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Stan McChrystal

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2015-07-06
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2015-07-06
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  1. “Spend on that leverage. His exponential return. I used to tell people we had a five-day training week in an infantry battalion or company. And if you spent five days training and then you sort of spent, you know, maybe at the end of the last day sort of cleaning up, you're going to be at a 20% level of effectiveness. If you spent four days training leaders, developing leaders, then spent one day out there actually pulling everybody together and scrimmaging, you're going to be so much better, but yet you don't think of it. We want to rush to the field and try the whole thing when in reality we haven't put the pieces in place in the professional development. So I think it comes back to developing leaders in every sense.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I think up through probably thirty five, I was very much a control freak because the size of the organizations I commanded and I was part of were small enough where I could micromanage them. And I had a fairly forceful personality. If you worked hard and studied hard, you could just about move all the chess pieces, no problem. About age 35 to 40 as you get up to battalion level, which is about 600 people, suddenly you're going to have to lead in a different way. And what you're really going to have to do is develop people. And so it started to become, and the advice I'd give to anyone young is it's really about developing people who are going to do the work. Unless you are going to go do the task yourself, then the development time you spend on the people who are going to do that task, whether they are going to lead people doing it or whether they're actually going to do it, every minute you...”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It started about 50, went to about 8,000, and every day everybody could get all this update. It's like going in the quarterback's huddle. Everybody here in the situation, somebody saying, I can beat my defender. And everybody goes, okay, I got that. And here's where we go. And so as a consequence, we found that did two things. One, it informed the organization which allowed people to execute on their own without more instruction because they knew the situation. So they didn't have to have guidance. And two, they felt like they were part of one big effort as opposed to it wasn't about their batting average now. It was about whether the team won. And that was a very important dynamic. And we find that works in corporations very, very well.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “That slows decision making, it also takes away that sense of ownership that people have who are too far from where the decision is made. Then you become an executor, you get a piece of paper, do X, you don't really feel as though you're vested in that. And so there are a number of things that we found worked. One is radical transparency works. Now, we are not saying that we go to a system without organization, because as Chris described, we believe in a hybrid system. Reorganization is not the reflexive response that I think people should do, but they should look at the culture and the processes for our information flows. We went to a daily video teleconference across the entire command where everybody got what was happening.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Challenges or the effect on the battlefield that Team 3 had overcome wasn't enjoyed by Team 2 because they just didn't know about it and they weren't in that constant interaction. And what we found is that interaction can't come through the higher headquarters. It has to go directly watched by the higher headquarters, facilitated by the higher headquarters, created, you could say, the ecosystem for that created by the higher headquarters. So as we move to deal with surveillance firms, we found certain things work a lot. When we found the comparison to what we found silos and insular cultures tends to be pretty universal.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Above a certain size, we'll say 100. Suddenly, you can't be one big team. You can have banners in your company and you can say we're Team X. But the reality is you are a series of teams. And that series of teams can have several things. One, they can be under the command of headquarters, and then you've got these separate teams. Could also be silos into which they have sometimes insular cohesive cultures that may be very strong, but they may not be very well linked to the other teams. And the challenge we found is when I took command of Joint Special Operations Command, we had these amazing small teams that inside what they were unparalleled. The problem is they weren't linked together as a team of teams effectively. So we didn't get the synergy of having those teams the effectiveness of what was learned on team one wasn't automatically transferred to team three.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Sure. First off, the title of the new book, I think, is exactly right. Unfortunately, it's not the one I recommended. I had recommended one called the Proteus Problem, which was designed to allow organizations to deal with shapeshifters. But I was talked out of that, and I'm very glad I was, because team of teams really is based on the idea that we have this worship of the concept of teams. You bring people together, they get this trust in common purpose, they can finish each other's sentences, and they have this ability to do great things. But the reality is teams have limits of scale. If you go back to ancient history, the size of a Roman infantry company a century was a hundred people. The size of an American infantry company now is about 100 people. And it's that way because there are limits to how many people you can know in the interactions you can have where that personal connection is important. So once you get...”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And so I don't think they grow up with that, but what I do think they're going to have to come together to make certain things happen. And hopefully that'll happen organically.