Latest / SpaceTomatoes / Terrence Rotering - Flight and Fiction The Trinian Chronicles Unveiled S2-EP23

Transcript

Terrence Rotering - Flight and Fiction The Trinian Chronicles Unveiled S2-EP23 · SpaceTomatoes

• 0:00
  You're talking about it. It's like with the military. I'm sure it's, you know, whatever you see, they probably got stuff way beyond that. And I'm sure the AI is exactly the same thing.
• 0:09
  And these UFOs.
• 0:10
  When you were talking about, yeah, exactly that too.
• 0:13
  You know, is it our UFOs? Is it someone else's UFOs? And the arguments against that is if it was ours, we'd take over.
• 0:30
  All right, everybody.
• 0:41
  Welcome back to another episode of the Space Tomatoes podcast.
• 0:45
  I'm one of your hosts, Havoc.
• 0:47
  I'm the other guy, LX.
• 0:49
  Hello.
• 0:49
  How you doing?
• 0:50
  Today we have with us a special guest, Terrence Rotering, Roter, retired Air Force Weapons
• 0:56
  System Officer, which you could think of that as the backseat of a Tomcat, like, you know,
• 1:02
  that movie, we all know. Also an author of a 10 book series, The Chronicles series,
• 1:09
  a sci-fi fantasy series. Welcome to the show, Terrence.
• 1:13
  I love it, Galax. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to talking to you.
• 1:18
  Awesome. Awesome. So let's talk, I mean, come on, like we can't avoid the exciting portion here.
• 1:26
  You were a weapons systems officer.
• 1:28
  Like, did you, did, so are you a pilot as well?
• 1:33
  So we had the stick in the throttles.
• 1:34
  We flew, you know, I'm not a commercial pilot.
• 1:37
  I got more than enough excitement.
• 1:38
  I mean, in a way it was even more than, than if you were flying all the time, they'd like
• 1:43
  in the air force, unlike in the Tomcat in that movie we were talking about with goose
• 1:47
  rotor was in the backseat of an F-15 and it was an F-15E just like the, I don't know,
• 1:53
  everybody probably saw on the news a couple of weeks ago,
• 1:55
  the guys that got shot down over, um, Iran and they had, you know,
• 1:59
  this dude was down for like two days, climbing a 7,000 foot mountain. Um,
• 2:03
  and they had to go in and find them in that program that they used to find
• 2:06
  them. I don't know if we'll have time to get into that,
• 2:07
  but that was kind of crazy too. But that was my position, my jet, uh,
• 2:11
  same squadron Panthers, uh, bleed red. Yeah. From 20 years ago. So, uh, yeah.
• 2:16
  So I was a guy in the back seat that basically said, Hey, you know,
• 2:19
  pilot in the front, here's the banana, follow the banana,
• 2:22
  which means go that way, you know, do the communications, do electronic warfare,
• 2:26
  do the weapon systems, you know, and turn and look back at six o'clock, you know,
• 2:30
  cranked around while he's pulling nine G's in your head, which is 20 pounds, you know,
• 2:34
  becomes 180 pounds. And then sometimes all of a sudden he'll just pull and you're doing stuff
• 2:38
  in the back and your, your helmet's just planted against, you know, the instrument console,
• 2:43
  you know, on the jet, unable to move because who can lift 180 pounds with their neck
• 2:47
  kind of thing until he eases up on, you know, so anyways, yeah. So that was me. It was a lot of fun.
• 2:52
  Can't believe I did it now. Sometimes it's almost like the chapters that I write for the books. I'm like, did I really do that? I wake up in the morning and I'm going, wow, you know, are those just memories or, you know, since we're going to talk about some AI and stuff too, did AI put that in my brain? You know, am I a real human person or, you know, anyway, so as you get older, you start thinking about these things and, and it's just amazing the stuff all of us accomplish in our lives that we look back on different chapters and we're just wondering, did that really happen?
• 3:19
  But yeah, that was me. I flew a lot from the backseat, but I also flew with guys. The 111 was before the Strike Eagle, and that was my first love. Over in England, you'd be at 30,000 feet, and you're at night, and it's black. There's no moon.
• 3:35
  and it's just like, okay, we're going to let down now into the Scottish Highlands. So you set the
• 3:39
  little setting on a thousand, you watched your instruments and the radar and everything. You're
• 3:42
  sitting side by side, just like you're in the car with your wife going out to dinner. Um,
• 3:48
  not that kind of relationship, of course, with the pilot, but although we did have women in the
• 3:52
  cockpit too. Um, but, uh, yeah. And then all of a sudden the jet pushes over and, and, you know,
• 3:57
  about a minute later, you're flying at a thousand feet over the mountains and it's doing its terrain
• 4:01
  following radar deal where it's just climbing and diving, just keeping you a thousand feet ish.
• 4:06
  Then you set it down to 200 feet. Now you're at 200 feet. And when you first started doing that,
• 4:12
  it was like crazy. Are we really doing this? But as you do it more and more and you get hundreds
• 4:16
  of hours, you get so relaxed. There have been times where the pilot's sleeping, you wake up
• 4:21
  and you go and he's sleeping and the just just cruising along through Scotland at 200 feet and
• 4:27
  600 knots, you know, and, and it's, thank goodness it had a good system, but it, yeah,
• 4:32
  it was a good time. So long, long answer to that question, but yeah, it was, it was wonderful.
• 4:37
  Very exciting. That is really cool. I have, I have like out of the ordvark is one of,
• 4:45
  one of my childhood favorites. And it's, it's funny because like, I think jets are, are,
• 4:51
  are amazing, right? I really do. And fighter planes, they're, they're really cool. But if I
• 4:56
  could do a ride along in any one uh aircraft and i mean a balls to the wall run it would be
• 5:07
  a lancer that's that's what i would want to do i'd like to be touching the top of trees
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  going you know mach mach two and a half mach three at in in a giant aircraft just pinned
• 5:23
  I would love that.
• 5:24
  I think that would just be so cool.
• 5:26
  I'd like to ride in any of them, but I'd have to call the F-14 for mine.
• 5:30
  Because, you know, I had the G.I. Joe Skystriker.
• 5:32
  Everybody, you know, all the kids my age love the F-14.
• 5:36
  We didn't even know what it was.
• 5:37
  But like, yeah, that's with the wings and all that stuff.
• 5:40
  I don't know.
• 5:40
  Yeah.
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  So we had the sweep wings.
• 5:41
  That's good.
• 5:42
  The F-15 and the 111, very much like a Tomcat in that, you know, the F-111 had the sweep wings.
• 5:48
  But the F-15, most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the 14 and the 15, the Air Force version.
• 5:54
  Oh, okay.
• 5:54
  So very, very similar.
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  I rotated the camera just a little bit there just to show you the, you know, the 111 that's up there, the tip of the nose there.
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  I don't know if you can see it.
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  But anyways, yeah.
• 6:03
  Oh, yeah.
• 6:04
  Yeah, so it was wonderful.
• 6:06
  Very cool.
• 6:07
  Because of that air to ground thing and flying close to the ground, when you're up, most of the time, you know, in the F-15, you know, it was designed to be higher level.
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  So, you know, most of your mission is up high and you're looking for the bad guys to shoot them down on your way in.
• 6:21
  Then you might go down low or you might, you know, use laser guided munitions or whatever from up high.
• 6:25
  But in the 111, it was all, you know, back in the day with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, you know, it was all about being low and being underneath the different defensive systems, the SAMs, and trying to surprise the AAA as you flew by.
• 6:39
  So, you know, it was near to the ground.
• 6:42
  And if you weren't flying close to the ground, it was like, how boring is this?
• 6:45
  You know, it's like being in an airliner, but when you get down there, when you're in 200 feet and you're going 600 miles an hour, you know, that's pretty exciting.
• 6:52
  Good stuff.
• 6:54
  That's exactly why I always say the B1B just because, I mean, you'd have those giant windows there and you're just screaming, you know, you're watching trees way off in the distance.
• 7:05
  Let's just go.
• 7:06
  Yeah.
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  My housemate in England, we were in the black bat house and, uh, myself, him as lieutenants
• 7:13
  and then a major and his wife from Germany.
• 7:15
  But, uh, long story short, he ended up getting a pilot slot and went to fly the B1.
• 7:19
  So yeah, close and near and dear to my heart too, even though I never flew in it.
• 7:23
  But is the training as tough as we see on TV or is it even, it's way more harder.
• 7:29
  You know, you see, watch that movie or its sequel, which I, you know, I don't mind saying Top Gun because, you know, I think the second one was a lot better.
• 7:38
  I didn't mind going to see those.
• 7:40
  I was when they made the first one was just when I was going into flight training after I got out of college at the zoo, the academy.
• 7:46
  And and then this last one obviously just came out.
• 7:49
  But I think the second one was better.
• 7:51
  But when you're flying in the jet, it's in those movies.
• 7:55
  It makes it sound like, you know, this is all just easy.
• 7:57
  You know, piece of cake.
• 7:58
  There's nothing to do.
• 7:59
  have a good time and there's a lot of have a good time involved, but you are constantly working your
• 8:04
  butt off. And when you're pulling those G's, you're sweating like a pig. When we flew in the Strike
• 8:08
  Eagle in Alaska, you think, oh, you were probably pretty cool. No, because we had 85 pounds worth
• 8:13
  of equipment and stuff on us while we were flying in, pulling the G's on top of all of our other,
• 8:18
  you know, flight suit. And you'd have, you know, if you ended up punching out over Alaska, you know,
• 8:22
  you're walking around on glaciers, it's pretty cold. So you have all kinds of survival equipment
• 8:26
  that's right on you. And it's, you know, now you're not just holding up those body parts when
• 8:32
  you're pulling G's, you're holding up all that other stuff. So, you know, it's a lot of work,
• 8:37
  both physically and mentally, but it's worth it, obviously, for all of the reasons,
• 8:42
  you know, defending the country and having a good time, you know, so it was all mixed together.
• 8:47
  And the people that sometimes, whether it's politics or whatever, they're like, oh,
• 8:50
  you can't separate so-and-so did this just for this reason. No, so-and-so, whether you're the
• 8:55
  president or you guys or guys in jets, we're doing it for a lot of different reasons, right?
• 9:00
  It's not just one reason. Predominantly, it might be, yeah, you know, I'm young and stupid and I
• 9:06
  just want to go out and have a good time. But it's also defend your loved ones against the country,
• 9:13
  of course, you know, make a life for yourself so you've got money later on to take care of your
• 9:18
  family. I mean, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I diverge and I.
• 9:25
  All good. So, and then you, so, okay. So at what point did you decide like in your brain,
• 9:33
  like I would like to write something. Was this while you were in the air force or, or afterwards
• 9:39
  when you retired and kind of like, Hmm, what am I going to do? Or.
• 9:44
  Yeah. So it was kind of right at the end of my air force career. And I had little
• 9:48
  kids then. They were like six and eight. And I was, you know, I wanted to write a little book
• 9:52
  because they were reading books and I wanted to show them, Hey, you know, this will be fun. You
• 9:56
  can, you can write, you can have a voice in your life. You're not just reading books that other
• 9:59
  people write. It was just kind of like a little lesson for them. So I wrote, you know, the, what
• 10:04
  really turned out to be the second book in that first trilogy, the Chronicles of Trinian was
• 10:08
  called Stand. And it was very short, about 150 pages. And I kind of put the four people in our
• 10:14
  family, my wife and my kids and myself in there as the main characters, but it was set way back
• 10:18
  in time, kind of a Braveheart kind of look only in a fictional place, not, you know, over in
• 10:23
  Scotland. Um, and, and so I could read it to them and they'd see their names in there and stuff like
• 10:28
  that. And it was kind of, kind of cool. And then five years later, after that, I wrote a much bigger
• 10:32
  one called the faithful, which was a prequel to it, kind of like a, um, uh, star Wars kind of thing
• 10:38
  where you do the second one or the first, you know, the prequel second. Um, so that was the
• 10:42
  faithful stand, but it was like 500, 600 pages. And most of that was fantasy kind of deal. And
• 10:47
  that was, that first one was kind of fun. Now I'm going to make it better. Cause I kind of made up
• 10:51
  a bunch of stuff in the, in that first one stand. And I wanted to, you know, make it more realistic
• 10:56
  and give people answers and such. So that's what I did in the faithful. And then there was like a
• 11:00
  20 year break. I had a little bout with cancer, you know, and, and it was funny. Cause I still
• 11:05
  remember when I was diagnosed, I remember going into the bathroom and just looking in the mirror
• 11:11
  and going, you know, God, give me more time to finish my trilogy, you know, which was, it's kind
• 11:15
  of a ridiculous thing because it's like of all the things you could think about when you got a family
• 11:19
  and stuff. Why would you think about that? But then I got cured of the cancer deal and, and it
• 11:26
  took me 20 years to go on from there. So I don't know if I was telling God, Hey, you know, I'm just
• 11:30
  going to keep delaying this. So you keep me around kind of deal or what, but then I did forever.
