- 6 weeks ago
Dave Berke served for over 23 years as a USMC fighter pilot, Top Gun graduate and instructor, and combat veteran.
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00:00My name's Dave Burke, call sign CHIP.
00:02I was a Marine Corps fighter pilot for 23 years, flying F-18s, F-16s, F-22s, and F-35s.
00:09And this is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:12I spent my entire life fantasizing and dreaming and working towards being a fighter pilot
00:17to fly off carriers, and the day I leave Top Gun, I blink my eyes and I'm in Ramadi, Iraq.
00:22Leading ground marines in the most violent city in the world is something I never, ever
00:29thought of, I never expected, and I never considered, and I never pursued.
00:38There is no comparison between launching and recovering, taking off and landing from an
00:42aircraft carrier than from a regular runway.
00:45It's almost impossible to even try to compare the two.
00:49Landing on a carrier, you're kind of like smashing into the flight deck at about 800 or 900 feet
00:54per minute.
00:54So it is what they call a controlled crash.
00:56But also, we have a very small landing area.
00:59An aircraft carrier is about 1,100 feet long, but the runway is only about 300 feet long.
01:04More importantly, there are wires that a hook on your jet have to catch to slow you down.
01:10Those wires only take up about 100 feet, so you have to be really, really precise.
01:15Every carrier landing that you attempt, you expect to not land, meaning you prepare to miss.
01:22And it's not because you think you're going to miss, but the runway is so short that the
01:25second you touch down, you go to full throttle to take back off.
01:29Now, if you catch a wire, the wire will stop you.
01:32It doesn't matter how fast you're going or how much power you have on the jet.
01:34But if you don't, you'll be at the end of the runway in about a second.
01:38So you need to be getting back airborne right away.
01:40If you're coming in at about 140 knots, maybe 170 miles an hour, you'll slow to a stop in maybe
01:46two seconds.
01:47So these things are violent.
01:49They're tons of fun, at least during the day, but they're nothing like regular airports.
01:54Carrier landings at night in bad weather are always the scariest experiences that most pilots
01:59have.
01:59We were in the Sea of Japan.
02:02It was probably 2 o'clock in the morning.
02:04I'm coming back to land, and the ship had essentially steamed into a snowstorm.
02:09And I remember being up in the catapult, getting ready to launch, thinking, this is dumb.
02:13They're probably not going to launch.
02:14Boom.
02:15Off I go.
02:16I'm like, oh, wow.
02:18And it was bad, but it also deteriorated while I was airborne.
02:22And so throughout the evening, we started seeing like the clouds coming down.
02:26Things were getting worse.
02:27We all knew coming back this was not going to be a good night.
02:29I'm going to conduct a landing where I'm not going to be able to see the ship.
02:31We call it a zero-zero landing.
02:33I've only had two of these in my whole career.
02:35Any naval aviator hearing this knows what that means.
02:37It is going to be terrifying.
02:39And I'm going to have to rely on the ship's radar and eventually the LSOs to talk me
02:44into landing on the carrier because I'm not going to be able to see it myself.
02:48I was panic-stricken.
02:50Tons of fear.
02:50And so I'm up in what we call holding.
02:53I'm like probably 10 miles behind the ship, maybe 15 miles behind the ship.
02:58I'm up at about 6,000 or 7,000 feet and I'm just circling waiting for my turn to come
03:02down
03:03to land knowing I'm going to fly into essentially a storm.
03:06And I am totally freaking out.
03:09I am having to go through this mental exercise of calm down, relax, shake out your hands, shake
03:13out your neck.
03:14That's the worst part of the landing because you're not doing anything.
03:17You're just waiting for your turn.
03:18In retrospect, I'll always scratch my head like why did I even do this?
03:22But once you're airborne, there are no alternatives in carrier aviation.
03:26You've got to get back aboard the ship.
03:27There's snow on the jet.
03:28There's snow on the aircraft carrier.
03:29The LSOs talk me into the wires and I land.
03:31People were congratulating me, telling me what an amazing job it was.
03:35They're watching it on camera and people are telling me I did an awesome job.
03:38And I felt, I felt so good.
03:40I felt like I had accomplished something.
03:43And I remember going back to my room that night after this unbelievable career defining
03:47event and I went to bed and I had this nagging feeling.
03:50I felt like I was a passenger in my own plane.
03:53It was an odd thing because looking back, I didn't really felt like I did anything.
03:57I kind of, I followed some instructions.
03:59I did what other people told me to do.
04:00But if I was doing it by myself, it wouldn't have happened.
04:02And that changed my trajectory of my perspective and experience about being a carrier pilot.
04:08There's an old saying in aviation that said, it's better to be on the ground wishing you
04:13were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground.
04:16And I never understood what that meant, even though I heard it a hundred times.
04:20And it was like, ah, come on.
04:21That was the first time like, now I know why people say that.
04:29Top Gun is just a fancy name for what it's called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons
04:34School.
04:34I would absolutely be lying if I didn't tell you that the movie Top Gun completely changed
04:39the trajectory of my life.
04:40So the movie comes out in 1986.
04:43I'm 13, almost 14 years old when it comes out.
04:46And on the full screen of this movie, you are seeing the F-14 Tomcat, jets off carriers,
04:51dog fights, missiles.
04:53I owe a lot of my career to being captivated by that movie.
04:56The original also, and the sequel, also didn't get everything right.
05:00When you get to Top Gun, there's always a little sense of competition between you and
05:05your counterparts.
05:05There's no trophy at Top Gun, they don't rank you.
05:08The goal of Top Gun is to train you as a student so you can go on to be an
05:13instructor of a high
05:14caliber to prepare other students and other pilots to go to war.
05:18The chance to go to Top Gun as a student is a pretty rare event.
05:21It's very coveted.
05:22It's what most of the pilots want.
05:23It just doesn't happen for most pilots.
05:25Every squadron sends on average one pilot per year.
05:29Squadron has somewhere between 17 to 20 pilots.
05:32I think we had 19 when I was there, me and another pilot got brought into our commanding
05:36officer's office.
05:37We sat down and he just said, hey, you two are going to Top Gun, you're going to represent
05:42the squadron.
05:42He was a pretty demanding guy, really good believer in training his pilots.
05:47He was happy to send them to schools.
05:49Everybody in fighter aviation knows what Top Gun is.
05:52They also know, aside from the movie, what it truly represents is the pinnacle of your craft.
05:58Top Gun is located at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada.
