#177: Artificial Warfare - Accrete AI Government Founder & CEO Bill Wall

The war for information, influence, and decision making is paramount on today’s battlefield. Artificial intelligence is no longer a concept of the future; it’s essential for America’s national security and military dominance. From SOF Week in Tampa, Florida, Fran Racioppi https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisracioppijr/ sat down with retired Green Beret and Co-founder of Accrete AI https://www.accrete.ai/ Government, Bill Wall https://www.linkedin.com/in/billwall/, to talk about a fight most Americans never see. Bill is one of the leading voices redefining how we use AI and how our government is deploying it in the protection of America. Bill explains how Accrete’s Argus platform is actively being used to identify foreign ownership and control in U. S. defense supply chains, and how more broadly AI is helping analysts detect narrative warfare and influence campaigns before they spread. He shared how dual-use technology is shifting the battlefield, why algorithmic warfare is already here, and how Accrete is giving government agencies the tools to scale human insight without losing control. They also talked about the dangers of siloed innovation, the gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, and what leadership looks like when you’re building tech that needs to work at speed and at scale. This episode is about changing how we think about war, technology, and leadership; and what it’s going to take to stay ahead in the next fight. HIGHLIGHTS 0:00 Welcome to SOF Week3:45 Artificial Intelligence Defined6:53 AI in War Fighting9:07 Machine Learning10:51 Drawing the Line with AI14:48 Defining the Next Battlefield18:27 Combatting False Narratives & Misinformation22:03 Public Private Partnerships24:29 Accrete in the Corporate World29:11 Regulating AI31:05 Why Army32:55 Innovation changing SOF37:20 Transition from SOF51:50 Accrete AI’s future Quotes “Artificial intelligence is just using computers and data to think and reason the same way a human would, but just at a much larger scale and speed.” “Anywhere there’s a decisional situation and they’re overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to sort through, artificial intelligence should be there.”“Machine learning allows an algorithm or a program to continually absorb new data and learn from that data.” “Artificial intelligence empowers a human.”“We’re not engaging in the narrative battle. We don’t even know what’s being said.”“We don’t necessarily need the National Intelligence Community to tell us where our enemies are, they’re broadcasting it.”“Is artificial intelligence a general category of something that should have a governmental review on it or not?”“If you want to know where the next salifist, jihadist, preacher who’s going to lead an uprising in North Africa is, he’s on Youtube.”“In our community, there’s this ethos of being prepared for change and being able to take advantage of change as it happens.”“You are what you do. That’s how you identify your self worth and who you are.”“Something that guys have to think about is what their personal risk profile is.”“If you’re a checklist driven person that needs to be told what to do to understand your job, then entrepreneurialism is not for you.” The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health & Performance https://university-hp.com/, providing our Veterans world-class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs. Our SOF Week 2025 Series is made possible in part by Accrete.ai https://www.accrete.ai/; solving business’s most complex challenges today through the technology of tomorrow. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast https://www.instagram.com/jedburghpodcast/ and the Green Beret Foundation https://www.instagram.com/greenberetfoundation/ on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform https://pod.link/1558608802, read on our website https://greenberetfoundation.org/the-jedburgh-podcast/, and watch the full video version on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@jedburghpodcast as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge. The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are an official program of The Green Beret Foundation.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Fran Racioppi?

  The war for information, influence and decision making is paramount on today's battlefield. Artificial intelligence is no longer a concept of the future. It's essential for America's national security and military dominance. From SOF Week in Tampa, Florida, I sat down with retired Green Beret and co-founder of Accrete AI, Bill Wall, to talk about a fight most Americans never see. Bill is one of the leading voices redefining how we use AI and how our government is deploying it in the protection of America. Bill explains how Accrete's Argus platform is actively being used to identify foreign ownership and control in the US defense supply chain, and how more broadly AI is helping analysts detect narrative warfare and influence campaigns before they spread. He shared how dual-use technology is shifting the battlefield,

• 0:48Fran Racioppi?

  why algorithmic warfare is already here, and how Accrete is giving government agencies the tools to scale human insight without losing control. We also talked about the dangers of siloed innovation, the gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, and what leadership looks like when you're building tech that needs to work at speed and at scale. This episode is about changing how we think about war, technology and leadership, and what it's going to take to stay ahead in the next fight. The Jedberg Podcast is brought to you by University of Health and Performance, providing our veterans world-class education and training as business and nutrition entrepreneurs. Our 2025 Soft Week series is made possible in part by Accrete AI, solving businesses' most complex challenges today through the technologies tomorrow. Follow the Jedberg Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media.

• 1:33Fran Racioppi?

  Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front no matter the challenge.

• 1:46Fran Racioppi?

  Bill, welcome to the Jedberg Podcast.

• 1:48Fran Racioppi?

  Thank you very much for having me, Fran. I appreciate it.

• 1:50Fran Racioppi?

  We're here at Soft Week. We've got innovation out every door and window in this place. I mean, there's like three floors of it behind us. We've spent a lot of time over the last couple of, I'd say, year plus, really digging into what innovation is going to mean to the next battlefield, right?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:10Fran Racioppi?

  Defining the next battlefield, really starting to try to drill down from the most strategic level in our conversations with the Sergeant Major of the Army, used to saw Commander, first SFC Command Team, you know, how do we take that strategy? And then distill it down all the way to our conversations with like the fifth group commander.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:28Fran Racioppi?

  What does that mean at the ground level? How does that tie into training? And we always come back to kind of the same core soft principles, the soft truths about humans are more important than hardware, quality over quantity. And we know that in the next battlefield, technology is going to be at the forefront of everything. We're seeing it today.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:46Fran Racioppi?

  Ukraine, it's changing how we are thinking about everything, even on this, the showroom floor over here. But the, our humans have to start to leverage this technology.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:57Fran Racioppi?

  And great humans, humans, we know use technology better. You spent over two decades in the army, in the soft community at every level. You focused on technology, you focused on IT infrastructure. And enabling our soft operators to identify, close with and destroy the enemy. And now you're doing it on the private sector side right now with the Crete. So I want to talk about all of it.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 3:22Fran Racioppi?

  I want to talk about the technology. I want to talk about your journey. I want to talk about the entrepreneurism that comes inherent to Green Berets and how they leverage that when they transition. But I think we got to start with defining first.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:35Fran Racioppi?

  What is AI?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:37Fran Racioppi?

  Because you're in the AI space, it's thrown around all day long and every, you can't watch TV or the news for 10 minutes without someone talking about AI.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:45Fran Racioppi?

