The Daily Stoic - Admiral James Stavridis on Evaluating Risk and Building Confidence | Remember This Always

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Admiral James Stavridis about his new book To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision, doing the right thing in the face of consequence, maintaining confidence in who you are despite others opinion, and more.Admiral James Stavridis is a retired four-star U.S. naval officer. He served for five years as the Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 and is currently an Operating Executive of The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm. His new book To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision is out now. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/STOIC. Terms and conditions apply.Go to shopify.com/stoic, all lowercase, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today - go to shopify.com/stoic right now.InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.Framebridge makes it easier and more affordable than ever to frame your favorite things - without ever leaving the house. Get started today - frame your photos or send someone the perfect gift. Go to Framebridge.com and use promo code STOIC to save an additional 15% off your first order.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace in wisdom in their actual lives.

But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember this always. It's a phase. All of it. Not just with your kids and the tantrums or the teenager bellion, but also with whatever the cultural moment is. Be it political correctness or aggressive anti-intellectualism.

Marcus Aurelis would remind himself that even pain itself is a phase, one that would either end or end him. When you're stressed, depressed, anxious, angry, losing hope, you must remind yourself of this too. All of it is a phase. It's a phase in your relationship, it's a phase in the economy, it's a phase in geopolitics. Things boom and bust. Never forever. Things feel boring. Things feel incredibly exciting. But never forever.

They go up, they go down, they come, they go, they change. And in their changing, they test us. If we can look at them with a little perspective, we can bear them better. We don't know when they'll end, as Marcus was saying, only for certain that they will. And whether we'll be around to see them is an open question, but at the same time also kind of an answer to. And if we can remember that always, we will have passed the test of change. Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. There is this Greek concept, the ancient Greeks they called it, Craya. Gregory Hay is my favorite translator, Mark Surrealis. He says, it's an exemplarary story about a famous person often culminating in a memorable utterance. That's obviously what I try to build my books around, but I love books like that, right? And I've loved and I've recommended before Adam Road James, Stavritis's wonderful book, Sailing True North. I had them on the podcast a

while ago. We carried in the painting porch. So I was very, very excited about his new book to risk it all, nine conflicts, and the crucible of decision. Obviously, sailors are trained for combat, but how do they respond under stress and difficulty in those kind of, the world hangs in the balance? Do you make the right decision or wrong decision moments? How do you courageously charge ahead when other people are turning and running. How do you do the thing that people think is impossible? How do you do the thing that people are going to question and criticize? But you do it because you know it's the right thing.

And what can we learn from people who have been in that, in the crucible of decision? Maybe sometimes they made the right decision, sometimes they made the wrong decision. And when we think about Kraya, those exemplary stories, it's not always the person looking good. Oftentimes they made mistakes or they weren't perfect or they fell shorter. They performed admirably and bravely in one circumstance. And then in another circumstance, fell short of the inspiring example that they previously or later would set. And so with this new book I had to have Admiral Stavridis again. I loved our first conversation. I loved

this new book. That's me running through the pages here. I probably folded 40 pages. It was, it's a short book, but I got so much out of it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. And it comes from someone who's not just a great writer, because Admiral Stavrettis is a great writer, and he recently did a novel with another previous podcast, Eliot Ackerman. He is a great writer, but he's writing about these things from experience. Admiral Stavridis was 30 years in the U.S. Navy. He rose to the rank of Forstair Admiral. He was the Supreme Allied Commander in NATO. He commanded the U.S. Southern Command overseeing military operations throughout Latin America. He's commanded a Navy destroyer, a destroyer squadron, an aircraft carrier, battle group

in combat. And that wasn't enough. He has a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. And he just spent five years as dean there. He received 50 medals in the course of his military career. He published nine books, including, as I said, 2034, a novel for the next World War with Elliott Ackerman. And if that wasn't enough on top ofckerman. And if that wasn't enough,

on top of all the stuff that I said wasn't enough, he is a managing director of the Carlisle Group. I also had David Rubenstein on the podcast, and he's chair of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. Warrior, a scholar, a student of leadership, an academic, and all around fascinating human being. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you're going to like it.

