Actual TOPGUN, Dave Berke, Reacts to "TOPGUN: Maverick" with Jocko Willink

so the new top gun movie came out top gun maverick and i mean we just couldn't really help but to talk to the real top gun dave burke is here what's happening dave what's up jocko good to be here man dave burke if you don't know him uh marine corps fighter pilot top gun fighter pilot top gun instructor top gun senior instructor commander the first operational f-35 squadron on the ground with my task unit in the battle of ramadi as an anglico guy leading an anglico team air naval gunfire liaison so that's how we got to know each other initially now we work together you can fly an f-18 an f-16 an f-22 and an f-35 how many people in the world can do that i know it sounds crazy but i actually don't know of anybody else that was qualified in all four it may have happened in the last couple years i don't know about it but well who would get the call now the the real kicker is is the f-22 yeah that doesn't fit with both the f-18 and the f-16 it fits with one or the other but actually it doesn't really fit with anything anymore but so i think the chances of that happening are pretty slim it's kind of cool so you are it's safe to say you're you're you could be considered a little bit of an expert on this kind of thing yeah i guess so all right top gun before we jump into it yeah what what what is top gun explain it real quick so top gun like the real top gun is just a nickname for what's called the the united states navy fighter weapon school it's just a school that has been around for a while since since 1969 it's just a school that teaches kind of a graduate level capability for fighter pilots to be ready for war we can certainly go in a lot more detail the the school is called the navy fighter weapons school it got the nickname top gun because very early on it was literally about gunnery like it had its origins and being able to use the airplane correctly and use the gun on the plane well and i'm really paraphrasing but it comes from that so the name top gun has stuck from the beginning and it got a lot of prominence from the first movie top gun is where that name really kind of rung through but top gun by itself is really just a nickname for the school so you take normal pilots from the navy and the marine corps does anyone from the air force go there no we used to have an exchange program once in a blue moon but no i would say it's it's almost exclusively now mostly maybe a couple of marines so navy marine corps and you go there and you learn to dog fight amongst other things yes but that is the foundational thing you start to teach and learn up there and you scrap in the sky you you go up and you dog fight other really good pilots yes and so if who gets selected to go there do you have to be the best guy in your in your squadron yeah you have to be in the top tier of your squadron there's some things you have to work out some timing you know some other things beyond your control and you don't get ranked there's not like a board that says dave burke is number one and somebody else is number two but there's definitely a tier that you need to be in and there's some certifications where the the squadron kind of can judge you along the way and you need to be at the at the top uh towards the top of your peer group to be selected so you got selected to be to go to top gun school yeah then you what go on a couple deployments then you get how do you get selected to be a top gun instructor did you have to kind of do well at the top yeah so what's unique about that and it's it's a very unique for marines which i really like because the marine corps has a unique selection program the way it works for the marine corps you got to get selected to go from your squadron so your squadron just gets a billet and so the average math is every squadron's gonna send one person a year it might be two one year none the next because you're deployed but it sort of works out to one a year is the basic math how many how many pilots in the squadron 17 kind of regular pilots and then like co exo so you know just around 20 or so check in that selection process you got it you get picked to go by your commander your commanding officer gets to pick and you know there's a probably process he uses and then as the marine they send you up to top gun and you'll do the full 13-week top gun course and you go right back to your squadron which is a little bit different the navy you'll you'll either stay to teach at a schoolhouse whereas the marine corps you go right back to your squadron and most commonly you'll go back to your squadron and you'll deploy and then at some point in there the marines and the rest of the staff will vote and select on which marines they want to bring back there's only three pilots on the staff of 25 that are marines so to come back as a marine humblebrag it's kind of crazy math and by looking back on it to come back as a marine is it's a pretty narrow window you got to thread the needle to be available eligible and meet the staff's expectations of what they're looking for to bring you back to bring you back as an instructor and then how hard is it to be the senior instructor there is that based on what's that based on is it based on your seniority or what's it based on it's a combination of things i mean you have to be a more senior pilot you know the most junior guys are not going to be and the senior pilot is called the training officer that's the pilot on the staff at 25 that's really picked to run the class and so that's where you were i was as a marine i was a training officer which was at the time like the best job because you're