Join Dr. David Rock for a special episode of Your Brain at Work live as he interviews Damien Mander, an Iraq war veteran turned environmentalist and founder of Akashinga, an anti-poaching foundation. His story is a unique one that highlights a profound personal transformation when he traveled to Africa and was faced with the challenges of the world’s wildlife. He founded the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, which focuses on ranger training, operations and integrating modern technology into conservation. He now shares his passion for conservation, the lessons learned and the nature of our priorities in an uncertain world. This is not just a powerful story, but one that has strong connections to how we view and develop our leaders today. Join us for this incredible episode!
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Erin Wickham: Alright. Hello, everyone! Thank you for being here today on this sunny Valentine's day. It's sunny in New York, at least.
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Erin Wickham: I will give everyone a moment to get out of the waiting room and into the webinar. So bear with me for a couple seconds while we make sure everyone is here and can hear everything. If you want to start by saying hello in the chat, please feel free to do so. It's always great to see where people are calling in from, and why they're excited about the session. We'll be using the chat as we go through today, so feel free to add your questions your insights.
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Erin Wickham: and we'll periodically check in with the chat and make sure that we are responding to what's going on over there.
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Erin Wickham: Let me pull up my script
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Erin Wickham: I got my tabs mixed up. But for our regulars we're happy to have you back, and for our newcomers welcome. I'm Erin Wickham, Senior Director of insight design at the Neural Leadership Institute. In today's episode of your brain at work, live. We will hear an inspiring story of transformation, resilience, and empowerment, one that forms strong connections to how we develop and empower our leaders today.
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Erin Wickham: as I quickly share some housekeeping, feel free to continue to drop in the chat any comments or questions, and let us know where you're calling in from. We do suggest that you put your phone on. Do not disturb and quit any messaging or email apps. So you can get the most out of today's conversation. We do love the interaction. So, as I said before, feel free to share your insights and comments in the chat
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Erin Wickham: time to introduce our speakers for today. Our guest today is an Australian-born Zimbabwean based environmentalist, a formal special operations sniper and a navy clearance diver. In 2,009 he transformed his life's mission when he established an organization called Akashinga, a leader, innovative, scalable, sustainable, and impactful women-centric conservation in Africa.
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Erin Wickham: Akashinga currently has a permanent operational presence in 6 countries with 13 million acres of wilderness under management more than 6 times the size of Yellowstone National Park, and is overseen by about 900 staff
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Erin Wickham: in 2021 Akashinga co-founded the conservation Landscape Alliance to engage local and indigenous communities as custodians of threatened wilderness areas representing one of the largest positive environmental ambitions on the planet. He is the winner of the 2019 winsome Constance kindness, gold medal for services to animals and humanity.
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Erin Wickham: and has also been featured in several documentaries about his work, and serves as a resident speaker on National Geographic's live bureau. A warm welcome to Davian. Mander Damien. Thanks for being here with us today.
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Damien Mander: G'day, Aaron. Thank you very much. Happy. Valentine's day. Everyone.
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Erin Wickham: A proper Aussie. Welcome.
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Erin Wickham: Thank you for that. Thanks. Our next guest today. You all know him well. Also, Australian coined the term Neural Leadership Institute when he co-founded Nli over 2 decades ago with a professional doctorate for successful books under his name, and a multitude of bylines ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and many more. A warm welcome to our co-founder and CEO of the Neural Leadership Institute, Dr. David Rock, Hi. David.
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David Rock: Thanks, Erin, good to have you here, and hey, Damien.
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Erin Wickham: And if I.
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Damien Mander: How are you, mate? Good to see you again? Since Mexico.
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David Rock: Exactly happy Valentine's day to you as well.
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Damien Mander: Thank you.
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Erin Wickham: And finally, our moderator today holds the Phd in neuroscience from New York University. She leads the research team at the Neuro Leadership Institute, where she focuses on translating cognitive and social neuroscience into actionable solutions for organization. A warm welcome to our senior Director of research, Dr. Emma Saro, Hi, Emma.
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Emma Sarro: Hi! Oh, this is an exciting session to be in already. All the love. Thanks, Erin. So I am. I'm just going to kick it off to you, David, and talk about how you, how you've met Damien, and where your story begins.
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David Rock: Yeah, yeah, you know, I I could be accused of being biased, because, you know, he's a fellow, Aussie, and of course aussies are all fantastic. But I was, you know, I was at this conference.
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David Rock: and it was sort of a conference of inspiring ideas and things changing the world. And it's kind of a fascinating community of people, of founders and and startups all sorts of stuff. And I was at this event, and I actually don't go to a lot of talks at these things. I like the people, and but usually the talks are just like not that, even at sort of the best events. I don't know. I just don't really
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David Rock: enjoy them, but I walked in, and I don't know. Maybe it was the accent. Maybe it was the fact that he's an ex mercenary, basically. Now, like saving wildlife like in mass, like, okay, this sounds interesting.
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David Rock: And his story was so
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David Rock: I don't know just so real, it's so powerful and authentic, and just such a great story to listen to, actually sat through the whole talk, which is a real you know, rare thing, and and actually learned a lot. And as I was leaving it, I was like, Damien. You've finished the talk right where I want to start, which is the implications of all this more broadly can we can continue the conversation? And he very generously said, Yeah, of course, let's hang out sometime. Here we are hanging out sometime several months later.
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David Rock: To continue that conversation, and the conversation was sort of as you, as you'll hear it unfold, is is
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David Rock: you know, just a whole different way of thinking about leadership and and tasks. And you know, fundamentally there are some tasks that you know, women might be much better at than men, it turns out, and some of those are extremely non obvious as you hear the story. But let's start at the let's start at the end, Damien, and then we'll go back to the beginning.
