Nobody’s coming to save you. It’s a simple phrase, but one that can mean the difference between success and failure. Elite performers know that when it’s time to take action, they need to be ready to execute with precision and without excuse.
Scott Mann is a retired Special Forces Officer, the architect of Operation Pineapple Express, and a leader who knows how to get results against the odds.
Scott first joined Fran Racioppi after the withdrawal from Afghanistan to share how he took a stand when few would. Now he’s showing us just how to apply an action first mindset to anything we set out to do.
Our rainy Sunday morning conversation from the banks of New York City’s East River was the perfect backdrop to break down his new book; Nobody’s coming to save you: a Green Beret’s guide to getting big shit done.
Scott defines the churn; the divisiveness, fear-laden complexity of the world that is in our face 24/7 across our devices. He shows us how that has put us all in a trance of distraction, disengagement, disconnection and distrust where transactional relationships focus on performing for each other instead of connecting. As a leader of action, Scott gives us the cure; which rightfully so will be MESSY.
Jump In with Scott and Fran as they wake up New York City, then head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast platform to catch all our coverage of the 2024 election cycle and our national security series with today’s most prominent Special Forces leaders.
The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are an official program of The Green Beret Foundation. Learn more on The Jedburgh Podcast Website. Subscribe to us and follow @jedburghpodcast on all social media. Watch the full video version on YouTube.
—
—
Scott, welcome back to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having me back, Fran. It’s cool to be back.
The last time you were with us, we were on the other side, looking at the World Trade Center down in lower Manhattan, 44th floor. Beautiful view that we had that day. Little bit nicer blue sky day. I was hoping for the same thing here in Long Island City, but I wanted to spend some time with you right here, looking at the city behind us because it’s like 8:00 in the morning, and we’re going to talk about Nobody Is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret’s Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done. Nothing gets shit done like this city and nothing gets shit done like Green Berets. We put two of them here on the pier early morning on a Sunday, and we can get some shit done.
No place I’d rather be.
Let’s talk about the book for a minute because it’s been a bit since you and I had a chance to catch up like I was saying. Last time, we talked about Afghanistan. We talked about Operation Pineapple Express. We talked about your instrumental efforts to get so many people out of Afghanistan. A couple of years later, we still reel from so much of the effect of what happened there and so many ways as we’ve had conversations on this show, whether it’s been with senior military leaders, whether it’s been with politicians.
We attribute so much of the chaos almost to those moments of getting out of Afghanistan and what that meant. It’s hard to think or start to have conversations about whether we are in chaos. Where are we? At the end of the day, regardless of the situation around us, we have to make things happen. Why write this book and why now?
I think you just framed it. Honestly, for me, that was the biggest reason. You and I both learned as young Green Berets from awesome NCOs that when you’re out in those rough trust-depleted places or I call it the churn, nobody is coming. Whatever you’re out there with is what you’ve got. The bulk of what you’re going to do, in addition to your lethal skills, are the relationships you build and the connections you make. That’s going to get you through it. You’re going to do it from the bottom up.
As I look at the country today and where we’ve evolved, we are in our own form of that unprecedented churn. Distraction, division, and disengagement today are higher than it’s ever been. I think it’s an unprecedented novel set of social conditions that are in front of us right now. As leaders, business leaders, community leaders, and politicians, we’re so divided.
The United States today is facing an unprecedented churn of distraction, disengagement, disconnection, and distrust, and it is higher than it has ever been.
What got us here is not going to get us there. We need a set of skills that looks a lot like Green Beret skills to get big shit done. That’s why I wrote this book. It was to try to help leaders who are stuck in these novel circumstances that we’ve been talking about right here at home to still move things forward because I think our institutional leaders are struggling.
You brought up a couple of the Ds, You call them the four Ds, distraction, disengagement, disconnection, and distrust. You attribute that to the churn. That’s what you’re using to describe it, this churn or this never-ending nonsense in a lot of ways that goes around us. Break these four down for a second.
