Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Admiral Bill Owens, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Red Bison Advisory Group

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

This week’s conversation is with Admiral Bill Owens on leadership, courage, and relationships.Bill is currently the executive chairman and co-founder of Red Bison Advisory Group, a company which identifies opportunities with proven enterprises in China, the Middle East, and the United States and creates dynamic partnerships focusing on: natural resources (oil, gas and fertilizer plants), real estate, and information, communication and technology.He was previously chairman the board of CenturyLink Telecom, the third largest telecommunications company in the United States and was also on the advisory board at SAP USA.The list goes on and on of important businesses that Bill has been involved with.Bill began his career as a nuclear submariner. He served on four strategic nuclear-powered submarines and three nuclear attack submarines, including tours as commanding officer aboard the USS Sam Houston and USS City of Corpus Christi. Owens spent a total of 4,000 days (more than 10 years) aboard submarines, including duty in Vietnam.He was appointed to vice chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second-ranking military office in the United States, by Bill Clinton in March 1994.It’s through these experiences – serving both in combat and in Washington that has given Bill a unique perspective on the world.What’s become a common theme in these conversations is the guests have clarity. They know where they came from and what they stand for.Bill sees himself as a utilitarian. A person who seeks the greatest good for the greatest number.In this conversation, Bill discusses how he came to live by those principles and shares some incredible stories from serving abroad and beyond.It takes courage and conviction to make many of the decisions Bill has been faced with and we dive into what being courageous comes down to.We also discuss what it will take for companies to be successful in the rapidly evolving digital world and why having a mindset that embraces change will be vital going forward.It was truly a treat getting to spend time with Bill._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, spending time in the trenches with people who are the tip of the arrow, the best in the world, working to better understand the science and the art and the practices that help them explore the potential. And in some return, end up shaping the way that we understand what is possible. It's a fascinating art. If you're interested in the science, like I absolutely encourage it. It's been a wild and wonderful ride. Hard, but wonderful. And that was the impetus to set up this podcast, which is to have conversations with people that are on the path of mastery, to better understand what they're searching for, to understand the psychological

frameworks that they're using and the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people.

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goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life. When you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David D A V I D protein P R O T E I N.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N, dot com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Admiral Bill Owens. So Admiral Owens is currently the executive chairman and co-founder of Red Bison Advisory Group. And it's a company which identifies opportunities with proven enterprises in China, the Middle East, United States, and they create these radical dynamic partnerships that are focusing on natural resources and real estate and information, communication and technology.

Like they're really looking for five different vectors on how enterprise companies can be able to work together more efficiently. And Admiral Owens was previously the chairman of the board for CenturyLink Telecom. Admiral Owens was previously the chairman of the board for CenturyLink. And if you're not familiar with CenturyLink, it's the third largest telecommunication company in the United States. And Admiral Owens was also on the advisory board at SAP in the United States as well. So he sits on really significant, large moving organizations. And it makes sense because as an admiral, he had a lot of responsibility.

He had to make clear and decisive decisions that impacted many lives. And the list goes on of the significant contributions he's had in business. So rewinding the clock just a little bit to give a perspective of where Admiral Owens comes from. He began his career as a nuclear submariner. He served on four strategic nuclear-powered submarines and three nuclear attack submarines, including Taurus's commanding officer on the USS Sam Houston and the USS City of Corpus Christi. Admiral Owens spent a total of 4,000 days, that's more than 10 years, on submarines, including his duty in Vietnam. I mean, that's a big time commitment to live in a submarine. So he understands clear decision. He

understands the magnitude of decisions. He also understands how to work in tight quarters that, you know, for many people, those two elements alone are such stress and anxiety provoking that it is very clear that he understands how to operate in very stressful conditions. It's awesome. I mean, he just exudes it. And that just jumps out of this conversation, how clear thinking he is, how methodical he is, and how he has a bigger picture in life, you know, far beyond just the tactics that he's learned from leading some of the greatest war ranking military office in the United States. And he was awarded that by President Bill Clinton back in 1994. That's a phenomenal commitment to his insight, his understanding, and again, his ability to think clearly. And it's through these experiences, serving both in combat and in Washington, I'm not sure if there's a big difference between the two

sometimes, that he was given a unique perspective of the world. And he's earned it. Nothing was given to him. He earned it. And what's become a common theme in many of the conversations on the guests for Finding Mastery is the deep clarity that they have. And they know what they're about. They know what they stand for.

And that is where they make decisions from. And Admiral Owens sees himself as a utilitarian. A person who seeks the greatest good for the greatest number. And I think that you're really going to love and enjoy this conversation. And he discusses how he came to live by the principles. And he shares some incredible stories from how he served our country. And I just want to tease you there.

I mean, there's literally some incredible stories. And we also discussed what it will take for companies to be successful in this rapid evolving digital world and why having a mindset that embraces change will literally be vital moving forward. And we need people like Admiral Owens in the world. And it was a pleasure to be able to really dive deep to better understand how he thinks and how he sees the future. And I love introducing him to this community. So with all due respect, with a great richness and gratitude and regard for what he's done, let's jump right into this

week's conversation with Admiral Bill Owens. Bill, how are you? I'm great, Michael. Nice to be with you. It's great to be with you. And I've been looking forward to this conversation since we met maybe 18 months ago, two years ago, somewhere in that range. And so thank you for carving out the time in your influentially busy schedule that you have. So thank you. It's my pleasure. I like meeting you and the venue at the time, and it's nice to be able to talk to you. Yeah, here we go. Okay.

All right. So there's a couple of things I want to spend time on in this conversation. One, I want to understand your path, what led you to the experiences that you've had in your life. I also want to understand your framework, which is how you make sense of the world. And you've had such unique experiences and such unique position in our military, as well as business, that I can't imagine what you're going to offer in that part of the conversation. And then right underneath, I want to understand how you understand particular mental skills, right? Like how to be calm and confident and how to be optimistic when things are going wrong. And so I want to dig there as well with you. But first, can you think through the most efficient way for me to understand who you are? Like, how did you grow up? What were those experiences like that helped shape you?

Well, I think, Michael, it would be good just to talk a little bit about my early background because it has a bit to do with what happened later on, and a lot of it is good fortune. However, a lot of it had to do with where I grew up and what that was about. Okay, so where do we start? Well, I was born in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1940. And North Dakota was a very different place in 1940 than it is today. Every city was small. And it was obviously very rural. And there was a lot of farming. And there was a lot of railroads. And there was a lot of farming and there was a lot of railroads and there was hardly any university activity at all. And we all were in a situation where we thought North Dakota was the world. And I was born there and never left the state of North Dakota until I was 18. And I grew up as a very poor child in a trailer house in North Dakota, only child,

a bit of alcohol in my family, and no real family around except a grandfather and grandmother who also had alcohol problems. And a huge St. Bernard who was a great magnet for girls and a great buddy of mine. I got him at age four. And I went off from North Dakota, the bleak state of the family environment to having a dog that you were to have, you know, attract females to. I love I love where this is going to go. OK. All right. So his name was it was very imaginative. He was a St. Bernard, 230 pounds.

