5 American Heroes Everyone Should Know | Ty Seidule

Some of the greatest American heroes are people most of us have never heard of. In today’s episode, Ryan talks with retired Brigadier General and military historian Ty Seidule https://www.tyseidule.com/ about five remarkable Americans whose stories embody courage, sacrifice, service, and leadership. They also talk about why the people we choose to honor matter, what the renaming of military bases reveals about American history, and why telling the truth about the past does not mean giving up on greatness. Ty Seidule https://www.tyseidule.com/ served in the U. S. Army for more than three decades, retiring as a brigadier general in 2020. He is a professor emeritus of history at West Point and served as vice chair of the Congressional Naming Commission, which was tasked with renaming Department of Defense assets that honored Confederates. Ty Seidule is the author of A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/a-promise-delivered-ten-american-heroes-and-the-battle-to-rename-our-nations-military-bases?_pos=2&_sid=7c1d2df26&_ss=r and Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/robert-e-lee-and-me-a-southerners-reckoning-with-the-myth-of-the-lost-cause?_pos=1&_sid=7c1d2df26&_ss=r. 📚 Grab signed copies of both of Ty Seidule's books https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=ty+seidule* at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=ty+seidule* 👉 Follow Ty Seidule on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tyseidule/| @tyseidule https://www.instagram.com/tyseidule/ 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. It's dark out there, and I don't just mean it's dark because of what's happening. I mean, it's dark out there because there's not a lot of light, not a lot of people who we can all agree inspire us, whose example we can all agree on. And that's a shame because there are lots of those people out there. And we're struggling with this as a society. I think most of us are coming around to the idea that, hey, we probably shouldn't celebrate murderers and rapists and slave owners if we can help it. But I get why some people are threatened by the idea. And look, I get it. I think this is part of the resistance to like taking down statues.

• 0:58Ryan Holiday?

  People, people remember stories that they heard as a kid. They remember passing by it in the little town that they grew up in. And instead of feeling like, oh, I was lied to, that person wasn't heroic. That person was actually evil. My parents and grandparents were perpetuating something not just untrue, but monstrous. They feel like the idea of greatness or heroism itself is under attack. And I've said this because I've talked about Confederate statues before. I've talked about monuments. I've talked about how I do think some of the particularly racist and unjustifiable Confederate monuments should come down. Like, I was in New Orleans the day that the Robert E. Lee statue came down. I also have a big problem with the fact that they haven't put up anything to replace it. Like, who should we celebrate?

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  Who are our heroes? Who does embody greatness? We need this now more than ever. And when historians do nothing but tear down, instead of replacing it, they're doing this all a disservice. So my guest today, General Ty Sedgely, is someone whose work I really admire. He's a retired Brigadier General, a military historian, the former head of the History Department at West Point, who's devoted his whole life to studying service and sacrifice and leadership. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about five American heroes that everybody should know about, people whose lives tell us about courage and character, service, selflessness, greatness, and why we should talk about them and maybe not some other people,

• 2:27Ryan Holiday?

  that the people we choose to commemorate, why this matters. And there's probably no one better to talk to about this than General Sedgely, because he was on the renaming commission that renamed some of the bases, named after Confederate soldiers, with the heroes that we're going to talk about in today's episode. He is the author of a book I have raved about, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, which you can grab at The Painted Porch. And then, of course, his new book, A Promise Delivered: The American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation's Military Bases, where he talks in depth about some of these heroes.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  But I think you're going to really like this episode. It's going to be great. Let's do five American heroes that everyone needs to know. Let's start with Barfoot.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Barfoot. So Van Barfoot, Choctaw Indian from Mississippi. His family stayed in Mississippi rather than go on the Trail of Tears. So they're there and stay in Mississippi. And he joins early, about 1940, before the war really starts. So he's a little bit senior, a sergeant, eventually goes to Italy and takes out two tanks, kills, I don't know, double-digit Germans, saves his platoon, and then receives the Medal of Honor for this. I mean, Medal of Honor is, one little thing about the Medal of Honor many people don't realize is that it's created during the Civil War. And what is in the interior of that Medal of Honor when it's created, it's still the one in the Navy and the Marine Corps. It's Lady Liberty smiting the foul spirit of secession. So it's an anti-Confederate

