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"Building the Base" - an in-depth series of conversations with top entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders from tech, financial, industrial, and public sectors.
Our special guests provide their unique perspectives on a broad selection of topics such as: shaping our future national security industrial base, the impact of disruptive technologies, how new startups can increasingly contribute to national security, and practical tips on leadership and personal development whether in government or the private sector.
Building the Base is hosted by Lauren Bedula, is Managing Director and National Security Technology Practice Lead at Beacon Global Strategies, and the Honorable Jim "Hondo" Geurts who retired from performing the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and was the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition and Acquisition Executive at United States Special Operations Command.
Lauren Bedula (00:01.71)
Welcome back to Building the Base. Hondo Geurts and Lauren Bedula here with today's guest, August Cole. August is a really interesting guest because he is a strategist, an author, and a futurist who really looked at the defense strategy space and the role technology plays as we think about national security. I'm particularly excited today because we're at the 10-year anniversary of Ghost Fleet, a very noticeable book that August.
wrote with Pete Singer and want to dive into some of those reflections. So August, thank you so much for joining us today.
August Cole (00:36.514)
Lauren, it's great to be here in a Hondo. It's a honor to be back in conversation with you.
Hondo (00:41.144)
Yeah, it's great to see you again, August. We've had many fun times across our careers. we usually like to start out a little bit with an origin story. And I have a way of saying every guest has unique background. And yours is, again, of one of the most unique, going through journalism and then fictional writing and now into defense strategy. So why don't you give our listeners a little sense of kind of where you came from and your journey.
getting to this point in a very unique way.
August Cole (01:14.478)
I guess like a lot of people, can probably thank my parents when I was 11, 12, was a huge skateboarder, right? And had been, as a kid growing up in Seattle during the Cold War, realized that I wanted to learn Russian because I wanted to be a diplomat, maybe even the ambassador in Moscow. And so I literally would get picked up from skateboarding over by the U-Dub and taken over to my Russian language tutor on a weekend.
And so that's the kind of kid I was, right? Like someone who just had an idea that there was a bigger world out there and it was linked to these questions of like strategy and conflict. And as that built, I really fell in love with journalism through college and after, and got to a point though, working at the Wall Street Journal in Washington, DC, where I really wanted to write about what was going to happen next. I was lucky enough to cover some big stories, everything from, you know, breaking the story about hacking the F-35 to covering the private security industry. And yet,
a lot of what was coming down the road seemed to be just like out of the grasp of a lot of the conversations in DC. And actually it's because of that journalism work that I first met Pete. And you know, the zigzag path that I followed after my time at the journal in Think Tank World, working on Ghost Fleet, then working on Burn In with Peter, and then, you know, now with Useful Fiction. I think it kind of comes down to wanting to use the power of imagination.
to help avoid strategic surprise. And it's a little bit of a riff on that DARPA motto, but the idea that we really can fall victim to failure of imagination with catastrophic consequences, and even more so today when so many technologies feel or are exponential or logarithmic in their impact on warfare and other forms of conflict. And so for me, this path has been something that I think I was...
In many ways, if you've asked that kind of young teen August, like, what do think you're gonna be doing, you know, the mid part of your life? If I could have designed it, it probably would look a bit like this. And I think for a lot of people out there who are on journeys that aren't linear, you just need to keep kind of thinking about what you do and also what you don't. I would say that along this way, some of the best professional decisions I've made have been to try the next thing and kind of bet more on myself. And so not to make this like a coaching or a self-help conversation, but.
August Cole (03:33.23)
When you're trying to do something that's different than what other folks are doing, I think it is helpful to know that everyone can have their own path, as you said, Lauren.
Hondo (03:39.8)
Were you a science fiction geek as a kid? was a skateboarder science fiction, know, Foundation and Dune and all those kind of things. Were you an avid reader too or? Yeah.
