152: Stacy Bare — Adventure Not War

Growing and scaling a business is hard work. We know that.

You know that. And then there's life. There's your relationships, there's money troubles, there's family issues, there's your own feelings of despair and stress, the things that bug you, that trouble you. We have to deal with all that. And then there's your team and the human events that they have to deal with against all of that. We have to somehow survive. So you've got to take care of yourself and manage that at the same time. Today's show is about all that, but it's with a really interesting individual, a returning veteran who went through substance abuse and feelings of darkness and despair. And he transformed all that, reconnecting to those places, to the great outdoors, to a sense of awe and reconnecting with himself and with other human beings. It's a great story of a guy who created a program, Ski Iraq, went back to Iraq and is now creating outdoor and adventure programs in skiing in places like Afghanistan and around the world. I think you'll enjoy it. It'll benefit you. You'll get a great deal out of it. Listen as we talk with Stacy Baer about adventure, not war, and his program.

And what it means for you.

Listen in.

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today, Stacy Baer. And you know, we're going to talk about overall well being, dealing with stress and traumas and setbacks and things like that. I'm really excited to have you on the show, Stacey, where are you today?

I'm excited to be on the show, Bill. I am at my home. I live just south of Salt Lake City, Utah, and Sandy, and I am staring up into a cloud covered wasash that is getting snow in May.

So Stacy and I met and I'll tell you a little more, Stacy, in a second. But we met a couple of weeks ago at a Science of Happiness conference retreat in a beautiful place called 1440 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And it was, you know, all about things to do with the science and practices of taking care of yourself, your overall well being, your mental health, your happiness in life. And I thought Stacy's remarks were awesome and he was engaging. And then he's like, oh, I'm from Sandy. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to be there in a couple weeks. And so I thought, oh, we should have you come in and talk to the group that we're talking to and we should get you on the podcast. It's really great and compelling thing. And then, like, I just keep seeing reminders all around. So I was leading one of our accelerator program days yesterday, and I've got 60 some people in this accelerator, plus some of the guests, things like that. And, And I'm in the. The Phoenix area at Scottsdale right now, looking out over some. Some greens of a golf course and a little lake and, and the mountain ridge and. And I've got all these inspiring people creating great businesses and, you know, working hard to grow their. Their thing and fulfill their passion. And a week ago, one of them took his own life.

Very sorry to hear that.

Yeah, we had a moment of silence and remembrance and thought, reflection. But against all of the things that we try to do in life, whether you're a business leader or anything else, we deal with stress and upsets and breakdowns. And I've got another executive in the middle of a breakup of marriage. And I've got somebody like, we've got people at all times. I've had. I've had mental breaks. I've had relationship breaks. I've had thefts. We've had all kinds of stresses, financial woes that affect us as we go through life. And in particular, leaders where you can't always share everything that you're dealing with with the people that surround you or you don't know how necessarily to talk about it in a way that's appropriate to your role. So your topic really touched me. And even after we did it, I'm reminded of these more immediate things. I'm like, o, holy crap, this is so relevant. So thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I think we're. I don't know if we're at any more trying time in history than other people have been and other generations have been. I have a great aunt who's 100 years old and still very with it and talks a lot about, you know, the, the long view of history. But I think one of the things that is really different is, is that we hear about all the bad news all the time in a way that past generations haven't. And I think for some of us, there's a real feeling that a lot of the things we hold dear are under attack. And I think there's a greater understanding that there's a lot of people who never felt like they received the benefits that I know I certainly felt growing up. And I didn't realize that there were people for years that were struggling to be accepted simply for being who they were. Right. And that There were people out against their humanity, and things like the Holocaust or slavery seemed super far away. But you know, those are only a couple generations or four generations ago in most cases. And so. But with all the news and all the information that can impact us all the time, and I think oftentimes can be overwhelming and create a negative sense of awe. It's really important to find ways to find a positive sense of awe in our daily lives, if we can. And the thing that I really took away from that conference where we met was this notion that joy is a moral imperative. Right? No matter. Life is going to be hard. Life is going to be difficult. But we have a moral duty to work towards and try and find joy, even amongst the pain and the messiness and the anger. Because if we don't, we're not going to survive and we're never going to create the change that I think so many of us desperately want and are desperately working for in our daily lives.