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David Rock: How many you know, how much wildlife are you saving? Got 13 million acres under management, I mean, you know, you should take on a decent goal here. What do you mean? Just 13 million acres.
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Damien Mander: Wow, yeah.
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David Rock: By the way, we're gonna pay out each other a lot. We're being Australians. We're gonna pay out each.
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Damien Mander: No, that's fine, mate, let me let me fast forward like hypothetically, some decades, you know, when, when it's all said and done for me. I want to be able to sit back and say, Help! Play a part in protecting as much of the natural world as possible.
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Damien Mander: We're sitting here at the intersection as a civilization, we turn on the news. We see rising oceans, we see floods, we see fires. We're scrambling for solutions, and we're quite often overlooking
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Damien Mander: the best solution we have. And it's a solution that's just spent 5 5 plus 1 billion years getting it right. It's nature. It's this one beautiful backyard that we've got.
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Damien Mander: And this isn't this! Isn't this wasn't my script.
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David Rock: Okay.
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Damien Mander: A decade ago 2 decades ago. This is, you know, we're all a product of our past and and evolving as we go along. And I, you know I look at
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Damien Mander: nature has had billions of years to evolve, and evolution is cutting away the bits that don't work, keeping the bits that do and trying to improve. And as humans, we don't have billions of years, we have a handful of working decades at best. And so for me, it's been a process of
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Damien Mander: trying to figure out what is continuously the best way to achieve my life's purpose. Purpose being the most elusive thing in life. Some of us life doing this and doing that, classifying certain things as success, but really lacking purpose, and
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Damien Mander: Having left the military
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Damien Mander: where you have mission. You have purpose, and quite often the mission is the the only mission. Greater than the actual mission itself is is the guy next to you on the front lines. But when when the mission stops
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Damien Mander: and the purpose stops, the brotherhood evaporates quite often. That's when the war starts, when the bullets are no longer whizzing past your head, and you're trying to figure out what to do next in life. And just through a series of coincidence, I found myself involved with nature, conservation.
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Damien Mander: and and getting involved with it.
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David Rock: Let's let's dig into that a bit, Jamie. Tell me you told me some numbers when we met, when, like how many thousands of elephants were being poached before. And you've got it down to what sort of impact is the small army you've put together? I mean, you've literally put together a small army in in Africa.
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Damien Mander: Yes, I mean the area where we founded this this particular program and model. And what's now? The program became bigger than the organization itself had lost 8,000 elephants in the previous 16 years prior to us, moving into this area, doing long term partnerships with local
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Damien Mander: and indigenous communities, and in the past 8 years we've seen a 90% downturn in elephant poaching. So 8,000 times armed poachers came into this area willing to kill elephants or anyone standing in their way. And this was the area that we had a blank canvas to trial become the world's first.st All female armed, anti-poaching unit.
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David Rock: So you got it down 90% from 8,016 years out and 90% in the next 8 years. Congratulations. That's that's a big big impact and obviously expand. Go back to the start like what was the moment when you decided to go from kind of you know, being in the, you know, army business for whatever, for one of a better word being in the you know, the
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David Rock: to being conservation. Was there a particular moment? Did it happen slowly? Was there a sudden like level 5 insight, we'd call it, or what was the process.
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Damien Mander: Yeah.
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Damien Mander: Oh, part of part of that sort of evolution. You know, we're we're all
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Damien Mander: you know, product of our past. Iraq gives you a different lens through which to see the world. I was a pretty selfish person when I left Iraq. I didn't join the military to serve my country. I did it for adventure. I didn't go to Iraq to help the situation. I went to make money, and I made a shitload of money.
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Damien Mander: and when I came to Africa I came looking for a fight, not a cause. And you know, as someone that had lived this high octane lifestyle and done
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Damien Mander: pretty well from a soldier's standards, from residential property investment.
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Damien Mander: You know. It's pretty hard to try and find the next thing to look impressive on your Cv. And and I'd heard about this romantic adventure of of doing anti-poaching in Africa, came across, and.
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Damien Mander: you know, tried to fall into cadence with the security aspect of conservation. And that's when things really started to change.
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David Rock: Yeah, interesting.
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David Rock: Yeah, it's it's really a. It's really a a shift, isn't it? It's a pretty big shift from
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David Rock: you know, being out there in parts of teams, and, you know, going into countries and and then shifting to kind of building your own. Your own eye.
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David Rock: I'm curious. What was the situation when you arrived?
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David Rock: What was the situation when you arrived? Kind of describe the the landscape.
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Damien Mander: So the the in 2,008 there'd been a large one off sale of ivory that had been released and bought up by a handful of countries around the world which reinvigorated a trade in elephant poaching.
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Damien Mander: and at the same time what was termed the rhino wars was starting to escalate. So conservationists were looking at increasingly militarised ways to defend these animals. And that's what I walked into. However.
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Damien Mander: you know I was a foreigner, an Aussie.
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Damien Mander: you know, white ex special forces, Guy, coming over saying, I want to come and just work with you guys for a few months. And these are people that had spent decades setting up programs and building relationships with local communities. And I was trying to have an adventure on the coattails of their hard work, and understandably, I got a lot of closed doors.
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Damien Mander: and those closed doors were for a reason
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Damien Mander: because they made me reflect on my actual reasons for for being there, my purpose for being there.
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Damien Mander: and eventually I got a start with a Ranger unit in Zimbabwe. It was the 5th country I traveled through over a 6 month period learning the landscape.
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Damien Mander: And I've just come from Iraq.
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Damien Mander: working within a 600 billion dollars a year. Annual defense budget. We had every resource we needed to go out every day to our mission and try and get us home safely.
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Damien Mander: and we were fighting for resources in the ground
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Damien Mander: on behalf of the arguments of old men.