06:01It's kind of in the middle of nowhere.
06:03It's not an ideal place to be stationed, but it's a really good place to fly and train
06:08an aircraft.
06:09You can fly supersonic.
06:10You can drop bombs.
06:11You can simulate a lot of threats.
06:13Fallon is in the middle of nowhere because it gives you the best opportunity to do the
06:16most training without really impacting a local population.
06:19Typical day at Top Gun is a long day.
06:22You spent hours the day before and hours the morning of planning, preparing, rehearsing, coordinating.
06:28You'll do training missions that last less than 30 minutes.
06:31You are burning gas in full afterburner, doing one against one dog fighting, and you are burning
06:36through gas like it's crazy.
06:38Come back and you're going to debrief sometimes five hours, sometimes even longer, but a very
06:44long debrief.
06:45Every flight, every evolution, there's instructors that are evaluating you.
06:49The only way to do that is to set an obscenely high bar of expectation and then demonstrate
06:56that you can actually identify all the errors, all the shortcomings, all the failures, no
07:02matter how small they are, and that takes time.
07:05If you take four or six people on a mission, you got to go through every single one of those
07:10pilots' mission, how they flew, their radar, their communication, their formation, their
07:15flow.
07:16And so you can see things start to really stack up.
07:18Everything about being at Top Gun is humbling, everything.
07:21My first mission at Top Gun, the first flight was a dog fighting mission where I was flying
07:26against another instructor, just one against one.
07:28I did such a bad job.
07:29When we landed, he's like, don't get out of your flight gear.
07:32We're just going to go fly again, and we called it an immediate refly, which meant I was so
07:37out of the parameters that debriefing wasn't even going to be a good use of the time.
07:41I was totally in over my head at the beginning.
07:43The instructors fly airplanes to such a degree of precision that my mistakes got magnified
07:48to a point where he's like, hey, we just need to do this again.
07:51Just take it easy.
07:52And it was a little embarrassing, but Top Gun is not a place where you're expecting to outperform
07:57anybody on the instructor side.
07:59You just want to learn and do a really good job and show that you're receptive and open-minded
08:02to it.
08:03You get humbled the day you walk in there, and you stay humbled from the time that you
08:06leave without doubt.
08:07So the word mastery does not enter your mind at Top Gun as a student.
08:11I literally, you finish Top Gun, you graduate, you get your Top Gun patch.
08:14I climbed back into my same airplane that was my jet, and I flew home and landed at Miramar
08:19back to my squadron as the most recent Top Gun graduate of the Marine Corps.
08:24It was really cool.
08:25We had a tradition in our squadron that Top Gun graduates didn't wear their patch.
08:29Our squadron didn't want to differentiate that Top Gun graduate, so we didn't wear patches.
08:34And so I knew that I wasn't going to be wearing my Top Gun patch.
08:37So on this flight home, I'm like, I'm wearing it.
08:39I'm going to come back in, go back into the squadron with my Top Gun patch.
08:42I'm going to get my one day wearing that patch, and I got a lot of ribbing for it.
08:45But honestly, guys are pretty happy for me.
08:47It's a really cool qualification.
08:49It's a highlight of my career for sure.
08:55Saying your rank, your last name is pretty formal for aviation.
08:58So everybody gets a nickname.
09:00We call it a call sign.
09:01In the Marine Corps especially, there's a tradition that call signs are not very flattering.
09:06We're not going to try to call you something that's really cool.
09:08So most of the nicknames and call signs in the Marine Corps typically come from you doing
09:13something dumb, something embarrassing.
09:15I am no exception to that.
09:17It's in 1996.
09:18I'm flying the advanced jet trainer called the T-45.
09:21I am getting dressed to go for a flight, and I'm wearing something called a G-suit.
09:25And all a G-suit is, it's kind of like a pair of pants that you plug in.
09:28It has a little hose on the end of it that connects to the jet to fill up.
09:32In case you pull high Gs, it helps you stay awake.
09:34It's a really important piece of gear.
09:35The very end of the G-suit that plugs into the airplane is like a garden hose buckle.
09:40It's a big round metal buckle.
09:41I was having a conversation with someone as I'm getting dressed, and I'm moving my arms
09:44around, and as I'm moving my arms around, I hit my helmet off the table, and the helmet
09:48started to fall over the table.
09:50And I reached down to grab the helmet, and as I reached down, my hand hit the hose.
09:54The hose flew up and hit me in the face, and it knocked out my two front teeth.
09:58Holding them in my hand, I can literally see a pool of blood and two chipped teeth.
10:02My instructor walks around the corner, looks at me, and says, you're not flying.
10:06You've got to go to medical.
10:07The student I was talking to I was supposed to go flying with looked at me in horror,
10:10and I got on dressed with my flight gear and went to the doctor's office.
10:14If you've ever seen the movie Dumb and Dumber, and you've seen Jim Carrey's character
10:17with these two giant chips in his teeth, he had one.
10:20I had two.
10:21It could have been a lot worse, but they settled on Chip, and it was because I had two big
10:25giant
10:26chips in my teeth.
10:27Again, it's not flattering.
10:29I'm not excited to tell that story, but that's how I got chipped, and it stuck.
10:38I remember vividly my very first combat mission.
10:41I put combat in quotes because it wasn't necessarily the most harrowing mission.
10:45It was actually before September 11th.
10:47It was a mission in 2000 that we called Operation Southern Watch.
10:50We were patrolling the southern portion of Iraq to make sure that they weren't flying in that
10:55area, and they had actually moved in a surface-to-air missile, an SA-3 missile system,
11:01into an area that we said you couldn't.
11:02We got assigned what we called a response option, which meant we were going to go out and
11:06take out this surface-to-air missile system.
11:08I had in my squadron the newest jets in the fleet.
11:12These highly capable, we call them lot 18 F-18s with GPS, and this new, at the time,
11:17bomb called a JDAM, which is a Joint Direct Attack Munition, which is a GPS-guided bomb,
11:22something that was really new at the time.
11:25Hours before we launched on this mission, we knew it was going to happen.
11:28A lot of the preparation was, we called it mission planning, is knowing where the target is,
11:32making sure the information is correct into the jet, into the weapon.
11:35This is about a two-hour flight from launching off the carrier, getting gas to make sure we have
11:40enough gas to get there, and flying deep into territory the entire time knowing what I'm going
11:45to be doing.
11:45Obviously, I was nervous.
11:46It was night.
11:47It was dark.
11:48I was definitely amped up.
