197: Scott Mann "Nobody is Coming to Save You"

Today, we welcome back the author, actor, public speaker, Ret. Lt Colonel Scott Mann to discuss his new book "Nobody is Coming to Save You" https://scottmann.com/

The website Nobody is Coming to Save You is a practical guide for leaders who want to make a bigger impact in the world now. It distills what I’ve learned over my three-decade career as a Green Beret into strategies you can use to lead others through hard change. These are the same tactics Green Berets use to get vital stuff done when stakes are high and conditions impossible. You’ll also learn about human behavior, strategic influence and dynamic storytelling because relationships are rocket fuel for getting big sh*t done.

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Special thanks to Ahimsaz for the sample of “Shahamat." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmoH-fHhwQ

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Transcript

00:00:01    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Please welcome retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann.

00:00:39    JACK GAINES
As a Green Beret, Scott designed and led the local village stability operations program in Afghanistan. After leaving the military, he began to focus on using his experience with the struggle of transition from a fast -paced, high -risk lifestyle to civilian world of work and family. As a result, he launched Hero's Journey to help other service members, first responders, and their families cope with post -crisis trauma through storytelling. Scott also wrote and featured in the play and film Last Man Out, which portrays the impacts of war on our veterans and their families. Additionally, after Kabul fell to the Taliban, Scott and others launched Task Force Pineapple Express to help Afghan partners leave the country. Scott has made three appearances on TEDx to discuss his work with veterans and first responders and is now announcing his new book, No One is Coming to Save You, which will be released in October. So enjoy. Your book is coming out. It is. In October, right? October 1. October 1. It's a great book. I really liked how you took the turn. This is a lot of different things that the ESM would diagnose as issues with. adaptability, with coping skills, general anxiety, you were able to successfully build them down into a thing you call the churn. And that's really, really helpful because if I told somebody they have a bipolar and anxiety complexity disorder, they'd be like, what in the hell are you talking about? But if you say you're stuck in the churn, which is a culmination of all these different types of things they're struggling with. you created an object, you gave it a name, and it gave them a way for people's minds to focus on that and identify it. And then by doing that, preying on how to separate themselves from the churn and give themselves a break, give themselves some air so that they can recover a little bit. Because with any kind of condition that people are struggling with, they have to learn how to separate themselves from it in order to grow, to heal.

00:02:45    SCOTT MANN
Yeah, it's well said. And the thing is, I've been working on the book for years, and most of the books I've written have been either about Afghanistan or they've been about veteran transition. And a lot of folks have been after me to write a nonfiction, story -based, narrative -based book on how did we do Pineapple? How did we do Last Out? Because I don't have a title. I don't have authority. I don't have a lot of resources. Yet those were strategically impactful things, just like DSO. How did I do that? And so I decided to write a book, a very quick read, called Nobody's Coming to Save You. which was the rally cry in most SFA camps throughout history, but you can still get big shit done. And this is what this is. It's kind of a guide to getting big shit done. And to your point about the churn, the thing is, and this is Ivan Tyrrell again, he says that the brain is a metaphorical pattern matching organ and it has a mandate to make sense of the world. So metaphor and story is how the brain makes sense, right? And this is another reason that we want to be storytellers. And what I found is, for example, The Democrat or Republican sitting across from you at the holiday dinner table is not the enemy. The person that cuts you off in traffic is not the enemy. The person who wears a mask or doesn't wear a mask and points their finger at you is not the enemy. The person on LinkedIn that disagrees with your political opinion is not the enemy. The churn is the enemy. And I characterize the churn as the antagonist in this book. It is both an external and internal condition within our civil society that is novel and new. And it's something that we just have not faced as a country until the last five, 10 years. And we see versions of the churn over in Afghanistan, in Iraq, where tribal dynamics at play in groups and out groups. And you've also got your own internal resistance that you're dealing with. And that's just the nature of being in that roiling, churning environment. But it's weird to see it here in the United States, where we are supposed to be a society of abundance and rule of law. And out of many come one. And much of that has fallen away. And it was in that dark period of my transition that I saw, wow, there's a churn right here at home. And as Sebastian Younger says, most combat veterans are willing to die for their country, but they have no idea how to live for it because it's hard to know how to live for a country that's tearing itself apart along every imaginable line from race to economics to religion. And that is my assessment, the churn and that division, that distrust, that disengagement. As humans, we have an obsession for imitation. Back in the traditional world, we imitated animals when we thought animal pelts. Well, now we're obsessed with imitating machines. And the left hemisphere of our brain is obsessed with control while the right hemisphere is obsessed with the connection to the natural world. And the left has always worked for the right. But according to a lot of neuroscientists, it's flipped because of these things. We've become so obsessed with this represented reality that we've lost our connection to the natural world. And so my book starts off by framing the enemy. That's the first special ops imperative. Always understand your operational environment. Well, our operational environment has changed. What got us here is not going to get us there. So I take about one third of the book to lay out, look, your operating environment is different. And it's not just about transitioning from military to civilian. The civil society we live in. is different externally and internally. And if you don't know that, then you are at risk of being lured into shadow tribalism and a range of other things. If you do know it, the antibody to it is an understanding and appreciation of the human operating system. Another metaphor I use is the iceberg, right? So you've got the iceberg versus the churn and getting below the waterline of that iceberg part you can't see. That's where the innate human realities reside that we can leverage.