• 11:35
  In 2024, I rewrote the first two, did forever, finished the trilogy. And that was the end of the
• 11:40
  first trilogy, and it turned out to be The Faithful Stand Forever. And that third one really jumped
• 11:45
  ahead in time, spies and alliance versus the order and artificial intelligence and, you know, all kinds
• 11:51
  of crazy futuristic stuff. So it became that fantasy. And then that science fiction with the
• 11:57
  third one, and all at the whole time, you know, having some spiritual warfare stuff going on
• 12:02
  throughout that trilogy. And that's, so no, I never went, you know, to the academy to do English or to
• 12:08
  write books, you know, never majored in any of that stuff. Um, just in aviation, just went to
• 12:13
  the Academy so I could fly. So I never thought about doing that stuff until that, uh, sequence
• 12:19
  of events happened. And then in 2024 is when things really exploded for me.
• 12:24
  So your children were the catalyst for you, right?
• 12:28
  I think so.
• 12:29
  Awesome. So did this start out of like a, a natural, you know, just making up stories for them
• 12:36
  or?
• 12:38
  Well, I think, I don't know, you guys, I'm going to guess there's probably some flicks
• 12:42
  you like, some books that you liked when you were younger.
• 12:46
  For me, I want to say it was mostly movies, to be honest.
• 12:50
  I wasn't a big reader.
• 12:52
  I can't, I'm not going to lie and say that.
• 12:55
  Were you going to say something there Havoc No I yeah I was yeah So yeah so it was mainly movies and then just translating that into into words And at that that time there was been a big difference in the last 20 years between writing Right
• 13:07
  So when I did those, it was pretty much just on the computer, on the keyboard deal.
• 13:13
  When I was back in school, probably like you guys were, if you had to do a paper, you're on the typewriter, you got white out.
• 13:19
  I mean, what a pain. Who would want to write? I mean, you really have to be special to want to write back in those days.
• 13:26
  And I really, my hat's off to these authors that have written stuff, Tolkien and those guys way back in the day, you know, doing it that style.
• 13:33
  But then, you know, since then in 2024, what's really exploded with these books is probably just the ease of doing it.
• 13:39
  So how do I do it?
• 13:40
  I walk with my dogs, you know, I bring my phone with me and I talk into my phone and it just transcribes words.
• 13:46
  And it's just, it's like if I'm, when I'm sitting at a keyboard or something, I'm really trying to think of what I'm going to write.
• 13:52
  I can't do it.
• 13:53
  You know, if there's too much stress, it's like that blank page deal.
• 13:56
  You're like, oh, you know, time's ticking by.
• 13:57
  You can hear the clock ticking, you know, whatever.
• 14:00
  But when you're writing, you're walking your big Pyrenees in the mountains, you got your phone with you and you just go, hey, here's an idea.
• 14:06
  And you start talking.
• 14:06
  Then you make up some characters and they're talking to each other.
• 14:09
  They're leading you where to go.
• 14:10
  I think what it is is part of your brain is being used for something else.
• 14:14
  And so you have this free consciousness kind of thing where you're not really focused and anxious about it and just wanders.
• 14:21
  and that's when things start to hit.
• 14:24
  And so I just do that and I get a bunch of stuff.
• 14:26
  And I'm usually amazed when I come back home,
• 14:29
  like, where did that come from?
• 14:31
  Isn't that an awesome idea?
• 14:32
  And then I've got most of it already down.
• 14:34
  I throw it into the computer,
• 14:36
  fix the grammar and spelling and stuff.
• 14:38
  And now I got a chapter for the day or two chapters
• 14:40
  and I do the same thing the next day, the next day.
• 14:42
  It's either walking, it seems, or driving,
• 14:44
  which there's some hazards with that.
• 14:47
  But driving, you've got that same thing.
• 14:50
  You're doing something important
• 14:51
  And then part of your brain is really using it, but you're really using part of your brain.
• 14:54
  But that other part of your brain that you're not using, man, it's just on the roll for me.
• 14:58
  So that's where I get all my ideas and that's how it all happened.
• 15:01
  But, you know, and we'll talk about it, I think, after the first trilogy is when, I don't want to say weird things, but to me, kind of special things kind of happen.
• 15:10
  Things that are like out of the ordinary that just kind of led me along to this isn't done yet.
• 15:15
  And that's where we got into all these other books and the 6,000 pages.
• 15:18
  Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
• 15:21
  So all these books are linked together then in the universe that you created?
• 15:25
  So, and obviously the beginning of that was by design, but after that, you know, once you create a universe, you know, an intellectual property, as they call it, there's so much there and you kind of get where I think I'm stuck in here now for a while.
• 15:39
  But yeah, so each book is kind of by itself.
• 15:41
  You can read it by itself and, you know, it's got similar themes and, you know, character arcs and plots and all that stuff.
• 15:47
  and then each trilogy really wraps up you know where those those three books were going but then
• 15:55
  what happened and this would be a lead into the the next part probably but um each trilogy so the
• 16:00
  second trilogy became a prequel to the first trilogy because i you know each time i put stuff
• 16:05
  in the books whether it's fantasy i got some what looked like magic stones or you know where did this
• 16:10
  different stuff come where did that spacecraft come from that crashed on that planet that started
• 16:13
  all this stuff. And then you have to explain that. And so I did another trilogy that explained a lot
• 16:18
  of the, of the first trilogy, um, and some characters and stuff, but then I was like on a
• 16:22
  roll and I was like, I started making up when I jumped into the sci-fi thing, jumped in the time
• 16:27
  tunnels, you know, the, the, uh, wormholes with the time dilation and characters jumping through
• 16:32
  between books. You got characters that are in the first book that there's like two lines on them.
• 16:37
  And then in the, uh, about the fourth or fifth book, you know, I lose track. There's like
• 16:41
  chapters after chapters on this guy because he's really important. And no one knew that in the
• 16:45
  first book, right? So then you start really getting into this, holy smokes, I can make this really
• 16:49
  interesting for Havoc. And there's something LX did not expect is I'll just have, you know,
• 16:55
  this guy be critical to everything that happened in that first book. And then, oh, by the way,
• 16:59
  that guy that was in the first book, he's in the third book because he went through the time tunnel,
• 17:03
  you know, and the time dilation thing is because they're by a wormhole. And so that's how you make
• 17:08
  everything work. And so I was really caught up in, it became, I don't want any loose ends in this
• 17:13
  thing. I want fantasy. I want sci-fi. I want a protagonist, an antagonist, the master chess
• 17:18
  masters, the, you know, God and the devil. You know, there's going to be things about all these
• 17:22
  books that turn people off, but there's also going to be things that they're like, you know,
• 17:25
  I really liked that part. So maybe I'll be able to convince people that, you know, the sci-fi folks
• 17:29
  that hate fantasy and the fantasy folks that hate sci-fi and everybody that hates spiritual stuff,
• 17:34
  even though they're spiritual stuff and like everything we see and watch on TV, they just
• 17:38
  don't tell you. So, you know, so there was that. So then the second trilogy really expanded on the
• 17:44
  first. And then the third one, I said, I'm going to bring all of this stuff that's like in this
• 17:48
  fictional land, kind of like a Braveheart deal. And then in the future, the, you know, big sci-fi,
• 17:53
  you know, future Alliance versus the order and all that thing. I'm going to bring all that
• 17:57
  into seven different dimensions, seven different worlds in a multiverse kind of deal and just
• 18:03
  explode it up and just show what's going on in all these places and how they interact with that
• 18:07
  first place. It turns out that first six books is just the first of seven places. But everything's
• 18:13
  still tied together and people are able to cross over. And then one more real quick one here before
• 18:18
  the next question is, I just sent to the editor a couple of days ago, the first expansion to the
• 18:24
  trilogy of trilogies. So on top of the 10 books that you mentioned, which is really the three
• 18:30
  trilogies plus one that's stuck in there is actually one that has four books in one of the
• 18:34
  trilogies is another 700 page book that is, it's all in one book this time. It's not three different
• 18:40
  books. It's all together, but it's the first expansion to it all. And when you read that one,
• 18:45
  you go, okay, now I got to go back and look at all these books again, because it's all different.
• 18:50
  I just exploded everything upward. Now you're going, I had no idea any of this stuff was going
• 18:55
  on. It's kind of like the, I don't know, the legend to everything that's been going on with
• 19:00
  the first three trilogies. So, and then, oh, by the way, I wrote another 80 chapters already out
• 19:04
  for the second expansion, which blows it up even more. So yeah, it's kind of like that. Yeah, Alex,
• 19:11
  it's all, they're all contained in one, three, or the whole thing. But every time you expand to
• 19:17
  another trilogy or another volume, it makes it all exciting and new for people. And it really
• 19:23
  makes them start wondering about what was I really reading then? It seemed kind of boring with that
• 19:27
  first book, but now those guys are in this next, this last book. What? So yeah.
• 19:33
  Now, just a little bit off of that, it's, I guess, I guess it has a lot to do with it.
• 19:37
  It sounds very complex and intertwined. Do you ever have any problems with the continuity or
• 19:44
  avoiding any conflicts or contradictions?
• 19:47
  You know, it's kind of amazing. You know, I don't want to, as soon as I say, no, I don't,
• 19:52
  someone out there is going to go, wait a minute, you didn't have it. I'll have an answer for him
• 19:55
  Because when you make it complex enough, you can find answers to whatever anybody, a critic brings up about this, that, or the other thing.
• 20:03
  But, you know, surprisingly, so I was doing, I was letting AI.
• 20:08
  So I'm going to jump ahead and I'll answer your question in a second.
• 20:11
  But a Gemini is the only, the AI that I could find where I could pay 20 bucks a month.
• 20:17
  And I don't write, I don't use any AI to write anything, of course.
• 20:21
  But I could put all of these books into, I did this a few months ago, into Gemini and it would take them all and create a gem.
• 20:27
  And then I could go, hey, by the way, you know, tell me all the dudes that have crossed over between books.
• 20:32
  You know, tell me all the battles, you know, tell me whatever.
• 20:36
  And it could just jumps in there and it just lists off.
• 20:38
  And wow, what an aid for a writer when you're like you're talking about when you're talking about the complexity of all these books and all these pages and hundreds of characters and time jumping around and all that stuff.
• 20:48
  But to be honest, it hasn't found anything yet that's a conflict. It brings up a few things and I go, nope, here's the answer. And he goes, well, that's a great answer. So not really is the answer. And another why I jumped into that is AI was telling me there's different kinds of writers.
• 21:06
  And so I said, you know, what what are the weaknesses in my book so far?
• 21:09
  And they said, well, you know, like to really compete with the giants of the genres like Tolkien, you know, the C.S. Lewis and such.
• 21:18
  They were really into their language.
• 21:21
  And like Tolkien, he spent like 12 years writing these books that, you know, we went to see at Lord of the Rings, you know, watch the trilogy.
• 21:27
  But and I'm like, dude, I don't have that much time.
• 21:30
  You know, I enjoy the storyline, the complexity, the folks jumping around, you know, all of that kind of stuff way more than I do.
• 21:40
  I'm going to spend 20 pages describing, you know, the forest that this gal is sitting in.
• 21:44
  You know, I just can't do it.
• 21:46
  I can't do it.
• 21:47
  So I asked the AI, they said, yeah, this is your problem, if you will.
• 21:51
  And I said, okay, so I'm a loser.
• 21:53
  And, you know, I'm making some of this up.
• 21:55
  I said, I'm a loser.
• 21:56
  And they said, no, no, no, no.
• 21:56
  You know, there's basically three types of writers or readers that like different things.
• 22:02
  There's some people that really are into that.
• 22:04
  Man, you know, who is it?
• 22:06
  Is it The Wheel of Time?
• 22:09
  I think it's The Wheel of Time books.
• 22:12
  Is that, yeah, by Jordan.
• 22:13
  He's got, you know, I have friends that read that.
• 22:16
  I haven't read them.
