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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
Hello listeners, both Pesca plus and everyone else. Every month we do what amounts to a book club and this month is no exception, although you might think of it as an exception since it's going to be exceptionally good. As John McWhater is my guest. He was on the show, but only I got to talk to him. He was on the Colbert Show. You can't ask questions to the television set. I mean, you can. You're not going to get answers. But at a Pesca plus book club, we have on the authors and we have on all the members of Pesca plus who care to join to ask someone like, or in this case specifically, John McWhorter questions. His new book is called Pronoun Trouble, the Story of Us in Seven Little Words. How do you support the Gist and get in on exciting monthly book clubs like this and so many other offerings? You go to mike pesca.com it's all there, all the information. Get the show without ads. Get the show with John McWhorter right there. May 15th right there on your Zoom network. MikePeska.com May 15th John McWhorter, pronoun trouble, the story of us in Seven Little Words. It's Tuesday, May 13th, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and today I want to talk about the recent electoral fortunes of former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte for a couple of reasons. One, I wrote about him in the GIST list. Two, I I get to say the word Duterte correctly because I frequently leave off a T. It's very important to me get deluged or deluged with people saying it's not Duterte or Duterte, it's Duterte. And it is due to the runaway winner of the mayoral election of Davao, his home city. Here's the problem. He's currently in another city, that city being the Hague, a jail cell in the Hague, because he committed certain crimes against humanity. Here is a conundrum. The thing that won Due Turtle massive reelection. He won 89% of the vote is exactly the thing that has him before the tribunal in the Hague. The people of the Philippines love him for killing all those drug users. The people outside the Philippines say we do not want leaders to kill quite so many drug users, even in a country with a lot of drug users. Interesting. An interesting conundrum or not a conundrum, depending on if you are a Filipino sick of all these drug users and these drug gangs, or if you are a member of the international community who doesn't like drug users and drug gangs, but doesn't approve of the killing of the drug users and the drug gangs. You know who the last mayor of Davao was? It was Sebastian Duterte. And before that, it was Duterte's daughter who got a big boost in elections as well. It turns out, much like the United States, lawfare, what opponents of arresting those who break the law call lawfare redounds to the political benefit of those who are arrested. Lawfare, that is the term of critics of these tactics, whereas the term for critics of Duterte is law. The law must still apply. Now, the second place finisher, that would be Carlo Nogralis. Again, he came in with about 11% of the vote. Not quite. I got to tell you, all the Never Duterte podcasts in the Philippines, including the McKinley project, they say that Nogralis emphasized the brat thing too much. Also used big fancy words like democide. Should have just pointed out that Duterte murdered more people than was advisable. So speaking of issues of character and issues of international importance, Donald Trump pulled back on some of his tariffs and many rating agencies have pulled back on their predictions that we're going into recession. That will be addressed in the spiel. But first, General Stanley McChrystal is here. He has written a book called Character Under Fire. He has had to show it, he has had to live it. You know, he eats only one meal a day. That is the least interesting thing about General Stanley McChrystal who joins me up next. I'm joined now by Stanley McChrystal, who retired in 2010 as a four star general in the US Army. I can't read all of his postings, not even close. But at his height, he oversaw the United States military effort in Afghanistan. He has since gone on to a life of consulting, reflection, teaching and writing. A lot of writing and also a lot of reading. His latest work is called On Character Choices that define a life. General Stanley McChrystal, welcome to THE GIST.
- [05:00]
Stanley McChrystal
Thanks, Mike. It's an honor to be here.
- [05:02]
Mike Pesca
So, as cliche as it is, I'm going to start right on page two where you define character. The cliche isn't your definition. It's just to start right with the thesis. But I think we have to because it was interesting to me. Character you define as convictions times discipline. So first of all, the equation, it could have been plus why times?
- [05:23]
Stanley McChrystal
Well, because if either is zero, then in fact I think the resulting product is zero. So If a person has no convictions or lacks the discipline to live, to them, you end up with no character.
- [05:37]
Mike Pesca
That's. I hadn't even thought of it that way. That is true. I was also thinking that there is a multiplier effect with each. If one is one or very low, you don't really get elevated to what we would call someone of good character or high character. They feed upon each other.
- [05:56]
Stanley McChrystal
Well, they definitely do. And if you go to convictions, because we, we really haven't talked about that yet, your deeply held beliefs. The downside is you can have bad convictions, you can have values that are absolutely corrupt and then be very disciplined in pursuing them. Think Adolf Hitler. Think someone that we, we think of as evil. In one way, you could argue they have character, it's just of a negative sort. And then there are other people that I think there's almost. They're an empty vessel.