Let’s start contextually with places that you and I worked with when the global war on terror was still going. For example, if we moved into a small village in rural Afghanistan, we needed to work with that village. You go in there and let’s say that village has been through years and years of violence and war.
That elder sitting across from you who’s tickling the trigger of his AK-47, deciding whether or not to dispatch you in that first meeting, is not necessarily the enemy. Although he feels like the enemy and he looks like he could be the enemy, the reality is the enemy is more about the social circumstances that exist in that village. You’ve got to find a way to navigate through that and connect with that guy. I think that’s the same thing here. Those four Ds I believe are far more the enemy than the Democrat or the Republican, the mask or the no mask. It is this set of conditions, starting with distractions. The average attention span of a human in the West is eight seconds.
That’s down. I think about this show over the last couple of years. When we first started this show, we talked about how we were going to promote it. Everyone was like, “You have to have a minute of engagement.” This was three and a half years ago. Our promos could be 60 seconds long. We realized after a year, “We’re losing people at 45 seconds. Cut them down 35 to 40 seconds.” We’re down now, three years later, 15 to 25 seconds after that.
That proves my point. A lot of it has to do with these dopamine dispensers that we carry around with us. It’s a dichotomy, isn’t it? It has conditioned us to be much less attentive. We’re distracted far more. Adam Gazzaley in the book, The Distracted Mind, says that we are ancient brains trying miserably to make sense of a high-tech world. Our mileage hasn’t changed. That’s the distraction piece.
You then got the disengagement piece, which is the absence of purpose. Disengagement scores on average in corporate America today are somewhere around 85%. Eighty-five percent of the workforce and the management say they’re disengaged. That means they lack purpose. That’s a huge leadership problem. If you don’t know what your purpose is or you don’t know what your why is, we’re meaning-seeking creatures. That’s a real thing.
If you do not know what your purpose is, you will have a hard time leading.
The final two are the disconnection. We’re disconnected from each other, but we’re also disconnected from the natural world. We’ve lost the disconnection to our human nature, who we are at a primal level, and then the distrust. Two-thirds of Americans no longer trust their neighbor. When you add all those Ds together, that is a novel set of circumstances that make it very difficult to get your stuff done.
There are a few points here that I think about when I read the book and when you talk about these four Ds. What comes to my mind, and you bring it up in the book, is transactional relationships. Everything is done through our phone now post-COVID. We live in this world with Zoom, “Get on a Zoom.” We’re in a world now where people don’t pick up the phone and call you and have a voice conversation anymore.
I was in the car with my daughter the other night taking her to a football game. We’re supposed to pick up her friend. We’re driving to her friend’s house, about half a mile from the girl’s house, and she’s running the other way down the street. I said, “Lily, call your friend. We’re on the way to pick her up, but she seems to be going the other direction.” “I cannot, I’ll text her.” “You’ll text her? That’s ridiculous. How about I open the window and yell we’re right here,” which is what I did. My daughter was yelling at me, “Why would you open the window and talk to her?” “I don’t know. We’re going to pick her up. She’s not at her house.” That’s how crazy it’s become when we talk about this transactional relationship where people don’t sit in front of each other and talk.
I was in a coffee shop right over here while we were getting set up and it said, “No Wi-Fi available, pretend like it’s 1995.” I thought, “That’s so cool.” To your point, that’s a reflection of our disconnection from nature or the natural world. That’s not how humans are wired to communicate. We’re wired to communicate like what we’re doing right now, face to face. This beautiful city that you see behind us. Metaphorically, when I talk about this in the book, the tip of the iceberg of our human nature, or what I call the human operating system is the modern world.
It’s where we live, work, and play. It’s everything, and you look behind me at that skyline, and you think that’s what the world is about. That’s everything that exists around us. What we don’t see is what’s below the waterline of that iceberg, which is our primal biological nature. The hunters, the gatherers, and 250,000 years of hardwired interpersonal connection experience. Those things are invisible to us these days and we’ve disconnected from them. We’ve lost or we’ve atrophied the ability to tap into what’s below the water line of our human nature.
