An Army of Normal Folks - Lt. Col. Scott Mann: Green Beret, Author, Playwright, Hero (Pt 2)

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Scott is the ultimate patriot and renaissance man. He served in Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, co-founded Operation Pineapple Express (which rescued over 750 Afghan allies), wrote the play “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” and is the author of the new book “Nobody is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret’s Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done”. Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army of normal folks and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Scott Mann right after these brief messages from our you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling.

It's a dance. Its tradition is culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport, from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture, we'll learn more about some of the most iconic heroes

in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts. Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs?

Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez-Rejón. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. Season two, season two. Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? And this season, we're taking a bigger bite out

of the most delicious food and its history. Saying that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba, and the piñucolada from Puerto Rico. So all of these, we thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the ninth century BC. BC?

I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Kultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation.

Hey, GB, explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith

and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked. Voila! You got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse conspiracy theories that we liked. Voila, you got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We think of Franklin as the doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time. I'm Evan Ratliff. Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time, we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history. His media empire makes him the most successful self-made businessperson in America. I mean, he was never early to bed and early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing

their hair in what was called the coiffure a la Franklin. And who's more relevant now than ever. The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's too old, and wants Washington to do it. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast,

Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out, like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Estelle Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha

B., Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. So whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on, this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major, Op. 16, No. 2 in C major"] And so that's what the work you were doing. And to do that work, you had to build trust, you had to make promises, back to what I was saying. And then, I don't want to make it a political show. Okay.

But then decisions were made that made men like you have to break their promises. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to kind of give you an example of the kind of guys that we worked with, one of my best buddies over there was a guy named Nizam, Sergeant First Class Nizami. And he was born into Kar Province

during the Soviet occupation. He doesn't know what day, but his father was a Mujadin. He was killed by the Soviets. Nizam grew up- For Mujadin, or the guy, freedom fighters who fought against the Soviet occupation. That's right. Who, by the way, the CIA trained, worked with,

and equipped with American military stuff to be able to fight Soviets in Afghanistan. And most of them ended up becoming Al Qaeda. Which, that's the craziest part. We trained them, we gave them their arms, and then they became Al Qaeda once they pushed Russia's ass out of Afghanistan. A large group of them did, became,

and it was because rather than advise them directly and give them the funds directly and the stingers directly, we gave them to the Pakistani ISI. And the Pakistani ISI created basically what you saw after 9-11, and what led up to 9-11. That was a Pakistani intelligence fostered thing. Whole different. It's a little inconvenient history Pete

that many people don't understand, but we cheered them on, fed them with intelligence, fed them with money and fed them with arms because the enemy of our enemy is our friend and they were Russia, they were kicking Russia's eye off Afghanistan, so yay, we love them. And then it turns around. And this is why I'm always really skeptical about things like Ukraine. It's not that I don't believe that Ukraine is a righteous endeavor. But if

you're not there on the ground, responsibly monitoring and advising the disposition of funds and weapons, you don't know what's happening. And then the second and third order effects of that downstream can affect our children and grandchildren in ways that we don't even understand. Which is Afghanistan. It's irresponsible. And, but bringing it back to Nazan, this guy, he grew up

and he was raised in the barn with the animals. His stepfather wouldn't even let him sleep inside. And when he was 17, the towers were hit, NATO soldiers came to the country and, and he just thought that was the coolest thing, kind of like Mark in the soda shop. And he joined the- Oh, I was just about to say, how ironic. Yeah, yeah. He joined the Afghan army as a, as a young man. And within a year, he was a commando. Within another year, he was special forces, Afghan special forces. And I spoke at his key, at his graduation, I was the keynote

speaker. And then he and I worked together down in southern Afghanistan in Kandahar on this village stability mission that I told you about. And he was amazing. He was so good at engaging the locals. And so imagine this Afghan SF operator alongside US SF operators. And the Afghan SF are leading the engagements.

And I just kept thinking to myself, this is it right here. This is how we change. This is how you do it. And Nizam was so good. And how many of these, what's that? I want to pronounce his name right. Nizam. Nizam.

The thousands and thousands of these guys. I mean, we stood up, we stood up at special forces and other special ops units, an Afghan special operations group. And they were commandos, like our rangers, special mission aviators. And for years, these guys from 2014 on, they did the bulk of the fighting. Nizam was so loyal. He was leading an operation of US green berets and he came up on a Taliban ambush and he knew he was hosed. And so he brought his weapon up to warn the guys and he took a round

through the face and he dropped, but he warned the And so he brought his weapon up to warn the guys and he took a round through the face and he dropped but he warned the guys in enough time to beat the ambush back. So they pulled him back. They tried to work on his face. The wound was so grievous they had to call in a dust-off helicopter and they sent him off and they thought that was it. And then five weeks later he came back on a resupply chopper with US dentures and started conducting operations again.

Holy smokes. And that's who this guy was. And even after I got out in 2013, he would call and check on my family, how they were doing. And then around 2017, 2018, we started noticing that he was demonstrating, because when I went home, and maybe we can talk about that, I had a pretty dark transition. I had a really rough transition mental health-wise. And we could tell that Nizam was going through the same thing in 2017, 2018. So we talked him into retiring. And that's where he was. He was out of the military, wanting to come to the United States on a special immigration

visa when everything started to fall apart in Afghanistan and nobody from the government would pick up the phone. He was hiding in his uncle's house like Anne Frank. The Taliban were texting his phone. They were closing in on him. And that's- They had his phone number? They had his phone number.

And that's what happened to a lot of the guys. So they were like terrorizing him, like we're coming to get you. The whole collapse of Afghanistan was a brilliantly executed SIOP by the Taliban who had the local phone numbers of all the fight, of all the Afghan forces. And they just started texting him

and they sent them pictures of their kids. Okay, this may sound like a dumb question. But I don't understand this. I don't understand. We had all these guys that we equipped. We had all these guys that we trained. They were already fighting engaged in the fight with our support. Yeah. Why? First of all, we're about to get into the beginning of so much of what you've done with this amazing background, but why couldn't they fight off the Taliban? They had the munitions and the people. And I don't mean that derogatorily toward them. I mean, it's a it's an honest curious question

Why didn't they just kick the Taliban's ass? I had they even without us they still had the money the munitions of the training There was a lot of corruption a lot of graft in the Afghan government bad and I don't want to make excuses for them It was terrible desertions and morale in the Afghan National Army were terrible. Were they? The numbers of it. And understand too that in our army, to be a member of the US Army, the Marine Corps, it's a point of pride, not just for the individual, but for the family,

the community. It's not that way in Afghanistan. Remember, this is a rural honor-based society based on what? The group, the community, the tribe. Most, the only way you live in a city a lot of times is if you've been booted out of the tribe, if you've been booted out of the clan. Really? And so a lot of these folks who are in the military have lost honor or have had to move away from their community. And there's not a ton of nationalist pride in a military. Now it was growing, it was getting better, but again, it takes time. You're talking about 20 years after 40 years of breaking it, if not longer. And so it was starting to happen. And the Afghan special operation guys in particular, about 30 K of them

in the war, they were amazing. They were on billboards. They guys were specially selected. They were the pride of Afghanistan. And they did 95% of the fighting. They took the war to the top. The last five or six years, it was enormous. And a lot of people don't know this. But overall, the Afghan military lost 100,000 people in combat. Wow. And the people don't know that. And when I hear people say they didn't fight, I'm like, well, yeah, they did.

But here's the thing. We built that military in our own image, square peg and a round hole, top down. We built them heavily reliant on sophisticated weaponry and equipment, which required a lot of contractor support. And so when they had to dominate the battlefield using a three to one ratio like we did, everything that we built with them was built in our image. And then all of a sudden, as we start to pull back in June of 2021, the administration decides we're pulling contractor support out.

And we pulled contractor support out of the country. So General Sammy Sadat told me on my podcast, he said, we were fighting in Hellman. And my air commander walked in with tears in his eyes and he said, sir, we can't fly today. The contractors are gone. And just like that, the Taliban rolled. Well, why don't we just hang out in a support role? Well, that was, you know, President Ghani came to the United States and asked the administration, please just, you know, keep your advisors. This is what we need.

