Afleveringen
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If mountains have a vibe, Baker’s was “quiet stoner” compared to Rainier’s “Type-A caffeine addict drill sergeant.” It was a welcome relief. The crowds were massively thinned out by comparison, the vert-gain-per-day was about three or four thousand, and we had two nights in large, comfortable tents, rather than a noisy wood box covered in tar. My guide Henry said the key reason for the fast-paced Rainier regime is that the mountain aggressively tries to kill you when the sun comes out, especially later in the summer. The threat of Baker shedding rock or ice in the afternoon just isn’t as high, so the timetables are much more loose. For instance, were able to “sleep in” until 3:45am for our summit push.With the Easton Glacier route, you’re looking at about 7,000 feet of total gain from Park Butte Trailhead, a summit elevation of about 10,780 feet and a total distance of approximately 14 miles out and back.
My Gastro Gnome meal: https://www.gastrognomemeals.com/product/spicy-italian-sausage-rigatoniMusic:https://uppbeat.io/t/philip-anderson/currentsLicense code: GEAHAZ9XM9ORDPBZ
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Our summit bid was in doubt until the moment we set foot on it. Leading up to and after our climb, foreboding cumulonimbus clouds sailed around Shasta, strafing the surrounding landscape with lightning. I also almost lost the mental battle against pain from my blisters and fatigue.My climbing partner was another Nick. He and I met at a wedding about a month ago in Santa Barbara. We were seated at the same table at the reception and hit it off after he mentioned he had climbed Denali. It felt a lot like Nick was a version of myself three years into the future, having worked his way from guided trips on Shasta during the pandemic to technical climbs in the Alaska Range. We made plans to try Shasta together shortly thereafter.
Music: https://uppbeat.io/t/revo/pathfinderLicense code: D3JHFFFZJ5JW4HJW
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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I set out from Bend, Oregon, this past Wednesday morning and began the five hour commute up to Ashford, Washington. The whole time I was driving, I fretted about the weather. Rainier, like most big peaks, is known for unpredictable and rapid changes in its atmospheric attitude. Looking back on my experience, I feel like I cheated a little: We summited with cloudless skies and mellow winds. For many climbers, the weather is an obstacle to surmount not unlike the glaciers and vert that make Rainier the challenge that it is. When I pulled into Ashford I was thinking about all of the climbing legends who’ve been through this place: Ed Viesturs, Mark Twight, Jim, Lou, and Pete Whittaker, among many more. Rainier is a test piece. It’s the place where countless climbing careers begin, and some tragically end. As Twight says “the mountains have teeth.” One of the worst accidents in US mountaineering history happened right here in 1981, where 11 people were killed when the Ingraham Icefall fractured and avalanched down the glacier. It was the very same route we’d be attempting. My friends and I went with the four-day climb through RMI (Rainier Mountaineering Inc.), which dates back to 1969 and was one of the first guide services operating in the vicinity.Music: https://uppbeat.io/t/zimpzon/calmLicense code: 9IVKCMGYJXZNZTCHThumbnail photo by Lucas Davies on Unsplash
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During our high-velocity nomadic year, I resolved that I would vent my pent-up gaming energy on a long binge whenever I pulled my PC back out of the storage unit. But part of this resolution was that I'd be careful about it and select finite, story-driven games. This highly-relatable piece on video game addiction from Eric Hoel (thanks to my pal RobG for the link) makes this "finite"/"infinite" distinction about gaming that I'd internalized but hadn't put into words before.
I learned back in college that League of Legends, Starcraft, or World of Warcraft-types of games consumed my time, my motivation, and, ultimately, me. My first battle in League of Legends was fun but also revealed just how much I sucked. Instead of shutting it down and doing homework, I cracked my knuckles and decided I would level up. That's the moment where these things can go wrong, because there's no end to that project. It's an infinite-type game. The addiction starts because you get good enough to win, but then the game places you in rounds with increasingly competent players. The time investment required to start winning against better opponents grows and grows. If you stay committed, something else in your life has to give: Relationships, grades, job, etc. For many players, it's a toxic spiral into a bad place.
Links:
Eric Hoel: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/when-video-game-addiction-strikes
Protestant Work Ethic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
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I'm slowly caffeinating and jotting notes for this piece while taking in the morning glow. As the sun crests the Mule Mountains, the golden light spreads itself over the gulch that clutches old-town Bisbee, Arizona. My wife's family lives here and we're visiting again for the holidays. I wrote about this place earlier this year, before all the craziness of 2022. It's a strange and storied old copper mining settlement near the border of Mexico, just north of Naco. The scene out of the window in front of me is peaceful, and it reinforces that I haven't had enough of these kinds of moments lately. This year of nomadism was terrifying, beautiful, and probably the most intense period of introspection in my life thus far.
