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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Hey everybody, it s Jordan Harbinger from the Art of Charm here.
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Today we re talking with Jason McCarthy, founder of GORUCK.
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You ve either seen their backpacks or maybe taken part in the GORUCK challenge.
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We re gonna talk about charming the snake.
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This is a Green Beret military special forces concept about building rapport and we re gonna talk about applying this in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as to business in the civilian world.
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And with that, welcome to The Art of Charm.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC.
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In the US, just text charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the right answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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Here s Jason McCarthy.
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Hey Jason, thanks for coming on the show, man.
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I appreciate it.
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Thanks for having me, Jordan.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence.
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All right, so basically I steal all the best lessons that I learned in Special Forces and apply them to building tough gear, tougher people, and to empowering communities all over the world.
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That s a big mission, and people have heard of GORUCK, many people have.
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There s a lot of success involved in your brand, and there s a lot of success involved in the industry that your brand is in, fitness and things like that.
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When I think of GORUCK, I think of CrossFit, Spartan Race, there s Tough Mudder, those types of things.
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Clearly, there s a trend in this area, and do you think part of it was timing, or do you think that there s something very, very unique about what you re teaching that has resonated with your fans?
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So I think the big differentiator is that the brand of go rock is really intimately tied with my background in special forces.
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So the hundred plus guys that lead our events are all decorated combat veterans of special operations.
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And at our core at our foundation, what we are is teachers.
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Yes, there s the warfighter aspect of it as well.
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But we re teachers.
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And so we lead really small classes.
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and you show up on a random street corner in a random town, and then it s sort of a fitness team building thing with backpacks on, right?
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So you have some weight and a backpack, and you get this sort of guided fitness tour by this guy that s been there and done that.
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Now, I think that despite the fact that the gear came first at GORUCK, and we spent over two years developing the RUCKs that are ours,
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I think that certainly the fitness trend has helped.
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You know, I want more people out doing awesome stuff, whether it s Tough Mudder or CrossFit or Spartan Race or anything else that you can name in that element.
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I think that anything that strengthens communities and makes people better, just being part of those communities is a really positive force.
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So we re proud to be a part of that movement.
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One of the things we talked about prior to the show was charming the snake.
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Is this a Green Beret concept or a Spec War concept?
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Where does that come from and what is it?
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Right, so it s kind of a concept that is known within the special forces community.
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In essence, it s this, right?
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The snake represents the problems in your life, the challenges in your life, the enemies in your life, if you will.
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There s a lot of ways to deal with those snakes.
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You can kill them.
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But the problem is, is there will always be more snakes, right?
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Or you can charm those snakes.
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The way that you charm them is you charm those snakes, and then they go do the work for you.
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They go kill all the other snakes for you.
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And that s really the foundation of the community that I was raised in professionally, certainly, which is the Green Berets, Army Special Forces.
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And so, like I said at the outset, we ve taken all the best lessons of special forces, stolen them, and then repackaged and repurposed them so that they re sort of more digestible and more applicable to people s daily lives.
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Got it.
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So in order to really explain Charming the Snake, it sounds like we gotta dig into your roots in special forces.
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Tell us about Afghanistan.
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Right.
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So this is my community, full disclosure, I was not in Afghanistan.
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Later, I would go to Iraq in 2007.
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But in 2001, you know, you had about a battalion of Green Berets went to Afghanistan, let s call it 350.
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Okay, this is Afghanistan, 2001, the boneyard of the Soviet Empire.
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Right?
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What do you do there?
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How do you achieve mission success?
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Well, you know, the United States government had this idea that the Green Berets would at least buy us some time until we could send a much larger force in the spring of 2002.
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And the mission of the Green Berets was to win.
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And so we re trained in unconventional warfare.
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And it s by, with and through a local force.
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So how did we do this?
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How in under three months did we crown a new president of Afghanistan, which is essentially was the goal, right?
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That s a huge success marker.
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And so we did it by linking up with the Northern Alliance.
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The Northern Alliance was already there, it s their country, and they hate the Taliban, too.
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And so we showed up, we charmed the snake that was the Northern Alliance, they showed us where the Taliban were, and using them and using the United States Air Force, God bless them, we, the royal we, my community, defeated the Taliban very quickly.
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So you re in the boneyard of the Soviet Empire.
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You ve got, I don t even know how many Green Berets, but not a whole lot.
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I mean, this isn t like... No, you ve got about a battalion, you ve got about 350.