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Exactly, but not be dogmatic about what you are. Don't say, you know, I remember a guy when I was young who said his father told him in every election I want you to vote for the best candidate, you'll find it merely coincidental. That's always a Democrat.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Ideas or a party or anything like that. They're not what their parents were. They're what they are. And to me, that's a pretty big difference. I think generally it's good. But at the end of the day, I do think they are going to have to migrate from being just free agents too. I think they're going to have to find that they are going to have to come together to move things in one direction or another. And hopefully that'll come naturally.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “It certainly surprised me. I thought that I was going to go to Yale, and because of the history, they were going to be politically liberal and biased in that way. And therefore sort of closed-minded to open things. And I found that they are not that at all. They are not liberal. They're not conservative. They're skeptical. And that's a new quality. They are skeptical of how government works. They're skeptical of how business works. They're skeptical at how people who try to influence them operate. And because I teach leadership and you're talking about how do you lead something, suddenly I realize that the constituency that they represent, and I don't think they're completely unique, I think they're largely representative, is we are dealing with a group of people who want to test the hypothesis. They are loyal, but in a different way. They aren't slavishly loyal to even a set of ideas.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “That's right, more mechanical. If you think about it, if you and I were playing a game of chess right now and we each had our sixteen chess pieces and I moved, you moved. I'm against you and we're both micromanaging our teams. But what if through the dynamics of shared consciousness all of my chess pieces could decide on their own and they could communicate amongst themselves so in fact you aren't really playing me you're playing the combined intelligence and flexibility of my sixteen chess pieces and they can move whenever they want they don't have to wait for you to move suddenly they say well wait a minute that's not fair but that's the environment we're in now you're not against one iconic decision maker you're against this networked set of competitors maybe they're in coordination intentionally maybe they're unintentionally coordinating and so what I would argue is chess actually”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Amazing how often we actually skip that. And then if you go back and look at some of the great failures in history, if you do the math on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, it starts with an assumption that if you capture Moscow, Russia will collapse. Well, that assumption was bad, and then if you look at the logistics of it where you're hauling wagon loads of fodder for horses, suddenly mathematically you can't haul enough fodder in the wagons to feed the horses so unless you can live off the land it just doesn't work and the Russians aren't going to let you do that so you start to uncover basic disconnects that are are not difficult to come up with but we almost are in avoidance we don't want to look at the hard reality of the math”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “That's a great one. Chess is typically thought of as the classic strategy game, and it was designed to teach future leaders how they could do that. I think you could do almost anything. I think planning football games can do it. And so I think anytime you are trying to clearly define your end and then assign ways and means to that, there's a discipline to that process. And what I say is if you take a game or an endeavor and you say, I've got to apply these ends, and then you do a calculation, what am I willing to do? What am I capable of doing? And what resources do I have reasonably? And I'm willing to put against that. It's not mathematical. It's more art than that. But there's a certain underlying math to that. So I think just going through that process to seeing whether it gets there, it's like developing a business plan, like developing a war plan.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Short, the concept of red team is designed to And you have them take a look at it, and how would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan? And if you've got a very thoughtful red team, you'll produce stunning results. There was a war game back before the invasion of Iraq where a retired Marine General Officer He was the Iraqis, and he didn't wait to be attacked. He attacked Kuwait. He hit the ports, and he sent the entire planet into a tailspin. And there were people who said, no, no, you can't do that. They'd never do that. And he goes, Well, it worked. So maybe they would do that. That's right. He forced people to think. And so the entire idea of red teaming is, and yet it's hard to red team your own plan.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Not really. When I was at West Point, they were experimenting with trends in dittle meditation. So the psychology course I took, we did a little of it. But the answer is no. I had that just glimpse at it, but never really followed through.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Of selfless sacrifice. And maybe it's actually more than it should be because most of us join the military because it looked interesting. And yet once you're in, you get this self-reinforcing idea that you're making this huge sacrifice to serve your nation. And so I would actually argue it's far easier than leading in the civilian world is. In the civilian world where you're dealing with markets, Wall Street, boards, employees, the vagaries of competition and all these things, I think a leader, the impressive ones that I think leave Chris and I a really, really sometimes in awe is they can pull through all of that and they can pull the sense of purpose in the organization and the positive leadership even through the challenges that I think those things add to it.