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.

• 38:31Speaker 0

  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.

• 38:51Speaker 1

  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 0

  I think that's true.

• 11:33Speaker 1

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

• 11:38Speaker 0

  Yeah. I think first about risk as something that can undo you. I mean, that's got consequences. And so, as you know from the book, I consider it this relationship between threats that come and your vulnerability to those threats. Um, 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 is important is you can be cowed into inaction through a lack of courage. And you can rationalize your way to inaction or inappropriate action because you you fear these consequences.

• 12:25Speaker 0

  And so I think that if you perceive risks, particularly when we perceive risk to ourselves, our career, our physical well-being and all, you start to shape your behavior, sometimes in ways that that are not really the outcome you want.

• 12:44Speaker 1

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

• 13:15Speaker 0

  Yeah, and 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 asks 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 way to go downtown and do that.

• 14:00Speaker 0

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

• 14:11Speaker 1

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

• 14:23Speaker 0

  You know, I 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 until after I've made my money. And that actually turned out to be true for a lot of people. So I 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 1

  But maybe that goes to the the Carter mission, which is when the president of the United States tells you or asks you how risky is this, there's there's kind of an insane, but there's two incentives. There's a bureaucratic incentive to cover your ass and and uh under and and overstate the risk, right? Uh 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 uh are obviously the wrong call.

• 15:24Speaker 0

  And in that particular case, the third one is they really wanted to go. Yeah. 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 1

  Well, maybe to nerd out a little bit, because I wrote about this in the courage book. I was fascinated with with MacArthur's argument to land at Inchon, which I think he said was a 5,000 to one chance. Um, and and there's this scene, I for I forget who who is sort of sent there to inspect, you know, the plan. Um, they go, well, it's not impossible. And uh that was what MacArthur wanted to hear. That that they agree, you know, it's like in in the movie Dumb and Dumber, she goes, uh, he goes, so you're telling me there's a chance, right? Um, you know, he's he's looking at that at 5,000 to one odds, but he has this belief that he can beat the odds. So how how do we think about risk and then our sense, as you talk about at the end of the book, our sense of agency uh or or our belief in ourselves to let's say defy the odds.

• 16:36Speaker 0

  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 Pusan 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. We

• 17:17Speaker 1

  had a little practice at amphibious landings at that point.

• 17:20Speaker 0

  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. Oh, 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 uh 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 basically drove them to our force to go break contact and try to get away.

• 18:17Speaker 0

  And they immediately called to my commander and they said, we need to be extracted right now. And now 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, a 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 remember thinking, wow, he's not on the ground with them. And yet he is overriding their judgment. And then I thought about it, I put in context. If that organization, that troop had been run down and killed or captured, General Downing's name and American special operations history would have been just besmirched forever, because he would have been viewed as this mind or this heartless butcher.

• 19:12Speaker 0

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

• 19:42Speaker 1

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

• 19:49Speaker 0

  I think I think that's right. Um, he did. He believed that there was a much greater likelihood that they wouldn't have a big problem. And they didn't. Right. And so he was proving correct, but there was that period. And I was, I really noted that because a different kind of courage.

• 20:03Speaker 0

  daily email.

• 20:04Speaker 1

  Yeah, I was, I remember reading about in Sean, I guess as MacArthur Lance, 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 uh, it's like you put your life savings and you throw the dice, it works out. You're still you're still all nodded 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 Three with that same penchant for pushing the envelope and defying the more conservative uh, you know, extrapolations about where something would go.

• 20:48Speaker 0

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

• 21:06Speaker 1

  So uh I'm fascinated with the example that you just talked about, where uh the commander sort of is the reputational risk, and then of course, down the line is the physical risk. Um, to reference another funny movie quote in the movie Shrek, uh Lord Farquhar says, uh, some of you will die, but that is a risk I'm willing to take, right? So how how in your profession, or you know, now as we're seeing in politics, we're having to balance risks, but uh 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 position of leadership, how does one uh think about risk? You're a startup founder, uh, 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.

• 22:02Speaker 1

  So how do you think about those differences of risk tolerance?

• 22:06Speaker 0

  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 where you understand you've got to do certain things, even though it's uncomfortable to do.

• 22:53Speaker 0

  And if leaders can't do that, then they're not appropriate for that kind of responsibility.

• 23:01Speaker 1

  Does that require a kind of callousness? Do you have to harden your heart a little bit? You talk about Kennedy in the missile crisis in the book. I think about, you know, he's he's looking on the one hand, uh potential nuclear annihilation, which which requires him to say, uh, turn, not turn a blind eye, but but accept, you know, a you two pilot getting shot down, right? Like the the he's having to, he's having to make these uh trade-offs. Um 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 do you get to a place as a leader where you can where you can be comfortable with that?