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Yeah, that s a small number when you re talking about going up against tens of thousands of Taliban.
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As irregular as those guys might have been, they still have guns.
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Oh, they re very seasoned fighters.
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Yeah, they ve been living in caves and eating goats.
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They re very good at it.
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especially on their home turf.
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How did you start doing this?
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I mean, it looks like your original plan called for seriously more troops, and you re outnumbered, and I don t know if you re outgunned with the Northern Alliance, but you certainly have your work cut out for you.
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How do you start Charming the Snake?
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Where does Charming the Snake come in here?
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Right.
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So like I said, the snake really is the Northern Alliance is already there.
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So the first thing that happened was the CIA was in first and they linked up with the Northern Alliance.
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And you start building rapport.
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Everything really comes down to people.
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There s all these ideas about how the military works and rank this and rank that and
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even the military inside our own organizations comes down to people.
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With this, it was, you know, you send some people and they link up with the Northern Alliance.
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And they start going through, you know, the stages of rapport building.
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They start dealing with, you know, how do you solve problems systematically?
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And so, one of the things that we ll teach is what the phases of rapport building are.
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It s know your audience, mirror common ground, listen actively, and maintain rapport, right?
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And so,
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In this case, you ve got a very limited number of guys and they show up the audience that we link up with, that my community links up with is the Northern Alliance.
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And it s basically, you know, mirror common ground means I hate the Taliban, you hate the Taliban, let s go get them together.
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How do we do this?
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Right?
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You fight by with and through them, you re by their side the entire time, meaning you don t get to just sit in the rear and tell them what to do, you ve got to be out there doing it, or they just won t respect you.
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And also, you know, the best way to get eyes on to the enemy and know what s actually going on is to actually be there.
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So you have to listen actively to what they say, this is what you need to do.
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This is what s important to me, stuff like that, right?
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That doesn t mean that you wait for your turn to talk.
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It means that you listen actively to what they say.
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We re listening to them, and they re gonna show us how to do this.
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You just keep maintaining rapport.
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It s really hard to build, and it s easy to lose.
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At that time, one of the things that you wanna do by maintaining rapport is by keep bringing the Air Force in with big bombs that drop from the sky, because at that point, that s really important.
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Power is a good thing in those types of situations.
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It s really the human terrain in war and in life and in business and in anything else you want to prescribe it to.
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Okay, and so let s break this down a little bit.
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You ve got know your audience.
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How do you start to know your audience?
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Yeah, you know the Northern Alliance, the CIA was there.
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What does that mean?
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It s the difference between reading a Wikipedia page on Northern Alliance or getting to know something at a deep enough level where it becomes useful.
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Right.
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So you do anything that you can to know your audience means study the customs of the land.
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Use the right hand for this.
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Use the left hand for that.
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Never do these taboos, cultural norms, you know, stuff like that.
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You just want to know everything that you can.
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And in today s world, if you want to Google someone first, Google them first.
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If you want to look at all their profiles first, look at them first.
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In this case,
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You know, the community, there s some reports out there, and certainly there s handshakes where you show up and you re linking up with somebody that s already been there, and then they introduce you to the person that you re gonna fight beside, and that s how that works.
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How do we get beyond Google?
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Because everybody listening already knows, okay, I m going into a job interview.
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I should probably Google this guy or the company.
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That s so basic that it goes without saying.
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How do we dive deeper into that so that this becomes useful?
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I guess my initial pushback would be make sure your Google Foo is stronger.
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I mean, there s so many different outlets that people have.
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You know, if you re going to go for a job interview, you know, we see this all the time.
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People will show up and interview at GoRuck and they don t really know what GoRuck is.
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You can ask them a question or two and they just don t quite get it.
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There s lots more things out there.
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Understand the company that you re showing up to the same way that if you re going to show up in Afghanistan or Iraq,
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understand what the larger cultural things are not just a snapshot of someone s Facebook profile picture and think you ve got it like you need to understand the fuller picture of what works in that type of an environment and what doesn t work in that type of an environment.
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By the way, when we re talking about knowing the audience, we actually have a social capital course where we discuss a lot of these similar topics, especially rapport building for networking and business, maybe a little bit less so for taking down the Taliban, but some of the things that we go into there include, like you said, expert Google food, but also digging really deep into certain outlets and social media to find out what people like,
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what the person you re interviewing with likes and how to relate to those topics, even if you re not an avid women s volleyball fan and things like that, you can still find out what they like and you can find commonalities that are deeper than just what s on their Facebook profile, and those things can go a long way.
