The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 382: Scott Mann—Individualism Rightly Understood

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

The former U.S. Army Green Beret, NYT bestselling author, leadership consultant, and perennial storyteller talks about the division and tribal behavior that permeates our country now, the death of honor, shame, and consequence, and why Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he observed that America succeeds because she puts the individual ahead of the collective. You can preorder Scott's newest book here.

That was a good one. Oh yeah. Yeah, that was very good. I'm going to put it up there in top three. Top three. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

You know, sometimes conversations, they're just so ephemeral. You can be out with your best buddy and have a lousy conversation one night. And you can run into a total stranger and have a great conversation. Scott, man, is neither. He's a guy whose books I've read, who's been on this podcast before. But he brought their receipts today, man. I just had a completely engaging conversation with this guy, and I knew we'd have a good one.

I wasn't expecting a great one. Well, I'll tell you, I wasn't either just because of you. And I was pretty sure he was going to be great. And he was. I'll tell you, I sat here like a Christmas ham. That's how I know it was really good because I didn't feel the need to say anything. It was a really, really good conversation about a lot of topics. And it was very deep.

And let me just say this about Scott, is that he has... has thought through these ideas. Oh, yeah. He seems a lot like you in that regard to me, that you talk and think through these things before you really, really want to say it out loud. Well, the difference is, of course, Scott's a retired Green Beret

who served with incredible distinction for a long time and then ran Operation Pineapple Express and got a lot of people out of that horrible situation during that incredibly, I'll just say it, botched. withdrawal. But he is really concerned about the country, and he believes that the way through these current divided times is through a combination of leadership and storytelling. Maybe just storytelling. And though he is concerned, he is also extremely optimistic. And though he is extremely optimistic, he's also written a book called No One Is Coming to

save you. Tush. But there's a lot of yin and there's a lot of yang, and there's a lot of truth and a lot of wisdom. And it really only comes from people who have been in it and lived it. And I just really enjoy what this guy is doing with this part of his life. He's taking all the experience that he gleaned in the military, and he is channeling it through plays and books and all kinds of performances. And now he's doing, I guess it's like leadership seminars, for lack of a better word. That's fair.

But people are digging what he's screaming. People are hungry for this message. And I say that because I am. And sometimes you don't know you're hungry until you start eating. And that's what made this conversation fun. Can I just tell you that he said something to me that really made me feel great. Actually, he'd said it in the podcast as well, but he reiterated it when I walked he and his wife out now. And he said that there were like six people who came to see his play.

because they heard his conversation on our podcast. Yeah. And he said, some of those people came there and, you know, he goes, I know darkness. Some of them were headed in a very, very bad place. And I really feel like the play helped them. And that just made me feel great. Good. Because there'll be no money this week.

That's fine. No sponsors, no money, but you've got that feeling. That's a good one. So you got that going for you. Thank you. Which is nice. Can I eat it? Will it buy me dinner, that feeling?

We're not firing you, Chuck, but there'll be no more money. Scott Mann, on the other hand, is dealing in a currency far more valuable than filthy, filthy lucre. You're going to love this conversation. If you haven't listened to the first one, you might want to go back and do that, but there's no need. We meet each other where we are. You know what? Don't bother looking for some other pod. You're here.

It's happening right now. I mean, maybe later you could go check it out. Right now. But right now you've come this far. Enjoy the ad you're about to hear. It's good. Don't you dare fast forward through this. But hang on it.

You haven't told them that it's episode three something or other. It's 380 something or other. It's called individualism rightly understood. You'll hear this repeated several times, and neither Scott nor I can take credit for it because the great Alex de Togfeld originally said it. And man, oh man. man oh man is it time to understand that do you have to say dokeville like that i don't have to no it's a personal

choice okay you know why why because i'm an individual mother what say it with me i'm an individual we're all individuals all righty that's coming up right after this do do do do do do do do the federal government is not going to close america's skills gap they have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation

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U.S.S. U.S.S.A. Tell me that a long time ago. We were in rural Afghanistan and it was getting pretty sporty. You could hear a lot of chatter on the scanners and, like, you could tell things we're closing in and miles away from any kind of assistance.

And I had made some kind of comment about, like, quick reaction forces or something. And he was like, hey, sir, nobody's coming. It's us. And those words kind of always stuck with me. I think that's exactly where we are today. Yeah. Well, this is going to be cheery.

Well, you're welcome, Chuck. It's actually very optimistic. Yes, I agree. It's better to know. Yeah. I agree. How many years have you guys known each other? 1978, 88, 98, 08, 18, 18.

1920. What did I do? Three to four. This is 46 years I've known you? Yeah. Yeah. 46. That's crazy. That is crazy. Well, it's ironic, Scott, because you're here on the week. I'm firing him. I just want to say that no one is coming to save you, Chuck. Sorry for bringing it up, Chuck. You're on your own, pal. Scott Mann is with us today, not for the first time. You were such a fantastic guest nearly a year ago, long distance. And it was one of the first times we finished our conversation. And I yelled,

of my old friend and dear producer who I'm probably going to fire this week. Why can't we do these things in person? You were, if not the first, right around the first time. I love having these conversations and I love doing this podcast, but I'm so tired of trying to tell a story and connect with another human being through bits and bites and fiber optics and the arbitrary capriciousness of my internet service provider and so forth and so on. Having said all that, you know, all the electronics could crap the bed here and this won't work. But so far, I think it's going pretty well. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's, you're right. I mean, there is something about just being together, it's being together in person. You know, it's, I don't think it's something

that we will ever outgrow as a species. At least I hope we don't. Well, when it's good, it's math, right? It's the whole winds up greater than the sum of the parts and the most interesting ideas in the room come out of an unscripted conversation between curious people, and Yeah, 100%. Who just want to see how the next sentence ends. Yeah. Right? And when it doesn't work, you know it.

It's palpable. Because there's a universal expression on people's faces when they're casually trying to locate the nearest exit. Yeah, 100%. It's so true. And it's the same micro facial expressions that probably been carrying around for 70,000 years. Right. You know, finding the exit of the cave just as quickly as you can. Yeah.

So part of what I want to talk to you about, and I want to touch on virtually everything, but it is those microcues. It is communication. You seem to have crossed over the threshold of interest in storytelling to something that's borderline obsessive. Yeah. You care about it a lot. You're the only green beret I know who writes plays and is now deep into his next book and is doing something. I don't want to call it motivational speaking because I don't think the speaker gets to decide what's motivational. Right, right.

But I do know that people are hungering to connect. Yeah, yeah. To connect with their families, their loved ones, their employees, their friends, and everybody else in this crazy divided world. So how are you going to fix us, Scott, man? Man, I don't know. I think we're up against a lot right now. But like you, we were talking about just a few minutes ago, I'm still. very optimistic. You know, I'm very optimistic about what's in front of us. I still think our best days

are in front of us. I look at my three boys. I have three sons. And they're all grown now and doing their thing in the world. And I look at them and I feel really good about who they are and what they bring to the world. I worry about what they're up against. I'm not sure we're leaving it better for them than we found it. And that bothers the hell out of me. It really bothers me a lot because my mom and dad taught me not to ever do that. What worries you the most? I'm a sucker for chronologies. Yeah.