So let me. We've like dived right into the core of the content and the work. And there's more to say and share here, but let me say a couple things by way of introduction. So Stacy is. He's a skier, a boatman, a climber. You become a mountain man. But at least this work, a lot of it really started after your stint in the Army. So he's a veteran of the army, served in a variety of places. And you were in the EOD role, were you?

So I was a military intelligence officer. And then I got recalled. I got out in 2004 and got recalled at the end of 2005 and went to Iraq in 2006. And in between that time, I worked as an explosive Ordinance disposal officer for civilian humanitarian nonprofit called the Halo Trust. And I actually was slotted to. I don't know if I'm gonna remember this quite correctly, but I had been asked by the organization that I was working for if I would be interested in taking a position at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to teach humanitarian de mining to the United States military. But then when I got recalled to the Army, I remember writing back and saying, hey, I'm a trained Explosive Ordinance Disposal Technician, But I hadn't been through the army school. So I went back in as a civil affairs officer, but my EOD work was as a civilian.

Oh, got it, got it, got it. So intelligence, civil affairs. And so you served in a lot of scary places and dealt with a lot of stuff that if you haven't served, you know, they're intimidating. And starting 2015, went back to the places and started to reconnect and discover and focus on the healing. And I'm going to have you tell us about that. But you've gone back to ski in, in, in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? And that's just not.

That's right.

I think about skiing in Utah or Jackson Hole or Europe or. But I don't think about Asia or the Middle east or any of that in terms of a ski place. But I looked at your videos and I heard your story and I just thought it was really amazing about connecting.

So tell us the story, tell us.

Your the journey of this as we get into the healing aspect of what we're talking about some more.

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I grew up in South Dakota. My dad was an ag professor at South Dakota State University. My mom was a middle school and high school teacher. And I had a pretty solid exposure to the outdoors. Like a lot of middle class families in the 80s, we packed up the station wagon and headed off to a national park or, you know, a big road trip somewhere. So I got a chance as a kid to spend a lot of time in the Black Hills, which was six hours away, and a lot of Great Lakes and rolling hills around where I grew up in eastern South Dakota, but wasn't super hugely into it per se. I went to college in Mississippi, joined the military, and you know, in the army you spend a lot of time outdoors in the sense that, you know, even in college, one weekend a month, right, we were out doing a field exercise, typically in Holly Springs National Forest. But, you know, I. So I dabbled in the outdoors. And then when I got home from Iraq, I went to graduate school in Philly for urban design. And I thought at that point my goal was to live in a trendy apartment with exposed urban brick and, you know, live the city life and maybe every once in a while go for a couple days camping or down to the Jersey Shore and. And that was my sort of outdoor involvement. You know, I love parks. I like going to parks. I liked running along the river in Philly. But I ended up not getting a job on the Eastern seaboard. It was 2009, the economy collapsed and I ended up in Boulder, Colorado and was really struggling with a lot of issues around which I now can identify as post traumatic stress symptoms and depression and suicidal ideologies and substance abuse. And a friend got me out rock climbing and that pretty dramatically shifted my career path. And there had been things, I think, leading up to that. Right. When I came home from Iraq, I went on A three week surf trip by myself in South Africa. I'd never surfed before, so, you know, I didn't surf a lot, but I spent a lot of time getting blown off waves and sitting in the ocean in really beautiful places. And I think that was enough to kind of get me through those first couple years of the adjustment and coming home. And yeah, you know, around 2012, 13, I started thinking up what would become adventure, not war, which was this idea that I should go back and kind of take control of my narrative in the places that I had been as a soldier cleaning up after war. And at about the same time I was also trying to figure out how do we create or support our health system, whether it's the VA or non VA systems, to get more people in the outdoors, because I had received such benefit from it. And so I was working at the Sierra Club at the time and began to pursue a research agenda which led me to a partnership with Dr. Keltner at the Greater Good Science center at Cal Berkeley. And that led to some of the very first scientific findings, evidence based findings that highlight what we've known as a species for thousands of years, as written in our literature and our sacred texts. That time outdoors is good for you.

