433: What Aerial Combat Teaches Us About Leadership and Life. With "Good Deal" Dave Berke.

Jocko, Dave Berke and Echo Charles discuss aerial combat and the lessons we can take from and bring them into our lives. 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 433 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo.

• 0:05Dave Berke?

  Good evening.

• 0:05Jocko Willink?

  Also joining us tonight, Dave Berke. Good evening Dave. Good evening. So sometimes Dave, you and I wander into conversations about aerial combat. It's actually surprising to me sometimes how rarely we do that because of your entire career minus, what, six months or one year that you were on the ground? But the rest of your entire career was aerial combat and I, it's funny. You will tell me something about aerial combat. At least this was probably it two years ago, three years ago. You would tell me something about aerial combat and I would kind of interject that, yeah, you see, that's like the, that's covered move or whatever. And as you know, as another subject would come up,

• 0:49Jocko Willink?

  you'd explain to me how you do something in aerial combat and I would always see these connections. And I thought it would be good to kind of share those connections with, with everybody so that they can continue to see how, if you see the way broadly, broadly, you can see it in all things. So aerial combat. Well, first of all, when we talk about aerial combat, when you, when you hear the word aerial combat, I know some people are thinking of a dogfight right now. What are you thinking about?

• 1:13Dave Berke?

  I, I'm not thinking of a dog, dogfight. Not that you can't be in a dogfight, but when I think of aerial combat, I'm thinking about a thousand different things an airplane can do to contribute to the battlefield. And the range of that thing is so wide. Like there's so many different things that is that I don't go to one specific thing. I just think about, and certainly what I grew up with, how much more a person in an airplane can do now than they could do 30, 40, 50 and beyond years ago. It's pretty complicated stuff. And at the same time, every time we talk about it, we find these super obvious similarities and how simple that stuff is too, from what we know about everything else too. So there's a lot to discuss, but in the end, there's going to be a lot of parallels.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  I was reading a book and I forget which book it was. It was some book about air. And they were explaining how the machines, like when we think of a world war two plane, either a B-17, a P-51, a P-30, any one of them, we think of. Like we think of antiques. We think of antiques, you know? When they were going out to those planes to fly them, they were in the most modern badass science, the edge of science aircraft ever. And it's weird to think about that. You know, I mean, imagine Echo Charles, you're, you're going out to like a Model T Ford.

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  And when we think of, when we see them getting into a Model T Ford, we think, oh, that's just like an antique car. But for them, that was a Lamborghini. That was like the highest end freaking Tesla. That's what they're getting into. So it's weird. When you say, oh yeah, 30, 40, 50 years ago, it's totally different and you can do so much more now. But for those guys, did you watch Masters of the Air yet?

• 2:52Dave Berke?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Anybody that hasn't watched Masters of the Air, it's a, it's on Apple TV and it's, I would say it's the Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and now they did one for the guys flying the B17s and the fighter pilots. It's really focused on the B17 guys. Which by the way, my great uncle is a B17 pilot. Did I tell you that?

• 3:14Dave Berke?

  Yeah. We talked about that when we did the Bud Anderson podcast.

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 3:17Dave Berke?

  Legendary P51 pilot.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  Crazy. And then you and I did that Air Force Survival and what they talked about, and they showed it well in Masters of the Air. What they talk about is like, you know, your plane is going down for 10 minutes. It's not like for you, Dave Berke, your, your plane's going down. It's like, I mean, in a lot of cases, you're getting out real quick.

• 3:38Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's the longest you would be able to have? I guess you could have, you may maybe running out of fuel or something like this.

• 3:44Dave Berke?

  There, there's probably some small scenarios by which you know you're going to be in it for a while, but it's what you're talking about, like in a B17, you, you know, and it's even the process of like going down is going to take a long time.

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. What do they find at 30,000, 40,000 feet?

• 4:00Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  And so their glide path, I mean, they've got 10, 15 minutes.

• 4:05Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  To try and figure this out. Now, sometimes your aircraft's on fire. Sometimes it's getting shot up still. Sometimes it's falling apart. But that was crazy. So when you think of air, so when most people think of aerial combat, they think of dogfight. When you think of aerial combat, you think of this entire mechanism that's going to take place, this giant airborne machine.

• 4:24Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Jocko Willink?

  That's going to go in and do what?

• 4:26Dave Berke?

  And to that too, I also don't just think of one plane against another plane. I think of how my plane contributes to all the other planes that I'm bringing with me. Same airplanes, different airplanes, and then all of the things I might be fighting against that are in the air, on the ground, or elsewhere too. So I think the image of like air-to-air combat as me and you were fighting in our planes is not how I think of it. I don't think any modern fighter pilot thinks of it in those terms. But certainly the roots of that are there and you're still trained to those things. But the complexity of what you might be doing is so much different than it used to be.

• 4:58Jocko Willink?

  So what are we doing?

• 5:00Dave Berke?

  Well, we're doing a lot of different things. In fact, if you think about what it is you're doing, the start of any of this, of anything you're going to do in an airplane is you have to figure out what it is you're trying to accomplish. You got to identify what the goal is. Sometimes in the simplest terms, when we talk about planning a mission in an airplane, we have a saying, and I know there's similarities, we have a saying that you start with the target and work backwards. Meaning you start with what you're trying to accomplish in the end. The target might not be a bomb on the target, but it's the outcome. What are you trying to accomplish? Sometimes airplanes are there just to make sure that nobody else can operate there. And you've probably heard some very similar, some terms similar to the phrase like air supremacy or air dominance, air superiority,

• 5:42Dave Berke?

  or just, we're going to fly around here just to make sure nobody else shows up to disrupt us going on the ground.

• 5:48Dave Berke?

  The range of missions, I mean, I could probably think of 10 off the top of my head of different things you might be doing. Sometimes you're just gathering information. Sometimes you are literally dropping bombs. Sometimes you're shooting down other airplanes. Sometimes you're getting information to pass to other people. And so you have to figure out really what it is that you're trying to do. And then, of course, now in modern fighters too, like the ones that I flew, you might be doing three or four things at once on any given mission. In the end. Nine times out of 10, you're there to facilitate someone else's outcome, not, not just your outcome. More often than not, the way we are typically raised, and this is really reinforced at a place like Top Gun, we are, we are the supporting asset. We are there to support somebody else. Most of the time, somewhere on the ground, but in the

• 6:30Dave Berke?

  end, the mindset for a fighter pilot, certainly a modern fighter pilot is, I'm there to help someone else accomplish their mission.

• 6:37Jocko Willink?

  Wouldn't, what about when you're looking at like a, like a near peer, like China?

• 6:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah, there's some cool missions where, yeah, there's some cool missions out there when we're talking about, probably the classic mission that, that if you were to say, hey, you can only do one thing, what are you gonna go do? We would do something called OCA, Offensive Counter Air. I'm gonna take my jets, I'm gonna go fly around in a very offensive posture, looking for other airplanes to kill them. Cause what we're trying to establish is that, that dominance. It has to be done. So at some point, when the ground maneuver starts, people on the ground start moving, I have to ensure that they are safe from air attack. And sometimes that starts with just dropping enemy fighters, Offensive Counter Air. Sadly, that is a very uncommon mission. Most of the time, when we are flying, most enemies choose not to participate in that environment. Now, you said a near peer, we

• 7:27Dave Berke?

  know that's gonna, it has happened, and it can happen, and it, and it will at some point in the future, again. That's kinda like the dream mission. It's pretty low probability, at least right now.

• 7:36Jocko Willink?

  So, you're looking for out, what your end state is gonna be, that's sort of the first thing that you're, you're looking for, which is, yeah, like you said, in the SEAL teams, in business, we look at what's the end state we're trying to achieve. And listen, can that, can that end state change over time? Yeah. And if you have a closed mind, that can cost you. You know, that's an important part about the indirect approach, is it gives you an opportunity to say, yeah, you know, this idea that I had wasn't as good as I thought it was gonna be, and we need to make some adjustments. So, but you do have to start with some kind of an end in mind. Once you've done that, now what are you putting together the package?

• 8:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah, right, right before the, in between those two things, we talked about identifying what the outcome is, the goal, the mission, the target, what you're trying to, why are you there? And as you think about what the package is, one of the things you really want to take in consideration is what is the threat? What is the potential risk of doing this? And I think the reason why you want to think about the threat, if not first, at least simultaneously is, when you decide what you're going to bring, a lot of it is in response to what might be out there. If there was no, like, you are operating with total impunity, you could bring whatever you wanted. That is about as unrealistic as, I'm going to start a business and I'm going to have no, no friction in doing it. You're going to have some problems, whether it's your competitors, the marketplace, whatever it might be. You got to think about what that, what that threat is and what their capability is.

• 8:55Dave Berke?

  And I think if you put a generic assessment, you don't want to get too specific, but there are a high threat, a medium threat, a low threat. That'll indicate what it is you want to bring. A really high threat, risky mission, you're going to bring different assets than a relatively low threat mission that has some capability, but maybe not ones that you're super concerned about. That's going to dictate what you bring. And then, once you get a sense of what the threat can do, then you put together your, your package, what are you going to bring to the fight?

• 9:20Jocko Willink?

  And then this starts off, so you roll in, how's it to get executed? The first thing you got to do is take out the, the ground defenses, right?

• 9:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah, and in some, some, some ways, we're speaking pretty generically, there's, there's a whole science behind this. I mean, people in the military go to school for how to do this stuff. So we're-

• 9:34Jocko Willink?

  Wait, what, what school? Like the war college?

• 9:37Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  To plan, to plan the air side of an operation?

• 9:40Dave Berke?

  Totally. And, and there's so much nuance in that. So, uh, you know, every scenario, every mission is different, but generically speaking, the way you described it, that's right. You, you want to, you want to think about the outcome you're trying to achieve. And even that, you know, we didn't even talk to it, but you could even think it in those terms, like, even those missions vary. So if you think about World War II, like, that's a total destruction mission. You're talking about the B-17s, the P-51s. We're flying over Germany to, to annihilate them. Think about Desert Storm was like, we want to take this threat and move them out of a particular area. And it was like, okay, move, move the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And if we've done that, that was our, so a little bit more limited objective. So even, even that outcome varies

• 10:23Dave Berke?

  a little bit in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. The total annihilation scenario doesn't happen that often. And you know, you think about it, that's, that's like World War II Pacific European theaters. Sometimes we're not, we're actually not doing that.

• 10:35Jocko Willink?

  Those are guys that were teaching you when you were going through the rag and stuff with all, all those guys, like mile of death guys from Kuwait?

• 10:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Jocko Willink?

  How many of those guys were there?

• 10:45Dave Berke?

  So when I started flying Hornets in 97.

• 10:48Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:49Dave Berke?

  That it was prime Desert Storm guys. They had just done it like six years earlier. So they weren't even that, they weren't like old crusty guys. They were like senior captains and junior majors, which means like, they were experienced guys, but they weren't like these old, super old dudes, like Vietnam level guys. They were fairly young guys, had awesome stories and had awesome experiences there. But, but even like that example was even inside that conflict, that was not a World War II scenario, you know, what we were trying to do. And so even inside that, like what your objectives are, and sometimes the objectives is just, we did this for years. It's like, we're just going to provide a presence. We used to call those like the no fly zone. We did that in Iraq for like a decade, which was just, we're just going to fly up in the north and south, just to

• 11:32Dave Berke?

  tell everybody, so you don't forget we're still here. We're not really doing that much. So the range of even what you're trying to accomplish varies from overall mission to overall mission. But, but eventually you're going to get to some point where you're going to execute on some kind of kinetic mission.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  You dropped the bomb up there.

• 11:50Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  For what? What was the situation?

• 11:52Dave Berke?

  Operations Southern Watch.

• 11:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Dave Berke?

  Dude, it's the start of my combat career.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 11:57Dave Berke?

  Hmm, 2000.

• 11:59Dave Berke?

  Yep, so we're talking nine years after Desert Storm and not quite three years before OIF.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  And so, yeah, 2000, do you remember what month it was?

• 12:13Dave Berke?

  I, I think May.

• 12:15Jocko Willink?

  I think I was there.

• 12:16Dave Berke?

  Yeah, you might have been.

• 12:17Jocko Willink?

  I think I was there.

• 12:18Dave Berke?

  I think we talked about this.

• 12:19Jocko Willink?

  We definitely have talked about it, kind of figured out what the outcome was.

• 12:22Dave Berke?

  And this was a situation where we had been doing presence patrols, relatively non kinetic, meaning we weren't doing a lot of dropping at all. And we even had criteria for dropping, like we could only drop for a certain criteria and typically the criteria was below a certain, and I don't remember what the longitude line was, but some place that they weren't, we said, you can't go south of this line, whatever the line was, I don't remember what it was, you could Google it. And if you go south of this line, that's going to trigger what we call a response. And they brought a surface air missile south of that line and their hope was like they could do in the middle of the night and get a lucky shot against an American fighter and shoot them down. That was their plan. It was literally an SA3 missile. I knew what exactly what it was. We found it and we went on a launch and I blew it up. It was awesome. It was like a super cool mission.

• 13:06Dave Berke?

  I mean, looking back, obviously, like at the time, it was probably super exciting, is probably not the most dynamic.

• 13:11Jocko Willink?

  How many people on that deployment from your ship dropped a bomb?

• 13:14Dave Berke?

  Not that many. I, I was one of the first, interestingly, for whatever reason, on that, that deployment, once that happened, mine was kind of the start of maybe a good solid month of the Iraqis just.

• 13:26Jocko Willink?

  What, what carrier were you on?

• 13:27Dave Berke?

  I was on the John C. Stennis.

• 13:28Jocko Willink?

  Do you know who you relieved in there?

• 13:32Jocko Willink?

  Cause I was on the JFK.

• 13:34Dave Berke?

  Okay, so the, the JFK, I think is the carrier before us. You had a squadron, a marine squadron called the 251, the, uh, um.

• 13:47Jocko Willink?

  I don't remember.

• 13:47Dave Berke?

  Yeah, there's a marine squadron there. I think the JFK was the, was the ship that we relieved.

• 13:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so, cause we, we were there for the millennium and then we left. So we left in the spring. Yeah. So you must have relieved us.

• 13:57Dave Berke?

  Yeah, we got there in like March, April. This thing's going off like April, May, June, we leave in June and come home in July.

• 14:06Jocko Willink?

  So you dropped this bomb, come back, but the guys that had taught you were mile of death guys. And now you're the big combat experience guy.

• 14:13Dave Berke?

  Right. I've got a whole bomb under my belt.

• 14:16Jocko Willink?

  Was that your first deployment?

• 14:17Dave Berke?

  First deployment, first bomb.

• 14:19Jocko Willink?

  That is pretty, that's good, right?

• 14:21Dave Berke?

  For 2000, pre nine 11, dude, that was, that was huge. I was almost a celebrity for a little while there. I mean, it was, it was a big deal.

• 14:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 14:29Dave Berke?

  It just wasn't happening.

• 14:31Jocko Willink?

  We took down, we, like everyone was doing shipboardings over in the Gulf and we ended up taking down this big Russian oil tanker and it was on CNN and it was a big deal at the time. And the same thing, like at the time I was so stoked that we got to do that, you know, like it was awesome.

• 14:45Dave Berke?

  Heck, yeah.

• 14:46Jocko Willink?

  I was super fired up. Looking back, you're like.

• 14:48Dave Berke?

  Yeah. You go back, you know, back to Afghanistan and obviously the fact to our like in retrospect, but at the time, dude, huge deal. Huge deal. But an example of a conflict was like very limited objectives. We were not gonna use, oh, they brought a missile south of that. Let's go drop bombs on that. That wasn't happening. So even inside of how we use airplanes, it's all based on the outcome, like the strategic national objectives we have. Airplanes, even though that they're a quote tactical asset, certainly on the fighter side, they have massive strategic implications. If an American airplane gets shot down, news all over the world, obviously, as you know, an American fighter drops bombs or shoots something down, massive strategic implications. So even down at the lowest level of a single seat fighter pilot by himself,

• 15:31Dave Berke?

  he has to know that what he's doing has huge impact across the entire national strategic scope. And you have to know what it is that you're, we're going to get to this at some point, but like, that's a huge thing you have to think about.

• 15:43Jocko Willink?

  Were you thinking that? How old were you at this time?

• 15:47Jocko Willink?

  25?

• 15:47Dave Berke?

  No, like 29.

• 15:49Jocko Willink?

  You're 29?

• 15:50Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Jocko Willink?

  So you're 29 years old?

• 15:51Dave Berke?

  No, no, I'm 27. I'm 27. Yeah.

• 15:53Jocko Willink?

  And you felt you, you had a pretty good grasp on that strategic implications?

• 15:57Dave Berke?

  I had a very good grasp. I had a really good squadron that taught things in great detail, like rules of engagement, things that. A lot of legal, like, things that aren't all that exciting, but are super, super, super important. And so we had a squadron that put a lot of pressure, focus and stress on the important things. So I felt very capable and prepared and I understood what I was doing. Yeah. I even expected the aftermath that I got, which was like a big prop. I have some cool articles that I printed up, like a big propaganda campaign where,

• 16:30Dave Berke?

  like some article came out, like I had literally bombed like a baby milk factory or something like that. You know, like, oh, orphans have been murdered, you know?

• 16:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Dave Berke?

  And they're like, this is what's going to happen. And like, so we had a really good sense of what we're doing. I think the country and the carrier certainly were well-prepared for even the aftermath of those decisions.

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  Now, how do you think about things?

• 16:50Jocko Willink?

  Since this, a lot of this is much more doctrinalized. How do you think about things from an unconventional standpoint? When you're thinking about like, when you talk about unmanned, when you talk about remote, when you talk about using stealth? Like, what does that look like from your perspective? Do you, so if you're a conventional force commander, if you're in charge of a, of a army battalion or an army brigade or a marine corps battalion? You would say, oh, here's where I can fit some special operations into this thing. Or here's how I can do this in an unconventional way.

• 17:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Jocko Willink?

  What, what are the opportunities for that when it comes to aerial combat?

• 17:25Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I, I think that the unconventional use of airplanes and airplanes is like UAVs, drones, you know, regular airplanes too. I think the last several years have, have allowed like a lot of pioneering of things that are very unconventional. Partially out of necessity, but also partially out of

• 17:48Dave Berke?

  mitigating the risk of like putting a person in a plane, flying in enemy, enemy territory to get a relatively limited return on that. Things like UAVs have made a totally, I think a dramatic change in how we think about operating. Not to say that we look at a UAV as a like a disposable asset, but it's a totally different mindset of if the risk associated with that doesn't involve a human being, an American human being. And so I think it opens up the opportunity for a ton of non-traditional ways of how to operate where 20 years ago, we might not even think of it.

• 18:22Jocko Willink?

  Did you listen to RFK podcast?

• 18:23Dave Berke?

  Not yet.

• 18:24Jocko Willink?

  So I didn't know this. I knew that his, that JFK's older brother, Joe, was killed in World War II. Do you know how he was killed? He was killed, they were thinking unconventionally, and they made, I want to say it was B-17 bombers that were remote control. And they were testing this theory to take these B-17 bombers, remote control, put them up in the air, fill them with explosives, and then basically let these things kamikaze themselves into the target. So they did it. They designed it, but they couldn't make it take off on its own. They couldn't remote control take off. They couldn't figure that out because

• 19:06Jocko Willink?

  allegedly, there's a bunch of stuff a pilot has to do to get a plane to take off. So they couldn't get it to do it. The reaction time was too slow. So what they needed was they needed pilots to take the aircraft off. And then, once they turned it on the final IP, armed the thing, and then jump out, parachute out. That was the plan. And probably parachute out, you know, either in, I would say probably over the channel or something like that. So that was the plan. And so Joe Kennedy, he went up to do this, and armed the thing, and was getting ready to parachute out, and it detonated and killed him. And like whoever

• 19:45Jocko Willink?

  else was with him, the other pilot or whatever. So, yeah, this idea of unmanned aircraft, this is a pretty old idea. And but now, man, I mean, a six-year-old can fly drones easily, easily fly drones, take off land, hover, like do all this stuff that's. Incredible.

• 20:06Dave Berke?

  It's totally different, man.

• 20:08Jocko Willink?

  Are you still, so the last time we talked about this specific subject, I don't know what time range you gave me, but I was saying like the manned fighter pilots are, the manned fighter aircraft and bomber aircraft are, they don't have much time left. You said like another two generations, maybe one generation, 30 years. I think you said 30 years.

• 20:30Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Jocko Willink?

  Have you changed yet?

• 20:31Dave Berke?

  No, I think my attitude is still, and I think of things generationally, that's a term that we use in aviation, like fifth generation, fourth generation. There's not a time limit on that. I would say like a generation of fighters lasts between 30 and 50 years. And so when I think like-

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  How old's F-18 right now?

• 20:49Dave Berke?

  The F-18 first flew in like 80, you know, I think it came to the fleet in 83.

• 20:54Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 20:55Dave Berke?

