GMP Ep 122 Jason Blevins

Jason Blevins is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and former Chief Operating Officer at EPIC Midstream, overseeing operations and maintenance activities of pipeline and terminal assets throughout the country.

#thegabemolinapodcast #texas #airforce #afghanistan #oil #hotwife

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

And anyway, so she's coming by, and all of a sudden, and this is a like women only want what they think other women want. So as soon as this girl starts coming after me, I'll now all of a sudden my wife, my now wife, is interested. And I'm telling you, it it must have been two months. And I had asked her to marry me, and she said yes, and I was then back to Italy. And she was there for like another six months. She came out to Italy on her mid like R for a week. Uh spent with a month. So you committed quick. Yeah. And then I need to see his wife. When she did you actually ask her? Yeah. Oh, I thought you told her. No, I had a one. I had a one carat diamond sent to me in the mail to like ask her to marry me.

SPEAKER_09 0:50

So you were all in right away.

SPEAKER_05 0:51

Yeah, I was in love.

SPEAKER_09 0:52

I gotta see a picture of it.

SPEAKER_06 0:53

He was because I remember he was emailing her or like messaging me back way back in the day. And he's like, hey, I need you to go get me some hair fop. Like the hair product, like the black. And I'm like, in my head, and it looks I was like that. You're in the desert.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Why would you need that?

SPEAKER_06 1:10

I'm like, hey man, I'm gonna like it made sense, and he was like, I'm getting married. I'm like, oh, yeah. I was you were wooing somebody in the desert instead of shaving your head.

SPEAKER_09 1:21

What is courting a lady in the desert look like?

SPEAKER_04 1:25

It it's how do you run game in especially especially with a thousand other swinging dicks out there, you know, they're also in great shape and young and you're listening to the Game Molina podcast.

SPEAKER_09 1:47

Fellas, welcome to the podcast. Andre, welcome back. Jason, welcome. Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate you coming out, man. I appreciate I always love when Andre comes out, and then he brought brisket that smells delicious. But uh one thing that I want to tell you that I've been holding on to for 25, 30 years. I don't know. I want to thank you for getting me through Spanish class, man. This guy, I sat directly behind him in Miss Mendez class. I don't know what his Spanish was like. Mine was terrible. I didn't realize that my dad couldn't speak Spanish either. Cloche is not a uh Spanish word. But Jason would reach up to the clasp in front of us, pull up, pull the paper out of the out of the, you know, where you put it in when you're done at the end of the class. The bin. The bin. And he'd fill out his his spreadsheet and then he'd pass it mine, he'd fill mine out, put theirs back, and we got through it, man. That's right. So you know what? I like to think that part of your success is my success as well.

SPEAKER_04 2:49

You know what's funny, uh, Spanish class, because I've seen it with my kids now, I know you've seen it with yours, is it actually doesn't teach you to speak Spanish.

SPEAKER_09 2:57

No, not at all. Yeah, not at all. And conversational Spanish is uh it's more of like a formal Spanish, right? Like if you went to Mexico and uh talked in front of uh Parliament or whatever they have over there, maybe, but like when you go to uh Couple Street to go get a piñata, that's not the Spanish they're talking either, man. It's Tex-Mex, you know.

SPEAKER_04 3:18

And and that's that's a little bit crazy to me because think about it. You what, two years of Spanish, maybe we took? Now they're taking four years. Like my son is taking four years of Spanish.

SPEAKER_06 3:27

I think the fourth year is but kind of if you really want to do the advanced.

SPEAKER_04 3:32

So they're like, you know, conjugating and all the other kind of stuff that we did. I think maybe they just take longer to do what we did. But if they just took that time, that hour every day, and did like what you would if you were gonna decide on your own to learn Spanish, these kids would be speaking Spanish. Yeah, but they don't. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 3:49

For the record, I failed it in high school. And I speak it, read it, and write it.

SPEAKER_09 3:53

You couldn't reach the other classes.

SPEAKER_06 3:54

Couldn't do the conjugating and any of the grammar. You just know how to speak it, read it, and write it.

SPEAKER_09 4:01

And and your parents probably spoke Spanish well. Mine never did, and it's funny because I'll talk to people down, they're like, How come you don't know any Spanish? And even dad told me at one point, uh, he gave me this guilt trip when I was like 28. And he's like, you know what? I don't understand. He's like, You and your friends are that are Mexican, y'all never learn Spanish, and you're leaving your culture behind. I said, You know why I didn't learn Spanish? I said, You never taught me, you know. I said, What when when you and mom would talk about Christmas gifts or somebody being sick and you talked about it in Spanish, and I'd say, hey, what did that mean? You would say, Don't worry about it, go to the other room. You know what I'm saying? I was like, So, so whose fault is this really, big guy? But man, you've had a pretty interesting go at life so far. Uh one thing I find amazing is um is Under said you might be retired already, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah. Uh and you know, Thomasy, I think, recently retired. Uh a few other people, and I'm sitting there going, I still don't even know what I want to do with my life.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:01

I I'm kind of I would say quasi-retired. Um, I'm still, you know, meeting once a week with, you know, we this is kind of starting at the end, but we just sold uh three companies I was the chief operating officer for. Um we sold a olfin's business, we sold a uh NGL business, and we sold a crude business all within the span of uh 12 months, which was actually really unusual. Um, and to three different buyers. You know, we uh Howard bought the Olphans business, which is a local uh oil and gas company in San Antonio, quite a big one. Um P66 bought our NGL business. Uh we had the two fractionators down in Robstown. I don't know if you've seen those down there, and uh in a large uh NGL pipeline coming out of the Permian, as well as the Eagle Fruit. Um, and then we had a crude business that was a big 30-inch pipeline um out of the Delaware um and Midland basins all the way down to Corpus. And we had uh you know uh crude export uh terminal there. And we sold that one to uh Planes All American, which was my former company, um which was a that was an interesting sales process.

SPEAKER_06 6:10

The irony there, if you can imagine.

SPEAKER_04 6:12

But yeah, so we sold all of those, um, which is great because normally you sell one thing and you kind of you know you kind of slowly tell off. Um and the the fund that our parent company was Aries, uh private equity, and uh you know they were wanting to close those funds out, so there's no other, you know, buy this one, sell this one, like private equities typically do. They want to get out of the energy business um in general, and so we kind of all were at, you know, from the executives, you never stay with the companies that you sell, especially when you sell to like a bigger operator. And so we were all over the last, and I think it's been a cause the buyout's so high. No, you know, it's just they're not gonna take me to replace the COO at P66, for example.

SPEAKER_09 6:55

They already have a Jason Blevins on the other.

SPEAKER_04 6:57

Yeah, they do. Gotcha. Um, and usually like the corporate and the GNA, one of the things that makes it a an attractive buy for them and an attractive sell for us is they just absorb us into their GNA. So, I mean, that's just typical. Um, but yeah, so so it's kind of trickled off, but the CEO, myself, and our general counsel are still meeting once a week. We still talk to potential other uh private equity funds, see if there's anything interesting to do. And so to me, I'm at a point in life where you know, if I find something interesting that I would actually want to go to work to do, then I'm on the lookout for that. You know, something like we were actually very, very close to doing a massive project in Argentina. I was down in Buenos Aires a few times uh over the last eight months, um, ended up not going our way. Uh went to an it was the final between us and an Argentinian company. And uh, but something like that, which would be putting like a baseline infrastructure in for them to be for their kind of new renewal in Argentina and kind of being, you know, it's a legacy thing. So something like that I would do. Or if there was an old legacy company that somebody had just run into the ground and I came in and fixed it, that would be interesting to me. So but but just but real quick, but taking on just going and doing something like um just to have a you know, to go to work and stuff, that's not something I'll do now. So if none of those opportunities come along, it could be even something completely different, then then maybe I'll do it, but if not, then I'm retired. That's kind of I I saw I say quasi.

SPEAKER_09 8:29

Well, I like that, man, because like I'm opposite. I'm begging for some somebody, please throw me something. So to be able to be comfortable enough in in just in your skill set, right? To be able to say, hey, you know, I know what I want, and I'm gonna chill till I find it. You know, what one thing that I think is cool is like uh it sounds like you're a builder, right? It sounds like you're you want to come in. And that's kind of everywhere I've been, I've come, and that's kind of part of the p appeal of it. I just never made any money doing it, but I liked coming into a company that needed to be built, yeah, right? That needed structure, that needed processes, that needed all that stuff, right? Because uh uh I've done it before, you know. Now, not alone, you know, with a team of guys, and we'd sit down and we'd brainstorm what's the most efficient way to do X, Y, and Z, and you know, how can we be more profitable, all that other good stuff. Like I always enjoyed that. And now that I'm older, I sit there and go, I'm uh I almost get to the point where it's like I don't want to start over again, right? I don't want to I want to come someplace where they have their shit together, and you know, I can come in and make it better or make it more efficient, and you know, but I'm not having to start from scratch again because it's a lot of energy for you. It's a lot of energy for sure.

SPEAKER_04 9:46

That's what I'm saying. So you gotta yeah, it has to be something that you really want to put your heart into. And to me, right now, um time is the most valuable thing, you know. So to me, if I'm gonna spend my time doing something, it's got to outweigh you know, spending time with my wife and kids and doing things like that. So we do play golf once a week, too, so that would cut into that. So the right opportunity, I would go, you know. I haven't gotten any better playing once a week.

SPEAKER_09 10:14

So you know, I was talking to uh we we all have a mutual friend Benny. Benny Kanthu. Yeah, and uh we're talking the other day. Every now and then we do like little TikTok videos or you know, where we just go live and talk shit about you know old guys talking about things. And we were talking the other day, and uh we're talking about time with family, and and I told him uh, he said, You're the boodle, right? Uh he says, you'll you carry the heavy load, you'll do all the work. He goes, You need to stop being that. And it's like I told him, I said, you know what's weird is like I like being the voodle, right? Yeah now I want somebody to take care of me, right? I want I don't want some, I want somebody to go, hey man, if we give him all this, he'll do it. But let's not give him all this because we're gonna burn him out, we're gonna kill him, you know? But at the same time, like I I always told people this when I worked at the jail. They say, What's the best part about working at the jail? I said, the best part about working at the jail is when the shit hit the fan, you had to deal with it. And then what's the worst part about working at the jail? I said, the worst part about working at the jail was when the shit hit the fan, you had to deal with it. You know, so it just depended on like my attitude, right? That day or that week or whatever. But like, I like the feeling I get when I have accomplished something that when I started that process, I didn't feel like it was manageable. And I always equate it to like cutting a tree down, right? I always tell everybody, don't look at the tree, just look at where you're hitting and keep swinging.

SPEAKER_04 11:42

No, I'm telling you, anybody on in any um career, work, whatever, um, and I found this in the last company I was at, we filled our ranks with guys like this. It's um if you can put somebody in a position to prove something to themselves that they didn't believe they could do, you have them for I mean, you have them as long as you want. And we had guys with chips on their shoulders that came in, you know, all from these other big companies. And um, I can tell you right now, if we went and did something and I called those guys, because a lot of them, most of them operations or engineering, they went with the asset that we sold, right? So, but they would come in a heartbeat just because you know, like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna feed you, don't worry, I'm gonna we're you're gonna get taken care of financially and everything else. But yeah, so you know, when when you when you go somewhere and you're not just slogging through it, you're actually you come out the other end with confidence and ability and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_09 12:34

I mean, it's well that's rewarding. Like we were talking about earlier, like I've always been super cocky. Uh too cocky. And it's funny because like I've two jobs ago, I've had a lot lately, uh, but I think two jobs ago, we had a conversation, they had a position open for safety manager, right? I had no clue how to do it. I know nothing about it, I don't have a background in it.

SPEAKER_04 12:58

But that would probably make you one of the better ones that I've seen.

SPEAKER_09 13:01

Well, what's funny is the guy that left that position was a great guy, but he was a knucklehead. And part of my uh I guess my throwing my hat in the ring was I can at least do what he was doing, you know? And I've always felt like I'm the type of person, and maybe this is me being naive, but I've always felt like I'm the type of person where I tell everybody I can learn anything. Give me enough time, give me enough information to to digest. Because that's what I do now. I learned it on my own, you know. And uh I'm like, I can learn anything. And so I remember going to my department manager and saying, hey man, you know, I know I've been doing this job forever, but this came open. There's not a lot of managerial jobs that come open, so when they do, I want to throw my hat in the ring. And he goes, uh like fear was in his face, kind of like, oh no, like I don't want to have this conversation with you. So our division manager came in, and uh she's cute, but uh and uh we go outside, we go to the tailgate gate of the truck, which is like where I like to do everything, right? Let's go to the tailgate, we'll talk about it. And uh she said, So you want to go after this position? I said, Yeah, I want to throw my hat in there and see if what happens. And she goes, I can't let you do that. I said, Really? Why? And she said, You're too important to the role you do now. There's nobody else to do it. You're good at it. And honestly, at the role that I was at, I was the only one doing it. My buddy Rich was the other guy doing the HVAC, all of it. And then we had like six electrical guys. So I said, So you I've painted myself in a corner. Like, you know, I worked hard, I got good at a thing, and now I can't leave that because you need me there. No, no, no, no, that's not it at all. But in reality, that's what it was. And I ran into that at another job too, where it was kind of like you it was uh you're too important to production. And and like I get it. If I was a manager and I had a guy like doing his job well and I didn't have to worry about it, I don't want him to leave that spot. But at the same time as the guy doing that job, you go, fuck man, I got I gotta jump ship. Like the conversation I had with this company I'm leaving currently, that was part of it. I said, Look, man, I've been at a lot of places where we've built departments, and I never chased money. I was loyal, I became friendly with those people, they knew my family, I knew their family. You know, we were close. But the money never showed up, even when things got good, even when things got efficient.

SPEAKER_04 15:37

So, so without even knowing the company you're at, I'll tell you what was wrong with it. Okay?

SPEAKER_09 15:43

You are fucking handsome. We talked about that earlier. Like the eyes, man. Anyway, I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 15:49

All right, I'm uncomfortable. Um, so so think about this, right? Here here's the here's the problem with that with the company. I I'm assuming you're in production, so you were involved in doing what the company did to make money.

SPEAKER_09 16:03

Right.

SPEAKER_04 16:04

They weren't out there to safety doesn't make money. Safety's a cost center. So you were wanting to leave what made the company money to go to a job where they that doesn't make money. Um their problem was because they could quite frankly, if you have a good operation, usually safety doesn't report into operations, right? Because they say it has to be conflict of interest, they they report somewhere else. They should not be paying that person more than somebody that's actually making money for the company. I mean, that's black and white, and depending on like the size of the company or those kind of things. But in reality, what they've done is they you have an HR department that goes out to the market and looks like, what does an HR person make? Right. And now these HR people have like degrees, like HR degrees, or not HR, uh safety degrees and all this kind of stuff. But I'll tell you, even when I was at a Fortune 100 company, running like half their operations with plans all Americans. I you know, we had guys, um, you know, each region had their own safety manager and et cetera. And what I told my guys is like, listen, first of all, safety doesn't set the culture, the supervisors do. The guys that are running men in the field. And I was like, let me just give you an example. If you had the best and a region could be like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, that's a region, right? I was like, if you and so you and then you had a headquarters there, had a safety guy, safety director, maybe, or manager, whatever it was. And I said, if you had the best possible guy in the world, right, as your safety, your regional safety director, and you had supervisors in the field who took shortcuts and and you know didn't take pride in what they were doing and didn't watch out for their guys, do you think you would have a safe operation going out there? And they would immediately say no. And I'd say, okay. Now assume you had the worst safety guy. You didn't even come up to come to work, but you had supervisors that took pride in what they did, looked after their guys, didn't take shortcuts. Would you have a safe job? Would you have a safe work environment? Yes. That should tell you how important that safety guy is. Right? It it only matters the guys that are actually doing what the company does, like because and you've seen it now. I mean these whether it's HR or safety or any of these things that are like peripheral to what a company does, they always get way too much power. And I'll tell you an example. Like if you have a company where all of a sudden the safety numbers start going real bad, they actually start giving the safety department more people that don't do what the company does. It's just the craziest thing I've ever seen. And I've always thought that way, like the opposite of all that stuff, whether it's HR or safety or any of these other things. And so I I've never understood that. Anywhere I've gone, I've changed it. So I was telling, like, you you know, recently you've seen all these founders like the Elon Musk class and and even newer than him, these these guys that are all these AI and stuff, they've just done away with HR departments, just done away with them. Because all they did was create barriers to what the company was trying to do.

SPEAKER_09 19:07

You know what's interesting is is uh a few jobs ago, uh that's how I that's how I describe these companies. One of them started out as a mom and pop shop uh and tried to hold on to the idea that they were a small mom and pop country place full of good small town people. Yeah. And it was interesting because I got there at the tail end of that, but it eventually merged into hey, our lawyers want us to do this, our lawyers want us to do that. Uh we can no longer uh you know submit this document to our client because the lawyer says it's too vague and it might get us in trouble. And it was interesting because like I would tell my I had a buddy that worked at, we we've always worked together. I said, it's interesting because have you noticed? I said, every time we get in a company email, it's our lawyers told us this, you know, HR wants us to do that. And I said, and we're we we're no longer what they think that we are. Yeah, you know, and uh and it changes the culture, man. Yeah, you know, I've been at a place once before uh where everybody was like-minded, everybody was on the same page, everybody cared about each other, about the company, about the work we did, the quality, you know, and it was one of those things where it's like, hey Jason, you've got a lot of work and me and Andrea are done. I don't know what you do, but I can help you, right? Yeah, you want me to type something up, you want me to, you know, check something for for uh, you know, uh um make sure it's written correctly, things aren't misspelled, give it to me. Yeah, like we would jump in, and it was funny because like I got super spoiled there because I thought that's how it was everywhere. And then when I went everywhere else, it was not that way. And it was funny because I was always chasing that, like I always wanted to build that, and I would even tell in our my reviews, hey, when I was here, this happened, and let's build that. It turned out as a rare thing, at least in the industry that I was in, in the location I was in. It was it turned out to be pretty.

