General Stanley McChrystal on Getting Comfortable with Risk | Set Up Your Hall of Heroes

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to retired United States Army General Stanley Allen McChrystal about how to become comfortable with risk as a leader, the rise and spread of misinformation, the effect that individuals have on humanity, and more. Stanley Allen McChrystal is a retired United States Army general best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command in the mid-2000s. He established a consultancy firm, McChrystal Group, in 2011 and advises senior executives at multinational corporations on navigating complex change and building stronger teams. His new book Risk: A User's Guide is about an entirely new way to understand risk and master the unknown. Get a hand-sculpted pewter portrait bust of Seneca the Younger in the Daily Stoic Store. Only available for delivery to US-based locations. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. Go to Givewell.org to read more about their research or donate to any of their recommended charities. Enter Daily Stoic at checkout so they know we sent you. Shopify has the tools and resources that make it easy for any business to succeed from down the street to around the globe. Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Make your mental health more than just another New Year’s resolution, with Talkspace. Visit talkspace.com and get $100 off your first month when you use promo code STOIC at sign-up. That’s $100 off at talkspace.com, promo code STOIC. Reframe is a neuroscience based smartphone app that helps users cut-back or quit drinking alcohol. Using evidence-based tools, techniques and content, To learn more go to JOINREFRAMEAPP. COM/stoic and use the code STOIC for 25% off your first month or annual subscription. Download Reframe on the App Store today. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow General Stanley McChrystal: Homepage, TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Set up your Hall of Heroes. Whatever you think of him, it's hard to deny that Napoleon achieved a historic level of greatness. Born paradoxically into both poverty and nobility on an island called Corsica, he managed by the time he was only 34 years old to be the emperor of territories and client states stretching across most of continental Europe, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean Sea. He won the battles of Austerlitz, Friedland, and Rivoli. He wrote laws and instituted reforms that, in some cases, stand even to this day. How did he do it? What propelled him to achieve

• 1:24Speaker 00

  this level of glory and touch this kind of greatness, if only for a moment? According to one childhood friend and longtime aide, he rarely saw the first emperor of France not either poring over books on strategy or planning the construction of statues. "Moments pleased his imagination," the man wrote in his memoirs. To Napoleon, statues were glory embodied. Bonaparte well knew that the fine arts entailed lasting glory on great actions and consecrate the memory of princes who protect and encourage them. That's what he said. You can disagree, as the Stoics certainly would have, with Napoleon's endless ambition and thirst for fame. What you cannot dispute is the power of the motivation that got him there.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  How he was spurred toward achievement through inspiration and conversation with the dead heroes of history. Indeed, in 1799, when Napoleon took up residencies in one of his famous royal palaces, his friend tells us of Napoleon's First Order of Business. He says, "He selected statues of great men to adorn the gallery. Among the Greeks, he made the choice of Demosthenes and Alexander, thus rendering homage at once to the genius of eloquence and the genius of victory. The statue of Hannibal was intended to recall the memory of Rome's most formidable enemy, and Rome herself was represented in the Consular Palace by the statues of Cicero, Cipio,

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Cato, Brutus, and Caesar, the victor and the immolator being placed side by side. The remembrance of the glorious days of the French Navy was revived by a statue. Marlborough and Prince Eugenie also had their places in the gallery, as if to attest the disasters which marked the close of the great reign, and Marshal Sage to show that Louis XV's reign was not without its glory. The statues of Frederick and Washington were emblematic of false philosophy on a throne and the true wisdom of founding a free state. All of this was intended to bear evidence of the high esteem which Bonaparte cherished from his old comrades, those illustrious victims, to the cause which had now ceased to be his."

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Marcus said that we should surround ourselves with great people so we could be showered in their virtues. Seneca said to set as a guard over yourself the authority of some man, someone we regard as beyond the sphere of imitation. Epictetus's line was that we were constantly brushing soldiers with people covered in dirt. The question was whose stench and stain did you want to wear? We all need heroes in our lives. You can see how effectively this worked in Napoleon's life and still try to moderate it by selecting heroes that inspire us to be more just, less vain, less bloodthirsty. We look at a bust of a great leader like Marcus Aurelius on our shelf and remember that he was just a boy who read a lot of philosophy, who ended up changing the world

• 4:16Speaker 00

  as a result. We can put up a bust of Seneca and use it as a reminder of the tension in that great man. Use him as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. It's up to you to decide who sits in your hall of heroes. It could be Abraham Lincoln, or it could be Florence Nightingale. It could be Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, Simon Bolivar, or Charles de Gaulle. But you have to put them up and create reminders of them in your mind, in your life, in your home. Feel their presence so you can live up to their example. And look, I have a, I have a really old Italian marble statue of Marcus Aurelius that I bought when I was writing The Obstacle is the Way. That sits at my desk. Then I also have our

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Daily Stoic statues of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. And I look at them constantly. They remind me who I want to be. They inspire me to be greater. If you're looking for a Marcus Aurelius statue, obviously, there's a bunch of them out there. We sell a really cool one in the Daily Stoic store that I had commissioned by this great American sculptor, who I interviewed on the podcast not too long ago. So you can check that out. Just go to store.dailystoic.com. But I do urge you to put up something to celebrate the Stoics, whoever your heroes are. Across from my desk, I have a big painting of Marcus Aurelius. I like it. It inspires me. I think it'll have the same effect for you. Check it out.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Well, here we are in a new year and still dealing with the same problems that we were dealing with. Not just last year, but every year that humanity has existed with sentience and consciousness. Although I would argue that perhaps animals do this calculation in their own way as well. What I'm talking about is risk, right? Life is fundamentally about management.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Risk. There is no decision that does not involve trade offs. There is no going through the world without navigating dangers, literal and figurative risk. That's what we're dealing with. And I think that's what the pandemic has made clear, not just the risks of COVID, which have changed and meandered and surprised us and stunned us and caught us off guard time and time again, as we're dealing with now in this massive surge. I hope everyone's being safe. And if you're perhaps listening to this recovering from COVID, I wish you a speedy recovery. But I think as we've had to navigate, as we've bombarded with the real risk calculation of COVID, here's your chances, here's your chances of your children