basically running top gun as a um is a relatively junior person in the military how often do they pick a marine to do that not that often there's a handful i mean i'm not the only one for sure but it's not that common it's pretty uncommon for a marine to get a chance to be the training officer top gun how do you know so it's not based on seniority so is it just you're kind of the best pilot is that sort of what's happening there is a combination of factors at play what they really want is someone who is a good pilot who's experienced who is senior um but they want someone who's got two unique capabilities together you have to be a really good teacher so of course your teaching skill is really critical but you also have to be able to be able to lead a peer group who even though you might be a senior you're going to be like just a few months here's not some big difference in seniority so it's really do you trust someone to be able to lead a peer group of pretty evenly matched even capability even experienced pilots and be able to lead them as really peers so combination of how good of a teacher you are and how well do you think you can lead your peers which is not easy to do so it's a combination of things does it help if you shoot all them down it does help if you're credibility goes a long way in in anything but certainly fighter aviation if you're good in the jet that's going to help you for sure all right so that's kind of what top gun is yeah and that's where you were uh the first top gun movie what year did it come out 86 and you said you saw it in 86 i did and that impacted the trajectory of your life 100 i was 13. so if you can kind of picture the brain of a 13 year old i was ripe for that kind of influence and that's 100 why you chose the path you chose i had already even younger than that had had i wouldn't say just explored i had already decided i want to be in the military i think you know when you're 12 or 13 it's it's a little not clear as to even what or why but i knew i was already inclined i thought airplanes were cool i thought the military was cool i was already moving in that direction when i saw that on the movie it really narrowed this i think i want to be in the military too i want to fly jets around boats like it got really narrow from that how did you end up in the marine corps instead of the navy that's a good question because when i saw that movie of course immediately you go towards the navy because naval aviation is mostly around the navy and the airplane was a navy jet they have 14 tomcat it's all about the navy so there's not really a connection to the marine corps what was unique for me is i grew up right around the corner like a mile away from a marine base so inside of that there's a little piece of really thinking the marine corps was cool as a little kid kind of being enamored with marines and having this little sense of something about the marine corps to me was unique and anybody that that really migrates towards the marine corps there's an intangible quality about the marine corps it's really undeniable and i already had that so i saw this movie i'm like man i want to do that and at some point relatively soon i don't know if i was at an air show or somebody explained it somebody made the connection that marines fly jets off ships and when i was like holy cow i can do both of those things and i combine them marine flying jets off ships that's when it was like i'm going to do exactly that thing yeah you were just hook line and sinking all day all in all right so what did you do for okay so for the new movie top gun maverick what did you have to do with it you did something for it i did it was kind of cool so you know this movie just came out memorial day 2022 the movie's been done for a couple of years it got delayed you know for code and whatnot so this is probably back in 16 or 17 when they really started to come to grips that they're going to make a sequel they knew what was going to go on and they had a couple of screenwriters they had a a guy one of the guys who wrote the script for the movie we had a common friend and i don't even remember what the connection was but i got linked up with him what year was this 16 maybe okay 16. yeah i think 16 is probably right so kind of early on in the development and he had written an initial script and he i think on behalf of the navy on behalf of tom cruise on behalf of a bunch of people they really wanted it to be authentic so he actually came out and spent a couple days with me and we went through that thing and what he was looking for was is this how it would be is this what they would do is this how they would say it so i got a chance to go through kind of beginning to end and help contribute and listen my contributions were small but i got to contribute to the authenticity of how you'd go about doing it and if you haven't flown it it might be hard to understand some of the nuance and they really wanted to get the nuance right so i got to help with that which was really cool is there anything was there any scene was there any words was there any lines where you're like that's that's right there that's me any movements i don't think i made the connection to me individually but there were things that they there's a key theme that i really liked that comes out and i'm going to assume that most people now for seeing the movies i'm not going to give anything away but there's a theme about as technology moves on as technology gets better a lot of people buy into the idea that oh better technology wins now you and i both know that is not true now technology helps technology is awesome but in the end especially