#162 Chuck Yeager

What I learned from reading Yeager: An Autobiography by General Chuck Yeager. ---- [10:14] I was a competitive kid. I always tried to do my best. I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way. We managed to scrape by. Kids learned self-sufficiency. Mom and Dad taught us by example. They never complained. I had certain standards that I lived by. Whatever I did, I determined to do the best I could at it. [13:22] The sense of speed and exhilaration makes you so damned happy that you want to shout for joy. [17:15] In nearly every case the worst pilots die by their own stupidity. [26:04] I sensed that he was a very strong and determined person, a poor boy who had started with nothing and would show the world what he was really made of. [38:48] Every muscle in my body is hammering at me. I just want to let go of his guy and drop in my tracks—either to sleep or to die. I don’t know why I keep hold of him and struggle to climb. It’s the challenge, I guess, and a stubborn pride knowing that most guys would’ve let go of Pat before now. [40:57] Chuck is the most stubborn bastard in the world, who doesn’t dabble in gray areas. He sees in black and white. He simply said, “I’m not going home.” [45:26] The Germans began to come up to challenge us and ran into a goddamn West Virginia buzzsaw. [50:30] If you love the hell out of what you’re doing, you’re usually pretty good at it, and you wind up making your own breaks. I wasn’t a deep, sophisticated person, but I lived by a basic principle: I did only what I enjoyed. I wouldn’t let anyone derail me by promises of power or money into doing things that weren’t interesting to me. [55:38] Yeager would rely on himself. I couldn’t teach him enough. [1:03:31] My life was flying and pilots. I didn’t spend a whole helluva lot of time doing or thinking about anything else. We were an obsessed bunch, probably because we were so isolated. [1:17:29] Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself; the trick is to enjoy the years remaining. And unlike flying, learning how to take pleasure from living can’t be taught. Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing. [1:18:22] I’ve never lost the curiosity about things that interest me. I’m very good at the activities I most enjoy, and that part has made my life that much sweeter. I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much. If I auger in tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  I reached the top of the arc and began to level off. I could have shaken hands with Lord Jesus. Eighty thousand feet. A nighttime sky with flickering stars at 10:00 in the morning. Up there, with only a wisp of an atmosphere, steering an airplane was like driving on slick ice. I dropped my nose slightly to pick up more speed and watched the meter register Mach 2.2, then Mach 2.3. I was accelerating at 31 miles per hour per second, approaching 1,650 miles per hour, the fastest any pilot had yet flown and the fastest that any straight-winged airplane would ever fly. My outside wing began to rise.

• 0:44David Senra?

  I put in full aileron against it, but nothing happened. The thought smacked me. "Too high, too fast, Yeager." I might have added, "Too late, Christ." We began going haywire. The wing kept coming up, and I was powerless to keep from rolling over. And then we started going in four different directions at once, careening all over the sky, snapping and rolling and spinning in what pilots called "going divergent on all three axes." I called it hell. I was crashing around in that cockpit, slamming violently from side to side, front to back, battered to the point where I was too stunned to think. Terrifying. The thought flashed. I lost my tail. I've had it.

• 1:28David Senra?

  G-forces yanked me upwards with such force that my helmet cracked the canopy. Without my seat straps, I probably would have blasted right through the glass. My pressure suit suddenly inflated with a loud hiss. I was gasping, and my faceplate fogged, blinded, being pounded to death. I wondered where in the Sierra Mountains I was about to drill a hole. We were spinning down through the sky like a frisbee. Desperate to see, I groped to the right of the instrument panel, trying to find the switch to turn up the heat in my faceplate. But then the ship snapped violently back on itself, slamming me against a control stick and somehow hooking my helmet onto it. As I struggled to get free,

• 2:11David Senra?

  I had glimpses of light and dark, light and dark, through the fog visor. Sun and ground, sun, ground. Spinning down. I had less than a minute left. Through some sixth sense, I remembered that the stabilizer was set at leading edge full down, and I could find the switch in the dark. Still fogged over, I reached for it and retrimmed it. Still groping, I found the rheostat and the heat flicked on. My faceplate cleared and I saw more than I wanted to. I was spinning into the Sierras. Without even thinking, I set the controls with the spin. The ship flipped into a normal spin at 30,000 feet. I knew how to get out of that.

• 2:56David Senra?

  I had spun every airplane imaginable, including the X-1. At 25,000 feet, I popped out of the spin. I radioed to Ridley. My voice was so breathless and desperate that I doubted he could understand me. Down at 25,000 feet, I don't know whether or not I can get back. I can't say much more. I've got to save myself. I didn't know what was going on. I was so dazed and battered, I wondered if I could still fly. And I worried if the airplane could still carry me. I sobbed. I barely remember the next moments, but then my head cleared and I was at 5,000 feet, lining up with the lake bed. I was gliding in from the other side of the Mojave, doing 270 miles per hour, and I

• 3:38David Senra?

  started to believe I was going to make it. The lake bed filled my windshield, and I put her down a little hard, with a thump and a cloud of dust. But no landing in my life was as sweet as that one. The flight data would later reveal that I had spun down 51,000 feet in 51 seconds. I survived on sheer instinct and pure luck. That is what it's like to almost die testing jets, and it comes from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Yeager, an autobiography by General Chuck Yeager. So before I jump into the rest of the book, just a quick note on, I want to talk to you

• 4:22David Senra?

  real quick about Founders Postscript. I started a secondary podcast feed for all the books that I read that are not biographies as a way to incentivize people to sign up for annual plans. I gotta make a change. I added so much complexity. This week, I spent so much time answering emails, DMs, dealing with this added level of complexity. I had the thought while this was, this is time I should have spent, obviously, reading books and making podcasts and doing the things that you actually want me to do, right? And I had the thought while all this was going on, I said, you know what? If Steve Jobs was here, if he could come back from his grave and see what I did this week, he'd smack me in the face. So what I'm just gonna do is, even though I wanted to find a way to incentivize people to upgrade to annual plans, it's the best way to support founders,

• 5:06David Senra?

  I don't want hassle and I don't want complexity. So I'm going to leave the link for the new podcast feed. It's just gonna be a benefit for anybody that has access to Misfit, whether you're paying monthly, annually, whatever the case is. That's just the simplest way for me to do it. You'll find it in the show notes in your podcast player down below. Just grab the feed. I'll leave instructions on how to add it to. It's pretty easy. You can do it, you know, usually less than 30 seconds. And that's that. That's just the most simple way. It's just a way for me to continue to add value and to say thank you for supporting me and founders. All right. So with that out of the way, let me jump right into this book. I absolutely love this book. I could recommend reading it right off the bat. I have a ton of highlights. So let's get into it. There's a lot to learn. I guess I should

• 5:45David Senra?

  back up. How did I find this book? Chuck recently died at 97 years old. I had followed him on Twitter forever. He was this hilarious old man that spoke very frankly, very, very brutally, but he was fantastic on Twitter. And you read his bio, you know, he broke the sound barrier, was the first person to become an ace in a day, ace in a day in a single day in World War II. Just had all kinds of, he just lived an amazing life and had all kinds of accomplishments. He was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single pilot to ever live. And a lot of the ideas that he discovered through trial and error through his very long

• 6:27David Senra?

  career are ideas that you could apply to whatever it is that you do, whatever it is that you're craft. And so that's why I think he's worthy of study. And this autobiography I held in my hand is very old. I think it was published first in 1986. It has sold millions and millions of copies. It's very highly rated, and I could see why. It was a fantastic book, the same way the 90-year-old Chuck was on Twitter. He's 62 when he writes this book. He just writes, there's no fluff here. So let me just jump into a little bit about his early life and a shocking tragedy. One thing to know about Chuck is, he grew up in West Virginia. He calls himself a hillbilly, and he felt that he had to work extra hard throughout his entire life to overcome the prejudice.

• 7:11David Senra?

  When you hear him speak, later on, he sounded fine, but the chwang that he had in his voice, especially early in his life, people had a hard time understanding him. So it says, "We lived in Myra on the Upper Mud River," which was just a few farmhouses." He's describing the little town. I don't even know if you call it a town, it's like a settlement. "Which was just a few farmhouses, a post office, and a country store. Our house stood next to a cornfield. When I was about three, we moved to Hubble, where Dad went to work for the railroad. I remember him coming home with his face and hands bandaged from a flash fire when he shoveled coal into the firebox. As young as I was, that incident made a deep impression. I realized for the first time how hard he struggled to shelter us from the cold."

• 7:56David Senra?

