"My unit has lost more men to suicide than we lost to the enemy overseas… I focus on things like the loss of purpose that veterans encounter when they take off that uniform for the last time."
Jake Wood is founder and CEO of Team Rubicon, a non-profit organization that utilizes the skills of military veterans to deploy disaster response teams to a variety of different humanitarian crises.
The US military provides some of the most advanced skill training in the world to its service members. Too often when these veterans leave the military, there are no smart ways to apply those skills. Team Rubicon has recruited over 750K veterans and responded to over 750 communities in crisis. Disaster zones provide a unique opportunity for veterans to use those skills for good around the world. "January 2010, the Haiti earthquake hit. It was the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. Seeing all the chaos and destruction, it really looked familiar to me. I’d just gotten done with two really hard combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Suicide remains a crisis among veterans. A loss of purpose and community can play a major role in driving mental health issues and Team Rubicon goes a long way in filling that void. Working as part of a group allows many a chance to process some of their own unaddressed trauma. "One of the fastest growing demographics of volunteers at Team Rubicon are Vietnam Veterans. It's really amazing to see these men process the trauma of their wartime experience for the first time in 50 years."
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Jake Wood
Co-Founder & CEO
Team Rubicon
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello everyone, and welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie, I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. Our goal on SALT Talks is the same as our goal at our salt conference series, which our guest today has spoken at, I believe in 2015. But it's to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future.
John Darsie: (00:44)
And we're very excited today to welcome Jake Wood to SALT Talks. Jake Wood is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Team Rubicon, a nonprofit organization that utilizes the skills of military veterans to deploy disaster response teams to a variety of different humanitarian crises. Under Wood's leadership, Team Rubicon has launched over 650 operations in response to natural disasters and humanitarian crises since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and has grown from eight people to 120,000 members.
John Darsie: (01:18)
Team Rubicon has finished in the top three of the Nonprofit Times top non-profit to work for in America list three years in a row. Wood is a leading veteran's advocate who briefed president Obama on veterans issues, met with former presidents, Bush and Clinton, on disaster response, as well as has testified before Congress. As a Sergeant in the US Marine Corps, wood was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a scout sniper and earned the Navy Marine commendation medal.
John Darsie: (01:48)
Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony and Jake for the interview.
Jake Wood: (02:01)
Thanks, John.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:02)
John, thank you. Jake, it was great to have you at the SALT Conference. I'm hoping and praying that we can get you back to a SALT Conference someday and we can end this virtual situation. We're going to make it happen. John's going to make an announcement here shortly about where he wants to put the SALT Conference. So I just want to comment on everybody's wardrobe. We know who the poorest person is on the podcast because I'm wearing the tie and these other two millennials, they're dressed like billionaires. So, we're going to leave it at that, Jake. You don't have to respond to it. I just needed to make that editorial statement.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:40)
But first of, I want to thank you for your service. You're an amazing American, I've followed your career obviously since you came to SALT, and I've listened to many of your interviews. But for people that don't know Team Rubicon, Jake, or you, and John did a very good introduction of who you are, tell us about Team Rubicon. What is Team Rubicon?
Jake Wood: (03:02)
Yeah. So Team Rubicon or TR as like we refer to it is a nonprofit organization like John mentioned. And what we do is we recruit, train and deploy military veterans for disaster response and humanitarian work in humanitarian crises. And the concept is actually really simple. The US spends tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars a year training American citizens on the latest technology, the best equipment. They are giving them these incredible skillsets. And over the last two decades, these men and women had been deployed all around the world and some of the most austere environments and complex situations on the planet. And our concept is that we can build a better mouse trap when it comes to fighting the rising costs and impact of climate change and the increasing frequency of disasters by recruiting these men and women to repurpose their skills to respond to them.
Jake Wood: (03:55)
So we've done that at scale over the last decade. We've recruited nearly 150,000 military veterans into doing the work that we do. We've responded to over 750 communities impacted by disasters and crises ranging from tornadoes and hurricanes and floods to things like civil wars and plagues. And of course, over the last 12 months, our work has been focused on assisting with responses to COVID-19.
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:23)
Your name, the Rubicon was a river that Julius Caesar crossed, and it was an inflection point, which meant the end of the republic. And so, that was the beginning of the dictatorship and the end of the triumvirate that was holding the republic together. Why did you call Team Rubicon?
