Mark Smith, MMA referee and former U.S. Air Force Thunderbird pilot, balances fighter safety with controversial calls like Max Holloway vs. Calvin Kater while training under Herb Dean and Big John McCarthy. His $55M ISS trips highlight private space travel’s elite access, yet he critiques Space Force’s redundancy. Transitioning from F-16s (where he flew 450 mph formations at 18-inch gaps) to refereeing—including Travis Brown vs. Arlovsky—he prioritizes neutral judgment over fan reactions. Smith’s expertise spans submissions, high-G combat (10.3Gs in F-16s), and NASA’s post-Apollo knowledge loss, proving officials must master both physics and fight dynamics to prevent long-term harm. [Automatically generated summary]
You have, first of all, as a referee, you have one of the most difficult jobs in MMA, and you're one of the rarest guys because no one complains about you.
Do you know that?
Like, I have heard zero complaints about you.
Maybe there's somebody out there that's complained.
Well, it's such a difficult job because you have an impulse.
You don't know when to stop.
Like, is it now?
Is he okay?
Is he going to be okay?
Like, sometimes fights get stopped early and it is the worst feeling when a guy is kind of rocked, but then someone stops the fight and then the guy complains and the crowd's like, boo!
Because our philosophy, and I primarily work with two of the commissions, Nevada State Athletic Commission in California, two of the top commissions in the world.
You don't want to fight to go too long to risk long-term injury for the fighter.
So there's that philosophy of maybe stopping a fight one punch too early versus one punch too late.
Your goal is to stop it right on time.
But it takes a lot of hard work to get to that point.
Depending upon the history of the fighter, you know, their ability to come back and, you know, you got to make that subjective determination right away.
When is the time to stop that fight?
But man, it's the worst feeling in the world if you think you get to that point, you let it go too long, or if you mistakenly stop it too early.
You've got to kind of stay away from some of the social media criticism because you've got someone there that may not understand the detailed specifics of how we officiate and what we do.
And you're going to have critics.
Not tell everybody going into a fight.
Fans are going to hate you or love you.
Half of the fans are counting for a fighter in the red corner.
Half are counting for fighters in the blue corner.
And depending upon the call you make, it may be the referee's fault.
It may be the judge's fault.
But your goal is to go in there and be as objective as possible.
Of what they're looking at, and it comes down to intelligent defense.
And that's not just holding your hands up.
That needs to translate into doing something offensive.
And if you could tell that a guy's listening to your verbal commands and he's doing something to fight back, as long as he's showing some good cognitive skills and showing something offensive where he's not looking at long-term injury, there's a possibility of him letting that fight go.
But man, if it's starting to stem on a 10-7 round where the fighters just get destroyed and they're going to get hurt, now it's our responsibility to step in with fighter safety.
And then I went away for a couple assignments, and then when I came back, I was an aggressor.
And if you remember in the movie Top Gun, Viper and all those guys that were in the camouflage planes, they acted as the enemy forces and trained blue forces before they go off to combat.
That's what I did the second time around.
The Nellis Ranges are probably up in that general vicinity.
But as far as being someone that worked at that, no, I worked at Nellis Air Force Base.
You know, the crazy thing is in that area when people used to think they would see UFOs and stuff like that.
You know, there's a book that came out a couple years ago called Red Eagles that explained a lot of that stuff going on and what they thought were UFOs or, you know, transportation planes that were landing at some of the bases and stuff up there.
When you see one of those things in real life, you would think, especially if you didn't know that the United States was developing one of those, like when they were first developing them and flying them before they made it public, that thing looks like it's from another world.
I heard a crazy story one day that someone was hunting up in Montana and saw something similar to that that he had never seen before that came out of the ground in a vertical type thing and then took off.
Which, you know, the F-35 and planes like that will take off some of them in a vertical stance and then go forward.
But to see something that size and that scale do something like that, it kind of makes me wish I was still in the military.
So I got friends that fly that plane, and you see it.
A, it's designed in combat.
The United States is still going to be at the top of the food chain as far as the personnel that we have, the men and women that fly these airplanes, and then the equipment that we're flying.
So whenever you go to combat or something, you're going to have tanker support out there.
So you're going to meet an air refueler up at 20,000 feet and get gas.
And that thing can carry external fuel tanks.
But the goal is to be able to plan a mission to...
Be able to go in, escort, have guys drop your bombs or do whatever and get back out with tanker support.
You know, there's always that philosophy without the gas, you know, no one is going to go.
So like when I was in Iraq and stuff, we take off in Saudi Arabia, fly an hour up, meet a tanker, go fly a five hour mission, come back to the tanker, get more gas, go out and fly for another couple of hours and then go back to the base.
You obviously want to be able to stay out there to maintain and go the length of your mission.
But you look at the length of the mission and fuel capacity and the goal is obviously to have somebody there as a backup because you never want to be out there by yourself.
You always want to have that support.
You know, so you may have guys that are sitting back here in a cap waiting for their turn to come in.
So until they come up with something superior to internal combustion engines, we're always going to be limited by the amount of fuel that they can carry just because of the weight, right?
So in a fourth generation, like an F-15, F-16 is a fourth generation fighter, we wore G suits on the abdomen and down on the legs.
And basically what that does, as you pull G's, you're going against gravity, and blood starts to drain from your brain down into your lower extremities.
So the G-Suit is just a capability to help counter it.
It's really a tightening restriction of your muscles, starting with your calves, hamstrings, buttocks, all the way up.
So not just a g-suit, but you will have induced pressure breathing.
So you wear a specific kind of oxygen mask, and that's going to force air into your system.
Because the one thing you would hate to do is just hold your breath.
It's like a three-second count.
You do that hook, and then it's a three-second count.
Exhale, inhale right quick.
And as part of that pressure breathing, when you exhale and open your mouth, it's going to force air back in with that pressure breathing system.
So with the two of those together, And then we combine it with, you've got to be in shape.
You've got to lift weights.
You've got to have some kind of cardio conditioning to be able to last.
Because it's one thing to be strong enough to hold that G position.
But then you do a 45 minute dog fighting mission.
Your body's going to get tired, so you've got to be able to sustain that the entire time.
So most fighter pilots are going to lift weights.
They're going to do extreme cardio exercises to be able to sustain.
But anything else other than that?
It's kind of weird.
Back in the day, it would be, go drink a Coke and a bag of Doritos and get that sugar rush for that 45-minute flight and be able to sustain through it.
But you also can't be that short where you can't see over the dashboard.
But there's a weight limitation too.
You know, you can't be below a minimum weight because if you ever had to eject and you're below, let's say, 125 pounds, that parachute is going to drag you.
You won't be able to stop.
Or if you're above, you know, whatever the weight is, 250, 265, you're going to come down on that parachute pretty hard and you're probably going to get hurt.
So the Thunderbirds, it's a, you know, it's a frontline fighter that they take some of, they take the gun out and they put a smoke barrel in it.
but it's the same basic avionics, the same basic controls, and it's just painted red, white, and blue.
And all the professionals that are the maintenance guys for the Thunderbirds, the best in the world, the finest in the world, and I had four of the finest when I was on the team, they take them off of active duty lines and bring them to Nellis Air Force Base and do all the stuff on the planes, but...
Full nose down trim, I have to hold back pressure the entire flight.
It's about 30 pounds of back pressure the entire flight.
So it's like doing a bicep curl for 30 minutes.
And if I were to pass out, With that full nose down trim, instead of possibly bumping into one of the other planes and making it more catastrophic, my plane is going to go straight down into the ground and it'll be at a minimum loss.
So, you know, you'll see when guys and gals apply for the team, they'll put them through strength tests.
They'll sit there on a, you know, a shoulder pull machine and they'll have to hold this 25 to 30 pounds in this little range like this for 15, 20 minutes.