  And he's talking about, he's got an older brother and a little sister. Says Roy, that's his older brother, "and I slept in the family room on a studio couch that opened into a bed. By then, we had a two-year-old baby sister, Doris Ann. Shortly before Christmas, when I was four and a half and Roy was six, we were sitting on the floor in the family room, playing with Dad's 12-gauge shotgun. Roy found some shells and loaded the gun. He accidentally fired, and the baby was killed."

• 8:26David Senra?

  For our little family was a time of terrible shock, loss, and suffering. I'm sure Roy carried this heartbreak with him until his own early death from a heart attack at age 41. He and I never again discussed it, nor did my parents. Years later, Glenys, that's Chuck's wife, asked my mother about the accident, but she didn't want to talk about it. That's the Yeager Way. We keep our hurts to ourselves. So now he talks a little bit about his mom and her contribution to him growing up. She cooked us mush for breakfast, which was plain boiled white cornmeal, served in a bowl with milk and sugar. She made more than we used and set it aside until it got rubbery.

• 9:08David Senra?

  Then she sliced it, fried it, put butter on it, and that was supper. Some evenings, we'd only have cornbread and buttermilk. By the time I was six, I knew how to hunt squirrel and rabbit. I'd get up around dawn, head into the woods, and bring back three or four squirrels, skin them, and leave them in a bucket of water for mom to cook for supper. I actually use that example in my own life. My daughter was complaining about having to put some clothes away, and she's eight years old. And I just very calmly said, I was like, hey, I was like, when you were six years old, did you have to get up at dawn and go into the woods and hunt and kill squirrels, skin them, and leave them in a bucket for dinner because you had nothing else to eat? She's like, what? I was like, yeah, you don't really have that much to complain about.

• 9:51David Senra?

  On a few pages later, this is just what I love about the way he writes. This is just four short sentences, and he tells an entire story. You have an idea of who he was. Yeah, who he was. We ran barefoot all summer. Dad was gone all week. He came home on the weekends. I cannot remember a moment when there wasn't something to do. And here's some more short sentences that tell entire stories. I was a competitive kid. I always tried to do my best. I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way. We managed to scrape by. Kids learned self-sufficiency. Mom and dad taught us by example. They never complained.

• 10:35David Senra?

  I had certain standards that I lived by. Whatever I did, I was determined to do the best I could at it. And I think those sentences give you an idea of his early childhood. Now, we're going to get to the point where he's graduating high school. He's going to join the military. And on this page, there's several ideas that we have seen before. And, well, you know what? Let me read them to you, and then I'll tell you how they relate to other founders that we've studied in the past. I never thought of going to college, but I was always eager to acquire practical knowledge about things that interested me. That was a big reason for my success as a pilot. I flew more than anybody else, and there wasn't a thing about an airplane that didn't fascinate me, down to the smallest bolt.

• 11:18David Senra?

  So that's just one sentence, and those are two ideas that we've seen before. One, I flew more than anybody else, and there was... I flew more than anybody else. I always recommend Arnold Schwarzenegger's fantastic autobiography. It's like 500 pages. I can give you the main idea in three words. Reps, reps, reps. That was Founder's number 141, if you haven't gone back to listen to that. And what Arnold keeps preaching in that over and over again is you have to put in the time. I did thousands and thousands and thousands of reps, not only for... Literally, he means in like his bodybuilding career, but learning how to speak English, learning how to be an actor, learning anything he was doing, just time and time and time. So that's what Yeager says throughout the book. "I flew more than anybody else." He says that over and over and over again. And then that second idea.

• 12:02David Senra?

  "And there wasn't a thing about an airplane that didn't fascinate me down to the smallest bolt." We saw that before Samuel Zeremurray, back on Founder's number 37, the book, The Fish That Ate The Whale. His quote that I read in that book, I haven't forgotten. I probably did that book, what, two years ago? "There is no problem you cannot solve if you understand your business from A to Z." And Chuck will reference that over and over again, the fact that he saved his life multiple times, because not only did he learn how to fly, but he learned how the plane worked. And he compares and contrasts his approach with other pilots that only learned how to fly, didn't care, you know, outsourced the idea to the mechanics and cost them their lives. So it says, "I flew more than anybody else and there wasn't a thing about an airplane

• 12:45David Senra?

  that didn't fascinate me down to the smallest bolt." Back to his personality, "I'm stubborn and strong-willed and opinionated as hell." Yeah, that's for sure, if you've read his Twitter feed. And this is another good idea here. "As hard as Dad worked, he enjoyed it, and that was an important lesson, too. Tramping alone through the woods with a rifle or in a cockpit with a throttle in my hands, that's where I was the happiest, and that's how I wanted to live my life." Okay, so I'm gonna fast forward to where he starts learning how to fly. This is March 1943, and there's a couple of things happening on this page. There's a description of his training, but it's also a description of how you know if you have the right job or not. So it says, "You're whipping through the desert canyon at 300 miles per hour, your

• 13:29David Senra?

  belly just barely scraping the rocks, your hand on the throttle. It's a crystal-clear morning in the desert of western Nevada, and the joy of flying, the sense of speed and exhilaration 20 feet above the deck, makes you so damn happy that you want to shout for joy. A hill rises ahead, and you ease back, skim over the top of it, dropping down above cotton woods lining the bank of a stream. You feel so lucky, so blessed to be a fighter pilot." Now, a little bit about the training. "We live surrounded by the Nevada sand dunes in tar-paper shacks, belching black smoke from the oil-burning stoves that only warm themselves on cold desert nights.

• 14:10David Senra?

  The wind never stopped blowing, and the chow was awful, but none of us complained. We flew from dawn to dusk, six flights a day, six days a week. Dogfighting, buzzing, and practicing gunnery. We crawled exhausted into the sack at 10 o'clock at night and straggled to breakfast at 4:30 in the morning. I logged 100 hours of flying that first month. Hog heaven."

• 14:39David Senra?

  Now, what's most interesting about that is this is not something he had planned for his life at all. In fact, Chuck says over and over again in the book, he's like, "I'm not ambitious. I just decided to take the most interesting thing that was right in front of me, but I didn't plan very far ahead." So, this is about how it didn't really start that way. "I had never dreamt of being an aviator. Me? I was a pool hustler from West Virginia." He's talking about his life right before joining the Army, or the military, rather. "Before running chores, playing pool in the pool hall, or poker under a..." or, excuse me, "between." "Between running chores, playing pool in the pool hall, or poker under a covered bridge at the edge of town, and catting around with three or four different gals, there wasn't a hell of a lot going on in my life in the summer of 1941.

• 15:23David Senra?

  When an Army Air Corps recruiter came to town, I enlisted for a two-year hitch. I thought I might enjoy it and see some of the world." So, he starts off not as a pilot. He says, "I became an airplane mechanic. But after taking my first airplane ride, I'd rather have crawled across the country than go back up." So, this is very interesting. He got so sick, he's like, "I'm never gonna... I know everyone would be in a plane again." "I took off for a spin with a maintenance officer, flight-testing a ship that I had serviced, and I threw up all over the backseat, staggering out of that damn thing as miserable as I'd ever been. But teenagers blot out the past when the present seems appealing." What a great sentence. "I saw a notice announcing a flying sergeant program.

• 16:05David Senra?

  I'd take my chances with flying to become a sergeant. Flying became fun. Being cocky and competitive, I began bouncing other students and saging mock dogfights. I could line up on air or ground targets before others in the class even saw them. My instructor knew who was the best in the group, and in the end, I was the one he recommended to become a fighter pilot. I was thrilled." So, Chuck starts as a fighter pilot, and then he's... after the War... after World War II, he's gonna start testing experimental planes and then experimental jets, right? And so, just like when we studied Enzo Ferrari, Carroll Shelby, I think this is back in like the late founders 90s, somewhere in there, they were at the cutting edge of racing cars, and a lot of people were dying.

• 16:51David Senra?

  The books are just full of people dying. This is the same thing at this time. There's, you know, you could start off with maybe a class of 30 and you'd be lucky if half of them survived. They don't call it dying, though. They call it augering in or buying the farm. So if you hear me use those terms, he means dying. But what I found interesting is he's talking about how stupidity is leading to death. And I want to relate this to what Charlie Munger said. So first, here's Yeager. Yeager says, "In nearly every case, the worst pilots died by their own stupidity." So Charlie Munger has this idea where he's just like, avoiding stupidity is actually

• 17:33David Senra?

  a skill that you can cultivate and it's much more important skill than trying to be brilliant. So let me read, there's an interview that he gave, that Charlie Munger gave, and he was asked the question, it's like, "Why isn't Berkshire easy to emulate? You know, you have simple ideas, but why, why don't more people copy what you're doing?" And this is what Charlie said, it was very fascinating. He says, "We're talking about very simple ideas of just figuring out the standard stupidities and avoiding them. And I actually collect them," meaning he collects human stupidities. "Some people collect stamps. I collect insanities and absurdities, and then I avoid them. And it's amazing how well it works, because I've gone by the examples of all these people that are more talented than I am."

