 Well, thank you very much, Professor Cook. I was having a, as Professor Cook mentioned, I was a graduate of National War College as having a conversation out in the foyer before the first speaker. With an Army Lieutenant Colonel, we were sort of comparing notes on National War College versus Naval War College. You know, National was great. I really enjoyed my time there. I think that the highlights and the strengths of that are, one, it's in the DC area, so you did have access to lots of things going on DC. The class mix, just kind of looking at colors in the audience was probably a little more joint. It was also probably a little more interagency. But there are two things that make Naval War College, to me, I think, just amazing. And the first one is the commute is much better here than it is in DC. But the other one is this, it's the focus on leadership and ethics. I don't know how the other service academies are with that, but National, that's not really something they focus on. So this makes, certainly by comparison to, this makes this really amazing. I know that y'all are working very hard, but I'm also super jealous, because this is remarkable what you have going here. And speaking of which, I am just so thrilled to be able to participate in this remarkable symposium. So Professor Cook, thank you so much for the invitation and Admiral Howe is lying. I had nothing to do with him getting through hell week. He did that all himself. Okay, so Professor Cook also mentioned that I am currently working on my PhD at the University of Virginia. That's true, it's really, it's very cool to go back to school as a 50-year-old. And in almost every way, I'm just another student just like everybody else. Every once in a while I get kind of pulled out to go talk to veterans organizations or they wheel me out at Veterans Day. But I had, there was one opportunity that I really enjoyed, or I say that. I enjoyed it when I was invited to it. And that was the coach of the women's basketball team. I asked for me to come and speak to her team. Yeah, and I was very excited about that. So I obviously accepted the invitation and I went and talked to the women and it was kind of my usual shtick that I did. I didn't prepare very much for it. Got up there and told a few war stories and figured that would be sufficient. But I gotta tell ya, I could tell the whole time I was not connecting with this audience at all. This was a tough crowd. I mean, these were elite athletes, right? This was the top level of college basketball. They're concerned with winning national champions and championships and if I can help them, beat Duke in North Carolina and Notre Dame, great. If I can't, please move along. And that's what I was getting. I was definitely in their eyes as like, oh my gosh, would you please move along? But so I mean, I do my remarks and probably the clearest indication that I hadn't hit the mark was. I say, okay, what questions do you have for me? And y'all have probably been there before, just total crickets, there was nothing. There was nothing at all. Finally, the captain of the team, a gal named, she was the point guard, Lexie Gerson, who was an amazing athlete. She finally had heard the deafening silence enough and so she stepped into it and she asked the question that everybody was in the room was thanking and that was, okay, great, but what does this mean to us? So we got it. Seals are courageous people, but can we learn how to be courageous or is this just something you're born with? Is this just something that seals are born with? So wow, what an amazing question that was. And it's a question that's been bothering me pretty much ever since. It's been bothering me for two reasons. First of all, it troubles me that looking back on it, I gave Lexie a really crappy answer to that. So I think, I said, yeah, I think that courage is something you can learn. It is something that can be taught. And then I sort of wheeled out Aristotle. And yeah, Aristotle can tell us a lot about how we learn and how we develop and exercise our virtues like courage, but there's no sure way of shutting down a conversation than bringing out Aristotle. In fact, I think when Aristotle was up there, right, it was like, oh God, Aristotle, awesome. Actually, I have found that there is probably no more obnoxious creature on the planet than a PhD student wheeling out such people. I was, my wife is a recently retired flag officer, so pretty no nonsense. And we were having a conversation. And I don't recall what the discussion was about, but I said, well, you know, honey, I think the point you're making is epiphenomenal to the outcome variable here. And my wife kind of looked at me for a second and said, if you ever use language like that again, you're fired. So I'm learning my lessons slowly. But the second reason that Lexi's comments have really stuck with me or Lexi's question has really struggled me and has been troubling me ever since is that I hadn't asked that question. I had never asked that question. So I spent 26 years in a profession where arguably the core virtue is courage. And yet I never asked the question, how can I teach my seals to be courageous? Or is this just something that they, when they come across my quarter deck, they show up with? Or they don't show up with? And it's even worse than that. So for two years from 2006 to 2008, I commanded the Naval Special Warfare Center. So I was in charge of the basic training for all of Naval Special Warfare. And if courage is something that can be taught, and courage is something that can be learned, that's pretty much where it ought to happen, right? And yet courage was never a stated learning objective, never, throughout my time there, maybe it's changed. So I'm retired now, I've been retired for six years. So this question for