[00:00:42] Mark Divine: Hi, I’m Mark Divine and welcome to the Mark Divine show. Thanks so much for being here today on this podcast. I speak to some pretty extraordinary people, people doing uncommon things, bringing positive things into the world that are unique. I’m excited today to talk to Greg, the boss.

[00:00:58] Mark Divine: Woodridge, three time fight leader of the Blue Angels. The only time that there’s been a three time leader. He also took the team to Moscow, which is an interesting experience. Executive producer of the new IMAX movie, the Blue Angels picked up by, uh, Amazon. He’s an expert on second chances and he ran for governor in Oregon, 2018.

[00:01:15] Mark Divine: He’s an encourager, problem solver, and a challenge taker. I’m super stoked to have Greg, the boss, Woodridge on the Mark Duman Show. Greg’s so excited to have you here on the Mark Divine show. Appreciate it, brother. 

[00:01:25] Greg Wooldridge: Glad to be here, Mark. You know, I knew you were going to say that. Glad to be 

[00:01:28] Mark Divine: here. 

[00:01:28] Greg Wooldridge: You 

[00:01:30] Mark Divine: know, your friend, John Foley, who, which is how we got together, Blue Angel himself.

[00:01:34] Mark Divine: Uh, that, that came out of his mouth probably like 150 times. Last time I saw him in, in Harvard. What a great, what a great 

[00:01:41] Greg Wooldridge: wingman. He was one of my wingman. Is that right? Yeah. 

[00:01:44] Mark Divine: Tell me what, what was the scariest moment you had as a Blue Angel? 

[00:01:49] Greg Wooldridge: Oh, my, I don’t think it had to do with lying. You know, I don’t know 

[00:01:54] Mark Divine: whether you were going to get in or not.

[00:01:56] Mark Divine: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:01:57] Greg Wooldridge: No, I think things that happened to my people that I worked with, you know, my troops, right? Car accidents and things like that really, really scared me. I had a couple of flying things. I got distracted at the bottom of the backside of a loop and took my eyes off the altimeter in the pole. By an airliner out to my right in Hawaii, inside our five mile circle.

[00:02:25] Greg Wooldridge: And when I looked back, I looked at the altitude and I looked at the water and I thought, 

[00:02:31] Mark Divine: well, I’m going to 

[00:02:32] Greg Wooldridge: give it a pull here and see what happens. Right. Pull real hard. And that got my attention. 

[00:02:38] Mark Divine: I bet you that did. Holy cow. 

[00:02:40] Greg Wooldridge: That was kind of scary. 

[00:02:41] Mark Divine: You can’t lose your attention for even a second. Can you?

[00:02:45] Greg Wooldridge: No, sir. No, not, not especially. Like Especially if you’re leading, if you’ve got wingmen, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got the responsibility for their lives and for them as well as your own. And we, you and I talked a little bit ahead of time about the, the team and the trust, we didn’t talk about trust, but trust was so important within the team, interpersonal trust.

[00:03:06] Greg Wooldridge: And they trusted me. I trusted them. 

[00:03:08] Mark Divine: I 100 percent agree. We talk a lot about that in the SEALs. Developing trust the way we do it is going to, it’s got to have similarities, but also differences. But just as a backdrop, you know, I’ve been in business now for years, far, far longer than I was in the Navy. Um, you probably didn’t know this, but my Navy career was, I was one of those reserve guys.

[00:03:25] Mark Divine: I did 10 years active, 10 years reserve, retired as a commander. Um, so while I was a reservist, I was in business, so I’ve got more time in business. And trust is something that’s hard to come by in business. It’s pretty elusive. It’s the glue that holds us together in the teams, right? 

[00:03:40] Greg Wooldridge: When you leave the military, I think you have to adapt to a new, a new level of trust, and it may not be where you used to be.

[00:03:47] Mark Divine: Yeah. But is there any way, like someone listening to this was going to say, that sounds right, Greg. Yeah. But how do we develop trust, you know, to, to come to even like. 10 percent of a blue angel, I mean, diamond formation. 

[00:04:01] Greg Wooldridge: Well, we, I think we would say taking on the blue angel model that you develop on yourself, a sense of gratitude and that gratitude radiates, right?

[00:04:11] Greg Wooldridge: People want to be around people that are happy and have a sense of appreciation for what they get to do and what life is all about. That is a good 

[00:04:20] Mark Divine: gratitude and learn thing, or is it inherent? I mean, the glad to be here. Does that really, just by saying that every day, does that make people more grateful?

[00:04:28] Greg Wooldridge: No, no, you have to, you have to practice it. You have to walk the talk, you know, you have to get out there and reflect that sense and you have to wake up to it, you know, and I don’t mean wake up. I mean, actually, physically in the morning, if you can. The place where it gets me is in the middle of the night, you know, the worry warts, all the worry bugs.

[00:04:51] Mark Divine: Yeah. The two, the 2 a. m. Sweats. Yeah. 

[00:04:54] Greg Wooldridge: And you just wake up and you go, okay, you know, you’ve got a lot to be thankful for, let’s, let’s weigh this in balance, you know, and, and, and also the fact that at two o’clock in the morning, you can’t do anything about it, you know, so let’s weigh this, but, but steep it in.

[00:05:09] Greg Wooldridge: In a sense of balance and gratitude, and if you can carry that with you into the day, uh, and a lot of reasons why I, I have a great sense of gratitude. 1 is 2nd chances, you know, having had a cardiac arrest that should have killed me. 

[00:05:23] Mark Divine: Oh, wow. 

[00:05:24] Greg Wooldridge: You know, other sectors that I got through things that should have should have been pretty bad and, uh, I’m gratitude for those, those, uh, 2nd chances.

[00:05:36] Greg Wooldridge: So can’t you go back to your original question, Mark, can you. Are you born with it? Can you just have it internally all the time? You know, sometimes you run into happy people and you go, well, how come they’re so happy? You know, what do they have to be happy about it? And I don’t think it’s I think you have to develop that sense on your own.

[00:05:57] Greg Wooldridge: And hopefully you have things that you can be happy about. But how do you learn to weigh what you have? To tamp down the things that would make you unhappy one of the things you do is surround yourself with good people 

[00:06:10] Mark Divine: For sure. Hey everyone. This is Mark Divine founder of seal fit unbeatable mind and i’m super stoked to announce that my new book Uncommon is due out from St.

[00:06:18] Mark Divine: Martin’s Press this summer, July 16th, and we’ve launched a pre order campaign. You can learn more about that at readuncommon. com to try to get early awareness for the book, which I hope will help a lot of people, where I go and do a deep dive on the five mountains Of personal mastery physical mental emotional intuitional and spiritual uncommon simple principles for an extraordinary life Check it out at read uncommon.

[00:06:44] Mark Divine: com And thank you for your support and being part of the change you want to see in this world. Hooyah divine out What uh, what role did the debrief play in developing trust for you guys? 

[00:06:58] Greg Wooldridge: huge Huge. I used, I like to call it the way the team debrief, you know, with the boss, CEO coming in and saying, you know, there was a pretty good day out there today when we flew the practice or air show a little bumpy here and there, but overall, I thought we did.

