Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - War's Realities, Overcoming Failure, and Ethical Dilemmas

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Normally scheduled Friday Q and A for today: 1. First, a listener's concern about a controversial statement: "I love killing people." What are the realities of combat, and what does such a declaration truly mean within the context of military service and its psychological impact.  2. Guidance to a young man wrestling with the stigma of quitting. After leaving Army training just weeks before completion, he's now engaged and considering a career in law enforcement. What are some strategies to overcome self-doubt and rebuild confidence to face new challenges head-on. 3. An ethical dilemma faced by a government employee who's discovered a covert plan that could unjustly harm his manager's career just weeks before retirement. Torn between protecting his own position and doing what's right, he seeks advice on how to proceed without repeating past mistakes. Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

Welcome back, everybody. Hope you're having a good Friday. Two things I want to talk about before I get into today's episode, which I think I've got some pretty diverse topics. And then I realize I say that often, so I hope I'm actually delivering on that. I'm trying to ensure that it's not just rinse, rinse, wash, and repeat. Like I said, I have two things I want to talk about beforehand. The second one's going to be an advertisement for Black Rifle because they have a special going on. But before that, we are somewhere between 40 to 50 days from our next presidential election. And I don't like politics. I don't like talking about politics. I don't like getting into political arguments, which generally start off under the guise of discussions. But I do think that our ability to vote

in our democratic system is one of the most important, valuable rights that we have. And it should be guarded at all costs. And if you do a little bit of research at the number of people who choose not to express that right, it's shocking. Specifically today, though, I want to talk about active duty military and veterans. So the stats show that about 75% of active duty military members participate in voting, which I think is great, because that is much, much higher than the national average. But we'll round down. 7 out of 10. Why not 10 out of 10? my ask for anybody in the military, please have a cup of coffee or tea or whatever it is you like to drink with your friends as this election approaches.

And don't talk to them about who they're going to vote about or who they're going to vote for, I should say. Talk to them about whether or not they are going to vote. Have a cup of coffee and grab somebody and make sure that they are going to express that right. I'd love to see that number way closer to 100%. Now, on the veteran side of the house, that number falls. off a cliff. It's in the low 30th percentile. And some people would say, man, I don't necessarily understand why that is. And I can give you some, I can give you some personal insight to this. And this is my suspicion and hypothesis. Once you interface with the government, you really,

really see behind the curtain a little bit and you become, or can become, I should say, very disillusioned. There is a lot of bureaucracy inside of the middle. military, even inside of special operations. And a lot of guys don't feel that with the boots on the ground, but if you are in it long enough, you're going to find yourself in a role where you're literally trying to shovel bureaucratic shit out of a hole faster than they can put it in. You would like to think that the government in the military, when you pull back the curtain, it is like some Elon Musk, Neurrelink, SpaceX, incredible technology leading edge, always on the front leading edge, knowing what's going on at all times. But when you're going,

you pull back the curtain, it's a fucking donkey with a fly buzzing around its head. And I understand when leaving military service, you just kind of don't want to have anything else to do with it anymore. You want to be left alone a little bit. But I think that almost every issue that we have, if you look at the issues that surround you in your day-to-day life, your personal and professional life, if you follow them upstream, the potential solutions to those, the changes that we need to see in our country, in our society, they come through voting. So my request to veterans is actually the same as my request for active duty. Please have a conversation with your veteran friends. And don't get into an argument about who they're going to vote for. Don't even ask them. Try to get them

registered to vote. Make them, actually can't make anybody. Try to spark a fire under their ass to participate. For the veterans and active duty members out there, if you have people that don't know where to go to register to vote, I'm going to give you a website. It's www.voteforamerica.org. That is, vote, then the number for America, normal spelling.org. You can handle this issue of being registered to vote online in minutes. And I really, really would like to see the active duty number is when it comes to vote and get higher. but especially let's make a difference in that veteran population. Why commit yourself to the service of others, to the service of this country and not participate in the rights that that service helped to sustain?