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  monument is what the Medal of Honor is. So, love it. So Van Barfoot is this Choctaw Indian after the war. He then goes and fights in Vietnam for a while before they realize, oh, my gosh, this hero. We bring him back. The end of his life, what I love about him is he's in Virginia. He's Virginia National Guard. And the reason why we named that is the Virginians who were there, National Guard, wanted this guy because he reflected the citizen soldier, someone who fought, then came back, got out. And then, when the nation needed him again at another war, came back again. In his 90s, he's living in a retirement community and puts up a flag, the flagpole. And the HOA, the homeowners association, comes up and says, Mr. Barfoot, you are not allowed to put that flag up.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And he goes, you know, in his late 80s, 90s, listen, you go to hell, man. I am going to keep this thing up. And so it becomes like a national story. And eventually, you know, guess who wins that one?

• 4:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  But it's this guy who loves his country despite what happened to him earlier, and then serves it in multiple wars, receiving the Medal of Honor, and stays there in Virginia the whole time.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  And what gets named after him?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  So Fort Barfoot, I've got my list here. Fort Barfoot is named for Pickett, George Pickett, famous for Pickett's charge. And Pickett, that was the most disastrous charge. We make it sound like romantic. It's not romantic.

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  It was stupid.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Stupid and disaster.

• 5:26Ryan Holiday?

  Same with the charge of the Light Brigade.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 5:28Ryan Holiday?

  It shouldn't have happened.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  And don't romanticize it, you know? And Pickett, a year later, summarily executes 22 US Army soldiers. And it starts what could be a tit-for-tat thing, that the US stops and doesn't do it. And Pickett then skedaddles to Canada when the war ends because he thinks he's going to be hanged as a war criminal.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  Which it sounds like he was.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Which he totally was.

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And comes back. And so it is named around, in the World War II era, it's named for Pickett after George Pickett.

• 5:56Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. And let's do Michael Novacell.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Novacell. So that's what was Fort Rucker. And Rucker named for Edmund Rucker, a no-name guy who's from lower Alabama, the southern part of Alabama. The only picture we have of Rucker, he's wearing a medal that says, I rode with Forrest, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he's the founder of the Klan.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Founder of the Klan, the last person to bring enslaved Africans to the US and also massacred black soldiers at Fort Pillow.

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think Forrest is a racist. He's also a psychopath. Like, he is like just an unhinged psychopath, just like the kind of person that today, there's all sorts of psychological screenings to keep them away from guns and leadership. Because, right, did he kill one of his own men in like a knife duel? He's just a psychopath.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Psychopath. And we did have a Fort Forrest, by the way, Camp Forrest during World War II.

• 6:46Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Shut down in the late 40s. So Novacell is in Alabama. It's where they train helicopter pilots. So we go down to each one of these places and we talk to the community. And they want somebody who's a helicopter pilot.

• 6:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  So Mike Novacell flew B-29s in World War II as an officer. Like, he was then to be a Lieutenant Colonel by the end of the war. And then, when the war ends, he sort of gets out, becomes a reservist, stays in the Air Force. Vietnam comes around. He's still a reservist in the Air Force. It says, man, I want to come fight. I want to fight in Vietnam. I want to be there for my country. And we have no post name for anybody from Vietnam at this time. So the Air Force says, no, we don't want you. So guess what? The Army says, we'll take you to fly helicopters. So he takes a demotion to warrant officer, which is a lower rank, and goes and flies.

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  To learn how to do something he didn't know how to do.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Didn't know how to do. And by the way, flying a helicopter is really, it's really hard. You know, you got both hands, both feet working at the same time.

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  Especially back then.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Especially back then. And by the way, you're a treetop level. You're not fast-moving way up here. So he flies, I don't know, close to 3,000 hours of combat missions there as a rescue medical back pilot. He receives a Medal of Honor for rescuing South Vietnamese.

• 7:57Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Goes back in eight different times, landing in this tiny little patch. He eventually saves his son, who's also a helicopter pilot there.

• 8:04Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  And then, later on in that tour, his son saves him.

• 8:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  He retires outside Fort Rucker, teaches helicopter training until he dies in 2008. And they loved him. And so Fort Novacell is named after Mike Novacell, Medal of Honor recipient, helicopter pilot.

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, Arthur Gregg.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  So Arthur Gregg is the first person in memory that we've named a post after who was living at the time.

• 8:28Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Arthur Gregg joined the Army in 1946 as a black man, as a private, in a segregated army. And he joined to be a medical technician, a phlebotomist, to take blood out. So they train him up to do that, send him to Germany. They won't let him do it because blood is segregated in this era. So there's white

• 8:48Ryan Holiday?