me, Lexi's question, is now purely academic and I'm gonna continue to work on it. But I'm hoping that perhaps my evolving thoughts on this topic may be marginally useful and interesting to y'all. My first insight regarding this, as I've gone back and thought about it some more, is was basically that Aristotle insight that Aristotle, again, he's got something to say here, but that's probably not who I need to rely on to answer his Lexi's question. Better person to rely on is Senior Chief Tosh. He was one of my blood instructors when I was commanding out there eight years ago. So quick story, this was my first Hell Week as commanding officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center. Hell Week is, I guess most people kind of know what that is, it's the culminating event at the end of that initial selection phase. And it's hard on a commanding officer. If you really think about it, we feel that our responsibility is to look after and take care of the welfare of all of our people. And you know, it just, you're doing that and you know you're doing that, but as you're seeing these students going through this, it's really hard for you in your heart to say, yeah, I'm taking care of you, but you are. But even though I had been in for over 20 years at the time, so I was a captain, this was my major command tour, I really didn't get Hell Week. And I think that most SEALs and even most senior SEALs really still don't get what it is we're doing there. You almost have to have done it, you have to be there to get it. I understood the mechanics of course, but I had a very unsophisticated perspective on what the purpose of it was. So on the fourth day of my very first Hell Week out there, I was walking in, I was walking across the grinder, and I noticed the incoming shift, they had just arrived, we'd go on shifts, the students are there, one shift, 100% of the time, everybody else there on three shifts of eight hours. And so the morning shift had come in, and I noticed that they had really turned up the amp, man, they had really started turning up the intensity, and this is day four of Hell Week, and I wondered why. So historically really nobody ever leaves, nobody ever quits after the third day of Hell Week, so why not just kind of slack off and at least back it down a little bit. I'm trying to protect my people. So I pulled Senior Chief Tosh aside, he was the shift chief, and I asked him, what are we doing here? And he answered very diplomatically, but also very directly. It's like sir, Hell Week starts now, this is the most important part. And as I matured in my command, I started realizing just how right he was. Despite my many years in the teams, I had never fully grasped the purpose of selection phase. It's more than just a two by four across your forehead. There's some real purpose for it. And I had bought into that conventional wisdom that this was about culling the herd, about weeding out the weak from the strong. Not even close, not even close. Selection isn't about attrition and it never has been. It's about teaching and learning. It's about indoctrinating those who decide not to quit in the essential virtue of our community, in fact the essential virtue of any warrior and that's courage. So going back to Lexie's question, the answer is a definitive yes. Courage can be taught, courage can be learned. And what I should have told her is that Naval Special Warfare has been doing it for decades. So have many other commands or many other communities. Now we haven't been doing it deliberately necessarily. So courage training, at least when I was in command was something that just sort of happened organically and implicitly. But we were doing it nonetheless and here's how. So SEAL instructors incrementally and almost daily expose SEALs to experience or SEAL candidates to challenges they've never before faced. And in confronting these challenges, our students learn and practice three character strengths. Self-knowledge, self-control and love. And together I argue that these three strengths are the constitutive elements of the virtue of character, or I'm sorry, of the virtue of courage. So what I plan to do this morning is I wanna elaborate on each one of these. I also wanna discuss a fourth constitutive element of courage that I believe Naval Special Warfare and actually very few organizations pay proper attention to. And that fourth one is a tolerance for failure. So Dr. Cook asked me if I wanted to use PowerPoint and I said no. But there's sort of, if I could have, I would have had one slide up there maybe the whole time. So instead of PowerPoint, if you've got something to write on and write with, go and write those four down. So it's self-knowledge, self-control, love and a tolerance for failure. And when we come around to the Q and A just in case we're in crickets mode, instead of that, if you don't have a question, start to think about those four because this is kind of a work in progress for me. I'm thinking through this. Do I have it right that those are the constitutive elements of courage? And do I have it right that those are things that can be taught and that can be learned? Yeah, so let's just have that discussion or tell me where I'm right and tell me where I'm wrong on this. So first of all, self-knowledge. For every individual, there is a point of exertion beyond which the body and the mind shut down. That's just a fact. It's a physiological fact. Because our species has evolved to kind of pull up short, right before you collapse, which is a fine strategy, a very prudent evolutionary strategy, very few people explore that. Very few people understand precisely where that shutdown point actually resides. So when SEAL candidates start approaching that perceived shutdown point, most of them are gonna decide to call it quits. And