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And I m surprised, frankly, to hear that people show up for job interviews with GoRuck not getting what you guys do.
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That is so disappointing.
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I m sure you re more disappointed than me.
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I m disappointed just hearing about it.
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I can imagine what you re thinking when you went, crap, we flew this guy in, or I was gonna go eat lunch and now I m dealing with this.
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But when we re mirroring common ground, you mentioned you hate the Taliban, I do too, let s go get them.
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It s gotta be deeper than that, right?
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Because otherwise, how do we even signal we re genuine?
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I mean, it d be easy for me to walk in and go, yeah, go, Ruck, I like making people better.
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You d never go, great, you re hired.
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You d say, all right, hold on.
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How do I know you re really on the same page?
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Because it s easy to say, we both hate the Taliban, we got that in common.
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It reminds me of this movie, Idiocracy, which is great for so many reasons.
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And one of the lines, one of the dialogues there is, oh man, you like money?
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I like money too.
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We should hang out.
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It s just such an obvious commonality.
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There has to be something more there than just, oh, we re not trying to kill each other?
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We re trying to kill the same people?
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Let s do it.
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There has to be something more there or this is such a fragile situation.
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Super fair point.
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So the first thing is that presence implies interest, right?
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So we show up in links up with these fighters in the boneyard of the Soviet empire, meaning we re all there.
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It s not exactly Disneyland.
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there.
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So the first step is there, they want what you want, you can focus on a lot of things that would divide you, you can do this in any facet of your life.
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But if someone is from a certain place and cares about certain things, you need to focus on those things.
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If they care about mealtime, and they care about you sitting down and breaking bread with them on their terms and chatting with them for an hour about nothing and pleasantries, even though there s the early stages of a war going on, then you do that.
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You re working on their customs.
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You re working on their terms, not yours.
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And too often what happens is we try to say, hey, this is what needs to happen.
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I m right.
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We all try to be right.
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Instead of solving the problem and getting what we want out of life, we say, oh, if only this would go this way, then I would be happy.
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But if we listened a little bit more,
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And if we sat and observed and honored other people s customs a little bit more other people s ways of life, then we would get more what we want out of life.
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And so sure, it was more than just, I hate the Taliban, and so do you, it was also shows of force, meaning you ve got to prove that you re also a capable warfighter.
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You know, these are legitimately great fighters, and they don t want to work with you if you re bad.
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So you ve got to prove yourself.
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There s always a new guy, right?
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And the new guy has to do something.
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He s gotta do something to prove himself.
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You know, this was no different.
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You ve gotta show up and you ve gotta prove that you re worthy to be there in the fight with them against the Taliban.
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And how do you prove that?
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Just by taking the time and spending it with them about things they care about?
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Especially things that you might not understand that they care about until you go back to number one, which is knowing the audience.
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Right, so you have to be authentic.
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Your yeses have to mean yes and your nos have to mean no.
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If you break your word, they re not going to trust you.
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And so the first step is sort of more of a peaceful thing.
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They have to trust you face to face, eye to eye.
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This is someone that I want to go to war with, right?
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And the second step is, is once you ve passed that litmus test, and you know, you ve broken bread or done whatever cultural norms are, you have to prove yourself in war.
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There s no other way to do it.
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And so the easiest first way to do it was by fighting side by side and being a good war fighter.
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And part of that was linking up with the Air Force and targeting certain things that they could never do, right?
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They don t have an Air Force like we do.
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And so the things that our guys on the ground, because they were on the ground, were able to do was very impressive to the Northern Alliance partners.
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So next we have listen actively to what they say.
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And from what I m understanding, from what I m hearing here, this is a key component of also what we kind of do at the Art of Charm is rapport building.
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So we tend to go really deep into each one of these four components.
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Very, very deep, in fact.
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I like the concept of listen actively to what they re saying.
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This is, for a lot of people go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.
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you mean something very specific here.
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Can you explain this?
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Right, so listen actively means you re actually listening.
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You re not just waiting for your turn to talk to prove yourself right, right?
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And so imagine in Afghanistan, we had certain war plans, hey, this place is important, that place is important, and you know, you gotta get the capital first.
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Well, it turns out there were other strategic centers that we had to target first, before you could get to the capital, strongholds, if you will.