Check out his new book to risk it all. Nine conflicts and the crucible of decision. And please read his other books sailing true north. We carry both these books at the painting porch. You can check them out at thepaintedporge.com. Pick them up at Amazon, support your local bookstore, read 2034, but most of all, listen to this conversation because I learned a lot myself in it

and I think you will as well. Love the book, by the way. I have a bunch of questions, but I really, really loved it. I wanted to start with a question that I feel like pertains to the book, but also only you could answer. So there's a philosophy professor. He's also writer about stoicism. His name is Massimo Piccallucci. And he wrote something recently. He was talking about James Stockdale, obviously a great American naval officer, heroic in the POW camp

in North Vietnam, student of the Stoics. And he was talking about something that not a lot of people talk about with Stockdale, sort of a kind of a zelig moment, but that he was in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. And he reflected about how, like, he witnessed what didn't happen there or what was controversial about what happened there. And I guess he famously said when the US forces were retaliating, he sort of said retaliation for what, right? And the point that Massimo is making, and this is what I wanted to get your take on, because

obviously, Stockdale's courage and tenacity and commitment to ethics and principles is unquestionable. But he was, I guess, making a point about the difference between moral and physical courage, he was sort of saying, well, if Stockdale saw this, why didn't he say anything about it at the time? Or what was going on that he would witness this thing that would lead one to question what was happening, or what the government was telling us about what was happening, and then his heroic, not just his participation in the war, but his heroic endurance of injustice as a soldier in that war.

So this isn't exactly a specific question, but I just curious what your reaction to that is because it was food for thought for me. Well, let's start with James Stockdale, who really was extraordinary, won the Medal of Honor for his bravery and courage as you correctly point out in the POW camps. He was a leader, he was someone who always sailed true North as a title of one of my previous books would write over there. Amazing book.

Thank you. Yes, thank you. So, I don't think there is any reason to question, frankly, any aspect of the character of James Stockdale. In regard to the Gulf of Tonk and the incident, there is certainly a variety of views of what actually happened on that day. And I don't think we have time to kind of unpackage all that. But I will say that in war, and I've seen my share of war,

there are always competing views for what happened. And given the choice between gosh, the United States created this Machiavellian plot to get itself drawn into the war, or war is confusing. Different things happen at different speeds. Even the most reliable, truthful observers will come away with different reactions, typically because they're under extreme stress in the middle of combat. So I'm going to pick door number two. I really doubt that this was some kind of orchestrated conspiracy.

I know that James Stockdale never would have gone along with that. Everything I know about James Stockdale, Admiral Stockdale along with that. Everything I know about James Stockdale, Admiral Stockdale, and I met him on many occasions would tell me that he never uttered an untruthful word whether there was latent confusion about that particular incident entirely possible. But as a grounds for a conspiracy or a reimagining of James Stocknell as a lesser human, I don't think it warrants that. No, I think that's right. And I was talking to another high ranking military officer about this exact question

that written pretty extensively on Vietnam. And one of the frames he gave me on it. And I always think it's good, and you do this in the book. We have to question our heroes. We have to think about what they did well, what they didn't do well, and you do that amazingly in the book. But he was saying that he speculates that Stockdale's clarity about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, as memory being so unreliable, was a product of the information that came out later. So in the fog of war, in what's happening in that moment, you know, maybe he's not sure,

it's unclear. But as you said, it seems very out of character that he would have known implicitly in this moment what's happening and then participated in or sacrificed essentially everything for something he thought was wrong or bankrupt in some way. Yeah, I would be very skeptical of the latter view. And just to close it out, I also knew his wife, Sybil, very well. They wrote a book together called In Love and War, which I highly recommend to the listeners to this podcast. It really explores human relationships, particularly in the framework of marriage, again, under extreme stress, years of separation.

Symbol stock deal would never have let him become party to some kind of untoward conspiracy like outcome, just knowing the two of them, they sailed to North every day in their lives. Yeah, and again, I don't think the person I'm quoting is alleging a conspiracy. I think he's actually bringing up something that you talk about quite a bit in the book, which is like, when do you follow orders?

When do you question orders? When do you go, that's above my purview and I'm gonna insert myself in this and that that's never as clear cut or as black and white as we'd like it to be. And some of my favorite stories in the book are when you're kind of like, you could have gone either way.

It would have been courageous to say something and perhaps it would have been courageous and required an insane amount of sacrifice to just play your role and do your job and trust the people above you and that I have to imagine, he wasn't Admiral Stockdale in the Gulf of Tonkin. He was Commander Stockdale, and that's a very different role. Indeed.