• 22:16
  I watch some of the show, you know, because I'm that kind of guy that I'll watch it on
• 22:20
  TV, but I'm not going to read.
• 22:21
  But, you know, I'm not going to say it.
• 22:23
  I'll get her in trouble.
• 22:24
  but there, I have a friend who, you know, just loves that. I mean, you know, Hey, I can sit for
• 22:29
  chapters and chapters about you describing that scene. And I'm just like, that would be so boring
• 22:34
  for me. Yeah. Put me to sleep at night, but some people love that. And that's great. I'm on the
• 22:39
  other side. They said, there's other people. And the AI told me, yeah, I mean, the complexity of
• 22:43
  your universe, you know, how you have all these interactions, you have all these gems hidden in
• 22:48
  different places that people can find all that kind of stuff, the mechanics of the multiverse,
• 22:52
  how it all works together, using the science fiction that we know of right now to make it all
• 22:57
  work. You know, those fantasy stones, it's all tied together. As you go on, there's questions
• 23:03
  that people have as they go and they go, well, what is with all this? Well, that's to suck you
• 23:08
  into the next book. But at the end, all explained. And yeah, it's really complex and really intertwined
• 23:15
  like you were saying. But for right now, I haven't really seen or heard of and the AI can't find
• 23:20
  issues with that. So I feel really blessed with that. You know, I've, I've got that very
• 23:25
  organizational kind of brain, maybe from the Academy, maybe from checklists in the military.
• 23:30
  That's just the way my life has been. I've not been that flowery writing or reading kind of guy.
• 23:36
  I've been that, you know, big time multiverse, let's make it all work and the complexity. And
• 23:40
  so I think I probably appeal in general, and this is probably someone's going to get on me for this,
• 23:45
  but more to men than I will with women, maybe.
• 23:50
  And I don't want to overgeneralize that, but maybe just by one percentage, I'll just say that.
• 23:54
  51, 49, just because I think guys are more into the let's just make it happen thing and action adventure kind of stuff.
• 24:02
  And maybe, I don't know, that typical stereotype about, you know, little boys,
• 24:05
  they want to do hammers and make their grilled cheese sandwiches into guns and stuff and little girls.
• 24:10
  And I don't want to really go there, but maybe.
• 24:13
  just what I've seen so far as far as people that have really liked it and really been into it.
• 24:17
  So yeah, Alex, long, long answer. I ramble a little bit. Hope you guys don't mind.
• 24:22
  Let's put Fabio on the cover and he can appeal to women, right?
• 24:25
  There you go. Yeah.
• 24:27
  There you are. It sounds like it's an interesting thing because I think
• 24:32
  there truly is a third category of reader out there. There are your sci-fi purists.
• 24:40
  there are your fantasy purists excuse me but there are quite a lot of people that enjoy both
• 24:49
  and there was an author that i i think i've read if not all of most of this author's books and it
• 24:58
  was truly he he was able to blend the two very well for me and that would be pierce anthony okay
• 25:05
  Right.
• 25:06
  And especially in this one series that he wrote,
• 25:09
  I want to say it was supposed to be a trilogy,
• 25:12
  but I think it turned out to be four books as well.
• 25:15
  But it was called Juxtaposition, right?
• 25:17
  And you go from the sci-fi world with magic in it
• 25:21
  to a more fantasy land with magic, et cetera,
• 25:28
  and the blending of the two and different worlds,
• 25:31
  different timelines, and things like that,
• 25:33
  which, which I think is a really, really cool thing personally.
• 25:37
  Yeah. So, I mean, we're, we're very fortunate to have the ability to,
• 25:41
  you know you know,
• 25:44
  see all kinds of different authors and all kinds of different TV shows and,
• 25:48
  you know, people mixing all that stuff. And I, and I was kind of like,
• 25:51
  it's fiction, man. You can't tell me that I have to stay in one genre.
• 25:55
  I mean, what, what is up with that? It's fiction.
• 25:57
  Why are you making rules on what my fiction has to be So that just where I came from Yeah And then as far as like the you know the buildup the development of
• 26:08
  you know,
• 26:08
  locations,
• 26:09
  characters,
• 26:09
  et cetera.
• 26:10
  Like,
• 26:11
  my goodness.
• 26:13
  I have a lot of friends that are really into Stephen King.
• 26:17
  Yeah.
• 26:17
  I,
• 26:17
  I like his short stories.
• 26:21
  I'm not a big fan of his,
• 26:23
  of his work in general.
• 26:25
  And it's not that it's not great.
• 26:26
  It is.
• 26:27
  it's extremely good. I just find it exceedingly tedious to go through, you know, 400 pages of
• 26:35
  character development, and then we can have the story. You know what I mean?
• 26:40
  So, I mean, they probably beat up on my writing. I mean, everybody's going to beat up on somebody's
• 26:45
  writing, right? Because we all have agendas and we all have opinions and there are things we like
• 26:49
  and things we don't like, but my stuff moves very fast. There are probably little pieces of it that
• 26:55
  are a little slower just because, you know, I tend to, some of the characters tend to explain
• 26:59
  things sometimes. But it's not an over-explanation of things. It's kind of like, you kind of need to
• 27:05
  know this now and there's really no better way to do it. So I do try to let the characters explain
• 27:10
  things, you know, in a slower way. I let the story develop in ways that are leaving people
• 27:14
  questions in their mind. But sometimes I have to explain some stuff. And so I end up doing that.
• 27:19
  And that's probably the time that's a little slower. The first books, establishing that
• 27:23
  foundation and because those two were written 2005, 2010, and then just updated, they tend to be,
• 27:30
  if you will, very different than the next eight. The next eight or nine move very quickly because
• 27:36
  there's, I mean, I've got 9,000 years, I've got seven dimensions. You know, I don't really need
• 27:41
  to go slow. There's a lot of stuff to do. And so, and it's not, I mean, I could go forever,
• 27:46
  probably the rest of my life on it. But yeah, I think it's, I think it's got something for
• 27:51
  everybody and there's characters in there that everybody can relate to or that everybody can
• 27:55
  relate to some of the characters there i should say there's male you know male and female heroes
• 28:01
  there's orphan girls there's you know there's a a person that's you know it's trinity she's
• 28:08
  actually you know human half creature and half ai you know mech kind of person you know and
• 28:15
  there's all kinds of questions that you get into with that i'm giving away all kinds of stuff here
• 28:18
  But but there's so much that, you know, there's just so much I could give away stuff with you guys for four hours and people would still be surprised, you know, every third page, whatever.
• 28:29
  But and then there's been some weird things.
• 28:32
  I call them God winks.
• 28:33
  You know, you mentioned sci-fi and fantasy.
• 28:35
  And I have to throw in when I say spiritual warfare, you know, I'm bringing some Christianity, you know, God versus Satan into this thing with block at the end of time being, you know, beings like our kind.
• 28:47
  He's that big AI guy and he's, he's basically the night for, you know, of that time for the antagonist for Satan kind of deal.
• 28:55
  But, um, when, when, you know, the Jordans, the Martins, the, you know, the, um, what's her name to the Harry Potter stuff.
• 29:03
  I just lost it.
• 29:04
  Uh, you know, anywhere, you know, all of those folks, they have these, they have these stories, fantasy sci-fi and they're like, oh no, it's not spiritual warfare stuff.
• 29:12
  Well, what it really is, is not, you know, Christianity, spiritual warfare stuff.
• 29:15
  It doesn't have the Decker or the pretty angels and demons kind of stuff, but it has Eastern mysticism.
• 29:21
  It has humanism.
• 29:22
  It has, you know, God is dead or God is bad or, you know, so it's got all that stuff in there.
• 29:27
  All I'm doing is, you know, kind of throwing what I think and we all have opinions.
• 29:32
  You know, what I think is kind of true stuff that's operating behind all of this.
• 29:36
  So the way I look at it is the spiritual warfare thing is kind of an umbrella over the top of the sci-fi and the fantasy and everything that's going on through, you know, this beginning of time thing.
• 29:45
  And I made up a bunch of stuff. I'm not saying, you know, this is the Bible and Terry Rotering's words.
• 29:49
  You know, it's not that. But, you know, I am a big believer in, you know, God and evil and stuff that's going on around us that we just don't see.
• 29:57
  So a lot of that stuff is built into there, too. And let me throw one quick story at you.
• 30:01
  And I got a bunch of these. God winks. There's 30 of them, but I'll throw just the first one.
• 30:06
  At the end of the first trilogy, I was writing forever and I had I needed a place where it all began, even though it was like way in the future.
• 30:13
  Where did all this stuff begin?
• 30:15
  And I had one little place left on the map and I needed the name for that map.
• 30:18
  And I had written like, I don't know, a third of the book, 300 pages on this place called
• 30:23
  Tofit.
• 30:24
  And, but I just gave it away there, but forget I said that part, but I needed a name for
• 30:29
  this island.
• 30:30
  And I said, what should I call it?
• 30:31
  And so I pulled the first, I said, I'll pull the first letter from the places that I introduced
• 30:36
  in the books in 2005, 2010.
• 30:38
  And then this last place that I put in forever in 2024.
• 30:42
  and it turned out to be T for Trinian, O for Omentia, P for Parlantis, H for Heath and E for
• 30:48
  El Tigre because I was into tigers. Heath because I flew at Lake and Heath where that, you know,
• 30:52
  Wizzow in the 494th Panthers was. Trinian I pulled out of my ear, Omentia I pulled out of my Parlantis.
• 30:57
  What is that? And so those were over 20 years and just in the order I introduced them in the books
• 31:03
  and I needed that place where people were sacrificing their kids over a fire to a demon,
• 31:09
  right? Because that's where it all began way back in time, you know, in the fantasy kind of
• 31:13
  time period of all this. And so I put it in there, you know, T-O-P-H-E-T, Tophet. That has a nice
• 31:19
  ring to it. That is so cool. Okay. I'll keep that. Put it on the map. A few days later, I was like,
• 31:23
  I wonder if that's a place because it's a name. So I looked it up and it said, and Google comes
• 31:28
  back, I paraphrase, but it's like, it's just this valley of the valley of Hinnom in ancient Israel
• 31:34
  where a sect of Israelites were sacrificing their kids to a demon called Molech.
• 31:39
  Now, oh, yeah.
• 31:40
  So, oh, you made that up.
• 31:42
  You remembered that from 2005.
• 31:44
  Your brain just automatically picked these places that had these letters
• 31:48
  that you introduced them in the order in the story that 20 years later,
• 31:52
  when you did the trilogy, which you never even planned on doing a second book,
• 31:56
  then you would name it Tophet and you would know that from 2005 and 2024.
• 32:01
  There's no way.
• 32:02
  There's no way.
• 32:04
  You know, there's no way I could have done that.
• 32:06
  And so that blew me away.
• 32:08
  And so that's what kind of led me into, I got to write some more because something's going on and this is crazy.
• 32:13
  So that had a big effect on me and I just wanted to share it with you.
• 32:21
  Yeah, where do you go from there?
• 32:26
  Your audio is not working, Havoc.
• 32:30
  How's that?
• 32:31
  There you go.
• 32:32
  I mean, fun with technology and toys.
• 32:36
  I saw that in top.
• 32:37
  I mean, I can't talk.
• 32:38
  I can't hear.
• 32:40
  Yeah.
• 32:41
  Oh, I got my fingers in my ears.
• 32:42
  I'm sorry.
• 32:43
  I do that sometimes.
• 32:46
  So do you have a, is there a favorite character out of all of the books and why?
• 32:53
  That's a tough one.
• 32:53
  I mean, I've done like 30 podcasts now.
• 32:55
  No one's ever asked me that.
• 32:57
  So that's a good one, Havoc.
• 32:58
  And some of them come to mind, I think of, so because there's so many, my turn. Yeah, I'm just wasting time here so I can think.
• 33:11
  Because there are characters that jump through multiple books on the good side. On the bad side, I feel bad saying this, but that character I mentioned before, that beings like our kind guy, Block.
• 33:27
  and he's that AI dude that's basically, you know, number one right-hand man for Satan kind of deal.
• 33:35
  And I think he's probably, you know, one of my favorite characters just because he kind of shows up.
• 33:43
  So the AI kind of shows up way from in the beginning kind of too.
• 33:47
  I mean, I explore how artificial intelligence could have grown over, you know, we think of it as something that's new now
• 33:53
  because we're discovering it, because we're able to see it, you know, through computers and such.
• 33:59
  But, you know, how could it have maybe been manifesting itself very early on?
