Episode 008 – MARK HYATT

[00:00:00] Isaac: Welcome back to the open ed podcast, everybody. I am the sometimes host Isaac Morehouse. And today I’m joined by Mark Hyatt, who is the founder of Falcon arrow lab. And this is, I’m so excited about this conversation because I, I met Matt. Uh, sorry, Mark through Matt Bowman not that long ago and hearing Mark talk about the stuff that he’s doing with Falcon AeroLabs, which is one of one of our partners here at Open Ed.

It got me so excited. We talk a lot on this podcast about different ways to think about education and different unique approaches to learning. Every kid needs different things and whether it be approaching a similar subject in a new way or approaching a subject you never thought of. This conversation is going to be really cool because Falcon AeroLabs, let’s just get to the punchline.

You’re getting middle school and high school kids up in airplanes sometimes. Uh, and you, you said before we went on, yeah, we had this great camp and we had kids going up. They all had a great time. You know, only a couple of them needed to use the barf bags, but it was great. Maybe we start there with What in the world, uh, would make you decide that it was a good idea to get middle school and high school kids up in the air, learning about aeronautics.

Uh, I know you guys do a lot more than just aviation, but what, what’s prompted you to start this company in the first place?

[00:01:24] Mark Hyatt: Well, you know, and thank you, Isaac, for having me on board here. And, uh, you know, if you look at our country, uh, we, we excel and lead the world in certain areas. And one is aerospace and aviation. And I know we’ve got competitors overseas in France and Brazil and Canada, but we’re still number one. And that’s one of our core competencies is that I know Silicon Valley with the cyber and this it and all that.

But I live in Colorado and Colorado is the number one state per capita for aerospace and aviation jobs. And I’d say we’ve been number one for, Like two or 18 in the last 20 years and California of course has more Jobs, but they have 40 million people and we only have five point something but per capita But we import most of our labor for this these great jobs.

And these are jobs starting at six figures and going up and You know, I just think that we should you know, hire Colorado kids and prepare them But then as a national citizen and an American I would like to do this in other states, and the whole country, if there’s interest. And with the move in our country, and I’m going to give your generation credit, Because I’m, I’m 72 years old, but I’ve still got a lot of air speed as we say in the aviation industry.

Uh, but your generation is very discerning when it comes to education. Uh, I deal with mostly, uh, parents your age. And they want whatever they want, the way they want it, and right now. And guess what? I, I’ve gotten really good at saying yes ma’am. And yes, sort of all those people and, okay, you want it for your child this way?

How can we do that? And that’s not the norm in K 12 education across our country. It hasn’t been that way for 75 years. So, thank you to your generation for demanding better. Now, you’re reading, you’re, we meet a lot of resistance from the establishment and the system. But OpenEd, Falcon AeroLab, that’s what motivated me.

I’m an innovator. And a change agent, and I’m just glad to be in touch with you.

[00:03:38] Isaac: I love it. Well, I want to get a, just a little bit of your personal story and then dive in a little bit more to kind of what, what, why you think, even if, uh, even if a kid is not going to end up going into the aviation industry. What are some of the advantages of kind of approaching stem and learning some of these concepts through this lens, but, but let’s get to your story first, just a little bit of your background.

I know you served in the air force. I know you worked for a couple of different white house administrations. You’ve been in this school choice movement for years. You’ve been a part of various charter schools. What, give me like a nutshell version of your own story that everything kind of leading up to the founding of Falcon Aero labs.

[00:04:24] Mark Hyatt: Yeah, I, uh, I, I got an orientation ride when I was 12 years old, which was, uh, 19, uh, 64 I think it was. Yeah. I’m 72 now, and my dad paid five bucks and I went up flying for about 15, 20 minutes and I was hooked. I, I quit the Boy Scouts and I went over and joined the Civil Air Patrol. Uh, I came from kind of a lower middle class.

Uh, family outside of Philadelphia, and I just knew that there wasn’t money for this, so I just needed to join organizations that could help me pursue this passion. And so, I got interested in, as a teenager, and be, uh, you could call me kind of a nerd or a geek, but when all my friends wanted to go out and do bad things, and get in trouble, I said, well, the FAA doesn’t really want me to smoke that stuff, or do this stuff, A lot of things when you, when you have a why in your life as a teenager, you don’t get in as much trouble.