But as you look around, is it a feeling or is it something really specific you can point to and say, this is the sum of all fears and all the other stuff is emanating from it? So I'll just caveat what I'm about to say with the fact that everything I kind of do is informed by what I learned as a special forces officer, as a Green Beret. And, you know, we pride ourselves on on kind of being a mixture between John Wick, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Verizon guy. You know, like these relationship-based connectors were lethal, but we really put a lot of emphasis on the human domain, the human operating system. Because we're responsible for making, you know, building rapport and mobilizing tribes to stand. And if you can't build relationships, you can't do that.

So everything that I do and I think about the environment, I try to base on that human operating system. and what's going on with social dynamics. And when I got back from 20-some years in the military and I retired in 2013, I looked around and it seemed a lot more like Afghanistan in the U.S. than it did America to me. The vision, the levels of tribal behavior in groups and outgroups, the way they were positioning themselves. And Sebastian Younger really said it well. I think he's probably said it better than anybody in terms of what veterans are thinking.

He said, most veterans are willing to die for their country. country, but they have no idea how to live for it. And it's hard to know how to live for a country that's tearing itself apart along every imaginable line from race to religion to socioeconomics. Well, it's not a coincidence. This country is very good at training people how to die for it, but not that great at training people how to live for it. 100%. Where's our reverse boot camp? Right. Yeah. Even like I was looking through your pledge, you know, and the sweat pledge and just what those basic fundamentals, I mean, my parents taught me, my grandparents taught me. And now, as you and I were saying, in some corners, that can even be

to some people off-putting, which is hard for me to imagine. But there is a dilemma that we face right now in civil society where we are facing, I call it the churn, but it is just this unprecedented level of disconnection that's happening all around us. And the problem with it is, I mean, I've seen versions of it before, and it usually ends badly. You know, this kind of division that we have right now, this kind of tribal behavior. James Mattis talked about it when he resigned from the Trump administration. He talked about the tribalism that was permeating our country right now, and we were focusing more on our differences than what we have in common.

He was talking about that maybe 10 years ago. Yeah. I was at a Marine Corps Memorial Ball. I go every November in San Francisco, and he was the guest of honor. And that's what he talked about. And it made a lot of people in the audience uncomfortable. But my experience of that guy is he took the temperature of the room and concluded he just didn't give a damn what it was. He spoke from the heart.

Right, because if we don't start to call this out, it's a pretty predictable outcome. When you start to see an erosion, a lot of social scientists agree that for a strong civil society or certainly a liberal democracy to thrive, you really need three things. You need a strong sense of social capital between neighbors, you know, kind of a bridging trust that binds us together. You need trust in your institutions. And you need a narrative or myth that bind you. The stories that you tell down and in and up and out. I mean, how are we doing on those three? Give me the first one again?

A strong sense of social capital. So those tangible and intangible linkages between humans that bind us and enable us to get big things done together. And those subtle cues that let us know that we're connected. 100%. You know when you're connected to someone and when you're not. So that social capital, which is the oldest form of capital, and then institutions that we trust, and then myths that bind us. You know, those are the three things that we really, at least in the circles that I've operated, a lot of the social scientists that I talk to, you say those three things are requisite. Is it fair to say that they all from time to time change?

order. Like to me, I look at those and I'm in violent agreement with all of it, but the one that's on fire right now is the media and the general trust and institutions. Right. Right. That's it. That to me, right. I was hoping you'd say something along those lines because that's my perception. Yeah. And, you know, it's easy to blame and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but it's the media. The media is not doing its job. And as a result, everything's unraveling. It's a huge chunk of it. It's a huge chunk of it. It's a huge chunk of it, Mike, and I agree with you. I believe that it's in the past, we've relied on institutional leaders to kind of hold the line and be stewards of this society that we live in where we don't, you know, most

societies that I worked in as a Green Beret are what's called status society. And what it basically means is that these are societies where the currency is honor and shame, right? And it's the oldest form of civil society in that you form groups so that you can survive. It's resource scarcity all around you. There's not enough. Just like all mammals on the planet, you're competing for food. And so you form groups, right, to acquire resources and maintain resources.

And those in groups could be clans, tribes, qualms, whatever you want to call them. But they are the in groups by which you live, work, and breathe. And everything else is the enemy, right? That is a status society. And so your status within that in group is essential. And then the status of that group as a collective is essential. The same system exists in prisons. It exists in East L.A. and gang territory.

Like, this is what we naturally default to. If you play back the last 30 seconds, you'll hear group, gang, tribe, society, and four or five other synonyms for really what comes down to a team. Like the team is probably the most optimistic way to describe a group of people who are united for common cause. Right. But there's so many versions of a team. So like when does a team become a tribe?

When does a tribe become a gang? When does a gang become a mob? And when does a mob become the sum of all fears? And all of that is around honor and shame and status. This is the problem. Those types of collectives are fine in certain circumstances. But if that becomes the operating system of a society, then what you're always going to have is this in-group, out-group dynamic that is competing for resources.

And the group is the priority, not the individual. if there's no honor among thieves, and everybody's taking to some degree, honors on the ropes, and I don't know if you've read the book years ago, I forget who wrote it, but it was called the death of shame. Okay. Right? So if honor and shame are the hinges upon which this door swings in either direction, and both of them have been churned out.

Yeah. Because when you say churn, I think of one of my many bosses, the guy that runs, you know, Warner Media right now, is dealing with a churn. If you run a streaming service, the people who subscribe have quickly done the math and concluded that there's no honor in subscribing to a thing that isn't really giving me what I need. And so they'll watch the stuff they want. And because there's no shame in canceling their subscription, they'll do it immediately. Yeah. And so they take the cream off the top.

Honor and shame don't matter. And I realize I'm comparing something very, very frivolous to something very, very weighty. But the calculus is the same. The metrics are the same. The calculus is the same. And it's where we all come from. We all understand fundamentally honor and shame and status and group. And these are all very natural things.

But the problem is left to their own devices without leadership, what you start to get is you start to get in groups competing against out groups. And you start to get a level of tribalism that results in vengeance and feud. And the problem with feud is, how long does a feud last? Well, ask the Hatfields and the McCoys. Salt in the Earth. kill the firstborn. It can last for centuries. And I've seen this in Afghanistan. I've seen it in Iraq. I've seen it in Appalachia where my family's from. Feuds are the manifestations of in-group, out-group behavior that's kind of gone awry. Well, that's what happens when you have tribalistic behavior that's not regulated. We formed a democracy, an experiment in civil society where we said, you know what? The group is not the epicenter of life. The individual is. The individual actually is at the pinnacle of all of this. And the individual is where your loyalties reside to yourself. You won't find in status society.

Like if you go into Pashtun Afghanistan and you start talking about individualism, they will lynch you because that runs a foul of hundreds and hundreds of years of how they've governed themselves and most places on the planet. So we live in a very unique world where the individual is put before the group. And the key to that, and this gets me to the point about the churn, is that's not a normal state of affairs. When you have a civil society where you value you the individual, that means you don't have the vigilante justice. Groups aren't allowed to go out and pursue honor on behalf of their group.

