The Jordan Harbinger Show - 351: General Martin Dempsey | No Time For Spectators

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

General Martin Dempsey (@Martin_Dempsey) is a retired Army general who served as the 18th chairman of the Joint Chiefs for four years during the Obama administration, and the author of No Time for Spectators: The Lessons That Mattered Most from West Point to The West Wing. What We Discuss with General Martin Dempsey: Why learning how to follow is as much of a skill as leadership. That character is built over time based on a series of small decisions that we make during the uncertain moments when things don't go our way. How someone who wanted to grow up and become a Supreme Court Justice detoured into a 45-year career in the military. How an assignment that seemed like a career-ending punishment led General Dempsey to take on his most purposeful, important role. How to be a trusted advisor -- whether it's to a CEO or the President. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/351 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave, and we want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you'll like you. like to learn and improve, then you're going to be right at home here with us. In today's conversation, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, we'll discuss how learning how to follow is as much a skill as leadership, and how character is made over time, mostly to ourselves, based on a series of small decisions that we make individually. Character's not made in the easy moments where things tend to go our way. It's made in the uncertain moments that usually includes some measure of personal risk or professional risk, for that matter. I had fun with this one. And even if you're not into leadership or military topics, I think you're going to enjoy this episode. And if you

want to know how I manage to get all these great people in my orbit, it's about the network. I know you think, oh, he's got a big podcast. He can just call whoever he wants. It's always, always, always, always about the network. It's a reason I get guests that even popular nighttime or daytime TV talk show hosts don't get. It's because I'm hustling my butt off and using and leveraging my network and I'm teaching you how to do that for free, not book guests, but develop the network for personal or professional reasons. That's a free course. It's called six-minute networking. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

Now, here's General Martin Dempsey. I heard you initially wanted to join the Naval Academy, which I kind of found a little bit funny. No, no, not really. I mean, that's one way to put it. What happened was my uncle was a sailor in World War II. Of course, when he came back and we'd be watching the Army Navy game or something, and he always would be pushing the Naval Academy. So at one point, when I was applying to colleges, he persuaded me to apply, which I did. But I thought I'd made it pretty clear. I really didn't want to go there, but I would apply. Anyway, I didn't get in because I failed the vision, back to vision. I failed the vision test. And in those days, you know, pre-LASIC surgery, half of the class had to have perfect vision. And so anyway, I got denied, but in the process of

applying for the Naval Academy, I got to met some folks from West Point because I went up there to do my physical. It wasn't hard to get in to get in the military academies in 1969 and 70 for obvious reasons. And so anyway, somebody who was supposed to go to West Point changed their mind on June 27th. And I got a telegram and, you know, congratulations. We'll see you on the 1st of July. And I said, to my mother, I said, no, you won't. No, they won't. And, you know, long story short, she decided to cry. Right. And I ended up spending 45 years in the military.

She, mom cries in a career is born. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's kind of funny. I mean, I would imagine you didn't want to go because, I mean, I guess at that point, Vietnam was making military service very unpopular. Is that kind of when you said for obvious reasons? Well, that was part of it. Sure.

I mean, you know, the war had gone badly. The nation had turned against. against not only the war, but against those who were fighting it. And then secondly, I had already mapped out what I thought was a pretty credible path forward. I was going to go to Manhattan College in New York City and study pre-law and eventually become a Supreme Court justice. I don't know about that. But that was the plan. And I was dating a young lady in high school who eventually became my wife. And so, you know, it was just a little too disruptive from my taste. Yeah. I know you did this medical exam at a base. I actually did my medical exam at a

base in Germany. And I think it's interesting because they said, hey, your vision is bad. And I went and got Lasic, which didn't exist back when you were doing it. So I was like that close. But then I realized that getting into the Naval Academy was going to be a giant pain because you need these congressional nominations and all that stuff as you're well aware. And I just kind of went, you know, I don't know if I'm going to be cut out for this. What happens if I don't like it? You know, I'm stuck in there. And then I got to go, then you have eight years of service afterwards. Like, what if I'm not cut out for this? So I went to Michigan instead.

And that was probably a good decision for somebody like me who can't focus on anything for more than five minutes. Well, that's not really true. But that's what I thought at the time. Yeah, you're right. And, you know, one of the things, now that we've got an all volunteer force, and we can be selective about who we bring in. We try to bring in people with different personality types. And I think we're pretty successful at it.

But, you know, Big Blue is not a bad safety net for you. Yeah. I think one of the main reasons that I didn't end up joining the service, because I had a scholarship for the school from ROTC, one of the problems was, and this sort of speaks to some stuff that's probably still plaguing, I would imagine, the armed services is I was very interested in taking Russian and Arabic. And they said, no, we need engineers. And I said, I really don't want to take engineering classes. I want to take Russian and Arabic. And they said, none of those places are causing any problems for us right now. So forget it.

You're going to be a nuclear engineer. And I said, this guys don't have my best interest in mind. And I'm not even convinced they know what it's going to cause a problem for the country in a few years. And then, you know, September 11th, I think happened a few weeks after that or a few months after that. And I was like, well, I think we know where this is going. Yeah. How ironic. Yeah.

Russian and Arabic. That's what I was aiming at. We were scrambling in the first decade of the century to get Russian and Arab, especially Arabic speakers. In fact, you may know this. There's an acronym called Mabney. And what we did is it stands for military. accessions for vital national interest. And so what we did is we went out to try to find some men and women who were born in that region, in Middle East, who were fluent in Arabic, and then

bring them in as linguists and translators. So, I mean, it is ironic that, you know, we go from no thank you to, oh, my God, where are we going to find them? Right. Right. I mean, I'm not a native speaker, so maybe that would have been different, but, yeah, how good would I've gotten over the last decade and a half, or 20 years or how long it's, yeah, it's been 20 years. Yeah, it has. So you went to Army for track. I know that it was Vietnam time. I would imagine, were you worried about that a little, thinking like I'm going up going there, or was it kind of already in the bag that this was over? No, it wasn't in a bag at all, but nor was I worried about it. I would describe myself as a, you remember now, this was the end of the 60s. And so, you know, music and pop culture and racism and drug use.

You can look back and think that Vietnam dominated that period, but it only dominated. it kind of episodically. Things like the Tet Offensive, things like Ken State would cause it to, as they say in journalism, get above the fold. Other than that, though, I was probably as oblivious as any 18-year-old could possibly be. But I went there and I tell the story in the book about when it kind of dawned on me that, holy mackerel, this could actually be real. And then I had to kind of struggle with myself about what I wanted to do from that point forward. But no, when I went to West Point, it was a great school, good values, a lot of discipline, which was probably why my mother wanted me to go there. But it wasn't, Vietnam didn't really play a factor at all for me.