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And so by listening to the partners on the ground, the guys basically said, Hey, you know, we re gonna go here, we re gonna send our troops here, and we re going to attack here first.
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And then that paved the way to take over the capital.
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And so the important thing is that you put your ego aside.
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And you basically say, Hey, always trust the guy on the ground.
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And the guy on the ground was our partner force.
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And we trusted them, we listened to what they had to say.
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And that led to mission success.
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That was a lot more important than us saying, Hey, our initial battle plan was right.
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Too often we sit around and wait to talk.
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We wait to prove ourselves right.
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We don t actually listen or hear what the other person is saying.
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We wait until there s a gap in space and we say, the initial plan that I had when I showed up to this meeting, that s the plan I m going with.
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I m just going to wait for you to shut up so I can talk.
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And I m going to tell you how I m right, and that s going to be better than what you have to say.
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And if you do that, you re going to fail.
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If you listen to what the other person has to say, if your success depends upon them and collaboration of any kind, take your pick.
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then you need to know what s important to them.
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To understand what s important to them, you have to actually really listen.
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You can t just tell them what s important to you.
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It doesn t work that way.
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What if we find ourselves the type of person who doesn t listen well, or we have problems with that, or we feel like our mind wanders when other people are talking?
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Do you have strategies on how we can deal with that?
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It s just discipline.
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When I went into the Army, I told myself I couldn t run first thing in the morning because I needed my beauty sleep, and then I needed to eat breakfast, and then I needed to let it digest and stuff.
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Well, the first time I had to run in the morning, and there was no choice, I did it.
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And so, the point is, is you have to just practice it.
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You have to actually listen.
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It s really a skill, you have to just practice it.
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Like everything, it s a perishable skill too.
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And by perishable, you mean that this is something we can actually forget and not be able to use after a while?
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Right, so I just mean that leadership is a perishable skill.
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The more that you lead, the better you get at it.
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If you stop leading, you get rusty.
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If you re in the game, pick your game.
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If you re in the game, you re really good at it.
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You re sort of the tip of the spear, if you will.
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And if you stop doing that, you just get rusty.
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So to be really good at something, you have to keep doing it continually.
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And how do we maintain this over time?
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I assume at some level, you ve built it to a point where, do you then set it on autopilot, or is this something you have to keep putting work into?
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Obviously, we have an entire course based on building and maintaining rapport.
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So I know the answer to this, but I would love to hear how you do it.
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I mean, I think overcommunication is the key.
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By the way, it s not really possible to overcommunicate.
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And so, you know, in the professional world, you have to keep checking in with people.
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Presence implies interest.
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And you have to make yourself present.
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If you already know your audience, you know what matters to them.
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And so the key is if you mirror a common ground and you say, hey, you know, this is what s important to me, you have to actually show it.
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At a certain point, words stop being as important and actions start being more important.
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And so,
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If the love of your life loves going out on date night to whatever movie she wants to go out on, you know, once a month, twice a month, whatever that looks like, do it.
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It s not that hard, even if you hate the movie.
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It s important to her.
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And if she s happy, won t that serve your goals as well?
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I would bet it would.
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Of course, yeah, naturally.
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And you ve got this four-point, I don t even know what you call it, a structure, possibly, from your time in Iraq.
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Understand the problem, visualize the solution, over-communicate and adapt.
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What is this structure and how do we use it?
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Right, so this is more leadership slash problem-solving approach, right?
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Understand the problem, visualize a solution, over-communicate, adapt to win.
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So, step one, understand the problem.
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Too often times, we ll get something, our boss will give us something and say, hey, here s all this stuff, solve it, right?
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Too often, we just jump into it.
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We don t understand what the intent is, or what the goal is, or we don t define success.
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And the more that we sort of say, hey, what s the priority here?
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Priority is singular.
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There s not 10 priorities, there s one priority.
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And so you have to know what s going to happen at the end of this time, whatever you re allotted, where you say, OK, did I win or did I lose here?
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So make sure that before you jump in, that you understand how you re actually going to be successful.
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Understand what the problem is.
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Two is visualize a solution.
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Maybe not the solution, but a solution.
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point is, is it s probably going to have to adapt, right?
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So you have to actually think, Hey, how am I going to solve this problem?
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You have to come up with a plan.
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And so this is all before you really start putting it into action.
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You know, step three over communicate, which is not possible.
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Leadership is not, Hey, I press a button and I walk away.
