Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - ARRESTED CEO Confronts Derek Jeter, Wes Watson & Makes Millions | AG Gregoroff

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

ARRESTED CEO Confronts Derek Jeter, Wes Watson & Makes Millions | AG Gregoroff

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That's my lord's how to tell me to say. He's like, you know who that was? That's Derek Jeter. That West Watson kid. Growing up in San Diego, you know what? He went to prison as? He was a... Hey, you guys.

I want to let you know that this podcast is heavily edited. Some of the content was just too, let's say, raw for YouTube to get monetization. There are a couple of stories that are just... We couldn't put on the podcast at all. If you want to watch the unedited version, of the podcast. Go to Patreon. We'll have the uncensored version on Patreon. It's $10 a month. But either way, you can watch it here. It's just going to be edited. I appreciate you guys watching. Check out the podcast. I grew up in San Diego in an like Oceanside Vista area, which is the northern

part of San Diego County. It's a little bit more rural. It's outside of the city. But when we grew up, I was born in 78. So, you know, I was a little kid in the early 80s. It was all agriculture. it was all migrant Mexicans coming over to like work the fields tomato fields avocados um just stuff like that like really really rule not like how you picture southern California nowadays with big beautiful bustling houses there was a little bit of that maybe down in like La Jolla and stuff but where we grew up and then just north of us in orange county it was called Orange County because it was just nothing but orange groves so really agriculturally based because of that the migrants came up from Mexico and then they would

these really small poor communities and then gangs would form in them to obviously for protection or whatever reasons gangs form and poor neighborhoods so we grew up in those neighborhoods just around mexican gangs all the time so we were white kids surrounded by mexican gangs and that's how we grew up um and because we grew up that environment we grew up like around a lot of violence seen a lot of violence um my dad was a really good guy he was a truck driver and we grew up up Jehovah's Witness, which is so lame. Right. I didn't realize how lame it was, so I became an adult. I was always kind of a bad kid, but, you know, he would try to get us to go to church

and stuff like that, but I was a maniac. I was like taking a coyote inside of a building, like they're just going to destroy everything. Right. I was terrible in school. I couldn't hold still, like, you know, typical kid stuff. But when I was a little kid, like six years old, we were like watching TV at night. And I heard, we heard some like rustling around on our porch. and my dad opens the front door and you know back then there was no LED lights there's like a tiny 15 watt light bulb on the porch you could barely see basically candlelit right

and there's this Mexican guy just I mean dozens and dozens of times and he's bleeding and just bloods gushing out of him and he's sitting in my my grandfather's wooden like rocking chair that he would hang out at and like you know drink during the day and he's just sitting there bleeding to death and like at six years old we just watched this guy die and then you know you'd go to the liquor

store my dad would go grab some beer we go to the liquor store and like it'd be taped off like you couldn't go into the store because some guy got there was a shooting or drive by it's really big back then so we just kind of grew up in that environment you know um we grew up really poor but we always had like don't do this this is right and wrong but you know we grew up really bad and you couldn't like we is it's like you and your brother yeah me my brother my sister and then just there's a couple guys for the neighborhood, you know, that I grew up with, that was close to. Is your dad around at all? He died of cancer.

He died of cancer right when I started my company. Oh, okay. Sorry. And I remember, like, in third grade, we were, you know, third grade, you get to school, you play on the playground. There was some dude that was dead. In the playground, he died overnight, shooting, whatever. I remember I was being pissed that we couldn't go play because this dude was just sitting there dead.

And we're like, could we just play around him? Could we go play on the monkey? bars like a few feet away from him like the swings nothing right that's just how we grew up um well i mean was your dad like around when you were a kid when you said he was a truck driver so he was local but he'd be gone all day so my grandma um would raise us okay and then my great grandma so my dad's side's all russian and my mom's side's from cuba so everybody on my dad's side lives to be really old except he got cancer but everybody else lives to be super old so my great grandma was over a hundred And she was around in the 80s when I was a kid.

She was born in the late 1800s. So that was the lady I grew up with, you know, around. She didn't have like electricity in her house. She had gas and that was it. She would chop wood. Sorry, she didn't even have gas. She would chop wood and do like one of those big cast iron stoves that she was like cook borsh and hoopsie and like Russian stews on, like really, really old school.

And then I remember. remember, my grandfather had electricity hooked up so she could watch TV. She liked Judge Wapner. Remember people's sports back in the day? Judge Wapner and my grandfather served in World War II together. When Judge Wapner got shot, my grandfather was that brought him back to the landing vessel. He got shot in his ass. So my great grandma, who's the mother-in-law, she had like this funny crush on Judge Wapner back in the day.

So I remember we hooked up electricity to her house just so she could watch, Judge Wapner. Jeez. All right. So we grew up with really like, I guess old school work values. My grandma, I mean, she lived to be 100 and something, and she was, like, sick for one day and then died. My grandfather was, like, chopping wood and driving until he was, like, 100-and-something, and then, like, two days of being sick and then died. Grandma's still alive.

She's 100-something years old. she's still like you know cooking and doing all that sort of stuff so everybody on that side lives to be really really old but still they were kind of like in charge of you like they were too old to tick to kind of corral you or you know and there was cousins around so we were just running around wild and because it was rule we didn't like watch tv during the day like i remember seeing some cartoons but we'd just be outside running around you know we'd throw rocks at the cows across the street or you know we'd go like hide in a cornfield we listen to country music fish sneak on a people's property and go bass fishing and stuff when we were kids.

And then trying to go to school, I basically grew up like Huckleberry Finn, just running around. And then trying to get me inside of a classroom all day is impossible, impossible. Well, I mean, did you get in trouble in school? Oh, yeah. Okay. I was going to say, or did you just not go? No, it's terrible. I even got kicked out of kindergarten and had to redo it.

I did kindergarten twice. So my dad would kind of like load me in the truck in the morning. morning, drop me off at the elementary school, and then within an hour or two, my grandma would get a call to come pick me up. It was like that every day. I don't know that I've ever completed a full day of school. Right. But you graduated? No, hell no. You never graduated high school? I dropped on seventh grade. To do what? Work? No, just to run around and be a maniac. No, we didn't have a lot of role models growing up. I mean, work ethic-wise, we did because all of our relatives worked hard.

Right. And my dad loved us, but, like, he didn't teach us, like, how to balance a checkbook or, like, you know, or how to do your taxes or anything like that. So he loved us, he fed us, but he didn't teach us anything. Right. You know. Well, he's working all day trying to make a living. Exactly.

It's hard enough just to keep a roof over. And me and my sister talk about this. We're like, I don't think that our parents ever taught us anything. Like, everything I know nowadays, I learned as an adult or from other people, you know. As examples of other people, we don't learn shit as kids. Could read a little bit, could write a little bit. But I learned to read and write way better as an adult than I ever did as a kid. Right.

So what did you do for, I mean, when did you start getting in trouble? Like real trouble? Like, is this in, I want to say in high school, but you didn't make it to high school. Yeah, so way before that. So even in middle school, we would take the, we would take, like, they had this bus. They would take the bad kids out. because I wasn't the only bad kid. We're all bad.

Kids were getting shot in middle school. And you're 11, 12 years old, somewhere in that range. I started getting tattooed when I was 13. Oh, my God. My brother was sleeved. Is he like a Mormon or something? Yeah, practically. He probably hears way crazier stuff to this.

Listen, the worst stuff he's ever heard in his life has been. And it's been the first podcast we did. The first podcast we did, I remember glancing over at his face, and Colby's just like, the look at his face was like, I may have made a mistake. That's funny. That's funny. But, I mean, it was always bad. My brother was older than me, and he was running around with dudes that were, he was a professional skateboarder. So he was running around.

They were smoking smoking cigarettes and stealing motorcycles, like dirt bikes and skateboarding and just running around doing that sort of stuff. So I hung out a lot with my brother's older friends, even though I didn't skate. skateboard. And then coincidentally, one of my brothers, so I'm 13, my brothers, I think he's, it would be 18. And then he had a friend that was older than him, probably about 20. So I'd hang out with this dude that was 20 years old. And he met this dude, this Brazilian guy. And how old you? He's 20 and you're 13. Okay. Yeah. But I mean, I was a mature 13, you know. Still. Yeah. Mature and immature. But like, we were all kind of part of. It was like a little local street gang.

You just didn't walk around like by yourself where we grew up. You just get fucked up, you know? And then other guys wouldn't walk around because we'd fuck them up. So it was just one of those things. He always went in a group. And then he met this Brazilian guy down by the beach, surfing or skating or something. And the guy's like, hey, I'm from Brazil.

I do jiu-jitsu. You should come by and I'll show you some stuff. So Jerry started going over to his garage in this alleyway. Like it was in like Del Mar or, Salana Beach or somewhere in in in San Diego so Jerry would come back he's like dude I learned this move let me show you he'd learn this bullshit arm bar it's up do you know anything about Jiu Jitzi do you trend it all now so this was in 1990 I'm like a like a declawed cat this is in this is in 1990 three or four years before the first UFC so then we would

my dad would leave us like a dollar 50 for like if we went to school to buy lunch but we never did. We'd just go buy cigarettes or something. So we would take the bus down to... Your poor dad. I know. We were terrible. We would take the bus down to Nelson's and then we'd pay, we'd get like five bucks together. We'd teach him for, we'd pay him for some jiu-suitsu lessons. And he would show us a move and then we'd just find some guy in the street and just choke him out or arm-bar him or whatever. And we started just doing this all the time. So we got, at the time, we were like ninjas because no one knew jiu-jitsu. No one knew what jihitsu was. So then I took a little bit more serious and my mom started taking me, my mom and dad were divorced,

but she started taking me to Nelson's on a regular basis. And, you know, I went almost every day for like a year. And then like every other day for like another year. And then eventually I got a blue belt right before the UFC came out. So when the UFC one came out, we already knew we already knew about Hoyce. We knew what he was going to do. Like we were already kind of, we were already educated as to what he was doing where so many guys had watched him in the first year of scene and was like what the fuck is this magic this is crazy so then we would get in a fights and just choke people out so easily no one knew anything back then so we had this massive unfair advantage when it came to fighting you know I'm not a huge tough guy nothing like

that I'm also not a pussy right so if I lose a fight the guy who I lost to is going to look like he was in a bad fight right you know it's only happened a few times and there Those are usually with professional fighters. But that's how we grew up. So then all through like 13, 14, 15, we were just running around doing like street gang stuff, fighting people drinking, getting tattooed, going to show, banging chicks. That's pretty much what I did. That wasn't my early teens at all. Yeah, most people had a way better growing up experience than I did.

It sounds like you brought it on yourself. There wasn't a lot of options. You could have gone to school. You know what? I don't think I could have. No? It's impossible for me. It's impossible for me to sit still in a classroom. I lose my mind.

So how, I mean, when did you start getting into trouble like with like, you know, doing things that were, you know, blatantly, as opposed to street kid being a street kid, blatantly illegal? So one thing is I was never really a criminal. That wasn't my thing. I've been to jail. I've done a little bit of time. It's all like county time, though. Yeah. It's good to not have to go to state prison.

and I've been arrested a ton of times. We just walked through the neighborhood and you'd get arrested. The cops would just snatch you up and be like you look like a kid that did something. They'd take you down and hold you for a few hours. And they'd get to 10 kids and be like, right, we got all the kids off the street. Which one's the right one? That's the right one. We let the other ones go.

So the cops were so overwhelmed with how crazy. And I'm really pro-law enforcement. Like the world would suck without cops. I know a lot of people aren't. But those guys that are like the criminal. minded guys that are like, bro, fuck, cops. I would a guy like that if it wasn't for cops and the penalty of it.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, to me, it's all the people that couldn't survive without cops, that hate cops seem to hate cops the most. And to me, most, you know, most of the guys that I know that are, you know, that are criminal, you know, that they do understand.

Typically, they understand, like, hey, it would be chaos. Chaos. Chaos without fucking cops. I like chaos. Like, I, in the more hectic something is, the better I could maneuver through it. But a lot of guys can't.

And you don't want to live in a society that's chaos because you're not going to do well. No, no. There's always somebody who's tougher. There's always somebody who's got a gun. There's always something, you know, it's not going to work out well. But when I was so kind of my first thing I did in, in when I want to say we didn't know right or wrong because we did, but it didn't matter. Yeah, it didn't matter when every kid is smoking at school that's like 11, 12,

13, you know you're not supposed to, but it wasn't, it was more like, don't get caught. Right. So that's kind of how it was. So I remember, I was always, I always had a different outlook on things. Even to this day, I look at things totally different from normal people. And sometimes it helps me, sometimes it hurts me. But I remember thinking, kind of kids in the neighborhood, they sell guns and they make good money, but they're riding around on like those low rider, cholo bicycles.

You ever seen those before? The big front end, the forks are out and stuff. And they're bicycle? Or do you mean motorcycles? No, bicycle. We're kids. We don't have a license. Okay.

If you had a car, you get carjacked back then for it. You couldn't even have a car. So I'd get a, I'd get like a mountain bike, and I'd put on some slacks. And so I'd wear the clothes we'd wear to, like, Jehovah's Witness Church. So I look like a Mormon. Right. Like a white button up, tie. And I'd have a Bible bag full of guns.

And I would ride through the ghetto, and the cops would have sweat me because I look like a Mormon. Where are you getting the guns? Just from other guys, like Cholos and stuff like that. So you'd be like, so we would grow a little bit of in the field behind our house, get a few bucks, and then go buy a pistol from a guy. It's probably like hot, you know. And then we would take it to another guy and sell to him for like 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks profit. And you'd have a few different guns. You just kept kind of moving around doing stuff like that.