  So we, I just did an Instagram post like, happy birthday to the F-16, it turned 50. Now, the F-16 is still like a super relevant airplane too. So 50 is like, it's going to be around for another 20 years at least. So when I think of generational, generations of airplanes, I don't necessarily think of how long they're going to last. I think about what happens to the design of those planes. Designing and building a generation of airplanes takes a long time. We just started really fielding aggressively in the last 10 years, our fifth generation. Which means the next generation, the sixth generation is all being thought of, designed, contemplated, and eventually going to get built here relatively soon.

• 21:31Jocko Willink?

  How much faster is that? Is the sixth generation manned?

• 21:33Dave Berke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:34Jocko Willink?

  Wouldn't it be faster just to go unmanned right now?

• 21:36Dave Berke?

  Well, my basic assumption would be is they haven't made that. They, they haven't gotten it to do what they, they can't get it to do what they want it to do unmanned yet. I think the confluence of those things, my, my point behind that is they're going to build another generation of fighters. Well, we'll just generically call it the sixth generation fighter. It's coming, I don't know, 10 years, whatever, 15 years, something like that. My, my-

• 22:02Dave Berke?

  My belief is that they won't build another generation of man fighters. That doesn't mean the sixth gen plane won't fly for thirty, forty, fifty years and you'll have some, some like declining.

• 22:11Jocko Willink?

  Usage?

• 22:12Dave Berke?

  Usage of ban, like this plane, when they build them, however many they build, like somebody will be flying that until it's no longer useful. But I, I would not be shocked if the next generation of airplanes, they no longer are putting a person in the cockpit. Now, dude, I had people, when I said that on this podcast, like, you know, guys like, you're crazy. And other people are like, no, that makes perfect sense. Of course, I don't know. But I think about how long it takes and what they're trying to do and what it's, and the next generation is going to be. And then I think of the generation after that.

• 22:42Dave Berke?

  And the fact that these planes last thirty, forty, fifty years.

• 22:46Dave Berke?

  The seventh generation of fighters is probably not going to have a person in it, is what I think.

• 22:51Jocko Willink?

  I think, again, I'm a total idiot novice over here, but I'm going to chime in anyways, because I'm feeling like it. It seems to me like there will be another, sort of, sort of like another line of evolution that's going on right now. With unmanned aircraft, then that line is going to overtake.

• 23:09Dave Berke?

  Supplant, yeah.

• 23:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's going to supplant and overtake the sixth generation.

• 23:13Dave Berke?

  They're going to live together and the, the man world is going to be in a decline and the unmanned world is going to be in an incline. And eventually one will age out.

• 23:20Jocko Willink?

  Cause also you look at what is, what is the, what is the ultimate objective? Right? It's what you started with.

• 23:26Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 23:26Jocko Willink?

  Like what's, what's the goal? The goal is to do this. Well, you don't, there's, there's ways to do it without even having that type of aircraft. You could do it with forty little drones that can fly in, that are expendable. And it can create as much havoc or deliver what you need to deliver and with zero risk to human life.

• 23:42Dave Berke?

  And I think it's, people don't, we don't do a good job predicting the future. And I think oftentimes it's hard for us to, we, I think typically underestimate how, how quickly things can evolve on the technology side and typically things evolve faster than we imagine. And it's not hard for me to imagine a world where the.

• 24:02Dave Berke?

  Remote AI virtual world just accelerates so much faster than we think. I think thirty years from now, like, it's not hard for me to picture, like, dude, we're gonna be doing things nobody, very few people can imagine. And that the need for a person flying around like I did is gonna be far less necessary.

• 24:19Jocko Willink?

  Now, here's some, another debate from the air world that can come up from time to time, and it really does relate to everything that we do as human beings. Multi-role versus single-role aircraft. So, first of all, explain what a multi-role versus single-role is, and then we'll get into it.

• 24:35Dave Berke?

  Dude, it's really how it sounds is, is for years and years, we built what we called single-purpose airplanes. By design, you know, a fighter would be designed to shoot down other airplanes. A bomber would be designed just to hit targets on the ground. And at some point, and what's really interesting, too, is like, even single-purpose airplanes quickly evolved into multi-role airplanes. But it really meant the person or the people inside the machine had to be proficient in a lot of different things. The F-18 that I flew, at least on paper technically, was the very first aircraft designated as both a fighter and an attack. Meaning, it was built from the ground up with the expectation that the pilot will be able to conduct fighter missions and attack missions, air-to-air

• 25:20Dave Berke?

  and air-to-ground. Now, at the same time that the Hornet was being built and proliferated, there's an airplane called the F-16, which technically was a fighter. Very quickly evolved into a multi-role machine, so fighter and attack and suppress some enemy defenses, multi-mission thing. So, we've had several of those for many generations, but the Hornet technically was the first one designed to do that. A classic example would be at the same time the Hornet is coming on to the scene in the late, early eighties, you know, late seventies, early eighties, with an airplane called the F-15 Eagle, which to this day only does air-to-air missions. Now, there's several different things you can do air-to-air, but it is strictly a fighter. That's one of the reasons why the Eagle...

• 26:02Jocko Willink?

  Which they couldn't even, they don't provide ground support?

• 26:04Dave Berke?

  Zero. It is a single mission aircraft, the fighter mission. Now again, there's a bunch of different things that sit inside that, but they are not doing anything air to ground. There's no attack capability in that machine. Basically, everything has been built since the early 80s has had multi-mission capability. The debate is, and by the way, there are some other airplanes that were built just for air to ground, like the A-10 is a great example, like the classic ultimate cast airplane. Cannot shoot down other airplanes, can't shoot a gun or a missile at another fighter. That's a single mission. Of course, there's several missions that's inside that, but the debate is, should we have a whole bunch of different airplanes that do all these different things? Because if you're just an air to ground guy, you can

• 26:47Dave Berke?

  specialize that and be really, really good at that. Or do you need a machine that does a whole bunch of different things? And the risk is what they would say is, oh, you're a jack of all trades, you're a master of none, which means you're going to be deficient in all of those.

• 26:59Jocko Willink?

  Did the F-15s fly in missions in Afghanistan and Iraq then?

• 27:03Dave Berke?

  No. The Eagle?

• 27:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Dave Berke?

  No.

• 27:07Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 27:08Dave Berke?

  None. In fact, the Eagle community, which had done really, really well in Desert Storm, when Iraq, OIF was kicking off in 03, the Eagle community was like, here we go. And we had spun up the Eagle community to go to Iraq, to go get some again. And not a single aircraft from either Iraq or Afghanistan was launched against the American forces. And very quickly, they literally just sent the Eagles home to create ramp space for other platforms. Eagles had no engagement in OIF, no engagement in Afghanistan, and have not had any involvement in either of those conflicts. The F-15C. It's a single

• 27:51Dave Berke?

  mission platform, unbelievably good at it, but no place, no relevance in those conflicts. Doesn't mean it's an irrelevant airplane. In fact, there's a really strong argument to be made that the reason nobody, the Iraqis didn't launch an aircraft is they knew the Eagle was there. So while they might not be getting any kills, it's serving its purpose as a deterrent, but there's no like objective. Missiles getting launched and planes getting blown out of the sky. So you can't show what you're doing, but every Eagle pilot knows out there that a reason, the main reason the Iraqi Air Force didn't fly against the Americans is because how well the Eagle did in Desert Storm. So they're like, we just won't do this. They just pulled them into the desert and put them in the sand.

• 28:29Jocko Willink?

  F-18 versus F-15, same pilot, who's, which one wins in a dogfight?

• 28:34Dave Berke?

  In a dogfight?

• 28:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 28:37Dave Berke?

  God, I'm a little biased. If you're taking these two airplanes configured just for dogfighting and these two are equal pilots, the Hornet should win. Every Eagle pilot listening there right now is gonna just, his head's gonna explode by hearing this. I flew against the Eagle a lot. It is an unbelievably good airplane. If you were just doing dogfighting and the airplane is just slicked off for dogfighting, the Hornet should beat the Eagle.

• 29:02Jocko Willink?

  How come?

• 29:04Dave Berke?

  It's, it's, it is a, it is a more maneuverable, it is not as fast, it's not as powerful, it doesn't pull as many Gs, doesn't have as good turn rate. These are all words that the Eagle guys will hear and go, yeah, he's right. But it is a more nimble, a more maneuverable airplane. And if I'm gonna get behind you before you get behind me, I'm gonna do that in a Hornet faster than I'm gonna do it in an Eagle.

• 29:24Jocko Willink?

  So why do we make, why are we still have it in the inventory?

• 29:29Dave Berke?

  It's aging out. There's not much, there's not many, it's been replaced. The Raptor replaced the Eagle and the Raptor has a lot of air-to-ground capability, even though it's technically just a fighter, but it has a ton of air-to-ground ability. The Eagle has aged out and it's around because it has, it still serves a purpose, but that purpose is dwindling a little bit. Again, I attribute a lot of our air dominance in the world to the fact that that airplane exists. So there's still a reason to have it. It's, it's like having an arsenal on your shelf and you're thinking about coming after me and I'll go, hey, before you do this, just take a look over there and you go, well, maybe this isn't a good idea. That's everybody's effective is if you come at me and I, and I use those weapons against you, that deterrent ability is everybody's useful. In fact, maybe even better. It might

• 30:13Dave Berke?

  be better for you to go, I don't want to mess with you because you know it's there. The problem with that is it's really hard to account for that. The Eagle community has suffered from that because they're so capable, they're so proficient and so few threat adversaries are interested in messing with it that they just stopped flying against it. Doesn't help, doesn't help their cause, but I think it's true. I'm a huge proponent of the C model community.

• 30:38Jocko Willink?

  So it seems that the debate that I was bringing up has already been solved, which is single role aircraft just don't really make sense.

• 30:46Dave Berke?

  And I am a firm believer in a multi-mission aircraft, multi-role machine. There is still a debate that if you put too many mission responsibilities on a pilot, that it makes him less effective in all those. That is an ongoing debate that that I think that debate will always continue. I sit squarely on one side of that debate.

• 31:04Jocko Willink?

  Which is where?

• 31:05Dave Berke?

  My multi-mission fighter pilot can be as good at every one of those missions when trained correctly. And I was thinking about it, thinking we might talk about this, when I think about a SEAL. It'd be like saying, hey, listen, you can be a sniper and you can do, you know, a beach assault, but you can't be really good at both. You'd be like, ah, we could. And I'd say, well, okay, Jocko, if I told you how to be really good at being a sniper and being really good at like a room clearance and being really good at a vehicle patrol and being really good at a shore, a sea to shore assault. And then I said, but I'm going to take this other guy and take Echo. All he has to do is be a sniper. Who's going to be a better sniper? There's an argument that says, oh, he only has to be a sniper.

• 31:50Dave Berke?

  He's going to be a better sniper than you.

• 31:53Dave Berke?

  That's a fair debate.

• 31:56Dave Berke?

  My experience tells me that you can actually be really good at all those. And actually I've seen guys be everybody as good as a sniper, having multiple missions.

• 32:05Jocko Willink?

  I was going to say, I agree with that. And there's, you could get into a point where you can find some outlying missions that are so far, if you were like, hey, Echo, I want you to be good at all these things that you just mentioned, and I want you to be really good at tennis.

• 32:20Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  Right? There, that's going to be tricky because this is not related. But look, being a sniper and being doing CQC, which is close quarters combat and doing beach assaults, like those are all things that are all interrelated. And when you get better at one, have you ever heard this thing in the book, outliers? I think it's in outliers, but. They take, and I forget the exact experiment, but it has something to do with this. So they're training kids to throw a ball into a basket that's six feet away. And they have a test where you're going to take this ball and you're going to throw it in this basket at six feet away. And they take one group of kids and all they train is putting it into the basket that's six feet away. Throwing it in there and throwing it in there and throwing it in there. They take another group of kids and they train them. Sometimes they put the basket at two feet, sometimes they put it at eight foot, sometimes they put it at four foot, sometimes they put it at six feet. Day of competition, who wins?

• 33:06Jocko Willink?

  It's the people that had to do the multiple different tasks, right? Cause they got better. So, and the reason that this experiment exists was to talk about the fact that if you're training, if you're raising a child and you go, oh, I want my kid to be a good baseball player. Baseball, baseball, baseball, baseball, baseball. There's a decent chance if he does baseball, football, soccer and tennis, that that combination, especially in the formative years, is going to make him a better ultimate baseball player. Now, look, these days at a certain point, you gotta be like, all right, my kid's going to go really go for it in baseball. He's got to dedicate himself to baseball. I would guess 13, 14, maybe 15, Echo, yeah?

• 33:45Dave Berke?

  Yeah, something's right.

• 33:47Jocko Willink?

  Me, I also think you gotta watch out for burnout. I mean, we're getting into a totally different subject here, but you know, you can burn out a kid. And I had a bunch of conversations about this at ADCC. But so, so as long as these things are interrelated, and it seems to me like in an aircraft, look, doing a bombing run, which I've done before in an F-18, backseat, get some. Dogfight, which I've done before in an F-18, backseat, get some. All those things, those are skills that are, but you're doing the same basic skillset.

• 34:14Dave Berke?

  Well, you now know where I stand on that multi-mission versus single mission debate as well, which is, and that's really one of the reasons why I think Top Gun has maintained such a detailed focus on dogfighting and pure air to air, even though objectively it's very low probability we're going to do that. Is what we have known and discovered decades ago, I didn't come up with this. This is something that organization that we have figured out that we believe is that if you are really good at those things, that translates into all these other things. In fact, if you're really, really good at the complexities of air to air, you're very likely to be a really good bomber too, because they're so interrelated. Is there an argument that says if all you ever had to do was, is master just bombing? Yeah, there's an argument and that's a debate.

• 35:00Dave Berke?

  To your point.

• 35:02Dave Berke?

  And also, I think it might even be like, like, if I was going to measure a Navy SEAL sniper that was good at 10 different things, and also like a sniper, maybe he'd get a 98 out of 100 score on his test. And if I told a guy like, oh, all you ever do is being a sniper, and you don't have to do anything else, he might get a 99 out of 100. That disparity is so minor, that to me, it's much better to have you having the flexibility of being able to do five, six, seven mission sets, than only being able to do the one, which is why the multi-mission platform and a single-seat pilot is the, is how aviation is now. Meaning, all the planes being built, just about all the planes being built,

• 35:42Dave Berke?

  the crews have gone from 10 in the B-17 to four to two, down to one. Everything is being built with one person. It's not because single-seat pilots are any better, it's because they've created this platform where one individual actually is capable of being really, really good at all these mission sets, because they all translate. And the point is, is that you could get airborne in your Raptor or your F-35, you don't know what you're going to do on that mission. Even if you plan it perfectly, the enemy gets a vote, the environment gets a vote, the world gets a vote, and you better be able to be flexible. What you don't want to have someone go, hey Jocko, I only know how to, I'm only a sniper, I can't go clear that room, I don't know what to do. And you're like, dude, you gotta clear that room to get up on the roof. You don't want someone calling back saying, I don't know how to do that.

• 36:24Dave Berke?

  That multi-role capability is important, but you also want that guy clearing the room to be really good at clearing that room. You don't want him just fumbling his way through to get to his primary mission set. You want to be really competent in all those. And it's, I think, very possible for a single-seat pilot in a multi-mission aircraft to do that. 20, 30 years ago, massive debate over that.

• 36:42Jocko Willink?

  Now, even though you're a single-seat pilot's working alone, there's a massive amount of decentralized command that's got to happen, right, for this to work?

• 36:50Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I mean-

• 36:51Jocko Willink?

  So now we're going back to this whole idea of aerial combat, you have this giant mission going on. Even though you're a single-seat pilot, you're not, you're not king of the world, because you're, you're out there on your own. As a leader, you've got to understand what the mission is. You're leading your aircraft, you're leading your part of the mission. So it's, it's, it's a extreme form of decentralized command.

• 37:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah, I mean, you're pretty much reading my mind right now, because I'm thinking of the question we talked earlier about, like, how do you win? What does, you know, aerial combat look like? And the long answer is decentralized command. Is ultimately, you get down to this individual in this machine, somewhere out there doing something, where he's gonna, he or she's gonna end up- Making an independent decision by themself, doing something that's gonna have massive implications. And they have to really understand what is they're doing, why the outcome's gonna be and how does it support their larger objective? And then that's happening hundreds or thousands of times in these combat scenarios, all the time. I mean, that's what's happening. Decentralized command is how you win.

• 37:52Dave Berke?

  And that's a very short way. We could talk about this for as long as you want, but that's the shortest answer is that's how you're successful. A person in a plane doing a mission, eventually is gonna make a decision by themselves that's either gonna support or undermine the objective.

• 38:06Jocko Willink?

  So it's, so from your perspective, you're dropping one bomb in 1990, or sorry, in the year 2000. You're a frontline guy on your first deployment, you're doing a strategic operation that you are solely responsible for getting that thing shot, dropping that bomb.

• 38:25Dave Berke?

  A hundred percent.

• 38:25Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward however many years, squadron commander.

• 38:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  And now you've got to convey all that information. This is like decentralized command, right? You, it's kinda like me with snipers. Like I've got a sniper guy, but he's gonna make the decision on whether he pulls the trigger or not.

• 38:43Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 38:43Jocko Willink?

  He's gotta understand all the implications that he's got. You know, you go out into, in Ramadi, if we have a sniper that kills a

• 38:52Jocko Willink?

  an innocent person, kills a civilian, kills a woman, kills a kid, it's gonna be a disaster.

• 38:57Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 38:58Jocko Willink?

  For everyone involved. And they gotta know that. They gotta understand that. And that's our job as leaders to convey that.

• 39:03Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Jocko Willink?

  So when you were squadron commander, did you remember what it was like as a 27 year old that's dropping this bomb and said to yourself? That's the reason I asked that question, cuz I, cuz you gotta think, man, when you're 27 years old, and I've seen pictures that, you've seen pictures of 27 year old Dave Berke?

• 39:19Dave Berke?

  And video.

• 39:19Jocko Willink?

  You could see that guy red. You're thinking to yourself, hey, this guy's fired up, man. He's ready to drop some bombs, boy. Especially like, there it is. Here's your chance to do it. And you're gonna be one of the few guys on this deployment that gets to drop a bomb. And one of the few guys in the military.

• 39:31Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Jocko Willink?

  That has combat experience. And you've gotta be able to harness all that. Now you're a squadron commander. Now you gotta be able, and I thought the same thing. Like I got these young guys, they're ready to get after it. If I don't harness that properly, you can have issues.

• 39:44Dave Berke?

  Dude, the similarity is even down to the sniper mission is, there's so much overlap there. Because on the all the way extreme on one side is like, you know how bad I wanted to drop a bomb when I got into an airplane, how bad like I would almost like I'll do anything to drop a bomb. And then with a recognition of anything goes wrong, well, forget it. Even if it goes even 100% right, I alluded to this, even when we do everything right, there's still going to be some version of that story that that potentially has risk of we did 100% correct, exactly right. And there's still going to be somebody out there saying you did it wrong. And so the implications of that, even if you find the right target

• 40:27Dave Berke?

  at the right time, use the right weapon, cover everything you're supposed to do, there's still risk of something, some other problem being created, even if it's just a media problem, public relations problem. And now you take and not to diminish, I mean, dude, I was really lucky because I don't know how many hours I spent sitting next to Chris Kyle, but it was a lot. Because when I was with you, he and I had very similar, I don't know if mission is the right word, but we were thinking a lot of the same things. I was up there with you guys talking about talking to airplanes about how can we protect all the people moving around. That was a way to do it. Chris Kyle was doing the exact same thing. I don't know how many times Chris went to me and go, Hey, dude, come over here and look through the scope of my rifle and tell me what you see. I mean, I have vivid memories of that. And

• 41:10Dave Berke?

  that was his way of telling me, this is him really thinking about what he sees and how it's going to affect the larger mission. That takes a lot of maturity, because in the back of my mind, it was, I want to shoot my gun. I want to drop a bomb. And I've always remarked at that. And that that experience with me with him, with your SEALs is so similar to the experience I had as a young fighter pilot by myself with an airplane where I could press the pickle button, the bomb was going to come off. And I mean, that's what I wanted to do. Fast forward to being a squadron commander, I've got all sorts of different experiences reminding me, not just how important decentralized command is, but how often you have to emphasize it to the young frontline, we'll call them a shooter, whether they're shooting a sniper

• 41:52Dave Berke?

  rifle, dropping a bomb off an airplane, or any of those frontline Marines or soldiers, like you know what those frontline guys are like. They always have to be thinking in the back of their mind, how is what I'm about to do can affect the bigger mission. And if they don't understand that, they're gonna do something wrong, they're gonna make a mistake, they're gonna make a bad decision that in the end does more harm than good. The maturity it takes to do that, and then the leadership it takes to do that. is not just so difficult, it's what sets us apart as a country and why our military is so good is that we believe in that and we train and teach that and then we ultimately cut our people loose to go execute with that and that's what that's that's how we win. That's literally the whole point. That's how we were successful. Man, that is hard to do. I mean, that's same thing with business. Like this is a hard thing to do, but that that is what we do and that's

• 42:36Dave Berke?

  how we have to do it. So yeah, as a squadron commander, all day, every day, that's all I'm thinking about is how do I let my young frontline folks do their job, knowing how what they're introducing in effect, the biggest, the most expensive, most scrutinized program in the history of aviation, maybe even the military, that I'm the first operational CEO, getting the Department of Defense breathing down my neck, knowing I got a corporal that's going to determine the fate of my squadron. Yeah, that's what we're doing.