And his name was Bernie. I thought that was original at the time. So he and I grew up in a very snowy state, much more snowy than it is today, with huge snow banks where we had to burrow through and of course no TV at the time, although black and white came later in my young adulthood, and where we were mostly associated with farms or service positions in a city. So my father struggled for what he was doing, but was a railway mail clerk and worked sometimes on farms, and we lived in this trailer house quite a ways from where I had to go to school so my dog and I had a paper route from

early days and he was very good in deep snow and he would carry the papers and that went on the only reason I mention that is that lasted almost 14 years. And I think I got a paper route when I was six and I had a dozen papers and we built the business around that until I graduated from high school because it was good business and I remember clearly what the bills were. 35 cents a week, $1.40 a month. I mean, I remember collecting all my time. So I went to quite a large high school because it was a consolidating school from rural areas with people who, like me, didn't have a lot of money, but many had a lot more than we had, where there was an occasional bit of inspiration from a church pastor,

because my grandparents would take me to church, an Episcopal church, and where we engaged with the community through a bit of church, and then a few teachers who made a difference along the way. And I would say out of all of that, blessed with a great spirit that was inner spirit. I wouldn't say it was from religion, and I wouldn't say it was from my high school. I would say it was something that is a little bit God-given, that I'm okay. And life is a bit of a blessing, even though it didn't, as I look back on it now, seem like it was such a blessing, but it sure was. So that was my life for 14 years. So that all had a lot to do with my attitude about, you know, just work hard. I didn't do any drugs. I worked hard in high school. I don't know why.

I mean, there was no pressure from anyone. There were no school counselors. There was no one who said, well, there are these places, Harvard or Yale. I had no idea what those were. And I thought places like the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis were the far east. I had never been out of the state of North Dakota. And if I could have imagined going to such a magnificent place as the University of Minnesota. I could not even envision going to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. There was no money, and there was no wherewithal, and I had no one encouraging me to do that. So that was my life age, 4 to 18. The only interesting part about that was that I learned a little bit about St.

Bernard's and complete loyalty from an individual, a dog, who cared for me in a way that I couldn't imagine. A dog who met me at school every day. There were no leash laws. He never had any dog food. There were no veterinarians, but he was the healthiest dog you ever saw. And he would meet me after school every day for all 12 years of my growing up. And it was an amazing thing that this individual cared so much about me. And the only reason I focus on that dog is because he was so important in my whole upbringing. Do you know the impact you have on others as you tell stories, even this story? Do you have a sense of what other people experience in hearing you unfold? It's like this lotus flower or this napkin, you know, more concretely that you just

kept opening and there's another fold and you open it and there's another fold. And oh, that's how that fold relates to the first fold. And then there's another fold. Do you have a sense of how your ability to tell stories affect others? I don't think so, Michael. You know, these are from the heart kind of things. And so they're easy to talk about. And of course, very few people have any interest in listening to those kind of things. It's a part of the way we are, I think. When did you start to speak from the heart? It's a very good question because there's a great song by Don Williams about good old boys like me. And in that song, it's quite descriptive of my experience. There is a line in that song that says,

learn to talk like the radio man. And somehow I started to talk like a radio man. And again, the blessing of genes. My voice was attractive enough to be good enough to listen to, but it's also a voice that, as one secretary I had in the Pentagon said, when I said to her, Susie, why don't you listen to me? And she said, well, Admiral, your voice is a lot like elevator music. And so there's two sides to all of this. Oh, my God. Well, she had some courage. Yeah, she did. But that was a little bit of the work environment.

I mean, Kim Foster here would have no courage like that to say anything like that to me, would you, Kim? So Kim is not here. So anyway, I became sort of someone else as I went on from those 18 years and found my way to the Naval Academy, which is an interesting story. But I, much later, when I was a very senior admiral in the Pentagon, I ventured into something that I believed strongly in, which was to cut the military by 50 percent, the whole military. No increases, no favoritism, just cut it. The military was too large. It was terribly inefficient. And I was bound and determined that in my last years in the military, I'd do something about it. And so we did.

We cut it in half. The spending or the overall budget or the number of people? The spending. And what years was this? So that was 94 to 96. Okay. And so in those years, it was a Clinton presidency. Bill Perry was a secretary of defense, a wonderful guy. And there were no other military people because that's not what we did as admirals and generals.

But I had seen the first Gulf War. I was a 6th Fleet commander. I had seen how inefficient we were. I had been around long enough to have both positions in the Pentagon and in the field. And most senior military guys have a focus on either being a warrior or being a Washington bureaucrat. And I was blessed to have both of those. I was in a lot of warrior-like wars, and I was also in the Pentagon a lot. And so I had had a chance to, I was Frank Carlucci's and Dick Cheney's senior military assistant. That's a job that is interesting.

It's the senior military position in the Department of Defense, which is separate from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And so we typically have a three-star officer in that job. My predecessor had been Colin Powell, and we may be familiar with this now because General Kelly, who is President Trump's chief of staff, had been a chief of staff for Leon Panetta. So those are jobs of growth because you live your life with the Secretary of Defense. So I had had the blessing of those, and I was bound and determined that I was going to do whatever I could with civilian leadership to make the military better and much smaller because it was way too large. And I would tell you, it is way too large today. And so, you know, there's a long story about all of that. But during that process, when I was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that's the second senior position in the United States. How long did you hold that title?

I had it only two and a half years. On purpose for me, it's typically these people spend four years and then many of these people have moved on to be the chairman, but I was young enough and blessed enough to have been through many advancements that I probably didn't deserve early. I was only 54. Usually these people are 63 or 64 that I wanted to go into business. And so I was also always in trouble, except with the Secretary of Defense and the President at the time. And so, you know, it was a little bit of family pressure, but I also wanted to go off and do something else. And I had convinced myself that age 55 was the latest time you could go out and still be a CEO, still do something in business.

And so I was bound and determined I was going to go off and do that. So I was there for only two and a half years. In that position, that's a really powerful position in the U.S. military. Maybe you knew that you were going to be successful when you were campaigning or when you were asked to be part of that cabinet, but how did you know? How did you know that you were going to be able to manage it or be successful in there? You know, Michael, I mean, I think that's part of the gift that you're given when you're born. And part of it is by observation along the way is a little bit of this. There was a thing going on much earlier than you came along in psychiatry

and in America called I'm okay, you're okay. And this was called EST. And EST was, these recessions, they were going on all across America. And they would bring people in and they would school them and there were exercises and I didn't go to Est. But I was blessed with being an I'm okay, you're okay kind of guy coming out of North Dakota. And because of that, I always felt like you can do to me what you want to do to me, but I'm okay. And by the way, you're okay too. And so I feel that way about the Islamic community today. I feel that way about Democrats and Republicans. I feel that way about people who have wronged me in business. And I feel that way in general about things that go on

in life that I'll let it run off my back. By the way, you're probably okay if I get to know you because I've had such a great life experience. I've seen what you are in the broad sense of you, all nationalities, all ages, and great things by 18 year olds and and great experiences in my submarine life where on a nuclear submarine these are pretty much interesting little sewer pipes billion dollar sewer pipes where we send at my time men today we send a few women out for long periods of time with 130 to 150 men, and you live out there for 70 to 90 days. In the Cold War, we would do that. I did that a lot. In the Cold War, we would do that without any communications going out of the ship, so your family never heard from you during that time.

And we never heard from our families, except for an occasional, they were able to send us 15-word messages over a very low data rate trailing wire that all the ballistic missile submarines have. If you were on a ballistic missile submarine, there are two kinds. There are SSBNs that fire missiles, and there are fast attack submarines, and the missions are very different. I had a lot of time on both, and I commanded one of each. And so the personal side of this from a family perspective was very difficult, not just being gone, but being gone with no real communication. So that was sobering, and you got to know a lot about these men and you got to know a lot about how you live with them. And I saw enormous leadership in my years as of nuclear submarining because I got there just in time for the beginning of the nuclear submarine program.