You do have to do an Air Force fitness test, which is, you know, so they do waist circumference, and then you have to do sit-ups, push-ups, and a mile-and-a-half run.
You know, a combination of standards that they do for that.
You have to do that and get scoring on it and based upon your age, the minimum numbers that you have to get.
But honestly, if you're someone that's in shape and you work out regularly, like if you go out to Las Vegas and go to the base, their gym out there looks like one of the best gyms that you've ever seen in the world.
It's kind of weird because You had those capabilities within the Air Force already.
And to split it off into a separate force, you're essentially just pulling entities out of branches of service that were already there doing the same thing.
And there are a lot of people that, you know, we got some great folks that work, you know, do all the space stuff, you know, working with NASA and international space entities doing all that.
It's like, you know, priorities as far as financial budget, what we need right now.
You got some incredibly smart people that work at NASA and, you know, some of the other international space entities.
But I think the truth of it that came down to, and, you know, you saw those movies, Hidden Figures, and they talked about launching to the moon and stuff.
Some of the knowledge and capability to get to the moon was lost.
Because a lot of these professionals that did all their mathematics and calculations to get us there, they had that stuff up here.
They go to a chalkboard and they write it down and say, okay, this math formula, this calculation, this projection, this will get us to the moon.
When I was working down there, I had some friends down there in the space industry, and I was talking to one of my friends down there, and I had on this little band that said, you know, failure's not an option.
So the basically the philosophical head of, you know, all the launches down there, when we had some of the Apollo missions that were not successful, you know, launches that went off that weren't able to do everything or, you know, not able to get to our destinations.
He basically threw down with a NASA philosophy that said failure is not an option.
Well, they recreated it, but it's kind of obvious because he looks like he's acting and there's a light here and a light here because the shadows are in different directions and he's sitting there.
You can tell it's fake.
It's kind of weird, but they had to have footage of it just to kind of show that they did it.
But then...
You know, actual experts analyze this thing like this is probably not the real footage of the actual module being in space.
So here you are at their space station thing, their headquarters, and they're celebrating a successful launch.
They're celebrating going to stage two, stage three, et cetera.
And there was a lot of celebration, a lot of caviar and stuff like that.
But I kind of looked at it like, the base, could my kids live here for a year or two?
Now, obviously, they're going to take care of you.
The weirdest thing for me, when we travel around, you'd have security and stuff with you.
But when we went to Russia, because there may be some forces that, you know, are anti-government or other things that you want to deal with, we would have, like, we'd be walking in our group, and there would be Russian soldiers surrounding us, like, in a circle.
They would have, you know, like, their AK-47s and stuff, and if anybody thought they were going to interact and get in the middle of this, you know, those guys are hard, the way they keep their security, protecting their VIPs and stuff, but...
Yeah, because we had a design to have the constellation, what was going to be our new rocket system, etc.
But once again, because of budgetary constraints and what Congress is going to approve, If there was another means to be able to do that, we said, we're just going to send our folks to Russia for right now.
So when I left the White House, the boss was like, what do you want to go do?
And he said, narrow down to three places.
I was either going to go fly to the F-22, I was going to apply to be an astronaut, or as I did, I was going to go back to Nellis Air Force Base.
The astronaut program would have been a dream come true.
But since we had already selected the last crew for flying the space shuttle, I said, I don't know if I'm going to get the chance to go up in the space or not.
There's a satellite link on the back of the plane and hopefully it's working because that's our communication as far as back and forth, talking to the company, looking at weather and folks in the back as far as being able to socialize, internet, social media, stuff like that.
You know, I do that, and things have changed over the years.
I used to get on the plane and sit in the back, and I would be asleep before we pushed off the gate.
And that makes that trip.
But now I'm so conscious of everything going around me.
Because of sitting up front, we have to be, you know, our flight attendants are amazing, everything they have to deal with in the back.
But because of security procedures and stuff like that, so I had an incident on the plane about five years ago that I'll never sleep on the plane again.
What happened?
So it's very secure when we come out of the cockpit.
You know, you don't want any kind of cockpit intrusion.
And you'll notice when we come out of the cockpit, pastors cannot use the front restroom and there'll be security procedures in place.
So I came out of the cockpit, and this gentleman got up and started to walk towards me, and the flight attendant was like, you've got to sit down.
And the guy just stood there, and it turned into a Texas standoff, like, who's going to win here?
The guy wouldn't sit down.
So I leaned around the flight attendant, very aggressively.
I was like, hey, sir, you've got to sit down.
And he didn't.
He had this mean mug on his face.
About five feet away from the flight attendant, wouldn't sit down.
So what I did now is I picked up the P.A., Got on it and said, hey sir, pilot's out of the cockpit, you need to sit down right now.
And now what that did is that got other passengers involved and everybody's looking around in their seat to see what's going to happen.
I thought he aggressively was going to try to come up and do something.
So what I did is I put my hand on the back of the flight attendant and I said, if he comes forward, I just need you to lean about five feet to the left.
If he aggressively postures and tries to attack, I'm going to put his jaw on the floor.
But, you know, there have been people that have...
You know, before the safety seal at the bottom that have busted that out and tried to get into the cockpit and, you know, other crazy things that have happened over the years.
My goal is to get you from point A to point B as safely and smoothly as possible.
And if somebody tries to get into our cockpit, I'm going to defend that as much as I can.
It takes some, you know, that's how I go back to our flight attendants.
One of my flight attendants, Frank, you know, we talk about that all the time.
They are amazing with what they have to, you know, deal with.
So one, customer service, safety, et cetera.
And when you start to deal with issues like that, man, it takes a lot of, you know, patience and discretion to do the right thing.
But if it's an adult that simply does not want to comply, they'll do everything they can.
To get that person to comply to the point of having to call up front and tell the captain that we have an issue.
And then even when it comes to that, because it's about safety and customer service, we're going to get on the PA and say, ladies and gentlemen, we have compliance things that you need to follow.
Please do this.
If you don't do it, now we have to go to the next step.
Back in the day, that's where Randy Couture would train, Marvin Eastman, Tito Ortiz, Chuck Liddell.
I went in there, and that's where I started doing all my boxing, my jiu-jitsu, and everything else.
So, I was already doing some stuff with the UFC. You probably don't remember, but some of the old school UFC fights, like when Randy Couture fought in Columbus, Ohio, they would have me come out to the fights and go to a local VA hospital there in the area, and I'd bring a group of like 5 or 10 vets out to every single UFC fight.
One of the top amateur promotions there in Las Vegas across the world, you know, MMA, fighting, et cetera.
So they had me go to their fight the next day, and I sat there next to Barry, and he's like, is this something that you want to do?
And I would practice scoring fights.
I did that for a little bit, and the ISKA folks brought me on as a judge, and I did the judging for about six months.
While the whole time I'm still going to these gyms, Extreme Couture, Syndicate, JSEC, getting in the ring, and I'm practicing with these guys, and I go, you know what, I love this refereeing stuff.
So I decided to take a formal course.
So I went and took Herb's course, and I realized how much I didn't know.
So I took Herb's course, and I did really well there.
So I do that for a little bit, and then the Athletic Commission goes, we think we want you to be a referee as well.
So at the time, there was no one that was doing both.
They want you to concentrate on one of your expertise.
So if you go back and look at it, for a while there, I was the only person that was refereeing and judging, eventually worked my way up to UFC fights.
Now, I made a transition so I could focus more on refereeing, and then my fights have progressively gotten bigger and bigger as my proficiency has gotten better.
If you look at that last card that we did, I think I had three of the biggest fights of any UFC card.
And, you know, we don't have anything to do with the assignments.
The Athletic Commission gives us our fights.
I've done Kevin Holland's, like, last four fights.
And, you know, I tell folks I got the greatest seat in the world sitting there in the octagon with these, you know, men and women who go in there and do that stuff.