• 6:52Speaker 00

  getting sick, etc. You know, you may have heard stuff like, well, compare this to car accidents, or flying, or getting on a bicycle, or cancer, heart disease, etc. It's been a reminder, I think, of all the of all the risks that existed that we pretended not to notice, or we lied to ourselves about, or we fooled ourselves about. And that's why I loved this new book by today's guest, General Stanley McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal is a retired US Army general, best known for his command of the Joint Special Operations Command in the mid 2000s. He's been described as one of the finest warriors and leaders

• 7:32Speaker 00

  of men in combat ever. His consultancy group, the McChrystal Group, which brings lessons from the battlefield to the boardroom, advises senior executives at multinational corporations on navigating complex change and building stronger teams. He's also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a class on leadership. His new book, Risk: A User's Guide, is about how we understand risk and master the unknown, how we navigate the uncertainty of life, which was a reality in Marcus Aurelius' time, which was a reality in Seneca's time. Imagine the uncertainty and risks in the existence of Epictetus, a slave. And then imagine the navigation of risk, you know,

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Centuries later, for Stockdale and the Hanoi Hilton, thinking about Epictetus, but also navigating the very real perils and life and death situation that he was in. So I loved this new book. It could not be more timely. I really enjoyed it. I was looking forward to having this conversation. General McChrystal and I have the same publisher at Penguin Random House at the imprint of Portfolio. I know I've always heard great things about him. They've sent me his books as they've come out. I read his first book, My Share of the Task, which I enjoyed. I read his book, Team of Teams, which I also enjoyed. And it's a great concept because that's really what organizations are. It's not one singular team, but it's a team made up

• 9:03Speaker 00

  of teams. So he's really a great writer. I teased him about this at the beginning of the episode. He said that this was his last book. And I said, I'll believe that when I see it. I think he's a great writer. I think this has been a wonderful second career, a wonderful contribution that he's made in these books that he's written. But anyways, his book, Risk: A User's Guide, was wonderful. I really enjoyed this conversation. You can follow him on Twitter at @StanMcChrystal. You can check out the McChrystal Group at mcchrystalgroup.com. I hope you enjoy this interview. I hope you and your family are figuring out a way to manage this risk. I hope you're being smart. I hope you're being safe. I hope you are, as the Stoics say, being community minded, thinking, because

• 9:45Speaker 00

  it's important, right? It's not just how we manage risk, what people say, oh, I must have a higher risk tolerance than you. But all our risks are interrelated. The risks I run impact my family. The risks that I run that then impact my family, impact the kids at my son's adventure school. It impacts perhaps the person I'm sitting next to on an airplane, or the person who comes into my bookstore. Navigating this with my employees at the Painted Porch, how do I keep them safe, but also keep them employed? Right? This is what risk is really about at the smallest granular level, just as it's a

• 10:26Speaker 00

  president has to think about geopolitical risks, and a general like Stanley McChrystal has to think about this as he leads brave men and women into battle. Here is my interview with General Stanley McChrystal. Enjoy.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  I loved the book. I thought it was fantastic. You are, you are a machine. You're not, you're not resting in your retirement, are you?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  No, I mean, that's probably I need to counsel myself, but that's the last book.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  You're not going to do any more?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  That's what I promised myself. There, as you know, you know, from your own, it's hard work.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  I don't believe you. I think you'll do another one.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Well, I, I thought it's, I thought where we could start is something I was interested in on the book that I just did on courage. Talk to me about the relationship between risk and courage, because it strikes me that there's no courage without risk, but just because something is risky doesn't make doing it courageous.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  I think that's true.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  So how, how do you think about, how do you think about risk and courage?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think first about risk as something that can undo you. I mean, it's got consequences. And so, as you know, from the book, I, I consider it this relationship between threats that come and your vulnerability to those threats. When I think about courage, I think about the ability to appreciate the fact that there are potential consequences and yet be able to act anyway. And the reason I think that, that that is important is you can be cowed into inaction through a lack of courage and you can rationalize your way

• 12:18Speaker 01

  to, to inaction or inappropriate action because you, you fear these consequences. And so I think that if you perceive risks, particularly when we perceive risk to ourselves, our career, our physical wellbeing and all, you start to shape your behavior sometimes in ways that, that are not really the outcome you want.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I kept thinking in the book, because obviously, yeah, courage is sort of proceeding despite the risks. But then Aristotle talks about the golden mean. On the other end of not proceeding because of the risks is proceeding despite the risks. And I felt like in the book, you do, you talk a lot about, hey, here's someone, they were, the risk was there, they just foolishly ignored the risk and then were surprised at the outcome.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we tell the story of the Iran rescue mission in 1980, the spring of 1980, and it was really good people given a very difficult problem of trying to rescue 53 Americans from the embassy in downtown Tehran. And so they put together this plan, it's complicated in nature, and then they are called in to brief the president, and he asked them, what's the probability of success? And they go 85%. And if you go back and dissect this 10 phases of this operation, it's really hard to rationalize that it was actually 85% chance of success. And so, on the one hand, I don't doubt their courage, their willingness to go into harm's