And then this guy's like, hey, you get rid of this pistol. You know, you got rid of it because you probably either car jack somebody or did a drive-by or whatever it was. Murder someone with it. It could have been. Whatever. Could have been. And then you would off that to somebody else. Like, we'd just make a few bucks like that.

And 40 bucks back then when you're a kid, that's a lot of money. That's bus money. That's jujitsu. That's a couple burritos. That's beer. You know, and you get into a concert is well worth it. So that was kind of the first really criminal stuff I would say that I did. But to me, that was just more of a business opportunity.

I thought, well, the guys want to buy guns. I could figure out how to sell them guns. but the transportation is a problem. How do you not get stopped? It would look like somebody that cops aren't going to target. So I dress up like a Mormon. Right.

Just cruise through the neighborhood. I had to wear a long sleeve because I had tattoos already. I just cruise through the neighborhood and, you know, nobody really messed with you. And the dudes from the neighborhood knew who I was.

Yeah. And they kind of know what's going on. Yeah, they know exactly. Did you ever do, don't the Mormons do like a year-long pilgrimage? I think it's two years. Is it two years?

I think it's two years. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you didn't do that. No, no, no, no. Was it ever even something you considered? Well, we weren't Mormon. We're Jehovah's Witness. Oh, okay.

What's the difference? I mean, I don't know. The difference. Mormons have super hot chicks. Right. Yeah. I hope no one's listening to this. So the best kept secret in the United States is Utah.

If you want to find the hottest chicks in the world, southern Utah, all of them. You think about, you think about like the girls in Florida, there's some hot chicks here. The chicks in Southern California, there are some hot chicks there. All the hottest chicks in the world? Southern Utah. That's it. I went to Utah when I got out of a prison. Tyler

flew me there to do a bunch of videos on real estate. And I flew there and I was, in the morning I woke up and I went jogging. Like I jogged like a couple, two, three miles. Where in Utah were you? Up north? No, no. It was like, it was like, I want to say it was like Salt Lake City.

Like it was. Yeah. Yeah. It was and I remember I jogged all the way to Starbucks, got Starbucks. got Starbucks stood there and drank and I remember looking around and I'd been out for an hour or so staying there walking around and went there's no black people here none none and I went and my buddy by the way Zach who's black lived in the Utah and so when he got out I was like listen bro you lived in you where did you live he's and I said because there's no black people there He's like, I know. None.

He's like, it was like me and four other guys. When I go to Utah, they look at me like a minority. Tattooed, you know, I got a little bit of tan. Yeah, you got a little tint to you. What's going on there? Who are you? But there's nobody on earth nicer than Mormons. Right.

They're the nicest people, the coolest people. Even if they didn't like you, they'd never tell you. Listen, I outside the Starbucks, somebody had glued like a quarter to the ground. I watched like three or four people go and bend it over and they were like, Oh, that's not right. Like, what's going on? Mormon humor? I guess.

So Jehovah's Witnesses are way worse than Mormons. It's like a cult and they hate fun. Anything fun you can't do. No birthdays, no Christmas, no celebrations. It's the dumbest thing ever. The dumbest thing. There's been a lot of guys that have come from that world. And what happens is when you leave, your family disowns you.

Like, you know, I forget what they call it. Shunning? Dis-fellowship. Oh. disfellowship. Yeah, disfellowship. Now, I never got baptized, so I couldn't get disfellowships. I was just a product of a kid, of a family. So even today, if I go back home and I see some of the Jova's witnesses, like, hey, gee, how you doing? How was life going? I'm like, hey, you still doing that shit, dude? So dumb. But yeah, that's how, that's how we grew up. Did you ever get

caught for the guns? Not for the guns. We went and an ATM machine had ate my, or sorry, machine had eight my brother's ATM card so he kicked it in like broke it up a little bit and like three days later you roughed it up yeah roughed it up and then three days later the cops raided our house and they it was like attempted bank robbery right is what they had had rated us for but after looking at all the evidence all the stuff they just gave us like malicious destruction of property or something like that right they picked me up took me to juvie for a couple days and that was it There's nothing. How old were you then?

God, probably 15, 16, somewhere in there. But our house got raided, and my dad was like, you know, even early custody was like, what the fuck? Right. And then I would always hang out at the neighbor's house. They went and knocked the neighbor's door and said, hey, can we look to see if AG's in here? And they're like, yeah.

And they're like, so even my neighbors to this day, they're like, remember when you got our house rated by the cops? They technically knocked and asked, but still. So that was kind of the, first things we would do. But most of the stuff I would do would just be violence related. You know, we'd just be fighting, violence, have an argument, somebody would get something. Mostly stuff like that. That was more of my thing. And then I went to go pick up, me and my brother went to go pick up one of our buddies, worked at the gas station. We pull up

and our other buddy's already there and he's fighting these two cholos. And so I jump out of the car and I just, I go and help him real quick. And, and, um, he's having a, he's having a handful with these two Cholos. Right. And he pulls out a box cutter and just, and it just turns into a big, big, big mess, right? So one of the guys, but thank God for him, there was an ambulance that was filling up fuel. Right. And they worked on him right away.

So from, from there, we went back to my brother's apartment. And the guy that we originally went to go see. that worked at the gas station, he was on parole. And he gave up where we were, right? And then, so the cops pulled up, you know, to the apartment, and we jumped out the second-story window, and we started hopping fences and we took off. And then the cops have the whole place surrounded,

and we break through this, like, fence, and we go into a golf course, and I go all the way around the whole block and come up back behind the cops and take my brother's truck. It was like, he had like a bottle opener, that we started it with. Right. Just the ignition was,

it was an old truck. Right. So I came up through the cops. I was like, hey, can I just get my truck? I got to go to work. And they're like, where's it at?

I was like, it's that blue one right there. And they're like, just kind of look around like, I'm like, right, hurry up, hurry up. And they're still focused on the building. Right. Not realizing we've already went out back there and circle completely around. So I went to pick up my brother and our other buddy and we went to

Vegas because that guy, like my brother's older friend I mentioned earlier. Right. That I did Jitsu with. He had relocated to Las Vegas. So we fled to Vegas thinking that this dude that just got Was dead How old were you?

Probably 16 Jesus, we're not even out of your teens Okay, so you go to Vegas and we hang out in Vegas for a while And kind of, you know, some stuff We've got a lot of trouble in Las Vegas a ton Like what? Like what? Fighting concerts, going to concerts and just getting in big fights

Are you working at all? What are you doing for money? No, I just, you know No, I don't know, I had a job Guns and stuff like that And we didn't really have a lot of money. So, like, you know, we'd go to a concert and then, like, the older guy, his name is Jerry, he would be like, all right, here's $20, let's go to this concert.

We'd go to the concert, there's all these kids that didn't grow up the way we grew up, and they're being disrespectful and we just f*** them up, you know. And everybody in our group all did jihitsu and all knew how to fight, you know. And then the only time that we came across somebody that was like, damn, that's a tough, not tough, because there's a lot of tough guys, but a guy that was, like, really, I got in a fight at a concert with some guy from the Lions Den, which was like Ken Shamrock's gym. He was one of the early UFC fighters.

Or he was the early UFC fighter. So in UFC one, he was the guy that gave, like, hoist the biggest problems. It was the first few. The guy's listening, knows who he is. I got to fight with this guy and, dude, we both got fucked up bad. But both of our cheeks were cracked, jaw was cracked. But he was, like, a professional MMA fighter for that time. So I think he had, like, a kickboxing.

background. So that was the first guy that I got in a fight with where I was like, damn, that motherfucker was tough, tough. So then I wanted to step up my training and I just went back to Jiu-Jitsu. And then I had came back to San Diego. We were back and forth. So it's hard to keep like... Did you find out that the guy didn't die? The guy that got...

Yeah. Yeah. So the guy that worked at the gas station had said that he wound up living. So the charges that were going to be coming down on us were less into like, you know, attempted murder or some shit. And then the guy just refused to press charges, big for the neighborhood. So that all went away. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of

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Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. it's good to have a routine and it's good for your eyes too because with regular comprehensive eye exams at spec savers you'll know just how healthy they are visit specksavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. I exams provided by independent optometrists. Okay. But something happened. I don't know what we did to him but he was in a wheelchair for a long time. I don't know how that happened. Like we still don't know how because everything happened in like his belly chest. So I don't know how that messed up his spine. but he was in the wheelchair for a long time. It could have been something else.

But anyways, so we came back to San Diego. And then just same thing, just kind of getting in trouble, stuff like that. And then when I came back from Vegas, I had went to my uncle's house. So at this point, I'm 18 now, just turned 18, like maybe a couple weeks prior. I go to my uncle's house. So my uncle's was a really cool guy, but he grew up, he went to, like, high school in, like, the 60s. So he grew up in like the hippie, drug, revolution, acid, you know, kind of generation. He was really smart and his dad was even smarter.

They were uncles through marriage. You know, he had married my aunt. And he had worked on the guidance system for the stealth bomber. He was a electromechanical engineer, really smart guy. And I remember being a little kid and going to his house in Bonzel. And they had this shed off to the side where we weren't allowed to go into. They did all this, you know, it was electrical work. You know, they were working like on components for the stealth bomber.

Remember, we were never allowed to go in there. I remember these two guys, it could just been a coincidence, but these two guys in black suits came and were talking to him and his dad. And my grandma was like, go away, hide. Like, don't be anywhere around here. I think there were government guys. They were coming to just ask how the project was going or how the updates were going or whatever the situation was. We never, we never knew.

but I knew that he had a laboratory in town and I knew that they worked on these like components for the government and for NASA and then they'd do something for like Johnson and Johnson like if you needed a special piece of equipment so he made a lot of money and had a huge house but just a super irresponsible fuck smoking

drinking beer like he would be driving the station wagon with full of the kids in the back just chucking beer cans out the window but his house was on this huge avocado grove. He had a big house on the top, like a granny flat next door, a couple casitas, a garage down below, a shed, and then a place for the workers that managed all the avocados. Well, back then there was a huge methamphetamine problem in Southern California.

It was never really my thing. I didn't really mess with it. We were around it, but I didn't really mess with it. I've tried it a couple times. Not my thing. Drugs were just never really my thing. And I went to go visit him. I brought my, you know, overnight bag. We're hanging out with my cousins. They've got a couple cousins my age that live there. And the next morning, the FBI, D-A, everybody raids the property, blows a door open, rips you at- Your uncle's place? Yes.

Rip us out of the, like, I was sleeping in a recliner. They rip you out of the recliner, and you're hog-tied or your handcuffs have tied with like a gun to your head before you're even awake. Those flashbangs are gnarly. So they, they, and you can start to hear the flashbangs going off around the property because they're so. many different buildings. So that had a huge team that came and raided the property. And that's about all I knew at the time. But looking back and then having the foresight of knowing like what took place, what had happened was he had grown a little bit of work. And then they had a confidential informant come in, see the and then determine that's not enough. Like we need more. So he had planted

some Sudafed and some other chemical. I still don't know what it was, like way down on the bottom part of the property, they would constitute the bare minimum for methamphetamine manufacturing. So they rated that. They got the, they got the bare minimum for methamphetamine, and they seized the whole property. This was early asset forfeiture stuff, you know. Whoa. So they take like 15 of us to jail.

And in the, you know, the agents do their typical thing. All right, this is your one chance, you know, what's going on. You don't have any idea what's going on now, right? So when you look back at the police. reports for that incident it's every guy had just pages and pages and pages of contradictory shit right and when it gets to me it just says gregaroff invoked his Miranda rights right and the whole page is blank so they take us all to jail and they take it's a major case so they take your clothing for um to to do analyze it for like chemicals they do major case prints where they fingerprint in your entire hand and then they um they take a piss sample too so then we go to jail. We're in jail for maybe a week or so. And then my uncle

finally gets us all bailed out. We go back to the house and they raided again the next morning. The next morning. So what they did was they got us out on bail and then they left stuff purposefully so when they re-rated it they get to say they were re-offending.

And now we're habitual. And then because we're out on bail, you're automatically bail revoked moving forward. Right. So everybody minus a couple guys didn't go back to the house. So they originally arrested, I think, 15 people, maybe 13 or 12 of us, went back to jail. I feel like you're saying that the federal government doesn't play fair. No, no, at all.

That's so uncharacteristic. In their defense, like I said, I'm real pro-law enforcement. Except for this one time. Well, also, how else would they have ever solved this problem? They had to play really close to the fence in order to solve this problem. Because even though that wasn't like a amphetamine house, he was, you know, using drugs and things like that. It was all recreational stuff. But what this confidential informant was doing was just burning houses everywhere he went to so he could keep doing drugs and party.

And he would steal some things and borrow some things the night before the raid that would just never have to come back. Right. Hey, can I borrow that carjack or could I borrow that, you know, your VCR or some shit like that. So then we had to beat this case. And you're looking at like 16 years. And I said it before, but if it was, if that happened today, I would walk scot free. It'd be easy. My lawyers would just trash that case.

Right. But you're an 18 year old kid. And even though you know a little bit about the system, you don't have any money to fight it. And you've already seen the system work against you. And the old timers in jail are like, dude. They're like, they're like, if they give you a deal, you got to take a deal. Right. You know what you're up against.

You got to take a deal. So they wind up coming at me with with two county years run. consecutively, we're running concurrent, right? Concurrent. And I've already been in for a few months, I'll be out, you know, total would be five months and 20 days off a county year. So we go back and forth, whether I should do it or not. I just say, I sign for two county years run concurrent, or sorry, run consecutively at the same time. And then I started doing my time. My uncle wants of getting, I think, like seven or eight years in prison. And then some of the other guys pled to like 90 days.