• 43:02Jocko Willink?

  And that's, that was, you know, you bring up Ramadi there. It's like, that was one of the, one of the differences in that battlefield was we were so embedded, like everyone was so, like, I mean, you're literally sitting up there next to Chris, next to Leif, next to the rest of the snipers, the machine gunners, that's you. We are an army guy up there. We had army scouts in the thing next door. We got Iraqi soldiers with us. We got an interpreter. Oh, by the way, CNN's down in the bottom of the cop right there. They can actually see everything that's happening. It's just total visibility for everyone that's out there. And it was so obvious that if you, you know, when, when a shock gets taken, if it's a bad shot, it's going to be a disaster and it's going to be known about it. It's going to be

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  on Al Jazeera. So yeah, having that, having that decentralized command, making sure that people not understand not just what to do, but why they're doing it. Why they're doing it? Why is this important? What are the ramifications? What are the strategic ramifications of what you're doing? Because if you make a mistake right now, it's not just, it's not just this, oh, this, this little mistake happened by you on the frontline, you dropped this bomb and you shouldn't have, you hit the milk factory or whatever it is you said, or you shot this a mom, or you shot this, you know, a school teacher. I mean, in Ramadi, there's 400,000 people in Ramadi. Yeah, 400, there's probably what 4,000 or 5,000 enemy fighters was the estimate. So when you're looking down the street, you're seeing, yeah, you're seeing regular civilians, but also.

• 44:27Jocko Willink?

  You see that the enemy really stands out.

• 44:29Dave Berke?

  A hundred percent.

• 44:30Jocko Willink?

  They really stand out.

• 44:32Dave Berke?

  And to that point, too, like part of that is decentralized command is me realizing if I do something wrong, it's not just going to be me that gets scrutinized. My flight lead and then my squadron commander and the carrier like it goes all the way back up. That scrutiny. You know that you're not operating by yourself. You're operating independently on behalf of everybody else. And I think part of what decentralized and why the word why is so important in that is that if I squeeze that trigger. And that's also crazy, too, because I like. Shooting my rifle in Iraq, like squeezing the trigger on my rifle is a surreal experience as a fighter pilot. Part of you is like, what am I doing? This is crazy. And then, you know, a lot of, you know, some combat flying airplanes, but also seeing guys

• 45:15Dave Berke?

  much younger than me, much less, and I say experience, I don't want it to be in somewhat a critical sense, but I saw a lot of the military as a major in the Marine Corps before I got to Iraq, a lot, you know, in different ways and different strategic impacts, you know, a fairly broad understanding of just warfare and combat in general, and then seeing young guys on your team and young soldiers, young Marines that are squeezing triggers, knowing that they're doing it, not just by themselves, but on behalf, it might as well be your CEO pulling the trigger.

• 45:44Jocko Willink?

  Might as well be.

• 45:44Dave Berke?

  It might as well be, you know, the chairman of the joint, they know that. And so, and that weight, when done correctly, isn't like a burden. It's, it's a, it's a sense of obligation, but it's also, it empowers them to do the right thing, which is awesome. And that's what we do. Again, that's how we went.

• 45:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I just, I just wrote down exactly what you said. The note I took was burden of command because part of decentralized command is passing the burden, passing that weight. And look, ultimately, when you're in charge, you're the one that's going to bear the burden, but they better recognize, your team better recognize the burden that they're carrying and what's going to happen. And that's why I got real lucky because I was, I was the admiral's aide prior to being the task unit commander. So when NSW at large did something that was messed up, I saw that the weight.

• 46:32Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Jocko Willink?

  Go all the way up the chain of command for what some. dumbass SEAL did in Iraq or Afghanistan. I saw that. I saw that weight go all the way up to my boss, the admiral in charge of all the SEALs. I saw the scrutiny would come on him and I was like, oh, I need to make sure my guys understand that every little thing that we do is going to get is going to get scrutinized, looked at. And that's why you you have to have the right intent and everything that you do. And they need to feel what that is. And that's a huge part of decentralized command. And it's a weird thing. It's it's a weird I'll have to figure out how to phrase this because you can't, of course, pass on the burden itself, but they've got to

• 47:15Jocko Willink?

  understand what that weight is. They've got to feel it. Look, at the end of the day, if one of your one of your snipers or one of your fighter jet jockeys goes out and drops a bomb in the wrong spot, you're the one that's ultimately going to burn for it. And look, they might burn too, but you are both going down at a minimum, you know, it's it's coming on you. So you can't really, you can't really give the burden, but you have to show them what the impacts are of what they're doing and make sure they understand it. Otherwise, you're going to have significant issues and real problems. So

• 47:48Dave Berke?

  Well, I literally wrote down feel the weight about 10 seconds before you said that exact phrase. And what I was thinking when I'm saying that is, is, and you've described this in different ways. That weight is supposed you're supposed to feel that weight, but it's not supposed to like crush you. It's not supposed to be debilitating. It's it's it's you have to be aware of it. But the way that you put the weight on them also has to allow it has to give them the flexibility to do that. But the feeling of that weight can't be so overwhelming that decide, oh, I'm not going to do anything because if I make a mistake, then all these things will happen is the weight has to be felt, but it can't crush them. And and that's what the commander can't you can't just like, oh, this is on you. There's this old saying, when I was first learning to be a forward air

• 48:32Dave Berke?

  controller in getting ready to go to Iraq, that when you say cleared hot, which is the phrase that we use, we go all this coordination, all this planning, and in the end, I'm on the ground, you're in the air, I say cleared hot, that is the only cue that you have to be approved to release the bomb. And the phrase that got thrown around, at least when I was in training, I don't know if they still use it, was it's called the fact buys the bomb is the saying, which was like, okay, now you as the fact, you now own that outcome. And and I fully understand that logic, which is, don't you dare say cleared hot unless you are ready to take that responsibility. But the other side of that is there were times that I would see that early in aviation and I

• 49:13Dave Berke?

  I thought about this as I became a commander is what I didn't want that for the pilot to go, well, that's not on me. The fact bought that bomb is like absolutely not like the and if you're a pilot, you don't ever want to feel, oh, the fact buys this bomb, which means you are now no longer responsible for that. You have to feel that same weight that he feels, which means you're the one pressing that button. And if it ends up being wrong, we're going to come and go, well, that wasn't my fault. The fact said A, B, and C like negative. So the fact buys the bomb is a great logic of wanting that forward air controller to feel the responsibility, but you don't want to relieve the pilot of that either. And so as a commander, I wanted guys to understand we're doing that. Nobody can take that burden off of you on either side, even if I'm the one

• 49:57Dave Berke?

  saying, I approve you do this, you're cleared hot, that you still have the ownership too. So there's so much overlap.

• 50:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, there's a ton of overlap there because check it out. You're a machine gunner, you're a squad leader and your machine gunner shoots in the direction you shouldn't have shot at or whatever. And you, it's the same exact thing because listen, you get, guess what you tell the machine gunner? Hey dude, you bought that bullet. You pull that trigger, that's a hundred percent on you. And guess what you tell the squad leader? Hey, your freaking machine gunner shoots? That's a hundred percent on you. It's overlapping and interlocking fields of extreme ownership.

• 50:27Dave Berke?

  There you go.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you need. That's what you need in those situations. Actually JP tells, he had a situation where he didn't take a shot because he was, he wasn't quite sure. And it wasn't that he wasn't quite sure he had a bad, he had a good target, but he was like, wait, should I, this was like literally his first or second mission. And he was like, hold on a second. Is this, can I shoot right now? And he had to crawl over and ask Stoner, like, hey, I got a guy over here carrying AK or RPG. Can I engage him? And Seth's like, yeah. And you know, Seth realized like, oh, I've done a bad job. Like my snipers feel like they shouldn't

• 51:08Jocko Willink?

  shoot a literal Mujahideen fighter maneuvering through the streets. So that's the situation where again, if you put too many constraints on somebody, they're going to be like, oh, I don't want to take the shot. If you don't, if they don't understand what that burden is, they might go buck wild. And by the way, there's 100% ownership by the guy that pulls the trigger or drops the bomb. And there's also 100% ownership because I'll tell you, one of my snipers takes a bad shot. Like, oh, I'm, I'm not just mad at that. I mean, I'm not just going to hold that guy accountable. I'm going to be talking to the platoon commander. And by the way, guess who it ultimately falls on? Yeah, you guessed it. It's me because I didn't convey that information. I didn't convey that burden properly.

• 51:47Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 51:47Jocko Willink?

  So these are things from a decentralized command perspective, we have to think about. And that, you know, how does it supply the business? Well, the cashier in your store, and you've got 38 stores and you're a franchisee owner and one of your cash register guys talks smack or does something stupid and you say, oh, that's fire that guy. It's not on me. Okay, you can say that. Oh, the store manager goes, well, it's not me. It's that it's we had it. We hired the guy was a jackass. Okay. So what did you change?

• 52:18Dave Berke?

  Nothing. Problem doesn't go away.

• 52:19Jocko Willink?

  Problem doesn't go away. If you say, hey, listen, store manager, I don't do a good job of conveying the fact that we have to treat our customers with respect. Well, yeah, but I mean, I can't control this jackass. Well, why'd you hire him? How'd you train him? What are you doing with him? How often do you monitor him? Do you check in with him? Is he disgruntled? Do you have a person that's at your store that's working as a cash register that has a bad temper? Because if that's what you're doing, look, you're in that store every day. You see what the person's like. So these are the things that have to come into play. And that's decentralized command.

• 52:46Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 52:47Jocko Willink?

  Now, listen, I know you, you and I were talking about doing this and you sent me some, some words, some vocabulary. I also put together some vocabulary that I wanted to run through. So getting into some, some terms from the aviation world. And I think it's always good. Look, I do this all the time with jujitsu. Like I'll take, oh, what we're going to sweep them. We're going to maneuver. We got to set them up. Oh, we got to cover movement. So we use these things for everything that we do. But some of these, some of these terms from air combat and really just from flying, I think are usable. First one, pitch. What's pitch?

• 53:25Dave Berke?

  Pitch is, is, it's literally your nose moving up and down. So if you think about it like the horizontal axis, your nose is going above or below the horizon. So you're pitching the nose up or pitching the nose down. It's where you're moving the nose of the jet.

• 53:38Jocko Willink?

  So you're either gaining altitude or you're losing altitude.

• 53:41Dave Berke?

  Your nose is going up or nose is going down. It doesn't necessarily mean.

• 53:44Jocko Willink?

  You could have your nose up and be losing altitude. That's called getting ready to stall and die.

• 53:48Dave Berke?

  We might get to that. Ironically, like, maybe the larger question is like, when to do that? Like, if you're stalling, people want to pull the nose up.

• 53:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, because they want to go up.

• 53:58Dave Berke?

  And they want to pull the nose up because I'm going down. Like, that's actually usually a mistake. So it is just where your nose is going. So it doesn't necessarily mean climbing or descending.

• 54:07Jocko Willink?

  See, again, this is why I wanted to talk about this because that's so important. Because how often do you see people, they're trying to correct themselves by moving in a direction that's actually not helping them at all?

• 54:17Dave Berke?

  That's right.

• 54:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, we, we're not doing well in our marketing. Put more money in marketing. It's like, okay, you're just adding more fuel to the fire.

• 54:23Dave Berke?

  And, and the word that always comes to mind is, and I think about this when I teach leadership, which we do all the time, is the counterintuitive nature of leadership. If you want to go higher, you don't always pull back on the stick. And that can be so difficult because if you're going to stall, actually what you're supposed to do is push the nose forward. It means you got to go down even more. Like, wait a second, this doesn't sound right. But that's how it is sometimes. And, and that perfect example is, oh, we're not getting enough return on marketing. Put more money in. That might be, that might be a mistake.

• 54:51Jocko Willink?

  Or from a human aspect, like, oh, Echo's, Echo's not doing a good job right now. I need to take away his responsibility, take away more responsibilities from him. That might be the wrong move.

• 55:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Jocko Willink?

  I might actually want to give him more responsibilities. Let him step up.

• 55:04Dave Berke?

  I, I remember like, I hate to say even rolling with you, but I remember like the first time you and I were rolling.

• 55:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, jujitsu.

• 55:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And you made a joke. You said something like, which you were just mocking me, but you said like, push harder, which was like, oh, if I push harder, I might be able to move you. Which you obviously, and I knew when you said it, I was like, you're such a jerk. But your point to that was, and this is a center thing, like, if I want you to move backwards, I should push on you. And if you don't go backwards, I should just push harder, right? Like, that's how our brains work. But you know as well that is not always the right answer. So inside that, it's counterintuitive, like, oh. I shouldn't keep pushing harder won't solve this problem. Pulling back in the stick doesn't make you climb all the time. So it's, it's, there's a ton of parallels.

• 55:47Jocko Willink?

  All right, roll. What's roll then?

• 55:50Dave Berke?

  Roll is just a different axis. So it's the wings go, instead of the nose going up and down is the wings going up and down. It's how you turn left and right. So rolling, you know, which is the long axis of the plane, wing goes up, airplane turns, wing goes down, airplane turns.

• 56:03Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything that can be counterintuitive about that?

• 56:06Dave Berke?

  Well, there's not, it's not quite as counterintuitive as, as the pitch, because the pitch, people in airplanes learn like pulling back in the stick is not always the smart thing to do. Rolling, um, when you roll, the drawback to rolling is that whichever wing goes in whatever direction, one wing is going to get more lift and one wing's going to get less lift. So if you roll and you roll too much, you will start to fall out of the sky. So there is a drawback to rolling, which is the wing is most efficient when it's flat. You move it off the, off the level and you move it up or down, which you need to move, you, you can, you can descend.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  Do you lose altitude then on every roll?

• 56:46Dave Berke?

  In theory, unless you.

• 56:48Jocko Willink?

  Put your nose up.

• 56:49Dave Berke?

  That's exactly right. Yes. You gotta coordinate that. You can't just roll by itself or you're gonna fall out of the sky to some degree.

• 56:54Jocko Willink?

  Bro, Captain Charlie Plum and I, Echo and I went up to do a podcast with him up in San Diego and then he and I flew back and we did it with Jim, Jim Conkle and, and Charlie Plum. And so then it's me and Charlie Plum in, I forget what the aircraft was, open cockpit cloth aircraft. And I got, you know, me, right? I get in there and I'm kinda like thinking, hey, if something happens, I'll just take over. It's no big deal. You know, I got controls back here. I'll land this thing. We took off in like a massive crosswind and the plane was sideways. And I'm like, if something happens, I'm gonna die. Like I can't, I won't be able to fly this thing. My getting in that thing, I thought I'll be able to fly this. I flew an F-18 Echo Charles.

• 57:36Jocko Willink?

  I flew an F-18, bro. I was like, oh, I can do this. I got in that thing, the, the, what is it? Mechanical steering and mechanic, like everything is.

• 57:45Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 57:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's no, no computers. I had one, I had to freaking like. Leather helmet on with goggles like that's the kind of scenario I was in and I thought to myself when I when I was walking out there I was like something goes wrong dude I got this something happens to Captain Plum I got this no factor I'll land this thing by the time we took off I said to myself if something happens to him I'm dead dude this ain't happening

• 58:06Echo Charles?

  that was the most sketch takeoff I ever seen

• 58:09Jocko Willink?

  it was crazy right

• 58:10Echo Charles?

  real life the whole deal yeah no no no

• 58:13Jocko Willink?

  you probably did

• 58:14Echo Charles?

  I think I might have yeah but bro you guys were like like they were taken off sideways

• 58:18Jocko Willink?

  yeah it was nuts

• 58:20Dave Berke?

  Echo if you remember this is one of my what I call like classic Jocko is he comes back he goes oh dude we just flew up and did this awesome podcast with this legendary fighter pilot and he took me on a flight I should have seen if you wanted to go and I'm like dude that would have been super cool if you had asked me before the podcast and he's like yeah no I definitely should have called you on that one so yeah classic Jocko

• 58:42Echo Charles?

  you would have enjoyed that I think

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  I think so yeah you would enjoy the tour of his condo up there with all of his and then going into Jim Conkles AO where he's just like got all kinds of

• 58:53Dave Berke?

  dude I'm glad you had a good time man

• 58:55Jocko Willink?

  I mean it's no big deal as a P38 pilot got shot down over France

• 58:59Dave Berke?

  no good for you

• 59:00Jocko Willink?

  walked out that's no factor

• 59:04Jocko Willink?

  alright so roll that's gonna turn us left or right um how about so this is I kinda knew what pitch was I kinda knew what roll was yaw

• 59:12Dave Berke?

  yeah

• 59:12Jocko Willink?

  speaking of yaw speaking of taking off in a high wind right this is a yaw scenario

• 59:16Dave Berke?

  yeah so all these things are connected pitch roll and yaw are like none of it happens by itself it's just a three different axes you can move and this is the third axis where the jet essentially you can slide the nose back and forth or like rotates around itself where you know up down left right and then back and forth is yaw again all these things happen together if you pull the nose up you're gonna lose lift like all these things are all connected especially when you're turning but the yaw is like keeping the nose pointed straight and then you have a thing called a rudder which sits in the back where you use your feet to keep the nose pointed either straight or into the wind

• 59:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, then what's adverse yaw then?

• 59:52Dave Berke?

  So that's like, this is the term that we use is if you put in too much yaw, meaning you move the nose too much, eventually that will disrupt how the plane is flying and its response will be to counter your maneuver. Meaning if I push left on the rudder to move my nose to the left, the jet might at some point, based on like the wings and things go, I can't do this anymore. The lift doesn't work correctly and it will whip your nose back around. And what you typically hear called is an adverse yaw departure, which means it stops flying. So in all three of these control directions, all of them have done incorrectly, the reaction

• 1:00:31Dave Berke?

  will be the plane departs, does not fly, which means you have the risk if it's low to the ground and you were just talking about this, where this stuff is always the most difficult is taking off and landing. Like that's the hardest part, especially landing. Like if you have an adverse yaw departure on landing, you're probably going to crash and die. So you have to be really, really cautious about how you do this.

• 1:00:51Jocko Willink?

  I liked the euphemisms, right? Departure. That's such a great euphemism. Like this is, it should be a yaw, ah! That's what it should be. Cause now you're gonna die. But instead, we just call it a departure.

• 1:01:01Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Or even like adverse, it's like, instead of like deadly or cat, it's like adverse. It's undesirable.

• 1:01:07Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever had an adverse yaw?

• 1:01:08Dave Berke?

  Totally. I've had all, yes, of course.

• 1:01:09Jocko Willink?

  Every one of these things?

• 1:01:10Dave Berke?

  Every one of these things. Every pilot that's ever been trained, you will actually go up an altitude, maneuver till it happens, so you can feel it. Like, hey, we're gonna go do adverse yaw departures today, which means you're gonna step on the rudder until the plane departs and it's gonna whip around and you'll feel the rumbling, you'll feel the air, you'll hear the sounds and then you'll feel the movement and go, oh yeah. You'll do it enough and you'll be able to preempt it and go, oh, I feel, I know what's coming. I gotta stop doing this. So all those things have an adverse response. An adverse yaw is typically the... Like the most deadly because the reaction of a departure and yaw is like usually pretty violent and bad. And if you lower to the ground, you can't recover from it.

• 1:01:49Jocko Willink?

  And it's because it's you're forcing it and you keep for it so that the instinct would be, oh, I want the nose to go more left. I need to push it harder.

• 1:01:58Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:01:58Jocko Willink?

  And then it just goes, I can't do this.

• 1:02:00Dave Berke?

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 1:02:01Jocko Willink?

  So essentially you as a pilot, what you're doing this whole time is you're balancing these things.

• 1:02:08Dave Berke?

  Constantly.

• 1:02:08Jocko Willink?

  And you've got to be careful that you want to go too far on one extreme.

• 1:02:11Dave Berke?