• 13:56Speaker 01

  way, to go downtown and do that. But you can say that they probably put themselves in a position where they reasoned away the actual risk because they wanted it to be a certain way.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Sure. I mean, isn't that the 2008 financial crisis, that it was risk built on top of risk built on top of risk that people told themselves was very safe?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  You know, I think it was, I do think there was a sense of greed that drove that. I think a lot of people knew that they were building this house of cards, and everybody hoped that, well, hopefully it wouldn't fall down till after I've made my money. And that actually turned out to be true for a lot of people. So I think in a case like that, you've also got to look at people's, that intersection between their judgment and then their personal incentives or interests, where they start to let one override the other.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  But maybe that goes to the Carter mission, which is when the President of the United States tells you or asks you, how risky is this? There's kind of an incentive. There's two incentives. There's a bureaucratic incentive to cover your ass and overstate the risk, right? And then there's also the incentive to tell the person what you think they want to hear, which is that it's a good idea and it's safe. And both of those are obviously the wrong call.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And in that particular case, the third one is they really wanted to go.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  They wanted to go rescue Americans because they were patriots. They believed in their force. And so they very much wanted a yes. And so they said what I think in their heart they believed. But in retrospect, in the cold light of day, it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Well, maybe to nerd out a little bit, because I wrote about this in the Courage book. I was fascinated with MacArthur's argument to land at Incheon, which I think he said was a 5,000 to 1 chance. And there's this scene, I forget who is sort of sent there to inspect the plan. They go, well, it's not impossible. And that was what MacArthur wanted to hear, that they agree. You know, it's like in the movie Dumb and Dumber. She goes, so you're telling me there's a chance, right?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  You know, he's looking at that at 5,000 to 1 odds. But he has this belief that he can beat the odds. So how do we think about risk? And then our sense, as you talk about at the end of the book, our sense of agency or our belief in ourselves to, let's say, defy the odds?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's interesting. As a military guy, when you look at Incheon, on the one hand, it was very, very audacious. On the other hand, it wasn't stupidly audacious. Because in reality, he knew that North Korean forces were badly overextended down around the Busan perimeter. He knew that the North Korean army lacked some of the strength and logistics and command and control and whatnot. And that if the United States could get a landing at Incheon, where there was a challenge with tides and other things, but that there was every likelihood that they were going to be in very good position. Because it was the United States.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  We had little practice at amphibious landings at that point.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's exactly right. So, and, and a lot of people don't know, but that had been discussed before the war. People, that was not a brand-new idea.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  It's, it's still, if you think about it, for General MacArthur to do that move still took courage because he was basically putting his personal reputation on the line. I can tell a story about courage in combat that, that really left me stunned. Back in the first Gulf War, I was part of a special operations task force, and we were putting forces into Western Iraq to try to find Iraqi SCUD missiles. And so, we were putting small groups from Delta Force and the British Special Air Service in. And at one point, we put a team in of about 20 people, and they made contact with Iraqis, and the Iraqis

• 18:14Speaker 01

  basically drove them to our force to go break contact and try to get away. And they immediately called to my commander, and they said, "We need to be extracted right now." And the default response is, "Yes, we'll go in and get them, and we'll bring them out so that they can't, the Iraqis can't run them down." But my boss, General Wayne Downing, said, "Are you in contact right now?" And they said, "No, but we need to get out." And he goes, "No, I'm leaving you in." And at the moment, I, I remember thinking, "Wow, he's not on the ground with them, and yet he is overriding their judgment." And then I thought about

• 18:55Speaker 01

  it. I put it in context. If that organization, that troop, had been run down and killed or captured, General Downing's name in American special operations history would have been just besmirched forever, because he would have been viewed as this mind or this heartless butcher. But he understood that if our force, our reconnaissance force, got run out, that we were not going to get a chance to go back in. General Schwarzkopf, the overall commander, would approve it. And so, he took this, what was a, it wasn't a physical risk. It was a professional risk that I don't think it was designed to burnish his own power or

• 19:35Speaker 01

  reputation. He just knew to do the mission, we had to accept that risk. And the fact that he, I'm sorry.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Sorry, I was gonna say, and maybe he believed a bit more in their capacity than they believed in themselves.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  I think that's right. He did. He believed that there was a much greater likelihood that they wouldn't have a big problem, and they didn't.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  And so he was proven correct, but there was that period. And I really noted that because it was a different kind of courage.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember reading about Incheon. I guess as MacArthur lands, he throws up. He gets on the ground, he throws up. Like, it's successful, but the nerves had been, you know, it was such a, it's like you put your life savings and you throw the dice. It works out. You're still all knotted up about it. But I think what's so interesting about that is, you know, the person who develops a reputation as a risk taker or a defier of the odds, it's not many months later that he almost starts the World War III with that same penchant for pushing the envelope and defying the more conservative, you know, extrapolations about where something would go.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Well, that's right. I mean, as he started the exploitation all the way to the Alui River, he split the force. He left them more vulnerable than a more conservative commander might have done. So you're right. It becomes this overconfidence. Like, you're rolling the dice and you're doing really well, so you think the next roll is going to come up your way.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  So I'm fascinated with the example that you just talked about where the commander sort of is the reputational risk, and then, of course, down the line is the physical risk. To reference another funny movie quote, in the movie Shrek, Lord Farquhar says, "Some of you will die, but that is a risk I'm willing to take," right? So how in your profession, or, you know, now as we're seeing in politics, we're having to balance risks, but the consequences of that decision are felt much further down the chain, and they're real. So how do we, I think it's one thing to calculate your own personal tolerance for risk, but in a

• 21:47Speaker 00

  position of leadership, how does one think about risk? You're a startup founder, but if you've already made enough money that you never have to think about money again, you have a different understanding of risk than, say, your employees who have, I don't know, this is their first go around. So how do you think about those differences of risk tolerance?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are a couple things. One, as a leader, when you send forces into combat, and you are not with them most of the time, by the time you get senior, that's just not appropriate. You understand that you are putting them in harm's way. And you understand that not only you're putting them in harm's way, you're not able to be there to watch it or affect it or even share that danger with them. At the same time, it's your responsibility to do that. And you've got to come to grips with the fact that the risk to you is more reputational or maybe to the larger mission. But you have got to get yourself to the point

• 22:49Speaker 01

  where you understand you've got to do certain things, even though it's uncomfortable to do. And if leaders can't do that, then they're not appropriate for that kind of responsibility.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Does that require a kind of callousness? Do you have to harden your heart a little bit? You talk about Kennedy and the missile crisis in the book. I think about, you know, he's, he's looking on the one hand, a potential nuclear annihilation, which, which requires him to say, turn, not turn a blind eye, but, but accept, you know, a U-2 pilot getting shot down, right? Like the, the, he's having to, he's having to make these trade-offs.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  But if he, but, but if he feels any one of them too emotionally or empathetically, does it, does it prevent him from making a rational risk calculation? Like, how, how do you get to a place as a leader where you can, where you can be comfortable with that?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  I, I think you've got to really understand what the mission you're trying to accomplish is and what the likely costs are. There's the famous story of Ulysses Grant commanding the Union forces during the Civil War. And he wouldn't visit hospitals. And he wouldn't visit hospitals because he felt that the upsetting nature of what he saw would make him unwilling to make the difficult decisions to put more soldiers in harm's way. And yet he had calculated that the only way to win was to slug their way through and accept the cost.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  I never thought about that.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a...