And I didn’t get in trouble. I mean, I, you know, I probably should have studied more, but I studied when I finally got to the Air Force Academy and that went that actually better than high school.

[00:05:33] Isaac: that is, that is such, I will pause for one second. That is such a great point, Mark, that, you know, there’s, there’s often a question like, how much should you let kids pursue things that are really interesting to them versus things that you think they really need to know to get into college or to get a career?

And I’m not going to try to answer that, where that, what that answer is for every parent. But one thing that never gets mentioned about pursuing things you’re passionate about is what you just said. If. If a kid is doing something that they resonate with, that gives them meaning, the odds that they’re going to get into other kinds of trouble and make other kinds of bad decisions go way down because they have something to lose.

That’s a great point.

[00:06:14] Mark Hyatt: Absolutely. I was like, that’s that’s exactly it. Uh, so to me, another, you’re gonna hear a lot of little phrases that I love to be something different. You have to see something different. I had no aviation background. My dad was in the army and in the forties and all that. And, uh, you know, so I got that one flight.

I’d never even thought about airplanes. And I when I take kids up flying in my airplane and I’ve bought Many airplanes now and I have other pilots that will fly them because I just fly my one now, mostly, but just watch the kids get excited when they, when they take off and when they’re flying that airplane.

I can tell, sitting in the left seat of that airplane, when I’ve got them hooked. And it’s the coolest feeling for, for me. I, I mean, kids are 20 percent of our population, but they’re 100 percent of the future. And I feel that my goal and job in life, as an older guy, is to pass the baton in this relay race called life to the next generation.

So every kid, I say, you could be my replacement. I don’t care if you’re black, white, girl, boy, I don’t care what you are. The airplane doesn’t care either, by the way. So. Let’s get excited about this and be my replacement. But all of this is built on a solid foundation of character. I like to say the three C’s are what AeroLab is all about.

College, career, and community ready. We want citizens that are going to be the right kind of neighbors that you and I want.

[00:07:39] Isaac: Hmm. That’s uh, I think this obviously this applies to everything you do. Character is always paramount, but there are certain there are certain situations and circumstances that kind of, um, Hmm. I guess elevate or make more visible. The problems with lack of character or the benefits of strong character.

And one of those is flying. You are in a very potentially tense situation. If you are flying with other people, you have other people’s lives in your hands. You have, uh, not only like, you know, decision making problem solving in real time, but also managing potentially the emotions of other people. There’s a lot of trust involved.

This is one of those situations where the kind of character you have, Can be seen and it makes such a huge potentially life and death difference that I think it’s like you could, you could maybe afford to say, you know, oh, we’re going to learn finger painting and we’re not going to worry about character as a foundation for good finger painting.

You kind of can’t afford to do that. If you’re putting somebody up in the cockpit of a plane, is that is that a fair assessment?

[00:08:43] Mark Hyatt: Yes, oh my gosh, Isaac, you’re right on it. Uh, trust is the miracle ingredient. And you just said it when you were talking. Trust is the miracle ingredient because I have to trust the mechanic. Totally. I have to trust the air traffic controller. I have to trust the instructor. Uh, in other words, if, if we don’t operate with trust, In an environment of trust, it doesn’t work.

I mean, it’s like one of our sons runs multiple steel mills in Indiana. Well, my gosh, they’re moving 2, degree slag around the mills, and it can burn people and vaporize people in a second. In a lot of these industries and businesses, trust is key. But everybody has to do their job. And when I look at high performance teams, it requires every single team member.

To do their very best all the time. And that’s, that’s what I’m trying to do is develop team, uh, kids that are going to be team members of high performance teams when they get to Lockheed or Boeing and, you know, so anyway, we could really go down some paths here.

[00:09:49] Isaac: Well, no. So, uh, you know, on your story, you know, you were hooked from that moment from that, that flight. And then, uh, I’m assuming because you went into the air force that, you know, you were like, get me where I can fly.