Car/gear walkthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_C7pBzorlY
Grand Teton video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_uGaZREfic&t=1s
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In January of this year I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air which documents the tragedy on Mount Everest in May, 1996. Krakauer happened to be part of a doomed expedition and recorded the disaster, wherein eight climbers died on the mountain over the span of 24 hours, in excruciating detail. I realize now that seeking out mountaineering challenges in the wake of that reading is probably a strange reaction, but most of the book is not about the tragedy itself, but the context and lead-up to it. A good chunk of Into Thin Air investigates why people become obsessed with mountain climbing. For many, including Krakauer, it’s about achievement in a very pure and physical sense. You either get the summit or you don’t. That stark line between success and failure, and the terrible beauty of big, deadly mountains has an allure that I cannot deny. I’m not going to pretend that this expedition was anything akin to the rigor or peril of something like Everest, but it was my first, proper mountaineering expedition, and fraught with many of the same dangers one finds in any significant alpine endeavor. Nearly half of our party of twelve clients did not summit for one reason or another, though everyone returned to the trailhead safely.
I set out on this adventure with my dad and my flight-instructor-turned-great-friend, Jason.
https://uppbeat.io/t/richard-smithson/search-lightLicense code: J4UBGNVRDUPNZBK4 https://uppbeat.io/t/vens-adams/adventure-is-callingLicense code: ENDHVU1JXMEC9OZO
Photo Credits for Grand Teton stills (in videocast version): Fiona Foster David Herring (Unsplash) Toan Chu (Unsplash)
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Rear Admiral Pete Pettigrew, callsign "Viper," served in the US Navy from 1964 to 1998, completing 325 combat missions, and 529 carrier landings along the way. In one of his bios he says “I am the only former Top Gun instructor with a confirmed kill”—a MiG-21 over Vietnam on May 6, 1972. He’s also highly decorated, having received the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three air medals, and 30 strike flight air medals for his service. Pete was technical advisor on the first Top Gun movie and designed a number of the flying scenes, including the whole scenario leading to Goose’s death.
Today, Dad and I chatted with him about his wild career and I sat back while they compared notes about the F-4 and life as fighter pilots.
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Getting all sentimental at age 30 is a little arbitrary. I’m not that old. I also feel no different than the 29-year-old version of me from yesterday. But looking at it another way, I’ve now lived around a third of the total span of my life (assuming I'm lucky enough to live to 90) and I’ve just completed three full decades on the Earth. It’s a nice, round number; a good a time to take stock.
For this episode, I compiled a list of the people and things I’m grateful for, collected wisdom, and things I would have done differently over these past 30 years. I also made separate lists of my top books, movies and media, and places I’ve been, so far.
Links:
Top books: https://nickrroberts.com/books/ Top movies and media: https://nickrroberts.com/movies-media/ Top places I've been so far: https://nickrroberts.com/places/ The 27 Club: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club -
I finished reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer a couple days ago. I'm about to give away some of the story, so there's my warning if you want to read it first.
The book is Krakauer's account of the disaster on Mount Everest in May, 1996, where eight climbers died over the span of a day. The book is clearly and movingly written, but I was amazed while reading the postscript just how controversial it appeared to be (and probably still is) after its release. I expected a sober description of the tragedy and to get a sense of what it's like to go for the highest summit in the world, but the ending gives way to an acrimonious fight over the narrative. Like many arguments, the core of it is a disagreement on basic facts: Who was where when, who talked to whom, and whether conversations actually happened. The memories of each participant are made somewhat suspect by the pernicious effects of altitude, which does strange and terrible things to the human psyche. If there's a theme to Into Thin Air, it's delirium.
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Scott Roberts is a previous guest of this show. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel, a former F-15E fighter pilot, and my father. Today, we have a short chat about his reaction to the brand-new F-15EX, the most capable fourth generation fighter plane on the market. We talk about the controversy it has engendered, the new features it brings to the fight, and the what the next decades look like for the fighter business. I hope you enjoy today’s quick take.
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Technology episode
Katie Roberts, my sister, works as a research scientist at BBN Technologies, a subsidiary of Raytheon, the defense contractor, in Boston, Massachusetts. BBN, incidentally, was selected by ARPA in 1968 to create the ARPAnet—the precursor to the internet we know today. Another little-known fact is that it created the first person-to-person network email in 1971 and the use of the “@“ symbol in email addresses.