11:50When you get close enough to drop the bomb, you're only maybe five, ten miles away.
11:54It's really not that far, so you're really going a long way for a relatively short window
11:59to release this.
12:00Quite frankly, it's pretty straightforward.
12:02It's pretty mechanical.
12:03You get good feedback that all the systems are working correctly.
12:06There's a switch on the left side called the master arm switch.
12:09You turn that thing on.
12:10Everything comes alive.
12:11You get this indication that everything is working correctly and it's ready to go.
12:15You get a little cue that says to release.
12:17You hold down something called the pickle button, which is a red button on the control
12:20stick, and then about a second later, a 2,000-pound bomb drops off your jet.
12:25It's a big drop.
12:26It's a big clunk.
12:27The jet makes a lot of noise, and then the bomb goes and does its thing.
12:31I had what's called an infrared pod, which is basically just kind of like a camera that
12:35watches this, and I held that thing on the target until the bomb hit it.
12:39It went exactly where it was supposed to go.
12:41Huge explosion on the camera on the pod, and then a two-hour flight home.
12:46So it was probably a four-hour mission for about 30 seconds of excitement.
12:51It was worth every second though.
12:52I came back.
12:53I was like a celebrity on the boat for a little while because dropping bombs was pretty uncommon.
12:57And for someone that junior in their career for the opportunity, at the time, it was a huge deal.
13:02I remember being excited.
13:04I was honored.
13:05I felt lucky to be able to do it, but I was also just really pumped that I had the
13:09chance to do that.
13:09On my first deployment, you know, before September 11th, our carrier probably dropped
13:14maybe total 10 or 15 bombs.
13:16Really relatively small amount of bombs.
13:18That's over a course of about six months.
13:25I won't lie, pilots on a carrier do kind of enjoy, status is the wrong word,
13:31but there's definitely a uniqueness to being a pilot.
13:34And it kind of cuts both ways.
13:36It's a bit of a double-edged sword.
13:37You've got to be careful.
13:38It's really hard not to think you're the center of the universe when you're a fighter pilot.
13:42Our egos get out of control sometimes.
13:44Carriers are billion-dollar machines that are manned by thousands, four or five thousand
13:52people on a carrier to make this carrier function, all with the sole purpose of launching and
13:58recovering aircraft to go to war.
14:00And on the boat, there's maybe only 150 pilots total on the entire carrier.
14:07And when you are the one in the cockpit doing that, sometimes your ego tells you like,
14:11this whole thing is about me. That's not even remotely true.
14:14I literally could not do anything on that carrier without anybody else's help.
14:20Forget taking off and landing.
14:21I couldn't even move the aircraft carrier without 10, 15, 20 other people supporting and helping me.
14:26You've got to learn to keep that ego in check.
14:27Fighter pilots are often pretty type A.
14:30They're pretty strong-willed.
14:32They're pretty disciplined, meaning they're willing to do the work.
14:36Becoming a fighter pilot is not all just flying around,
14:39doing dogfighting training missions at Top Gun.
14:41In fact, it's mostly just a lot of discipline, effort to study and learn,
14:45even the things that might not seem all that fun.
14:47You know, how the fuel system works and engine systems work.
14:49But to be good in a jet, you have to build some aggression.
14:52And I don't mean just like kind of wild, uncontrolled aggression.
14:54I mean the ability and willingness to put your jet into very extreme scenarios and extreme environments.
15:01That's the type of aggression I'm talking about.
15:03You can't be passive.
15:05You can't be slow.
15:06You can't be hesitant.
15:07You have to learn that aggression when controlled is probably one of your best assets.
15:13I am not a big risk taker in my private life, in my personal life.
15:18If I look back on things I did in an airplane, it is startling some of the things I chose
15:24to do
15:24and some of the dumb things I did in an airplane.
15:26I am not like that in my private life.
15:32Let me just think for a second.
15:34Because the ones I would think about, I definitely would not want on camera.
15:37I think there's no statute of limits and some of the dumb things.
15:39What kind of people marry fighter pilots?
15:41I got to be careful with this answer because my wife, my wife may watch this.
15:45I'm not crazy people, but people that absolutely understand that there is a uniqueness to what we're doing.
15:56You know, I have an incredible wife.
15:57I met my wife when I was at Top Gun, when I was an instructor there.
16:01She got to see kind of the full range of combat and life experience.
16:06And it's very sad to say this, but at certain intervals, there are going to be accidents, mishaps and fatalities.
16:12It's going to happen.
16:14I never really thought about that.
16:15I mean, I knew it was a possibility.
16:17I understood that objectively.
16:18I saw it happen.
16:19I've been to a lot of funerals.
16:23I don't and didn't at the time, certainly never really understood the burden that a spouse would carry knowing that
16:30your spouse is going to go do something that might produce that outcome.
16:33And I think that weight is much heavier for the spouses, for the people that marry fighter pilots than for
16:38the pilots themselves.
16:45I flew four different airplanes.
16:47I started an aircraft called the F-18 Hornet.
16:49I first started flying the F-18 in 1998, all the way till 2002, when I went to Top Gun
16:55as an instructor and started flying the F-18 and the F-16.
16:58So I had dual qualification in both of those aircraft.
17:01As soon as I got up to Top Gun to be an instructor, I was in the very first class
17:05of Marine Top Gun instructors to fly the F-16 because it had just arrived up at Top Gun.
17:09And then transitioned to what we call the fifth generation fighters.
17:12I started flying the F-22 Raptor, flew that for almost four years and completed my career flying the F
17:17-35B for three years.
17:19The exchange with the Air Force to fly the F-22, it just turned out that right at the time
17:24that I was available for that exchange,
17:26they were looking for a former Top Gun instructor with F-16 time to fly the F-22 Raptor.
17:31And then ultimately, my time flying the Raptor coincided with the Marine Corps buying the F-35B and I was
17:37a natural fit to be the first operational pilot to fly that airplane as well.
17:40I can't promise you this, but I'm pretty sure no one else has flown those four jets.
17:44If they have, it's a very recent advent, but during my time in my career, I was definitely the luckiest
17:50guy.
17:50I was the only guy to fly those four jets.
17:51The reason I got to fly so many different aircraft, I have to admit, is a real combination of luck,
17:58timing, circumstance, and of course, some preparation.
18:01So the F-18 is really the Marine Corps' primary backbone for conducting operations in the full spectrum of capability.
18:07On the Air Force side, the F-16 is pretty similar.