actually that's simply a rational response when you get right down to it. It's a very rational impulse. But those who decide to stick around, they will take one more step, even though this perhaps seems irrational. They'll take one more step, even though it might even be dangerous. And what they do when they take that next step and then the next step and the next step is they learn something, they learn a basic truth about all human beings. And that is that our reserve tanks go pretty dog on deep. We all have this understanding that our limitations are here, but actually they're somewhere here. It's the same with the machines we use. Where is that line? Where is that point where the airplane just is not gonna fly anymore? Sometimes there's a delta between perceived limitations and real limitations. Has anybody ever read the book or seen the movie Loan Survivor? So not that many. Okay. Well, so this was Loan Survivor recounts the story of Operation Red Wings, which was an aborted reconnaissance, well it was larger than this, but the part that the story recounts, it was an aborted reconnaissance operation in the Kunar province of Afghanistan in 2005. The story gives a great account of a pretty remarkable firefight that given the odds probably should have lasted a couple of minutes and ended up lasting several hours. It's also an account of a multi-day evasion that Marcus LaTrell, who was the only surviving member of the four-man SIL reconnaissance element, so it recounts his evasion. So Marcus was awarded the Navy Cross for this extraordinary courage that was recounted in that movie. But if you break that citation down, what the award is primarily recognizing is LaTrell's almost inexplicable refusal to quit. I think just about all of us, myself included and maybe myself especially would have quit long before that, but he just kept on going. And that's what we see, that's what we honor in that Navy Cross citation. But maybe it is explicable. And indeed in the book, Marcus LaTrell spends a lot of time talking about his experiences at Buds. His experience as a trainee. And that's where he learned about this difference between what his perceived limitations were and what his real limitations were. This is where he learned self-awareness. Peter Berg ended up directing the movie version of this. And I think it speaks volumes that one of the first things he did when he got the gig as director of this movie was he flew down from Hollywood to my command to take a look at this to see, okay, what happens here? I wanna know because this seems central to the story. Something that's happening, some learning and some teaching that is happening here is central to this story of courage that I'm gonna try to capture on film. The second constitutive element of courage that I am arguing can be taught and can be learned is self-control. So chaos is a killer. People are unaccustomed to chaos, seize up when they're confronted by it. They try to control everything and in the process of trying to control everything they end up controlling nothing. So introducing seals to chaos is one of the key objectives of the early phases of seal training. The desired learning outcome for the candidate is to understand that even in the most chaotic situations, we are never entirely powerless. There is always gonna be at least one domain of control and that domain is ourselves. It's our own emotions. It's our own responsible, our own emotional responses to whatever is happening. I had a commander one time that it was sort of his big three of this is what we do and this is what we, it makes us who we are and one of them was we thrive in chaos. I don't think that's right. I don't think that anybody thrives in chaos but I will say this that for those people who for whatever reason have learned to control their emotional responses to chaos, they at least seem to be thriving in chaos and that can be everything. So a good example of this and pulling away from a seal example here, Admiral Stockdale and his fellow POWs during their captivity and the Hanoi Hilton. So at the core of this amazing story of courage that these men events just about every day, I argue was self-control. So Stockdale had before he was a POW, he had studied stoicism and he had studied the stoics, especially Epictatus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and when he was captured and when he was a senior POW at the Hanoi Hilton, he put that education to use and he meticulously sorted out, okay, these are the things that I can control, that we can control, these are the things that we can't control and he focused everybody's attention on what they had agency over. Now a POW has very little personal agency, indeed being a prisoner might be one of the most constrained set of circumstances imaginable but what Stockdale taught his fellow prisoners and what they learned from Stockdale was to concentrate all their energies only on those things where they had some control over it and this was probably especially important not to ruminate on those things that they had no control over. So rather than echoing those hollow edicts about tell them nothing but your name rank and serial number, which is a strategy that is always gonna go wrong, Stockdale directed his fellow POWs to instead focus their energies on making their torturers work for everything they got, that they could control. So rather than feeling like failures when they gave up information, they felt like successes when they lasted one more minute, five more minutes when they made the torturer sweat just a little bit more. The third constitutive element is love. I wish maybe I had a better word for it, but I don't. And here again I am arguing that this is something that we can teach and this is something that can be learned. So how? And here again I'm gonna