Pod Insights Jocko Podcast The Actual TOPGUN, Dave Berke, Reacts to "TOPGUN: Maverick" with Jocko About this episode Reaction to the new movie "TOPGUN: Maverick" with Dave Berke and Jocko.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Jocko Willink? So the new Top Gun movie came out, Top Gun Maverick. And I mean, we just couldn't really help but to talk to the real Top Gun. Dave Berke is here. What's happening, Dave?
0:16 Dave Berke? What's up, Doc? Good to be here, man.
0:17 Jocko Willink? Dave Berke, if you don't know him, Marine Corps fighter pilot,
0:22 Jocko Willink? Top Gun fighter pilot, Top Gun instructor, Top Gun senior instructor, commander of the first operational F-35 squadron. On the ground with my task unit in the Battle of Ramadi as an Anglico guy, leading an Anglico team. Air naval gunfire liaison. So that's how we got to know each other initially. Now we work together. You can fly an F-18, an F-16, an F-22, and an F-35. How many people in the world can do that?
1:01 Dave Berke? I know it sounds crazy, but I actually don't know of anybody else that was qualified in all four. It may have happened in the last couple of years. I don't know about it, but.
1:09 Jocko Willink? Well, who would get the call now?
1:11 Dave Berke? The real kicker is, is.
1:14 Jocko Willink? The F-22?
1:14 Dave Berke? Yeah, that doesn't fit with both the F-18 and the F-16. It fits with one or the other, but actually it doesn't really fit with anything anymore. But so I think the chances of that happening are pretty slim. It's kind of cool.
1:25 Jocko Willink? So you are, it's safe to say you're, you're, you could be considered a little bit of an expert on this kind of thing.
1:34 Dave Berke? Yeah, I guess so.
1:35 Jocko Willink? So, all right, Top Gun, before we jump into it.
1:38 Dave Berke? Yeah.
1:39 Jocko Willink? What, what, what is Top Gun? Explain it real quick.
1:42 Dave Berke? So Top Gun, like the real Top Gun is just a nickname for what's called the, the, the United States Navy Fighter Weapon School. It's just a school that has been around for a while since, since 1969. It's just a school that teaches kind of a graduate level capability for fighter pilots to be ready for war. We can certainly go in a lot more detail. The, the school is called the Navy Fighter Weapons School. It got the nickname Top Gun because very early on, it was literally about gunnery, like it had its origins in being able to use the airplane correctly and use the gun on the plane well. And I'm really paraphrasing, but it comes from that. And so the name Top Gun has stuck from the beginning and it got a lot of prominence from the first movie. Top Gun is where that name really kind of rung through, but Top Gun by itself is really just a nickname for the school.
2:26 Jocko Willink? Mm hmm. So you take normal pilots from the Navy and the Marine Corps. Does anyone from the Air Force go there?
2:33 Dave Berke? No, we used to have an exchange program once in a blue moon, but no, I would say it's, it's almost exclusively now mostly Navy, a couple of Marines.
2:40 Jocko Willink? So Navy and Marine Corps, and you go there and you learn to dogfight?
2:44 Dave Berke? Amongst other things, yes, but that is the foundational thing you start to teach and learn up there.
2:49 Jocko Willink? And you scrap in the sky. You, you go up and you dogfight other really good pilots?
2:55 Dave Berke? Yes.
2:55 Jocko Willink? And so if, who gets selected to go there? Do you have to be the best guy in your, in your squadron?
3:01 Dave Berke? Yeah, you have to be in the top tier of your squadron. There's some things you have to work at, some timing, you know, some other things beyond your control and you don't get ranked. There's not like a board that says Dave Berke is number one and somebody else is number two, but there's definitely a tier that you need to be in. And there are some certifications where the, the squadron kind of can judge you along the way and you need to be at the, at the top, uh, towards the top of your peer group to be selected.
3:25 Jocko Willink? So you got selected to be, to go to Top Gun School?
3:28 Dave Berke? Yeah.
3:29 Jocko Willink? Then you what? Go on a couple of deployments? Then you get, how do you get selected to be a Top Gun instructor? Did you have to kind of do well at the Top Gun?
3:34 Dave Berke? Yeah. So what's unique about that, and it's, it's a very unique for Marines, which I really like because the Marine Corps has a unique selection program. The way it works for the Marine Corps is you gotta get selected to go from your squadron. So your squadron just gets a billet. And so the average math is every squadron is going to send one person a year. It might be two one year, none the next because you're deployed, but it sort of works out to one a year is the basic math.
3:56 Jocko Willink? How many, how many pilots in the squadron?
3:57 Dave Berke? Seventeen kind of regular pilots in the like COXO. So, you know, just around 20 or so.
4:02 Jocko Willink? Check.
