Warriors Ethos
David Smith talks about Warriors Ethos, a non-profit that provides career planning, professional development, and placement assistance to service members, veterans, as well as their spouses and caregivers.
In this episode, David gives some great advice for those who are transitioning out of the military and looking for career assistance.
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Transcript
Scott DeLuzio: 00:00:00 Thanks for tuning in to a Drive On Podcast where we're focused on giving hope and strength to the entire military community, whether you're a Veteran, Active Duty, Guard Reserve, or a family member, this podcast we'll share inspirational stories and resources that are useful to you. I'm your host, Scott DeLuzio. And now let's get on with the show.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:00:22 Hi everybody. Today my guest is David Smith, who is a combat wounded Army Veteran. He's also the executive director of a nonprofit called Warrior's Ethos, which provides career planning, professional development and placement assistance to service members, Veterans, as well as their spouses and caregivers. He's here today to talk about Warrior’s Ethos, and provide some advice for those who are transitioning out of the military. So welcome to the show, David. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your military background?
David Smith: 00:00:53 Hey Scott, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to talk to you and to your listeners as well. I retired in 2013. I'm medically retired from injuries that I've received in Helmand Afghanistan in 2010, I was injured in an IED. I had spent 23 years in the military. I retired as an E8 Master Sergeant, from a special forces ODA. I absolutely loved what I did and I am convinced that it was the best job in the world. But when I got injured, it was a fairly significant injury; it was my second IED and that put an end to the career. So I had to figure out what was next and, speaking for myself, that was really hard for me because I didn't make a decision to leave the military.
David Smith: 00:01:48 That decision was sort of made for me and I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. So really finding the thing that was going to get me up at five o'clock in the morning and be excited to go to work was tough. And I struggled with that for several years. I eventually made my way through that. And, as you said, I'm now the executive director for Warrior's Ethos. We're a 501C3 based in Reston, Virginia, and we help service members and Veterans and their spouses as they're transitioning out of the military and into their next career.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:02:25 Yeah. And that's what we're talking about today, that transition process. And you know what, I think a lot of times Veterans get out of the military or they're about to get out of the military and they don't really have a great plan for what the next step is. So much of their military life was sort of planned out for them, whether it's the schools they went to or the different training that they had, a lot of that stuff gets planned out for them day to day. And then all of a sudden they take the uniform off and they're just hit in the face with reality of nobody else's planning this stuff for me, you have to figure it out. So, let's jump right in. What was your own transition out of the military like, and how did you end up getting involved with Warrior's Ethos?
David Smith: 00:03:19 So, I guess to sort of explain my transition, I've got to go back a little bit before that, to be able to paint that picture accurately, I hit my first IED in 2006 and in that IED, I lost a close friend of mine and also suffered a fairly significant traumatic brain injury. When I returned from that deployment in 2007, I struggled like a lot of service members did and still do with not only the traumatic brain injury at the time, but also a lot of post-traumatic stress because I'd lost a close friend during that deployment, we'd been sitting right next to him. And I went through all of the same, I won't say same, but similar challenges a lot of other people in similar circumstances go through, which was, I had survivor's guilt.
David Smith: 00:04:19 Why, why him? Why not me? I blamed myself if only I had done this instead of that. I went through everything and fortunately I had a patient wife and family who were able to work with me going through that. I wrestled with everything that comes along with that, drinking a lot and burying myself in my work and with my team and that sort of thing as time went along. I deployed again in 2010 and got another IED and the first one was a mounted IED, was a double stack, anti-tank mine. The second IED was dismounted and it was a homemade, explosive IED. A teammate of mine, actually, was the one who stepped on the IED and was severely injured because of it. I was standing right next to him and I got the effects of it as well, again, because I'd never fully recovered from the post-traumatic stress and things like that, I was kind of burying and carrying with me before.
David Smith: 00:05:33 It's sort of weighed heavily during my recovery from the second IED, because during that time I was the team Sergeant. I was the NCO in charge and it was one of my guys who had been severely injured. And so again, I went through all the different things of, why him, why not me, it was my fault. And all those kinds of things. And this time worked out a little differently though, because one, the Army had matured a little bit in their traumatic brain injury diagnosis and studies and also post-traumatic stress. So I was able to have both of those things taken care of while I was at Walter Reed going through care. And so I came out of it on the other side of it while I was at Walter Reed in a little bit better place than I had been before, but I still had the physical injuries that I had to deal with at that time.