I heard your kids talk to you into staying in the service. That seems unusual because usually kids don't want to move every two years. Yeah. Well, what I've learned is that through the years is that you think you know what's best for yourself. And then my mother persuades me to go to West Point. and obviously it turned out well. And then as I tell the story of the book, there was a time in the middle of my career where I began to feel really guilty about moving my children and my wife all over the place all the time. Yeah. And so I decided myself that I would resign my commission retire. By that time I had 20 years, I would retire. And I'll make the story shorter for the purposes of the podcast. But, you know, my wife and my children, first of all, chastised me for thinking I could

make such an important decision by myself. And then secondly, convinced me that, you know, that they were going to be fine and that they thought that it was a good fit for me, not just for the first 20 years, but even more for the next 20 years. So yeah. And then the last kind of episode when I thought I should end my career, is I had cancer in 2010. And, you know, although the doctor said we have an 80% chance that we'll be able to beat this, I still didn't like the idea of a 20% chance that we wouldn't beat it. And so you look inside and you say, look, I've been at this now for, now that, by then, I'm at it for like 30 years. And I'm thinking, you know, maybe, just maybe I ought to, you know, go and see if I could shave a few points. There are actually a lot of points off of my golf game.

And then, you know, the doctors, my family, the parish priest all, you know, kind of supported me and once again convinced me that, you know, that I should do whatever I could still do in the Army. And so that whole introduction in the book is really about accepting the fact that you may not always know what's best for you. I think a lot of people have trouble accepting that. I don't know if it's generational, but there's kind of this feeling now that if you're not driving every element of your life as a young person, that you're somehow leaving something on the table or you're getting FOMO, right, fear of missing out because you're not joining the next thing or doing the next thing or riding the next wave when I think a lot slash most everything that happened to me,

by accident was maybe I had a hand in like starting the process, but then the end of the process was an accident that turned out to be great. For example, I was an exchange student, and of course that was something that I chose to do. But then I got placed in the former East Germany and I said, oh, this is going to be garbage. I'm in this dumb former communist place. And then at the end of that year, I realized I was the only exchange student in the whole country who could speak German the way that I could, except for one or two other people who'd been studying for 10 years because nobody spoke English at that point in the East. I got a whole. whole feeling for post-communist societies, the way that Soviet unions influence their satellite

states, what secret police were all about. And all these kids in West Germany just had kind of like a German spin on what they were doing in the United States. And that was pretty much it. Yeah. No, that's such a great point. This book could have been a thousand pages long because well, I'm 68 years old. So, you know, there's plenty of stories. And I'm Irish, you know, which is really a bad combination. But anyway, one of the stories I left out, though, was very similar of that. I'd just become a brigadier general. It was 2001, and I was an armor officer. The dream of every armor officer who makes general is to go be an assistant division commander, because that's usually the tried and true path to becoming a two-star division commander. So I wanted to do that. And when I got

my orders, it turned out I was being sent to Saudi Arabia for two years to manage a program building the Saudi Arabia National Guard. By the way, and accompanied tour, which meant I was going to bring my wife. And when I found out, I was at work and I thought, how in the world am I going to go home and tell my wife we're going to Saudi Arabia for two years? Yeah. And about the time I was really struggling with why this was happening to me, you know, the usual. I'm being left behind, you know, FOMO. I was, you know, I was going to miss out on all the really cool stuff. I got a call from the chief staff of the Army, a guy named General Rick Shinseki, one of the finest leaders I've ever known. And he said, hey, look, let me tell you why I'm sending you there.

He had several reasons. The last one was fascinating. He said, you know, Marty, by the way, this is, I was getting this phone call from him in the spring of 2001. So it's pre-9-11. He said, you're going over there because we don't have much of a bench of people that understand the Middle East. And he said, I just have an instinct that we're going to have some challenges in the Middle East. And, you know, lo and behold, I become one of the Army's experts on interacting with senior leaders in the Middle East. And here I am. Yeah, wow. So, and all that stems from what looked at the time, like, I don't know what you'd call it, maybe being put out to pasture. Yeah, farmed out, absolutely. Yeah, I got to take care of these Yutzy National Guards guys who are going to not, you know, shoot the gun over the back of their head. You see that stuff on the news, right? I have, yeah. Yeah, so, like the guys that run the other way or the guys that forget to bring their ammunition with them on duty, a tour or something like that in the deployment. Yeah, it turned out to be a wonderful tour of duty. and but there were moments when it was like the gang that couldn't shoot straight. By the way, I ended up doing the same job as a three-star five years later in Iraq.

And by the way, that was the job that was actually going to decide whether the United States would ever go home again or not. Because at the time, if we're doing all the heavy lifting on security and they're not, first of all, human nature, they're going to be happy to let us do it. Sure. So we really needed to get them to take over the job. But anyway, all that is to say that this book, which could have been a thousand, that's one of the stories that didn't make it out of the cutting room. Yeah, I can see that. I mean, going back to the security arrangement, it seems like, and I could be wrong here, I'm also 40, so the Soviet Union was pretty much done and dusted by the time I was double digits in age. But it seems like the Soviet Union, they wanted to do all the security for their satellite states.

I mean, they had local partners, obviously, those guys were working, but they were largely under, it seems like they were largely under Soviet command. but we're kind of doing the opposite where we're like, no, no, no, no, we want you to do like 99% of this, listen to our suggestions and experience, but we want you to do the rest, whereas it seems like the Soviet Union just wanted to do 80% and then have the other people on the ground kind of be the face of the thing, right? Yeah, which is very similar to what the Chinese are doing, for example, all over Africa. It's one way to do it. You know, even harkening back to the last, actually two centuries ago now in the imperial era,

when the European nations, they, you know, they would come into places like Africa. They would essentially run the country. And then they would generally pick a tribe. You know, these countries in Africa, and in the Middle East, by the way, are very ethnically mixed. And there's multiple tribes. And so what in the imperial era would happen was the, you know, the Brits or the Belgique's or the French would pick a tribe and then educate them to take over. But in so doing, you alienate the other tribes. Right. Which is why, you know, for another century after the end of imperialism, we had real big, huge problems on the African continent. We actually had studied history and decided that model, you know, picking a particular group, running the thing for an extended period of time and then turning it over to a particular group was kind of, you know, ran contrary to our values of, you know, democratic principles, not trying to establish a Jeffersonian democracy because that's not going to happen.

we were hopeful that we could give them a glimpse of democratic principles. Has it worked? It's slow going. I mean, it just is. But I think we have the proper and the more compassionate ultimately model. And I think the more effective model, but it's a model that takes far longer to implement. It seems a little bit, well, we can get to that later, but it does seem a little scary slash, I don't want to use the word hopeless, but that's kind of the first one that comes to mind. I think a lot of people feel that way. And we can dive more into that in a bit toward the end of the show. But I find it interesting that when it rains, it pours, especially for you, or at least that's a way that it was written in the book. I mean, you'd throat cancer. And by the way, that whole thing about them pulling all your molars first so that they don't give you trouble later sounds excruciating and horrible.

