Rebuilding American Courage and Character

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL: We need to decide, what is our character in America going to be? What is okay and what is not okay? Because we’ve allowed the norms to slip. We watch TV and we see people lie to us on TV and we accept it. We decide that. Let’s hold each other to account. We get to decide what kind of nation we are.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Stanley McChrystal, retired U.S. General and leadership advisor to CEOs talking live at 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco on October 8. Stan has been a guest on Rapid Response before, most recently to talk about his book on character. In this special episode, Stan is interviewed on stage by another repeat Rapid Response guest, futurist, culture critic, and media personality Baratunde Thurston. They talk about the responsibility of leaders in 2025, the role of the US military in civil society and what it means to be courageous. Plus they do it all with warmth and a smile, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.

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BARATUNDE THURSTON: Hello, General McChrystal. Thank you for being here with us.

MCCHRYSTAL: Thanks for having me.

THURSTON: In your book “On Character,” you wrote about a period of your life when you were dismissive of philosophy. You said, and I quote, “Famous philosophers in my junior high school, they would’ve been bullied and had their lunch money stolen.” Stan, did you know that I majored in philosophy?

MCCHRYSTAL: Not till today.

THURSTON: Anything you want to say to me, bro?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, this is very uncomfortable.

Copy LinkBreaking down the building blocks of character

THURSTON: Well, we can lean into that discomfort and work through it. On a more serious note, I was moved by your book. I was moved by your philosophical exploration, the concept of character, not just pushing a specific version of it, but breaking it down into component parts. Character is conviction plus discipline, and the thing that you argue for is to be curious about our convictions. Why is it important for you, for us to not just have character or have good character, but to challenge the components of it in our lives?

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, if you break character into the convictions, the strongly held beliefs you have, times your discipline to live to them, because anything is zero if you don’t have the discipline to live to it. The convictions matter a lot, but they’re not the things that someone just told you. And if you think about it, most of us are the religion we were raised in, we’re the nationality we were born into. We are a product of the experience we’ve had. So much of what we believe is what was sort of handed to us as we went along, and that doesn’t make it right.

And I remember in the counter-terrorist fight we would be against members of Al-Qaeda who were extraordinarily effective and they were killing people and they were trying to kill us. At the same time, the best they had were loyal, they were brave, they were focused on a cause that they believed in. And the only difference between me and my people and them was the life’s journey. Had we switched life’s journey, every probability is we’d have been at the other place. And so once you get there, you step back and go, well then maybe they’re not entirely wrong. Doesn’t mean I agree with them, it doesn’t mean I support them, but it means that my convictions need me to pressure test them to the greatest degree possible.

Part of that comes with philosophy, and I didn’t do it through much of my life. I did a few things, but then as I get older, you start realizing how important character always was. It was always the thing. At the moment, you didn’t always consider it that way. You were trying to be more proficient in this or more successful in this or more powerful. And then at the end you go, the common denominator of getting it right was always character. And the decisions that I’m most proud of were good character and the ones that I regret, and there are some, they were places where I didn’t live to the character that I knew was the right answer. And so I think we’ve got to be humble enough to decide what we think we believe and then challenge it.

Copy LinkWhen we fail to live up to our character

THURSTON: I want to follow up on the humility and on what we do, and I use “we” intentionally. I know I have not always lived up to the character I profess and deeply believe in. I’ve put my emotional needs before someone close to me. An act of small but significant selfishness, and maybe you’ve had your own versions and people here have. What have you found works when we recognize that we haven’t lived up to our character, to recover from that and still maintain a good path forward?

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, I think the first thing is we say, “Well, that’s not me.” But if any of you flew here and you made the mistake of checking your luggage, you had to go to the turnstile where the bags come out and what do you typically see? You see people crowded right up next to it, like wildebeest at the last watering hole in the Serengeti. And there’s this idea that my bag’s going to come out faster if I’m closer, but the people down below putting the bags on thing, they don’t care. If we all stepped back three or four feet, everybody could see it. We could calmly get in and reach our bag and when it came out and we could move on.

