Jocko Podcast - 231: Welcome Stiff Competition and Keep Your Ego in Check. Top Gun Fighting Tactics. With Dave Berke

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:01 - Top Gun fighting tactics.  2:27:27 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 2:40:51 - How to stay on THE PATH 3:01:55 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 231 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight once again is Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. So last podcast was with Dan Pedersen. If you haven't listened to that, he was the first officer in charge of the top gun weapons school in the Navy.

It's a great podcast. It was awesome to have him on there. And as I heard him talking the entire time, as I read his book, which is also called Top Gun, an American story, the thing about Top Gun is that it's not just a school for fighter jet pilots to go to. There is a thought pattern. There is a mentality. There is an attitude. And this is not the attitude of, you know, that, and it really, you know, we barely even talked about the movie Top Gun on the podcast with him. And that's because in my mind, I could barely connect the two.

I could barely connect the reality of that original Top Gun school with the attitudes. Look, there's some on the Venn diagram. There's some overlap, of course. But we're not talking about the arrogant jet jockey. We're talking about the attitude of trying to improve, trying to learn, and trying to win. And there is a giant overlap. The biggest overlap that I found,

the largest overlap in the Venn diagrams in my brain, is, well, it's my, kind of fundamental core thought pattern, which is extreme ownership. That's what it boils down to, is this attitude that when you lose a dog fight, and this was very interesting, when you lose a dog fight, you don't blame the plane, you don't blame the other pilot, you blame yourself, you say, okay, this is my fault. Why did I lose? And how can I win? win. And that's something that has possessed my life. And I see all kinds of comparison in there. And I see the same, look, that same mentality, that ownership mentality, it's in good seals.

It's in a good jiu-jitsu school. It's in a good business. It's in a good team. And it's in good leaders. And as it relates to the seal teams, part of this is, when we started using simunition, and we'll get into it. When we started using paintball, whatever you want to call it, simunition slash paintball, this multi-million dollar laser tag system that we have, when you add that in here and you can start dog fighting, you figure out if you're smart, if you take ownership,

you figure out how to win. UFC, Jiu-Jitsu, look, no one really knew who was going to win. fight between a karate guy and a wrestler or a or a Kempo guy and a jiu-tizu guy no one really knew who was going to win until the UFC until people started fighting or whatever valetudo and bezell whatever you want to go when people start to go at it when people when you actually engage in combat and then you ask yourself why did I lose why did I lose and and when you ask yourself why you lost and you don't blame it on the guy was big think of how easy that would be in Jiu-jitsu hey the guy was bigger than me the guy was stronger than me the guy was faster

be those are the reasons why my system didn't work it's this excuse it's that excuse it's another excuse instead of saying you know what I didn't win let's figure out why I didn't win and then let's make some adaptations and so the more I thought about this and I said it you know as soon as he left as soon as Dan left, I was like, oh, we're going to have to go deep on this stuff, Dave, because the better, you know, the better I can understand what it looked like from your perspective, I think it just opens up a better understanding of this whole mentality. So let's talk top gun and let's talk fighter tactics and let's talk winning and owning and making mistakes and learning from mistakes. Like this is how this is what the winning teams do. There was some really interesting points when he was talking about Boyd and he's saying Boyd is saying this aircraft beats that aircraft, which if you think about it, just like we talk about with extreme ownership, if I say, oh, that aircraft is faster, tighter turn or whatever than mine, it's not my fault that I lost.

instead of saying, what can I do to win? How can I win? And to me, that right there, that's the difference. That's the top gun attitude. That's the extreme ownership attitude. It's not my plane's fault. It's my fault. And by the way, if you deliver me a plane, a military industry,

if you deliver me a plane that doesn't function correctly, what do I need to do? take ownership of that and say, let me give you guys some feedback. Here's where this is true. Here's where this fails. Here's where this doesn't work. Here's where the shortfalls are.

If you don't have that attitude, you go, you know what? We don't have a good enough plan. Oh, well, they didn't get it right. Oh, well, we're going to lose now. Oh, well. That's the attitude of blaming others and you never get better.

Yeah. I could talk all day. So this is a cool subject for me. I'm in. Just first things first with the the mentality of Top Gun is I learned more humility at Top Gun as an instructor than anywhere else. That's where I really started to learn humility, which is somewhat if you think about it from the outside, kind of counterintuitive. It's also connected to what you talked about with the movie. Is the closer you get to Top Gun, the farther you get away from the movie.

And to the point that there is literally zero connection because, you know, of course it's a movie. But when you're a kid, you see it and it sort of represents some idyllic thing that looks really cool. And it puts you on a path to want to go do that. And the more you learn about it, the more you realize it's just a movie. Top Gun breeds more humility because of what is going on at Top Gun. The charter for Top Gun is even more daunting than the charter for being in a fighter squadron. So when you're in a fighter squadron, you're supposed to be ready to go to war. You're an operational fleet squadron.

It's probably no different than being in a team. Your job is to be ready to go to war. The charter for Top Gun is to train every single fighter squadron's leaders to lead their most junior pilots into combat. And that is a big, big deal. So when you talk about, am I doing this right or doing this wrong, it isn't just how good am I, or it isn't even really just how good the people around me are, is if what I'm doing impacts the entire, the entire friendly U.S. and allied air forces across the entire globe. And that's a huge charter.

And that generates a lot of humility because you recognize what is you're doing. And it's really hard to understand that until you're on the inside. When I got on the inside of Top Gun, I realized what it really meant to be an instructor, you have a lot of weight on your shoulders and you have to deliver. Did you feel the same attitude of being the people that were responsible for preserving the capability of aerial combat? Did you feel that? Was there a sense that, hey, this is on me? Yeah.

You are part of a legacy. And you are one of the people in the line that's currently working in that line. And you have three years. That's what you're going to get. The obligation that you feel to preserve the legacy and then make it better, which is also pretty daunting because you look back in the history of talking and think, man, how am I going to contribute to this and not to sustain it, but actually improve it? You feel that from day one.

There is a lot of history there, and it's not just history to feel good about it. It's history to give you a sense of what you were a part of and what they expect from you. It's also, I've never worked so hard. I've never put in so many hours, and I've never been more solely focused on one thing than I did in those three years. Even in the fleet, there was a little bit of a balance. When I was a top gun, the balance was skewed so far towards, and I'll just say work just to make it simple. but the balance was so far skewed towards Top Gun that I honestly didn't do, I don't think I ever did anything from Monday morning at 5 o'clock in the morning

till Friday night at probably 6.37 o'clock on a Friday night. Those are the short days. Friday afternoon was a short day. Everything I did was completely connected to work, everything. And I imagine when you compare that to being out in the fleet. Out in the fleet, you got other things going on, right? You got manpower, you got administrative things that are happening, You got whatever deployment cycle and schedule and all this other kind of administrative stuff that just is totally gone when you're at the Top Gun.

The fleet is cyclical. So you have a workup phase and you have focus on this workup and you prep and you have deployment phase and that's a huge amount of focus. And you come back and you kind of have a bit of a letdown phase. You lose some people. They go elsewhere. You get some new people on board and it cycles. And the pace cycles up and down. The responsibility cycle up and down.

What you're trying to do changes all the time. Top Gun is a bullet train. It has been since 1969. You get on that train and there's no cycles. There's no downtime. There's no post-deployment. None of those things happen. So you are just on that train all the time and that train is just moving and it never really slows down where when you're in a fleet squadron I did my first four years in a fleet squadron.

It cycles all the time depending on what you're doing. And those cycles don't exist at Top Gun. So when you went to Top Gun for the first time as a student. Yeah. How long had you been flying an F-18 for? I started flying F-18s, if I can get this right in early 1998, and I got to Top Gun in 2001. So you were kind of a new meet.

I was on the younger side in both time and flight time. So time and flying, total time, and then time in an airplane. So I was a more junior guy. There are certain qualifications you have to get, and one of them is called a division qual, which is leading four airplanes or more. that's a requirement to be there. I got that qual, I think, like the week before I showed up to Top Gun.

So I was really junior to be going, you know, not unprecedented, but I was much more on the junior side and more on the inexperienced side when I got selected to go to the course as a student. And how did you get the nod and not someone else? You know, I mean, some of it's a bit of a numbers game. Every fleet squadron roughly has about 18 pilots. And it varies, but the math is typically one person a year is going to go. So in your three years that you're in a squadron, you know, maybe four, three or four guys are going to go.

Now, sometimes you get two in one year and none the next because you're deployed, but it kind of works out to one a year. But there's also, you know, kind of a window of where you can go. And I probably was competing with maybe 10 guys. It was not all 18. No, some of the squadron commander, some are guys that are not really in the window to go. So over those 10, you know, peers that you have, you're going to probably see one or two of those in your peer group go. during your time of the fleet. And it's based on your performance.

It's based on how well you've done up to that point. There's a bunch of qualifications you got to get. What you've done one deployment at that point? I had done one deployment. And they log every landing that you do on the carrier. And it's all graded. Everything. And so you had whatever a bunch of tens and some nines

and some other guy had a bunch of tens but had an eight. Yeah. They added all up. There's a little more subjectivity to it. Probably the biggest event is, this big culminating event in the fleet and the Navy in the Marine Corps do very similarly is when you get what's called

an ACT air combat tactics instructor qual. It's like the big workup to kind of fully qualify you as a combat flight lead. And it's a huge process and it culminates with this kind of week-long evaluation where an instructor from the weapon school comes out

and you fly out this person for a whole week and it puts you through from beginning to end he puts you the whole thing. At the end, he kind of determines a if you're a qual and then he goes to your squadron commander and basically says, this is how this kid did

compared to the dozens and dozens and dozens that I've done personally as an instructor and the hundreds and hundreds that we've done as a weapon school. And they kind of tell the squawgent commander where they think you are in their experience. And the feedback that my ACT instructor gave my squadron commander

was enough for my squaging commander to look at all the other things he had and then get this external feedback to say, hey, I'm going to send Dave to Topka. Do you guys dog fight in like your regular squadron? You're going against each other. Yes.

And how many guys in the regular squadron have been to Top Gun before? I think when I was there the first time, there were two patchwares in my squadron. So if 18 guys, I think two had, were Top Gun Gradually. And they can kick everyone's ass

in air combat. Yep, they're pretty much. So you get the nod, you go, when you show up there, do you have any inkling in your head that you're going to do well, that you're going to be able to hang? You're just like,

you know 100% that you're getting in with the black, in with the sharks, and with the black belts. Yeah. So I don't have a feeling that I'm not going to succeed, but I have, to be totally honest, I don't have a sense that I'm going to go that I'm going to dominate.

I don't walk in there on day one thinking I'm going to crush this place. I wasn't afraid of failing. And, you know, I've had that feeling in different places. I remember going to OCS the first time thinking, oh, man, I might be in over my head here. But I had no sense of... How long into OCS? Probably a week.

It took me about a week to figure it out at OCS. First week was just kind of a state of paranoia. Like, I'm not supposed to be here. I think I made a mistake. I'm in over my head. Did you not know what you were getting into? I didn't. I did kind of sort of, but I didn't quite get it until I got there.

All the things leading up to OCS were just a whole bunch of administrative things that get you there. It's like paperwork and interviews and applications and GPA and all. Just a bunch of stuff. All it is is on, you know, you have to run physical fitness tests and show that you're qualified. But nobody had ever, I'd never replicated that experience at all. Complete and utter loss of freedom of any kind. Complete and utter loss of freedom. And then, but what kind of shocked me for me at OCS,

and there was a little bit of a detour. When I got to OCS, I looked around and everybody looked, the way they looked, they all looked bigger and stronger than me. And it kind of made me think like, oh man, I'm supposed to look and be, I'm supposed to be six foot one and two and ten pounds. That's what I'm supposed to look like. And I didn't.

I was 18 in OCS. I mean, I was small. And I kind of told myself that what I was on paper wasn't who I was in real life. I'd never really been tested. I'd never been put in a situation I didn't think I could handle. And I get to OCS. And 36 hours after you get there, you're on the first platoon run. And I'm like, I can't run this fast.

I've never run this fast in my life. How is everybody running this fast? And I remember looking around thinking, this is nuts. I had enough fortitude in my mind to not quit. And the thing that helped me the most about OCS is the first time somebody else quit. And the first time I saw somebody else quit, when I got over how weird it looked to see somebody quit,

that actually was a little fuel for a little help for me. And in the first week, people are quitting left and right. And every one of those times was help me. And go, hang on a second, I can do this. Until I got to a point, I'm like, this is no factor. and the latter half of OCS was almost fun. I'm not going to say fun, but it got pretty close.

And by the end of OCS, I thought I was 10 feet tall. But that was the only real time of my life that I went somewhere in the Marine Corps. I don't think I should. I might have made a mistake here. And I proved my, you know, it was a good test for me. So I didn't feel like that at Top Gun. I didn't feel like I was in over my head, but I felt like I was in a big, big, big ocean. And I was a pretty small fish.

And I would have to work really hard to get by. So how long is the Top Gun school? Ten weeks. A little bit over ten weeks, but it's basically a ten week school. Okay. So how many flights are you doing a day? In the beginning, you kind of plan on two, and then about after the first third of the program, it's typically, typically one a day. One flight is an hour, hour and a half?

Flights themselves are about an hour. A one, one point one is what you're going to log for flight time. at Top Gun. One flight a day for five weeks. First couple weeks you said is two, two flights a day? Yeah, so first week is academics. Then you do about two weeks of kind of two a day. Then you get another academic kind of thing in there.

And then you're typically for the last half of one flight a day. How many air combat duels do you get in an hour? So when you're fighting one against one, you're going to get probably four sets, we call them. A set is one engagement. From start to finish, you can get four, sometimes five, and then, you know, depending how it goes maybe three, four is about right. Okay. When you, when you start off, you just said one on one. That's where you start is one on one.

Yeah. Me against you. Yep. That's where it starts. That's right. And I would think that because then the next thing you do is two against one, right? Is that right? That's right.

Who's the other, who's the other? there's one bad guy and there's two good guys. The other good guy is a top gun pilot. Correct. Or sorry, a student. Yeah, so when you go out two against one, it's you with an instructor. Oh. Against an adversary.

Got it. Who's also an instructor. Okay. Yeah. Most of the fights you do up until the end, the really heavy phase, the one against one and the two against one is you are by yourself or you are with an instructor as your wingman. Okay. Well, let's see.

I assumed it would be you and me as students against Echo, the instructor, and we would go out there and beat him up. There are a couple flights like that, but most of the flights, your wingman is your IP, your instructor. And that's because if it was two knuckleheads out there, we just wouldn't, we just wouldn't get anything right. It's not that you wouldn't get anything right. It's that the closer the instructor is to what you're doing, the more he can help evaluate your performance and give you the feedback that you need. Okay, so you go out, let's say I go out, I'm the student, you're the instructor, we go out, we dogfight against Echo, we do three dog fights, four dog fights, it takes an hour, we come back, and look, I've heard you talk about these freaking debriefs, right? What are you telling me as my instructor in these debriefs? What are you telling me and how are you telling me the things that I'm doing wrong?

Is it just cold-blooded because, look, we all know that you know more than me, and I just fully accept it, and I'm like all ears. Is that pretty much where people are at? Yeah, for the most part. Look, I mean, I do not want to understate that their ego is out there, and it's a top gun, it's there as a student. The ego is usually connected to kind of the fear of being exposed as not as good as you are as opposed to the ego of, I think I'm better than you.

And so the ego reveals itself in different ways, but for the most part, most people get there pretty early on, and the disparity between the students, instructors is so great that people aren't really that afraid to just be brutally honest. Now, people aren't jerks about it, but they are brutally honest. And you figure out very early as a student, the two things you figure out is it's in your best interest to identify all of your own mistakes and your instructor's mistakes,

if you can identify those too, because it reveals that you actually know what's going on. The other side is if you don't, the instructors pretty much don't miss anything. So if you have a thought like, man, this was really minor. I'm just going to kind of not talk about this. It's going to get brought up. And it's always better for you to bring up your errors than have somebody else bring them up for you. And that gets in your head pretty quick.

So when we get back from this thing, I'm going to go through the debrief first. I get to kick it off because I'm the student. And I go, hey, I turn too tight there. I didn't use enough gas there. I didn't know where I was for a second over here. I lost track of you, my wingman here. So this is the same thing at when I was running trade at. We would let the platoon's debrief first.

Okay, guys, you tell us how it went. And usually the platoon chief will kick it off. And he's going to hit a lot of stuff. The good ones will. The bad ones, same thing. They'll either covered up or even worse. They don't even know what just happened. They don't even know what mistakes got made.

And, you know, so the platoon chief goes. then maybe the platoon lieutenant goes. And he doesn't see as much usually as the chief, but then the task unit senior chief might go and he's gonna see more. And then the task unit commander, you should get pretty close. And my goal, every single, when I was going through training

with my task unit, my goal was like the instructor cadre will be silent because there will be nothing left. We are gonna rip ourselves apart so hard that the instructor cadre is gonna go. Actually guys, it wasn't that bad. That was always my goal. So that's where we're going. going.

Yeah. And are you having to teach me? Okay, so if you were coming to our desert warfare training and you're a new lieutenant, the first thing I'm going to do is okay, I'm going to say, okay, here's maneuver number one, here's maneuver number two, here's maneuver number three, here's maneuver number four. You got those basic four moves, right? You got four moves that you're going to do. This is what a contact front, you know, the enemy's out front.

Here's what you're going to do. You're in a closed terrain. Oh, the enemy's out front. You're an open terrain. It's a different move. But there's a, there's a basic. number of moves that you're going to go through. That's where we're going to start.