  The absurdity of it.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  The absurdity, the white blood and black blood, all through World War II, this is the case, segregated blood. And some southern states just continues into the early 70s. So he's not allowed to do that. So what does he do? Send me anywhere. So he goes to a segregated quartermaster unit, where he's so smart, they make him the supply sergeant. He becomes the first black military policeman when they need military police because those were segregated as well during this time. Everything is completely segregated. He is, says, I want to make this a career. He goes to officer candidate school. One of two black soldiers in officer candidate school then goes to Fort Lee as a logistician where he's not allowed to go to the officers' club. Everything's still segregated there. Eventually, he commands the largest battalion in Vietnam.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  He's a logistician, somebody who is responsible for beans, bullets, and that, which is what this Fort, Fort Lee is named for. And he's named for that. And he is the one that we named this post after because it is something that is the mission that they do. And he is mentored, he's famous for mentoring other logistics officers at Fort Lee, named after Robert E. Lee.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Sure. And it's in an area that is primarily a majority African-American town. And he was there at the ceremony. So here's this 94-year-old.

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  He's tall. It must be 6'3". And he gets us with this baritone voice. And he thanks Corporal Mayberry. Like, who is that? That was his sergeant, his drill sergeant in basic training in 1946, who taught him the way to be a soldier.

• 10:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It was amazing. This started out as a church service, and it ended as a block party. It's the first time we'd ever named something after a black soldier.

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Just amazing.

• 10:29Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, charity atoms early.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  So you may have heard about the Netflix movie Six Triple Eight. She was the highest-ranking black woman in World War II, commanded a postal directory battalion of all black women that went to Europe and unscrewed the mail. If you're a soldier, mail is a huge, huge deal. My favorite one of those is the movie Battle of the Bulge. And Robert Shaw plays the Nazi commander, Piper. And they've just gone through and attacked an American unit. And they pick up this package, and it's got a fresh cake in it.

• 11:02Ryan Holiday?

  From Boston.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:03Ryan Holiday?

  The logistic miracle of that.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  And he looks in and goes, how can we win this war if they can afford to send fresh birthday cakes from Boston? And this is what she did is she took for millions of troops over there and got the mail right, the highest ranking black woman during that. She did civil rights activity after she gets out of the army. And at this ceremony, her two children were there, along with all the descendants of the six triple eight battalion were at the ceremony. And so we've now named that Fort Greg Adams.

• 11:32Ryan Holiday?

  What did she do after the war?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So after the war, she becomes an educator. She becomes a civil rights icon and a mentor to black women throughout there. So she gets out of the army, but she continues to serve and to lead for the rest of her life.

• 11:44Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. And then Cavazos, who you're talking about.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Dick Cavazos, this is named after Fort Hood. And Hood was a guy who said he would rather have pestilence than have freedom for African Americans. So he was a civil war general from Kentucky, who was sad that Kentucky didn't go succeed early enough, went and fought for a Texas brigade. So they named it after him. So Cavazos born on the King Ranch. So the King Ranch here in Texas, you know, he was a seventh generation Texan, born in the 1920s. And in fact, his great grandmother was the Angel of Goliad. Now, do you know that? You know, the Angel of Goliad story? So his great grandmother was the Angel of Goliad. So this huge family going back in for generations of Mexican-American families.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  He then joins the army after World War Two and goes and fights in Korea and is in charge of the Puerto Rican soldiers there because he speaks Spanish. They had been relieved because they had ran in the face of the enemy because for a bunch of different reasons, not their fault. And he re-trains them, takes them back and eventually has an engagement where he receives the Medal of Honor. Then he is in Vietnam as a battalion commander and there receives the distinguished service cross as the finest officer of his generation. I already told you, Powell mentors Schwarzkopf, both of men mentioned him as their finest leader they'd ever met in their memoirs.

• 13:06Ryan Holiday?