And he had, they called it a wish list and they refused it. They didn't honor it. And then so then the only thing that was left was a residual force of 2,500 to at least keep like a counterterrorism force in the country. And a lot of the generals felt like if that stayed, that would work. But somehow this administration, and like you, I'm very apolitical on this, but look, you got to be accountable too. You got to talk about what happened. Trump's Doha deal was not a good thing. It marginalized the Afghan government and dealt directly with the Taliban. So it's setting in motion a very bad deal. Biden executed the deal, but then would not listen to

senior military leaders who were saying, at least leave 2,500 dudes. You cannot just rely on diplomacy in this country. It will fall. He didn't listen. Somebody advised him or he took the advice and he said, nope, we are fully out, where everything's coming out. And that's when the House of Cards fell. You know, that's when the Taliban looked at it and said, oh, we can just roll. But rather than rolling guns blazing, they were smart. They just sent texts. They just sent texts to local commanders,

pictures of their families. Were coming for you. Stack your arms over here, get out of your uniform, you'll be good, except the special operators. They said to them, oh, we have a special, special surprise waiting for you. Which was? And they would even tell the local commanders, turn them in

because they will not be forgiven. So they really said to these guys, you put your stuff on a pile and we'll forgive you and we'll leave you alone. Expect, except for the special ops guys, we're going to execute them and their families. There was no quarter given to them. And there was no quarter given to them. You know, some of them have now been co-opted, unfortunately, We're going to execute them and their families. There was no quarter given to them, and there was no quarter given to them.

Some of them have now been co-opted, unfortunately, and put into roles in the military because those guys have had to keep their families alive. But the wholesale abandonment that we practiced on them, they really had no recourse. There's nowhere to go. Afghanistan is surrounded by Iran, Tajikistan, Pakistan. Where are you going to go?

Uzbekistan. And all of those countries said, uh-uh, don't even think about coming here. Which is interesting because of the people that you were closest with were the special forces guys, interpreters and all these guys. Yeah, yeah. And so now they have nowhere to go.

Nowhere to go. Meanwhile, you're in Florida. Yeah, and I had actually retired in 2013. I didn't like where things were going. And so I decided to hang it up. And it felt really good, man. I had like, I was retiring on my terms. Monty and I were still together. The boys were still in the house

and I was gonna write a book on village stability. I had a job as a contractor. I mean, everything felt great, you know? But I'll tell you, Bill, after within like 72 hours of taking off those desert boots and putting on the Tampa Bay flip-flops, the snakes in my head started squirming. One of my old Vietnam SF buddies, Dave,

who's like a national treasure, this guy was on the original Jawbreaker team that went into Afghanistan, they brought him out of retirement. Really? Yeah, he's just a national treasure. This guy was on the original Jawbreaker team that went into Afghanistan. They brought him out of retirement. Really? Yeah, he's just a bad. And Dave told me over, I was bragging about all my transition plans

at a dinner in DC, and he just looked at me and tears in his eyes. And he said, when the snakes in your head start to squirm, I want you to call me, you promise? And I'm like, it pissed me off. I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm fine. I'm good, dude. I'm good, you know? me. You promise? And I'm like, it pissed me off. I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm fine.

I'm good. I'm good. You know, and it made me mad because I'm like, I wanted him to be proud of my plan, you know, and what I was doing. I didn't want to hear any of that, you know, veteran mental health crap. And-

He said the snakes in your head. The snakes in your head. Is that a fair metaphor? It is so accurate. It is so accurate. Explain it. Well, I found that when I got out, It's snakes in your head. Is that a fair metaphor? It is so accurate. It is so accurate. Explain it. Well, I found that when I got out, there was, it literally felt like things were slithering

in my head. Like I looked around at a country I didn't recognize anymore. I mean, people- Why? Well, the division in the country, the violence in the country. Sebastian Younger said it really well, and this is what I felt. He said, most combat veterans are willing to die for their country, but they have no idea how they're

supposed to live for it. Because it's hard to know how to live for a country that's tearing itself apart along every imaginable line from race to economics to politics. And that's what I saw. I came back home and I'm looking I'm like, this is Afghanistan. This is exactly what we've been over there fighting for all those years. And we're doing it here. That's what all my buddies died for? We'll be is back. Season two. Season two.

Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? Okay. And this season, we're taking a bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba and the piñacolada from Puerto Rico.

Oh, also. So, all of from Cuba, and the piñacolada from Puerto Rico. So all of these, we thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the ninth century BC. BC? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the MyCultura podcast network,

available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport

and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling. much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. It's tradition. It's culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of lucha libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar.

Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We'll learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my Kultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you stream podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Bajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey GB explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian,

now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning. In a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the grid iron and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked, voila! You got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea but worse if that's possible. Listen to Spiral'd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We think of Franklin as the doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time. I'm Evan Ratliff. Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time, we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history. His media empire makes him the most successful self-made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed and early to rise type person. He's enormously famous.

Women start wearing their hair in what was called the coiffure a la Franklin. And who's more relevant now than ever. The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's too old and wants Washington to do it. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch, and I'm exhausted. But turns out, the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight.

I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out, like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Estet Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well.

I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. Whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on, this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you find it interesting that Memphis, this is my town and I know these demographics that I'm going to give you, but it also, you can tag about 50 other

American cities with the same world, but I'm just going to say it to you. Memphis is 653 police officers short. We are a city that needs 2,600 police officers. And as of today, according to the United States Marshal Service I spoke to yesterday, we are 653 officers short. As a result, our current police department spends all of its shift time going to take reports from yesterday's calls. Okay, so call after call after call. So if I come on

shift today and I'm going to work 12 hours, I'm going to catch the overtime because there's not enough of us. All I'm doing is clearing all the calls from yesterday, going report after report after report just to keep the reporting and the basic services in. I don't have time to chase bad guys. I don't have time to do routine traffic stops. I don't have time. What happens now is I don't have time. So what happens now is little by little, your culture and your society get pulled apart at the fray, at the edges. All of that is because people don't want to be police officers. It's very hard to recruit people into police officers now because of trust depletement. Yes, yes.

And it's all, when you said that at the beginning, I can't quit thinking about it, but the truth is the community not trusting the police, the police not trusting the community, a person saying, I don't trust the job of being an officer, I'm gonna go do something else. And now not having a big enough police force to keep a civilized society in check,

which leads to more distrust. Because when that happens is we all, when you lose the rule of law, you don't lose justice. What happens is you revert back to primal justice. We're all primal. We're all, we all live at a baseline level, more like folks live in Afghanistan than in the modern world.

That's where we all come from. That's what we originated from. And it's what we go to when we're afraid. And so this notion of rule of law and institutional care and all of that, that's a construct. That's a social construct that must be preserved by responsible stewards and leaders. But as you've said, most of these leaders have abandoned their responsibility. I call them divisionists because they foment division

in the pursuit of their own narrow agenda versus a bridging approach, which is necessary to be a steward for all of these systems. Like those leaders have bailed. Right. And if we don't quote trust those leaders, we're not going to bond to the construct. Right. And there's an article in the Atlantic that says most social scientists agree that for a civil society liberal democracy to flourish, you need three things, right? You need trust in your neighbors, you need institutions you can trust, and you need stories that you believe in as a collective. How are we doing? So you come back from Afghanistan.

And none of those are there. Like, you know, and it was, I didn't have that kind of coherence. So you're fighting it and you're seeing the destructive of it. It's a different perspective but you're fighting for what you believe in and fighting against the breakdown or the lack of ever building of that social construct, that trust and then you come home and you see what you just left. I call it the churn and it just that churn that I'd seen all those years in Afghanistan was here. And I just thought, man, what was this all for?

And at the time, I had lost my purpose. I'd lost my passion. I'd left my identity in the team room. I didn't clock the idea that the Army doesn't get to keep those things that my mom and dad instilled in me. Those were the things I'd walked into the team room with, but I left them there. And so now I'm like, it's like, it was like,

I try to tell people when you leave the military, especially the special ops world, it's like you leave because it's a tribal society too. It's an honor based society where the team is everything. What you want is an individual doesn't matter. It's the collective. And then all of a sudden you come back to this world where everything's about the individual. Everything's about what you do in a contract transactional society that's not about the team. There is no team, it's you. And the team that you had is gone, they're back in Afghanistan.

And so you're trying to figure out what planet am I even on? And that was, for me, was the hardest part was I didn't, it was like changing planets. I felt like I was moving four feet off the earth just untethered all the time. And so I would put on a good face, everything's fine. But in reality, I was really hurting. And that's when the survivor's guilt, the PTS, all the stuff that I had pushed down for years to stay in the fight, it just came flooding in. And that's the snakes. And those were the snakes. And I didn't know what to do with them. And I was so scared that I was going to hurt somebody. And I was so scared that I just couldn't do this. I can't do this. And I would fall apart in the middle of the day. I would start crying.

I would lose my focus. And I thought, my God, I'm like, I was this high performing dude. I was doing all these things and now, like I can't even focus on, you know, a task without just falling apart, you know? And the boys, my three boys, that all these years I couldn't wait to be with them, would

get up and walk out of the room because they didn't know what version of dad they were going to get. You know? Monty and I didn't talk. It was just, it was, it was awful. And Monty, did you see it? Oh yeah. Yeah.