Is this what's happening? Or do you already know these moves? Yeah. When you show up to Top Gun as a student, you know all the moves. You have to have demonstrated some proficiency in all the moves to even get there. Give me an example of let's go. Let's just teach me a couple moves right now. And you know what?

At this point, I'm going to call this. If you're not watching this on YouTube, I'm imagining you might start moving your hands around a little bit, which is, which is, you know, cool with me. but I don't want to keep saying the whole time, trying to describe what you're doing. If you start talking with your hands,

which you might, maybe you won't. But teach me a couple moves right now. Yeah. So when you start in the one against one phase, so it's pretty straightforward. It's your airplane and my airplane. Same exact airplane. You're flying it as a student.

I'm flying it as an instructor. And like you said before, each phase, the instructor will demo a brief, but after that, the flight lead and the person running it is the student. So he runs the brief. He runs the flight. and he runs the debrief. And obviously the instructor's there to support through it.

But the first set of moves would be what we call offensive BFM, which means I start behind you. What's BFM? Sorry, good question. Basic fighter maneuvers. So offensive BFM is the first flight you do, which is one against one. And I am being set up by design in an offensive position to fight, to dogfight you. So we're going to do a dog fight, and we're going to set it up on purpose that I start behind you.

And so I'm going to put you in a defensive position. I'm going to put me in an offensive position. position. And the only real objective there is kind of three objectives is the first thing I need to do is I can prove that I can stay behind you, which is going to require me to do. This is you're the instructor. I'm the student. Okay. As the lead. You want to do it? Yeah, yeah. Let's make me the student because I'm going to have more dumb questions. Perfect. So I'm the student. You're the instructor. The first thing we do is I'm going to start behind you. Is that right? No, so I got it backwards. So if we're going to do offensive BFM, you're the student. You're going to lead the flight.

You will be offensive starting all day. So when we start the fight and we do those, we do those four sets, all four sets, you will be behind me. I'll be the instructor. And your job is to maintain that offensive position. Got it. And the moves that you're going to do during that, there's only like three moves. The first is called an offensive break turn, which means that when I react to you as a defender,

and I don't like this because you're over my shoulder and I'm going to try to shake you. you have to show the timing and the site picture to maneuver your airplane to stay behind me. And then the next move might be is that you have to be able to do a maneuver to avoid flying into the ground. And we have a simulated ground. So we save 5,000 feet to the ground. You have to do another maneuver that you can show me that you can transition down to the bottom of the of the fight, of the, of the fight and the deck correctly. And then the last move that you might be trying to do is that you can put yourself in a position to employ a weapon. Now, you know how to do all those things.

You know how to do a break turn. So a break turn is I'm turning my aircraft. That's it. You turned yours. Are you doing like a shuck and jive here where you go a little bit in one way and then you break the other way? Is there anything like that that's happening? No, there's not. So there's that because we're keeping it basic?

No, it's because there's actually kind of a science behind it. And there's, in each situation, especially in this rudimentary phase of one against one, there's essentially one optimal way to maneuver your. aircraft and it's different if you're defensive than if you're offensive but as a as an offensive so I'm offensive as the student or your offensive as a student you don't have like 14 different things you can do as a matter of fact you kind of have one and what you need to be able to do is do it exactly right because if you're one second too late 10 knots too slow or any number of other variables off you're giving away chance for me to get away from you so for you for you

you to stay offensive and keep that offensive position that I've given you, you have to perform that maneuver correctly. Does the defensive guy shuck and jive a little bit? No, to be quite honest, what the defensive guy does is pulls directly at the offensive airplane, pulls right at him, closes the space as much as he can, tries to create some space, limit the space, and then I'm going to maneuver away from you based on how well that you do your turn. And if you do it right all day, eventually you're going to end up in the same place that you started. I will not respond by, like you said, shucking, you're driving or maneuvering

until I see what you've done. Okay, so you're just being nice. I am flying my airplane the best way that I can until I see how you respond to that. And if you do it correctly, then I'll have to start doing other maneuvers. But if I just break into you

and just pull my airplane right into yours, really hard turn, we call it a break turn. And you as the offender are, really late or screw up the timing or go too fast or miss the cues to do it, there's not much for me to do. I don't have to do much because you've given away that offensive advantage. So you're flying flat, dumb and happy. I come in behind you. Yep. And you're just going to, at some moment, boom, you're going to turn left, right, whatever, and I just have to track you and stay behind that's exactly right. It seems very simple. It seems very simple. Do you even head fake?

Right? Can I see your head in your canopy? So the way that the ranges that we start are typically a half a mile, a mile and a mile and a half. Those are kind of just a predetermined ranges. So you're way, way, way out there. You're actually, for most of those, you know, at least the start, you're using the radar as a cue to determine that range. You kind of have some eyeball calibration. But the head fake, again, someone who knows what's going on, all it does is just give away more advantage. The head fake doesn't help you.

The best thing you can do is just break hard. Max performance. What if I was a mig, you know, and I was going after you, what's the best thing? I'm on your tail. What's the best thing you can do? Same thing. Exactly, same thing. The tactics that we apply are the ones that we use in the real world.

How is it not good to give a little shuck and then go the other direction? Because what that does is that creates separation between our aircraft. And if I'm offensive and I'm the guy attacking on behind you, I want separation to be able to maneuver, employ my weapons, saddle in the way that I want and adjust the situation, the way that I'm looking to have it be. offensive for me if you minimize that separation create a bunch of closure meaning we're now closing the distance I have a whole much of maneuvering I have to do to manage that closure which I don't want to do so when I'm on defense I want you closer to yes when I'm on defense I want you closer to me that's correct interesting interesting just like Jitsu your optimal position on offense is to have

their back because they can't see properly they don't have any weapons that shoot backwards, right? No, you're right. So just like Jiu-Jitsu, you want to get the person's back. Yes. So that's where we're at. So this is day one. We're doing this.

All we're doing, so that's one move. You just taught me one move. I'm sorry, it took so long. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. The first thing you teach me is, hey, I'm just going to break. And, well, now it's, I'm going to break, and you're going to break. and you're going to follow me. Okay, what's the next move?

Move two. You're going to teach me three moves. Yeah, I'll teach you three moves. So remember, you're the student. You're offensive. Because right now, this is easy. I'm ready to be a top. All I got to do is break.

Are you kidding me? Let's do this. I got this. Well, the interesting thing about the offensive break turn that I just taught you, the percentage of students that get that right in the beginning is zero. Zero.

And the percentage of the time that you get it exactly right, meaning you've hit all your parameters is even by the end is still really low. Now, you've narrowed your error window pretty, pretty small. But even just the simple, when do I do my turn and when do I identify all the cues and know exactly what to do and exactly how to make it happen, just doing that very first move is almost impossible for a student to do correctly the first time. So let's say, I said, oh, what about a head fake, right?

if I'm in the offensive position behind you, I can see the very first indicator. As soon as I see your flaps do whatever, they move a little bit and I'm on it. Yes. The quicker I react, the better I stay with you. Yeah.

The more you can observe, and there's multiple cues out there. It's the angle of your airplane. It's whether or not your afterburners have opened up. It's your angle over the horizon. It's how quickly you're moving. It's whether you're really. Rotating or transitioning through the sky there's a whole bunch of cues out there that you have to be able to identify in real time as you're moving typically

400 and something knots so the closure is happening really fast you have seconds to get this right you call it closure But we're both moving in the same direction right not when I break back into you so if I've got this guy behind you know I'm behind you and you break you're breaking into me You're turning into me creating even more closure So picture The picture you're flying around and you look over your shoulder and you think, and you don't realize this. Now of a sudden you see somebody's there. They're behind you and they're in a really good position to shoot. The only place for you to go to keep him from shooting you is towards him.

Because if you continue straight ahead or just kind of maneuver around left and right, I just stay back there. So you have to get, you have to turn back into me to close that distance. Guess what that's exactly like. For sure, man. Exactly like Jitza. Yes. Right? You, you, as long as you're.

looking away, as long as they have your back, you're doomed. So your goal, you have to turn back towards them. That's right. It's weird for me, I think, conceptually because this is taking place over a long distance, right? Yeah. Like when I'm trying to turn back into you, it takes, how long as it takes turn back into them?

A minute? 30 seconds? No, seconds. Seconds? Yeah. So you will go from the time that you say fights on, which you would say and then I would start to turn into you, if you did nothing, and just flew straight ahead, I would be past you in four seconds.

I did a dog fight in an F-18. I did a bunch of, I did a backseat ride up in Fallon, and I did a dog fight. I did a bomb run. It was really cool. But one thing, and I saw and did with the pilot guy,

was you can fish tail. Is this right? Am I perceiving this correctly? Like we turned, like our wingman or whatever, turned so hard, you could see them fish tailing through the sky. Yes. So I guess that cuts down your amount of time that it takes to turn.

Yeah, and that's a cue. You have to be able to see that and perceive that. And if he's doing that maneuver, that indicates how fast he's going. It indicates his angle of attack. It gives you a whole bunch of information about what he's doing. You need to be able to perceive that that's happening. You can, in your own mind, you can figure, is he turning a small circle, a big circle? You can calculate all those things in your brain as that's happening.

That is a cue that you need to know in that other airplane. as he's doing it. Are you getting taught these cues specifically? Yeah, you know the cues, you know the moves, the planes are being flown in such a precise and aggressive way that they are hard to see. And that's really what the debrief is about, is dissecting the cues that you need to figure out in order to maneuver your airplane optimally. It's probably no different than jujitsu. If you were to give me your back, say, hey, we're going to start, Dave, I'm going to give you my back. And all I want you to do is maintain that position. How long do you think it would take you before I couldn't keep your back.

It would probably a matter of seconds. Yeah, pretty quick. Yeah. But if you said, hey, as I start to lower my shoulder and I put my, I want you to kind of bring your hip towards me and you show me that. Now, there's probably 20 other things going on, but now I got that. It's going to add another two seconds before you, before you out maneuver me. Now eventually you will.

And then you show me something else. And now, so the goal is for me to incorporate all of those little individual things together. And the eventual goal is that I've started. this offensive position and I never give it up. So that's one move. That's one move. One move. What was it?

What's the name? Offensive break turn. Offensive break turn. What's the next move? So the next move is when me as the instructor figure out, hey, you're doing a good job. My defensive turn here isn't going to work for me. He's just going to stay behind me. He's going to shoot me.

I'm going to do something else. You kind of call that I'm going to shuck and jive. I'm as a defender going to maneuver my airplane in a different plan of motion. That first move didn't work. You followed me, and if I keep going, you're going to shoot me. So I have to do what's called a ditch, which I'm going to now point towards the ground and change this two-dimensional fight into a three-dimensional fight. Complicates the problem for you, gives you a different thing you've got to deal with,

and now you have to figure out how to chase me not just two-dimensionally, but three-dimensionally. And you're going to have to follow my ditch. And we just call that simply a ditch follow. There's different terms for it, but it's can you now take this two-dimensional flat fight and be as effective in a three-dimensional fight, which introduces a whole other level of complexity. Now we're going downhill. And this was the big thing that Dan kept talking about,

depending on the aircraft that you have and the power that you have. We're going to go from horizontal plane to vertical plane. To vertical plane. And so this ditch move is the first movement into three-dimensional, out of the horizontal plane into this other plane. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that seems pretty straightforward.

It does seem straightforward. All of these maneuvers are straightforward. How, what altitude are you at when you, what's the minimum altitude above ground that you can start this maneuver at, this ditch? Depending on the airplane, a good rough number is between three and four thousand feet before you think, hey, if I go much, if I'm much lower than that to the ground and I do it, I have a pretty good chance to hit in the ground. You need several thousand feet to do it. Okay. Third move. The third move is that when I get down to the, to the ground, the floor.

You know, we call it the deck, but you're down towards the earth. We now have to do a deck transition, which means that now I can't move in vertically anymore. Because if I keep going downhill, I'll hit the ground. So now I have to transition back into a two-dimensional fight and preserve my position in a two-dimensional fight with the ground as a component of this fight now, which was not a factor up at altitude. This means you're having to just gain altitude again? Is that what we're doing? The goal is to do one of two things. Either I now can gain altitude above him

or I can push him out in front of me and stay behind him. Either one of those work for me, but I need to have some separation from the person I'm fighting so I can employ my weapon. I can't shoot the guy at zero feet away from him. I have to have some distance between us. I can either have that distance above him or behind him. Just like Jiu-Jitsu,

just like this more moves into MMA, where if you're trying to hand him, hit me, I want to close the distance, get close to you, where your strikes won't really make a difference. Yeah. The parallels are, I mean, there might be some differences in terms of, like, the physical locations of the machines against it with the people, but the parallels, they're exactly the same. As a person who's offensive, if you think about finishing somebody and the way I'm going to finish is through a strike, which is kind of similar to what these weapons are, I need to have some distance between you and me to make that strike effective. Now, there's a

distance that if I get too close, those strikes just don't work. There's also a way that if I get so far away, the strikes are ineffective or it actually allows you to strike as well. And so I'm constantly managing those those separations and distances. And if I'm defensive and I look over and I see that person's in a great place to just throw a punch at me, I can either try to get away from him, which almost never works at that distance, although there is a separation that you might try to play. But at that, we started off was like, hey, you were starting in a place that We know running away won't work. So that range of a half a mile a mile,

it's designed to say the escape option is not available to you. So the only other option is, is I've got to close that distance to you. I can't let your strike be effective. And I'm going to wrap you up as best I can to do that. That's the defender's job. So what's this third move called? The deck transition.

Deck transition. But it sounds like there's multiple options on how you transition from the deck. There are. And all those options are all accumulating. they're all an accumulation of how things have played out the entire way from the beginning of the fight down to the end of the fight.

So remember, I started that fight 6,000 feet behind you. I'm a mile behind you. If you do everything right and I do everything right, guess where I'm going to be at the deck transition. A mile behind me. Six thousand feet behind you. I'm going to be a mile behind you

and I'm going to be good to go. But if you've done a better job that I have, I've missed some cues. I'm a little bit late. I'll lose 500 feet here. I'll lose 75 feet here. I'll lose a thousand feet over here. I'll lose another 50 feet here.

And each one of those moves that I'm doing down to the floor, you've chipped away. By the time we get down to the floor, you know where the fights against top gun instructors usually end up. Either zero or worse, the defender has become the attacker, which happens sometimes. So that 6,000 feet,

it's pretty uncommon to be able to preserve that distance against a top gun instructor from beginning to end. And each part of the fight in each maneuver that's being executed, you're fighting, you're fighting for that distance. Again, apologize. I'm the student. You're the instructor. I start off 6,000 feet behind you.

You break, turn. You do it successfully. You're now closer to me. Yes. And then you break turn again and you're even closer to me. Yep. And you break turn again and you're even closer. Then you ditch and you get even closer.

And then finally, you either are so close to me that you're, behind me. That happens. What's the other thing? If you don't get behind me, what if we're just now we're really close? So just realize, obviously we're not going to get so close that we're going to hit.

And so the distance of going from 6,000 feet a mile to being something less than that, if we were zero feet apart, we'd be parallel right beside each other. We wouldn't be zero feet. Obviously, the airplanes have a safety bubble between them. But when we transition down to the ground, I'd look across and instead of being directly behind

you, I'd be directly beside you. And I'd have no way to shoot you just looking at you side by side. We'd be in a completely neutral position where nobody can shoot the other person. And I've given away an entire mile of advantage that you gave me or that I gave you at the start as a student. Okay. How we doing? We're doing good.

I mean, there's something still a little bit hard for me to understand at this point. You two echo Charles? A little bit. But I guess so because you keep got to remember or you got to keep remembering that the distances are way far away. Like, you know, when you watch Top Gun, it's like, oh, they're like right there and they're shooting each other. And, you know, but they're like super far away.

But they're also kind of not because it's only a, it's a second or it's two seconds or whatever to travel that mile. Well, the best thing I could do other than explain this better would be to erase from everybody's memory the movie Top Gun. Because if that's where your head's going, this isn't going to work. Well, yeah, because you're like, hey, close the distance. So I'm like, okay, close the distance. But then yes, you got to remember as well that there is no, because essentially like, okay, like in Jiujitsu or MMA, where it's like green zone meaning save zone if you're too far away from the guy, he can't punch or kick you, whatever.

Green zone when you're close, he can't punch and kick your effect. But there's the red zone, which is that distance, right? So in, and correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm trying to understand this too, where that initial green zone, the out of range green zone, that's not an option in this particular drill. What is it? What is it? Is it like 10 miles, 12 miles? The separation in terms of, if I'm on your tail, how far away are you from me that I bet you're not in danger? Miles.

Yeah. Several miles. Yeah. And that's not an option for this particular trail. It's by design. This 101 and so one phase, we build it where you running away at the start, you can't do it. You can't just go faster than me. So you start, we start, I'm behind you, you're in the red zone.

Yep. and you want to close the distance to get close enough to me that I can't fire my wife. That's the second right. The close green zone. Yeah, well he's behind me. My goal is to

take that 6,000 feet separation and make it zero. Yeah. Or as close to it as I can get. Yeah. It's like closing the distance in Jiu-Jitsu basically. Don't you, okay.

Don't you, when you hit a break turn and I'm slow, doesn't that make me further away from you? No, because I'm turning back towards you. you're behind me. I'm rolling my plane and pulling it directly into your plane. And I'm literally going to point right at you as hard as I can and take whatever that I can get,

whatever that 6,000 feet is and close as much distance as I can as fast as I can. And I'm not going to get much, but I'm going to get something. What's the turning radius of an F-18? It's totally airspeed dependent, but at the speeds that we're talking about, the turning radius is probably 3,000. 4,000 feet. Dang.

