General Stanley McChrystal
speaker
36 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 16 Feb
General Stanley McChrystal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When these professionals finally decide to retire, it should happen on parade fields, in offices, on the deck of ships, wherever the Space Force goes, I don't know.
God forbid if we're in a major war and we need to start calling everybody up, I would hope that we would not suddenly say we are only going to draft people of a certain type because we wouldn't have enough.
It's great to see you.
Well, I'm just going to break out of this and start with what I want from you. From me? I want you to start a national conversation on character. Yes. I think we could begin it tonight with this group. It's a fine group. I think we... What's the framing of the conversation? I think we turn the lights up, we bring some beer in.
Yeah, I think first is character is our choice. That's the great thing about it. We have agency over who we as individuals are. And Heraclitus said an individual's character is their fate. Character is destiny. I think that's true. Yeah. I also think it's true of a nation. And so we get to choose what our character is. Not somebody else. We get to choose. And it's the answer.
Didn't we just try that? Yeah.
American people went, eh, character. And only 65% of America voted. Yes. And the reality is we can do better than that. Right. What I think we can, yeah. Right. If character is the essence of who we are, Thomas Paine said that reputation is what men think of us. Character is what angels know of us.
Then I think if we look inside and we say, what can we, each of us as individuals, be, we have the opportunity to be something different. I mean, none of us is perfect. Every one of us makes a mistake every day. I'm 70 years old. I make mistakes, and it still frustrates me. You're 70? What am I doing wrong?
The great thing about character is it is a combination of two things. It is our convictions. It's what we believe. Right. And there's no right or wrong to that, except we have to have thought about them. We have to know what they are. The beauty of writing this book is it forced me to put on paper and to really think about what I believe. Then the other half of it is our discipline.
Do we live to them? You know, you can have a lot of convictions you tell people about, but if you don't live them... They're zero. Right. And so I think our character is the essential identity of us as people and us as a nation. And we've led it a road.
Yeah, I think it's got three steps. I think the first is we need to think about character more. That's largely individual, but you can share it with people. Then we need to talk about it. We need to talk about it in small groups, not just on TV, but we need to talk about it in our schools and our families.
There are certain norms that I think almost all of us would agree on. But as you talked about faith earlier, There are parts of faith that we vary on. But I think that if we talk about what are the things that sort of bound America together, what are the things that we all believe, how we treat people, be fair to people, have empathy, give an opportunity to people.
I think that's right. First, you need to listen to them. One of the things I learned in the counterterrorist fight was we had our forces, which, you know, I was obviously very close to the most elite people. And then we had our enemies. And there was a perception that they were two poles different. They actually had bent up.
The personal attributes of the best people that I worked with and the best people that we fought, they were courageous, they believed in their cause, they were willing to sacrifice. There was a different life journey that got them to where they were. And if we're willing to listen to another person's life journey,
and admit often that had we had that same life journey, we would reach those same conclusions. Then you reach at a different point. Then they're not suddenly the enemy. They just have a different perspective.
Well it is but if we try to say they're incontrovertible truths you know many of them what are they. You know, we start to say he courteous, kind and forgiving. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty good. And those are the things that are common denominator sort of things.
And that's where we have to connect, because the reality is we're not going to have the same view from different parts of the world, different parts of the country, different zip codes, different economic backgrounds, because your life journey is just enough different.
Yeah. I think from experience, one of the things you learn is you have to try to find common ground, and you have to start by having enough empathy. And remember, empathy is not sympathy. Doesn't mean you're rubbing somebody's belly and you agree with them. It means that you can... Would that have ended the Afghanistan war? Probably pretty quickly. Bring in the governor.
You have to be able to put yourself on the other side of the table. You know, I would talk to Pashtun elders, and they had big turbans and beards and craggy faces and different lives in mind, spoke a different language, had a different religion. But in reality, they were actually pretty good people. And if you had their loyalty and their respect... They were as good as we are.
In fact, they are very similar to us. So if you stop assuming that anyone who doesn't share those attributes is different and therefore less than you, you have a different approach to it.
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