Mark Esper

speaker

276 appearances 4 recordings 3 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Mark Esper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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Living The Red Life · 27th U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper: Power, Leadership, and Life-or-Death Decisions · 2 Apr 2026 podcast

You have to be there and you have to have an intensity to either, whether you're lifting weights or on a bike, to constantly pushing yourself as hard as you can, get that heart rate up.

And because again, you're training for a race.

If you want to win or improve yourself, it's, there's no shortcut.

I mean, hard work is really the only path, certainly in these types of endeavors.

And that is the challenge, generating that type of intensity on a daily basis to achieve a goal.

For many years, right.

It doesn't happen overnight, unless you're extraordinarily gifted.

And there are people out there that have been given those God-given gifts.

But for the most part, for the average person, at least for me, it's a lot of hard work, a lot of effort, a lot of successes, a lot of failures.

And you learn more often from those failures than successes.

Yeah, look, to me, leadership always begins with integrity.

And that is you have to have a core set of values that begin with honesty and putting your people first and folks understanding what is truly your goal, your aim, the ability to articulate ideas, empathy, judgment, extremely important.

And when you're in a smaller organization, you have your company now, 130, 140 people.

When I was a company commander in Italy, a rifle company commander, I knew everybody and they could, on a daily basis,

get to know me, talk to me, judge me, and vice versa.

But when you run big organizations like the Department of Defense, which is, what, 2.8 million people, so much of it then has to be conveyed in other ways.

It's your presence, your appearance at certain sites or operations or exercises or facilities.

It's how you convey that publicly.

And it's conveying a sense of your integrity and your goals and your interests and your concerns and how you place those priorities so that people understand the authentic you.

At the end of the day, it is actions speak louder than words.

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