SPEAKER_04 21:03

Yeah, because you're it was it was a company with good culture, everybody's pulling in the same direction. Yeah, that's usually what that is. And then you get to these other ones when you start having lawyers or um buyouts, and where people are starting to try to cut margin without knowing what they're cutting, you know, those kind of things. Instead of trying to grow revenue, they start trying to cut costs, those kind of things. I mean, you it just everybody starts pulling in this, you know, looking out for themselves, you know, who moved my cheese. Don't even know like how they contribute to company profitability, they don't even know. They don't care because they're not paid to care. You know, they're just they're paid to fill out the paperwork correctly, and so that's what you get.

SPEAKER_09 21:42

It's right, you know. I told Andre the other day, I said, I need to talk to your wife because I don't understand corporate culture. You know, but there's a lot of things that you're saying where it's kind of like, oh fuck, man.

SPEAKER_04 21:51

You know, I I'll tell you, and you know, if if if when we if we go back and I kind of walk through, I'll tell you the point that that became clear in my career.

SPEAKER_09 21:59

That was my next question because. I knew something happened to you. I mean, you've always been a good dude. You know, you come from a good family and a small community. So, I mean, it's not like your night and day of who you were when you were younger. But when you showed up and you gave that speech at the high school graduation, it was it was one of those things where I hate high school graduations because the speech is always you're the class that's gonna be different. You're gonna change the world, you blah, and you came in and basically in a nutshell said, uh, if you don't, if you don't become somebody, you're not gonna become somebody kind of thing. It's up to you. You gotta put the work in. And uh you can stay somebody who ain't shit, but you don't have to, but it requires a lot of effort.

SPEAKER_04 22:45

Yeah, and and you know, the the because you know, I I probably took two months writing that.

SPEAKER_09 22:52

Um I want to say when you got done, I I quietly to myself went, oh snap.

SPEAKER_04 22:58

Well, I I I did. I took like two months writing that um and rewrote it a couple of times, and I because you know you don't want it to be too long. Um, but I wanted to I wanted those kids to be able to go back and look at it, and that's why they asked me for a uh like a printout of it, and I gave it to them, and I think they put it online for something. But I wanted them to go back and look at that and be like, yeah, you know, when they were at some point younger than most of us realize that kind of stuff and say, because I knew they weren't gonna quite understand what I was saying being 18-year-old kids, but um but look back and that helped them make that leap that I made probably in my late 20s. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 23:36

Well, you know, I feel I feel like there's a lot of uh, especially nowadays in particular, like I they should read that speech at everybody's graduation, but it's kind of like you know, I feel like we fill our kids with um a false sense of who they already are. Yeah, and it's like you can be whatever you want to be, yeah, but we forget to tell them it requires a lot of work and dedication. It's not just, hey, I want to be a fucking astronaut. Yeah, you know, where when we were kids, I don't know about y'all, but uh, you know, dad had a seventh grade education, you know, mom was a very passive lady. Uh so I've I always felt like dad never felt, even though he was the dominant parent in the family, I don't feel like dad ever felt like he had a leg to stand on when it came to education and stuff like that. Work ethic, yes. But dad was content with us going to.

SPEAKER_04 24:37

That is exactly. My dad never said a word to me about grades. Really? Ever. Not one. My mom, you know, I would say up until high school, at which point I, you know, went home maybe three, you know, I didn't see George West. I stayed home every three nights and I was with buddies or whatever. Yeah. But my mom was, I mean, iron rod, all A's, you know, up until I was probably through junior high. Um, and then it was on my own, so I can learn, but my dad never said a word to me. And I think it was the same way because he felt like he didn't have a right.

SPEAKER_09 25:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:08

You know, I don't know. It takes people to help you, right? Like you're saying, helping you set expectations. I mean, a counselor, any counselor, school counselor, to me, their expectations should be higher than whatever a kid's expecting though. Yeah. I think she I think I'm related to her. Yeah, it might be. Um, but you know, uh, unless you're at one of these really good schools and you have really successful parents, um, I mean, my kids, they have the benefit of us having huge expectations for them. And, you know, for me growing up, I mean, I was doing well in school. You know, wasn't trying real hard, but you know, doing well is George West. And um, you know, everybody's everybody's friends there, so it wasn't like clicks or anything that I fell into. But I would say uh Lana Holland for me, because she was really good friends with my mother growing up, you know, she was you know math in high school, so she would not let me like miss anything, right? Just and then the other one, uh probably the largest one for me, and academically and where I went to school was Tim Holt. Um you know, he just decided uh, you know, hey, you're going to Air Force Academy. You know, my dad was military and my grandfather was, you know, they were all airborne and everything, but it wasn't something that I was like, you know, Chad McNeil, you know, knew everything about the Air Force Academy. But you know, Tim Holt, you know, he knew my background. Um, and you know, we had Ivy League schools coming down that I was talking to, you know, for a while, and he was like, No, you're going you're going to Air Force Academy. So I ended up there, and I think that just set me out on the right path. It's a it's a tough place to go, you know, uh, you know, from a disciplined perspective and everything. But um, you know, and then going through there, you get thrown in where everybody's like, you know, hard charging cream of the crop. And so you just get lifted with that. Um, and so I think I kind of got lucky there um that that I had people like that that that pushed me to do that, you know, starting with my mother, obviously, from a um from a school perspective, it's like all A's are you know, we're gonna have a problem. Yeah, which is funny because she didn't really do that with you know, I'm the second of nine kids, and I don't remember her doing that with my younger siblings. Maybe she did, I don't know. Or older.

SPEAKER_09 27:26

Yeah. Well, you know, it's it's funny because like um in doing this podcast, when I talk to people who are who've done well or have uh their shit together, um there's always been this mentorship from somewhere, whether it was a a lifelong mentorship or maybe it was uh uh a summer or you know a year. It it's like having somebody going, hey man, um Tim Holt looking at you and going, You're a good fit for the Air Force. Yeah, you didn't know that. I didn't know that. He knew that. He knew it. And and like that helps to be able to go, uh fuck, I guess I'm going to the Air Force, right? Yeah, it you know, even for and you know, my mentality when I was younger was just like uh I tell everybody I wanted to do what my dad did. I don't know. Yeah, you know, uh dad worked at U.S. Steel, hell everybody worked at U.S. Steel. Uh, you know, then there was the refinery and the prisons, and I remember like uh before I followed you to B County, like two weeks before that, I was like, I guess I'm going to uh electric school where Joe went and go work for Scott Electric in Corpus for a little while and go from there. Like that's what Joe did. You know, and it wasn't like uh, you know, even going to B County was like uh it was a stretch. You know, I always tell people, like, you don't understand growing up in George West in uh you know the 80s and early 90s.

SPEAKER_04 28:54

It's like that was your world. Yeah, because you know, the internet didn't exist. I mean, the early, but not you, we were not exposed to all the everything that was going on out there. There wasn't Twitter. Now these kids, they're exposed immediately to everything that's going on all over the world. Yeah, so they know, you know, hey, I want to do what this guy does, or I want to do that, but for us is whatever we saw, right?

SPEAKER_09 29:18

Yeah, yeah, and it, you know, it's it's interesting because like uh uh to see you now, like you've experienced a whole lot of things, even talking earlier about when it was time to call it quits, yeah. Like that takes a lot of balls, man, to be able to go, hey, you know what? This isn't fulfilling, you know. I'm like my kids are at a good age where I need to be around, right? They're not tiny, where they forget that daddy's been gone a long time. You know, they're not old enough to where they're doing their own thing, you know, outside of the house. Yeah, it's important for me to be here, you know. And same thing for Andre, it's important for me to be here. And like for me, we kind of touched on it earlier, but for me, it's I've always been like, dude, I don't even know why my wife's still with me. Because there's times where it's like we'd get tickets to go to a show in the valley or in Houston or whatever, you know, and we're leaving right after work. And then I call her at three o'clock and I'm like, call some friends and take off because I'm gonna be in late, you know. I mean, that's part of it, right? I'm sure I'm sure all you guys have done the same thing. Yeah, but it's like at a certain point to be able to go, uh, I need to reprioritize stuff, you know, and maybe down the road when the kids are gone and they're older and they've moved on and they're in college, you go, you know what? Fuck, I want to get throw my hat back in the ring. Yeah, you know, because there's a little bit of especially what you guys were describing earlier, you know, that kind of that this sounds stupid, but it's there's a lot of action in that kind of work, right? Oil and gas and construction, and it's like when when you're kind of manning the ship and everybody's rolling in the same direction and shit's getting done, yeah. I mean, it's kind of a dopamine kick to that man.

SPEAKER_04 31:04

Yeah, no, it it is, and and like I said, you know, it's it's gotta be something you want to throw yourself into. And even right now, you know, I've gotten calls um, because you know, from being a uh an officer at Plains All American, which is like a Fortune 100, and then you know being the CO here, you know, there's there's not it's a small group of folks that are and so when somebody in that industry is looking for that, you know, like you know, whether it's in Houston or Dallas or Oklahoma City or wherever, they don't go to Denver.

SPEAKER_09 31:34

They don't go to LinkedIn, they say, Hey Jason, that's right.

SPEAKER_04 31:36

Do you want to do this? That's right. Right. And so, but even then, and and I say, Listen, my son's gonna be a senior, my daughter's gonna be a sophomore, I'm not leaving Marion, Texas. I'm not pulling on my kids that already moved around a lot, I know Andres have to. And you know, the initial thing will be like, well, you could do like a um hybrid schedule, hybrid schedule. And I'm like, if that's what you're looking for, that ain't me. Because that role, or any role that I would be interested in, I couldn't do from home. It requires way more than because it's you know it's full full steam ahead, you know, being in, you know, you gotta be willing to outwork everybody in the company, you know, you're working to make them better and work make the company better, and uh especially from a leadership perspective, doing that like two days from home is not yeah, you know, maybe if you're doing something really technical, that might work, but you know, for me, I'm like, no, it's if I'm gonna take something, it's gonna be like I'm gonna be there later than everybody else, I'm gonna be, you know, there.

SPEAKER_09 32:39

That's kind of the problem that I've run into with this job that I'm at right now, because it's 100% work from home. Yeah. And I manage to work with some of the younger people, and and and I think it kind it goes well to some degree. It's very technical. Yeah. But uh uh, but I find that I don't stop working, especially when it's across the country and somebody in Arizona's, you know, two hours behind me, you know. So her lunchtime is two o'clock for me. You end up just always being at work, always working, you know, and then it gets to the point where we're in this weird place right now. My wife and I, my father-in-law's been sick, so she's been staying with him. So it's literally just me at the house. Yeah, and you don't want to come to my house because there's dirty underwear, it's like a frat house, it's terrible. Uh, I really shouldn't live that way as a 50-year-old. But like, so I sit there and go, fuck, let me keep working. You know, I mean, I have the deadlines, I've got plenty of stuff that needs to get done. Uh, I don't have to uh let me just keep going. And I had a conversation with Bojon the other day. I said, man, I and this this is a very negative thing, but uh I said, dude, I need to be careful. I said, because I'm getting to the point where I'm comfortable just worrying only about me. You know, Nita called me, it was a it was a Saturday, and uh actually it was a Friday night. She said, hey, let's do lunch tomorrow. She didn't let her dad. And I remember my I didn't tell her, if she listens to this, she'll know, but my first thought was fuck. I got my day planned tomorrow. You know, I got a meeting at nine, I was gonna work till this time, I was gonna call mom and have an hour conversation with her, and I had all this stuff planned out, and you weren't part of it, you know, and it was funny because I was talking to Bo about it, and Bo goes, dude, I'm the same way. He's like, he's like, our calendars are always full. And Kelly will be like, hey, let's go to dinner tonight, let's go do a little date, something. And Bo's like, I got a meeting. I got it all that way. Right. And it's like it to be able to sit there and go, hey, I'm gonna get out of this stuff for a while, because it's addicting, right? It's addicting being able to be the man at your job. You know, it's it's addicting to be successful at something that you've committed yourself to a career, but to be able to go, my family's important too, because they're important, we all know that, but it's like they I got to tie it together. I got time, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:08

You know, because you know, if you lost it, nothing else would matter. Right. And it's just hard to make, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:15

No, you're in that introspection is tough. So where did you acquire all this, man? Was it in the Air Force?

SPEAKER_04 35:21

No, I mean, um Was it from your family or no? I mean, yes, I was, you know, I had a good family. Um, you know, raised right, like we all are in George West. Um most. Yeah, most. Um but yeah, you know, one, um, but yeah, I can tell you, coming out of coming out of um George West, even coming out of the Air Force Academy, like looking back, I still look, you know, we all thought you were really smart, and everybody tells you you're so smart and uh Air Force grad and all that, but I looking back, I'm I still was um ignorant, you know. Ignorant, I mean I guess young, uh, some people come to it. Probably people that have harder lives come to it a little, maybe introspection a little bit more. But I would say until I was oh maybe 20, right around when I got married is when I really started, when I was doing starting to make decisions like leave the Air Force, um, despite being on a really you know fast track, um and and really started throwing myself out and realized like there's nothing that you can't do or try to do, right, if you're not afraid of failure. So I started doing that, and then um doing 17-hour days while I'm doing that, and then starting to come to the realization uh like a a hard realization that you are trading this for that. And I actually made I mean Andre knows my wife really well. I I I can't tell you how lucky I am. She's um so I was doing all this stuff.

SPEAKER_09 37:05

Is your wife the one that works at uh in the brothels?

SPEAKER_04 37:08

No, no, my wife's Jeremy's wife. That's Jeremy's wife. Okay, I'm sorry. No, my my wife's a radiologist. Okay. So, you know, that's undergrad, med school, uh residency, and you know, radiologists are like cream of the crop uh doctor type, you know, top 10% minimum to even get into radiology.

SPEAKER_09 37:26

I married a school teacher.

SPEAKER_04 37:28

Anyway, I'm sorry. But so you know, she did all this while I was in the Middle East or in India or in Turkey. Did you have kids at the time? We yes. Um we got married and That's a big load for her. Maybe 12 months later, my son showed up. Um but yeah, and she was so she was uh at one point in California for a year. And my son was in kindergarten, my daughter was three, and she was the only radiologist at 29 Palms, which is a big marine training base there. And so she would get called up at two in the morning. And there's no family there, there's no you know, daycare. And so she would drive 20 miles to the base and be like with my kids sleeping on the floor in her office, like doing reads, you know, right? And so she did that, and then from there went to corpus. That's why I had the place out on the island in the corpus because my kids went to uh like primary school, I guess it is, on the island at the charter school there. But you know, and then she was there, and I lived in Houston and would come down on weekends. And it's funny, my daughter's a great artist, by the way. He well, I have to talk a little bit about it. I don't know where she got it, but she's just like great artists. She used to draw these pictures of the family, and it'd be like my mom, my son, and her. I know where the stories go. And I'd be like, Allie, where where am I at? And she would point and there'd be like a little spider in the window. And she's like, There's daddy's spider. And I was like, I was like, Oh, no matter what we we do, we're gonna need to live together. Um, and so then, but you know, when she got out, uh she was still Navy, and then she got out and moved to Houston, and you know, we lived there for four or five years before I moved to San Antonio. And then the last couple years, though, here she was, you know, radiologists can work from home now. And so that's why we were able to move here. Um, and she had her office in our house, and you know, my kids were in uh my son was a freshman, maybe I think my daughter was uh seventh grade. Um, and uh, you know, she stressed out because radiology is all about how fast can you read these things now? You know, um there's a thousand studies a day, you know, just crazy stuff. X-rays are the easy ones, and my wife was like more of a um her fellowship was in like body, so it's all like the cancers and you know, so I mean that's that's real fucking important she gets her job done correctly. Yeah, and fast. Yeah, because it's all about speed now, you know. They need to get through these patients, and they're trying to cut, you know, private equities own all the radiology companies, and she was always stressed out, and she worked um like every other weekend. You know, we always have stuff with the kids, so I said, Hey, and this is a good position to be in, but I'm like, why are you doing it if you don't if it stresses you out? Like the money you make doesn't change anything for us. And so finally talking to you. Jason was like, I make a fuck ton of money. No, but you know, but for her, you know, but for her, that was the thing. I'm like, why why are you doing this? And and sometimes I thought she would think like I could leave her or something, which I could never leave my mom.

SPEAKER_09 40:38

Well look, I was gonna ask you that. Was there was there ever a time where that was a stress to where not in my mind, okay?

SPEAKER_04 40:45

But I couldn't figure out why she wouldn't stop working. Um so she had that concern, and she finally, I'm like, I know you get the most joy out of being a mom. And so she finally, like what two years ago, something like that, stopped um, stopped working. And she still kind of stays current, like other radiologists always still send her stuff to look at because they always want to suck an opinion. But yeah, so she doesn't, she's she's a mom now, she's a great mom.

SPEAKER_09 41:11

That's a that's a lot on her, man. You know, being alone with the kids, you know, having family nearby when they came to Corpus, but in California, not, you know, not only doing her job, but also I'm sure there is a portion in there where she's still learning her job, you know, and having the kids and having you in another country that's dangerous, you know, it's like it's it's interesting because when you describe all that, it's like man, she had a lot on her fucking shoulders.

SPEAKER_04 41:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She did. And so I I mean, like to me, you know, I I legitimately made those decisions knowing, I mean, luckily she was strong enough to to do it, but knowing that at some point I would be able to um put a you know make uh put us in a better position overall with a with the sacrifice of that. So um, but yeah, I mean it's I've been now I've been living with them for since they were you know 11 or 10 or something, but for like between three or four and that it was kind of like touch and go.