[00:07:14] Greg Wooldridge: Okay. And here were my mistakes, right? 

[00:07:18] Mark Divine: Right. You start with yourself. 

[00:07:20] Greg Wooldridge: I never said, Hey, George, what the heck happened? What did you, how’d you do that? You really screwed that up. Didn’t you? It was all about strength in vulnerability. And if you think about that, how can you be vulnerable admitting to screwing something up and have that be a strong point?

[00:07:37] Greg Wooldridge: Well, You are being fully accountable and transparent. You take that into this debrief, which is so unusual the way the Blue Angels debrief compared to the rest of the world. And we try to take that message out there to let people grow by the way we debriefed with the boss being fully open, fully vulnerable.

[00:07:56] Greg Wooldridge: Now that encourages others. And it dissolves fear in the workplace. People aren’t afraid to say what they had done wrong because it’s becomes the expectation that you’ll address it and promise to fix it. And if you can’t, then we talked about mentoring. 

[00:08:11] Mark Divine: We should qualify that, that term fear. It dissolves the fear of retribution for, or fear of being judged for making a mistake.

[00:08:21] Mark Divine: It’s not going to dissolve fear of death or fear of, you know, of not pulling out quick enough on that. On that turn around, so that’s cultural fear when 

[00:08:32] Greg Wooldridge: you come down to deep. I mean, you know, it’s environmental fear, right? It’s kind of environmental. This is a high, like, you were in a high, high, high consequence environment, right?

[00:08:42] Greg Wooldridge: There’s always going to be that element of, of wanting to avoid things that have bad outcome, but if you can dissolve fear in admitting to your own errors. And promising to correct them, that’s when you’ll. He’ll do really well. 

[00:09:01] Mark Divine: Yeah, I agree with that. 

[00:09:02] Greg Wooldridge: You’ll have a, that’s where the debriefs, the way the Blue Angels do it, comes into great.

[00:09:07] Greg Wooldridge: Prominence and getting it done in a better fashion. 

[00:09:10] Mark Divine: Yeah, I want to come back to the actual process of the debrief, but I do also just want to address this, this issue I have with the term vulnerability, you know, in the Navy SEAL world, like when you’re training against people who are trying to kill you.

[00:09:26] Mark Divine: Right. For you, the environment was your enemy, right? And the blue angels, I’m not talking about your combat career. I know that that’s slightly different, but in the blue angels and for us, you know, we’re training, and so we were trying to close our vulnerabilities all the time, and when I talked to Navy SEALs about being vulnerable, they literally start crossing their eyes and they’re like, yeah.

[00:09:42] Mark Divine: It doesn’t resonate with me. So, so I said, well, it’s the same thing as, you know, transparency, like in our debrief, you have to be utterly transparent and authentic. So it’s authentic to say, you know what I screwed up and to own it. Um, and so I think that just for anyone who’s a guy out there, who’s like, I don’t really love that term vulnerability.

[00:09:59] Mark Divine: I’ve, I’ve watched Brene Brown’s videos, but it doesn’t resonate with me. Just change the word for transparency and authenticity. And I think we’re really talking about the same thing, right? 

[00:10:07] Greg Wooldridge: It’s vulnerability too. Criticism, not so much life and death vulnerability, but it’s strength you have in your personality and in your ability to say, I did this wrong, but I’m going to fix it.

[00:10:20] Greg Wooldridge: You know, it’s recognize it and need to have the awareness of it that it’s not something you go, Oh, I didn’t know I did that. And well, 

[00:10:28] Mark Divine: or. Right. And also it’s about the process and not the person. Right. So you can say, I did this wrong without saying I’m a bad person, you know, and we used to say, yeah, first time, no problem.

[00:10:37] Mark Divine: Yeah. If you do it a second time, okay, now this might be a personality issue, right? If you’re not willing to do the, take the steps to rectify if it’s third time, you’re off the team. Tell us about the process, uh, the actual process of the debrief that you guys went through. 

[00:10:52] Greg Wooldridge: We usually got back from flying, probably a little tired, a little thirsty.

[00:10:56] Greg Wooldridge: We might have a soda or a sandwich and sit around the table, around the room, all the All the officers that were at the air show wouldn’t necessarily be all 16 on the team, but could be 10 or 12. anybody had anything to do with making that air show happen. And I would say, as the leader, I, after a while, you know, we kind of calm down.

[00:11:18] Greg Wooldridge: I say, okay. Okay. It was, it was the key word that said, we’re starting, we’re starting to debrief and that’s when I would give my comments. Promise to fix what I’d done wrong. And then everybody would go, what we call around the table. Get everybody’s comments about what they had done wrong. Um, and and what they and not just what they’ve done wrong, but praising elements of that day that went well, especially if it’s individuals that did something really well, you’ve got to get that in there too.

[00:11:48] Greg Wooldridge: That was crucial and then we would go on to dissect things with videos and comments from non pilots about what they had seen the maintenance officer and the doctor on the team was kind of cool. In that regard, because you couldn’t. You, if it were an aviator or a pilot said, yeah, well, you were off here and that formation looked weird.

[00:12:12] Greg Wooldridge: And, you know, then you’d kind of maybe want to push back based on judging the way you flew. But if it’s a, from your 

[00:12:19] Mark Divine: perspective, 

[00:12:20] Greg Wooldridge: objective observer, I mean, it worked great and they got very, very good at it, trained at it and did it every, every time we flew. So then we get, so we get those comments and then we would just wrap it up at the end and take away what we had.

[00:12:31] Greg Wooldridge: Right. And try to elevate going forward what we had grown from and getting all those answers to what had happened. 

[00:12:39] Mark Divine: Yeah. The whole point is to come out of that with momentum and not, uh, not the energy that’s going to get everyone stuck. Right. But now you’ve learned, you’ve grown, you’ve kind of healed, whatever, kind of like if someone had a little self doubt, like, Oh shit, man, I really screwed up.

[00:12:54] Mark Divine: Well, they’re coming out of that meeting, feeling confident in spite of their screw up, but that’s, that’s, that’s incredible. How long did it take? 

[00:13:02] Greg Wooldridge: How long did it take? The debrief? 

[00:13:04] Mark Divine: Yeah. How long would a typical debrief take? 

[00:13:07] Greg Wooldridge: I would say on average about an hour and 15 minutes. So we, we really studied hard the, the uh, videos of what had happened.

[00:13:18] Greg Wooldridge: And you know, you’ve got two elements. You’ve got the Diamond and the Solo. So the four airplanes are, and it’s about a two thirds of the show we fly individually. So we’re always putting something in front of the crowd. We bring the diamond around. We do it a maneuver. We bring the solo. Then they do a head on.

[00:13:37] Greg Wooldridge: It looks like they’re going to hit and all that stuff. Do that for about 2 2 3rds of the way through the show. Then we join up as a 6 plane. So each element will also be studying what they’ve done in their individual maneuvers. During that debrief because we’ll get films watching all that that happened takes a while, but we grow from it.