And this man, Admiral Rickover, was the godfather of all of that. President Carter was a Rickover guy. Many, many famous people in the United States were Rickover people. What does that mean, Rickover people? That they were in the Navy nuclear submarine program. They were nuclear power people who got into Admiral Rickover's program. Okay. Rickover himself is an interesting case study for you.

He was not a likable man. He was not a leader at all. He was not a good man to talk to, and he was brilliant. And so there were about 50 of us young guys who were chosen because we were from one of 10 universities and we happened to be in the top 10% of our engineering class. And then in those days, if you were a naval officer coming out of college, you would be chosen to go back and have a Rickover interview. So if you want to read something interesting about psychiatry, read the book Nautilus 90 North, which was the beginning of all of this, and a lot of stories about Rickover interviews and how those went. So this was an emotional thing, and many guys didn't like this at all.

I was, I'm okay, you're okay, Admiral. And we never got along well, but I always accepted him. But there were a few of us who were right at the beginning of that program. So Nautilus was the first nuclear submarine, and then I was on one of the next. I was on Sea Dragon at an early stage, and I was in Vietnam on Sea Dragon and did a number of things in Vietnam. And so a lot of that experience with Rickover and then my experience with men on long deployments in those years were very instructive to me about who I was and how you function in a world that's not going to be very fair. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus.

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And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. I'd love if you could help capture who you are as succinctly as you can about maybe saying like your philosophy in life or what you've come to learn about yourself. learned about being in a command position and leading people in very close quarters in an environment that was highly compressed, both physically and emotionally for people over an extended period of time. So take it wherever you want, but I'd love to know what you learned about who you are and how the world works from those experiences. And then also what you learned about who you are and how the world works from those experiences. And then also what you learned about commanding others. So, uh, it's a, it's a 20 hour discussion because I spent so much of my life there. I am the most radiated person you've ever met. Don't get too close to me. I was, uh, have you had health issues from that? No, but I watch it really carefully. So I had in days when we didn't know really what radiation was, I mean, you doctors know about

gammas and gamma x-rays and neutron x-rays. And I've got all of those in big quantities and so today when you get an x-ray you talk about millirem a thousandth of a rem I have several rem of radiation and today I think I could get a permanent disability if I got that kind of radiation in any facility. But that was a different time and those were different years. And we also breathed a lot of asbestos. So I'm also mesothelioma adverse, but I'm fine. I can't imagine those conditions down there. In those years, I mean, typically, these were very important times for the country. It was the Cold War. It was from the middle of the 60s on through all of the Cold War, which, as you know, ended in about 1990. And during those years, there were all of the Cold War, which, as you know, ended in about 1990.

And during those years, there were all of these discussions about nuclear weapon interchanges, et cetera, the triad. The triad is bombers and land-based missiles and submarine-based missiles. So when Rickover came along and discovered you could put a sewer pipe under the ocean and keep it there for a long period of time, by the way, and it makes power so you don't have to refuel it ever, or at least for seven or eight years. missile submarine program, which was to put long-range missiles onto a nuclear submarine that could be launched from underwater, wouldn't be detectable until they were launched and had enormous destructive power. And that drove the American industrial activities in many, many ways, just like the space programs, but this was much more, I think, than the space programs. It drove excellence in several areas, and it drove huge ingenuity to build the most destructive machine ever built, which is the American Trident submarine. So just to put a framework around this,

the Trident, I had command of one of these, the Michigan. A Trident has 24 huge missiles that are the size of this room in diameter, and they each can fly 7,000 miles, and they each have five independently targetable warheads on them, and so they can launch 24 missiles times five, 120 different aim points 7,000 miles away, and those individual re-entry vehicles were a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear weapons we used in Nagasaki or Hiroshima. systems that go into doing that, including all the communication systems, all of the command and control, and then the submarine itself and the missile, to launch those things quite quickly when the nuclear war began, and to threaten the Soviet Union that if they ever launched, if there was only one of those remaining, it would destroy the Soviet Union. And it could. 120 different aim points in the Soviet Union. Were they equally as

armed? So the Soviets started to develop quality nuclear submarines, but never like ours. We could hear them a hundred miles away. They were never as quiet. They were never as well-manned. God bless the American people and the military for providing these quality people. and they were always having mechanical issues. So they were never, at the end of the Cold War, able to do that. And clearly, to me, I ask the question today, why do you worry about Russia? Again, they certainly are not able to do anything like that today. So no is the answer. The British, we gave them a lot of technology and they

developed the same kind of capability, but only we and the British and the British much later had this kind of capability to do this kind of thing. So today there are only a few of these remaining. Okay. So before we go to what you learned about commanding men and the insights that you learned only from those compressed experiences, physically and emotionally, what about North Korea? So we want to talk about North Korea today, right? Yeah. So I feel lot about this. And I was there on the North Korean border with the Chinese, including a couple of Chinese military, and thought about it a lot. I'm very engaged in a program that we started to bring together five ex-members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a similar group from China twice a year. And we've been doing that for 10 years.

And I like these Chinese generals. And I think they're very loyal to their country. We have a lot to learn from them. And I was there with a couple of them on the North Korean border with a couple of American retired generals and with an active duty contingent from China. So I've lived through a lot of Korea solutions. dealing with a guy who is Kim Jong-un, who is a rational man. He's young, as we know. He is from the Kim family, and he happens to be the guy who is the proprietor of a system of repression that keeps the North Korean people in line. As we know, he's killed his uncle, he's killed his half-brother. This is a guy with no scruples whatsoever.

But he's totally rational, he knows exactly what he's doing, and he's watched what's happened with us and Gaddafi, who had a nuclear weapons program, and Saddam Hussein, and he's watching us try to dismantle the Iranian nuclear capability. And his contention, I think, is that without those nuclear weapons, I cannot lead, I cannot have the power to lead this country. It's my only link. So I think he limits the amount of information to his people and builds this myth around what is his power base, which is developing, being brave, not letting his people learn about the rest of the world, restricting information.

So the solutions, it seems to me, Michael, are quite simple, and I'll give you five of them. We could, in my view, cut a deal with this guy in a month and we would be free of a lot of the angst we have today and the uncertainty. So it would start with a U.S.-North Korean dialogue, person-to-person, not a five-party, not a six-party dialogue, but two-party North Koreans in the United States. It would have, as our goals for a solution, a peace treaty between the United States and North Korea from the Korean War. We've never signed one with him. Seems to me like that's a no-brainer. We could always declare war if we thought it was necessary, but I think that's very important to him. Seems to me like that's a no-brainer. We could always declare war if we thought it was

necessary, but I think that's very important to him. We could do one of the things he's requested, which is, you do, he says, all of these exercises with the South Korean military, I'd like you to trim them back. We could do that and maybe trim them back by 35% or so and still have an active, aggressive exercise program, but he could say he wins and that would be important for him to say. we could put in place a situation where as a result of those things, he would agree to not disestablish, not to destroy what he has in uranium manufacture or enrichment or missile development, but he would agree, I believe, to no further testing and no further development. And he would agree, I think, to the Chinese leading a nuclear inspection team that would be all over his programs to give us

verification and the Chinese would if we asked them include us in that inspection regime so that we would have quite good assurance that that would not be in place and then we would have to prepare ourselves for all the propaganda that would come out of that. And politically, I don't know if the American administration, Democrat or Republican, could ever withstand the assaults on, I won, I beat the United States, et cetera, except that we are a great power and we can tell our side of that story

and we would tell it better than his. And then we could engage with the Chinese to make the North Korean people better off. And eventually, they would become more knowledgeable about what is going on in the world. And eventually, they would find a way to a more peaceful society that could last a long time. I think that could be done in a month. And that's what we should do. However, there's a lot of perceptions in all of that that would need to be addressed. So that's how I feel. Okay. Super thoughtful. And I'm imagining that comes from your insights on you leaving North Dakota. And so you thought North Dakota was the center of the universe and had no conception of what happened in other countries, let alone at each coast of the

