The Daily Stoic - How to be an Honorable Leader and Combat Imposter Syndrome | Admiral Bill McRaven

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Ryan speaks with Admiral Bill McRaven about the nature of being a Stoic, imposter syndrome when being a leader, and how resilience is sometimes enduring injustice. They also discuss McRaven��s two books, The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple and Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe Even The World.Admiral Bill McRaven is a retired US Navy four-star admiral. He served 37 years as a Navy SEAL leading men and women at every level of the special operations community. During those four decades, Admiral McRaven dealt with every conceivable leadership challenge, from commanding combat operations—including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips, and the raid for Osama bin Laden. Get a signed copy of The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple and Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe Even The World from The Painted Porch. Check out Admiral McRaven’s other books: Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare Theory and Practice, Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations, and The Hero Code: Lessons Learned From Lives Well Lived. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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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From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom. From the outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil George is trapped in a lie of his own making with a secret He feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out Follow terribly famous wherever you listen to your podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wandery plus on Apple podcasts or the Wandery app or the Wandery app.

I'm Peter Frankapern. And I'm Afro-Hersh. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent,

the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter?

I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives Setting a kind of stoic intention for the week something to meditate on something to think on Something to leave you with to journal about whatever it is. You're happy to be doing so let's get into it

Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I was invited to play basketball at a friend of mine's house several months ago and I get to the game and I recognized someone there. He's a little bit older than the rest of us younger guys. And he goes, hi, I'm Bill. And I go, say hello, we chat. And I realized this is Admiral Bill McRaven, the four-star Navy Admiral,

the longest serving Navy SEAL at the time of his retirement. Just an absolutely incredible, fascinating life, which he talks about in his many amazing books. You'll almost certainly seen his super viral talk when he was the president of the University of Texas about how you gave this commencement address on making your bed. But, you know, he's had some pretty interesting

career moments, not just making it through Hell Week as a Navy SEAL, not just serving for decades and decades, but ultimately, as we talk about in today's episode, he was there for the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips, the raid for Osama bin Laden served 37 years as a Navy SEAL. And just an all around great guy. He's an amazing author too. He has a book, Make Your Bed,

The Little Things That Can Change Your Life, and maybe even The World, which comes out of that talk he did. He has a great one called The Wisdom of the Bullfrog, Leadership Made Simple. He has this great book, Sea Stories, and he's working on another couple of great books, which he told me about after we were walking around

the bookstore after he left. One of the things I just love about his books is they're short, they're simple, and they're earnest, right? It's all these kind of slogans from the seals, from Pete Performance, just kind of classic hard-won wisdom that when you hear the idea, you know, that no easy day is yesterday, those who dare win, you know, that no easy day is yesterday, those who dare win, you know, fortune favors the bold. When you hear these expressions you think, yeah, yeah, yeah, but somebody, somebody, generations of people proved that idea. They proved

it on the battlefield, they proved it in the classroom, they they proved it in their personal life, they proved it's suffering, and and he really explores what those things mean, but in a really memorable way that I think sticks with you. And I think that's a kind of the core of Stoicism also. So it's a, it's a great interview. I'm really honored that it came out because he's a, he's a Texas guy. He grew up in San Antonio. When I was telling him I lived in Bastrop at the basketball game, he was like, Oh, I used to drive through there all the time. He was saying it had been a long time since he'd been out to Bastrop at the basketball game. He was like, oh, I used to drive through there all the time. He was saying it had been a long time

since he'd been out to Bastrop. So it was good excuse for him to do that. And I've since run into him a couple other times. We bumped into each other on a flight back from DC or Seattle once, I'm forgetting. And then I was taking my kids to Whole Foods and they loved the Whole Foods in downtown Austin. There's a short escalator up

and then a long slanted escalator down. And they like to do laps of the escalator. So they were doing that. And then I happened to bump into the guy that led the raid on Osama bin Laden. And go, hey, Admiral McRaven. And he goes, hey, you know, the way it gets recognized all the time.

And then, oh, hey, it's Ryan. So it was cool for my kids to get to meet him. Maybe not the greatest example of my parenting, but I was just trying to ride the chaos as best I could. He seemed like he understood and he was nice enough to come out. And I think you're really going to like this interview. We've got signed copies of The Wisdom of the Bullfrog and signed copies of Make Your Bed, which you can grab at the Painted Porch. I really do love these books. I recommend them all the time. They are absolutely awesome. And I'll just let you get into the interview. Did you know Admiral Toole? Jim Toole?

I did not. I was just reading about him. He was a rear admiral, but then he bought a bookstore in DC. Oh, sorry. He retired. He owned Capital City Books. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I can't imagine there's many admirals turned bookstore owners. Well, it's something.

I love this. Thank you. Who came up with this idea? Actually, the idea, have you been to Ford's Theater in DC? I have not. So it's the little theater you see where Lincoln was assassinated. And then there's this museum attached to it. And it's a big museum.

And you get in there there and they have this floor-to-ceiling sort of cylinder of books that's all books about Lincoln. So it's like a giant art piece of books about Lincoln that goes like two stories or three stories. It's pretty incredible and so I saw that a couple years ago and I thought it was really cool and I was trying to think of how to decorate the bookstore so we came up with the chimney and then we were thinking about acoustics for in here and I thought, how long did it take you to? You know, actually this kid, I've talked about him before, he's my neighbor at my ranch out

here. Just this kid, he came to our house, his name's Braden, like when he was like 16 and he was like, hey, can I like do some chores? And so he started doing like little like Candyman stuff. And he kind of just taught himself how to do like crazy stuff on YouTube. And I said, hey, I want to do floor to ceiling with books. Can you figure it out? And he figured it out. This was actually much easier. The one next door was so I've seen that because it's weight. Like to they're stacked on top of each other in a way that created a weight bearing issue.

Right. So those books are cut in half. So it looks like there's more folk there. But this was this was less hard. And they're still hard. Yeah. Well, it's painstaking. And I think next story of you screws and maybe here you only use glue. But there's a company called Books by the Foot, and they just sell.

So some of these are like books that I like and books my friend sent me and my publisher sent me a bunch of books. But most of these you'll notice are like women's choices and natural healing. If you look too closely, it ruins this a little bit. But they- I see Michael Crichton. Yeah, you got some, yeah.

Well, they're books that were really popular at a time. I mean, like, so there's McCulloch's John Adams, which is good. There's lots of good books in here, but then some of them are filler. The books. Charlie Wilson's War. Oh, yeah.

But they sell books for, like, movie sets or, like, rich people's houses, who suddenly they have, like, an enormous library that you've never built. That's their specialty. Interesting. Yeah. Well, and I love your books. And maybe in 30 years when someone's buying books

for the foot, after all the people that have read your books. It won't take up a lot of space because my books are only about this big. I like that. I think there's something powerful about a book you can read in a short flight. Right. That's the whole idea behind it.

And I've got a lot of friends that are writing books and they want to tell, I mean, Sea Stories is my longest one because that was quote unquote kind of memoir, but it was, but all the other ones I keep them small. In fact, for Wisdom of the Bullfrog, I thought it was too long. Relative to... It's like twice as long as the other one. It does. It's, you know, and I don't know how it got to be that long. I mean, I was like, at the end, I'm like, how do I have that many words? I didn't want that many words. But.

But and it feel like when you're reading a short book, I think it's also it's great for someone who doesn't read a lot because then you're you're like, I'm whipping through this. Like, I'm great. It builds confidence. It's like, you know what it is? It's it's the making your bed of books because it's a little thing and it gets you starting to go, I can do this. I can do this.

You identify as someone who reads, right? Like the amount of people I meet who are like, I hadn't read a book since high school. And then they read a book like this or one of my books. And they're like, oh, I thought I hated books. I really just hated the books I was assigned in school. And then you can change your identity to be someone who reads.

My daughter, big fan of yours. So she's got the Daily Stoic. And she's going through that. And she quotes it to me all the time. Sorry about that. No, it's good. She's 32 years old. So it's been good for her.

Was she a reader? Oh, yeah. A voracious reader. All my wife and two of my kids are voracious readers. Number one son, not so much. Yeah. But I think there's a lot of people who think they don't like books, but really they

don't like reading. And so then audiobooks are this whole thing that kind of open. They're like, oh, there's a lot of people who think they don't like books, but really they don't like reading. Right. So then audio books are this whole thing that kind of open. They're like, oh, there's good stuff in there. It can be entertaining. It doesn't have to be a chore. It changes how you think about it. It's good. So there's this, I was thinking about when I was reading your books,

because your books are built around, most of them are built around aphorisms or famous sayings like semper fi, or just those sort of core things that get repeated inside an organization or in a culture. I guess at some point they become cliches and it is interesting like the military has those sports has those, you know, like if you walked on the trading floor of a Wall Street firm, they might have those. And some people kind of look down on those things.

Like they dismiss them as cliche or maybe even people in the organization, they're like, oh, that's something we say. But there is actually, I think something that there's a lot of meaning packed in these very short expressions. And there's a reason they stick around. That's right. And that to your point, you know, certainly in the military, most of them are written in blood.

So it's, they prove their worth time and time and time again, or they wouldn't stick around. Yeah. There was this early stoic, his name was Aristo and he gets in this debate because stoicism is kind of a series of these like little quotes or aphorisms, right? And he didn't like that. And he was, he said these sayings,, he said it's like advice from old women. He said, you know, like a trained person should know.

They shouldn't need these little quips. But they do. And that's what's so interesting. I think about this in the sports context. Like nowhere is there people who have been more trained in certain skills. Are they more highly paid? And is the thing they're doing more simple? And yet, Bill Belichick or LeBron James or whoever it is gets all the guys together and

he's like, let's focus on what we can control. It doesn't matter if we win or lose. You know, it's almost paradoxical, but if you've ever been in one of those situations, it makes sense. Well, you have to have something that people can internalize. Yes. And if it's too complicated, I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you just got a PhD in theoretical physics, that's one thing. Yeah. But if you're like the rest of us, then you've got to be able to internalize.