[00:13:57] Greg Wooldridge: And it, uh, it, it can point out things that we wouldn’t have seen. We wouldn’t have realized that we’re not seeing those videos, 

[00:14:03] Mark Divine: right? And you’re working, I know, with John Foley and your organization, um, Is it called glad to be here by the way? Is what, what do you call the organization that you’re, where you’re doing consulting and keynote stuff?

[00:14:16] Greg Wooldridge: It’s under John’s name. It’s John Foley, Inc. dot com. I am 

[00:14:21] Mark Divine: John Foley, Inc. Okay. So I guess my question related to that, since you’re doing that work with, um, corporations is have you been successful in getting, um, the organizations you work with to appreciate the value of the debrief and to integrate debriefing into their processes?

[00:14:38] Mark Divine: Because I think it’s a game changer, personally. It 

[00:14:40] Greg Wooldridge: is. Many of them have, and it kind of depends on the type of meeting. Some want infotainment, right? They want, they have, they want to have these legacy holding people come in and talk and you know, they’re, they’re, they’re impressed with the personalities.

[00:14:59] Greg Wooldridge: Many of them want to have the lasting results of having you there. Some will do a deeper dive onto Debrief to try to really. Put it into the organization. Procter and Gamble did that with us last fall with about six follow on virtual events to talk about how to get it into the R& D department of P& G. So there are those that will embrace it.

[00:15:24] Greg Wooldridge: They say, yeah, we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it. Well, they sign their emails. Glad to be here. You know, they’re on there at the starting point of. Of picking up on some of the stuff that we say, but it’s like any other consulting you do, and I’m sure you’ve done it, Mark, where you go in and you go, this is what will work for you.

[00:15:43] Greg Wooldridge: I give this a try, uh, and you make an impact. And then two days later, 

[00:15:50] Mark Divine: life gets in the way. Yeah. 

[00:15:52] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah. Because it takes buy in at the, at the highest levels. There has to be a commitment from the boss, from the CEO or, or C suite somewhere in there. Where they say, we are going to do this. This is my expectation because we can grow from that.

[00:16:08] Greg Wooldridge: So do we see it a lot? We don’t see it a lot. 

[00:16:11] Mark Divine: Yeah, you know, it’s in a sense, and I bring change theory into this, like Cotter’s change model said that one of the first things you have to do in a change to affect any change in organization is create a sense of urgency. And so the CEO, to use your terminology, has to create a high consequence, you know, organization or a high consequence scenario around implementing some of these, um, procedures that are going to keep the organization thriving in VUCA and relevant and not be disrupted with what’s coming down the pike with AI and social change and what, you know, all the things that we’re seeing out there.

[00:16:50] Mark Divine: And that’s not easy when you’re just going to make money. Right. So how do you, you know, I guess this is a good question for you again, putting your business head on is how can, how can a leader who’s listening shift the mindset of their culture to be a high consequence culture when they’re not dealing with life and death?

[00:17:05] Mark Divine: Like we were in the seals and you were in the blue angels. 

[00:17:07] Greg Wooldridge: One of the ways you can do it, my wife works with a consulting company out of New Jersey, long time, successful company. What they do is they train people. They train internal people. And get them certified, you know, and I think as much as you want to talk about certification, I think sometimes that is a factor and then not only to get them certified, they become disciples of that method methodology, right?

[00:17:33] Greg Wooldridge: So they buy into the methodology. Now you’ve got somebody on site that doesn’t belong to me or you. They are with that company and they’ve got the commitment, those agents, those disciples of what you put out there. They’ve got the commitment Embed this and how we do business. One of my wife’s into problem, problem solving problem, you know, root cause analysis and these sorts of things.

[00:18:00] Greg Wooldridge: And so that is a way to do it rather than slam bam. Thank you, ma’am out the door. That was great. And then tomorrow, yeah, that was great. And the next day that was great. Okay. We got these problems we got to fix and we’re back to our old. Old way of doing business. Challenging, Mark. I don’t know how, you know, it is 

[00:18:19] Mark Divine: challenging.

[00:18:19] Mark Divine: Yeah. 

[00:18:20] Greg Wooldridge: They want to invest in it, but they don’t. 

[00:18:23] Mark Divine: Well, change is hard. I want to get back to the, um, the exciting stuff. Um, tell us about the, just like frame up, like the experience of like getting inspired about the blue angels, getting, um, you know, having the, even the just go ahead to like I mean, do you apply or to get invited?

[00:18:41] Mark Divine: What’s the process look like? It let’s say there was a 22 year old young entrepreneur listening to this. It was like, you know, it’s not too late for me to join the Navy and learn how to fly. Cause I would love to be a blue angel someday. What’s that? What’s the path like for him? 

[00:18:53] Greg Wooldridge: Uh, you know, I, I, I honestly think that if you.

[00:18:58] Greg Wooldridge: Go into it saying, I want to be a blue angel. I think you might be going in the wrong direction. Because it’s not good to be a blue angel. I think it’s good to be, it’s great. It’s a great opportunity. A great honor. Right. But I think the way you head into it is, I want to be a Navy pilot. I want to learn how to fly off aircraft carriers.

[00:19:17] Greg Wooldridge: Be 

[00:19:17] Mark Divine: an excellent pilot first, in other words. Yes, sir. 

[00:19:19] Greg Wooldridge: Yes, sir. And then, and then, you know, later on, you can, you can see what, what the chemistry is of, of the Blue Angels, what, what the individuals are like, their humility, humble, humble, humble, humble. Man, you can decide, is that something you want to do, and I’ve seen, like, like in the movie, we made the one young fella, Cheese, his name is, I applied three times, so he actually applied for the team three times, went to the Naval Academy, got his wings, flew F 18s, and then applied to, and he was persistent, and he won out, and he did great.

[00:19:57] Greg Wooldridge: So you’re a 22 year old. You just graduated from college, going to the Navy, wanting to be the best naval officer you can possibly be. And then see what comes around you with that, you know, test pilot school. That’s pretty cool. You know, if you’re a great, excellent pilot, you’ve got science in the head, which I don’t, you know, you know how to do things like that, then sure, um, maybe that attracts you.

[00:20:23] Greg Wooldridge: But I think you, you know, talked to a group this morning. They said, well, when did you know? When did you know? I said, when did you want to fly? I didn’t know. I didn’t, I’m, I’m the antithesis of what people want to hear. I graduated from college and I knew I was going in the service. It was back in the days when your college deferment went away and you were going, right?

[00:20:49] Greg Wooldridge: And I thought, I don’t mind serving. I want to serve, but I got to do something that I can learn a skill from. And then when I get done with service, how about if I go. Learn how to fly airplanes so I can fly for the airlines when I get out of the, out of the Navy, as they would have it. Uh, no, I never, I, I didn’t have a twinkle in my eye.

[00:21:10] Greg Wooldridge: I, I did it out of necessity and, and with a business plan, you know, going forward, I, I, I was different from what people thought. 