go back to basic skill training as an example. So every class of skill candidates that comes through, it's always the same thing. So we will pile task upon task upon task on them that nothing that they could possibly accomplish as individuals and yet they try to accomplish it as individuals every single time and they fail miserably and they fail painfully and they fail often in doing this. And then again, just as predictably, every single class, you see this happen, something clicks in that class, okay, a light comes on. They, we just call it coming together as a class. So it starts with a simple, a set of a few simple cooperative routines that they do together. The relationship of one student to another at this point is purely instrumental. What they value in that other human being is the fact that they are useful to them. They are useful for the fact that yeah, you're keeping me out of the surf zone, you're keeping me from that pain that I'd otherwise be expecting, be experiencing. But they soon learn to appreciate their classmates' usefulness and then maybe eventually start admiring the skills that they bring to the table that keep them out of the surf zone. Next comes a sense of trust and a desire to reciprocate. At some point in the process, a bud's class learns a basic truth and that truth is that there's almost nothing that we can't accomplish when talented people come together and start working as one and when they reach that point, they also discover that the welfare of those other human beings that they're working with is at least as important as their own well-being. The welfare of their classmates are just as important as their own personal well-being and that I say is love. And if you look at the citations for all of the Medal of Honor recipients, those are just love stories. I mean, they're almost all love stories. This was clearly the case for one recent seal recipient, Michael Mansour. In September 2006, an Iraqi insurgent threw a grenade into an observation post where there was being occupied by Petty Officer Mansour and two of his teammates. According to his teammates that survived that day, the only one who should have survived was Mike Mansour, who did not. Mike could have easily rolled out of that OP and saved himself and I'll read from the Medal of Honor citation. While the seals vigilantly watched for enemy activity, an insurgent threw a hand grenade from an unseen location, which bounced off Petty Officer Mansour's chest and landed in front of him. Although only he could have escaped the blast, Petty Officer Mansour chose instead to protect his teammates. Instantly and without regard for his own safety, he threw himself onto the grenade to absorb the force of the explosion with his body, saving the lives of his two teammates by his undaunted courage, fighting spirit and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of certain death. Petty Officer Mansour gallantly gave his life for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the US Naval Service. So I imagine that to many Americans, this account reads as some sort of gung-ho tribute to runaway patriotism. That would be a profound misunderstanding. I had the opportunity to speak with one of Petty Officer Mansour's teammates at his memorial service. And the story that he told was factually the same as the Medal of Honor citation, but the tenor was radically different. So according to his teammate, before Mansour smothered the grenade with his body, he looked down at the grenade, looked up at his teammate, made eye contact with his teammate and offered his final two words. Oh, shit. This was not somebody who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. This was a supreme act of love. Okay, let me recap kind of where we've come so far. So I've argued that courageous behavior requires three constitutive elements, self-knowledge, self-control and love. I have also argued that these three constitutive elements are things that we can teach and things that people can learn. And then I also have offered that basic seal training at least provides an exemplar. And I know there's tons of other examples out there. That's the one I drew on for this. But now I'd like to discuss what I believe is a fourth constitutive element of courage which unfortunately has fewer exemplars in the military. And that's tolerance for failure. And I think I'll spend a little extra time with this one because I think it's less intuitive. In fact, I actually, I may just be wrong here. So I'll spend a little more time there and so you can attack this, because I might be wrong. So a decent engineer, any engineers out there? A decent engineer approaches pretty much any project knowing just one thing for certain. And that's that someday this thing is going to fail. So why so negative? Why are engineers so negative? And negativity of course has nothing to do with it. Engineers assume failure because they're trained to make this assumption. Every first year engineering student learns that any non-equilibrium system, a category of system that includes all man-made systems, I think, is destined to someday degrade and someday fail. Armed with this knowledge that degradation and failure is a matter of when and not if, good engineers focus on the question of how? How is it gonna fail? They design their bridges and their rockets and their computers so that when they degrade, when they fail, they fail gracefully. So graceful failures are anticipated, they're controllable, and most importantly, they're recoverable. Catastrophic failures, by contrast, are unforeseen, unmanageable, and they often result in disasters. So I think we're all fortunate that the technical experts who design our hardware, our submarines, our surface ship, our aircraft, our communications networks, they understand the importance