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Not Dead Yet
H.R. McMaster
01:03:40
Everyone knows the Warrior Poets get the headlines, but do Warrior Historians deserve the recognition? Do free societies produce better soldiers? How do leaders know when to be disagreeable? H.R. McMaster joins the guys to talk about the history of...
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- [00:00]
H.R. McMaster
Foreign.
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Ben Sasse
Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.
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Chris Direwalt
And I'm Chris Direwalt.
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Ben Sasse
And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
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Chris Direwalt
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
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Ben Sasse
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
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Chris Direwalt
Pence asks, are you ready to go to war?
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Ben Sasse
Hell no. I mean, depends on the topic, but with if Iowa invades, screw them, we're ready to roll.
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Chris Direwalt
I don't know whether you guys could still take Iowa. There was a time I would have said Nebraska would definitely beat Iowa. I don't know now, I don't know
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Ben Sasse
when Ohio State, just when the Big 12 spent a year trying to negotiate a Jersey patch for 16 members, they got 20 million divided by 16, so they're at 1.25. And then Ohio State comes out with a $17 million patch, both Nebraska and Iowa. I got a lot of growing to do.
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Chris Direwalt
I don't. I only understood about a third of what you said. And I'm just, I'm glad that I don't have to worry about WVU being good at football this year.
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Ben Sasse
You still live in your coat, your hangover. What's the word? Afterglow. Of baseball?
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Chris Direwalt
Well, yes, the baseball. As long, for the foreseeable future, we're going to say WVU is a baseball school. Okay. Why did you want to talk to HR McMaster?
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Ben Sasse
Why would anyone not want to talk to HR McMaster? I like historian warriors. I want to talk about history with them. I want to talk about war with them. I want to talk about why historians make better soldier warrior leaders. I'm interested in what he thinks about teams. I'm interested in what he thinks about the future of our country. He's a hell of a mentor. Like, I know a lot of mid career folks in different branches and whether they're, you know, army tank guys or not, they want HR to mentor them because they know so many other people that he's agreed to mentor. He's, he's a crazy good dude.
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Chris Direwalt
How did you get to know him?
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Ben Sasse
Well, I knew of him by reputation, so I ran for office in 2013. Fourteen, elected in November 14, took office in January 15. And I probably learned about him during that period and sort of some of my nerd learning. But then when President Trump became president elect in November of 16 and his name was bouncing around, as you know, going to be a key advisor at some point anyway, he became national security adviser. Early. Not immediately. It wasn't obvious, but early on. And a lot of us were just thrilled there were going to be more adults given advice than some of the stuff the President implied, Had implied during the campaign about the types of people was going to listen to. So I was a zealous hoper, slash promoter of his rise in the Trump White House, and then got to know him early on in that.
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Chris Direwalt
Okay. His book. I've interviewed him, I think a couple of times, but his book, At War With Ourselves, which is his. Which is his memoir. It's the kind of memoir that you would expect a general to write. In some ways, that sounds snotty, but
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Ben Sasse
do you mean it's naughty?
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Chris Direwalt
No, no, no, no. It's snappy, it's businesslike. But he is a good writer. Right. It's the most useful and by my estimation, the most useful account that anybody has written about the Trump administration. Maybe I just find it the first Trump administration. Maybe I just find it useful because it's well written.
- [03:47]
Ben Sasse
Let me say one more thing to just praise him. I mean, we've all got that shorthand in our head of poet warrior, which is great if the mythology could work, but really, I think history shows that historian warriors are the guys who calibrate well. And it's too simplistic to say it that way, but he's a heck of a speaker, too. Like, there's a broad range of topics you could ask him to stand up and make a speech on, either with or without prep. And he's really dang. He's a polymath. And I mean, I think for people who listen to his. The. The Good Fellows podcast from Hoover, you know, we're.
- [04:24]
Chris Direwalt
Don't. Don't be on here cross promoting other podcasts.
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H.R. McMaster
You know what?
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Ben Sasse
There are no other podcasts. There's nothing else anybody should ever listen to but us and just scripture being read by somebody with an English voice.
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Chris Direwalt
Yeah. Don't help emerget on his other projects. That's not.
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Ben Sasse
Yeah, I don't think McMaster has any podcast, to be honest. My confusion.
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Chris Direwalt
Yeah, good point, good point. Okay. Things that you should know before we talk to H.R. mcMaster. He was the. What number. He was the 25th of 20.
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Ben Sasse
He was fifth of 27 national security investors.
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Chris Direwalt
It's the. He was the 25th national security adviser. He served 34 years in the United States Army. He was the director of the Army Capabilities Integration center, where basically he invented the modern army in a lot of ways. His work on counter. Is it counterinsurgency or counterterrorism? Which one is it?
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H.R. McMaster
Counterinsurgency.
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Chris Direwalt
So the moment where HR McMaster sits down with Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney says, you're succeeding where the rest of them are failing in Iraq. Why? Is sort of a hinge point in the history of the United States military. And he was that guy. He's won a Silver Star, I believe. He is a combat. He's a tanker. A combat veteran, wildly distinguished both for his writing and all of that, but also his physical courage and his bravery. He has a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served for a period as professor of history at West Point. So I think you're going to enjoy talking to him because he's also kind of funny.
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Ben Sasse
Roll. General.
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Chris Direwalt
What.
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Ben Sasse
What a pleasure and privilege to get to spend a little bit of time with you. I don't need to do full sycophancy. But I will be honest, though. I sleep like 14, 15 hours a day most days. I've been pretty active the last three days, and I've told people two or three times a day that Chris and I get the pleasure of interviewing you today. And every single person said some version of I love that. And ask him about this. And I just learned that from him. So we are going to go long today. And none of them are Chris. And my questions, they're just audience questions, but I will start with an easy one. Can you tell us the history and the future of tank warfare? And so I got four parts just so Chris can mock me. I want to know the long history, origins of tank warfare. I want to know the legends of 1991. Let's call it intermediate history. And the Battle of 73 Easting, I think, is what the. The guys in the know call it. I only partly know why it's called that. Then the present and then fourth, the future, because obviously drones are going to make tanks obsolete. Discuss keeping it sexy.
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Chris Direwalt
Ben is. Ben is. Ben is keeping it sexy.
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H.R. McMaster
Okay? You call me Senator, so you. You call me General, so I have to call you Senator, you know, General?
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Ben Sasse
Hell no. HR Teach us the history and future of tanks.