[00:21:21] Mark Divine: Well, then what led you, I know you, you were, you ended up cycling through three times, right? And you were the boss three times. What led you to, um, to make a leap for it? Once you were, once you were flying planes pretty straight.

[00:21:34] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah. The first time you have to, You come in 99 percent of the time you come in as the boss, having never flown with the blue angels before. 

[00:21:43] Mark Divine: Is that right? Oh, interesting. 

[00:21:45] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah, you and what happened to me was a enable message came out. Wasn’t email and enable message came out, said we need it. We’re taking applications for.

[00:21:55] Greg Wooldridge: Light leader of the blues, you need to have commanded a squadron. You need 3000 flight hours, flying off carriers, carrier landings, all that sort of thing. Put in your application. I’ve read that. And, uh, I kind of had my, I was on a ship on in the ready room on an aircraft carrier where I was commanding a squatter and I kind of spoke out loud to some of the fellows around me, the junior officers, wouldn’t that be something to lead the Blue Angels?

[00:22:22] Greg Wooldridge: And I said, but they’d never picked me, you know, and they said, come on, skipper, you gotta give it a try. You’d be great. And besides, you’d get a front row seats at the air shows, 

[00:22:34] Mark Divine: of course. 

[00:22:35] Greg Wooldridge: Oh, I thought, you know, but I put on the serious part of my brain. I flipped the switch there for a 2nd and I thought, you know what?

[00:22:41] Greg Wooldridge: If you, if it looks like something you want to do, if you never give it a chance, if you don’t jump at the opportunity and give it a chance. You’ll never know. 

[00:22:52] Mark Divine: You’ll never know. You’ll never know. 

[00:22:54] Greg Wooldridge: So I, I applied and, uh, against great competition. Uh, the commanding officer of Top Gun was one of the applicants.

[00:23:04] Greg Wooldridge: There was a guy, Art Snodgrass, rest his soul, rest in peace. He, um, was a demo pilot on the, on the East coast and the F14 had this hairy and blonde hair, you know, and he just looked like him. Look the look, right? So I went in there very relaxed. I said, I’ve never picked me. And I think being relaxed enabled me to go in front of the interview board and be very honest and just not worry about what they, what they might want, but just say what I would say.

[00:23:36] Greg Wooldridge: So I got, I got selected and then, and then I went away, got called back once, went away again, commanded a base in California, up in the Central Valley. Navy base. Jet base Lamar got ready to retire and they called me back again, had to extend my retirement. 

[00:23:56] Mark Divine: It’s interesting though. I’m drawing a parallel to Navy SEAL training itself because, you know, not many people really think about this, but humility is one of the main things that the instructors are looking for.

[00:24:10] Mark Divine: They’re looking for their next teammate. And so the people, the people with the big egos, um, Or, or make it all about them. Are they usually the first ones to wash out of training and they do not make the best leaders, right? The best leaders are one who put their team far before themselves, always taking care of their team, you know, and then you take care of your team, your team takes care of you.

[00:24:32] Mark Divine: It sounds like the similar situation with the blue angels. 

[00:24:34] Greg Wooldridge: Really does. We got to pick our own, our own blue angels. We, the, the Bureau, what we call the Bureau, you know, the people in Washington didn’t send you somebody and say, this is your next blue angel. We asked for applicants to the team and we’d say, and here’s the prerequisite, you know, 1, 200 flight hours, 1, 500 or whatever it was at the time flying off aircraft carriers.

[00:24:57] Greg Wooldridge: Your rotation is good because now you can go to shore duty, which meant you weren’t deploying, which the blue angels is a form of shore duty. Kind of a joke though, 

[00:25:06] Mark Divine: cause you’re always gone. Right? 

[00:25:08] Greg Wooldridge: Out of the air. I mean, it’s, You’re, you’re away from your family more than you are on deployments and right.

[00:25:14] Greg Wooldridge: Right. So, we say, put your applications in and so we say that in about March or April and then July is when the finals, the final selection comes, but we put your application in. And see if you can get to our air shows to watch what we do. 

[00:25:32] Mark Divine: Oh, cool. So that’s the interview process. If they don’t show up the air show, they probably don’t get selected.

[00:25:36] Greg Wooldridge: No, it’s not so much that, Mark. It’s, I hate to say it was rushing the team, but you know, you came to the air shows as many as you could. It could have been just one or two, but we could get an impression, or it could be four or five. We could get an impression about that individual. And you talked about humility, huge, huge.

[00:25:58] Greg Wooldridge: Some red hot, you know, fighter pilot, you know, just, um, yeah. And he’s always coming to the boss to say, Hey, boss, that was a great show today. You know, you guys look good. How do you like it? What do you think? We wanted to see the guys that were humble that would talk to the. E1s, the lowest enlisted in this quarter.

[00:26:16] Greg Wooldridge: Talk to the supply officer. How does this work for you guys? How does this work for you? What do you do in the blues? What do you and talk to people that are watching? You know, what do you think of the blue angels? And, and, and, and we’d get to see socially how they interacted, you know, where they, you know, drinking too much.

[00:26:34] Greg Wooldridge: Because we just couldn’t have it, you know, and, uh, so we would get a good sense of that, get down to what we would call the finalists that we would bring back to Pensacola in June or July, July, usually, and we would go to social events and bring our spouses along. Now, here’s where you get some really interesting clues.

[00:26:56] Greg Wooldridge: And the personality, right? What did you think? They ask you your wife or your husband. What did you think of this fellow? You know, or this gal and they can give you because that applicants not not really interested in what making an impression on the spouse. But you get a definite feeling on how they’re going to be out there with the American public were on, you know, on the road 300 days out of the year with each other 300 days out of the year.

[00:27:24] Greg Wooldridge: So we had to have compatibility, man. We had to have humility. You know, you’re taking The best of the best that have huge egos likely, but how do they control that? And that’s what we needed to see. And that’s how we selected people. And it was about 98 percent accurate and good and worked. 

[00:27:44] Mark Divine: That’s interesting.

[00:27:45] Mark Divine: Is it a two year tour duty? Roughly. It seems like that from the movie that I, that I watched your 

[00:27:53] Greg Wooldridge: flying standpoint and even the other, uh, ground jobs, it was two years because of the separation. 

[00:28:00] Mark Divine: That’s incredible. You think all of that training and they would keep them around for a little longer. 

[00:28:04] Greg Wooldridge: Well, we’re worried about complacency and we worried about losing that edge, the edge of still being sincerely, sincerely, uh, honored to meet people.

[00:28:17] Greg Wooldridge: And to take the, the label that you had and use it in a very positive way, the Blue Angel label, right, that, uh, you’re just a, a guy that came from the fleet, gets to do this, fly blue jets for two years, and is going to go back to the fleet. We wanted that, that joy, that glad to be here spirit to still be there after two years.

[00:28:40] Greg Wooldridge: It’s a grueling schedule after 2 years, that might go away and we didn’t want that. 

[00:28:44] Mark Divine: Right? And there’s, I love that idea of never complacency because during that 2 years, there’s not a moment where you, you don’t think you can improve. And at the end of that 2 years, there’s still a lot of improvement that you probably see in yourself, but, you know, but then it’s diminishing returns.

