[00:00] Scott Mann: We are primal creatures that are focused on meaning and we are emotional in how we navigate the world. We’re social, we’re storytellers, and we’re all bound by struggle. We’re a mess. That’s the acronym that I use. And the more we can understand those realities, the more we can lead people in these modern problems.

[00:20] Scott Mann: So I just think we need to understand our nature more and get back to who we are as a species and really understand that.

[00:28] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host Jim Harshaw Jr. and today I bring you retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. Scott was a Green Beret, served in Afghanistan, and has absolutely fantastic stories. You may have heard him back in episode 384, and that was in late 2022 when I interviewed him about his book, Pineapple Express. And this was about a sort of, Off the books, off the records operation that Scott headed up to get some of the people out of Afghanistan whenever the United States was pulling out of Afghanistan and everything went wrong that could have gone wrong there.

[01:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And it was sort of his view of how that happened. It’s interesting. I love his political views. He doesn’t point fingers at Republicans or Democrats or one president or the other. He just has this sort of higher level perspective, which I appreciate so much, especially in the world today and great book.

[01:33] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It was a New York times bestseller. He has a new book coming out. It’s a great book. And I absolutely recommend it. It’s nobody is coming to save you a green berets guide to getting big shit done. And it’s going to surprise you. How do green berets go about getting big shit done? It’s not how you think it is.

[01:51] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s not going in guns a blazing. It’s not going in, in the ways that you think Green Berets might go in, that Warriors might go in to make things happen. This guy. Ooze’s passion comes with just a different way of going about how he shares his message. He speaks from the heart. He speaks from his DNA.

[02:10] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. He’s got a book to sell, but he’s not selling a book. He’s selling his story. He’s selling what he can give you that will help you in your life. So you’re going to get a lot out of this interview in this conversation. I’m going to ask you one favor. I bring you these guests because it’s a passion of mine.

[02:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I don’t make money on this podcast. You never hear an ad on this podcast. Can you share it? Can you give it a share? Can you tell one person? Maybe it’s somebody who you know who listens to Jocko Willink, uh, podcast or somebody who was in the military who you know that might appreciate a conversation like this, or maybe it’s a leader, um, because he talks a lot about leadership here today and give this a share.

[02:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: If you could forward it along to someone who you think would, would value this, this episode. So thank you in advance for doing that. Let’s get into my interview with retired Lieutenant Colonel. Scott, man. You know, there’s not a whole lot of folks who have done multiple episodes. Um, I told you before we hit record, I just love who you are.

[03:04] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I love how you are. I love your message. You’re passionate about it for all the right reasons. You’re not just doing the rounds to pitch your book or to pitch your thing or your leadership coaching. It’s like, this just comes from the soul and the depths of the DNA of who you are. So really excited to have you back

[03:22] Scott Mann: here.

[03:22] Scott Mann: Thanks, Jim. I think probably I get in trouble sometimes because I don’t talk enough about like the book and those things. But for me, it’s, those are just an extension of the message and what’s really at play here. And so, yeah, I like to just tell stories and see where they go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’ve got

[03:39] Jim Harshaw Jr.: some good ones.

[03:39] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So let’s talk about. Your latest story, your latest book is Nobody is Coming to Save You, A Green Beret’s Guide to Getting Big Shit Done. Why did you write this book?

[03:51] Scott Mann: I’ve been writing this book for six years and I’ve been wanting to put out a book because people would ask me, how did you do Pineapple Express?

[03:59] Scott Mann: Or how did you put a play together and learn how to act when you were 50 and get with Gary Sinise and get this thing on the road and do those kinds of strategic things when. In reality, you weren’t qualified to do it. And I think that comes from a place in my origins as a Green Beret and what I was taught as a young, as a young Green Beret about how to work from the bottom up that it’s very relevant where we are today, particularly when you look at how disconnected we are.

[04:24] Scott Mann: And it’s just to me, it’s very similar. What you see in our country today in our civil society is very similar. To a lot of the low trust, high stakes places I worked as a green beret, that same kind of churn. And so I thought, well, if I could capture that methodology in such a way that it could show up as best practices and techniques for leaders who are out there getting it done every day, battling against that same churn from the bottom up, then I owe them that I owe that to the folks that I serve.

[04:51] Scott Mann: So that was really the impetus for it. And it took a long time. I don’t even know how many redos and rewrites, but I think we finally got it to a place where. I’m really proud of this thing and I think it’s going to help people.

[05:03] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah, I think it is too. You talk about low trust, high stakes environments.

[05:08] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And to a certain extent, we’re all living in that. And you talk about this in the book, like we’re all living in that all day, every day, especially in this political season that we’re in right now. You live this in a much more intense level, right? Much more acute level. You open the book by talking about When your helicopter touches down in a remote village in Afghanistan, can you take us back to that moment?

