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How Veterans Rebuild Purpose After Service | Montana Vet Program | EP 428
23 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Michael, are you prepared to do a subpar job?
Yes, as per usual. Michael, are you from Montana? Are you? Yeah.
He's never left.
Never left. That's not true.
Like actually here in Kalispell?
Like Kalispell? Well, I grew up in Butte. Oh, you're a Butte kid? Yeah. My daughter's going to tech right now. She's getting her nursing degree. She loves Butte. Do you love Butte as much as everybody else who's from Butte loves Butte?
Yeah, I do like it. It gets a lot of hate, but yeah.
Is that a real thing? Pork chop sandwiches are real? Pork chop johns. I've never been. I pass through Butte. I get gas. That's what most people do. That's how I used to be. Here's the deal. I'm not talking smack on Butte. I'm just saying I have yet to actually have a reason to go explore beyond the freeway gas station. Yep. My uncle lived there.
And so my mom would send us to Butte during the summer for like a month. And he had his kingdom of two trailers. I'm not going to get lost in this, but he would take us to Star Lanes, which is a huge bowling alley, or to Porkchop John's. And most of the time we're just shooting cats with BB guns outside of his trailer. Because that's what you do in Butte.
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Chapter 2: How do veterans find purpose after service?
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But when it comes to justice and like you're talking about truth, finding truth, right? Like in the Constitution and the idea of our country allowing for justice, how do you go forward and find that if you can't determine truth? Like one of the quickest ways, again, just spending time thinking about where our country is going, which does tie into... the veteran population.
And I would also say what the veteran population is producing with their errors, because I think that that's absolutely important for the direction of our country. But if you can't determine truth, right, fundamentally, how does this country continue to move forward? And so then to answer your question, if I'm going to I'm going to have to rely then on feeling, right?
I can't use empirical evidence when it comes to feeling, but if I have to feel my way through what I think is going to be truth, because I'm going to have to source it from 17 different sources that are out there. Each one of those sources is going to have some form of a credibility score. I'm probably going to be the one that has to assign each one of those.
Then I'm going to feel my way through it. And if I... Again, thinking about this the other day is... If I really want to feel my way through this, then I have to strategize the way in which the group, right, who is up there, out there at 1%, if you want to go that far and be crazy with that, I guess, the belief that they exist.
Strategically, what would- Are you talking about the Illuminati?
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Chapter 3: What challenges do veterans face when reintegrating into civilian life?
So that you can be better. We all float. We all get better. Everybody rises. I think that, I think we can find it.
Trust me, I like that headspace. That's definitely a glass half full approach. Yes. And I think if you had to choose between, this is also a false choice, between glass half full and glass half empty because glasses are refillable, so we don't really need to worry about the volume that's currently in them. Everybody forgets that part.
But if you only had the binary choice of half full or half empty, of course I would rather people live their life with the half full approach because the other one, I can't think of a faster way to rob yourself of joy or satisfaction or even a sense of accomplishment.
And you had made mention earlier of the veteran population in the last 20 years and the direction that maybe it's going.
I don't know which way it's going for clarity. I'm just curious. You guys are actually probably more connected with the veteran population than I am because you have a program dedicated to work with them. Like I know I still know people from my previous life, but I'm not actively out there participating in a program or with a group like yours.
So you might actually have a better take on it than I do.
Yeah, I guess more or less with the glass half full, glass half empty, is being able to... because glass half empty to me is victim mentality, right? Where if things happen, bad things happen to me and so I kind of identify with those. It does seem like to me that you do see that predominantly in the veteran community.
And I think that that is a byproduct of a lot of veterans being told that they're the victim, especially when you go and speak to a counselor. I think that counseling over the past couple decades And Jordan Peterson speaks about this pretty frequently, actually. So this isn't just my opinion, but there is a tendency to believe that you need somebody else to fix your problems.
At MVP, one of the things that we focus on and that we see positive results from is showing the capacity that you are the thing that can overcome whatever obstacle is in front of you, right? Reminding veterans that they are powerful and that they can take it on versus, again, glass half full versus half empty. So that's one thing that I have noticed and has kind of been the...
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Chapter 4: How does the Montana Vet Program support veterans?
And I don't even try to. We've had this talk a couple times over the last two days of people from the outside thinking that they understand who somebody is. Just from observation, even somebody close to you, like an aunt or an uncle or something, trying to gauge what's going on in your life with your family, and it's not a fair assumption. Luke and I are pretty close friends.
I still can't gauge how he should feel about something or how his marriage is going or anything like that because it's his own... He's the main character of his movie. Take it a step farther than that. Have either of you ever done something and surprised yourself and then had to have a moment of like, why did I do that? Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm not even an expert.