That's tight. Yeah. Well, when you're slower, it's much tighter. The slower you get, the shorter your radius is. Okay. And so even that point that you made about the turning radius, that's a massive calculation. You're getting deployed right there. I have to know what your airplane is capable of doing at 18,000 feet at 400 knots in full

after burner because it's different than what your airplane can do at 10,000 feet. at 250 knots. And it varies in every three-dimensional plane, it varies. And I have to figure out, I have to be able to determine what your airplane is capable of doing and base my maneuver, part of my maneuver based on that. That's why these simple moves are so complex in terms of implementation, getting it right,

because there's so many things going on. Because even your physical ability in your aircraft changes based on your altitude and your airspeed. It's constantly a variable. It isn't your F-18 just does this. Every single altitude, every single airspeed, every single throttle position has a different output capability that you're able to generate. Dramatic differences? Yeah, it's very dramatic.

What an airplane can do at 15,000 feet versus what an airplane can do at 5,000 feet is dramatic. Big difference. Percentage-wise, just rough percentage-wise. You probably have your turn radius of probably a third the size that low altitude than it would be up at altitude. So instead of you're talking 3 to 4,000 feet, you're talking closer to, And I'll just keep it generic, but, you know, a thousand to 1,500 window, much, much, much smaller. Okay. So we get done with our first three engagements on my first flight.

I did whatever job, you know, I did a pretty crappy job because no one does it the first time. That's right. Okay. So now we come back in for the debrief. And what do we look? Are we looking at a dry race board? Are we picking up the little planes with the sticks on them? Both.

You're looking at a straight up dry erase board with colored pens. Do we have video? Yep. And we got video. We've got the what's called the HUD view, essentially the first person view of the pilot's view of both aircraft. Do you replay like the radar as well or not really? Not in the one-on-one phase.

Because it's two-dimensional. Yeah. Well, it's not that it's two-dimensional. It's that, you know, there's only one aircraft. So in terms of how you're managing that system is not that important. When you account for how well you shot your weapons, you might look at that. But 95% of what you're,

looking at is just the altitude and the air speed and the angle of attack of each airplane through that pilots view. Okay. So now you're debriefing me. How much do I as the student? What percentage you go, okay, Jocko, what do you see up there? You've got, how many points do you have on your checklist? Me and the stakes that I made.

Instructor, um, 20. Okay. How many do I get? How many do you, you say, you tell me to debrief how many do I? And I'm a humble guy. Yeah, yeah. And I have a good attitude and I'm trying to give you a good percentage. Do I get, do I get seven?

Do I get 10? I was going to say five or six on day one. You're going to get five or six. You're going to get the big ones. You're going to get the big ones. Again, you've know these maneuvers. You've been flying F-18s for three years. You've been through a training course.

You're going to get all the big ones for the most part. You know, here and there, some folks kind of get overwhelmed. But for the most part, you've got the big ones. You're now doing an assessment of me. Like, this is just in your own head. Because are we paired up for the whole time? We're at Top Gun, is it you and me? No.

No? But you're going to see me five more times, eight more time, whatever the numbers. You're looking at me and you're going, eh, or you're going, hmm, guys got some potential. It's not bad. Is that based on my experience? Is that based on the time I've gotten the aircraft? Is it based on, hey, this guy's got a little natural ability. Is it all the above?

I think it's all the above, man. It is. I've listened to you talk about this when you first lock up in jiu-jitsu and you don't know 100% of this other guy but you know a lot right away like right away

it's the exact same thing almost on that first turn when I'm the instructor and I'm looking over my shoulder on your very first break turn I'll get about 75% of what I need to know about you in that turn

and sometimes it's like oh man okay this is gonna be lots of learning Yeah, and that sounds like, damn, that was pretty good. And you can feel that in a very same way in an airplane. It does not tell the whole story. But it gives you a really good cue and a really good indicator of who that person is in terms of flying the airplane. And that's a big part of it.

But I am much less concerned about how well you flew your machine than I am about how well you can explain what happened. And so the debrief is still a huge part of what my assessment is about you. and I won't really know what that debrief is going to be like until we get in there. But if you show me, if we lock up and I feel like you're in the game and you fly a really good airplane, I bet you that your debrief's going to be really solid. If I'm out there with a kid who's all over the place,

he can barely keep his plane where it needs to be, it's very likely his debrief's going to be just as bad. You know what's interesting is this. I'm thinking about this idea of when you lock up with someone on the jiu-jitsu mats of justice. Yes, sir. You could lock up with, nine different types of people and they all feel totally different, but the indicators that

you're getting are providing you with messaging that you have to have a high depth of knowledge to understand. My clear examples, you get the guy that's just super strong, right? And he's super strong so you feel all this tension but you know as soon as you lock up with him you go oh he's strong he doesn't know what he's doing right like that's crazy that you can sense he's really strong but he doesn't have jiu jiu jutsu you lock up with someone that's all lanky and skinny and pale and just and you lock up and they're weak they're weak and you lock up with them and you go uh-oh this guy's got some skills you can tell that when you lock up even though the messaging that you're getting to your brain is totally opposite.

They're totally opposite. And then occasionally you get someone that you lock up and you're like, oh, this person's strong and they know jiu-jitsu. This is going to be fun. This is going to be a challenge. But it's interesting that you can gather all that from we just, you know, that lock up and maybe a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of movement. I'm talking two seconds of movement, three seconds of movement.

You're like, okay, this is going to suck. This is going to be hard. Or, okay, I'm going to have weather the storm here. This guy's strong, but he's know what he's doing. That's a, I don't know if that's completely unique to Jiu-Jitsu. And maybe you're getting guys that, do you notice that level of understanding based on this guy's, you know, initial reactions? You get a good read.

The way you described it, I think, is exactly how I would describe it. You get a good read. It doesn't determine the outcome. You don't know everything. But in those for in I'll call it the first three or four seconds It's really the first one or two turns You watch a couple of turns out of a guy You know what you're dealing with for the most part and you know what a good turn looks like

And you know what a weak turn looks like and if a guy gives you two weak turns You kind of know how it's gonna play out what what does a good turn look like? What does a bad turn look like? A good turn versus a bad turn is his His angle towards you is exactly exactly where it's supposed to be. There's no too high or no too low. It's exactly on the plane that it's supposed to be, down to the degree.

And you're like, wow, he gave me, he gave away nothing in that turn. Because I can oversteer. You can, you can oversteer. I can understeer. That's right. You can do both.

You can pull not enough. You can pull too much. You can overturn. You can under turn. You could be a little late on your after burger. You could be a little early on your after burger and get going a little too fast. And it opens up your circle even bigger, which gives me even more room.

And so the, margin of that of the four or five things that you're in control of you got to get now hold on you yeah you just said it gives you more room it gives you more room because i hit i thought you i thought you wanted to have more room oh no you want to close okay i got it i got it no i'm it's it's definitely confusing to me yeah and and i i'll need to kind of maybe as we keep talking i'll try to there's a lot of what we're talking about here in this one against one that's that's really cool and reveals a lot of things, but it's a really small part of what we're asking folks to do at Top Gun

and what you're really trying to train to. And I need to just explain it a little bit more simply and more rudimentary in a way that, hey, what the objectives are so that as we talk more about what Top Gun is, it'll make more sense. It's just, it's not quite as simple as I want to close the gap and you want to close the gap. What I'm really trying to maneuver to is a place where I can employ a weapon.

And now there's like this weapon has this minimum max range. This weapon has this minimum max range. And I might try to start for a gunshot, but like, oh, that's going to be hard. So maybe I'll maneuver to a missile shot. Well, this missile has this envelope. Well, I'm outside of that, but this missile has another envelope. So there's a lot of overlapping things. I think the biggest takeaway is, is that in order for me as the defender or you as the attacker,

the offensive airplane, for either of us to succeed in our role, the margin of air at top gun is really small. The capacity to identify your mistakes and those errors is what the real test is. And that happens in the debrief. But you can fly a plane against another aircraft and look over the horizon and watch you fly. I can fly against you. And I can tell from the way you move your plane through the sky how good you are. And I can see it. And I can feel it and I can watch it and I can calculate it and I can most of the time in the first two turns tell you exactly how the fight's going to play out. Now if you show up and you give me those first two turns are every bit as good as mine. Now it's like, man, I don't know how this is going to. Now you're in a real fight. Student

against instructor, it just doesn't happen. Yes. They just can't bring that level of capability and that performance. You're never contemplating the outcome. You're mostly contemplating how well they minimize their errors and how well they optimize their performance to give away as little as possible. Okay. So in the debrief, you're like, hey, you know, you, you, you pulled too hard. Here's what happened. Look right here. You see, you see this? You pulled too hard. That's why I'm drifting out of the screen or whatever, because you pulled too hard. Yeah. Is this something I go, okay, cool, got it. Is it a relatively easy thing for me to note and I'm learning it? It's like, Oh, I mean, in Jiu-Jitsu, I'd say, hey, you know, you're, you need to squeeze your knees together, right?

On an arm lock, hey, you could have done better, but your knees were loose. Squeeze your knees next time. And that's something he can factually start doing, like at that next arm lock. He tries it again and boom, he tightens knees and he gets it. So this is a similar level of correction and ability to make those corrections. Yeah, it's almost immediate because everything I'm telling you, you understand. I'm not teaching you a concept and I'm not showing you a move that you don't know

I'm revealing a little bit of an error that you know, hey, what you did here was just like, hey, you need to have your hips here and you need to have your arm here. But you get that. You're like, oh, man, I can actually recall that my hips weren't where you said. That makes sense now that I'm seeing this.

And typically the way you would have that work is, hey, do you think you're earlier or late on this entry here? I'm going to go, I'm super late. I'm like, yeah, why do you think you're late? Well, first I saw your airplane kind of, a move, which tells me I'm late, but I also look up and you're doing this airspeed 470. Hey, you know if you're doing 470, you should have turned already, right? So what's a kid?

And see, hey, I need to start this turn sooner and I need to look for different things. And he can go out in the very next flight and almost immediately make that correction. So that's good. So where we're at right there is I like, I caught this. I saw your airplane move so I knew I was late. I've said this about Jiu-Jitsu. If you have to think about the move, you're too late. If I take a second, if I go, oh, Echo's arm is available right now, I think I'm going to go for it.

He already defended it. I had to have felt it and acted on it. Same thing? That's exactly the same thing. What do you see? Yeah. What do you see? What's a little indicator?

So the indicator is if I'm far enough away as you're turning, so you're offensive. If I'm far enough away and you're watching me and you're looking for a cue on when you should start your turn, if I'm far enough away, I kind of just, I appear to just be rotating in the sky because I'm so far, you don't see it,

you don't see the lateral move. You don't see my airplane moving across the sky. I almost appear to be stationary. But the closer I get, and you can picture this, like seeing something far away doesn't have a high crossing rate and something like a car. You look at a car a couple miles away.

You don't see it moving back and forth. And as it gets close, you see this movement back and forth and it's a lot easier to see. What we tell people is you look for the queue that when he stops being stationary in the sky and starts to move across the sky, you're at the range of which you should start to turn your airplane. The problem is, is I'm sitting there staring at you going, okay, I'm waiting for him to move. I'm waiting for him.

Okay, I see him starting to move. And then you're late. And so it's that visual cue of rotating to translating through the sky, which occurs at an exact range. It's a mathematical range of which you can see that. you have about a second to be on time. And if you're a second early or a second late, you've missed that window. And if you're looking for it, it's too late.

You're looking for the attitude. Is that the right word, the attitude of the aircraft? No, you're looking for the way the aircraft moves. I would call it the crossing rate. So if I'm five miles away from you and I'm staring at you, you could be moving pretty aggressively, but I don't have to move my head to keep up with you. You're so far away.

You're just a little dot. You're just moving. The closer I get, the more it's obvious, I can, oh, he's actually moving back and forth. You know, these really small turns, actually the closer you get are huge turns. And so at some point, the turn of you rotating through the sky actually appears to be moving across the sky. Got it. That range, I'll say it roughly a mile. Just keep it simple.

That's the point at which you can, you can, that transition from rotating to moving. That's about at that mile. you have to know where that is. As soon as that happens, you have to start turning. And I'm teaching you to look for that. Now, you already know what that is. You can explain it. You can teach it.

But it's the ability to do it against an aircraft moving as dynamically and as aggressively as I'm going to be when you're fighting me is where the challenge comes from. And to prepare for this to come to school, a lot of the guys you've been flying with don't show you. the optimal maneuvers. They show you a pretty good maneuver, but not an ideal maneuver.

And that's just because their lack of ability? They're just not as good. And you know, you've talked about when guys like Dean train to go fight in the UFC, they don't just have one training partner. They have one guy who's exceptionally good at maybe this one thing.

He's really good at grappling. Maybe this guy's really good at striking. Maybe this guy's really good at judicious. And he's going to train to be really good in all those things as opposed to just his training partner. Well, he's a little weak in this, but he's my training partner.

Hey, if my training partner has some strengths here, but he's not great here, you're going to show up to Top Gun, and we're talking about this one particular skill, you're going to get overwhelmed. All right. So how many flights do we do like this where we're just one-on-one?

Five, six. Do you ever go, as the instructor, do you ever go on offense, or is that just too easy, or is that part of it? That's part of it. That's the next flight. The next flight.

Yep. Once you... You don't let me get another crack at the title? Well, if your fight is so bad that you couldn't even stay behind me, we're going to go do it again. But as soon as you proved to me, hey, you've demonstrated that you're good enough, you understand what's happening, that you can maintain this offensive position. We're moving on. Didn't you say zero people execute a good turn?

Zero. Perfect turn. So a marginal turn still keeps me in the game? You're going to have four different sets. So I'm hoping that each one gets a little bit better. If you have one of those three ranges that wasn't good, I'm going to have you do it again. Hey, let's do that 9,000 foot one real quick.

Let's do it again. Show me one more. And if you're in the window and then in the debrief, you can really explain to me what your errors were. And I truly think that you understand what those were. I don't need you to go do it again. If I finish the debrief and I can tell you're lost, I can tell you don't really know what happened

and you didn't really execute and can't explain why, we're going to go refly that until you do it again. How many out of 10, how many would you have to reload? Out of 10 pilots, how many do you have to reload and say, you know what? Eight. Maybe nine. Nine out of 10? My class.

Why did you say it's the next flight? We're already doing something else then. It sounds like we need to do this shit again. Well, what we skipped is something I've mentioned you once before. Most of those reloads, you don't even get to the debrief. We do what's called an immediate refly. We land. We go back.

and I say, Jaco, don't take off your flight gear. Sign for this airplane. We're going right back out and doing it again. Don't you want to tell me what I did wrong? I'm going to. And the time that it takes to walk from the airplane

to maintenance to sign for the airplane and go back to the airplane in that 15 minutes, you're not going to talk for the entire 15 minutes. Hey, I want you to start looking for this. You're consistently late. Look for this cue. Pay attention to this. Hey, I need you to slow down.

Relax. You're going too fast here. You're going too slow here. And I'm going to give you three or four things to think about. I'm going to go do it again. And that's usually a nice. to get you to kind of get back to your composure

and get back to doing it again. And my first, when I went through as a student, only one student in my class got past the first flight on the first try, one guy. Was his name Dave? It was not.

That would have been pretty epic if it would have been. It was pretty epic. It was not me. I was lucky enough that I had one refly and it was that very first flight. I reflued that first flight on immediate refly and I never reflued a flight again, which was, which was kind of crazy.

Did you kind of want to get more reflify so you get more time flying? No, I didn't. I wanted to pass the flight on the first try. They, we could tell the story some of the time, but I got plenty of flight time, but I wanted to pass. I wanted to do well enough on my first flight to pass. That's what I wanted to do when I was there. Okay, so now we finished with this one-on-one.

Yep. What's, well, we finished with the first flight. now so I was on offense now you're going to go on offense and I'm trying to shake you yeah you're going to be on defense we're just going to swap rolls and all I'm doing is doing a freaking tight turn that's it there's no shock there's no drive jive there's no it seems why is it seem like that just like I could do something a little bit better yeah like how come you guys couldn't think like me yeah I mean I think the jiu jitsu parallel is Probably pretty good.

If you and I are going out there and I'm like just going to, and I just start getting wild with you and just turn to throw these crazy things. And I'm trying to throw these crazy moves your way to try to shake you. Is it really going to be a problem for you? No. Is it going to make it easier for you? Yeah. Yeah. It's going to make it easier than if I just do like exactly what I'm supposed to do.

And there's sort of one or two things that I really have to do. I have to put my body in this place. I have to put my weight in this place for this to work. And if I don't have those two, all the other stuff that I'm doing for you is just like, what are you doing, man? Like it's just almost like it's just it does it does nothing but make it easier for you to attack my position That being said If you're on defense as the instructor you can do a break a ditch a deck a deck transition and then another break and then another like you can pile these moves on top of one another Right. Oh yeah I mean this happens multiple times in a flight. Yeah you're doing ditch and ditch and ditch and the

That's happening several times. It's not just three moves that those moves might happen several times. So those are the moves then. Yes. The moves are. Those are the moves. So in Jiu Jitsu, there's a really easy way to explain this. Escaping the Mount, right?

When you escape the mount, you can either basically, you can either opa, the guy over your left shoulder, over your right shoulder. You can knee escape or you can elbow escape their right leg or their left leg, right? You can go in any one of those four spots. And, you know, this is actually deemless. material. You can go, so you have to try A first. When it doesn't work, you can try B. When that doesn't work, you can try C.