in when you're fighting one against one or force against force it comes down to the person flying the machine and that's the cool thing about aviation is it's airplanes are really good equalizers they wanted to keep with the theme that they you know the person in the box the man in the box and so they they understood and i helped get to the idea that it's not that the airplane is better than ours or vice versa it's the person flying it and that was a theme that we talked about and it really made its way into the movie which is cool humblebrag coming at you again hey it's not about the machine it's about me dave burke best pilot ever i'm so glad i'm here right now uh what was your overall so now you've seen the completed movie i saw it too totally i saw it so we could do this because i didn't want to be completely blind and it was very fortuitous in the fact that my wife i made it into a date i was like oh you know i'd really like to see this and she was like she was all happy because you know i'm like the worst person for doing fun things or whatever she was all excited so we went she was ea as we went let's go see it so we've seen the movie i've seen the movie what was your overall impression how did they do dude i thought it was awesome i loved it now i also knew i was going to see a movie so in terms of like what i was thinking and my criteria for it um for the baseline i was expecting dude i thought it was awesome it's a hollywood movie and we have to take our knowledge and kind of suspend it a little bit for these type of situations i think that's a movie like this i think that's the best word you got to suspend some of those things i was not there looking at how they laid out the tactics and the format i looked at it as this is a movie but it's also a movie that's connected to a world that i know really really well and there's elements that i wanted to see how how well they could depict that not about the tactics of the moves in the airplane but what it's like to be in an airplane and there's also some cool themes in there too that i really liked like america is awesome when we build really cool stuff and we can go anywhere and do anything so there's a lot of things about the movie that i really liked and overall for what i was expecting i love that movie yeah i thought it was good too and another thing you have to take is when you're watching these movies whether it's a war movie or this guy i guess this is allegedly a war movie or kind of a war movie you have to take that they've got to get all these different complicated things into an hour and a half two hours personalities emotion like they gotta do it so they gotta make some they gotta make some adjustments in reality to make it to make it hit the way it's supposed to all right so uh the pilots in the movie the various pilots in the movie how did they how are those personalities did they did they nail it yeah it's funny because you know had this movie come out 10 years ago i probably would even look at it differently than i do now because half of the way i'm looking at this now is through the lens of leadership and personalities and the stuff that we talk about at echelon front all the time um so like i said kind of going back in one sense i saw the first when i was 13 or 14. and so part of me is looking at this movie thinking what does 13 or 14 year old dave burke think of this movie and part of the reason why i'm so positive about this movie is i think any 13 14 year old influential kid watching this what i said the other day was millions of kids are going to want to join the navy and fly airplanes which to me is a huge win that's awesome in the leadership lens i'm looking at ego i'm looking at all these other nuanced things and they do magnif they magnify the personalities to do exactly what you described they got two hours to depict all these things so they take these individual personalities and they magnify them so they're really obvious to see and so in some sense i didn't have a lot of experience with people whose personalities were that kind of i guess over the top in some ways but i could identify and and resonate with every single one so i think in that sense they still did a good job depicting ego complacency a bunch of other subtle attributes you really got to think about in order for someone to be successful in difficult situations so i thought they did a good job of that too and then how about the mission profile uh first of all what was the reason why they needed to use an f-18 instead of an f-35 or some other mechanism like a t-lam or something like that what they made a comment um that i think to allow them to use the f-18 which was hey this is the ideal mission for the f-35 but the gps jamming negates the weapons so if people have asked me like did you think that was a slight on the f35 or unrealistic and i'm like no they just wanted to use the f-18 so they had a reason to use the f-18 and the reason they gave was the f-35 gps weapons wouldn't work in a gps jammed environment whether that's true or not kind of but it certainly was plausible enough to explain why they're doing it the way they did it so that actually made sense it's fine uh that said there's pilots out there can have all sorts of opinions on it but if you again look at it through the lens of this is a movie it was totally fine why did they want to use the f-18s oh because that's why you want to bring tom cruise back maverick back i think his number one criteria and i think one of the things the navy wanted to do is they wanted it to be as realistic as possible and despite how good cgi is and computer stuff is really cool you cannot replicate a