of graceful failure. Yet we who operate those systems are often very ill at ease with failure. And I'd like to see more leaders who become comfortable with the F-word, with the other F-word, this failure. Okay, like engineers, military leaders, design and manage systems. But the systems that we are entrusted with are infinitely more complex. They're more fragile than anything fabricated in a shipyard. The non-equilibrium systems that we lead are human social systems, a ship's deck division, a marine rifle company, a seal platoon, a numbered fleet, an expeditionary force. So these are all examples of non-equilibrium systems. So no matter how good they are, no matter how good you think you are, they are going to fail. They are going to fail someday. And this should prompt us as leaders to ask some important questions. So when the human social systems that we lead fail, will they fail gracefully or will they fail catastrophically? And this may sound defeatist. And even worse, when we talk about tolerating failure, it's counter-intuitive and it's potentially dangerous given the stakes that some of our missions that sometimes we are playing for. The failure is not an option approach to leadership on the other hand, it's quite intuitive. It enjoys an admirable pedigree and it has been credited with many distinguished accomplishments. Indeed, the seals several years ago put together an ethos. The last line of that ethos is, I will not fail. So the failure is not an option is built in to who that community thinks it is. So definitely a failure is not an option approach to leadership can result in great things and great achievements. I suggest, however, that they are far less likely than conventional wisdom may suggest. A more likely outcome, I argue, is an uninspired workforce that seeks safety and middling accomplishments. Fears change and deals with perceived errors by either concealing them or deflecting the blame on somebody else. In short, when we are intolerant of failure in ourselves and in our organizations, I believe we stifle courage. So three mechanisms contribute to this outcome. First, failure is not a leadership, I'm sorry, failure is not an option leadership, discourages boldness. Generally for any given tactical or strategic situation, there is the standard solution, the way things have always been done and then there is the best solution and ideally they're one in the same but there's no real reason for us to expect that they always will be. The authors of our textbook solutions, they can't foresee everything, right? So we have to be thinking beings and oh, by the way, those other guys are potential adversaries who are trying to get inside that textbook and mess with it. So we always have to be looking for that best decision or that best approach. Sometimes that is the standard solution. Sometimes though the standard solution is like the surest path to disaster. Yet regardless of whether the standard answer is the best one, merely the safest or perhaps a bad way of going, our people are gonna reach for that textbook answer every single time if failure is punished. Novel approaches are just too risky given failure is not an option leadership. If however, our people know that regardless of the outcome, a well-managed risk will be tolerated and perhaps even rewarded, then they'll approach problem solving differently, preferring the best solution to the standard solution when they're not the same. When people work in risk-tolerant environments, not only are they more likely to discover the best solution to persistent problems, but because they are accustomed to working off-script, they're also gonna be better prepared when they are forced to work off-script, when something unique or novel comes their way. So like at the Battle of Gettysburg, failure really was not an option for Colonel Chamberlain at the left flank of Little Round Top, but clearly he was not operating under failure is not an option leadership. Judging from all of the inventive moves that you saw across the union lines those days, risk-taking and context-driven innovation was clearly what leadership out there was doing and was pushing. And the most famous example of that of course is the downhill bayonet charge, which if it didn't succeed magnificently, history would have questioned seriously. So the second mechanism by which failure is not an option, leadership institutionalizes mediocrity and I believe cowardice is by introducing disincentives to trying anything hard. So despite the I will not fail at the end of the seal ethos, every seal that's worth their salt has failed again and again and again. They failed repeatedly. Again, that's how you get at understanding where your limitations are in the first place. Where the system's gonna fail. But people who are taught not to fail, people who are taught to fear failure, they're never gonna get at these limitations, they're never gonna understand where they are and the result is going to be, we're gonna leave vast resources of human capability permanently unexplored and permanently untapped. Likewise, teams that fear the consequences of failure are gonna engineer training scenarios where success is virtually assured. I tell you, I have been in so many exercises like this where the victory party was pretty much on the schedule. We knew exactly when that was gonna be. It's like the Harlem Globetrotters, right? They're always gonna win just as long as they bring out that team that's being paid to lose to them and we do that to ourselves. So how are the Harlem Globetrotters gonna do when Golden State Warriors come out? They're gonna fail. So failure is not an option leadership. I believe has a chilling effect on ambition and vigor. It stunts personal and professional growth. Finally, when failure is not an option, personal