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I make a decision and I walk away.
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It s constant re-engagement with the people that you re leading.
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There s nothing really worse than being a private that s just told what to do all day long everyday and doesn t know any wise.
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And so you have to constantly over communicate it s very motivating for the people that you re communicating to and the team that you re trying to build.
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That s gonna be able to achieve what you want to achieve and step four adapt to win is really murphy is going to strike i promise you.
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Murphy always finds you when you re at your lowest, and then you find something lower.
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And you just have to improvise, adapt, and overcome to the situations on the ground, and you have to then go back and re-understand the problem and start it all over again, and just never give up.
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So walk us through a situation where you use this in your duty in Iraq, during your tour in Iraq.
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Okay, so we had a partner force, and they didn t really want us there.
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This was 2007, the height of the surge.
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They thought that we were just there to pass out money and give them guns and let them sort of patrol their own towns, right?
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What happened was, is all of a sudden, they found themselves pinned down in a hospital.
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There was a bunch of dying and dead soldiers of theirs, partners that we had worked with, that we knew.
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And so the solution was that we would help them.
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They asked us for help, we would help them.
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The solution was we ll get our gun truck with our 10 guys and go face, you know, force of thousands at this point, which was the Intel that we had, and go link up with them downtown and provide a show of force for us to rescue the guys that were pinned down.
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Now, war is always a series of communication because it changes very quickly.
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And so, you know, there was the constant communication with them.
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about this is what s going on here.
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This is what s going on there.
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Where are the bad guys?
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And so we were following their lead.
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And of course, it was back and forth in terms of where we were going to go and what we re going to do.
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But we started operating as one to go on basically a war party in town at that time.
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And so step four was just adapt to win, right?
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So the enemy always has a vote, never forget that.
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And so the enemy had some votes that night and they did their worst, but we did better just by following the following steps.
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What are they thinking they re gonna do?
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Like, oh, we don t need these guys here, we got this.
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Is that really what s happening?
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Do they really think that?
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The local forces, basically, it s a pride thing.
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They re in their country, and they should be proud of their country.
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We want them to be proud of their country.
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We want to empower them.
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to do their job.
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That s our goal.
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We re teachers.
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We re there to teach them how to do what we know how to do really well.
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They re proud, and we re not from their country.
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Imagine how you d feel if someone from another country came over and was here fighting a war in America.
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I would not feel well about that at all.
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And so there s a little bit of that, but they needed us.
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The bottom line is that they needed us.
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My community of war fighters is one of the best that s ever existed, and we re really, really, really good at it.
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For them, it s just sometimes you gotta put pride aside and say, hey, I need help.
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I ve certainly been there professionally.
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I ve been there personally.
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It was a good experience.
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It was certainly a successful night, but it cost us some.
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How do we apply this stuff to business?
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Obviously, business is what you re doing right now.
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GoRuck s doing really well.
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You re bringing these lessons into the real world, the civilian world, in business.
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How are you doing that?
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How are you understanding the problem, visualizing solutions, over-communicating or not, and adapting to when?
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So we actually teach this in a sort of an endurance event style called the Go Rough Challenge.
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And it s a leadership laboratory.
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It s a team building laboratory where people show up and we expose them to a high amount of physical stress.
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It s loosely based on the training that I went through.
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The point of the physical stress is really just to get you to a point where your mind wants to quit.
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Your mind wants to say, oh, this is too hard.
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And all of those demons, they always come out.
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I ve faced them.
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Everybody that I know has faced them.
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And so we break it down in terms of, you know, hey, there s a really heavy log, you re going to carry it an undetermined distance for an undetermined amount of time.
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And you ve got to have a team that rotates in and out.
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And you ve got to lead that team to the objective, wherever that may be.
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And so we teach the leaders of those missions in our challenges what that looks like and what we found over the years is that people want more than just hey i m gonna carry a heavy log you can do that by yourself you can have anybody show up and say hey do a million push ups you can t do it.
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Anybody can show you how to fail, right?
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But what we re doing is changing lives.
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Your motto is where ordinary guys become extraordinary men.
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That s war.
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That s a go-up challenge.
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That s something where ordinary people, and I think we re all basically ordinary, show up in an extraordinary situation.
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You have to be in an extraordinary situation to be extraordinary.
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And so those people then apply themselves more in this event, and they take it back to their daily lives.
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And so, you know, how we apply this day to day at go ruck is we practice what we preach.