SPEAKER_09 42:14

How how was it when you came back, so to speak? I mean that's not the way the right way to say that.

SPEAKER_04 42:20

You know, I it's funny because like you mean when they moved when we started living together again full time?

SPEAKER_09 42:25

What was it? Oh, it was great. Okay, so it wasn't like hey, we gotta get to know each other again.

SPEAKER_04 42:31

No, because whenever I was in Houston, for example, I just worked all the time. Um so I and then whenever I was like off, I was down to corpus with film. Okay. And so I didn't have a life. I like people would come to Houston and be like, where do you want it? Like, what restaurants are good around here? And I'd be like, I don't know. I I've yeah, I've lived here three years, but I don't do anything.

SPEAKER_09 42:52

So what's funny because me and my wife, we have this uh we have a time limit, man. After about two and a half hours, we get sick of each other. Even now that she's at her dad's, it's like we're more cordial to one another. We're very much the same person, and I think that's why we grind gears. But it's like even now, it's like hey, you know, we're very nice and sweet to each other, and about two and a half hour, three hour mark, it's like I'm going back to the house, I'll see you tomorrow.

SPEAKER_04 43:17

I'm you know, like I said, I we sold maybe three months ago, three and a half months ago. So I've been home since then, not going to work every day. And so it's been good. I was a little bit worried about it, like man, we're gonna get on each other's nerves, but yeah. My wife's easy going. So we're we're opposite. Okay. So that helps. Yeah. She is as easy going as you can imagine.

SPEAKER_09 43:38

Well, that's good, eh?

SPEAKER_04 43:39

No drama.

SPEAKER_09 43:40

It was so you ended up going to Afghanistan after the military or during the military?

SPEAKER_04 43:44

Both. Um, yeah, so you know, I do the Air Force Academy. Um first, they keep about eight play eight football players to help coach. And I did that, it's my first year. And then I was over in Virginia a couple years, and I went to graduate school. In Ohio, and then from there I was out of the country. So after graduate school, I went to Korea, was there about 16 months. Very interesting experience. And from there went to Italy, Aviano, kind of near Venice. It's the airbase up there. And then but from Aviano, I got deployed for the first time into Afghanistan. That's when I went to Kandahar, which is a southern Afghanistan, you know, the home of the Taliban. Like I was telling you earlier, their final kind of rats in the hole was at the at the Kandahar Airport. And so I was the cylinder in commander there. I want to say that was in 06. No. Something like that.

SPEAKER_06 44:52

Were you married? Were you married? No, no. So yeah, it was probably 06, 07. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 44:58

So I don't want to pa I don't want to stop you, but funny story about Afghanistan. Uh Benny Ganthu was telling me. Him and uh his his buddy that we do little TikToks with. He said they were in Iraq, and he said all of a sudden we got sent to Afghanistan in the wintertime. He said, and all we had was our Iraqi gear. Yeah. He said we froze out.

SPEAKER_04 45:17

That's the Himalayas. Yeah. That's the Himalayas. So I was in the south, so it wasn't that bad, but it was still pretty cold. Um, it was more desert. Uh but yeah, so I went out there, um, was single, you know, um, and it was great. The job was great. Um it was what was a nightlife there?

SPEAKER_09 45:37

Night. None beers a day. I'll tell you.

SPEAKER_04 45:42

I'll tell you because this kind of comes with a story. Um I had a compound. Um, you know what Hesco barriers are? They're like the big things filled with sand. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had a compound inside the base that was like the civil training compound, and I had all my equipment and all my guys. We we'd be in there. Um we had like the case bands, like the you know the buildings that are like the you know, the our domes, domes. The dome, yeah. So we had all of our stuff in there, and we had we had the ability to build or do anything, right? So that's what me and my guys did. And we took care of the the most important thing on the base was the airfield, right? And we had like 13 different countries. So I would chair this airfield construction board because we're building all this stuff, and I had like 13 countries that I'm trying to like give them ramp space to park their aircraft and do all this kind of stuff and and kind of prioritize everything. So we had all this. I had electricians, I had structural guys, I had big heavy civil equipment operators, you know, all this stuff. And so we would um I can remember this because the Canadians were a big contingent there. Um and there was a hospital there and the Canadian nurses. And so you think about it, you're on a you're on this base that has, you know, it has the Dutch, it has uh the Danes, it has the Brits, it has us, it has Canadians, has all these different countries, and 90% of them are you know alpha military males, and then you have these like nurses and you know this kind of stuff. Canadian at that. Yeah. And they had the Canadians like across the road from where I was, the Canadians had the what they call the MWR, where they had like clotables and they played music and everything. Um there's no alcohol. Yeah, there's no alcohol in the base, right? And so I had gone to graduate school with this girl and another guy from the Air Force Academy, he was a baseball pitcher, and they were married, and they were going to grad school at the same time as me. And so got to know him really well. And so I'm out there and I get an email from this girl, and she says, Hey, my sister's coming to Afghanistan. She's getting deployed to Afghanistan, you know, as a doctor. And I said, Um, okay, yeah, put me in touch with her, and wherever she's going, I'll put her in touch with the civil engineering guy there, you can help them out, help her out, or whatever. And she goes, No, she's coming there. And I said, Okay, you know. And so I start going back and forth with this girl, and she tells me when she's showing up or whatever. I'm like, oh, I'm over here, you know, stop by, you know, when you get here, whatever, I'll show you around, whatever.

SPEAKER_09 48:28

Yeah, I'll show you the rocks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:30

So I've been there maybe, I don't know, four or five months. And you ever heard about like desert goggles? When you've been around this, like and you haven't been around women, is it like beer goggles? Like, yes. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Desert queens.

SPEAKER_06 48:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:46

So this girl shows up and I see her, and I just like my mouth goes dry. I'm like, holy shit.

SPEAKER_09 48:54

You know, like in a negative way or like a good way. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 48:58

Like, I'm like, like the best thing I've ever seen in my whole life. Okay. Um, and it's like it just, you know, long story short, it's my wife now. Oh, really? So it's her, it was this girl's sister, right? And so I I see her and I'm just like, oh shit. And so I am, you know, I'm aggressive, like, you know, you know, talking to her, and she's kind of like standoff-ish, you know. And I'm like, well, maybe she's getting all this attention from everybody, but you know, out there you gotta fight for your scraps, right? So and I can remember, um, I knew her mom because her mom would come up to her mom's Thai, like from Thailand. Like married, um, my father-in-law is also an Air Force Academy grad pilot and all that. So my wife is half-thai, but her mom's Thai, and I don't know if you know Thai people, but they don't have, yeah, they don't have like a uh like a polite.

SPEAKER_09 49:49

Is she addicted to the little electronic machines? No, no, no.

SPEAKER_04 49:53

But she does not have whatever she's thinking, she's going to say, yeah, like that thing. And so, but she's very opinionated. And so I can remember I'm still like I've me and my guys are are like expanding the the aircraft parking area, and it's kind of by the hospital, it's right on the airfield. And so we're gonna go pave the stuff, and like all the doctors and stuff, their their cars are parked there. So I send somebody in, I'm like, hey, tell them we we told them already they gotta get this stuff out because we're breaking this up and starting to you know do the base work and everything on it. And she comes out, right? And I'm you know, maybe she's been there a week or two. And I can remember I've like, I'm like just in my t-shirt, I got my sleeves up, and she's like in her car with the window down, and I put my arms up, and I have like a you know, tattoo. And she goes, her her mom's name is Kat. She goes, Cat Sweeney doesn't like tattoos. And I go, Well, I'm not interested in Cat Sweeney. I'm telling, and you know, and to this day she'll tell you, my wife is so like she said she thought I was saying that just I didn't care that her mom didn't like tattoos. Not that I was hitting on it, you know, she still doesn't get it. So anyway, go on and on, and and finally I'm like, I I guess it's just she's just not interested. And things happen out there, it seems like a year, but it's only like a week. You know, it's like how life and everything's like crazy. So there's this uh British officer that is like male or female? Female. And and I got him, I know my wife's gonna listen to this. And um, and she's into me. You know, I'm like the all the colonels on the side, and I'm like telling them what they can and can't. I've got this power.

SPEAKER_08 51:43

There's some heavy set, almost 50-year-olds that are said you're good looking.

SPEAKER_04 51:48

So and anyway, so she's coming by, and all of a sudden, this is a like women only want what they think other women want. So as soon as this girl starts coming after me, I'll now all of a sudden my wife, my now wife, is interested. And I'm telling you, it it must have been two months, and I had asked her to marry me, and she said yes, and I was then back to Italy. And she was there for like another six months. She came out to Italy on her mid like R for a week. Uh spent with a month. So you committed quick. Yeah. And then I need to see his wife. When she did you actually ask her? Yeah. Oh, I thought you told her. No, I had a one. I had a one carat diamond sent to me in the mail to like ask her to marry me.

SPEAKER_09 52:39

So you were all in right away.

SPEAKER_05 52:40

Yeah, I was in love.

SPEAKER_09 52:41

I gotta see a picture of the club.

SPEAKER_06 52:43

He was because I remember he was emailing or like messaging me back way back in the day. And he's like, hey, I need you to go get me some hair flop. Like the hair product, like the black. And I'm like, in my head, and it looks I was like that.

SPEAKER_01 52:58

You're the one that doesn't do that. Why would you need that?

SPEAKER_06 53:00

I'm like, hey man, I'm gonna like it made sense when he's like, I'm getting married. I'm like, oh, yeah. I was you were wooing somebody in the desert instead of shaving your head.

SPEAKER_09 53:11

What is courting a lady in the desert look like? It it's how do you run game in the card?

SPEAKER_04 53:19

Especially with a thousand other swinging dicks out there, you know, that are also in great shape and young.

SPEAKER_09 53:26

And apparently they probably noticed that she was also called they're not blind.

SPEAKER_04 53:29

Yes. You go into Cell Hall and I had to eat with everybody staring at us. I mean, there's I would just you know, and and so you know, then we lined up where I was leaving Italy. I'd you know been there two years before.

SPEAKER_09 53:50

Um Dude, I would be so cocky if I was one of the dudes with one of the only three women. You're just worried all the time.

SPEAKER_04 53:58

And so, but she flew, she got done, and she was getting uh based in Portsmouth, Virginia. I was getting based in uh Langley again. And so when she when she's close to those together, they're pretty close. They're pretty close. We actually lived in between and went to it's okay. But when she came back, she was out processing out of her old base in San Diego because she was at the Balboa hospital there. And so I flew to San Diego, she landed there, we went down to the Justice of the Peace. I actually met Andre and Tracy there.

SPEAKER_09 54:30

Um living on that side of the country?

SPEAKER_06 54:33

No, actually, we were in Virginia as well. Yeah. And Tracy had to go do some work in San Diego, let's say. Oh, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_04 54:44

And it just happened to line up with like the reason I remember all this because we we played like the only reason I remember San Diego, but we did my wife and I just walked down into Just of the Peace, like in flip-flops, and got married. Just us. And and we've been married almost 20 years now.

SPEAKER_09 54:58

And you never went to Chow Hall with her again after that.

SPEAKER_04 55:01

Like, I got it. Yeah, but mostly, but mostly what I remember San Diego is Andre and Tracy were there, but we played golf, and it was like the one of the only times Andre ever beat me at golf. I did not beat him at Teasbell. You almost did. I almost did. Now he beats me all the time.

SPEAKER_06 55:17

Um he was supposed to get married when I was there, but for whatever reason it didn't happen. No big deal. Um, he actually discovered that I had gotten married. Yeah. I didn't tell anybody, but I got married. I pulled out my ID card to get on basic.

SPEAKER_04 55:31

Yeah, I thought he had a military ID card. Wait a minute. Oh, you know, going back to when I was at grad school, I went to grad school with a girl um who graduated like six months before me, and she was going to San Antonio. She's from New York, and I said, Hey. And she was like bad-mouthing Texas, and I was like, I you just you need to know the right people. Whenever I go down there and you're there, I'll introduce you to some of my friends. And I introduced her to Andre, and they're married now. That's oh, is that her? Yeah. So you used to be super proud of that. Now he's like, Man, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_09 56:04

So that that's awesome that everybody is so so well connected.

SPEAKER_06 56:09

Our our lives are weirdly braided, intertwined. It's it's unreal. Like that's pretty cool. There's a story where when he was in Afghanistan, I would see him on Skype or something, because we were in Turkey, so we're in the same time zone fundamentally. And he we just chat all the time, and then next thing I know he's like with his gun cleaning. I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, Well, I this is what I carry every day. I'm in a chopper or whatever, you know. And I'm like, Oh, I had no idea.

SPEAKER_04 56:37

I just saw your Yeah, that was the second the second time I was out there. Um, I traveled all over South and East Afghanistan. Um, which is weird. I just did it however I could because I didn't have a supporting unit. So I would be in like a soft skin, like a beat up thing with like Afghans, like driving through checkpoints.

SPEAKER_02 56:54

Oh, really? Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 56:56

I wonder if you and Benny were ever in the same place, same time. Uh Benny was uh uh I guess the gunner in the helicopter. So uh he was the guy that sat on the big gun, you know, whenever they went to go take people.

SPEAKER_04 57:07

Was he marine or army? Army. Yeah, so I was I only flew with the Marines. Oh, okay, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_09 57:12

Um it was funny when when he ended up going to Iraq.

SPEAKER_04 57:15

Yeah, I'll tell you, Benny was in things that didn't take passengers. Oh, okay. Yeah. Like for me, I'd either be like the Marine, like the Jolly Green Giants, or I'd fly with USAID. I mean, I would just have to hitch rides with people. But yeah, what Benny was in, they weren't taking hitchhikers.

SPEAKER_09 57:33

You know, you know it's funny because I I talked to him uh when he first enlisted, uh, he wrote down all the places he wanted to go. And he wrote down Hawaii just for shits. Yeah, he went to Hawaii for three or four years. And then his last year, they tell him, hey, you're going to Iraq. And I remember talking to him, and he said, Man, I'm going to Iraq. And I said, I said it's time to pay the piper, man. I said, You've been in paradise for three years. I said it's time to pay the piper. But he was in for, I guess, maybe like 10 or something. But uh, that's interesting. So, how long were you in Afghanistan for? And you were there multiple times.

SPEAKER_04 58:08

So that's what I'm saying, it's funny. So, like I said, after me and my wife got married, we were in Virginia. From there, um Virginia, I got deployed again to Afghanistan. And I was based out of Kabul, but I was responsible for all the it's like the And you already had kids at this point? We had a son, my son.

unknown 58:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 58:33

Um, but we like the Air Force version of the Corps of Engineers. I that's what I was doing. So I was responsible for all the stuff we were doing in southern and eastern Afghanistan. So I was traveling all around there, and I was probably there for like seven or eight months.

SPEAKER_09 58:47

Um was Kabul or they finally pulled out. Yeah, that's their capital.

SPEAKER_04 58:52

Okay. It's in like a mountain valley, um, and it's got the city around it, you know, the old city. But then, you know, you go um on the south, you have Hellman Province, which was one of the hotbeds, um, Kandahar, uh, which you know, also similar, but then on the east it got pretty hot because that was the border with um like uh Pakistan. And then on the far on the far east side, or on the far west side, uh the country bordered like Iran. It wasn't as bad over there for some reason. I don't know why, but uh but yeah.

SPEAKER_09 59:28

So um what is what is it like working over there where and you know the uh you know we talk about Benny and there's some other guys you know from back home that went over there and and you know being a guy that hasn't participated in anything like that, this is all speculation off the top of my head. But I would imagine that when you go there to do a job that you know maybe Chuck Brissy knew what went to go do, or or Benny you went to go do, you know, you you get in that mind frame, right? This is what I'm here for, you know. But then you get a guy like you who comes in for a different job while all this is happening, like so um yeah, it's a little bit different.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:09

Um, one, because I because of the nature of what I was doing, uh and Benny might have been training Afghans too. I don't know. A lot of those guys had to end up doing that kind of stuff, but I dealt with the Afghans quite a bit. Um, whether it was building facilities for their Afghan army, Afghan Air Force. I was also building stuff obviously for US or even other countries.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:29

Um how was that getting Afghans to work?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:32

Um rewarding in some spot. I can tell you when the first time I was out there, so you know you have do you know what an MQ9 Reaper is? The Reaper drones? Like the hunter killer, the fairy drones.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:44

Are those the ones you see online all the time with the two fans on the back?

SPEAKER_04 1:00:47

Um, yes. Okay, the two fins sticking up. Right. The original reconnaissance drone with the two fins sticking down as a predator. Okay. They were not made to put um warheads, you know, they they were just for reconnaissance. Um they did retrofit them to be able to have hellfires, but the MQ9 was the original hunter killer, and it could carry, you know, um, it carried hellfires, it carried GBUs, um, you know, and it could stay up 24 hours in loiter. It was made to, you know, their whole thing, like the coins it has says warheads on foreheads. Um, and there's a guy, there's a guy back in there's a guy back in there's a guy back in Nevada flying on that. That's what I say. It's like video games, you know. Wow. So, but the very first one in the AOR, I built the MQ9 facility at Kandahar. And I used, besides my own guys, like my own civil um engineers, like you know, in the Air Force, the like the equipment operators and electricians are uniform wearers, not like Army and Navy and all them where they contracted them out. Um but in the air force because our fighting platforms were our air bases, so the guys that took care of it were uniform guys, not civilians. Yeah. And so I use all those guys, and then we hired a bunch of Afghans, like contracted. We had to train them like how to how to cure concrete, how to place concrete, how to form it up, you know, why you did certain things and why you didn't. And so you really got to know them. Um, what was interesting about it is you would have, you know, because we were under a timeline. I mean, you know, I'm giving like updates to freaking uh CentCom about when we're gonna be done so they can get the Reapers out here. And um they just wouldn't show up to work one day, the whole crew. And it would be because they got a night letter said, Hey, if you go to the base, we're gonna kill your family. Like out in town, you know. And there's nothing you can do about it. You try to send your quick reaction. I mean, like your guys that are trying to go out and do different things, your teams. But there's I mean that that really between that and then there's other things like uh but yeah, anyway, we we trained them all to do that, we got it done. Um they flew a C5 to bring the first two Reapers out there, and they're in these huge coffins, almost like they call them coffins. And it was the largest aircraft that I because you know you see 17s and stuff all day, they're made for auxiliary airfields, but a C5 is like a monster.

