What does it mean to be a courageous leader in 2025? Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star general in the U.S. Army, joins futurist and culture critic Baratunde Thurston to discuss McChrystal’s new book, On Character, the responsibility of leaders today, and the weight of being an active citizen in democracy. Considering President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, McChrystal explores the role of the military in civil society.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
I was moved by your book. I was moved by your philosophical exploration, the concept of character—not just pushing a specific version of it, but breaking it down into component parts. Character is conviction plus discipline, and the thing that you argue for is to be curious about our convictions. Why is it important for you, for us, to not just have character or have good character, but to challenge the components of it in our lives?
If you break character into the convictions, the strongly held beliefs you have—times your discipline to live to them, because anything is zero if you don’t have the discipline to live to it—the convictions matter a lot, but they’re not the things that someone just told you. And if you think about it, most of us are the religion we were raised in, we’re the nationality we were born into. We are a product of the experience we’ve had. So much of what we believe is what was sort of handed to us as we went along, and that doesn’t make it right.
I remember in the counterterrorist fight we would be against members of Al-Qaeda who were extraordinarily effective, and they were killing people and they were trying to kill us. At the same time, the best they had were loyal, they were brave, they were focused on a cause that they believed in. And the only difference between me and my people and them was the life’s journey. Had we switched life’s journey, every probability is we’d have been at the other place.
And so once you get there, you step back and go, ‘Well then, maybe they’re not entirely wrong.” Doesn’t mean I agree with them, it doesn’t mean I support them, but it means that my convictions need me to pressure-test them to the greatest degree possible.
Part of that comes with philosophy, and I didn’t do it through much of my life. I did a few things, but then as I get older [I’m] realizing how important character always was. It was always the thing. At the moment, you didn’t always consider it that way. You were trying to be more proficient in this or more successful in this or more powerful. And then at the end . . . the common denominator of getting it right was always character.
The decisions that I’m most proud of were good character and the ones that I regret—and there are some—they were places where I didn’t live to the character that I knew was the right answer. And so I think we’ve got to be humble enough to decide what we think we believe and then challenge it.
I want to follow up on the humility and on what we do, and I use “we” intentionally. I know I have not always lived up to the character I profess and deeply believe in. I’ve put my emotional needs before someone close to me—an act of small but significant selfishness. And maybe you’ve had your own versions and people here have. What have you found works when we recognize that we haven’t lived up to our character, to recover from that and still maintain a good path forward?
I think the first thing is we say, “Well, that’s not me.” But if any of you flew here and you made the mistake of checking your luggage, you had to go to the turnstile where the bags come out. And what do you typically see? You see people crowded right up next to it, like wildebeests at the last watering hole in the Serengeti. And there’s this idea that my bag’s going to come out faster if I’m closer. But the people down below putting the bags on the thing, they don’t care. If we all stepped back three or four feet, everybody could see it, we could calmly get in and reach our bag when it came out, and we could move on.
Yet why are we that way? Not because we’re bad people, I don’t think. It’s because those people in that moment, we are anonymous to. We’re tired, we want to get home, we’re never going to see them again, so we can be that way.
And how many times do you deal with somebody or some instance where you just think, I’m going to be this way because I’m angry or it serves my purposes? Things you would never do around people that you see routinely or your family. And then you realize we have lapses. So I think that the key thing for me is—and I’m pretty self-critical—at the end of every day I literally say and think of the times in the day when I was not the person I should have been, when I responded incorrectly to somebody. I got mad, I was short . . . you name it, there’s just a litany.
And the key is not to make that the new standard. The key is to say that was wrong, and tomorrow I’m going to try to do better, knowing you’re never going to get to perfect. . . . And I think the other thing that we desperately need in society are norms where we hold each other accountable, where we’re willing to do that. Your mom would do that, but if your mom’s not around, who will do it?
Sometimes we need to look each other in the eye and just go, “That’s not the way we do things. That’s not the way we treat other people. That’s not what we would consider the standard that we all want to hold ourselves to.”
Since you brought up how we treat other people, let’s talk about what is happening with the U.S. government right now, which has a duty of care to treat people a certain way and is making really radical decisions on how to deploy the services of the government. How do you respond to the deployment of armed forces in American cities, particularly those run by Democrats, but really any city, or the deployment of immigration officers dressed as special operators? How do you see this, and how do you feel [about] this use of our military right now?
Well, I think it’s unfortunate and I think it’s a big mistake. But if we stepped back and sort of antiseptically said, someone looks at you and you didn’t like it, and they say, “Well, you don’t believe in illegal immigration, do you?” And I sort of don’t believe in anything that begins with “illegal,” but that’s really not the issue here.
The issue is how we’re treating each other, how we’re treating people. And there are probably two levels to it. The first is people are human beings and there should be a standard that we all decide we’re going to treat people, particularly people who are less strong than we are, who need to be supported, who need to be respected, who need to be helped.
Then the use of the military, and this is of course personal to me, there’s a tradition of not using the military in the streets of the United States, the Posse Comitatus rule, and it’s got a really good reason. It’s because you don’t want the American people to identify the military with people that come and police. . . . We don’t want the American people to grow to fear or be resentful of our own military.
Now, are there instances where the military can do things other organizations can’t? Absolutely. There’s a common-sense point of this, but I think the apolitical nature of our military is one of the sacred norms that we have respected for most of our history—never perfectly, but pretty darn well.
When I was a senior officer, actually at all ranks, I never knew the political persuasion of any of my peers. I didn’t know if they were liberal. I didn’t know if they were conservative. We didn’t talk about it. It was considered inappropriate to do that. And of course it was inappropriate to talk about it with your subordinates because that’s undue influence. You just didn’t because the military wasn’t part of that.
The problem is if a military gets politicized—we need only to look around the world for examples where that happens—then suddenly it has a different role in society, and we won’t like it. I guarantee it.