Today we speak about a wide variety of topics, but focus the first half of our conversation on teaching machines to produce text from speech, otherwise known as Automatic Speech Recognition. What’s crazy is that Katie develops machine learning models every day, but she hails from an entirely nontechnical background. She studied Italian and linguistics at the University of Southern California. We discuss her transition into computational linguistics through a masters at Tulane University and a few her speech recognition projects, one of which included analyzing phone calls from inmates at Rikers Island prison.
In the second half, we get into a very candid discussion of mental health, particularly as it relates to food and body image. Katie is forthcoming about own her experience with an eating disorder.
References
Studies on red meat and cancer: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-meat-and-colon-cancer
Book: The Fuck It Diet https://thefuckitdiet.com/
Book: The Anti-Diet https://christyharrison.com/book-anti-diet-intuitive-eating-christy-harrison
National Eating Disorders Association: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/
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Aviation Episode
Lieutenant Colonel Jason Brightman is a former US Air Force pilot with one of the wildest careers I’ve heard of. He also happens to be my flight instructor, bringing me up to speed on the Cessna 172. Jason and I were put together by chance (and by COVID) at our flight school. Ordinarily, he flies for a major airline, but found himself with a whole lot of time on his hands during the summer when coronavirus almost completely shut down travel. So, he started teaching, as is his habit. His military pilot students nicknamed him Guru.
Jason initially served with the Army’s First Infantry Division combat engineers before transitioning into the Air Force, but he went through pilot training with the Navy. This guy’s spent time with essentially every branch except Space Force—although, we could have just not gotten to that story yet. He’s full of them.
While in Iraq, Jason and his team cleared the way for American and British tank battalions, who came rushing through Kuwait during the famous 100-hour ground war in 1991.
After pilot training, he flew the C-130 for a tour. But then he took an instructor pilot exchange with the Indian Air Force, where he trained a cohort of pilots that would go on to fly planes like the Sukhoi 30 - known by NATO as the Flanker C. One student would even be shot down in operations near Pakistan, yet end up in a Pakistani tea commercial. More on that later.
Jason then flew combat operations in a C-17 in the Iraq War, delivering Humvees, and ferrying racks of wounded US soldiers to safety.
As if this was not enough action, he then took an opportunity with the US Central Command’s intelligence unit and spent a lot of time in Kabul, Afghanistan, trying to patch together alliances against the Taliban. We talk about all of this and more.
Hogs in the Sand, Buck Wyndham: https://www.amazon.com/Hogs-Sand-10-Pilots-Journal/dp/1646631609
Ghost Wars, Steve Coll: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669
Pakistani tea commercial featuring downed Indian Air Force pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman: https://twitter.com/VishnuNDTV/status/1102871131197980672?s=20
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Technology/aviation episode:
Mike Christman is a product manager at Google and, previously, a CIA intelligence analyst turned Marine AH-1 attack helicopter pilot. With the Marines, he served two tours in Afghanistan and three total. On his first, he flew regular combat missions against the Taliban in the Helmand Valley. On his next, he became a forward air controller, guiding close air support onto targets while embedded with infantry. He was selected as a 2014 Tillman Military Scholar by the Pat Tillman Foundation. I’d encourage you to check out some of his articles linked below.
Today, we speak about his nine years with the Marines engaging in faraway firefights, and then his big transition to business school and, ultimately, Google. We also discuss product management, our mutual career, the finer points of anticipating user and business needs, and how to build great products.
"Shades of Green" by Mike Christman: https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/shades-green
"Inside the Box" by Mike Christman: http://www.thegiddysummit.com/inside-the-box/
Music: "Carved From Stone" by TrackTribe
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Lieutenant Colonel Ken Peterson flew the B-52H Stratofortress and the B-1B Lancer bombers during some of the most tense moments of the Cold War. Today we talk about his experience while on alert, ready to take flight with terrifyingly powerful weapons in tow. We also cover the time Ken briefed the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board which recommended the B-1 program to President Reagan.
Aside from flying one of the fastest bombers in the world, Ken is full of stories about crossing paths with legendary historical figures, like General James Doolittle, who led the first strike on the Japanese homeland after the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, or Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon.
Ken's picture with Neil Armstrong: https://nickrroberts.com/posts/b1_b52.html
Buzz One Four Documentary: https://www.amazon.com/Buzz-One-Four-David-Woodhouse/dp/B0795BZ3F3
Music: “Get Tough” by TrackTribe
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Technology episode:
Nic Bertagnolli is an itinerant data scientist who lives almost full-time from his van with his partner, Laura McNerney, a previous guest of this show. He’s also mathematician, tinkerer, and, though he may not admit it, a futurist and philosopher. Outside of this, Nic enjoys mountain biking, rock climbing, and mountaineering. He’s worked for the likes of 3M, a series of startups, and even Verily, a health research company in Alphabet, as he travels the world with little more than a laptop on his mission for adventure and high accuracy, precision, and recall.
