510: The Ego Trap In Leadership. The Need To Lead Pt.2. With Dave Berke.

>Join Jocko Underground< https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe The second part to The Need to Lead, by Dave Berke. How ego quietly sabotages leaders and teams. When we see others’ failures as our wins, frustration and judgment take over. We talk about how that mindset damages trust, limits growth, and creates division. The conversation shows how shifting from ego to ownership not only builds stronger relationships but also unlocks the real strength of leadership—helping others rise instead of hoping they fall. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 510 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us once again is Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. We are continuing the conversation about Dave's new book. The book is called The Need to Lead. It is available for preorder right now. Release date is October 21st, 2025. 10 years after the book Extreme Ownership came out. It also comes out on the same day I left the city of Ramadi with Leif Bab and Seth Stone on our way home and the rest of the guys that remain there. So it's kind of a interesting date for me, a meaningful date for me.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  So if you're listening to this, we started the conversation about this book on the last podcast, number 509. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, go back and listen to it. And on that first podcast that we did, number 509, we cover the first half of the book. And the first half of the book is called The Mindset of a Good Leader.

• 1:08Jocko Willink?

  And that's the first five chapters. And now we're going to look at the second half of the book, the second five chapters, which is called The Actions of a Good Leader. So we have the mindset and we have the actions. And Dave Berke, Top Gun pilot, F-18 pilot, F-16 pilot, F-22 pilot, F-35 pilot. And you and I were talking, you flew the Raptor. You were up there for like three years flying the Raptor? Yeah, more than that.

• 1:48Jocko Willink?

  And a flight in the Raptor for, let's say, how long is a flight in the Raptor? Hour and a half, hour, hour and a half. How much does that cost?

• 2:00Dave Berke?

  It, I don't know the number, but it costs the taxpayers this amount of money.

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  How much, I mean, how much gas do you burn?

• 2:06Dave Berke?

  Uh, you probably, you know, depending on it, if you refuel between eighteen and thirty thousand pounds of gas, depending on what you're doing.

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  So this is, you're talking fifty grand an hour, something like that?

• 2:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah, sounds about right.

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  How many sorties would you fly a day while you were up there?

• 2:26Dave Berke?

  Usually up at Nellis, we, I do one, one a day, yeah. Top Gun, you're flying at a different pace, but up in Fallon, or up, up at Nellis with the Raptor, one, one flight a day was pretty common.

• 2:36Jocko Willink?

  How many did you fly at Top Gun?

• 2:37Dave Berke?

  A lot. There are times-

• 2:38Jocko Willink?

  Four hours a day, five hours a day?

• 2:41Dave Berke?

  Hours is not necessarily the best way to measure it, but I would routinely at Top Gun fly two, sometimes three a day, and you could burn a tank of gas at Top Gun in like thirty minutes.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're putting the pedals to the metal?

• 2:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah, you're just firewalling it the whole time.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  What about off of a carrier over Afghanistan? How long are those flights?

• 2:57Dave Berke?

  Those are seven, six, seven hour flights, are long flights.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  How many times you have to refuel in six hours or seven hours?

• 3:04Dave Berke?

  Four or five times.

• 3:07Jocko Willink?

  Those things just suck gas.

• 3:08Dave Berke?

  They're just, they're burning gas. Once you get up to altitude, they're much better, but it, it takes a lot of gas, especially a heavy combat loaded jet to get it off the carrier up to altitude, takes a lot of gas.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  Don't you refuel as soon as you get off the carrier?

• 3:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah, traditionally, like the carrier will, will give you some gas to get you. Afghanistan was unique, cause it took a whole hour flying over land, over Pakistan to get into Afghanistan. It's a landlocked country, it's way off the coast. So flying off carriers, or really from anywhere, you had a long way to go, so you had to get gas from the ship before you left.

• 3:38Jocko Willink?

  So you get gas from the ship, what, what does that mean?

• 3:42Dave Berke?

  Uh, back then it was S3s, now it's F18s, but a jet that's configured to, to take off, has a bunch of tanks of gas, a, a pod or probe, the, a basket you could plug into, and they would just transfer, so you take off, you top off to whatever you burn, from starting up to getting up to altitude, whatever that amount was you burned, you'd get that in the front.

• 4:02Jocko Willink?

  You'd get refueled by another F18 sometimes?

• 4:04Dave Berke?

  That's, that's how the carrier does it. An F18 will take off with, they call it five wet, five tanks of gas, twenty-four hundred pounds each, so. 12, 13,000 pounds. You take off, let's say you burned 4,000 pounds from your total internal fuel. You get, you fill that back up, up at altitude, which is nice because it, an airplane's much more efficient up there than you could go for a long time.

• 4:25Jocko Willink?

  God, the logistics is just insane.

• 4:28Dave Berke?

  Carrier aviation, there's, there's nothing like it. Nothing like it in the world.

• 4:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, uh, there's that, see, the Navy SEAL Museum has opened up down in downtown San Diego. So it's right by the USS Midway. So if you're interested in carrier aviation, you, you have to go to the midway. You have to go to the midway. It's so, it's so awesome to see. And after the last time we talked, I was, got a, I got a little bit sucked down into the YouTube al- algorithm, watching some stuff and watching some carrier landings and whatnot. And it gets, yeah, it's, it's just a bizarre world. It's like bizarre that we even thought of all this.

• 5:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Jocko Willink?

  But here we are.

• 5:10Dave Berke?

  Here we are.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. All right. Well, let's get into the book then. Um, the, the book, obviously, it's called The Need to Lead. A Top Gun Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge. Written by Dave Berke. Forward by Jocko Wilk. Check. A lot of people think that's the best part of the book.

• 5:34Dave Berke?

  People are saying.

• 5:35Jocko Willink?

  A lot of people are saying the reviews are incredible about the forward.

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  All right. Part two, Actions of a Good Leader. The, this is chapter six, is called Take Ownership. Ramadi, Iraq, barracks room, June 20th, 2006. This was the second interruption in as many hours. A young Marine stood in my room. He'd entered without knocking, his face telegraphing concern. Sir, there's a call for you in the radio room. I think it's important. A wave of adrenaline rushed through my body. In the silence, I could hear the click of my laptop closing. After a deep breath, I followed him out the door to the operations room.

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  And there's a, I'm gonna refer to a call sign here, which is, the call sign is simple. This is another Marine captain that was in charge of an FCT, which is a firepower control team. These are, um, this is your guys, right?

• 6:37Dave Berke?

  This is my guys.

• 6:39Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, "On this trip to the radio room, my heart rate was elevated and I had to consciously elongate each breath. Whatever was on the other end of that call, I had to be calm. My emotions were contagious and right then, the only thing I could do was not let them affect my team." "Simple, Chip here. What's up?" I asked. My chest tightened during the second it took for a response. "Chris was hit. We're loading him in a Bradley and headed back. We're going straight to Charlie Medical," Simple replied. Simple's voice remained steady even as he relayed this distressing news about Chris Leon, the model Marine who was his radio operator. This was why Simple was so effective

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  in combat. Emotion doesn't help. He was problem solving, he was in problem solving mode, and this was the guy you wanted in your foxhole, rock steady in every situation. "Roger, I'm heading there now. I'll keep a radio with me so you can update me on the way," I said. I jumped into the pickup truck I had at my disposal to get around base and headed to the medical facility just a few hundred yards away. During the short drive, I got a follow-up call. "Chip, he's in route. The Army has him. He's stable and breathing. We're about five minutes out."

• 7:56Jocko Willink?

  I exhaled for what felt like the first time since hearing the news. Simple was preparing the medical team for what to expect and knew I would relay everything he told me.

• 8:07Jocko Willink?

  Mere minutes after I got there and coordinated with the medical team, an Army Humvee burst through the vehicle entrance, followed by the massive Bradley, its diesel engine announcing its arrival with raucous authority. Doc and I watched the ramp drop from the back. As planned, Doc climbed into the troop compartment to help lift the stretcher. Two soldiers already had control of the bottom handles, so I waited at the base of the ramp for them to pass with Chris. I would grab Chris's hand, I thought, and walk with him to one of the operating tables inside the facility.

• 8:45Jocko Willink?

  As the stretcher pass, passed, I saw Chris's face. His head wrapped in field gauze, a plastic mask covering his face. His helmet and body armor had been removed. The entrance wound from the bullet was visible above his left temple.

• 9:06Jocko Willink?

  There was no need to reach for his hand.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  So you go from the terror of one of your guys being wounded. You have no idea how bad it is. As a leader and a military commander, you assume the worst.

• 9:35Jocko Willink?

  And then you get a radio, radio call

• 9:38Jocko Willink?

  that he's stable. And I can't even imagine the um complete ecstatic emotions that ran through your body then you're expecting like, hey, it like the world between, you know, someone being badly wounded and someone being dead, that's, that's everything. And then you see him and you realize he's, he's dead.

• 10:06Jocko Willink?

  I had um, there were some SEALs overseas and I was traded at the time and there was a SEAL that had been really bad, badly wounded and I got a call from the guys overseas. And

• 10:22Jocko Willink?

  you know, they were telling me, they were kind of, they were very, very emotional. And telling me about the guy's condition. And you know, I said, like, is he going to live? And they were like, yeah. And I said,

• 10:44Jocko Willink?

  and nothing else matters.

• 10:52Jocko Willink?

  Um, first, you know, it's interesting. I always refer to the fact that Mark Lee was the first SEAL killed in Iraq and Corporal Chris Leon, the first Anglico Marine killed in Iraq. And Anglico had been there just as long as SEALs have been there, you know, since the beginning, 2003. What's going through your mind at this juncture?

• 11:18Dave Berke?

  I mean, I think you you captured it pretty well. You know, the Marine that came in, obviously, the story is much longer than the book. I cover all the detail, but we always had someone manning the radio in case something was going on. I had a team out in the in sector, Adam and his guys were there. So when the Marine came in, he'd been in, I'd been interrupted 1000 times in that deployment. It was fine. Hey, sir, you know, this, whatever, just updates. I knew, I just knew the every way he cared himself, I knew it was a problem. I didn't know the extent of it, but I could just tell by the way he cared himself, the look on his face. He's like, hey, sir, you need to take this call. And I just, I just had a feeling that he this is going to be really bad. And when I talked to on the radio and simple was bringing his team in,

• 12:05Dave Berke?

  it was the first time I I was able to piece it like I knew it was bad, but I knew he'd been shot. And, you know, it's just, it's, that's always bad. And it's probably Jocko, it's, I've got this in my head, you could probably picture the route. It's, it's, I don't know, a three minute drive from my where I lived to where the hospital was, Charlie Med. In that three minute drive, I get the call. We're on our way in. He's stable and he's breathing. And I'm like, I kind of have the same reaction. I was like, oh, okay. Well, we're going to figure this out. But but the worst case scenario, I now don't have to consider what I'm going to how I'm going to react to the worst case scenario because he's okay. And obviously,

• 12:52Dave Berke?

  When you see, when you see that, like, I just, I could tell, I just, you could, I just knew he was dead.

• 13:01Dave Berke?

  It was, it was much more shocking, I think, to me. Had I not gotten the call, I was kind of prepared for that, but there was this moment of like relief and I was sitting there with relief, like, I was, I don't know if it sounds weird to say this, I was excited to see him. Because I was looking forward to being a comfort to him. Like, I was excited for him to see me, to be like, hey dude, we got you. And I had built that scenario in my head, like, I'm gonna hold his hand and Doc and I had kind of rehearsed like, okay, you go to the top of the stretcher, I'll be down here, I'm gonna talk to him. Like, it was all built on putting him at ease, making him calm, and giving him a friendly face of like, hey dude, we got you.

• 13:39Dave Berke?

  And so when he came down the ramp and I saw what it looked like and what he looked like, I kind of, I mean, I just, I just froze there and I do remember this feeling of, of just a combination, I guess you'd describe it of like shock and denial, like, it, uh, I think the reality of that war, I was probably always operating at like 98% reality. And the piece that I wasn't operating in was like, this was gonna ever happen to me. You and I had been to Charlie Med, I don't know how many times. I've been in the memorial, which that facility sat right next door to the, to the hospital, dozens and dozens of times. And this was, there was no escaping this one.

• 14:22Jocko Willink?

  Did you think, so you just mentioned 98% reality. Did you have in your mind that you would, like, your guys, you wouldn't, you wouldn't take casualties?

• 14:35Dave Berke?

  I had it in my mind that we're all gonna come home.

• 14:39Dave Berke?

  No Anglico had ever lost a Marine. We'd had, we'd gotten casualties, we got people hurt, we had people shot, we had, we had had, had all sorts of things happen in Anglico. No one had ever been killed. And, you know, I was, I guess, in quotes, I was prepared for that. But I wasn't until when that happened, I'm like, oh, this is, I never really thought it was gonna happen.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird to uh, kind of the opposite story, Ryan Jobe. So when he got shot, it was like, you know, I talked to Leif and Leif like, you know, he was being as positive as he could humanly be, but he just, you know, seen Ryan's, you know, face blown apart. And yeah, and then when he ended up, you know, making it back to Charlie Med and making it home, it was like, very, you know, I haven't really thought about that much because, you know, Mark was killed the same day. Um, but yeah, there was like a, the opposite that you had, which was, you know, I thought Ryan

• 15:49Jocko Willink?

  was, you know, was dead. And then he turned out to, to, to have made it back and, you know, eventually made it back to America before he died. But, um, you know, I, I definitely had the feeling that it didn't make sense to me from an odds perspective that we could go through deployment, you know, without taking some significant casualties. And part of that for me was, you know, um, someone getting killed. And just, you know, again, you cover a lot of this stuff in the book and I'm, I'm reading some of the various parts of this, but we had gone into

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  South Central Ramadi for the first time, um, set up, uh, COP iron, Combat Outpost iron, which we had done a big joint, you know, that was a big joint mission with the 137. It was actually Leif's platoon that went over there, crossed the river. Um, I think we talk about this in one of the books, but it was, you know, there was a, there was a village there that was called Muj Village, which we eventually cleared, which was, that was again, that was Leif's platoon because that was on the, the western side of Ramadi. And you and I were running C2 on that one. It was like, everyone thought, you know,

• 17:12Jocko Willink?

  Muj Village is gonna be crazy. But just north of Muj Village was where we put Combat Outpost Iron.

• 17:20Jocko Willink?

  And we went in there, built the combat outpost. I don't know what the date was, but we were there for, we were there for maybe a day or two days, the SEALs were. And then we left to go back and start getting stuff ready. And your guys either took our place or, you know, showed up there. And so now Chris was on the roof of that combat outpost. And he got shot by a, by an enemy. You know, I, I hate to use the word sniper because it's almost like you're giving credit to them. But somebody that knew how to shoot decently, um, shot Chris.

• 18:02Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, within a few hours, I found myself standing on the same helicopter pad I had arrived on four months earlier. This time watching Chris's body rise into the sky aboard a Marine Corps helo. I'd hoped never to witness an angel flight, what the Marines honorably call such a somber occasion. Yet there I was. This was the worst moment in my 23 years of service.

• 18:30Jocko Willink?

  And the lowest point of my life as a Marine.

• 18:34Jocko Willink?

  I was devastated to realize as a leader that I could not protect one of my own.

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  The morning of the following day, I brought my entire team together to talk about our mindset moving forward. Chris was the first Angloco Marine killed in Iraq. And it's sent shockwaves through the entire community. I didn't want to lose anyone else. But we had a job to do. While I don't remember my remarks specifically, the gist of my speech was that Chris's death was tragic and unfortunate, but that no one should blame themselves. It was a lucky shot by an insurgent sniper, one of many that claimed the lives of hundreds of American service members. We couldn't and shouldn't dwell on it. We needed to stay vigilant and committed to supporting the Army for the final three months, just like we'd done before June 20th.

• 19:29Jocko Willink?

  And with that, the war continued for us all. While filled with continued fighting and sustained combat, thankfully, the rest of my men survived and made it home. But the burden of losing Chris has never left me. I carried the memory of him and his sacrifice and everything I did throughout the rest of my military career, I carry it to this day. At every opportunity, I recognize Chris Leon's sacrifice. He deserves to have his story kept alive. By doing so, we can remember the heartache of the unavoidable cost of war. Nearly 10 years to the day I returned home from Ramadi, I read Extreme Ownership. Before I'd even finished the last chapter, I felt as though...

• 20:14Jocko Willink?

  Before I'd even finished the first chapter, I felt as though I'd been punched in the gut. Like a tsunami, a sense of failure washed over me as I read how Jocko told his team that the failure of the fateful Blue on Blue mission was his and his alone. He stood in front of his subordinates, peers, and superiors and took complete ownership for everything that had happened. Having been in the exact room where he spoke, I could picture it perfectly. I could imagine his words, body language, tone, and voice. Then I thought back to the moment, the moments I spoke with my team immediately after Chris's death.

• 20:53Jocko Willink?

  I thought about what I did and didn't do as a leader and what I said and didn't say. I never fully took ownership of what happened. Instead, I deflected blame. It was a life-changing experience for me to read Extreme Ownership and recognize that in the most critical failure of my entire life, I hadn't accepted complete responsibility. In doing so, I failed the team I led.

• 21:24Jocko Willink?

  Chris's death was 100% my responsibility. When I first spoke to my men about Chris, I served up cliches and banal platitudes. I wanted to assure them that it wasn't their fault, that they couldn't have done anything differently. I thought that hearing those words would somehow make it make it make sense for them. It did not. What my men needed was to see their leader take ownership of Chris's death. While the world they inhabited certainly involved random chaos and disorder, I needed to take ownership of everything that I could. I failed to do that.

• 22:01Jocko Willink?

  I should have told my team that moving forward, I'd train each FCT on adjustments to our rooftop operations, or that I'd engage with Jocko's SEALs to learn from their ongoing counter sniper tactics. We could implement different protocols, change procedures, something, anything.

• 22:20Jocko Willink?

  Instead, I did nothing but assign blame to the randomness of war, the chaos of the situation, which meant I, as their leader, had nothing to change.

• 22:32Jocko Willink?

  Which meant there were no corrections to be made.

• 22:36Jocko Willink?

  But there were, and I did not address them that day. After Chris was killed, I needed to make changes. I didn't because I was comfortable excusing this tragedy as an inevitable consequence of war. We were in combat with unavoidable danger and risks around any corner, yet I gave up the most powerful tool in my arsenal, control. I surrendered it not only after Chris's death, but before, when I could have preemptively stopped those dangers. Prior to that fateful day in June, I should have responded to looming risks and fought against them. We knew sniper activity had been increasing throughout the war, and SEALs were conducting counter sniper operations as it was reaching fever pitch.