  Which is the segue of like, all these things are about. And I think we talked about like, trimming the airplane, which means you've got this little, you know, it's now it's like electronic little buttons or whatever, but like there used to be little levers and knobs and things you'd spin, which is throughout flight constantly. And this is more true in propeller airplanes because every time you would change the power of a propeller airplane, the torque would change, which means the yaw would change because propellers spin in a certain direction. And if you change the pitch of that or change the power of that propeller, it has a different amount of yaw input, which means you're constantly trimming. The point behind that is that what a good pilot is constantly doing is seeking balance. In all three of these

• 1:02:51Dave Berke?

  control surfaces, the entire time, to the point it actually becomes subconscious. On an F-18 or most jets, the trim tab, or I'm sorry, the trim button, whatever they call it, is like on the control stick and it's up, down, left, right, and you do it with your thumb. I would not be surprised if like subconsciously thousands, literally thousands of little clicks, one click, one click, up, down, that you're constantly just seeking balance to the point that a pilot knows like, that's what you should be doing all the time is seeking balance. If you can't find a connection from that to leadership, then we're missing something.

• 1:03:26Jocko Willink?

  To leadership in life.

• 1:03:27Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Jocko Willink?

  You know, you sent that the plane kind of shudders. I was watching a documentary about Dave McCoy, who's the guy that founded Mammoth Mountain up in California, which is a ski area. And he, it's a cool documentary. That guy was a real go-getter, to say the least. Like he made that whole thing happen just out of nothing. And he, at one point, he had this woman, and I can't remember her name right now. She was a ski racer and she went and raced somewhere and she crashed and she was paralyzed. But what was interesting was they were talking about when she was racing. I think it something with the wind or what she was wearing, she didn't have clothing on

• 1:04:12Jocko Willink?

  that normally signaled to her kind of how fast she was going. And so she entered a corner too fast. And maybe it was like she was getting a tailwind. So the wind, she didn't have that feedback of like, oh, I'm reaching a certain speed right now, and this is a problem. She, it just didn't have that little bit of signal. So that's got to be a huge part of being a pilot.

• 1:04:37Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Jocko Willink?

  Of, oh, I can feel this. I can feel something's going on right now. And you know what it is and you know how to adjust it.

• 1:04:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah. The term that's used in aviation is they call it seat of the pants. Meaning you can feel it like literally in your seat as you're sitting there. One of the, one of the critiques of modern fighters is the computers like nullify all that stuff out. So you don't quote feel it. So if you got into P 51 and then got it on F 18, you would feel everything that P 51, every little buffet, every little motion. And so that feedback of how fast, how slow, you could almost like close your eyes in a P 51 and feel exactly how fast you're going, how close you were to stall speeds and things like that.

• 1:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I used to in a Zodiac boat, you know, the Zodiac.

• 1:05:19Dave Berke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:20Jocko Willink?

  So in a Zodiac, so I was in from the beginning of my Navy career, I was the guy with the GPS. So when GPS is first kind of came out. So I was always, and we used to have this great design on this GPS. It was a huge brick to carry. It was bigger. It's more like a cinder block, but the control was designed by the most brilliant person in the history of the world. It was just so efficient. But one of the things, so I was constantly, while we were doing Zodiac transits, I was constantly looking at that thing and I was always looking at our speed. And eventually I started playing this game in my head and be like, oh, right now we're going 14.4 knots. And I'd look at that thing and sure enough, and I got so good at that where I didn't even have to look. I'd be like, oh yeah, we're doing 22 knots right now. I'd look, boom, yep, we're doing 20. Oh, we're only doing nine knots. My, my boss would be

• 1:06:03Jocko Willink?

  like, how fast are we going right now? I'd be like 12 knots. He'd be like, how do you know? And I'd just hold up the GPS like without looking at it. He'd be like 12.7. I'd be like, there you go. So that's flying, that's the seat of your pants.

• 1:06:15Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:06:16Jocko Willink?

  Did you, how much of that did you notice going from the F 18 to the F 35? Was, is it a big difference or no?

• 1:06:22Dave Berke?

  It's a smaller difference. It, it's harder in the newer airplanes to feel them that they are, are designed to balance it for you, which is good and bad. You could get pretty good, certainly in the Hornet that I have, I have thousands of hours in the Hornet, like over 2,000. I never had that many in the other jets. It was, and the advantage of that is, let's say I'm looking over my shoulder and trying to figure out how to maneuver against another aircraft. If I want to know how I'm fast, I'm going in an older jet without like this really fancy helmet, I'd have to come back in and look at the airspeed. Which sucks because that means I have to take my eyes off you. And you could get to a point where you could figure out your airspeed, your G, your AOA, all these really important things by that like

• 1:07:05Dave Berke?

  pretty darn tight, like down to, you know, five or six knots, you know, a degree or so. Because there's optimal ways of moving the airplane, the perfect angles of attack, perfect G, like, and I don't want to stare at the gauges to get that. I want to be able to do that by feeling. You could get really, you needed to get really good at that to be good.

• 1:07:21Jocko Willink?

  Usable load, what's usable load?

• 1:07:23Dave Berke?

  It's what you can carry, you know, and it's a huge measurement of an airplane now too, because, because you don't know what you're going to do. You don't know what you're going to be bringing. And so oftentimes we have these loads of a range of weapons. You'll have a couple of pure air to ground weapons. You'll have a weapon that might be functional both in the air and all the ground. And you have weapons that are only good for the air. And so

• 1:07:45Dave Berke?

  other things, fuel, all these different weights of things that go into that, even where they sit on the aircraft. You know, for like lateral, like if you put a really heavy bomb too far out, it can make the jet less controllable. The point behind that is you have to know what you can carry. And how long you can carry it, which means you now know what capability you bring and when with this thing that you're bringing, this useful load that you're bringing to the fight.

• 1:08:12Jocko Willink?

  Which is, when I, when I was looking through these terms, I thought about when you're in business, right? And I'm in business. And you have things that you bring on board. And they're gonna provide you with some capabilities. They're also gonna cost you something.

• 1:08:27Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 1:08:28Jocko Willink?

  And so, and there's times where I've worked with companies where you're like, hey, you're, you've got these assets on board. What are you getting from them? And what are they costing you? And if you don't think about that usable load, you might end up in a bad situation. You run out of fuel. You run out of capital.

• 1:08:46Dave Berke?

  The first GPS weapon that we started carrying was a thing called a JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Commutation, GPS guided. GPS guidance is really good. It's actually better than my eyeball. You know what I mean? So it's a really cool technology. Changed the way warfare worked because we could be really, really precise, really, really precise. And maybe a tiny bit less precise than lasers, but lasers are cumbersome and it's hard to do. And like this thing was like GPS, cool, go to the target. The first weapon and the only one we carried was a 2,000 pound bomb. And for a fighter, 2,000 pounds, especially at a ship, is a lot, which means like, if you're carrying a 2,000 pound bomb, that's 2,000 less pounds of gas you could bring back. And so even carrying this super cool bomb that was like changing the-

• 1:09:31Jocko Willink?

  They didn't make any like 500 pound versions?

• 1:09:33Dave Berke?

  They eventually had, but when this thing first came out, the first thing that came out was a 2,000 pound-

• 1:09:36Jocko Willink?

  And I bet they're like, look, if we're gonna use a GPS and it's gonna cost all this money, it's gonna do some frigging damage.

• 1:09:41Dave Berke?

  They eventually came out with a thousand and five hundred, and now it's, it's much more. But the first one, and so to your point though, is you take off like, oh, this, this is part of my conventional, this is an awesome thing. It could be a huge liability to the point that sometimes like, I never had to, but guys would have to jettison them to get back aboard the ship, which is total, it was your point is, these things are real strengths and they have a drawback. All of them have a, a, a cost associated with them too. All these positive things have, have a, a counterweight associated with them.

• 1:10:13Jocko Willink?

  I got a term flying dirty. I don't know. I might've just thrown that in there because it sounded kinda interesting, but.

• 1:10:19Dave Berke?

  It's probably not as exciting.

• 1:10:20Jocko Willink?

  Not as exciting.

• 1:10:21Dave Berke?

  You're either dirty or you're clean. Dirty is gear down and clean is gear up.

• 1:10:25Jocko Willink?

  Do you ever, did you ever have to, do you ever fly dirty? Like, do you ever have to put your landing gear down because you're trying to go slower or anything like that? No, it's not happening.

• 1:10:34Dave Berke?

  You're gonna dirty up to come aboard the ship?

• 1:10:36Jocko Willink?

  That's it.

• 1:10:36Dave Berke?

  And that's it.

• 1:10:38Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever, did anyone ever?

• 1:10:40Dave Berke?

  Literally what they'll say like, hey, you know, two or six dirty up, which means you're putting your gear in.

• 1:10:43Jocko Willink?

  No kidding.

• 1:10:44Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Jocko Willink?

  Dang, alright, cool. I'm glad I brought that up.

• 1:10:47Dave Berke?

  When you put the gear and flaps down, like the jets like loud and rumbling, you know, it's all, all the, the feeling of the jet changes dramatically. Flying a dirty airplane is very different than flying a clean airplane.

• 1:10:58Echo Charles?

  Do you think, uh, commercial airliners, uh, pilots say that too?

• 1:11:03Dave Berke?

  Dirty up?

• 1:11:05Dave Berke?

  I don't know. That's a good question. There's gotta be a commercial guy listening to this right now. You can like DM me or whatever. I, I don't know if they use that term. That is a straight up military vernacular. I don't think it's a technical term, but they will literally say, dirty up. That means, that's the word we use.

• 1:11:20Jocko Willink?

  Which is weird because it means put your gear down, even though you're saying dirty up.

• 1:11:23Dave Berke?

  Yep, yep, dirty up. That means put your gear and your flaps down. And they would sometimes, and they'll say things like, okay, let's say, I'm doing this approach to the carrier and the doctrine says at eight miles, I, I know that's when I put my gear down. And if nobody says anything, at that time, but it slows you down by a lot. And so it changes this, the, the sequencing. They will say, hey, aircraft two or three, stay clean through 10, or stay clean through eight, which is them saying, don't, do follow the, you know, so the terms clean and dirty are super normal in military aviation.

• 1:11:56Jocko Willink?

  Stay clean.

• 1:11:58Dave Berke?

  Stay clean.

• 1:12:00Jocko Willink?

  Ground effect.

• 1:12:01Dave Berke?

  Yeah. This is a good one. Um, can't retweet it, man.

• 1:12:08Dave Berke?

  And I'm not like an aerodynamics expert, but airplanes actually from an aerodynamic like a drag, you know what drag is like dragging is poor aerodynamics like slow the plane down. It's like a negative thing as you get close to the ground, like really close to ground, five, 10 feet off the ground, the airplane, the drag reduces because the way the drag comes off the wings hits the ground and like it makes the plane a little more efficient. And, and I'm paraphrasing it, but as you get close to the ground, ground effect is you get more lift at like the last couple of seconds, which is kind of a, a bit of a bummer if you're not careful, because what the jet, the plane will tend to do is start to fly a little better, which means it'll float.

• 1:12:49Dave Berke?

  So you've got this whole thing coming down, you're going to land and in the last couple, literally seconds, 10 feet off the ground, just seconds before you land, the jet will start to get a little more efficient and start to fly a little bit better, which means it'll float you long. And sometimes people will get caught in ground effect and, and the impact of that is you got a relatively short runway, or maybe you're going to really heavy jet and you have to get stopped and you target a place on the runway, you've got this image of where you're going to land. And as you're getting ready to put it on the ground, the jet just floats and floats and floats because it's a little bit more efficient and you can get caught in ground effect and the jet will land much longer than you want. Seems obvious like, oh, better, better efficient. It's, it's not necessarily what you want. So getting, getting caught in ground effect can be a bad thing.

• 1:13:32Dave Berke?

  Young pilots struggle with ground effect all the time, just trying to land.

• 1:13:36Echo Charles?

  Do you feel that like?

• 1:13:37Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. I've definitely felt it.

• 1:13:40Echo Charles?

  Right?

• 1:13:40Jocko Willink?

  I've definitely felt it in an aircraft where I did a landing the other day in Vegas. It was howling, like the wind was howling and I don't mean I landed the plane, but I was in a plane and there was freaking howling wind and it was crazy. It was shaking like I was thinking to myself, okay. And, and sure enough, like as you said, literally 10 feet off the ground, the thing just went and it's whoo and all of a sudden I said, oh yeah. And I've, I've definitely felt that.

• 1:14:06Echo Charles?

  You can feel it like floating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It lasts like a few seconds. Now, now maybe.

• 1:14:11Jocko Willink?

  Is it guaranteed? Is there anything that takes ground effect away if there's a 40 knot like?

• 1:14:16Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Jocko Willink?

  Wind on the ground or is it not?

• 1:14:18Dave Berke?

  It's, it's mostly associated with like as the vortices, I'm getting super technical, but as the vortices come off the wings, they hit the ground. So it's literally proximity to the ground and they, they reduce the drag. What I was gonna say, which is how you mitigate that is the Navy and the Marine Corps have a really cool way of mitigating ground effect, which is we land and like smash into the ground at like literally 800 feet per minute on the carrier. So if you've ever seen like a carrier landing, you're coming down on what we call like a three degrees glide slope and we don't, like in an airliner, you guys, people probably feel this, right before it lands, like the nose kind of pitches up and it tries to get, they want to make it super smooth. They want to like, almost like you don't feel it. And if you've ever

• 1:14:59Dave Berke?

  been in an airliner where you've hit really hard, it startles the passengers, it's like boom and like, and I was thinking, you know, that's a carrier pilot. I'm always laughing, right? So most of the time in most airplanes, certainly in civilian flying, all civilian flying, you want to make that really, really smooth because you want the people in the back to have like a very comfortable experience. We don't do that in carrier aviation. So in a normal carrier landing, there is no ground effect. You just come smashing into the ground, into the cables or on the runway. When I first started flying the F-16, which is an awesome airplane, landing an F-16 could not be any more different than landing an F-18. It has the tiniest little, thin little gear that you have to be very, very delicate

• 1:15:39Dave Berke?

  with. I would be struggling, I'd struggle with ground effect all the time in the F-16. Cause you, it would not do what I was expecting it to do and be floating and it's, it would wobble and it'd be super uncomfortable. And it's what you described, you could feel it like, oh crap. And then you can't predict when it's going to land. And then what, what the risk is, when you're in ground effect, what you should do is nothing, as long as you can tolerate it. But that's not what most people do. They, oh, they feel it float and they push the stick forward and then they realize, oh, I, I pushed too much and they pull back and they get what's called PIO, pilot induced oscillation and they'll, and they'll bounce up and down on the runway, which can be really bad. That's why I said most junior pilots struggle with that. Ground effect can be a real hassle when you're trying to land smoothly. It's not a problem for carrier pilots.

• 1:16:23Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're just gonna slam it into the deck.

• 1:16:26Dave Berke?

  No factor. And the gear is built for that, like thousands of feet per minute, no big deal. If you did a thousand feet per minute in an F-16, you'd rip the gear off. Literally, you can't do it. You gotta be really careful.

• 1:16:36Jocko Willink?

  How hard was your first landing in an F-16?

• 1:16:39Dave Berke?

  I don't, I mean.

• 1:16:41Jocko Willink?

  Do you have an instructor in there with you teaching you to fly that thing?

• 1:16:43Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Jocko Willink?

  Is he like, like Dave, okay, bro, you're not.

• 1:16:48Dave Berke?

  Like your first flight in F-16, you know, the guy in the back is like, expects you to know how to land an airplane. And there's a saying in the F-16, it's easy to land, it's hard to land good. Any Viper pilot listening to this knows what I'm talking about. They were probably all like crappy landings, but nothing was like unsafe or dangerous. They're probably just laughing like, oh, that sucks. But it wasn't like, oh, hey, that was, that was dangerous. So.

• 1:17:09Jocko Willink?

  So you never trashed the gear?

• 1:17:11Dave Berke?

  No, no, nothing like that.

• 1:17:13Jocko Willink?

  Would, would have, is it possible that a pilot trashed the gear?

• 1:17:15Dave Berke?

  Yeah. So like.

• 1:17:16Jocko Willink?

  Cause it seems like to me it'd be a habit.

• 1:17:18Dave Berke?

  Classic F-16, like if you're like, the classic F-16 quote mishap, landing mishap would be if you, the way the, the speed brakes work on F-16, speed brakes are all the way at the very back. Any F-16 pilot listening to this is laughing right now because they know exactly what I'm going to say. In a Hornet, like you could flare if you wanted to. If you don't want to do a car landing, you just flare, which is a standard landing where you bring the nose up and you make it smooth landing. You could flare as much as you want in a regular fighter, in any other fighter. The F-16, the way the speed brakes are, they open up, up and down. And if you flare too much, the bottom of the speed brake would scrape along the runway. And they also had a little thing, like a little speed brake override, where if you're trying to slow down, you'd pull

• 1:18:01Dave Berke?

  the button back and open up the speed brake even more, like another five or six degrees.

• 1:18:06Dave Berke?

  A lot of Navy pilots learning to fly the F-16 would be presented as a gift upon graduation. The, a speed brake with the bottom just, just shredded down. So if you were to screw up in an F-16, it's probably not ripping the gear off. It's scraping the speed brake because you flared too much trying to be smooth and you screwed it up. I unfortunately never did that, but I saw it happen many times.

• 1:18:27Jocko Willink?

  I figured it had to have been a thing.

• 1:18:28Dave Berke?

  Oh, it's a thing.

• 1:18:29Jocko Willink?

  It's gotta be crazy. Like you've got all these instincts.

• 1:18:32Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:18:32Jocko Willink?

  From the F-18, that things that you're no longer thinking about. Now you're talking about this button over here for this special thing that is totally different. How do these guys like Jaeger just go and fly a different aircraft like every day?

• 1:18:43Dave Berke?

  Dude, those guys were incredible. I mean. Going, I mean, we're getting way in the weeds here. One of the things that drove me nuts about the F-18 and the F-16 is most of it's fine, but the small things were big deals. I think there's a term called negative transfer, which means how you're wired in your jet, you get in the other one. If you bring that habit, it's going to transfer negatively to your plane. In the F-18.

• 1:19:06Jocko Willink?

  That's a good one right there.

• 1:19:08Dave Berke?

  In the F-18, the canopy switch was under your right hand on the canopy on the right side, and the seat switch was on your left by your thigh. For whatever reason, in the F-16, the canopy switch was on your left side by your thigh.

• 1:19:23Jocko Willink?

  Open this thing?

• 1:19:24Dave Berke?

  Yes, and your seat adjust was on, so they were literally exactly opposite. And as you're thinking about landing, sometimes you would adjust the seat position from a fight to regular flying, you'd move the seat up or down to get more comfortable. Well, as you're coming in for a landing, like it would be not uncommon to raise the seat to get a little bit better view.

• 1:19:44Dave Berke?

  And the number of times, like I've talked to people myself, like reaching for the canopy button and trying to activate the canopy switch to lower your seat in an F-16 as a Hornet pilot is an example of negative transfer.

• 1:19:54Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't actually open though, would it?

• 1:19:55Dave Berke?

  Oh, it 100% would open.

• 1:19:56Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 1:19:57Dave Berke?

  You were like, you, if you're, you'll go, oh my God, like you'll hear like, you'll hear the, the motor of the canopy, or you, you would like, right before you like, oh my gosh, I'm about to, you would catch it.

• 1:20:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Dave Berke?

  But your instinct, the subconscious is you would just do your old habit. Those things called negative transfer, when you're talking about the guys like Jaeger, if you have a lot of habits in your jet, you go to another jet, you're gonna, you're, you're gonna struggle. I don't know if it's like, picture like getting into a car, like, you know, cars have electric start buttons now? Like you press the start, no, no more key. My wife has a car where the, the, the press button is on the dashboard, and we have a car where the press to start is in like, and I'll get in the car, and I'll take like four or five seconds to try to remember, that's what negative transfer is. When you're reaching and there's nothing there and you don't know where it is, you didn't have that problem, you, every car, you put the key in the thing and you turn it, didn't matter what it was. Now every car's got its own little thing, the parking brake is here.

• 1:20:50Jocko Willink?

  So annoying.

• 1:20:51Dave Berke?

  That's what it's like flying different fighters.

• 1:20:52Jocko Willink?

  Should be standardized. Here's one you probably wondered when you saw this on the list, kneeboard.

• 1:20:58Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:20:58Jocko Willink?

  Here's why.

• 1:20:59Dave Berke?

  Okay.

• 1:20:59Jocko Willink?

  I always thought the kneeboard looked really cool. And as a comm guy, occasionally I'd break out a kneeboard, like if I was doing CAS in like an administrative situation, I'd be like, I'm gonna bring my freaking kneeboard, dude. Talk about a wannabe. But the reason I brought this up is, are these digital now? Cause I've seen pilots with digital kneeboards and what's your opinion? Like, are we sticking analog? Do we need to have digital?

• 1:21:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay, or is it just we're doing both?

• 1:21:26Dave Berke?

  Yeah. So a kneeboard is literally like a little clipboard strapped around your thigh, typically on your right leg. So you can write literally a piece of paper and a pencil that's like tethered to that thing. So you don't drop it.

• 1:21:43Dave Berke?

