Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist Podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Moltz, VP of business operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting brave browser and search engine.

Now powering AI with the Brave search. API. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Scott Mann, who is a former US Army Green Beret with tours in Columbia, Peru, and Afghanistan. He’s the founder of Task Force Pineapple, a 5 0 1 C3, supporting veterans Afghan allies and the author of Operation Pineapple Express, a New York Times bestseller.

Scott also wrote, nobody’s Coming to Save You, A Guide to Building Trust and Human Connection in divided times. He also hosts the Scott Mann podcast and is a playwright and star of Last out El Elegy of a Green Beret, an [00:01:00] award-winning play honoring the sacrifices of our military community. In this episode, we discussed their unprecedented use of the consumer app signal during Operation Pineapple Express in Afghanistan, and how it’s become a go-to resource for natural disaster management and special operations.

How biometric data collection has become a major part of US Army missions and details of his new creative venture last out, an award-winning play, his touring on stages across the country to provide healing to veterans and their families. And now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist.

Scott, welcome to The Brave Technologist. How are you doing today?

Scott: Hey Luke. Thanks for having me on, man.

Luke: Really been looking forward to this one. We haven’t really had many folks with your, background on the podcast before. It was kind of like a really interesting merging of worlds together. Maybe you can give the audience a little bit of your background.

Scott: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in a little town in Mount Ida, Arkansas, logging town that didn’t even have a [00:02:00] stoplight, still doesn’t wow. Less than a thousand people in the town. When I was around 14, I met, uh, green Beret, an Army Green Beret named Mark who had come home on leave to visit his dad and was just enamored with anytime a stranger came into the town was a big deal.

But, uh, as a runt, skinny runt that was kind of on the outside looking in all the time in my life. This guy just, he was really. Cool. And when he sat down with me and explained to me that he was Army Special Forces or the Green Berets, as they’re often called, I just, I was really awed by that. He talked about how they worked by, with and through indigenous cultures and however, since like World War ii, that they would go behind enemy lines and, work with tribes and partner nation forces.

And they spoke the language and just immersed themselves in the language, the culture, the traditions, and then they would. You know, kind of go in with 12 and ride out with 12,000. And that whole Lian Lawrence of Arabia component fascinated me. And that [00:03:00] was it. From that point on, I, I obsessed over it until I could join the Army and, try out, took me about five years ultimately to get.

To that point, but then once I did, I spent about almost two decades as a Green Beret in places like Columbia, Afghanistan, mostly Afghanistan during the War on Terror, and then got out in 2013 and started, believe it or not, work as a storyteller, public speaker, taking the interpersonal skills I’ve learned as a Green Beret and teaching that had even written a play about the war that I was performing with other veterans.

And that’s what I was doing. In the summer of 2021 when the country of Afghanistan collapsed and ultimately kind of brought us together here on this show.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. Why don’t we dive into that a little bit. I first kind of came across you, you were a guest on a couple of different podcasts I was watching, and you talked about, this Operation Pineapple Express.

Can you go into a little bit about what was going on at the time and then, how that came to be?

Scott: Yeah. I think in order to set the context properly, Luke, what, if it’s okay, I’ll back up just a [00:04:00] little bit and state that, you know, through the 20, this was a 20 year war in Afghanistan. I mean, this was.

What, four times longer than World War ii. Right. And you had less than 1% of the American population. Like there’s only 6,500 Green Berets out of 1.4 million. Wow. You had a 20 year war, and so you, you know, you were over there. Your, your life was, either you were in Afghanistan or you were getting ready to go back.

That was your life, And. When you were over there, we worked with very closely with Afghan Special Forces, Afghan Commandos, Afghan interpreters, and one of my dear friends was an Afghan named Naza, and he was a young guy who had lost his parents as a child, lived on the streets most of his life as an orphan, and basically joined the army.

After nine 11, he joined the Afghan army. He went to the Afghan Special Forces course, the commando course. He even went to our special forces training. Wow. Was shot through the face defending us Green Berets in a firefight, and then was back in the fight five weeks later, [00:05:00] geez. Just year after year after year, working alongside us.