4:04 Dave Berke? In that selection process, you got it, you get picked to go by your commander. Your commanding officer gets to pick and you know, there's a process he uses. And then as a Marine, they send you up to Top Gun and you'll do the full 13 week Top Gun course. And you go right back to your squadron, which is a little bit different than Navy. You'll, you'll either stay to teach at a schoolhouse. Whereas the Marine Corps, you go right back to your squadron and most commonly you'll go back to your squadron and you'll deploy. And then at some point in there, the Marines and the rest of the staff will vote and select on which Marines they want to bring back. There's only three pilots on the staff of 25 that are Marines. So to come back as a Marine.
4:44 Jocko Willink? Humble brag.
4:46 Dave Berke? It's kind of crazy math and by looking back on it, to come back as a Marine is, it's a pretty narrow window. You gotta thread the needle to be available, eligible and meet the staff's expectations of what they're looking for to bring you back.
4:59 Jocko Willink? To bring you back as an instructor. And then how hard is it to be the senior instructor there? Is that based on, what's that based on? Is it based on your seniority or what's it based on?
5:07 Dave Berke? It, it's a combination of things. I mean, you have to be more senior pilot, you know, the most junior guys are not going to be. And the senior pilot is called the training officer. That's the pilot on the staff of 25 that's really picked to run the class.
5:18 Jocko Willink? And so that's where you were.
5:19 Dave Berke? I was, as a Marine, I was the training officer, which was at the time, like the best job. Cause you're basically running Top Gun as a, as a relatively junior person in the military.
5:28 Jocko Willink? How often do they pick a Marine to do that?
5:30 Dave Berke? Not that often. There's a handful. I mean, I'm not the only one for sure, but it's not that common. It's pretty uncommon for a Marine to get a chance to be the training officer of Top Gun.
5:39 Jocko Willink? How do you know? So it's not based on seniority. So is it just you're kind of the best pilot? Is that sort of what's happening?
5:46 Dave Berke? There is a combination of factors at play. What they really want is someone who is a good pilot, who's experienced, who is senior. But they want someone who's got two unique capabilities together. You have to be a really good teacher. So of course your teaching skill is really critical, but you also have to be able to, be able to lead a peer group who, even though you might be senior, you're going to be like just a few months seniors. That's a big difference in seniority. So it's really, do you trust someone to be able to lead a peer group of? Pretty evenly matched, even capability, even experienced pilots and be able to lead them as really peers. So, combination of how good of a teacher you are and how well do you think
6:30 Dave Berke? you can lead your peers, which is not easy to do. So, it's a combination of things.
6:34 Jocko Willink? Does it help if you shoot all of them down?
6:35 Dave Berke? It does help if you're... Credibility goes a long way in anything, but certainly in fighter aviation. If you're good in the jet, that's gonna help you, for sure.
6:45 Jocko Willink? Alright, so that's kinda what Top Gun is, and that's where you were. The first Top Gun movie, what year did it come out?
6:53 Dave Berke? Eighty-six.
6:54 Jocko Willink? And so you saw it in eighty-six?
6:55 Dave Berke? I did.
6:56 Jocko Willink? And that impacted the trajectory of your life?
6:58 Dave Berke? A hundred percent. I was thirteen. So, if you can kinda picture the brain of a thirteen-year-old, I was ripe for that kinda influence.
7:05 Jocko Willink? And that's a hundred percent why you chose the path you chose?
7:08 Dave Berke? I had already, even younger than that, had, I wouldn't say just explored, I had already decided I wanna be in the military. I think, you know, when you're twelve or thirteen, it's a little not clear as even what or why, but I knew, I was already inclined. I thought airplanes were cool. I thought the military was cool. I was already moving in that direction. When I saw that on the movie, it really narrowed this, "I think I wanna be in the military" to, "I wanna fly jets around boats." Like, it got really narrow from that.
7:37 Jocko Willink? How did you end up in the Marine Corps instead of the Navy?
7:40 Dave Berke? That's a good question, because when I saw that movie, of course, immediately you go towards the Navy, because naval aviation is mostly around the Navy, and the airplane was a Navy jet. They have fourteen Tomcat. It's all about the Navy. So, there's not really a connection to the Marine Corps. What was unique for me is I grew up right around the corner, like a mile away from a Marine base. So, inside of that, there's a little piece of really thinking the Marine Corps was cool as a little kid, kinda being enamored with Marines, and having this little sense of something about the Marine Corps to me was unique. And anybody that really migrates towards the Marine Corps, there's an intangible quality about the Marine Corps that's really undeniable, and I already had that. So, I saw this movie, I'm like, "Man, I wanna do that." And at some point relatively soon,
8:24 Dave Berke? I don't know if I was at an airshow or somebody explained it, somebody made the connection that Marines fly jets off ships. And when I was like, "Holy cow, I can do both of those things, and I combine them, Marine flying jets off ships," that's when it was like, "I'm going to do exactly that thing."
8:42 Jocko Willink? Yeah, you were just hook, line and sinker all day.
8:45 Dave Berke? Totally, man, all in.