  Everybody, everybody flies with a kneeboard. Now, just about everybody, certainly a lot of people are flying. Well, I shouldn't say everybody. A lot of relatively modern fighters are flying with iPads. Straight like straight up iPads. And they're dropping that. So all these like charts and we have to fly with like four or five different books of different airspace. Like it's all digital now. Now the most modern airplanes, you don't have to carry that iPad. It's up on the screen. So most people are flying with both. The drawback to digital, and you probably know this, is digital, although it relieves a lot of stuff, digital can make things more cumbersome. So the best example I have of that is like turning down the volume.

• 1:22:27Dave Berke?

  If for whatever reason, the volume, if you, you know, this is a com guy. You got two radios going. One's chattering, one person is talking and you need to hear it. You just turn the volume down for three or four seconds of the other one. And if it's analog, you just rotate the knob. If it's digital, it's like com. You're pressing buttons, com button, audio button, volume button, volume down, down, down. And you're like pressing these buttons. It takes you 13, 14 seconds to turn the volume down. And so this idea of like digital is easier, not always true. Sometimes digital is a huge pain in the ass. F-35 was built with these two iPads up on the screen. Literally touchscreen, voice active, like the most modern technology. After about a year of flying the F-35,

• 1:23:10Dave Berke?

  it was advocated so hard, they installed like a 50s vintage volume knob. It sits in the airplane now, which is just a little wheel that you would just turn up and down because it was so difficult just to change radios. Digital's cool. The old school kneeboard, the old school analog is required in flying.

• 1:23:29Jocko Willink?

  Another word barricade, which is when you're gonna land with on an aircraft carrier without a tailhook.

• 1:23:36Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:23:36Jocko Willink?

  For whatever reason.

• 1:23:37Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:23:37Jocko Willink?

  And you're gonna hit a freaking net.

• 1:23:38Dave Berke?

  Correct.

• 1:23:39Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever have to do that?

• 1:23:40Dave Berke?

  No dude, thank God.

• 1:23:42Jocko Willink?

  What causes that?

• 1:23:44Dave Berke?

  The most common thing would be like a massive hydraulic problem by which you literally could not put the tailhook down.

• 1:23:50Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 1:23:51Dave Berke?

  The other is like an engine problem that prevented you from, you couldn't, let's say like a normal landing, you had a problem, you just go around. If you have an engine problem, like, hey, this is a one-shot thing. There is no like going long and doing a touch and go or we'll call it a bolt turn, try it again. You had a one-shot thing. They would do what's called rigging the barricade. It's happened in the Hornet a couple of times. One was in my squadron right before I checked in.

• 1:24:16Jocko Willink?

  You mean ever? It's only happened a couple of times?

• 1:24:18Dave Berke?

  In the Hornet? Yeah, just a handful.

• 1:24:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:24:20Dave Berke?

  Much more common in the past, very, very uncommon now, but still a thing. One was a Hornet where they had a massive hydraulic problem where eventually when they put the tailhook down, the hook wouldn't come down. Like literally there, you cannot stop. So you gotta take a barricade. The other was a massive engine problem. And in that engine recovery, they deemed like the only safe way is just get them into the, into the barricade. And as a, literally what you said, it's a massive net that sits right between the two and the third wire of a carrier. And you fly right into the net and it's strong enough to stop you. It's crazy. If you're bored, you Google or YouTube Hornet barricade. There's some cool videos out there. There's probably two or three of those there.

• 1:24:58Jocko Willink?

  And is that, that's more of like a emergency measure? It's not like

• 1:25:02Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 1:25:02Jocko Willink?

  Can never be a strategic thing.

• 1:25:03Dave Berke?

  Negative.

• 1:25:04Jocko Willink?

  Hey, let's do it this way today.

• 1:25:05Dave Berke?

  Hundred percent one-time use. You bring everybody else down. It's the last thing you're gonna do. And if it doesn't work, it's gonna be a catastrophe. It's super dangerous, very uncommon.

• 1:25:15Jocko Willink?

  The, we've run the boats where the, I think it was the Marine Corps would fly their UAVs into those big nets, basically flying them to barricades.

• 1:25:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Jocko Willink?

  They did the same thing. You just see these freaking, this is back in the day when UAVs were just piloted by some kid, like no digital AI making anything easy. He's like, wahhh, big giant nets sitting up there. Boom. You're like, yo, these guys are crazy.

• 1:25:41Jocko Willink?

  Total pilot error. I almost went down a rabbit hole and I probably should at some point. I started looking on all these aviation accidents yesterday. But one of the things that came up was just total pilot error, meaning this is 100% and I read some of them. Uh, one of them was like, they didn't realize that this switch, the, the auto whatever switch was off.

• 1:26:06Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 1:26:06Jocko Willink?

  And they're focused on this other thing and he's crashed.

• 1:26:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah. Total pilot error mishaps read really badly because it's things like that. You're like, dude, what, what is going on here? Perfectly good airplane doing everything it's supposed to be doing and the pilot is the sole cause of the mishap. It's actually very rare. When you think about the factors, they call them factors. When they do an investigation, they try to think of the factors that caused the mishap.

• 1:26:29Jocko Willink?

  Is that where no factors come from? No factor?

• 1:26:31Dave Berke?

  Probably, or at least it's, it's, it's terminology is correct.

• 1:26:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Dave Berke?

  Almost always pilot error is a factor, but almost never the sole factor. The corollary is also almost always true, like especially in modern airplanes, it's almost never just the airplane. The pilot contributes some way. So it's usually a combination of both. So when you read a total pilot error, it's usually heartbreaking because as you're reading it, especially if you know the machine and know what that switch does or understand it, you're reading it because you already know the outcome. You're like, oh my God, I can't believe that they misunderstood or lost track or stopped paying attention. The most common one is something we may talk about and we've talked about it before is where you fly a perfectly good jet into the ground because you're looking at something else. Because you got distracted or like, yeah.

• 1:27:19Jocko Willink?

  That's a C fit, right? Controlled flight into terrain.

• 1:27:22Dave Berke?

  That's, that's like the classic total pilot error. You take a perfectly good airplane functioning a hundred percent correctly. And the pilot flies it directly into the ground for some other reason. Not like, he's not dealing with a malfunction. He's not dealing with an issue with the jet. He just control, controlled flight, meaning it's everything's perfectly fine and he flies it into the ground.

• 1:27:40Jocko Willink?

  And it could be that they couldn't see, right? I mean, does fog, if I, if I'm flying through a mountain range and it's foggy and I just slam into a mountain.

• 1:27:49Dave Berke?

  Yeah. I, I mean, yes, you could have C fit in bad weather, but even then like you have instruments and, and, and like. Information available to you by which that shouldn't happen. And to the points like the plane is not causing that problem. You are.

• 1:28:06Jocko Willink?

  So a C fit is generally a total pilot error?

• 1:28:09Dave Berke?

  Almost always. The worst part about C fit is what you described is a bummer. Like, oh, it's fog, it's adverse external conditions. See if it happens under perfect conditions as well, like day, sunlight, no fog. And so those are the ones that are the most heartbreaking, which was where typically the most common things that it happens is either on like a low level where you're flying in this. And that's not that common because you're usually paying attention. It's when you're diving towards the ground like in a dive bombing scenario. And in that bombing, you're looking at something to like, make sure your target is you have like a good sight on the target. And you get focused on making a perfect little, um, they call it like a target, target designation.

• 1:28:54Dave Berke?

  You're putting a little reticle, a little sight onto the target. And you want to keep improving it as you're in this dive. And you get so focused on the displays, you forget, or you lose track of the, the ground. And I've seen videos of guys literally will just fly directly onto the target in perfect weather, clear day, beautiful sunlight, because they're, they're focused on their targeting and not focusing on the ground. And they'll literally see fit in the ground.

• 1:29:18Jocko Willink?

  Target fixation.

• 1:29:19Dave Berke?

  Target fixation is exactly what it is.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  What the, and I forget where this came up. This is, isn't this what happened with Kobe Bryant's helicopter? It was foggy and it was just C fit into the ground.

• 1:29:30Dave Berke?

  That's a, yeah, that's weather. Yeah. Uh, I don't actually know the, the details on that, but to my knowledge, and I should be cautious, but I do not believe there was a, there was a problem with the helicopter. Now, obviously weather is terrible. Weather sucks. When I think of C fit in a, in a good weather scenario, that's what you were describing where you're like, oh, I'm looking at this gauge or I'm looking or I'm, I'm doing something else. And then I just hit the ground. That's really hard to reconcile because you're typically, the pilot is overwhelmed.

• 1:30:04Jocko Willink?

  Why I, well, what do you mean typically the pilot's overwhelmed? Because it's not like there's a bunch of different things going on, right? It's not like they're like, oh my gosh, I got this, I got that. I don't know what to do and they hit.

• 1:30:13Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Jocko Willink?

  It's more like, oh, I really want to get this target dialed in. I'm looking boom.

• 1:30:17Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Jocko Willink?

  Right? So they're not really overwhelmed in the classical sense that someone would think of like, oh, there's all this chaos going on. And now I hit the ground. It's more like, oh, there's one little target fixation that I've got right now. And this is going to make me burn in.

• 1:30:30Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And the, and the.

• 1:30:31Jocko Willink?

  Am I wrong?

• 1:30:31Dave Berke?

  No, you're not wrong. There, there's, there's. The target fixation is probably the most common one. And when I say overwhelmed in my mind, there's, there may be a better word for it. It's not overwhelmed that I'm trying to do 30 things at once. It's that I'm unable to prioritize those things. And I tend to focus on just that one thing and I forget that there's other things to think about. Um, not that I'm just too busy. I just get, and there's a word I think that I'll, we call it getting boresighted. It's the same thing as target fixation. Um, that's the most common thing.

• 1:31:08Jocko Willink?

  This struck such a chord with me. This, this idea of controlled flight and terrain. And the reason is because I've worked with leaders, civilian leaders and military leaders. Where it's so obvious, you're like watching them destroy themselves. There, you're watching them plummet to the earth and you know they're going to crash. And you're just like in an aircraft. I mean, when, when you've seen a guy, a target, target fixated and trying to get that thing, get that little screen. He's getting warnings in his ear that are going altitude.

• 1:31:40Dave Berke?

  And he's not even hearing it.

• 1:31:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And he's not hearing it. And it says, warning, warning. I mean, that's all that stuff is happening and he still hits. I've had guys where I'm telling them like, listen, you cannot behave like this. If you behave like this, you are going to get fired. And they're like, still going, doing the same thing. Yeah, people, this is a classic case of when you're unaware of what's happening, you're not detached. You have to be able to detach. Otherwise, you're going to see fit. You're just going to controlled flight into the ground. That's what's going to happen. I've seen people do this with not only in leadership positions, but they do this with their lives. Yes. Right? They start going down a path. It's so obvious that it's the wrong path to go down to everybody that's around them. The warnings, altitude, like, wrong woman, like, bad job,

• 1:32:26Jocko Willink?

  like, drinking too much, like, all these things, the warnings are so clear. Yeah. And yet, they just stay on that path and boom, they explode and their life gets ruined. So, this idea that you can have these things going on in your life, where you can stop them, you can correct them, but you have to take a step back, look around and say, oh, yeah, this relationship I'm in is a disaster. This job I'm in is a disaster. This alcohol that I'm using, this drugs that I'm using, this whatever I'm doing, is this iPhone that I'm scrolling on, these things that I'm getting caught, all these things are disaster, and I can't do them anymore. And you're hearing the warnings and you're not paying attention to them. So, this can happen. And it's so often I see this with leaders. I'm looking at them, I'm like,

• 1:33:08Jocko Willink?

  do you not freaking read the room? You know what I mean? Do you not see what's happening right here? Take a look around. What is it? People's faces right now? People's faces, do they look engaged in what you're saying? Do they see, are they nodding their head like, hell, yeah? Or are they looking at you kind of with a blank, like, hmm? Are they, are there questions like, hey, how can I move forward with this? Or are there questions like, what are you talking about? I'm not really sure. Wait, what do you want us to do? Because if that's what you're getting, you got to read the room. You got to pay attention to the altitude, altitude, because you're going to burn in. So, you need to be careful. See fit. Watch out. Yes. Other human error, air traffic control, improper loading,

• 1:33:50Jocko Willink?

  fuel contamination, improper maintenance. Dude, we should do a podcast. There's a really good aviation disasters to look at. I've almost done one in the past too with the Challenger. Yeah. Like, there's so many little things that led to these crashes, these airline crashes, and they're so well documented because they got the black box that's recording what they're saying. Totally. And it's got all the instruments. They know exactly what happened. And like you said, it's heartbreaking to hear these things or read about these things because it's so obvious. But here's the thing. Here's the thing I'll tell you.

• 1:34:23Jocko Willink?

  That's what life is like. You're in the cockpit and there's all kinds of things that you can pay attention to and look around and be like, oh yeah, this is a problem over here. And we don't pay attention to the warnings. We get too focused on one thing. We don't listen to the other people like those, I forget which, I think it was Korean airline or Japanese airline, but the, the co-pilot is like, sir, I think maybe this is, he's like, hey, hold on, hold on a second. I'm, I'm working like, hey, be quiet. You're subordinate. Yep. And so he's like, okay, I'll be subordinate. Yep. I won't say anything else. I'm obviously wrong. And that's not good.

• 1:34:55Dave Berke?

  It's thrown to the ground. Yeah. Middle of the day. Yep. A hundred percent. And, and only two, two things, you're spot on. And the only two things to say about it, just to add from that perspective on it is typically those lead to catastrophic problems. The, the, the discovery of that is usually catastrophic. Like you literally hit the ground and blow up and kill everybody, which means they're not like gentle life course corrections of like, oh, that's a good lesson learned. I'm going to not do that next time. That's not usually how these things go. And the other part too, is sometimes when you talk about the power of detachment, and we talk about detachment as a superpower, because we're telling people, it's not just that it's really, really hard, is that if you can do it, it can change your life, is what I

• 1:35:38Dave Berke?

  have seen, and I've seen this, obviously not always after the fact, I've seen it with guys where I've, I've actually had guys where I've not let them fly airplanes anymore, where I'll watch a video of them flying and they'll be flying around at 200 feet and the altimeter will be going altitude, altitude, altitude, altitude. And we'll say, are you hearing that? And he's like, I don't hear that. Where the warnings are being shouted into his ear and he cannot process that. It's, it's, it's a level of, of not being attached that's so extreme that even sometimes the warnings cannot be heard. Like, man, I got a guy in an airplane who can't hear the airplane say, we're about to crash. I can't let this guy fly an airplane. I'm trying to, I'm

• 1:36:22Dave Berke?

  trying to help him. But sometimes that can be so debilitating that they don't even hear the warnings. And you, in real life, you see those people where they, they have can.

• 1:36:33Dave Berke?

  I don't know if they've convinced themselves, but they've become so unaware of the warning signs that they're no longer registering, which means they're not actively ignoring them. They don't even hear them. And typically, the discovery of that is a catastrophic episode. Something catastrophic is going to happen in your life. Like, you can't hear what your wife is saying. You can't hear what your kids are saying. You can't hear what your teammates, your coworkers are saying. You don't even hear it. So by the time you discover there's something wrong, it's not like a gentle tap on the shoulder of, hey, Jocko, you need to adjust something. It's, it's over.

• 1:37:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay, you know, when you're driving a car and, you know, you get in a near accident for whatever reason, and you get that like full adrenaline thing shoots down your hands and arms and everything? Did you ever suddenly become aware prior to the catastrophic event taking place?

• 1:37:22Dave Berke?

  Yes. I was fortunate. I never had it. Obviously, I never crashed, but I never had an injection. I never had a quote catastrophic event. Near misses? Oh, yeah. Like, I don't know if it's a lot, but I've had more than enough to remember. And what you described, that feeling, that's the feeling. I know that feeling extremely well. And you look back like, holy cow. How did, I got lucky, or I dodged a bullet, or I can't believe I got away with that. Or I can't believe I didn't see those things happening. That feeling of the adrenaline rush often is, it's when you just avoid the outcome somehow, or you just figure out beforehand like, oh, my God, pull up or turn or whatever it might be. Yes, absolutely know that feeling.

• 1:38:01Jocko Willink?

  I was parachuting and I wasn't very good. And I never really got great at it, but I was parachuting. But of course, I wasn't good at it, but guess what I was? Freaking arrogant, cocky and thought I was a badass. And so my buddy, we're going to get, you know, one of the guys had like a camera. Like, and I'm talking, you know, like the click, click, like wind up. And he was a good parachutist. So we were like, oh, get a picture. I'm going to link up with my buddy. And this guy's like my best friend. This is a guy I've talked about before. Like I went through Bud's with him. Went did three platoons with him on the training cell together and we lived together the whole time. I mean, this is like my brother, right? And so he goes out first. And for whatever reason, I was pretty far back.

• 1:38:42Jocko Willink?

  And so I come out of the aircraft and I freaking go into like a full track, which means you put your hands like behind you and you're doing like, it's as fast as you can go because I'm trying to get to him. And I'm hauling ass. I mean, I'm probably going 200 miles an hour. And he's, but he, you know, what he did when he got out of the plane was he like went for what we call flat dumb and happy. He's kind of like slowing himself down like hugging the air so that he can be as slow as so instead of going the normal speed, which is probably 120 miles an hour of flat dumb and happy. He's probably slowed down to like 100. So I'm trying to catch him and I'm going like 200 miles an hour in a full track. And when I went to like slow down, I way, way, way was too late.

• 1:39:27Jocko Willink?

  And I flew by him. Really fast. And I was like, dude, you're a freaking idiot. And luckily I didn't hit him because if I would hit him, I'm going, I'm definitely going to die and I'm probably going to kill him too. And I was like, dude, like I'm an idiot. But the feeling that I had was, you know, I just avoided the, the C fit, right? I almost did a controlled flight right into my friend and killed him and killed me. And look, am I maybe dramatizing this a little bit? Yeah, I'm probably drama. I, I had enough steerage where I didn't hit him. I wasn't like out of control. I still could steer my track, but I definitely knew that I was stupid.

• 1:40:04Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05Jocko Willink?

  Did, do you have any examples where you were target fixated and all of a sudden you're like, what's that noise? Oh, it's the, oh my God.

• 1:40:11Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Dave Berke?

  I mean, yes, a decent amount. You know, especially at the beginning, you know, of the career, because all the stuff you do, you're doing missions, you want like, you're going out to do stuff. And what you want is to come back and like, I did this mission. I dropped the bomb. I whatever. I found the target. Like I got the missile off. And the fixation is oftentimes wanting to, I'm going to, I got a rendezvous with my buddy here, whatever it is you're trying to do.

• 1:40:38Dave Berke?

  Some of it just, just dumb luck in my career, just like you described, like, oh man. And, and, and other times like.

• 1:40:46Dave Berke?

  You catch it just, just in time. Like, oh, man, I'm lucky I caught it at a certain time. Not, my best story of like not hearing, not, not hearing the warning is I've talked, I think I've talked about on the podcast, like the zero, zero landing, where you're going to land in the carrier and it's, the weather is so bad, you can't see in front of the plane at all. So there's zero visibility, which means you're not going to see the ship. And of course, amazingly, the jet flies the same. The jet doesn't care. It's you that care. So you get all freaked out. You get all worked up. You get all nervous. You get all anxious. And all those emotions, emotions keep you from detaching from just flying it. All these little indicators, like the altimeter warning, they're all set up.

• 1:41:27Dave Berke?

  They're actually never supposed to go off. So a perfect thing is, oh, I'm going to set it at 500 feet. And in my mind, at 520 feet, I'm going to reach down and like tell the airplane, I know I'm at 500 feet. And if it goes off, it's a telling you, hey, you're behind you. This thing shouldn't have gone off. You should have caught it right beforehand because you know it's coming. So I don't want to get surprised by my altitude. I want to set it up where I got one at 500, one at 200, and I'll at least go, okay, I'm about to hear it. Cool. I heard it. Move all, and I'll, I'll silence it. When you hear it, the first one, you're like, oh, man, that, that. If it surprises you. If it surprises you, like, oh, that's a bad sign. I should not have been surprised by that. But there are times that you can hear it.

• 1:42:06Dave Berke?

  And it's kind of like, you ever woken up from a dream and you go, oh, that was a dream. And like, you can replay back that this thing had been happening for a while. Where I hit the 200 foot altimeter and it goes off. And by the time I heard it, I was able to go, oh, that thing's been going off for four or five seconds. Like, I didn't just get surprised by it. I, it was in the background somewhere. Like, picture like your alarm clock going off in a dream. You're like, and you like, oh, that thing's been going off for 30 seconds. I've had moments where I've, I've hit the 200 foot altimeter. And then when I hit it, I'll go, oh, crap. And I'll be at 70 feet, 60 feet, something like really, really low. Like, like obscenely dangerously like this, you, like, how are you still alive? This doesn't happen very often.

• 1:42:51Dave Berke?

  It's the ones where you are, the ones that are surprised are bad. The ones where you can look back and go, that thing alerted me 10, 15 seconds ago. And I'm just now, I'm just now catching up. Those are the worst. Those are ones like, I don't know how I'm even here right now. Again, it doesn't happen very often. Those are the most nauseating of, dude, I am so lucky because you can account for. Dude, that thing's been going off in my head for 10 seconds now.

