22 Million Kids a Year - A Marine's 5-Page Fix for Family Courts

0:00 Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I've heard that flying a helicopter is much more dangerous than a fixed wing, and there's much more incident of things happening. Is that true? Yeah, and the biggest thing is relative motion. So a jet's at 500 knots, but if it's at 30,000 feet, how fast is the ground moving under you? But when you're at 50 feet and 100 knots, and you're dodging power lines and birds... all right everybody welcome back to another episode of the space tomatoes podcast i'm one of your hosts havoc and we got another guy i'm lx hi how you doing today we're joined by a special guest Keith Barton. Keith Barton is a 20-year Marine Corps veteran, former military aviator, not a nasal radiator, author, congressional candidate, and advocate for family court reform who brings an unusually broad range of real-world experience to a conversation. Also, an author, of note, one of the ones I'm interested in is the Proxima War series. However, he has a number of other works and we'll get into where to check him out.

1:31 Welcome to the show, Keith Burton. Thanks for having me, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. Our pleasure. So, 20 years in the Corps, huh? Yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit. I feel it every day, let me tell you what. Oh, I bet. Knees, back, ankles. All of it. Yeah, gotta love it. Gotta love it. I bet you have no stories from that, do you? No, not at all. Yeah. And I was enlisted to officer too. So I got both sides. I earned that damn title twice. Yeah. Oh, so you're actually right now going through a congressional candidacy. Is that correct? Yeah. So I lost, uh, I only ran 85 days the first time and got eight and a half percent of the vote facing millions from two different candidates.

2:17 So I did really, really well. And then, uh, yeah, I just decided to piss everybody else off and announced the very next day that I was running again. Interesting. All right. How does that work? How do you actually get to run for that? Do you have to collect signatures and do something like that? No, it's money. And you got to be vetted first. And every state has their own laws. So you can announce once you're a candidate at any time, but then you get officially on the ballot here in Texas, September timeframe. Okay. So I'll be able to pay my dues, which is actually quite a bit. For U.S. Congress, it's almost $3,200.

2:58 And then the vote will be in March. So here in Texas, we do the primaries really early. That begs the question, is Congress unionized or something? You got like a card or something? Like you pay you $3,200? It pretty much is. That's a good way to put it. That explains a lot. That explains a lot. Yeah. So, I guess, what is it that drove you to want to become, you know, one of those people? Oh, man, I didn't want to. I already figured 20 years of federal service was enough.

3:40 But this comes down to child court reform. And I am a Lean Six Sigma guy. I found the root cause to fix it. and it is literally the largest social issue when you account for money and number of people affected that the country's ever faced. And I put it number two behind slavery for morally, but I can fix it in five pages. It's already written. And so that's really what spurred me because enough is enough. It's terrible. It's epically terrible and it's tearing our country apart. And it all comes down to money, guys. It's always about the money. And so states are federally incentivized to break up families.

4:23 I'm going to reverse that. Instead, we're going to give you this money for following your own damn laws and start keeping parents in kids' lives. That's the basics of it. Honestly, If there ever was one, that's a pretty damn worthwhile goal. Yes, sir. It fixes so much. Do you ever fear that if you get in there that somebody will try to slide you in their pocket and pay off and do that whole nine yards. There's a lot of people making a lot of money in there that did not have that money before they got into that position. That is a perfect question, and my answer to that always is, I'm a Marine, man.

5:05 They ain't shooting at me. They don't scare me. They not going to My moral values are too ingrained and it 22 million kids a year and their families that are in this system yeah that crazy that means every year and a half um more people are in the family court system than there are african-americans in our country dang yeah and it's it's a pretty brutal system and especially if you are in certain states when when encountering it. True statement. It can be exceedingly ungood. Yeah. It is.

5:45 And we call it the black box of the family court system. And that's really where it comes. Besides the money, it's the lack of transparency. And family courts always go with the best interest of the child, which is really gut feeling for using discretion to not follow what the law says. And that's really where we're at. And why I say it so big, and I guess this is even more important to understand, is it affects mental health issues in children. If we put the parents in their lives equally, we're going to see higher education levels, higher lifelong earnings, less domestic violence, less child abuse, less divorce, less reliance on SNAP, less reliance on Medicare, less reliance on all other welfare programs.

6:39 And the biggest one is less crime. So some studies say it's anywhere between 70% and 85% of all violent crime is by a person who was raised by a single parent. It is that it's that big. And so I fixed it with five pages. So there's a lot of technicalities within those five pages on how to do it. But yeah, that's really the gist of it is making judges actually write down why they're making these rulings and incentivizing the states to follow their own laws. And that's the key, really, because every time somebody tries to change this from the federal level, well, let's face it, they're lawyers and they want to change state law, which means they violate the 10th amendment.

7:26 Yeah. That's not the power of Congress. It's an interesting one. Having gone through that system myself, uh, I, you know, uh, actually ended up in a situation in a courtroom where they heard the, you know, other side. And when it came, you know, that was done. I went to respond and was told, no, you, you, you don't get to respond. And I actually talked to my lawyer after that and said, you know, that's that's illegal. You cannot do that. I have a right to respond. It's part of the whole process. And she said, yes, you absolutely do.

8:08 And I said, well, I want to take that guy to task. And she said, well, first step is to hire this type of attorney to go to the state to ask them permission to actually do that. And I was like, you what? And she was like, appeal attorney, you'd have to appeal them based on your constitutional rights, both federal and state being violated. Yeah. And that's really, really tough. Oh, yeah. She said to start would be about fifty thousand dollars. And it was like, OK, just basically priced out of anyone's reach for the most part. So how does how does that you know, how do you how does your idea deal with, you know, extreme bias that we all know exists?