August Cole (03:50.722)
My mom was a librarian, so I got the gene and was a huge, voracious reader of the early cyberpunk. In addition to classic sci-fi, a lot of Robert Heinlein, Asimov, know, the Cold War science fiction too that was trying to make sense of like Annihilation and Apocalypse, Kandil Kupralibowitz, know, War Day. There were a lot of titles too that as a young person just trying to make sense of, you know, what's over the horizon.
those were really helpful. But I really, think of all the authors in that era, know, William Gibson, know, Neil Stevenson, I just really love cyberpunk and that kind of gritty and realistic portrayal of the future, you know, or the technology. There's, you know, William Gibson had fax machines in his cyberpunk novels alongside depicting is better than anyone really what the internet would be like. And I love that, that dyad, that duality. And so I think that's something that kind of has stuck with me today. And yeah, like you, just found a lot of
a lot of like, don't know, refuge is the right word, a lot of inspiration, I think even at that time, just trying to make sense of the world through, you know, kind of 80s and 90s sci-fi.
Lauren Bedula (04:54.16)
So cool. And what gave you the vision for Ghost Fleet? Like, when did you start thinking about it? When did you commit to it? Or could you tell us a little bit of that story?
Hondo (05:01.357)
or maybe for those who ever read it, a little bit of the story and then what's the story behind the story.
August Cole (05:08.792)
So Ghost Fleet is a novel about the next world war, as we called it. And it is a global conflict with China, where they have launched a surprise attack on the US, I'll spoil a little bit, in Hawaii. And it's sort what happens next. And I think what's really important about the story, and it harkens back to, I think, both Peter Singer's and also my origin stories of being big Tom Clancy readers, particularly the early Clancy. Red Storm Rising for us was a really important book.
very, very inspirational for Ghost Fleet because what Clancy did that was unique was he showed what the third world war would look like from five or six different perspectives. So you got a really complete picture, new technology like stealth, but also the importance of economics, the oil fields to just the character driven dimensions to that. And so when we were looking at what was happening in the strategic landscape back in like 2012, almost even 2011,
having conversations between Peter and I about this question of China's rise. And I've always been fascinated by it, even though I'm a dilettante and not a sinologist. But the idea that we were getting China's rise wrong seemed really consequential. And it might have been easier to write a nonfiction book. That was certainly both of our backgrounds. Peter had just written Wired for War, which was a New York Times bestseller. I come from the Wall Street Journal. And those are great.
pedigrees to do a nonfiction book, but neither of us really felt that was the right way. And so we just made this bet that we thought we could tell a big war story that would not only reframe how people think about China and by doing open source research, reading their doctrine, reading the Aviation Week articles about, I don't know, their growing competency in helicopter transmissions back in 2012, 2013, really kind of like nerdy stuff. But
together it painted a picture that was very different than the kind of consensus that we could have a kind of peaceful rise. And what's funny is when I was a journalist at CBS Market Watch before the journal, I covered the WTO protests in Seattle. I came up from San Francisco where I'd been living to do that and saw kind of the street level action, so to speak. But I think about my own journey and trying to understand where China's been, where it's going.
August Cole (07:25.576)
as that being a really seminal point in their economic and certainly societal growth, and then to write Ghost Fleet and kind of thinking, where does it go next? And so the book became this fiction project that was rooted in nonfiction. At the end of the book, you'll find 30 or so pages of endnotes, because we did the homework and we wanted to share it. As much to show people there's nothing classified or off limits here, also to sort of inspire people to say, hey, this is all out there for you to put together yourself too.
And there were of course two new domains we really wanted to show their impact on warfare and that's cyber in space. And so, you know, if you're kind of going back into that like 2013, 2014, you're working on the book, we sold it, which is a really privileged position to be in as a writer, writing it and thinking through like, how do we anticipate, you know, what is the most important thing that might happen in the space domain at the start of a war? You know, and so we looked at that with, you know, quite a bit of interest and
the book starts, you know, actually in space. And there's, I think, for a lot of people, really kind of striking moment to realize how critical that is. And then similarly to cyber, you know, who are the new actors in cyberspace? And we talked about groups like Anonymous, which, you know, weren't really part of this national security conversation in terms of their impact on the outcome of a major war. And we know from kind of the real world impact of the book, that was one storyline, for example, that had a...
that got traction as did say supply chain security, which of course is, know, thankfully much more commonplace of a conversation now. So, you know, these are all in very narrow and kind of siloed communities who are deep into the issues. know, folks would work on this long time, but it wasn't really something where there was a lot of cross talk between experts or at the, certainly the policy level. And so to kind of capture the imagination of why it all matters, that was sort of our objective with Ghost Fleet. And it took a little time to gather steam, you know.
three, six months, I think. And then once people really started to kind of see the value in it, it's been more more impactful. And people still read it today, thankfully.