• 1:43:13Jocko Willink?

  And I would say that's an overwhelm. Like, you got this, you're looking to pay attention to that, and there's some signal coming that you're not even paying, because you're just too much stuff going on.

• 1:43:21Dave Berke?

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  It was crazy when I worked at Trade Ed. Like, I would just watch guys just be overwhelmed, and they're just not hearing.

• 1:43:26Dave Berke?

  They don't hear anything.

• 1:43:27Jocko Willink?

  They don't hear anything. Like, I have the platoon or the troop radio. Like, I can hear that, you know, someone calling the platoon commander or the troop commander, like, "Hey, boss, we need fire support down here, we need..." And the guy's just sitting there totally overwhelmed, freaking out, just nothing happening.

• 1:43:43Dave Berke?

  We talked about it during, when we would turn over. Remember, the new units would show up and you'd get in these firefights, and they'd be standing there, and bullets. Like, I remember watching another officer, we talked about this one, and he's standing up, and there's like bullets going past, hitting the walls, and everybody is doing what they're supposed, and he's standing there, not being brave, and like, he just, he cannot acknowledge, he's not able to keep up with what's happening, like.

• 1:44:10Jocko Willink?

  Get down.

• 1:44:10Dave Berke?

  Get, gotta get down. But he's overwhelmed that he can't process bullets going past him. So, this is a real thing that happens in a lot of different, not just in airplane.

• 1:44:22Jocko Willink?

  Some of the words that you brought into the play here. Redefine.

• 1:44:25Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Jocko Willink?

  Freaking great word.

• 1:44:27Dave Berke?

  I wanted to think about some, some, we were talking about the connection to flying, to leadership, and just life in general. And the word redefine is a term that we use. "I'll go into the game plan, I'm gonna fight against you. I got a plan. My plan will be whatever it is. I'm gonna turn across your tail, go up, go down, doesn't matter, I got a plan. And I want that plan to work." And I have maybe a turn or two to figure out, like, is this working? And if I go around once and it didn't do anything, maybe I'll go around again. But at some point, I gotta acknowledge, I'm not getting, I'm not, this is not, my plan is not working. And if it's not working, I have to do something different. We call that a redefinition,

• 1:45:02Dave Berke?

  which is, you have to change your plan. And we were redefined by if you're gonna go up, you're gonna go down, and again, I'm simplifying it. If you're gonna go level, you're gonna, I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna redefine what I'm doing. It's an acknowledgement of what I am doing to this point has not worked. I mean, I think about Ramadi. Like, we redefined how we were going to fight in Ramadi, mostly based on what I was doing up to this point does not work, did not work. And I also think about, like, I'll come back from fights, and I'm like, hey, is there any reason why you didn't redefine on this second turn? And they're like, well, I really wanted to stick to the plan, or I wasn't quite sure. Like, hey, let's, let's go backwards. Do you have any information telling you need to do something different?

• 1:45:46Dave Berke?

  Yes, all sorts of good information. Nothing's working. Your outcome isn't the way you want. The redefinition seems super straightforward, very, very hard to do. But a term that we preach all the time is redefine the fight, redefine the fight, redefine the fight. Is when what you're doing isn't working.

• 1:45:59Jocko Willink?

  Guard passing, echo Charles.

• 1:46:01Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 1:46:01Jocko Willink?

  Something everybody in the jujitsu gets caught up in. I'm trying to pass whatever. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice. And it's not working. It's not working. It's not working. It's not working. Get what I do? Keep trying. Keep trying the same thing. It ain't gonna work. And when there's that much defense in one area, you gotta go to a different area to do a different move. That's my recommendation to you on the guard.

• 1:46:28Jocko Willink?

  That's such a good word.

• 1:46:30Echo Charles?

  Well, I think this will actually apply to the whole deal where even you can do, can you? Or then again, I should ask you, is there such thing as like a little micro redefine? Because look, if I'm passing Jocko's guard or trying to.

• 1:46:42Dave Berke?

  Yeah. There's a difference between an adjustment and a redefinition. I use the word redefinition. That's a pretty, you're changing your plan.

• 1:46:49Echo Charles?

  Yeah, like, like I go for foot lock or something now. But if I make an adjustment, I don't need the redefinition. See what I'm saying?

• 1:46:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I'd say it's a small, it's a, it's a micro redefinition. I would say something like that.

• 1:47:05Echo Charles?

  Yeah, that's what I thought.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  But it opens up a pretty big part of the game, right?

• 1:47:08Echo Charles?

  Sure.

• 1:47:09Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, this happens with people as well. Like, oh, Dave's not performing. What do I need to do? Counsel him. Oh, he does still unperforming. Wouldn't you counsel him more? Counsel him more. Counsel him more. Counsel him more. Counsel him more. Counsel. Doesn't work. Guess what? I gotta try giving him some responsibility. Start taking some, oh, so now I give him responsibility. Doesn't, now I'm gonna take responsibility. Like, there's a bunch of different ways you can approach something.

• 1:47:28Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:29Jocko Willink?

  And if you don't, you're not gonna get the same results.

• 1:47:31Echo Charles?

  Yes.

• 1:47:32Jocko Willink?

  So whether you're dealing with people, whether you're dealing with business, whether you're dealing with jujitsu, whether you're dealing with aviation, sometimes you gotta redefine. Reef, I use the word reframe a lot, but I think redefine is better. I'll say, I'll reframe this question or let me reframe. Usually I think of reframing as my perspective on something. Like, let me reframe what I'm seeing right now. Like, honestly, if we're doing jujitsu, it's like, oh. I can't pass your guard. I've redefined a couple of times. I need to reframe like, hey, maybe I should, maybe I should pull guard myself. You know what I mean? Like, let me just reframe this whole thing. Like, we're go- like, I can't pass your guard. I can't pass your guard. I can't pass your guard. And we go five, five-minute rounds and I haven't passed your guard. Guess what I might do?

• 1:48:16Jocko Willink?

  Pull guard. Let's see how your passing game is. Maybe, you know, maybe I can get something from the bottom. So I might have to actually reframe the whole thing. Redefine to me is a little bit more micro. And then we probably have a micro reframe. So.

• 1:48:29Dave Berke?

  I dig it. So pivot, would you say is that like a normal civilian term for redefine like pivot? You know, like, you know.

• 1:48:35Jocko Willink?

  I think so.

• 1:48:35Dave Berke?

  Pivot, right?

• 1:48:36Jocko Willink?

  I think it's a good one. Totally. I think it's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a good one because I've used that term to describe like at Echelon Front. We pivoted when COVID hit and we had to do virtual engagements with clients. It was a pivot. It wasn't like a total change. It wasn't, and I would almost go so far as to say, if we would have reframed what we're doing, it's like, hey, we're going to go from doing leadership training to doing something else. You know what I mean? For me, a reframe is a bigger thing. But just to redefine, like, okay, we'll redefine this situation. We're going from mostly in-person to mostly virtual. We're going to all virtual for a few months. So yeah, pivot. I've used that word. I'd say they're pretty interchangeable. But redefine's a little bit better.

• 1:49:21Dave Berke?

  Sounds way cooler for sure.

• 1:49:23Jocko Willink?

  I think, I think it actually has a better, although I will say pivot means there's a still a connection. And I think redefine also has a connection.

• 1:49:30Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31Jocko Willink?

  In my mind. Very similar. Very similar. All right. Fluid mutual support. I mean, obviously, this one's good to go.

• 1:49:38Dave Berke?

  This is so good to go. I mean, it's like, it's a classic cover move. This is a, like, a bit of an advanced concept in the idea that, first of all, the word mutual support is you and I are supporting each other. You know the word. You've used the word a thousand times. Mutual supporting Overwatch positions. These are two things that are working in concert. I think what makes this complex or what makes this challenging is the word upfront, which is fluid, which means it's going to adjust. It's fluid. It's going to move around. So in aviation, you and I, okay, I'm aircraft one, you're aircraft two. We got four of us out there today. You and I together, we're going to support each other. But old school used to be like, I want you one mile away from me, 1,000 feet above me. We call that combat spread. Like that worked decades ago.

• 1:50:22Dave Berke?

  Does not work anymore, which means sometimes you're going to support me from nice and close. Sometimes you're going to support me five, six, seven, eight miles away. Sometimes it'll be in front, sometimes it'll be behind. But the point behind the fluid mutual support is all your movements in the sky. Keep in mind, what you have to be able to do is provide support for me or be in a position for me to provide support for you. So you can't just move autonomously. You can't just move around in what might seem best for you if you lose the ability to provide or receive mutual support. So it's that concept that cover and move, mutual support. It varies constantly, three dimensionally throughout the flight. Is it is fluid, it changes all the time. And if you're not thinking about step one is can I provide cover and move? Or can I receive cover and move?

• 1:51:07Dave Berke?

  Your movement may seem optimal to you, it's actually a bad move.

• 1:51:10Jocko Willink?

  Yep, there you go. That's, that was a, a definitely a development. Cause like, uh, went to do immediate action drills with Stoner and Stoner was like, oh, here's where we're supposed to be according to the standard operating procedure. These guys are here, we need to be 20 meters to the right and 40 meters back. It's like, no, bro, you got cover, where's concealment? Where are those guys? Where can you provide a lane for like, there's so many other things to calculate. And that's why it's fluid mutual support.

• 1:51:39Dave Berke?

  That's right.

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  Tethered, what does this mean?

• 1:51:43Dave Berke?

  It's a, it's connected to this. And the, the way I typically explain it is like, okay, Jocko, you and I are tethered. Meaning I'm the one that you are linked to. Like I gotta, we have like a tether, a leash between us. And during the flight, I might have this plan, okay, I want to stay tethered to Jocko all day. So I'm going to move in relationship to you and keep him, keep an eye on you. It might be that in the middle of the fight, go dang, it really doesn't make sense for you to have to stay tethered to me. I'm going to now switch, you're going to now be tethered to Echo. And so the point behind that isn't like who's going to be tethered to who. It's the concept that everybody has to be tethered to someone else during. Nobody can ever be untethered. Cause then I got, oh dude.

• 1:52:23Jocko Willink?

  Get someone on their own.

• 1:52:24Dave Berke?

  Alone and unafraid, he's on their own, we can't help him. We know that's going to be bad. So the concept of tethering is I always have to be thinking about not just conceptually mutual support, but also that individual is going to be required. Oftentimes it's, I'll get a young guy and like, oh dang.

• 1:52:39Jocko Willink?

  Is it, is it official? Like a verbalized like, oh, Dave and I are tethered?

• 1:52:43Dave Berke?

  We will, we don't, not during the flight, but we will, that is, that is an actual word where we'll talk about when we build formations like, hey, these two aircraft are tethered, these two aircraft, like, we'll talk about.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  So it's an official thing?

• 1:52:54Dave Berke?

  Yes. Uh, this is a real word. Absolutely. Yep.

• 1:52:56Jocko Willink?

  No, I'm not just saying a real word, but like unofficial thing like, hey, Dave, on this flight, you're tethered with Echo.

• 1:53:01Dave Berke?

  It'll be like, these two aircraft, these two aircraft in, in these positions and, and those positions in the, in real time might swap. So it might not be you, Jocko. And to inform it, but tethering is absolutely, yes.

• 1:53:13Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Out of plane, out of phase. What are these things all about?

• 1:53:18Dave Berke?

  Yeah, these are cool things too. Like this, really the origin of this is dogfighting, like relationship to another aircraft. You and I are fighting together. When we're in plane or in.

• 1:53:28Jocko Willink?

  Fighting together?

• 1:53:29Dave Berke?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  On the same team?

• 1:53:30Dave Berke?

  No.

• 1:53:31Jocko Willink?

  We're opposed.

• 1:53:33Dave Berke?

  We're fighting against each other. It, it, the origin is really a one against one. I'm fighting you, you're fighting me, our aircraft, our, our aircraft.

• 1:53:42Dave Berke?

  The classic way of thinking of it is like, we're going to be turning circles around each other. Whoever does a better job gets behind the other person. I win or whatever. That's in phase. You're turning left, I'm turning left. You're turning right, I'm turning right. You're going up, I'm going up. It is a much harder thing to do, but becomes a much harder problem for the enemy to solve when I maneuver what's called out of plane, out of phase, which means if you're going to go across, I'm going to go down. Which now makes the two dimensional, this flat problem and any problem in an airplane is relative. If I'm going up and you're going up, we're in phase, we're in plane, like it's a flat problem. It might seem weird from the outside, but from in the cockpit, you're just directly across from me. Doesn't matter if I'm up, down, left or right. It's only two dimensional because we're doing the same thing.

• 1:54:27Dave Berke?

  If I now move in a different direction, like out of plane, it becomes a three dimensional problem, if that makes sense. Cause we're now. Opposite flow from each other. If you're going up, I'm going to the side. That's a very complicated thing to figure out geometrically where things are going to go. Picture like two circles not working together. You're forecasting movement. It's, it's very complex out of plane, out of phase. We teach and train, especially in an airplane like a Hornet, which from a pure power standpoint is an inferior machine. You show up in a jet with more thrust and we are in plane, sooner or later, you're just going to get behind me. You're faster, you got more energy, you're more powerful, you're just going to get there. It may take some time, but in the end, it's not going to work out.

• 1:55:08Dave Berke?

  What I have to do is work out of plane and out of phase with you and make this a very complicated problem for, for both of us, but also for you. Or I'm just going to die. Out of plane, out of phase maneuvering is what makes fighting so dynamic is it's in three dimensions of doing that. It can be very, very complicated. When you have an inferior machine on paper, you have to do that or you will lose, period. It's almost like saying like, okay, we're going to arm wrestle. And if you're stronger than me, let's say all technique being the same, but if it's just pure strength against strength, you will just push my arm down. Let's say, like I said, everything else is the same. Well, I, then this is dumb. I need to come up with something else. I need to maneuver differently.

• 1:55:52Dave Berke?

  That's out of plane, out of phase.

• 1:55:55Jocko Willink?

  You, you have to maneuver.

• 1:55:56Dave Berke?

  You have to maneuver.

• 1:55:57Jocko Willink?

  Maneuver differently.

• 1:55:58Dave Berke?

  Differently.

• 1:56:00Jocko Willink?

  Situational awareness.

• 1:56:03Dave Berke?

  It's like the most important thing in the world. You have to know. You just said like, can you read the room? Like, it's like saying like, bro, do you have no, we call it SA. We just abbreviate it as a. Dude, if I were to go to Echo and if I want to like, make one of like the most critical comments about you, I'll be like, dude, that guy's got no SA. That's my way of saying like, that guy does not know what's going on. It is, it is a highly critical comment.

• 1:56:26Jocko Willink?

  So you're saying in the fighter world, in like, in the fighter world, saying this dude's got no SA.

• 1:56:30Dave Berke?

  If I say you've got no SA, it's like probably one of the worst things I can say. Because if there's one attribute that we place a premium on.

• 1:56:40Dave Berke?

  Is you go out in this totally complex, three dimensional world with 30 different airplanes, all going in different directions. And if you can come back and tell me what's going on, like dude, that guy's got fricking high SA, man. He knows what's going on, which means he's got good decisions. He's a good leader. He's all these positive attributes. And if I go like, dude, he came back from that flight. He had no SA the whole day. That's, that means you didn't know what's going on. There's nothing more important than knowing what's happening. If you had no SA to like, let's say you're a platoon commander and I was at trade at, and I'm putting you through training and I grabbed the platoon commander like, hey, we're all your squads. And he was like, I have no idea. Like, that's way worse than, hey, I don't know if this decision to put your machine, I made this decision. It wasn't a good decision. Maybe think about a different location for this. Okay, okay.

• 1:57:25Dave Berke?

  But like, I don't know where my guys are. Okay. Well, do you know where the enemy was? Oh, I didn't know where the fire was coming. Like, situational awareness is the most important thing. And without it, you actually can't make good decisions. Now, if you have high SA, you make bad decisions, we can talk about it. And you go, oh, okay, cool. I learned from that. No SA, dude, that is the worst.

• 1:57:43Jocko Willink?

  And I'll go ahead and throw this out there. No detachment, no SA. If you're not detached, you're focused on that freaking one thing that's right in front of you, you have no idea what's going on around you. So, so be careful. Simultaneous or sequential?

• 1:57:56Dave Berke?

  Yeah. This is how we decide how we're gonna move forward. And you can think of moving forward, like, doesn't necessarily technically have to be in a straight line, but we're gonna progress. Whatever our progression is gonna be. We have a choice. We can either do it, this is also in relationship to problems, adversaries. We got people out in front of us that are enemies. We gotta get rid of them. I can either do it simultaneously, like if you and Echo are both my enemy and I'm fighting against you, I can attack you at the same time, pointing at you and putting you side by side, or I can go, ah, I don't have enough people to do this. This is not good to be fighting you two at the same time. I'm gonna go all the way around and set, change the geometry where I do it sequentially. I'm gonna start with you and then go to you.

• 1:58:40Dave Berke?

  As you know, classic P and E, there's pros and cons to both. Going, it can take longer. It could be, you know, more, more in theory, time depending. And I need to pick who's a higher priority. There's a lot of things I have to do, but if I'm just gonna go straight because I said I'm going north and the problem presents itself and I say, I said we're going north, we're going north. And I have a too big of a problem to handle, I can lead to real problems by being committed to the direction I'm going rather than saying this is not a good problem to handle simultaneously. I'm going to go sequentially, which means I need to move around. I have to make that decision in real time. How do I handle the challenges in front of me?

• 1:59:19Jocko Willink?

  We would hit targets, so you know, sometimes sequentially, sometimes simultaneously. And like you said, advantages and disadvantages to both. So that's what you gotta pay attention to. You also gotta be, I think it's good to have a contingency to, like you just said, switch. And be, be going into the target thinking we're gonna do it simultaneously. And then get there and think, oh, wait a second, there's more enemy overheads reporting that there's more enemy on this target. Okay, cool. We're gonna go sequential now. Let's hit that, hit that contingency.

• 1:59:47Dave Berke?

  Sticking to the plan is not a good plan. If, if the information tells you, you shouldn't.

• 1:59:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We were rolling up in a target in Baghdad and as we're rolling in, like the overhead reports some, you know, there's 40 people in the street outside and we were gonna like stop off, you know, whatever, four blocks away and full patrol the rest of the world. And I was like, hmm, let's roll. We rolled right up on that thing. So we had the big guns with us and everything and the maintain as much surprise as possible in that scenario. So yeah, have those little contingencies ready. Signature, signature management.

• 2:00:23Dave Berke?

  Yeah, it's a pretty good segue because all that is, it's really in theory, like it's an advent of like modern stealth. A signature is just what people can see. My signature is, is me. Like what I'm putting out there is you can see me. My, I have a visual signature. I have a heat signature, like my engines put out heat. That's called a heat signature. If I'm an afterburger, that heat signature is huge. You can see that thing dozens of miles away. If I'm an idle, that heat signature is really, really small. You can't see it hardly at all. Visual signature, if I'm pointing right at you, you can imagine like pretty hard to see a little tiny airplane like an F-16 pointed right at you. If I'm on a side with my wings 90 degrees to you, you can see that thing 15 miles away.

• 2:01:05Dave Berke?

  You need to pay attention to the signature you're putting out into the world. Not just your heat and not just your wings. But what are you putting out into the world and what do people see? And sometimes I want you to see me. That might be a good deterrent. Sometimes I don't want anybody to see me. But the, the lesson from this is pay attention to what you are emitting. What are you putting out into the world? Again, might, might be a good life leadership lesson snuck inside this concept.

• 2:01:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's interesting how if you don't have good essay, you might not know what kind of signature you're putting out to the world.

• 2:01:41Dave Berke?

  Well, keep coming back to what you said. It's like the best examples, like, bro.

• 2:01:44Jocko Willink?

  Read the room.

• 2:01:44Dave Berke?

  Read the room, man. Can you not see what you're doing? Like, these people are now afraid of you. They don't want, like, how do you not know that you're doing? How do you know that you're not putting that out there? Is there's no essay, there's no detachment.

• 2:01:57Jocko Willink?

  Marking.

• 2:01:58Dave Berke?

  And this is, they're super closely connected. If I'm flying with you, I'm like, hey, Jocko, you're marking. I'm telling you, everybody can see you. Mostly it's connected to what we call cons. When you get up to certain altitude, like your engines disturb the air enough that you'll get a white line. You see it in commercial airlines, these white streaks that come from behind the airplane. And we'll get a brief that says, okay, cons today between 27,000 and 34,000. Okay. I should know that. I should be below that or above that. Or if I'm in that, they're going to see you. And you can have this super fancy airplane that's invisible to everybody. But if you're marking, everybody can see it. And so we'll run a test and fly around and go, hey, you know, climb, climb and go, hey, Dave, you're marking. Okay, cool, 27,000. All right, everybody knows.