[00:10:02] Mark Hyatt: Yeah.

[00:10:03] Isaac: When did you start to, or maybe this is always the case. When did you start to say, I want to, I want to help other people have that same moment that I had.

When did that spark the kind of the education passion, which clearly I’ve seen throughout your, you know, when I look at your, your career bio, um, has it always been there or was there a moment when you said, now I got to help others do the same?

[00:10:22] Mark Hyatt: You know, and I didn’t really answer your question about talking about me. Okay, I graduated from the Air Force Academy and became a fighter pilot in the Air Force and lived overseas nine years. Uh, you know, you’re preparing for war and then there are little wars here and there that you have to go do, but you do your best.

But when you’re 40, You’re an old man or an old lady in that world because then they promote you to colonel or general and then you go out and you’ll be in charge of others. And I actually found, as much as I loved high performance airplanes, top gun style, that was what I did. Flying upside down and pulling G’s and going supersonic.

I actually enjoyed the leadership management part too. So I, uh, I then. Uh, as a colonel went out to the Air Force Academy was I ran their character and leadership development center, which is all the diversity, gender, racial, religious tolerance, lying, cheating and stealing all the stuff that none of the other colonels wanted to deal with because they were the head of the English department, the math department, the history department they gave to me.

But I actually found I loved dealing with that stuff, even though it was very. You know, I had to go on the news a lot and explain why this cream of America’s crop would do these incredibly dumb things to each other, to themselves, um, public, you know, whatever. And, They’re good kids, but in the end they’re 18 to 22 year olds and they’re experimenting in life and trying new things and you know, even though they have high IQs doesn’t mean they’re gonna be Ready to go out full up.

So bottom line is when I retired at age 50 I became a school superintendent and I did that because I love young people, you know, we had children We have grandchildren now and I just found that it’s not money that motivates me. I have to have a noble mission and And, uh And so, it took me until I was 40 or 50 to figure that out, that it wasn’t money that was the key thing.

And, uh, it was making a difference in young people. And so, that’s where I got, when I became a school superintendent, from 50 to 60 years old, that’s where I really learned a lot about K 12 education and got excited about, uh, especially your generation, um, demanding different things. They wanted Character education, uh, character across the curriculum.

They wanted, you know, integrity woven into everything that we were doing at school. I mean, your generation’s trying to make this country better. Uh, uh, and I’m really proud of your generation for that. And I’m trying to lead the way and be a good example and role model and encourager to all the young people.

And I would hire people that have that same passion. And then when I was 60, I retired again from the school system. And that’s when I. I was, ran a non profit, uh, it was the National Clearinghouse of Character Education. And then I was asked by President Obama to, uh, go in and help him after the, uh, Newtown Sandy Hook shootings.

And I did that, um, and then I was asked by, uh, the Trump administration to be a speechwriter for Ivanko when she would come out here to Colorado, and I helped him do that. So I, I’m, anybody that’s for kids, I’m gonna help. I don’t care about R’s and D’s. How am I doing so far?

[00:13:38] Isaac: Oh, love it. You know what, what I’m so, uh, it’s so good to hear you say. And, uh, I like that you’re referring to me as a young person. Cause I was joking before this I’m 40. My, my kids don’t think that they don’t think that it can get any older than me, but, uh, but your optimism and your appreciation for things in, let’s say my generation or even people younger than me that, cause, cause I think you’re onto something.

There is a combination of On the negative side, I would call it maybe entitlement. Expectation that I deserve things to be the way I want them to be. On the positive side, it’s a refusal to settle. For things that aren’t as good as they could be. And uh, hey, I want, I want the best education for my kids. I want to customize everything.

I don’t want to just accept things pre packaged. And that’s such a good, that’s a, the fact that you can see the virtue in that and not just turn into a, you know, shaking your stick at the kids these days. Uh, I gotta, I gotta commend you for that. Um, on the, so, so let’s, let’s dive in a little bit to kind of the specifics of what goes on and.

the learning opportunities for kids when they approach, uh, I guess, aerospace in general. And I know there’s various different sort of sub disciplines within there. But one of the first things that comes to my mind is as a parent, it feels very daunting or inaccessible. If you say, Hey, it’s really great for kids to learn about aviation and aerospace.