When that doesn't work, you can try D. When that doesn't work, you go back to A. But the way you actually escape is A, D, B, C, D, B, C, B, C, B, C, B, D, D, B, B, C, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, so you are going to apply them throughout that flight, but you're not going to come up with like, oh, man, I'm going to come up with some crazy thing that he's never seen before. It doesn't work. And it actually makes it worse for you. So if you're mounted and I'm trying to get you off, I just am flailing or I roll over on my

stomach or do some, as the offender, he's like, dude, you're not helping. Just do A. Because truly the best thing you can do is just do a break. That's right. That's the best thing you can do. The best thing you can do is do a break and then do a ditch. Yeah. And then do another break.

Yep. And then do another ditch. Yep. And then do another break. Yeah. You only... And you're out of moves, by the way, the three moves. Yeah.

And listen, sometimes you can't do a ditch. If you're too close to the ground, the ditch isn't an option. It's not available to you. If you do it, you will die, period. So it is not in your repertoire. How much do you use a change of pace? Like in basketball, you know, when you're dribbling down the court, you change pace. You go, you're going fast and you slow down for second, then you go fast again.

Is there any of that? Yeah, not really. Is that because it's too hard to control the rate of speed of the aircraft in a short enough time that it will make them react in the proper way? Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. And so getting from fast as slow is pretty easy. Getting from slow to fast is harder. And so the change of pace to me is more about I'm going to try to get some airspeed back.

Let's say I'm going 200 knots and I'd love to be 400 knots. I can't just go from 200 to 400. So I'm going to go to 2 to 220. And that may take a second. And I'm going to steal that 20 knots. And then we're going to swirl around a little bit. And then I'm going to see an opportunity to go, ooh, ooh, jocko gave me a little bit of room here.

I'm going to go from 220 to 250. And that'll be three seconds. Boom, I got it. And I'm going to steal that. And I'm going to get two 50. And I'm going to, so that change of pace is me trying to steal. But if you ever apply so much pressure to me effectively that I can't do that, I don't get that speed back.

And you can actually fly an aggressive enough airplane to keep me from doing that. That I don't get to just steal that, to dictate the pace. So the pace of that of changing air speeds, it comes at a pretty big cost. And so you have to do it really intelligently and when you do that and steal it every chance you get.

What about when Dan was talking about going vertical? Yeah. So there's a really unique thing that they discovered at Topcom, when they talked about the egg, about this vertical fight is the way your airplane maneuvers vertically going from pointed up, so pointed high to low, is A, your airplane is typically very slow at the top of a loop, which makes sense.

You lose energy to get up there. So the slower you are, the smaller your radius is, so the tighter you can turn. But you also have something we call God's G. So it is pulling you back towards the ground. So the radius of your turn at the top of a loop is way smaller than your radius at the bottom of a loop. because you're fighting against G going from low to high, G is helping you going from high to low. So if there's ever a place where you're above someone and they're below you,

and all the other factors are relatively even, your turn at the top is better than his turn at the bottom, and it's typically a more advantageous place to be. And so the key would be is how can I maneuver to a place where I can climb above you without putting myself at risk to your weapons and then maneuver above you and take advantage of that free G force that's available to me going from high to low where you're fighting against that

and you're losing it going from low to high and that's kind of the goal of that vertical fight that he described. So is that something that you would do? Yeah, I mean that's something you could do. So he brought up an interesting thing and you mentioned this with Boyd, I think the way you said it was exactly right, man.

So F-18, F-16, F-15, M-29, S-E-27, All these airplanes in this generational world that I was in at Top Gun during that time, they're all pretty good. And you know what? The F-16 is a little bit faster than an F-18. But the F-15 has got a little bit better turn rates.

And it's no different than, hey, maybe you're stronger than Echo. But Echo's got, you know, a little better flexibility. And maybe you've got some capacity that he doesn't. But none of that is exclusive, meaning you don't get to just beat him because you're stronger. Because he could counter that strength that you have

with something that maybe you don't have. So on paper, all these airplanes have different strengths and weaknesses, but none of them are so absolute that you get to just beat me because your machine is better than me. It's always, always, always comes down to the pilot. Depending on what type of plane I'm flying against,

that vertical move is an awesome move. Some airplanes, it's the last thing I want to do, so I won't go up there at all. When Boyd comes to his conclusion, conclusion, wasn't our aircraft in Korea worse than the other aircraft? In most ways, yes. Most of the ways you... And how was that not just a red flag that, hey, actually, it depends on what the pilot does?

Well, in Boyd's defense, Boyd kind of understood that. Boyd had the way Boyd explained it when he talked about EM theory that Dan was talking about. He explained it in somewhat of a different way. He also evolved into a different airplane, the Phantom. but Boyd, make no mistake, Boyd understood that just because your machine turned faster, climbed higher didn't mean you're going to win. Boyd understood that without a doubt.

Because we know that there's other areas that we're stronger in. Others that we're stronger in. And I can actually assess in real time how well you're performing your aircraft. So I can observe and go, hey, your airplane can actually do this, but you're not making it do that. So guess what?

you're essentially giving that to me. So the strength on paper that says, you know, you can jump this high, well, in theory, you should have that extra three or four inches that you can jump that I can't,

but you're not jumping that high. And I can see that and assess it. I'm going to take that from you and I'm going to make that your advantage is no longer your advantage. So how does Boyd then get to, hey, don't fight a mig with a F4 Phantom?

I mean, the way I perceive, that is a failure to recognize, A, how much training matters, how much, how critical it is to be able to observe all these tiny little nuanced things that by themselves may not appear to be a big deal. But if I find 20 of them in a fight and I put them all together, it's a massive advantage. And what this, what, what science says an airplane can do isn't the limiting factor. Now, there are some limits. but when you build an EM diagram,

you don't account for Dan Pedersen's tail slide. It's not in the EM diagram. It's not in the science because the science says the airplane is no longer flying. And these guys are like, yeah, that may be true, but watch this. I can go pure vertical to my tail of the airplane slides back down. I can pitch it around with my rudder.

None of that is in the diagram, and I can make my airplane do something that paper says it can't. And when I do it to you, you will not know how to react and I'm going to kill you. So that combination of the mentality and the mindset, with the recognition that a fight is 20 things pieced together and all of them together is how you get to the outcome

is why Top Gun is what Top Gun is. If I'm looking at that, like I just don't understand how I don't figure out that I can beat a mig with an F4 if I know... Well, let me take it one step further. How do the engineers not know this? How do the engineers not say, hey, here's what you can do with one of these aircraft.

In that era, I think the way Dan Yank describes it is they didn't have the right mentality. These airplanes were not even designed to be dog fighters. They were convinced that that era was over. That's kind of why guys like in the Air Force guys like Robin Olds are such legends. Because in the face of an entire industry and in the face of entire era of, of the military mindset, he recognized that the thing that makes us better is how well we train

and how aggressive we are with our machines, not what you tell me the machine can do. And that's why guys like Yank and the dudes that start a top gun and guys like the Robin Olds of the world, that's why those guys are legendary because they fought against a trend that said, this is a machine that's not designed to turn.

If you turn with the mig, you're going to lose. It's like, well, we're turning with migs, and I'm not going to lose, so I'm going to figure this thing out. And some guys did, and that was the origin of Top Gun. It's when everybody else saying, you can't do this.

He said, not only can we, we have to. And that's pretty cool. The other, I'm just thinking of the test pilots, right? Because those guys are taking these birds and the engineers are saying it can do X, Y, Z, and they're taking it way beyond those limitations.

Especially in that era. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because nowadays, maybe with computer modeling and AI, you can maybe get a little closer. But back then it was like, okay, here's the bird. Here's what we think he can do. What do you got? Dude, those guys back then in the Yeager era, those guys would get in airplanes.

They didn't even know if they were going to fly. I mean, what they knew on paper versus what was going to happen. There was a big gap there. Those test pilots of that generation, you know, that right stuff generation, I mean, they were doing crazy things in heaven. and the discoveries they made and what they were able to do. Now there is so much more modeling, so much more science behind it that,

look, there's still a community out there. They're doing incredible things. But typically when you strap on an airplane, you have a pretty good idea of how it's going to perform and how it's going to behave, nowhere near like what they were dealing with in that era. How did you feel when you were flying the F-22 and the F-35?

How much were you saying, hey, you guys told me X, Y, Z, let me give you the real numbers over here from good deal. Yeah, well, that was, kind of my life in the Raptor. I was an operational test pilot. So not a developmental guide. There's developmental tests, which is literally they build it and they wanted to go see if this thing works. Our job is once they figured out the machine worked, which is the Raptor, operational test pilots go out there and figure out how to use this thing and operationally tested

in operationally relevant environments. So not the science, but the operational piece of it. And look, you had to know the science. You had to know what the airplane could do mechanically. But the coolest thing about being an operational pilot was taking an airplane. playing like a raptor and then finding everything you didn't like about it, everything you thought was wrong about it, everything that the science said was good, but you knew wouldn't work in combat, and we got to identify and fix those things. And that was awesome because you took this awesome machine and put it in relevant operational scenarios and you beat the crap out of it to see how it would do. Give me an example unclassified of like, hey, you took your raptor out and you said,

you know what? You need to make some adjustments over here. And I mean, I, I mean, I, I know the acquisition systems in the military is like crazy. Would you get real-time fixes on these birds? Yeah, some would get pretty quick. You know, we had to do a lot of prioritize and execute back when we were doing operational tests. So we'd get this airplane. We'd have, we'd have this list of 30 or 40 things on this tracker of all the things wrong with it. And oftentimes what we thought was the number one problem would take the longest and cost the most money.

But problem five, six, and seven. combined were less than problem one and they could fix it in a matter of days. And so we hit problem five, six, and seven and got really quick turnarounds and made a ton of incremental changes that over time, over a two, three year period, completely changed the capability of the airplane. We didn't always get everything we wanted. We didn't always get all the money we needed and we'd always have time to make all the fixes. But we had a really cool feedback loop with the engineers to fix the things that we said were

important and they could fix it really fast. Okay. I'll run you back to Top Gun. All right. You're putting me through training. Yep. And you're judging, you know, Echo and me. Okay.

And you get your first lockup with both of us. You do your little assessment. What? Prioritize and execute. What's the number one differentiator between echoes? Top line capability. So you're going to get Echo. Your new goal is just to train Echo and train me.

to be as good as we possibly can get. What is the, what's the quality that you're like, oh, echo's good at this, he's going to be able to excel in this. And he's going to do a little bit better than Jocko because I can see Jock was kind of lagging in his ability to X. Yeah.

I would say recall. Because remember, I'm teaching an instructor. I'm teaching a teacher here. My job is to make you and echo teachers in this, not just how to fly the airplane, but how to teach flying the airplane. is recall. Can you tell me what happened?

All the things that happened. And recall is connected very closely to something we call situational awareness. So do you really know all the things that are going out there in three-dimensional space with all the airplanes in real time? The more you can process what's happening,

the more you can recall what's happening, the better you are going to be able to teach this and understand what actually is going on. You could be really good in an airplane and maybe a little bit better than him just pure moving that machine around. But if you don't really know what's happening around you the way that he does,

eventually he's going to outperform you. So it sounds like I need to have the ability to detach. I would agree with that. Did you identify that while you were in the top gun in the Marine Corps? Did you ever identify like, hey, oh, I can see this guy gets all wrapped up, doesn't know what's happening.

But this guy over here, he's, you know, he separates his brain from his body and what's happening and he can see the big picture. Yeah. I mean, what did you call it? We used the situational awareness. Well,

the term of situational awareness, when people lost situational awareness or no longer did what you just described, we just call it, we'd say looking through the soda straw. I mean, which is very similar to, you know, I think you guys use a phrase front site.

Well, front site focus isn't the best because front site focus is a positive thing. Right. Because you're doing it in order to aim a gun. We say you're, your target fixated. But then we say, you know, you're staring down the scope of your weapon, which that is exactly what you're talking about. You're looking at it through a straw.

Same thing. Yeah. And I think it's just, just same, different phrase, same exact meaning. What that typically meant is that Echo or you, whoever's looking through the soda straw, would just start to stare at one piece of information. And an airplane, you've got a whole bunch of things going on inside and outside of the airplane. Plus, you're hearing things. So you've got always different inputs. And I could tell when you are, or Echo's looking through the.

Soda Straw without even seeing you because I'll say something to you and you either won't respond You know you'll respond really late. You'll do something wrong. You know really I hate this I hate this. You know why I hate this because I know it's on video right it's on video like you're like oh. Here's me calling you again. Here's me calling you again and I'm going oh Yeah I know I was not detached. It's crazy what do you tell me so we get back I was staring through the soda straw what do you tell me a what's your debrief? And then what's your What's your corrective measures that you're going to give me? When you're looking through the soda straw? Yep. So the debrief.

We get done with a flight. I'm looking through the soda straw. I didn't respond to your calls. I missed a bunch of stuff. What do you tell me? So the way, I'm going to have a pretty good idea while we're flying around that you're doing that. And I'm going to know because you're missing calls.

You're not going the way you're supposed to. You're not hearing things. They're not doing things. But when we get back, the first time I'm going to do is say, hey, tell me what happened on that flight. Why should just draw it out for me. Just run me through what you saw.

And that is the standard debrief. the first thing we do is recreate the flight. And you get a marker. You get up in front of the flight. You get red pens and blue pens. You get good guys and bad guys. And you just need to draw it. We started here.

We went here. You started here. And that may be two airplanes. That may be 16 airplanes. But I'm going to need you to just show me your recall. And that's going to be my first real indicator other than me watching in real time that you've missed some things. And so after you draw it up and just say this is what happened. then we're going to put up the tapes.

So before I get into your and say, hey, you miss this and miss that, what I really am going to do is give you a little bit of a chance to now watch the tape and go, ooh, hang on, stop tape for a second. I drew that we went off to the north and turned here with this group, but I'm watching the tape,

hey, that didn't happen. Now, I as an instructor, you know, okay, that's a really good sign. Jocko maybe wasn't altogether there, but Jock can self-assess. He's detached in the debrief and he's self-aware. The likelihood that you're going to go out,

and get better on the next fight is actually really high. And I don't need to give you a ton of debrief. And I might reinforce and go, hey, that's a good catch, man. Listen for the audio on the next call. Did you hear the call that there was a maneuvering in the north? And he's like, no, man, Jocko says he missed it. Okay, these are all good things. If you draw it up, clearly you're missing things.

You run through the entire tape and don't make the connection. Now you and I need to start back over. Then I need to draw what's up there. And I'm going to put some big circles on the board and go, hey, we're going to really analyze this engagement here. And I'm going to play the tape and go, stop, what do you see? Where's this airplane? Where did you depict it? I'm going to show you that you miss something and I'm going to have to kind of run through that whole thing in detail with

all this data to show what happened to try to get you to realize that you're missing things. And then what I'm going to tell you moving forward is you are more likely to start to lose situational awareness after we get past to this phase. So once the first turn happens, you tend to get too connected or to engage or too borsighted on this thing. And I, I can start to figure out what triggers you to get emotional, what triggers you to get borsighted, or what triggers you to look through the soda straw, and they start to call this out for you

and get you to think about it before we go do it, and then see how well you can adapt to that. How well can you actually pull yourself out of that, detach, and we'll go do that again and see what you do in the next one. So I, you know, because you're not in an airplane, because you're, you know, in a fake urban environment or you're out in the desert, like this is a conversation, I had more times than I can count with a young leader.

Hey man, you're all caught up in this. Here's what you need to do. You need to put your weapon in high port. You need to take a step back off the line. You need to turn your head and look around. Yeah. So it seems like that is a clearer form of instruction. It's an actual thing that you can do because it's a different environment.

Is there anything that you could give them more directly to, get them to take a step back, put their head on a swivel, look around, detach. Is there anything better that you could tell them? I see what you're doing with, hey, here's all the things you missed. And I did that too. I would do it with my little pocket recorder. And the other thing we had these laser gun. We had these laser tag system.

And they had little GPSs on them. And those little GPSs would track where you are. And then we could replay the whole thing on Google Earth. And these guys would have no idea. I didn't know my element was over there. I didn't know this guy. And so that's the same thing. That's the same technique of, listen, man.

You didn't know this element was over here. You didn't know that the assaulters already left the building. And you didn't see where, you didn't know this stuff was going on. And they go, yeah, I need to pull back. But then I'd say, listen, man, you need to get off your gun. You need to go to high port. You need to start looking around. You need to start paying attention to what's going on big picture.

Is there any instruction you can give like that while I'm flying an F-18? it's pretty uncommon that in the middle of a training flight that I as an instructor, I'm going to give you cues to do the things that you're supposed to do. There are a few exceptions. But I mean, I could do it after the, after the op. I mean, this isn't always like, hey, I'm right there. I'm after the op. I'm going, bro, you can't let this happen.

Here's what you need to do. All the time. All the time. And that's sort of the beauty of the tapes. You know, one of the crazy things is the way that the tape machines used to run before is that the cameras would be kind of connected to the canopy and record the screen. And in the reflection of the screen, you could see the pilot's head, literally see his head. And I go, hey, listen, every time we're approaching a merger than 10 miles, I can see you staring at this display.

At 10 miles. So what I want you to think on this, but every time you get, and the reason 10 miles is important is that we had a radio call that would come in and say, Somebody would say 10 miles. And he wouldn't be hearing that call. 10 miles is the call that's telling everybody, start looking outside. Start literally looking up and out so you can stop looking at your screen and start finding the actual airplane itself.

Hey, I want you, I want you to give the 10 mile call. You're going to be the 10 mile call today. And get that guy to, and I would say, this is a way to get you out of the cockpit and up and out. And we would, it probably had 100 different tricks and 100 different ways to give a guy something to think about, hey, this is where you get wrapped up. And this is a tool and a technique that you can use to take yourself out of being too attached and to detach.