Hondo (09:22.84)
So I understand we should talk a lot about the power of science fiction and the power of imagining and all that. But how did you imagine it? Right. So it's one thing to be able to come up with an idea and then spark the imagination of everybody else. you still have to have the originating idea. How did you sort out kind of of all the different trends and silos, which how to put those together in curious ways? You and Peter just riffing off each other or was it?
know, some other method to stoke your own imagination.
August Cole (09:58.302)
Our process that we developed in Ghost Fleet started with non-fiction research. Even though we both are huge fiction fans, we knew that we had to have the facts down pat. And so trying to figure out and assess a bit like what you're talking about, how do you understand the arc of a given technology, say swarming missiles, right? If we're gonna include those in the book, I actually had one of the Norwegian engineers that worked on one of the...
know, swarming missiles in the book come up to me at an event and also I'm like, thank you so much for writing about my program. And I was like, okay. You know, versus something like the rail gun, right? Where, you know, that was a really important technology being considered very seriously and still has a lot of potential obviously, but massive engineering challenges that just didn't seem like people were really quite trying to get their head around. And I think one of the underlying lessons of the book when it comes to these technologies that you have to kind of understand.
where they might go or the macro trends too. Everything from how we use personal technology to again, the viability of a kind of talk about sci-fi weapon like a rail gun. Really being able to kind of hone in on the real world aspect of that. So if we're gonna invest in something really expensive like a rail gun, what are the odds that it works, right? Building and buying this stuff is so hard. And so we took a mothball weapons program basically and...
gave it a frontline role in part because we wanted to send the message like this stuff is hard and technology is not always the answer. And I had the experience of someone who was reading and critiquing the book and saying we were in love with technology and you know kind of fetishizing it almost and I was like I don't think you finished the thing because this is not at all like the motivation. And I think that's a really important takeaway too that technology is essential and especially again today as we look back you know a decade on you can see a lot of this stuff has come to life. But at the same time the human dimension is everything.
and we live in the real world. So the methodology going back to that, a ton of non-fiction research. And then once we had that down, we started thinking through, what's the story we wanna tell? Who are the characters we wanna put into this world and see where they go? And that then became more important than to let the narrative arcs of each of these characters grow so that they're changing from the start of the story to the end, so they're interesting. And it's a trade-off when you're writing a book that has many different perspectives.
August Cole (12:22.338)
you know, seven characters basically, you don't get as deep with each one. And so you just have to kind of accept that's a creative choice. But you have, you know, some kind of outlandish characters like, you what are the billionaires gonna do during the third world war? You whose side are they gonna be on? How are they gonna shape the outcome? You know, we talked a lot about that, especially in space, because that's a fascinating and important question. So, you know, our hope was that the marriage of those two, you know, parties, the nonfiction and the fiction would create something readable, you know, something that people would be able to read over a weekend, you know.
really just want to talk about it at work on Monday. And I think we hit that mark, which is something that think required a lot of that nonfiction research up front.
Hondo (12:56.408)
No.
Lauren Bedula (13:01.264)
Wow. And as I think back on that time, because I was an early reader, I loved this book. I was deep in cyber at the time, but mostly counterterrorism focused. Think Boston Marathon bombing 2014. We were so focused on homegrown terrorism. And yet you were looking at China's rise and what that might mean in line with
the trajectory of where technology is going. We weren't talking about AI back then. We weren't talking about quantum computing, even drone swarms like we are today. It's been amazing to see the changes over these past 10 years. From where you sit today,
What is your outlook in terms of the threat environment or technology? then, so one question just on the threat environment, and then this concept of crosstalk. I love the idea of this. Have you seen improvements over the past decade or so as it comes to crosstalk between the communities that are really on the forefront of technology and national security?