Big time. You can see it, you can feel it. And I'm just really helpless. I didn't know what to do because it felt like everything was so perfect. We're finally together. We're finally together. Yeah, big time. You could see it, you could feel it, and I just felt helpless. I didn't know what to do because it felt like everything was so perfect. We're finally together. We don't have to worry about these deployments anymore. Yeah, he's alive. Yeah, well, I mean, you had to have fear that didn't you live in fear of that call? I mean, you do, but you don't because you try to, my job was to just be with the boys

and help them live a normal life as they could, you know, with dad gone so much. And you try not to focus on that because there's just... Everybody listening to us needs to understand the sacrifice, certainly of Scott and his brothers, sisters in arms. But for God's sakes, we need to understand the sacrifice of Monty and the three kids and every single man and woman serving in combat roles overseas and the unbelievable sacrifice of their families. And then you get home and everything's good and then the snakes appear. Yeah, and it got so bad that there was one day

that I just, she left and I just, I'd been thinking about it a long time and I just thought, today's the day. You okay yourself? Yeah, and I was calm. I just walked into my closet, shut the door, cause I'd played it in my mind a million times, you know. And I just, all I could think of was, I'm a burden, you know. Like, this is better. It's just better this way, you know.

And I couldn't see, like I can't describe like the fog, but it was so heavy. And it was just, I just couldn't see any way out, you know. So I went in the closet, I got my 45 and was, it was in my hand against my face. And I heard a sound outside in the house and it was my son Cooper had come home. It was like I stood there and I thought, and I can remember thinking what kind of dad kills himself and lets his kid find him. So I put the gun up and my hands were shaking. That's when they started, they weren't shaking up until that point. I cleared it, put the gun up, locked it up and I walked out of the closet like nothing

happened. I was a wreck. Get myself together. And I walked out into the house just so ashamed and so embarrassed by that scar, you know, by that what I had almost done. And I still felt helpless. I still felt like I don't know how I'm going to live. And I went back in that closet again a couple of times, never to that close point, but I just was in this purgatory, man. I don't know how to describe it.

It was like a purgatory of being where you can't die and you can't live, you know? Do you think the snakes, I've never asked this question. I've interviewed five or six former combat military personnel and the snakes. No one ever said snakes, but snakes. Do you think the snakes are hatched from the humanity that you had to suppress

to be able to do your job effectively in Afghanistan? And then when you no longer have to suppress to be able to do your job effectively in Afghanistan. And then when you no longer have to suppress that, the humanity at odds with what your conscience recognizes was inhumane things you had to conduct yourself doing. I mean, I think there was definitely some version of that. I mean, I think there's a conflict. There's a conflict, but not as much as you would, I mean, for me, honestly, that part didn't bother me in what I,

it was the loss of friends that died. But that's what I mean, you about to be a human. It's not normal. No, no. At 20, 30, and 40 years old, it is not normal to watch your friends die. No, there's actually a thing out now called operator syndrome. Operator syndrome. And it's because they're really trying to take a crack at why

are so many special operators killing themselves and why are they going through what they're going through. And you know, the preponderance of the war was fought by special operators. I mean, that was, you know, the war a lot of conventional guys fought and God bless them and then not taking anything away from them. But the special operations op tempo was ridiculous. And the toll that that has taken with TBIs, traumatic blast injuries, sleep deprivation, and like you're talking about, just the survivor's guilt and all the stuff that goes with, you know, PTS as well. All of that, all I know is I pushed all of it down.

I had not dealt with any of it. And all of a sudden it just came screaming in and that's what Dave was talking about. Was those, cause it all became just one slithering lump of crap. Like I couldn't clear it, you know? And I did end up talking to him. I did end up talking to other folks.

And the thing that kept coming back to me, and my dad helped me with this too, and Monty was the one that helped me more than anybody, but I realized I just wanted to be relevant again. I just wanted to be in the game again, you know? And I didn't know how to do that. I looked at what was happening in the country, at the lack of trust and the loss of just connection.

And I thought, well, I know what that is. Now, isn't that interesting? I know what that is and I know how to deal with that. And what they're trying to do to deal with this is actually taking them the other way. Like, this is novel. This is not something what got us here ain't gonna get us there. But every time I would try to talk about it,

every time I would try to address it, I would lock up. Like, my throat, I would feel like an imposter. I would go through all kinds of anxiety. I couldn't talk. I couldn't speak. We'll be right back. Season two, season two. Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? OK. And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out

of the most delicious food and its history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba, and the piñuculada from Puerto Rico. So all of these, we have, we thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the ninth century BC. BC?

I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lucha Libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. Its tradition is culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of lucha libre. And I'm your host Santos Escobar, the emperor of lucha libre and a WWE superstar. Santos! Santos!

Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my cultura podcast network on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you stream podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation.

Hey, GB, explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved.

You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked, voila! You got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We think of Franklin as the dodging dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time.

I'm Evan Ratliff. Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time, we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history. His media empire makes him the most successful self-made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed and early to rise type person. He's enormously famous.

Women start wearing their hair in what was called the coiffure a la Franklin. And who's more relevant now than ever. The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's too old. And wants Washington to do it. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted, but turns out the end is near right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Astead Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod.

But we're also going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha B., Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. So whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on,

this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I knew I had something to say and I wanted to, so poor Monty, I told her I think I know what I want to do but I've got to figure out how to do it. So I just started going to like conferences around the country. I would sit in these conferences, these speaker conferences, and I would just sit there and I would listen to all these people about how to be a speaker. And I'm sitting there. No, I'm serious. And it's what you know, it's actually funny, but you know, it's those ones like out in California where the speaker comes

out and everybody's like, yeah, yeah, all that. And it's in, and I hated it. But I'm one. And so I was at this one in California and it was terrible. And I was getting ready to leave. And they said next guy coming up is Bo Eason. And Bo is I looked at the thing. He's a former NFL football player. Free safety voted the dirtiest free safety in the NFL when he played for the Oilers.

And Bo is now they said he's a former actor turned playwright, turned storyteller. And I was like, I'm going to be Bo Eason. So I'm watching, he comes out on the stage and he's moving on that stage and he's prowling that stage like an operator, you know? And I'm not kidding. It was like seeing Mark in the soda shop. No kidding. he's like an operator, you know? And I'm not kidding, it was like seeing Mark in the soda shop. No kidding. And nobody in the audience was moving, everybody was breathing in unison,

and he was telling a story about being a runt and becoming an NFL football player and how he was an imposter. Now that is the greatest juxtaposition ever. I never saw it coming. You're doing really good job in storytelling right now, because that's it. Yeah.

That was your second. Yep. That was your second introduction to how to conduct your next stage of life. And so I'm watching him. Right. And my hand is, yes, that is it. At 14, you got your first win and Bo.

And it's hitting me. It's hitting my body as I'm watching him. Like I'm reacting. You're having a visceral reaction. I'm having a visceral reaction to this cause now I'm like, it's becoming clear to me and I'm watching him move on that stage and then he says this, he blew his knee out for the seventh time and they're carrying him off the field and he knew that was it. And there's a picture of him being carried off the field and you can see he's not even focused on the, he's not even worried

about the fact that he's not playing in the NFL anymore. He's moved on. And he said, what was running through my mind was, I'm going to go to prison. If I don't learn how to take this TNT that is inside me and put an end to the world for something good, I'm not going to make it. And I was like, oh my god. And I just went up to him afterwards, and I elbowed my way through everybody.

And I was like, I got to work with you. And I told him, and he looked at me like, he was like, what the hell? But he listened to me and he said, I'm going to help you. Here's my number. And the dude trained me for two years on storytelling. Wow. And it changed, it saved my life. That is the greatest part of your story I've heard yet. Yeah? Yeah.

It's redemption, bro. And what I tell people about... And this guy, the dirtiest safety in the world, ultimately, I'm not, I don't want to overdo it, but if not saving your life, directing it. He saved my life. He's the one that talked me into the play that I wrote. All of it. He saw in me, like when Mark looked at

me at 14, he saw what I was at 28. And Bo saw the same thing. And from that point on, and I could tell he saw it. You know, and he told me, he said, if you work with me, you're going to have to, it requires emotional access. Did you immediately, did the snakes go away? Almost immediately. I mean, at first there was resistance. Like he had me, one of the things he had me do was say the names of all my guys. Oh boy. And I had not done that ever.

He made you do it. And he's like, if you're going to tell the story, you have to say their names and you have to let them be with you. And I fell on the floor and I cried and I kicked and he had a counselor right there as he's doing this. And I'm screaming and I finally, I spit their names out and I say, and I'm just like, and he looked at me and he said, now we can get started. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Were any of those guys Afghans? Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Were any of those guys Afghans? At that time, no.