That’s just one guy. But that was the one guy, Luke, who started texting me on signal. I didn’t know that much about Signal. I, it was an sf, a special forces buddy of mine had told me about it. Things were starting to happen in Afghanistan in the spring of 2021 that I got on signal because it was advised to me, Hey, some of the stuff that’s happening in Afghanistan could affect our allies.

And so it’s better if you get on signal where it’s encrypted and we can have conversations about it within the veteran community and the active beauty community and with Afghans. We did, and that’s where I started getting these frantic signal messages from Nizam who was hiding in his uncle’s house.

Like Anne Frank at this time.

Luke: Oh my gosh.

Scott: He was on the run. The Taliban were texting his phone, they were circling the house, and the country was collapsing one province at a time. And I had been out since 2013. Man, I didn’t really have, I didn’t even [00:06:00] have a security clearance anymore, but Nizam and many other of our allies were because.

The US government was not picking up the phone. They were texting their buddies that they had known as veterans. And so that’s kind of where I was doing in June, July, and then August 15th, 2021 on a Sunday, the whole country collapses and it was just frigging chaos at this point, like I equate it to.

Imagine like a 20 year an anthill that’s been built over 20 years, like a big anthill. Mm-hmm. Like you see out in the southwest. Right. And that anthill consists of intelligence operatives and special operators from Afghanistan that we trained. We advised, we resourced and we developed over 20 years so that another nine 11 didn’t happen.

And then in one fell swoop. A big boot kicks that anthill over and everything just falls out on the ground. That’s what August 15th, 2021 was. [00:07:00]

Luke: It’s, it’s wild. Like these are people that live there, they have families there too, obviously. And I think one thing that is lost on a lot of people, uh, especially those that haven’t researched or or haven’t been in the space, is just the level of like biometric data collection that was going on too.

How much are you aware of that? Like, are these allies of ours, were they in databases and their families and things like that? So like when someone like the Taliban comes in and takes over, do they have access to that data? Like, I’m trying to kind of get a sense of like, because I remember hearing about, you know, some of these data collection procedures that were happening, but I’m not sure how well aware our is of that.

Scott: On two levels, right? So remember that first of all, we were there as part of what they called the global war on terrorism. So mm-hmm. That’s where nine 11 originated from. That was the strategic sanctuary of Al-Qaeda was at rural Afghanistan. So there was this notion that one of the lessons out of nine 11 with the nine 11 commission was you had poor interagency cooperation, poor human intelligence on [00:08:00] the bad guys from point of origin.

The pipelines where they would travel and then where they would deploy themselves, United States, Europe, and so biometrics became rapidly necessary in the Global War on Terror post 2001 because we needed to track. These terror groups, these individuals, through the pipeline, through their recruiting. It was almost like a, an industry foot race for biometric capabilities.

I watched it transform overnight as a Green Beret pre nine 11. We had no interest in biometrics. I. But then overnight we did, like you were fingerprinting, retina scan, all that stuff now, so there was that side of it where you were tracking bad guys and there was a database for that. But then as we built up the Afghanistan army, the Afghanistan police force, you needed to modernize the ability to pay them, to resource them, to keep up with them on the books.

So there was this notion that, alright, we’re gonna use biometrics with them too, so that we can [00:09:00] database them for tracking. For logistics and that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Well, when we bailed on Afghanistan in August of 2021, we just scurried out of there and we left the Ministry of Defense and all of these databases completely unintended.

And so the whole database of the Ministry of Defense. Was captured by the Taliban to include, you know, biometric scanners and the ability to almost immediately get out at checkpoints and places around the country and start scanning for Commandos, Afghan special forces who were usually made to disappear or shot on site.

Luke: Wow. Wow. That’s huge. It’s wild to think about. We spend 20 years in a place, I mean this is after decades of, of other wars that have been happening there too, right? And then to just pull out and kind of leave folks hanging. There is, it was rough.

Scott: Yeah. I tell people it was Luke, probably the largest.

Systemic abandonment of an [00:10:00] ally in modern history, even more so than Vietnam, mainly because we had put in place an army, built in our own image. We had made explicit and implicit promises to that army to work with them over the long term. We created massive vulnerabilities, technological vulnerabilities through these databases, and then we just left with no.