United States. So if somebody would have come to you when you're at North Dakota, and as you're growing up and you're throwing papers and having an ambitious paper route, and said, hey, listen, I've got a way where you can change your life, your future would be bright, but you'd have to give up the thing that you were banking on, which was your life, your future would be bright, but you'd have to give up the thing that you were banking on, which was your business, right? Your identity and your business in the related way. What would it have taken for you to do that? At age 18? At age 18, yeah. I didn't know anything about the world at all at that stage, you know, and so I wanted to find a way that I had no way I could imagine

going to college. I would get accepted, I thought, at a junior college somewhere. There weren't many in North Dakota at the time, but I had no way of ever imagining that I would get a college education. I mean, there was no, I had to work, There was no money. There were no social security programs. There were nothing that would support me. And so I knew I had to work. I would have worked at a lumber yard or whatever. So I knew that I had to get an education. And it so happens that we got our first black and white television set in our trailer.

And I remember watching a show called The Men of Annapolis, the black and white show. And these guys had white uniforms and swords. And I said to my dad, how do you go to a place like that? And they talked about going to school. And he said, I think you have to go and see our congressman. And so I went to see our congressman, a guy named Quentin Burdick, North Dakota only has one of them. And I said, sir, I'd like to go to that place, the Naval Academy. And he said, why, sure, son. No one has asked me that in years. And so I wound up literally a month later on a train from Bismarck to Washington, D.C., to get a bus to go out to Annapolis. And that was the first time I'd ever been out of North Dakota.

So if I had looked at it at that stage in life, I would have said, I'd sure like to get an education somewhere. There was a lot of patriotism at the time in North Dakota and across the country. I mean, the National Guard had been very active in World War II and then Korea. And we're very proud of all of that. National Guard armories, all of that was front and center. There were a lot of American flags around. There was a lot of we are America kind of thing and I had no idea except that I sure liked the idea

of what those people seemed to have done and I had heard a lot of stories of World War II, and I had a pretty good education, but not a great one. And so I was very happy to find that I could go off to the Naval Academy, get a free education, and that was something I didn't know what it was going to be, as evidenced by the fact that when the train went through Minneapolis, Minnesota, I saw my first African American. And that was surprising to me. I mean, where do these people come from? And I had never heard of African Americans, even in my limited history books in Bismarck High School. And so it was a whole new world to me. And the other story about that I would tell you is after I'd been in Annapolis for a year, getting ready to go on a summer cruise where they sent us out to be on destroyers or ships for a summer,

I discovered that that big body of water outside of Annapolis was not the Atlantic Ocean. That was the Chesapeake Bay. And my whole plebe year got a whole lot worse when my upper class realized that I didn't know even where I was. So this was a very green experience. But again, I learned at the Naval Academy that, you know, I'd work hard. I was a good student, but not a great student. But every year my rankings went up. And I think the last year I was number one in the class. But the first year I was a good student, but not a great student. But every year my rankings went up. And I think the last year I was number one in the class. But the first year I was kind of halfway down. And I learned about I'm okay, you're okay.

A lot of people at that time had been to other colleges first, and many of them had come from wealthy families who had given them a variety of private school educations. And I came to believe that, you know, maybe I'm up to this. And so the Naval Academy was very unfair. Plebe year was a time of physical hazing, so you'd get slapped around, and there was a lot of unfairness at the Naval Academy. And I seemed to weather that at a time when it was hard to weather. We would take in 1,400 kids. By the time it was over four years later, only 700 remained. And it was pretty hard,

but it was persevering and it was hanging in there. And I think all of those experiences were formative for me about the country, what it meant to me, and how life was really unfair. But I'm okay, you're okay, and I'm going to be able to make this a go. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature.

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Couldn't do it. I had to go off and go to Vietnam. You couldn't do it? Wasn't allowed by the Navy to do this. My goodness. So for people that don't know what a Rhodes Scholar is, it's Vietnam. I had been selected by my friend, Admiral Rickover, to be a nuke, but still I was going to go off to Vietnam one way or the other. And the Navy was not willing to allow us to go off and do that. So we didn't. And so a couple of years later, I thought I would reapply and see if they could reinstitute it. And I went to Oxford and was a politics, philosophy, and economics student

at Oxford, although my degree at Annapolis was math. So I had uh, I had that, that, uh, experience of going through that. And so Oxford's been one of two, three, four top universities across the globe. And you came from a town where you didn't know how even you could go to the local junior college. You weren't sure what the boundaries of the United States even look like you had never met an african-american male until you had an idea that you wanted to become part of this unique fleet of people that wore white suits carried swords and had a particular way about you know honoring the united states of america and and then you find yourself at one of the top universities in the globe, offered by only a route that 32 people a year get offered. I think that number's gone up a little bit, but okay.

So I had a unique experience there. I was a lightning rod because it was a time when Bill Clinton was also there demonstrating against Vietnam. I had come having been in Vietnam, and so I didn't like that guy very much. I was older than he was. I had been shot at a little bit. He had not, and he was demonstrating against America. I laughed with him in years after that when I was on the Joint Chiefs during his presidency that I would have been a lot nicer to him if I had known he was going to be the Commander-in-Chief. But it was an interesting time because there were no other military people like me at Oxford. So I was the object of lots of discussions, debates, and I learned how to try to defend myself and at the same time be accepting of what I was hearing.

So never mind that Bill Clinton was right. You know, I learned a lot about the debate of what was going on. And I also had strong feelings that we had been betrayed by the U.S. government in some interesting ways. That Secretary of Defense McNamara, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, wrote a book later on telling us all, especially us Vietnam veterans, that he never believed in Vietnam. He never thought it was the right thing to do. And yet, in many of our minds, he was not out there getting shot at. We were.

So as our most important civilian leader, where was he? And I think the other side of that that I quickly learned and resonated with, and it's why I have some respect for General McMasters, who is in the present administration, he wrote a book called Dereliction of Duty, is my strong belief that frequently we don't hold the responsible generals and admirals responsible. So I was quite pleased recently when we let the 7th Fleet commander go because of these collisions in his area out in the Pacific. And so during my time those years, I came to believe that people like General Westmoreland were not honorable Americans.

They were falsifying body counts. They were telling the White House different stories. And yet they were never held responsible. And so that formed my views about how we should be responsible. And it formed my views later in life that when I was, and it was a principal reason why I wanted to get senior in the military, I was never particularly trapped with this great-looking uniform and call me Admiral. Later in life, a young three-year-old said, when her mom said say hi to Admiral Owen, she said, hi, animal. And I kind of liked that story. But I was never particularly entranced with all of that. And that was a good thing.

So I really believed that if I could get into a position where I could do something about it, I would do something. And I was blessed to have been along a chain of jobs that got me there early enough and with enough influence to truly make a difference. And so it was during those years then, and with that spirit, I was not a popular guy in the Pentagon that we cut the military by half. But I wanted to come back, Michael, quickly to Oxford, because it made a big difference to me, the philosophy courses. And crazy as it seems, I mean, I did very well at Oxford except philosophy.

So I didn't get a first, which is a big deal at Oxford, but I got a high second, which is a big deal at Oxford, but I got a high second, which is not too bad. But I thought the philosophy course was the most valuable one I'd ever had. So I spent a year with a young pipsqueak Don, who was my Don, who would tell me things like, you are the least creative human being I've ever seen. Did you come here to learn how to punctuate, he would say, and he'd hold up a paper I had written with punctuation and grammar errors. And eventually he said, I think that maybe you don't belong here.