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Damien Mander: and I see these rangers leaving their their families behind for up to 11 months of the year, and that, you know, they didn't even have boots, the right uniforms, medical kits. And it's like there's there's an imbalance here, and in parallel with that was seeing what was happening to animals, and you know I didn't grow up being a conservationist or an animal lover. I just
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Damien Mander: I did grow up, though, with a belief in justice and and always wanting to fight for the underdog. And here I saw.
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Damien Mander: you know animals don't want a car, a house the bigger paycheck they just want one thing, they want to live, and we as a species, we continually take that away from them. And
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Damien Mander: you know I saw an opportunity for me to be able to make a difference, one in in helping to train these rangers and give them the right equipment
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Damien Mander: in the most basic of needs which made the the most biggest of differences and and animals just
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Damien Mander: you know the the language of animals is is too complex
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Damien Mander: for us to comprehend, but the language of suffering is universal, and seeing what was happening to animals was something I couldn't turn my back on.
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Damien Mander: and I set up 2,009, the International Anti-poaching Foundation, which is how we started. I liquidated an entire property portfolio in Australia and Dubai.
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Damien Mander: and put it into starting this organization with one person and here we are today. 15 years later. One of the largest
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Damien Mander: wilderness portfolios under protection across the across the continent. And
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Damien Mander: yeah, I'm marching with with strong ambitions to keep doing what we do. But it's it's been
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Damien Mander: It's been a long road of of school fees along the way. I'll call it that.
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Emma Sarro: That's so interesting. And I know we're going to go into who your team was made up of, and and how like empowering women, and the results of that. But I all I'm hearing, and what you're saying is this, like amazing transformation of your purpose? And we talk about purpose a lot. We've been starting to talk more and more about it. But
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Emma Sarro: how important that is to success, I mean, because what you're saying is that you've just hit so many roadblocks along the way in an area that was, you know, you'd have to change the whole way. Everyone was looking at this. A dangerous situation. So how important was that purpose, and what did it feel like to actually have something so deep like that.
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Damien Mander: Yeah, you know, I think.
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Damien Mander: How do I say this without sounding arrogant?
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Damien Mander: The good thing about trying to do good
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Damien Mander: is the more you do it, the more it becomes infectious, and it becomes almost selfish in a way that it makes you feel better than doing something bad.
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Damien Mander: and when you start to see the results and the impact on other people, and and then
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Damien Mander: like with anything in life.
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Damien Mander: you know, I would never have dreamed. We're doing what we're doing now. And I probably I have, like probably no ideas of the heights of where this movement
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Damien Mander: can go. But you know, when you start to get some wind in your sails, you start to dream a little bigger and realize that that the only horizons are the ones you set for yourself.
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Damien Mander: And
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Damien Mander: yeah, I would say along the way. And like we've been through some of the most immense challenges in 2012, after liquidating my life savings and investing them into Zimbabwe. I was falsely accused of espionage. I lost everything. I was exiled from the country. I was wanted to come back to the country to face trial for espionage.
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Damien Mander: It took 2 and a half years before I could clear my name and come back. During that time I lost all my projects, my life savings, and you know the house that I'd built to live in.
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Damien Mander: and I suppose that's the time when most people would turn around and say, All right, it's probably to look for something different. I went to South Africa. I registered as a nonprofit. I found a massive project in Mozambique to fund that. I went to the Us. The biggest philanthropic market in the world, registered as a 501 c. 3, and and just never looked back. And
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Damien Mander: You know the lessons that I got from making it through the military units that I got through, and in the end. There's nothing special about people like me.
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Damien Mander: Only that when most other people say it's too hard or it can't be done. We're just the stubborn pricks that just stay there and never give up. We're not usually the room. We're not usually the smartest in the room. We've got that one thing that is often the difference between success and failure. And it's the it's the. It's the never, ever, ever give up attitude.
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David Rock: We are a stubborn nation, aren't we? I I think I've got that same like stubbornness in some ways like I didn't have quite the challenge that you had in 2012. But I had, you know, a couple of times a couple of times where I was right back to the start in my career. And definitely, it's I think we're a very stubborn nation. Must because we came from convicts or something. I don't know what it is, Aaron, you're gonna ask Emma. You're gonna ask a question.
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Emma Sarro: Well, I was well, one thing that that I'm just hearing is just the power of of finding some kind of purpose. I mean it allowed you to go past all of the moments where most people would give up. So all of those people that are facing something that they think is impossible. You just haven't found the purpose that you need to move forward.
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Damien Mander: Yeah, it's it's you know I was. I was one of the lucky ones, you know.
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Damien Mander: there weren't too many jobs for a sniper in the local newspaper after Iraq.
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Damien Mander: I somehow always knew I was going to find what I was looking for in traveling. It wasn't going to come and land on my doorstep. It wasn't going to come. Knock on my door. It wasn't going to be a phone call. I had to go out and find it, and that I told my I've got 3 children, and I don't come from an academic background, and the best thing I can give them is what I consider to be the best classroom in the world, and that is travel.
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Damien Mander: and a different different
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Damien Mander: classrooms of culture and sound and smell and geography, and and I knew somewhere amongst that I would find purpose. And it happened, and that was that was that was just gut instinct.
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David Rock: Jamie talk us through sort of the the because, you know, I've got a bit of an experience bias. So I kind of know some of the background. But I know people listening don't know some of the kind of detail talk us through like, why you? Because basically, you've set up a you've done something very, very different. Normally, the the anti poachers are, you know, called rangers.
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David Rock: and normally the anti poachers or rangers are men, and they go out, and they, as you're saying, they're away for 11 months of the year, talk us through like, why did you decide to train literally an army of female
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David Rock: anti-poachers, female rangers. So you basically trained a female army of like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these rangers. What made you decide to kind of go that way, and and what was what was surprising about that about that journey.