Yet why are we that way? Not because we’re bad people. I don’t think it’s because those people in that moment, we are anonymous too. We’re tired, we want to get home, we’re never going to see them again. So we can be that way. And how many times do you deal with somebody or some instance where you just think, “I’m going to be this way because I’m angry or it serves my purposes.” Things you would never do around people that you see routinely or your family. And then you realize we have lapses. So I think that the key thing for me is, and I’m pretty self-critical. At the end of every day I literally say and think of the times in the day when I was not the person I should have been, when I responded incorrectly to somebody. I got mad, I was short, you name it, there’s just a litany.

And the key is not to make that the new standard. The key is to say that was wrong, and tomorrow I’m going to try to do better, knowing you’re never going to get to perfect, but if you don’t have some kind of pressure.  

And then you didn’t ask this, but I think the other thing that we desperately need in society are norms where we hold each other accountable, where we’re willing to do that. Your mom would do that, but if your mom’s not around, who will do it? And sometimes we need to look each other in the eye and just go, “That’s not the way we do things. That’s not the way we treat other people. That’s not what we would consider the standard that we all want to hold ourselves to.”

Copy LinkGen. Stanley McChrystal on deploying troops in cities

THURSTON: Since you’re brought up how we treat other people, let’s talk about what is happening with the U.S. government right now, which has a duty of care to treat people a certain way and is making really radical decisions on how to deploy the services of the government. How do you respond to the deployment of armed forces in American cities, particularly those run by Democrats, but really any city or the deployment of immigration officers dressed as special operators? How do you see this, and how do you feel this use of our military right now?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think it’s unfortunate and I think it’s a big mistake, but if we stepped back and sort of antiseptically said, someone looks at you and you didn’t like it, and they say, “Well, you don’t believe in illegal immigration, do you?” And I sort of don’t believe in anything that begins with illegal, but that’s really not the issue here. The issue is how we’re treating each other, how we’re treating people, and there are probably two levels to it. The first is people are human beings and there should be a standard that we all decide we’re going to treat people, particularly people who are less strong than we are, who need to be supported, who need to be respected, who need to be helped. Then the use of the military, and this is of course personal to me, there’s a tradition of not using the military in the streets of the United States, the Posse Comitatus rule, and it’s got a really good reason.

It’s because you don’t want the American people to identify the military with people that come and police. You’re familiar with the Quartering Act. Part of our initial – the founding fathers put it in – couldn’t make soldiers live in your homes. And that was because the Redcoats had done it. And so we were trying to protect ourselves from it. And of course people grew to hate the Redcoats. What we don’t want is the American people to grow to fear or be resentful of our own military because the military has to be a mirror of the population. It has to be diverse. It has to be as much talent as we can bring. Parents have to feel good about their sons and daughters going into the service or there won’t be a service. And so there’s got to be this organic relationship and so you got to be very careful.

Now, are there instances where the military can do things other organizations can’t? Absolutely. There’s a common-sense point of this, but I think the apolitical nature of our military is one of the sacred norms that we have respected for most of our history. Never perfectly but pretty darn well, and sorry to go on so long. 

When I was a senior officer, actually at all ranks, I never knew the political persuasion of any of my peers. I didn’t know if they were liberal. I didn’t know if they were conservative. We didn’t talk about it. It was considered inappropriate to do that. And of course it was inappropriate to talk about it with your subordinates because that’s undue influence. You just didn’t because the military wasn’t part of that. And the problem is if a military gets politicized, we need to only look around the world for examples where that happens. Then suddenly it has a different role in society and we won’t like it. I guarantee it.

THURSTON: You probably can’t answer this one, but how are y’all talking about this in the former generals group chat? You’re right. There is no group chat.

MCCHRYSTAL: There are communities of people, not just former military, but who just care deeply about our country. They’ve been alongside service members who’ve sacrificed, they have sometimes sacrificed, and they just have this sense of responsibility for the future of the nation that although we’re not serving actively right now, so we don’t do those things, there’s still emotional attachment. So I think there’s an entire community of people out there who feel very strongly that we need to go in a better direction.