  What's so interesting to me about these, these people who, for people to know, you've subsequently renamed bases in their honor. They strike me as just incredibly incredible figures, inarguably great. And then what's so interesting, in many cases, the names of the people that they replaced were not that impressive. Like I gave a talk at JSOC, maybe two years ago, and I was talking about, because all this stuff was still then going on, the renaming, and they just renamed Fort Bragg. I was joking that it's not just named after a traitor. It was named after a pretty mediocre traitor, too. Like, and actually someone stormed out of the talk, but.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 13:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, me too. But like the heritage element, like this, this is our heritage. You're replacing our heritage. In many cases, it's not the Robert E. Lee's that these places are named after. Not that he's, he's a complicated figure, but indisputably good at what he did. Right? A bad person, good, good professional. These people were good and great.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. These people are good. And importantly, they fought for the United States of America and they did not kill US Army soldiers.

• 14:15Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think it's important to remember that Robert E. Lee killed more US Army soldiers than any other enemy general in our history.

• 14:21Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And so the idea that we, and when did we name these in World War One and World War Two, when we were a segregated army and the South was a Jim Crow society?

• 14:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  You know, in, in the ones that were named in World War One, this is an era of, of lynching.

• 14:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  So the black soldiers that were serving, you couldn't name it because they had no political voice, because Jim Crow meant they had no vote, even though when we went to World War One, South Carolina and Mississippi are majority black.

• 14:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, we can get into that, but I've always found it like, it seems like an underexplored argument is when we talk about these statues or these things. It's like, the basis of America is that taxation without representation is theft. Right? And so if you're putting up public works or naming, you know, public institutions after people, and you're taking money from all of the people to do that, but you're only, you're only considering the opinions of a small percentage of those people, that's criminal. There's something profoundly wrong about taking taxes from everyone to raise up a statue of a person who persecuted some of those people.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  We're in violent agreement. Violent agreement on that one. And I think, but it is important to know that all the names that we put here, they've all been changed.

• 15:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Back.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Well, back, but not to the Confederate.

• 15:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  I think it's important to know in Texas, Cavazos, we went and talked to the community in Texas every time we went. So I was a vice chair of this naming commission that created by Congress. It wasn't tied that did this. It was Congress that did it.

• 15:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And Congress did it because they saw it was wrong to do this. And it, by the way, Trump vetoed it. Because he loves Robert E. Lee.

• 15:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And Congress overrode that veto with a super majority when it's a Republican led Senate.

• 16:02Ryan Holiday?

  Never happened.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Never happens. Never happened. It's the only thing that over, only veto that was overridden by him. So here in Texas, they name, they, they, they have a Texan now named for Fort Hood, someone who commanded that post as a three star. There is no one as more better Texas bona fides than Dick Cavazos.

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  And they replace him with a guy who had never been in Texas in his life.

• 16:26Ryan Holiday?

  What's interesting, both the before and the after, your, your stuff being in the middle, you know, there's this slur now that, that is sort of not popular, but using our culture, we'll call someone like a DEI candidate, which is to say that they're unqualified, that they're only there for special circumstances, they're trying to be politically correct. The DEI candidates are the sort of mediocre Southern generals who were celebrating for the lost cause or the, or the reactionary people that we're putting in after, because we can't ever concede that, that, you know, Dick Cavazos represents the best of us or whatever. Right? That there's this weird, like, I'd rather actually have a mediocre person that we're celebrating than have to concede that there was a super talented person of this minority,

• 17:11Ryan Holiday?

  that minority, that, that in order to recognize their story, I have to acknowledge that some of the sins of the past in order to specify what made them great.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I mean, this is so true. The idea that somebody who is, who served the nation under the harshest circumstances, who was black, you can't honor him now.

• 17:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  I mean, we can't honor him now, even though Congress told, this is a law. I mean, it's not as though we just made it up. This is the will of the American people through their American, through their elected representatives. And that just didn't mean anything.

• 17:41Ryan Holiday?

  Right. So it's a, yeah, who's actually having the change rammed down?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Right. Who's having the change, which is again, and doing this in a way that doesn't involve the local communities either. So it is damnable in like, in, in so many different ways and they, what they want. And Trump said it, I want, he thought he was going back to Lee.

• 17:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  He really, he said that. He said that.

• 18:00Ryan Holiday?

  That legally can't or?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Legally can't. There's a law that says you can't name anything after a Confederate new. And they, then they worried about that. Now, since that time, they have returned the statue, the statues and paintings of Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform at West Point that our commission took away. They have returned that, including a large portrait of Lee in Confederate gray with an enslaved servant in the background.

• 18:22Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. Servant.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  A servant. Enslaved, you know, he's a enslaved man. I mean, it's, he's in, dressed in rags.