And there were plenty. What about now? Yeah, now. Yeah. I'm able, in fact, I talk about Afghan brothers, you know, right in there with my special operations to come. I think that is so important for our listeners to hear. Absolutely.

We automatically assume that you lost American brothers and sisters in arms that led to the snakes. What I have learned from talking to just a handful of guys like you is now after more progress and more time, there's Afghan brothers and sisters in arms that there's Afghan brothers and sisters in arms that deserve our respect and admiration just as much. The last three years in particular has been so terrible because they've all been abandoned. They've all been left behind. Which is a great deal because I want to get to the book and the playwright, why you're a member of the Army of Normal folks, and why I think what you have to say and what we're trying to do

are absolutely parallel with one another. But that's a good time for you to tell us. You are now fully, you are snake depleted, full on Tampa flip-flop, living in Florida, and your phone starts blowing up. Yeah, yeah, well, once I started the storytelling, three Ted Talks, Keynotes, a lot like you, I started really going on to, because I felt like the storytelling was cathartic for me,

and it was my bridging vehicle to reach people. And that's what I was- Which is beautiful. Yeah, and even the play that I'd written, I saw in 2017 that the country didn't even know we were in Afghanistan. And Bo's like, do a play. They'll know do a play. So so we're talking we're telling a guy who has never written never anything like that

is like, hey, quote, do a play. So I just started writing it and then Monty started helping me because I would write things about it. It was started out as a one person show about a Green Beret sergeant that, based on three sergeants I lost in combat. So he became master sergeant Danny Patton, a composite character.

And I'm writing about him as a one person show. And I'm talking about like what Danny's wife did and said, Monty's like, that's not even close to right. Like, what are you talking about? And she would, you know, and I'm like, oh, wow. And so as it as she started to weigh in what her life experience had been, it started to open up and I'm like, oh, this is a lot of perspective. Yeah, this is not a one person play. This is this is a full on ensemble. So it

ended up being a play about a Green Beret sergeant that's killed in the he's mortally wounded in the middle of the beginning of the play. And he's trying to ascend to the warrior resting place of Valhalla, but he's, he's stuck between his fire base and his living room, and he can't ascend. So his best buddy comes down from Valhalla, who was killed in the Pentagon based on my best buddy,

and with other operators, and they become the people in Danny's life that made his heart pump the most blood. They become his wife, Lynn. They become his son, Kayden, they become his arch nemesis Saeed Wali and Colonel Smith, and they take Danny through his life from the time he joined the military, special forces, 9-11, got married, had a kid, all the deployments until he finally figures out it's coming off the rails, what he's holding on to, and he lets go. And he does it in front of the audience. It's coming off the rails, what he's holding onto, and he lets go. And he does it in front of the audience. It's this full cathartic ascension that happens.

And every member of the cast is either a combat veteran or a military family member. And so it became like this whole thing that traveled the country, 28,000 miles on the U-Haul van. We did it as a nonprofit. All of our touring company. You acted in it. Then I decided I'm going to play the lead character because I thought, and

Monty was like, you're what? And so I secretly went to New York for a year and studied under Larry Moss and Carl Bury, because they were so, they thought the novelty of this guy, 50, talk about a midlife crisis, you know, that wants to do this. And so they trained me. And so I trained for a year and then we debuted it at the Marriott because no theater in Tampa would rent to us.

And it ended up becoming a tour and eventually was picked up by Gary Sinise and produced as another tour. And that's what I was doing when Afghanistan fell. I've met Gary Sinise a couple of times. He's an amazing guy. He, so when Afghanistan fell and we stood up this group of veterans that we called the Pineapple Express, Gary Sinise contacted me because he had been contacted by a guy named John

Androsik from Five for Fighting who was getting musicians out of the country. And I had met John. Oh really? Yeah. I'd never even heard that story. That's interesting. And he and I met each other and I told him about the play which we had turned into an Amazon film during COVID. And he watched it. And he said Gary Sinise need to see this. And I was like, dude, I've been trying to get this from Gary for six years. Good luck. And he's like, no, he's we talked in my driveway. I walked in my driveway for two hours just talking and he said, okay, I did a play like this after Vietnam called Tracers to help Vietnam veterans. We're going to do this.

This needs to tour. How soon can you get the cast together? And I was like, you don't want to do a contract or anything? He's like, no, we're going to be ready. And we went and we did it. We toured another nine cities for an entire year in 2023 to help heal after the Afghanistan collapse. So the play was very much, it's been a big part of our life and it was all grassroots, man. Almost everybody in the play has not been a professional

actor. We travel with our own counselors, 250-pitch PTS interventions in the lobbies. How, that's, there, that part. Say that again. Yeah, so what we found was we would get jammed up in different scenes because they're so visceral. So we started traveling with a counselor. Yeah, although it's a piece of fiction, it is all based around people that you knew and likewise. All the scenes are true.

And likewise, all the scenes are true. And likewise, many of your audience members, as they're watching this, they must be having this reaction to it. Because even though, I mean, all of that is just real to them, right? It is. And what I wrote the play,

cause I wanted to inform civilians like you've been doing on the cost of modern work, cause they just didn't understand at all. And I wanted to validate those who had lived it. And I wanted it to happen at the same time at a community level in a theater where they're all sitting together. Democrats, Republicans, politicians, wounded guys, all that. Gold Star family members all

there. And so then we do the play. Everybody goes on this ride with Danny and his family. And then at the end when he ascends and the play ends, we have a talkback. And sometimes the talkback will last as long as the play. That's phenomenal. We'll come out and the actors sit on blocks and we're all veterans and family members. So we lead the talkback with the community. But the coolest thing is that's when the community stands up and a Gold Star mom says, I saw my son tonight. And you're like, what do you even say to that? You know, but she says it in front of her neighbors and they get to hear that and they get to feel that more importantly. And everybody just leaves there changed with a new fundamental understanding of what it means to serve at that level. And you also have people there to talk to folks who have snakes.

So we have counselors, we position our counselors near the doors and then we have a couple of spotters. Because what will invariably happen is members that are watching the show, they'll have a visceral reaction that's emotional and they need to get away. And we're not doing it to rattle them, the play's just realistic, but they have the reaction

and then we will intervene in the lobby and help them bring themselves back down to a parasympathetic state and they're most likely not getting help. That's what we learned is they're not getting help. And so we make sure that we help them immediately right then. We stay with them. Most of the time they go back in the show and they go for the rest of the ride and they

participate in the talk back and they actually tell us what an amazing experience it was. And then we run a storytelling workshop for them the next day that they can come and tell their story. And we have counselors there. But we also connect them to local counselors to make sure that they've got it. Because if you go see Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge and you're a medic or a combat veteran or a first responder and you walk out and I'm not blaming those films, but what do you do? Who puts you back together? Right? So we try to take a very, very intentional

effort to use it as an opportunity to spot and assess those that are not getting help and intervene immediately. And we've done over 250 interventions on the road and it's been, it's been wildly effective. It is phenomenal. We call it our emotional breaching tool. That a play can be therapeutic and even lead to deeper therapy. But you know what? Civil society has been doing this for thousands of years, Bill. If you think about returning warriors, they sat around a fire, they told stories, the warriors told stories, and the community listened.

And that cathartic experience is what storytelling, it's actually how storytelling came around. You know, actually what we're doing is not just about the story, the warriors told stories and the community listened. And that cathartic experience is what storytelling, it's actually how storytelling came around. Actually what we're doing is not new, it's just we've forgotten how to do it as a civil society. Most countries do this when their warriors come home. We don't, we just throw them into the game and give them a job and a ticket to a ball game.

Well intended, well intended. And I'm not diminishing that, but that's not, we need these guys and girls back in the game. Well intended. Well intended. And I'm not diminishing that. But that's not... We need these guys and girls back in the game. We need them leading us here at home. The country is so divided right now. I think personally, our Global War on Terror veterans, in my opinion, the 1.8 million of them, they're our last best hope for this country, in my opinion. Because they represent a core fiber of character that, if put into play, could bring us back together. It's a long shot, but I think they could. Especially if they're working with leaders like you at the civil society level, at the community level, there's no ceiling to what can be done. I look at Ben and Jess Owen, what they're doing

here in Memphis, in South Memphis. I look at Al, who I met last night that's doing his outreach with veterans. They're all veterans. And I'm not saying you have to be a veteran to do this. I'm saying it's not about giving them a blanket. There's a community there. It's about getting them in the game because they've gone to places and led through situations

that would make most diplomats spit up a hairball, right? And they know how to lead in ways that are so contributory. But instead, we're medicating them. We're sitting them in a corner. We're telling them they're victims. You know, we're not engaging them and empowering them to lead us. And that's what the play is about, really. The play is about breaching those emotional walls so that we can have the hard conversations that we've gotta have. So everybody's gonna know where can I watch this? How can I see this? It's on Amazon Prime right now. Shameless plug. We're gonna give it. Yeah. And the title? Last Out, Elegy of a Green Beret. Last Out, Elegy of a Green Beret. Elegy is a lament for the dead. All right. So there's the first plug of many coming.