• 2:02:42Dave Berke?

  It's also an alert, like, you're emitting a signature. This is a visual one. You should be aware of that. It's how we tell someone they're not managing their signature.

• 2:02:51Jocko Willink?

  Once again, no essay and you're marking. Bad situation. Behind the power curve. We have definitely talked about this one.

• 2:03:01Dave Berke?

  Yes, there is a odd regime of flight. Which the phrase behind the power curve is connected to, which is a line that's used in all sorts of scenarios by which you need more power to go slower. The power curve really is just this arcing curve that it's pretty intuitive for the first most of it is, which is the more power you have, the faster you go. Like, the more you push up the throttles, the faster you go. Well, at some point. Due to all sorts of different factors, mostly just aerodynamics is if you get to a place where you get behind that power curve, meaning you you're not on that curve anymore. The jet needs more and more power to stay up, which means you've gotten behind. And of

• 2:03:44Dave Berke?

  course, power is limited. You don't have unlimited power, unlimited resources, unlimited energy, unlimited money. And you need more and more of that to stay airborne. If someone is behind the power curve, in some sense, it can be a very literal thing like, oh, man, my jet, I didn't fly it very well. I got behind the power curve. Ninety percent of the time in aviation, we're talking about this mentally, or relationship wise, or how you're interacting, not just the mechanics of the aerodynamics of flying. If I'm talking to Echo, I'm like, hey, dude, I've been with I've been with Jocko on this task for a while. He's he's behind the power curve. That's me saying, he can't keep up with what's expected from him, or he can't, he doesn't have enough energy or or ability or capacity or capability

• 2:04:28Dave Berke?

  to get done when he needs to get done. It's a it's a critical sentence. If someone's behind the power curve, they're struggling. And at some point, they're going to reach a limit, because the more power you need to stay, eventually, there is a maximum you can do. Like, if you're exercising, you get behind the power curve, you're going to push harder and harder and harder, and eventually, you can't push harder anymore, the weight's going to come down on top of you. It's not a good thing.

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  I had a saying before I even understood any of that, but I knew what the power, I knew the power curve, like, we'd use that expression.

• 2:04:57Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57Jocko Willink?

  And I would always say, get as far ahead of the power curve as you possibly can. So like, um, hey, should we, look, we were doing a mission tomorrow, should we finish up the plan tonight? And or should we just get some sleep, since we don't know, it's like, no, finish the plan tonight. Finish the plan. Get ahead of the power curve. Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can. Oh, you know, I gotta, actually, here's where I failed. I failed one today. I was gonna cut my hair before I got down, before I came to this today. But because I got a flight tomorrow, and like, stuff I gotta do, and I didn't get it done. Now, at some point, I know I'm gonna get it, I see in my mind right now, but there's times where it's like, oh, wait a second, I still gotta cut my hair that takes 20 minutes. Like, all of a sudden, I'm behind the power curve. Could be a thing. What I should have done was done it yesterday.

• 2:05:40Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:05:41Jocko Willink?

  That's when I should have done it. I should have done. So I went a little bit behind the power curve today. Now, again, it's 20 minutes, I'll catch it back. But I don't like it. I don't like that feeling of being behind the power curve. Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can. Here's the thing, once you're behind it, like you said, there's once you're behind the power curve. It's a problem.

• 2:05:59Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:06:00Jocko Willink?

  And listen, in aviation, as long as you have enough altitude, you're gonna be okay, because you just put the noise to the ground and you're gonna be okay. But when you're in life behind the power curve, something's gotta get sacrificed.

• 2:06:09Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:06:09Jocko Willink?

  And you're gonna drop something.

• 2:06:10Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:06:10Jocko Willink?

  Something else isn't gonna happen because you got behind the power curve. And that's something that isn't, isn't gonna happen, could be a very significant thing. So you gotta stay ahead of the power curve. The SEAL Teams was great at teaching this, and I don't mean the SEAL Teams taught it to you as like, hey, here's a course on the power curve. What, it was a lesson that you would learn.

• 2:06:29Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  It's like, I remember being a young guy, it's like, well, do I, should I waterproof the radios now? Or just wait till, you know, for a few hours, go to lunch, get a workout in, and then I'll just do it later? No, do it now, get ahead of the power curve. The lunch can do later, the workout can get sacrificed. The radios need to be waterproofed right, you know, before we go on this mission tonight. It's gonna take an hour and a half to do it. I can either do it now, or I can get behind the power curve. And now what am I sacrificing? And by the way, once you get done with it, it's done. Now, if you got time, you can eat. Now, if you got time, you can work out. But if you don't got time, cool. We didn't fall behind the power curve on the most critical thing, which is the mission. So if you keep that in mind in life, get as far ahead of the power curve as you can. Especially when it comes to projects and tasks and daily life.

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can, it's gonna make your whole life better. It's gonna make your whole life easier.

• 2:07:18Dave Berke?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:07:19Jocko Willink?

  Uh, when in doubt, broadcast your intentions. I've never heard of this before, what does it mean?

• 2:07:24Dave Berke?

  Yeah, so this is like, the next phase of some of the words I wanted to throw out there was, we have a set of rules, we call them training rules. And this really applies to friendly, to each other. This is not like to an enemy or anything like that, but let's say you and I are working together. And we've got, I got my group, you got your group. Or we're working together, but we're doing our own things right now.

• 2:07:46Dave Berke?

  I have a set of rules that we're both gonna follow for the most part. And you probably, we know each other pretty well, I'm hopefully predictable, you're predictable, I have a good sense of what you're gonna do. At some point, I'll go, hmm. Well, maybe I don't know what's happening here. That's the doubt. And the default is typically, I won't say anything. We have a totally, the rule is, when in doubt, broadcast your intentions. If you have any shred of an idea that this person might not know, tell them. I'm going high, I'm going low, I'm going, whatever it is. As opposed to not broadcasting your intentions. The whole point behind that is, I want everybody else to know, we have this whole thing choreographed and planned. Well, unfortunately, when we get out there, things are gonna get a little crazy. Maybe this plan isn't gonna work. I need to tell everybody what I'm going to do.

• 2:08:30Dave Berke?

  It's, it's really cover and move. But when in doubt, broadcast your intentions is, don't assume the other person knows what's going on. Assume that they don't, and, and let them know what you're going to do. What are your intentions here, rather than saying nothing?

• 2:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and if you don't know someone else's intentions, ask them.

• 2:08:47Dave Berke?

  Totally.

• 2:08:47Jocko Willink?

  Like, hey dude, hold on a second, what are you trying to make happen here? Always assume the other aircraft doesn't see you. This is kinda tied into the last one, right?

• 2:08:55Dave Berke?

  Hundred percent. It's part of our, like I said, we have these training rules, there's probably 15 rules, we brief them every time we go fight. They're reminders of things to do. Always broadcast your intentions. Always assume the aircraft, the other aircraft doesn't see you. So if I'm fighting, part of it is, I wanna see the world from your perspective. I wanna, if I'm gonna do a good job fighting you, I wanna know what, I wanna picture what you're seeing. And as I do that, I don't wanna get to like, oh, I know what he's gonna do, he's gonna do this move, he's gonna do this thing. Actually, I'm gonna make the assumption that you don't see what I'm doing. That's, my mindset is gonna be is, I'm gonna assume you don't see me. So I don't wanna put myself in a position that requires you to do something to keep us safe. To keep us from not, in this case, we're trying to avoid hitting each other.

• 2:09:38Dave Berke?

  I mean, that's the simplest way to describe this, is, I don't wanna make a move that the, the safety of this move is reliant on you seeing me. So I'm gonna do everything with the assumption that you don't.

• 2:09:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's...

• 2:09:53Jocko Willink?

  That is very close to something that we call extreme ownership, which is, listen, I can't count on Echo to solve this problem. Like, I need to step in there and make things happen. I can't, I need to take ownership of what's going on. As opposed to saying, well, I thought Echo was gonna do it. That just doesn't work. Break off attacks prior to pushing the defender through the hard deck.

• 2:10:16Dave Berke?

  Yeah. So another rule. This goes in both directions. There are two really cool ways of looking at this. One is I'm fighting you in real life. In, in real life, and I chase you down to the ground and you fly into the ground and I follow you into the ground, I didn't win. So I have to break off my attack, air to air, I have to, before I hit the deck, which means I have to have the awareness as I'm being aggressive in my maneuver against you, there's another disinterested third party called the ground that doesn't care who we are, what we're doing, it will kill us both. And so I have to calculate that. There's also another part of it too, like, the way I think about this, when we talk about this in training, if I'm fighting in training, and so you're not working together

• 2:10:59Dave Berke?

  to try to figure things out and learn from each other, if you're looking up over your shoulder and you see me, leave this maneuver, break off this attack, there'd be, you should wonder why, like, oh.

• 2:11:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm about to.

• 2:11:13Dave Berke?

  That, yes.

• 2:11:15Jocko Willink?

  I'm about to form a relationship with a disinterested third party.

• 2:11:17Dave Berke?

  That doesn't care. So, so there's a, a methodology of, I'm gonna break off the attack part, of course, in real life for my own, like, let him hit the ground, I can't do that. But I also want you to learn to do that as well. Which is a way of saying, like, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an out, a little bit of an opportunity to exit, like, you can not, you don't have to hit the ground either. I'm gonna break off this attack, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to break off your attack as well. And if I do that in training, as the defensive person, the person looking up, learns that that problem of the ground is every bit as important, sometimes more so than the person attacking you, which means I can't just be looking at you, there's other things out there that are a problem. Again, we can't find parallels to life here, like, we're missing out, yeah.

• 2:12:04Jocko Willink?

  Um, this one intrigued me. Skate versus bonsai.

• 2:12:08Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Jocko Willink?

  What's going on here?

• 2:12:10Dave Berke?

  These are what we call flow decisions. We're air to air. We're fighting other aircraft. Very simply skate means I'm going in and out bonsai means I'm going forward. So you can think of bonsai like bonsai, I'm going in, I'm going to attack you.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Like Leroy Jenkins.

• 2:12:24Dave Berke?

  That's, that's it. Now hopefully it's a little more controlled of that. Now if you picture, I've got you and then behind you is Echo and behind that is Kerry.

• 2:12:35Dave Berke?

  Bonsai might seem like a really cool idea until I get past you and go crap. What did I get myself into? And sometimes skate is like, oh, you know, you're avoiding, you're avoiding the enemy. And so again, there's pros and cons to both. The point behind the, the decision of skate and bonsai is there's risk and reward to both. Bonsai is a really aggressive maneuver and being aggressive is a really good thing. It's a really good thing. It can catch you off guard. I could be really offensive. I can kill a lot of you if I'm, if I'm aggressive. But I can also use a lot of weapons, use a lot of gas, get really, really far away and then find myself where I can't get home or something. Cause I've been bonsai and too much. Skate's really conservative. I'm going to probably kill less of you. I'm going to do less, less damage to you, but I'm going to save a bunch of gas and a bunch of,

• 2:13:20Dave Berke?

  I have to figure out what the balance is between those two. If all I do is bonsai and I'm just like, here comes Dave. We're just going to attack everybody or here comes Echo. Like it is, is conflict averted. He never wants to kill anybody. Neither one of those by themselves are good. I have to have a going in plan. I have to broadcast that, hey, we're going to skate on this. We're going to bonsai in this. I gotta tell everybody what we're thinking. And so they understand what the intent is. The worst thing I can do is have half my team skate and half my team bonsai. And that we're, we're not providing mutual support.

• 2:13:49Jocko Willink?

  This one I recognized pretty quickly. Um, in some prioritize and execute situation, you have a saying of aviate, navigate, communicate.

• 2:13:58Dave Berke?

  This is a, a little ditty, a little catchphrase taught probably like, I think day three of flight school. And it's really associated when something goes wrong is you will aviate, navigate, communicate in that order. Think of it as just classic Peony. You got something going on. The very first thing you do is aviate is you fly. If you got all that thing sorted out and you're flying, cool. Now figure out where you're going and navigate and get to the right heading and location. Cool. You did all that? Cool. Then you can start talking to people. What typically happens is you got a problem and you start talking, "I got a problem, you know, I got this and that," and you're not flying or navigating, that's when people crash,

• 2:14:39Dave Berke?

  that's when people have problems. Midair collisions is, I'm trying to figure out where I am, what I'm doing, and how to communicate that, and I'm not just flying my jet. So it's the constant reminder of aviate, navigate, communicate. If you get a problem, the priority is, the most important thing is, fly the airplane. If you don't do that, I don't care how well you're doing all the other things, you're gonna have an issue. So, every pilot in the world knows this saying, aviate, navigate, communicate, that's the priority in that order. If you get them out of order, you will have a problem.

• 2:15:07Jocko Willink?

  But you are gonna aviate. I mean, I start to pull up on my stick, now I figure out where I'm going, I'm still pulling up on my stick, I'm still figuring out where I'm gonna go in a little bit longer, but I'm still coming back on the radio and saying, "Hey, I was just, I got a little low, I'm okay."

• 2:15:22Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Jocko Willink?

  And then you're going back to, so it's like you're doing all three.

• 2:15:26Dave Berke?

  It's not hard to do all three. The reason this is a thing is that when you have a problem, you get boresighted on one of those things. You get target fixated, you get emotional, you get focused, you're not detached. Flying, navigating, communicating is easy, until there's a problem. If you recognize the problem, you have to make sure you're flying first. CFIT is people that skip the aviation part, and they start doing other things. You're like, "Dude, did you forget to fly the airplane?" And the sad part is, yes, yeah, they did. And what happens is, it's catastrophic. So we have a saying, aviate, navigate, communicate. It's the reminder of prioritize and execute. You can't skip this to get to these two. If

• 2:16:08Dave Berke?

  you got this, cool, good to go, get to this. And if you do, cool, no problem. 999 times out of 1,000, no factor. But one out of 1,000, it is a factor. And if it's a factor and you get it wrong, catastrophic. That's how flames, people fly to the ground.

• 2:16:24Jocko Willink?

  And you just mentioned the last word that we had for this, which is boresighted, which is target. Did you guys use the term target fixated? Or did you just use the term boresighted?

• 2:16:32Dave Berke?

  We typically use the word boresighted because that is a target fixation we used. And actually, target fixation, we would typically use air to ground, because you were literally fixated on the target. Most of the time, we use the word boresighted because there's a mode in the airplane, which is called boresight, which takes all your radar, all your tools, and it focuses in front of you in like a little three degree circle, which means you want to get what's directly in front of you. Sometimes that's really important. It's rarely very important. But every now and then, I want to just get the guy around in front of me. I push the button forward. It's called boresight mode, which means everything is focused directly off my nose.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  You mean all my instruments?

• 2:17:10Dave Berke?

  Everything.

• 2:17:10Jocko Willink?

  That's what you're saying. So it's all my instruments. When I go boresight, all my instruments are...

• 2:17:13Dave Berke?

  It tells everything, find that guy right in front of me. Get the radar on that guy. Shoot that one guy. Boresight mode. Everything is pointed directly in front of me. Cool for about 10 seconds. What you'll typically come back and like, dude, I got really boresighted on that one guy, which means I lost everything else that's out there. If you're going to boresight someone, you better kill them immediately and then get right back out to a wider search. Being boresighted is the same thing as being target fixated, but it's against something in the air. So if I'm boresighted, it means I'm pointed at someone in the air. If I'm target fixated, it's typically on the ground. That's just typically how we... It's the same exact thing. And how often do you think in a fighter, people get boresighted? They go, oh, there's a plane in front of me. And like, cool. What'd you do? I locked him up. And you know, the classic is you got flanked.

• 2:17:56Dave Berke?

  You guys got somebody behind you and all these other... It's usually not just one against one. It's usually 10 against 10 or something like that. If you're boresighted, you're going to get killed.

• 2:18:07Jocko Willink?

  Well, there you go. Don't get boresighted out there. Could have some problems.

• 2:18:13Dave Berke?

  Yep.

• 2:18:13Jocko Willink?

  Could have some significant problems. Awesome. So many comparisons, so many verbs and descriptions to use for everything that we do. And thanks, man. Thanks for coming down. Speaking of systems, speaking of, you know, that one problem that you can have, which is contaminated fuel.

• 2:18:34Dave Berke?

  Sure. Hell, yeah.

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  We don't want to have contaminated fuel.

• 2:18:36Dave Berke?

  You ever... So I have these go-karts. They work.

• 2:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Dave Berke?

  And they go, I don't know, what, 20 miles per hour, maybe 18, 20. They're solid for a go-kart. They're for the kids. But I jump in there from time... So...

• 2:18:49Jocko Willink?

  From time to time, meaning every day.

• 2:18:51Echo Charles?

  Every set.

• 2:18:52Jocko Willink?

  King of the block.

• 2:18:53Echo Charles?

  So what me and my son.

• 2:18:54Jocko Willink?

  Mario Andretti out there.

• 2:18:56Echo Charles?

  He's seven, so we'll go out there and we bring these boxing gloves. So you know what Mario Kart is, right? It's like basically battling, but you're on go-karts so you can hit them with what.

• 2:19:05Jocko Willink?

  I know well.

• 2:19:06Echo Charles?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 2:19:07Jocko Willink?

  Is it a video game?

• 2:19:08Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:19:09Echo Charles?

  So, but so this is essentially the real Mario Kart. So we have these gloves, boxing gloves, and then a regular like these gloves, right? That we just have, I don't know. So you go and you you throw the gloves at them, right? And if you have weapons, the rules are if you got weapons, you get hit, they gotta hit your body. You gotta like throw all your weapons up. Anyway, I feel like you'd be real good.

• 2:19:28Jocko Willink?

  This is the green tortoise shell right here. I know what's going on.

• 2:19:30Echo Charles?

  Yeah, exactly. It's it's that's essentially what it is. I feel like you'd be really good. I fit in a lot of times where when you describe like how to, um, you know, how to be successful when you're in dog fighting and all this stuff, it's like dang, it's the same. It's two dimensional because you can't go up and down or whatever. But, um, I feel like you'd be real good at that.

• 2:19:49Jocko Willink?

  I agree.

• 2:19:51Echo Charles?

  Come over sometime.

• 2:19:53Jocko Willink?

  Hell yeah.

• 2:19:53Echo Charles?

  We'll see what up.

• 2:19:54Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:19:55Echo Charles?

  But yes, bad fuel is no good.

• 2:19:57Jocko Willink?

  We need the good fuel.

• 2:19:58Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:59Jocko Willink?

  The good stuff.

• 2:19:59Echo Charles?

  That good one.

• 2:20:00Jocko Willink?

  The good stuff.

• 2:20:01Echo Charles?

  Integrity, so, uh, the Jocko fuel, I guess, apparently, from what I understand, is synonymous with integrity. Like people try only the good stuff.

• 2:20:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, we go through great lengths to make sure we keep it that way. Yeah, if you guys need fuel out there, go to Jacofuel.com, get some hydrate, get some greens, get some protein, get some go. You finished that one already, huh?

• 2:20:26Echo Charles?

  Killed it.

• 2:20:26Jocko Willink?

  Killed it. What flavor you got over there?

• 2:20:28Echo Charles?

  This is iced tea lemonade Jocko style. Apparently you're out of orange.

• 2:20:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was out of orange. Sorry about that. We couldn't get you that. Um, we got that. We got protein, both the protein powder, which is freaking delicious and the RTDs now, which let's face it, they're super convenient. Let's face it, dude.

• 2:20:47Echo Charles?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:20:48Jocko Willink?

  It's a lot easier and, uh, the the sweet cream coffee. Is crushing. You guys out there really like the sweet cream coffee? Cause it's sounding like crazy.

• 2:21:00Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  So just a heads up.

• 2:21:01Dave Berke?

  I'm pretty sure my wife is a large contributor to the.

• 2:21:06Jocko Willink?

  She crushing it?

• 2:21:07Dave Berke?

  Loves it dude.

• 2:21:09Jocko Willink?

  Did, was she a coffee drinker?

• 2:21:10Dave Berke?

  She is a, well, she was a, I don't drink coffee.

• 2:21:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13Dave Berke?

  She drinks coffee and we have supplanted significantly.

• 2:21:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:17Dave Berke?

  And she didn't, I hate to say it, like she didn't drink the other mulks, like it just wasn't her thing. She crushes the sweet cream.

• 2:21:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a real thing. There's a whole like, there's a whole demographic of human beings that that's what they're doing, man. Like they get the caffeine in there, ninety five minutes. It's like a cup of coffee with thirty grams of protein. I mean, it's like, let's face it, dude. It's freaking awesome.

• 2:21:39Echo Charles?

  True. Bro, my daughter's into it. She's into all the mulks, but she, I had to stop her because of the caffeine or whatever, but she was like, she's down for that.

• 2:21:47Jocko Willink?

  It tastes good. It tastes like tiramisu.

• 2:21:52Jocko Willink?