- [06:27]
Mike Pesca
Yes. So that's the one that was interesting to me. And I'm seeing the appeal of it more and more in society. So I think we all understand what are convictions without discipline. It's someone who perhaps has strong beliefs or says they have strong beliefs, but they don't do anything to put it into practice in real life. That is very easy to understand. But I think I'm seeing more of the kind of character who has a lot of discipline. He'll post something on Instagram and there'll be a four hour routine and he'll put on a breathe right nasal strip and dunk his face in a ice water or any other manner of I'm working out really hard or I'm doing the grind to make a lot of money and this care, this kind of person. I do think more and more has been elevated by society as someone to look up to. I wonder if that's what you see as a person with discipline but without character. And if you think that this more and more is becoming attractive, especially to younger people.
- [07:31]
Stanley McChrystal
Well, it's an interesting observation. I see it somewhat differently. The person who gets up four in the morning to have their hair done so they look a certain way, they present something that is a form of discipline, no doubt about it. But the discipline that I'm talking about goes back to convictions and values. If you are raised believing in integrity, if you are raised in believing in equity, fairness, and then even though you are willing to get up every morning at 4:00 clock to get your hair done or do any of those things that allow you to carry on actions, but you are willing to depart from your convictions you are willing to step away from your idea of what right and wrong is if you are willing to abandon what you think is fairness, because opportunistically that's in your advantage. I would argue they don't really have discipline. They've got this sort of energetic ability to function, but it is not moored to serious convictions.
- [08:34]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, it wouldn't lead to character. I think that vanity plays a large part of that. Do you think that the physical necessity of soldiering, of being in the military, is almost a cheat code for achieving character because you have to or when the military engages in training, they have to emphasize the physical. And as a result, discipline is almost built into the process of creating a soldier. Airman, Marine, sailor.
- [09:07]
Stanley McChrystal
I think it's helpful. I think that when you enter the service, you're given a number of values as well as a number of new behaviors. They take away your name, they cut your hair off, they give you new clothes, they give you an identity, and they offer a set of service related values which are wrapped in patriotism. And I think those start a habit of behaviors that are. That are very positive. They don't give you solid character. Because I knew too many military leaders and military members who could do all of those external actions of being a soldier. But when you actually got down to real character, how they treated people, their difficult decisions in moments of stress, that they were not reflective of what I would consider strong character. But again, they are helpful. Anything that starts the habit of living to norms and values, I think is something that helps.
- [10:08]
Mike Pesca
Right. And again, and this is something you said in the beginning, since there's such great subjectivity as to what those norms or values are, and you've said this in the book, that someone who lived a life as you did, and the best soldiers under you did, aren't that dissimilar than someone who lived a life in a religious community, even an Islamic community in Afghanistan, and has dedicated themselves to killing Americans. There's more overlap than we might think.
- [10:39]
Stanley McChrystal
Yeah. And you're pulling at something that I relate in the book. Members of Congress and other visitors would come to Iraq at the height of the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, and they would be very impressed with my forces. And then they would say, are you killing those evil bastards on the other side? And I would go to a whiteboard and I would draw a line and I'd put on one end our force and on one end the best Al Qaeda terrorists. And then I would erase it and I would change it with a curved line to that curved up with the two arrows just about pointing at the top. And I said, the reality is, the best of my people are very similar to the best of their people. They are very loyal, they are team oriented, they're very personally disciplined. They support a cause and so do all of theirs. The difference is what they were subjected to during their life's journey, the values they were offered either through religion or family or society. And so that's. You find yourself sometimes actually admiring the people you are killing.
- [11:44]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [11:45]
Stanley McChrystal
And not admiring some of the people that you are serving for.
- [11:49]
Mike Pesca
This has always been true in war. Right. It's why Richard the Lionhearted saw and Saladin a figure of respect. Lee and Grant, that's maybe even too simple. They, you know, went to the same military academy, didn't they? But soldiers, the Christmas truce in World War I, they would always look across. They would always look across the battlefield and see a kinship quite often.
- [12:11]
Stanley McChrystal
Well, that's right, because you also see it up close. You see the sacrifice they're making. You see the privation they may be suffering, and you feel that in your own world. And so you say, except for the cause, they are people that. That I feel are good people.