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Damien Mander: So over the 1st 8 years of our organization we scaled up to be very successful at doing one thing, stopping poachers from killing animals, and
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Damien Mander: but in doing so we we created a model that we have essentially had.
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Damien Mander: Excuse me, essentially had
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Damien Mander: an ongoing conflict with the local community. The local population surrounding the areas. We're trying to protect these areas the size of small countries.
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Damien Mander: We did some research. It said, there's gonna the UN Population Division said, there's gonna be 2 billion people
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Damien Mander: on the African continent by 2040. And in my mind I knew it was. It was not going to be bigger fences and more guns that decide the future of African conservation conservation is not a conservation issue. It's a social issue. And to have
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Damien Mander: social impact will equal a conservation outcome. We just didn't know how to do it. I used to get up on stage in the Us. And explain to people. Don't think of us as the solution.
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Damien Mander: Think of us as a paramedic. We're trying to stop the hemorrhaging save what's there and get the situation to the operating table, or someone with a better idea can can come along and try to fix this, and there's only so many times you can look into the eyes of a woman
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Damien Mander: in the local community that's lost her son, her husband, her brother, or uncle to poaching, you know, in an armed conflict, trying to kill a rhinoceros or an elephant, and then turn around and try and figure out how you're going to have a hearts and minds relationship with that community the next day. It doesn't happen.
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Damien Mander: You have generations of resentment.
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Damien Mander: And so what what we did is is.
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Damien Mander: and the many hours of laying awake at night is start to try and research what was the single most effective dollar that can be spent on community development in Africa, and what I saw was an overwhelming body of evidence that said empowering women was the single greatest force for positive change in the world today.
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Damien Mander: which was a foreign language for me, who came from the ultimate Boys Club of special operations.
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Damien Mander: and it built a career across 3 continents in training men for armed conflict, law, enforcement and conservation.
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Damien Mander: I'd never worked with a woman, and I didn't understand how that would fit into into an industry in an operational sense, where they're outnumbered at a ratio of 100 to one.
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Damien Mander: And you know, we weren't really convinced we did more research. We saw police units around the world where there was predominantly women seeing less corruption. We're seeing military units using all female counterinsurgency teams because the trust system with men had been broken down
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Damien Mander: to a point of of 0 relationship being possible. There's only so many times you can kick someone's door in at 3 in the morning and put a gun barrel and a torch in their face, and then turn around the next day and try and have a conversation.
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Damien Mander: And
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Damien Mander: and then the final straw for me was an article in the New York Times about the Us. Army Rangers training women for frontline combat
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Damien Mander: and almost to a decade to the to the month of
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Damien Mander: Prior to reading that article. We were on a mission in Northern Baghdad. Our convoy got blown up going through a checkpoint. There's a few people killed.
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Damien Mander: We managed to push through the contact zone, and we were quickly surrounded by local militia.
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Damien Mander: we. We made Comms with a control center. We had 2 Apache gunships like circling our position very quickly, and then, 5 min later, the Us. Army Rangers came and and got us out of there alive. And so, reading that article, I thought, you know, what if the if the
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Damien Mander: the unit that was good and gracious enough to save my life that day in Northern Baghdad is now training women to be army Rangers. We're going to try and train women to be wildlife Rangers, and that was the beginning of akashinga.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, that's amazing. So so how do you? How do you train them? How do you train them to deal with poachers differently than you would a man.
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David Rock: Even before that, even before that, maybe, like what is, help us paint a picture. You're training these women to, you know, to stop poachers who have guns like? How is it better than than men doing it? Just to be facetious like? What do they do differently? How are women approaching, you know, men with guns make money differently than how men do. What's what's the difference on the ground? Sorry.
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Emma Sarro: No, it's right.
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David Rock: I'll just interrupt you just for fun.
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Emma Sarro: Know.
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Damien Mander: No, it's it's it's a good question, because I've very much become the student over the years
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Damien Mander: in parallel with holding the CEO title.
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Damien Mander: and I think that's an important thing, you know, being always willing to learn. And and
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Damien Mander: for me, that learning only came with letting go of the ego, you know, when when I was in a
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Damien Mander: the Navy Clearance Diving Branch, we had a, you know, research done on us on how to integrate women into the dive branch, and we took a locker room vote and said, We don't want this
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Damien Mander: amongst the lads, and you know, looking back on that now that was based purely on fear and ego
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Damien Mander: and
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Damien Mander: So the the 2 things that have made this program what it is today is. And I can say this, you know the women
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Damien Mander: well, actually, let me talk about the 1st part. If Denmark ranks number one as the least corrupt country in the world. On the Global Corruption Index, Zimbabwe ranks 157 out of 180 countries.
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Emma Sarro: Oh!
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Damien Mander: We haven't had a single incidence of corruption with the women.
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Damien Mander: So instead of employing men that come from hundreds of miles away to come in and protect an area, defend an area from the local community. So they're not colluding with people that grew up with. We're now employing exclusively from the local community, which means all our money that we're spending on those salaries is going directly back into a circular economy. So it changes the economics
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Damien Mander: at face value. It changes the economics. If you actually drill down into it. A woman spends 80 to 90% of her salary on family and local community versus a male that spends 30 to 40%. So the economics made sense
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Damien Mander: when we look at the operational side, which we only discovered over time. But women. Women bought a different value system
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Damien Mander: into the law enforcement aspect of conservation. And that was our primary focus at the time was law. You know, the law enforcement side
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Damien Mander: and
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Damien Mander: that different value system meant de-escalation. So instead of situations that would otherwise have antagonized, we had de-escalation, de-escalation in law enforcement, and this is a very relative topic when we look at parallels in the United States at the moment, but de-escalation means demilitarization.
