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Oct. 8, 2023 - Stew Peters Show
55:49
Challenges Faced by Vets When Transitioning Back to Civilian Life
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Time Text
80 weeks ago, I started filming this show.
Once a week, every week.
When we started, my sole purpose was to bridge the gap between veterans and civilians.
Things that maybe you as civilians, if you're a civilian watching this, you may not understand about veteran culture.
And I think that we have done that pretty well.
Today, we are going to continue down that road.
I have my good friend Jason here with us.
We have picked a topic to just get together and talk about and hopefully bring some understanding about some issues that veterans may have.
If you are somebody who served in the military and don't have these issues and have different ideas, please feel free to let us know what those are.
Hey everybody, welcome here to another installment of the Richard Leonard Show at As always, I want to thank you very much for joining us.
As I've explained before, it's a very humbling experience to do this every week and watch this show grow.
Before we get started with Jason, of course, I know you won't mind me telling you about how the show is made possible.
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Okay, so let's not waste any time.
Let's get right into it.
Let me get over here and find Jason.
There he is.
Yeah.
Folks, before we get started, what I wanted also to say is, before we started, I was telling Jason that he reminds me of like the old wise lion in the pride.
And so, Jason, I really appreciate you being here, buddy.
Thank you.
Good to chat with you, buddy.
You always have great insight, and I hope that you will continue to come back as often as you'd like.
We'd love to have you.
Every week, if you want.
Well, I thought you would really appreciate my Zielinski gear today.
I do, I do.
Although you have him beat in the beard department.
I don't know if he can grow a beard, actually.
He looks pretty beautiful.
I think he and I differ in a lot of departments.
I don't know.
Have you seen some of his older show business videos, his dancing videos?
Yeah, I was going to say, we have a similar dance style technique and look.
You know, I certainly jiggle a lot when I do it, but, you know, all 16 people that have seen that are still pretty excited.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to tell the audience right now, folks, if I ever find any footage of this said jiggling dance style, I will be bringing that to you right away.
Special report.
Should it exist, we wouldn't be talking about it.
Roger that.
Good point.
Okay, so today, folks, the topic that we have chose to talk to you about is life after the military and some things that maybe veterans, military members can kind of get stuck on when they're leaving the service,
not only like directly directly, After they leave, but I believe that it's a battle or an issue or a struggle, whatever you want to call it, for men and women for long after, long after they leave the military.
Kind of the three subcategories that we talked about offline were like a financial, social, and professional topics, right?
And they're all pretty broad.
I think let's just get her going, right?
Financial.
Now, Jason, you are, between the two of us, you're a lot better with finances than I am.
I mean...
I like to buy drones and all kinds of crazy stuff.
But you understand money a lot better and how money works for you a lot better.
What are some insights you have as to how veterans struggle financially when they leave the service?
Or if at all?
Right.
Well, I think veterans, I think we all struggle with a little thing called impulse control.
You know, it's one of those things that I don't know how it gets drilled into us.
Maybe it's innate in how we pick things up as we drive through.
But, you know, kind of, I noticed for me, I won't speak for anyone else, but when I got back from my first deployment, boy, I could piss through money faster than most people could.
Absolutely.
It was about accumulating things and having these experiences and doing stuff I couldn't have otherwise done.
You know, and I think part of that is, for me, I was an even older veteran when I first went in 2003.
I mean, I was 24 years old.
I certainly wasn't like, you know...
A 18-year-old boot coming out of, you know, mama's nest or somebody taking a one-year deferral going into college.
I had already lived a fair amount, kind of that precursor start into adulthood.
And if it were something that I guess if I were to look at myself and say I had some type of, you know, savvy control put in place, I certainly think I had that when I was young.
And boy, that sure as hell went away when I got home.
Yeah.
Well, I would venture to say that I had trouble with it even while I was in the service.
I remember coming home from my second deployment and at the time I was living with my mother and my stepfather because I had gotten divorced before I left.
And I remember walking into my room and seeing, and there was probably about 45 to 55 packages, boxes, of things that I was purchasing while I was deployed and sending home clothes.
I think I bought a pair of rollerblades that I wore one time, but they looked really cool, right?