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H.R. McMaster
Hey, Ben, I mean, what. What a pleasure to be with you, man. I mean, do you remember we first met? Do you remember coming to see me in the evening at the White House? And you were either.
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Ben Sasse
I do.
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H.R. McMaster
You were either bearing a bottle of bourbon or we imbibed with. On.
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Ben Sasse
With.
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H.R. McMaster
On one that was in my office,
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Ben Sasse
which I think it was both.
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H.R. McMaster
I think you probably think you probably Jefferson bourbon. We were sip bourbon at the end of the day and you said, hey, we historians need to stick around, stick together in this town. We're the only two of them around here.
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Ben Sasse
And I'll tell you. So then I wanted to begin with the history of tanks.
- [08:19]
H.R. McMaster
Okay, here we go. Here we go. So tanks were. Tanks were invented to restore mobility to the battlefield after the stalema on the Western front, particularly in World War I. And so what a tank is, and this is what's important to remember, is it's mobile, protected firepower. And when the tank was first introduced, it was introduced by itself really to kind of break through the lines. But guess what? That didn't work very well. So tanks are part of what we call combined arms teams in our army and in our military, where you employ different arms fires like artillery and missiles and now drones and FPV drones. You can think of them as fires and maneuver capabilities. Infantry, you know, those who fight primarily on the ground, but are often mobile in armored vehicles themselves and tanks which provide that. That mobile protective firepower. You also need combat engineers in order to get through obstacles. So combat battle, you can think about it as rock, you know, rock, paper, scissors. You gotta have all three of them together. And so there's always this interaction with the enemy and the enemy's capabilities. And what you want is a mismatch. You want to be over to able to overmatch the enemy with the simultaneous application or sequential application of these capabilities to gain the initiative, to gain a physical initiative, to gain psychological initiative, to gain temporal initiative such that you're imposing a temple of events on the enemy they can't respond to. So once tanks were integrated into other new capabilities, because there's never one technology that makes the difference, right? It's not the drones in Ukraine alone, it's the drones plus collection capability in low earth orbit, you know, for, for example, you know, combined with other kinds of capabilities. So it's never one thing. So in the interwar period, and there's a great book called Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, edited by Williamson Murray, you know, whick Murray, what a treasure that guy was. And, and, and in it, what he describes is how the Germans applied. They applied new tech, new technologies, the tank, the automotive revolution, essentially applying that, the aviation revolution and the radio. And then that's what allowed them to affect what most people would know as blitzkrieg. Another great book about this period of time is Robert Doty's the Breaking Point about the Battle of Sedan. And it sort of contrasts the French Application of the tank, which was a big, slow tank, to only support infantry. And the Germans, who had lighter armored vehicles that were meant to. To break through and then exploit those breakthroughs and, as I mentioned, gain that physical, positional temporal advantage. So World War II, obviously decided in large measure by, you know, by armored warfare, combined arms, armored warfare combined with. With aviation. You know, the Americans, you know, began to out blitzkrieg the Germans. So did. So did the Soviets, you know, with these sort of tiered sort of offensive operations. But, you know, what's important to learn about tanks and how they fit in is that it's what gives you an advantage in close combat, but also allows you to rampage around the enemy's rear. I mean, the tank is best applied in what I used to call happy land when you're. When you're attacking enemy artillery and command posts and logistics. And so you're always going to need more protective firepower. I don't buy into this kind of narrative. Oh, the tank's finished. When we got ready, you mentioned seven, three easting. This is our battle in the Gulf War in 1991. You know, right before we went to that fight bend, my executive officer was cleaning out his office. And those who served in the army know the executive officer usually has all kinds of different contraband in his office. Smoke grenades, whatever it is. You know, so he's cleaning out everything in there. In the back of this drawer, there's this crunched up your paper that he pulls out. It's all yellowed. It was probably there since the 1950s. And the title is Notes on Combat Actions in Tunisia and North Africa by the Commander of the 2nd Armored Division, General Ernest Harmon. Okay. It was the Rosetta Stone of armored combat in the desert.
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Ben Sasse
I read that.
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H.R. McMaster
I was like, oh, my gosh. And, of course, I'd read Rommel's accounts in North Africa in the Rommel papers. I'd read other accounts in North Africa. So, you know, we applied that to our tactics and our techniques. We trained very hard, Ben, in terms of being able to fight together as a team and gain that advantage. And when we got into that fight in the middle of the sandstorm on February 23, 1991, my tank crested this rise, and I immediately saw an enemy force that was about five or six times our size. We gained an initial advantage with the first blows. We developed, delivered. Think about a boxer that lands a hard jab, and then we followed with our right, you know, and. And we assaulted that position. We destroyed about 70 armored vehicles in 23 minutes. While we assaulted across, you know, four to five kilometers of terrain, we consolidated on this ridge, destroy and then destroyed everything within the range of our guns. So that was. It was what we trained to do. And I attribute that.
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Ben Sasse
That.
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H.R. McMaster
That overwhelming effect on, yeah, we, hey, we had technological superiority. I mean, an Abrams tank is a beautiful thing. I miss my tank, Ben. I mean, I love it. I mean, I loved it. And so my tank's name was Mad Max, but it was really our tank's crew that we operated together as one. We were so well trained. My driver, when we. My. My loader, when we stopped, he. He said, hey, hey, sir, I'm anchor Lie. I was fixing to panic, but I said, don't panic. Just do your job. You know, one of our sergeant, one of our gunners, Sergeant Martinez, said, hey, it just, you know, we had trained so hard that we didn't feel any fear, you know, because we had confidence in each other. So it's that. It's that physical capability you have, but really it's the psychological effect, the emotional effect of a good army unit that takes on the quality of a family that has confidence in one another, that really has affection for one another. Ben, you know, our soldiers feared letting one another down more than they feared any enemy tank or any enemy bullet, you know, and that's really what we got the combat power from that resulted in that lopsided outcomes. And so for the future, hey, do you not want, you know, mobile protective firepower? I would say, hey, you know, can you think of a problem you can't solve with the tank, Ben? Try. Try right now.
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Chris Direwalt
You can't.
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H.R. McMaster
You can't.
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Chris Direwalt
You can't.
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Ben Sasse
So, I mean, so making my wife be less angry at me, I miss my tank.