David Smith: 00:06:34 I also understood that I wasn't going to go back to the Army. You know, it was an above the elbow amputee on my left arm, had some significant injuries to my right hand and injuries elsewhere as well. So, really going back to a team, going back to the special forces world, just wasn't an option for me. So I had to think about what was next. And that was really tough for me because my background was such that anything that I was going to do in the future was going to revolve around something physical, whether it was going to be a US Marshall, which I had considered, or FBI agent, which I had considered or something along those lines that was no longer an option. And so not only did I have to think about what's next, but I had to think about it in a completely different direction.
David Smith: 00:07:30 And it was during that time that I got introduced to an organization. It was in its infancy. It was essentially in name only, Warrior’s Ethos. It was the brainchild of our founder, Jared Shepherd. And it was during that time that I came to know Warrior’s Ethos, sort of what their bread and butter was, is to help folks like me, who at Walter Reed were moderately to severely injured, think about what's next, because I was in my mid thirties at the time. But as you're aware, there were a lot of younger guys and gals at Walter Reed at the time as well in their early twenties. Some of them are 18, 19 years old, they got their whole life in front of them. So, Warrior’s Ethos really helped its members in the early days
David Smith: 00:08:31 think about what's next? What do you want to do next? It's not the end. You know, this is just a transition. It's just a new chapter. And I personally really needed that even though I was a senior NCO and had a strong marriage and been married for quite a while. At that point, my kids were early teens and tweens at that time. But it was tough for me. And over the course of that, I began to realize that I had to retrain myself to think in a different direction. And so that's what I did. And I went to school and got some education under my belt because I had to rely more on my brain as opposed to my physical attributes like I did when I was on a team. I had to go do something different and that worked out well for me, it took me a long time.
David Smith: 00:09:27 It was not an overnight process. I struggled with what am I going to do next? What do I really want to do? I struggled with that for probably five, six, seven years. And I'd be lying now. It's been 10 years since I hit that second IED, it'll be 10 years this August. And I'd be lying if I say I have it all figured out. But instead of having a 180 degree myth in front of me where I have no idea what direction I'm going, I've got much more narrowed and I have a direction that I'm going in and I feel optimistic and better about the future.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:10:10 And that's a good point that you made is that you have a direction that you're following now, as opposed to looking at the world and seeing all the different options that are out there and feeling overwhelmed when you have all these different jobs and all these different career paths and all these different things that you possibly could be doing. But not all of those things would make you happy and not all of those things are you qualified to do, or would you necessarily want to do? So being able to narrow that scope down to a limited field is probably in your best interest to be able to move on in the direction that you want to go. I think a lot of times people who are just looking for a job when they get out of the military, they're looking for something that's just going to pay the bills, maybe give them a little bit more spending money than they had when they were there in the military.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:11:17 But like I was saying, not all jobs are created equally and they're not all gonna make you happy. When you're in the military, you have a sense of purpose. You're serving something bigger than yourself. If you aren't feeling some sort of sense of purpose in your civilian career, you may not be as happy in that position for very long, right?
David Smith: 00:11:40 You're absolutely right. And in my own personal experience, and in the experience of friends that I have who left the military after retirement or whatever and from the members that come through our program at Ethos, what I've found is that what is imminently crucial to a successful transition back to civilian life? Because it's back to civilian life. It's not just to say you were a civilian before, correct. But what is imminently critical to that is redefining that sense of purpose and identity, because most service members were known to their family members or to friends outside of the military. In my case, Dave, Army guy, SF guy, whatever that was, that was part of my identity. And it was a noble profession being in the military. And so that's sort of your identity and your purpose.
David Smith: 00:12:46 And when you leave that you have to redefine that. So it's a process. It doesn't happen overnight, but you have to accept that part of that transition is redefining your purpose, redefining your passion. The other thing that I would say that goes along with that they're hand in hand is acknowledging that you need the tribe around you when you're a Veteran and you leave the military. And I was guilty of this. I had sort of a three year transition. I like to say because I was at Walter Reed and I knew that I was going to be retiring, medically, requiring whatever they said, that was it. I wasn't going back to my military career and being able to find that purpose and that passion and redefining those things was critically important. And so, that's a challenge when Veterans find out that they don't have other Veterans around them anymore.