• 23:46Speaker 0

  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 1

  I never thought about that.

• 24:22Speaker 0

  Yeah, it's a 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.

• 24:35Speaker 1

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

• 25:00Speaker 0

  And 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 that would maybe cost president uh Lincoln's re-election, in which case they 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. Yes. He couldn't finish it before the election, but he made enough progress where the American or the population of the North was accepting uh situation.

• 25:36Speaker 1

  No, that's interesting because it brings up another another question with with Grant and risk tolerance. Um Grant is not incredibly popular with the troops for for that reason, contrasting that with McClellan, who, among other things, uh, you know, the more charitable interpretation of McClellan is that he had a low risk tolerance. Uh that uh that one argument, of course, is that he he he wanted to preserve slavery. But the other is that, you know, he 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, uh putting your head down and slugging it out.

• 26:16Speaker 0

  I 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 or story of Lyssies 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 gonna get it over with.

• 26:53Speaker 1

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

• 27:01Speaker 0

  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 1

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

• 27:26Speaker 0

  Well, this also brings up something that we talk about with military training or even child rearing. Um, 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 dangerous training because they just didn't want to accept the potential of hurting their own careers.

• 28:16Speaker 0

  Sure. Uh, in the process. And yet the greater risk is an unprepared military.

• 28:21Speaker 1

  Yeah, and you brought up child rearing. It's uh what we call those uh snowplow parents today. They they they uh they plow the path in 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 0

  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 you know, that's gonna be life.

• 28:50Speaker 1

  Yeah, I was reading a story about uh Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, and that um 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 uh for Fred Rogers because he had been so sort of coddled and protected, it it gave him a sense of, and I think that goes to the again, the point at the end of the book, which is um 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 0

  That's exactly right.

• 29:31Speaker 1

  So one one of the um one of the stories uh I I loved in the book, and and I've read a bunch about it too. Um, 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 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 do you? I'm not going to do that. Like how does that tension come in?

• 30:17Speaker 0

  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 to move, and then maybe ask me. Sure. 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 say, no, why do you want us to do that?

• 31:03Speaker 0

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

• 31:32Speaker 1

  Yeah, right. That makes sense. And that that brought up another thing which I loved in the in the book, and I've thought about it. So it's obviously the courage of the light brigade is 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 at the at the most senior level, they probably should, no one should have been there to begin with, right? And so uh the courage to to 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. I had a biographer, a biographer of Robert Elyon recently, and it was sort of like sure, Robert E.

• 32:22Speaker 1

  Lee was courageous ultimately, but there were so many moments when he when he 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 0

  Well, if I think about members of Al-Qaeda, uh, particularly Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which we uh faced, and they would do these extraordinary things in terms of courage and operations and to include suicide bombings and whatnot. Um, but they but I fundamentally disagreed with the rationale they were using. And I could make an argument, and in some cases, they lack the courage to do otherwise. They lack 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 militar US military are the 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.

• 33:31Speaker 0

  And so you are also guilty of maybe not being discerning in deciding where your courage is best spent. Uh, but how many times do we see opponents in a war, both sides showing extraordinary amounts of physical courage to almost no value? I'm just reading a book on Gallipoli.

• 33:51Speaker 1

  Yeah,

• 33:51Speaker 0

  uh, 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. Uh that has no, at the end of the day, no value.

• 34:08Speaker 1

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

• 34:27Speaker 0

  Well, I think it is. I think it is inherently admirable. We had a case of uh 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 executed. The fact that he was killed by friendly fire, and he misunderstood the situation. He had a he had a bad read of situation, doesn't take away from the decision he made because it the context in which he made it was was pure. And so I don't think we should, I think we should still be willing to respect the courage people show, even if they are operating in a bad context or are just wrong.

• 35:20Speaker 1

  Yeah, I guess it there's probably a sort of uh 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 yeah, you're looking at sure, uh, 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 0

  Yeah, but 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 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. Right. You know, we the United States has fought some wars where arguably we were not the bad guys. Yeah. Yeah, we were not the good guys. Right. 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 uh apart.

• 36:38Speaker 1

  Well, no, that that that connects to something we talk a lot about in the book, the idea of narrative, but also the idea of the uh of the information one gets, right? So um, yeah, how how many of the people, let's say uh that that fought for the Confederacy? Let's say there's a certain amount of moral guilt just for obviously not questioning the institution of uh of slavery itself, um, but also had grown up in an environment that had fundamentally misinformed and misled them. Uh, and and obviously this is even more true in, you know, uh uh Nazi Germany or or uh Imperial Japan, how how does one know uh how can one be held responsible when they have are themselves a victim or uh you know have have had the wool pulled over their eyes, which which you know, you talk a lot about COVID in the book.

