Hey, everybody. Welcome to My Guest Tonight. I've got a great guest
joining me tonight. Author of unflappable, soaring beyond
A diagnosis we have. We're going to be talking surviving cancer,
becoming an author, paragliding. He learned to
fly through the clouds and the
pain Turn his struggle
astray Sunshine through the
rain from scattering
dreams to stories on the
page
Jonathan Hunter takes the
stage. It's My
Guest Tonight with Jeffrey.
A voice unflappable
strong and resilient Strong
lifting heart sky high
Tonight we learn what it means
to fly.
I even left the crowd cheering in there
because I would imagine, like, if I'm sailing over, like, cornfields at
sunset, like, I want to be amped and pumped. I want to. There's a
calmness to paragliding, but I also want to have some
adrenaline, I think, you know, so that I'm fully paying attention to
everything around me. Yeah. When, you know, when you're new at it,
there is no lack of adrenaline,
I'll tell you that. Yeah. Oh, thank you for the intro. Love
it. You're welcome. I'll officially welcome Jonathan Hutton to My Guest
Tonight. We're going to go back, we're going to tell some stories, see the
bits and pieces of the history that makes Jonathan who he is Today. We're going
to talk about the new book. He's got a little bit of announcement he just
shared with me right before we went live. He's got something to show us.
Jonathan, let's go back, you know, before
authoring and paragliding and tell us a little bit about, you know, where you came
from and. And a little bit about your childhood. Where were you born in?
Yeah, well, I was raised
as an army kid. Right. So
when I was a young adult and people would ask me
that question, like, where are you from? Where are you from? I never
really had a good answer because I was from a lot of places
from the time that I was born. I was
born in Savannah, Georgian in that area. And
we moved in the military all over the country, and
we were abroad for a little while. And then I
continued doing that after my dad
retired, got out of the army. And then by that time I was
off to college and kept moving.
Eventually, I returned to
a place that I had discovered
a semester away in school, which was
Pacific Northwest. Something
about this part of the country stuck with me, and
I decided to return here. And I've
never left. So home for me now is
Olympia, Washington. I
write about kind of that whole origin story and
the first couple of chapters
in the book so, yeah, that's a little bit about
where I'm from, how I got here
to Olympia. And then, you know, there's
the story of how I got into
paraclining. I mean, I totally get the area that you're
talking about. I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is a mid Atlantic.
We're probably about the same latitude. I used to live in Buffalo.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, probably about the same
latitude, probably same temperature. Maybe not the same amount of precipitation.
Yeah, we don't really get snow here. So
I'm kind of. Right. Situated near the Puget
Sound. Right. So we're at
the same latitude, but our winters
here, very, very mild. So that's
definitely a big difference. For my years I spent in the northeast
and, like, western upstate New York.
Yeah, Buffalo can be brutal. But that's. That's one of the things about these
areas. We do get to experience four seasons.
Even though yours is a little bit more mild, because you probably have those. The
South Pacific, west winds coming up the coast there, but
you still get four distinct time. And that's. That is something that is
unique to the northern part of the United States, is
those seasons and those changes make a big difference in the quality of your life.
They do, absolutely. So you returned there. What
were you studying in college? I studied business
and English. I. I didn't really have a
clear idea of what I wanted to do
beyond I want to make more money than my dad made.
And so I spent a little bit of time working
in banking, and I realized I
hated it, and I was miserable. And I'm like, well, what the
hell do I do with my life now? And right around that
time was when the Great Recession happened.
And so I kind of flown in and did a lot of different things for
a number of years. Kind of in that period of
time was when I first tried
skydiving, which is not paragliding.
But I realized I absolutely
loved it. The experience. You know, I'm doing a tandem skydive
where you jump with an instructor. Just a ton of
fun. I went with a friend of mine, and as soon as
we're on the ground, he's like, we have to do this again. We have to
learn this. And so that kind of started a
whole side quest, I guess you could say.
At that point in my life, I didn't have
the money to afford to continue to learn on skydive.
And I realized that the thing that I really loved was not
falling in free fall, it was flying the
parachute. And then I was like, is there a way to do
that it's like fly and soar.