But I fortunately have, with great mentors and guidance and opportunities from the UFC and some of the organizations, have gotten some of the biggest and best fights in the world.
Or they get the bright light of the doctor shining a flashlight in our eyes of what happened.
And one thing we've tried to transition doing, you know, I've had some fighters get really hurt really bad.
We normally keep everybody out of the octagon.
But one thing we're doing is we're allowing a coach to come in.
With the doctor, with the inspectors, with myself, and give them a familiar voice.
You know, you get knocked out, you come back, and here's Mark telling you, no, the fight's over, you may not recognize.
But if your coach is there in the corner saying, hey, such and such, you got knocked out, calm down, it's fine, this is coach, such and such, I'm here.
We're finding that's calming the fighter down just a little bit.
Obviously, medical protocols and safety, we've got to do all that.
But I like doing that.
I like asking one of the coaches to come in, stand off to my side, and kind of give them a familiar voice.
When Olivera had Tony Ferguson in that arm bar and he had his arm completely hyperextended and it looked like his arm was breaking, like what was your thought there?
Because some guys have stopped fights when a guy has a fully locked out arm bar and it's very controversial.
Like some people think you should just let it keep going.
Other people think like that one of the best examples was Herb Dean with Tim Sylvia versus Frank Mir.
So I tell guys, and we learn as we progress watching fights.
You know, we talk daily, weekly about stuff that we gotta do.
So I tell them in the back of the rules meeting.
For a choke, at this level, I'm not going to stop it unless the fighter goes out.
If it's any kind of other submission, I've got to see a dislocation, separation, or it has to break.
Or, if you scream, and there's a difference between a scream and a grunt to get out of something, if you scream, it's a verbal submission and we're going to stop it.
So the 10-second clapper had already gone off, so I'm counting down in my head.
And the goal is to right when that horn goes off, you'll see when we stop a submission from that, we go right to the pressure point, push back the opposite way and take off the pivot point and it's underarm to stop it.
Because some guy is going to try to hold it for an extra second after the bell goes off.
Right as that stops, I'm pushing on it and stopping it.
Also verbally telling the guy to stop because you don't want any extra damage after the bell.
You know, it's different now because they're not fans in the UFC Apex or, you know, wherever some of these other people are doing.
But if it's like the T-Mobile or something, and you may hear something, you may hear a snap, or someone may verbally submit, and if you stop it, man, the crowd will go crazy.
They'll be ballistic.
So we, you know, we count on.
And one thing I've learned, so I did a UFC fight a couple years ago, and I had a fighter bite somebody.
In some senses, because some stuff you don't want them to be able to hear because you can overwhelm them with referee feedback.
The goal, I really don't want to say anything to them a lot during the fight.
I want to interact as least as possible.
You know, you say some stuff, you know, some fans are like, oh, he's in the middle of the fight, he's interacting too much.
But to help the TV audience, the pay-per-view audience, etc., what I've learned I need to do is, you know, either say it in the microphone where you guys can hear me or to come over to the table and, you know, kind of tell you what's going on.
And then once we were done with that, we took it to the ABC Rules Committee, you know, who looks at what's going to be fouls, what's not going to be fouls, and then we presented it to them about two months ago.
Everybody there, you know, we gave some feedback.
We're still trying to refine it.
It used to be...
You could use instant replay, but then once you did it, the fight had to be over.
It had to be for a fight-ending sequence.
I could not restart the fight.
It needed to progress past that.
So I can call time now.
We have a dedicated instant replay officer that's sitting there at the table, and that's all he's looking at.
He's only looking at potential fouls.
He's working with the production truck.
The views that you guys get for instant replay and stuff, he has a capability to, you'll see, they'll put that yellow light on the catwalk of the octagon.
That's telling me it's going to be an instant replay.
Or, if you see the referee, Do like this?
That means something just happened where I need an instant replay.
I think enough people don't understand that now, what's going on with the instant replay.
Because for the longest time, it stopped the fight.
Even if it was an illegal move and someone was going to get a point deducted, once you instituted the instant replay to find, for whatever strange reason, the fight was automatically stopped.
Because we had a couple fouls in the UFC fights earlier that could have constituted the fight continuing to make a determination.
Was it a foul or not?
And then you can get to the point that we find that if someone is faking an injury, if we find that through instant replay, there can be point deductions.
Oh, so if a fighter kicks a guy to the body, and the fighter is down, said he got kicked low, and you determine that he did not get kicked low, you'll make him down on the ground again?
Wherever he fell, so you gotta take that snapshot.
You know, if someone's in guard and there's a foul, I call stop time, and if I need to have a doctor look at them, before I bring that doctor in, I'm gonna take a snapshot of where they are.
So let's say the bottom guy commits the foul.
I wanna put him back in that same, if it's a dominant position, you know, at least 51% dominant position, I'm gonna put him back in that.
So in that case of if someone fakes an injury, I can't get it back to that point where he's 100% hurt.
But I can put him back as close to I can in a dominant position.
Now, if I determine that a guy is intentionally faking an injury or something, and I can't put him back in that dominant position, I can fix it by saying unsportsmanlike conduct, and it can be up to a point deduction.
Or if I determine that, nope, he would have been done at that point, get up and fight right now.
And the way we determine weight bearing, I can't determine weight bearing if he just has his fingers down, even though there may be some bending in it.
So we alleviate it and we say flat palm or flat fist.
If that fighter is flat palm and they're transitioning, coming up, and you catch that person, you know, if the hand is that close, man, it's a tough call.
That's what they pay us for, to be able to make that high-level subjective call, though.
We've got to be consummate professionals, but there's no pride and ego.
The worst feeling in the world is as a referee to know that you just made a mistake in front of however many millions of people that just watched that pay-per-view.
I mean, you remember, it was so loud in that arena.
I can hear the coaches coaching back and forth.
I can hear you guys at the table talking.
But if I can't hear that, that tells me I'm not going to hear the horn or the bell.
I was so worried because, man, these guys are slugfest back and forth.
I go, I was so much into it, I didn't have track of how much time was left.
So I go, that horn is going to go off and I'm not going to be able to hear it.
But the great thing right now is, A, you can hear the horn with no fans in there.
But it is so incredible because we can hear you guys with all your commentating and you can hear the coaches.
And then you can hear the fighters talking back and forth to their coaches.
They can hear all the specific instruction.
And as you know, this whole season, you know, back from like March or April, whenever we started, man, we got some hungry fighters in there that, you know, with the teamwork, with the coaches and stuff, that closed environment, you could hear the punches and the kicks.
Well, the first one I did without any audience was Justin Gaethje and Tony Ferguson, which was in Florida, which was just wild just to be there and to see a fight with no audience.
I mean, you really feel, first of all, you feel very fortunate because there's so few people that are going to get to be there live.
But also, there's a dynamic to the fight.
There's a purity to it.
Where there's no audience and you're just seeing the competitive drive of these fighters.
You know, the fans get to hear things they normally wouldn't hear.
Like, you know, I had the fighter that kind of quit on the stool a couple months back.
And the fans, with the microphone that we have on...
They get the chance to hear me actually talking to the fighter.
I went over to him and said, hey, do you want to continue to fight?
And he had the interaction back and forth with his corner a couple times.
In the normal, in the T-Mobile, which is a phenomenal arena, I may not be able to hear that because you've got 20-some thousand fans in there yet.
But as I go back to the corner, I can hear everything that the coaches are saying.
And if a fighter is given an indication that they no longer want to continue, now I can put that back into my equation on how the fight's going to go, my interaction with the doctor, et cetera.
And that occasion, I heard him going back and forth with his coach, you know, I don't want to fight.
When that 10-second clap went off, it's my determination now, unless the coroner, they throw in the towel early, make that determination.