8:50 people call it out and you know they do whatever with numbers to make it look like it's not as biased but you know you can see the stories you can you can you know it's a reality i lived through it and was told i had a case but unless i had about 150 grand it was going nowhere and i didn't have anywhere near 150 grand so the the key is to apply um systems that are already working and so in criminal and civil court in most states judges already have a checklist at the beginning of things that they have to fill out and do okay so they actually go through the entire process but no family court has that same checklist and then family courts always come back with if we want to try to do this well it's going to cause more work well the data shows that in civil and criminal court it actually expedites the process and it even expedites so dca's just for courts of appeals their vast majority of their appeals are child cases.

9:54 So by requiring this checklist, so the way I'm allowed to require the checklist is states, you have to volunteer for this program if you want this money still. And these are the requirements to do it. And that includes filling this checklist out, which would include things like what's the percentage that you're given to each? What mother or father do they have primary? What state laws did you cite to actually come to this decision But once you put that out on paper where they required to do it then when it actually goes to appeal instead of an appeal court having to go through and find and make judgment calls on what the judge meant and whatnot, they got a checklist right in the beginning. This is exactly what they meant. And guess what? You didn't follow X law, right?

10:42 Perfect example. So let's give you, my case is in Florida. So Florida has this wonderful set of law is called 9803. And it's a hearsay exception law to recording your child under distress from abuse. And judges keep out these recordings all the time, even though the state has these very specific exceptions for this kind of stuff. So why I know all this is really, that's kind of important. So I spent 16 years in the family court system and I spent about a half a million dollars in lawyers. I learned enough to where I started winning when I stopped hiring lawyers. And I actually won my appeal. And my appeal is now being used for family court advocacy and being quoted by family court attorneys in Florida already. And we only won it on August 12th.

11:37 So it was that massive. When you read enough appeals, you realize that district court of appeals have their own special language. And when you can read between the lines, you know, when they are chewing that judge's ass, well, guess what? They hammered this judge, not just a little, like she is professionally embarrassed. And to do that against a pro se with a high power lawyer on the other side, it's a black mark on her record. It really is. but that's why I was able to learn all this and able to do it. And then I obviously, since I'm such a nerd and I, I research and I started figuring it out and then I just decided to apply lean six Sigma, just like in my professional life to it.

12:23 And I figured out how to fix it for everybody. And that is nice. It's still kind of a travesty of justice though, when you think about it. So this person, and I'm just going to say this person got a black mark on the record, But chances are they're still sitting on that same bench and they're still adjudicating cases that are coming up and most likely have not truly changed their methods of adjudicating. So not yet. So, you know, it would be a heck of a lot better if it was like, yeah, you can't do that. And so you can't be a judge because that's just off the table. You've violated the law, you know.

13:05 Yeah, but they have that process. But guess what? Like the district court of appeals, those are judges, too. And they're still going to give benefit of the doubt to the lower court judges because they're in the same. Right. So you they that judge can't just have a one off and get removed. Right. They got to show a pattern. And so it takes time. The problem is you have to have people that are willing to fight it and win because the chances of winning an appeal is so astronomically low that it's really hard to do it. And so, and the other part with family court is in the regular county courts, you're going to see testimony and whatnot.

13:47 It's all emotional, right? But then it's a totally different skill set when you go to the district court of appeals. Now it's actually all what's in the books, what's on the record. And that's where I personally, that's where I excel, right? Versus because I just, dude, like you're making conjectures through assumptions and whatnot. Suddenly somehow that's evidence in a lower court. At DCA, they don't care about that, right? What does the law say? That's what they care about. And so that's kind of why it's so hard. And that's why it needs to be fixed from the top because they won't fix it until we heard their pocketbooks. Well, and also their evidentiary requirements are far lower than other courts because they are a civil court, right?

14:34 And all of the civil courts have this much lower bar to, you know, hurdle to get to where they decide is good. So, yeah. All right. Well, that's that's pretty interesting stuff. um so what do you what did you what was your what was your job in the military i did a lot um so when i was enlisted i was a grunt and then recon marine okay and then uh i already had my flight contract so then i went to flight school commissioned went to flight school flew the huey all the wonderful built between 1968 and 1975 uh one november and then i transitioned to being a logistics officer and then a foreign advisor to the Afghan National Army.

15:19 So it's pretty funny. I went through recon and pilot, didn't see combat, became a logistics officer, and then I finally started getting shot at. How does that work when you I mean do you go into the enlistment office or the recruiter and you say like I want to fly a helicopter Or do they pick you up and up and say like hey martin you gonna fly a helicopter next week get over here or yes it an entire testing process and it very difficult and you know people give us jarheads a lot of shit but um we have the highest requirements for flight school by far it's not even close and so you have to have a get an actual flight contract and for me i actually had to test for it three times because it took that long for my commissioning day.

16:02 So naturally, actually, it was pretty cool. I kept getting higher scores on all these tests by the time I got there. But you don't get a choice. So a naval flight school is Marines, Sailors, and Coast Guard in the same flight school. And you go through first what's called primary. I flew the T-34 Mentor. Now they fly the T-6 Texan. It's a fully aerobatic turboprop aircraft. And then from there, you'll get, in the Marine Corps, you'll get cargo, jets, helicopters, or tilt rotor. And then you go to advanced, so that's your next pipeline. So I got helicopters, and then out of helicopters, it would have been the 46 to 53, the Huey or the Cobra.

16:44 And I got Huey because, frankly, I had stick skills. If you fly a Huey, it's all fingertips. Everything's fingertips. So we call her the ex-wife, man. If you piss her off, she's going to kill you. So you just got to kind of coax her along to what you wanted her to do. But the things you can do in a Huey are, it's pretty unreal. I've done some pretty stupid, but yet really cool stuff like flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. I've probably flown inside Mount Pinatubo at least a dozen times in the Philippines, things like that. You go up to DC, you get cleared for 200 feet and below. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. A helicopter is much more dangerous than a fixed wing, and there's much more incident of things happening.