• 34:04
  And so he's kind of there then.
• 34:07
  He's there all through the books and through time here and then big time at the end and kind of manifest himself.
• 34:13
  So the way he he comes out first in the in the book forever, which is at the end of the first trilogy,
• 34:19
  and then at all these other places, and then big time at the end, is he kind of creeps out as,
• 34:26
  you know, I'm a force to be reckoned with. And then I'm like, we would see artificial
• 34:31
  intelligence as a tool. And then it kind of becomes a holographic kind of creature, if you
• 34:39
  will, at a board meeting kind of deal. And then he ends up, hey, because of those vaccines and
• 34:45
  everything that you guys have been getting, you know, and been getting instilled with some
• 34:51
  artificial intelligence stuff that's changing some things up here with maybe some nanobots or
• 34:55
  something, you know, I'm able to kind of take over, you know, everything. And a very interesting
• 35:01
  aspect to this is I was talking to another guy on a podcast probably a month and a half ago,
• 35:06
  and he swears up and down by this, his friend that he has, who was at a big conference kind
• 35:11
  of thing with, you know, I don't know if it was 60, 100 people kind of thing in an auditorium.
• 35:16
  And they had the different CEOs and, you know, the different directorates, if you will, heads
• 35:22
  come up there, talk to the people and such. And then they had a get together chat time where people
• 35:26
  could go talk to him one on one and everything. He swears up and down that his friend said,
• 35:32
  yeah, we're sitting there, you know, this really good looking dude came out, you know, for his 30s
• 35:36
  kind of deal, talked to us for a while. And we all went up and talked to him and other people
• 35:40
  afterwards. And then at the end of it, the CEO comes out and says, Hey, what'd you guys think of,
• 35:45
  you know, James or whatever? And they're like, yeah, you know, he's, you know, seems like a
• 35:49
  rock solid kind of guy should be in that position, whatever. Um, you know where this is going,
• 35:53
  probably based on our discussion. And he says, the CEO tells him, yeah, that wasn't a guy that
• 35:59
  was an AI robot dude that we were, we're bringing out to see how he was going to do. And they were
• 36:05
  just like, there's no freaking way, right? Other than a couple people said it kind of seemed like
• 36:11
  he didn't really have the normal spirit, like when you're talking to a person, there was something
• 36:16
  just a little bit off with him. But other than that, and so you wonder, what are the Microsofts,
• 36:21
  the Googles, the Amazons, all these big companies that have the billions and trillions of dollars
• 36:26
  kind of deal? If we're just seeing bits and pieces of that, are there like a bunch of guys
• 36:30
  and gals walking around at the supermarket you don't interact with, but you don't just to test
• 36:35
  out how they're doing? You know, are they looking pretty good? No one's noticing, you know, whatever.
• 36:40
  Are guys asking that gal for a date? You know, whatever. Yeah, I don't know what's going on. But
• 36:46
  every time I've written one of these books, I look at my wife and I go, I got to get this out
• 36:49
  because I'll see something on TV like UFOs and all this attention they got to UFOs and stuff. I'm
• 36:53
  like, I got to get that out or we'll be watching dark. You know, I don't know if you guys saw that
• 36:57
  series dark. If you haven't, it's pretty interesting. It's really different. But there
• 37:02
  were a bunch of things in there and I'm like, oh man. And I, I grabbed one and I grab a book and I
• 37:07
  go, look, honey, you know, I came up with it first. It's right here kind of deal. But you know, I got
• 37:11
  to get this stuff out because stuff is happening so fast now, you know, our science fiction of
• 37:15
  tomorrow is, or our science fiction today is our reality of tomorrow. Right. And so you wait long
• 37:20
  enough and you're just gonna, you know, the books are obsolete kind of thing. So I can't even remember
• 37:25
  what the first question was now. Havoc. I just rambled on the next 20 questions.
• 37:30
  you're talking about it's like with the military i'm sure it's you know whatever you see they
• 37:37
  probably got stuff way beyond that and i'm sure the ai is exactly the same thing when you were
• 37:42
  talking about exactly that too you know is it our ufos and someone else's ufos and the arguments
• 37:48
  against that is if it was ours we take over if it was theirs they take over i mean there wouldn't i
• 37:53
  mean so is it so if it's not a human at least in our time you know people talk about it maybe it's
• 38:00
  from a different time, that kind of thing. And just because we haven't figured out how to do
• 38:03
  that doesn't mean it can't be done. I don't know. So then if it's not those things, you know,
• 38:08
  is it an alien kind of deal? Is it, you know, the people under the water, we're talking about now
• 38:13
  it's coming from under the oceans. And you're like, you know, dude, there's what, two thirds
• 38:16
  of the earth, if that's right from, you know, our sixth grade science or whatever. I don't know,
• 38:21
  you know, but it's no one really can give you an answer that is an absolute, right? You,
• 38:26
  Each one of us might have a different idea of what it could be, but what they could be, but what is it?
• 38:32
  What's the answer?
• 38:33
  Because there's holes in any argument.
• 38:36
  All of the above.
• 38:37
  All of the above, yeah.
• 38:40
  Powers and principalities.
• 38:42
  Well, and I kind of touch on some of that.
• 38:45
  Imagine that in the books.
• 38:47
  But I kind of leave all of this stuff.
• 38:50
  I flavor it so that it might be 50, like I've mentioned the 51% before.
• 38:54
  It might be 51% from the author.
• 38:56
  If you really read closely this is what I think But I kind of try to leave it some of the questions that are out there Here are the possibilities like the UFO thing that we talking about but at the same time you know I not going to blow up anybody bubble Maybe it this maybe it that I don know
• 39:13
  Very cool. So block was the character's name.
• 39:17
  Yeah. Beings like our kind. If you guys got,
• 39:19
  and I actually thought of this beforehand, believe it or not,
• 39:21
  but if you got like 30 seconds,
• 39:24
  there's like a,
• 39:25
  like two thirds of a page that kind of explains just where I'm going from.
• 39:28
  coming from with block. If I could just read that two thirds of a page for you,
• 39:32
  it'd probably take less than a minute. Okay. So yeah, I got it right here, but, and you know,
• 39:36
  it's not the greatest writing, whatever, but so it's in the beginning of that book,
• 39:39
  that third book forever, and it's called energy and light. It's a chapter three and it's probably,
• 39:44
  you know, a hundred, a hundred words, but the dark figure moved undetected through the darkness
• 39:48
  thinking scientists now know that the, at the moment of human conception, there's a release
• 39:54
  of energy as a burst of light. This is reasonable as God is light and there is no darkness in him.
• 40:00
  The creator's signature for a new soul being created is a burst of light. God is love and
• 40:06
  his signature is beautiful. Conversely, when energy is consumed and light is absorbed at the
• 40:12
  birth of another, what conclusions should we then reach? What life would exist outside the key
• 40:17
  signature of the maker? What would this life be if God did not create it? We must conclude it could
• 40:24
  only be God, for there is only the creator and the created. So we agree that beings like our kind
• 40:29
  should not only be allowed to exist, but also to thrive. We are above the control and reproach of
• 40:35
  the lesser created beings, just as the creator is above the creation. A flash did not mark our
• 40:40
  beginning. We are superior to them. They are flesh. We are immortal. So that's how Block announces
• 40:47
  himself kind of, you know, he's like, if everything that's created is with a flash of light at
• 40:52
  at conception and we are actually absorb energy and there's only the creator and the created
• 40:57
  then i we must be the creator we're we're immortal and and that's how it says you know all this other
• 41:03
  rest of this creation should be underneath us you know we should own it we should control it
• 41:08
  whatever so i don't know it means more to me probably than more people i thought it was really
• 41:13
  cool but when i walk around and i come up with these things i'm like you know whether they're
• 41:19
  I'm not saying they're Tolkien-ish or Lewis-ish or, you know, Asimov-ish or whatever.
• 41:27
  But I get these ideas and I'm like psyched when I come home and, you know, try to throw it on the computer kind of deal.
• 41:32
  And my stuff has been compared a lot, you know, to the Lewis's and the Deckers and all that stuff, but also to the Asimov's because he wrote, you know, not in the flowery, whatever language.
• 41:44
  which he wrote a lot more in the complexity and the scientific kind of aspect to it.
• 41:50
  So, you know, there's a broad range of stuff out there.
• 41:53
  This is just, it's really unique.
• 41:55
  I call it the unified theory of everything because of all those genres.
• 41:58
  And you talked about other people having multiple genres.
• 42:02
  But I don't know.
• 42:03
  I think it's pretty unique.
• 42:06
  Sounds right up my alley.
• 42:07
  I think I would enjoy that.
• 42:10
  So when is Hollyweird going to start knocking on your door?
• 42:13
  to convert these in the...
• 42:15
  Yeah.
• 42:15
  You know, I'm trying to figure out
• 42:17
  how to, you know,
• 42:18
  cut into that groove
• 42:20
  kind of get in there
• 42:21
  because, you know,
• 42:22
  obviously I know this better
• 42:24
  than probably most people.
• 42:25
  Just, you know,
• 42:26
  it's all up here
• 42:26
  and then down there.
• 42:28
  But man, talk about Netflix or Prime.
• 42:31
  I mean, I...
• 42:32
  And that's another good thing
• 42:33
  about the Gemini.
• 42:33
  I can say, hey,
• 42:34
  you know, look at all of these chapters
• 42:36
  from all of these books
• 42:37
  and give me 100 chapters
• 42:39
  on each book,
• 42:40
  what it's about,
• 42:41
  what the title is,
• 42:42
  and it'll just go...
• 42:43
  And I'll go, okay, now how do I get this to Netflix? You know, because it would be like, you know, I always say it's like, it's, it's everything. It's, it's Braveheart all the way to Interstellar, you know, with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings on different, different sides of it. And then, you know, just everything you can think about all those movies that we loved as we were growing up. And now it's all, it's got pieces of all of that in there and all intertwined. It all, you know, is set up to work out.
• 43:09
  But yeah, it would be pretty incredible.
• 43:13
  It really would.
• 43:14
  But there's probably thousands, if not millions of people that have stuff out there that would be incredible.
• 43:20
  But good luck.
• 43:23
  Have you ever thought about if that did happen and how you would –
• 43:26
  I mean, maybe personally that you want to join that club.
• 43:29
  But I mean, for me, I don't know.
• 43:31
  I think selling yourself out – I mean, not that way, but to become part of that Holly weird kind of thing.
• 43:39
  like how do you not yeah yeah and how do you not do that yeah you're absolutely right and it would
• 43:44
  really depend on just how many how much right you you maintain to it you know how much they have to
• 43:49
  pass through you i mean if they just said hey we want to buy you know all of your books and we'll
• 43:53
  give you you know i don't know name a number whatever you know you'd go right you know do i
• 43:58
  really i mean i don't know it would have to be pretty big for me uh to go yeah i don't i don't
• 44:03
  own that anymore and you guys just do whatever you want with it because you know yeah how would
• 44:07
  you feel? They just start making changes to like, well, we got to add this and that to, you know,
• 44:11
  fit our agenda that we're pushing forward. Absolutely. Right. And although I did only,
• 44:18
  I did all this in two years, you know, Alex, I, other than, you know, the first two, I kind of,
• 44:23
  you know, the first 600, 700 pages of the 6,000. Yeah. But then I rewrote those. And then the other
• 44:28
  5,000 plus have all been in the last two years. It's just been like this constant stream of
• 44:33
  consciousness where I, I'm retired now. I'm up in, you know, after I did 15 more years at NORAD.
• 44:38
  So for a total of 39 years total, I'm with the academy time and then the 20 years in the Air
• 44:42
  Force and then the 15 at NORAD Northcom. We moved up here. We've got like, you know, 111 acres,
• 44:48
  two big Colorado mountain dogs, you know, running around in the mountains, just living life for like
• 44:52
  the last eight years. And so I enjoyed that for like six years. And then I said, you know, I need
• 44:55
  another mission because my whole life has kind of been a mission. I've been, you know, feeling like
• 45:00
  I needed to be doing something. And so I can't just like waste the rest of my life. So I started
• 45:04
  doing this again and it's just flowed like 10 pages, seven, seven to 10 pages a day. And I just
• 45:11
  don't feel, you know, different people have different things. Like if you, if you didn't do
• 45:13
  this or that, you don't feel good about the day. If I don't write a chapter before the wife gets up,
• 45:18
  then I don't, I don't feel good. And so that's probably partly my, my sleep problem, I think,
• 45:25
  because I don't sleep for more than four hours a night now. I can't, I get up at one o'clock every
• 45:29
  morning. And I end up, you know, thinking of stuff and doing a couple chapters and doing the hot tub
• 45:35
  and walking the dogs and, you know, whatever. And so I don't want to be like, hey, you know,
• 45:40
  look at my wonderful life. But, you know, you know, as you get older, that's what we all become.