August Cole (14:00.942)
Yeah, I think I'll start with the crosstalk, you know, the richer conversations that are happening. I think there is a lot of progress that's been made in getting communities of interest, especially the technology and the operational communities more aligned. People who have specific expertise in one area. think, you know, the cyber and operational intelligence fusion, you know, that we've seen in the last 15 years is part of that. I think at the same time, you know, being as close as possible to the operational edge.
is probably going to make more effective innovation actually useful and maybe even cheaper than some of the models that maybe the last 30 to 40 years we've had defense industrial paradigms predicated on. I think that's really, really interesting. The hope is that when you're looking at the next wave of technology, there's two areas that I'm acutely interested in. One is synthetic biology and the other is quantum.
And you know, both are as sci-fi as it gets and I don't have a crystal ball to tell you when you know, a world-changing moment's gonna happen with either but there is great potential in those and not a lot of attention on them. Which to me is one of the things that you know, someone who works creatively is constantly thinking about, you know, what are people not talking about? And what should they be talking about? So two areas right there I think that have a lot of potential. AI of course is, you know, man, absorbing a lot of oxygen and capital for good reason.
But at the same time, I think we don't want to ignore some of these other facets, especially when in the hands of an adversary, the nature of conflict, how it can radically change, especially with the fusion of some of these different technologies together. There was a project we worked on for the French MOD where we re-imagined the Mark Block story, A Strange Defeat, which is really a nonfiction accounting of Francis Fall when the Nazis arrived.
Hondo (15:54.06)
Okay.
August Cole (15:56.448)
It's really important because as a historian and someone who became a resistant who was killed by the Gestapo in Lyon, he really understood the failure of leadership within the French high command and how catastrophic that was for their nation. And that that failure to defend the country was really attributable to almost an expectation that victory was assured.
They had done the investments, they had built the defenses, fixed and otherwise, and yet a new paradigm for warfare that leveraged technologies that were nascent radio airplanes and coordinated and combined them. I worry that we think we're doing everything right in one domain, but not enough across them. Or there's a capability like quantum, which could supercharge sensing or cyber.
And suddenly we have a very different operational playing field where we are not gonna have an advantage for a second, know, fast follower if you even wanna call it that or second mover. So I get worried about those kinds of things. I, know, I sort of say jokingly, I'm an optimist who stares into the abyss. I do believe we can do it. I mean, that's a core message of Ghost Fleet, you know, and it's something I think that's woven into all of our useful fiction projects too. But at the same time, I think if we don't act as if, you know, the adversary, the...
the enemy is working just as hard or harder, then I think there's a real risk. The failure of imagination, one risk, is so as sort of patting yourself on the back and thinking, got this.
Hondo (17:20.18)
Yeah, so, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, how do you rapidly adopt technology? You know, it'll be invented. How do you adopt it and operationalize it? And I kind of go through the, you know, you got a vision of possible futures. And I put that in parentheses, right? Then you've got to build scalable platforms, right? And then you've got to iterate and test and adapt. Talk to me about the importance for leaders to vision a possible future. Back to your point.
If you've already decided on the future, everything you're going to do is going to get colored by whatever that perception, whether you're going to win or you're going to lose, you're almost going to, you you create these blind spots. How do you talk to leaders about the importance of visioning this widespread and that kind of set of futures? And then how do you use tools like fiction to help them vision something that they would normally just kind of dismiss?
or some assumption that they would lock in on and not even understand it.
August Cole (18:23.822)
For lot of leaders, particularly national security, there is a challenge to communicate a vision of not only where an organization is even now, because things are moving so fast, but also where they're trying to go. something as simple, well, it's not really simple, but something as simple as a strategy to shape the direction. Everything from investment to personnel can be really, really challenging to share beyond just the usual PowerPoints.
the usual one-pagers. People want to see themselves in the future. They want to feel like they have agency. It's a really important theme, I think, both in the creative work we do. Certainly it was core to burn in our second book, especially when technology is doing so much for us. We're app-driven. Menus decide a lot of how we interact digitally. We want to feel like we have agency. And think that's especially true for leaders today, whether they're military or civilian or industry. So that piece of it's really important.
Hondo (18:55.416)
you
August Cole (19:22.318)
How do you capture someone's imagination so they can see that they have a role to play? And then the other challenge too is that we often just talk to ourselves, right? Because we're easy audiences. And I think really being able to both speak to people where they are and to kind of use, again, narrative story. It's one of the oldest technologies around. PowerPoint's what, 40 years old? We are hardwired for it.