We're getting paid every two weeks.
We don't have much to pay for except for your bills back home.
Jason, you and I have talked about this before on the show, that the Army, for us, in our case, the Army, the military does a really good job at...
I'm providing you or making things look sexy like your paycheck.
It looks a lot better than it really is because of the things that you don't have to pay for while you're serving.
But they don't do a really good job, at least while I serve.
They may have changed now in the last four or five years at helping you to understand what How to be responsible with your money.
And so, I think that post-service, guys and gals really struggle with this because, you know, it's not...
You go in at 19, 20 years old, you spend all that time, but you haven't really lived on your own.
You haven't really had to provide for yourself.
And now you're in this situation where it's sink or swim.
And we find ourselves in trouble, right?
I guess my question would be, where do you think that we go?
If I'm a 25-year-old dude who just left after a five or six-year enlistment, where do I go?
And I realize I have a problem managing my money.
Where do I go for help?
Right.
Well, and I think that's, you know, maybe it would be one of those things that the VA could make contact with some type of nonprofit who could build out a real financial education center, not these ones that, you know, these banks put on that are just all geared and driven towards this 10% savings thing and all these other Old school or older philosophies to start helping people get ahead.
We're living in a financial time that we've never seen before.
Money doesn't go anywhere near where it did two, three years ago.
Percentages of your budget are completely blown out of proportion.
I mean, Richie, think about this.
If I were a single guy right now and I was just starting all the construction trades, and let's just say, I mean, I got a nice, nice entry-level job as a carpenter at maybe 16 to 18 bucks.
Let's just pick 18 bucks on the high side.
And my boss is so fortunate that he'll let me pick up 10 hours of overtime.
So I'm going to grab my calculator because I've actually just thought about this one.
So if I had 50 hours, that means I had one and a half times on the 10, that's 15, that's 55 hours times $18.
That's $990.
That's almost $50,000 a year if I marketed that and I ran that out over a 52 week, right?
Mm-hmm.
But I lose roughly 32% of that, and I end up with marketably less, like $675 times 4.
Roughly $2,700 a month coming in.
But the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in the market in which we live is going to run me between $1,250 and $1,400 to $1,500.
And I certainly think that, you know, I would be living in the $1,450 to $1,500 probably because there's fewer bullets.
Just saying.
Yeah, it's true.
If you take that $1,400 against that $2,700 of actual taken home income, you have spent 50% of your budget on housing, living by yourself.
Now, statistically, going back, a great benchmark for housing And that would have been your entire nut of housing was 25 to 30%.
So you've increased that number by at least 40%, if not 50%.
That's an extraordinary amount of money going out just to pay one basic bill.
How the hell do you navigate that world?
And I'm sure that breaks into a whole other host of issues, but that's the world we live in right now.
So if it is a transitioning military member coming off of, you know, active duty service, trying to think about something that you've never had to think about, that would be a real eye opener.
Like, where am I going to live?
I'd get a stinking box.
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Right.
And then I think what happens, what ends up happening then is that these guys and gals, they end up shacking up with roommates, right?
A couple of them get a place together or, you know, like I would have came home and got a place with a buddy of mine or a couple buddies of mine if they were looking.
If not, we end up going where?
We end up going home.
We end up going back to mom and dad's house if that's an option, which I think usually mostly it is.
I think most parents are probably pretty cool with their son or daughter coming home for a year or something like that after they leave the military until they figure it out.
But things aren't getting better.
And so now we have to figure out how to navigate...
Paying 50% of our income for housing.
We need to eat.
We can't live, as we found out recently today, we can't live without decent internet access, right?
We gotta have fuel for our car.
We gotta have groceries.
We gotta have a social life, right?
There's a lot of things that...
There's a lot of problems that we have day to day that a little bit of cash in our pocket solves.
And I mean a little bit of cash.
And so I guess that brings us to the next thing, which is professional, right?
And so having a job that is worth going to because it's going to get you ahead is becoming an even bigger struggle for everybody across the board.
Not just veterans, not just members of the military, but having employment that is meaningful, that helps you to feel accomplished, is a huge struggle, in my opinion, for some veterans, because what does that service translate into in the civilian world?
And there is help for that.