I’m like, yeah, that sounds cool. But where do I start? I don’t have an airplane. I don’t know where the nearest airstrip is. Like, How do I even introduce my kids to this to find out if they’re interested in it? It feels overwhelming. What would you say to a parent who’s listening and who’s like, okay, I’m curious, where do I start?

How do I, how do I introduce my kids to this concept and see if it’s something that maybe is worth pursuing?

[00:15:30] Mark Hyatt: Well, I’ll start with, um, the two coins of the realm in the K 12 world are student time and money. Those are the, and I’m just saying this because I’m older and I’ve been through it, and I, and it’s hard to get the establishment to even give you the time in the day. I mean, schools are like, Minimum security prisons now with all the security and all the things, and I know I understand all this, all that, why we do that.

Um, and then just getting the right people in front of the students is difficult. And then there’s the money part. The, uh, and I notice there’s about 10 or 11 states now that have gone to these ESAs where they actually let the parents decide. Because it’s your money. It’s, I mean, it’s your money and, uh, uh, I’m the, I’m just, you know, I, I want to serve you because you’re the customer and, but that’s not the way the school districts have generally worked in the last 75 years in our country.

They get the money and then they, you know, uh, I don’t mean to, to slam people. I met with Randy Weingartner, who’s the head of the, uh, NEA, the head of the teachers union in the country. I had the privilege of having lunch with her about 10 years ago. Eight, nine years ago she was in charge of the New York Teachers Union, a quarter of a million, uh, teachers.

And I said, Randy, when are you going to start talking about children? She said, when, when students start paying union dues, I will start talking about children. Okay, I’m just, and I, she’s a wonderful, smart person. I don’t agree with her on, on a lot of things. Uh, we’re both from the East Coast, the Northeast.

But, um, I have a problem with that. Because I’m for you first. I’m for everyone your age, plus or minus ten years, whatever. Uh, and, and I think parents are the primary educators in a child’s life. And so that’s what motivates me. to serve you until I take my last breath. And I’m going to do everything I can.

Give you one example. When I first dreamt up Falconerolab seven plus years ago, I went to my superintendent buddies around Colorado. And I said, well, what do you think about, uh, kids flying airplanes, gliders, helicopters, hot air balloons, vertical wind tunnel with STEM lessons integrated. And, uh, and they said, are you kidding me?

You’re going to put kids in airplanes, they’re going to die. And I don’t want that liability or that risk. Our risk manager would never go for that. I said, well, yeah, they, you could, they could die. Um, seven and a half years later, we haven’t got, thank God nobody’s died. But, uh, I said, number one, dying on the interstate through all the interstates in our, that’s the scariest thing.

I mean, we’ve

[00:18:12] Isaac: the school busing program because, you know,

[00:18:14] Mark Hyatt: Why? So, there are impediments, but my favorite phrase is impediment removal. In other words, if money’s your problem, I’ll find money for you. If transportation’s your problem, we’ll figure it out. There’s, you know, kid friendly Ubers, there’s carpools. And if language is your problem, I’ve got Spanish speakers on my staff.

You tell me what your problem is, the impediment to your child reaching their dreams, and I’m going to remove it. I sound like I’m running for office, but I’m not.

[00:18:45] Isaac: I mean, it’s just the, the genuineness of the passion is, is there. It comes through. I don’t think that’s like clearly it’s infectious and it attracts people to what you’re doing and makes them curious and makes them want to be a part of it. I’m wondering if you have like, you know, short of getting up in that plane for that first experience, which.

I think nothing can come close to just experiencing it yourself and having, I remember the first time I was probably. Trying to remember, maybe 10, 11, 12, somewhere in there. And I had a really good friend. We were all really into like military planes, you know, a top gun, all that kind of stuff. And for his birthday, his dad surprised him and got some local guy with a little six seater Cessna to fly us from Michigan to Ohio to, uh, there was a museum there.