I'm not going to say they provided them because those were really, you know, frameworked out in the founding documents, which I'm pretty sure nobody's serving on active duty was alive at that time. But I think you get the point. If you don't participate, well, What's the point of wearing the flag and the uniform throughout the world and being a beacon for what we stand for? 30% is dog shit. Please reach out to your veteran friends. And again, if they're remote, www.voteforamerica.org, get registered and participate.

I don't care who you vote for. And that's it on my political opening for the day. Black Rifle Coffee has a timely sale. So I'm going to do a quick ad read for you right here. If you're a fan of coffee, I have good news. My friends over at Black Rifle Coffee Company have a bogah, which stands for Buy One, Get One, brewing ahead of National Coffee Day at the end of September. From September 20th through September 22nd, head to black riflecoffee.com and buy two bags of coffee

to get another one for free. So a two for three. Actually, a three for two would be the better way to describe that. This will be a great way to pick up a little extra something for yourself or get some early holiday shopping done for somebody that you care about. If you don't know, Black Rifle Coffee Company is a veteran-founded and veteran-run company, proudly serving coffee and culture to the people that love America. Every purchase you make with Black Rifle Coffee helps them further their mission to support veteran and first responder causes. If you've been looking for a great company that believes in serving those who serve, you need to check out Black Rifle Coffee.com and celebrate National Coffee Day with thereby

to get one coffee sale. September 20th through the 22nd. So very, very shortly after this episode comes out. Actually, it's the day this episode comes out. I had to do a little double checking on what day of the week it was. And that's it. to some Q&A. Let the red smoke.

Okay, Kathy, whizs to the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. All right, first of three, here we go. I'm a long-time listener of the podcast, and I'm a fan of your work, and appreciate what you've been doing. I've taken away some great advice from your content that has helped me improve my life.

You made a statement during your conversation with Andrew Milburn, and this comes out Friday. So this was the Monday's episode of this week, that I love killing people, if I'm being honest. And I was wondering if you'd be willing to unpack that statement a bit, because on the surface it sounds like the words of a sociopath, which you are obviously not. I don't think I'm a sociopath, but I think that's what a sociopath would say, right? A sociopath and a psychopath would just like lie to your face and say they're the opposite.

I'm not claiming that I'm either of those, and I don't think that I am, but I'll leave that for the discussion of others. I don't think I'm a sociopath. For context, I've never served in any capacity, but I can understand the camaraderie and desire to do what you've trained for in the military, but the concept of love of taking life is foreign to me, and the vast majority of the population, thankfully. My only touch point with taking life is through hunting, and while I don't enjoy the act of killing, it's a means to an end that I have respect for and I'm thankful for, that life, which is now in my freezer. I guess that I would just like some context around the statement, and then I actually screenshoted this

and cut off the last sentence. I'm glad that you asked this question. I remember making that statement and even in the moment I needed to have a little bit of time to unpack it. And I'm going to do the best I can to explain this. And I don't know if this is going to make sense to anybody other than those who have walked a mile in shoes similar to my own. And that's okay. I appreciate the question. Here's the context.

Is it that I enjoy the act of taking life? There is some truth to that, but I don't think that's what I meant to say. And as I mentioned when I first opened with this, I needed in that moment, I should have actually just kept my mouth shut given that I was trying to let him talk. And I needed more time to explain it. Regardless of who you are in the world, whatever belief system that you hold, you are, I'm going to say you're an ex person. Regardless of what your belief is, there are people out there who are Y people, meaning they hold an access belief to whatever it is that you hold, regardless of how altruistic you think your personal. belief structure is. I am telling you right now, you look hard enough, you'll find an individual or a group of people that believe you are completely and utterly wrong. Now, the vast, vast majority of those people are not going to do anything about that other than potentially get

frustrated or angry or disagree with you on your beliefs. It can be civil, there could be a discourse or a discussion, and they're going to live their life as a Y person, if you're an X person, and not agree with you and do absolutely nothing about it. On the far engines, why is I going to say engines? On the far edges of all of these groups, there are, or belief systems, I should say, there are a small contingent,