Institutional concern for how that would transform into wholesale slaughter, which it did.

Luke: So your buddy, uh, nazeem hit you up right over Signal. It still kind of blows my mind how far we’ve kind of come along, where signal is just kind of, it’s almost like it’s consumer grade app now, where it is being used for these types of content.

It’s amazing. Where does it go from there? What are the next steps that happen after that?

Scott: So he started sending me, these messages and pictures of everything as it was collapsing. And the only way I could describe it, the way I try to lay this out for people is imagine an entire generation, [00:11:00] so there were like 800,000 veterans that fought in Afghanistan across the country.

Mm-hmm. Wow. And all of a sudden they start getting, you know, and many of them have gone on with their lives. They’re working in corporate America, they’re working in nonprofits, they’re working in factories. But what did we do for 20 years? Well, we worked in a distributed fashion where we used this kind of technology on the secure side to get after bad guys in isolated places using.

Discounted technology distributed operations where we were communicating across vast amounts of distance and closing the tyranny of geography by. Encrypted communication and moving fast and with agility. In many cases, these were self-organizing bottom up technicians that we would get after targets where we would share information almost in near real or in real time about what we were seeing from our little sliver of the universe.

And then it would be compiled in a common operating picture somewhere in Kandahar or Cobble, or even Langley, Virginia. [00:12:00] Then that holistic picture would then be ferreted out to all of these distributed networks, and we would get on the target. And we got really good, and we got really fast, and we got to where we could solve complex, ambiguous problems using this technology in a bottom up fashion without even thinking about it.

So when Afghanistan collapsed. All of these veterans basically stopped what they were doing, walked outside their board rooms, stood up from the kitchen table, or stayed at the breakfast table and just started using Signal the way they had used their own secure systems in Afghanistan for years. And the self-organizing networks popped up.

Taskforce Pineapple Sacred Promise Taskforce, Argo the hundreds of veteran groups, self-organized and used technology, basically the same way that I just described where. I had a chat room on signal point to point with Nizam, right, and he’s telling me what he’s seeing on the ground in Afghanistan in real [00:13:00] time.

And then I have a networked connection with all these other veterans who are doing point to point communications with their individual allies. And now as we form these self-organizing groups, we’re getting a holistic picture in the big signal room while the point-to-point comes within signal are happening for tactical movement, dropping pens, giving instructions for how to get in the airfield, that kind of thing.

Luke: So you guys were helping to organize and kind of get folks out of the country? Is that how it worked? Yeah. At,

Scott: at first it. And I think this is probably true for most of those groups that I talked about. No one thought about they, we weren’t like a 5 0 1 C3. We all got pulled away from our lives and our friends were in trouble.

Like Nizam was in trouble. So what did I do? I got on Signal and I contacted five buddies who nun Naza. One of them was a US Congressman Green Beret. One of them was an active duty battalion commander in Afghanistan. One of them worked in the intelligence community in dc. All of them were relevant to not just [00:14:00] knowing Naam, but they had a certain thing they could do to help get him out, for example.

See here was the dilemma. Here’s the dilemma. The only way out of the country at this point is Kabul International Airport, which is like a postage stamp in that country. It’s a small little airfield. There’s only a few thousand Americans securing it. The Taliban have formed a ring of security all around it, so the only way out is if you can get your person in through that airfield onto a C 17 aircraft and flown to the United States.

Well, we’re not on the ground, so we don’t have access in placement. You may or may not know somebody that’s pulling guard, and you have to figure out who that might be, that you might know who’s on the perimeter. And you have thousands, and I mean thousands of Afghans in this sweltering crowd holding up their babies above the tear gas, holding up certificates of appreciation from 2013, holding up medals that they had been awarded.

And none of these guys on the gate, for the most part, these are younger Marines, [00:15:00] younger paratroopers. Mm-hmm. They don’t know any of these people. Like they’re just being mm-hmm. Bombarded with these thousands of faces desperate to get outta the country. So what we thought was all right, our little group of five, we didn’t have a name or anything at this point.

