Palantir, Afghanistan’s SICK Secret & Deadliest Preacher | Fat Electrician & VWAS

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It's just so, well, what happened was I'm so tired and exhausted because like the T the date, the day is long. Like when you do the tour, you show up at like four, drop your bags. And then we go to the venue, audio check, we, uh, food, they do the VIP and then it starts around eight and then we were, we don't leave till like midnight. So I would only get like 10 to 15 minutes each time into the movie. So I'm just like laid out on the plane. You Pavlov yourself into falling asleep to this. I did watch Liam Neeson die. A lot of times I did. It's rough. I don't know what happens next. Yeah. Guys in a lot of movies though. So that's his, that's his thing for sure. It's his thing, but it was just like an ongoing joke. It was like, you've talked me into it. Liam Neeson, like him also the main character in the worst movie ever made. Which one? The gray. Oh yeah. Like that movie. I hate that movie. Why do you hate them? That movie is an hour and a half of edging and not getting to come. It's literally, it's 90 minutes of, I get to see Liam Neeson fight a wolf. No, you don't credits roll the credits. That's kind of the idea though. It's an artistic rendition of think about it. That's like getting on porn hub and watching a plumber, fix a sink the entire time. And then he leaves. Okay. Ain't nobody came to see how to, fix the drain. That's absurd. What about the electric fixing the fucking outlet? Whatever. I don't care what it is. Nobody came. Nobody came to see my fat, hairy ass, fix an outlet. Okay. That's right. That's right. Well, I like some of the cinematography in that movie. So I'm a little biased, but I see what you're saying, but how was it actually like going on tour and doing things in front of a live audience? Like, cause you've had unsubscribed for a long time. You guys got multiple podcasts. You do one together too, but I always wonder what that dynamics like. Cause it's, it's way different. Than sitting in a room like this. Obviously. It might be the best drug I've ever done. Really? Like it's I mean, just from my perspective, I have the easiest job. I have a bit, I come out and tell it. I have like one thing I have to do. Nick starts off the show. He tells a story and I have to wait for my cue. And then I go up there and then my friends work for an hour and a half. And then we hang out again, but it's a good job. It's great. But it just kind of happened naturally. And it's, you know, everyone unsubs. We're all like a very, we're very, we're tight. Like our group's really tight. And for me, it's just like the craziest experience. There's no like direct linear path from like getting out of the Marine Corps, going to college, working in healthcare, holding up cardboard, going on tour with your best friends. Like it's not, it doesn't make sense. And it sounds like a fever dream. Like I have like malaria and I'm like reciting something, but it's just like, it's crazy. The energy in the room's insane. The fans are awesome. And they're just, they're, they're screaming at the second you like walk out there the entire time. Like it's, that's cool. It's insane. That's the thing. Like it's less scary than you think, because like, it's not like being a standup comedian, you know, like I'm not going out there trying to win over the crowd. Like the crowd already knows who I am. They already liked me. So I just have to show up and meet expectations, which is pretty easy when the expectation is to be yourself, hanging out with your buddies and get drunk. So, I mean, it's a very low bar to make everybody happy. So they're thrilled. It's it's a lot of fun. That's cool. Yeah. I see a lot of guys doing that these days. I don't know. Like, I think it's also a different dynamic too, from the outside when you have like a really big fun group podcast where it's like the boys and everything versus like one where it's usually me talking with someone else or something like that. I always wondered if it would be like, you do three hours and you could actually have the same kind of conversation. I don't know. But like, if you're drinking with your boys, like you're on a stage, everyone's rowdy in the crowd, that's probably going to be pretty good. Yeah. That means definitely. It fits well for unsub. I don't know how it would fit for like, you know, the Joe Rogan experience or like other podcasts. I think it's very podcast specific, but unsub is the whole thing's always been four friends get drunk, fly somebody out. They want to hang out with and bullshit. So it works. It works good. What do you guys film out of unsubscribed films out of San Antonio and then underwhelming films out of Nashville and Iowa. So you're just bouncing on it. Cause you live in, you live in Iowa. So you're bouncing around all the time. I've been in seven States this month. Yeah. And I've seen him almost all the trips. I'll be in Las Vegas tomorrow. Oh yeah. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Yeah. You ever get tired. Yeah. I'll worry about it later. Yeah. Yeah. You got a YouTube channel as well. You're keeping up with, I mean, that's like, that's the one benefit of this. Like I record here. So we're, we have a lot going on all the time, but I know where I'm, where I'm at at all times, but then I'll have guys like you in and, you know, you guys are flying all over and somehow keeping that balance. I'm not jealous of that part. That's hard. It's a good time. Yeah. It's a good job. You get better at traveling. That's probably. Yeah. Like you can, there's ways to like relief pressure and like, it's little things you get pre-check, you get clear, you fly enough times, you get upgraded, the upgrades turn into more upgrades. And so like, it's, those are the things that honestly like mean the most, because like it's little things to be more comfortable. That'll like make, the whole trip better, at least in my opinion. Cause like, you know, if you're scrunched up next to someone, the AC is not working and you know, it's, it should be illegal to have the windows open on a plane before noon. I don't know. Who's looking outside of the window. Like this morning, the guy. Three hour flight. It's still white outside. I don't, I don't, the guy, dude, the dude next to the dude at the row across me, he was like, wow. He was like looking out and I'm like, it's, it's, the earth is flat. I don't know what he's looking at, but like, and he was, he was mesmerized by the clouds and it is not, we took off at like seven. - Oh no. - And the whole time I'm like, dude, come on. Even they're even like, we're dimming the cabin lights. He didn't get the clue. He's like, I'll, I'll raise the curtain up more, but. - Yeah. That's when that's the one time in this post Epstein era where private jets are not exactly in vogue, where I'm like a little jealous of those people. So I don't have to deal with any of that. - It's, it's just, it's just weird. You see, you also see like, I'm, this is a side. Like what blasted people get in the morning for a flight? - Oh, I know. - Like just to go to like, for instance, does people know where you are? - Yeah. - To go to Newark. Like there was a ton of people like crawling on the plane. And I'm like, dude, it's what do you, where are you going? - That's one thing I've never understood. Like I love going out and having a good time. - Yeah. - I have never had an alcoholic beverage at an airport or on a plane. And like so many fucking people do. And I'm like, I would, I would flip out. Like that's not for me. Whatever that is, that gene where you can just get fucking loaded on a plane. I don't think that's mine. - I forget where we were. It was either two were from Atlanta. We drank the plane out of Tito's. I know that. - That was from Atlanta. - Yeah. - Do you get like that weird, like head high when you're drunk on a plane because you're like errors popped and everything? - There wasn't enough Tito's to get us all drunk. I do remember, fun fact, the little shots of Tito's come in like a, you know, like vacuum sealed Amazon bags. - Yeah. - That's what they come in. Cause the stewardess literally just brought out the bag and ripped it up. It was like here. It was handing it like it was fucking Halloween. Like just take what you want. Like I don't. - Was that going to, that was going to Orlando, wasn't it? - Probably. - I think it was going to Orlando. - Yeah, cause we played at the hard rock. - Yeah, that was, yeah. - The hangover is not worse coming off a plane like that. - You gotta stop being drunk to get hung over. - Yeah. - You gotta think ahead. - You just gotta keep going. - Stay on pace. - Yeah. - But no, - I'm poor. I'm not stopping. It's like, I get someone like having a drink, going on a vacation, all that stuff I get. But like just regular, normal business suit people blasted at six o'clock in the morning. Fascinates me endlessly. - Absolutely nuts. - And they're like, I'm looking for 4A. And they're just like, they're like all messed up. They can't even lift the bag, which is like the most emasculating moment as a man. Like if you can't put it up above your head, like your back. - Not great. - Not great. - That's a rough look. - Yeah, we were lugging around what? Like 50 pounders on all those trains in Italy last week. - Oh yeah. And then every AC unit would just be out and they're like, yeah, we're gonna move your seat again. but we got it every time no no emasculated moments it was good it was good but you were saying jack that you know all these things like kind of happen like you come out of the military we'll come back to that in a minute and i think you said you're working in health care yes and you start holding up the sign and then somehow everything lines up and now you're doing tours with your buddies around the world with your bit and all that do you ever like pinch yourself like damn what if i didn't do that one thing that one day like seven years ago and then none of this happens i i think about that a lot actually um because of all of our friends i would say me and nick had real jobs the longest yeah and so there's never a moment where i'm like this will last forever or that i take it for granted because i'm convinced i was i was at this one health so nashville's the health care capital of the of the world um which is why you either go in the music industry or go into health care and so i remember sitting in my cubicle and they have a sound machine over each of us that would just play like white noise oh my god and i was like this kind of feels like a like that's attention center we paint the walls robin egg blue to keep them calm yeah type of shit they would the walls were all the same it was stuff like that and like and i just remember i was like i'm wearing a suit though but i just remember like that and then i look at my life now and it's normal even to my my family of like what are you doing today oh i'm going new jersey and then i've got to go to vegas and blah blah blah blah ever woken up and immediately needed a nicotine pouch or a cup of coffee just to feel like a normal human it's funny how we'll do everything in our power to stay healthy go to the gym eat well get eight hours of sleep but then stay relying on putting chemicals in our body constantly just to get some 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him winds up getting married lives 15 years has a wife has kids and then one day he's like sitting in the living room and the lamp looks weird and he like slowly becomes obsessed with this lamp because it just looks weird and then eventually he's just staring at this lamp all day and then eventually he wakes up from a coma and he had lived 15 years it was all completely fake and he was just in a coma from getting his head smacked on the curb so that's like the recurring joke in the friend group is like anytime we're doing something cool one of us will be like guys the lamp's starting to look weird like we're all gonna wake up this is fake yeah that's that's a that's a dark way to think about it but that's what i think about like with the simulation sometimes i'm like what if what if we are all looking at a lamp technically this is great i'm good with this you want to hear the part that scares me about that the most what's that when i was in six years ago i was like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i'm gonna be like i had to write a paper on what i wanted to do when i grew up when i was in sixth grade i wanted to be a stand-up comedian and i loved blue collar comedy tour you ever heard of that yeah larry the cable guy jeff foxworthy billing vol ron white four friends that would travel the country they would all do their bits and then they would come out and sit together on stage in front of a crowd of people and bullshit with the crowd and tell jokes fast forward um by the way my favorite comedian because i was in sixth grade i was in sixth grade and i was in sixth grade and i was in eighth grade at the time was larry the cable guy larry the cable guy was pretty fucking yeah fast forward 15 years later i'm the fat electrician and i travel the country with my three friends and we do comedy shows where we all sit up there together and bullshit with the crowd came together they came to the vision the vision's visioning for sure lamps looking weird lamps looking weird yeah no it's the fan electrician thing though that's a it's a pretty hard name a complete accident cable guy complete accident how was it in the it was dude i all right so i uh electrician you're ripped so you just say you're fat instead of ripped i was an electrician and i got i ruptured my pack i tore my pack so i was off work for like six months in a sling and my wife i was sitting at home all day doing nothing and my wife was kept sending me fucking tiktoks which to me at the time was an app for little kids to do dances on and i was i'm a grown-ass man that's a journeyman electrician i'm not getting tiktok she kept sending them to me so i would have to watch them through the internet browser you know oh when they let you do that yeah back when they let you this is you know six years ago so i would just watch them through internet browser and eventually i was like i'll get the fucking app i downloaded it well then you got to make an account didn't know what to use for a name so as a joke to my wife because i was hurt and couldn't work out i made the username as a joke the fat electrician so hard and it was just a joke to my wife like oh can't work out i'm gonna get fat now ha ha ha and then a couple months later i got a wild hair up my ass made a tiktok 12 million views what was that tiktok about it's about a grocery store called aldi what's going on at aldi i just explained these days i just explained why the business model was insane like it was made by the germans right after world war ii and it's like just german engineering applied to a grocery store right and why it was funny and efficient and why i liked it more because it just prevented people from being annoying in the grocery store by design and just made it funny got a ton of views and then i just kept making videos and they're like honey i'm a tiktoker i'm the fat electrician forever yeah yeah but a tiktoker no i switched to youtube pretty quick to youtube that's good yeah what's funny about it is aldi's such a legit business that everyone admires it that i i wrote about it in business school like i did a case study on it no shit like it's that good like they do basically they've decided the best way to move a customer through the store um they don't put stuff in special packaging they just put it out there in pallets like basically it's cheaper than everywhere else when you walk into an aldi there's no like entryway and you can like walk left and go down all the aisles it's fucking you walk in you're in an aisle the only way to go is left yeah you're going down aisle one when you get to the end of aisle one you have to turn and go down aisle two and there's only like four three or four aisles so you have to go there's one path of traffic there's no fucking one person's going against the current you have to go this way and everything in the store is just like we're not taking the bags of chips out of the boxes and putting them on the rack no we're just opening the box and setting it there and when the boxes are fucking empty then we get we throw away the box yeah and then we don't give out bags you're bagging your own groceries you can take the boxes if you forgot bags so then they get people to take their fucking boxes for them like it's just you put your cart back you get a quarterback all these like little things that they did to make it efficient so it's like the real autobahn of grocery stores pretty much yeah i don't know the last time i was in an aldi they also have really good food um like the quality of their food is really good because like costco level yeah uh probably better honestly because they have to meet european standards on the quality of their food so like minimal gmos if any at all like if you're getting like a cookie for instance like it's actually just like flour sugar chocolate chips the end not like a bunch of like weird stuff see that's the thing and we say we'll eat like shit hypothetically and things like that drink a lot and somehow we feel decent the next day because there is so much shit in all our foods here i was even looking at a protein bar the other day i think it was like i don't want to get the company i think it was a david bar and i went and said let me check out the ingredients here because it's like pretty good for you like the macros all look good i don't remember what was in there but it was some sort of like corn syrup and like all these other preservatives and shit like no wonder i have to take a shit within an hour like not the good kind every time i have one of these you know it's like something went very wrong in our society where they just let that happen and it's just a very bad slippery slope these days yeah it's pretty rough it's keeping ian carroll in business though that's how i found out about him was all the the food shelves and how it's all like owned by one company i think it's unilever mainly i don't know yeah doesn't ian has like an app for that now or something right i'm pretty sure it's called like buyer yeah yeah yeah i think that's it where they tell you like what's what but someone told me a few years ago and then i've seen it all over the internet since then so it's probably been around a while but they're like just don't buy the shiny wrapper stuff in the in the food store don't go to the middle aisles go the outside where it's like produce and stuff like that and you'll be okay i think there's something to be said for that i think it still applies yeah yeah what why do you think that is that we let that happen in america we're supposed to be like the leader of the free world and everything but we're kind of like very behind on stuff like that profits profit i'm thinking of the scene in uh the founder where he makes the milkshake out of powder at the restaurant at some point or another we let money go into politics because we lost track of what a politician is supposed to be the country was designed so that the politicians in america were supposed to be independently wealthy successful individuals that then after becoming wealthy and successful went on to serve the public be a public servant to help run the country because they know how to run a business they know how to get shit done they're leaders in the military they're leaders in business they're they're accomplished individuals and for some reason they're not going to be able to run a business they're going to be some reason now most of our politicians all have law degrees and their entire life from the time they were 12 years old was i'm on a chart to do this so i need to go to this high school and then i need to go to this college and then i need to join the military where i will intentionally get a job to ensure that i never see combat for the minimum amount of time once i get out of that so i can you know check the veteran box and then i'm going to go be a city council member here be this here and then they've spent their entire life on this trajectory to run the country and they've never even lived it and they've never even lived it and they've never even lived it in the real world and these people need money to win elections so when some asshole comes to the factory and is like i'll give you a million dollars to win your election but let me pump corn syrup into fucking strawberries right they say yes and they're owned and then they just insider trade on the information so they can get fucking rich right no nancy pelosi's husband is better than warren buffett by 700 he's he's got to be better yeah and when he has company over sometimes he doesn't have pants what's the big deal guys that's it that's it i know when i get from a long day in the suit i take pants i go pants all first never the tie never the shirt i go let's drop trousers trousers first trousers first shirt later for sure you got a winnie the pooh this shit so you just got to go tom cruise and risky business you know you start and then that's that's just kind of how it goes that is true we don't hear about that story though anymore that just kind of that went away right i like the footage the cops are like yo and he's like he's like we're fine and he's like holding the one guy off he's like he's like we're fine he's like are you sure you're fine he's like it doesn't look like you're fine no no we're just two friends hanging out is that a hammer ah come on dude what are you doing crazy i agree with everything you said though but i think you're even giving too much credit because you're just mentioning the ones who maybe go the military route for the checkbox on on the resume a lot of these people don't even do that yeah you don't have to and they're like they don't even do the the standard is constantly getting lower yeah for sure yeah i mean most of them just take like admin jobs if they do the military or like you know something that's in like logistics is a popular thing like you can get in move stuff around blah blah blah you're not going to really see combat at all or if you do it's very minimal you'll be at like a big base yeah and yeah it's a lot of people in intelligence so that's a lot of that too a lot of that that's always interesting but well they know the game yeah you know yeah they used to be the guy on the other side now they come in they're like now i'm your inside now i have a white naval suit that's right that's right isn't one of your boys is he's like literally about to win right yep herrera yeah what what district is that in texas district 23 in texas okay and that's where the guy who like fucked his assistant or something yeah yeah why did he why did he before all that why did he want to run against him in the first uh so after the um um one he just didn't have a good voting record in general for being um a republican and then uh brandon's big thing was he kind of rolled over on guns and was becoming anti-gun as a republican representing texas so really yeah brandon brandon ran against him last time actually took him to a runoff election so in texas you have to win by more than 50 so he prevented him from getting 50 of the vote so they had to go to a special runoff election just between the two of them and he beat brandon in that special runoff election by outspending him i think 11 to 1 i think he spent like 11 million dollars campaigning against brandon and it was all like complete lies of like brandon's anti-veteran brand brandon hates it's like brandon's on one of the biggest veteran podcasts on the internet and has raised hundreds of thousands i think we were broke a million at this point for veterans charities it's like no no he isn't but you have enough money and you can lie loud enough you know people i don't know how that's legal how's it legal like to do something to to spend money fill the public airways with things that are verifiably false great question very good point um because when he this second go around when all this stuff happened the text messages were published it was on nbc nightly news i was at my house i just like took a photo of it and i was like oh my god like they're talking about tony and um all those things happened still he wasn't stepping down uh i remember there was a push in there i found about out about this from chris jacobs a friend of ours there was a photo we all took somewhere and it was in a rolling stone article and it labeled brandon as a neo-nazi a neo-nazi yeah which is and their their logic of why he was a neo-nazi was because brandon makes youtube videos on guns a lot of which are either weird historically interesting like one-off like experimental stuff there's not a lot of or guns that had like a big significance on like this gun was revolutionary to firearms because of xyz yada yada yada yeah amongst all of his videos which he covers all of he has covered some guns from germany oh my god in world war ii that was enough and talks about how you know the mg42 the machine gun that the nazis used was revolutionary for heavy machine guns because it fucking was but because he made a video talking about a nazi gun and saying it's a good gun because objectively it is yeah he's a nazi because if the nazis did anything and you liked it you must also be a nazi that's nuts yeah that was that was their logic i mean they were literally fitted by hugo boss yeah i don't see anyone not wearing you you know i mean like it's that's crazy not to mention his name is brandon herrera so they wouldn't like them um i i you know it was it was a stretch i mean he he his grandmother uh literally escaped nazi germany um we've all met her she's a lovely lady she even walked back from france when she was 14 so like her family literally fought against the nazis wow and so like but it didn't matter like none of these things mattered and so like eventually like i think his his staff or whatever they got it all taken down but like it was just like photos of all of us like hanging out like doing the podcast or like just like random instagram things that were out there and they're like neo-nazi brandon herrera there was there was the one where he said god what was it somebody brought because like the running joke on the internet is i hate communism so we had a guest come on that brought me the communist manifesto as a gift that funny haha and you keep it they got on uh i already had i have a copy okay i gotta read it you know that's it yeah i gotta learn the know your enemy so um that brought up uh you know the mind conf or whatever yeah and brandon said that he owned a copy he also owned a copy of the communist manifesto and then he listed off like 10 other books that he also had copies of and he goes have you ever read it it reads like a dude's schizo posting on the internet like hitler was clearly fucking crazy and then he goes but watch they're not going to add that part they're going to cut that out and then just say that i own a copy of mine comp and like literally right exactly right where they did he called where they were going to cut it and put that in the ad and it's like that's nuts holy shit yeah you just i don't know when this stopped but like my dad was in college in the mid 80s they assigned mine comp for for classes to have to read it to do a breakdown of like what sociopathy looks like it used to be like