William McRaven

Summary

Podcast Summary: Not Dead Yet

Episode: William McRaven

Hosts: Ben Sasse (“A”) and Chris Stirewalt (“B”)
Guest: Admiral William McRaven (“C”)
Date: June 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Not Dead Yet features an in-depth, candid conversation with Admiral William McRaven, celebrated Navy SEAL Commander, architect of Operation Neptune Spear, and author of the bestselling Make Your Bed. Hosts Ben Sasse and Chris Stirewalt explore what it means to live well in the face of mortality, focusing on character, grit, and gratitude. Admiral McRaven shares formative stories from military and civilian life, lessons on leadership, the shaping power of teams, the importance of learning from failure, curiosity, and the art of building trust. The episode concludes with personal reflections and McRaven's recommended reading for young leaders.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining a Good Life & Updates on Ben Sasse’s Health

• Sasse discusses his ongoing cancer battle and how he and his family are redeeming their time ([00:37-02:30]).
• “The great news is cancer numbers… we’re kind of kicking butt. So we’re very, very grateful to Providence that I’m on a super drug.” (Ben Sasse, [01:36])
• Themes: Living meaningfully despite uncertainty; resilience in adversity.

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2. Introducing Admiral McRaven: A Life of Leadership

• Hosts reflect on McRaven’s unique place among modern US military leaders alongside Petraeus, Mattis, et al. ([02:37-04:42])
• Noted for “considerable rectitude and dignity” and being “genuinely big cause, low ego” ([04:42-06:45]).
• “When there’s work to be done, this is the serious kind of guy you want to be making decisions. And when you’re sitting with him side by side, he’s just not an asshole. And you wouldn’t think that’s possible… right on that.” (Sasse, [06:34])

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3. What Makes a Great Team?

• Chemistry vs. Talent: McRaven emphasizes the primacy of team chemistry over raw talent ([07:54-09:44]).
  • “If I’ve got to choose between talent or chemistry, I’m going to go with chemistry. I’m going to go with the team that can work together to get the job done.” (McRaven, [09:32])
  • Shares the story of building SEAL platoons: the “super” platoon full of stars failed due to ego, while the “Bad News Bears” excelled ([08:17-09:44]).
• Team construction as art and science: Avoiding the “fallacy of composition”—not just collecting stars, but fitting complementary pieces ([09:44-12:06]).

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4. McRaven’s Unlikely Path: Journalism Major to SEAL Commander

• McRaven shares his academic and family background ([12:17-17:30]):
  • “I will have to confirm that I am a proud journalism major from the University of Texas.” (McRaven, [12:27])
  • Started as pre-med, switched to journalism due to poor grades and love of writing.
  • “In the military, you spend a lot of time briefing, you spend a lot of time writing reports. ... Writing came simple to me.” ([16:15])
• Communication skills as force multipliers: Clear writing and briefing are essential leadership tools ([18:31-20:35]).
  • “You have got to summarize very difficult, very challenging, very complex scenarios into a one or two page paper.” ([18:31])

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5. Swagger vs. Arrogance: Confidence Rooted in Humility

• Navigating the balance between necessary confidence (swagger) and hubris ([21:24-22:24]).
  • “The difference between swagger and hubris is that, you know, again, you’re not the smartest person in the room, and you’re prepared to listen to competing ideas.” ([21:46])

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6. Evolution of the US Military: From Post-Vietnam to Joint Force

• McRaven’s career spanned military decline post-Vietnam to elite force post-9/11 ([23:06-26:33]).
  • The creation of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) united previously siloed units, driving innovation and adaptability.

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7. Learning from Failure & Building a Culture of Innovation

• Special Operations’ culture: candid debriefs where all members (regardless of rank) can speak freely and critique missions ([28:17-32:51]).
  • “You better have thick skin if you’re going to be a SOF operator anywhere...” ([30:41])
  • Innovation is expected—even at risk of failure—provided lessons are internalized.

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8. US Military & Civil-Military Divide

• Shift to all-volunteer military created a professionalized force but widened the gap with civilian society ([34:44-38:24]).
  • McRaven supports the idea of “national service,” not just military, to bridge the divide and cultivate public-mindedness.

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9. Habit, Character, and ‘Make Your Bed’

• Inspiration for his viral speech and book: SEAL training as “life crammed into six months” ([40:21-44:15]).
  • “If you can’t even do the little things right, how can we ever trust you to do the big things right?” ([41:08])
  • Lessons: Small tasks, working with diverse teams, grit, learning from failure, never ‘ring the bell’ (quit).

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10. Curiosity as a Leadership Virtue

• McRaven’s childhood and education fostered curiosity—in poetry, philosophy, and military history ([45:09-53:27]).
  • “If you’re not curious, you’re gonna find yourself in a situation where you don’t have an answer, or you don’t know where to go to get the answer...” ([47:09])
  • The value of intellectual as well as physical courage; being broadly read as preparation for leadership.

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11. Selecting and Developing Leaders

• Importance of recruiting for not just academic prowess, but also critical thinking, resilience, and ability to function under pressure ([53:27-54:00]).
  • “We want people that are critical thinkers that can think when things are going south… And not all guys with 4.0 GPAs can do that.” ([51:53])

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12. Recommended Reading for Young Officers & Leaders

([54:11-57:18])

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Once An Eagle by Anton Myrer
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
• The works of Will Durant (historian/philosopher)
• The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey
• Poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Rudyard Kipling
• The 100 Days of Lieutenant McHorton (WWII survival story)

“You realize that part of my responsibility as an officer or a leader anywhere is you have to build trust in people. And you build trust by being authentic, by building a personal relationship with them… at the end of the day, if you promise something… you’ve got to deliver…” (McRaven, [56:33])

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13. Reflections on Courage – Physical, Intellectual, and Moral

• Sasse and Stirewalt reflect on McRaven’s blend of “warrior poet” virtues: toughness, empathy, intellectual curiosity, and a passion for poetry ([59:51-66:39]).
• Moving story about John McCain, memorization of poetry in the Hanoi Hilton, and the sustaining power of literature during hardship ([62:49-67:37]).

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14. Communication and the Future of Leadership

• In an age where “IQ is commoditized,” EQ and communication become the differentiators ([68:44-69:57]).
• “You need high character people who have EQ who can be generalists and then can also communicate with and motivate and listen to other people on their team.” (Sasse, [69:44])

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15. Closing Thoughts

• Liberal arts, curiosity, and communication skills as necessary for tomorrow’s leaders in both military and civilian life ([69:57-71:58]).
• Echoing throughout: the need for “well-furnished minds,” humility, resilience, and the courage to never ring the bell.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Team-Building:
  “The sum is greater than the parts… You want people that come together, that don’t have an ego… but they also better understand they’re not the smartest man or woman in the room…”
  — McRaven ([10:50])
• On Failure and Growth:
  “You can’t wallow in your failure… We could have done better here, but we really screwed this up. And then they internalize this and they fix it for the next time…”
  — McRaven ([28:17])
• On Courage and Curiosity:
  “You better be curious in the military because you better find out how, you know, how the enemy thinks… If you’re not curious, you’re gonna find yourself in a situation where you don’t have an answer…”
  — McRaven ([47:09])
• On ‘Make Your Bed’:
  “If you can’t even do the little things right, how can we ever trust you to do the big things right?”
  — McRaven ([41:08])
• On Enduring Hardship with Dignity:
  “No matter what kind of difficult times we’re going through, we can make it if we just persevere, or even if we can’t make it, we’re going to go out with dignity."
  — McRaven ([58:04])
• On Trust and Leadership:
  “You build trust by being authentic, by building a personal relationship… if you promise something… you’ve got to deliver…”
  — McRaven ([56:33])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:37] – Sasse on living with cancer
• [02:37] – McRaven’s legacy and introduction
• [07:54] – Team-building: chemistry vs. talent
• [12:17] – McRaven: Journalism major, communication in leadership
• [21:24] – Swagger vs. arrogance
• [23:06] – Post-Vietnam military transformation
• [28:17] – Learning from failure/culture of critique
• [34:44] – All-volunteer military, civil-military divide, national service idea
• [40:21] – The “Make Your Bed” story, lessons from SEAL training
• [45:09] – Curiosity and intellectual courage
• [53:21] – Selecting for critical thinking under pressure
• [54:11] – McRaven’s favorite books for young leaders
• [59:51] – Host reflections on courage, poetry, leadership
• [68:44] – Communication, EQ, and the future