And again, I don't think there's much more to be said here, but I'll simply say it one more time, whether he was in Ensen or Luteno, Luteno Commander, or Commander, or 3-star Vice Admiral, throughout his life, he carried the highest of principles. And I for one will stand by his accounts of what he believes he saw. And I think that's an interesting segue into something that I've experienced with people.

I've interviewed even that we're having this conversation about Stockdale, which is one can sail through North, make the gutsy risky call, stick with the character thing, and people are going to question it. People are going to attack it. Your motives and your integrity can be impugned. I'm forgetting the exact name, again, not a super well-known person to my generation,

but Lieutenant Commander Lloyd Butcher makes an incredibly painful, difficult decision to surrender his ship, what he thinks, as you say in the book, for the good of the crew and to avoid escalating a conflict. And it's a mixed bag, whether people see him as a hero or a coward.

And that's got to be incredibly difficult. Indeed. To risk it all, the idea of the book is to look at nine different leaders who face a moment of decision under extreme press. And so Lloyd Booker, I think, is a very good example of this. He's in command of a small intelligence gathering ship, USS Pueblo, off the coast of North Korea. He's in international waters doing everything right from illegal perspectives. And suddenly, he finds his small command surrounded by North Korean gun boats, North Korean jets

overhead. He's radioing frantically back to high command, trying to get help, trying to get someone to come rescue him, but it doesn't happen. And so the North Koreans presented with a very stark choice, which is either surrender your command, haul down your colors in a nautical context, or we will sink you and kill your entire crew. That's a hard choice because beaten into the ethos of every Navy officer is we don't give up the ship.

And this goes back to the first character in the book to risk at all, John Paul Jones. His immortal words, I have not yet begun to fight. So here's Lloyd Booker, Lieutenant Commander. His ship is basically defenseless and has almost no weapons on it at all. It's designed as a listening post at sea, and the system has failed him. But despite the fact that he did what frankly I would have done in that scenario, which is surrender, lived to fight another day, preserve the lives of my crew, avoid an escalatorian incident that could have led to an even wider war, he made the choice to surrender his ship. But as you point out correctly, Ryan, many, many Navy officers criticized him very deeply

and said he has betrayed the fundamental values of the Naval service. So in my view, Buker did everything right, and he was morally and ethically in the right place, but there are, as you point out correctly, a wide range of opinions, and in fact, I'll close with this, he was court-martialed when he came back and convicted, and then the conviction was effectively set aside by the Secretary of Defense after taking into account all of the competing variables in the case. And he, Lloyd Booker, retired, was never really promoted again, and underwent a year of torture in North Korea.

But ultimately, he was freed, and all of his sailors survived. I think he did the right thing, others would disagree. Yeah, I think this is a through line through both books of yours, which is basically that there are no easy decisions for the leader. People, if the decision was easy and obvious, somebody else would have taken care of it,

and ultimately command or responsibility means making decisions, taking risks, taking heat for, and there's no guarantee of success and certainly no guarantee of appreciation or consideration for the difficulty of that decision. Indeed. And in some degree you're describing any American who is leading a public life in politics today.

You can make what seemed to you to be fundamentally moral, ethical decisions, but given the wide divergence of opinions in our nation on kind of every public issue, it feels like at the moment, you're going to take heat. And part of the storyline into risk at all is that you have to be prepared for that. You have to be prepared to recognize that making a decision often makes others unhappy, even though there will be hopefully plenty who applaud your decision. And that I think gets us back to the stoic principles, which is that we have to accept what comes and be confident in our decision and accept stoically what those outcomes are at times very bitter and difficult to swallow.

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Yeah, Marcus Aurelius has a line he says, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. And that could mean your career, that could mean public opinion, that could mean a number of different things, but I think Lloyd Buker, or Buker, he makes the right decision. He protects the people he was intended

to protect, tasked with protecting. And by the way, prevents a conflict from spiraling out of control. And he pays for it physically. He's not like he took, it's not like you could look at what happened and go, well, he got it, the easy go of it, right? Like, not at all.