So the phone started during all of this, which is honestly born out of your therapy, really. It was. Right? Monies. And Monies. But that's what it is. Yep. And beautiful, we're on our way, right? But your phone starts ringing with the claps.

Yeah, we had just put the film up on Amazon. Like we were getting ready to debut it and Nizam started sending me signal messages. You know the signal app that's encrypted? And he's sending me these, and it was, hey, this province has fallen. This district has fallen. This district has fallen. I'm thinking, this is the spring of 2021. And I'm thinking, that's really weird. I've never seen this many. Are you at this point, when I read this about your story, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but are you,

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but are you... As part of you, like, the snakes have gone, I'm moving on, I'm trying to help this. Why are these people in Afghanistan dragging me back to this bull... Nailed it. That's exactly how it is. I would have been thinking, enough. Have I not given enough? Leave me alone.

That's exactly what I felt. Monty was, we were talking about it, we were like, Brayden, our youngest, was getting ready given enough? Leave me alone. That's exactly what I felt. Manny was, we were talking about, we were like, Brayden, our youngest was getting ready to go move into his apartment. I was finally going to be there for something for one of my kids. Yeah, now you're calling me back to Afghanistan. And so I'm getting these signal messages from Nizam and it started, he's just letting me know what's happening because we stayed in touch, checked in on each other and he was hiding in his uncle's house. But I could tell he was scared. It was bad. He was waiting on his visa because he was already out of the army. So I was like, okay, all right, look, I'm going to make some phone calls and we're going to see if we can't

get your visa accelerated. I still know a few people in the army. Let me see what I can do. So I start calling people and meanwhile though other buddies are calling me Going hey going hey, man Talking to my interpreter and they said that Harat just fell the disk You know the province of Harat fell and I'm like, yeah heard the same thing and Because we've worked in that country a lot of years and you don't you know every now and then a province or a district Center will fall and then it'll be reclaimed by the army now. They're falling like dominoes No one on the news is talking about it. The administration's not talking about it. And we're all going,

if these provinces keep falling like this, this thing's gonna go. And so- And meanwhile, all these people we made all these promises to that fought and bled alongside us, they're screwed. Right, so I'm calling like guys at Fort Bragg and I'm telling them, hey, Nizam is calling me

and I'm just checking on his visa because Nizam is calling me and I'm just checking on his visa because Nizam is not only an Afghan commando and Afghan special forces, he went to our Green Beret qualification course. He is a certified 18 Bravo US weapon sergeant. He is one of our regiment. So I said to this officer and he said, yeah, we've got a special list for those guys. We're working it. I was like, OK. Work faster. Yeah. And so I let Lizan know that and it starts getting worse and worse and worse.

I called. Now they're not taking my calls. And at some point I talked to Monty and I said, nobody's coming. Nobody's coming. These guys are on their own. And it wasn't. And then on August 15th, three years ago, that was a Sunday, I get a text from one of my buddies. He said, hey, it's a veteran. He said, are you watching the news? And I said, no.

And he said, turn it on. And so I turned on the news, which I never watch. I cannot watch the news. I turned it on and I see Afghan Taliban rolling into Kabul on our gun trucks in our uniforms, wearing our kit, carrying our carbines and terrorizing Afghans on international television. And I'm standing there just trying to make sense of it. And my phone, it's blowing up, and then it rings and it's Nizam. And I knew something was up because he was calling me voice. And he said, you know, sir, it's over. He said the Taliban are here. They're texting my

phone. They're circling the block. I'm hiding in my uncle's house like Anne Frank. The president has left the country. The generals have taken the money. The commandos have disbanded. And then he just got quiet. And I'm out in my backyard because I didn't want money or anybody to hear it. He's on speaker. And he said, you know, I never worried about dying. I just never, I never thought I would die alone. God. And I just thought. That had to just crush you, bro. Oh, it was the worst possible thing that happened that day. And I just said, the only thing I could think of is, look, Sergeant, you're not going to die alone.

You're not going to die at all. In fact, you're going to get your little ass across the city. You're going to get past the checkpoints. You're going to go to the airport. You're going to get into the crowd. You're going to go to East Gate. We're going to get you out of here. You're going to get pulled in.

You're going to go to C-17. You're going to fly to the United States. Not just anywhere. You're going to Riverview, Florida. You're going to be my neighbor and you're going to get you out of here. You're going to you're going to get pulled in. You'll get a C-17. You're going to fly to the United States. Not just anywhere. You're going to Riverview, Florida. You're going to be my neighbor and you're going to work in my nonprofit. Are we clear, Sergeant? And he has this little Arnold Horschach life he does like from Welcome Back Carter that he doesn't believe anything. And and and I knew that Arnold Hoyt,

you just devote Arnold Horschach on my podcast. It's what we call narrative competence. Well done, sir. Thank you. Thank you. But I could tell he'd kind of dialed back in and I just said, charge your phone, pack a bag and be ready. And then I started calling buddies that had known him and loved him. And we started putting a plan together using our cell phones, our relationships and the

knowledge of the country. And basically worked to just surreptitiously move him through the city, get him close to the airfield. He did the rest. He got within five feet of the guards. And then this was like 96 hours of just not sleeping, being on our phones like this all the time. And poor Nizam had been beaten and, you know, been through it and dehydrated in that

hot sun, crowd of thousands. And then he texted me and he said, sir, I'm sorry to tell you this, but the Marines are getting ready to toss me. I don't have my paperwork and my phone's on 10% power. And I thought, man, the Taliban have formed a ring of security around the airport. So if he gets tossed, they're going to check him. He's done. He's going to be executed. And the only thing we had was a phone number to a diplomat named JP. We didn't know the guy's last name. And so one of our guys called the guy and he's

like, you could tell he was smoked. He was exhausted. And he's like, I don't know. You guys heard my phone's blowing up. What do you want? And told the story about Nizam and what he'd been through, being shot through the face being a US Green Beret. And JP said something to the effect of that I tell you guys I was a Green Beret before I was a diplomat. And no. And he said, all right, they're going to throw him out. If you don't get him to say the password.

What's the password? Pineapple. Tell him to say pineapple as loud as he can. That's where Pineapple Express goes. We're like, dude, say pineapple. So we ended up going up to this guy at the gate and he's like, excuse me, sir, I'm the pineapple. I am a pineapple.

They let him through. That became our first passenger through and then over the next six days, a group of veterans. Then what happened, I just fell on my knees in the driveway and Monty thought something had happened to him. I'm like, no, baby, he's out. We're done. And then my phone just started blowing up. I feel like just hearing the story, I just breathed heavy. You had to have just felt like the world came off of.

Oh man. And when he was out and we saw a selfie of him standing by the plane with his family, I just thought it's over. We did it. It's done. I can be done with that. I can relax and go back to writing plays or something. Yeah, because that's, I mean, I was, look, at this point I've been out of the army 10 years. I'm an actor, a playwright. I'm not your number one draft pick for Hostage Rescue. You've had your seventh ACL blowout. That's right.

You're out of the game. I'm not the guy. I'm moving on. I'm not the guy. But that was what was so ironic about it, was then my phone started blowing up, and it was other veterans. Saying, hey, you got this dude out.

I need help with the lab people. Yeah, I've got 10 interpreters plus families. I've got 25 NMRG plus out. I need help with work. Yeah. I've got 10 interpreters plus families. I've got 25 NMRG plus families. I have five cost. What was the NMRG or the national mine reduction group? These were the guys who actually I've read about. They're amazing. They took, they ate, they, they sucked down IDs for us. Like they're the most trustworthy dudes. Once again, for those of you who think the Afghans weren't willing to fight, these are guys who went out and cleared minefields before American soldiers went in. American SEALs and Green Berets, you know.

They saved American lives. Yeah, and they were completely on the run being hunted. And so we, what we started to do was we formed a group of veterans then in a signal chat room and we said, we're now called Task Force Pineapple. We'll be is back. Season two, season two. Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out

of the most delicious food and its history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba, and the piñuculada from Puerto Rico. So all of these, we thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the ninth century BC. BC?

I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of a little guy. The rush is queasy and of course you can.

It doesn't get more Mexican than this. It's a race on globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment which Lucha libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. Its tradition is culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of lucha libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of lucha libre and a WWE superstar.

Santos. Santos. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from Escobar, the Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you stream podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, GB, explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest.