And now this guy was probably two years older than I. And so I looked at him with a somewhat jaundiced eye. But I'll help you to find a good university to go back to the United States and do. You know, and so in my I'm okay, you're okay, it's a little hard to stomach. But I took it on board and i became quite creative and that was a big part of this but the other part of that was uh that he put me through six months of who are you and everybody should do this so you know we started with uh i'm a Christian. I'd gone to church a lot.

I knew a little bit about the Bible. So we spent several weeks reading about this, and then he would disprove that I was a very good Christian anyway. I mean, I didn't live by the golden rule. I did things that were not along those lines, and I stood by the things I had done. And then we went into, well, I'm a man of principle, military guy, Naval Academy. So six weeks later, we have proven that I'm not a man of principle. And we eventually walk through

several different iterations until we come to John Stuart Mill, the father of utilitarianism, and six weeks later I discover, my God, I am a utilitarian. So am I an American? I don't think so. I mean, I am in a strong patriotic sense, but am I, do, will I live by America no matter what? No, I will not. And are you a Christian? No, I'm not. All of those questions were answered for me. And a utilitarian is a person who seeks the greatest good for the greatest number. And that's who I am. So

I'm willing to weather the storm and try to seek the greatest good for the greatest number. Now it turns out that by coincidence the greatest good is frequently associated with being an American, being a Christian, being a personal principle. But when you're pushed to the brink and make the decisions that you have to make, then is that what I'm about? And so I may have told you that story about the Chinese junk. Is that the submarine story? And I discover who I am in those kind of cases. And I do exactly that the same time the same thing another time around because I care about the greatest good for the greatest

number and and and when the chips are down I may not live by the specific regulation I've been given if I think the situation has changed. Okay. So utilitarianism is, John Stuart Mill was in, if I go back to some early frames of philosophy, he was competing in ideology with pacifists, with spiritual leaders, with people that would say killing is wrong, Christians. Those points of view would be that killing is wrong as an ethical dilemma or as an ethical conversation. And that dilemma would be, one frame would be the act to kill is immoral.

Yep. Right? And therefore unethical. I think that's how that logic thread would go. And John Stuart Mill came into the conversation. He said, hold on. What if you kill one person, but it saves a thousand? Is it still an unethical or immoral decision or action? And you have clearly identified that the killing of one would, could be considered an ethical act

if it saves the greater good for the greater, for and so how does how has that position played out for you with people that um you know have a maybe don't have an appreciation for the places you've been the things you've seen and the choices that you've had to make i think you have to be gentle about that conversation i'm quite aware of how how volatile that conversation can be. Quickly, too. Yeah, it becomes really emotional for people. It has to become, and it's part and parcel of our political system today where we are what we are, A, B, and C, and I am not. And so it makes it very difficult to do that quickly.

It's very easy to make a lot of enemies in all of that. And certainly in my last days in the Pentagon, when we were cutting the military by half, it was brutal. And so you asked me an earlier question about how do I get familiar or how do I get comfortable with saying what I believe? And it happened during those last years in the Pentagon where I had 25 younger generals and admirals who worked for me who each had a very strong position on you're going to cut the military by 50 percent and you're going to cut the nuclear submarine force by two thirds. Which is what you grew up in. Which is what I was cut the nuclear submarine force by two-thirds. Which is what you grew up in. Which is what I was, a nuclear submarine guy. And I said, yeah, that's what we're going to do. Because that's what I've learned.

And that's what I think is the best thing for all of us. And we're going to save all the aircraft carriers, yes. We're going to save much of the Army. I'm not an Army guy. Yes. And we're going to cut a lot out of the Air Force and the Army. I'm not an Army guy. Yes, and we're going to cut a lot out of the Air Force and the Navy. And so you can only imagine the congressmen, Boeing and Lockheed, my brethren, admirals and generals. And in the face of all of that, you know, I was quite confident we were

doing the right thing. We also made the military a lot better because we put a lot of very sensitive sensors, precision weapons, GPS, things that we take for granted. Now, drones were started in those three years. And so a lot of things happened that made the military much better, and the culmination was the shock and awe kind of thing that the American military can do today. And so it was a very brutal time with the 25 of us to argue this through, but I believed also, Michael, that you had to spend time on it. So our day was six days a week, and the day started at 5 a.m. every day. And, of course, admirals and generals play golf and other things, but I didn't play golf. And I almost demanded that they not play golf, that this was our opportunity to make a real difference if

we could all come together somehow and do the right thing for the greatest number, the United States. We're going to help Clinton balance the budget. We're going to do the right thing by the military. And only we know this. Congress can't know. No one else is going to know. The civilian leaders won't know, and many of us are going to have great difficulty inside the system. So we went on with that for a year or so with very little progress, and then we knew a lot about it. We did a lot of analyses. These are in-depth operational research kind of things to figure out things we'd never looked at before. What is how many dollars per pound of explosives on a distant target, for example?

And what are the most efficient ways to do what we were required to do by the country. And in the final analysis, I was frustrated, although I was still optimistic. And we hired a woman, Barbara Lane Brown, who had been with Royal Dutch Shell to help them with a huge turnover strategically in Royal Dutch Shell. And Barbara Lane Brown came and was with the 25 of us for about a year and a half. We gave her clearances. She went to all the speeches each one of us gave. She watched us in meetings. And one day, after about nine months, I guess, we always had dinners because we worked not only five in the morning, but till seven or eight at night every day. And we always had dinner together. This was not popular hours for many people, but we did this. And Barbara said, she called us all by our first name. She said, Bill, can I have all of this dinner to talk about you, you 25?

And that changed my whole life, that dinner, where Barbara said, you know, I've learned a lot about all of you. I've watched you give speeches. She says to me, first she addresses my shortcomings, and she says, you know, you really care a lot, and you're, in my observation, a good leader. And she says, I've watched you give speeches, even to these people, and frequently you will read what you're doing. And she says, you have passion, you love what you're doing, and you love these people, despite what many of them say about you when you're not there. And she said, and you're all lucky that he thinks the way he does.

And she said, when you give speeches or when you're talking to these people, you should just talk from the heart. And so there were more things about me and critical things. But one of the things she said about one of the most egregious admirals among the admirals and generals was, and I'm not going to give you this guy's name because he's still around. She said, you know, there is this guy, Dave. And she said, none of you like Dave. Dave is here. You know, he's at this dinner. And Dave is, you know, he is, he is not a likable guy. None of us like Dave. But he's the smartest probably. And she says, you know, you don't know, but you should see what he says about all of you when you're not here.

You should see the way he feels about all of you. You should feel like this is the guy, she says, of all of you who loves all the rest of you more than you could ever imagine. Dave starts, even to this day, I get tears in my eyes because this was such a passion for all of us. Dave starts to get tears in his eyes when this happens. And Dave, the guy next to him, I remember, was a fighter pilot, Navy guy, hardline guy. And he stands up and he hugs Dave. And all of us are watching this. This had never happened before. You know, and it was an amazing thing that I'm sentimental about this, you know, the Pentagon and all of this,

but it made a huge difference in my life that even in this most difficult thing where we've all lived these experiences and we're totally dedicated to our kind of military fighter planes or submarines or troops, that in in this environment we might find a way to do something together and one of the marines stood and said you know this is this is so right we are a band of brothers and from that point on this was a band of brothers and i brought those guys all in and we had a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was senior on the Joint Chiefs, and I said, you know, you guys need to hear this. And so this is what we want to do with the military.