00:06:32    SCOTT MANN
storytelling, empathy, active listening, breath, a range of things that are available to us. They're innate. They're already in us. Our ancestors knew, but we need to access them in a new way with an improved understanding of how our environment has changed so that we can lead with those things. And the cool thing is, and I'll end on this for this question, is that that's available to all of us, whether you're working in diplomacy right now, whether you're working in civil affairs right now, or whether you are transitioned and you're trying to just lead your family, most people are victims of the churn. And if you have a language and a grammar for it, and if you have an understanding of the human operating system and a practicality and how you can engage using old school or personal skills, you can lead your way pretty much out of anything without a time.

00:07:20    JACK GAINES
One brilliant point you had in there was that the person on the social media that's Leaving comments is not your enemy. A person who cuts you off is not your enemy. Because if you are stuck in a churn, it triggers that they are the enemy because it's your natural instinct that they've wronged you and you have to defend yourself. So by separating the person from that sense, you can back away from potential fights, road rage, getting arrested. It does. Yeah.

00:07:50    SCOTT MANN
And all of that could happen. Think about how we're trained in these rough places around the world to respond, and the responses that have been ingrained in us are not necessarily appropriate for responses in our civil society here at home. Yet, the way in which our body physiologically responds, it goes into a trance state. We enter a sympathetic state of fight, flight, or freeze. Our bodies have been preconditioned to fight. Our bodies have been preconditioned to lean into the problem in a very aggressive way, for example. And that's a primal response that has been infused with training. Okay. Well, here, if you're watching your 401k erode over six months, kind of response that we were trained to do is not appropriate. Is to go burn down the hedge fund. Yeah. The reality is, so what's actually happening there is that trance state that Ivan Terrell talks about. We all go into it. A trance state is just a state of hyper -focus. And the churn has created these conditions all around us where people are in it all the time. And when you go into a trance state and get a secondary emotion of anger, anger makes you stupid. Anger reduces your higher intelligence functions. You can't look with a shared perspective. You're trying to survive. And so what are we going to do for those of us who have trained a certain way? It's not good. And so we have to manage our energy. We have to manage the energy in the room. And it starts, I believe, when emotions are low by reading about and learning about the charm that's out there and this human operating system that's old and primal within us and is going to act on us one way or the other. And the more that we can appreciate the human operating system and reconnect to it, the more we can manage our own energy in a possible way within this new context that we live in. and be the most relevant, relatable person in the room. Those skills that we learned in the military all of a sudden truly then become very relevant. But if we can't manage the churn or read it for what it is and then manage our energy and those around us, we will be a pawn for the divisionist leaders that are out there just like everybody else.

00:10:09    JACK GAINES
That's a great point. That churn of feeling like it's coming at you from every angle. allows people who do work in information and influence to then say, okay, you're all wound up. Here's the bad guy. And then have them lunge at that person or that issue and explode all that energy that they've been building up on a problem. It goes after what I want them to do versus them thinking through an issue and actually coming up with their own position, either agreeing or dissenting on what I want.