[05:31] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Because that mission seems to be, you know, obviously it’s very, very relevant to this low trust, high stakes environment that you talk about and kind of where your philosophy grew from, can you take us back to that moment when the helicopter touched down and what your mission was?

[05:46] Scott Mann: Yeah, the mission was called Village Stability Operations, and it was basically a modern day Magnificent Seven, a kind of a bottom up operation about 10 years into the Afghan war, when we realized we were losing the war.

[05:57] Scott Mann: There were more Taliban in the rural areas than when we had started, and a big reason for that was that we had, for 10 years, we had focused on getting payback and retribution from 9 11, and kind of walking the enemy down, and then trying to project a top down. Western style approach in a country that was very busted up, very infested with disconnection and distrust.

[06:18] Scott Mann: And rather than working at the community level, the bottom up level, which is what Green Berets have done since World War II, we tried to come from the wrong direction. And so I was fortunate enough to be part of that mission that was a reset basically in the special forces approach. And the way I opened the book is in one of those villages was going in there, To engage with a community that was very, very oppressed, that was very, very disconnected from themselves, from their neighbors, and certainly from us, and then building relationships that would ultimately empower those folks to go up on their own rooftops and defend themselves the way they had done for centuries, but it was based on the social capital and rapport.

[07:00] Scott Mann: That was built when nobody was looking. And that is the essence of what I learned as a Green Beret. I can’t tell you how many times Jim, a senior non commissioned officer would tell me as a young junior officer, Hey sir, nobody’s coming to save us. It’s just us. And then he would say something like, well, we got a good team.

[07:16] Scott Mann: We’re going to be fine. And then this little team would 12 and come out with 120. And that to me is indicative of where we are today. You’re right. Different stakes. The stakes in some ways are higher in those rough villages, but in many ways, maybe not, you know, maybe where we are today as a civil society, it is unprecedented and I think that what got us here is not going to get us there.

[07:39] Scott Mann: We need new approaches to leadership that are based on a lot of these old school interpersonal skills that we did as Green Berets that still are done out there in the rough places and making leaders at home more aware of those so they can, they can put them into play.

[07:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What was that like going into that village?

[07:55] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, what, what did the villagers say to you? What did the leaders say to you? How did that go?

[08:00] Scott Mann: I think what I try to explain to people is it’s, you know, you imagine a village that’s been at war for 40 years where even the children have post traumatic stress, that Green Beret, Patrick Christian, he’s an anthropologist.

[08:12] Scott Mann: He calls it inescapable shock that the people that live there, they can’t move between fight and flight. They’re in a trance like state. They’re in a churn of disengagement where they don’t have purpose. They’re in a churn of distraction where the least little thing pulls them off track and, and they’re in a churn of disconnection.

[08:28] Scott Mann: They, they, they don’t trust each other. They don’t trust their government. They sure as hell don’t trust us. So trying to go in there with just a handful of folks and to make a connection like that, you know, it’s extremely, extremely difficult and it starts with. Making a connection with one individual.

[08:45] Scott Mann: You might have an elder sitting there looking at you, tickling the trigger of his AK 47, you know, trying to decide if he’s going to dispatch you or not. And you have five minutes to make a connection with that guy, to build some kind of rapport. And you have to be so intentional and so focused on that relationship.

[09:02] Scott Mann: And imagine, I just think, well, what if we did that here at home? What if we were that intentional? What if we were that focused on the connections that we make with our kids, with our spouses, with the neighbor down the street when we’re talking about politics? What if the relationship was the asset like that?

[09:18] Scott Mann: What if we treated relationships in a precious way like that here at home, rather than casual, rather than as an inconvenience? And so that for me is what it was like. It was like, it was life or death, but it was all built on the kind of relationships you could build. That’s what kept you alive. And I think that’s.

[09:34] Scott Mann: Very much true for us here today.

[09:36] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. Before we get into, I want to take this and say, how do we, how can we apply this? How can the listener apply this? I really want to get into the, to, to a moment, a moment where you were there, you were looking eye to eye with, with a villager and, and maybe you weren’t sure how this interaction was going to go.

[09:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Is there a specific moment or a person that you remember time that you can tell us about where, where you really learned this lesson?

[10:01] Scott Mann: There was one community in particular in Northern Kandahar province where it was just so difficult to get into the community that they were very resistant. They were intimidated by, and there’s, this is actually a scene from my play as well, Last Out.

[10:14] Scott Mann: And, and it was, they were very, very resistant to working with the Green Berets in that village because the Taliban had their foot on their throat. And frankly, many of these old men, their sons were in the Taliban, you know, so there were a lot of reasons not to work with us, but mostly it was just high intimidation.