and personal ethics may become a negotiation and a brief thought experiment illustrates this pathology. So imagine that you are preparing for a test and you can pay a few bucks and get an answer and let's say that people have been doing this for a long time, we sort of, yeah, I know, this is just sort of what we do. The chances of being caught are pretty slim. So would you cheat? Well, presumably you wouldn't. There really are no gray areas to this one. This is a right versus wrong. Pretty easy question. So now let's think about what if failure, what if the price of failure starts going up? What if the price of failure means you don't get that promotion? What if the price of failure means you lose your job? What if the price of failure means that your family is not going to be fed because we're in a really bad economy right now and I don't know where the next paycheck is gonna be coming from. So would you cheat then? Again, perhaps not. Most of us guard our integrity fiercely. The point, however, should be clear that as the cost of failure rises, as leadership increases our cost of failure, then the nature of the moral question has changed. As the previous speaker was talking about, it's no longer a right versus wrong question. Now we're in that question of two competing rights. It is good. It is good. Fair play is good. But so is feeding your family. So we increase those stakes. A more difficult question perhaps is, all right, what do you do if you observe somebody buying that test? Okay, so now what? What if one of your colleagues purchased the answer? Would you turn her in? The honor system of some of our finest institutions are built on that. They require, they need people to turn their friends in when something like that happens. Yet many universities, many of our top universities who have these cherished honor codes find that their students are surprisingly equivocal about this. And the reason is they see the death penalty for their friends. They see that the school's intolerance for failure means that, yeah, if I turn this person in, regardless of the circumstance of that person is out. And so many universities, despite, again, they cherish their honor codes, they have come back and said, okay, let's take a more sophisticated understanding of ethical failure and incorporate that. And then once the students understood that the death penalty had been lifted at most of these places, they started seeing more compliance with the honor code. So when cheating scandals at our service academies, at Ivy League schools, at nuclear missile commands, they shock our conscious as a nation. And justifiably, we question the character of the cheaters, and we should. But I'm suggesting it may also be illuminating to investigate what was the price of failure in each one of those situations. In short, I'd like to suggest to all future commanders that failure is not an option approach to leadership. A leadership style that is generally celebrated in our military and corporate cultures may in fact produce timidity and unethical behavior. Human social systems that do not accommodate for graceful failure inspire caution and rote adherence to standardized procedures. And organizations by contrast that tolerate honest failure, I argue, inspire moral and physical courage. So leaders should ask themselves and their key advisors, okay, is our command built for graceful or catastrophic failure? Okay, when our troops are driving to work, what are they thinking about when they're driving to the work? Are they thinking about, okay, how do I come up with that best answer today? Or are they thinking about, oh my gosh, I hope this isn't the day that I get fired for stepping out just a little bit, for taking a risk. What is the tenor of our dialogue? How many times do phrases come out like I will not tolerate, failure is unacceptable? How many times do they turn up in our instructions, in our standing orders? Do we encourage our people to be bold? And then the first time they do try something out of the box, we slam them when they get it wrong. Clearly there are cases where a zero defect mentality is absolutely correct. Clearly there are outcomes that assault our notions of decency and we have to nip those in the bud. But as the words I will not tolerate and as that I will not tolerate list expands to include lesser crimes and misdemeanors and even honest mistakes. And I have been in commands like this and I assume many others have. Then the unintended and unhealthy consequences that I discuss above, I think are absolutely predictable. So before I wrap up, most of my examples have come from the seal world and come from my own experiences which I guess is natural enough. So I think a good critique of what I'm saying here is that it's not generalizable. I'm suggesting it is. I'm thinking of just about any command and I'm thinking just about any organization and I feel that the idea of courage comes back to those four constitutive elements. As Dr. Cook mentioned, I in sort of an act of academic recklessness, my second year at the University of Virginia, I moved, I went off and went to the mountains of Wyoming and became qualified as a Knowles instructor. And I got introduced to the world of experiential education and outdoor education and I kind of got hooked on it. In fact, last summer I took a Naval Academy group out to the Absorcas. It was amazing, I really enjoyed it. And this has taken me in a somewhat strange direction. My plan had been to go ahead and seek that tenure track professor job somewhere but also to come back to Knowles once a year and get my fix for outdoor experiential education. And last year I was dipping my toe in the academic job market and one of my friends from Knowles shot me a job advertisement for the Outdoor Academy, this weird little semester