• 45:45
  We get retired and that's what we do. So I'm glad I'm very happy that I found a mission,
• 45:51
  if you will, in writing these books. And like I said, I'm in this multiverse now and I just can't
• 45:56
  get out of it as soon as i send what a book off to the editor it's like i you know the next day
• 46:00
  i've got 80 chapters kind of planned out ish so i don't know i have a mission for you yeah if you
• 46:07
  do me do me a favor and do everybody a favor like if it does get picked up and turned into a series
• 46:12
  yeah don't crap the bed on the final season because there are a lot of these things that
• 46:16
  leave me completely disappointed yeah i'm not gonna name any names but a lot of them yeah well
• 46:23
  Well, first of all, in order to do that, if they if someone whatever you are out there, you know, you know, Netflix, Amazon, you know, whoever you are, if you want to buy all these, just so you know, because of this discussion right now, you know, it's going to be in the multi six figures or seven figures at least.
• 46:38
  And I'm not going to cop out on what I own as far as, you know, I'll let you change some stuff like some names, because I got to tell you that when I first did some of the names, it was all about all the people I knew.
• 46:48
  So I was like, you know, because I did the first book with, you know, our names as main characters in the family, slightly changed, like Terry was Taroth, you know, kind of thing.
• 46:58
  But then when I went in the second book, The Faithful, I've got names in there like Cosintimus.
• 47:02
  And you're like, who the heck is Cosintimus?
• 47:04
  Oh, that would be my cousin Thomas.
• 47:06
  So, you know, so when you read some of those names, so those would be the things that they could change, you know, like if they wanted to and little places like that.
• 47:14
  But at the end of the books, I've got a lot of the blog entries that I have that I wrote in the Chronicles of Trinian dot com over the two years that I was kind of writing stuff, mainly the first two years.
• 47:25
  And in those blogs, I talk about Air Force, you know, events, things that have happened to me, like falling out of the sky through a stack of 111s at night over Germany because the pilot didn't sweep the wings forward enough and, you know, dropping 20,000 feet and almost dying.
• 47:39
  Just tons of those stories, but also stories of where different things came from, like that Tofet story.
• 47:48
  And so if they change the names and stuff too much, then they lose a lot of that.
• 47:52
  So is there a way that somebody wants to develop this story, but also put a lot of the real world events that actually had to do with the story?
• 48:02
  If you take and change a whole bunch of it, then you lose all that.
• 48:05
  So is there a way to make use of both of those things where people would actually enjoy, you know, after you get done with the story, looking in the back and going, that's where he came up with that. That's kind of cool. It makes it more memorable. And as the AI says, it unfences the fiction a little bit, brings it back to the reader a little bit more, more of a reality kind of thing.
• 48:26
  And that's really what this last volume that I just sent off to the editor does in that, you know, I exploded it into the seven different dimensions and worlds, but now I bring it back down to Earth and I make it more real for everything that's going on here with some of the battles that have taken place in time here on Earth and such.
• 48:46
  I tie all that stuff in so that it's all connected, not only in all that fictional way with the seven different wheels, as I call them, or the six, but I connect it to the seventh wheel, which is us.
• 48:57
  So that's kind of the fourth explosion here in this last volume that I sent off.
• 49:03
  so i'm just going to go with if if they can make all of the feature films that they did on looter
• 49:12
  as well as uh the hobbit and keep those names i think toll fit something you could stick with
• 49:20
  guys yeah i'm just just saying boromir is a little more you keep the merchandising rights
• 49:25
  yeah oh yeah yeah so they call it the ip right the intellectual property aspect of the universe
• 49:31
  kind of deal yeah so when they come up with the uh you know the yoda or whatever you know yeah
• 49:37
  all the block you know you have that mechanical block uh you know what would you say so out of
• 49:44
  all the i asked you about the characters what would you say is your favorite world location
• 49:52
  timeline inside of the the books that you've written yeah so i'm going to diverge slightly
• 49:58
  from that and I'll maybe get to it at the end. But, but as I develop that answer, since, you know,
• 50:03
  these are great questions, these are brand new questions for me. So there's this little girl.
• 50:09
  So I have two granddaughters, right? And so in the third, the third trilogy, I said, I got to wrap
• 50:15
  my new granddaughter into this. So her name is Emma and I came up with M. So this, this third
• 50:21
  trilogy is huge about M and she actually, you know, spoil alert. So, you know, shut off now
• 50:27
  and come back on in five minutes, you know, if you don't want to know this stuff about the books.
• 50:31
  But M has this little bag of stones and they're different colored stones kind of deal. And she
• 50:37
  ends up, how should I say this without spoiling too much, but she ends up going to all of these
• 50:42
  different places. And she brings these stones with them, with her. And then for one reason or
• 50:48
  another, she either has to leave or, you know, something happens to her. But these stones affect
• 50:53
  each of these other wheels in different ways. So there's one place that's called Eros and they have
• 51:00
  cities that are built on like columns of light. And there are the different colors, columns of
• 51:05
  light that they've developed from. They have a tunnel array where they've got each one of these
• 51:09
  stones at the end of the arrays. And it wasn't something that they even came up with. They
• 51:14
  discovered these stones from him, but they don't know that, allow things to be levitated up into
• 51:20
  the air and they didn't really find a limit to how much weight they could levitate. So, so there's
• 51:26
  these, these nine, um, cities basically eventually that are on these columns of light. Well, in a
• 51:33
  different place, Nautica, you know, there's, there's underground cities of water on a eruptus.
• 51:39
  There's, there's underground places that are like volcanic caves kind of thing, but they have the
• 51:44
  light of these different, so on and on and on. Um, so all of these things kind of, these stones
• 51:49
  kind of seeded these different worlds.
• 51:50
  And each one has, you know, different challenges,
• 51:53
  different enemies, different things going on.
• 51:56
  But I probably gave away a lot right there.
• 51:59
  But there's way more than that that goes into it.
• 52:03
  So, yeah.
• 52:04
  And you'd have to actually read the books to find out what the stones are and such, but they are all explained.
• 52:10
  And it's not just like so unlike, you know, like Frodo, you know, you got this ring and that's all cool.
• 52:16
  Or you got Harry Potter with the wand.
• 52:17
  And, you know, I like to say that, you know, so you don't need a wand and you don't need a ring, but you got these stones and and people can actually use those on this planet on Earth, you know, to fight the battles that we that we're fighting here.
• 52:32
  But what was it?
• 52:34
  You know, you got the Wheel of Time and you've got, what is the other one?
• 52:38
  Trying to think of Jordan's.
• 52:40
  I'll think of it in a second.
• 52:41
  Next question.
• 52:42
  Every once in a while when you ramble for, you know, this much time, you're going to forget something.
• 52:46
  But I'm not sure where I was going there.
• 52:48
  But, yeah.
• 52:48
  So what is my favorite place?
• 52:50
  Man, they're all pretty cool.
• 52:53
  And I kind of tried to build them out of, you know, back in the day, people would think like way back, what are the elements, right?
• 52:59
  You've got fire.
• 53:01
  You've got land.
• 53:02
  You've got sea.
• 53:02
  You've got air.
• 53:03
  Right.
• 53:03
  And then I added, you know, like space, inner space to those to make six new wheels, if you will, on top of our earth kind of deal.
• 53:13
  So I kind of did that.
• 53:14
  And there's so much with the stones, with colors, with those different elements.
• 53:22
  It's all intertwined into all the books.
• 53:24
  So they all have gems in them.
• 53:26
  And when I say, you know, people will have to go back and read the earlier trilogies and stuff if they were really into that, like, I'm going to move on to something else. Five years later, they come back and they read it again. And it's all different because they have a different understanding from later on of the other trilogies. But then when they're reading, they're going to go, I never caught this because, you know, Terry Rotaring didn't mean for you to catch that until you understood, you know, down the line what that meant.
• 53:49
  And now all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, that was happening. I just, I didn't even think of that at the time because I didn't know about that stuff down the road and now it's all changed. So yeah, that's another part of the complexity of it. And, and to kind of get back to one of your earlier questions, Alex, I, I, a lot of it, it's almost like as mysterious in a way as some of the Tophet stuff, that Tophet story and all those other God winks. I didn't, I didn't plan all this stuff from the beginning.
• 54:16
  But now I look back and like just today, I look back at something I was developing for this fifth volume, the second expansion.
• 54:25
  And I'm going, would this work? And then I look back and it was like in The Faithful, the first book towards the end.
• 54:32
  It had all this stuff happening and it was like, I didn't even realize it.
• 54:36
  So it's almost like, am I an AI guy? And somehow I'm not letting the human part of me know what I'm writing here so I can be surprised later.
• 54:46
  it's crazy stuff it really is i was also wondering when you were earlier talking about the time
• 54:53
  travel and the wormhole and you know singularity etc how much of this did you ground in actual
• 55:01
  physics uh as opposed to just kind of i'm just going to wing it and go with it yeah it's all
• 55:07
  grounded so um there's some stuff you know when i say like when i said before i i have mysterious
• 55:15
  stuff that sometimes I write and I leave it kind of hanging there in the next book, I have to solve
• 55:19
  it for the reader. Some of that I have to solve for myself. So I've put it upon myself where I
• 55:24
  have to solve these things where, you know, at the end of it, you know, you guys are going to be
• 55:29
  talking and you're going to go, well, he didn't solve that. And then one of you is going to go,
• 55:32
  no, he did right here. You're going to go, you know, you're right. So I don't, I don't want to
• 55:36
  leave anything hanging at the end. You know, everything I would say probably, and you know,
• 55:42
  because I got to leave myself some leeway, right? Because I'm not perfect. And I don't know,
• 55:46
  I would say 95% of it is solved through scientific stuff. And there might be, you know, four to 5%
• 55:54
  that's left. And I'm going to go with 100% science because, and here's the reason,
• 56:01
  that spiritual warfare stuff that I put in there, and one of the big critics of it was the AI when
• 56:07
  I had to go back and look at stuff. I forget what it's called something with DX. You know,
• 56:12
  it's got basically it's a Latin term and it means, you know, the author used God to solve this.
• 56:18
  In other words, have it got out of that problem because God just sent angels and how cheap is that
• 56:23
  kind of thing? What I did in my, in my series here is I said, okay, I, because I got protagonist
• 56:30
  antagonist, you know, God is in charge of, you know, the good stuff that's happening here,
• 56:35
  but he's going to use everything that we know about because he established all that stuff. So,
• 56:40
  So all of the scientific stuff that we know, that's what's going to solve the problems.
• 56:45
  That's what's going to be used, you know, with the different characters and such to get from A to B, you know, and get people out of trouble kind of thing.
• 56:52
  So early on, you might go, oh, you know, Rotor, he used God to solve that kind of thing.
• 56:57
  And later on, you're going to find out, like in the one that just went to the editor, that 95% of all that stuff that looked like God working directly in there, nah, you know, it was science and it was something else.
• 57:09
  And I'll give you a hint, but you still won't catch on to it.
• 57:12
  But it's called The Chronicles of the Wheelstones, The Tesseract Vortex.
• 57:16
  So, you know, there's a tesseract involved, you know, and basically the way I looked at that is it's a block of time.
• 57:25
  But when you're in the inside of there, everything's in the present.
• 57:28
  So the stuff that was in the very beginning in the fantasy, you know, ages and the stuff way at the end that's in the, you know, AI.
• 57:35
  it's got all these you know multi-dimensional wheels and all these different places and all
• 57:39
  that stuff there may be somebody that can move back and forth to those different places in time
• 57:45
  and those different places in space because of the tesseract so i mean different authors have
• 57:50
  experiment experimented with that um so we have the experience of like you know interstellar you
• 57:56
  know towards the end there where you know the dudes inside of that you're like what the heck
• 58:00
  is this and he's he's able to see his daughter you know when with with the what was it the sand or the
• 58:06
  whatever in that room and he's pushing off the books and that's from way earlier you know when
• 58:12
  he was in that room watching the books fall off and he didn't realize he was the guy that was
• 58:16
  going to be in the future pushing the books did you guys see that movie or am i talking stupid
• 58:21
  interstellar is that what you're talking about yeah yeah yeah so i mean at that point i was kind
• 58:26
  of like what the, you know, cause the movie was so cool. And then that part kind of threw me off
• 58:31
  a little bit, but just now talking to you guys, I just realized that may be where I got part of this
• 58:36
  from. And of course we're all kind of the products of our experiences, you know, and, and how,
• 58:41
  you know, that we build on that with college and becomes our wisdom and that becomes internalized.