  So what is AI? Why is it important?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  I love that question to start off with because it's so fundamental and I talk to government customers all the time and they say, I want some AI. And I always say like, what do you mean by that? And you'll get various answers. Someone will say, well, I want to take all my data from Excel and have AI put it into SharePoint. I'm like, well, that's not AI. And why would you do that? That's a horrible idea. And then someone else will say, well, I want a drone that will circle, circumnavigate the world autonomously, sniff up people's DNA. And then eliminate them with laser beams based on their DNA and their. Family connections like, okay, that's a great idea, but it's not AI and it's not possible. So. It capability. Right. But so for us at the very basic level, and I'm really not a computer scientist or a technologist.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  So I try to make it simple. Artificial intelligence is just using computers and data to think and reason the same way a human would, but just at a much larger scale and speed. Humans are bandwidth limited. We can only take in so much information. We have to sleep eight hours a day. We can only make. Eight hours a day. No one in this place sleeps eight hours a day. Yours for your health, you should be sleeping eight hours a day, but you've got to sleep, you've got to step away from things. But the machine like the Terminator is constant. And so getting a computer, a data to do the tasks and thinking that a human can do, but shouldn't necessarily do.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  So I, in my tiny brain, I think of it like a Roomba. Do you have a Roomba? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And it automatically just goes around and vacuums. No matter what's on the floor. No matter. And we've learned it with the dog. But the good thing about the Roomba is there are some tasks that humans should never do again. And vacuuming is one of them. So when it comes to a lot of the data tasks that analysts are doing, that humans are doing, they shouldn't have to do that. Machines should be doing that for them so that they can do much higher levels of thinking that humans are really good at. So for me, that's what AI is. It's computers, data, doing human-like thinking at a scale and speed that humans aren't capable of. What's an example of that?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  So in, in my company, an example is we've built a product to identify foreign government involvement or leverage in a commercial supply chain. And that's a huge problem because there's so much data and commercial data changes all the time. Every week, there's a new company, there's a new investment, there's a new merger, there's a new acquisition. I like to say that commercial data is the river you can't put your foot into twice. The moment you take your foot out. So much river has passed by, it's a different river. The data goes too quickly. So to enable a human to make sense of that data without artificial intelligence would take months on end.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  But with artificial intelligence, they can make sense of it in just hours or days. So it just speeds up the process they would naturally have done. But it does it for them in a much faster way.

• 6:53Fran Racioppi?

  We live in a complex world that threats to our business and our people in seemingly every direction. As leaders, we need tools to analyze data and proactively alert us to threats so we can rapidly make decisions. Accrete AI Government delivers AI solutions powered by domain-specific expert agents that scale human expertise for proactive threat detection and deterrence. Accrete's configurable knowledge engines unify siloed data, identify hidden risks, and automate analytic workflows, turning complexity into clarity. As a trusted partner to federal entities, Accrete AI Government uses open source information with government data to transform decision-making at mission-critical scale. For more information, visit accrete.ai backslash government.

• 7:40Fran Racioppi?

  And when you look at the soft community and even maybe the broader DOD, where are you seeing opportunities for AI to be leveraged across the? I mean, I would say the warfighting functions.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Right. No, absolutely. So anywhere that there's a decisional situation where someone has to make a decision and they're overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to sort through, artificial intelligence should be there. And you see it in the drone world, which I'm not part of. You see it in targeting. You see it in understanding social media. You see it in the intel and open source information world. There's just way too much information to make sense of these days. So sorting through that information and figuring out what makes sense and what doesn't make sense so a commander or a staff can make a decision, that's where it belongs, across the battlefield, across our government.

• 8:31Fran Racioppi?

  We've seen a lot of AI advancements in physical security.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:36Fran Racioppi?

  So in my physical security company, I mean, that's what we Deal with on every day when we're talking about integration of CCTV access control, you know, fire alarm, how AI is coming into play because it's giving you pattern of life data. It's analyzing that. And then instead of having somebody age old conversation we have is we'll walk into an operations center and there will be 30 TVs on the screen. And I'll ask, oh, well, you know, it's an operator there. Well, what do you do? I watch the cameras.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  I watch the camera.

• 9:08Fran Racioppi?

  And meanwhile, there's like a magazine, you know, lunch is half eaten. And it's like, so how many cameras do you watch? All of them. Or you can watch, you can see what happens at a, at a minute level on each one of those cameras at any point in time when you're reading your magazine and eating your lunch. And then they kind of stare at you and you realize like, yeah, you can't do any of that. No. So AI has been instrumental in the ability to identify Right. Patterns of life deviations in pattern of life triggers alerts and alarms.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  And what a horrible job. Like no human should have to stare at cameras and computer screens for a 12 hour shift. No. Like we should not be doing that.

• 9:43Fran Racioppi?

  And they're not effective at it.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  No, they're not.

• 9:45Fran Racioppi?

  So we've seen AI, I think, really kind of come, come to the forefront. You know, we've talked about things like other terms that get thrown out there like machine learning.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:53Fran Racioppi?

  So in your words, like what's machine learning? And then how does that work with AI?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So machine learning is just a component of AI. It's one of the things that are there. Natural language processing, neural networks. There's all these computer science terms and techniques that combine together to make a capability. Right? So again, I'm not a computer scientist, right? I'm a layman. But you know, machine learning allows an algorithm or a program to continually absorb new data and learn from that data. There's a great historical example. You might remember when Watson went on Jeopardy. Do you remember this?

• 10:35Fran Racioppi?

  IBM.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  IBM Watson, right? And won Jeopardy. But there was a pivotal moment there where a question was asked, and the question was what year, what decade did Oreo cookies come to market? And the Jeopardy champion, Ken Jennings rang in first and he said, 1930, eh, he was wrong. And so Watson rang in and Watson said, 1930. And the reason why was Watson wasn't able at that time in that generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning to absorb new information. Watson only had what it had. A human, you or I, would have been like, oh, I thought it was 1932, but I'm not going to guess because I know that's wrong. Watson didn't have the, the level of machine learning to be able to do that. So machine learning is when

• 11:17Speaker 02

  the machine can continually get new information, understand the contextual place of that information and then put it into its deliberations and decision-making process.

• 11:28Fran Racioppi?

  How do we weigh the positive that we get out of these computer models, quote unquote, the algorithm?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:37Fran Racioppi?

  Verse, what's the point where it becomes detrimental or negative?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think it's all about the human, right? Like for me, artificial intelligence empowers a human. The first soft truth stays. It doesn't go away because of technology. Artificial intelligence doesn't negate the first soft truth. It's always about people. So if people are involved in the process, then it will be positive. If we let the machines run by themselves, it will end up going somehow astray. So there always has to be a human in the loop that comes back and corrects, recalibrates, ensures that it's still doing what we want it to do.