I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories

that we liked, voila, you got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral'd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We think of Franklin as the doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time. I'm Evan Ratliff. Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson.

This time, we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate to be dusted off from history. His media empire makes him the most successful self-made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed and early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing their hair in what was called the coiffure

a la Franklin. And who's more relevant now than ever. The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin, but he's too old and wants Washington to do it. Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out, like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki,

Astead Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also gonna have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne the God. We're gonna take some viewer questions as well.

I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. So whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on, this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the main guys in Pineapple was a Green Beret turned Syracuse middle school teacher named Zack. Why wouldn't he?

Why, an amazing dude who came- Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe will tell you the most influential teacher that he had was a former military guy that taught music at his high school. It's funny you say that because Mike and I had zoned in on Zach and I think he told me the same thing. And Zach, because we were kind of at a loss, we'd gotten his arm out, we'd gotten a few others out, but it was flooding the gates. Imagine these young troopers on the gates, and you got thousands of people holding their babies up,

little, you know, they're turning purple in the sun, and certificates from when they worked with the military, and you're a 19-year-old Marine, you're like, I don't know who's who, there's no vetting criteria. So what we figured was the best we could do- Probably feeling like crap. Yeah, and hating it.

And so what we figured was, we worked in this country multiple years, we know who the commandos are, we know who the SF guys are, we know who all the special ops guys are and the interpreters. They trust us and they're tactically trained. We can move them remotely, responsibly, and then they can present themselves in a pre-coordinated fashion to the guys at the gate at the right time, right place. And it becomes an operation, and they can pull them in and they know they're vetted.

So that became what we were like, that's what we need to be focused on. But we couldn't figure out, Zach kept weighing in. He had come to us through LinkedIn, he was much younger than us, and he's like, you know, we're studying Harriet Tubman right now, and we need somebody on the inside. We need an underground railroad, but we can't do the underground railroad unless we have somebody on the, we need conductors.

And so Congressman Mike Waltz's staffer, who had been helping us, said, I might have somebody. And it turned out it was a company commander and a first sergeant from the 82nd Airborne who were not on the line. They were back from the line. Jesse and John and their company had helped Mike Waltz's interpreter get out because she was pregnant and she was inside the airfield and she was going into premature labor. And they helped her. And they ended up talking to Kelsey and said, if you need something something we might be able to help with some more. And Kelsey mentioned that to Zach and he's like, that's it. That's it. And so we got in touch with the company commander and the first sergeant. We laid out the plan and basically the plan was at a designated time

and designated place, each shepherd, as we were called, who was working with their own interpreters, their own nizams, they would work with them on their own signal channel. And then in the main signal room, Zach would put out time and place in coordination with Jesse and John for link up. And then that would be given to each of the shepherds who would then compartmentalize pass it to their people. They would move their families tactically to loiter areas like a Chicago airport lining up for approach. And then at the right time, right place, Jesse and John would get behind the barriers of the blast walls with a green chem light.

And then we would send baseball cards of each family with the head of the family, a picture, their names, and the number in the party. And that would go to Jesse and John. So they would have that standing behind the barrier. And then when Zach would open the express, he would go up in the signal room and say, it's open. Everyone would have that standing behind the barrier. And then when Zach would open the express, he would go up in the signal room and say, it's open. Everyone would have order of movement.

The first family would come up. They would drop into the sewage canal, which the Taliban would not get in because it was too nasty. Told it. We hadn't even brought up the sewage canal. Do not think some concrete culvert that you're ankle deep in. We're talking these people were dropping in literal rivers. Raw sewage.

Of raw sewage. Yeah, and standing in it for hours with their children who was up to their nose in it in the 105 degree sun. Yeah. Go ahead. But if they, what we figured was if they dropped in the sewage canal, that was a mobility corridor that the Taliban wouldn't get in and they wouldn't get beaten.

And so they could move through, you know, pick your poison, right? So they could move through the canal. And then when they got to where Jessie, they would see the green chem light, then they would hold up a pineapple on their phone. And then when Jessie or John saw the pineapple, they would challenge, it's called challenge and password. They would challenge them with name and number in your party. The head of the household would say his name, number in the party, and then he would say,

we're going to pull you. They would pull him out of the canal. Jesse and John and Doc Gundy and a couple of the guys from the company would pat him down, search him, make sure they were clean, and then move him to a four-foot hole in the fence. Then onto their Hilux trucks to apron eight, where they had discovered that the State Department quick exit on that side when they had helped the female that was pregnant get out. They had discovered that part of the, you know, how they could, and made coordination and rapport.

So it was a full express. So we started moving hundreds of people out over two periods of darkness. One of the people that were in this sewage ditch was like one of the highest ranking women. She was the most wanted woman in Afghanistan. She was the minister of women's affairs, Hasina Safi. And here's the part that was amazing. I mean, that's not like that's if you compared that United States government, that would be like the secretary of interior. Yeah, but we're talking about a high ranking woman. And think about the- Who was up to her nose in little rivers of crap to survive. And the audacity in Afghanistan of a ministry of women's affairs. How bad did the Taliban want to get a missile on her neck?

They wanted to make a point of that. And the thing was, none of the, and I'm just going to say it, the US government, State Department, nobody got her out. Nobody thought to get her out. Nobody cared. And there were people trying to contact the State Department desperately to get her out, including a former ambassador who was trying to be her shepherd and get her out.

Nobody from the government would respond. So she ended up getting moved into the express. And what was cool about it, all of the shepherds who moved her, she was the matriarch of the family who moved her family through. She was the matriarch, not the husband. All of the shepherds that guided her were women. No. Yup.

All women, former ambassadors, just these bad-ass Spartan American women that were on the phone guiding her. And she was terrified of soldiers. Her father had been beaten by Russian soldiers back in the day, and so the thing that scared her the most was getting down in that ditch. It wasn't the Taliban, they'd already beaten her.

It was the US soldiers. She was terrified about that. But she got down in the ditch when it was time to go, and she was panicked, and she's like, I cannot, and this big, hulking guy named Jesse, the first sergeant of the 82nd Airborne that was part of our operation, he calls her name and her name's really shaking

and she says it and he reaches his hand down into the ditch and she grabs it and this is her perspective. And she said, she looked up at him and he said, I'm Jesse, you're safe now. And he pulled her up. And she said that when she said when I went in that ditch, I had five brothers. And when I came out, I had six. Wow. And to this day, they're still in contact. He gave her the American flag off his shoulder. He waited with her at the aircraft for the plane to pick them up. And to this day, still is in contact with her.

How many lives did Pineapple Express save? We estimate between 750 and a thousand. From a bunch of retired army dudes fighting off snakes and flip-flops with cell phones, off snakes and flip-flops with cell phones. You did what the United States government wouldn't or didn't. I don't know the right word. Monty asked me, why are we doing this? Why are we bringing all this up? He's like, I don't want to see you in that closet again. What are we doing? I said, our boys are watching us right now. Our boys are watching us right now. They're looking to see what we do. You know, and I can't do this. I can't, I cannot just sit here. No, you cannot, sir. No, you cannot.

We have so much division, so many problems in this country. We have so much division, so many problems in this country. And if we normal folks don't have the courage and the temerity to not only face our own demons, but face the demons that our culture and society are facing today, then we get what we deserve. A hundred percent. And we're not that far away from getting what we deserve if we don't move. Like, we're running out of time. Somebody, it wasn't Confucius, but it was, I think it was Plato, said the penalty for not engaging

in politics is you end up being governed by your inferiors. Yeah, but yeah. Likewise. Yeah. The penalty for not meeting each of our own demons and engaging in our culture today is we will end up living as our inferior. Yeah, you surrender your agency. You surrender your autonomy.

It's like when you were in that interview talking about driving by a neighborhood and looking in there and going, you know, somebody ought to do something about that. The real action is to tilt that mirror up a couple of degrees and look at that, because that's the somebody. You know, and I- You and me, bro. And I firmly believe that.

I mean, and I only tell you that, Bill, because I saw it in some of the most trust depleted violent places on earth, where when that mentality was put in play, I can remember team sergeant saying to me, or senior NCO, sir, nobody's coming. It's just us, we got a good team, we're gonna be fine. You know, and sergeant saying to me, or senior NCO, sir, nobody's coming. It's just us. We've got a good team. We're going to be fine.

And then all of a sudden, two months later, that team has totally changed the dynamic of that community. And that community's standing up on their own. And I saw it over and over and over again. And I saw it with the play. I saw it with pineapple. And I honestly believe that we are on the cusp of what Robert Putnam described as an upswing in his book, Bowling Alone.