But not everyone appreciated it. Right, he was shot himself wounded, fairly, fairly badly, and then, again, a year in North Korean gulag, undergoing real torture alongside his crew members. Finally, they were released. Many of them had lasting health problems and weaknesses, as you can imagine. But I'm in the end, I think Lloyd Booker helps us understand that to be a decision-maker in that crucible of decision under extreme press, in the furious moment of combat in the case of Lloyd Booker, you reach deep inside yourself, you do what you believe is right, and you live with the consequences. And that in the end is stoicism, right?

Totally. And I think one thing I take from the book that I sort of go through out is empathy is really important. I think we can do a better job as a society, as individuals going, hey, did this person do their best where they operating in good faith? What were their motives? And even if you disagree with the outcome, can you understand the stress or the difficulty

that they were under? I've been a, I interviewed Alexander Vindman on the podcast and I was amazed, not just, I knew it would be controversial, I knew some people would not like it. But I was amazed at the number of people with military, email addresses, who emailed me very simplistic, angry responses,

which took me back because if anyone should have appreciated the agonizing nature of the predicament that he found himself in, did not seek out, I think we should appreciate, hey, I might, like, I think of John McCain in his vote to preserve the American Healthcare Act, right? Like, he didn't want, he was, he ran against and disapproved of what we call Obamacare. So in making that decision, he was pissing off both people, but it was the right thing to do. I think we need to get better at respecting people who make difficult decisions in good faith.

I completely agree with that. And another example of this from the book is the last, the ninth of the characters. And this is Captain Brett Kroger, who was the commanding officer of this 100,000 ton aircraft carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, and COVID breaks out. And so he is faced with an agonizing choice in real time, which is does he just let this disease rip through his crew? And of course, this is at the very beginning

of the pandemic, there are no vaccines. We don't understand masking at all. There's no way you can socially distance 5,000 people, even on a big ship. You know, think about your kitchen at home. Nine people live in that kitchen on a ship. Right. In their bunk stacked, one on top of the other. So you can't socially distance.

So his choice really was to push the Navy to take the ship out of combat. Of course, they weren't in high-level combat. They were on readiness patrols in the Western Pacific. Brett Kroger sends an email. It's a very direct email. It's very critical of the Navy. He knows. He knows it's going to end his career.

There is no way he will survive and be promoted to Admiral something that almost undoubtedly would have happened if he had not launched that email. But he does it because he believes firmly that in order to protect the lives of his crew, he has to push the Navy to do what in his view is the right thing. Take the ship offline. Because of the glare of publicity, it ends up cutting both ways. The Secretary of the Navy, the Acting Secretary of the Navy, command named Tom Modley, who

I know who is a good man, but was outraged by this email. He flew to Guam. He publicly fired Captain Crozier, had him removed from the ship. Very dramatic moment. The whole crew turns out applauding Captain Crozier at the moment of high drama. Crozier is effectively carted away. They bring another substitute captain in. So here you are left with a commanding officer who, again, in my view, has done the right thing for his crew, but it's caused embarrassment to the Navy. It's caused embarrassment to the administration. He pays the ultimate career price for doing so.

But I think, as I say in the book in Tarrisq, at all, he can walk off that ship with his head held high, he did the right thing for his crew. That's another very striking example of someone doing the right thing, but suffering real consequence as a result. What's something I noticed in the book I was just talking to you about empathy. I thought it was very revealing. You were looking at, well, how much sleep was this guy having? You were thinking about not just, hey, did he make the right decision, but what would have been acting on his mind? What would that pressure do to someone? So,

you don't hesitate to go, here's what I would have done differently. Here's these are mistakes that he made. But again, we have to understand, well, what would you have done in that situation? What are the pressures operating on a person? And I think one of the things you take, because it's so easy to condemn or criticize someone, but part of what we should be thinking is, well, if we don't like what this person did, how do we put future leaders in a better position to succeed by addressing the underlying conditions that might have brought about the outcome that you disagree with. Exactly right.