• 12:17Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. I think that, that term, human in the loop is the one that we hear kind of come up

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:21Fran Racioppi?

  all the time and that you always have to maintain it. Sergeant Major Weimer talked about that, you know, we have to put a human in the loop to be the decision maker from the data. And if we allow the machine to be the decision maker,

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:34Fran Racioppi?

  then we run into issues. I mean, we see that on our YouTube channel.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:37Fran Racioppi?

  I mean, literally where the processing works so quickly that in real time, as you're uploading a video, it will analyze it, it will give you recommendations and then it will tell you, hey, this is, you know, fit for any audience. This is

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:53Fran Racioppi?

  going to get flagged for their 35 different versions of inappropriate content. But then we'll then make a decision for release or not.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:02Fran Racioppi?

  And distribution across your audience.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:04Fran Racioppi?

  Which becomes frustrating when they don't get it right.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:09Fran Racioppi?

  And then you're like, okay, now I gotta go back. I gotta challenge it. I gotta fight it. Then you're fighting the algorithm back in to.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:15Fran Racioppi?

  Re-look at all your stuff, but it's already made a decision.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:19Fran Racioppi?

  And you can't unlearn it.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:21Fran Racioppi?

  So it becomes super challenging, I think, when we see that. There's been a lot of discussion, though, about, well, the robots will take over, you know?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:28Fran Racioppi?

  The Terminator situation. Where are you seeing the integration of AI? I guess the question, where are you seeing the integration of AI in both the kinetic and the non-kinetic parts of warfighting?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think everyone's seen it on the kinetic side, right? That's all the drone stuff, that's autonomous weapons and stuff like that, which we really don't do. So for us, it's all about on the decision side of the house, the intel analytics, campaign planning and strategy, like, understanding what's going on on the battlefield with the enemy, understanding the enemy's strategy. And I think one area that we're seeing it grow, and you've heard General Fenton talk about this, is it's also understanding, not just the enemy, but understand the environment. What's going on with the local populace? What are they talking about? What's their state of mind?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  There's a great quote from our community from the 1980s, Colonel John Wagelstein, who was the commander of the El Salvador advisors in the 80s. And he said, "The critical terrain on insurgency or counterinsurgency is the six inches of brain matter in between the populace's ears."

• 14:43Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  So understanding the populace, I think, is gonna be a huge thing moving forward. I don't know if we've always done that well enough, but using huge data collection, artificial intelligence, some of the things that are out there, I think that's gonna move into a good direction for us.

• 14:58Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. You brought up this foreign ownership control or influence a few minutes ago.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:04Fran Racioppi?

  And this is something that I think is really important when we talk about what is the next battlefield.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:10Fran Racioppi?

  How do we? Define warfare.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  All right.

• 15:12Fran Racioppi?

  Define war. What does war look like today versus tomorrow versus who our adversary is? In our conversations with the current SMA, with the 15th Sergeant Major of the Army, Dan Daly, with the congressman that we've had the opportunity earlier this year and late last year to sit down with. I've asked this question to a number of them.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:31Fran Racioppi?

  And to get their different perspectives about how do you define war?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:35Fran Racioppi?

  What is the next battlefield? And I'll kind of pose that that question to you because when we look at something like foreign control in the investments and in small businesses, you know, I'm looking out behind you because they're small business row over there, you know, and you got foreign investors who are funding these things. When does that become a risk? So when you look at the environment, you look around, you know, how do you define warfare as we see it on the battlefield?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  So like I said, I'm not a computer scientist. I study political science. And in political science, as an undergraduate and undergraduate, we looked at national power through the acronym of DIME, Diplomacy, Information, Military and Economic. So we've been solely focused on the past 35 or 40 years, almost entirely on the M in DIME. And we do it really well. We haven't lost very many firefights in the past 20 years. However, we haven't paid as much attention as a nation to the E, the economics, or the I, the information. It's ironic too, Fran, like here you are doing a podcast, you're on social media, you're talking to all these people. In the past 15, 20 years, the information environment has exploded, right?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  There's more channels, there's more apps out there for people to get their word out and to communicate across communities. But as US government has kind of ignored that as a source of power and power projection, at the same time, our adversaries have embraced it.

• 17:04Fran Racioppi?

  So.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  And the same way with economic power, like you said, foreign nations are making stealthy investments. They're buying companies, they're making subsidiary arrangements, and they're hiding it all behind commercial activity, which is kind of hard to uncover. It makes me think. I was thinking about this the other day. Do you remember the movie in the 1980s where the Soviet Union invaded the US? Red Dawn?

• 17:31Fran Racioppi?

  Oh, the submarines.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 17:33Fran Racioppi?

  Where the

• 17:33Speaker 02

  The Red October. That was the Red, right. Wolverines, you know, and there's a scene in there where a high school professor or a high school teacher is talking to his classroom. And as he's talking to them, Soviet paratroopers start drifting down into the schoolyard. And he's kind of looking at it confused. He doesn't realize what's going on and that's the Soviet invasion. Well, nowadays, our nations don't have to parachute their troops in. They're parachuting in ideas through social media and information areas. They're parachuting in their influence in economic ways. And so for me, that's the battlefield of the future. We've proven that we can hunt down and kill or capture almost anyone.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  But those other realms and our enemies know that. And so those other realms, the economic realm and the informational realm is where the future battle is going to happen. And it's happening right now, actually.

• 18:28Fran Racioppi?

  I mean, we're seeing it on social media.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 18:31Fran Racioppi?

  We're seeing it in the media. You know, and to your point about how the media landscape has exploded, I mean, I think back to when I wanted to be a when I was in undergrad and my goal was to be a journalist, my goal was to be a network news correspondent. We had like, you know, the three major networks.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:47Fran Racioppi?

  And then we had the cable news networks were kind of, I mean, you know, becoming more and more mainstream. But over the last 20 years, there's been this explosion of mediums by which you, anybody can be a journalist.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:59Fran Racioppi?

  I don't know if that says much for me now. Maybe I just got finished paying BU for my undergrad.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:05Fran Racioppi?

  So I'm not going to figure out if it was worth it. But that's the reality of the situation is that.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:09Fran Racioppi?

  They're making it out there and they can say whatever they want.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:11Fran Racioppi?

  Relatively get that narrative out. How do you think we're doing as a country, you know, maybe even as the DOD in combating those false narratives and misinformation?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  So.

• 19:23Fran Racioppi?

