#132 Ret. Gen. Stanley McChrystal - The Essence of Leadership

Retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal calls on more than three decades of military experience to discuss the fundamental tenets of leadership, and practical advice for taking calculated risks and making important decisions. This wide-ranging conversation includes insights on mitigating risk, making decisions under uncertainty, why civilian leadership is tougher than military leadership, developing mental toughness, teaching discipline, and so much more. A veteran of four U. S. wars in the Middle East, McChrystal was a four-star general best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-08, when he oversaw special operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His troops were responsible for both the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the 2006 death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. After retiring from the military in 2010 he joined Yale University as a Jackson Institute for Global Affairs senior fellow, and in 2011 he founded a consultancy firm, McChrystal Group, which helps organizations tap into human potential in service of stronger business outcomes. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And we did some operations that were pretty difficult. We lost, I remember one instance when we lost a little bird pilot, actually two, in a daylight firefight using a weapon system that was designed for night. And the father of one of the pilots who was lost had a fair question afterward. He said, what are you doing having that, my son fly in that helicopter during daylight in its conditions? And our response was that's the only time we could get at the enemy. We had to do that. And he accepted that, you know, which is tough because of the loss. But I think I was pleasantly pleased that people were willing to accept really difficult decisions and orders if they understood the purpose clearly.

• 1:03Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best, what other people have already figured out, so that you can unlock your potential. To that end, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover what they've learned along the way. Every episode is packed with timeless ideas that you can use in life and business. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member only content, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal joins me today. Throughout his military career,

• 1:44Shane Parrish?

  Stan commanded a number of elite organizations, including the 75th Ranger Regiment. He's also the former commander of the premier military counterterrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command, also known as JSOC. Today, he's the founder of the McChrystal Group, an advisory service firm that helps businesses challenge the traditional command and control approach to management. And he's also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on leadership. For more than a decade, starting in 2001, I worked for one of the most secretive three-letter intelligence agencies in the world. And one of the reasons I wanted to

• 2:23Shane Parrish?

  sit down with Stan today was to expand my perspective through his eyes. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about risk and how we can mitigate it, learning to make decisions under uncertainty, how to make sure you're dealing with reality on the ground when you sit at the top of an organization, the timeline problem, what he reminds himself when he's under a lot of stress, why civilian leadership is harder than military leadership, developing mental toughness, the advantages of studying history, teaching self-discipline, the impact of his famous once-a-day meal on the people he worked with, the greatest misperception other people have about him, and why we don't hold people that fail to make a decision

• 3:06Shane Parrish?

  to the same standard as the people that do. It's time to listen and learn.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  What is risk? I used to think of risk as something bad that could happen, and typically the intersection of probability and consequences. So what's the chances that something occurs? And if it does, how bad will that be? And that sort of becomes a risk, and you buy insurance, or you try to dodge it and whatnot. Now I think of it a little differently. Now I think of it as a mathematical equation, and this is the extent of my math expertise. But if you think of it as threats times vulnerabilities equals risk, then you suddenly realize that threats are things that are out there that are inevitably coming our

• 4:00Speaker 00

  way in most cases, and then our vulnerability to them. And so if we can drive threats down low or to zero in a perfect world, which we usually can't, then we'd have no risk. But if we can't control the threats that are out there, which we usually cannot, then we've got to focus on our vulnerability to them. And we have some agency over that. Not perfect, but we can do something about that, and that can decrease our risk. And so I think of risk as the result there, and what we're trying to have some level of control over.

• 4:35Shane Parrish?

  Is it fair to say that threats are effectively uncontrollable, and our vulnerability to them is controllable or more controllable?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  I think it is. There were people who would argue that if we are really good at predicting threats, we can dodge them, or some threats you can reach out and do something about. But I would say practically speaking, you're right. We're really not very good at seeing where all the threats are coming from, particularly in a complex environment. And also, we're not very good at predicting when they will come. So I think it's a fool's errand to try to think you're going to swat away every threat, but you can do a lot about your vulnerabilities.

• 5:19Shane Parrish?

  Did you come to this idea through the immune system, or was that just a way to explain this? How did you use that?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Well, we came to the idea of risk first with this gap between what I'd studied about the theory of risk and what people had tried to teach me in my career, and then my actual experience with it. Meaning, I didn't actually have very good outcomes with risk, even if I'd gone through the checklist and the matrices and all the sort of scientific approaches. And then I looked historically at the things just really in my lifetime. And I think of the 9/11 attacks, where we had all the information necessary to stop the World Trade Towers being hit, inside the US government. But we couldn't connect

• 6:04Speaker 00

  the dots. Or the financial crisis, where all of the bubble and the fragilities were knowable, but we couldn't do much, we didn't do very well with it. And then, of course, COVID-19. So because we've done so poorly at dealing with some pretty predictable risks, I wanted to study, why is that? And that got me to the human immune system when this immunologist who I'd met at Yale taught me about the human immune system when we were working on a project on counterinsurgency. And she taught me that the human immune system is this extraordinary miracle capability we have to detect threats, assess them.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Respond to them and then learn from it. And you say, well, okay, it's pretty good. I say, wait a minute. They actually estimate 10,000 times a day. We ingest a microorganism that could kill us. And yet they don't for the most part. It's only when our immune system is weakened that we become vulnerable to things that otherwise wouldn't be a problem. And so if we think of that analogy, then suddenly you think of the systems were a part of, the organizations were a part of, the nations were a part of, or even us individually. We have an ability to detect, assess, respond and learn. And the question is, how strong is it? How healthy is it?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Determine our ability to withstand the threats that inevitably show up.

• 7:40Shane Parrish?

  Are there practical things we can do to increase our ability as people to detect, respond to these threats?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the good point. This is not just something you are born with, that you are more resilient than the next person or your organization automatically has. In reality, there are, we have enumerated 10 risk control factors that make up this system. We could have had 12, we could have had 15. It's, we tried to make it manageable as we, we captured it. But really, they go around things like communication, the ability to communicate inside the organization. Do we have a clear narrative? And are we aligned on it? Do we have the ability to respond or act? Can we overcome the inertia of inaction? Or change our action if we're in the wrong direction? Can we get the timing right?

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Can we swing at the pitch at the appropriate moment? Can we adapt when conditions change and the requirement is there? Do we bring in the, all the different perspectives needed? Meaning diversity. Can we overcome biases?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Does leadership provide an umbrella or connection for all of this? Now, if we take each of those, they are a holistic system. But we can actually break out, almost like the human body. We can exercise certain muscles. We can make them stronger. And then, of course, we can exercise the entire system so we're more resilient. And there are a number of things we can do, really on a daily basis in our organizations to make ourselves ready for that next threat.

• 9:15Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to something you said about 9/11, where we had the information and we just didn't use it. Do you think that that's necessarily valuable? We'll always have information, and then we have to assess the credibility of that information. You can't chase down every single piece of information that comes in with a threat against the United States. So do you think it's possible to eliminate that risk to nothing by internal controls? Or how do you see that?