18:11The F-16, like the F-18, is a really capable multi-mission, multi-role aircraft that does kind of
18:18everything.
18:19When you start talking about fifth generation aircraft like the F-22, the origins of that jet really were just
18:26what we call air dominance.
18:28They wanted the Raptor to be this highly capable stealth fighter to control the skies.
18:32But that aircraft has also, it's evolved into a multi-mission, multi-role capability aircraft that does a pretty wide
18:40range of things.
18:41The F-22, that's unlike anything else that's out there, is it has what we call thrust vectoring.
18:47So it's an incredibly powerful airplane, 35,000 pounds of thrust per engine, so you've got 70,000 pounds of
18:53thrust.
18:54And you can do things like cartwheels and pedal turns and these unbelievable things.
18:59You just can't do that in a 4-Gen airplane.
19:01We have something called a pedal turn, where you're essentially spinning around like a top.
19:04You'll watch it do things that just seem to defy the laws of physics.
19:08It's nothing but just, it's just pure fun.
19:10It is just the most ridiculous thing.
19:12And then you lead into the F-35, the newest fighter in the world.
19:16By far the most capable when it comes to the range of missions.
19:19It's also a stealth aircraft, really hard to find.
19:23The F-35 pretty much does everything.
19:25The attributes you need to be successful in warfare.
19:29There is no airplane better than the F-35 that represent that.
19:32You need to know what's going on, where it's happening, when it's happening, who's doing it,
19:37who are they doing it to, in a sensor-fused, network-centric communication with all sorts of
19:43resources, space, cyberspace, surface, subsurface, land, sea, air, radio frequency, infrared,
19:51laser, electro-optical.
19:53They all conduct a whole wide range of missions, really to make themselves available to do whatever
19:58is necessary, really as warfare evolves.
20:00These aircraft are not cheap.
20:02You know, the F-18, you know, started as probably a 30, 40 million dollar jet.
20:06Now, the modern versions of the Hornet, probably 70, 80 million dollars.
20:10Same thing with the F-16.
20:11When the F-16 was designed in the 70s and the Air Force bought that in the late 70s,
20:15it was intended to be a low-cost, pretty simple, single-seat fighter.
20:20That thing has evolved.
20:21Our newest block aircraft are pretty expensive jets.
20:24The F-22 and F-35, at its origin, were well over a hundred million dollars each.
20:29To the American taxpayer who spent a hundred million dollars on this airplane,
20:32the first thing I wouldn't say is this thing's untouchable and unbeatable.
20:35I would say war is war and war is deadly and war can be dangerous.
20:38What I would tell you is that airplane is worth every penny.
20:43Because everything that has preceded that thing, every other fighter that we have,
20:47the threat, if they so choose, depending on where we operate, has the potential to make them irrelevant.
20:59I'm home from Top Gun maybe a month at the most when September 11th happened
21:04and our squadron went off to war.
21:06The expectation is right away you become one of the key tactical leaders to start training
21:10other pilots and prepare them.
21:12I had this routine.
21:13I'd get up, I'd exercise and I'd get ready for the day and I would lace up my boots and
21:17my flight
21:17gear, or my flight suit, I'd lace my boots up and I'd turn on the TV in the morning.
21:21And you know, I'm probably, it's probably five, I'm in West Coast time, so maybe 5.30,
21:25something around that time.
21:27And I'm watching the news and, and like, holy cow, what's going on here?
21:31I only lived a little, a little ways from the base.
21:33It took me hours to get on the base.
21:36They're inspecting every vehicle.
21:37They got the dogs.
21:38I mean, clearly the world had been upended.
21:41By the time I get on to the base, you know, it took me, like I said, a couple hours.
21:45I am briefing as the flight lead of four F-18s of the potential of launching with live missiles.
21:51Because we had a whole bunch of aircraft, long haul jets flying from like Asia Pacific,
21:55Japan into San Diego, LA to the West Coast.
21:58The idea of civilian airliner being a threat, totally foreign to all of us.
22:04And a lot of that is very much a blur.
22:06Four of us on a live, a live missile mission, the potentially thinking about
22:11what airliners might be doing.
22:12Obviously, thank God it didn't happen, but the world turned upside down that day
22:17and everything changed after that.
22:18And I think in retrospect, there's a lot of expectation that we really didn't know
22:22exactly what to do or what we were doing, and we were doing our absolute best.
22:26And within a matter of days, our squadron embarked aboard an aircraft carrier parked
22:30off the West Coast.
22:31I went back to Afghanistan in October of 2001.
22:35My second deployment was much more robust, much busier.
22:38But ultimately, the carrier, even though you might not be flying a combat mission every day,
22:45the minute the carrier pulls off the pier and the aircraft come aboard, it's all business.
22:49One of the most memorable missions that stands out to me was a mission where I didn't even drop
22:54any bombs.
22:54I was on a mission with a relatively young guy in the squadron, and we were flying essentially
22:59over a town in Afghanistan.
23:01A team had gone in, a ground team had gone in and found some folks to get them and get
23:05out of
23:05there, and they're essentially in a difficult situation on the ground.
23:10There's a lot of civilians involved.
23:11It was in a small city, and what they were looking for was some help from us.
23:16They didn't want us dropping bombs.
23:17They were looking for some support, and we were flying around at really low level,
23:20I'm talking hundreds of feet, doing a circular pattern, trying to find their location.
23:24And it was really tough to find them, and it was incumbent on us to find them
23:29and fly over the top of them as a kind of a show of force.
23:32A hundred percent, you're nervous.
23:33You're totally aware of it.
23:35It's a foreign environment.
23:37You're close to the ground.
23:38You're trying to pick things out.
23:39You're trying to find the other aircraft.
23:40There's a lot going on down at low altitude.
23:43There's a huge difference between hundreds of feet and thousands of feet.
23:47I don't want to be flippant when I say this, but thousands of feet off the ground is very easy.
23:50It's very low risk, relatively to what you're doing.
23:53When you start talking 500 feet, sometimes lower 300 feet, which is pretty uncommon,
24:00those are very, very risky missions.
24:03You have to be uniquely qualified to do that.
24:05The margin for error is very small, and the time to hit the ground is second.
24:09So you got to be on your game when you start talking hundreds of feet, not the same for thousands.
24:14That one is the most close and personal.
24:15I think the most risky to the people on the ground, and our contribution wasn't dropping bombs.
24:20It was doing a show of force over the top of them.
24:23That one surprisingly stuck out, and I think it was because of how difficult the situation they were in.