They basically got a prosecution off everybody, even dudes that were just there as workers. Like, they had nothing involved. But I had no drugs, no fingerprints on nothing, no drugs in my system, and I had no drug residue on my clothing. So from a court case, I would walk on that easily nowadays.

But back then, you don't know. So then now I'm in Southern California. It's just, it's jail, it's county, but it's not much different than prison in the sense of the guys coming through there. They're all getting struck out. They put me this place down by the border, which was, it's a maximum security place, and they called it a prison hold. So if you're in Southern California and you come in for a DUI, you're going to go to, you didn't go to like, you know, the vista jail.

Right. You're going to be in like South House and you're going to be like in bunk living. But if you come in and you already have two strikes, you can't put a guy like you who's a hardened, you know, a dude who's done 16, 20 years in the California prison system, you can't put those guys. guys with like a normal DUI guy or guy or you're facing life now high security guys so you don't want to mix them with low security can't yeah and you're and and you're usually can get struck out so the case you're trying to beat is a 25 to life case right so that's where they put those guys and that's where we were so it's ran exactly like a prison but just none of the benefits none of like no tv no that sort of stuff so really really violent um and did you do your time

in California? No, I was here in Florida, in federal prison. Are you familiar with like the California politics and stuff at all? I mean, semi-familiar with it, yeah. So it's way different than the rest of the country. It's super race-segregated. Everything's race-segregated. It's really hardcore.

But it's such a progressive state. That's the thing. It ain't like that in jail. It's the opposite. So it's whites, and the whites consist of Peckerwoods, which are standard white guys. Right. Guys like the three of us. and then you have skinheads, which are just their own gang.

Yeah, yeah. The own gang within the prison system. And then you have northern and southern Mexicans, and then you have the Paisas. And the northern and southern Mexicans don't get along. I think they're at some truce now, but they weren't back then. And then you have the blacks.

And then you have the others, you know, Arabs, things like that. But those are really small. They're really small groups. So most of the time, we can buddy up a little bit with the Southern Mexicans, the South Siders,

if it's against the blacks. And you can kind of eat with the Mexicans, but you can't shower with the blacks, you can't sit with the blacks, you can't play cards with the blacks. You don't even talk to the blacks. You're at war with them constantly. So you're living in the same area, but if anything happens, it jumps off immediately. At least it was when I was there, and it's still like that. In every facility has slightly variables, and sometimes you're at war with the Mexicans. But when I was there, we were at peace with the Mexicans and anything with the blacks or Nortenius would jump off.

right away. So that's just how we did our time. And just be fighting. You'd come in. You'd roll in. And, you know, we'd get your paperwork. Who are you? Where are you from? Is this your first time? Are you trying to, um, be active? Or you just a white dude going to do his time? Yeah. I just want to do my four months and go home. Yeah. Um, but usually if you were with us, there was only a handful of us that weren't going to prison. Right. It was like me and this other dude that was doing the same thing I was back to back county years. And then some other dude that like had somebody. There's only a handful of us. weren't going over to Donovan prison.

Right. Everybody else was going to prison. So... Were you still 18 now or 19? 18? 18. I turned 19 and 20 in jail. Okay.

So the way it is in California, and it might be where you're from. You roll in. Immediately, that's a white guy. A couple white dudes are going to walk up to you get your paperwork and start talking to you, you know, the shot call will check your paperwork. One of the guys will check your paper because you are, see if you're a chest or anything like that. See if you read it on anybody.

And then just kind of give you the heads up. These are our showers. These are our tables. This is what order you're going to eat at. So if you want to sit at the table, there's not enough tables. So it'd be like, these guys will sit first. When they're done eating, you could take and sit in this seat. And then these guys will take in the seat after you.

So we kind of rotate through the tables we own. Don't sit on those tables. Don't play cards with those guys. You know, that type of shit. We give you the rundown. Coleman wasn't like that. Yeah. What was it like for you?

It was, yeah, it wasn't. There were, there were, um, Paisas, and there were Latin kings, and there were, like, there were those groups, this was at the medium. I was a medium security prison for like three years, but it wasn't, it wasn't super serious. I mean, there was stuff would happen, but I didn't really, I wasn't a part of it. Like, I'm, I teach GED and, you know, teach the real estate class.

Like, I go to work every day and come back and, you know, I say it's like being a non-enemy combatant in a war zone. Like, you know, nobody's, like, they're not like, hey, you got to join up. Like, why? nobody's, nobody's pressuring you here. Nobody's, but there's some guys that just, that's just how they do their time. And, yeah, when we got, when, you know, when I got there, like, it wasn't a big deal. I mean, I understand most of the prisons are like that, but that's like a penitentiary or in California on most levels.

But that, but it wasn't like that in the federal prison that I was at. But then again, it was much more. Federal prisons, much softer than a regular prison. Especially California prison is the extreme of all the states. I've heard of some gnarly stuff in federal prisons. Yeah, but those are always like pens. Like, I wouldn't in a pin. You can't put me in a pin.

I'm a soft white collar. Yeah. And the dig we grew up, but they all went to Supermax, federal facilities or maximum. But so that's how it is just at the basic level. Even at county, it's like that. And then you're either active or inactive. But if there's a riot, it's mandatory. Everybody participates.

Mandatory participation. You can't just stay in my cell? Nope. You can. But then we're going to pay you a visit afterwards. So in jail, there's like a lot of fighting, a lot of enforcing stuff. And the jail stuff, I don't really, I've talked about it before. I've told my friends and stuff, but it sounds so sensational sometimes.

I was like, I don't sound like some asshole bragging. But I also had fought a lot growing up, and I knew Jiu-Jitsu, and I was healthy. I was in shape. I was lifting weights all the time. So the ability to just get your hands on somebody and choke him unconscious was easy. Right. You know, and a lot of the guys were ex-drug addicts and shit like that. And they were tough guys.

There was mean guys. But they're not prepared for that. And they had no formal training, but they're still mean, you know, like, they're still mean guys. So that's kind of what we did. So for five months, so at five months late, you get out, like, how do you end up back? I lost all my good time. I wound up doing almost, almost two years. I was just wondering, how did you, how did you turn 20?

Yeah. So you'd get in a fight. And sometimes you would get caught. Sometimes you wouldn't. But most of the time, it was, it was in a situation. It was just out in the open. You know, somebody acted up and you just fucking up, and that was it. The guards would take you, put you in a different area, do your pay, you know,

write some stuff up and be like, you lost nine days, you lost 20 days, you lost whatever it is. And then they had made the mistake of moving me over to this lower security place right across the street. Why? If you're getting in trouble, why would they just fucked up? The guards can f*** up, you know, there's people moving people around and, you know, and there's dudes way more violent than me in there. probably looked in my paperwork and was like, oh, this guy's not going to prison. Let's stick him over there. The 60 guys I'm with, they're all doing 25 to life. You know, some of them are doing life, you know. Right. So they put us over in this kitchen and I got to find this

Mexican guy, this big old Cholo, you know, he's just talking shit. I just picked him up, spiked him on his head, got on Mount, which is on his chest, and just busted all of his teeth out, like in chunks. Because he was like an old tweaker, you know. Right. He was a big guy, like Jack tattooed, face neck tattoos, all that stuff. But, like I said, wasn't trained to fight. So I would, like, elbow his face and, like, two or three teeth, the roots would come out at a time. And then I remember one of the guards pulled me aside before they brought me back to that other facility. And they're, like, dude, I've been here a long time.

I've never seen a dude to get fucked up that bad. But it's, I mean, I didn't control the guy's teeth. Right. It's had bad dentists. But his teeth were coming out in chunks. So then when I went back to that place, but when I went back to the higher security place, A couple guys that were in the kitchen, they had rolled back a while later, and they're like, hey, I've seen that white dude that, that white dude could fight. So I got that a little bit of a reputation that I can fight, you know.

And there's tons of guys that are tough, that are better fighters than me. But I was just really willing to fight. And I wasn't scared to fight because we grew up fighting. Right. Some guys get nervous public speaking. Some guys get nervous having to perform. I don't get nervous doing stuff like that. So I do decent, you know.

Right. don't get the anxiety, the butterflies, things like that. And then like I said, I don't want to come across as some tough guy. That's just how he grew since we were little kids. You know, my brother would be like, hey, go fight that kid at like five years old, you know, and you'd get beat the fuck up. My brother would beat us up and the older kids would beat us up. So we were really good at taking an ass whipping. So if you're not good at delivering asswhipins, I'm going to you up. Right. So you better be really good at delivering an ass whipping. And then that's just what we did. Hey, real quick, just wanted to let you guys

know that we're looking for guests for the podcast. If you think you'd be a good guest, you know somebody, do me a favor. You can fill out the form. The link is in our description box, or you can just email me directly. Email is in the description box. So back to the video. And then we got this thing we would do. Whenever you get in a fight, the guys would start rubbing Nogzima on their face,

that white, like, Zid cream, because it would be camouflage. If me and you got in a fight and we were dinged up, then Nogzima would cover it up. So it was kind of just protocol when, like, whatever something jumped. off a lot of guys would just knock zima up just so when the guards walked by they would just see 20 dudes with noxema on their face every night they'd be used to it it'd almost be like a camouflage but if it was only me and you'd be like hey those two assholes with noxema on their face they look like they probably got in a fight right so everybody would do it to kind of throw them off um so every the guy started noxeming up and dude it's like 20 minutes and nothing happens

you know because they're dealing with this dude making sure he's staying alive and then they come in You know, they come in, they got the fucking, they got the, the riot shields, but the riot shields have like this electrical bar, like a taser bar on them. And they're curved towards you. Like a normal riot shield curves towards the officer. You're right. This curves towards you. So they come in with those, the pepperball, all that stuff, and just start stripping people down

one at a time, one at a time, or a sell at a time. Come out, strip, buck naked, bend over, cough, and they're just checking everybody, everybody, everybody and they took me and a couple guys to the hole not for what had happened but because we were some of the leadership you would call it of that particular area um so they broke us up through that time i was in the hole for i don't know a few weeks or something but this was a new facility so it's like it's nice you know it's like you're in a cell by yourself it's clean i had was in this other facility in san diego in downtown san diego and this place was built the same time Alcatraz was built.

So same architecture, same look. Have you ever been Alcatraz like the tours? Yeah. It's an open air. So if you're listening to this, Alcatraz has walls, but the bars are open. So that salty sea air comes into the cell and just decays and rots everything. That's how the San Diego facility was. And it was built, God, I'd have to guess, in the 20s or the 30s or some shit like that.

Super old. It's long gone now. It's been gone for probably 20 years at this point. but it was really old at the time and then um i was in this holding tank and i came out for a med call and then there was other guy across it came out for a med call and one of the woods it was like hey we've been trying to get to that guy so i just punched him up real quick and the guards tackle me take me upstairs and throw me just in a regular cell block like you'd picture in alcatraz those skinny cells tight white bars all resty decayed and i'm sitting in my cell one day just minding my own business you know

literally doing nothing just sitting on my rack and the guard comes by doing count and he's like what the fuck's your problem and I wasn't even looking at him I was just staring at the ground I was like in between sets doing push-ups or something and I look up at him

and he was like open you know whatever the cell is and they shackled me and they take me to the hole literally didn't do anything didn't even look at him I was just staring at the ground right in between sets he was just with me for no reason and then this is the real hole

people always say they've been to the hall this is the real hole So they take you down this dark corridor, and there's this gigantic black steel door, rusty. It's 100 years old, and it has those old school rivets in it all the way around. They pull open this door, and it just screams when you open it up because it's rusty and corroded. And then inside there is probably about a two foot, three foot, four foot area. And then there's two more cells. And it's dark in there.

And they're inside of a concrete room, but they're safe. steel boxes that are inside there. They built these steel boxes over a sloped floor with a hole in the middle, an open air vent that you shit and you piss in. The floor is covered in, it's 100 years old. It's

covered in green moss and it's wet. And the steel room you're in is it's literally resting apart. There's like chunks of rust breaking off. It looks like an old, like this I have an old ship. They look like old like where you hold slaves like on a ship. And there was a

There was a black guy on the left that had three people, and they were bringing him back to the court system to face another murder trial. And then I was in the other one. I was in there for three months. Every single day, you don't know, you're in there, you never come out. Right. So you don't know day or night, nothing like that. It's dark in there.

There's like a five-watt bulb that's like the light of a match. It's like basically that much. It's behind this plexiglass stuff in the roof. but the room's dark, it's wet, sewer gas is coming up to that hole in the ground, and there's a knob on the wall, a faucet, no sink, no toilet, no nothing. Why are you in there? You were just staring at the ground? Yeah, just the other stuff.