• 18:16David Senra?

  Charlie's also described himself as a biography nut. He's read hundreds and hundreds of biographies about his life. "If I had to set out to invent more quantum mechanics, I would have been an also-ran. I just set out to avoid the standard stupidities, and I've done a lot better than many people who mastered quantum mechanics. It's a way for mediocre people to get ahead, and it's not much of a secret either. Just avoid all the standard stupidities. There are so many of them, and so many brilliant people do it. Being a prodigy is hard. I'm not trying to be a prodigy. I'm just trying to avoid the insanities, including the insanities of prodigies."

• 18:56David Senra?

  That enables a man of moderate abilities and moderate work habits to get so much more than his logical desserts. Think of the talent it takes to make a lot of money. And so that's when I read, when I'm reading Chuck Yeager, I'm hearing Charlie Munger at the same time. That you should avoid stupidity. Stupidity will get you killed in Chuck's line of work. In Charlie's line of work, stupidity can make you go broke, make you deeply unhappy. It can cause a lot of pain to yourself and those around you. So avoid stupidity. It is a skill you can cultivate. I love that. Now, this is the second part of what's happening on this page is the North of myself is humans are capable of dark psychological states.

• 19:41David Senra?

  Let me read this to you. He's talking about the training to become a fighter pilot to serve in World War II. Okay. A gruesome weeding out process was taking place. Those who were killed in Nevada were likely to have been killed in combat. But those of us who did survive the training were rapidly becoming skilled combat pilots and a cohesive team. I turned my back on lousy flyers as if their mistakes were catching. When one of them became a grease spot on the tarmac, I almost felt relieved. Think about what a crazy sentence that is. That is a dark psychological state. It is way better to bury a weak sister in training than in combat, where he might not

• 20:22David Senra?

  only bust his ass, but do something that would bust two or three other asses in addition to his own. So what he's later in the book, and later in flight history, they start having to be refueled in midair by these giant bombers. So you have this giant plane, there might be 10 people on board, and you have a fighter pilot that has to get up underneath them. You might have seen this before. And they refuel. And he says, you know, if you make a mistake, if you're a stupid pilot at that point, not only, you know, you killed yourself, you damaged very expensive, you ruined a very expensive plane, but in some cases, he calls this guy an idiot, he says, one idiot took out an entire bomber and the 10 people on board. So not only did he make a mistake, he cost his life, but he lost two planes and 11 souls.

• 21:07David Senra?

  So this is, if you, if you read what Chuck is saying here without context, it seems very like dark and extreme, and it definitely is. But when you, when you put it into the context of it's not just this guy's life that's at stake, but it's everybody around him. It makes sense why he's so brutal, I guess is the word I would use here. So it says, where he might not only bust his ass, but do something would bust two or three other asses in addition to his own. But I got mad at the dead, angry at them for dying so young and so senselessly. That's another point of this book, you know, it's not, there's, there's no 97 year old fighter pilots. These are young, even by the time he's in his 30s, you know, he's just, he's, he still flies all the time.

• 21:52David Senra?

  That never stops, but he, he keeps getting promoted, so he's teaching more and they consider it a very young man's game. You're talking, you know, when he was serving in World War II, the person leading him was 25 years old and he thought they, they thought this guy was old because they were young, you know, 19, 20, 21 years old, extremely young when he's doing this. Anger was my defense mechanism. I lost count of how many good friends have augured in over the years. But either you become calloused or you crack. Shooting down an airplane seemed an incredible feat. I had no idea why the German people were stuck with Hitler and the Nazis and I could care less. History was not one of my strong subjects, but when the time came, I would hammer those Germans any chance I got. Them or me.

• 22:37David Senra?

  Even a D history student knew that it was always better to be the hammer than the nail. So now it talks about just the, the kind of people that would be attracted to becoming fighter pilots. They are wild and being wild makes them happy. And this is an example of that. Those six months of squadron training were the happiest that I've ever been. That is a hell of a statement. He lived an amazing life filled, you know, this is, he still has got a third of his life to go when he published his book, but even if he ended at 62, he lived many, many multiple lifetimes compared to the average person. And he says, those six months of my squadron training were the happiest I've ever been. Now that I was a fighter pilot, I couldn't imagine being anything else. Again, another sign that you have a great job, or that you have the right job, rather.

• 23:22David Senra?

  We were hell raising fighter jocks with plenty of swagger. So let me actually stop there because I, that's, I shouldn't be so flippant, like that's a, like, like let's spend some more time on that comment. Now that I was a fighter pilot, I couldn't imagine being anything else. It's a great, simple system or simple way to figure out if you're doing what you're meant to do in life. You can't imagine being anything else. We were hell-raising fighter jocks with plenty of swagger. When we weren't flying, we zipped out on our leather flight jackets and told the world who we were. On paydays, we crowded around the blackjack tables, drank ourselves blind on bourbon, drank ourselves blind on bourbon, and staggered over to the local cat house.

• 24:08David Senra?

  So it talks about they got in trouble in this cat house, which is a bordello.

• 24:13David Senra?

  A brothel, I guess is a more common term. It's in this little town in Mina, and they were causing so much trouble that they called the cops on them. But we went to Mina anyways, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. Okay, so cops saying, "Get out of here." What does this guy do? The next morning, a P-39, that's the plane that he's flying, strafed Mina's water tower. So he goes back, and they call it strafing, sometimes they call it buzzing, but it's getting the aircraft so low that people on the ground feel the vibrations and the sound is just extremely loud. It's unpleasant.

• 24:58David Senra?

  And so, yeah, you might have kicked me out of town, but I'm coming back the next day, and I'm coming back with my fighter planes. It's just insane. So I started the podcast with the most haring experience that he ever had, but he almost died multiple times. I'm going to share another example of him almost dying that took place maybe a decade before the accident at the beginning of the podcast. So it says, "Before then, I almost bought the farm." That's another euphemism for dying, right? "Our fighter group staged a mock attack, and I was indicating about 400 miles per hour when there was a roaring explosion in the back of the aircraft. Fire came out from under my seat, and the airplane flew apart in different directions. I jumped for it.

• 25:41David Senra?

  When the chute opened, I was knocked unconscious. A sheep herder found me in the hills and tossed me across his donkey face down." My back was fractured and it hurt like hell. So I think he was 20, he was 20 years old when that happened to him. Now, this is his, he just met the woman that's soon to be his wife. They were married for like 45 years before she died of cancer. And this is his wife's description of Chuck at this time. And I think this is a description of Chuck, but it could, it could go for almost any person that we've studied in this podcast. "I sensed that he was a very strong and determined person. A poor boy who had started with nothing and would show the world what he was really made of."

• 26:26David Senra?

  Okay, so let's fast forward, World War II. I forgot to mention in his list of accomplishments. He gets shot down, survives, walks across the mountains into Spain, and then is the first pilot to be allowed back. And this all makes sense as I continue to read this section. "Free-falling, flat on my back, spinning from 16,000 feet. Velocity doubling each second. Hold off, get below the clouds where the Krauts," that's what he calls the Germans, "can't see the chute. Yank that cord now and you're dead. Germans' strafe guys floating down. Clouds whisk pass. French countryside filling horizon. Even so, wait, goddammit.

• 27:11David Senra?

  Ground rushing up. Occupied territory. Two fingers grip the chute ring. Corner of my eye. Ground closing in. Smell forest and field below. Now, I yank the ripcord ring. The parachute blossoms, breaking my fall, and I'm rocking gently in the winter sky. Below me, the hills and fields are crawling with Germans. I see the black smoke from my airplane wreckage and sweat the slow ride down. I'm an easy target, I'm easy target practice from the ground. I hear a dogfight raging far above me. The chattering machine guns and roaring engines of dozens of fighter planes spinning across the sky.

• 27:51David Senra?

  I'm dropping down over southern France on a deceptively peaceful countryside. Trees rush up at me. I reach out and grab onto the top of a 20-foot pine. I bounce a couple of times, I bounce a couple of times on that limber, leaning it over to the ground." And just as I did as a kid in West Virginia when we ride pines for miles through the woods. In only seconds, I'm six inches from the ground. I step down, gather in my parachute to use later as shelter, and limp off into the woods. There's blood on my pant leg, blood on my torn leathered gloves, and blood dripping down the front of my flying jacket from my head. The woods are dark and still, but even as I move deeper into them, I hear the distant

• 28:34David Senra?

  rumble of army vehicles and the sounds of voices shouting in German. "They pick you up fast in occupied territory, before the locals can hide you." The bastards saw me coming down. It is slightly past noon on Sunday, March 5, 1944, and I'm a wounded, 21-year-old American fighter pilot, shot down and on the run. So let's go into what he does next. "I study a map of Europe that is sewn into our flight suits. Man, I can't believe how fast luck changes in war." Now, you've got to remember this part for later. "But whatever happens for me, the war is over. If I make it home, no more combat." Now, this is very surprising to me.