SPEAKER_09 1:03:14

You know, how big are these drones? Like when you see them online, they don't look very big.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:19

Um, they're bigger than you think. Really? Um, yeah, they're probably the length of this room.

SPEAKER_09 1:03:24

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_04 1:03:24

That big? Yeah, but they're real quiet. You know, they're real quiet. Um, and predators are a little bit smaller, but yeah, the wingspan is they're probably the length of this room, and the wingspan is this and the porch. The porch. Yeah, they're they're they're not they're about the size of a fighter aircraft. That's pretty big. But people don't realize how big a fighter aircraft is either.

SPEAKER_09 1:03:42

Well, um, you know, even especially those drones, like when you see pictures of them online, I mean they're in the air, or they're in a big big warehouse. Yeah. And it's like, oh, that's cute. The new ones are small. You go, I got a drone too, you're right. So you sit there and go, it's hard to understand how big those are, but I guess when they're carrying payloads like that, they gotta be.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:59

Yeah, they're they're big. Um, and they uh but like I said, they're quiet. We'd be working, I'd have my guys out, we'd like, because we're on these airfields where like we'd be, you know, on an airfield with jets, you can't have any gravel or anything because one little piece of gravel gets in an engine, it'll fight out a five million dollar engine. And so you're always sweeping it. Anytime there's starting to be spall like cracks or something, um, you got to go in and repair it, you know. So so even a little piece of concrete that gets sucked up in the wind. And we'd be working, and all of a sudden, like you'd hear like a and turn around, and there's one of these things taxiing, waiting. I don't know what happened, like waiting for you, and it's trying to like zoom its engine so you would hear it, and then you see like the little pod, like so is that the guy in Arizona telling you I'm behind you? No, no, it's the guy, so they had the the flight things, the way the the they they may not do this anymore, but the drones were operated, they are takeoff and landing by local guys. Oh they had like a little video game type pod that they would operate out. But once they got them up, they hand them over to the states, and those guys run the you know 24-hour missions and stuff. But all the landing, I don't know why, and I don't know if it's maybe because conditions or something, but all the landing and the takeoffs were done by local local pilots.

SPEAKER_09 1:05:14

What do they run on? What's their fuel source?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:17

Um to run that long. Uh I mean it's I think no. It wasn't, it might be now, but no. I don't think anything can fly along with a battery for what those do. But no, it was fuel. It was fuel.

SPEAKER_09 1:05:30

Okay, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:31

Um, they were coated with something that you couldn't touch. Um, because we did have one splat. You know, because again, that happens a lot because a pilot, they can feel as they're coming in, like the oh I got caught by a thermal or whatever, I'm gonna adjust, but the guy in the tank can't, so you would see them like wham, and just a landing gear go out. That's good. I mean, you know, it's got like hell fires on it still and stuff that they didn't fire. Um we go out there and they're like, Oh, you can't touch the stuff because you don't have the right equipment. Yeah. Um but yeah, so the Afghans. So that, you know, seeing that kind of stuff, like the conditions dealing with him. And then also, like I could see from the base poppy fields. And when there was a little in Kandahar, there was a little area, maybe like the size of a city block, that was fenced off separately, like US territory. It was the State Department. And they would do stuff like fire cruise missiles or you know those kind of things. But they would the say guys were like cowboys. They would they had like Huey helicopters and they would go out and do poppy eradication, you know, and and just some other like I never saw it myself, but just something like it's ain't fucking Vietnam, you know, like don't lead them so much type shit. But you could see the poppy fields, they wouldn't touch those. They would go out and 10 miles away do poppy eradication because this poppy is grown by your their partners, you know, whatever. Like I guess you don't want to mess, you know, third behanger. Too close to home.

SPEAKER_09 1:07:09

Yeah. So these so these are these are I guess these are poppy fields for Afghans that are up and yeah, you know, and it's like the whole thing is like it just started going bad.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:18

And like I the stuff I saw the second time I was out there, like I said, I'd build like a $25 million dorms and training facilities for the Afghan Air Force, and like um, you know, they started to fly the little prop jobs and stuff. And like these these motherfuckers grow up in like biblical type conditions. I mean, one of the reasons Afghanistan was the most dangerous place to fly in the world is because there's no ground lights. And so flying at night anywhere else in the world, you have reference like ground lights. In Afghanistan, there's no fucking ground lights because there's not you know no power. Yeah, I mean there is like in Kabul, but elsewhere, you know. But so they come in there, and you know, we've got, you know, they have their dorms and the bathrooms and their office spaces and everything. And and then the first day, like they don't even know, like they go do their ablutions or wash their feet for prayer and stuff. They don't even know to turn the water off and not leave it running. The second day, all the fucking copper's ripped out of the whole fucking facility and sold.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:23

Mexicans in Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:27

Hey, dude, they're not doing it. I mean, the Mexicans aren't doing it out of their own homes. But, you know, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's just, and I see this, plus the night letters, plus the, and then talking, you get to talking to the guys, and they kind of just tell you the Afghans will tell you, like, you know, you know, we have a five-year plan, like the whole hearts and minds thing is such bullshit. Um, we have a five-year plan. We're only gonna be here five years when we get this mission done. And the Afghans are like, we don't care if it's our kids or our kids' kids, but you will not rule us, you will not change us. You cannot, you can't have a five-year plan for that. And so you that's exactly what happened. No matter anywhere we've gone to try to do this stuff, especially Afghanistan, which is known as a graveyard of empires, you know, like every Russia had hell there too. Alexander the Great. Yeah. That's where he ended, right? I mean, India, but that's where he got stuck mostly with Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_09 1:09:22

Is it terrain or is it a mentality of the people?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:24

It's mentality and terrain. Um it's you know, by the way, Kandahar is named after Iskander, like Alexander, and there are um aqueducts underground that that they built that were still at that base. So when I was there, the north side of the base, there was a huge ammo dump with all the old Russian shit in it still, like Russian bombs, all kinds of shit up there. And then there was like a wet area, like reeds and stuff, and one time we had a fire out there, and all of a sudden these things start cooking off, like down in, and we go in there and finally get it out, and we go in and we these aqueducts that were underground that Alexander the Great built. The Afghans back in the day when we were helping them were coming up in the base, the Russian base, and the Russians just blew it, like caved it in, like because they were coming up in there stuff there. We found this stuff up there, and there was like I mean, it was like tripwires and all kinds of like pineapple grenade type shit up there. That's crazy, just old rounds, and you would see a bomb the size of this table, like a Russian one with all the Russian writing on it. They just left it there, and it was still on the north side of the base. The first time I was done. Second time I was down there, though all that side of the base had been starting to be developed, so they finally cleaned it out.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:40

But so let me ask you this like if if that's the culture, if that's the mentality of the people, you know, we talked, we just talked about like uh uh the terrain, but if if that's the mentality of the people, what is the purpose?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:00

Uh and and I get we were chasing we we were I I I think what happened is originally for whatever reason we went in there, right? But after that it became a way to there was too much money being made. I mean I saw this shit. I I was out there, you know.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:15

Are there resources in Afghanistan? As far as like uh yeah, minerals and things like that. Yeah, minerals.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:21

Minerals, yeah. But they don't. I mean, the number one resource in Afghanistan to this day is opium. It's poppy.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:28

I guess that and and uh spending money on uh military equipment.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:35

So Well, us, yeah, yeah, and all the money we were just spending money, not just on military, the stuff I was doing. I mean, it was over a billion dollars in infrastructure that didn't mean shit.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:44

I saw a guy do an interview uh shortly after we pulled out of Afghanistan. And uh I think I forgot what it was, like $88 billion, they said that they left there. And it was interesting because the guy, and I mean he may have just been talking shit, you know, hadn't signed 2020, but he said, I knew we were gonna leave all that there. He said, I I I knew we were. And they said, What do you mean you knew you were gonna leave all that equipment there? He goes, We don't need it. We want the new shit. We want stuff that they're developing, the things that are already coming out. He said, We didn't need it, so we left it there. That's not true.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:17

I would I would agree with what he said. Uh well, which was Well, because they still want uh some of the things that you would think they don't want, but really they want to make more. Which is the money part.

SPEAKER_09 1:12:28

So, what was the purpose of leaving all that there, do you think, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:33

Um the the government, it the people that were making decisions. So if you owned a company, right, and you had a big job out in Nevada, and you bought a bunch of like graders, like caterpillar graders and dozers, and you took them out there to do that big job, would you bring them back here? Or would you just leave them out there and be like, okay, job's done?

SPEAKER_09 1:12:57

I grew up, I grew up in a small town, I'd probably bring them back.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:00

There's a cost associated with that mobilization. You would bring them back because you're like, hey, I can make money doing this other stuff, right? With film, right? And you probably wouldn't have written them all off on that one job. You'd be like, So it's more cost-effective to leave. No, it's because the people that are making decisions aren't making decisions with a profit in mind. They're making decisions with what's the least paperwork. Oh, I see. Yeah. So it was stupid. Okay, because I'm not, it wasn't just military equipment we left out there. We left like all the civil engineering equipment out there, like everything. Generators, you know. You you know, what gets the headlines is is the um you know, like the uh striker vehicles and the Humvees and all that kind of stuff that that that they're riding around in, but just the amount of money and like transformers and stuff that got left out there is just unbelievable. It's just because it's already paid for, it's the government, government's paying for it. You know? It's not like a company taxpayers. It's not like a it's not like a company's gonna pick it up that's not getting paid for it, you know, and bring it back and be like, hey, I'm gonna try to get a job, I'm gonna find a warehouse for this and try to get a job. Well, one, they're not equipped to bring it all back because the U.S. airlifted everything out there.

SPEAKER_09 1:14:18

But well, you know, I I guess this is maybe where I'm naive. Is I sit there and go, and and it's I'm sure I'm sure it's where I'm naive, but I sit there and go. There's a group of people in Afghanistan who've worked with the U.S., who put their lives on the line to help the US to work with them, and uh are maybe even friendly to the U.S. And then there's a group of people over there that can't stand the U.S. And you've left so much equipment there that the people who are against you are gonna take over and utilize. And uh uh who's gonna suffer for that? The people that got left behind who were friendly to the US, you know? And uh when you s when you kind of look at it at that perspective, you really almost have to take any sort of like uh, you know, I guess pairing for others out of it because you know what's gonna happen to them. Yeah, you know. Uh I've heard stories of people when they were trying to pull people out and they were trying to get people out. I guess private companies were sending people in, and it's like uh it it's I think they even got a hold of some database that had like names of people who were working on US bases and stuff like that. And it's like you've just killed them all, man.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:40

Well, one I'll I'll tell you one, they didn't need databases. Let me ask you this if somebody came over here, China, right, and made a takeover bid, and we're in George West, and like ten people from George West went and helped them. Would you know who those ten people are? Oh yeah. They don't need a database. They know. They know already. And like um, even the ones that were helping us, they're getting paid you know from the other side, and you know. I mean, it was I can tell you, I was out in Gardel's one time, and we I'm flying out there checking on this job that we're doing, and there is it's out in the middle of nowhere, right? It's like an army base that we're building for them. And it's got like a man camp with all the workers next to it, and then it's got another smaller man camp with like my guys that I've like my project managers and those kind of stuff that are Canadian or South African or US. And island go out there, and I'm the only these are all civilians. I'm the wearing my uniform, you know, walking around. And all the kids are coming up, you know, they got because they work their kids too, you know, like little gophers and everything. And everybody's coming up, want to shake a hand, take a picture or whatever, you know, just kind of walking around. And then I get back to the I get back to the man camp at night, grab dinner, go to my connects, like a bunk, and all of a sudden we start getting mortared into our man camp from the fucking workers' man camp. Oh, really? Yeah. Because then these workers they don't have anything against you, but either they're gonna be threatened to do it, like you do this or or else, or they just pay five bucks. They don't give a shit.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:24

You know, so it's you know, it it's almost like a a more extreme case of like what and I I'm not a I'm not a specialist at at what happens in Mexico, but I mean look at fucking Mexico. It's like you're dirt poor and they threaten to either shoot you or give you money. Yeah, you know, yeah. It's like, okay, well, I don't have anything anyway.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:48

You know, it's a lot like that. Like, imagine going against um now the difference is that there's not anything really against the cartel, right? So they kind of have carte blanche a lot in terms of uh brutality or whatever. When we were in Afghanistan, you had big bad US Army and US Air Force and all this that you know could retaliate. Um, and so for them, you had a lot more people willing to play ball or to make because they were making money too, right? You know, they're they're getting all kinds of stuff. Um, but versus you gotta think about the courage it takes in a place like northern Mexico, you know, to do to like stand up and try to do the right thing or try to get the country going in the right or stop corruption. I mean, you see what happens, yeah. The amount of courage that takes is like because there ain't nobody that you can go tattle to to help you.

SPEAKER_09 1:18:38

I I've seen a few videos where there have been uh groups of people like in northern Mexico with that uh like a town with a band together, but it's always futile, man, because at the end of the day, you're outgunned big time, you know. And then when I think about like the the Middle East or I think about Afghanistan, you know, uh I I've seen ex-military folks talk about and say, well, we didn't get attacked for 20 years, so that was the plus side.

SPEAKER_10 1:19:01

No.

SPEAKER_09 1:19:02

And and it's kind of like when you sit there and you look at at it in its totality and in hindsight, you know, you sit there and go, we were never gonna stay there forever.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:12

No. And they were willing to say they were willing to go as long as we wanted, even play ball, make money off of us, but they knew that at some point because they did it to the Russians, they just bled them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:19:24

Yeah. It's it's unfortunate to to you know, you see the videos with people falling out of the off the plate, and and you hear the stories of of you know what was happening there at the base that day when they were trying to get everybody out. And you kind of look in hindsight, and you know, we often we often think about uh you know what's what's best for people and doing the right thing. And a lot of times I sit there and I go, Well, you know, I get that we uh whatever we described it as, maybe we were at one point we were chasing uh bin Laden, right? And then it turned into just something completely different, right? And uh uh you sit there and you go, as a person who wants to be compassionate, you sit there and go, Well, what's the real compassion? You know, it's in in part, and I I take things to extremes, right? There's times where I'll see people like in in Mexico, right? And it's like, okay, you this cute kid comes up and dirty and you want to give him money and you give him 20 bucks, and then all of a sudden he gets beat up and like somebody else takes the 20 bucks. Yeah, you know, it's like, did I do any good helping, or did I make it worse? No, you may yeah, so that's crazy, man. So when you get out of that, you get in the is the oil and gas business now?

SPEAKER_04 1:20:37

Yeah, so you know, I'm I'm doing all that. I uh I get out of the military because my wife, with all her uh medical school and everything, had a longer commitment.

SPEAKER_09 1:20:47

And at that point, like I said, about your smoking wife, let's refer to it correctly.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:51

My my beautiful smoking wife to this day. Um so I decided I'm gonna get out for a couple reasons. One, I'm in the Middle East nine months out of every year, because uh Air Force civil engineers, because like I said, Army and Navy didn't have that, what we had, and so we were whether it was for Army and Navy support or Air Force, we were always out. Um and so I'm gonna get out. She still has commitment, and I'm gonna go start working on the civilian side. That was part of it. The other part of it, like I told you before, is um promotions and and more responsibility in Air Force based on tenure versus performance. I mean it's performance a little bit, but tenure is a minimum, and uh I wasn't you know, I wasn't gonna do that. So um I got out, went to work for this company that was building stuff like in Afghanistan, Iraq, um, for Department of State. That was part of their stuff. I was helping them out. And so as a civilian, it was funny, um, I almost immediately went back out because we got I was helping them put these bids together, and they got this huge, I won this huge job out in southern in Hellman province.

unknown 1:22:06

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:07

And so, but I'm not the one out there running it, I'm just helping them with it. Uh kind of put it together. Um, we have a main office in Dubai and a main office in Kabul. And so I go out and I'm in Dubai quite a bit, and then I go into Kabul.

SPEAKER_09 1:22:23

What is that feeling when you're like, hey, I'm going to private sector, and they're like, Welcome aboard. Don't leave, stay where you're at.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:30

Yeah. So I, you know, I was in Dubai a lot, and then you know, I'd be in Turkey because of the contractors I was bringing in there to do a bunch of stuff were Turkish contractors. Um, and then I'd be in Afghanistan down there at the jobs doing different things and like making sure everything was in order, helping them get things together. And um, but yeah, our we had like uh they're not mansions, but they're just large like multifamily homes in Kabul, like in the city. And you know, we have guns at the front, Afghans. So I tell you, if shit went wrong, I'm pretty sure they're not gonna lay it on.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:06

It looks good, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:07

So, you know, I was back out there just as a civilian um quite a bit, and all around that area, you know, like in Dumray Oman and doing a lot of stuff. Like I said, I spent a lot of time in Turkey, ran into him there while I was doing that kind of stuff. But I told the owners of the company, I was like, hey, you know, the whole reason I one of the reasons I got out was I was always over here, and you know, I got a two-year-old son and you know, daughter on the way and all the so um he said, Yeah, I've been meaning to do that, I've meaning to talk to you about that. You know, we need to diversify. We have our municipal side, which is really small, and we have our federal side, which is like 90% of the company at this point. He's like, I really feel like and this was completely privately owned uh company. Um the shell boom was just starting, and um it was really big in in uh North Dakota, you know, also some in Oklahoma, but um he's like I'd like us, I'd like you to put together a plan to um start a business unit for the oil and gas for oil and gas um construction, engineering construction. So I spent like three months putting a plan together with initial investment.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:17

So at this point, you have no prior history in oil and gas?

