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Jocko Podcast
516: The Fat Electrician & Veteran With a Sign Talk Military Service, Life, and Putting Out Word.
02:06:19
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- [00:00]
A
This is Jocko podcast number 516 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.
- [00:05]
B
Good evening.
- [00:07]
A
You may notice that things have changed since you left. Family may have grown older, friends may have moved, and familiar places may look unfamiliar. That's as it should be. After all, you've changed to civilian life with its own duties and pleasures, now offers the chance for a new beginning built on the foundation of your service and sacrifice. And that right there is an excerpt from a military pamphlet that was issued by the War Department and the Navy Department in August of 1945. And the pamphlet is called Going Back to Civilian Life. And it's a very, when you look through the entire manual, it's actually a very positive spin on coming home from an absolutely brutal war. And that paragraph right there is about all they have to say about what the transition is going to be like from like a mental perspective, a psychological perspective, because the rest of the pamphlet is just, you know, talking about your military records and your taxes and your family allowances and allotments and wearing your uniform and when you can and when you can and how to, how to get good insurance and the change of beneficiaries and getting a government job and other just kind of like mundane administrative information that you probably didn't care much about when you were coming home from Iwo Jima, but the rest of it was up to you. And again, if you think about 1945 for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of the greatest generation, they took advantage of every opportunity and they did adjust well, and they built America into what it is today. And it's not to say that veterans didn't struggle then as they sometimes struggle now. But there are a great many examples of service members who come home from war or come home from their standard military service doing whatever their country asked them to do, who then carry on successfully with their next mission in the civilian sector. And we've got two of those men here tonight. Zach Bell, also known as Veteran with a Sign, who joined us before in the past, episode 4 26, where we talked about his time in the Marine Corps, serving in Afghanistan, his post service life leading up to becoming a veteran advocate through his social media and podcast. And also joining us is Nick the Fat Electrician, another veteran who served as a medic in the National Guard, who then became an electrician at some point along the way, apparently was fat, or at least heading in that direction before finding an outlet for his sense of humor and his interest in military history, making educational and entertaining videos on his YouTube channel, the Fat Electrician. So, gentlemen, thanks for joining us.
- [02:55]
C
Thank you.
- [02:55]
A
Thanks for coming out. Yeah, this is how that fat electrician thing come about. Let's get on that one.
- [03:02]
C
I was electrician and just had my first kid. He was about three months old. And I was at the gym bench pressing and completely ruptured my pec and tore it off. So like whole muscles sucked into your chest and. And couldn't work as an electrician with one arm. So I was sitting at home doing door dashing a sling, trying to make money. Got a new kid I just had. Wife isn't back to work yet. And she kept sending me these links through text messages for this little kids dancing app called TikTok. And I refused to download the app cause I thought it was for little kids. So I just kept clicking them and watching them through like Safari or the Internet browser on my phone or whatever. And after 500, I was like, fuck it, I'll download the app. So I downloaded it and sent it on home. Doom scrolling on these shorts when they first came out. And then for some reason, I decided to, you know, make a video on my own. And I named the. My. My username was the Fat Electrician as a joke to my wife. Like, I'm. I can't work out. I'm not at work. I'm sitting at home doing nothing all day. I'm gonna get fat. So that's what I went with for the name as a joke to her. Then I made a tick tock. And I think the first one I ever made got 12 million views in about three days.
- [04:11]
A
Damn.
- [04:12]
C
And then it just kept going.
- [04:14]
A
You. It's like you struck oil like you were digging in your backyard and all of a sudden, like black stuff started coming out. You're like, wait a second.
- [04:20]
C
I know.
- [04:21]
A
Maybe I should keep digging.
- [04:22]
C
Timer starts. I've got 45 seconds till the DOD's here. It's gonna be awful.
- [04:29]
A
Well, let's get into that. Zach, obviously, last time you were on here, we talked about your past and what you went through and how you ended up what you're doing. And if people want to hear that, go back and listen to 426. But before we get into what you guys are doing right now, let's get a little bit more background on that on. On you, Nick, where you came from. So where'd you grow up?
- [04:47]
C
California and Iowa. So I was born in Chico, California. Grew up there till I was about 12 years old. So parents. Parents didn't really have their. Together they Were young when I was born.
- [04:58]
A
How young?
- [04:59]
C
I think My mom was 18, I think my dad was 21 and they, they weren't really ready for it and whole childhood was, you know, moving from one town to the next. I think I went to like 13 different elementary schools. So like I was always, always the new kid. They had, you know, drug problems, some other problems. And then right around the time I was 12, two younger sisters, I think she would have been 7 and 3 at the time, they decided to get their together and the only way they could do that was to go somewhere where they didn't know how to get drugs. So when I was 12 years old, I got on a Greyhound bus with a backpack, full clothes and a Goosebumps backpack with my PlayStation 2 in it and had a three day bus ride to Charles City, Iowa and then lived in my grandma's basement for a year.
- [05:47]
A
Oh, so your grandma was out there?
- [05:49]
C
Yeah.
- [05:49]
A
Did you ship out there before your parents rolled out there?
- [05:53]
C
So me, my mom and my two sisters all went together on a Greyhound bus. So super fun to do that as a 12 year old on a three day bus ride. Get to see a lot of the world inside of a bus, let me tell you. So yeah, and then my dad probably came three weeks, a month and a half.
- [06:09]
A
Did you ever talk to your dad and mom and figure out like what was the wake up call? At what point did they go, hold on a second, we gotta, we gotta fix this?
- [06:16]
C
I mean it's just one of those things, like they always knew they were doing a bad job. And then, you know, I think seeing the kids start to grow up and you know, it sucks for me being the new kid all the time. And it's like, okay, well not that I was already too broken to repair, but like we've got two more chances. We can make it better for those two also. And then, you know, I think it, I think it got to the point where, you know, extended family was gonna try to get involved and you know, have us go live with them. So just decided to get their together. It's been great ever since.
- [06:44]
A
What time of year was it when you got to Iowa?
- [06:47]
C
I don't remember exactly. I tell you, it's a lot colder than California I was gonna say because.
- [06:51]
A
Especially if it was Chico in the summertime. Yeah, it was like you went from blistering hot and. Or if it was the wintertime you went to just buck ass.
- [06:58]
C
I think there was, I think there was snow on the ground. It had to have been winter cuz I mean, and I live in, I live in northern Iowa. I'm like 30 miles from the Minnesota border. And like that upper tip of Iowa is, I mean it, you'll have wind chills and stuff. Minus 30 to minus 60 in the winter. So it was crazy.
- [07:15]
A
Didn't you not see snow echo Charles until like you moved to San Diego or something?
- [07:21]
B
Oh, I saw one time and then like years and years and years after I moved to San Diego. Yeah.
- [07:27]
A
Once you got to San Diego, when's the first time you went and like ran around in the snow?
- [07:30]
B
In the snow? Well, on the Big island in Hawaii, if you go to Mauna Kea, sometimes there's snow. So I saw snow, walked in it, that was it. And then the first time was, I don't know, maybe like eight years ago maybe.
- [07:42]
A
Yeah, because I was, you know, we were friends. When you saw snow for the first time, you can't be pretty excited about that.
- [07:50]
B
It is a very magical experience, for sure.
- [07:52]
A
Probably more excited than Nick was. And he showed up as a 12 year old.
- [07:56]
C
He shows up to my house for the first time. I, I, my house is on a river and he's like blown away and infatuated that the river is frozen in January. He doesn't get it.
- [08:06]
D
It's too cold. If moving water is like, we're done for a little bit. My people aren't made for that. Like, I come from the Mississippi. Like, I need to be near warmth, dude.
- [08:15]
A
Real cold. I was up in Montana, I think it was two years ago, and it was negative, like negative 45. Like my diesel engine gelled up. You know, it was freaking gnarly and you couldn't do anything except for. If you're in Montana, that's just life. If you're in like Minnesota, that's just life. That's just the way it is.
- [08:35]
C
You got to plug your diesel truck in, have the warmer so that your fuel doesn't gel up. That's normal stuff, man.
- [08:42]
A
So what was it like growing so in a small town there up in the middle of Iowa?
- [08:46]
C
Yeah. So Charles City, Iowa. I think at the time it was like seven to 8,000 people. So I mean, I went from being a new kid and, you know, pretty big cities all over the place. You know, like graduating classes were, you know, so big you never even met everybody in your class. And I think the graduating class that I had in high school was like 150 kids. So like you, you know, everybody. And then, I don't know, I was probably not the new kid for the first time in my life, around 14 years old, so.
- [09:11]
A
And you, what sports did you do?
- [09:14]
C
I did football for like the first year and then I just got into Jiu Jitsu with a local MMA team and just was doing that the whole.
- [09:21]
A
Time, straight to Jiu Jitsu, even in Iowa. And wrestling was wrestling at your school? Big.
- [09:27]
C
Wrestling is big at every school in Iowa. Except I was 14. And that's a. Unless you're an athletic freak, which I am not. It is way too late. You go in at 14 years old to wrestle this other kid that's also competing for the JV slots. Got 900 matches, you're like, I'm good to wrestle before you can walk. They're crazy.
- [09:52]
A
It's epic out there.
- [09:53]
C
It's insane.
- [09:55]
A
So you did. And football you just did for a year?
- [09:58]
C
Yeah, I did football for a year, just not my thing.
- [10:01]
A
And how'd you find Jiu Jitsu?
- [10:03]
C
I was working at a pizza place called Pizza Ranch and one of the like shift managers who was, I don't know, a couple years older than me maybe could did a MMA at like an abandoned school in the next town over. They had MMA events every month or whatever and he would go fight there.
- [10:20]
A
So starting kind of neat. In what time frame is this?
- [10:23]
C
This would have been like 22,008 to 2012.
- [10:28]
A
Cuz there's a certain, if you go back a little further than that, you got to put air quotes around MMA matches in Iowa because it's just like too. And even out here, like, remember some of those old matches we'd go to that. You'd go, bro, this is not regulated in any way. And these people have very limited training.
- [10:44]
C
Oh no, it was very much that, it was very much, by the way.
- [10:47]
A
Pro matches, pro matches, air quotes. You're going, dude, I, I sincerely hope no one dies because this is not, this is not okay. Yes, sir.
- [10:56]
C
They at least had, they at least had like the local volunteer ambulance people showing up so that you got that going for you.
- [11:03]
A
Yeah, that's another thing that's really weird. Like, I used to get these, these young MMA fighters, like, I want to fight, I want to fight. And you go to an amateur MMA fight and sort of like that kid that had 900 matches when he's 14 years old trying. The same thing happens with MMA where, hey, oh, this guy's O and O. But he, you know, is a junior college wrestler that was a Golden gloves boxer, like, and you got some kid that, you know, is, has been doing Jiu Jitsu for eight months. He's like, dude, I want to fight mma. It's like, bro, you don't know what that first match is going to be like. It could be that kid. Yeah, that's just going to annihilate you. And I had some people that were on the annihilation side of that too, you know, like Taylor. Remember Taylor? Yeah, bro. He, you know, he was like a junior college All American and he just murdered people, you know. But he had his own record. It's like, then he had a 1 and O record and he's getting somebody else that has a one in one record. It's like just pure annihilation. And so you're training Jiu Jitsu. Did you kind of get the Jiu Jitsu bug right out of the gate?
- [12:03]
C
Yeah, I loved it. I mean, I was a like, fat, chubby kid until then. So then started working out and stuff with that too. And then, you know, didn't have a high quality training in the area. So I was, you know, taking all the money I was making at my minimum wage job for gas money to drive down to Waterloo, the only town with a Jiu Jitsu gym that was, you know, 90 miles away, go train there, drive up to Mesa City, where they had a bigger MMA team. So did that all through high school.
- [12:29]
A
Did you start getting any kind of, like, goals of fighting MMA or using that for a career type thing?
- [12:36]
C
I mean, it was always one of those things that I wanted to do, but it was also just like, man, I hate competing. I did a bunch of Jiu Jitsu tournaments and stuff, and I think MMA would be better, but I loathe doing Jiu Jitsu tournaments.
- [12:48]
A
What makes you loathe it?
- [12:50]
C
I just, if I just want to show up and do it, and I hate the. All right, well, we got to be here at 8 in the morning to weigh in. And then, you know, you're younger and you're in the middleweight to heavyweight weight category, so you're not going to compete till 4 in the afternoon. So it's like you're stuck at an airport on a layover for six hours before you got to try to, like, turn it on to compete. And it's just not fun to me at all.
- [13:13]
A
Yeah, they're getting somewhat better at it now. Like, Jiu Jitsu tournaments are a little bit better now. Part of it is because they have computer, whatever, apps that kind of set the whole thing up. So the cool thing now is they'll tell you, oh, you know, men's adult 200 pounds is competing at this time. And they're fairly accurate as opposed to. I remember showing up at 5 o' clock in the morning to weigh in and literally not getting my first match until 8 o' clock at night. And it was just complete disaster.
- [13:43]
C
It's just like, this is. I'm still working. I got a normal life. This is turned into a whole weekend thing. And I spent money to be here. It's.
- [13:51]
A
Yeah. And what are you going to win, like a $4 plastic medal?
- [13:54]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [13:55]
D
It's pretty sick.
- [13:56]
A
Yeah, pretty sick.
- [13:58]
D
With your name spelled wrong or something?
- [14:00]
C
No, they're not engraving at custom for you.
- [14:03]
A
What else were you into when you were growing up?
- [14:06]
C
I mean, that was it, man. I was always. I. I liked business, liked history. So, I mean, history class, business class. So, I mean, I was always working. I think all through high school, I was working 34 hours a week because that was the most you were legally allowed to work before they had to offer you benefits. So, I mean, I was working, doing jiu jitsu, going to school. That was about it.
- [14:26]
A
What was your plan as you look into the future when you're 17 years old or whatever your junior year? Did you have a plan?
- [14:33]
C
No idea. Had no idea at all. So that's kind of why I just did the. Always Originally wanted to go into the Navy and then had a high school girlfriend that I loved and she didn't want me to go away and do the active duty thing, so I did an Army National Guard instead because it was one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. Never had a single Saturday Sunday drill ever. But whatever. So did that. Stayed. Ended up.
- [15:01]
A
What do you want to do in the Navy? Did you have, like a specific goal?
- [15:05]
C
I actually want to be swick.
- [15:06]
A
Okay.
- [15:07]
C
So I thought that sounded cool.
- [15:09]
A
Yeah, you even. I'm surprised people even knew about that back then.
- [15:13]
C
I was. I was pretty big on, you know, googling it and looking into it and stuff. But you gotta remember this is also 20, 2012. So, I mean, it's not like the 1990s where it was like, what's a seal? Never heard, you know, so there's some information out there if you could find it. And I was young, knew how to use the Internet, so I thought swick sounded cool.
- [15:31]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's a cool job. If you like boats. Like, it's what you're gonna be doing, driving freaking boats. So it's. If you like boats and some people are really into boats. I mean, obviously, like, you go out till Lake Havasu or Something that's a whole thing out there. It's a whole culture of driving boats. So if you want to get free gas money, swick's pretty good. Pretty damn good job, you know. So you go to the National Guard. Did you. Did you pick an MOS out of the gate?