That must have just been part of the worst of the treatment. I can't imagine getting all your team pulled. Well, psychologically, but not physically actually. I had a wonderful team. And I had a terrific. dental oncologist. And they anesthetized me. I came out of it. And as I tell the story in a book, going into the, it was a biopsy. He said, if we determine that this is, in fact, cancer, we're going to put a feeding tube in and pull all of your molars. You know, I said, oh, well, okay. Say that one more time. I'm not sure I heard. Yeah, that's really what I did. It was shocking. But when I woke up, the first thing I did is I put my hand on my stomach to see if I had a feeding tube there. Oh. And as soon as I did, I knew that the rest of it was what it was. But honestly,

I didn't suffer physically from that at all. Now, ironically, after I beat cancer, one of the things that happens is that your jaw, if you've been radiated like that, your jaw can't oxygenate. And so what happened was the gum began to pull away from the jaw, exposing the jaw, which is not a healthy situation. So I thought, oh, now what? But I had another great doctor who said, let's try hyperbaric oxygen. I don't know if you know what that is. No, no. It's a big acrylic tube.

Yeah. They slide you in and they put you under pressure. It was invented to help people recover from the bends, divers. Yeah, sure. Anyway, you sit in there for 30 minutes at a time for sometimes, I think I went through 30 sessions. And I said, why am I doing this? And they said, well, because if this will oxygenate the part of your body that is failing to oxygenate right now. And we have a very good chance that it'll close up.

And it did. And so I honestly have no residual effects of having had cancer other than I wake up every morning remembering that I had cancer. What do you mean? Well, you know, once your body, I'm sure you have listeners who have had cancer, once your body betrays you, that's really the way you feel about. Why did you do this to me? You know, why did you cells in my, and by the way, every cancer survivor always asked, one of the very first questions you asked your doctors, how did I get this? And every doctor answers the same way. Well, we're not exactly sure how you got it. You know, there's some lifestyle things that might have contributed. But every cancer is different than every other cancer. Honestly, there's the one thing you learn is that your cancer is, it may be typed, you know, mine was throat cancer, but it's not the same as someone else, necessarily as someone else who had throat cancer. Now, by the way, that's why artificial intelligence is such an exciting breakthrough in

terms of not just in computational things, but in the ability to look over data at a pace and at a size that no human being could. So we're really excited that AI is going to help with cancer diagnosis and treatment. If I were in your shoes at that point, I would have gone, did I breathe in too many gas fumes in Saudi Arabia or were we breathing in the Iraqi burning oil fields or whatever was going on? Like, what was it for the two weeks that you tried smoking or something? You're like, you don't even know. You just drive me crazy. No, you don't. And burn pits. I mean, the Veterans Administration is always cautious about declaring something as a result of an environmental exposure because, you know, they want to have the science behind it. But truthfully, sometimes they're too slow in coming to that conclusion, like with Agent Orange. Yeah. I think there actually has already been a declaration about burn pits in Desert Storm, in particular when you burn human waste in a cutoff 55-gallon jump because you've got nothing else to do with it.

And if you're in that where that smoke is distributed, you know, I mean, just kind of intuitive that that's not a good thing. But you're right. You know, when Saddam burned off the oil fields and we were in our base camp or bivouacked, I suppose, 10 kilometers from there. And the wind shifted. There were times when you couldn't see 100 meters. So I'm sure there were environmental reasons. But I don't let myself dwell on that because it's. Sure. Yeah. No, I can imagine that there's no sense. And that's the type of thing you'd probably bring into your. work as well, right? I mean, you can't sit there and second guess why either the enemy is doing something or something has shifted a certain way. You have to react to it. You can always do the post-mortem later on, right? You know, you just said exactly the right thing, Jordan,

which is in the middle of a crisis is not the time to be trying to do the forensics of the crisis, you know. I mean, what you do in the middle of a crisis is you try to get everyone off the bench, you know, hence the title of my book. You get everybody in the fight. You'd be inclusive as possible, as transparent and candid as possible. And then you also at the same time begin to see if there are opportunities to use the crisis to do something you couldn't have done otherwise. You know, they say never waste the crisis.

And then when it's over, you've got plenty of time to beat yourself and others up over it. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com. Subscribe to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to the show. Right when your cancer subsides, you're asked to be the chief of staff of the Army. And that seems like, I don't know if that's good for your recovery. Like, no pressure, but hurry up and get better because you have to go and meet the president in the United States for the biggest job of your life, right?

You know, my initial reaction to General George Casey, sitting across the island in my kitchen, you know, and I'd already lost by that point about 25 pounds on the way to losing 30. I was incredulous, really. I thought, do you even know what I'm going through? But then, you know, I thought to myself, I wonder if he's actually, you know, giving me a glimpse of what could be to help me, you know, get through what I'm going through. And by the way, I concluded afterwards that's exactly what he was doing, which is really terrific of him and, you know, says something about him as a leader. But as you say, I didn't think there was any, first of I'd never met the president. And secondly, you know, I put on my uniform having lost 30 pounds and I looked like, you know,

looked like Gomer Pyle or something. I don't know. No offense to Gomer Pile, but I just looked awful. I was gray. I was skinny. You know, I'm not that good looking to begin with. So, you know, when you get this going on. But the president was extraordinarily gracious.