All of us, we know that this might kill us, many of our careers. I was already senior, so I wasn't going to get hurt too much. But I said, these guys, you know, all of you are going to advance or not, depending on how they perform. And I just want to tell you about them. And I told them about what had happened. And then we went ahead and put that budget in that disproportionately cut the military. America was a lot better off. And it was the principal element of Bill Perry, great Secretary of Defense, being able to represent for the White House and OMB a balanced budget for the country because we cut so much. So there's a lot of emotion in all of that, Michael, but

lessons learned from that. And I still hold a special place in my heart for those 25 guys who were willing to, they were two stars, three stars to step out there and yeah, you're right, Barbara, you know, this is something special. And thank you for sharing that. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to amplify and accelerate the skills within people, mental and emotional skills within people to help them flourish. And sometimes, I mean, the word flourishing sounds almost like flowerful, but flourishing in the true sense is when a person becomes their very best. And it does not mean that the person, the process to bring that out of the person needs to be soft. There's a razor's edge to it oftentimes, right? There's a way that we pull and challenge and bring the best out of other people. And in return, it ends up bringing the best out of us, I think, as well.

Are there one or two or three ways maybe that you can think about that you've learned over the period of time of your illustrious career to be able to pull the best out of people? And then on the heels of that, I also want to ask if there's one or two or three thoughts or practices that you would hope that the next generation or anyone listening would want to, or that you would hope they could install in their life to become better. So it's a two part question. The first is like, are there any practices to pull the best out of people that you found to be valuable? And are there any thoughts or habits that people within themselves could start practicing? Well, I mean, a lot of it is pretty straightforward. In my view, do you really

want to sincerely feel, and if you don't, you shouldn't be in the position that I like these people who work for me. You really want to feel that way, and if you don't, then something's wrong. You can't like them all, and if it's a very large organization, you can't do that. But you can talk to people about this same thing that we're talking about. I used to do that when I was the CEO of Nortel at a very brutal time in Nortel's history.

And there were a lot of blank stares, and probably that's because I'm not effective in communicating. But it was a time. So I think when we need to treasure them, because we treasure them, not because we say it, but because we treasure them. And we want them to feel that we treasure them. I think that caring about your people, really caring, do you know their spouse's name? Do you know some of their dog's names, their kids? Do you know some of their dogs' names, their kids? Do you care? It was one of Bill Clinton's great talents was he seemed to genuinely care and sincerely care about people he had met. I can tell you a number of stories about that. But I think you really want to sincerely care.

Now, you can't just give that to everybody, but you can give it to them by watching. So I want to tell you about a captain of a submarine who made a big difference to me. His name is Dave Cooper. He's still alive. He's in his late 80s. And Dave is a prince of a man. And tough times, nuclear submarine, fast attack submarine, that mission is different. That mission in those years was, and I commanded one of these ships later, was you leave your home port.

In my case, it was Pearl Harbor. In the case with Dave Cooper, it was Pearl Harbor. In the case with Dave Cooper, it was Pearl Harbor. Go up through the Bering Straits, over the North Pole, go to Murmansk, wait for a big Soviet submarine to come out of port, trail him for 70 days with the idea that if he was getting ready to shoot a missile at America, we would sink him. It was not for children, and it was very high pressure, and Dave had huge pressure on him to be zero defect. That was a Rickover phenomenon.

Don't make a mistake or I'll kill you would be what Rickover would say. Would he back that up? Yes, as much as he could. And he was never nice about it, and there was no gentleness about it. But without Rickover, we would probably not have had the nuclear submarine program. But Rickover was not a good man as a leader. All of us would say that. So Cooper, I had had several captains who were directly out of the Rickover mold. And Dave Cooper, I was the number two guy on that submarine. And Dave Cooper was not that way. And he loved that crew. He loved them. He knew everybody's wife's name and he knew what they were going through

and he would hug them and he would hug me and i went to work every day when we were in port at 4 a.m because i wanted to do the best i could for dave cooper i'd never seen a guy like him in the nuclear power program we were all trying to be Admiral Rickover in some way. Zero defect, demand satisfaction, not lead satisfaction, but demand it. And so, you know, there are lots of incidents I could tell you about Dave Cooper and a lot of tears as we went through our life together as the captain and XO of Pogie. But I would not have stayed in the Navy without Dave Cooper. And so one night, it's midnight, I always got up at midnight because that's when we had fresh donuts. And I was always the first to get one.

And then I'd walk around the submarine at midnight. And one night I was walking around through the engine room and I heard crying in the back part of the engine room where few people ever went. And there was a young man always put on watch down there and he was on watch. And I went down to say hi to him. And Dave Cooper, my captain, and he were down there, and both of them are crying.

It was about the kids' homesickness, and I could see what was going on. I didn't interrupt, but later I said to Dave, you know, I was so touching. You know, I loved seeing that. And he said, don't you feel it? So those are tough times with tough men and difficult things and touching times. And I had never seen that before, Michael. And so that inspired me when I became a captain. I was never Dave Cooper. I could

not. It wasn't in me to be the compassion, but I struggle for that today, to find that compassion, to be welcoming of everyone, no matter what, and to be not just, I'm okay, you're okay, but you're great and believe it. And that's what Cooper showed me. And it made a world of difference to me in my life later on to see the difficulty of that and the human spirituality of it. And I've thought many times about how great American business could be if many of us were able to exhibit that kind of talent and care. And inoculate yourself against bias. You know, I mean, it's not about I hate A, B, C, D. It's about I'm listening and I'll help you to understand what I understand.

Maybe we'll find a way and to be sympathetic about it and open to what's going on in our minds. When you're in that moment where you walk to, um, and saw the two men that you, one that you respected, one, maybe you didn't quite know well. And he said, don't you feel it? And you didn't, is that right? You didn't feel it the way that he felt it the way he felt it. How did you, how did you do that though? How did you take that information in and work with it? Did you block yourself off? Like, well, that's him. That's not me. Or did you say, Oh my gosh, there's something wrong with me. I should feel more. That's like a self-critical approach. Like how, how did you move through when somebody

challenging you, challenges you that you don't, that you're not quite right. Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's a great question. I certainly identified with that, but it had never been drawn out in me. That's a really cool thought. and from that point on, I mean, I can tell you as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I used to have some of these moments where I'd put my arms around young people having difficulty and we were, you know, and I was never bashful. I always wanted to be more like that because it's much more human and it's not exactly the military stereotype and people are often struck by, oh, really? So that's a military guy.

And now that's a human being who is doing what he thinks is the right thing. So that is what I learned from Dave Cooper. And I was much braver about it. I was much better when I was a captain that I would have been had I not had that experience because I was I never had the same degree of passion total trust in my people that Dave had we always took care of him he never had to worry about how well we did. And Pogie, that was the name of the nuclear submarine, all named after fish at the time.

And Pogie was the best submarine in the entire U.S. Navy. There's an award for this, the E-ship, for three years in a row, while Dave Cooper was the captain. And he was not a nuke guy like Admiral Rickover had told us we needed to be. He was somebody who, I think, demanded excellence without demanding excellence through pure sensitivity and feeling. And all of us wanted to be excellent because of him. And it was an amazing experience for me. And I became very brave in my later years in command, and risking, I mean, the submarine and the junk story. Can you tell that story?