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Damien Mander: So instead of spending money on helicopters and drones and free running canine attack teams and military grade hardware. We found something far more powerful than biceps and bullets, and that was relationships. We cut our core operating costs by 2 thirds and started investing the savings of the money that we had to the community. Like, you know.
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Damien Mander: we're having success. But we, you know, we'd be spending a 3rd of the money.
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Damien Mander: What else do you need?
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Damien Mander: And they're like healthcare, education, clean water, more jobs, infrastructure development. And we started investing it back into the community. And this is how Akashinga started to be this holistic model where all these different social impact metrics alongside conservation. They didn't operate in silos. They became something that leveraged off each other, and it started to show the community that the long term benefits of
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Damien Mander: ecosystem protection was actually linked to what it should be. Social impact metrics.
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David Rock: So it's a combination of things. Because you've gone from, you know you and your family to like a team of 900 people. And it's obviously the models obviously successful. And what I hear is it's partially the sort of economics and the systems level. So you're not hiring people from miles away who have no relationships locally, you're hiring local people who have a stake. And then the fact that you're hiring women to do that that core job is.
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David Rock: you know, they're spending their money on their families and on their community as opposed to. You know, men tend to spend on other things, and then on top of that, they're just approaching it differently. And I heard I heard you say, de-escalation, can you? Can you sort of paint us a picture of an example of what that looks like, what is what you know? What is a female ranger? What skills do they have? What do you train them. I'm assuming they have guns, but how like? What does it look like? Give us an example of sort of them walking up and de-escalating versus what you know used to happen in the past.
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Damien Mander: Still, the most common question asked by a poacher when they're being arrested is, why am I being arrested by a woman?
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Damien Mander: It's it's usually very, you know, benign sort of situation. There's been only
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Damien Mander: several times that shots have been fired, whereas working with with
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Damien Mander: all male units in a historical context. I know that a lot of these situations would have escalated to the point where you know the two-way shooting range. Someone's gonna someone's gonna get shot.
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Damien Mander: I don't know what it is for.
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Damien Mander: you know, when when I went into a race one of my roles in Iraq I was project manager for the Iraq Special Police Training Academy. When the America arrived in Iraq they disbanded the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police effectively, putting a million plus people out of work overnight. Our job was to try and recruit, train, equip, and deploy as many people as possible
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Damien Mander: to fulfill that void, and for them to turn back and tell Congress, hey? We fixed our problem, however, as soon as we we gave
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Damien Mander: those weapons and that uniform to a lot of these young men from rural communities with low education, we generally saw, you know, one of a few things. They either they deserted. They joined the militia and fought back against us. They went out for revenge, or they got killed.
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Damien Mander: There's no greater demonstration of a failed theory than to continually send young men off to get killed or seek retribution. And so, you know, at the time I was too young and too inexperienced to ask the right questions about the wrong practices. But it was one of the concerns when we started this program.
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Damien Mander: because all the women that we employ they're survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence aids, orphans, single mothers abandoned wives, reason being. When I 1st arrived here in Zimbabwe, it had the lowest life expectancy in the world for a woman
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Damien Mander: thought. If we're gonna an opportunity here, then let's create it for those that deserve it the most. What we didn't realize is we we were getting the toughest
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Damien Mander: in society. And we we thought, you know, maybe these women are going to go out and seek retribution. But that uniform and the tools to carry the job did not become an extension of ego. It did not become a domineering force. It was. It was more of a sense of pride and a sense of purpose, a sense of sisterhood. They became part of a family. And
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Damien Mander: you know, actually, I'm up here in camp at the moment, and, you know.
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Damien Mander: sat down around the campfire with 30 plus the women last night and just chatting with them.
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Damien Mander: you know the you know they they keep.
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Damien Mander: They keep thanking the organization, for the opportunity and or for the for for what's happened. And I keep reminding them like you are everything that's happened.
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Damien Mander: The only thing we did as an organization was, create the one thing that never existed for these women. And that was the opportunity.
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Damien Mander: And you know, we've we've got women that are going off and doing amazing things around the world. You know.
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Damien Mander: it's not just about being a ranger. It's a stepping stone. The 1st question we ask the women when they come to selection or pre-selection. What are your dreams? What do you want to do? Because there are no limits? I think the perception in their own minds has always been that there is a limit, and that limit is set pretty low.
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David Rock: Yeah, let's let's let's talk about sort of how you're training them in a minute. But it just you just remind me I was
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David Rock: I was in Sydney for a couple of weeks recently. I'm just back in the States. I saw family and what I was driving back from my Dad's, and
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David Rock: there was a police I had to pull aside for a police car, and I saw this police car kind of whizzing down the side and join another police car. I'm like, Oh, what's going on here? Something bad has happened, and I sort of started to pull up, and there was a very battered old car that the 1st car pulled up, and I was just the timing was right that I could see exactly what's going on, and there was, you know my assumption was there was some, you know, a bunch of
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David Rock: young young blokes that were doing something wrong. There was this very, you know, an older woman who probably doesn't drive all that much I don't know. But she she caused some some issue with, you know, with driving, and this Policewoman walks up, and I thought, you know, like walks up to her window. The traffic was kind of moving very slowly. I saw the whole thing like, and walks up this window and basically puts a hand in and holds the old woman's hand.
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Damien Mander: Yeah.
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David Rock: Just like just stood there for 30 seconds, just held a hand while she talked to her, and this older woman was clearly like super distressed right, and she.
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Damien Mander: And.
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David Rock: And it went in, and just like de-escalated and just.
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Damien Mander: Yeah.