And in fact, there is. It's called paragliding.
And so I Learned about that
13, 14 years ago. And I was like, I'm going to learn
how to do that sometime. I kind of put a pin in that in my
mind and. Yeah. And that was kind
of the origin of something that is
a big theme in the book, which is kind of that dream
of learning how to fly, being in the sky,
soaring, picking that back up and actually
doing it. Was the first time you went skydiving? Some people have
a story like it was my 25th birthday, so I was
going to do this, or a friend dragged me along. Was
there a specific reason the two of you decided to go that
day? No, I don't think so. I think it
was one of those things where we had a free
day on the weekend. We weren't doing anything. And my
bunny, Chad, who's one of those very
charismatic people who can convince just about
anything, anyone to do anything, he was like, do you want to do?
And I was like, yes. So I.
Yeah, I was all in kind of right at the beginning. And then I was
really convinced that it was something I wanted to do more of once
I tried it for the first time. And when you
landed finally, that. What's that feeling like the.
The first time you go through the process of leaving a plane,
free falling, opening the chute, and coasting to the
ground, how does that feel when you first get
to the ground? Yeah, well, I'll answer that in two
ways. When you first.
First ever do something like that, especially
skydiving, but to a lesser extent, paraclining.
A lot of people when they have that first experience, and
for most people, it's the first and only experience
you're tethered to an instructor,
but what tends to happen is it's just
overwhelm and
your adrenaline and your energy is so high,
you don't really get to savor it in the same way as
when you become a student and you do it
repeatedly. So,
you know, I think the experience for me that was
really life changing was
when I was learning how to skydive as a student.
You know, you jump, there's an instructor over here, an instructor over
here, but you all have your own parachutes that you're gonna throw.
And just that experience of
all the nervousness leaving the plane and then
you're. It's so loud in freefall, it's
just wind against your ears. You can't hear anything.
And then you throw in the parachute and then in a.
What feels like a split second, you're no longer
falling, you're flying, and it's quiet.
That was just otherworldly for me.
And I knew that there was something special there. And then just
kind of boating around in the sky under a
canopy really unlock something for
me. And I was just. I was convinced I was going to do it
again. How long does it take to be a student before you
can, you know, go on with your own shoot, even though there's instructors with
you? What kind of regimen is that kind of training?
You know, for people who are really
brave, you can. You can have that sort of jump,
be your first jump, but it requires dedicating
like a day, a half a day to
training on the ground and practicing
maneuvers and learning about reserve parachutes
and automatic activation devices and what
to do in certain sorts of events if the main chute
doesn't open or opens all twisted up.
So. Yeah, but for most people, what they do is
they'll go into a tantrum or two, and then they're like, oh, I want
to do this. And then they enroll in a training program. And
then you have to, I think for.
It's called AFF, Accelerated Free Fall.
It's like 25 jumps or something like
that. And you have to demonstrate certain skills, and then you get
your kind of beginner license. Yeah.
And while you're studying
parachuting and you're kind of. Your mind is in the future thinking
about paragliding, there's some changes in your
health that start to happen, and maybe even before you went
parachuting the first time. But there's some history
here with your health that I think is important to the story and especially
the book that we're going to talk about. Yeah, it is. And
in terms of timeline, you know,
13 some years ago, dabbled in
skydiving. And then it was more like a little
over 10 years ago that I got a very
unexpected diagnosis of
really rare nasopharyngeal
cancer. So here, for people who are like
nasopherouette, your nasopharynx
is like this area behind
your nose and above your jaw, like
that general area. It's all kind of connected. And
you'll hear people say, like, nasal,
sinonasal, nasal, all kind of referring to the same
general area. But, yeah, I
had. I didn't have any
symptoms beyond. I seem to have
allergies, like runny nose type
allergies that never went away. And it was just annoying. And
eventually I
went to see an allergist he's like, oh, you're just allergic to grass. Like,
get some allergy shots I can flick out here.
And I was like, it doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem right.
And I eventually
saw an ent. An ear, nose
and throat doctor.
