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This week's questions come from a parent, a son, and a man who hopes to be a father someday. Each one is facing a decision that has no right or wrong answer, only pros and cons.
The first is whether to sign the consent form for a teenager who wants to join the Royal Marines and has never shown an aggressive streak. I walk through the difference between being aggressive and being capable of violence, what the military actually teaches, and why waiting a little costs him nothing.
The second is about staying away while a parent dies of cancer and wondering whether that is a choice or an excuse. I share how I handled my mom's death, which was poorly, and why I prefer to remember people as they were. Grief is the price we pay for love.
The third is about fearing marriage and fatherhood after growing up around divorce and a difficult relationship with a father. I explain why a title does not change who you are, what my own divorce taught me, and why nobody is ever ready to be a parent.
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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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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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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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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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