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Final Thoughts

In this rich and reflective conversation, Admiral McRaven distills decades of leadership in war and peace into actionable wisdom for any listener: Build your team on trust, humility, and chemistry. Don’t fear failure—learn from it. Cultivate curiosity, resilience, and communication. Hold confidence and humility in tension. And always, always make your bed.

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For further reading, see the full book list recommended by Admiral McRaven at [54:11–57:18].

Transcript

[A]

Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.

[B]

And I'm Chris Darwalt.

[A]

And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.

[B]

However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to

[A]

live a good life, one with meaning, love, and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.

[B]

All right, dude, how are you doing? What's. What's the What's. Can you give us a brief update on the Ben Sasse experience?

[A]

Ah, not interesting enough. Okay, here's the shorthand that we tell, you know, extended family, two small bads, one great good. A small bad, one gone from puking once a day to five times a day the last couple weeks. And the crappy rash that used to be on my face has migrated to my scalp, and so I bleed out my head all the time, and I saturate three pillows a night. But I have a wife who's a hell of a team player. And so we take turns both doing laundry and figuring out where on Amazon you can buy pillowcases by the gross. And so we just throw away our gross, gross, gross, gross, and keep moving. But the great news is cancer numbers. I don't have blood cancer, but the cancer residue in the blood numbers are called CA19.9. Kind of like you measure your blood sugar with a 1C. CA19.9 is a measure of cancer residue in your blood. And we're kind of kicking butt. So we're very, very grateful to Providence that I'm on a super drug.

[C]

There you go.

[B]

And I will only ask. We were going to do. We said we'll do five. Our text chain is first five or six episodes, and this is episode 16. Sweet. So it feels like we have exceeded original expectations.

[A]

Have you seen the Kevin Nean riff about his buddy who got a terminal diagnosis? And then every time.

[B]

Every time anybody sends it to me, I'm like. He's like, this is how. This is sass, right, dude, I'm five

[A]

and a half months into having 90 days to live, and I think my kids are like, let's move this ship

[B]

on down the road. It's been great, dad. Been great. And wrap it up.

[A]

The farewell tour has gone on a bit long, brother. Anyway, let's get to a guy who knows something about kicking ass.

[B]

So the question I have for you, everybody already knows that our who our guest is because it's the title of the show. But I want to ask a. A broader question first, which is there was a cohort of military leaders. I would put Ray Odierno in Iraq in the group. I think Jim Mattis was the, the, the dude, the goat in this. There was William Petraeus and there was H.R. mcMaster. This, both the class, I guess we'd call it like the class of 2005, 2006. These were the people who, when Iraq was not doing what Iraq was supposed to be doing or was intended to do, that became the elite. And William McRaven, to me, even in this group, sort of stands out, right? To me in this group, he. He stands out. The, the CV is he is a retired admiral, which means he's four stars, he's all the way live. He was the head of the Special Operations Command. He was the architect of Operation Neptune Spear, which was the bin Laden raid. That was him. And he was in charge of the search for Saddam Hussein in Iraq and his presence in Washington. You would know better than me. His presence in and around Washington was as a person of considerable rectitude and dignity of. He was, he. He had a lot of swack with multiple administrations of both parties for a period of time. He was a guy that people really listened to. What would you say about him?

[A]

Well said. So I've spent some time at MacDill, at Special Ops in Tampa. And there is a culture when you called it the class. David Petraeus and others in the class of 2005, I don't know all their exact birth years and when they graduated the academies or Admiral McRaven, who we're going to spend time with, was ROTC at Texas. But I don't know all their moments in life. But I think generationally, what you've said is exactly right, that Special Ops Command became a thing after a lot. I mean, it's older than this, but it became a new vintage after all the counterinsurgency stuff. And it's pretty crazy that you can have a bunch of really amazing known badass warriors and a whole bunch of guys who'd follow them anywhere. And I've met a lot of people who've been on units under McRaven's command over the years who'd still drop anything they're doing in middle age or older or corporate America to go back to be under McRaven's lead again. Like you said about Mattis as the Goat, there are a whole bunch of people who they've ever been able to be led by some of these folks, they just want that spree de corps again. And yet McRaven, by the accidents of, you know, Greek history. It's both bin Laden and Hussein. Just absolutely crazy that the same dude is in leadership in both of those. And so I've known Bill for a very long time. I was on faculty at the University of Texas 20 plus years ago. And then he was later president at Texas or Chancellor. And so because of UT connections besides DC Connections, I've known him for a long time. And he is one of those weird dudes who is genuinely big cause, low ego. Like, one of the reasons people love him is that when there's work to be done, this is the serious kind of guy you want to be making decisions. And when you're sitting with him side by side, he's just not an asshole. And you wouldn't think that's possible to do the two by two. Right on that.

[B]

All right, so what is he going to teach us about living a good life?

[A]

Well, I mean, I think for one thing, we gotta mock him for not ever trying to truly cash out and making $10 million as a writer. Like, I mean, the guy gives one speech, make your bed, and it's dang good. But then when a publisher calls you because you give the commencement speech of the year, I think people think they're gonna get 250 grand. And the dude sold like 7 or 8 million copies of the book. So I think one of the of Not Dead yet is if constraints are removed, most people think their life will get a lot better. And for a lot of people, once constraints are removed, you reveal more of the brokenness of their character. And Bill's a guy who seems more Bill McRaven the more free he is from constraint. And he's a really interesting and desirable human.

[B]

Oh, I like that. That's a good. That's a good note to dive in on. No pun intended. So why don't we go ahead and get to it?

[A]

Admiral, welcome. So good to see you. Thank you for making time for us.

[C]

Of course, Ben. It's great to be with you, sire.

[A]

Walt's smarter than I am, and he's got a broader range of topics. I'm going to. I'm going to dive into something that's probably just a complete softball for you, but I'm fascinated with a guy that has your bio and experience set. What do you think about. About what makes a great team? What's the common denominator? Or when you're building a new team tomorrow.

[B]

Tomorrow.

[A]

What are you looking for?

[C]

Yeah, I'm actually looking for chemistry rather than talent. And years ago, Ben, when I was the executive officer of Seal Team 1, the executive officer is the number two guy, and his job is to kind of. It's like the NFL draft. You get all of the. The resumes, you get all the bios, and you build the SEAL platoons, which is the fighting unit. And I remember I decided I was going to build the perfect SEAL platoon. I went through all these bios. I got the. The officers that were Naval Academy graduates. One guy was an Olmstead Scholar. I got a chief petty officer who had Vietnam experience. I got the best enlisted guys I could find. And then. So that was my super platoon. And then, you know, I kind of build the rest of the platoons. I got down to the 10th Platoon, and they were like the Bad News Bears. You know, they were the guys and. And they knew how the platoon structure worked. Well, as it turned out, the best platoon turned out to be the worst platoon because they couldn't work together. They all had egos. They all thought they were the top dog. And the guys that were the Bad News Bears, they had a little bit of a chip on their shoulder. They figured out how to work together. They were absolutely one of the best platoons I ever served with. And it was really a bit of an epiphany for me to realize that, look, talent is important, and if you can get talent and chemistry, better yet. But at the end of the day, if I've got to choose between talent or chemistry, I'm going to go with chemistry. I'm going to go with the. The guys and the team that can work together to get the job done.