[00:29:01] Mark Divine: And so you don’t want to get to that point where you’re going down the other side of that slope. And, and all of a sudden you’re like, well, I think I’ve got this right. Because the moment you think you got it. It’s when bad things happen. 

[00:29:11] Greg Wooldridge: Look out. Yeah. I like, I like what Vince Lombardi said. I’m sure you’ve heard this quote many times, but gentlemen, we’re going to go out there today and we’re going to go out there every day and we’re going to seek perfection.

[00:29:20] Greg Wooldridge: We’ll never find perfection, but along the way we’ll experience excellence. And that’s what you’re, and that’s what the blue, never perfect. So just like you said, Mark, you’re always looking for the way to make that next step Improvement. One of the guys in the movie had a great, great saying. So once you think you’ve gotten to a point where you got it, you look at it again and you go, you’re so far away from getting it from affecting it.

[00:29:50] Greg Wooldridge: I gave you the chance to be honest about it. 

[00:29:52] Mark Divine: Right. And that brings it back to the debrief. Why that’s so important, because you don’t, you can’t see what you can’t see from your perspective. Right. And so you may think, oh shit, I just nailed it. And you get the perspective from your wingman. It’s like, no, you didn’t nail it, man.

[00:30:06] Mark Divine: You know, or the ground person. 

[00:30:08] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah. From the ground person, from your wingman, kind of expect you to expose everything that you know. Now, you know, if you don’t, if you didn’t see it, you know, Maybe your wingman didn’t see it, but it’s unlikely your wingman is going to comment on it, unless it was an intentional avoidance.

[00:30:25] Greg Wooldridge: Which I only saw twice in my four years of leading. I only saw twice where somebody wasn’t forthcoming about something that was blatantly obvious and a negative. Right. 

[00:30:35] Mark Divine: You know, it just occurred to me, Greg, that the corollary to what we’re talking about in the corporate world is the 360, right? And, and organizations that do frequent 360s, where they’re getting the perspective of their, their bosses, their subordinates, their peers, and their They’re taking it seriously and they’re taking corrective action because, you know, sometimes that that’s brutal.

[00:30:57] Mark Divine: I remember the first time I did a three 60, it was like getting hit over the head with a two by four. Um, but not many people do that back to our comment earlier about people, you know, executives or, you know, there’s so many demands on their time and everything seems to be moving so fast that they’re like, Oh, we don’t have time to do that or they plan to do it and then it just never gets done.

[00:31:15] Mark Divine: But it’s one of the most important things I think for developing leaders and developing teams is getting that. That objective feedback 

[00:31:23] Greg Wooldridge: there, there’s a time and there were the debrief is one of those areas where we don’t have time to do that. And we teach as we, as we drill down deeper, we teach how you can do a debrief and it’s not going to be able to, you don’t need to do a blue angel debrief.

[00:31:38] Greg Wooldridge: It can be a 2 minute debrief. Like we got started at FedEx when I was flying there, we had some haul losses and it was time to figure out what’s going on. How come? And I, and I realized we get out, we get to a, an overnight, an overnight flight where you fly in the mail into the packages into Memphis and then back out landing at four or five in the morning.

[00:31:56] Greg Wooldridge: The last thing you want to do is have an analysis of the flight. You want to get in the hotel van, get in there, make it seem like nighttime for about six hours and try to sleep in the daytime. We never touched on, we never gathered good ideas from the debrief and we finally got it to where we put it on the FAA checklist, got it on there where the captain would, before we left the cockpit, the captain would say, okay, let’s debrief because it’s on the checklist and it takes two minutes max.

[00:32:27] Greg Wooldridge: You know, I was off by a hundred feet on this one pass or this one. Uh, approach, but I can fix it. The captain says, and, uh, over to you, you know, 1st officer, 2nd officer and back in the day, uh, what did, you know, they get to talk about what they saw, but, but you, and I was off by 100 feet because of the distraction of something right and you learn from it and you grow from it and if you can’t capture that with, with some sort of a debrief, it doesn’t have to be a blue angel, but the fact of debriefing with an attitude of self.

[00:33:05] Greg Wooldridge: revelation rather than, Hey, you were way off on that one. That’s, that’s screwed up, man. That’s when people close off, 

[00:33:14] Mark Divine: shuts people down. Right. 

[00:33:15] Greg Wooldridge: Right. We talk about that. It totally goes away. And that fear, the fear jumps in there to take over from learning the right answers. 

[00:33:26] /

[00:33:26] Mark Divine: We’ve talked about, um, the debrief, but I think, you know, equally as important as the brief, um, in the, in the movie, there’s some really compelling scenes of the brief and the visualization that’s going on, everyone visualizing their role.

[00:39:12] Mark Divine: And. And, you know, even you as the boss, it wasn’t you, but the boss in the movie, you know, queuing the movements, you know, when you’re going to like juke left or right or up, down, I don’t know, that was fascinating. So tell us about the brief and, and how you develop those visualization skills and the significance of them.

[00:39:30] Greg Wooldridge: Back in, back when I led the team, I briefed each and every maneuver just like that with guys with their eyes closed, visualizing, listening to my voice, because. What, what happens there to develop the trust is a consistency and that consistency is in the cadence. So something like, I don’t know if any of the viewers or listeners can see my hands, but something like the lead and a wingman, I would say something like coming left, Oh, okay.

[00:39:59] Greg Wooldridge: And on the K, my right wingman would know I was turning and he would start turning into me. That cadence was established and that’s what they’re looking at with their eyes closed, with visualization. When the leader, and even in the movie, when they chair fly one of those maneuvers, they’re thinking about, okay, this is what’s happening, listening to the voice, the voice and cadence in that ready room, in that recital, if you want to call it that, is exactly what they’ll hear in flight.

[00:40:28] Greg Wooldridge: So they go, come on left, okay, and start turning. If I don’t honor that, if I don’t, if I’m not consistent, don’t start turning exactly on the kuh and kay. Chance is going to get pretty darn close. Right? So that’s 

[00:40:41] Mark Divine: the boss. The boss in the movie would use rip it and he’d kind of roll the are like, rip it. So what you’re suggesting is there is a point where they know in that right?

[00:40:52] Mark Divine: It’s probably right when he hits their hip. That’s when he’s turning or something like that. 

[00:40:56] Greg Wooldridge: Absolutely. There’s a point. It’s, it’s so crucial to have it exactly the same place each and every time the profile roll rates, all that stuff has to be just so perfected 

[00:41:08] Mark Divine: when it comes to the skill of visualizing itself.

[00:41:10] Mark Divine: Now that’s a, that’s a unique skill. I imagine, you know, really good pilots kind of develop that and they get taught it. Maybe I, you know, I don’t know, um, when, if it’s formally taught, but you know, how do, how do we develop that skill? And what’s the significance for corporate leaders to develop the skill of visualization?