Ten Mile call is an awesome way to do that. An engaged call is an awesome way to do that. Anything that you could help with that guy and the debrief, because these are good guys. These are guys you built really strong. Ten weeks is a long time to share a little space to somebody. You got to know these students really, really well. You could have really honest, straightforward conversations. You could build really good relationships.

They would come over on Saturdays. You'd barbecue and you just talk flying and you could tell them all the things and you wanted them to succeed and you would give them everything you could you could to help them get better And what did you call this recall? Recall Can you tell me what happened? Yeah, which is the massive indicator for I'm detached and I'm actually paying attention to everything that's going on 100% if you are not detached You won't know what's happening other than maybe what's happening inside your cockpit

But Topkin isn't about just you and your airport It's you leading a formation of 16 planes. And you need to know what's going on with all those 16 planes. And I'm not saying that you have to know every step that they're taking, every turn of their minute. You know, there are times that you were detached from your tasking and they're maneuvering, but you know what's happening. These guys are shifting to this building. These guys are heading up to the roof. These guys are bogged down.

There's a problem over here. Hey, I need to now pull some resource over here because there's no resistance over here. And these guys are kind of doing nothing and shift them up. and that you can manage your task unit in real time and have a really good idea of what's going on with all of them without being with any of them. And in the exact same way, that's completely trainable. How much does athletic ability play a role?

You know, I don't know if anybody has ever, that I've ever seen like the connection between that specifically, but if you're a good athlete, you were probably a good pilot. And if you were a good pilot, you were probably a good athlete. And we used to say all the time, the joke would be when people are asking,

should this guy come to Top Gun? The joke would be is, hey, can you throw a football? That's the question we'd ask. And it was a little bit tongue-in-cheek because I don't really care if you can throw a football. But it was the connection

between those two things. And it doesn't mean how to be a superstar athlete, but you had to be athletic. It's physical. It's physical. You had to be athletic, you had to be physical. you had to be, you had to not be afraid of conflict.

And did I care if you were the captain of your football team and height? Nobody cared about that stuff. But there was an absolute connection between being athletic and liking athletic competition and being good in the airplane. How about, how about eyesight, which I know back in the day was like the component, Chuck Yeager, you know, could like PID, bogeys. So before anyone is even close to seeing them. Same thing. I know you have really good eyes. I do.

And I did at the time I had, I had really uniquely good eyesight. I mean, I was picking off, I could see things in the eye chart that were really good. Back and certainly back in the day, that was everything. Because the only resource they had to find the enemy was their eyeballs. But I would tell you that it's still really important. Eyesight was really important. Now, one of the major discoveries that the military came up with in recent decades was that they would let you wear glasses. So, you know, if you didn't have good eyesight, they would let you fix it.

But eyesight was really critical because there's a phase in every fight that transitions from the systems to the visual. And that transition was really hard. It's really hard to look at your screen and then look up and try to account for where that person is in space, clouds and all sorts of different things. And so the sooner you could see that with your eyes, the better. You know, technology has helped without a bunch. There's cues now, little boxes, and you can do that. eyesight is still important. It's not as important as it was before,

but it was something that if you had good eyes and could determine what's going on at farther ranges, you'd have an advantage. How much does luck play a role? Luck plays a role. It does. I'm a beneficiary of a ton of good luck, you know, all through my entire life.

You know, and there's a bunch of cliches and catchphrases about what luck really is. luck by itself would never be enough. Just getting lucky and, you know, you'd come back and man, we got lucky on that one. But typically the lucky things that worked out, you could almost always connect it to a whole bunch of things you did right to get to the point where some things just worked out in your favor. So, yeah, do guys get lucky? Did I get lucky all the time? But rarely was that by itself an attribute or a circumstance that was very reliable?

Can you utilize, okay, so in Jiu-Jitsu and really in any endeavor, you can wear someone out. Like in Jiu-Jitsu, you call it gassing them. I would imagine that that is a strategy that you would have, hey, I've got a bigger gas tank than you, or I can make you do maneuvers that are going to burn more gas. Is that a thing? Yeah. No, it's totally. The MIG-29 was notoriously bad on gas, notoriously. You know what the next worst airplane for gas?

F-18? The F-18. So we knew going into our fights that we're always at a disadvantage. And when bigger planes showed up, like we talked about the SC-27, that thing had a ton of gas. It's a hundred percent of consideration, 100 percent. And you would think about it all the time. Not to mention, in naval aviation, you got to go back to the ship. You are always managing your gas.

You had enough gas to go back and get back aboard the ship, not some giant airport with, you know, 18,000 feet of runway. You had to go back and land aboard the cabin. carrier and that was a gas critical endeavor. How many carrier landings do you have? Maybe 450. It seems like a lot. It's not that much. You know, there are carrier guys out there with eight, nine hundred landings, some close to a thousand. So it seems like a lot, but there's plenty of guys with a lot more than me. Did you ever, were you ever comfortable with it? I got comfortable during the day for sure. To be totally honest, I never got comfortable with the night landings. Never

got that comfortable. When I did Afghanistan right after 9-11, we were the night carrier. So all of our operations for about six months were at night. Just by pure, just doing it every single day, it got a lot better. But the night landing was always in the back of your mind. It was always something to kind of contend with psychologically

that you knew it was out there. This is the first time reading Dan's book. book was, look, I've been told a thousand time, a posted stamp and all these other things, and, you know, it's so hard, and it's the hardest thing and blah, blah, blah. This book was the first time I really said to myself, yeah, it has got to be a gut check every single time. Yeah. Look, I've done a decent amount of flying.

I've flown a bunch of different airplanes. I got to fly with all the services. A night carrier landing, there's really nothing else like it. And it is a gut check. And it is a gut check every single time, no matter how many you've done. I got well over 100 night landings, which on a ratio of day to night, like, that's a lot of night landings because I happen to be on a night carrier, which most deployments, you don't spend the entire deployment at night. And I just happen to be on one of those. It is, it's a gut check for everybody, the pilot, the flight deck, the LSO, the ship.

The night page on a ship on an aircraft carrier at sea, there is nothing in aviation like it. and it is a gut check for everybody. And it never gets better. It never gets easier. So talk me through a little night carrier landing. I will. Yeah. Night carrier landing is kind of the great equalizer in naval aviation.

That's a thing that's out there that every fighter pilot's going to have to do. And no matter what has gone on in your mission, whether it's just a straight up, just super simple training mission, you could have been by yourself just flying around. or you just did six hours in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else, you're going to come back and you're going to land aboard the ship. And no matter what you've got going on, that always sits in the back of your mind.

You've got to plan for it. You got to account for it. You've got to manage your fuel for it. And you've got to recognize that more than likely, the hardest part of your flight, no matter what you're doing, more often than not, it's going to be the last thing you do.

When you're coming back to the field, and you know you're coming back to Marine Corps Station, Miramar or wherever, you're not even thinking about the landing. That's just a no-brainer. It's just a no-brainer. Landing a regular plane on a regular runway most of the time is just not hard. It's just, and it's certainly not something you're going to sweat. Like, man, I hope I can land this time.

Like, it's just not something you think about. So once you figure out how to land an airplane like an F-18 and a regular runway, you just don't really think about it too much. Carriers totally different. And so it's something you have to think about. You got to compartmentalize. You got to detach from it. but you can't ignore that it's out there either.

So you got to think about your fuel. You got to think about your wingmen. You got to think about the other 20 airplanes that are going to be landing on the ship at the same time as you and the coordination goes along with that. And this is a huge choreography that you, the ship,

and the other airplanes have to manage and coordinate. And typically, typically, the goal is to do it either no-com or min-com. There's very little talking going on of this coordination. You might get to sign an altitude, and you might get to sign what's called a push time, when you commence your approach.

And that may be all the talking you get up until the time that you're about to land. So you're kind of alone, you're self-contained, and you've got to manage all these things. So night landings are, look, man, they're legit. And they never get easy.

They never get comfortable. The idea, I've said this before, right? When people say, Hey, what makes the seals good? Well, I think the thing that makes the seals good is that we have to work in the water. And the water is the same thing. It's an equalizer.

Every time you're in the water, you don't need an enemy to kill you when you're in the water. You can, the water itself can kill you. When you have to do a mission over the beach, swim in, you know, your weapons covered in sand, your radios get flooded.

There's just all these things that happen. Doing a direct, action mission from Humvees compared to doing a direct action mission that you swam over the beach. It's not even comparable. You could train, you know, you could take a high school football team and you could train those guys in three or four days to do a pretty decent job doing a direct action mission and they'd be able to pull it off to get them to be able to come to launch from a ship

and take zodiacs over the beach and get on the beach and change out into their new gear and you need months. You need months, if not longer. You need six months and you'd have a washout rate. You'd have people that

are not capable. Because look, on a football team, how many people on a football team? The whole team? What, high school? Yeah. Call it. Let's go college. 100, 105.

100, 100. 100. Okay, so 1005 that are going to train to do a land direct action mission, you're going to have five or six that can't do it. They've got some issue. They're not safe. They're just not with it, whatever, whatever the case may be. You put them in the water and you start swimming over the beach,

you're looking at, you're losing 50% of those guys, maybe 70% of those guys that are just, they can't. They're not good enough swimmers. They're not good enough in the water. They're not comfortable. They're cold. There's so many things. That right there is the difference.

And when I start thinking about landing on aircraft carriers, it's got to be somewhat similar because the weather, you're landing on a thing that is moving. Yeah. Dude, that's so true, man. I mean, I think the thing about the water is, you're operating around the water, you can never, you can't take a time out. You can't pause. You can't just stop for a minute.

Look, if I'm coming back to Miramar and there's a problem in Miramar, I got 10 other airports within 30 minutes that I can go to. I can go back over to Yuma where the weather's always perfect. I can go to North Island. I could go to L.A. I've got so many different options. And the water never lets you pause. You cannot pause.

You can't just wait. You can't just decide not to do it. There's no divert that's just down the road. This awesome seal captain who was of prior Marine and a little bit of a rebellious guy. He gave a speech that I was at. And I don't even want to give any details about where it was at or what was it about. But he was making a dig at some of the other personnel that he was working with at the time. And he said, it was a great speech.

He was saying, look, we're in the Navy. And what's different about the Navy is we come from ships. And on a ship, you don't have any choice but to fight. There is no retreat on a ship. Those are our roots. Now, look, he took the most absolutely romantic view that a, that a, the most heroic view that a human could ever take about tying, you know, the modern Navy. and especially the SEAL teams to rooting our character in the fact that on a ship, there is no retreat, there is no surrender.

If the ship goes down, we all die. That's our attitude. I mean, you want to talk about a young Jocko bit getting pumped up. But that's what I'm thinking right now is when you're at sea, you can either land on this carrier or you can land on this carrier. That's it. I mean, that's it. There's no other options.

Yeah. And if you got a problem or you're running low on gas, or you've got a mechanical issue that's going to create some problems for you, you're going back to the ship. I mean, if you take your seals and you load them up into boats and you jump off the bigger ship to go do some sort of insertion and the weather's so bad and the environment's so bad

and then everything's like, hey, we can't do this training exercise. It's not safe. The training exercise is canceled. What do you have to do? Yeah. We got to go drive those boats into the well deck of the ship in 12-foot seas, which is a complete nightmare. You're not in a parking lot thinking this was a bad idea.

we can't do this and, you know, the weather is not going to allow this, this training mission to happen. Believe me, our, we would say, you know what, let's just go. Totally. It's easier than trying to get back on that ship. Yeah. And so the thing about carrier landings is there's really, there's no, there's no training and there's no real life.

It's just real life all the time. And there's another thing, there's a psychological component about the ship that kind of It reminds you what it is every time. So you get, you're coming back, you may be over the beach and, you know, you've done a long mission or it doesn't matter what you're doing. At some point, you end up what's called the stack. And all the stack is is about 15, 20 miles from the boat at every altitude, you know, 5,000, 6,000, 7,000. There's an airplane at every altitude. And they just stack them up from five up to however many there are, up to 20,000 feet or if there's 15 airplanes, something like that.

And you just sit in the stack. And you've got your gas and somebody will come up in the radio and go, hey, you know, aircraft 204, your push time is time 1015. Roger that. That's the only call you're going to get. So I'm at 9,000 feet. I look at my watcher. I look at the clock.

And I am now wait until 1015 for me to push. And then there's a very particular route and a particular heading and turns and out. And there's a whole sequence that we all memorize how to do it. And it's not that complicated, but you got to do it. But the entire time, the entire time as you're looking out, you can't see anything. It's just dark. It's just pitch black. Every now and then there's like a nice moon.

The water has a little white reflection of the moon, which looks kind of cool, but you can't see the ship. When you're 20 miles from an airport, you see the runway lights. You see the lights that line you up. You see the white lights. You see the control tower. You can see your buildings. When you're 20 miles from the ship, you can't see anything. And then when you're 10 miles from the ship, you still can't see anything.

And then you descend down and you do the last bit of this approach at night is it like 600 feet. over the water and it's pitch black and you're just going towards the ship. Are you on 100% instruments at this point? 100% instruments and look modern airplanes have great instruments. The Hornet is a beautiful instrumented instrumented machine. I'm sure you know when Yank was talking about back in the Vietnam era is more challenging but you're just flying your instruments. More challenging because home boys up there with a red lens flashlight trying to figure

out where he's at. Dude I had that same way he's telling that story. Or he's 40 yards above the looking for the the wake of the ship. Crazy. You chuckled because you were asking, you're like, hey, I think I know that flashlight. It's the same flashlight out of my flight.

It's the same green elbow-shaped flashlight we all have. I mean, it's one thing that hasn't changed much in naval aviation. It's the gear. It's all the same stuff. But as you're coming back, you're on instruments. You're waiting for your turn for the final approach. You know, the last mile of descent where you go from 600 feet and then you start to descend down onto the boat.

And that's when you start picking up the visual cues, the meatball they call it, kind of the lineup of the runway. But a lot of times you still can't see the ship if there's cloudy or foggy or low or rain or snow and all these things. And all these elements are just there. And you have no choice. You have no alternative. And the psychological component of knowing that every single time you're going to sort of duel with that, it's in some ways, it's kind of terrifying. But in other ways, it means that every single, there's a challenge in every single flight. And I think one of the cool things about being around the ship, and one of the things that makes naval aviation unique, what these guys in the Navy and the Marines that did it is that every single flight, there was this risk.

There was this fight that you were going to get to duel against this machine, this boat, this thing that's out there that's sort of geared and designed in every way, shape, or form. it's a really bad airport. It's not designed to be an airport. It's got this tiny, and the margin of error is minuscule. I think in the Hornet, the margin of error from coming across, they call it the ramp.

That's the very first piece of steel that you get over the top of the ship to land. If you were eight feet off, you're either going to miss and go around or if you're eight feet low, you are going to hit the ship. So the margin of error is tiny. Hold on a second.

What happens when you're, in a 12 foot sea state. Yeah. Well, when you're in a 12 foot sea state and that thing is moving around, the visual indications on the ship, this visual thing, we call it the meatball, just a light system that reflects where you are. So if the light is high above, there's like a green light that goes back and forth, there's a round yellow light in the middle.

It's round, it's yellow, so they call it the meatball. It looks like a circle. If that ball is above the green lights, you're high, and if that ball is below the green light, you're low, and you're kind of flying in around to try to you're to move that white or that yellow ball in between the green lights. That system keeps up with ships movement up to some degree. I don't remember exactly what it was. The ship will kind of list back and forth. It'll raise up and down. And as long as it's not moving too fast or too much, that light system is accurate. Oh, so you're, you're, you're accommodating the movement of the ship

with your aircraft? Yeah, yeah, 100%. And you're moving your throttle, let, you know, forward and backwards, you know, 10, 15 times every second to accommodate for that. And the good, you know, thing is, is that it's good information. It's trustworthy. So if the ball is high, you're high. If the ball is low as you're low. If the ball gets too low, it turns red. You're good, you are dangerously low. And that gives you a very good cue. If the ship starts moving too fast or too much, that system is no longer reliable. It doesn't keep up with the moving the ship fast enough so you cannot rely on that. And then your landing signals officers, your LSOs, your people that have radios on the flight deck, they have to start talking to you. And they'll say things like,

ignore the information that you're seeing, you're low. And now you're in this challenge of seeing this visual cue that you've relied on hundreds of times and you have someone saying, ignore that information, I'm telling you you need to add power

even though that's showing you high. And look, those things don't happen all the time. How can they give you the micro adjustments fast enough in that situation? The LSOs and look, one of the cool things about- Or is he like,

Power, power, power, power, break, break, break, left, left. Is you doing that? It's quite as fast as you, but that is what we were saying. So I was in LSO. One of the cool things in my career when I was on the ship is I got to lead an LSO team. So I was a landing signals officer.

So every fifth day on a cruise, I just help airplanes land. I sat out there with a team on radios. And usually, usually, if Jocco's coming in and he's low, I can just say, little power. That's all you need.

Just a little cool, smooth call. And you, oh, okay, I'm behind. had some power. Sometimes it's power and you're like, dang, and you'll hear it and you'll, and that's a little more heat, little, little, little, little, little big, a little more of a hitter than you might normally need. There are a few times, and every LSO that's listening to this and every student that's out there in flight school probably knows this, there are times in my career that I've had to scream power, power, power, power, and barely, barely got these airplanes over the ramp to the point that after they landed, we'd go investigate and we'd see divvits on the very edge of the carrier

called the rounddown. Divots from the hook smashing the edge of the boat, which means that their wheels may have missed it by, no joke, two feet, something like that. So what you described doesn't happen very often, but it absolutely does happen. And then all the time say, hey, you're lined up a little left. And it was a right for lineup, right for lineup. And you're talking to them. And the, and the, The tone of your voice and the rate at which you say it hopefully solicits us the response. Now, the interesting thing about that is what do you think the mental state is of a pilot who's so low and can't assess that on his own to respond to your cues? You're typically dealing with the guys who are so, they were struggling behind the airplane.