With my doctor, you know, two feet away from me, I go over, I look at him physically, try to get a mental assessment, ask him one question, do you want to continue to fight?
So the preparation, the matchmakers, matching somebody up with a good fight, having a proper preparation, training, et cetera, to be able to get to that point.
But you know this.
The first time...
I've done hundreds of fights.
The first time I stepped inside of an octagon, it's like, man, this is surreal.
And I'm just, I'm refereeing it.
Can you imagine?
unidentified
What was your first fight in the UFC? It was actually Robert Drysdale.
Yeah, so, you know, you stepping there, and for me it was preparation ahead of time.
And what helped me out is Big John pulled me off to the side, and he said some crazy stuff to you to prepare you.
He said one thing to me when you get in there.
He said, Mark, don't fuck it up.
Yes sir, I want one.
And you know, that may seem very harsh to say that, but it's a simple thing of, hey, we've prepared you, you've prepared to get to this point, go in there and do your thing.
So we had to take him through a series of medical tests in the back.
Mr. Ratner was back there, you know, the Athletic Commission was back there, a couple of the doctors from the UFC. And they were like, Mark, if he demonstrates that he tears that muscle even more, if he's hurt, you got to stop the fight.
So can you imagine in that Orlovsky fight with Travis Brown, If I see that calf muscle tear, I have to step in the middle of that fight and stop it.
That was a fight that was fought at such a pace that you knew this fight could not go the distance.
they had a history together training at Jackson's and Arlovsky had an incredible confidence coming into this fight because look in training he had gotten the best of Travis that was the word and so you know he kind of big brother to him he knew and it seemed like Travis kind of knew that too because this was when Travis is really in his prime you know Travis was one of the most athletic heavyweights I think I've ever seen with
He kind of changed his style at one point, and he started fighting more flat-footed and slugging.
But when he knocked out Semmy Schilt with a Superman punch, I was like, that guy is the dark horse of the heavyweight division.
Because he's a huge heavyweight, but he would move really light on his feet.
And Travis weathered the storm and came back and KO'd It's about right here that I'm thinking the fight's over because he's going to miss him with the punch and he's right there and he staggers so much that I'm already at the mind frame that this fight's going to be over.
And then he catches him here and then he turns away without any intelligence.
Yes, well, they've realized, they see these, you know, the Conor McGregors, the stylebenders, they see these guys that are becoming these gigantic superstars, the Dustin Poiriers, and they realize, like, wow, like, you know, fortune favors the brave.
We see it with the Tuesday night fights, and then also the Saturday venue there at the Apex.
You know, some people may not realize the impact of what the UFC did.
In the middle of this pandemic, you know, Bellator did it in their bubble as well, but, you know, UFC kind of led the sports world for everybody.
You know, folks are getting burned down on social media and it's like, what else do we do?
And sitting on the couch doing a thing that gave an outlet, you know, not just for us as officials, but athletes and teams and everybody have something exciting to be able to watch.
You know, you know how passionate Dana is about it.
And we all kind of follow that lead.
So we as officials, whatever commission you're working for, very, you know, very fortunate that he's given us opportunities to do that.
Well, listen, as fans, we're all very fortunate because the UFC led the way for the return of live sports.
They really did.
I mean, Dana stuck his neck out there and led the way for the return of live sports.
And they did it in as safe a way as possible.
And when we're talking about the athletes, there was a lot of crazy hyperbole.
Like, you're risking their lives.
Listen, man, those guys are not dying from Coronavirus.
Maybe we thought maybe they were risking their lives at the beginning of the pandemic because we didn't really know what the virus was.
But now the argument that they're risking their lives now is preposterous.
You're not gonna kill elite athletes with this virus.
They may not know the safety protocols that we go through, you know, no, you know, the testing, you know, you test and you go in the bubble and you isolate and Also, they're alerting the fighters about vitamin supplementation, how to strengthen your immune system, and how to check.
If they're paying attention, they're monitoring their resting heart rate.
If you wear something like a whoop strap, it'll show where you're cardiovascular, how your body is recovering for things, and it can actually give you indications that you might be suffering from this virus.
Some people get there the night prior on Friday, and then, you know, we go to the arena like at 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock, or, like, since I live there local, I'll go over Saturday morning at 7 o'clock, test and isolate, and then go to the What do you bring like a Yeti cooler with you or something?
I bring a food bag.
And, you know, I do my meal prep at home.
So I do my stuff there.
Like I work with, you know, some folks like the Honest Plant Company, and they give me protein supplement and immune booster.
You know, I've heard you talk about the vitamin C, the vitamin D, the zinc, and then I take one of their immune boosters.
And that helps me out.
So like, for me, I had my thyroid removed a couple years ago.
So, you know, proper nutrition, did you have cancer?
The crazy thing about that is when I had the surgery, The anesthesiologist made a little mistake and I wasn't completely anesthetized yet when they put the intubation tube in and I hit my vocal cords.
So you go back to that Arlovsky and Travis Brown fight.
I took a little hiatus right after that because when they hit my vocal cords I couldn't talk for about six months.
So he damaged my left vocal cord and then he stretched my right vocal cord.
You know, your vocal cords essentially touch together to make the tones.
I couldn't talk for about six months.
So here I am, an airline pilot and a UFC referee, and I got to be able to talk.
Or, you know, an MMA referee, got to be able to talk for both of them.
As a single dad...
Primary income from my kids.
I was like, what do I do?
I can't talk.
So I had to go through voice and speech therapy and I eventually got all that back.
You know, I'd go through a speech therapist and you know, they, they, she'd do stuff like she, you know, had me go over certain tones to be able to get it back and you know, never raise my voice.
They don't even want you to whisper because I guess the whispering would still have, you know, effects on the vocal cords being able to heal.
The only place I notice it, if I do a lot of fights where I have to yell a lot, at the end of the night, my throat can be sore and I sound like I lose my voice just a little bit.
People don't realize the lateral movement back and forth.
I am sore when I'm done with the fight with all the side-to-side movement.
And if you have to step in and pull somebody off, it can be exerting on the body.
So I lift weights and do other preparation and stuff like that.
And just the mental fatigue from, you know, you go back to that last card with the three big fights that I had.
All huge fights.
Every fight is important, whether it's the first fight on the card or whether it's the 12th fight on the card.
But when you have a night like that, just a mental preparation and a letdown when you get done with that, you know, you realize it's a little bit fatiguing, tough on the body, etc.
So, man, there's so many elements that you've got to come into to be ready for that.
And I try to, you know, so in addition to the strength and conditioning stuff, you know, I've done some classroom stuff like, you know, people talk about what they do during the pandemic.
I was actually crazy enough.
I went back to grad school during the pandemic and I got master's number three.
And I went and got a master's in exercise, wellness, fitness, and nutrition.
And that helps me understand, you know, do I really know how to meal prep?
Do I really know what proper proteins and supplements and stuff to put in my body?
So I wanted to learn that side of it.
And then I'm planning on taking that back to share it with the other officials that work with us and doing some corporate wellness and fitness too.
I got grand plans and stuff that's coming out there.
The octagon surface is one thing to be able to do it.
But what I do for preparation in the back, I do a lot of side-to-side movement to the left and back to the right, and then shuffling back and shuffling forward to try to mimic the actual movements that I'm going to do inside the octagon.
I've got to be able to practice with the application I'm going to use it for.
I try to put myself in that scenario.
Where we stand.
When guys are fighting, what am I looking at?
When they go to the ground and certain submissions come up, what position am I going to be able to go in to look at the pressure point to be able to hear and see what the fighter is saying?
So it's a lot that goes into it.
It's a lot of preparation and getting ready for it.
I would say that Travis Brown and Arlovsky, because of knowing of Arlovsky's injury ahead of time, The impact of that, the number of fans that were there, how loud it got.