He'd obviously been briefed before I got there. It turned out to be a really positive experience. And this is Barack Obama, right? It was, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that people can sort of put a. I think a lot of people imagine these things as we tell these stories. I think that's pretty

natural. You mentioned that when you went into the Oval Office, that every president redecorates the Oval Office in their own way. I had no idea about that. That's interesting. I guess it makes sense. I mean, it's your office after all. You might as well throw something in there that. Yeah. I was lucky enough, I'd been in the Oval when President Clinton was president because I accompanied the chairman at the time. I was a colonel. I was his special assistant. and he allowed me to accompany him to an Oval Office meeting. By the way, which is unusual, but I got in there. It's pretty clear to me that they decorate the office to reflect the kind of president they want to be

by what pictures are in there, what statues are in there, how the rug is the shape of the rug? You know, does it have language on it? Is it just floral? And the only thing that stays from president to president is the HMS Resolute Desk, which is pretty cool. I didn't know the desk had a name. That's great. Well, it's from wood from the HMS Resolute. It's actually, you know, maybe they don't call it that.

I think they do, though. What is that ship, though? That's not a U.S. designation, right? You know, honestly, Jordan, if I'd known you were going to ask me that question, I'd have done the research. And if it wouldn't be too rude, I'd reach over and Google it. We'd know the answer in 20-dgaggot. Yeah, let's find out right now. We can always edit out the sort of like silence of, uh...

Okay. Okay. Mid-19th century type of sailing vessel with three or more mass. So, though, one of those three-massed big sailing ships. When you think pirate ship, it's one of those. of the British Royal Navy, especially outfitted with heavy-duty construction for withstanding pressures of ice and freezing weather of Arctic exploration. Wow, okay. Resolute became trapped in the Arctic ice and was abandoned in 1854, recovered several years later by an American whalership.

She was returned to the British government and Admiralty, presented later to Queen Victoria. But how the heck did we get it? Okay, I'm going to sort of... Well, how did we get the wood for the desk? Yeah, I thought maybe we sank it in Boston Harbor or something like that. That's what I was thinking. Oh, it was broken up in 1879, included a resolute writing table used by Queen Victoria and subsequent monarchs in offices in Buckingham Palace. Oh, with an additional famous piece of the Resolute Desk, which was presented to the president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, in 1880, symbolizing British royal government

gratitude for American help and highlighting British American reconciliation of friendship. Okay, so a completely different story than what I had imagined. given to us as a gift, not taken from the crown in some kind of beef. All right. Well, there you have it. Beautiful desk, though. Yeah, I bet it is. I mean, the thing is, it's got to be heavy duty.

It probably weighs a ton. I never had the nerve to walk over and excuse me. I said, Mr. President, could just slide back. I want to try to lift this thing up. But it does look heavy. I mean, it's a huge desk. It's got to have some cool tech built into it, too, right? I mean, if it's in the Oval Office, it probably does all kinds of top secret stuff.

Maybe it's bulletproof. Who knows? Well, you've seen those National Treasure movies, right? I'm sure. Yeah. So it's featured in several movies, actually. And it's a, I don't know whether it's the actual desk itself that they allow to be photographed. But if not, it's a very close facsimile.

You said that Obama had a rug in the office that was kind of the centerpiece of the place. I'm curious about the significance of that. Because you hint that the rug was very significant in the book, and then you just, you just drop it right there and I thought, grab, way to leave us hanging. Yeah, and I dropped it because I honestly don't remember what it said, but it was an oval, of course it was, oval rug,

and it was plainer than the other two rugs I'd sink. And I'd also been in the oval with President Bush. And when I walked in, it just struck me that it was a much simpler design. But then it had an inscription all the way around the out, you know, kind of on the circumference of it.

And I don't remember whether it was a biblical verse or whether it was something from the Constitution. But I remember being struck by how profound the words were. And I wish I could remember what the words were. I'm going to find that too. Obama's favorite piece of White House art, a rug made in Grand Rapids. Oh, Michigan, I guess. Oh, it's on a University of Michigan website here. Here's some photos. Oh, it's huge. Yeah. I guess the Oval Office is bigger than you think when you're watching it on TV, right? It is bigger, but it shrinks. You know, when you walk in, especially for the first time, but really every time, you have this profound sense of history. And then the room fills up with people and it shrinks into your talking points. But when you first walk in there, it is quite imposing. It says no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. The welfare of each of us. I got to turn my head around to look at it. The welfare of each of us is defendant fundamentally, a dependent probably.

fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Okay. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Government of the people by the people for the people. This rug is enormous people, by the way. This thing is huge. So now what that tells me is an accumulation of his favorite quotations.

Right. Yeah. So when you leave, I wonder if you just get to roll that thing up and take it home, or is everything you buy, that's taxpayer money, right, to decorate that? Yeah, I would expect it would end up in the Presidential Library. That must be a sight to see. There must be all kinds of stuff in there. Yeah, it's not built yet.

He's building it on the south side of Chicago. But I have been to five or six of them. The most impressive is actually right now is actually the Reagan presidential library out in Cemi, California, where he's in the building. He's got the Air Force One that flew with him, you know, his Air Force One. I mean, suspended from the ceiling. Which gives you an idea of the size of the space. Yeah.

Isn't that like a 747? It is a 747. I don't know if I'd want to walk under a suspended 747. If you ever get a chance, though, it's really remarkable. Although I guess we've all been underneath the 747 that's not actually suspended by wires. Yeah, that's sure. Or in one that's not suspended by either. Yeah, I won't get underneath one that's suspended by wires, but I'll get in one that's going to be just flying around in the sky.

Yeah, there's no sense of logic here. You did mention in the book that you have responsibilities as an advisor to the president. And I wrote some of these down. So advice only, no ultimatums. You have to say things even if you think they don't want to hear it. Would you discuss some of these responsibilities? Because I think these are great even in a business or probably even in a marriage or a family. You know, that's such a good point, Jordan.