So they didn't always necessarily respond to your calls. They didn't detach. And it's, that's the challenge of the night carrier landing. is can you detach from what is can be by itself under the best circumstances, a terrifying experience. Under the best nights. And when you have engine problems, fuel leaks, hydraulic issues, low on fuel, no diverts,

two in the morning in a snowstorm, you have no choice but to get aboard that ship. And it does, that is, that is why the carrier landing, especially the night landing, that is the great equalizer in aviation. And hearing Yank talk about it and reading about it, there's nothing else in the world like it. There's nothing I've ever done that I can compare that experience to. And you did, you said you did 100 night carrier landings.

Yeah, I'm a sketchiest one. Dude. So, I mean, I have landed in what we call zero zero. I've landed where there is zero visibility. Zero visibility. Yep. And what's the other zero? So the two measures is the height of the clouds and the depth which you can see them.

So, you know, a hundred and a half would be clouds are at 100 feet. Visibility is a half a mile. So zero, zero is the clouds are at zero feet and your visibility is zero feet. So you can kind of picture being in fog. It may be on the ground. It may be at zero feet, but it's thin fog. So you kind of maybe see a mile in front of you, you know, driving a car. And if you've ever been in a car, we're like, dang, I can't see, I can't see 10 feet in front of me.

That's zero, zero. So you landed in zero zero zero. Zero. So here's how, here's how that works. And here's how much fun the night zero zero landing is. You can fly your instruments.

You can't see a meatball? You can't see anything. Zero. Zero. You see nothing. Get some. Yeah. These are good times.

So you've got your instruments though. And your instruments. Everyone that was thinking they wanted to be a fighter pilot just during the Air Force, bro. Yeah. Because they don't want none of this. If you're going to fly fighters in the Navy,

you need to know what you're getting yourself into. Because you're going to, have your night in the barrel. There's not a pilot. There's not a naval aviator in the world that hasn't had that night. Whatever that night is for you, you're going to have that night. And I bet you the exact same thing in the team's like you're going to have an experience. You can have something that happens to you. You cannot avoid it. It's going to be your night or your day or your experience. You're going to have that. There's no getting around it. And we call everybody in naval aviation calls it the night in the barrel. That's your night. And

you know, you don't know what's going to happen. It's just your night to deal with whatever you got to deal with. That zero-zero-zero landing, your instruments will get you to about maybe a quarter mile at best, maybe a half a mile. So probably the last eight seconds. Once you're inside that last eight seconds, your instruments just aren't, they don't keep up with what's going on fast enough for you to fly off them. You have to transition to a visual landing. You have to. And the only way for that to work when you can't see is for you to turn on your taxi light, which is this giant really high-powered light in your nose gear. And the LSO, and this is a call, you want to have your stomach drop.

When you're out in the stack with nothing else to do but thinking about your landing. And he says, he says, it comes out of the radio, 99, which means every, when you say 99, that's a call for everybody. 99 taxi lights on. Now, every pilot in the sack is like, oh, God, it's so bad that I now know that at the end of this landing, I will not be able to see the carrier. And the LSO is going to have to talk me down. And you talk about trust and relationships and putting your life in somebody else's hand. You're going to fly this machine doing 140 knots, this 35,000 pound machine to a half a mile from the carrier. And you'll never see the ship until you hit it.

And the guy on the ground is going to talk you through the last eight seconds of that. and he's only going to do it through his eyeballs, literally through his eyeballs, and the faint, through the fog, that faint little glow of the white light coming from your nose gear. And that is a, I'm recalling that as we speak.

That is a, that's a life-changing event right there. I mean, that's a, that's a no-joke experience. So he's giving you the same things. He's, eyeball, eyeball. He's eyeball calibrating. Who the hell trains this guy?

How does he know what to do this? Well, the LSO qualification at the Navy is typically reserved for the best guys in the squadron. Typically, not always, but it's a very highly thought of qual. It's a well-respected qualification that I'm going to take, Jaco. We're going on cruise. You've demonstrated as a young guy as a nugget. You're good around the ship. You're reliable.

I'm going to task you with learning to be an LSO. I'm going to put my pilot's lives in your hands. I would do that as a squadron commander. I'm going to send you to school to be an LSO. You'll go LSO training. And then you'll go through kind of an apprenticeship where you sit and watch other LSOs. And after about three or four months of that,

I'm going to give you the radio. And on a perfectly clear, gorgeous blue day, I'm going to let you start to see what it looks like. And you know, you're doing it hundreds of times a day every five days, cruise after cruise after cruise. And eventually you build this capability through your own experience to be able to do that.

Do they ever have to call in like the, The cooler. They're like, hey, man, it's zero zero. Go get the ice man over there or whatever. Absolutely. Bring him up here. Dude, that's no joke. We call him the CAG LSO.

So on the ship, the air group is known as the CAG. So that's, you know, the ship is the ship. And they've got all their people, but then the air wing is all the planes. There are two guys that are the two senior landing signals officers on the ship. 90% of the time, all they're doing is training us and letting us run the show. Well, when it's zero zero. The cooler is the CAG LSO, and he's going to be supported or backed up by the team lead. And so that guy in those nights, he's going to be the primary controlling LSO.

He's going to do one doing the talking. And his backup is going to be the team leader of that LSO teams. There's five team leads, you know, five teams, one for each day. You rotate every five days. Those two guys, the CAG LSO, the cooler, and the team lead are going to recover every airplane on the ship when it's, when it's required. Are you answering, so you're coming in zero zero? And I tell you power. What do you say, Roger?

No, you don't talk at all. You just do what he says. And so. And I can tell by watching your aircraft. Instantly, you can also hear it. You can, so you're a quarter mile away. You're seven, eight seconds from landing. When I say power or when I say power and you add power, your, your motors are going to change.

You're going to hear that. You're going to hear the tone of that. And you're going to, he did it. And you can hear the duration. And so if I say power and you, you add it and it's not enough, I'm going to immediately say it again. before I even watch you settle, because I know you didn't do it long enough. And I'm going to say power, power.

And that means you're going to go longer. And if you go too long and I hear you really run the engines, I'm going to say easy with it. I'm going to ask you, and you're going to bring power off. And so I'm going to talk. I'm going to watch and listen. Are these uniform pro words used by all? Every single word in the LSO manual is exactly the same.

We only use one word for power. We only one word for takeoff power. One word to turn right. One word to turn left. And they're predetermined. They all know everybody else. So uses the exact same terminology. Did you say easy, buddy?

What is it? Easy with it. Easy with. And that's the, that's the terminology in the book. Easy with it means back off power a little bit. That's right. If you're going to have someone go right, you say right for lineup. If you're going to have someone go to the left, you say come left.

That way, if you said come left, come right, you might get a little, come. I'm not sure. Right for lineup, left for line. So there's a different version of going right and then there is going left. Every pilot in the world and every LSO knows in the world, he's going to go left. come left. If you want to go right, right for lineup.

And as I start to hear the I know he's telling me right for lineup because I don't have to really decide for that call. And if I hear the E in the easy with it, I'm coming off the power a little bit. And so there are,

you know, the terms are totally predefined. Everybody knows what they are and we rely on those. And so the zero zero recovery doesn't happen all that often, but it happens. You can't see the ship

until you hit it. Yeah. A zero zero landing, you may get it lucky that a half a second before you feel the shutter of hitting the flight deck, you might catch something out of the corner of your eye. And meanwhile, at that moment, you go, prepare to go full, you actually go full throttle when you hit the deck, right? When you feel your, your flight, when you hear your tires hit the flight deck, you go full power.

Every time. That way, if you miss, you're taking off and you're not just falling into the drink. That's right. That's exactly right. If you miss, you go back around. Everybody knows that. Yeah. And, you know, that LSO piece of flying around the ship is also a skill that it's really hard to get people to appreciate how good you have to be. How much confidence is an LSO you have to be to say, I got this. I would a thousand times over, like, prefer to be the guy that's the pilot and not be the guy that's, you know, it's one of those horrible situations where you're not actually in danger, but you've got. someone that's relying on you to get it right. Yeah. You'd be a good LSO because you also know the power.

You talk about it all the time of just how you communicate. The LSO is that panic when you're, when I look up and I see your jet in a really bad spot, a really bad spot. And if I panic in my communication to you, and it doesn't mean I won't be stern and very specific, power. But if I panic and I have a high pitch, kind of a shrill to how I'm communicating,

you're going to react that way. So the best LSOs were the guys that would look at the worst situation in the most dire circumstances and the worst weather with a pilot that he knows has one chance to get aboard, one chance.

And he has the coolest, calmest, most chill voice in the world. 202, you're a little low, just a little power. You're on glide slope. And that can put a pilot at ease to go, oh, holy cow,

I can do this. I can get a little bit. a board now whereas before he's thinking I can't see the ship I got this engine problem I got all these things and creates a situation in his mind that he knows he can get a board and LSO can talk him out of that mindset and get him on the flight deck so when when Dan was talking about the guy that missed 12 times in a row and I think it wasn't it Dan that actually went down there and said let me get on the radio let me talk this guy on and that's the same thing he says hey bud we're gonna

get it done we're gonna get done right this time yep and and if it's from the right person or the right time in the right way it makes all a difference and And that was that guy's night in the barrel. I mean, that's a lot. That's not common. The reason you don't get another shot is because you're out of fuel. Yeah. Don't you have a refuel up there?

Yeah, usually you do. There are emergencies that your jet will not take gas. You've got emergencies that you've got a hydraulic problem that even if you had all the fuel in the world, eventually your hydraulic fluid will run out and you can't fly the airplane. So in most cases, these are not common cases, but there are cases that this happens. What do you do if you are out of hydraulic fuel, you missed your landing? What's the protocol to eject now? What do you do?

Do you go to a certain spot? Do you, they spin up, they get the helicopters ready? That's exactly right. So there's two options. You've got a barricade option. But if it's not a controllable situation, I mean, the saying is you pull alongside the ship and eject. So what you do is you try to fly a parallel straight right across, you know, aboard the ship,

you know, a mile a beam. The helicopter's out there spinning. There's always a helicopter flying where you're coming aboard, at least during the day. And I've never been on a cruise where we had to intentionally do that. I've been on cruises where we started briefing that option as an LSO. Like, okay, here's what we're going to do. This is what our plan is going to be. You're starting to coordinate with the ship's emergency recovery team on this is what we're going to do if indeed we don't, you know, get this guy upboard for whatever reason.

Life of the ship is no joke. And the Navy makes it look easy because they're doing it hundreds of times a day every single day. and 99 times out of 100, or 900 99 out of 1,000, these dire situations, they pull it off. And the only ones we ever hear about are the ones that it rarely,

but these type of things happen all the time. These dangerous situations are happening right now. There's someone in the barrel once a day on a carrier deployment, once a week? Yeah. Once a day is, no,

I'd say more often than not, certainly when weather's good. I mean, it's smooth. I mean, you're putting 120 a board, you know, launch and recovery in a day, and most days just go by. But if you've got, you know, if you did the math that we've got multiple carriers deployed at sea all the time and you're doing multiple flatups all the time, once a week out there somewhere in the blue ocean, there's a kid up there who's struggling. It might not be 12, you know, but he's struggling and he's having a hard time and you're watching him have a hard time and you're trying to talk him down. Did you ever have a hard time?

Did you ever get shook to the point where you came back and had to decompress and say, you know what? This, I had a, I had a buddy in the teams and he did a, he did a, he was doing some, we'll just say maritime operations off the coast of Korea for an exercise. And it was just freezing cold and claustrophobic. and the whole nine yards and he was telling me you know he's in this evolution and he's thinking himself I don't even know if I actually ever want to do this again you know what I mean I mean I mean think about that so when that kid and you know the kid that Dan talks about that does 12 12 tries to make it in the next day they put him right back up there and he did fine did you ever

get shook as they say in modern terminology I struggled in the beginning before I would go launch. I had a real problem in the very beginning when I got assigned to a carrier squadron and I kind of had to come to grips if this is going to move my day-to-day life. I think I might even mention it too. I think I mentioned the name Gunny Pilgrim being just this awesome gunnery sergeant that taught me everything as a lieutenant. He and I were pretty tight and I'd say for the first, probably the first month of my carrier career where I'm doing sustained, carrier operations. If I was, I would walk up on the flight deck, I would pre-flight my jet, and I would throw up over the side of the ship, just from nerves and anxiety and just like, man,

just being stressed. And I would just, I would just be physically ill. And, you know, I didn't tell anybody about it. And he knew. And so if he ever managed to find this kid, he'll tell you those stories. And it was just something I just, I just had to learn to deal with. But, you know, you man up, I don't mean it like the phrase man up. We call getting into an airplane. manning up, like you climb up the ladder to man up your jet. We manned up the jets and you'd go and you'd come back. And then at the end, you'd look back and be like, that was awesome. And then when it's time to go again, you'd get nauseous.

And that subsided. I did have a couple of landings and he described it really well. I had a couple landings that were so kind of terrifying that I couldn't move. I couldn't control my legs. So my legs would, they would shake so fast and so your feet would, from the adrenaline that it'd be hard to steer the airplane. And a couple of times I had to stop the airplane. And the flight day crew kind of understands this.

Like when you just stop, they kind of look at you and you just, you kind of give them like, give me a second. And so I had several times. This is after you, you hooked onto the, you hook,

you come to a stop, you kind of turn off and that adrenaline wash kind of goes out. So maybe about a minute after that, your whole body will convulse. Like your legs, and you steer everything with your legs. You're putting a lot of pressure on your feet and your toes and you maneuver the airplane with your feet.

And your legs are shaking so hard that you literally can't steer. And they're, your margin for like, they take you to the side of the ship. like three feet away from the edge of the ship. So you're looking over the water and you're just kind of, so I've had several landings where after I landed, I needed to stop for a second.

And just like, hey dude, just give me a second. I would just stop the airplane. And usually they would look at you and go, catch your breath. I never got out of the airplane and said, I don't want to do that anymore. Even on, and I had some pretty rough nights. And I think there was just this piece of this idea

that it's like, you wouldn't send something a long time ago that I just laughed at. I'm like, that's not me. And you said, I like the taste of blood. You like, and I kind of took it like, you like fighting. Not that you want to, I don't mean it like you like to fight other people, but that feeling that you get, you like that feeling. Well, I told you, I'm like, I don't like the taste of blood.

Flying a fighter around the ship with all the things that made me think about not wanting to do it, all the danger, all the emergencies, all. I loved it. I freaking loved every second of it, even the things that I hated. And there were things I hated about it. I loved it. And I loved doing it.

And I hated it at the same time, but not once did I ever say, I don't want to keep doing that. Now, my as a crew went on later on, but being around the ship, being on the ship, doing ship things as much as I hated it. My squadron would tell you,

Dave did not like flying around the ship. I hated it. But man, I freaking loved it. So that was kind of my, personal experience, everybody's different. I never really quite normalized to it. I always just felt like, man, this sucks. But there was something about it that never got old and never got tired for me.

And I love doing it. Yeah, and it's weird because that idea of, I like the taste of blood, it's one of those things where when I haven't tasted blood in a while, I don't notice I'm not sitting there thinking about it and then all of a sudden something will happen something will will will will happen you know could be any number of things it could be it could be something as simple not not usually jiu jitsu to me isn't isn't this type of thing maybe occasionally there'll be something will happen on the mats but normally that's not it i just enjoyed jiu jitsu too much but something will happen some some situation will unfold and i'll i'll go into like war mode and when i go to

war mode I just feel so good and when I get there I'm like oh yeah and it makes me you know sometimes I I I if when I get there it makes me just look around and I just think I wasn't really I wasn't really supposed to be doing anything else you know I wasn't really supposed to be doing anything else I was supposed to be doing that that thing because it makes me feel so, so good to be in that mode, to feel that focus, to have, like for me, and this is just so weird for me because, you know, I like to, you know, we're building relationships, we're building teams, we're working together. For me, when I have an opponent, not just an opponent, it has to be stronger than that,

When I have somebody or some entity that is antagonistic to me and my family, my friends, my team, I feel something that is the best feeling to me. And it doesn't happen that much anymore. I mean, it just doesn't. I mean, that's just the way it is. But, like, even when I was a platoon commander and something. would happen some some other you know whether it was whether it was the enemy whether it was some part of some organization you know some person that had some did something that was I want to

throw this word out there because it just it just sets off a whole bunch of you know what could it be but you know if there's a betrayal scenario where someone betrays me and they want to go to war with me. That delivers me. You know, that's when I, I love the taste of blood and I, and I can feel it. And, you know, like I said, it's, it's, uh, you know, it's an old man talking now and just don't get those situations very often. But it's good, it's a good, it's a good, it's a good feeling. Yeah. It happens from time to time. Well, it's, it's, it's, you and I are two old men, at least for this game at this point. But if I were to look back, and I spent a lot of my life dreaming of being a fighter pilot,

a lot of my life was spent dreaming about doing the things that I got to do, if you were to ask me at any point during my time at sea flying what I was doing that I could have done anything, anywhere for any amount of money, there's not one single thing in the world I would have done. On my worst night, on my scariest, whatever, not one other thing. And when you said what you said, that I think described that feeling is this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And every night, the thing that you were fighting, you know, in some sense was yourself, but it was that environment that is sort of designed to kill you. It's dark. It's pitch black at night and it's a steel unforgiving ship with a tiny little area that's 42 feet wide and 130 and everything about

that on paper is designed to kill you. And the only way you're going to outmaneuver that is is what you and your machine do. And there was a piece of that fight, which I think is what it was, is that the satisfaction of doing that on the best days or the worst days is really hard to recreate and replicate and feel in other ways, that satisfaction of I did something I was supposed to be doing, and if I didn't do it well enough, it was going to get me hurt or killed, or the people around me hurt or killed.