24:33Top Gun is kind of a three-year billet.
24:36I was a Top Gun instructor from August 2002 until August of 2005.
24:40Getting selected to be a Top Gun instructor is kind of like the ultimate full circle moment,
24:46like a fantasy, basically.
24:47You still don't ever think it's going to happen.
24:50You know you got there through performance.
24:52You've earned the opportunity to be there, and there's some part of you thinking,
24:55like, hey, you must be pretty good at this, right?
24:57When I got there as an instructor in the beginning, some of my very, very earliest flights are with
25:04the commanding officer at Top Gun, really senior guys, and they're just out there doing things in
25:08an airplane that even at that stage, I'm like, I didn't know you could do this.
25:11I'm just at the very bottom of this mountain.
25:14The bottom of the bell curve of Top Gun instructors are better than almost any other pilot in the world.
25:20Being good in the airplane is not enough.
25:22You have to be able to teach.
25:24Every instructor there has what's called a subject matter expertise area,
25:28but across the board, we all teach all the phases of flight.
25:31I taught about surface-to-air missiles and counter tactics,
25:34how to defeat SAMs and getting shot at from the ground.
25:36We're teaching one against one, two against two, two against many, four, eight.
25:41So we're teaching all the different phases of instruction,
25:44air-to-air, air-to-ground, reactions, things like that.
25:47So the instructor's job isn't really just his subject area.
25:50It's teaching the skill of flying and teaching.
25:53I showed up to Top Gun as an instructor with a lot of experience in the F-18.
25:57I thought that was the only fighter I was ever going to fly.
26:00The day I show up to Top Gun, they start receiving brand new F-16s
26:04as training aircraft to replicate threat.
26:08The F-16 was there essentially to pretend to be a bad guy aircraft.
26:11And right away, they started sending guys to get qualified and trained on the F-16.
26:16I didn't even have to volunteer for it. It just happened.
26:18In a lot of ways, it's similar to the F-18, but it's much more powerful.
26:22It pulls more Gs. It's a faster jet.
26:24The training officer job at Top Gun is kind of like, it's like the job.
26:28When I was told by the commander of Top Gun that I was going to be the training officer,
26:33meaning I was going to be the senior instructor and I was going to run Top Gun
26:36as the senior instructor as a Marine, which is a pretty rare opportunity.
26:40Oh my God. I am going to run Top Gun as the training officer.
26:45That's a really coveted position. It's a lot of fun. It's very humbling.
26:51My CO at the time was a legendary instructor that had this incredible reputation.
26:55I knew I was going to work directly for him.
26:57I went through, I think, 13 classes and I was a training officer,
27:03I think for the last three, so probably about nine months of being a training officer.
27:07How often did you hear the theme song from Top Gun as an instructor at Top Gun?
27:11You do not play the theme of Top Gun as an instructor at the real Top Gun.
27:16Anything that references the movie at the actual Top Gun, the Navy's Fighter Weapons School,
27:21it's a $5 fine. So we're not playing the music. We're not quoting the lines at the real Top Gun.
27:30I left Top Gun. I had this nagging sense that I wanted to do something uniquely Marine Corps.
27:37I was going to lead the cockpit and I was going to now lead Marines on the ground in a
27:41totally
27:41different role. So I volunteered to be a FAC. A forward air controller is just someone who's
27:46qualified and certified and specially trained to communicate with aircraft, helicopters and jets,
27:53to call in air strikes, to drop bombs, and to use the aircraft in close proximity to ground troops.
27:59The Marine Corps trains pilots to be forward air controllers. And I had a pretty good sense of those
28:04things because I had done combat from the air in an F-18. The Marine Corps believes,
28:09rightly or wrongly, for better or for worse, that pilots have unique perspective on how to use
28:14aircraft, which I totally subscribe to and I understand that. The Marine Corps is the only
28:19service that does this. The other services have what's called a JTAC, a Joint Terminal Attack
28:23Controller, which is essentially the same qualification, but it's not a pilot. It's a pilot
28:28FAC school, which is called TACP school, Terminal Air Control Party School, the school that teaches
28:34people how to use airplanes to drop bombs. It wasn't that hard for me because probably 90 percent of
28:39what they were teaching, I knew because I'd done it from the sky. So I was learning a little bit
28:44different perspectives, but ultimately a pilot going through that school, it's just not that hard.
28:49It's pretty straightforward. I was going to go to Japan for a year and stand up a new unit that
28:55was
28:55being built. It's going to be a year. I go right back to San Diego, back to the F-18.
29:00That's not how it worked out. Within days of getting there, mid-September,
29:06there were other units of the same type. They call them Anglico units, Air Naval Gunfire Liaison
29:13Company. It just meant a team of forward air controllers and Joint Terminal Attack controllers
29:18that were supporting combat operations in Iraq, and they were shorthanded. When they asked for
29:22volunteers, I was a highly qualified F-18 pilot, qualified foreign air controller.
29:27I had to volunteer for that, so I put my hand up and said, I will go, and they selected
29:32me as one of
29:32the pilots to go be a FAC for this other unit. I deployed to Iraq from February of 2006 to
29:39September
29:39of 2006. The commanding officer of my unit essentially brought in a piece of paper to me as the senior
29:46FAC
29:46in Iraq with all the different locations we're going to send little teams to. And he goes,
29:50you need to get this filled out. We have 25 teams or something like that. There's 25 locations. Fill
29:55this thing out by the end of the day. I had the sense of knowing that I should. I volunteered
30:01myself
30:01to go to Ramadi. I was going to replace my best friend that was there. And Ramadi in all the
30:06cities
30:06in Iraq was the most violent city. It was the epicenter of all the fighting. I could have put my
30:11name on
30:12anywhere on that list. I did it because I thought I should. I did it because I was a well
30:17-trained
30:18pilot. The Marine Corps invested a lot in me. I understood how these machines worked. I also knew
30:23that if there was one place that was the most violent and the most deadly place, it just doesn't
30:29make sense to ask someone else to take that risk. It doesn't make sense to do that. Plus, my best
30:34friend
30:34was there. And I just, in good conscience, I could not imagine asking someone else to do it and not
30:40asking myself. And listen, I was volunteering me and my entire team. It wasn't just me. I had a 13
30:45person team I was responsible for. So I think eight of them were on their very first deployment.
30:50We had heavy weapons. We had Humvees. And the most important thing we had was
30:55the ability to control aircraft and use those resources. So we had F-18s, Harriers, Cobras,
31:02and Hueys that were the Marine Corps aviation were all right there just on the outskirts of Ramadi.