The expectations of my two mentors, John McCarthy and Herb Dean.
But, you know, one, it takes a great message like that from a mentor.
Don't fuck it up.
You know how John's personality is.
He's a great teacher, but there's no one more knowledgeable about the sport than him.
But knowing that you've got the trust...
Because, you know, the athletic commissions are going to talk to the senior referees as to where to start to put people.
And to make it to a UFC slash Bellator level of fight, you've got to be really, hopefully, a good judge, a good referee, or a great judge, great referee, because of the impact that it could have.
And then to have that on a pay-per-view, to have the expectations of the Athletic Commission and Dana and the rest of the UFC staff there, because the last thing you want is to have a fight get messed up and catch the criticism of the promotion, the fans, you know, fellow referees, etc.
And then because of how loud it got in there.
But what I try to do is I try to say, Regardless of it's, you know, amateur fighter, A, B, professional fighter, fighting for a title, contender, etc.
Once that door closes, I try to treat everybody the same.
My routine is the same.
How I talk to the fighters, how I treat them is the same.
But, man, just going in and having a good time.
I may smile a little bit every now and then when I'm in there because I'm like, man, this is an incredible fight.
When I came back to Vegas, you know, I go to a couple of different gyms there and trying to keep that balance of professionalism with training with the guys.
I go to Coutures and I go to Syndicate.
And then, you know, I was at one point there.
We had Vinny and Fredson and Mike Powell, all those guys in the same gym.
Now, I train for application.
A lot of people train, you know, to get the belts or to go do a tournament and stuff like that.
That's not my focus is, one, because I don't have the time.
I try to learn how I can apply that back to me refereeing, knowing the details of a specific submission or hold or something like that, and at what level amateurs, am I going to stop it when the guy's in a good choke and he can't get out of it, versus at the next level, knowing how somebody's going to transition from one position to the other.
You get the guy sitting at home eating wings with the beer in his hands.
I can get in there, and you hear it at the T-Mobile.
I could get in there and kick his ass, you know, this, whatever.
And they don't realize the level of professionalism, proficiency some of these fighters have.
You know, to watch a Vinny Magales, you know, do a stand-up fight and then transition to the ground, you're like, man, you're about to see something incredible.
You know, you're fighters across the roster in the UFC. They may think someone is a stand-up expert and they go to the ground and you see something amazing right there.
So that's why us as referees, you got to be proficient at it.
You got to have an understanding of how that's going to apply.
Really, our judges as well.
You know, the judges are like, they think they just sit there and score the fight.
But our judge has to be able to determine Is that more of a position?
Well, there's a judge I will not name, but he told me that he was in the middle of a fight once judging a fight and one of the other judges asked him what the person was doing.
But it was weird back then because you had a lot of people that were refereeing fights that didn't really even understand what they were judging fights.
They really didn't understand what they were judging.
And, you know, we, you see that criticism out there, you know, these judges in this jurisdiction are their boxing judges and stuff like that.
Now, you got folks that have been doing this for, you know, 15, 20 years, that they may not be proficient on the ground themselves, but they have an understanding of it.
You know, some of the judges may be in whatever, you know, their 60s.
If you train with these guys and you're friendly with these guys, do you excuse yourself from a fight, or do you just keep it professional with everybody?
And, you know, for me, so like when I started at JSEC Fight Capital back in the day, he was in there with Randy and Marvin Eastman and all those guys.
So, you know, I've taken this transition with him the entire time.
It would be really tough for me to go in there and do a Mike Powell fight.
So what I do is like to, you know, two primary commissions, Nevada and California, I'll call them ahead of time and say, you know, Hey, Mr. Foster, I've trained with Mike Powell before I did this kind of training with him.
And I'll leave it at that.
And that's something that Herb and Big John taught me back in the day, present it to the commission and tell them and let them make determination.
I think, you know, John Morgan and the MMA Junkie guys did the article a couple months ago, and they talked about, you know, the numbers of fights of the year for 2020. And I think Herb was at the top.
And then, like, he had 80-some fights, and Jason had 60 fights.
And, you know, both guys dominated Tyron Woodley, which is crazy to think about that Tyron Woodley was literally at the top of the heap destroying everybody.
And then two guys come along and dominate them back to back.
And those two guys are now fighting for the title.
And both guys can do everything.
I mean, both Usman and...
When you look at Gilbert Burns, you're talking about a guy who's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, top of the food chain grappling game, and learned how to strike while he was fighting.
Started training in MMA and didn't know how to strike.
Now he's one of the scariest strikers in the sport.
Well, that's why, you know, a guy like, bring up a guy like Tyron Woodley, you know, who was on top of the heat for so long, and then you go through three brutal fights in a row.
He has those two fights, and then the Colby Covington fight.
It's like, you, you, you, it's such a fucking hard, scrabble game.
Like, you're on top, and then you're not, and then you look at a guy like Anderson Silva, who was on top forever, and then just lost, like...
We are cognizant of that as officials, that we may have to watch someone a little bit closer.
If you really count on, regardless of organization, the officials knowing and understanding that, that someone's a little bit older and it's going to have an impact, you better do your part as a referee.
And, you know, we have to do, you know, brain trauma protocols in courses, you know, because you want, like, your high school coaches and stuff like that to understand that for their athletes.
But we as officials have to go through those protocols as well, you know, to take these courses and understand, you know, the impact of brain injuries.
Because, once again, fighter safety is always a top priority.
I would never want to be part of a fight that someone had a long-term impact injury because of brain trauma or something else because I didn't intervene.
How do you feel when you see guys that are fighting, like they have these 20-plus year careers, like guys like Diego Sanchez.
I mean, he won the Ultimate Fighter Season 1 in 2005, which is really crazy when you think of the fact that 16 years later he's still fighting in the UFC. And then his actual career, fighting career, goes back a couple years before that.
And you remember up against the cage he was taking some pretty hard shots.
And you have to delineate as an official, do I step in and stop this?
Or do I know this fighter's history of being able to come back?
Man, that was probably one of the tougher fights I had to do.
And then looking back at it, that was probably a lesson learned for me that I probably should have or could have stopped that fight a little bit earlier.
You know, I let him take the shots, and then he threw some punches back, and then finally when he punched him and he went down, I stepped in.
And Diego actually, excuse me, he thanked me afterwards for when I stopped it.
You know, he came to realization that he could not have come back.
But you think of a guy's resilience, you know, and then I did this fight several years later against Chiesa, I mean, you know how Diego's one of the all-time great fighters when he does stuff.
His ability to be able to come back.
So subjectively, as a referee, there's that fine line balance of Do I make this decision, my decision, in the best interest of the fighter?
Or do I think about the impact, you know, the capabilities of this fighter to be able to come back?
So one, you got to know who it is in there fighting with you.
Yeah, to know what a guy's capable of, whether or not a guy's a big shot lander or whether he's not.
It's such a complex sport.
There's so many different things going on because of when you're combining the wrestling and the jujitsu and the striking and then powerful guys versus endurance guys.
I mean, even, like, I get in my head, like, oh, this is the way to do it.
And then I see another guy who does it differently.
I'm like, well, that way is pretty goddamn good, too.
Like, it changes.
Like, there's trends that happen in this sport.
Like, some guys are just big-time power shot guys.
And then other guys, they hit you with, like, 50%, 60%.
Guys like Colby Covington or guys like Nick Diaz, they don't really throw 100% shots.
They just pepper you and stay on you.
Guys like Neil Magny.
They just stay on you and overwhelm you with volume.
Yes, I moved up a little bit more, you know, started training with Chaz and, you know, a couple other folks in town.
So I would say that would be more of my foundation.
But to fully understand, you know, with the jujitsu, you know, taking a shin-to-shin kick, you got to do it at least one time to know what it feels like to see what these fighters are going through.