and I say that in comparison likely to the total size of the group, that is willing to take action on their beliefs, that is willing to sacrifice their life in the hopes of destroying yours and your belief system. And if you have never looked into the whites of the eyes of one of these people, who when you square off with them, you can tell in every essence and fiber of their being, that they want nothing more than to destroy what you believe in, your life and everything that you care about,

it'll be hard to understand why I love removing those people from the chessboard because that is what I was actually talking about. The environment overseas is the environment that has had the most consequences in my life. Now, skydiving and base jumping has risk and you can lose your life. But the overseas environment, that end of life is thrust right upon you. It's inches from your face. So, yeah, those other environments

you might end up losing your life, but not in the velocity and manner that you will overseas. It is the highest consequence environment that I have ever operated inside of. And you are aware of the consequences when you're in that environment. I have said this many times. I respect the people who are willing to fight and die for their beliefs. That doesn't mean I I believe what they believe, but I respect that level of commitment and belief. But when you square up with somebody, and I'm going to use, I'll use the ideology of what the United States is. And right now, man, in 2024, depending on who you ask, that ideology can be described in many, many different ways. And it seems to be there's hands on the wheel

turning that towards an ideology of we're just oppressors and we've we've mucked up. the world, if you will. I don't believe that. I believe that the United States is a beacon of what is possible in the world. And regardless of how much I believe that and how altruistic I believe that to be, there's a segment of people out there who disagrees. And they want us destroyed and they want their type of life, belief, philosophy, ideologies layered on top of everybody here and everybody in the world. When you encounter these people, when you encounter what I'm going to consider to be and what I am going to call true evil. And a person that is willing to fight to the death for that, yes, I love removing that.

The act of killing, I mean, a quarter of a second, a half of a second, it's so wrote and binary, in my experience, meaning you have such little time and such little information and you are reacting to something that somebody is doing, a hostile act or hostile intent. You are not sitting there and, you know, waxing and twisting your mustache and learning the backstory and, you know, understanding, you know, networks and family trees. I mean, the intelligence individuals are doing all that and helping us finding these targeted individuals that end up on the J-Pel list. Point being, when you actually encounter them and the rubber meets the road, your interactions with them are limited. But yes, I hate bullies. I hate people that prey upon others. I hate people that try to

exert their will of destruction and damage with a stick and sword. I fucking hate bullies. So yes, when I encounter those people, I love taking them off the chessboard. And also, in top of this, you're in this consequential environment, two people enter, one person leaves. It feels awesome to win. It feels awesome to operate inside that environment, knowing everything is on the line, and you win and you exit that environment. I like winning. It feels good.

I think everybody likes winning and feels good. And I'm saying you should view war as that, but I'm saying as somebody who's been in those situations, the more I have thought about it, there's a reason why I feel about it the way that I do. I avoid violence at all costs in my life. And anybody who knows me in my personal life, I think would tell you this. I am not a violent person. But if I am pushed to a place where I need to be violent, I'm capable of it, and I will do it, but I am not seeking it out.

Is it a fair point? Is it a discussion point that if I'm an ex-person and there are Y people, that they could use the same argument that I just made, against me. Yes, there is. And that's just the way the world works. I believe in what I believe. They believe in what they believe. We met in an arena where we got to work that shit out, and they didn't leave that arena, and I did. And that feels awesome. We could argue all day long about the value of beliefs and the merit of beliefs. And like I said, that's a valid conversation point. Do I think that there is a difference between the belief system of those that we were targeting in this country? Yes, but that is my opinion. And I leave it open for a conversation and

discussion that they may hold the opposite opinion of that. And if they're willing to fight and die for it, I'm willing to meet you there in that environment. And I don't feel bad about feeling good about winning. So yeah, I should have probably explained it a little bit more in those terms. And again, I don't think I'm a sociopath or a psychopath. Other people might, especially after that more long-winded explanation. But that is me trying to unpack why I feel the way that I do. It's not about the taking of life.