Our primal biological nature as hunters is invisible to us these days. We have disconnected from them, which atrophied the ability to tap into our human nature.
Things like yelling out the window, “We’re going this way,” is atrophied. While that’s happening, everything that’s moving so fast and swirling around us puts us in a trance state. I try to make that case in the book. Most humans are in a trance right now. We don’t realize that we’re walking around in this transactional world like robots, disconnecting from our nature and leaving tons of opportunity and value on the table that is social capital.
Let’s talk about leadership for a second because we have to lead through these times. I want you in a minute to talk about some of the difficulties and challenges that America faces and we face as leaders right now. When we talk about leadership, go back to why the Green Berets get shit done.
Green Berets get shit done because we select people for certain capabilities. When I work with companies and I work with organizations and athletes, I always bring up the fact that it’s very easy to be good at what you do. When it’s a blue sky day, your company is making money, customer retention is through the roof, you’re winning games, you’re scoring points, you feel good, and you’re not injured, most people can find a way to be successful.
The reality is we live in this VUCA world, Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. We need leaders who come out and can adjust, change, adapt, and do things in the face of challenges because that is the reality. The reality when we build a business, when we play a sport, or when we lead others is that we are going to be challenged more than not. Do we have people who are ready to do that?
Tim Spiker says that the leaders that are most worth following are inwardly sound and others focused. I always think about Green Berets throughout my career and that was certainly most of who they were. They were very steady and stable inwardly and they were always looking at the other party and how that affected what we were doing. They were others focused. They were paying attention to the operational environment, and the human terrain.
That’s great when you’re working in these low-trust high-stakes areas around the world that we got dropped into, and that’s where Green Berets still get dropped into. Now the problem is the churn is here. These unprecedented social conditions of division and distrust are here in our cities, in our communities, and in our election system where people will unfriend each other over a candidate. High school friends who have been friends for five decades will unfriend each other on social media and never speak to each other again and catastrophize the outcome of an election to the point that they end a friendship.
We’ve normalized it. Now it’s a verb, “I’m going to unfriend you.” You and I did that when we were kids, but I would play with you the next day. Now it’s become this normalized verb and that’s a leadership problem. Leadership is the management of energy, yours and those around you. How you manage your energy and how you connect with other humans is everything. I think we’ve lost the ability to make human connections in a meaningful way. If we don’t get that back, I think it spells disaster for our civil society, not just in our bottom line but in how we can govern ourselves.
We’ve come to a point where we cannot find mutual agreement through disagreement if that makes sense.
Civil discourse.
For me to be right, you have to be wrong. There cannot be any other way to look at it. We cannot sit down and say, “I don’t agree with you. These are the reasons why, but let’s find some common ground or maybe we’re going to agree to disagree on this point, but later on down the road, you’re going to have to help me.”
I had a chance a couple of years ago now on the show to talk to Newt Gingrich and Patrick Murphy, the former Secretary of the Army and Congressman. Those are conversations that we had there, which was we used to live in a world where the two sides of the aisle could come together and they could sit down and say, “We’re going to find a resolution even though we may not agree.”
We seem to have lost so much of that and it’s become this polarizing effect. One of the things you bring up in the book rightly so is that we as people emulate leadership. Our elected leaders are the people that we see every day as a society. Now when they’re out there fighting, arguing, not getting along, and creating this example for us as adults and our children, we’re all subject to that behavior.
I refer to them as divisionists. I don’t even think that’s an actual word, but I like it. I think it works in describing this because of this perfect storm of the churn that we have. You have this reality that humans are like all mammals. We form in-groups and out-groups. That’s what we do. When we’re afraid, we get even more inclusive or we draw back into those groups, the people who look like us, think like us, or vote like us. It’s what we do.