- [12:28]
Mike Pesca
When a politician would come and visit you in a war zone, would you be able to draw that curve where the best of the military curved and met the best of politician? Or were they, in general, a different breed of cat?
- [12:46]
Stanley McChrystal
They were a very different breed of cat. There were people who were just as. As good as any people that I had, but many of them had a. Just a different frame of reference, the. The way they thought and the things that. The incentives in their lifestyle, you know, in the world that they were living in, the political thing were so different from ours that sometimes you found there was a pretty significant gulf.
- [13:15]
Mike Pesca
Does that mean they have poor character? Or is there something that selects for one mission, which is yours in Iraq or Afghanistan, and then some other personality traits or incentives that selects for their mission? Maybe their mission, you wouldn't call it the same kind of character that you're looking for in your soldiers, but maybe their mission is best served by their makeup.
- [13:40]
Stanley McChrystal
Yeah. And this is something that's complex. And so I'll describe it. If you take someone in the military, we reward a certain kind of behaviors and values. It's pretty stoic. People would say it's inflexible. I think that's probably oversimplified. But then you go into politics, for example, and if somebody enters politics, they enter an environment to which they must adapt. I have a lot of young people come to me now and they say I'm thinking about running for Congress. And I always give them an answer that says, I think you'd be great in Congress and you're the kind of person that I want there. But you are probably going to become something that I will mourn seeing you become because you will adapt to the environment you're in necessarily. You will start to act and do things that are required in that particular ecosystem. And I think we see that pretty broadly. And I think most of the people who enter politics enter with really good intentions. And then as we see down the line, many of them start to say things that are just sort of irritatingly self promotional or they'll say things that you don't believe they think are true or they're certainly so different from what they said a few years before that it doesn't seem true. And on the one hand I want to damn them all, but on the other hand, anyone who goes into that environment and survives, that may be the cost of doing it. And so I'm conflicted on my opinion. If you ask me on Monday, I will be disdainful of all of them. If you ask me on Tuesday, I'll be more understanding. And then I circle back on Wednesday.
- [15:24]
Mike Pesca
I want to break down that strategy. And first of all, it's you telling the aspirant that probably take it on face value, you believe it, but also there is a strategy there. You're a general. You understand tactics. I would assume that what you're trying to do is this is the kind of person who comes to you, General Stanley McChrystal, for your advice and approval. So it's a certain kind of person. And which means that at least at this point in your lives you have some common ground. You're trying to plant a seed. You're trying to perhaps say don't let this happen to you because I've seen it so often and I don't know what the track record has been or if many of those people have gone on to Congress. But it reminds me of that story that I once heard you tell about when you were either a first or second year and I'm going to get the terms wrong, plebe at West Point and a new commander came in and gave you some advice and gave you some encouragement. But I also thought that there were some tactics there to try to get not just to give advice but to get the best out of you. So two part question. Does it remind you of that and are there some Tactics going on when you give that advice.
- [16:40]
Stanley McChrystal
Yeah, of course. Anyone who comes to me for advice, I try to take the advantage of influencing them. To go back to your story, that was 1974. I was a plea or I was just finished my second year at West Point, and I'd been very unsuccessful my first two years. I'd almost been thrown out for academics and behavior. We had a new tactical officer come in, a guy named Dave Barratto, a special forces officer. And he sat me down, and I'm sitting across the desk from him, and he goes, it was the new tactical officer having one on ones with all the cadets he was going to be in charge of. And he goes, I think you're going to be a great cadet. I think you're going to be an even better army officer. And I remember I almost tried to lean over the desk to see if he's looking at the wrong file, because I actually did say, do you know who you're talking to? This is Stan McChrystal. I haven't done too well. He says, yeah, but the stuff you haven't done well at is stuff that doesn't matter in the Army. The stuff I see in your file that tells me you're going to be a good soldier is right here. I think you're going to be a great soldier. And of course, my second. My last two years at West Point, I did much better, partly because of his leadership, partly because I started Dayton, who is now my wife. But I do think there's. When I give that challenge to people who want to go into politics, what I'm basically trying to do is trying to get them to not be what most people become. Sometimes it works, and I'm sure it doesn't work all the time.