00:10:37    SCOTT MANN
It's a very good definition of what I call divisionist leaders in the book. It's at a basic level that the civil society we live in here in the West is based on the individual. The individual is above the group. Well, in most places of the world and where we all come from, the group is above the individual. Status society is where we all come from. Just like any other mammal, it's for the good of the group because it's the only way you can acquire resources, maintain resources, find a mate. It's all within your circle, your tribe, your quam. And the group is above the individual. Well, in America and other places, we put the individual above the group. That's not a natural state of affairs. Which is why cults are so popular. Yes. And it's also why leadership is so essential and why a lot of social scientists say that you need for a democracy or a republic to survive that way. You need social capital where you have faith in each other and trust as neighbors. You need institutions that you can. have trust in and then you need stories that you tell each other and the outside world that you believe in right how are we doing on that we are really struggling with all of those so as a result they've abandoned that stewardship of bridging and then instead they practice this divisionist approach where they foment instability from the president all the way down both parties to meet their own narrow agenda social media engineers Instagram and Facebook create algorithms that are designed to encourage us to share negative fear -based information about outgroups because they've done the studies and they know that we will share information faster if it's negative information about an outgroup. So in other words, you have engineers that have done deep research on in -group, out -group, tribal dynamics, and then they're using it. You orchestrate algorithms that will leverage in -group, out -group behavior. Now, that to me is insidious. That is a divisionist approach that is practiced in 24 -7 news. It's practiced in politics. It's practiced in social media. And if we're not careful as humans who are just moving along our day, we will enter into this represented world. It's not reality. It's a represented reality. It's not the natural world. And that world is their world. 24 -7 news is the world of the divisionist. It's not an even plank. And so it's so easy to just get sucked into that trance state where the primal condition visits you, and all of a sudden, you're just as tribal as anybody, and you are dealing with contempt and moral superiority. That's the two things you always want to use as an indicator. Am I demonstrating contempt that I would normally reserve for enemies, and am I demonstrating rigidity and moral superiority? If you are, you are likely in a trance state and you've likely been mobilized. And so the book takes some time in the beginning to equip us with this grammar, with this framework, so that then you can step into that arena reconfigured for how you lead yourself and how you lead other people in these times that we live in and still get big shit done.

00:13:55    JACK GAINES
The second half of the book is more of how to use the tools. to then go out and battle those issues. Simple things like how to do introductions, how to tell a story. One of the real gems of this book is the seven -act storytelling guide that you built because it goes down every step of how to tell a story from the beginning to drawing people in and how you use details, how you set up the issue, how you set up the solutions and what the future looks like. And it's something that's not often written about. Here people say storytelling is very important and they go to a story, but they don't really break down how you do that. Right. Well,

00:14:36    SCOTT MANN
let me ask you this, Jack. Been around the game a long time, right? Yes, I am that old. But how would you characterize introductions in the world of the audience that you speak to on this podcast? Typically, when people introduce people from the stage, when they introduce them at mixers, I've been very underwhelmed by how we introduce humans to humans. But I'm curious on your thoughts on it. Yes.

00:15:01    JACK GAINES
I learned from Jordan Harbinger. He has a guide on how to present yourself in a room, how to make introductions, how to build connections and network. And I follow his introduction system because it's all about getting the background of the people that you're going to introduce, making sure that both of them want to be introduced, and then writing. an introduction that promotes and builds both of them up so they feel like a hero meeting the other person. I'll be honest, whenever I give someone an introduction, I am selling them as the coolest person on the planet and has helped people connect and make better relations. It's a sacred act because we're social creatures.