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, Shade, I think it's not possible, or at least not realistic. And when we studied the 9/11 situation for the book, we found that there had been a lot of information, intelligence pumping into the system. But if you compared it to the amount of overall intelligence pumping through the system, it's a very small amount. So having that signal differentiate itself from the rest of the noise is probably impossible.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Now, some people will say, "Well, big data will solve this. We use artificial intelligence and we'll crunch and we'll see patterns and trends." And to a degree, that will be of help. But I don't think it will be the panacea. I think there will still be too much noise, too much information pumping in. And so what we've got to do is accept the reality that we're probably not going to be very good at it. And so what we should accept is the fact a significant amount of those threats will make it through whatever kind of detection process we have. And so we're going to have to deal with them when they're on our doorstep.

• 11:31Shane Parrish?

  The most interesting thing, I think, about the 9/11 stuff is multiple departments had different information. And in the context of the information and that department, the information didn't sort of trigger a high enough threat. But if you aggregated all the information together, then you would have, any of those departments would have acted on the information.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Well, that's exactly right. If you think about it, it's the analogy of the blind man and the elephant. You've got blind men looking at the elephant. One sees a leg or touches a leg, thinks it's, the elephant's like a tree. Another holds a tail, think it's like a snake. And none of them are wrong. But you remember there was a case in the 9/11 where you had some people doing flight lessons?

• 12:15Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  And that didn't rise to the level where the people who were aware of that said, "Red lights, we've got to stop." Because they just couldn't connect that to the idea of hijacking and doing what they ultimately did. And I think we'd be overly critical to say that they were all wrong, that because they saw this narrow picture, they didn't automatically see the big picture. And so, two lessons for me. The first is, we've got to try to connect organizations as much as possible to complete the mosaic where we can. But we've also got to be humble enough to say it's unlikely we'll ever have a clear picture. So we've got to be prepared to deal with the unexpected.

• 12:56Shane Parrish?

  I want to come to that later. Do you think we're getting better at sort of dealing with risk? Or are we getting more risk averse as a society at large?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  That's a great question. I actually haven't answered that one before. I think probably a little bit of both. We are probably getting better at our ability to share information. At least we have the ability to share information better. Technology allows that. We now have the help of augmented and artificial intelligence, which lets us see trends. So we can see the effects of climate change. But then the counterargument is, okay. So what if we don't do anything about it? Are we really getting better? And so I would argue, on the one hand, there is the ability to assess the risk with greater accuracy and more timeliness.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  But we have problems in our society and our organizations now where it's very hard to overcome inertia. Either the inaction or the momentum we have in a certain direction because there are stakeholders, there are habits, there are fears. And so I would argue that we're probably not better, although we could be.

• 14:09Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we're sort of almost setting ourselves up for that? I'm just thinking in terms of like, we seem to have a lot more government around risk now than we've ever had before, trying to protect citizens from everything. And does that make us? How does that affect us? Do we filter information the same way? Do we think differently about risk? Because now we can absolve ourselves of responsibility or do you have any thoughts on that?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  I think it really is in two levels. The first is you talk about responsibility. There's a moral hazard here in that organizations like Lehman Brothers, who named a very capable chief risk officer, created an impression inside the organization that other individuals didn't have to worry as much about risk because they had a person who was responsible for that and they would they would cover it. And of course, that's inaccurate. That wasn't even her role. And she wasn't allowed in things like investment committee meetings where the biggest risk decisions were made. So I think there's there's that dynamic. And then there's another dynamic of, I'll call it anonymity.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  And I think it shows up in particularly in American society where someone is grows up in a town, they're born in a community and they spend the first few years there and then they go off to school and after school they go live somewhere else. And during that period of life, they are interested in certain things in the community. They're very interested in the schools and whatnot. Then they hit a retirement age and they move yet again and they move to a warmer climate. And suddenly in that new environment.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  They're not interested in the schools because they don't have kids or grandkids in the community, so they don't have that same level of responsibility to the entire depth of the community. And you also haven't been there as long, so you don't feel like I'm going to be born, raised, and be buried here, and therefore my legacy is very important. And I think that decreases our sense of ownership over risks. We tend to be more short-term, and that more short-term is, I think, applies nationally as well. And you could argue to commercial organizations, if they have a short-term profit motive,

• 16:33Speaker 00

  and they can just make goals for a certain period, they're not thinking about, I'm going to leave this to my sons or daughters and grandsons or granddaughters, and therefore they don't have the same kind of long-term view.

• 16:46Shane Parrish?

  I like that a lot. One of the biggest structural problems that I think of when I think of decisions is the difference in timeline between parties. You can think of this as shareholders and CEOs, but you can also think of this as a mismatch between politicians and military leaders. As an outsider, it seems to me that politicians who operate on a four-year election cycle have different, more short-sighted timelines, and this drives behavior. To what extent do you think that's true, and how do you think about that?

• 17:17Speaker 00

  I think it's very true. In my own experience, separate from politicians, you found different parts of the US government, the Central Intelligence Agency took a longer-term view. They would operate in an area, and they would build intelligence networks and capabilities because they were going to be there forever in some form or fashion. The military was typically there for much shorter periods in larger numbers, and so the military became convinced they had to do something in relatively short order. So we had to come in, and because we had mass and expenditure, we got to move fast, which could be weak, because the military could be looking at expedience over long term. And then the State Department had a different view as well, and often they had a view that

• 18:02Speaker 00

  said, we're not here to change reality, we're here to report it. And so... Those different timelines became at tension with each other. Now, they could work together. They actually could be mutually supportive because they could help each other see a more complete view. Politicians are the same way. I had Mayor Mike Bloomberg one day tell me that he thought that only executives, meaning elected mayors, presidents and whatnot, are likely to do long-term infrastructure things. At the time, he was talking about a project to make New York City more resilient against

• 18:44Speaker 00

  things like Hurricane Sandy, which was a huge expenditure. He said legislations or legislatures which thought on a two- or four-year cycle had a difficult time making that kind of investment because the payback wouldn't come quickly enough. And I think that's true in different versions across many elected officials. It's hard for someone, as Margaret Thatcher said, when you make a decision, you shouldn't be thinking about its impact tomorrow, but the impact 10 years from now. And it's hard for an elected official who knows they won't be in office 10 years from now to make that kind of call.

• 19:21Shane Parrish?

  Is it also hard for you as a, you know, executive or general to make that argument to them where you think about the compromises that you make to have these immediate, short-term sort of steps or victories or that might undermine the long-term sort of progress that you actually need to make or distract you from something longer term when you have to take a longer view? How do you offer that perspective in a way that people listen or sort of see it through different eyes?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd start by saying I think the military, we've done it imperfectly. The first is because the military has the temptation to have short-term views as well. A commander may have a two-year command tour and there's this desire to make certain improvements or achievements by then, and it's hard to take a 10- or 20-year view. We think we do, but when I'm very honest, I think we don't do it real well. And then your really good question about how do you articulate that and tell people, well, we've got to think 20 or 30 years out on that because that's how long it will take to create certain entities. We sometimes can make that philosophically. You know, we can rhetorically say we need to do that.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  But know full well that elected officials, if they say, "American forces are going to stay in Afghanistan for 20, or 40, or 60 years." But that's a really hard sell. And that's a hard narrative to make to the American people. That melding between the military and policymakers has got to be richer. And we've got to all be more thoughtful long-term. I would argue that probably after World War II, when we sent American forces back to Germany, when it was clear that the Soviet Union was going to be a Cold War adversary. Had we said, "We are going to be there 70 years from now." That the American people probably would have really had a problem with that.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  How do you simultaneously be completely honest with what you think the long-term requirement is, and yet successful in having your message accepted?