David Smith: 00:13:58 And I didn't think that was going to be a challenge for me because I spent three years sort of preparing for leaving the military. And six months to a year after I left, we moved to our new area in our new home. And I just started a gradual decline. And I didn't even realize it at first, but things weren't happening as fast as I felt they should be happening in my professional life and endeavors that hours consumed pursuing. And I didn't have like-minded people around me that I could just engage with it. Wasn't about bouncing ideas off of them or anything like that was just engaging with them, you know? And I didn't have that. And I got really low in a bad place personally. And what I realized fortunately, was that I felt so much better when I was around other Veterans.
David Smith: 00:15:06 I didn't have to be around them all the time, but just on those random occasions that I would be around friends or something like that. I didn't see him very often. I didn't stay around a military base. I felt imminently better and I felt so much more optimistic and I could let my hair down and be me, so to speak. And I think a lot of service members, when they're transitioning out of the military, they underestimate the value of staying in touch with members of the tribe, whoever it is, and really just having that network, just to talk with, you know, it matters.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:15:49 Yeah. I think you're right because a lot of times people will get out and they'll think, Oh, I can handle this on my own. And they don't think to reach out to them, maybe some of their old friends, especially if they've moved away from the area that those people are in, and in your case, your transition wasn't necessarily abrupt, but the decision was made for you. It was a long time period where you went through the medical treatments and everything else that you had to go through. During that time, people move, people grow apart and I'm not necessarily saying that that's the situation in your case, but with other people, time happens, people move apart and things like that.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:16:45 So, keeping in touch with people or finding a new tribe to use your word, people who are in your area that you can get together with on a regular basis, it doesn't have to be all the time, like you said. But people that you can get in touch with when you need that situation to help out like joining Veteran groups like the VFW or American Legion, that type of thing, could be a way to do that, or just finding other Veterans in your area, any other place that you found your tribe in your area, or is it mostly people that you've been in touch with in the past?
David Smith: 00:17:33 Yeah, for me, it was a little unique, not completely unique, but being a special forces soldier, we have a pretty robust network across the country. There are special forces chapters across the country, and it was, I won't say it was easy because there was a bit of pride and you always make excuses and time because most Veterans, I won't say all, but a lot of Veterans are fairly antisocial. You know, they stick to their family, they stick to what's close, and they're not extremely outgoing to reach out to people, make new friends, make that sort of thing they're willing to a point, but no more than is necessary, you know? And that's me to a T. I am absolutely like that. So I was very insular, not outgoing to make new friends and that sort of thing.
David Smith: 00:18:28 And what I began to realize is that just the few people that I had in my neighborhood, or in my community who were Veterans, I could go out and just meet him for a beer at a local pub or something like that. Not going out all the time or nothing like that. Or I could have, I was going to school at Georgetown, while I was at Walter Reed. And I would invite a group of Veterans who were in the same program as me to come out to my house and we cook out, you know, every few months or so, I don't mind the deck. And it was good just to be able to kind of be us, and Veterans are like that, across the board, no matter what your branch, no matter what your background, that's how Veterans are. And that was, I can't overstate this. I really underestimated the importance of that when I left the military. And it smacked me in the face when I realized that I was really in a low place. There were other things going on in our lives that were challenges, but feeling like I was alone was exacerbated. Everything else that made it 10 times worse.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:19:44 Right. Exactly. There's no point in suffering that way when there are options out there; there's alternatives that you can work your way through and not have to kind of suffer through that. So, I think that that's a really good example that you've provided there with your transition and finding that tribe and getting together with those people. Let's talk about the career side of things. When people are looking for a career outside of the military, what are some of the things that they should consider? I'm assuming that the shotgun approach of applying to every job that you qualify for and just accepting the first job that comes across, as an acceptance, isn't the best way to go. What are some things that people can do to find the right career and help themselves out in that aspect.