There are places you can go for that, but...
I think that at the end of the day, those struggles, whether you get help to write a resume or interview skills or you just get hooked up with a job, there are still things that hinder your progression through a career because of your service.
And Jason, you employ veterans, don't you?
Yeah, I mean, with the exception of myself, I think we have one on staff still, but we certainly, we have.
A lot of good people have come through and gone on to other opportunities.
We certainly, anytime I see veteran notation on those applications when they come in, I always want to do a deep dive because I just know we all have stories, right?
And I think we're very unique in the fact that it doesn't matter.
There's three linear storylines that kind of go along with the military now.
Maybe it's something in years past you didn't really think about, but it's truly true.
In today's time, because you have the active component departures, of which we just had a great guy, even though he got the extra pay to go jump out of airplanes, I don't hold it against him.
I never understood that.
Yeah.
But he was a hell of a nice guy looking for a place to land.
He ended up coming and staying with us for a year and then moving on.
But then you've got veterans who have since departed from, you know, the reserve component service.
That's a completely different person too.
And then you have the others that, you know, are still active in the guard and again, or the reserve component.
As a whole, but those are, I still consider everybody a veteran regardless of your deployment time, even though we can argue amongst ourselves what veteran really means.
Those are three different unique spaces in life that can be terribly challenging for an employer to figure out how to navigate.
Right.
Right.
Well, let's talk about that.
What are some of those things?
And I'll tell you this right now.
My current job, everyone knows, I work at the local Harley-Davidson dealership, struggle bus today.
And my boss will surely tell you, if you were to ask him, that I am a scheduling nightmare.
Aside from some of the issues I have with my mental health, my physical health, hindering some of the duties I should be performing at work, but there's also this time that you need to go to the VA, to your appointments, and a doctor's here and a doctor there.
Some veterans, some days they just wake up and they're just in a bad way.
Right?
And so, not that that should be an excuse not to show up for work, right?
Because we all have shitty days.
But you still got to do what you got to do.
But...
It also presents a challenge while you're there at work, if you're having a crap, just like anybody else.
What are some of those issues as an employer that you've run into employing veterans?
I imagine it's had to have been an issue at some point, whether it was big or small.
Right.
Well, and it comes up, you know, if somebody is in the reserve component, reserves or guard, you know, especially when I was in, when you were in, you know, it started out kind of one weekend a month, two weeks a year.
That quickly escalated to a lot of muta fives, muta six, losing Fridays, volunteer Mondays.
I don't know what the training schedule looks like today.
But I can say in the past that we've had a couple of folks who were in the guard here in the state.
And the amount of training time that they had taken off.
And it's great because you get to know it in advance.
And for the most part, the schedules did hold.
But when you lose...
Three to four days a month.
When you really start to think about what a month looks like, when you say three days on 30, that's only 10%.
It doesn't sound like much.
But we only have 20 working days.
We don't have 30 working days.
We have 20.
And so if I'm losing three or four, that's 15% to 20%.
Out the door.
And so sometimes, you know, of course, you know, you're not going to say no to hiring that person because of that, but it's going to create some hurdles and obstacles because typically the end of the week is when you're busy.
And I'm sure that's one of those things too at Harley.
They need you there when they need you there.
I can understand.
I deal with it myself my way because that's what we're going to do.
But I could also understand if it was a turnoff to an employer because it's still a widget.
I don't care if it's a person, if it's a thing that you're selling.
And if you have 40-hour holes that you're trying to fill, you have to look at reserve component individuals as part-timers.
That's a unique, that's terribly difficult.
And then take out the fact that they're still going to have sick days, they're still going to have bad days, they're still going to have this, and then tag on another two weeks.
By golly, it's a treacherous path to navigate, especially as a small business owner.
A big business owner, yeah, maybe there's some pitfalls there, but still to them, it's a bitch.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, because at the end of the day, you still have to provide your service, your widget, whatever it is that you're providing, and your customers or the people that use your service, you know, they probably don't care, right?
They don't care that, well, you know, you got to allow this person their two days off or their two weeks of summer, but yet they're still paying you for a service.
You're still there to do a job.
And so making those excuses is not a good thing.