• 21:28Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, it sounds like a really tricky thing, because there's things that we wouldn't get involved in if we knew sort of how long that they would last. And maybe some of those things we should, and some of those things we shouldn't.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  I tell people with parenthood, how often do people come to me and say, "Congratulations, we're going to have a baby." And my response is, "No, you're not. You're going to have a person. And you're going to have them for at least 18 years." And my son, I've only got one son, he lives next door to me, so he's 38. So it's great, but it's a relationship that's forever. And thinking about that sometimes is hard.

• 22:06Shane Parrish?

  Totally. How would you go about teaching somebody to make decisions under uncertainty? How do you teach soldiers to do that?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  First, teach them that certainty is an impossible goal. When I was a brand-new lieutenant, I asked my father, "How would I know if somebody that I worked for, worked for me, was going to be a good commander in combat?" And I asked him, "How would you tell him peacetime?" And he says, "You won't. You won't know." Because people have capabilities or coping mechanisms that in peacetime look fine, that don't play well in war. But when you're in combat, then I asked him, "Okay, when you're in combat, how do you know?" He said, "Some people keep asking for more information. And what they're trying to do is drive uncertainty to zero. So that there's really not a question on the right course of action because you know everything. But you can't do that.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  It's not achievable. And so they become hesitant. They become tentative and they become focused on getting more and more information to ratchet the uncertainty out of the situation. And they don't act. And good commanders know when they've got to take a risk. There's a certain amount of absolute due diligence you do to get information responsibly. But there's a moment in which you have to act. Either take advantage of the opportunity or negate the risk. And part of that is learned. And I think part of that is a person's makeup. I think everyone has a relationship with risk. And it doesn't really change. You may get a little better with it, a little more experienced.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  But you have a certain ability to deal with that uncertainty. And I think that comes from birth.

• 23:50Shane Parrish?

  I think about this in the sense of when do you stop gathering information? And I have sort of a heuristic around this, which is called "stop, flop, or no." So you stop gathering useful information. Flop is your first lost opportunity where you know what to do. And at that point, you can make a decision. I'm wondering if you've developed any heuristics over your career that sort of can guide you in when to decide?

• 24:13Speaker 00

  I've never captured them as clearly as you just did there. But my tendency is to make decisions too quickly. I have a tendency to get too little information and shoot from the hip and make a decision and let's go. And so what I did learn about myself is I had to bring people around me who were not that way. And every once in a while, I've been lucky enough to get some people around me who, I say this pejoratively, but it's unfair, are hand wringers. They're always seeing the problem, etc. And what that does is it gives us a balance because I will sometimes be irresponsibly rapid, superficial. And if I've got people who want to look under every stone and sort out everything, we can meet somewhere in

• 24:58Speaker 00

  the middle. They pull me to a reasonable area and I can pull them to where we need to be. So it did do that. But one thing we do practice that I learned from a mentor of mine, and that is sort of phases of decision making. There's a phase in which you gather information and you get inputs from everybody. And then there's a point at which you make a decision. And he used to very clearly announce, and he taught me to do the same. Phase one and phase two are different. Phase one, I want all your inputs, I want this. Once we've made a decision and we're in phase two, unless you have information that substantively

• 25:37Speaker 00

  changes our feeling of reality, we're in the execute boat. And you're focused. And it's not fair to come back and revisit the decision just because you didn't like it. Unless something real has changed, shut up and row.

• 25:53Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I like that a lot. Jeff Bezos has the disagree and commit. It's okay to disagree, but you got to commit once we decide which direction we're going in. Are there types of decisions that you made, sort of, or that you forced yourself to slow down with more than others? Because you're faced with only difficult decisions, right? No easy decision is getting to you. And yet you have to make all these decisions. How do you decide which ones to make quickly and which ones to take your time with?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  One technique that's worked very well for me is you start with what action would need to be executed to be effective. And then you back plan and figure out how long it would take to implement that action. And so that's your decision point. You must make the decision which gives you time to propagate the decision out to everybody and then time to actually act on it. And you go by the point, the last possible time you can make that decision and have an effective outcome. That's very useful. Because I mentioned that I tend to make decisions too quickly. I find if I go on and say, this is when the decision has to be made, and there may be no value in making the decision before that.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  No advantage. It doesn't get better. So that taught me that I had a lot more time in many cases to gather more information, increase my conviction, all that kind of thing over the decision. So that's kind of number one. And then I think also it's as soon as I think I know enough, and I'm not kidding myself about it, you know, I tend to make the decision. You know, I had a conversation earlier today with someone about a phenomenon we've probably all seen. Someone comes to you and says, I think old Stan's not performing very well. And I think we may have to let Stan go or reassign him.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  But I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna give it three months to analyze it. And you go, now what are you gonna know three months from now about old Stan that you don't know now? And usually the answer is nothing. And what could he possibly do, changing his behavior that's realistic in the next three months it would change it? And the answer is often, well, nothing really. So you already know the right answer. You're just delaying because it's uncomfortable. And often I see those tough decisions get delayed just because we don't like them. We don't like to make them.

• 28:22Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, that's really interesting, right? We don't like to deal with the consequences of the decision, whether it's a hard conversation with somebody, or you know, we have to hurt somebody, or it's really, but they don't get easier. They don't tend to get easier with time. They actually get harder.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Exactly. And you're better, once you know the right answer, you're better to act.

• 28:43Shane Parrish?

  There are no easy decisions in battle. Troops are often put into moral dilemmas or situations where there is no right answer. There's something you can't be taught. Is there sort of an experience that comes to mind that you can think of? And how do you assess people's ability to handle that degree of or that type of dilemma?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Surprisingly good, Shane. Particularly in professional military forces where people have a fair amount of experience because most of them will know pretty quickly that there's not a good answer. We would do military operations where you were going to conduct it, particularly in the counter terrorist world in Iraq during the height of the fight 2005 and 6. We were designed to fight at night, but at times the opportunity came during daylight. And the only time you could get at the enemy was when you could find him, and that was during daylight, which was when they wanted to fight. And so you have to make these decisions that say, okay,

• 29:43Speaker 00

  we are going to give away some of our advantage because we have to get them while we can. And we did some operations that were pretty difficult. We lost, I remember one instance when we lost a little bird pilot, actually two, in a daylight firefight using a weapon system that was designed for night. And the father of one of the pilots who was lost had the fair question afterward. He said, what are you doing having that? My son fly in that helicopter during daylight in its conditions. And our response was that's the only time we could get at the enemy. We had to do that. And he accepted that, you know, which is tough because of the loss.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  But usually I found in the organization, if you communicate clearly that this is the rationale that we are using, this is why we are doing this. That people were remarkably understanding and bought in. And sometimes what you do is you you help yourself because you make the argument that says, this is why we're doing this. And you'll get someone inside the organization who points out, there's a better way. Saying, wait a minute, we can do this differently. And achieve the outcome we need to. And and the command sort of rises, but. But I think I was pleasantly pleased that people were willing to accept really difficult decisions and orders. If they understood the purpose clearly.