• 18:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. When you studied these figures, there are these people that people don't know about, but that they in many ways represent the absolute best of America, the ideals of the military, the ideas of public service. It's sad that people don't know who these people are because they would give us something to celebrate and to come together in sort of common cause and say like, this is what we want our kids to be. This is what we want our society to be, people like this.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  So true, because my last book was writing about traitors for slavery. And this book, I got to write about people that I just enjoyed being with.

• 19:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  And let me give you one example of that. So Hal and Julie Moore. So Fort Benning was named after a Henry Benning, who never served a day in the US Army.

• 19:14Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  So we've named, this is the most prestigious post for the training of infantry and armor and cavalry. And Benning was a leading secessionist, fire eater, someone who tried to break apart the United States, starting in the late 1840s, and told the Virginia Secession Convention that he would rather have famine and pestilence than see the end of slavery.

• 19:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I mean, this is a terrible guy. So we named him after, in World War One, we chose Hal and Julie Moore. It's the first time that anything's ever been named after a family. So we named after Hal Moore, who's a West Point graduate, who serves brilliantly in Korea, is the, the person who commands a battalion in Vietnam where, which is, we were soldiers once in young. This is the Mel Gibson movie, 2000, 2001, we were soldiers movie. And he's incredibly heroic in that and takes on this huge number of, of North Vietnamese. So now again, we're naming things after the Vietnam War, people, heroes of the Vietnam War. But if it was just him, we wouldn't have done it. His wife, Julie, saw her father go to war, her husband go to war, her sons go to war.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  And she was, while in Vietnam, she was a battalion commander wife. And the way they treated families then was that she was living in this 3,500 square foot home on Fort Benning, beautiful white stucco, pecan trees all around. And she had 30 days when he left for Vietnam to move out of that house and go find other housing.

• 20:38Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  You weren't allowed, if your husband was deployed, you weren't allowed to stay on post.

• 20:42Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 20:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  So she goes from 3,500 square feet to 1,000 square feet with five kids.

• 20:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  And they're

• 20:50Ryan Holiday?

  You're being punished

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Being punished.

• 20:51Ryan Holiday?

  For serving your country.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  For serving your country. So she realized now the casualties are starting to come in and she notices that how are those casualties done? Well, she finds out a cab driver comes up, stops outside her house. She goes down to her knees because what does that mean? A yellow Western Union telegram, something has happened to your spouse. She gets up shaking, goes up, opens the screen door and the guy's just asking for directions. And she, she just breaks down and cry and she says, oh my God, these other women are going through this. So she starts following the cab drivers to each one of these houses to find out, to, to provide comfort for them. And she's so angered by this, she writes to Washington and gets the army to do a casualty notification program,

• 21:35Speaker 01

  which sends a chaplain, another officer, and then a follow on to help this family. So she changes the way they're doing it. They're both buried there on what was then Fort Benning. And we went to this ceremony as well, and all the troopers from the first quadrant, seventh cavalry are there. All the family members are there. Amazing to recognize women and to recognize family members. And that's who we named it after. They changed it to Fred Benning, who served in World War One, who'd never been in the state of Georgia.

• 22:03Ryan Holiday?

  Oh yeah. The, the little trick of like, how do we keep the name, but, but pick a different person?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Pick a different person. But the Moors are the representative of everything that the army family is.

• 22:11Ryan Holiday?

  Don't you think that's something about history, like, you know, history can be depressing. History can be uncomfortable, but one of the things I find, and this is why I hate this argument that like, if we, we tell all this stuff, our kids are gonna hate themselves. When I study history and these complicated periods, I go, oh, there were good guys, right? There were good guys. And the idea that, I mean, that's instinctively who I identify with, right? I don't, I don't, I don't go, oh, that, that shitty person looks like me, so I suck. I, I, I don't think about what they look like or where they're from as far as my identification. I identify with the, the people that I aspire to be like, and there's an unlimited amount of those.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Unlimited. I had two examples. The first is that's why I don't say the Union Army in the Civil War. I say the US Army.

• 23:01Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I noticed you did that earlier.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Blue uniform that I do. I love that idea. The other one is, one of the things that changed was the USS Chancellorsville. And that was a, a guided missile cruiser that was named after Chancellorsville. And it had pictures of Lee and, and Jackson, who were the, the heroes of that, for the Confederate Army in the wardroom. And they had gray in their thing. So we said, you should change it. The Secretary of the Navy at the time, Carlos Totoro, changed it to Robert Smalls.