• 29:18David Senra?

  "A rule meant to protect the French underground from pilots they assisted, who might later be shot down again and tortured by the Gestapo into revealing escape networks." So there's all these French Resistance fighters that are hidden out in France, that Germany, obviously, is occupied territory, Germany's controlling France at this moment. And so, they're going to have, these are the people that actually wind up helping Yeager escape to Spain. But the problem is, is, you know, let's say he goes back up, a year from now, he gets shot back down, but this time, the Germans get him. Well, they'll torture him, and then, under torture, he's liable to say, "Hey, this is where they are, this is their networks, this is how they travel, this is how they're getting fed, all the other stuff." So this is a rule where he's like, "Damn, all I want to do is fighter pilot, and now

• 30:02David Senra?

  not only may I not survive this, I might die, I might freeze to death, it's cold, you know, I could be killed, I could be turned in for money, but what I wanted to do is taken away from me. I'm never going to get this opportunity again." So this kind of compounds, just, I'm trying to tell you all this background, if you put yourself in his position, just imagine, not only the physical anguish, but the mental anguish that he's having to endure at this moment. "So far, none of the guys shot down in my squadron had been able to make it back." Now, remember this for later, though. He winds up making it back. And it's part of that where his wife was just describing his insane levels of determination and persistence and just, he's stubborn as a mule. He says, "I peek out to see..." So, he's hiding in the bushes.

• 30:44David Senra?

  This part reminds me of this fantastic book I just read, Andy Grove's autobiography, Swimming Across. So, he says, "I peek out and see a woodcutter shouldering a heavy axe." Remember, this is a French guy, okay? "I decide to rush him from behind and get the axe, killing him if necessary." He's not gonna kill the guy, don't worry. "I jump him and he drops the axe, almost dead with fright. With eyes the size of quarters, he stares at the pistol I'm waving in his face. He speaks no English, so I talk to him like Tarzan. Me, American, need help, find underground." He jabbers back in excited French, and if I understand right, he tells me that he will go find somebody who speaks English. I read his face, which is scared but friendly.

• 31:26David Senra?

  Remember, the French, I mean, he understands what's likely to happen. Yeah, some French people would turn him in. The French did not want the Germans in their country, and they realized the Americans, British, all these people are trying to help get the Germans out, so it's in my own interest to help them. "So, he hurries back off into the forest after signaling to me to stay hidden and wait for him to get back. I keep his axe and watch him run off, wondering if I should take off or wait for him. Can I trust this guy? Long before I see them, I hear returning footsteps, definitely more than one person. It's been more than an hour since the woodcutter took off. My pistol is pointing at the path." So, what he does is, instead of hiding in the bushes where the French guy thought he

• 32:09David Senra?

  was, he smartly goes across the way, because they're gonna run up to the bushes, thinks where he is, he's gonna be able to see them before, in case it's a setup, he'll be able to see them before they see him, right? "My pistol is pointing at the path. I won't get very far if he's brought a squad of German soldiers. I'm burrowed into the wet ground, my heart thudding like a 500-pound bomb as the footsteps stop. My impulse is to turn tail and run, but I check it. Then I hear a voice calling to me in a whisper. 'American, a friend is here, come out.'" I can't, this is such an interesting, because again, put yourself in his shoes. I can't see them, and it takes all my courage to slowly pick myself up. I'm on the oppo-, it takes all my courage to slowly pick myself up. That's a fantastic sentence.

• 32:53David Senra?

  I'm on the opposite side of the path from where the woodcutter left me. My forty-five is aiming at the back of an old man staring into the brush. The woodcutter is with him. Silently, I move forward. Oh, I never, I realize I never explained what I meant by this. It reminds me of swimming across, because when he flees Hungary, and he's moving into, across the border, there's so many times that Andy meets random people that are not expecting him, that help him get to where he's going. And the same thing is gonna happen to Chuck in this situation. So he's going to actually meet the French Resistance.

• 33:37David Senra?

  So it says, Gabriel, don't worry about the names too much. These are just all these people helping him. You know, goes from the French citizen to French underground. They keep handing him off and trying to get him closer to closer, to get him out of France and into Spain. Gabriel tells me to wait while he goes on alone. I wait for him most of the day and begin to wonder whether I've been deserted. But when he finally returns, he's with a group of heavily armed men. I don't have to be told who these guys are. They are the, I wanna pronounce this word marquis, but there's no R in it. They are the marquis, the French Resistance fighters who live and hide in the mountain pine forest by day and blow up trains and bridges by night. And I'm ashamed of myself. I know I can never pronounce anything correctly normally, but I just listened to a sixty-hour, for the past few months,

• 34:21David Senra?

  I've been listening to sixty-hour audiobook. It's a biography of de Gaulle, who was leading. I should know how to pronounce this. I'm ashamed of myself. It's different than reading books. Okay, you don't know how to pronounce it, because you're just reading it. But I heard this. It's even worse. All right. Robert is the commander. He speaks fairly good English. He tells me he's a lawyer. And he's been in the resistance for two years. Most of them spent, most of that time spent hiding from Germans in these pine forests. I count 26 guys in the group, including a few really tough old birds, who can hike longer and carry heavy loads than many of the younger men. They know these deep forests the way I knew the woods back home. It's a tough and dangerous life. I need these guys.

• 35:04David Senra?

  If I'm gonna, if I'm gonna get out across the Pyrenees, I think is how you pronounce the mountain range that separates France and Spain. It's what he's actually gonna have to escape through. And it's gonna be crazy. He's gonna walk to Spain. We're gonna get into that now. The Pyrenees make the hills back, so the French Resistance will lead him up to the border. They'll point him in the right direction. But it's in the wintertime. They're at like 11,000 feet, I think is the elevation. And there's a group, other group of survivors. He doesn't know who they are, but he winds up teaming up with some of them. So it says, "The Pyrenees make the hills back home look like straightaways. We are crossing slightly south of the central ridge that forms the boundary line between occupied France and neutral Spain. The highest peaks are 11,000 feet,

• 35:47David Senra?

  but we figure we won't get higher than 6,000 or 7,000 feet. The trouble is, we are up to our knees in wet, heavy snow. We cross ridges so slick with ice that we cross them on the seat of our pants. At first, we rest every hour, then every half an hour. But as we climb into the thinning air, we, we, well, there's no oxygen, right? We are stopping every 10 or 15 minutes, cold and exhausted. The climb is endless, a bitch of bitches. And I've got to wonder how many of our guys actually make it across these mountains? And how many feed the crows that call overhead? Okay, so I'm skipping ahead a little bit in the story. They start off, there's a group of guys. None of them keep up with Yeager, besides this guy named Pat.

• 36:32David Senra?

  Eventually, they start off waiting for him. And but then Yeager's just like, you know, they wait 15 minutes, half hour. They're just moving way too slow. So they just keep going. And him and Pat are pushing the pace. Now, they're very tired. They're, they're not sleeping at all. They're in, you know, perilous conditions. And it's about to get much, much worse. So this is a few days after they've been going through the mountains. They find a cabin and they're gonna like, oh, wow, it's, it's, it's, um, no one's in there. We can, we can lay and rest out of, out of the, out of the elements, right? And so it says, "I just crumple on the floor. Pat takes off his shoes and hangs his soaked woolen socks on the branches of a bush. The two of us sleep side by side on the bare wooden floor.

• 37:16David Senra?

  And while we sleep, a German patrol passes in front of the cabin. They see Pat's socks hanging on the bush out front. The bastards ask no questions. They just unsling their rifles and begin firing through the front door. The first bullets whine above my head and thud into the wall. I leap through the rear window, Pat right behind me. I hear him scream, and I grab hold of him and yank him with me as I jump over on a snow-covered log slide. I'm spinning around ass over tea kettle in a cloud of snow, and it seems like two miles down to the bottom of that flume. We splash straight down into a creek. Fortunately, the water is deep. I surface, and so does Pat. I grab him and paddle across to the other side.

• 38:01David Senra?