You don't do that. You have rule of law. You have punitive justice. But all of those things are artificialities that are only a couple hundred years old. And we need leaders at an institutional level who are the stewards of those. So there's no shortcuts. If you want the macro to be good and virtual. and desirable and attainable, then you have to start with a micro.

100%. Right? And the micro is the individual and the macro is the society. And all of the gradients between the two are all of these varieties of teams, mobs, gangs, groups, tribes, and so forth. And how are we going to stop doing this? How are we going to stop taking the basic group, America? Yeah.

Okay, we've got two political parties. That's pretty binary. Maybe we've got three now. But then look at all the inner nicene fighting between each party. It's like religion. All of a sudden, it's Baptist and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and this and this and that and that. And it almost feels like if we keep doing that, ironically, we'll get back to the individual, but the individual will then be alone.

Yeah, it's run too far. You've over-indexed on the individualism to where we're getting to a point of isolation now. And I would submit that there's a guy named Toekeville who came over. were from France in the 18th. Alex was the young man's name. And he said that the thing that made America such an impressive experiment in governance was that it was individualism rightly understood. Like we seemed to have a foot in the past, but a foot in the future.

We had the connections to community. We had the connections to honor. And we had the connections to family and storytelling and all of those old school, collective things that make a status society really cool. But we also had this sense of our. ourselves as individuals and the autonomy and agency to navigate the world that way. And it was individualism rightly understood. And what Robert Putnam and other social scientists think is that we've just gone way beyond that. We've over-indexed on the aspect of individualism to the point

that we've lost our connection to our past. And I think this is where I'm going with the media, the social media. We've got leaders now who we once relied on at the institutional level to hold the line for democracy, for politics, for media, for corporate behavior, and they've surrendered their post. They're no longer bridging and bringing us together around what makes us Americans and what makes us out of many come one. Instead, they're fomenting instability and actually creating in-group dynamics to advance a limited agenda.

And the absence of leadership now is probably troubling me more than anything else at an institutional level. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy. named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high

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doctors to do what doctors do. And my God, we need our scientists to do what scientists do. But we especially need the media to do what the media is supposed to do, which is afflict the comfort comforted and comfort the afflicted. It's hold the people in charge, whoever they are, hold them to account, ask them the hard questions. Because if they don't, then ultimately the individual is going to have to. And then suddenly you've got a society full of people who should be skeptical but are now deeply suspicious. And the trust is gone, right? And because the media, in my view, and I think the view of a lot of people, have abdicated

that responsibility, wandered outside of their lane, they're doing something indulgent. And as a result, it feels like everything else, it's like it's all just half a bubble off plum. And you know from shooting many, many firearms, to miss the target by five feet, you only need to be off a fraction of a millimeter. That's right. Back at the trigger point, right? And that's just how it feels to me. Like, we just got a little off course here, but now we're way down range, and we're not hitting anything. You know, leaders in the media, I think, are, again, they're advocating their institutional responsibilities of our First Amendment rights. And like you said,

holding people accountable for Afghanistan, there's still been no accountability. How pissed off are you about this? It's disgusting. You know, I watched the testimonies, the recent testimonies with General Millie and General McKinsey. And I will tell you, Mike, those guys were very well prepared and they said all the right things. But the veteran population, the post-9-11 veteran population in particular is furious over this. It's more than just feeling betrayed. It's feeling like serve pro, you know, like it never even happened. Yeah, nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. And here we are at a pre-9-11 state where you have eight new al-Qaeda training camps. You have al-Qaeda for the first time up in Northern Alliance

territory, establishing presence up there. And then you had this recent attack on Russia by ISIS K. The dashboard is blinking red. And the veteran population, particularly those of us who fought this war and who watched 9-11 happen, and we said never again, and then to watch this and now recognize it's going to be our kids, it's going to be my son that gets loaded up on a C-17 when the next catastrophic attack hits. And he's going to have to go face, you know, a pissed off commando that I trained with state-of-the-art optics and an M-4 carbine that used to be mine. You know what I mean? And my kid's going to face that. And the fact that our leadership, that our senior flag officers, that not one set of stars went on the table when this went down to me is just unconscionable.

The death of shame. The death of consequences. The death of honor. When you take all of that out, I don't disagree with anything you've said. I just wonder, back to churn. If you can churn your favorite movies on your favorite streaming service, then you can churn your favorite words out of the vernacular. You can churn your favorite turns of phrases out of the lexicon. I don't think we're dealing with just all of a sudden ideas like honor and shame have become out of step or out of fashion. It's not that. They've become affirmatively triggering. They've become dog whistles. That's what we were almost laughing about my sweat pledge before we started talking. It's like, I get that work ethic is a hard sell.

I get that delayed gratification, nobody wants a lecture or a sermon. But we've morphed from saying, hey, I'd rather not hear that to, how dare you? How dare you? Right? It's like, who are you to talk to me about virtue? Who are you to talk to me about the importance of showing up early, staying late, taking a bite of the shit sandwich when it's your turn? Who are you to talk to my kid that way?

Right. How dare you? So that's what worries me. We're not just disagreeing on the virtue of virtue. We're disagreeing about the decency of it. Yeah, I worry right at the shoulder of that, of the media abdicating its responsibility, is this emergence of social media and digital technology. That I also think is, while it does have some good qualities, and you and I talked about that,

there's things that really like pineapple wouldn't have happened without signal and all of those things. We wouldn't have been able to do it. But at the same time, I think these dopamine dispensers that we carry around with us are putting us on a path that we don't even understand. I think that there's some stuff going on with how this is affecting our brain chemistry. You know, our brains, we're these ancient social animals. We're not wired for – there was somebody that told me, and I thought this was really pretty cool. They said, humans are great at innovation, and we suck at implementation. And if you think about just the way even social media when Facebook and MySpace came out,

and it was pictures of cats and grandma. And, you know, it was really pretty cool. But within very short order, it became performative, right? Everything that everybody was doing was a performance. It was in this represented digital realm where we started to lose connection with the natural world. You know, and this guy, Ian McGilchrist, he's a psychiatrist that really kind of talks a lot about how technology is affecting us. but he says that, you know, if you imagine a bird in a park, right? And he says the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere work together.

The left hemisphere focuses with the birds picking up the bird seed. The right hemisphere is keeping an eye on the natural world. The cat that's over there in the corner, the humans that are getting a little too close, but both are firing at the same time. And that left hemisphere, right hemisphere balance with the right hemisphere being the dominant allows the cat, the bird, to get without getting got, right? What McGilchris says is because we have become. so focused on digital technology and the imitation of machines that the left hemisphere,

which has always kind of been the emissary, has staged a coup on the right hemisphere. And we have become myopically obsessed with mechanistic behavior. Now the cat's a little closer. That's right. And so now we are living in a represented world, a reality that we can control. Right. We can be in here. And we can control that.

but what we've disconnected from is the natural world. So I don't want to hear the opinions that make me uncomfortable. That's right. Only unless I feel like being outraged for a minute so I can go back to my tribe and have a conversation about how idiotic the other guy is. Exactly. And so what you're starting, so I call it shadow tribalism. We're demonstrating all of the dark sides of tribal behavior.