We thought we know who Naza is. We know he was shot through the face, he’s vetted, he’s a Green Beret, qualified Afghan, so we can present him responsibly. To someone on the gate and vouch for him, and because this guy is a tactical commando, we can have him move tactically through that crowd and go to the right place, right time, give a password if necessary, and get pulled through.

Wow. And so that’s exactly what we did. We coordinated with, you know, luck of the draw. I got a diplomat on the other side who was a former Green Beret of all things and explained to him about Naza, and he said, okay, they’re gonna, and I was like, dude, he’s four feet from you right now, but they’re getting ready to throw him out of the [00:16:00] compound because.

He’s been there for too long and he doesn’t have paperwork. And I said, but he was shocked through the face, JP and JP said this diplomat. He said, okay, you’re right. They’re gonna throw him out. He is gotta say the password. And I said, what’s the password? He said, pineapple. Tell him to say pineapple and they’ll let him in.

And so we’re screaming over signal, say pineapple. And he does. He said, sir, I’m the pineapple. and the gate guard. Had been given the password and allowed him through, and that set in motion a sequence of events where the five of us looked at each other and go, like that worked. So let’s get another one.

At that point, we started to network more and more within Signal. People heard Naza got out that knew me, and they’re like, Hey, you wanna work together? So at some point we named ourselves Task Force Pineapple. We grew to about 40 veterans. Who each had their own relationships, and we probably had thousands of people in our manifest at that point and started working in a more deliberate, systematic fashion using signal to get [00:17:00] what was ultimately somewhere between 750 to a thousand Afghans through an open sewage canal and a four foot hole in the fence.

Luke: Oh my gosh. Over how long of a period? Less than 96

Scott: hours.

Luke: Whoa. Whoa. That’s wild. The, the amount of coordination to do that, and there’s so many things that could go wrong, you know? Yeah. Like on top of the, the conditions, it’s amazing that you guys were able to pull this off.

Scott: Thanks. And we weren’t the only ones.

There were, look, there were dozens if not hundreds of these groups doing this. We just happened to tell the story. I think we called ourselves Task Force Pineapple. The mechanism that we used to move them through was the Pineapple Express. So it, you know, it had kind of the mm-hmm. The snazzy name to it, not the one that you saw with Seth Rogan in the movie.

And then I ended up writing a book about an Operation Pineapple Express that I do encourage people to read or listen to. Because if you really wanna appreciate how Signal was used, I mean, we actually have the quotes from Signal in there. You can see the chat room. It kind of reads [00:18:00] like if you saw Dunkirk, you know the World War II movie?

Yeah. It reads like that. You would almost be say like, wow, this has gotta be fiction. But it wasn’t. You’re right. It was a. Herculean amount of coordination, none of which I can take credit for, but what I will say is that it was this combination of, like I said, 20 years of doing this kind of distributed networked communications in a war that required it and access to a platform like Signal where.

We already knew how to do it. We just needed the platform that allowed us to do it. This kind of exodus would not have been possible in Vietnam because the technology simply did not exist to flatten the landscape and allow veterans to coordinate the way they did.

Luke: You even get the ability to have voice and audio and then video and then media and, and text all these things kind of in in one.

It’s like really interesting that you’ve got all these access at your fingertips. And I mean, not only that, but people often question the security around the [00:19:00] software, but. Life and death is right there. You guys are right on that line where you’ve got active people pursuing your guys’ allies over there and, and you guys were able to use this technology to like, help get them out when it’s literally life or death.

It’s just super interesting, like as a signal user forever. I, can’t believe, like I hadn’t heard of it until recently and it’s just super cool that like you guys were able to put it all together and it seems like you guys created a model here that could be used in other circumstances and situations.

Is there anything you guys are doing with that kind of a, a model for any other applications? I mean, like, are are there any other applications for what you guys have did in Afghanistan?

Scott: It’s really insightful that you bring that up, Luke. I mean, the fact of the matter is yes. the short answer is yes immediately following the Afghanistan.

So what happened was here, first of all, this set in motion, a use for signal. That honestly, I think, brought in politicians and congressional leaders and diplomats in a way that had never [00:20:00] been done before the collapse in Afghanistan. Mm-hmm. And you’re right, it was the dire circumstances, the life and death reality that our friends were being slaughtered.