  Christ, he's gray. He's been shot in the knee, and he's bleeding to death. I tear away his pant leg, and I can't believe it. Uh, it blew, the bullet blew every, blew away everything. This is going really extreme here. His lower leg is attached to his upper leg only by a tendon. I use a knife to cut off that tendon. I take a shirt and wrap it two or three times around the stump and tie that. Pat is unconscious but still breathing, and we're pretty well hidden from the Germans up above. I decide to wait till dark and then somehow drag both of us up that mountain and get us into Spain." So it's going through, he's carrying this 175-pound guy with him now, making it even worse.

• 38:46David Senra?

  And he says, "I think he's the lucky one. He's unconscious. Every muscle in my body is hammering at me. I just want to let go of that goddamn bomber guy and drop in my tracks, either to sleep or to die. I don't know why I keep hold of him and struggle to climb. It's the challenge, I guess, and a stubborn pride, knowing that most guys would have let go of Pat before now, and before he stopped breathing. I keep on, I keep going on anger, cursing the mountain that's trying to break me." So he winds up making it. Pat survives. They get into Spain. He winds up leaving Pat on the side of the road in Spain.

• 39:28David Senra?

  Like where, like on a road, so a motorist winds up stopping by. Finds out like six weeks later that Pat survived. He was okay. Yeager has to walk 20 more miles into Spain, gets to a little village, goes to like a police station. Eventually, weeks after that, the Americans get him out. So in this book, in addition to Chuck's writings, there's other parts, paragraphs and pages, written by people that knew him. This is probably his closest friend, describing for us Chuck's personality. "He was aggressive and competitive, but awfully skilled, too. In combat, he didn't charge blindly into a gaggle of Germans. But with the advantage of having sharp eyes, he had like 2010 vision, that could see forever,

• 40:09David Senra?

  he set up his attack to take them by surprise when the odds were in his favor." So that's a main theme that we've learned over and over again in these books. Identify your edge, right? He's saying where the odds were in his favor. And when Yeager attacked, he was ferocious. Yeager was the best, period. No one matched his skill or courage, or I might add, his capacity to raise hell and have fun. He was the first in our group to somehow make it back as an evadee. So that's what they call people that were shot down, that had to escape back into, from occupied territory, back into, like with their group, right? And these are the people, the evadees, are the ones they send home because if you're

• 40:52David Senra?

  caught again, you've learned valuable information that you might give up if you're tortured, okay? "I doubt whether any other evadee could have avoided being sent home. But Chuck is the most stubborn bastard in the world who doesn't dabble in gray areas. He sees in black and white. He simply said, 'I'm not going home.'"

• 41:14David Senra?

  So this is Chuck's version of how he wound up being the first evadee to be reinstated. So it says, "I was raised to finish what I started, not slink off after only, after flying only eight missions. Screw the regulations. My friends told me to take my medal and run. No way, I said." So he wins a medal because he saved Pat's life and everything else. And, you know, I could spend a half hour listing off all the awards and accomplishments this guy got during his career. It's insane. So when he gets back, he's in his room and he's now, the room's empty. He used to have a roommate and it was this guy named Mac. And this is a hell of a sentence, the second sentence here. He winds up dying. "Mac was a bloody

• 41:57David Senra?

  mess when he bailed out. He left one of his arms in the cockpit." Whoa. "I told myself, well, that's war. That's how it is. But that wasn't much comfort. I felt like I lost a close brother. He had flown more than 20 missions and fought the good fight, which is a lot more than I could say for myself. evadee, rule or not, I figured the war had been cut out from under me before I could even make worthwhile all those hard and expensive months of combat training. There wasn't a rule ever invented that couldn't be bent. So I marched on group headquarters and began my fight. Without realizing it, I was about to take charge of my life and push it in a direction where everything that

• 42:37David Senra?

  happened in later years was a logical outcome for a career fighter pilot who had compiled an outstanding combat record." So at this point, this is a fork in the road. If he did not, if he said, "Okay, I'm just gonna take my medal and go home," we don't know who he is. He never breaks the sound barrier. He never has the career he has. So he's saying, "I didn't know it or not. I didn't know it yet, but I was about to, to change my life because I was just being so damn stubborn about refusing to quit." That's a lesson any of us can apply to whatever it is that we're doing. There wasn't a rule ever invented that could be bent, so I marched in group headquarters and began my fight without realizing I was about to take charge of my life and push in a direction where everything that happened in later years was a logical outcome for a career fighter pilot who had compiled an outstanding combat record.

• 43:20David Senra?

  If I had submitted to being sent home, I doubt whether the Army Air Corps would have been interested in retaining my services when the war ended. I would have probably mustered out and my flying career abruptly ended. But I wasn't consciously thinking about my future. I was just being stubborn about the present. I knew the odds were stacked against me, but in the end, events and luck came together for me and one man, the only one who could, decided my fate. General Dwight D. Eisenhower. So they just keep kicking him up the chain of command. They're like, "Go home." He says, "No." And he's like, "All right, I'm sending you to another person." They say, "Go home." He says, "No."

• 44:01David Senra?

  He goes, he does this routine till he gets all the way in front of General Eisenhower. And so it's him and another guy. And Eisenhower's like, "Listen, I just took this meeting. I'm busy with other stuff, but I just, I can't, I'm so surprised that based on what you went through, that you, I have to talk to the guys that refuse to go home." And then he's like, "Listen," at the end of the meeting, he's like, "Listen, if it was up to me, I'd let you, like, I'd let you fight. We need good pilots. We want people to be here, but this is a War Department regulation. Let me see what I can do." So he goes, Eisenhower goes to the War Department. The War Department's like, "It's your choice." And so Eisenhower's like, "Yep, come back in." And that's how Chuck became the first FAD to ever be returned because he's such a stuttered old bastard, right?

• 44:44David Senra?

  And so this leads to the next section I'm about to read to you, where he becomes, one of the things he's known for is he was the first pilot in World War II to become an ace in a day. To become an ace, you have to have five kills. So I'm going to skip over the battle. It goes on for several pages, but he kills, he wanted to shoot you out of five, maybe six in a day. I forgot the exact number. And there's this, this like, internal publication called The Stars and Stripes. And it says, "But The Stars and Stripes said it better in their front page headline. Five kills vindicates Ike's decision." So that's Ike's, Eisenhower's nickname. "Five kills vindicate Ike's decision. Group recommended me for the Silver Star." I particularly liked this part.

• 45:27David Senra?

  This is how a fellow pilot described Chuck at work. The Germans began to come up to challenge us and ran into a goddamn West Virginia buzzsaw. And so this is a description of one of the, just one of the several battles that he had with the German air force, the Luftwaffe. And my note's very simple, "The dude is crazy." "On German radar, we were mistaken for a fleet of unescorted heavy bombers, and the Luftwaffe scrambled every available fighter in East Germany and Poland. Andy and I were the first to see them coming, at 50 miles or more. They were a dark cloud moving toward us. 'God almighty, there must be 150 of them,' Andy exclaimed. We couldn't believe our luck."

• 46:11David Senra?

  How many people in the world are gonna see 150 enemy planes coming at them? And there's like 15, 16 of them on the other side? And be like, "Oh, this is great." "We plowed, we plowed right into the rear of the enormous gaggle of German fighters. There were 16 of us and over 200 of them. But then more Mustangs, that's the kind of plane that the Allies were flying, from a group caught up to us and joined in."

• 46:38David Senra?

  He says, "I shut down two very quickly. One of the airplanes blew up, but the pilot bailed out of the other. I saw him jump, but he forgot to fasten his parachute harness. He pulled, it pulled off in the wind stream, and he spun down to earth. To this day, I can still see him falling.

• 46:59David Senra?

  I knew that dogfighting was what I was born to do. It's almost impossible to explain the feeling." And that's another important aspect to understand Chuck. He found the single thing that he loved more in his life, and that was dogfighting. No matter what he does, he becomes world famous because he breaks the sound barrier, but that was just part of his career when he was testing jets and everything else. He always, he's like, "I want to be a dogfighter. This is what I want to do, this is what I love more than else." And so this is him describing dogfighting, right? And what, what it takes and everything else, it's just a simple paragraph. But really, as I read this to you, this probably applies to any difficult endeavor, right? "Dogfighting demanded the sum total of all your strengths and exposed any of your weaknesses.

• 47:44David Senra?

  Some good pilots lacked the eyes, others became too excited and lost concentration, or lost their nerve and courage. A few panicked in tight spots and did stupid things that cost them their lives." The best pilots were also the most aggressive, and it showed. And this is how he felt at the end of the war. "We were a pack of untested kids who grew up in a hurry." And he called it "The College of Life and Death." "I don't recommend going to war as a way of testing character, but by the time our tour ended, we felt damn good about ourselves and what we had accomplished. Whatever the future held, we knew our skills as pilots, our ability to handle stress and danger, and our reliability in tight spots.

• 48:29David Senra?