- [15:57]
C
So when you go there you go, you go to MEPs and then they, you know, they get your GT score and they're like, they pretty much told me, I, I don't remember what the score was, but I could do borderline anything I wanted. But with National Guard, it's like, you know, yeah, you can do that job, you qualify to, and we'll do it for you. But the nearest drilling location, a unit that has, you know, military intelligence or whatever I thought I wanted, knowing nothing is eight hours away and you got to drive there every month. And I was like, all right, well, what's, what's close? And they're like, well, there's infantry and combat arms and artillery 45 minutes from your house. And I was like, okay, cool. What do they want? They're like, you be infantry, mortars or a medic? And I was like, all right, I'll be a medic.
- [16:36]
A
Yeah, right on.
- [16:37]
C
So that's what I picked.
- [16:38]
A
Did you have any interest in being a medic or is it just like. It seemed like a transferable skill.
- [16:42]
C
It's one of those things where you're just like, yeah, it sounds cool to do. I'll go do that. And then, then that kind of changed the plan to, you know, I'm going to go off, be a. Be a combat medic, and then I'll come back and do like, nursing.
- [16:53]
A
How old, how old were you when you signed up for The National Guard?
- [16:55]
C
17. I was in my senior year still.
- [16:57]
A
So you sign up for combat medic. How long did it take before you could leave for boot camp?
- [17:02]
C
So I signed up, had to finish my senior year. But the National Guard has a program. It's not rotc.
- [17:07]
B
It's.
- [17:08]
C
There's some acronym for it, but it's basically like you start drilling right away, and they have a whole drill weekend for recruits that haven't been to basic yet. And it's like, go there. So, I mean, you show up to basic knowing how to march, you know, all the rank, you know, all this stuff, they make you yell and recite and do everything.
- [17:24]
A
So you're ahead of the power curving boot camp.
- [17:26]
C
Yeah. So National Guard, at least in the army, I don't know about everybody everywhere else, but they have like the Highest percentage of honor graduates because you show up already having done, you know, 100 hours of instruction and all this other stuff for free. Yeah, it's for free, right? Hey, they paid me to go.
- [17:42]
A
Oh, did they pay you?
- [17:43]
C
Yeah, they paid you to go. They paid you the same rate for whatever your rank was for the. I think National Guard splits it up into two eight hour periods in a day for a mua and that's what. But they paid you, so that was cool.
- [17:55]
A
So how's boot camp? You pretty much crush it.
- [17:58]
C
Yeah, I walked in, I got honor graduate and I mean, it was just, you know, I walked in knowing how to march. I actually cared, tried to, whatever, and other people can't understand. Left face, right face. For six weeks. I'm doing push ups because of it, but it was fine.
- [18:14]
A
Did you get any of that? Sort of like, hey, maybe I want to do this for a living, like for real, like I want to stay in, I want to go active duty, anything like that?
- [18:23]
C
Yeah, I definitely thought about it. But again, you know, the whole reason I didn't was girlfriend. Didn't wanna, didn't wanna live that life. So made that decision, chose her and it worked out so far.
- [18:36]
A
Yeah.
- [18:37]
C
Mother of my kids and happily married, so.
- [18:39]
A
So you made a good call.
- [18:40]
C
Yeah, I don't regret it.
- [18:43]
A
So. So you get done with boot camp and then you go directly to your advanced training with being a medic. How long is the medic school?
- [18:49]
C
The medic school is like, it's one of the longest Moses in the army. I want to say it's close to six months. And they split it up into two, two categories. You have like a civilian side and then the whiskey side because it's 68 whiskey mos. So the civilian side is you have to get your EMTB civilian certification. And I think six, six or eight weeks. And I mean the EMTB book is this thick and you go through it and it's like 12 hours a day and it's like this chapter, next day we're testing on it. If you fail, you're retaking it. If you fail to retake, you're recycling. So it had like, I don't know, 30 to 40% people getting kicked out. RA just failing the written tests, like wasn't physically hard, but it was just, you have to do this. So get through the civilian side. Then you get over the whiskey side where you can do the actual like combat medicine that the army allows you to do that civilians won't. So you leave with an EMTB certification. You can go work at the fire department or whatever.
- [19:47]
A
And what year is this?
- [19:48]
C
This would have been 2012, 2013.
- [19:51]
A
Okay, so you're looking at the wars. Are you thinking, like, I'm definitely going to get called up? Did you think that way? Because, hey, in 2006, I was in Ramadi and when I got there it was National Guard on the ground. They'd been there for 14 months and like taking massive casualties. And they were awesome.
- [20:08]
C
Yes.
- [20:08]
A
It was not probably what most National Guard dudes thought they were going to be doing when they joined the National Guard.
- [20:14]
C
No, my recruiter and my unit were very upfront with us, so we were 133rd at a Waterloo out of the 34th infantry, which is, I think it's the most deployed National Guard unit in American history. And I mean, those guys have deployed everywhere. And while I was at ait, my unit was in Afghanistan on deployment. So, like, I was told right out of the gate, like, hey, we deploy every four years because they deployed every four years through all of gwad. So, I mean, I was under the impression I was going to Afghanistan for the first three years I was in. So you have like the train up period and we're training up like we were going to Afghanistan. And then a year out they're like, well, everything's winding down now you guys are going to go to Egypt. And then six months later they're like, ah, we're not going to Egypt. You're just going to go train in Alaska. It's like, okay, whatever.
- [21:02]
A
So you had, at least you had this medical background and then what? You said you were going to become a. Do something in the medical field.
- [21:10]
C
Yeah. So then I figured I'd do something in medical field. So I came back home, got through all the training, was drilling, doing National Guard stuff, and then started going to college. Got the associates and science. You need to get into nursing school. And then I went into nursing school.
- [21:25]
A
And how'd that work out?
- [21:26]
C
Not great. Not my thing, let me tell you.
- [21:29]
A
What did you like about it?
- [21:32]
C
I. I can tell you the moment I knew it wasn't going to work out. It was about 15 minutes into the first day.
- [21:37]
A
Damn.
- [21:37]
B
Okay.
- [21:38]
A
You went deep.
- [21:39]
C
Yeah, super, super deep.
- [21:41]
D
Got the threshold.
- [21:42]
C
Yeah, it. And I'm not ragging on nurses. It's a very hard job. They're incredible people. They're super compassionate. It just wasn't my thing. Yeah.
- [21:50]
A
What you should say is they're super compassionate. And you're not.
- [21:53]
C
Also true. The, the nursing teacher who was young you know, nursing's the hardest job on the planet, yada, yada, yada. Fine. She plays this YouTube video. It's like an animated thing still on YouTube, talking about how incredible nurses are. It's like, okay, that's a good point. That's a good point. And then they're like, most people don't realize this, but more nurses get hurt on the job than active duty military cops, firefighters and construction workers combined. And I was like, okay, not that we need to make this a competition, but there's a difference between straining your back, helping an old lady out of bed and getting blown up or falling off a skyscraper, landing on some rebar. Like, so it was just very much, I don't know, I couldn't handle the gossip. Didn't have the, the compassionate side, I guess.
- [22:37]
A
My, my sister, my younger sister is graduating from nursing school in December. She's going to be a nurse. But you know, she's. And you probably like a little thinking, wait, how old is your younger sister? Because, Jocko, you're 54. So, yeah, she's like 50 something. But she's made up her mind that that's going to be her career. But she's a perfect person for, for it because she is like ultra compassionate and hard working and like, she is going to be a great nurse. And I would be probably in the running for being the worst nurse, you know, ever. Probably right behind you, I guess.
- [23:15]
C
Apparently that's where I was. Like, apparently you can't talk to the patients the way you talk to the army guys. Like, okay, fine.
- [23:23]
A
Well, I guess so were you. You were enrolled in nursing school in 15 minutes. You figure out that this is not your jam. What do you do then?
- [23:33]
C
You know? Well, there's still, that's like the hindsight. I should have known them. So, I mean, it's still like, okay, maybe this is just, you know, it's like the army. It's like anything else. There's, there's the BS you got to walk through where it's like, this is what's supposed to happen versus what actually happens. So I'm still pushed through it for, I think two semesters, trying to, like. And then eventually I get to the point where I'm doing clinicals and stuff and I'm like, oh, I. Clinicals at first for me were really good.
- [23:58]
A
What are you doing during a clinical?
- [23:59]
C
You literally just show up and like, you get, here's the nurse that works here. She's got five patients, there's five students. You're each going to Take a patient over for her and. And she's just going to supervise you handling her patients.
- [24:13]
A
So you're basically like practicing.
- [24:15]
C
Yeah.
- [24:15]
A
While being supervised, 100% looking at patients.
- [24:19]
C
With one patient instead of five. So you get overwhelmed, you know, and clinicals at first went great for me because it. When you first start out, the clinicals are usually just in like old folk homes. And so they would always give me the old war veteran that, you know, he's in there, he's 80 years old. And I would just sit down and be like, okay, you need your diaper change or food? Nothing cool. And all the other students would just like go sit down and work on homework and then check on him every 45 minutes. But like I was in there for eight hours just talking with some dude that was, you know, a cav scout and you know, company.
- [24:55]
A
Exactly.
- [24:55]
C
So like. And that's like part of why I love doing the military history stuff. So just got to go and talk with so many of these old war veterans and these retirement homes and then, you know, you get to the next, you know, nursing too, or whatever the next class was. And then you start going into like hospitals and it's like, I didn't care for those clinicals at all. I was like, I'm gonna go do something else.
- [25:14]
A
And what was the something? Something else? Is this where you picked up the electrician?
- [25:18]
C
I had no idea what I was gonna do. Like, I joined the army to pay for college, didn't need college, apparently, don't like it. And I was like, ah, what a. Then I was on social media and micro dirty jobs, posted a meme that it was. I forget the exact stat, but it was like 85 of all licen electricians are set to retire in the next 10 years and their average pay is this. And I was like, okay, cool, I'll do that. And then I called every electrical contractor in my town that day, asked for a job, had a job by the next day. Damn. And was starting my apprenticeship to being a journeyman electrician.
- [25:53]
A
And how long, how long does that take?
- [25:56]
C
Depends on where you're at. It's either a four or five year program. The where I was at at the time is it was a five year program.
- [26:03]
A
How deep did you go in that?
- [26:05]
C
I finished it. I'm a journeyman electrician. Still have the license and everything.
- [26:08]
A
Got it done. Yeah. And then so. So you become an electrician, you're working. Are you getting like a lot of overtime? You're working your ass off once you become an electrician or when you're working to become a journeyman.
- [26:18]
C
Yeah. I mean, so you, you can always tell them no to over time. But like, when you're the young guy don't have kids yet, and so, you know, you're working 60, 80 hours a week, depending on the time of year and how busy it is. And the company that I worked for, we did mostly industrial. So, like, we had, you know, there's 15 factories in the town I live in, and this company has the contract to, like, nine of them. So it was very much a. And they're running around the clock. So it was always a situation like, hey, this electrical panel blew up or melted down or they've got some emergency. So, like, you're on call, you're showing up at whatever time, whenever something breaks to fix it. And then you got, you know, your new projects you're installing during normal hours.
- [26:58]
A
Did you like it?
- [26:59]
C
I loved it.
- [27:00]
A
Yeah.
- [27:01]
C
I mean, it's just the, the construction industry is so much like the military, it's insane.
- [27:07]
A
Yeah, it is.
- [27:08]
C
I mean, you show up to a construction site, they've got the whiteboard with all the rules and all the stuff. The same thing like a military range does. You can.
- [27:15]
A
Here's the timeline that we're trying to make. Here's the mission that we're trying to get accomplished. Here's the restraints that we've got to maintain. Here's the overall regulations we got to follow. Go.
- [27:24]
C
Exactly.
- [27:25]
A
I've always thought that being so I, I, I took electricity in high school, so I, I, like, knew how to wire houses and stuff. And I also work construction, so I knew. I know how to, like, do plumbing and whatnot, too. But I've always found that the thing that sucks about electrical is when you get done with a job and something doesn't work, it's really hard to figure out where it is, and that sucks. The thing that sucks about plumbing is when you get done with a job and something doesn't work, you see exactly where the problem is, and it's spraying all over the place, and it's. And that sucks too. So it's like, which one do you want to do? Do you want to do the one that's like, unknown to try and figure out or the one that's real easy to figure out where it is? But it's like, you're, you're.
- [28:04]
C
It's gross.
- [28:05]
A
It's a sandwich.
- [28:06]
D
Yeah.
- [28:07]
C
Dude, I love the, you know, because I was so, I was a service truck guy, so I was one of the. I Was like one of the top electricians at my company that they would call with like issues. So I was always getting pulled off the job to go solve the mysteries that nobody could figure out. Some of the I've seen that people have done. Like, I've shown up to somebody's house. My switches electrocute me. What? I'm not you. I show. I show up to this house and I'm like flipping the switch. I was like, it's plastic. I'm not getting shocked. Like, what are you guys talking about? They're like, I don't know. Sometimes it just shocks me and I get up and I'm like looking at light fixtures and plugging stuff in and out. And then I touch the light fixture. The light fixture shocks the dog out of me. What is happening? They had tied the, the hot wire in with the ground for this new room they built. And then the ground feeding that whole room wasn't grounded at the panel. So they were electrifying all the metal boxes and anything, anything touching metal in that entire room. So if you walked by and brushed the light switch, the. The two screws on the COVID plate would shock the. Out of you. Like all kinds of stuff like that. But I love the problem solving of it. I had a. I bought a house.
- [29:19]
A
And it was built in 1948. And bro, I went into the attic like once I bought it and started trying to figure out what I had to fix on it.
- [29:26]
C
Got up there with knob and tube wire.
- [29:28]
A
Totally insane that this place was still, still standing. There was just open wire, like electrical taped in 1952. Peeled off everywhere. Insulation sitting right by it. It is. It was a. I couldn't believe that this house was still standing. And then I had another house that had aluminum wire.
- [29:48]
C
Yep.
- [29:49]
A
From the seventies, I guess, at the seventies. And so it. It shrinks and like everything is open and missing and just a disaster.
- [29:59]
C
Some of the. Some of the houses and stuff you run into. It's like I'm shocked there's not more house fires. But the other thing is like, I'm shocked at how complex the electrical systems and stuff are and how much thought goes into keeping the average person safe that has no idea what electricity is. Like, it's just a magical plugin that powers to you. But it's like there's so much that could go wrong and there's so many safety measures that you don't even even see protecting you.
- [30:24]
A
And I hate to say this, but it's. It's also gone very much the route of cars like Back when I was a kid and you'd open up the hood of a car, you're like, okay, there's the carburetor, there's the spark plugs, you know, there's the distributor. Like, you could see and identify what was happening. And you could listen to it and be like, oh, this could be the problem over here. Nowadays you open up a car hood and it's like, yeah, I'm going into the, the, the, the Ford dealer. Like, I have no idea what this does.
- [30:59]
C
So I like, I was in that generation that had to make that switch. So all the electricians that taught me how to be electricians, they got started in the 60s and 70s and they were wild in hindsight to work with. I mean, I had a, I had a journeyman that would walk up. I like, I have a little pen that tells me if something's got electricity in it, if it's on or off. I got a meter where I can see how many volts it is. This dude would walk up to hot panels and, and just be. He'd lick his pinky and his thumb and he'd touch his pinky to hot bus bar, electrified bus bar, and then touch it to the case to shock his hand. But it just went through his hand and he could tell you how much voltage it was by how much it shocked him. And that was just a normal thing for him to do.