And partly, this is why I wrote the book was to give a frame that shows these kind of consequences can follow decisions. Look, this would have been a very easy book to write, you know, nine terrific decisions that could have been the title, the nine greatest decisions of all time. And then just write a bunch of hei geography about people who made really great decisions that turned out perfectly, you know, news flash, that's not real life. Sure. And so in the book, you find a real mix of people who make very gutsy decisions under extreme pressure. The quintessential one, of course, is John Paul Jones, the original, if you will, iconic figure in the US Navy. And he's on a battered old ship, the Bonam Rechard, the Brits are pouring fire into it. His crew feels

the battle is lost. The British, Captain on the other side, says, you know, through a megaphone or whatever, just yells across the two ships are lashed together at this point. You know, strike your color, sir. Save your crew. And John Paul Jones says, I have not yet begun to fight. It kind of reminds me, by the way, of President Zelensky. And I, we should get to that in a minute. But here's John Paul Jones, who makes a hugely gutsy decision. And it turns out perfectly his crew rallies. They overcome the British, they sweep the battlefield under

extraordinary odds, again, kind of like what we're seeing in Ukraine. And so that's a decision of high success. And I could have had nine decisions like that, but I chose very deliberately, for example, the two we've talked about already, Lieutenant Commander Booger and Captain Crozier, both of whom suffered career termination, physical pain, great difficulty as a result of making decisions that I think were perfectly correct in the moment, and history will judge them as good decisions. Well, I was thinking about, as you talked about, Crozier walking off the ship with his head held high,

I was thinking of the famous interview, and I've told this story a bunch times on the podcast between Admiral Rick Over and a young Jimmy Carter, where he says, he says, how'd you do in your class at the Naval Academy? And I was 80th in a class of 400, and he says, but did you always do your best? And that comes full circle when Carter sort of,

I don't wanna say fumbles it as president, but it doesn't go the way that maybe people would have thought it could have gone. He sort of has so much potential. It obviously, it doesn't get reelected, which is a sign of not a huge amount of success, but it's then that Rick Overs says, look, I think in the future you'll be seen as a far-seeing wise man, and you'll

know that you did your best, and that's really all you can do. And I think knowing that you didn't hold back, that you put yourself out there, that you did what you think was right. It's no guarantee of success, but it is a guarantee of that more important thing, which is you can look yourself in the mirror. You can, you know who you are. It doesn't matter what other people think of who you are. I think that's correct. And for anybody, any walk of life, and this is something that I like about the book, you know, if I can say that as the author, is that I think it, I think it, it very

much has a applicability outside of the military. Yes. The stories happen to be about naval officers and enlisted people like Dory Miller, the hero of Pearl Harbor. By the way, for whom a nuclear aircraft carrier was just announced, it's going to be named after USS Dory Miller. Yeah. You know, at Pearl Harbor, he's a, he's a mess cook. And because that's the only thing African Americans are allowed to do. And the still quasi-racist US Navy in the 1940s. And yet, when the guns are blazing, he charges to the sound of the guns literally and takes over an anti-aircraft gun that he really doesn't know how to operate. He later says, well, it's just like shooting ducks.

You got to kind of get out in front of the airplanes. Any shoots down Japanese airplanes. And even the Navy of those days, which is hardly an enlightened institution looking for black heroes, they light on Dory Miller, not because he's black, but because what he did was so extraordinary, it wouldn't have mattered what his race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality was.

This guy charged to the gun and shot down Japanese aircraft at immense risk to himself. It's a fascinating story. Again, if someone who makes a decision under extreme pressure, in this case, it really came out well for him. in this case, it really came out well for him. My favorite story in the book is about rear-admral Michelle Howard, who I'd never heard of. And you make this point in the book. I not only never heard of her, I've seen, I've read about Captain Phillips, I saw the movie Captain Phillips,

and it struck me that, and I think you do a good job of the book in all your books, of picking well-known people and then hidden figures of history, but it struck me that the leaders who want you to hear about them, you often hear about them, right? The ones, the MacArthur's or the Patins or the CEO who likes to have their name on things or whatever, but there's a whole, a much larger number of great leaders, heroic leaders, who are busy doing their job

and don't play the PR game, and that is a quality in leaders that we probably don't celebrate enough, ironically, because they don't wanna be celebrated, but. I completely agree, and let's park don't want to be celebrated. But... I completely agree. And let's park on Michelle Howard for a moment. Here is this physically tiny, by the way. I mean, she's like five feet tall African-American woman, someone who would be so easy to underestimate,

so easy to kind of overlook. She claws her way into the Naval Academy where she does well, not, you know, absolute top of the class, but she does well and gets out in the Navy and very steadily through real diligence, through real personal qualities and integrity works her way up. And by the way, she's not in the, if's not in the glamorous part of the Navy. She's not out there flying hornets around or driving nuclear submarines to the bottom of the sea or even in the surface navy where I lived. She's not on the Arleigh Burke destroyers, the front line Aegis combatants. She's on amphibs, which means her ships are very unglamorous, big, bulky, gray hulls that are designed to carry marines around.