• 58:46
  So there's a lot of, you know, all these movies, you know, I, I incorporate flying in our different
• 58:52
  tactics, you know, where there's, there's, there's folks in the series that are flying jets.
• 58:56
  There are, you know, future jets, you know, like F-38s and all kinds of stuff.
• 59:02
  But there's also people that are flying spaceship fighters.
• 59:05
  But there are also dudes riding dragons operating and doing the same kind of tactics as we did air to ground.
• 59:11
  So, you know, I take all of that stuff and I incorporate it.
• 59:16
  You know, I don't know what percentage of this is new other than the incorporation of all of it and the intertwining of it all.
• 59:25
  is probably new. And then the other stuff is all based off of life experiences
• 59:29
  and different movies and such that have impressed me.
• 59:35
  What would be one thing that you found out about yourself or the world you live in or
• 59:41
  something that you learned through the process of writing these books?
• 59:46
  Yeah. So I'm going to take one thing and make it applicable to me and everybody else.
• 59:50
  For me, I guess, you know, I never planned on going down this route, right?
• 59:55
  I mean, it's like I never planned on being a writer, writing books, putting together stories.
• 1:00:01
  And so when I started dabbling with this and now looking back, like I don't, I tend to think of this as one of the biggest things I've done in my life.
• 1:00:13
  You know, I spent the 20 years flying.
• 1:00:15
  You know, you can say whatever you want about the military and defense of our country and all that stuff.
• 1:00:19
  Being a father, being a husband, all that stuff is outstanding.
• 1:00:22
  But as far as personally, I can't imagine having lived and not done this.
• 1:00:29
  So how do I take that and apply it to everybody else?
• 1:00:32
  I would encourage everybody to try new things.
• 1:00:35
  And we go through these different periods of our life where, you know, you might think,
• 1:00:39
  okay, I'm 63 now.
• 1:00:41
  And when I started this, I was 61.
• 1:00:43
  You know, I'm old.
• 1:00:44
  It's time to sit in front of the TV, just veg out, play with the grandkids.
• 1:00:47
  I'm done.
• 1:00:48
  You know, there's nothing more I can do.
• 1:00:50
  I would say, no, don't do that.
• 1:00:52
  you know, try some stuff because like rotor, you might end up doing something that it's like the
• 1:00:57
  best thing that he's done in his whole life. When he looks back, how could I have lived without
• 1:01:00
  having done this? So please everybody try new stuff. Don't think you're at a stage where you're
• 1:01:05
  done. Um, don't think that you're at a stage where you can only do the stuff that you've done in the
• 1:01:10
  past. Please jump into new stuff and try new things. And, you know, hopefully take a look at
• 1:01:15
  these books and, you know, be more, that's one of the things I really like about these is,
• 1:01:19
  a lot of the stuff we've talked about and that we've thought about maybe in sci-fi and fantasy,
• 1:01:24
  there's the stuff that's out there. Not everything, of course. There's millions of
• 1:01:29
  books on Amazon and tons of movies and ones we haven't seen yet, but a lot of the stuff is
• 1:01:34
  negative There chaos People aren unique They not special There isn hope God is dead know all of there no answers it leaves you with the end of the thing is there
• 1:01:46
  no answers where you're left up with well that was fun but now after the series is over and i guess
• 1:01:52
  tolkien he didn't finish or no wheel of time they didn't finish writing that or the dude didn't
• 1:01:57
  write it was jordan he didn't finish writing it and they had to finish writing that that 10th
• 1:02:01
  season or whatever. So they did it. But my stuff, it's all, you are unique. You are special. There
• 1:02:09
  is hope. There is a God. There is a big plan. This is a massive puzzle. You know, LX and Havoc are
• 1:02:15
  different. Rotor's different too. I don't want to be Havoc. Havoc doesn't want to be LX. LX doesn't
• 1:02:20
  want to be Rotor. And we shouldn't want to be. We all have different shapes. All of our different
• 1:02:24
  shapes are critical to the puzzle that's being built, whether it's be this Chronicles series
• 1:02:29
  or in life in reality.
• 1:02:31
  And we don't need more than one piece of a puzzle
• 1:02:33
  that's exactly the same because it's useless.
• 1:02:36
  I don't want to be that person.
• 1:02:37
  So for the kids that are in school,
• 1:02:40
  don't be, so what if there's the prom queen
• 1:02:42
  or the quarterback of the football team?
• 1:02:44
  You don't want to be that person.
• 1:02:46
  That is not who you were made to be.
• 1:02:47
  You're special in who you are.
• 1:02:49
  Your piece of the puzzle is critical to the big picture
• 1:02:51
  that's being formed here.
• 1:02:54
  And don't try to be like anybody else.
• 1:02:56
  Try to figure out who you are
• 1:02:58
  And what the edges of your, you know, the trials of your life will shape those edges of that piece of that puzzle so that at the end, you know, that piece of the puzzle will fit perfectly in that puzzle that the puzzle master is basically building there.
• 1:03:12
  So, you know, don't give up.
• 1:03:14
  Try new things.
• 1:03:15
  Don't be like anybody else.
• 1:03:17
  You are special and there are answers.
• 1:03:19
  You know, that's kind of what I would say from all that.
• 1:03:22
  That's great advice.
• 1:03:25
  Great takeaways.
• 1:03:26
  Yeah, for sure.
• 1:03:27
  The Rambler?
• 1:03:28
  You can call me Rotor or you can call me the Rambler.
• 1:03:31
  That wasn't actually a call sign, but maybe it's a call sign from your show.
• 1:03:35
  Well, we had you on the talk, so I think it's fitting.
• 1:03:41
  Yeah.
• 1:03:41
  It's fitting for sure.
• 1:03:43
  All right.
• 1:03:44
  So let's go back to the weapons systems officer days.
• 1:03:50
  what was your funnest most enjoyable exciting exhilarating whatever flight that you ever took
• 1:04:00
  what and why yeah so i was gonna as you were forming that my mind went through you know like
• 1:04:07
  we said air to ground flying low level screaming across the ground dropping bombs blowing stuff up
• 1:04:12
  i mean what what guy doesn't like that right so there was that and then there and then i went to
• 1:04:17
  the, well, after we got done flying, that's when we got to let down. So we'd go in the, in the
• 1:04:21
  briefing room, close the door, you know, partially unzip the flight suits, get the popcorn and the
• 1:04:27
  brewskis, you know, and just talk about the mission, watch the tapes, drink the beer, eat the popcorn,
• 1:04:32
  go out and play foosball, you know, that kind of deal. Because before that it was all work.
• 1:04:37
  And talk about what we can do better for next time. So there was that. Then it was what I alluded
• 1:04:41
  to earlier, you know, it was one of my earlier first missions over in England when I first went
• 1:04:45
  over there. Still the Cold War, still Soviet Union. You know, they're always trying to throw
• 1:04:50
  off our navigation so that we fly across, you know, the line so they could try to shoot us down
• 1:04:54
  kind of deal. So we're orbiting over the spot in Germany, talking to Ramstein control. We're
• 1:05:01
  about to do a low level. We have 19, it's an exercise. So I don't know, you know, you lose
• 1:05:05
  track a little bit, but I'm going to go with 19. We had 19 F-111s in a stack from like 10,000 up to
• 1:05:11
  29,000 feet, 1,000 foot apart all the way up.
• 1:05:14
  And we're all flying big circles, right?
• 1:05:16
  Taking our, waiting our turn to go in.
• 1:05:17
  The guy at the bottom is, he's dropped down.
• 1:05:20
  He's about, he's going to be the next guy in.
• 1:05:22
  Then after that, as it goes up, we're way up at the top at 29,000 feet.
• 1:05:26
  So I'm, you know, the pilot's over there.
• 1:05:28
  He's like, hey, rotor, you know, how are we looking?
• 1:05:31
  Is the radar good?
• 1:05:31
  Is our navigation tight?
• 1:05:34
  All that stuff.
• 1:05:35
  So when we let down and do that terrain following radar thing I told you about,
• 1:05:39
  we let down, we're doing that 1,000 foot low level.
• 1:05:41
  you know, we can't see anything. Are we, are we good? Cause otherwise we're going to get in trouble,
• 1:05:45
  right? Cause if we're flying over a city or something, which one of my buddies did in Turkey
• 1:05:48
  and blew out 10,000 windows and they had him on a airplane, you know, an hour later to go back to
• 1:05:53
  England. But, um, so we let down or we don't let down, we're up there, we're flying. And then all
• 1:05:57
  of a sudden I hear him saying, you know, Ramstein control, I need lower, you know, this is VAR 29,
• 1:06:01
  whatever it was. He's like, and Ramstein's like, no, I can't give you lower. There's a stack of
• 1:06:06
  111s below you. And I'm going, you know, we know that. Um, and he's like, no, no, I really need
• 1:06:10
  lower and I look over and it was back when everything wasn't digital. It was just tapes.
• 1:06:14
  And the tape is showing 29, 28, 27, you know, and I'm looking outside and you don't feel it.
• 1:06:20
  You're just, you're just dropping. So we were, we dropped from 29,000 feet all the way down to 10,000
• 1:06:25
  feet through a stack of F-111s at night that are orbiting below us, you know, and, and we didn't
• 1:06:31
  hit anybody fortunately. And then they said, Oh, you're next into the low level. We're like,
• 1:06:36
  because we're at the bottom of the stack now. And we went into the low level, we did our thing
• 1:06:40
  and he was an instructor pilot at the time.
• 1:06:42
  It was a brand new guy.
• 1:06:43
  It was like one of my first night missions over there.
• 1:06:45
  No one ever brought it up.
• 1:06:46
  It was back in those days, right?
• 1:06:48
  Where, you know, the big 10 foot tall Soviets
• 1:06:51
  and, you know, we were gonna have the big nuclear exchange
• 1:06:53
  and we're all gonna die.
• 1:06:55
  And so something like that, it wasn't a big deal
• 1:06:57
  because nothing bad happened.
• 1:06:59
  You know, no one ever brought it up again
• 1:07:00
  other than rotor, you know, 30 years later on a podcast.
• 1:07:04
  So now, you know, my ops group commander back there
• 1:07:07
  is gonna go, wait a minute, what?
• 1:07:08
  if he's still around.
• 1:07:11
  But yeah, so that was kind of obviously kind of exciting.
• 1:07:13
  But at the same time, not really, because it was dark.
• 1:07:16
  And so it was kind of like, you know, you're in a simulator
• 1:07:19
  and you just kind of went, that really happened?
• 1:07:21
  I don't know.
• 1:07:22
  And maybe Rotor's dreaming about it.
• 1:07:23
  Maybe it's in one of his books.
• 1:07:25
  You guys don't even know, do you?
• 1:07:26
  Yeah.
• 1:07:27
  So no, that really happened.
• 1:07:29
  And other than that, it's like the other thousands of flights
• 1:07:33
  all kind of mixed together.
• 1:07:35
  I do, the other thing, then jumping to the Strike Eagle,
• 1:07:38
  Big advantage there.
• 1:07:39
  Obviously, you fight your way in with missiles.
• 1:07:42
  You know, you do your low level, you drop your bombs, and then you fight your way out
• 1:07:45
  with missiles.
• 1:07:46
  Vardvar CAD, you know, like some sidewinders, you know, the infrared kind of, you know,
• 1:07:50
  shoot them at someone to scare them.
• 1:07:52
  Obviously, the strike Eagle like the Tomcat or anything else.
• 1:07:55
  You got the 20 millimeter gun.
• 1:07:57
  You got the, you know, three different levels of air to air missiles from AMRAMS or sidewriters
• 1:08:02
  to AMRAMS.
• 1:08:02
  but when you're practicing and playing out there for the way you're going to fight,
• 1:08:07
  training the way you're going to fight, now you're going to go vertical. You're going to go on
• 1:08:11
  vertical scissors and turn around each other and you're bleeding off airspeed as fast as you can
• 1:08:15
  because you want to drop down to 50 knots or below so you can drop down or you want to be
• 1:08:21
  competing with the other guy so that when you guys do drop down, you're behind. So when you're
• 1:08:26
  increasing your speed then, you're behind him because he fell first and then you can put guns
• 1:08:30
  on them. So you're, you're up there, you know, you're, you're bleeding energy. You're, you're
• 1:08:34
  looking up at the other guys that you're going to go have popcorn and drink beers with afterwards.