So we need to pick up the slack.
And I will tell you that, to the best of my knowledge, the operation tempo of the Minnesota Guard anyway, from the few people I know that are still in, It hasn't slowed down at all.
In fact, a Muta 3, which would be...
For those of you who don't know, a Muta is about half a day, right?
So a Muta 3 would be a one-and-a-half-day weekend drill.
Muta 4 would be Saturday and Sunday.
But now they're doing 5, 6.
There's even a couple 7s I've heard of.
I heard of an 8 last year.
I mean...
And employers have to give you the time off.
It's not like they can say, well, you know, I'm sorry, I can't let you go.
Federal law dictates that they have to let you go.
And they also cannot fire you for serving in the military.
So you're protected that way.
But it's probably not unheard of, Jason, that some of these soldiers or service members...
There's some kind of backlash or they feel it or there's some kind of BS going on when they get back to work or some shitty feelings, right?
Because someone else had to pick up their slack.
And so, like you said, they end up essentially being part-time employees.
But the challenge is, for me, understanding how Our government, the military, kind of just expects the soldiers and veterans now to just kind of figure it out.
Like, hey, we need you here.
We have a training event.
Everything else you're going to just have to kind of figure out.
Because any other kind of benefits or any other kind of stuff that they might be able to offer you to make life easier...
It's nearly impossible to get or it's not offered at all.
So what do we do?
And so I think that this kind of brings us back around to the unemployment rates, veteran homelessness, some chemical dependency issues.
I mean, I don't think it's a rare story.
To hear of veterans who kind of had life by the balls, right?
Had decent jobs, had a nice family, and then something happens and everything kind of just snowballs, right?
And before you know it, they're homeless, jobless, and addicted to some kind of substance.
And I don't think that's the vast majority, but in a population of people that's less than 1% of our country, that's a pretty big number, whatever that is.
Yeah, we do some high-flying in the veteran community, don't we?
We always push out the left and right limits.
Well, yeah, and we're always looking to just kind of tiptoe right on that line and see if we can just get a foot over it, you know?
Yeah, live in the fringe, but I mean...
You know, and I keep glancing over at this because I find so much humor in half of the stuff that, you know, we kind of went through when we were departing, you know, our military service, Richard.
Did you know that on the VA's website, one of the things that apparently is challenging to veterans, and I quote, a veteran may have to learn how to get a doctor, dentist, life insurance, etc.
Hmm?
Okay, number one, I don't care.
If you spent four years in the military and you cannot navigate how to find a dentist or a doctor, there are other problems.
This can't be in the top 10 list of things that the VA needs to spend its time discussing with veterans, you know, preparing to enter the workforce.
And I heard you say it before, you know, to help them write a resume.
I mean, it's not 1982 out there.
Yeah.
You know, these resumes aren't what they used to be.
As long as you can run it through, you know, you bring it to somebody and you have this thing wordsmith, you're going to rise to the top and at least get an interview just through that simple fact.
This thing doesn't, you don't need to spend any more resources on these archaic old ideas and philosophies of problems with people transitioning out of the military into civilian life.
Well, I think the fact is that a lot of these places, if we're going to talk about employment Anywhere you go to apply for a job, I think that they still do give you the option to upload a resume, but I would say 95 to 98% of these places, it's a fill in the blank, right?
Put in this job and the dates and the times and where'd you go to school and what did you do there type of stuff.
So writing a traditional resume may be quickly something of the past.
I would say that more than anything, it's about how you present yourself in person.
When you do get the interview, actually applying for the job, in my opinion, seems like it's easy enough, right?
I mean, you create a profile, you answer the questions, you hit, I like this job, apply, right?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know.
I've never done that either.
But, and I'm not saying that resumes don't exist.
What I'm saying is like the resume of your is gone.
All of these corporations and even smaller businesses use third party resources.
To do analytic reading on the actual resumes themselves.
So you could actually be a stud or an all-star, but because you're writing your resume yourself or you're having one of these old timey VA experience resume writers where they bring you up to the edge, but they don't really, you know, They don't really know what's going on.
They're not hip with the game.
Holy shit, did I just age myself with that line.
But, you know, you can honestly have, you know, you spend $15 and they can write a resume that will get you read, like right to the top.