It's kind of like bus driver duty. And yet Michelle never complains, never puts a foot wrong, keeps steadily working her way up the chain. And at some point, there's just an irresistible set of qualities that become apparent, her steadiness, her humility, her sensibilities, the way the crew follows her. And so she does become an admiral, and then fate intervenes as it does for us all. And she is the one star admiral in the really remarkable story of rescuing Captain Phillips. And if you've not seen the movie,

Tom Hanks plays Captain Phillips, I think brilliantly, he's captured by these Somali pirates. And Michelle Howard, she's been an admiral for like five minutes, literally. I mean, she has just taken over her command. She's on one of those big deck Amphibs, command and control ship, but she maneuvers those destroyers in place. She calls in the seals.

She delegates command of the operation. Again, that that function of humility, and when it's over, she steps back. She's not the face of this could have been maybe the Navy tried to push her. I don't know that. I'll just close on Michelle by telling you something about the book. So the book to risk it all comes out and a number of agents have reached out to me and said, Admiral, gosh great book. Love the chapter on Admiral Michelle Howard. I'd like to get in touch with her to see if she wants to write a memoir. So I think that'd be a great idea. So I do tofully email Admiral Howard, my dear friend, Michelle Howard, and I get back a very emphatic, nope, I'm not doing memoirs.

And you got to respect that. I mean, talk about a through line. It's a through line of low profile, low drag, due diligence, get the job done. There's a lot to like about full four star admiral by the way, retired Michelle Howard. Yeah, I say this in one of my books, most successful people are people you've never heard of

and they want it that way. I'll give you another line from the world of tennis. I played tennis for the naval academy and many pro tennis players will tell you the best place to be is to be the number 13 or 14th ranked player in the world. Effectively no one knows who you are. You don't get hassled at the airport. No one's asking for your autograph. You're still playing the world. Effectively, no one knows who you are. You don't get hassled at the airport. No one's asking for your autograph. You're still playing the game you love. You're still winning a lot of tournaments to be at that level.

You're in the Uber Ultra Elite in the sport, but nobody's really tracking. And there's a lot to commend that kind of moment in a life. Although you point out in the book, and I thought it was a good line, it reminded me of Kennedy's thing about how success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. You said if she, if it had gone the other way, right, everyone would know who she is. Oh yeah, we would all have heard of Michelle Howard at that point.

And that's, you know, that's another aspect of what we're talking about. And again, it gets into the way you can make the best decision is to check all that at the door. The minute you start trying to weigh the pros and cons of how's this gonna look on my resume, you're on your way to making a bad decision in most extreme pressure decisions. Well, because you pointed it out with her that she's sort of, as this sort of ordinary,

although it plottingly upward career. And then as Churchill says, you know, destiny taps you on the shoulder and you gotta answer. Are you ready, you know? That brings us to, Zelensky, I see here, Ukraine pin, as a former Supreme Allied commander of NATO. I imagine you've got a unique perspective on not just what we're seeing there, but the way that a singular individual risking it all sailing through North literally or figuratively can change the course of human history.

Yeah, I think Zelensky is edging into that category. He's not quite Winston Churchill yet, but pretty remarkable performance thus far. I do know Ukraine well. I have been to the country many, many times. Ukraine, although famously is not a NATO member, but they've been a NATO partner for decades. I deployed Ukrainian soldiers, sailors, Ukrainian Airmen deployed under my command to Afghanistan, to the Balkans on counter-piracy missions. The mission we were just discussing, the counter-piracy mission, had Ukrainian warships involved in it. So I know Ukraine extremely well.

I know the military. I never had any doubt they would fight and fight hard, but my question would have been, is Zelensky up to the task. I mean, let's be candid. He's not a physically impressive guy. And by the way, I say that being someone myself who is five feet, five inches tall, I'm pretty easy to overlook.