- [31:42]
A
Day bro.
- [31:42]
C
And then like, I'm, I'm learning from this guy, but I'm also having to deal with all these new light fixtures and light switches where it's like, to install it. I got to download an app on my phone and then figure it out. And then I got to teach the customer how to run this app so they can dim their lights is suck.
- [31:57]
A
That's what I was just about to complain about. Cuz I'm that guy now. And I have like an app on my phone where it's like, oh, you want to dim the lights? There's no dimmer switch. You know, like, oh, get into the app, which is your app needs to be updated. And in your downloading this thing, it's just, it's a total. It's a different world. And the electrical panel is also now through what looks like some kind of a computer server of some kind. Echo Charles. Like, you look at it, you're like, all right, cool. You know, you, you. The electrician job has got to have stepped up in the last five years as far as what you need to know.
- [32:30]
C
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's gotten a lot more complicated. And the other thing with like the electrical field is saying you're an electrician is like saying you're in the military. It's not. And a lot of people don't realize that. Like, it doesn't give you a good grip on what this guy knows or does on a day to day basis. Because you can be a journeyman electrician and all you've done for 30 years is dig ditches and lay pipes in it and pull wire to traffic lights, which nothing wrong with that, but that's all you know how. You don't know how to wire a house. You don't know how to install a giant animatronic robot arm to palletize shit. Or you could be dealing with a guy that quite literally has to frequently correct the electrical engineers on how to build a factory. Like, you just have no idea.
- [33:11]
A
It's a broad spectrum.
- [33:13]
C
It's humongous. It's everything with electricity. Yeah, Shockingly enough.
- [33:18]
D
Shocking.
- [33:19]
A
So then I guess, did your life start to turn a little bit when you hurt your pack?
- [33:26]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [33:26]
A
I mean, is that so? We. You told that quick story about you blew out your pack. Total, total pack tear.
- [33:32]
C
Yep, Total, total pack rupture. I had. I had just become a journeyman electrician. So, like, I was pumped because every year you finish a year of the program, you get a big raise. And that jump from being an apprentice to a journeyman, it was like a. It was like a ten dollar an hour raise. Like, it was what I've been working for for five years. Didn't get a single full paycheck in before I got hurt. My son's three months old. God, it sucked.
- [33:56]
A
Just. You were benching.
- [33:57]
C
Yeah, just bench press.
- [33:58]
A
Were you maxing or was it like a moment?
- [34:01]
C
It was like the third rep and I was doing 375. Like nothing I hadn't done before, all the time. And it just went.
- [34:11]
A
No warning, nothing. Was it a hard rep?
- [34:15]
C
No.
- [34:16]
A
God, this is scary. I find this scary. Echo Charles is this scary.
- [34:19]
B
At 375, you kind of.
- [34:21]
A
You're in the game.
- [34:22]
B
Yeah.
- [34:22]
A
You gotta know things can happen.
- [34:23]
B
Things will be happening.
- [34:25]
A
Things will be happening. So it's gone.
- [34:28]
C
Yep. So, I mean, that tour and like, you know, Lucky.
- [34:31]
A
Did you drop the weight? Like, what happens? Wait, that side just freaking gives out.
- [34:36]
C
That goes. And then I had, you know, I had a spotter with me standing there. But he knows that. He knows that this wasn't heavyweight for me. He was just there for more of like a Check the box. Been. And so out of nowhere, yep, he gets it off me and like, just drive home from the gym pissed. And like, I could tell immediately, like, this muscle isn't here. You know, I walk into the doctor and you know, my mom worked at the hospital, so she got me in to see an orthopedic surgeon and he's like, yeah, it's torn. He's like, do you want to, like, mess with the MRI and stuff? I was like, no, just fix it. So I go in, get it fixed and like that.
- [35:13]
A
Do they fix it immediately or you got like surgery like two, three days.
- [35:15]
C
Later or two, three days later? I mean, it's not like an emergency thing. It's. It was. I got really lucky. It's hard to find a place, a doctor that will do that surgery, actually, at least in rural Iowa, where I live, because I've torn both. And the second time I tore one, like, I, that guy had retired and I had to call around all over the state to find somebody. Usually they're like, oh, we, we treat it conservatively. And I go, that sounds like want. It sounds like you're not going to fix it is what they're like, yeah, well, we can give you rehab. That's not going to reattach the tendon to the bone. Like, I'm 30.
- [35:47]
A
I think kind of like the way car mechanics and electricians, I think, like doctors are going to have to adjust to the new attitude of humans, which is like in the old days, you're still able to lift your arm to. You're good, you know, you don't need. We don't care about your pack, we don't care about your bicep. We don't care about, oh, you lost some strength in your hands because your freaking spine is jacked up. But you're still, you can still do the dishes. You're good to go. Like, we're not like that anymore.
- [36:15]
D
Get in there and do the dishes.
- [36:16]
A
We're like, no, you, you, you get me back to like as close to full capacity as you can get me. Well, you know, there's risk. Yeah, I know there's risk.
- [36:25]
C
Let's.
- [36:25]
A
Let's do this.
- [36:26]
C
Yeah, so it's hard. It was hard to find a doctor that second time, but so, I mean, luckily haven't, you know, gone through a whole lot in my life. I guess that was probably the shittiest chapter of my life. It just felt like a complete bag. You know, I'm out here lifting weights at the gym, got a three month old Son, wife's not back to work yet.
- [36:42]
A
What number kid was that?
- [36:43]
C
My first.
- [36:44]
A
Oh, damn.
- [36:45]
C
So like, you know, I got a three year old baby that I can't even pick up because I'm in a sling. Like, just felt like an absolute bag of ass. It's my fault. Going out here trying to be Mr. Tough Guy, lifting a lot of weight, and then was doing doordash in a sleep sling, trying to make whatever money I could. I got like, I don't know, like 200 bucks from Worksman. Workman's comp or something.
- [37:05]
A
And, and you got, do you, did you own a house? Do you have like a mortgage and.
- [37:08]
C
Yeah, house had a mortgage. So, I mean, it was, it was not good. It's not a good time.
- [37:15]
A
And at some point your wife sending you Tick Tock videos?
- [37:19]
C
Yeah.
- [37:20]
A
What was the first freaking Tick Tock one that you made that got 12 million views?
- [37:24]
C
Man, I just, I was scrolling through these Tick Tocks, I was like, man, I think I could be funny. And then I made a, I made a three minute video about why Aldi is the. The best grocery store. And it was just like a comedy bit. And 12 million views, hundred thousand followers on Tick Tock overnight.
- [37:42]
A
And then what was next? You're like, okay, like I said earlier, like, okay, I got oil, I'm gonna keep digging.
- [37:46]
C
I was like, okay, well, the whole vibe of the video was this, this business model is crazy and it's awesome. And I explained that from like my perspective. And then next video I did was why the Marine Corps is the craziest branch of the military and people loved it. And then the comments were like, now do army infantry, then. Now do Mortarmen, now do Seabees now. And then I started doing these three three minute short videos on why every military job is crazy. And then it progressed into 15 minute videos. And now I'm doing, you know, 45 minute to hour and a half stories on war heroes.
- [38:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, they're great. I've. I've watched a bunch of your videos. They're great. They're like, they're kind of the perfect YouTube video. They're long enough, they're short enough to watch, like in a, you know, a rapid period of time. You don't have to like get in the proper chair to watch them. You know, you don't have to like get your neck warmer out or anything like that. You can just watch them. They're fast moving. Like, I was like watching you talk and I'm like, oh, he's it almost Seemed like you're editing even little moments out. So it's just like. So they come at you really quick. You got your, you know, you're funny. So it's so, you know, you get like a smile out of it. But they're also, you're just telling epic badass stories of dudes that are doing epic badass shit. So most grown ass men want to hear that stuff, right? And you do it in between 20 and 30 or maybe 40 minutes. Boom, you got your little dose of badassery with some laughs and smiles and you're a little smarter. That's a freaking awesome model.
- [39:19]
C
Yeah, I like it a lot. It's a. People seem to like it. I think that, I think the reason it works so well for me is because I didn't like, I never deployed, never got to go do that. So like, I still have the, I don't know what it's like. So I just, in my head, I just assume it's incredible and really hard. So it's like I'm still looking up to those guys with like the, like a kid looking up to his dad. So everybody's awesome to me.
- [39:43]
A
Yeah.
- [39:44]
C
So then we can, you know, I'm doing a video on a CB telling you how awesome the CBs are. I have somebody hundreds of emails and comments of like, hey, I'm 45 years old. My dad was a CB in World War II, and I had no idea how awesome my dad was. And now we watch your video videos together and it brought us closer together and I understand my dad a lot more and it's really cool. It's like, that's awesome.
- [40:07]
A
That is awesome. And yeah, I, you know, I had a lot of that too where I've had people say, oh, my dad was in Vietnam and we sat down. He never talked to me about it before. And we watched this video when you had this Vietnam guy or you covered this book and we, you know, he's. Now we go out for dinner every Wednesday and he tells me like another story of what month, you know, we're in. He tells me about what they did that month. So, yeah, that's. It's pretty cool to have the help people make that connection. And you know, for me, I mean, I didn't do anything crazy in combat, but I still look at like, you know, all the guys that I get to read books about. It's like I still look at them. How'd you say you look at them?
- [40:46]
C
Like a kid looking up.
- [40:47]
A
Exactly. I mean, I just did a podcast with A couple, like, SEALS from Vietnam. And it's literally, these guys are actually why I joined the SEAL teams. It was like, SEALS in Vietnam is why I joined the SEAL teams. And here I am sitting here talking to SEALs from Vietnam that were in kind of one of the most iconic SEAL platoons from the West Coast. Charlie platoon, Seal Team 1, 1968. And I'm sitting here talking to him, and it's like, it's hard for me to act like a grown man, you know, I mean, when my inner 12 year old just wants to. To like, ask him a bunch of questions about their stoner 63, you know what I mean? It's. It's awesome, dude.
- [41:26]
C
Like, we were so. Because, like, one thing that was interesting to me, and it makes complete sense in hindsight, but one thing that was interesting to me is, like, I've read so much of the history of, like, the broader scope of what was going on. I'll talk to a veteran that was there, and I know more about the big picture of what happened than he does. He just has his first person perspective. He likes, I got drafted, I went there, I did a job, I came home. So, like, we'll talk about stuff. I was like, holy, you were at that battle when this, this. He's like, how do you know all this? I was like, that's kind of a big deal, dude. Like, and we were talking with Mr. Graves, a World War II veteran. There's a flamethrower in IO Jima. And just like, hearing him being like, oh, yeah, I was there when they raised the flag. And just, yeah, we found an old drainage pipe and slapped it up there and raised it. I was like, this is insane. And he's just talking about it nonchalant, like the most iconic picture of all time.
- [42:16]
A
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. It's weird for me, like, when. Because when I started this podcast, it was mostly just books because I didn't know anybody and no one knew what a podcast was or anything like that. So it's me just taking these old. And for me, the big focus was the. The frontline, like, first person accounts. You know, who was there and let me read your book and wrote what you wrote about being there. And sometimes, you know, I would usually add some of the bigger picture context to it, but a lot of times, like, we. We learned the bigger picture context in school. You know, you learn about these major battles and whatnot. But to hear a dude or read about a dude that was on the ground, you know, picking lice out of his friend's jacket so he would return the favor. And by the way, you don't. You can't get all the lice. They're always going to be there, and they're just going to gnaw your sk. Skin for the next four months. And that's what we're doing. It's like, that's. That's. It gives you a different perspective than just, oh, you know, it was cold, and so everyone wore coats for the entire time they were deployed on whatever front. And it's like, oh, yeah, there's something called lice. You remember those things? Yeah, they were everywhere, and everyone's infested with them, and they would chew through their freaking skin. Like, it just gives you a different perspective when you hear that from the people. People that were there.
- [43:32]
C
Well, I think it. I think that's why, like, content like mine and yours works were a little different, but the same type gist. I think history's. There's a lot of people that just, like, I don't like history. It's boring to me. And it's because school always starts big picture and slowly zooms in, and you've lost everybody's attention just being like, in 1945, the Germans, blah, blah, blah, and they were here, and this division of 23,000 dudes moved to here. You lose everybody. But if you start with. With, like, here's this guy that had really shitty childhood, it winds up being the guy that, you know, Jake McNasty, paints his face. He has this iconic picture. He jumps out of a plane with his 13 renegades that they call the Filthy 13, and he jumps into this battle. This battle is a big deal because boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, now, like, you've taught somebody history that they otherwise never would have understood because they didn't have the attention span, but because now it's part of. Part of an actual hero story, they learn it and retain it.
- [44:27]
A
Yeah, you. You get to understand and relate to. And this is something I said, like, one of the earliest podcasts that we did. You know, I don't even remember what book it was, but I'm, like, reminding people that these guys are not characters in a book. They're a person. Like, this is a person. I think it was, like, baton death march. You know, these guys just. Everyone's dying. Everyone's dying, just. And it was like, broken down. The way this guy broke it down was basically, anyone that just did not have a deep intrinsic desire to live would just die. Like, if you just said, I can't take an if I can't, I can't walk right now. I just need a rest. You're. You're dead. You're going to die. You're just going to get left on the side and dead. And to, to convey to people like McNasty, right, like, this is a dude. And how does a dude end up like that? Well, look, let me tell you a little bit where he came from. And, and how does he end up with 13 other dudes that are also kind of like that? Well, they took a bunch of freaking knuckle draggers that really aren't fit for much else in the world, but we're going to put them all in a group and we're going to let him go get after it. What about, what about when he gets thrown in jail a couple times? Don't worry about that. That's the guy we're looking for.
- [45:35]
C
Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's a human frag grenade we're going to throw at the enemy. It'll be their problem soon enough is pretty much the strategy.
- [45:42]
A
Hey, we could either have this guy back on our base causing problems, or throw him over behind enemy lines and let him cause some freaking chaos over there.
- [45:51]
C
The chain of command is sitting in their office like, what do we do with this guy? Well, option A, we kick him out of the military and he's running around free with all our wives back home, or we put up with this for another 45 days and throw his ass out of a plane at the Germans.
- [46:05]
A
So freaking good to go.
- [46:07]
D
Send it.
- [46:08]
A
So as you're looking at, you're on tech, you start with Tick Tock and then what comes after Tick Tock?
- [46:14]
C
Tick Tock. I immediately knew that Tick Tock was a fad. There wasn't any money in it. And, you know, I've been, you know, history and business.
- [46:21]
A
What year is this?
- [46:22]
C
This was 2020 21. This is like the ass end of coven for at least where I was at up in Iowa. So, like Covet was like pretty much over at this point.
- [46:32]
A
Got it.
- [46:32]
C
And, you know, I just studied business my whole life, knew what businesses worked and I knew there wasn't money in Tick Tock. So I immediately started doing everything I could to push that audience over to YouTube. And originally I was just uploading way before YouTube shorts even existed, just my vertical Tick Tock videos. I'd just scrub the watermark and upload them and I got a decent sized following there and then eventually switched over to normal YouTube format, then just started uploading and kept going and then what.
- [47:00]
A
About being an electrician?
- [47:02]
C
I still did it for, like, two years. You know, I was.
- [47:05]
A
I've.
- [47:06]
C
I still, to this day, am fully ready to wake up and find out I got canceled, it's all gone, and I'm going back to work. And I won't be upset about it. I'll just. It is. It was a fun ride while I had it. So I still worked, I want to say, a year and a half to two years while I was making more money on YouTube. And I was just doing that at night, grinding it out. And finally my boss told me he needed me to work over a weekend, like 12 hour shifts over a weekend. And weekend is when I made all my videos. I told him I can't. And he said, you're gonna have to decide if you want to be a YouTube guy or an electrician guy. And I said, all right, I'm gonna go with whichever one pays me more. And he said, I'm assume that's me. And I go, you're wrong. And he's like, all right, I'll see you on Monday. And then a couple months after that, I was just like, I gotta. You know, I started flying down to Texas doing podcasts with these guys. I was like, I'm getting too busy.
- [48:02]
A
I just can't. That's the. The unsubscribed podcast. And how'd you link up with those guys originally? Were you part of the unsubscribed podcast out of the Great Zach?
- [48:10]
D
No, I'm just friends with all. I've known them for over five, almost six years. And, like, it's. It's a big creator hub down in San Antonio. So, like, what's something we always talk about is, like, if you look at the span of time we've known each other, it's really not that long. But from sun up to sundown, we're with each other the entire time. Doing something, eating something. You know, like, our rooms here, they're joining. Like, we're always, like, interacting. Like, it's. It's just because you're. We're maximizing that time we all have together. And when I had met Nick, they had brought him. I think it was like a few episodes after they brought you down is before you became a host. He was an electrician then, and he was like, I'm still doing this. And I was like, for real? And he's like, yeah, I got to be back Monday. I remember you saying that. It, like, burned in my mind. And I was like, damn, dude. Like, While his videos are getting a million. A million. A million views. A million views. And by that time people had started sending me stuff, like a lot of his marine stuff coming. Cuz they'd be like, this guy really knows what he's doing. I was like, matter of fact, we've been hanging out. So like.
- [49:13]
A
So that's how you guys met originally? Yes, was through Unsubscribed podcast. And who's the original unsubscribed podcast dude?
- [49:22]
C
So original. It started with three buddies. Eli Cuevas, Eli Double Tap, Baddy Streams and Donut Operator were the three original hosts.
- [49:32]
A
I remember Donut Operator Raider because I remember seeing that name and going, that's pretty good. You know what I mean? And he was a cop. And I was like, oh that's, that's, that, that's one, that one's gonna stick. You know, it's a pretty good name to, to throw it out there. And then so you guys, so you're part of that now. You're a part of Unsubscribe.
- [49:52]
C
I'm a host now.
- [49:53]
A
And so where do you guys film that thing?
- [49:55]
C
We got a studio down in San Antonio.
- [49:57]
A
So do you have to travel down to San Antonio?
- [49:59]
C
Yeah, travel down there about once a month. And then we film, you know, three or four podcasts over the span of two or three days and then those are our podcasts for the month and I head back home.
- [50:08]
A
And what's, what is the nature of those podcasts for someone that's listening compared to just the straight up fat Electrician podcast?
- [50:15]
C
Oh, it's completely differentiate the two. So Fat Electrician is, you know, it's never me talking about myself. It's never me telling any of my stories or anything I got going on. Fat Electrician is. This is a video on this dude. It's today we're talking about this guy. Here's his childhood, here's how he got in the military. Here's the crazy things that happened. Here's the crazy things happened after the military. Here's how he passed away. The end. See you next week. And Unsubscribe podcast is literally me hanging out with two to three of my buddies and potentially flying out somebody else that we think would be cool to hang out and drink beer with and just shooting the for three hours straight.
- [50:54]
A
Do you go into those with any kind of list of topics you're going to cover or you just roll it?
- [50:58]
C
It's a guest by guest basis. We have such a broad range. You know, if we're bringing out some other YouTuber that we just think is a funny guy. Like we're just gonna drink beer and have fun or, you know, it swings the other direction. Totally. We had, we had Jim Capers, come on. You know, I mean, that dude's a military legend. So I mean, I went through, I read his book book. I watched all the documentaries on him. And my thing is I like, I like finding the funny, crazy stuff that like humanizes these bigger than life figures. So, like, you know, everybody else that brings Jim on is wanting to talk about a knife kill or all the crazy war hero stuff, but it's like, also like, Jim, I understand that you were on a mission in Vietnam and you captured a 23 foot python mid mission and brought it back as a pet. Like, I want to hear that story. Like they were coming back from a recon mission and just happened upon this 200 pound snake. He's like, yeah. So we took our poncho covers and wrapped its head up and then we were carrying it through the jungle, headed back to our FOB and we got, we got to a river and we couldn't get it across this river because it was so heavy. So we left it and then we got back up there and the helicopter pilot didn't believe us. So we took a chopper down and landed it on some shallow part of the river and took this snake up to our base and dug a pit and kept it as a pet. We called it Gomer.
- [52:15]
A
Like freaking N, dude. These guys had way. These guys knew how to like get it on. They have way better. And plus Vietnam was just a better AO than like either Afghanistan or Iraq as far as just having some normal going down, you know. And the, the SEALs, the East Coast SEAL SEAL team too, in Vietnam, they brought home, they, they caught a monkey and they brought it back to America and they had it on the quarter deck and it was really like an angry monkey that would like, they had it on a leash or some. But when I got to SEAL Team two, one of those old Vietnam guys, like, hey, we had a monkey. His name was Jocko. So they had a freaking monkey on the quarter SEAL team too that they brought back in Vietnam. His name was Jocko. And I was like, yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
- [53:00]
C
Do you know about, do you know about Sergeant Reckless? No, the Marine Corps warhorse.
- [53:04]
A
What about them?
- [53:05]
C
Oh, God, it's. They did the same thing. They had to smuggler back. So the, the Marines were up and they were fighting in Korea in this point, you know, it Was they were basically fighting on the 38th parallel. And the Korean map is just. It's just hills. It was just. You're either running up a hill or you're running down a hill. So the Marines were up on these hills just trying to hold the line for negotiations. And these Marines, it was called the Iron Triangle. And all the hills were named after Nevada cities. Reno, Carson, Las Vegas. And these Marines were holding this iron triangle. And the North Koreans wanted to punch through their position because that was the most direct route to Seoul. So the North Koreans wanted to take over Seoul because it would be highly beneficial for their negotiating power. So they were throwing everything they had at these Marines. These hills were so steep, the only thing they could get up there for, you know, bigger than small arms, was recoilless rifles. But these big recoilless rifle rounds are, like, 30 pounds. And so they're having to lug them up these hills. And when, you know, the commies start rushing down, there's just meat wall after meat wall. There's too many of them. So they get permission to go into town and buy a horse or a donkey or whatever. So they go into a racetrack, they buy this Mongolian mare, short, stocky little horse, and they bring her back, and they put her through hoof camp instead of boot camp. They, you know, they're blowing up grenades, and so she doesn't get scared anymore and covering her with flak jackets. And North Koreans and Chinese end up attacking. And they're attacking for, like, four days straight, and all day and all night, this horse is just lugging rounds up. They said she spanned, like, it was like, something crazy, like, a hundred miles and carried a couple tons of ammunition uphill under gunfire. Completely saved the Marines during the. This battle multiple times. And then they go to take her back, and they're like, no, we're not taking her back. We're not taking this horse back with her. So the Marines link up with the Navy, they smuggle her to Japan, and then they link up with some independent shipping company that agrees to ship her back to California on boat. They link back up with her on the boat, and the Marine, like, chain of command is mad that they got her this far.
- [55:12]
D
So.
- [55:12]
C
So they have the Department of Agriculture come in, and they're like, we're gonna. We're gonna destroy her because she could have diseases or whatever. And the Marines are like, no, you're not.
- [55:20]
A
Ain't happening.
- [55:21]
C
Not happening. So an altercation between the Department of Agriculture and these Marines goes down, and they're like, well, we can take A blood sample, and then we'll get the lab results back in a couple days and if she's clean, you can let her go. But in the meantime, just leave her here. Go. Go to your Marine Corps homecoming ball. Whatever, whatever her. We'll take care of her. And they're like, now they had a full security detail with her the entire time. As soon as the Department of Agriculture leaves, they smuggler off the ship out of the, like, port and they smuggler into a high rise building. And I want to say it was like San Francisco or San Diego. They get her up to like the 17th floor where the Marine Corps Ball is, and there's pictures of Sergeant Reckless at the Marine Corps Ball, like eating the flowers and eating cake. And she would walk up, she was actually a sergeant.
- [56:08]
A
Yeah.
- [56:09]
C
And they made all of the lower enlisted treat her as though she was a sergeant. So like if Sergeant Reckless walked up and like, like that was in order to share your food with her or to give her a drink. So like they would literally mix drinks directly into her mouth. And then. Yeah. She ended up retiring on Camp Pendleton. And she had a. Always had a lower enlisted farm kid that was her handler and she was the one in charge and nobody was allowed to ride her. So the running joke. The running joke was literally the kid in charge of taking care of Sergeant Reckless was the most in shape Marine in the Marine Corps because only way they could exercise her was to run beside her for 10 miles a day. So, yeah, just smuggling animals back, having a good time.
- [56:53]
A
Yeah, we really screwed up the military with all these, these rules, man. Because it was, dude, it was like we couldn't bring home anything. You know, like the whole idea of bringing home war trophies, which, you know, when you think war trophies, maybe you're thinking something, you know, crazy, but like to bring home enemy AK47.
- [57:12]
C
Right.
- [57:14]
A
Why can you not do that? That's freaking totally ridiculous. I have, I have a friend that got in like major trouble because he took the blame for someone that brought home an AK47. It's like, bro, what do you think that's like going to. Yeah, it's like going to McDonald's and saying you stole like one of those plastic straws.
- [57:31]
C
Common loot. Yeah, that's the issue. Yeah.
- [57:33]
A
We should be. We should have been shipping home for just freaking cruise boxes filled with AK47s to hang up at your command or in your living room or whatever. You know, like, let's go.
- [57:45]
C
It's not like World War II, we're shipping back trophy skulls or nothing like that. I could kind of understand a little bit.
- [57:50]
A
I don't know.
- [57:51]
C
It's also kind of cool.
- [57:54]
D
That's not a cool thing at all.
- [57:56]
A
Yeah, gross.
- [57:59]
C
Those pictures of all the wives back home with the skulls of her husband's enemies didn't go hard as.
- [58:05]
D
I'm still upset about my nunchucks, so that's.
- [58:07]
C
Oh, my God.
- [58:08]
A
What's up with your nunchucks?
- [58:09]
D
My first deployment, we came acr. We came across this kid, and he was, like, running around, and it's in Afghanistan. They don't have electricity most places. And he had a set of nunchucks.
- [58:20]
A
Hell, yeah.
- [58:21]
D
And he wouldn't stop hitting people with this, so I. I snatched him. And I was. To this day, I don't know how this. This young man in Afghanistan found out about nunchucks, but we were leaving, and we had to go through Manus, and a bunch of mps were, like, going through my stuff, and they, like, pulled out my nunchucks. And he's like, what are these? And I was like, they're nunchucks, dude. They're mine. I'm taking them home. He's like, no, you're not. And I said, like, I'm taking him home. And he's like, this is a weapon. And they had, like, a big burn pit, and we had to put all the stuff, like, over the side. And he was. The way he was looking at him, I was like, oh, he's about to take them home. So I walked over, and I tossed him into the thing, and he was just like, dude, you're not taking them from me. Like, because it was just, like, a really cool thing.
- [59:01]
A
And they wonder why brothers get ptsd. Bro, your whole life would have been complete if you had a set of freaking Afghan nunchucks in your damn living room.
- [59:09]
D
That's what I. That's what I'm saying. Like, I watched Bloodsport as a child. I watched all of those martial arts movies. How did that culture find that. That kid in the middle of a poppy field in Afghanistan? Like, none of his friends. His friends must have thought he was insane. Like, what is he doing? He's tying two sticks together. Like, I really wanted them. They took him. Stupid mps.
- [59:28]
A
So how did you guys end up. Because you guys have another podcast.
- [59:31]
D
Yes.
- [59:31]
A
Which is called the underwhelming podcast.
- [59:34]
D
Yes, sir.
- [59:34]
A
And how did you. What triggered that thing into existence?
- [59:38]
D
Well, I wanted to spend more time with Nick, so I had to start a business with him. Um, but, no, it's just. It just. It just kind of really happened naturally. Like, I got invited. So I got invited on the show, like, literally a month after I did this last year. And, and like I said, we're like always hanging out. Like almost every other month we're doing stuff together. And they, the unsubscribe guys has started their subscription company called Pepperbox where it's. It's Patreon, but like, it's literally made by them and they're the owners and stuff. And so there's been like this expansion of like, content in the unsubscribe universe. Right. When you say it's probably the best way to describe it. And so, like, you know, other shows are being made on there. Like, Donut has a cooking show. Brandon has like a gun specific show, you know, and Nick has another show as.
- [60:26]
A
Wait, who has a cooking show?
- [60:27]
D
Donut Operator.
- [60:28]
A
Really?
- [60:28]
D
It's called Let him Cook.
- [60:29]
A
What is he teaching how to cook?
- [60:32]
D
Cody's like, really good at cooking. And like, it was something that's been passed on from his family. He's from group in the South. Like, he, like, literally north Alabama is where he grew up and stuff. And so, like, it's just like the coolest version of guys hanging out. Like, I. I went on there and made smash burgers and like, he just makes stuff. And so, like, we just started talking. He's like, do you want to start a podcast? And I was like, yeah, I think that would be fun. Like, let's do kind of like on an old dad new day, different.
- [60:59]
C
Like, unsubscribe is very much like smoke pit. Unsubscribe, smoke pit. Hanging out with your buddies in the garage talk. And then underwhelming is like, he's a dad with more experience. I'm a new dad. We're talking about more like family oriented stuff. And like, hey, how did you manage this? What was the mistakes you made when this issue was going on when you're five year old, you know?
- [61:21]
A
Yeah.
- [61:21]
D
And so it's just, it's just something that happened naturally because, like, from the time that I came here a year ago to now, my life has significantly changed.
- [61:31]
A
Right on.
- [61:31]
D
In a way that.
- [61:32]
A
In a good way.
- [61:32]
D
In a good way. In a good way. No, like, like, I can't anticipate it. Like, like I was saying, it's just, it's. It blows my mind that I remember when you came on Joe Rogan, I was like, this dude's awesome to like, now I can text you. Like, it's just like this weird timeline.
- [61:49]
C
Okay. I read his Book in high school.
- [61:51]
B
Yeah.
- [61:51]
C
I'm sitting across the table from weird.
- [61:54]
D
It is. There's a, there's of lot, a lot of that. Like, you know, you're like looking up to heroes. I'm like, this is so cool. But like the, so like the last year, the beginning part was kind of weird. So like I, I kind of. In January I had this like mindset of like I want to lock in and like do this push to kind of like continue to do what I'm doing with veteran with a sign to kind of like continue to be a force for good, a change agent, stuff like that. And I, I found myself in like really uncomfortable moments and because I did a bunch of podcasts I did here and did unsubscribe and then out of nowhere the, the VFW started talking about me.
- [62:35]
A
And that was that about. That was like you talked about one of the veteran assistance.
