Captain Brad Geary
speaker
303 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Captain Brad Geary’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks for having us. It means a lot to us. My pleasure. To start, we have to do the disclaimer that obviously everything I say here today is my own opinion. Brad Geary is not representative of the Navy. or Naval Special Warfare or the Department of Defense in general.
These are all my opinions and my understandings of the facts as I understand them in our entire case and everything that's happened since our last show, for sure. And to that point, big win with them dropping the case.
You know, as you released on social media, the signed document dated 13 December 24, where Amy and I basically signed it, both signed it saying, Sean, the lies finally crumbled under the weight of truth. Thank you for being a pivotal voice for truth. Blessed are the peacemakers, Brad and Amy Geary. Oh, man. Thank you.
Our honor, too. And we thank you. Thank you for being a continual voice for truth for me and so many others.
Somewhere around there. Yeah.
What happened? So, like I alluded to, what we hoped and what we expected. Before I get into that real quick, I do want to highlight something I think we've seen here. It's interesting because it all plays back toward leadership, which we talked a lot about in the last episode.
Years ago, when I first took command of SW Team 1, one of my task unit commanders sent us an article called Power Causes Brain Damage. The Atlantic published it, I want to say 2014 to 17 time frame, I think. Really, really interesting. And it's not a new idea, right? I think it was Lord Acton said, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But now in the modern day, we've been able to study that psychologically and actually do magnetic brain mapping and see what happens in the brains of those who have authority for long periods of time. And it turns out it's not great. So this article lays that out.
And it talks about how it creates hubris, a bit of cognitive dissonance, and what I think a lot of lower folk would look up the chain of command and say, that guy drinks his own Kool-Aid. And so it's very dangerous. Now, the hard part about this study is it identified that knowing it's a psychological problem, and by the way, this isn't like unique to a few people. This is everything.
This is everybody. This happens to anyone who's in a position of power for a long period of time. Even knowing that it's a problem, it's a psychological condition, I think they dubbed it the power paradox, or someone did, or the Huber syndrome, or maybe those are two separate but similar things, but either way, even knowing it's an issue, isn't enough to counteract it.
You actually have to take deliberate steps to counter this as a leader in order to stay humble, grounded, and kind of in sync with the force and who's entrusted to your care, the organization you're leading, whatever entity that is. I bring that up because it was important for me in my development as a leader, certainly as a commanding officer, and then getting to do that second one at BUDS.
Did they talk about this in Navy leadership? How did you find out about this? So, great question. They don't talk about it enough.
When I went to CO's school, they talk about the Bathsheba syndrome, which is where you study David as this king from the Old Testament who, you know, the classic story is he sees Bathsheba bathing on the neighboring roof, takes her, impregnates her, and then he has her husband killed.
And so they talk about how being in a position of authority and power for a long time, the rules don't seem to apply to people and how that can be a dangerous slope. So it's good that they talk a little bit about it, but they don't take it far enough because they don't really say anything other than, be careful that doesn't turn into you. Well, okay, not helpful.
And what this article does is breaks it down even further into how to stop that from happening. There's ways. The point is you have to have a mechanism in place to stay humbled, stay grounded. Some examples from the article. Franklin Roosevelt had an advisor that he made call him by his first name all the time. So he wasn't allowed to call him Mr. President or anything else.
And the reason is the minute we established a hierarchical order, You and I both know, no one ever tells the boss the truth. We sugarcoat it, we write it in our sit reps, and we massage it so that it doesn't sound as bad as it was back at the beginning. And so he knew that if I have an advisor, they're never going to tell me the full truth, whether they mean to or not.
And over time, that creates a gap in my understanding of what's actually going on with the organization I'm leading. and how I'm being perceived as a leader. So the point is we all need people in our lives who are willing to look us eye to eye as an equal, as a peer, not in a hierarchical status and basically call us on our BS. That's one example.
The article gives a bunch of other ways on how to do this, how to stay grounded. Another one, I can't remember the name, but she was some bigwig in some organization and She comes home to tell her mom she just got excited about getting selected to this huge board, and she's all proud of herself, and her mom's like, hey, before you get to that, go to the grocery store and get me some milk.
And so her mom did it deliberately. And she said something like, leave that damn crown in the garage. So when you come home, you're not a bigwig anymore. You're not super important. You're not puffed up on your ego. You are my daughter or my son or you are Franklin in that case. But it's very interesting, and it takes a deliberate approach. We do not talk about that in the military. Yeah.
Not only do we not talk about it, this is super interesting. they teach these leadership concepts before your first commanding officer tour. And prior to that, there's a lot of leadership development stuff. Here's what's super, I think, backwards is once you're done with your commanding officer tour, there's no more real big leadership development that you do especially prior to major command.
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