• 23:28Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  I don't know if you know, Robert Smalls is a guy, is an enslaved.

• 23:32Ryan Holiday?

  See the guy that steals the boat?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:34Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, yes.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Yes. I love this story. He, he steals his boat, this, this Confederate boat, gets all these enslaved people on it, takes it to friendly US Navy lines and then eventually commands the boat himself as a Navy captain.

• 23:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Later serves five terms as a South Carolina congressman. And, and so now it is the USS Robert Smalls.

• 23:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  What, there's your hero.

• 23:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  See what, we have heroes.

• 23:59Ryan Holiday?

  That's America right there.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  That's America right there. And every time you think that, that's why, don't, don't look for Confederate heroes.

• 24:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  You look for people like another one that we named after, Mary Walker, who was the only surgeon employed by the US Army during the Civil War. Yeah. Only, oh, she's a woman, the second woman to graduate from medical school at Syracuse. And she just keeps going down, says, you need to use me, you need to use me. Eventually goes into the Tennessee campaign, is a contract surgeon. Eventually is captured behind enemy lines where she was, not only was she doing surgery stuff, which she totally was doing, a little light spying on the side too, sent to a prison in Richmond. Eventually she's paroled from there and is famous the rest of her life for, for putting on pants. Like, I'm telling you, I'm gonna wear pants.

• 24:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  And she is arrested multiple times for wearing pants. But she then receives from Sherman and Grant and Thomas, the Medal of Honor. She's the only woman to have ever received the Medal of Honor and it was taken away from her right at the end of her life. And then given back to it posthumously. So we named a, a post after Mary Walker.

• 25:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Because here's someone, again, a hero. There's so many in American history. We have, we, I love this country. I love my country. I was serving in a uniform for 36 years. And we have plenty of people that we could and should honor. It doesn't mean we can't do both of these. I'm comfortable.

• 25:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Saying slavery bad, you know? And yes, we should know what that caused and the Jim Crow that came with it and the lynching and other things, redlining. But we also have these great heroes.

• 25:35Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. So there is this debate going on right now about the sort of naval academies and, and also how you instruct what we would call warriors and this sort of split, this is where maybe our work intersects with each other. This split between like, are we trying to create Athens? Are we trying to create Sparta? Or the Athens Sparta model? Tell me about those differences and then where you think about it as a sort of a professor and a military thinker.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, in fact, we call it the Athens versus Sparta debate.

• 26:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And it is as old as the academies. It's as old as.

• 26:07Ryan Holiday?

  Athens and Sparta.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  As Athens and Sparta, which is what should a warrior or a soldier or a sailor be? And this is tension between Athens, which is the mind, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, and Sparta, this society created only for, for, for war. And, and the tension there is when you get to West Point is, well, you have the military and you have the academic. And which is going to be more powerful? And at West Point, for years and years, starting with Silvanus Thayer, who was the father of the Military Academy. And he comes in and says, it's going to be about academics. And he creates this modern sense, which do away with the classics. Now it's math and science and natural philosophy, which is physics, those sorts of things.

• 26:50Ryan Holiday?

  Engineering schools.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Well, it not, initially, initially it's, it's more about the, the sciences. And then the army comes and says, we want you to do engineering. And Thayer says, okay, now we'll do engineering as well. So then it becomes a great engineering school. In fact, before the Civil War, it's the only engineering school in the country. And so all those, those engineers, that's the top branch to do, go to do this. But then there's war that comes in and says, how much should we train them to be trained versus educate? And that, every time there's a war, then that comes up. So World War One comes, guess what? They go down to one year. It almost becomes a, a finishing school for war. But then, then World War One ends quickly and they bring second lieutenants back to West Point. So then the same thing happens in the World War Two, goes down to three year program.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  But you know, we're, we don't, it doesn't have to be a four year school. Sandhurst, the British equivalent, is a one year finishing school. So what do you do with this? So this Athens versus Sparta debate, and of late, Sparta's been winning.

• 27:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  And I, you know, I'm on the, I'm on the Athens side. I'm a history professor. So I think you can get that training elsewhere. In fact, training is better done elsewhere. But the focus tends to be more and more. And what happens is what, what loses in this is sleep. And if there's anything that this human being needs and every human being needs, that you can't train your way out of, is sleep.