- [15:00]
H.R. McMaster
So what you could do, Ben? I mean, what we need to do, we need to have drone capabilities ourselves. We need to have counter drone capabilities ourselves. We need ground autonomous systems that augment crude tanks and armored vehicles, mobile protective firepower. Because guess what? Winning wars still requires the control of territory, populations and resources. And do you want to do that? Do you want to. If you want to reenact Belleau Wood, you know, in World War I, you can just do that by walking forward in your flak vest. Hey, I would prefer, you know, to have a little bit of armor around me, you know, and recognizing there are threats to that armor, but you have to obviously just protect against those threats.
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Chris Direwalt
Okay, I do want to talk about the battle of Belleau Wood, but I also want to talk about how you have lived a good life. I Tell people all the time. Your book, which I think came out. Most recent book, which came out in 2024, which is called At War with Ourselves, is the best, certainly by my estimation, the best book to come out of the first Trump administration. Right. And as Washington memoirs go, it's not. You can tell that you're a historian, because not only is it cogent and laid out in a useful way, it's actually a really good read. I recommend it very highly, Everyone within the sound of my voice, but it was a book. It was also a book that allowed you to start to change the way the United States military worked. And that was Dereliction of Duty, which is the book that you wrote about the. And I will. I. I'm going to overgeneralize, and you can pull me back in your answer. But the way in which the high command of the United States military failed to provide adequate pushback on Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson as the Vietnam War turned into a quagmire, that there was not adequate resistance. Being disagreeable is hard for me. I don't like to be disagreeable. I want to be agreeable.
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Ben Sasse
This has not been my experience of. Chris, but continue.
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Chris Direwalt
Well, once.
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Ben Sasse
Once.
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Chris Direwalt
Once I know that we're in the trust tree, then I can be disagreeable. Right? But I don't like. I'm conflict avoidant conflict, diverse conflict, avoidant. Talk about what you learned and what you know about how to be a skunk at a garden party. Because what's necessary, very often it's agreeability that makes us successful. Our ability to get along with people, to keep a good attitude. One of our first guests, Chris Pratt, said something that I may get a tattoo of. PMA equals opm. Positive mental attitude equals other people's money, which now my children have heard me say 10 million times. That's all necessary. But then sometimes it's necessary to be good at being disagreeable. You have had success and not success. You have had a career that's been marked by being willing to be disagreeable. Talk about how you develop that strength. Talk about how to deploy it.
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H.R. McMaster
Hey, Chris. Well, thanks so much for that question, really. I think what connects the two books you mentioned is a recognition of your role. This is what Epictetus told us. This is what is most important to understand, well, the role assigned you. And so as a senior military officer, your role is to provide best advice and to not compromise your principles for expediency, for corporateness, for parochialism. And so the book Dereliction of Duty is largely about the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knowing that the strategy that Lyndon Johnson adopted as Vietnam became an American war would lead to disaster. But what they did is they suppressed that assessment in favor of getting their foot in the door. This is, to use George Herring's term, about this period of time getting their foot in the door. And then over time, hey, work to increase the level of troops, increase the intensity of the war, consistent with what they thought would be necessary to stabilize South Vietnam and to prevent a Vietnamese Communist, North Vietnamese takeover of the country. So essentially it was about their failure to do that. And then as a result, a lack of consideration of the long term costs and consequences of the strategy of graduated pressure. So what I learned from that is, hey, it is a disservice. It's a disservice to the country, a disservice in the role of National Security advisor, which I found myself in years later after having written about failures associated with national security policymaking, decision making. Hey, now I was like in charge of the process, you know, and so, hey, you know, Mr. Smarty Pants Historian, you know, what are you gonna do now as you're, as you're in the job, you know. So what I tried to do is to establish a process and relationships that allowed best advice to get to the President and multiple options to get to the President. And on my first day on the job, Chris, I wrote down on a legal pad what I thought were the top five lessons of how and why Vietnam became an American war that were relevant to my responsibility as National Security Advisor. To get the President best advice to run a process that developed options for him and helped him make the best decision and helped implement his decisions in an effective, integrated manner that helped communicate his policies, that helped to build unity of effort with allies and partners. So understanding my role and then writing down those lessons, Lesson one, Lesson one was to spend more time thinking about the nature of the challenges and opportunities we're facing internationally, how the recent past produced the present as the best way of understanding the present and making a projection into the future. The second, and you're going to think, well, this is kind of obvious, is to establish clear goals and objectives. Before that step, we would then list, hey, these are our vital interests. View that complex challenges through our vital interests. Answer the so what? Question, hey, why do we care what's at stake and then have clear goals and objectives? I mean, during this period of decision making in 1964-1965 associated with Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy, you know, my predecessor said, hey, it's Better not to have a clear objective in Vietnam because that way, if we don't accomplish it, it'll give, quote, the President, more flexibility in the domestic political arena. So, hey, it turns out in war, clearly understand goals and objectives are important. The third step, also extremely important, to identify the assumptions on which your strategy, your policy is going to be based. Hey, I was on the receiving end of nonsensical policies in places like Kabul, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq. And usually what made those strategies nonsensical is because they were crafted based on what Washington thought about that situation, not the reality on the ground. One of my old colonels, Joe Rayburn, used to say, sir, you know, the problem with this strategy is this strategy is for my rack instead of Iraq. My rack can be whatever you want it to be, you know, and we're in Iraq. So, so make those assumptions clear, you know, and deliver those to the President. Then the other aspect of this, give the President multiple options. Give the President multiple options. And, you know, because it's in the comparison to those options that you can draw out long term costs and consequences, you can have a meaningful discussion.
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Chris Direwalt
You know, I have to say something, and it's unbelievably not the first time that I have said this on this podcast, that never has this line been repeated twice on any podcast. But I want to drill down on Epic. Epictetus, the how do you know, right, when to be disagreeable? Just talk about how you know in your personal life. There are times, so I, I take your point, that when you're in that tank and that's your crew, this is not a time for disagreeability. Mostly this is a time for high. All right, boys, we are here together. This is us. We're doing it. We move as one. We think is one. This is not a time for discord. And also perhaps when your family says to take out the trash, this is not a time for you to be highly disagreeable. Talk about how, you know, is it just a moral sense? Is it about knowing your role and knowing the times to be a pain in the ass?