• 23:22Jocko Willink?

  I missed opportunities to be proactive, and although it may not have guaranteed Chris's survival, I would have had more control over the outcome.

• 23:32Jocko Willink?

  I didn't want Chris's death to be real. That's the reason that halfway to the barracks to tell my men about him, I drove back to the hospital to confirm it. It certainly wasn't something I wanted to own or admit could happen again. I didn't accept the depth of my responsibility as a leader. So I relinquished my most critical opportunity to lead. I just never understood that. Until I read the book.

• 24:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was reading that and it was definitely very heavy to read. Very heavy to read. And you know, you and I have had conversations about that. And that is. It's the burden. It's the burden of combat leadership. And that is when you lose people in combat. It is your fault. And are there random things that happen? And does the enemy get a vote? And yes, there's chaos and there's disorder. But. You're in charge.

• 24:52Jocko Willink?

  And when you're in charge, you have that responsibility. And that's the lesson that you put here is the takeaway. Take ownership of everything and don't wait.

• 25:12Jocko Willink?

  Leaning into some preemptive ownership with that.

• 25:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I mean. It is hard to hear you read my words. I mean, it takes me back to that moment and it takes me back to the whole arc of. The experience of losing Chris. I don't remember what I said, but I can picture fairly well. I know where I was standing. I know what I was saying and I know what I was thinking too. I certainly know what I felt. Um, man. I got probably a lot on my mind. I don't want to waste too much time on it, but. You know, there's a balance.

• 25:51Dave Berke?

  There are things beyond our control. That is the world that we live in. And combat is a place by which things are going to happen you can't control.

• 25:59Dave Berke?

  And, you know, I don't want to overstate like, I listed a bunch of things I could have done before and a bunch of things I could have done after. That was part of my own reckoning of realizing where my failures were. That wasn't, that's not a recipe to guarantee what the outcome, I could have done all those same things and the outcome could have been the same. And the point isn't, that isn't even the point.

• 26:20Dave Berke?

  But,

• 26:22Dave Berke?

  you know, that ground combat experience for me was, was a,

• 26:27Dave Berke?

  whatever the word is for a out of my comfort zone experience. I mean, there's the contrast between being the senior instructor at Top Gun, months earlier to being a ground combat leader in Ramadi with your SEALs. That's a, that's a, there's a big difference there.

• 26:48Dave Berke?

  You know, for me, if I think about, God, so many thoughts.

• 26:53Dave Berke?

  You cannot write a leadership book if you don't talk about the concepts of humility, ownership and teamwork. They belong in every book. I also wasn't going to write a leadership book that just restated the concept of ownership that you articulated in the very first chapter of that book. And as I thought about how I was going to discuss or explain the lesson that meant to me, what I had to do is be really honest with myself of when the concept of ownership really, really, I think, made sense to me. And it was when I was reading it. And reading that book was like, oh, I'm going to read, I'm going to read Jocko and Lee's book. This will be cool because these are my friends. We serve together and I'm really excited to read what they wrote.

• 27:35Dave Berke?

  And then it's like, holy crap.

• 27:40Dave Berke?

  It's humbling.

• 27:43Dave Berke?

  But I think also very required for me to be.

• 27:48Dave Berke?

  For me to be, for me to have been successful in that show in front, for me to truly understand what we are trying to do with what you made. I had to be honest with how that landed with me was that chapter wasn't you talking about your story. That chapter was talking to me about mine. And my story was at the hardest thing I've ever done, the lowest point I've ever been in. Did I actually do the things that you were teaching and I didn't? And that was a really hard thing to accept. Writing that, it was really the first time I really put into words, but I've carried that feeling with me for a long time of what I didn't do and I don't like that feeling. I don't, I don't like that feeling and I, I don't live where I like, had I done this, it would have been okay. I don't live like that. I don't have that sense of I could have changed the outcome.

• 28:34Dave Berke?

  But if you really think about what I did in the wake of that experience, or I guess a better way to put is what I didn't do is I attribute the rest of us coming home.

• 28:48Dave Berke?

  I can't take, I can't take credit for that. Because I didn't do the things that I should have done. I just like, hey, this is what happens in this war. Just carry on and there's some truth to that. There's some truth to that. But there's so much that was missing there and I felt I had to capture what that meant to me. So it's relatable in a way that people can go, hey, this applies to every aspect of your life. And our tendency is to just avoid that and it took me 10 years to figure out that that's what I've been doing.

• 29:20Jocko Willink?

  Well, I'm teaching the young junior officers. One of the things that I've talked about with them is hey, you can, you know, you gotta make a call to go left or right. You can make a call to go left. And you, you, you guys take a left and they step on an ID and three guys get killed.

• 29:40Jocko Willink?

  And that was, is that a bad call that you made? Well, oh, you told them to go right and everyone walked off and you made it back to base. Or you told them to go right, they hit an ID and you know, you lose three guys. Or you told them to go left and everyone made it back to base.

• 29:58Jocko Willink?

  Good decision, bad decision. With the information that you had at the time. The piece of it that doesn't change is that it was your decision. And another very similar thing to that is the whole idea of being on rooftops. So being on rooftops in Ramadi carried an amount of risk to it. But the risk was, there was two, two major risks. One of them was snipers and the other one was having grenades thrown on the rooftop, which soldiers were killed by grenades thrown on rooftops. Mike Monster was killed by a grenade thrown on a rooftop and three of other guys were wounded.

• 30:43Jocko Willink?

  So there's an argument, well, hey, why would you go up on the roof? Well, the answer is very simple. When you're on a rooftop, you can cover more angles than you can when you're looking through windows. So you're, everything is a trade off. And by the way, if you've seen the movie Warfare, those guys were not on the rooftop. They were inside the building on the upper deck and someone put a grenade through the window. That, so it's one of those things where, well, did you decide to go on the rooftop? Or did you decide to go in the building? Maybe you got away with it, maybe you got caught. But regardless of that outcome, you have to, that, that was your decision that you made as a leader. No one talked to you and hey, they might, they tried to talk to you, platoon chief said this, platoon chief told us to go up there.

• 31:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but it was your call and you're up there and this is the consequences. And here's where I actually think that. And, and you know, as we, as we mentioned, there is randomness that is completely beyond our control. There are things that we truly cannot control. And can you stop, you know, can you truly stop? Can you never go on a roof if you're taking, if you're walking through Ramadi? Nope, you have to go on rooftops sometimes. Do you have to move down the street where there's IDs? Yes, if you're going to accomplish, if you're going to do your job, you have, there's going to be risks. You can't completely eliminate those risks and you have to know that as a leader.

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  And you have to own that as a leader.

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  And I think as hard as that is and as brutal as that is, I actually believe that that is the healthiest thing that you can do. Because if you just throw it to chance, and look, there's, there's some things that are chance. But if you know that you did every, you made your decisions based on the information that you had at the time.

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  You own that decision. I think that is more healthy than putting your hands up in the air and saying, well, it was just bad luck that day. Does bad luck play a role? Oh, absolutely. Bad luck plays a role. But everything outside that one, that one element. Everything outside that element, we did everything we could. And I, I think that is a healthier way than shrugging your shoulders and saying, well, that's just bad luck. There's gonna be bad luck.

• 33:25Jocko Willink?

  There's gonna be things you can't control. That's the way life is, and that certainly is the way combat is, but you have to take ownership of, of everything that you can. Of everything that you can. And I believe that when you take ownership of that, instead of pointing the fingers and blaming the circumstances and blaming bad luck. I think that actually hurts in the long run more than knowing that you're doing your job.

• 33:58Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, people will make mistakes in combat too. People will say, hey, they'll, they're, they'll send people in the wrong spot. They'll assault the wrong building. You know, you read those chapters in, in, when, when Leif was with Chris. And Chris or Leif could have easily said, go ahead and engage that, you know, Leif, uh, Chris saw somebody with a scoped weapon.

• 34:22Jocko Willink?

  Chris saw someone with a scope weapon, reported the building. Leif ran it up the chain of command, de-conflicted. The army said, there's no friendlies in that building. Take the shot. Kill that enemy sniper.

• 34:34Jocko Willink?

  And it would have been totally understandable if Leif had said, yes, Chris, there's no friendly in that building. That's an enemy fighter. Shoot him. And it would have been completely understandable if Chris said, Roger that boss and taken that shot. And if he would have done that, he would have killed an American soldier because there was a problem with the deconfliction.

• 34:56Jocko Willink?

  That can happen.

• 34:59Jocko Willink?

  Those things can happen.

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  And if you leave it to chance and you shrug your shoulders, those things are much more likely to happen.

• 35:11Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, I think the healthiest thing to do, even though it's painful, is to take ownership. And, you know, for, you know, I was the, I was a senior SEAL under Ramadi.

• 35:27Jocko Willink?

  Every operation that we did was mine.

• 35:32Jocko Willink?

  Was mine.

• 35:39Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way things work.

• 35:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Jocko Willink?

  You go forward a little bit. You talk about the ultimate form of ownership is what we call preemptive ownership. And this again, this is, you know, one of the problems with extreme ownership is it's looking to the past. Hey, a mistake was made. It was my fault. Well, preemptive ownership is, hey, if a mistake gets made, it is going to be my fault. Therefore, I'm going to implement these things to prevent a mistake from happening as much as we possibly can.

• 36:23Jocko Willink?

  Strange thing about your job

• 36:26Jocko Willink?

  is a single-seat fighter aircraft.

• 36:31Jocko Willink?

  What happens in that bird is literally yours.

• 36:35Jocko Willink?

  There's no, there's no finger pointing to be done. Even down to the maintenance. I mean, you do a walk through. You, I mean, I guess someone could make a real bad mistake with some kind of maintenance protocol.

• 36:50Dave Berke?

  It's hard to. When you're by yourself on a jet, it's really hard to find someone else to blame for anything goes wrong in that jet. So yeah, I, I, there's always, you know, like some crazy thing, but I mean, generically speaking, who, who are you to blame, you know, and that's, that's a hundred percent true. And everything you just said about that, I mean, that was really what, that's really what reading that chapter did to me.

• 37:16Dave Berke?

  You know?

• 37:22Dave Berke?

  It's everything. You gotta take ownership of everything. I don't know. Well, I know for me that I wasn't doing that. And I think I had gotten to a place where I was comfortable. You know, I wasn't running around like pointing the finger and blaming it. I don't, I haven't been living my life. I hadn't been living my life my life, or I'm some sort of victim of, of things going on around me, but when you read that and you think about what that means to you.

• 37:46Dave Berke?

  Part of it is for me is recognizing if I need to be able to cross the bridge on that moment. And, and if there's one good thing that that has done for me,

• 37:55Dave Berke?

  it's really hard for me to find another circumstance now and be like, well, that's not really my fault. With this is a, is a backdrop, right? Like, this is the ultimate for me.

• 38:05Dave Berke?

  And the benefit of that is you can look around, I can look around at everything else and be like, hey dude,

• 38:11Dave Berke?

  this is not going to be that hard. Find out what you did wrong and fix it. Look in the future, prevent it from happening. It's just what you gotta do.

• 38:20Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, uh, you know, I think, I, I think the only part about Chris that I read was, I think you called him the ultimate Marine or something like that. And then you, you give, you know, more detail in the book, but um, just a total stud.

• 38:33Dave Berke?

  Total stud.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  Just a total stud.

• 38:38Jocko Willink?

  Just outstanding across the board. And doing his job.

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  And loving doing his job, by the way, you know, which is, it's um, something, you know, you you'll hear the phrase like, oh, he died doing what he loved, right? You hear that? This kind of sounds like what you call a cliche or a platitude.

• 39:04Jocko Willink?

  But man, I take a lot of comfort in that fact, that, you know, um,

• 39:12Jocko Willink?

  you know, just, just was with, uh, up at Mikey's grave and like knowing, knowing, I mean, I know 100%, 100% that Mikey wanted to be doing exactly what he was doing, exactly what he was doing. That's what he wanted to be doing. Mark, same exact thing. Ryan Jobe, we actually got to hear him say, you know, even though he got shot in the face, even though he's blind, he's like, I want to come back, because that's exactly what he wanted to be doing. And Chris Leons is the exact same way. Go, you can go look at a picture of him right now on the internet,

• 39:49Jocko Willink?

  and you will not see one ounce, or one, the slightest indication of any hesitation of any kind whatsoever. That is a United States Marine in combat, supporting his brothers, and that you can see it 100% in his face with no, not even any indication of any kind of anything other than that. And like you mentioned in the book, the opportunity to share his story and let people know is, is a, is a pretty, it's an honor to be able to do that. And you did a great job of it in the book.

• 40:32Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, as your leaders out there,

• 40:38Jocko Willink?

  whatever little tiny excuse you're grasping on to, and look, look, the moose, the moose, the enemy fighters, yeah, they're, they're the ones, you know, they're the ones that pulled the trigger. They're the ones that killed Chris, killed Mark, killed Ryan. They're the ones that killed Mikey, like, yes. But we have to take ownership of everything that we can,

• 41:07Jocko Willink?

  as much as it hurts.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  And it does apply to everything and you get here into the the real world application which once again you start off with a with a quote and the quote is completely applicable to what we're talking about. The quote that starts off with from one of our clients at Echelon Fund is, "How am I supposed to take ownership of something I didn't even do?" Right? And you know, this guy goes on, "I'm not trying to be difficult and I know it's time for a break. I like what you're saying, but some things are just not my fault." And so you break that down and you actually break it down in this one in this chapter is

• 41:53Jocko Willink?

  like in a family scenario, you know, someone's like, you know, they're having problems with their wife. And of course, how well does it work out when you push, you know, place the blame on your wife for something that went wrong instead of taking ownership yourself? I guarantee, you know, I've been married for coming up on, I think, 28, 29 years, something like that. People like, you know, what's the secret? I'll tell you the secret straight up is extreme ownership. That's straight up the secret. And that's one of the stories that you're telling here for the

• 42:30Jocko Willink?

  application. Yeah. Um, fast forward here to the next chapter is called Listen. Pacific Beach, California, one mile west of Interstate 5, September 26, 2006. It was the middle of the afternoon and the blinding sun lit up every side alley and driveway. My eyes scanned left to right and back again as my vehicle moved methodically down the street. A kid on a bike wore a backpack. I instinctively changed lanes, giving a wide berth. There could be danger anywhere. An IED in a trash can, a sniper on a rooftop. Observing, watching everything for

• 43:15Jocko Willink?

  potential threats was an inexorable part of my life in Ramadi during the height of the insurgency, so much so that it was as much a reflex as blinking. On that drive, that bright sunny day, I wasn't thinking as much as I was anticipating and ready to act. So there you are. And you'll notice the date, September 26, 2006. What day did you get home?

• 43:41Dave Berke?

  That's the day.

• 43:42Jocko Willink?

  That's the day.

• 43:43Dave Berke?

  Yeah. That's the, that's the hour.

• 43:46Jocko Willink?

  Um, and so you're driving in the car and, uh, you know, I'll fast forward a little bit. I heard the din of arbitrary chit chat grow cause with your family, the vehicle filled with background noise and voices, but the words were indiscernible and I was losing focus. What were they talking about? There was nothing to discuss. We should have been closely observing everything exactly as, as we'd always operated. Everything else was support for us. I could feel myself becoming agitated. The cacophony grew until I couldn't take it anymore. Stop talking, I barked abruptly and loudly. Everyone froze. My sharp words had sliced through the chatter like a blade, but the inhabitants of this car were not my troops. So there you

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  go. A little, uh, decompression happening. A little, a little PTSD. That's what that is actually. It's the short fuse and these are textbook PTSD, by the way.

• 44:41Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 44:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, bad dreams, which you mentioned, I didn't cover them, but you mentioned the bad dreams, the short fuse, which is textbook and hyper alert. Three for three.

• 44:53Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Jocko Willink?

  Uh, how was it? How was when you got home?

• 44:58Dave Berke?

  Well, chapter tells quite an interesting story. I mean, it's funny hearing you listen, uh, here, listening to you tell the story that I wrote and, uh, you know, you do this really well. You pick certain, you can read the whole chapter. It's gonna take forever. But, you know, I land, I get in the car. I got to drive from the San Diego airport to our house in PB. It's like a, I don't know. 12 minute drive. I mean, it's a short drive, dude. And it's like a gorgeous day. You know, September in San Diego is just like epic, perfect. And I'm in the car with my mom and my wife.

• 45:30Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:30Dave Berke?

  Like the two most important people in my whole world that I just had been missing. I just wanted to get home too. And I'm home. I'm home from Ramadi and you know that feeling of like,

• 45:41Dave Berke?

  When you come home from Ramadi, it's like it's a your home. It's a big deal.

• 45:43Jocko Willink?

  What was your, uh, what was your decompression on the way home like?

• 45:48Dave Berke?

  Remember, I mean.

• 45:50Jocko Willink?

  My buddy, the first deployment to Iraq and my buddy Johnny, who's my brother. And he was, he was on a long deployment and he was at the ragged edge, edge of it. And he goes, dude, bro, tomorrow we're gonna go on a metal tube. And then 24 hours later, we're gonna be in BB. So that's pretty much what you were dealing with.

• 46:13Dave Berke?

  We went to like Kuwait for like two days or something, you know, waiting for the, I think we flew in out of Kuwait. If I'm not mistaken, I'm almost positive. And I remember like Kuwait was like a thousand degrees. It was miserable and you're out of Ramadi. And like, I think we went through some decompression thing, but in your mind, like, I don't want to be here. I want to be home. This is ridiculous. Anyway, you know, it take, takes all like six or seven minutes on the drive home that I, I, I don't have a really good sense of like, you know, the, the, the arc of getting to the point where I like screamed at them. But it kinda, when I yelled at them, like, kinda startled myself, like, whoa. And I can still, I mean, that's a, that's a hard chapter to write. It's a very hard chapter to listen to because I can really, I can show you the street on the map. I can place it.

• 46:58Dave Berke?

  And my wife is in the passenger seat and my mom's in the backseat. But when I say it, I turn to the right and I can, I can still to this day, like see the look on my wife's face. Which probably, you know, had like 10 different emotions. Like she felt bad. She was, she was sorry. But in underneath that was like, almost like a look of like, she didn't recognize me. So you gotta remember, I met my wife when I, when I checked into Top Gun. So she meets me and you know, it's like, oh, my boyfriend's a Top Gun instructor, which we like.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  With a Corvette.

• 47:30Dave Berke?

  Yeah. I mean, like it is the most idyllic, ridiculous, fun.

• 47:38Dave Berke?

  You could not have a better scenario to start a relationship.

• 47:41Jocko Willink?

  Weekends in Tahoe.