8:46 Jocko Willink? All right. So what did you do for, okay, so for the new movie, Top Gun Maverick, what did you have to do with it? You did something for it.
8:53 Dave Berke? I did. It was kind of cool. So, you know, this movie just came out Memorial Day, 2022. The movie's been done for a couple of years. It got delayed, you know, for COVID and whatnot. So this is probably back in 16 or 17 when they really started to come to grips with they're gonna make a sequel. They knew what was gonna go on and they had a couple of screenwriters. They had a, a, a guy, one of the guys who wrote the script for the movie. We had a common friend and I don't even remember what the connection was, but I got linked up with him.
9:22 Jocko Willink? What year was this?
9:24 Dave Berke? 16, maybe, 16. Yeah, I think 16 is probably right. So kind of early on in the development and he had written an initial script. And he, I think on behalf of the Navy, on behalf of Tom Cruise, on behalf of a bunch of people, they really wanted it to be authentic. So he actually came out and spent a couple of days with me. And we went through that thing and what he was looking for was, is this how it would be? Is this what they would do? Is this how they would say it? So I got a chance to go through kind of beginning to end and help contribute. And listen, my contributions were small, but I got to contribute to the authenticity of how you'd go about doing it. And if you haven't flown it, it might be hard to understand some of the nuance. And they really wanted to get the nuance right. So I got to help with that, which was really cool.
10:08 Jocko Willink? Is there anything, was there any scene? Was there any words? Was there any lines where you were like, that's, that's right there. That's me. Any movements?
10:17 Dave Berke? I don't think I made the connection to me individually, but there were things that they, there's a key theme that I really liked that comes out and I'm gonna assume that most people now have seen the movies. I'm not gonna give anything away. But there's a theme about as technology moves on, as technology gets better. A lot of people buy into the idea that, oh, better technology wins. Now you and I both know that is not true. Now, technology helps. Technology is awesome. But in the end, especially in, when you're fighting one against one or force against force, it comes down to the person flying the machine. And that's the cool thing about aviation is it's, airplanes are really good equalizers. They wanted to keep with the theme that they, you know, the person in the box, the man in the box. And so they, they understood and I helped
10:59 Dave Berke? get to the idea that it's not that their plane is better than ours or vice versa. It's the person flying it. And that was a theme that we talked about and it really made its way into the movie, which is cool.
11:08 Jocko Willink? Humble brag coming at you again. Hey, it's not about the machine. It's about me, Dave Berke, Best Buy whatever.
11:16 Dave Berke? I'm so glad I'm here right now.
11:19 Jocko Willink? What was your overall? So now you've seen the completed movie. I saw it too. I saw it so we could do this.
11:25 Dave Berke? Yeah.
11:25 Jocko Willink? Cause I didn't want to be completely blind and it was very fortuitous in the fact that my wife.
11:31 Dave Berke? I made it into a date. I was like, oh, you know, I'd really like to see this. And she was like, she was all happy. Cause you know, I'm like the worst person for doing fun things or whatever. She was all excited. So we went, she was E A E as we went to go see it.
11:44 Jocko Willink? So we've seen the movie. I've seen the movie. What was your overall impression? How did they do?
11:48 Dave Berke? Dude, I thought it was awesome. I loved it. Now, I also knew I was going to see a movie. So in terms of like what I was thinking in my criteria for it, um, for the baseline I was expecting, dude, I thought it was awesome.
12:02 Jocko Willink? It's a Hollywood movie and we have to take our knowledge and kind of suspend it a little bit. For these type of situations.
12:10 Dave Berke? I think that's a.
12:11 Jocko Willink? See a movie like this.
12:12 Dave Berke? I think that's the best word. You gotta suspend some of those things. I was not there looking at how they laid out the tactics in the for me. I looked at it as this is a movie, but it's also a movie that's connected to a world that I know really, really well. And there was elements that I wanted to see how, how well they could depict that. Not about the tactics of the moves in the airplane, but what it's like to be in an airplane and there's also some cool themes in there too, that I really liked. Like America is awesome and we build really cool stuff and we can go anywhere and do anything. So there's a lot of things about the movie that I really liked and overall for what I was expecting, I loved that movie.
12:51 Jocko Willink? Yeah, I thought it was good too. And another thing you have to take is when you're watching these movies, whether it's a war movie or this guy, I guess this is allegedly a war movie or kind of a war movie. You have to take that they've got to get all these different complicated things into an hour and a half, two hours. Personalities, emotion, like they gotta do it. So they're gonna make some, they're gonna make some adjustments in reality to make it, to make it hit the way it's supposed to. All right, so the pilots in the movie, the various pilots in the movie, how did they, how were those personalities? Did they, did they nail it?