The good stuff, honor, reciprocity, storytelling, long form communications, Um, patience, restorative justice, relationships. That stuff's gone because that's right hemisphere stuff. That's the stuff the relationships with the natural world and connection. The left hemisphere is just obsessed with control and with manipulating what's in front of us. Because in the real world, one of the muscles that you have to develop is to tolerate, maybe even accept a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of circumstances that aren't necessarily your cup of tea.

Yeah. And so you learn to adapt, you learn to adjust, and then you learn to assimilate. That's right. The three great A's. Adapt, adjust, and assimilate. All very difficult to do. Right. And all, now not only out of fashion, but to my point, how dare you tell me to adapt?

How dare you tell me to adjust? How dare you? How dare you tell me to assimilate. Add two plus years of prolonged isolation to that from COVID, where we've, you know, there's a reason that Tom Hanks, the friend did a friggin' soccer ball, living on that island, right? Isolation is the quickest path, the madness. Volleyball, but out of way. Thanks. Well, thanks for that, Mike. But, you know, you add that to the mix. And I think we're kind of on this dangerous pathway. That's why I call it the churn. I think we've

lost connection with the natural world. We've lost connection with our own human nature. And we're moving in this direction that doesn't end well. Did you ever read any faith popcorn? No. You'd love this. She was sort of a futurist. and a prognosticator of sorts. And the popcorn report was very popular in the 70s and 80s. And she was the first one I remember who wrote about something called cocooning, where she suggested that technology is going to make life so easy that going to the theater is going to not be as interesting as sitting home

in this really comfortable couch and looking at this amazing TV, which is going to appear with a level of tech that we've never seen before. And it's just going to be easier to do that. And then it's going to be easier to order really good food in. She said, I don't know how yet. But there's going to be a combination of driver services and delivery services and just increased culinary expertise. And it's going to be easier to do that.

And so this whole thing of cocooning became a thing. And then it became real. And then she wrote about burrowing. And burrowing, she said, is going to be brought about by some sort of existential event, not sure what it is, but it's going to take the cocooning tendencies, and it's going to put them on steroids, and we're going to go deeper and deeper and deeper into our cocoons. And so that's this, right? 100%. That's that represented world. It's a digital realm. It's represented. It's not

presencing itself as the natural world. It's another world that we can manipulate and fully control. But that's the seductive hell of it. We're more connected than we've ever been in that realm and more disconnected than we could ever imagine becoming in the real world. And that's the problem because when you disconnect from that, I believe, you disconnect from your human nature. You disconnect from that relational part of your being. All of the things that we've always known to be true that have made us uniquely human, whether that's storytelling, whether that is, you know, relationship building rapport, reciprocity. These are all things that we think that are just innate within us. But if we keep going down,

that road, then we start to abandon those things. We start to do it in favor of the things that we can control. And then that in-group, out-group behavior starts to really profoundly rear its head. And this is where I think getting back to... Hold on one second. Before you go on, I just want it, for people who are listening, you guys are pointing to the phone, that's the thing that you're talking about. Right. That's right. You said this and that. The digital realm. The digital realm. There you guys. That's represented by the thing that we are now armed with as surely as you and your team were armed with an M4 carbine once upon a time. Now, everybody, 330 million people,

have this weapon in their back pocket. And so I think the existential elements that Faith Popcorn was prophesying were this in part and then the lockdown on top of it. Right. And so now for the first time in the history of the world,

I mean, maybe in relative terms the printing press posed a similar challenge in the day where all of a sudden you just couldn't control the dissemination of information. Now you can't control the adoption of new identities. You become your own avatar, your own cipher, and you form this new identity, and you've got all the time in the world to massage it and shape it and put your essence into it, but it's not really you. And it's completely performative. Like it's not even really you. Then I've had people say to me, yeah,

but that's just, you know, our parents said the same thing about, you know, cassette tapes. Okay, sure. But the reality is that what's happening with this is that we're losing, it goes back to the bird in the park. So if the bird in the park just enables its left hemisphere of control, grabbing, and pecking at the seed, and all it's focused on is the seed, the same way that you're focused on that cell phone, then the whole ability to get without getting got goes away. That does not end well for any species on this planet that surrenders that agency. This is just too perfect. because before we started rolling, I played a video. Did we get to see it again?

I'm going to play it again right now, folks. Here it is. I mean, that's the story of our lives. Okay, if you can't see this, a woman is looking at her camera and asking the world if the world likes her new boots. She lifts them up to show the world her new boots

and a cabinet door swings open. Her foot gets caught on it. And in the space of a second, she falls to the ground. Flat on her face. Flat on her face. And the face is extraordinary because you see all five stages of grief

flash across it in about half a second. That's what's happening to us, man. It is, man. And look, I got to tell you, look at some of the things that are happening on social media right now. For example, in this election cycle that we're in, this is going to be a really challenging year

for our country and how we treat each other. I'm less worried about the issues. Don't get me wrong, they're troubling. But I'm less worried about the issues than how we treat each other around those issues, right? it's really getting dangerous. And, you know, I'm seeing, I've got a couple of friends of mine that were teachers, my teachers in this little town, that have unfriended each other over a candidate. First of all, when did that become a verb, you know, to unfriend someone. I mean, I know I did it when I was a

kid, but I would usually still go back and play with them the next day. But to unfriend someone that you've known for decades over something like a political candidate, it's striking to me. And we've normalized it. Now, if someone says, if you don't like what I'm about to say, unfriend me. We're using this thing as a normalized verb. It's just the social behavior that is coming out of this realm is novel. I don't believe we've operated this way 10 years ago, even five years ago. So what I'm saying is for the leaders out there. I think most of the leaders are going to come from the bottom up at this time. I think it's a real opportunity for bottom up leadership, for leaders at community levels, for leaders in their families, for leaders in small businesses

to really demonstrate what Wright looks like. I'm not doom and gloom. But I am a believer in the first special operations imperative, which is know your operational environment all the time. And the second that you take your eye off the ball, that's when it kicks you in the butt. So I do think that leaders are going to have to be more aware of these challenges of churn than we've ever been in our life. We have to realize that what we're up against is not what our parents faced. It's not what our grandparents faced. This is a pretty insidious threat that's dividing us. And we've almost got to get back to our human nature. We've got to get back to what makes us uniquely human and fight for that. The name of the book, this optimist you're listening to has written

is called No One is Coming to Save You. Come on. When's it going to be out? October 1. It's the ultimate election antibody. I want to read you something from the introduction. If you're reading this, you're likely standing in a bookshop or library or conference room, wondering if or even why you might want to read a self-help leadership book written by a retired U.S. Army Green Beret. There is attention in this formulation. Green Berets, so far as they're understood, and they are not understood well, if you ask me, are not generally thought of as touchy-feely types who would be just as happy discussing meaning, storytelling, emotional capital, modern life, social science, and the intentional application of good faith as they would be telling war stories. But it's true. I like talking

about all of it. More than that, I feel the complete and total need. to talk about all of it, for better or worse, this has become my obsession. Yeah. All right, man, I'm in. I want to know what has to happen in the leadership space from the perspective of an erstwhile green beret

who has taken to not scrolling left or right or diving deeper into the digital miasma, but of writing plays. Yeah. And talking about campfires. Yeah. And the stuff we can exchange around the illumination therein. Yeah, I appreciate it.