And he's a comedian. And he's a comedian. He's a performer. That's by the way, turned out to be his greatest gift, right, his communication skills. But Zelensky, there is nothing in his background that would have suggested he would rise to become this heroic figure. And at the very start of this conflict, when every Western intelligence agency is saying, your capital will be overrun in the next week, at most, and your country will be overrun

in the next two to three weeks. Every Western intelligence agency is saying this. And the United States goes to Zelensky and says, we'll get you out. And we'll set it up. You can establish a government and exile. We'll give you asylum here in the United States. We'll get your wife. We'll get your daughters out.

What Zalinsky say? Zalinsky said, I don't need a ride. I need more ammunition. That's a quote. They had a carve that one in the wall of the parliament and Keeve as we've all learned to say it now instead of Keeve. Remember when we called it Kiev? Now it's Kiev.

We all got that down. They got to carve those words in the side of the parliament because I think that's what's keeping that country free. That and a lot of help from his friends. So it's a remarkable story of someone who really did choose to risk it all. And you have to compare it to Afghanistan. Here in Afghanistan, the intelligence agencies also got it completely wrong, saying that

the Afghan military would hold out for at least a year. We had all the weapons there. It's the inverse of the Ukrainian situation. And also the leadership is inverse. Ashraf Ghani, the last president, and I think he will be the last president of the Afghan Republic, ran, grabbed a bag of cash, got on a hilo and fled the country. Who knows what would have happened if he had had the kind of moral quality, but those are two individuals who would be classic studies.

And if those events had happened as I was writing the book, I would have put them in the book. They're not Navy. I would have put them in the book. It's just too perfect a pair of bookends. And as you want to think about making decisions under extreme stress, you see a Zelensky doing everything right and you see an Ashrov Ghani literally doing everything wrong.

Well, obviously and hopefully none of us find ourselves in a situation like that. But to me, it's a reminder too that, and it's sometimes cliche or, you know, attacked, but that an individual can make a difference. And I mean, your book is all about individuals making a difference, but those are two really great examples of, hey, if they had done the opposite, the whole chain of events might have turned up differently. There's that great expression. One man with courage makes a majority. And the converse is probably also true.

One individual deciding to step up, whether it's Zelinsky or Charles DeGal, it changes the course of human events. It does. I will give you, by the way, for those who are reading and listening to this and thinking, well, I'm not the president of a country or I'm not an admiral out at sea. Listen, these moments come for everybody. They come for everybody. And it may be in a shopping mall, active shooter.

What are you going to do? There are weaker older people. Are you gonna stay behind and help them out? Or are you gonna bolt for the doors? These moments come for everybody. You are the second car behind the huge car crash. You go zipping on by and say, I, I'll call 911. Or you pull over. You do what you can in that moment. I was in a very similar situation in a line of ATVs, all terrain vehicles going up the side of a mountain in Montana. Suddenly, three cars ahead of me, one of them went spinning over the side and fell 150 feet down the side. It

was very interesting to watch the psychology of who in this line of SUVs just kept going and who pulled over to do what they could. Yeah. And I'm, you know, I'm a military guy. I know where my DNA is. You've been trained. Exactly. I pulled over.

But the car one in front of me was a guy who was at the conference I was at, who was an academic. He studied British literature and was given a talk on the novels of Jane Austen. That guy was out of that ATV scrambling down the side at the scene of it was pretty ugly to look at, you know, compound fractures, blood, you know, and a couple other of us, you know, pitched in. My point is these moments come for everyone. And yeah, maybe we all be so lucky never to face a moment like that, but these moments come and you have to be ready beforehand. And that's really the essence of why I wrote the book. And it's not always physical stuff, right?

It could be your child coming to you and saying that they're gay, it could be witnessing something unethical in your industry. It could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to start your own business. You know, that's what church was saying. It taps you on the shoulder. Do you brush it off and ignore it or do you, is it your finest hour, right? And that could be an hour on the world stage as it is, Vrzelinski, or it could be the quiet dignity of being a good person in your neighborhood

or in a friendship. Indeed. And I'll tell you three things that always rattle around in my head in this idea of preparation. And you and I Ryan have talked about it before. One is, know what you value. And don't try and figure that out while you're standing there. Now, we're north this to go to go to go to your other. Know what you value. Spend time literally thinking about what do I really value?