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Can I jump on that? Absolutely. Because I actually. Agree strongly with Chris. Military leadership is actually easier than surveillance leadership and for lots of reasons. One, the military culture is this incredibly seductive or addictive thing. Most military people will tell you they don't like the big bureaucracy. They don't like a lot of things about what the military you do in the military. But being a part of that camaraderie, being a part of that organization is just absolutely magnetic. And most people who served a while would tell you they would go back in a heartbeat to be back in that. And it's easier because, one, there's this very clear sense of who you are. There's uniforms. There's a tradition. There's this lofty mission of defending the nation. The issue of money is never on the table. The government pays you a certain amount everybody knows, so there's no idea I'm not paid enough and Jim got more than I did. So that's completely gone. And there's also this sense.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Exactly. And so, what I told him was that's what happens in war. You don't get, the enemy gets to do that. You get to kill him. He gets to kill you. And what you do is you get right back at it and you get right back at it right away and stay focused. And that's, I think, the best catharsis you can do, difficult as it is.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, and of course, you don't say that quite that explicitly in the organization, but the first thing you do when an organization suffers a loss is not tell them, you know, don't let people marinate in their grief. They can grieve. When I was in Afghanistan, the German army got in a firefight. And they had four of their soldiers killed. And it was the first four German soldiers killed in combat since World War II. And so I flew up to be with this company and they were literally in shock and they were all in this room trying to figure out how do you process this because we go to war every few years. The Germans' fathers hadn't been at war. Maybe their grandfather's had, and certainly no one in active duty had ever had a soldier killed in combat under their command or a comrade. So they were trying to figure out how to figure this out.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Small communities, tribes, and really our forces were a tribe. So suddenly the effect of that can cause you to be even more impacted by. Ulysses S. Grant used to say that he didn't visit hospitals much because he found if he went and he saw the terrible carnage for which he was responsible, he'd lose his nerve to command it. So what I think happens is you don't become detached from the loss and you don't go into denial. What I found is you keep yourself focused on the objective and you say this is what we are doing, this is important, this is attainable and the steps we are taking to it are the best steps I can figure out. They're responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability and they are judiciously executed to the best of what we can do.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Found that we just couldn't do what we had to do without bringing more of our force over. We had a third of our force deployed all the time, and then two-thirds back training and getting ready. And that was about the tempo we could maintain for a long, long time. But we had a period when we needed two-thirds of the force in the fight. And mathematically, of course, because the last thirds back on alert in the US, that's not indefinitely sustainable. And just at the time, we made the decision to do that, we started taking a bunch of casualties. And when you take casualties in a very elite force, it's not the nameless rifleman at the end of the squad that nobody knows. It is Chris, who I have served with for 10 years. I'm the godfather to one of his kids. I'm married to his sister. I mean, that's the effect. Lawrence T. Lawrence writes about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Mindset because then people start to make their personal calculation. They said, how long can I do this before the roulette whale hits me? And is it going to even come out right if we pay all this price? Are we going to have a successful outcome? And that's a different mindset as well. What I found myself was if you stay focused on the mission and everybody understands the cost of that, when you have an outcome where people are killed or wounded, if you let yourself freeze up with either the self-doubt that maybe you made a mistake or this sense that there's just no exit to this maze, then of course I think it's very difficult to make those kinds of calls. You can find yourself locked up. In the summer of 2005, I had”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Yeah, a little bit of historical context. If you think about it and you can compare this to earlier times of war, but the first part of after 2001, we were worried about Al-Qaeda, worried about Afghanistan. We went in and it turned out to be remarkably rapid and relatively speaking, low cost in terms of casualties and whatnot. And then Iraq, actually the invasion turned out to be the same way. So there got to be this sense that, okay, this isn't that hard. It's not going to take this long and the cost will not be hard. We have a few fallen heroes and we celebrate them, but we don't think it's going to be a grinding attrition. Then as we got into the difficult era after fall of 2003 and got into 2004 and 2005, something different happens. One, we started to realize that this was going to be very hard. And every time we lost a comrade, they were not going to be the last. And that's a different.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “It signals a couple things. One, it signals maybe I'm I think I'm more important than they are. It also signals maybe that I don't have the same courage they have. And so as I'm walking around and dealing with them for me to be in this suit of chain mail equivalent, I think it's in a very dangerous thing. I was trying to send a message that I trusted them. They were going to secure me when I'm there and I trust them. And that sort of gets down to the Pashtu idea of hospitality. So I thought it was very, very important. I had to wrestle with the idea that there was going to be a certain part on the American side that says, wait a minute, what's he doing here? We've got a policy he's violating it. But when you're at four store on your last assignment, okay, what are they going to do? And I thought it was important to send that part of the message as we did it.