Jake Wood: (04:43)
Well, let's not invoke praises like the end of the republic given recent events. The name was no accident. When the organization was founded, it was not founded with the intent of starting a global humanitarian organization. I had just gotten out of the Marine Corps in late 2009. I'd been out for maybe 60 days. In January, 2010, the Haiti earthquake hit. I was watching that situation unfold, it was the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century. And seeing all the chaos and the destruction, it really just looked pretty familiar to me. I'd just gotten done with two really hard combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I called up a couple of organizations, offered my services. They all understandably said no. And so I organized a team of veterans and some doctors to go down to Haiti. But you have to understand, we didn't know how we were going to be able to do that.
Jake Wood: (05:36)
And so, there were all these obstacles and challenges in the way of us being able to do that, but we knew that if we could get to the border, the Haitian-Dominican border and get across, that would be our Rubicon, that would be our point of no return. And so, we flew to the Dominican, we made our way to the border, we crossed the border about four days after the earthquake and made our way into Port-au-Prince. We referred to the team, and it was just a small team at the time, eight people, we referred to them as Team Rubicon.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:05)
Well, I didn't want to invoke the end of the republic. [inaudible 00:06:09]
Jake Wood: (06:10)
Too soon. Too soon.
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:11)
And I have a tendency to be very shy and introverted related to my political points of view and my opinions of different political leaders, so, we're going to stick to Team Rubicon for this conversation, due to that shyness, Jake, due to the inhibitions that I have personally. What difficulties do veterans have transitioning back into civilian life? How do you address those issues?
Jake Wood: (06:40)
It's an important topic for me. There's an epidemic within the veteran space that is manifesting itself in the form of the highest suicide rate of nearly any demographic in the country. My unit has lost more men to suicide than we lost the enemy overseas, and understand that we served at the height of both wars and lost a lot of guys overseas. So it's tragic that we've lost more here at home to their own hand. When I think about what the root cause of that is, I don't focus on things like post-traumatic stress, I focus on things like the loss of purpose that veterans encounter when they take off the uniform for the last time. I think about that loss of community that they encounter when they leave that military base for the last time.
Jake Wood: (07:25)
And ironically, we were just talking about the threats to the republic, I think what we saw unfold on January 6th at the Capitol and in our subsequent understanding of just how many military war veterans were involved in that insurrection and are involved in right-wing extremist groups like the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, The Proud Boys, that military involvement I believe is also rooted in that loss of purpose and that desire for community. And so, Team Rubicon, we give those veterans a new mission, we restore that purpose and that community for them. But if you haven't discovered Team Rubicon, there's an appeal and an allure to an extremist group that gives you purpose, this purpose to fight and defend democracy as you see it, to be a part of something that is tight knit. And of course, that's a tragic application of purpose, but it's exactly what we're seeing.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:22)
This again, this is my experience, when you're happy in your life and good things are happening to you and you feel aspirational where you can achieve some of your dreams, maybe some of it is related to your disposable income, maybe some of it is just related to the holistic parts of your life, you seem less engaged in issues like that. But when you're returning home from war and you are, as you pointed out, disengaged from your team or your battalion or your group, and the adrenaline is down, and the trauma or the memory of what happened is up, that's a recipe for a disaster. Is that fair to say, Jake?
Jake Wood: (09:01)
Yeah, I think it is fair to say. There's a challenge in processing those things. And I think one of the things that we've seen at Team Rubicon is, we send these men and women into disaster zones. And in a way, some people think, oh, that must trigger those traumatic experiences. Has that happened? Yeah. I mean, we've seen people who failed to cope with the scenes of disasters. But more often than not what it does is it provides people perspective, because what happens for many military veterans is they assume that the veteran community, the military community, has a monopoly on trauma. And of course, we know that's not the case. People experience trauma in their childhood, they experience trauma in their marriages, they experience trauma in all sorts of things.