- [24:03]
H.R. McMaster
Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with what is at stake, you know, and, and, and what lies within your control. Right? This just goes back to another stoic philosopher. Aristotle supposedly said, right, that this, you know, to, to focus on what you can, can get a lot done. And so what I would say to our team, because, you know,
- [24:22]
Ben Sasse
a lot
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H.R. McMaster
of my last book is about, you know, sort of the, you know, the power games that go on in Washington. And I would just Tell our team, hey, does any of this stuff, does it affect our mission? We only worry about it if it affects our mission. To help the President make the best possible decisions and to help implement, help him implement those policies, you know, through, by coordinating and integrating across the departments and agencies. So that's the first thing. There is also a moral component to this, you know, I mean, you know, a lot of these decisions have to do with life and death, peace or war, you know, and so to meet kind of the Thomas Aquinas criteria of
- [24:59]
Chris Direwalt
just war, you're checking a lot of boxes today.
- [25:02]
H.R. McMaster
I mean, well, you have to have a just end in mind, right? That's the goal and objective. So, you know, strategy is not just about like, you know, competence in terms of how to integrate all elements of national power and efforts of like minded partners. Strategy has a very important moral dimension to it. Dick Betts pointed this out years ago in his definition of strategy. And so when I came into the job, you know, actually I thought that our strategy and policy for Afghanistan was not only ineffective, I thought it was becoming immoral because we had soldiers fighting, giving their lives, we had Afghan soldiers fighting, giving their lives without a clear idea what the heck we're trying to achieve. And so this is why I put into place this process of this framing. Then to get to your first question about when do you be disagreeable, how to be disagreeable, we would present the framing to the President before we discussed any options and say, hey, do you think we have this right? Is this what you want to achieve? Does this comport with your understanding of the challenge we're facing and the so what firm? Americans, Right. And so after that discussion, we would put out a cabinet memo to the departments, agencies with the framing as we initiated the development of options. Because then when something else comes up as another course of action, we say, okay, well, yeah, let's entertain that. But how does that relate to the framing of this challenge? You know, so I think there are ways to be disagreeable. There are ways to challenge that are more effective than others. If you go in there and say, hey, Mr. President, I think your decision really is terrible, you know, without an option, you want to go in with first. Clarifying, clarifying the understanding. Common understanding is a precondition for common action. And people oftentimes just jump right to the action. So what do we do about it? Okay, well maybe we should talk about what the it is, you know, before we jump in to action. Because otherwise you kind of confuse activity with progress and that's what tends to get us into trouble, especially in war.
- [27:11]
Ben Sasse
Can we stay there? About team building, I mean, obviously the consequences of life and death when you're in a tank battle. There's also something special that you've experienced that Chris and I haven't, not having been able to, not have been, you know, have the calling to be a part of a unit to do what you did. So not everybody gets to be a part of a tank crew, but you, you sort of, we, we see the romance and the nostalgia of that, but everybody's a part of some kinds of teams. And if you contrast tank team with the NSC as an example where side point. I think a lot of the tech guys, a lot of tech builders are making a good case right now that the industrial era corporate structures we've inherited are so large, so clunky, so layered, so cumbersome that you don't get a sense of big cause, low ego. Where we Aristotelian deliberate, decide and then act as a unit once the decision's made, whether it was a 6040 decision or a 955 decision and it's 100 to 0 after the fact because we're
- [28:11]
Chris Direwalt
all a part of the team.
- [28:13]
Ben Sasse
Smaller teams seem to build a kind of human platoon, meaning and richness and depth. When you think about the lessons you learned when you went to the NSC where you knew people were going to be leaking all the time, did it require shrinking to smaller and smaller teams to get the same effectiveness? Or is that too simplistic and a really good leader can lead even a, you know, 75 person team.
- [28:37]
H.R. McMaster
Well.
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Ben Sasse
Or do you have to get to smaller teams when there's a lot of leaking and outside prayer?
- [28:42]
H.R. McMaster
Well, what a great question. I'll tell you, Ben, I think it depends on the base motivation of the people on the team. You know, the vast majority of the people on the NSC staff were motivated, right, to help the elected President, you know, determine, you know, his, his policy and his priorities and implement them. But there were people there. There are different base motivations in the White House that I, that I identify. And I'm sure you've seen this in government too. You know, so there are people like me. I mean, I was in the army for 33 years. I mean, this was my seventh commander in chief. You know, I understood my role, my role. I mean, nobody elects generals, right? It's Donald Trump who got elected. So my job was to help him make the best decisions. Him and Vice President Pence, the only two who got elected, right? But there's A second group of people who were there, and many of them were in the NSC staff initially because they had been in the Obama administration. And President Trump, I think, was quite rightly applying like 180 degree corrections to a lot of unwise policies during the Obama years. So these are people, though, who thought, well, hey, what they want to do is they want to manipulate decisions consistent with their agenda. And there are other people who came in with President Trump who were trying to do that on the White House staff, for example, on issues of alliances or trade or people came in with their own agenda or immigration. Then you have a third group of people who think it's their job to protect the country and the world from the president. Well, the problem with that second and third group is again, nobody elected them. So not only they're not serving the President well, but they're actually undermining the Constitution. If you believe that sovereignty lies with the people. The President is accountable to the American people, Obviously through Article 1 in the Congress as well. And his executive power is checked both by, by the Congress and by the judiciary. You know, this is what really bothers me. I'm going to go on a quick, on a quick tangent here on this, and I want to go back to the leadership question just quickly. But the tangent is that there are those these days who are suggesting that the military should be a check on executive power. This is your former six colleagues in the Senate, in the House, remember that video, like don't follow legal orders. I mean, the subtext was, hey, you should be a check on executive power. No, nobody elects generals or soldiers and so forth. This is what our founders were most concerned about, you know, 250 years ago. And this is what George Washington, the paragon, you know, of the role of the military in our democracy, set out, of course, to keep that bold line in place. But you know, under those conditions, what I tried to do, Ben, and it was a mixed result here, you know, I tried to appeal to their sense submission of the National Security Council staff. I had all hands two days into it, I explained our role to them and I tried to give to the NSC staff what you learned about in the army to give to a military unit. Purpose, motivation and direction. And if you are able to achieve that, then you can get out of this hierarchical structure. If you have a common understanding of how you work together as a team, what your role is, then you can empower people to take initiative and you can get so much done through what the army, the military calls mission command, mission Command is devolving down to lower levels of responsibility, a higher degree of autonomy and responsibility. That way you can achieve simultaneity of activity. And you know, people, good people, and these were good people by, I mean I, there were a couple people were, you know, that were disruptive and I had to fire people over time and everything else. But hey, the. But the vast majority of them will far exceed your expectations once they have a common understanding of what you're trying to achieve. And we know that that always happens in a good organization is if you try to direct everything, you're going to fail. A big part, and this is what people don't understand about the military. A big part of higher level command in the military is to be comfortable with relinquishing control. And those people who are control freaks, I think they tend to really limit the potential of their organizations.
