Rye Barcott
Co-Founder and CEO, With Honor
This episode will premiere July 30, 2026 at 7:00pm ET
“Courage, as I define it in this book, is always contemplative. It considers the risks. … And then it makes a choice in the service of what the Stoics referred to as the common good.”
Summary
Over the last half-century, the share of veterans serving in Congress has fallen from nearly 70 percent to about 20. From Rye Barcott’s perspective, this decline has come at a real cost. Veterans in Congress vote across party lines at a higher rate than non-veterans and, along with nurses, are among the only groups that Americans still trust across the political divide. Veterans understand what it means to serve the country, and their increasing absence from the highest levels of government leaves a gap that is difficult to fill.
On this episode of Leadership Matters, I sat down with Rye to discuss the work that he and his organization, With Honor, are doing to fix that problem. With Honor is a cross-partisan nonprofit that recruits, elects, and supports principled veterans who pledge to serve with integrity, civility, and courage. Since 2017, it has helped elect more than one hundred veterans and national security professionals — fifty of whom now serve in Congress — and help advance more than two hundred bipartisan laws.
This battle is a personal one for Rye, who served five years as a Marine Corps officer in Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and Iraq, and has also co-founded a number of other organizations aimed at promoting the common good. Over the course of this episode, we discussed Rye’s background, the remarkable advice he’s received from figures like Colin Powell, and his latest book, Courage Can Save Us, which profiles ten Americans now serving in public office.
Amidst an age of rampant polarization, Rye makes a case that is both hopeful and clear-eyed: courage is, in his view, fundamentally a form of service, and service may still be the thing most likely to bring us back to one another.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Rye Barcott is a Marine Corps veteran, social entrepreneur, investor, and New York Times-bestselling author of Courage Can Save US. He is co-founder and CEO of With Honor, a cross-partisan organization that fights polarization by supporting principled veteran leadership in public office. As a college student, he co-founded CFK Africa (formerly Carolina for Kibera), a locally led youth leadership and public health non-governmental organization based in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. He later co-founded Double Time Capital, a solar power investment firm. His first book, It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace, juxtaposes humanitarian and military service in Kenya and Iraq. Following its publication, Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.