31:07I could also control Air Force aircraft. I controlled A-10s. I controlled F-15s, F-16s.
31:11One of the drawbacks to that is you've made this massive investment in time and money to teach
31:16them to fly airplanes. That is a huge expense that the military absorbs. And there's some question
31:22like, why would you want to put that person in the middle of ground combat? Well, the Marine Corps'
31:26belief is they're the best person for it. And one of the things that I remember learning at the very
31:31beginning of my career at the basic school, when I was trying to become a pilot, is they say,
31:36hey, look around. These are the people that you're going to go to war with. And one day,
31:40these who are your closest friends and your counterparts, your buddies, are people you're
31:43going to rely on for each other. And they kind of paint this picture that's kind of ethereal. It's
31:47hard to imagine, but it sounds really cool. And it resonates. And you think, oh, that'd be kind of
31:52neat. We're going towards this position. And as we're moving, and I picture it, we're moving south
31:58into a two-story building. And as my team is going to enter the building, we get lit by machine
32:04gun
32:04fire. It goes directly over the top of our heads. It probably missed me and a couple guys by a
32:09foot.
32:10I mean, we are so lucky to not get hit. It goes right on the top of us. I'm like,
32:14oh my god.
32:14By the time we run into the building, and my job as a fact was always to get up to
32:18the roof as best we
32:19could, because that's where I could see the airplanes. I could use my radio. That was a good vantage point
32:24to be.
32:25Up on the roof, as we're getting up to the roof, we start taking what's called RPG fire,
32:29rocket propelled grenades, that's hitting the wall outside of this roof. And I'm like,
32:35man, this is crazy. It was a crazy situation. And I'm with my army patrol leader. The guy in charge
32:40was an army lieutenant, and I'm there supporting him. And you can kind of see out in front of us,
32:45we're taking fire from a position. It's really like a vehicle. And they kind of staged themselves
32:49between two buildings, kind of cut us off, and they're hitting us. And I had an aircraft overhead
32:54that was supporting us. I hadn't checked in with them. I didn't know who they were,
32:58but I knew aircraft were assigned to us. There's these very specific procedures. You check in using
33:02the exact phraseology, the right terms. It's all sequence. It's like almost like a list,
33:06and it's almost like robotic how you check in. Well, this guy didn't check in using any of those
33:10procedures. He said, he said, Chip, this is Boo. What do you need? This guy, Boo,
33:16I'd been in the squadron with him in VMFA 314 before. I had deployed with him. This is one of
33:21my closest
33:22friends. This is somebody I had been flying with hundreds of times. He was a Top Gun graduate as
33:27well. This is an unbelievably amazing guy that I knew personally. And so we didn't have to follow
33:32the procedures. And I looked over to the lieutenant and I go, we're going to be fine. When you tell
33:37an
33:37aircraft to follow the checklist to drop bombs or shoot the gun, you follow what's called a nine line,
33:43which is nine lines in order that you're supposed to go through to make sure the communication is
33:47perfect, that all the risk has been mitigated. I needed Boo in his F-18. And I go, hey, Boo,
33:54south to north call wings level. We got multiple, we call them type one gun runs, like close enough
33:59that you can see that are right there in front of you. And Boo strafed this vehicle. They hit it,
34:04it burned to the ground. It was awesome. He ran down to like the absolute minimum fuel that he could
34:10get.
34:10He kind of barely made it home on fumes. And it was like this unbelievable culminating event of like,
34:16oh, this is why the Marine Corps does this. This is why they train pilots to be facts. This is
34:20why
34:20relationships matter. This is why you got to take care of your teammates and your counterparts.
34:24Because at one point you're going to find yourself in combat and someone's going to save your life.
34:28And if it was a stranger, it would have taken a lot more time to figure out what's going on.
34:38Ramadi was the hardest seven months of my life. Ground combat is different. And the intimacy,
34:43the closeness of it is really hard to capture. The missions I did in an airplane, there's an arm's
34:50length to that, a separation from that. There's a comfort of the confines of a cockpit. It's a place
34:57you're very comfortable. I asked myself repeatedly during those seven months from Ramadi, what am I
35:03doing here? Why did I volunteer for this? How did I get myself into this mess? I certainly never thought
35:08that I was going to be facing like near death experiences. One of the missions they would do
35:12is called movement to contact, which is exactly how it sounds. We would move in a patrol and the
35:17patrol is about 20 army soldiers and three or four of us from my Anglico team. And we'd move until
35:22we
35:22made contact with the enemy. Our job and our goal was to draw the enemy out so we could fight
35:26them.
35:26So the enemy had set up on the perimeter of our patrol, uh, two heavy machine gun positions. And
35:33they kind of baited us into this through some mortar fire. And I had been mortared a lot in Iraq.
35:37It's a
35:38very common thing. They shoot these high lob, very inaccurate, uh, essentially little miniature bombs
35:42that get launched out of a little tube and they detonate. They kind of get your attention. And when
35:46the mortars were going off, they were originally pretty far away and they got pretty close. I was like,
35:50man, this is, this is closer than normal. We get lit up by two heavy machine gun positions on our
35:55perimeter pointed right. And I am in the absolute dead center of this, uh, ambush. And the bullets are
36:04coming in from my left and right. I kind of lean in one direction and I'm forced to kind of
36:07lay down
36:08on my stomach. I call it the prone position. I have to have to essentially lay down. And the reason
36:12I
36:12have to lay down is the bullets are essentially going on the top of our heads. I'm there with, uh,
36:16uh,
36:17two other guys from my team. One of them is my radio operator who's with me all the time. He's
36:20probably 10 feet away. And he and I are essentially laying on the ground, staring at each other with
36:24eyes as big as saucers. You're, you're trying to run through scenarios of what you should do.
36:29How should I handle this? How should I react to this? Um, you know, what you want to do
36:33was we want to get up and run to a safer place. And about 30 feet in front of me
36:36was like a,
36:37essentially a drainage ditch, like a little canal. And a lot of guys had positioned themselves
36:41and then they were safe and they were kind of gesturing over, come over here, you know, yelling.