[A]

When the dream Team, I think it was 1992 USA Basketball, I remember. I think it was Kyzhevsky coaching at that point.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

I think he said that the fallacy of composition sounds like a logic nerd problem from eighth grade school, but at the end of the day. Is sodium poison? Yep. Is chlorine poison? Yep. So you put them together, obviously, salt must be super poisonous. And he says regularly the composition of the team is different in positive and negative ways. And you get. In basketball, why you wouldn't want five guys who each wanted to be the ball hog. Maybe you have a power forward, four. Or you have a shooting guard too, whatever. But if everybody wants the ball all the time, it doesn't work. But you still need to have the chemistry point you're making. But when you're building that team, is it like puzzle pieces that the first person is still the highest draft pick and then you're figuring out how to compliment him or what do you. How much do you have to have known about the individual input ingredients to put together the team that doesn't have the fallacy of composition problem?

[C]

Yeah, it's a great point. I don't generally look for, you know, who do I think is going to be the Michael Jordan on the team and build it around them. I really do kind of look at all the pieces of the puzzle first. And so, you know, in a SEAL platoon, for example, or any team that, that you're trying to build, you know, the. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So you have to look at the sum of the parts. I'm looking for people that are. Are again, in the military structure. Of course you're looking for people that understand how to follow the chain of command, that are gonna be passionate about the mission, that are willing to sacrifice. But this applies whether you were in the military or academia, where I was, or healthcare or corporate America. You want people that come together, that don't have an ego. You gotta have a little swagger. Make no mistake about it. Certainly if you're in a SEAL platoon or a basketball team or whatever, you better have some people that have got some swagger, but they also better understand they're not the smartest man or woman in the room, and they need to listen to the other people. They need to take the ideas of the other people, and then collectively, to some degree, they've got to follow the leader and move out and get the job done. So it's not so much about finding the single individual that I think will build the team around. It's about making sure all the parts come together appropriately.

[B]

Admiral, I found something very disturbing in your biography, and I'm only one thing, Chris. I'm. I'm a little. I'm. I'm as. As the. As the youth would say.

[C]

I'm shook.

[B]

Is it true? Can you. Will you. Will you now confirm or deny whether you were a journal. A journalism major at ut?

[C]

I. I will have to confirm that I am a proud journalism major from the University of Texas. You bet. What?

[A]

So.

[B]

So here. Here's the thing.

[A]

Your glee is amazing right now.

[B]

I'm not. I was not a journalism major. I don't think anybody should be a journalism major unless you want to teach journalism.

[A]

I.

[B]

So when. When the world met you, when I. When you came into the national consciousness, it was as. As some people might say, straight out of central casting, right? You, you, the. The uniform, the, The. The commendations, the service record, all of this stuff. It seemed like you had been hatched in a laboratory under the Naval Academy chapel and made for this. Tell us about how you decided. I know you're. I know your father was a flyer. Talk about how you decided to not go into the military and then how you decided to go into the military. Really good.

[C]

Yeah. Well, first, there's nothing about me that says central casting. All you need to do is check my gpa, check all the roads that led me down dark paths and. And rabbit holes. And, you know, you get very fortunate. You get very lucky in life sometime to end up where you. Where you are. And that. And that's me in my case. So to kind of answer your question, Chris, I did grow up in a military family, as you pointed out. My father was a World War II fighter pilot. A little time in Korea. He retired in 1967. But I grew up in a military environment, and although my dad was not the Great Santini, he didn't push me into the military. It was something that I loved. I loved being around military bases. I loved the camaraderie I saw between he and his World War II fellow pilots and those sorts of things. And so I knew from a young age that I wanted to be part of this kind of brotherhood at the time. And so when I had a chance, my mother, God bless her, I mean, she pushed me hard to try to get to the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy. But back to. Not out of central casting, you know, I didn't have the grades or the SAT scores to get into any of these elite, you know, academic universities that the academies were. I was fortunate to get into the University of Texas, but. But I went through the ROTC program there and the Naval ROTC program. And that really kind of shaped the. The leader that I became. It was a great program, you know, great military and civilian instructors. And so, you know, that path seemed to be a very natural fit for me early on.

[B]

So explain journal. What was the journal? Was it because it was easy?

[C]

Well, the journalism. Back to my gpa. So I started off pre med. I started off in pre med. That did not go so well. I went to accounting. That went even worse. And so at the end of my sophomore year, my naval science professor said, look, you're not. You're not doing too well. I had a 2.001 GPA, and at 2.0, you go on academic probation. He said, you need to find something you can do. Well, I'd always enjoyed writing, so I decided to try the school of journalism. And it turned out I had a Knack for writing. And it wasn't engineering, it wasn't math, it wasn't accounting. It was something I could do. And then again, not only was it something I could do, it was something I enjoyed doing. And so I finished my last two years in the school of journalism.

[B]

But what the military, I assume certainly at that time, probably now still wants are hard sciences and they want calipers. Were you, did you feel like that was going to be a disadvantage when you were going that that would be a problem for you?

[C]

Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, the military, you know, contrary to what a lot of people think, they're very, very technical services. I mean, if you're in the navy, you know, running a ballistic submarine, or you're, you're an airman flying a, you know, a B2 bomber, or you're in the army and you're having to go look at high Mars and these are, it's a very, very technical field. Nowadays everything is kind of computer driven, AI driven, that sort of thing. So a very small percentage of the students going through the ROTC program or going through the academies are allowed to go into, you know, humanities or liberal arts. And that was true when I went through. Fortunately, my naval science professor decided if he was going to save my career, he was going to have to give me an opportunity to do something other than math and science. But what I found with journalism that served me very well in the military was in the military you spent a lot of time briefing, you spent a lot of time writing reports. And my advantage was I had no problem standing in front of senior officers and briefing them. I felt very comfortable doing that because it was a skill you learned in the school of journalism in radio, television and film, which was part of the curricula. And then, you know, again, you had to write reports all the time. And writing came simple to me. It did not come that simple to my engineering counterparts.

[A]

Yeah, if we can just linger on the word brief for a minute. I don't think we think about it enough in education, frankly. The skill of being able to do a precis, to do a summary. We have some friends who have a family exercise that started as a didactic thing for their kids, but they still use it for dinner parties. They call it a five minute, which is anybody can be teed up at any point to have to give a five minute speech on some topic that they've just invested 120 or 200 hours in, and now you got to write it up in five minutes. I think of the Oxbridge tutorial model where you write a 10 page paper and then you get to class with your tutor, professor and only three other classmates and all of a sudden you have to summarize it and you may get four minutes, you may get 40 minutes, but you're surely not going to read a 10 page paper. It's an important skill and I imagine as a young office, is that, is that an ingredient you look for when you're putting together the composition of a team? People who can see clearly enough to say, hey, you might be smarter than I am, but know nothing about this topic. How do I distill it fast?

