Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Who is More Toxic - Army or Prison?

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

I cannot believe that we live in a world where this is an actual discussion or conversation point, but here we are. My thoughts on the recent viral social media video discussing who is more toxic, someone in prison or someone in the military. The Speed of War Comic Series: https://www.thespeedofwar.com/ Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/  

It's more toxic, a guy in prison or a guy in the army? A guy in the army. A hundred percent. Really? I have a few thoughts. Let's get into it. Okay, got the red smoke. Okay, Kathy, west of the smoke.

I'm looking at danger close now. Come on women, man. Give it to me. I made it. You're clear it hot. Coffee, cleared hot. All right, everybody, welcome back traditionally on Fridays, as people know who listen or watch the podcast. I answer Q&As.

And there are some things that I'm looking at as we come to the end of 2023 going into 2024 that I want to improve and change about the podcast. One of the things that I want to change about the podcast is I am going to, from time to time, I'm not going to put myself on a strict regimen yet, even though I think we'll get to it at some point. At time to time or from time to time, I want to be able to be able to. to dissect and review things that are going on in the world, specifically from, I'm going to say, the perspective of leadership. I don't really have a desire to chase current events and things that are going to be leading in the newspaper or social media or whatever it may be, but just the ability from time to time to find something that's interesting and dive into it a little bit, which is like this video. I said there was two things, one I wanted to improve, one I wanted

to change. I discussed the change. We'll get the improvement here in a second. I was tagged hundreds of times in this video. And it took me forever to find it because it was on TikTok, which is a platform that I don't have. But I eventually did find it on Instagram. And I found an actual, what I believe to be raw copy of this video, which is from a podcast. I'm not even going to put the podcast name up because people can find it if they want to. What I'll say about this video is this. It's really low hanging fruit. It would be so easy to come over the top with my response to this video, review of the video, and be an asshole.

And nothing would be gained by that. Nobody would learn anything from that. And I think we can do better. That's what leads me to what I want to change, or I'm sorry, improve about the podcast in 2024. I want to be a positive impact on the world. And there have been times since I have started the podcast where I have fallen down the rabbit hole of things like this video and just decided to make fun of the people who are in the video. And that's not what I want to do.

And it's not who I want to be because there is plenty of them. that in the world already. And I think there is a lot to actually be learned when you just listen to people talk. So as ridiculous as I may feel that this video is, and I'm going to play the whole thing for you here in a second, when we choose to listen and believe the things that people say, it's pretty enlightening. And particularly in this video, I think two very important things are highlighted outside of the general context of the video. So let me play it for you, the full video, and then we're going to dive in and we're going to dissect a little bit. It's more toxic, a guy in prison or a guy in the army?

A guy in the army. A hundred percent. For sure. Because in prison, at least they find like religion. Find relationships and they get married in prison. So it depends on the branch, though, what branch is. Yeah, he's definitely very toxic. I'd rather have a prison man. I'd rather a man in prison too. Yeah. Or recently out. Is there, I think maybe Navy. I think, I think a name man. Or Air Force? Nope. Dade one of those.

They cheated on me. Yeah, they seem like they have too much access to air. All right. Where do we start? I think I'm just going to take this one right by the numbers. I'm going to go kind of through the video sequentially and maybe provide my own opinion on the things that they said. And then I'll talk about the two major issues that I think this video actually speaks to.

One of them is from a societal perspective and the other one is from a military perspective. And both of them, I think, are actually problems that if we don't get a handle on, we're going to be in trouble. So when I was originally able to find this video and go back to the platform that created it, it was interesting. They positioned what they were saying in the video as purely satire. And perhaps that is actually why this video was created, although I suspect it wasn't. Oftentimes, especially on social media, when something doesn't land the way that you wanted to, the easiest escape route or retreat, if you will, is to say, oh, I was just joking. In this particular case, I don't think these particular women were joking.

Now, I have no idea how old they are. I'm going to guess that they are between the ages of 20 and 30, and I'm not going to go more precise than that because I am terrible at guessing ages and not trying to offend any of these young women. My point in talking about their age is I remember being that age, And I remember some of the dumb shit that I used to say as well. So I don't necessarily hold that against them. I hope that they get some more life experience and maybe some more touch points with people in the military.

Because I suspect both communities of people that they are talking about, prisoners and military members, they don't actually know that much about. And I say that because of the content of what came out of their mouth. And again, I remember being that young. I don't begrudge them for that. I said some very wildly inappropriate things at that age. And I'm glad that the Internet wasn't then what it is now. Because who knows what would have happened. But let's get into it.

You know, one of the first things that they talked about, you know, people in prison, they find religion. They find relationships. And they get married. And all of those things are true. But none of that addresses why the person would be in prison in the first place. if you were to give me a choice between somebody, a community of people that had found their way astray of the legal system, and we're in prison, which is not jail, we're talking sentence to prison versus people who were in the military, a community of individuals that have decided to waive some of their constitutional rights to serve our country and wear our flag in defense of this nation, regardless of what people may think about them, I am going to go with the last. People who have chosen service above self. I don't think that there's anything wrong necessarily with somebody in prison getting married or women.

I mean, the data is actually already out there. The number of people who reach out to people while they're still in prison, the love letters, the fan mail that they get. All of that's actually very real. Personally, I believe that it speaks to the mental health of our country, but it's actually real. If you were to present me with that choice, and I had two options, looking at it as a scale, a community of people that has chosen to serve something greater than themselves versus a community of people that has gone astray of the legal system, has been convicted by a jury of their peers and sentenced to prison? I'm going to go to the former, not the latter, but that's just me. Can people in prison find relationships?