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Now, in Afghanistan, one of the things about American defense policy is you don't want Americans to get hurt, so you spend a lot of money, get them good body armor. And every time an American soldier is injured in some of our allies had the same policy, you have to report what they were wearing down to each piece. And the idea is we are going to prescribe all of this because our people are so valued and so important. Where you're there to build confidence and rapport with the Afghan people who don't have body armor, and they are living out in the same areas. And so if you go to visit them and I'm going to visit a district, a governor, a province governor, or just a society leader, and I go all body armored because I'm so important that we don't want me to get hurt.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “It's a labyrinth. And the enemy, if you think about it, all they got to do is be at the corner, turn, shoot down there, and there's nowhere to go, or place improvised explosive devices, landmines, and whatnot in the walls of this, which of course they did all the time. We went down and I went on this patrol with them, and there's no way they could have described it. But when I went on it and they said, sir, we see about 50 feet in front of us, 50 feet behind and about a foot and a half left and right. What are we doing here? What are we accomplishing? You go down and do that, you send a signal, but you also walk back with a much better understanding and appreciation, and nobody can describe it to you. So there's a certain just importance. And then I think also if you don't.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “So it's like being shrunk down and being put into your corduroy trousers. And you are walking and suddenly you go, holy, it's acres and acres and acres.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “To you. They can give you absolutely factual reports about what they did and the way they did it, but you don't know until you go out there. You don't understand the conditions under which they're operating, the frustrations, the nuances. And so going out there, every time you do, you come back and you go, wow, I had no appreciation for what they're doing. When I was commanding in Afghanistan, I had a sergeant write me an email that says, I don't think you understand what's going on out here. And at first, I took umbrogetic because I spent a lot of time on it. I said, okay. And the next day we flew out and went on a patrol with a squad in his platoon. And we went into this area in which it was vineyards. But in America, we'd have vineyards with wooden or metal trellises. They don't have wood or metal in Afghanistan, so they use mud. And they're about three and a half feet apart.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Yeah, I think all commanders go out operations. What was different about me as I got more senior, the kind of organization I was in, it made sense for me to go out. And so when I had joint special operations command for me and Chris would go, you know, we'd go together for us to go on a 20-person raid suddenly made sense because that's the size of operations we did. Another commander might go with a brigade of several thousand people doing something, but we go with 20 because that's how we operated. It's very good on a number of reasons, Neville's. One level is you have to share danger with the people that you operate with. You don't have to do it every day. You don't have to be the strongest or the bravest or kick open the door. But just being willing to go out there does send a message to them that you are willing to put it on the line with them. The second is you can have operations described.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “I went onaudible.com and I buy this packaged deal where you get a whole bunch of credits. And I look at the history first and I look at what's trending new just to see if what's trending new. I tend to like sweeping history stories of an era that's 20, 30, 40 years or big projects like the building of the Panama Canal, building of the Boulder Dam because they got a beginning, middle, and an end and challenges or biographies. And I will also do binge reading, meaning I went through a period where I read about wailing and I read like five wailing books together or I'll read biographies or something about the founding fathers and I did seven or eight George Washington and other founding fathers and because they're all mutually overlapping it's very interesting because suddenly you know more about the era and the new one is more”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “So I just finished a book on the South African Gold and Diamond Trade, Cecil Rhodes and whatnot. And up through the Boer War, it was fascinating and it probably took me, you know, six, eight weeks of shaving time to do that.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Found that eclectic part really good. I learned to run with audiobooks. My mind will stay collected on it when I lift weights. And I also, just because I get sort of fanatical about something, I have a little set of speakers in my bathroom. So what I do is I go in in the morning and I'm listening to one book there. I turn it on and while I brush my teeth, while I shave, while I put my PT clothes on, because my wife's out in the bedroom, I'll listen to this book. And then I'll walk out of there to go work out and I'll have my iPod. I have another book. And I listen to that when I work out. Now it will take me quite a while of shaving time to get through a book.