17:30 Is that true? Yeah, and the biggest thing is relative motion. So a jet's at 500 knots, but if it's at 30,000 feet, how fast is the ground moving under you? But when you're at 50 feet and 100 knots and you're dodging power lines and birds in an aircraft that is not designed for you to whip the controls around, and you got to be smooth with it, it's quite a bit different. So for sure, but we're all airplane pilots, at least as naval aviators, we're all airplane pilots first. We all get qualified. So I have a commercial license on airplanes and helicopters. Hardest thing about flying an airplane is landing. Truth. Absolute truth.

18:10 100%. I actually had a friend a long time ago. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War and he was a Huey pilot. and you know he he told me if you ever have an opportunity to get in a huey take it but if there's not hydraulic fluid on the floor get out i was like what he goes a non-leaking huey is one that's gonna go down and i'm like yeah she's like a harley that way she's exactly like a harley that way yeah that's when you're worried about it my my father-in-law tells good stories about he was in the Air Force, I guess, in Vietnam, and he did mechanics, and they, I guess, flew him out in the jungle to fix downed aircraft, and he's had a lot of stories, but he speaks quite fondly of that helicopter. It's pretty amazing. So, here's my other favorite part about it, okay?

19:04 So, every military aircraft has a mission essential task list, okay? So, a number of missions is designed to fly the second most in the military is the c-130 with nine huey has 15 yeah that makes sense right you got everything from troop to logistics to equipment to you know i have a gunship to geez i don't know whatever our our primary our primary jobs at this point is close air support actually. And the laser designator on a Huey is phenomenal. So it's the second best in the military, but because you're already lower to the ground, it's beam divergence, which is important so that the missile can track it better.

19:48 So you can host laser guided bombs and missiles from other aircraft and really hit the target right. So they can release, move, and it's following your laser. So that's also a very cool thing. So I have gotten to, in training, hosts a couple hellfires from another aircraft is pretty cool to watch. That is really cool. Yeah, that would be fun. See, we just nerded out again. On a target. I would like to do that in a range. I don't know about the whole people disappearing thing. I'm kind of, yeah, I'd rather not do that. I'm sorry, did you have your own call sign? I'm sure you did, right?

20:28 You want to share that with us? Yeah, so we'll explain call signs first, okay? Air Force, they're cool, so you sound cool on the radio. In the Navy and the Marine Corps, you earn them by messing up. Okay. Yeah, my call sign is Krusty with a K, like Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons. I had this major, his call sign was Hunter. And you would think that is freaking cool, right? Now, his wife was about 18 years younger than him, and that was her stage name as she put herself through vet school. Oh, okay. Stage name. Yes. Yeah, the image is there. He spent a lot of money to get her to go out with him, I'll tell you what.

21:09 One dollar at a time. One dollar. So what you're saying is don't go on a demo ride with somebody to call sign like Crash or something, right? Well, yeah, but here's the unwritten rule, though. You can ask a naval aviator what their call sign is for. They don't have to tell you. Okay. Yeah. So because some of them, yeah, they can get really bad. So they don't write it on the side of the under the cockpit? Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's the story behind it. Oh, okay. Yeah. So call signs are actually used. They're not used for external. They're used for either inside the aircraft or in your own section division of other aircrafts, right?

21:51 So you're not calling a JTAC and you're not using your call sign. You're using your aircraft number at that point. So it's just a personal identifier while you're flying without using your name. Gotcha. Yeah. Interesting. And so you did logistics during combat, and I'm assuming that some of that was the impetus for writing the Proxima War stuff? A little bit. So really what Proxima War is when it comes to the Marine Corps is, and I'm not bragging here because I kind of cheated, and I'll explain why I cheated. But we have this school called Expeditionary Warfare School, and it's our education at my level as an officer at that point.

22:36 And I graduated as a distinguished graduate. Well, I was able to do that because I'd already been in the ground, the air, and the combat service support. So I already understood the whole thing. And that whole class is about the MAGTAF, Marine Corps Air Ground Task Force Group. So all the tactics within Proxima War is MAGTAF, Marine Corps, real tactics applied 5,000 years in the future. So actually, you see it all. You see logistics affecting the battlefield. You see air support. You see ground combat maneuvers, maneuver warfare, all of that, all while going up against a species that considers you ants. So, the entire five book series, the plan series, is designed to answer one question.

23:28 And that question is, what would really happen if we met a type two civilization? And so, for the people that don't know, so we're under a 0.7 now as humanity. so a type one a species can harness the power of their entire uh planet type two is their entire star type three is their entire galaxy type four is their entire universe so in this so they're from proximus centauri that tri system but their star is a red dwarf right we don't see them because i have that planet at a perpendicular rotation to our view.

24:11 Okay. But they have Dyson ring capabilities. They're a liquid-borne species. That would be the only way when you look at that star system that this would work. A heavy atmosphere far enough away from that red dwarf where the solar flares are not affecting it, but the only way to keep heat and whatnot is high pressure. And the other thing is they are silicon-based, not carbon-based. And I went through all the chemistry. That meant that their environment has to be high sulfur, which also helped me on a couple things because that means that their heat source and their first energy sources could be thermal. And so they are liquid-borne, and they go directly from liquid to space and obviously well ahead of us.

24:56 but their red dwarf cannot create enough power for faster than light speed. Right? And they can't use their two other stars because they are orbiting each other, which the gravity would destroy that Dyson ring. So the whole point is they don't care about us. They want our star. That's it. And so they are coming. And they start about now. They try to exterminate us. So they hit us with a probe that changes our genetic makeup so that we age extremely fast. So we have to do all sorts of things. And so we get delayed, which actually also helped another hand waving thing that most people do.

25:38 It's why they still speak like us because we were nearly extinct. And so we kind of kept our social network as we kind of built back up. I don't want to ruin too much. So there's a lot of Easter eggs and there's Easter eggs even in book one that are for book five. Cause that the best sci series Right Um so it took me a year and a half to write it Uh I had to cause I had to build the entire universe and I had to work out all the math and the science So when they actually arrive the first set arrives I figured out the orbital mechanics to be That's when a time when Uranus and Neptune are actually going to be in the path and a 20 degree cone to block their approach from our view.