- [32:42]
Ben Sasse
Really good insight, Chris. I want to give it to you, but one tiny coda on that. Do you think that's why free societies make better armies over the long run than top down societies? Because the militarism and the control freakishness is part of their system on purpose. They're consolidating more and more power on top. And you know, every two years or whatever, two plus or minus years that command's over and it may be time to move on to a civilian life. Is that part of why free societies build better militaries?
- [33:09]
H.R. McMaster
Absolutely. And you can see that on battlefields again and again and again through, in American history, you know, beginning with our, you know, with our revolution. I mean some of the, some of the greatest successes were, you know, these kind of militias and regular forces working together. You know, I'm thinking of Guilford Courthouse and cow pens, for example. Hey, look at Saratoga. Well, before he became a traitor, you know, Benedict Arnold makes an unauthorized cow counterattack, you know, which really helps secure victory in the most important turning point in the revolution. And so you know what I often tell our sergeants, which I think is the most beautiful word in the English language? Sergeant. It's one of our greatest, it's one of our greatest advantages is our non commissioned officers who are empowered to take initiative. I would say, hey, the only mistake you can make is to say you're waiting for orders if you think it's the right thing to do. You know, don't be brash, don't take a gamble. But you know, the riskiest course of action in combat is to not take risk because that seeds the initiative to the enemy. And Americans get that. I mean, and you can see example, an example Chamberlain at little big top or you know, little round top, Little round look gush, little round top. Geez, you know, ordering the bayonet charge the 20th Maine, you know. So example after example of, of commanders empowered with initiative is what wins fights.
- [34:35]
Chris Direwalt
Okay, tell me about another motif of this podcast is a word that doesn't have much understanding in Washington D.C. and doesn't have a lot of understanding in elite spaces in America generally, which is the word enough, having enough, being enough, saying enough. Is it true that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wanted you after you left the White House to go for a fourth star, to stay? Is that true?
- [35:10]
H.R. McMaster
It is true. I was offered the opportunity, I think the best way to say this accurately is I was offered the opportunity to compete for four different four star jobs while I was in the job as National Security Advisor.
- [35:22]
Chris Direwalt
You are a competitive person. There is no way that you would be where you are and do what you did if you were not an achievement oriented, competitive person. But that wasn't what you wanted to do. And I would imagine that from the before, when you were in military school, in high school, before you even got to West Point, the idea of being a full general, a four star sucker, is the, is like, that's it, that's playing in the All Star Game. That's it. That's the hall of Fame. How did you know it was time to go? Why didn't you, why didn't you go for the next brass ring?
- [35:57]
H.R. McMaster
Well, Chris, you know, I, I made the decision when I, when I, when I accepted the, the President's offer to serve as National Security Advisor and stay in uniform, doing that job, to retire out of that job. There was not a four star position for me to compete for in 2017 when I got that phone call to interview at Mar A Lago. And what I didn't want to do is give even the impression that I took that job to serve President Trump, to get that fourth star when that was not in the cards for me anyway in 2017. So I decided when I took the job to retire out of the job. The Secretary of Defense at the time, he didn't want me to stay in uniform, but the President did. And it made it a heck of a lot easier on me and my family to stay in uniform. And I had senators calling me, Ben, you urged me that first night and so did John McCain. He said, hey, I think if you stay in uniform that will help you transcend kind of the hyper partisanship. You can be seen as somebody who really is serving the President well, by being an honest broker and presenting him with options to advance the interests, to secure the interests and the prosperity of the American people. So, so I thought that was the best course of action. So did the President. Some people wanted me to get out of uniform. So, I mean, I thought I was maybe let everybody know I'm not going to stay in uniform. I'm just going to do this job as hard and as long as I can. And when I get used up in the job, I'll be at peace with that. It took a lot of pressure off me, really. I mean, all I knew I had to do was to do my best to serve the President well. And if it didn't work out, which, you know, a lot of times it doesn't work out with President Trump, you know, I was totally, I was totally at peace with that. I really was. I mean, and the President, I had very candid conversations when, when it was clear I was getting a little bit ground down with him, I said, hey, listen, Mr. President, I'm happy to go whenever you want me to. I will help transition the new person in. I want you to have somebody that you, you know, you're, you have confidence in who can do the best job for you. This is not about me. I don't want anything from you. I do. I didn't want an ambassadorship. I didn't want to, you know, a four star. And, yeah, so I think that was the best way to approach it. And it allowed me, I think it allowed me to serve him better. You know, honestly, you know, when you have somebody in that job who has political aspirations.
- [38:10]
Chris Direwalt
Yes.
- [38:11]
H.R. McMaster
I mean, they might, they may be more reluctant to tell the President what he didn't want to hear. I knew from my research and writing about the Vietnam War that not telling him what he didn't want to hear, talking about double negative, sorry, would have been, would have been a great disservice to him.
- [38:27]
Chris Direwalt
Okay. Before I let Ben bring out his Russian nesting dolls of questions to conclude us here today, I want to just put an exclamation point on what you just said, which echoes actually something that Mitch Daniels told us a couple months ago, that he wanted to be the kind of guy who did the things that he said he was going to do. And in his case, I was giving him a hard time about not running for president. And in your case, you made. Just as my old daddy used to say, the time to decide whether or not you want to kill a deer is before you go hunting. And you had made up your mind and said, this is what I need to do for this to work. And you very easily could have found a lot of people to help you rationalize your way into doing it differently. Right. There would have been a line out the door of people who would have said, no, no, actually, the right thing for you to do is to stay. You have to stay. The most important thing is that you stay. And you said, no, that's not what I set out to do. What I set out to do was that this would be my terminal job in uniform. This would be where it ended. And I'm not looking for anything else. And that, that gave you latitude. So I just, I'm just putting a big exclamation point on what that says about your character and also what it says about what you need to do to do a good job.
- [39:55]
H.R. McMaster
Well, thanks, Chris. Thank you.