That so many jumped into the fray, took advantage of signal. I mean, one of the main members in our group was a congressional staffer who worked for Congressman Waltz. There were echelons of politicians involved in this, and it flattened the landscape that continued all the way up until all the tough that you, you see people talking today about politicians and.

People in signal because they were all likely involved from the withdrawal and it never stopped.

Luke: Mm-hmm.

Scott: There were people on Signal that are, that are still in signal that are very high levels of government. Now, to your question about did it create other examples of press? Yes. I mean, those networks stayed together.

They became Task Force Pineapple Task Force Argo. Some became 5 0 1 c threes like ours. And most of the Afghans got left behind. So now we [00:21:00] found ourselves, if these people show their face in public, they’re gonna be killed. So now

Luke: mm-hmm.

Scott: We found ourselves paying for safe houses, having medical supplies dropped in four months.

I think we delivered something like several hundred babies through midwives that were coordinated on signal. Because they were in safe houses and they couldn’t go to a hospital, and so these networks entrenched and it became like the world’s longest 9 1 1 call, you know, four years running. Mm-hmm. We still have groups that are keeping Afghans alive using signal.

And then you also had the wildfire in Laina, Hawaii. West Maui. Remember that? Horrific wildfire.

Luke: Oh yeah.

Scott: Task Force Pineapple stood up and worked with locals in La Hna, reporters from Fox and CNN resources in Las Vegas, and ended up having a large cargo planes flown out to La Hna using pineapple and using.

Other donors through Signal.

Luke: Yeah.

Scott: The [00:22:00] hurricane in Western North Carolina, the hurricane in Florida, all through Signal, if you saw veterans going up into the mountains delivering water and medicine, that was all done on Signal. As soon as that Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina and everything was shut down, veterans were using starlink and Signal to get in there and get supplies when the National Guard couldn’t get in.

Luke: It was amazing. I mean, because I think too, people often feel kind of a disconnect between, we have this representative government here for the people by people, all of that, but people also feel like the only way to get action, you, you end up getting a answering machine somewhere or a letter goes to nowhere or whatever.

It’s really interesting hearing you explain how actually, like we can get direct representatives or people working. For them directly involved. It’s really cool how this has opened up this ability to get more direct action between people and their representatives on these types of things where action can actually happen.

Yeah. A lot of people feel disconnected or powerless because you’ve got these entrenched powers in DC and, and you know, all those memes around that. [00:23:00] But yeah, it’s really interesting to hear that.

Scott: I think you’re right. I think what it did was there was, you know. Uh, a lot of Americans got really behind this, uh, particularly I know task force Pineapple kind of built a, a little following, or a large following with Americans because it resonated with them.

I mean, these were veterans. Mm-hmm. These were our friends. These were people that we care about. These were people that many of us are alive today because of these allies who took a chance on us, who risked their lives for us, and were not good. With an abandonment like this, regardless of what our politicians said, regardless of party, we weren’t good with this.

This was not what we were taught as young soldiers or marines. It’s like you don’t leave an ally behind, you don’t leave a a comrade behind. So we used our relationships, our knowledge of the country, and we used a signal platform to. Devise bottom up solutions that could then be connected with institutional agents, whether that was a sergeant in the 82nd airborne standing guard at a hole in the fence that could pull [00:24:00] people through, or whether it was a congressional leader in DC that could expedite a visa.

To get this person on an airplane. Right? You’re right. It flattened the landscape and it allowed us to swarm on the problem. And more importantly, what I think it’s done, if you look at again, the response to Western North Carolina during the Hurricane West Maui during the fires, I think what it has also done is it’s invigorated this private public.

Partnership capability that is possible, and that, in my mind, veterans from the Global War on Terror have really led the charge on this, who are showing us what leadership looks like when our institutional leaders fail. And I think that it has activated in a lot of positive ways, citizens to say, well, you know what?

I’ll get involved too, and we start to demand private public partnerships with our institutional leaders who before that are in their ivory towers because they don’t have to be accountable. I think that frankly, if you look at some of the gaps, regardless [00:25:00] of the administration in the last few years, when it comes to homeland security, when it comes to.