• 31:11Shane Parrish?

  Is that sort of the commander's intent? Or is there something deeper to that?

• 31:16Speaker 00

  The commander's intent, that's part of it, but it's probably better for me to explain commander's intent in the idea that. You have a in a military order, you have a. What we call a mission statement. And it normally says, who, what, when, where, why? And how you're going to do that. And it tells an organization, this organization will do this on Tuesday to accomplish this mission. But that's kind of sterile. It's usually a single sentence. And what the commander's intent was designed to do was tell everyone in the organization. This is what I actually mean. And if everything goes to hell. As long as we get this done, accomplish this outcome. That's success.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  And so while I've got a plan that says we are going to do it this way. If the plan falls apart. Whatever we can do to accomplish this outcome is good. And it's letting all of the force into the commander's head. Understanding what to do. And so when the plan goes badly, as they invariably do. You know, and you're picking the pieces up and adapting. Everybody can pick up the piece and adapt by themselves. They don't need you to tell them exactly what to do.

• 32:32Shane Parrish?

  I like that because it gives a level of autonomy, right? If you lose radio contact or you lose something else, at least you have you have that next step. You know which direction that you're headed.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:43Shane Parrish?

  As a commander, you have to make decisions with maps, not physical maps, but sort of abstractions of reality that have been filtered through a lot of people before it gets to you. And the decisions you can make are only as good as the information that you get. How do you make sure you're dealing with reality on the ground to make sure that you're really understanding what's happening?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is really important because, as you know, by the time it gets up to you, it's been sort of homogenized to the point where it looks neat and clean. And military units are depicted as symbols on a map and you move military units around. And the little symbol doesn't get tired, doesn't get frightened, you know, doesn't suffer casualties. But on the ground, it's very human and very different than that. There are several things. First is experience on the part of the commander, having been there, having looking at a movement of an organization across the map and you go, wait a minute, I've made movements like that. I know what it does, how tiring it is or difficult.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  The second is staying in communication with people as much as you can, listening. You know, there's a lot of text communication now, but there was incredible value in voice communication. You could talk to a subordinate and you could tell by the tone of their voice how their morale was, whether they were upset, whether they were shaky, and you could hopefully be a reassuring voice to them. That's hard to do in a printed thing. Finally, it's gotten trickier in recent years because we have the ability to get two-dimensional depictions of the battlefield, specifically from unmanned aerial vehicles.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  In Iraq and Afghanistan, over every fight, we could have at about 10,000 to 20,000 feet, full motion video. So the commander could sit in the command center and watch from above, a movie of what's happening, almost like a war game. And so you have the tendency to think that you have this godlike perspective. You see all the forces, you can move them around like chess pieces if you want, because you have the capability, the communication to do that. What you have to remind yourself, and we had to keep... Telling ourselves, you're not there. You don't know how dark it is, how cold it is. You don't know, you don't hear the crack of the bullet. You're not tired.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  And so, don't fall into the self deception that you have a better understanding of what's happening than they do. Use that, that position and that visibility to gain some perspective. But then, listen, talk, do everything else you can and support the person on the ground because ultimately, they do know better. They, they have a much more visceral feel of what's possible and what isn't. And you can help them with a perspective. But, but you have to defer to them because they have a sense of it.

• 35:45Shane Parrish?

  I think it's really interesting because we, we think that our perspective is sort of all there is to see. And you know, the boots on the ground have one perspective. The person watching on the video screens have a different perspective. And reality is a blending of sort of those two perspectives. But whichever perspective you're in is the one you default to.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  And it's interesting because in a chain of command, in a corporation, in a government or in a military, as you go up, you tend to have a bigger strategic view. And down on the lowest level, you tell someone to accomplish something and they go, this is really hard, but from here, it looks really important. So you say, shut up and make it happen. Sometimes you're right. Sometimes you're not right. Sometimes it's really not worth it or smart. And building trust and building communication all the time. So you can get as rich a picture. So you don't try to move chess pieces around when it doesn't make sense.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Or sometimes you have to push organizations to go when they don't want to. But, but that's critical to have that, that connectivity that's richer than just a, a sterile communication.

• 36:59Shane Parrish?

  Is there an example that comes to mind where the information you were given and then seeing up close, the reality of the situation were just different?

• 37:08Speaker 00

  I can't tell you how many times I would do that. I once went out to this small area in Afghanistan. I say small, it was far away from Kabul. And we've given a strategy out to them that says, okay, this is how we're going to deal with the locals and whatnot. And I got an email from a young sergeant, a staff sergeant, a squad leader. And he sent me this email that says, sir, with all due respect, I don't think you understand what's going on out here. And of course, as a commander, my feelings are hurt and whatnot. And we got in a helicopter the next day and I said, we're going down there, we're going to see.

• 37:47Speaker 02

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• 38:02Speaker 03

  How about a latte?

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Maybe dark roast?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Vanilla?

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Caramel?

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Blueberry?

• 38:08Speaker 04

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• 38:27Speaker 00

  So we went down to this area and it was outside of Kandahar and it was an area that was a pretty tough fight. And it was the damnedest thing I've ever seen. In Afghanistan, there's not a lot of wood to make trellises for grapes and things like that. So they do it using mud walls. And those mud walls are about six to seven feet high and they pack them together. And then the vines of the plant are inside the mud wall and the blossoms on the top. So what you've created is like suddenly being shrunk down and being into corduroy.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  And you are suddenly in this corduroy landscape for miles, literally square miles. Well, think about that in a combat sense. You can't see over the the walls.

• 39:11Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  You could probably raise yourself up and then somebody'd shoot your head off. Instead, you're moving in this corduroy area that goes maybe a hundred feet before it turns. So the enemy, if you're, it's like fighting in a big maze. And the enemy, all they have to do is get at one end, shoot down it, there's nowhere to go. And then disappear. And then they could put mines and booby traps in that area. So you got to be incredibly. So I I went down to this organization and I said, I'm going to spend the day with you. So we spent all day going on a combat patrol. And I came out of there going. That's the most difficult thing I've ever seen tactically. And he goes, yep, we're in there every day, sir. And you're trying to get us to control this area. And it's really hard.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  And he was right. And we sat down and we talked. And at the end of it, I said, yeah, but I can't take away the requirement. We have to secure this. I can't make it easier. I can appreciate it. But my requirement, our requirement strategically is this. So we got to get it done. So I don't think they were in love with what I said, and I certainly did wasn't in love with the situation. But the reality was you close the gap between perceptions. And that's so leaders have got to get out sometimes and get on the ground in the corduroy and feel it. You know, understand how hard it is. And then sometimes you got to tell people what they don't want to hear. But they know you know. And that's key.

• 40:41Shane Parrish?