• 47:42Dave Berke?

  Just all of it, dude. All of it. All of it. And there was like a moment of like a lack of recognition on her face to me and I could see her seeing, I could see that in her face looking at me like.

• 47:53Jocko Willink?

  Did she understand what was going on in Ramadi?

• 47:55Dave Berke?

  I mean, I think to a degree, there's, I mean, no. As much as a 20 something year old girl who's, we got married in, you know, the, the previous May, I deployed in September. So as much as that person can know, yeah, she knew all of it, which is essentially nothing. She certainly didn't have any sense of like, I was going to carry that. You just write three textbook things. She didn't have no, she had no frame of reference for that. But you know, that was a moment like kind of came in and went, and I was like, I think I apologized profusely. I'm like, I'm sorry. I kind of lost track of things and no, all good. We're good. No problem. You know, she goes, my mom goes home and I'm back home with my wife and I, you know, it's the first night we're back home and I wake up that night

• 48:40Dave Berke?

  with that nightmare. And it's a very vivid nightmare to me. I can, I could replay very clearly, but it was like, I mean, it's like crap out of the movies. Like I, I, I sit up like in a cold sweat. I'm, I'm hyperventilating. She's, she, her eyes are like saucers. Very quickly, like she's realizing like something is going on and I am too, you know, I'm like, I know this is not normal behavior, or I guess it's not standard behavior, if that makes sense. So like, it was like, um, welcome home, you know, like, welcome home to this, this, this whole act that I brought with me.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  You have to adjust.

• 49:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Jocko Willink?

  And, and I'm going to fast forward to the adjustment.

• 49:24Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 49:25Jocko Willink?

  While not necessarily easy at first, the correction was simple. I needed to listen more. That was it. I had to recognize, identify and intercept my typical path to be the first loudest and often the only verse, voice in the room. And that's exactly what I did. I just stopped talking so much. Instead, I got back in the habit of inviting her to be herself, just as she had been before Ramadi. Ironically, it led to a discovery I hadn't anticipated. My talking to listening ratio also taught me to listen to myself. This is where I was kind of, oh, when I read that, I was like, okay, Dave's gonna take a little exploration here. For months, I'd been trying to silence the voices in my head that felt frustrated and angry. I did everything possible to stifle those emotions, but it proved impossible. So instead of trying to block them out, I turned them on their head.

• 50:09Jocko Willink?

  The more I listened to my own internal voice, the more I was able to recognize and diagnose whatever emotions I was feeling. Listening to myself, acknowledging what I was feeling and dealing with whatever that issue was almost immediately improved my own mental state. Just as it improved our marriage when I listened to Whitney more. Listening was how I understood what was going on and what allowed me to get past it. Ignoring my own voice was as dumb as ignoring Whitney's.

• 50:40Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. There you go. It's funny. We were just answering another question on, uh, on the underground podcast and it's like, you, you've heard me say this before, like you gotta tell yourself the truth, but it's really important. You, you gotta listen to yourself too. You gotta listen to what the, you know, what are, what is going on in your head? And you gotta listen to it. Cause you, you can't, you can't ignore it, right? You have to have the conversation. And you can say, okay, I'm listening to you and what you're saying doesn't make sense and therefore I'm not going to act on it. But I understand it and now I can, I can deal with it.

• 51:19Jocko Willink?

  You say something else occurred to me too. Whitney had been the better leader throughout our impasse because she had been listening to me to what I needed. So a little credit to Whitney.

• 51:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Ignoring what's going on in your head is not going to work out well.

• 51:41Jocko Willink?

  And I, you know, what's interesting is I wonder, I wonder how close, you know,

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  you know, the, the feelings that you had about Chris and, you know, I wonder, I wonder how close you got to uncovering those thoughts at that time, you know, like, hmm, what is this? What is this feeling that I have right now? Why don't, why don't I, why do I feel this? And why is this bothering me? Why is this keeping me up? Why is my having bad dreams? Like all those things?

• 52:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, it's hard.

• 52:15Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I mean, I think about even why I wrote that and why that story was so important. I mean, one thing I know for sure, totally independent of my story there that I was telling is like,

• 52:27Dave Berke?

  just in general, in life,

• 52:31Dave Berke?

  listening is such a good thing to do. Like, it's such a, it's such a, it seems so obvious to say that, but it is such an overlooked and underappreciated behavior, just in life in general. Just stop talking so much and just listen, just listen. Even people that are upsetting you, frustrating you, or disagreeing, like, just listen to them. And how so much better your life is in every aspect of your life, personally, professionally, your marriage, your kids. And obviously, I alluded to this in there, yourself, of just listening. People just talk so much. And this, you know, this was a key lesson, like, hey, you gotta just listen more. You know, you didn't talk to it.

• 53:14Dave Berke?

  One of the, I, I, I had just created, I had, I had to recognize that I'd fallen into this habit.

• 53:21Dave Berke?

  And in my world, like, talking made sense. And I, I, I give some examples, like, okay, when you're, when you're by yourself in a jet, it's obvious you're the primary talker. You're the only talker. When you are the vehicle commander of a Humvee and you're controlling the aircraft, you're, you're communicating to the airplanes, you are the primary talker. Makes sense. When you are an instructor at Top Gun and you are teaching classes and giving debriefs, clearly, you are the primary talker.

• 53:47Dave Berke?

  And I had just, I had just created a habit by which that was just kind of normal. And so, I'm this, I'm in this primary talking role. And then I come home and you said it, like,

• 54:01Dave Berke?

  you know, PTSD, the baggage, like, and listen, I gotta make it clear, like, what I endured.

• 54:08Dave Berke?

  People have gone through so much worse and I don't want to overstate like the significance of this, but this was what happened to me and there's all sorts of different ways I think to approach this, but in my mind, like what I came to realize is just about all of the solution to my problem that I came home with, I had control over. Like I had so much control over solving my frustration. Um, what was the only thing you said? Like heightened, you know, awareness, you know, trigger, hair trigger. And I think one of the things that was somewhat comforting was like, oh, this is all I'm, this is, I am, I can control all of this. And I know it sounds like almost like too simple to say, just listen to yourself, but I, I don't think, I think that's correct. That's, that is the

• 54:50Dave Berke?

  whole conclusion of this is like, oh, I'm, I'm mad about something or I'm frustrated or I'm getting anxious or whatever those things are, like stifling out, like I'm just going to ignore that. Like, well, that's dumb. Just listen to it. It's like, why? And like, and there's so much more inside there, but two main things happened. One is like just remind, I was like, just stop talking, dude. Like the last thing you should be doing is telling your wife anything. Like this is insane. And it wasn't like that before. Our relationship wasn't like that before I left. I came back and all of a sudden she's in this like hyper deferential mode. She just scared shitless about what's going on with me. She just wants to take care of me and, and she just kind of like deferred to me and whatever I needed to help get through this. And in that period of time, like she kind of lost who she was

• 55:33Dave Berke?

  in our marriage. I'm like, this is, I came to the feeling like this is not a functional relationship. It'd been like, I cannot, we can't survive like this. And the other part too was like, hey, the stuff going on in my head, like, why would you ignore that? Why would you ignore what's, what you were feeling and thinking? And to your point, like, I don't have to react to that, but I can't pretend it's not going on. And I don't want to say it was like overnight, but once I, I cracked the code on that, like it was very, very quickly, things normalized, stabilized and got very, very much back to normal. Once I learned that habit of like, oh, okay, I got it. And it was just, it was so much easier. And that stuff applies everywhere, man.

• 56:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. We, I know we have the, uh, the saying default aggressive at Echelon Front, but here's another good default. Listen, just listen. And I'll, I'll tell you, a lot of times, if you actually, a lot of times we are ego. Our egos sitting there telling you like, everyone wants to hear what you have to say. There was some pretty freaking hilarious clips that rolled into my algorithm. And it's like, a guy who's, who's like, inside voice is telling him to do stuff and they're like, I think one of them was like, he's at a wedding party. And the voice is like, hey, everyone wants to see you do the worm. The worm dance. And he's like, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know. He's like, oh, they definitely want to. And so we have that voice in our head that's going, oh, everyone wants to hear your opinion.

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  Everyone's waiting for you to give your opinion. No, no, actually they don't. They don't. Your default should be, no one actually wants to hear what I have to say. That should be your default mode. That's part one. Um, and by the way, if, if you hear me say that and you go, gosh, that must be so bad for other people. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's actually you that I'm talking about. You. No one wants to hear what you have to say. No one. So don't, don't say anything. The other thing is, and this is such a, such an awesome answer, is people will, you know, will be working with a company and someone will tell me, you know, well, how do you deal when someone's really mad? How you deal with someone's really frustrated? How you deal when someone's really upset? How do you deal with someone's pushing back?

• 57:40Jocko Willink?

  How do you deal with someone has a different, uh, uh, idea than yours? And it's like, oh, it's all the same answer. Listen to them. When someone's angry and they're raising their voice, listen to them. When someone's frustrated and they're attacking, listen to them. When someone has a different idea, listen to them. When someone is pushing back, listen to them. And if you learn how to listen, and by the way, you're kind of also have to put your ego and check in that, whatever they're saying might be right. And oh yeah, they're mad because you did something stupid, or you did something that was egotistical, or you did something that looked out for yourself, or you did something that hurt them, like all those things.

• 58:18Jocko Willink?

  Listen is the best way to diffuse emotions. So keep that in mind. And also, you know, you mentioned that, you know, what you'd been through was miniscule and what all of us went through, you know, was miniscule compared to, any pick an island, you know, pick a European village that, you know, all those things. And also, but you know, your reaction to it was also, you know, relatively not that big of a deal, you know, they're kind of the, what I say, three for three on these PTSD things, but they weren't exaggerated to a point where it was, you know, some huge problem, but you know, you don't want to exist in a relationship with your wife and make her feel like

• 59:03Jocko Willink?

  nervous and whatever. So

• 59:06Jocko Willink?

  the lesson, listening is the most overlooked and underestimated leadership behavior. And then you go through the five components of a relationship, trust, respect, listening, influence and care. You have listening, you add an ing on that as opposed to listen. Right on. They wanted us, we discussed doing that with the four laws of combat leadership. Changing simple to simplify. So you have cover and move, that's an action to take, simplify, that's an action to take.

• 59:45Jocko Willink?

  Prioritize and execute, that's an action to take and decentralized command is actually an action that you can take. Hey, decentralized command. But we decided that since that's what we actually taught, that's what we stuck with. Just simple, plus it's a little simple.

• 1:00:03Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, self-awareness isn't always easy, but it's critical, it's crucial to being a successful leader in business and life. Often it's difficult to comprehend just how much time we're talking. But there's a simple test, the next time you're around others at a dinner table or anywhere else, take stock of the conversation, actively pay attention to the dynamic. Calculate how long you are talking relative to how long others are. If you're the one with more food on their plate than anyone else, stop talking and let someone else share. Even if you're the best storyteller, everyone still, everyone else still wants to be heard. So keep it short and don't overdo it. Just be quiet and listen.

• 1:00:44Dave Berke?

  That's classic. Yeah.

• 1:00:45Jocko Willink?

  Dude, check your plate.

• 1:00:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Jocko Willink?

  Still got food on it? Shut your trap.

• 1:00:50Dave Berke?

  Yep, that's right.

• 1:00:52Jocko Willink?

  Uh, real world application. This one, Erica was the charge nurse. That meant she was responsible for scheduling, compliance, and making sure all other nurses were doing their job. I'm in, I'm the charge nurse for a reason. Erica declared, I have the most experience and I have seen these problems more than anyone. Believe me, I get it. So.

• 1:01:14Dave Berke?

  Erica's fired up.

• 1:01:15Jocko Willink?

  Erica's fired up.

• 1:01:16Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, it, man, put a muzzle, put a muzzle on yourself. It's gonna be helpful.

• 1:01:27Jocko Willink?

  Tindall, am I saying that right?

• 1:01:28Dave Berke?

  Tindall.

• 1:01:29Jocko Willink?

  This is the next chapter.

• 1:01:30Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:01:30Jocko Willink?

  This is the chapter called change. Tindall, Air Force Base, Florida, F-22 Raptor training, March 2008. So the Raptor. You described to me at one point, the Raptor is like a Porsche.

• 1:01:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Jocko Willink?

  Is that, is that, is that accurate?

• 1:01:46Dave Berke?

  Yeah, totally. It's just.

• 1:01:48Jocko Willink?

  Not a, not a GTO judge with an eight cylinder, you know, not a drag racer, but a Porsche. Because it's powerful but maneuverable. Can you, and it's a dogfight.

• 1:02:04Dave Berke?

  It is.

• 1:02:04Jocko Willink?

  It's a dogfight machine, right?

• 1:02:06Dave Berke?

  It can dogfight, yes, better than anything.

• 1:02:08Jocko Willink?

  Better than an F-16?

• 1:02:09Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Better than an F-20, better than F-18?

• 1:02:12Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:02:13Jocko Willink?

  Better than F-35?

• 1:02:14Dave Berke?

  Keep going. The answer is yes. Yeah.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  It's, is it, is it the optimal machine?

• 1:02:17Dave Berke?

  If you're gonna go dogfight, get it, do it in F-22, 100%. It's the most, it's like you said, it is insanely powerful, but it is so nimble and can be so light. So how it combines all those attributes is, is, makes it very unique.

• 1:02:34Jocko Willink?

  And it can outclimb these other aircraft?

• 1:02:36Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:02:37Jocko Willink?

  It's just a beast.

• 1:02:38Dave Berke?

  It's just a beast. It's just better at everything. It's just a beast.

• 1:02:41Jocko Willink?

  Is there an F-22 squadron?

• 1:02:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah, several.

• 1:02:46Jocko Willink?

  And their purpose is to dogfight?

• 1:02:49Dave Berke?

  Their purpose is air dominance. How you achieve that, there's a whole range of ways to do it. But yeah, there's a bunch of F-22 squadrons and they're.

• 1:02:58Jocko Willink?

  How did you get to an F-22 squadron?

• 1:03:02Jocko Willink?

  Your nickname is the Good Deal Dave.

• 1:03:04Dave Berke?

  Dave, man.

• 1:03:04Jocko Willink?

  So fill us in.

• 1:03:05Dave Berke?

  Echo. All right. The short version, it's a long story. I'll try to keep it as short as I can.

• 1:03:09Jocko Willink?

  Is this an air force squadron?

• 1:03:10Dave Berke?

  Is this an air force only airplane? No other country has it. No, it's only just the air force. So the, the around 2008 timeframe, the Marine Corps is like, okay, we're going to buy the, a new airplane. The airplane's called the F-35. It's coming in a couple of years. They were kind of doing some math. It's going to be here in a few years. That F-35 was what's called a fifth generation fighter. It was going to replace F-18s and Harriers, which we had had since like the early eighties. So the Marine Corps hadn't bought and introduced a new airplane in decades, like almost 40 years.

• 1:03:46Dave Berke?

  The air force had bought and started introducing the F-22 in 2005. And there was all sorts of problems introducing a new jet. They hadn't bought, built and introduced a new airplane in also decades. And it's just, it's just friction, man. It's new, new technology. It's stealth. It's something they'd never seen before. And so the air force had all sorts of issues introducing this new airplane. The Marine Corps is like, okay, well, we don't want to learn these lessons ourselves. We're going to take a guy, send him to the air force to the F-22 for about three or four years. And his number one job is like, learn all these nuances and all these challenges of introducing a fifth gen fighter to a service.

• 1:04:27Dave Berke?

  And that guy will come back to the Marine Corps and as we start standing up the F-35, he'll have all this resident knowledge. So it was like the ultimate good deal is this guy, whoever this guy was going to be, and I said in the book, it wasn't going to be me. It was going to be somebody. Goes, flies Raptors, learns how the air force introduced a brand new fifth generation fighter, the first of its kind, first time in decades. He'll take all that institutional knowledge. He'll stand up the first F-35 squadron and he'll, he'll help us not make a bunch of those mistakes.

• 1:04:58Jocko Willink?

  So it was not only a ticket to fly the F-22, it was a ticket to go to the F-35.

• 1:05:03Dave Berke?

  All but guaranteed. I mean, Is the closest you can ever get to a guarantee that I knew I was going to go from F22s to F35s? Which is exactly what happened. And that was the ultimate good deal.

• 1:05:14Jocko Willink?

  How big is an F22 compared to an F35?

• 1:05:16Dave Berke?

  It's big. It's noticeably bigger. It's probably-

• 1:05:19Jocko Willink?

  It's bigger.

• 1:05:20Dave Berke?

  F22 is significant. If you put an F22 next to an F35, the F35 will look small.

• 1:05:25Jocko Willink?

  No kidding?

• 1:05:26Dave Berke?

  Yes. The F22 is a big airplane compared to an F35.

• 1:05:29Jocko Willink?

  But it still can outmaneuver it?

• 1:05:31Dave Berke?

  It's unmatched.

• 1:05:35Jocko Willink?

  And is that just the design? Because that's what it's designed for.

• 1:05:39Dave Berke?

  All sorts of things. Yes, you're correct. There's some long engineering story. The short answer is exactly what you said. That's how it's built. And if you've ever seen, speaking of YouTube, just Google, or I'm sorry, just YouTube, F22 Airshow. And you'll see an airplane do something that no airplane can do. It's just ridiculous.

• 1:05:59Dave Berke?

  And I got to fly it.

• 1:06:00Jocko Willink?

  And you got to fly it for like four years?

• 1:06:04Dave Berke?

  Yep, just about, just under-

• 1:06:06Jocko Willink?

  All out of Vegas?

• 1:06:08Dave Berke?

  Well, I did all my training in Tyndall. That's where this chapter starts. So in February of 08, I go to Tyndall. I think I spent maybe three years-

• 1:06:15Jocko Willink?

  How mad was every other Marine Corps pilot at you at this point?

• 1:06:18Dave Berke?

  Mad.

• 1:06:23Dave Berke?

  I mean, the craziest part is I said it in the chapter. I just said on this thing, like, I wasn't going to do it. I was on a deployment in the F-18 as the XO, the number two of the squadron. I had already dropped my letter and already put in to get out. And I'd gotten accepted into grad school. So on this deployment, I extended on this deployment to make the deployment and I was getting out of the Marine Corps. On the deployment, the notification comes down that they're going to accept applications for this Raptor job. But I had already like, I was getting out and my boss, everybody knew. I'm like, well, you know.

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  Where'd you get accepted to college?

• 1:07:00Dave Berke?

  Dartmouth Tuck School of Business. Going to go get an MBA at an Ivy League school. Sounded cool at the time.

• 1:07:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then they dangled that F22 in front of you.