David Smith: 00:20:48 So, there's several things that you should do when you've made the decision that you're going to leave the military. As I mentioned, too, that when you come to that realization, you want to prepare as early as possible. We have people who come to us and they're separating from the military in two weeks, we're absolutely going to help them, but they severely limit their options when they do that. We typically like to see our members come to us about a year out from their separation, whether that's retirement or otherwise, because a year out takes some of the pressure off of you when you're planning for what’s next. One of the first things that we try to get our members to do,
David Smith: 00:21:42 and we emphasize the importance of starting a list of what is important to you in your post-military transition, your post-military career. Now we recognize, and we understand that everybody is different. Our approach is deliberately, personalized and customized, because everybody comes from different backgrounds, they have different experience levels, and they've got different ambitions. They've also got different considerations in their personal life, whether that's family members or special needs situations, or they're moving back to their hometown and small town in Georgia or Oklahoma, or they're open to anywhere, literally in the world, everybody's got their own thing, background experience, and ambitions and considerations. So we take all that as a whole. So understanding that the first thing we ask our members to do, particularly even more important if they're married, is to start a list and write 10 things that are important to you in your next career after the military. It could be a high salary. It could be a lot of travel. It could be no travel. It could be a nice title. It might be something like I need to be here, I've been gone so much in my military career that I need a nine to five. I'm done with the 12 hour days. We've also seen the other side of it, where service members are gone so much, their wife's thinks he needs to be gone.
David Smith: 00:23:35 I mean, it's different for everybody, right? But it could be you, maybe you have a special needs child or a special needs family member, and you have to have particular access to healthcare or something like that. You may have geographical considerations that you're considering, all of those things make a list about 10 or so. And we ask our members to do it, they and their spouse independently go to different rooms. Don't work together on this and come up with your list independently, then come together. Well, before you do that, after you make your list, number them from number one, being the most important to you. Number 10, being, it's important enough to be on the list, but it's number 10 and then come together spouses and compare them. And you may find that they're not the same.
David Smith: 00:24:39 You spouse may want you home for supper every night as number two. And you may have ordered number one, and you may have travel as number one, you may have salary as number two, and she may have salary as number seven, the point of the process is to come up with those things individually, and then together make your list. Once you do that together, work in tandem to come up with what your priorities are, because understanding those priorities is going to help drive the positions and the career that you're going to pursue next. It's going to save you a lot of time and a lot of frustration, a lot of headache, and a lot of stress, because let's face it, we all know transitioning out of the military is a hundred new changes in your life, and it's stressful. And if your spouse feels like she's tired of you being gone. And then you're just going to jump into another career where you're going to be working 15 hour days, or traveling 75% of the time, it's not going to do you any favors as a couple,
Scott DeLuzio: 00:26:00 I think that's just generally good advice to try to get on the same page as your spouse, to make sure that you're both reading from the same book and that what it is that each other is expecting. Because like you said, if your wife is expecting you to be home for dinner most nights, and you're looking for a job that's going to require you to travel 75% of the time, you're not on the same page. You're probably not even reading from the same book at that point. You're in two completely different worlds. And that's gonna lead to some friction in your marriage, and that's just going to make so many other things worse. And so, maybe there's some other job that wouldn't require quite as much travel that you would be equally happy with and that would also make your spouse happy and so working together and ironing out those details before you even get into this process, I think is really great advice to have.
David Smith: 00:27:05 And understanding that there are trade offs. You know, if time at home is extremely important to you, and it's really high on your list, that has an impact on other things, it's gonna have an impact on salary. It's going to have an impact on the type of position that you go into. It's going to have an effect on the trajectory of the career that you're embarking on. So being able to understand all these things and sort of pick your top three to five, pick the top three things should be things that you're not going to budge on, and they shouldn't work against each other. It can't be number one, I've got to make $200,000 a year. And number two, I gotta be home every day at five o'clock, the modern workplace just doesn't work that way.
David Smith: 00:27:59 Or, I want to own my own company. I want to start my own business, but time with my family is important to me. It's not realistic. I mean, business owners, entrepreneurs, they're buried in their business for the first few years. And before they make a dime and before they come up for air, so we try to get our members to think about those things, and we try to give them GroundTruth. So, because we don't want 65% of Veterans who leave the military, it generally takes 10 weeks to get from the time you apply for a position until the time you start working in that position, generally 10 weeks, 65% of Veterans who quit their first job within two years, 65%. That means 65% of Veterans, the next job, that first job they get after the military, they're gone for whatever reason.
David Smith: 00:29:05 That's not necessarily a negative because the great thing about the civilian workplace is you can leave. It's not like the military. You can move to something better. You can take a position at another company that positions you for growth. You can make lateral moves, you can make upward moves. Sometimes you have to take a different position that's a step back so that you can take three steps forward, but those vary based on the career path that you're choosing, the field that you're in, and those considerations that we were talking about, what's important to you. And so we try to be as upfront and illuminating as we possibly can with our members to allow them to make the best decision possible, because it is so confusing when we're transitioning out, you've got all of these things.