26:23 it's so i've done as much as humanly possible not being a scientist to do zero hand waving that's pretty cool the entire thing so and then yeah thinking about this we're obviously we're probably fighting them outside of our atmosphere right uh correct and and i guess the the first first well i got a bunch but you know we're we're strictly conventional weapons for the most part and you fire it, it goes, boom, okay, and then it's gone. So logistics starts to make you kind of go, hmm, how do I get enough payload to be resupplying whatever kind of craft is up there, especially if we're firing, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of tons of munitions out into space?

27:17 So I kept kinetic weapons and plasma, and I only went through plasma because that's the only one that we can scientifically say is possible. Right. All these other fake weapons in other sci-fi series is not scientifically plausible yet, like phasers. Right. So that's the only that's I stopped it there on purpose just because that and that's with them as well. But I mean, obviously, we could still use kinetic weapons, but plasma handles most of your concern right there, right? Because of that situation. Really, for my anthrocanes, and there's a reason why they're named that, because we're evolved humans at that point.

28:03 But the biggest thing for them is fuel and oxygen. so I even have during a battle oxygen becomes a major factor in trying to get to resupply them because that is real combat right at any point so one of the other cool things because they're liquid born well their planet their body hopping so they want Enceladus and Europa so let me show you something so here's a author only copy but i worked out space jumps through the ice into underwater oceans there you go cool yeah interesting so we fight them in space and under oceans and everything so and I don't hold back on the brutality.

29:04 And that's kind of, it's not gore for gore, but it's how the environment actually works. Like I even have a ship that gets, loses propulsion and how it then falls into Saturn's gravity. How would that ship get torn apart by the rings? Cause the rings are not safe at all. We know that, right? And so you get to watch this person, you know, in the book, just getting eaten alive, you know, right. or you know you you're bleeding inside your spacesuit but it seals you're drowning in your own blood right it's so yeah it's very brutal well i don't think people think about stuff like that too much yeah and how no and then comes the other piece right i mean you've got the radiation belt uh and then you've got you know things that like you said right the ring itself even if it was made of nothing but dust particles which it's not uh but if it was that's still going to poke holes and things because they're going fast, you're going fast, even if you're not, they're going really fast.

30:05 And, you know, think bullet, right? Small, tiny little thing going really fast makes little holes, right? So that's an interesting thing. The plasma thing is interesting to me too as well because while I know that we can use plasma and there's a lot of design work going on to, you know, create plasma-based engines in space, they are all, you know, at least from my knowledge, they're all very, very low power. The plasma, the engines that we're talking about are fully functional in a vacuum or, you know, the vacuum of space. I don't know that it's a true vacuum, but, you know, the reason being is, you know, there's very little friction there. So it's putting out the, you know, weight of maybe like, you know, a folded piece of paper falling, you know, free fall.

30:59 So it's not a lot, but you know, over time with no friction, you start to move and you go faster and faster Now how do you get to the point where you can actually harness plasma in a manner that could be effective and used as a weapon I guess this is one point that we cheat because it almost 5 years in the future They have figured it out We got better. But that's again, because that's the only thing that we have enough scientific knowledge that could be possible. All this other stuff like shields around your spaceship. No, that's not going to happen. spaceships being able to warp space, have enough power to warp space. No, it's not going to happen.

31:43 So all that stuff is, is not in my book because it's just not possible. There are some theoretical things in there and I even work out, this is actually pretty cool. In book five, we're going to get through to the point of understanding. So you know about the hairs around a black hole. So a flatter circular black hole, like Hawking used to talk about where there's mass being ejected out so where's that weight of that mass right and then if you go into one of those types of black holes the theory of it being a gateway to someplace else well then how do you work out the weight that you just lost that's being shot back out right well then i came up with a theory of well you're going in as white matter what if you come out the other side as black matter dark matter and we just solve the equation right interesting now in the book it's still theory too i don't use it it's a theory and i don't want to ruin the ending but it's the theory at the end okay and and i think you know i you know a little sad here i think gene roddenberry might disagree with you you know but that's okay drive's gonna happen man come on now maybe you can answer me havoc so so when these when these ships jump to light speed right and then they like get to the where they're going how do they stop so fast because like how does space brakes work because i mean i can like my name lx it was lx 460 because i put a 460

33:15 big block in a mustang like tons of engine but like the thing had no brakes yeah so i just picture something like that here's how this works imagination you know okay honestly yeah the The whole concept, right? I mean, if you think about what the plasma that I was just talking about, right, it's going to push you faster, right? And it's only a very, very minimal amount of thrust. And you keep going. If you turn that thrust off, it's going to take a very, very, very long time before you start to reduce your speed in any appreciable form. So if you look at things like the ISS and you look at the, you know, the, you know, SpaceX stuff, et cetera, they all have, uh, you know, little ports of, of different rockets that can be fired to change direction, but also to slow your speed, increase your speed, you know, change rotational, any of the axes.

34:15 Right. And that's how it's done. Right. So you would have to have something, I would imagine, like a really, really, really big solid fuel booster on the nose cone of this thing that just lit off, right? Otherwise, yeah. So the best way to really do it, and this is a more leading series, is a warp corridor. And that's what I get into in the book. So that's why they're kind of harnessed Saul. People that don't know, that's the name of our star. But if you do a warp corridor, you can only aim it. It's no return. Yeah. Okay. So you're literally creating a corridor. You're wrapping space around itself, and then the ship is going into it.

34:57 So you don't have to, while you are skipping, because space is folded up on each other and you're skipping that point, when you get to the other end, you're still just only slowing down with the speed that you went into it as. Yep. Does that make sense? Because then it stops. So that's the. And I love this description, right? Someone holds up a piece of paper and says, you know, you're trying to get from here to here. And it's, you know, a thousand light years or whatever. And it's not about going from here to here. It's about. Now I'm there. Right. So you're folding space and you're literally punching through to the other side.