that apparently that used to be a thing and then at some point it was like not only are they not hey signing it you can't you don't want that on your amazon history what if we expose people to this and then explain to them why it's so fucking stupid and horrible and then they're like oh my god i don't know what to do with it i don't know what to do with it i don't if it ever tries to happen again they'll be able to identify it and know that it's stupid and horrible 100 you know what i mean like but now the answer is to just bury your head in the saying pretend that the problem can never happen and get mad if anybody tries to educate you it's perfect but yeah the reason they're attacking him is because he doesn't have any of the traditional levers you know he has money he has power they're attacking him because he's exactly the guy that i said he's supposed to be yeah that's what he's independently successful he's independently already got a bunch of money he runs multiple successful businesses he doesn't need people's money to get bought out and they fucking hate that yeah that's nuts so like how do we manipulate him he's like you can't you can't and they're like we're just gonna call you a nazi and he's like a mexican they're like all right we'll call you a neo-nazi i'll say it louder like yeah yeah and i have zero interest in ever going anywhere near politics or whatever i don't think people would like me over there in any way shape or form but like you know i see some of these guys who will get labels like that and you said you said his grandma literally like survived world war ii literally yeah literally we've like my anger if that actually happened because it's one thing to be lied about and stuff but like then when it's something personal you and they're saying like you're the opposite i would not deal with that well i would just fucking lose it good that's what we need though yeah unpopular opinion i want to go back to the time where it's not a bunch of 70 year olds that don't understand how to connect to a fucking wi-fi router running the country trying to explain to them what the fuck ai and why it's important and then i want i want guys like you and i want people getting on the floor of congress being like let's fucking run it right now like i want to see you guys throwing hands like that's when shit was getting done yeah well what's that one got the uh the treasury secretary he's fucking throwing hands with everyone these days you seen that i saw that he's like hit beat up elon beat up some other guy another guy like they had to separate him from really yeah is that real i i swear to god it's real i've seen the clip of the one guy being like we can take this okay pop up let's go and he like gets up that's mark wayne mullen and the head of teamsters oh he threatened the head yeah yeah and he's like he's like we can set us outside and he's like we sure can and like he's like all right cool pop off and i was like come on dude i think a little popping off would be good yeah treasury secretary scott percent has been involved in several high profile internal clashes with the administration bill polte elon musk and we can't every time we ask about this and i've gone to look for it it's like almost deleted from the internet there's another there was a guy like at the beginning of the iran war that he that he not polte it was another one that he like beat the shit out of him back there good that's one tough that's what i want yeah he's fucking that's what i want he can throw it around think about how much cooler filler busters would be if they were just running fades the whole time i want that i want i want to have to like be taken into consideration weight classes when i'm voting for politicians like you know what i mean yeah iowa needs a heavyweight like sorry is iowa gonna get a heavyweight you're gonna think about doing that we get no we'll see we got we got zach lawn running for governor right now so what's his story uh zach lawn is like literally just a farmer from iowa his family has been there since fucking forever like showed up in a covered wagon and helped build the state love that family fought in the civil war like all he's got this huge family history and um which side iowa fought for the north okay yeah so make it sure yeah iowa never had slaves yeah imagine he comes out and arrives again so uh vote for me for governor i'm sorry but uh no iowa's got i think we're the only we're either the only state or one of two states that has a rising cancer rate in the united states of america and we have like the highest cancer rates in the world and it's because glyphosate iowa yeah iowa's the most um i guess the term would be like terraformed plot of land on the planet like iowa used to be all prairies with tall grass and now it's all corn everywhere brother and the shit they spray on the corn gets in the groundwater and it's fucking up everything nitrates glyphosate and his whole platform is we need to quit letting them do this there's safer ways to do it he's literally running on the platform of cancer is bad yeah this episode sponsored by she's birdie you lock the hotel room door then check it again and maybe one more time because even the nicest room can feel unfamiliar at night that's why she's birdie created birdie box with she's birdie you can bring peace of mind with you birdie box is a portable travel door alarm for hotels dorms airbnbs and anywhere you stay away from home just attach it to the door frame switch it on and if someone opens the door birdie box blasts a loud siren and flashing alarm to alert you and everyone nearby because the best part of travel isn't worrying it's sleeping soundly birdie box from she's birdie locking in peace of mind wherever you stay for safer more confident travel visit she's birdie.com that's s-h-e-s-b-i-r-d-i-e.com and the i think it was the des moines register um they had like a democratic journalist basically cancer's actually good no no to their credit they were pissed off at the democratic party they were like how in the fuck did you let a republican beat you to this he's like historically speaking this is a democrat progressive progressive issue like well the environment environment we want to you know be do the healthy thing even if it doesn't make profits like historically speaking that would be a democrat talking point they're like how did you let this guy beat you to it because now he's the cancer's bad candidate and i don't know how to run against that yeah i can't say it's good that's crazy but so they have like the highest rise in rate of it and yeah when did that when did that you know because i think that's one thing especially like someone who's been from the east coast my whole life i'm from jersey it is called the garden state we have some great farms and stuff here but we got a little bit of everything right and i'm from less like the farm area if you will but obviously you look at middle america this is the ground zero of producing in this country and getting all everything into your food store like that's supposed to be good for you and all that when did it start to get like out of control with the glyphosate and with all these things and like what was the idea of even bringing these things into the picture when we have human history that worked for so long without it uh so i'm guessing here so not this completely accurate uh so iowa used to be iowa's all prairie it used to be covered with this prairie grass that was really tall like historic accounts when the pilgrims and pioneers and stuff were coming over they said this grass was so tall that if you were sitting on horseback you could tie the the grass around the horse's neck these this grass had to be covered with this prairie grass has root systems that's like 10 times longer than the grass itself and i've seen it in museums it's like three stories long this massive root system going down it's like 30 feet yeah it's it's insane how deep these roots go well we got rid of all those roots and that stuff's been there for thousands and thousands and thousands of years the grass dies the soil absorbs all the nutrients from that plant and that went on forever so iowa and the midwest has like some of the most fertile growing ground on the ground the soil absorbs all the nutrients from that plant and that went on forever so iowa and the midwest has like some of the most fertile growing ground on the planet corn takes all the nitrogen out of the ground so for a long time you would do crop rotations and that's why iowa's known most for corn and soybeans so you would rotate your field it's like corn soybean corn soybean corn soybean because the corn takes all the nitrogen out of the ground the soybeans puts nitrogen back in the ground so you would rotate and my guess this is where i get into what i don't know my assumption is with ethanol and everything else it became a lot more profitable to grow corn because who the eats soybeans right so they figured oh we can just pump nitrogen into the ground with chemicals and then we don't need to grow soybeans to put that nitrogen back into the ground it's like a drug they became reliant on so then now iowa's predominantly corn even when i moved there you know 15 years ago i would see way more soybean fields or like different times a year different crop yeah uh dave just pulled out this is the root you're talking about yeah so i mean that's the root system of this prairie grass that they had in iowa going on for thousands of years and that's why the ground there's iowa dirt doesn't look like dirt and they're like dirt in the rest of the country is like brown yeah dirt in iowa is like black like dark black so i mean it's just the soil is good but then i don't know it became profitable with ethanol and everything else to just grow corn so now they're just pumping chemicals into the ground and spraying and now when we're talking about potentially you know where people are aware of this kind of thing we want to get rid of stuff like that we're doing it at a time where we inflated the dollar six ways to sunday you know people can't afford to buy a home anymore people are making financial decisions as to whether or not to make a kid we're funding all these wars but can't feed the poor and everything and so if you as far and this is a 30 000 foot in the air view of it when you go to unwind stuff like this there does have to be some short-term financial pain you know five ten years something like that to readjust the industry and you're gonna like to me i hate to be a cynic but it's like they're gonna keep kicking the can down the road because no one wants to eat that and then lose on a tuesday in november yeah i heard uh rfk talk about it on rogan that they're looking into um robots that shoot lasers at bugs dude they look dope have you seen them i haven't seen them it's a giant trailer basically that they pull behind a tractor it looks like a solar panel laying down flat it's a robot it sits it's just a trailer but it it looks it's like a big metal and it's got wheels and it's got ai and cameras on it and lasers everywhere and you just drive it over the crops and it's like a star wars battle scene it's just shooting lasers at little bugs bug zaps it and they just drive it over the field and it kills everything this is okay now we're talking yeah wait a second these are the robots and it's like this is what we could be using instead of spraying chemicals that give you cancer on our fields so what he what he said on the episode is that it's something that hhs is looking into the problem is cost but until this is like up and running and even they've like figured out the cost if they just pull the ripcord right now and take out glyphosate it'll collapse our food industry because we have nothing else so it's kick the can yes but it does give me hope that he's like actually looking into it because from what i understand he has a history of doing really good stuff he cleaned up the water out here right isn't that what he did here yeah the hudson yeah he cleaned up when everyone else was like nah don't do it he's like i'm gonna do it yeah he's a late he's a long time you can definitely say he's a long time environmentalist and you know also jacked he is dude i'm gonna work out till i'm dead yeah like because of him like everyone's like oh he's not that strong i'm like dude he's 70 he's yeah he's like 72 or he's 72 and jacked and i saw him what was it i think it was a workout with kid rock but like but i did see him like work out with oh it was michael hearn he was a michael hearn yeah i was cold he pops top he's in jeans and he's repping on bench at 72 135 i'm like that's fucking good that's crazy yeah most people in their 20s and 30s can't do that and your papaw is doing it i mean yeah fast forward when i'm 70 dude i'm gonna be obnoxious of here what is up with you can't pump your own gas here oh yeah what's that about oh you you're unaware of this what is no we live in america i don't trust any state that doesn't let me pump my own gas no no listeners you can't pump your gassy don't knock it before you try it it's actually a good thing i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna do that it's actually a very nice luxury in this state which side of the civil war did you guys fight on what the fuck you got going on i'm not pumping my own gas just hear me out listen like when i drive over to pennsylvania or into new york i'll i'll sit at the gas station for a minute and forget i'm like oh shit oh you got gas ptsd yeah then i know because i'm like i'm like where the fuck is the guy ah and then he doesn't come by i'm like oh right i'm in a different state i pump it but like when you're here and you can just pull up like if you go to a wawa and like janice or something like you just pull up you hand the guy your card you come back it's great you give a stranger your credit card and you just leave it's amazing this camera's everywhere oh you know you don't like that europeans bitch about that a lot i didn't know that about what uh like europeans when they come over here a lot of them they say it's really weird at restaurants that americans give their credit card to the waiter or waitress and they take the credit card away to run the transaction they think that's apparently that's weird to them well they do and in europe they do always bring the thing to the table and they tap it right in front of you i mean they're doing that's that's fine you can also look and be like oh there's like three hundred dollars from oh charlie's i just don't think that they realize this is america and we'll throw hands over shit because that's the same thing in france where they were like americans are trying to fight the pickpockets and the pickpockets aren't used to handling that usually it's like a game if we catch you they just give you your stuff back and the americans are just beating the shit out of people dude dude you've seen tyler oliver's content on that with the pickpockets tyler on you you've heard of him he's huge on youtube but he does he has one series that he does where he goes to different cities in europe and goes after the scammers and everything i think i know who you're talking about so he we were back in rome a couple weeks ago and he actually hit me up on something separate and i told him i said dude i forgot to tell you this in december when i was here and now we were just thinking again when i was here but when i lived in rome 12 years ago it was the safest city ever the one thing was when you'd go on the bridges there'd be pickpockets and scammers and shit so you always think about that and then you had to like walk across with your hands like this now you go on a bridge over there ever since he fucking was there you can't find one dude i was like i think you scared him all off because he'll like tackle them and shit while he's videoing them like scammer scammer and they fucking they don't like him hell yeah good that's what i'm saying like you solve the problem yes but what's the reasoning behind having people pump your gas as opposed to you doing it it's just a really nice service we're a great state it's it's like a lull right it is i believe it can we check that deep i'm pretty sure it is codified like you have to have one i'm just curious what the legislation was oh i can can i guess can i guess this was a hundred percent like some union bullshit when cars were coming out gotcha that's ah all the that's gonna be right all the union fucking guys that feed the hay to your horse at the bar are gonna be out of a job they gotta learn how to pump gas and then we need to make sure they keep their jobs because we don't want to lose those okay here we go so under the retail gas dispensing safety act there's that's such a gay name but you know whatever it is illegal for a customer to pump their own gas in jersey it's the only state in the u.s that still maintains this ban the reason the law was originally passed in 1949 due to safety hazards and fire concerns associated with dispensing flammable liquids you know we do smoke a lot of cigarettes in this state you know that could be why it's like your elected official said i don't trust these fucking idiots with flammable i'm telling you i'm telling you you can't trust these civilians with the gas pump and they'll get all confused but once they once you like get used to it it is like a drug and you're like this is very nice it's very convenient for your day yeah are we still not a pump like when i go to another state yeah once you get used to the big brother state and the government controls everything it's very comfortable very comfortable you're literally one step away from like everybody else is worried about like everybody else is worried about them putting auto kill switches in cars so they could just shut your car down and prevent travel new guys and nobody will know what the fuck to do yeah well i mean a lot of times like you know it is like an indian guy or a pakistani guy or something so it doesn't feel like big brother like i don't feel like they would be and we don't mind if that guy catches fire is that what you're saying we know that's what i heard you say yeah this is crazy work um is it a 24-hour situation yes there's literally a guy on post like a military graveyard shift if i go get gas before a long drive at like 3 30 in the morning or four there's a dude waiting for me saying what do you want like 89 regular let's go dang i don't know i feel like you're just one step away from being like you're over your monthly allotment go back home i mean it was a 1949 law we've been good on this i'm just saying like it just feels like it's one it's one step away from being like let's cap those what the fucking balls on your government in 1949 to be like oh oh all you guys that just won world war ii that were literally having jeeps mailed to you in boxes and assembling them in the field and driving them into combat you you just got home got your life together and now you can afford a car i don't trust you to pump gas no i'm not buying hold on a minute they more said we're going to give you a nice service you don't have to pump your gas this is hella finessing listen i'm a finesse i like this you're trying to take it away the cope is real and i'm like the bad like you know always worried about big brother with everything but i feel like you're you're roping this in i think i think you're coming to realize that they got you and you're mad about it i don't i don't think so yeah this is my new goal is this like a peter was he alive in 1949 was peter teal resident of argentina yeah yeah i just had uh my boy pop in here hold on no no don't don't don't change it now are you allowed to plug in your own teslas or do you have to have a guy for that too no you can plug in your own teslas i'll show you it's right up i mean power can kill just like fire it can kill just like if you watch avatar power is more dangerous than fire but actually here's here's a mind fuck for you i think that's new jersey saying don't get a tesla because you got to fucking do it yourself so we're going to stay on gasoline it's the last state to do just turn that around on you see they're trying to disincentivize electric vehicles they're trying to say we do gasoline don't fucking threaten me with a good time the first the first politician to be on v8s and no carburetor uh no emission standards is getting my vote like i'm all for it come to new jersey where you have gas attendance and that's what they're running on apparently i don't know dave you're supposed to back me up here no i i like i want to be able to pump my own gas from being honest you son of a bitch that's why i was that's why i was keeping quiet i didn't want to you know but it's a pain in the ass well that's just stamping on me while i'm driving yeah i'm sorry i'm not i'm not for it i don't want to i don't want to bring my car here but you are a big fan of peter teal i don't fucking which one is that that's the reptile more specifically it's the guy who funds no which billionaire is he how do you make a billion dollars uh paypal mafia facebook board best founders fund what's his ai project which one is he is he palantir chat gp yeah i think i'm trying to think if there's another one that he's on the board of are you right yeah he's got to be on the line he's honestly been angel investing more than anything the past 20 years where are you at with ai you're more down these conspiracy rabbit holes than i am i am i would assume really i would assume i walked through your office what was in my office there's you know white boards and red there's white boards and red strings everywhere i thought we were in philly look like charlie over there yeah i think i think ai's in this sense, I think it's like every innovation before, it in one way and then unlike it. The way it's like it is that people have always been afraid of the next big technology and they say it's going to end the world and yada, yada, yada. But it just over time, even if there's pain, like it creates overall progress. And I think there's a lot of great things AI can be used for. The way it's not like previous technology though, is because of the exponential curve of technology. We're now talking about something that has the potential if it's seen through to be able to outthink a human being. And then there's a lot of weird slippery slopes with that. I'm going to be honest with you. Every AI I've ever fucked with can already outthink a lot of human beings. Right. That's the scary part to me. It's like, and who has their hand, their fingers on these triggers? Like, do you think Sam Altman seems like a regular schmo? I don't. You're mad that AI is too smart. I'm mad because people are too dumb. Come to Jersey. They're smarter over here. Apparently. All right. Maybe they're smarter because they haven't been in. Hailing gas. We're not going to sit here. I'm not going to sit here and be a cock at the gas pump. I've never had someone fight. It's always the opposite. People are like, yo, people pump your gas. I will never in my life pull up with my car and look another man in the eyes. Be like, yeah, bro. Pump my tank. It's not happening. Stick it in. You do it. I'll watch while I sit in this chair. Not happening. I'll be pumping the gas. Do you guys have fun? All right. I'm going to go. Yes, Bush. Okay. She full. All right. I'm going to take off. Like we're good. All right. No, I don't need a receipt. No, no eye contact. It's weird. Let's go. I think you got to make a tick tock before you leave. Do you, do you tip the guy? Is that? No, you don't tip. That's one. Like I'm a huge tipper. That's one thing you don't tip the gas station. Cause that's his job. They're paid a full salary. It's not like a waiter or something like that. Those guys, you tip the shit out of them. Don't tell me you tip the gas and then you tip. No, no, no. Okay. But sometimes they'll, they'll, they'll hit the hood for you or the windshield. Give them a dollar when they do that. They never do that though. Yeah, no, not anymore. Someone do the window squeegee and probably like 10 years. No class anymore. Yeah. And that, the thing that pissed me off about that is like, I didn't ask for that. Maybe I like my window dirty. That's why I have window fluid. Like you don't need to come do that just to get more money out of me. I'm already spending fucking, well now it's like $7 a gallon just to get, well, it's like five, but you know, it got up to seven in California just to get gas. Cause it's more expensive at the moment. It's like, I, you know, I already got a big bill coming. You're really, this is really making me rethink things. He's mad. Cause he wants to do the cleanup. I get it. This is like a giant, the whole thing. Did you pump your own gas in the military? Yeah. They didn't have like a designated, no. They have stations all around bases. They have, they have guys whose job it is to drive like the giant fuel tank truck. Right. But yeah, no, usually you're pumping your own gas. That's a gas attendant though. Cause they're getting you the gas. And this, the least you can do is pump it. Well, it's kind of like the semi truck that brings the gas to the gas station and then you still pump your own shit. Okay. All right. I got you. I got you. How long have you been out of the military though? Me? 2012. 2012? Yeah. So you got in, do you get in at 18? 17. No shit. Yeah, I was still in high school. Was that something you always wanted to do? No. How'd you end up? Poor. I got to pay for college somehow. I thought I had to go to college. So joined my senior year. Where did you live at the time? Iowa. So I thought you said you moved to Iowa 15, well, that would be like 20. Yeah. I moved to Iowa when I was like 12, 13 from California. So I finished high school and everything in Iowa. Where'd you live in California, Stan? All over Northern California, Chico, Orland, Orville. So. And why'd you move to Iowa? Just family decided to move. I was a kid, moved with them. And then got to spend the rest of the time in Iowa. Joined a national guard while I was. Still in high school, shipped off, did all the training for that right after. And then, uh, tried to go to nursing school, failed that miserably. Not my thing. You as a nurse, bro. I was like, I'm a combat medic. That's close to nursing. That'll be similar. It's not, that is how they pitch it. Actually. Yeah, that'll be similar. No, it isn't. No, no, no. You know who you're dealing with in the military. Well, yeah. Healthcare. Stay here. I thought I was real good at giving. IVs. I didn't realize that everybody I was trying to give IVs to was 20 to 30 year old men that were in reasonably good shape and I didn't have to go through four inches of fat to find a fucking vein. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, everything's harder. Everything sucks. It's not a good time. Wasn't for me. Yeah. A lot of different personalities you're dealing with on that. For sure. Not exciting. So you, then you became an electrician. Yep. We quit nursing school, went and joined. An apprenticeship, um, became a journeyman. Electrician did that for almost 10 years. And then it turned into this, then it turned into this YouTube thing. And now I'm here now I'm in, in New Jersey where somebody is pumping my gas for me. I'm at the peak of luxury. That's right. It is cool though, because like, I think that there's been a recent movement over the last five, six years that I've seen more to where like trades that by the way, are like really good jobs. Like. I think that there's been a lot of people that are like, oh, I'm going to be a electrician plumber, all these things that are, have less people going into them. They're starting to say like, Hey, more people should look at that instead of spending fucking $200,000 for a gender studies degree. Yeah, absolutely. And like, the other thing is, is like the most people don't think about is it gets pitched all these kids as like, you need to find what you're passionate about and then go to college and get a degree for that. I got a newsletter. You don't fucking even know who you are, let alone what you're passionate about or what you want to do. Trying to figure that out when you're 16. And playing the rest of your life. Very small margin for success. You have no fucking idea what you like. You've been hanging around the same people exactly your age that grew up in extremely similar circumstances. You think you like the, like the same shit in 10 years. You're going to look back at what you were into in high school and cringe and be like, I can't believe I did that. I can't believe I wore those clothes. I can't believe I listened to that music. I can't believe any of it. Like, why would you stage your whole life off of what you thought when you were 16, 17 years old? Cause that's what. The system soldiers actually like a modicum of truth. And it's never, I don't think it's ever been. Right. But like the, the trades in particular is, I don't think I would be here if I wasn't an electrician first. And the reason I say that is I can call my boss that I had and I can fly back to Iowa and I could probably finish out the work day if I want my old job back. Like I still have a journeyman electrician's license. I can go anywhere in the country and get a job making six figures. Right now. So like me being able to quit my job and be like, I got a wife and kids and I'm about to quit my job to be a fucking YouTuber. That sounds like it's going to fail for sure. But I had a certain level of confidence in knowing, Hey, if this doesn't work out, worst case scenario, I go back to where I am right now. Yeah. My life can't get worse from what I'm already doing. I'm living the worst case scenario. It can only get better. So I might as well try. And I tried and it worked. And if it didn't, I would have went back to work. I went back to be an electrician and I could have said, I tried, you know what I mean? So like when you get these trades licenses, you become a journeyman, electrician, a journeyman, plumber, any of this stuff. You have that for the rest of your life. You can always fall back on that. Like my new minimum wage is a six figure salary with full benefits. That's amazing. And like you can get, if I wish, like, I don't wish I didn't join the military, but like, had I known that this was an option, I probably wouldn't have. Cause the whole reason I went was to go and pay for college. And if I would have known that at 18 years old, I could have joined an apprenticeship and been a journeyman, electrician at 22, making six figures. Why wouldn't you do that? And then you have that for the rest of your life. You're still 22 years old. Now you, if you want to go to college, you can go to college and fucking pay for it. Right. And if you don't like it, guess what? You can fucking quit and keep doing what you're doing and dick off and try different stuff till you do find what you're really passionate about. And then you can go do that. I don't think they want people to know that. It's insane. You know, there's not a lot of jobs that are like you just said, where it's like, you know, you can come back to it because you have that skill and there's no bullshit people. If the job needs to be done, you can be plugged in and do it. All these other, this whole corporate mindset is like, well, you got to rise through the ranks. You go from fucking associate to VP and this and that. And if you stop, God forbid, some girl goes home and has a kid and decides to take a couple years off. She's like done in the chain. Like there's like. There's something about that that just feels like that's the fucking plan. And I think that we're in a moment where enough people are waking up to that, that maybe it can change for the next generation. I really believe that, you know, you see more people do what you did or more people actually like take a chance on a career and things like that. Go out and try to make something like that's what the American dream is supposed to be. I think like either or, you know? Yeah. I hate a corporate life. I wasn't any good at it. You know, I was really, really bad. at it. I can't stress that enough. Like, it's just. um, especially coming from the military, the, the problem I had was like in the military, at least when I was in, you know, when you're in like combat arms, like the infantry and doing stuff like that. And Nick can attest this too, is you work until the job's done. And then that's it. Like you go home, like you get the job done, you go home, you're training, you go home. And so like, I treated most of corporate life like that. If I was done, I was done. And they're like, no, no, you're, you're not done. You got to stay. And I'm like, I don't understand. I got to sit underneath this white noise underneath the, you have a suit on though. Well, that's the other part that, you know what I'm saying? Like, I completely agree because like when I was an electrician, it was like, don't get me wrong. There was times where like, I was dicking off at work, but you know, I was with the boys, we were doing pranks, whatever with each other. But like, for the most part, it was like, if I'm somewhere as an electrician, there's work to be done and I can do something. And I really enjoyed like showing up to an empty plot of land. And by the time I leave, there's a fucking, there that's got the lights on. Like I enjoyed a seeing that progress, but I enjoyed there always being work to do. And I have a bunch of friends that work in corporate and shit. Like I have a buddy with a history degree. That's a fucking banker. Like, and he's like, yeah, I have to work. Not him particularly, but like these people are like, oh, I have to actually work like maybe six hours a week. And the rest of the time, it's kind of just me fiddle fucking around on the computer. I just have to punch the clock for fucking eight hours a day. Whereas like a lot of these trade jobs I have, I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to my boss would be like, Hey, here's what we got to do today. I bid it for eight hours of work. Fucking. If it takes longer, it takes longer. I got to pay overtime. If you get it done in fucking six hours and it's done, right. You want to go home, fuck it, fuck off. I don't care. Yeah. Like this is what we're doing today. Get it done too much sense. Yeah. You know? And like, I've, I've kept that same mentality with all the employees that I've hired that work for me personally. And I was like, here's how much I'm willing to pay. Here's my expectations. And they're like, okay, what hours do I need to work? I don't give a shit. If you can get this done in four hours. Great. Perfect. Wonderful. Go on with your life. And a lot of the people that have like come from those corporate backgrounds, they're like shocked or think it's like a test or I'm fucking with them. It's like, I don't, I need this job done. I'm willing to pay this much money. If you can get it done and work a second fucking job and make even more money. Great. I'm happy for you. Do it. Well, Zach, you were saying like in the military, they, it's just common sense. Like you get it done. Yeah. That's it. I'm hearing that and how you're describing this though. Like it, it sounds like your entire baseline, whether it be like why nursing didn't work out and then why you were effective, like moving into the electrician business, like one plus one equals two. That's totally from like kind of being ingrained into you at a young age that you're working in the military where it's, let's go this, this, that done. Yeah. It's just, it's, it's, it's very simple. Like, um, one of the jobs I had was at a company that doesn't exist anymore. And it was 2016. Uh, Trump had just been elected and in healthcare, the affordable care act had been rolled out at that point. So like smaller hospitals were being absorbed by bigger organizations. Some just didn't end up existing anymore, community-based hospitals. But like I had just left business school and I show up and there's a generation of people who don't understand what a PDF is. And, um, they, they literally had no idea what I was doing any given moment. Like one time I got pulled aside. You were working for Congress? No, they were, they were all too old for Congress, which is bad. But, uh, like I have this very clear memory of like, we're in a meeting and like, I have my laptop and I'm just like typing away on Google docs. Somebody says something, you know, I make a note, call this person, whatever. And then I got pulled aside by my boss and he was like, uh, how do you talk to you about your meeting etiquette? And I was like, Oh, what did I say? Yeah. And I was like, did I say something? I was like, could they see my tattoos? Like I, you know, I could look like Post Malone now and everyone wouldn't care, but 2016, it was not the same. Right. Um, especially in boomer corporate America. So, uh, I was like, Oh, what'd I do? And he's like, well, you're always on your computer. And I was like, Oh, uh, yeah, I was, I was taking notes. And he's like, yeah, but you're on a computer. And I go, yeah, I take notes on Google docs and like, I type it there and it's everywhere. It's saved and it's done. And he's like, that's not how we do it here. What we do is we write down all of our notes on paper. I need you to go thinly slice a fucking tree. Yeah. And then he's this, I'll never forget this looks at PTSD. He looks at me and he goes, and then we go back and digitize it. Oh my God. Um, and, uh, I was like, sir, with all due respect, I'm not doing that. And he's like, well, that's how we do it. And I go, I am not going to write stuff down on paper. And then after a meeting a lot, like 15 to 30 minutes, this is how they plan their day. So a 30 minute meeting will become an hour on deal, an hour ordeal. Um, so now you can see why the company doesn't exist anymore. And, uh, and I, and I knew it, it was, it was just like, it was so rough. And it was things like that all the time. Like I had to explain to them how to like, like they wanted me to digitize everything. And so I went to this like $300,000 scanner printer copy or whatever. I took all the old files. They'd kept moved multiple different buildings. I just put them in there. And I was like, we put this in here and it organizes it and you can search it and to pull up the file. And they were just like, wow, that's crazy. We're just going to keep paper copies. Like it was just like one thing after another. Um, cause I was on the, the like, cutting edge of technology coming. Yeah. Coming into like healthcare and to see people that were actually like trying to stop it was, is like a core memory. I'll never forget. Yeah. I used to joke cause I worked at a bank out of college for the first five years. And it was like an order. I had to ask for permission to use toilet paper when I took a shit. That's where the red tape was everywhere. And like, was it name of America, Merrill Lynch. And they were just kidding. No, no, no. I've talked about it before, but it, it, they were so handcuffed by fucking a million lawyers in a room interpreting laws and then creating guidelines that no one could ever break it. It's like if one person, an enormous bank ever breaks a rule, everyone, regardless of their job role, that's now like it creates a new requirement that you have just to be able to get through a hoop. So as an example, I was not allowed to text clients. This is in 2017, 2018, 2019. Like I'm not allowed to send a text to a fucking client. That's against the rules. And when I went and left the bank, I was telling my boss who I was really close with. I was like, listen, I'm a liability. Like I text people. Okay. Like this is not going to work out. And it just made no sense. And you see why places like that have had to totally change, like even how they do business and stuff, because people don't want to work there. You know? It's rough. I actually got offered a job at a, what is it? Are they called financial centers? So I got offered a job. At a grad school by a guy who was like, you could run this financial center. He's like, you could be the whatever. And he's, this was 2020 and he's like, and I was just like, I don't know, man, I think banks are kind of going the way of the dodo bird. There's like less and less of them. The ATM can literally do everything you need. You can deposit your checks with your phone. And he was like, dude, banks will always exist. And I go, I didn't say that. What I said is there's not going to be these anymore in a different form. And I don't think he works at any of the banks anymore. Is there a certain age that people are just like, that's it? No more new shit ever. Cause like I experienced this same thing, even working in like the trades where like some of the older dudes that have been doing this for 30 years, I would work with and they would just adamantly hate new power tools that were like extremely fucking convenient. So like as an electrician, you have to cut a lot of like metal piping to run wires through EMT, rigid conduit, whatever it is. And when I was first in apprentice, they had, you know, recently come out with a portable bandsaw. It's this big, it's awesome. It's a fucking band saw that you can cut metal with, with a battery from like DeWalt or Milwaukee, pick it up with your hand and cut the pipe up until then. Everything was either a big machine. They were cutting it on or a fucking hacksaw old guys fucking hated it. I had, I had a couple old guys try to tell me that for my first couple of years as an apprentice, they wanted me to cut with a hacksaw anyways, because I needed to know how to do it. I was like, I don't need three years of experience to know how to cut something. A fucking hacksaw. Okay. A I already know how to do it. B that's stupid. I'm not doing it like, or like even the difference between a regular hand drill and an impact drill. They fucking hated the impact drill, which was hilarious. Cause I don't know what it was with these older guys. It's like, they didn't have, I don't know if they didn't play video games, they didn't have any throttle to them. It was zero or a hundred. So every time they'd go to hit an impact and they'd go too fast and fuck up their shit. And I was like, no, don't squeeze it all the way. It's fine, bro. Just have a little sensitivity. Your poor wife. This is fucking awful. Like what are we doing here? No, I think it's the two, the two themes of what you're saying are people get used to what they did. And also people want other people after them, the young bucks to have to go through what they did too. And so the idea that like someone like you could come in and be like, Hey, we got these really cool new things that can do the job better. They're like, nah, you gotta do it. You gotta do it. It's like your old math teacher. It's like, no, you have to show the work all the way up. I got the answer. Doesn't matter. I loathe, I loathe the attitude of I did it. You have to suffer through it. Like I did. I fucking hate it. I do too. It is the worst attitude for social security. Here we go. This is the argument for social security of like, I've, I've been getting fucked by the government in this Ponzi scheme my entire life and didn't say anything. And now you have the balls to come in and point out that this is a Ponzi scheme. And going to work and it's going to blow up in your face. you need to shut the fuck up and take it just like i did it's like no no i don't actually i hate to break it to you no i i don't know i can't run out 2032 i think yeah can you explain this to people why you know it is very problematic if you will why do you call it a ponzi scheme is a ponzi scheme because it fucking is i know like i don't explain it for internet oh my god okay thank you one of the problems you have is in a ponzi scheme okay you have i don't know a generation of a lot of people we'll call it i don't know the baby boomers um if you had to name it a lot big number yeah big number yeah and they start at the bottom of this shape i don't know we'll call it a triangle or a pyramid so to speak like a structure like this big population if you will this big population starts at the bottom and they start paying into social security they think for some reason they're not paying into social security they think for some reason they're not paying they're not paying into social security they think for some reason they're not paying into that the money is going into a savings account or a retirement account and it's just sitting there waiting for them it's not they're taking their money and they're giving it to the older generation above them smaller smaller generation okay not as big not baby boomers okay greatest generation they won world war ii they were awesome okay so they're paying all their money to them okay that's fine and then they have kids they go down here but they're a smaller generation also okay and all their money goes to the the big generation okay and then the generation below that's even smaller and now now after you know five generations the big part is at the top of the fucking pyramid and there aren't enough people to pay in to fucking get them the money they need so what you're saying well a ponzi scheme is when there's no underlying asset go so there's no underlying asset with social security there isn't and then you take all the money from the new investors and pay off the old investors which is exactly what social security is doing it's a made-off ponzi scheme yeah now how do you fix it you fucking quit doing it just but pull the rug out and say it doesn't exist anymore you can if you wanted to do it the right way and taper it off and make it work first of all you come out and say this was fucking stupid here's how we're gonna fix the problem and you tell people hey we haven't been giving all your money to a fucking checking account and it's not sitting there anymore it doesn't fucking exist okay you get a fucking cut off first of all you let people opt in and out of it because right now i've been paying into social security since i was 14 years old if you gave me the option sign away your rights we're not going to give you any money back i'll do it but you never have to pay social security again and you're just done i'm signing that shit so fast keep the fucking money leave me alone that would make too much sense though exactly everyone would opt out everybody else you taper it off you say okay you're at 40 you paid in for this long we're gonna quit collecting social security and then when you reach retirement age you're gonna get this level of benefits for the amount that you paid in a percentage like you paid in 60 of your working life you're gonna get 60 of social security we highly advise that you as an adult take the money you're saving by not paying into social security and invest it for your fucking retirement now here's and here's the issue and because i i agree completely and i think that's the exact way to solve it but again it makes too much sense because i remember like i was talking with this guy one time and it's you know at the beginning of my career whose literal job was like he was a social security analyst and he raised a lot of the same points like yeah this is demographics aren't looking good with this but i was like how do you end it and he said the problem is the minute you come out as a politician you talk about incentives here and say i am for ending social security you're done not that's a percent of the time you're done you're done it's because there's a fundamental misunderstanding because the amount of people that generally have the rebuttal i paid into it my whole life that's my money under the notion of it's sitting in a savings account for me you're trying to take my money it's like no dude the government already took your money and gave it to other people and then raided it every time they wanted to to go invade the middle east and you sat by and did fucking nothing about it your entire life i'm sorry that's not my fault i didn't do that just because you were kicking around letting the i'm obligated to do it too for your benefit sorry 100 like that fucking sucks you should probably get a hold of the government that did it quit getting mad at me for not wanting to get fucked and get mad at the person that's fucking you yes like that's the analogy i give like if i don't know if zach is robbing us okay and zach comes up to you and is like give me all your money and you have five hundred dollars and then he robs me and i only have a hundred dollars are you gonna get mad because you're gonna get mad because you're gonna get mad because you're gonna get mad got robbed more than me or are you just gonna get mad at him because he got robbed no you're directing your anger at me because like you only lost a hundred dollars shut the fuck up bro like no we both got robbed that fucking sucks let's blame him but they don't see it that way it does seem to be i don't know if this is the right word it does seem that there is a generational cognitive dissonance with the baby boomers i mean and you know i guess maybe baby boomers exposed the fault in democracy as a whole yeah but they also you know caused the opioid crisis multiple wars social security collapsing i mean we literally they literally had the world handed on to to them on the platter it's just like don't mess it up we won the war do good and they're like we're gonna pump gmos in the food we're gonna we're gonna poison the food and then we're gonna we're gonna sell heroin through walgreens because it looks pretty because historically opium has been known to be a good thing like it's that's that's like the opioid thing bothers me to this day especially someone in health care i used to see those vultures you know they would show up in their high heels and their business suits and they're just like you know just looking at doctors like you want to go on a free trip all you gotta do is give them clean looking heroin and like no one no one blinked they all were like oh it's fine it's fine the study said it's good oh who did the study jess you know what i mean like they did the study oh so it's an internal study yeah doctors wouldn't lie why would doctors lie because they get paid more like it's it's just all this thing and so it's like one thing after another and then they're like oh it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just and then the biggest boom they're gonna do is we have to we're the ones carrying the bill for all of it they made all of these problems generational problems and now looking at us being like ai's taking jobs and i'm like well you you killed all the jobs you killed all the food you killed all the things and then it's just kind of like this it's really weird especially when you're a place of like and you guys are also in charge of most of the government like yeah i think so of course like every generation there's a subset of people who are in charge of most of the government and it's a different number it's just the way humanity works but there's a subset of people that are either incompetent evil or both right and they certainly have that but i think when you have two things take over society which i would argue it has throughout the life of baby boomers and that those two things being group think and backwards incentives it causes a passivity and you said it perfectly a cognitive dissonance yeah to how you know oh there's one little block right here it's not just a block it's a block of people who are doing things that are not doing things that are not just one little block it's one of a thousand blocks that we're stacking into this entire call actually a card into an entire house of cards and eventually the music's going to stop and someone's going to flick it and the whole thing comes down and they just when you're putting each card in there one at a time it's just human nature the boiling frog idea like you don't think of it that way and now we're starting to see that frog's getting fucking hot in there yeah and our generation's seeing that and now the anger is directed i get it the other part is the baby exposed like the flaw in democracy as a whole because it's a bigger generation than everybody else and as a bigger generation like i said when you know you don't really know yourself in high school because you're growing up around other people all the same age there's certain fads there's certain things you want at the same point in time when you get it when the new toy comes out at christmas everybody wants that new nerf gun everybody wants the new particular bike at the same time so as a generation around the same time everybody wants cheap college and then everybody wants cheap housing and then everybody wants low taxes and then everybody gets towards retirement and then they want benefits like social security which means high taxes and because they have the bigger voting numbers they're constantly able to impose what that one generation wants on the rest of society and they're not even doing it maliciously they're just coming from the i'm a person living a day-to-day life this is what i see in my life that i need and that's how i'm going to vote like i can't fault them for that but it exposes the flaw in democracy as a whole like what do you do when one generation of people want something at the same time and they have the voting power to get it and it's to the detriment of everybody else and that's what's happening right now how would you fix that would you do weighted voting or something like that per like year block i can't i don't know first of all i don't think everybody should be allowed to vote anyways maybe maybe that should be like an actual starting you don't think everyone should be allowed absolutely fucking not i can tell you the moment i came to this conclusion okay i was at a verizon yeah i was getting a new phone and it was me some other dude in a dirty high-vis shirt that clearly just got out of off of work it's like six o'clock in the afternoon i'm my photos and stuff transferred onto my new phone and it's like i got the verizon guy helping me verizon guy helping me him and a third verizon guy just kind of standing there and we're all chatting while things are getting done and this 60 year old woman comes storming in verizon with a fucking attitude she's holding a surge protector you know like the power strip with like seven plugins on it she's holding that and a fucking phone charger in her hand and she walks up and is like you sold me this yesterday and it doesn't work i'm watching like i'm engaged now and the verizon guy's like what do you mean it doesn't work like like it won't charge your phone and she goes no i can't even plug it in and you know how the fucking phone chargers now the prongs fold in because some asshole stepped on it one time so now they have to fold in so you don't step on them she grabs it with the prongs folded in and just smacks the two pieces together like a fucking caveman that doesn't know how fire works and looks at him and goes see and he folds the prongs out and plugs it in and then she