• 37:31Speaker 1

  I'm fascinated with that, where uh how many of the people have become sort of partisan pawns or just been fundamentally miss uh misled by information on the internet or bad actors, or or maybe even sort of foreign interference in some cases.

• 37:48Speaker 0

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

• 37:53Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 37:54Speaker 0

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

• 38:10Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 0

  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 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 1

  No, it's it's sort of the uh 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 what are your vulnerabilities? What do you 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 that's it's almost uh too when you start to think about it, it's it's like too much to deal with.

• 39:22Speaker 0

  You know, you start to give in cases where uh armies are also told that their foes are not as good as they are. And therefore they they crank up the courage. If we just show more Alan 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 tremendously? Loss of life because there's a miscalculation of the risk through misinformation.

• 39:49Speaker 1

  Yes. So how does one 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 like had their brains scrambled. And I don't know how you unscramble that.

• 40:09Speaker 0

  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 1

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 0

  We're going to say that in the 1940s, it started to become apparent that tobacco caused huge health risk to include cancer. And yet for decades, we went to 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 1

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 0

  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 1

  Yeah, I think that's right. And uh 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 0

  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 MPR. Yeah. Instead, they get snippets on their cell phone, and that's all they get.

• 42:16Speaker 1

  Yes. No, and 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 0

  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?

• 43:08Speaker 1

  Yeah, it's the that's the truth. That's it requires uh 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 does one convince someone that that's the whole tricky problem?

• 43:28Speaker 0

  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 1

  Yes, yeah, the backfire effect.

• 43:40Speaker 0

  Right, exactly.

• 43:42Speaker 1

  But when we talk about risk, because I think COVID has brought this up in an interesting way, 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 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 uh 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. Uh, I think a lot of people go, well, why should I get a vaccine?

• 44:30Speaker 1

  Why should I wear a mask? Why should I even think about this at all? And 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 0

  Yeah, I 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 you know, 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 uh put up on pedestals. And now we're in a period where at its most basic level, we're 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.

• 45:42Speaker 0

  But 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 1

  But it's 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 uh the president says, hey, you got to get a life-saving vaccine that'll reduce the spread of a virulent right of 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 where does that compartmentalization of selfishness come from?

• 46:39Speaker 0

  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 gonna have to do whatever it takes to win, and everybody's got to pull their part. We didn't do that. Yeah, 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. Um, 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.

• 47:30Speaker 1

  Yeah, Stephen Pressfield at the beginning of the pandemic, even before there was the uh vaccines, was talking about it, uh analogizing it to the Spartan phalanx, the that everyone has to have their shields, and that the greatest sin you could commit is not dropping your weapon, but dropping the shield. And and it's been, yeah, it's been very disillusioning to watch people question why they should have to carry a shield. Um, and not just question it, but actively try to convince other people not to carry theirs either. It's it's it's uh pretty remarkable.

• 48:08Speaker 0

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

• 48:21Speaker 1

  Yeah, it's uh 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, um, they would probably or or or regularly do accept that all the time from following speed limits to not drinking and driving. Um 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 one percent the danger on someone else, uh that's where it ceases to be acceptable.

• 49:09Speaker 0

  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 1

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

• 50:10Speaker 1

  That's right. I one of my favorite parts of the book, you were talking about this, because it's something as a parent, I've experienced a bit with my parents, but you hear it all the time. Um, people will say things like, well, when I was a parent, uh, we you know, kids didn't have to wear seatbelts, or you know, like the 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 uh changing our behavior now because it retroactively uh criticizes our past behavior, if that makes sense.

• 50:57Speaker 0

  It does. I think that we we've gone a little overboard in some cases where we want to reduce risk, particularly with children. Um obviously things like car seats make great sense, but but there are other things where we look at people ascance 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 I how do you hit that balance point? And part of it is public shaming if you are sure 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 1

  Yeah, I was I was talking to a reporter about this with uh, because I have two young children, my my oldest just turned five. Um, I speak about narratives, like with vaccines, we told everyone hey, there's no risk sending your kid to school, right? It was we try 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, uh I 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 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.

• 52:41Speaker 1

  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 0

  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 their iron lung. The numbers were actually pretty limited. But the idea, because it was so clearly depicted and it was so horrific in its depiction that people were obviously very, very interested in getting vaccinated.

• 53:16Speaker 1

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

• 53:33Speaker 0

  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.

• 54:21Speaker 0

  Um, 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 uh 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 or not respect ourselves? And so when I look at he Pictetus and other uh writers and how they lived and the questions they asked, to me, it gets to the heart of why are we here?

• 55:14Speaker 0

  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.

• 55:33Speaker 1

  Right.

• 55:34Speaker 0

  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.