lot of what you saw in the movie their faces g-forces all that stuff and if you want to put two people on an airplane you need to fly an f-18 because there's no two-seat f-35s and you're not gonna film a movie with the singles at 35 and make it look real at least not this real so they needed hornets which is totally fine dang so that's legit yes they okay the physical aspect of being a fighter pilot wha what's the reality there you know you got tom cruise you got these people making it look like it's all hard how hard is it come on the reality is i'm sitting across from jocko willing navy seal and the reality is it's not like this all the time but flying fighters is exhausting sometimes like very physically demanding and um there are components of flying that physiologically are really really hard and i think they wanted to depict those segments now it's not usually quite as sustained as difficult it is there's elements of flight that are like downright boring like navigating to and from you're just sitting there you're just sitting in a cockpit and then there's times that there's extreme levels of physiological challenges that a lot of human beings would struggle with and i think they wanted to depict that there are times that flying is mind-blowingly difficult both spatially like thinking about three dimensions and physically when you have eight or nine g's on the airplane and if you're close to 200 pounds with your gear you're feeling 1800 pounds something like that and you're literally feeling that having to look around and do things those can be really hard you don't do that for hours at a time you do it for minutes at a time but inside those few minutes that can be tough and i've always enjoyed taking people out and they come back and when they land they they don't know that they're going to be as tired as they are so there's some adapting physiologically that is pretty hard do you have to do did you guys have certain workouts that you did totally absolutely i mean standard thing you got to have like strong glutes strong hamstrings and you have to have really good technique for breathing and if you have the right muscles and the right technique really anybody of any build can physiologically adapt to high g flying how many hours when you were a top gun instructor how many hours would you fly a day that was physically challenging so like how many hours are you dog fighting a day like in a good day like a good day at top gun i'd get two maybe three dog fights like three would be a really good day so we'll just say let's say it's two a dog a one against one dog fight flight would be 45 minutes total and of that you're probably 25 ish minutes per flight like under g like really maneuvering and bending the jet around so that's what a bfm flight would be about 25 minutes of that i flew in an f18 i did the backseat ride up at fallon nevada which is where top gun ended up this was before top gun was there yeah pretty sure and pulled i think seven and a half g's and flew around and did a bomb drop and did a dog fight so i had like a cool experience for for that the the mission in the movie they have to fly up over this thing and that's a normal procedure because i've done it it's and i remember this in the pop that's a thing right exactly so talk us through that yeah so you're flying at low level to avoid radar which is real yeah that whole mission at the end every segment of that mission is things that i routinely and what pilots do routinely in f-18s on a regular basis and not like top gun pilots just any pilot as a routine series of pieces of emission that you would do to include what you described the low level ingress the high g pop the really high climb acceleration the rolling on your back high g turn why do you have to roll on your back so to go from pointed high to pointed low meaning nose up to nose down because they're diving down towards the target if you push on the jet going as fast as they are it's probably five six hundred miles an hour the number of negative g's you would we wouldn't black out it's called red out like you would put so much blood in your brain that you would you couldn't you physiologically couldn't do it so you roll onto your back so when you pull the apply the g it's in the right direction it's the type of g that you want and so instead of getting all weightless and floating and just making it really slow and painful you roll inverted and you pull really hard because it's the type of g's you're designed for so you roll inverted and you pull down to get into the dive in a way that you can tolerate when i did that the one time i did it it was awesome how fast that the aircraft goes you're you're flying right side up also you're upside down yes it's like instantaneous it is fast yeah and then you're then you can see that i thought it was so you could see the target better there is a component of that so a move like that like coming over a ridge line it's to be able to get the jet pointed down towards the target as fast as you can um the the technique of doing that you could debate all day but the maneuver is a real maneuver that we do routinely what about the afterburner talk to me about that yeah um so you have a drink called afterburner right i do afterward orange yes well why'd you call the drink afterburner orange and what does afterburner do to a plane what does afterburner orange do to your brain yeah you know they both serve very similar functions which is kind of cool i think the name for me was pretty obvious i think in the first like seven seconds of the original movie top gun uh there's like a jet on a the tomcat is on the catapult and goes in a full