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And so there s always communication, which is the glue to everything between subordinates and bosses between teams, there s always dynamics and the human terrain is a really messy place.
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You know, people are very complicated and messy.
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It s also the most rewarding facet of life, I think, is the communities that we re a part of.
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But no matter what your boss gives you, you have to understand what success looks like.
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So, what s the problem?
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I need to define success.
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You have to then take the onus upon yourself to figure out what the solution is.
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And then, as a leader, you have to build rapport and galvanize the troops and get everybody on the same page, and you have to keep doing that.
3
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And then you have to just accept the fact that Murphy s gonna strike.
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Then you have to go back to the beginning and re-understand it all over again and keep going.
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How is GORUCK then adapting to win?
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I mean, if we re understanding the problem in terms of getting in there and creating the right team, from probably not knowing a whole lot about starting a business, I m guessing just coming from the military directly, the solutions in terms of finding things with marketing, and when you came through and started your business, Facebook and Google ads were new.
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That s like some alien technology when you re coming from a desert wartime environment, right?
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It s alien technology for people who were in business in 2001.
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and they had to figure this stuff out.
3
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I can t imagine what it s like when you come home and you re like, smartphones?
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SPEAKER_00
There s gotta be a lot of challenges that you had to overcome.
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SPEAKER_00
And the communication thing totally makes sense.
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But I wanna know how GoRuck is adapting to win and how you re taking the Green Beret strategies and putting these into play in your business in real examples.
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I aggressively did not want to be in business.
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I was going to transition out of the Green Berets and I was going to go back into the government, you know, continue to serve.
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I thought that, you know, to those to whom much is given, much is expected.
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And I felt like I d just been given this awesome opportunity to serve America after 9-11, because of 9-11, in wherever she may send me.
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In that community, making money is not cool.
3
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Being in business is not that cool, right?
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What is cool is service.
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And so it took me a long time to make peace with that.
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And the early days of GoRuck, it was just a hobby.
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It was something that I was gonna do to pass the time.
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I was married at the time.
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SPEAKER_01
I was getting out, all that type of stuff.
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SPEAKER_01
Life was on the precipice of rock bottom.
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I eventually hit it.
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That was not fun.
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In the midst of those sort of ashes came GORUCK.
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GORUCK started, little known fact, as a gear company.
3
SPEAKER_01
We started out with just one rucksack, one backpack called GR1.
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SPEAKER_01
That bag took two and a half years to design and build and figure out.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know how to sew.
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I don t know anything about manufacturing.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t know anything about starting a company.
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SPEAKER_01
A lot of the cards are stacked against me.
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And so, come May of 2010, I finally have this bag, and I ve got a lot of them at this point.
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I ve got every dollar I ve saved up that s poured into this pile of inventory that s in the basement of my condo.
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SPEAKER_01
I drove around the country to 48 states trying to meet people, get into adventures, and try to get retail shops to carry my stuff, to carry the rucks.
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SPEAKER_01
and everybody basically said no thanks or worse yet they just greeted me with silence and i exited with greater silence and so the problem was that i had no awareness i had no brand i had nothing i only had a story that i was uncomfortable telling because i didn t really want to be in business because it s not cool
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And so I thought, what s the solution?
3
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How do I do this?
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And like you said, I don t know anything about Facebook, I don t know anything about Google, and I barely do to this day.
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But I had to do something.
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It s just in my blood.
3
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I hate losing.
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And so I didn t want to fail.
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And so the solution became the Go Ruck Challenge.
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It s a team event, it s based on my training in special forces.
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You show up, a guy, at that time it was only me, leads this small group
3
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On a guided tour of the city that s got a lot of team building elements to it so it s physical in nature and that became this sort of great relationship between gear and events so we developed both internally and organically from our outset right and so the over communication in this was just run more events.
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And the events slowly became the brand of GoRuck.
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We d rather focus on people than things.
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People are a lot more interesting, people are a lot more rewarding than things to us.
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Communities are how we re happy.
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It s how I m happy, being a part of a community that s about more than just myself.
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And the Adapt2Win is just the market votes.
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And in business, the market votes with their wallets.
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So we ve got new events, we ve got new gear and all that stuff, but at its core, we re a people company.
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And we evolved from a things, a gear company.
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It took a long time, and that was my initial plan.
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I showed up, I m like, man, I got this awesome rock.
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And time has proved it awesome, but I got this awesome rock, and that s my plan.