Jake Wood: (09:45)
And when these veterans see the survivors of these crises and these disasters and they see the loss of life or they see the loss of property, they realize the trauma in human suffering is universal, and it helps provide perspective for them that aids in their ability to cope and heal.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:05)
I think it's fascinating. One of the things I want to applaud you for is raising the awareness of all this. One of my uncles who I'm actually named after, my uncle, Anthony, was in Normandy beach on D-Day. Survived that, was subsequently wounded. When he came back, that generation was somewhat quiet about it. I think he never really recovered from the war and lived with post-traumatic stress his entire life. And so, tell us what you're doing at Team Rubicon to make those issues more aware. Obviously, you want family members to be more aware of these things. And making it acceptable. In the case of my uncle, it wasn't acceptable for him to talk about it culturally. I think you've done an amazing job of making it acceptable. Tell us steps that you've taken, tell us things that you've been doing to make that happen.
Jake Wood: (11:00)
It's a great question. We have certainly tried to provide a space for veterans to be safe, to feel safe about being open about their experiences. One of the amazing things about hard work, toiling together alongside people literally under the sun, sweating your ass off, breaking your back every day, which is what happens in these disaster zones, is it's got this unbelievable ability to bring people together and develop this inherent trust in sense of safety, psychological safety alongside these people who were just strangers two days before. We're very deliberate in providing people opportunities at the end of those days to share and open up about their experience. It might be their experience on that particular disaster response mission, it could be their experience from Iraq or Afghanistan years or decades before.
Jake Wood: (11:50)
And in some cases, one of the growing demographics that we have as a volunteer in Team Rubicon are Vietnam veterans. It's really amazing, to your point, to see these men, they're almost exclusively men, process the trauma of their war time experience for the first time in 50 years. And part of it is because they now have idle minds. They came home, they had careers, they're now leaving their careers and they're retiring. And now suddenly they don't have anything to stay busy, and they realize that, oh my God, in the quietness of this retirement, I have to for the first time really think about what happened in Da-Nang or Khe San or any of the battles that I fought. And so that's been really powerful to observe.
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:36)
I want to talk about your book, Once A Warrior: How One Veteran Found a New Mission Closer to Home. It's interesting, how business executives learned from the experience of military leaders like you to improve their companies. You incorporate elements of that in the book. You obviously told the story that you're telling right now. For SALT viewers and SALT listeners that haven't read the book yet, why should they read this book and what will they get out of it?
Jake Wood: (13:08)
I would hope that there's a couple of motivations. On the one hand, this is a great American story. It's a memoir, but it's not just my story, it's my story of going to war and coming home. But this is really indicative of the story of three million men and women who served overseas and are coming back and have the opportunity to serve their community and their country in new ways. And that's the story of Team Rubicon. It's also the story of how to process trauma. I mean, going back to your earlier question, I lost my best friend and my sniper partner to suicide in 2011. It was a tragedy in all the ways that your viewers right now could imagine. It took me years, years to process his death and to forgive myself for his death.
Jake Wood: (13:57)
on the other side of the coin, one of the people that reviewed the book was Chris Sacca, a fairly well-known angel investor. And his review was, you know how the best business books aren't business books, this is that book. Because this is really also the story of how I scaled one of the fastest growing non-profits in America in the shadow of the great recession, overcoming all of the natural challenges you can imagine building an organization that responds to disasters. There's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to building out a strategic plan when the nature of your business is responding to things you cannot predict. There are plenty of leadership lessons throughout it that people can pick up.
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:39)
Well, Chris is a leading innovator. I actually met him at Richard Branson's house in the Virgin Islands, which is a trip that I'm going to encourage you to take at some point in your career.
Jake Wood: (14:51)
Make that introduction for me.
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:53)
I will. John, remind me to do that. So, how can people support Team Rubicon? Where do they go to support your missions and to help you with the veterans that you're helping?
Jake Wood: (15:07)
We're easy to find. Our website, teamrubiconusa.org, across any of the social media platforms, we have a big voice. How can people help? There's a dozen things, more important to us than money but they all cost money. We're a nonprofit organization that runs entirely on philanthropy. We operate at a large scale. We run on a $15 million annual operating budget we have to raise every single year to assist these communities that would otherwise be forgotten in the aftermath of these storms. But beyond that, I imagine many of your viewers, they know someone in their life that could find value in the work that we do. We've got nearly 150,000 volunteers, but I can tell you, we're a couple hundred thousand short of where we need to be in order to continue to meet the need that we see across the country and around the world.