- [62:42]
D
Yeah.
- [62:43]
A
Like organizations and you promoted them as doing a good job for you.
- [62:48]
D
Yeah, so I did. So I'll go as quickly as I can through. But the long and short of it is there are organizations that veterans can pay to help them with their benefits. Right. And there are companies that take like back pay and stuff like that. That's not what I'm talking about. This organization that I work with is called Re Medical R E E Medical. And what you do is you go talk to them and then they give you like an outline of how they can help you with getting supporting medical evidence for your claims. That's why most claims are kicked back now. It is not free to use. It is free to talk to them and then they tell you how much their services are the same way, you know, TurboTax does. It is free to do your taxes online or you can pay TurboTax or a CPA. Right. And it is, I believe it's every. Everyone should have the right to choose. And I've told them this and I've told everyone this. I don't like that they exist at all. But I do like that people have the option to choose.
- [63:38]
A
And I think, well, just so like I'm capturing this right. So just for people that aren't veterans, like when you get, when you get out of the military, you can get some form of compensation for generally speaking, it's. It's service related injuries.
- [63:52]
D
Yes sir.
- [63:53]
A
So that is. Seems like it should be pretty straightforward. Hey, I lost my left pinky, you know, in a, in a range accident and. Okay. Yep, yeah, you lost your left pinky. That sucks. We're going to give you whatever percentage of your pay for the rest of your life.
- [64:10]
D
Yeah.
- [64:10]
A
And you go, okay, that makes sense. Cool. That's. It seems like it should be like that, but it ain't like that.
- [64:14]
D
It's not like that.
- [64:15]
A
It's way complicated. It's like, well, what, how exactly did you lose your pinky and how long, what length of pinky did you lose? And are you left handed or right handed? And are you going to be an inoccupated? Like there's all these things that you have to go through. And so it ends up being a very complicated process. Much like, you know, you brought up taxes. Like for me to do my taxes.
- [64:35]
D
Yeah.
- [64:36]
A
Is not possible. I'm gonna go ahead and say that like, I believe, you know, you can make anything happen. You know what I mean? If you believe it, you can achieve it. I'm gonna tell you right now, I could not do my taxes.
- [64:45]
D
That's smart.
- [64:46]
A
It's, it's impossible for me to do my taxes. There are so many things. Or I could try, but I would get like arrested because I would miss something. And so, you know, I have a, a guy that I've been working with for a long time that does not just my taxes, but he does the taxes for like 80 different people, 80 different families. And so he's really good at it. And he works with people that have multiple businesses and have lots of weird tax stuff going on. So he does that and he does it for me too, because he knows how the system works. And by the way, he gets updated when there's a regulatory change or a new tax law comes in. He understands it, he dives into it, he researches it, he goes through it and he makes it work for me and figures out the best way to address the situation. That's a really, that's a full time job. Yeah, about a bunch of stuff. Any more than I would go to a freaking, you know, factory and start trying to wire a factory up. Like, no, I wouldn't know how to do that. So it's the same thing when you're trying to figure out what the government, what the VA owes you. It's a really complicated process. I know it shouldn't be just like doing your taxes shouldn't be, but it is. And so a lot of veterans, they have trouble getting what they're supposed to get and it's problematic. And so what's happened over the past, I don't know how long, but these various companies have sprung up. Some of them are charities, some of them are Companies and they sprung up to help veterans do a good job with their VA claim. And so this one of these companies that did that does that and what are they called?
- [66:24]
D
Remedial. So Romeo Echo Echo Medical.
- [66:27]
A
And so you're, how did you get involved with them and then how did the, the vfw. Why is the vfw.
- [66:34]
D
Okay, I can say all of it, right?
- [66:36]
C
Yeah.
- [66:37]
D
Okay. I just, he's involved. I just want to, want to co sign for my boy. But we have the same management agency.
- [66:45]
A
Okay.
- [66:45]
D
And what they do is they help to facilitate bringing on sponsors for like his YouTube channel or there'll be like Zach with you talk about this, you know, will I be involved with, you know, X organization. They're doing these things and they had. One of the creators at the agency was working with the VFW as a part of this build that they're trying to push. I don't know where it's at now. I've heard it gets knocked down everywhere. Thank God. But basically what they're trying to do, underneath the guise of protecting veterans from fraud and not being taken advantage of, they're trying to put forward a bill. What is it called? The, is it the Guard.
- [67:16]
B
Guard Act.
- [67:17]
C
Yeah, I think it's the Guard Act.
- [67:18]
D
The Guard Act. And so basically what they want to do is to make all of these for profit companies illegal and, and to restrict only a certain amount of nonprofits to help veterans with their benefits moving forward or state or federal agencies like basically them, the Legion and the dav. So they want to monopolize a market and I, I don't like that. And they came forward and they were, they work with this one creator, he doesn't care if I name it. I'm not going to. But they, they'd worked with him, he had talked about it and then they wanted to expand to like other talent. So they came to myself, they came to the fat electrician, Nick, and they came to Angry Cops. Rich, a friend of ours as well, very good friend. And we all talked about it behind the scenes. And I lean a lot on Nick because as you've seen from his videos, he's never, he's almost never wrong. I haven't come across a time where he's wrong. There's one time where he's wrong and I won the army argument, but that's it. And that will carry me through a decade. I can't talk about it.
- [68:14]
B
Fair enough.
- [68:15]
A
Classified information. If you're going to be wrong, Nick, it might as well be something you can't talk about you're even right about what you were wrong about.
- [68:22]
D
I like that he always wins. But no, and we. I just, I know too much from, like working with veterans since 2011 and everything else. I don't need the government to protect me. I don't need them to remove choice. I don't need them to do freedom. I need them to worry about things like what's in our food, the never ending wars, supporting veterans, stuff like that. Let me have the right to choose. I don't need the government to start regulating freedom and choice because it's a very slippery slope that I don't want to be a part of. And I don't know anyone that the VFW in particular has helped with their claims. I've just never heard that from doing this for a long time. And so I didn't support that. There's another act that's called like the choice act. And basically what they do is I'm not crazy about this either because it just feels like something else to just have the government involved. And I don't like that. But the idea is that they would create some type of credentialing process to where if you're a for profit entity, you go through this credentialing process and you get a stamp that says, hey, you can use them. Right? And I just, I made like an ad and I was like, hey, talk to this organization. And it was like a month went by because I had done this and unsub. And then I opened up Twitter one day and there's this guy, you know, doing like the worst version of me, and he's an older veteran. I'm gonna try to be kind. And I wasn't thrilled.
- [69:40]
C
He was dressed like you. Yeah, he had the same od, green shirt, holding up a sign over his head. Doing the veteran with a sign thing. Yeah, basically on you.
- [69:49]
D
He was on me lying about me. And I camera the exact tweet. But it was something to the effect of veteran with the signs lying. It's like on Twitter. I don't actually. It's not veteran with signs, just Zach, but because it's just me. Because at the time I'd started it, I was like doing op EDS and stuff for, like, different publications to include, you know, Fox News, not Washington Post and the New York Times. And so, like, I was like, holy shit, this is bad. Like, and the first person I called was, was Nick. And then I was like, what do we do? And he's like, don't do anything. And I was like, but I have tweets saved. I have things I want to say. And he's like, don't do anything. We're going to figure this out. And then I call Rich and then the same thing. So we start, like, trying to figure out what to happen. And it was really, like, the immediate. The immediate response from, like, people that know me or people who heard about me was like, this isn't right. Stop lying about Zach. Whatever. Because their thing was saying that I was working with a claim shark company.
- [70:43]
C
Which is they were calling you a predator.
- [70:44]
D
A predator.
- [70:45]
C
You were accepting money to take advantage of veterans using a predatory company.
- [70:50]
D
All because I did not accept their campaign is the long and short, which it was not an insignificant amount of money.
- [70:56]
C
Also worth mentioning, the whole reason I turned it down immediately without even looking into it, just because it was red flags for me. I'm sorry. An organization wants to pay a YouTuber called the Fat Electrician to push legislation. No, I'm out. I don't know what. I don't know what you got going on. This is either a stupid plan or something bad. There's no other options. You're trying to hire the. The Fat Electrician to force legislation through. Now get out of here.
- [71:22]
A
Something is strange.
- [71:23]
D
Yeah, yeah. And, like, I even tried to, like, DM them and stuff and be like, we should talk about this. We should figure this out. And they were like, no, no, no. And they just kept doubling down. And then we just kept moving with it. And then finally, like, we developed a plan. And basically the idea was that Rich. Rich is famous for, like, doing breakdowns of, like, military stuff that's, like, happening currently. And then, like, he was gonna, like, take it all up, and we were just gonna gather the evidence and have, like, one conclusive video of, like, exactly what happened. And then Nick's like, I've got some stuff to say too. So, like, and then this is what.
- [71:58]
C
People would call a poor strategy was trying to get in a pissing match on the Internet with a group of guys that just have pissing matches on.
- [72:06]
D
The Internet who have blind, dangerous, dangerously blind loyalty to each other. Like, it's kind of like, shoot that guy. Bang. Why did we shoot that guy? I mean, I don't care. You know, it's. It's a lot like that. And because, like, my. My concern was, you know, most Internet content creators, they don't last longer than four.
- [72:29]
A
Five.
- [72:30]
C
Three. Yeah, three to five.
- [72:31]
D
So I'm already in, like, rarefied air to begin with. And then it continues to become, like, something different after that. So I was like, what if. My only concern was, like, what if people believe them and then I can't recover from this? Like, what if my reputation, you know, the work I've done, everything else wasn't enough to really counteract the motherfucking vfw saying that I'm a predator. And I was overwhelmed. It was like a rough 24, 48 hours. And then we. They put together the video and we just dog walked the VFW up and down the Internet. Like, it felt great. I'm not gonna lie to you.
- [73:09]
C
I mean, after the video. Video came out, there was. They got a hold of you pretty quick because there was people dropping their membership to the vfw.
- [73:15]
A
And then what did the VFW say to you when they got a hold of you?
- [73:19]
D
I'll say this. The president guy called me and he's like, he's like, hey, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't, I can't remember his name, but, like, he talked to me and he's like, hey, you know, it's important that we all work together. Like, he's in New York. He's like, I'm. I'm a veteran. You're veteran. I go, I know you're the president of the vfw. Like, some of the stuff we could cut out of this conversation. And I thought he was going to be much more of like, hey, this is a leadership thing. I should have squashed this negative. His. His, like, first thing that he said to me was like, yeah, that angry cops and the fat electrician guy are pretty mean. And I was like, they just described what you did. And he's like, fair. Like, he was. But his, like, initial response was like, we're the problem, not them. Because it became very apparent to me that the VFW does not like that they are not taken as seriously as they believe that they should be taken in the modern era. They believe themselves to be leaders and elder statesmen and all of this stuff that just isn't based in reality. And so he was like on a tour, visiting the boys in Korea or something that have, like two VFWs. And I'm like, listen, I'm not gonna tell you how to spend your time, sir. Kind of sound like a vacation. I'm not gonna tell you how to spend time. Your time. But what about the VFWs in Philly, San Diego, Nashville, Iowa? Do they not get this type of attention? Oh, they're not in Asia in, like, really cool places.
- [74:38]
C
Well, the other part, like, I feel like we should point out is, like, it. We keep saying the vfw, but, like, there was a lot of, like, chapter leaders and, like, ground level VFW that came out and were like, hey, I don't. Like what I. I don't know how to explain it. The corporate. Yeah, the national corporate.
- [74:55]
A
Been to VFWs that are freaking kickass. Like, great people. You know, there's some chapters down here in San Diego that I've hung out with, and they're fantastic. Like, they're great. And, you know, I. I doubt they knew any of this stuff was going on. I mean, I didn't know any of this stuff was going on.
- [75:10]
D
So they started pushing out, like, talking points to them and, like.
- [75:13]
A
So has this thing come to, like, any kind of a resolution? Have you guys, like, when they called you were like, hey, man, like, let's. If you want to be on the same team, let's talk about how we can do this. Or is it. Is it just so still negative where.
- [75:27]
D
We left it with the previous president? Was he. We talked on, like, a Monday, and he was like, I'm traveling back Wednesday, and then let's set up a time for me, Nick and Rich to all sit down and talk. And I was like, I'll do that. I'll do that. Like, I want. I honestly want them to succeed.
- [75:45]
B
Yeah.
- [75:46]
A
Yeah.
- [75:46]
D
Of course, he no longer was in that position by Friday of that week. No kidding. His term ended. I don't know if it ended early or whatever. I will say it's highly unusual to make plans because, you know, you know, Rich is a cop in Buffalo. Nick's got a family. We were all like, okay, we're all going to D.C. thursday to get there Friday. Like, we made plans. I don't know why he would say that to me. And then none of it move forward with.
- [76:11]
A
Yeah, that's very strange.
- [76:13]
D
Yeah. I don't know if he left early or if it's just the end of his term, but, like, it feels like, oh, yeah, by the way, I won't have this job. Friday would have come up if he. If he. If I felt like he was intentionally trying to do it. And, like, they continue to just kind of. What's the right word? They continue to resent. I think, just like, newer veterans in general because, like, they feel like we're not giving them their due. But, like, honestly, they're the ones who did a lot of the work that put myself and everyone. I believe this room in a position to succeed. I wanted to work with Them, but, like, what I always say to people is, like, I have the ability to reach out and interact with hundreds of thousands to millions of people at any given moment in my life. That's what they did to me. They straight up lied about me. What do they do to other people? How do they interact with other people? Don't have that.
- [76:59]
C
I think they thought they could do that to you and they realized they couldn't get away with it and then dropped it.
- [77:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's such a strange time that someone can, you know, and this is not just this case, but it happens pretty regularly where you can just put something out there into the Ethernet. You know, you watch the politicians. The politicians are. It's insane to watch them just. Just openly lie. Just blatantly openly lie as if it's nothing about whatever. And that's now just part of the Ethernet. And depending on which algorithm you're living in, that lie becomes the truth. And that's what's happening right now.
- [77:39]
D
Yeah, it's.
- [77:39]
A
A.
- [77:39]
D
Certain governor's doing a lot of that on podcasts right now, apparently.
- [77:42]
A
Yeah, it's crazy to watch. Like, these things are.
- [77:45]
C
Is it bad? I don't know which one you're talking about specifically.
- [77:48]
D
That's actually a worse.
- [77:49]
A
That's even worse, right?
- [77:50]
D
So many of them. Yeah.
- [77:52]
A
Openly lying. And it's the. I forget. Which. You'll probably remember this, Nick. Like, who is it Goebbels that said, if you lie enough, it becomes the truth? It's like that. That is a real thing, and it's just lie, lie, lie, lie. And it is interesting, too, like this. The approach that you guys took with this dude. Because sometimes it's like if you. When you rebut something or someone rebuts something, it just adds more fuel to the fire, as opposed to, like, oh, yeah, that happened three years ago. Like, this is. Yeah, it was just a bunch of bullshit. Oh, okay, cool. Because there's the. The news cycle is so fast and filled with so much stuff that if you wait, like you said, 24, 48 hours, you were really, you know, really hating life. And then, like, well, 72 hours, you're like, oh, yeah, what are we doing this afternoon? Oh, yeah, that's right. Somebody said something to me about, you know, three days ago, and it doesn't matter anymore because it just fades into the past. And the other thing that I think you pointed out, which I think is really important, is, like, it's. That's not part of your character. And eventually as a person, you build up Enough like, repetitions of who you are where, when someone just jumps out of nowhere and, you know, calls out some random thing about you. When you've been doing repetitions and repetitions of helping people, of, of helping charities, of helping veterans for year upon year upon year upon year. But now all of a sudden all that was just like, that was just a front because I was really over here just trying to get this paycheck.