• 24:25Speaker 01

  It is a level of calculation that a leader who is putting people in that kind of position has to reach if they're going to be effective.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, because doesn't Ulysses S. Grant essentially go like, look, we have more manpower, more resources, we control most of the territory that's required here. It's just, he saw it almost as a math equation. And so really, the courage for him was, can he not blink once he's committed to the strategy?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  And he understood that the North was tiring of the war by 1864, and the great risk to the North was a lack of popular support would maybe cost President Lincoln's reelection, in which case the opposition candidate was likely to sue for peace. And so he understood that you had to lower your head and you had to just batter the Southern Army under Robert E. Lee into submission as quickly as you could. Now, he couldn't finish it before the election, but he made enough progress where the American or the population of the North was accepting of the situation.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  No, that's interesting, because it brings up another question with Grant and risk tolerance. So Grant is not incredibly popular with the troops for that reason, contrasting that with McClellan, who among other things, you know, the more charitable interpretation of McClellan is that he had a low risk tolerance. One argument, of course, is that he wanted to preserve slavery, but the other is that, you know, he loved the troops so much that he didn't want to risk any of them. But the irony is, that ends up prolonging the war and is probably a greater evil than, as you said, putting your head down and slugging it out.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  I think that's true. I think George McClellan probably loved the troops, but he also loved not losing. You know, and of course, there's the famous soldier, our story of Ulysses Grant in May 1864, when they fought in the wilderness and they've had a brutal fight, and he's moving the army and they come to a fork in the road, and they don't fork north, which they've always done before to go refit, they head south and the army cheers. And you think, why are you cheering? Because, you know, you're going into harm's way and they're cheering because they're going to get it over with.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a great book, Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton with that scene. And it gives you goosebumps when you read it. It's incredible.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. If you think of the level of casualties that the Army of the Potomac was suffering at that point, but they understood you have to finish the war.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you're right. It's almost by protecting them that you are doing them an injustice by making it potentially all in vain.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Well, this also brings up something that we talk about with military training or even child rearing. In military training, there's always this tension of how realistic or difficult you make the training. When I was a young commander, if you trained hard in the summer in the south where I was stationed, there was a potential for heat injuries. So there was always this idea that you don't push the men too hard because you might have heat injuries. And that was bad for an officer's career. And yet, they need to develop the stamina and the ability to operate that way. The same way with live fire operations. And so a lot of commanders would pull their punches. They wouldn't do very difficult, somewhat

• 28:10Speaker 01

  dangerous training because they just didn't want to accept the potential of hurting their own careers in the process. And yet, the greater risk is an unprepared military.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you brought up child rearing. It's what we call those snowplow parents today. They plow the path in front of their children so they never have to experience any difficulty. And the irony of that is that it makes pretty undifficult things much harder down the road.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I've got three granddaughters and they live next door to me. And they got to get scuffed up. I mean, that's going to be life.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was reading a story about Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, and that his grandfather let him climb on this wall. Like, he was a sort of a very fragile, soft kid, and his grandfather let him climb on this wall that he could hurt himself on, but that it was it was actually very empowering for Fred Rogers because he had been so sort of coddled and protected. It gave him a sense of, and I think that goes to, again, the point at the end of the book, which is, if you don't believe you have agency, if you don't believe you can do something, that is an effective truth, because you won't be able to do anything.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  So, one of the stories I loved in the book, and I've read a bunch about it, too. There's a fascinating book called The Reason Why, about the Charge of the Light Brigade, which I'm sure you've read. But what I found so fascinating about the Charge of the Light Brigade is that the men were willing to rush into sudden death, more than they were willing to question why they were being sent to rush into sudden death. So, where does the sort of, maybe this is that spectrum of fear versus fearlessness, where do we, where do we step in and go like, hey, guys, this is crazy. I shouldn't, like, what are you, I'm not

• 30:14Speaker 00

  going to do that. Like, how does that tension come in?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's famous. I'll start with a family thing. My wife and I have been married for 45 years, and if a meteor was falling down, it was about to hit her on the head, and I turned and said, move. She wouldn't move. She turned to me and said, why do you want me to move? And it drives me crazy, because my time in the Army, I wanted her to move, and then maybe ask me.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  But she's just not one of those troops. If you think of the Charge of the Light Brigade, we had a situation where, in the ranks, down in the cavalrymen, we had bred into them the idea that you would follow instructions, you would follow orders, because there wasn't time or ability to explain everything to people. And you didn't want everybody looking at the commander and saying, now, why do you want us to do that? So where it broke down was, at the more senior levels, where commanders are communicating instructions and intent, they should have asked questions. That's in their level of responsibility. They are supposed to say, now, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. Why would you tell us to do that? Clarify that.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  And so, as you say, I wouldn't want every member of the light brigade to have turned around and say, no, explain this to me. But I wouldn't want the commanders to do that.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. That makes sense. And that brought up another thing, which I loved in the book and I've thought about. So it's obviously that the courage of the light brigade is immense. And that's where the poem comes from. But there is something kind of empty about it in that it was pointless. And then who even remembers what the Crimean War was about? Right? So even at the most senior level, they probably should, no one should have been there to begin with. Right? And so the courage to, sorry, when one is facing risk, but it's to not any real purpose, is there something hollow about that? And I liked your sort of reckoning with Robert E. Lee.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  I had a biographer, a biographer of Robert E. Lee on recently, and it was sort of like, sure, Robert E. Lee was courageous ultimately, but there were so many moments when he, when he got himself into the mess through a lack of courage. Right? Like through a lack of questioning or through a failure to do the harder thing. And so how do you think about, how do you think about that?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Well, if I think about members of al Qaeda, particularly al Qaeda in Iraq, which we faced, and they would do these extraordinary things in terms of courage and operations and to include suicide bombings and whatnot.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  But they, but I fundamentally disagreed with the rationale they were using. And I could make an argument, in some cases, they lacked the courage to do otherwise. They lacked the courage to question the instructions or the level of extremism that was being communicated to them. Now, someone could turn the lens back and they could say, You, US military are same way. You're sent by the nation and so you, without questioning, you go to Iraq, you go to Afghanistan, you go to any war we have. And so you are also guilty of maybe not being discerning in deciding where your courage is best spent. But how many times do we see opponents in a war,