[C]

Yeah, you hit on something very important there, Ben. And it's, you know, again for a SEAL platoon it's not critical, but as you get more senior, that skill becomes more and more important. For me, when I got to the White House, so right after 9 11, I was in the Bush administration and on the National Security Council staff. And as you well know, and you can appreciate, Ben, I mean you've got to write papers. So Dr. Condoleezza Rice was the National Security Advisor and Bush 43 was President. Bush was the president. So every day you're writing papers, multiple papers for Conde and for President Bush. And to your point, nobody's going to read a 10 page paper. You have got to summarize very difficult, very challenging, very complex scenarios into a one or two page paper. And this skill that I learned as a journalist and interestingly enough from sports writing, you know, the sports reporters were always these guys that could, okay look, you had nine innings of a baseball game or you had four, you know, four quarters of a football game, but now you want to hit the highlights that are important to the reader. And so my ability and actually when I got to the Pentagon early in 1986, on the Pentagon staff there, Naval officer, I also had to write point papers. And so these skills once again came in very handy to be able to take complex ideas, make them simple, but not leave out the important facts. When I got into after 911 and I'm briefing President Obama and President Bush, same sort of thing. I mean you have a complex mission you're going on. You can't explain all the intricacies of the mission to the President of the United States. But the President needs to understand what the risks involved are, you know, how certain you are of the intelligence. The President needs to understand the most important things. So you've got to take a complex mission and simplify it in a way that will resonate with the President. So that again, you've explained all the potential risks and he can make an informed decision and get back to you really good.

[A]

I mean, obviously clear communication is going to matter even more in a world where IQ is commoditized. So the eq, the ability to say, I'm not giving you a linear argument that goes beginning to end of my order of discovery. I recognize that order of presentation is a little more rose petal structure. I got to be at the center and be able to go out to any side topic and come back but President Bush, President Obama, you're super smart guys and your, you're regularly impatient when people are briefing you because your time is the most important, limited resource in town. I kind of feel like this skill is going to become even more important where we go next. So I, I think about your word swagger a minute ago and maybe, maybe the best way to ask it is just what's the difference between swagger and arrogance? How do you find that line?

[C]

Yeah, and, and it's, it's a great question and it is a difficult line to find sometimes. But I would offer that swagger means you have to have a level of confidence in your skill set so that that confidence is exuded. It comes out when you're standing before the troops, whoever the troops are, whether it's military troops or my, my faculty at the University of Texas or anywhere you go. So people have got to be confident in you. But the difference between swagger and hubris is that, you know, again, you're not the smartest person in the room and, and you're prepared to listen to competing ideas. You're compared to, you're prepared to be humble in, in spite of the fact that, you know, you have the confidence to be able to lead this group because, you know, you don't want to go in thinking you have all the answers and not be prepared to listen to. Again, a contrarian view. That really might be the right answer.

[B]

So you, your military career, it begins with basically the crescendo before the end of the Cold War and then the weird period in American history, the peace dividend, the post Cold War, the world is flat. Da da da da da da da. Talk just in, to whatever degree you, you, you want to talk about the military that you found and the change you, you already talked about 9, 11, but talk about the change from when you went in to that, to that pivot point.

[C]

Yeah, obviously a lot of years there. So, you know, I come into the Navy, I get commissioned in 1977, and to your Point, Chris. This is the. This is the end of the Vietnam era. Vietnam's over 1975. And so we are in this kind of lull, if you will, in terms of the fighting that we saw for many years in Vietnam. But everybody that raised me in the SEAL teams was a Vietnam vet. So you're still learning the skill set from the Vietnam veterans on how to be a great Navy seal. But of course, time goes on, they age out, and then you get into the 80s, you get the Reagan buildup. But it was a long time in the special operations community before there was a real appreciation. We see a bunch of failures. Of course, we had the failure of Desert one. You look at the conflict in Grenada, where we had some successes but some failures. And then, frankly, after Desert one and after Grenada, it's Congress that comes together and decides that they're going to establish the US Special Operations Command. Because prior to that, every service had their own special operation. You had, you know, the Navy SEALs in the Navy, you had Air Force, Air Commandos. You had the Army Green Berets and the Rangers and the Delta Force. And Congress said, you know what? We need a joint force. All of us in the special operations community resisted that. You know, want to be part of the army, the army didn't want to be part of the Navy, etc. It was the single best thing that ever happened to U.S. special Operations. You know, Congress had it right, they got it right, and they brought us together in spite of the resistance. And this created this joint force that really helped the rest of the military become joint because they saw the benefits of, you know, my ability to take a SEAL platoon, put an Air Force combat controller with them. That could really do a better job of calling fires from aircraft. We could bring in, you know, army guys that knew how to call in artillery. All of that became better at what we did. So all of that comes from about the mid-80s. So by the time 911 comes, we've kind of gone through this revolution in military affairs. We've looked at technology. We have understood that the world is changing. By the time 911 happens, I would offer we have gone from being a military in decline after Vietnam to a military that was on the ascension because, again, the Reagan buildup, Congress had begun to support us. Technology had come into play. And then 911 happens. We have become a joint force by that time, and now we are off and running on the global war on terrorism. And, you know, as horrific as the implications of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world were the fact of the matter is we got so much better as a military. You know, we fought every day in Iraq and Afghanistan in a joint environment against a very difficult enemy. I got it. This was not a near peer competitor, but make no mistake about it, Al Qaeda and Taliban knew how to fight. They knew how to fight in Iraq, they knew how to fight in Afghanistan. These were hard, tough fights for the guys on the ground, but it made us a better military.

[A]

I'm torn because to stay at the rise of the Special Ops and how more centralization, I think, actually enabled more decentralization. It seems to me that there's a delayering that came from that centralization. So I'd love to hear you talk about that, but I'll give you a second question you can go to too, if that's too boring. But failure as a teacher, the. The Special Ops community seems to learn well and fast. I think there's a lot of, you know, pop psychologizing going on about Elon right now. But one of the interesting things about his, I think spectral behavior is probably the way to call it, is that most people internalize lots and lots and lots of pain about a failed rocket catch. Right? And it seems like I only know Elon a little bit. I've never talked about this with him, but it feels like when there's a failure in his world, he almost internalizes no pain or regret at all. He just views it as data and we got an extra chance to fail. I've heard Peter Thiel say before, you look at young students and they look at Silicon Valley, you know, whatever unicorn founders, and they'll say something like, well, I already failed twice and you were successful in what you did. And he's like, dumbass, you're Owen 2. I'm 1 and 49. The whole difference was I just didn't care about how many losses I took. I was just going to keep going until we succeeded. And it feels like the Special Ops community is pretty good at learning from failure as opposed to just, you know, wallowing in it. And I wonder if there's a relationship between that and how we get to a delay or decentralization that allows a lot more innovation.