  It was the difference between thinking you're pretty good and proving it." Okay, so after the war, he's sent out into the middle of nowhere. They're in the middle of the desert. This eventually where he's at will become Edwards Air Force Base. It is not known as that yet. It will become later. It's called Murdock. It's the middle of nowhere. No one's out there. It's not what you think of as an Air Force Base. And this almost, when he's doing this testing, the Air Force kind of leaves them alone. It's him and a group of other two people. They form like a little team. It's almost like a little startup that happens here. But there's a couple of things happening on this page. One, differentiate yourself. Do what others don't, or do what others won't. And two, another example of the Sam Zemurray quote, "There's no problem you can't solve if you know your business from A to Z."

• 49:14David Senra?

  "Unlike many pilots, I really learned the various systems of an aircraft. A typical motorist is content to drive without knowing a spark plug from a crankshaft. A typical pilot is much the same. You've got to love engines and valves and all those mechanical gadgets that make most people yawn to have an eager curiosity about an airplane's systems. But it was a terrific advantage for me when something went wrong at 20,000 feet. Knowing machinery like I did and having a knowledgeable feel for it, I knew how to cope with practically any problems." See how these ideas relate? He got an advantage because he's doing something no other people won't, and he knows more than other people. He knows everything about a plane, including how to fix it, how to fly it, how to, everything. And winds up saving his life. "I knew what was serious or manageable. All pilots take chances from time to time,

• 49:59David Senra?

  but knowing, not guessing, about what you can risk is often the critical difference between getting away with it or drilling a 50-foot hole in Mother Earth. And it also set me on a path that would change my life. It was my feel for equipment that first brought me to the attention of Colonel Albert G. Boyd, head of the Flight Test Division." Now, why does he say? That changes his life because Boyd is the one that chooses Yeager to attempt to break the sound barrier. And because he broke the sound barrier, it opened up all these other opportunities later in his life. But before we get there, Chuck has some good advice for us. If you love the hell out of what you're doing, you're usually pretty good at it, and you wind up making your own breaks. I wasn't a deep sophisticated person, so he says this over and over again, you know,

• 50:43David Senra?

  I'm uneducated, I'm not that smart, but he's really brilliant in the sense he's got practical knowledge and he develops, he has simple rules that he lives by. Again, we talked about this idea, we have to compress all this information that comes at us into things, into smaller digestible portions that we can take with us that we can remember, right? It's the distillation, it's the compression that is so valuable, and Chuck did this instinctively. I wasn't a deep sophisticated person, but I lived by a basic principle. I did only what I enjoyed. I wouldn't let anyone derail me by promises of power or money into doing things I wasn't interested, that weren't interesting to me. This kept me real and honest. Now, the company that's gonna make the plane that breaks the sound barrier, it's called

• 51:27David Senra?

  Bell, and they have civilian pilots. And the guy that was originally supposed to take that test flight was a civilian pilot. And this is, he winds up balking because he wanted $150,000, right? Let me put that in the context. Yeager is getting paid about $240 a month from the Air Force, okay? And because this guy balks, Yeager takes that opportunity and becomes famous. There's a lot of lessons in here. He asked me if I knew why the Air Force was taking over the program. He told me that Slick Goodland, that's a civilian pilot, had negotiated his contract and demanded $150,000 to go beyond Mach 1. So going beyond Mach 1 is what breaks the sound barrier. The reason it was so expensive, no one had done it at the time.

• 52:11David Senra?

  And two, a lot of scientists and engineers said it was impossible, that there is a invisible... Barrier in the sky. If you go faster than the speed of sound, you'll run into like essentially they thought it'd be similar to like running into a brick wall. And so people thought you have to pay me because I might die. Right? But the Bell lawyers turned down Slick's payment. Until the matter was resolved, Slick refused to fly. The Air Corps lost patience. So the Air Corps, there's no Air Force at this time. Air Force, it becomes a thing during Chuck's career. So that's why he's saying Air Corps, not Air Force. Okay. And he also talks about NACA, NACA, which is NASA before NASA.

• 52:56David Senra?

  We'll get there because he also later in his career, he's flying with like Neil Armstrong. And you know, they don't, he doesn't really get along with a lot of the astronauts, even though he trained some of them. Okay. So, but the Bell lawyers turned down, okay, I just read that. "The Air Corps lost patience with all the delays and decided to take over the X-1 project." The X-1 is the plane he's going to fly. "I asked the old man," that's Boyd, "if he ever thought there was, if he thought there was a sound bearer." "Hell no," he said, "or I wouldn't be sending one out, one of my, out one of my pilots." "But I want you to know the hazards. There are some very good aviation people who think that at the speed of sound, air loads may go to infinite." Do you, or infinity, excuse me. "Do you know what that means?" "Yes, sir," I said. "That would be it." I mean, he's dead. He nodded.

• 53:40David Senra?

  "Nobody will know for sure what happens at Mach 1 until somebody gets there. This is an extremely risky mission." Now, there is a description coming from one of the engineers on the X-1 project. And he's describing test pilots. But this is going to match a quote that's on the back of the book. So let me read that first. So he says, "Supreme self-confidence is a big part of a fighter pilot's baggage, a real cockiness. But they saw enough buddies die to know that what they were doing was a dangerous way to live. So all of them adopted the eat, drink, and be merry attitude. Being a wild character was part of their traits." On the back of the book, here's a quote from Chuck.

• 54:25David Senra?

  "I don't deny that it was damn good." If there's such a thing as the best, I was at least one of the title contenders. I've had a full life and enjoyed just about every damn minute of it because that's how I lived. And I think that is the main lesson of this book. It opens up our minds to the possibility, understanding that life can be as broad as we make it. But also understanding, going back to that, the quote from Benjamin Franklin. "Time is the stuff life is made up of." Like, we lose the plot of life when we make ourselves miserable. Chuck didn't do that. He accomplished a lot, but he's like, "I used fun as my north star." "I had a full life and enjoyed just about every damn minute of it because that's how I lived."

• 55:07David Senra?

  That's fantastic. And talking about there, it's like, "Yeah, we may die, but I'm gonna have fun while this happens." And everybody's gonna die anyways. The biggest difference between them was Slick's lack of interest in learning about the airplane and the power system. So he's talking about the difference between Chuck and the guy that turned this down, right? "Slick depended entirely on the fact that I was in the sky with him." This is the engineer on the plane, flying chase. "And it never occurred to him that the radio might go out." "In a pinch, he counted on me to tell him what to do." And here's the difference, the biggest difference summarized in two sentences, right? Between Yeager and Slick. "Yeager will rely on himself. I couldn't teach him enough." That's another example of A to Z, right?

• 55:52David Senra?

  This is, at this time Chuck is married, he's got kids. This is his family's living conditions as he was trying to break this down, Barry. Remember, they're out in the middle of nowhere. He does not have a lot of money. He's doing this for the pure love of it. This is his wife writing. "We got so desperate that we almost rented a rancher's chicken house. But then someone told us about a place available about 30 miles from base, and that's where we ended up. It was a one-bedroom, adobe guesthouse, much too small for a family of four. But by them, it seemed like a palace. We had a kitchen and a living room, but no facilities like a washing machine. And I did all the diapers and laundry in the bathtub. Donald, their son, slept on a daybed in the living room, and little Mickey slept in the playpen in our bedroom." Chuck laughed.

• 56:38David Senra?

  So, once he breaks the sound barrier, I'm skipping over that part. He becomes real famous. A lot of people become jealous of him. And this is just one sentence that is fantastic. It's just a reminder to never underestimate. "A lot of test flight people badly underestimated him, fooled by that West Virginia drawl. Their bodies were strewn across the landscape." Okay, so, I need to introduce another character. There is two books I have ordered as a result of reading this book. So, an example of this idea, you and I talk about over and over again. The books are links. And this is this person I'd never heard of before I read the book. Her name is Poncho Barnes. I just ordered her biography, and I actually watched a documentary. It's on Amazon Prime if you want to watch it.

• 57:21David Senra?

  It was really interesting. And just search Poncho Barnes, and you'll find it on there. But this is Chuck talking about her. Poncho Barnes and her place were a big part of the 16 years he spent out in the Mojave. This is at Edwards, or what soon becomes Edwards Air Force Base. "If her little oasis didn't exist, we test pilots would have had to invent something like it, because it was the only place in sight to unwind and have a good time." So, it's in the middle of nowhere. It's a hotel, a bar, it's like an airstrip, there's like a rodeo, it's all this kind of stuff. And Poncho Barnes was one of the first female pilots. And she had a remarkable, unbelievable life. That's why I ordered her biography. So, it says, "It was our clubhouse and playroom, and if all the hours were ever totaled, I reckon I spent more time at her place than I did in a cockpit over those years.