35:38 The paper is no longer consequential at that point. That is an actual scientific theory too. It's just, you know, there's a lot of science behind it and no real way to prove it out. Right. Uh, it, you know, in theory it's possible, uh, but we're not there and, you know, maybe type two, maybe type three before we even see something like that. Right. Because we just don't have the technology. We're not advanced enough as a civilization to get to something like that. Yep And that kind of what I dealing with here because it a type two that already knows how to build Dyson rings And here part of the other logistics Where do you come up with the matter to be able to build that Dyson ring So they are so far advanced that they are dismantling moons and planets for that construction material That how far advanced the Type 2 would have to be And I don't even get into how they do it because we don't know how they do it.

36:38 Right. But to be a Type 2, they would have had to have figured it out. Yeah. And so that's what we're looking at. We're watching them destroy moons and other planet bodies to build these Dyson rings. It's ridiculous. And that's why we're ants. We're just complete. What do these other creatures look like? Are they humanoid or something different completely? Oh, no, absolutely not. Because I was not going to do men in suits. So I call them the Centurions. And one of the cool things about them is everything from their ruling class through their DNA is in three. And that's partly because of the silicon based. so their triple helix DNA and it's to handle all the pressure and everything even their tactics their military tactics are all in groups of three and at the very top there's Proxima Prime and her two daughters so they are underwater they have three eyes they have a trunk and that trunk is for because underwater you're not going to have vocal cords you're not going to do that and I don't do the stupid you and me can just hear each other's thoughts they communicate by touching trunks.

37:50 So they can pass information that way and you can kind of think that that's how they get their hive mind, but it's the delayed hive mind, right? Because a true hive mind per science fiction, we'd never really see because we want to come on, man, right? But it's tactile. They have three fins in the back in a triangle pattern. So everything's rule of three. And that just really allowed me to create a truly unique alien, which also means that their spaceships are very cool too. They're not airplanes in space. Their fighters are literally a high pressure orb that they float inside and it's not water, but that also means that they can handle the Gs.

38:31 Yeah. Boom. Right. So all this science is like, but it also means that they're omnidirectional. They just change direction. while we're still forward-facing, right? And we got to turn and do all the thrusters and all that. They can just change direction in a swarm. Can you just imagine trying to fight that? Unreal. No, I mean, just putting my little bit of brain power into it, a type 2 society wants your planet, bye. like kiss your wife and kids it's done it's over you know but then again that assumes that you know this type suit two species started out as a warring species they may not have right there may be other societal you know things that they are going for besides you know uh uh you know conquest yeah they could have been a predator they could have been a um um they might not I would have even started out as a predator species.

39:39 They could have been consumed and just eventually survived. We don't know, but that's kind of the point. You don't want to, if you're going to truly have an alien that's terrifying, you can't just give the reader everything, right? I mean, so there's a lot of this that I figured out that'll never actually go in the books, right? Because then you just kind of ruin it, and eventually it'll come out slowly. I also do this cool thing where I put a reference guide in the back. so book one has about the anthracanes book two will have a reference guide about um the centurions themselves book three is actually a prequel so i do book one and two that way and so you could think like space troopers martian and all that kind of mixed together well then we because we do the prequel that's my game of thrones book and how i handle the near extinction to rebuild is through new earth laws because we have to completely start over so the reference guide for book three will be those laws and they're already written out and we turn ourselves into a fighter versus breeder class and literally change the amount of litter that we can still reproduce faster there's all sorts of things so i'm i'm literally touching every major science through these five books.

41:01 And then if I really got into four and five, I'd totally ruin it. And I don't want to do that for you because five, if you're not crying at the end of five, I did something wrong. So when's the movie deal coming out? I know that's why I did write them with making them into blockbuster movies. I wanted that style. So if it could actually happen, that's also why I did all the concept art because I wanted that. When you're building the universe, if you have that concept art, it just, it helps your writing a ton, right? Because then you're actually thinking about it. Like even my space carriers, they are modular. I eventually turned them into modular Because when you think of the logistics of building it, you're going to build it in an orbit.

41:45 So in my case, I'm doing the orbit around the moon and Mars, not around Earth. And we're building it. And then you can modular piece the ships together. Because logistically, that would make sense. Right? And it's easier to move. But that means you have to have a standardized production process. Do you have a physics or science background at all? no but they were by far my best subjects in school which is funny because english was my worst subject but math and science were always my highest you know i got through calculus and i did eight advanced science classes in high school and stuff and then of course let's face it half of flight school is science sure so and physics yeah absolutely yeah yeah it just seems like you know a lot of what you've described so far you know has a lot of rooting in invalid physics that we know of today right at that you know 5 000 years from now we may go yeah those guys were idiots oh yeah look at superman one right i mean yeah sure but you know i mean at least from where we sit now right like the spherical orb you know being able to change directions at high speed high right um that's an interesting one because we we would love to do that but we can't right because humans just turn to mush and you know we can build a craft that'll do it but the human inside it

43:15 they're gonna die so yeah interesting i'm sorry i was just thinking the the changing directions and you know overcoming the g-force uh it makes me think of those like uap videos and stuff it Have you ever seen anything like that in your experience? No, it's not possible. We don't have that technology right now. Yeah. I thought about AI. And so AI is actually a central character in the book and why we, and it's part of the earth laws of why we didn't let it advance. And that's why we still had to have humans in these ships because it does become dangerous. And then it actually ends up saving the day too.