It's not, in my experience, God, that was not this earth-shattering, you know, trajectory of life-altering moment or experience. I'm not saying it shouldn't be those things, but in my experience, given how quickly those decisions are made, you do the best you can in the moment that you have. It is after now well over a decade of ever being, you know, the last time I was in a combat environment was in 2010. So we're talking about a decade and a half at this point. This is me looking backwards and trying to make more sense of those experiences and what, how I felt in that moment, why I wanted to be in that environment in the first place. And hopefully that makes sense to the person that wrote in this email. And I'm glad that you did because that

comment did actually, I don't know if it required or needed, but I'm glad that I had the opportunity or have had the opportunity to provide a little bit more context. And hopefully that gives people maybe even a little bit more of an understanding of who I am and the way I view the world. Question two. Hello, my name is redacted. I had been listening to the podcast since the beginning of 2024. Welcome aboard, eight months in, and have enjoyed your insights on many topics. I'm sure you have answered this before, but I was curious about your thoughts if someone can overcome being a quitter. I enlisted in the Army infantry when I was 17, but I ultimately quit during week 16 or 17 of the 22-week training cycle. Before that moment, I would say I wasn't a

quitter. I started MMA when I was 14, and up until I left for basic, I was competing in jujitsu, wrestling, and working out. I never thought about quitting at any point during that time. I know they are not exactly comparable, but I am not sure what caused me to quit the army. I am now 23 years old, and my girlfriend and I just got engaged last month. We plan on starting a family soon, and I want to be able to provide for her and future kids. I have come back to the idea of being a police officer, but I am worried about past mistakes and that they will come back and I will quit again. What advice would you have for somebody trying to overcome that feeling of being a quitter and proving to themselves they can do challenging things? Man, what a fascinating

question. How you view your life and what you decide to make your anchor, I think really shapes how you view yourself. I have failed at so many things in my life. God, galactic amount of things. in my life. I mean, I've failed at like the basic shit. Hey, I wanted to be on time and I wasn't. I failed in relationships. I failed being a man. I failed at falling short of being the person that I wanted to be. When I look into the mirror, I failed from a leadership perspective. I failed from a parenting perspective. I can't think of a situation in which I haven't failed. And I know I'm going to continue to do so. I'm going to, I constantly try to do the best that I can, but I am just a human being like everybody else listening to this or watching this, and perfection is

impossible. I don't feel like a failure, though, because I choose not to anchor myself in when I fell short. I choose to anchor myself in the lessons that I have learned from falling short and how it made me feel when I fell short. That feeling of absolute disgust of looking in the mirror and knowing that you have no other direction to point your finger than at the person that you see staring back at you. And that pit in your stomach when you know you've fucked up and you could have done better and you should have done better and you have no excuse for it. I don't try to live in that moment.

And for me, I mean, those moments of like the rock bottom have not been. It's like, hey, this is Thursday time to have another rock bottom moment. But they've occurred throughout my life. I don't ever want to return to that. So I anchor myself in how shitty that felt, and I try to use that to throw logs on the fire of my own motivation to help me when I don't want to do shit and pair that with discipline and try to do better and be a better version of myself. The point of saying all that, though, is if you anchor yourself in a shortcoming, damn, that is a tough psychological place to live, which doesn't directly answer your question. So I'm going to get into that right now. How do you overcome that feeling of being a quitter and proving to yourself that you can do challenging things? You've already proven to yourself that you can do challenging things. MMA sucks. Getting hit and kicked and mauled, sucks. Jiu-jitsu is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's challenging for sure. It's difficult in the moment you have to get used to being, again, mauled and put in positions that you don't want to be in and working your way through uncomfortable situations. Wrestling, Jesus Christ, that activity sucks. Anybody who does jiu-jitsu and starts. standing on your feet. Wrestling is more exhausting than jiu-suitzoo for sure, working out.

So those are all challenging things. You've proven that you're capable of doing so. I think where you're falling short in this email, and what I would suggest to you is you need to figure out why you quit in the army. It's clear that you did. It's hanging over your head. That's the gold mine that you need to start sifting through. You may not look at it as a gold mine. But if you can't identify what happened, well, you already know what happened. If you can't identify why it happened, then I think you are far more susceptible to allowing it to happen again. Was it a one-off? Was there something that was going on in your personal life?