- [39:57]
Ben Sasse
I didn't have a Russian nesting dolls version of the question, but now I feel like I've been challenged. So I'm going to. I'm going to rise to the occasion. I do believe your historical sense, obviously you have a theologically rooted worldview as well, so you have a sense of vocation and you were content to be out of that job. And in 2017, it wasn't as obvious that the bet was everybody gets fired sometimes. I say around MD Anderson Hospital, we're not unique here. All our days are numbered. Nobody gets out of here alive. But that's true of everybody, whether you're an MD Anderson Hospital or not. There was probably a moment where you realized, I'm probably leaving here with a pink slip. That's just the nature of this institution right now. But we're getting to work alongside you and listen to you and learn from you. Back then, it was obvious that there was no panic. So partly it was that you're an omni competent guy and you knew there were going to be lots of other vocations and you were going to be able to pay the bills. But I think some of it is that you were a historian soldier, and obviously General Mattis brings a historical sensibility to things as well. And so it was a unique moment for you two to be able to reinforce each other. But I kind of wonder the nature of our free society and the liberal arts and the fact that that IQ and EQ are at least as important as brawn in all this stuff. I'd love to hear you reflect broadly on what you would say or what you do say to 15 and 18 year olds who might think they're interested in future military service, but when you give them advice, you're not recommending that they train narrowly to be a soldier. You're recommending that they train broadly to be a soldier and a citizen. Will you walk us through how you give life advice to young men and women who want to, who want to serve and what kind of reading lists you give them?
- [41:43]
H.R. McMaster
Oh, well, great. Thank you so much. Well, hey. Well, first of all. First of all, I urge them to serve in any capacity, in uniform, out of uniform. But I highlight oftentimes the rewards of service in uniform. I mean, first of all, you get more responsibility at a younger age in our army as an enlisted soldier, but then certainly non commissioned officer, warrant officer or officer than I think in any other walk of life. The second thing is you have the satisfaction of being part of a mission bigger than yourselves to defend the nation and to fight for one another in these teams that become like a family. And you'll be part of an organization that does take on the qualities of family in which the man or woman next to you is willing to give everything, including their own lives, for you. It's fantastically rewarding. I found it to be so. I mean, when I, when I came into the army as a new second lieutenant, I'd always wanted to be in the army, serve as an officer in the Army. But when I first came in, I thought, I'll just do five years and go to law school or work in a corporate job and get money for grad school. And that's what my wife and I were operating on that premise. And then at my retirement roast speech that my wife gave, Katie said, hey, thanks for the bonus 29 years. But I just found it too rewarding to look believe, you know, So I think what people don't understand, so I try to impart to them an understanding of the rewards of service. But in terms of how to think about the responsibilities in our army, you know, it is very difficult to replicate the emotional, the psychological, the moral dimension of combat.
- [43:17]
Ben Sasse
Right.
- [43:17]
H.R. McMaster
And you can replicate in training a lot of the conditions. But it's hard, it's hard to, to, to experience kind of the human, the visceral dimension of, of combat. Where you get that, you get that from history. You get that from reading Memoirs of Combat, for example. I grew up in the post Vietnam era, but very few people were talking about Vietnam back then. But I read books like, actually this was a historical novel. But James Webb's Fields of Fire is pretty darn good in terms of understanding small unit combat leadership. James McDonough's platoon leader. Fantastic. Going further back, you know, Charles B. McDonald, company commander, you learn about command, but then to learn about the human dimension of war, the human dimension of combat. Hey, how about Tolstoy's short stories? You know, I think it's called the Wood Feller, the Tree Felling, Sebastopol sketches. You get a real sense for the human dimension of. Or how it affects those who are in the military, but also civilians, you know, and then in leadership. There are great novels about military. Military leadership as well. I mean, the Killer Angels. I mean, you can't beat that. From historical novel. About. About Gettysburg. I mean, I think every high school student should. Should read it. But. But then. But then also, you know, Once An Eagle, Anton Myra's book, you know, where you have. You can compare and contrast the two. The two, the. The protagonist and the antagonist, you know, you know, Sam Damon and Courtney Massingale. It gets back. It gets down to their base motivation. Right? Massinget was always wanting the next rank. Damon was really all about his soldiers and fulfilling his responsibilities. And he wasn't perfect either in the book, but it shows kind of the contrast based on their base motivations. But then in terms of thinking about war and battle, there's such a wonderful, vast literature there. I think young officers, soldiers, should read the Face of Battle by John Keegan, because it's in the face of battle where he looks at. At over four centuries, battles had occurred in the same geographic area. And so the book is largely about changes in the character of warfare based on new technologies, but it's also about continuities in the human dimension of combat. And in the conclusion, he has this killer paragraph that is essentially about. He writes, what battles have in common is human. The struggle of men and of course, women struggling to reconcile their instinct for self preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them. And then he says, battle is always about the disintegration of human groups. You know, I internalized that when I was, you know, 18 years old, you know, and I thought, my job is to make sure my human group, my family, my platoon, you know, my troop, our squadron, our regiment, that we will not disintegrate because we will have the bulwarks of confidence in one another that comes from tough, realistic training. We will have this kind of really affection for one another that gives you a power much greater than the numbers you can bring to a battlefield. And it also made me recognize that what you want to do is Disintegrate the enemy and gain not just a physical advantage through targeting at nodes and enemy network, that's all important, but a psychological advantage. And of course, then you bring that to a counter uncertainty, where you also want to isolate the enemy from any sources of ideological or social or psychological support. So anyway, these books had a profound effect on me. And I think that when I talk to young officers, I give them these sorts of recommendations.
- [46:58]
Chris Direwalt
Well, you can't ask. We've had guests before, General, who did not actually give us recommendations. You understood the assignment and gave us excellent recommendations. That is fantastic.
- [47:09]
H.R. McMaster
And then everybody needs heroes, right? Read about some real badasses, like Daniel Morgan, you know, in the Revolutionary War. I mean, you know, I. I mean, I. Or Ernest Harmon, who I mentioned, you know, or. Or Creighton Abrams in. In World War II and across his career. I mean. Oh, geez, you know, hit the. Lewis Sorley's biography of Creighton Abrams. Thunderbolt. Fantastic. I mean, gosh. I mean, I could go on, obviously.
- [47:34]
Chris Direwalt
And how great would it be to take General McMaster's class? How great would it be to have him. Oh, my goodness, wouldn't that be. You'd come out of there fired up. You'd come out of there like every day you'd heard Patton's speech, you'd be ready to go. Ready to go.