And I haven't experienced a lot of other things like that, but it's rare to be in a work environment where you get that so regularly. And that's every single landing. If you take your eye off the ball, no pun intended, on the most clear, perfect blue sky day, you'll kill yourself.

You'll get yourself killed. And you'll probably hurt a lot of people along the way. And there was a challenge there that I never got tired of, which was for me doing what you described as this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Can you imagine the screening process that it's the de facto screening process that we can launch? I mean, how many guys are landing on a carrier today, right? And that happens all the time. And this screening process and the training process is so good that these guys can pull this off over and over again around the world and every C-State, day, day, night.

Clouds, no clouds, fog, no fog. That's what, that's what we do. And we'll make it look routine. It's just insane. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, a ship's doing well over 100 a day every single. Day. And, yeah, dude, what the Navy is doing, it's unreal, man.

It's awesome. So with that, with that, does that then, is this where, okay, look, inside the Navy, inside the Navy where you cannot surrender because you cannot give up the ship, because otherwise you all die, inside the Navy, you have this, of all the people that are in the Navy, of all the people that are in the Marine Corps. a little bit different because it's just a different it's a different a subset right but the subset of Marine Corps aviators fighter jet pilots the Navy you're your it's more prevalent in the Navy let's face it the Delta between a surface warfare

officer in the Navy and a Navy fighter pilot that Delta is bigger than the Delta between a Marine Corps infantry officer and a Marine Corps fighter pilot. Unless we want to go back to World War II and you want to see some just insane, incredible, just,

I mean, the danger of being on a Navy ship in World War II was totally insane as well. So the Delta, the screening process, where you get to is you end up with a certain type of person. So in the Navy,

when you're going to go for the SEAL teams, there's a certain, There's a certain element that's there. And for lack of a better word, and I think I'm using it because Dan talked about it, there's a rebellious nature, right? There's someone that's going, hey, look, I don't care. Look, you don't volunteer to go land on that freaking postage stamp if you hold life to be the most precious thing.

There's something out there, right? There's something. You don't do that. You just don't do that. And that's what I like about this top gun mentality. And I'll call it the top gun mentality. I'll call it the, the idea that I talked about earlier, this extreme ownership mentality of like,

hey, I'm gonna go and make this happen. And when it goes wrong, I'm gonna figure it out and I'm gonna fix it. There is a certain breed of human that tend in that direction. And you can, because otherwise, I mean, let's face it, you talking about landing on a carrier at night, there is a massive swath of human beings that there's no way in hell they ever want to do what you just talked about. Echo, what is your, are you fired up to go do a carrier landing right now? No, not at this time.

Thank you. Not at zero. What about zero? No. What about nighttime? No. The whole barrel thing. What about day after day after day after day after day after night after night after night, right?

So we're talking about a different, you know, a different kind of human with a different mentality. And what we've done is set up this process that finds those humans, gets them to that point where they do that for 25 years. For 25 years, that's how we're doing this. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. So I had a couple more things I wanted to ask. Flexible 4.

Is that what it's called the flexible 4? What's the fluid for? The fluid for. Yeah, that's what to mean. What we're in a formation. We work together. It sounded like it was a lot more regimented than it was fluid. Yeah.

Fluid 4 is not a fluid formation. Does anyone use it anymore? Yeah, we use it to kind of like navigate to and from the space. Other than that, it's not happening. It's not a tactical thing at all. You do it just to keep people. close together. So, hey, we're going to go from point to point B, and I don't want to mess around,

just kind of get close to me. We're going to fluid for out there. I sent you a text. I said loose deuce. I said loose deuce equals cover and move plus decentralized command over. And you were like, Roger. Makes sense. Yeah, that's it.

Exactly. You got it. Because in a loose goose formation, or sorry, loose deuce formation, either one of us can take lead. We can take lead and we can make things happen on our own. And yet, we have to cover for each other. And if we don't work together, we're going to die. That's right.

That's exactly right. And I can direct you to do something that I need you to do. And when you don't comply, I know that it's because you can't. And so there's this relationship piece. There's all those components that you just talked about are inside there. And that's how you and I are going to work together to eventually isolate the bad guy and one of us is going to kill him and I don't really care who does it as long as one of us does it and if that means I got to stay engaged the whole time that you get the kill

it's good by me because we're good and we move on these guys figured that out right these guys said the other way doesn't work this way works better this is again you have to have some element of rebel mentality in your brain in order to say you know what it's same thing with same thing with uh jiu jitsu right you someone's got to say listen i don't really believe that if you do this kata to me that it's going to work somebody's got to say that in the teams the you know the biggest this this happened to us in the teams we were we were using we'd use real ammunition we'd shoot at paper targets and you win every single time and you you you know you go through the house and every every target is dead and they didn't maneuver you they didn't fire on you and they don't

maneuver so it becomes so easy when we brought in laser tag we brought in paintball and sim munition and these things that allowed us to fight each other even then somebody had to have the mentality number one to say you know what first of all we should try these tactics on each other because we've been being told over and over again i got told that for my first 10 years in the teams eight years in the teams hey this is what works you know what you say roger that roger that roger that to say you know what we need to check this we need to test it you know what there was people that when paintball, when paintball revealed the shortfalls of our tactics, there was people that said, yeah, but, yeah, but, you know, it's only paint.

So it's, oh, yeah, but it's not a real weapon. Yeah, but there's a different in the penetration. There's all kinds of yeah, buts. The rebels said, yeah, you're saying, yeah, but guess what? Somebody just pointed a paintball gun down the hallway and, you know, 13 out of 16 of us, got hit with paintball. That doesn't seem good. And there was people that were saying,

yeah, but, yeah, but it's not an AK-47. AK-47 only holds 30 rounds. A paintball gun has a hopper with 100 rounds. That's not realistic. Okay, what if they had a freaking... Totally. Any kind of machine gun. So you have to employ this rebel mentality.

And that's why you get, you know, that's why you get these crazy top gun stories. That's why they're stealing, trailer to set up shop. The SEAL teams has traced its whole history back to that kind of rebel behavior. Yeah. There is a, and that's what shocked me. It didn't shock me, but that's what was so amazing.

When Dan was like, hey, he's the OIC and he says, we are going to be the most professional humans that these pilots have ever talked to. We're going to brief these things. We're going to murder board each other. We're going to be in the perfect uniform. They're talking about uniforms. This attitude of we're going to be rebellious, we're going to make sure things work, and at the same time, we're going to be above board across the board and everything else so that when we step out and say, hey, this is wrong, people will actually listen. That is a rare thing.

It's a rare thing to know that you have to hold the line, toe the line, be above board across the board, and then at the same time, know, know, that when something's not quite right, you've got to be a rebel at heart. A top gun mentality. Yeah, man. It's so legit. And to have that legacy persist and to be able to cultivate it in a way that has evolved and changed a whole bunch, we're not dealing with the same problems that the original bros are dealing with back in the late 60s.

We're not losing in Vietnam. We're not dealing, but we actually have to do the same thing. And what that mentality now is. fighting against the complacency that comes with the things that we've been able to do so well for so long and have people say, hey, listen, I know this has worked for a long time. And I know this has been the best way to do it. But it's not going to keep working like this because the people we're fighting against are going to figure this out.

They're going to build a new machine. They're going to build some countermeasure. They're going to do something that keeps us from working. And we have to be every bit as creative. And now tell the entire institution what we're doing won't work anymore and figure out a way to get institution, this giant behemoth institution, to listen to you. And none of that happens ever, unless you as a leader, as a team member, stay humble. If you don't stay humble, I can't even imagine.

Like, like, I know what, you know, when you're going into this seal training and it's the most elite training and you, you know, the video, the recruiting video that I watched, the title of the video was, be someone special, right? That's the title of the video to try and get you to go in there. So you're getting told your special

the whole time. Top Guns got to be 10 times worse. On top of that, you add the freaking, you know, Maverick and Viper and Iceman. I mean, we're talking,

you're just, this is an ego booster rocket. And to have that ego booster rocket and yet, you know, throw out the C. anchor to keep you grounded to keep you down to earth to keep you humble that is the last part of this top gun mentality that's allowed us you know allowed the allies of America are our air

forces around the world to be the best and continue to be the best and you have to have all those elements and what's awesome is if you have these elements these elements do not only apply to fighter flying aircraft they they apply to being in a seal platoon they apply to being an infantry company they apply to being on the jiu jitzy mats they apply to every to be to be in a part of a family part of a team part of anything these aspects will make you win in the end two and a half hours Dave did I miss anything no man that was awesome there's probably a bunch of other things that you could get me talking about the mentality that you talked about at the end i think for me is the most important thing for sure

yeah and that's and to finish with that and to have that be the thing that persists in the legacy of top gun and have it have nothing to do with Hollywood or any of those things but the legacy of people who took that burden of responsibility of i'm responsible for people's lives who are going to go out and lead junior pilots out into combat and turn that into something that becomes an organization that's lasted for decades. I mean, what Yank was able to do in the face of more organizational resistance than I've ever faced.

I didn't face a big Navy or big Marine Corps telling me no all the time. I didn't grow up in that Marine Corps. And I said this last time, but to be a small link in that long chain, I had a harder time reading this book personally because it was so easy to connect. I was so inside. I read this book and understood so much of it that a hard time seeing it. You and I actually even talked about a little bit of, hey, what, like I was missing components of that because I was in the inside.

Talking about it with him last week and then coming back here again on today has helped me detach even more to see even what I did at Top Gun while I was there. that didn't, I didn't understand quite that level because I was inside of it. And the story is incredible, but it's, it's the persistence of that mentality that is how you win everywhere connected back to the attribute that has been my biggest challenge and by far the thing that has mattered the most of my life, which is humility, to learn at a place at Top Gun where people are telling you that you're the best of the best. That is the phrase that gets thrown out all the time. The best of the best.

You know, there's a difference between humility and showmanship. There's plenty of showmanship up there. You used to talk about with Carmen McGregor all the time. But there is so much humility inside that organization because of the burden and the responsibility that they feel that it's cool to come from a circle from the beginning of this conversation was I learned more about humility at Top Gun than anywhere else because it was the thing that was required the most for me to actually be successful there.

and Yank and the original bros They deserve a lot of credit for creating that No doubt and it's it's also amazing that When you trace back the history of the SEAL teams And the way they were formed and the way they learned and the the attitude It's the same it's the same traits It's the same traits that we talk about all the time This is what it takes to win

And with that echo Charles Yes do you have any suggestions on how we can employ the top gun mentality in our own lives? Yeah, sure. But first, I have a question for... Good deal, Dave.

So back to the... Because it's kind of confused. Back to the dog fighting situation of scenario one. Okay. Maybe two scenario. The one where... Dang, you're going way back. Yeah, because let's face it,

that wasn't as cut and dry straightforward as far as understanding it. goes. It was just hard to track. Yeah, a little bit, right? So, okay, so you're trying to close the distance as the guy on offense. No, defensive guy wants to close the distance. You got it. That's right. So, yeah, because it's confusing because usually like in jiu jitza fighting, the offender wants to close if you're a jih Tzu fighting, you want to close the distance as the, you know, yes. And then that outside green zone is not available in the scenario, but it is still available in the whole kind of scope of

fighting. Okay, you said that you don't do like a like a juke or like a faint or anything like that. You know, go one way and then break right or whatever. Is there any version of a faint

in dog fighting at all? Well, wouldn't it be you do a break and then you do a ditch? And then you do another break and then you do another ditch? No. I would not equate, I did not explain it well enough to have it in your mind, see it clearly enough. But the break and the ditch are two exclusive things. And the simplest way to answer that is no.

Because if you're fighting against an opponent who recognizes that that's a faint, what a faint would do if you move to one direction to set up a move in another direction is that you're giving him the separation that he wants to attack you. And part of what might be confusing about this is that, you know, we started with this one against one, which is a very canned setup that we're starting at a mile or whatever that might be, you know, that 6,000 feet. It hasn't accounted for all the things that have gotten to that point,

but that mile is actually the optimal separation for an attacker to get. So if you were in whatever the optimal position between you and something, somebody else in jiu-jitsu for you to be successful as the person in the offensive advantage, that's a mile. So if you can kind of equate, if you were to just show me exactly how you'd want to position yourself against someone else, you know, you're taking his back, you've kind of started to set up the rear naked or whatever that might be, whatever that, that separation is, that's not the same separation as if someone in the mount pulled you and kind of grabbed you

and pulled you close him so you couldn't strike them. So that start of you being behind him is, is, is, you know, you. is that start of that position. And if I kind of fainted or kind of hinted at I was gonna move in one direction to stop the choke and I opened up my neck to do it, the guy you're fighting is gonna laugh at that faint because all you did was open up your neck

and he's good enough and fast enough to take advantage of that, that he, what you're doing is giving him more positional advantage than you already have. Yeah, totally understand now, because I think it's natural when we're not fighter pilots to think, oh yeah, Yeah, the defender, right, the guy who's in front or whatever, we think of that as like, why doesn't you just get away, right?

Or why don't you just do a move here and fake them out and get away? But it's not that. It's like the offender, the offensive guy is just kind of trying to keep you at a certain range, right, attack range. Like that's essentially his goal. It's not to like follow you everywhere, you know, like a high speed car chase or something. It's like to keep you in that range the whole time. So if you compare it to Jiu-Jitsu, right,

you know how like we have situational training, which that's essentially what it is, right? Situational training. So if you start on my back, Jocko, I'm the defender. It's essentially the same thing. I'm the defender. And you hold me, I hold you tight.

Like I'm holding your hands and stuff. Like I got one hand here, one hand here. I'm holding you tight. You can't like maneuver at all. so tight, everything is just so tight. You want to get me in a range that essentially you can choke me, right? So or actually a better one is side control. You know how?

I think I have it. I think I have it. I think I figured out what's going on here. You've heard me say in jujitsu that if I'm going to fake a move, if I'm going to faint a move, I actually have to faint the move enough that you have to have to. to react to it. Right? I can't just, I can't just fake the sweep and expect you to react because if you, if I

fake the sweep and you know it's a fake sweep, you just pass my guard or you, you, you take advantage of my fake or you don't fall for it at all. I think because of the, because of the reaction of an aircraft, if you're going to fake enough that I'm going to actually have to fall for your fake, for you to recover back is you can't do it quickly enough and I am going to be able to take advantage of it. So you can't, it's not possible to throw a fake that's committed. Like when you commit, the hands down,

the best thing you can do is commit to that move. And that is the hardest thing for me to track. Is that an accurate assessment? Yes. That took me so long to figure out. It took me this entire conversation to figure out that. Yeah. So like in jiu-jitsu, they're not really even faint.

They're essentially just chaining moves together. I'm going to do this move. And when he reacts to this move that I'm doing, not a fake one, a real one. When he reacts, then I can do this. You have to do a real move. Yeah, yeah. And let's face it, if you do a real move in jiu-jitsu

and the person doesn't react to it, well, then you just get the move. So that's what they're saying here is, You're doing the move. And if the person doesn't react to it, cool. You win. If they do react to it, you go to the next move in the chain, just like you would in Jiu-Jitsu.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you ever been against someone where you get side mount on them and they hold you really, really, really tight? Like just new guys, I think, do it out of panic. But if you get a strategic guy, like some of the graces will do this where they'll hold you. Because if you're too tight, Chester, you can't. doing the submission. You need a little bit of space, you know.

So it's essentially that, right, where the defender, he's holding you tight. That's what he wants. He wants to hold you tight. You don't start off tight, but that's how he can kind of defeat your attacks because you're out of a range of attack, right? So I think it's just a misconception where outsiders, people who are not pilots or whatever, they look at top gun and they're like, yeah, you just shoot the guy. That's how you win, you know, kind of thing.

But it's no, you got to keep them in that range. And then, yeah, if you can find the correct jiu-jitsu. scenario that's that's similar then it becomes easier to understand because I wasn't understanding at all I was like fraud that doesn't even like why doesn't this guy yeah but then yeah after a while I think I got it I think I'm ready let's go up to top gun ready for top guns do this so I think so speaking of top gun we do want to be capable as capable as we can you know we don't all have 20 30 vision we which one is the good vision 20 30 or 30 20 25 yeah 25 that's the dope one so 25 would be like superhuman so second

number is the low number so 2020 means at 20 feet yeah the object appears like it's 20 feet away that's normal 20 30 30 means at 20 feet the object appears like it's 30 feet away that's fighter pilots some fighter pilots out there they got 20 10 vision they see it as if they're 10 feet closer that's how good their eyes are my my daughter allegedly Allegedly They brought other When she was doing the eye It's my oldest daughter

And they doing the eye test The doctor was Or the whatever the practitioner was Hey Everyone come in here and look at this Because she was just Really good She said 25

That seems unrealistic to me But she also kind of gave like a 25 And then she was like 25 2010 So maybe it's just 20. 2010, but yeah, it's pretty, uh, pilot. My, my, my dad also had really insane vision, really insane, really good vision.