13:30 Dave Berke? Yeah, it's funny because, you know, had this movie come out 10 years ago, I probably would even look at it differently than I do now because half of the way I'm looking at this now is through the lens of leadership, like personalities and the stuff that we talk about at Echelon Front all the time. So, like I said, kind of going back in one sense, I saw the first one when I was 13 or 14. And so part of me is looking at this movie thinking, what does 13 or 14 year old Dave Burke think of this movie? And part of the reason why I'm so positive about this movie is I think any 13, 14 year old influential kid watching this, what I said the other day was, millions of kids are gonna want to join the Navy and fly airplanes, which to me is a huge win. That's awesome. In the leadership lens, I'm looking at ego, I'm looking at all these other nuanced things.
14:15 Dave Berke? And they do magnify, they magnify the personalities to do exactly what you described. They got two hours to depict all these things. So they take these individual personalities and they magnify them so they're really obvious to see. And so in some sense, I didn't have a lot of experience with people whose personalities were that kind of, I guess, over the top in some ways, but I could identify and resonate with every single one. So I think in that sense, they still did a good job depicting ego, complacency, a bunch of other subtle attributes you really gotta think about in order for someone to be successful in difficult situations. So I thought they did a good job of that, too.
14:49 Jocko Willink? And then how about the mission profile?
14:53 Jocko Willink? First of all, why, what was the reason why they needed to use an F-18 instead of an F-35 or some other mechanism like a T-Lam or something like that?
15:01 Dave Berke? They made a comment that I think to allow them to use the F-18, which was, hey, this is the ideal mission for the F-35, but the GPS jamming negates the weapons. So people have asked me, like, did you think that was a slight on the F-35 or unrealistic? I'm like, no, they just wanted to use the F-18. So they had a reason to use the F-18 and the reason they gave was the F-35 GPS weapons wouldn't work in a GPS jammed environment. Whether that's true or not, kind of, but it certainly was plausible enough to explain why they're doing it the way they did it.
15:30 Jocko Willink? So that actually made sense.
15:31 Dave Berke? It's fine. That said, there's pilots out there that can have all sorts of opinions on it, but if you, again, look at it through the lens of this is a movie, it was totally fine.
15:42 Jocko Willink? Why did they want to use the F-18s? Oh, because that's why you want to bring Tom Cruise back, Maverick back?
15:46 Dave Berke? I think his number one criteria, and I think one of the things the Navy wanted to do is they wanted it to be as realistic as possible. And despite how good CGI is and computer stuff is really cool, you cannot replicate a lot of what you saw in the movie, their faces, G-forces, all that stuff. And if you want to put two people in an airplane, you need to fly an F-18 because there's no two-seat F-35s and you're not going to film a movie with a single-seat F-35 and make it look real, at least not this real. So they needed Hornets, which is totally fine.
16:16 Jocko Willink? Dang. So that's legit.
16:19 Dave Berke? Yes.
16:20 Jocko Willink? They, okay, the physical aspect of being a fighter pilot, what's the reality there? You know, you got Tom Cruise, you got all these people making it look like it's all hard. How hard is it for real? Come on.
16:32 Dave Berke? The reality is I'm sitting across from Jocko Willing, Navy SEAL, and the reality is, is it's not like this all the time, but flying fighters is exhausting sometimes, like very physically demanding. And there are components of flying that physiologically are really, really hard. And I think they wanted to depict those segments. Now, it's not usually quite as sustained, as difficult as it is. There's elements of flight that are like downright boring, like navigating to and from. You're just sitting there. You're just sitting in a cockpit. There's times that there's extreme levels of physiological challenges that a lot of human beings would struggle with. And I think they wanted to depict that. There are times of flying is mind-blowingly difficult,
17:13 Dave Berke? both spatially, like thinking about three dimensions and physically when you have eight or nine Gs on the airplane. And if you're close to 200 pounds with your gear, you're feeling 1,800 pounds, something like that. And you're literally feeling that having to look around and do things, those can be really hard. You don't do that for hours at a time. You do it for minutes at a time. But inside those few minutes, that can be tough. And I've always enjoyed taking people out and they come back and when they land, they, they don't know that they're going to be as tired as they are. Uh, so there's some adapting physiologically that is pretty hard.
17:43 Jocko Willink? Do you have to do, do, did you guys have certain workouts that you did with?
17:46 Dave Berke? Totally. Absolutely. I mean, standard thing, you gotta have like strong glutes, strong hamstrings. And you have to have really good technique for breathing. And if you have the right muscles and the right technique, really anybody of any build can physiologically adapt to high G flying.
18:03 Jocko Willink? How many hours when you were Top Gun instructor, how many hours would you fly a day? That was physically challenging. So like, how many hours are you dogfighting a day?
18:12 Dave Berke? Like in a good day, like a good day at Top Gun, I'd get two, maybe three dogfights. Like three would be a really good day. So we'll just say, let's say it's two. A dog, a, a one against one dogfight flight would be 45 minutes total. And of that, you're probably 25 ish minutes per flight, like under G, like really maneuvering and bending the jet around. So that's what a, a BFM flight would be about 25 minutes of that.