• 33:41Speaker 01

  both sides showing extraordinary amounts of physical courage to almost no, no value? I'm just reading a book on Gallipoli.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  The campaign. And of course, you have this ill-fated campaign that wasn't going to work from the beginning. And yet it's this bloodletting for 10 months that, that has no, at the end of the day, no value.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a Lord Byron poem. He says, "Tis the cause makes all that halloes or degrades courage in its fall." Do you agree with that? Or do you feel like courage or the navigation of risk is inherently admirable by itself?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think it is. I think it is inherently admirable. We had a case of, a soldier was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan early in the war. And he was maneuvering to do something that he thought needed to be done. And it was a courageous effort. And he was hit by friendly fire. And to me, that in no way takes away from the courage of what he decided to do or he was executing. The fact that he was killed by friendly fire and, and he misunderstood the situation. He had, he had a bad read of the situation. Doesn't take away from the decision he made because the context in which he made it was, was pure. And so I don't think we should, I think we should still

• 35:11Speaker 01

  be willing to respect the courage people show, even if they are operating in a bad context or, or just wrong.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess it, there's probably a sort of, a general window in which we can accept it. And then there's extremes that once you go past, it stops making sense, whether it's, you know, a kamikaze pilot for, for Japan or, or yeah, you're looking at, sure, a lot of these Confederate generals were very brave, but the cause to which they were committed was objectively treason. And so I, that's an interesting tension, I feel like.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what I'd want us to do is to parse those. Because on the one hand, you've got to recognize that there is physical courage. And sometimes there's also other values. There's loyalty to others. There's commitment. There's all of those things that someone in a bad cause can show that are very, very admirable. You know, sometimes you're in a bad cause and you don't realize you're in a bad cause.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  You know, we, the United States has fought some wars where arguably we were not

• 36:20Speaker 00

  We were the bad guys.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were not the good guys.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  And yet, we've got to admit that if the country asks people to go and they go do it with the best of their ability and conduct themselves personally, honorably, then I'm, I think we have to parse those things apart.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Well, no, that connects to something we talk a lot about in the book, the idea of narrative, but also the idea of the information one gets, right? So, yeah, how many of the people, let's say, that fought for the Confederacy? Let's say there's a certain amount of moral guilt just for obviously not questioning the institution of slavery itself, but also had grown up in an environment that had fundamentally misinformed and misled them. And obviously, this is even more true in, you know, Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  How does one know, how can one be held responsible when they are themselves a victim? Or, you know, have had the wool pulled over their eyes? Which, you know, you talk a lot about COVID in the book. I'm fascinated with that, where how many of the people have become sort of partisan pawns? Or just been fundamentally misled by information on the internet? Or bad actors? Or maybe even sort of foreign interference in some cases?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  I think this really gets to one of the most dangerous things in society, and that is disinformation.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Now, it's not new. It's been around for a long time, but what it should remind us is we are all vulnerable to it. If you and I lived in Nazi Germany, someone would say, "Would you have been a Nazi?" We'd go, "Oh, no, of course not." Well, statistically, we would have been.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  If we were born in the South before the Civil War, statistically, we would have worn gray. And I think it's fair to admit that we, as people and as populations, are incredibly malleable. We are vulnerable to leadership, and I use the term "vulnerable" very carefully because

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  it means that bad leaders can take us in a bad direction, just as good leader can take us in a good direction. And we're not that good at deciding which is which. And that doesn't make us evil. It just makes us vulnerable.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  No, it's sort of the elephant in the room when you're sort of making a risk calculation. Because as you talk about so much in the book, you're like, you know, what about this? What are the facts? What are your vulnerabilities? How can one do that if reality itself is suspect? And I think for a lot of people are making rational decisions based on irrational information or just simply incorrect information. And that's, it's almost too, when you start to think about it, it's like too much to deal with.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  You know, you start to get in cases where armies are also told that their foes are not as good as they are. And therefore, they crank up the courage. If we just show more alon than the enemy, we will win because they will run away or they will not be effective against us. How many times have we seen armies badly shocked and tremendous loss of life because there's a miscalculation of the risk through misinformation?

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Yes. So how does one cultivate the ability to pierce through misinformation? That strikes me as the oppressing issue of our time. It's almost like a significant percentage of the population has had their brains scrambled. And I don't know how you unscramble that.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  My feeling is that particularly social media, but all digital media now are much more powerful than we are prepared to deal with. The analogy I would use, in 20 years, we're going to look at this like tobacco.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  We're going to say that in the 1940s, it started to become apparent that tobacco caused huge health risks, to include cancer. And yet, for decades, we went into this period of denial because it was profitable, it was pleasurable, and all of these things. I think we're going to find that social media is that kryptonite that is so powerful and so dangerous, but it's also addictive.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  And that we are going to have to come to grips with what we do about it. Now, part could come from the maturation of the population that says, we're going to become more discerning, more able, but there's no historical precedent for that. It's more likely we're going to have to figure out ways to square controlling that with First Amendment rights.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's right. And understanding that, you know, the digital divide, let's say, is no longer access to the information technology versus lack of access. It's fluency or ability to process large amounts of information or misinformation, and the inability to do that. And it's like, some people have the training and the skills, and they've been able to successfully manage, you know, some of the rise of populism, and then some of the misinformation regarding the pandemic. And then, I think we all know and love people who have struggled to do that because they just, they just don't have the toolkit. It's like they're being asked to swim, and they don't know how to swim.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Or they don't have the time. If you think of someone who's in a hard job, and they don't have time to do stuff, they can only, they can't go home and spend a lot of time reading long-form journalism or watching NPR.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Instead, they get snippets on their cellphone, and that's all they get.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Yes. No, and I think it is hard to have sympathy, whether we're talking about a Confederate soldier or a spreader of conspiracy theories, but that person is, although they may be perpetrating or propagating misinformation or pursuing a bad cause, they are themselves a victim of that as well.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Which is bringing up something that I've been thinking about in Visa courage and judgment. And that is, if you have someone that you know well, and you think they are misinformed and wrong. They have just reached a set of incorrect conclusions. And as we approach the Christmas holidays, do you go home and look them in the eye and say, no, you are dead wrong? And you might be stupid, but I know you're wrong. Is that, is telling them that courageous or bad judgment?