I think that, first of all, it's what I learned as a Green Beret operating in low trust areas. I believe it's very replicable here at home. And the first thing is I think we have to understand our own human operating system. Low trust areas. That's not the most optimistic turn of phrase I've heard. Yeah. Isn't that what we're in? Yes.

but I assume it used to refer to, hey, this field might be littered with mines. Right. We can't be sure. Yeah. Somebody go out there and find out. Yeah, or going into a community where, you know, an old poshtun elder is sitting there glaring at you tickling the trigger of his AK trying to figure out if he's going to dispatch you or not, you know, as you asked to live in his village, you've got to connect with this guy and you've got to do it fast

and you have to build a relationship with this guy where ultimately he'll go up on a rooftop and fight alongside you, you know, and that's where I come from in this thing. And I've seen it. I saw these amazing NCOs, Mike, these sergeants over and overdo this. It would be so easy to draw down on somebody. But instead, they would find a way to build a relationship with this illiterate farmer and find a way to connect with this guy. And over time, fight alongside this guy in a way that they are crying when he gets on a helicopter to leave.

And I believe that is a model that's possible for leaders here at home. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand.

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hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Part of the reason I wanted you back to is I think that there is in our collective imaginings and understanding or a misunderstanding of what a Green Beret is and what a Green Beret does. I've seen the movie and I've seen a ton of other movies like it

and none of those films lead with communicators going into villages to break down barriers vis-a-vis the language and storytelling. But you made that point the last time we talked. That's job one. 100%. It really is. Of all the places that I've operated and I've seen these iconic Green Berets that taught me so much, they were all magnificent storytellers.

They had this ability to just really move mountains and build relationships through their stories. A lot of people don't know this. There was this operation in Panama during Just Cause called Operation Ma Bell. And this kind of gives you an idea of how Green Berets operate. But there were several Green Beret units living in Panama when Noriega, when we invaded. They were living there and they were training the Panamanian Defense Forces. they had built relationships with them. Well, when they invaded Panama,

most of the Panamanian defense forces retreated to the rural areas, to the quartels out in the outlying areas, and they were going to dispatch the Rangers, the 7th Infantry Division, the Marines to go smoke these guys. And they were going to basically, it was going to be search and destroy for these remnants of the Panamanian defense forces. There was one major, Green Beret, who raised his hand and said,

listen, give me a couple of hours. Give me a couple of hours. And I think I can get these guys to surrender. He loaded up with a couple of NCOs, flew to one of the largest quartels where these guys were, and basically took a quarter and a payphone, called the commandantia from right next door and said, listen, I've only got a few minutes here. And by the way, he's telling him this in Spanish. I've only got a few minutes here.

The 82nd Airborne is right behind me. If you will stack your arms right now and surrender, I will get all of your people out of here, all of your men, and you'll even be able to keep your pistols. and they flew over 13 guys on this chopper, and there are just rows upon rows of Panamanian defense forces in line ready to surrender. And they called it Operation Maabelle, and they affected the surrender of the entire PDF without firing a shot. With a phone call.

With a phone call. They called it Operation Maubel. There were multiple phone calls happening. But these were relationships that were built when risk was low. They built these relationships when risk was low. That social capital was already there. And so they leveraged it when risk. because hi, we did the same with pineapple.

You know, people, all these volunteer groups that got Afghans out, they were astounded that a bunch of old farts with cell phones could do that. But we had built these relationships for 20 years, Mike. We built these relationships in places that people didn't even care about. And all we did was leverage those relationships when it counted. And I'm just saying that there is a science to that. There is a way to do that more than ever. But we need to recognize that if we don't value that with intention,

And if we don't value what it means to build a relationship with another human, we're not going to be able to leverage it when it counts. Now is the time to be building those relationships. So the last thing I'll say on this is you asked me how. Understanding the human operating system, understanding that as humans, man, we are ancient brains trying to make sense of a modern world. And the more we understand about how the human brain takes action around social activity and storytelling and meaning, that's how you move people to action. You don't plant seeds when you're hungry. No. Absolutely not.

Exactly. And this is stuff that our grandparents knew. This is stuff that you would roll your eyes and say, of course. But I don't think they're foregone conclusions anymore because we've lost our connection to the natural world. We've lost our connection to the things that were innately human and made sense. Think about it. Look around the things that just don't make sense anymore.

We just shake our head and we almost don't have a language for it. But I'm saying we need to get a language back for this. The human operating system, the acronym I say is, Humans are a mess. We're meaning-seeking emotional, social storytellers who struggle. As leaders, if we just understand that with our kids, our teenagers, our coworkers, the way you approach problems, the way you approach leaders, it is radically different than the transactional stuff that we're doing today. You described yourself as three different things earlier, and I forgot him, but the last one was the Verizon guy. Yeah. What were the first two?

John Wick, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Verizon guy. I think that's the modern day Green Beret, yeah. There it is. In reverse order. Yeah. The funny part about it is in today's world has become so transactional, so corporate, so mechanistic that we relish these hard skills. We talk about the hard skills all the time. And then we kind of roll our eyes on the soft skills. I believe that it's actually what we call the soft skills, storytelling, active listening, physicality, presence, rapport building, showing up, being intentional. That's actually the hard skills. That's the stuff that actually I've seen in the the worst places on earth create bonds that enable people to fight alongside each other at a savage level and do amazing Herculian things. Those Laurentian skills is what I choose to call them. Lorenzian. Yeah, T.E. Lawrence. Instead of soft skills, you think about Lawrence of Arabia in 1917, he goes in as a former geologist, right, goes into what is now modern Syria and Iraq and somehow finds a way to unify all of the Bedouin tribes to liberate. To liberal, liberate Akaba, not from the sea where the guns are pointing, but from the desert side.

Like, he tells these guys a story, spins this tale that if these nomads are the only ones that could come across the desert and actually take the jewel of the Ottoman Empire from the six o'clock. And he knew that those guns weren't facing that way from when he was a geologist. And he used storytelling and rapport bill. He was highly decorated for valor. But Lawrence of Arabia was the ultimate return on investment for the British Empire. I mean, he was the ultimate an ROI because he was a great storyteller. And those Laurentian skills that he used are the same things that we need today. Those are the things that leaders can move a lot of people with if they just understand how they work. Storytelling's at the heart of it. Well, it's certainly upstream of

politics. It's certainly upstream of most everything. You know, I think the irony of Lawrence is David Lean, right? I mean, the director of the movie is telling a story. about a storyteller. Right. Have you ever seen the film in 70mm in a theater? You know, I haven't. I need to insist. Okay.

