Sea Control - Sea Control 473 - Doctrine Man, Leadership & Superheroes with Steve Leonard

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

Links1. Power Up: Leadership, Character, and Conflict Beyond the Superhero Multiverse, edited by Steven Leonard, Jonathan Klug, Kelsey Cipolla and Jon Niccum, Casemate, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Nate Miller is in the hosting chair today and he has Doctrine Man himself, Steve Leonard, here to discuss his new book, Superheroes and Leadership. Nate also edited and produced this episode. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. Our latest call for submissions is for the annual fiction contest. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Village Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts.

And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. My guest today is Stephen Leonard, and we're discussing his edited volume, Power Up! Leadership, Character, and Conflict Beyond the Superhero Multiverse. Welcome aboard. Can you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please? At my age, I hate to start off with my age, but I've been around the block a day or two. So my background is a career military logistician and strategist, did almost 30 years in the Army, lifelong writer, reader, speaker kind of guy, retired about eight years ago and took a dive into academia as a practitioner more than an academic, bringing that kind of bent to things.

and then have spent the last eight years working in various roles within academia, teaching the whole time, but now I'm an administrator as well as a teacher and loving life. Beyond that, just ordinary guy, lots of hobbies. And obviously, if you can tell from the book, there's a passion for comic books there and superheroes that permeates my life and always has. So there's a part of me that's still that 12-year-old kid sitting on a tree stump in the woods reading Spider-Man in 1976. And he's here today now, a few years later. Well, as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed here are strictly our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated.

So the first question that I wanted to ask was, how did this book come about? That's a lot of people to kind of wrangle into into one project and uh also kind of piggybacking on that why does fiction and superheroes in particular uh what's the need in the space uh for that kind of storytelling so there's there's a few answers there first how the book came about uh this is something that i've wanted to work on for a while and it gets to my back and the skinny little kid the worst glasses you know growing up that that lives in this world that that was uh that was my life and a big piece of my life was comic books and superheroes and enjoying their stories and the stories are just tremendous and we've seen that on screen um since so probably the last 20

years really more and more frequently the depth of the narrative is there the storytelling is there and this isn't this is a space that doesn't necessarily get a lot written about it but there's a there's there's a crossover there between what they deal with strategically what they deal with in terms of conflict uh how they deal with issues like different social issues all of that plays out in our world as well and so it gives you a really a different lens to look at things through and so after we had written um as a group and there's a different group for every book but we had strategy strikes back with max brooks and um and and the crew there uh liam collins and then we moved on to uh winning westeros and all along i kind of okay i want to push a

little bit let's get further into different genres let's try some different things and so when i when we did to boldly go obviously we pushed further into the broader science fiction universe but still I wanted to get to the comic book universe I wanted to get into the superhero genre because I have so much fun with that and what you can't see in my office is my office is literally surrounded with superhero memorabilia action figures toys I have a three foot tall rocket raccoon behind me uh that's my world and i knew that with the depth of the narrative that exists in that in that world that genre that there was a lot to explore that that provides that that directed lens that we can then turn it back on ourselves and look at how how we can look at

strategy through their lens how we can look at conflict how we can look at leadership how we can look at the dark side of of life how we can look at humanity how we can look at social issues diversity you start to pick your topic all this stuff gets explored there but then it provides a safe space where you can talk about those things but hey you know i'm not talking necessarily about this conflict but let's we can look at ukraine through the lens of uh civil war or something like that and it's there and it allows you to discuss things without having to get into that acrimonious discussion you know who's right who's wrong whatever because okay now we're going to talk about iron man and we're going to talk about uh you know dr doom and we're going to talk about

thanos or we're going to talk about something but it's all within that world and it just takes you to a different place and so what you end up with is a book that is interesting for people who have our background where we want to look at those certain things for that reason but also if you're a fan of the genre you could pick it up and enjoy it just as much because then you're recounting stories that you're familiar with or maybe not familiar with and it's fun and and that helps to expand that audience uh to get more readers to expose more people to different aspects of the genre and it's just it's just fun at the end of the day and yes wrangling that many authors is always fun i think we had 35 people on this book that i always bring up the old the old metaphor

or cat herding, because literally, you have 35 people, there's somebody who's not going to sign their contract, there's somebody who's not going to meet a deadline, there's somebody who is going to write something, and you look at it, and say, there's a wrong genre, that is not, that's not the superhero genre, but I look at them as superheroes, okay, but they're not, and we're not going to go down that road. So you have all that to deal with as an editor, as a team lead. It makes for interesting times. I don't think I had any gray hair before I started writing these books like this. It brings it out. And you're resolving things until the 11th hour. But it's nice to know that we're free and clear to navigate with just days before publication. I think we're at nine