Yeah, I think about as a CEO and as a human being. Right. There are these different moments in life, whether they're deeply personal or social. I remember after September 11, the economy tanking, shortly after that, already having some issues, but now the shock of that. And it was hard to comprehend the scale of what that represented. Now our lives are disrupted because the airplanes weren't flying and so on. And one of the things that I did was start to take walks. And I live in a beautiful area in the hills in the. Across from San Francisco. And I would just walk in the hills and I would look at stuff and I kept having this notion like, okay, the sun's still rising, the birds are still chirping, the. The flowers still bloom. Like life didn't end. Some certainly lives ended. Right, but. And there was trauma and upset and pain. And one of my employees lost later. He was an employee then, but he lost his apartment and dog and that kind of thing in the tower collapse. But like our world and our view of reality was significantly disrupted. And then soon my business was radically disrupted, actually all three. We had three companies at the time. But that act of walking just in nature, noticing the trees and the things like that reminded me that in spite of whatever we face, that like, there's life goes on and there's beauty still around us, similar kind of thing. In 2008, the economy tanks. The end of 2008, 2009, I'm like, well, what's going to happen to us? Am I going to have a house anymore? Am I going to have a business? How will our family deal with this? What am I going to do? And I'm walking again. And that simple act of noticing the. The wind moving through the leaves left me with a sense of calm and connection to the sort of eternal nature of time and the forces of the world around us. And beautiful.

Yeah. And I think it's hard, right? I mean, there's all these things that are going horrifically wrong oftentimes for a lot of people, and we have to find a way to deal with that. We have to find a way to change some of those systems and some of those structures and things that are going wrong. And I think one of the things I really struggled with when my first couple years home after Iraq was this feeling that, why was I getting to enjoy life when a lot of men and women weren't right? A lot of men and women that I served with, a lot of men and women that I had met in Iraq, children died, Good people died, good people were killed. And I've struggled to find and understand a reason for that. And for me, there isn't one, you know, and yet, going back to what we were talking about, joy is a moral imperative. Trying to find and seeking out the beauty and, you know, breathing and meditation and seeing the world around us, that there are still fundamentally good things in the world, even if it's a flower making its way through a crack in the sidewalk. And I think right now, for a lot of people, that's getting harder and harder to find, which I think is all the more reason we need to be promoting it. You know, the. The quest for awe, the quest for beauty, rallying people around that and building our world and our communities back up where that is a focus. And it doesn't mean that you put blinders on and refuse to see the problems in the world. It means if I know that I can see something beautiful and have this wonderful moment of awe, what do I then do? How am I motivated to create a world, make a tiny change each day that's going to help other people to see that and other people to feel that?

And, yeah, I hear in that, it's not to put icing on a mud pie, as the popular or as the old saying goes. It's not to cover over something. It's to say, yes, that's crappy over there and that's horrible, or that's upsetting and stressful, whatever the event or the circumstance that you're dealing with is. But there's also something beautiful around and, and, and, and that this whole cycle of breakdown and upset and beauty and like, it's all part of something greater.