Just the guard is being a dick. Okay. But then once you're in there, the other guards aren't contesting while you're in there. Just read the report and you're in there. And you're in there only like your witty tides, you know, and you're sleeping on the wet, angled floor. So you're just covered in bacteria all the time and once a week they'll take you out shackle you head to toe They'll lead you down this corridor and put you in this tiny shower that's smaller than like a phone booth

And you hit the button and you got a bar soap and you're still shackles So you get like maybe reach your dick in your ass and like maybe you could get like your beard a little bit But that's it and then you go back in there And you don't know if it's a day or night But you only have an idea based off of the food So like you know if it's like breakfast type of food and they're bringing it to two in a styrofoam and they do suicide watch all the time so they're always like

knocking on the door pounding on the door so you're never able to really sleep and you can anyways the floor sloped and it's wet and you're freezing cold all the time so most of the time you're like huddled up in a ball in the corner like with your head against the wall so just picture like a steel box

mounted to concrete you think of the the last scene and catch me if you can we're in the French prison I've never seen that you've ever seen it he's in the French prison and it's just there's just this it's a box like he can't you can't stand up it's five foot probably five foot by five foot yeah four by four he can't stand up you could stand in this it was a cell size so it's probably like six by six okay um sorry it's probably like eight by eight and maybe eight feet tall but it's

you're surrounded by steel rivets yeah all the way around and then concrete on the bottom has in there for three months so today when i look back on that and people are like dude it's a hard i'm having a hard day i'm having a but here's a thing not to sound like a tough guy again I've had people have asked me like how was it it didn't bother me at all at the time zero like zero emotion zero I could have spent 50 years in there at the time like mentally right that wasn't going to break me that wasn't going to affect me there was never a moment I remember where I was bored or I was bummed out or I was like I need to get out none of that stuff just you you in my mind you the whole time like you can't you can't do anything to me you

I was in the shoe one time I was in the shoe like three or four different times but the longest one was probably 45 days and it didn't bother me at all because because I was able to read you know I don't know if they're bringing the cart oh okay see if I wasn't able to read yeah oh I would have gone nuts like I would not only could you not read but there wasn't enough light to read like it was just like it was like taking a match and holding a match up to like a ceiling like that's how much light you had no and then when they would open the door did you be blinded even though it's behind multiple multiple doors. like even that little bit of light would blind you. And then just one night in the middle of the night that took you out, shackled you, just put me back into general population. So what are you doing, what are you thinking about for three months? Like what do you do to keep yourself occupied?

Really everything. You think about stuff you did on the outside. The things you miss most are like tastes and smells because there's none of the food has no taste. Nothing smells good. Even like if the guard comes and they have like after shave on, It's such a, like, different smell from what you're used to smelling on a daily basis. You just smell septic and sewer all the time.

So nothing ever smells good. So for me, I would just think about jiu-jitsu. I would think about, like, what I'm going to do when I get out. Think about, like, guys that did me wrong. And, you know what I mean? Just shit like that. Yeah, I was going to say, I would, there were times when, you know, you're trapped in yourself for three or four days during a lockdown. You know, you get tired of reading or whatever.

And I remember just laying there and I would plan out different scams. Like, well, where would I get the IDs? How do I go about that? How do you set up this? Where do you have a mailed? Where do you have this? I mean, I can do that for four or five hours straight. And, you know, typically I fall asleep.

What I'm thinking about that, it's so comforting. So finally I get out of jail. And I'm not on, I do all my time. So I'm not on any probation, nothing like that. So I get out and then just immediately back to, and my buddies, you know, hanging out. I'm jacked, working out all the time and stuff like that, you know. So I come out of jail and I'm in better shape than I was when I came in.

Right. We go right back to Vegas. And right back to Vegas, we're banging chicks. We're getting in fights. I started doing a little bit of window cleaning. And then one day, and remember, I'm not really, in my mind, I'm not really a criminal. I did some bad stuff, but I'm not really like a criminal mind. Like, I'm not looking for what's the next heist.

Let's go robbing jewelry store. My buddies are robbing jewelry stores. I don't want anything to do with that stuff. My buddy got in a bank robbery. My buddy, we call him Crazy Sean. This guy's so outrageous that it's almost not worth sharing his stories because they're so preposterous. He was this Norwegian guy, a complete lunatic, like 100% lunatic. He would just spontaneously rob people.

So he'd be hanging out with you all day. He wouldn't say a word for like six, seven, eight hours. Then you just go to a store to like buy something. He'd pull the gun and rob the place. You're like, dude, what the fuck? God damn it. I'm buying an iPhone. He kept some AK-47s in his trunk,

had this old white Cadillac de Ville, the most racist guy that's ever lived. Crazy racist. So he had this plan. This is so stupid, I don't want to say it. So dumb. It's good. Come on. He'll be all right.

Keep in mind, like, we have friends that are crazy, but they're normal guys, they're just crazy. They don't have limits. This guy was like an actual lunatic. Like, complete lunatic. He had this whole plan well. mapped out where he was going to steal a gorilla from the

wild animal park and chain it to a sidewalk in El Cajon and teach it to sell crack. But I'm not talking about like this was some crazy thing he said. It was planned out. He tried doing it, all that sort of shit. So he had this sidewalk really highly trafficked in this like ghetto

neighborhood, like a while away from his house. He had the light pole. He had the chain. He had like the leather wraps, all that sort of stuff. He went to the wild animal park twice. to try to steal a gorilla, but on the one time he went, there was like a whole bunch of cactuses. So there's two places in San Diego.

There's the zoo, and then there's a wild animal park. The wild animal park is out like in nature. It's like way out in East County and like Escondito. And it's like, it's like, I mean, it has to be like a thousand acres. It's huge. And he tries going up this hill at night and it's just covered in cactuses and he just can't get through. And then he tried wearing some disguise and getting into the park.

But he had a whole plan to steal a gorilla. chain it to a corner and teach him to sell crack. Did you ever have a conversation with him? All the time. Like, this isn't going to happen. This isn't going to. Or did you egg him on? No, no, I didn't egg him on.

But he was so crazy that when, and he would, he would talk so infrequently so that when he did say something, the room would just stop. And you would see what he's saying? Because he's like, fuck, what's he going to get us into? He went with my brother. He's like, let's go to this guy's house. So I'm going to get some from him. So they'd go to this guy's house.

Late at night, they knock on his door. And then like a gentle knock like that, just a gentle knock. My brother's just hanging out, smoking a cigarette, and Sean just kicks the guy's front door and pulls on a pistol and does like a home invasion. My brother's like, God damn it, dude, I told you to stop doing this shit. That's the type of lunatic this guy was. He would pull out AK-47 and run in and rob a bank while you were in the car. So you had to be really careful when you were around him.

Spontaneous robberies. That's what we called it. But so those are the type of guys we were hanging out with. So to me, I was a normal dude. I didn't do that crazy shit Like we'd go to a bar And some dude would be like Hey that's my chick

We'd get in a fight That's normal guy shit That's the type of stuff I would do And I'd sell some guns here or there But I never really got In like criminal trouble You know My other buddy would like rob

Or rob jewelry stores And like steal watches And things like that I was never my thing I was never a thief Stealing stuff was never my thing Right Did you pay for the Rolex?

Yeah Okay Yeah A lot of money So we We're sitting, and this is the one time out of all that, everything I just said. Did you pay for the Rolex from a legitimate watch place? Okay.

Not your buddy Tom. No. No, I gave Tom $400. This is from the Rolex store at Caesar's Palace. Make sure. Make sure. So this is the one time that's contrary to that. We're actually stole something.

Okay. So we're hanging out, we're like staying at this guy's apartment, and we're hanging on this back, cinder block wall. And the train tracks are right. there. We're just hanging out on the wall, smoking cigarettes. Just kind of like looking at the Vegas skyline. And my buddy is like, I wonder what the fuck's in that train. And I look down just huge, just like the giant train cars, you know, just the whole train. I was like, what do you think they keep in there? And he's like, let's go find out. So we jump off the wall,

we go down there and we break into this train. And it's packed, a train car, packed with old Milwaukee beer. I mean, it's 30 feet in the air from the ground. It's huge. And we just start unloading cases and cases of old Milwaukee beer. But keep in mind, when you slide open one of those gigantic doors, you're standing on the ground, maybe at eye level is probably five and a half feet. And then from five and a half feet, it's probably 15 feet above you's the top. And it's packed. There's no way to get anything in there. Like this. So my buddy that's with me, he's kind of like a rock climber guy he scuffles up there and the first we have to throw down like the first 10 and just break them just so we could kind of knock down the pile right then we could start taking them and then we

call our other buddies up and we got this gigantic line the guys in the apartments we lived in it was like a ghetto apartment right and we're literally but it looked like one of those refugee things where like the UN pulls up and you start like handing off food to the next thing they call it a daisy line what are they call it like a daisy chain you know yeah so he would pull down a big case of old milwaukee's and there were full of like 32 ounce. So like, not a 40, but like a 32 ounce thing of beer, yeah, or a bottle.

They're bottles. So, and there's maybe 12 of them in there. And he passes, so they're heavy. So he passes to me, I pass to the next end. There's, dude, there's at least 40 guys. And it's going up over the center block wall. Everyone's coming over and we unload this whole thing. We pack one of our rooms

top to bottom with old Milwaukee. Some black dudes down the way, they take a bunch, some Mexicans take some. And every Everybody in the area is coming by taking this old Milwaukee. How long does that take? Dude, all day. You know how long it takes? Forever.

Forever. For one, because there's only one guy pulling out at a time. Right. So that's how fast we can go. Yeah. And it took forever. I mean, you got to think we took 100 cases, maybe. We drank old Milwaukee forever.

Forever. Ask me how long we drank it for? Forever. And we gave it to everybody, and there was still, like, more than you could possibly imagine. Did you empty the whole container? So we wound up leaving after we ran out of room to fill our extra room. But the rest of the guys were neighborhood, they kept taking stuff and taking stuff and taking stuff. And it wasn't until, I think, the next morning until the train people, like, came and did their walkthrough and was like...

We're missing a... Yeah. They have one of these things that's empty. So that's our... We technically burglarized it, but that's our train robbery story. Was there like a seal or anything? Yeah. Yeah, there was a metal tab.

I remember he had a stick. something in there and twist it to break it but there was no lock yeah there's just like this steel like the old milwaukee bank robbery yeah when i worked with uh like in logistics the truck drivers would try to back their trailers up to cement walls and something like that especially they're carrying like electronics and things like that because they'll get into it yeah you're absolutely right so um so fast forward a couple more years i go back i'm doing a high-rise window cleaning the cleaning glass stuff like that and that glass cleaning is what led me to go out to Tampa for that project

where we almost got in the fight with that Derek Jeter guy. I used to be a high-rise window cleaner way back in the day when I got out of jail. And they sent me out here for a job. They sent me out here for, like a window cleaning job

for like three or four months. So me and one of my buddies, we came out here and we started working for this other team that was out here. And like the first or second morning we're in Tampa. We're at this little place

called like Mom's Cafe. It's just right across from like the Tampa Bay Buccaneer Stadium. We meet the guys And the place is covered in, like, a Yankee memorabilia. And because this is where the Yankees, they, you know, that's where the Yankees have their, like, season training or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some, someone told me that after the fact.

But my buddy who's with me, he's a little bit of a psycho. He starts talking shit about the Yankees because we're from San Diego. And I think that had just beat us in the, in the World Series several years, a few years prior to that. So we're kind of back and forth talking shit about the Yankees. The Yankees and this guy in this booth right across from us like two Puerto Ricans are looking at us. You know, we're real tuned in growing up in a tough neighborhood. Like they're looking at us. So after about the second look, we're like, what the fuck are you looking at?

And the guy's like, you know, kind of smirky, smiling and shit. And I just flipped the whole table. There's like 10 people there. I flipped the whole table. My boy who's a psycho, he grabs the steak knife off there. He's the psycho. He's the psycho. I mean, I used to have a hot.

That was reasonable. I used to have a hot temper But mostly we just grew up in a tough neighborhood So if something's gonna jump off We're not gonna wait or posture Let's just get started So I flip the whole table over And we just go after these two Puerto Rican guys

My buddy grabs a knife And we're going after them And all the guys at the table They don't know what's going on They're trying to grab us The dude starts kind of slouching down in a seat Then all the staff run over Just a big melee and stuff

And I get super close to him But there's probably six or seven and guys in between us and shit. You know, it's just typical shit talking. He come outside, you f***, you know, all that type of stuff. Then everybody, like, kind of herds us outside, and the new boss is like, dude, he's like, what the fuck's wrong with you guys? He's like, you know who that was?

I was like, I don't give a fuck who that guy was. He's like, that's Derek Jeter. Okay. I guess he's a shortstop or something for the Yankees. Right. No idea who that guy was. I know that even I know the name. Yeah, I don't know anything.

Yeah, just some Puerto Rican guy staring at us. So that was my last time in Tampa. But then I went back to San Diego. I started working in strip clubs, like security, things like that. My uncle got out of prison, and being the genius he is, he decides to sue the police department for, like, all types of negligence, things like that. This is the one that got locked up for the methamphetamine thing. So he winds up suing them.

And I'm not around at that time, so I'm just kind of peripherally hearing what's happening. And he winds up suing them for the asset forfeiture, and he winds up winning. So he winds up getting his whole record, his whole case. dismissed getting his property back which has already been seized and sold and sold and a new family is living there so that was a night like that was a total cluster fuck so what they wound up doing with a property is it was they could give the people like money to move I think or they'll give you the equivalent in cash value because there's already people living there right sold it so he got like two million bucks or something like that is a gigantic property huge like acres and

acres and acres in San Diego. So then he's telling me, he's like, hey, listen, get your attorney to attach onto this case, and we could probably get your charges removed. The attorney did. It was all dismissed, all my case, everything associated with it, it's all gone. So sitting here today in front of you, zero misdemeanors, zero felonies, zero criminal record whatsoever. Nice. Crazy, right? How were you when that happened? Probably 20, somewhere between 22 and 24, somewhere in that range, maybe 25, but terrible with time frames. Once I started hitting my 20s, things started moving so fast. It was really hard to kind of keep track of stuff. So I worked in the strip club, just banging the chicks and lifting weights and doing jiu-jitsu. And then the owner's like,

you know, all my door guys are banging all these chicks. I want to bang these chicks. And he fired all of us and hard new guys. And then I started working at like LA Fitness, Bally's 24-hour fitness. I started doing like gym membership stuff. And then I went, well, I started as a personal trainer there and worked my way up to like a GM. So a lot of my sales techniques, a lot of like just good customer service as far as follow up, that all came from working in the gym industry. Then from there, I became a military contractor where we trained Marines had to escape from crashed helicopters and vehicle crashes. And during this whole time, growing up in San Diego, we'd always go out to the beach, we'd swim, we'd body surf, we'd scuba dive, we'd spear fish.