[C]

Yeah, fairly complex question, but let me see if I can kind of peel back the onion a little bit on this. So I. We're a little bit different, I think, than. Than Elon and Peter Thiel in that, you know, when we fail, unfortunately, lives are generally at stake and lives are generally lost, or the reputation of the community and the reputation of the nation is put at risk. So I would say we definitely internalize those failures. They are painful. They hurt. But to your point, you can't wallow in your failure. One of the things that we are very, very good at, certainly in combat, and I mean, I saw it every single day. So if the Rangers or the seals or the Delta Force guys or the Air Force Air Commandos, you go out on a mission and it doesn't go well, or it does go well, either way, at the end of the mission. And the Rangers are a great example because the Rangers are really an elite infantry unit. You know, they aren't, you know, kind of the. The tier one Special Operations Forces, but they are great, great soldiers. But they have some very young soldiers in the group. You know, some of these kids are, you know, 18, 19 years old, along with some NCOs. But the Rangers are also very disciplined. Every time a Ranger gets up to give a brief, it's, sir, Rangers lead the way. And then when he's finished, sir, Rangers lead the way. But what happens is before they go out on a mission, you know, the young captains or the majors and the. And the first sergeants get together, they kind of plan the mission. Everybody kind of talks about it. They go out on the mission. When they come back from a mission, they go into, you know, the briefing room, and metaphorically, everybody takes off their collar devices. So the privates and the corporals and the sergeants have just as much say as the captains and the majors do. And so you get into these very heated discussions after a mission. Hey, why did you do this? Or what happened here? And we should have done this better. And it really is this kind of both cathartic. But to your point, Ben, this is a. We could have done better here. We could have done better here. We could have done better here. Hey, we did pretty well over here, but we really screwed this up. And then they. They internalize this and they fix it for the next time they go out, because if they don't fix it, somebody else is going to die. But as soon as that briefing's over, they put their collar devices back on, and it's, yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, Rangers lead the way. Right.

[B]

Do they literally remove their collar devices?

[C]

They don't literally remove them, but the. Psychologically, yeah, metaphorically, again, the privates are just as important in this conversation as the captains and the majors. Right. And so I think this is a real strength of the US Special Operations Force, is that we're all prepared to do that. You better have thick skin if you're going to be a SOF operator anywhere, if you're going to be a SEAL or a Ranger, Delta, whatever, because if you don't have thick skin, if you're not up for criticism, then the wrong organization. Because this is the nature of how we learn. Do we internalize it? Is it painful? You're damn right it is. I don't know that any of us could be an Elon Musk or a Peter Thiel because we see the risks of somebody losing their life as greater than the software. Didn't go well, right? Yeah. So that makes it a little bit more challenging. But to the innovation. Here's to your point, Ben. And in fact, Eric Schmidt, when I was on the Defense Innovation board with Eric Schmidt and we had an opportunity to kind of take him to some combatant commanders and then the special operations, and he had seen how the big Army, Navy and the Air Force worked. He had not seen how special operations work. And when he came in to see the way our guys innovate and the speed at which we look at issues and oh, by the way, to your point about the decentralization, it is a culture that says we expect you to, to innovate. We expect you to be, to take risks and again to, to think outside the box. In the, in the old vernacular, that's who you are. As a special operation. They won't always work out. Well, we got it. But we would rather have you be, you know, take these risks, be innovative so we can find out what the next cutting edge technology or tactic is so that we can be better. And that really comes from, again, a culture of, yes, of decentralization, but also a culture of innovation and a culture of risk taking that is a natural part of who we are as special operators.

[B]

Okay, the, the story. I saw stripes. The, the, the story of the decline in the US Military in the post Vietnam era is replaced by this lethal, effective, highly professional, this, this, this amazing military that we have, right, that can not only can we project force anywhere in the world very quickly, we can have a fully functioning Taco Bell set up in that location and like 48 people will be not only fighting the enemy, but quenching their thirst with Baja Blast. The US Military. The turnaround is remarkable, was amazing and all of this stuff, but there was a cost. You have lived at the, at the intersection between civic and civilian life and the military. I think about our colleague Corey Shockey's book the State and the Soldier and that one of the consequences of this highly professionalized, highly effective military is that we have seen a separation into a military caste and you came from a military family. But then again, I don't know how many million American men were under arms during the Second World War. But you were not alone in coming from a military family. The pipeline is narrowing and it looks like that has consequences both for the military, but also for the civilian population's relation to, relationship to and understanding. Talk about the, the societal costs of the, the, of that very effective turnaround.

[C]

Yeah. So I think a lot of the turnaround had to do with the fact that we went to an all volunteer military. And I remember when we did this and I'm not sure I've got the date right, maybe 1975 or somewhere around there. I remember when we did this. I'm thinking this will be disastrous. Who in the world is going to join a military where the pay is low, where you're deployed all the time away from your family, where you're risking your life? I just didn't, I didn't think we would be able.

[B]

It's going to be the French Foreign Legion.

[C]

Right. I didn't think we'd get young men and women to sign up. And oh, by the way, they signed up in droves. They were passionate about serving. And so what you saw Chris, over this again from the kind of post Vietnam era, this increase and then again the Reagan buildup came the 90s with the technology. By the time 911 comes, we have got an all volunteer military that has been in place for quite some time. And we have learned how to compensate these young men and women at the appropriate level. We've given them the skill sets because the money's come in so we can train them better. So this has had a lot to do with where we, you know, we got to in terms of, of a military. Now I will tell you my, my position on and I, I'm a big fan of Corey Sake, Corey Shockey. So I do understand this concern from the American public that, you know, you know, less than 1% of the Americans have ever served in the military or something like that. I guess I have always viewed it differently. I'm okay with other people not serving in the military. People come up to me all the time, they kind of apologize for it. So for God's sake, don't apologize for it. Go do what you do. Well, I agreed to sign up to serve in the military as did all these other young men and women. We're proud to do it. We're happy to. I want Americans to live their lives. When 911 was going on and we're in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would come back to the States every once in a while. And I was both surprised, but also I was okay with it, that people were more concerned about the super bowl than they were about what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. And a lot of people didn't like that at all. And I understand that. Don't misunderstand me. I understand that there are young men and women over there dying overseas and the American public should be concerned and focused on this. I agree with that. But I also wanted America to continue to, you know, go to their kids soccer games, to go to the Super Bowls, to live their lives. That's what I joined up to do, was to protect America. And, and I wanted to protect America so that Americans could continue to live their lives. And I was okay with that. Now, I'll add one other thing though. I do think national services, something we need to get into. Not necessarily everybody joining the military, but if we had a, you know, a national, you know, security, you know, agency, not national security agency, a national public service. I'm sorry. Yeah, a national, you know, service corps that, you know, young men and women could come to a national service academy where they could learn, you know, not how to shoot artillery but how to be doctors in, in West Texas, you know, how to be civil engineers so they could solve the Flint, Michigan water problem. How to do things that were domestically focused so the national service would be again, focused on helping America. I think that would bring Americans and those that are in national service, both in the military and in a national service corps together in a way that would be important.

[A]

Your viral make your bed speech, which became obviously an unbelievably successful book. Chris and I have both written bestsellers and I think that means they our books together add up to a rounding error to 1% of your 10 million copies.

[B]

The tables at graduation parties this week are fairly groaning under the weight of your book.

[A]

There are so many of your book

[B]

that you can hear them groaning at the graduation parties under the weight.

[A]

We won't nerd out around the economics of the 14% of authors who get to earn out their advance, but congratulations on eight figures of overage. But as I read make youe Bed, it's about habit stacking and it's. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's habits that you learned in the military. And I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how the Military takes an 18 year old and trains them to handle life and death situations and operate with millions and millions and millions of dollars of equipment and other lives depending on them. The military forms character in a way that I, I am idealistically desirous of a world where a national security corps could work or a national service corps could work. I'm hugely skeptical that it would end up culture war politics around what we train in the latest trendy fights in higher ed. But what you've done, and it's against a backdrop where General Kneller, who ran the Marine Corps a couple years ago, told me one time, less than 30% of American 18 year olds are really fit enough to join the military. And that means that something like 11% are fit enough to join the Marines. Give us the shorthand version of make your bed updated for today and what your hope is for the civilian population that doesn't have the same grit and will as the people who are signing on a dotted line to come and say, yeah, I'll put my life at risk under the authority of people above me in the command.