[10:31] Scott Mann: And I can remember going up on rooftops of where our platform was and defending whenever the village was attacked and there would be nobody else around, there’d be nobody else there. And then this would go on for, you know, days, sometimes weeks. So the Taliban would come in and attack that village? Yeah, they would attack the village with sometimes within hours of a team getting in there because they knew what that represented.

[10:55] Scott Mann: They knew that a team moving into this community like that, growing their beards out, living in the community represented a direct threat to their ability to influence that population, which was at the heart of their insurgency. And for years we had lived on these built up fire bases, basically driving to work.

[11:13] Scott Mann: And when we changed that operating system and moved into the communities, that was a major warning flag to the Taliban. And so they would attack with unmitigated violence almost immediately. You know, think of like community policing in East LA. If you have a cop that moves into a community and parks his Cruiser out front of his house, that guy’s going to get hit.

[11:34] Scott Mann: Because it represents a direct threat to the population that they need. And this is what would happen. And you go up on the rooftop and you defend yourself as best you can. And for the most part, the community’s not coming up there. They’re going to hang low. They’re going to stay down below. You have to apply amazing restraint to not shoot back in a way that you’re going to commit collateral damage.

[11:56] Scott Mann: But at the same time, you have to defend yourself. And it’s extremely difficult being up there on a rooftop like that by yourself and nobody following you. And this would go on again for days, weeks, sometimes months. And during the day, you go back out into the community, you drink tea, you engage the farmers, you try to, you try to find ways that you can be relevant, whether that’s providing medical care to the kids.

[12:17] Scott Mann: And then over time, incrementally, usually it would be when you least expected it, you would hear a gunshot off to your side and there would be a muzzle flash on another roof, but not shooting at you, shooting in the same direction as you are. And it would be one farmer up on his roof, defending his home.

[12:33] Scott Mann: The way he had always done, and then your team, and then a few nights later, there’d be two muscle flashes up on two roofs, and then on and on it would go, and it was incremental, but before long, every village, you know, every, every rooftop in the village would have rifle fire firing back as a collective, and over the years, I started to call that rooftop leadership, as I would bring these various Senior leaders down to see this because it was a phenomenon.

[12:58] Scott Mann: I mean, it really turned the tide of the war about midway through Osama bin Laden wrote to his intelligence chief that the program that we were doing represented the biggest threat to the insurgency in Afghanistan. I mean, that’s the kind of effect that it was having. It was very bottom up, but it was big shit, man.

[13:15] Scott Mann: And so when I unpack that, and when I look at where we are today, It’s the same approach. Humans are universally similar in how we’re wired to interact with each other. And it was really, you build trust when risk is low and you leverage it when risk is high. That’s why those guys eventually went up on the roof is because of the trust that was built when risk was low during the day.

[13:36] Scott Mann: Over time, social capital was established and ultimately one by one, they go up on that roof and, and stand up for themselves. And I think honestly, in today’s world that we live in, it’s the same way, you know, people aren’t going to follow you initially, but if you just kind of stay committed to the relationships and the connections, eventually they will.

[13:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. How is that relevant for us right now? I mean, whether it’s politically, whether it’s in our communities, whether it’s just, you’re trying to win people to a new way of thinking, how do we use this for our own personalized?

[14:09] Scott Mann: I think there’s a couple of ways to look at it. One is, first of all, is I think is to think about the environment that we live in.

[14:14] Scott Mann: A lot of times it’s easy to say that the enemy is the Republican or Democrat that’s across from you or the person that doesn’t wear a mask or wears a mask. But the reality is, I believe that the enemy, much like in Afghanistan, the enemy, yes, of course, the Taliban was the enemy, but the enemy was also the churn.

[14:30] Scott Mann: It was that social disconnection that existed.

[14:32] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. Talk about the church. Can you define that? Cause you’ve used that term use that you talk about in the book, but can you define that for the listener?

[14:38] Scott Mann: Yeah, it’s really just a set of unprecedented social conditions that divides us as a population from each other and meeting our goals.

[14:45] Scott Mann: And it really is brought about by a range of conditions that are, again, unprecedented, many of them are kind of brought about by the modern world. They’re brought about by external stressors, but they usually manifest in what I call the four D’s, uh, distraction, disengagement. Right. Disconnection and distrust.

[15:04] Scott Mann: And all of those, it’s like the perfect storm. When those manifest like that, you have these conditions where basically you’re in a, you’re in a trance state all the time and you’re disconnected from your neighbor, there’s a, there’s a lack of trust. And so you, you walk around almost all the time in a sympathetic state of fight, flight, or freeze.

[15:21] Scott Mann: The least little thing can set you off. And if you see how we behave on social media, you see how we behave around the 24 7 news cycle, how we, how we, how people drive in public after COVID. Like all of this is a manifestation of what I call the churn. It’s an unprecedented set of social conditions that divide us.