• 58:05David Senra?

  And I was flying about five different airplanes every day. At the end of each flight, I turned off all the cockpit switches, but there was no way I could easily turn off all the switches inside myself. Glennis, his wife, understood that her only serious rivals were not other women, but other pilots like myself, who shared the dangerous life of testing airplanes. The physical and mental stresses we felt were felt by all of us and drew us together in special ways. Often, at the end of a hard day, the choice was going home to a wife who really didn't understand what you were talking about, and from whom you kept back a lot so not to worry her, or gathering around the bar with guys who had also spent the day in a cockpit. Talking flying was the next best thing to flying itself.

• 58:47David Senra?

  And after we had a few drinks in us, we'd get happy or belligerent and raise some hell. Flying and hell-raising, one fueled the other. And that's what Poncho's was all about." Brief description. Pancho was 46 when I first met her. She would never use a five or six-letter word when a four-letter word would do. She had the filthiest mouth that any of us fighter jocks had ever heard. She had to be tough because the only argument about her was whether she was the ugliest woman we'd ever seen, or one of the ugliest. But that didn't keep her from being married four or five times, and bragging that she had had more lovers than all of our flying time put together. We liked each other right off the bat. She'd been one of the first Hollywood stunt pilots.

• 59:31David Senra?

  Her grandfather was one of the founders of Caltech. As a girl, she lived in a 30-room mansion. She became a smuggler, a gunrunner, and flew into Mexico during a revolution. She got a bang out of the idea that we were flying the X-1 for the kick of flying it, not for some big contract bonus. This is when they're trying to break the sound barrier. She wouldn't let us ever pay for food or drink. She told Slick right to his face, "Do you know what Yeager makes? $2.50 a month. Do you know what he's getting to fly that goddamn X-1? $2 bucks an hour. And where are you in your $150,000 bonus? You'll be reading about him in the paper when he does what you're supposed to do." When Pancho got married the final time, she asked me to be the best man.

• 1:00:16David Senra?

  It was the damnedest wedding we ever saw. Pancho brought in a bunch of Indian chiefs to do a special bridal dance that lasted nearly an hour. In the middle of it all, the bride announced, "Hey, everybody, help yourself to the food. My ass is killing me in this girdle. I've got to change into my jeans." I can't recall any rowdy fun that wasn't connected to Pancho's. Of course, she had the most fun of all. Pancho sat next to me at my farewell party in 1954 when I left Edwards to take over a flighter squadron in Europe. I was glad I wasn't around to see Pancho's decline. I visited with her a few times a year. She was my friend. So this is how Chuck's friend remembers this time.

• 1:01:00David Senra?

  And there's just sentences here that resonate because I think we all understand, especially now he's looking back and maybe we're in that time in our lives and we have to take advantage of knowing that we're in the time, right? Mention his name and I don't think of the sound barrier or any of his other accomplishments. I think of him nose to nose with some bomber pilot at Pancho's. For some reason fighter pilots and bomber pilots always got in fistfights. Erasing me for a couple of hundred miles balls to the wall. Or sneaking in booze to me at the base hospital when I was recovering from an accident. I think of him. I think of crazy Pancho. And this is a sentence that just really resonates. And I think we just have to nail, pound into our heads over and over again that we're like, you're going to, whatever's taking place in your life, like you're going to

• 1:01:44David Senra?

  look back at what's happening now and think of, oh, those are the good old days, right? We have to realize that they're good old days now. And I think, how lucky I was to have shared that time and space with those people and in that place in the middle of nowhere. I think, how lucky I was to have shared that time and space with those people and in that place in the middle of nowhere. So he becomes world famous after he breaks the sound barrier and I don't think he likes it. And we hear, he's going to talk, we hear in his own words, his perspective at the time that this was occurring. And there's two things I think I'll just tell you going into this. One, it's a great perspective that he has.

• 1:02:27David Senra?

  And two, it's another example of an obsessive personality, finding something he loves to do and just doing that. And that gives life meaning, right? It gave Chuck a meaning to his life. She complained to me, you're getting a royal screwing. I told her, well, up theirs. My flight's in the history book and that's the whole nine yards for me. All the other crap doesn't mean a thing. That's how I felt about it. Hell, I was being practical, not modest. Movie stars put up with all their mans that go with fame because it means bucks. As a blue suitor, meaning an enlisted pilot, he wasn't getting any money, right? As a blue suitor, I wasn't getting a dime out of the deal.

• 1:03:08David Senra?

  And being famous with the public meant absolutely nothing to a guy living out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The public wanted heroes and to me, I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride. But then I was as naive as I could, as could be, living a cloistered life out at Mirac. When flying was fun and the living was easy, it was a tight little circle. My life was flying and pilots. I didn't, this is a great perspective. I didn't spend a whole hell of a lot of time doing or thinking about anywhere, anything else. We were an obsessed bunch, probably because we were so isolated.

• 1:03:48David Senra?

  So he gets into some of the arrogance he didn't like about the NACA pilots compared to the people he was with in the Air Force. And this section is, "Don't be like Scott." Scott Crossfield worked for NACA and was the first pilot to fly at Mach 2. He was a proficient pilot, but also among the most arrogant I've met. Scotty just knew it all, which is why he ran a Super Sabre through a hangar. That stupid accident would have never happened to an Air Force pilot because he would have accepted a few pointers about what in the hell was going on with a new airplane. But Scotty wouldn't. His attitude was typical of the NACA bunch. There was nothing worthwhile that a military pilot could tell them. I had been testing the Super Sabre.

• 1:04:31David Senra?

  I handed him all the paperwork and the handbook on the airplane and told him, "Scotty, it will take you about a week to run an acceptance inspection on this airplane. There's a lot to learn, but when you're ready to fly it, give me a call and I'll come over and go through the various systems with you." His reply was, "It has a pilot's handbook, doesn't it? That's all I need." Well, you look at that guy and say, "See you around." And shortly after that, he flies the plane through the hangar. He survives though. And I don't remember, I know there was a quote in one of the books, I don't remember who it was describing, but I think the opposite of Scott, if it's like, if we're saying this section is, "Don't be like Scott," what's the opposite?

• 1:05:14David Senra?

  And somebody that we studied in the past, the quote was, "He went to school on everyone." Right? Meaning he'll learn from everybody around him that he thinks has valuable information, he's going to soak it all up. Scott's the opposite. Like, "I know everything, I don't need your stupid little book." Watches us fly this plane through the hangar, right? So I think, "Don't be like Scott. Instead, go to school on everyone." It's good advice.

• 1:05:35David Senra?

  So this section is really interesting. He's testing a flight, uh, he's testing a plane. They're having issues. People are dying and Chuck's trying to figure out what's wrong with the airplane. And really, you could summarize this section by saying, "complexity and arrogance kills." "I climbed to 15,000 feet where it was safer to try it again. And each time I performed the rolling maneuver, the aileron locked." I think that's the back tail part of the plane, if I'm not mistaken. "I figured that somehow the wings were bending under stress and locking the aileron. I called General Boyd as soon as I landed and told him I thought I knew how those crashes occurred, but not why. The old man sent inspectors to take apart my Sabre's wings. They found that a bolt on the aileron cylinder was installed upside down.

• 1:06:18David Senra?

  Crew chiefs in every Sabre squadron were ordered to inspect their airplane's wings for that upside down bolt." Remember, people died because of this. "While an inspection team went to the North American plant and found the culprit. He was an older man on the assembly line who ignored instructions about how to insert that bolt because by God, he knew that bolts were supposed to be placed head up, not head down. Nobody told him how many pilots he had killed. Those complex airplanes were unforgiving of mistakes." Complexity and arrogance kills. So he understood, he's like, "Listen, I take a lot of risks.

• 1:07:01David Senra?

  I've survived way past most of the people I started with. It's impossible that I'm going to keep surviving if this keeps up." This is, this is, he, this is how his test pilot career ends and where he's transferred to Europe. He actually teaches people dogfighting, which is, he'd rather do that anyways. But, um, I thought it was very interesting because this happens right after, very soon after the accident or the near accident I opened the podcast with. So, uh, he's talking to General Boyd. "He asked me if running a fighter squadron was something I'd enjoy after my test flying days were over. 'General,' I said, 'my bags are packed.'" You're ready to move on to other things? If it means getting a squadron, you bet. Remember, he's just very simple. What do I love most in the world? Dogfighting.

• 1:07:45David Senra?