18:38 Jocko Willink? I flew in an F-18. Uh, I did the backseat ride up at Fallon, Nevada, which is where Top Gun ended up. This was before Top Gun was there.
18:46 Dave Berke? Yeah.
18:46 Jocko Willink? Pretty sure. And pulled, I think seven and a half Gs and flew around and did a bomb drop and did a dogfight. So I had like a cool experience.
18:56 Dave Berke? That's awesome.
18:56 Jocko Willink? For, for that. The, the, the mission in the movie?
19:01 Jocko Willink? They have to fly up over this thing and that's a normal procedure because I've done it. It's and I remember this in the pop. That's a thing, right?
19:10 Dave Berke? Exactly.
19:10 Jocko Willink? So talk us through that.
19:12 Dave Berke? Yeah.
19:12 Jocko Willink? So you're flying at low level to avoid radar, which is real.
19:16 Dave Berke? Yeah. That whole mission at the end, every segment of that mission is things that I routinely and what pilots do routinely in F18s on a regular basis. And not like Top Gun pilots, just any pilot as a routine series of pieces of a mission that you would do to include what you described. The low level ingress, the high G pop, the really high climb acceleration, the rolling on your back, high G turn.
19:40 Jocko Willink? Why do you have to roll on your back?
19:42 Dave Berke? So to go from pointed high to pointed low, meaning nose up to nose down because they're diving down towards the target. If you push on the jet going as fast as they are, it's probably five, 600 miles an hour. The number of negative Gs you would, we wouldn't blackout. It's called red out. Like you would put so much blood in your brain that you would, you couldn't, your physiology couldn't do it. So you roll onto your back. So when you pull the, apply the G, it's in the right direction. It's the type of G that you want. And so instead of getting all weightless and floating and just making it really slow and painful, you roll inverted and you pull really hard. Cause it's the type of G's you're designed for. So you roll inverted and you pull down to get into the dive in a way that you can tolerate.
20:20 Jocko Willink? When I did that, the one time I did it, it was awesome how fast that aircraft goes. You're, you're flying right side up, boom, all of a sudden you're upside down.
20:29 Dave Berke? Yes.
20:29 Jocko Willink? It's like instantaneous.
20:30 Dave Berke? It is fast. Yeah.
20:32 Jocko Willink? And then you're, then you can see the, I thought it was so you could see the target better.
20:37 Dave Berke? There is a component of that. So a move like that, like coming over a ridge line. It's to be able to get the jet pointed down towards the target as fast as you can. The, the technique of doing that, you could debate all day, but the maneuver is a real maneuver that we do routinely.
20:54 Jocko Willink? What about the afterburner? Talk to me about that.
20:58 Dave Berke? Yeah.
20:59 Jocko Willink? So you have a drink called afterburner, right?
21:01 Dave Berke? I do.
21:02 Jocko Willink? Afterburner orange.
21:03 Dave Berke? Yes.
21:04 Jocko Willink? Well, why'd you call the drink afterburner orange? And what does afterburner do to a plane? What does afterburner orange do to your brain?
21:10 Dave Berke? Yeah, you know, they both serve very similar functions, which is kind of cool. I think the name for me was pretty obvious. I think in the first like seven seconds of the original movie Top Gun, there's like a jet on a, the Tomcat is on the catapult and goes into full afterburner. And it's this giant, huge orange flame, which is giving this jet a bunch of additional thrust. And most catapult launches you take in what's called full afterburner. And then really the technique behind afterburner in general is you're flying around in a regular engine. It just spins and puts out thrust. Afterburner is where they take literally liquid fuel and they spray it in the back. So it kind of creates like a mini explosion and just shoots a red, an orange flame out the back, but it gives the jet a whole bunch of additional thrust.
21:55 Dave Berke? So what it gives you in somewhat limited timeframes, a bunch of extra speed or a bunch of extra ability to maneuver.
22:01 Jocko Willink? What percentage of extra power am I getting? Is it like double power? Is it like 20% more?
22:06 Dave Berke? So here's an example, like when you're in full power without afterburner, they call it mill. And those engines that you saw, and I'll get close. I'll kind of use the original Hornet. You get about just under 11,000 pounds of thrust in a mill rated engine. If you go to afterburner, you get about 18,000 pounds of thrust. So it's not quite double, but it's a big jump. And if you go from two engines, so 22,000 pounds to 36,000 pounds, you're getting a big additional boost in thrust, a lot.
22:36 Jocko Willink? You can feel it.
22:37 Dave Berke? You, you absolutely feel it.
22:38 Jocko Willink? Go back in your seats.
22:39 Dave Berke? You accelerate quick.
22:42 Jocko Willink? And then you made a drink that's called that. Same thing.
22:45 Dave Berke? It's exact same thing. There are times my normal steady state, I'm pretty good to go for the day. I get up, I'm good till the evening. But there are times I need that little, that little kicker. And that drink, for obvious reasons, the name, but you also get that little hitter that'll give you what you need to get through some more challenging times if you need that little enhancement.