- [79:29]
D
Yeah.
- [79:30]
A
And it's like, it just doesn't add up. And so I think the, the long term consistency of a person, generally speaking, will win when someone comes out with some, you know, trash bullshit about him.
- [79:47]
D
Yeah, it was, it was crazy because, like, I knew we were gonna get through it. I was just, I didn't know what type of damage I was going to take.
- [79:55]
C
Well, that's, that's the only reason that we even bothered to acknowledge it was because, I mean, the, the default setting for all of our friend group is, you know, somebody comes out saying crazy stuff, ignore them, it'll go away. Like, people know it's not true. The issue with this one was like, this isn't, you know, nobody coming out of the woodwork with an allegation. This is, that's true. This is the vfw. This is one of the oldest veteran organizations on the planet that exclusively deals with a big overlap in our audience. And like, that's actual. Okay, we do have to correct this.
- [80:27]
A
Because, well, yeah, that's crazy. Like I said, hopefully the vfw, you know, I've known a lot of great people in the vfw. Hopefully they kind of come to their senses and realize that, you know, we're, we should, we're supposed to be their people. Right.
- [80:40]
C
Again, I don't even. We keep saying VFW and like, it's not even. It wasn't like we had so many, like, chapter leaders and VFW members that were reaching out, being like, hey, this is, they're doing. We don't like what the international is doing. And so, I mean, I think it was very much like D.C. a couple of dudes at a very, very high level just mad that they didn't have enough political power at the top of the hill that were more worried about their own, you know, leverage points than the actual mission. And like, all the people at the ground level and like mid level were very much like, this is stupid. We don't support this. So the VFW we keep saying is the issue, but it wasn't, I think it was a couple of high leaders that maybe shouldn't have been there.
- [81:18]
D
It's the head shed. It's the headshot. They had no idea what's going on in the ground.
- [81:22]
A
Yeah.
- [81:23]
D
And, like, it's. I can still think of, like, when I open up my phone and I saw it, and I was just like, my wife's gonna be so pissed at me. Like. Like. Because I was just like, I can't believe I'm in this place. Like, I've. Like I said, like you said, like, I have worked with veterans. I have worked with nonprofits. Mark Green, who was my congressman, was my state representative. I worked with him in Tennessee to help pass, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars a year to support veterans organizations at the state level. Like, I've done all of these things, and, like, there's a moment where I'm like, is this. Is this what's going to wipe all that away? And so it just really, like, changed everything in the sense of, like, it gave me a new sense of feeling of support because the unsubscribe community in general, they came forth. They're. When they lock in these. When these boys lock.
- [82:10]
C
They're aggressive.
- [82:11]
D
They're aggressive. His. His wife made a meme that's probably the most perfect meme ever. You've seen two Towers, right? Lord of the Rings. The Rings?
- [82:21]
A
No.
- [82:21]
D
You haven't seen Lord of the Rings?
- [82:22]
C
No.
- [82:22]
D
Are you being serious?
- [82:23]
A
I'm sorry, but no.
- [82:24]
C
Echo.
- [82:25]
D
Echo. Can you can blame that?
- [82:26]
C
Can you explain?
- [82:27]
D
You've seen two towers, right?
- [82:28]
A
No.
- [82:28]
D
You haven't seen.
- [82:29]
A
Oh, damn. Oh, for two.
- [82:31]
C
That's a hell of a Venn diagram. Scene. Snow scene. Lord of the Rings.
- [82:35]
A
Nope.
- [82:38]
D
No, it's fine, but.
- [82:39]
A
So this whole freaking metaphor is gone out the window.
- [82:41]
D
Well, there's this point where Aragon and a few people are down at the bottom, and they're waiting on Gandalf to reinforce them with the Rohir.
- [82:48]
C
They're. They're in a. They're. They're in a fort, and they're completely surrounded by a million dudes.
- [82:53]
A
Yes, I understand.
- [82:54]
C
Like, the end is coming.
- [82:55]
A
Okay?
- [82:56]
C
And the reinforcements show up at the top of the hill with the sunlight to their back, right as the sunlight peaks over. And they cavalry charge in Nice and save the day is pretty much.
- [83:06]
A
And that was the unsubscribed crew audience.
- [83:09]
D
Yeah. Hannah made a meme, and it was just an ocean of people with memes and tweets and comments, just really just putting the VFW back in their place. So it was. It was, like, overwhelming support. And to this day. I still get messages about it and stuff. And it just, like, it's. I don't know, it gave me hope in a way I didn't anticipate in the very best way. Because like you said, like, if you say something enough times, it can become true. And like, no one really researches stuff anymore. You know, they're like an inch deep in a mile wide type stuff. And so it just changed everything. And it's been an exciting year. And like, me and Nick hung out enough. I was like, yeah, I can do a podcast. I'll go here. You go there and we'll. We'll figure it out. And it's, you know, it's under. He's like, what do you want to call it? And I was like, I don't know. Underwhelming. He's like, why? And I was like, just set the bar low and we'll just achieve it.
- [83:57]
B
Yeah.
- [83:59]
A
It'S funny, the meme things. I remember a few years ago, I saw like a. A meme of a hat, and it was like a VFW type hat and it said like, meme. You know, veteran of the meme wars.
- [84:12]
D
Right.
- [84:12]
A
And the first time I saw it, I was like, h. That's. That's like pretty funny, pretty awesome, pretty cool. But there is reality behind the idea of meme wars and information, you know, to take Alex Jones's, you know, the name of his organization of infowars, like, that is a real thing and that is what is. Is happening. And these are like what you guys just described, this sort of micro meme war of, you know, sort of a social media war between, you know, you and the vfw. It's like a really small scale thing where, you know, you had the backup, the reinforcements, the whatever. Tower of whatever. You said Rohirram, Right. You had that, right?
- [85:01]
D
I had the real. And you're Life Riders of Rohan.
- [85:04]
A
Yeah. And you're able to overcome what you know, the enemy in this case. And what people got to remember is that that's happening on a real scale in a real way with. With just straight up call it what it is. Meme wars. Like memes that do. Well, people that. And, and I mentioned this earlier. What algorithm are you living in? Because. And you, you know, we were talking about this a little bit last night, but the. If you're living in an algorithm and what you're being, whatever you're being fed, you begin to believe that and. Never mind begin. You end up believing that this algorithm that you see all day, every day is Real and that, that is the way the world is. And it's just what you've been fed through information warfare. It's very disturbing.
- [85:54]
D
It.
- [85:54]
C
Well, it's. I always explain it like, you know, back in World War II in Korea and stuff. You could, the government could censor. Like, we're not putting this out. We can hide this. That like those days are gone. Everybody has a smartphone and a camera phone. So now the only way to have control of the narrative is to over saturate the market with so much that nobody knows what's true. And then that's where memes. You think it's a stupid picture on the Internet, but a picture is worth a thousand words.
- [86:21]
D
Yep.
- [86:22]
C
And if I can create a meme that conveys a thousand word message and makes you go, huh or yeah, it's.
- [86:29]
D
Immediate, then you share it. This is how I feel. This is a reflection of me and my opinion.
- [86:33]
B
Boom. You share.
- [86:34]
D
And then that.
- [86:34]
C
Look at the, look at the current presidential races. Like, memes played a humongous role in the last presidential election. You've still got the official White House and Department of Homeland Security and all kinds of. They're posting memes.
- [86:46]
A
Posting memes straight up. Yeah, The President of the United States is dropping memes.
- [86:51]
D
It's like, it's kind of crazy.
- [86:52]
C
It's like human communication went up and up and up and up and up, and language got more and more articulate. More and more articulate. And it peaked. And now it's like, okay, everybody understands the articulate part. Now we're going to dumb it back down to hieroglyphs because they can articulate a thousand words in one image.
- [87:08]
A
And that being said, it's like, you know, I think we talked about this a little bit last night as well when we were having dinner. But, you know, you've heard the whole thing that Jordan Peterson would talk about of the podcast being like a bigger revolution than the Gutenheim, you know, printing press, because now not only does it just completely like goes anywhere in this press of one button. I mean, at least when you had the printing press, you had to like buy paper and ink. And even if you were writing books.
- [87:35]
C
Up there, put the dies in the right way.
- [87:38]
A
Fifteen, 20 years ago, if you were gonna, if you wrote a book, it was like you had to get a publisher. There's all kinds of cost a bunch of money. Now you can then, then, you know, you could vlog for whatever, blog for a while. And that was like you could write and it was kind of cheap to get that out there. And that worked for a while. And the barrier to entry was lower and lower. And then with podcasts, well, bro, there's like, you don't even know. You don't need to know how to write or read to, to do a podcast, but you have to put in at least a little bit of time to talk the words or listen to the words. But you get into the meme zone now, it's like I'm gonna give you a message that you are going to absorb in one second. One look. And so if you nail. And we know it, like, how often do you look at a meme? Because I got kids that are 25, 16 through 25. So look, we're freaking knee deep in memes, right?
- [88:31]
D
You're all over it and meme deep.
- [88:34]
A
And yeah, we're meme deep. And yet it's like, you know that there is a meme when it's good. It might as well be a freaking incredible, you know, piece of poetry because it just lands and the whole family gets the meme. Like the whole family knows what it means, understands what the, what the indication is, understand what's about, understand like the humor in it or the sorrow in it or the frustration that they all understand all these things from a picture and seven words. That is next level. And there's a certain level of art to. Oh yeah, I mean a high level of art to making really good memes. And the other interesting thing is we have this, this, this system now that percolates the winning memes to the top. But at no point is it required for that meme or for that seven second video to be true. It just has to bring out emotions.
- [89:34]
C
Was it Da Vinci said that simplicity is the ultimate complication? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
- [89:40]
A
Or Mark Twain said, hey, I wanted to write you a long letter, or I wanted to write you a short letter, but I didn't have time because it takes more time to like, make your words more concise and more direct. But it's. But the scariest part of this is it doesn't need to be true. And so you can get a meme that has just complete misinformation in it. And that's probably what, what's the word they use? Disinformation. They use misinformation. Yeah, that ain't true, right? It's like, this ain't true. And yet it perpetuates whatever, you know, algorithm that I'm living in. It perpetuates that and makes, deepens my Strength. And I talked about this after Charlie Kirk got killed. It's like, bro, at least from the outside. And look, I'm not, I'm not deep in day to day researching on what happened there, but it certainly appears from the outside that you had a dude that was kind of normal, like, you know, normal family, normal job, like going to normal college. And in a relatively short period of time, he went from that person who could have had a totally normal, great, positive, productive life to a person that murdered another human being in front of millions of people. And you know, change hit the course of his life, his family's life, Charlie Kirk's life, Charlie Kirk's family's destroyed. Like, it's, it's crazy that that took place at least again. And I don't know if you guys have more information about this, but it certainly seems like that guy went from a relatively normal human to this twisted person. Yeah, right. Is that kind of what happened in.
- [91:26]
C
A short period of time?
- [91:27]
D
I mean, that's probably the best way to describe without knowing details that they'll probably never share. But like, regardless your political opinions, he was put in a place by the things that he was ingesting that made him convinced that this was the only solution to this problem. So he had been radicalized by the misinformation or disinformation. I think misinformation is supposed to be a straight up lie. Disinformation's like obscuring, obscuring with like kind of like 75 true 20. Like they kind of. What is it called where they give you what it cops. The thing with the tree when you.
- [92:02]
C
Fruit of the poisonous tree.
- [92:03]
D
Yeah, I think that's kind of the whole thing of like, it's a thing cops always say, but basically like you follow a thing, but it's, it's like a bad lead. And so then you have fruit of the poison tree. Like all your stuff that comes after. Is that the best way to describe it? And you know this person? And again, I don't know everything but just want to gather and all the stuff. It just seems like there's so much stuff that's thrown at you now. You have to have deliberate and intentional mechanisms, mechanisms within you to be like, I need to stop. Like, because that's. That the Internet is built off of reaction. It's built off of what? Like, that's the whole thing. So you have to be like, yep.
- [92:43]
C
I, I love freedom. I don't know if I actually support this, but if the government came out with legislation tomorrow and they were like, you know what? Every Tuesday, we're just going to shut off all social medias for 24 hours. It probably wouldn't be a bad thing for society.
- [92:56]
D
Touch Grass to Tuesday Sounds good to me. Touch Grass Tuesday. Yeah. Because I use the Internet now just for goofs with my friends. Like, we just.
- [93:04]
B
I'm.
- [93:04]
D
I'm trying to bring it back old school. Like back when it was just silly, silly good time stuff, you know, not a lot to it, you know, I think that's one cure. But I like Touch Grass Tuesday. Yeah, we're gonna make a shirt.
- [93:16]
A
I tell people, like, you know, when, when, when someone creates a meme or a comment or a post, their goal is to make the readers of that or the viewers of that emotional. Because if I see something and it freaking pisses me off so bad, I freaking retweet it to you guys. Like, I want everyone to, well, check this out. Or if it's something that I strongly support, hell yeah, I reposted hell yeah, everybody. But either way, it's like, that is absolutely traveling. And the weird thing is too, is, you know, sometimes I'll see these super passionate freaking posts, you know about something, and I'm like, it's weird. Imagine your world where when something you see something that, like, you don't agree with strongly or whatever, and your reaction is like, you know what? I can't believe this is happening. I'm gonna go write a tweet and post it. Like, that's what we're doing.
- [94:14]
C
No. Yeah.
- [94:15]
D
No.
- [94:16]
A
What is that?
- [94:17]
D
Because there's actually, like, I don't, I don't know. I think you, you get what you need in life, and if you look for things with intention, they'll come to you. Like, one of the best stories out there right now, in my opinion, online, everyone should check him out is Ethan Bernard. Yeah, Ethan Bernard. He came to the San Antonio show.
- [94:34]
C
Yeah, he's awesome.
- [94:35]
D
There are few people in my life that have a vigor of vigor and, like, enthusiasm for, for working hard. And he is doing it. That boy is about it, about it. And I love him.
- [94:46]
C
Like, that's the stuff where he's lost, what, 170 pounds?
- [94:49]
D
Yeah. He lost a Backstreet Boy. Yeah.
- [94:51]
B
Yeah.
- [94:51]
D
A full blown. A full blown pop star. And he's still digging in. He was telling. He's. He's up training in Philly now. Right. He's out there. It's so great. Like, those are the things that we need more of someone who's like, I. I can change this. It's not too late. Watch me do it. And he's doing it.
- [95:08]
A
Yeah, there's, there is so much positive out there, and that's a good example. Like, Ethan has gone and grown very rapidly, like, in popularity because he's doing something super positive, but negative spread so much more, so much faster. Like, I, I, I bet if he freaking blew out his knee and was in the hospital, it'd be like, you know, I knew he was faking it. Yeah, yeah. You know, Jocko Fuel injures freaking Ethan Bernard by pushing him too hard in uncontrolled circumstances. That would be a bigger story than, hey, he reached his goal. Like, it's going to be great when he reaches his goal and we get done with that training. Like, he's like, our goal is that he gets good habits. That's the goal. Like, I don't care if he loses £5 or £50 or £150 while he's up in Philly, but, hey, can you recognize, Like, I want him to know what it feels like to not want to do something, do the something that he doesn't want to do and realize how good that feels. Because, like, if you can get that to me, that's always, you know, to this day, I know that if I get out of bed, I'm going to feel better later. I know if I get my workout.