I mean, I'm pretty good at knowing myself, but I'm not even perfect when it comes to understanding myself. I'm going to somehow become a radar. I did clarify Dan and I were arguing about radar versus sonar. Bats use echolocation, which is a portion of radar. Unfortunately, he was a little bit correct about only that in the episode. Everything else was untruthful and I won the honesty.
Yeah.
That's an important measure to win.
Yeah. Echolocation. So what are you going to do? You're going to try to project that on somebody else and be an expert on them when I don't know anybody who's even an expert on themselves? I mean, come on. What are we doing here? Well, and you can even take that a step further. I mean, I don't want to pick on Dan at all, but he can be a good human and have done something wrong.
You know what I mean? Like he can still be somebody you can rely on. Both of those things can be very true. They can be so true. But oftentimes because we get so divided and you're either red or blue, you guys talked about a lot on that podcast, you know, you have to be on one team or the other. We paint people that way too. I used to be in ministry.
I was a pastor for a little while after the military. And one of the pastors that was my boss, he used to say, these brownies are great. You like them, right? Yep. Well, I just put a little bit of poop in there. So it's okay. And that, that, that meaning his analogy, meaning that once a person has sin, that whole batch of brownies is ruined.
You wouldn't need a batch of brownies with a little bit of poo in them. I probably have. And would it be put in, in the mix or afterwards? because I feel like you can roll it. Is it cut up into 100 squares? I got a one in 100 chance.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges veterans face after service?
None of that stuff. But now afterwards, I've had a lot more of those conversations. I've been shocked. So they brought a whole they brought a full sea bag with them to use a Navy term, which is just a large bag for you guys. Actually, you should know this because, of course, the Department of the Navy, it's the men's department. Thank you for acknowledging me. However, we sign your checks.
I don't know what that means. We haven't issued checks since the late 90s. To my knowledge, it's just all digital at this point.
Chapter 6: How do shared experiences contribute to healing?
So that's like, man, we can't even say that anymore. No, Marines are fantastic. I love them. But you bring the sea bag with you. You can put a lot more in it when you're in. Then you get out. And if you find yourself in a place where you make that choice, if you served in the military, and I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but your suicide is going to be associated with that service.
And maybe it totally is, or maybe it's a, it's a microscopic impact. And what really got you to that place was unresolved things that you never dealt with before layered on top of the other pressure that comes with that job. I don't know the answer to it.
Chapter 7: What role does camaraderie play in veterans' lives?
I want the number to be lower from what I've heard and what I've been able to look up. The 22 is actually low. It was an incomplete study that was done when they did it in the first place.
I mean, it's 17 now, but- Is it though? As per the last, I think it was a 2024 annual prevention, suicide prevention report, it was 17 per day. So the initial number was 22, but there is a caveat that if you were to- to add in, right, statistics related to high risk activity, right, as well as alcohol, X, Y, Z, that they think that it could get quite a bit higher.
It's just hard to tease out those variables. I agree with you about most of that when it comes to just how much we lean on alcohol alone. And if we have some C baggage coming in and then we do our service, we got some C baggage going out.
Chapter 8: How can veterans continue to find purpose after service?
The only way that I know how to, again, most of this comes down to a feeling of anxiety and guilt and feeling low, right? If the only way that I know to make myself feel better is to drink a bunch of alcohol, copious amounts of poison over extended periods of time are going to change your personality. So that's not useful at all.
You'd have to get rid of that certainly is something to take off the table. And then with the veteran group, when you don't have much of a, when you go from hunting humans for your country,
I mean, I don't call it that. I call it hide and seek.
Sure. Fair enough. When you play hide and seek. With night vision at night. And pop guns. And they didn't have those. That's a whole nother conversation that you could go down. But when you get I mean, you do that for so many years in your life and there's so much honor that comes with that and prestige and camaraderie.
And then you step out and I no longer have that as a part of my identity no more, nor do I have any type of job that would ever remotely come close to that. There's a grieving process that has to happen with that. Just giving up your job like you have to grieve and grieve. cry and like feel like shit and like give yourself time to heal from that. And then on top of that, one of the,
In my research, one of the saddest things I think is that a lot of humans will get it in their brain that the best thing that they could do for their family is to take their life, right?
The sinister- I've heard that from quite a few people, yeah. Which is an irrational, they make an irrational thought rational, which is not a headspace that I can replicate, but I understand that they get there. Let me ask you this. Should there be honor and prestige in hunting other human beings?
Yes. Why? Personally, to me, with the intent of protecting.
And I only ask that because there's a weight that comes with it. And if you have prestige for those people and you honor those people, but then they can never be that person again, are we setting them up for failure?
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