Yeah, tell that story. Like, it's unbelievable what you did. So I told, but there were other things that I did because of what I got from Dave Cooper. I mean, when we were on these patrols, we had a lot of time, and all the officers have master's degrees at the time anyway. And so we taught courses, college courses for Georgetown University, and I got them all certified as associate professors. And we had about 15 young men who we got Georgetown University degrees by the time they left the submarine. I was in deep trouble for that because, I mean, we're supposed to be out there focused on the mission, focused on the safety of the nuclear power plant. And

I was talked to a lot by my admirals about how have you gone so far adrift? And then we had lots of examinations and surprise, surprise, we did really well on our Navy examinations. And one of the admirals said, I can't believe it, but I'm going to let you continue this, although I don't like it. But we continued that. And all of that was because of Dave Cooper and what we could do, you know, and the troops loved it. Everybody was inspired by each other and the fact that we were allowing this to happen. And so the Chinese junk story was interesting for me. It was 1980. I was a captain of a nuclear submarine. We were off the coast of China, fairly close in. Lots of junks in the area. We had been advised that by my admiral back in Pearl Harbor that if you ever, there's a lot of junks out

there, they would brief you. And if you ever have an incident with one of them, you lower the scope, the periscope, and get out of there. And so that was embedded in all of us because it was, you were a billion dollar platform, you had 130 men on the ship, you're going to risk all of that, you're going to give away your location. Don't ever think of it if you have an incident, just get out of there. Lower the periscope and get out and give me a call. Now, we weren't in communication until after we backed away from the Chinese coast. But one night, it's a long story, but I came to periscope depth we were deep so I could sleep a little and we came up and stuck up the periscope and sure enough I had stuck the periscope through the bottom of a Chinese junk and that is somebody's house that's basically where they

lived on the so in those years I mean this was, there were lots of junks out there, and this is how people made their living, and that was their house. That's where they lived. And I had scoped a man and his wife and two children, and I could tell that there were people in this thing. I didn't know what I had done at first. The submarine is very large, so you couldn't even feel the jolt. But I looked around the periscope, and it sure didn't look like a horizon to me. And I suddenly realized that, oh my God, I stuck the periscope through a junk.

And I could see dim little lights. And so now I realized that I had a Chinese family hooked on my periscope. And I also realized my orders from Pearl Harbor and decided that, you know, I looked around. I could see that there were not there. We had two scopes, so I could raise the other scope and look around. And I looked around and saw that, yeah, I don't see anything very threatening around. So we will try to get them on board the submarine. I knew we had destroyed their junk. And so we broached the submarine up far enough to get the family on board the submarine.

Against orders. Of course. Of course. And knowing full well, but not having much second guessing going on. Although the XO, a pretty straight Rickover kind of guy, and two other officers I remember saying, Captain, you can't do this. And I said, well, I think we need to do this, guys, so just watch. And so we got the family on board, and I let the man look out the periscope as I lowered the scope and watched his livelihood disappear under the ocean. The wife and the children were feeling pretty good. They were being fed ice cream in the crew's mess. The guy and I were the two scared people. He and I were standing up there at the periscope stand, and I was thinking how I had ruined his life. And so every captain of a nuclear submarine at the time had a $50,000 impressed fund in a box. And I took out the box and I showed it to him.

No, we could speak Chinese. I had people on board that submarine who were intelligence people who could speak Chinese. So I said to him, you know, here I have this money, and I feel really badly that I've done what I've done to you, and so you can have it all. So I gave him, this was 1980, I gave him $50,000. And the $50,000 was turned over to him. And three days later, we dropped him and his family off to a British destroyer off the coast of Hong Kong. And I've told the Chinese about this in years past as I've come to know them. And they've looked at records. There is not a record.

But I thought maybe I should have a piece of what this guy is worth today. He's probably one of those Chinese billionaires. And so that was the junk story. And I can't tell you how much trouble I was in when I got back to Pearl Harbor. There was an inquiry. And are we going to court-martial the captain and whatever. I was absolutely certain we had done the right thing. And so we had not risked the submarine.

I knew what was around us. And so anyway, it was what it was. And I was always glad we did that. You know, it was a good thing to do. How would you help other people develop courage? What would be a couple of things that you could hope people could train towards or do or think about to develop the type of courage on demand that you're talking about through this story? It's so hard because it's not courage, courage. I mean, you don't know what you're going to do when you're getting shot at.

And that kind of courage is, I think't know what you're going to do when you're getting shot at and that kind of courage is i think i know what i'm going to do but uh it's kind of it's kind of hard to judge where other people are in their journey with uh life and and courage and and so uh i found very few who have the willingness to do what they absolutely think is right because they know who they are. Back to that subject. And I know who I am, right or wrong. I know who I am and I feel pretty confident about this. It's a discussion I have all the time with my wife, who may not agree with everything I've told you here. But it is absolute in my mind that if you have confidence that you know who you are, that you are the result of great experiences and great people

and great associations, then in today's, I feel quite comfortable doing what I think is the right thing. And so I am that. When you think of mental skills and the skills, the interior skills that allow people to be courageous or be present in difficult situations to develop confidence. When I say the word calm, how do you think about training towards calm or becoming calm? Calm, C-A-L-M. You're right. Yeah, I think there's a lot of gift of where your genes are and all of that. But you also learn that there's a lot of things

that happen out there in the world, and when you've seen a bunch of them, that you should be somewhat calm when some of the lesser big things happen. And so maybe you can be calm. Maybe you can, at the right times, show that if I'm calm, everybody will be calm. And so it's something you can say to people, especially if you can do it a little bit by example.

And so example is terribly important. Do they really believe you when you talk to them and tell them a story or tell them what you've learned through life. And can they learn from you? And therefore, can you be as good an example of that as possible? And so I think that a lot of this is who you've had exposure to, the great examples. I've given you a couple of them that were important in my life. And trying then to find that in yourself when the time is demanding courage. So I think that courage is something that can be taught by example. And so when we are exposed to what we see,

we can find a way to do what's best. As we're moving into a progressively digital world and the speed and transactions of now and the changes that are ahead of us, what is it going to take for companies and people as we move forward to be successful? Yeah, it's such a good question. I've had the good fortune to be involved in a lot of companies involved in a lot of that digital revolution. And,. And I think it's such a good question. Remembering that many companies are pretty short term. I mean, it is more than just words that they are quarter to quarter. The CEOs on average of large companies in the U.S., I think, have lasted about three years. So they themselves, when they drive the company, are looking at a short-term, not a long-term, not just quarter-to-quarter, but total length of time.

And therefore, the mandate for boards to be much wiser than they needed to be ten years ago is an imperative, it seems to me. There needs to be courage to do the right things and to move much faster than we move today. As we see the approach of something that I think you're familiar with, Michael, called singularity, the moment in time when the machine is smarter and perhaps has some emotion, but certainly smarter than we are. And of course, the machine does problem, will find exponential solutions. There is a guy named Peter Diamandis, who is the founder of Singularity University, who has written about a book called the it's called abundance it was a new york times bestseller and talks about how most problems will be solved and the great issues we have are how we can find things for people to do that are meaningful uh in a new world that has that happening. Now, he and his early partner, Ray Kurzweiler, believed that

that would happen near the end of 2020s. But it's happening every day now. It's coming along as we progress towards that. And so we see companies that are leading the way in technology around the world, not just in the United States, but around the world as we try to struggle to make the changes that will incorporate that. And I happen to believe that large companies will be seriously challenged to the extent of finding it necessary to restructure unless they figure out how to have the courage to move fast and to do the right things and to listen to the right people. Otherwise, those who are coming out of nowhere and are able to move fast and have the right

mentality and don't have the culture of the certainty that came from slowness and deliberation. It's about leadership, how you see the future, how you assemble people who can, with you, envision the future and then continue to change, continue to realize that it's going to be different next year than it is this year. So, I mean, we take a lot of things for granted in the United States government, for example, and in the United States, this is not related to this, but we take into a given that alliances are a very important part of international relations. I happen to believe they are not at all.