What do we mean by the triangle defense and the triangle offense? And how do we play that? And I got it. It's a triangle. Yes. OK. Yeah, I can understand that. We got it. You know, and so, yeah, these things. The power is in the simplicity. Yes. You wouldn't think that the five professional basketball players, the game is on the line, the coach gets them there and he's like,

move the ball, gentlemen, move the ball. Like that's what they do. And yet it does, it expresses something simple that maybe they're not doing enough of. Or it's just like, hey, I know you're thinking about a million things. Let me give you the only thing of those that matters. And what's also interesting, I think, about those expressions

is like, they're very simple and then it's kind of the, they're simple to someone who's a beginner, but then as you get more advanced in what you do, they also, there's a complexity to them the more you kind of think about. I mean, that's sort of the concept of a bunch of your books is like, here's the sayings, what do they mean? How do I, how have I seen them applied and not applied? And then what's the nuance of that?

Yeah, you got it. You've read them. But yeah, and it's weird, too. I try to remind myself, like at one point, this wasn't a cliche. Like somebody made this up. Somebody started. Yeah. So the you know, the every Army Ranger starts every meeting with a senior officer, so rangers lead the way. Hmm. And most of them know the the context of it, which was on Normandy as the Rangers are charging up

point to Hawk. But it's not Rangers lead the way. It's not a declarative statement. Hmm. They think it is. Rangers lead the way. It's not a declarative statement. They think it is. Rangers lead the way. Right, like this is our identity. We're people who lead the way. Because there's no comma after Rangers. But in the reality,

what happened was, the guy said, Rangers lead the way. And it's a different, it means something different. Rangers lead the way and it's a different, it means something different. Sure. You know, Rangers lead the way means we're the Rangers, we lead the way. Yeah, yeah.

As opposed to I'm in trouble, lead the way. It is a little bit nuanced and I mean Rangers lead the way was a call for help. Yeah. It was not a declarative statement that you know, the SEALs are the best, the Rangers are the best. So, but that's only from World War II. And yet is the foundation of every Ranger unit out there. Interesting. Rangerly Dwyer.

Yeah. And like, you know, the saying, thus always to tyrants, or just sort of mouth words. A stoic in ancient Greece, his name was Scipio Emiliaunis. He said that. Like he's and then, of course, it gets perverted by John Wilkes Booth. But like those those were some of these words were not arranged in that order until someone arranged them there. And then it it takes on this meaning and maybe maybe also we're wrenching it from its original context and become something new.

Or you understand it differently early on. And then as you hear it repeated, or I guess really the point of these sayings too is like it's something to say at the beginning of a meeting, but then potentially in some life or death situation, it's gonna mean something very specific to you in that moment. Absolutely. Also be fun.

Yeah, and it seems maybe, I don't know, there's kind of this cynicism or this scorn that maybe people who are outside of the context of a certain culture have towards the things or maybe someone who didn't appreciate being in it. But like there is kind of this, oh, that seems very simple or that doesn't seem like it means much. or that doesn't seem like it means much, but it's to me the way to learn and the way to sort of articulate your values. Sure. I mean, you can take, to your point, you can take any sector of society and you find the

people that are generally successful have learned to take complex ideas and make them simple so that the workforce understands how to implement them and so that it resonates with people and that's you know just do it. What the hell does that mean? I don't know. But you know what it means. It means let's just do it. Protect and serve is a good one. Protect and serve for every cop. Yeah so they have value to them.

Yeah. And they can be so simple. And then a more complex sort of values of an organization can be built upon that. Absolutely. But without those, you're kind of leaving people to just wing it. Yeah.

Exactly right. You have to have a framework. Yeah. What are some that mean the most to you? Well, I mean, it depends on the, in my military life, of course, as a Navy SEAL, you learn very early on that it's about not quitting. So it's just kind of never ring the bell piece. And you're gonna have a thousand opportunities

in your career and your life to give up when things get hard. But as you go through SEAL training, you come out away from it, you say, you know what, I could have quit, but I didn't. And that becomes your standard in life. It's like they threw everything at me and I didn't quit. So if life doesn't throw anything more at me than what they're throwing, I'm going to be fine. Sure. And, you know, I mean, there were times in my career when I was just absolutely miserable.

You're freezing, you're wet, you're hours in someplace and you say to yourself, am I as cold as I was in hell? And if you go, I'm not. Yeah. Well, the heck with it. Then you keep moving. Yeah. But it's also, you know, you well, So, I'm not. Yeah. Well, the heck with it. Then you keep moving. Yeah. But it's also, you know, you, well, one is the physical pain of going through training. You know, emotionally, you also say to yourself, hey, I was tough enough mentally to get through this point.

Yeah. So, whatever happened in my personal life, I can get through it. Yeah. And in the SEAL training you have a bell and if you ring the bell you're you quit. So this has always stuck with me but you know I mean to your point about sayings I mean you think about you know Marcus Aurelius's meditations I mean they're all kind of a bunch of aphorisms. Yeah. That's kind of what it is you know. My father taught me this, my mother taught me this, this guy taught me this. Here's what's important. Be people of integrity. Don't do this, don't do that.

It's pretty simple, but it's who's speaking that gives it credibility too. Well, what's interesting about meditations is that it's a series of aphorisms, but he's not doing it in the way that a typical leader or a philosopher or a general would do it in that you're writing these aphorisms down for other people. What's interesting is he's writing them for himself. So it gives you the, he's writing down, he's reminding himself, you can live good anywhere. We're made, he says, we're here to help people

or put up with them. He's just saying these sort of things. And you can imagine that he's doing it in the moments when he felt like doing the opposite or he did the opposite and he feels bad about it and he's like, hey, why did I leave this person hanging? Why did I lose my temper? It's sort of a debrief of himself every day. Yeah. I don't remember how long it would take him to write. I mean, it's over obviously all of his campaigns and but what's the, I don't know, the historical context of was this written over 10 years, 20 years?

And we don't really know. And we what's interesting about meditation is that you mentioned the gratitude. That's at the beginning. Right. But like we don't have the original. So that could have just been a later editor. It could have said, here's all the different places. He thinks people I'm going to move that to this. That makes the different places. He thanks people. I'm going to move that to this that makes the most sense

There's two books that have a geo graphic location attached to them and We vaguely know that they can sort of discern from certain mentions like when wars happened or what was Yeah, yeah, they have a vague sense like when they have a sense of when it must have started. And then we the last meditation, I mean, this is an interesting, the last, the last meditation, we know Marcus dies of the plague or dies of some illness. And so the last entry in meditations is you've lived as a citizen in a great city, five hundred, five years or a hundred. What's the difference?

The laws make no distinction. But he's like, oh, I've only gotten through three acts. He said, well, this will be a drama in three acts, the lengths fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace the same grace shown to you. So did he write that the day that he died? You know, he could have. Sure, could have.

Or he was doing a pretty good job meditating on death, and it was years later and someone moved it. But it is interesting to think that we don't really know. We know he wrote some of it at a quincum, which is this camp outside Budapest. You know, he almost certainly did not do it, most of it from the comfort of his palace. Right, oh sure.

But yeah, it's such an interesting book in that we don't know what it was for, who it was for, except for it seems to have done him a lot of good. Yeah, sure. It's a journaling. Yeah. Did you keep a journal or you weren't that? I wasn't that disciplined. I thought about it at one point in time when I went back as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, I thought,

I'm going to do this and I'll just tape record it every night on events that happened during the day. But then I realized the tape recorder then was classified. So I was like, how am I going to do this? So I said, that was hell. It was too hard. I have a little aside and he goes the enemy. I love George Marshall and George Marshall during the war, someone says, you know, you got to keep a journal. And he decides not to because he felt like it would make him,

he felt like the journal, unlike this, where it's totally private and he's, he thought it would be kind of inherently performative. And he felt like it would almost like contribute to ego. Like I'm I'm writing the first draft of history kind of a thing, which, you know, people do it. It seems they're doing the thing with the eye of doing the memoir about it later. Of course.

Happens all the time. You know, one of the other expressions, I think is an interesting one, you know, that that saying and it starts as a Latin saying, but fortune favors the bold or favors the brave. That's from a naval officer. Do you know that story? Remind me and I'll probably remember so Pliny The elder is a naval admiral in the the Athenian Navy and he hears there's been this explosion it's the explosion at Pompeii and He his friend is

trapped there. And he's like, we got to go rescue this guy. And they're like, No, you're gonna die. This is a horrible idea. Don't do it. He says, Fortune favors the bold. He says head towards Pompeii is his friend who's there. And so so that what I love about that expression, too, you know, now we use it to, you know, someone's fortune favors the bold. I'm going all in on this business venture. Yeah, right. He's saying no fortune favors the bold. I'm going to go save my friend. And the tragic part is he does save his friend, but he dies.

So fortune favor. I think that's the other interesting thing that the emphasis is on favors. It does not guarantee success. You know, most probably most of the time it doesn't. But I just love the idea that some guy jotting off some letter, you know, coins a phrase that we're still repeating, you know, all these years later. Well, the one that drives me nuts is the World War two one where the guy says nuts. You know, the German says, do you want to surrender? Yeah.

And he's debating how he's going to respond to it and he goes nuts. And his aide says, send him that. And somehow the US Army has turned that into something that it really wasn't. A moment of defiance when it was like it was like it was like somebody going, oh, shit. Oh, let's tell him that. And then all of a sudden, now we've taken it. Well, what nuts really meant was stop. The guy was just, you know, saying something.