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David Rock: Whole situation down, and it was such a surprise! It was such a kind of a distracting thing. I just couldn't imagine that happening here as well. But that's kind of the sense I'm getting is that women are just responding differently in the same situation. They're de-escalating where others would, you know would escalate? Is that something teachable like? Do you teach them? That? Is it like, how do they get to that.
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Damien Mander: We don't. We actually don't teach it. And
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Damien Mander: community-based policing was a was a subject we used to teach in law enforcement with men. You know how to interact with people.
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Damien Mander: you know, from a from a job sense, we seem to have found the most powerful force in nature, and that's a woman's instinct to protect
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Damien Mander: from a corruption standpoint.
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Damien Mander: You know, women, these women. They want to buy their own, and most of them within 18 months they've bought their own land. They've built their own house. It means getting their families back together. It means getting their kids back into primary school, their siblings back into high school healthcare for the parents, and food on the table.
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David Rock: And they don't want to jeopardize that for all the tea in China, and and.
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Damien Mander: corruption is the threat of getting between the mother and the cubs. The women just wants to protect the family unit. And this is not. This is not. I'm not sitting here, man, bashing. I'm just talking about
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Damien Mander: 2 and a half decades of experience across 3 continents. It's it's a different dynamic. You know, there was a completely different formula. And it was working. We'd be using that. This is just what's working for us.
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Damien Mander: And you know it's it's I mean.
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Damien Mander: it's not just working for us. Now we've we've helped.
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David Rock: Write the the policy and guidelines for
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Damien Mander: That will inform over 160 governments around the world on how to integrate women into the front lines of conservation and and akashing was benchmarked as the case. Study on how to do that, and we're still getting it right. One of the big big things for us was, you know, we you know, we found this this model at a small scale that started to work. But you know we're a bunch of knuckle dragging tattooed ex special forces, dudes. And
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Damien Mander: and we're like, well.
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Damien Mander: you know, is this the right foundation to build an organization up at a rapid scale.
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Damien Mander: you know, centralized around a strategy of women's empowerment, and we had 2 independent gender mainstreaming audits done, and we we literally had to go and break the organization down to rubble and rebuild it back up into into what it is today, in order for us to be able to scale. Otherwise there was no way we were going to be able to achieve what we had to do. And there's a lot of egos that had to be left at the door in that process.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah, what I'm hearing. I mean, this is, I think, what a lot of us will want to hear about is, yeah. Women have. Maybe this natural instinct to protect, and they bring a set of values that might be different than than men would. But how would you like? What if what if we were to train individuals to to kind of have those features? What is it about the dialogue that women bring to the interaction the poachers that de escalates? And how can we kind of build that and train that? Or can we.
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Damien Mander: Look, I mean, my my job is counterinsurgency warfare. Our job is to look for a fight and finish it. And
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Damien Mander: I don't know. Women. Women seem to want to have a conversation before they blow something up which is pretty powerful when you're trying to have a relationship with a community that outnumbers you in the tens of thousands living alongside such massive wilderness areas, I think
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Damien Mander: you know. So I think some of the most powerful things we can do as men is is to
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Damien Mander: sometimes just take a sideboard step and
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Damien Mander: and let things run their course. And that's a scary thing.
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Damien Mander: It's a scary thing. And and I talk about this. You know, we have women that go around and and talk about the program women from from the program. And they talk about this. And if, like women already get it
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Damien Mander: like, they know that they have this superpower. I talk about it because
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Damien Mander: I am a knuckle dragging Alpha male, and some of the people that really need to hear what needs to be said are only going to listen to guys like me. And that's why I do what I do.
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David Rock: Are you? Are you training like, are you? So you're finding there's a natural instinct to de-escalate. What about, you know with with 900 people. You've obviously got some leadership structure. And have you found that you're developing leaders? How you're developing leadership within the organization itself. I'm curious about that.
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Damien Mander: Yeah. So it's it's like one of the major things we identified is we're bringing women into an industry where they've and not only into an industry, but from a society where they've
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Damien Mander: a very patriarchal society, where they've lacked exposure to the experience
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Damien Mander: necessary to be able to be in leadership positions and through all the courses in the world. But you can't fast track experience. So you know, we we do have women that are in in senior leadership positions. At the moment. Some of the operational leadership positions. We have some of the best men on the Continent.
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Damien Mander: paralleling the women bringing them up
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Damien Mander: through the ranks. You know you can't fast track 3 decades of experience. But you know you've got
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Damien Mander: like Nurazo, she she she went and did a a bachelor's in in
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Damien Mander: conservation biology. She's just been accepted through a scholarship from the Clinton Global Initiative. She's about to leave for the us and go and do a master's there. She's lectured at Harvard. We've had women that have spoken on the National Geographic Speakers. Bureaus in, sold out crowds 3 nights in a row in Seattle for 2.5,000 people.
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Damien Mander: women that have been named the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Ranger of the year, Maggie. She just won the International Ranger Federation, Young Ranger of the year.
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Damien Mander: women that are traveling all over the world speaking about what they're doing. But most of all women that are not limited to
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Damien Mander: just signing up and being a Ranger, women that understand that there is no limits to what they can do, and the opportunities are there. The only things that that
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Damien Mander: will limit them is their own motivation to dream as much as possible. And it's the same as any one of us who, out of all of us there's very few of us that will sit here and go who've done something significant, will sit there and go shit. You know, I really saw myself here at the age of 19.
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Damien Mander: It becomes progressive, and you build, you know you start stepping on. You know you climb one mountain and you see a taller mountain peak ahead and you go. Yeah, you know what I can go for that. And that's that's the situation we have here. And these women are so young, you know. They're, you know. They're like late twenties, early thirties, and they've been with us for 7, 8 years, some of them, and they're already rocking it.