• 28:09Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I just think it's, it's interesting because Eisenhower gets basically the Sparta model at West Point. Actually, he's, he's an interesting example because he goes to a school that thinks it's academically based. It's pretending to be Athens.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:25Ryan Holiday?

  But it actually isn't. It's just cramming him full of facts and figures and getting him to memorize mathematical formulas. And then it's not until much later that the deficiencies of that education become clear. And he's sort of tutored in the actual Athens model. And then I think it's so interesting because one of the greatest generals ever is actually not, is, is an Athenian in the sense that he understands, uh, history, psychology, human beings, relationships. He is a, a light touch, not a heavy hand. He's not Patton, although Patton's also very extremely educated. But he is, he's not your stereotype of a warrior.

• 29:07Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what allows him to operate as a grand strategist, which is how the war is won.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Totally agree. I mean, the more time you spend with Ike, you like Ike. I like Ike.

• 29:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  And the more time you spend with him, and, and listen, he's got his issues. It's not, so he doesn't. But the more time you spend with him, the more you realize his capacity, his intellect, his ability. One of the things I love about him is his ability to create teams.

• 29:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  And his ability to create this grand alliance, which is, has never been done before.

• 29:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  That has never been done. It wasn't done in World War One. And that's what's different about what he does in World War Two. And he does this understanding World War One, because he's read about it deeply, the problems of World War One. And he understands these great, the, the great generals as well. He understands Grant, he understands Washington. And he lives up to that. I mean, that's the other thing is that he does that and he knows what people can do. He understands what Patton's capacity is. He understands what Montgomery is. And you know, a few of them he doesn't get, but, and he also has a great mentor as well in George Marshall.

• 30:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Who is a VMI graduate. But I think you are so right that, that, that this education that West Point provided at that time was memorize, memorize, memorize. And we know that's just junk.

• 30:14Ryan Holiday?

  Well, in this Athens and Sparta debate, it's like, what, what's the goal, right? It, it seems like it's, there is this obsession, I think politically right now and with raising. It's like, it's training to be, I don't want to say a middle manager, but it's not training to produce the Eisenhowers that you would need or the stock deal I'm writing about is so surprising to people when I tell them that, that the Navy sends him to Stanford to get a degree in the humanities and he almost stays to get a PhD. That seems frivolous or pointless, but, but actually this is a really important part of the educational process because you don't want a warrior making decisions at the Pentagon or advising the president

• 30:53Ryan Holiday?

  or serving as an ambassador to some country. There, you actually need this broad set of skills and understanding.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the ways that we describe that in the past is when you get to war, everything you do before you get to war, you're building your bank. You're putting, you're depositing intellect and energy into that bank. And you use it during war or in these really tough assignments. And that's what going to grad school is. So many of our finest leaders have all done that. They've all gone to grad school. I spent years in grad school because it then teaches you in this complex thing of war, I have allies, how to be a better leader on this grand scale. And remember, you know, where is America gonna fight next? Well, for 50 years, we have gotten it. We have had the same thing. We've always gotten it wrong. We have never predicted where we're going to fight next. We have no idea.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  If you had told me Christina, Mogadishu, Talafer, Damam, all these places where we went, I would never have been able to see them on a map. So you need somebody that can really think through these problems. And that's what the problem with our current administration is, is they're saying, listen, we want you to be fit, but the most important six inches on the battlefield isn't around the waist, it's between the ears.

• 32:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Yeah. And, and this breadth of historical knowledge and insights and understanding into why humans do what they do is ultimately what leadership is about.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  It is, because war or peace either is a human activity undertaken by humans under the most complex and dangerous circumstances. And you've got to understand that. And the thing is whether it's reading, and reading is the vicarious way of getting that, to understand what others have done. It doesn't, the motto of the Department of History at West Point is wisdom through history. It doesn't teach you lessons, but it does give you wisdom over the longer stretch of doing it. Because the thing, the other thing about it is, there's a million independent variables when you go to war. It's not going to be just like this. And that's the thing about it. You just can't read the last war and think it's going to be that way again. But history informs and provides wisdom for that, for the next one.

• 33:02Ryan Holiday?