school in the back country of North Carolina that focuses on experiential education. And he put a little smiley face emoticon afterwards. This is the job you should be looking for. Give up that tenure track thing. That's a waste of your energies. Anyway, I thought it was a joke and I didn't pay much attention to it and a little later on, I decided to open up that right before I was gonna trash it. I hit on the button and said, what is this? I didn't know a place like this existed. It's remarkable. So our mission is experiential education for young people, promoting the natural world and the betterment of human characters. It's like, wow, that's bold, that's kind of interesting. So I did explore it a little bit. And just enough that I put in an application, really kind of on a whim, I wasn't serious about it. But the same week that I had, I had two interviews lined up. One was at University of Pennsylvania, so great school, lobby league school. And then that same week, at the end of the week, I was getting an advertisement at the Outdoor Academy. The first interview I had at Penn was with three graduate or with three students. And yeah, it was a softball interview. It was a total softball interview. I think I was asking most of the questions. Like, okay, why are you at Penn? Do you like it here? What's new? And they were answering most of my questions. And then I went on to the real interview, which was tough. The next week, later that week, my first interview was with five 15-year-olds. I just got done with three dad gone Ivy League kids, five 15-year-olds. They're hobbits, man. This is gonna be easy. I'm gonna crush this. I sit down with the five hobbits, and I say, okay, so why are you at the Outdoor Academy? What have you learned here? What's good here? What's not so good here? And they were answering it. And finally this one young lady goes, hey, look, Roger, we've only got an hour here. And we got some serious questions to ask. So what do you think experiential education meets to you? And what would you do if you were the director? And then all five of the hobbits go, they start, they're just like this. And have you ever had that dream that you didn't study for a test? I'm like, ah, this is a real interview. And so I started just, yeah. And they're all writing this down. I was like, what are you kids writing down? Anyway, at the end, again, I came into this interview. I was surprised they even brought me in. I hadn't been in secondary education. And I came into it with really low expectations and didn't want to, this isn't the path I was gonna go on. But I left that interview in holy cow. And so what I saw was that in these students, these were courageous people. And what I have learned since is that organization, that's what they do. It is like a school of courage. And when I think about what we do every day, it's those four, those four constitutive elements. So again, I think I'm onto this. I think that this is generalizable. Self-knowledge that the students come there. In fact, this semester, they showed up in January. Within 24 hours, we were out in Pisgah National Forest and it was nine degrees outside. So they started learning a lot about themselves. Self-control, one of the things that we teach them in all of outdoor ed and in outdoor medicine in particular is when things start getting stressful, the first thing you do is, after you stop the bleeding, et cetera, is you smoke a cigarette, metaphorically. Parents would frown on that if we did that for real. Yeah, you smoke a cigarette, you wait. That's something that we're trained in the good infantrymen learn. Amateurs fire back right away. Professionals get down and figure out what's really going on before you shoot back. Love. We have all of our students, we take away their cell phones right there. We have all of our students vying for one landline phone. Somehow you got to figure that in that process. You develop that strong, powerful community and we go further than we do in SEAL Training by we do give them, we teach them how to do things like giving and receiving feedback. We do teach how you can thrive in community. And failure, absolutely. We, the last, this last trek we are on, the highest grades came from the class that was lost the longest. Well, they got the high grades because they did find their way back eventually. But they were lost for four days and it was like, yeah, that was great. That was pulling victory out of failure. So yeah, I do think that this is generalizable. I'm afraid I probably went a little longer than I should have. Just bear in mind that I'm afraid of Q&A after my UVA experience. So I tried to do this part as long as possible. But I will summarize quickly. I have argued that courage, which is the fundamental virtue of the profession of arms and I think many other professions, is a virtue that can and should be taught and learned. I discussed four constitutive elements that I would love to get your feedback on. First, armed with self-knowledge, a courageous person has learned to persevere when others have packed it in. She responds to real, not imagined human limitations. Second, armed with self-control, a courageous person has learned to be cool-headed when others panic. His mind is clear, his trigger finger, whether that trigger finger is real or metaphoric, is steady. The game slows down for him. Third, a courageous person has learned to love her teammates and is ready to sacrifice much and perhaps everything for them. And when she goes into harm's way, she knows that they have her back in every conceivable way. And finally, a courageous person has learned that he can take well-managed risks because he works in a climate that celebrates graceful failure. I am so grateful for the opportunity to participate in this extraordinary symposium. Thank you.