SPEAKER_04 1:24:21

None. None. It's not a lot different than what I did because you know, a critical infrastructure, you know, it's not a lot different. But I mean, I wasn't out there drilling for it, but um in terms of when you're building pipelines and terminals and stuff, it's all the same stuff we built for like aircraft fueling and stuff on on basis, but but yes, it was still coming in cold. So I made phone calls to guys that I knew that were in industry, um, kind of picked their brains a little bit, and there was a desperate need for contractors that could operate in North Dakota. So I flew out there, um, got a rental car, drove around, and I I hate sales. I I mean I it's not me. Yeah, um, and so having to do that was really hard for me, but you know, I got over it. But I drove around, figured out what people needed, figured out where the you know everything was, put a plan together, um, got it approved, as I told you earlier. Not exactly what I wanted, um, a little bit more expectation within 12 months and a little bit less initial capital. I think I asked for 10 million or 12 million, and they gave me five. Um, and I had a I th I think my my revenue um the first year was supposed to be like 10 million. I was gonna try to get some small jobs. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:38

Hold that thought. Let's take a pee break.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:40

Okay. Uh I think where we left off was Yeah, the so they had asked me to to um like put a plan together, and I got the plan approved, so I went, and it was, you know, modest, um conservative. I was gonna go out, get a few little small jobs and do this. But um, and this is really when I started working with Andre. Um, and I'll tell you, like when you talked about kind of where did I develop the way I look at things, the first was my first time in Afghanistan because I was the commander of my unit out there. And unlike everywhere else where there's like doctrine and the way certain ways to do things, there it was war, right? And there wasn't the ability to be like, well, we gotta go through the red tape. You just had to get shit done. And you know, I know the I know like enlisted guys and stuff, they always have to figure out ways to, but this is at the upper levels, like putting projects together, doing different things. Like there were no, there was no help. It was just like, you gotta get this shit done, so figure it out. Go beg, steal and borrow and do all this kind of stuff, and here's the guys you got.

SPEAKER_09 1:26:51

Did you did that come natural to you, or is that something you think you developed?

SPEAKER_04 1:26:54

It was intimidating when I first got there. I was just like, I haven't been trained for this, you know. It was like the last time I ever felt that because within the first week, I mean, uh it was blowing and going, and I was we were doing stuff, and just you could tell everybody was like from other countries were like, holy shit, you know, how do y'all do this and all this kind of stuff? And and the more I got comfortable with just not having any rules and doing whatever we wanted to do and getting shit done, I realized like, why were we putting these restrictions on ourselves before? But even then, I'm still in the military. There's still all kinds of, you know, I couldn't just fire somebody, you know, um, or hire somebody. I got what I got. And so that was the first thing that kind of started me the way I I am now. And then when I got out and I went and started this oil and gas business unit, it was just me and a plan initially. Then I went to North Dakota, I bought property, built a facility in a man camp, and then I started having to hire people. Um And ask them to do some crazy shit like just hey, move to here. I'm going to pay you this. Um, and you know what, like what can you do?

SPEAKER_09 1:28:11

What's what's the process for finding the site? Uh like to say, hey, this is we're gonna set up a main camp. This is where the work was everybody were there other companies in that area? Yeah, or did you?

SPEAKER_04 1:28:22

Oh, Williston, Williston. I I knew where the hub was. Okay. The hub was already becoming Williston, but you kind of had to fly into my knot, and it's a three or four hour drive. I mean, it's like it's about three hours, yeah. It's fucking crazy.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:36

So somebody's already been geological report saying, hey, this is what we're doing.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:40

Yeah, we're the we weren't drilling for oil. The guys that we're drilling for and producing oil were the guys that were my customers. So I was out there building like tanks, you know, pipeline. Infrastructure for think of the plumbing like midstream, you know, like pipeline companies here, like that. Okay, okay. But I wasn't, you know, later in life, I was the operator, the owner operator of the asset. There, I was a contractor helping them build it. Gotcha. So I went out there and started doing that, and it went from like in in I want to say two years, it went from like me and a plan to me and 400 people and doing like 100 million a year. It was just like you know, even people say you grow too fast, um, like those kind of problems, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:25

Um, I don't necessarily agree with you there.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:29

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_06 1:29:30

I don't think we grew too fast. I just we didn't have the support from the other end. Oh we were doing well, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:36

What but what I mean is um by the time the corporate, like I like I told you, I think it wasn't on the podcast, but we were talking earlier, and I say the federal, whenever the U.S. pulled everything into Kabul, um, like all the federal jobs, which was still 75% of the company, just went so all of a sudden the revenue stopped coming in, but the bills didn't. They started shaving off my revenue to pay help pay their bills and short paying my contractors and stuff. And so obviously I had a problem with that, and that's why I ended up leaving. But when I say grow too fast, because you need people so fast that you can't be choosy. Um, you can't grow like, hey, we don't necessarily need another guy, but this guy's so good we're gonna find something for him. We just I I hired, I mean, like when I said we were up to a hundred, like four hundred people or whatever, I probably fired like 300. I mean, and once I got big enough with guys like Andre and Jeremy, my brother, and another guy, Jeff, who's this partner right now with their company, like then they started doing that. But initially, I mean, I was even like I had to drive, I had to fly up to North Dakota. The very first guy I put in charge was a guy that the company gave me. Old guy been with them forever. And he was up there running my North Dakota stuff, which is where most of our stuff was initially, and it started going bad. And so I flew up there, drove from my not three and a half hours to the shop, went in there, told him, like, hey, I'm replacing you with this guy that used to work for you. Get your stuff, drove, here's your plank ticket, and I drove him back after terminating this guy that had been for forever, you know. Drove him back like three and a half hours to mine up. How'd he take it? I it was it was strange because he like on the way back, he apologized to me. Oh, really? Yeah, you know, it you never know how it's gonna go.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:38

Um so he he knew that he wasn't doing what he needed to do.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:41

I don't think he did. Um, I think he was he some people have like emotional intelligence and empathy where they know it's uncomfortable, and he's trying to not make it uncomfortable. Oh, gotcha.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:52

Yeah, because then he started asking me that's almost a guy you want to rehire. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:58

Um he was asking me stuff like that. I think the flares were more bright when there was a full moon. Because there was just flares everywhere out there, they're burning gas off. I mean, it was just weird stuff.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:10

He couldn't handle the awkward silence. Yeah. Oh, gotcha, gotcha.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:13

Yeah. Um, but anyway, uh, the guy I put in charge was, you know, uh he knows him pretty well. He had his own drawbacks, but he was a go-getter. Um, and it ended up, you know, growing, growing, growing, growing, growing. But anyway, like I said, that that kind of went by the wayside. I left um and ended up at Planes All American, which is like a Fortune 100 midstream company, still to this day, a great company. And um initially went in there and within in the engineering side, um, but I want to say within a year and a half, I was like running the operation for half the country. Like, if you drew a line from Midland Strait north to Canada, I had everything all the way to the East Coast, wow, operating that. So that was another thing I got thrown into. Um, but when I was telling you the two things that really kind of changed how I look at things, first was Afghanistan, the second was growing that business unit whenever there was the company didn't know anything about oil and gas, so it was me with just a and you were still learning that too. Yeah, and it was just a I'd never run a commercial business unit, and so I had to figure everything out. Uh it was, you know, because there was nobody to pass, you know, the profit and loss up to and say, okay, now you re-explain it. It was just me. Yeah. And so every little cost and every little strategy that we did, you had to kind of, you know, like there's nobody else doing it. So I learned a lot there, and that's kind of really where I thought, like, there's nothing that you know, you now you see guys like Elon Musk and these guys that they're there there truly is like nothing stopping you from people from doing whatever they want if they just want to put the effort into it. Yeah, you can learn anything nowadays, whatever.

SPEAKER_09 1:33:55

So let me ask you this when when you're talking about the oil and gas side and and you you know, we were talking a little bit earlier, you know, what is the difference between oil and gas in the United States, Venezuela, Middle East.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:13

When you say the United States, I'm assuming you're probably talking about WTI. And I'll let me tell you how complicated it is. That's the same thing. You're sounding confusing like the girl I talked to earlier from the when you when you s if you ask somebody right now what's the price of oil, they're gonna give you the daily price of WTI at Cushing. It's called the the WTI index. It's actually called the NIMEX, it's called the NYMEX index. Um it so the NYMEX WTI price is what you can buy a barrel of. This is where it gets really crazy. It's not even truly WTI, which is West Texas intermediate. The NYMEX WTI price is actually the price for a barrel of domestic sweet at Cushing, Oklahoma. Um, up until a few years ago, that was what everybody priced off of here.

SPEAKER_09 1:35:00

What is domestic sweet?

SPEAKER_04 1:35:02

Um, it is a low sulfur barrel. Domestic sweet is a low sulfur barrel that's between like 36 and 42 degrees API. It's a gravity, so it floats on water, you know.

SPEAKER_09 1:35:14

But so does that mean that it's easier to refine?

SPEAKER_04 1:35:17

No, it's more difficult. Um it's easier that it's low sulfur. Okay. Um because when you have sulfurs in that, you have to like coke. Like you see the big towers with all the black stuff all over them. That's a coking tower. A lot of like if you're just doing like a sweet barrel, you don't have to have some of these processes. And so, yeah, like a heavy barrel, like a that would like be closer to the density of water, that's like a heavy barrel. It could be like anywhere from a 15 to 30 to 30 degree API. That's not temperature, that's like weight, you know, um, density. So um the amount the the refining processes that it takes to break that up is a higher pressure, higher temperature, a few more processes, so you see bigger refineries. But the US actually produces all kinds of oil. But what you're used to seeing is like a a WTI, which is a sweet, but even in in Midland and there's a WTS, which is West Texas Sour, which has high sulfur, that's all that means. Sour versus sweet or intermediate intermediate.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:22

Is there a benefit to having a high sulfur content or no? No, no, okay, not really. Um so it's it's beneficial to have a lower sulfur content, right? And when we take a barrel of oil, you know, it's not like hey, we're gonna take a barrel of oil and make it a barrel of uh gasoline. It breaks up differently, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:36:43

So the yields.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:45

And what are they getting out of a barrel as far as like uh its content? Because there's different, there's like you're gonna get jet fuel, you're gonna get gasoline.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:53

Yeah, you get jet, you get kerosene, you get gasoline, you get diesel, you get asphalt, you know, at the very at the very bottom. Um, you you get naphtha at the very top. Um so yeah, I mean, and different crudes have different amounts of those when you break them up. So um, like the heavier barrels. Sounds very complicated, man. It is. It is, and if you think about it, most like there hasn't been a new refinery built in the United States in probably 40 plus years, right? Maybe more. I don't know. But the U.S. refineries were originally mostly built to um refine imported crudes. So like the Mayan's um Venezuelan crudes, those like the sitgo refinery down in Corpus is made for Venezuelan crudes, obviously. Sitgo's a Venezuelan company until it got taken away from them recently. But um they're supposed to I there was talk that they were yeah, they've been there they I think the the bankruptcy court's still messing around with all that to this day.

SPEAKER_09 1:37:52

Well, I think there's there was talk about them maybe building a new refinery in Brownsville.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:56

Yeah. Which sounds kind of cool. I think they actually are. I and um I've actually worked with some of those guys uh because they were looking for a pipeline from Corpus down there. Um but yeah, they're doing uh they're looking to do a refinery as a small one, and they have some other stuff down there too.

SPEAKER_09 1:38:14

Um I guess next era, maybe I'm not trying to remember who it is. I guess for like people like me or just laymen, you know, when we say we sit there and we go, uh, hey, we went into Venezuela, we're controlling that, you know, we took a we took a tanker from uh Cuba, you know, uh we're still getting you know crude for the Middle East. We you know, we always hear well, we've got enough oil here that it would last us forever. You know, and uh I think a lot of people go, well, then why is gas so high? Yeah. But it's like, well, there's there's a lot to the way it's refined. Uh and I guess it does the need for a certain portion of that refined crude dictate how much they process? Like, let's say, let's say um, I'm just pulling this out of my ass. But let's say they need a whole lot of jet fuel for something. And you know, maybe we've gone into another war, we need planes, we need all kinds of things. Yeah. Does the refinering kick up and then now you end up with more gasoline, more tar, more asphalt?

SPEAKER_04 1:39:18

Yes, but the refineries um for the most part um I guess they have a capacity too. They can do they do. And most of them run at full capacity already. Um very few of them run lower. Um during COVID, some of them went down when the demand really fell off. But um for the most part, um, so that our problem is refined balance.

SPEAKER_09 1:39:42

Is there problem refining more than anything? Like the capacity to refining?

SPEAKER_04 1:39:46

No, because well, yes and no. So one, it's where are you getting it from, right? Um so anything priced, like if I told you, hey, I'll sell you 10 gallons of gas for five dollars, you'd probably buy it. But then I'll tell you, but you gotta pick it up in that in Alaska. You know, so there's logistics costs that get added on the different things. Um and you'll see what really where you see, you don't see so much swings anymore. And people, I know everybody thinks gasoline's expensive, but it's actually one of the few things that has not gone up like everything else. I mean, think about it, right? Twenty years ago, a two dollar and fifty cent gas wasn't that big of a deal. Right? Right? I mean, yeah, hell in the early 80s it was.

SPEAKER_09 1:40:39

I don't remember paying 99 cents and a circle can corpus being pissed off. Yeah, because it was like 79, you know, before that.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:47

Yeah, but you think about in the early 80s, it was like $4 a gallon. Yeah. And you do you know what gas is? What well petrol, um, what they call it, but in Europe, it's probably a liter, yeah. It's it's like three times the cost of ours. Really? You wonder why they all have small cars and mass transportation. And then there's places, you know, here in the in the world still where gas is 99 cents a gallon. But the reality is from a crude oil perspective, is even though we produce a lot here, we're on the international market, right? We have all kinds of export terminals. Corpus is the largest export uh port in the country.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:27

Do we, and I don't expect you to know the exact amount, but do we export a fair amount of of oil and gas or crude? Do we send a lot out or do we not?

SPEAKER_04 1:41:38

We do. We do, okay. Yeah, but we import a lot too. We're a net exporter. Okay. Yeah. But in Corpus, I want to say we were doing what's the difference?

SPEAKER_09 1:41:48

Why are we and and I guess maybe it's the type. Why are we okay? So that's why we import some. Yeah, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

SPEAKER_04 1:41:55

Well, kind of. Um, because a lot of like refiners are in California, for example, and they won't let anybody build pipelines, and so they import their crude. You know, just things, things like that. Yeah, but yeah, you know, you have um different qualities for one. So and again, all these refineries, a lot of them were built whenever they were doing the heavier crudes, and you do get more diesel, more jet out of a heavier barrel. Um, the light barrels, which is like a 42 plus gravity, um you know, they produce more napsa, more gasoline. So yeah, I mean you think about something like most people don't think about this, but how much does that bottle of water cost you?

SPEAKER_09 1:42:44

Probably I think it this is like a dollar fifty.

SPEAKER_04 1:42:48

How many of those are in a gallon? You see? Hey, I told you already I did the pre-informal mass. Yeah, I mean, people pay more for a bottle of water, like ten times as much as they do for gasoline.

SPEAKER_09 1:43:00

Well, you know, I saw somebody one time kind of try to make a point. They were like, uh, and I get it, but they were like uh, you know, you're paying four dollars, let's say, a gallon of gas. And it was interesting because uh they said, but you're paying six dollars for a gallon of milk. And I said, Yeah, but I don't need 25 gallons of milk at a time. That's right. You know, that's right. But I I guess I guess one thing that that always flusters me a little bit is the the idea and the concept of us getting away from oil and gas, uh getting away from crude and going electric. And it's like, you know, you always hear that, and California always drives that. But it's like uh, you know, by 2035 we're going a full electric, but you're doing rolling blackouts every summer. You know, it's like so I I guess I guess for people that that push that, is that something that's feasible in the future or is it not feasible? It's not feasible at all.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:59

I mean, yeah, it's more listen. My family's a Tesla fan. We got three Teslas, right? I don't do it because it's an electric car. I do it because it's the most badass machine. I mean, from uh from just everything about it, right?

SPEAKER_09 1:44:13

I do have a 2013 Toyota Tundra score. I mean, I understand how you feel.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:17

Yeah, I mean, but you know, until when I first bought my Cybertruck, this was two or three years ago, I kept my my Cummins diesel, and I was going to like drive them half and half. But it's so easy to drive a Tesla, and they're so convenient. And I just plug it in when I get home and and it drives like a supercar. You know, it's my first one had like 650 horsepower. Um, the one out there has eight 850, you know, it's the bigger one. But and it'll drive itself. Like if from right here, I could say, let's go home, push a butt. I never touch it. Really? Yeah. That's what we're gonna do on the way home. Yeah. Uh, but anyway, I did, you know, I'd get all kinds of grief, right? Because you're like, how can a chief operating officer of an oil and gas company, you know, have an electric car? I'm like, you know, you can run your house off diesel generator. Why don't you do that instead of you know? But I don't do it for like sustainability or any other thing. We do it because it's badass. I do it because it's a better machine, yeah. Right. So um, but you know, I I there's a couple things. One, you know, as technology comes along, more and more vehicles will be electric, right? Um, the same way like golf carts and stuff will be, you know, are now yeah, as as things go more and more and like technology gets better, they'll do it.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:35

But what is the charging time on it? Isn't it like 30 minutes or something?

SPEAKER_04 1:45:39

Yeah, if I'm at one of the superchargers, yeah. But it's convenient. Initially, when I got it, I had the same like range anxiety to everybody else, but I go to Houston, I go to San Antonio, I mean Corpus, whatever.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:53

Can you get there and back?