In America, one of the things that has made this civil society different, Robert Putnam says that this is a society of bridging trust. We have this ability to bridge beyond our in-groups and bridge into other out-groups. That’s been the social capital that’s kept the secret sauce, kept this country strong, and made businesses high-performing. What’s happened in the last 5 to 10 years is you’ve seen a downslide away from that bridging trust back into bonding trust, where you only trust the people in your in-group. You only trust the people in your tribe or your party. The leaders of this country at the institutional level have always been the vanguards of bridging trust because it’s not a state of nature that occurs normally. You have to put that in place.
They’ve opted instead for this divisionism where they foment division between in-groups and out-groups in favor of a narrow agenda rather than doing the more uncomfortable thing, which is to bridge us together. When was the last time you heard a politician or a policymaker talk about connecting and bridging as Americans? You don’t hear it anymore. It’s not even in the language. It’s not even in the grammar. If those divisionists are doing that then we mirror that at a community level and it’s a very scary outcome.
How would you get the likes?
Exactly, and that’s the trend. That’s the tip of the iceberg piece. We start to think about and assess our relevance in the world based on how we are perceived, not in the natural world, but in a represented reality. How am I perceived here? That’s not even the natural world, so it causes us to be performative in how we operate. There are filters all the way through. It’s duck lips and selfies. That is not how we operate with each other as humans, which means our social skills atrophied.
You end up in a state too where you begin to judge almost your self-worth by what an algorithm is telling you. We forget that this is still a machine and this algorithm is looking for certain things that may be pushing it out to people or not. That’s what’s judging you and then you’re looking at it going, “I only got five likes. I only got so many impressions of this thing. Therefore I suck. I’m not good.”
I go into this deep in the book and I hope people will check it out because there’s a level of entanglement that we have with digital technology, particularly mobile technology. Before we get into the AI realm fully, we need to get a better sense of the human operating system, how ancient and primal it is, and how ill-equipped it is to deal with this rapidly advancing technology. We need to get clear on that. I hope people will check that out because what you’re talking about is the way we assess our relevance in the world based on an algorithm is a very dangerous way to navigate the world.
Assessing your relevance in the world based on an algorithm is a very dangerous way to navigate life.
I want to ask about what we do. Once we’ve identified it, which you talk about in the book as the very first step, we’ve got to identify that this is the situation we’re in. Once we do that, now we’ve got to get messy.
We get messy. That’s getting below the waterline of that. If the iceberg is that metaphor for the human operating system, the tip of the iceberg is the modern world, below the waterline is the traditional world. It’s where we all come from as hunters and gatherers. It turns out that we are well-dressed Neanderthals. We are still as primal as we were 250,000 years ago. We still navigate the world the same way. The brain and our biology haven’t changed.
We’ve disconnected from that primal reality. In other words, what’s below the waterline is invisible to us. We got to get below the waterline, and we got to realize that it’s a messy creature that lives down there. The acronym that I use for that is meaning-seeking, emotional, social, storyteller who struggles. If you start to look at yourself and those around you through that lens, it can give you levers and tools to have more authentic influence in that world over there.
One of these that I want to dig into here is your second S of storytelling. Nick Lavery, who you know and a good friend of mine, we’ve had a lot of chances to sit down and talk about this concept of the silent professional versus the quiet professional.
That’s a great way to frame it.
We’ve got to get out there and tell these stories.
We do. Let’s back it up because I think it’s important, particularly for many folks who are tuning in to this. Storytelling, when you first hear it, because of the transactional world, you think of Bedtime for Bonzo or this one-time at band camp or no shit, there I was. That’s not the storytelling I’m talking about. What we need to understand is that at a primal level, our brain is a metaphorical pattern-matching organ. The brain makes sense. It has a mandate to make sense of the world. It does it through storytelling.
