Admiral William H. McRaven, is a retired U.S. Navy Four-Star admiral and the former Chancellor of the University of Texas System. During his time in the military, he commanded special operations forces at every level, eventually taking charge of the U.S. Special Operations Command. His career included combat during Desert Storm and both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
As the Chancellor of the UT System he led one of the nation’s largest and most respected systems of higher education. As the chief executive officer of the UT System, McRaven oversaw 14 institutions that educated 220,000 students and employed 20,000 faculty and more than 80,000 health care professionals, researchers, and staff.
McRaven is a recognized national authority on U.S. foreign policy and has advised Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and other U.S. leaders on defense issues. He currently serves on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Football Foundation.
McRaven graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1977 with a degree in Journalism, and received his master’s degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey in 1991.
He met his wife, Georgeann, while they were students at UT Austin, and they have three grown children. McRaven stays active with his writing, speaking and board commitments.
Jason Redman: The Overcome and Conquer show is presented by The Project. The Project is a full immersion, 75 hour experience designed for men who know in their core they’re not living up to their fullest potential. Rather than waking up every morning ready to dominate life, the mediocre man rolls out of bed and slides into the same unfulfilling routine they’ve unhappily been in for way too long. The Project is for men that have lost their internal flame and motivation to conquer. It’s for men living an unfulfilling life that lacks excitement and purpose. Sound familiar? Then listen up.
Jason Redman: The Project is specifically designed to challenge you mentally and physically. We push you to the ledge of self-limiting beliefs and prove you’ve got much more in the tank. We kill the bitch and unleash the beast. We uncover the demons that hold you back, and turn extreme pain into super powers to dominate life. In the end, we turn mediocre men into modern day knights. We forge a brother hood and bond that levels you up as a better husband, father, and friend.
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Speaker 3: Everybody wants to be on top right now. The problem nowadays is, people want to get dropped off at the top of the hill and walk down.
Speaker 4: It’s that I overcome mindset that makes all the difference.
Speaker 3: See the way it works hard is, you’re going to fall, you’re going to scratch, you’re going to bite, you’re going to dig, you’re going to do whatever it takes to get to the top of that mountain.
Speaker 4: That unequivocally is how I have managed to keep myself moving forward and finding success.
Speaker 7: Two SEALs, one mission. The Overcome and Conquer Show.
Jason Redman: And welcome back to The Overcome and Conquer Show. It is another amazing episode. You guys, I’ve got to tell you, we have an absolutely, absolutely incredible guest today. As a matter of fact, we may have to go with our official military titles for this show.
Ray Care: Yeah, I’m not going to lie, I’m actually fucking nervous. We talked to him before this and I was just… I am-
Jason Redman: You were quaking a little.
Ray Care: … I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but in the SEAL community… I just did. I’m a little nervous. He was two ranks higher than me, so I’m a little nervous.
Jason Redman: Two ranks exponentially, my friend. That’s all right, we will jump in that. How’ve you been?
Ray Care: I’ve been good. The boot camps are taking off. The Project’s kicking ass, LTDs. We’ve been doing some stuff together. Life’s good. As long as I’m not six feet under the dirt, you know me man, I’m happy.
Jason Redman: Amen. We’re still breathing. Right side of the Earth. And The Project, Overcome and Conquer Show presented by The Project. For those of you that are looking, if you are a man out there and you’re looking to push yourself, The Project is where it’s at.
Ray Care: I’ll push you.
Jason Redman: You want to know what you’re made out of. Instructor Care over here, along with some other amazing individuals, Mr. Fitbeard, Mr. Matt Snyder, the crazy Marine himself, Steve Eckhart. And of course the man, the myth, the legend himself, Mr. Bedros Keullian, who would be the CO of it. I’m technically the mad master chief who… I facilitate things. So technically, instead of being the captain now, I actually considered giving myself a promotion, I’m the Master Chief.
Ray Care: I heard that.
Jason Redman: You guys have put together something great. For those out there who are looking, really, to take yourself to a higher level, you definitely need to check out The Project.
Ray Care: The Project, www.mdkproject.com. Check it out.
Jason Redman: So we are post new year, my friend. We are in to 2020.
Ray Care: I know. We are getting ready for me to have a birthday, coming up soon.
Jason Redman: Dude, what are you turning, 61?
Ray Care: Go fuck yourself. I will be 48 years young. So 48 years young… Age is a number. It’s mindset, baby.
Jason Redman: Well, thank God. You look like you’re 25.
Ray Care: I feel it. I married out of my league and that’s what keeps me going to the gym. You know her.
Jason Redman: That is true.
Ray Care: You know my long haired animal, and I know yours.
Jason Redman: I do, she’s amazing. All right, man. Well we’re off to the races in 2020. I know both of us are out there. My new book, Overcome, is out and it has been getting amazing reviews. I’ve been getting so much great feedback. As a matter of fact, the reason we have the guest on our show today is because he contributed to this book. And he gave some amazing insight on leadership, overcoming adversity, how we hold ourselves accountable. All key things in Overcome.
Ray Care: Technically, I heard it was a barn burner between you adding what I had to say, and him, and I think he beat me. He’s not laughing, but it was a joke, sir.
Jason Redman: All right, well, let’s jump right in. We’re going to jump right in to our guest. I’ve got to tell you, we are honored to have him on. He served 37 years with the United States Military. The United States Navy, to be exact. He was the ninth commander of the Special Operations Command. He was the chancellor of the University of Texas. He is a New York Times best selling author. He is a YouTube sensation. He is, yeah. He is a father, a husband, a friend, and most important-
Ray Care: Say it. Say it.
Jason Redman: … he is an American UDT SEAL diver, a lover, a fighter, a shooter, a rootin’ tootin’ paratroopin’ scuba divin’, demolition, double cap crimpin’, frogman, and he was the bullfrog of the community.
Ray Care: Yes.
Jason Redman: He had the most service as a Navy SEAL in the history of our community, at that time of his career. So it is our great honor to introduce the legendary teammate and friend, Admiral Bill McRaven. Welcome to the Overcome and Conquer Show.
Bill McRaven: Hey, thanks Jay. Thanks guys. It’s great to be here with you.
Jason Redman: We are honored to have you on. As we do with every show… go ahead.
Ray Care: Well, I actually wanted to do something. If I can use your power, sir, for a second.
Bill McRaven: Lay it on me.
Jason Redman: Wait.
Ray Care: Well, hold on. I don’t get a four star on here too often.
Jason Redman: What’s happening here.
Ray Care: And I’m sure you remember me from me being an E5.
Jason Redman: Actually, Ray, you’re very unforgettable.
Ray Care: No, but sir, Jason, obviously you understand was an 03. Let’s see, 03… 10, doing the math. That’s seven levels higher. Okay. Could you, or would you, for me… You’re much higher, four star Admiral. I want to make that very clear to everybody. This is the cream of the crop. Could you make Jason call me sir, and salute me? Do you have that power?
Bill McRaven: As I understand it though, you’re a five, I was a four, he was a three. I think we both need to salute you.
Ray Care: You know what? That was the greatest math I’ve ever seen done.
Jason Redman: Hold on. If that’s going to happen. Basically the admiral just told me I need to salute you.
Ray Care: Salute me.
Jason Redman: You know what? Raymond, for you.
Ray Care: Wait for me to drop it.
Jason Redman: That’s good.
Ray Care: Carry on.
Jason Redman: All right thank you. I’m not even going to play that game with you.
Bill McRaven: Even out of uniform your all look good doing that.
Jason Redman: Thank you, sir. So we try and have a lot of fun on the show. Obviously the frogman humor, and it was one of the big things. I finished reading the Sea Stories this weekend. I really enjoyed it. There were some amazing stories of your career, but Admiral, one of the greatest things and one of the things that I love about the community, it’s one of the things that Ray and I have in the show, it’s the comradery, it’s the shenanigans that have gone on. There were a lot of stories in your book that you brought out the humor. Definitely one of the ones that I thought was hysterical, because anybody that has done a lot of civilian flying when you’re in the military, I don’t know what it is. If there is a direct flight, you’re going to take six legs to get where you’re going and you are always in the absolute worst seat on the plane and you make that reference in the book that-
Bill McRaven: 32A. You can always smell everything coming out of the head on 32A.
Jason Redman: … yeah, so I loved your joke about either they thought I had a small bladder or just like to always get off the plane last. No, I mean that’s good staff. So Ray, you and the admiral have some connections.
Ray Care: Yeah. So sir, obviously, fellow STVs. All right. Most of these guys don’t know what the hell we’re talking about because we were the real-
Jason Redman: That’s real frogman stuff.
Ray Care: … It’s like he can read my mind. But there is a story, there’s legend that has it that you guys were doing something off the coast of Vieques. You were doing it with, at the time was an E5 who was my senior chief. That’s that’s how old school you are, sir. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that because the word on the street was, as you were waiting for an extraction, I’ll let you get into it. And you guys started telling some stories because like frogmen do. And maybe you can elaborate on that what happened, what transpired from transponder, what transpired from that message. Because that’s what, I think, people want to hear is how you just did the crazy shit that we did back in the day.
Jason Redman: And there was a little surprise.
Ray Care: Yeah, a little surprise. Tell them the surprise.
Bill McRaven: So let me set the context for it here. So this is 1986 and we are preparing for a very classified mission at the time there. To go against Gaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi’s oil pumping stations off coast, Libya. Now remember Gaddafi had been involved in a number of terrorist operations, state supported terrorist operations. We have the goods on him. So the plan was to go back and do a proportional strike on him. But so for your audience, recognizing what a SEAL delivery vehicle is. So this is a wet submersible. So think of it as a man torpedo, if you will, with a shell over the top of it. So you have a pilot and a navigator in the front and you can cram a couple more guys in the front, but they better be small. And then you have a compartment in the back where you can put a couple of SEALs.
Bill McRaven: So the pilot navigator deliver about four seals maybe to the objective. Well, this particular mission require us to go, a pilot and a navigator, and I was the Navy Lieutenant in the back of the boat. And with me, I had all the demolition, I had all the beacons. And our objective was going to be to launch from a big submarine because these little mini submarines launch from a big submarine at about 40 foot depth, and then you go up to about 15 feet. And then we were traveling for several hours, come to the Libyan oil rigs if you think of it in that way. We would go down to the bottom of these pumping stations, load them with demolition, and then go to the next one. There were three of them.
Bill McRaven: So we were rehearsing this mission off the coast of Vieques, off Puerto Rico. And so this particular night, and it was a long ass mission. I mean these were 12 hour missions. So when you think about being an underwater for 12 hours, you can imagine how challenging that is. But this particular night was going to be a search and rescue mission. And the idea was going to be that if in fact we were off the coast of Libya and we had problems with our SEAL delivery vehicle and we had to surface, then we would deploy a beacon, a radio beacon, a transponder that would initiate a signal to a P-3 airplane. It would signal a helicopter and the helicopter would come get us.
Bill McRaven: So that’s what we were doing this particular night. So we launched from the big submarine and we traveled for about an hour or so and we surfaced. And again this was just a rehearsal, but as we are off the coast of Vieques, Puerto Rico, this is an Island off Puerto Rico. We get to the sharpest and I’m in the back. I pull out the sonobuoy and I initiate a pinger. So the sonobuoy starts pinging, and this ping is supposed to be sending a signal to the airplane. Well, we were expecting to get picked up and about 30 or 40 minutes. And so we wore shorty wetsuits. So we were not very warm, particularly because we didn’t think it’d be a long mission.
Bill McRaven: So as we surface the boat, the boat gets boring. So the three of us are sitting on top. The pilot and the navigator, Dave Roberts, as you mentioned, was one of them, sitting on the top of the boat. And I’m sitting on a boat, we’re waiting. So an hour goes by, and then two hours goes by, and then three hours goes by. And of course we are drifting out in the middle of the ocean. We have no safety boat. We don’t know where we are now because we’ve been drifting for hours. It is really getting cold. The weather is coming in, things are really looking bad. And of course as the officer, the two enlisted guys, they’re obviously not happy, but they’re, troopers, both great guys.
Bill McRaven: And so I’m thinking, well, what can I do to kind of lift their spirits? So as you tend to do in these situations, I’m looking for a joke. Now again, to set the scene, you’ve got three frogmen sitting on the top of this man torpedo. We’re in these short wetsuits. We are freezing our ass off. We are lost at sea essentially not knowing whether or not the helicopter has picked up the beacon. The submarine doesn’t know where we are. So I started telling this joke and the joke is simple one, it’s a gorilla walks into a bar. And I remember Dave turned to me going, “Hey boss, this better be good because we’re really miserable out here.” “I got it.”. So a gorilla walks into the bar and of course the bartender sees the gorilla, and he runs back to his manager and says, “Hey, a gorilla just walked in the bar. What should I do?” And the manager says, “Well, go see what he wants.”
Bill McRaven: So the bartender comes up to the gorilla and he says, “Yeah, can I help you?” The gorilla says, “I’d like a gin and tonic.” The bartender goes back to the manager and says, “Hey, the gorilla wants to gin and tonic.” Manager says, “I’ll tell you what. Get him a gin and tonic, but charge him $9 for the drink.” “He’ll tear me apart.” And he says, “No, the gorilla is not very smart. He’ll never know the difference.” The bartender goes up, gives him a gin and tonic, says, “That’ll be $9.” Gorilla reaches into his pocket and gives him a 10, the bartender gives him a change. And the bartender goes back to the manager and says, “Hey, you were right. Gorilla didn’t care. He’s not very smart.”
Bill McRaven: Few minutes later gorilla pounds on the bar. Bartender comes over and says, “Yeah.” He said, “I’d like another gin and tonic.” Gets him a gin and tonic. Gorilla gives them a 10, he gives him a $1 change. And about that time, the helicopter starts coming. We can hear the helicopter coming. But of course I’m carrying on with the joke. And the bartender comes up to the gorilla and he says, “You know we don’t get too many gorillas in here.” About that time, Dave goes, “Hey, I hear the helicopter”. So all of a sudden I stopped the joke. The helicopter starts to come, but it’s windy, it’s bad seas out there, we’re rocking and rolling. The helicopter is having trouble. Takes us about 45 minutes.
Bill McRaven: Finally we get hoisted up into the helicopter and the three of us travel back to Roosevelt Roads. Well, I get back to Roosevelt Roads and we’re going back through our barracks area, and all of a sudden the master chief petty officer, a master at arms, so a military police, comes to our barracks and says looking for Lieutenant McRaven, looking for me. He says, “Commander Mayberry wants to see you and the admiral wants to see you.” I said, “What admiral?” “Yes, sir. I was just told to come get you.” So they grabbed me. We go all the way across, about 45 minutes, and we go all the way across the the base to an empty parking lot.
Bill McRaven: And there in the empty parking lot, is commander Bob Mayberry, who had been the commander of the team and this admiral who I don’t know. And so they’re talking to me and they say, “Hey, we need you to come debrief tonight’s mission.” So I walk into this hanger and there are about 200 people in the hangar. I don’t know where the hell these people came from. I don’t know who they are. And so the admiral says, “Let me introduce you to all the people that are behind the scenes, that have been monitoring your mission tonight.” And I’m thinking, “Monitoring our mission?” So as typical with sailors, we had been sitting on the top, I mean, bitching about everybody. About the commanding officer of the submarine, about our own commanding officer, about the lurid affairs that these guys had been involved in over time.
Ray Care: Team guys.
Bill McRaven: Team guys staff.
Ray Care: Holy shit.
Bill McRaven: And that’s exactly what I’m thinking, “You have got to be kidding me.” And so everybody, all these 200 people, they’re looking at me. I’m still in my wetsuit and he says, “Well, we’d like you to debrief the 200 folks on the mission.” I said, “Okay, sir.” He says, “But before you do that, we want to know what the punchline is.” And I said, “The punchline, what punchline?” He goes, “You didn’t know there was a microphone in that buoy, didn’t you?” And of course they had been listening to everything we had said. And so of course they all start laughing. I’m the brunt of the joke. And so I had to tell them the punchline. The punchline was the bartender comes up to the grill and says, “We don’t get too many gorillas in here.” And the gorilla said, “Well, hell, for $9 a drink, I’m not surprised.” So not a very funny joke. But the joke was on me because these folks had been listening to everything we’ve been saying all night long.
Bill McRaven: But I tell the story about… So the mission doesn’t go. As you recall, this was called Eldorado Canyon. A couple of weeks later, the Air Force came in and actually bombed Qaddafi’s a headquarters. But about a month or so after that, I am driving into work and no kidding, I’m turning on the radio… This was the old dial radio. I’m turned on the radio and I hear from the DJ on the radio, we don’t get too many gorillas in here and the gorilla says, “Well, for $9 a drink, I’m not surprised.” And that is a no shit true story that I heard that joke told over the radio after this classified event. So somehow that was too good a story to be kept secret.
Ray Care: I love it. Love it sir.
Jason Redman: That’s [crosstalk 00:19:08] for you. I can only imagine man sitting there, dude. I mean, for all of us, we’ve sat there on those long, dark hard cold missions and, dude, all those stories, I would have been cringing. Well, hey, let’s jump into the word of the day. This show we always focus on what is that pivotal word of leadership that sums up our guest on the show, and obviously this show is no different. We reach out to the Admiral ahead of time and said, what word would you say best describes you and your career that means the most for you? And Ray would you do the honor?
Ray Care: Yeah, the word that the Admiral chose was persevere. And so, sir, what I do is I just read it right off of Webster’s. And then what we’d like to do is have you elaborate and what it means to you. So write off the dictionary right here, to persist in anything undertaken. Maintain a purpose in spite of difficulty, obstacles and discouragement. Continue steadfastly. So that is the Webster’s dictionary. I think you’re going to have probably a little bit different version of that, sir, if you may.
Bill McRaven: Yeah, I don’t know that my version is that much different. But the fact the matter is, as you guys well know, when you go through SEAL training and particularly nowadays, I get a lot of young kids coming up to me, wanting to know what the secret of getting through SEAL training is. And they’ll ask me, “Should I run more? Should I do more pushups, should do more pull-ups?” And of course the answer is always the same. You just don’t quit. And they say, “No, I understand that.” I said, “No, I’m not sure you do.” I said, “The fact of the matter is you’ll have 1000 opportunities going through shield training to quit. You just don’t quit. You have to persevere.”
Bill McRaven: So when all you guys think about going through training, you think about those nights where you are cold, wet and miserable and you just continue to press through. And then you get into the SEAL teams, and frankly, for my career and knowing you two guys’ background, not a lot different. And Jason certainly you had to overcome an incredible amount of challenges. But in my career as a young lieutenant, I was fired from a job. Yeah, I was at an elite East Coast Seal team. You think you’re doing great and the next thing you know, the commanding officer comes up and says, “Hey, you are no longer wanted here. You’ve got to go on and find employment elsewhere.” Well, that’s a tough thing to stomach. And you make a decision right then and there, “Well, okay, my career could be over.”
Bill McRaven: And I remember, I credit my wife and we’ve been married 41 years, but this was one of the first times in my career when I thought about quitting. And she said to me, “You’ve never quit at anything in your life. Don’t start now.” And this was about perseverance. It was about persevering through the failure of not excelling at that SEAL team. It was about persevering through the whispers that you hear. And you know how team guys are. It’s like any organization, you screw up, everybody knows you screwed up. And now they may come up to you and say, “Hey Bill, how are you doing? You’re a great guy,” and everything and you know what they’re thinking. Are you good enough to be one of my officers? Are you good enough to lead SEALs in combat? Are you good enough to be part of these teams?
Bill McRaven: And you have to persevere through that. You have to overcome that and continue to press on. And then again, throughout the course of your career, you’re always challenged with whether it’s constant family moves, whether it is things that don’t go right to the command. And then of course after 911, every day was a challenge. You make mistakes in combat. Things don’t always go well and you have to decide whether or not you’re going to persevere through the challenge. So I certainly am no smarter, no more talented, no more heroic, no more brave, no more accomplished than any body else. I know. In fact, I am well below most of those standards. But the one thing I learned very early on was, you just have to persevere through the challenging times. And sometimes success comes to those folks that persevere. And those folks who don’t persevere, they go on to do other things.
Jason Redman: Admiral, I can definitely relate to that. For our listeners that are out there, obviously, I mean those that know me know that I had a leadership failure in my career also, I talk about it. Really it’s the basis of the trident and that journey of leadership, being able to overcome and conquer.
Ray Care: Thank you.
Jason Redman: Those hard lessons. And I go into it in a little bit of depth in the new book. But a question I have for you, because I know I’ve felt it a lot, even to this day you find people that want to bring those things up. You made it all the way to the very senior level of your career. And we carry these scars. It’s one of the things I talk about in Overcome. We have these life ambushes that come along. My leadership failure was one of the life ambushes I went through. I have no doubt it was one of the ones you went through, because obviously you talk about the journey where… Thank God we have our long haired admirals who keep us in check, because mine made a big difference for me also.
Jason Redman: But what advice would you give to the others out there when we’re going through these periods, when we’ve had these failures, when we’ve been knocked down and we’re driving forward, but we always have the naysayers, we always have the haters that want to bring it back up and throw it in your face. Even as you climb higher, how do you stay focused on, “Hey, I learned from that and this is what I learned from it.” How do you stay focused on that? What advice would you pass on to those out there who are moving up their own leadership ladder and they’ve got those scars, those life ambushes they’ve encountered?
Bill McRaven: You can certainly turn the challenges and the failures into successes. And I think most of the great men and women I know I’ve had failures. They have had failures of leadership, failures of management, sometimes failures of integrity and so you have to be able to overcome these. I can’t think of a single successful person I know who hasn’t had to overcome some failure. So you have to learn from the failures. So you really have to be, I think, self critical. And so as I went through this, I look back and said, “Okay, what could I have done better?
Bill McRaven: But you also have to have confidence in yourself and realize that, yeah, you could have done a lot of things better. Now you have to go out and work twice as hard. And the thing that I have learned, I think early on in my life, is that to overcome the challenges, you doubled down on work. So you have to work harder than everybody else. You have to prove. I mean, and it is proving. You’ve got to prove yourself. I tell a story, when I was a Navy captain, a senior Navy captain, I was working in the white house. As you know Jay, I had a parachute accident, got severely banged up. But this was about a year and a half after the parachute accident. And I was just starting to rehab. And I went from Washington DC down to Virginia Beach and we had little SEAL, the Commodore down there and invited me down.
Bill McRaven: And so I’m with a bunch of Seals and we’re doing our usual PT and then we’re going to go for a run. Well, again, my parachute accident had been pretty severe. I busted my pelvis, ripped a bunch of muscles out, so I get through the PT, but then we’re going to go for a 10 mile run. And so we start off and I hang for about 200 yards and then of course the guys leave me and it was a couple of two mile loops around one of the parks there in Virginia Beach. And I remember at point in time as I am falling way behind, a guy comes up to me and I’m doing the best I can. And he says to me, he goes, he says, “Captain, I don’t understand.” He says, “You don’t have anything left to prove. Why are you doing this? Why are you out here running with the guys after you’ve been busted up? Because you were the Commodore, you’re coming from the white house. You’ve got nothing left to prove.”
Bill McRaven: And that guy was absolutely wrong. The fact of the matter is, certainly in the teams, my philosophy has been every single day you wake up, you’ve got to prove that you are good enough to earn that tride, own that tride. If the day comes when you think that you’ve accomplished everything you can accomplish and that you’re as good as you’re going to be, then you probably need to step aside because you’re not there. Every day is a challenge. Every single day you have to prove you are good enough. And that failure for me back in 1983, 1984, that failure to me reinforce the fact that you can be on top of the world one day and then get knocked down the next. And that’s going to happen. Then you just work twice as hard and get back to proving that you are good enough to be whatever your position is, a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a policeman, a fireman, or a SEAL.
Jason Redman: I love it. I got to tell you I’m not going to tip off the readers because they need to go read your books, Sea Stories. But Ray and I fashionably called your skydiving accident, the wishbone accident. Yeah, I bet you felt like unlucky turkey on Thanksgiving.
Bill McRaven: But Jay, I’m always quick to point out that the story while a lot of people focus on that. When I look at the guys like you and others who really had serious accidents and injuries as a result of combat operations. I mean, my accident paled in comparison. The point I tried to make in that particular story, it took a whole lot of people to get me up and running again. It took my wife to be my nurse, [inaudible 00:28:49] made sure I was able to stay in the Navy. The guys came around and checked my morale up and got me working again. And as you know, if you’d all have those fellow frogman, those comrades, those friends to help you through the tough times, life can be pretty doggone challenging. So my parachute accident, as traumatic as it might’ve seemed, really paled in comparison to what got you and so many guys and girls have been through after 911.
Jason Redman: Amen. And I appreciate you saying that. And I know for all the other wounded warriors that are out there, but one of the things Ray and I’ve talked about a lot on this show is, everybody lives in their own personal hell and it’s easy to sometimes take a look at somebody else that may be going through something hard. And it can give you perspective, which is a great thing. It can motivate you, but it also can make you feel sorry yourself because you’re like, “God, why should I be struggling through this?” So the bottom line is everybody lives in their own personnel hall. You got to drive forward. That’s all that it comes down to, everyday proving yourself driving forward. You did it and you ended up at just making an incredible contribution to the SEAL community by setting the example. So I think it’s great.
Ray Care: Okay. I got my question, sir.
Bill McRaven: Throw away.
Ray Care: Here we go. We’re rewinding. [inaudible 00:30:07]. University of Texas, 2014, I was the motivational coach for the UCLA Bruins working under coach Sal Alosi and coach Jim Moore, and it happened. We heard it. There was this epic speech that someone gave. The question I have sir… It’s probably one of the most impactful speeches I’ve ever heard.
Jason Redman: I looked it up this morning. Currently right now, 10028000 views.
Ray Care: But the question I have with you sir is, it’s two part question, one, what inspired you to give that specific speech, and two, did you think you were going to receive the impact? I mean, when I have a bad day and this is a SEAL, my job is I motivate people. I’m not going to bullshit you sir. I listen to this and it’s not a short speech. I call it my shawshank redemption. It’s something that once it comes on, I can’t put it down. So can you elaborate, sir, to why you gave that speech and did you think it was going to be as impactful as it was?
Bill McRaven: Yeah. I am a University of Texas at Austin graduate. So after the Bin Laden raid and there were some notoriety behind that, the president of UT asked me to come be the commencement speaker for the class of 2014. And I have actually been working on another speech. And I had a day job. I was a commander of US Special Operations Command, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to write this thing. And I’ve fiddled around with it on the weekend. And then finally I sat down and started writing it. Well, the Wednesday before the Saturday I was supposed to give the speech, I realized it didn’t work. A good speech has got to have a beginning, a middle and end. It’s got to have a theme. And the speech I had written wasn’t working.
Bill McRaven: So I went down to my wife. I was a little bit in a panic mode in light of the fact that I was going to be standing before 30000 students and parents here on Saturday. And she says to me, “Why don’t you write about something you know.” And I thought, “That’s a clever idea.” I said, “The problem is, all I know is how to be a seal. And I’m about to step up in front of 8000 graduates. I’m going to be in uniform. I don’t know whether or not students want to hear about being a SEAL.” But I realized that I could take the lessons from SEAL training and maybe turn them into life lesson. So that became the approach, and again, as you guys well know, these are just lessons that you learned going through SEAL training. And of course we started out every day by making our bed and getting that inspected. And then I talked about the munchkin crew and a number of other things.
Bill McRaven: So it really was just a chronology of my SEAL training. Did I think it would get this traction? Absolutely not. And in fact, to show what an old guy I am, when I got through giving the speech, one of my security guys comes up to me afterwards and says, “Hey, admiral, your speech is trending on YouTube.” Well, I didn’t know what the hell trending on YouTube is. So I said, “Well, I guess that’s a good thing unless it’s trending poorly.” But then it just took off. And I think the reason it has gained so much traction, is that as you guys can appreciate, there are simple lessons. And we’re frogmen, we try not to complicate things. So these are not complicated things.
Bill McRaven: Making your bed is not something that’s hard to do, but we also know that that can be pretty impactful. And it’s not about making your bed, it is about doing something every morning that gets you up and get you moving, that you take a little pride in, that encourages you to do another thing and another. And of course the making your bed was also about doing the little things well. I mean, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the seal teams is, you have to be able to do the little things well, clean your weapon, take care of your gear, know the playbook on a mission, do the little things well and you’ll be able to do the big things well. So I was pleased that so many folks have enjoyed the speech.
Jason Redman: Yeah. If you have not seen this speech, definitely just go on YouTube, check it out. It is an amazing speech. I mean, when I was running my organization, we were running our Overcome Academy, the leadership program for wounded warriors, we’re teaching them how to speak. And I actually used your speech as one of the templates to show them the flow of a speech and how well you set it up. The use of humor, all those things.
Ray Care: Yeah. My daughter, she’s 11 now, sir. And I showed her that video back in the day and she used to get up and we used to help her, but now she’s 11 she makes her own bed. Where we sell our sense of accomplishment. You do one great thing, let’s do something else and something else. So my point is this, thank you for that sir because it actually changed my life, and I mean it’s amazing.
Jason Redman: Admiral, you talk about doing the little things well and first off I just wanted to tell you once again, thank you so much for contributing to my book. The stories that you share in Overcome are amazing, and it’s actually one of these stories that actually relates directly to what you’re talking about, and it’s holding ourselves accountable. It is making sure we do all the little things well. And you tell the story of go into Shkin, which is an outpost on the Afghanistan, Pakistan border. A really hard place to be. A place where our troops were always coming into contact. And you had an individual that basically had been out there too long.
Jason Redman: He was supposed to provide a brief to you in a more senior ranking officer at the time, I believe you were one star at that time and the army officer was maybe a two or three star. And this individual was not prepared for the brief and pretty much had scrapped all protocol that there was. And as a matter of fact, he just didn’t do certain things that in the military we always do. I don’t care where you are, unless you’re in the middle of a battlefield, we obviously don’t salute there. But other than that we follow protocol, because it’s what makes exactly like your speech talks about. These little things, make the big things work. And you talk about that in the book, how critical it is as a leader that we have to hold not only ourselves, but our people accountable.
Jason Redman: For anybody out there, can you elaborate just a little more on that? Because I meet so many leaders that have a hard time having those hard conversations when they notice that something’s out of alignment, but they’re like, “I don’t want to be the bad guy. I don’t want to hold my… I know I should say something, but I’m not going to.” And I think even you in that story, talk about for a few minutes you debated whether you’re going to say something because of the conditions. And then you said, “You know what, the right thing, the right thing.” So can you elaborate a little bit on that in leadership, we have a lot of leaders that listen to this podcast. I think this point of accountability is such a critical one.
Bill McRaven: Yeah, thanks. And you’re right, it is critical. It’s particularly critical for leaders or managers in any position. The fact that matter is everybody that joins an organization wants to join in a lead organization. I don’t care whether you are working at the pizza place, whether you’re working at the post office, whether you’re working at an elite seal team. Nobody says, “Gee, I want to be part of a mediocre organization. Where’s that mediocre organization? That’s what I want to go join.” No, you want to be part of a great organization. Organizations are great because you set high standards and you hold people accountable for meeting those standards.
Bill McRaven: Soldiers in particular want to be good soldiers. They want to make sure that the work they are doing is noble and is honorable. They want to be held accountable because they understand that in order for them to be part of a great organization, you have to have high standards and you want people to achieve those high standards. There’s a great book called Morale, just like it sounds. Morale, by a guy named John Baines. And I had read the book probably 20 years before. It’s a hard to find book. I’d rented it at the Naval postgraduate school. And Baines goes back and he does research on the 5th Scottish Rifles, the 5th Scottish Rifles.
Bill McRaven: And they were a unit prior to World War I in the British army that was considered one of the worst units in the British army. And so he details why they were such a bad unit. And they were a bad unit because the commanding treated those that performed well no differently than those slackers. So he didn’t push the slackers to become better. And consequently those guys who were busting their hump said, “Why am I busting my hump? Why am I trying to look sharp? Why am I trying to be the best soldier I can when the slackers are treated just the same way?” Well, prior to World War I, a new commanding officer comes in and he says, “Hey boys, here’s the deal. We are going to become the best unit in the British army. Here’s the standards that I expect of everybody. And if you can’t meet those standards, you’re going to go somewhere else.”
Bill McRaven: So it turns the unit around, they go on during the battle of Neuve Chappelle in 1915 to be one of the most decorated units in the British army. But the point of the book about Morale is, just as we all know in the military, if you don’t set the standards and hold people accountable, then before long that good order and discipline, which is essential for every single thing we do, particularly on the battlefield. We think of good order and discipline, to your point, Jason, about, okay, this is just something you’d do in Garrison. This is where we make sure we have good uniforms, that we’re clean shaven, that we salute when we need to, that we have the right military protocol. Let me tell you, that is even more important when you Are in combat.
Bill McRaven: Because in combat the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, if you allow them to get off the reservation, to go to the dark side because combat will do that as you know. When you start killing people on a daily basis, when you see your buddies blown up, when all of a sudden you are living in a place like Shkin or someplace else, and you don’t have to shave every day, and you don’t have to put on a decent looking uniform, and you don’t have to do these sort of things, before long, it affects your own personal morale. And before long the good order and discipline starts to decline. I don’t know if I mentioned to you when we talked last time. But when I became the commander of JSOC, I went over to Afghanistan and I pulled one of the Navy captains in who was my chief of staff, and I said, “Bill, I want to send out a message. I’m telling everybody to cut their beards, shave their beards off.”
Bill McRaven: And I remember he said, “Sir, you can’t do that. I mean, we need to have a committee. We need to take a hard look at this. We need to do a thorough examination.” And I said, “Okay, Bill, I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you one week. And then when you come back in a week, I’m still going to tell them to cut off their beards.” “Sir, that’s not intellectually honest.” I said, “Okay, you go talk to the noncommissioned officers and then get back to me.” So about two weeks later he comes back and his head’s down. I said, “Bill, what’s happened?” He said, “Well, sir, I’ve talked to all the NCOs, I’ve gone to all the outposts, I’ve talk to all the Sergeant majors, the mass chiefs. They think we need to cut the beards off.”
Bill McRaven: And so we cut the beers off except for those guys that truly needed them. The guys were working undercover. And the reason we did that was because, as you know, when you grew a beard in Afghanistan or Iraq, it took away from a little bit of what we know soldiers need. The soldiers want to wake up as much of a pain in the ass as it is, you get up every morning, just shave. You may not have a crisps starts uniform, but doggone and you put on something that looks like a uniform because you want to have good order and discipline, you want to have a military bearing about you. And when you start growing that big Afghan beard and you can snarl at people through that, and everything about it starts to change.
Bill McRaven: As soon as we cut off the beards, I mean, the guys, all of a sudden you could see morale come up. You could see they have changed because doggone if they were soldiers again. It’s a small thing. It’s a little bit like making your bed, but you have to, as a commander, you have to reinforce the good order and discipline or when you’re in the middle of combat, it is easy to go to the dark side to have people start to go down that slippery slope, and then they feel bad about themselves. They get into firefights and maybe shoot people they shouldn’t shoot or they do something that they regret later on because nobody kept them in the box. My job as a commander was to keep the guys in the moral, legal and ethical box as much as you could in a wartime environment.
Jason Redman: Yeah, and that’s what it’s about as a leader, to hold the whole people accountable. I think it’s awesome. I think it’s so important and so many leaders sometimes are afraid to do that, not recognizing this longterm impact. I want to flip it around to another story you tell in Sea Stories that I found fascinating because it’s almost the flip side of this. And when things go wrong, sometimes there is an opportunity to capitalize on a bad decision. And it is the story you told about one night you got a late night phone call and you were told, “Hey, I got bad news. You were going after a high value target, a guy that had been going into Syria and basically launching his operations out of Syria and then going back across the border, and you guys were trying to figure out a way to get this guy. And all of a sudden one night, accidentally, a group of army operators found themselves on the other side of the border, which is a big no-no without high level approval.
Jason Redman: And you immediately implemented emergency action procedures and then you went to your boss, who was General Patraeus at the time. And this story fascinated me. Because when I read what Patraeus asked you first, which was, “Did you let them keep going?” And I was dumbfounded by that. But it also made me recognize that good leaders recognize sometimes we have to make risky decisions. And what is your advice for leaders out there when things are starting to go off the rails, where can you look for those opportunities to capitalize on a mistake where you could actually turn it into your advantage? Because was a perfect situation where this occurred. And I’ll be honest, I don’t even think you saw that coming when Patraeus said that to you.
Jason Redman: But I found that story fascinating and I thought there were so many deep lessons in it as a leader that, a good leader sometimes have to make risky decisions and obviously sometimes they don’t pan out so well and other times you walk away looking like the prom king.
Bill McRaven: It’s funny, I was just with General Patraeus last week and we were talking about this story, because he had read the book and he remembered the event very clearly. So your timing is perfect on this. I think this is the real nature of leadership, Jay. People ask me all the time, are good leaders born or can you make a good leader? My answer is always the same. You can absolutely, positively make a good leader. I mean, this is what the military does every single day. We take young men and women from all corners of the globe and we teach them good order and discipline, we teach them how to be responsible, we teach them how to take the right actions and they can become good leaders.
Bill McRaven: However, I would offer the great leaders, the truly great men and women that lead that there is something in their DNA that is just a little bit different. It is their ability to see opportunities as you pointed out in the midst of where other people may not see opportunities. I have the chance to work for General Patraeus on three separate occasions, I think frankly more than any other army officer. So I worked for him when he was in Iraq, I worked for him as a CENTCOM commander, and then I worked for him when he was in Afghanistan. And I have tremendous respect for Joe buttress and this was one of those times when having worked for him, this was in Iraq. He’s also a pretty stern guy, and he can wire brush it pretty quick if you do something wrong.
Bill McRaven: So what I found amazing about that night was as you point out, so my army operators had gone across the border into Syria to get this bad guy. They weren’t supposed to be there. I like to think that I had handled it well on my end by going back to the army Colonel and saying, “I got it. Let’s not overreact to this. But I still got to notify Patraeus.” So when I went to see Patraeus, my expectation was that he was going to fire me up and he was going to wire brush me and say, “WTF, what were you thinking?” And instead he paused. I think he realized, again, because of his experience, that we were trying to do the right thing, the guys were trying to do right even if they’ve got a little overzealous.
Bill McRaven: And so he said to me, “Well, you probably should let them keep going.” And then when he found out, I said, “Well, I’ve already recalled them. They should be back across the board to here within the hour.” And he said, “Okay, we’ll keep this between you and me unless something goes South.” And I really appreciated that and it was a great learning experience for me. So you think by that time I’m a three star admiral. I’ve experienced an awful lot in my career, but you can always learn something more. And there were many times in my time as the JSOC commander and the CENTCOM commander, and frankly, I think, before that. It’s not that it’s a lesson I hadn’t learned. But you get a lot of opportunity to implement that lesson in a wartime environment when you see guys that are out there in a combat environment, getting shot at. They are trying to do right, but it doesn’t always come off well.
Bill McRaven: And you as the leader, yeah, you can bring them in, you can wire brush them. What you have to be able to do is you bring them in, you talked through the mistakes they made. If the mistakes they made were honest mistakes, trying to do the right thing, then you just correct those mistakes and you move forward. Conversely, if the mistakes they made were premeditated, bad mistakes that we’re not upholding what is no moral, legal and ethical, if they were those kinds of mistakes, then you handle it differently. But if it were mistakes that were trying to do the right thing for all the right reasons, then you have to cut them some slack and move forward.
Jason Redman: Nice. Well, I know I’ve had some slack cut in my career.
Bill McRaven: We all have.
Jason Redman: Well, there’s so much. I mean, we could probably spend hours. There’s so many lessons both that you share in my book obviously, the lessons you have in your book, and make your bed book, all these things. But let’s fast forward. You now are out there and recently you created a little bit of a firestorm. You did something that a lot in the military say, “Oh, my God. We should never do this.” And you wrote an op-ed that basically question president Trump and about some of the recent decision making in some of the division we’re seeing in this country. And I see individuals on both, the right and the left. I have some individuals on the right who just are so upset at that op-ed. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Where do you really stand? What motivated you to write that?
Bill McRaven: Well, first, I’ve told folks, as you well know, there this just unwritten rule that as retired senior officers we don’t question the commander-in-chief. And I think that is a good rule. And I have told folks, I received a lot of criticism for this and I think it is fair criticism. So when somebody comes out and says, “Admiral, you shouldn’t have done that.” I say that’s fair criticism. Having said that, my oath was to the constitution of the United States. And consequently I’ve got to wake up every morning and look myself in the mirror and decide is being quiet more honorable than speaking out. And sometimes you just have to make the decision that you think speaking out is worth the criticism you’re going to take.
Bill McRaven: So in this particular case… And I’ve told folks before, I want the president to do well. Every American should want the president to do well. And frankly I don’t have a lot of disagreements with some of the president’s policies. I think we need a strong border. I think we need to engage China on their unfair trade act. I think going out, well, I wouldn’t have engaged North Korea the way the president has, I don’t have any problem with them engage you with Kim Jong-un. Should we pull out of Syria, well, I think these are policy discussions and I have no issues with good folks on both sides of the aisle having honest discussions about policy decisions. My concern and the reason I wrote the op-ed really had to do as much with the president’s not adhering to the process. Again, and this really wasn’t about Gallagher.
Bill McRaven: I mean Gallagher was the face of the discussion and Syria was about the face and the discussion. But the fact of the matter is, let’s take Syria to start with, because that’s what drove the beginning of the op-ed, was this idea that the president really didn’t engage with this military leadership before he tweeted the fact that we are pulling out of Syria. So if he had gone through the process and had a serious engagement with the military and had good discussions with his principals, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and the others and said, “Look, I’m thinking about pulling out of Syria, what do you think?” Then the military could have come back and said, “Well, Mr. President then if we’re going to do that, we need to do that in a measured fashion, so that we can take care of our allies, that we can do this so that our guys aren’t at risk, et cetera.”
Bill McRaven: But of course that is not the way it unfolded. It unfolded in a tweet and it caught a lot of the military leadership off guard. The issue with the Gallagher case, of course, has been that the president, well, within his right to pardon Gallagher or anybody else after the court’s marshal or after the proceedings. There is a thing called unlawful command influence. It is a violation of the uniform code of military justice or any senior officer in the chain of command to opine on the outcome of a proceeding, a tribunal or a Court’s Marshall before it is complete. And the reason you can’t do that is because, when I was the Commodore of Naval Special Warfare group one, I was not allowed to go down and tell the commanding officer of Seal team one how I thought his captain’s mass should come out. That’s unlawful command influence or undue influence.
Bill McRaven: You can’t do that. And of course for the president of United States to come out and talk about… Again, really not having anything to do with Gallagher, but the president United States is not supposed to put his position out there before these things are completed. Now once a jury has come out, once a Court’s Martial is complete, once a tribunal or a proceeding is over, then the president can absolutely make the decision. I don’t have any problems with that. But this really was an issue of the president has come out against the intelligence community, he’s come out against the law enforcement community, he’s come out against the state department. And now of course he’s beginning to come out against the deep state that he feels that the military leadership has.
Bill McRaven: And I just think this undermines the important aspects of who we are as a nation. The president should be supporting those institutions rather than trying to undermine them. But having said all that, I want the president to do well. I want all of the American institutions to do well. We just need his help in getting there.
Ray Care: Amen.
Jason Redman: Yeah. Amen to that. I mean, there’s a lot of division in this country right now. I think for all of us. I know I do. I want to see ways that we can bring it back together, to bring the American people back together and unified and understanding the beliefs and the foundation of what this nation is. I mean, that’s what I fought for. It’s what I signed up for. It’s what I’ll continue to fight for. So I respect you taking a stance. I know you’ve gotten a lot of heat for it, but that’s what it’s about in this. And it’s about taking a stance.
Ray Care: Amen.
Jason Redman: Much better to stand by your convictions.
Ray Care: Be heard instead of wallow in silence.
Jason Redman: Amen. So, sir, as we’re starting to wrap up, I’d like to give you a brief rundown on what’s going to happen. First let me explain, when we wrap up, we like to do what’s called the two minute segment of motivational. Just we like to end with the two minutes of what your word of the day means. Each one of us likes to hit on it and that’s where we really like to close home. But before we do that, this is probably one of the most beneficial points that I think people can get away from here, especially coming from you, is what three pieces of advice would you give to a leader? That’s it. I mean I can’t say junior leader, I can’t say senior leader, because you’ve been there, you’ve done both.
Ray Care: If you were in an elevator and you had 30 seconds to tell someone three pieces of advise-
Jason Redman: Yeah, you want to tell [crosstalk 00:55:51]. Yeah. What would you tell me.
Bill McRaven: Yeah, that’s pretty straightforward for me. We expect our leaders to be servant leaders. So the answer is you’ll take care of the troops. Take care of the troops, and the troops will take care of you. I mean, it is as simple as that. Now, let me expand on that a little bit because taking care of the troops doesn’t mean giving them every Friday off and cutting them slack when they don’t look sharp. Taking care of the troops means, you set high expectations, you give them the resources to do the job and then you hold them when they are not achieving the expectations and the standards you expect. That is taking care of the troops.
Bill McRaven: Again, as I said before, whether you’re working in the pizza place, the post office or the SEAL team, everybody wants to be part of a great organization. So to be part of a great organization, you set high standards, you give the men and women the resources to do the job, and then you hold them accountable when they don’t do the job. That’s how you move a great organization law. So that would be part one. Part two is for a leader, you really have to get down with the troops. There’s a great saying from the Pope that says, a shepherd should smell like his sheep. I liked that because it is about the fact that… When I was a three star, I would go out on missions maybe once or twice a month. And part of this was the troops want to see you sharing the dangers, sharing the hardships with them. They don’t want to think that their admiral is sitting there and bog room or in Ballade drinking a cup of coffee, while they’re getting shot at.
Bill McRaven: You have to get down there and find out what the troops are going through. But this isn’t just about combat. I tell CEOs all the time, “Look, you need to go down to the mail room or whatever the equivalent of a mail room is and do the mail room job. Find out what the guys in the mail room and the girls in the mail room are doing so that you can make better decisions that are going to affect your organization.” One of the best lessons I learned, was when I was a Navy midshipman at the University of Texas. In between your freshman and sophomore year, they send you on what they euphemistically call a cruise. So as a midshipman, I went out to the Ussolid. It was a fast frigging out of Pearl Harbor.
Bill McRaven: And as a budding officer, they make you an enlisted guy. So you live with the enlisted men down in the barracks. You’re scrubbing the deck, you’re cleaning the heads, you’re working in the boiler rooms. And it gives you this great sense of the fact that the officers that are above decks on the bridge in the state rooms making the decisions, how those decisions affect the sailor at the deck plate level. And it is the greatest lesson I had, is that as an officer or a leader, when you make a decision, you better understand how that decision affects everybody in your organization. The only way you will know that is if you share the hardships with them, if you share the pain with them, if you have been there and done that job.
Bill McRaven: We’re fortunate as SEALs is that we all go through training together, and we know what we’ve all been through. That’s how the officers and the enlisted guys earned the respect. And I think that’s important. But at the end of the day, it really is about taking care of the troops and then leading from the front. And sometimes leading from the front means getting down and doing the jobs with the guys.
Ray Care: Amen.
Jason Redman: Well, awesome. Sir, it’s just been an honor to have you on. I mean, just a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of leadership. I mean your professional resume is awesome.
Bill McRaven: Thanks guys.
Jason Redman: So thank you for taking the time.
Ray Care: Thank you admiral.
Jason Redman: Thank you for contributing my book. We’re going to it up. Two minutes?
Ray Care: Two minutes.
Jason Redman: Two minutes. So you want to go first?
Ray Care: I don’t know who goes. I guess, we let him decide.
Jason Redman: So the way we do this real quickly, we wrap it up. We go back to the word of the day, persevere. So just shotgun this. And actually, how about I’ll go just so you can see how we do it. It’s really fast, our shotgun approach. Okay.
Ray Care: Then we’ll [crosstalk 01:00:09].
Jason Redman: And then we’ll let you have the last word, sir. All right. The word of the day today is persevere. Our amazing guest, Admiral Bill McRaven talked about. It was the quintessential thing that really allowed his career to go forward. I got to tell you, I feel his pain. When we talk about leadership failure, it was what enabled me to drive forward. So many times I questioned myself, I doubted myself, I felt the naysayers and it was my ability to drive forward and persevere and lean on great people around me, that’s social leadership I talk about. It was persevering and driving forward. When you are down, when you were on the ax, when you have those life ambushes, you have to persevere, drive forward.
Ray Care: Amen. Persevere. Attack the hill, ladies and gentlemen. No matter how bad it gets, you’ve got to keep pushing forward, keep pushing upward. You’re going to have good days. You’re going to have bad days. Leaders that levels from the top to bottom, bottom to top are going to make mistakes. My motto is fail to you succeed. But just put 100% of who you are and put that mindset in everything that you’re doing, you will overcome and conquer everything that you set your mind to. I am sitting here among two great individuals who I respect very much in the SEAL teams. I’m in all, so, sir… Excuse me, Admiral, I’m going to turn it over to you.
Bill McRaven: All right, persevere. Never ring the bell. It’s pretty simple. You’ll always have that opportunity to quit and you’ll think it’s easy. You will think quitting makes things better. It never makes things better. And as long as you’re going to go into life for this attitude that you’re never going to ring the bell, you’re never going to quit, then you’ll be successful in life.
Ray Care: Amen. Boom!
Jason Redman: I love it.
Ray Care: I got nothing.
Jason Redman: All right. Holy smokes. Well, this has been another episode of the Overcoming and Conquer Show. I am Jason Overcome Redman.
Ray Care: And I’m Ray Cash Care. And we are out. Boom!
Speaker 7: Thanks for listening to the Overcome and Conquer Show tune in next time. And please remember to subscribe on iTunes. Please visit overcomeandconquer.com.
Ray Care: The overcoming conquer show is presented by the project. The project is a full immersion 75 hour experience designed for men who know in their core they are not living up to their fullest potential. Rather than waking up every morning ready to dominate life, the mediocre man rolls out of bed and slides into the same unfulfilling routine they’ve unhappily been in for way too long. The Project is for men that have lost their eternal flame and motivation to conquer. It is for men living an unfulfilling life that lacks the excitement and purpose. If this resonates with you and you want to learn more, we encourage you to apply today at www.mdkproject.com/ocshow. Boom!