23:04 Jocko Willink? How about staying cool as a pilot? I, I talk about this a lot, you know, from a SEAL perspective, you know, you always want to say, sound calm on the radio to make everyone else calm and make yourself not sound like you're freaking out, losing your mind. How much detachment do you have to have as a pilot to remain calm in pressure situations?
23:24 Dave Berke? A lot. I mean, the concept of detachment is something that's kind of universal. We talk about it in leadership. It's no different than an airplane. The way you communicate and the way you sound is, I think, two things. One, it's a reflection of how detached you are, and you want to be detached because you want to see as many things as you can, especially in a jet. You want to look around and see a lot of things. You don't want to be looking at just one thing. But you also want to give the impression that despite the amount of chaos that's going around, you want the people that you're talking to to think that you're calm. And if they think that you're calm, like, hey, this isn't that bad. This isn't that stressful. We're going to be okay. They tend to react the same way. Now, there are times that on a radio, and it's not all that common, but there are times I want to convey a little extra emotion to get you to move quicker.
24:09 Dave Berke? And I might elevate my voice or speak in kind of a higher octave or a little faster or louder. Those are typically calculated times when I really need a reaction. And I don't think it's much different than the way you described being a SEAL. And it's really no different in any leadership role is the times that I do that, I'm pretty judicious about doing that. And it's because I want to get a reaction. The rest of the time, I want to sound cool, calm, collected, and just like, hey, this situation, this situation is no factor. We're good.
24:37 Jocko Willink? I got some general notes from the movie.
24:41 Jocko Willink? One thing that was interesting was there was one part where a pilot screwed something up, and he's like, this is my fault. Is that standard, taking ownership? Or did you put that in there?
24:54 Dave Berke? At Top Gun, it's pretty standard. By the time you get there, you have figured out early on your career that the standard litany of excuses that you're going to make, first of all, they haven't been tolerated by anybody else. Nobody wants to hear your excuses. And after a while, you come to realize that anything that didn't go well is actually your fault. It's doubly true if you spent your life by yourself in an airplane. I mean, who else are you going to blame for anything that's gone wrong? So the best pilots early on come to grips that any problem that's been created out there is your fault. And, you know, a little humility and whatnot, but yeah.
25:28 Dave Berke? Despite what you might see, the humility that most aviators have to be successful is recognizing that if something went wrong, it's your fault.
25:35 Jocko Willink? There's a scene where, or there's actually a couple of scenes where this happens where Maverick is going against the, the other Top Gun pilots. He's just slaughtering them like time after time after time. And I know you and I have talked about this. That's pretty realistic. I was thinking to myself, if I was watching this, I think, oh, if I didn't know anything, I'd be like, oh, that's unrealistic that he would just go kill everyone. But he actually would. Yeah. If you're that much better of a pilot. Now, he's a Top Gun instructor and these guys are just regular Top Gun pilots. So it's still as realistic that he would just slaughter them all. It's not really competitive.
26:08 Dave Berke? I don't think anybody inside of Top Gun as a student or an instructor would say that the most proficient instructor is significantly better than the most proficient student. Like a big, big, big difference.
26:19 Jocko Willink? Okay, so the best instructor is way better than the best student.
26:24 Dave Berke? Yes.
26:24 Jocko Willink? And so that was an accurate depiction. He's just up there murking people.
26:29 Dave Berke? Yeah. I mean, the students come through, even students that are graduates, they're good. I mean, these are good pilots. This is not that they're not good in the airplane. But instructors are getting so many reps. They got so much experience. They've seen it so many times that the difference between sort of the senior BFM or dogfighting pilot at Top Gun versus, you know, even a Top Gun graduate, there's a huge disparity there.
26:50 Jocko Willink? How about G-lock? Talk me through G-lock. What happens?
26:54 Dave Berke? That's a thing. Absolutely. Fortunately, in the F-18, it's not quite as prominent as it is in some other airplanes. I think the most notorious G-lock plane out there that's flying is the F-16, which is just the coolest jet. It's an unbelievable machine and it is a very, very high G platform. It pulls just over nine Gs. Problem of the F-16 is you can go from one to nine Gs and I think it's like a second or something really, really fast. Yeah. So if your technique isn't perfect and if your physiological conditioning and current situation that day isn't perfect, in that second, you can blackout really fast. So this idea of G-lock, which stands for G-induced loss of
27:34 Dave Berke? consciousness, is a real thing. And so what they teach pilots to do is before the onset of that G, meaning pulling back on the stick, you pre, you start ahead of time by controlling your breathing, tensing the right muscles and anticipating the pull. The problem is sometimes when you have to react, you look over your shoulder and you see you're being shot at and sometimes you'll onset those G's before you set it up correctly. And that's when G-lock tends to happen, but it is a real thing. We have, we have crashed planes, we have killed pilots and we have actually introduced technology design specifically for that because it is a, it's such a common prominent thing where you're killing a pilot
28:15 Dave Berke? in an airplane that are otherwise perfectly functioning correctly and we don't want that.