I need to insist that you do this. That should be easy to do this. Monty, would you make this happen? I'm talking to Scott's lovely wife, Monty, who's been sitting here watching us wax on. But, I mean, I think it's relevant. If you think of the connections you've felt in a theater during a great movie,

or in the midst of a great book where you realize maybe there's a tear, running down your cheek and you didn't even know it, you know, where you're turning the page is so fast, you're cutting your fingers, right? Right. The ability to tell that kind of story on the big screen, the little screen or the page, that's for sale right now, like never, ever, ever before. I think because it's lacking. It's so lacking. People are starving for it. You can't make Lawrence of Arabia today. You sure as hell can't shoot it in 70 mil. No. Right? No way. But we need to see that stuff. We need to get completely sucked into the store.

to forget about so much. Going back to the last time you and I were together, we talked about my play last out that we've performed. And I think that has a lot to do with what you're talking about. You know, we continued to tour after you and I talked. And one of the things I was telling you off camera was that after you and I had that conversation about the play, we would go and do this show.

We did it in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee's one place that comes to mind where we performed this play in this beautiful concert hall, Skylight Theater. And there was this gentleman that stood up in the top row in the talkback. And he said, I'm the United States Marine. And I fought in Fallujah. And I heard you and Mike talking about this play. And he said, I drove 250 miles to get here.

And he just started weeping. And he said, this was my life up here. You guys just told my story on the stage. This was my life. And my family gets to see this now. they get to see why I feel this way and why these moods change this way. And I could see like I could see his daughter and I could see his wife. And I just thought, man.

And it was all storytelling. It was all this transfer of imagery between humans and this wonderful shared perspective that was in the room, Mike. And there was such a diversity of thought in the room. Certainly there was diversity of ethnicity and things like that. But just the diversity of thought that was in the room. But when it was over, the shared perspective that was there, we were almost breathing in unison. And it just reminded me kind of what you're saying is like that's the kind of stuff the world needs, I think, is that we need more storytellers. Ura.

That's really great to hear on a personal level because I don't know about you, but when you're doing the play or when you're doing these leadership conferences now, you have to consider your audience. But it's hard to really know who you're reaching necessarily unless you can look across the table in their face. Right. So, you know, that's the nature of broadcasting versus narrowcasting, media. social media, whatever it is. We throw stuff out. We're desperate for feedback.

Not desperate, desperate, desperate, but what are you going to look at ratings? You're going to look at some advertisers going to tell you something. Hey, you reach this many, you reach that many. That's all important vis-a-vis the filthy lucra that makes the world go around.

But, you know, to hear a Marine drove 250 miles because you heard you and I trying to make a connection over a sketchy connection, as I recall, vis-a-vis my shitty Internet service. right? And so it's all, it's back to the connection thing. It's also fragile. It really is, but it's so powerful at the same time. Like it's what we're all starving for. What I found was in the darkest of times, in the roughest of times, whether I was in a closet holding a 45 pistol, 18 months into my transition, or whether I was in a gunfight in a remote place of Afghanistan,

it was always human connection that pulled me through it. It was always human connection that showed me a better pathway out of it. And since then, working with veterans working, you know, I speak on stages where there's corporate bankers and tech sector folks. But what I found is that we're all hardwired. We're all story animals. We're all craving that storytelling. And going back to something you said in the beginning that I think is what you and Chuck

do that's different is that storytellers, they put stories out there in the service of the audience. Whereas a speaker, I think a lot of times is up there for themselves. Like they're up there to give a speech. A story is told in the service of the listener. And that goes all the way back to our deepest biology. You know, 12,000 years ago, if I stagger into the campfire and I'm like, let me tell you why Saber 2 Tigers make crappy pets. You know, like you're here.

You're listening. And when that story's over at a censoral level, you actually feel as if you experience that. There's a level of censorial appreciation that you listen autobiographically. And that's the crazy thing about storytelling is it's this transfer of imagery that. that happens, even like in this setting that we're in here, where a Marine would trust those bona feces to that degree and feel something that deep in his solar plexus that he would drive 250 miles in this low trust world that we live in to go see a play he's never seen. I mean, and I think that's what's possible on a whole range of fronts, not just military stuff, but

but just leadership in general. You think that shared desire and connection can actually help write the country? I do 100%. I believe it so deeply. I see it in so many different ways. Well, there's a pretty cool book called The Upswing. I don't know if you've heard by Robert Putnam. Yeah. And he also wrote Bowling Alone. And so Putnam is a really highly regarded social scientists. But one of the things I love about him is he talked about in the early 1900s, America was at this really dark place where you had the haves and the have-nots, you had political division. Immigration was really unchecked. City infrastructure was failing. People were moving from the agricultural areas and droves. And all of the pundits in America were saying she was on her last days,

you know. And in fact, he starts the upswing chapter one describing, and you think he's talking about now, but he was actually talking about like 1910. But then what's striking is during that same period, for example, a couple of dr. Bob and bill W. who couldn't get sober at the institutional level and finally said okay nobody's coming let's have a meeting and they called the meeting Alcoholics Anonymous right and in Akron, Ohio of all places and that began this amazing movement that all these years later has led to millions and millions of people getting sober, including me. But during that same period, the Rotary Club. J.C's. the JCs, the future farmers of America in AACP, like most of the elements of social reform

and social capital community clubs that we knew that our parents belonged to. Lions Club. Yes. All of it started during that 1900 to 1920. And it began the longest running period of bottom up social capital in American history. It ran all the way to 1972. And then in 72, we started to see another down swing. and Putnam believes and several other social scientists and this dude too that we're on the verge of

another upswing, that we're on the cusp of another upswing, that that same thing is, and I believe it, I think we're on the edge of it. Because sometimes things have to go splat first. 100%. Right. Man, that feels awfully true to me. That makes me agitated. I talk a lot about my pop, the sweat pledge dedicated to him, the foundation, even dirty jobs.

Yeah. that brand of storytelling. But I always forget to talk about his devotion to the Lions Club and the Lions Club devotion to him. And the million pairs of glasses they donated through the Maryland School for the Blind, right? They, like, all of the good work they did in their community. I didn't appreciate it as a kid.

I saw it, and I was like, yeah, yeah, that's nice. But the dinners and the luncheons and the ones. award ceremonies and the time they took to celebrate that which is the opposite of shame honor to take a moment not the academy awards not the grammies not some freaking trophy actually there were trophies but there was such modesty around it yeah but at the same time they felt like big deals in the zip code that's right right yeah and bush got a lot of crap for it over the years but he was the first guy I remember talking about the thousand points of light. Absolutely.

That's what they were. Yeah. That was the grout that held the tile of the country together. Individualism rightly understood. Right? And I think it's very available to us. And I think it's actually happening. Like I don't even think it's something out there in the stratosphere.

I think it's happening. I think I've said that I believe what happened with the collapse in Afghanistan when you saw these hundreds, it wasn't just pineapple. There were hundreds of volunteer groups that stood up. I feel like that was. the first true shot across the bowel of this upswing. Like I think there's other examples of it. I think what you're doing with your foundation, the sweat plagues.