Was there a family issue? And I ask both of those things because I've seen those unwind people specifically inside the seal training. I've watched people quit because they just received a horrible diagnosis that's somebody in their immediate family has cancer or is terminally ill. And it just unwinds their world, regardless of how much they were dedicated and motivated before. I've seen students in training who are navigating their way through divorce while in the middle of seal training, which is hard enough as it is. Holy shit.

Maybe potentially pairing two of the hardest activities a human can do, divorce and seal training. That doesn't work out well. And sometimes they come back and are successful, and sometimes they kind of just hang up that dream. And I actually haven't had a chance to talk to either of those. So I can't speak any further on that. Point being, things in your personal life can absolutely impact the decisions that you make. But if you can't identify why you made that choice, I would say you are at risk of finding yourself in that situation and not having the tools necessary to deal with it. If you can identify what happened, again, wrong word. If you can identify why it happened when you were

in the Army. Then you can start working on your toolbox. Is there, you know, is this something a way where, is it self-talk? Is this how you are viewing your goals? Is this a motivation issue? Is this a strength and conditioning issue? And again, maybe it's any of those things, all of those things, or none of those things. But by identifying the problem, you can reverse engineer and start putting tools into your toolbox that when you encounter these things, you are ready to deal with them again. I would not recommend you go down the, the policing cycle pathway until you determine what this is. Because if you do quit again, and by the way, you know, to anchor this back into what I was saying, the way, you know,

if you anchor yourself and your self-worth and failure, it's dangerous. Quitting something in your life, while the vast majority of the things you've done in your life didn't have that end state, I think is very dangerous. Right. It's this self-imposed negativity bias where you're only focusing on the thing that you fell short of because you made that decision to quit and are now wondering whether or not, at the core essence of who you are, you are a quitter. One, find some professional help to have you answer that question or to help you answer that question because I think that can turn into a very, very negative self-licking ice cream cone of just going down and down and down.

Involve somebody who knows and understands pathways to talk to yourself. pathways to actually critically and objectively look at something that's a shortcoming in your life without negatively judging yourself or derailing your emotional state. Again, that's one of the counselor, priest, psychiatrist, psychologist, whatever. Figure out what it is. Involve somebody that can help you look at this objectively without getting intrinsically tied to it. Because if you don't, it might repeat itself. There are ways to do that, but all this email, the one thing,

thing you didn't highlight is your desire to figure out why. So figure out why. Develop the tools and then drive on. It might be a one-off. And you never know your decision to quit. Think of everything that's happened in your life between then and now. How many of those opportunities to include meeting your girlfriend who you're going to marry may not have presented themselves? had you not made that choice. Right? There's always two sides to every coin. There's a way to look at this stuff

where it doesn't have to be, look at me, I'm a piece of shit, I did something that I deeply regret and now maybe I will going forward. I mean, again, like I said, analyze and assess the reasons why, but then recognize,

fuck, what would my like actually have looked like if I didn't make that decision to quit? Would I have met my future wife? Would we even be talking about kids or going down the police, pathway. It's, you know, life's going to happen to us all. Don't be a victim of your own life. Be the author of your life and focus as much on the opportunities that came from that decision as the decision itself. Last question for today. Andy, I'm in quite an interesting situation. I work for a

government entity. Recently, I took a lateral promotion, no title change, but I did get a 50 cents per year raise, which has more responsibility and visibility for leadership. I was recognized for my outstanding performance in my previous role and thus selected. Through an application process, of course, part of the course of your bureaucracy for this role. In the government, you don't always get the title and salary increase with more responsibility. It is what it is. True that. A month into the role, I'm loving it. My manager is great and very smart. The job is interesting and mostly important. I get to help and advise people on how to do their job better. I am part of a team helping people get their technology solutions through the process of approvals,

and it's fulfilling helping people navigate the system because I have become quite adept at it. Several months ago, a new executive joined the C-level team. Naturally, and for people who don't know what that means, CEO, CFO, CMO, the upper echelon of leadership. Naturally, the challenging government environment and bureaucracy causes various state agencies, a lot of pain with the process I help them navigate, and their voices are being heard. It's great that they seek to make improvements to make the government more efficient. I think it's an overcorrection, but you know how you overcorrect and then reel it back in, rinse and repeat. But here's where the problem starts.