[15:39] Scott Mann: And if we don’t recognize those conditions for what they are, then we start to label the neighbor across from us as the enemy. And they’re not. The reality is it’s the same dude or dudette that you’ve been dealing with for years, right? But the conditions around us have changed. And so how you navigate that is really important.

[15:56] Scott Mann: That’s the, so the second thing I think that we can use to apply from that world that I lived in and the world that we live in today is, is to think about our own human nature differently than we ever have before. What I call the human operating system. We’ve become so disconnected. We’re also disconnected from our own nature.

[16:14] Scott Mann: We forgot that we are a We are a primal creature, right? We are a, we are a 250, 000 year old well dressed Neanderthal. And the way that we handle the modern world, the brain has not evolved that much. Multitasking is a myth. These dopamine dispensers that we walk around with all the time, they put us in a trance like state.

[16:34] Scott Mann: And so there’s just a range of modern realities that are pulling us away from our nature. So I say, we got to get back to our nature. We have to understand that we are primal creatures that are focused on meaning. And we are emotional in how we navigate the world. We’re social, we’re storytellers, and we’re all bound by struggle.

[16:53] Scott Mann: We’re a mess. That’s the acronym that I use. And the more we can understand those realities. The more we can lead people in these modern problems. So the other piece of it is I just think we need to understand our nature more and get back to who we are as, as a species and really understand that. And that’s what I do in my book.

[17:11] Scott Mann: I go really deep on what makes us tick. And then with that in mind, how do you make connections across that?

[17:19] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Quick interruption. Hey, if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to get the notes, quotes, and links in the action plan from this episode. Just go to jimharshawjr.com/action. That’s jimharshawjr.com/action to get your free copy of the action plan. Now back to the show. You experienced churn yourself at a very deep level. I mean, you at one point had a gun in your hand, you found yourself in a closet in your house. With a gun in your hand, can you, if you’re willing to, or can you share what led to that moment?

[17:52] Scott Mann: Yeah. I mean, I came back from being a very high performing guy in special forces, like, you know, many special operators. I lived a life that was won by design. I involved a lot of combat, but I lived the life I wanted to live. And I retired what I thought was on my terms, came home in 2013 and. Still married, had my kids, was going to write a book, had a good job, but within 18 months, Jim, of taking off the desert boots and putting on the Tampa Bay flip flops, the snakes in my head started to squirm pretty hard.

[18:21] Scott Mann: And one of the big reasons for that was all of the disconnection and churn that I saw in my own country. I came home to a country I didn’t even recognize. You know, Sebastian Younger, this guy, he writes in his book, Tribe, that most combat veterans are willing to die for their country, but they have no idea how they’re supposed to live for it.

[18:38] Scott Mann: And that’s because it’s hard to know how to live for a country that’s tearing itself apart along every imaginable line from race to economics, to politics, to religion. And that was true for me. That’s what I felt like. I was like, you know, I’ve lost all these friends. I’ve lost my entire adult life. I’m no longer part of that world for what?

[18:53] Scott Mann: So that we can sit here and literally behave the way we did over in Afghanistan. What I saw over there. And it just felt like it felt so empty and it took me to a really dark place where I really started to question my purpose and my identity and it opened the door for things that I had pressed down for years on the emotional side.

[19:11] Scott Mann: Post traumatic stress, survivor’s guilt, moral injury that I had not dealt with, didn’t know how to deal with and they came racing in. And it took me to a place where I was, yeah, standing in a closet, holding a pistol with no intention of coming out in this very house. And you know, and had my son not come home from school when he did, I’m pretty confident I wouldn’t be here.

[19:29] Scott Mann: But the thought of my son finding me was enough to have me put the gun down, humiliated, ashamed. I didn’t talk about it for years. I didn’t, I did not talk about that incident. But what did stay with me was Uh, and it wasn’t the only time I went in that closet either, was that I felt like I had something to say, man.

[19:49] Scott Mann: I felt like I had, I had seen a world over there that looked a lot like the world over here, and that I had some things that I had learned that might be helpful. But every time I would try and talk about it, every time I would try to tell stories of what I’d learned, I would jam up, I would freeze up, I would experience severe anxiety.

[20:05] Scott Mann: And I didn’t know how to tell my story at all. And it was, uh, I met a guy named Bo, who was a storyteller. And I talk about him in the book. He was a former NFL football player turned speaker. Bo Eason. Yep. Bo Eason turned speaker and he changed my life. He showed me how to use storytelling as a modality to heal myself and then to bridge the civil military gap.