And I think that's often underutilized. And it doesn't mean that everybody needs to write or read a science fiction story or a national security strategy based off a novel, but rather than basic elements of story that I think are totally applicable, whether you're a mid-career officer or whether you're a CEO or a board member, that's really important to understand that. And I think those times when we've really had breakthrough moments with people we've worked with, one of the best things that someone can say is, I wish I'd had this a decade or 20 years ago in my career.
To me, that is a really good indicator that this is a great moment, right? It's never too late. You the future is coming only faster anyway, right? So it is one of those moments where I think you really want to kind of hone in on, you know, the narrative of an organization. What is the story you're trying to tell and how do you get people to play a role in it? It's a big challenge.
Hondo (20:29.848)
Yeah, can you share, is there an example you could share, you know, without the specifics, can certainly relive one and soak on right after your book was written. another example where this methodology unlocks something for a leader that they, you know, they thought they had it all maybe wired or figured out and that, my goodness, anything you can share along those lines?
August Cole (20:53.656)
think there are a couple examples from the early days of Ghost Fleet, and I can talk about some of the useful fiction projects and the impact. One of the really important impacts that Ghost Fleet had within the Pentagon, within OSD, was to give people who were working on supply chain security and concerned about it a tool that they could say, read this book and you'll understand why our hair is on fire. And they were now equipped with a narrative that made clear that these often really difficult
almost intractable problems, you know, had battlefield implications that had to be addressed. It was not optional. So that I think is a really, really important moment where the utility of fiction to me was crystallized. And I've heard that from different people who've been involved in.
With Useful Fiction, we've had lot of really interesting experiences where we've seen organizations, especially if we're helping communicate something like a strategy, now have almost a piece of paper, so to speak. If you're able to take a story and share it with someone, you have a new way of talking about it. Especially when, again, there's a lot of shifting from the military paradigm of counterterrorism.
counterinsurgency to large wars. for big swaths of the armed forces, right, what is the way to help make that shift? You can decree it, but all the downstream, the cultural pieces of it are hugely important. There was a podcast I recorded with Major General Peter Antley, who's the commander of MARSOC, who talked about some of the narrative work that we've done for MARSOC over the last four-ish years.
You know, one of the ways that the narrative work we've been doing has been useful is that it allows the teams who are going forward to have a vision of what that operational environment might look like and how the operating concepts that the Raiders have developed can help them thrive in it, right? And so that has been an interesting thing to see the application. And that's a pretty tactical with strategic implications example of something like that, you know, kind of pulling back. We've worked for senior leaders.
August Cole (23:05.358)
and help them communicate to their peers as well. The basic priorities that you have to think about today to be ready for two decades from, you know, the point at which you're kind of weighing in. And that long-term vision is really hard to do, especially when, you're beyond a Friday where you're trying to clear an inbox. So how do you create generational opportunities to have conversations among like four stars about what the future of a service is, a branch, et cetera?
And so I think that's another example too, where you've seen the opportunity to use narrative in a way that pulls people aside. When we've looked at how people consume the content we've written, and much of it is public and some of it is internal, a lot of it's read on the weekends. People don't, least not too many people I know, pull up white papers or doctrine on the weekends too often.
Hondo (23:57.303)
Yeah, it's, it's you probably, you and Peter probably don't know it right after you came to Silicon, we were working a hard problem and we did a kind of narrative thing and then we, we matched it with a graphic novel. So we essentially wrote a narrative and then put it in a graphic novel form. And that was by far the fastest way to close distance between the operator personally had the problem and the people who could solve problems. Cause they saw it all on the wall and people started taking pages off. Well, if I
If I could take these three pages out, you could go three times as fast. And so it really does have a strategic impact on some of the nation's hardest challenges. But it's really hard to challenge yourself to get out, envision something that's different than what you've thought for a long time.
August Cole (24:46.062)
You know, one of the things that we do is we run workshops where we're telling and kind of training people how to use these approaches. And we'll have folks who do really hard stuff in their military crews say, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I'm like, no, it's not. I appreciate that you're serious about it, but that's the level to your point of leap that you have to sometimes make at an organizational level or even an individual one. Say, I'm ready to do something different, right? This old way is not working. And that's really all you can ask for.