They said, oh, this is good. Let's give them that. And it's a. But well, I let's learn about this because first off, I'm cool with that. I'm cool with wrenching it from context if it serves a purpose. Which apparently it did. But obviously, damn the torpedoes is a great example of that. It now we take it to mean like some submarine thing because we think torpedoes

He means damn the mines. It's still a badass cool line. It kind of means fortune favors the bold. Absolutely. But then but then the other interesting one was it Halsey? Who's the one Who's heading in the wrong direction? Yeah, and and they they ask him where he is. They missed the line on the type two and the total time. Or what I as I understood it.

So they would send messages and then they would add lines of gibberish after. And so they sent the where are you? And it says the world wonders. And so it sent him into a depression and didn't come out of the statero room for a couple of weeks, I think. Yeah. So for people who don't know the story, this general, or this admiral is going kind of in the wrong direction, this big pivotal moment. They tell they telegraph him, where are you?

And then and then the code would put gibberish on it to make the meanings confusing to codebreakers and said the world wonders. And so it stained him with this kind of dereliction of duty, which he wasn't doing, but it's just a random set of. It's a total horrible coincidence, but it is a beautiful phrase. The world. It is absolutely. All right.

So there's another interesting thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is there's a stoic named Poseidonius, who's this sort of advisor to these different generals in ancient Greece. And towards the end of his life, he goes and he sees Rome's sort of notorious strongman. His name is Marius. Marius had served like the most his consul, but he's here like almost Shakespearean sort of never enough power addict, bad dude. And Postone sort of writes this interesting kind of he captures a formerly great man at his lowest point, you know, like all this power and fame and the fear that he struck in people, it suddenly stripped away when he's a tortured, dying, broken man. Seneca said, you know, Marius once commanded armies, but armies commanded Marius, you know, that he's the cautionary

tale. You're, I think, unique among living people and then maybe even historical figures. I mean, you saw a strong man reduced similarly. And you were in the room with that person. What did you see being in a room probably not much bigger than this with Saddam Hussein? Yeah, the interesting thing about Saddam was, you know, when we first captured him, he was in fact,

he continued to be kind of pompous and arrogant. But, you know, very quickly. Well, the day after we captured him, the senior leaders, U.S. leaders and the Iraqi leaders came down to see him. And you could tell he was still in charge. I said he was kind of telling these guys, hey, boys, sit down. You're talking to Saddam Hussein here. And and first they came in the room and they were yelling and screaming,

spitting at him, actually. And, you know, we had him in an orange jumpsuit sitting on a on a cot. And and they all they were yelling and screaming at him. But but they were kind of backing away at the same time. And he was like, okay, you boys settle down. You know who I am, you know.

But then, so I told the ambassador at the time, I said, okay, so we're not going to do this again. I'm going to keep him isolated, you know, and he doesn't need to be talking to anybody else. So I kept him in a room like this. I had a doctor in the room at all times and security in the room. And I mean, we we treated him as well as we would treat anybody. I mean, three, three or four meals a day.

And but what happened was when he no longer had his palaces and he no longer has generals and no longer had his handmaidens, he really just became a pathetic old man. Yeah. And and you could see, you know, he needed all of the trappings in order to be someone. And that's when you know somebody's not real. Do they have to have the trappings to be who they are? If they do, then that's not the person you think they are. And with Saddam, you know, I would go in to see him every day for about 30 days.

I'd never talk to him. He always would get up and he'd want to engage me. And I would, because I didn't want him to have the latitude, I didn't want him to think that all of a sudden, now he was important enough that he could talk to El Hefe. You said, El Hefe. And I would motion to him to sit down. I'd talk to the guard in the dock and everything okay. Yes sir, everything's fine. He's doing well. Is he eating? All that sort of stuff.

And then I'd leave. And I could tell it actually kind of drove him crazy that I wouldn't engage him in dialogue. But yeah, he just was after a while just not the bully, not the. Yeah, not the maniacal leader that we knew him to be. He was just a pathetic old man. And I imagine that was the first time in his life that that had ever been the case, except for maybe when he was a boy and his father. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, he ruled for a very long time with an iron fist.

And and but it was interesting as well when we talked to him a lot of times, we asked him questions about things. He was almost like a godfather. He would say, well, that was family business. He literally said that one time. If you recall, his daughters and a couple sons-in-law slipped over to Syria or Jordan, I forget. And then when they came back, he said, oh, come on back, everything's good. Well, he came back, then he killed him.

And he was asked about that and he said, family business. He was like, wow. And then of course, he was responsible for gas in the Kurds and his response to that was, that was Ali, chemical Ali, right? So he, I mean, he ran the country, you know, not just like a dictator, but like a mafioso. Yeah. Who's the guy that wrote Black Hawk Down? Mark? Boudin. Mark Boudin. Yeah, right.

He wrote a profile of Saddam Hussein many years ago. And he said, you know, we have this fantasy that it would be great to be the king, the dictator, the person with unlimited power. And he says, you know, basically they're actually the least free of all people because they're trapped by the edifice that they built around them. And, you know, this is the famous story about the Sword of Domocles. They're worried something's happening to them. Yeah, it's actually torture. But I and so we can kind of think that.

But very few people ever see them without those things. So you have kind of it's fascinating to me. You have a there's not a lot of deposed kings. And and most of them lived a long time ago. One of Napoleon's brothers, who he puts up as kings all over Europe, he just ends up as like a guy in New Jersey. Like he moved to New Jersey.

And it's weird. You know? Nothing wrong with living in New Jersey. No, of course not. But if you were the king of an Italian duchy or whatever, and then you just live in an estate in know, an estate in in Princeton or something. I'm sure that's I'm sure it feels very I'm sure it feels like there's something wrong with it to you because you had it and now it's gone.

So so when you say pathetic, it was it was what it was the sense that he it revealed what was actually there beneath the surface or did what? What do you see? So he lost his bravado pretty quickly. He lost his confidence. He I mean, you could tell all of a sudden he realized that he was isolated and and I could tell that bothered him because he expected that even though he was captured, that senior people would come to see him and

they would defer to him and he could still be the president of Iraq, although in detention. And that didn't happen. The only people he saw every day were me and the guard in the dock. And I told them they couldn't talk to him. So I didn't allow him the latitude to engage them in conversation, even though they were in the same room, literally the distance we are to your wall here. And that bothered him. I think we have this fantasy that there's karma, you know, that the people suffer for

the deeds that they do. And I mean, ultimately he gets the ultimate punishment. But was there a sense that the man who had made so many people feel fear was afraid? Or do you get the sense he's a psychopath, a sociopath that doesn't feel those kinds of emotions? Yeah, it's a good question. You know, what I did find is at one point in time, very, I mean, I had him for about 30 days and then unbeknownst to him, we were going to move him to the military police who

would eventually move him to the Iraqis. And I had been, again, we'd been treating him pretty well. I said he ate well, we had docs looking after him and that's all that sort of stuff. But I came into the very last day and the last day I was with him, I engaged him in conversation and I explained to him that, you know, at the time, and I kind of knew how this was going to unfold, but I felt obliged to do it. I said, look, you know, the Iraqis are still fighting and they're dying.

So you know, the Americans, you know, the war is over. We've won, you've lost. And and but your people are still resisting. It would be great if you could just tell them to lay down their arms and now we can begin, you know, another chapter in the history of Iraq. And I said, look, you can be a petty dictator like Mussolini or you can really kind of go out and do something noble. And he turned to me and of course I had a translator there and he says, would you tell your men to lay down their arms? And of course, I had a translator there and he says, would you tell your men to lay down their arms?

And of course, I knew the question was coming. And I probably lied to him and I said, I would if it meant saving my country. But of course, every military leader knows, you know, if you're fighting for what you think is a noble cause, whether he did or didn't. And he said, I don't think so. And so he saw right through my ruse. But I said, OK, well, you're leaving here in two minutes. And you will not see me again.

And where you're going will be a lot harder than where you are now. So you can either cooperate or, and that's when he got scared because he didn't know what was coming. And again, we just sent him off to another cell with the military police. But he didn't know that. coming. And again, we just sent him off to another cell with the military police, but he didn't know that. And the fear was absolutely there because again, he didn't have his generals, he didn't

have his armies, he didn't have people that were going to kowtow to him. He had American military police that were going to treat him like a detainee. And so, you know, I immediately moved him, we only really moved him across the street to where the military police were in Bagram. But it was not as comfortable. He was in a cell as opposed to a room that I had for him. And so that, and then the translator who had been working with him

went over and saw him every day. And the translator comes back on like day one says, Saddam wants to come back. I said, no, that time is over. This message comes from Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos.

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of well-being titles like bestsellers, new releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. I imagine other than the general existential dread, the sort of domicile fear that all absolute leaders or corrupt people have, the idea of being exposed or deposed, that's probably the first time that he had felt that kind of fear in his whole life. I have no doubt. I mean, he'd had essentially ultimate authority. Yeah. And he could be as evil and as bad as he chose to be without any consequences. Yeah. And so to your point, that invariably lasts for a while, but it always ends. And when it ends, it doesn't end well.

Yeah, they say like it's pretty up until the last 15 minutes for thugs and dictators and gangsters. You think you're getting away with it up till you don't get away with it, and then it's usually not so great. And I think that's what Postonius was saying. This guy was this incredibly powerful, everyone envied him until it was all stripped away.

And then you face that final mortality or that lack of, was all stripped away. And then you face that final mortality or that lack of, you know, the humility that we all face at the end where we're all equal. But I think this is, you know, the lessons that you put out in your books on this, you know, the nature of being stoic, of course, is this recognition that it is about honor and dignity and humility and dealing with tough times in a way that shows that you are the right person. And again, as we were talking about with Marcus Rills, whether you are an emperor or whether you are the handmaiden cleaning the stalls, it doesn't make any difference.

That's who the good people turn out to be. If you have surrounded yourself with things that do not serve the public good, as again, he talks about in meditations, you want to do what is good for the people. If you're not doing the things that we know to be good behaviors, honest, noble, honorable, humble, respectful. Sooner or later, the edifice will crumble and what's left of you, if you haven't been that person, will not be standing very tall. It's easy to skip over it, but Marks Reus has the same power that Saddam Hussein has. Absolutely.

That's my point. Yeah. But he lived a good life because he tried to live the stoic life. Yeah. In all the best. Now, he wasn't always successful. I mean, he wasn't a perfect guy.

We know what his shortfalls were. But in general, he was part of that epic time in Rome where it was Pax Romano for a very long time. And he may have been the last leader, I guess, that really kind of represented that error, I think. Well, yeah, there's this. The sun comes after him right here just as a disaster, as I recall. Well, that's what I was going to say, right?

Like you have these five emperors in a row. None of them have a son. So they choose their successor. And it's this sort of accidental process not accidental, but it's a it's a Quirk in history where you don't get bad absolute rulers for the most part and then Marcus hands it to his son and then we revert to the rule that absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. And yeah, you think Ultimately, I think this is true at the individual level

It's certainly true at like the highest levels of being a head of state, which is you get to the place where no one can really tell you what to do. You're in control of your own life. And there needs to be the final check and balance inside, whether it's a constitutional monarchy, democratic republic, or just you as an individual,

is what does your individual conscience or set of virtues or values allow you to do or not? The Stokes say, you know, you have to command yourself first. And, you know, Marcus has that. And then other people find themselves in that position because they're parents or a coup or, you know, they're chosen, they're elected for it. And if they don't have those values, it does seem to corrode and corrupt remarkably quickly. Remarkably. Yes.

Again, and I've seen it with Saddam. I've seen it with lesser autocrats and authoritarians and people that are just. Happens in middle managers too. Happens in middle managers, you're right. So if your North Compass isn't in the line properly, you know, eventually, you know, all you have to do is take a look at the companies around,

whether it's, you know, FTX or Enron or Lehman Brothers or universities that are chasing a championship but their recruiting policies are not right or they let doctors get away with things that they shouldn't and et cetera, et cetera. It never ends well. And yet we continue to seem to learn the same lessons again and again.

Yeah, in meditations he says, "'Be careful that you are not Caesarified and stained purple,' because the emperor wore the purple clothes. And I've got to imagine in military circles, the stars or the bars, they can change a person. Yeah, absolutely. You like to think by the time the person gets to that point in their career. So for me, it was 26 years into my career, Then I get my first star, but it does change. I mean, because you, now you

have kind of excelled probably past the point where most of us thought we would ever get to, but it is also humbling. Yeah. And you need to take it with a little bit of humility. That's great. You are now an admiral, but there've been a lot of admirals before you. Yeah. And you got to be an admiral because the men and women that you served with. Because I always tell folks, look, you get made a general and an admiral

because of the soldiers and the sailors that served you. They're the ones that make you successful. And if you don't treat them well, if you're not the servant leader they expected, if they don't have confidence in you, if they don't respect you, it's going to be reflected in the work that goes on in the SEAL teams and the special operations forces in the infantry, pick something, and you're not going to be successful. Yeah. When if you don't respect them, right, and the power that you are holding in trust for them, then you you wrongly think that it's about you, that you're special. I think Fox Connors advice to Eisenhower, something like

always take the job seriously, never yourself. Right. I mean, that's a common refrain as we were talking about earlier. It is one of those things that you have to be careful about. I remember when I was when we were when you become a one star, they send you to, we refer to it colloquially as knife and fork school. So they're gonna teach you to, you know, the delicacies of being a one star.

But, so you travel around and you have a chance to speak to folks. And we traveled up to Northern Command and there was a four star Admiral that was there. And I think his name was Tim Keating, Admiral Keating. And pretty funny, but now he's in charge of all, essentially, North American defense and everything. And so he's got us all in there, and we're all the baby one-stars. And he says, so, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you how this is going to go.

He says, you know, I'm a four-star admiral. I'm about to leave here in a few minutes. And I'm going to go outside. I'm going to get into a staff car. And that staff car is going to take me to the airport. And there at the airport will be waiting five or six, I think, young petty officers. And they will be standing on a red carpet, because I'm going to be getting on my private military

airplane. And as I start to walk up, they will pop to. They will salute. And I will walk through this. I will get on my G5. And I will fly to Andrews Air Force Base. And when I landed Andrews Air Force Base, as I'm getting off, another six sergeants will line up on the red carpet.

And as I get off, they will salute me. I'll get in the staff car. I will go to the Pentagon. And so he goes through this whole thing. He says, I'm retiring in a year. And in a year, I'm going to be schlepping my bags through San Francisco International. So, it ain't about you. That's great. You're wearing one star, two stars, three stars, or four stars. But if you ever think it's about you, as soon as you're gone, the next person will come in.

So, don't get too full of yourself. And again, it is a refrain that that you try to remember every with every rank. And it's not just flag officers, every kind of rank you make. You start to get you can be you got to be careful because you get more and more confident and bigger. Well, I mean, I must be important. I must have done well. You know, be careful. Yeah. How do you feel good about the accomplishment you have and take seriously the the power and the, the power and the position you're in

and then also wear it lightly because you're not going to wear it that long. And if it changes your identity of yourself, then you're going to have a lot of trouble adjusting when you're not wearing it anymore. Right. Well, this is why you have to be grounded. And in the case of most leaders, the smart ones always have a good kind of right-hand man or right-hand woman. And for me, it was always a Master Chief Petty Officer or a Sergeant Major. So an E9, a senior person in the Special Operations community who you knew could pull you into your office and say, boss, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life.

Or you didn't handle that well. Or come in and say, you, that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. Or you didn't handle that well. Or come in and say, you did that pretty well. And you know you're getting honest advice. And you know that they're going to be there to tell you, to speak truth to power, but also to kind of pick you up when you stumble. And then of course, I've been married for 45 years. So it's easy to be humble when you've been married for that long, because you know you wouldn't have gotten here without her.

Yeah. Isn't that sort of where some of the people get themselves into trouble, the MacArthur's of the world, where you surround yourself with people. They're out to get you. When they're worshiping the ground you walk on, then everyone's worshiping the ground you walk on. If your spouse thinks you're superhuman, now you're. I never had that problem.

It wasn't an issue with me. But also, I think those people self-select, right? They do. That's a downward spiral or a feedback loop you can create. If you're a sensitive person who can't take feedback, you start to select people who don't give you feedback. And then they understand, hey, when I say he really blew it out there,

he doesn't get better. He pouts. And then he doesn't listen to me for a while. Right. And so so a lot of those strong men or those divas or whatever, you know, whatever pejorative you want to use for them. It's they didn't start out that bad. It it accelerates and gets worse over time because the environment gives them what they want but shouldn't get.

And I mean, you see it in the military, you see it in the corporate world, you see it in all sectors of society. And you're right, you have to be on the lookout. You got to be able to look yourself in the mirror and kind of reflect on your behavior. But you also need somebody that, again, is your trusted confidant that you know is going to tell you the truth. Yeah. They think that's why, so it's remarkable. Why does Hadrian pick a kid who's not his son?

Why does he set up this succession plan where he adopts Antoninus who has to adopt Marcus Aurelius. What does he see in this kid? And we sort of make up from his nickname, Hadrian nicknames Marcus Verismus, which means the truest one. That he basically was a kid who couldn't tell a lie. And so there's some sense that he's

kind of the boy in the fable about the emperor who has no clothes. He was at this young age telling the emperor what he needed to hear as opposed to what he wanted to hear. And then the other interesting sort of, again, it's like Robert Carroll's line was that power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. And so the reason that Hadrian selects Antoninus is that before he selects him, he's sort of watching, he's in the forum one day, and he sees Antoninus help his elderly father-in-law up a flight of stairs.

Right. I recall the story. And the idea of just a moment of kindness, decency, that the core is good, maybe that's what gives him a sense that these two men will not be made worse by power. And that's what seems to happen in both cases. We say power corrupts absolutely, but in these two cases, they got better. It revealed who they were. Yes.

And that's the inherent problem of power, I think, is that the worst people are most attracted to it. So where the founders do an amazing job here in America, but where history sort of tells us to be careful is like the worst people want it the most. And how do you keep them out or how do you contain them when they get it? That's the really scary thing. There's a story about Truman. He leaves the White House. It's the first time his car stopping at red lights in eight years. And he goes home to independence and reporters ask him the next day, they go, so what'd you do your first day? You know, not as president, he goes, I took our suitcases up to the attic.

And all of a sudden, he's a he's a regular person again. And he doesn't, you know, his day is his own. And the vertigo that must be in that must be surreal. Well, you know, the day you retire, certainly as a four star, there's a lot of pomp and circumstance. But back to Admiral Keating's point, before the retirement ceremony, you're driven up, in my case, I was down in Tampa, and you've got a security detachment, you've got people

out there, and they're all congratulating you and all this. And then after retirement ceremony is over, you go out and your security detachment's gone. Because you're no longer important. They don't need you to be security anymore. They don't need you to be security. So you're like, I mean, my wife and I came out, we were looking for our, we refer to it as PSD, personal security detachment.

And I'm looking around and there's one guy in a car and they're going, kind of waving at me going, over here, sir. And I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. Is that my Uber driver? That's going on to the next guy. Yes. And again, it's an important reinforcement of The rank you held was a was positional Yeah, and again, that's not to say not to reflect on the fact that you were not worthy of it, but that's gone that's behind you now you gotta move on and

And you're not as important as you thought you were. When if you, but if you have been stained purple or C-05, then you're like, who am I? But if you know who, if you're Truman, you're like, I put the suitcases away and I'm gonna go read a book this afternoon. If you know who you are, then you can adjust for it. But if you're, if who you are has been, you know,

if you wake up and you're like, I'm the bestselling author, well, eventually invariably, you are has been, you know, if you wake up and you're like, I'm the best selling author. Well, eventually, invariably, you are not that right. And so if your identity is tied up in the ephemeral external accomplishment, what happens when it goes away? Athletes talk about that. They're like, wait, I have to book my own flight. You know, like, what is that?

So I get people that I work with all the time. I'm sure you get the same thing. People call me up there. They email me and they say, if you'll put me in touch with your assistant, and I write back, I go, I am my assistant. So just email me. We'll be fine.

It comes back to normal pretty fast, is what you're saying. Yeah, of course it does. And I will tell you, I was happy to have it come back to normal. There's a pressure of being at the top and I loved the job, it was great, but being a little bit normal is good too. But you also talk about the exact opposite of this in the book with the other hard part. You talk about, I think the lesson one of your teachers gives you, Lieutenant McCoy, about the sort of inherent imposter syndrome that every person has

in a position of leadership, which is you go, wait, can I do this? Can I measure up to these people? I mean, the story of Mark Cirulis is that he breaks down crying when he finds out he's going to be emperor, because he knows how many great ones there have been, but also he knows how many bad ones there are. And he doesn't know if you can do it.

And I forget what he had said to you, but it was something like you're in a position of command for a reason. Yeah. So this is the story actually about Chester Nimitz. So here we are in Bastrop and of course, Nimitz was born and raised in Fredericksburg, not too far from here. And so-

Great Naval Town. Great Naval Town, that's right. And although a fabulous museum out there that's in the World War II in the Pacific. But so this Lieutenant McCoy I had, Jim McCoy, teaching Naval ROTC, it's our freshman year, and we learned all the great battles in history. And then we started talking about Chester Nimitz.

And the story is one that I tell quite a bit because I think it's important because Nimitz is now he's the fleet commander in charge of the Pacific fleet. It's about six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And Nimitz is having to make this decision should he sail the fleet to the small island in the Pacific called Midway. And and his staff is advising against it because, oh, by the way, the fleet's already been hit hard. And if we sail to Midway and we lose, it could be the end of the war in the Pacific. Washington is telling him it's a bad idea.

And of course, he goes to see or he goes to see Bull Halsey, we were talking about earlier. But Halsey is in the hospital because he has shingles. So he goes up and they've been friends for a long time. And Halsey, of course, is this gruff old Admiral. And then it tells him about the dilemma. I don't know, everybody's telling me I shouldn't do this. And what do you think?

And as the legend has it, you know, Halsey says, well, Admiral, you told me when in command, command. And it is an important thing to know. I mean, it's important to recognize that as a leader, you're not always going to have perfect information. A lot of times when you're in a leadership position, people are going to tell you this is bad, this is high risk, and when you're in a leadership position, people are going to tell you, this is bad, this is high risk, and sometimes you've got to make those hard, hard decisions. As I told that story, I think I mentioned as a little bit of an epilogue when you fast forward from that discussion with Lieutenant McCoy, about 45 years, I guess, and I'm now a four-star admiral. I'm down

at US Special Operations Command in Tampa, which had historically been an Army command, although Admiral Eric Olson had been right before me. But there was a lot of Army paraphernalia everywhere. So I'm heading out for about a three-week trip at one point in time. And I just kind of, as I'm walking out my office, I kind of flippantly turned to my senior master sergeant, Air Force senior master sergeant who was out there, and name was Dana Hughes and I said, Dana, I don't know, give me something naval in here. I mean, I need to make this place a little bit more naval. I mean, I don't know, give me Nimitz's desk or something. And I walk out and I go out on this three week exercise that I'm on.

I come back after three weeks and I walk into the office, say hi. I go into my office and I'm like, what the heck? What is all this stuff? Got a new desk, a new conference table, a bunch of chairs. And I walk outside and I said, Dana, what is all this stuff? I'd forgotten all about it. And she said, well, sir, you told me to get you Nemitz's desk. So I got you Nemitz's desk. And I said, what? So the Naval Archives had loaned me Nemitz's desk, along with Nemitz's conference table and a bunch of chairs. And so I sat at that desk for three years.

And I told folks, I remember thinking to myself, every time I was making a difficult decision, think about the man who sat at this desk and the decisions he had to make. And then it kind of put all of my decisions, they all kind of paled in comparison. But also I imagine there's kind of a tactile humility to it where you're like, this is a regular size desk.

Well, that was a big desk actually, it was huge. But you know what I'm saying? It was not an emperor's desk, yes. Yeah, yeah, like this table and the chair I sit in in my office were Joan Diddians. Oh, there you go. And I sit in them and I go, a great writer sat in this and there's kind of an upness to it.

Of course. And then also kind of a, it's just a fucking table. Right. It's just a chair. And you sit in and you do, what matters is what you do at the right. And there there's when you see some of those historical artifacts, it it makes it real in a way that the figures can kind of loom historically and unrealistically large to you when they really were just men and women.

Absolutely. And people ask me all the time about, you know, certain historical events that I may have witnessed or been part of. And I'm quick to point out, you know, when these are happening, there are no timphony drums. You don't hear the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There is no crescendo. There is no...

It's just people making decisions. Yeah. And a lot of times you make the decision, you walk out and you go, you don't think that all of a sudden this is a moment in history. In hindsight, I mean, it's not to say that sometimes you do. I can remember when we received, where I was in the White House and we received word that we were going to invade Iraq. And Dr. Reyes, Condi Reyes came out and kind of told the NSC staff president made

this decision. But once again, there were, there's no orchestra, no timpani drums, no, you know, no, it was, the decision was made and we all kind of went back to work and said, okay, well now we got to get to work. And it was the, the, the human-ness, if that is a word of it, there wasn't huge grandeur. There wasn't, nobody was wearing purple robes. There was just, there were people trying to make the best decision they could. Whether it was a good decision or not, it was not something that, again, came with a lot of drama.

Well, you know, what's interesting is when you think about that specific one, right? It's like depending on where you are in history, what music you would put in there is different. There's the dramatic music, and then if you were doing the movie about it today, it would be some kind of warning, you know? And so it's good to remember, yeah, like some of the things that seemed significant turned out to be not significant,

and some of the things that seemed insignificant turned out that everything hinged on that moment. And that sometimes the music in your head is really the dangerous thing. The thing that Stokes would be talking about, the passions. Like when you're too passionate, when you're too emotional, when you are too caught up in the moment, that's when you're making not great decisions.

And maybe, speaking of another pivotal White House moment, I think about, you know, the Cuban missile crisis. And, you know, to me, that's such a great example of leadership that's turning the music down and turning the passions down to figure out how to make something extended over a period of time to make better decisions. Because in that heat of the moment, to me, that's really what Stoicetan is about. It's not the suppression of emotions, but it's not getting caught up in big emotional moments and then maybe doing the wrong thing. Going to the wrong thing, right? Yeah. I mean, I think he does in meditations talk about kind of taking your time to think through the challenges that you're facing. Absolutely.

Yeah. And then when other people bear the consequences of that decision, those are the ones that are most significant, right, and great leaders. And I can only imagine the decisions you had to make where you're not the one that has to go do it. And it's not that it doesn't weigh on you, but it weighs on you differently than the person who has

to go be the tip of that spear. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's a... Yeah, part of it is, you know, it's the old kind of coach's syndrome. Sometimes you'd rather be in the game than coaching on the sidelines, but the guys that are in the game, of course, are the ones that are risking the most. Yeah.

So to talk about your early career, because I think there's two moments that really stuck out of me that I thought were interesting. You tell the story of the frog float that you're supposed to make, which you thought was this sort of humiliating bit of busy work. And what's the advice that you? Because I think people, we find ourselves in this position.

We get tasked with something where like, this is the worst thing you could ask me to do. I hate this. This is beneath me. And what did they tell you? Well, so this is, it was at my first SEAL command. I was a brand new ensign. And I remember the day it happened,

I'm out at some training exercise in San Diego. So this all happened in San Diego and in San Diego Bay. And some petty officer comes running up to me and says, hey, sir, the commanding officer wants to see you. Well, I'm an incident commanding officer. I mean, he's the big guy, right? I didn't even know if he knew who I was. I'd only been at the command a couple of weeks.

And I'm thinking, well, this is it. This is why I went through SEAL training. I'm going to go do a mission into Vladivostok to get the Soviets. We're going to go back to Vietnam and rescue the POWs, we're going to go do something, right? So I rushed across, I had to go across the base and get to my headquarters and I go in to see my commanding officer and I pop to and he's a guy's name was Bill Salisbury, terrific guy, Vietnam vet, highly decorated.

And he says, well, Mr. McRaven? He says, I've been hearing good things about you. Thinking, yeah, yeah, highly decorated. And he says, well, Mr. McRaven? He says, I've been hearing good things about you. Thinking, yeah, yeah, you have. He says, you know, I've been talking to the chief petty officers, and they say you're the best incident in the team. I'm like, that's great. And then it occurred to me, I think

I was the only incident in the team. And then he says, well, you know, the Commodore called me. Well, the Commodore was his boss. I'm thinking, wow, the Commodore. And it's a big guy. This has got to be something important. And he says, you know, the Fourth of July is coming up. I'm thinking, OK, what does that have to do with Vlad Vostok?

And he said, well, you know, every year, the city of Coronado has a parade. And now I'm really thrown off. I'm not sure what the heck we're talking about. And he says, so we need to build a frog float for frogmen. And we have the frog float. And of course, I'm like, and he says, hey, well, go talk to the supply officer and he'll get you all the gear you need and go build that frog float. You're in charge of the frog float. So to your point,

I mean, I go back to the locker room and I'm muttering under my breath and this crusty old master chief. So again, senior seal, guy named Herschel Davis, comes up to me and he says, what's wrong, Ensign? I said, nothing, Master Chief. He goes, no, no, what's wrong? I said, no, he goes, come on. I said, well, finally I confessed. I said, well, sir, I said, Master Chief, the commanding officer just called me in and he

wants me to build a frog float for the Fourth of July parade. I remember the Master Chief says, and I bet you thought you were going to be jumping out of airplanes, blowing things up and saving the world. I said, yeah, I did. And he goes, well, let me tell you something, Ensign. Says, I've been in this canoe club for 30 years. And if the skipper wants you to build a frog float, then you build the best damn frog float you can. And that was it. It was the best advice I ever had. You build the best damn frog float. You know, we all get these jobs, as you said, Ryan.

We all get these jobs that we think are beneath our status. Yeah. But if you take the jobs on and you take the job on, you do it well, one, people will think that you're good enough to do the next job and the bigger job. But I think you also have a responsibility. When somebody gives you a job, do it the best you can. Yeah. And so throughout the course of my career, I kind of had to build a lot of frog floats.

And I always tried to do the best I could, no matter what the job was. And I think that put me in a position where people said, you know, every time we give McRaven a job that, by the way, most people don't want. Yeah. He does a good job. Yeah. And so let's let's give him this next big job here. Some things are meant to be shared, like sunsets over the Pacific, picnics in Central Park, or Aeroplan points.

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Your girl, Kiki Palmer is out here doing all the things, winning an Emmy, acting, singing, looking fabulous, and my favorite role yet, podcast sales. In my podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer, I'm talking to so many cool people. Some of my favorite conversations have been about growing up as a child star with Allian AJ, queer rights and trans issues with JVN, abusive relationships with Dr. Drew, silk presses with the VP, and the music that shapes us with Mean Girls' Renee Rapp. So many to choose from. And in this new season, just wait,

who I'll be talking to next. Snoop Dogg, Sterling K. Brown, Saweetie to name a few. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch full episodes on YouTube and you can listen to Baby This Is Kiki Palmer early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer, early and ad free, right now by joining Wondery Plus.

["Wonderful Place"] When I read that story, I thought of this story from ancient Greece. There was this sort of promising, up and coming, you know, young, young, young man. And so he threatens the powers that be. So they go, how do we, how do we sort of get rid of this guy?

They were like, how do we, you know, what now, how do we send him to Alaska or something, right? And so they banish him to this position or they promote him to this position that he has to manage like the city sewers, which is supposed to be gross. It's supposed to be horrible. He's supposed to quit in disgust.

It's supposed to be shameful. It's like a backwater that's supposed to kill his career. And instead he becomes like the best damn sewer guy in the history of Athens. And he cleans it up. And it becomes this not just a position of honor, but it becomes now a position that people aspire to, because it becomes the launching point for his career.

And Plutarch says the lesson of this is that we bring dignity and honor to the position, rather than the we bring dignity and honor to the position rather than the position bring dignity and honor to us, which is so, you know, we think we want the important, powerful, fancy thing, as opposed to understanding that we have within us the ability to turn making the frog float or whatever into something of meaning and purpose. And that's ultimately what happens, right?

You did a pretty good job. Yeah, it worked out OK. OK. The other one that I thought of, do you know the famous exchange between Admiral Rickover and Jimmy Carter? There's a number of them, but which one in particular? So when he's being interviewed by Rickover

to work on nuclear subs, he's sort of trying to get the sense of this young kid. And he asks Carter, how'd you do at the Naval Academy? What were your grades? And Carter's sort of listing off all these accomplishments. And he's like, this is where I stood in my class. These are my grades. This is how great I was. And Rick over sort of nodding along and nodding along. And then he goes, Rickover sort of nodding along and nodding along. And then he goes, but did you always do your best? And Carter says, instinctively wants to answer,

but then he decides to be honest. And he goes, no, I didn't always do my best. Cause he's thinking of times when he got asked to do this project and he phoned it in, or there was extra credit and he didn't do it. And so he goes, no, I guess I didn't always do my best. And then Rickover says, why not? And then he gets up and leaves the room and that sort of haunts Jimmy Carter's whole life.

So that question of like, if I was asked to do it, if I'm doing it, why not do my best? And if you're not going to do your best, why do it? And I think that's when I try to think about opportunities that I had or things that I go, yeah, I didn't always do my best, and why? I should have just not done it, or I could have given an extra 8%, and who knows where I'd have ended up.

But this also stems from, again, my parents were part of that kind of greatest generation. And my father was an Air Force officer. My mother was a East Texas school teacher and I remember my grandmother who was from Grapeland, Texas, she would have things and one of them was always, hey, if you're going to do a job, do it well. And my mother, there were a lot of times my mother when I was a young teenager would give me jobs to do and I remember one of them was washing the windows in the house.

We lived down in San Antonio. And, you know, frankly, I'd do a half big job at it. And she'd come out and go, it's not good. You miss this. You didn't do this. And she'd keep me out there until I got done. And then she would. When I finally got it done to her satisfaction,

she would say, you could have done that the first time around. You could have put the effort into it. You know, and I know you don't think these windows are important but they're important for our home and and when I give you something to do I want you to do it to the best of your ability and Again, I probably like Jimmy Carter didn't always do things to the best of my ability But I remember and I remember my mother being kind of disappointed in me that I didn't Watch the windows to the best of my ability

my mother being kind of disappointed in me that I didn't watch the windows to the best of my ability. And that was probably more of a wake up call than just not doing the work. You don't want your mother to be disappointed in you. Well, when we were talking earlier about the slogans, the credos, the mottos, the sort of values, it's interesting to me, having now been able to, I've studied it, obviously I've gotten to speak

to some of these different institutions. When I am exposed to an institution or culture where there's a sports team or the Air Force Academy or the Naval Academy or Rangers or something, and you see these really bedrock values get taught, like repeatedly, just beaten into someone until it becomes part of who they are. I do feel a kind of a jealousy,

because like you'd say like in the civilian world or the secular world or whatever you wanna describe it, there isn't a lot of that, right? There's a lot of teaching of like almost the opposite, not just by example, I just mean they're sort of a tearing down of old ways or old things, but not like I didn't, I don't, other than maybe the occasional sports team, I don't remember anyone really giving like those things. And I was, I'm writing about whistleblowers in the book I'm doing now and I was talking

to this man, he's an air force officer and he was talking about how he was in this position where he became a whistleblower and I asked him why and he goes, well, at the Air Force Academy, he's like, I'm a graduate of the Air Force Academy and I swore an oath. And the sincerity and the earnestness with which he said that, like it was like he had this kind of higher obligation that a normal person doesn't have. It struck me as so simple, but also so profound and something that I don't think most of us get.

Well, and to your point, you know, we all that are members of not just the military, but generally the federal government, I mean, the congressmen and senators and folks that work in the office of the president, we all raise our hand and we swear allegiance to the Constitution. I, William H. McRaven, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge

the duties of the office upon which I'm about to enter, so help me God." You say it enough times because you do it for every reenlistment, for every soldier, for every sailor, every airman, every marine, and it is important. And it is important that when you do these reenlistments for these soldiers or officers, is that they understand the nature of the oath. And a lot of times before you do that, you talk about why the oath is important. And so, it doesn't surprise me that your whistleblower had that just emblazoned on his heart. Yeah. Because it is, it's why you serve.

Yeah. And, and, and it's probably easy to sort of skip over, fast forward through the oath as it's a part of the thing, but, but to really, to sort of be steeped in those values. And I think maybe that's why I took to Stoicism, is that it was the first thing outside of religion that was like, hey, here's a guide to living. Here's a code that has worked for people in the past. That was something that was struck by a lot of the codes you talk about in the book. How many of them are like, I am inheriting a legacy or a culture and I won't let it down.

And the power of deciding to be part of a tradition is. Well I think that is actually what draws a lot of young men and women in. They love the idea of tradition, they love the idea of camaraderie, they love them. I mean, you know, when you think about 247 years of the United States military, there's a pale comparison to some European countries. But for us, that's a lot of tradition. Yeah. And that's the longest one.

It's the longest one, longest serving democracy. But the traditions are important. And we reinforce those traditions. Everything between the color of the stripes on the Marines uniform to pick something. And that tradition gets reinforced. And that sense of duty and honor and country gets reinforced all the time. And yes, sometimes it comes across

like a bit of a platitude. It's going to be the bumper sticker here. But it doesn't when you're in a foxhole and somebody's shooting at you. It takes on the meaning it was meant to be. How do you think about teaching more people those ideas? I guess you talked about the greatest generation. Maybe part of the reason that generation was so great is that they all sort of go through

this same system. They're forced to. I mean, it would have been better that they not had to do it, but they did. And so they came away with a shared set of values. And look, the country was less unwieldy and less populous and more homogenous in ways that it's not now. And not that they fully lived up to any of those ideas, but they all ran through a system. And so they had some values. They were forced to sacrifice. But I was curious if you even came up when you were at UT, like how do you in a secular civilian world, how

do you think people can learn those sort of- Well, I mean, it starts at the top. I mean, this is the nature of any organization is the people in an organization are going to look to the top. And they're going to say, who is this man or woman and are they a person of integrity? Do they represent the values that I think are important? Are they honorable? Do they tell the truth? Do they work hard?

Are they respectful of us? Do they listen to us? Are they the servant leaders we need them to be? Now, the fact of the matter is when you're in an organization the size of the US military, I can remember, again, I talked about my personal security detachment. I remember one point in time talking to one of the E6s, our first class petty officer.

And I asked him, I said, do you know who the chief of naval operations is? So that's the senior guy in the Navy. He didn't have a clue. Why would he? I mean, chief of Naval Operations doesn't affect him, but what happens is the Chief of Naval Operations affects the next Admiral in the chain of command,

who affects the next Admiral, who affects the captain, who affects the commander, who affects the lieutenant commander, who gets down to affect the chief petty officer. So there is this sense that, yes, he may not know who the chief of naval operations is, but the chief of naval operations will begin to affect the kind of entire organization by the thrust of their values.

So I mean, when I was chancellor at UT, you try to live the values. You try to express those values in the things you do, and you hope that that has an effect on the people that work for you. But also, we talk a lot about is there ever the possibility to have a national service. And I think it's something the United States should look

towards. It doesn't have to be the military, but could we have a national service academy that focuses on domestic issues? So you go through the same process, you go to your congressman, you get an appointment, you know, and, you know, a thousand young men and women show up. But what they're going to learn now is they're going to learn civil engineering so they can solve the water problem in Flint, Michigan. They're going to be teachers, they're

going to be doctors, they're going to be public defenders. They're going to be whatever is domestically focused. And then they serve. But then you could also have ROTC-like programs where people come in. You could have an enlisted corps. And if you ever got to the point where you could convince everybody that it was worthwhile for everybody to serve two years, teach for America,

something that gave back to the country, you would begin to see the sense of common values, I think, begin to embed themselves across the nation. Instead, we don't do that. So you have to look to organizations like the military or law enforcement or, you know, or any of the other federal governments that people come into an organization that has a history, that has a ladder that they climbed in order to be better. You're going to have to live those values.

Yeah. Maybe we, and now that you say that, it makes me think we might even overestimate the importance of military service on the greatest. Oh, absolutely. Because it also included- Civil engineering, I mean- Yeah, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the WPA.

What they experienced was government as it's supposed to be, which is of the people, for the people, by the people. They were doing the work. They were seeing the tangible results of that work. And they were also like, you know, I think we talked about Truman earlier, like, you know, Truman meets a bunch of people that he wouldn't have met, you know, in a small Missouri town, you know, he meets Jews

and blacks and, you know, he meets different types of people outside of his world. And this is the first opening up of him as what ultimately became a great leader. You're forced out of your comfort zone, and you're forced to think about something bigger than yourself. The other thing that I thought was interesting about your career, because you allude to it a number of times in your books, you have this pivotal moment where you're a young seal and you're fired.

But you don't talk that much about what actually happened. I was curious what happened and why was that such a formative experience for you? Well, it was a formative experience because as we were talking earlier, I think I viewed myself as a successful SEAL. I got brought into this elite SEAL team and it didn't go well. So the commanding officer lost confidence in me, didn't think I was a good fit for the team, which was probably true. And I got relieved in my command.

And all of a sudden, everything I thought about myself, which was, my gosh, I'm always successful. I'm successful because I do all these things. And then all of a sudden, the rug just pulled off from under you. But I will go back to, you asked right up front, the kind of never ring the bell. It was like, I mean, I went home that night after the boss had told me that I was no longer running my team. I talked to my wife and I said, I don't know if I got a career left here.

You know, it's never good to get fired, really bad to get fired in the Navy and particularly bad to get fired in the SEAL teams because everybody knows who you are. And she says to me, you know, you've never quit at anything in your life. Don't start now. Yeah. And't start now. Yeah. And it was hard. I mean, you know, because you have to go back and you have to face, because I was still at command for about another month before I moved to another command. But even when I moved to another command, everybody knew I'd been fired.

Yeah. So, you know, you got to hold your head high. You've got to, you know, stay confident. You got to stay humble. You've got to re-earn everybody's respect because they think that you're broken. And so this was a tough time, but I fell back on the values my parents had taught me. I fell back on this idea that I'm going to work through this tough time. And of course, eventually you have another success, which fortunately I moved to another SEAL team.

They put me in charge of a SEAL platoon. I almost immediately went on deployment. It was a wonderful deployment. The next thing you know, I'm back up and running again. It's interesting when we talk about resilience, how people can be really resilient in one way and maybe not in another. Oh, absolutely. So, you know, I think about some of the things, you talk about this a lot in Sea Stories.

When I think about the sheer, in some cases, literal hell that you have to go through to be a Navy SEAL, and then it's like, well, now I have to quit because people might think, now I'm embarrassed in front of my, like, you know what I mean? The sheer physical endurance you had, and then we get tested in this other way,

which is I'm humiliated or I screwed up or, you know, someone lost confidence in me. And then we're like, I don't know if I can take this. Well, as I was mentioned earlier, the thing about this never ring the bell is, yeah, in my career, there were the physical challenges, you know, freezing cold in the water, you know, long patrols. That was easier to endure, of course, than the humiliation. But if you have convinced yourself or if your core values are strong enough, then it's got

to apply equally. Okay, I've been humiliated. This isn't good, but I'm not going to give up. Was it a fair firing? Do you feel like he deserved it? You know, it was a, you know, any time you're the commanding officer, you're the ultimate arbitrator of whether or not a young officer is doing

what needs to be done for the command. He didn't think I was doing it. So I guess from his standpoint, it was fair, from my standpoint, you know, hard, hard to tell. Even to this, this far away, I could have done a lot of things better. And there's no question about it. Well, and the reason I ask is that sometimes resilience, it's not just, you know, enduring physical pain or the blows of fortune. Sometimes it's enduring injustice or unfairness or just all around assholes.

You know, like how just I think sometimes we we are most devastated when it feels like we didn't deserve it, but we never deserve it. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And but I can tell you there was part of me that said, yeah, I could have done better. There was part of me that felt like it was a little bit unjust, but I would say it was probably 50 50. Some of what I thought was unjust and some of it, I thought, yeah, I probably could have done a better job.

Was it like a clash of leadership styles or? No, it was it was basically a class leadership styles. I was, as he he later said, I think in an article, I was too straight to be a good special operations guy. They were a little bit more freewheeling, a little bit more. And again, I'd been raised a little differently than he had. And so again, yeah, it was really just

a class of leadership style. And that's a lesson, I think, every young person who's inserted in a company or an organization or a system finds is you clash with the people above you because they're too conservative, they're too slow, they're too this or that. And you go, well, I would do it differently. But you're not doing it.

And the ability, it's this tension between sort of biding your time, paying your dues, and then also we wonder why the next generation of leadership sort of isn't the clean break that we want. It's because how do you think they got there? They were steeped in the old system for 40 years, and now you're expecting them to be some radical rule breaker. That's a tricky balance for young people.

It is. I mean, do you go along to get along, or get along to go along so that you can continue to advance? I mean, there were just some things that I didn't think right were at the command. And I just wasn't prepared to go down that road and that's a road he needed me to go down and so again we had a part anyways but I will tell you it was never acrimonious as a lot of people think.

You know he sat down we had a good conversation I wasn't happy about it obviously but at the end of the day I recognized he was commanding officer and you know, and we we crossed paths a number of times, you know, later on in our careers. He retired soon thereafter, but but it was never acrimonious. Yeah, there I talked to when I gave a talk to the Naval Academy a few years ago, one of the things I talked about is this tension that, especially in the military, but I think in all organizations, right? They want to make you part of the team.

They want to make you a team player. They steep you in the culture and how we do things here, how things have always been done. And then they also want people to be independent thinkers, to do the right thing no matter what. So it's like we expect a certain thing, which is the definition of leadership, which is a moral compass and, you know, a business or a sort of where things are going compass. And then also this like intense conformity on top of that.

And then we wonder why there's ethical stand scandals. We wonder why, you wonder why people see things coming and they don't change fast. It's this tension between we want you to be a team player, unity over self, and then we go. But of course, never obey an unlawful order. Always do the right thing. Put the country over your career, et cetera. And that's a real tension.

And if you don't have the values, the inner values, the inner sense, and you're valuing the external things too much, that can be, that's an incredibly difficult line of work. Yeah. In The Wizard and the Bullfrog, when I was asked to write the book, the publisher said, well, we'd like you to write a book on leadership. I said, great. A lot I want to say on leadership. In fact, I had so much to say I couldn't figure out how to frame the book.

And as you know, you got to kind of have a frame first before you begin to put the meat on the bones. And I struggled for a long time. And then I started thinking, well, how did I learn leadership? What was it? And I think I tell the story in the book about when I was young and again, same early command. I went in, I was getting ready to do a training operation and I'm briefing the commanding officer again or maybe it was the operations officer.

And he says to me at some point in time as I'm finished, he says, well, if you make these decisions and you take these actions, will you be able to stand before the long green table? Well, I'd never heard that expression. And of course, we didn't have Google back then, so I had to go figure out what that meant. Well, from World War II days, and even actually when I joined the Navy in 1977, if you walked into the conference room, they had a long boardroom table, and it was covered in a very thin film of green felt. Like a pool table? Like a pool table, yeah. Absolutely. And so the implication of the saying was, because if you had an

official proceeding, the young officer would have to come in and sitting at the long green table would be the senior officers who would judge your actions. And so again, the point of the saying was, if you can't convince reasonable men and women that the decisions you've made and the actions you're taking are the right actions, then maybe you should rethink them. And later on, we talked about this, and there were three litmus tests. Are they moral, legal, and ethical?

And if you apply those three tests to every decision or every action you're going to take, you're generally going to end up on the right side. Doesn't mean you can't take risks, doesn't mean you can't be bold, doesn't mean you can't do all the sort of things, be independent thinkers, but there are certain lines you got to stay within. You got to be ethical and follow the rules, you got to be legal and follow the law, and you have to be moral and follow what you know to be right.

And people say, well, yeah, that can be relative sometimes. No it isn't. Everybody knows what right looks like, whether you choose to admit it or not. And if you follow those three things, you're going to be okay. Adam Smith, before he wrote A Wealth of Nations, he wrote this philosophy book. He was sort of taught by a professor who's a big fan of the Stokes, and it's called A Theory of Moral Sentiments. And one of the tests he has,

which I thought of when I heard your thing about the long green table, he says, pretend there's an impartial observer on your shoulder. Like if there's just a regular reasonable person watching what you're doing, could you sell it to them? And what would they think? Because so often, because we're doing it in private or because we're doing it when we think no one's looking or we're doing it inside the confines of our own authority or auspices,

we don't take the time and go, how would this look? There's a Roman who is a powerful politician and this architect says, hey, people can see in your house. And he says, for like 10 talents, which is an extraordinary amount of money, I can make your house private. I can redesign them, give you a little privacy. He goes, here's 50 talents. And he's like, make the whole thing visible.