[00:41:31] Greg Wooldridge: Don’t they say that sometimes it takes, you know, like the Beatles, they, they played together. They played in Germany, I think, but they, they played three or four times a night. It takes like, it’s either a thousand or ten thousand repetitions of doing something to get it, to get it to be the best at it. As far as visualization goes, I never used it in the Navy until I got to the Blue Angels.

[00:41:52] Greg Wooldridge: I never saw it. Yeah, 

[00:41:55] Mark Divine: that’s curious. 

[00:41:56] Greg Wooldridge: It’s, it’s, it’s something where you, you’re coordinating with another airplane. I think more than anything else is like, but, you know, I guess I could have used it. Coming aboard the ship, visualizing how that approach was going to be with the, with the people, the landing aid down there on the ship and the flight deck moving away from you on an angle as you’re.

[00:42:16] Greg Wooldridge: Trying to get into land, I could have visualized that, but I, I frankly, I didn’t use it till I got to the blue angels. 

[00:42:22] Mark Divine: You know, it’s interesting. Um, I, I teach this now for to NSW guys seals. Um. And part of the reason is that, um, you know, it’s. Combat is messy, right? And the end result can look very different than expected and still be acceptable.

[00:42:40] Mark Divine: And so it’s important that everyone has the same general imagery in their mind about what’s going to happen along the way. What’s, what to do when the contingencies, you know, need to be executed because, you know, the helicopter went down or, you know, secondary insertion is, is compromised or whatever. And like, what’s the acceptable.

[00:43:02] Mark Divine: Vision for victory look like, right? And so we use, we visualize, we call it dirt diving. A lot of our missions and we visualize our individual roles and team role. And we use a lot of video and imagery when we brief. So I think that is, there’s some of that that was kind of informally being done probably in the ready rooms, because you use a lot of imagery, you know, all the military does in their, in their mission planning and their preparation.

[00:43:29] Greg Wooldridge: I think in air combat, you know, air combat, dog fighting, you kind of, you know, okay, what am I going to do if he pulls straight up rather than continues to do horizontal work? You know, what? What am I going to do? I just thinking ahead and being you have to 

[00:43:43] Mark Divine: anticipate the OODA loop. Right? Well, I think there’s a, there’s a big opportunity there in, uh, for, for organizations and organizational leaders to learn from the brief and the debrief and to, you know, to begin to integrate, you know, this kind of anticipatory mental, um, mental imagining.

[00:44:01] Mark Divine: Because it’s really useful, in my opinion, anyways, I found it to be extraordinarily useful. 

[00:44:05] Greg Wooldridge: I think the first I ever heard of visualizing was, was golfers visualizing a putt, looking at the contour of the, of the green and going, okay, I see the ball going that way. Visualizing before they actually took the putter stroke.

[00:44:22] Greg Wooldridge: I think that was the 1st, I’d ever heard of and it’s been around the term has been around for a long time, but how you use it, 

[00:44:28] Mark Divine: I noticed a couple other similarities. Right? Um, you know. I’m, I’m a big advocate of breath control training for stress management, arousal control, you know, getting to that mental clarity so that you’re not, you know, you don’t have this like constant chatter monkey mind and breath control is very useful for that.

[00:44:49] Mark Divine: And it seemed to me like in the beginning when you just check in and they put you through that whatever that gyroscope thing is, and you don’t have your The 

[00:44:57] Mark Divine: centrifuge. 

[00:44:57] Mark Divine: Yeah, the centrifuge. And you don’t have your. G suit on. And so they’re queuing them to breathe and to like control the breath and to hold the breath and to contract muscles.

[00:45:08] Mark Divine: There’s a lot of similarities there. And I imagine that that dialogue and that training continues on until it becomes second nature. Am I right? 

[00:45:14] Greg Wooldridge: Certainly. Yes, sir. But you know what it is too, Mark. It’s, uh, um, it’s training to the high G’s you’re going to experience. You don’t actually ever visualize it.

[00:45:28] Greg Wooldridge: You just know, I’ve got to start grunting and groaning now. Yeah, no, I don’t 

[00:45:32] Mark Divine: mean visualizing. I mean, greasing the groove of knowing when to do it and and appreciating the value of doing that. Right? And I imagine there’s a lot of breath control going on as you’re. Preparing to enter the cockpit and of course going through your procedures.

[00:45:48] Mark Divine: And I love the very formality of everyone, you know, walking in the very, very tight formations and saluting their, their, their crews. That’s just beautiful. But all that ritual is, is all about stress management too. It’s not just to look good for the crowds. 

[00:46:03] Greg Wooldridge: That’s it. That’s an excellent point. And part of the stress management is supporting each other.

[00:46:09] Greg Wooldridge: I know, uh, I’d been on, I’d had flights where one of the wingman was having a lousy day and I’d say, okay, we’re behind the crowd, setting up the diamond roll and they’d check in with their call sign, you know, and you could hear in that person’s voice that they were starting down 

[00:46:24] Mark Divine: at the seams. Yeah. 

[00:46:26] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah.

[00:46:26] Greg Wooldridge: And you could, you could sense their frustration. And then it was incumbent upon me to say, okay. Okay, we’re behind the crowd, setting up the diamond roll to show that I’m pretty darn happy. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m okay with what’s going on. I want them to take and we would talk about that pre event.

[00:46:46] Greg Wooldridge: Occasionally, we’d say, look, if you have a bad maneuver, put it behind you. Don’t carry it with you throw it away. We’ll talk about it when we come back because you can’t, we can’t let our performance and what happened a few minutes ago. Okay. Impact what’s going to happen coming up because those maneuvers that you’ve got coming up or are demanding and if you let something weigh on you and your attitude goes down, you I’m crappy.

[00:47:12] Greg Wooldridge: You know, I can’t do this. I’m the worst. Pilot they ever had 

[00:47:16] Mark Divine: no, 

[00:47:17] Greg Wooldridge: that’s not good. Yeah, but and a big point there too is that. As a leader, you now, it’s incumbent upon you to say, I need to, I need to pick this guy up. I need to make sure he knows that we’re not mad at him. We don’t dislike him. You know, we know he’s working his best and that’ll come out in the debrief, of course, 

[00:47:34] Mark Divine: too.

[00:47:35] Mark Divine: But no, I think that’s spot on. I love that because we call it feeding the courage. Well, if you start feeding the fear wolf, then, you know, you’re going to drag yourself down. Your body’s going to get weaker. Your confidence is going to go south and that’ll infect the rest of the team. So it’s incumbent upon the leader Or, you know, if the leader doesn’t notice it, whoever notices it to be like, okay, interdict that let’s get this guy back on track because otherwise everyone’s affected by that negative attitude.

[00:47:59] Greg Wooldridge: Love you, bud, buddy. Let’s go. Come on. Let’s go. 

[00:48:02] Mark Divine: Yeah, we got this. Come on. One last pass. Easy day. Tell us about, like, John was telling me, um, like at the beginning of the season, maybe it’s when you’re out at Fallon and starting to do the work together. Like you, yeah. You’re like feet apart in the formations, but at the end of the season, you’re like inches apart.