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, that's the, that's, it requires an immense amount of restraint and patience, because it almost certainly won't convince them to tell them they're an idiot, if they are in fact being an idiot. Uh, but, uh, how, how does one convince someone that that's the whole tricky problem?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, and they, they actually say data wise, if you try to disprove somebody's beliefs, that it strengthens them.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, the backfire effect.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  But when we talk about risks, and I think COVID has brought this up in an interesting way. It, it brings up a whole lot of philosophical questions, especially for the Stoics. You know, the Stoics talk about this idea that we're all connected. We're all, we're all in service of a common good. What's bad for the hive is bad for the bee, and so on and so forth. But there is kind of this belief, and maybe it's, I think, part of it's sort of a machismo culture. Part of it is maybe a misunderstanding of risk, or it's, uh, it's a, the idea that one's personal risk tolerance is, uh, separable from the consequences of that risk. So like, let's say you don't give a crap about COVID, and you're young and healthy.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people go, well, why should I get a vaccine? Why should I wear a mask? Why should I even think about this at all? And if you were the only person in the world that existed, that would make sense. But it seems like people are struggling to understand how the decisions they make voluntarily have implications for people, other people's risk levels that they then have no control over. So how do you think about the interrelatedness of risks?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we are in a period of intense selfishness. And we rationalize the risks. If you think back to one of my favorite poems, the old Horatius at the bridge and he goes out and defends the bridge. And the willingness of people to accept risk for themselves and maybe sacrifice their own well-being for the greater good is something we've always admired and we've always put up on pedestals. And now we're in a period where, at its most basic level, we have a group of people who are unwilling to do that. And they rationalize, well, it's not good for me. Well, the soldier who throws himself on a hand grenade, that's not good for him.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  But it is something that they feel they have to do to protect their comrades. And so I think that we are seeing, in this particular case, a manifestation of self-interest over the idea of responsibility.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  But it's odd how compartmentalized it is, right? Like, I'm sure you know, and I've certainly read about, and I have some friends, who are special forces operators or soldiers who have served selflessly, tirelessly, courageously, who would throw themselves on a grenade and perhaps have thrown themselves on the equivalent of a grenade. And then the president says, hey, you gotta get a life-saving vaccine that'll reduce the spread of a virulent virus that's killed a half a million or 750,000 Americans. And they go, I'm out, I won't comply. So where does that compartmentalization of selfishness come from?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think that we we made it worse with a weak narrative at the beginning of this effort because in my mind, the analogy should have been one of war, the world against this faceless enemy COVID-19, and we're going to have to do whatever it takes to win, and everybody's got to pull their part. We didn't do that.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  We didn't create that narrative. But then, you're right. How do you compartmentalize a way that says, I don't have to pull guard duty in my foxhole because I don't want to? And yet, that's that's the equivalent of being unvaccinated, leaving a hole in the defense. And and this is a little bit, in my view, this misplaced idea of I have my personal freedoms, and therefore, I get to decide everything about what's best for me, independent of its effect on anyone else.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Yes, Stephen Pressfield, at the beginning of the pandemic, even before there was vaccines, was talking about it, analogizing it to the Spartan phalanx, that everyone has to have their shields, and that the greatest sin you could commit is not dropping your weapon, but dropping the shield.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  And and it's been, yeah, it's been very disillusioning to watch people question why they should have to carry a shield. And not just question it, but actively try to convince other people not to carry theirs either. It's it's it's pretty remarkable.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think it's a display of courage. I don't think that when people stand up and, you know, resist the request that that's personal courage. I think it is personal selfishness personally.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a it's it's strange, but I think you're right. Narrative plays a big part of it because if you had presented the exact same risk calculation to that person, but it had been something less politicized, they would probably or regularly do accept that all the time, from following speed limits to not drinking and driving. We we we have to We have to think about the the consequences of our like your freedom stops at somebody else's nose. So when you take when you when you endanger yourself, that's fine. But the second you increase even 1%, the danger on someone else.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  That's where it ceases to be acceptable.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think part of Stoicism is understanding where you fit in society, where you fit in the world, and not taking more than your share and doing your part.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, and and that selfishness you could also argue is why we're struggling with things from climate change to income inequality. All of these issues require one to sit down and go, what do I need? What what am I doing? And then how is that affecting other people? And how do we come together collectively to solve problems? And that almost always requires some bit of personal sacrifice. If we all come together in a large group, it's a small amount of sacrifice. Unfortunately, we, you know, we see with our sort of warrior culture these days that almost no one, including me, has to sacrifice. And then a very small percentage of the population has to sacrifice everything. But at the end of the day, everyone has to put something into the pot.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  And if you don't do that, you're a free rider or worse.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  I one of my favorite parts of the book, you were talking about this because it's something as a parent I I I've experienced a bit with my parents. But you hear it all the time. People will say things like, well, when I was a parent, we, you know, kids didn't have to wear seatbelts or, you know, like this sort of. There's also this, and it strikes me as a misunderstanding of risk. Just because you played Russian roulette a bunch of times and didn't die, doesn't mean it's something you should keep doing in the future. Right? But we I think sometimes there's a cognitive dissonance where if we take a risk, we don't get punished. We don't want to think about

• 50:50Speaker 00

  changing our behavior now because it retroactively criticizes our past behavior. If that makes sense.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  It does. I think that we. We've gone a little overboard in some cases where we want to reduce risk, particularly to children. Obviously, things like car seats make great sense. But but there are other things where we look at people askance if they don't have their kid in body armor, you know, in a tank, or, you know, any number of ridiculous things, because they've got to get out there and they've got to get experiences. And so how you hit that balance point? And part of it is public shaming if you are

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  too far off the line than than what some people think is right, which I think is, I mean, there's some value in it. It does remind some people, hey, you got to be a better parent. But it can go overboard.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was I was talking to a reporter about this with, because I have two young children. My my oldest just turned five. I speak about narratives like with vaccines. We told everyone, hey, there's no risk sending your kid to school. Right, which we tried to convince parents to send their kids back to school. There's no risk. Kids don't get COVID, you're fine. And then we're wondering why parents are reluctant to go get their kids vaccinated. Because now they would have to go, well, wait, if my kid is fine, they don't need the vaccine. But then if my kid actually hasn't been fine this whole time, then what have I been doing sending them to school? Right? And so I it strikes me that what actually the the thing you have to sit with is that

• 52:31Speaker 00

  there is no decision in the world without risk. And that we have to be comfortable with the fact that there are some amounts of risk across the board. But the problem is, we try to swing to one extreme or the other instead of sitting with the somewhat uncomfortable day to day risks of life.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think back to the stories of the 1950s. I was too young to remember, but parents were terrified of polio because of the specter of the iron lung.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  The numbers were actually pretty limited.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  But the idea, because it was so clearly depicted and it was so horrific