And the Chinese would tell you they have never had an alliance. And we need to be able to listen to that. And as we look at our alliances and whether they're good or bad for America, you have to, I won't point to any particular ones, but you have to ask, were the alliances good at one time but not today? And alliances may not be a good idea at all. That's a contentious thing to say. When you look at a company, you take things for granted that we live in a world that is linear, that's going to have 3% change a year,

and yet the real changes in the business world are exponential in many cases. They are a J-curve of some kind that we may not even know unless we see that future. And so we have to try to gaze into the future with people who are knowledgeable about these things. And when we see the future, we will make the changes to make that happen. I can name several leaders in the world who have done that very wisely. They're not all Americans and that's the world we're going to live in now as we see dramatic changes that are exponential and not linear because somehow we human beings seem to be very linear. That's what we've learned. And I, in my life experience, have learned that linear is

not the way it is. What an extraordinary insight. And you've gone through from, you said, born in the 40s? Yeah. To being right at the forefront of some of the most significant advances in technology, the board positions that you have, and the CEO position that you had as well, to be able to think that humans think in linear ways, but we need to think exponentially. And I want to make sure I'm calibrating correctly with you, is the exponential means to you is so expansive that it's difficult to even conceive. Is that how you're articulating it? So I think that's exactly right. And by that, I guess, I don't guess. I think when we are talking about dramatic changes, we have to think about the workforce, how we are as an HR company.

And it's not, in my view, about HR. It's about leadership. Back to that subject. It's about how we're going to lead in this. How are we going to make our employees, as much as we can, part of the dramatic change? And if necessary, bring in different ones. And if necessary, the greater good for the greatest number, let some of them go, but try to be compassionate in doing it. Some companies do that better than

others. So I think that other than linear change requires other than linear management, and most of our management, in my view, is linear. Just like alliances, we take some things for granted. In a public company, we take for granted that quarterly results are the way we run businesses. That's not a given. I mean, the reason we do that is because it's so hard to roll up numbers and get them audited and get them out, and that's about as often as we can do it. But in three years, I predict, big data analysis of multiple kinds of accounting spreadsheets will allow us to release results weekly.

So why would we have a market that is dependent on all the analysts and all the banks that are dependent on a quarter-by-quarter release? Maybe it's going to be weekly, and maybe eventually it'll be daily results because we can have audited, rolled up financial results that represent how our business is doing today. And then you have to ask what impact that has on all the institutions. I happen to think that's going to happen sooner rather than later. So how do we react to that in our mindset? And I can tell you from my exposure to several large companies that we don't react very well to it. With that grin, yes. I think what I hear you saying is that change is difficult and humans find it difficult to adapt to those changes.

Is there a habit that you would hope people could begin to install or practice to be better suited for the rapid change, the exponential thinking that's required for people to be successful in the future? Well, I do think we have a lot to learn from exposing ourselves in business and in life to people who are very different from us and believing them to be as credible as we are and not being biased and listening, whether it's to news or to newspapers or to what we read or to whom we associate with, where we can learn and be exposed to what might be. And then most of us are blessed with enough intelligence to make some judgments around that if we are willing, if we have the courage to expose ourselves to a lot of that kind of thinking, which I happen to think is extremely broadening and it's not outrageous. I also think, Michael, that it's not just things like the

digital revolution, it's also things that are going to change much differently than linear that may not be associated with digits, but may be associated with things like the Arctic ice cap is melting. So in China, there is a thought now that trade with New York City and the East Coast is going to get much easier over the top. So you don't have to take big ships around South America or the Panama Canal, which is too small to take big ships, you can take them over the top. And that cuts about two weeks of ship time from Shanghai to New York City. And so that's not a linear change. And I can name several others like that, that are not linear in other than the digital worlds. Is there, when I say optimism and pessimism, right? And those are basically

lenses that you see the world through and optimistic lenses that the future is going to be bright. Pessimistic is meh, I'm not so sure about it. How do you see the future? So always with optimism. I mean, maybe that's another one of those things that you get through your DNA. But I've always been optimistic that it was going to turn out okay. A lot of people, as you know better than I, are quite the opposite, are quite sure that the negative side of things, I mean, this is a glass half full or empty model, but a lot of people are quite sure that it's going to be pretty negative. I happen to think that we are so blessed to be living these lives as Americans in a

relatively well-off society with a great form of government, no matter who is the president, that we can have a lot of, we can feel a lot of blessings and try to make a real difference in the lives of people out there in our country and abroad. And that optimism of having been given the gift of what we have in this country and the kinds of education, and this is the best educated workforce in the world, the kinds of opportunities we've been given, no matter where you come from, will set you up well to be prepared to listen and learn and I know I'm skipping some steps in here, to joint chief of staff, to it seems to be becoming more and more polarized, biased. And I think we need to inoculate ourselves against bias and listen well and welcome everyone. And I think there was a time when we did that a lot better than we do today. There's a lot of forces acting on us about all of this. And we need to demand better from

those who lead us in government or companies that are feeling this way. And I think that that's what we need to, that's what we're getting not better at. We're getting more challenged to do those things just at a time when we need it most. So your time and insights are literally priceless. Last question is, how do you articulate or think about or even define the concept of mastery? Well, part of it is, I suppose, defining what the mastery is about. I happen to believe that I have mastery over my life, and I'm happy about it. That's not a bragging, it's a blessing.

And how can we achieve that mastery over your life so that you feel like you are comfortable in your life. And that has a lot to do with education, experiences, exposure to ideas and people, and I suppose some of the blessing of well-being. But I think it's not that so much as it is a mindset about who you are and are you comfortable in that life that you're leading. And if you can feel comfortable in that life and then try to do good in a greater sense than just making money, most of us have enough money. It's how much is enough? I heard something on PBS the other day that they had asked a number of people, how much is enough money? And the common answer came down to, among well-educated, successful people, a billion dollars. A billion dollars, I think, is a crazy answer. I know that's not the case.

I'm a long ways from a billion, and I'm quite content. And so it's not about money. It's about finding that source of satisfaction. And I think that comes a lot from family that you're blessed to have. Celebrate that family. That's an element of mastery of your life. Some of us do better and worse at that, and certainly my family has been challenged because of the life I've led, much of it away, stressed by some wars and other things that have been

heavy pressure on my life, but have stuck with me, and I love them and am very proud of them in a special way. So that's a part of the blessing of my life. And I certainly wouldn't say I'm the master of my family, but I feel good about my family, and I feel good about who I am. So when you're a master of your life, I think you feel good about who you are. And then you have to give credit to all of those things that have happened to you that made you feel good about who you are. And all of us have a lot of those blessings if we just allow ourselves to think about them and re-celebrate those good things in our lives

they far outweigh in almost every case the bad things so that mastery is that I think mastery of life is also association with a variety of people and having, as a result of that, a vision of who you are and maybe even a vision of what could be for whatever organizations or civilizations you're associated with. And when you have that feeling, it doesn't matter if you are the master. It is an element of mastery of your life where you can go to bed at night and never wind up sleepless because of worrying about that. Your experiences, your insight, your compassion and regard for other people are exceptional. And the world is a better place, Admiral Owens, for you in it.

And I can't tell you how grateful I am to just know you, but to have this time to be able to learn from you as well. So thank you for your insights. Thank you for the time that we've spent together. Thank you, Michael. It's been a real pleasure. team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for

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