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “All the time. It's funny. I first used to listen to music and I get bored listening to music. So I started listening to audiobooks because if you think about time menagement, what I found was I love to read, but particularly when we started the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have a long day. I'd have good books. I'd go back to my hooch and I'd read about a page and a half, and then I'd wake up 20 minutes later with my head on the page. And so I realized I was going to have to get a better way. So I started putting audiobooks on my iPod. And I like history and I like biography. And so I would put those on very eclectically. And initially it was eclectic because audiobooks weren't that prevalent. And so my wife would go to the library. She'd go everywhere she could, get all these audiobooks. I'd download them onto my iPod and then on my computer and then put them on my iPod. And so it was whatever was available. Later is more things became available. I had a wider choice.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Much more than people give him credit for. So I think he's a huge one. There's another, and I'm going to, I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name. There was a naval admiral between the First and Second World War, who essentially championed the development of aircraft carriers. There were people who championed the development of air power, and that was pretty obvious. But building aircraft carriers during that period when battleships were still king was a dangerous sort of step out there. So I think those people who push change, when change is not otherwise automatically going to happen.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “That's a great question because there are people who did things for which they get huge credit and then there are other people who changed the direction of organizations. And of course I think Ulysses S. Grant is often underrated. He's viewed as this mechanical basher who is going to just bash the enemy into submission. And I think he was much more than that. I think he took an army that was already maturing when he took overall command of Union forces, but he understood the absolute truth that you had to destroy the army of the South. You capturing Richmond was interesting, but it wasn't the real point. The problem was as long as you had an existing army and that that was going to take a very focused effort that was going to be high cost and you weren't going to lower the cost by doing it more slowly. It was cumulatively had to get it done. And I think he understood the political side of it.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I'm not sure that wasn't the right answer, and I couldn't tell him afterward that it was, but none of them left him, but they agonized over it. I mean, they tried everything they could, but it was just good because I said, those are the situations you're going to be in. It's never going to be easy, this or that.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “It's hard to say. The first thing I would say is you want them to be thoughtful. The first response from people was, okay, the Ranger Creed says I'll never leave a falling comrade, so I'm not leaving a fallen comrade. We're standing here, period. And then you say, wait a minute, the president of the United States sent you to rescue those American citizens. If we fail, then what's going to happen is we are going to have the loss of Americans and we're going to have this embarrassment and all of these things. So the nation that is relying on you, you're going to let down. So what's more important? Your personal promise or the promise to the nation and your mission and whatnot. And it was this quandary that you're looking for them to be more thoughtful than just this automatic black and white, reflexive, this is what we do because that's what we do. Interestingly, I didn't have any of the companies leave the wound.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Faith with your comrades, or you're going to stay there, in which case you're probably all going to get killed and the students are not going to be rescued, so you're going to be a failure. And we would do this, and it was a fascinating situation because you saw this moral dilemma on top of all the tactical dilemmas. And then afterward, we would have these long after action reviews where we talked about it. The fun thing is there was no right answer.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “I in fact reinforced that enemy with about 100. And so suddenly what happened is they get in a firefight that they can't extract from and very quickly they have wounded of their own. And so now they're in this situation and I'm playing higher headquarters. I'm actually on the ground watching through my controllers I'm playing higher headquarters and I say, all right, your mission is to get those students out of there, get them out and get them to the airfield. And they go, wait a minute, I've got 40 wounded. I can't move my wounded. I can't get them. And I'm not going to leave them. And I said, wait, we sent you for the students. Get them. And so they always try to work around. They try to say, I need more aircraft. I need more forces. Something to take away the constraint. And of course, you say, nope, nope, nope, won't happen. You're going to have to make the decision. You are going to police students out and accomplish your mission at the cost of breaking.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “There were a number of ways to do that, to make tough decisions and whatnot. When I was a regimental commander, a colonel of the Range Regiment, we did a, put together an exercise that was designed to test them with uncertainty, but also with a no-win decision. And so what we did was we went to a battalion on no notice and we alerted them and we took a company of rangers, put them on airplanes, and flew them to Texas, and then did a parachute assault. And their mission was to then move from the drop zone to this town and rescue a bunch of Americans who were there working nonprofits and whatnot. And they were then to police them up, bring them out to an airfield, and be extracted. Pretty straightforward. And so they parachuted in, and as they moved toward this town, they're told that there are a small number of enemy forces there, ten or so, enough they can deal with, and they develop a plan and they deal with it. Once they got into that fight,”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Courses that was as realistic as it could be, there was the stress, there was the sense of danger, although they were set up to inherently be safe. That required it. To that, I would add, dealing with uncertainty. I would try to put people in cases where they have to make decisions with absolutely incomplete knowledge, and they have got to live with the results of that, and often it'll be bad. And what do they do then?”