It was like an air force museum in Dayton, Ohio.

[00:19:34] Mark Hyatt: We just did a

[00:19:35] Isaac: flew to Dayton in this little plane, you know, got to have the headphones. I mean, I will never forget it. It was incredible. So like. So getting everyone to that moment, as many people as you can, I feel I totally understand like the key there. Let’s say short of that, you’re not able or ready or willing to go up in a plane yet or let your kid.

Is there any kind of like, do you guys do, do you have like sort of introductory material or online courses that kind of help introduce the concepts and tease at these things, um, prior to, prior to actually getting up in a, in a plane? Um,

[00:20:08] Mark Hyatt: Yes, and one of them we actually partnered with OpenEd, and, uh, it’s, I think it’s Introduction to Aerospace, where they, they can get one flight, get two if they really like it, and they do an online course, uh, it’s called Over the Horizon, that we broadcast out and it’s virtual. And, you know, we, we, uh, We, we put that into Oregon and Utah and, uh, actually worked a little bit with TechTrap over there in Idaho too.

But, uh, bottom line is, uh, it’s a survey course, almost a Smithsonian survey course. And we bring in astronauts and the weather presenters from TV to talk about meteorology. And we bring in mechanics and we bring in people that have flown the coolest airplanes. And, uh, and then we broadcast it out and let them just tell their story and get these kids excited.

And I think storytelling is, is, is the coolest way. And then, they get to have a flight if they want. It can be a very short flight, it can be a little bit longer. And we set that up with a, with a flight school or somebody in that community. And so I see this expanding nationwide where we can do this for all 50 states.

Um, so that’s in our future. You know, I’ll run the ball down the field as much as I can in the next 10, 15 years. And then I’m going to train up all these young people your age to do it and then get out of your way.

[00:21:30] Isaac: Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, so many people talk about, um, subjects in the abstract like stem, like, okay, technology and, uh, engineering and then math and science. And these are really important. And there’s this, you know, everyone’s worried there’s a deficit and American kids don’t know as much as they should.

And all that’s fine. Not criticizing that. But when you put yourself in the shoes of a child, They don’t care about an abstraction like STEM. They don’t, they don’t care about an abstraction like math. They care about actual concrete, tangible things. And if you say, do you want to learn engineering? Like, why?

What is engineering? If you say, Hey, do you want to learn how to launch a satellite into orbit? Now we’re talking about something interesting. It captures the imagination. It’s concrete. And so just hearing your list off things I hadn’t even thought of related to aerospace, like meteorology, you know, like, what is it?

Trying to predict storms and help people evacuate for hurricanes at like, that’s really interesting to kids. Kids are fascinated by storms, anything to do with launching vehicles or anything into orbit, flying airplanes. Like there’s so much that these are, these are kind of like the big optimistic dreamer type of problems that I think America had sort of a several decades where that, that was like the big thrust.

And I feel like we’ve kind of been in a space where we’re. We’re all kind of feeling a little negative and beaten down and and thinking and turning our attention to something that captivates the imagination like that something big and heroic That’s how you get kids interested in stem, you know.

[00:23:08] Mark Hyatt: Well, that’s it. And you’ve nailed it on the right on the head there. Uh, I want our kids to touch it, taste it, feel it, and do it. Cause what I’ve seen in K 12 education is they get to learn about it because the school district lawyers are much more comfortable with them sitting in a classroom. And, uh, then they are out doing something, but the kids.

And I hate to say this, especially boys need action. We want to get out and do things. And, and we have, lots of girls do too. And I don’t, I’m sorry to do my sexist old man thing. But we, we do have 75 percent boys right now. I’m trying to get more and more girls. We have about 25%. But if you look at the pilots in America, 6.

8 percent are women. 1. 6 percent are black. Hispanics don’t even register. Almost everybody looks like us. Okay, I would love. To double those percentages before I kick the bucket. That’s one of my little agendas here because The airplane doesn’t care the spaceship doesn’t care as long as you can do the job And I know one of the impediments to what I’m just talking about is that they don’t have as many role models as as us White guys do.