SPEAKER_04 1:45:54

No. Okay, you gotta charge. But the the other thing that people don't think about, because the only thing about cars, what do you think all this shit's made out of? Your phone, every piece of plastic you've ever come across, that's hydrocarbons. And so even if you're not making gasoline, because one of the byproducts of hydrocarbons are all the plastics and you know, they they send them the crackers, use it for makeup too, and stuff like that. Yeah, everything. No, like everything, all your clothes, everything because it's big.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:25

Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_04 1:46:26

No, everything is made out of hydrocarbon, yeah, like uh polymers now, you know, all this kind of stuff. So you would still have to produce the oil. So maybe we're just burning gasoline off, like you know, right now. Um you know what they call natural gas in the Permian? Associated gas. What does that mean? It means they're not drilling for it, but they're getting it. Oh. They want the oil, and they used to flare everything off. That's what they were doing. Oh, gas. You know, you talk about all the flaring and stuff, that's what they're talking about. Because it was so worthless that they'd flare it rather than gather it and use it, you know, for natural gas. So now you know, regulation and stuff have have there was a couple things. Initially, it was the environmental nuts that were all against it, right? But what really turned the tide, where even Texas now you can't flare like that. Um, because quite frankly, one of these volcanoes you see does like a hundred years of that. Just one. You know, so it's that didn't really move the needle. What moved the needle was the fucking royalty holders, the landowners. Like, you're fucking burning my hydro, because they only get paid based on what the companies drill and sell. Oh, gotcha. And so they're like, You're letting you're burning my hydrocarbons for free and I'm not getting them. You have to start paying me for that. And so that's what really drove the regulation.

SPEAKER_09 1:47:43

Where so they said if we're gonna spend money on this, we may as well utilize it.

SPEAKER_04 1:47:47

Well, you're yeah, because you're gonna have to pay the landowner for it. I mean, even still right now, um, you know, whether it's oil or natural gas, it gets priced at a hub, like where that where a buyer can go buy it, you know, like a bulk buyer or whatever. Like that's why Cushing or Midland, these are like hubs where there's actually a market for it. The main hub for natural gas on the Gulf Coast is called Henry Hub. The other one that you'll hear is Houston Ship, Houston Ship Channel, right? So those typically match pretty close. Wahaw is out west of Midland, south of uh near Wink. It's a natural gas hub out there. It is a negative price right now. Really? And the only way it can go negative is if they the regulation makes them so they get all this gas, they gotta sell it. People may not want to buy it, so they're actually paying people to take it. So it's a negative price. If you go look at, like, if you ever go look at prices and stuff, you know, the natural gas price in West Texas at the Waha Hub is a negative number right now. And it was actually, you know, when COVID first hit, crude oil went negative.

SPEAKER_09 1:48:54

You know, when Bo's dad was working oil and gas, he said uh he said there was so much oil we didn't care about the shell.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:03

Shell's always been there. Yeah, conventional.

SPEAKER_09 1:49:05

We just ignored it.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:49:07

And uh they didn't know how to get it out. Yeah. It was it was not economic to get out. So when the process changed and and the economics changed, all of a sudden they were going after shell. Well that you think that'll ever be the same for natural gas? Well, because it it sounds like Well, shell is natural gas. I mean a lot of um Well, what I guess what what's what's priced negatively? It's like it seems like here's an energy source, whether it's whatever its efficiency is or whatever our our capacity to use it is, you know, is one thing, but it's like here's an energy source that's kind of like meh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:43

That that's that is why data centers and stuff are going in West Texas, because they're trying to build natural gas power plants out there, and now all the the uh midstream companies and stuff, especially the ones that deal with natural gas, are starting to put like cogin plants out, power plants, and then the data centers. Center's out in the middle of nowhere where all these things are.

SPEAKER_09 1:50:02

Oh, gotcha.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:03

So yeah, so but even then there's so much natural gas. I mean, they can't build pipelines fast enough to get it out of there. Because if there was a pipeline out there right now, the reason it goes negative is because more and more gas gets produced and it gets ahead of the pipelines that can take it out.

SPEAKER_09 1:50:20

And so do you think we'll ever end up where and I guess I I get that everybody's got this this negative reaction toward like nuclear, but there's no reason to. There's no reason to go nuclear because No, there's no reason to be negative about it. It's just marketing. So so do do you, in your opinion, do you think that there ever be an a time where you know we skip the we we we bypass the crude and the natural gas and just go nuclear? Because it's it's um I understand it's cleaner and it's it's more efficient from what I understand.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:56

It's cleaner until it's not. Okay. You know what I mean? Like until something goes bad. Like Chernobyl or whatever. But uh or Three Mile Island, you know, back in the day.

SPEAKER_09 1:51:04

But even those, like in hindsight, is like, how bad was it?

SPEAKER_04 1:51:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:51:08

I mean, I hate to sound sound that way, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:51:10

Well when you're far away, it it's not, but if it's you know, your bloodline that's wiped out for the next whatever.

SPEAKER_09 1:51:17

But well, I guess I guess when I sit there and I look at you remember the train that you rode in, what was it, uh Pennsylvania, uh maybe like four or five years ago? And I guess it was a train wreck and all that crude or whatever that that uh biohazard yeah, it was all over the place, ended up in the water and and all over the place. It's like nobody really gives a shit about that anymore. You know what I'm saying? And it's kind of the locals do, yeah, you know, but it's like okay, well, where is our capacity for saying, hey, that's an acceptable amount of damage that's that's worth cheaper energy, more availability.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:53

Well, that's the decision. I mean, that is a decision that's been made. We're still sending the shit by rail and all that, but people don't realize there's a derailment in the country every day. Sometimes, you know, if it whenever all the media is against oil and gas, if it's oil and gas, it gets all the coverage. Oh, gotcha. But the uh but yeah, I think nuclear, especially now that because they're looking at micronuclear and all of that. Um, I think at some point it's and I think right now we're in the middle of some momentum being built. It's got to be part of the equation for sure. It's less part of the equation than it was 20 years ago. I I still to this day cannot fathom what Germany was thinking. Um like taking their perfectly good new uh uh nuclear reactors down, and now every bit of industry is leaving that country because they can't compete on because you know if it costs you 10 times as much from a power perspective to produce a widget, it's gonna be built in the US or India or somewhere else. That's what's happening.

SPEAKER_09 1:52:54

When did Germany end up doing that?

SPEAKER_04 1:52:56

They just did it like recently, their last one, like uh 10 months ago or something, and already their prime minister like I don't know why we did that, we were stupid. It was almost like they made the decision five years ago, and then just nobody had the courage to stop it.

SPEAKER_09 1:53:10

You know, you know what bothers me about people? And I'm sure we've talked about it on one of these podcasts that we've done together, but we'll talk about uh we'll use Mundami in New York, right? It's like I I'm not the smartest guy on the planet, right? But I like patterns. And I can sit there and go, This is a bad idea, you know, and maybe not just him, but other things. You know, you sit there and go, uh I've talked to people who are a little bit more liberal. You know, I'm a more of a conservative thinker, and it's kind of like I always tell people look, when the left or liberal people pull to the left, we always let it go to a certain extent, and then when it gets real bad, we pull back to the right, but we never pull it back to where it was center. Yeah, it's always still a little bit farther to the left. And it's kind of like it's kind of like being a parent, right? You you tell your kids and you say, Hey, don't touch the stove because it's hot.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:11

Yeah, that's mostly on social issues, by the way. Yes, not so much financial or economics.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:17

Yes, because I I feel like everybody involved in financial and economics, they can, you know, math, maths you can't lie about it.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:24

You're right. It's math. I don't know what it was, but it maybe the maybe right after World War II or or but at one point the the top income tax bracket was like 90% tax.

unknown 1:54:40

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:40

And we came back all the way from that down to whatever. So that's what I'm saying. Like economic policy can shift, but what you're talking about, yeah, the social shit, it's the overton window. Yeah, if you you know that's it.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:51

No, explain that to me.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:52

But it sounds like what I'm the overton window is, and I'm probably gonna get this wrong, but it's like what an acceptable consensus thoughts are, and the left has been really good at always shifting it, like you're saying, like it shifted way over here. So what seems like right, still left, it still 10 years ago is left. But now you're like, I think the last few years, especially with with kind of Twitter being unlocked and stopped uh being uh censored and all that kind of stuff, it's starting to shift, uh finally shift back.

SPEAKER_09 1:55:22

But but you're right, normally I mean when you when you look at Mandami in New York, yeah, it's like September 11th, right? That was uh 25 years ago. And now they're doing called prayers, you know, in Times Square. Yeah, you know, and it and it's like I don't understand, and and it's a different generation, right? Because those people 25 years ago are now 25 years older, and the kids who have no idea what it looked like watching people jump out of a burning building are now sitting there going, yeah, why not let people you know come here and do prayer in the streets? And it's like it always bothers me because we always have to, we always have to touch the fucking hot stove, you know? And it's like I wish as a I wish as a society we could look at that together and go, let's not fucking touch the hot stove.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:11

Especially you can look over at Europe and be like, let's not do that.

SPEAKER_09 1:56:13

Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, and you know, it's it's unfortunate. And it it everything's similar to this, right? Like, even when we get into the border and we get into like ice, like I've had conversations with people, and you know, the the conversation always starts, and that's usually where I get real heated and hot-headed, and and then I get super passionate, and then it takes me out of my cool spot. But it's kind of like a lot of people I've talked to, they go, Well, look what ICE is doing to people. They're pulling people out of their homes and they're shipping them out, and you know, people have gotten shot. And I sit there and go, Where's the responsibility of the governor in that state? Right, when Tom Holman tells you, uh, hey, let us go get these people. We'll send two officers, we'll go to the courthouse, we'll pull them out of jail, we'll arrest them there, and we'll take them away. Or I gotta send 16 guys in the neighborhood to get this guy, and then when we're there, we're gonna take everybody.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:10

Well, I you know, the the thing to me, and I um it's like a large portion of the country. Are you are you familiar with the term useful idiot? Oh yeah. Like such a large percentage of people are that way now, and so the media can make them believe anything. So if you ask that same person, like, hey, I'm going to go to uh Mexico. I'm not gonna do, I'm not gonna be a citizen, I'm gonna just I'm gonna wave the American flag and like raise hell and do all that kind of stuff. And do you think that they have the right to like send me back to the US? And they'll say, yes, absolutely, it's their country. But they won't hear because the media has told them that's not acceptable. But they know, like if you applied that to any other country that they're sympathetic to, they would say that's their right. You can't go there, you would you a colonizer or whatever, you know. And I'm like, I don't, I I do not understand. The only way I can understand that, that people can't like apply that in in the way they think across the board instead of just one specific instance, is because they fallen into that kind of like cognitive dissonance where they don't have their own thoughts anymore, and it's whatever the machine tells, like, pull the chip out and put the new what you're mad at chip in. And you know, man, that's where I always go back to public schools, man.

SPEAKER_09 1:58:30

Yeah, you know, I and especially nowadays, like there's so many smart kids that are regurgitators, yeah. Right? And it's they don't think for themselves. They don't think for themselves, and and a lot of times I think that's by design, you know. You know, my wife's in public school, you know, I I it's funny because like when uh when they were talking about vouchers, you know, a lot of people that I know that are involved in public school, they were not happy about it. Yeah, you know, but it's like when I talk to them, they talk about these teachers that don't do their job well but won't get fired. You know, they move them to another school or they move them to another class. Uh there was one school that I won't mention, but it was interesting because the administration didn't get along with certain teachers. Like after a while, they didn't like how they communicate or however they did it. But instead of firing them, they would go, you know what, you've been a third grade teacher for 10 years, you're teaching kindergarten next year. You know, well, that teacher would go, fuck, I don't want to teach kindergarten, you know, and they'd leave. And it's that passive two jobs, three jobs ago for me. It's that passive firing thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:59:38

Yeah, you're flicking the booger.

SPEAKER_09 1:59:39

Yeah, it's just like we don't flicking the booger. Well, just pushing it down the road. And and it's kind of one of those things where it's like, this just make it uncomfortable and you left on your own. And all of a sudden, you know what, you've got a specialty in something, he's got a specialty in someone else, something else. I don't like you, I fire you. Guess what? You're doing his job, you have no clue how to do it. I still need you to do his job. And so you go do his job and you're terrible at it, and you hate it, you're stressed out, you tell your wife, I can't do his job, I've never done it before. I do my job, and I've done that for 20 years. So then you decide to leave. And it's like, that's how I see the public school system. Like, there's no effort to go, let's make quality uh thinkers, let's make people that are gonna be able to go out there and no matter what happens to them, they'll figure it out and they'll be able to take care of it.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:25

Classic liberalism.

SPEAKER_09 2:00:26

That's that's what we end up with. We end up with No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:30

Like a classic liberalism is like reasoning. It got co-opted into liberals, but oh, I see what you're saying. A liberal thinker is like the like the French that came up with democracy. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:00:44

But we don't we don't teach that anymore. But n now we teach uh now we teach um victimism, yeah, victimhood, right? Yeah, the victim parent. The reason you're not successful is because everything's against you. You know, and it's like it's funny because I always say that like our generation fell in this weird place where we were on the tail end of something, but at the very beginning of something, and it and with everything, it's with computers, it's technology, music. I feel like we were on the tail end of something, but at the beginning, even with our drafting, right? We we were manual drafting at one point, then we went into CAD. You know, everything was like that.

SPEAKER_04 2:01:21

We grew up without we were like the last ones to grow up without social media. Yes, because when we were just out of high school, it's when like MySpace and all that shit hit. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:01:34

But you know, it's kind of one of those things where I just wish people were more, and especially, and sometimes I feel we got a lot of Generation X parents, they're really good parents, but then I feel like we got a lot of Generation X parents who really fucked it up. You know, my dad, I remember having buddies when they were having kids, they were saying, uh, he's my buddy, he's gonna be my friend.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:01:59

And I always tell people, my dad made absolutely certain that we were not friends. Yeah, that wasn't his job. You know, he was like, You don't talk to me the way you talk to your friends, you talk to me with respect. Yeah, there was always this definitive line between us and authority, and you know what, it didn't matter, you know, maybe you misunderstood with an adult, you know, you still had to show respect. Yeah, you know, and and then we kind of I've had friends that have told me even when their kids were little, little, they'd say, uh, my kid doesn't have to respect anybody that doesn't respect him. That's crazy. And it's like he's fucking three. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? And so there was that weird.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:38

They're not doing him a favor, isn't it?

SPEAKER_09 2:02:39

No. And you know, those those kids luckily have turned out well. Uh really? Well, I think I mean, honestly, really? Maybe not, but they're not as disrespectful as I expected them to become. You know, and I think a lot of that was influenced by their peers and being embarrassed to act like a little shit in front of their buddies. You know, I think even for us, we would we'd hammer each other.

SPEAKER_06 2:03:03

So you know these kids now?

SPEAKER_09 2:03:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:03:06

What box do they fall in, conservative or liberal? No, they're gonna be liberal. Okay, that's all I needed to know.

SPEAKER_09 2:03:12

They're gonna be liberal, but but you know what? I think they're That's what I wanted to know. I a vast majority are gonna be liberal because I feel like it's more appealing. You know, it's easier, it's easier, you know. Hey, eat dessert, fuck your vegetables, you know. I'm a fat guy, I I gotta say mentality, but but it you know, there's that there's that, hey, do you want to this is a weird thing. We were talking about jobs earlier in my my prior work history, you know, and being the donkey, right? Being the boy. And it's like I took pride in that because my dad was a hard worker, right? And and so I want to be a hard worker, and then it gets to the point where it's like you I start taking a sense of pride that all of a sudden in a room full of ten guys, they're not like me. Yeah, and and I take pride in that. But then after a while, I find myself in a room with a hundred guys and they're not like me. And then I'm in a room with a thousand guys and they're like not like me, and I go, what the fuck's going on? You know, I I gotta go back to George West people to go, okay, there's the familiarity. Yeah, you know, it's it's so funny how uh so many of us have stayed in stayed connected, yeah, you know, over years and years and years, and I've met some cool people. There's a lot of cool people, good people out there. Some of them are liberal, and then I still get along with them, but like they're they're not made the same way we were made in the place that we grew up. And I don't know if that's uh my like that job I told you that where we all worked hard together and it was a rare thing, it was just luck. But it's like after a while, and this is where I get negative, it's like I want to be a positive influence to other dudes, right? Even younger guys, but then I get to a certain point where I turn into to uh uh you know our fathers, where it's like all of a sudden, as a guy, it takes effort to maintain this because it's so easy for us to go, I'm just gonna do my own thing. Yeah, I'm gonna stay at the house by myself.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:16

I'm telling you, if it went for this guy, I'd probably none of you guys would hear from me. Oh, I'd be the same thing. There's no doubt. Yeah, I have to drag him places and he's like, oh, I had a good time. I'd like even right now, the only people I I mean, I still try to, I'm still staying in touch with every once in a while, like guys I went to Air Force Academy with, or but other than that, and even that maybe it's like once every four months, maybe a text or something. But but like the George West guys are the guys I've you know, him, obviously my brother, my brother. Yeah, but Sean Temez, Jeff Shabola, you know, Chad McNeil. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:05:55

And and you know, they're all good dudes. Yeah, you know, uh Trey Moffitt's over there, New Braunfels and Bo's right over here, and you know, Lee's on the other side, James.

SPEAKER_04 2:06:02

Oh, we are Lee now, we play golf with Lee. You know, there's Lee and Mondo.