I speak to him today about the state of machine learning and his areas of research. We also discuss the evolving relationship between humans and machines, potential futures, and how to keep current in one of the most dynamic domains of human knowledge.
Jeremy Howard's Fast AI class: https://www.fast.ai/about/
The Morning Paper with Adrian Colyer: https://blog.acolyer.org/
Music: "Morpho Diana" by the Rachel K. Collier
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Aviation episode:
Father’s Day was just a couple weeks ago and to show my appreciation to my dad, I made him read a book with me. It’s called Return with Honor and it’s by Captain Scott O’Grady, U.S. Air Force retired. The reason I chose this story in particular is because his and my father’s histories overlap somewhat. They were contemporaries in the Air Force, they both did some time in the 555th fighter squadron, also known as “The Triple Nickel,” which was reconstituted from an F-15 to an F-16 squadron in 1994. But where things get interesting is that they both served in Italy during the same NATO operations over Bosnia in the mid-nineties. On June 2, 1995, O’Grady was flying a patrol in the NATO no-fly zone when an SA-6 soviet-built surface-to-air missile smacked into his F-16, severing the nose completely from the rest of the fuselage. O’Grady was traveling at 350 knots, or a bit over 400 miles per hour, at 27,000 feet when he was hit. Miraculously, O’Grady survived the explosion, ejected, and began a six-day survival odyssey in hostile Bosnian-serb country. Today, I speak with my dad, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Roberts, a former F-15E Strike Eagle pilot, about his view of O’Grady’s experience and how it changed things for the whole Air Force, from what they carry in the ejection seat to the survival training every pilot receives to this day.
Before we get into the meat of the topic, we start off with some regular old father-son plane talk, so either bear with me on that or skip forward to about 18-20 mins.
Check out Return with Honor on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Return-Honor-Scott-OGrady/dp/0385483309
The F-15C cockpit walkthrough referenced at the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zikI2fazPLo
The Wikipedia history of the Triple Nickel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555th_Fighter_Squadron
How to fly an F-4 as a civilian (spoiler: it is pricey): https://www.collingsfoundation.org/vmf-flight-experiences-flight-training-programs/
Music: "Controlled distress" by Biz Baz Studio
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Aviation episode:
Laura McNerney is a pilot, engineer, skier, climber, mountaineerer, kite-surfer, van-lifer, mountain biker, and the textbook definition of a badass. She ranks among the youngest women ever to join Delta Airlines as a pilot. Today I speak with her about her experience going from building components for intercontinental ballistic missile systems, and having no piloting experience, to becoming a first officer with Delta in merely three years. We also talk about her love for the outdoors, along with the joys and perils of climbing mountains and glaciers.
I find her story of relentless, singular focus on her goals to be very inspiring and I think it needs to be heard. Laura is a model for folks who want to make a career pivot into something they love.
Music: “The Big Guns” by Silent Partner.
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Aviation Episode:
Today I bring you an interview with my dad, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Roberts. As I’ve mentioned before, this podcast is going to jump around a bit between focuses on technology, history, aviation, and travel, as I come across interesting topics and interesting people. I know, it’s somewhat low-hanging fruit to interview your own father, but he’s had a storied career and gotten a chance to fly some of the world’s premier fighter aircraft, including the F-4 Phantom II and the F-15E Strike Eagle, something only a tiny fraction of men and women get to do. With my eyesight there’s probably little chance I could have emulated my dad’s path. Not to mention the obstruction presented by my fear of death.
One apology in advance: We pick up quite a bit of background noise in the house during the interview. Somebody was putting dishes away and occasionally the drone of the laundry machine kicks in, so, sorry for that. But, overall, it’s clear and I think it’s a great rundown of what it’s like to be in the seat of a fighter jet.
Music: "Burnt" by the Jingle Punks
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History episode:
A brief history of nuclear escalation and its nail-biting byproducts
Script and sources: https://medium.com/@nickrroberts/broken-arrows-and-almost-annihilations-ca0ff71cdec8
Referenced in the podcast:
"The Bomb" Making Sense, Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/podcasts/186-the-bomb/,
The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, Fred Kaplan,
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Eric Schlosser
Checkpoint Charlie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkpoint_Charlie