  And identifying it.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Right. I was at a conference, not this one, but a conference a couple of months ago and someone asked General Fenton that question. And before he could answer, someone else on the screen said, I think we're about on the stage said, I think we're about a C. And gentlemen said, yeah, actually, I think we're on F. We're not engaging in the narrative battle. We don't even know what's being said in the narrative battle. We don't know in local target audiences, we don't know who the influencers are. We don't know what their discussion points are. So when the US goes to a foreign country and does a military exercise, we have very little idea of what the reflections are happening in that society and what they're talking about. For all we know, the foreign nation is seeding in malicious messages about why we're there and what we're doing

• 20:09Speaker 02

  and portraying us in horrible, horrible ways. And the local populace isn't seeing any contrast to that, so they believe it. And the people that manipulate messages are very good at doing that. And so they're feeding into previous fears, they're feeding into previous incidents, and they're building on small truths to tell big lies. And we're not even in that space contesting it because we don't even know what's happening. How do you identify it, though? Yeah, right. That's my question. So first off, you have to have organizations that pay attention to that. And traditionally, and this is not a hit on our brothers in the intelligence field,

• 20:49Speaker 02

  they have always relied upon top secret exquisite information because that's the best that the US could provide. And in the Cold War, that was true. We needed that type of information to reach into borders behind the Iron Curtain and find out what the Russians were doing. But you want to know where the Russians are today? They're on VK. You want to where Hamas is? They're on YouTube. We don't necessarily need the national intelligence community to tell us where our enemies are. They're broadcasting it. Here I am, mom, crossing the border into Ukraine, right? It's on Facebook, it's on YouTube, it's on Reddit. So there's this vast array of unclassified, open source information that we have to pay attention to, and we're not paying enough attention to it.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  And the reason why we're not paying attention to it is because there's too much of it and people are overwhelmed. So that's why artificial intelligence is so important. Because it helps sift through all of that information and get to the important contextual things that people need to know to make decisions, to build counter messages, to build supporting messages, to understand the operating environment.

• 21:56Fran Racioppi?

  This show, conference, trade show, whatever you want to call it, SOFT Week, is designed to bring the private sector into the spotlight of governments.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:09Fran Racioppi?

  Okay, specifically special operations for us on a global scale. Because we have partners and allies here from all over the world.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:17Fran Racioppi?

  Looking at the same stuff we are. The SOFT, SOCOM specifically, have done a very good job, especially over the last couple of years, of identifying what they're good at and what they're not good at.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:32Fran Racioppi?

  And saying, hey, if we're not good at it, we got to go find somebody who is. And so you've seen a real strengthening of the public-private partnership.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:40Fran Racioppi?

  And you see that across the globe in a variety of both lethal and non-lethal capabilities. Why is it important that more broadly, the DOD, the US government, really begin to strengthen that public-private partnership? When we're talking about innovation and technology advancement versus doing like the old NASA, you know, idea of like, hey, we got to, we got to build it ourselves.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. So I think the world has changed. You know, 40 years ago, all of the innovation came, 80 years ago, innovation came out of the government because they had the resources and the innovation ecosystem of the United States wasn't what it is now. Now you're seeing all of the innovation is coming out of the small innovative companies, industrial, what we call Silicon Valley, wherever you might be.

• 23:29Fran Racioppi?

  People in garages.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And it's really hard for most of those people to engage with the government because the government has so many challenges to doing business with them. So any event like this that helps break those barriers down, that helps get technology in front of users, helps the technology providers understand the government's

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Process for evaluating and contracting technology is really important. You had to break through those natural barriers that have been over time, those bureaucratic barriers that have existed and knock them down. And that happens here a lot.

• 24:06Fran Racioppi?

  Who determines what capabilities are out there that almost become like a, you know, this is US only verse, you know, this is something we're gonna market and allow to go out to our partners and allies.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Congress passes a law, the international ITAR, international.

• 24:23Fran Racioppi?

  It's like trade agreement.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Trade, yeah. And so, and there are specific systems that Congress prohibits from being sold. And we're talking about like specific types of airplanes or tanks or bombs or munitions. Versions of them can be made for foreign export. When it comes to commercial stuff, like my company is a dual use, commercial government company, we sell commercial software. Anybody can buy our software. And I think the government is beginning to think more about should they have more control over that or not? Is artificial intelligence a general category of something that should have a governmental review on it or not? Right now it doesn't, so we make a moral decision of where do we want our software to work?

• 25:08Speaker 02

  And who do we not want it to work for?

• 25:11Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  And so for us, it's an ethical decision, not a legal one. And that's how we look at it.

• 25:16Fran Racioppi?

  What's Accret doing in the corporate space?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so fascinating. We started, Accret started as a commercial company. And about seven years ago, they were bringing artificial intelligence to the finance world. And really in the finance world, everyone in the finance world is seeking alpha, right? First decision advantage. And that's about the speed of your information and understand the context of it. So one of the products that we've made for the government information operations space, came from the commercial space. And within the recording music industry, if you can imagine this, there was a pressing need for artificial intelligence to help the recording music labels, identify viral talent before it went viral.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  You're looking at me like I'm crazy, right?

• 26:03Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, you know, I am actually, yes.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:05Fran Racioppi?

  Yes, because I got a buddy who actually is a Green Beret, just retired, who moved to Nashville and he's a talent. I mean, he's a music artist representation.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:16Fran Racioppi?

  And all I hear are the stories about how they gotta go to 80 bars.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:21Fran Racioppi?

  And watch people perform.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:23Fran Racioppi?

  And maybe they don't even find one.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so it's interesting because that's the traditional model is you send your talent scouts to the cool bars, right, in Nashville and LA and Manhattan. They see the bands, right? Forty years ago, they're like Guns N' Roses, that's the band, sign them. And you sign them before they get too big. And that's how the recording music label makes money. They develop that band, they make records, or however they. But now, the majority of music doesn't get released by bands in bars. It gets released on SoundCloud, YouTube, TikTok. And there's such a volume of it. 20,000 new songs and artists a week. So no talent scout can keep up with that. And then when they look at things online,

• 27:07Speaker 02

  it's very hard to distinguish whether or not someone's gonna go viral or not. So for instance, if I was a young artist and I wanted to make a name for myself, the first thing I would do, I'd go hire a bot farm to give me 30,000 likes a week. But those aren't authentic likes, right? So if you have 30,000 likes, but they're unauthentic, then you're not gonna go viral. But then you look at the opposite end of the spectrum. Let's say someone only has five followers. That can't be good, right? Five followers. But if those followers are Taylor Swift and Jay-Z and Ed Sheeran, those are some pretty powerful followers, right? So they're gonna go viral eventually. So we built this product to help talent scouts sort through

• 27:50Speaker 02

  the massive amount of information that was flooding them on a daily basis, make sense of what it meant contextually, and then make a business decision of, this is someone that we think we should start looking at and determining whether or not we want to contract. So, we took that technology and we started thinking about how could the government use it? Right? Part of my career, I have a CT background, right? So if you want to know where the next Salafist jihadist preacher who's gonna lead an uprising in North Africa, if you want to know where he is, he's on YouTube. Right?