realizes that she's a fucking moron and goes thanks and walks out you you through tsa and they're like no shit no no belt no shoes no laptops there's signs there's a guy doing it 9 11 happened a fuck ton of years ago and everyone in there is just like do i do i wear my belt do i wear where's what about my laptop sir do you have a laptop no but if i wanted to bring one later do i need to scan it no shirt no belt i mean no shirt no belt no laptop no laptop shoes no belt no laptop i don't have any shoes do you need them i have i have preached it or like that's when i'm like i'm the older i get the more pro barriers to entry i am that's what i'm trying to tell you i want barriers to i don't care what it is at this point give me any standard to become a voter i'll take it i want you i want you to dream with me for a minute i want you to dream dream with me all right dream with me brother i want you i want you to go back about 89 miles from here give or take maybe it's 91 i haven't looked fuck i don't know i don't know i don't i'm gonna have to have somebody pump my gas and the yeah no no you won't because gas ain't around yet and you're on the other side of the border i want you to go back to 1776 and a little beer hole in fucking philadelphia okay i'm not even going to the constitution in new york i'm saying before then yeah these guys were like yo fuck this tyranny yeah we're out type shit yeah these are the guys that then we're just going to give them the credit of 13 years later came to an agreement that you know we got this thing set up and people can vote on who their elective representatives are what do you think they would say about imposing some sort of ban um they did that voting they did that what are we talking about what do you mean they did that in 1776 the founding fathers did not fucking be like everybody gets an equal say you had to own land you had to be an american you had to be invested in the system you had to have something at stake you had to be a stakeholder in america you had to be a landowner at no point did the founding fathers just be like everybody gets a fucking vote but never happened so they didn't let women vote they obviously didn't let slaves vote and stuff like that but i'm saying like at the time the cultural standard was like men in society are allowed to vote so land land owning men only so in 1789 when they when they got the constitution it was double check me i'm almost positive you had to be a landowner there was criteria nick's never wrong there was this is my life there's more criteria on top of that too but what was that criteria to vote when the country was founded because it was not just white men like it wasn't just like a racial thing you had to be a land owning american citizen i didn't know that that's why i love the internet we can just double check that's it that's why that's why this year there's old i see he's got like a whole timeline of when it was but we're just trying to go to 17 i just want like a nice list yeah there's obviously like there were other things as i said that they were totally behind on but just like in general of what was how society viewed it i don't know the every man at the time which excluded people here we go all right so 1789 white male virtually universal restriction so that would okay so age 21 or older property ownership or tax paying status most states required owning land to vote a few states allowed taxpayers without property to vote instead of or in addition to land so you're correct several states also imposed religious tests which required voters to be protestant or christian a few excluded catholics or jews from voting or holding the office outright free status enslaved people could not vote and then it doesn't say women on here but women couldn't vote either at the time residency typically some minimum period living in the state or country that's interesting so they had they did have restrictions on it yes so at some point this changes and we get to where everyone can vote and that kind of takes away my dream scenario now it's illegal to fucking ask for an id to vote in california that's you don't even have to be an american citizen that's fucking absurd it's like i mean you if you just gave me you got to be an american citizen and you have to like i would like it if you were actually a tax paying member of society yeah i just want to know that you're paying into the system okay and like i'm willing to give exemptions for people that are genuinely like actually disabled and can't work a job like sure and what about search protector lady what if she was paying taxes you know what i'll take it if she is if you were giving me that like bro she works a job and she's productive member of society she's just a fucking moron i'll fucking take it it's better than the standards we have now do i want some higher standards than that in my dream scenario sure but i'll take any standards you fucking give me at this point because right now there are none right the no id thing is crazy i have never heard a coherent argument for why some because there is not there isn't one for why someone shouldn't present id to prove that they're a fucking citizen of the country or a citizen of the state and area just to verify your address that you're at the right or just to verify you only voted once yeah i mean what the fuck is stopping me from like i really want this mayor to win and there's 15 precincts to vote in i'm gonna go to every fucking precinct and vote because they don't know who the fuck i am yeah i do remember and i wish i could remember the detail right now so i don't want to say it and get it wrong but when i voted i'm remembering like the big one when i went into the 2024 cycle which was the presidential cycle i remember something happened when i checked in and then got to the ballot box and i was like i didn't have to do anything maybe it was something like i didn't even have to show my id i didn't have something something like that but i was i remember going in i'm like this feels kind of like the third grade class president one like they didn't even check what grade it meant you know what i mean i showed up in a for a recent election for my congressman and uh i have my voter registration card my id and they're like you don't need any of that and i was like don't like that don't like that answer at all dick but like it shouldn't be easier to open up a fucking gmail or easier to vote than it is to open up a gmail or to do anything on the internet yeah i can't get shit on the internet without at least giving them my name and my email address i agree with that like give me anything to prove you're one person yeah more the reason so i'm absolutely on the same page with like barriers to entry like you said with that but like whenever like the the thing that i'm getting at is it's a subjective thing so you could be technically the way a slippery slope tyranny could start is you'd be like i think that guy's stupid so he can't vote and then the next the next guy down below is less stupid and less stupid but they keep using the precedent that's why i asked that question the way i did but like if there's like some requirements like oh i don't know you're paying taxes into the system like you're a functional member of society that that's probably fair yeah maybe a general intelligence test i mean you have to take a version of uh i think it's called the minnesota multi something uh inventory i can't remember what it's called now but even when you get a hunter safety license you have to take like a test to make sure that you're not psychotic and it's like you see two deer in a parking lot do you a not shoot them b hit them with a car c all the above like it's questions like that and by the way they didn't even make it to the shooting portion but there's like a general thing we could ask questions like do you think the mood is the moon is made of cheese a yes b maybe c ribs like it's there there has to be like a general knowledge thing that can be applied to like i mean it's applied to everything else in life so why can't it be applied to voting because it's probably the most that is a good point because the military has got it pretty dialed in with the asvab you go in for the military and the military says you are qualified to do these jobs you are smart enough to be able to learn these skills and perform these tasks why can't we do that with i mean we do that with all kinds of shit you take it when you uh we do the as unpopular i want more age restrictions i'm so sick of the age bullshit arguments because i want age restrictions like well like we said over there you had to be 21 to vote and i don't even like the age restriction part like i just want some criteria to be met right and whether that's like i don't want to be a military service automatically you're allowed to start fucking voting like i was signed up i was signed up for the military before i was allowed to vote or drink yeah like if you're in the military you should be allowed to vote i think if you don't want to go in the military and you still want to be able to vote absolutely i think you should have to pay x amount of taxes on a delay if you're making a million dollars at 20 years old and you're paying a shit ton absolutely you should be able to vote if you're making minimum wage or whatever like you'll get like you're invested in society you have a track record of performance and being a productive member of society I'll tell you one thing that is an interesting idea that I've thought about before. When did they even come up with 18? Dave, can we look that up? It's been a while. What if you had it to where, like if I go to rent a car, you got to be 25 years old. And part of that is, I mean, there's literal science about brain development. But also it's like this is someone who's now had, hypothetically, on the average, if they went to college, standard college, like they have at least three years out in the real world to understand consequences of life and things like that. I think someone should probably have spent three years in the real world to be able to know like, oh, that's how my billing works. Oh, that's how accounting works. Oh, that's how people like, you know what I mean? I didn't know anything when I was 18 years old. And they're like, you can go vote now. That's what I want. I just want criteria that we can fucking look at. Because I'm sick of the age arguments where it's like, I think a 16-year-old should be allowed to vote because it's their future too. But also when that same 16-year-old commits a fucking crime and somebody winds up dead. That's right. Oh, he's just a kid. He can't be held responsible for his actions. If he can't be held responsible for his actions, why are we allowing him to dictate what direction all of fucking society goes? Agreed. Like, it's bullshit. They want it both ways. Either you're an adult or you're not. I want a solid criteria on when you're a fucking adult and you get to be treated that way. Period. And I even hear the stupid argument on the internet like, well. We should actually, their brain isn't fully developed, like you said, until they're 25 or 26. So they should be treated like a kid. Fuck you. I was 25. If I got pissed off and like did some illegal shit, I absolutely should have been thrown in prison at 25. I knew better. I hate that. I just want people to be like, you're an adult. Actions have consequences. There's benefits to being an adult. There's downsides. You get them all. You can't fucking pick and choose 24-7. It drives me fucking nuts. Yeah. And by the way, Deef pulled it up. It was 1971 where Amendment 26 of the Constitution lowered the voting age to 18 years. But again, also like somewhere along the way in society, and fuck if I know where it was, like it's probably a slow descent. There were basic civility standards that just slowly went away, you know, to where people could get away with more things or society, I don't know, accepted more behaviors it wouldn't have in the past. And like when I look at something like 1971. Or an age where it gets lower to 18, that's, you know, that's a different kind of 18 year old than it is today. You know, there's just some realities that that 18 year old understands that today's 18 year old doesn't, today's 23 year old doesn't have a fucking clue about. Yeah, because your grandparents were in the depression. Right. And like you have perspective. I mean, that's really what's lacking as a whole is like, I think we should mandate some form of civil rights. I mean, like, you know, like, I think we should mandate some form of civil service. I don't know what that looks like. I don't think it should be military for everyone. That's a hard stop. But I think if we gave everyone like out of high school, like a year or two years, whatever, work at a nonprofit, you know, do hell go for Habitat for Humanity, do whatever you want to do. Yes. Just do something and learn more about the world than the world you live in. It'll help to shape everything about the rest of your life in a positive way. And like, you'll actually have some sort of investment in your future. I mean, like, I've actually like experienced. I've experienced different things as opposed to like, because K through 12, you don't really have any real life experiences that you can pull from unless like your life's hard or you have different things like that. That's like personal. But like, I don't know, because like my time in the military really helped to shape me as a person. I had a horrible childhood growing up, but like it also exposed me to things I never thought possible. Like, and not that everyone should join the military, but it also got me to college for free. It also changed the course of my life. I got two degrees out of it. Like. Think about just the college. It's a culture shock and going to basic training, though, going to basic training at 18 years old, you show up spent, you know, I, I moved around a lot. I'm a bad example, but like, hypothetically, I grew up in Iowa my entire life in small town, Iowa, surrounded by corn. Okay. Like everybody was into the same things. And now I'm going to basic training with a 33 year old that just got a divorce, had a midlife crisis, divorced his wife. He's in, he's in one bunk next to me. The other bunk next to me is a 20 year old kid from Chicago. Who, you know, had a completely different upbringing than I did. I'm going to become friends with both these people from completely different walks of life. And there's 50 other people in the platoon that all have extremely other different walks of life. I'm going to have to learn how to work together with these people, be a team, care about them. And at the end of the day, realize that we're all Americans and we've got to fucking work together. Yes. That's crazy impactful being 18 years old and then getting to live the rest of your life, understanding that. And a lot of these kids are just like, Oh, I'm going to be a team. I graduated from high school. What college are you going to? We should all go to college together. And you live in this fucking bubble. Even when they don't though, to your point, Zach, it's like, if there's some level of civil service, you're doing whatever it is. Yeah. You're working for something that is in some way like an actual cause or something bigger than you that helps build like a cultural bond. It's not to say college isn't fun and you don't meet people from different walks of life. Cause I, I mean, I did and I think that's great, but like, you know, you're going there, you're doing your class. This is yourself. And then you're going out there and you're partying and having a good time. It's not like a higher calling in that way, nor is it supposed to be. But if you said like, Hey, for like a year out of college, everyone is required to do something that at least gives them some perspective on life. Yeah. I think that would be worth its weight in gold. Yeah. You go to somewhere where they have like rolling Brownouts, not even blackouts, just rolling Brownouts where electricity is not common. Most parts of Europe don't have air conditioning. You go to other countries that you've heard about, but then you go there and you're like, Holy shit, this is crazy. Like, those are the things that helped to shape you as a person. I mean, like I grew up in Memphis and, uh, you know, prior to the military, people from the Northeast were like in movies. Like I'd never met people in New York and it's, it's like cliche. It's my friends like, Hey, my name's Tony, Tony, you know, like it's all like the most, you know, Hey, I'm from Cape Cod from on Cape or off Cape or Yenza's from Pennsylvania. Like I'd never met people like that. I'd just seen them and I was like, wow, this is wild. Like I'd never, but they don't pump their own gas. They don't pump their own gas. Those cowards. But like Nick's right. Like you never outside of that. That's the only time you'd ever meet people. I mean, now, even now people do like more often because of like remote work and things like that. But like you learn cultural things. Um, and there's just little differences that you learn about people. And like, unless you're like trying to break that, you're not going to do it. I think it's actually popular in either Europe or Australia. I can't remember where, but they do a sabbatical where they're like, Hey, you got to go. Um, they send you out like after, after see Amish, it's rumspringa rumspringa. I mean, even there, even they're doing it, but like they go out for a year and they just travel the world or they do something like, I mean, think about how awesome it'd be. Like if you're like, Hey, just go to Australia or whatever, you got to work with this nonprofit. They help, you know, make sure people don't kill all the kangaroos or something. I don't know. I'm just making stuff up, but how else would you get there any other way? I would be okay. Actually putting my tax dollars towards something like that. Like if you're like, Hey, this is like, I hate to say this. Social security, but like some sort of stipend that'll go is like, as long as you're doing this, we're going to give you X amount of dollars. It's enough to live on. And you can go on this thing. Cause it will help to make you a better informed member of society. Cause that's the biggest problem. People who are in the military as opposed to outside the military is like, you get exposed to a lot of different things and you see the world a whole lot differently. I suppose people who aren't, who are just like hearing about it and like, everyone's like, ah, the government's like doing this and stuff. Like, yeah, they're all obviously doing things, but as someone who was also in the government, everyone's also pretty fucking dumb and like, it's not, it's not give the government too much credit. They're not that smart. Yeah. Everyone's like, oh, there's like one guy. No, no, there's not like, there's, there's not that many people that are like that sharp or smart. I mean, oh, it's like seal teams. Even them. They're full of morons. Like they can just hold their breath for a long time. So they get movie deals. How long were you in the military when you were there? Four years. Did, was it something you always wanted to do or, oh dude, I was made for it. I'm a child. Yeah. I'm a child of trauma. Poor white trash. There was nothing, um, nothing then my family knew other than like how to break the cycle of poverty other than like do a trade, be a mechanic, which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. My father did it. His father did it. His father before him. You know, the first bell was probably looking at Mr. Ford being like, I think there might be something here, Mr. Henry, you know what I mean? Like we were made to turn wrenches. But I also saw my father and my stepfather and my grandfather, I would always see them in the morning, rubbing their hands. Because you can only turn a wrench for so long, you can only do things. And every morning they would like warm up and do these like stretches and stuff. And then they'd light a cigarette and head out to the car. So what's tough about growing up in poverty, nobody really talks about is you don't have an example of like how to get outside of it. Like there's no, like, you know, uncle Mike did this and now he, you know, he has a mortgage and he has a house and he goes on vacation once a year. So there's nothing, you know, it's just my grandmother telling me to start a side business, which is code for still Freon and sell it on the side or, you know, scrap copper when nobody's looking. Things like that. I miss Freon. I do too. I miss the cold stuff that was punching holes to the ozone. I mean, that's, I mean, we were so poor. I remember when we got a car with the air conditioning, I was like, technology is the fucking best. Like literally I remember seeing it frost the vents and I don't care what it did to the ozone. This other stuff is nothing compared to it. I'm so. What was it? It was, I think it was one 34 a, I need to do a video on this maybe because like the new ones. could be it doesn't matter because the fucking patents run out that's why and so someone has to make a new formula yes so just spitting a cup in the end i got a new ac in my house and i'm like homies with the guy that did it for me and he's like i'm warning you right now this is not going to be as cold as your last unit and i'm like why it's newer it should be getting colder as time goes on like this is it what do you mean technology has improved why is my ac getting shittier and he's like the new chemical the freon replacement the refrigerant basically they came out with you know new environmental regulations we got to use this new stuff it's not as efficient so then i go and i look into it and it's like conveniently every when they make these new formulas they have a patent period where they're one company owns it they're allowed to make all the fucking money from this refrigerant and conveniently as soon as that patent fucking expires that you know oh there's a new environmental thing this is actually bad for the environment you but we have this new one that's better for the environment now you have to use this one sign that shit into law as luck would have it we have a new formula isn't that something every fucking time i hate them but yeah no i watched live leak when i was little uh well when i should have been watching it uh 9-11 happened when i was in eighth grade um you remember where you were uh yeah my mother called called me um and said you need to stay home because uh i was going to walk to the school bus the bus stop and so it's like eight o'clock our time so it's nine o'clock new york time um and so i was like what's happening she's like something's bad happening turn on the tv and i grabbed i literally grabbed my brother's like we're not going to school and like he at first didn't believe me and he was like scared that i was going to get us in trouble for skipping i was like no mom said to stay home and so i turned on the tv and right when i did was when the second plane at the second tower i was like you're old enough to in eighth grade you're old enough to grasp that mm-hmm and uh my cousin joined the marines about four years before i did he's four years older than me and he went to iraq twice and then i was like watching stuff on live leak like there's like dudes like with m203s like launching grenades going like click click boom and like i was like locked in on the family computer that took forever to like load and dial up and i'm just like waiting like show me the war show me the war and then you know i went into the recruiter's office and i was like i want to be in the infantry and they're like you can do whatever you want and i was like i don't want to do that and they're like well this is kind of like that and i'm like i'm not doing kind of you know i'm not going to roll the dice on maybe and the marine corps at that time had like you would pick a field you pick the infantry field then you get a job when you go to your mos school and i wanted to be 0311 infantry rifleman and that's what i picked and why did you want to be that i wanted to go on an adventure i didn't want to risk uh not having that opportunity fuck you tell the story i wanted to know tell the story of the speeches when they brought in the rifleman i mean well that was infantry in general but yeah so okay so you go to the school of infantry and so what happens is combat mos's go to like one side of the camp non-combat mos's go to the other side they do 21 days in the field they do a bunch of hikes they get exposed like they sit behind a 240 they shoot a few rounds they get up and they go to another thing 21 days in the field consecutively honestly sucks but that's their only it's like drinking water from a fire hose like they're exposed and they go off to whatever school camp they're doing well all the infantry guys are brought into this auditorium and there's multiple mos's that are pitched at you and uh they start they come out and these instructors you get to pick like which one you want to do and based on your scores and other factors they they match you to whatever and so the first guy comes out and he's an 0351 assaultman and he's like hey my name's sergeant so and so you're like rocking she's like blowing shit up you want to be a man be an assaultman and everyone's like you're like it's just a bunch of dudes you know and then uh next guy comes up sergeants hey i'm sergeant so and so i'm a mortiman you want to drop steel rain on top of the enemy you want to play some cards you want to do some spades be an 0341 mortar right right right and it's like going on and then there's this guy who comes out looks like a fucking fullback and uh he's like my name's sergeant so and so i'm a machine gunner you want to put rounds on the target from a click away you want to fucking carry big guns you pick 0331 today boom and everyone's like wow and i'll never forget this one guy i fucking wish i could know his name he comes out and he takes his can of dip and fucking puts a dip in he goes my name's sergeant so and so you want to be in charge of these fucking idiots pick 0311 i wrote down 0311 three times and i turned it in and they're like yeah you're an idiot we were obviously going to pick you but yeah oh my god and so then that was that was it that was it went off to my unit um they had just got back from armadi it was like being dropped off and in a what year is this like 05 this is 07 so i went in february 07 i got there july i didn't know that you got in right when they got back from armadi brother bro you're the fresh meat in a prison at that point so it sucks so you get picked up from receiving you gather all your gear an obnoxious amount of gear that you put in a sleeping bag and you're dragging it across the lawn and they're cat calling you and throwing shit at you hey fuck you boot that's that's the that's the lowest level of term to be called in the military you're fresh out of boot camp you haven't deployed you get called a boot it's it's our version of like the worst word ever and so they're throwing stuff at you you have to run past them like the first two weeks i basically just got tortured like uh digging uh fighting holes and filling them back up running past doors uh plotting points uh on a map underneath the gas map with a gas mask going underneath the poncho in a shower like all sorts of crazy shit some of my best friends but like nothing that was like ever derogatory or degrading it was