afterburner and it's this giant huge orange flame which is giving this jet a bunch of additional thrust and most catapult launches you take in what's called full afterburner uh and then really the technique behind afterburner in general is you're flying around in a regular engine it just spins and puts out thrust after burner is where they take literally liquid fuel and they spray it in the back so it kind of creates like a mini explosion and just shoots a red an orange flame out the back but it gives the jet a whole bunch of additional thrust so what it gives you in in somewhat limited time frames a bunch of extra speed or a bunch of extra ability to maneuver what percentage of extra power am i getting is it like double power is it like 20 percent more so here's an example like um when you're in full power without afterburner they call it mill and those engines that you saw and i'll get close i'll kind of use the original hornet you get about just under 11 000 pounds of thrust in a mill rated engine if you go to afterburner you get about 18 000 pounds of thrust so it's not quite double but it's a big jump and if you go from two engines so twenty two thousand pounds to thirty six thousand pounds you're getting a big additional boost in thrust a lot you can feel it you you absolutely go back in yourself yes you accelerate quick and then uh you made a drink that's called that same thing it's exact same thing there are times my normal steady state i'm pretty good to go for the day i get up i'm good till the evening but there are times i need that little that little kicker and that drink for obvious reasons the name but you also get that little hitter that'll give you what you need to to get through some more challenging times if you need that little enhancement how about staying cool as a pilot i i talk about this a lot you know from a seal perspective you know you always want to say sound calm on the radio to make everyone else calm and make yourself not sound like you're freaking out or losing your mind how much detachment do you have to have as a pilot to remain calm in pressure situations a lot i mean the concept of detachment is something that's kind of universal we talk it about it in leadership it's no no different than an airplane the way you communicate and the way you sound is is i think two things one it's a reflection of how detached you are and you want to be detached because you want to see as many things as you can especially in a jet you want to look around and see a lot of things you don't want to be looking at just one thing but you also want to give the impression that despite the amount of chaos that's going around you want the people that you're talking to to think that you're calm and if they think that you're calm like hey this isn't that bad this isn't that stressful we're going to be okay they tend to react the same way now there are times that on a radio and it's not all that common but there are times i want to convey a little extra emotion to get you to move quicker and i might elevate my voice or or speak in a kind of a higher octave or or a little faster or louder those are typically calculated times when i really need a reaction and i don't think it's much different than the way you describe being a seal and it's really no different than any leadership role is the times that i do that i'm pretty judicious about doing that and it's because i want to get a reaction the rest of the time i want to sound cool calm collected and just like hey this situation this situation is no factor we're good um i got some general notes from the movie uh one thing that was interesting was there was one part where a pilot screwed something up and he's like this is my fault is that standard taking ownership or did you put that in there at top gun it's pretty standard by the time you get there you have figured out early on your career that the standard litany of excuses that you're gonna make first of all they haven't been tolerated by anybody else nobody wants to hear your excuses and after a while you come to realize that anything that didn't go well is actually your fault it's doubly true if you spent your life by yourself in an airplane i mean who else are you going to blame for anything that's gone wrong so the best pilots early on come to grips that any problem that's been created out there is your fault and you know a little humility and why not but yeah despite what you might see the humility that most aviators have to be successful is recognizing it if something went wrong at your fault there's a scene where or there's actually a couple scenes where this happens where maverick is going against the the other top gun pilots he's just slaughtering like time after time after time and i know you and i have talked about this that's pretty realistic i was thinking to myself if i was watching this i think oh if i didn't know anything i'd be like oh that's unrealistic that he would just go kill everyone but he actually would yeah if you're that much better of a pilot now he's a top gun instructor and these guys are just regular top gun pilots so it still is realistic that he would just slaughter them all yeah not really competitive i don't think anybody inside of top gun as a student or an instructor would say that the most proficient instructor is significantly better than the most proficient student like a big big big difference okay so the best instructor is way better than the best student yes and so that was an accurate depiction he's just up there murking people yeah i mean the students come through even students that are graduates they're good i mean these are good pilots this