We are in a downswing period right now, but the same way that in the early 1900s you saw Alcoholics Anonymous and Rotary Club and Junior League and all the things that we grew up with that our parents were part of that was part of that bridging social capital that we started to lose in the early 70s. I think we're on the cusp of it right now. And I really believe that. I think that we are on the cusp of another major upswing. And sometimes when it's darkest, that's when you're on that cusp of it. I hope you're right. I feel like I am. So here's where we are. Scott is the New York Times bestselling author of Operation Pineapple Express, which you just heard about, and number one international bestselling author of Game Changers,

going local to defeat violent extremists. You've heard about Estetix Dawgs. He's a playwright and ended up being an actor, which is hilarious. But let's all be honest, the playwright and actor was to get rid of the snakes and ended up just being really cool. All of that. I want to say what I want to say, but I want to say it right. I want to say what I want to say, but I want to say it right. What a phenomenal life this scrawny 14-year-old bullied kid had as a result of meeting a Green Bray once. And how so very literally you have taken the illustration of what a true modern green beret does, which is not be John Rambo and blow up his town, but is to build consensus among those who need it.

You're still a green beret. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even as a civilian, you're a green beret and you are a Renaissance guy. And you also do what I do, as you say your greatest accomplishment is your 28 year marriage now 29 this 20 29 my 33

Thank you you as well When I do speeches there's this long old bio and many times they wanna cut some of the bio out because it's just too embarrassing and long and I'm like, cut anything, except Lisa, my four kids. And that's so, okay. This leads us up to an October.

You have your next project about to hit the world. And it is called something that you just said, nobody is coming to save you, a Green Braze guide to getting shit done. Big shit. What? Big shit. Big shit, oh, I missed big.

All right, nobody is coming to save you a Green Braze guide to getting big done. So we've got a few minutes left. OK. When I've read that, you tell me define and qualify big. It's the stuff that scares us at night. It's the stuff that when we're lying in bed and everybody else is sleeping and we're staring at the ceiling knowing there's a bigger game we should be playing, but we just don't know how to do it. And we're afraid that nobody's going to listen and nobody's going to take us seriously. And I'm not the

right person to do it. And surely somebody else is going to do that. God, I love that. Do you know how parallel we are? I do. Ultimately, how parallel we are. That is my gosh darn, that is what I keep saying. Yes, we do have to tilt the mirror and look ourselves in the face. But the big is that. Yeah, it's the stuff that scares us, because nobody's coming to do it. And if we think that somebody's going to, I mean, did anybody honestly wake up this morning

and hit the floor and go, woo, thank God for Washington, DC. Government's coming, baby. Yes. Man, hey, you know what? That dude on Fox is going to save my ass today. Absolutely, right? And it's like, no, I mean-

No, it's disgusting. Yeah, but here's what I think hopefully will help people with the book is I wrote this, it's taken me six years and I asked myself- This has been a six-year project? Six-year project. I don't even know how many rewrites, but I wanted it to be a guide for that practitioner who was willing to walk into that arena with their knees wobbling and facing an enemy they've never faced before.

And the enemy, here's the thing, it's easy to think, and you described this perfectly, it's easy to think that the enemy is the Democrat or the Republican across from you, the person that voted for Trump or Biden, the person that likes a mask or doesn't like a mask. But that is actually an engineered response that is created by a trance-like state that a lot of these divisionist leaders have put us into. There has been an engineered environment that we live in where we are conditioned to look at our neighbor, as Sebastian Younger says, with the contempt normally reserved for one's enemies. We have normalized contempt. Why wouldn't we, when our politicians running for the highest elected office in the world,

describe people that they have different policy views as of the enemy? Exactly. We are being conditioned by our quote leaders to think of one another as enemies. And when you do that, when fear kicks in and a primal response happens, and this is what I write about in the book, and when you're in that primal state of fear,

you go into a trance, a sympathetic state of fight, flight, or freeze. It's like a gunfight. You revert back to your training. You revert back to your basic instincts to survive. Fight, fight, or freeze? Fight, flight, or freeze. It's like a gunfight. You revert back to your training. You revert back to your basic instincts to survive. Fight, flight or freeze. That's a sympathetic nervous system doing whatever you... But that is where we are now. It's just people. Yes. In society, fight, flight, freeze. Am I going to fight? Am I going to move to the suburbs or to some 10 acres out where I don't have

to be around anybody or I'm just going to sit here and frozen in fear and what happens happens. What happens when you do that is you form these groups and this is where you talk about how we really hang with the people that look like us, feel like us, believe like us. That is in group, that's in group, out group behavior that comes from a primal fear. It's a natural response. It's not wrong in the sense that it's what we do when we're afraid. Leaders are supposed to step in and hold space

and bridge those in groups by giving us patterns to look at of a better civil society, a better condition, a better way of doing things. They're not doing that. Nobody's coming. So what's happened is we've all reverted into our in groups and we've all got our backs against the wall. And that's how we're navigating the world. That's why when leaders come in and their knees are wobbling and they are like, okay,

I'm going to try this, they need the same kind of tools that I had as that young captain going into that village where that elder is tickling the trigger of his AK-47, trying to figure out if he's going to dispatch me or not just because I look different than him and I don't have a beard yet. Right? That's how do you build rapport with that individual? How do you ask thoughtful open-ended questions that start with how and what and let him tell you his story so that you start to locate yourself in his story and he starts to get a sense of you and all of a sudden the armor falls away and you get a little bit of, and all of a sudden, the armor falls away, and you get a little bit of rapport,

and then you engage some more. Like, that's what this book's about. It's about defining the enemy. The enemy is not the Democrat, the Republican. The enemy is the churn. It is this set of social conditions that we're navigating right now, and that we've gotta learn to see it for what it is,

and that we're primal creatures, and we're gonna respond like a scared animal. If we don't lead ourselves first, get into a parasympathetic state of calm and connect, actually see what's going on, get our agency back, and then start to engage. We'll be right back. Season two, season two. Are we recording? Are we good? Oh we push record right? And this season we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its

history. Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the margarita followed by the mojito from Cuba and the piñu colada from Puerto Rico. So all of these we have we thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the ninth century BC. BC? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling.

It's a dance. Its tradition is culture. This is Lucha Libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. Its tradition is culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of lucha libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of lucha libre and a WWE superstar. Santos. Santos. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport

from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you stream podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, GB explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play.

A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church, and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked, voila, you got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea,

but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We think of Franklin as the doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, but those experiments are the most important scientific discoveries of the time. I'm Evan Ratliff. Last season, we tackled the ingenuity of Elon Musk with biographer Walter Isaacson. This time, we're diving into the story of Benjamin Franklin, another genius who's desperate

to be dusted off from history. His media empire makes him the most successful self-made business person in America. I mean, he was never early to bed and early to rise type person. He's enormously famous. Women start wearing their hair in what was called the coiffure à la Franklin. And who's more relevant now than ever. The only other person who could have possibly been the first president would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's too old and wants Washington to do it.

Listen to On Benjamin Franklin with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Katie Couric. Well, the election is in the home stretch and I'm exhausted. But turns out the end is near, right in time for a new season of my podcast, Next Question, starting October 3rd. This podcast is for people like me who need a little perspective and insight. I'm bringing in some FOKs, friends of Katie's, to help me out like Ezra Klein, Van Jones, Jen Psaki, Estet Herndon, and political strategists like Karl Rove and David Axelrod. But we're also gonna have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. going to have some fun, even though these days fun and politics seems like an oxymoron. But we'll do that thanks to some of my friends like Samantha Bee, Roy Wood Jr., and Charlemagne

the God. We're going to take some viewer questions as well. I mean, isn't that what democracy is all about? Power to the podcast for the people. So whether you're obsessed with the news or just trying to figure out what's going on, this season of Next Question is for you. Check out our new season of Next Question with me, Katie Couric, starting October 3rd on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Talk about the churn. Well, the churn, it is this set of, I get the four Ds, distraction, disengagement, disconnection, and distrust, all at unprecedented levels. Think about the distraction in this country right now. The average attention span of an adult human in the West is eight seconds, right? Eight seconds that when you walk into a room- What'd you say? I'm just kidding.

Yeah, because they pull your phone out. And these dopamine dispensers that we carry around. He's holding a phone up. Right. I mean, these things have really exacerbated it. So our distraction levels in civil society day are terrible. So when leaders, like when you and I grew up, you walked into a room, it was a fairly common assumption that you held that attention of the room. Unless you were really bad, you could hold the attention for a while. Now you have about eight seconds before folks are on their phone under the table. And so how you even command a room is different. Your physicality, how you prepare.

You can't just walk. I see CEOs walk in rooms all the time and they're the worst ones. Their people are not listening to a word they say. And they're giving their vision statement, right? Because people are so distracted that they can't focus for even more than a few seconds. So we've got to get back to those old school T.E. Lawrence of Arabia interpersonal skills.