And his point was, people should be able to see what I'm doing. And I shouldn't be doing anything that people, I don't want people to see. Of course, it doesn't mean what he does in the bathroom or whatever. But his point is, yeah, the tests you're going, if I had explained this to the American people, if more politicians thought that, if people

knew what our supply chain looked like, would you have a lot of explaining to do? And could you explain it? And you're right, that's a really good test. Yeah, it's tough though, because sometimes that means we can't do stuff. Or I think you, do you talk about who was that famous Air Force guy who, you know, believed in this air supremacy and he gets court martialed? Sometimes you make your case in front of the green table and you lose. And you lose.

Even though you were right. But of course later on, it's Jimmy Doolittle, later on he becomes the father of the Air Force. Yeah. So, yeah. So, you know, he stood his ground against the Navy and the Army Air Corps and said we needed to form an Air Force and he was court-martialed. Yeah.

And found guilty. And only one officer abstained and that was Douglas MacArthur. And MacArthur, I think somewhere in his paper said, look, officer should have an opportunity to disagree. But of course, what happens is he goes on to... Oh, no, it wasn't Doolittle., oh no, and it wasn't due little. It was Mitchell, right? Mitchell, thank you. I'm sorry. It was Mitchell. And of course, fortunately, he'd made friends at some point in time with FDR. And when FDR becomes president, FDR brings Mitchell in and of course decides that they're going to invest in an Army Air Force and

the rest is history. And Mitchell becomes, again, the kind of father of the modern Air Force. Yeah. Right, but it's like sometimes you could take the story of can you defend it in front of the green table and go, well, if they say it's OK, then it's OK. And if they say it's not OK, then I was wrong.

And I think history is replete of examples of people who did really bad shit getting cleared and people who did really good stuff. You know, I gave a talk to the Joint Special Operations Command. I was doing the talk on the four bridges. Like it's important to remember Jackie Robinson was not only a veteran, but he was dishonorably discharged. You know, he was court martialed, right?

For something he was told to go to the back of a bus when that was illegal and he defends himself and he gets sort of basically brought up on charges and he goes before his version of the table, makes his case and they kick him out anyway. He had to know inside he did the right thing. And so it's this, I think the green table is metaphorical. Do you know what I mean? It's your conscience that you're really making that appeal to, or your parents,

or some higher authority. Well, and of course, in Billy Mitchell's case, again, there's some nuance to this, of course, which was Mitchell not only stood his ground, but he really went, really went after publicly the Navy and the Army and D.C. And so it was, I mean, he kind of got outside his lanes, which is really why they court martialed him. I don't know. I mean, they court martialed him for a number of reasons. But in the end, he felt passionately enough about it. He saw that war was coming. And so Mitchell realized he had to make a stand.

He probably could have been a little bit more delicate in how he did it, but who knows? As I said, in the end, he ends up being on the right side of history. Yeah, I interviewed, I feel so bad I'm forgetting his name. I interviewed the captain who was the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Who was- Oh right, during COVID. Yeah, and he loses, he probably would have made admiral, and people can agree, disagree. And he has to look at that and go,

maybe I could have been more delicate about it. If I was doing it again, I would do it this way. But it's also like, did I more or less do the right thing? You know what I mean? In the heat of the moment, in life, since none of us are perfect people, we're not gonna do it perfectly, but were we largely on the right side of it?

Was our heart in the right place is maybe a way to think about it, right? Like, no one's gonna be perfect, and that's certainly true for whistleblowers and rule breakers, et cetera, or groundbreaking thinkers is that they tend to rub people the wrong way or they, you know, they challenge vested interests in a way that even if they're right, they're right in a way that's politically inconvenient or, you know, they air dirty laundry.

And you have that's why I think if you have to be able to sleep with it at night. Yeah. And I'm sure he sleeps just fine. Of course. do laundry and you have that's why I think if you have to be able to sleep with it at night. Yeah. And I'm sure he sleeps just fine. Of course. You know, these are it is it is hard sometimes to to stand up to the conventional thinking, to stand up to your bosses. There is, of course, you know, as all of us who have spent time in any sort of organization, you know, there are ways to do this properly,

and then there are ways where sooner or later, if it's not getting through properly, you gotta start banging the table. And we used to always say, look, you can always throw your stars on the table. So the implication is, if you disagree, the great thing about the US military, is if you disagree,

if you think it's either not a lawful order, or it's an order you, it may be lawful, but it's not one you wanna carry out, then you can always resign. And you take your stars off and you put them on the table and you say, thanks very much, it's been an honor and I'm moving on. And it happens periodically. I can honestly say in my career, I never saw a decision made by a senior officer or senior leader that I thought was immoral, illegal.

There were some I didn't agree with, probably a lot of them I didn't agree with, but on balance I understood why the decision was made and I never felt the urge to say, well, hell no, I'm not going to go, this is terrible, I'm going to throw my stars on the table on this because one, I realized that I'm not always right either. Sure. And my opinion isn't always the best. And you know, I used to tell young officers that were coming into command positions, I would say, look, the man or woman before you was not an idiot.

So you come into a new command and now you've been anointed as the commanding officer and, you know, and you think, well, I'm the new guy, obviously, I'm going to make things better. And then you get in there and you realize that all the decisions of the guy or gal before you made, they probably made for a reason. Sure. It was hard to make things seemed easy from the outside, but now that you're in there, now that's your responsibility. Now that you have to make those decisions, they're hard decisions to make. So you do have to come in again, you have to have a little bit of swagger, but you ought

to have a whole lot of humility when you're taking on a new position. Yeah. Yeah. You it's, it's again, it's attention, right? All these things come down to a sort of a nuance and opposites, right? It's like there's, there's, there's an institutional logic to the status quo. Always. There's a reason they do it that way and why they haven't done the thing that you took two seconds to think about. They also thought about it. And at the same time, when you look at why nations or companies have sleptwalked into crises or kept repeating in error, it's also because of the inability for someone to go,

this is insane, right? Why are we doing it this way? And so I think your point, a leader has to be willing to throw their stars on the table or you can't be so wedded to the position or the thing that you value it more than either your integrity or your freedom because you're of course other people for lower down the command to to to potentially throw their stars on that. They're you know, their stars on the table. You want them to not go along with something that.

And then if you're not willing to do it, if you go, well, I got to stick around. I'm too I'm too important to be expendable. That that message also trickles down. And I think we we see that too. Yeah, I was I was fortunate in my SEAL career. And I think all the SEAL admirals that were kind of my contemporaries would tell you the same thing. So when I came in in 1977, there were no SEAL admirals.

There were only two Navy captains, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast. None of us ever thought about making captain because, I mean, that was the pinnacle of anybody's career. you just wanted to be a Seal of Platoon commander like a lieutenant. And so every time you got promoted past lieutenant, it was just gravy. He was like, you know, if they fire me now, I'll be fine. But what that gave you, actually, as I became more senior was this confidence that, okay, if it's not right, I'm going to throw my stars on the table because I'm five pay grades higher than I ever thought I'd be.

And again, I can tell you with all of my contemporaries in the SEAL community, we were all like that. None of us expected to make Admiral. We were all very fortunate to make Admiral. And therefore, we didn't mind speaking truth to power. We didn't mind confronting conventional wisdom. We didn't mind a lot of these things, because we were playing with house money. Yeah, if your success, your rank, if your money, whatever it is,

if it doesn't make you more confident and less risk averse, it's having the opposite of the intended effect. We expect the people who have advanced a certain, they're the ones who are supposed to have the independence to be able to say, hey, this is a bad idea. Hey, I'm not going to go along with this. That's what that, they're supposed supposed if they can't do it, you can't ask someone, you know, somebody lower that's got two kids in college and whatever, you know, you need you need to. But unfortunately, I think in across levels of society or sectors

of society, it tends to the opposite tends to be true. And it's understandable. I mean, you mean, I've never criticized those people that you thought, well, why didn't they make that hard decision? And when you step back and you say to your point, well, because they've got a job, they've got a wife, they've got a couple of kids that are in college, I get it. I understand exactly why they did or did not make that decision. And you can't really harbor any ill will against them.

But when you're in a position of responsibility, like me and my fellow admirals were, you know, at that point in time, you know, you're kind of past that ceiling where you can't afford to throw your stars down if you need to. Well, the Stoics say you got to you got to remember how it used to be. Right. You know, Seneca would practice wearing rags or eating hard bread. His point was he wanted to be able to go, this isn't so bad. So if there ever came a moment where he had to sort of put all his chips in, he wasn't

afraid to lose. He said, this is what you fear. And there comes a time he works with Nero and he goes, I want out. And he'd probably been complicit for too long, should have left earlier. But he goes, you can have it all back. You can confiscate everything. I want out. I want no part of this.

That came from that cultivation of that independence. And if you, if, as you said, you know, the driver and the staff and the identity and the things on your shoulder or the Twitter followers or whatever, the accoutrement of your profession, if you come to identify them, you're not going to be in the position to roll the dice. When the reality is like ex-Senator, ex-Congressman, like I interviewed Adam Kinzinger, it's still a good life. You know what I mean? They don't end up under a bridge somewhere, right? That's right. You've got to be willing- I've got no complaints. Yeah. You've got to be willing to say,

this isn't worth it. I accumulated this credibility or I have this conscience for a reason and this is where I draw the line. We need, ultimately that's what leadership is. Well, Adam, well, thank you very, very much. This was amazing. Oh, well, thanks. My pleasure, Ryan. Good to be here. And what a fabulous bookstore you have here.

Well, I know you've got to get out of here, but you want to check out some book show fast? You betcha. You betcha. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at DailyStoic.com slash email. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music.

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