43:57 So another little Easter egg. It's definitely capable of both. There is no question about it. Yes, it absolutely is. Give you a great recipe for some chicken and at the same time, hack your competitor and, you know, do not good things. So, yeah. All right. I think the best part about AI in a war like this is its ability to help you control a craft and make spontaneous calculations that you humanly could not be able to do. And that's really, along with helping you build these ships, that's how I primarily use it in the book. But the laws keep it from going further than that. So it's not a threat to us. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. And you also have like a big children's book series? Yeah. So that series came second and full transparency became because of writer's block. Okay. So yeah. And I just, his name is Joey America and you know, I'm a dad and I wanted kids books that are just different and I wanted them to see cool shit that they don't get to see. And so book one, Joey America learns how to fly a helicopter. Nice. Nice. And I don't, and I treat kids like the smart people that they are. I don't talk down to them. I give them the actual vocabulary because that's what they deserve. And I also want these books to spur

45:30 learning with the parents. Right. I'm like, Oh, I didn't know that that was called anti-torque pedals. I better look this up. Why is that happening? You know? So that's just kind of how it happened. And then my two-year-old daughter, my God, she is the biggest Joey America fan there is by far. And I even made her a little cartoon of Joey. Nobody else gets to see it because it's epically horrible, but she loves it. That's all that counts. That's all that counts. Yeah. So that's where Joey came from. And then I started my travel read series. And I just, so that was the idea for that was just traveling a lot. You know, people's attention spans are down. And I want to be able to finish a book in three hours on a flight.

46:15 Yeah. And so it's a full encompassed story, 100 to 180 pages that you can finish. And you can enter the series at any point because it's all different. and it's spread across all these different genres. And I know that is the, I'm breaking the cardinal rule here, right? But I'm really not because at the center of all my books is realism. Yeah, you know, that's my genre. I mean, we kind of break the cardinal rule as well, right? I mean, as far as it goes, you know, in the podcast world, everyone asks, what's your niche? And I like we don have one You know our niche is we like to talk to interesting people that are you know experts in whatever they have either created or a field that they in et cetera And we just would like to talk to interesting people, get to know the person behind all this. And, and yeah. And so here we are. So I think it's fine personally, but I'm, yeah, I'm glad I did too, because it's not boring. I coached high school football back in the day. So I turned my story as a young high school football coach into a book because it was fun. And I had some cool stuff that happened while I was doing it. And it was a lot of leadership learning experience. I was only 25 years old at the time. And yeah, so I got to turn it into a book. Or I see all these problems with aircraft procurement within the government. So I wrote a book about it and I fictionalized it. And that's just kind of the cool thing about being your own boss when you're writing your own books is you just

47:47 write whatever the hell you want that you think is interesting that's just all i've done i also think it's interesting because we've actually had a few military former military people on the show and one thing that seems to stick out is is it seems like the majority of them uh, have moved into kind of an artistic field of one, you know, shape or form, you know, from, you know, screenplay writing to acting to authorship to, you know, you name it. And I'm like, that's just an interesting divergence there. Right. It's the experience behind it. And that's why you just get all these stories and you don't have to, cause you have that unique experience.

48:33 you don't have to research. You're writing what you know, and you got to do some things that most people didn't get to do. And so that's why it becomes interesting. So that absolutely makes sense. And then, of course, most vets are probably like me, and they just can't sit still. There you go. There you go. Yeah. What would you say was the most challenging thing to write about in your Proxima Wharf series? and on the flip side what was the most exciting and fun part to write about as in general first off it was learning my pace um because every author and i had to learn this on my own has their own pace that they write out in their books and i'm fast-paced i am absolutely um and that's also one of the reasons for the reference guides because i didn't want to slow down the story, wasting a bunch of pages, trying to explain some shit. And I'm like, just go to the back of the book and you can read about it. Right. And so, um, that was difficult and kind of learning. And you can actually see a growth in my writing from chapter one to chapter 13 and that's okay. Right.

49:43 And because it actually ended up, I didn't go back and fix a lot of it because it matched the story because in the beginning I have to get through a good 40 years pretty quickly. So, so that happened, And that was okay. And then the best part was just getting to invent these characters and then apply it with my tactical knowledge and seeing it on paper and seeing that all this stuff that I did for 20 years and I frankly did pretty well at actually translates to a really interesting story that most people don't see because you actually get to see command decisions from the upper deck all the way down to the low marine.

50:26 which a lot of people don't see. They always focus on one, right? So most of my main characters might be in charge and whatnot, but you get to see it all the way down, and you get to see the decisions on the battlefield and the decisions back at command in the course of the battle playing out and how they affect each other because that's really how combat is. And so that was really cool for me to be able to see it. And then, of course, then I realized, shit, I'm just – It's becoming pretty gory. Well, you know, I would imagine a situation like that would be insanely gory. Is there a standout protagonist in the story, or is it just kind of the human race is the protagonist?

51:14 No, there's numerous. Okay. And you don't see it all. Who's your favorite? Space itself. Well, space itself is an antagonist. Right, right. Sure. Yep. The centurions are. There's political theater within it. So there's obviously a lead one. God, you're going to make me ruin it. No, don't ruin it. So what I was looking for was the protagonist, right? Is there like a central key player that's like, I don't know, a sergeant or a one sergeant or something like that, first sergeant? you know. So there's a protagonist for the entire five book series. And it's a family.

51:59 For book one though it Lieutenant Colonel Max Hunter And so we meet him as a second lieutenant and we watch him go all the way up through Colonel through book one And he the main character of book one him and his nephew So absolutely. And that's kind of the reason why I had to be so fast in the beginning, because you're not going to understand Max unless you understand his training and what he went through. And because he was bred to be a warrior class, you get to see how that is handled through that training versus his sister was bred to be a breeder class. And I have names for them. Right. So her whole and that's where his nephew comes from.