- [96:21]
C
In, I'm going to feel better later.
- [96:22]
A
I know if I do the work on the project I'm supposed to be working on, I know that I don't want to do it right now, but I know that when I do it, I know that I'll feel better. And that's like a great fuel to have, but you kind of have to learn that. And I don't think he learned it, you know, early in his life.
- [96:36]
C
Yeah, I think, like, I don't know, as a, doing content creation, as a job for, like, three years now, I think I. Most political pundits and, like, people whose whole job is to piss people off is, like the lowest tier, easiest level of entry for being a content creator. Like, the whole vibe, you get paid for making people feel something, but making people feel anger is the easiest thing in the world to make somebody feel. You know what I mean? It's much harder to inspire somebody, make them feel happy, make them, you know, entertainment positively. Yeah, right. Like, that's so much more impressive to me than somebody walking away pissed off. Like, that's so I get, I think I'm pretty good at, like, inspiring people, you know, with the stories That I tell. But it would be so much easier. I could piss off so many more people so much faster. I don't need 45 minutes to piss somebody off. Like, I could do that easy.
- [97:29]
A
Yeah, well, when I was a kid, there was magazines like the National Enquirer, and it is just gossip, like negative stories about celebrities. And who doesn't love seeing some celebrity with all their money and their plane and. Oh, how you like that now? Now you got rolled up for two dui, you miserable piece of. I knew, you know, like, people just. There's. There's some sick little twisted part of our ego that just loves to see people that are doing well get crushed or people that aren't doing well get crushed. Like, we just freaking. It's. That's like you said, it's so easy because that's such a natural instinct that we have. Like, oh, burn it down. And I always tell people it's like so much harder to build something than it is is to burn something down and destroy something. And that's why it's like, well, if I haven't got to do something, I'll just burn. Just set fire to stuff. And it's a good way to make things happen. And I don't think things are gonna. It's gonna get real weird right now because the AI is upon us. And, you know, I was get on Twitter the other day, and people were posting like, little. Little clips of me doing stuff. It's not me, but it's me doing stuff. And I sent one to Echo. I was like, bro, this shit's getting pretty good. And Echo immediately sent back, that guy's teeth are straight. He has no gap between his front two teeth. And I was like, okay, so AI Jocko does not have a gap between his front two teeth. Hurtful, but hurtful, but helpful.
- [98:58]
C
Yeah, he put that out. It's going to be patched by tomorrow.
- [99:01]
A
Yeah, that's the thing.
- [99:01]
C
It will be.
- [99:02]
A
Yeah, you're right.
- [99:02]
D
It's fixed now. Well, and it's. It's just weird because, like, it used to be like, AI was like, really clunky. Like, I. There's the video of like, Will Smith eating spaghetti in like, 2024. Will Smith eating spaghetti in 2025. And it's just like, what is the uncanny valley?
- [99:19]
C
It's.
- [99:19]
D
It's pretty. It's pretty close. It's pretty close, some of it.
- [99:23]
A
Oh, it's gonna get.
- [99:24]
D
Especially someone like, you. Like, you have so much stuff. You have so much stuff in the ether, like your memes of Jocko working out, throwing batteries in the ocean.
- [99:30]
C
Wow.
- [99:32]
A
Have you seen this echo, Charles?
- [99:33]
D
It's, it's, it's just the most like, what type of workout would Jocko do? He would carry two car batteries to the beach, throw them in, and then run back home at 4. 35. Yeah, 434. Excuse me. Excuse me.
- [99:44]
C
That's it. I've never heard anybody compare the AI thing to the uncanny valley. That's an interesting.
- [99:49]
A
How ironic. I thought the AI thing was the.
- [99:52]
D
Uncanny valley as it enters humanism.
- [99:54]
C
Right, the, the uncanny valley, or at least what I was under the impression of is the uncanny valley is like predates AI forever. It's. The uncanny valley is like when you can look at something that looks like a human but you can tell for some reason. You don't know why, but I can tell in its eyes or something that's not a person. So like the theory was always like the, the theory, like the cryptology or whatever theory or the Bigfoot people, whatever that's called. Research and conspiracy.
- [100:23]
B
Conspiracy.
- [100:24]
C
No, it's like cryptozoology or something like that where they study. That's not real. The, the theory was like, oh, there must have been some type of predator or something somewhere in human evolution that looked similar to humans and tried to trick them. And that's why humans all have this ability to identify humanoid looking creatures that aren't actually human and aren't friendly. So like if that were true and then it comes back to be in handy again to help differentiate AI to where people can again just be able to be like, that's not true. I can just sense it.
- [100:58]
A
Yeah.
- [100:58]
C
Never heard anybody compare it.
- [101:00]
A
The is getting good though.
- [101:01]
B
Yeah, the, the. Well, I don't want to contend with the crypto zoo people, but isn't like facial recognition is like one of the most valuable assets that people have because it's like, yeah, I can tell your intentions by your face. So it's a collection of systems is really what it is.
- [101:17]
A
You don't mean facial recognition? You mean like reading someone's face? Not just like, I know that that's Nick, but like I know that Nick's pissed or I know that Nick doesn't care.
- [101:26]
B
Exactly right.
- [101:27]
A
Got it.
- [101:27]
B
Exactly right. Like what? Your face, Your face don't even talk. Your face is telling me a lot, you know, so that ability is so fine tuned with people. So. And again, it's a collection of things. So it's not just, oh, his eyes are squinting, therefore this. No, no eyes squinting with this, you know, all this stuff. So the uncanny valley just doesn't get all of those systems in correct order is essentially what it is. Like the eyes don't squint enough. I can tell that's. That's fake, you know, and that uneasy. And even as people, we can't really say like, oh, the wrinkle in his cheek. There wasn't enough for me to be, you know, we don't know that. It's too. It's too fine tuned, you know, so the. So the computers, they just, they just send it. The resolution is not high enough. And the people. We can tell, we can't tell what we can tell, but we can still tell. So it feels weird. It feels uncanny.
- [102:20]
A
I'm just freaking pissed at the AI people because they freaking just what they did to my wife. Because my wife would like send me a meme or whatever, like a video and it would be like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And it'd be like a. A baby cow that like walks over and like jumps in the security camera footage. Yeah. And it's like a baby cow walks over and like, you know, licks the face of the little baby who then like jumps on it and rides away.
- [102:51]
D
Yeah.
- [102:52]
A
And maybe not that fantastic, but my wife probably sent me three or four of these videos where she was like, oh my God, you know, like her, she's the sweetest person. Just like her, her benevolent hope and humanity was like back, you know, and then I'd be like, that's just AI. And she'd just be so freaking disappointed. That like that little cow with the little bell around its neck with a little kid riding it, like, no, it's not real, hon. I'm sorry. It's terrible. Yeah, it's a terrible thing.
- [103:20]
B
But that's what it's going to become after a while. Where the Internet, if you see an Internet video, it's on, like by default. Not trustworthy. That's how it's gonna be. So it's like you gotta authentic and then these little companies are gonna pop up. Authenticator companies, you know, we are not.
- [103:34]
D
Trusting your videos online. Go to authenticator.com.
- [103:37]
B
Oh yeah, but that'll be the standard, right? Everything will be fake.
- [103:40]
D
It's a circle, right? There's a thing that happens. There's a solution. There's a solution.
- [103:45]
A
I posted a picture. I was gonna post a picture on Instagram of the sunset. And in this, I took a picture of the sunset and there was like refraction or reflection or something weird where the sun was here and Then up above it, there was like a little like another artifact. Yeah, like an artifact.
- [103:59]
C
Yeah.
- [104:00]
A
And I was like, oh, that sucks. And it kind of made the picture not look as cool. And I did something either with Instagram or with my Apple photos to like get rid of it, and it offered it to me. It was like, you know, hey, do you want to get rid of this thing? And I was like, cool. And I posted it on Instagram and the got labeled AI image. And I took it down and I was like, dude, that's kind of crazy.
- [104:25]
B
That's good.
- [104:26]
A
You know, it was a little tiny adjustment and it was like, this image has been altered by AI.
- [104:31]
C
Oh, man, the fitness model industry is.
- [104:33]
A
Going to be pissed.
- [104:36]
C
This ass is fatter from AI.
- [104:41]
A
Yeah. God, those, those. That's going to be crazy, isn't it? Because, like, you see some of those people do a picture of like, what they really look like. They'll admit, like, hey, this is what I really look like and this is what I look like in the picture. But, you know, as disturbing as that got for, like, Girls in the 80s and 90s when the magazine covers were, you know, unachievable physiques other than like just completely starve yourself and be anorexic and bulimic and the whole nine yards of what? Terrible, terrible. And now they're just getting that all day in these all day apps, all day, every day.
- [105:20]
D
There's a few creators who like, do stuff that like break down, like fitness people, which I think is actually good, especially as someone who has daughters, where the world's being thrown at them to be like, dude, this change, this about you, you look good, but you could look great, you know, like, I don't like that stuff and. Because, like, I'll see some of these people and like the telltale sign is like, you look behind them and like that staircase probably shouldn't do like this. All of a sudden it's like zipped, pinched, enhanced. And I'm just like, come on, man, do better. But you buy their fitness package and you can look like them too. It's just the same thing over and over again.
- [105:55]
A
AI is about to get more wild, huh?
- [105:58]
D
Yeah, I think Touch Grass Tuesday is the best solution.
- [106:02]
C
Definitely moving faster than the government. They are bunch of dinosaurs that don't know what's going on.
- [106:07]
A
Yeah, well, that's going to be. That could be very problematic, you know, like them trying to operate in the system of how long it takes for them to make changes and implement things. And this system is moving so rapidly that you just can't, you can't behave like that.
- [106:23]
C
The, the system itself doesn't move fast enough to keep up. You're correct. But the other problem is the people in charge of that system on average are what, 60 years old. I mean that's a youngin. We all saw the, the video of Mark Zuckerberg getting called before Congress and some 70 year old Congressman being like, can the Facebook app access my WI fi? Yeah, that's how the Internet where like you don't have the prerequisite knowledge to understand anything. You know what I mean? Like you don't know two plus two. And we're trying to explain it physics to you. Like it's impossible.
- [106:56]
D
Mr. Zuckerberg, how do ads work?
- [106:59]
A
God.
- [107:00]
C
Yeah, that's the worst. Yeah, well you're jocko. You don't have this problem. I don't know the worst. You were. I just like, I don't know ever. I've only been doing the YouTube thing for three years. So it's always like, oh, what do you like, I'll meet new people somewhere or something. Oh, what do you do for work? I'm a YouTuber and I just say I make videos on the Internet Internet. And you know, I'll be, there'll be some dinner with like doctors or whatever, you know, like successful people and they'll say that. And it's like 90% of the time their face is just like, gives me this look like loser. This guy's, this guy's married to a doctor and sits at home in his underwear making video games shit online all day. And I don't know, it's just, it's like my pet peeve. And it was, it was impossible to get a mortgage for a house. Being a YouTuber really. Oh dude, it's so bad. Try going to the bank and being like, I make, I make fart jokes on the Internet and that's how I make my money. They're like, ah, we'd rather you had a W2 from McDonald's like 100%. So like. But I was making enough money that they finally like it was a local bank and they like brought me in to the, the loan committee of just old bank people and they're like, so what do you do? I was like, I make videos on the Internet and the one lady on the committee did my pet peeve and she's like, what does your wife do? And I don't know why I let it fly this time but I just go, me.
- [108:28]
A
Did you get the loan?
- [108:29]
C
Oh, yeah. The other two guys on the committee were laughing their ass off.
- [108:35]
A
Yeah. I guess it is a weird. I guess it is a weird job to have. And I. I've. Because I. I've always done, like, a bunch of different things. Like, once I retired from the Navy, I was doing a bunch of different things. So I was. My. My answer, like, random person asked me. It's like, oh, I retired from the military. That's my answer. And that usually kind of usually diffuses the rest of the conversation. And I don't really, you know, have to go into, like.
- [108:56]
D
Well, yeah, because even do the business voice.
- [108:59]
B
Yeah.
- [108:59]
A
It's like, even, like, you know, what do you do? Because I don't. Because how.
- [109:03]
C
What.
- [109:03]
A
What do I do? But, like, I'm a writer. Like, I'm not. Like, I'm not going to say that.
- [109:09]
C
What. You know, the worst. The worst is, like, I'll be like, I make videos on the Internet. Oh, are you an influencer? Like, as much as I hate that title. Yeah, it fits. Unfortunately.
- [109:19]
D
Yes, I am.
- [109:20]
C
Yes, I am.
- [109:21]
D
I just tell people I'm jocko now.
- [109:23]
B
That's.
- [109:23]
D
That's what I do. They want to do I'm jocko, and I just exit the conversation.
- [109:27]
B
That's a job. Yeah.
- [109:29]
D
Oh, he's a jocko. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
- [109:33]
C
Right on.
- [109:33]
A
All right, well, does that get us up to speed? We got the Underwhelming Podcast. We see the. The Unsubscribed Podcast. We got the Fat Electrician YouTube channel. That's what we got going on. What did we miss anything?
- [109:46]
C
I don't think so.
- [109:47]
D
I don't think so.
- [109:47]
C
No. Drag you onto the Underwhelming podcast next.
- [109:50]
A
Looking forward to it, man. Awesome. And people can find you. So, Zach, veteran with a sign.com Instagram and Facebook, you're at Veteran with a side Twitter. X, you're at Zachary Bell.
- [110:01]
C
Yeah.
- [110:02]
A
And Nick thefatelectrician.com Instagram and YouTube is at the Underscore. Fat Underscore Electrician. And then Twitter X, your Fat Underscore Electrician, and your Facebook is the Fat Electrician official.
- [110:18]
C
Yes, sir.
- [110:20]
A
And like I said, your podcasts are the Fat Electrician Podcast, Underwhelming Podcast, and unsubscribe. Yep. That's Echo. You got any questions?
- [110:28]
B
Yeah. Back to your pec tear. What about your second one? How did you do that? Benching.
- [110:33]
C
First one was bench pressing, and the second one was just a freak accident doing jiu jitsu. Just, like, caught myself in a roll. But I think, like, it shouldn't have tore. So what I think happened, because it was about a year and a half after the first one. I think the first one got damaged having all like, this one blew. So I think this one took some damage with it. Also makes sense. And then I think a year or two of just like I was overcompensating everything on my right side because this one was still getting back to normal. So I think this one just got overworked and then it blew eventually too. So I think this one's a freak accident.
- [111:07]
D
Who are you rolling with when it happened?
- [111:09]
C
I don't know. Zach, who was it? Go ahead.
- [111:12]
D
I think it might have been me.
- [111:15]
B
Worst.
- [111:15]
D
The worst 10 minutes of my life. And when he stood up in his arm, moved with extra slack, my first thought was, oh, that's sucks. My second thought was, hell yeah. Thank God. Just pushing fire.