And so I try to find the role models for these, uh, underrepresented groups and really get them in front of kids. And there are really good role models. And, uh, and so there’s just so much here. The sky’s, I mean, the sky’s the limit. That’s kind of a point. No, so I, I just think the reason AeroLab has grown from seven summers ago, summer 17, to now, from, we had 14 students in our first class, and we now are going to be impacting over 13 to 1, 400 students in three states.

We’ll add Arizona this fall. But I would love to, to take this nationwide and, uh, and help Thousands, tens of thousands, whatever it is. And if open ed wants to partner in that, let’s figure out how to do it. I don’t have all the answers, but I can tell you and your team have enthusiasm.

[00:25:07] Isaac: Oh Absolutely, I mean that you know, our mission is to help parents Open up their kids education to all the options on the table and to be able to pick and choose and combine and take things Like falcon arrow labs and say hey, this is a great opportunity Piece. This is a great building block in my kids education and things that like this that you may never have thought of were possible.

I think so much of what a child does or what a parent does is shaped by what they believe is possible. And if you’ve never seen it, and most people haven’t been exposed to aviation, most people don’t have a friend who flies a plane. And so they haven’t had that exposure. They don’t even know it’s among the option sets.

And what you said when we opened up, This is a industry that there’s so many job opportunities, and these are incredibly well paying jobs. I lived in Charleston, South Carolina for a while, and there was a Boeing facility there building the Dreamliners, and it was, it was crazy. They couldn’t, they couldn’t find enough people.

They couldn’t hire enough. And these are like amazing jobs. And I think a lot of people don’t know that or don’t know where to start. So, um, I think it’s just incredibly exciting. Um, what, what is, what is something that maybe you have like a specific story or something of, of a student or a couple of different stories, maybe like unlikely, unlikely successes or, uh, unexpected outcomes for getting kids exposed to aeronautics.

[00:26:30] Mark Hyatt: Okay. My number two is a, an amazing woman who homeschooled her four kids and, but she’s married to a farmer and they live about two and a half hours Southeast of Colorado Springs, which is down towards the Kansas Oklahoma border. And. Somehow she found out about her, Sarah, the mom found out about us and her 12 year old daughter, who was the oldest of the four kids, I got had the privilege of giving her one of her first airplane rides.

I think it was her second ride because I arranged for the first and then I took her in my airplane. So she then got in our program. She was in our first class. of, of, of kids. And she was 12 turned 13. And then we started expanding aero labs. So we started a glider program, IFT, introductory flight training gliders.

And we, now we have IFT drones where they get their FA part 107 drone and we get them jobs and drones. We have pilot IFT powered where we get them airline jobs, commercial jobs. So Ella. The, the young lady, uh, her mom drove her two and a half hours to Colorado Springs from, from the farm down towards Lamar, Colorado.

And she soloed at 14 in gliders and she was like the most excited 14 year old that exists on the planet. So then she said, this is what I want to do. So we got her in as a 15 year old and 16 year old. She soloed in powered airplanes at 16 and we kept her going and she got a commercial Pilots license, her instructor license and her instrument license at 18.

She was immediately offered. She, she, they, they asked her to come down to Pueblo, Colorado, where they, where they train the air force cadets after they graduate from the air force academy, starting her at a hundred thousand a year, no college. Just come teach these kids how to fly. Uh, yeah, they’re all college grads.

We don’t care that you’re not, but you’re a really good pilot. And I’ve flown with her a lot. She’s an amazing pilot, an amazing instructor. And that’s just one example that, now, not every mom is willing to drive their kids two and a half hours. But when you live out in the country, uh, that’s what people do.

They drive to, to the population centers. We’re, we’re, you know, Colorado Springs is the number two city in Colorado. But. This is where I live. So this is where we started and now we’re expanding it and doing this for lots and lots of more young people. So that’s a pretty good story.

[00:28:52] Isaac: Oh, that’s a that’s an amazing story. I knew you would have something right off the cuff. So I got to imagine and we touched on this a little bit already, but I got to imagine that like the number one thing you hear all the time is safety concern. And I’m curious your thoughts on, you know, exposing kids to risk, how much risk, what, what should you let kids do?