And he, as they do, looked up
my nose. I was like, huh, there's a
mass there. And, yeah, that kind of
began the whole journey, which
has been, you know, 10 some years over.
Over the course of, like, all of my 30s,
dealing with this really kind of persistent
cancer. So, yeah, that kind of got
in the way of the paragliding thing.
Well, that's good that you. You knew enough to, like,
something feels off here, Something feels wrong. You know, you have symptoms
other than what look like or represented, like allergies.
You're like, I've had allergies. I've. I've been allergic to things before.
This feels different. And you, you went out and got that second opinion, even
though there wasn't like pain or discomfort or distortion of the
face. And, and you on your own did that. And, you know,
you got the right diagnosis and you're able to get treatment or start treatment at
that time. And tell us a
little about that journey, because getting that news isn't easy
the first time. And there's been subsequent times.
Yeah, yeah,
the timing was just awful. I had
just started a new job
and
I was like, well, I don't. I
have not been here long enough to
have any, like, protection for
my job. Like, what am I going to do?
Thankfully, that worked itself out.
I still work for the same company. That's
amazing. That's great. Yeah, they've really taken care of me in a
lot of ways in my cancer journey and my
career journey. Very much
have a lot of parallels. But
yeah, it was. The timing was bad. I was like,
well, I'm newly 30
and I have this rare cancer that no one has
heard of. I've never heard of anyone who has
nose cancer, let alone rare nose
cancer. And so I'm like, well,
this might be the end. I've had some fun in my life.
That's fine. I'm not going to stress about it. And
then, yeah, I kind of jumped into
surgery and treatment and
spent a lot of time in Seattle. And
that kind of started a whole other
journey, which I talk pretty
extensively about in the kind of
middle section, first half of the book.
In some ways, sometimes accepting that is liberating.
Like, this is the journey that I'm going to be on. I'm lucky. I'm
Here today, you know, I need to celebrate every
moment of my life. And that's kind of your philosophy too. Like your every
day is a great day to be alive. Like, I think I
read a little something, if I could pull it up in my
notes real quick. The presence and gratitude. You believe
in the ability that the present is a gift, especially
given the limited amount of time that we have, the four, four
thousand weeks. And that's something that, you know.
Yes, you have this diagnosis and you're going through these treatments, but
may have given you new perspective or. Or a whole new
perspective on life. Yeah, yeah, I think it
definitely did. And one of the
really valuable things that I learned
kind of reflecting back and one of the
reasons I think I wrote the book and decided
to start waking up at 4am
and trying to
block out enough time and space in my life
to take on a project like this was I wanted
to understand what kind of the
cumulative effect of
those 10 years, how I had
changed. I
understood really
acutely the physical things that had changed.
And I talk about that quite a bit in the book. But
I hadn't really spent a lot of time sitting and
reflecting on how I had changed as
a person. What were some of the
things I had learned from the experiences
of going through really awful treatment and
recovering, having really
serious reconstructive surgery
following some pretty awful side
effects from radiation, how that had kind of
changed my life. And so
the book was really instructive in that I had to
kind of unpack that for the reader, but
also for myself. So yeah,
but I do have a
more articulate way of conveying
really what I've learned. And
I feel really lucky to have managed to
scrape together the time and resources and
the right people who kind of pointed me in the
direction of, no, yeah, you should actually do that.
And in the middle of all this, you had your eyes on the future.
Eyes on paragliding is during these treatments
or in between where you're like, now I'm going full
speed ahead in the paragliding. Yeah, actually.
So it was about two and a half, three
years ago, I had another
recurrence and more surgery.
This was kind of after
housing two really kind of life
altering surgeries
to repair damage to my skull and my
face that radiation had caused.