is not that they're not good in the airplane but instructors are getting so many reps they got so much experience they've seen it so many times that the difference between sort of the senior bfm or dog fighting pilot at top gun versus you know even a top gun graduate there's a huge disparity there how about g-lock talk me through g-lock what happens that's a thing absolutely um fortunately in the f-18 it's not quite as prominent as it is in some other airplanes i think the most notorious g-lock plane out there that's flying is the f-16 which is just the coolest jet um it's an unbelievable machine and it is a very very high g platform it pulls just over nine g's the problem with the f-16 is you can go from one to nine g's and i think it's like a second or something really really fast yeah so if your technique isn't perfect and if your physiological conditioning and current situation that day isn't perfect in that second you can black out really fast so this idea of g-lok which stands for g induced loss of consciousness is a real thing and so what they teach pilot teach pilots to do is before the onset of that g meaning pulling back on the stick you pre uh you start ahead of time by controlling your breathing tensing the right muscles and anticipating the pull the problem is sometimes when you have to react you look over your shoulder and you see you're you're being shot at and sometimes you'll onset those g's before you set it up correctly and that's when g-lock tends to happen but it is a real thing we have we have crashed planes we have killed pilots and we have actually introduced technology design specifically for that because it is a it's such a common prominent thing where you're killing a pilot and an airplane that are otherwise perfectly functioning correctly and we don't want that bird strike that's a thing that is a thing that's a thing and you have procedures that you're going to roll through 100 it's not common for a bird strike to snuff out a motor like that but it is that it has absolutely happened it's very uncommon bird strikes are not that uncommon for a bird strike to get you to crash the airplane very rare but not unheard of and she's going through who's a female pilot though so there's procedures you're just going to follow these procedures yeah and they were actually pretty close on that too they weren't super far off the mark there's a couple things that a pilot go oh that's not right that's not right but generically speaking they had it right and that's what you have to do you can't freak out oh my gosh you just gotta oh here's the procedures cut this engine restart this thing turn off this fuel thing boom you just go through the procedures are those memorized they call it immediate action i bet you i i still know the engine fire immediate action i could probably do it right now i'm gonna do it [Music] uh what is the life of a pilot like just day to day like at work yeah mostly not flying so you know i talked about it earlier is if you go up and fly let's say once a day which is more than you normally would in a regular squadron um prepping for a flight takes a lot of time but the day-to-day life of a pilot especially in the marine corps and it's also very true in the navy is you have a job you're in charge of a department or a division or potentially in charge of the whole squadron so a lot of your time is dedicated towards the department you're responsible for and the individual marines or sailors that work for you and what that department has to deliver so at a bare minimum you know you're kind of 50 50 splitting between your role as a pilot and your role as a leader in the squadron uh so i watched the movie and at one point and spoiler alert whatever sorry tom cruise gets shot down now in my mind this is the point where the movie was going to get really good because they were going to send a seal team in to get him out of there i mean this was i said okay cool this is going to get this right they're going to get this right they're going to make it work and i was kind of bummed out when that didn't happen until they stole an f-14 right and brought the tomcat back and then i said uh you know what we'll go with it i still thought we might see some seals maybe do some recovery at some point they kind of blew that look they're not gonna they're not gonna be able to nail everything perfectly and plus you don't want you know a movie that's supposed to be about jet fighters you don't want the whole movie to get stolen by you know seven minutes of a seal platoon going in there and kicking ass and taking names which you know probably could have happened so i think they did it right uh just just to maintain the integrity of the movie and keep the focus on on the on the pilots which is fine uh how about the next generation of fighter pilots you talked about the fact that it's not the plane it's the pilot but what about i thought there's another thing i thought as soon as the movie started i thought okay this is going to be human versus computer human versus ai human versus drone that's what i thought it was going i was surprised that they even put pilots in the other aircraft how many generations are we away from having no more fighter pilots yeah i got asked a somewhat similar question after the premiere and i i think i discovered i might be i don't know about alone no i don't know if i'm wrong i mean obviously the future will be what it is but my opinion i think maybe is not as universally shared as i thought so we just really in the last you know decade or so introduce what we call fifth-gen airplanes that's the f-22 raptor and the f-35 lightning of course the fact that