SAFIAN: Stan isn’t being coy about a better direction. His description of the diverse political perspectives within the military echoes what I keep hearing from business leaders too about the need for their organizations to represent the wide breadth of the population even when that’s challenging. So how is evolving technology like AI impacting the military and what sort of character do we need in deploying AI? Stan and Baratunde talk about that, what it means to be courageous and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, we heard retired U.S. General Stanley McChrystal live at Masters of Scale Summit in conversation with futurist and media personality Baratunde Thurston, about the role of character in leadership and the role of the military in civil society. Now, Stan and Baratunde talk about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, Stan’s exhortation to embrace national service and the double-edged sword of AI. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkWhy Baratunde uses “citizen” as a verb

THURSTON: One of the projects I’ve been honored to work on is called, “How to Citizen.”  We interpret citizen as a verb, and it’s not just about voting and electing people, it’s what we do every day. And our work and premise has been telling these stories of people who are practicing democracy, who are citizen-ing in innumerable ways. When you hear that more open definition of citizen as a verb, what is your call to the people right now on how we can citizen?

MCCHRYSTAL: I love what you’re doing with that, and I love citizen being a verb because I think that’s what it is. Most of the people in this room became citizens by accident of birth. We didn’t do anything to earn it. And most of us think that if we pay our taxes and we vote, we’ve checked the block. But as you know, in the last presidential election, only 65% of eligible voters voted. That’s a lower percentage than Afghanistan when I was serving there. And so whoever wins, wins with less than 50% of 65%, so the winner comes in the low thirties. I don’t think that that’s really the kind of democracy we need. So the first thing I think is we need to take the responsibilities. People talk, my inalienable rights, we have responsibilities that go with those, and I think they are wider than simply voting or paying taxes or not violating the law.

I think they’re participating in things that make the nation stronger in our communities. There’s a great tradition in America about volunteer fire departments and raising barns and all the things. You couldn’t have a community work without that. And yet we’ve drifted a bit from that. I’m a great believer in national service for all Americans. So every young American gets an opportunity to do a year of fully paid national service, not big money stipend kind of money, but so that they don’t have to be supported by their parents, healthcare, conservation, whatever. Some will go in the military, some might go law enforcement, but everybody should go do something for the nation for a year or two, and then they should go on with their life and they will have a common experience.

When they get together, they meet somebody later when their kids are playing soccer, they’ll go, “Where’d you serve?” Somebody says, “I taught down in New Orleans.” And somebody else says, “I built trails in this park. I worked with the elderly.” And that connectivity would give us something that starts to go across zip codes, political ideology and all race, religion, all the other things that divide us, something that’s a common experience. Even if it was a really painful year. Even if they just hated that year, they’d laugh about it. “Yeah, mine sucked more than yours.” And maybe my generation could craft it to make sure it did.

Copy LinkGen. Stanley McChrystal on AI in the military

THURSTON: Well done. We are also good at playing the oppression Olympics, so let’s not do that one. I work on a show, I’ve helped create a show called Life With Machines, and we’re exploring how to live well with tech, not just endure it. There’s this emergence of AI where it’s not just a tool anymore, it’s becoming a teammate and we’re having professional and personal and even familiar relationships. How do you think about the role of artificial intelligence in the chain of command for the military or in a business structure, and what are you seeing that excites you? What are you seeing that deeply concerns you?

MCCHRYSTAL: I think in the positive, it’s going to be an enabler. It’s going to take a staff officer or an intelligence analyst, and they’re going to be able to do it just remarkably faster. It took two years to plan the Normandy invasion during World War II because the logistics and everything, you’ll be able to do that in the morning and it’ll be pretty close. And so those kinds of things can be much better and you can free up talent to do other things. So that’s very positive. There are going to be some challenges. One, we used to say that we’ll never put anything that doesn’t have a human in the lethal loop, meaning before we shoot and kill something, a human will be involved, that’s already gone. It’s not fast enough. We respond to things now strictly because of machines, because if a human’s in there, you just can’t get it done.