It is. And again, like, if you look back at our sacred texts, right? I mean, I sometimes like to try and imagine what might have been going through Christ's mind as he stepped out for 40 days into the desert, right? What is he seeking there in the midst of turmoil, in the midst of oppression? What is Moses doing when he moves up to the mountain to get the, you know, ultimately to bring down the Ten Commandments? What is Muhammad doing when he spends 40 days in caves before his ministry? What is Buddha doing sitting underneath a tree and recognizing that all things are suffering? Right? I mean, we have in our religious texts, baked into our religious text, these moments where spiritual leaders are seeking out beauty, right? They're seeking out solace in wild places, they're seeking out solitude. They're not running away from these challenges. They're going to a place of beauty and wildness and solitude to prepare for a broader engagement, to prepare for systemic changes, to prepare for these global movements that, you know, they're attempting to start or create. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by thinking that that should only happen for somehow anointed figures throughout history. I mean, these are the things we should always be taking care of, whether it's a 5 minute or 10 minute or 20 minute walk in the woods each day or out in the desert. And I think, you know, one of the critiques or pushbacks I've heard from time to time from people is like, oh, you live in Utah, you live in a beautiful place. My response is always, well, doesn't everyone? And I realize that a place like Port Arthur, Texas, for example, where we have more refineries, I think, than any other place in the world, that might not seem really beautiful to a lot of people, but it's in a beautiful place. It really is. I mean, Port Arthur's set in some beautiful, you know, on the Texas Gulf Coast. There's a lot of things that have been made to make it maybe unbeautiful, but can we still find beauty in that? Can we still find a moment of a resilient flower, resilient plant, or resilient people? And I think the answer is yes. And in some ways it's hard work to find Joy, and it's hard work to find beauty. Other times it's just right there and smacks you in the face. Right. The author, Willa Catherine, said anybody can love the mountains. It takes a soul to love the prairie. And I think what she's really saying is you have to sometimes take the time and take the work to find the beauty. And it is. It's that challenge. And we don't want to be Pollyannish, but we also don't want to. You know, the other day, somebody shared an article with me about the importance of sharing joy in the struggle. Like, even if you're struggling to make a change and it feels like the world's against you, like, look around with the people that you're with and realize hopefully you're having a lot of fun together, trying to make the change in the world that you want to see. And I think from, you know, the entrepreneurs that I know and the business people that I know that really believe in their business, that really believe that their company can change the world, they don't shy away from the big challenges of their business, but they also find joy and happiness within that. And I think they find ways to integrate moments of beauty and awe. Whether that's awe of their family or awe in the outdoors, they find ways to integrate into that. And when we don't and when we, you know, I mean, it's like, even I can't imagine going to school without recess. Right. Like, and. And of course, all the evidence is now backing that up. Right. I mean, there's. There's research that shows counties that have more forested and vegetated and scrubland have lower Medicare costs than those counties that don't. So we know this stuff. But I think we. Busyness and success as busyness have gotten so convoluted that it's hard to. For a lot of people and myself too, it's hard to pull those things apart. And I think we still have, you know, there's a lot of guilt sometimes from feeling good about things or recreation is only for the wealthy, or, you know, I don't deserve this, or there's so much to do, if I don't do it, it's never going to get done. And having a little kid at the moment running around our house, our little one, helps me to keep me on my toes and helps me to see those things. And. I don't know, I mean, it's been a tough week for a lot of people, myself included. But every day it's like, wake up and try and Find those things that are beautiful. Try and find those things that are worth living for.

You know, some days are awesome, right? Some days we experience joy and sunshine, some days we land the big deal, some days we make the key higher. Some days we have great results and other days we don't. We have setbacks, we have upsets, we have disappointments. And I think what you're speaking to is that somehow we have to take care of ourselves through that. We have to find the way to do it. And one of the key things is to connect to something bigger than yourself, connect to nature and allow yourself to be awed by something. And I think that alters your perspective.