00:15:40    SCOTT MANN
sacred act because we're social creatures. We're wired to interact. But my assessment, and I'm glad to hear that you do that, my read on most of our community, and the more senior you get, the more we suck at introductions. to the point of it almost being insulting. The way some people introduce others from the stage, guest speakers, they read their bios word for word instead of talking to the audience about, hey, here's why I think this person that I've taken your time with today to have you be here, why I think they will serve what you are about in your life and why I think you should listen to them. The point here is that there are a range of innate interpersonal skills that are available to us as humans. that our great -grandparents understood and knew. But now that we have advancements in neuroscience, we can actually study brain activity when storytelling, active listening, introductions, when you're honoring somebody for an award or their departure from their organization. We can actually measure that. For example, David Phillips did a study called Death by PowerPoint, and he hooked audiences up to a machine. And he measured their brain activity during PowerPoint presentations where he learned that 90 % of the content that you present in a PowerPoint presentation, after you say thank you for your time, within 30 seconds, 90 % of it's forgotten because you're engaging working memory. You're not engaging long -term memory. Storytelling engages long -term memory, and it has for 70 ,000 years. That's why we remember the stories our grandparents tell us with vivid detail. or a story that a mentor from the Vietnam War told us with vivid detail. It's how we've survived and actually socially evolved as a species. We're wired as story animals. But yet, everything that we've created in the modern world is the opposite of that. It's short form communications. It's robot -like. And my hope with the book is to get back to the old school interpersonal skills and become very proficient in those and then... Let them inform all the stuff you do at the tip of the iceberg. And I'm not telling you to abandon PowerPoint. I'm saying inform PowerPoint with a narrative competency that holds your listener's attention with a story in the beginning and then you wrap the story up at the end of the presentation or populate the presentation with small stories throughout because the brain is a metaphorical pattern matching organ. If you don't know that as a senior leader. That the brain A has a mandate to make sense of the world and that the brain B does it through metaphor and narratives. You are at a competitive disadvantage and frankly, irrelevant to the people that you lead and engage with.

00:18:23    JACK GAINES
Storytelling. It's a great segue to your points about you struggle, we struggle. But if you don't add that struggle into your story and it's not authentic, people don't really believe you. And we've seen that. We've seen the sales pitch style of storytelling.

00:18:39    SCOTT MANN
Here's the thing, and I hear exactly what you're saying, and this is where I think our tip of the iceberg modern world unwittingly has conditioned us to the wrong approach to storytelling. Everywhere you look, and senior leaders are really bad about this, and I hope that if there's any listening, you'll hear me on this. If what you do is get up there and talk about three ways to be great, it's just unwatchable. We are inundated with it everywhere we turn. And part of that reason is because we've been conditioned. in this modern, high -tech, mass media world. And it becomes performative. And storytelling can be performative, but storytelling in its oldest form, honestly. If I staggered into the campfire 10 ,000 years ago and I'm like, let me tell you guys why Saber 2 Tigers make shitty pets, you're going to lean in and you're going to listen. Sure. And when I get into the detail of my struggle and why I'm all scuffed up and cut up. then you listen autobiographically. You locate yourself in that story, and it is as if you went through that lived experience without going through it. I'm doing it now with the saber -tooth timer. Right, and that's called narrative transportation. Narrative transportation creates reciprocity. It creates meaning. It creates long -term memory. It accelerates the trust between the audience and the listener. But here's the thing. If you leave struggle out, and you go right to the three ways to be great like me, your audience will not only dismiss you, according to Dr. Kendall Haven, they will turn on you.

00:19:28    JACK GAINES
to lean

00:20:11    SCOTT MANN
will turn on you. They will become a narrative insurgent to your story, to your keynote, to your vision, right? And so struggle is not only something that is necessary for storytelling, it's a biological necessity. And so the smart leader is going to find ways to integrate struggle. into their personal and their organizational narratives. And that's why I took a whole chapter to talk about it because it is that important. Well, it feels like you're giving people ammunition to shoot you with. Now, it feels awful, Jack. And a lot of people, that's when they go, well, I don't want to talk about me. I don't want to make it about me. A lot of veterans struggle with this. But what I tell them is, listen, this has nothing to do with you. Stories are told in the service of the listener. But if you don't invoke... your own personal struggle so that they can achieve a level of relatability of what she's been through, where that young soldier goes, oh, wow, she's just like me. She's been through what I've been through. Then that emotional breach happens and they open up. So there are so many different reasons. And I think the chapter really hits it hard. But suffice it to say that for this podcast, if you are going to engage people and move in a strategic way, struggle is a biological necessity to that process. Nice.

00:21:33    JACK GAINES
You created a whole TED Talk around being generous with your scars. I really enjoyed the TED Talk, by the way. One, because it did show how challenges and struggles do build towards a better future, but also in how you treated the other actors. Because every time you cut scenes, you guys kind of like fist bumped or handshaked or some type of good job thing. And that showed me that it's more than just scene break. It's actually people. in as a team performing it to succeed.