SPEAKER_09 2:06:06

Uh I love making fun of those guys. But it's funny because, like uh when I married my wife, I I'm not gonna say I lost contact with my buddies, but you know, you spend more time with your wife, your kids, you start doing that thing. And it it's interesting because uh uh now everybody's kids are grown, they've gone off to college, maybe they're done with college, and it's this weird this funny thing where now we've gravitated. It's like Mercury, right? We start gravitating back to each other, and uh and it's the same shit that it's always been, you know, and I'm thankful for that, but at the same time, it's like we're fucking dinosaurs, right? And at the end of the day, it's like I can't help but think that liberalism's gonna win out because it's so much easier. You know, it's so much easier to play victim, it's so much easier to kind of do your own thing. You're gonna always have you're gonna have like y'all's children, which I think, you know, I I I haven't met yours. Oh, I did I met yours once, you know. I've seen Lincoln and your daughter, and it's like there's still these, and this is what I always tell electric cars, we'll get back to that, because I sit there and look at electric cars, and I have to have a thought about this, but I'll tell you in a minute. But I go, there's always gonna be that fucking, there's always gonna be Sheldon Wapple that wants to do burnouts. You know, there's always gonna be that kid with a Metallica jacket smoking weed behind the dumpster. The mullet. You know, and it's like with the mullet. And it's like with your kids, where it's like there's even Bose told me he's like, and Bose's got a different perspective. Bose like, dude, you'd be surprised a lot of these kids are conservative. You know, a lot of these kids are very religious.

SPEAKER_06 2:07:43

My kids are a hundred percent, like they might be even more than I am. Really? And that's what Bose is. My son is the burnout kid. Hopefully he's not the weed kid behind the shit, but he is a burnout kid.

SPEAKER_09 2:07:53

Well, which is which makes me feel good, right? But it's like, and I guess the squeaky wheel gets a oil, like we see more of the crap, right? But I I think I'm hoping that we end up in this area where there's that generation of kids that go, This is stupid, and I'm not doing it. No, you know, and uh that's what that's what I hope the future has.

SPEAKER_03 2:08:15

But yeah, I mean if it doesn't, um we'll be gone. Yeah, it'll be over.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:20

No, I'm just saying, like if if the rest of the country goes like Mam Dami, because he's a communist. I know they say socialist, there's no difference. No, but if it goes that way, it's it's done.

SPEAKER_09 2:08:34

What bothers me is like sometimes I feel like Florida is out Texasing Texas. Yeah. You know, and I don't know if it's the governor. They are right now. I I don't know if it's the governor. Like, I've always liked Abbott, I've always wanted like it's the more and more I go, what's he doing, man?

SPEAKER_04 2:08:50

No, yeah, no, you'll see, you'll you'll see every once in a while, like you you see this up on Twitter, they they try to make him like a fire brand, like the new um you know, like Trumpism and all that, where they just fucking bull in a China shop. But if you actually go look and like he he um lets things through that are you know it's like it's old good old boy conserve Texas conservatives, which used to be the Texas Democrats, like LBJ, you know. That's kind of what it is. I mean, he doesn't really go to bat for for the stuff that you see Florida going to bat for, you know.

SPEAKER_09 2:09:27

And you know, this is one thing that I always in the back of my head, and I'm not I'm not by any means saying this has to happen or whatever, but I always kind of go back to like uh the border and my sister. There was a certain point where you heard about all these bailouts in George West, right? And my conversation with the folks when we would talk about that topic was there's a middle-aged, uh, overweight lesbian out in the middle of nowhere with a gun on her hip. And because we haven't protected the border the way we were supposed to have, one day she might be in a position where she's gotta defend herself. And hopefully she'll be on the positive side of that outcome, but it will impact her life forever. Yeah, and it's gonna happen because we didn't do our job as a federal government, because at one point Texas put razor ribbon and the federal government went out there and lifted it up with a fork truck. You know, and it's like because of that, it's gonna put this overly attractive, heavy set, middle-aged lesbian with a gun on her hip, potentially in a position where she has to defend herself. I see the same thing with the influx of Muslim folks, right? It's like you get to a point where it becomes overpopulated, and i it's the same game plan, man. I watch Nighty Day Fiance, love that shit. And there's so many white women that go and they chase a Middle Eastern guy, and uh a guy who's a Muslim, and it's the same thing every fucking season, even though it's different people. Hey, you're gonna you can wear whatever you want, we can do whatever you want, it doesn't matter. Then they get married, they move them over here, they get here, they get their green card, and now you gotta wear a burqa. Now you gotta cover up. And the girls always say, Well, he he always told me I didn't have to. And now he's telling me I have to, but he's doing it for me, keeping me safe.

SPEAKER_06 2:11:24

Yeah, and it's like This is a real show. Oh fuck yeah, I love it, man.

SPEAKER_09 2:11:28

And but that's that happens every episode.

SPEAKER_06 2:11:32

Every episode. I I I I I don't know. I don't know. Sorry.

SPEAKER_09 2:11:36

But that's the same process that happens in New York and it'll happen in Texas. Where we go, they go, well, they they just want to be they just want to have a community. You know, they just want uh to you know build a church. They just want to have a neighborhood. And then all of a sudden, well, now we've got Sharia law. Uh I've I've read some stuff or or seen podcasts where like there's even Asian communities that have their own law enforcement in court. Yeah. You know, in the United States. Well fuck. What are we doing?

SPEAKER_04 2:12:04

I'll say the the uh Islam's really good at it. Yeah. I mean that is like a that isn't just happening by chance.

SPEAKER_09 2:12:12

Well we also have a very fucking stupid section of the population in this country.

SPEAKER_04 2:12:16

Yeah, they won't say it till it's too late, but yeah. But yeah, uh China's really good at it. You know, we were just down in Costa Rica, and it was the same story I heard in South Pacific and every other little country we've been to where they go and um they they buy the government and the police departments like equipment and they fix bridges and fix bridges. It's called the Belt and Road. That's what China calls it, the Belt and Road. So they go and invest in infrastructure free, gratis.

SPEAKER_09 2:12:43

Yeah, they're doing that in Africa quite a bit.

SPEAKER_04 2:12:45

Yeah, they do it in Africa, they do it everywhere. South America, Central America, although right now, if you've noticed, um Department of State and everything is really focused on rooting all of that out of South America, and they're they're having a lot of success doing that, but even now they're still down there. So they go do all this, and then they also bring, they'll do like a little grocery store. And then the you know, like little family-run grocery store, which they don't they never even like learn the language, and then they put the Costa Rican mom and pop, you know, out of business, and they they start to just grow and grow, and then the only grocery stores in the country now are all Chinese, you know, and so I mean that's their whole thing where they become now you become dependent and they don't have to pay taxes and that kind of stuff because China invested in them and got them to agree not to do that, and it's gonna be great, and all of a sudden they can't do anything for themselves and they're beholden to China, and China can use these little seemingly private um you know commerce, but they're Chinese citizens, and so but you know, in China everybody's part of the government. So I mean it's a and Islam does. That raises something.

SPEAKER_06 2:13:54

I have a question for you guys.

SPEAKER_04 2:13:55

What and so what what China doesn't do is they don't go in and like um they're very uh they don't come in and create burden on the government. So they don't come in and like those people that are running those grocery stores start doing scams on welfare. A lot of times because those countries don't care about welfare, but Islam will use the West's largesse against it. They come in, they have ten kids, and don't work, and just get you know every welfare you can get. They like, hey, you're gonna give it to me, give it to me. And they use it against you, and then before you know it, you got dearborn, you know. We've been up there, there's like no English signs.

SPEAKER_09 2:14:40

I sent I sent uh him and and a couple other buddies, like uh uh this thing I'd seen on uh I took I took it off a grock or something, but I didn't realize this till I saw a different podcast, and they were talking about uh section eight housing programs.

SPEAKER_06 2:14:54

That's been around for a long time.

SPEAKER_09 2:14:56

Well it Section Eight has the part that I didn't realize was there's a portion of Section 8 that they'll allow them to buy their own home. So basically, you go buy a house, you end up on Section 8, instead of them saying, Okay, well, here's an apartment in uh, you know, a shitty part of town and this is where you can stay, they will just pay you to keep making payments on your own house till it's paid off. And that's what a lot of people are starting to do, is they're buying these homes, going on section eight, the government gives them fifteen hundred dollars a month to maintain those payments, and in 30 years the fucking house is paid off, it's theirs. It doesn't belong to the state of Brotherhood.

SPEAKER_04 2:15:34

Yeah, you know, the immigration uh the whole problem would be fixed if we just stopped the uh the welfare stuff because then there'd be no reason to come over here. Yeah, then it would go back to like when we were growing up where hardworking motherfuckers came. You know, that's not the ones that came and just were immediately a negative impact.

SPEAKER_09 2:15:53

I even tell people, I'm like, you know, back when we were kids, like fucking George West ran on favors, you know?

SPEAKER_06 2:16:00

Everything's transactional. Yeah, make no mistake. So here's my question, you guys. Um, so you have the Chinese who are slowly infiltrating the world. I mean, they're they're the best at it 100%. There's nobody better, right? They're pretty good, but they're not as good as Islam. So look at Europe. Okay, so but they're loud about it.

SPEAKER_09 2:16:20

Somali's were kicking ass recently, too.

SPEAKER_06 2:16:22

Well, they they kind of fall fall into that, right? So they're they're loud about it.

SPEAKER_04 2:16:26

Like a World Cup bracket. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:16:28

They're loud about it, and then they're slowly sort of growing, right? One loud, one quiet. What happens when the two meet?

SPEAKER_09 2:16:39

Well, that's where I go back to the lesbian in the country.

SPEAKER_06 2:16:44

No, no, no. I'm saying so they they finally win. They finally, the momdamis and everybody like get rid of us, the the normals, even the liberals. And you have the China. They don't put up with it.

SPEAKER_04 2:17:00

Well that well, that won't happen until I mean it's a until we're gone. Far forward. Right. Right. Yeah, because you think about it like right now because they're both vying for Western the whole like uh pride. Well, that's that's they're all wearing the kefia um Palestine things, you know? And they get thrown off roofs over there. But right now they're bedfellows because they have a common enemy, which is like the West.

SPEAKER_09 2:17:26

Right. You know, until they're not needed anymore. Yeah. But but one thing that you see like, and I don't know that it happens a lot, but you see a little bit of the news. Europe's gotten so bad. Like now your 22-year-old male white guy in Europe, now he's uh now he's a racist because he's sick and tired of Muslims, and you know, everybody else coming in this country, and you know, you hear about the rapes, you hear about the the the violence, you know, in Ireland as well. And it's like I go back to the lesbian out in the country. It's like you didn't do your job, and now there's gonna be blood in the streets, man. And it's because and maybe that was maybe that's by design, you know. Maybe that's politicians going, hey, chaos is good for us.

SPEAKER_04 2:18:10

Well, the difference between what your scenario and in Europe is now in Europe the police forces are captured. I mean, they're against the guy trying to defend himself, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_09 2:18:22

Did you see that that guy uh Fort Worth, Texas?

SPEAKER_06 2:18:25

Did it happen there too? Well, the they're going after preachers, they they're proving it day in and day out. What you're talking about the guy they handcuffed and he died.

SPEAKER_04 2:18:33

Yeah, he had got it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:18:36

I think that happened back in December, but it's like crazy. Even when people were in Europe are getting arrested for fucking uh social media posts, yeah. It's like, what's going on, man?

SPEAKER_06 2:18:46

You know. No, in Fort Worth right now, there's a preacher that's preaching on a corner and they're giving him grief saying he can't preach publicly. But if somebody's offended, right. And oh vice versa, he'll say on video, hey, what if they say something about me? Oh no, they can do that all day long. And they have the police officers multiple, like three that I've seen. Well, see, that's that fucking that they will arrest him, but not them, and he's just a preacher.

SPEAKER_09 2:19:16

Yeah. And and that's that's that's and this is Fort Worth, my man. That's what I'm saying. And you know, people people like to go, or it's interesting because I see a lot of people always make comments about Texas, and Texas is Texas, and it's like, hang on, motherfucker. We haven't been Texas in a while. Yeah, you know, uh You haven't been to like Frisco. Well, yeah, I mean that that that's kind of where it's changing, and even in Houston, you know, your small rural communities, yeah, they're gonna hold out probably forever. But when the population, you know, starts voting in the state, and you know, your your rural communities aren't out voting, you know, the Houston population, the Dallas population, the Austin, and all of a sudden it's like fuck, you know, we didn't want it, but now here we are.

SPEAKER_06 2:20:00

And our problem too is he only had two kids. I only had two kids, you have zero kids and eight kids. They're each family has ten. Yeah, yeah. Biggest regret of my life pulling out.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:11

Yes, and no, my wife and I both wish that we had had more. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:20:17

Well, you know, I I think that's uh you know, and I don't know if it's the fucking communist, because to me it all comes back to communism. Yeah, uh, you know, and it's like there was this this never worked, never in the history of hands. Yeah, but there was all there all of a sudden it was like people quit having kids and they started getting dogs, and all of a sudden your dog goes in a shopping cart, and you can take your dog into Lowe's, you can take your dog in the Home Depot, and now all of a sudden you take your dog places, and and now you can put your dog on your fucking insurance.

SPEAKER_06 2:20:47

You get caught up in the rat race. But the that's the thing, is like is that design, it is designed, it is the the dual income family, you get caught up in the rat race.

SPEAKER_09 2:20:59

I literally talked to the girl earlier about that. We she's got a fur she's got a friend who's like the last Rosie the Rivet, or she's like 100 years old. Um, and we were talking about it. And I said, when they put when they took the women out of the workforce, because the men came back from work, then they put them at the house, and they went back to the the important job of being a homemaker. But all of a sudden there was a group in this country that said homemaking, they started demonizing being a homemaker. Yeah, they started demonizing you know the importance of that job, the importance of somebody in our family raising our kids. Now, so then all of a sudden it was like, no girl, go to work. Yeah well, now you got the government taxing two incomes in one household, and they say, Well, you know what, send us your kids. You know, we got pre-K, we got pre-pre-K. And all of a sudden, your kids are spending eight hours with somebody outside of the fucking family. You can't even pick a daycare to send them to because daycare is fucking three grand, you know.

SPEAKER_04 2:22:00

Uh but whatever, you know, I think it's designed, obviously, like you said. I don't know. The whole thing about um, and I've told him, you know, this, I don't know how you feel, but you know, all of our parents were like, you know, go to college first, go to get get your feet under you first before you start having kids, right? That's stupid. That's stupid. Like, and like, like to me, I tell my kids, like, I'm I hope you are having kids by the time you're 22.

SPEAKER_08 2:22:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:22:29

Yeah. I don't tell that to my kids, but the difference is, but I would say the differences here for both of us, is number one, we would 100% be behind them. And when I you guys need help, we we have the ability to help, which is like daycare. We would step in at 22. His he's still young enough to step in and help. However, that help might fall, whether it's financial or just bring the kids to the house and they can play with the cats and dogs and swim in the pool. Yeah, whatever it is. Well, I didn't have that.

SPEAKER_04 2:23:07

Like that makes it easier, but yeah, it but I mean, how many people can't do that? That's what I'm saying, is like you just gotta do it.

SPEAKER_06 2:23:16

Yeah, you should. You should just jump in, but the the problem is uh an intelligent person is always thinking like your son, your daughter, my daughter, my son, they'll be like, Well, do I have enough to make the mortgage? Do I have enough to for the groceries, and do I have enough to put pampers on my kids?

SPEAKER_02 2:23:36

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:23:37

Well, you know, that that's that's part of it, is like for the majority of people, you you're it's never a good time. Never, you know.

SPEAKER_06 2:23:44

No, that's part of the rat race.

SPEAKER_04 2:23:45

Hey, listen, I the way you know how I grew up. You know how I grew up. I was the second of nine kids. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:51

I'm pretty sure my parents didn't have the money for the mortgage and the pampers.

SPEAKER_06 2:23:55

No, and there was a lot more of that. Exactly. Well, I don't know. There was there's but there's a lot of government cheese going around too.

SPEAKER_04 2:24:03

Well, the thought, I mean, to me, the thought is, even in our heads, is that we want our kids to be like professionals and and highly, you know, financially successful and stable and and all of that, even though we now know that the most important thing in life is our family.

SPEAKER_06 2:24:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 2:24:21

Even though, but we are somehow trying to pass on to them that it's important that you do this and plan it and and do all that.

SPEAKER_06 2:24:27

Yeah, it's not. No, because I will admit that my wife and I got caught up in that rat race, and then at one point we're like, why do we need a 5,000 square foot house when nobody's seen the other half in like two months? Yeah, this is this is dumb. This makes no sense. Let's take a step back, let's downsize. Andre, you don't need to work anymore. There's no point, there's nobody at home. We don't need a nanny because my son was raised by a Turkish nanny and a Colombian nanny, and like what's the point?

SPEAKER_09 2:25:00

Yeah. Well, you you want to take a step back. You want them to have the most influence by one of the parents, you know. And granted, there's some kids someplace that don't have two parents or don't have any parents, but those are cases that you know you can argue a different argument. But when when things are are when there's two parents and things are working out great, you know, yeah, fucking have kids.

SPEAKER_04 2:25:22

There's a hirh higher chance for success there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:25:25

There's a I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's an old movie. Andre's probably seen it. I don't think you fuck with stupid stuff like this, but that movie Idiocracy. I know. Have you seen it? He's as big of a movie buff as you're like that more so that is there's so much truth to it because in the very beginning. They even tell you how you know, this is a couple who's successful and educated, and they want to get their career started, and that's where their focus is, or not focused on children. And then Billy Bob and the uh Tina Fey, you know, they're just banging it out and shooting kids out like crazy, and they're not concerned about careers or you know, where they live or anything like that. And and then all of a sudden the people that you would want to be having kids together are now in their late 30s, early 40s, and they never had kids, but they've been successful. And you know, it's even just that portion of the movie, if you don't get into the rest of the craziness, like it's like fuck that is happening.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:22

It is you know, it's like reverse um um Darwin.