With the positions, you know, to train to get an understanding of, yeah, that's a good choke right there.
You know, that's a good pressure point submission right there.
But what I also do in conjunction to getting on the mat and actually doing that is I will have two guys get on the mat and roll, and it may be a step-by-step process.
Okay, put on a Kimura.
And I want you to flex it to the point of knowing when you're going to tap to be able to equate that to, I got a fighter in the cage right now, knowing what to look for.
And when you got Vinny and Fredson and those guys out there showing you the different types of things.
So I do a little bit two-fold.
You're going to get on the mat and roll, but I also want to stand there next to Vinny and say, that's a pressure point right there.
That's where the guy's going to tap.
So my methods may be a little bit different, but me as a referee, I got to understand fully what I'm looking at there from the outside perspective of knowing.
But that Tuesday night fight, this guy goes out from it, and everybody's like, what is he?
He's still, his eyes are open, he's awake.
I go, no, his eyes are open, but he's not awake.
And then when a fighter lets go of the hole and then you realize that he's out, that's the kind of thing you've got to train for to be able to not understand.
Everybody can see it, and you'll hear the coaches saying, no, don't do that, don't do that, because they know what's going to happen, and he'll put you in it.
That's a little bit different versus getting knocked out, you know, if you've got any kind of brain injury.
But I mean, we've got a lot of pilots that we work with, you know, that, you know, they do train, you know, for one, cockpit defense and, you know, physical preparedness and stuff.
I think to fully understand it, you got to be put in those situations.
Like I will tell you, for me, one of the most painful things I've ever been in was a toe hole.
I mean, I thought I was going to, you know, break the damn mat.
I got put in a toe hole before.
And some of the other, you know, submissions and stuff like that may not be as effective on you, but...
Yeah, one of those guys, he screamed at, I think it was a knee bar or something, and he screamed out of it, and the referee stopped it, and he yelled, and he said, no, you verbally submitted it.
You know, there are certain camps that everybody- Isn't it crazy?
They don't see, people don't realize the physical impact of it.
When you get hit with that thing a couple times and it starts to swell.
And because of where it is, that swelling, you know, the blood doesn't have room to expand.
Like maybe if it's the quad or something like that, it can expand out a little bit more, but in the calf, With the restricted limitation there, that swelling and the blood compact is going to stay there in that area.
And if you don't learn how to properly check, you get hit with that thing a couple times.
Also, specifically in that fight, because Conor has that wide stance, and he puts a lot of heavy weight on that front leg, and they're also southpaw to southpaw, so it opens up that back left leg kick to that front leg of Conor's.
That if somebody gets kicked like there a couple times and then they change their stance, you know, that's going to alert us on what we've got to start to look for.
And if I think someone's hurt from that, we may not interact with them.
But, you know, I'll bring the doctor in a couple times and the doctor will sit there and they'll watch them stand up and they'll look at it.
It is just bananas to me how that one technique has dominated the sport over the last several years.
Sometimes a technique comes around and a lot of fighters start doing it, but it's very rare that a technique that's been around forever, just they change the location of the impact.
And by the way, Benson Henderson was doing that way back in the day.
And for whatever reason, it didn't have the same impact.
You know, if we see a fighter change in their traditional game plan because of an impact or injury...
Now that changes.
So, you know, I may stand about 7 to 10 feet away from a fighter.
If I see that somebody's hurt like that, I may move a little bit closer so I can get a, you know, a better feel, look at their face and, you know, see what kind of impact.
Or if he changes his stance, now I know we could be stepping down the ground to a stoppage of this fight.
So as a referee, you got to build all that stuff into it.
You got to understand what the guy just threw, the impact, that calf kick, impact that it could have on it.
And honestly, go back to that fighter safety again.
If a guy doesn't know better and he keeps taking all those shots, it's our responsibility to help him out.
Like, say if a guy like Tony Ferguson, who his hand could be broken in a million different places, and I'm going to let you know, he'll still keep swinging it.
Like, how do you know?
Like, if you notice that someone did something like that, they pulled their hand back or shook it, like, how do you make that distinction?
It depends on the severity of it, because you've got guys that may be hurt that are going to continue fighting.
They'll just change their game plan.
But if the doctor makes a determination for the long-term longevity, their health, etc., You know, you'll see the doctor and I walk off to the side and, you know, we'll cover the microphone up to, you know, you still can hear what we're saying, but, you know, we want to be able to have a discreet conversation right there.
In our jurisdiction, in Nevada, it's up to the referee to make the decision with the consultation of the doctor.
In other places, California, et cetera, the doctor can stop fights.
But we work together as a team.
So if the doctor says, you know, Mark, his hand is messed up, we need to stop this fight.
I'll go back, we'll make decision, and we'll pass it, you know, under the advice of the, you know, medical staff, Nevada State Athletic Commission, or whatever commission, referee such and such is going to stop this fight.
You know, we've had, you know, at the amateur, tough enough where you get some of the best competition.
We've had fighters that have had, you know, leg breaks and bones coming out and, you know, other stuff like that.
You know, we've had fighters get teeth knocked out and, you know, if a fighter says a tooth came out, you know, they swallowed a tooth or something like that, that's an automatic stoppage.
You know, stuff like that.
I've seen some crazy stuff.
We've had...
Fighters that have gotten knocked out and defecated on themselves or peed on themselves or something.
That causes bigger problems.
Now you've got to sanitize the ring and stuff like that.
When you've had this incredible military career and been a fighter jet pilot, and I would imagine that the thrills and the physical demands of that, it's probably pretty hard to top.
Everybody from the Air Force Academy gets a Bachelor of Science because of the amount of math, science, and engineering that you do.
I did political science there, but I focused on legal studies and pre-law.
I got a Master's in Computer Systems Management.
I got a Master's in International Security and Strategic Studies, which is like State Department stuff, and then this last one with health and wellness, nutrition, physiology, etc.
This was a, so when I went to the Air Force Academy, you know, we got enlisted instructors, you know, along with the officer and instructors that help us do stuff.
And it was someone I guess didn't like my, the way I talked and my persona.
And, you know, she pulled me to the side and gave me the, you ain't gonna ever mount to be shit.
That's the thing that I love about military vets is that when you become very accomplished in that, in the military, like the amount of discipline that's required, they just develop superior human beings.
I've run into so many guys that are accomplished military vets, and they have more character, they have more discipline.
It's standard.
Some cars have a V8 with a lot of horsepower.
Military vets, accomplished military vets, they just have more character.
You know, so you kind of related to the fight game.
I had a mentor tell me, you know, you get championship fights.
It takes a lot to be able to get there.
And he said, you think about your career, military, academics, you know, refereeing fights.
And he said, you begin to hang around champions enough.
You start to get that championship mentality.
And I try to look at it on everything.
You hang around Herb Dean, Big John McCarthy, all these guys enough.
That stuff starts to rub off.
You want your level of proficiency to be that good.
At Nellis Air Force Base, where, you know, it's the home of the fighter pilot, the best of the best hang out there.
You begin to increase your level of proficiency.
You become one of the best in the world.
You know, you've got to have that, is it cockiness?
I'd rather call it, you know, confidence, yet unassuming.
You don't want to be too cocky to the point of thinking you're, you know, you're indestructible, but you want to be good enough to be able to declare and know that you're the best in the world.
And if I achieve something, yeah, I'm satisfied with it, but it's like, okay, what else can I go do now?
You know, I finish at the Air Force Academy.
Let's go get a master's.
Go to pilot training.
Let's not just go to pilot training.
Let's finish in the top so I can choose which plane I get.
And I chose to get an F-16.
So here I am, this kid from southeast Washington, D.C. that, you know, grew up with my parents taking me down by Reagan Airport and watching planes take off.
And then I saw an air show, Thunderbirds, and I said, I think I want to do that one day.