Disaster relief or even this botched withdrawal. The gaps were filled by concerned citizens who stepped into the breach, used networks and relationships and signal to collaborate and solve the problem from the bottom up. Maybe not as profound a solution as what the government would do, or institutionally as resourced, but a solution nonetheless, and that’s what I think people are hungry for.

Luke: I got the job done.

Scott: Got the job done. That’s awesome. As best we could. It’s better than sitting around watching it happen, feeling like a shit bag because your allies got left behind.

Luke: Right, exactly. You know, you, you mentioned too it got set up as a five oh and three C, like where’s the organization focused now?

What are you guys up to with the org these days?

Scott: We’re in an interesting spot, Luke, because a lot of our. Members, including myself, went through a real mental health crisis. I mean, I had mental health challenges when I got [00:26:00] outta the Army just because of friends lost and survivor’s guilt, and took me a long time to come home, so to speak.

Mm-hmm. And then Afghanistan collapse happened, and it was a real moral injury for myself and a lot of other veterans who felt like it was a complete betrayal of everything. That was our value set that we. Fought for in that war by institutional leaders that we once trusted. And so a lot of the people that started these groups went through a lot.

And then of course, imagine being on a nine one one call with an Afghan commando and his family, and you’re keeping ’em alive, and then all of a sudden you receive a call where the the mother is screaming over the phone and they’re literally killing the husband on the phone while you’re listening. This has happened across breakfast tables across America.

Mm-hmm. Where our veterans who gave so much to this war are being re-traumatized by trying to keep their allies alive. And so we’ve had to step back and really say, all right, and plus, you know, living in [00:27:00] signal, I. It’s not a healthy place to live. It’s, it’s just not right. You know? Yeah. It’s not, it’s like looking at the world through a digital soda straw, and you need Yeah, yeah. Some connection to the natural world too. And, and I know for me, like during pineapple, during the 11 days of the withdrawal, I didn’t shower. I was walking around in my bathrobe. I missed my kids moving into college, I was gone. And most veterans did that. And so I’d say all that because we had to take a step back.

We’ve done some recovery efforts with the hurricanes and we say that we’re always ready to assemble when the bat signal goes up. And a lot of groups are like that. There are groups that are actively right now. For example, sharing information on bad actors that are fomenting the riots. Hmm. And they’re sharing that information with law enforcement who are in the signal rooms.

Pineapple is actually kind of pivoting away from that. And we are actually, mm-hmm. Working [00:28:00] on veteran mental health. Storytelling. We’re taking the, the same process that we used to help our allies. We’re now trying to help our veterans. So I’ve kind of gotten out of the real time signal game for now, because I’m frankly exhausted.

There’s others that are still in the game, and I think a precedent has been set for. The near term future that this will continue, and I encourage people watching this too in the signal community, if you see something that’s going on that is natural disaster or something like that, you don’t have to look far to see groups of veterans and civilians and civilian leaders forming signal rooms around that.

It’s happening.

Luke: That’s awesome. I’m just kind of curious too, it seems like helping out our allies. Was there ever any follow up with anybody in the government about this operation? Like kind of a debrief or lessons learned or anything like that afterwards or, or were you guys pretty separated from that?[00:29:00]

Scott: Actually there was, there was testimony by several groups on what happened, and I testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee for example, on this, and I’m gonna, actually, I’ll share the link with you so that you can maybe share it with your folks. But it was about a six minute testimony that I did to the House Foreign Affairs Committee where we updated them.

So several years ago, I actually went with a group of veterans from the signal community to the. National Security Council under the Trump Administration to update them on what happened during the withdrawal under the Biden administration. And also, one of the things too, that we haven’t talked about, Luke, is that by staying in the signal rooms, intelligence analysts and special operators, veterans continue to talk to our Afghan allies in Afghanistan.

Well, these are former. Assets that were developed and handled by the Central Intelligence Agency and other three letter agencies that were wholesale abandoned. In fact, the sitcom, the Central Command Commander, four Star General responsible for Afghanistan, said that 98 to [00:30:00] 99% of the human intelligence assets from the Afghan War were abandoned.