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “He read about it, studied it, and now made the decision to go do it. It'll be interesting to hear him after he comes out. If I was going to prepare people for combat, if you assume that they can do the basic skills, they can shoot a weapon, they can do first aid, they can do those things. If they can't do those, obviously you've got to teach them the things that are absolutely required. But if you assume that most people come out of basic training and initial training with those technical skills, I'd spend time on things that do two things. The first would be to push themselves. After World War II, when they talked to organizations that have then been through combat, they said, what of your training was of value and what was of less value? They said long foot marches that forced them physically and really caused them to reach down inside themselves like distance running was invaluable. And the second was live fire training”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Very interesting. And just as an aside, the young man, the Yale graduate who worked with me on the memoirs you read is in his final week of Ranger School now. So he lost a boatload of weight and he comes out and he's a specialist in second ranger battalion.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Well, I think it caused me, one, you don't want to let somebody down who's got faith in you. If somebody doesn't have faith in you, they say, I think you're a screw up, you go, well, okay, if I screw up, you know. But if somebody says, no, I really have trust in you. I trust you're going to do really well. It gives you a new sense of loyalty to someone. You don't want to let them down. Plus, he's now put on the table in front of everybody. You can do this. He didn't say it that way, but it was clear that's what he'd done. So it changed my opinion for lots of reasons, this being one of them, my grade point average skyrocketed my last two years, and I finished on the Dean's list and all which was for me nosebleed territory. But it was a lot because of the way people around me just started shaping my expectations.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Misspent youth, I'd say. I suddenly was dating someone seriously, so I had this taku believed with me. I was going to settle down more because I was dating one person. And I could sort of see the end. And for me, West Point was this dark tunnel you went into just to go be an army officer. If it could have been done in a weekend, I'd have been happy to do that. I didn't bask in the West Point experience. I just wanted to be an Army officer. And West Point seemed like the best place to do it. And suddenly I could see, it was two years out, but I could see the reality of it. Here was a special forces combat veteran who was telling me he thought I'd be good for that world.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “I'm looking at you. You know, you've gone outside the boundaries a couple times. He said, but your peer ratings are really good. My peers were reflecting confidence and whatnot. He says, I think you're going to do great. And it was amazing. It was transformational because sort of like that kid in elementary school where suddenly they start to say, you do have high potential. We just got to pull this out. And I had also started seriously dating now my wife of 38 years dating her then. So after my first two years of”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “A little like that. You have a commissioned officer, a captain, or a major for each company, which has about 120 cadets in it, and they don't live in the company. They're not there every day, but they are responsible for the company. So they have an office couple hundred meters away, and they're responsible for overseeing the cadet chain of command on discipline, and they'll come down and inspect things. And they're also mentors and whatnot. And so after the first couple years, I came back and I expected to have this new tactical officer, my first in briefing and counseling he brings each person in together. I expected him to look at my record and then give me the riot act for, you know, all my problems and shortcomings and whatnot. And I sat down with him. And he's a special forces officer. And he sat down and he goes, well, I'm looking at your record here. And he says, and I think you're going to be a great cadet and a great army officer. And I literally said,”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Crushed. And so I went that summer and I went off to training and whatnot. They send around the army to do different things. And I came back that fall and we had changed tactical officers. Now I had a nice tactical officer the first two years, but I don't really think, I mean, he tolerated my two years of problems.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Yeah, it really was. Several things happened. I had entered West Point and I was from an Army family and I had expectations of myself. But my first two years at West Point were difficult. I got in a lot of trouble for discipline, my own immaturity. I didn't do well academically because I didn't know how to study and I didn't study very hard. I really didn't take West Point very seriously. And it was also heavy on math and sciences. And so that was not my strong suit. So by the end of my sophomore year, I wasn't ready to quit, but I was having a crisis of confidence. I had gone through some things. I had applied to go to Ranger School as a cadet, which they let a small number each year. And in the spring of my sophomore year, for that summer, they said, you can't because your record is your lack of discipline is bad enough. You can't go to Ranger School. And I was really...”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT