The Importance of Books and Teamwork

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Falling all haters, this is gonna be so delicious. Have I ever written I James Patterson, written a book that just annoyed the hell out of you? or maybe several books? Have I killed off a character you loved, told a joke you found, obscene? Now you can tell me directly to me on the James Patterson Hater Hotline Call six four six five nine eight three five five four and it' not my home number and tell me a story about whatever it is I did that got you to make a phone call in the year twenty twenty six. So anything that pisses you off, you know, go for it. If you make a good point, I will probably play your message on a future episode of Hungry Dogs That number again, six four six, five nine eight, three five five four. I can't wait to hear from you haters. Let's go. comeome on haters. Let's do it. I am the biggest fan of the millennials and the Gin Z that you'll ever meet. There's this narrative out there that this generation are these young kids, that they're these soft and tidle little snowflakes And then I'm always quick to point out, well, then you've never seen them in a firefight in Afghanistan or going to school to make a better life for themselves. I'm a great fan of these young men and women. This is Hungry Dogs. I am James Patterson. Today's guest, this is one of the most fascinating people in the world. He should run for president, Admiral William McRven. He's a retired four star admiral, a former Navy SEAL And someone who spent a lifetime leading through high pressure situations most of us can't even imagine. And after that, he decided to try something really stressful, writing books. He's the author of several great ones, including Make Your Bed, S Stories, My lifeife in Special Operations, and let's get to it Admiral McRraven You started out as a journalism major at the University of Texas, I think, right? Right. Let talk about that in terms of the effect of that on who you are, how you've operated, the successes you've had if you don't mind. Yeah, I got into journalism probably for not all the right reasons. you know, I couldn't do math, I couldn't do science, I couldn't do accounting. And and at one point in time, my GPA was so bad the head of the Naval ROTC said, Hey, you really need to find something you can do And I always enjoyed writing. My mother was an English teacher, my sister was an English teacher. and so I read a lot growing up. and I thought, well, I'll give this journalism thing a try. And so for my last two years in college, I was a journalism major. and to your point, there were a lot of people that said, well, that's kind of a silly degree to have when you're going into the military But I was quick to point out, you know actually it's a great degree to have because in the military, frankly, like any other leadership position, you have to learn to communicate. You have to be able to communicate in writing, you have to be able to communicate verbally. And the schoolchool of journalism taught you those skill sets. So when I came in as a young officer and I had to write reports and I had to brief the troops Th things came naturally to me. And I think it was very helpful in my leadership journey. Oh, I think it's hugely. that whole notion of communicating it's so, so, so important. So you graduated from Texas and then you're commissioned into the Navy, right? And you volunteer for CEAL. So just talk about that a little bit. I know some of this is familiar to people, but so I graduated in nineteen seventy seven And and I had gotten a slot at what we refer to as buds, as you said, basic Underwater demolition, seal training. So I started in the summer of ' seventy seven. and you know, it's you know a lot of people say, well why did you do it? Well, you know, I was a young man and young men liked to be challenged. I wanted to see if I was tough enough to get through. My class started with about one hundred ten guys and we ended up with thirty three. Yes, this is pretty normal. You got about a seventy five percent attrition rate Uh you know, guys comeing in and they may be, you know, great runners, great swimmers, great athletes. But it's really all a matter of can you hang on when times are tough? And that's what you learn really in basic SEL training. I don't how you classify this as a failure, I wouldn't. You wanted to get into the SEL team six. and that didn't work out. Just talk about that in terms of how that moved you forward in a strange way Well, actually, I did get into the team. The problem was the commanding officer and I didn't agree on a lot of things. I think he felt I was a little too straight laced for, you know, some of the the approaches he took to leadership. You know I had been raised in a military family and I believed in good order and discipline. I believed in you know things that were a little bit different. He was a little bit more on the pushing the edge of the envelope on a lot of things. and I just wasn't a good fit for the organization. So I was there for about a year and I got fired. And you know, that's always hard to get fired.red It's hard to get fired in the corporate world and certainly in the Navy, when you get fired, it's really not a good thing. I was all of twenty six years old. I'm married with two kids at the time and I didn't know whether I had a career left. This was a time when, you know, it's great when you marry somebody that is you know, better than you all around. My wife is, you know is stronger, you know, better in every respect. And I came home that night and I said, Look, I don't know if I have a a career left here. and And she looked at me and she said, You know, you've never quit at anything in your life. Don't start now. The good news is He didn't hurt me too bad in my fitness reports. So while he did fire me and dinged me a little bit, it wasn't enough to kill my career and I was able to resurrect my career at the next command. Eventually you get and you're running JSOP, essentially counterterrorism kind of missions. And how did that happen? Yeah, so by that time, I'm pretty senior. So we're talking about when I was first at ShL Team six was A Navy lieutenant I was twenty six years old, but as I said, I was able to kind of resurrect my career. and after that, things went pretty well. I was on you know a pretty good trajectory. I took all the hard jobs, did the hard jobs well. and in two thousand three, I was promoted to Admiral and I went down to from Washington, DC, I went down to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the headquarters of JSOC was And I was the deputy commander there for three years. And then after that I took over spepecial Operations commommand in Europe for two years and then I got promoted to three stars and now I came back to JSOC as the commander And and I was the first Navy commander The good news was I'd spent time there before and so all the guys knew me. It wasn't really it wasn't that big a deal that a Navy guy came in. They'd all been Amy officers before me. back back at Brag again? Back at Brag again, right? It six years of Fort Bragg. a Navy guy, a sailor in the Army, as I used to say, But it was a great exper You developed a lot of respect for the Army, right Absolutely. You know, I love my soldiers I love them all. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen. I mean, I was fortunate. and this is the nature of special operations is it's a joint command. So you know, even though I was Navy, I had Army Rangers and Army spepecial forces. I had Navy SEALs, I had Air Force Special tactice guys and helicopter pilots, and you so I had the full range of special operations operators, along with the technicians, intelligence experts and these sorts of things. And then I also worked with all the three letter agencies. So CIA, DIA, NSA, and of course the State Department. So you really get a good sense of the entire swath of government organizations that are supporting national security. After the death of bin Laden and the fact that you your operations being involved in that, what was the effect of that on you? Because all of a sudden, it's big news. and what was the effect of that on you? How did you handle that? You know, and I don't want to downplay it. It wasn't the most important moment in my life. I've got I'm married with three kids But here's an interesting thing that happened, Jim. I remember after the bin Laden raid, I was thinking to myself, you know, everything in my life kind of led me to that point. I mean, I was iminently qualified to be the guy in charge. I had spent you know by that time thirty four years as a Navy SEAL. I'd been in combat for six years. I mean, I knew everything about how to run a mission. and of course, the mission turns out successful. And I remember thinking to myself, well, that's it. That was my destiny was to run this mission. And then something happened. Interestingly enough, you know, about a year or so after the mission, I got a call from the University of Texas. And they asked me to come be the commencement speaker at the twenty fourteen graduation. So you know, I wrote the speech, what became known as the Make your bed speech And and that speech, of course went viral. And every single day, every single day somebody comes up to me to tell me about that speech And I realized that it wasn't the bin Laden raid that was going to be the defining moment in my life. And it was this speech But the bin Laden raid is what gotot me on the radar of Bill Powers, who was the president at the time to come through the speech. So you know, there's always these kind of cascading effects on things in your life. It's fascinating, once again, going back to this starting with the journalism and that ability to to not just speak clearly, but to do things that are memorable, but starting with Make your betteret, was just brilliant It's just, I mean, that's that's the way you do it. That's the way you communicate memorably because who's going to say I can do that. Okay, That's the first step. Now it's going to get a little harder. But just talk a little bit about some of the other things in that book because not everybody has read it. There's still are a few people out there. Interestingly enough, when I was writing the speech, I had a day job. I was running US Special Operations commommand And as you well know, Jim from having written a bunch of speeches, you know, speech has got to be it's got to have a beginning the middle and an end. It's got to have some some really strong points. your to your point. peopleeople have got to walk away and go, I get it Well, the Wednesday before the Saturday I was supposed to give the speech. I came into my wife and I had the speech. I goes, It doesn't work I'd written the mother' speech, and it was just terrible. And she says to me Well, why don't you write about something you know? And I thought, well, that's a clever idea. I said, lookook, the only thing I know is how to be a Navy SEAL. And she said, Well, write about that. And I thought, I don't know. I mean, I've got to be talking to a bunch of college kids and all their parents. She said, wrrite about what you know. So I started re crafting the speech. and of course, this became the speech that I gave But I realized that my six months at basic SEL training W really life crammed into six months. I mean, it was all the sort of obstacles you were going to have to know face in your lifetime. You faced them in the six months. Every day you had to wake up, you had to be on your game. You know, life was, I mean, the instructors pushed you hard. you were cold, wet and miserable. You know, you had this boat crew that had to be your teammates So in the speech and in the book, I talk about these kind of ten lessons And the first one was, yes, get up and make your bed. It's something that kind of gets you going and inspires you. It's also about the little things in life. My instructors used to say, look, if you can't even make your bed right How are we ever going trust you to lead a complex seEL mission. so learn to make your bed right But then the other ones were about respect. I mean, my My boat crew and the boat crew, so you had these seven man crews that manned this little rubber boat And we had one boat crew that was called the Munchkin crew because they were the little guys But in that boat crew was one Native American, one African American, one Polish, one French, one Greek, and a couple of tough kids from the Midwest And they were one of the best boat crews we had. And you realize the only thing worth measuring a person by is kind of what's in their heart You know, It's not their size, it's not the color of their skin, it's not their socioeconomic background, their gender, their orientation. You measure them by kind of what's in their heart. And so you learn to respect people. and that was an important part of this. You know, You're going to be humble. You're going to have to stand up to the bullies in life. You're going to fail. These are the life lessons that you learned in this Six months of seEL training And those lessons all played out in the rest of my career And then of course, the final lesson was in SEL training to quit All you have to is ring this bell. You ring the bell and you're out. And the point I make in the speech and in the book is, look, if what you're doing is good and noble and honorable and you're passionate about it, then don't ever quit. Don't ever ring that bell. And so those were the lessons I brought out in the book and the speech. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this showel will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit at indeed dot com slash podcast That's indndeed d. com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apppply. Ne a hiring hero? This is a job for indndeed sponsored jobs. This summer, Prime V videoide takes you back before legally blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle Woods in high school. Set in nineteen ninety five, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, nineties nostalgia, and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one thing Law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of legally blonde, watch L, a new original series only on Prime videoide. Watch now. So the next qualification for being the best of the best is you become Chancellor of the University of Texas system which is incredible and qu quite the jump. And it's an interesting thing. I'm dealing with it now. I don't want to get into the sideline, but this whole thing of of coming from another field and then trying to understand academic life and students. And just give us a few of you know with the kids now coming up today because you had to experience that and how do you deal with them? And what did you learn about college students Well, I am the biggest fan of the millennials and the Gin Z that you'll ever me. I've told this story thousands of times, but There's this narrative out there that this generation are these young kids, that there arere these soft entidle little snowflakes. And then I'm always quick to point out, well, then you've never seen them in a firefight in Afghanistan or going to school to make a better life for themselves. I'm a great fan of these young men and women. When I took over the University of Texas, I was often asked, you know, what's the difference in leadership in the military and academia I would offer that leadership is leadership At the end of the day, you know, you've got to come into the job. You've got to be a man or woman of integrity. You've got to be able to make the hard decisions. You have to listen to people. You have to be humble enough to know you're not the smartest person in the room. These are all leadership qualities that are going to you translate from the military to healthcare to academia to the corporate world. Now you have to learn the business of the business. When I took over the University of Texas system I didn't know anything about academia So I had to go learn, you know, what does a chair do? What does a dean do? What does a provost do? I had to learn how the faculty Senate worked. But those are things you can learn U in terms of leadership I felt leadership was the same. I mean, I tried to be the same person, you know, make the hard decisions, listen to people, respect people and always try to be, you know, a person of integrity. Jeff Bezos and his wife, I think, they laid a bunch of money on you, and you pretty much have given it all back. That's another little piece to me, the whole philanthropy thing. Just talk about that a little bit. Just your feeling about, okay, here's a bunch of money, fifty million do, I think. and then How did that affect you? what did you do? Yeah, you know, it was of course, quite a surprise. We had breakfast like once a year at an event and I mean, I didn't know him well. You know, we well enough to say hi to him. But a couple of years ago three years ago, he presented me with the Bezos Courage and Civility Award. and with it came fifty million dollars that I could give to charities of my choosing. And what Jeff had been watching, which I didn't realize, he knew that I was focused on two real issues. One was educating the children of the fallen. So we've lost a lot of guys in the special operations community and across the broader military. and a lot of their kids, you know, they need money to go to school So I had been focused on that, and then the other one I'd been focused on were traumatic brain injuries from our veterans. So he had been kind of following my path on those two issues. And when he gave me the fifty million dollars, he said, Hey, look, this is an opportunity for you to put that money to good use. And so over the last couple of years I've been investing Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos money in those two areas primarily a couple of one offs, but most of them are Educating children whose parents have been lost, including first responders and also you know, trying to tackle the very tough brain health issues that veterans are dealing with today. I grew up not far from West Point and duty honor, country and life, at least the duty honor and country part of it a little bit comes from and General MacArthur I gave a famous speech at West Point. Once you start talking about that and why you added the word life to what he had said Well, of course, it does come from MacArthur's famous speech in nineteen sixty two. And I remember when I was a kid, my father had me listen to a recording of it, I think on an old LP. And I was young, but my father who was also in the military, was an air Force fighter pilot. And he had not been a fan of MacArthur. as a lot of you know the folks of that generation saw him differently. But after that speech My dad was so moved by that speech. and MacArthur gives this speech when he's in his early eighties. So, you know, he is life is, you know, I mean, he's no longer in uniform. the sting of being a failed politician is past him. And he's just a soldier now. and he's telling soldiers about, you know, kind of life as a soldier And he talks about duty on our country And you know, he says these three words are, you know, what we can be, what we ought to be, what we will be. And he talks about, you know, faith and how it can renew our faith. It can renew our hope And so I wanted duty honor country to be in this, but I also wanted the readers to accept the fact that look, we've got to take these values of duty honor country, and we've got to make sure that we incorporate them into our life as well. because you life will challenge you a lot of times. And of course, the subtitle of the book is A tribute to the American spirit. And so what I wanted people to also see was in spite of the headlines that you see every day, and it's hard to get away from them. But if all you do is listen to the headlines and look on social media, You forget that there are a lot of great Americans out there. and I'm on the road four or five days a week. I'm all over the country And I see great people on the right, on the left, in the middle, tremendous Americans And I mean, I think about just my time at Texas, you know, we had Hurricane Harvey a couple of years ago and it just, you know devastated Houston And people came from all around And they didn't ask whether or not you were a Republican or a Democrat. They just came to help. We got to learn how to bottle what happens when disasters happen and use it when when there isn't a disaster. because you're right. We come together, you know, when things get extreme like that and somehow we need to understand that that's we need to do it every day Not just when something terrible happens. It's the human component of it. When you can connect human to human, you can get past a you know a lot of the politics. Yeah, yeah know, I always talk about this thing about, you know, you can't have a boat and ten people you're seven guys and they're all paddling in a different way Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha fappuccino drink? or a sweet vanilla? smmooth caramel maybe, or white chocolate moocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Rappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. This is going to be an extremely busy month. I have to watch one hundred and four soccer games, follow the pre game, the post game, yell useless opinions at the TV It's a li So I knew that when it comes to screening for colon cancer, the choice was clear Cola Guard pllus test. It can be used at home and can only take fifteen minutes, so I can do it during halftime and not miss any action If you are forty five or older or at average risk, ask your healthcare provider about screening for colon cancer with the colgard test. You can also request a prescription at colgard dot com d In duty ononor country in life, you also put some poetry in there. That I mean, that's great. You wrote one about your mom? Yeah, she was as I said, she was an English major and she loved poetry. And you know, so she had this book one hundred one famous poems. and of course it was all the classical poets, but she would read from this all the time. And you know, it was a lot of you know Kipling and Wordsworth and Longfellow and the classic poets. And so I grew up you know re reading poems I debated whether to put them in this book because, you know, it's not good for my tough guy seal image to be writing poetry. Yeah Yeah bouances it, man. Excellent. But you know, they you know as you can well appreciate, writing in the case of poetry, writing can be cathartic You know, and some some of these poems are a little dark, maybe a little hard, but they were there were poems I needed to get out. I needed to put them down on paper. One of the interesting things, I think it's in the book, just a notion of making reading and experience and you talk about sometimes going to the library at the University of Texas. because there's something about just being surrounded by all those books that changes that reading. That's kind of interesting. Just tell people about that a little bit. like Books I like hard copy books, books that I can touch that I can feel. And it's youah, I mean I will read on my Kindle and every once in a while I will listen to an audioob book But I like books. And there's something about it as you can certainly appreciate There's something about holding the book. There's something about looking at the print on the paper And when I go into a library at the University of Texas or anywhere, I love libraries. and there is just something that sounds kind of crazy. Mbe something spiritual about being around books. Yeah, yeah, ye. I think so. And so I can sit in a library and read books forever and I happen to like poetry, I like philosophy, I like mysteries. So all of that, you know, it's just fun to be in a library. You know, a few months back, I got an award a gold lion at the New York Public Library, which was kind of cool. I got to meet Bruce Springstin. He got a gold lion too. One of the cool things that was held in the reading room there And I was reminded, here I was getting this gold lion. And when I was writing my first novel, I used to go in there to write. I would sit in that same room and write that first I was twenty six, twenty five, twenty six at the time. One of the books I know you admire is John Wooden on leadadership. One of the things he said is this notion of good values attract good people I just love that notion about Let's somehow find you know our people who are really great are great leaders and let's use them. Yeah, the one thing I get asked a lot in large public settings is, you know, people that are concerned about where we are now and I said, well, it's up to us. It's still a democracy You know, we can vote for the right people and we've got to be looking for men and women of character of integrity that will be principled leaders. We've got to expect, governance that works for the people. We've got to hire competent people in these positions. But this means that the Senate has got to you make sure that they do their job and only confirm people that are really qualified, you know It means that the American people have got to vote in the the right leaders. Somehow people need to think things through a little better. You know, you just got to think it through. What does that mean? What's the consequence of that? You know, onene of the interesting things also that you talk about is the notion of real progress happening at the local level, which is really interesting in terms of school principals and teachers and police chiefs and your local Cgress personerson. why you talk about it? because that's really I love that. I think it's a cool idea. and we don't think about it or talk about it as much as maybe we should. Yeah. so when I left the military, you know, my whole world revolved around the Pentagon and Washington, DC and the White House And I really thought that was the center of gravity And I thought, well, my goodness, every decision that affects every American you know comes from the White House and in my case, the Pentagon. But when I got to the University of Texas and I spent a lot of time traveling around the state of Texas I realize that the work that really affects Yo my grandchildren and my children and other was really at the local level, to your point. It was It was the principals that ran the schools. and all my kids went to public schools and I always found that look, you could have a mediocre faculty, but if you had a great principal, you could have a great school And conversely, you might have great faculty, but if you had a mediocre principal, you were going to have a mediocre school. And it was the city councilmen and the city council womomen and it was again, the superintendents of the independent school districts that made a difference locally that really affected your day to day life. Now to your point, yes, we could tax billionaires, we can save social security, we can get more research dollars for our universities But day to day, you know the schools, the bridges, the roads, you know, all of that was handled locally. So I began to I had a complete kind of shift in how I thought about governance and how I thought about leadership. And I will tell you, I was really impressed as I traveled around Texas when I would meet with some of these principals and I would meet with some of these You know, superintendents, they don't make a fortune But the impact they have on tens of thousands of kids in some of the larger independent school districts is huge. An area where I really think we need to pay more attention is I don't think people pay enough attention to it are the people we elect who are boards of education. Really important. and they need to be great leaders and they need to be good thinkers and they need to be fair and reasonable and all that stuff And I don't think we necessarily don't you know, we just don't pay enough attention to that But they're really, really, really important. You know, one of your heroes, John D. McDonald, when I did my first book, I was twenty six, the Thomas Bererman number, and he sent a quote to the publisher and he said, I'm quite sure that James Patterson wrote a million words before he began the Thomas Behrman number, which was great. I was too young to have written a million words But it was a great quote and a very generous quote and it really helped me to really believe in myself. know, because at that age, know the idea that you're a novelist is sort of doesn't quite ring for you, you know? It's hard to believe So anyway, I'm not going to really get into the spurs other than I enjoyed the whole thing. I actually it was one of those series. I didn't care honestly who won. I thought both teams kind of. it was sort of like who's going to play the best Well, I'm of course, growing up in San Antonio, I was a Spurs fan. But I also likek Jaylen Brunson because he played at the Mavericks. He was with the Mavericks for a while. so. There's a guy that you talk about, you know, he's going he's going to be there at that last bell boy. Of course. I mean, forty five points in the last game. and you know, they kept having this comeback. I mean, a tremendous player. Well, you know, the one thing about the Kicks and maybe true of this for is as well, that they were taught to operate as a team. Well Jay Wright I think was a great coach, you know, a great coach of Vanova and really, taught them the fundamentals, but Again, you know, Brunson was just is just one of these guys that He's never, ever going to give up. on don bad how bad he's shooting. He's going to keep driving. And his ability to shoot over Wimby, you know, was just phenomenal when you consider Rdam Blunson's six one or six two and Wimby seven four. Yeah. It will be interesting, you know, getet a twenty two year old and he keeps improving. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah Sps are a young team. He'll be back Thank you, thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for joining me on this episode of Hungry Dogs Help me out by liking and subscribing to the show. We want to get these interviews out to as many people as we can. You can help a lot. If you like the interviews, your friends will like the interviews. So help. Also, drop me a comment with any ideas you have to make the Hungry dog interviews better I'm hungry to hear what you think. I love new ideas. Thank you, thank you, thank you Hey it's Ryan Reynold here from MitMobile Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for fifteen dollarars a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made fifteen dollarars bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. 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