And I know I’ve, I’ve read a lot of different, uh, educators and, and, you know, Different approaches. People saying, Hey, let your kids use power tools when they’re young. Let it like. This is okay. Physical risk is not the worst thing. And, um, I think there’s a lot to be said for that. But as a parent, it’s still scary.

And as an educator, if you’re responsible for other people’s kids, the idea of having them flying in an airplane is scary. What is your sort of philosophy on the risk involved in in aviation? But just in general, with kids, you know, are we too concerned to shelter kids from things that might be dangerous?

[00:29:50] Mark Hyatt: well, I’ll just say that the risk to our nation of not letting them Be exposed to a little bit of physical risk is bigger than the physical risk that we put them in. Now, I know that’s a very broad answer, but we can probably debate that a lot and we’ll have another chance, I assume. But as far as the airplanes, I am, I hire a lot of these retired airline pilots, uh, military pilots.

That happens to be my network, mostly, um, and I, I make sure we have very highly qualified pilots. Now, you know, I know that in the Colorado Springs area, we’re near the Air Force Academy. It’s a beautiful, the whole Pikes Peak area is beautiful, and that’s where a lot of these guys come back and retire. But, that is my number one concern.

Safety is first. You know, I say STEM, aerospace, built on a solid foundation of character, but, But the thing it’s resting on is safety, and I have meetings with the pilots, I have meetings with the mechanics, I, I, in other words, that has to be number one in everything we do, uh, no matter what it is. And

[00:31:03] Isaac: Yeah, I love what you said there to open that, um, you can’t assess the risk of one thing in a vacuum and pretend that the alternative is a world without risk. So the question is, you know, uh, is it riskier to let my child do something that’s potentially dangerous or to shelter them from that? In which case they may not be ready for a world that has risk in it.

And I think that’s just a That’s, uh, it’s called the nirvana fallacy, right? Comparing something to an imagined world where there is no downside. It’s like, well, no, we’re just, we’re comparing things that varying levels of risk in, in different ways. Um, and I, I always, anytime people object to, uh, you know, letting kids do anything that’s perceived as dangerous. I always liked it to remind them how crazy it is. If you really think about it, that we’ve got 15 year olds driving automobiles, 70 miles an hour on the highway with their parents yelling at them, but we’re just, we’re used to it. It’s normal. So, so it’s okay. Um, if we can handle that, I think we can handle exposing kids to aeronautics and getting them up in an airplane with a, with a highly trained

[00:32:11] Mark Hyatt: I think, I think you and I could be very dangerous combination. If next time you’re in Colorado Springs, let’s, uh, let’s get together and, uh, or I’ll come down to Florida, wherever you are, but I, I think there’s some real synergy here, so. I’d love to continue this conversation as you see fit.

[00:32:27] Isaac: It’s, it’s a deal, Mark. Uh, any, any final thoughts you’d love to leave with our listeners or any recommendations for parents who are curious?

[00:32:35] Mark Hyatt: Well, I would say, you know, I have all these old sayings, these old men’s sayings. You know, how did the turtle get on top of the fence post? Well, somebody helped her or him get there. Um, somebody helped me by giving me a flight scholarship when I was 15 years old, 16. Because I didn’t have the money to do this.

One of the impediments, uh, was money. And in the aerospace, aviation world. Everything’s expensive and it’s driven by insurance and maintenance and all the, and the cost of the airplane, everything’s expensive. And the poor kids like me, we just go in the military and get it for free. But then you gotta be willing to go live overseas and fight wars and all that, which I’m, I can help.

I have, I help a lot of our kids if they want to go do that too. Cause you know, I’m on our congressman selection committee for the West Point, Annapolis Merchant Marine Academy, Air Force Academy. So I can help them. But. Our main thing is let’s get them certified, credentialed, and licensed while they’re still in high school.

And they can go to college, but let’s do it on the taxpayer’s dime. And then get them ready for jobs in this country. And get them internships, let them re meet role models who

[00:33:45] Isaac: I love it, Mark. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. See you next time.