- [18:21]
Mike Pesca
You have a chapter on quitting and subtitle is abandoning things we've committed to is a dangerous habit. But a friend of mine and professional poker player Annie Duke has written a whole book on quitting, and it's kind of counterintuitive. And she frames quitting as a decision skill. It's worth getting good at, she says, to recognize the sunken cost fallacy. She says that when you quit successfully, it speeds up progress to allow you to free up resources that devote that can be devoted to more promising things. So I understand if you're in the middle of Ranger training school and half the people drop out, and it's pretty. A pretty direct line from here you are to here's the end of school and you're going to have to tough it out if you can. That's one set of decisions. But for most of us in the rest of life, I. I tend to think more like Annie does, and I even wonder if quitting has gotten too bad a name. What are your thoughts on that?
- [19:24]
Stanley McChrystal
Yeah, I'm a great admirer of Annie's. I love her books, and I think she's right on this. But let's make sure we understand what she's saying. She is saying to take into account the probabilities of the outcomes when you make a decision to quit. And I think most of the decisions we make in life, particularly the ones I'm referring to, we are deciding to quit not because probability of outcome, but because it's hard or because it's uncomfortable or because we're scared. Any number of reasons. And we need to understand that unlike a poker table, where if you fold a hand and walk away from something, there's not a lingering impact to that. If you walk away from a commitment, if you walk away from a marriage with children, if you walk away from allies in a war, if you walk away from business partners, there is a scar tissue left both on the people you walk away from. And, I would argue, on ourselves. And so I think the habit of quitting, in my view, becomes too much seen through a very, very narrow lens. I want to quit because I just want to stop doing this and not because we've really thought through the outcome.
- [20:42]
Mike Pesca
Do you think the ethos of the military, however, is more resistant or hostile to quitting than it always should be? I mean, you in the McChrystal group, you have clients in the tech sector quitting there. If you quit at the right time, you've made a billion dollars. So there's a lot of quitting going on. But. But when I think about the military, quitting has certainly a negative sheen, and it correlates to failure or a failed mission. And I wonder if that's a problem the military needs to grapple with.
- [21:19]
Stanley McChrystal
The answer is yes and no. And so from the standpoint of you want the military, once you unleash them, to be focused and not be willing to walk away almost like a dog in a fight, you've got a dog in a fight, and you want them to be completely focused on winning, and that's what you want the military to do. This is the importance of civilian leadership over the military. The reality is, if you put the military in a war, they're going to try to win, and they're not going to stop until somebody tells them to stop. And they run into the risk of not being able to say, hey, this isn't going well. We're not likely to win. This is a bad outcome because it's not in the DNA. This is where that the partnership with the civilian leadership must be able to understand. It's like a baseball pitcher I used to pitch in high school, if the coach comes to you in the seventh or eighth inning and you're not throwing as well as you were earlier and says, how do you feel? I expect that pitcher to say, I'm good. I can keep going. Any pitcher that doesn't say that I don't want to play with, but I expect the coach to say, nope, you've been doing pretty well. Take a seat. If that's the right answer. And that's the way I think it is with the military. The key is the military's got to understand that about themselves. They've got to be honest enough to know. And I can look at my own experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and once given the mission, I became focused on the mission and I was no longer detached enough to provide perfectly unbiased assessment of where we were and whether we were likely to succeed.
- [23:01]
Mike Pesca
Did you realize that at the time?
- [23:03]
Stanley McChrystal
I did, and because I wasn't a historian, but I was an enthusiast of history. So I'd read about previous wars, particularly Vietnam, where my brother and father served. And so I was very attuned to that reality. But when you're up close to it and you've been given a mission, it's really hard to say. I know you told me to do this, but I'm telling you we can't or shouldn't.
- [23:31]
Mike Pesca
Stanley McChrystal, retired general Stanley McChrystal is the author newly of On Choices that Define a Life. Thank you so much.
- [23:40]
Stanley McChrystal
Thanks Mike.