David Smith: 00:30:01 You've got ratings, you've got med boards, you've got, what are my benefits? You got all these different things that you're trying to understand. I have got to sell my house. I have to think about buying a new house. I have to put my kids in a new school. Oh, you've got all these things. And then on top of it, you're applying for, you're leaving a culture that you've been familiar with for however many years, and you're in BARR, you're going into a completely different, it might be the same job type. Cyber as an example, but it's a completely different culture. And it's a lot of change at once. So we want to prepare our members as much as possible to make the decisions that will set them up for success and to prepare them for the things that are coming.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:30:55 And so you keep referring to them as members, the people who you work with through Warrior's Ethos. How many people, on average do you work with, and how does that process work? If, let's say someone who's listening to this podcast is looking for transition assistance or any of the other types of assistance that you offer, how do they approach Warrior's Ethos and get started with that process.
David Smith: 00:31:29 So I would say, the first thing is we're a small organization. We're not large in a multimillion dollar putting through hundreds of thousands of people a year, kind of an organization. I think right now we've grown since last year. I think we're some somewhere North of a hundred members in our program at one time. Bear in mind that we formally became Warrior's Ethos in 2013. So we're still a pretty young organization, but we're also transitioning. 2020 was going to be a transition year for us. And then COVID hit just like it hit everybody.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:32:12 It became a transition year for everyone.
David Smith: 00:32:16 And kind of bounce to those plans. But so 2021 is a transition year for us in a lot of ways. Financially and organizationally, we've been able to mature and put processes together to help us increase our assistance to members and bring on additional members. Importantly, we don't deny,
David Smith: 00:32:40 We don't say no to anybody. We don't care what your background is. We don't care what your rank is. We've helped everybody from special operations all the way down to infantry signal folks, transportation, MPs, medical field personnel, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't choose people based on their background. At the same time, we've had people from E4s up to O6s in our program. So again, we don't select people based on their rank or anything like that. We help them as they come to us. The best way for someone to come to our organization is probably to go to our website. That's the best way, which is www.warriorsethos.org, Warrior's ethos.org. And then they can apply right from our website. And when they do that, that kicks a bunch of processes in on the backside.
Dave Smith: 00:33:48 And they're introduced to a couple of our transition coordinators. Some young ladies that do that work for our organization. They're awesome at it. They're, Veterans and Veteran’s, spouses, et cetera. And so they work with them and they'll tailor a process in a way forward for them. And that's where it starts. And we do everything from, we'll have an executive meeting with somebody that's in a career field that they're interested in. Almost always a Veteran, who can talk to them about that transition process, but then also talk to them about the career track that they're interested in. And again, it doesn't matter what their experience level, if it's an O6, who's interested in getting into sales or business development, or an executive level position somewhere, or if it's an E7, who's got 14 years in cyber or an E4 who's got four years as an infantryman, it doesn't matter to us.
Dave Smith: 00:34:51 We can work with everybody. Sort of the neat thing about Warrior’s Ethos is again, because I was one of the early members of Warrior’s Ethos because of my circumstances, my injuries, and a lot of the other early members of Warrior's Ethos came from Walter Reed who were severely injured. It forced Warrior's Ethos to come up with unique ways and individual ways to sort of help out each of those people. And that has evolved into a process that we use now, where we treat each person as an individual. We don't have, come in here, do these 10 steps and outcomes as a success story. It doesn't work that way. You come to us, we're going to understand your situation, everything about it, and we will get in the boat and we will row with you as hard as you do, as long as you do, and we will help get you to exactly where you want to be. And so you're going to be optimistic about the future, your professional future when you get there.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:35:57 I really liked that you have that kind of smaller feel to it where it's more individualized one-on-one attention. It's not a a cookie cutter manufacturing process where you're just sending everyone through the same exact process. You kind of tailor things to the individual, because, let's face it, the career path that's right for you, it's not the career path that's right for me or the next person or the next person. And we all have different needs, our top 10 list of things that we're looking for are gonna look completely different from each other. The type of job that we end up in is going to be different and the path that we need to take to get there, whether we need additional education or other training, that type of thing, to get into those jobs is just going to be different. And so by taking this personalized approach that Warrior's Ethos takes, I think it really will help get people into the jobs or careers that they are going to enjoy. And that's going to make a more fulfilling life for themselves. And I think that that's really, really awesome how you guys do that.