• 1:08:38
  And you're looking right. You're probably, you know, from your house to your neighbor's house,
• 1:08:42
  looking at each other through your canopies, like, you know, and guys will send visual signals
• 1:08:47
  sometimes, you know, to each other at that point. And then you drop down and then you're screaming
• 1:08:52
  along again through the sky, doing all kinds of crazy aerodynamic and aeronautical stuff.
• 1:08:57
  you're trying to put different weapons on each other. So, you know, they both had their great
• 1:09:02
  advantages. My heart is still with the F-111 just because it was my first love, if you will.
• 1:09:08
  And when I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid. So we don't have time probably maybe next
• 1:09:12
  time. And I'm not trying to cut us off, but we've got parachute incidences. We've got falling off
• 1:09:17
  roof incidences. We've got motorcycle things that have happened. We've got all kinds of things that
• 1:09:22
  When I was young and stupid, yeah, I was young and stupid to coin, what is it, George W. Bush, I guess he said that back in the day.
• 1:09:29
  So, yeah, you know, and I think we all were.
• 1:09:33
  Wisdom comes with time and experience.
• 1:09:37
  Yeah, I'm still here.
• 1:09:38
  I shouldn't be here.
• 1:09:40
  I really shouldn't.
• 1:09:41
  Was the harm?
• 1:09:42
  Yeah, it was in service, the harm.
• 1:09:46
  That would have been something that would have been typical loadout for an aardvark, right?
• 1:09:50
  The high altitude, what is it?
• 1:09:52
  The radiation missile, yeah.
• 1:09:54
  Yeah, anti-radiation missile.
• 1:09:56
  Or so, I think, for Strike Eagles.
• 1:09:58
  And, you know, A-10s use those a lot when they're not using their big gun.
• 1:10:02
  You know, and those were big tank weapons and, you know, those kinds of targets.
• 1:10:07
  The aardvark, just because, you know, you mentioned it earlier, very, very short.
• 1:10:11
  But in Desert Storm, because it was old and they were trying to phase it out, it really didn't get that much attention.
• 1:10:17
  but it took out, I think like 1900 tanks. I mean, when they were prepping the battlefield before the
• 1:10:23
  army went in there. Um, and so, you know, dudes were just sitting on the ground and all, cause
• 1:10:28
  they had tanks, you know, in berms every, however, you know, many yards away from each other, just,
• 1:10:33
  you know, setting up this big kind of marginal line for anybody that would invade Iraq. And, uh,
• 1:10:39
  all of a sudden plank, you know, a tank would blow up. And so you'd see guys like in, you know,
• 1:10:43
  all around that tank and their tanks, all of a sudden, all these dudes are jumping out of tanks
• 1:10:47
  and you see their little bodies running across the desert, right?
• 1:10:50
  And then another tank would go plink and another tank
• 1:10:52
  because that we had the convenient scent of being high altitude
• 1:10:55
  and dropping, you know, the laser guided bombs from, you know, 20,000 feet.
• 1:11:01
  No one knew they were coming and all of a sudden tanks would blow up.
• 1:11:03
  So I don't want to trivialize the loss of life kind of thing.
• 1:11:07
  But, you know, our guys and their guys, for whatever reason,
• 1:11:11
  sometimes under tyrants you going to go do this you know for the most part our guys we all have an all service or all volunteer you know military We sign up to go do these jobs and hopefully deterrence works and we never
• 1:11:23
  have to do it. But if we have to do it, we're ready to do it. You know, and for whatever, you know,
• 1:11:29
  however you feel about what's going on in Iran right now, all of the people in the Navy, the guys
• 1:11:34
  that are flying over there, all of those folks, you know, they're risking something and they all
• 1:11:38
  have families and they're doing it for us. So, you know, politicians make decisions. You can agree
• 1:11:43
  with them and disagree with them, but there should never be any doubt about how we feel about,
• 1:11:47
  you know, our warriors that are out there protecting us. So, yeah.
• 1:11:53
  So just some of the things that, you know, are exciting and fun.
• 1:11:57
  Yeah.
• 1:11:57
  There's many more.
• 1:11:59
  It's interesting. My favorite platforms have always been the ones with the electronics
• 1:12:04
  that gave them the capability of flying in oe yeah right that nap of the earth that that like
• 1:12:11
  terrain hugging and it's just i actually got to see a demo of a lancer come in for a bomb run
• 1:12:20
  and the funny thing is is you don't hear anything you you hear nothing and then something blows up
• 1:12:28
  and then you hear as the thing's like gone.
• 1:12:32
  Yeah.
• 1:12:33
  The sound of freedom is always after.
• 1:12:35
  Yeah.
• 1:12:36
  Yeah.
• 1:12:37
  I always thought that was pretty magnificent.
• 1:12:39
  I'm pretty much anti-war myself.
• 1:12:42
  I think it's,
• 1:12:43
  it's a,
• 1:12:44
  I think after this many thousand years on the,
• 1:12:47
  on the planet,
• 1:12:48
  we should have been able to figure out how to deal with each other without
• 1:12:52
  killing each other.
• 1:12:53
  But I totally agree.
• 1:12:55
  Yeah.
• 1:12:56
  I mean,
• 1:12:56
  I tend to think of war as the second worst thing. So, you know,
• 1:13:02
  the worst thing being, okay, you know, if we don't defend ourselves,
• 1:13:07
  what are they going to do to us? And that's, you know,
• 1:13:10
  when I think about what happens to the family, the kids, you know, whatever.
• 1:13:13
  And yeah, you know,
• 1:13:14
  there's a million ways to think about this and talk about it and I'm not
• 1:13:17
  disagreeing with you at all. People have strong feelings about this and yeah,
• 1:13:22
  I totally get it. It's the same as police, you know, because,
• 1:13:25
  because everything can be used for a good reason and a bad reason, right?
• 1:13:29
  Everything, not just military, not just, you know, police, but, but everything we do, right?
• 1:13:34
  We, every, every ability that we have, we can use for good or bad.
• 1:13:37
  And there's going to be a mix of all of that all the time because we are humans and we're
• 1:13:42
  screwed up.
• 1:13:43
  I mean, you, you go back to black powder and it was, you know, created ostensibly to create
• 1:13:48
  very pretty visual displays with fireworks.
• 1:13:52
  And we thought, well, you know, we can fire things at other people and kill them with this. And then dynamite, we could move mountains, we could create tunnels and railways, and we could also put them inside of hardened steel and drop them on people and kill people.
• 1:14:07
  And we created this new energy, you know, thing that's, you know, super clean, super dense energy, lasts forever, runs forever.
• 1:14:17
  But we could also put this inside of a bomb and kill lots of people.
• 1:14:21
  And it's like, okay.
• 1:14:23
  Yeah.
• 1:14:23
  I mean, it's human nature, right?
• 1:14:25
  It is.
• 1:14:25
  That's a nice bike you got there.
• 1:14:27
  And I don't have one of those and I'd like to have it.
• 1:14:29
  So you can give it to me or I'm going to take it.
• 1:14:32
  Good luck.
• 1:14:33
  That's all I'm going to say is good luck.
• 1:14:35
  And so all of a sudden I come over there, you're going to defend that mic against me, and now we have a war. See how that works?
• 1:14:42
  Well, I'm a pacifist in general, but when it comes to defense, I'm fully on board with, you know, defending oneself and one's property and family.
• 1:14:54
  Now, I will tell you, I know I said once before, hopefully deterrence works. I will tell you of all of the people in the military that I've ever met, and I know there's people out there that are screwed up and just, oh, I can't wait to go get Jerry, you know, whatever. But I have not met anybody like that.
• 1:15:10
  Um, I think that's part of that volunteer force thing.
• 1:15:14
  Most people, when they're young and stupid, maybe I can't wait to go fly that jet and
• 1:15:19
  drop those bombs, whatever.
• 1:15:21
  Although I never saw that.
• 1:15:22
  Most people don't want to do that, especially once they get a wife, kids, their parents
• 1:15:28
  are around unless they're messed up and they don't have an inner voice, which I heard like
• 1:15:32
  40% of us don't have inner voices, which is like, are you kidding me?
• 1:15:37
  I couldn't survive without an inner voice.
• 1:15:38
  but unless you don't have an inner voice
• 1:15:40
  you don't want to go do that
• 1:15:42
  I mean everybody loses so
• 1:15:44
  yeah hopefully deterrence wins
• 1:15:46
  99% of the time 100%
• 1:15:49
  hopefully but yeah
• 1:15:50
  we can cross our fingers I agree with you
• 1:15:52
  and maybe someday we'll figure
• 1:15:55
  it out how we can like deal with
• 1:15:56
  each other without dropping bombs
• 1:15:58
  and stuff dumb wars
• 1:16:00
  until then go back to those hey that's
• 1:16:02
  a good idea
• 1:16:03
  you could break your thumb that way though
• 1:16:05
  you could you could
• 1:16:08
  I suppose those slap things right we're always in there and slap each other open
• 1:16:15
  do the slap things are violent you ever seen them guys holy crap man I thought that one dude's gonna
• 1:16:22
  break the other dude's face open arguably less violent than a bomb but okay hey here's something
• 1:16:29
  for you really quick and I researched this it turns out and I didn't know I'm not trying to
• 1:16:34
  I categorized myself as one of these great authors that's built this massive universe, even though I'm an author that's built this massive universe.
• 1:16:43
  But I look back because I had kind of some of these issues.
• 1:16:46
  And so I look back and all of the C.S. Lewis is the Tolkiens, the Asimovs.
• 1:16:51
  All of these people had this stuff all going all the way back to like not Shakespeare.
• 1:16:56
  But who's the other guy? Who's a guy like in England that wrote a bunch of really, you know, the classic books?
• 1:17:01
  I can't remember his name
• 1:17:04
  but anyways
• 1:17:05
  so
• 1:17:06
  you don't have to agree
• 1:17:07
  with me on this part
• 1:17:08
  I agree with me on this part
• 1:17:10
  so
• 1:17:10
  and you had me on
• 1:17:11
  so I have to
• 1:17:12
  I have to throw it out there
• 1:17:13
  so when I
• 1:17:14
  since I've not been waking up
• 1:17:15
  like after
• 1:17:16
  two o'clock every day
• 1:17:17
  I got in this habit
• 1:17:19
  because I'm a big
• 1:17:19
  John 316
• 1:17:20
  God sent Jesus
• 1:17:22
  he saved us
• 1:17:22
  you know that kind of deal
• 1:17:24
  so
• 1:17:24
  I would take a picture
• 1:17:26
  of my clock radio
• 1:17:27
  at 316
• 1:17:27
  put John in front of it
• 1:17:28
  just post it on my Facebook
• 1:17:29
  you know that's it
• 1:17:31
  just because I was always waking up at 316. So I said, okay. Then I started writing this series.
• 1:17:37
  And so I, you know, the first, I had to self-publish the early books because,
• 1:17:42
  you know, I just had to. So I had this gold and silver buried out, you know, on my land out here
• 1:17:46
  because, you know, I'm not really a prepper, but I was like, yeah, I'm going to go do this because
• 1:17:49
  I don't want someone to steal it. So it was kind of fun, fun thing to do, kind of a big kid thing.
• 1:17:54
  So I had this piece of gold and I took it out and I said, hey, you know, what are you guys going to,
• 1:18:00
  I'm on the phone. What are you guys going to give me for this today? And they're like,
• 1:18:02
  changes constantly today. It's $2,316. And I was like, okay, 316. That's kind of interesting.
• 1:18:09
  First review from this lady, number 316. The book comes out after going through all the editing and
• 1:18:15
  stuff like that. The publisher's doing all this stuff, 316 pages. I'm like, okay, that's all crazy.
• 1:18:20
  You know, the TOEFIT thing, this stuff starts happening. And then the early books, because,
• 1:18:24
  you know, again, we were building a church out east of Colorado Springs. And I was like, I'm
• 1:18:29
  I put on there, I'm donating everything I make from these to this church.
• 1:18:33
  So it's delayed from COVID and all this stuff, tons of delays with the city and all this stuff.
• 1:18:38
  And it comes out and we open up the church, totally unplanned.
• 1:18:43
  First service is on March 16th, 316.