Can they find recovery or their programs? Can they find religion? They absolutely should. Let's not forget why they're there in the first place, though. I would also recommend to these young women, if you really want to get an understanding of the difference between those two communities, figure out a way, and I know this isn't possible, but this is a good thought exercise. For the three of you young ladies in this podcast, try to figure out a way to spend a day unaccompanied, unprotected in a prison yard. And then let me know how that goes for you. And then either I would actually recommend before that try to figure out a way to spend a day on a military installation, your average military installation all over the year.

U.S. What you're going to find are communities of people who are living on base. You're going to find churches. You're going to find schools. You're going to find after-school care programs for children. You're going to find resources for families, significant others, support networks for those families that are left behind when the service members are deployed. You're going to find largely a professional working environment, an entire encapsulated community. that has everything from gas stations to grocery stores to education to religion. It's probably going to be the exact opposite of what you would find inside of the prison yard. So towards the tail end of the video, the women start going through all of the branches,

and one of them brings up the Air Force. And one of the young women says, nope, not the Air Force. I dated an Air Force guy and he cheated on me. And that sucks. I'm sorry that you had that experience. My initial reaction is, please point me towards an occupation where you think that that's not going to be a potential. because you can't. So if you were to date a doctor and a doctor cheated on you,

does that mean you're never going to date a doctor again? Or a lawyer or an actor or an athlete or whatever it may be. My point is, human beings aren't perfect. And perhaps it's a little bit rash to write off an entire community of people because you had an experience that was poor with one individual. There's a bell curve to everything, occupations and people. of course the combination of them. Maybe don't paint the entire community with the edge case.

And I would also say, and this is kind of a snap judgment, I guess, but I'm going to position this back to this person as a question. What role did you play in what happened with your relationship? Now, having said that, and person who makes the decision to cheat or takes that action, you're responsible for that. But to the woman that I'm asking this question to, I think, just based off of how you are presenting yourself in this video, you may want to take a hard look in the mirror and realize that when pointing out at somebody, there's a couple fingers pointing back at you. It's not your fault, but I think you might have had a heavy hand in it. So this video was all over social media, and I get it. It's very soundbitey. It's blurby. You know, what's more toxic? People in the military or people in prison. And I was thinking about it. And what's really toxic, is not the people in the military,

and it's not even the people in prison. It's just the conversation in general. And it would be easy to close the lid or the door on that and just leave it at that and be like, you know what, you women are the problem. And as I said in the beginning, I'm going to get to the two issues that I think this video actually highlights.

And it highlights it, ignore a lot of the things that they said about people in the military, which is going to be tough for people in the military. but just listen to them speak and then ask yourself, how did they land at this place where this is actually how they feel? And if you can just listen to them talking, I think it presents two very important questions that need to be answered. Or two situations, I should say. The first one is this.

What society and people in that age group think about the military and what are young men and and women being taught about the military and military service. The people in this video are of an age range that the military is looking for to fill their ranks. And in 2023, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force missed their recruiting goals. I had said recently quite a few times that I had heard all four branches,

or five, if you include Space Force, had missed their recruiting goals. But it's actually only the first three, the Army, Air Force, and the Navy. The Marine Corps and Space Force met their recruiting goals. But the other three are averaging a 25% under recruitment per year. And the Army specifically has missed it for the last 10. The people who are in this video, let's just take them at their word.

We listen to them and what they're saying is what they believe. I remember being a young man in my late teens and early 20s. I'm not going to look for and pursue a job that is perceived as being more toxic than somebody in prison. I wanted a significant other. I didn't want to be alone. And as a young man, if I looked at three influential women on a podcast platform like this and looked at them as somebody that I would potentially want to be with or in that same social circle, that's going to create a problem for me when I'm looking at military service.

So if society is starting to think that way about our military, the military has a very big problem on their hands because the recruiting issue is only going to get worse. The bigger question that comes from this, the second issue is, why do they think this way? What are young men and women being taught about military service? I am by no stretch an expert on the educational system in the United States, but having had three children, two of whom are out of high school and my daughter is still a sophomore in high school, I have a good amount of touch points with people of the age where they are considering military service and are getting to the place where they could actually be called to serve

if there was, in fact, a draft, which hopefully never happens again. And for the first time of my life, I'm hearing people of that age group use terms around military service that I've never heard before. They're using terms that have to do with oppression and colonialism. And I don't know where that is coming from. But it is real, and it is something that we have to address, both as a society and the military itself. For the recruiters out there, for anybody in the Department of Defense, you have a messaging problem right now that you need to fix a portion of, in my opinion, at least, of why the recruiting goals are consistently being missed. We have to, as a society, find a better way to educate young men and women about what military service is. And I don't know if that's

through a different curriculum in the schooling system or a mentorship program or just people who have served being more vocal about their experience. Tied to that, and in addition to that, the military, the military needs to pull their heads out of their ass as well. So anybody here listening to this or watching this associated with the DOD, you guys need to dump it into fifth gear and figure out a better way to message what it means. means to serve. Because if you don't, if your voice is absent, that vacuum is going to be filled by people like the women in this podcast. And if that happens, if we lose the ability to find men and

women, to have them volunteer for service in whatever branch of the military that they may want to, then we are going to lose one of the most important, if not the most important tool that we have as a country. And I don't want to see it come to that. So instead of just blindly making fun of a video like this or dismissing a video like this, take the time to listen to what they're saying and then ask yourself, how could they get to that place? And if they are really at that place, is there anything that I could do to potentially change their mind or, more importantly, change the minds of those that may be listening to that video without any other context or any other voice. Because if we can't or we don't, I'm very worried about the direction this country is heading.

And that's it. Hopefully the different format was something that you enjoyed. Let me know in the comments. And I'll see you guys on Monday.