And here we are, years later, I stand out and the greatest accomplishment, greatest thing I think I've ever had.
I was in the gym at the base in Arizona working out one day and I get paged to the front desk.
I go, what is this about?
On the phone, it's a four-star general that's in charge of, you know, all of air combat command.
And he goes, what are you doing six months from now?
Why don't you come out to Nellis and be one of my Thunderbirds.
But, man, and, you know, like I told you, when I got that message from you about stuff like this is, you know, We believe in the adage of good things happen to good people and a lot of dreams that keep coming true.
And I try to impress this upon my children as a single dad.
And I will tell you, above all else, anything else I've done, I'm most proud of being a single dad.
Now, tell me what, like, to be a Thunderbird, when they have those crazy air shows, I mean, there's so much danger and so much coordination between all the jets.
Like, how long does it take to prepare for one of those shows?
So when he rolls inverted to come back the other direction, he needs so many thousand feet to be able to make it on the backside of it without impacting the ground.
You don't have the three dimensions, the XYZ axis, so you don't get that part of it.
But as far as the ocular stimulation, you're going to get all that.
You're going to see everything that you would actually see.
And it's more of a hand-eye coordination.
So athletes tend to do very well when we fly.
Because it's a lot of look outside.
It's not a lot of looking down at your instruments inside the cockpit.
With the heads-up displays, it's designed to very rarely look inside the cockpit.
And then your control stick is going to be on your right hand, and then your throttle and everything on your left hand with anywhere between 5 and 10 buttons on either one.
So we used to call it the piccolo drill.
You know, you do all this stuff and you'd have to manipulate doing shooting missiles and turning the gun on and turning your radar and doing all this stuff with your hands.
You know, for us, the United States Air Force, we're the spokespersons for the Air Force, Department of Defense, etc., But it's also instill, you know, faith and confidence in your military.
It's a little bit different than out there dropping bombs and shooting missiles.
But it's the, you know, to show the performance capabilities of the men and women in the Air Force, the personnel, as far as the performance capabilities of the equipment that we fly.
You know, the F-16 is a fourth generation fighter.
The best of the best will be the fifth generation plus F-22s, F-35s.
But that's also to have a little bit of fun and go out and do an air show, you know, as fans.
You're living the life of a rock star.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
The Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, you know, we did shows in Fort Lauderdale, like over spring break, where there are, you know, a million plus people out there on the beach watching us.
Uh, so the training, uh, so we practice in Las Vegas at the ranges just up north and you start basically right after Thanksgiving.
So the last show of the year is going to be the second week of November.
They take Thanksgiving off and then they get cranking from there.
And from end of November, all the way up into March, Monday through Friday, sometimes on Saturdays, you fly two to three times a day, every single day.
So it's about a hundred, you know, anywhere 120, 150 rides, flights to get you prepared for that.
And then it's, you start off as a two ship, bring in the third plane, bring in the fourth plane.
So the diamond goes and does their thing.
The solos go and do their thing.
When they get proficiency up to like 50% of the flights, everybody comes back together.
And the goal is always perfection in an air show.
We honestly believe we never achieve perfection.
You know, the crowd may be sitting there loving it and crying out.
That was incredible.
You've never seen a debrief to talk about a flight until you watched a Thunderbird or a Blue Angel debrief.
We could be in there for hours talking about you taxied out and you were, you know, six inches off to the right or you were taxiing five knots too fast.
We want perfection.
You know, the way we salute, the way your uniform look, you can't be fat, dumpy and sloppy in your Thunderbird uniform.
It was that goal of perfection because, you know, you as an American citizen want to have faith and confidence in your military.
And that's one of the greatest tools that we can have to be able to demonstrate that.
You know, it's fun for people to go to air shows.
We want to recruit.
We want to have that next generation come in and follow in our footsteps.
You know, it's all voluntary force, so we've got to get people to join.
But we also want you to have a little bit of fun and, you know, see something amazing when you come to an air show.
You have drawstrings on it, but so when he ejected there, so when you watched a video inside the cockpit, He's going down like this, and he has his hand on the right stick, and you can see his left hand move three times.
He's thinking about ejecting.
Had he ejected the first time, he would have gone right into the fireball.
Second time, he's starting to flat plate the plane a little bit, he still would have gone to the fireball.
So he waited to the perfect time, and he's actually below the ejection envelope.
It's a zero-zero seat, meaning sitting on the ground, no airspeed, I can eject out of it and it's going to give me a parachute.
He steps on the rudder, which turns the nose of the plane about 10 degrees to the left, because he's over the runway.
When he ejects, the drogue chute comes out, which slows him down, and he separates from the seat, but he does not get a full parachute.
So you go, how does somebody survive without getting a full parachute?
And, you know, unfortunately, in this one, it was deemed to be pilot error, and he was removed from the team.
So that was towards the beginning of the show season.
So it's always six airplanes, and there are six demonstration pilots.
There are eight pilots on the team, but one is the narrator and the other is the safety officer.
We don't have any backups.
So if I wake up Tuesday morning and I got a cold, there's no backup for me.
So he got removed from the team, and then, you know, unique for us, we finished the season as a five-ship.
So we changed around some of our formations.
Instead of having a six-ship formation, we did five-ship formations.
We had to do some, you know, downtime there in Idaho, and then we got a waiver to fly back to Vegas, and then we sat for a little bit until they made a determination there was not actually something wrong with the plane, you know.
Because if there's determination there's something wrong with the plane, everybody has to be grounded.
When they determined all that was fine, we started training again and made a transition to a five-ship show and we finished the season as a five-ship.
And then they hire odds and evens every year.
So 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 will stay on the team while they hire 2, 4, 6, 8. And that's to keep consistency on the team every year.
So that next year when 1, 3, 5, 7 are done, They'll hire a new 1, 3, 5, 7. And now you've got your 2, 4, 6s, and 8s that are second year consistency and will be the instructors for the team.
But it's, again, at Nellis Air Force Base, the home of the fighter pilot out in Vegas.
You know, you got the best of the best that are out there.
And, you know, to be a Thunderbird, it's a multi-step process.
You know, you got to have great flying capabilities, letters of recommendation from a lot of people, and you got to look good in uniform.
You got to look fit.
You can't be out of shape.
And you got to be, you know, have the nerves to be able to do this, to It's one thing to go out and fly a fighter plane.
All the basic maneuvers that we're doing are the same as every Air Force pilot learns.
But now you're doing this in tune to music, you know, sitting 18 inches away from another plane, you know, in front of a crowd of however many hundreds of thousands of people.
It was fun, though.
You know, it's high stress.
You know, my instructor was like, wiggle your fingers and wiggle your toes because you start to tense up and you do that, you're going to relax a little bit.
But, you know, my neck was stuck like this for about two and a half years because that's...
They were like, oh, we're going past Mount Rushmore.
How did it look?
And I go, it looked like 132 bolts on the left side of Thunderbird 1. That's all I can see all the time.
Uh, so you do the T37 for, so at the academy, you flew the glider for, I don't know, 10 rides and then the T41, uh, for, you know, 10, 20 rides until you solo, you know, they put you in a plane where you're proficient, you go out and solo.
And then in pilot training, this is a formal, after you graduated ROTC, the academy, you do six months in the T37, decide what track you go on and then you do six months in the T38. And then I did well enough in the T-38 that I was able to pick.
I selected F-16s and then I went to Luke Air Force Base out in Arizona and became proficient in F-16s.
And then from there, I went to combat squadrons all around the world, South Carolina, Korea, you know, back to Arizona, Nellis.
So I've flown, I think, six different versions of the F-16 and then flew to Thunderbirds where they fly F-16s, went away to do the tour at the White House, and then came back and finished up on F-16s again.
So in 1964, President Johnson formed a program called the White House Fellowship, where the, it's actually the President of the United States will select anywhere between 12 and 15 young Americans, doesn't matter military, civilian, anything, to come and serve in their administration.