52:40 Right. That breeder class is all about as many kids as humanly possible to repopulate. Right. So and that allows for some very interesting political tension, if you can imagine. Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine. Yeah. So, so who was, who was, uh, who was Gunny in the, in the story or do you have a gun? You have to have a gun. Yeah. Yeah. Gunny was his nephew. So, um, yeah, Derek Hunter gets promoted eventually up to, to Gunny. So you watch his growth too. And, uh, he has to get a waiver to work for his uncle to be in his uncle's command. Right. Cause I'm, you know, I'm looking at the real rules of today, but yes. so yeah you see those two and they're frankly they're pretty badass but they're but they're not superhuman does it make sense absolutely they're just the pinnacle of being up jarhead they they yeah that's that's a good yeah yeah the pinnacle of gruntness yes it is which also allows me to put a lot of you know inappropriate dad style marine jokes in the book too so which is good which is good does everyone get issued like a box of crayons or no i you know we kind of went past crayons in this point it is 5 000 years in the future we're not eating circuit boards that we know of that we know of yeah that's awesome that is awesome so how was the the

54:15 the whole publishing thing with that, like one of the things that, you know, always kind of amazes me, I guess. So, you know, I mean, having thick skin is a part of it, but you know, when you create something and then someone comes back and they redline the crap out of it and they're like, you know, circle this and change that and swipe that and tear that page out. That's gone. You know, I don't care how thick skinned you are. You're like, that's my baby. You just trash. How did, How was that? Was that hard for you to deal with? I'm okay with it. Okay. I'm absolutely okay with it. And I had about three or four friends that were reading chapter by chapter as I wrote it and helped me.

54:56 Awesome. Okay. They were Marines too. But being a logistician and Lean Six Sigma guy, you welcome failure. Because failure is a data point, right? And that made it so I could make it right the first time before it ever published. Um, I went, I first tried to do agent and I don't know if, you know, trying to find an agent is terrible. So I eventually self-published and amazing. Once I started self-publishing, I started selling. That is pretty cool. Yeah. I've heard the agent thing is really kind of a, it's like an insider's club essentially. And unless you know someone, it's almost impossible to get, you know, even a meeting with one of these people. Um, yeah, very. So you got to have the sales then to go back And so that's what I'm building now, right, is as the sales kind of continue to grow, then eventually I can go back and be like, well, you missed out on book one.

55:53 Let's talk about book two. You know. Wow. Yeah. I actually tried to write a book a long time ago, about 35 years ago. I've gotten three pages in. So any day now. We finished any day now. Squirrel. No, I just, it started off and it was flowing for me and then I hit like this wall and I was like, you know, a lot of it was my inability to properly place things in the correct timeline. If that makes sense. It's very difficult. And I had to keep going back to it. And I'm like, that doesn't work.

56:35 And I just went, all right, I'm shelving this and I'm not ready for this. I was young too, so maybe I could make a go at it now. But I don't think I have the patience or tolerance for sitting at it. Now I say that and I do that all day. So I don't know. You kind of got into my writing process. And my writing process includes using Excel. Really? So, you know, let's just take one of my travel reads. I come up, first I come up with what I want to do, what's the end goal. And then I write out subplots for each chapter first So I know where the story going And I move things around as I go But then I just then when it time to start writing then I look at chapter one I read through it and I just start hammering at the keyboard And I don't care what it comes out to at the end, right?

57:27 I just put it out there because editing takes me longer than writing every time, right? And you kind of got to go back. What is it with that? Editing always takes the longest. Like these things are like so enjoyable and we can sit here and have a great conversation. Well, it's probably because I was not very good at English. Like I said, I wasn't good at English. Man, diagram a sentence. No, this is Greek to me. I don't know what in the heck you're talking about. Well, no, it goes here. And I'm like, does it really? It doesn't sound right. Yes. I mean, didn't Einstein film math? I don't know if that's an urban myth or not. I think that's an urban myth. I think that's an urban myth. Yeah. I don't think he continued and completed his primary education, I think is, is a reality.

58:13 But I kind of highly doubt that he failed math. And if he failed any math at all, it was probably because he was, you know, well, no, he was, he was advanced enough to be doing things and they were like, no, you need to do it this way. And he was like, well, that's stupid. I'm not doing that. I already figured this out in my head 10 minutes ago. Exactly. Yeah. Like, I've got the answer right here. And they're like, no, you don't. He didn't show, you know, show your work. No, go away. Oh, man. You know, I think Isaac Newton was probably smarter than Einstein. Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, hard to say, right?

58:57 Because you're talking about a time difference that is, you know, changed, right? So our knowledge of things by the time Einstein was doing his work had increased exponentially. So you may in fact be correct, right? But, you know, Newton didn't have all of the tools available or the published works available to, you know, augment his own efforts, I guess. yeah at one point though in his early 20s just to figure out a problem he had to invent his own style of math yep yep that's you know that's when you're like oh my god right i mean he's the guy that figured out that white light is actually a mix of all these colors right and you know just the dude was unreal yeah so brilliant minds those those people truly amaze me honestly they really do. And that the most interesting thing about these extremely intelligent people is, uh, you can find like a really intelligent person, right? Professor or somewhere, and they can try and explain something to you and it just kind of right over your head. And then you take someone who is just brilliant and they can come in and explain it to you and you just go, Oh, I get it. You know, I mean, they really know it so well that they can dumb it down to just easy for anyone to uptake.

1:00:27 And that's a pretty interesting quality that I've had the opportunity to meet a few people like that in my life, which is, I appreciated it. I think Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson are perfect examples of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, both very, you know, very, very intelligent people. Isaac Asimov would be another one, right? I mean, really intelligent person known best for his writing, which, okay. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's just, it's just insane what some people can come up with and just, you know, tooling an idea around for long enough.

1:01:15 they're like ah you know what if we did this this and that and boom you know new scientific theory and it's like whoa you know yeah but it's amazing where intelligence can be in all sorts of different places too like it's it's not just science you know there's that kind in every field and that's well there's there's farmers we have a we have a supercomputer there's farmers out there that are like that you know what i mean they're like you know they walk up to a broken piece of equipment i know what the problem is and they go straight to it and they fix it and they're like yep you know or you're doing that wrong if you do it this way it'll be easier and you're like that doesn't make any sense that seems like it's a lot harder and then you do it and you're like okay i was wrong you know that's what 30 years of experience gives you right there yeah lx man you gotta tell me about this car while he's figuring this out so what'd you do no it's just a notchback mustang that i crammed a big block into yeah but it it was kind of a project that i mean it kind of took off but not not really did you twist the frame no it was just a not that big no it was basically just a takeout motor out of an old lincoln and then uh okay it built a bigger motor that I intended to put in there, like a 512 stroker motor, based on a 460 big block, but it never really came to fruition the whole way.