• 1:07:08Dave Berke?

  Then I applied.

• 1:07:09Jocko Willink?

  It is still kind of weird that they even selected you knowing that you were going to get out.

• 1:07:13Dave Berke?

  It was very weird.

• 1:07:16Jocko Willink?

  Freaking good deal Dave has arrived.

• 1:07:20Jocko Willink?

  No complaints, man. It worked out. I was about to ask you about what it was like getting into the new bird, but we're about to get into that. So here we are, Tyndale Air Force Base, Florida, F-22 Raptor training, March 2008. My tantrum was epic. It rivaled that of a sleep deprived toddler being told he can't have any, the toy he wants. Only I added a stream of explicitives, expletives that would make a sailor blush. In keeping with the tone of this book and the fact that my children will likely read it, I'll let you fill in the blanks. What the are you doing? What the is wrong with you? How in, how in the is this happening? What the is going on? Why the is this so hard? After the first outburst, I started thinking bigger.

• 1:08:05Jocko Willink?

  Why the can't you do this? How the, did you even get here? How the, are you going to figure this out? What the are you going to do now? In the moment, I felt as though my brain might be disintegrating and I couldn't understand why. By the time I hit the 10 minute mark of training, I'd essentially given up on the mission and started to rant. To that point, nothing I tried to do worked. And because I was inside a modern flight simulator, it was all on camera for my instructor, a relatively young air force captain to watch. Out of shock, morbid curiosity, or perhaps sheer entertainment, he let me go on until I'd gotten everything out of my system. Thank goodness Instagram didn't exist yet.

• 1:08:46Jocko Willink?

  Whatever it looked like from this, from his point of view, the display couldn't have been flattering. There I was in high definition, the first and only Marine ever to fly the world's deadliest fighter, completely losing it during a simulator training event. It was awful. So what's going on with that? Like, are the controls backwards? No, I can explain.

• 1:09:13Dave Berke?

  Every, you know, this is the third chapter of the second half of the book and it's just a reminder of like, these are the most unflattering stories. So if you, if you think you're going to get some hero story in this book, you can attest for me on behalf of having written this, like every one of these stories I look back on, I just cannot help but shake my head. Like it's so embarrassing to picture me in that situation. And, and I explained it in great detail in the book, all the reasons why, like what, what is going on with this dude? And, and the backdrop is you already got to it. It's like, what got me to the cockpit of the Raptor was, dude, top of my class in, in the basic school to get a flight training slot, top of my class in flight school, get selected for Hornets, combat deployments into carrier, Top Gun, number one student, Top Gun, like all this stuff.

• 1:09:57Dave Berke?

  Senior instructor at Top Gun, ground combat leader, been in Ramadi, flew the F-16. And, and I get, I get handpicked for this job with maybe 150 other applicants. I'm the dude. And I get there and it's like, on paper, there is not a more qualified naval aviator to be doing this job. And I get, in, in the first part of Raptor training is like how the systems work, like how the engines work and how the hydraulics work and like navigating around, very easy. It just, there's nothing tactical about it. Just this pipe and this lever and this, this battery, like you learn this stuff, super easy. So I got through the first phase of training very quickly in the Raptor because it wasn't, you just listen and take notes and study and it's fine. This was the tactics phase. How do you employ this jet?

• 1:10:43Dave Berke?

  And I can't go in like a ton of detail, but I will just, I'll explain it this way is,

• 1:10:50Dave Berke?

  I had built in the F-18 and the F-16, a lot of habits. I had done things so many, I could basically fly those jets in my sleep. Like I just, I knew what to do. I had, I had been an instructor at Top Gun. I knew everything there was tactically to do. I was so comfortable. It'd probably be like, at the height of your like, hey, go take your seals and clear out this building. You'd be like, Roger, no factor. You just know what to do. It doesn't mean it's not hard, but, but you're not like, you, you're not insecure about understanding what you're supposed to do. Very, very simply put. The two things that makes the F-22 unique unlike any other, remember this is the first and only fifth generation airplane in the world at the time.

• 1:11:30Dave Berke?

  The first one is, is something that's really hard to understand is this is a stealth airplane. When you're in an F-18 or an F-16, you don't spend any time wondering if people can see you. You are visible from the second you take off. Everybody, good, bad, radars, everybody sees you. In a Raptor, you are number one. The biggest benefit you have is they can't see you. So all of your decisions, where you point, where you move, all the things that you do, the number one criteria that you're considering for your movements is to stay invisible. You don't even, there's not a brain cell that you use in an F-18 to avoid detection. You just, you just know that they see you.

• 1:12:13Dave Berke?

  So every decision you make is different. And the problem is, is like, once you start getting into the tactics, what you rely on is tactics. It'd be like if I told you everything you knew about jujitsu, like there's a new thing now and it doesn't work. You're like, and I go, hey, just forget all the stuff that you learned. You're like, so.

• 1:12:31Jocko Willink?

  I actually have an exact comparison.

• 1:12:34Dave Berke?

  Well, you, I, I know it, it'll be good and you can, you'll have to elaborate on that. Picture me in the cockpit is like, okay, we're good, we're going to do an intercept, a very basic tactic against this other enemy aircraft. And like everything I do on habit, he's like, that's wrong. Don't do that. Like, and I'm paraphrasing, it's a little more complex than that, but ultimately every bias, every tendency, every inclination, every instinct I had was wrong. And so not only is all my experience not a benefit, it actually, it's a liability. It's the opposite. It's worse. I, if I had shown up, had never been in an airplane, I would have learned quicker, if that makes sense.

• 1:13:16Dave Berke?

  So I'm in this thing like, and I'm realizing like, I don't know what to, I had not felt like that in an airplane in a decade. And I'm in an airplane, I'm like, I, I don't know what to do. And intercept after intercept, I'm, and I get to a point, I'm like, I kind of like in the cockpit, like.

• 1:13:33Dave Berke?

  I don't and I had like it just I I kinda said something like

• 1:13:38Dave Berke?

  what the fuck is going on like I said that out loud and like then the next intercept and it's like oh my and and that's it at some point I'm just like I kinda like drop the you know I'm just in a sim I don't think I kind of just like and I just just like lost it and thank God the instructor was a really cool dude and you there's you know there's like there's some comms in there like I get through this whole thing and he's like are you okay and I'm like I need a minute you know he's like hey dude take all the time you need like he was super cool with that whole thing but it was a realization of all the things I thought were the benefit the reason I was there was all these things that I had all these experiences all this knowledge all this capability all this skill

• 1:14:19Dave Berke?

  and like I said it wasn't that it wasn't helpful it was actually the opposite it it was it was a liability and it got into a place where it was like it was a it was a absolute low point I'm like may I maybe I don't even belong like this is bad it was it was an epic meltdown it was rough

• 1:14:37Jocko Willink?

  my exact comparison to that so as you know I spent my adult life in the SEAL teams and when you're in the SEAL teams you know you're you're either you know obviously go on deployment you're going against bad guys humans but also you know I spent 20 years training and approaching targets and setting up on targets and you know uh avoiding being seen and you know operating trying to kill other human beings so I end up getting into hunting and I'm elk hunting and so I'm kinda like out in the woods for the first time with my buddy John Dudley and this is this is the exact same thing

• 1:15:21Jocko Willink?

  so my whole life I've been you know trying to hunt humans and now I'm trying to hunt elk well there is the most significant difference the number one priority when it comes to hunting humans is you don't want them to see you and you don't want them to hear you right so you're you know you learn how to use the terrain you're watching where your feet go like all that stuff

• 1:15:47Jocko Willink?

  you know what you have to watch out for with elk like far and away the biggest thing that you have to be concerned with is smell

• 1:15:57Jocko Willink?

  So like everything that I had learned and their their vision isn't that good. Their hearing is is good, but they don't. They don't really react to it as much as a human does. And so you have to, you take all the tactics that you learned about terrain and movement and all this stuff and dead space, all these things that you look camouflage, you throw all that out the window and it's all about, hey, you, you, you have to be, you know, you have to have the wind in the right direction. You have to be, you know, walking into the winds, the winds blowing your scent away from them. And so everything that you learned is just blown out the window. So that's exactly the situation you're in. Everything that you would do to avoid, you know, contact and all this stuff is just gone. Gone. Because they can't see you anymore. And that's the same thing with an elk, an elk literally can't see you. They really can't see, I mean,

• 1:16:40Jocko Willink?

  you gotta be really obvious, you gotta be moving like actively and they'll, they'll see you. But their eyesight sucks, but their sense of smell is incredible. So there you go. That's my, uh,

• 1:16:50Dave Berke?

  There you go.

• 1:16:50Jocko Willink?

  That's my deal.

• 1:16:53Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that being said, there are a bunch of similarities. Because once you figure that out, then you are playing a very similar game.

• 1:16:59Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  Um, which did that come into play eventually?

• 1:17:02Dave Berke?

  Of cour-, I mean, clearly at some point I, I cracked the code.

• 1:17:06Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:17:06Dave Berke?

  And a lot of it was, all my instructors are like, hey, take all the time you need, we've all been there. They'd all gone through that same transition. And I think the coolest part about that was they also understood it was like twice as hard for me because I'm now a marine. And you know this. If you take how like the Navy and the Marine Corps and the Air Force, just the, the language is like, whatever we say, they're like, we don't say that, we say this instead. So you have like this constant, like this translation of like,

• 1:17:37Dave Berke?

  all the words that you use, they got, oh, we have a different word for that. And so I'm in this really tough spot where I'm having to learn all these new things. And then this whole, like, take everything I know and throw it out the window. They were very patient and yeah, it took a little bit longer, you know, a couple of months than I would have liked. But then like with everything, oh, I got it. Once you get it like, oh. Then you got it. And, and once you get it, you get it. And I did eventually get it. And my Raptor experience was nothing but positive. But this moment, I can't even remember his name. I wish I could. If this guy, who am I instructor reads this book, he's gonna be like, that was me. I was there. I remember it. I wish I could remember his name. I hope he does. And as soon as he says his name, like, I'll remember it. He was a young captain. You know, he's probably out of the Air

• 1:18:20Dave Berke?

  Force at this point. He's gonna, I guarantee you, he went back. It's like dudes, you should have seen what the, what, what the Marine did. Like, I'm sure it was a story they got out and well deserved. But to their credit, all those guys were like, so cool to me. And helped me. And then the light comes on, like, cool. And then I spent the rest of my career loving this new, like, it was awesome. I loved it. But it was a painful, humbling, I was just so, so resistant to admit that everything I had done to put me in the seat of that airplane, no longer mattered. And it was just, I just, I couldn't do it. I just, I just had a hard time accepting what got me there wasn't going to get me any farther. And that's a, it was a tough day, man.

• 1:19:03Jocko Willink?

  Does this increase our respect level for Chuck Yeager? And like, the test pilots, I would be like, oh, what? You got a jet? Let me get in that thing. I'll fly it.

• 1:19:12Dave Berke?

  Figure it out. Yeah. I have high regard for that mentality of like, you don't know what you're doing. Be open minded. Be willing to be flexible. Don't take your preconceived notions. And whatever you do, don't take the answer into the cockpit before the problem reveals itself. And that's what I like. I know, I, this tactical problem, I know exactly what to do. I've seen this tactical problem 50 times, 500 times, no factor. That didn't work. Okay, run it again. Hey, that didn't work. Uh, okay. And by like, run for him, like, I literally don't know what to do. I keep dying. Why am I dying? This is ridiculous.

• 1:19:43Jocko Willink?

  The mechanics of flying, tactics, uh, out the window, like, tactics don't count?

• 1:19:49Dave Berke?

  Mechanics of flying are like,

• 1:19:50Jocko Willink?

  The same.

• 1:19:51Dave Berke?

  The same. It, it takes you about 10 minutes to go, okay, the stick, the throw, like, the mechanics of getting good at like, being really good at it takes a little bit of time. But the mechanics of flying F-18, 16, 20, like, it's all the same. The tactics are everything.

• 1:20:03Jocko Willink?

  And then, how long is it to switch from one aircraft to the other one? Like?

• 1:20:12Dave Berke?

  Go so this is the story of going from the the F 18 F 16 like they're very similar kind of keeping them together to the F 22 was really hard when I went from 22 to 35 it was like

• 1:20:22Jocko Willink?

  No factor.

• 1:20:23Dave Berke?

  No factor. Super easy because in the the what makes them similar is 95% there's a there's a couple of small differences. You get used to those little things, but those two airplanes are so much more alike than they are different. And the flying part is just not that's not the hard part. It's knowing what to do. And it's like if like is take 15 years and every instinct you have and it's now wrong. And that is just it's it's in a place where like you don't want to spend a lot of time like, you know, going to thousand like thinking about what you're doing when you're going that fast. You don't want to have to be thinking too often. You want to be pretty quick on the decision making matrix. And I had gotten good at that like boom, I can decipher something. You know me, I talk too fast. I think too fast. Like I'm comfortable

• 1:21:08Dave Berke?

  in those settings. And so the the time to decide what to do, things were getting past me. And I was like, bad situation, dying, failing before my brain could even like even know what's going on. And so it wasn't like, I didn't know what to do. It was like, I don't know what's happening right now. And that led to like, the most epic tantrum of a grown man, you know, in high def in front of this other dude who was like probably eight years junior to me, just like, keep going, sir, just get out of your system. You're good. I'm like, thanks, bro. He was awesome. He's a great dude. Thank God.

• 1:21:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. With my ego in check, you go on to say, I found myself listening and learning from people who are younger and younger and less experienced, less and less experienced to my surprise and delighted helped embracing the change came quickly in part because the results presented themselves immediately. My performance in tactical training improved dramatically as I demonstrated the ability to execute maneuvers that made the F 22 so lethal. I was eventually selected as the commander of the F 22 division at Nellis.

• 1:22:12Dave Berke?

  Crazy.

• 1:22:13Jocko Willink?

  An unheard of opportunity for a Marine, but one which I took seriously and for which I will forever be thankful. Things had come full circle. I was now leading a crop of newly transition Raptor pilots still struggling with change. So you ended up being.

• 1:22:28Jocko Willink?

  The commander of the F twenty two division and that's an air force division?

• 1:22:32Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:22:33Jocko Willink?

  Bro.

• 1:22:33Dave Berke?

  I know, dude. It's crazy.

• 1:22:36Jocko Willink?

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:22:36Dave Berke?

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:22:38Jocko Willink?

  And how long did you have that bill it for?

• 1:22:39Dave Berke?

  About a year.

• 1:22:40Jocko Willink?

  You took a air force officers.

• 1:22:44Dave Berke?

  What level is that?

• 1:22:45Jocko Willink?

  Lieutenant Colonel. A lieutenant Colonel slot.

• 1:22:49Dave Berke?

  Trigger Volga, if you're listening, thank you. That was all trigger. Trigger's awesome.

• 1:22:54Jocko Willink?

  Freaking epic. Good deal, Dave. We were learning it all over again, bro. There's a reason. Here's the lesson. We resist change, but we shouldn't. And I'll start this one off with a with a quote as well. What happens to companies that don't innovate and adapt over time? What happens to people when they refuse change? In almost every case, companies that don't change collapse, just as people who don't change are doomed to fail.

• 1:23:22Jocko Willink?

  Your real world application starts off with a quote. It really is how we's all how we've always done it. God. It's so people should choke themselves when they hear that, but they don't. They still say it. That time worn phrase was quickly followed by, and I know how that sounds. He nearly went to his own comment. He knew. So there you go.

• 1:23:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Jocko Willink?

  What was his deal?

• 1:23:45Dave Berke?

  Dude, this is a company, man, that had been like dominating their their their space for like a long time. And like they kind of rolled up some other competitors, like they were doing great. And like in the previous couple of years, like really in the last eighteen months, like their numbers started to drop their, you know, kind of a tech based company and they they were marketing in like a pretty niche area. And they'd hired a bunch of new people. Like, oh, we had this awesome recruiting process from the best schools and some of the best minds in this this kind of like tech marketing space to try to

• 1:24:17Dave Berke?

  win in their field that they had been the best company, but for the last eighteen months, like, oh, our numbers are going down. And the craziest thing is they had this this whole story about who they brought in, how smart these kids were, how much they, you know, they were going to contribute. And every time one of these new kids had an idea, they're like, we're not doing that. And and I'm paraphrasing. There's obviously women or deaf. And and when they would and when these young kids had the audacity to say, why not, instead of just doing what they're told, the answer was.

• 1:24:46Dave Berke?

  Essentially, this, we know what we're doing. We've always done it this way and it's worked. And what they're dealing was like, they were dealing with immunity where these young kids were like, "Oh, I'm gonna leave. I'm not gonna work for you. This is stupid. You, you don't listen to anything I said." And, you know, you're in this meeting and you're kind of talking through like, "What's the problem?" And, and the problem was like, "Oh, they don't know what they're doing." And then you, you know, you ask a couple of honest questions and then at some point they go, "Oh, my God." And they kind of look around like, "Oh, my God, we're not, we're not letting, we're not listening to what they're saying. They're telling us we have to make these changes and we're not doing it." So it's so obvious from the outside. I know how, and, and the point is like, I know how, that's much easier said than done from the inside,

• 1:25:27Dave Berke?

  but dude, resisting change is gonna kill you. It, you resist change, over time, it's gonna kill you and your, and your company.

• 1:25:35Jocko Willink?

  And there's even a more extreme irony be, besides like hiring freaking young people that have all these great ideas because they have great ideas and then not listening to them.

• 1:25:47Dave Berke?

  It's crazy, right? It's crazy. Well, that's the stuff we see and, and the fun part is taking like, "Oh, that reminds me of when I got in the F-22." Like, "I don't need to listen to you. How do you think I got here, dude? You know, I know what I'm doing." It's like, "Oh, actually, you don't." And it's not good.

• 1:26:02Jocko Willink?

  Check. Uh, "Chapter nine, put the team first." Sea of Japan, 23 miles behind the carrier, February 2000. And by the way, the font that's used for those little date time settings is like a military Top Gun looking font, which I appreciate. I'm a, I'm a font aficionado.

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  Afficionado, yeah. So I like that. You get that vibe. It's like the vibe from any military movie that's gonna tell you where it's taking place.

• 1:26:32Dave Berke?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:26:33Jocko Willink?

  What is that, Courier New or something?

• 1:26:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah, that sounds, but it could picture like the little ditch.

• 1:26:39Jocko Willink?

  Ninety-nine taxi lights on.

• 1:26:43Jocko Willink?