[00:48:20] Mark Divine: And what, tell us how that works and what those, you know, how razor close you guys actually are when you’re flying it mock, whatever 400 miles an hour, 

[00:48:31] Greg Wooldridge: about 400. 400 is about an average speed, 400 miles an hour. 

[00:48:34] Mark Divine: Is that right? 

[00:48:35] Greg Wooldridge: Three something in knots indicated. Um, we come out of winter training those 10 weeks, twice a day, every day for 10 weeks, and we’re, we’re down to like where we can do three feet pretty comfortably.

[00:48:50] Greg Wooldridge: And then as we go through the season and that skill improves, but probably more importantly than the skill is the trust because the skill improves, we now start to trust each other. We see that cadence being exactly right. Come on. Okay. Okay. Everybody knows it’s going to happen. They trust the lead. They trust each other.

[00:49:11] Greg Wooldridge: And that’s how we, we, uh, we refine it. We can refine it down to 18 inches. That’s about mid season. If things are going right. We always have the option to go. All right. That was a little rough today at 18 inches. Let’s move it back out to two or three feet, right? So that’s always there. You’re not held to it necessarily.

[00:49:34] Greg Wooldridge: Can I ask 

[00:49:35] Mark Divine: you, sorry to interrupt, how do you know how far apart, like how do you tell that you’re 18 versus 36? 

[00:49:41] Greg Wooldridge: It’s where you put your visual cues. Like if you’re looking at Where the wingtip hits a certain letter on the fuselage and how, and where that lies, there’s ways you can use visual cues to move it in closer, like talk about in the movie, the Yankee set, well, Yankee, you know, phonetically, that’s, that’s what you call a Y is, you know, A, B, C, D, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, the Y under the wing under, let’s say, my wing is the lead, the Y is the last letter in Navy, right?

[00:50:16] Greg Wooldridge: The last letter in Navy is Y. He’ll drive up and put his nose right under that Y, and that, that Y is, is where in the movie you come out with the term, where in real life in the blues, they call it the Yankee set. And will we ever get there? Some, and like one of the pilots in the, in the movie says some, some squadron, some blues teams never get there.

[00:50:39] Mark Divine: And 

[00:50:39] Greg Wooldridge: some 

[00:50:39] Mark Divine: do. Is that 18 inches or is that closer? 

[00:50:41] Greg Wooldridge: 12 inches. 

[00:50:44] Mark Divine: That’s 12 

[00:50:44] Greg Wooldridge: inches. We never used to advertise 12, but now they’re, they say it, you know, we were over 12 inches apart. And that’s the Yankee. That’s what the Yankee set does for you. Not only are you 12 inches apart this way, I mean, your airplanes are just overlapping, you know, like the wings are overlapping.

[00:51:01] Greg Wooldridge: Crazy. 

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[00:51:56] Mark Divine: That is delicious. Do you have to have like perfect weather for that? Because I can imagine if you had a wind shear or some sort of turbulence that that would be terrible. Dangerous. 

[00:52:05] Greg Wooldridge: You need it where it’s not extreme turbulence and great question because when there is turbulence, it’s incumbent upon the leader.

[00:52:15] Greg Wooldridge: And when I was there, in my case, to have the turbulence hit you and not reactive. It pushed the push your airplane out up a little bit from an updraft. You don’t push those back over. You just hold what you got. Don’t flinch. One of the things I like to say is, hold what you got, don’t flinch. Hold what you got.

[00:52:36] Greg Wooldridge: Pretty soon that’ll, it’ll settle back down. But I’m not as a lead. I can’t react to the turbulence. I just have to let it, between where it goes, because we’re so close together. We’re all going to get pushed that same amount. If I try to fight it now, you know, now we’re just making it hugely complex to, to do it.

[00:52:56] Greg Wooldridge: So you, yes, you can fly and turbine. Now, if it’s really, really, really rough, um, then we say, okay, 3 feet apart today, no closer, no 18 inches, no 12 inches, right? We’re just going to honor that turbulence because we just can’t control it. 

[00:53:11] Mark Divine: It’s fascinating. We’ve got to wrap this up. I’ve already kept you a little bit longer than I, uh, promised you I would, but, uh, well, tell, just tell us about the movie.

[00:53:20] Mark Divine: How did it come about? And was it, was it fun to make? Did you know, what was that like? And then what’s, what’s happening next for the year? 

[00:53:26] Greg Wooldridge: I learned a lot. I, um, so five years ago, five years ago, almost to the month, I said to Rob Stone, who had made blue angels around the world, speed of sound, uh, award winning documentary from the nineties, uh, that a lot of our clips are from.

[00:53:41] Greg Wooldridge: I said, Rob, it’s time to make another doc, you know, another documentary and, and let’s go out, you know, because we’re coming up on the 75th anniversary of the blues. Let’s go out and get it done and let’s find we’re going to go small ball. Let’s get Boeing involved, USA involved, uh, Southwest Airlines, the usual suspects that love the love us, you know, love the military and, and of course, Boeing who makes the jets, right?

[00:54:08] Greg Wooldridge: And, and just, we’re gonna, we’ll see if we can get a million bucks and put this together and we’ll have a good document. Uh, that was going well until the pandemic hit, and then it was time, you know, then nothing happens. But I found Kevin LaRosa through another avenue, who was the aerial coordinator of Top Gun Maverick, the best in Hollywood, flies, flies civilian airplanes around the military stuff and does a great job.

[00:54:32] Greg Wooldridge: And he said, hey, what are you doing? What are you up to? I’m trying to make it smooth. He said, okay. Um, uh, Glenn Powell, who I work, he, who. Kevin had worked with on Top Gun Maverick, Hangman on Top Gun Maverick, loves the Blue Angels. He had a Blue Angel poster in his bedroom wall growing up. He said, let me hook you up with him, hooked me up with him.

[00:54:52] Greg Wooldridge: He got us to Creative Artists Agency, CAA, the best in LA, and we found a producer, uh, who turned out to be Bad Robot, who’s, you know, Hannah McGillivray runs film there, and it’s owned by J. J. Abrams, right? So J. J. ‘s a pilot, and he loved the idea, so they said, we want to produce it, and then we found, uh, John Turner at IMAX, who’s the VP of Documentaries, said, I want to make a feature length film, documentary style, first time ever.

[00:55:22] Greg Wooldridge: And I want to take the power of the Blue Angels, the force of them, and the power of IMAX, put them together. And that’s how we got started. Went in and got the Navy to buy in, which is tough. 

[00:55:33] Mark Divine: Yeah, I was just going to ask you if they played along. They must have, because 

[00:55:36] Greg Wooldridge: I think you’ve seen that in Special Warfare.

[00:55:38] Greg Wooldridge: It’s hard to get the Navy to say, okay, you’re going to embed Because the Navy wants to see an outcome in their minds, I think, uh, uh, recruiting. They want to see something that’ll come positive out of what you’re doing. Convince them. And we started into production and we got the best in Hollywood. A great cinematographer, uh, Paul Crowder, Britt was our director.