  Do you think it would be beneficial for politicians to spend some time in deployments or in theater? And where they're actually getting a different sense? I mean, it's one thing to sort of like sit in Washington or wherever your headquarters is and make decisions that affect. And people, it's another thing to get on the ground and see it.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And in in the defense of politicians, a lot of them did do that, not not all of them by any means.

• 41:06Shane Parrish?

  Are those press tours, though, or are those like real engagements?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  It ran the gamut. There were people who were battlefield tourists and they were there to check the block and. And tell people they'd been there. And there are other people who were literally. When they got out there, they asked thoughtful questions. They focused on it. They tried to get as close as they could to the. To the action and listen to junior soldiers so they got a good view of it. It's hard to do, usually in compressed trips. And when they fly over halfway around the world, they're exhausted when they get there. So there are challenges, but there were a lot who did it very well. And I really admired the effort they put in to try to really understand. Because, you know, the truth is, if you sit back in DC and you listen to what the military tells you,

• 41:55Speaker 00

  you know, the military, God bless us, will say what we want to be true. It's not that we're lying, but we've been given a mission and we desperately want it to be going well. And so there's a tendency to portray it that way. Go on the ground and feel it yourself.

• 42:12Shane Parrish?

  How do you think about the risk of not deciding? Like not making a decision, especially in like a chain of command in government sort of carries a risk. But people seem to punt on that. The people who don't make decisions, delay or avoid making the decision, the opportunity gets lost. But they don't get held to the same standard as other people.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  No, they don't. I've described my experience with some bureaucrats when I was in the counterterrorism world, where you had to go up the chain of command, multiple levels, sometimes to the White House for permission to do something that was a bit sensitive. And you'd get to a decision maker somewhere in route. And that decision maker would ask a question like, how much wood can a woodchuck chuck? And I go, what are you talking about? It's got nothing to do with it. And they'd say, well, I need to know that. And we'd go back and we'd try to gather that information. We'd come back and they would say, well, the opportunity is gone. You know, that intelligence is no longer good. And they would look at me and they go, you didn't come prepared. But what had happened was they hadn't made a decision to approve it

• 43:19Speaker 00

  and they hadn't made a decision to disapprove it. So their hands were clean. They had no responsibility at all. Now, we still failed because we didn't take advantage of the opportunity. We in the aggregate. And they were able to push back and say, no, you didn't come prepared. When it wasn't realistic to have come with that kind of information. And that's to your point of sometimes not making a decision is making a decision. It's creating an outcome, but avoiding responsibility for it. And it's pretty common in bureaucracies where people are not incentivized to take risk. Where people tend to be punished for bad decisions, but really not rewarded for good ones.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Or even for contributing to a good one getting made. Now, there are a lot of good people who don't fall prey to this, but there are too many good people who do. And so that's why you'll find in many organizations that have layers, a difficulty in getting really important decisions made.

• 44:21Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little bit about that asymmetry you just mentioned between not getting rewarded for good decisions and being punished for bad decisions? And how organizations can go about changing that?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you think about any organization that punishes failure, whether they do it intentionally or unintentionally. The United States Army, in the period in which I served, was really bad about punishing any mistake by a leader. So if a leader made a mistake in their personal lives, their conduct, even if they're a fairly young leader at the time, that's a ding on their career that typically ended their upward mobility. You think of the Navy, if a ship's captain has a mistake, often they pay for it with their career. But if you think about where you learn the most,

• 45:15Speaker 00

  you typically learn the most when you've screwed something up really badly. And you've gotten scuffed up for it, you've lost a lot of money, or you've gotten physically hurt, or you know, if you're young, you do something really ridiculous and somebody holds you to account for it. If you don't get a second chance, all that experience is gone.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Now, what you don't want to do is create an environment where people feel that they can be negligent or cavalier because it's okay, they won't be held to account. But on the other hand, I think it's really important to say that if people haven't pushed the bounds a little bit, they probably haven't pushed as hard as we want them to. So I would say that the military has not been very good about that. We have not created an environment, and I see the same thing in civilian corporations. I hear leaders say, "I want people to take more risk. I want them push the bounds," all the rhetoric that you hear about that. But then you ask them to point out the people who failed significantly and where they are in the company now.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  And typically, there'll be a pause and a silence. They might bring up an example of something really small. But the reality is, people who made big mistakes or pushed programs that didn't succeed are very rarely rewarded with a significant move forward. And so, everybody in the organization watches that. Everyone goes to school on it. And if you are safe and you don't make any mistakes, it's possible to rise up. And that's a negative message in itself. Because the safe sort of bureaucrat is rewarded when someone who pushes harder often is not.

• 47:03Shane Parrish?

  That's a really interesting point. I'm curious, when you're under stress, what do you tell yourself? What does that internal monologue sound like?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Great question.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  I want to say it's voices say, "Panic, run away." Now, typically, what I try to do when I'm at my best, I have to step back and say, "Okay, what is the problem I'm faced with? And what is the outcome that I'm trying to achieve?" Because you can sort of drown out some of the noise around it if you can focus on that and say, what we really have to do is this and achieve this particular outcome. And then I try to think, okay, what's governing my decision here? And I think it should be two things. I think it should be my values. Am I sticking to my values so I don't drift off those? And two, am I making a probability-based decision? Because I can't make a perfect decision. I'm not smart enough to do that.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  But I can make a decision that is reasonable in judging the probability. And if I get those two things right, something that has a reasonable chance of success and reflects my values, then I'm probably dealing with the crisis. And can I communicate that clearly to my team? Can I give them the kind of atmosphere that reassures them? Can I show clear confidence? I can absolutely communicate, this is a tough moment. It is a time for everybody to be focused, but not a time for panic, because I haven't seen any situations where panic contributes to the good outcome.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  So you're trying to create the environment, create confidence, focus people on that, make a clear decision. Now here's the thing about the outcome. It may come out wrong. And just because you got it wrong, or you get a bad outcome, doesn't mean the decision was bad. You can make the best possible decision and bad luck or randomness. Similarly, you can make a stupid decision, get a good outcome and convince yourself you're a genius when you're not. And so as you come through that, it's really important to come back and not reinforce bad habits just because you lucked out. Because the organization is always going to school on what you do. They are modeling your behavior.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  They are emulating you. And if you do things the wrong way, even process-wise or interpersonally, all those things become reflected in young leaders. Once when I joined a battalion when I was a captain. All the lieutenants ran around with their T-shirts on backwards, under their blouse. And I thought, I saw the first couple of guys and I said, "These guys get up early in the morning. They need to pay a little more attention." And then I saw, most of the lieutenants were doing it and none of the captains were, one rank up. And so finally, I had to ask, "Okay, what's up with this?" Well, the battalion commander was a very charismatic guy.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  And he told people that in Vietnam, they wore their T-shirts on backwards so less of their skin showed, and the Vietcom couldn't see it as easily and wouldn't count. And I thought that was questionable, but anyway, he was this charismatic leader who pushed it out. And that same charismatic leader later got himself in significant trouble for his personal conduct, and he deserved to get in significant trouble for his personal conduct. But he had created this cadre of younger leaders that he'd influenced tremendously. And so it became, in my view, a pretty dangerous situation where they could be led into thinking,

• 50:48Speaker 00

  "This, this person we admire so much but shows this, does that mean that's okay?" And the answer is no.