  My stomach immediately turned inside out. If another carrier pilot is reading this, they get it because 99 taxi lights on is possibly the most dreaded call of all of naval aviation. On the ship, radio calls are normally preceded by your aircraft number and the information that is communicated after that number applies to only you. 203, you're cleared to climb to 4,000 feet. 107, descend and maintain 1,200 feet. Other pilots may hear the call directed at you, but if you don't hear your aircraft number, it's just background information for them and not paid much heed. When a radio call is preceded by 99, however, it means the information about

• 1:27:26Jocko Willink?

  to be transmitted applies to everyone. It's an efficient way to share critical information needed by all airborne jets to coordinate the recovery back to the ship. 99, the carrier is in a turn. 99, expected fire final bearing is 350 degrees. Everyone pays attention to typical 99 calls, but no one gets nauseated. 99 taxi lights on, however, has the same effect on the stomach as weak old sushi. It's not a call that helps anyone do any coordinating or adjusting. It just tells everyone that weather, the weather is bad. End of days, apocalyptic bad.

• 1:28:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, bro, you did a good job writing this book.

• 1:28:15Jocko Willink?

  This is such a good chapter. Um, so 99, what it means is everyone listen and then turn your lights on means we can't see any of you guys at all. The weather freaking sucks. So dude, you go through this story. It's like, it's like edge of your seat reading because it just sucks. Get the book. Get the book. Uh, I'm going to fast forward a little bit.

• 1:28:47Jocko Willink?

  So you, you basically now you're coming in, you're, you're on a, what is that? Okay. So it's, you can't, you can't, let's set the stage a little bit. You can't see the ship. Can't see anything. You can't, there's no, where you're at, South China Sea, is that where you are? Sea of Japan. Sea of Japan, there's, there's no other option. Nope, no divert. It's like when, when my first child was born, my wife was in labor. And my wife looks at my mother-in-law and says something along the lines of like, I don't think I can do this. And my mother-in-law looked at her like,

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  This is happening. This is what's happening, you know? And so this is the same thing, like there's no like, hey, I don't think I could do this. Oh, and by the way, um, we have a podcast guest coming, uh, who didn't get aboard. Yep, he didn't get aboard. And he caused a problem and he didn't get aboard and he got ejected from the pipeline. Uh, after all the training. And he went to the, he was a Navy guy, academy guy, couldn't get aboard, didn't get aboard.

• 1:29:57Jocko Willink?

  Went to the detailer, flew to the detailer and said, do not send me to a ship. He's like, well, I got something else for you. Yep. He said, let, send me to BUDS. And he goes, well, right now I got a ship for you in Hawaii. It's not going to be that bad. He goes, I'm not going on a ship. I'll take BUDS. And the guy goes, well, when you wash out, when you wash out of BUDS, since you just washed out of carrier training, when you wash out of BUDS, it ain't going to be pretty orders like you got right now to Hawaii. He said, send me to BUDS. So he ended up Vietnam SEAL, epic SEAL in Vietnam. Yeah, I would kill to be, to listen to his story. Yeah, it's coming, it's coming. I'll be out on the next couple of podcasts. But what a great guy, great leader, but. And you know, he was like extremely humbling, you know?

• 1:30:42Jocko Willink?

  The ship is no joke, man. The ship is no joke. The ship is no joke. So you can't see the ship. So what do you, this is just pure instrument? Pure instruments, 100%. And are you seeing, does it paint like a fake picture of where the ship is? No. You're just looking at the horizon, what's that instrument called?

• 1:31:02Dave Berke?

  The HUD, yeah.

• 1:31:03Jocko Willink?

  The HUD.

• 1:31:03Dave Berke?

  The heads up display.

• 1:31:04Jocko Willink?

  The heads up display is showing you what?

• 1:31:07Dave Berke?

  It's a, it's a computer read out of the horizon, your angle of bank, your altitude.

• 1:31:11Jocko Willink?

  So that's my point is you see the horizon, but it's not the real horizon.

• 1:31:14Dave Berke?

  Correct. It's fake. Yes.

• 1:31:15Jocko Willink?

  So you see a fake horizon.

• 1:31:17Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:31:17Jocko Willink?

  You see kind of where you are and is, does it give you any indication of where the ship is?

• 1:31:22Dave Berke?

  Yes. You have.

• 1:31:23Jocko Willink?

  A little computer generated thing?

• 1:31:25Dave Berke?

  Arrow and it tells you like, and distance is called DME. Yes. So you have all the information you need and, and we get good at deciphering that. So that's like, that by itself is not disorienting. It's just a skill you learn like, okay, this arrow means this, this number means that. And, and like, it's fine. And by the way, even on a clear night, quote unquote night, you can't see the ship until maybe the last, you know, on a really nice night, you could see the ship six, seven miles away, which is cool.

• 1:31:49Jocko Willink?

  Which is how many minutes?

• 1:31:51Dave Berke?

  Four or five.

• 1:31:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:31:52Dave Berke?

  Like, oh, I see it down the horizon and it's certainly the last two minutes, you have a really nice clear picture. And ironically, like the darker it is, the more clear the ship is because the contrast of the lights. But up until like the last, literally the last 20 seconds, for the most part, even when you do see the ship, you're still flying those instruments. So flying the instruments is fine. It's just you get used to it.

• 1:32:12Jocko Willink?

  Bro, is, is some of this aircraft carrier landing, I just realized some of this is faith based.

• 1:32:21Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:32:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:32:23Jocko Willink?

  If you're not seeing something until 20 seconds, that is a faith based evolution.

• 1:32:28Dave Berke?

  Yes. There's a lot of faith being put in all sorts of things, your technology, your procedures. But other than, I think I had one, and I had one other landing like this in, right off the, right off San Diego. Every other landing, at some point you see it with your eyes and you're like, okay, it's no more, it's, you see it, which is, I don't care. That's human instinct is that once you see something for better, for worse, like that's what you want. I just want to see this thing. I can see the boat. I can see the ball. I can see the lineup. I can, I can land.

• 1:32:57Jocko Willink?

  So normally you get, at best case scenario, you get five minutes of seeing the ship. Sometimes it gets down to two. Bad scenario is it's going to be like 20 seconds.

• 1:33:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah. All right. There it is. Cool. Yep. That's right.

• 1:33:10Jocko Willink?

  So all you can see is black.

• 1:33:14Dave Berke?

  It's kind of an interesting thing. I talk about it. The first thing I see is like green streaks. Remember I was talking about that? Like there's these, I'm in the clouds, but everything, it's, everything's off. Like it's dark. So it's just pitch black. But I see these green streaks going up over the cockpit can, the glass. And I can't figure out what those are. They almost look like electrical, like staticky things. And what it was, was a snow. Snow would build up and fly off in chunks and little white streaks were flying up over the canopy.

• 1:33:43Jocko Willink?

  And because your lights are on, it's hitting the snow? Or is it just the lights from inside the cockpit?

• 1:33:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah. It just, it just the way it was reflecting off the, like the little din, the little glow of that. So I'm like, oh, we're like, I understood before the landing that we were in a snowstorm. I understood that. Can't see anything, but you can see the snow pile up and just these little, it's hard to describe. I just call them white streaks.

• 1:34:05Jocko Willink?

  So you're in, you're seeing little white streaks. Your visibility is zero.

• 1:34:08Dave Berke?

  Zero.

• 1:34:08Jocko Willink?

  Zero visibility.

• 1:34:10Dave Berke?

  Literally zero.

• 1:34:10Jocko Willink?

  Zero.

• 1:34:12Dave Berke?

  Correct.

• 1:34:12Jocko Willink?

  You're from California, but you, but you did live in, in Nevada. So you drove in the snow before.

• 1:34:18Dave Berke?

  I, Virginia, I'd, yes, I'd.

• 1:34:21Jocko Willink?

  It's weird. Echo Charles, ever driven in the snow before, in a snowstorm?

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  In a, yeah, I have actually.

• 1:34:26Jocko Willink?

  At night?

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  No, no, it was not at night.

• 1:34:28Jocko Willink?

  So if it's at night and it's a bad snowstorm, you turn on your lights and you, you can see less. Because it just makes bright white cloud, like bright white things in front of your face, basically.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, like super, super thick fog. Same thing.

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, probably similar.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  And it's like brighter.

• 1:34:44Jocko Willink?

  Probably something similar to that. So you can see nothing. They're talking you on.

• 1:34:53Jocko Willink?

  I'm trying to figure out where to pick this up. Uh, the three mile mark. I began my final descent toward the ship. Normally by this point I would have seen the visual cues on the carrier to validate my alignment. And confirm I was set up for a good final approach. Not tonight. There's nothing to see but flashes of snow, my HUD and the glow of my taxi light shining up from the nose of my jet, reminding me of how deep in the weeds we all were.

• 1:35:22Jocko Willink?

  My eyes never left my instrument readouts. Again, this is a faith-based operation. God. I was so paranoid, I would get off course or altitude and make a fatal mistake. While I dropped through 450 feet, a shrieking whoop whoop blared in my headset as my jet notified me of my descent through my final altitude check. So that's a normal warning.

• 1:35:46Dave Berke?

  Correct.

• 1:35:47Jocko Willink?

  Like you get to 450 feet and it goes beep beep beep.

• 1:35:49Dave Berke?

  Set the route out on purpose. You set it to 450 as like that is your final alert. Like, hey, you're you're you're getting really close to the ground, to the water. Yep. It's by you do it by design. It's part of the SOP. You know it's there.

• 1:36:00Jocko Willink?

  Normally I would have anticipated the startling alert, a sign I was mentally focused and toggled it off right as it sounded. But I was so overwhelmed, it completely caught caught me off guard. Next was the call from air traffic control. 203 on course on glidescope, three quarters of a mile. Call the ball. So he's saying to you, okay, dude, we got you. And he's just watching you on radar because they can't see anything at all.

• 1:36:24Dave Berke?

  They're in the bottom of the ship on radar.

• 1:36:28Jocko Willink?

  203 Clara. What's Clara mean?

• 1:36:30Dave Berke?

  Clara means I do not see the ball.

• 1:36:32Jocko Willink?

  203 Clara, I replied, trying to hide it. Hey, do us all a favor right now. Just make that call right now. What did you say it like?

• 1:36:40Dave Berke?

  203 Clara.

• 1:36:43Jocko Willink?

  And Clara is a term used to inform the LSO. I didn't see the ball or the ship or on this night, anything. 203, keep it coming. And that's how they're talking, right?

• 1:36:54Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Shit. They didn't see me either. Because otherwise, what would they have said to you?

• 1:37:00Dave Berke?

  They'd say paddles contact, you're high, you're low, you're on. They'd say, I see you, you're on glideslope. And they're like, their way of saying, I don't see you is keep it coming. Like, we're looking, eventually we'll see you. So you're about, this is about the 18 seconds from landing, you're three quarters of a mile behind the ship. I tell them, I don't see them. And they say, in in Navy speak, and I they say, we don't see you either.

• 1:37:22Jocko Willink?

  Keep it coming. Shit. They didn't see me either. I continued to fly the instruments, having never been this close to a ship without seeing it. Two or three paddles, paddles, contact, they finally saw me. So, what does paddles mean?

• 1:37:38Dave Berke?

  The LSOs, uh, the, the landing signals officer, they have a radio and, and they're talking to you. Back in the day, World War II, see those old videos, the guys stand out and they're holding on their hands, these paddles. And they'd hold them up and down and flip them around. And those visual cues from the paddles would tell the pilots, is before the days of radios, it was a visual, they, they were holding these paddles, red, white, and they'd flip them around. So the nickname of an LSO is, they called them, hey, you're a paddles. So I was an LSO. And part of my job on the ship was I was a lead, I trained and led an LSO team. Your nickname is paddles.

• 1:38:10Jocko Willink?

  So that's his call sign, his paddles. So two or three paddles, contact. So that means I see you.

• 1:38:15Dave Berke?

  LSO is, is paddle saying, we see you.

• 1:38:18Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Uh, they finally saw me. Right for lineup, power. Is that you?

• 1:38:24Dave Berke?

  That's them. No, you're just listening, yeah.

• 1:38:26Jocko Willink?

  And you say P O W E E E R. Like power?

• 1:38:30Dave Berke?

  That's exactly.

• 1:38:31Jocko Willink?

  Is there a little?

• 1:38:32Dave Berke?

  You'd be a great LSO. That was exactly right.

• 1:38:34Jocko Willink?

  And are they, is there like even a smidgen of like, a little bit like power? Like you're you?

• 1:38:40Dave Berke?

  You are taught, and we learn this as LSOs. If I say, little power, power, power, you can tell, same word. And you, the inflection is built into what I want you to hear. Cause if I say power, you're like, okay, cool. Like, that's a small shot of power. If I say power, that's a long blast on power. So that extended E E E E, there's an inflection with that with him, which is saying like, you have to do this immediately and a lot. And way more than a little power would be like, almost an indiscernible little shot of power. He's seeing something you don't see and he's just keeping you from settling.

• 1:39:20Dave Berke?

  That call was like, holy shit dude. You, we need this, like, I just instinctively just like threw the left hand.

• 1:39:28Jocko Willink?

  And why is he telling you to do that?

• 1:39:30Dave Berke?

  Cause by the time he sees me and recognizes where I am, I'm, I'm dangerously low.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  And power is going to

• 1:39:39Dave Berke?

  Climb me back up.

• 1:39:40Jocko Willink?

  Lift you up a little bit.

• 1:39:41Dave Berke?

  That's right.

• 1:39:41Jocko Willink?

  And that's just because you're going slower. And so when you add power or is the angle of your aircraft pointed slightly up at this point? So when you add power, it just immediately heads up a little bit.

• 1:39:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah, so you set in carrier aviation, different than air force and commercial and civilian flying is. When you land in the carrier, you set the angle. We call it angle of attack. The whole point of setting the angle is, and you know, on the, on the screen, you'll see it, but like the, when the tail hook comes down, the hook has to be in a certain place to grab the wire. And so if your jet is flat, the nose is down, the hook is up, the hook will go over the wires. If you're too cocked up, if your nose is really high and the hook is really low, you'll hit the ship. So you set this angle.

• 1:40:25Jocko Willink?

  What is it like 10 degrees?

• 1:40:26Dave Berke?

  It's, it's, you're on a three degrees glide slope and an 8.1 degree. Why I know that, I just, it's 8.1 degrees.

• 1:40:34Jocko Willink?

  That sounds like a good thing to know.

• 1:40:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we know all this. Yeah, totally. We tie train on it. So that 8.1 degrees sets the perfect angle of the hook. And so your entire descent, you maintain that. And all power does is if you add power, the jet rises. If you take power down, the jet lowers, but you never change the angle. The instinct is if you're low, as you can imagine, is you want to pull back on the stick to bring the nose up. That's the, the worst thing you can do because it gets you slower, you'll fall more and the hook goes even farther down. You increase your chances of hitting the ship. So you do not mess with the nose. You've got to keep the nose exactly perfectly trimmed. So if you get low, the only solution then is adding power will bring you up on the glide slope. That call is his way of saying like, dude, you need to add a lot of power right now.

• 1:41:22Dave Berke?

  And I was a little bit off. I was a little bit lined up in the wrong, so right for lineup. If you can picture as you roll the jet, when you roll the jet, you lose a little bit of lift because your wings aren't flat anymore. So you're going to fall even more. So he's saying right for lineup. You're going to get even lower. So you really need to add power.

• 1:41:39Jocko Willink?

  Dude, what is the qualification course to become an LSO?

• 1:41:42Dave Berke?

  Just like everything else in the Navy, man. You go out, you take a bunch of classes, you get some academics and some Sims, and then you go shadow and experience LSO.

• 1:41:51Jocko Willink?

  How long do you shadow and experience LSO for?

• 1:41:54Dave Berke?

  So my, I got selected to be an LSO before my first cruise. I did a bunch of field, a bunch of field training with qualified LSOs. And then eventually, you know, they make you watch, then they like, you sit next to them, then you talk and they're next to you. And then at some point you've proven that you can do it. By my second deployment, I was a team lead. Like I ran my own team. So took a full deployment, but by my second deployment, I was in charge of a team.

• 1:42:18Jocko Willink?

  Does everyone become an LSO?

• 1:42:20Dave Berke?

  Negative dude. LSO, especially for the Navy, like they'll pick like two or three guys. It's, it's, it's their best guys are LSOs. It's a, it's a very coveted qual in the Navy. Marine Corps doesn't,

• 1:42:34Dave Berke?

  you know, the Marine Corps is always kind of like, whatever, but it is, if you're an LSO at the ship, that is a coveted qual that people really want and they, they give it to the guys they put a lot of faith in. It's a qual that I, I am really, look back on with very fondly. That was a wing called and a team lead LSO. It was awesome. You're the guy bringing home all the jets. And you know what? 99 times out of 100, you don't need to do anything. No factor. Every now and then, you are the difference between Dave Berke crashing in the back of ship and Dave Berke landing. That guy.

• 1:43:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what it sounds like here.

• 1:43:07Dave Berke?

  That's, that's what he did.

• 1:43:08Jocko Willink?

  Right for lineup. Power. My response was pure reflex as I shoved the throttles forward, not all the way, but just enough for a good shot of thrust, trying to give the LSO what he wanted. Bam, tug. Wait, what? Holy crap. I was aboard and I never saw a thing.

• 1:43:27Jocko Willink?

  Faith-based landing, instrument-based landing, team trust landing.

• 1:43:35Jocko Willink?

  That's nuts. And you only had one other complete, complete, no visual landing.

• 1:43:41Dave Berke?

  I had another zero zero landing. It was day San Diego. Just one of those days where the, you know, the, the marine layer rolled in, caught us off guard. And like, the ship, I, I, I got aboard in zero zero. And that one was kind of crazy because it was in training. Training is the wrong word. Uh, uh, workups, not training, work. I was a Hornet squadron. And it just, when I launched, it was like, man, it was totally good day. This one, we kind of took off like, it's kind of a sketchy day, maybe, or at night, you know, it's two in the morning kind of thing. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this. The other one was like, middle of the day, workup and totally caught the whole ship off guard.

• 1:44:18Jocko Willink?

  Does, on that, like on that day, anyone to go, hey dude, go ahead and land at North Island?

• 1:44:23Dave Berke?

  How do I say this? That sounded like a total tool. Um, I was the only guy to get aboard every other jet diverted to North Island.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you earned in some of those good deals.

• 1:44:35Dave Berke?