days but i don't know that the book will come out on the 15th i guess a sunday i don't think book published on a sunday i think they published on tuesday so we're counting on the 17th seeing that thing pop and hopefully get a good price and take it from there but that's a that's a long story and how that comes about is it's a passion project and then it's then you're gonna have the fun the fun part of reaching out to people who you either know or only know virtually and hey are you into this and you find out how many people are closet nerds that really are into this kind of thing and they're like i've always wanted to write about squirrel girl like okay that's cool dan ward hey let's write about squirrel girl and you know you get that and

it's so much fun because many people want to talk about it and they want to get on the phone and say hey i really want to tell you how i look at this i don't need to know that's cool i trust you but i got 35 other people who want to do the same thing so yeah we're good but yeah that's that's kind of a the long way of answering that there's a lot of history there and a lot of fun there and this is the culmination of like i don't know 60 50 years of reading comic books and uh it finally came to fruition now i don't know what the heck i'm gonna do and i'm i'm gonna skip ahead here and actually ask you a little bit about uh doctrine man because it it came up but uh for the uninitiated can you kind of explain your work in in that space and uh and introduce the

listeners there if if they haven't already uh consumed all of uh all of your work there's always somebody who hasn't and it's one of those things that can be kind of polarizing but to make a long story less long doctor man grew out of the same kind of thing it's it's the infusion of the of the comic book genre into my personality which uh i have i have two things that conflict there i have one a desire to grow and develop and mentor people and help people achieve really what they can do but do that in a professional sense where hey how can we bring the most out of nathan how can we help you learn and grow and develop and and meet your goals and do those kinds of things well there's that piece of it but then there's the uh i'm i've got an odd sense of humor and

it's fueled by a passion for the comic stuff. So I want to do this, but I'm going to bring this into it. And so I ended up creating a cartoon and because I really can't draw, I work well within different mediums. Like I'm a woodworker. I do some fun stuff with woodworking, but I can't draw. So it had to be stick figures. That's about as far as I can get. And I had to use PowerPoint as the medium to work in because that's part of the gag. And Doctrine Man is also part of the gag because that's a community the doctrine community which would never have a superhero i love all those people to death they're wonderful people but they're not the kind of people that have a superhero or if they would it would be a dysfunctional superhero like doctrine man

and and it's really just a collection of the comic itself is a collection of oddball characters that i've worked with over the years but it was a way to infuse humor and then wrap the learning and the growing and sharing of articles and and more of my own writing all mixed into it and it's something that you know every morning I do it six days a week I used to do it seven days a week but every morning you know there's a there's a there's a tranche of articles that'll come out different things different news a little bit of humor mixed in a cartoon and it you know Monday through Saturday every week you know you get your morning dump and then maybe a little bit in the afternoon to the evening, all intended to drive discourse, to get conversations going,

to stir some debate, but to share what's going on around the world and how it affects the defense national security space, which is really hard to stay, especially these days, to stay narrowly focused in that space and not get into more of a political sphere. Although the politics obviously influence that, as you and I both know, as soon as you start to dive into that world, it gets really divisive really quickly and you lose your audience. I say I lose my audience. I could probably double my audience overnight or triple my audience if I went full Tucker

Carlson, but that's not who I am or what I believe in. I still try to stay true to the oath that I took, you know, 30, 40 years ago that I I want to be nonpartisan as opposed to apolitical, so I don't go down that road. I don't go one way or the other. I'm a centrist. I try to stay there. I try to keep the politics out. But keep it a lively discussion forum that allows people to kind of speak their minds and do so within a respectful space,

which also is very hard to do because it requires a lot of adult supervision to get dating trolls out, to get the personal attacks out, to keep the politics out. Yeah, I want people to focus on more positive things, which is always difficult to do, but it's a passion. It's something that was unintended. It grew out of something that I did in the cubicle when I worked in the doctrine community that, hey, how can we share some of these things and talk about some of these things And then it just kept growing and growing and growing. And now it's, you know, 300 and some thousand people over a couple of different platforms, a lot more than I ever thought it would be. But it also becomes something that the more people that are involved, the more of a responsibility you have to ensure that it's the positive, productive space that it needs to be, which it isn't always, but you try to, you do your best. and all those people keep me going when i wouldn't i i told somebody not even a week ago there's always a day where i think you know there's something else i want to do in the morning