And I teach a course at Duke in how to be a trusted advisor. It's really interesting because we were talking about our youth, our days of we were younger and how we were ambitious and so optimistic and so confident. You know, with not just Duke students, but I teach a lot of graduate students. And, you know, they are really convinced that within weeks, maybe months of graduation, there'll be CEOs and congressmen and senators. And of course, some of them may, maybe even many or most of them will be, but I think it's not going to happen in a couple of weeks. So what I try to persuade them is that you really ought to learn about how to be a trusted advisor first, and then you will eventually have the knowledge, experience, and character to

become a leader. And I think I've managed to persuade them over the course of a semester. And one of the things I do is I use my own experiences in, I call it leading up, because that's really what a trusted advisor does. He leads, but he's not leading down. He or she is leading laterally and up. And it requires certain attributes. It requires candor. I mean, it requires the ability to communicate. It requires a sense of timing. You know, you have to know, I mean, I can tell you stories about working with President Obama where, you know, I really wanted to get a particular military decision, whether it was troop levels in Iraq or Afghanistan or some deployment issue or a budget issue affecting the military. And in my early days as chairman, I would just kind of go over and deploy my argument.

whenever I could get there. I mean, it was all a matter of chronological time. And then somebody said to me once, you'd be better off if you had a sense of the other kind of time. And I said, well, what's that? And they said, well, what do you mean by that? And they said, well, and they used the two Greek words, chronos and keros. Kronos is chronological time. Kuros is the right time. It's kind of like, if I ask you, you know, did you ask your wife to marry you any time or did you kind of pick the time? Yeah, yeah. And so the answer. The answer is. was that this person was trying to lead me to was understand what the person you're advising is going through before you press on something that he or she's just not ready for. And so timing

becomes a real issue, in particular, the more senior the person that you're advising, because they have a lot of competing priorities. Yeah, I can imagine it's just you're just one person in their ear at any given time and you really have to pick everything from timing to delivery. And the idea that it's advice only no ultimatums makes sense. But I'm wondering what the rationale behind that is, because it seems like you almost, in life and death, conflict, you know, wartime situations, it seems like, yes, the president's the commander in chief, but like, they don't know more about this stuff than you do. They just don't. Well, so let me separate giving advice in a crisis or, you know, giving advice as part of the routine process of government.

And let me start with the routine process of government. So if we thought as a military group that we needed, I'm making these numbers up, but if we thought we needed 5,000 more troops in Afghanistan and went to the president and said, Mr. President, we need 5,000 more troops in Afghanistan. And he said, well, and this is what he would do. He'd say, well, why is 5,000 the right number? You know, why isn't it 4,500 or why isn't it 5,500? That's why you need the time to provide the assessment and to do the analysis. I can only speak for President Obama, but at least long as you went to President Obama with an argument that he could embrace, you know, with analysis and assessment, you know, my experience was more often than not, he would either meet your request or he would explain to you why he wasn't meeting it and then give you an opportunity to mitigate the risk. And what I mean by that is, and here's why I say, you know, give options, not ultimatums. If I had stormed in there and said, Mr. President, we need 5,000, and if it's not 5,000, we're going to lose the war in Afghanistan. We might as well just

bring everybody home and, you know, that's your choice. Well, I mean, that's not being an advisor. That's being someone who is a little too confident in what they believe. And so I always tried to remember, and not to dilute my advice, but to make my advice to the president of the United States cognizant and attuned to everything else going on in the world, whether it's domestic or international. Now, that's in the normal course of things. But there were cases where I had to go to them and say, I'll give an example. In 2014, you may or may not recall, but ISIS made a run from Mosul in northwest Iraq toward Erbil in north-central Iraq. And we had a consulate in Erbil. And ISIS was moving fast. You know, the Iraqi army had crumbled. The Kurds were putting up a bit of a

fight, but the Kurds had a raid themselves along the Zab River. And it was the last geographic feature that would slow the ISIS down. If they got through the Zab River, they'd be in Erbil in a matter of a couple of hours. And so the choice I had to bring to the president was there were just two choices, really. One, we use our air power to support the Kurds, and in so doing blunt the ISIS movement, or we'll send cargo planes into Erbil and pull our personnel out. And I said to him, Mr. President, you know, there are no other options to be assessed here. Because time has now become the principal factor that we have to deal with. And under those circumstances, you know, he didn't, he didn't turn to me and say, well, you know, maybe, what about, you know, can we float

something up to Zabber? I mean, he didn't. But I had built enough confidence with and in him that when I did come with something where it almost had to have the feel of an ultimatum. But if I had done that, you know, every time, because I became chairman in 11, so this is now 14. So we've got three years of repetitions under our belt. And so you just have, again, time is such a real factor. And the other thing is you have to be really willing to learn as a trusted advisor. And again, I did from 11 to 15 when I left. I was a much different chairman in 15 than I was in 11.

You'd also said if you bring a problem, recommend a solution. And this has probably been talked about before in business books, but I really like this, articulate risks with each option as well. And I think this is really good for a young, well, and older people to know in their careers. Because I often, even in the small team that I manage for this show, sometimes when somebody is new or working with us for the first time, they'll say, hey, here's a bunch of problems. and I can always tell who's going to be a better fit for the team or a better contractor when they say, here are a few problems, here are a few options on how to solve that problem.

For now, I've done this one based on my judgment, but I can always go back and do these other ones if you think one of these other solutions is better. And the people that aren't a good fit go, well, I stopped working on this project and there's three ways to solve this or there's no other ways to solve this. I stopped working on it because I ran into this problem. And then I've got to kind of go and retrace their steps and figure it out. And at some point during that process, I go, why do I need this person again? What is this person doing around here? Can I find somebody else who's got some common sense? You know, you can figure this out.

I couldn't agree more. I mean, President Obama used to tell us collectively or collaboratively, the National Security Council, he said, look, the first thing was just that. He said, you can count on me to have read all the briefing material to try to bring myself up to speed before I walk into this meeting. So in the meeting, what I need from you all is two things. One, you know, first of all, you have to be here. Don't be distracted. This is the meeting. don't think you'll just keep your cards close to your vest and then the next meeting, what you can show them. This is the meeting. Secondly, you know, I need recommendations, you know, with the risks associated with them. And then the third thing, and this one I thought was really clever was I want somebody in this meeting to surprise me. Help me think about this problem in a way that I may not have thought about it before.

And he said, oftentimes it'll come from somebody whose expertise doesn't necessarily reside right in the topic we're discussing. So this came as a result of a meeting we had on the Keystone Pipeline where I was kind of, frankly, daydreaming, early on this was when I was probably my first year as chairman. And it's a Keystone Pipeline meeting. I'm thinking to myself, why in the world, I'm not even sure why I'm here. I mean, a Keystone Pipeline is moving oil maybe and maybe there's environmental and economic issues, but I don't see any military. I don't see anything for me here as a military person. But anyway, he caught me daydreaming. And he said, look, I need people like you who are not kind of consumed by this issue to listen in this meeting. And if you

hear something, it doesn't make sense. Tell us. Or if you see a connection that maybe we're too close to we can't see, tell us. And I thought, you know what, I'm never coming to another meeting unprepared. And I didn't. I can't imagine getting busted daydreaming in a meeting with the president of the United States. Yeah. I guess it happens everywhere, right? Oh, sure. Yeah. That's really funny somehow. So you get offered the job to be the chairman. of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which before that you were the Chief of Staff of the Army, right? Right. But you didn't want the job.