My dad is 80 years old. He has had three bouts with cancer, a stroke. He's a career firefighter for the Forest Service. But he is leading an effort right now to restore the American chestnut tree to the eastern seaboard. You know, this functionally extinct tree. He's leading. He gave a TED talk at 73 on this tree. What's your dad's name?

Rex Man. And the TED Talk was called... It's called an American tragedy. And I think the subtitle is like The Restoration of the American Chestnut. He's a storyteller. He's this old Appalachian guy. But he gave this talk after about with cancer. And it was fun because I got to coach him on it and then give him all the redos that he gave me as a kid.

Yeah. He crushed it. He was so good. But if you watch him, he's just telling a story. He's telling a story. The brain works in metaphor and patterns. And he's painting this picture of this iconic tree that was used. used for everything from cradles to caskets when our grandparents were alive.

And it was revered by indigenous communities. It was revered by settlers in Appalachia all the way from Maine to Florida. And then all of a sudden in the early 1900s, a foreign blight took it out, took this tree out, billions of trees lost. And it changed our ecosystem. But for some reason, the root systems survived. And they will grow up to it be like a little sapling. And through good science, they found ways to actually restore this tree.

And they're on the edge of it right now. And if they can restore that tree, and these are all man-made problems. You're talking about the ash tree. There's a sudden oak death that's out here in California right now. The oak is, if this thing gets out into the country, it could wipe out all our oak trees like the chestnut was. But the point is, there's this whole bottom-up movement with the American Chestnut Foundation that is leading the charge on restoration of this functionally extinct tree. You see it with the black-footed ferret. I mean, there's amazing movements that are happening, Mike.

all over the country that are very similar to your sweat pledge and this kind of engagement. And I just think that's why I wrote the book is I want to take kind of that green beret skill set of understanding the human operating system and old school interpersonal skills and arm these leaders with this because they deserve it and they need it. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time. Do you miss the rotary phone?

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The subtitle is a Green Beret's guide to getting big crap done. Actually, it says shit. I read it. All right. I believe it's S.H. With an asterisk. Thank you, Chuck. You're welcome.

You know what? Shame might be dead, but not manners. Yes. Getting big stuff done starts with getting small. stuff. And I wonder if, like, did your dad's interest in the American chestnut evolve out of a crisis of the chestnut or a need for meaning and purpose in his life? My dad has this old saying that it's actually I've integrated into my leadership now,

which is leaving tracks. He's like he would always, we lived in little logging towns everywhere in his career growing up. and he would always talk to my brother and me about the importance of leaving tracks. He would emphasize that we would go for walks out in the woods. And what he was talking about, Mike, in that regard, was that all of us have this inherent responsibility to leave a legacy that's bigger than ourselves. And he was adamant about it, leaving tracks, leaving tracks, leaving tracks. And it wasn't really until he had his first real battle with cancer and we thought we were going to lose him.

He was going through chemo. And he asked me, because he could tell something was wrong with me. And I just said, dude, I'm just not ready to lose you, man. I've lost too many people this year. I can't do this. And he said, he said, Scotty, he said, I'm scared as hell. He goes, but think about all the firefighters I've been able to mentor the years I've had with your mom, my grandkids. Like, I left my track, son. You know that. And it just, it really hit me. And I thought I understood leadership. Like, I had lost men in battle. I dealt with a lot of loss and guilt and things that I thought went with leadership. But how I'm watching

this guy that has got death crawling closer to him every single day. And he's, He's just got as much grace and dignity as I've ever seen in a dark moment like that. And just the comfort he took and the legacy that he had built up to that point, those tracks that he had left. But he was still scared as hell. He was scared. Of course he was. He was terrified.

But what was really strengthening him was what you alluded to was this deep sense of meaning and purpose. And I go back to my acronym, you know, mess. We are meaning-seeking creatures. We're the most meaning-seeking creatures on the planet. We don't only seek meaning. We assign meaning to everything we do. Like in the military, if you do a mission statement, whether it's an F-16 raid into Syria or a truck convoy to Camp Lejeune, the two components of every mission statement is task and purpose.

What and why? And I've seen time after time after time, Mike, where these young men and women would go into combat and they would accomplish things on the battlefield that your jaw just hits the ground. And you ask them in the interviews when you're putting them in for a valor award, you're like, Why in God's name would you do that? Why would you risk this kind of and play at that level? And they'll all say the same thing. Two things.

Didn't want to let my buddies down. And I knew why I was there. And if you push him, will they admit they were scared? Absolutely. And, you know, this is something that Steve Pressfield talks a lot about in his book, Warrior Ethos. We got to have him on. Yeah. I hope you'll ask him about this when you have him on.

But there's a passage that the warrior community really. the veers that Steve wrote in the warrior ethos. And I'll paraphrase, but it's in the battle of at the hot gates of the Spartan 300, you know, when they're in the final days, thermipoli. And it's on the last day of the battle. And it's the sun's coming up and the remaining Spartans are, they know this is it. This is it. This is it. Like Xerces is going to overrun him. And so they turned to one of their revered lieutenants. They ask him what they should hold in their hearts being afraid like this. And he basically says that the opposite of fear is not courage. It's love. It's not love of your country. It's not love of your constitution. It's love of the man at your

shoulder. For he is everything and everything is contained within him. He who sheds his blood with me is my brother. That's right. And I think that for all of us today when we're looking at these times that we're in, that's a good place to start. Yeah, ma'am. Admit your frailty. My dad had a massive heart attack after Christmas, day after Christmas. Oh, I'm sorry.

A horrible thing, man. He'd had a couple in the week prior. We didn't know what the heck was going on. I thought it was an indigestion thing, but he had 98% blockage in his main left vein, right? Nearly lost him. And he was so nonplussed by the whole thing. Now, he's 91.

He was walking three miles a day, then two, then one, then tired, then sit and down. down and like, dude, you're not getting any blood in your heart, right? This is basic physics. And I asked him how he was doing. He was embarrassed to say it. He took my hand and he said, I'm afraid. Yeah. I hit him with some proofrock, which always comes in handy in situations like that. I've seen the moment of my greatness flicker and heard the eternal footman snicker. And in short, I was afraid. To start by saying, this scares me.

me, this worries me, I don't know, to take the uncertainty and own it. You know, start there. Yeah, it's so true, Mike. I think that we need more of this from our leaders today, not hand-wringing. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about this recognition. My favorite definition of vulnerability is not knowing what's going to happen next and stepping into the arena anyway, because you don't know. the men that I fought with and served with that I thought the most of and that I would follow to hell and back, they were usually the ones that would say, I'm not sure. I don't know. What do you guys think? There was a collective comfort in that. I think leaders who are able to ask questions of their people, thoughtful, open-ended questions. Can you imagine how COVID would

have been handled, how the population would have responded? Had we been entrusted enough had the leading health authorities and the leading elected officials said, you know, you could fill a book with what we don't know here. And if that makes you nervous and afraid, well, take a number. I'm with you. But here's what we know from the past. Here's our best guess right now. Just talk to us honestly and humbly, I'd pay anything to see what we would have done in the wake of that kind of forthright disclosure. Our history is replete with examples of where that did happen, where we were confronted

with those ambiguous, scary realities and our leaders didn't have the answers. And they turned to their people or to the folks that they served and said, I'm not sure what to do here. What do you guys think? You know, I know for me personally as a leader in combat, the toughest situations that I faced,

there were times where I didn't have a clue with Pineapple Express. We reached a point where, Mike, we had gotten Nazam out, and I was feeling really good about that. But then we were just log jammed. We had all of these people that couldn't get out. And they were standing in this just to see a flesh with a 106 degree temperature, no food, no water, people defecating right beside their children getting trampled. And they're staying out in this crowd because they trust us. And they're on the phone with us.

