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The Watch List That Never Caught a Terrorist | Sonya LaBosco & David Londo | Ep. 481 Nov 09, 2026

Show notes

Sonya LaBosco is a former Virginia state trooper who became a federal air marshal in 2002, one of the last classes required to pass the old tactical pistol course. She was medically retired in 2014 and now runs the Air Marshal National Council as its executive director. David Londo joined the service in 2006 and spent 20 years on aircraft, including time as a recruiter, before retiring. He is the council's president. Together they spent years working with the Boston Globe, Judicial Watch, and congressional oversight committees to expose the Quiet Skies program, and they are now producing a documentary called Watchlisted in America.

This conversation covers how a program meant to find threats to aviation turned into undercover surveillance of citizens who were never suspected of anything. A computer flagged travel habits, a team of three marshals was dispatched to shadow the person, and after-action reports came back saying the same thing every time: not a threat. They walk through how it expanded after January 6, how an air marshal ended up assigning his own wife's surveillance detail, and why a Senate investigation and an inspector general audit found zero threats ever caught.

We also get into the pre-9/11 standards that got thrown out, why they want the program pulled out of TSA and rebuilt as a small specialized unit, the holes in private aviation and the northern border, and a geotracking contract they say has quietly replaced Quiet Skies.

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Two Crashes, One Attack Ad, and a $1.9 Million Post | Negligent Discharge Friday | 11.6.2026 Nov 06, 2026

Show notes

Michael is back from Spain, which means we open with the high-speed train that slammed into a stopped private train on the same route he rode a week earlier. Sixty-nine people died. Early reporting points to a control center manually clearing trains after the safety system had already halted them.

Then the Learjet 60 that went in near vertical over Florida with nine people on board. I walk through what the ATC audio and flight tracking show: light clear ice at 35,000 feet, minus 47 degrees, moderate turbulence, a request to climb that was denied, and a small red cell they flew straight through. I cover why that wing is sensitive to icing, what mach tuck does to the center of lift, and why a 20,000-foot-per-minute descent is not something you recover from. I also address the people trashing the second-in-command online. She was type rated, qualified, and working the radio until the end.

From there: a governor's race attack ad built around a candidate's estranged mother, a $1.9 million settlement for a professor disciplined over a social media post, and what the First Amendment actually protects. We close on the slave trade, reparations, and the countdown to Michael's last episodes.

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Torture, Gitmo, and the 9/11 Case That Won't End | Jessica Trant & Frank Pellegrino | Ep. 480 Nov 02, 2026

Show notes

Jessica Trant lost her father on September 11th. He was on the 104th floor of the North Tower, above the impact, and he called home before the building came down. She spent years running from it, then turned around and faced it, and she now travels to Guantanamo Bay to sit through pretrial hearings for the men charged with killing him. Frank Pellegrino spent more than three decades in the FBI. He was assigned to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, chased Ramzi Yousef through the Bojinka plot, and from 1993 on carried the fugitive file on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who brought the planes plan to bin Laden. He sat across a table from KSM at Gitmo in 2007. Both appear in the Paramount+ documentary Daughters of 9/11.

Most people know bin Laden. Most people cannot tell you who KSM is or why he matters. This conversation fixes that. Frank walks through how a single line on a 1993 bank record, a Minesweeper high score on a seized laptop, and a tip-off in Qatar in 1996 shaped the hunt, and how close they came to grabbing him before 9/11.

From there we get into why the case is still in pretrial status 25 years later: the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, the ruling that threw out the FBI's clean-team statements, the push to try it in federal court that collapsed under politics, and a military commission that moves in two-week increments. Jessica describes what Gitmo actually looks like for the families, what the detainees' lives look like, and what finality would mean for her. We close on why the ideology outlives the man, and how to keep this from being forgotten by people who weren't alive for it.

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Who You Are When Nobody's Watching | Full Auto Friday | 10.30.26 Oct 30, 2026

Show notes

Last Friday's VA disability answer generated a lot of "but what about" responses. One came from a Marine who was medically retired after Helmand, went through NICoE, and now runs a manufacturing business that sees how much money pours in from defense work. If contractors can fleece the government, why shouldn't the people who were the living, breathing tools get a cut? I break down where the training and gear money actually went, admit the price gouging I saw firsthand, and explain why someone else getting away with something has never been a reason for me to do it. You control one thing in that equation. Yourself.

A search and rescue volunteer with every certification his team asks for still feels like he's fooled everyone for four years. I've been in that spot more than I'd like to admit. We get into the difference between imposter syndrome that paralyzes you and imposter syndrome that pushes you to go learn the thing, plus the structure I use to catch negative self-talk early. There's a tangent about backcountry preparedness and the people Two Bear pulls off the mountain every year.

Then a quick one about fighter pilots. No regrets. Or regerts.

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Mogadishu, the Silver Star, and the Man in the Mirror | Kyle Lamb | Ep. 479 Oct 28, 2026

Show notes

Kyle Lamb spent more than 21 years in the Army. He started as a commo guy in the 82nd Airborne, went to 5th Special Forces Group for Desert Storm, then spent the bulk of his career in the Army's Tier 1 special mission unit, retiring as a Sergeant Major. He fought in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, and his Bronze Star with V from that day was later upgraded to a Silver Star. He went on to found Viking Tactics and write Green Eyes and Black Rifles, Stay in the Fight, and Leadership in the Shadows.