[C]

Yeah, well, I hope both the make your bed speech and the make book, yes, they were about pattern stacking, but they were about a lot of other things. What I told folks was when I, when I wrote the speech, and I've told this story before, you know, I write all my own speeches. So I started writing this speech, you know, a couple weeks before I was going to give it, I had a day job, I was running U.S. special operations. And the Wednesday before the Saturday I was supposed to give the speech, I came to my wife and I said, this doesn't work. I had a whole different speech written. It's just not any good. And she said to me, she said, why don't you write about something? You know, I thought, well, that's clever idea. I said, but look, honey, the only thing I know is how to be a Navy seal. And she said, well, write about that. And I thought, I don't know. I'm about to talk to 8,000 students and their parents. I don't know if they're going to want to hear a military guy talking about. She said, write about something, you know. And that's when it occurred to me, Ben, that basic SEAL training, and it's probably true of all military training, but basic SEAL training for me was six months long. And it was really life crammed into six months. So it was all the things you're going to learn in life. But let me tell you, these instructors are going to make sure you learn it early. So you're prepared to deal with it later on. So, so I wrote about, you know, SEAL training and the lessons that I learned. And of course, the reason that make your bed was the first lesson in the 10 lessons from the, the speech and in the book was it's because how we started our day, and the point of it was, look, you want to start your day doing a simple task that you know you can do that will inspire you to do another task and another and another. And then, of course, the instructors wanted also to make sure that when you made that bed, you made it correctly, you made it to standard. Because their point was, if you can't even do the little things right, how can we ever trust you to do the big things right? Right. To lead a complex SEAL mission? So they wanted to emphasize how important one habits were, but also standards were standards of excellence. And then, of course, the rest of the story is about the things I learned on again that I think the next one I talk about is the kids I had in my boat crew. And, you know, we had young men from, you know, all walks of life and the, I talk about the, the munchkin crew, the little guys, and we had, you know, one. One Native American, one African American, one. One Greek, one French, one Polish, and, and a couple of tough kids from the Midwest.

[B]

It's like a World War II movie.

[C]

Yeah, it was. It was terrific. But of course, you realize that the color of your skin doesn't matter. Your size doesn't matter, your ethnicity, none of that matters. You know, that's not how you judge people. You judge people by what's in their heart. And so each of these lessons, I hope, was to the listener about life in general. Look, you can't back down from the bullies. You've got to take some risks. You know, you've got to stand up when things. You're going to fail. Learn to deal with failure, because it's going to happen. And the sooner you understand it's going to happen, and the sooner you can pick yourself back up, the better off you're going to be. And then, of course, the bookend to starting with making your bed was never ring the bell. And the bell in SEAL training is the fact that you have quit. If you have quit on training, if you've quit on your dream of being a Navy seal, all you got to do is ring that bell three times and you're out. And the point I wanted to make in the book was, look, if what you're doing is good and decent and noble and honorable, then don't ever ring that bell. Unless, of course, you're going through cancer. Ring that bell because that is the completion of your cancer journey in a good way. But, so, yeah, it was a lot about life crammed into six months.

[B]

All right, I want to know about curiosity. We. I. In an earlier episode, we talked to Mike Rowe, and he said something that stayed with me about being curious. And when I look at you about the. About how essential it is to remain curious to live a good life. And I look at you as a person who you obviously have a super curious mind. Right. I've read your writings. I've listened to what you've talked about. I did not expect you necessarily to have opinions about Voltaire. I did not, not. Not to take anything away from our. Our uniformed military, but I did not. I was not expecting Voltaire. Talk about the point in your life that you became a curious person. Were you always a curious person?

[C]

Yeah, I think it was always curious. Not in the. The academic sense your listeners probably can't see. But I'm sitting here in my library with a couple of thousand books. Most of them are books on philosophy and poetry and things that, again, people probably would not have expected from me. But there's a large percent of her own special operations, too. But I think when I was growing up as a kid, again, my parents were absolutely not helicopter parents. Again, these were kind of the greatest generation. They allowed me to. You know, I would. During the summer, you know, I'd leave in the morning and my mother would say, you know, come back when you hear Taps. Because Taps was what they played as the sun was going down on the military base we were on. So all day you're outside and you become curious because you want to know what's going on in the woods. You want to know what's going on in the neighborhood, in the canyons, what are our neighbors? You know, there was this natural desire to get out. And when you saw things, I wanted to know more about them. Now, sometimes that got me into trouble as a kid, and that was okay. And I think my parents understood. They would rather have, you know, a young boy that was curious and was climbing trees and was, you know, breaking into ammunition storage points and was, you know, learning about the world rather than somebody who was sheltered. So that curiosity. As I got older, I wanted to know more about the world outside of Texas. And we had lived in France as a kid, and I come back to Texas in 1963. Well, Texas was not France in 1963. This was kind of the deep south and segregation was. And I didn't understand it and I, I didn't like it. And, and so, you know, I wanted to understand about, you know, social issues and I wanted. And of course, the military. You, you better be curious in the military because you better find out how you know how the enemy thinks and how your allies think and how artillery works and how does a bomb coming out of an F18 work. You know, you have to be curious every minute of the day. And if you're not curious, you're gonna find yourself in a situation where you don't have an answer or you don't know where to go to get the answer, which is just as important and just as important to be curious to understand where that answer lies, where the solution to the problem lies.

[B]

So where was the point in your life where the kind of curiosity that makes you break into ammunition storage turns into. I want to know more about Scipio Africanus? I want to know. I want to. I want to read Wordsworth. I want to like. Your intellectual choices reflect a. You're really broadly read. You're really interested in a bunch of stuff that I don't think most people would expect you to be interested in. In all of the philosophy and all of the poetry and all of the history and all of those things. The history makes sense to me. Right. An admiral needs history. You need to know what Nelson did right. And what Nelson did wrong. You need to know all of that stuff. Talk about the intellect. When does the, when does the physical courage slash curiosity part change into intellectual courage and intellectual curiosity?

[C]

Yeah, and if I can add two

[A]

footnotes to that, I want to know who your favorite poet is and when you started reading poetry. But more fundamentally, like to Chris's core point where this happened in your adolescence, like you've said multiple times, Admiral, that you didn't get good grades. I, I've heard this from so many special operators. I think we over select right now for a passivity in 14 to 17 year olds and I could do the full on nerd thing. Karen. Mother, may I? Getting ahead in school, but I think regularly we're selecting for the wrong variable because a lot of kids and maybe especially a lot of boys who might be headed toward physical combatant brain and brawn jobs are not content to be indoors all day sitting still passive on receive mode. So to Chris's point, we'd love to hear your, your biographical tale of. Was this curiosity already there? Was there really a reform movement come to the reform moment, come to the altar? Or were you Always just pretty pacified by school.