i flew them and flew them both was crazy super lucky to get to see that and i got exposure to that whole new generation of pilots where there's still of airplanes there's still pilots that's never flown either of those so we just really are the beginning of fifth generation and i would say that those planes the raptor and the lightning you're gonna have those things around for like 20 30 years a long time and we are now getting to the part where we're building our sixth gen or building is a strong word designing and starting to think about what that airplane will be so i don't know in the next 10 or some odd years the next generation is to start being more of a reality that's going to go another that'll take 30 years are they putting a pilot in sixth generation they are the the next generation plane which is certainly being designed is going to be a manned fighter my conclusion is that i won't be in the least bit surprised if that's the last man fighter we ever built and i'm just looking like that's 30 40 potentially 50 years of these two fifth and sixth generation platforms you know flying that if we don't do another one after that it won't surprise me now i've come to realize that a lot of pilots don't agree with it uh what do a lot of pilots think i think there is a belief and that might be true for some mission sets there's a belief that you have to have someone in the cockpit oh okay i thought it was going to be the other direction that i'm that that you were the one person that thought oh we still need people for another 50 years i don't think so i i and again i'm not 100 sure on this but i think most pilots would tell you um at a minute well at a minimum the next generation is going to be a man fighter i think that's kind of a universally known thing and that there are some people i think believe that you will always have to have someone in the airplane i think that if in my lifetime we build an unmanned fighter i won't be surprised at all but from your perspective the 13 year old 14 year old that just saw this movie he's going to be good to go she's going to be good to go if they want to get into an aircraft and fly that thing as a fighter pilot they're going to have that option no problem what's crazy is that if you're in that same age i was if you're 14 years old and you're watching that movie and you actually get on the path to do that you'll be flying jets in 10 years like you'll be in you'll be 10 years from now you'll be flying a fighter so i qualified in the hornet i was 24. and if i think about you know from 14 to 24 it's a short amount of time to have that much development from a kid watching a movie to being in the cockpit of a fighter so if you're watching that as a teenager now and you're thinking i might want to do this no factor you're going to get a chance to do it that's what i'm talking about alright any closing thoughts on the movie i liked that movie a lot i was it was better than i thought for a lot of different reasons and you know again there's people out there discussing the things that are wrong yes it is a movie unquestionably but from what i was looking for my experience i was stoked to see that movie when's the last time you watched the og oh dang does it hold the the og in my house is is a little bit of a thing like with my kids and stuff um and certainly with my circle of friends so i've seen bits and p to see beginning then i cannot remember the last time i sat down and watched the movie the last time i saw parts or pieces or clips from youtube it happens like on the regular so i know that movie will and it holds its it holds up today i think so what's crazy about that movie is how many people in the last 35 years have seen that and think the movie is awesome there aren't a lot of movies from the 80s that that can keep up just for just basic you know cultural like you just look at things like that looks old because there's real airplanes and because there's real flying i think it holds up pretty well did you get issued aviator glasses you totally did you wear them at all times uh second lieutenant and first lieutenant dave burke wore them at all times at some point um and i think people might know this from my social media post between that and my flat top i outgrew them both but it took a while when did you transfer from to an a regular pair of sunglasses from aviators do you ever break out the aviators at this point i i broke them out the other day to go see topics go see the premiere my wife actually wore my uh my flight jacket oh yeah so there's a picture out there floating around her in my you know dave burke standard issue fighter pilot jacket is this is that a leather jacket it is that's issued it is you have you got patches on it i do what's your most sacred patch on that jacket uh the most sacred patch on that is my first fighter squadron which sits on like your chest so um it's sort of i don't know how it is in the teams but you will always hold a special place for your first squadron and you'll kind of always go back to that first tour that first deployment that first experience in that first squadron and no matter what else you do you're gonna that's gonna that's gonna stay close so that's what's on there awesome all right well with that if you haven't seen the movie suspend disbelief a little bit check it out this might not be the totally accurate movie but it's a good time rock and roll go get some thanks for joining everybody

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 2,854,125

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: pn3tmr_cbSw

Length: 37min 29sec (2249 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022