[20:25] Scott Mann: And that’s what I started to do. And I became obsessed with it, man. I became obsessed. With this notion that storytelling, which is a sense making tool biologically for us, and it is a real antibody to the churn, no matter what your profession is. And so I just, I just immersed myself in the realm of storytelling.

[20:44] Scott Mann: Three TED Talks, hundreds of keynote speeches, going on the news as an analyst, learning how to become an actor, writing a play, anything that I could do that would stretch my comfort zone on storytelling, I did. And that became where I found most. Most of my relevance was teaching other people how to use storytelling in their own arena as a way to bridge gaps.

[21:04] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Storytelling is, is one of the parts of your framework in terms of how we deal with churn and how we can face it, minimize it. I mean, we’re surrounded by what you said earlier with the four D’s distraction, disengagement, disconnection, distrust. I mean, these are all All around us. We’re not going to completely escape these unless we get off the grid and go, go back to our caveman days.

[21:28] Jim Harshaw Jr.: But how do we manage this? You have your mess framework. Can you, can you share that mess framework again with us and go, you know, bullet point by bullet point on what these mean and how we use those.

[21:37] Scott Mann: Yeah, absolutely. I start off by, by basically making the case that we need to bridge this churn and to lead through it.

[21:44] Scott Mann: We need to understand the human operating system. And at a macro level, the way I describe it is I use a metaphor because the brain is a metaphorical pattern matching organ. The brain looks for metaphor to make sense of things. That’s why songs and poetry and plays work so well in stories. And so the metaphor I use is the iceberg, right?

[22:02] Scott Mann: The iceberg and the tip of the iceberg is the modern world and the bottom of the iceberg below the waterline, the part you can’t see that’s actually the largest part of the iceberg. That’s the traditional world. That’s where we all come from. That’s the primal creature. And as humans, we are that full iceberg.

[22:17] Scott Mann: We are the tip of the iceberg, which is about 20 percent of that iceberg. Is the modern world. It’s getting, it’s the cash flow reports. It’s binge watching Yellowstone. It’s getting the kids to soccer practice on time. Zoom fatigue, all those things. And it feels like it’s all consuming, but the bottom of the iceberg is really the bulk of our humanity.

[22:36] Scott Mann: And it’s the part we can’t see. It’s invisible. It’s where we all come from. It’s the traditional world. It’s our ancestors. It’s the hunters, the gatherers, because that Is still our genetic and biological makeup. What we were 200, 000 years ago is still what we are today. We just haven’t changed that much.

[22:55] Scott Mann: Adam Ghazali says in the Distracted Mind, we’re still ancient brains trying to make sense of a high tech world.

[23:01] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. We haven’t had a chance to evolve yet.

[23:03] Scott Mann: No, we haven’t. And that’s why you see people have these primal responses to modern day problems that are totally inappropriate. So you might see somebody lose their shit.

[23:14] Scott Mann: Over their 401k eroding over six months, right? And the amygdala doesn’t know the difference. It’s, it’s responding the same way it would if it was a saber toothed tiger in the bushes. That’s great if it’s a saber toothed tiger, but it’s totally inappropriate if you have that response in front of your team at an all hands meeting.

[23:31] Scott Mann: Because what happens is you’re in survival mode. You’re in a sympathetic state. You look like you don’t trust yourself when in reality, what you need to do is to connect with the people in that room and bridge that, but the way we are made up at a primal level, that’s not the immediate response. And so the more we can understand about what’s below the waterline, the more we can manage our own energy and the energy of those around us.

[23:55] Scott Mann: And that’s what I teach still to this day, Green Berets, federal law enforcement. And now corporate executives and salespeople is like, it’s the same thing. So the acronym that I use to describe that creature that lives below the waterline is a creature that is focused on meaning, emotions, social connection, storytelling, and struggle.

[24:17] Scott Mann: And those aren’t the only things, but they are very, very significant. And if you can focus on those things as both lenses and levers, In how you see your own behavior and the behavior around you and how you manage behavior and manage relationships. It’s very effective. And so what I did was, I just build one chapter in the book around each one of those and go super deep on it.

[24:41] Scott Mann: Tell us about meaning. Meaning, finding meaning. We’re the most meaning seeking creatures in the world. We don’t only seek meaning in what we do. We assign meaning to what we do. You know, Simon Sinek says, people don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. He’s absolutely right. We are driven by purpose.

[24:57] Scott Mann: And in this day and age, what I’m seeing and I teach and I speak across all kinds of industries, we have omitted purpose from most of what we do. We don’t talk about the why. We have so much ambiguity and complexity around us and what people crave. In times of complexity and ambiguity is clarity and the only way you can be clear is if you have a sense of purpose.