I think especially in this moment where all of our priors need to be re-examined, there is so much change going on, the technological, at the strategic, at the social and political, right, economic. mean, models are being not just shifted, but broken, like, you know, literally every month. And so I think the more people hang on to the old ways of doing things, the more vulnerable they are to, you know, lot of discomfort, if not outright disruption. And people forget, like I remember during a lot of the defense innovation conversations over the last decade, you know, disruption was such a buzzword.
And what folks who always use that forget to consider, it sucks being disrupted. If you're sitting on the other side of the table, it's not a good place to be, and you really don't want to have that happen.
Hondo (25:47.608)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Hondo (25:54.231)
Yeah, I often say the only person who change is a baby with a wet diaper. Everybody wants to drive change, they don't want to be driven by change. It's a really hard one.
August Cole (25:58.19)
Hahaha
Yep. Yeah.
Lauren Bedula (26:06.202)
So to that end, August, what advice would you give to our listeners who may be leaders in both industry and government and nonprofits on how to stay fresh and creative in a time where it feels so hard to just keep up? Like, I know you're an avid athlete. You surf, you row, you cycle. What's your advice to leaders who are trying to stay creative?
August Cole (26:30.254)
I think understanding the linkage between making time for something that is unorthodox and it doesn't again need to be sitting down and writing necessarily that allows you to break with the maybe calcified ways that an organization is approaching a problem. As Hondo mentioned, it could be getting people together and taking a method like creating a graphic novel. That is a signal as much internally.
One of my favorite projects we did at the Atlantic Council when I headed up the Art of Future Warfare project there for a few years was we had graphic novel artists come to the Atlantic Council to talk about future urban warfare. It was a conversation that included everything from data and the value of it and those kinds of operations to people using graphic novels to depict that. we...
sold graphic novels that the artists brought and put up posters of graphic novels in the lobby of the Atlantic Council, which is not a normal Atlantic Council kind of thing you'd find in there. And I think that signaled a lot of value to doing something different. So that's one thing. I think the other is actually just making time for it. mean, what you spend your time on is what you value. And that's the most important currency we have today. And I feel that acutely. And trying to figure out then...
for me personally, right, what do I need to do to be more creative? It's not only reading, but it's also making sure to create space so that I can have time to get my mind and body ready to do that. You none of us have enough time in the day or a week or a year to accomplish all the things we wanna do. And so you have to be kind of ruthless about what you don't do. That to me is especially, you know, go on is something I think about a lot and really focusing on the impact. So for leaders who are trying to understand the value of it, I think it is
first off to know that the people who are working for you and with you, and even the people above you, like your board, they want to know that you are thinking clearly and cogently and realistically about the future. The last thing we need is more vaporware or more hand waving about the impact of a given tech like AI. We really do need to have people applying the tools that allow them to do that credibly. The second thing is that it can be
August Cole (28:43.042)
taught. This isn't something that you're born with. mean, sure, some people have easier facility with writing or being creative, and there are generational talents out there, so I don't want to take anything away from that. But as writer like Stephen Pressfield or even Stephen King has said, you just got to get your butt in the chair. And that's not just for writing a novel manuscript of 120,000 words, but it's about making time to kind of think creative and differently. If you don't sit in the chair, the muse isn't going to come. And I think there's an analogous kind of example for
for a C-level leader who if they're not spending time thinking strategically, talking to people who have clear-eyed views on it, not listening to themselves, then you're not gonna have the impact you want. And the relevance just starts to slip away if not avoiding kind of that strategic outcome that looks like failure.
Lauren Bedula (29:29.38)
I like that because in my head I was thinking more about the individual, like go for a run and think creatively about scenario planning, but you went more to the group think initially, which is probably harder to be disciplined about getting everyone together, but so much more valuable too. So that's a takeaway for me.
August Cole (29:45.966)
I'll tell you a funny story for a Ghost Fleet talk. I went down to Fort Benning at Maneuver Center for Excellence when General Scott Miller was there and I ended up doing PT with them at Pieden Field in the morning. It was like, you five o'clock. And I had the insight that it's amazing that everyone is, you know, together and, you know, I love writing really early in the morning and this is the point when you can have a lot of mental clarity because you're just tired and you just want it to be done, but that's often how you get out of your own way.