28:22 Jocko Willink? Bird strike, that's a thing?
28:24 Dave Berke? That is a thing.
28:25 Jocko Willink? That's a thing and you have procedures that you're going to roll through?
28:27 Dave Berke? Hundred percent. It's not common for a bird strike to snuff out a motor like that, but it is, it has absolutely happened. It's very uncommon. Bird strikes are not that uncommon. For a bird strike to get you to crash your airplane, very rare, but not unheard of.
28:43 Jocko Willink? And she's going through, it's a female pilot then. So there's procedures, you're just going to follow these procedures?
28:49 Dave Berke? Yeah, and they were actually pretty close on that too. They weren't super far off the mark. There's a couple of things that a pilot go, oh, that's not right. That's not right. But generically speaking, they, they had it right.
28:58 Jocko Willink? And that's what you have to do. You can't freak out, oh my gosh, you just gotta, oh, here's the procedures, cut this engine, restart this thing, turn off this fuel thing, boom, you just go through the procedures. Are those memorized?
29:08 Dave Berke? They call it immediate action. I bet you I still know the engine fire immediate action. I could probably do it right now.
29:14 Jocko Willink? Check.
29:14 Dave Berke? Want me to do it?
29:18 Jocko Willink? What is the life of a pilot like just day to day?
29:24 Dave Berke? Like at work?
29:25 Jocko Willink? Yeah.
29:27 Dave Berke? Mostly not flying. So, you know, I talked about it earlier is if you go up and fly, let's say once a day, which is more than you normally would in a regular squadron. Prepping for a flight takes a lot of time, but the day to day life of a pilot, especially in the Marine Corps, and it's also very true in the Navy, is you have a job. You're, you're in charge of a department or a division or potentially in charge of the whole squadron. So a lot of your time is dedicated towards the department you're responsible for and the individual Marines or sailors that work for you and what that department has to deliver. So at a bare minimum, you know, you're kind of 50 50 splitting between your role as a pilot and your role as a leader in the squadron.
30:10 Jocko Willink? So I watched the movie and at one point and spoiler alert, whatever, sorry. Tom Cruise gets shot down. Now, in my mind, this is the point where the movie was gonna get really good because they were gonna send a SEAL team in to get him out of there. I mean, this was, I said, okay, cool, this they're gonna get this right. They're gonna get this right, they're gonna make it work. And I was kinda bummed out when that didn't happen until they stole an F-14. And brought the Tomcat back and then I said, ah, you know what, we'll go with it. I still thought we might see some SEALs maybe do some recovery at some point. They kinda blew that. Look, they're not gonna get, they're not gonna be able to nail everything perfectly. And plus, you don't want, you know, a movie that's supposed to be about jet fighters.
30:54 Jocko Willink? You don't want the whole movie to get stolen by, you know, seven minutes of a SEAL platoon going in there and kicking ass and taking names, which, you know, probably could have happened. So, I think they did it right. Just, just to maintain the integrity of the movie and keep the focus on, on the, on the pilots, which is fine. How about the next generation of fighter pilots? You talked about the fact that it's not the plane, it's the pilot, but what about, I thought, there's another thing I thought. As soon as the movie started, I thought, okay, well, this is gonna be human versus computer, human versus AI, human versus drone. That's where I thought it was going. I was surprised that they even put pilots in the other aircraft.
31:36 Jocko Willink? How many generations are we away from having no more fighter pilots?
31:40 Dave Berke? Yeah, I got asked a somewhat similar question after the premiere and I, I think I discovered I might be.
31:49 Dave Berke? I don't know about alone. No, I don't know if I'm wrong. I mean, I'm, obviously the future will be what it is. But my opinion, I think maybe it's not as universally shared as I thought. So, we just really in the last, you know, decade or so, introduced what we call fifth gen airplanes. That's the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning. Of course. The fact that I flew them and flew them both was crazy. Super lucky to get to see that. And I got exposure to that whole new generation of pilots where there's still of airplanes. There's still pilots have never flown either of those. So we just really are at the beginning of fifth generation. And I would say that those planes, the Raptor and the Lightning, you're going to have those things around for like 20, 30 years. A long time.
32:29 Dave Berke? And we are now getting to the part where we're building our sixth gen or building is a strong word. Designing and starting to think about what that airplane will be. So I don't know in the next 10 or some odd years. The next generation is to start being more of a reality. That's going to go another, that'll take 30 years.
32:48 Jocko Willink? Are they putting a pilot in sixth?
32:50 Dave Berke? They are. The next generation plane, which is certainly being designed as going to be a manned fighter. My conclusion is that I won't be in the least bit surprised if that's the last manned fighter we ever built. And I'm just looking like that's 30, 40, potentially 50 years of these two fifth and sixth generation platforms. You know, flying that if we don't do another one after that, it won't surprise me now. I've come to realize that a lot of pilots don't agree with it.