These are the keywords.
And you and I remember, you know, for NCOERs and certainly OERs for other folks, If you didn't write those things specifically with that particular verbiage, you know, by the time it got up to a senior rater, you know, it was kind of thrown in the garbage.
It wasn't necessarily about your, you know, your specific attributes.
It was how many buzzwords, ideologies, and other pieces can you add to this to quantify who this person is in a manner in which they can read it.
And that's, in essence, what a resume has become is a senior rater, which just happens to be the old interweb, Goes through and scrubs this thing to figure out who you actually are because they have personality traits that they want to find in the specific resume that's written versus identifying individual skill sets within those people.
So I think as awesome as technology is, it's certainly taken away from the individualistic approach of a resume and it's drawn it out to this grand approach where just get the resume put together so you can go meet somebody in person and then impress them.
Yeah, I agree a thousand percent.
And I'll tell you this, there is a lot of, these programs have all your keywords picked out before you even, five seconds after you submitted it.
And I use things nowadays in my professional writing Like Grammarly, right?
Where I can write out what I want to say.
I can go in the menu and click serious, you know, funny, passive, whatever.
Different emotions and it'll reconstruct my writing into that tone.
Or at least give you ideas about how to do that and recommendations.
So there's a lot of ways around that stuff.
I agree a thousand percent.
Anyway folks, we've run out of time in this segment.
We will be right back.
Stick with us.
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Hey folks, welcome back here.
After the quick break, I want to continue, Jason, if you will humor me.
I know that we have, as always, we have a planned list of things to talk about.
But I'd like to continue on down the employment road because, as you were saying offline, that employment solves a whole litany of things for people, especially for veterans.
And so, I think that maybe we should talk about that, right?
And I was thinking back to the thing that kind of helped me to, I don't want to say grow up, but maybe that's the right term because maybe I should just face it, I was kind of a shithead.
When I was young, but my first real job came after my first deployment, right?
I did two deployments.
I got home from my first deployment in 2007.
It was probably late winter, early the next spring, so very early in 2008.
When I secured a job working for a member of Congress, doing military and VA case work and outreach here in Minnesota in the district in which that congressman was responsible for.
And it was a struggle for me.
And I still to this day, and I'm thankful for the congressman, of course, who's now retired.
But everyone else that I worked with and for on that staff because they were very patient.
Very patient people.
Because I was struggling with some stuff.
I was getting divorced.
My mental health was not right.
There was just a whole list of things.
And they certainly had more than one reason to tell me to beat it.
And they didn't.
And so I've always been grateful for that.
It gave me a lot of experience to build further employment off of and kind of be able to put myself in a position to help other veterans deal with government, basically, which we know, and especially in the last 80 weeks, that dealing with government is quite a bear at times.
And so, but I obtained that job through someone who was also a veteran, working in the capacity to help veterans work, but still a good friend of mine, and had that connection not been there.
I would have been working or what I would have.
But that was the one thing that kind of set me on a path to build a bigger and better life for myself and my son because I was newly single dad.
And looking back on it now, Jason, it was...
It was a godsend for me because I can see now where life was really kind of probably going down the wrong dirt road, if you will.
Right.
What about you?
What was your first experience with a job or employment that was of substance, as you would put it?
Right.
Well, I think, you know, probably my wake-up job was coming off my, after my second deployment.
I knew what I didn't want to do, if that makes sense.
And certain people on the National Guard had decided what I wasn't going to do anymore, so that made that pretty easy.
I guess I look back, I can't blame them, but still, a little salt there.
Yeah.
But it's similar to you.
It was a friend of an acquaintance, certainly a pay grade well, well beyond mine.
Actually made a fairly good contact at a regional bank.
And I ended up there for almost a decade.
You don't need to learn much.
If you understand how banks make money, that's how you do it so you can make money.
And always being mindful of that.
I'm blessed looking back on it because it was probably the one thing that drug me through a divorce.
Drug me into a new marriage with kids and it really set me up to succeed.
And I can assure you, similar to your statement, there were many opportunities or reasons that I could have been terminated, but I think my redeeming quality was my inability to quit.