August Cole (30:13.386)
And I thank God I didn't write this essay, but I was like, know, the army should think about having like writing time in the morning. And, know, I, it would have, I think come across as being sort of naive to say that. And I'm not saying you should trade PT time for creative time, but there is something there to the discipline and the routinization and the culture around it. You know, if you looked at the rigor and regularity, and I know not everybody loves PT, but the rigor and regularity of doing something like that as a practice and make space and time for it.
important. And to your point Lauren, I really do think being physically active in some manner, know, getting outside, touching grass if you can, is actually massively helpful for being able to think a little bit more clearly about what's coming. That just hamster wheeling on the inbox and know zooms and stuff is it's kryptonite. You know, it's and not everybody has the chance I know to do that and some jobs you know are literally 18 hours a day, but the more time that can be made for those opportunities the better impact you can have.
Hondo (31:08.994)
Yeah, any innovation I had was when I was not trying to think innovatively. That's right. What would you say August for the 20 year old version of August now coming up, you know, in this very chaotic, very disruptive world, unclear career paths, unclear, know, three years ago, computer science was a great degree. Now it's maybe not a great degree. How do you, you know, for our younger listeners just starting out in their career.
August Cole (31:12.622)
100%.
Hondo (31:36.76)
Any advice you'd give on how do they, you know, not try and super navigate something that's probably not, you know, discernible. Any advice you'd give them on how they think through, you know, how to make their passions reality.
August Cole (31:51.896)
This is a very real conversation, not only in my head, but with my daughter who's that age. I would say that the thing that seems most important as technology does more and more for us is figuring out how to invest in the skills and experiences that make you a much better person to collaborate with, whether that's bringing.
a language that allows you to speak to someone in their native tongue, whether that is a level of empathy that you've developed, your practice, whether it is a technical competency that lets you again see a problem from someone else's perspective is massively important. I don't know that it's as easy as saying, you know, let's do, you know, math is the thing that you should be studying, right? And it's most kind of complex. And thank God I'm not 20 years old from this perspective rather than computer science.
But I do think that if you pull back and as much as I can endorse, you know, the importance of the human dimension of the work lives and also just, you know, the place that people have in society. I do think that having some facility and understanding with the technical components of what's going on around us is crucial. you know, and whether it's, you know, block or vibe coding, you know, is something that is worth, you know, or being able to really kind of understand data and how those architectures work. That's crucial, but I would not shortchange.
some of the tenants of the liberal arts education, including history, know, political science, philosophy, certainly again, foreign language, I think is, is massively important because again, I'm trying to think about if you have an interest in a passion and again, go back to, you know, young Hondo, young August in that skateboard sci-fi era, you know, if you had tried to do the thing that everybody else did, you know, you probably wouldn't be sitting here right now in this podcast.
And I think that's also a really powerful force to resist sometimes because there's very good reasons to go with the flow. But I think the more you can figure out how to bet on yourself and following those interests, the more successful over a lifetime you'll be. And that doesn't mean that every month or every year or even as great, right? There's sometimes we get frustrated. I've been there, but I think over time you have to kind of believe that the arc bends towards being able to have an impact on the world, which that's the biggest thing I tell my daughters. Just try to figure out how the biggest impact you can and help people.
August Cole (34:07.163)
Take on the problems that matter the most. Don't worry about the, just let other people worry about the other stuff.
Lauren Bedula (34:13.304)
I love that, and I think it's also great advice for folks that are, there's a lot of churn right now. So changing industries, maybe leaving government, going to the tech world, or going from tech to investing, or into government. I think your point's about don't have a failure of imagination, be creative. And so much of the progress, I think,
I've seen in terms of crosstalk between these communities over the past decade is because of storytelling and transparency between these communities that speak such different languages. So August, thank you for taking the time to come on the show to talk about your experiences in this space and for all the work you're doing to bring these communities together.
August Cole (34:53.07)
I really enjoyed the conversation. It's an honor to be here again, speaking to you, Hondo, speaking to Lauren. Thank you.