Well, guess what? Most of them. We’re in signal rooms with veterans and are still in signal rooms with veterans because they didn’t make it out of there, and they are reporting what Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, isis, and others are actually doing to regenerate themselves in the country where nine 11 started and it’s terrifying.

Luke: Wow. In

Scott: fact, I wrote a book called The Gathering Storm that we just published that talks about the reemergence of this, and most of the information is coming from signal.

Luke: Wow. That’s wild. I’m glad to hear that there was at least some kind of a host game thing, you know, given the circumstances at least there was some kind of takeaway that could be shared back, and especially that it was testimony too.

Well be sure to link to that too. And Andrew books too. Do, I mean, please do, please do. I’ve, I’ve had a

Scott: lot of veterans, Luke actually say that, that testimony, not just mine, but several others, but the one that I shared with you is mine, that it gave them closure to the war. That the way the war ended was so open-ended and so [00:31:00] gutting.

But the testimony, particularly on the heels of the withdrawal and how we came together in signal to form these networks and try to do the right thing, afforded some measure of closure to veterans that were really hurting and their families.

Luke: Do you have any advice for anybody that might be considering getting involved in this way?

Any pointers or words of wisdom?

Scott: I think first of all, signal is a really great, so building communities of practice, that’s what we, what I call ’em, communities of practice around wicked ill structured problems is something that we need to be able to do and we should do in these times that we live in because there are so many unforeseen crisis where you can take a signal room, for example, and a hard problem and you can go in there and in very short order.

If you are. Uh, relatively decent at distributed networking and just reaching out. You can form a self-organizing starfish around a problem that has this eclectic [00:32:00] mix of folks that are really relevant to the problem, and it’s groups of people that probably would never come together. But what unites them is the interest in solving the problem.

And so in the immediacy of the crisis, signal is an amazing. Platform to surge and gather and collaborate around the problem and get after the problem. What I found though, is as time goes on and the situation matures. I believe Signal becomes less of a relevant platform for several reasons. One is it becomes a more structured problem and requires a more structured solution, so, mm-hmm.

More traditional communications. Not to say there shouldn’t be secure communications, and there shouldn’t be encrypted communications, but the flat, dynamic nature of signal. Doesn’t necessarily lend itself, for example, to a four year sustainment of Afghan allies. Like it becomes exhausting and untenable in many cases bad for mental health.

The other thing is that signal [00:33:00] because of it, the way it can also be reverse engineered and used by bad actors. We had several con artists, sociopaths. Others who were stolen valor, kind of people that got into the signal rooms and inserted themselves and really did harm. You can, because there’s anonymity in it, you know, you don’t know who’s who necessarily.

And then the final thing is, I think that when we do this, we need to have some business rules of how we operate. That was something that I learned, was that you need to have business rules of how you respect each other. No personal attacks. If you’re not relevant to the problem, keep your mouth shut. No, ping your wares in here.

We’re only here to solve the problem. Pending those business rules to the front, to the top upfront and making sure mm-hmm. That they’re adhered to and that it’s a self-policing network and that you’re, you let people know if you violate these, you’re gone. Because if you don’t, what I saw is that even pineapple at one point turned into a Reddit [00:34:00] dumpster fire.

Luke: Oh man.

Scott: It was just a disaster. And once it goes down that road, it’s almost impossible to get it back. And you just gotta shut the room down and start over.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s great advice. I mean, and it’s funny because it’s stuff we’ve encountered too, like whether it’s crypto communities or even support for tech, uh, help where you’re building communities around these things.

I think there’s, uh, you’re absolutely right. Like these platforms have a really good function for a certain problem set. Then trying to organize beyond that. It does get very nightmarish after a while if it, once you hit a certain stage. Yeah, it does.

Scott: And I think we, we have to realize that some of these signal rooms, they have a shelf life and becomes very palpable and obvious when it’s time to shut it down.

Listen to your gut and shut it the hell down.

Luke: Yeah, you mentioned helping veterans a bit around acting, and I, I read a little bit about last out. Um, do you wanna share a little bit about that journey too? Like how’d you get into acting and using that as a, as a process?

Scott: That’s what I was like telling you in Samantha off stage is [00:35:00] like the ultimate midlife crisis.