You didn't want the Joint Chief's job? No. Why? Probably the simplest answer to that question is that the responsibilities of the two roles. So the Chief Staff of the Army is the individual, man, someday woman, I'm hoping, that is responsible for organizing, training, equipping, developing, and accounting for the professionalism. of, you know, roughly, if you add garden reserves, 800,000 men and women, and then their families. Let me make this distinction. So what the chief staff in the Army does is build an army. You're an

architect. The chairman is responsible for meeting the needs of the combatant commanders around the world, you know, Pacific Europe, Middle East, consistent with the president and secretary of defense's guidance. And he largely consumes the force. So he takes all. All of the readiness that the chief staff of the Army, the chief of naval operations, chief staff of the Air Force, Commandant and Marine Corps, they build this organization, they train it, and then they say to the combatant commanders, okay, you know, we've got this much readiness. What do you need? And by the way, the need always exceeds the available inventory. And so the chairman becomes kind of an arbiter. But you're in the business of consuming the joint force. You know what I mean?

Secondly, as the chairman, you're largely a public figure, and I didn't necessarily aspire to be a public figure. Third thing is you spend a lot of your time, you know, trying to harmonize the desires of the White House with the suspicions of the Congress. And I didn't necessarily want to put my face into that wood chipper, but I did 45 times, to be exact. Forty-five different times I testified. It turned out to be a wonderfully rewarding job. At the time, when offered it, I thought, you know what, I'm happy being the chief of staff of the Army and let's just leave it at that. I thought it was interesting that you said, I don't want the job. And they said, that's why you're perfect for the job. Are there people who are just gunning for these jobs because it's a political,

potentially a political stepping stone or something? I don't know. And as you recall from the book, it was Secretary Bob Gates who said that to me. And so my inclination is to believe that he was potentially dealing with a couple of people who really wanted the job. But he never said that to me. he said to me was, okay, you don't want it. Good. We found one. You're at. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash podcast. If you're listening to us on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now back to the show. Very few people turn down promotions, right? Especially in something at your level, or at least that's the impression that I would have as an outsider. Yeah, I don't want to make it sound too noble. I mean, there really is no promotion involved. You know, the four stars are all paid the same. I mean, the chairman is in fact the senior military officer in all of the armed forces by protocol. But there's no benefit that really comes from that protocol, except where you sit at ceremonies, you know. But here's what I will tell you this. I think that another one of the things I learned about the relationship between leaders and followers

here, or leaders and advisors, is that I learned a lot about how to use my influence more than authority. I didn't have much authority as the chairman. I had more authority, far more, as the chief of staff of the Army. As the chairman, I had very little direct authority. It all runs through the sect deaf and the president. But I had enormous influence. And so I learned how to use influence more than authority. And I think, by the way, my instinct is that the best decisions we make as a country, as corporations, as academic institutions, professional sports league, is when you can use influence and bring people together behind an idea rather than just say, look, it's my way or the highway. So you're saying bringing people together through persuasion,

them on your idea, getting their buy-in instead of saying, if you don't do this, you're going to be digging holes in the backyard for 13 years. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that makes sense, right? Getting people to want to do something because they're part of the idea, rather than if they don't do it, they're going to end up in trouble or never getting promoted. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing, you know, one of my lasting memories of having been the chairman and being on the National Security Council and sitting in meetings in the White House two or three times a week was that in a very encouraging way to me, the best ideas usually carry the argument. If you come armed with good data, a good narrative, you're confident in it, you know, you can lay out the risks and rewards,

the opportunity costs, you know, all of that. Generally speaking, people are going to line up behind you, as opposed to walking in and say, here's how this feels to me. Well, that's really interesting, general, but we're not all that worried about how you feel about things here. So, I know, you took these jobs like five months apart and you have to move from one house to another. Yeah. And the house was like a hundred yards away. Your wife must have been so annoyed by this. That is really a good way to put it.

I tell the story in the, and by the way, we'd move 22 times. So it wasn't like she didn't know how to do that. Everything was still probably in boxes. Well, she thought, as I did, that when you move into the chief's house, you're there for four years and then you retire. So she had in mind that this was our last house during our military career. And there's a tradition. I mentioned in the book that, you know, it's kind of folklor that you should never hang the last curtain in a house when you're in the military because as soon as you do, somebody's going to tell you it's time to move again.

And just by pure luck, she had, or bad luck, she had just finished working with a terrific Air Force spouse by the name of Debbie Biscone to make some curtains for the house. Make it her own, you know, she wanted to make it her own. And they had just finished putting up the last of the curtains. and I stagger into the ambush and say, hey, by the way, I think we're moving down the street. Right. Looks great, ladies. You think these will fit that house over there? That's exactly what happened, by the way.

That's, they must have been like, it just daggers at that point, right? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. You say in the book also learning how to follow as much as skill as leadership, which is funny, because it almost sounds like one of those demotivational posters, you know, that you see on the wall where it's like jokingly says, like, this is probably the first day of the rest of your life, you know, in this office are like,

you'll be in a bigger cubicle in 10 years or something like that. But learning how to follow is as much a skill as leadership. Tell us about why that's the case. Well, because I think, you know, as I say in the book, I think the best leaders that I've been around are also the best followers. They also know what it means to follow. So they know what the impact of their leadership is on those who follows. This is really why I wanted to write the book, Jordan, is that I wanted to write a book, not just about leadership. You know, one of the things you'll see in the kind of the universe of books about business and industry and sports is there's so many books about leadership. Yeah. Actually, the most books are about management. You know, how do you make things more efficient?