  If, and for any of the like, the coolest part about that story I just told you. Ron Rostek, if you're listening, he, he just like hit me up on like LinkedIn. He was on the flight deck when I had that zero zero landing on the ship. And he's like, sir, totally remember that other landing, like your eyes were as big as saucers, but you're the only guy that like, he just messaged me. I had that. I should probably show it to you, but like, as you can imagine, like, I'm, I'm kind of shaking right now, re-recalling that stuff. Those are like, some of the most memorable experiences of my entire lifetime. This is zero zero landing. That is a absolute,

• 1:45:17Dave Berke?

  like you, I, I didn't use the words before, that the concept of being faith-based, like, you're kind of like, what just happened? The margin for error is so small. And the, and the,

• 1:45:33Dave Berke?

  If you get outside the margin for error, it is, I mean, we're talking jets exploding like

• 1:45:38Jocko Willink?

  It's just death.

• 1:45:39Dave Berke?

  It's death. It's, it is. So the fact that when I'm like, what just happened? That is, I'm like, I was like, what just happened? Like, if there was somebody next to me, I would have looked at him like, what just happened? It was, it's so hard to describe. Like, you were just like, I cannot believe that just happened. How did I land? And that's how I felt. And I talked about that, like, crazy.

• 1:46:02Jocko Willink?

  And if people couldn't get aboard, is there, like, if Sea of Japan, do they just, I mean, have there been situations like that have occurred in the world where it was like, we had to send tankers down there and get people like, transition to another area or whatever?

• 1:46:17Dave Berke?

  It's very uncommon. We also, there are what we call blue water ops. Like, the ship has to be certified, the pilots have to be certified for no divert operations.

• 1:46:27Jocko Willink?

  No divert, meaning you can't divert anywhere else?

• 1:46:29Dave Berke?

  There's sometimes the nearest land is

• 1:46:31Jocko Willink?

  Bring it over to North Island, bro.

• 1:46:33Dave Berke?

  That other one was like

• 1:46:34Jocko Willink?

  Dave Berke out there, just feet up on the desk. Yo.

• 1:46:39Dave Berke?

  The craziest thing about that one is like, they all went to the beach and like, like, went home. And I'm like, I'm like stuck in the ship, you know, it was like ridiculous. But it's very uncommon. The ship is well-equipped to handle that stuff. So like, there, the tanker, like, but dude, every now and then it's a thing. It's every now and then it's a problem. It's, it's just goes with the territory.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  Zero zero, daytime San Diego. And when did the aircraft pick you up? Did, when did paddles? Same thing, whereas like moments, literally moments before?

• 1:47:17Dave Berke?

  Very similar. I think that the, the difference in the daytime and the nighttime and that's, and the, the North Island or the San Diego one and the Sea of Japan one, when we started coming back on that daytime one here in San Diego, two things. One, it's daytime. So it just feels different. It just, it just feels different. I don't care who you are. It just, it's easier during the day than it is at night. Okay, I was gonna say. And, and so that one is an interesting landing. You know this, like the marine layer typically around here, the marine layer is like starts around eight hundred and stops around fifteen hundred. So it's crystal clear above and crystal clear below. And so we spent the whole flight like above it, like it's a clear blue sky day. We're training, we're fighting hard. And when you're coming back to land, you're like, okay, I'm gonna go in at fifteen hundred. Breakthrough at some point.

• 1:48:01Dave Berke?

  And I'm gonna break out it, you know, I'll break out with like a half a mile, no factor, or maybe the, the full thing. And it's one of those, you're like Clara and like paddles is like, makes a quick call. I get aboard. Kind of a similar situation. The difference between those two is on that one, I'm just a young guy listening, just doing what I'm told. On the San, on the daytime? On the San Diego one, you also, I had no sense that this was gonna happen. There's no like fear, there's no anxiety. You're like, whatever. Marine layer is just a thing around here. You just go in at some altitude and come out another. So when that happened, I landed, it was like, holy crap. And like the next jet behind me didn't get aboard. You hear like the jet flying away and you look up, you don't see anything.

• 1:48:42Dave Berke?

  And on the radio, they're like ninety-nine, your signal is divert, everybody go to North Island, which is like, or maybe they even went to Miramar, like the Marines probably went to Miramar and the Navy guys went to North Island. It's beautiful. Like it wasn't some big thing. This one was like, everybody has to get aboard or they're gonna, they're gonna crash or run out of gas or it's gonna be a major thing. I knew that for like forty-five minutes. And so like that ninety-nine taxi line on call probably came thirty minutes before my landing. So you're just sitting up there in the cockpit. Heart rate's like at one fifty. You're just like nauseous, like how, how am I going to do this? I will, this is the only way for me to like, say, I know what your wife was talking about, having not done, that's exactly how I felt. It was like, I don't think I can do this.

• 1:49:28Dave Berke?

  And I think he even mentioned there, I'm like, I don't think, I don't think I can do this. That's, that was the feeling I had. The other ones, like it just happened, like I don't know what happened, just kinda came and went and like, that was crazy. My buddy Ron was on the flight, he's like, oh my God, dude, that was crazy. Your eyes were like saucers. I'm like, I know, right? This was totally different, totally different. We're deployed, we're underway, we're, we're, it's on my, we're taking, you know, our sweet time to get there, but we're gonna go to Iraq. Like it's a totally different scenario. This was like way worse. Anyway. Good talk, naval aviation, man.

• 1:49:58Jocko Willink?

  Did you, um, so you might have heard me talk about this a couple of times, but I've been talking about how like mindset wise, like humble, humble, humble, humble. When it's time to execute, put my night vision goggles on like, dude, I'm, I'm getting it done. I'm going to make the shot. I'm going to do the thing. We're going to make it happen. But you didn't have that feeling. You were like, dude, I'm scared shitless the entire time.

• 1:50:19Dave Berke?

  This is my first deployment. It's the first month of deployment. We had left San Diego. The first stop is Japan.

• 1:50:26Dave Berke?

  This is like one of maybe like, I wouldn't be surprised if I look back in my logbook. This is like the fifth or sixth night landing of my entire operational career. And I'm just, and, and also like, I won't lie, like

• 1:50:41Dave Berke?

  the night carrier, like I'm so, at some point you get, you, you learn to manage it. I am at the, basically the absolute very beginning of my night carrier landing career. So on a perfect night, I'm scared. On a perfect night, I'm scared. So this is just like, this is insane for me. Young chip, like this, like there is definitely a time I'm in that cockpit. I can feel it. I can feel myself right now feeling this like, I don't know if I can do this. And you want to talk about the worst possible mindset to have in the cockpit of a single seat fighter? Like, I don't know if I can do this. And I carried that with me all the way to landing, like

• 1:51:22Dave Berke?

  it's a very, that's why this chapter is in the book. That's why I wrote this story is this was a, that was a major hurdle for me. Big, big thing.

• 1:51:31Jocko Willink?

  It's, I'm kind of surprised, like, at, you know, I would expect you to be like, look, I was, I was all nervous. And then at, you know, a certain point I turned my downwind turn, took that final, you know, left turn, starboard or whatever, port side turn. And I was like, I'm going to make this happen. But you were just like horrified.

• 1:51:50Dave Berke?

  Horrified. And I, as you know, like I expand in great detail on what I'm thinking during this whole thing. Like this is not a, uh, this is another, like this dude is kind of barely hanging on, like barely hanging on.

• 1:52:05Dave Berke?

  Good times.

• 1:52:07Jocko Willink?

  And here's the whole point of this chapter. You say, literally, nothing happened to my jet on that ship without that entire team. And you talk about it, everyone did. I couldn't start an engine, taxi one into the flight deck, take off land, or launch a weapon in combat without the support of countless people. And while it was me and my F-18 dropping bombs who got the recognition in the newspapers and on TV, I was only one cog in a machine of 5,500 men and women doing the miraculous. It was the epitome of team effort. Is this, is this the, uh, this is 2000?

• 1:52:42Dave Berke?

  2000.

• 1:52:42Jocko Willink?

  And this is where you dropped guided munitions for the first time?

• 1:52:46Dave Berke?

  Later in this deployment, I dropped the first JDAM in Iraq, big time. And there's a little piece in there, I just, I think it's, yeah, good deal, the first one, man. There's a little thing I think is worth mentioning is because, so I land, and I eventually make my way down to the ready room, and dudes are like, high fiving, like, "Bro, good job." Like, I'm getting all this congratulations. And there's a little part of that I write in there, and I'm like, I was so stoked. I was so freaking stoked. So I'm like, "Hell, yeah, dude. I am, I am now etched in the, in the annals of naval aviation. I did the impossible." And then like a couple hours later, I'm in my room, and I'm like, when I'm alone, I'm like, I, I felt like a fraud. Cause I'm like, I didn't, that was like, I literally,

• 1:53:31Dave Berke?

  like, I don't know what happened. And what happened was I just, I flew my instruments, and the guy's like, "Power rifle line up. Roger, click, I'm in." But to say like, "Oh, I did that." I really, I had a hard time. I struggled with that. And what I came to realize, like, dude,

• 1:53:50Dave Berke?

  first of all, obviously the LSO, clearly. But 20 other things happened that made, I was, I certainly played a role in it, no doubt. But like, to say that, like, I did that, I really had a hard time with that. I could not get that out of my head. Like, dude. And there was a very humbling moment, because up until that point, you're like, I'm the man. You know how I know I'm the man? Look, everybody look around. Dave Berke in that cockpit, he's the man. And that one, like, I just couldn't get past, like, damn dude, I just kind of felt like a lot. I felt, and I wrote it in there, I felt like a passenger on my own plane. It was a weird feeling. And that was like, dude, you gotta get out and see what's going on. That's when I started to learn about the ship and the jobs and the people and what they're doing. I'm like, oh, man, this thing is so much bigger than me.

• 1:54:32Dave Berke?

  Hard lesson to learn to teach you a brand new young fighter pilot. Hey, this is not about you. What do you mean it's not about me? Like, that movie, that's me. And like, so it was a very humbling thing to realize all these other things are going on. And that landing is what got me to think about that, like, damn dude.

• 1:54:48Jocko Willink?

  You know what? Again, going back to this idea of dealing with like, high stress situations and like humble, humble, humble, and then kind of, you know, execute. As I thought about how I figured that out, part of it was like, oh, and then when you join the military, like, okay, you're going to climb over the top of the cargo net at Bud's. This, I don't know, 50 feet up in the air, like, it's not comfortable. If you're, you know, even if you are comfortable with heights, you're, you're basically flipping over the top of this thing and like, you can fall and die. Okay, cool. If you fall, you die. Let's just put it to you that way. And then the slide for life is the same thing. Like, you're, you know, you're gonna get badly injured if you fall. But you, you know, you do it. And it's actually before that, you're going over like, the low wall, and then the high wall.

• 1:55:33Jocko Willink?

  And then you go over the cargo net, and then you do the slide for life. And then you're gonna rappel off the tower, and then you're gonna rappel, then you're gonna fast rope off the tower, and then you're gonna rappel out of a helicopter, and then you're gonna fast rope out of a helicopter, and then you're gonna jump out of an aircraft static line, then you're gonna jump out free fall. So you're doing like, all these things. And each time, you know, let's say you're a little bit scared when you're going over the high wall. A little bit, but you learn how to suppress it. And then you go over the cargo net. A little scared going, but you learn how to suppress it. You go off the slide for life, learn how to suppress it. And I don't know what you're doing with those feelings, but, you know, how Echo Charles deals with it, how Dave Berke deals with it, and how I deal with it, we might, I don't know what we all do individually, but we all figure out that there's this thing that's gonna come over us, and we're gonna make, we're not gonna pay attention to it,

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  or we're gonna deal with this way, we're gonna breathe, we're gonna look, we're gonna, you know, tell ourselves we're badass, or say, I'm gonna follow the protocols, whatever you're gonna do, you're gonna do. But at some point, and I'm thinking about all the wickets that you have to go through to be in that position, they knew. I mean, because you think about, I mean, how many aircraft were in the air? Twelve. So to all 12 people. Yep. Got aboard. Yep. Twelve out of 12. Yep. Like, that's pretty freaking awesome to do something that is so difficult and so horrifying. And yet 12 out of 12 guys got aboard. Yeah. And got it done. And who knows, you know, I bet if we interviewed all 12 of them, some guy would be like, oh, yeah. Whenever I got in those pressure situations, I would tell myself, look at the instruments, pay attention to this. You know, they all would all have these little protocols. Yeah.

• 1:57:01Jocko Willink?

  Of what they're gonna do, how they're gonna get through it. I'm the baddest guy on the planet, you know, I'm ready for this, I've trained for this, whatever those things are. And some of it might also be like, dude, I'm falling like, I have one cutaway from parachuting, like where I got rid of my main parachute because it was not functioning. And like, if you ask me what I didn't, like, what was, what was I thinking? I was just like, literally just doing what the things, you know, like, oh, yep. Look at my altimeter, I'll look up again, check it, shake it out, nope, nothing, look at the altimeter, okay. This is, this is decision time, yep, 2,000 feet, cool. Arch, arch, look, grab, look, grab, pull, pull, check, check, okay, we're good. Like, it was that, there was absolutely no uh, uh, fear. Yeah.

• 1:57:43Jocko Willink?

  Now, I, that same jump trip, I was watching one of my friends. And his parachute wasn't opening. And I'm yelling at him, I'm under canopy and I'm, he can't hear me, I'm like, Paul, I'm like, caught away, caught away. And like, I'm scared for him. Yeah. But two hours earlier, I'd cut away with no emotions and now I'm watching one of my friends go low. And, and he just got lucky because he didn't cut away, he should have. But his, his parachute eventually like opened kind of and he landed. But my reaction to that, watching him was like, dude, Paul, Paul, you're cut away. And I was scared for him, but when I was in the situation, I wasn't scared, I was just following the protocol.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, you have that little procedure and I, I did also break that down is like, what do I do in those situations? I'm not gonna go. Like, oh, I'm looking at a something and it's, I'm hesitant of like, oh, wait a second, I feel that, that fear in doing something, I'm like, I'm going. I was, uh, skiing at Mammoth. And I was up on like, a, like, for me.

• 1:58:50Jocko Willink?

  A very sketchy situation and I was skiing with another dude. And we get out like we walk out to this end and do a little hike up and now we're sitting over or standing over this thing and there's rocks and snow and ice. And I can, this does not feel safe. A, this does not feel like a good decision. B. And I can, I can kind of tell by what the other individual is saying that he might not do, in fact, likely is not going to do this drop in. And like in those

• 1:59:29Jocko Willink?

  1.5 seconds, I freaking launched and did it and pulled it. But I, I got back to thinking about, I was like, oh yeah, that was me executing that thing. I did, even in the moment, I wasn't like, hey, when you're in a situation like this, you go, no, no, I was just like, oh, fear, rocks, ice, snow, drop, boom, boom, go. Like that's what we're doing. And I honestly, when I looked back on it, I was like, I don't think I was in a, in a mode of thought.

• 1:59:57Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:58Jocko Willink?

  It was just like, I know what to do when this feeling comes, you go.

• 2:00:01Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  And that's what I did. So it'd be interesting as you think about this, like, think about what was, what like, was actually going through your mind? And it might be like me cutting away a free fall, just like, up, power up, good, cool, toggle up, yeah, watch the horizon, it's in, it's in the right spot. And you've been taught those things, you're going to follow the protocol and that's what you're going to do.

• 2:00:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:23Dave Berke?

  The worst part about definitely was when you're in holding and you're just doing laps for probably 25 minutes, it's like, oh my God, oh my God. And then, you know, then you start the process, like you said, like you, it's all, I talked about the, you know, the rat out went off and like, oh crap, I should have not have, like, that's a bad sign. I should have not have been caught off guard by that. So there's all the indicators, but definitely just sitting up there like waiting for your turn. It's the worst because she's up there, it's like.

• 2:00:47Jocko Willink?

  I talked to, I talked to a young kid that was, uh, just got his, you know, like free fall and, you know, he was all fired up like, oh yeah, I got, you know, four jumps today, my first day of free fall, freaking awesome being up there, blah, blah, blah. And I go, oh, that's cool. Do you like it? And he goes, oh yeah, it's freaking awesome. I go, oh, I go, were you scared? He goes, I was scared shitless.

• 2:01:10Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, it's like one of those things, right?

• 2:01:12Dave Berke?

  Totally, man.

• 2:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Scared shit, let's go.

• 2:01:14Dave Berke?

  Go.

• 2:01:15Jocko Willink?

  All right, lesson for this chapter, again, we kind of mentioned it, but it's the most important thing is it's not about you, it's about the team. A leader owns the responsibility for everything the team does and fails to do.

• 2:01:27Jocko Willink?

  You talk about cover and move here, teamwork, must work together, no silos, if the team wins, everybody wins, talk about relationships. And I'm sure you must have an incredible, like, like, when you're working with the people, what are they called, a plane captain, is that right?

• 2:01:41Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:41Jocko Willink?

  That's the individual that's in charge of your aircraft. Is he in charge of just one aircraft?

• 2:01:45Dave Berke?

  No, he's got multiple.

• 2:01:48Jocko Willink?

  That must be your bro.

• 2:01:49Dave Berke?

  He's your boy. The power line guys, those are your boys.

• 2:01:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh huh.

• 2:01:52Dave Berke?

  Those are your boys.

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  You buy him a case of beer on Fridays and stuff?

• 2:01:55Dave Berke?

  Take care of them. I was the power line OIC, it was my first like real job with Marines was I was the officer in charge of the power line team. Those dudes, you, you take care of those guys, those are the guys, they're awesome.

• 2:02:07Jocko Willink?

  Check. Real world application, once again, starting with a quote, "Last year was the best we've ever had and I'm facing what feels like a mutiny." The chief people officer was beside herself as she walked me through the recent personnel changes her company was facing. And you go into a story about a pharmaceutical company and this is a good one, they have like a conference and you're like talking about the conference, who was there, all 12 sales leads, four regional managers and the entire executive team. Teresa explains, you know, you're talking about the conference, what was the focus? We went through all the growth numbers, clients, production, revenue, profit, it was a bit of a celebration for all those successes, heck yeah. And fast forward a little, did you keep the rest of the team aware of everything that happened at the conference? Or let them in on the great results?

• 2:02:54Jocko Willink?

  We didn't really do that, but they're paid well and that paycheck is an acknowledgement of those results. And you say, let me ask you this, what message do you think it sends when you bring a few people in a supervisory roles to the offsite in Las Vegas and leave the rest at home? There you go, little earnest question activity.

• 2:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Final chapter, chapter 10, prepare for your departure. Niceville, Florida. VMFAT, what do you say, VM fat?

• 2:03:24Dave Berke?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:03:24Jocko Willink?

  VMFAT?

• 2:03:25Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:03:26Jocko Willink?

  501 commander's office, November 26, 2012.

• 2:03:32Jocko Willink?