So you'd get a spear gun, go out to the ocean, shoot a fish, bring it in, eat it, go get lobster, bringing it and eat it, you know. So we grew up in the ocean. All of everybody in my family, all the guys in my family are good in the water. They're good at spear fishing. They're good at fishing. They're good at swimming, body surfing, surfing, all that sort of stuff. My brother was a professional skater so he could just relate that right into surfing. So having all that water experience when I became a contractor and we would train like all this amphibious training, that it was really easy to me. So we do what they'd call drownproofing where, you know, you've seen like

the Navy SEALs, they tie their hands behind their back and they throw them in the water. That shit's easy. We dish in our lunch break. You'd have to go down and bob, grab the mask. Like those 12 foot bobs, we'd do them at 15 foot. We do two hour treads in the water with gear on, you know, all that type of shit. That stuff was easy to us. Underwater, not tying,

all the, um, where they grab your regulator, rip it out, tie your shit and a knot. All the stuff you see in like the amphibious portion. of like the seals and then that's just a small portion the seals don't even use any of that training all my seal buddies have done zero like water missions and all their careers um but all the stuff you see in the videos we would do all that stuff like all the time just for fun so that's the training they put us through is easy it's a piece of cake um yeah we interviewed a seal

maybe seal yeah the other day he failed a drug test for steroids and they asked him to leave And then he ended up going. Well, then he went to work. He worked for a few years. And then he ended up going to the French Foreign Legion for five years. Oh, wow. And then after five years, he was a few months shy of the five years. They asked him to leave because he started a YouTube channel and they wanted him to take it down.

Like he was a YouTube channel about being in the French Foreign Legion. He was a guy you guys just had on, right? Yeah. But he started getting kind of popular. And they were like, look, you need to take this down. He was also doing personal training, kind of personal coaching. And he was like, like, I was making, like, I knew this is what I wanted to do in life. I'm a few months shy.

They're saying, take it down, you know, or leave. And he's like, like, this is making me a ton of a chunk of money. It's what I want to do. So he's like, I'm going to leave. And he said he left on good terms. They were just like, you can't, you or take it down. He's like, yeah, I'm not going to take it down. So yeah.

Let's do some gnarly training. All my seal buddies, they're like, did, we've done zero water missions. I did 20 years. Yeah, but that's what he said, too. He was like the seals was, um, sea. C, what, something. It's sea, air land. Sea, air land.

Yeah. So, okay, so he was like, he was like, people think that it's all water missions. Yeah. But I don't think, I think he said the same thing. I think that as, he doesn't do any. The S and the E is C and then it's air and then it's land. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, he, but he was same thing. He's like, no, I don't, I didn't do any water. Because I was, to me, I think seals, I think of them coming in on the raft. Yeah. And the beaches. And they're trained to do that. But that was like World War II, or sorry, that was a Cold War. you know, 80s, 90s, swim up, put like a, put like a limpid mine or something on like

an enemy vessel, blow it up, you know, things like that. They can do all those things, but it's, they're more utilized, like drop him in a helicopter, kick a door. And they're like a very specialized SWAT team that you could put in, you know, because you know what the SWAT teams are like. Yeah. Except you're doing that in foreign countries, which is super difficult, tons of intel. You got to gather, like just all kinds of, it's a nightmare.

So you have for like a normal person let's say they crash and they get their car submerged under water How do you escape that? How do you get out? So your car will float for a long time So you hit the water first thing you do is roll down the window on belt and just get out right away Because you'll float for a really long time right If it starts to fill with water like the water's coming through the window you have to wait for it to fully fully fill before you get out right if you're trying to get in against the forest you try to open your door it's not happening So how long do you think before the car sinks? The windows are up?

Yeah, it could be an hour. Okay. Yeah, it's a long time. So that's probably a very unlikely scenario. Somebody's trapped in a car. And an older car will sink faster. A modern car will float. So I may have been, I may have had a few drinkies one night.

Right. And I rolled my BMW into the bay in San Diego. The car hit the water, but the way it rolled, it was tires down when it hit the water. I rolled down the window, got out, and it floated for like, an hour and a half, and then it sank. And then when the tow truck came, I swam the cable out to it, connected it to it, and we pulled it back out of the water. Was it trash?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Once the water hits the dash, it's considered total. Okay. What's like some of the hardest training that you have to put the seals through or the military through, like a water mission? So for most guys, a seal or like Marine Recon, any of those guys, they're going to go through our training and breeze it because they're so comfortable in the water.

but the bulk of mankind, as soon as you introduce water, they change. They change, you know. Like if I had to, if you're like, hey, dude, you got to fight this scary guy. I'm like, okay, let's take him in the water. I'll fight him in the water. Because water's going to break. It's a great equalizer. You take people in the water, they don't know how to act.

They don't know what to do. They freak out. They panic. They don't know how to swim in a pool. Can't really swim in a swimming environment. If they have to swim 100 yards, most guys are going to die. most guys there's plenty that could do it but if we put a million guys in the pool just random million of the population dude i would guess 90% of them are going to drown maybe more people

just suck at swimming how long can you hold your breath that's a great question for the rest of my life i could hold my breath for the rest of my life so i could go underwater hold my breath until i completely pass out how long is that a minute it depends what we're doing right so there's two types of breath hold there's a working breath hold where like let's say me and you are water and we're wrestling that's working or you're in water you're swimming and then there's a static breath hold we're like the static breath hold is the I'm in my buddy's jacuzzi I put my arms on the side I go face down I'm calm I hold my breath that breath isn't worth anything because you're never using that breath you know so me and you're in a pool you go underwater and you just hold

your breath calmly let's say you hold your breath for a minute two minutes whatever that breath doesn't apply because you're not going to be using it so when we're free diving if you can stay underwater for a minute to a minute and a half in a free diving scenario, you're really competent. That seems like a lot. It is. A minute, actually, is like a really long time. Because you're swimming down, you're staying on the bottom, and then you're coming back up with enough breath to, you know, be able to still function as a human. I got somebody who's that could do it for like three or four minutes, their studs.

But it's a perishable. You've got to practice it all the time. But most guys, you take them underwater, you tell them to hold their breath. they could technically hold their breath for dramatically longer, but the breathe reflex will start to trigger and don't make them panic and go to the surface. So if you can hold your breath underwater and tell you to pass out,

that's considered like a high level water because you're never physically, you're never letting your body physically take over from your mind, if that makes sense. How do you train yourself to, is it a something that you have to like work on? to train to go longer, or is it just something that you have it, but mentally you just can't get to that point?

No, it's definitely a trainable. So right now, if I jump in the pool, I'll be out of shape, you know, or I'll be in decent shape. I was in Austin, and we did one of those, I forgot what they called. It's like this underwater workout program. It's like former SEALs, RECON guys created it. And my buddy's wife does it, so I went with her. And they give you through, they put you through like the, okay, it's your first class, let's

try it. I aced all their stuff. I couldn't hold my breath and do like as many cross over as I could when I was in shape. But it's almost like if you were a high school like long, long distance cross country runner. Like maybe you can run 10 miles, but today you could probably run six just right out the door. Right. It's most more like that. It's like muscle memory. It's it's muscle memory. It's your lungs ability. But it's also even if you're practicing within the day, let's say we went to the pool right now, our first ones would suck. And then as the day progressed, we'd get dramatically better. Right.

So you could, you could gain a lot of breath-holding experience just throughout the course of a day. And have you ever passed out underwater, like holding your breath that long? No, not completely. Okay. I've had, um, every, so when you do it a lot, you get a, you get a tell. Like, every person will have their own thing. Mine is like a severe pulsing in my inner thigh that, uh, like my arteries struggling for,

Um, there, there's too much carbon dioxide in my body. It's usually not air you need. It's usually the, um, you need to expel the carbon dioxide being built up by your muscles. That's usually what's giving you the, I got to breathe. Right. Some of my buddies will start to get tunnel vision where like their vision will close in and close in and close in and close in. Mine will do that too, but my thigh are going to burn in my thigh.

They'll tell me, okay, probably I'm within 20 seconds of blacking out. I don't know if we just, I never, I don't know if we answered it, um, with all explanation so how long do you think like if you're just static is it like five minutes 10 minutes no no those are world record numbers yeah so like a static breath hold i think when we tested it last it was like two minutes just static sitting there okay but my working breath hold is what i'm stronger at even though it's smaller so i can move efficiently underwater i could um move efficiently underwater so in like let's say a minute and a half of holding my breath underwater i could do a lot of stuff in that time versus just on the surface maybe it's two minutes but i'm not doing

So that breath holds not worth anything. Does that make sense? Yeah. So if we, you're just sitting there. Exactly. I'm not getting anything. I'm not accomplishing anything other than holding my breath.

So we would go out on our lunch break. We would swim out to like the San Clemente Pier. It's out, man, it's about a little bit less than a quarter of a mile. It's out there quite a ways. And then we'd get to the end. And then we do what's called a soil sample.

So we're all treading water and say there's eight of us. Everybody goes down. you got to come back with some dirt. That means you really touch the bottom. Right. Because if we both go under, you're like, I touch you. You're like, bitch, you didn't touch it. Right.

So you all come up with some dirt. If you can move efficiently, you could be down and up in like 15 seconds, maybe 18 seconds. But you may get a guy who sucks at swimming. He can't like stroke. And it might take him 30, 40 seconds to get down and back up. That guy's struggling. So your efficiency moving in the water is even more important than your breath holding because it's how well you get things done.

So what I could get done in a minute and a half underwater is substantially greater than what the average person can do. So how does any of that connect to what you're doing now? So, I mean, none of that leads to where you are now. No. So one thing I've always tried to do, and maybe I get this from my dad, is I was trying to be good at what I'm doing, right? So if I'm in jail, I'm going to be good at it. Yeah. If I'm doing stuff in the water, I want to be good at it.

If I'm doing sales, I want to be good at it. So after that, this is the best part. After that, after I was a military contractor, I left that, I started working for Apple. And then went up to be a manager at Apple. And Apple is the biggest, one of the, I think it's the biggest company in the world. Colgate Total is more than just your favorite toothpaste. It's dedicated to advancing oral health. The new Colgate Total Active Prevention System features a reformulated toothpaste, innovative toothbrush,

and a refreshing antibacterial mouthwash. designed to work together to fight the root cause of common oral health issues, such as gingivitis, plaque, and tartar. Use the full routine twice daily and be dentist ready. Shop the Colgate Total Active Prevention System now at walmart.ca. And it's the most valuable company in the world and they got like the strictest and like the most complex like structure as far as like team development. You know all the self-improvement stuff people talk. about nowadays, all the mastermind, all the, what do we do for our people, here's how we value our staff. That's all copied from Apple. Apple is the king and the inventor of all that shit.

So you remember, like, Google would be like, hey, we have bicycles on our campus and we get a cafeteria for our people. That's all Apple shit. Apple invented all that stuff. Apple's the king of retail. Apple's the king of sales. Apple's a king of manufacturing, the king of operations, or the kings of logistics. Every category that company lives in, they're the kings of it. So they're the absolute best on this planet at it. So when you're around great guys like that, you learn so much stuff. And you see what the possibilities are. We'd have people on our staff that were like regional managers for Disney or they were regional managers for Starbucks or they were like national vice presidents for Radio Shack or Circuit City.

Remember those companies? And now they're just salespeople for us. Right. Making similar money and just doing great, great, great. great work. You know, so Apple's philosophy was come in, do your best work for a few years, and then go out and create something special in the world. So Apple really likes people to leave after five years.

There's some people that stick around longer, but like the NFL, you come in, let's get you in your prime, and then do whatever you're going to do. Right. Except Apple really values your progression outside of that. And that all came from Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had something that I find I have myself in the sense that I'll look at a company or situation and I'll see the good and I'll see the bad in it where like I could go to a hotel and I'd be like, oh my God, these guys are up right here so bad.

They're going to experience right here by this one thing and no one sees it. Steve would do that all the time. He'd go to a hotel, check in, and then call a staff and be like, let's get the fuck out of this place sucks, you know? so he wanted everything to be like the Ritz Carlton where not opulent but where the service everything was thought up everything had a reason and the customer experience was very well planned out um so because of that I did really well at Apple extremely well and then I've taken a lot of that that I've learned there and I've applied it to my own company but it's having a different way of

thinking, right? So I'll give you an example, like when it comes to customer service. If we, it's a good example. If you had a problem with your phone, so let's say your phone's not making calls, right, or whatever the issue is. We call Verizon right now and you're going to get what, probably the Philippines, maybe India, you're going to get somebody on there who's not very good and they're going to say, how could I help you today, sir? And you have to repeat yourself a bunch of times. You're going to complain and they're going to not really understand what the problem is, right? And they're not going to have solutions for you that matter. And they'll probably tell you whatever the policy is.

Right. And then you're going to be like this. Let me talk to somebody else. And then he'll talk to like the manager there. And then that person won't help you. And eventually you're like, you know what? I just want to cancel. They're going to transfer you to the U.S. And you're going to get the stud team.

Right. It's like, hey, Matthew, how are you doing today? I go to help you. Yeah. Oh, I appreciate you. Let me know. So let's see. Here's what we can do for you.