And then there's a menu of books about leadership. There's almost no books about followership because exactly the reason you say, it sounds like the most boring topic, you know, ever conceived. but I wanted to get at it. So the way I tried to get at it in this book, as you've seen kind of the paradigm I used, is that I'm not talking about leadership all followership. I'm talking about the relationship between them. What are the common expectations that we should have of each other in order to produce productive, positive relationships in the workplace, whether it's military or business or academia? And so that's the way I went about it to try to convince people that we've all got responsibilities to each other if you want this thing to work

out. Character is something that you focus on quite a bit in the book. You say character is made over time mostly to ourselves based on a series of small decisions that we make. Can you unpack this a little bit? Because I think this is really important. I think now especially, I don't know if this is a conscious thing, but it's almost like people think character doesn't matter unless other people can see it. Right. It's like it has to happen on Instagram or it just doesn't matter. Or MSNBC or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

And by the way, that's literally 180 degrees out. It almost doesn't matter what you see. The Army's got a phrase they use to describe how we try to develop those who volunteer to serve. And it's called be no do. We want you to be, we want you to know, and we want you to do. That's a little abstract for me. So when I teach, I talk to these young men and women about the fact that through your whole life, you've got three buckets that you have to keep filling. One is knowledge. You can't stop learning. As soon as you

stop learning, you stop leading. Experience, you know, back to your point, you may start out in a little four by four cubicle, but that's an experience that you shouldn't ignore. You know, you should actually know what that is. So there's knowledge, experience, and then the other bucket is character. And if you don't keep trying to fill that bucket through your life, by making good decisions that are kind of values then you're not going to be the kind of leader we need you to be. You've got to have the knowledge, the experience, and the character. Character really does matter because at the end of the day, this relationship I'm talking about between leader and character kind of assumes a level of trust, and that trust can only be, is only possible among people who live lives of character.

How do we build character over time? You have a set of principles here, one of which is choose the harder right over the easier wrong. That one seems kind of self-explanatory. Yeah. Never tell a half-truth when the whole truth can be one. I wasn't sure if that was O-N-E or W-O-N, actually, because I listened to the audiobook, so it would have gone either way. Tell us about that, because I feel like that's so common now in the media, from leadership, from management.

I mean, we see it now during this corona where management is like, oh, yeah, you know, this is just a temporary blip. And it's like, then you'd find some leaked document where they're like, we're never hiring these people back. Yeah, yeah. I'm reluctant to apply it to any particular episode that we're currently going through. Sure. Although, you know, those who are experienced it should actually apply it to these episodes.

You know, they should make decisions about that level of trust based, you know, on what they learn about each other. You learn a lot about each other in a crisis. But more importantly, this idea of developing character is a lifelong, it feels to me anyway as a lifelong experience, whether you're someone who's following or someone who's leading, you're always confronted with issues of character. Always. You know, parents are constantly confronted with issues of character and how to develop it in their children. And I'm not going to suggest that I got it, you know, right 100% of the time. I mean, I think that that might be so

intimidating that you'd kind of give up early on. But I do think that, as I said, knowledge, experience and character, I think characters got to be part of the equation all the time. And if you find you, not you, but if people find themselves kind of parking it as though they've already got it and they're dealing with just issues related to knowledge and experience, then they're not going to be the kind of people who build positive productive relationships. They're just not. You say character is not made in the easy moments when things go our way. It's made in the uncertain moments that usually include some measure of personal risk. And I'm paraphrasing here. And that's the point. We have risk, but we do the right thing anyway. And this. I don't know if you made this, if you created this, or if this is from some ancient Greek teaching, but it sounds really good. Allow our aspirational self, or the creation of characters to allow our aspirational self to confront our actual selves and influence our behavior so that our actions match our words. That is really profound, maybe is the right word. I really like that a lot.

Yeah, thanks. I've never seen that written any place, although obviously I'm not oblivious to the possibility. there is some ancient Greek out there who had that same thought, which, by the way, brings me to another point. I do a lot of tweeting, and it's at least what my intention is that it's to get people to think about leadership, but also how to just be a good, productive partner in any relationship. It's fun for me to go back and try to find a quote from Escalis or Plato or Socrates or Shakespeare, William Butler, Yates, Maya Angelou. And what you quickly realize is that it's, a rare occasion when we're going through something new. I mean, the circumstances are probably new.

Like, you know, we've never had a pandemic of this magnitude before. But the way people are reacting to it is not new. And I would suggest it's part of that knowledge bucket I talked about. I always look for things that I have a saying, again, it's probably not my own, but I'll take credit for it if you allow me to, that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And, you know, we shouldn't be content to commit the mistakes of history because we were ignorant of them. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you there. Another element in which we agree strongly is you'd note in the book that we now shrug off character defects and faults among high profile people with kind of with a shrug, really, especially if the person is accomplished or has a lot of accolades and we should stop doing this.

And it makes me angry when I see people setting a poor example for others. So they maybe have a big platform and they're using it to set a poor example. Sports players who say, I never asked to be put on a pedestal. I never asked to be a role model for kids. So they go out and they drink and drive and they beat up their girlfriend or something like that. We should be judged on how we accomplish things, not just that we accomplish things. Yeah. I mean, you can live your life that way, but what I'm suggesting in this book and in my Twitter account and in my classrooms is that, you know, we can't let ourselves be guilty of absolute relativism. And what I mean by relativism is, you know, if you allow yourself to ignore that little voice in your conscience, that little voice in your ear, the,

I call it the moral compass, if you say, well, yeah, I know that this kind of doesn't feel right in terms of my understanding of integrity, but, you know, look how much good we're going to do with it. And then you persuade yourself that you can slide, you know, before we started, you had me slide that little audio bar, you know, from 55% to 80%. Yeah. So, you know, you slide your bar from 50% to 70% and now all of a sudden, because you've allowed yourself to be guilty of relativism, now the next time you may slide it to 75% or 80%. And the next thing you know, character doesn't matter.

And so I don't know anybody that I would say probably has never done anything that rubbed uncomfortably against their beliefs, their values, their character. But most people that I enjoy being around that I've enjoyed being led by and that I enjoy having follow me will correct it. They'll slide, you know, if they get from 40 to 50 percent on that sliding scale, they'll say, whoa, wait a minute, you know, I'm getting a little too far here. And they'll slide it the other way and try to get it back to 25 percent. That's kind of the way I think about character is that it's just got to be part of the conversation. Sometimes you're going to listen to it more strongly than others, but it's always got to be part of the conversation. I know you had a meeting with, speaking of celebrities and others, he had a meeting with, was it