  FM FAT 501 Warlords. At the time, we were the first and only operational F-35B squadron in the world. And you give some details on this 130 million dollar aircraft, bro. Bro, 130 million dollar aircraft. That's freaking epic. Dude, I was, I was outside the other night and I was sitting there with my family and we had just eaten dinner and I see like something on the horizon and I'm like, that's weird.

• 2:04:10Jocko Willink?

  And it's like going fast and it's like bright and uh, it, I realized pretty quickly, once it got a little higher up, there was the, it was one of Elon's rockets going up into space. And I was like, damn dude. Like the entire coast of California just watched this dude's plane or aircraft just blast off. What does one of those things cost? Echo Charles? Rocket?

• 2:04:37Dave Berke?

  I don't know.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  Apparently, um, quite a bit. This may not be quite a rocket into space, but 130 million dollar aircraft. How many of them you got in your squadron?

• 2:04:47Dave Berke?

  I signed for the first 14 ever made. 14 jets. It's a lot of money. That was crazy.

• 2:04:56Jocko Willink?

  Um, in 2012, no other lieutenant colonel in the world was responsible for more assets than I was. I personally signed custody forms for the first 14 F-35s ever delivered, three of them purchased by the United Kingdom. It tallied nearly 2 billion, an unheard of amount for a commander in my role. Just a little FYI. The USS Michael Monsour was 2.8 billion dollars just for procurement and 7.5 billion when they add in the, the R and D. But I guess in the Marine Corps, they're not going to have anything that big.

• 2:05:33Dave Berke?

  Not as an O5. Yeah, it's crazy. Your typical squadron, you know, an F-18 squadron's 12 jets, you know, I don't know, 50 million or something like that. It's, it was just a different calculus at the time.

• 2:05:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, luckily there was no pressure. The Commandant of the Marine Corps paid me a personal visit to wish me luck. He wanted to emphasize how important it was to fly our new jets as much as they could tolerate. To prove their capability, he also reminded me of how tenuous things were, as if I needed the additional pressure. Chip, I know this isn't fair to say, but if you crash a jet, we will lose the F-35 program. Why would you guys lose the program if you crashed a jet?

• 2:06:14Dave Berke?

  That jet at the time, there's a, I have a photo of it, of me and him having that conversation in the ready room of my squadron. That's my sergeant major snagged a picture of it, so I've got that for posterity. The program was so far behind and so over budget and so underperforming at that time. And it was really the B was the biggest problem of the three variants, the Marine Corps, you know, the Stovall version that we had gotten to.

• 2:06:38Jocko Willink?

  Is, is the Marine Corps version the only one that does take off, vertical takeoff?

• 2:06:42Dave Berke?

  Yes. It's a major modification of the A variant, which the Air Force wants is a conventional jet.

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  The Air Force just can't even do a vertical takeoff at all?

• 2:06:51Dave Berke?

  No, it's just a regular airplane. They have no need for that. So the Marine Corps is like, we'll have the same jet, but put an engine in it where you can land straight up and down. So the Marine variant was, was causing a lot of problems. And I say that comfortably, like.

• 2:07:04Jocko Willink?

  This is known.

• 2:07:06Dave Berke?

  This is known. We were on probation and the Department of Defense had gotten to a point.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  Does it have an extra engine?

• 2:07:11Dave Berke?

  Hmm. It has a major extra component called a lift fan and it also has the-

• 2:07:17Jocko Willink?

  That's a thing that pops up behind the canopy?

• 2:07:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah, exactly. And also the engine has this thing called the three bearing swivel. So you take an engine and you can like rotate it till it points down. This is a major change.

• 2:07:27Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say this, I did not, I didn't know the Air Force couldn't even do this.

• 2:07:31Dave Berke?

  Neither, the A and the C can't do that. They're just very conventional airplanes.

• 2:07:34Jocko Willink?

  Bro, this is like totally different.

• 2:07:37Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 2:07:37Jocko Willink?

  I mean, what's the price tag increase on the A versus the B?

• 2:07:42Dave Berke?

  It's probably $30 million different. This is, it's changed a lot now. It's much, much, things are much better now. This is at the time, that to your question, like, we were at a point where we were kind of losing the battle to justify this, all these changes. And we were years behind.

• 2:08:01Jocko Willink?

  Cause couldn't you just put a tailhook on it and just use it for aircraft carrier only?

• 2:08:06Dave Berke?

  Well, you could have just- Bought the C, the carrier version, or just gotten rid of the B altogether and the Marine Corps have just relied on the other services. There's all sorts of potential risks inside there.

• 2:08:18Jocko Willink?

  Cause what do you need, what do you need vertical takeoff for?

• 2:08:21Dave Berke?

  Smaller deck carriers and austere airfields. There's a totally justifiable reason for it. We need it, but we had not proven the worth and the value of that jet at a time where there's a lot of scrutiny, appropriate scrutiny to the point. And also the other thing, the Marine Corps was all in on one airplane. We had the Hornet and the Harrier, which were going away. We had no Plan B. The Air Force had five other jets. The Navy had Super Hornet. Like the Marine Corps was in a very tenuous precarious spot. There was no alternative to have the, you know, the, the inherent flexibility of a Stowville platform, the maritime, all the things that make the Marine Corps

• 2:09:04Dave Berke?

  unique. This was it. There was no alternative. And so he came down and was like, hey, man, I know how this sounds and I appreciate it. He was, he was actually was awesome, but he was telling me the truth, the unvarnished truth. And he was also telling me like, it's like, you know, it's like, you can't crash your car. You're like, okay, I want you to know that even without you telling me that I'm going to do everything in my power to not crash this car. I didn't need that guidance, but it was his way of saying like, you need to know the magnitude of what's going on. And at the exact same time, you have to fly this way more than people think can it be, you have to prove, and his number two, the deputy commander for aviation was like, you fly the wings off those

• 2:09:47Dave Berke?

  planes as best you can. So I'm getting like, fly, fly, fly. Do not lose an airplane.

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  How many F-35s have been lost?

• 2:09:56Dave Berke?

  I can't tell you exactly the number. It's, it's a, it's a relatively small number. I can say at least statistically, it is a very safe airplane. Like the mishap rate of that jet is very, very low, especially for the first 10 years of a jet. It's probably the safest jet. Statistically speaking, for the first 10 years, probably has the one of the lowest mishap rates ever. And the like mechanical contribution mishaps is very, very low. But this is 2012, totally like

• 2:10:25Jocko Willink?

  Unknown.

• 2:10:25Dave Berke?

  Dude, under the microscope, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fly the first, like, okay, by yourself, good luck. Like, we were just, we were uncharted territory, man. It was a crazy time.

• 2:10:35Jocko Willink?

  And you had trained up the squadron at this point?

• 2:10:38Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:10:38Jocko Willink?

  And you spent some time in simulators?

• 2:10:41Dave Berke?

  All of it, yep.

• 2:10:43Jocko Willink?

  And but at some point, like, you put a guy by himself, because there's only, there's, is there any two seaters?

• 2:10:47Dave Berke?

  Nope. And that's another thing the Marine Corps had never done. That's another thing the Raptor did. The first flight in the Raptor, you're, but there's no two seat F-22. So I had gone through that whole experience of like, what does it mean to? It's one thing to like, okay, Jocko, we're gonna go on your first flight. I'll be in the backseat.

• 2:11:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:11:02Dave Berke?

  Of a jet I've been flying for 30 years.

• 2:11:03Jocko Willink?

  Like, the difference between that and you're just by yourself is insane.

• 2:11:08Dave Berke?

  It's insane. And nobody else other than me had ever done that. So every other guy's first flight in the F-35 was the first flight in a new jet by themselves. I had done that in the Raptor, so I understood the slightly different approach you take to make someone safe. Usually, like, it's one thing to get to a criteria where you can fly with an instructor. Then you get to what we call the safer solo criteria, like your fourth or fifth flight, like, okay, you can now do this by yourself. First flight, day one, first time you ever get in that jet, you're taken off by yourself. It's just a, it was a point in time in Marine Corps aviation history that I just happened to be where I was at that time. Just a unique circumstance. And the commoner wanted me to know the gravity of the situation.

• 2:11:54Dave Berke?

  He was awesome, man. It was good to go, but it was tenuous.

• 2:11:58Jocko Willink?

  Check. And meanwhile, of course, into all this, your daughter gets sick. And it's like, kind of one of those worst case scenarios where things are not good and you don't know why. You know, it's like, it's real easy when you go and your doctor says, oh, this is the problem, and now we have something to address. It's not like that. It's unknown.

• 2:12:26Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, of course, the timing of it all could not have been worse when it came to the $2 billion project I was supposed to be managing pilots need to be trained, new best practices need to be put in place, the entire new F 35 protocol needed to be developed and learned, all while the dogs barked at the gate. And now I was gone, because you left.

• 2:12:44Dave Berke?

  I left.

• 2:12:46Jocko Willink?

  And you didn't even, like, you just left, you left, what was the situation, she had to go to a different hospital or something like that?

• 2:12:52Dave Berke?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of detail, but I'm like, living, literally sitting at my desk, Whitney calls me. And she's like, something to the effect of like, I'm worried. And I'm like, me too. This had been going on over the weekend, we were kind of like, we knew something was up, didn't know what. The other part of the problem is my daughter at the time was 18 months old, so she couldn't talk to us, she couldn't say, I feel this way, she was just acting away that just was wrong. Whatever it was, Whitney had reached her threshold, like, hey, I, I'm, her calling me, and I imagine you, and like, my wife never called me at work, ever, like, like, I don't, she just didn't call me at work, it just wasn't a thing, not because I had like, oh, you don't call, it just,

• 2:13:36Dave Berke?

  she, I just, so if she calls me at like, one in the afternoon or something, like, okay, and she's like, hey, it's basically like, I can't do this anymore. I'm like, Roger. So I went straight home. Soon as I got home, we put her in the car and went right back to the base, because it was, Eglin is a small base. And it has like a little, like a little clinic, you know, and you go there for your little checkups and stuff, and, you know, the pediatrician. And we get there, I'll make a very long story short, the doctor, who's this unbelievable guy, he's like, this doesn't look right, he kind of saw, he looked at her face, looked at her eyes, did a quick lab, you know, took a blood draw, did the labs. And he's like, hey, you got to get to a real hospital, like, immediately, I'm like in my flight suit, like, I just ran home, came back or something, you know, whatever the logistics were.

• 2:14:20Dave Berke?

  It's all very blurry, but like that night, we're at the Pensacola Hospital, which is about an hour and a half away is the nearest big hospital. And by the next, the next day's morning, the doctor's like, we can't help you here and put her on a life flight with Whitney out of Pensacola to a hospital up in Atlanta called Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, the Eggleston Hospital. So if you hear this shout out to them, they're fricking awesome. And I'm like watching them fly away on a life flight. And I'm like, what? You know, like, I, I actually can't really recall much of what happened in those 36, 48 hours, other than I went home and I drove up to Atlanta. It's like a six hour drive. All that's a blur to me from like, she calls and then my memory, like, I certainly remember getting to the hospital, having the doctor be like, this is bad. Getting the other hospital

• 2:15:03Dave Berke?

  like, this is bad and we can't help you. And then the other hospital, we show up and, and, and I now spend like three weeks sleeping on the floor of that hospital. I have no recollection. I do not have a recollection of even talking to my XO or Sergeant Major. I, I know I did. I'm, I'm sure I, I'm like, hey, whatever. But it was so like blurry. I'm like, something like probably like, I'm going to the hospital. I'll call you later type thing. I don't even, I have no recollection of what it's, in fact, I probably should ask, I know who the two guys were. I probably should like, do you remember that? I don't know if they do or not. I'm just gone, dude. Like my daughter is really sick. We don't know what's going on. I share a lot of like details in there, but I'm just, next thing I'm in Atlanta at this hospital. And then that's, that's what I remember.

• 2:15:48Jocko Willink?

  And how long, like, when did the, when did the squadron form up? And when did this happen? Do they, do they like commission the squadron? How does that work?

• 2:15:58Dave Berke?

  Yeah. The administrative part of the squadron, like it became a real squadron, like a commissioning and a ceremony had happened, you know, well before I got there. The guy before me stood it up. He, he went there, this other guy went there to be the F-35 CO to, to fly the jets. I told you like, the jet was like three years behind schedule. That's part of the reason why the commandant was calling me. It's like, All this is supposed to be, three might be, it was years behind schedule. So the guy I replaced, he should have been the first pilot, the first operator, they should have operationalized. None of it happened. I mean, it was a real squadron, had a building, had a flag, it had a emblem and stuff.

• 2:16:33Jocko Willink?

  Didn't have planes?

• 2:16:34Dave Berke?

  Didn't have planes.

• 2:16:35Jocko Willink?

  Is that a real squadron?

• 2:16:36Dave Berke?

  No, it's so, it's really, we, so I was the CO when we declared it operational, IOC, initial operational capability. So the administration of the squadron was fine. But in terms of like, I'd have to like, double check the timing of it. But like, we're talking a relatively short period of time of getting jets, flying, I think I started flying that summer and it's probably, I'm guessing, I did up three or four months, something like that. Squadron's kind of like-

• 2:17:05Jocko Willink?

  So you at least had the time to get things up and running?

• 2:17:07Dave Berke?

  Things were, I had gotten qualified, I probably qualified four or five other guys out of the, out of the, you know, we were, we were starting to move.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:17:15Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:17Jocko Willink?

  And then you disappear.

• 2:17:17Dave Berke?

  And I'm gone.

• 2:17:18Jocko Willink?

  And as you say in the book, I simply left. And fast forward, but yet, the application of decentralized command across 501 paid off. Thankfully, my team thought independently. They focused on the mission. More importantly, they made decisions that were in the best interest of the squadron and prioritized the team's success. In short, they led. Despite all my experience as a fifth generation fighter pilot and instructor, the ultimate measure of my performance now would be how well the squadron performed in my absence.

• 2:17:52Jocko Willink?

  True decentralized command. You disappear and they continue to function and you go into some of that in the book. Lesson, good leadership outlasts the leader. One day, you will not be around. And in the real world application-

• 2:18:12Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "The caller ID disturbed me immediately. I knew the phone number well and always enjoyed talking to its owner. She was a client I'd come to love working with as much as any at Echelon Front. Normally, her calls and texts were welcomed and appreciated, but it was Sunday afternoon and we had no event scheduled on the calendar with her, her teams for over a month. I was sitting in a lounge chair in my backyard as Whitney and I enjoyed a lazy day at the pool, watching our kids and a few of their friends enjoy the Southern California weather we had come to love. Already anticipating something bad, I got up and walked around the corner to take the call. Hey Janet," I said, feigning excitement. Janet was the chief administrative officer and had worked directly for Jack for over a decade.

• 2:18:55Jocko Willink?

  The quiet on the other end confirmed what I already suspected. The voice on the line feebly said hello, then delivered news that was even worse than I expected. "Jack passed away yesterday." "Oh, my God. I'm sorry. What happened? I don't know what to say," I stammered. "What happened?" "He was at dinner with his family." Janet couldn't get through the story and stop mid-sentence. We shared a long, painful silence. I knew to wait however long Janet needed to regain her composure. It felt like forever. "He said he had a backache and asked to leave early. He collapsed by the entrance and died in the restaurant," she said. "It was the worst of situations. Restaurant workers had called 911, but it was too late. He had a massive aneurysm,

• 2:19:39Jocko Willink?

  and there was nothing anyone could do."

• 2:19:44Jocko Willink?

  "Janet, I'm heartbroken for everyone. I can't imagine." Janet continued, "Jack loved you so much. Your team has made such an impact on all of us. His entire life changed for the better in the last few years since reading the book and connecting with you all, but we don't know what to do right now. I don't know what to do. You're the first person I called after meeting with the executive team this morning. Most of the firm doesn't even know. Everyone is in shock."

• 2:20:14Jocko Willink?

  Terrible.

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  Terrible situation and.

• 2:20:21Jocko Willink?

  Well. Fast forward a little bit. A few days later, I landed in Seattle and made my way to their office anticipating chaos. What I witnessed completely amazed me. I saw a group of people doing exactly what they needed to be doing. Despite how raw the emotions were, the team had rallied around each other, detaching from those emotions as best they could to keep things working. An interim CEO had been put in place to handle day-to-day operations. A task tracker was put up on a whiteboard in the lunchroom for everyone to see and add to. All major clients had been called. The downstream teams had been informed of what happened and priorities were defined for them. Anything critical to the firm's long-term stability was assigned to an owner, while less important tasks were identified and put on hold.

• 2:21:01Jocko Willink?

  I witnessed decentralized command in action, and everywhere I looked, I saw the right people doing the right things and making decisions that helped the team.

• 2:21:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, I remember when all that stuff happened. It was terrible. And, you know, I haven't made this, what's this caveat yet, but when we write about the companies that we work with, we change the names of the people involved. We change the industry. You know, we

• 2:21:31Jocko Willink?

  we tweak the incident enough that people won't be identified. But, you know, this was a terrible situation where a company we had a great relationship with and still have a great relationship with, they had a terrible thing happen to their founder and leader.

• 2:21:49Jocko Willink?

  But then you got to witness this, what we teach, what they learned, put into action.

• 2:21:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah, this one, this one's awful. That story is so heartbreaking. And yeah, we make very, I made little adjustments to each to not identify who the client is, and then that's a little bit for their protection. This one, very obviously, is even with the little adjustments, it's very close to the mark. And in fact,

• 2:22:18Dave Berke?

  I wrote this book. I put a little caveat in the front. I said something to the effect of, hey, these are stories based on my imperfect memory. I think they're pretty close. I was definitely telling stories that were about me. So it wasn't like somebody else's point of view. It didn't put anybody else at risk. This is what I think happened. It's pretty close. There's two stories that I wasn't totally confident I had right because they involved another person. First was that chapter of Dogfighting Trim. I sent Trim the chapter. I'm like, hey dude, I gotta make sure I get this right. And he was like, you nailed it. He made a couple of changes. It was Bravo 17. But it was important to get it right because I knew he was involved. And I wanted him to read it and go, that's what happened. And so I sent it to him. And he read it. And he's like, dude, you captured it.

• 2:22:59Dave Berke?