[C]

And you needed more with my mother. So my mother was an English teacher. And so from a young age, you know, she. And she loved poetry. So she had. And again, your audience probably can't see it, but off to the side here, I've got a whole section on poetry. She had a little book called 101 Famous Poems. So this was Kipling, this was Wordsworth, Wadsworth, all of it. And so she spent a lot of time reading. So I grew up, you know, liking poetry, but I would offer where it really changed for me back to the School of Journalism. So when I started in the School of Journalism my junior year, the curriculum wanted you to have a lot of electives because, yes, they wanted you to know how to write, but they also wanted you to have an understanding of. Let's see, I took classes in philosophy and Sufi mysticism and poetry and, you know, all these sorts of things that I think began my. My journey of curiosity for other things. Right. Because that I didn't have to take, you know, advanced chemistry or calculus. I. I took all that stuff. But, you know, when I got into my junior year, because the curriculum said, yes, we're going to teach you how to write, but we want you to have this broad understanding. I ended up being a Middle Eastern miner back in 1977, when nobody really had a. At least was because I found it fascinating. And again, I took a lot of classes on philosophy. And so I would offer. The School of Journalism kind of started that. The other place where it happened was when I got to the Naval Postgraduate School after Desert Storm, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Once again, a lot of history. Chris, to your point, but, but again, it. It was not just the history. It was understanding about Sicipio Africanus. It was understanding these things. And then you would say, well, okay, what influenced him? Where did the Greek philosophers come into play? Where were the Stoics? Where were the. The Sophists? Where. How did all this come into the thinking of Marcus Aurelius? You know, so. So much of this was. I think in my life I've had an opportunity to be in an educational environment that. That helped me. You find interest in that. But Ben, to your point, and I think it's a great point, and it is one of the things that when we look at recruiting SEALs, yes, GPA matters, because that says a couple things to us. If you're a Naval Academy guy or you're an ROTC guy, that says that you have the discipline to sit down and do the Hard work and hopefully the brains to do it. But at the end of the day, we want people that are critical thinkers that can think when things are going south on them. And not all guys with 4.0 GPAs can do that. And this is what basic SEAL training is going to find out. When you are cold, wet, miserable, when you are exhausted, and now all of a sudden the instructors throw a whole bunch of shit on top of you. You know, can you, can you think your way out of this? Because when you get into combat, bad things are going to happen. And your 4.0 GPA may not help you, but if you can be calm, if you've got just enough swagger but just enough humility to get out of these problems, that's the person we're looking for. And I think in teams in general, of course, you know, if you're a medical research team at MD Anderson, you want the smartest men or women you can get. Absolutely. You don't care whether they can do one pull up. You want the.

[A]

Thank you. Thank you, Bob Wolf and chew Bomb Pont. I'm not commenting here on your pull ups ability, but I'm with the Admiral.

[C]

Of the matter is there are certain areas where you want certain skill sets. But I think in all of those areas, whether it is again, MD Anderson, Sloan Kettering or the Navy SEALs, you want people that can come together to work as a team. And that really does require not only brains, it requires people that can again think under pressure, that can work well with others. These are incredibly important skills that I think I learned and that we select for certainly in the SEAL teams.

[B]

I don't think, I don't think we can improve on that. Unless. Brother Sass, do you any, any, any parting shots?

[A]

I mean, I want to know your four or five books for young officers.

[B]

That's a great idea.

[C]

You can't go wrong with Marcus Aurelius. I mean, come on, you got to kind of start with that. I think I would say Once An Eagle is always good by Anton Meyer. I mean, it really is the kind of contrasting styles of leadership. It's a, it's a long, thick book, but it's pretty good. I like All Quiet on the Western Front. And the reason I like it is the first time I read it, I think in high school maybe it was, you know, it's written from a German soldier's perspective and you realize that the German soldiers, this is a World War I time frame. The German soldiers think just like American soldiers do and just like French soldiers do and just like, you know, Kuwaiti soldiers do and just, you know, all soldiers really kind of think alike. And so I had a bit of an epiphany there that, you know, we always try to dehumanize the enemy, but you realize the enemy is, can be just as patriotic and just as courageous as, as the American can. And that's an important thing, I think, to remember. You know, I'm a. I'm a big fan of Will Durant. I read everything Will Durant. Ish. So again I look over here, you know, and again I'm a. I'm a big. You asked me who my favorite poet is. It's Ella Will or Will Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I'm not sure she ever wrote a bad poem. But of course you can't go wrong with Rudyard Kipling and, and some of the classics either. Other books. You know, there's a book called the Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey. It's small, but the reason I like it, it's a business book, but it talks about how you build trust. And it's important because you realize to build trust you really need two factors. You need to have a personal relationship. And somewhere in the book he says, look, you know, you have a personal relationship with your brother in law. He's a great guy, he married your sister. You really like your brother in law. But you also have to follow through on your promises. So if your brother in law borrows your lawnmower and says, look, I'll bring it back next week, but never brings it back, then you begin to lose a little trust in your brother in law. So I realize that part of my responsibility as an officer or a leader anywhere is you have to build trust in people. And you build trust by being authentic, by building a personal relationship with them. But at the end of the day, if you promise something, if you tell them you're going to do something, you've got to deliver, or after a while they might say, hey, that McRaven, he's a nice guy. But I don't know. I don't know if I can trust him because he didn't deliver on this promise. This promise or this promise. So the Speed of Trust, again, in a very kind of business fashion, was always a pretty important book to me. They're all good. Oh, one, one final. The 100 days of Lieutenant McHorton. Of course, you don't

[B]

know that.

[C]

I'm looking to see. I've got like three copies of it over here. It's a book written by a British officer During World War II, he has moved in. The British went into Burma with. With a bunch of Indian soldiers, and it is. He ends up getting shot, and they have to leave him behind because the British have got to move to be. To survive. And it talks about his, you know, the 100 days, how he survives. And it is this tale of phenomenal survival. Oh, wow. And whether or not even half of it's true, if only half of it's true, it's remarkable. And the reason I like it is because it really makes you realize, you know, and, Ben, you are living it. God bless you. You know, you are showing the kind of courage and the kind of resilience and the kind of inspiration that we all need. And it is people like Ben and people like Lieutenant McHorton and others that, you know, that give the rest of us hope that no matter what kind of difficult times we're going through, we can make it. If we just persevere or even if we can't make it, we're going to go out with dignity, and we're going to go out showing the world that you can end on a high note. And again, Ben, you are doing that and doing that exceedingly well. And I got to tell you, from one person to another, thank you for what you're doing. You're inspiring millions of people.

[B]

Admiral, I love that you got him at the end. That was great. Yeah, he's going to try to cut it out, but this is why I'm talking right now, so that it's uneditable, so that. Because you got him at the end. And that. That's what I appreciate many things about your heart. Appreciate that.

[C]

We're gonna.

[A]

We're gonna wrap because that was too generous. You've been gracious with your time. We covered a lot. Trust, humility, swagger, reading list, leadership. We didn't get to bin Laden or Hussein or what. What China is learning from the US

[B]

War in Iran right now.

[A]

So I think we need to.

[B]

We need to have you back, Admiral.

[A]

Thank you, sir.

[C]

I'm available anytime, anytime.

[B]

We appreciate you, sir. Thank you.

[C]

Very grateful for you.

[A]

Look forward to seeing you soon, friend.

[C]

Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Chris.

[B]

You bet. Well, professor, what did we learn today?

[A]

I gotta flip the tables and make you go first sometimes, but I really did like how he talked about swagger. I mean, you can't go out as a commander of Special Forces and get some of the baddest dudes ever. You can't lead in that context without a lot of swagger. But I think the counterintuitive thing about swagger is that it depends on humility because you have to know your lane, you have to know all that you don't know to be able to be confident about what you do know. So I like that and I liked learning what he had to say about failure.

[C]

What about you?