Mine was always just, you know, solid race. Good. What, did you, was yours? So I was better than 2020. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I was, I would read the 2015 line kind of no factor and I was picking off like a couple off the 2010, um, which is not, not common. I mean, not a lot of, I was lucky enough to have a gift.

of really good vision. Yeah, I mean, just a man, how stoked were you? When you're like, they're like, oh, yeah, you're going to take your vision because you want to be a fighter pilot. Oh, by the way, this is one of the most important factors. Oh, by the way, you happen to have just naturally one in a hundred thousand humans have this kind of vision. Can you like not become a fighter pilot if your vision is like a, you know, it used to be

like that. Like I said, now that you figure out like, Jack Kerr and go get LASIC and like, as long as he pass a physical way is good. Right. There's, there's technology and science out there that. improves your vision. You don't have to be born with it anymore. Did you notice that on the muster video? The one that got the muster that got canceled, Orlando, right?

Yes. The one that got canceled in the video. I put little attributes to each of the team members and yours was the I test. It was real quick. But if you look, you can notice. That's why. I saw that. Yeah, you did. Pick it off. Check that out. Anyway, capability, right? All right. You want to be capable? You want to stay capable. Jock Fuel will. Help you do that.

Actually, here's a thing. All right. Look, do you have a perfect diet? Do you have a perfect diet? No, I do not. I don't have a perfect diet either. So, Jocco Fuel, food, drink, supplementation. Boom.

All in one. So what do we got, joint warfare, super cruel oil for your joints. When they go out and they will. After you said boom, I was like, uh-oh, he's trapped. I don't know where you. I don't even think Echo knows where he's going. But then you just maneuvered right out of that. No, that was like, you did a little deck transition and you rolled right out.

And I was pretty impressed. Like, what is that, a hard break scenario? Deck transition was awesome, man. So that's what happened right there, right? There you go. And the last, I'm just trying to explain what we got here, you know, what we're taking, what I'm taking, you know. Anyway, let's just be straight up. What do you take every day?

Super Cruel oil. I ran out of joint warfare just text. I know. I know. You know. I'm quarantine 2020 and that's my excuse. But nonetheless, you know, I got a response. So is he FedExing?

I, you know, I don't go over those details. Okay. So we'll look through guy 100%. The good thing is we can, we will now get another, what is that, scientific assessment of when you go off joint warfare. Yeah. And you start getting aches and pains. Yeah.

Which is what happens. Yeah. All right, so you take joint warfare. Super cruel oil, that's the combo. That's the joint maintenance, antioxidant combo right there. What do you? I take three joint warfare in the morning, three joint warfare at night, three super cruel in the morning, three super cruel at night every day.

Yeah, I take basically half that. I do that. I do that. I do that. One hit, three and three. Easy money. Discipline every single day. Put it this way.

Every day that I work out, deplane all day. With like an electrolyte kind of thing. You know, I used to take this pre-workout with caffeine. Don't even take it anymore. Discipline. So the powder of discipline. Yes, sir. What flavor?

Which are all of them? All of them. All interchangeable. To me, because I kind of- Dave, she still looked at you like you were evil. Well, the afterburner or orange. With ice. Crushed ice.

Crushed ice is ridiculous. So good. Tropic Thunder, you know, is my go-to with the cans. 100%. I drink cans every day. But the discipline powder, 100%. Every day that I work out, which is five, sometimes six days a week, yes. So that's the everyday thing too.

Mulk, not every day. Oh, really? That goes comes in waves. That's interesting. You know, sometimes you just... I told you about the milk and the coconut milk, right? Yes, sir. That's a big difference.

Because, look, I can't pound a freaking half gallon of milk or whatever. I can't pound a big giant, what is it, 20 ounces of milk on an empty stomach. It's not optimal. It's not optimal. as the way you feel. Right. You're familiar with this. I understand.

Yes. But you can hammer that coconut milk and it tastes. You're freaking delicious. Yeah. Delicious. Arguably better than regular milk. Taste-wise, coconut milk with.

We could be there. Yeah. We could be there. I know that's up. Dave's looking at me like I'm crazy. I'm telling you, we could be there. If you haven't gone,

have you gone down the coconut milk road, yeah? No, but I'm not a milk guy. We do almond milk. Oh, okay. And so I think you're speaking my language. I'm, I mean, to drink like 20 ounces of milk right now actually sounds like it would be a problem for me.

Yeah. Because I haven't drank regular milk in a long time. Let me like a night carrier landing. It would be. The bigger issues barrel all day. What do you mean you don't take it every day? What, milk? Yeah.

Yeah. You know, it goes in ways like for, you know, week, two weeks or whatever. So what do you do like if you're, what do you do when you get done with dinner and it was a really good dinner? And then you're like, oh yeah, but I want dessert. Yeah. I don't need that much. Dessert makes you strong. Well, you know, when I'm.

thinking that milk train all day but the thing is that feeling comes in waves you see what me anyway the almond milk Dave Dave are not relating at all the almond milk coconut milk regular milk I like regular milk straight up like it empty stomach full stomach whatever I had coconut milk in like us you know a random smoothie before and I was surprise it was surprisingly good oh it's good for coming from a dairy milk cows milk lover that's that's something cool all right so we got that we got warrior kid milk as well we got jocco white tea we got the cans of dysplingo which I've been partaking into quite a quite a few many today so getting a little

crazy with that and part of that reason is just because it freaking taste delicious all these things are available at the vitamin shop so if a vitamin shop's open around you can find some of this stuff If not, you can go to origin, main, M-A-I-N-E.com. You can order it up, and we will send it to you stat. Yep, very reliable crew over there. Statt. Oh, the crew is up there just getting after it.

Yes. Just getting after it. Also, origin, they also make geese for jujitsu, because we are doing jujitsu. Hey, slow, we got to get back into jitsu. Have to. At some point, we have to. Right. And I dig it if we're, if we're exercising restraint, being a,

a little hesitant, you know, given the current. I dig it. But some of us, man, it's kind of... Got a corn and train. Crain with your quarantine, yes, sir. With your corn team. Yeah, man. And some people getting back into it quicker than others. So if you don't have a ghee, you want to know what the best key is.

Factually, origin geepo, mid-America, 100%. Also, aside from jujitsu, not forgetting about jiu, but aside from jiu-tzu. We got... In addition to jiu-jitsu. Yes, correct. In addition to jiu-tibu-a. that are made in America, we have other things. Yes, sir, that is true.

Denham, American denim, in the form of jeans. Yep. We all wear jeans. Quarantine or not, we can wear our jeans, and we can represent made in America 100%. By the way, no big deal, but you can also help rebuild manufacturing in the United States of America. Maybe that's important to you.

I know it's important to me. So you might want to get on that train as well. Gets yourself some origin boots. Boots 100% yeah Boots have it as you mentioned the last time That was a good that was good way to put it yes I do as a matter of fact I do I don't think I've seen you wearing them have I Oh wait well no I haven't seen you wearing them I tend to reserve my boot wearing scenarios Um pretty conservatively you know so I uh you know I don't wear them basically this is your way of saying we need to make origin slippers or and slippers and some form of

sneakers sneakers tennis shoes running shoes whatever whatever depending on what part of the world you're from what do you guys call sneakers in in Hawaii

shoes shoes you know what I don't know if we were ever familiar with that product shoes or whatever so yeah when I moved to the mainland it was like yeah shoes

sneakers we wear slippers a k a flip flops or go bare feet 100% what are we calling sandals I call them flip-flops. Yes.

Sandals, to me, sandals means has a strap over the top. It's a different situation. Maybe this is like a guy that lives in Miami that's taking his young girlfriend and he's like 52 years old and he's taking her out to like an Italian restaurant. That guy's wearing sandals, right?

I'm wearing flip-cloths over here. Well, is there a, did I catch maybe, is there an order? In origin flip-flop scenario brewing here? I would not be mad at that scenario. No. Let me put it to you this way. I don't want to wear things that aren't made in America.

At origin. So, yes. And as like you, I wear flip-flops pretty much every day. So are there some brewing? The answer is in the affirmative big time. Well, I think sandals, and this is just how it feels, so I don't know technically. Flip-flops, sandals. If you're referring to flip-flops are the ones that they're referring to my homeboy in Miami

Yeah, well, that's different. Well, if the thing goes between your big toe and your second toe, the thing, you know, they call them thongs sometimes. Oh, that's a good enough term for it. If it has that, then, yeah, sandals don't. They just cover your foot. They don't go between your tail. That seems like the technical reason. All this stuff and more available at origin, maine.com, get some.

Yes. Very true. Also, what do we got? I think we have a store. Yes. It's called Jocko Store. So you want to continue to represent on the path is where you can get your discipline equals freedom,

good shirts, more rash guards, David Burke, hoodies, hats, beanies, you know, all this kind of stuff. Apparel.

We got some posters on there too. Oh, yeah. Some worry kit stuff as well. That's always good. Yeah. So yeah, jocococor.com.

Go over there, you know, get something. Represent. while you're on this path that we're all on. Also, you can support this podcast by subscribing to it. Subscribe to this podcast. And then this podcast called Jocko Podcast.

We also have another podcast that I'm changing the name of and we'll get it back out there. And we're discussing how we're going to actually play that game or how we're going to do it. But so there was a podcast called The Thread. it will be back under a new name. I didn't I didn't even Google the name when I just named my own new podcast right? Just zero research.

This is a good name. I like it and do it. So sometimes I'm a little bit too default. So got to watch out for that. Got the grounded podcast where we talk about life through the lens of jihitsu, Warrior Kid podcast for your children and also pretty good for parents to listen to and also get some warrior kids soap available yet?

Yes. Oh, it's available on jocco store.com. Order yourself some killer soap made by young Aden so that you as a human being can stay clean. Also not to mention jaco soap and trooper soap. Oh. Yeah. So the, you know, so sometimes I'm not saying this is what it's for because it's not what it's for, but sometimes soap is sort of sitting out.

it's just sitting out on display we'll call it it's a word on the street is the trooper soap in particular gets many many compliments with the aroma so it smells good is what I'm saying interesting yeah I personally like that killer soap yeah I like the killer soap but I guess the trooper soap if you want to you know let's say it's at nighttime your final shower you're gonna go go sleep with your wife or something like this

maybe use the trooper soap is what I'm saying interesting Anyway, yes. Echo Charles has spoken. Ranch.com also Jocco store.com. Boom. Soap. Available.

Get some. Also, we have a YouTube channel. If you're interested in the video version of this podcast, you're going to watch it instead of just listen. By the way, I posted a video the other day of me making some food with Josh Hall and Tori. And somebody wrote like the no explosions. So I think we kind of owe it to the world. world to put explosions in some you know some jaco cooking videos i'm the worst cook uh well you know

some guys are into it yes you know it's kind of like a thing like yeah i'm gonna grill up layf babbin all the way dude layf babin's all about that grilling and what what do you do with uh what do with it before you cook it you leave it in the fridge inside some sauce for the night what's that marinated yeah he's marinated he's doing a whole nine yards but leif's like yeah i got some move he's all fired up for that You know what I'll do with food? Eat it. I understand. You know how you can tell if someone's really into cooking.

When they put salt on it, they don't just put salt like this. Or like, you know, you put seasoning, you know, before it goes in the oven, wherever it goes. You know, you just put salt, put seasoning. This is how you can tell. They grab the salt. They grab the salt with their fingers. And they sprinkle it like in a circle. You know, like they have a technique to sprinkling.

You see what I'm saying? People not into cooking. They don't do that kind of stuff. What about the guy that, the salt? Bay. Oh, advanced. Oh, advanced. Here's the deal. Salt administrator.

I've been to his restaurant. Yeah. And I have had him actually put salt on my steak, cut it for me. Yep. And he did he? And he did it that way. I did.

He was advanced. Name drop. You want to hear name drop? Yes, sir. You know who I was sitting there eating steak with? A couple friends, including. Henzhou Gracie. We're kicking it.

Oh, yes. That's a solid name drop. He's so awesome. Yes. Such an awesome guy. Yes, sir. So there you go. Name drop.

Yeah. Anyway, so the point is, yeah, we have a YouTube channel. So, yeah, check that out if you're, if, you know, you don't watch the podcast, straight up. Also psychological warfare. You need a little spot. That's what it is. A spot if you're hitting moments of weakness, specifically in the workouts that, I mean, if I'm speaking for myself right now. If you need a little spot, you want to get past that feeling of, oh, I don't feel like doing this, whatever.

Boom, psychological warfare will spot you a little bit. Flipside Canvas.com. Dakota Meyer making prints for you to hang up in your house that will keep you on the path. We got a bunch of books. We got Top Gun by Dan Pedersen. You can get that on jocco podcast.com, the books. Some people were late getting that up there. No big deal.

You know. Whatever. Better late than never. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You can get that there. You can also get the latest book called The Code, the Evaluation of Protocols. Dave Burke. Getting some good feedback on that book?

Getting some good feedback on that book, big time. Agree. Troopers are in the game on this book, which is awesome. Humbling book. Dude. Humbling and repetitively humbling. It's one of those books where it's kind of like what you were saying about landing on a carrier and being on a carrier and having that life where you're like, this is hard.

But I love it. That's the code, the evaluation. Put yourself in check. And it's like a, or it is a reminder. Because like a lot of this stuff is like, yeah, like you could have a one day. You could have a zero day, right? But if you forget about the code, it won't even really move you either way. But if you're on the path, you know, if you're, if you are reminded that, hey, you're going by this code, you throw up a zero.

Brother, that hurts, you know? But if you're not reminded, it doesn't hurt. See what I'm saying? Yeah, remind yourself. So get the code. You can get leadership strategy and tactics field manual You can get way the warrior kid one two and three You can get Mikey the Dragons

You can get discipline equals freedom field manual You can get extreme ownership dichotomy leadership Been writing books over here Get some information in you Check those books out Eschon Front is our leadership consultancy Where we solve problems through leadership You may think well how are you doing that

No one's traveling because of COVID-19 Well we are We are doing it all day long. We're actually stepping up. We're doing a lot of it virtual. Well, we're doing it all virtual now. And what we found is that you can have me come and talk to your, you can have me come and talk to your team of a thousand people in a big auditorium. And most of those people, what they're watching is the screen next to me on stage that's projecting my face.

That's what they're actually watching. And then they don't have any interaction. They can't ask any question because there's too many people there. Or during a Zoom call, I'm right there. Dave's right there. Laves right there. Whoever from the echelon front team is right there talking directly to you, to your team. So it's turned out awesome.

You know, the interaction that we can have, the connection, the discussions, that's what we're doing at Eschelon Front now. It's been a great transition. I'm sure we'll do, we will end up doing live face-to-face consulting again. But right now, it's no factor. We're pushing right through it. How many Zoom calls do you think you're doing a day right now?

Dude, I'm doing a lot of Zoom calls. And the whole time in my head I was thinking, it's no factor. It's no factor. It's been awesome. Yep. It's, in many ways, it's better. Yeah.

It's better to be able to have Dave talk to your 12-person team twice a week, and that cost Dave an hour, but he spent, it cost him two hours, you know, in a week, whereas if he had to fly up to your location and spend two hours up there, that cost him, whatever, two days. It cost him two days. and your people can't, you know, hit them up in that conversation and say, hey, what do you think? Hey, let me, let me hit you in the email. It's, it's truly developing relationships that we didn't think was possible.

So go to Eshlamfront.com for details on that. And in that, we also stepped up our game with EF Online, EFonline.com. This is the other thing we're doing. We are communicating all the time. We're having live meetings. We're doing them basically five times a week. If you want to ask me a question, if you want to ask me a question, if you want to sit there on a computer, look at me and ask me a question, go to eFonline.com and come to one of our live meetings. You will get to ask me a question.

We'll have a full conversation. It's epic. Not to mention, we've got all kinds of material on there for you to learn leadership, to train your tactics. It's all in there. And it's only growing. It's growing really fast. We've we're pouring everything we got into EF online. So check that out.

We also have the muster coming up. We have Dallas, Texas, December 3rd and 4th. We have Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona, September 16th and 17th. So if you want to come to those, better register quick. Extreme Ownership.com. We've sold out all of our gigs we've ever done. We'll sell these out too. So if you want to come, go register.

and EF Overwatch and EF Legion. Look, we work with companies all the time. All companies need leaders at every level from frontline leaders to senior leaders. If you need a senior level leader, go to EF Overwatch. If you need a frontline leader, go to EF Legion. If you were in the military, in any capacity, go to EFlegin.com and go and register

so we can get you connected with companies that are looking for front-line leaders. And finally, America's mighty warriors.org. That is Mama Lee. That is Mark Lee's mom. And that is her charity, which she set up after Mark was killed. She decided to pick up the fight. She decided to carry on.

And she's out there helping service members, helping their families, helping Gold Star families around the world. to give you an example of what she's doing. There's medical treatments that sometimes aren't covered by insurance. America's Mighty Warriors is covering that kind of thing for our vets. She's doing it all the time. That's one of the many things that she's out there doing.

So if you want to support, go to that website, and you can either donate or you can get personally involved. And if you want to hear any more of my despotic sermons, Or you want to hear any more of Echo Charles's preposterous myths? Or you haven't had enough of Dave's overindulgent anecdotes. Then you can find us, all of us. We're on the interwebs. We're on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Dave is at David R. Burke. Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to all of the military personnel out there. Look, they all make this machine work. When that carrier, when that fighter pilots going to land on that carrier, there's 5,000 people that are making that possible on that ship. There's 5,000 people working, coordinating, making it happen. They're all over the place. So thanks to all of you that are out there.

Thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service. and everyone that defends our way of life right here at home. Also, thanks to all the doctors, nurses, and medical personnel who care for us when our way of life is threatened. And everyone else out there, just remember to keep that top gun mindset. Put your ego in check. Throw in a little bit of rebellion.

Push yourself to learn. Set up competition. that forces you to get better and then get out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Dave Burke and Echo and Jocko. Out.