[25:19] Scott Mann: It’s the only way. And so we need to get back to the things that we do that help us get a sense of purpose first for ourselves. Getting clear on what that is, but then organizationally, what is the collective purpose of what we’re trying to do? And leaders have to integrate that in what they talk about.

[25:37] Scott Mann: One of the first things I talk about in that chapter is leaving tracks, which was a term my dad Rex used all the time and still does about really leaving a legacy in this world. So kind of the North stars. And so I start that chapter off. With helping leaders get a sense of what’s the legacy that you’re leaving behind and how do you integrate that into every single thing you do every day of the week and get real clear on that because If you’re clear on your purpose, man, people know it.

[26:04] Scott Mann: They feel safe and they want to be around

[26:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: you. It makes things so much simpler when you have that clarity of purpose. My philosophy and my coaching framework comes from my experience as a college athlete. Like when I was there, when I was competing as a college athlete. It was very, sort of very limited and maybe a little selfish at that point.

[26:23] Jim Harshaw Jr.: But, but I still had this very clear purpose, which allowed me to do really hard things, things that nobody would consider doing, waking up early and doing ridiculous workouts and losing. 20, 22 pounds and two and a half days at one point. Like we just, we just. Doing these kinds of things, it’s really hard and you can do hard things when there’s purpose, right?

[26:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I make a distinction between hard work and inspired action to call what, what I did when I was competing hard work is, yeah, it was a hard work. Sure. It was, but it’s like almost unfair to call it that because it was really, it was inspired, right? It was inspired by my purpose. And when you get clear on that, I’m speaking to the listener right now.

[26:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: When you get clear on that, everything gets simpler. I’m not saying it gets easy. It just. Gets simpler. You find yourself more consistent, more focused, more disciplined in doing things that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. That’s really

[27:12] Scott Mann: good. And you’re less exposed to the churn. When you are clear on your purpose, you’re less exposed to all the BS that’s going on around you.

[27:20] Scott Mann: I’ll give you an example. The last time you and I were together, we talked about Pineapple Express. I went back through that chat room when I was writing Operation Pineapple Express. I went back through the Signal chat room. There were I mean, thousands, 150 veterans doing entries over 11 days with, you know, 7, 000 people in our manifest.

[27:38] Scott Mann: You can imagine thousands of entries. I went through all of them. The word Biden was mentioned one time, the word Trump, never. Now, Think about this. 150 special operators whose partners have just been abandoned by both of these individuals. Not just Biden. Trump’s Doha agreement was very, very destructive in how we dealt with this problem.

[28:03] Scott Mann: But yet, it was only between the two of them. They only mentioned one time. And how is that even possible? And I will tell you it’s because the myopic focus of honoring a promise. That was the only thing the guys were in there to do. They didn’t have time. And I saw the same thing in combat. You saw the same thing as an athlete.

[28:22] Scott Mann: The brain has a mandate. To make sense of the world. It has a mandate. They call it the make sense mandate. That’s what Dr. Kendall Haven calls it. And if you recognize that out of the gate as a leader and for yourself, and you feed that mandate, the life gets super clear and the people around you feel much safer and they want to be around

[28:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: you.

[28:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So your acronym M E and three S’s. So we talked about meaning. Let’s talk about emotions.

[28:49] Scott Mann: Yeah, emotion is a big one. It’s probably the one I’m most concerned about because there’s this, in this tip of the iceberg world, we think that we are thinking creatures who happen to feel. Not true. We are emotional creatures who just happen to think, right?

[29:04] Scott Mann: That frontal cortex is a fairly new thing in the evolution of humanity. The ponderance of our existence of our brain is quite primal, and we use emotions to navigate the world, right? Alan Weiss, million dollar consultant, says, Logic makes people think. Emotions make people act. And what we’ve done in this modern tip of the iceberg world is we’ve pressed emotions down.

[29:27] Scott Mann: It’s just business. We don’t have emotional access. We don’t allow emotions to permeate how we navigate the world. We just press them down and it’s killing us. It’s killing our first responders. It’s killing our veterans. And I believe post COVID it’s starting to have, we have a mental health tsunami in civil society right now.

[29:45] Scott Mann: Yeah.

[29:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Especially with our kids.

[29:47] Scott Mann: Yeah. I mean, and so we’ve got to learn how to manage emotional temperature. This is again, a metaphorically what I use as a thermometer. When you look at our, at our body, we go into a sympathetic state for fight, flight, or freeze when we’re facing a crisis. And we then regulate to a parasympathetic state when the crisis is over.

[30:07] Scott Mann: To metabolize the trauma, process it, tell stories, learn from it, and heal and connect. So you go from fight, flight, or freeze to calm, and connect, rest, and digest. And we did this thousands of years ago. If you and I and our clan dealt with a saber toothed tiger, sympathetic state, deal with the tiger. We did this thousands Parasympathetic state when we go back to the cave, bury our dead, treat our wounded, tell stories about what we learned, and heal, right?