It does. And we know that right through the research we've done with folks like Radagude Science Centers that when you experience those moments of awe, the pro social emotions, willingness for curiosity, wanting to meet new people, wanting to learn new information, wanting to share new information, wanting to spend time with people, that all increases. And I think we've all had those experiences, right where you're walking on a trail or you're spending time with somebody, or you're by yourself and you round a corner and you see something beautiful at the same time that a stranger sees the same thing beautiful. And you have those immediate connections. And I mean even we were having dinner at a strip mall, at some restaurant in a strip mall and it was a place where we could meet my in laws and there's a huge double rainbow that was out over the kind of acres of parking lots and a bunch of us ran outside to see it and my daughter was on my shoulders and there was a businessman and there was a fellow covered up with lots of tattoos. And you know, there are five or six people who otherwise we may never. We probably wouldn't have said hi to each other at Home Depot or in the restaurant earlier. And we were all laughing together and talking and excited about this double rainbow that we got to see together. And you kind of wonder like, why aren't we talking and laughing otherwise? But it really creates like these moments of awe and beauty really create these awesome human bridges that all of a sudden you're talking to people you never would before and you're like, man, that guy, you know, made made a really profound statement or was really funny or was very kind and no, it's interesting.

At first I was just thinking about like my own sense of perspective and balance and. But you make a great point about connecting out the other. I mean I was dealing with, with a upsetting family crisis and I was feeling hopeless and despairing, and I just felt a great deal of pain and all that for. For a period of time. But I was down working in Southern California, and I was staying in a room overlooking the beach. And I'm like, I was going through all this stuff, and it had been a long, long, sleepless night. And I'm like, okay, I have to go to work today. People are expecting me. And so I just got up and I walked outside and I walked along the beach. And it was interesting because it wasn't like. So we're not talking here, right, about avoidance. We're not talking about getting drunk or engaging in risky behaviors or using other substances or doing things to escape it. We're talking about putting things in balance and perspective and then reconnecting to the humanity around us and our own humanity, right? That's the key. That's different. And too often we're like, fuck it. I'll just have another drink, or, she looks great to me, and I'll run off in that direction or whatever it is. But that isn't healthy, and that doesn't make us feel better. It's that balance. And I remember looking at the flowers and looking at the surf and feeling the wind on my face and smelling the ocean and being like, okay, I am in deep pain and despair right now. And there's also beauty around me. And exactly like you said. I didn't think about it till you said it, but I looked around and I saw other people, and we smiled because we both were looking at a beautiful thing, you know, the beach and the flowers and the stuff in Laguna Beach, California. And it was like, right?

I mean, one of the things I've done a lot of work with veterans and others in the outdoors and who have, you know, a lot of trauma and a lot of challenges and struggles, a lot of times in group settings or in crowded settings. And one of the things I kind of learned accidentally from my first raft trip was, you know, I met 24 people, including the guides that I may never have met before. Very few of those folks, you know, you can't, like, look into a room and, like, pick the veteran, right? I mean, at different times, people have said to me, well, you don't look like a veteran. And I was like, what? What do you want me to look like? You know, do you want to see my regrettable tattoos? Or what is it that you're hoping to see of me as a veteran? But after you spend, you know, four days on the river or whatever with this group of people, I remember shortly after that first river trip, I was in a big crowd and I was nervous and kind of freaking out. And I looked around and I looked at all those people and I thought, I bet there's people in here that would be a lot of fun on that river trip. Because I felt the same way at the start of the river trip, right? I looked around the group. I didn't really know anybody, and I was nervous. And at the end of four days, you know, we were all hugging and crying. Tough men, tough women, hugging and crying at the takeout. And we just wanted to stay in the river. And so I was able to translate that. And then we. We talked a lot with folks in. In future trips, like, hey, everybody came here a stranger for the most part, you're going to find strangers the rest of your life. Imagine what they would be like as you're getting nervous out on a river trip. You know, would they be people that you can connect with? And chances are there's at least one or two folks wherever you are that would be a lot of fun to be on a river trip, even if you don't know them and even if you won't ever talk to them about that. And that's one of the things I still use when I'm on a crowded subway, crowded airplane, crowded airport, crowd, wherever. I was kind of looking around and in my mind imagining the people that I might, you know, learn something about on. On a river trip. And I mean, we even talked a little bit about this word, I think, at the conference, right? Which. What is the word sonder, when you think about other people's lives and what they're doing. And so having that sonder, I guess, as to what it would be like for, you know, if you're at a conference and wondering, feeling that intense pressure or stress, which may not have anything to do with the conference even, and looking around and being like, which of these people would be, you know, what would I learn from them on a river trip?