00:22:04    SCOTT MANN
You're the first person that's ever picked up on that. I really appreciate that. And you're right. And they were all veterans, except for one, and she was a military family member. That was my third TED Talk that I had done, and I wanted them to be in that one. Because it was tough to talk about my mental health, and they had been essential in me dealing with it and getting the play on its feet. And we had toured at that point all over the country. So we all have this very deep bond. And you're right to pick up on that because the generosity of scars is what I characterize as the integration struggle. It is the repurposing of one's struggle in the service of others by telling your story. That's what I mean by being generous with your scars. If you are generous with your struggle. and you share it with the idea that someone else can locate themselves in their story and make meaning out of your suffering, out of your struggle, how can it get more generous than that? And that's what I had to realize with my mental health and with my challenges that I had gone through. If I could repurpose those struggles, and with the TED Talk, we had already done it with the play, but I wanted people to see it in a TED environment on full display, that even our darkest scars, the ones that are most embarrassing. can be repurposed in the service of others. Because our Gold Star families, our combat veterans, civilians who've been through things in their life, whether it's divorce or bankruptcy, all of those things hold immense value to the people that are out there trying to make sense of a very difficult world of churn. And if you're willing to repurpose, to be generous with your struggles, man, there's no limit, no ceiling to the impact you can have in this world.

00:23:46    JACK GAINES
Well, that gets to why I spotted a certain sentence in your book. Nowadays, we need to move large numbers of people rough times. Let's make it personal in order to make it universal. And I kind of called that your calling because you seem like you've gone to that dark spot. You've even teased with suicide. You worked through it. And like a good leader, now you're saying, hey, I'm there. I'm moving forward. I'll rally here. Let's all get together and do this. And it seems like you're trying to find and build a path for others to relieve the struggle of coping with their transition, with their challenges of life. And for people that weren't in the military, with all of the churn and the problems coming in so that they can see that, hey, there are alternatives. There are things that you can do better yourself, your community, and get past what people are trying to drive you towards anger and conflict.

00:24:42    SCOTT MANN
Yeah, I appreciate that. I go back to one of the first chapters in the book after we get past the churn and I talk about what my dad taught me and still teaches me with leaving tracks. And, you know, as meaning -seeking, meaning -assigning creatures, we are on this earth, I believe, to leave tracks, as my dad calls it. In other words, to leave a legacy that lasts well beyond our time. And maybe it's manifested in how we, as our kids, maybe it's the capacity that we build in our job. Maybe it's just the relationships that we build. in friendships and things like that. But however it manifests, those tracks, the metric that I always kind of use for them is that they don't just serve the people around you. They serve the people you've never even seen. And so for me, that's really helped me in terms of my journey that I'm on for the rest of the years that I have on this earth. I'm here to lead my track. And I work very diligently on getting clear on my tracks and continue to do that. And also recognize that I know I'm on the patrol just like anybody else. I don't feel like I'm done. I still am very much in the arena as an advocate, as a artist, as a leader, and in some regards. And my vision of my tracks is to pour myself into as many people as I can through a range of modalities from books to plays to workshops that we run live and help leaders who are really looking to make that larger impact get people up on the rooftop. and move in ways that they otherwise wouldn't go. And I do believe that I've found not the way, but a way to help folks do that and love it. I just love it so much. And I think the reason I love it is because I'm still making tons of mistakes. I'm still getting out there and learning new skills, like acting at age 51. I mean, you talk about the ultimate midlife crisis. Good Lord. But it's allowed me, Jack, to really get in there and mix it up with a range of industry performers who are just trying to do the same thing and to be able to just say, look, here's what I found along the way. What do you see? And just approach it like team guys after a mission or during a training exercise where you kind of pull each other aside and say, here's what I'm seeing. What do you think? And let's try this. I love it gives me such purpose. It gives me such fulfillment. And I'm just blessed, honestly, to be able to do that in transition and maybe help a few folks have not as dark a transition as I did and maybe get to fulfillment faster, whether that transitions from the military or the next job or whatever. We're all trying to make an impact. And if I can play a role in that, man, it's good stuff. I think you do.

00:27:27    JACK GAINES
you do. And think about from the rooftop. It's a guide to self -agency. Because you were talking about getting big shit done. It's easy if you have a star or you have a colonel's eagle on your chest because you've been given the authority. But when you don't, the society has to choose you to lead. That make sense? Yes. Because if you were somebody else and they just didn't have that stuff, that X that makes a person attracting the crowd, then you'd be out there doing plays and it would have been a community hitter and it would have gone away because it didn't stick. So population is choosing you to lead. It does. Which is a much harder gig than coming in with an eagle. Yeah.