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David Rock: Doing big things. I'm sure you're changing the culture you're creating a generation of leaders at the heart of some of the toughest countries in Africa. I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when we applaud your work, and I think you're one of the people that's constantly asking that question, you know, how do I best use my life?
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David Rock: How do I best use my skills? My training, and, you know, be as useful as I can. It's an important question for us always to ask ourselves. Let's lift up a little bit, I mean, can I ask the elephant in the room question about the elephant on the planes question. But the the elephant in the room question is, you know, where else do you think this principle is is relevant to like. Who else you know where else? What are the functions?
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David Rock: Around the world, you know. Should we be? Have a lot more women involved in? You know. And where do you see this? This? These lessons are relevant. If you could wave a magic wand and sort of change, the you know, makeup of different functions. What do you see?
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Damien Mander: You know, I never saw a picture of a bunch of women gathered around building a nuclear bomb.
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Damien Mander: There's something there's something different there. And I can say that as as a
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Damien Mander: a former young, hot headed testosterone, fueled male, immature, male and
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Damien Mander: you know, I just think I genuinely believe, throughout all sectors. We need more women leadership the
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Damien Mander: opening of more opportunities to break down the barriers that women have to do far more to prove themselves in various sectors and at board level, and a management level than men do.
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Damien Mander: And I sort of.
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Damien Mander: you know, take away this, all these bromances that that knit so many organizations together, and just like be vulnerable like.
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Damien Mander: Be open like. Leave the ego.
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Damien Mander: as I said, leave the ego at the door and see what happens. We're not a women's empowerment organization. We just found something that makes greater business sense. And perhaps that's something that will appeal to people that don't want to think outside the box.
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David Rock: I mean, would you say like policing would be done better by by women like or significant percentage more women or all women? Or what would you say if you could, you know. Look at another country and advise them, would you say? Look, put women in charge of of policing
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David Rock: us to to charge right now, but in another country, somewhere in Europe, if they called you and said, Damien, what should we do here? We're having, you know issues with our police force and corruption. Would you advise them to put women in charge of policing.
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Damien Mander: The thing is, you can't go on and sack an entire unit of men and replace them with women and see what happens, because you're going to get resentment. All the areas that we have gone into long-term partnerships with in Africa are former trophy hunting areas. Foreigners used to pay to come over and shoot the animals
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Damien Mander: and take the trophies back and hang them over the fireplace, or whatever the fuck. Excuse me, I know I'm not supposed to swear whatever they want to do with those trophies
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Damien Mander: that trophy hunting as an industry is dying. So we wanted to look at it as an equation, to be solved rather than an argument to be had.
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Damien Mander: and
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Damien Mander: in doing so we had a blank canvas, because where hunting had failed from a commercial aspect, there was no employees left.
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Damien Mander: so we had these blank canvases to come and trial it.
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Damien Mander: and I can't sit here and try and prescribe formulas to other countries. I can just say what's working for us, and it's not just working for us. It's scaling rapidly.
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Damien Mander: and it shifts the paradigm of of what we're trying to do from being inside an area, trying to defend it
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Damien Mander: from the local community, to being outside shoulder to shoulder with the local community who see the long term benefits in what we're doing, because the social impact that goes into the communities because the broken bridge between conservation and communities has been mended by the relationships of the women that come directly from these communities.
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David Rock: So it's a lot about rebuilding the social fabric and having a more sustainable kind of ecosystem social ecosystem. So that's like a really important thing, and there's lots of research showing that, you know, conservation is good for everyone. It's good for the economy, it's good for locals. It's good for everyone when you're not just, you know, poaching the movement to remove that is actually better for everyone. I guess that's part of the equation as well.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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Damien Mander: I mean sorry.
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Emma Sarro: Oh, no go ahead!
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Damien Mander: And I was going to say, like, you know, we've got a small group of women that have achieved what very few armies in history have been able to do, and that's win the hearts and minds of a local community. And if I was going to be completely
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Damien Mander: you know, go back 2 decades and take a militaristic view at what we're doing from a counterinsurgency standpoint. If you, if you, if you can win the women, you win the household. You win the household, you win the communities, and that's essentially what needs to be done is to is to be able to win the hearts and minds of the communities, because then they see the long-term benefits. You have a long term vision.
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Damien Mander: And then you've got a formula that formula that works. Today it changes. Something may happen overnight. That means the formula has to change. Our job is to sit in the middle of an ever shifting formula and make sure that we have the community on site. It's like being in politics. You can't please everyone. How do you please? The majority.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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Emma Sarro: that's a great point. You know. It's coming up a lot in the chat is just the power of diversity. How important it is. So there's got to be some men in your organization, too. Like how that? How does that work? And how does it all work together? How many men are there. What do they do?
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Damien Mander: So absolutely. So we you know, it was one of the 1st points we had.
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Damien Mander: From the traditional leadership of local government was you need to employ some men.
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Damien Mander: we by this stage, we'd seen the power of the potential in the formula that we were, we were.
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Damien Mander: you know, refining. So we started. But we we we
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Damien Mander: isolated the power roles of decision making law enforcement management for women, and then we open up a bunch of other roles in construction, labor, firefighting
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Damien Mander: for men this subject matter experts as well. So at the moment we have 918 personnel.
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Damien Mander: we have 99% African, 95% come from within 15 miles of the boundary of the area that we protect. And 63% of the organization is women.
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Emma Sarro: Amazing.
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David Rock: Well, that's helpful data. So it's not 100% women, 62% women. And there it sounds like they're in the range of largely the Ranger roles. What percentage of the ranges of women.
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Damien Mander: Almost a hundred percent of our law enforcement staff are women. Yeah.