other than just get up and do that and i want to just get up and like i want to go sit outside and i want to go do something different but then somebody will say i'll get a note from somebody oh you know this just it changed my career it refocused me it gave me something good came of it and you're like and then you're left thinking all right i'm not going to go outside i'm not going to stop today i'm going to keep going because obviously it means something to somebody somewhere so you continue to put energy into it and that's i mean the story there there's it's a much longer story this thing could go for hours uh because there's so many different nuances to it but it's a silly cartoon surrounded by a lot of learning so kind of swinging back to the book

which I enjoyed a lot and put a whole bunch of notes in. I thought it was really interesting that throughout the book, you're using positive and negative examples. And I have to be honest, I was a bit surprised to kind of see that mix as it were. Do you think there's anything about the genre that lends itself in particular to that kind of learning where you can see such stark contrast oh absolutely and i think that's part of the magic of the genre is that there is there's so much depth to it and when i remember when i was 12 years old i think i was 12 my dad got tired of seeing comic books and said you know those are stupid you're not going to buy them anymore you're not going to read them and i had stopped but i could never convince him that there

was so much depth to that genre and and the storytelling was so good that it drew you in as a kid it drew you in it wasn't just like a you pick up a comic and you read an adventure it was you pick up a comic and you got to pick up something else then you got to pull in something else and pretty soon you're buried in the genre and the storylines are they run over the course years and uh there there's so much i can't i'll use the word depth again there's so much depth to that and and like life it's never clean and so you get okay your your favorite hero can do negative things and i think you catch a lot of that when you talk about uh matt lancaster's chapter which deals with captain america civil war and and and how that reflects a lot of what's going on in

today's society cap can be wrong he's not always going to be perfect he's but but we can still learn from that when i my chapter where i write about where uh where monsters dwell was something that i always thought was interesting was that when uh that when marvel comics for example they they created all kinds of monsters but the monsters were always redeemable there was a quality about them that you if you could get past being scared they weren't bad and they might do bad things sometimes but there were other reasons why they did bad things you could see the positive in them they could be redeemed and they were a different kind of superhero and and so you could be bad and be good but you could be good and you could be bad and and and it was the mix is one of

things that i thought uh if you remember a few years ago when um the x-men franchise decided to do the age of apocalypse and they did it wrong the age of apocalypse was a six-month storyline i still have all the comics a tremendous storyline that you couldn't capture in two hours it was it was kind of like 10 years of avengers you needed to do 10 years of the x-men to draw out that timeline and to find the you know the side the side of magneto where magneto becomes the leader of the x-men and and takes the team over and and um the defeats apocalypse in the end and then resets the timeline to where it needed to be a tremendous storyline where magneto's the good guy instead of the bad guy the whole time and and and a lot of the heroes are bad guys and they

that everything is switched and it was a great example of what you mentioned initially that positive and the negative that you know juxtaposes and your heroes can be bad guys and your bad guys can be heroes that's life right that's that's what life is like life isn't clean and and i think that's why the book pulls a lot of that together through different different uh different publishers but it's that's a that's a good part of the genre and that's what makes the storytelling so good is that it's like life and but you get that as a kid you're reading that as a kid and it you grow when you read that you start to see that that hey you know okay spider-man makes mistakes he makes bad mistakes but he continues to go on and try to do good and and they've got people

that you think are bad sometimes they do good things it surprises you but you see that and it's like hey life isn't clean and neither is the neither is the genre so if you don't give it that same treatment in the book and bring out the fact that that um not everything in life turns out the way you think and not everybody not everything is black and white and i even think we have a chapter called it's not all black and white so yeah i mean it's it allows you to tease that out of the genre but in the same time you're really just talking about everyday life which i think is the power of the book and the power of the genre that's a good pickup too by the way because i don't think we well i don't think we purposely really ever mention that anywhere so it's it's a

very subtle theme that runs under everything that's a good catch that certainly stood out to me as you look back at the book there it covers just an enormous variety of things like you said the number of authors is huge but because of our audience and our listeners uh we've got a lot of academics but we also have a lot of practitioners and so i'm curious were there any lessons that stood out to you that you feel like practitioners should hear and that are probably the most important for that audience? And see, I teach these subjects on a daily basis, and I haven't tried to infuse this in the class. So now I think I'm going to have to do that. Lessons that stand out. Oh, that's a tough question, Nathan. I'll just go back to what I said a minute ago. Nothing

is black and white and and that's the lesson that you try to convey through the book but it's a it's something that that i also pass on to my students that we always talk about nothing is the way it looks on the surface so and i always tell students you know you got to get below the surface you got to dig in you got to do the analysis because very little is what you think it is and what you see you've got to spend the time dive in and what i and what i do tell my students is the more analysis you do the more that you see the more that you understand and really what you're trying to do is build that understanding and so you want to do the deep dive and you want to think things through then you want your mind to pick up because your mind's eye