  I'd rather dogfight and teach people how to dogfight than test planes, right? Well, Chuck, he said, after we've all we've asked for you, I personally think you ought to get what you want. General Boyd had a lot of clout, and I've got to believe he was a big reason why a Colonel from the Pentagon called me a couple of weeks after I got back and told me I could stay on as long as I wanted at a desk job, but I could no longer do research flying. Or I could take over a tactical flighter squadron of jets in Germany. He was almost apologetic, explaining that the Pentagon brass decided to get me out of research flying before the law of averages caught up with me. I just chuckled and told him, Colonel, you've given me the easiest decision of my life. Okay, so this is another example of books or links. This is Jackie Cochran, who's a crazy character. I just ordered her autobiography.

• 1:08:29David Senra?

  I spent a lot of money on it, too. It was very expensive, so I hope it's worth it. I'm confident it will be worth it because of just how crazy she is. "I'm Jackie Cochran," she said, pumping my hand. "Good job, Captain Yeager. We're all proud of you." She invited me to lunch, acting as if I should know exactly who she was, and caused an uproar just entering the posh Washington restaurant. The owner began bowing and scraping, and the waiters went flying. In between pumping me for all the details of my flights, I learned a little about who she was. She was a honcho on several important aviation boards and committees and was a famous aviatric before the war. Winner of the Bendix Air Races. She'd been a close friend of Amelia Earhart's.

• 1:09:10David Senra?

  During the war, she was a Colonel in charge of the WASP, which is the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, who ferried B-17 bombers to England. Hell, she knew everybody and bounced all over the world. On VE Day, she was one of the first Americans to get down inside Hitler's bunker in Berlin and came away with a gold doorknob off his bathroom by trading for it with a Russian soldier. On VJ Day, she was in Tokyo, playing poker with a couple generals on MacArthur's staff and conned her way onboard the battleship Missouri to watch the surrender ceremony. She has one of the most unbelievable life stories I've ever come across. As I would learn more than once over the next couple of decades, when Jackie Cochran sent her mind to do something,

• 1:09:54David Senra?

  she was a damn Sherman tank at full steam. She was as nuts about flying as I was. If I were a man, she said, I would have been a war ace like you. I'm a damn good pilot. All those generals would be pounding on my door instead of the other way around. Being a woman, I need all the clout I can get. But clout was no problem for Jackie. Her husband was Floyd Odlum, who owned General Dynamics, the Atlas Corporation, RKO, and a bunch of other companies. We liked each other right off the bat. I could talk flying with her just as if I were, just as, just as if she were a regular at Pontius. She knew airplanes and said flat out that flying was the most important thing in her life. She was tough and bossy and used to, and used to getting her own way. But I figured that's how rich people behaved.

• 1:10:38David Senra?

  When we parted that day, she said, let's stay in touch. We sure did. Glenys and I became Jackie and Floyd's closest friends. It was a friendship that lasted more than 25 years, until their deaths. I was the executor of Floyd's estate. They treated me like an adopted son. I flew around the world with Jackie, and she was right. She was a damn good pilot, one of the best. And I'm sure the reason she latched on to me was because for Jackie, nothing but the best would do, and she thought I was the best pilot in the air force. Hell, she'd tell that to everybody, to anybody, anytime. Jackie played a big role in my life and I in hers. I met two sitting presidents in her living room. Wherever she traveled overseas, she was, she was treated like a visiting head of state.

• 1:11:23David Senra?

  I never met anyone like her, man or woman. She came on like a human steamroller. Now, why is this so important? Think about where she started. Jackie Cochran didn't own a pair of shoes until she was eight years old. Compared to what she suffered as a child in rural Florida, I was raised like a little country gentleman. She never knew who her real parents were, or why she was given away. The people who raised her lived in a shack without power or running water. As a little kid, she had to forage in the woods for food to keep from starving to death. She had no education, no affection, no nothing. She was kept filthy.

• 1:12:04David Senra?

  Her only, only clothes, an old flour sack. Jackie was tough as nails. She learned how to become a hairdresser, got out of Florida, and finally landed in New York. She got into the cosmetics business and started her own company. She became very successful and got interested in flying.

• 1:12:23David Senra?

  So I definitely, after hearing that, you can understand why I was so interested to see who she was. Just a few more things. This applies to more than just flying. The best way to fly safe was to know what in the hell you were doing. This is Chuck's simple formula for work. I use my own simple formula. Either the Air Force was still fun for me, or it wasn't much fun anymore. If it wasn't fun, why would I hang around? And this is towards the end of the book. This is something we've talked over and over again, being in the right place, the right time, with the right set of skills. He's just born at the right time in history. And I'm going to read this to you, and then I'm going to ask you a question. The person I am is the sum total of the life I've lived. So I have very deep emotions about the Air Force uniform that I wore most of my adult life.

• 1:13:07David Senra?

  The Air Force molded and trained me, and who I am and whatever I've accomplished, I owe to them. They taught me everything I needed to know how to do my job. There is no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work. Really, a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession. The one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others. That's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.

• 1:13:51David Senra?

  I don't deny that I was damn good. If there's such a thing as the best, I was at least one of the title contenders. But what really strikes me, looking back over all those years, is how lucky I was. How lucky, for example, to have been born in 1923 and not 1963. So that I came of age just as aviation itself was entering the modern era. Being in my early twenties right after the war was the key to everything that happened in my life. Placing me smack in the golden age of aviation, research and development. Allowing me to participate in the historic leap from prop engines to jets. And from jets to rockets and outer space.

• 1:14:31David Senra?

  To make his mark on history, Christopher Columbus had to be born at a time when the world was believed to be flat. To make mine, people had to... People had to still think that the sound barrier was a brick wall in the sky. To have reached my 21st birthday in the age of the Concorde would have done me no good at all. So summarize that section, he was born at the right time in history. And so the question is, okay, we're not in 1923, we're not in 1963. What is today's equivalent? And if you haven't yet locked on to what you feel is the greatest opportunity in your life, maybe look for opportunities that could only exist now. And on the next page, we're going to see this, another example of the same expression

• 1:15:15David Senra?

  of Arnold Schwarzenegger's idea of reps, reps, reps, right? "I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world. British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese. And there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them, except for one unchanging certain fact: the best, most skilled pilot had the most experience. The more experienced, the better he is. Or for that matter, she is. I'm thinking of Jackie Cochran, who was really outstanding, much better than many, many male pilots I've flown with. But only for one reason: she had more flying time. Reps, reps, reps. It's that simple. If I had a choice between dogfighting a less experienced pilot in a better airplane than

• 1:16:00David Senra?

  mine, or a more experienced guy in an airplane that wasn't as good, I know how I'd choose." This is a great quote from Jimmy Iovine that I always think about. He talks about, "Most people let fear stop them. It pushes them, or, excuse me, it stops them from doing that." He's like, "You should use fear as a way to push you from behind. Use it as a tool, instead of as an adversary." Right? And so this is Chuck expressing a very similar idea to Jimmy Iovine's idea. "I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in a cockpit."

• 1:16:44David Senra?

  He used the fear as a tool. And this is the last lesson that we'll learn from Chuck, and I think probably the most important. Life is as unpredictable as flying in combat. If the day comes when a flight surgeon tells me I can't fly anymore in high-performance jets, I can always sneak out back and fly smaller planes. You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up, but you don't give up. I know too many people who have erected barriers, real brick walls, just because they have gray hair and prematurely cut themselves off from lifelong enjoyments by thinking, "I'm too old to do this or that." That's for younger people.

• 1:17:29David Senra?

  Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself. The trick is to enjoy the years remaining. And unlike flying, learning how to take pleasure from living can't be taught. Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item of their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing. As long as I can put one foot in front of the other, I'll be out there 10 years from now. I don't still fly high-speed jets out of some nostalgia for the past. I do it because I love it. If it wasn't fun, I'd drop it in a minute. I'm definitely not a rocking chair type.

• 1:18:13David Senra?

  I can't just sit around, watch television, drink beer, get fat, and fade out. And there's so much more I want to do. I've never lost my curiosity about things that interest me. Fortunately, I'm very good at the activities I most enjoy, and that part has made my life that much sweeter. I haven't yet done everything, but by the time I'm finished, I won't have missed much. If I augur in tomorrow, it won't be with a frown on my face. I've had a ball.

• 1:18:47David Senra?

  And that's where I'll leave it. If you want the full story, read the book. I highly recommend reading the book, listening to the audiobook, whatever format you want. Your life will be better once you read this book. It's absolutely fantastic. As a reminder, that new Founders Postscript feed will be in the show notes on your podcast player. Just look underneath. I'll label it Founders Postscript. I'll even leave another link to another article that explains, because every podcast player has a different way to install a private podcast feed. So that's 162, 162 books down, 1,000 to go. If you buy the book using the link to the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Thank you very much, and I'll talk to you again soon.