This new executive put a team of people from other agencies, and in parentheses, who didn't know anything about what was good in the legacy process to develop something new, and purposely, or purposely, excluded my manager and I. It was all mostly speculation until I set out to help an agency in my normal job and stepped into assist and came upon a treasure trove of documents that basically shows they had been doing this all and purposely avoiding us. I'm not really worried about my job because I'm still low level and have the same title I used to have. So I probably, so I will probably soft land back doing what I was doing before I was recognized. and fake promoted. I confronted an involved leader and have been asked by them not to share what I

stumbled upon with my manager. This is because it's clear he is being targeted, and in my opinion, wrongly so. I'll accept biased claim, but I believe it to be true. Fair enough, and it's clear that it's cool that you can accept because of your proximity to the person that you may be biased, but it sounds like the documents that you encountered cut through that bias a little bit. It seems to be a touch more black and white in what it is that they're doing. If I sent him screenshots of a chat I had with another involved leader and the copies of the documentation, he could make the claim to HR that he is being wrongfully targeted and it could open a can of worms for leadership. And for me, for sharing that after being asked not to, we're talking about a guy who is six weeks out from being retirement vested. What should I do? Keep my head down and just continue being a good worker knowing I will soft land and he will.

get screwed or share the information with him knowingly it will put me at jeopardy or share the information with him knowing it will put me at jeopardy. Wow. Reading is tough sometimes, guys. P.S. This is not the first time asking you for work-related advice. Last time I followed your advice 1.5 years ago and I got targeted to be fired after being transparent with leadership about information I knew and I had to quit. So don't fuck it up twice. I'm going to start there. What do you mean you had to quit? I think you mean you made the choice to quit. I have no clue what I might have told you a year and a half ago, but I bet it's going to be something similar to what I'm going to say today.

Interesting tie-in to the last question. When it comes to quitting, I've heard a lot of people say over the years, they made me quit. Someone made me quit. I had to quit. My response to that is, fuck right off. You made the choice to quit. It's a tough pill to swallow, and I'm not saying that there aren't reasons.

for it, but don't outsource why you quit and who made the decision. You did. A lot of people present questions as if there is an answer A or answer B, and that is far too binary for the world. The reality is probably there's answer A through answer Z, which most people ignore, but the reality is the limit of your options is probably going to be governed by your imagination. So, you know, you present into this, do I keep my mouth shut or do I not? And there are, again, a variety of options in between. I don't know what you do in the government. I don't know where you work in the government.

If you wanted to do something with this information, I bet you there is an ability. If you do believe that somebody is being maliciously targeted, I bet you that there is at least an avenue for you to report this outside of your normal chain of command. I don't want to use the term whistleblower because I don't know the exact definition of what that means in the corporate world or the government. I don't know if that has to be about a specific an action or I just don't know what it's tied to, but I'm going to use the term broadly. The pathway for people to come forward with information outside of their chain of command, even in the military exists. I know FERFAC exists in the government. So you have more than just

binary, keep my mouth shut or open my mouth. Like I said in the last question, I fucking hate bullies. I hate people who present themselves as one thing, and then they are something behind the scenes. And when that is left unchecked, when you encounter something like this and you know it exists and it is allowed to continue, it's not going to self-correct. It doesn't course correct. And I'm not saying you have to be the savior to everybody and to all things, but you are presented with a situation where you have information that you think is valuable. You

have information about people and a system that is not above board. And if you, choose to do something with that, there are consequences. And if you choose to do nothing with it, there are also consequences, like you said, a soft landing probably back at your job. But how about this? How about the knowledge that you encountered something that you knew was fucked up? And you didn't do anything about it. Now, people have a different capacity in dealing with that. those are the things that keep me up at night. I, my biggest fear is not being there or capable or good enough specifically to help my family or the ones that I care about in a moment of need.