• 55:43Speaker 1

  No, I I love that because 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 act so you know what I mean? He actually experienced it's like a normal person goes, oh, 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? Uh, 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.

• 56:35Speaker 0

  Yeah, I think there is. And of course, we always question through the sweep of history, is it real? Yeah, 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. Um 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. Right. But there are certain things about yourself and your being and how you react. You have control over. You have agency. Sure.

• 57:15Speaker 1

  Yeah, that's fascinating. And and uh, and that 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 that even as you go up? And I I love, yeah, Ulysses as Grant's memoirs. You realize that it it doesn't matter what situation you find yourself in, it's still just people struggling with the same existential issues.

• 57:45Speaker 0

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

• 57:58Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 0

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

• 58:04Speaker 1

  Well, that's what I love about meditation specifically. I I think obviously there's a few diaries, of course, uh, 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 in 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.

• 58:48Speaker 0

  Yeah, I'll tell you ask, but I'll throw my idea about presidential debates. Yeah. Because I think it would be great to have a presidential debate with one candidate, of course, is off in 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.

• 59:22Speaker 1

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 0

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

• 59:27Speaker 1

  Yeah, although uh 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 0

  Yeah, that's fair point. Um, 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 uh philosophers, but they have to be able to ask certain questions. Why is it you do what you do?

• 1:00:00Speaker 1

  Right. No, we want the president for some reason to recite a bunch of facts and figures that uh that a 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 uh do you have empathy? How do you how do you question the information you're 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.

• 1:00:29Speaker 0

  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 aside. I gotta stand there. It'll be awkward.

• 1:00:45Speaker 1

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

• 1:01:00Speaker 0

  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 uh 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 and an interview to really assess that person. Some people are better than I. Right. Um, I do ask some questions like, you know, what are people who don't like you say about you? Uh there are things like that that raise some interesting questions about self-awareness, things like that.

• 1:01:47Speaker 0

  No,

• 1:01:47Speaker 1

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

• 1:02:28Speaker 0

  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 Sandberg'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, Sandberg writes as a poet, you know, can write in ways that that I wish I could.

• 1:03:14Speaker 0

  So it's people like Abraham Lincoln, and it's it's partly who he really was, but it's also the idea we've created around him. Sure. And you know, George Washington, of course, I admire deeply, but he was a slave owner. I mean, he had he had some pretty big flaws. Yes. 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 ash heap. Um 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 0

  Yeah. 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. Ulysses Grant was because he was human. He had a lot of flaws.

• 1:04:18Speaker 1

  Yeah, there's a line from Marcus Realis. He says, um, you know, if it's humanly possible, know that you can do it. I think one of the things, like we're we're so reluctant to humanize these heroes, but it 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 grand, especially. I mean, Grant was selling firewood by the side of the road before the Civil

• 1:04:41Speaker 0

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

• 1:04:49Speaker 1

  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 0

  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 1

  Yes.

• 1:05:25Speaker 0

  You know, that 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 a it had developed a different meaning.

• 1:05:43Speaker 1

  Yes,

• 1:05:43Speaker 0

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

• 1:06:06Speaker 1

  Yeah, it's like um 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 uh 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? I haven't. It's a fascinating book. You I think it 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 out most of the abolitionists were very rabid, right? 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.

• 1:06:59Speaker 1

  But you know, Lincoln was not someone who rushed into the civil war. Um, and and the the argument is partly because he really he knew what pain was. And he he didn't jump to conclusions the same way other people did. And I think Lincoln's empathy is something that that is maybe under appreciated 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 0

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

• 1:07:50Speaker 1

  Yeah. And then my my other favorite Lincoln book, which I have this little bookstore here, and we sell it, uh, 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, uh, but by a handful of those works alone is probably the most consequential writer of the 19th century. I mean, uh those speeches, I mean, school children can memorize them today. That's how good they are. And the idea of thinking about him as a as a creator, a crafter of words was a perspective I I hadn't thought about, but now it's hard for me to unsee.

• 1:08:39Speaker 0

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

• 1:08:53Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 1:08:54Speaker 0

  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 1

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 0

  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 right through this logic trying, and it's brilliant.

• 1:09:21Speaker 1

  Isn't it amazing to think like he taught himself that logic? And he taught himself uh Euclidean uh 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 under, like he's thinking about the constitution as a contract, and he's like, Nope, sorry, it doesn't work. Here's why you're Cases incorrect. It's just, it's lovely to think he taught himself that.

• 1:09:51Speaker 0

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

• 1:09:54Speaker 1

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

• 1:10:13Speaker 0

  No.

• 1:10:15Speaker 1

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

• 1:10:26Speaker 0

  Ryan, my pleasure, my honor. Take care.

• 1:10:29Speaker 1

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

• 1:10:35Speaker 2

  good. Take care.