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David Rock: Okay, but 62% overall are women. But 100% of the law enforcement. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, that's a model right there for other law enforcement agencies to to research and study and understand and see if it makes sense to, you know, to shift to it's it's a really different model. What are some of the implications dream big for us? We've got 5 min left. And but dream big big for us. I mean, what are some of the implications of this? Universally? If you if you could kind of
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David Rock: if you had the, you know world stage and could could make big changes. What would you be wishing for? Universally around, you know, particularly around law enforcement.
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Damien Mander: Around law enforcement. I'm not going to talk about law enforcement. I'm going to talk about conservation, because that's you know, environment. That's that's my passion law enforcement. It's just one of the tools to protect this this beautiful backyard called nature that we have.
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Damien Mander: My
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Damien Mander: my wish would be that the leaders and decision makers start to understand that we're not the main act, and our future as a civilization is going to be dependent on that willingness to preserve biodiversity of mass.
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Damien Mander: we, we are accelerating ourselves into the 6th mass, great extinction for the 1st time in history. It's a human creative phenomenon as a father of 3. I want to be part of the generation that defines our success as a failure, not our failure. And
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Damien Mander: Who knows where this is going to go at the end of it all. I'd like to say I went out with a you know, fighting on the right side of history, and that means doing the right things, making the right choices, looking after nature, protecting animals, protecting the vulnerable.
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Damien Mander: giving nature a chance to do what it does best regulate this planet. And if if we can all just start to think that way, we don't all have to drop everything and run out and be full time conservationists. But if we just think
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Damien Mander: about that aspect, the environmental aspect in everything that we do, we can start to make change. And humans. Civilization is capable of amazing things. When we push far enough into a corner, I just don't think we realize as that global community, how far into the corner. We are at the moment.
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David Rock: Hmm.
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David Rock: yeah, no, that's that's big. We're gonna wrap up. We got one or 2 more quick questions. I know my team wanted to put a poll up for folks to know to let us know how we can support you. We've got a probably a different audience, and we often have here for this one. So my team can put the poll up now. So we know how to follow up with you, Damon. Interesting question in the chat, and folks, you, you know, feel free to put comments to the questions in the chat.
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David Rock: you know. One of the provocative questions was, you know, with 62% women. And you know, 38% men and women all at the front line. Does that mean? Men are in the majority of leadership, roles or women, the majority of leadership roles or sort of how is that structured.
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Damien Mander: I mean, I can say at the moment, like out of the top 6 highest paid personnel in the organization. 5 of them are women
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Damien Mander: in terms of field operations and leadership roles
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Damien Mander: majority, women, law enforcement majority women. There are men in various roles, including myself as a CEO. But yeah, every mile that's in a leadership role. Their job is to work themselves out of that role by bringing up women through the leadership pipeline of the organization. So they're in a position to be able to to take over one day, my job included.
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David Rock: Yeah, beautiful. Any closing questions or thoughts, Emma? Maybe just some closing comments as we. We let people wrap up
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Emma Sarro: I mean, I'm hearing a lot of like the reasons to empower women, but also the importance of humility as a leader and experimenting because this was a huge experiment, right? And and then how purpose, how important purposes! For you know, driving through all of the obstacles, it's been fantastic.
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David Rock: Cast.
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Emma Sarro: Yeah.
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David Rock: Yeah, I just say, Damien, thanks for pushing through and and never giving up. Appreciate you. And I think a lot of people appreciating you in the chat right now. And just appreciate you for for sticking to your guns, so to speak, about finding the most useful thing to do you know for you, and congratulations on the impact that you've had out there? And I agree with them a lot about purpose and a lot about just looking fresh at the situation
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David Rock: and making, you know, getting rid of biases, getting rid of how things should be, and really thinking about different ways of doing so, you know, I'll close with where I started when I met Damien. It was such an inspiring story, and I wanted to share it with lots of folks. We've put a link in the chat if you want to learn more and support his organization anyway. But
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David Rock: just just such a it's such an important story, and I think
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David Rock: you're going to continue to go from strength to strength across many, many countries as you have across Africa. And here's to that being a model for conservation all around the world.
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David Rock: I think that's the next step for you guys, I'm sure, and look forward to supporting you guys any way we can on that journey. I think we might be hosting you in New York sometime in May. So folks look out for that. We may do it in person. Event in the city as well when you're in town. So thanks so much, Damien, for joining us and Emma, and
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David Rock: just a happy Valentine's happy Valentine's day, one aussie bloke to another. We love your work. Thanks for all you're doing out there. And, Emma, thanks for all you're doing out there as well. Thanks everyone for joining us. We'll hand back to Erin for some closing comments. Thanks, everyone. Take care! Bye-bye.
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Erin Wickham: Thanks everyone and thank you, Damien, David and Emma, for today's discussion. We appreciate your time and everything that you shared today for closing. If you haven't already. Please take a look at the poll on your screen and let us know how Nli can help you in the future. The poll will stay up while I go through some closing comments
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Erin Wickham: for C-level or senior level executives looking to get an inside, look at their own brain as they learn from learn critical habits for leaders. We're designing a three-day brain lab of effective habit activation seminars in real-time. Eeg, scanning participants, will walk away with the insights to their own brain as they face complex challenges.
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Erin Wickham: There should be a link in the chat for everything that I announced. But just in case we will also be sending a follow-up email
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Erin Wickham: specifically for senior executives. If you enjoy your brain at work, live, you'll love our Nli insider program. We invite you to join this exclusive opportunity, where you can enjoy benefits such as 1st looks at new research, roundtable discussions with leading executives and researchers, and helping us craft new innovations at work to apply, follow the link shared in the chat. If you enjoyed today's conversation, you'll love, our podcast show. So make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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Erin Wickham: Now, on behalf of myself and the Nli team, we wish you a great Friday, have a wonderful weekend, and we'll see you next week.