And they're going to start working through that scenario for you, right? And they're going to do everything they can to keep. you as a customer. That guy is at the very end of the line. That guy should be at the very beginning of the line. Right. And for whatever reason, companies don't want to do that. Or companies want to advertise to people.

I'm going to put a bulletin, a billboard up. I'm going to put a TV commercial up. I'm going to put an Instagram ad. I'm going to put all this content on Instagram and I'm going to advertise to you. But when you respond to it, I'm not going to be there to help you. So if I'm like, if you're selling me T-shirts, I'm like, cool, I like that shirt, how do your shirts fit? Dead silence.

On Instagram, you email them, nothing. You email a company nowadays, what do you get? If you emailed somebody, when do you expect to get a response back? Oh, like days later. Or you get the bots things that you're talking to like an AI, little drone thing. Yeah, that doesn't exist in my world. So if I emailed you and you don't respond to me that same day, that means the day you came into work, you brought yesterday's work

to today. Right. That's a no. You finish everything the same day. So if you email my company, we respond to usually within 60 seconds up to an hour. Any day of the week, any day of the year. So I'll give you an example.

If you message toehold on Christmas morning, how many people are going to respond to you on Christmas morning? I mean, toehold? I don't know. No, no, no. Any company, any company. Nobody. Yeah. You could probably get maybe a pizza place and the cops, right? That's it.

Nobody else. And if you email a company, you probably won't hear back from them until after the first, right? New Year's comes. Maybe it's on a Monday or Tuesday. They need a few days to get back in the rhythm. And maybe 14 days later, you're getting an email back. We've all experienced that. That to me is unacceptable.

So if you message my company Christmas morning, you're like, hey, I just got these beautiful handmade flip-flops. Are these size, did I get the right size? How should I care for them? How should I break them in? Can I take these in the water? Can I not take these in the water? I just got a gift card. How could I use that?

We respond to you within 60 seconds on Christmas. Okay. 60 seconds. Because I know you're waking up in the morning. You're opening up our product. You're excited to have it. And you're going to have a much better experience knowing that your answers, your questions were answered right away, than if I waited days and days and days.

And because we do that, we have insane almost record sales days on Christmas or on holidays because you're sitting around with your family, you're bored, you know, you're already open up your presents. You've got to hang out with your in-laws. That's, you know, everyone knows that's lame. But then you're like, I'm going to message these guys and I'll hear from them someday. And then boom, you got us right there. Right.

But we're like that every day of the week because a customer experience is the most important thing because customers are the most important thing now with toehold specifically if you don't if you've never bought anything from us you're not our customer i don't give you any thought i don't care you know once you become one of our customers that's when we focus so many times people focus on the people that aren't their customers so i want to focus on these guys outside of our network to get more people in but then when they come in what's the customer experience like right right so i bought this brand new really nice Harley. Lowrider, ST, tricked out, like 20 grand and upgrade super stick bike. And I was like, you know, I'm going to get a cool helmet for it. So I called it this helmet company. All right,

sorry, I went online, bought a helmet. They sent me the wrong one. No big deal. These things happen. So I called them up and I said, hey, this is AG. I bought a helmet. You guys sent me the wrong one. And the lady said, I'm so sorry about that. Would you like a refund? Right. That was her solution to the problem. I want the helmet that you want to keep I want to, if you're the company, you want to keep the, the thing is to keep the money, give them the right product. It's not a lot of money. It's like a $700 helmet.

So let's say that's your company. You own it, okay? You own that company. You're paying a person to pay, you hired a person to hire a person, to hire a person, to have some chick giving your money away. Right. And because you're focused on reports and because you're focused on your investors and because you want more passive income and because you want to be more hands off and you want to,

you want all the key words people talk about nowadays, you've got some person giving your money away. And slowly but surely, your company's losing, losing, losing. And then on the other end, you're literally putting money out there to advertise to get people to come in and buy your product. So imagine we were herding cows. And I spent a shit lot of money to hire these cowboys. And they go out to the field, they bring in all these cows. These beautiful cows, right? And they come in, they come into the corral, and at the other end of that corral, I'm paying a guy to let them back out again. Right.

How stupid is that? That's how most companies operate, because everyone wants passive income. They don't want to earn it. Everybody wants to be more hands off. Everybody wants to delegate more. That's the opposite of how companies that are successful operate. You have the best people first. At Apple, we did the same thing.

So you don't have, if we have somebody in our company that's $8 an hour, Guess what that person is doing? They're reading some bullshit report for me. They're not talking or touching our customers. No. The best guys are on our phones. The best guys are on our email. The best guys are talking to our customers.

And the low-level paid people are in the back, sweeping the shop, you know, doing the dumb shit. Not the opposite. How did you come up with the product? And what is the product first? Because nobody probably knows what the product is. You could show the product. Everybody knows what we do. Now, so the way it started was my flip-flops kept breaking.

You know, I grew up wearing flip-flops everywhere. And all through my life, they would break. They would break. They'd break. So I was on this hike. The thong pulled out. It broke. I was pissed.

You know, I had to walk back like four miles over like pine cones and pine leaves and like oak leaves all the spikes on them and shit. And I was like, this is stupid. So then I went, I was in the jungle in Okinawa when I was a military contractor. There was this leather worker guy there. It was like making bags and stuff. And I said, hey, I got this idea for a pair of flip-flops. I don't know leather work.

If I gave you my like drawings, can you help me make something? And our translator talked to him. And he's like, yeah. So he came up with a pair. And I was like, oh, these are cool. I want to tweak a couple things, but these will work. War him for a long time. Eventually they wore out.

And then I'd hit up guys in America. And I said, hey, dude, I seen you on YouTube. You do beautiful leather work. Can you make me a pair of flip-lops just like these ones? I already had made. And they're like, dude, I don't, I don't know how to do it. Like, I don't, I can't figure out the tread. I can't figure out the bonding.

I did that a bunch of times and nobody can do it. So then I just decided one day, I want to try it myself. Just for my, for my own, for my own pair. Not for a company. I thought you had to hike back up and find that guy. You know what? I actually sent one of my buddies back to the jungle that worked for the program to get a second pair.

So I did get a second pair from him, but my buddy went to get them. But I knew they were going to wear out eventually. Yeah. Anything on your foot? Anything on your car, the time. tires. That's just going to wear out eventually. But at what point? Everything nowadays is made so cheap and so disposable. It's made in China. It's made with bullshit materials. And we don't really promote like the toxic environmental stuff because that's not sexy. That's right. But you literally

have like some petroleum product on your foot leaching that shit into your skin, you know? So anyways, I start tinkering around in my garage on like how to make flip-flops. Zero leather experience background. Zero, anything like that. Nothing. I mean, you just heard my background. No creative, no arts, no art classes. You know what I mean? I didn't do anything like that.

Never painted in my life. You know, nothing. So my buddy and I were talking before you got here. And we were both saying, oh, well, you know, the leather, like, oh, he must have learned that in prison. Because in prison, they have tons of guys that do leather work. They do, yeah. Only in federal prison. Like, phenomenal, like stuff that you're like, this is insane how good some of these guys are

Of course, they've been doing it for 10, 20 years. Yeah. And that's all they do. And they're not worried about time. You know what I'm saying? So they can get super crafty. It's funny you bring that up. One of my buddies, he's a hell's angel, he did like, I think, 12 years in federal prison,

and that's where he learned leather work. He's probably amazing. He's super good. Yeah, he's really good. And then when he got out, he was showing me his leatherwork. I remember thinking like, oh, shit, you could actually learn to do leather work. So that just stuck in my brain. So a few years later, I decided, you know what?

But I want to learn for myself. And I pick his brain on stuff like that and like, hey, what kind of leather? But really, he lives in a different state. So I'm really on my own as far as figuring this out. I go into a leather store and I'm like, hey, I want to buy some leather. And here's the thing. What's the difference between leather you see on a wallet? Leather in like the seats of a BMW or a Ferrari?

Leather like on a horse saddle or a gun holster. Like what's the difference? There's a gigantic array. Some are super soft and subtle, but they won't hold up for a shirt. shit. There's chrome tan, vegetable tan. There's different weights, thicknesses, temperaments, full grain, um, uh, full grain, um, top grain, genuine leather. There's endless amounts. And there's tons of fake shit where if you have like a Kenneth Cole belt or a Calvin Klein belt or any of these like fashion brands, take your Kenneth Cole belt right now, get some scissors, cut it in half

and look at, look at it. There's no leather in it at all. It's paper core and it's a synthetic outside. They don't use leather. Because you got to have a, craftspin to use leather. Very few companies actually use leather nowadays because it affects your profits. You got to be... I don't want to teach my staff how to be... That takes away from our money. You want to have it stamped out by a machine?

By a machine and by China. And so everything's done nowadays. So I just started tinkering around in my garage to make flip-flops. And then my buddies would come by. We'd hang out after jiu-jitsu. And, you know, we'd be... We'd just f***ing around and we start calling it like, you know, like the toll-hold hang out. We'd just hang out in the garage.

And my buddy was like, hey, can you make me a pair? And I'm like, nah, you're not ready, bro. You're not ready for these flip-flops. You can't handle this. And then a guy, like, from a gym down the way, he would ask. And I'd be like, who is that guy? Oh, that guy's cool. Maybe I'll make him a pair.

And by the other guy, not f*** that guy. That guy's a weirdo. And that's kind of like our philosophy is like, we'll sell some to some people, others we won't. And then people just were asking us, asking me so many times, like, to make him flip-flops that I had left my job and just decided to do it full time. and it was only the demand that we did it for. It wasn't like, oh, I got this idea. Here's what we're going to do.

And here's how we're going to plan it. Here's a strategy. It was like, all right, who? Yeah, tell him. All right, I'll do a pair for him. And it's even to this day, if someone messages us in their douchebag, ah, fuck you, go barefoot. You can't have our shit.

Go wear shoes like a dork. So are they custom made like per order or? So everything is made to order, but we have two different avenues. So what does that mean? I don't know what that being. Two, made two orders. So we don't make stuff and then sell it to you.

Okay, so it's not in a box waiting. Correct. Oh, grab a nine and a half. Exactly. Okay. So what we do is you message me like,

AG, I want to get a size 9, 10, 11, 12, whatever. And I'm thinking about doing something, not on the website. I want to do something cool. So there's two ways to do it. You go to our website

and we have some of our popular stuff you could order. And the ones on the website are just a version of that. So let's say we stamped a samurai logo in there. Right. You're going to get some, something similar to that. It's not going to be exactly the same. Everyone's a little different.

We try to like always make them. So if you own three of the same pair, they're going to look a little different. Yeah. Or what you can do is you can message us directly. And you can say, AJ, I want to do something cool. I want to get like black elephant for my wife. You know, she loves elephants. Like she likes black footwear. Like do what can we do? And I'll say, well, what size is she? She's a seven. Let's do black elephant, black straps. I'll send you a link. You'll pay for it. We're done in like 30 seconds. And then that goes into the queue. And around 12 weeks later, they show up in the mail. You look at them.

You're in awe at the quality. You've never seen elephant leather before. You've never seen hippo leather before. You've never seen some of the lizards we have, the sharks we have. The leather we have is brought in. So everything we do is made in America. But the exotics, we bring in the best exotics from around the planet. And they're all ethically sourced.

So for example, these parks in Africa, let's say there's a big bull elephant, right? And that elephant is a breeding elephant. You would never that breeding elephant because that's what's maintaining the population. But at a certain point, that elephant will stop breeding. And what that elephant will do is he'll off all the younger males to protect his girls, even though he's not breeding them anymore. And then eventually, after years and years and years, he'll grow sick and he'll die. Well, what the parks will do is they'll say, hey, as soon as he's done breeding and he's no longer a viable breeding male,

Jamie's just a problem. Let's get him. Right. And that way it will allow the other males to breed and it'll increase the population. And there's parts in Africa where elephants are extremely scarce. And there's parts in Africa where they're infested. There's just too many of them everywhere. And the parks have to shrew them off because there's just too many.

Just like you do a deer or bear. There's like no brown bear in California, but there's parts of Canada where they're infested. You've got to kill them because there's too many. So what they do is they'll bring in a hunter. the hunter will pay, you know, let's say $100,000 and he'll kill that elephant. And then the meat will go to the villagers. The hide will go to the government tannery.

The bones will usually be sold to a museum. And the hunter will often just be left with some photos. Maybe he could get the trunk or something like that for like for a mount at his house. But that whole ecosystem of money is what keeps, these parks funded. If we pulled the American people and we said, hey, do you want rhinos to die? Everybody

who's not an asshole is going to say, no, I don't want them to die. How much money do you write to save the rhinos? Nothing. Nobody writes any checks. We write huge checks all the time. Right. So everyone wants to solve the problem, but they don't want to solve it with their own money. So the way you solve the problem is you monetize these things.

The reason deer and the American elk and all those populations are so strong today is because hunters spend billions and billions of dollars to manage that. Because who's going to go out there and what scientists are going to monitor the population? It costs a lot of money. Helicopters to monitor, right?

Game cams, game wardens, fuel, ammunition, operational costs, staffing costs, administrative costs, you know, maintaining the vehicles that monitor the parks, all that stuff is a huge cost. Well, Africa is fucked. So what happens in Africa Is if these parks weren't out of money Those game wardens will poach the animals themselves And then they'll make the money And if funding comes back

They'll go back to protecting them But that guy is going to feed his family And he doesn't give a fuck about that animal Right If he could feed his family by protecting it He'll do it If he could feed his family by it He'll do it. Welcome to Africa

It's fucked over there So Everything we get is ethically sourced So let's say an elephant dies. It gets hit by lightning. It dies of natural causes. It dies of old age, right? It gets an infection. It dies. That leather that's turned over to the tannery, our broker will go over. He'll inspect the leather and be like, hey, this section right here, this six by six, this six by six foot is two foot. This 12 foot by 12 foot is beautiful. It's total hold quality. They want seven grand for it. I'll tell him we'll do it for six grand, you know. And then we'll negotiate a little bit. and we'll be like, all right, $6,500, $600,000, boom, it's ours. And then we bring that back to the States, and then we cut it up into pieces, and we sell it in our flip-flops. So the money that we give them, they get 100% of that money.