They're just staying out there for days at a time. And I'm just sitting here in my office in the dark looking at my phone. And I don't know what to do. I don't have a clue. And I'm just lost, you know, and I'm just thinking, there are people getting stomped to death right now because they trust me. And I don't have any answers. And you're 7,000 miles away. And you're 7,000 miles away.

So I just typed in the chat room, hey, guys, I got nothing. I don't know what to do. I think we're going to have to turn these people, like tell them to go home. And this young school teacher in Syracuse, New York, who was a former Green Beret named Zach, he came up on the net and he said, I think I have an idea. It's based on Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad. And if we could get somebody on the inside, I think it just might work. And I just thought, man, screw it, let's do it. He gave us the plan.

We got on the phone, and it became the Pineapple Express. It became the very thing that we were able to get people out, using a sewage canal and a four-foot hole in the fence, you know. And this guy, this young man, I'd never met, met him on LinkedIn, made that happen. And it was in the moment where I felt, most out over my skis, most exposed, and just incapable of leading in that moment, he stepped up. And I will tell you, that has never failed me in my life, ever. So if you don't in that moment say, I don't know what to do, he doesn't have the opportunity to step up and offer a solution.

If your arrogance would have compelled you to put on a brave face, then ultimately you don't get the result you need more people. people are trampled, more people are shot to pieces. Again, I don't think that's unique. I mean, I know that's an extreme example, but I don't think it's unique to where we are today in this time of churn. I think when we look around and we see these things that we just throw our hands up and we're just say, I don't, I just wish our institutional leaders in particular would turn to us and say, I'm not sure what to do here. What do you guys think? I mean, why do you think people are turning to podcasts instead of network news? Why are they reading substack instead of the New York times. Because at least in those other forms of media, you do have people having conversations

exactly like this. We're not all wearing makeup, wearing a suit and tie, staring into the lens and talking as assuredly and as earnestly as we possibly can, right? It's true. I can think of lots of occasions in history where people have got to a good end by being honest and vulnerable and exposed. But when's the last time an elected official in recent memory came out, looked into the lens and talked to the American people like that?

I can't think of one. We're starving for it. We're living in an era where professional spokesmen are still saying, take it from me, trust me. When the only thing that's persuasive today is don't take it for me,

do your own research. I'm not lying to you, but don't take my word for it. We live in uncertain times. here's the homework you need to do. Here's a place you can go to do it. Make your decision. Come back. Be a grown up. We are starved for it. And the irony of it is, Mike, a lot of it revolves. Storytelling is at the heart of it. I firmly believe that if leaders will embrace what you just said as just as a reality that we live in and then start to develop their skills as storytellers, you know, because storytellers, they're the ones that can really frame that picture of struggle. Because all,

also at the epicenter of this is struggle, the one universal singular, the biological necessity for all of us, is we're going through the shit. We're all going through it. We're all, we either going through it or we just came out of it or we're about to go into it. I mean, that's kind of the human condition is that we're always, no matter how wealthy we are or how advanced we think we are technologically. We're always struggling. People are in some form of pain. And it's what binds us. Honestly, it's the thing that binds us. It's the thing that transcends race and gender is this. this reality that we all struggle. And the leaders who understand that, who frankly integrated and embrace it, they're the ones that we're drawn to. We relate to them. We feel safe with them, even though we're going through it. You know, it's the most ironic thing in the world. The ones that are just talking about five ways to be great like me, it's completely

unwatchable. And in fact, I think it's starting to create social insurgents like you talked about, where people are actually revolting against them and moving away from them, you know, in looking for that storyteller who embraces the struggle and talks about what's really going on. Or maybe the poet. Maybe. Well, I've seen the moment of my greatness flicker and heard the eternal footman snicker. And in short, I was afraid.

It's okay to be afraid. It's okay to admit it. And this other thing you're doing, this storytelling motivational thing, would people need to know? Well, so we do this. What I believe is we need leaders that are relatable to pain. and relevant to goals, right? That's what people follow. We follow leaders who are relatable to our pain and relevant to our goals. I've seen this over and over again. And those are the ones that own the room. You know, those are the ones that we follow. Those are the ones that influence.

And so one of the things that I've started doing, it's our first time to do it post-COVID, is I run this event out at a dude ranch in old Florida. And we get around fire pits and live oak trees. And I teach those old school interpersonal skills that I used to teach at Fort Bragg and federal law enforcement, but I'm teaching it now to small business owners, nonprofit leaders, C-suite executives, they come from. And we build it all around storytelling. We spend two days out there learning about the human operating system, how it works, how we take action. And then we start working with personal stories on how to craft them, how to deliver them, how to really connect with people, how to listen to the storyteller, how to ask calibrated questions. It's just all of those

Lorenzian skills and just pouring that into various business leaders from around the country. That's my jam. That's the thing I love doing more than anything else is getting people who thrive in that bottom up kind of mindset that want to learn those interpersonal skills and then take it back to their arena and training them out in the woods. That's my thing. That's awesome, man. Where do people go? Scottman.com. The name of the event is own every room. We run it twice a year. It's a small event, usually like 50 to 75 people. What's the rooftop thing? The rooftop leadership is my, overall approach to leadership. The idea is that in Afghanistan, what we would do is we would go into these communities. I mean, we would connect with farmers that were skeptical and didn't want us there

in the first place. And then over time, we'd build rapport with them. And then whenever the Taliban would attack, it would be our special forces team that would go up on the rooftop in the beginning and defend the village. And then one at a time, one farmer at a time would come up on the rooftop and fight back until eventually the whole community was fighting back from the rooftop. So I started to call that approach of getting people to take action when they're scared shitless, rooftop leadership. Walk the walk. That's it.

Yeah, being willing to go up there until people find the courage to join you. Well, that's the John Wick part of it. Absolutely. We didn't talk much about that because I think people know what that means. Yeah. But this is a good place to land the plane. It's John Wick. It's T.E. Lawrence.

And it's the Verizon guy. Can you hear him now? Scott, man, I'm so glad we did this in person, man. Thank you, Mike. It was really great fun. Yeah, you and Chuck. You're welcome back anytime. And thanks for the kind words about the sweat pledge.

Absolutely. I took it, signed it. It will be proudly displayed my bride, Monty, and I at rooftop headquarters, and all of our team will sign it as well. And Monty, thank you for coming by and watch it. How do you do? What's your honest take? Wonderful.

It was great. 28 years. She's kept me straight, man. 28 years? In a row? In a row. In a row. Not damn.

Thanks, folks. See you next week. Thanks. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't. Won't you please? Won't you please? Don't you please.

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