• 50:56Shane Parrish?

  You've said that military leadership is easier than civilian leadership. I'm curious as to what variables go through your mind when you said that and why you think that?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  A lot of people think civilian leadership is easier because you don't have to wear uniforms, it's not life or death, and you can give people more money. And so it's easier. But I will argue, almost for all of those reasons, it's much harder. The military has a very clear culture. You wear your rank and your resume on your uniform. People can see where you've been, what you've done. You can wrap yourself very clearly in the flag. The reason for the military's existence and the mission is clearly stated. It sometimes gets confused, but the basic premise is very good.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Military leaders don't have any money to distribute. And that's an advantage. Because everybody says that yearly bonuses motivate people. And I would argue, not really. They may be a requirement now because they're an expectation. But intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic things like. And everybody likes their bonus until they find out their desk mate got just a little more. And then suddenly the bonus becomes an item of dissatisfaction. And so civilian leaders have got to navigate a bunch of things. And then you add on top of that, the market, the market requiring certain behaviors.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  The fact that most civilian corporations don't spend much time on leader development anymore. They they've decided that that's an expenditure that is not worth the cost. And so the vast majority of them don't invest there. Whereas the military, for all its weaknesses, spends an awful lot of time developing leaders. And as I described, the military takes very average talent and gets above average performance. So I think military leaders actually have a significant advantage. Now, one thing that civilian leaders can do that's much better is they can make big decisions. A military leader in combat can make a big decision. But in peacetime, laws, regulations, tables of organization, equipments,

• 53:07Speaker 00

  really narrow them down to a pretty small area of maneuver space. They can train their unit, but they really can't do much outside of that. A civilian corporation, whether it's private or public, if the CEO is decisive, they can go 180 degrees tomorrow. Now, they may take some scrutiny and pressure on it, but they can do it. And that's a big advantage.

• 53:30Shane Parrish?

  That's an interesting one. I hadn't really thought about that. How do we develop mental toughness? How would you teach somebody to develop mental toughness?

• 53:40Speaker 00

  I think it's in several things. I think one of the first things is that. You've got to build a sense of who you are, and part of that is the organizational narrative. I am a member of this organization. I am proud to be that. That is important to me. I identify with that, and I identify with a set of values, some of which are associated with the organization, some are my personal values. Those two things together give the person a sense of who they are. Admiral James Stockdale was captured and for seven years was held in captivity in Hanoi Hilton. And he was tortured tremendously, and he wrote some interesting things afterward. And he won the Medal of Honor for his conduct there.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  And he wrote that the things which made him effective in his resistance to that pressure, because he couldn't stop the torture, he couldn't stop anything else, was his grounding in his faith and philosophy, the study he'd done in philosophy, because it gave him a sense of identity, and it gave him a sense of what's truly important in life, and was more important than his physical well-being at the moment, or his ability to control the environment, which he couldn't. But instead, it gave him this sense of confidence and purpose, I would say, as a foundation upon which he stood. And he found prisoners who didn't have that very, very vulnerable.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  And so I would say that when we talk about ourselves as leaders, if we can ground ourselves in who we are, if we identify ourselves only with our rank, or our position, or our popularity, or any of those things, as soon as the wind blows hard, or we get toppled, we're in a bad way. But if we are much more careful, or tightly moored to things which can't be taken away from us, our integrity, our sense of commitment to others, no matter when you start to lose those other things, you aren't threatened. There's you there that you can fall back on.

• 55:50Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned Stockdale. You're an advocate of studying history. What are some of the important lessons that you've learned from studying history? And how have you applied them?

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are a bunch of them. One is that leaders are important, but the sun doesn't rise and set on leaders. Great men are great women. You know, we had this tendency for many years to put our leaders on pedestals. And those people we admired, we admired completely. You know, they were perfect in every way. And of course, none were. And so we're going through an age now where we find the fault in everyone. And we get very disappointed when we find out that George Washington owned slaves and didn't free his slaves when he died. We get very disappointed with other iconic leaders. Woodrow Wilson was a raging racist, and yet he did much good for the nation.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  And so I think one of the first things I've learned from leaders is don't expect perfection. Expect humanity. Because if you expect perfection and you you put your leaders on a pedestal, but you know you're not perfect, then that gives you an excuse for saying, "Well, I can't be Abraham Lincoln, so I'm just going to be lousy." Because it's unattainable for me to be a great leader, so I'm not going to bother. Well, in reality, nobody is 10 feet tall. So that means that all of us can be taller than we are if we hold ourselves to that standard. So that's sort of the first one. The second is, you've got to commit yourself to something.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  And we talked about being moored in values, but commit yourself to a cause or an organization or to people, and sometimes to all of those things. And your commitment's got to be real. If it's if it's not more than you, your personal wealth or your personal ambition or any of those.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  If it doesn't have more to it, then there's not much there there. There's, there's always going to be this fragility. And I also would argue that if you really want to be rich, or you really want to be famous, or you really want to be senior, all of those things are, are pretty attainable. But you can get there and find out if that's, is that all there is? There's just not, it is not enough to have money, it is not enough to have rank or something. Because it's empty. And I know that sounds, people say, well, you know, at my age, that's easy to say. But the reality is, at my age, it is easy to say because I've seen both sides of it.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  And I would tell you, what's most important in life is not the extrinsic things. It is the intrinsic things. It's how you feel about yourself. It's how my granddaughters think of me matters a lot to me. And so you got to figure those measures that are real for you and focus on them.

• 58:48Shane Parrish?

  The idea is to turn our future hindsight into our current foresight.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Well said.

• 58:54Shane Parrish?

  Are there particular history books that have influenced you more than others?

• 58:57Speaker 00

  You know, it's interesting, I, I read a lot and I read history almost exclusively. Only occasionally do I read fiction. I've just finished reading Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln. And it's funny, I've been teaching Abraham Lincoln in our course at Yale for 12 years. And I, I know a fair amount about Abraham Lincoln, like most people do. But I went back and read, and Carl Sandburg wrote in the 1920s, this monumental set going through Lincoln. And he wrote in a way that we wouldn't write today. He writes like a poet. And he, he describes things and he describes Lincoln in a depth. And so what I'd say is, when you get a chance to study somebody beyond the Wikipedia page,

• 59:43Speaker 00

  who, what, when, where, why, all right, that's, that's interesting. It doesn't tell you the person. And often it's incorrect. And Sandburg may be obviously a little out of his time now.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  But it gives you a sense of a man in a way that I think most books can. And so I think sometimes going back to read those kinds of accounts, or read what the person wrote themselves in their letters or diaries, can give you a humanity that it's hard to catch otherwise. So I'm really into reading those. I'm not a big military historian. People expect me to. I like to read books about the building of the Hoover Dam and stuff like that because I like big projects that took a lot of people cooperating to get them done and the hard parts of them.

• 1:00:34Shane Parrish?