33:15 Jocko Willink? What do a lot of pilots think?
33:16 Dave Berke? I think there is a belief and it might be true for some mission sets. There's a belief that you have to have someone in the cockpit.
33:22 Jocko Willink? Oh, okay. I thought it was going to be the other direction.
33:25 Dave Berke? That I'm
33:26 Jocko Willink? That you were the one person that thought, oh, we still need people for another 50 years.
33:30 Dave Berke? I don't think so. I, and again, I mean, I'm not a hundred percent sure on this, but I think most pilots would tell you. At a minute, well, at a minimum, the next generation is going to be a manned fighter. I think that's kind of a universally known thing. And that there are some people I think believe that you will always have to have someone in the airplane. I think that if in my lifetime, we build an unmanned fighter, I won't be surprised at all.
33:55 Jocko Willink? But from your perspective, the 13 year old, 14 year old that just saw this movie. He's going to be good to go. She's going to be good to go. If they want to get into an aircraft and fly that thing as a fighter pilot, they're going to have that option.
34:10 Dave Berke? No problem. What's crazy is that if you're in that same age I was, if you're 14 years old and you're watching that movie and you actually get on the path to do that, you'll be flying jets in Ten years, you'll be in, you'll be in ten years from now, you'll be flying a fighter. So I qualified in the Hornet. I was 24. And if I think about, you know, from 14 to 24, it's a short amount of time to have that much development from a kid watching a movie to being in the cockpit of a fighter. So if you were watching that as a teenager now and you're thinking I might want to do this, no factor, you're going to get a chance to do it.
34:40 Jocko Willink? That's what I'm talking about. All right. Any closing thoughts on the movie?
34:45 Dave Berke? I liked that movie a lot. I was, it was better than I thought for a lot of different reasons. And, you know, again, there's people out there discussing the things that are wrong. Yes, it is a movie unquestionably. But from what I was looking for, my experience, I was stoked to see that movie.
35:00 Jocko Willink? When's the last time you watched the OG?
35:02 Dave Berke? Oh dang.
35:03 Jocko Willink? Does it hold?
35:05 Dave Berke? The OG in my house is, is a little bit of a thing, like with my kids and stuff. Um, and certainly with my circle of friends. So I've seen bits and to see beginning to end, I cannot remember the last time I sat down and watched the movie. The last time I saw parts or pieces or clips from YouTube, it happens like on the regular. So I know that movie well.
35:26 Jocko Willink? And it holds its, it holds up today?
35:28 Dave Berke? I think so. What's crazy about that movie is how many people in the last 35 years have seen that and think the movie is awesome. There aren't a lot of movies from the eighties that, that can keep up just for just basic, you know, cultural stuff. Like you just look at things like that looks old because there's real airplanes and because there's real flying, I think it holds up pretty well.
35:49 Jocko Willink? Did you get issued aviator glasses?
35:51 Dave Berke? Totally.
35:53 Jocko Willink? Did you wear them at all times?
35:58 Dave Berke? Uh, Second Lieutenant and First Lieutenant Dave Berke wore them at all times at some point. Um, and I think people might know this from my social media posts, between that and my flat top, I outgrew them both, but it took a while.
36:13 Jocko Willink? When, when did you transfer from to an other regular pair of sunglasses from aviators? Do you ever break out the aviators at this point?
36:22 Dave Berke? I broke them out the other day.
36:24 Jocko Willink? To go see Top Gun?
36:24 Dave Berke? To go see the premiere.
36:25 Jocko Willink? Yeah.
36:26 Dave Berke? My wife actually wore my, uh, my flight jacket.
36:29 Jocko Willink? Oh damn.
36:30 Dave Berke? Yeah, so there's a picture out there floating around of her in my, you know, Dave Berke's standard issue fighter pilot jacket.
36:34 Jocko Willink? Is this, is that a leather jacket?
36:37 Dave Berke? It is.
36:37 Jocko Willink? That's issued?
36:38 Dave Berke? It is.
36:40 Jocko Willink? Have you got patches on it?
36:41 Dave Berke? I do.
36:41 Jocko Willink? What's your most sacred patch on that jacket?
36:44 Dave Berke? Uh, the most sacred patch on that is my first fighter squadron, which sits on like your chest. So, um, it's sort of, I don't know how it is in the teams, but you will always hold a special place for your first squadron. And you'll kind of always go back to that first tour, that first deployment, that first experience in that first squadron. And no matter what else you do, you're gonna, that's gonna, that's gonna stay close. So that's what's on there.
37:09 Jocko Willink? Awesome. All right. Well, with that, if you haven't seen the movie, suspend disbelief a little bit, check it out. It might not be the totally accurate movie, but it's a good time. Rock and roll. Go get some. Thanks for joining everybody.
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