And it's one of the, and again, I keep glancing over at this because this Veterans Employment Toolkit, there is something in here that I thought was actually a very amazing tool.
It's actually articulated here where I've never really seen it, and I always understood who I was and how I operated, and it's clear that this happens to a lot of us, and I quote, In the military, personnel do not leave until the mission is complete.
In the private sector business, an employee might be expected to stop and go home at 5 p.m., whether the mission is complete or not.
This may not be apparent to all veterans.
Now, I don't know if that was a redeeming quality that you brought to the congressman, but I can assure you my availability for my job, 40 hours was probably picked up by about Wednesday.
So...
They certainly got the 70 to 80 hours a week out of me.
And again, I love the fact that I had the opportunity to work there, but seeing it right here in black and white was something I've never seen before, and I guess I've just never looked at this.
But I know it rang true for me, and it's probably the reason that I was able to stay there as long as I was.
Well, so let me ask you this.
I thought of this as you were talking.
Because for a lot of employers, especially maybe small business owners, having an employee that is frustrated or upset or refusing to go home until him or her is done with that task, Can be something that is unacceptable, right?
Because overtime pay, you know, for my, and I don't know if this is true, but the way I kind of understood it is, you know, if you're, if you're at work past hours doing extra work, it's still getting paid, but then something happened, gets hurt.
And then, you know, like your, your insurance and all the other stuff becomes more expensive maybe, or whatever.
I don't know the ins and outs of all of that.
But those types of things become a problem for employers, especially small businesses, because there's not just an unlimited supply of money coming in and out of there.
You know, and in certain instances, too, you need to have supervision.
You know, you have to have a technical expert there on site.
And so then again, it's an additional drain in productivity because in a small business world, in the construction world, every hour we get before noon, we can count as two hours.
Every hour from noon to two is one hour.
Anything after two is a half of them.
As far as we do, like productivity calculations.
And so in the construction world, it's just, it's, you know, maybe you get 10s, 12s, but you're only going to get those a few days a week.
In the job that I had, It was just the fact that I wouldn't stop.
And I was salary, so nobody cared if I was working 80 hours a week.
And again, in retrospect, I certainly gave a lot more than I received in compensation, but I received more in education than I could have ever paid for.
Right.
Well, what other things do you think might be on the mind of an employer That is timid about hiring veterans.
Well, you know, number one, I don't turn my TV on and see it, but I certainly hear all the horror stories about veterans, right?
You know, we have all these issues.
Clearly, our suicide numbers are out of control.
We struggle with substance abuse.
Again, I need to be at the doctor.
I have certain inavailabilities that make me less desirable to be hired.
You know, all of those factors, you know, if you're a small employer, say you just have a handful of employees, you know, if you've got three employees that are on the job site and one of them has gone half of the time, I mean, you're losing 16.5% of your overall productivity for the week just from that one person.
And then chances are good.
Everybody else sees that.
You know, they kind of, they feel like, you know, this guy is letting them down.
They can't get as much done.
So, like, all those force multiplication things.
Numbers I told you before that, like the hours before 12, after two, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, it just bags on the attitude and people hear those stories.
I mean, we've had veterans now for what, 20 some years?
You know, the young veterans in the workforce?
The stuff we're talking about now isn't anything new.
Now we're talking about an entire generation of veterans who have, you know, worked here, there, and everywhere.
I would find it suspect if you told me that there was somebody who hadn't worked with a veteran and probably wouldn't ever say it to me.
They probably wouldn't ever tell me, but they either had a really good or really bad experience.
And I rarely hear a lot of great experiences.
Just saying.
Right.
And so...
It becomes, for me, in my opinion, it becomes kind of a catch-22 as it relates to this show, right?
Because we spend a lot of time, or I spend a lot of time, making this show, being a talking head on this network, and we talk a lot about veteran struggles.
About the things that ail the community.
We talk a little bit about the great things that we do, but usually we're talking about the struggles we have as it relates to government and VA and the community around us.
I hate to be that information outlet that's saying, well, you know, the veterans, we got all these problems.
But then on the flip side of the coin, say, yeah, but you should be hiring all of us because we're great human beings.
And I think that the truth of that, Jason, is somewhere in the middle, right?