  You sort of mentioned perfection and humanity within the last two answers. And it reminds me that we're so focused today on that perfection that if we find a blemish with somebody, we sort of dismiss them outright. It's like we can learn nothing from them because they're not perfect. Is there a way that we can get around that? Like mentally trick ourselves? You know, with my kids, I try to teach them. I'm like, you're like Sherlock Holmes. You meet somebody, you're a detective, and your goal is to learn something from everybody because everybody knows something you don't. But as adults, we tend to, and I get this all the time, right? We'll include a link in our newsletter that's by somebody that's done something in the past. And I'll inevitably get a thousand replies on Sunday saying,

• 1:01:19Shane Parrish?

  you know, I don't trust you anymore. This is crazy. What are you doing? Why are you promoting this person? And it's like, well, you didn't hear the idea that was in there. You didn't actually read the article. You didn't take anything away from it. Is there a way that we can change that for society or go about doing that better?

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  I think it's a question of maturity. I'll get this wrong, but if I remember correctly, the Scottish poet Robert Burns had a problematic personal life. And Frederick Douglass once described the poet. And he said, you know, if we can't look at someone and take the good and discard the bad, then we never get. To get all the good that's in all the people who are flawed humans. My personal journey, most viscerally, has been with Robert E. Lee. I live about 100 feet from the house Robert E. Lee grew up in. And I went to Washington Lee High School. I lived in Lee Barracks at West Point.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  I went to the same college as Robert E. Lee. And then I served in the US military, same one that Robert E. Lee spent 31 years in. And he was a very effective soldier and in, by most respects, a very admirable person. In 1861, he made the decision to join first the state of Virginia and then the Confederacy. And he spent the next four years trying to destroy the nation that he had been, he had sworn his allegiance to. And in fact, no commander in history has killed more American soldiers, United States soldiers than Robert E. Lee. And so, obviously, on the one hand, I should hate the person who opposed

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  the nation that I've sworn my allegiance to. I should hate the slave owner, as he was. I should hate the person that did all those things. At the same time, there were so many things about his character and his personality and his service before that that I can't hate. And so, where I've arrived at Robert E. Lee is that he's a human being. He's flawed. He's like me. There were many things incredibly admirable about him, but on the biggest decision of his life, he was wrong. He literally got to the fork in the road and went the wrong way. And so, I'm not prepared to throw him on the ash heap of history and say he's an evil person.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  I'm prepared to say he was a person who was wrong. And I know a lot of people have been wrong about a lot of things, to include me. And so... I think what we've got to do is mature as a society and decide at which point a person can still be studied or admired for the good parts while realistically being judged for those things that they weren't good on.

• 1:04:17Shane Parrish?

  It's interesting, especially in the context of this, and I don't know if there's a movement with Robert E. Lee, but there seems to be a lot of movement to erase people like this from history, where we rename the high school, we rename the streets, we want to forget that this happened. What do you see as the consequences to that?

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got mixed feelings on it because, on the one hand, I think the idea of Confederate statues around, because many of them were placed in a period in which the people who placed them were trying to make a statement about white supremacy in the South. There was a very clear lost cause narrative to them. And so at that point, I think many of the memories of people like Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders were being leveraged to make a different point on white supremacy. And I don't support that. I find that abhorrent. At the same time, I think that when we overreact and we say that suddenly we go from this adoration of someone to this just hatred, blind hatred

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  of them, we confuse ourselves. What we hate is slavery, and what we hate is the Confederacy trying to destroy the United States of America. And we hate the idea and the acts surrounding that, and we should. And so when I think of an African American in a small southern town having to walk by the statue of a Confederate soldier into the courthouse to seek some kind of legal redress, it's a conflicted message. And for the many years in which we have allowed that to sort of send a message of, hey, African American, the whites are in charge here, that's completely wrong. At the same time...

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Not every soldier who fought the Confederacy thought of themselves as a racist or owned slaves. The vast majority didn't. And so if we're unable to take a nuanced view of history, then everything is binary. Everything's right, wrong, black or white. And I don't think that's any history I'm aware of, a reality I'm aware of. So this is where we've got to get to maturity, I think.

• 1:06:27Shane Parrish?

  How would you go about teaching someone self-discipline? Is that something we're born with or something that can be instilled? Like the military through discipline, like through just through structure? Or is it something that we can do, will ourselves to?

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that it is something that can be taught. You know, I joke with people, I still fold my underwear in my drawer at home. And people laugh at that. My wife laughs at that and says, why do you do that? I said, because they told me to do that at West Point. And so I still do it because that's the right thing to do. Admiral Bill McRaven taught us to make our bed every morning. And I've been doing that for years, but he's exactly right. There are, there are habits you form that are good habits. I exercise every day, not just because I should, but because it's habitual for me. If I don't, something feels wrong. If you are kind to people by habit, it's a good habit.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  And I think all of those things of discipline are really good habits that you hold yourself to, expectations, standards, whatever it is. I think organizations can happen, but we as individuals. And I do think you can teach them to people. I know that in the military, we take people from all over society, different parts. And you put them through this series of training events and a lifestyle that forces them to certain behaviors. And they may not love it at first, but they start to stand straighter. They start to fold their underwear. They start to do the right things and treat people. And for the vast majority, it has a very good effect.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  So I think that those things we can do, and in some ways I would argue in today's society, we've gone a little bit lax there. We've said that everybody can act any way you want to act and it's your right to do that because, you know, nobody should tell you what to do. I don't think that's right. I think there should be norms in society that say, "You don't act outside of these bounds because we won't have it." You don't yell "fire" in a crowded restaurant, you know, a crowded theater. You don't do certain things because we, society, say that people doing that are outside the bounds of what we can accept in society because it'll be bad for everyone.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Now, how tight that is, it's a point of argument, but I think there should be self-discipline enforced by ourselves first and foremost, and then society should expect us to have it as well.

• 1:08:57Shane Parrish?

  How would you assess the judgment of somebody else in terms of sort of a civilian organization or even a military with somebody who had a lot of decision-making authority?

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  The first thing to do is remember that they are making judgments in the context in which they operate. And unless I'm in that context or incredibly informed about it, I'm a little bit careful on making judgments. Because if you haven't stood in somebody's shoes, it's easy to criticize from afar. So that's the first one. But I would go back to what I said earlier. If someone is making decisions with the right values and a reasonable probability-based assessment of what they think the outcome will be, meaning was there a reasonable chance that the decision they made would come out right? And if those two things line up, I'm okay with it.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  And so when a president or a business leader makes a decision, if they're in the bounds of acceptability in those two... I'm okay with that. I mean, I sometimes I wish there was a different outcome, but but to me, that's good enough.

• 1:10:06Shane Parrish?

  There's sort of like an axiom in clinical psychology, which is everybody's behavior makes sense from their point of view. So if you understand their point of view, like they're not doing anything intentionally to hurt other people or themselves, or but, you know, they're they're processing different information or have access to different information. So I like the idea of putting yourself in their shoes to see that first.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  This is what is so noteworthy in today's society, though, because, you know, it really in we were fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq in the the tough years of the war. And rather than hate the Al Qaeda operatives because they were bloodthirsty and they would do horrible things, you had to step back and say, if I'd had their life journey and their perspective, I might very well have the exact same conclusions and activities as they did. And that gets you back and say, just because I think differently doesn't make me right and them wrong. And that's very important. We're in a critical time in our nation, I would argue around

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  the world, where disinformation is so important, because what it is doing is it's impacting people's perspective in a skewed way. If people tell you, white is black, up is down long enough, and you start to believe that that's correct, suddenly your perspective may be rational, but it's improperly informed. And so it's been based on facts that aren't facts. And so you've reached conclusions that aren't good conclusions. That's very dangerous, because we're in an era now where disinformation, it's not more powerful than it was in the past, but it's more easy to distribute. And so information technology

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  makes it, it amplifies its effect. And that is dangerous, because rational people will do irrational things.