• 28:24Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  That's where you're gonna find him. And so you have to be able to understand what his following is, what his reach is. Is it authentic? Are people engaging with him in an authentic way? Is this someone we should pay attention to? That's how we look at understanding target audiences now is it's a growth from the recording music industry.

• 28:42Fran Racioppi?

  Transitioning out of the military is about more than polishing a resume or attending a LinkedIn workshop. It's about rediscovering your purpose and forging a new path that's worthy of your service. At the University of Health and Performance, veterans are offered transformative GI Bill approved programming designed to help take them to the next level with confidence. Nestled in the heart of the Ozarks, their 800 acre, all-inclusive campus features world-class training facilities, modern living spaces, and miles of trails for reflection and growth. Here, veterans find a structured, immersive environment where they can explore their strengths, develop new skills, and build a life that not only honors their past, but prepares the future.

• 29:23Fran Racioppi?

  That's fascinating. And I'm thinking about your example of the next extremist leader. You know, thinking about how even 15 years ago, that was all a manual process.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:35Fran Racioppi?

  You know, when you didn't have social media, you didn't have YouTube, you didn't have the ability to so rapidly get in front of so many more people.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 29:45Fran Racioppi?

  So from a targeting standpoint, it was a lot easier to track down when they're holding meetings, when

• 29:51Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 29:52Fran Racioppi?

  You have a mass of folks coming into Libya to go have one of these

• 29:57Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 29:58Fran Racioppi?

  That is to be wrapped.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  And we're using, you know, specialized intelligence, signals intelligence, and we're intercepting messages and we're trying to understand what's going on. And now people are just doing it on their phone.

• 30:08Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. Where do you think it goes? Like, what's the? There's no limit, right? I think that there's a lot of things that are coming and happening so quickly every year where we're looking back going, well, I didn't even think about that. I didn't even think about that. You know, and so you really, it's very hard to predict and say, you know, where are we going to be in five or 10 years? Or what's the ceiling? Congress is trying to identify that.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:31Fran Racioppi?

  Congress is, and I think even, even at the O D level, they're trying to identify that. And with this conversation about what are the limits that we put on AI? You know, what are the left and right? Boundaries that are going to help dictate how we govern and regulate this space.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:48Fran Racioppi?

  Are there limits to this? And what are they? And as Congress probably uses AI models to inform them on how they're going to make decisions on this very topic. What are those decisions and what are the left and right limits that need to be put in place from a regulatory standpoint?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  I think a lot of that's still in flight from, and I'm not sure exactly where it's going to go. Our point of view on it is the most important aspect of artificial intelligence moving forward has to be its explainability. And I never want to put a person, an analyst, an officer, non-commissioned officer in in any organization in a position where they go to their boss and they say, hey, this is a bad company or hey, we need to do this. And their boss says, well, how do you know it? Well, because a crete said so, right? Like the, the computer told me so, right? So there has to be an, an explainability portion to it that says the machine learning algorithm came up with a recommendation,

• 31:49Speaker 02

  but here's the basis of that recommendation. Here's the data that it looked at, just like in college when you had to do footnotes. Here's all the footnotes, right? I'm not trying to hide my work from anybody. So as long as the artificial intelligence remains explainable and people aren't hiding behind this black box theory of it's too complicated, friend. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. Just do what we say. I think that's where it has to go. That's where regulations are going to eventually go towards explainability.

• 32:20Fran Racioppi?

  You said a couple of minutes ago that you're not an IT guy. You're not a heck, you're not an engineer. Well, you're a Green Beret.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was.

• 32:27Fran Racioppi?

  Uh, which in my mind means basically, and we live this every day in my company, you can do anything.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:32Fran Racioppi?

  Talk for a minute about why I come into the army in the first place and why I'm a Green Beret.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I came into the army in the mid eighties. It was a different world, Cold War era. Remember very distinctly as a young kid, reading a National Geographic magazine, and on the cover of it was a Green Beret captain in Vietnam, who went through a ceremony to become a mountain yard. And that was part of his building an alliance between two different tribes. And I was just fascinated by the idea of being a US soldier, but working with a local populace in their language and in their culture. And that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to be a Green Beret from the moment I was, saw that article. And I went to college and I knew in college,

• 33:21Speaker 02

  I just want to be a Green Beret. So I was ROTC off cadet. And knowing that I was going to graduate, knowing I couldn't get into SF right away, but I got in as fast as I could. And so.

• 33:32Fran Racioppi?

  What did you do first?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  I was an infantry officer. I did a tour in the 82nd Airborne Division for two and a half years. And then I went to assessment and selection. And I went to the Q course right after that. I was a first lieutenant in the Q course. I got there as fast as I could.

• 33:47Fran Racioppi?

  You went through your career in really a time of monumental change.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:52Fran Racioppi?

  We're here talking about technology.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:55Fran Racioppi?

  But you really spanned that era of being trained in the 80s by a Vietnam generation.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:02Fran Racioppi?

  Of special operator, you know, and of leader. And then by the time you, you know, fast forward and get out of the military, we're in the GWAT.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:11Fran Racioppi?

  You know, and we're rapidly advancing, probably seemingly every day.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:16Fran Racioppi?

  If you recollect, if you go back and you think about the career that you had and you saw this technological advancement, what are some of the biggest innovations that you think really changed SOF over that time?

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I remember as a, as an ODA commander in 7th Group, when we got computers for the first time and we had printers. And the printers were dot matrix printers and they had a roll of paper. And on the edge of the paper was these holes that would fit into spindles that would push the paper through the printer. And the way we decided to use them was for any type of paperwork, we had to do with the S1, you know, an award recommendation of 4187. And we would. Space out on the computer screen where the words would end up on the army form. And then we taped that army form to the paper that was going through the computer. So that's how I started, you know, with computers and, and it was, I literally remember like, what are we going to do with this thing?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Like, who wants a computer? Only to fast forward 15 or 20 years later and we're doing things like computer network operations. Like, who even heard of that? Like, when I was a captain, I never said to myself, I want to be involved in, you know, as a senior officer in the army. I never said, I can't wait to be in an artificial intelligence company. Cause no one saw that coming at the time. So you ask that question, like, what's going to happen next? What's going to happen next? And, and I don't know what's going to happen next, but I do know that in our community, there's this ethos of being prepared for change and being able to take advantage of change as it happens. And so that's the important thing for us is we're, we're always going to be flexible. We always have that mentality of we're going to think and figure things out.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Deep thinkers who know how to use violence when necessary, but not just violent guys, like deep thinkers. And that's always going to be one of the hallmarks of, of SF and the rest of the community too.