And again, I'll go back to Ukraine. Believe me, those bankers and lawyers and checkout people in the supermarkets three months ago, they didn't think they'd be on the front lines of a war. But they knew what they valued. They valued their country. They valued their elders. They valued their country, they valued their elders, they valued their children, they valued their spouses that they said goodbye to and sent them on a train to Poland,

they valued their language, they valued their civilization. They didn't like decide that on a Tuesday. That's something you prepare for by knowing what you value. And then secondly, know yourself. You know this at the Temple of Delphi. I'm Greek American, so I'm required to have a Greek reference in every conversation. But on the Temple of Delphi, the Greeks carved what they thought was the greatest wisdom and one of the things carved there is, know thyself, know thyself.

And here's the point I want to make. You've got a bunch of books behind you, books help you. They help you because every book is a simulator. You can put yourself into a book. Go back and reread to Kill a Mockingbird and say to yourself, would I have the moral courage to be Atticus Finch and think your way through that and you can't do that on the spur of the moment when an ATV goes tumbling or an active shooter is loose in a mall or you're on the edge of combat if you happen to be in the military, you have to prepare for those moments and events.

I think that's right and I think and I know you've got to go. So I thought one thought worth pointing out here, when I think of Zelensky, when I think of DeGal, and then when I think of Civil Stockdale, who you mentioned, is you say one person with courage makes a majority, but we should also give some credit to the the bedrock foundational support system that each one of these people had. The person they turned to and asked for advice. I think of DeGauve fleeing and I think of his wife having to uproot their life and going. You think of Zelinsky's wife, you know, and their children, I know she just met with First Lady Jill Biden, you

know, nobody is doing this alone. And that is one of the myths of stoicism. We hear about the singular male stoics. And the fact that their wives or their spouses or children are not even credited is to me evidence of the real stoic there who, again, was the hidden figure, didn't shout out for attention. but it was their strength that also helped the other person in that moment, that crucible of decision that you talked about. Indeed.

And I almost defy you to find a solitary figure who really follows these kind of principles, makes endlessly moral and ethical decisions. I'll tell you why, because we all need a sounding board. We all need friends, and we need spouses. And some of us are lucky enough to be married for 40 years. Some of us are in and maybe out of relationships, but I think we're underweight Ryan in those horizontal relationships. In other words, everybody spends a lot of time thinking about,

okay, how am I gonna please the boss? What's my boss thinking? What can I do to be loyal? And those are good things. And I think the light has come on for most people that as a leader you take care of your subordinates. You enable them, you mentor them, you protect them, you encourage them, you criticize and discipline them when necessary.

But we are underweight as a society in those horizontal relationships, in friendships, in family ships, if you will. And I found in writing this book and many of my other books, which touch on this, that's so often it's not a solitary act. It's really part of these lifelong conversations that we have with our friends and our family. No, you could almost argue it is a form of preparation, right? Like so, if you want to know how you're going to do in that moment of crisis and stress and difficulty,

well, prepare now by investing in the relationship and the friendship and the horizontal safety net that you're talking about. So you're not alone when it feels like the world is collapsing. Yeah, let me just give you, if I can, in our listeners, a very small homework assignment, which you can do or not, of course. But I call this have a hero. And what I mean by that is, very few of us actually stop and think, who do I really admire? Who are my heroes? And I'd encourage people to get out of sheet of paper and write down the names of four or five or six people that you really admire. And they can be friends and family, they can be figures from history, they can be fictional characters.

You can write Atticus Finch from to Kill a Mockingbirdies, a pretty admirable person. Leon Adys, the king of the Spartans who died at Thermopylai, very admirable. Condi Rice is someone I really admire, who's a friend, but also a remarkable national figure. Anyway, the point is, right down five or six names, and then ask yourself consciously, why do I admire them? And I think you'll find it's because of decisions they've made, generally under real risk, because that is the set of people we ought to admire. So, have some heroes and write it down and think about them, because that is also a form of preparation for when those dice land in your moment of life. As it happens, it's a deeply stoic thing. Senaqa says we have to choose ourselves a Cato.

He says because without a ruler, you cannot make crooked straight. That's such a great line. And so true. And from your lips to God's ears, hopefully we'll have some leaders who can do that for our society. I know we need that. Admiral, thank you so much. I love this book. I love sailing through North, which is... There it is. I won't take your time. It's on the shelf because I loved it so much and I appreciate the time and all of your insights as always.

I come away as always with some new insights of my own from the other side of the conversation. Thank you so much, Ryan. What a pleasure. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. episode.