I think the sonder is coming from a place of empathy and appreciation. So you are imagining a whole life for them, but you're not really. You're not stereotyping them or judging them in the same sense. You're imagining from a place of empathy and appreciation, what sort of a whole rich thing exists there that I'll never probably really know, Right? So you might be speculating that's the sonder thing that you're referring to. When we talk about the people connection, you remind me. So I think we all, many of Us, anyway, have a notion that there are certain kinds of people we connect with and certain kinds of people we don't. And as we look out around us, we see people that are like us or not like us and that are like people that we've worked well with or like people that we have not worked well or interacted well with. And so we start subconsciously, like putting each other into different buckets really quickly. And that creates real barriers. That's shifted for me profoundly over time to where today there are certainly people that take more energy than others to connect with, but more effort, but that, but I don't hold that there's anybody that I can't connect with or relate to or appreciate anymore. And maybe the most vivid example, I was on a. I was waiting to catch a flight between two Pakistani cities there on a business trip. And I've been well treated and received in Pakistan, although it's a really sort of a different place. But now I found myself alone in an airport flying between two different Pakistani cities. And I am the only white face, and I am a pretty white face, straight white, North American male, pretty, definitely not rugged looking in any sense of the, of the word, as many of our listeners will know. And. But there I am. And not only do I look around and it's a little bit. I mean, it's an airport, so it's a little bit upscale, but it's, it's a Pakistani airport, so it's got a different quality to it. And I look around me and everybody looks different from me. Everybody's much darker than me. There's no other faces like mine. And the sort of the default set point, the facial expressions are fairly stern and serious, right? And although I'd been well received in Pakistan for a few days in one of the cities and well treated and hosted, now I found myself in this other place and I'm like, okay, well, now maybe I'm with the bad people who don't like me. And I was just, I was really anxious. So I'm trying to look like, disappear, right? And to blend in, to not stand out, to just, you know, mark the time, get on the airplane, get somewhere, and I forget what it was. But I wanted to charge my cell phone at some point, maybe to distract myself or something like that. And I look around and then I see over on this pole, there's a couple outlets and there's like 20 phones all plugged into it. And they're all plugged in and there's cords going everywhere. And I walk over and Try to.

Find.

A plug for my phone to plug in, see if I can also get some juice. And I look to one of the guys who makes contact with. Facial contact with me, and I smiled by way of apology, you know, like that sort of shrugging smile you do. Like, look, I'm just trying to do something here, dude. And he, like, beams back, and then somebody else does. And pretty soon, like, all these people are connecting with you and all these stern faces are suddenly smiling at each other, and I'm like, oh, I'm with human beings. Yes. And I suddenly, like, I didn't. I mean, I'm moved to remember it now, but at the time, I was relieved and elated. Like, oh, my God, I'm just with human beings here. And we're all just schmoes trying to get from one city to another and.

Charging himself so that you can look at inane news sites or pretend like you're going to respond to a really intense email there, right? I mean, I think it's something like.

Whatever, just buy the time, stay in touch, right? Like, we're all dealing with just a everyday plight, but suddenly, like, we're connected and reminded that we have more in common than sets us apart.