• 36:07Fran Racioppi?

  I want to ask you about transition.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:09Fran Racioppi?

  We spent a lot of time at Green Beret Foundation really talking about transition.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:14Fran Racioppi?

  But you recently, over the last year or so, have put a lot of emphasis on the next Ridge Line 2.0 program and developing really cohesive courses and classes that we could take transitioning.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:28Fran Racioppi?

  SF guys, put them in, give them the skills to be able to go out there and succeed in the next chapter of their life.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:35Fran Racioppi?

  And then also combining that with the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual side.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:40Fran Racioppi?

  That's going to change when they come off the team.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 36:43Fran Racioppi?

  They leave SF and they go into the civilian workforce. One of the things that frustrates me, and I'm out nine years at this point, which is crazy because it feels like.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:54Fran Racioppi?

  One of the things that really frustrates me is guys get out as Green Berets and they spent this whole career, you know, whatever it was, five years, 10 years. Twenty years, thirty years as part of a team. Yeah. With this group of like minded individuals that whether they're on an O D A or on a J SOC staff or the SOCOM staff. Right. Even the guys who work at the Pentagon, you know, are on a team. Right. They're there every day with these guys and then they get out and they're like, oh, I'm gonna move to the middle of nowhere and I'm gonna hunt and fish all day long. And then eventually you hear stories about them in rehab. Right. Like for drugs or alcohol, or you hear stories about them taking their own life. Yeah.

• 37:37Fran Racioppi?

  Or getting divorced or, you know, estranged from their family. And I'm gonna compare us now, it's important, I think, because we got the Navy SEAL Foundation over here. Sure. But SEALs, I think, do a great job of bringing their guys in. Yeah. Post-service. And they go into finance. Yeah, I got a buddy, one of my best friends from undergrad at Boston University. Right. And we rode together at BU. He spent twenty-five years on SEAL Team Six. And now he's working at Andreessen Horowitz. Yeah. You know, as a consultant. Yeah. And then I feel like your story and guys like you who did this, this long twenty, you know, multi-decade career and then said, hey, I'm not done yet. Right. I'm not gonna go off and do my own thing. Right.

• 38:22Fran Racioppi?

  You know, are really impactful for the community to understand that you have a next career. Yeah. And I started, you know, this, opened this block up with, you know, you were a Green Beret, you were in a tech guy. But what being a Green Beret allows you to do, in my mind, and I tell my team at F R Six this every day is we can't do everything, but we can do anything. Right. We just gotta figure out how. Yeah. So can you talk about your transition, how you view the transition process? Right. You know, what we as Green Berets bring to the next chapter of our lives? Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think first off, what a great topic. Like, and for our community, transition in some cases, a life or death situation. Like, the percentage of suicide that we have, the degree of PTSD that we have is horrendous. And for me, transition is a way to combat that. And I've been out 17 years now, like, that's frightening. And I learned a lot of things the hard way because there weren't any transition services at that time. The Honor Foundation didn't exist, the Green Beret Foundation didn't exist. I mean, there were no, there was a tap, which was horrible in my day when I went through it. But even for me, that's all there was when I- Right, yeah. And so I think I've learned some lessons along the way.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  I think the first lesson I learned is the military and, and special forces in particular, teaches us, and we learn inherently, that you are what you do. And that's how you identify your self-worth and who you are. And I see it in transition, I go to transition seminars and guys introduce themselves like, "I'm Bill Wall, I'm a Green Beret." Like, no, you're not. And so the first step is to understand that if you drive your self-worth based on what you do, one day you're gonna wake up and you're no longer gonna do that from which you derive your self-worth, and you're lost. That's where guys get lost, is because I'm no longer a Green Beret.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  My whole life, I wanted to be a Green Beret, and now I'm not a Green Beret anymore. And I'm lost, and I don't have a sense of purpose, I don't have a mission. So you have to get over that first step. And there's like three paths, I think. One path is, okay, don't change who you are, embrace that. Be a Green Beret. So what can you do career-wise as a Green Beret? Go back to the schoolhouse and be an instructor, right? Go work for a company that has a contract supporting the community. Get involved in the Green Beret Foundation or any of the other charities out there. Great, hold on that community, keep all the stickers on the back of your pickup truck, right? Just own it and that's who you are and that's fine.

• 41:03Fran Racioppi?

  I love seeing those stickers, by the way. I live in Connecticut, so they're like rare.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  They're rare.

• 41:08Fran Racioppi?

  And every once in a while, I'll see a pickup truck go by with like a drive the Ranger tab or yeah, SF, you know, you did passion. I'm just like, hell yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and there's nothing wrong with keeping that. There is an additional path, though. The other path is to say, okay, I was a Green Beret. That's a foundational part of who I am, but it's not all that I am. And I'm gonna embrace a path of growth and learning. I'm not sure where it's gonna end up, but I'm going down a new path to figure out who I can be at my fullest measure of who I am. And that's a scary path to go down for some people, right? Because you have to learn new skills. You have to learn to self-reflect in a different way. You have to understand that you're not protected anymore in the way you were in the past.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  It was very simple in SF to know what your next jobs were gonna be for the next 10 years. And you had a certain sense of value to who you are. And now you're going into this strange corporate world where you have to figure out who you are. The other thing I would tell you is the third path is we have to realize what a privilege it is to get a sense of value and self-worth from our job. Cause a lot of people don't have that. I guarantee you, within 20 miles of here, there's some guy unclogging a toilet. And his job as a plumber is not his personal self aspiration. It just pays his bills.

• 42:31Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And his self-worth comes from his church or his bowling league or his fantasy football league or his kids or something else. So your self-worth and value doesn't have to come from your job. If it does, great. Embrace that. But maybe think about where else does it come from? Because we get so absorbed in being a Green Beret that we forget there's a whole wide world out there.

• 42:56Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. Yeah. And as you said, that world can be super scary.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  It can be.

• 43:00Fran Racioppi?

  I think it's important too, and I want to talk about entrepreneurism.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:04Fran Racioppi?