Because first of all, there's no secret that in our community, we have some shitheads.
Every community has them.
Nobody is exempt from that.
But I guess what I'm trying to say is that we as a culture or a population of people, we're not perfect.
And we do have issues.
And there are things that ail us.
I don't know.
I guess I don't...
I'm struggling with how to word it properly.
Because I do believe that as veterans, we can be amazing employees for somebody.
But we have to individually figure out how to navigate...
That world, right?
That whatever industry we want to work in, wherever it is we want to be, we have to figure out how to navigate that world and make it work for us the best way that we can, but also in a way that helps that employer stay profitable, helps the people around us that we work with stay motivated and engaged, and yet meet the requirements that we need for our own health and our own well-being at the same time, which is the biggest struggle in my opinion.
Right.
And I would just jump on the back of that and say, yeah, we certainly, I think what I enjoy the most when we do this is talking about those struggles because, you know...
I don't do a lot of preparation, so anything that I'm talking about has likely been something that I've experienced myself.
And so I'm just hopeful that somebody out there is hearing it.
Maybe it's one person, maybe it's more.
But even just one, and that person happens to be me listening to it later in the day.
I want people to feel that they're not alone because those struggles are real and sometimes we hide like that dirty, ugly, calloused anus of a problem on the backside where you just get it out in front.
No, you're not alone.
Be able to go into this and you can go find that team.
There are...
Multitude of employers that would love to have, you know, those people with those warts and issues and everything in that group because certain people gel together.
People in the military understand what team building is.
Even if you weren't a high-ranking NCO or an officer putting together groups or teams, we all had our battle buddies.
I don't care if it was the team shitbird or team stud.
It was still a team.
You knew who you could operate with and who you could do things with to be successful.
You'll be able to find that place and bouncing from job to job is no longer something that you should really be thoughtful of because if it's not meaningful and if it's not fruitful, it's not worth wasting your effort on.
I agree.
I agree.
And I think that this may be something that folks of an older generation have trouble understanding.
For example, my mother, God bless her, I love her to death.
But we've had multiple conversations, her and I, because I've had a ton of jobs in my day.
And a lot of them were because, you know, it just wasn't working out for me to be able to excel in my military career any longer when I was still serving.
And for me, it was important for me, right?
The commitment I made to the United States Army, albeit just, and some people out there are going to go, well, you were only in the National Guard.
Well, whatever.
I made the commitment and I was going to see it through.
My goal was to put in my time and retire and retire.
And so that's what I was trying to do.
And so everything else around me as it pertains to my employment, to my social life, kind of revolved around that.
So when I was working at a place that, and I never worked anywhere that was like, well, you know, you got drill coming up and then you have this other training event a week after.
I don't know if we can accommodate that.
Nobody ever said that.
But it was clear to me that certain places, certain employers, just were not cool with it, right?
And they weren't happy about it.
Nobody ever threatened to fire me or anything like that.
That's not what I'm trying to say.
But you can just tell, right?
You can tell when there's a problem.
You can tell when people are feeling some type of way.
And so I would move on and find another place.
And so my mother used to get on me all the time about, well, you know, you should really think about getting a job here, there or wherever and just plant your roots and stay there until you're ready to be done working.
And I could never fathom that.
The only thing that I did for longer than six or seven years at a time was the United States Army, bounty hunting with Stu Peters, and that's it.
Everything else was a couple years here, a few years there.
And then we're on to the next thing.
Because my focus always was, well, you know, I think we're going to deploy in a year or so.
So do I really want to go to another job and then start from the bottom?
Maybe I'll just stay here until we get back from deployment.
We'll see how that goes.
If they offer me a promotion when I come back from deployment, because they're supposed to let you have those things.
That type of stuff.
And so, I guess I don't...
When people are talking to employers about hiring veterans, I don't know that it's common practice that we talk to employers about the real no-bullshit struggles that some people are going to have until they just kind of fall into their place.
Right?
And allowing them to do that within reason.
Does that make sense?
Well, absolutely.
But I'm sure the devil's advocate here is, well, we can't afford those failures.
Well, I'm certain he can.
And I know that's something you always want to do, right?