You know, coming out of the military, especially special forces, you know, performing and acting from the stage was like the last thing I thought I would ever do or being a playwright, but it actually has become a central component of not only what I do, but task force Pineapple. You are asking about what we’re doing now.

We’ve actually migrated our focus into the modality of storytelling as a way to heal veterans and a way to educate civilians on the impacts of modern war. So we teach storytelling in our workshops to veterans first responders. I. As a way to process and move through trauma and grief and moral injury.

But then we also do theatrical storytelling from the stage. When I was, gosh, I think it was about seven years ago, my oldest son told me he was joining the Army, and this was before the collapse in Afghanistan. It, but things were still going in a, direction that. I didn’t agree with, I’d left the army actually because I didn’t like where things were going in Afghanistan, and I think, man, my kid’s gonna go [00:36:00] fight a war that I didn’t finish.

Yeah, it really bothered me and it bothered me that most civilians didn’t even know that we were still in Afghanistan. I mean, less than 1% of the population served in the 20 year war. So I thought, I really want to find a way to help people understand. What modern war looks like, how it impacts the family.

And so I just started, I was already a speaker and a storyteller and my, one of my coaches said, you should write a one person play. So I just kinda did it really to kind of appease them and get ’em off my back, and it ended up becoming something that. We performed it with a group of other veterans, it was called, last Out Elegy of a Green Beret, and it really resonated.

We put 28,000 miles on a U-Haul van with our nonprofit. We traveled with our own counselors who did 250 post-traumatic stress interventions in the lobbies.

Luke: Whoa.

Scott: Gary Nic, Lieutenant Dan from Forests Gump ultimately saw the play and ended up producing it. [00:37:00] So we, you know, really we looked alike. 36 cities and I started studying acting at the age of 50 to play the, the lead role of, of the Green Beret, Sergeant Danny Patton with a group of other veterans.

And I tell you, L man, I just loved it and I still love it. And now the play is touring in its third season. It is, uh, going all over the country and I’m not in it anymore. It’s another group of veterans that are touring it. I’m the executive producer, but. I’ve put my playwright and acting hat back on and I am writing and about to launch a one person play called 11 Days, the True Story of Operation Pineapple Express.

And so there’s gonna be a one person show that I’m gonna be performing around Pineapple Express that will debut on Veteran’s Day 2025. And then we’ll tour the country in 2026. And, I’m really excited about it.

Luke: Oh, that’s fantastic. I’d love to have you back on too. There’s, there’s a whole bunch of questions I’d love to dig into just around what you just covered around, you know, kind of having these on location kind of sessions [00:38:00] and, and all this stuff.

And wow, Gary sent these to is awesome man. Just keep, layers and layers keep, uh, opening here. But yeah, I’d love to have you back, kind of cover that and let people know when they can, uh, check out the show as well. It’s a really, really cool process. Man. Scott, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Is there anything, we didn’t cover or anything you’re trying to get the word out about that we can help you with here? Well, in these last few minutes?

Scott: Well, you know, our allies are in trouble still and our veterans need our support as well. I would encourage people to go to scott mann.com. We’re doing a lot of big work there.

I’ve got a leadership platform, a community on the school platform, S-K-O-O-L, Scott Mann Leadership Academy if folks want to go there. And lastly, I would encourage people to read Operation Pineapple Express. It’s available on Amazon anywhere else. If you really wanna read a book that describes what we’ve talked about here and shows the signal application in real time in a complex, wicked problem, I think people will really get a lot out of that book.

Luke: Awesome. Scott, I’ll be sure to include all that, that link in the show notes. It’s just such a [00:39:00] fascinating story and, and an awesome effort. We talked to a lot of people from startups to, you know, other founders, et cetera, and there’s just something real startup energy and the courage involved with what you did.

It’s just, it’s huge and life or death stuff. Really appreciate you taking the time to share that with your audience here. Love to have you back anytime you want and we’ll be sure to include that info so that people can check your other workout and follow you up around online.

Scott: Yeah, thanks Luke. I appreciate you man.

Luke: Thanks, Scott. We really appreciate it.

Scott: You bet.

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