  And I think General Mattis has talked about this, that it's sort of morally unconscionable to learn by experience what others have already learned by experience. That, that to go, hey, I'm gonna, like, actually, the best place to learn this is on the battlefield. That may be so, but it's very expensive.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  It is very expensive. And by the way, in that next way, that's where you're going to fight, is guaranteed not to be like the last one. And that's the other thing. So, and the way you train is guaranteed not to be the next one. So you have to develop a flexibility of mind that comes with the broad reading of history and other disciplines as well. And that's the other thing about the military is we don't just send people to get degrees in history. It's in every single discipline. And this is what we decided to do after World War II, when we knew we were going to be a world power now. And what are you going to do? You're going to send your officers to get regular education throughout their career. So I did a year's worth of more training after I, I came in the army. Then I did another training, my fourth year of service, another year. Then I start education

• 34:04Speaker 01

  at my eighth to ninth year, and then war college at your 20th year. And then in between there, many of us do grad school. So there is this, this punctuated education system throughout the military, the military officers get. And we think, and we know that it's better than, than just being in the dust at Fort Irwin or 29 Palms.

• 34:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, just, just being a badass, if you think they should all just be badasses. There's a, almost a lack of curiosity about all the important positions all over the world that military officers and former military officers go on to hold, whether they're an ambassador to a country, or an advisor to a country, or they run for office, or they serve in the Pentagon, or they handle something in logistics, like the, you're, you're training future leader. Like, I think maybe the Athens and Sparta debate is, and this is true, I think, not just in the military, but you're, you're not just training to be soldiers, you're training leaders generally. And you want that education to be as far reaching as possible.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Right. And remember that the Department of Defense isn't a trillion dollar company. It spends a trillion dollars a year. I mean, that, it spends a trillion dollars a year. And it is in almost every country in the world. And it is preparing for war everywhere. Because again, we have no idea what's going to come next. So the level of complexity for that organization means you need people who are not only have experience, but who are bright and who have spent years dedicating their life to becoming better and having more knowledge about this really complex subject.

• 35:44Ryan Holiday?

  Does Patton sort of embody then the fusing of the Athens and the Sparta stuff? Because he's, he is your sort of image of your soldier's soldier. But I don't think people understand how versed he was in the classics.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  You're exactly right. I mean, he goes, Fort Leavenworth is the Commander General Staff College, which is this, this year long education for captains, majors, about your 10th year of service. He goes and he gets like number two or three in the class. By the way, he and Eisenhower were best buddies, starting in like 1918. They were stationed together. They both wrote about tank warfare, and then were told not to do, ever do it again, because the conservatives in the organization said, don't do it. So they became great friends. And Patton gave his notes to Eisenhower. Eisenhower becomes number one in his class. And as you said, Patton reads everything. So I used to take my cadets at West Point to the West Point Library. And Patton's library is there. Oh, my gosh, Brian, it's so cool.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  So you go up there and his copy of Clausevitz is underlined in three different colors of pencils. And if you look at the outside spine, there's an R on the books, meaning red.

• 36:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  R on there. So I would take them in there, show them his copy of Clausevitz and say, here's what a professional is doing. He is really trying to figure this out. And right, he does the classics too. So all those books are on them.

• 37:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and you know, the, the famous thing about Patton, how he thinks he's the reincarnated spirit of all these warriors. And the famous scene, it's in the movie where they're in Italy, and he tells the story of this Roman battle. And he said, I was here as a boy. That actually did happen. Not, not he was there in Italy, but there's a scene where he's at one of the sites of the Battle of Wilderness, and he's describing it to this tour guide. And they get in a disagreement. And then some man, like some old man intervenes and is like, no, no, I was here. This is right. You can believe whatever you want. But I suspect that's just, he'd read so deeply. And what's interesting about Patton is he was dyslexic as a kid. And so, most of these things were read to him first. So he kind

• 37:51Ryan Holiday?

  of existed in this oral tradition, almost like the ancients did. And then I think it just became, history became real to him in a way that it was decidedly not even for Eisenhower, who would come to resent how rote and boring it was. Like, to Patton, these myths and ideas were like part of his shared consciousness.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Amazing. These, these generals of time. I think the other thing about, that's interesting about that movie is, who is the, the person that is the, in the 1970 movie is the expert is Bradley. So, and Bradley, his star has continued to decline over time. Patton's keeps going up. But so Bradley's, that movie makes Patton look a little crazier than he really is, to make Bradley, I think, look a little bit better. And Patton fired very few people. He was really great at managing humans as well. Fired very few people. He really had a great team, and people loved working for him. Bradley, make one mistake and he fires you, over and over again. So it was like scary to work for Bradley, because he was always looking for somebody to blame. And Patton always made all those people under him look better.