And that's up to me to sell it to our customers. So we don't bring it in, and then if the customer sells it, they get a portion, now they get 100% of the money up front, and then they're on to the next thing. So the leather we bring in is only the best in the world. elephant, shark, things like that, there's already a very limited supply to begin with. Have you seen, have you guys seen a lot of elephant leather in your life? No. Maybe none? I mean, I just, we went to the zoo about a month ago, but they were walking around.

Were they still wearing it? Were they still wearing it? So most people have never seen these things before, right? So you want to get your wife something. Your wife wants to get you something cool. We could go to Louis Vuitton, and we could all buy the same bags, right? We could all buy the same Rolexes. They're expensive.

They're hard to get. You've got to be on a waiting list. But if you have the money and the patients, you could get them. With what we do, this might be the only piece on the whole planet. Maybe there's a specific pattern or texture. Maybe there's this really cool scar in it. So now you have the only pair like that or extremely rare pair. Or let's say you want to get her black elephant base, but you want to get like pink, like pink lizard straps.

Guess what? She's the only person on Earth with those. Right. So the uniqueness of what we do and then the durability, the quality, and the efficacy that goes into it, nobody else does anything like that. And the straps don't break. Everything could break, but they're not going to break from your foot. So we've got a video online where Brian Shaw, who's the strongest man in the world,

he's trying to break the flip-flops, right? Right. And he can't. Now, we've had guys pull them in weird ways and break them. But so let's say I had a Chevy truck. And I'm like, dude, this truck could pull 10,000 pounds. And they're like, no, shit. It could tow 10,000 pounds.

And I go and I hook up a trailer to the front bumper And I try pulling it backwards And I rip the front bumper off You're like, hey, dumb fuck That's not how you tow things You tow things from the back Because the directional force is a forward movement, right? So we've had guys pull flip flops

In ways that your foot doesn't work And break them with your arms Your foot could never generate that strength Right. So the way you would walk is you put your foot down You make a forward motion to walk Those, that forward direction Where your foot's caught in the mud

Or let's say somebody steps on the back of your heel and hold your flip-flop down, your foot moves in a forward direction, they're not going to break. They're super, super strong. But you could put your hand on one side of the straps, put your hand on the other, pull them sideways,

and eventually break them with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of lateral. They're like towing of trailer or motorhome behind your truck with your mirror. Your mirrors are going to rip off the truck. It's not where it's supposed to be attached from. Right. So they can break, you know,

but they won't break by you wearing them on your feet. But they're tougher than the average bear. Substantially tougher. Yeah, I think like a thousand pounds of tinsel strength stronger. How much do you sell flip-flops for? So our flip-flops start at $400, but those ones we don't really sell a lot of. I mean, we sell, you know, hundreds of them. But our $1,000 and up stuff, that's the stuff that we have the huge lines for.

So $400 is like our basic model. Around $1,200 is our most popular products. And then we hold the world record for the most expensive leather, flip-flops ever sold at $5,000. And Joe Rogan mentioned, what do you say? He mentioned it on the podcast or something. Yeah, he said a couple times, they're the best flip-flops he's ever owned. They're unbreakable.

He has just big, fat gorilla feet. So, you know, anything he wears, like, his foot's really, really wide. It's like stuffing a football into a flip-flop. She has, like, this weird chimpanzee gorilla feet. I was going to say, I have, yeah, my wife says I have Fred Flintstone feet. Yeah. Mine are super wide. And that's what you want.

So we have this thing. So we don't really talk about the toxic materials, the environmental stuff. We don't talk about foot health because that's not sexy. We sell flip-flops with guns and tits involved. You know what I mean? That's what American people want to see. But if we go down to foot health, so picture your foot like a chimpanzee's foot. Flat on the ground, it grabs and it grips, right?

It almost looks like a hand on your foot. That's how the human foot is designed to work. But what do we do? we wrap it up in like a Nike and we pull the toes inwards right and then we're like you know what the foot's not getting enough circulation so how do we keep your foot alive you know what if we put an arch underneath it that's basically like doing CPR to your foot every time you walk it's pulsating on the heel of your foot and it's bringing blood to your foot because your foot's dead your foot's dying in a shoe it's not how it's supposed to be if you stuck your hand inside of a shoe and you didn't move your

hand all day. How long do you think it'd be before you had hand problems? Right. How long? I don't know. For a little bit within a few hours, maybe more days. Imagine you do that 20 years on your feet. Right. And they're like, my feet are all fucked up. My ankles are fucked up. My back's fucked up. And their feet are always fucked up. Yeah. And your back's not fucked up. It's your feet that are fucked up. So we have this crazy thing where we have really weak feet as a society. And we can blame Nike for it. Because before Nike, everybody wore vegetable tan dress shoes. vegetable tan cowboy boots. That's the tanning process that's been used for thousands of years to cure the leather.

But they're like, listen, there's no profit in using that stuff. So it's starting using synthetic materials. And then what happens is that shoe binds your foot. It pulls your toes inwards. Your toes can't splay out and your foot just dies. So think about this. Why do you think people need arch support? I have no idea.

No idea, right? nobody knows has any idea i argue with like foot podiatrist about it and they're like oh yeah that's a good question we don't do that anywhere else on your body so from your ankle up if i'm like you know what you know it'd be better for you for your neck why we put a neck brace on you every day every day walk around with a neck brace on it doesn't seem like it'd be a good idea your neck would become so weak right and so and just it would fall apart we do that with your foot we bind your foot and then your foot doesn't need a art support that's not in nature that doesn't exist anywhere what the What are you talking about?

They do that because it's how you pump blood to your foot when you walk, because your foot's dead because it's not moving the way it's supposed to move. If you're listening to this and you make a fist and then open your hand all the way as wide as you can and then close and make a fist again, your foot basically should move in a fashion similar to that. Not quite with the same dexterity, but that's how your foot should work. But how do most people's foot work? Like a hoof.

It moves like that. Right. Like a little dolphin foot. It doesn't do shit. And that's because we've stuck our shoes. We stuck our feet in these stupid-ass shoes. Go to a villager, anywhere in the world, and look at their feet. That's how the human foot's designed to work.

And then, if you were to break your hand, let's say you've got a motorcycle accident, a motorcycle accident, they're going to do physical therapy that involves a lot of movement and dexterity of your hand. With your foot, what does your doctor say? Oh, you need more orthotics. Oh, yeah, let's stop using your foot. Let's make your foot more immobile. Right.

Let's put more support underneath it. What the fuck are you talking about? It's literally like this biggest scam of our generation is this stupid shit people do with their feet. So, vegetable tan leather, our flip-flops start off perfectly flat, and that leather is going to mold and shape to your specific foot characteristics. So what is the strategy behind your social media and your marketing, and how did it kind of evolve to what it is? So what I do with our social media, so people think that we just hire chicks to show our flip-flops off. And our Instagram is really our hub. You can go to our website, but start off on Instagram because that's where you're going to make contact with us.

And what I did from the very beginning is I just document my life. So it's just me hanging out with a chick, me doing jihitsu, me shooting guns. And it's sometimes I'll incorporate some flip-flops, sometimes. But guess how quickly people get over looking at flip-flop. or looking at anything like sunglasses right sunglasses are dumb flip flops are boring to look at would you rather look at guns and tits the shit you could do in flip flops guess who never gets tired of looking at tits and guns americans chicks you're usually and we're usually not going to show them in flip flops because why think about red bull you never see red bull like as a can what do you

see red bull doing it's on the side of a race car i think i know what you're i think i understand what your strategy is now. I feel like she's not doing quality work. I feel like maybe she's just hit. I feel like this is her hitting her working the leather is not what's really happening. Is that not the best post ever? So yeah, that's their advertising. Look.

And guess what? Guess what? It crushes. This is good for Danny. Danny Jones. For Joe Rogan's comedy. I forgot about this. He's got a Danny loves aliens.

So that's what we do Because if we post I got buddies that own knife companies Great knives But guess what I get bored of looking at your knives Right I get bored of seeing how your knife is used I think you should show the product differently

At least for us anyways Right It's a lifestyle And chicks dig flip flops So if you want to wear shoes You're not going to get any chicks It's just not going to happen When are you wearing shoes

Like when are you wearing flip flops Your best life is always in flip flops When you're on a boat, you're in flip-flops. When you're at the beach, you're in flip-flops. When you're on vacation, when you go to a nice restaurant, when you hang out friends. You have half a million followers. Yeah.

I was watching one of your pods and your boy was talking about that West Watson kid. So he, growing up in San Diego, do you guys know anything about his past? Not real. I mean, I know that he went to prison and got out. He wasn't some big, hot shot peckerwood dude. Right. You know what? He went to prison as?

He was a Frostafari. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's from our neighborhood. He's a Rastafarian, dude. He's like a snowboarding Rastafarian. Look up his kid, his kid pictures. What's a, I don't even know what a rostom.

The dreads of, you know, I mean, like a smoking dreads and shit. He's not some tough Pekkerwood, dude. I don't understand what the fuck everyone's talking about. Well, he went to, he went to prison and kind of parlayed his prison experience into, you know, it's kind of like stolen, I guess they called Stollard. Baller, yeah, where he, you know, one, it was like he did 10 years. Well, you didn't do 10 years. So, too, I was in this level three yard and this level, and you weren't in those yards. You know, based on your, based on other YouTubers coming out with his prison record on where he went, like you weren't in this California prison and this one.

You were actually in this Arizona minimum security or medium security prison. But he's come up, he's, he's spun this whole thing. And, you know, I don't even have a problem. I don't have a problem with this message. I just have a problem with his delivery is so overwhelmingly obnoxious. I can't imagine that you, I just can't imagine calling another man a bitch or telling him that because he doesn't have abs, he's not a man. Yeah. The thing is, the way that he talks to people online, you get smacked right in your face talking another man. Yeah, I mean, you didn't go to prison talking like this.

You didn't behave on. He went to prison and was barely a white guy because he came in as a Rastafarian with dreads. Right. it's been known that he's testified against other people he that tough guy attitude you go back to prison he's dead the reason that he would do his videos the way you would see him where he would he would do like if you notice his posts he like work out three in the morning all that type of shit because a bunch of dudes from san Diego wanted to f*** him up he's a frat dude and that's why you think he went to miami listen look at me he's a rat right so my boy was banging his wife

the whole time he's just beating up rasshole and stuff like that those for the last few years right And she's just talking shit on him She's telling him a pussy And he's a fucking And he can't get hard And all that sort of shit, right? But he'll go to the gym Like three in the morning

And then he'll post he's at the gym Once he's gone Or like he'll go to the park And do his tough guy video And then he'll bounce and post When this he's gone He's doing all that elusive shit Because dudes from San Diego

Want to fuck him up Miami. No one's going to Miami You know what I mean? Right But yeah, that dude's a lame dude A total lame And here's a thing

When you're a hardcore shot caller Where's your other guys at? Right crew. Right? You don't have a crew because you're just lame talking shit by yourself, telling dudes online. You know, I mean, it's like some weird dominatric shit that he does. Yeah, I was going to say it's a special kind of person that has to hire someone to belittle

them to get them to do what, honestly, you could watch a Jordan Peterson video and get the same and get better advice for. Yeah, it's. He is making a ton of money, apparently. Yeah. I mean, I know drug dealers make a lot of money, too. It ain't going to last very long. Right.

You know what I mean? So, and listen, I don't give a fuck what the guy does. He never burnt me. I wanted to fight the guy one time at Tyson Park. He didn't show up. He's a pussy. But from the neighborhood. So you knew him?

Yeah, I know of him. He's a nobody. He'd be like just a low-level dude from the neighborhood that's like, you'd do like your cousins would buy him from and shit. Right. Like a snowboarding Rastafarian. That's who Wes Watson is. He had some tough guy prison, dude.

He's a nobody. Hey, we're from the same town. He's a nobody. When you were in prison, fighting and stuff, or in county jail. fighting stuff, were you ever worried about any of these things causing you to stay longer or extending your stay? No, not at all. Yeah, that stuff's all automatic. Okay.

And then being a part of a car or like a gang or whatever you want to call it in prison, like what are the privileges? So you're not part of a gang. So being a part of the gang would be like if you're part of like a, like the brand, which is you better be doing life to get something like that. You have to be super active. Or you'd be like a Nazi lowrider, piney desquals. Like one of those hardcore prison Nazi gangs, those are gangs. The car just made up of just peckerwood, just white dudes that are like, dudes like me and you, just doing time, you know. And you're just, or they could be like biker guys.

This is for people that don't know who to picture. So it's picture biker guys. Those are just peckerwoods. Anyone white is a peckerwood. And then if you're a skinhead, you're part of the, you're still a white guy, but you're like a neo-Nazi, like, gang member. And those dudes have all different politics. Right. You can't really manage them and they can't manage you.

You know what I mean? If there's a riot, they're all required to be like front of the line guys. Like they have to be front of the line, like, be first. They're a whole different thing. But let's say, for example, you're into drugs. Like you're going to get, if there's drugs come into the facility, you have access to them. Access to better food to like the gym equipment would be like waterbacks and shit we would work out with. But like even like to be able to sit at the table.