  I mean, and you know, as, as a business founder, you know, I'm living it now. It, people will say, Well, what's the hardest thing you'll be, you know, some of that like, oh, well, being a Green Beret must must have been the hardest thing you've ever done, you know?

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:17Fran Racioppi?

  No, no, man, that was the easiest thing I've ever had. The hardest thing I've ever done physically was being on the men's rowing team in college.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:24Fran Racioppi?

  Cause nothing's been as hard as that ever was and nothing ever will be. And then, but emotionally, at times physically, you know, mentally taxing is being an entrepreneur.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:35Fran Racioppi?

  Is being a founder, being a business owner. And I think that guys get out and I was guilty of it. I see it every day. And they say, well, my next job has to be the next 20 year career.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:47Fran Racioppi?

  Cause they're committed, you know, committed.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:49Fran Racioppi?

  It was at the forefront, the foundation of everything we do. And so they get scared by this because they get so nervous that their first job out of the military has to be this thing that is going to be so perfect in every realm. They're never going to have to leave it.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:04Fran Racioppi?

  When the reality is, is you have a lot of agency when you get out.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:09Fran Racioppi?

  And you can go do whatever you want. What's your advice to the person who's sitting there saying, okay, I think, you know, it's time to move on, time to move into the next chapter, but is now scared about that first step?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think the first thing I would tell him is your first step doesn't matter. Land anywhere, right? When you parachute into a country, you just land where you land. And then you have to figure out where you're going to go next, right? Same thing in business. Take a role, any role and do it and learn from it. What do you like? What don't you like? My first role then, when I got out of the military, I worked for a large company, a big IT infrastructure company. And I learned a tremendous amount there about how business is run. What good looks like in the business world? And after a period of time, I began to realize that I wasn't personally fulfilled

• 45:06Speaker 02

  there because for me, personal fulfillment comes with being involved in change and transformation. And I was not going to change this big multinational corporation. And if they were going to change, it wasn't going to be by me, right? So if I wanted to do that, I needed to be involved in smaller, more startup companies. And so I started gravitating towards those companies, which is, it's a different world. So I had to go in to different roles and learn what startup companies are like and what's important and build up the skill set to eventually get to the position that I'm at. But it was a series of learning jobs. And interestingly enough, in 17 years, I don't

• 45:50Speaker 02

  know, I've had eight or nine jobs in eight or nine companies. So when I talk to people about transition, one of the things I say is transition isn't a one-time event. You're going to continually transition. You're going to grow in your skills. You're going to transition to new roles. You're going to move to new companies. I hope you don't spend 20 years in one company. Like, that sounds horribly boring and it doesn't sound like you're growing to me, right? Maybe that's good for some people, but I'd like that challenge of learning something new and then applying it in another place and learning something new everywhere I go.

• 46:23Fran Racioppi?

  The 9th Annual Global Soft Symposium Europe is taking place in Athens, Greece, this October 7th tonight. It's co-sponsored by the Greek Special Warfare Command with over 800 attendees expected from 30 nations. GSoft Symposium Europe will feature senior defense speakers from across the global soft community, an exhibition with over 70 industry organizations showcasing their capabilities, and networking opportunities along the Mediterranean Sea. The Jedberg Media Channel will be there hosting the International Senior Leader Defense Panel, recording interviews with our partners and allies, and bringing you the most up-to-date look at how Europe conducts special operations across the world. Join us in Athens this October 7th tonight. Registration is now open at gsoph europe.org.

• 47:10Fran Racioppi?

  That's a hundred percent how I view it too. I mean, I got out, I went and worked at Bank of America.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:15Fran Racioppi?

  I knew day one, this wasn't going to be for me.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 47:19Fran Racioppi?

  But I also knew I wasn't going to quit.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:20Fran Racioppi?

  I wasn't going to walk away. There was something to be learned.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:23Fran Racioppi?

  I knew that however long that lasted there, you know, I will be better at the end of it. And those relationships that I met were instrumental in starting this show.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:34Fran Racioppi?

  I had met the CEO of Jersey Mike's.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:37Fran Racioppi?

  And then when I started the show, three years later, called him up and said, hey, you know, would you be a first guest? And he said, absolutely. And three months, four months after that, just calling him up to wish him Merry Christmas. And he asked us what we needed. And I said, well, I'd be awesome if I had a sponsor. And he's like, well, you have a sponsor.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 47:53Fran Racioppi?

  I'll send you a check today.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:54Fran Racioppi?

  And they did. And they got us through the first two years.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:57Fran Racioppi?

  Of the show, which all comes down to, you know, kind of jumping in and saying, I don't know if it's not going to be forever. And then, you know, I've subsequently had multiple roles. But when we look at entrepreneurism and then starting your own business, it's totally different.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  It is.

• 48:08Fran Racioppi?

  It's totally different.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  I think something that guys have to think about is what their personal risk profile is. If you're coming out of the military and you have three car loans and your house isn't paid off and you have six kids that are getting ready to go to college, you've got a high financial risk. So maybe entrepreneurial is not the way to go because 90% of startups fail, right? So if your startup wins, if it's successful, great, you hit the lottery ticket, you're good to go. But if you're in the 90%, you lose everything. So maybe start a little smaller. Get your feet in the business world. Start with an established company. Learn, right? What business is like, and then build your risk profile to the point that you can

• 48:55Speaker 02

  accept a little bit of risk in your personal, professional and financial life. And what's really interesting is we all have the skills to succeed in business. We just don't know it yet and we don't know how to explain it. So when I first started in business, I was doing business development and my job was to capture new business. Well, having spent many years in the JSOC. Community, I understand how to capture things, right? We have a methodology for that. Find, fix, finish, exploit and analyze. And that was the methodology to hunt down Al Qaeda and ISIS and all those guys. That same methodology translates to the business world. It's different words, it's different activities, but it's the same phases.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  And so instead of find, fix, finish, exploit and analyze, it's identify and qualify and propose and close. And there takes different skills, but it's kind of the same thing. And so we have a plethora of knowledge and experience that is applicable to the business world. We just have to have some experiential learning to know how to translate that into a new language and a new way of doing things.

• 50:07Fran Racioppi?

  I always say you don't know what you don't know.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:10Fran Racioppi?

  And so you have these inherent soft skills. And then what we have to do is get the experience of the hard skills. So that we can actually apply them.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:20Fran Racioppi?

  When you're faced with the tough business challenges, which mostly comes around, you know, managing the financials, the cash flow, right? Understanding marketing.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:30Fran Racioppi?