And then I get cancer again. And
I told my wife, I was like, you know what, I can't
wait anymore. After we get through this neck
surgery and I'm recovering, I'm making
this happen. And yeah,
we did. I went
part time at work And I was
fortunate enough to be put in
touch with some instructors in the Seattle
area who are now like good friends of mine,
people I talk about in the book. And I
lived up there in Issaquah part of the week and
just trained and trained and trained
during that summer. And I had
a lot of fun. It was more challenging than I expected,
but it's really been
massively rewarding. And
yeah, I'm. The people
I've met in the community of folks that do
this, the places I've traveled to and the
perspectives, the things, the way that I've
seen the world very literally
from thousands of feet above the ground, it's just
has really shifted how I
think about life and my
priorities. And it's been really, really
a gift, like you said. Is there, is
there a ceiling cap of how high you can go or when you're up there?
It's got to be meditative, just floating with the clouds.
How high up do you go? And the higher you go, does it clear your
mind more? Well, so
you start getting into the things
that airplanes have to deal with, like
airspace restrictions.
But yeah, there is a ceiling, which is a function
of the area you're flying into airspace. But
one of the things I didn't really know heading into
learning was there's kind of a whole other
discipline in
flying, which is finding
the air that's rising and putting yourself in it and
going up. That's how you have longer
flights, is how you do something I talk about in the book,
which is called cross country flying.
That can be depending on where you are, depending on the air
actually can be rough at times. Like
you're in active air moving up.
There are moments where it's still and quiet and you're just kind of soaring.
But there are moments where you're
climbing and you're moving. You're kind of getting tossed around
a little bit.
It can be in its own way meditative because
you are so focused on what you're doing.
You are not thinking about all of the things on
your calendar that you're going to have to do tomorrow. You're not thinking about
work projects, you're not thinking
about anything else but being
in that rising air, noticing
things to help you stay in that lift and then just
going up and up and up and up.
Yeah,
the time center, really
calm. Or when you're kind of flying in
smooth air, just kind of moving around. And
we have a number of terms for
what that's like in paraclining.
Yeah, you, you really, in some of Those
moments. I'll tell you
about one. You know, I was in Chelan, and
there is amazing flying site
that situated something like
3,4000ft above the
ground level. And you launch
off and you can soar above the Columbia
river and see this
whole valley from the sky above.
And it really gives you a new appreciation
for this beautiful place that we live in
and the birds and how
they soar through the air.
I'm absolutely convinced, having done this for a while, that
everyone needs some sort of endeavor that
takes you outside of yourself and makes
you feel awe and
deep appreciation for
the world around you. That kind of
shifts your focus from the mundane things in life
to something more profound.
I think increasingly, people and
their fixation on these things do less and less than
that. So, yeah, it's important to
find ways, flying or otherwise, where
you're outside and you're appreciating experiences
that are kind of holy,
physical and natural and help you appreciate
your surroundings and your humanity and your place in
the. In the planet we live on. I see
a lot of fights. I am fascinated by paragliding, and I hope once I heal
up to it. And we should also stress that just because you
can buy these on Amazon doesn't mean somebody should just start doing
paragliding. You spent a lot of time studying
and researching and being instructed. But also a lot
of the videos I watched, paragliding tends to be either early
morning or late in the afternoon. Is the atmosphere actually
calmer or is that just when people's schedules line up with when they
can paraglide? That's. Wow. That's a really.
That's an observation that not a lot of people who've never done
this would make.
Yeah. So earlier in the morning,
later in the evening, depending on where you
are in general. Yeah, the
air is going to be calmer. And that's a function of
the sun. Right. So the sun heats up the
ground and things on the ground. And then
what will happen is that warm air
sucks in other air and that turns into. And
mind you, I'm not a weather person. There's people in our sport really good
at weather. That's not me. But basically
very simple, very simply, that is how a thermal
forms. It will start on the
ground with area
that gets warm, air comes to, it
turns into a thermal. And that thermal, as warm
air does, rises. This is also how clouds
form. Right. So warm air rises and then condenses into
cloud. So, yeah, a lot
of that activity where you have
the biggest, strongest thermals
is in the middle of the day. So beginners
or people looking to only have very smooth
flights, again depending on the site place you're at,
only really fly in the, you know, the calmer conditions in the
morning are later in the afternoon or evening. Yeah,
that's probably not at like 2:30 in
Florida, you know, because every day in Florida you have like a 3pm
thunderstorm. It would be terrible to fly around. Oh, we don't. Yeah, we
don't fly in thunderstorm. Yeah, that's a horrible idea.