00:28:09    SCOTT MANN
Or a star. Yeah. Yeah, it is. But I do think it's what's warranted and needed today more than ever. And that's why it's such good news for people in the churn because most of us don't have stars. Most of us don't have eagles. And then even those who do or C -suites. I don't necessarily know that they're appreciating it and leveraging it to the way that they could. They're writing it too much. And so even if you do have those formal titles, you can still apply this methodology in a way that it moves people to want to go to the rooftop for you. Again, another metaphor that in Afghanistan, I saw time and time again, these teen guys and girls that would move and inspire through social capital. and vision and old school interpersonal skills when risk was low, these individuals to go up on a rooftop and fight when they were terrified and reluctant when risk was high. And that to me is the ultimate endeavor for a leader in any situation is building social capital infused with purpose when risk is low is so strong that people go up to a rooftop and take action when risk is high, not because they have to, but because they choose to. And if you can do that over and over again, whether it's a play, whether it's Pineapple Express, whether it's starting your business, whether it is putting that piece of music out there that you've always wanted, or just helping your child move through addiction, all of these things are something bigger than ourselves. All of these things are ways of leaving tracks. And the good news is, in my assessment, There is both an art and a science available to us in these unprecedented times of churn that we live in to do it. But we've got to train. It's not just instinct. What got us here is not going to get us there. Even the most high -performing, I think we've got to re -evaluate our operational environment. We've got to get a new grammar and a new lexicon for what we're dealing with. And we need to reconnect to this human operating system that's primal and is struggling to make sense of this churn. And once we can start to do that, then we can start to implement storytelling, active listening, nonverbal physicality, breath work, empathy. And by the way, this is not a Pollyanna thing. You know, I don't believe that what's in this book or my methodology is all about, you know, I'm okay, you're okay stuff. It is based on human connection, but it's infused with red lines and always standing your ground on what you believe in. I think that what we did with Pineapple Express and some other things demonstrates that. That it's not about just rolling over and going along to get along. Willingness to pick the lead and thrive, be successful. When it's hard. When it's hard. Right. And nobody else is coming. Because that's the ultimate time, honestly, to lead. When nobody else is coming. And to me, that's the point in which you step into the arena when everybody else steps back. When that tap on the shoulder comes and you're like, you've got to be kidding. You've got to be kidding me. Right now. You know, like that dude is way better than me or this girl over here should be doing this. Well, guess what? She's not. It's your turn now. It's your turn.

00:31:20    JACK GAINES
your turn. All right. I've spoken everything I wanted to discuss. Is there anything else you want to pitch or bring up? Is there anything we missed?

00:31:29    SCOTT MANN
I appreciate the thoroughness in the work you did ahead of time. I think that's always evidenced. So I appreciate it. As a fellow podcast host, I know what that takes to do that. And so it's not lost on me. I do hope that people will back out the book when it comes out on October 1st. The easiest way to do it is scottman .com. All of my body of work is there. And I hope people stay connected. And if we could ever serve in any way on Open with Human Connection, the human operating system, the churn, we've got a range of things out there on it. A lot of them are free. As you go forward, if you remember anything from this interview is when all else fails, make a human connection. Make a human connection before anything. It could be eye contact. It could be a handshake. It could just be taking a breath and taking in the person in front of you. It could be asking how their kids are. You'll know. You get in there. But if we could just put human connections before everything else, that could have a massive impact in your ability to influence hard jobs. Because no one does. Everybody's so busy on their agenda and transactions that they forget to make a human connection first. And I think those are the people that follow in the times that are coming. Absolutely. Social capital is the oldest form of capital in the world. And it always will be. Well, thank you. This was terrific,

00:32:47    JACK GAINES
was terrific, Scott. I'm glad you took all this time.

00:32:49    SCOTT MANN
Yeah, for sure, man. Thank you so much. This is like the first book interview I've done. And so I appreciate everything you're doing to get it out there. And again, I hope folks will pick it up because I do think it's a very, very practical guide to getting big shit done. All right. Well, thank you very much. Absolutely. Thanks, pal. We'll talk to you soon.

00:33:08    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes. 1CA Podcast.