His new book: The Next Mission, is historical fiction built on the Bible, told as war stories by a special operations soldier. We get into Benaiah in the pit with a lion, Jael and a tent peg, the forlorn hope, and Agincourt.

We also cover what he still thinks about from Mogadishu, the award upgrade he never asked for, the day he walked out of a ceremony at Fort Bragg and did not recognize himself in a mirror, and the infighting in the community. He explains why he PNG'd the unit, and why talking about faith takes more courage than any war story.

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27 Years Undercover, Zero Dent in the Drug Trade | Britt Elmore | Ep. 478 Oct 26, 2026

Show notes

Britt Elmore spent 27 years with the San Francisco Police Department, 25 of them in narcotics, almost all of it undercover. He dropped out of school at 15, worked as a garbage man and a glazier, got a GED at 24, and started at the San Mateo County jail before SFPD hired him in 1998. Six months in, he was loaned to narcotics for six weeks of buying dope in the Tenderloin. He never left. His last 15 years were on a DEA task force running gun buys and federal wiretaps. He consulted on Training Day, and his dog's alert on a FedEx package helped kick off an MLB HGH scandal.

We get into buying crack straight out of dealers' mouths, booking 30 bodies in an afternoon, and buying rifles from a man who had told an informant he planned to rob him. He also walks through six hours in a prison van, wired and shackled, next to a man who killed his pregnant girlfriend.

We cover Flock cameras and the Fourth Amendment, fentanyl killing two people a day in eight blocks, reactive policing after 2020, and his one-word answer on how much of a dent 27 years made.

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"Free Money" Is Costing Someone | Full Auto Friday | 10.23.2026 Oct 23, 2026

Show notes

A Marine veteran with no combat time or service injuries asks what I think about his stepsons' VA disability ratings and whether he should file for the same "free money." I break down where that money actually comes from, what the deficit and national debt look like, and why I'd tell him to stick to his morals. I also address the people who feel the need to qualify their service.

A listener pushes back on last week's censorship conversation and cites an FBI arrest as proof that some speech has to be stopped. I walk through what the First Amendment protects and what it doesn't, why an arrest for incitement is a consequence rather than censorship, and I repeat the question I've been asking for years: show me one example where censorship was a net positive.

A 25-year-old whose father coached him from high school through college writes in about losing the sport he loved, feeling behind in his mid-20s, and worrying his fiancée will be collateral damage while he figures it out. My advice is simple. Share all of it with her.

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Inside the Thunderbirds and the Cost of Getting It Wrong | Ryan Bodenheimer | Ep. 477 Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

Ryan Bodenheimer spent eleven years on active duty flying the F-15E, including 70 combat missions over Afghanistan and a stint building strike packages at the air operations center in Qatar. He was selected for the Thunderbirds, flew Thunderbird 2 for two show seasons, and instructed the next team. After the Air Force he flew airliners, then walked away to build Max Afterburner, now one of the largest military aviation channels on YouTube, and to write Take Command.

The thread in this conversation is rules and when to break them. He kept a loaded jet at .99 Mach so he'd arrive with something to protect a SEAL, then went down to 100 feet because 500 would have gotten the guy killed. He went off dry on a cleared-hot strafe because he saw kids, and two targets got away. My helicopter instructor put it simply: know the rules and why they exist, then you can break them.

We close on Iran, drones, the withdrawal, and the limits of air power.

Enjoy.

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He Should Die. Should We Watch It? | Negligent Discharge Friday | 10.16.26 Oct 16, 2026

Show notes

I asked a question this week about whether the Fort Hood shooter's execution should be made public, and the emotional response to it surprised me. One video about my post opened by telling me never to defend him. I didn't. He should die, and I spent ten years of my life removing people like him from the planet.

The real question is what a public execution gains and what it costs. Deterrence and closure are legitimate arguments. So are martyrdom, the countries that already do this, and what happens when footage reaches people who never went looking for it. I don't have a deep stake in either answer, and the responses on X land much closer to an even split than my own comment section would suggest. That gap is worth paying attention to.

Michael and I also get into a YouTuber's RPG-7 test going wrong, flat earthers confronting the 24-hour sun in Antarctica, the reported removal of more than 130 million names from India's voter rolls, and a 94-year-old barrister arrested in the UK over a sign.

Enjoy.

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The AGI Promise Is a Cover Story | Bill Thompson | Ep. 476 Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

Bill Thompson joined the Army at 17 and spent 22 years there, most of it on the technical and communications side of a special missions unit. He now runs Spartan Forge, an AI-driven hunting app with over 100,000 users, advises high-profile clients on communications security, and is building his own compute network to run AI without feeding anyone else's system.

His core argument is that AI as it exists today is training data, matrix math, and human correction. It produces novel output, not novel thought. He argues the companies promising AGI know they cannot deliver it, and that calling for regulation lets them blame the government, guarantee investors a captive market, and shut out the open-weight models anyone can run at home. He is moving his own companies off the closed systems now.

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