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  in its depiction, that people were obviously very, very interested in getting vaccinated.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Well, as we start to wrap up, there is a couple stoic mentions in the book. You have the Epictetus quote at the end and you talk about Marcus Aurelius at the beginning. I'm just curious about your familiarity with the philosophy and how it's part of your toolkit.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the idea, I do some reading, much more reading about philosophy than a reading of philosophy than I ever did when I was younger. I had this cursory, you know, knowledge of the names and my mother would give me books and so I got bits and pieces. But after you've lived a good part of your life, you start to figure out, well, who am I? And sometimes it's a little bit in the rearview mirror because you look at your past behaviors and then you look at your current and future behaviors and you say, well, why do I do, why do I do things the way I do it? You know, why do I fold my underwear in my drawer? Why do I, which I do. And because West Point told me I should and, you know, nobody's told me differently.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  You know, I eat one meal a day. I do certain things that people will look at me and go, well, that's crazy. Well, I have certain attributes that I try to figure out, what am I embodying? To a degree, Stoicism is attractive to me because there's a discipline to it. There's a idea that if I am willing to deny myself certain things that I can either achieve or obtain other things, but most importantly, I can have a self-image that I am comfortable with. And I think most of us.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Don't think enough about what our real self-image is. You know, do, what, how do we want to think of ourselves? How do we want to respect or not respect ourselves? And so when I look at Epictetus and other writers and how they lived and the questions they asked, to me, it gets to the heart of why are we here? What are we supposed to do? Marcus Aurelius really questions our motives. I remember the part where he goes, "Why do you do something good? Well, you want your legacy to be good. Well, guess what? Pretty soon, the people who follow you are going to die also, and your legacy is going to be gone."

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  So now, so now, why do you do something good? And he says, "You should do it simply because it is the right thing to do."

• 55:40Speaker 00

  No, I, I love that because of, of course, a philosopher at Harvard could come to that same conclusion, right? Just sort of thinking about, "Well, you know, are you going to be around to experience your legacy? No, so your legacy doesn't really matter. What matters is that you do the right thing for the right reasons," or whatever. But there is some extra weight, knowing that, like, the highest guy in the biggest empire of all time, who, so, you know what I mean? He actually experienced. It's like, a normal person goes, "Oh, it would, no, it would not be any fun to be a celebrity. It doesn't matter." Right? But it, but that could just be sour grapes, right?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  But if you've actually gotten there and wrestled with it at that level, when you're a peer to Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, or something, there is a, there's an extra significance to it, I feel like.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there is. And of course, we always question through the sweep of history, is it real?

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  The accounts that we read, did they do that? Or did they sort of have another persona that they didn't do? And then we question, even celebrities we read about now, they write their books, and they say, "I do this, and I don't do this." And then you find out later, that's different from reality. I think it's, it all has to come back to, how do we want to self-define ourselves, you know, ourselves? Because you have that opportunity. There are a lot of things you can't control in life.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  But there are certain things about yourself and your being and how you react, you have control over. You have agency.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, that's fascinating. And yeah, even powerful people are still struggling with the exact same things. What's in my control? What's not in my control? What are my motivations? Who am I as a person? How do I deal with criticism? That even as you go up, and I love, yeah, Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, you realize that it doesn't matter what situation you find yourself in, it's still just people struggling with the same existential issues.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  That's right. And I think we don't talk about it enough. I think we talk in one superficial level, we talk about it. At a deeper level, at a philosophy level, I don't think we do.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  And I think, I think we'd be better, better served to have those conversations.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Well, that's what I love about meditation specifically. I think, obviously, there's a few diaries, of course, many, many diaries have survived over the years. But it may be the only major work of philosophy or sort of self-reflection that was never intended for an audience, right? Even your and my books, like even when we're being personal or vulnerable, you're still thinking like, what will the audience think? It's got to go through an editor. Will it sell? Is this marketable? There's so many sort of constraints on you. Where else do you get an inside look at the brain of a person like that? It's pretty remarkable.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you didn't ask, but I'll throw my idea about presidential debates.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Because I think it would be great to have a presidential debate with one candidate, of course, is often a soundproof booth, so they don't get to hear what the other says. And then you ask some questions about philosophy, how that person processes those kinds of ideas and questions. And to hear a potential candidate take on some really big philosophical questions, to me, would be really important, because some people would stand there silent, they'd be just lost.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Other people, what I think would give us a good window.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, although when Stockdale got up there and said, who am I? Why am I here? In the philosophical question, people thought he was a senile old man. So it may be, it may be us, the voters, who are the problem.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a fair point. Yeah, that was a, of course, that was an ill-fated run of his. But, but still, I think if a person can't be, and they don't have to name drop, they don't have to say, "I've read all these different philosophers," but they have to be able to ask certain questions. Why is it you do what you do?

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Right. No, we want the president, for some reason, to recite a bunch of facts and figures that a, that an aide prepared for them two minutes earlier. And what we're not, what we should be trying to get from them, as you're saying, is, "Yeah, how do you process risk? How do you, do you have empathy? How do you, how do you question the information? Or how, how do you process and think? How does your brain work? What's your character?" Because ultimately, everything else is downstream from those two things.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and what, the way I would do it is, I wouldn't let them give glib answers. I would give them a whiteboard and I'd say, "In the next 15 minutes, describe your character." And if they can only speak for 30 seconds and there's 14 and a half minutes of silence,

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  I gotta stand there.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  It'll be awkward.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  I love that. I love that. Well, like, when you interview someone, like, for, for the McChrystal Group or, or when you were in, in, in the, in, in the forces, how do you, how did you try to discern what those things were in people?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  It was, it is still difficult, because many people learn how to do interviews and they give you sort of clever responses, or they give you falsely candid responses, because they, they've just figured out how to do that. I, I like the idea, or my experience is, I have to have interaction with a person a bit over time. And that means I am very humble about my effectiveness in an interview to really assess that person. Some people are better than I.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I do ask some questions like, you know, "What do people who don't like you say about you?" There are things like that that raise some interesting questions about self-awareness, things like that.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  No, you're right. There's a certain amount of ego involved in assuming that you can get to the core of someone's character in a 45-minute performative job interview.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  So, last question, and we sort of touched on it earlier, but as you talk about in the book, your decision, and you wrote a great piece, an excerpt, I think, that was in The Atlantic that I remember reading, but you take down your picture of Robert E. Lee from the wall, and you throw it away. Who have you replaced him with as far as a personal hero, or who are some personal heroes that you think about either in regards to how they manage and deal with risk, or just how they live their lives?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question, because that was a big moment for me to do that. And I live right near Robert E. Lee's boyhood home. It's for sale right now. I talked to my wife about buying it, and she scotched the idea. But, you know, I go to probably some of the ones. We teach Abraham Lincoln in my course at Yale, and I just finished reading Carl Sandburg's 1926 biography. I've only read the first two books of it, The Prairie Years, you know, up to the Civil War. But it is so different from the other depictions of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, it's so much more human, and of course, Sandburg