sees things that nothing else sees and this this this is a good thing that i'm i have not discussed this in the book i don't think anywhere but but it pulls out and it's the lesson that you always uh you always want to you always want to you know people pick up is it's not black and white there are no black and white situations everything is different shades of gray and you have to do the analysis you have to do the thinking you have to allow your mind's eye to open up so you can pick up those subtle shades of gray and then you can interpret what's really happening and in this case in the competitive sphere where what's happening and and what's the interplay and how are things interacting uh you need to take that time because not all of us are napoleon not all of us can look

at something and sees at a glance exactly what's happening, most of us have to spend some time looking at it because things are not all black and white. And that Alyssa Jones's chapter teases that out with Black Widow, that again, a nuanced character that there's a lot there. It's not all black and white. And that theme kind of runs through the book is that if everything was black and white, there wouldn't be any reason to write the book. You wouldn't need to go down below the surface and start to tease out things that maybe people don't understand or don't see monsters aren't monsters you know captain america is not always right uh there's always more and you need to dig in deep and that's a that's a lesson that i always go through with my own students

on an almost daily basis you've got to get below the surface you got to dig in you got to find out those things that that you don't see all right and then one last question for you is there anything you think that I've missed or anything that you would like to leave the listeners with? It's the one thing is we said this. I had lunch with John Nick. I'm one of my co-editors,

the guy who wrote the foreword. And John is just a tremendous, tremendous human being, a great writer, really insightful guy. But we're having lunch. We went to a place called Pizza Palace in Lawrence,

which just opened up. It is an Indian style pizza restaurant. And so we're having this chicken, tikka pizza with curry sauce. The weirdest thing you ever thought is great, right? And he looks up and he's like, what's next? And there's always a what's next, right? If you really have a passion and you really want to do this, there's always a what's next. And he and I've been asking that question back and forth as we kind of allow the ideas to gain some traction and maybe solidify a little bit so there's there's two different answers to that question and so what's

next with us as a team is we're probably going to take on um we think we're going to take on kind of monsters and horror and slide over into that but we're going to wait and let and see let let that one kind of idea kind of grow a little bit but we think there's a lot there that the last section of the book that deals with that kind of the scary side of life there's a lot there and it gets back to human nature why do we like to be scared why do we want to be scared what do we learn from being scared uh what what what do you learn from having your uh your fight or flight mechanism activated on a regular basis you learn a lot right that's that's something that it's hard to convey to people but there's there's a book there we're pretty sure we need to tease that out

a little bit more and then i had an hour long conversation with john klug on sunday who another one of the co-editors, and John and I have been working together for, God, I don't know, probably 20 years. And out of that conversation, we went to a different book. And so what we're doing is, well, we don't even have a title for this book yet. We have a publisher already, but it's going to deal with the interplay between strategy and logistics. And we started to build a team right off the bat, right? It's the same way. I don't want to write a whole damn book myself but i'm happy to edit and work with people and so we already have a probably most of our team put together uh don't have a title yet uh but starting to parse out subjects

and so we're talking about everything we're not talking about the roman empire in case you're curious but that's you know that was something that came up as you start to think about that hey who's talking about the logistics of the roman empire and we all get a big laugh out of it But, you know, people, you get people who are really passionate about something. And, you know, we have Kevin Benson, who used to be a Sam's director. Jim Greer used to be a Sam's director. Jim Storr, who's a really well-known published author. Different, different, other different people that start to come to mind. And I want to write about this. I want to write about that. I want to do this. and and you see well i want to write about the red ball express and how the red ball express allow this all to happen in europe and i want to write and it's fun because everybody's got something that they're really excited about them wow okay okay we're at 70 000 words already we haven't written anything so that's good so we're good there so uh so what you didn't ask was hey

what's next and that's what's next is you know a real book i say a real book a non-fiction book that, I don't even know if the other ones are nonfiction, but a different, a different project here, and then another project in the works, and my wife, who's gone right now for three weeks doing family stuff, will come home and say, you said that was going to be the last book you were going to do, and I'm going to have to just say, yeah, mea culpa, you know, I found more projects to do, but I'll make something for you, I'll go out in the, I'll go out in the garage, and I'll build you a bench, or I'll build you a cabinet, or something, and I'll make you happy for a week, well i'm sorry that's all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guest steven

leonard you already answered this uh about what's coming up next but where can we find you online you can find me on twitter uh at doctrine man or on facebook same thing and i do do an occasional thing on instagram so usually about six o'clock in the morning you'll see some little piece of humor pop up on instagram all three with the same titles you know it's always some variation of Doctrine Man. Wonderful. Well, thank you again for joining us, and to the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. ¶¶