- [47:48]
H.R. McMaster
Well, speaking of Patton, a genius for war. Fantastic book.
- [47:52]
Ben Sasse
Great biography, Pat.
- [47:53]
Chris Direwalt
Keep it going.
- [47:54]
Ben Sasse
Let's let these show notes go forever. I mean, my Americans were crazy, crazy smart, crazy driven. No better ally, no greater foe. And therefore we're filled with heroes. And like you. You talking about this list? I mean, I. I wanted the book recommendations list, but I just want you to keep preaching, just Name dropping, your 20th century military command heroes as well. This is special, General. We.
- [48:18]
Chris Direwalt
We thank you for your time. And I know it's hackney to say, but I thank you for your service.
- [48:24]
Ben Sasse
Amen.
- [48:25]
Chris Direwalt
In combat, out of combat. As a historian, all. All that you've done and continue to do. I know that you have the special quality which the great Peggy Noonan once described as patriotic grace. I know you've got that in spades, and I dig it. So thank you so much for your time.
- [48:45]
H.R. McMaster
Well, thanks, Chris.
- [48:47]
Ben Sasse
If I. If I can close by echoing that. I didn't know Peggy's phrase unpatriotic grace, but I was just going to say your winsome nature of explaining complex stuff. I know you know it, but for our audience who doesn't know this, there are a ton of guys and gals but who. Who regard you as a mentor, even if they never got to actually directly serve under you because you've mentored so many people and given so many people advice. I mean, you know, you got a whole bunch of people who feel like they've served under you because of the way you've been gracious and magnanimous with your time mentoring people. People. So thanks for that as well.
- [49:25]
Chris Direwalt
Amen. Amen. Thank you, General.
- [49:27]
H.R. McMaster
Well, Ben, Chris, hey, what. What a privilege to be with you. And, Ben, I've got it. I can't thank you enough for your example as, you know, a. A historian, as a senator, as a university president, but especially as a man, as a person. I mean, honestly, you know, when. When, you know, I went from the moment I first met you, but now, especially now, what you're doing with this podcast, what you're doing with whatever you have an opportunity to speak. I just heard you give a talk that I think every American should hear. You're making me reassess myself and helping me strive to be a better person through your example and through your profound insights into making the most of our lives and serving others as best we can. So, man, I mean, it's a tremendous privilege and an honor to be with you. And Chris, thank you.
- [50:18]
Chris Direwalt
You take that.
- [50:19]
Ben Sasse
Ben says you're way too generous.
- [50:21]
Chris Direwalt
The.
- [50:21]
Ben Sasse
The main. The main thing I've discovered in the last seven months is the power of netting. I sleep a hell of a lot. Thanks, guys. General.
- [50:31]
H.R. McMaster
See you guys.
- [50:31]
Ben Sasse
Take care.
- [50:31]
H.R. McMaster
Love you, Ben. Take care.
- [50:33]
Ben Sasse
Love you too, man. Thanks, General.
- [50:35]
Chris Direwalt
Well, professor, what did we learn today?
- [50:39]
Ben Sasse
Well, I think he met expectations at being a polymath, so I'm delighted we had him on. I love learning from him, but I. Let's start by mocking him, because I like. We praised him a lot. The answer on tanks. What bs. He just redefined the word tank to mean everything, you know, to bastardize his answer. Well, there's going to be technology and there's going to be people in war, and if you're a person in war and you have to meet the enemy, I'd probably rather have some protection and defensive garb rather than not. But Ben and Chris, if you just
- [51:15]
Chris Direwalt
want to water up to the enemy
- [51:16]
Ben Sasse
without any protection, sure, let's not have any tanks. I think you completely. It depends on what the meaning of the word is. Is. Bill Clinton said, And I say HR General McMaster depends on what the meaning of the word tank is.
- [51:30]
Chris Direwalt
Are you suggesting he presented a false choice? Are you suggesting he was an excluded middle There was definitely an excluded middle. I meant what I said in my praise for him about his book. It is a good book and he is a good writer. And the, the question of disagreeability. How disagreeable are you? How, how good are you at being disagreeable? Me?
- [51:54]
Ben Sasse
Yeah, well, I think I'm really good at it. And now we should invite my wife on my view is ad hominem stuff is so dumb. And if you do a two by two of like the good version of Ben, it's called the old Adam of Ben and the, the, the newly birthed Ben and then you got me versus my opponen it or my good ideas and my under formed ideas and me versus my opponent. It seems like the way you want to have a debate with somebody is assume I want the better version of my ideas and the better version of your ideas and your character. Not the worst version of my ideas and the worst version of your character. We're naturally tribalists who go how about all of me good and bad against all of you good and bad? And I think the other split is more fun. And so I kind of feel like you can be dispassionate and say hey, let's figure out what we're debating here because I know I don't, I don't, I don't think I'm always right, but I always think I'm right at any moment. I wouldn't hold the position I have unless I thought it was the right position. But that doesn't mean I think I'm always right. So I'm going to be revising. So I kind of think I'm decent at being disagreeable and my wife is like, yeah but jackass, that's because you speak so impatiently you don't give another person room to clarify their part of the view. So I guess I suck.
- [53:08]
Chris Direwalt
Well, so how good were you as a young person? So the, the question here being when we are young and we don't know anything, the temptation of we don't know anything. The a version of what you just said, we don't know anything but we think we know everything. We're, we're deep in the grip of dunning Krugerism.
- [53:29]
Ben Sasse
Yeah.
- [53:31]
Chris Direwalt
How do you know as a young person, no, this is the time I should be, I should disagree. This is the time that I should not suck up and go along. This is actually the moment when I need to say nope, nope, nope, you guys are wrong.
- [53:45]
Ben Sasse
Well, I mean isn't the solution to that answer partly a reparsing of what the middle is because it isn't. You have to decide whether or not you sit back and don't have a perspective or you're definitively certain you're right and they're wrong. But it is to say, hey, here's what I think the assumptions are, and here's what I think the building blocks of my argument are that I go to from there. Will you help me disaggregate inside this? And what are the weakest parts of my argument? I don't use AI for this a lot, but I, I have a lot of friends who do this where they say to Gemini or Chad, GBT or Claude or whatever, hey, don't suck up to me, you stupid robot sycophant. Instead, go through my argument and tell me what the weakest parts of my argument are. It seems to me that's a useful device when you're debating friends or opponents as well.