- [111:28]
A
Just like I. I had a neck problem and my. My arm like went kind of like not fully limp, but like way crazy pain and like way weak. And I was. I was training jiu jitsu at the time with a dude, and I like had to just summon the whatever ring of power from this movie you're talking.
- [111:53]
D
I had to like, I had to.
- [111:54]
A
Like summon that ring of power to like submit this dude and like say like, hey, thanks man. Good roll. And like walk off the mat and like crawl into a corner, hide, and like die inside.
- [112:05]
C
You just gotta get through the cool guy explosion. Walk away. And then I can cry.
- [112:09]
A
Freaking.
- [112:10]
C
I did it.
- [112:10]
A
And I was like, bro, I'm so screwed right now cuz my arm is just all like shitty and crazy pain. Yeah. So you got to just suck it up sometimes, like for that last. Did you finish the round?
- [112:21]
C
Huh?
- [112:21]
A
Did you finish the round?
- [112:22]
C
It was like right at the end.
- [112:25]
B
How's it now back 100%.
- [112:27]
C
I mean, I just. I don't know, I just kind of like made a deal with myself. I never bench more than 225, so I mean, I'll just sit there and rep out 225, but.
- [112:34]
B
And you said you were like 375.
- [112:36]
C
I was doing 375 the first time I tore it.
- [112:38]
B
And even that. What's your best bench?
- [112:40]
C
Huh? It was four plates on each side.
- [112:43]
B
So that's your best one. Yeah, well, 375, you're kind of in the red zone before injury. And how old were you at the time?
- [112:50]
C
27.
- [112:52]
A
Yeah, I was like, we're good.
- [112:53]
C
Yeah. I think it was the third rep though, and like, I've been able to do it 5 I mean, it wasn't even to the point where we were doing, like, shaky stuff.
- [113:00]
B
Right, Right.
- [113:01]
C
But I mean, it was literally. And it just went.
- [113:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're in. You're not in the red zone in. In that way. Yeah.
- [113:08]
A
Right.
- [113:09]
B
So we're not worried about. At 27 years old, third rep, like. Yeah. You're not worried. Worried about it?
- [113:15]
C
Yeah.
- [113:16]
B
Do you have, like, explosive style?
- [113:19]
C
Yeah, yeah. That was part of my problem because I, like, at the time, I was like, okay, well, for, you know, force times acceleration. Yeah. You know, So I was like, if I can do it faster, I can do more.
- [113:30]
A
Going west side.
- [113:31]
B
So Cake Nuts did the exact same thing with less weight. Cake. My friend Kicko. Yeah, he was a seal back in the day. So he. He just entered a contest, Right. Bench contest. And he was like, hey, I didn't know that your muscles could just, like, tear off the bone from your own, like, strength. So it's like your muscles are too strong for your body to hold it on. He's like, I didn't know that was a thing. I was like, bro, it actually is a thing. And there's a thing. There's a. It's called a Golgi tendon organ. There are these little things that, like, attach to your bones and muscles and stuff that basically it's like a little regulator that's like, hey, there's too much force being generated. So we kind of shut down your muscle a little bit.
- [114:09]
C
Sorry. But this is like. This is like the thing that gets overridden when you hear the stories about, like, the mom lifted the car off her baby.
- [114:17]
B
Exactly.
- [114:17]
C
Right, okay.
- [114:18]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [114:18]
B
And actually training, especially with the explosive style, but any kind of, like, strength, like, you know, power training, starts to override those. It. Sure, it improves the structure of your body as well, but it over one of the. The results is overriding those. Those Golgi tendon organs.
- [114:34]
A
So you overrode those and overrode them and overrode them, and then finally it's just like, yep, yeah, done.
- [114:39]
B
Like, you get enough.
- [114:40]
C
I don't need it. I'll push through it. Ah, that was actually an important part.
- [114:47]
B
Yeah, man. So it works so hard.
- [114:49]
C
Well, right on.
- [114:50]
A
Any closing thoughts? Nick, any closing thoughts?
- [114:52]
C
It's a good time.
- [114:53]
A
Right on. Zach, Anything.
- [114:56]
D
Stay. You're worth fighting for.
- [114:58]
A
Right on. Right?
- [114:59]
C
Yeah.
- [115:00]
A
Good message. Well, gentlemen, thanks for. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing lessons learned. Thanks for sharing some freaking good stories. Thanks for your service to the country and thanks for what you're continuing to do right now to make people a little bit smarter, a little bit happier, and a little bit better. Appreciate it.
- [115:16]
D
Thank you.
- [115:18]
A
And with that, Zach and Nick have left the building. Getting after it. Bench pressing.
- [115:26]
B
Yeah. Yes, sir. Hell yeah.
- [115:28]
A
I mean, what do you say?
- [115:30]
B
375, third rep. 375.
- [115:33]
A
27 years old.
- [115:34]
B
27 years old in the zone. Strong.
- [115:36]
A
You know, that's even at. Even at 27, when you're throwing around, what do you think you enter? Like, just yellow zone. Regardless of. Regardless of age.
- [115:50]
B
I mean, that's it. I mean, depends on how many reps he was going for, but any anywhere from one to three reps is. Is kind of yellow zone.
- [115:58]
A
So wait a second. You're saying when you're working with a weight that you can handle for one to three reps, you're in the yellow zone?
- [116:06]
B
You know what, though? At that age, I don't think so, to be honest with you. I. I think that.
- [116:10]
A
Remember what you felt like at 27. Yeah, bro. Like, whatever.
- [116:13]
C
Yeah, whatever.
- [116:14]
B
At me, whatever. Yeah.
- [116:15]
A
I don't care.
- [116:16]
B
Yeah, you're just gonna. You're gonna fail with the weight before you start tearing stuff off, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He. He said that he was. He thinks he injured it in that first one kind of a thing, so it was like a. Maybe like a partial going on.
- [116:30]
A
No. Injured the other one.
- [116:32]
B
Right.
- [116:32]
A
So first one sounded like it was just out of nowhere. Yeah, you're right.
- [116:36]
B
You're right.
- [116:36]
D
You're right.
- [116:36]
A
Out of left field, just gone.
- [116:38]
B
Yeah, it can happen for sure. Like, you know, like when you're running and you get a hamstring pull.
- [116:43]
A
Yeah. Have you ever heard about Achilles? People that tear their Achilles, and that seems to happen out of nowhere.
- [116:49]
B
Scotty Lewis. Tory is a key.
- [116:50]
A
Really? Scotty the legend.
- [116:52]
B
The legend of squatty Lewis.
- [116:54]
D
Yeah.
- [116:54]
B
Sorry. Well, it wasn't while he was walking those. When he. He was doing something, but it was one of those ones. It's not like he was, like, on the starting line of some intense sprint up a hill or something like this or. You know how you play basketball? Sometimes you pivot wrong or. I don't know. I think it was, like, something like. Kind of like you wouldn't think, but, yeah, it happens. That's a long recovery right there.
- [117:14]
A
Yeah.
- [117:14]
B
But he's back.
- [117:16]
A
Well, hey, try not to tear these things. Maybe. Maybe take some junk warfare. Take some super growth. Take some time war. That's what we're doing. Check out jockofuel.com. we get protein. So good. I'm having one right now, as a matter of fact. Little bit of 30 grams of milk. Ready to drink. Chocolate flavor, tasty. That's what we're doing. Jocko Fuel. You get a jockofuel.com, you can get it at a bunch of different stores. Including a bunch of different stores. So check it out. We make the best, we make the cleanest, we make the tastiest and the most efficacious. You know what I'm saying? I was gonna say effective, but I decided to step it up. My. My goat kicked in.
- [117:55]
B
Yeah.
- [117:56]
A
And I was like, no, we're not just gonna be effective. We're gonna be efficacious.
- [117:58]
B
Efficacious.
- [117:59]
A
So that's what we're doing. Check out that. Whatever you need, we got you covered. Hydration. I'm having that hydration too, which is freaking, as we like to say, GTG. That's what we're doing. So check out. Check out jockofuel.com. also check out originusa.com. we got American made clothing. We're talking a lot about American history, right? World War II, World War I. We won those wars with our manufacturing capability, we could out manufacture these other countries. And we gave that away. 70s, 80s, 90s. Gave away that manufacturing capability. Blew it. We're bringing it back. Origin USA.com. not communist. Not Origin USA.com munist. No, it's Origin USA.com. it's not communist at all. It's communist free. Jeans, boots, Geese. As a matter of fact, Nick was just asking me about, like. We had these work pants that we made for a while, and Gardner loved them too. I might have to talk to Pete. We'll have to bring those things back into the mix. They got like extra pockets on them. They're super heavy duty. They're.
- [119:03]
B
They're.
- [119:04]
A
They're awesome. They're awesome. You know, so we'll see. But we got jeans, we got hoodies, T shirts. We got everything that you need. Got that. Did you get the bonded fleece hoodie?
- [119:19]
B
No, I did. I did not.
- [119:21]
A
This thing is a technical piece of gear. It's a technical piece of gear.
- [119:24]
B
Okay.
- [119:25]
A
Wind, no factor. Rain, no factor. Warmth or cold, no factor. We just got you covered. Check out OriginUSA.com. we got you covered. Head to to toe. Head to toe.
- [119:34]
B
Beanie, socks, everything.
- [119:36]
A
Socks, boots, everywhere in between. Everywhere in between. Belt, we got you covered.
- [119:40]
B
All right.
- [119:41]
D
All right.
- [119:41]
B
Also, jocko store, jaco store.com. this is more apparel. Discipline equals freedom. Shirts. Got some hoodies on there. It's Almost hoodie season. Kind of is hoodie season for some of us.
- [119:53]
A
Some people, yeah, definitely. Especially by the time this comes out, it's going to be way deep in the hoodie season.
- [119:57]
B
True. Got some hoodies on there. Oh, worry kid stuff on there and kid stuff. So, man, if he is shopping still for Christmas at this time, like, oh, you want to get your kid a cool little shirt that he wants to represent? My boy wore his. Discipline equals freedom. He had a baseball scrimmage yesterday.
- [120:14]
A
How they do they. What position is he playing?
- [120:17]
B
He plays outfield.
- [120:20]
A
And yeah, I brought my kid. How old is he?
- [120:24]
B
Nine.
- [120:24]
A
I brought. My. My son was a little bit younger, but I brought him to, like, he wanted to play baseball. He's like, oh, you know baseball. That's what we're doing, you know.
- [120:31]
B
Hell yeah. Of course.
- [120:32]
A
I take him out there, bro. He's like picking dandelions in center field, not giving a about this. Once he realized how boring it was for him.
- [120:41]
B
Yeah, you know, I can dig it.
- [120:42]
A
They're like, hey, but the thing and the stuff, and he's just out there just not caring about any of it. He. He. Needless to say, he didn't have a long baseball career, and part of that was on me. And I've briefed you on this before. You know, kind of the way I manipulated the scenario was, oh, you want to play baseball? Cool. Don't give him any training.
- [121:00]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [121:01]
A
Have him go down there. He's not good at it because he hasn't trained at all. So I was like, this kind of sucks.
- [121:06]
B
Yeah.
- [121:07]
A
Meanwhile. Oh, like, well, how was Jiu Jitsu? Well, I choked three people. That's pretty fun. It seems like fun. Seems like I'm kind of good at that.
- [121:13]
B
And you're into it too.
- [121:15]
A
I happen to be.
- [121:17]
B
Let's see.
- [121:17]
A
So that's was.
- [121:18]
B
It's okay. Yeah, I dig it. And that would be the case. But I take. I take him up to the park and we hit balls and, you know.
- [121:24]
A
It'S like, you're better than I was.
- [121:25]
B
So he did. He did good in scrimmage, though. He did better than he did in all other games.
- [121:29]
A
So let's just hope he likes Jiu Jitsu, too.
- [121:31]
B
Yeah, well, we got mats at the house, so that's always. That's.
- [121:35]
D
Yeah.
- [121:36]
B
But nonetheless. Yes. So there's some kids stuff on there too. Also the short locker, which is a subscription scenario. Scenario. New design every month. People seem to like that one. So. Yeah. Subscribe on now and if you want, check it out. Go jocko store.com. click on the top button there says check out the shirt locker. Just a heads up for the store. Probably from here moving forward, this going to have something new in some capacity every month on top of the shirt locker. Shirt lockers every month. That's for, I'm saying from the store, you know, so whether it be new design or maybe we might release like one design from the shirt locker a few years ago.
- [122:12]
A
Got it.
- [122:12]
B
You know, something like this. Anyway, there's an email sign up thing if you want. I don't spam, so put your email on there and in there and I'll give you the heads up on everything.
- [122:20]
A
Once a month you'll be sending an email. Something new.
- [122:23]
B
Yeah, more. Yeah. Once a month. Ish. You know I'm not saying every single month, but that's, that's the goal. You know, something, something good, something relevant. See, I'm saying it won't be just some nonsense like hey, just checking it. No, not that kind stuff.
- [122:34]
A
Anyway it's all on jocko store.com bread on. Also we got some books. We got the book things my brother used to say written by Ryan Mannion if you want to check that out. Great book for your kids, for the neighbors kids, the whole nine yards. Of course I've written a bunch of warrior kid books and don't forget about leadership books. I've written a bunch of those and so has Dave Burke. Wrote a little something called the need to Lead. So check that one out. Echelon Front, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com if you want us to meet with you in your organization and get you squared away on leadership. Or if you want to come to one of our events, go to ESL front.com We also have an online training academy. We're on there live. I'm on there live. So if you want to join that, you can take courses that are pre recorded courses that have interactive tests and quizzes and learning and you can go to extreme ownership.com to learn the skill of leadership. So check that out. Also if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help the families, you want to help gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org also check out Micah Fink's organization, heroes and horses.org and finally Jimmy Mays beyond the brotherhood.org and if you were in Ramadi with us in 2006, 2007 with the one one ad. Go to ramadireunion20.com January 16th and 17th, 2026 down in Texas. We will see you there if you want to connect with us once again for Zach and Nick. We got Zach veteran with a sign.com Instagram and Facebook at Veteran with a sign and Twitter X at Zachary Bell. And then Nick, you can just find him@thefatelectrician.com he's also Instagram and YouTube at the Fat Electrician and then Twitter X Fat Electrician, Facebook, Fat Electrician Official and their podcasts that they have collectively are the unsubscribed podcast, the Fat Electrician Podcast and the underwhelming podcast. So check those out. Also check out for us jocko.com and then on social media, I'm Jocko Willink and echoes at Echo Charles, just as you know, don't spend too much time on there. It's a waste. Thanks once again to Nick and Zach for joining us and for sharing their knowledge with America and for your service to America. And thanks to all of our service members who right now as we're sitting here in an air conditioned room, they're staged around the world standing by to protect freedom and our way of life. And we thank all of you for that. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks for your service here at home and everyone else out there. You know, keep an open mind. Keep an open mind. When I, when I look at Nick and Zach, I see two, two guys who, you know, walked different paths in life. Some places those paths kind of overlapped a little bit. Some places they didn't. But they both had an open mind as they looked around and looked to look at the world and see what they could add to it, see what they could bring to the world. What could they do to help make the world a little bit better? Who could they help out? And I think if you open your eyes and you keep an open mind, you too can find a place where you can help someone else. And if you're doing that, then you're winning. And that's all I've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.