1:02:40 I mean, it had a lot of torque, but the brakes were still stock, so that was the dangerous part. So you had to replace the gearbox and the transmission too then, right? Yeah, it just had a C6 behind it. Okay. And that handled all that power just fine? Yeah, it was just a stock drivetrain out of an old Lincoln. Oh, okay. So you did the whole thing. So it was, I don't think that makes sense. But you weighted down the car with a new frame that was much smaller and lighter then by using the Mustang. Oh, it added a lot of weight to it. Yes. Oh, it added. Oh, okay. No, no, no. I'm saying versus the Lincoln frame and body versus the Mustang frame and body, the Mustang is going to be much lighter.

1:03:24 Oh, just the engine and transmission, you know, different drive shaft. it fit in there barely must have been a pain in the ass to work on too then yeah a little bit a little bit not as bad as my father-in-law's old Mustang he had an old 428 Super Cobra Jet Mach 1 that thing like you had to drop the engine out to change the spark plugs on that thing it was that that tight kind of crazy Havoc you back man nope stop using the air force signals i don't understand those ones he can hear us so that's good i don't know als so lx those are all nintendo games behind you yeah what do you got like almost every one of them or what almost really yeah well i i started buying them like back in the early 2000s because i mean i had a nintendo when i was a kid i probably had you know like 15 games Then you know I would buy them at flea markets and yard sales for you know like a quarter a piece or a dollar a piece.

1:04:51 And I'm like, I want to get the ones I never had. Give them a try. Most of them are garbage. Yeah. Especially the expensive, rare ones these days. They're the worst ones, believe it or not, for the most part. Well, it was like E.T. for Atari, right? the flashing light i'm going to exit and i'm not sure if this will drop the session oh okay i see hey that was just the two of us so it didn't kill us that's good blast i it happened one other time and he dropped off and it uh that it dropped everybody but how long have you two been doing this uh i think we're going on three years yeah i i had a game podcast it was just audio only and it was a game that actually he and i met playing it was stupid game but anyway i'm glad for the people that it brought into my life but yeah it was horrible a horrible horrible waste of time and energy and and funds but what was the game you mind telling me war dragons it was a phone game it was like a literal mobile game all right can you guys hear me all right yeah yeah we can hear you now hey you're on the right side you need to be in the middle yeah you know what i'll be wherever i am i guess we were talking about the dating app you were using called war dragons they got you two hooked up yeah

1:06:24 you'd be amazed how many people actually used it as such there were quite a few relationships that came of that game people even got married right i don't know how successful and divorced subsequently thereafter yeah like i said because once they finally met in person that's pretty much how it worked yeah yeah it's crazy yeah sorry about that i don't know what happened i'll bet when it comes down to the end it all going to be there And I going to be like but it all How was that again You you can hear us what that it going to keep all i never thought about that yeah i could hear you guys talking through the whole thing oh all right yeah i and i i could you know hear myself through my monitor but i could not hear you know you couldn't you couldn't hear me so good chance it'll keep all of that. But I guess at this point, maybe it's a good place to wrap things up and start going through that piece. And I apologize for this. This is the most technical issues we've ever had on this platform, which is kind of annoying. Anyway, so one of the questions we like to ask all of our guests is throughout our lives, there's a figure that has a lasting and massive impact on our lives. And this could be like a sixth grade science teacher, an author, historical figure, heck, it could be mom. And we like to ask our guests to give a shout out, kind of give back to,

1:07:55 you know, someone in their life. Who would you like to give that shout out to? Well, you know, parents is kind of cliche because that's an obvious thing for me. But so Lieutenant Colonel Alan Salter. And towards the end of my Marine Corps career, I was going through a lot of personal stuff and he was the biggest supporter I had outside of family and he helped me through it and um ironically enough he is still the commissioner of the same fantasy football league that we've been playing for now 15 years so I still talk to the man on a regular basis but uh yeah he did a lot for me and uh I can't I can't imagine if he wasn't there at that time so it's out to him that's awesome that's that's a good one that's that's a first for us too was was he a direct line commanding officer or yeah he was my co okay oh my yeah so i was in um the headquarters uh support squadron of the second marine aircraft wing long story short he was my administrative co and then i had a another it's it's weird when you're at the command level you have two different bosses So he was one of them The other boss happened to be this commanding general of the entire MAW So entire Marine Aircraft Wing.

1:09:19 So, you know, yeah. Well, very cool. So what do you got going on? What are you working on next? Where can people find you? What are your socials? Where can people buy your books? What's the best place for people to buy your books? I made it as simple as possible. It's just my website, bartonfortexas.com, and all my social media is on there and my bills that I wrote. So I always challenge people, go read my bills because unlike other politicians, I actually wrote them out. So I can be challenged and you can find the holes and we can fix it before I go. And then I also have a dedicated page for all the books and it's all connected. What I'm working on now author-wise is I'm slowing down.

1:10:01 I'm still building the bones of book two. So what I've been doing instead has been translating a couple of books to Spanish. Get those out there. So my spouse is a naturalized Venezuelan and mama lives with us. And yeah, my daughter is going to know more Spanish than me in about a year. So yeah, that's kind of, you know, being when you're in South Texas, it's kind of a good thing to put your books out in Spanish as well, I would say. Oh, yeah. Well, I think a lot of the country, it's probably a pretty decent idea. You know, that's pretty cool. All right. Well, you know, hey, this has been wonderful. And thank you very much for giving us some of your time.

1:10:44 It's our most precious commodity. And thank you for giving us some of your time as well. You know where you can find us. We're everywhere. I mean, literally everywhere. YouTube, X, Telegram, you name it. and literally everywhere podcasts play. So you can also check us out on our website, spacetomatoes.net, and yeah, leave us a comment. We'll reply. We always do. And remember, wherever you are, whenever you're watching this, have an amazing day. Thanks for stopping by, Keith. See you, everybody.

1:11:24 Thank you, gentlemen. Really appreciate it.