And I think there's things, right, Like, I mean, and even if you can pick up a couple words, right, that's of a local language, if you're going to be in an area for a long time that says, like, you know, I'm happy to be here, your country's beautiful. And that's the only language I know. Like, the ability to break that ice with just that little bit of a gift to the other person, like, hey, I'm trying, you know, like, I'm new here and I'm trying. And, yeah, I mean, I've had the opportunity to travel, and even as a soldier, I mean, you know, if you took off your sunglasses and could look at somebody in the eye, you could create a connection that, you know, otherwise was so difficult. And it was one of the things that I really remember quite vividly coming home from Iraq was the amount of personal touch, for example, that I received when I wasn't wearing all the body armor and Kevlar and carrying a weapon. And, you know, it was one of the lovely things about men in the Arabic culture was that when they're talking to you, they oftentimes take your hand to make sure that you're connected and listening. And for a long time, you know, like, there's a lot of hugs around Kevlar, but, like, we all Yearn for that touch, right? We all yearn for that acceptance. And I've definitely had kind of the similar experiences what you're talking about. And I have a resting, very stern face and myself and have had people, you know, after I've smiled or laughed at something, come up to me and said, like, I thought you were going to start a fight, you know, And I was like, oh, no, I'm just tired or traveling or whatever. But yeah, those little icebreakers, right? And I mean, that was one of the real joys. We were in Afghanistan in February and March, and one of the real joys of my time there was hearing people tell me in the country how beautiful their country was and then being able to go out and see it. Right. Or hearing people wax poetically about the mountains as we were staring at them, realizing how similar. I mean, now the mountains, I can't see the mountains outside my window anymore. They're completely covered in fog. But the same desire, the same love of mountains and mountain culture and natural beauty exists regardless of where you are. Right. People want to see a beautiful lake, People want to see beautiful trees. People want to see a beautiful flower and cactus. And we've got to get to a point where we can recognize that as a basic human desire and need and that we're not all that different. But yeah, in those moments, right. Like, think of all the other ways you could have responded negatively and that that crowd could have responded negatively to you, but you found something to create a very human connection. And in that sense, it was just trying to plug in your smartphone. It doesn't take much.

That's a great. So let's talk about your project. What are you up to now?

Yeah, so now what I'm doing is working more or less full time, helping other organizations incorporate awe and the outdoors into their work. I am helping other organizations that do that type of work with their strategic planning and development. But the thing that I'm most excited about is taking what I learned about awe and time in the outdoors and really applying it to an international community. That started out first myself, going back like we talked about at the beginning of the show, got to climb in Angola in 2015. Folks can see that film. It's Alex Honnold climbs in Angola. I was his belay buddy for the most part on that trip in 2016, my wife and I welcomed our daughter into the world. And so I didn't. That was pretty awe inspiring in and of itself. And then in 2017, I went back with two friends of mine who were also US army veterans. And we were able to record the first recorded ski up and ski down of Mount Helgard, which is the tallest peak in Iraq, which is in northeastern Iraq in the Kurdish regional autonomous zone. And then this last spring went and skied in Afghanistan. And along the way, we've been making movies to help other people share the experience. And coming home from Afghanistan had this idea that we needed to create an opportunity for folks in that region, you know, Central Asia, the Middle east, to help better understand, experience their own countries and create opportunities for regional cooperation and create opportunities for more international tourism to those regions. And so we're in the early, early stages of figuring out what the Silk Road Free Ride Tour looks like, but are, you know, borrowing heavily from our friends at the worldwide Freeride Tour and, and seeing if we can't replicate some of their success in Central Asia. And while also still continuing to go back. There's three other places in my personal Adventure Not War tour, Abkhazia in the northwest corner of Georgia, Bosnia. And then I'm also interested in figuring out how to apply the same lens to South Dakota, where I grew up. And the reason South Dakota is in there is because, you know, you've heard Iraq and Afghanistan probably referred to as our nation's longest wars, but the longest wars that this nation has been involved in were the, the Indian wars, with some specific reference to the Dakota wars in what is now South Dakota. And thinking about, you know, how do I go back and think about South Dakota as a place that also has its own post war history? And what does it mean for the native community? What does it mean for the immigrant community like myself, who's been there for one generation and then even recent immigrants to that community? And what does it look like when we begin to apply that same kind of adventure not war lens to the Dakotas? And what can we learn from that?

I love thinking of ourselves as immigrants and framing that and referencing that, because it's awfully real. But we don't think about that every day, especially as some of the noise about immigration today in a, in a chronically tight job market where we need people and we're screaming about folks who are desperate to come in and find work and prosperity here. I suppose I'm revealing my true colors, but I think it's really interesting. You're talking about creating adventure and connecting experiences, actually skiing and in Afghanistan and Iraq and things like that, which is really cool.