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  writes as a poet, you know, can write in ways that I wish I could. So, it's people like Abraham Lincoln, and it's partly who he really was, but it's also the idea we've created around him.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, George Washington, of course, I admire deeply, but he was a slave owner. I mean, he had some pretty big flaws.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  But in those flaws, he also accomplished an awful lot. So, I think it was Frederick Douglass who said, "You've got to be able to take a person and take the good and discard or ignore the bad, not just assign someone because of a flaw to the ass sheep." So, those are the kinds of people. But, you know, I'm not a hero worshiper in the sense that... Particularly when I read about people, they all become human.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  And so I, there's almost nobody I can put up on a pedestal. Instead that, in a good way, that makes them more approachable because it makes me say, I could be a lot more like Ulysses S. Grant was. Because he was human. He had a lot of flaws.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a line from Marcus Aurelius, he says, you know, if it's humanly possible, know that you can do it. I think one of the things, like, we're so reluctant to humanize these heroes, but it should, it should have the effect of making people think that you could be like them, right? That they're, they're, they're just regular Grant especially. I mean, Grant was selling firewood by the side of the road before the Civil War.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and that, that should take away our excuse for not trying to do it.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, I saw a great meme the other day where, you know, obviously there's these debates now about what you should teach in school, what you shouldn't. And they said, isn't it kind of insulting for white people to assume that their kids won't also identify with John Brown or Frederick Douglass? You know, like, like the idea that by tearing these people down, you're destroying their identity or their worth. Maybe you're just identifying with the wrong people.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  That's a fair point. You know, that, who we study and who we emulate and who we build statues to becomes so important because it says so much about ourselves.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  You know, we had a long discussion the other day, a friend of mine and I, on the Confederate statues, because I live in Alexandria, Virginia, and about a year ago, they took the Confederate soldier statue away. And I didn't disagree with the move because it had, it had developed a different meaning.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Than it had had for a century. But the bottom line is, when it was put up, I believe it was put up by fellow veterans in 1884, I think, trying to just memorialize their, their shared experience.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  And so we shouldn't assume that they were evil while we, at the same time, we can, we can judge they were wrong.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, um, there, there's one down the street from my office that I've been working on trying to get removed and it went up in 1910, which would be the equivalent of putting up a Nazi statue today, right? If you think about how distant that was from the war. And so the context matters. Um, on the Lincoln front, have you read, uh, Lincoln's melancholy?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  I haven't.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  It's a fascinating book. You, I think you would like, it's about Lincoln's battle with depression. He has a sort of crippling lifelong depression and it just sort of goes through the loss and the pain of his life and how that made him so like, you know, the, most of the abolitionists were very rabid, right? And, and, and I mean, in a good way, obviously their cause was correct, but Lincoln was much more patient and calm and compromising in both a good and a bad way. But, you know, Lincoln was not someone who rushed into the civil war. Um, and, and, and the, the argument is partly because he really, he knew what pain was and he, he, he didn't jump to conclusions the same way

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  other people did. And I think Lincoln's empathy is something that, that is maybe underappreciated about him as an, as a leader. He was famous for clemency and, and, uh, you know, pardons and all that. It's an, it's an interesting look. I think you would like.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the question is always, what would have happened if Lincoln had not been assassinated?

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  How would reconstruction have gone? What would have been the feeling of it because of his sense? And it gets to his empathy and I don't want to say weakness, but you know, his ability to, to maybe be more accepting than, than the North may have been ready to be.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then my other favorite Lincoln book, which I have this little bookstore here and we sell it. It's not as popular as I'd like it to be, but it's called Lincoln, A Biography of a Writer. And it like, because we think of Lincoln as a politician, but he wrote the Gettysburg Address. He wrote the second inaugural address. And so it's, it's thinking about him as a writer, which isn't how you think about him really. But by, by a handful of those works alone is probably the most consequential writer of the 19th century. I mean, uh, those speeches, I mean, schoolchildren can memorize them today. That's how good they are.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  And the idea of thinking about him as a, as a creator, a crafter of words was a perspective I hadn't thought about. But now it's hard for me to unsee.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, his ability to use logic in the Sandberg biography, they've got a, a depiction of a handwritten set of notes in which he basically argued to himself the irrationality of slavery.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  And, and he basically says, if, what gives a person the right to enslave another person? If it's based on color, if you are white, but somebody comes who's slightly whiter than you, can they enslave you?

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  If, if it's based on brains, is it, if someone's slightly smarter than you, do they have the right to enslave? And he takes you through this and he's taking himself through this logic train and it's brilliant.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Isn't it amazing to think like he taught himself that logic and he taught himself Euclidean geometry? And he taught himself, uh, uh, the law. I mean, even his arguments about why the South could not legally secede came from his underst- like, he's thinking about the Constitution as a contract and he's like, nope, sorry, it doesn't work. Here's why your case is incorrect. It's just, it's lovely to think he taught himself that.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's easy to make me feel inadequate when I read that.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  Well, you would, uh, one, one story I heard about Lincoln is that when he became president and it looked like war was going to happen, he, he checked out books about warfare from the Library of Congress.

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  Not many presidents would check out books from the library anymore, I don't feel like.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Well, General, this was truly amazing. I loved the book. I really enjoyed the other ones, too, especially my share of The Task, and it was a complete honor to talk to you, and thank you very much for writing it.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Brian, my pleasure, my honor. Take care.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  All right. Well, hopefully, we can go for a run on that road you talk about in the book sometime.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I'd like it.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  All right. Sounds good.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

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