just like no elephant walk or anything like that uh oh you know yeah about that one oh you heard about the pickles and all that stuff yeah i don't know about pickles i've heard about the elephant walk yeah no not nothing like that because like honestly you're the reality is you can't push people too far you're all depending on each other in a worst case scenario right so you don't know if that kid's gonna like remember the time that you fucking made him run naked somewhere and somebody saw him or whatever it was and um and these were like hard dudes they had a multiple racked appointments and um i just kind of like fell in and i was like i'm gonna treat this like a job treat it like a job and we did a workup and went on my first appointment to garmser afghanistan in uh the march of 2008 what was that like i've heard so many stories in here from so many different guys across many different units who talk about in particularly afghanistan starting in like 0708 all the way to like 2015 and how fucking crazy it was yes what what what what was it like when you got there so when we got there i left a few days after my first daughter was born um basically a week from the time she was born until i got there and i thought i was gonna like land on like dune like i thought it was just gonna be like rockets going off everywhere and i land the first thing i can see is a fucking burger king so i go i go to eat at burger king shout out dick cheney friend of the show what a what a flex thanks what a what a thank thank you sir i don't think you're dead um but uh i don't think he's dead no dude you think he's alive why would he stop giving up hearts that he was harvesting every few years like all of a sudden he's gonna collapse there's no way i i'm pretty sure he reached in his heart i'm the president of the dick cheney hate club so i'm not arguing with any of it but he's the halbert that motherfucker was dead dude he's like tony stark he just took a new battery out and put one in you know what i'm saying me and him had to go to the uh the george bush center or some shit they did like us cracking dick cheney jokes every 30 seconds when did you go to the george bush month a month ago or something yeah we got invited and i thought i thought w and fucking dick cheney weren't on the best terms when he died well all i know is i didn't like our jokes but uh yeah it was it was funny it was just me and nick making like dick cheney bush jokes the entire time other people were there but it was literally just me and him passing the mic back and forth um but that was like my first meal and um there's an acclimatization period and that was in kandahar airfield which in the early 2000s there was nothing by that time there was a ton of stuff toby keith came out to visit us blah blah blah that's a cool story but um we're waiting and then like hey the mission launch we're going to uh go out secure this area and you're going to stay there for seven to ten days that's what they told us and my unit had a for some reason um they did a drug test before we deployed now i'm not condoning the use of drugs going to war dude you know what i'm saying like you ask me no questions i'll tell you no lies so when they did the drug test across the entire battalion there was over 30 people that popped because it was snowing yeah in camp lejeune at that time i mean it was ski slopes yeah brother i don't it was wild and um so they ended up reorganizing the entire battalion which is highly unusual so i was in this platoon called third platoon i think i moved to a second platoon like the worst platoon with like a platoon sergeant who was relieved of command in boot camp because as he said i get too excited that's how he always said he's like i get really hands on and like he was known for that and so i could mean a lot of things yeah it means what you think it means i mean for them to fire a drill instructor in the early 2000s is pretty rough but uh we went out there engaged the enemy that that deployment we i mean we literally had every asset in the indirect fire mortars and like we were like on top of the battle space the entire time the living conditions were nightmarish because you were just outside an entire time, like doing posts for four to six hours at a time, doing a patrol and just kept doing that back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And it was dangerous and it was hard. I didn't call home for 90 days. There was a lot of that stuff, but that deployment overall, like in the grand scheme of things was like a good deployment for like getting your feet wet. Now, when we did the invasion of Marjah in 2010, completely different scenario. What was so different about that? So in that point in 2010, Marjah was where there was a ton of dope. And so that was where the Taliban were getting a lot of their money and we were trying to interdict that movement. Very famously, Geraldo Rivera went around that area and was like, these Marines are guarding the poppies. And that was actually not far from where I was. And that was in December of 2010. But we left in late 09 and my wife was pregnant with our second child then because they had told us during the workup, you guys are going to be shutting down bases in Iraq. And I was like, great. It's going to be maybe a 90 day deployment. We'll come home. So we started planning our second child. Then they switch it to Afghanistan and like a real. Yeah. It was when President Obama went to West Point. They told us like hours beforehand, hey, there's gonna be a troop surge in Afghanistan and that's you. I mean. Yeah. And so that deployment was highly documented. It's very famous. There's a speech. Fuck it. Can we play it? Yeah. It's Gunny Walgren speech. It's on my YouTube veteran with a sign. So this guy, Gunny Walgren, it's like my mentor in the infantry. I'd known him the whole time. He was known for giving these speeches. And the whole day prior to us leaving, there was a fuck ton of speeches, like to a point where my junior Marines were like, yo, are we going to be okay? I was like, I don't know, because this has never happened before. They're talking to us a lot. Like it was, it was gnarly. Yeah, there it is. This is fucking great. So I'm, I'm here. You can't really tell, but like I'm across the other side of the field. This is back in the 280P days. Yeah. Well, it was secret, but this is perfect. All right, let's see. CNN, we gotta be done with this. Where's the combat camera at? Marine, you're done. Camera's off. CNN, no, negative, negative. Negative. I agree with one thing that's been said. It is about how good you look. These camis make my butt look fucking awesome. I see a whole bunch of do-rags. That motivates the shit out of me. Fucking professional. Why professional? Is that what we're called? I think y'all are some crazy goddamn motherfuckers. Not one speech. Now we've been talking about this. I'm kind of upset about the general speech. I'm kind of upset about the high commander speech. I haven't got any fucking goosebumps yet. Have y'all been motivated about this? I know y'all figured out another secret that the Marine Corps has. We don't tell you shit, and we play games. Man, I knew we were leaving tonight. Fucking seven months ago. I didn't tell y'all because we want you to get fucking pissed off. You might be envisioning us when you kill the enemy. But motherfucker, you're gonna be pissed. Martian. Fuck that. What do y'all want to hear? Y'all want to hear the worst? Do y'all want to hear the white sleeves? Fuck yeah! Fuck yeah, man. We're not doing the fucking white sleeves. We gotta fucking step across this parade deck, and it's goddamn cold. I'm not doing that shit. Don says I don't like you. He didn't do it. The white sleeves. That's too long. Y'all know John Glenn's speech, right? Did I tell you that yet? All right, we'll do that. We'll do that real quick. Huh? Is he repping a bow? Dude, he can't talk. He would only smoke cowboy killers and rebel. That's all he would know. John Glenn! John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth in space. Killed. What? Was the senator for the state of Ohio. Oldest man to go back up into space, 'cause he's a PT god. Before all of that, he was a fucking Marine. An air winger, though. A pilot. Right, Captain Smith? You don't have that camera. Get the fuck away from me. John Glenn, 1974, ran for Senate against a politician named Howard Metzenbaum. Howard Metzenbaum was a sorry motherfucker. John Glenn, at this point, was a Marine. First American to orbit the Earth in space. Howard Metzenbaum asked him, "How could you run for Senate when you never held a job?" What the fuck would you do if somebody said that shit to you? Killed. Now, I'm gonna change a little bit up in my tennis, my world. John Glenn said, "Is that right?" I served 23 years in the United States Marine Corps. I fought through two wars. I flew 149 missions. My plane was hit by an aircraft fire on 12 different occasions. I was in the space program. It wasn't my job. It was my life that was on the line. And this wasn't a 9-to-5 job where I could take time off to take the daily cash receipts to the bank. I asked you to come with me as I went the other day to a veteran's hospital. And you stand there. You look at those men with their mangled bodies. You look them in the eye and tell them that they never held a job. You come with me and visit any gold star mother. You look her in the eye and tell her her son never held a job. You come with me to the space program and visit the widows and the orphans of Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chafee. And you look those kids in the eye and tell them that their dads never held a job. You come with me on this Memorial Day weekend coming up to Arlington National Cemetery where I got more friends than I'd like to remember. And you stand there. You watch those waving flags. You think about this nation and you tell me that those people never held a job. Fuck! I'll tell you, Howard Metzenbaum, you should be on your knees every day of your life thanking God that there are some men who have held a job. And they required a dedication to purpose, a love of country, and a dedication to duty that was more important than life itself. Their self-sacrifice is what made this country fucking possible. Isn't that badass? Fuck you all. Isn't that badass? Hey, Roger, Matt, Hoopy, are you motivated? I think you're too, Roger. Quiet professionals. Fuck all that. Fuck all this talk about doing what you've been trained to do. You all know damn well you get out there and you fucking do shit because of the Marines to your left and the Marines to your fucking right. God, country, and corps don't matter at that fucking point. Let the Taliban throw the fuck out of your face. staff nco's accountable but he's the subject matter expert for a company which is for platoons all things warfare like it's his job to know it front to back and he was just a fucking g is a fucking g to this day like um he convinced the battalion that he needed um about five vehicles for a logistics log train he didn't need that he just he made him wanted he made a mobile qrf and so he'd be like oh yeah we're delivering water and you just hear like a machine gun going up he's like you know angry six angry six inbound he's just like laying down rounds he's like oh yeah we're dropping chow's too like because that's how he would do it and um i mean i don't know that that deployment from start to front was gnarly um what'd you guys do right after that like straight to the flight line land in the middle of a field uh there were some aa guns that went off shot some of the helicopters not ours thank god um we had apop you know what apop is um it is made to clear a minefield so it's a rocket with a bunch of grenades attached to the side of it on strings and you shoot it and it should have a meter of clearance you know unless one of the grenades flies up and then you know that's in god's hands um it happens all the time though and we were like going into clear pathways so that the rest of the units could come in and basically just take over this town and then we would break it up in different areas of operation and just try and interdict and stop taliban movement throughout the area i cut off the supply line to their heroin and how long were you out there um 210 days the entire time so like a month it's basically like a two or three weeks on the front end and then like a week or two in the back and but you're out there consecutively the entire time did it feel like we were winning at that point the first deployment did um you know we definitely affected change i mean i remember on my first tour uh we went to this schoolhouse that like someone had built i don't remember some some ngo and uh there was blood on the walls and the blood was from the taliban beheading children that went to the school and then they would use their blood to to write like don't go there and um the whole time we were there we were able to change that um we were able to change that into where children were able to go back to school and actually like have a place to stay where they were safe and so that was stuff that i saw firsthand on my first tour the second tour um you know i don't know when he what does when he looked like uh we made the area we were in safer i will say that um you know but like i was never like malicious towards the locals like i didn't i wasn't i wasn't like why don't you believe in me like i know we're coming and going um you know they're just trying to bet on the horse that'll take them the farthest right you know and when you got the taliban coming through hanging up people by change dragging them through the streets cutting people's heads off um lighting families on fire like the most important thing is that we're going to make sure that we're going to fight like the most horrible like a lot of it's not to downplay it it's theatrical but it's it's a show of force through violence to get them to submit and you know they don't grow poppy because they want to they do because taliban's like you're growing poppy well i don't want to we're going to kill your entire family okay i'll grow poppy like it's it's not that you know and you add in other effects to like the moms which other religious leaders in a place that has a dangerously low literacy rate of below 25 no one knows how to read no one knows how to low 25 yeah oh i didn't know it was that low yeah it's it's it's i mean that was like last data i don't know what it is now with the taliban taking over um but so the religious leaders oftentimes the moms are bought off by the taliban and they're like oh blow those americans up that's you know because you're told to listen to them and you're told that that's the only person that will you know tell you what to do and what's right or wrong and you know we lost marines in in my platoon in my company um you know it was it was gnarly it was absolutely gnarly and uh i was about halfway through it through that second appointment we ended up having to do a reorganization of my platoon so i went from being a first team leader to a squad leader so i mean i went from having like three guys to 12 and i had teams and i had people that reported to me and that usually happens when you're six to eight years in the marine corps not when you're on your third or fourth and so when that change happened uh i just saw the way things were going and i kind of had this like vision of my future of the next 20 years and i was like i missed my i left after my first daughter was born um i haven't met my second child yet and i don't know if i want to do this for the rest of my life and i'd accomplished all my goals and uh how would you say you accomplished all your goals i wanted to i wanted to be a squad leader i wanted to be a squad leader i wanted to be a team leader and i did it in four years there's only one other person i know that's done it and there's a friend of mine who actually sells interns now shout out clayton blunt um but yeah yeah it's a hard name um but like it was just me and him that had accomplished that and uh you know it's i mean the military what's cool what's cool about it is like you can go as far as you want but for what i wanted to do it was going to cost me everything i wanted to operate i wanted to do the work and so since i had moved from a private to a pfc to a lance corporal to a corporal ended up picking sergeant in july i got off factor duty in 11 so i picked it up like five months later usually takes at least six years to do that had all the things so when that happens to stay operational to keep doing the work you either got to move over to a sniper platoon maybe you'll do some time there maybe two to two years maybe four years or you go to like marsock at that time marsock actually wasn't even stood up yet it was still called msob before that was actually when cody alfred and all those guys were standing up marsock yeah yeah so you can maybe get four years there but if you get promoted again you got to be an admin guy now you can't do the work anymore and i'm like i don't want to do logistics i want to do this i want to do the work and so and the the cost was going to be so high on my family i was just i wasn't willing to say you have kids now too it's like and you don't get to see them are you worried about ever i'll lose my marriage i'll lose my family so nothing of the risk to life obviously when you're out on the battlefield yeah no and i have i have an incredible wife she's she would do things that uh really kind of like really made me fall in love with her a lot more um she would send me packages about every week and whenever we would have time to talk she would actually ask me if there are people who didn't have mail and then she would send them a package and uh sadly it's a lot higher than you would think like family's just like it it's it's yeah and it's not even that big like she would just be like what she would send me tobacco q-tips baby wipes junk food and people magazine actually people my people magazine dude the ground's exploding i want to hear about kim kardashian's ass like i don't want to hear anything oh my god kanye like it's just like whatever and like literally some of some of the hardest like i had this one guy who was in kosovo he i remember him looking at me being like hey let me get that people after you bell like it was just like five seconds away from reality um and uh she would send stuff like that uh you know uh she's you know put up with a lot then and now and like was as always kind of been this rock of like right you know someone that i knew i could lean on but i mean i've known since the first moment i met her um what'd you mean oh when i meet her um where okay i met her at her cousin's house on uh okay so her cousin luke and i were friends for a long time i was a bad kid and he uh i was a bad kid and um i was kind of like crashing at their house now and then and uh his dad was turning 50 and he was getting ready to go to iraq in the army for his first appointment so i picked him up from the airport took him to this party and there's this big surprise party no one knew he was coming this is like before facebook and where everyone's like you know the good old days american soul you know like playing stuff it's just like cool and so we did that and then i you know luke god love him couldn't talk to a girl to save his life and i have disproportionate game to who i am as a person like it's obnoxious but like i have really tight game all it is is confidence that doesn't make sense and um you're sitting next to mariano rivera over here yeah look at him dude look at him i see you pop off god forbid he's different god forbid yeah no um but uh i looked across the room and there was this girl i'd never seen before and i had to introduce look to girls i even had like a roster showing up for him like hey a soldier's showing up a hero you know come through hitting them on the next tail push to talk i think it was but i swear to god i think it was my phone was so big it was birth control by itself um but i went up to luke and i was like who's that and he goes that's my that's my cousin christy she lives in nashville and i go you got a cousin christy that lives in nashville he's like yeah we have never talked about cousin christy that lives in nashville dude i i've i've done so much for you as a friend where where has this been he goes you weren't ready oh yeah we hit you with the week you weren't ready and i go yeah you're probably right i tell you what though i'm gonna marry that girl and i went over there and i i i hit some solid line drives you're not going for a grand slam i'm just trying to get on base get a number follow through she couldn't even care less she she didn't know i existed but at the end of the night got the digits two weeks later we're dating a year later we were married had our first child how did you know that you wanted to marry her right away all i can think to say is from the first second i saw her i felt something i'd never felt before or since and i just wanted to do everything i could to be the best version of myself for her and for me that's all it was like it's like i got bit by something and i i don't know how to describe it and everyone finds it whenever it's your time to find it but i was just like if she asked me to give her a mountain i would give her two like it was just thunderbolt i just yeah i was just like it just hit me and we're coming up on 19 years of marriage now that's all and through deployments and everything deployments you know me being a veteran uh all the hanging out with me hanging out with nick nick's fine yeah over the place well that's well that's been a change because it used to be what are you doing to now like you get out there and you podcast your ass off you know she slaps me on the ass it was like it used to be like i could hear on the phone be like i don't know i think he's talking to someone there's a fat day laborer in our house i don't know you know a donut dude zach's telling people about that time somebody fucked a donkey again but it's paying the bills yeah yeah it's all right though things are okay you know i understand her concerns because it is coloring outside the lines but it's just it's she has allowed me to be the best version of myself and challenged me to be better which is ultimately what you want in my opinion as a partner you don't want a girl who's like ah whatever you want someone who's like what are you doing what the fuck someone that makes you the best version of yourself yeah that's what true love is i've never heard it described better than in the godfather though where they tell them you've been hit by the thunderbolt and that's what that sounds like right there you just can't explain it you don't know why but that's it no i i i was just like oh all right that's in christy yeah the wife christy yeah that's the one that's that was the one and uh it's funny too because everyone i shouldn't say it's funny because it sounds like i'm you know celebrating people's failures but everyone who was like don't get married don't do it blah blah blah none of them are married now right or if they are they're remarried and also in their defense in my defense she didn't have a stage name um she wasn't like most marines marry be only fans girls so why go to the strip club when you can do it on base i guess but i mean most military marriages so like we kind of break that statistic but most of them shouldn't be married in the first place most of them are contract marriages and you know it's not the best thing category to win in but i don't know i love her worked out for you oh yeah awesome yeah how many kids do you have two that's awesome two girls yeah how long you been married eight or nine years i don't know that's awesome so high school sweethearts yeah we didn't get married till we were 25 though you had to try her out for a long time i mean no i mean for me it was like uh i mean she was getting fucking frustrated i hadn't proposed yet but it was also very much like i was uh i was in the camp of like i'm not gonna go to your dad and ask to marry his daughter when i'm a fucking 22 year old kid that doesn't have a shit figured out yet like by the time i felt comfortable enough to do that i had a mortgage i had a full-time job like i had my shit together and i could actually take on that responsibility so that's kind of why i made her wait that's very mature to think about at that young age i grew up poor as shit i'm not fucking around good for you same yeah you're you're kind of you strike me as a fucking just do it kind of guy yeah can i hit the oh yeah yeah let's take a break i'm full of everything what's this uh fighting preacher video you were talking about oh it's a last video i did who's the fighting preacher logan weston aka the fighting preacher probably like all of them all of world war ii korea and vietnam oh he he did a world tour if you will yeah what's the story uh dude grew up super poor log cabin up in michigan pennsylvania bounced around a lot um gets he's like in his early 20s 22 i think great depression's going on he's got a job working in a coal mine single guy one of his best friends is hunting but he's got like a wife and kids can't find a job so he goes to his boss and he's like hey we can we get this guy a job he's like no i'm struggling to keep you guys employed so he's like all right well give this guy my job he's a good dude i'll give him my job so he can pay for his wife and kids um next day fucking claps at this coal mine his buddy survives but a bunch of his other friends die and uh he goes gets a job fucking being a logger like a lumberjack working again that coal mining collapse happens and then he does the same thing again gives his logging job to his buddy so he can pay for his wife and kids a couple weeks later logging accident wipes out the crew friends die so he's like super depressed beat up about it feels like death is chasing him wherever he goes decides he's gonna take his own life grabs a pistol puts it to his head pulls the trigger click doesn't go off and like when he pulled the trigger he heard somebody say wait gun doesn't go off he looks around nobody's there and then he goes out and he like can't believe whatever happened he's immediately and i've heard like other accounts of this like when something that event does get stopped people are immediately like thankful have a whole new lease on life like they realize they didn't want to do it he has that moment and then he goes out outside of his house in this log cabin in the woods with the same gun that he just tried to fire pulls the trigger fires into a stomp it goes off so he becomes convinced that you know god gave him a second chance uh dedicates himself to god goes to bible school he wants to be a preacher goes off to bible school for a couple years he's a junior trying to get his degree in theology so he can become a preacher he gets drafted for world war ii this is pre-pearl harbor but the draft is going on leading up to pearl harbor like america the american government knows we're going to war they just there hasn't been the catalyst yet so they are already drafting people he gets drafted goes off to training he shows up this is 1940 40 1940 early 1941 one of the two and uh so he shows up to training and he's grew up in a log cabin in the fucking woods dude he doesn't know anything about the military there's no tv shows there's no books he's read like he doesn't know anything he gets off the bus and they're like all right if you