36:45But I knew that if I'd gotten up, it stood up, I would have gotten hit. It was so bad
36:49that if I had
36:49reached out my arm, my arm would have gotten hit because the dirt between me and my radio operator
36:53was getting hit by these bullets and kicking up and kind of hitting me in the face. You can feel
36:58the heat and the movement and the sensation of the bullets. And I could see and feel the trajectory
37:04shifting towards me, uh, which was an awful feeling. And as you know, these micro thoughts,
37:10I probably had 20 thoughts in, in, in milliseconds and everything was, you can't do that. You're going to
37:14get hit. You can't get up. You can't crawl. You can't move. You can't roll. You have to just
37:16stay right there. It's the only place you can be is I, I, I accepted that I was going to
37:26get killed
37:26and I knew it. I had gotten married a couple months earlier. Last words out of her mouth,
37:30her mouth were don't be brave. And that was her way of telling me, don't do anything stupid.
37:38Just please come back. You got to come back. It was about two o'clock in the morning back home
37:41in San
37:42Diego. And I had this image of like someone knocking on her door, waking her up at two
37:48o'clock in the morning, telling her that I was dead. And as the bullets got within maybe an arm's
37:52length, they shifted up and over. And you know, I kind of described it like almost like the hand
37:58of God. And you can picture someone on the gun, on the heavy machine gun, kind of leaning back a
38:01little bit and kind of tilting up and over. And the bullets go over the top of my head and
38:05start
38:06impacting the dirt to my right and shifting off a little bit to the right just by a matter of
38:10feet.
38:10And that gave me a very small window for me and Mo, my radio operator, to run to that ditch.
38:16I'd
38:16never been that close to that outcome before. And it was a reminder of what war is, what combat is,
38:25and what I was doing, and some recognition that I probably should have been better prepared. I was
38:32really good at an airplane. I was really good in that portion of my leadership life as a Marine.
38:37Ground combat was different for me. I was, I was working really hard just to keep up.
38:46I finished Ramadi in September of 2006. Undeniably, the worst thing that ever happened to me was
38:52losing a Marine in combat. And my radio operator, a young Marine named Chris Leon, June 20th, 2006,
38:59was killed in Ramadi. And you don't think about losing a Marine in combat when you're at Top Gun.
39:08I come home to San Diego and I come home to, you know, the best weather in the world. I
39:15come home
39:16back to the amazing beaches. I come back home to an F-18 squadron. I come back home to my
39:21wife,
39:21my favorite person in the whole wide world that I'd just gotten married to. I hadn't seen for almost a
39:25year. And I come back home to my life in San Diego, but I don't bring home Chris with me.
39:32That was hard, the heavy realization that I didn't bring home all my Marines.
39:35I fly into San Diego International and I get picked up by my mom and my wife, my two favorite
39:40people.
39:41You know, my mom kind of, Whitney comes in to meet me. My mom kind of like is outside at
39:46the curb,
39:46you know, waiting for me. So I had this amazing reunion with my wife. We walk out to the car
39:51and
39:51like, it's kind of a blink. Before I know it, I'm in my car driving home. You know,
39:57it's probably a 15 minute drive from San Diego International to my house in Pacific Beach.
40:01And my wife is sitting next to me and my mom's in the back seat. I kind of lose track
40:05of what's going
40:05on. And I, I mean, I'm realizing like I'm looking in like the gutters and stuff for IEDs. And I'm
40:13kind
40:13of having this very odd moment of like, I'm looking around and scanning, like I'd been doing
40:18in a Humvee for seven months, looking for potential threats, looking at people. I'm in the side streets
40:21of my community and I'm looking for things that stand out as a problem. And the, like the din of
40:27my wife and my mom talking to me is an, is an annoyance, is a frustration. And I scream at
40:32them.
40:33I tell them to shut up. And I'm like, I said like, stop talking, which was kind of my way
40:38of like,
40:39you shouldn't be talking. You should be scanning for threats, which is how I operated with my Marines.
40:43And it was a very, um, startling thing for all of us. Certainly a startle for them
40:48because I'm screaming at them. And I kind of startled myself out of whatever mindset that I
40:52was in. Super embarrassing, super, um, insecure for having done that. And I don't even know why
40:59it happened. I just, I just, I just lost my place in the world. First night I'm home, uh, I'm
41:07with my
41:08wife and remember we got married, uh, in May and I left in September, but we really hadn't ever
41:13really lived together, you know, like that. The future is ours to how are we going to become
41:18a couple and grow as a family. Um, and I woke up the first night at home, um,
41:26with what became like a recurring nightmare. I'm, I'm on a patrol and I can, I can see it very
41:31vividly and I don't know the environment around it. It's just kind of a weird thing, but if I'm on
41:36the ground, there's a grenade rolling around. By the way, this never happened to me. This is a
41:39totally made up scenario. It's not a real thing. And I'm kind of using my rifle, the, the, the,
41:44the barrel of my rifle, I'm trying to knock it away almost like a hockey stick. And the grenade
41:47goes off and blows up and I wake up. I mean, I'm not reliving an experience, but I'm having this
41:51crazy nightmare that is, um, becomes like a daily thing. And I got to a place, got pretty corrosive,
41:58because every time I go to bed, I knew this was going to happen. It was a really rough start
42:02to my life
42:03post combat in Ramadi with my new wife who would wake up and see me just, you know, cold sweat.
42:09I had learned in my career to, to talk. When you're a flight lead, you talk all the time. You're
42:15telling everybody what to do. I was one of the challenges and the problems and like things had
42:18to be my way. I had this very rigid, narrow sense of, of trying to deal with my frustration. And
42:24what
42:24I didn't want is a bunch of people around me talking to me, which is not a good way to
42:27have a
42:27relationship. My wife kind of knew she had to defer to me. I was one of the challenges and the
42:31problems.
42:32And like, I got to a place probably three or four, maybe five months after getting home was like,
42:36Hey, this is not going to work. This is, this is not, you can't have a relationship like this is
42:40not a marriage, but also isn't healthy for me. And I know how ironic and how simple it sounds,
42:47but I was able to solve my own problem by just changing that approach, which is,
42:51I shouldn't talk. I should listen. Other people should talk. Who am I to be the,
42:56how come I get to be the primary talker and all these things as if somehow I should control the
43:00environment. These nightmares were a reflection of something that was bothering me, a frustration,
43:05an anxiety, a fear, a memory, something that was bad. And what I was doing was ignoring it.