So there's like these concreted in tables to sit at. There's a couple for the whites. There's a couple for the Southern Mexicans. There's a couple for the blacks. Everybody else sits on the ground or you go back to your cell to eat, you know, depending on the facility, depending on the facility, every facility is different. But this place we were at, so then when we were done at our table, we would get up. And then a dude who could sit down where I sat, he would take over.

And then you kind of rotate people through there. So depending on where you are as far as how active you are and what you're willing to do. You know, you always get some, like, you'll get a lame, like, Wes Watson who comes in his tattoo and he'll tell some new guy, be like, hey, dude, don't put him work or fucking. Shut the fuck out, bitch. What are you talking about? You're not calling anybody shot. But here's the thing. As tough as you want to be, you still have to be able to back it up with your fists.

Right. You still have to back it with your fists. Or with a knife, like, if there's a no-hands policy and it's a knife-only yard, that's a thing, too. There's some places where, like, if we have a beef, we can't fight, we have to stick each other. No-hands policy. Aren't you happier now? I was, yeah, way happier now. My God.

Yeah, it's way better to be on the outside and have a lot of money. You got a lot of bitches than to do that shit. But the thing is when you go through that stuff, it's kind of like, I think it's kind of like the military, right? Where one of my buddies always says, he says, referring to himself, he says, I was the only guy that was ever just in the military. I wasn't a special forces guy. I wasn't a crazy shooter. I wasn't a sniper. He's like, I was just a military guy.

he's like every dude now when they come out of the military they like only the president can see my file you know that dumb shit people say right that's how that's how dudes like that guy is of jail but i was gonna say like it's like the military like 70 80 percent of the military is the guys that are just changing tires yeah they're just the guys behind the line they're cooking those guys changing tires want to be in the action like they're willing to right like they're putting their you know they're saying hey i'm signing up i'm willing to go and but sometimes they get stuck yeah you know doing bullshit or well just in in let's face it in general that those are the guys that make everything else work like those are the guys that make all the other guys shine because somebody has to come the meals and those dudes will be picking up the rifles if the front guys the guys drop right now so you get a lot of that stuff you get a lot of the after the fact tough guys that exist you know what what do you think made you that way when you're younger just a product of your environment yeah I mean we you only know what you know like one of my buddies is like well you knew the difference from right and wrong I was like I did my

right and wrong was so much different than your double parent fucking, you know, suburb right or wrong. Right. It was way different. You know, you don't know what you don't know. What's that phrase they always say? So it was like, well, if I don't steal from anybody, if I don't steal from anybody, I'm considered a good person. Right. You know, like that was our standard growing up.

So just to punch someone in the face wasn't, that's not a big deal. You know what I mean? Just beating people with violence or, like, that's how you solved conflicts. It's the fish that doesn't realize it's surrounded by water. or it's just, this is what it is. Right. And it's also the other people watching you are looking for weakness. So, like, you have to respond in an overwhelming fashion for people to be like, all right,

that guy's not to be messed with. All right. That's way better. Trust me. That's way better than being somebody that people want to fuck with or get picked on. Guys who get picked on, like the California thing, there's no, like, maybe in some rare cases, like this, like, there's no, there's no shit in California. There's no, there's no, there's none of that sort of stuff.

If you come in and you're even like, if you streak the football game, you know, like you're wrapping your shit up, you're getting the fuck out of there. Right. No weird sexual stuff whatsoever, you know what I mean? Even if, like, you have weird kinky shit that you bring up, get the fuck out of here. It's like just a men's world. That's it. And everyone's just looking for an excuse to, you know, to take somebody else out.

But that's the only way it works. That's the only way it works. Do you think that life in jail, like, prepared you for the business world at all? yeah i mean everything prepares you it's mostly like just having the mental fortitude um like nothing that happens with my business is ever worse in jail right or ever worse they getting shot at or someone trying to you or any of that sort of stuff you know so and like i was saying really a lot of guys grow up where that's their identity to me that's just something i did right you know what i mean like if we go to a bar tonight and someone tries to get in a fight with us i'll just be like hey let's go get a

drink. Let's get the f*** out of here. Right. Like, I'll walk away because I got millions of dollars to lose. I know better. And I know that that dumb at the bar is the only thing that could bring me down. You know what I mean? Meaning like I feel them or I f*** them or something like that. So I don't even put myself in situations where I'm around anybody dumb anymore. Nobody. Right. Like my circle, you can't even, if you're like, hey, can I bring my friend with me? No, you can't. You can't bring your friend because your friend might not have the right energy. Well, I'm going to say it's that saying, you know, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room. You know what I'm saying?

So, yeah. But like, it's being in prison, like a lot of the, a lot of guys get out and it defines their entire life. It's like being the, the high school quarterback. Like, you live here. Like, you're, what is it? Is it a Bundy, not Ted Bundy, uh, Al Bundy, you know what I'm saying? Like, you're, you're still living like you're the high school, you're the big shot high school

quarterback. You know what I'm saying? Like, your whole life. Like, to me, that's how I feel about prison. Like, that's just something that happened. Like, this is, that's all of that kind of led up to where I am now. I'm always thinking in the future. And you asked what's a big thing that's changed.

So one is recognizing it. So, you know, we have guys like the guy we just talked about with those motivational shit. That motivation to do something doesn't, doesn't work, right? It gets you motivated for a little while and it doesn't work. What you need is to remove self-limiting beliefs, right? And what I did was I worked with this guy named Dom the hypnotist. He has a big Instagram He's really, really smart guy

But what he does is You ever worked with the hypnotist before? I hate to say this, but I actually have So, yeah, only because I did what's called regression. Okay, so I don't know all the terms And when you think of a hypnotist, you think of the dude on TV, fucking making this person act like a chicken.

Yeah, no. I don't know what that is, but that's different. So what it is, the best way to describe it is it's a therapy session while you're meditating. So you're really deep in thought.

You're really like internally focused. And what I had realized, what he had helped me realize was that because I've seen so many people get done stuff growing up, that I never really planned for the future because we could die tomorrow the next day. I just planned a few days at a time. Right. I would never long term anything. And I never knew that I didn't do that.

So working with him, I identified the fact that I had a self-limiting belief around people just dying. the time. And like, why plan for 20 years in the future? Because you're probably not going to be here. Yeah. So after working with him, I had just a huge clarity. And now everything I do is towards motivation where a lot of times a guy will work a job because he doesn't want to be homeless or he doesn't want his phone to go off or he doesn't want to get kicked out or he doesn't want his car to get repoed. Where you want to work a job because you want to be the best at that job or you want to use that to pivot into the next career or like everything's always focused

on the on the forward versus the back so think of that away from motivation is like a tiger chasing you you start running from the tiger and eventually get away from it and you start walking again and that tiger starts to creep up on you and you see it and you start to run again right but if your goal isn't to get away from the tiger your goal is to make it to the top of that mountain you're automatically going to get away from that tiger because you're focused towards that mountain. And with that tiger behind you, you're always moving forward. You know, you never stopped to walk. So that was one of the biggest things for me that totally changed my mindset. It made me start planning for the future. And once I started planning for the future,

our company success skyrocketed. Like to the level, I always pictured it'd be a successful company, but I never knew it'd be this successful. You know, like you dream. You dream like one day, and I'll use another mountain analogy because there's no mountains here. So, like, let's say we're way away from a mountain, right? And you're like, I want to go to the top of that mountain. But you're so far away from it. You can't really see the mountain. It's just kind of hazy in the distance.

Once you get closer to that mountain, you can be like, oh, shit, I actually see a path to the top. You know, I could go up that ridge line. So from far away, I knew toehold would be a big company. But I didn't really have a path, what that would look like. I didn't have no picture. I'd be sitting here with you, you know, one day. But you move forward, you know, years and years and years and tons of hard work. And suddenly you're much closer to that.

mountain. You're like, oh, fuck, I see the route. And then you look again and you're like, I could look down halfway up the mountain. I could see where I started from way back there. And I knew I'd make it to this mountain one day, but I had no idea this is what the mountain looked like. And then you just keep finding your path up to the mountain. And all you're really working on is getting in the top and looking for pitfalls. And make sure you don't fall off. It's funny because that's exactly what I say about this podcast, is that I got out of prison and I knew I wanted to start a podcast. I'd never heard a podcast. I'd only been told what they were.

I kind of had an idea of what it was, didn't really know what it was going to be ultimately. But I knew that every day I had to work a little bit toward that goal. And the closer I got, the more clear it became, you know what I'm saying? And ultimately, what it is right now is not what I had originally envisioned. It is a podcast, but it's not the podcast I envisioned. You know, it just changed along, it's still a podcast, but it just changed along that journey. And so sometimes you hit a brick wall and you go, wow, that's not going to work. So you go to a different path.

That's not going to work. But every day, if you just move a little bit towards it, like I can't get there today, but I can get a little bit closer. It's kind of like the alcoholic thing. I can't say I'll never drink again, you know, like alcoholics. Like I can't say I'll never drink again, but I'm not going to drink today. Like that's all you can do. And eventually you look back on your life.

You're like, fuck, I've been sober for 40 years. Right. And with business, there's multiple good ideas with business. so if you're like what what's a good business move what's their next move so if you're planning on doing a business the tricky part is there's so many good choices but what you have to figure out is which one can you chain multiple good ideas together like in jiu jihitsu like a like a move in jihitsu would be like oh that's a great move to go to but can you chain multiple moves together to get to the finish you want to get to and that's what you what i feel like you got to do in business you got to

really be dumb to fuck things up. And the other part, too, is we talked early about our product, right? Having a good product to me is the price of admission. You know, a lot of people will talk, well, it's the best in the world. It's the best quality. I was like, yeah, that doesn't matter. You're not going to be successful by just doing that. You have to do the above and beyond. So having just a best product is just the price of admission. Now you're on the field, right? So now that you're on the field, what do you do that stands out? What do you do that's better? What do you do that's better than everybody else? Like in the NFL, like just having muscles doesn't matter.

Just being fast doesn't matter. You have to have substantially tangible things that are better to be successful. You know, and those things are accessibility to customers, a high level of customer focus, a high level of ambiguity, being able to change things on the fly. And for us, it's never taking outside money because I never have to answer to anybody for anything. I just do whatever the fuck I want, whatever I want. The other people we answer to is our customers. And that's it.

If you want to get a hold of us, we have a website, but the website, you can send me an email, you know, but the best way to interact in real time where we could have a back and forth conversation, Instagram. Shoot me a DM on Instagram and just say, hey, I heard you on the podcast. We'll respond right away and then ask any questions you want. We'll respond in real time. I'll send you voice messages. I give us to send you videos back and forth.

Email, like, it's hard to send videos. It's hard to send, you know, pictures. you can send it like a photo, maybe two photos, but on Instagram and the DMs, we could really have an interactive conversation and really show you the things that we do and get all your questions answered. So always message us on Instagram, and it's at T-O-E-U-E-U-L-D. So I brought you something. Okay. Okay. That's a handmade shark wallet, buy fold, hand-stitched, ethically sourced.

There's only a handful of those in the world. I've got to get it out. Hold on. Oh, my gosh. nice what is it it's shark shark yeah so that's we make two different styles we make a bifold like that one full-sized hold cash we also make a minimalist wallet also only a cardholder so i gambled and brought you that one if you're more of a cardholder guy we could send you the the little one too i'm going to send you guys some flip flops also okay nice my my wife by the i almost mentioned that

i almost mentioned the flip-flop thing because when my wife was looking through everything and And you had said, hey, I'll send you guys some flip-flop. She was like, she looked at me immediately. And I was like, just calm, like, calm down. Like, yeah. I like to talk in person, make sure when we're done here, I'll get exactly what you guys want. I'll send you a link. And that way it goes into the queue and then I'll bump it in the queue.

So it gets you guys faster. Okay. Look, because you can see, look, this is exactly pretty much. This is. So the camera here, this new one. Yeah, yeah. This is pretty much. You have to look at this.

The thing. Oh, it's got another thing here, too. Okay. Cash slot. So look at the stitching on your wallet. See how it's like a thin. Yeah, yeah. They use a presser foot.

And then you see how the leather's coming apart right there? So that's probably a genuine leather, which is like a like a particle board type of leather. Right. Nobody makes anything like that. Yeah, this thing's way thick. I bought a Louis Vuitton wallet recently just because I like the color green. And it's got a thing too. It's got a little logo.

In three weeks, it started delaminated and come apart. $650 wallet came apart in three weeks. And all I did was just kept it inside my fanny pack. Why would you buy a Louis Vuitton? Test them. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then I gave, and then we did a contest I gave it away to one of our followers.

But that stitching is guaranteed for life. So in 20 years, if you cut one of those stitches, send it back and we'll repair it. But also, because these are hand stitched and their saddle stitch, which meant, let's say you were to pull a thread, the threads on each side of it won't come undone. because each one is nodded individually. This is how cowboys would stitch their saddles and all their equipment so that their whole system just doesn't come unraveled if a thorn cuts one of them. Nice. I appreciate it.

Thank you. All right. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. Leave a comment. Share the video.

Also, please consider joining our Patreon. It really helps Colby and I produce these programs. It's $10 a month. We also put Patreon exclusive. There's a couple of stories that we talked about today that's going to go on the Patreon so we don't get demonetized. I'm trying to think of it too right now. In the description box, we're going to leave all of the toehold links, especially to Instagram,

to the website, to everything, as opposed to the, I can tell you from personal experience, from being on the website. The website is way more boring than the Instagram. So you definitely want to check out the Instagram. I really appreciate you guys watching. Thank you very much. See ya.