Storytelling is a 70,000-year-old sense-making tool. We ignore storytelling at our peril, but what’s happened is in the transactional world, everything has become bullet points, talking points, and elevator pitches. We’ve left the story out of the equation. Leaders get up in front of their people at an all-hands meeting. Instead of talking about their story of struggle and what they had to go through to get to where they are and what they can learn from it, they talk about three ways to be great like me. It’s unwatchable. We’ve omitted storytelling from how we engage other humans. I think that’s exactly why we’re treating each other the way we are. We’ve got to get back to being better storytellers.
We ignore storytelling at our peril. Everything has become bullet points and elevator pitches.
You have to genuinely care about other people too and what they go through because once you identify a person’s story and what they went through to get to where they are, why it was important, and what made them, then you can appreciate their positions. Because of the nature of this transactional relationship where I only know you on LinkedIn and what you want to present to me because social media is fake. What you put on Instagram, now I think I know you, but I don’t know you. When we disagree or we agree, I don’t know where you come from or why you believe what you believe, so how do I then find common ground with you to come to a resolution?
In Operation Pineapple Express, which by the way, a lot of volunteer groups did the same thing we did. We just told our story of it. In one of those situations where we were desperately trying to get my friend Nizam into the gate, he had been out in the crowd for three days at this point, he had no food, no water, and the Marines were getting ready to toss him, and the Taliban had formed a checkpoint behind him, and his phone was on 10% power. It wasn’t looking good.
We got on a phone call with a diplomat who gave us one minute to tell us what the hell we wanted. In that one minute, we told stories about how Nizam had worn ladies’ high-heeled shoes to get accepted in the Army to pass the height requirements. How he had gone to the Afghan Special Forces course, our Q course had been shot through the face defending US Green Berets. We hit it in a minute. He got real quiet and he said, “Did I tell you guys I was a Green Beret before I was a diplomat?”
There’s no way that we ever would have got to that had there not been a narrative exchange. He brought him in. The point here is that I go back to all the great Green Berets that I ever knew. They were awesome storytellers. Even more than that, it wasn’t the stories they told. It was the stories they asked to hear. When they would go into these environments where most people would immediately reach for their weapon, these guys could ask questions that started with what and how and they would get the other party to share stories. The next thing you know, they’re moving forward on an initiative together because of the dance of storytelling between those two individuals. That narrative competence is what we need in the country today.
It’s funny, people ask me what Green Berets do and I tell them their primary job is to get shit done strategically. We were talking before we started about my day job, where I started this security and operations company here in the city and we do the majority of our work here in New York and in and around the city. We have almost exclusively Green Berets and SOF guys who work for the company for that very reason because they get shit done. It doesn’t matter what you ask them to do. They figure it out.
It’s a mindset and I’ve had people ask me, “How did you write a play when you weren’t a playwright? How did you act in the play when you weren’t an actor and get Gary Sinise to produce it?” Doesn’t everybody do that? That’s the approach. That’s what you do. I saw a need to inform civilians of the cost of modern war. I saw a need to validate and heal those who lived it. It only made sense to do it from the stage. I’m going to surround myself with the best people who can teach me how to do that, and I’m going to listen and learn, and eventually iterate and figure it out.
I credit all of that to the Green Beret NCOs and warrant officers who taught me that’s how you get big shit done. The reality is that what’s in that book is the roadmap for doing that and a range of other things you’re talking about. The fact of the matter is that all of us are capable of strategic outcomes if we set our minds to it. It also requires not just a mindset, but I think it requires a skillset. A lot of that skillset is to navigate this transactional world that we live in with better human connections.
I encourage everyone to get out there and read the book because it’s a quick read. It’s a phenomenal read, and it gives you the road map. It lays out where we are in society. I’ll tell you what we did. We got it done this morning because we’re standing here in the city and the rain is picking up behind us, but we seem to have found the one spot under this cover that kept us dry.
Which I never found when I was on active duty, but we seem to find it now.
Don’t worry, we still got to walk out of here together. It’ll get us. Nobody Is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret’s Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done. Scott Mann, thanks so much.
Thank you for seeing me again. I appreciate it. Good to see you again.