Yeah. I mean, and. And it's amazing, right? I mean, I have the opportunity sometimes to share talks with folks, and I'll put up photos of some of the places I've been or some of the places I'd like to go, and I'll ask people if they can identify where I'm at, you know, and it might be a mountain range, and the three photos might be a mountain range in Iraq, you know, the Zagros Mountains or the Coe Baba, where we skied in Afghanistan. Or there's some beautiful photos I have of North Korea that I borrowed from other folks. And, you know, the first one, people raise their hands, and they might be like, oh, that's, you know, that's the Eastern Sierras. And then Afghanistan, they're like, oh, is that, like, around Taos? And then, you know, the North Korean photo oftentimes gets, like, zap. Kings Canyon, you know, south of Yosemite. And it's like, okay, that's Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea. And people are like, oh, I never had. I never conceived that you could do that, you know, And I have this T shirt that we made after the Ski Iraq film, and it just says, ski Iraq. Right. And.

Right.

Every time I wear it, somebody's like, can you actually do that? Or, oh, that's a funny joke. And it's great to be like, no, actually, we did it. And you can do it.

Right?

Like, you can fly to Erbil. You can rent a car. You know, I have the guide information, and you go, do it.

Yeah.

And. And meet this amazing country and meet these amazing people. And I think about, what would it be like if we sent more folks there? And, you know, yeah, there are challenges and problems, but in these places. But as I had the conversation back and forth with the Minister of Tourism in Afghanistan, and I said, you know, I'm nervous about coming, and these are the things I'm worried about. And he said, would you go to Disney World? Because there was that big shooting in Orlando. You know, he's like, do you go to music fests? Because in your country, those aren't safe. And he's like, that's my understanding of American news. And it was a very pointed critique. Right. And I think he's right. Like, yeah, we've got to be safe. And, you know, I wouldn't encourage people to go into an active war zone. And there are places in Afghanistan and places in Iraq we did not go. Yeah, but we were safe.

Yeah.

And we received tremendous amounts of hospitality, and people were excited to meet us, and we were excited to meet them. And we got to share some really powerful moments together doing the same things. You know, if you and I spent a week skiing together in Telluride or outside of Telluride, we'd walk away from that being likely super close to one another. And that is the same around the world. And that that's really what this adventure, not war and the Silk Road Freeride ski tour is all about. Ski and snowboard is all about is highlighting the beauty of the world and the similarity. You know, like my friend Ryan's always talking about, if we can't figure out how to give each other common ground, we're not going to make it.

All right, so we've covered a lot of territory and we'll put the links to your project and stuff in the show. Is there one website you can call out?

Yeah. Adventurenotwar.com okay.

Adventurenotwar.com There'll be stuff there. We'll put links to anything else that we mentioned in the show notes. It's been really great to talk with you. I hope it's been thoughtful and helpful to our listeners. You know, we're here every week with something to do with scaling up, growing your business and the leadership that's required. But along the way, of course, we also deal with the things that it takes to stay human and take care of yourself in the process. You've heard the phrase put on your own oxygen mask first, right? You can't hope to lead others if you're not taking care of yourself. If you find yourself in a crisis, you will be unable to do that. So remember to do that and hopefully this is helpful. You'll find us and all our tools are 160 so past podcast episodes on all these topics@scalingcoach.com free downloads of our stuff. A copy of the book if you want it. Just pay the shipping and handling is yours for free otherwise. And I look forward to having you all back talking to you next week. And I look forward to seeing Stacy next week in and salt like wear your Ski Iraq T shirt. Thanks again everyone. We'll talk to you next time. Well, I want to extend deep thanks to the original growth guru, Vern Harnish. This show is produced by Crystal Carson and audio production is done by Podfly Productions with audio editing by Albert Burge.

The show notes are compiled by Ayn.

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