And what it is, it's the highest level mentorship, leadership program that you can be a part of in our country.
And the president places you somewhere in their cabinet to be a senior advisor to like a cabinet secretary, or like for me, I was a senior white house advisor at NASA. So I worked directly for the NASA administrator and you're a, you know, essentially a senior white house, you know, advisor or consultant, whatever task that cabinet secretary wants to have from you at NASA. And what I did for, uh, you know, NASA administrator, Mike Griffin, one of the smartest guys you'll ever meet in your life.
Like he had seven degrees, a couple of doctorates in there.
I was in a lot of capacities his right-hand man, so he would have me do all the programming for stuff at NASA. He would take me on trips with him to Russia, you know, discussions about the International Space Station.
And I prepared a budgetary book for Congress 2007 that was presented to Congress to talk about the, you know, the compartmental programs for NASA moving forward with the cancellation of the space shuttle.
Where is NASA's budget going to go?
So that was my, you know, kind of summary project for working at NASA for the year.
And then I got to interact with all the agencies that work with NASA, you know, the International Space Station, working on the Soyuz, going to fly, and essentially getting to see things at that level.
Now, part two of it What's back on the White House side?
They bring us in a couple days a week and we'd have, you know, one-on-one private meetings with cabinet secretaries or, you know, chief of staff of the Air Force and folks like that.
So I grew up in Washington, D.C. And you get these tours of the East Wing of the White.
You know, you can walk through and see all the stuff on the East side.
But it's surreal to be in the West Wing.
Because you, they meet outside, and you know, you got to do all the safety protocols and everything, and then they take you in, and you take the elevator up to that.
But as a husband, as a father, how passionate he was about his incredible spouse and his children, to see that side of a person.
A lot of stuff we can't disclose just because it's private conversation, it's non-disclosure, but to see the emotion You know, of a father talking about his daughters, you know, who are in college and, you know, his hopes and dreams for them.
And to be able to really respectfully ask any question, you know, that you want.
We'd have these sessions, like with the president.
We'd meet in the Roosevelt Room in the Oval Office, and it's tough as a cabinet secretary to get 5, 10, 15 minutes with the president.
We'd sit in there with him for an hour and a half and talk about stuff.
You know, ask, is the country ready for a female president?
He had people that he looked at, leadership, that he thought would be candidates for presidency.
Condoleezza Rice was on his administration, and obviously Hillary Clinton was there.
So the level of people that were out there to have these discussions of, these are the type of people that we think, regardless of political affiliation, that could be looked at for leadership in our country.
And with us, the people that they select to be in that program to be future leaders, military, non-military, you're sitting around some of the finest people in the world, people that I still talk to and associate with and have discussions with today.
So here we are, years later, that these are still some of my best friends in the world.
That you talk about goals and dreams and, you know, you think about stepping into politics and stuff like that and, you know, you get some sound advice to these people.
But I'd already seen and been around the president before because when we did some of the air shows, you know, the president or vice president, someone comes, you know, they come and speak.
And we did a show at the Air Force Academy.
President Bush is there.
So I got, you know, pictures and stuff with him and, you know, getting to talk to him.
And it's weird.
Because we have military call signs, you know, like Maverick and Goose.
After General Chappie James, the first black four-star in the Air Force.
So we go back and do this White House stuff, and we're at a Christmas party, and there's a formal greeting line to go and meet the President and the First Lady.
And the aide is standing there, and he says, you know, Major Mark Smith.
And he goes, Chappie, come on in.
Meet the wife.
And I was like, how the heck did he remember, you know, what my military call sign was?
But that's the type of personal relationship in that ultra-professional environment that you get.
So, you know, so here I am growing up in southeast Washington, D.C. Go away to school.
And the proudest moment I think I've ever had is we would get to give tours and stuff of the White House.
So I get to bring my parents down and give them a tour of the West Wing of the White House.
So, you know, people talk about dreams come true, hard work and stuff like that, man.
So as part of the design program, we have pilots that will be coded as test pilots.
You know, so they may be stationed at Edwards or they may be stationed there at Nellis Air Force Base.
That's their active role.
You know, they look at development of it based on historical platforms.
You know, you go from the F-16, F-15 to the F-22 to the F-35, you get all that kind of input.
So they're guys that, instead of being in a combat-coded squadron, they're actually in a test and evaluation squadron that get to do all that stuff.
And they go out and test, what are the capabilities of this missile?
Ah, it's not doing exactly what we want it to do.
And they take all that feedback.
To the design folks like Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics back in the day when they're building stuff.
You know, for the longest time, the F-15s and the F-16s, for us, that production line was done.
But you go to St. Louis, and you look on the opposite side of the runway, they're building F-15s there again.
And we just announced that the Air Force is going to start buying the next block of F-16s, the block 70s, which is, man, that's a really advanced plane.
And guys that are active duty, they get to go out and fly that thing and test it.
So the amount that it cost, you know, when the agreement came down to how many we were going to buy, I think it's probably in the hundreds now, you know, that we have, Congress was going to allocate a certain amount of funds to, okay, you can have this much money to buy this money.
F-22s.
And the more you buy, the, you know, per price may go down, but because we have a limited amount, budgetary-wise, that's what we stop with.
And then we got congressional approval for the F-35.
And, you know, their competitions, the F-22 versus the, you know, the YF-22 back in the day versus the YF-23, which company makes it, they're going to have, you know, fly-offs and make a determination of which one we're going to get.
I think with, there are probably limitations in the capability of the pilot that's flying it.
You know, like, I think the most I've ever pulled is 10.3 G's.
The plane is designed at, yeah, so if you think about the concept of a G, If you're...
The amount of G that you pull, you take the body weight or whatever it is and multiply it times that.
So if my hand weighs 10 pounds, I'm pulling, you know, 7 Gs, my hand feels like it weighs 70 pounds.
So if it's a 200-pound guy...
You pull 9Gs, your body feels like it weighs 1,800 pounds.
And you're trying to maneuver the plane, keep sight of the other plane, maybe deploy weapons, control avionics, control your radar and stuff like that as you're doing all that.
So there are physical limitations of the person that's flying the plane.
That's why they looked at pilotless aircraft.
I think some of the cargo companies have talked about that.
There's a human element that I believe you always have to have there because of unknown conditions, you know, emergencies and stuff like that.
They've looked at single pilot, you know, cargo airplanes and stuff like that.
But I can tell you, when you have emergencies up there, it's nothing like having a person sitting in the seat next to you where somebody can handle the emergency while the other person's flying the plane.
We've got drones and stuff that are out there, and you may have a pilot or controller that's on the ground that's controlling a single drone or multiple drones.
So yeah, we're probably going to advance to that because...
Yeah, you've got to get over the air sickness and the fear of moving in the third dimension and really combating against the G-forces, but...
In a dogfight scenario, you may get maneuvers like that, but in a long-range fight, you're going to be flying straight and level and maybe shoot a missile.
You may not do stuff like that.
My body eventually got used to it.
It was tough at first, you know, fighting against, because I'd never experienced anything like that before.
You get on a roller coaster, it's like one or two Gs.
I'm like, that's nothing.
When you get up to nine, you're like, oh my God, this is, you know, sinking down into the scene.
And you've seen like a footage of, they call it the, like the G chamber where guys go and do their stuff.
When they spin like that, you can see the physical toll that it has on the body.
And what it does to you.
Now you put that up in the air, moving in three dimensions, while you've got the G-forces on you.
You know, when I finished pilot training, it's down at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
You've got to do that to be able to go into your fighter, and then once you're done, to be able to prove that you're combat ready, you've got to go down there and you do that.
You sit in a seat, and you've got to be able to pull 9Gs or whatever it is for a certain amount of time.