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And the problem is, is that that plan was flawed.
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And so the adapt to win part was that, no, that s not the plan.
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The plan is, yes, we have this rock, we have these things, but we re a people company.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you had to rebrand.
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SPEAKER_00
It s funny, because in business, the market and the fact that the consumer votes with their wallet kind of sounds like what you guys refer to as Murphy when you re in the battlefield, right, in the wartime situation.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve got these things going wrong, and the winds are shifting, and the weather s changing, and this thing is jamming, and this system s not working.
3
SPEAKER_00
But in business, it s like, oh, consumers just frickin  decided that this stuff sucks now, and this is cool.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you re like, what?
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SPEAKER_00
We spend three years on that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, we can either freak out or we can figure out what we re gonna do.
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly right.
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I mean, Murphy basically means when something can go wrong, it will go wrong.
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And so in the early days, it was, hey, we ve got zero awareness.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s a huge problem.
3
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You know, the big question that they ll ask you at the outset is how are you gonna get your first sale?
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That s what someone s gonna ask a budding entrepreneur.
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SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, the GoRuck challenge really helped that.
3
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And, you know, now we re at a different precipice in the company where we ve got some awareness.
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We re not as much as we d like.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, we ve read 4000 events globally to date just to sort of put some scale to it.
3
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But the problem is, is the gear is really expensive and the events, the challenges specifically are really hard.
3
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So future adaptation is as we want more people to experience what the GoRuck community is all about, because
3
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outside of what I felt in special forces, which is brothers from another mother, it s I would do anything for anyone in that community at the drop of a hat, go rock is based on that.
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And so it s a really, really strong community.
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We want people to experience what that s like.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, though, the problem is the events are really hard.
3
SPEAKER_01
Someone says, man,
3
SPEAKER_01
some Green Beret or some SEAL or some Delta Force guy or some PJ is going to show up and lead me around the city, that s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re crazy, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so what we ve done now is kind of taken a step back and say, how do we maintain our brand and still scale to more people?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so that for us now is really the rucking revolution.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so what does that mean?
3
SPEAKER_01
It means that you put 20, 30 pounds on your back and you go for a walk.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s called rucking.
3
SPEAKER_01
Basically anybody can do it if you can walk.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, that s a lot more scalable.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of fitness benefits that are to it.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can do it with somebody that s right next to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can actually talk to them.
3
SPEAKER_01
You might want to make sure you like them before you go ruck with them.
3
SPEAKER_01
Unlike running, which, running basically sucks.
3
SPEAKER_01
I like it, but it sucks.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I like it because it sucks.
3
SPEAKER_01
Rucking is one of those things, you can make it suck as bad as you want.
3
SPEAKER_01
As much weight as you want to put on your back, or as fast as you want to go.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so we think that we re in the early stages of something that s got enormous scale potential.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s our newest version, I should say, and what we re focused on in terms of ADAPT to win.
3
SPEAKER_00
Jason, thank you so much for coming on.
3
SPEAKER_00
Much appreciated, looking forward to seeing what happens with GORUCK in the next decade and beyond.
3
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for having me.
3
SPEAKER_00
Interesting stuff, I love always applying military technology and concepts to the civilian world, and of course, hearing a little bit of behind the scenes about what those guys are really doing over there, because that stuff is endlessly fascinating, and the fact is that even high-tech, high-touch things like business and war, in the end, they re always, always, always about people.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Jason on Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ll have him linked in the show notes, his Twitter there, as well as the other resources mentioned on the show.
3
SPEAKER_00
They ve got great backpacks.
3
SPEAKER_00
I totally want one of those.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can tap our album art in Most Mobile Podcast Players to see the cheat sheet for this episode, and we ll link to the show notes directly on your phone.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m also on Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of stuff that never makes it to the show.
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of articles, insights, other stuff, and you can engage with me there.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_00
I also want to encourage you to join our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or in the US, text charmed to 33444.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s all about improving your networking and connection skills, those people skills we talked about today on the show, and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every week.
3
SPEAKER_00
It will make you a better networker, it will make you a better connector, and it will make you a better thinker.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text charmed here in the US to 33444.
3
SPEAKER_00
This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
3
SPEAKER_00
Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer
4
SPEAKER_00
Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
4
SPEAKER_00
Go ahead and tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
4
SPEAKER_00
See you next time.
4
SPEAKER_02
Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
4
SPEAKER_02
Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.