[B]

The idea of one of the themes that we have come back to again and again in this series is about Aristotelian midpoints and holding. Holding good things. Holding competing goods, intention and virtues as midpoints between vices.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the. How hard it is to be a grown up because it isn't good and bad. It's good and good. It's bad and bad and. And holding those things in tension is really hard. And I thought that the way that he talked about having just enough swagger and just enough humility, that there is. And as he very, in a very grown up way acknowledged, you're going to blow it a bunch of times. You're going to be too cocky, you're going to move past swagger into the bad place and you're going to have too little humility or too much. And it's just this constant effort of trying to keep it in that. In that tense place, which I thought was really good. I also think that there's. If we're thinking about the two kinds of bravery or if we're thinking of two of the kinds of bravery. So he exhibited as a young person the physical bravery that he had. Right. That he could be. Do difficult things and do scary things and do things that were demanding and not ring the bell and do all of that. But I would submit that there's also quite a lot of bravery in a guy who is an unashamed poetry enthusiast, an unashamed critical thinker. And in the introduction we talked about Jim Mattis and people like that who. And this is a froofy way to say it, but the warrior poet thing about. And it was funny I didn't mention it to him, but when he was talking about his love for poetry, do you remember what happened with John McCain in poetry? Do you remember that story?

[A]

I have lots of John McCain in memorization stuff, but no, what story are you talking about?

[B]

So when John McCain is running for president, there was a. I forget whether it was. I think it was a questionnaire. Back in those days there were still magazines and stuff and there was a questionnaire and I don't know whether it was that or whether it was an answer to a question, but it was posed to John McCain. The question was posed to John McCain about who is your favorite poet? Which is supposed to be a question for John McCain. That's like, you idiot. Right? Like what, what are you, what are you going to say? Or the expectation would be like, Barack Obama is going to cite Omar Khayyam. He's going to roll off Emily Dickinson verse. He's going to do whatever. And what is old John McCain going to say? And he said, Robert Service. You remember this?

[A]

I do now, yep.

[B]

And he riffed off a few lines of Robert Service. Now, Robert Service is. Is it Robert Service or William Service? I guess I could have looked it up, but is not exactly Rudyard Kipling. But not exactly not Rudyard Kipling. Which is to say that it is. No, it's real. I, it, I would, I would say that Sarah Lawrence is not offering a course in service, that capital S service. And he was mocked a little for it. And the answer was, of course, that he had memorized all of that poetry in Hanoi in his five years sitting in Hanoi when he could have been released but chose to stay because the others were there. And that story has stayed with me and the idea of poetry and literature and the necessity of having those things inside you, even if your business is slaughter.

[A]

Oh, dude, we got a wrap. But I want to stay here and I want to go back to McRaven for a minute sometime. Let's just put this on the 2 list.

[C]

Here we are. What do you care?

[B]

What are they going to do? What are they going to do to you? Ben says

[A]

McCain was kind to let me go to a lot of edges of war zones with him. Over a handful of years, he would travel every second or third weekend. When you're the chairman of armed services and you're who he was to the Navy, if he requested a plane, the executive branch was never going to say. And so he would go and visit troops all the time, both to learn and to thank them. I remember being in Kabul with him on the 4th of July, 2016, I think, and he and I just manned the grill pit for hours, serving a bunch of troops, burgers and hot dogs. And we just were just saying thanks. But a lot of times we were going places to learn and when John wanted to work really hard. And so we would spend every day on the ground with the people we're trying to meet or thank or learn from. And we would fly at night. And a lot of times, you know, you'd be trying to get your sleep. But guys who were getting promoted would have found out a month ago or two months ago that they were due get promoted. If they heard there was a chance John McCain was going to be coming to their base, they would delay their promotion to have him do the promotion ceremony and the swearing ins when they were relevant and whatever. And so you'd be in the middle of the night and people sheepishly knock on some door to come back and say, hey, would you do this ceremony with me? And so you end up being woken up in the night. And it was great to celebrate these guys and gals, but once you're awake and it's the middle of the night, you'd say, I want to ask McCain another question. And so I'd ask him Hanoi Hilton questions. And he was notorious for using the F word as a noun, a verb, adjective, adverb. It was straight up high school locker room.

[B]

He was a sailor.

[A]

Yeah, he could articulate a 15 word sentence and somehow have the F word be 9 of the 15. But he had no meanness inside him. Cussing you out. But I was stunned at how much he had memorized. And so a couple of different times I'd ask him, how could you possibly learned that as well? And he's like, I won't drop all the F words. My mom might be listening. But he would scream, you effing moron. Sundays, I had five and a half years. All I had was time and that 5 by 5 grid by which you can tap out stuff. He would not only know the stuff he knew, he would ask the people on either side of him in cells in the Hanoi Hilton, what did they remember from high school. Old poetry, old hymns. And he would get other people to teach him stuff by tapping it out. And he would memorize new things while imprisoned. Crazy discipline.

[B]

And I think for musical people, I am not. I love music, but I'm not a musical person. I'm sure they have tunes in their heads, but I have words, right? And I have the passages of Romeo and Juliet and the Merchant of Venice and what that Peg San Ambrosio made me learn in seventh grade. I have these poems that I did with my dad and all of that stuff. And another motif again of this podcast is read poets, right? Read poetry that you like and do that, and I think that's good. And I hope that the intrepid Stuart Baker will put in the show notes, the books that the admiral, that the admiral recommended at the end. The Hundred days of Colonel McWhorter and the speed of Trust and the works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Will Durant. I hated All Quiet on the Western front. I did not, I did not care for that book. I was a red badge of courage. Red badge of courage man. But whatever.

[A]

And Will Durant messed up up almost all the reformation, but still big survey texts are awesome, let's say. I want to say one more thing about McRaven before we part, but his point about communication I thought was also really insightful. You said earlier one of the themes of this podcast is X. Another one I think is that AI is going to make intelligence more ubiquitous, more readily available, and therefore the relative value of EQ goes up. But EQ without communications doesn't do much for a team. So you need high character people who have EQ who can be generalists and then can also communicate with and motivate and listen to other people on their team. And so I think we started at asking him some stuff about what it takes to build a great team and he clearly is a big cause, low ego, team builder. But I thought it was very interesting how much he was willing to overlook. I think he's right on this overlook early versions of IQ mistakes if people demonstrate grit, resilience, team building, low ego, big cause. And what are you holding up?

[B]

I'm holding up that I have two arrows and five underlines under critical thinkers. And I was going to also just say of him that in the AI question and in the and I have thought about continue to think about our conversation with Ben Thompson, which I found really illuminating. I do think that the I'm saying this probably because I'm a liberal arts goofus, but I think that I think there's a will be an increasing need increasing demand in the future for and this is why like he has a journalism major but that's why it was helpful for him to learn about a bunch of different things. And as I tell people in the news business all the time time, I can teach you how to write an inverted paragraph lead or an in I can an inverted pyramid lead. Somebody can tell you how to edit video. We can teach you all of that stuff and AI can do most of it pretty soon. But what I can't teach you are the causes of the War of 1812. I can't teach you how photosynthesis works. I don't have time. I don't have time to tell you all of that stuff. I can dive deep. If you work for me, you're going to end up hearing a lot about Taft and Roosevelt and the 1912 election. You're going to hear some weird, specific things from me. But I can't teach you everything. So come into the working world with the furniture of the mind and ready to make good critical thinking decisions based on a well furnished brain.

[A]

Well said. Liberal arts will rule the world, not robots. But liberal arts are going to have to be better than what masquerades as the liberal arts in most universities today.

[B]

I think this means we should probably talk to a really top notch education person at some point. Who would that be? I don't know, like a guy who like understood that. But also, I don't know, maybe like if there was like an engineering focused school in Indiana. I don't know. Just a thought. Just, just, just throwing it out there.

[A]

Foreshadowing tonight.

[B]

That is indeed it for this week's episode. We hope you like review and subscribe. And why don't you tell a friend? Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind. You can write [e-mail] this podcast was produced by Scott Emergut 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.

[A]

Sam.