• 1:11:58Shane Parrish?

  Sort of a good segue into the next question, which is, I used to work in cybersecurity, and I always wondered why the budgets were so skewed towards physical weapons like ships and planes, when the next war is clearly likely to be a cyber war. There seems to be a structural allocation problem. What's going on behind the scenes here that keeps us anchored to the past, fighting the last war and not moving forward into the future?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, Shane, I think it's several things, and I agree with you. And in fact, the next war may well be won or lost before people actually realize it's on. Maybe so fast that that's occurred. I think first is there's a natural constituency for stuff. Aircraft carriers, tanks, planes, all those kinds of things. There's defense industries that make money doing it. There's a certain familiarity to it. If you don't have enough of these things, you worry that you don't have enough. And the people making most of the decisions are my generation generally. And so, we didn't grow up with cyber. We're late comers to having any appreciation for it. So I think that there's that those habits

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  that way. And then it's hard to get your mind around cyber, because you can't touch it as easily, you can't count it, you don't. We keep so much of it secret, we don't know how strong the United States is with cyber or not. Because we can't define the next war clearly, it's hard to do war games or equivalent that show people what could or will happen. And so as a consequence, we underinvest. And I think that we also underappreciate our vulnerability. We're the most connected society in the history of man.

• 1:13:40Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  I joke, I bought a new refrigerator not long ago, and it's connected to Wi-Fi.

• 1:13:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  And I go, why, why does my refrigerator, is it going to send me an email or what? But the point is, there are so many entry points now to the networks, that they, people don't, opponents don't have to go after Fort Knox or, or Defense Department. They can do bank shots into things, they can hit power, they can hit confidence, they can hit bank. There's so many things to hit, that we are a target waiting to be struck. And so as a consequence, what we really need to do is take a look at our defense, and then have an overwhelming

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  Offensive capability that can target nation states. Now that doesn't solve the non-state actors who can't be deterred as easily. But we've got to be, if we're not at parity and above, we're, we're just extraordinarily vulnerable.

• 1:14:37Shane Parrish?

  It's interesting you mentioned nation states and non-nation states. It used to be we'd have to worry about nation states because they could afford the physical infrastructure, the ships, the missiles, the bombs, all of that stuff. But now you have these loosely coupled groups of people that can cause arguably as much, if not more, damage that you never had to consider before.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  In fact, in some ways, if you think about the challenge to consumer packaged goods, you have companies that used to make this range of products and they sold them. And then you start to have a bunch of garage startups that go with niche, organic graham crackers, or you name it. And they're, they're only going after a small part of the market and they're not coordinated. But there's a, a school of piranha, each of which is doing this. And they go after the consumer packaged goods and they take away the high market, high margin part of the business and they leave people, they leave the big ones, the traditional ones, which are hard to fend off, much smaller ability to be viable. And you take that to military. We can have countless opponents and they don't all have to be coordinated.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  They just have to share a general common intent to do us harm, which makes them more difficult because you have to defeat each one, not you can't defeat them as a network. And that's, I think that's the future.

• 1:15:56Shane Parrish?

  Switching gears a little bit, you're famous for your one meal a day thing. It gets a lot of attention. I listen to a lot of interviews with you and I have a different question about it than I think I've heard you've been asked before. So I'm curious as to what impact that you think that had on the people who work for you.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, it was a two edged sword. The people who were on my personal staff, you know, we, during the war, we called it the pain train. There was a pressure there because I, I eat one meal a day. And so during those other meal periods, I typically don't stop and make sure they all go to lunch or breakfast or whatever. I'm, I'm tended to be moving. I don't ever tell anybody eat one meal a day or, because it's not right for many people. But I think there's kind of an implied pressure. And there's this also this mythology that grew up around it, you know, that I've only eaten once a week for, you know, that kind of thing. And so people think if they don't do that, that they're letting me down and that that's not the case.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  On the other side of the coin, you know, there's a value in sort of mythology sometimes because people started thinking, you know, McChrystal is some kind of zen warrior who, you know, the stoic who eats one meal a day and he's etc. He's never slept slept in his life and that's not true. But the reality is that those things which made me, made the people that worked with me intrigued and in some cases inspired by my commitment were helpful. And most leaders have some combination of those things that that helped them be a little bit more effective in in leading people.

• 1:17:37Shane Parrish?

  What's the greatest misperception that you think other people have about you and who you are?

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  It's a great question. There was a period of time when people would say that I was aloof and arrogant. And if I was arrogant, it wasn't because of what they saw because I'm incredibly introverted. I mean, we did psychological tests in special operations when I was a young officer and I literally pegged the chart on introversion. And I remember telling the psychologist, I said, well, I assume I'll grow out of that and I'll become an extrovert. The guy says, no, it doesn't work that way. You become more of whatever you are. You will develop some coping mechanisms. It won't be as evident to people because you'll learn how to do certain things in some situations.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  But for me, being around people is draining. You know, I tell people, I joke that if I die and go to hell, it'll be an endless cocktail party where I got to make small talk. And so I think that there's sometimes people will see me and I'm either quiet or aloof and they'll misread. The introversion for something that it's not.

• 1:18:48Shane Parrish?

  I want to add with sort of, or end, I guess, with one last question, which is, how do you define success?

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  At the individual, personal level, for me, success has evolved over the years. I think it was much more, if you'd asked me 30 years ago, I'd have said success. I'd probably said the first thing was my career. I want to be thought of as a good soldier. I didn't have a rank idea, but I want to be respected as a good soldier. I would have said, my family is very important to me, but I may have said that more because I thought I had to say it than I had thought about it. Now I'm at a different point in life. And what's important to me now is my family and how I interact. I have three granddaughters. My interaction with those granddaughters is sacred to me. Their opinion of me is very important to me, even when I'm gone.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  I want them to be able to look back at what people thought about me. And if it's accurate, I want them to feel good about it. But I also view success as the people I'm around, are they succeeding? And am I in some way empowering that? Whether I get credit for it or not, am I giving people opportunities? Am I creating an environment in which they can function and be successful? Then that feels like a win. It's a different set of metrics. They're more emotional than when I was younger, but they're probably more powerful as well. For me.

• 1:20:20Shane Parrish?

  That's a great way to end this. Thank you so much.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Shane, you're kind of had me.

• 1:20:36Shane Parrish?

  The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at [email protected]. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog/podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog/tribe or check out the show notes.

• 1:21:00Shane Parrish?

  Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. [0.84-2.34] Thanks for listening and learning with us.[3.99-4.62] Till next time.[4.62-6.81]