- [23:41]
Mike Pesca
If you are a Pesca plus listener, this interview went directly into McChrystal talking about the consequences of the Rolling Stone controversy. That was the article where he was or people on his staff were quoted criticizing Obama. I then asked him, did Obama really have a choice? He talks about his relationship since that time with President Obama. He talks about self doubt and reputation. And I asked him, if you had written this book on character in 2010, how would it be different? A fascinating answer that all our Pesca plus subscribers have access to. Go to subscribe.mike pesca.com for ad free podcasts, bonus episodes and to support the show. And now the spiel Trump pulled us from the fire that he thrust us into his crazy tariffs. Sorry his stalwart reindustrialization plan drew warnings of recession from market forecasters like JP Morgan. But now that Trump has resented on 80, 90% of his stated tariff levels, he has saved the economy that some guy, we don't know his name wrecked. Who might that have been? Is he driving a hot dog mobile? Bloomberg dropping its earlier call that the world's largest economy would sink into a recession in 2025. Quote the administration's recent dialing down of some of the more draconian tariffs placed on China should reduce the risk that the US economy slips into recession this year, JP Morgan chief US Economist Michael Feroli said Tuesday in a note. Note we believe recession risks are still elevated but now below 50%. By the way, the draconian Chinese tariffs. I wonder if draconian attaches itself to Chinese more than to other countries whose symbol isn't a dragon. So I did research and it turns out that it does. And Graham registers draconian Chinese even though that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about draconian near Chinese. But anyway that shows up, you know, an appreciable amount of the time. And draconian Russian does not. Draconian Russian is half as many results as draconian Chinese. Draconian, Romanian, almost nothing even though Dracula was Romanian. Draconian Draconian does not come from Dracula, comes from a Greek lawmaker and even that draconian Greek a third the results of draconian Chinese. What am I saying? I'm saying that tariff rates are down or at least for 90 days they will be unless Trump has another fit of peak and therefore recession odds are down to JP Morgan says. So their colleagues at Goldman Sachs also lowered their risk of recession.
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Stanley McChrystal
Our US economics team has upgraded their growth forecast from a half percent over the next four quarters to 1% and lowered their probability of recession in the US from 45% to 35%. On the back of the US China trade announcement.
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Mike Pesca
Oh, you hear a smug Andrew Tilton's voice is there. We never even had the risk up to 50% by the way. You know what science, what deep science determines whether a bank says the risk is 45% or 50%. 50%. There is no science. It's just that these banks don't want to say 50% because it makes them look wishy washy. I don't know. Could happen. Could not. And they're Goldman Sachs. They're not wishy washy. They're in the 45% or 55% business people. So with all this chewing and froing and tariffing and relenting. Trump's approval ratings, those are still down. Those are consistently down. But they might recover, I think. Turns out there is a correlation between actively destroying the economy and voters getting disappointed in you. I was, I'm going to be honest, I was a little unsure of the strength of that correlation. But it does seem to have been correlative. Now that the economy might not be destroyed, maybe Trump will recover some. Also in economic news, and really the only economic agenda item of the Trump first term entirely, there is a big, beautiful tax bill and it's being advanced. I cannot co sign whether it is beautiful, it is certainly big. There will be, if this bill does pass. No taxes on tipped wages. That is in the bill. Eliminating levies on overtime pay. That is in the bill. Salt deductions, Some are in there, but are there enough salt deductions to lower the blood pressure of Northeast Republicans? Remains to be seen. But also a sentence that actually scans and wasn't tortured just to make some sort of wordplay. The math of big Beauty is roughly 4 trillion in tax cuts outlined in the plan. That means we won't be getting $4 trillion into the government, paired with 1.5 trillion in spending cuts. So divide by 10, it's over a decade, those numbers I just gave. And yeah, it's going to increase the deficit a lot. Of course it will. The I'm going to be generous, 50 serious Republicans really don't want to increase the deficit. They're not enough of a caucus to actually lower the deficit. I also did some reading, and it turns out that the Yale Budget Lab. Love those guys over at Yale. I hope they have beakers and lab coats just, you know, to make them feel good about themselves. But they say that the tariffs will add to the country's coffers pretty significantly. But of course, tariffs will subtract from GDP growth and real spending power. Add these items up and you get something less than the totally disruptive chaos that Trump's instincts and words often usher in. What you really get is the usual somewhat depressing lack of progress on vital issues like the debt. But maybe that's the best we can hope for, given the incentives and structures of our sclerotic system. So what I'm saying is it seems like we're trending back to stasis on macroeconomic issues. Trump may and will, let's be honest. He will back radical proposals around items like immigration and human rights and everything having to do with the culture war. But every indication is that he touched the hot stove of economic insanity and, at least in his instance, pulled his finger away. And that is good. We have a president who still acts on basic human reflexes, and so, too does the public. Chief among these reflexes gag. Less relevant these days. Yawn. That's it for today's show. Cory War produces the gist. Michelle Peska is CBSO of Peach Fish Productions. Astra Green runs our Social. Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list. And Leo Baum just runs around in circles doing all sorts of things like making spreadsheets improve G Peru Duparu. And thanks for listening.