43:12Something wants to happen to me that sets you off, that's triggering this. And it's in my head
43:16somewhere. And what I need to do is find it and just listen to it. And, and I, I am
43:21aware of how
43:22simple this solution sounds to other people. Just listen. But what I literally did, I literally just
43:30started listening to my own thoughts, my own brain, my own feelings. And shockingly, shockingly,
43:35it helped. I won't say that I'm completely over it every, but the glide path went from getting worse
43:41to getting better to a place where I am so much better now. And the intervals gotten wider and wider,
43:45but things will trigger. And I'll, I'll kind of revert back to that a little bit. It's very rare now,
43:49but it's not zero. You've got the playbook, you know what to do here. It's okay. I think veterans
43:54come home and they don't want to reveal those flaws and shortcomings. And I think embarrassment
43:59and shame are two of the bigger ones that I struggled with. And you just want to sequester
44:03those. You want to, you want to hide them. And I think that makes them even worse. There's a lot
44:08of
44:08embarrassment that, that you feel and some shame that you feel when you, when I told them to,
44:17when I yelled at them to stop talking, or if I get startled by a loud noise, or if I
44:22watch something
44:22and I start crying, what you feel more than anything is you feel embarrassed. When you're
44:27the training officer at Top Gun, you'll get embarrassed very often. You feel like you really
44:30know what's going on. You have a lot of control over your life. I never sought professional help.
44:34I'm not judging people that do it. I want those resources, the Marine Corps and the military,
44:37they should provide those. I love that they do that. For me, it wasn't easy, but it was very simple.
44:49When I came back, I started flying F-18s. Very quickly, I got the opportunity to transition
44:54to fifth-gen airplanes and I start flying the F-22 Raptor. And the F-22 is what made me
44:59realize
45:00the world and warfare was changing. I love flying the F-22. The most fun you could ever have in
45:05an
45:05airplane is that jet. I very quickly ended up as the very first operational commander and the very
45:12first operational pilot to fly the F-35B. The F-35B is what exposed me to the reality that the
45:19world,
45:20aviation, warfare, and the future were changing. And many of the things that I was doing
45:28were going to become irrelevant very quickly. Now, I don't mean the ethos of fighting and using
45:34aircraft as part of a tool for future warfare, but certainly the tactics, techniques, and procedures,
45:38the world was going to change. And the F-35 is what told me that because it gave me the
45:44insight for
45:44the first time is that the commodity that guarantees dominance on the battlefield is information and
45:51awareness. Not how many bombs you carry, not how much fuel you have, not how fast you can go, and
45:57not
45:57how many Gs you pull. And so even today in the modern era, if I look back at what I
46:02knew at Top Gun,
46:03it doesn't work today. The lessons that I learned, how to teach, how to fly, how to train, all that
46:10is
46:10exactly the same and extremely relevant. But the world of how airplanes support warfare is totally
46:18different and it's changing dramatically before our eyes. The future of warfare and how aviation is
46:25central to that is so different from when I grew up in fighter aviation. And the future of fifth and
46:32sixth
46:32generation fighters, think about just the world with AI and information and all that. That's the world
46:38we're operating in. This is a very dramatically different world than it was in the one I grew up
46:43in. We've already moved in this direction, major shifts, brand new wingmen that are just learning to
46:50fly these airplanes are going to have massively more responsibility than we had. When I first learned
46:54to fly the F-18, they told me to join up and shut up. That meant just fly formation, be
47:00next to the
47:00airplane, don't say anything, don't lose sight of your lead, do what he does. Now we're flying in
47:05formations that are fluid and you might have 10, 15 airplanes out there and you can't control who's
47:09where and what. So your most junior person has to have the skills of a seasoned flight lead. So the
47:16burden of responsibility has shifted. It's much more heavier for a younger, less experienced pilot than
47:21it ever was, which means they have to be a masters of their systems, their capabilities,
47:25their equipment, and understanding what's going on. The mentality, the mindset, and the skill set
47:32that's required for that and how we train to that is very, very different than how I grew up.
47:44I retired from the Marine Corps in 2017. I was about three months away from promoting to Colonel
47:48and I'd been selected to go back to Command and fly the F-35 again. So on paper, it looked
47:55like an
47:55unbelievable life experience, another opportunity, flying modern fighters for the Marine Corps. And
48:01there was a little nagging voice inside me that was saying like, this kind of seems stale. It seems a
48:07little familiar and a little routine. And you can imagine throughout my career, everything I did was
48:13different. And this is the first time I had a sense of, of kind of recycling some things to be
48:18a
48:18really good fighter pilot. When you stand at the ladder of the jet to climb up, you want to be
48:23excited and you want to be passionate and you want to be invested in that. And there's a little part
48:28of
48:28me that I had lost some of that a little bit. And even a little bit to me was enough
48:32to say, there's
48:33no way I can imagine for the next three years. And if I took the promotion to Colonel, I was
48:37going to owe
48:38three more years of doing something that felt more like a chore than a passion, which for someone who
48:44spent his entire life fantasizing about flying fighters, even one degree of that was not okay. The day I
48:50submitted for all those things, I get a call from my old friend. His name was Leif Babin as a
48:55forward air
48:55control with my team. A group of SEALs came from SEAL Team 3. They were called Task Unit Bruiser. The
49:02leader of
49:02Task Unit Bruiser is a man named Jocko Willink. I essentially worked with Jocko and his SEALs in my entire
49:07deployment. Embedded is probably a strong word, but it's kind of how it worked. As every major
49:12operation Leif and his platoon of SEALs from Jocko's Task Unit went on, I was with them. I had
49:17done countless of operations with him in Iraq. I held him in the highest of regard. He and Jocko had
49:23wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. That book had led them to have a leadership consultancy of teaching
49:30the lessons from their experiences that I was with them to companies and businesses. And it was starting to
49:35take off and grow. Leif said, hey, handshake deal. I can't promise you anything. I don't know where
49:39this is going to go, but there's a chance this company might take off. We'd love to have you be
49:43part of it again. I'm at Echelon Front. I've been with them since it was just the two of them.
49:47We're
49:47now probably the world's premier leadership consulting company. We are all over the world taking the
49:54lessons that they captured in the book Extreme Ownership. They wrote a follow-on copy, a follow-on book
49:59called Dichotomy of Leadership. And they were kind of have to let me write the third book in that series
50:04of Extreme Ownership called The Need to Lead, which took my lessons from aviation, from Iraq,
50:09and some other personal stuff. And I'm out there teaching leadership to companies to help their
50:13leaders get better, which is the coolest thing ever. Hi, I'm a producer on Authorized Account.
50:19If you liked this episode, then you should check out our new podcast
50:22and comment below with the names of people you'd love to hear us interview.
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