And so machines are already doing that. And if we train humans, well, they can become great tools, but we do have to understand the power there. But I would throw this scenario to you. As AI is starting to be able to derive probabilities of things happening, suppose you get a scenario where leadership is suddenly told tomorrow, “Country X is going to invade country Y.” And maybe we’re country Y and a machine tells you this, and humans don’t have the ability to get in and fact check the machine well enough because of the complexity of all the data that’s been considered and how it’s been done. And so they’re going to have this thing, “You are going to get attacked tomorrow.” What do you do? Well, traditionally what leaders would like to do is take the first punch. Let Pearl Harbor get hit or whatever happens. So then we have the moral right on our side.

But if it’s potentially an existential threat, then you’re going to be put with this idea, “Do I do a preemptive strike to protect our people based upon what this machine told me?” And this machine’s usually right. Now think about that and now speed it up. Don’t say that you’re going to have 13 days like President Kennedy did for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Say you’re going to have 13 minutes, and somebody calls the president and says, “Here it is. It says it’s coming. It’s coming in 13 minutes. You’ve got to make a decision right now.” And they say, “Are the missiles all ready? Are the enemy missiles launched?” “No, but they’re about to.” So we are going to have to get our minds around dealing with some of the things that AI will do that we’re not yet comfortable having done for us.

THURSTON: It sounds like you want to make sure you have the type of leader who’s maybe thought a bit about character.

MCCHRYSTAL: That’s right. I mean, I know some people are trying to put character into AI, but you’re going to have to have leaders who have really thought about this, and they’ve got to be so grounded in their values so that they are moored to things that we know we’re comfortable with, and they’re going to have to be courageous. They’re going to make decisions. They’re going to terrify them in the moment, not because they’ll be hurt, but because they will fail the nation. And I think that that’s going to have leaders of extraordinary, not just confidence, but courage to accept that kind of responsibility.

THURSTON: We have such little time left. I’m not going to pry open a specific question. I’m going to give you an opportunity to say something that you wish you had gotten to say while you’re on this stage.

Copy LinkWhy we need to think about character now

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah. They kindly mentioned that we had this book on character, and it’s not the brilliance of the book, it’s that it’s the point we need to talk about character. We need to have a national conversation on character right now. And we don’t need to have it in DC. We need to have it in churches, in classrooms, at dining room tables. We need to have it at grassroots level. And what we need to do is we need to decide, what is our character in America going to be? What is okay and what is not okay? Because we’ve allowed the norms to slip. We watch TV and we see people lie to us on TV and we accept it because, well, it’s TV and that’s the way it works. We decide that. And so what I want everybody to do is to think about character, talk about character, and then let’s hold each other to account. We get to decide what kind of nation we are, and if we make no choice, we’ve decided.

THURSTON: Wow. A closing reflection of gratitude. There’s a lot of volatility. We’re in a crisis that can’t decide what kind of crisis it wants to be.

MCCHRYSTAL: That’s true.

THURSTON: I love y’all. And in times of such volatility, you started to say it yourself. We got to hold onto something deep. We hold to principle. We hold to each other, and we remember that we have the power. Stan, I’m a Stan of you. Thank you so much. Please.

MCCHRYSTAL: You’re so kind.

SAFIAN: Stan and Baratunde have such different backgrounds and experiences, yet they meet on common ground. I got a chance to eavesdrop on them chatting backstage before their appearance and while they’d only just met, the empathy and the mutual respect was palpable. A decade ago, I interviewed Baratunde and Stan separately for a series I wrote at Fast Company about what I call Generation Flux, people with a mindset of adaptability. Since then, they’ve each continued to adjust as our world has yet remained anchored to core principles. This is the tricky dance we’re all engaged in 2025 as we test our own character and our convictions and what it takes to be courageous in the face of change.

Like Baratunde, I am, as he puts it, a Stan of Stan’s. Stan manages to inspire me every time we talk. I’ve tried to deconstruct just what  makes him effective as a leader. There’s his calm and his clarity and his steadiness, but the emotional chords he’s able to stir comes from something deeper and harder to put into words. Let’s just say, I think he’s in deep touch with his own humanity. It’s something we can all aspire to and remind ourselves of as we face the political, technological, and business challenges of our modern age. I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.