Horrible idea. There are some, I know there are some videos
out there on the Internet of people like getting sucked into
cloud to like 18,000ft and barely
surviving. That is not the sort of thing you ever want
to be doing. When you train,
you learn to be very attentive to the wind
and the weather and the clouds and what those things are
doing. So you don't go out flying when
conditions can change and you can very easily get injured
or killed. Yeah, it's like a metaphor
for life. Early in the morning's calm, it gets crazier. Middle,
middle. And then towards the end it kind of fades out again and.
Yeah, and you shared with us, share with me right before
we went recording that you did receive something in the mail today.
We mentioned the title already. Unflappable, Soaring beyond the
Diagnosis. But you only ever had a digital copy up until
today. For those of you watching now, you're going to see
maybe the first time on video. I don't know. Let me, let me turn the
blurriness off on here. Yeah.
So this is an advanced
proof copy of my book, which I'm really excited
about. You know,
I, so I worked with a designer
on the confirm. I did all of the layout
in the interior of the book.
I, I gotta tell you, I was just over the moon
to see it in physical form and hold it
and I, I
knew roughly how thick like these.
The tactile part of it. Really
important to me, you know,
books that there's, there's kind of a whole, for
some folks, there's a whole stigma about like self publishing a
book and it's somehow lower quality.
There's a lot of book snobs in the world.
But I will tell you, wow, I'm just so
delighted at the fit and finish kind of the fact
that the 200 page count
really looks nice in this form.
Yeah, I'm just like nerding out on
having a physical book. And I wrote it. Yeah.
It wasn't just the time it took to write it, it was the time it
took to live it.
Do you have a release date for the hard copy or can people get
the digital copy now? So I am going to
have a pre order that
opens in early September.
There are still some unknowns about when
the final print copy will be
available for sale, but the
likely release date is late
September. But yeah, early
September pre order. I have some
really special swag
that will be available only in the pre order.
If folks are interested in doing that and
getting some of these special items that are exclusive,
you can follow me on some stack because they're exclusive for
my subscribers over there.
Yeah. So pre order early
September. I'll have all of the details
and dates announced over on
my sub stack. And yeah, really excited.
At launch ebook, print
and audio will be available for
folks. I'm really excited about the audio.
A friend of mine who's also a pilot who has a
much better voice acting
voice than I do is narrating it.
So yeah, I'm excited to share it with people
and it's been with some advanced
readers and the feedback has been really encouraging
and uplifting. So pun intended.
Yeah. And for those of you listening, it's Unflappable blog. You can go
over, subscribe, get on the list, make sure you get all the
updates for when the book is ready. Late September, October, release
date possibly. Yeah. .unflappable.blog
Yeah. And also mention I don't know if you have any
listeners in the Seattle Olympia
area, but I will be doing some in person
events as well. So if you're here in Washington
and would like to come attend to reading, I'll be announcing those
details on my blog as well.
Yeah. Awesome. Jonathan, this has been so much
fun. Let's get ready to rock out.
The strains. Sunshine through the
Rain from sc
it's my yesterday with
Jeffrey. A
voice unflappable. Strong
and resilient. Strong and
brilliant. Lifting heart
sky high. Tonight we learn
what it means to fly.
Good night.
Oh, I had a. What's the ground speed of paragliding? I've
seen some videos where, you know, they come down maybe over a farm and
they're moving at quite a clip. Like what's the speed that
you're actually going? I don't think it's just gliding. You can. You can actually
make some distance. So when you have
a speed that we refer to
as trim speed, which basically means
if you're flying in perfectly calm air with no
wind behind you or so no
tailwind or headwind, that's your
trim speed that really varies a lot
on the glider. The type of glider I fly,
which is more for, you know, an intermediate pilot.
We'll do something like 24 to
28 miles an hour in, like, still air.
Yeah. But most of the time, there is some wind.
You want some wind? Because that's where the fun happens.