Angelina Jolie about refugees and migration. I'm curious how that is, because my perception is someone who's obviously never had that type of meeting is that a lot of these celebrity spokespeople, and I'm pretty sure that this is an erroneous conception that a lot of us have, but that these celebrity spokespeople for these issues, they're not experts in this, they're just lending their name to a cause. They're doing it because it looks good. But you described your meeting in a way that made it sound like she really did know what she was talking about and was also very persuasive and not just kind of a pretty face attached to

the cause of migration and refugees. Yeah, I was very impressed because, I mean, look, my first, as I'm walking in the, I told you the story, my half of the Pentagon had assembled outside of my office because somebody had leaked the fact that she was coming. And, you know, when I walked into the office, I was half expecting to be attacked by Laura Croft. You know, I didn't know whether I should I should have somebody make sure she wasn't armed. But when we sat down and began talking about, by the way, what she wanted to talk about is she was as the special envoy for, I can't remember the exact title, but she was a special UN envoy. And she was intending to recommend to the United Nations and the various charities and nonprofits that were going to help to build a school in kind of

the outskirts of Kabul. And she basically wanted to know whether I thought it was secure enough for her to do that. And also to get my advice on how to think about allowing the school to be populated, because she was very alert to the different tribal and ethnic groups, you know, the Pashtuns, the Uzbeks. And she understood all that. It was as though I was having a conversation with someone who had served for us in Afghanistan. So I can't speak for all celebrities who align themselves with issues, but I can say that she was very much attuned to the challenges and eager to be part of the solution. In closing here, I know you keep photos and items in your office to remind you of fallen soldiers, and there's a sign that says, make it matter. On that same note, as a civilian,

it's really hard to see why some of the sacrifices we're making, let's say, in the Middle East, really matter, if I'm honest, right? Does what we're doing over there matter? How do we get out of there responsibly out of Afghanistan and Iraq. I mean, looking at how it worked out for the Soviets, it just seems like, man, was this just a giant mistake or what? Yeah. I mean, that's such a profound question that I'll try to do it justice and briefly. Right, right. Like 90-second version, not really, but yeah, I know this is hard. No, I know, but there's people here in Duke University are doing their doctoral degrees on that subject. Right. But here's what I'd say. Compare us to, to compare the United States to China and Russia. China and Russia's national security strategies

are both built on kind of spheres of influence. And frankly, if we're honest, they generally try to exploit the countries and the populations with whom they interact, whether it's for natural resources or political influence. You know, contrast that with us. You know, we have 53 allies and partners around the world. So we have actually structured our well-being. as part of a larger community of like-minded nations, 53 of them. Secondly, we have national security interests all over the world because we're the world's global power. And at least in my judgment, you can't say we have interest all over the world and then decide to stay home and hope those interests are, you know, are met. And so what we do is, so let's take the Middle East, you know,

people cynically say it's all about the oil. Well, you know, maybe at one time it was. I don't remember when it was. But, you know, maybe at one time it was about our access to oil or our allies access to oil. But now I think it's far more about making sure that terrorism doesn't take root in some less governs place. It's trying to make sure that the tensions that exist in the region don't boil over, you know, and in so doing affect our allies and partners. It's freedom of navigation. It's access to markets. It's a whole bunch of things that the American people should say, well, you know what? Maybe we do have a role to play in the Middle East. Now, if you agree with me that we have a role to play, then the debate begins to take shape about how big should that role be. I do think we're over-invested in the

Middle East right now. But I have only come to that conclusion since 2014 when we've seen China and Russia begin to become more assertive and Iran and North Korea. But, you know, the first decade of this century was all about terrorism. And if it's all about terrorism, then you do invest in the place where it generally emanates from, which is the Middle East. Now I think we're in a place, as this has evolved, where we've got to influence the peaceful rise of China. We've got to make sure that Russia doesn't become too revengeist in Europe. And at the same time, we've got issues in our southern hemisphere, you know, and we've got issues, as we well know now with a global pandemic, that won't be the last one we see in our lifetime, probably. So we've got competing

priorities. I think, though, that the way to deal with those is to acknowledge the competition and not decide that it's an al-a-carp menu. And I'll take China and Iran and the hell with the rest of them. We can't do that if you're us. So we got to figure out how to meet our needs, adapt, and not be over-invested in any one place so that we can, and importantly, we've got to stay true to our allies and partners. General Dempsey, thank you very much for coming on the show today. My pleasure, Jordan. And thanks for all the really cool electronic gear here. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks to General Dempsey for coming on the show. The book title is No Time for Spectators, the Lessons that Mattered Most Point to the West Wing. It's a good read. I mean, look, it's always

cool to talk to a general and admiral. What can I say? It doesn't get old. I mean, these are people who have done and seen and experienced a lot, and there's just kind of no replacement for that. What I thought was really fun about this, a little humble brag here, he never went on Kimmel turned him down David Letterman turned him down Jamie Fallon turned him down comes on the Jordan Harbinger show nice all right I'm done I know I'm insufferable sorry about that folks links to the book will be in the show notes of course if you buy books please do support the show by using our links we've got those little Amazon links in there they work in every country we've got some system set up so if you're in Germany or the UK or Australia you can still

click our our genius link on the show notes and it'll it'll help support the show also in the show notes, there's worksheets for each episode. We got a worksheet here for General Dempsey. You can review everything you've learned from General Dempsey, and we now have transcripts for each episode. Those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course. That's always free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't do it later. Do it now. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Build that network before you need it, even if it feels like starting from scratch. I guarantee you you are not starting from actual scratch. Stagnation comes about

when you procrastinate, and there's a rhyme in there that I didn't bother with this time, but you know what I mean. Come on, ignore this at your own peril. It helped me a lot. I guarantee it'll help you order your money back. It's a free course. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's going to be free forever. So, you know, but that doesn't mean you should postpone. Go do it. Dang it. I don't want to hear about how you got laid off and you didn't do it. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company, and I know you're smart.

That's why you're doing six-minute networking, baby. Why not reach out and tell General Dempsey you enjoyed this episode of the show? Show guests love hearing from you. You never know what might shake out of that. And speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out. Follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And I'm on LinkedIn, man.

I'm telling you, LinkedIn is on fire lately if you want to add me there. Go ahead, add me on LinkedIn. You can send me messages there. I'm posting stuff there. I feel like it's a more active platform. Well, at least the people that are smarter than Twitter and Instagram so far, at least for the stuff I'm putting out there.

This show is created in association with podcast one. This episode is produced by Jen Harbinger, engineered by J. Sanderson, show notes and worksheets by Bob Fogarty, music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own, and I'm a lawyer, but not your lawyer.

I'm definitely not a general. That's why I had one on the show. Not a doctor, not a therapist. Pretty underqualified, if you add all those things together. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. That's my point. And remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. Know someone in a leadership position? Share this episode. Know somebody who wants to be in a leadership position? Share this episode. Hopefully you find something useful in every episode. So please do share the show with those you love.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format.

Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts.

Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.