David Smith 00:37:25 Yeah. I mean, the program has come a long way over the years and it continues to get better and better. I mean, the services that we offer, we help our members with resume writing, we help them obviously identify career paths and opportunities and things like that, we help them with internships if they're still in the military and paid internships. If they're recent Veterans, same for spouses as well, we'll help match them up with mentors and coaches. One of the big things that we've had a lot of our members talk about is so you put together your resume. We have a person on staff who helps with resume writing and their LinkedIn profile and things like that. So you got all these things put together, you applied for a position, you went and interviewed.
David Smith 00:38:20 We help out with mock interviews as well, based on the position that you're applying for. So we'll help do a mock interview before you go in for it. You knock it out of the park at the mock interview you're hired or you're given an offer letter, and you're looking at the benefits and you sign the offer letter because the benefits generally are pretty broad in the offer letter. And then day one, you're filling out all your benefits information and things like that. And military folks have very little, generally speaking, very little to no experience of what those benefits actually mean. And more importantly, what they actually cost, right. If you're not retiring from the military, you have to know that the medical insurance that you get from your employer is probably going to start in the ballpark of about $800 a month. And that's out of your paycheck. So you just negotiated for this awesome salary. And you had no idea that the benefits package that you're going to get as part of this job could conceivably cost you 12, 13, $1,400 a month. You need to know that because you got to build a budget around that. You need to know those things. And most military folks don't know what they don't know when it comes to that stuff. So we try to educate them so they can make the best decision possible.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:39:53 Right. Because in most of those cases, they never had to deal with any of that type of stuff. That a lot of the stuff was just provided to them. They never had to have to really think too much about those types of benefits. And yeah, it's definitely going to be a shock when you get that first paycheck and you look at the total amount, and it's not quite what you were expecting, you know?
David Smith: 00:40:20 Yeah. And for the folks that are retiring, even if you're going to have healthcare, your time as a retirement benefit when you're retiring, there's lots of other things that are parts of the benefits package. Like, number one, if you don't know exactly what the limits are of your retirement, health care coverage, both dental and health, if you don't know what the limits of that are, then it makes it much more difficult to understand what you actually need to spend as part of the benefits package. But that's just one small piece of everything that we put together, but it's an important component. And it's things like that, that a lot of military folks just don't know, it's not that it's harder or easier or anything else in the civilian world. It's just different. And you're used to operating under one system in a type of culture, and you're going into a different system in a different culture, not worse, better, easier, harder, none of that just different, just different. So, as much as you can prepare yourself, the more successful you'll be in those endeavors.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:41:34 Well, that's definitely a lot of stuff to consider when people are transitioning and I think having some support, like the support that you guys offer through Warrior's Ethos, I think is definitely a smart way to go. So anyone who is in that window, that transition window you're a year out or so, now's the time to get online, go to WarriorsEthos.org, and click the apply button, get the help from them, don't go it alone and wind up making some of those mistakes, like you said, the things that you just don't know that you don't know, it's just a different world out there.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:42:26 And so, get some help navigating it and have a better transition process than some of your peers, not that it's competition necessarily, but you want to make it as smooth as possible for yourself. So, David, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and I think the resources that you offer, through Warrior's Ethos is absolutely amazing. and again, it's a nonprofit organization. So if people want to donate whether it's financial resources or, maybe they have some particular skills that they can donate their time or resources to, where can they go to offer some of that.
David Smith: 00:43:18 So again, same website, www.warriorsethos.org, go there. And in our website, you'll see, there's a couple of buttons there for you to choose from. If you want to donate and make a contribution, or if you want to get involved, you can get involved and leave your contact information. It'll come to us and we'll get back in touch with you. And we're a nonprofit. So obviously we exist off of the philanthropy of other people’s donations and things like that at the same time, the nature of the work that we do, We also need the expertise and the experience of people as well, to be able to share that with our members, opportunities, career opportunities, all those things are important to us. So, if you're interested, please go to our website and click the button. Thank you.
Scott DeLuzio: 00:44:14 Thanks for listening to the Drive On Podcast. If you want to check out more episodes or learn more about the show, you can visit our website DriveOnPodcast.com. We're also on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube at Drive On Podcast.