Thank you for joining us for episode 422 of Live Happy Now.

I'm your host Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with Brett Crozier, a 30-year Navy veteran

who became a household name when he stood up for his men and women during the pandemic.

As commanding officer of the USS Theodore, his actions led to his dismissal, but it also

provided an incredible example of leadership and following your conscience.

With his new book, Surf When You Can, Brett shares some of the many valuable lessons he's

learned as a military leader, and he's here today to talk about kindness,

relationships, and the importance of creating a life, work, balance. Let's have a listen.

Brett, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. Thanks, Paul. Happy to be here today.

We have so much to talk about. You have such an interesting story. And one thing that's

very unusual is that most people learned about you when you very publicly lost your job. And that is

not normally where we start. But I feel that's really a great starting point for us. So can you

recap that story for us? Sure. Yeah, I served in the Navy for 30 years. At the end, I was the commanding officer of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with about 5,000 people on board.

And in March of 2020, if we remember that time in all our lives, we were all trying to figure out what COVID meant and how to deal with the pandemic.

And the Navy was no different.

We unfortunately got some cases of COVID on the ship and if you've ever been on a Navy ship

or a cruise ship for that matter, that's not the place to fight a pandemic as it were.

It's a pejor dish. And we were doing all it's a petri dish and we were doing all we could to get

the help we needed and take care of the sailors. And know i think i think the leader's number one priority is to take care of the people that work for them and and so to that end i you know i sent an email asking for assistance and help because we just weren't was a lot of a lot of roadblocks i guess barriers that were preventing us from getting the help we needed as quickly as we needed it.

And in fact, it worked. I got the help we needed. But I got fired in the end because I think higher up in the military, maybe at the administration level at the time, there was concerns that it was bringing unwanted attention to this problem that obviously we were all coming to grips with. And so I got fired. But I say that. And I'll be honest, when I was reaching out for help and sent

the email, I knew that was a possibility. So when that came to be true, I left the ship and got a nice

send-off from the crew of 5,000, kind of thanking me for sticking my neck out, as it were.

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