Jake Wood: (15:57)
So, whether it's that niece or that nephew or the cousin, the friend, the coworker that you know maybe served overseas in any war who might just be looking for that little extra something in their life. And even if that person's not a military veteran, we'll take anybody, we'll give them the training that they need, and we'll give them the opportunity to of service to their country.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:19)
I think that's something I really want to emphasize to people, it's not just for military veterans. And I want to test the hypothesis on you and get your reaction to it. The world War II generation, you think about the draft and the inclusion of so many families in the military experience. And then you add this shared military experience, whether you're from New York or California, Dakota, Texas, once you were in the army or the marines, you could then have that bonding experience. Where were you, what battalion or division did you serve in, etc?
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:54)
And then we came out of that war, as a result of all of that military training, there was a level of civic virtue in the society that I think helped to transform the post-World war II society. Today Jake, you tell me, is it one and a half to 3% of our country is somehow tied to the nation's military. And so I'm wondering out loud, do we need to do more from a civic virtue perspective? Maybe the volunteer army is the right thing for the United States at this point, but do we need more compulsory service from our men and women the way the state of Israel does, or the way other people think about this to tie us together more closely and to make our union more perfect? What's your reaction to that?
Jake Wood: (17:42)
100% agree. And there are multiple reasons why this is important. One, you look at the state of our public discourse today, the inability of the factions across America to even understand or want to understand one another. Ultimately, what we lack today is empathy and compassion for our fellow Americans who have a different lot in life than we do. You can't have empathy or compassion for someone if you don't understand their perspective. You can't get their perspective if you've never left your bubble. Service helps transcend those bubbles, it brings people together in what is the most perfect melting pot that America ever created, which was I believe military service. We've seen that play out.
Jake Wood: (18:29)
So, there's that issue. But this is I believe actually a slow burning national security threat. We have an all-volunteer force today that has largely become a family affair. The vast majority of people who are joining the military today are coming from a lineage of military veterans. The challenge is that the military veterans of today poll after poll after poll are stating that they are not going to encourage their children to join the military. So we're actually going to have a pretty large recruiting crisis that's looming on the horizon.
Jake Wood: (19:07)
That is coupled with the fact that when you create almost this warrior caste where 1% of Americans serve becomes a family affair, they become disconnected from the rest of society. And it becomes much easier for the rest of our republic to send those men and women off to war because there's no cost to the rest of America. It's not their son or daughter that they're sending off. And so we find ourselves embroiled in conflicts that are poorly planned, no exit strategy. And we find ourselves there for decades upon decades. And that's not sustainable.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:48)
I have to turn it over to the resident, millennial, Jake, otherwise, I can't get the ratings because I'm this aging white male, I'm heading deep into my middle age now.
John Darsie: (20:00)
As opposed to me.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:02)
I don't know if I have the attraction of these young youthful looking millennials. I have to turn it over to this guy. It's a little horrifying for me. But go ahead, Darsie. I know you're dying to ask Jake all these brilliant scintillating questions. Jake, you know what's also horrifying, since you're cheaper than my therapist, this guy gets fan mail. [inaudible 00:20:23] it's unbelievable. Go ahead.
John Darsie: (20:26)
It's a big point of contention, Jake. I got I think one email that somebody said that I did a good job and it hurt Anthony's ego.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:34)
It was bruising. It was bruising. There's no euphemism to describe the pain, but go ahead. Go ahead.
John Darsie: (20:42)
I think your point about service and bipartisanship is very well taken, Jake. I frequently give my friend, Rye Barcott, a shout out on here for his organization With Honor, who you're likely familiar with. It's a pact that they basically encourage military members to run for office. While giving them funding, they forced those candidates to sign basically non-binding contracts to commit to bipartisanship. And naturally, there's just more of a comradery among those members across the aisle in terms of solving problems as opposed to looking at things through a partisan lens. So, I think that point is extremely well-taken, and we love what you do at team Rubicon and what Rye is doing at With Honor. And hopefully every time we shout out these organizations, hopefully members of our community step up and contribute to the cause.
John Darsie: (21:28)
I want to ask you about the COVID-19 pandemic. So you guys have responded to a variety of different types of humanitarian crises. How has the COVID-19 pandemic been unique and what does your response look like at Team Rubicon?