I call them Lorentzian skills, right? So what I try to do with this book is like what Ben and Jess are doing in South Memphis right now. Ben and Jess going in there turning dope houses. You can refer back to a previous podcast. I don't have time to go into the Ben and Jess story. I would love to, but we just don't have time. But just go back in the catalog.

Former opium addicts turning dope houses into hope houses. It's phenomenal. It's unreal. So what I try to do is give them the skill set for going into those low trust, high stake situations so that they can employ not just the instinct of human connection, but the skill, the same skill that a green beret trains on that you understand the human operating system, as I call it, and how this thing functions and how it operates when it's scared, when it's angry, when there's reciprocity, when there's rapport, what happens with the brain when it actually hears a well-tell story,

right? What active listening actually means in real time. And that's it. That's what the book's about, is about how to take that skill set and integrate it into what you're building, right? It's because the churn is this novel set of conditions where, I'll give you another example, you said, tell me about the churn.

We have forgotten our human nature. We've disconnected from our human nature. We don't even really know who we are as humans anymore. We are so down in this represented reality of a phone that we're not connected to the natural world anymore, right? And when we lose our connection to the natural world, we lose our connection to the humans around us. Watch people in a restaurant.

They will, a family will be sitting at a table, or friends, and they'll all be on their phone in the presence of each other. How about, how about people that sit at a restaurant, both on their phones, across from each other, and they will text one another. Text each other, that's the text one another. Text each other. That's the churn.

It's due to speaking. But that's the churn. Because in that environment, if you're living in that world most of the time, which you are, it has been engineered in such a way that in-group, out-group behavior happens in that environment. And we know in this attention-based economy

that the information that gets shared and liked the most is negative, fear-based information about an outgroup. Right? So that's why Fox News and CNN and social media platforms, that's why they actually do what they do. They focus on in-group, out-group dynamics and sharing negative information. That's what holds your attention. I have said on the show 50 times. I've said on my shop talk. I've said in speeches. I say it everywhere I want to. There is an enormous amount of power and wealth being populated into a few people's hands, largely, largely accumulated by crafting narratives. It's all storytelling. It's all storytelling.

And here's the thing, here's the other reason the book's so important. If you don't understand the human operating system and how narratives work on the body, you will be a victim of the trance. Yes. You will go into a trance-like state and somebody else's narrative

will push you to foment instability around you. You will become an in-group member. And if you don't believe the power of that, ask yourself why Russia and China spends billions of hours, man-hours and money mining into the phone that you carry to craft narratives to confuse you about your democracy, about your neighbors, about your democracy, about your neighbors, about your politics, about your elections, because they're doing it right now. It fuels content. If you don't think storytelling is incredible, ask yourself, why is China and Russia doing

it all the time? And that's why narrative competence or storytelling capability in real time is so important. And that's what I push really hard for leaders who are going to do this kind of work, this army of normal folks. You have got to be the storyteller in chief. You have got to be the best storyteller on the block. And if you don't train on it, somebody else will be and you better believe they're going to be nefarious in what they do. Our answer is tell the stories of average normal people doing amazing things all of

this country and take back the narratives. It's the only way. And I'm telling you that is a green beret and I've seen it. It's the only way. And I'm telling you that as a green beret, and I've seen it, it's the only way it actually works. You can, if the only tool in your kit bag is a hammer, then every problem you come across is gonna look like a nail. And that's exactly what's got us where we are.

That is a, wow, that's great. And to hear this from a guy who's been doing this his whole life, who is not backed down from the requirement of a firefight. No, not at all. And all of that. We had a full license for coercion. And this is what I tell skeptical leaders

who are looking at me like storytelling. And I'm like, listen, we had full license for coercion as as as rugged as you want to get with it. I was and I've seen what that does. How do you feel when you're looked down the nose at a politician who's never even and they look at you as if you're being soft on storytelling when you yourself have done things that most human beings it's hard. It's easy to kind of get that feeling of contempt. and you yourself have done things that most human beings can't.

It's hard, it's easy to kind of get that feeling of contempt on that. Boy, I get it for you. I get it in your stead. I want to stand next to you and say, hey, he's killed people for our country. That's how I feel. What I usually come back at- I shouldn't feel that way, but I do feel.

It's hard not to. What I usually come back at him with is, listen, I've been in places where green berets were the highest casualty rate of anybody around, but I will tell you the way that they turned things around throughout history is not the bullets that flew out of their weapons. It was the relationships they built when it was more tempting to reach for your gun, but instead you reach across with a handshake. Now that's not some kumbaya theory. What I'm saying is, special forces has done the homework.

Like we've looked at the science. Humans are social creatures. We're wired to be social. And if you look throughout history, the leaders that have had the greatest impact, they were the ones with vision, and they had a personal story that could convey that vision. That's who we feel safe with, that's who we follow.

And whether those leaders were bad or good, right, that is for history to judge. But what was always the common thread was storytelling. You look at any leader throughout history, Bill, and they are phenomenal storytellers if they created movements. And if you don't have that skill set of storytelling and human connection, then you're going to be the victim of someone else's storytelling. And I would add to it the ones we revere the most. Added a little element of service in the work that they did. I call it the generosity of scars. It's my one of my Ted talks and it's repurposing your

struggles, your stories of struggle in the service of others. I's one of my Ted Talks and it's repurposing your struggles, your stories of struggle in the service of others. I've worked with Gold Star family members. Say that again because once again it is just a parallel that you and I see so out on but it's the generosity of scars. The generosity of scars. But it's... Right, it's the repurposing of struggle through narrative in the service of others. It's the generosity of scars. But it's... Right, it's the repurposing of struggle through narrative in the service of others. It is the most generous, relatable thing you can do as a leader.

It's the thing that feels the most vulnerable. It is also the essence of what I think is quality leadership. Struggle is at the heart of every leader because actually struggle is the biggest universal singular that we have that connects us as humanity. Doesn't matter what your wealth levels are, your race, your religion, everybody is either in struggle, has just come out of it, or is about to go into it. So according to the boundaries of that explanation, you can be a servant leader exacting an enormous measure of change

without a 501c3, without serving some big thing. Just seeing it. You don't even need a title. You don't need anything. You don't need a title. You just need to see an area of need in your local community and fill it with your passion and abilities,

understanding that through your struggle and your willingness to serve, you that through your struggle and your willingness to serve, you can exact some measure of change. And if we had a battalion and army of people doing that across our country, the thing that you saw when you came back from Afghanistan, we could fix. Because people are hungry for it. Being willing to tilt that mirror up to where you see your own eyes in it, people are starving for leaders who do that.

Even though you feel like your knees are knocking, it gives us courage. We are so hungry for leaders who are willing to repurpose their own scars in the service of other people that when that happens, we actually get a sense of ourselves. We locate ourselves in that story of struggle. My dad's battle with cancer becomes your sister's battle with cancer. And you listen autobiographically and you start to go, maybe that's possible for my life. And all of a sudden that person that is telling that story becomes the most relatable person in the room. And we locate ourselves and we start to make sense out of our own lived experience in the

safety of that person's struggle, scars, and narrative. And we start to get a sense of ourselves and we want to move. The way Bo did, he talked about his struggle. Mark talked about his struggle. You talk about your struggle. That's what we're drawn to. Do you talk about your struggle? Absolutely. And it feels clunky and awful.

And I'm hoping that that's what the book will do is knock that body armor off and let people get that emotional access. And the two best stories in the world, I tell people, the scar stories. The second best is the story that you don't want to tell others and the very best is the one you don't want to tell yourself. Amazing. October, nobody's coming to save you a Green Berets guide to getting big done written by Lieutenant Colonel

Scott Mann who has been an author, a playwright, an actor, put together Operation Panoplo Express, would save 750 to a thousand Afghanis who supported our Americans in their country. He's an unbelievable guy and what he is is the product of a school teacher, a forester, and a happen chance meeting with the Green Beret when he was 14 years old. And he has inspired me today. Same here brother, thank you. I just, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming to Spencer County Memphis and telling your story

and sharing Monte with us for a couple hours as well. Thank you, sir. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it, it means a lot. Thank you for what you do and it means a lot and keep going, man. Yeah, you too. Yes, sir.

And thank you for joining us this week. If Scott or other guests have inspired you in general, or better yet, take action, by contacting him about bringing Last Out to your community, buying his new book, Nobody Is Coming to Save You, or something else entirely, please let me know.

I'd love to hear about it. You can write me anytime at bill at normalfolks.us and I'm telling you, I'll respond. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and on social. Y'all please subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it. Join the army at normalfolks.us. Think about becoming a premium member there. All of these things that can help us grow. An army of normal folks. Thanks to our producer, Iron Light Labs.

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