Because we want to come up with a solution.
Like, what's a fix?
What's a patch?
What's a this?
What's a that?
I don't think this one has one.
I think the fix is in each and every one of us.
You know, it's, you know, your mother's philosophy that you need to have a corporate career and hold on to it until you retire is, again, a bygone idea because corporations and companies don't take care of their employees the way that they used to.
They don't bump compensation.
They don't have, you know, not only 401ks, but they don't have these dividend pays and all these other great things that they were fortunate enough to live through in their generation.
Our generation makes its big financial jumps by leaving jobs and going to the next, right?
Taking the skills that you learned, learning from the failures that you had, going to the next place until you find that place that's a true career and it's a true fit.
And it might be you found the career, you just didn't find the place.
You know, I really enjoyed the job, the people sucked.
Well, guess what?
There's other places that do it.
Yeah.
There's not a job that I can think of that's so specific that there's only one company doing it.
As long as you're kicking up 10% to the big guy, everything's fine.
Well, and I'll tell you this.
Some of the veterans I know personally that are the most content, I won't necessarily say the most happy, but the most content are the ones that have figured out how to work for themselves.
Are the people that figure out how to own their own business and make a wage and sustain it.
Because then all of those problems become not really a problem for you anymore.
Right?
Like if I start a...
You know, here, my pipe.
Like this is something I enjoy, my pipe.
So if I start a pipe making company...
I don't have to worry about whether or not I got a VA appointment.
I'll make an extra pipe tomorrow, right?
Whereas if I'm working for Tommy, the pipe maker, he's going to be like, well, I need you to come back and finish it.
Well, I'm not coming back to finish it, right?
Whatever the case may be.
But those folks who have found a way to Fall into whatever industry they like and find their niche and have their own business and make their own wage and support themselves and their family on their own thing, I think are the ones that in my circle of people that are the most content.
And maybe that's the message that we should be putting out.
We got like three minutes left.
So maybe that's the message we should put out, right?
Like, to be the most happy veteran you can be professionally, start your own business.
You know, I don't know.
Maybe.
Well, you own your own business.
Do you like it better than when you were working for somebody else?
Everything's got its pros and its cons, right?
I mean, there's a difference between self-employed and a small business owner.
And I would say the majority of veterans that I know that are very content are self-employed.
So that next step where if you're not making said widget, like your pipe, you have to have other people doing it and you're dealing with, you know, clients.
It's more stressful than people would think.
But I would say self-employed veterans.
Absolutely.
I never really thought about that until you just started to say it.
But There's something there.
I think we've got to talk about what opportunities are out there for veterans to start businesses, find opportunities.
We could chat about that a bit.
Yeah, well, let me ask you this.
If I were to call you Monday morning, tomorrow morning, and say, Jason, if I were to offer you $200,000 a year to come work for me, You can't ask me any questions about what it is that I'm going to have you do.
It's going to be within reason and within your skill set.
I'm not going to have you go, like, collect bull semen or anything like that.
Would you do it?
Or would you...
For 200 grand, I will collect that bull semen with my armpits.
Period.
Done.
Okay, so what I'm trying to get at is if I offered you some ridiculous job making more money than you make as a business owner or being self-employed, would you take it?
Or is it not necessarily always a better thing because having that peace of mind, knowing that you're the boss, you can come and go when you want, The buck starts and ends with you.
Starts and stops with your decisions, what you say, what you want.
And sometimes, maybe that's more valuable than a bigger salary.
I think your understanding of what it is to be a small business owner is askew.
Maybe.
Maybe, but I'm just talking about in general.
For generalized freedom, 100%.
You do get to make your own decisions.
So there is something there, but again, for $200,000.
Just saying.
Well, alright folks.
So, with that, we have run out of time for this week's show.
Yeah.
If there's any cattle farmers out there, if we insulted you, that's too bad.
But we're having fun here today.
We're not in the business of apologizing here on the Richard Leonard Show or on the Stu Peters Network because truth lives here.
So anyway, thank you for joining us.
Jason, thank you for joining us.
I hope you'll come back sometime with clean hands.
And we will see you all next week.
Please take care of yourselves.
Have a great evening and we'll see you next week.
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