want to be infantry you're going to be a soldier you're going to be a soldier you're going to be a soldier go over there you want to be artillery go over there you want to be a medic go over there you want to be this go over there he doesn't know what any of these fucking words mean so he's like i don't fucking infantry i guess i don't know this sounds easy so he fucking walks over to the infantry line becomes an infantryman then uh gets out of training he's kind of on camp shelby in mississippi pearl harbor gets attacked and they just like they don't know what the fuck is going on so they station him out on the mississippi river and he's just like camping on the mississippi river in case the japanese fucking invade or something or if they get attacked he's out there for a couple months they bring him back in they ship his ass over in world war ii pacific or he ends up going to the pacific so cut through a bunch of bullshit he winds up he's uh he winds up becoming an officer he's a lieutenant he's in charge of a platoon and he's told they're about to invade some island in the pacific and he is told you're you're the first guy to hit the fucking beach is this midway no no it's uh guadalcanal oh yeah yeah yeah so he's told you're gonna be the first one to hit the fucking beach jeez so like fucking he's got the moment like the gets in the higgins boat fucking rolling up the door drops down he's the first one off the higgins boat falls immediately neck deep in water just like takes this wind out of his fucking sails you know like cool guy moment gone they get up on the beach he's expecting enemy gunfire there's nothing going on he's like what the fuck he gets all his guys up on the beach there's just dead japanese dudes everywhere supplies thrown all over the fucking place like what the fuck is going on apparently the marines had already been there for like fucking six months the island was already wiped out like guadalcanal was already taken and the funny part is if you go back and watch the pacific you see this moment in the show like the army guys are rolling up after the fact and like they're all nervous like they're racking their guns they're getting ready to go like the army guys were told where they were going to be the first ones there and then they get there the marines are like what took you guys so long start raiding all their shit so that doesn't happen he he hopped on the beach and he's like what the fuck is going on he's like what the fuck is going on he's like you know what the fuck is going on he's like what the fuck is going on he's like what the fuck is going on he's like what the fuck is going on he's like what the fuck is going on into the next campaign in this island called new georgia also brutal jungle warfare it's basically guadalcanal 2.0 goes out with his battalion his battalion gets cut off and surrounded for i believe 29 days completely cut off surrounded he goes from like 180 to 119 loses a ton of weight a lot of his guys get fucked up they make it out he goes back regain some weight they take a bunch of the other guys that are healthy enough again go back out on another mission gets caught surrounded it again this time it's for 21 days and the whole time this is going on he's like functioning as a pseudo chaplain because they don't have a chaplain out there he's like being the preacher he's like counseling guys he's an officer he's helping him out so he picks up the nickname preacher the fighting preacher and he's just like trying to help these guys get him through it he's also an officer he's leading his men but the second time around they get surrounded like they they know the game they've done this before and somewhere along the line the first time they figured out the japanese all have like packs of rice for their rations so now as soon as they're killing japanese guys they're sneaking out at night they're grabbing all the rice this time they've got some native guides the guides are showing them all the tips and tricks like oh we can mix this bark from this tree it makes it taste better and we can eat these plants and these guys are like doing master chef while the japanese are like launching attacks they just couldn't give a fuck less they'd already been through so much and uh ultimately they start running low on ammo and the battalion commander's like all right you're the most experienced you know patrol officer we got take one of these guides probe around their line see if you can find a way to get us out of here so he takes this native guide by the name of beady and they go out probing the enemy line and they walk right into an ambush enemy machine gun fire lights them up and uh they run take off they dive into the swamp they're hiding in the swamp they lose them he gets out of the swamp they start wiping all the mud off they get all the mud off the native guide beady and beady's like he's he's good he's good to go he didn't get hit they start wiping the mud off logan he's got a bullet hole in his helmet didn't hit his head went around to the helmet lost velocity he's got another bullet hole in the heel of his boot didn't hit his foot his foot he's got another bullet hole he's got two more bullet holes like in his clothing all the bullets missed him and his wristwatch got shot off his wrist and grazed him god but he's fine that's god so beady beady the native to this island in the pacific sees this and he's like wow your god must be really powerful and he's like yeah man yeah he's pretty cool yeah he's like can i can i worship this god yeah he's like sure yeah you just you know accept jesus as your lord and savior and you know you can be christian too blah blah blah and they say a little prayer together and okay cool that was great let's get back let's get back to the guys now and beady from his perspective now is under the impression that he is immune to bullets so he starts dancing and singing and making a bunch of fucking noise and logan's like shut the fuck up like but you know he's he thinks he's fucking invincible now what's he got to be? scared of so he gets through that situation they make it back he gets the guys out of the line um continues to fight i'm abbreviating this is like an hour and 20 minute long video it's a good abbreviation yeah so he uh he uh fights through the rest of world war ii and then goes back home finishes his theological degree becomes a preacher for a couple of years and he had signed up for the reserves while he was doing that well then they called him back a couple years later and they're like yeah we need you to go on um occupation duty you can either go to europe or japan you can pick which one you want he picks japan because he wanted to see what was up now because he just got done fighting the japanese and uh well there were two bombs that went off yeah you know yeah we'll see if they're still holding a grudge and he uh so he chooses to go over there but before he leaves he requests that he becomes a chaplain now it's kind of what he wants to do he wants to be a military chaplain he's got the degree for it now and they tell him uh you're too old he's 31 you got to be 30 or younger to be a chaplain i would think it's the opposite apparently that's what he gets told so he's like well fuck it i guess i'm infantry so he shows up to japan he's got a wife and kids back home at this point they're living in a trailer outside of like fort benning i think so he shows up to japan he's there for a little while and then he gets a notification one day the north north koreans are attacking the south koreans pack your shit we got to go up there he gets told it shouldn't take longer than a week so he leaves all his personal shit in south or and uh japan heads up to north south korea technically because this is the point where they had pushed the south koreans all the way down to the very very end of the peninsula called the pusan perimeter where they held out so he shows up at the pusan perimeter they're like all right take this platoon go stand out at this fucking gate and uh you know if there's an attack repel it so he's out there with this platoon that he just picked up fucking bunch of north koreans come rolling up with three t-34 tanks and the t-34 tanks punch through their machine gun positions they just drive right through it and they get behind his position he's up on a hill so he radios back he needs a you know an anti-tank crew to come up here he gets this anti-tank crew they show up with the bazooka he's got his guys up on the hill repelling the infantry and he's got these tanks behind him he takes the anti-tank crew and he goes out they run through these rice patties they sneak up on these tanks they hit all three tanks but they just take out the tracks to immobilize them and before they're able to actually knock the tanks out they just take out the tracks to immobilize them and before they're able to actually knock the tanks out completely the uh one of the tanks hits their position kills all the guys in the anti-tank crew and he's the only one left so he fucking starts firing rifle grenades at it and everything else and he gets up on top there's two tanks that are still operational both on the ends with one in the middle that's completely knocked out and he's like i'm getting fucking shot at there's nowhere safe to be right now so he's like the safest place i can be is on top of the tanks and he's like the safest place i can be is on top of the tanks and he's like the safest place i can be is on top of the tanks so he gets up on top of the first tank and they fucking open the hatch drops a grenade and fucking closes the hatch takes them out the other tank guys start trying to climb out of their tank shoots all those guys knocks out three tanks and i in the video i pull up like the old newspaper articles they've got drawings of like the fighting preacher knocks out commie tanks blah blah blah blah from the era and um from here they fucking pull him he goes on a couple missions they're still preserving the pusan perimeter at this point just trying to keep a foothold on the peninsula and he's basically put in an area that's deemed safe because his guys have already kind of like been through some shit that's how it starts and they're chilling out there and he's you know everybody's just hanging out basically camping but they got their guns and uh off in the distance he's like checking everything on binos they're up on a hill it's north korea you can see fucking 20 miles out he sees a formation of guys coming towards them as they get closer he's like those are fucking north koreans so he sends a runner back to the headquarters tent away a ways back and he's like tell him i got north koreans coming runner makes it back he's like commander says they're not north koreans well they're constantly getting closer he's like tell him i can see their uniforms they're carrying japanese rifles i know what a japanese rifle looks like i fought in world war ii that's what the north koreans are carrying tell them they're north koreans get some more guys up here sends a runner back runner comes back they're not north koreans or south koreans this is a safe area and this conversation goes back and forth playing fucking phone with the commander until the fucking north koreans are at the hill and open it open fire so he starts defending himself winds up getting shot at the beginning of the firefight gets all his men set up they're fighting runs he gets shot through the thigh he's he's losing a bunch of blood so he runs back to this like aid station gets tourniquet put on then goes back up with his guys keeps fighting uh takes out an enemy machine gun position that they were trying to get set up to wipe out his guys leads a counter-attack and then gets shot i believe three more times he gets shot through the arm he gets shot in the chest and ultimately ends up stopping this attack before he gets uh medevaced um he had a platoon so like 30 guys and they stopped an attack of 700 men and killed over 400 he was personal credited with 27 of the kills six with bayonet one with a trench knife um so he's bro he's so fucked up they gotta fly him to japan to a hospital to go through surgery and at the time the standard operating procedure was if you're in the hospital for 60 days they send your ass back home day 59 he gets orders to go back out oh my god so he goes back out and by this point he basically shows up and that's when they make the amphibious landing an inch and they're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die and they start pushing the north koreans all the way back up the perimeter is this before after general macarthur was fired like what point in the war he isn't fired yet this is what gets him fired oh god so macarthur has the amphibious landing at inch on he's supposed to you know push up the peninsula take out the north koreans um as they're approaching the chinese border macarthur is ordered to stop short of the chinese border because we don't want the chinese getting involved like we're not coming for them it's communist nations they're going to think that you know we're trying to eradicate communism that's why we're there so he's ordered to you know stall short of that but he decides to push forward anyways he pushes the forces all the way up to the yalu river which is basically the border of china and that's where they start getting attacked all the allied forces they bring in hundreds of thousands of chinese soldiers they basically have to do fighting retreats all the way back down the peninsula it gets pushed back down below the 38th parallel again and then they fight their way back up and it gets stalled out at this 38th parallel so he fights all the way up the peninsula all the way out the hospital yeah all the way up the peninsula all the way back down the peninsula and then during uh when they're fighting back down they get pushed back down past seoul for a minute and there's another town right outside of seoul i can't remember suwan i think it's called outside of suwan um by this point he's been promoted he's no longer leading a platoon he's leading a battalion and he's kind of the role that you were talking about with the marine where it's like he's the guy that knows everything war and he's telling the platoon elements what to do in this battalion and the platoons that he's working closest with is uh echo company and echo company gets fucking attacked by these guys up on a hill and echo company is led by this crazy lieutenant that also fought in world war ii named lewis malette and lewis malette has the dude likes combat and he has heard that the communists are talking shit saying the americans are scared to bayonet fight so he decides Those boys, he decides that he is going to lead the last bayonet charge in America. military history and take the hill and he got to oversee that as well and then uh after that's so fucking cool at any point was he like thinking about you know because he's like a big christian guy owes his life to god and everything he's just out here full-blown ben stiller in it and fucking that's what i'm picturing him on top of the tank like ben stiller and tropic thunder like i mean i skipped the merrill's marauders part it gets worse all right well let's keep going all right sorry rewind world war ii uh new new georgia so he gets done in the pacific uh after he gets done with that new georgia campaign he gets a letter so this is back in world war ii sorry um he gets he gets two letters they're backdated 14 months one letters from mom and dad one's from his fiance first letter mom and dad are getting divorced oh second letter fiance is leaving him oh jesus then they come around and they're like we're taking volunteers for a dangerous mission for guys that have extensive jungle warfare training and he's like don't have anything else to go home to fuck it why not so they're all right get on the boat okay so he gets on the boat they're taking him to all these different islands he goes he winds up in australia he's like where the fuck are we going next thing he knows he's the weirdest japanese ever yeah remember dude grew up in a log cabin in michigan like next thing he knows he's in fucking india like what the fuck is going on yeah they start training for more jungle warfare in india and then he figures out like oh here's the mission we got 3 000 guys including you we're gonna walk from india into burma into the jungles of burma and you're gonna go fight the chinese while they're in burma full-on guerrilla warfare tactics your whole mission prevent the japanese from taking out china china's basically cut off we need to establish a foothold in burma so we can establish the burma road to get supplies to the chinese so they can defend against the japanese because if china falls japan and the nazis are going to have a direct like highway between them and that's going to be awful for the war effort so we're going to send you 3 000 guys into the jungle just go fuck up the japanese as much as possible 3 000 guys to stop the connection of the entire eastern world now the problem is they can't get supplies into china right so how are you going to get supplies to 3 000 guys that are trying to fight a war airdrop them that's all they do they live in the jungle for seven months straight while they're getting airdrop supplies conducting guerrilla warfare operations against the japanese 3 000 guys against how many would you say i don't whatever the fuck the empire of japan had and they were just in there wreaking havoc the entire fucking time and i get into like the different major battles they had but uh that this unit's called merrill's marauders uh general merrill was a guy in charge and this would later go on to become the 75th ranger regiment so this is like the predecessor to the 75th rangers so these guys were functionally special forces at the time and he was selected because of his experience inside of the dangerous mission they asked for volunteers for another more dangerous mission inside the dangerous mission nobody volunteers so he gets voluntold you're the guy he is the platoon leader for the ir platoon for the whole element ir's uh intelligence and reconnaissance so he's a scout platoon so he's like 30 miles ahead of the rest of this element in the jungle in the jungle moving forward he's the eyes and ears is that where they came up with long range uh that's lerp long range reconnaissance patrol that's vietnam okay um but yeah this is basically where this all stems from and starts he at the middle of that one too what coming up with lerp in vietnam oh yeah is that where this is going he was the guy that invented that there too uh he didn't he he didn't coin it but i mean he pioneered the shit right so uh while they're in he's in merrill's marauders fuck lost my train of thought my bad so he was going ahead 30 miles oh so he's ahead like 30 miles so and they're this is such a historic military unit and they did so much shit while they were there i had to like stop reading his books and doing research on him and i had to go and read a book just on merrill's marauders okay and merrill's marauders has a book it's about this is about 3 000 dudes this is all talking about here's this entire element moving through and here's what happened like this is what happened here's what happened here's what happened here's like they're not really talking about individuals and he's just a platoon leader like he's not a big he's not important he's not a general he's not a colonel he's not an officer he's not in charge of shit he's in charge of 30 guys in this book he's named 14 times and on multiple occasions his platoon saved the entire element of 3 000 guys the official historian for merrill's marauders equated one of his actions to the battle of thermopylae and goes on to explain king leonidas' fought on his own soil this guy fought on enemy soil in the jungle king leonidas lost all his men this guy didn't lose a single guy do we have tape of this guy talking like being interviewed he doesn't even have a fucking wikipedia page it's fucking crazy did you hear about him from that book is that how you found out about i got an email saying you should look into this guy and then i looked into it and every anytime i get an email like that i just google it i was like there's no wikipedia for this guy what the fuck but the nickname the fighting preacher was the name of the book so compelling that i just kept fucking digging deeper he wrote memoirs later in his life but they've been out of print forever i finally tracked down a copy of his book and then like went back pulled all the all the stuff i could find from like national archives his award citations and everything and like i cross verified everything and it's like everything he says he did in his book he fucking did and then he's in i'm just doing math in my head he was 31 when he went to korea in 1950 or 51 so by the time vietnam's popping off he's in his mid-40s so yeah so then he finishes up with merrill's marauders world war ii ends he goes does the korean stuff gets pushed down the peninsula overseas does the koreans overseas the last bayonet charge after that he gets shipped home from here he decides he's just going to finish out his career in the military he's already been in long enough yeah so he goes he basically helps rewrite the book on jungle warfare he's working at the pentagon for a while and then he gets uh he's like i i hate this i hate paper pushing stuff i want to go back so he's like i hate this i hate paper pushing stuff i want to go back so he's like i hate this i hate paper so he goes out to brag and he's like i think he's 44 at the time and he's like i'm sick of having to walk everywhere because merrill's marauders walked he is his platoon scouted over 1250 miles at jungle my kind of guy so he's like i'm tired of walking everywhere i want to jump out of planes so at 44 he becomes a paratrooper and then they're like hey you want to become a green beret he's like sure so then he becomes a fucking green beret in his mid-40s oh my god and then vietnam pops off and he doesn't talk much about what he did in vietnam but he was sent over to laos as a green beret to be a technical advisor to the lay oceans on how to combat communism which you ever heard of mac v sogg i have heard of that remind me though mac v sogg was the green berets that were basically operating in laos and cambodia waging a shadow war against the vietnamese the entire time like the most dangerous fucking combat you can imagine super insane attrition rate like i'm assuming he was doing that but i can't verify it but he was over there for um he was over there for his first 12 months and then they're like okay you can go back home now or you can extend for 36 months and we'll fly your family over here and they can live here too so he flies his family over he stays there for like the additional 36 months and it's like you know you're bringing your family to vietnam and then you're like oh my god i'm gonna fly my family to a war zone like what your videos what do you do to make what do you do to make it up to your daughters and your wife when you bring them to you know vietnam during a war like how do you make a kid happy you buy him a pony right you get him a dog they're in southeast asia so he gets him a monkey oh my god spunky the monkey spunky the monkey spunky the monkey because that's what this story needed and uh yeah ends up uh finishes out it finishes out his career in vietnam brings his family and the monkey back home keeps the monkey forever and then uh goes on to become i forget the title but basically the campus religious leader for texas a&m for 13 years after all that still the chaplain still the chapel oh my god this is him logan weston medal of honor silver star u.s military man of god and uh yeah badass motherfucker can you pull up my instagram there's a picture of him with all of his medals so he got given the distinguished service cross he was supposed to get the medal of honor for repelling that attack of 700 but the commander that kept arguing back and forth with him basically made sure he didn't get the uh that that post next one over no other one sorry right there you go that's all of his medals the fucking shadow box it's as tall as he is he's got over 200 200 awards and commendations when did this guy pass away uh he lived to be like 86 i think so maybe like 20 years ago yeah yeah that's an insane sack wow what got you into telling these stories they're so compelling i mean you do so many of them across military history i started doing you know i mean the whole youtuber thing like i didn't do it on purpose it was an accident i told you i made a i made a video about a grocery store and i got 12 million views and then i was like oh well i guess i should keep doing it so then i made like a couple more videos and then you know i'm just looking for any ideas to like crack jokes and be funny so i made a video about how the marine corps is the craziest branch of the military it's not even a branch of the military it's a cult and i did a little quick three-minute video of all the little crazy shit they do and uh people loved it and they were like oh now do army infantry now do army mortars so then i started doing these little three-minute videos on jobs and then that kind of turned into like five-minute videos on equipment it. And then one day I just like covered one dude, one dude's war memoirs and people loved it. I didn't think people would want like a 40 minute video, but it performed great. And then, uh, I just, I kept doing it. And I mean, over time, I mean, obviously you look for more purpose for doing something other than I enjoy getting views and likes and clicks. And, uh, I think the purpose is just kind of turned into, you know, we don't celebrate war heroes anymore. Like we used to have war heroes in world war two, like you earn the medal of honor. You'd come home, you'd go on a war bonds tour. People knew who you are. You were a celebrity. We celebrated brave men for doing incredible things and being selfless. And we did it a little bit in Korea. And then we kind of quit after Vietnam. I mean, the fact that, you know, Bass alone, we're from Jersey, like, you know what I mean? But like, there's no G watt guys that have notoriety like that. There's nobody from desert storm. There's nobody in any of the wars that we like celebrate and hold up like this. This is the example of what you should and could be. And, you know, I think it's extremely impactful, especially for kids growing up, having war heroes to look at and be like, I want to be like that. Yeah, dude. No, you're making an amazing point. I forget who I had in here recently, but this came up and I couldn't agree more. It's like, I don't have any problem. Like, I think it's great when, you know, there's a great athlete or stuff like that. And you look up to him or you really like Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor. And you look up to him. That's awesome. But like in society, I think like people who make the ultimate sacrifice and understand how the world works, because they go over and see the things that we're lucky enough to not have to see here, because there's guys like them doing that. I mean, you're telling me that story from a guy from three generations ago across two generations doing wars. I feel like I was fucking there. Like people should know what was his name? Logan Weston, Logan Weston. People who should know that name. Like that's, I completely agree, man. You know, it would be a great thing to look up to in society. And everybody wonders, why like, oh, none of these kids take pride in being an American. Half these kids think America's bad or evil or whatever. And it's like, yeah, because you've never heard any stories of anything like, you know what I mean? Like America has so many heroes that have done so much incredible shit and nobody teaches you that. Yep. Yeah. Some of the, some of the, I saw you guys did this too. I really admired that, but you guys had in a world war II veteran on, on unsubscribe. Really, really cool. He just passed away. Right. Well, we had a couple in a couple of summers ago. One of them left like one of his purple heart, like, I guess mementos here is really cool. But you know, you're sitting there and you're like, these guys are a hundred years old and they were just thrown into a situation when they're 18, 19, 20, and they had to figure it the fuck out. And I'm just, I don't know. It's a strange feeling that you understand, but it's like the gratitude you feel that people were able to do that and pull that off. No questions asked is pretty fucking immense. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know. The cool part for me, I mean, I get tons of emails, tons of comments, but like some of the emails I get are crazy to me. Like I've had, I've had wives reach out to me and say that she started watching these videos with her husband and she, her husband served 15 years in the Marine Corps. And she's like, I understand my husband better after watching your videos. Or my favorite ones are, Hey, my dad served in the military for a long time. He's passed away now, but he never, never talked about it. He fought in Vietnam or Korea or world war two. And the unit that you talked about that this guy was in, that was my dad's unit. I had no idea. He's, I learned so much about my dad. I had no idea what a bad-ass my dad was. Thank you. Like that's cool. It's, it's cool being able to show somebody like, Oh, you know, to you, dad was just the guy mowing the lawn and new balances, but your dad was a fucking bad-ass at one point. And they went their whole lives, never knowing that. And now they do. That's really cool to me. That's really special. And I think, you know, you talk about how we stopped doing it as a society, like propping these guys up and everything, but like the U S military to me never stopped having amazing people in it or amazing talent and being bad-asses and stuff like that. We quit caring because of money. What do you mean? I mean, the U S government switched over to fractional reserve banking and they could just print more money to fund wars. And they didn't need to anymore. The reason the U S government was promoting these people was to bring them back to sell war bonds because they needed money. To go fight the fucking war. And as soon as they said, Oh, what? We can just print more now. Fuck promoting these guys. Who cares? I don't need, but you know what I mean? But that also before fractional reserve banking, and they could just have an infinite money printer. If you wanted to go fight a war, it had to be a reasonably popular fucking endeavor because you had to sell war bonds to fund the motherfucker, right? Like how many people would have bought war bonds for Afghanistan? Guessing not a lot. I'm getting, I, Iraq, maybe Iraq mostly because of nine 11, but like Iraq, they would have printed them. I mean, they were doing freedom fries and all that shit. Yeah. Like Iraq, they would have sold a bunch, but Afghanistan, they wouldn't. So like, I think that fucked up all the society. It has a ton of downsides because you know, at least you had the population backing the war. Yeah. And now we fought a lot of wars over the years that usually just through like over time and not really having a plan eventually, like we have to leave and we lose or whatever. But what I always say with that is, you know, I don't know. I don't know if it's a good thing. I don't know. It's not, it's not because of the guys were there that aren't capable. It's because a bunch of people in suits in DC who now have infinite, infinite money to fucking vote and print, print money for wars. It's like, you know, they make bad decisions and they play war games that they don't have the balls to go out there. They're not allowed to win. The Marine Corps could steamroll any country in the Middle East and fucking a week if they wanted to. Like I had a, I had an apprentice that had actually served 20 years in the army and he came in, got out of the military. He was my apprentice for a while. Great guy. And he would tell me stories about how like he was remembers being in a Humvee on a 50 Cal and they start taking enemy fire. He's got a fucking 50 Cal and somebody with an AK 47 shooting at him from up on the Hill. What do you think he did? Had to radio in to ask permission to fire back. No, he had to tell somebody in the Humvee hand me my M four because he wasn't allowed to return fire with the 50 Cal because it wasn't fair. Fuck that shit. Blow the fucking hill up. Who fucking cares? Yeah, I didn't do that, but, um, you first apologize later. Um, this is also why you don't know about Norman Swartzkopf because they probably fucking hated him because he won too quick. Yeah, that's, that's what he won too quick. Oh, the guy did the first school for it. Yeah. Like I, my deployments were in this weird space. Um, Iraq, as it was coming to an end, as they were getting ready to shut down bases was much more urban and everything else in Afghanistan when I was there was literally the wild west. Um, not long after I left, they started having, you know, drones in the air, these things called G boss towers. They could see you and they give their interpretations of interactions and things like that. Like we had a bigger gap and like it, I also want to say, like I actually found the exact number of guys that we lost on my deployment to Marsha and it was 10 guys. That we lost. Um, and I, I don't, I don't, the only reason I don't say their names is because it's not my place. I don't know who all will hear this. I don't know where this will be, where there'll be when this finds them. And I don't want to say anything that could, you know, cause any type of thing, but you know, it's just, I just took a moment to reflect on it. Um, you know, we, we lost a lot of guys and because of that, so many other people had to step up to, and that included my friend Wendell Archer and Wilson, other guys who, um, were put in these situations you can't imagine. And I constantly think about it now because my children at the age to where, you know, I was and, uh, I've thought for a long time, like, you know, did we win? What did it look like? Who did I fight for? I could have solved Afghanistan in five minutes. That's what I always say. I would have, um, so there's only one place in the world where you can actually, uh, grow and sell pharmaceutical grade pop, uh, poppy. And that is, um, New Zealand. The other place is Afghanistan. It's part of the golden triangle, right? So what I would have done is I would have paid a pennies on the dollar more than the Taliban was to basically cut off their funding resource and take that over and then harvest that and provide a legitimate economy for the people because they weren't doing it because they wanted to, they were doing it because of the threat of death. And then that would have forced the Taliban out, cut all their funding operations done. Um, built the economy, built the economy. Yeah. Like it's not that complicated. Now, does that get, you know, the people at home thinking about this? Like, well, poppy can be turned into heroin and a whole lot of shit. Can that get bastardized in a way that it turns into like ground zero for a black market? Like it did. That's what it is now. And that's what it was. But like, you could also wean them off of that. Like if the long-term goal is not have that, obviously you can change that. But if you're paying pennies on the dollar more than a war for 20 years, like, I remember like we were doing a buyback program and we would like go up to them. And this is, this is like literally what I was ordered to do. They're like, go up and offer it to them. And I was like, well, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. I have a question. What is winning then? I know everybody says America's never hasn't won a war since world war II or whatever, blah, blah, blah. Like what is w like, I don't know. What was the winning in world war II? What do you mean? Like what, what did that, what did it say? What did that look like? I mean, there's two arguments. One, we showed up in their country with guns and they couldn't do shit too. We forced their government to sign a treaty. - Yeah. - Okay, well, if the government doesn't fucking exist anymore because we overthrew it entirely or it just never had one what other options are there for winning other than we showed up walked around your countries with guns and did whatever the fuck we wanted the entire time we were there until we decided to leave right i think it's a matter of what happens when either we do leave or the shooting stops right so in afghanistan to look at the a modern day example it's like there's a badly executed pullout obviously not the fault of the guys there at all yeah and we left all the weapons behind the guys that were in charge 20 years ago became in charge again and it's and there are people that felt like wow it was just time is a flat circle whereas when you finish world war ii you took out the japanese emperor you took out the nazi command you made them start a new government you have a new problem with an old ally then now you have a cold war with afterwards but like effectively the moment of like the world's fastest growing gdp trying to start a forefront war and take over the world all at once with whatever his ideas were that was stopped i would describe that as a win for sure but then the question is like so the hinging point is like can we teach this group of people to rebuild a society that can be productive again what do you do when you can't that's hard we shouldn't have ever left afghanistan that's it yeah i was gonna i was gonna ask you what hard stop we should have never left um there's a precedent we didn't leave germany we're still there right we didn't leave a bunch of countries around it vietnam korea we're still there um japan we still have a marine base there um both of them have become world superpowers japan and germany alone in technology innovation society um because we were there to stop a power vacuum to being being created we should have kept a base in the north well one in kandahar and then one up in the north i think around bagram probably would have been a good spot off top of my head i don't really know that area that well but i mean tyler vargas andrews who was on sean ryan who's a very good friend of ours um amazing amazing tough as one of the best people out there um when you hear the way he was hemmed up yeah and the way i wasn't like they had id they had intelligence they knew what was going to happen and they're like no no no no it's not that and like literally as he's i'm gonna steal this from him because i think about it all the time he said it was like if someone filled this room with sand that was what it was like the amount of people that were trying to get through to leave it's like it was unstoppable and you see that and you see the impact that it's had on that part of the world where things are you know it might look good for the influencers they're paying to fly out there but it's not a good place to go you know i don't care how much the taliban's cutting you a check for to go roll the blade and down the one road they have it's not a place you want to be um but we have created another power vacuum and a very dangerous part of the world again yeah it's an interesting argument with the bases and stuff and i could i could see a good argument there but when it did when they did decide to basically like get out and now your post-career veteran watching this who was there and fought battles and lost friends and lost friends after to suicide as well double over over double um since i've since since i left the service 2011 the first suicide was in november of 2011. and again i don't want to i'm not going to name names it's not my place um that and it just continues to happen since then um what's going through your mind when you watch them pull out in august 2021 i was in a much better place uh personally um you know because of a lot of things i'd done i had started you know when i got out in 2011 i realized no one was coming to help us and so i started working with non-profits i started trying to basically do what i do now but i wasn't making a living doing it i was just i was the only guy who knew how to do the gi bill i was the only guy knew about benefits non-profits that'll send you to ride horses if you want or hyperbaric oxygen therapy or you can put magnets on your head whatever i was like doing all of it and i worked with a non-profit for about six months and i started like basically auditing and using anything that i could to make my life better i wasn't like this will make me 100 better but what if i get like 15 to 20 you know what i mean like what if i can start chunking together patch working um a path towards healing and you know ultimately it's because my wife and my community and the people i was surrounded by that put me in a place to where i was um able to not have the impact uh really be detrimental to me and about a month later i went to mexico and and did psychedelics i believe it was that year maybe it was a year i can't remember is it 21 or 22 when i did and what did you do specifically the thing that uh that everyone talks about now i did ibogaine and dmt but back when you had to lie about it right and not tell people we had to get medical exemptions on our passports all these different things through an organization called vets um which was a life-changing thing for me and it obviously like it helped you tremendously yeah no it's it's one of the single greatest things i've ever done was it immediate or was it a gradual improvement absolutely immediate immediate immediate what why do you think it was for you i mean so ibogaine is um it's outlawed in america it's because it's it has been shown to have a hundred percent uh effectiveness in opioid cessation um it attacks all the addiction centers of the brain um can't have that can't have that um uh and it basically wipes you clean um and it is not a fun experience there's a documentary about it on netflix called in waves and war it's the same organization i went through um basically it shows you all the good bad and all things you need to see and for like eight to ten hours you're swimming in deep water with weights on and you're blindfolded and i don't go too much into it just because it's very it takes a long time but like for me what i kept seeing was a photo of my wife and two daughters and it was like fuzzy and unclear and as it got closer to me like it would become more clear and as it got closer these moments of trauma throughout my life would kind of appear like a roll of your phone i would spend time with it and go back down in the medicine and come back up and purge um they say it's a physical manifestation of trauma that you're purging and i hadn't eaten in 12 hours and i don't know what came out of me but something came right and you wake up the next day you're like trying to stand up and can't because like your brain's like literally brand new and then we took a day and then we did dmt five meo dmt the next day what was that like they call it the god molecule for a reason um it takes you to the eternal whatever people want to call it that's that's where you go and um you know it helped me to put all the like ibogaine like gave me the pieces for the puzzle and dmt put them in place and um that's crazy that's that's probably the craziest thing i've ever done was it the kind of thing where when you're forced to i was just thinking this when you were describing the ibogaine part where you're like oh god i don't know how to deal with these traumas and live in them during that period is it like it's not just facing them but then also like having you get like some self-forgiveness out of it like it's it's in the past or yeah i mean i mean it was a combination of like my life growing up through having you know an alcoholic father who's abusive and all the different things that come with that and um and then like you know all the stuff that made me good as a marine made me bad as a person and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and i think that's one of the best things that i've ever done for myself and so you know when i did that and so you know when i did that the ceremonies it was just it was unlike the ceremonies it was just it was unlike the ceremonies it was just it was unlike anything else i mean it's anything else i mean it's anything else i mean it's why i'm excited that the va is working why i'm excited that the va is working why i'm excited that the va is working with hhs to fast roll it i mean we just with hhs to fast roll it i mean we just with hhs to fast roll it i mean we just talked to the secretary of va about it talked to the secretary of va about it talked to the secretary of va about it they're literally laying out a plan um they're literally laying out a plan um they're literally laying out a plan um it's some something i think really needs it's some something i think really needs it's some something i think really needs to happen what he said about ib game was to happen what he said about ib game was to happen what he said about ib game was weird to hear what was that he had like weird to hear what was that he had like weird to hear what was that he had like uh he was kind of explaining it like he uh he was kind of explaining it like he uh he was kind of explaining it like he was he was also a chaplain forever so he was he was also a chaplain forever so he was he was also a chaplain forever so he was like very much like was like very much like was like very much like not bought into the idea but he was not bought into the idea but he was not bought into the idea but he was talking to like psychologists and the talking to like psychologists and the talking to like psychologists and the psychologists were telling him like psychologists were telling him like psychologists were telling him like i thought it was at first like i thought it was at first like i thought it was at first like i've done research they're like this is i've done research they're like this is i've done research they're like this is legit yeah and he had given you know legit yeah and he had given you know legit yeah and he had given you know this anecdotal example about how some this anecdotal example about how some this anecdotal example about how some people needed to actually have ib gain people needed to actually have ib gain people needed to actually have ib gain done multiple times done multiple times done multiple times because they had so many different because they had so many different because they had so many different issues that they had to work through issues that they had to work through issues that they had to work through that they didn't even know were like that they didn't even know were like that they didn't even know were like part of the problem so like one dude part of the problem so like one dude part of the problem so like one dude would go in and you know hypothetically would go in and you know hypothetically would go in and you know hypothetically speaking it wasn't just something that speaking it wasn't just something that speaking it wasn't just something that happened in his military service but it's happened in his military service but it's happened in his military service but it's actually something that like happened in actually something that like happened in actually something that like happened in his childhood and that first session his childhood and that first session his childhood and that first session only got him through whatever the issues only got him through whatever the issues only got him through whatever the issues were in his childhood and then he had to were in his childhood and then he had to were in his childhood and then he had to do another session to get through do another session to get through do another session to get through the stuff after that yeah and then the stuff after that yeah and then the stuff after that yeah and then it fixed him so that was interesting to it fixed him so that was interesting to it fixed him so that was interesting to hear it's it's hear it's it's hear it's it's it's interesting to hear him take like a it's interesting to hear him take like a it's interesting to hear him take like a very clinical approach to it in a way very clinical approach to it in a way very clinical approach to it in a way where he's like we can't just where he's like we can't just where he's like we can't just throw veterans to the wolves of this the throw veterans to the wolves of this the throw veterans to the wolves of this the reality of it is not everyone needs reality of it is not everyone needs reality of it is not everyone needs that much um that much um that much um that's kind of like the highest level that's kind of like the highest level that's kind of like the highest level it's it's it's it's bleach right it's bleach right Um, and there's other, there's other psychedelics that have been shown to be just as effective MDMA ketamine, um, psilocybin, things like that. That's what you're supposed to do. I skipped those steps. I don't recommend what I shout out to Jared Taylor from black rifle. Call me coffee. He called me like the end of September. It was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm mowing my yard. I was literally mowing my yard. And he's like, I'll never forget this. He goes, do you have a passport? Like a grown man? I was like, yeah, I have a passport. And he goes, all right, you're going to go to Mexico in a month. And I was like, how do I take off work? And he goes, you'll be fine. Cause I was working with him at the time. He's like, you'll be okay. He's like, I own the company. I was like, yeah, that was a dumb question. I wish I hadn't said that out loud. Um, but he sent me in a bunch of guys down and I was, there was some dudes who'd done psychedelics before Derek Carver's a good friend of ours. World champion power lifter has one leg. He looks like the thumb thumb things from spy kids minus a digit. So he's just a big fist. And, um, we took the medicine. It's weighed, you're hooked up to an EKG. You have a drug test. You do all these things. You're under care of a doctor and everything. I'll never forget. I look at him and he takes off his leg and he goes, won't be needing this. And I was like, oh shit, this is about to be gnarly. And it just changed everything. It just changed everything. Um, and so instead of, you know, I'm, I don't want to seem like I'm stumping or like grifting or whatever. Administration. Um, I don't, I don't like red or blue. I do like Doug Collins a lot because I've seen them take input from the veteran community and be like, you're right. We were wrong. We're like, yeah, we should do that. I've never seen a VA administration do anything like that prior. Like he's like, yeah, you're right. We should look into this. I'm partnering with health and human services to figure out how to do this. The end. That's great. As opposed to like, well, we'll see. Cause most people, most people take that job. It's like, whatever. It's like a career. Thank you. You served. Here you go. Run this thing. You didn't quite make it to president. Yeah. You didn't quite make it. You're in the line of succession, you know, a bunch of people got to go, but you're still up there. But, um, you know, he's a pastor. He just retired, uh, from the, uh, from the military. And like, he just wants to help. Like he, he went from having a really good life in North Georgia to living in a condo in DC. Not exactly a good trade also. Didn't realize he was in the line of succession. Kind of threw me off trying to film a podcast for the first time with multiple secret service guys staring at me, not laughing at any of my jokes, even though they landed with everyone else in the room. Yeah. I get to the point. I was trying to make these guys laugh stone face the entire time. Couldn't be done. Secret service agents. Yeah. Nice and serious. Couldn't be done. No, it was, it was funny. The parent, we were all inside, but the street was blocked off and everything. Like one of our friends was like, I'm just going to see my friends. What? The street was blocked off? Yeah. Uh, Trout, when he came in, he's, he was like, there was just a dozen cars, apparently a half dozen cars outside. So like, Well, they're not fucking around, I guess, since July of 2024. I mean, they're, yeah, no, they're, they're serious and like protect this man at all costs, but like, it's just, um, I, I, I don't know, man. It's, you know, PTSD, people have a lot of meanings for it. They call it PTS, PTSD, whatever you want to call it. I don't care. I think, uh, when you come to the realization that the memory of who you were before the trauma is better than the reality that you are, it's almost impossible not to hate yourself because you can remember everything before the thing that happened, whatever it is, a car wreck, you're, you know, something traumatic happens. You lose someone close to you, you go to war, whatever it is, doesn't matter. And that's, that's where that thing comes up. And, you know, for me, I was just carrying it for such a long time. And I was kind of patchworking myself together and trying to help people. And that all led me to the veteran with the sign stuff. Cause I was like, what if I open source this shit? What if, what if I call myself war fighter? And like, I refer to myself in the third person. What if I wear the same thing every day? What if, how would he look? Oh, he would wear this shirt. He would write stuff on cardboard. Cause that's what veterans do. He's a homeless veteran. Okay. What, what if I partner with, companies that will help this? What if I get the word out? What if I talk about how June is men's mental health month? What if I talk about, you know, this thing or this event, whatever's happening. And if I just keep doing this, maybe, maybe people will find out about stuff. Cause everyone's always asking me Zach, how do you do this veteran thing? How do I get my benefits? How do I get counseling? Whatever. Why don't I just lean into that? Right. And that's literally what I did. Like there's, that was what, like seven, eight years ago, you started 2020 March. The first, the first one I ever made, you know, the two weeks you stopped the curve. Yeah. We stopped the curve. It was two weeks in Iowa for real. Yeah. So I hear, yeah, Tennessee, we had, it was long two weeks. No, it wasn't. So it was like the week before the young lady was cutting my hair at the time. We were trying to like spend money in the local economy. I went to her and I was talking to her about this idea. And she was like, that's a good idea. And I was like, will you take my photo? And she's like, yeah, sure. So I went out, went outside the barbershop. She took my photo and it said, drink water, take Motrin, change your socks. And the caption said COVID remedy on ironically, it would have worked. It would have worked early. Yeah. I was a little early. Um, but that's the most common thing people say to you in the military. If you're hurt, drink water, take Motrin, change your socks. Right. And so I did that. And then I just kept making versions of that. I was talking about tiger Kings, you know, stuff that was like, well, it makes sense. Well, truly making like inside jokes about the military and you know, for like the first 90 days, some people got it. Some didn't. My wife was like, stop trying to make, you know, your friends laugh. Like 10 people laugh. You're embarrassing me. There there's always the embarrassing curve, right? There's the, they'll say it now. Like I always believed in him, but there's, there's a few text messages. You go back. I don't mind being embarrassed. I don't mind being embarrassed in new car. But, um, I remember there was this guy who got relieved. His name's captain Crozier. He was actually here on the, in New York. He had a vessel that responded, uh, when they had the, the, what are they called? The, the medical ships. I can't remember what they're called, but there was a bunch of them. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. They were stationed right outside here. And he was trying to get help from the Navy and they were actively suppressing his request for assistance. He's like, I've got a ship full of six sailors. We're trying to help with all these, you know, medical ships. I need help. And the Navy's like, no, you don't. He's like, no, no, I, I really need help. Blah, blah, blah. They ignored every single time. He eventually released it. I believe the CBS, he then got related to his command. And as he's leaving the ship, which is the equivalent of losing a base, which is a big fucking deal. Um, there's going captain Crozier and the whole deck is shaking like as he's walking off. And I have this one, I saw this one video. It wasn't like barstool sports and all this stuff. They're like captain at closure. And like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm getting chills even thinking about it. It's a great fucking video. And I saw that and I was like, I don't really do anything political. That's not really political. That's just a good leader. And I looked at Christie and I was like, Hey, I have an idea. And I like wrote it down real quick. Got her to take my photo. And at that time I had turned off all notifications on everything. And I was like, I'll just, you know, have a ton of stuff to do. I'll give this a day. And, um, I waited 24 hours. I got back on my phone and I refreshed it. I didn't know this until that moment, but Instagram will only cap out your notifications at a hundred. I refreshed it and it was a hundred, a hundred, a hundred. And I was like, Whoa, that's crazy. I hit it again, a hundred, a hundred, a hundred. And I did it again. And every time I did it, it kept doing that. And then I went to my followers and I was like, Oh no, we might have a problem here. Comments are through the roof. Things are going up. And then I was just like, okay, what do I do with this? And now just keep moving forward. I ran with it, ran with it. And then, you know, eventually you like, you know, you like meet somebody, DM them and you're like, Hey, you do this thing. I do this thing. Cause you don't, that's, that's honestly the hardest part is finding people that do the thing you do. Is that how you guys met? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's literally like how much do you charge someone for an ad or like what's a company you should work with? Or is this even a company? Like there's like, there's no one. It was like, Oh, I know this, blah, blah, blah. And so I'd met, um, donut operator and Brandon. And then they told me about the, the podcast they had and it was coming up and they're like, Oh, there's the fat electrician. And his videos are being sent to me on the regular, like all the time. The Marine videos are like, you should talk to this guy. I was like, who is this? Who is this guy? It was just, and then this YouTuber, no, it was, it's just a thing where like you become aware of certain people in your space and stuff, because you know, you are the company you keep, you know? And, um, we just all started hanging out and then like slowly but surely, like I just started to realize like, you know, all my friends are kind of like, uh, you know, the verses are different, but the course is the same. Yes. And like, we just started hanging out like one by one by one. And I had a podcast where I was interviewing people on my page called after action. I mean, they could hung out several times. We'd done a bunch of, you know, unsub adventures, different things. And he came in town and we just started talking for like four some odd hours. I don't know. We ordered tacos like halfway through. it was good yeah yeah tacos good to people going yeah it was me him and blaz who's also part of uh underwhelming and then he's like that's probably the best one we've ever done it was just it was just good like we just really hung out and then like we both thought about it and then it's like do you want to keep doing this and he's like yeah and he's like well let's start a podcast and he's like what do you want to name it and i was at his house and i was just like underwhelming i was like so you're taking on another pro i mean that's amazing oh he's he's fine he takes on 20 to 40 projects a lot of projects yeah yeah good for you man and then we just you know we just kept going it's it's fun you know it's like old dad new dad or newer dad um it's just kind of like us navigating life and trying to figure things out and it's just it's just fun well i think it's two things i think a obviously it's you know you scratch in the itch of like things that you're familiar with the world of music and music and music and music and music and music and music and you know and there's a lot of other people from those worlds who are looking for you know something they can relate to but then be like you guys are like so representative of like the everyman out there you think and say the things that people think and say and they're like ah that guy speaks for me that's really like that's the vibe i always got from like unsubscribe watching that from afar like it's you like you said it's guys hanging out and everything but there's like an element of just like this is just like me and my boys hanging out too yeah it's really fucking cool for for military yeah it's really fucking cool for for military yeah right like it's where everyone gets around rips a butt and is like the fuck was that about you know like but you know because it's just it's just boys hanging out and you know they all have like elaine nick's history brandon's guns cody's cops right eli's streaming everything and so it's just like i don't know and then it's kind of like wish version avengers when you look at it because like they like made this universe and somehow like i wound up a part of it like it's cool i'm like the hawkeye the hawk you're famous for the donkey story i am i am famous yeah what's the donkey story i can tell oh no let's tell it real quick it's not quick though well let's go then we got time all right all right so first off the first time i told this story i've been talking shit to nick for like a year we're at shot show one year and nick's like when you're on come on this is my nick voice when you're on come on unsubscribe i'm like i've got the single best story i'm only gonna tell it to you and joe rogan you're like okay and he's kind of he's so and he's like don't tell me now and like this is also like at two o'clock in the morning in the venetian like we're oh hammer just do it was shot show so we're like i gotta sorry i'm i don't want to drool but like we're exhausted there's people everywhere it's sweaty it's a whole thing all right so when my first appointment time called garms are right and uh we'd inserted and we were trying to establish like an area of operations we're moving through like buildings and the buildings over there like courtyard style so like your kitchen is an individual building and your bedroom is individual building and so forth so on so like we finally found like one good spot we're set up and i'm doing post and like for anyone doesn't know post is you're just looking out a hole rethinking your life being like holy shit i really wanted to be funny in high school like what am i doing here like you're just sitting there and we're all all the marines are in this one building because the rest of them are like either blown up or we had blown them up or they had blown them up and so we only had like one good structure so there's like 30 guys in there like laying on top of each other trying to keep warm and i'm looking out a hole my friend uh zachary group's looking out another hole we're both on 240s down this main thoroughfare like right in front of us crossover fields of fire intersecting fields of fire we're ready machine guns and like we're saying like dumb shit you're just trying to stay awake you ever you hit that spot oh yeah yeah i know what you're talking about you're like yeah dude when i get and it sounds like old-timey like when i get back to the world you know things will be different i'll see my gal like you're just like it's not like that dude when i get back i'm gonna get so drunk i can't wait i'm gonna eat like fried chicken or whatever you're saying like i'm gonna start a business i'm gonna do this he's saying stuff and you know we had told the people not to move around at night we're trying to stop movement of the taliban all these different things and um we're trying to stop them from basically creating bombs and like don't do it don't do it we even put pamphlets out like i said nobody knows how to read so we just covered the area with paper we just we just played it on the radio we did everything we could and so we're sitting there it's late it's really late it's not that far um we're very close to the road it's like from here to a little bit further than that wall and uh we see these two military age males and a donkey starting to walk down the road and i call up to the post i'm like hey cog cog is post one roger uh we got two military males moving from east west and move down the road what do you want to do i'm on my way over he like comes over from the other building he's like looking out of the hole and he looks at the hole he goes listen they do anything they do anything at all you fucking smoke them i was like roger that and i hit the 240 i'm like i'm about to go to college for free right and i'm there i'm there we don't even need nvgs it's there's there's no noise or light pollution there if there's don't have nvgs we also don't have nvgs right it's a budgetary issue equipment makes you weak chesty puller said that equipment makes you weak chesty puller said that equipment makes you weak chesty puller week move forward right um so i'm on the 240 he's not 240 and the cog corporal the guards like uh what's what's going on i'm like nothing nothing and they get like right center so like me and group like we're locked on we're like ready because what comments when they plant a bomb this is very well known this isn't releasing anything the way it works is like that it's not a one-person job you basically get paid for what you're doing there's one guy who gets paid to dig the hole another guy comes by he puts the item in the hole right the third guy gets paid to cover it up basically so they don't want to lose like one go they have like oh we still have the holes out there we still have the bombs out there and cover them up so like we thought they would come by just scoop some stuff or just drop some stuff off whatever waiting and they just stop and then like looking at him and he's like what's going on i was like i don't know they're just kind of standing here and they're looking around and then one guy goes to the front and then one guy goes to the back and the one guy goes to the front takes the donkey and he puts it like this like he puts a headlock and like a guillotine he locks it up and and then the other guy takes his shirt and puts it in his mouth and he starts fucking this donkey i swear to god i swear to god this is verifiable by every person i was with i swear to you i swear to you this happens and i and i go oh my god and group goes holy shit and then people start waking up they're like what's going on i'm like cog cog he's like what and i go you gotta get over here right now i don't say it over the radio because this stuff's documented and he like looks at her hole he's like oh my god he's fucking that donkey by this point every marine in the room starts waking up be like what the fuck what the fuck's going on and so they start looking out of the glory hole right the first glory hole and he's like oh oh my god so all of them are like they're moving around i remember guys are moving around machine gun barrels be like holy shit holy shit called the lieutenant like sir sir wake up wake up wake up he's like what's going on i was like they're fucking a donkey they're fucking a donkey sir it's like no they're not and he's like oh my god they're fucking a dog this is a well-educated man too fucking a donkey right and uh and i was like sir let's kill him he's like you can't kill him there'll be blood and cum everywhere this guy fucks his donkey for like a long time arguably way too long to be fucking a donkey right because you feel like if you're gonna fuck a donkey you're in and out no this he was like slapping on the ass and his friends holding it and then after finally it just it stops it just stops and the cog is like what's going on i was like he stopped he's like all right let me know if anything else happens and i was like roger that and i look up then they fucking swapped oh my god so and that was the moment that i knew we're not gonna be able to teach these guys democracy so so yeah um so i told this story on unso it's one of their most popular episodes today and so i tell this story on stage in nashville and the crowd just explodes and the the it was it was the first time unsub also ever did two shows back to back so we do that and then nick looks at me he's half in the bag he goes you gotta tell it again we're gonna act out the donkey story next time it was his idea and i was like what who plays the donkey our friend rich he hates it he hates it but rich was also half in the bag and he's like who's fucking the donkey both of us and he's like i'll be the donkey and so now it's an integral part of the show where it's like a leading up point because where nick tells the story and then nick leads into it he's like you guys want to hear a donkey story so i travel the country telling the story about two guys fucking a donkey and your sweet wife loves nothing more than hearing two thousand people scream and lose their fucking minds yeah when her husband has to go out there and tell a story about two dudes fucking a donkey yeah it's all right it puts up with a lot it'll be okay pays the bills it pays it does pay it does pay the bills it's just that's incredible no and she's it was funny because like for a while she was like searching my friends being like maybe one of them will tell me zach's lying and like they've all come to the house been like no it happened it was super fucking gross we're traumatized she keeps hoping it's the only time my wife is going to be in the house and i hope my husband's stealing valor maybe this is all made up and maybe it's all a dream it's not made up it's not a dream sir get over here where are the i can't say it's sir you know well but yeah it's yeah i mean there's other stories they're not like that that's next level yeah i never heard anything like that before no it's yeah so that's when people are like oh you know what are the people like over there and i'm like i got a story fucking donkeys i got a story for you we heard about some other fucking over there it's not great either that's been well documented on this podcast yeah it's it's very well documented the guy who made a documentary about my um deployment uh to marsh's name's ben anderson he used to work at vice news i don't know if he still does um but he also made a documentary called this is what winnings look like the trailer's probably the worst thing i've ever seen i don't even want to say it but basically talks about the head afghan police chief at the time says i'm gonna be vulgar but it just is what he says he says if we don't fuck the little boys they're gonna fuck the pussies of their grandmothers this is the head of all afghan police this is the very intro to the documentary like um their uh rationalization and normalization of the behavior they do is beyond anything that i could even really understand um but yeah i don't know how you get that out of society because of how deep-rooted it is and like i don't i said they also don't like homosexuality they hate gay people that is a i've they've tortured killed goes back to i had to go through this you have to now too yeah yes but i think you i mean there has to be like all abuse a strong power dynamic and getting off on that power dynamic there beyond just like i went through this so you will too and you know it's not one or two guys who were in afghanistan coming in here and telling me this it's everybody dude they would try the a and a would try and like be like hey we gotta go talk to people be like you're not fucking talking to anybody here stay over here stay right here you know and like oh no no we need to talk to no you don't you don't i mean there's there's tons of stories um you know of it happening uh i mean army e6 that got like oh yeah there was a it was a like famous court case this is years ago but there was an army e6 that beat the shit out of his ina yeah like equivalent commander and he got fired and i believe he got i believe he got separated from the military because the army e6 was the one that was the one that was the one that the official stance of the u.s government was we need to respect their culture yeah he came in one uh he came in on them in a gang rape situation and he he actually stopped it and uh they punished him for it i've had people in here who went and stopped those situations and they didn't get punished but that's crazy that's fucking crazy yeah no we were they were never allowed to be out of my sight they were always around us um you know our afghan army counterparts at least counterparts at least the ones we worked with i don't know didn't have any situations like that i wouldn't allow anything like that were you warned about that before you went there um no i mean the first appointment we didn't work with them but the second appointment they were like literally left seat right seat they were with us everywhere so how did you find out about that culture um they talked about it without going too specific into it we were working with some um intelligence uh assets internal to the marine corps that just gather intelligence and he would honestly teach us this gentleman's opinion would teach us some of the things about their culture to like he's like he would literally be like no shit this is what happens here and he would explain things to us because like you hear things and like you read things and the only real cultural training we had prior to that was there was this like professor from like unc wilmington or something she showed up at the marine corps showed the marine corps base theater at campus union she was like this is how you tell this from that and she would like talk to our whole battalion and she like played aladdin and said like how none of it applied to like the middle east and i was like yeah we know like she was like she's like this isn't real and i'm like no shit genies aren't real holy fuck that's robin williams isn't over there i was just like damn they really make anybody a professor these days they literally cut her speech short because it was just like insane um but there are some cultural training stuff that goes into it but like honestly like the majority of the things that we would do would like my thing was like i was always worried about the kids in particular the the young girls because like one of them there was one i took a photo with my first appointment just reminded me of my daughter and um i gave her some skittles once when we were walking by i just gave her some skittles and her little brother came up to her and like started hitting her with a stick and so i walked over there and i was like hey what's up bud and i cracked him in the head and i was like come here john this is our interpreter i was like you tell him that if he ever touches his sister again we'll come back and he'll regret it for the rest of his life and john's like don't worry and he's just like bang bang bang bang bang boom and he's like cracking his knuckles and he's like i told him and the kids started crying and so i gave the girl a bottle of water and stuff because there's all sorts of things societally about them like if you interact with females past a certain age they're outcast all those different things um they're used as like property that's how women are treated once uh girls become women it's just it's rough and so um you know and then you hear people talk about like things over here in america and i always feel like i'm just putting on my grizzled veteran hat like people have no idea the things to which the rest of the world is societally um talk about equality and stuff newsflash no one's working as fucking hard as we are at it like we are winning in every nothing's perfect i'm not saying that i've never been that fucking stupid but everyone's like speak of the devil um everyone's um like you know you have no idea blah blah blah i didn't get this i didn't get that it's so hard and i'm like oh man you ever seen a young child get beat because she had skittles by her family members who treat her like she was less than you ever seen all the different things that happen over there and you know that's that's what's tough is i think that's what i think about when i think about you know people that are still there i think about the ones that uh they don't really have a chance at a life because we're not there anymore that's why we shouldn't have left we created a power vacuum which is a safe haven for terrorism and narco drugs and so many people got killed too people who helped out i mean the best way i think to explain it is people like ask how bad afghanistan is i'm like this is how bad it is we're withdrawing from a country we're leaving it people are literally holding on to a fucking airplane that deep down inside they know they can't hold on to but they're still gonna fucking try as it takes off that's how bad it is yeah i remember that video like that's that if you ever if anyone ever needs anything to be like is it that bad that's how they're willing to be maybe i can hold on to it maybe it'll land when we get out of here who the fuck knows but i'm gonna try i'm gonna try to hold on to this c-130 as long as i can because it's better than what's back there yeah yeah it still gets me yeah but i mean guys we just did like three and a half hours oh we have to do this again sometime yeah you guys are fucking awesome i was telling me he's doing it i will run we'll take him out cpu view that would be cool yeah you're saying to you no i've never been out to iowa dude's crazy he can he can in a good way he can throw his wedding ring in the air and shoot a nine millimeter round through it while it's falling do we have a video of this he has it he has it in super slow-mo high speed yeah the first the first time i'm born with something for that the first time i met him i didn't know what to expect i thought it was gonna be like a dude perfect situation like he sat out here for six hours getting an incredible shot done i'm staying he's like pull your pistol i pull my pistol out he's like shoot at a target i go okay ding i shoot at the target he's standing right here next to me he goes okay shoot at the same target in the same spot i'm like all right that's weird what are you doing i shoot at the same target the same spot he just wanted to see where my brass was ejecting on the second shot he steps back kicks my brass into the air pulls his gun out from concealed and shoots my brass i'm the first try and that's how i met him dog go to this go to his shorts yeah go to his shorts go to his shorts shout out to the boy popular should we do popular hit popular on shorts yeah the problem is there's so many uh do one with a pistol um dude hit your brass do that one yeah that one's at the washer classic wait it just went off it i think yeah what happened go to oh it might do that yeah hit it and then it might yeah no yep no that's one bad white anywhere's fucking sunglasses doing it yeah bro all right so they're gonna eject the washer out from behind him yeah his cameraman's gonna throw it yo that's some spider also while filming shout out dalton for throwing it and filming all at the same time that's spider-man shit no no fucking way yeah bro is that ai no i've seen him do it i've seen him do it in person several times i didn't even fucking touch it yeah nick didn't he buy the slow motion camera just to counter all the comments just to do this shit yeah yeah because people didn't believe it oh my god yeah all right yeah i would love to come see that me and him outdid mythbusters in an afternoon like i mean this is this is jesus of guns right here show and show another pistol war where he's just fucking tearing it up do that one uh far far left that one how do you slide oh yeah slide move so early okay what it's it's a lot better with sound with sound it's oh wait we gotta take it off because yeah you have to take the sound out yeah let's mark that because it's copyrighted but i i mean i can see it with this that's just like that looks like some dude some kid in his basement who's played call of duty non-stop for 11 years except this is real yeah and then what's he doing now just beating it up yeah he's just beating it up he can do it yeah what the fuck yep he gets his videos on youtube get demonetized a lot because you're not allowed to shoot machine guns and have the video be monetized but he's not shooting machine guns he's shooting semi-auto guns and he just is able to fire that fast there you go youtube see monetization followed he's firing semi-auto guns not a machine gun he's just god wow so i to a shirt that's hilarious i never really had any pistol shooting in the marine corps at all um he's so good at it that the first time i shot he's like hey do this with your hand and like ever every every time i'm around him i've probably become a little bit more of a fan of him i've probably become a little bit more of a fan of him a better pistol shooter by like 50 and he could even like like one time he turned around he's like hey you're squeezing too much with your left hand i was like were you even looking at me he's like nah can he bend a bullet if anyone can do it it's anybody can and it's him yeah i gotta come see that i would love to see it that's crazy bro that's some next level shit yeah all right boys well we're gonna link all the channels and everything down below we got fat electrician veteran with a sign we also got the underwhelming podcast we'll put unsubscribe podcast down there as well what else are we missing that's it that's it man all right yeah well thanks so much for coming out yeah man thank you gotta do this again sometime yeah sure everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review they're both a huge huge help thank you