  Hey, we got it all for you. Um, go check it out. Jocko Fuel dot com. Also you can go to Wawa and get Mulk. Which is the protein drink. You can go to Vitamin Shoppe, GNC Military Commissaries. A fees, Hannaford Dash Stores in Maryland, Wake Fern, Shop Right, HEB down in Tejas. Meyer up in the Midwest, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere. And, and by the way, if you got a gym. Whether you got a, you might have a Globo Gym. You know, you might have a CrossFit gym, you might have a Jiu Jitsu Academy.

• 2:22:24Jocko Willink?

  Might have a boxing gym. I don't know. I don't know what you have. Or you might go to one of those gyms. If you want that gym to have Jocko Fuel, email. J F sales at jockofuel.com. We're spreading across the country with that stuff. Anyways, appreciate it. Jocko Fuel dot com. Get yourself some clean. Energy. That's what we're doing. Also, Origin USA. OriginUSA.com. If you need a Jiu Jitsu gi, if you need a Jiu Jitsu rash guard. By the way, there was a girl competing at ADCC in the day two and I was across the. Across the arena from her and she was wearing an old school freaking trooper.

• 2:23:04Jocko Willink?

  Rash guard and I didn't get I couldn't find her I couldn't like make it happen but I mean she was just out there wearing a you know zero four thirty four

• 2:23:11Echo Charles?

  Yeah, just representing.

• 2:23:12Jocko Willink?

  She was in the the semis maybe

• 2:23:14Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:14Jocko Willink?

  Just out there representing and I didn't get I like you know look there's a lot of people wearing origin hell yeah.

• 2:23:19Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:20Jocko Willink?

  But that was an old school representation.

• 2:23:22Echo Charles?

  That is hard.

• 2:23:23Jocko Willink?

  So whoever you were I appreciate it she actually lost unfortunately but I mean look dude these are the best people in the world at grappling.

• 2:23:30Echo Charles?

  Yeah, fully.

• 2:23:31Jocko Willink?

  So um if you need a rash guard if you need a gee if you need jeans boots t-shirts if you need stuff and you want to support freedom and America go to originusa.com and get something. That's what we're doing.

• 2:23:44Echo Charles?

  Also Jocko has a store called Jocko store new discipline equals freedom shirt.

• 2:23:49Jocko Willink?

  What is it?

• 2:23:50Echo Charles?

  It's a new one.

• 2:23:51Jocko Willink?

  I haven't seen it yet.

• 2:23:52Echo Charles?

  No, nobody's seen it yet. Well, actually by the time of this being released is still gonna have a few more days. So do this. If you want to remind you uh sign up for the email list if you haven't already. You get the email when it drops.

• 2:24:05Jocko Willink?

  That what we're doing?

• 2:24:06Echo Charles?

  No way it's not a.

• 2:24:08Jocko Willink?

  Echo's going he's lost his mind.

• 2:24:10Echo Charles?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  Drop if you sign up for the email list he's got all the warnings.

• 2:24:14Echo Charles?

  No, no, no, I'm not saying.

• 2:24:15Jocko Willink?

  People just stopped people just stopped listening.

• 2:24:17Echo Charles?

  No, that you're talking about drop culture. See what I'm saying? That's different. That's where the all your stuff is only through drops. You heard of this, Dave Berke?

• 2:24:23Jocko Willink?

  Negative.

• 2:24:23Echo Charles?

  Okay, so there's this way of selling stuff whatever it may be uh wait your wife drinks coffee, right? Does she have Starbucks cups? Like the you know the ones you can buy and stuff? So anyway Starbucks does drops with cups. They'll be like hey limited edition you can only get it from this day to this day. That's it.

• 2:24:40Jocko Willink?

  What about my new track?

• 2:24:42Echo Charles?

  Your new track?

• 2:24:43Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna is that gonna drop sometime soon? Is that different? Like hey Echo's gonna drop a new track?

• 2:24:48Echo Charles?

  It's the same term, kind of the same vein, but it's different. Yes. So anyway, if you're so drop culture is what you sell everything like this all limited edition. You gotta you gotta get on the email list, which I dig by the way, because you can find some cool stuff. That's not what this is.

• 2:25:01Jocko Willink?

  See what I'm saying? This isn't drop culture. This is a one off drop.

• 2:25:05Echo Charles?

  I just use the word drop.

• 2:25:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, because it's also not gonna be unlimited.

• 2:25:08Echo Charles?

  No, no, it's unlimited.

• 2:25:10Jocko Willink?

  Oh, it is unlimited.

• 2:25:10Echo Charles?

  It's the new one. So you know how you know ah time goes on. You know, a lot of people have the old school discipline equals freedom. Then they got the second one, which was good. You designed that one, by the way.

• 2:25:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you're talking about when I made it more of an equal sign?

• 2:25:22Echo Charles?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:25:23Jocko Willink?

  You made it so that equals is the biggest word.

• 2:25:25Echo Charles?

  Well, you know, spatial, well, that's debatable, but spatially, you know, it made sense. But hey, look, I dig it, man. I like yours as well. Then we got the third one, which we called the standard issue.

• 2:25:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:25:37Echo Charles?

  Representing all the different branches, if you pay attention. Now we got the fourth one. For the, it's been years, you know what I mean? It's just an updated one. Anyway, if you wanna, uh, you want the first edition on that one, sign up for the email list and then we'll indicate that, uh, the day that it drops.

• 2:25:52Jocko Willink?

  Okay, and that's at jocklestore.com.

• 2:25:54Echo Charles?

  Jocklestore.com.

• 2:25:54Jocko Willink?

  Check it out.

• 2:25:55Echo Charles?

  Also Shirt Locker. Don't forget about this. This is a subscription scenario. One drop every month.

• 2:26:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Echo Charles?

  Not limited edition, because all you gotta do is sign up. It's a subscription scenario. Anyway, you get new, uh, new designs every month.

• 2:26:06Jocko Willink?

  Hey, at ADCCC, at ADCC, I saw some in the wild.

• 2:26:10Echo Charles?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:26:10Jocko Willink?

  And you know what that was? Uh, lies, lies.

• 2:26:13Echo Charles?

  Yeah. People, a lot of response on that one. People very much liked that one. I see the one Dave Berke's representing. That's one of, that's one of the Shirt Locker ones.

• 2:26:20Jocko Willink?

  True dish.

• 2:26:21Echo Charles?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:26:22Jocko Willink?

  Um, also, if you need some steak, you can go to ColoradoCraftBeef.com, or you can go to PrimalBeef.com. People make an awesome steak for us out here. That's what we're doing. We're eating steak. By the way, the beef, do you ever get any beef sticks from Colorado Craft Beef?

• 2:26:38Echo Charles?

  A hundred percent. They're good.

• 2:26:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Do you have to stock up on those? Because it's like having a Snickers bar, but it's steak.

• 2:26:48Echo Charles?

  Better.

• 2:26:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like having a Snickers bar, but it's better, because Snickers bar is junk.

• 2:26:54Echo Charles?

  Way better, yeah.

• 2:26:55Jocko Willink?

  Hey, no offense, Snickers bars, but let's face it. I appreciate what you did for me when I was nine years old, you know, and it's like, what's for lunch? Snickers bar and a Coke. Growing up in the seventies, bro, that was the, that was the deal right there. That was the jam. Did you, did they do that? Did you do that?

• 2:27:14Echo Charles?

  No, my mom was a hippie, bro. My mom is, she don't, oh, she don't play.

• 2:27:18Jocko Willink?

  She was giving you like mineral water.

• 2:27:20Echo Charles?

  Yeah, kinda. I mean, not mineral water, but yeah.

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, sprouts.

• 2:27:24Echo Charles?

  You know, like we make the sandwich with the real turkey and the sprouts in it. I mean, I guess, you know, hey, man, do what you did. Wasn't a better than Snickers and Coke. I'll tell you that.

• 2:27:33Jocko Willink?

  Coke, bro. That was kind of the jam when I was a kid.

• 2:27:35Dave Berke?

  Yeah, hundred percent. I remember like Little League baseball games over. You got 50 cents to go to the snack bar. You get a 25 cent Coke and a 25 cent Snickers bar.

• 2:27:43Echo Charles?

  Yeah, dang.

• 2:27:45Jocko Willink?

  Hey, why is America having problems with obesity right now? I'm not sure. Why do we have type two diabetes running rampant?

• 2:27:51Echo Charles?

  Well, then again, no, it's not because of that because look, you guys are saying you guys are freaking down for the Snickers and Coke. You guys aren't obese.

• 2:27:58Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, we were.

• 2:28:00Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:00Jocko Willink?

  We were.

• 2:28:01Dave Berke?

  You were obese when you were.

• 2:28:02Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying that people that didn't go, hey, hold on a second. This might not be the best combination of breakfast, lunch and dinner over here.

• 2:28:11Echo Charles?

  Brother, they didn't do the, what do you call it? Refrain, re.

• 2:28:15Jocko Willink?

  They didn't redefine.

• 2:28:16Dave Berke?

  They gotta redefine.

• 2:28:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you gotta redefine.

• 2:28:18Echo Charles?

  Especially now you got all your other problems solved.

• 2:28:21Dave Berke?

  That phone, you gotta watch out. Redefine that whole thing.

• 2:28:24Jocko Willink?

  So there we go.

• 2:28:25Echo Charles?

  Beef sticks, no Snickers. Stop the Snickers already.

• 2:28:28Jocko Willink?

  And primalbeef.com, coloradycraftbeef.com. Check those out. Also subscribe to the podcast. Also check out jockounderground.com. We're getting ready to record one of those. So that way we can say whatever we want, answer questions. Uh, go to jockounderground.com if you want to check that out. We have a YouTube channel. So does, so does Jocko Fuel have a YouTube channel? So does Origin USA have a YouTube channel? So does Echelon Front have a YouTube channel? So a bunch of different options there to see what's going on. I would say Origin USA is sort of a behind the scenes of what is going on. I would say Jocko Fuel is kind of a current what's going on. And I would say Echelon Front is information. A little bit about what's going on, but mostly about, hey, here's some good leadership things for you to move forward with.

• 2:29:12Jocko Willink?

  So check those out. YouTube, Psychological Warfare, flipsidecanvas.com.

• 2:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Get some cool stuff that Dakota Meyer makes to hang on your wall. And also, we've written some books. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, the new one. There's a new version that expanded a dish. Talk about the extreme ownership leadership loop in there. I've written a bunch of other books. You guys know what they are. Check out the kids books for your kids. How's it, how's the Warrior Kid progress coming over on the Burke front?

• 2:29:41Dave Berke?

  Strong. You get good insights. Because I send you texts when they like get a new belt or run a tournament or something, but they're on the path, bro. They're totally on the path.

• 2:29:51Jocko Willink?

  Is Jiu Jitsu for them, for your kids right now, it might be different for different kids, but is it like the focus of your family or is it just part of the family? It's just part of what we're doing?

• 2:30:02Dave Berke?

  Especially for my middle of my youngest, it's just like, it's just what we're doing.

• 2:30:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:06Dave Berke?

  It's just, it's funny because they're like, oh, what sports do you play? And they're like, oh, I play soccer and baseball or soccer and football, whatever. And then like, oh, and like, we also do, it's not like a seasonal, it's just, it's just, it's like saying like, do you guys like do your homework? And do you guys sleep and you guys like whatever like? And so for me as a parent, obviously that is the best part about it is not, it's not an activity that they are, are like, oh, it's football season. Or it's just, it is just part of the deal, man. It's just, they're on that path. It's just what they do.

• 2:30:36Jocko Willink?

  I think.

• 2:30:37Dave Berke?

  And no judgment on if you're like doing soccer season, like they're doing that stuff too.

• 2:30:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:43Dave Berke?

  But Jiu Jitsu is just, it's just a standard. It's just a thing that they do.

• 2:30:46Jocko Willink?

  Yep. What I was gonna, what I was, it didn't, you actually gave me a response I wasn't really expecting. There's people that maybe hear us talk about Jiu Jitsu and they think that it's going to be this thing that's like all of a sudden you have to dedicate your life to. And well, I guess you did give me a response. Hey, your kids do still do football. They do still do soccer. They still do all these other things. Play guitar. This doesn't have to be your life.

• 2:31:08Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:31:09Jocko Willink?

  But it should absolutely be a part of your life.

• 2:31:11Dave Berke?

  And it's not, it's not, they don't, there's no like to taunt from something else. It doesn't come at the cost. It's just, it's just part of life. And it's normal and it's just what they do.

• 2:31:20Jocko Willink?

  Do you know what a gift you're giving them?

• 2:31:22Dave Berke?

  I have a small sense of that.

• 2:31:24Jocko Willink?

  Kid is gonna get picked on and they're not gonna get picked on. I mean, like they're not, they're gonna, first of all, they'll be able to avoid it. They'll have the confidence that people won't look at them like, oh, I'm gonna pick on this kid over here. There's just that, that right there. Epic.

• 2:31:39Dave Berke?

  Yeah. And here's the thing, just quickly, I. I guess I have a little bit of an advantage. I am closely connected to Jocko and Echo and like that world. But here's the thing, what Dave Berke is doing most days out of the year is just following the plan. Like the Warrior Kid books, like the plan is out like, I'm not doing this. I was lucky to have the secret insight into some secret world that nobody knows about. Like, I'm just on the path, just following the plan. And that plan is out there for everybody. The Warrior Kid books, just like, just here's the plan. Everybody can do that. It is not rocket science, man. And I'm not doing some crazy mental gymnastics to convince my kids to do. We're just on that path. And it's a path that everybody can follow, dude. It's an awesome community. So, yeah, I'm just, the

• 2:32:24Dave Berke?

  kids are, I'm so stoked that they have that in their lives.

• 2:32:26Jocko Willink?

  Get your kids, or your neighbor's kids, or your nephew, or your whatever, kids around the neighborhood. Just give them the books.

• 2:32:33Dave Berke?

  Give them the books.

• 2:32:33Jocko Willink?

  Best event. You know how much nicer it's gonna be when that kid turns 15? And that kid is working out, eating healthy, doing jiu-jitsu. Instead of, he turns 15, this is your neighbor, by the way. And the other kid, what, he's at home blasting music, he's getting in trouble, cops are showing up. Like, there's all kinds of mayhem going on.

• 2:32:55Jocko Willink?

  So don't, don't let that happen. You know, let's just get the kids on the right path. You agree. Get that kid square their life away. It's beautiful.

• 2:33:02Dave Berke?

  I couldn't find my son last week. My wife and I could not find my son for like 15 minutes. On a day we're like, I should know where he is. Walked down to the gym, I opened the door, just to, and he's, he's doing pushups. I didn't tell him to do pushups. I didn't ask him or make him. He just, I'm like, hey bud. He's like, he's like in the pushup position, looks over his shoulders, like, hey dad. And I just like, see you later, I close the door. I'm all like, I'm like, super stoked. He just said they're doing pushups.

• 2:33:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:28Dave Berke?

  The path is out there, man.

• 2:33:29Jocko Willink?

  Freaking outstanding. Outstanding. Also, so yeah, a bunch of books. Also, we have Echelon Front. We have a leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. When you have problems in your life, they're leadership problems. We can help you solve those problems by teaching you leadership, by teaching your team leadership. We do, obviously, consulting. We also have some big events. We have one coming up. Sold out, though. Sold out, right?

• 2:33:55Dave Berke?

  Nashville is pretty much sold out.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Nashville.

• 2:33:57Dave Berke?

  Yeah, you, if you really want to go to Nashville, reach out.

• 2:34:00Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:34:00Dave Berke?

  But do it very quick.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  That's two to four May, and then we have Dallas, 16 to 18, October. So if you want to come one of those, they all sell out, so. And, and we sell out to a point now, it used to be like, we sold out, and then someone would call, hey, I've got four people that really need to come, we'd be like, okay. Now it's like fire code.

• 2:34:20Dave Berke?

  Yes.

• 2:34:20Jocko Willink?

  Scenarios.

• 2:34:21Dave Berke?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:21Jocko Willink?

  And we already did the thing, we already did the thing where we eliminated all the seats for everybody in Echelon Front, so no one has anywhere to sit. We're all in the back standing, or in the back of like tables with like packed in there. So there's nothing else we can do. So if you want to come to the muster, get, get signed up quickly. We also have the FTX, we have council, we have battlefield. The next council is June 26th through 29th, that's up in the mountains. That is a total exercise in detachment. Are you going to that one this year?

• 2:34:48Dave Berke?

  I don't know. We, we actually added a second one this year, because so we sold, first was sold out, we sell them all, so we added a second one, and the second one's like halfway sold out.

• 2:34:58Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So there it is, that's the council, June 26th through 29th, up in Washington State in the mountains. And then we have the Women's Assembly, run by our COO, Jamie Cochran, that's September 11th through the 13th. This year it's going to be in San Antonio, Texas. So Women's Assembly, this will be the number two of those, just incredible feedback from the women to that went to the first Women's Assembly.

• 2:35:23Jocko Willink?

  So if you want to learn about these principles, check out some of these things that we do at Echelon Front. We also have an online training academy, because you don't just, you don't get an inoculation, you need to go to the gym. So check out extremeownership.com and learn these principles, go through the courses, and they can apply to your business and to your life as well. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization, it's an incredible organization. I know the people that she has helped, well, I don't know them all, but I know a number of the people that she has helped. It's been phenomenal, providing the medical services that the VA doesn't give to veterans.

• 2:36:03Jocko Willink?

  And that is outstanding and it really just just dramatically impacts people. So if you want to help out, you want to donate, you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also check out Heroes and Horses.org. This is Micah Fink up in the mountains of Montana, taking veterans up into the mountains. So they can lose themselves and find their soul. Also Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org, helping transition guys that were in the military into the civilian sector. Setting them up with mentorship, setting them up with jobs, helping them through that transition. He's doing an awesome job with it. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, Dave is at David R Burke.

• 2:36:48Jocko Willink?

  I'm at Jaco.com.

• 2:36:52Jocko Willink?

  Got that website.

• 2:36:53Echo Charles?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:53Jocko Willink?

  Jaco.com. I'm at Jocko Willink on the social media scenario. Echo is at Echo Charles. Just, just be careful because there's an algorithm out there and it'll grab you by the throat.

• 2:37:05Jocko Willink?

  And it'll do horrible things to you. And you know what? You won't know it. You won't know it. You'll see fit.

• 2:37:12Jocko Willink?

  You, you will just collide with the earth because you won't be paying attention to what's going on. You know what? This was, I've talked about this experiment before, going in the cold tub. And if you go in the cold tub while you're scrolling Instagram, you're like, oh, that went by pretty quick. In a bad situation, like you're freezing.

• 2:37:31Jocko Willink?

  It goes by quick. It just disappears. Time goes by real quick.

• 2:37:35Jocko Willink?

  Guess what happens when you're in a comfortable situation? Guess what happens when you're on the couch? Like an hour just went by, an hour.

• 2:37:43Echo Charles?

  And don't do that while you work. Have you ever scrolled Instagram while you work out? Ever do that?

• 2:37:48Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I have done it before, but it's a total disruptor. Like if you, you gotta look at that phone, like you cannot pick up your phone when you're working out and open it. Like that's just a bad thing across the board.

• 2:37:59Echo Charles?

  Well, I did it like probably maybe four or five times in a row workouts in a row where I'd like, basically your mind is like open to is fine with it. Yeah, I'll just between sets or whatever. And then when I was like, okay, I gotta stop doing this. I gotta hurry up and really focus or whatever. And it was actually kind of hard, like habitually for that one where I had to force my brain or whatever. But the workout and then, you know, then obviously I got a hold of it. Bro, your workout gets just done way quicker. Bro, that thing will just suck you into like a two and three hour workout. Think about that. Watch out.

• 2:38:29Jocko Willink?

  Think about that thing. That dopamine flowing.

• 2:38:32Echo Charles?

  Yep, that's true.

• 2:38:32Jocko Willink?

  Disturbing.

• 2:38:33Echo Charles?

  It's true.

• 2:38:33Jocko Willink?

  So, don't let that happen. And, um, that's where we're at. Also, obviously, thanks to all of our military out there around the world, and I'll say today, especially in the skies, our aviators, mechanics, air traffic control, maintenance, all the ground crew and flight crew. Did I miss anybody? We got them. If you're out there, we appreciate it. Thanks for your service. Thanks to all the military. Thanks for our, our air men and women for keeping the skies free for us all. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders.

• 2:39:15Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for what you do as well here at home to keep us safe. And everyone else out there.

• 2:39:22Jocko Willink?

  These are some good rules to pay attention to. Good things to watch out for. Not just while flying, because you might not be a pilot, but while living, don't get boresighted. Be careful about how you mark your position.

• 2:39:37Jocko Willink?

  If things aren't going right, or they don't seem to be going right, redefine the situation.

• 2:39:44Jocko Willink?

  And you can't do any of that if you lose SA. If you don't have situational awareness, if you're not detached, you can't make that happen. And also, if you're not detached, you might get behind the power curve. So do everything you can to stay ahead of the power curve at all times. And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko. Out.