  This one I knew when the real girl who read this, I was, it was really important that I got this right. And I had this sense of like, not anxiety, whatever the word is, like, I was anxious to get to have her read this. And I sent, you know, sent her this copy of the advanced copy of it and had her read it. And I was just kind of waiting. And thankfully, she got the book. And she's like, I was gonna go straight to the last chapter, but I read the whole thing. She kind of read it in one, like, in one night. And then, anyway, she called me and she was kind of in tears. She's like, it's perfect. And she said, like, thank

• 2:23:38Dave Berke?

  you. Not as a compliment to my writing, but that I had captured what she experienced as kind of his closest friend, being so close to that. And that the way that we captured the lesson, the way we wrote about this in this book, was truly a reflection of what happened to them. Because this story of that guy who died in this totally unexpected prime of his life in front of his family is the worst story. And yet, The lesson that we got to take away from this, and I really have to give Jamie Cochran credit because she included this story in her muster brief called The Barriers to Extreme Ownership, and she tells these stories of impact at the very end, and this is the last one she tells, and she coined that phrase when we were just thinking about what this meant, me going

• 2:24:23Dave Berke?

  there, seeing this team like, holy cow, in the worst scenario, this guy's leadership had influenced the company so much that they were, they were okay without him, as she coined that phrase, "Good leadership outlasts the leader." And there is no better compliment to him and his leadership in that, in his totally unexpected absence, his team was okay. It was hurt, they hurt, it was awful, but they're okay. And this company, this is years ago, this company is thriving, there's memory is alive and well, we are still close to them, they are still important people to us, but it is the ultimate reflection of, you better be thinking about this now, because

• 2:25:03Dave Berke?

  you don't get to pick when your team is on their own. You don't pick that date and time. And part of the chapter in my story was, I had that thought, like, okay, I got my young guys, at this point, I'll start to get them ready for this, and underestimated the need for decentralized command, because I had that thought of like, oh, I'll be here for two years. I'll know when the time is right. And my daughter threw that timeline out the window, and it reminded me that it isn't just decentralized command, it's the recognition that your team, your family, whatever it is, success is what they do when you're not there, when you're not around, and you don't get to decide that. And his is the ultimate version of that story, like, it was,

• 2:25:46Dave Berke?

  it is out of left, this is a, I mean, Extreme Ownership changed his life. He loved you, that book, everything from fitness, everything, his entire life changed, everything attributed to his experience with Extreme Ownership, and I think like, maybe two weeks before this happened, he came to an FTX. Yeah. And I had this thought, like, what am I, I had to get on a plane and get out there, and I was worried, I was worried that it was going to be chaos, and I didn't, and it was remarkable. And it was the ultimate compliment to him, is that his leadership outlasted him, and it's a huge lesson for all of us.

• 2:26:28Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to um, close out the book with this little section right here. There is nothing more important than the skill of leadership. It is what allows people to thrive in a world filled with chaos and trauma that we can't always anticipate. The best leadership outlasts the leader. Prepare your team to outlast you. Give them authority to perform their tasks, make decisions and stand on their own when the occasion calls for it. It's the only way you can ensure they'll win no matter what happens. Be humble and forget about perfection. Don't get complacent or be afraid to change. Listen to the team and put them ahead of yourself.

• 2:27:11Jocko Willink?

  Empower your team and lead yourself. Empower your team and yourself to lead through the worst case scenarios by taking preemptive ownership. Every problem is a leadership problem. From Top Gun to war and from business to life. The solution is you're in your own hands. To find it, you need to lead.

• 2:27:40Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 2:27:43Jocko Willink?

  Well, another thing that you've got in this book is you've got this application guide. Kind of like an echelon front type application guide where you go through kind of how to work through the chapters. You know, chapter one, you ask questions that people should be asking. You know, chapter one, every problem is a leadership problem. What are the top challenges you are currently facing in your position? At its core, every problem we face is a leadership problem. How can you view these problems through the lens of leadership? This is always a classic one because people, people say, well, it's, you know, the market or it's the union or whatever you want to say it is. It's the product, it's the thing, the supply chain. It's a leadership problem is what it is. It's a freaking leadership problem.

• 2:28:28Jocko Willink?

  Chapter two, humility is the most important attribute in a leader. What are some of the common phrases your ego says to protect you? And again, this is like a little application, little, little things that you can do, little drills that you can do that will help you. You have in some of these things or in all of them, actually, you have immediate action drills. This one is, who is one person you need to build a relationship with, but have let your ego get in the way? What will you do to put your ego in check and build that relationship? Again, just earnest questions that if you're honest with yourself, they're going to help you. Chapter three, complacency is a killer. In what areas of your life have you become complacent? Chapter four, and then I'm just hitting some like highlights. Chapter four, detachment is a superpower.

• 2:29:10Jocko Willink?

  What routine can you create to better train your mind to detach when necessary? Here's the immediate action drill. What was the last argument you had about? How can you detach from your point of view to see the other person's perspective? That's very smart. Chapter five, perfection is a lie. Immediate action drill. Take a low impact risk the next opportunity you get. What was the outcome? And how did it ultimately impact execution? Chapter six, take ownership. One of your questions here, when you know there's potential for things to go wrong, how can you take preemptive ownership? That's good. Chapter seven, listen, how do you show people you're listening to them? It's a good one.

• 2:29:55Jocko Willink?

  Chapter eight, change. Immediate action drill. What is one thing in your life you need, you know, needs to change? What is one action you can take to move? So there's just a good, you know, thing, a good thing to follow, a good thing to guide you. The last one is immediate action drill. On your next project or assignment, who is one person on your team you can ask to take lead? What a brilliant little idea.

• 2:30:18Jocko Willink?

  How will this help the person and the team's growth and development? So there you go.

• 2:30:22Dave Berke?

  We got, we got a ton of good feedback on that application section that we actually pulled it out and created this companion guide. That's like bigger and more and like more, even more organized than that because people are like, how can I use this? Like, oh, cool. We have to make this its own thing. So just like the extreme ownership and dichotomy companion guides, there'll be one for this to the exact same thing. It's like, this is how you use this stuff.

• 2:30:43Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 2:30:44Dave Berke?

  So it's out there if you want it.

• 2:30:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, we can all use some immediate action drills to get better. And if you do, if you do this stuff, every aspect of your life is going to be better. And it's so cool because there's just so many examples of this now, you know, people that have turned their life around. You know, turned their business around, turned their marriage around in a positive way, turned their family and went around, get their kids back in the game. Like all these things. Take ownership, listen, change, put the team, like all these things so important.

• 2:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Leadership is just the cornerstone of life, really. Mental, physical, vocational. I like that word vocational. You know, because leadership is the cornerstone of your vocation, what you do for work. Your family, obviously, relationships, it's all leadership.

• 2:31:39Jocko Willink?

  So you need to learn the skills of leadership, you need to understand leadership. And we can thank Dave Berke for making all of that, the understanding and the learning of leadership a little bit easier. Thanks to this book, The Need to Lead.

• 2:31:54Jocko Willink?

  The verdict on the title. How do you feel now?

• 2:31:58Dave Berke?

  I feel good about the title.

• 2:31:59Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, Top Gun fan?

• 2:32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, big time.

• 2:32:02Jocko Willink?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  A hundred percent, especially how you brought it together at the end there.

• 2:32:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:08Jocko Willink?

  You like that little closer there?

• 2:32:09Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 2:32:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I wasn't, I honestly, I, I didn't even, I, I'm not that much of a fan of Top Gun, the original movie. Not, not like against it or anything. I probably saw it one time, but I never, actually I didn't watch it until the other night when my wife's friend Maggie was in town. And like she was, she loves Top Gun. And so there I was, watching Top Gun. And but I didn't, I didn't, you know, the need to leave, the first time you said it to me, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't connect it to the movie at all.

• 2:32:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:42Jocko Willink?

  It, I, I just thought, oh, you know, cool. Like, that's cool. And then it became a little bit less cool when you told me about the, the movie and you like, it's from Top Gun. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, okay. But then, once I saw the movie again and read the book, freaking nailed it all day, all day. Um, so if you're listening to this right now, order the book, get the first edition, comes out October 21st.

• 2:33:09Jocko Willink?

  Great addition to your leadership knowledge. That's what it is.

• 2:33:15Jocko Willink?

  Dave Berke wrote his first book. Freaking outstanding.

• 2:33:18Dave Berke?

  Thanks, man.

• 2:33:19Jocko Willink?

  Got a freaking winner right here. A winner. Dave, anything else?

• 2:33:25Dave Berke?

  I, I don't have much else to say other than I, I mean, it's kind of surreal to hear you read the book that I wrote, but all of this comes from what we get to do at Echelon Front and the lessons that started. If extreme ownership doesn't get written, none of this happens. The way that we communicate, the way that we talk, like, none of this happens. And so to get to be part of that and add something to that is, it's like the coolest thing, man. It is an honor to have, have something to contribute to the, the lessons that are out there. So I'm grateful, man. I appreciate it.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, you know me, I'm over here being grateful that you wrote a book and let's get the word out there, man, all day. Freaking pumped. And it is also, you know, if you're a person out there that's like, uh, got some ideas in your head and you want to write, you know, go for it. Number one. And number two, it's hard. And it took Dave some grinding work to get this to where it is. And man, he did a great job. And I could see even Echo Charles, when I was reading about landing on the aircraft carrier, you're getting fired up over there. You know, we can go to the video if you don't believe me. You were shifting in your chairs. You were like rubbing your hands together. That's sketchy, dude. Zero, zero.

• 2:34:35Dave Berke?

  I felt it for sure.

• 2:34:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But the whole book's like that. The whole book's like, we got zero, zero scenarios going left and right, all hands. So 99.

• 2:34:45Jocko Willink?

  All Hands, The Need to Lead by Dave Berke. The, uh, what do we call it? The next book in the Extreme Ownership Series?

• 2:34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:55Jocko Willink?

  Is that what we're, is that what this thing is?

• 2:34:57Speaker 02

  That works.

• 2:34:57Jocko Willink?

  I think it fits well.

• 2:35:01Jocko Willink?

  So, also, you're gonna exercise your brain and your leadership skills with the book? And have to exercise your body as well, you know? Lifting, training, uh, Jiu Jitsu.

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  How's that Jiu Jitsu going for you, Jocko Charles? How's that last, how's that last sesh?

• 2:35:19Speaker 02

  You know, I'm glad I was there. You know, it was good to, good to, you know, do it.

• 2:35:24Jocko Willink?

  Feel good about that one?

• 2:35:28Jocko Willink?

  Bro, that was like,

• 2:35:29Speaker 02

  It was a net positive.

• 2:35:30Jocko Willink?

  There was like pent up scenarios also there.

• 2:35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 2:35:35Jocko Willink?

  Do you, do you, do you drive home like not liking me?

• 2:35:37Speaker 02

  Nah, uh, well, you know.

• 2:35:41Speaker 02

  I'll say I have mixed emotions the whole time. How about that? Hey, I'm happy to be here like everybody else. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:35:47Jocko Willink?

  We in the zone, we in the zone. Uh, so when you're training, you need some fuel. You need some, you need some fuel. You need protein. Need some energy. Need some joint supplementation. You're gonna need creatine.

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  We got all those things for you. Jacofuel.com. Check it out. Jacofuel.com. What do you, what do you got? Uh, Orange Hydrate over there. We didn't have any orange. That's your flavor. That's your, your Fanta flavor. Is your orange go. Anyways, you guys know what you need. Jacofuel.com, check it out. You can get it at Walmart. You can get it at Wawa, um, Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Military Commissaries, Afees, Hanford, Dash Stores, Wakeford, Shop Right, HEB, Meyer, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Publix. Just, just all over the place. Hy-Vee, you can get it. Lifetime Fitness, Shields, and a bunch of small gyms. So that's what we got. We got Jocko Fuel for you.

• 2:36:47Jocko Willink?

  Check it out. Get yourself some. Also, Origin USA. Origin USA. We got jeans, American-made, 100%. New kind of jeans, Maverick jeans, like pure cotton.

• 2:37:02Dave Berke?

  They're called Maverick?

• 2:37:03Jocko Willink?

  I think they're called Maverick.

• 2:37:04Dave Berke?

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, when you think of that, good deal, Dave.

• 2:37:07Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:09Jocko Willink?

  How'd you get the nickname Chip? Cause that was your actual call sign. Where'd it come from?

• 2:37:12Dave Berke?

  I knocked my teeth out in flight school.

• 2:37:14Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do it?

• 2:37:15Dave Berke?

  I hit myself in the face with my own G-suit.

• 2:37:17Jocko Willink?

  How'd you do that?

• 2:37:18Dave Berke?

  My helmet, during a conversation, was sitting on a desk and I knocked the helmet off the desk as I kind of moved my hand to like, show something. And as the helmet fell, I reached for it. I kind of leaned down and reached and the G-suit, it was, I was wearing my G-suit. There's a hose with like a buckle on the end of it that plugs into the jet. It's like a metal, almost looks like a hose buckle. And as I reached for the helmet, I hit the hose. The hose came up and hit me in the face. And have you ever seen the movie Dumb and Dumber?

• 2:37:44Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 2:37:45Dave Berke?

  Um, I did that to both of my front teeth.

• 2:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:37:48Dave Berke?

  Knocked a triangle out of both of them. And, um, as you know, if it's not emergent, Navy medicine is like, we'll get to you when we can, cause you're not gonna die. So I had to walk around the squadron for like a week with these two holes in my face.

• 2:38:00Jocko Willink?

  Dumb and Dumber.

• 2:38:01Dave Berke?

  Dumb and Dumber. It could have been, it could have been way worse than Chip. And some of the options were way worse, but thank God, like they're like, oh, we'll call him Chip and moved on. But it happened in flight school and it's.

• 2:38:10Jocko Willink?

  Do you remember any other options?

• 2:38:13Dave Berke?

  Dude.

• 2:38:13Jocko Willink?

  Can't say I remember.

• 2:38:15Dave Berke?

  It's like all sorts of craziness, but yes, you know.

• 2:38:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, Maverick, was Mavericks, was that Maverick's dad's call sign as well in the movie Top Gun? Or was his call sign something else?

• 2:38:26Dave Berke?

  I don't recall that being the case.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:38:28Dave Berke?

  But that's a cool call sign that you would never see in the real Navy. Yeah, it's not a thing.

• 2:38:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:33Dave Berke?

  Uh, wait, why not?

• 2:38:35Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's too cool.

• 2:38:36Dave Berke?

  Cause it's cool. Yeah, like, oh, he's, he's a Maverick. He's awesome. Like, your call sign is gonna be the, hopefully, you know, not too painful, but it's gonna be the dumbest thing you've done and they're gonna make you remember it. So, um, there are no, to my knowledge, like, there's no cool call signs in the Navy and the Marine Corps. They're all just like, either like, kind of like, not a big deal, or like, you did something really dumb.

• 2:38:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Or your name.

• 2:39:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah, your name.

• 2:39:01Jocko Willink?

  Kind of requires it.

• 2:39:02Dave Berke?

  So Iceman, Viper.

• 2:39:05Jocko Willink?

  Not a chance.

• 2:39:06Dave Berke?

  No chance. Okay. No chance.

• 2:39:08Jocko Willink?

  I understand. I understand.

• 2:39:09Dave Berke?

  If you have a cool call sign, it's probably an acronym and you don't realize it's like, it stands for something really unflattering, like, you know, like, you know, Ike, like, oh, he's my buddy Ike. Ike actually stands for I know everything, which is them, they were saying, like, you talk too much and you think you're really smart. So even if it sounds cool, it's probably has a meaning that is really uncool.

• 2:39:33Jocko Willink?

  Well, we got Maverick jeans, which does sound cool.

• 2:39:36Speaker 02

  Does sound cool, is cool, the whole deal.

• 2:39:38Jocko Willink?

  And they're a hundred percent cotton.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:40Jocko Willink?

  So there's no, like, there's no stretch, they're old school.

• 2:39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:42Jocko Willink?

  You have a pair of jeans growing up in Hawaii?

• 2:39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  They probably, they didn't have no stretch back then, so we're bringing that back. Uh, originusa.com, a hundred percent made in America. What freedom has made these jeans.

• 2:39:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:39:57Jocko Willink?

  American hands have made these hoodies, these t-shirts, these boots. A hundred percent American made, originusa.com, check it out. Also, obviously, we've got some books, I've written a bunch of books about leadership. And now, Dave Berke has written a book about leadership.

• 2:40:16Jocko Willink?

  The book is called Need to Lead, order it. Ashlon Front, we have a leadership consulting company, this is what we were talking about today. We talk about leadership all the time, this is what we do, we've seen it in every type of environment. Not only we see it, yes, in our military careers, but now that we have been working with civilian companies for over a decade, we have experience in every industry. So if you have issues inside of your organization, those issues are leadership issues. And we will help you with those leadership issues through leadership. The skills of leadership, the alignment of leadership, that's what we do. Go to ashlonfront.com. We also have an online training academy. We can learn the skills of leadership online. Go to extremeownership.com for that.

• 2:41:00Jocko Willink?

  If you want to help out service members, active and retired, want to help out their families, their Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, check out heroesandhorses.org. And don't forget about Jimmy May's organization, beyondthebrotherhood.org. Now, listen up.

• 2:41:22Jocko Willink?

  We talked a little bit about Ramadi today and we are all going to a reunion. Go to Ramadi reunion 20.com. If you were connected to the 11 AD in 2006, you're invited. If you're a Gold Star family, you're invited. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, we were all there. We were all in that battle. So if you were there with the 11 AD, go to Ramadi reunion 20.com and sign up for the reunion. It's going to be January 16th and 17th down in Texas. 2026, our 20 year reunion. It's been 20 years.

• 2:42:10Jocko Willink?

  We'll see you there. If you want to connect for Dave, his Twitter, X, and his Instagram is at David R. Burke, B E R K E. And for us, you can check out Jaco.com or on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink, Echo's at Echo Charles. Be careful, the algorithm. Also, thanks to all of our military members around the world right now for holding the line and protecting freedom in our way of life. Thank you for your service. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for holding the line and protecting us here at home and for everyone else out there.

• 2:42:52Jocko Willink?

  Once again, from Dave Berke, good deal, Dave Berke, Chip Dave Berke, from his book, The Need to Lead. Here we go. This is a quote. "It is in our human nature to find reasons we are not responsible for whatever is going wrong in our lives. Without ownership, when projects fall behind schedule, it can easily be blamed on external forces and factors beyond our control. Excuses are a satisfying, albeit temporary, fix to soothe our ego and exonerate us from blame for the problems we face."

• 2:43:36Jocko Willink?

  We might feel as though they absolve us of responsibility.

• 2:43:41Jocko Willink?

  But they actually rob us of the ability to address and fix what is wrong in our lives. Taking extreme ownership annihilates those excuses.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  Which is a beautiful thing. Because it destroys the single largest impediment to fixing what is wrong. It gives us the power we need to truly change what undermines our success.

• 2:44:09Jocko Willink?

  So, problems get solved.

• 2:44:17Jocko Willink?

  And that's what we got. Keep your ego in check, everyone. And keep trying to get better. And that's all we've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko. Out.