I lose sleep thinking about things that have happened to either me or my family and my desire to write those things and what I am willing to do. do about that. And again, everybody is completely different in their desire to do so. Some people could see this and be like, fuck it. I don't even care because I'm going to worry about myself and they move on. That's not me. And I don't know where you fit on this spectrum. But I can tell you regret is a bastard. And six weeks from now when your buddy retires, or not your buddy, but your boss, your manager, I'm sorry, when they retire, that's going to be too late. So you can do something about this or not. If you choose to not do something about it, you may regret it for you.

for the rest of your life because you will know you had information about something that was wrong and you sat on it. And I'm not here to make a value judgment on which direction you take. But I guess I'm trying to say is there's no free pass, whichever direction you take with this. Anytime people try to silo information, I have found it to be a bad thing. Anytime people try to operate inside of the shadows or tell other people, hey, just come to me for this. You don't need to talk to these other people that are a part of the organization or a management structure or a team, just come to me. I've yet to find an altruistic reason that people do that, that they silo information. I have found plenty of reasons why they do that I would consider to be negative,

whether it's their own ego. They want to hide information that they think would be revealing in a negative fashion about themselves or their team or their organization and everything in between. I'm yet to find, I mean, there's obviously in the military and in the government, you know, there is a reason at times to control sensitive information, but that's not what we're talking about here, right? That's in the classified world where you're, you know, talking about sources or methods or tactics, techniques, and procedures. Yeah, you know, there's a reason to operate behind closed doors and only read the people in that have the need to know and the clearance for it. That doesn't sound like what you're talking about here. This sounds like

somebody who came in in is building a system to undermine the system that is in place and your manager. So the question becomes, what do you want to do about it? I don't know anything about why you got let go last time or why you made the decision to quit, but I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm just going to send you back with a little bit of homework for yourself. And that homework, there's only one question on this assignment. And it's up at the top. What kind of person do you want to be. I can't answer that for you. I can answer it for myself. And over the years now that I have been answering these questions on Friday episodes, I would hope that people get some insight into the type of person that I am trying to be, that I want to be. You know, not every battle is yours

to fight. And that's not for me to say. You know, oftentimes it's so easy to get pulled into other people's drama. And one of my favorite sayings is, you know, it's not my circus. It's not my monkeys. or not my circus, not my clowns. It helps with a lot of personal drama, but you are a part of this professional system, and it is going to have a real-world impact on potentially your manager and where you land. So you need to ask yourself,

what type of person do you want to be? Are you comfortable being the type of person where you know a system is being put into place and developed and targeted towards an individual and you didn't do anything about it? Or do you want to be the type of person? That when you see that, you recognize the potential risk to yourself,

but you also recognize maybe I don't want to work for a fucked up entity or organization that's going to tolerate this anyway. So I don't really give a shit if I get let go because I know I'm never going to stop in life and I'm going to figure out a way to achieve what I want to achieve regardless of job title. If you land more in that category, fuck it. Who cares? You know, you could go right at this people. You could go the potential whistleblower route. But you have to accept the consequences of that action and what may come from that. what that may lead you to, the impact it may have on you. And that is a choice that only you can make. If you were to add a follow-up to this and you were to ask me, what would I do? I would probably, I would not be able to, in this type of situation where you're talking about,

where it's clear that something is being developed, people are being cut out and you have the documentation, I don't think I would have the ability to not do something with it. I would share it with the manager because the manager is the one who is six weeks from being vested into retirement. And if they think it's worth the fight because it directly involves them, I would let them make that decision. But I would start there being prepared to escalate as need be, regardless of the consequences. Because when I find something that I believe in, I'm willing to go all the way for it. and if you put my back up against the wall or you try to make me feel like my back is up the wall or against the wall up the wall, if you may try to make me feel like my back is up against the wall

and stand the fuck by because that's when I'm going to start moving forward because I'm limited in my options. But that's me. You have to answer the homework question. What type of man do you want to be?