Jake Wood: (21:41)
This has been unique in immeasurable ways. Too many to enumerate. But to put it in perspective, back in March or April when this thing was first [inaudible 00:21:55] in the US, it was the first time in American history that all 50 states plus US territories were under an emergency declaration simultaneously. It was simply the scale, the breadth and depth of this crisis that was nearly impossible to overcome. Our organization pivoted very aggressively and early into the fight. We said early that we didn't have a playbook for a global pandemic, but we had the players going back to our philosophy on, our human capital strategy is based on recruiting these men and women who do chaos for their day job. And so, we, over the last year have done a variety of things. We searched over 10,000 volunteers in the food banks across the country to help sustain their operations in the face of growing food insecurity.
Jake Wood: (22:40)
Perhaps on the more complex side, we deployed hundreds of medics in the Navajo nation, where over the last several months we've treated 5,000 COVID positive patients. We established dozens of mobile testing sites for COVID-19 throughout the western US. We managed all the collection distribution of personal protective equipment for the city of Chicago. Over 330 American communities requested our assistance in the aftermath of COVID and we responded to over 300 of them with operations.
Jake Wood: (23:12)
Right now, our entire focus is on getting our organization into the vaccine space. We've been operating a dozen pilot programs in states across the US, supporting the logistics and wraparound services that are necessary for effective vaccination programs and delivery. And we anticipate rolling that out and expanding it and scaling it to several hundred communities here in the coming months. We're actively raising a fund right now to do that. Might as well make the pitch now. We're raising an initial $5 million to get it off the ground and $30 million to take it to scale and sustain it through October, which is really the point at which we'll think that our chief medical officer believes we'll hit the point of community immunity. Of course, all of that is dictated by pace.
John Darsie: (24:07)
And people can find information to donate to that fund on your website?
Jake Wood: (24:11)
People can find out about that on our website. We're about to launch a veteran's coalition for vaccination, which will bring about six other organizations focused on veterans under a tent that we will be managing. Of course, they can reach out to you with some fan mail and you can put them directly in contact with me and I'd love to have a conversation with them about it.
John Darsie: (24:33)
All right. I would ask you how we could have improved our response to the pandemic at a federal level, but I think that would take an extra 30, 45 minutes for us to get into.
Jake Wood: (24:43)
Talk about needing a therapist. I need to talk to a therapist about that myself, but yes, we would take much time.
John Darsie: (24:52)
We will leave it there. Thank you so much, Jake, for joining us. We always love having Team Rubicon affiliated with SALT. It's a tremendous organization and you have scaled it in a way that it's extremely impressive and you're really solving two problems. You're addressing these critical issues around the world and in the United States, while also helping military veterans transition back into civilian life and cope with those mental health issues and loss of purpose that you talked about. So thank you so much for everything you do.
Jake Wood: (25:20)
Yeah, John, Anthony, thank you for having me.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:22)
Jake, tell us one more time where we can send money. Where do people go?
Jake Wood: (25:27)
Please visit us at teamrubiconusa.org. You can find out all the information right there. Love to have you.
John Darsie: (25:32)
And buy his book too. It's a tremendous memoir. Once a Warrior is the name of it. It's a tremendous memoir talking about a lot of these issues that we spoke about today, that loss of purpose and how veterans are uniquely suited to solve these humanitarian crises that exist around the world. So we encourage you to buy that book. Thanks again, Jake.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:50)
Jake, I hope to see you at a SALT event soon.
Jake Wood: (25:55)
I check my mailbox every day for the invite, Anthony.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:58)
We're going to gear up the fundraising and the SALT event soon. We appreciate all your work, you're a great American patriot. Thank you for all the things you're doing for our country and the world.
Jake Wood: (26:07)
Thank you, Anthony.
John Darsie: (26:09)
And thank you everybody who tuned into today's SALT Talk, especially if you are now going to the Team Rubicon website and donating to the cause. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this episode or any of our previous episodes, you can see the entire SALT Talks archive at salt.org/talks/archive, and you can sign up for all of our upcoming talks at salt.org/talks. A reminder, please follow us on social media and tell your friends about SALT Talks. We love growing our community and spreading the word about great causes like Team Rubicon. We're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram, LinkedIn.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:41)
Don't send any more fan mail to John Darsie.
John Darsie: (26:43)
Send all fan mail to, I'm not going to read your email out, but send all your fan mail to Anthony's email so he gets it and can treasure it. On behalf of the entire SALT Team and Anthony, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT Talks for today. We'll see you back here again tomorrow.