[30:30] Scott Mann: And metabolize the trauma. They work in tandem. But today, in this time of churn, because we’re so disconnected from our nature, we’re staying in a sympathetic state all the time. We’re in a sympathetic state all the time, and we don’t know how to manage our own state, and the body’s not designed for that.

[30:47] Scott Mann: The body is designed, you know this as an athlete, you episodically go into a sympathetic state to perform, and then you drop into a parasympathetic state. We’ve lost the ability to do that. We’re staying in the red all the time, and it’s creating this trance like state, because you’re in a trance when you do that.

[31:05] Scott Mann: You’re in a trance of hyper focus and you’re on full autopilot to just survive. And when you do that 80, 90 percent of the time, you look like you don’t trust yourself and you completely detach from the people around you. And that’s what in my assessment is causing the preponderance of the problems you see in the country today to include the election.

[31:24] Scott Mann: The third

[31:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: letter in your five, the five part acronym M E S S S the third letter is S social

[31:30] Scott Mann: connections. Yeah, social connections. Think about it this way. Matthew Lieberman in his book, Social, he says that humans are the most social creatures on the planet. We don’t have fur, fangs, or claws, right? We sit on top of the food chain because we form teams better than any other mammal on the planet.

[31:45] Scott Mann: That’s how we survive, is we form groups. And we are predisposed to do that biologically. We are always semi consciously looking to make connections. And I submit that in the modern world, particularly after two plus years of isolation, we’ve lost a lot of our innate ability and appreciation for social connection.

[32:03] Scott Mann: We don’t, we’re so isolated right now. And so what I’m trying to get us to get back to is. Like we did in Afghanistan, the relationship has to be the asset. You put the relationship before the transaction. The reason that we were able to get a thousand Afghans out of the country with our cell phones and really nothing else, no authority, no money, no resources, no access and placement was because we had built trust when risk was low over 20 years and we leveraged that trust when risk was high.

[32:32] Scott Mann: And that is to me, the way we need to navigate the world today. You build trust when risk is low, you leverage it when risk is high. And in order to do that, you have to put the relationship before the transaction. The relationship is the asset. Social capital is the most important capital in the world. If you have social capital, it’s the oldest form, tangible, intangible linkages between humans.

[32:56] Scott Mann: If you have that, everything else will flow from that. All other forms of capital.

[33:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And for the listener, you got to buy the book because Scott talks about that, that social capital, that relationship capital, and how that played out in Afghanistan in building relationships with these villagers.

[33:11] Scott Mann: And a lot of techniques to use it today.

[33:13] Scott Mann: So like that in that chapter, I go deeper probably than any other chapter on how to build social capital as a bottom up leader with no title, how you can build communities of practice. And I use the play Last Out. I use some other scenarios like Pineapple Express to show how basically you build these communities of practice around wicked problems, around hard problems.

[33:36] Scott Mann: It’s amazing what you can do if you make social connection, the, uh, the priority. And, but there’s an approach to it that really works well. And, and that’s what I try to hit hard in the book. The next S is story. Yeah, we’re story animals. We’ve been telling stories for 70, 000 years. And the thing I think probably could most succinctly get at this is the brain has a mandate to make sense of the world.

[33:59] Scott Mann: And it is a metaphorical pattern matching organ. In other words, it uses metaphor, narrative, story to make sense of things. The brain of your listener, of your child, of your client. And yours will tell itself a story in order to make sense of anything. So if you show a PowerPoint deck and it’s 70 slides long, David Phillips did a study that showed that your audience is going to forget 90 percent of your content 30 seconds after you say thank you for your time because you’re engaging working memory.

[34:29] Scott Mann: Stories and They evoke long term memory. They provide meaning and context and emotional connection. And so it becomes a vehicle by which you can bridge these gaps and people locate themselves in the story. If you’ve ever listened to a story and you almost start processing your own life in that story, it’s called autobiographical listening or narrative transportation.

[34:51] Scott Mann: And storytellers own every room they walk into, particularly today, because we are inundated with this short form, It’s all about me communication stuff, and it’s unwatchable. Storytellers are the ones that everybody will slow down for, even the distracted people. And I’ve seen it over and over again as a speaker.

[35:11] Scott Mann: I test it in every forum I can go into, and I tell stories. And I hold every room I walk into. And I’m no different than anybody else. I just train my ass off at it. And that’s what I would encourage people to do. And this book really lays out. How to tell better stories, not just design them, but to tell them for maximum impact.

[35:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s interesting to hear, like, you weren’t just naturally a great storyteller. You’ve trained at it. You’ve worked at it. You’ve put effort into it. And for the listener, we have to do the same thing.