- [54:32]
Chris Direwalt
But you've had a moment, surely in your life where you were too young to disagree or you did not have the status in the place. Maybe you were, I don't know, a freshman senator or I'm sure at many points before that in your life as a young man that you had to figure out, is this the time to be the skunk at the garden party? Because I ask. I focus on this because that's sort of what I'm supposed to do vocationally is be annoying. And what's the advice that you have for a young person who is, can you think of a moment in your own life where you were like, you made the right call or you made the wrong call about being a pain in the patootie?
- [55:21]
Ben Sasse
Well, I'll both take your bait about a place where I made the wrong call. And then at the risk of kissing your butt too much, I'll say one of the reasons why I don't think you seem annoying even when you ask repetitive hard questions questions is because they're questions, they're not declarations. Right? So when I say when to your question, what are places where I've screwed that up? It's going in too strong at what I think the strong point of my argument or the weak part of my opponent's argument is when I could have just framed that as a question which left you a little more wiggle room isn't the right word because that sounds, you know, mealy mouth, but it allows you the flexibility to grow. Right. And so I think I, I don't. I see you asking hard questions in your interviews with people sometimes, which I don't regard as annoying. Maybe it's because I'm sympathetic to you and I don't care if the person's wrong or if they look dumb when you're interviewing them. But I, I think the reason why you don't come across as an annoying jerk in that is that it is question centric.
- [56:20]
Chris Direwalt
Okay, well, then I feel better. That's good. Then that's, that, that's important.
- [56:25]
Ben Sasse
But one more on that, because I think part of building a really good
- [56:28]
Chris Direwalt
team
- [56:31]
Ben Sasse
is that arguing hard behind closed doors. But then once a play is called, being committed to executing together and recognizing that over the course of our lives, we're going to have different roles. I was a crappy quarterback for a lot of reasons, but one of them was my high point was going to be 511, so I could never see the whole field over the big lineman. But if you recognize you're gonna have different roles over time and you're not really the quarterback yet, there's a, there's a virtue in being able to be a rookie because it gives you a freedom to ask the question without having to declare the whole final definitive, summative truth.
- [57:08]
Chris Direwalt
The final definitive summit of truth. I like, I like that. And just to, to continue to flog this, because I, I, I am, I. It is a question on which I think is essential to success and happiness. What advice do you have for people who are parents, bosses, coaches, whomever, about how do you encourage effective dissent and disagreement? What do you do? What have you learned about being effective? To encourage people to disagree so that they do it in an effective way.
- [57:50]
Ben Sasse
I don't know that I'm a great advisor on this, but one of the places where it's fun to watch me seeing my kids grow is by encouraging them to see a third dimension, which is time. In a lot of hard debates, a lot of times it feels like there's an X axis and a Y axis and there's a me and a U and there's this position and that position. And a lot of times the right solution to de escalate or to get the 8020 benefit out of something with only the 20% risk in the conflict is to say, how do I add time to this debate? And so a device that we practice in our house is something that, weirdly, I learned through fundraising, which was, you know, in a lot of jobs, you know, university leadership jobs or raising money on a campaign is I developed the habit of asking people if I could ask them permission to later ask them for money. And it was like a second One opportunity in football or like a kid who's learning to water ski well, where you don't have to come out of the tuck, you can just stay in the tuck for longer or the skis are going to want a plane. You don't have to stand up right now. And so instead of asking for money early where you might get a no, I would say to someone, hey, here's a project I'm working on and I think it's a big deal and I think it's going to benefit some people and I think it would be a cause that you'd be able to give good advice on and could make an investment in. I'm not ready to ask them question yet. I'm not ready to ask you for money yet, but I'd like to get into a position where I could ask you to be a part of this project later. And if you add time to the dimension, it just seems to de escalate it a lot. And I, I add the dimension of time to the equation. I mean to say. And so I've been encouraging my kids the last two or three years to if there's something where they don't know the right answer and they think something's wrong and they think they should speak up asking permission to ask later, it's really hard for anybody to ever say no to that. And you got to preview the topic and usually what happens is you drift into the topic but with less head on conflict at the front end. What do you think?
- [59:43]
Chris Direwalt
I. Yes. And I will give one other thing that I learned. I think what you say is true, but I learned something else which is never agree to do anything in the future that you wouldn't do tomorrow. And I definitely learned that one the hard way of saying, when people said things like hey, could we do? And I would say yeah, so like I've had to learn to be better at being disagreeable because I'm a kiss ass by nature. And I've had to learn to say no and be willing to disagree and refuse and disappoint people. Because what I found out was that you will end up disappointing them more over time if you are not true to the person who God made you to be. If you're not doing, if you're not doing, if it is not harmonious, it doesn't mean that you're not going to find yourself doing a lot of things that you don't enjoy you will get to do in this life. You'll get to do many, maybe most things that you don't enjoy. But it means that if you know it's wrong and you know you don't want to do it or you know that the other person is making a mistake, time's probably not going to improve it. It's probably not going to get better later. And if you agree to do and when you said about about I'd like to the opportunity to ask you for money later, it just reminded me of the hard lesson that I learned about would you like to do something in September? And I say yes. And then it gets to be September and I say, what idiot agreed to this? And someone says it was you. It was you who agreed to do this. And I say, ah, I need to have another talk with myself about being better at being disagreeable so I don't end up in Vietnam.
- [61:35]
Ben Sasse
You're totally right about that. But then we should just go back and revise the opening version of this question then. I want to say one final word at time, but I want to say one final thing about HR too. You mean something that has a real expenditure of time. 100% agree with you. I was meaning the thing where we might feel a little cowardly or conflict avoidance about saying a hard thing or asking a hard thing. But as far as having to expend a lot of time in the future, holy smokes, have I made the mistake that you're talking about a million times. I'm probably the most disagreeable person I know on a lot of things where I'm immature. But an even worse flaw is not wanting to tell people no about spending time on something they want you to spend time on. And you're not really sure if that's a good enough use of the calling of limited time.
- [62:21]
Chris Direwalt
Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I. We. Look at us, we're disagreeing and agreeing. So we're here. We are. We're doing it. We're. We're practicing. We're practicing what we preach. I like it. Okay, that is it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like. Review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind. You can write us@sassandstyrewaltgmail.com and we should do. It's about time for another one of those episodes. This podcast was produced by Scott Emergett with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life.
- [63:18]
Ben Sasse
Sam.