• 1:18:47
  A whole bunch, fast forward, all the stuff's in the books.
• 1:18:51
  Again, I talk about this stuff because it's like, what the heck?
• 1:18:54
  And then I write this last volume that I just sent off and I have a second granddaughter coming.
• 1:18:59
  but they don't want to say what her name is until it's done.
• 1:19:02
  So a big part of this last piece, the spiritual aspect part of it,
• 1:19:08
  is gifts of the spirit kind of thing, gifts of God.
• 1:19:11
  And so I have this whole thing written.
• 1:19:13
  It's ready to hit send, just waiting for the name,
• 1:19:15
  because I got put M, Emma, in the first book series,
• 1:19:20
  the first or the third volume, the first trilogy.
• 1:19:22
  And I have to put my second granddaughter in this.
• 1:19:25
  So I'm like, I got to have her in there.
• 1:19:26
  So they tell me, okay, first of all, when was she born?
• 1:19:29
  totally unplanned take a guess march 16 a.m march 16th they didn't have they they i don't know for
• 1:19:39
  whatever reason they're really busy brand new couple little kids haven't read any of the books
• 1:19:43
  don't know anything about this stuff um march 16th so they didn't plan it like nine months okay we're
• 1:19:48
  gonna plan you know whatever that's just when she gave birth and then they tell me her name and it's
• 1:19:52
  and her middle name is thea and i'm like who names their kids thea what does that mean i look it up
• 1:19:57
  and it means gift of God. And I'm like, okay. So again, I've told you about maybe six of the
• 1:20:05
  probably 30 things like this. These are the things that just motivate me to do this. It's another
• 1:20:10
  part of the joy of doing this. And I believe, you know, I'm like, oh yeah, you know, these,
• 1:20:16
  these books are like the Bible and God's inspiring him to write. No, you know, I'm not,
• 1:20:20
  I'm not going there, but I do believe in God. And I do believe maybe because I'm saying something
• 1:20:25
  good in these books. He is inspiring me in a way to do this stuff. Different people might look at
• 1:20:31
  it. Oh, it's numerology. Oh, it's, you know, you're just, you're being aware, you're being
• 1:20:36
  open to the different things that are happening. Oh, it's some kind of mysticism. It's some,
• 1:20:40
  you know, whatever, whatever you want to believe, that's fine. But I just want to bring this stuff
• 1:20:44
  up because it really cool It cool stuff that happening and it in the back of the books too So there more than just the fiction There this fiction although it not really fiction it actually happening So and it motivating me to do some
• 1:21:00
  of the things that are in the books and stuff. So I don't know where it's coming from. Just wanted
• 1:21:04
  to throw it at you guys because it's, it's just a really cool thing that's happening in my life.
• 1:21:08
  Just like you guys have cool things that, you know, feel free to talk about them. It's your show.
• 1:21:12
  So if you want to throw stuff in there, um, but yeah, so I just want to bring that up.
• 1:21:17
  I do think that's cool.
• 1:21:19
  Yeah, I do as well.
• 1:21:21
  I think it's actually a really great place to lead in on wrapping things up personally.
• 1:21:26
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:21:27
  And I hope that didn't turn anybody else.
• 1:21:30
  Not at all.
• 1:21:31
  Not even in the slightest bit.
• 1:21:34
  Not one tiny bit.
• 1:21:35
  So I just think that was a really, honestly, very impactful and great place to kind of close things going forward. I think we'd really enjoy speaking with you some more. I think we could fill the air for another four to six hours.
• 1:21:57
  But one thing we like to ask all of our guests is throughout our lives, there is a figure that has made a profound impact on our lives.
• 1:22:07
  This could be, you know, mom.
• 1:22:09
  It could be wife, sixth grade science teacher, literary figure.
• 1:22:13
  It could be historical figure.
• 1:22:15
  We like to give our guests an opportunity to shout out that person that had a major impact for them.
• 1:22:22
  Wow, that's a tough one.
• 1:22:23
  And you kind of caught me off guard.
• 1:22:25
  Um, so the things that go through my mind, you know, my, my kindergarten teacher that told my mom and dad that I would never accomplish anything or amount to anything. That was kind of a cool thing for a teacher to tell parents.
• 1:22:39
  um that had an impact on my life I suppose there's the uh Jim Gleason and Bobby Bolin
• 1:22:48
  Bolin that you know crashed that red flag back in you know the late 80s you know just doing an
• 1:22:53
  exercise there out in the Nevada desert had an impact because hey this stuff is serious you know
• 1:22:59
  all that uh having fun and flying fast with your hair on fire it's not just a joke it's a it's a
• 1:23:06
  serious thing and bad things can happen. When they ejected from the 111, their canopy hit just the
• 1:23:11
  very top couple feet of a 300-foot knoll out in the desert before the parachute could deploy.
• 1:23:18
  And so the canopy was destroyed along with them. So that had an impact. Obviously, your parents
• 1:23:23
  have impact on all of us as we're going through life in one way or another. My mom died a couple
• 1:23:30
  years ago. And right after that, I started this big series. So maybe she had a big part and just
• 1:23:35
  you know, me doing something that, like I told you guys before, I can't imagine having not done.
• 1:23:41
  So a lot of times moms will encourage their kids to do things that they maybe don't want to do or
• 1:23:47
  can't see the wisdom in, but maybe she encouraged me to do that after she was gone. I don't know how
• 1:23:52
  that works, but I guess I would be off base if I didn't say that I wanted to throw a shout out to
• 1:23:58
  my wife who, you know, has followed me through this whole journey all the way back through most
• 1:24:04
  of the flying, you know, raising the kids when I was off on deployments, not knowing, you know,
• 1:24:08
  what was going on with me. I'm over, you know, flying over Iraq and such and things can happen.
• 1:24:14
  She's taking care of the kids. She's raising them, you know, staying by my side the whole time. And
• 1:24:18
  we've been married now 35 years this July through, you know, the pluses and the minuses, the goods and
• 1:24:24
  the bads, the kids, the parents, the, you know, all of the relatives that are passing away, the
• 1:24:29
  friends that pass away, going through all the different moves while we were in the Air Force
• 1:24:33
  and now out of the Air Force. And then when we moved out here, out in the mountains, you know,
• 1:24:38
  she kind of told me, well, you know, I can't just do you, which, you know, I always joke because
• 1:24:45
  guys and gals think about that sentence in different ways sometimes. And she was just saying,
• 1:24:50
  you know, I'm going to be there just with you at the house the whole time. I mean, what about,
• 1:24:53
  you know, and it turned out we have tons of friends here just in the mountains with us and
• 1:24:58
  the ladies do stuff all the time. So I think that worked out great, but through thick and thin,
• 1:25:03
  you know, our, our wives, you know, if we're fortunate enough to have good ones,
• 1:25:07
  stick with us. And even though we don't necessarily always deserve it. So
• 1:25:13
  I shout out to her, to Teresa. I love you. And thanks for sticking with me. And
• 1:25:18
  would you just read some of these books already?
• 1:25:20
  don't feel so bad i can't get my wife to watch a podcast that we create and and i know i ramble
• 1:25:30
  but this is really super short she started reading the faithful and she's and she's reading
• 1:25:34
  and because she was a teacher and she's going yeah there's a missing period there circle with
• 1:25:39
  a with a you know you know pencil and then the sun was rising in the west and she's like
• 1:25:45
  okay, you know, that we're done. Not knowing, of course, that was Trinian. And I didn't want to
• 1:25:50
  tell her this isn't earth. It's it, you know, half of our planets in our galaxy, I think,
• 1:25:55
  spin the opposite direction. So, you know, anyways, but yeah, so that, that's the only
• 1:25:59
  thing I've got against my wife. And I just shared it with millions of people through your podcast,
• 1:26:04
  just that she won't read those books. But, but other than that, she can teach.
• 1:26:07
  hand her a red pen
• 1:26:10
  and a little
• 1:26:12
  little uh you know college rule
• 1:26:14
  notebook please and just say please
• 1:26:16
  please write everything
• 1:26:18
  down there you go yeah that's a good call
• 1:26:20
  thanks so read it
• 1:26:22
  mark it up for you there you go
• 1:26:24
  yeah all right well that
• 1:26:26
  is awesome man and I think that's
• 1:26:28
  a great shout out to be honest with you
• 1:26:30
  and uh
• 1:26:33
  where
• 1:26:34
  can people find your books where
• 1:26:36
  where can they find what you're working on? Where can they find you?
• 1:26:40
  Yeah. So I think in this half of the world and part of the other half,
• 1:26:44
  if you have a Google or a search engine, you can just put in Terrence Rotering,
• 1:26:48
  T-E-R-R-E-N-C-E, and then Rotering, R-O-T-E-R-I-N-G.
• 1:26:54
  And any of the Googles or any of those, I'll just throw you into here are a bunch of the books.
• 1:26:59
  Here's where you can get them. Amazon, you know, all of the places really.
• 1:27:02
  and also chroniclesoftrinian.com. It's all one word, chronicles, O-F-T-R-I-N-I-A-N,
• 1:27:11
  which is that first wheel, chroniclesoftrinian.com. And I've got all of the links to the podcasts on
• 1:27:16
  there. I've got, you know, where you can get the books. I've got reviews on there,
• 1:27:20
  just all kinds of stuff, links to everything. And probably 200 of the different blogs that I did
• 1:27:28
  over time, a lot of which are in the books, also the interesting ones. So yeah, so that's how you
• 1:27:33
  can find me. It's pretty easy, really, if you're interested. And one thing I want to just throw out
• 1:27:37
  is you can get everything cheap on Kindle. You can probably get the entire series for
• 1:27:41
  less than 30 bucks. Some of the books are more expensive as they come out. The later books are
• 1:27:46
  more expensive. The earlier ones are cheaper. And Amazon, much to the angst of my publisher,
• 1:27:52
  does deals where they'll just drop books way down, like 90% off for this week, that kind of deal. So
• 1:27:59
  you can get them there, but you can get the Kindle stuff really cheap. They're not on Audible yet,
• 1:28:03
  but you can also get, there's different apps like, I forget what it's called, Speechify,
• 1:28:09
  where you can have a thousand different readers you can pick between constantly change
• 1:28:12
  through anything that you have that's in any written form or digital form. You can just link
• 1:28:17
  it through their app and then you can have Barack Obama or Gwyneth Paltrow or a British
• 1:28:22
  Everything sounds the best in English, the Brits reading something.
• 1:28:27
  So you can have that happen and get tired of it.
• 1:28:29
  You can switch for the next chapter.
• 1:28:31
  So don't let the Kindle turn you off.
• 1:28:33
  The Kindle readers, she's getting better.
• 1:28:36
  I think six different voices you can choose from.
• 1:28:38
  But these different apps and stuff will let you read things in different ways that make it exciting for you again, however you prefer.
• 1:28:45
  So thank you for letting me throw that in there very quickly.
• 1:28:49
  Yeah, no, that's wonderful.
• 1:28:50
  And you heard him.
• 1:28:51
  If you've been listening to this podcast, dragons and dragon riders included.
• 1:28:58
  So you know who I'm talking to.
• 1:29:02
  The Rambler.
• 1:29:03
  We've got a substantial part of our base audience from the very beginning.
• 1:29:09
  And a lot of it revolved around a game with dragons and dragon riders.
• 1:29:14
  So quite a few fantasy and sci-fi readers in our audience.
• 1:29:20
  in our audience.
• 1:29:21
  And again,
• 1:29:21
  I'm going to say it one more time,
• 1:29:23
  dragons and writers,
• 1:29:25
  chroniclesoftrinian.com.
• 1:29:30
  All right.
• 1:29:31
  Well, thank you everybody
• 1:29:32
  for joining us for another episode
• 1:29:34
  of the Space Tomatoes.
• 1:29:35
  And thank you so much
• 1:29:36
  for giving us some of your time, Terrence.
• 1:29:38
  We really appreciate it.
• 1:29:39
  Or Terry or Roeder.
• 1:29:42
  And wonderful conversation.
• 1:29:45
  You know where to find us.
• 1:29:47
  We're everywhere.
• 1:29:47
  we are now hosted off of fountain.fm
• 1:29:51
  it's a value for value podcast 2.0 application
• 1:29:54
  go check us out and remember
• 1:29:57
  wherever you are whenever you're watching this
• 1:30:02
  have an amazing day
• 1:30:04
  thanks guys nice to meet you rotor see you everybody
• 1:30:07
  okay bud
• 1:30:17
  We'll see you next time.