[35:38] Scott Mann: Yeah, because the tip of the iceberg world tells us not to do that. You know, we, everything in the modern world tells us not to tell stories.

[35:44] Scott Mann: It pushes us away from that. And the reality is I say, go against the culture on that and become a storyteller.

[35:50] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The last S is struggle.

[35:53] Scott Mann: Yeah. And they kind of go hand in hand, storytelling and struggle. I call it the generosity of scars going back to my time in that closet. I didn’t talk about it for years.

[36:02] Scott Mann: And it was only when my seventh friend had committed suicide. That Then I told my wife, I was like a couple of weeks out from a Ted talk. And I said, you know, I need to change my Ted talk. And this was my third one. And she said, what? And I said, yeah, I need to talk about, you know, I said my friend’s name and, you know, suicide.

[36:17] Scott Mann: And she’s like, oh, so you want to talk about how it’s affected your friends? I said, no, no, there’s something you need to know. And that’s when I told my wife, this was 2019. Then 2015, how long I’d carried it. Had to tell my boys, never told them, but I knew that if I could share that story, if I could repurpose that, that story.

[36:32] Scott Mann: Of my struggle, of my scars in the service of other people, that maybe somebody would locate themself in that story. Maybe somebody was sitting on that audience who was hurting. Well, it turned out that happened again and again and again. And to this day, that TED talk of all three has had over a million views.

[36:49] Scott Mann: It has, I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me and said, Hey man, I was in that closet. Thank you. And so it really just drove home for me, Jim, that the two best stories we can share in this world, the two best scar stories, the second best is the story you don’t want to tell other people.

[37:03] Scott Mann: And the best one is the one you don’t want to tell yourself. And if you’re willing to take your struggles and put them into the service of other people, you become more relatable to their pain. It’s a trust accelerant and it drops the armor. And people will follow you up onto that rooftop. And I know it feels clunky and scary and vulnerable, but I am absolutely convinced in this time of churn that leaders who can integrate struggle into what they talk about, their own personal struggle, who can be relatable to the struggle of others and even the struggle of their organizations, they’re the ones that we feel the safest with, the most connected to, and the ones that we want to follow.

[37:38] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Scott, you know, I told you I wanted to have you back cause you just ooze passion for what you do. I mean, your message is so powerful and I’m glad that we can be a small part of amplifying your message. For the listener who is bought into what you’re saying, uh, you know, we’re going to have a link to where they can pre pre purchase the book, which comes out in October.

[38:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And we’re publishing this prior to the launch of that, but you can for the listener, you can. You do a pre purchase of that book. We’ll have the link where the listeners can do that. What’s an action item that the listener can do in the next day, 24 to 48 hours to start following through on what

[38:16] Scott Mann: you taught us here today.

[38:17] Scott Mann: You know what? I would say let’s take storytelling as an action item and let’s do this. It’s not always the stories. In fact, it’s most of the time. It’s not the stories you tell, it’s the stories you ask to hear. And so find three opportunities to ask thoughtful, open ended questions, people in your life, and allow them to respond in story, right?

[38:38] Scott Mann: Questions that either start with how or what, just an open ended calibrated question that lets them respond to you in a story. It could even be something as simple of, well, what’s the biggest lesson you learned from all of that? Or, how did that compare to this when you were going through that? And just watch.

[38:55] Scott Mann: Watch the look on their face because no one ever gets asked those questions. Watch the way they respond and notice the connection that starts to happen at a palpable semi conscious level. Thoughtful, Chris Voss calls them calibrated questions in Never Split the Difference. Questionology that let the other party tell you a story.

[39:15] Scott Mann: It’s two thirds of every high stakes engagement. And the cool thing is you can start right now with the people you love. Cause they’re usually the ones we blow it off with the most.

[39:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What

[39:24] Scott Mann: a

[39:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: fantastic action item. That’s going to help us and help the, help those that we love. Where can people find you, follow you, uh, buy the book when it goes on presale here, Scott?

[39:34] Scott Mann: Yeah. Thanks, Jim. Uh, scotman. com. Uh, two T’s, two N’s. The book is there. We’ve got some pretty cool things that are coming down with the book. We’re going to have a live event in the fall where we’re going to do tons of storytelling at a dude ranch that I do twice a year. It’s pretty fun. Uh, all that’s at scotman.

[39:48] Scott Mann: com and, and also the rooftop, you know, I might do my own rooftop podcast where I usually walk down my driveway out here and riff on this stuff. Yeah. All of that’s at scotman. com.

[39:57] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Excellent. We’ll have links to all that in the action plan. Scott, thanks so much for making time to come on the show again.

[40:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Absolutely, Jim. Thank you for

[40:03] Scott Mann: what you do and thanks for having me on.

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