SPEAKER_09 2:26:27

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:28

Yeah, reverse evolution, you know, because like in every other species, right, the most suitable produce the most. That's like success for animals, right? And so their traits get the most. The best traits, the the best traits anymore. Yeah, the best traits for like survival for animals are the ones that that's how they evolve. Survival over the fittest.

SPEAKER_09 2:26:50

Yeah, so when you think about like a lion, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:26:52

He's he's the strongest, yeah, you know, and he's he's he fights to get the women, or the one that's the like the best the bird that's good at but gathering food or whatever has more chicks and they survive more, but it's opposite for humans in the last eight years.

SPEAKER_09 2:27:06

It you know, a lot of these girls have just you know they're they're a prison pen pal, and as soon as they get out, they start knocking it out, man. Well, hey, before I let you go, yeah, because we've been here a while. You're Cybertruck. Again, I love the burnouts. I love the I love the show and Whoppos who's gonna want to you know leave tar at the stoplight downtown. Um I see Ford coming out with these trucks. Nope. And they go, hey, you look tired, you should pull over. Right? Yeah, and then they say, in the future, the truck's gonna look at you and go, hey, you're inebriated. Yeah, you're not going anywhere. Yeah. And then I I sit there and I take things too far, but I go, I I told my wife, I said, in the next 10 years, the cops are gonna have a fucking PlayStation 5 controller, and they're gonna be able to sync up with your electronic vehicle and pull you over.

SPEAKER_02 2:28:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 2:28:08

You know, or Tesla can go, hey, you know what, you missed some payments, fucking bring the truck back. Yeah, you know, or disable it where you can't even turn it on. Yeah. And I sit there and go. Ford already has that, by the way. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 2:28:21

And I think it's getting more uh five years from now. We we can go home now without him touching the steering wheel. Well, that's what I'm saying. Do we want that world? And I'm asking him. And number two, you can also hack the system where he can fall asleep and they put a little fake head, but perspective looks like his head, and we're going home anyway. So there's always gonna be a hack. But there's button.

SPEAKER_09 2:28:45

You're saying the thing a privacy thing?

SPEAKER_06 2:28:49

You're talking about giving up control.

SPEAKER_09 2:28:50

Giving up control, uh, you know, do we want that?

SPEAKER_04 2:28:54

It's gonna happen. I mean, I don't want to give up control for sure. But I will say this because whenever these frames first started coming out, I've been to your house once and I didn't see a regular vehicle there, so I'm just saying. No, I have only Teslas, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So um it's gonna happen. Yeah, I would say it probably does. I don't like it.

SPEAKER_06 2:29:15

Um I bet at some point you're reluctant to put in your credit card information on the internet, and now you're just like every other day.

SPEAKER_09 2:29:22

Yeah, I do it all the time. But I I guess one thing that like I've got an old truck uh recently paid off, fellas. Uh father-in-law gave us an old car. Uh it's 20 years old. Nice, it's 20 years old. Uh, and I sit there and go, if I'm gonna buy anything again, I want a 60, 70 model vehicle, uh, decent motor in it, drivetrain, I want it patinaed out, and I'm gonna clear coat that shit. And that's what I'll drive. I don't want to break down, right? I want air conditioned, I don't want to break down, but I don't want it going, have you been drinking? You're not going anywhere. Yeah, you know, or hey, you know what? Let's call the cops. You know, you look inebriated. You know, let's call, let's get you home safe, let's call the cops. And again, it's like uh it's like when State Farm goes, hey, I need your credit card uh take out payments. And I go, do I have to give you because I might want to miss a fucking payment one month. You know what I'm saying? I I might need 10 more days to pay that bill. You know, I like that idea, even though I'm probably not gonna never do that, but I like that idea. I don't want to lose control.

SPEAKER_04 2:30:37

Yeah, no, listen, if yeah, I I don't like that either. Um will the technology be there? Yes. Um will they be able to implement it? Um I think Tesla would be the last one to do it because of who their owner is, right? So well their owner, it's a public company, but because of Musk. You know, he's all about freedom, right?

SPEAKER_09 2:30:59

But when you talk when you describe your truck right now, I mean if he decided one day to go fuck it, let's go extreme, I mean, he can probably do it quicker than anybody else because a truck is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:31:14

Yeah, I think they could, but would they? I mean, you know, another thing, like the the argument on that used to be um they can take over it and kill you with, you know, like like wreck it and kill you. And that's uh there was a lot of conspiracy theories or true theories about uh you know, all the way back to um McClendon, Audrey McClendon, the guy from uh Chesapeake, remember the CEO, um or anybody high profile that was going like 70 and went into a tree or something, right? Killed him. And so uh I used to think about that, like you know, it's like oh I'll get a and I had like remember that Jeep I had, it's like a standard Jeep. And then after a while, I'm like, man, it's kind of like your your credit card or something. And then even one time I think Jeremy brought it up, my brother. I know he yeah, he did. He'd bring one time like, man, I it could just take over and kill you, and nobody would know. I'm like, Yes, it could, but why wouldn't it just kill you with my car? Like, why wouldn't they just they know where you are? You got a phone and everything. Why don't you need to drive one? It can kill you with my car or any other Tesla or electric car out there, you know. Like if they want to kill you, you you're not gonna be they're gonna kill you, you know.

SPEAKER_09 2:32:29

Yeah, I I just feel it gets real minority report.

SPEAKER_06 2:32:32

Yes, you know what I'm saying? Well, you're worried about a slippery slope, right? Right. And like I worry about cashless society, you know, like yeah, I mean there's that too.

SPEAKER_09 2:32:41

And I guess, I guess uh one fire at a time.

SPEAKER_06 2:32:45

Yeah, that's a huge one too. It is a I could probably worry more about that than the car thing. Like, I could give a shit. I can still go buy an old Ford, like you want to do.

SPEAKER_09 2:32:54

And I guess that's what I want for Jeremy for Jason. I want you to have your Tesla truck, man. But I want you to have that old stick shift G. Yeah, I had it for a while. That that way you go, you know, when it turns into uh uh fucking uh what was that movie? We made you. We made you what was that damn um 80s movie with the 18 wheelers that were killing everybody? Maximum overdrive. When we go into maximum overdrive, man, yeah, I want you to have a stick shift jeep. Because I don't know, man. I I just I feel like I feel like you're it's inevitable, like you said. It's it's coming, it's gonna happen. Yeah. I just want to head that direction as slow as possible. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_04 2:33:40

Yeah, the tech the technology's not gonna slow, it's whether it gets implemented or not. Right. You know, another um another thing about those um oh god damn it, what was I gonna say? You were talking about um the maximum motor re drive shit. Great movie. Yeah. It's gonna come to me. Oh well, you don't.

SPEAKER_09 2:34:00

But I mean I mean that's kind of where uh like I I your truck's amazing, it looks amazing.

SPEAKER_04 2:34:04

Oh, I got it, I got it. Go ahead. So people always say, hey, when the when the balloon goes up and the shit hits the fan, where are you gonna plug that thing in? Right? Like whenever this is like the apocalypse comes. And it will be the only one that drives because I know what it takes to run a refinery. How long do you think fucking gasoline's gonna be around? That's gonna be the first thing. Once gasoline stops making, we have like maybe a seven-day supply. That's if you can get it.

SPEAKER_09 2:34:30

You know what's funny is is uh during COVID, I was uh I got a little freaked out, right? And so I like to prep a little bit, right? I don't get crazy, but you know, we got extra gross. Every man should have that in the back of his mind. Like, what would I do? You know, we got little propane tanks we need to cook something, you know, little heaters, uh hunting, typically hunting stuff, right? Hunting gear. And uh I called Lee one time. I said, Hey man, I probably shouldn't say this because he's always bitching, he can't give free um advice, but fuck it. I said, Hey man, should I buy gold? And he goes, Um, can you eat gold? I said, No. He said, Can you defend yourself with gold? I said, no. And he goes, then don't buy gold. And I go, so I should buy ammunition. And he goes, probably. And I started buying ammunition like crazy man. And and I told my wife, I said, listen, yes, this is crazy. Yes, when she gets bad, it it probably gonna be overwhelming and we're not gonna last very long. I said, but I could see uh filling up a tank of gas and swapping it out for a handful of five, five, six, you know? Yeah. I would want it, right? You can hunt, you can defend your family, and I started thinking that way. Bought some, you know, dried goods.

SPEAKER_04 2:35:48

Well, I will tell you this. If you don't have it, then whatever you've bought, it ain't yours. Right. Somebody's gonna come take it.

SPEAKER_09 2:35:54

Right. Yeah, you know, so it was it was a lot of two, two, three, five, five, six, um, you know, nine millimeters, stuff like that. You know, just kind of, you know, I got friends that kind of do similar. Uh uh when we stop recording, I'll tell you one. But uh uh, you know, I I just think that the direction that we're heading as a society is it's kind of one of those things where people go, um, we don't do this because that's how my parents did it. And it's like, okay, well, what the fuck was wrong with it? Yeah, you know, maybe it was pretty good. Yeah, you know, yes, you always want to progress. Yes, you want to have mod, you know, technology is great, you know, but it's like let's not let's not be in a hurry to jump off that cliff. Let's look over the edge and see what's down there a little bit, right? And that's kind of where I'm at.

SPEAKER_04 2:36:41

Like, like I said, like I said, it's coming. I'm telling you, it's on all fronts. Pretty soon, like us sitting here right here, like without any implants in our brains, will not be able to compete even closely with the ones that have implants. Yeah. Like the Neuralink, that kind of stuff, where it interfaces with the nervous system and their brain, you'll be able to like put something in and like learn.

SPEAKER_06 2:37:05

Well, they're doing that right now with vision. Yeah. Oh, the glasses. Like, no, no. Oh, your eyes. They're given sight when it's not only just sight, but it might be thermal or infrared. Really? Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 2:37:17

So they're gonna you're gonna be able to be augmented. So yeah, like we're like just Neanderthals. You're a hybrid, like Android.

SPEAKER_06 2:37:25

So the stuff you're worried about, and you're you're 100% correct. And by the way, you should just have a horse if you're worried about because at least you can eat the damn horse.

SPEAKER_09 2:37:34

Yeah, you can ride the damn thing with your six shooter. You know, it's funny because like uh uh I think we've had this conversation before where it's like uh um fuck, where was it going with it? You were talking about uh the site, the site and and you know, Neurolink, and it's kind of like, well, he started using Grok, that's what it was. He you the first time you brought your laptop, you brought grok. And I had never seen Grok before. I'm I'm the guy that goes, Oh, I'm not putting Grok on my phone because they're gonna know everything that I'm doing, you know. Well, this is this is what I this is why I need you to slow down. Because to me, I go, is Andre doing it yet? Because I know Andre it isn't, you know, Andre's against a lot of stuff. I am against a lot of stuff. So I I ask myself, I don't ever tell you, but I go, is Andre doing it? So when you brought Grok, I was like, Andre's using it, let me start using it. So I put on my phone, and I will fucking sit there for an hour and just ask it questions. You should. I love history. I should.

SPEAKER_04 2:38:43

I sit there and I go, okay, well, you know, you're using it like you would use a search engine.

SPEAKER_09 2:38:47

Right. Yeah, that's not what it's meant for, but that's what that's what we use it for. I'm not smart enough to use it correctly, but that's what I'll do. I'll ask questions, and I'll, you know, wonder things, but this is one thing that I always go back to and I always bring this up. One day I Googled uh a word, and I think it was uh I think it was nationalism or something, and it described it as a right wing something, something, something, something like that. And so immediately I've always said there's not never an always, there's never never. So when something says that it's a right wing, I go, that's impossible. It cannot always just be a right wing thing. So I bought an old dictionary a long time ago, probably 30 years ago. And so I always double check the internet against the dictionary. Yeah, it had the exact same definition without the right wing. Yeah, and that's where I go, like with Grok and other stuff. It's like at some point, it's like, and I've had this conversation before where we grew up in a time without it, right? We've seen, we've had real life experiences, we've seen real life shit to where we can call bullshit. And I think we talked about this last time, you know, we can go, hey, I Googled that, but I know that's bullshit because I have lived experiences. Yeah, you know, your grandbabies are only gonna know what fucking Grox ever told them.

SPEAKER_04 2:40:15

Like, think about this whether it's uh anytime something went wrong, they start to, you know, and you've probably been through trainings like this. What do they say, like avoid groupthink? Because you know, when you're like doing an investigation or coming up with what could go wrong, you don't want to do groupthink because somebody's afraid to step outside the group and say something different. But that's exactly so we have the ability, because we grew up without it, to not like be influenced by groupthink and how we were developed, our brains were developed and how we think about things. But you're right, our our kids and our kids' kids.

SPEAKER_09 2:40:45

Yeah, yeah, it's only what they've ever looked up, yeah. You know, and it's funny because like I one, I feel like I have several amazing qualities, but one of them in particular, it's hard to pick this one. One of them in particular is, and I've always been this way, even when I was a little kid. If everybody goes to the right, I will go to the left. If everybody, whatever directly, yes, just by nature, you know.

SPEAKER_04 2:41:12

You know, my dad is like the contrarian. Is he? Oh my god. Do you know during COVID, I mean, my dad never once put a mask on his face.

SPEAKER_08 2:41:22

Really?

SPEAKER_09 2:41:22

That's not true.

SPEAKER_04 2:41:22

Not once. And he went into a hospital because my nephew broke his ankle and my dad took him there. And I try to tell him, like, you gotta wear a mask. He's like, No, and they just let him go.

SPEAKER_09 2:41:32

Yeah. You know what's funny is like I I I did at work because they made us wear water. Of course. But I I go, you know what? I'm not fucking going there. I went to I went to one restaurant, Salomon, and I good food, really good food. But I started going to him regularly because he would do I need a mask? Fuck no. Yeah. Oh fuck, okay. I'd go to the shooting range in Marion. Do I need a mask?

unknown 2:41:58

Nah.

SPEAKER_09 2:41:59

And I I started going, okay, I'm only going places where I don't have to deal with that shit. Yeah. And granted, I'm a homebody anyway, I'm going a lot of places, but I really started to structure that my my patterns that way. We worked a little bit out of the office, a little bit out of home. And it was funny because my wife told me one time, she goes, uh, she's working out of the house. How do you feel that COVID has impacted your life? I said, not one fucking bit. I said, I still everybody got more annoying. Everybody got more annoying. Uh I said, I still go to work. I still go to George West. I still go to the places I go to, and I don't wear a mask there, and I don't fucking worry about it. You know, where granted she worked for the school district, it's a little more different for her, but uh, you know, I just always want to encourage people to fucking stay defiant to some degree. Don't be an asshole, right? Don't be defiant just to be a dick, but be defiant to some degree, you know, and and I think that keeps that keep as long as we have the burnouts, you know what I'm saying? I always go back to that. As long as we have those guys, yeah, you know, there's always that North Star to go kick. That's that's what we used to be. You know, there was a time where that's that's what it was like, and why do we get away from that? Because that looks kind of appealing, yeah, right? And I think as long as we have those burnout north stars, man, we're gonna be we're gonna have a reference, and I think that's pretty important. But fellas, I appreciate Joe.

SPEAKER_04 2:43:30

Yeah, Jason.

SPEAKER_09 2:43:31

We'd love to do it again. Oh, we're gonna do it again. There's plenty to talk about. And uh uh Andre, I always love having here, man. So worries. Um I wanna We didn't get to use Grok. We didn't use Grok at all, did we? No. Look, see? Okay, let's let's do one search. What do we want to look up? I was gonna have you look up what crude oil was, but he told me what it was. It's not dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_06 2:43:59

You barely scratched the surface with him. He's got a lot in his head. Well, I've just had I've had a lot of years around him. A lot.

SPEAKER_09 2:44:09

I I think there's a I think uh probably the most access to him, I guess. Well, anytime, anytime you want to come on, you're welcome. Uh we can always say something inappropriate, but I know you have kid children. Yeah, uh, but you know what I mean? I I really I don't I don't hold back around them. You know, I've always enjoyed you, you know. Always enjoyed Andre. Uh, you know, I've always enjoyed you, and your family's always been awesome. You know, I always go back to the speech at the high school, you know, because that was I've always known you're a good dude, you know, uh when you went to the Air Force.

SPEAKER_06 2:44:43

It was welcome to the starting line.

SPEAKER_09 2:44:45

Yes, yeah, you know, and I and I think that's what we need to be telling kids more so. You know, we don't need to tell the younger kids, hey, you can be anything you want, without telling, without reminding them, but there's a big cost, yeah, right? Do you want to be fat and lazy at home with nobody there and it looks like a fret house and there's uh you know, you're there's underwear all over the place, you can do that. But if you also want to be retired with three Teslas at 46 or whatever the fuck you are, you know, there's options for that too, but it requires different effort. So I think that's important because they're not getting it at the public school, man.

SPEAKER_04 2:45:24

The biggest thing is that they know that they can do whatever they want.

SPEAKER_06 2:45:26

You know what? Both of our kids have gone through public school, they'll be top tier.

SPEAKER_09 2:45:34

He told me. So you're number one, he's number two. Is that what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_04 2:45:37

My son. Yeah. Yeah. They still got a year to go, though.

SPEAKER_06 2:45:42

You know what? And they're both conservative, I would say.

SPEAKER_09 2:45:46

Well, you know, I I think uh uh, you know, like I said, Bo's kids are are very similar. So, you know, sometimes I feel like uh all hope is lost, but maybe it's not. So maybe I need to change my mentality.

SPEAKER_06 2:45:56

There's some dim lights if you look around.

SPEAKER_09 2:45:58

Oh, there's plenty of those. But hopefully there's enough of them that it starts to get a little brighter for for the ones that don't have that light on at all. But all right, fellas. Appreciate y'all. Thank you all so much. And uh thanks everybody for listening. Yep, thank y'all.

SPEAKER_00 2:46:15

Thanks for listening to the Gabe Melina podcast.

SPEAKER_07 2:46:23

Yo, Barry.