  Understanding sales cycles, but it's like all those things can be taught. And then the other thing is I think guys have to be willing, as you talked about, number one, understand the risk. But then two, be ready to constantly evolve and change.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 50:44Fran Racioppi?

  And I always have in the back of my mind, what you said, that most of these are going to fail.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:50Fran Racioppi?

  So how do you not? And I always think that you gotta continue to do what Green Berets are great at. And that seize opportunity from challenge.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:00Fran Racioppi?

  And everything that comes your way, it can't be no.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 51:05Fran Racioppi?

  It has to be how.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:06Fran Racioppi?

  And if you continuously put that in the back of your mind and reiterate that to your team, reiterate that to yourself every morning when you wake up that, you know, today's not the day where we say no. Then I think the opportunities will come in. And again, you don't know where those opportunities are going to take you.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:24Fran Racioppi?

  Because you gotta have every conversation.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:26Fran Racioppi?

  And if you have every conversation, you're gonna probably waste some time. The big light bulbs go off and you're like, oh, it's so awesome. And you realize, well, maybe it's not so awesome. But then you had another conversation, which might be that thing that takes you to the next level.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for me, like entrepreneurialism is a lot like when I ran the 18 Alpha course, right? And we would do a training exercise for the students. At the end of the exercise, they would always want to know, what's the answer? What's the blue book solution, right? And I'm like, I don't know. You tell me what the answer is. There's no answer here, right? And so entrepreneurialism, there's no checklist. There are all sorts of things that you can learn from, but if you're a checklist driven person that needs to be told what to do to understand your job, then entrepreneurial is not the place for you. Right? Cause every day I'm trying to ask myself, not, am I doing everything well that I know to do?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  What I'm really thinking about is what am I not doing that I should be doing? That I'm not thinking about. And, and that's a different mentality as an entrepreneur to constantly be thinking about, what should I be doing that I'm not doing? And, but it fits our mentality well because greenberries think like that.

• 52:39Fran Racioppi?

  That's a conversation that I have with myself every day.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:43Fran Racioppi?

  And it usually is, it's, it's always at, at night, you know, like kids go to bed, wife goes to start watching TV and I'll sit there in the kitchen or in my office and go, okay, I can go to bed. I could go watch TV because I haven't seen anybody in weeks. Or there's a list of things that I need to be doing to get to the place that I want to go. And then you've got to weigh your risk reward on what decision you're going to make there in that moment. But for me, I'm always thinking about that same thing, like.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  But no one's going to tell you, no one's going to hand you that list and say, here are the 10 things you need to do today.

• 53:18Fran Racioppi?

  No.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  You have to do it yourself.

• 53:19Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. That, to me, it's the drive, the adaptability.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:23Fran Racioppi?

  Curiosity, those characteristics that we're looking.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Curiosity is huge.

• 53:27Fran Racioppi?

  So, and the ability to just continue to go get after it.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:30Fran Racioppi?

  Bounce back, I think, comes back to my mind. You know, you're running the 18 Alpha course. You know, you intentionally put guys in positions to fail to assess their bounce back.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 53:40Fran Racioppi?

  That's entrepreneurism.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is you put them in undefined situations that don't have clear, concrete answers. Cause that's the entrepreneurial world. There's no blueprint for what's going to be successful. You have to discover it every day as you keep figuring out where your business is going and, and what the right thing to do is to make it grow and be successful and bring value to your customers.

• 54:06Fran Racioppi?

  What's next for a creep?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Wow. So Accrete is, you know, our government business is about five years old. We've gotten significant traction, but we're not a big company yet. We think we have amazing technology that has application across several different domains and customer sets. I think for us, it's just continuing to grow. It's continuing to educate customers. One of the biggest challenges in innovation is Henry Ford's famous quote. Henry Ford's quote, Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Cause they couldn't comprehend an automobile, right? So for us, there's a lot of education with customers about what the art of the possible is, what you could be doing.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Not what you are doing, but what you could be doing. So technology and innovation is transformational and transformation is about a journey. So I'm on a journey with my company to transform the way customers do things. To use artificial intelligence to make them better at their core mission. So that's a never-ending job. I can do that forever. And there will always be transformational needs. Technology, AI capabilities will continue to advance. We'll find more and more places where it makes sense to use them. And we'll find more and more places where it brings value to customers to get to their end mission. Which, supporting the SOCOM community, there could be no higher mission, right?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Like, it's an honor and privilege to support all of our organizations, much less the ones we came out of. Cause they've got hard missions. Having been there, I know what those guys are struggling with and they just want a little bit of help. And so that's for us where we think we're going.

• 55:52Fran Racioppi?

  Well, it's busy week.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  A huge busy week.

• 55:54Fran Racioppi?

  And we get you on your way here at the Tampa Convention Center. You guys are doing awesome work.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:00Fran Racioppi?

  And we appreciate your leadership, both, you know, at Accrete and what you're doing now and your time in service. Leading the rest of us, younger Green Berets coming up behind you. But you really set the foundation for so many of us to follow in a great path. And I really enjoyed, you know, looking up to you and all of those that serve. You a few years ahead of me and a thank you for charting that course.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  No, Fran, like everyone else, I stand on the shoulders of giants, you know, that went before me and I've learned so much, you know, in those early years, the guys that were in special forces were guys who all had foreign names, who had all come into the community through special programs that were set up to pull people out of the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain, Zhakovenkos and Ivan Ivanovs and Shaknaws and being around those people and learning the values that they passed down to us to be involved in making your units better and transform them for the future carries on. It is an honor to support the

• 57:04Speaker 02

  company and not just that, but to continue to support the community as people transition out because we haven't always done that really well. So we've got a commitment, me personally and as a company, to support that transition process also because yeah, the next mission is out there. It might not be with a Green Beret on, but it's out there.

• 57:23Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. Awesome. Well, whatever we can do to help, we're here.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  No, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.

• 57:29Fran Racioppi?

  Thanks.

• 57:33Fran Racioppi?

  American Jedbergs went on to form the foundation of the United States Special Forces and the Special Activities Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thanks for listening to the Jedburgh Podcast, an official program of the Green Beret Foundation. I'm your creator and host, Fran Ruchel. Join us next week for a new episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out on YouTube for full episodes, highlights, and other long and short form content. If you like what you heard, give us a like and leave a review. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, extra threads. Send your comments and inquiries to [email protected]. As former members of Special Operations Forces, the Jedburgh Media Channel and the Green Beret Foundation remain committed to supporting all generations of US Army Special

• 58:15Fran Racioppi?

  Forces and their families. Thanks for joining us on this episode. How you prepare today determines success tomorrow.