[00:56:01] Greg Wooldridge: He was awesome. He’s got a couple of, uh, awards and Glenn Zipper was, uh, was the conduit to a bad robot. So we got a lot of great people. Worked on it for the 2022 season, hoped to get it out in 23 on IMAX and that slid a little bit. There’s some elements there that caused that. And we finally got it out in this year and about May for about a week in IMAX prior to that 6 months prior to that, Amazon bought the rights to it and they want to stream it on Memorial Day.

[00:56:38] Greg Wooldridge: So we showed it in theaters for about a week. And then, uh, Amazon took it and ran with it and just, it became the number one movie on Amazon on prime, which is pretty, is that 

[00:56:49] Mark Divine: right? Oh, that’s cool. 

[00:56:50] Greg Wooldridge: And rotten tomatoes rated it 98 percent viewer approval, which is almost unheard of. So it really took off.

[00:56:59] Greg Wooldridge: And it’s been a great, great product for Amazon Prime. 

[00:57:02] Mark Divine: So a lot of the aerial scenes are new. 

[00:57:04] Greg Wooldridge: Yes. Oh, absolutely. And how do they 

[00:57:07] Mark Divine: get those? Like, how do they get them? With a helicopter, helicopter, 

[00:57:10] Greg Wooldridge: a lot of that, and then great cameras within the cockpit. And we actually attached cameras underneath one, underneath another F 18 cameras in a big, big container, if you will.

[00:57:24] Greg Wooldridge: to film Sony Venice cameras to film a lot of what was going on. So we use 

[00:57:28] Mark Divine: so that that bird would fly next to the four nation or underneath it to capture it. Or how did that work 

[00:57:32] Greg Wooldridge: nearby? It wasn’t part of the format because of the drag involved. It could in the interference. So and we but it was budget.

[00:57:42] Greg Wooldridge: It was a small budget. It was, you know, six or 7 million compared to 235 million to make Top Gun Never. You can do that when you don’t have to build sets and pay actors. It was just great. 

[00:57:55] Mark Divine: Was it financially lucrative? I mean, was there a return on investment? 

[00:57:59] Greg Wooldridge: I don’t know the answer to that. I didn’t get involved with the business end other than, you know, a contract to be an executive producer and be a part of that.

[00:58:10] Greg Wooldridge: But it wasn’t documentaries don’t make a lot of money. 

[00:58:13] Mark Divine: It’s not why you did it. Yeah, of course. Yeah 

[00:58:16] Greg Wooldridge: I think I did it because america needed a boost, right? I 

[00:58:20] Mark Divine: agree with that Yeah, 

[00:58:21] Greg Wooldridge: bring it together a little bit. That was you know, nothing more Uh american flag apple pie mom and all that than the blue angels.

[00:58:29] Greg Wooldridge: I mean really america’s team america’s so I thought you know, we need to do this and uh, Bring something to put smiles on faces and I feel like we did a pretty good job of that 

[00:58:40] Mark Divine: Yeah, you did. Well done, sir. Well, what’s next for you as we wrap up here? 

[00:58:45] Greg Wooldridge: Oh, well, I’m still doing public speaking, which I, I, I just love, um, I’ve, uh, I’ve, I’ve found, uh, some spirituality parts of my life that had been missing and that’s been really rewarding for me and, uh, changed the way I believe and, and what happens and how it happens, you know, so.

[00:59:06] Greg Wooldridge: That’s been huge and I, in fact, I even talk a little bit in that area too, which is very personally rewarding. Um, so I do that and we, we may try to do some more production stuff. We’ll see, you know, I’ve learned this Hollywood stuff and it’s pretty cool. 1 of the thing I want to mention was, you know, us outsiders from that world that we think, oh, what a bunch of crackpots and knuckle and not not heads.

[00:59:29] Greg Wooldridge: You know, those folks are, they work their tails off. 

[00:59:33] Mark Divine: Yeah, they’re hard working. 

[00:59:35] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah, extraordinarily professional and they work, they work really, really well and they know how to build teams and they know how to do all that. So That that was a wonderful takeaway from being involved with movie production.

[00:59:47] Mark Divine: Yeah, that’s good to hear. I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve had some experience with, um, with my company and training, you know, individuals who are going to go play like seal roles, you know, and whatnot. And I’ve always found them to be very professional and hardworking and, you know, contrary to what a lot of people think about Hollywood, some brilliant people there.

[01:00:05] Greg Wooldridge: That’s great. Sure. Great. 

[01:00:08] Mark Divine: Greg, uh, you’ve been amazing. I appreciate your service. Uh, you know, just very inspirational and thanks for putting that movie out. I agree. It’s like a big boost. Like we we’re living in through some crazy times, like the Chinese proverb, may we live in interesting times. It’s good to have a spiritual center, you know, in times like this.

[01:00:25] Mark Divine: So keep doing that work too. 

[01:00:27] Greg Wooldridge: Mark, you, you, thanks for what you do. I mean, you reach thousands and thousands and thousands of people with, with good news. Good ideas and good words and wisdom. Yeah. 

[01:00:37] Mark Divine: Well, it’s like we we’ve got to put the light out there because there’s a lot of darkness in the world too.

[01:00:41] Mark Divine: Absolutely. I agree. 

[01:00:42] Mark Divine: The only way to dispel the darkness is with light. Yeah. Yeah, sir. It’s been amazing conversation again. I appreciate you. And, uh, I hope to meet you in person someday soon. 

[01:00:50] Greg Wooldridge: I hope so too, Mark. Thank you. Give my best 

[01:00:52] Mark Divine: to John. 

[01:00:53] Greg Wooldridge: Yeah, I will. And. Glad to be here. 

[01:00:56] Mark Divine: Glad to be here. 

[01:00:57] Greg Wooldridge: Booyah. 

[01:00:59] Mark Divine: Wow. What a fascinating conversation with Greg Woldridge, the boss, blue angel, unbelievable story, and wow.

[01:01:09] Mark Divine: Just the intensity of that job. Go check out the show, blue angels on Amazon. It’s amazing. I watched it myself last night and you won’t be disappointed. It’s really phenomenal. Shout out to my incredible team, Catherine divine and streamline media and jet studios who work behind the scenes to bring you the show and my newsletter every week.

[01:01:25] Mark Divine: Speaking of the newsletter, divine inspiration comes out every day. Tuesday, you can go to my website, markdivine. com to subscribe. Also, the YouTube video was on my YouTube. You can link there from my Mark Divine site and the show notes from the show will be there as well. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook at Mark Divine or at real Mark Divine.

[01:01:43] Mark Divine: And if you want to send me some ideas. For guests or any questions you might have that I can hit up in a solo podcast, reach out on my LinkedIn profile. Certainly helps to have you rate and review the show, wherever you listen. It’s very helpful for visibility and credibility shooting for 5, 000 plus five star reviews.

[01:01:59] Mark Divine: Please help and keep us relevant and motivated by doing that. I appreciate it. So thanks again for listening. Thanks for being part of the change you want to see in the world. And, uh, thanks for doing the work till next time. Divine out. Ooh, yeah.