Dan Cox

Dan Cox is a friend, a general tradesman and plumber, and a family man. He also makes coaching and commentary on LinkedIn.

He can be reached at his LinkedIn page.

This is episode 5 of Flipside Frolic. It was recorded November 23, 2024, published November 25, 2024, and runs about 3 hours and 2 minutes.

Listen

Apple Podcasts
YouTube
Spotify

Transcript

This transcript was generated from the episode audio. The YouTube caption file was not available. Obvious name errors were corrected. The conversation was not rewritten.

Hey there. Thanks for joining us at Flipside Frolic, where we learn to understand each other's perspectives by flipping the script and having some fun. Here we go. All right. Welcome to Flipside Frolic. I'm Carl Kmiec, your host. I have with me here today, Dan Cox. Dan has always been a wonderful conversationalist. We definitely got in a lot of different conversations through the years, and people that don't really have too much of a problem with speaking their mind and speaking their truth and giving, letting their opinions and voices be heard. so we thought we'd have some good conversation for sure. most of all, Dan is a businessman. You've always been a pretty much an entrepreneur your whole life.

so we could probably just start a little bit with that and, and how you're you're, you're tell a little bit about yourself, maybe growing up and what, what made you have this like entrepreneurial lifestyle choices from whatever. But go ahead and pull that close. 1st, I'd like to say thank you for you know, inviting me to be part of your podcast. I appreciate that. I grew up in East Central Illinois, Champaign-Urbana area, home of the U of I, and learning from my father and other people about how if you run your own business, you know, you can basically make your own schedule and do things your way. that looked very advantageous to me. While I did go in the army for a brief time 17 went in, was injured, back out, ended up working at the University of Illinois as a Glorified janitor, if you will.

They called us building service workers for about six years, and that's where I met my wife and moved up to Chicago area and became a plumbing contractor. takes about four years of apprenticeship, and then after that you know, running my own business. Been doing that now for altogether over 35 years. So I've worked in Chicago and all the suburbs surrounding Chicago. long history of, of doing basically everything that is residential plumbing. Nice. And yeah, we have some mutual family and different, different people. I did a little work myself in some of the north side of Chicago higher-end areas with some residential plumbing mostly. so we got some stuff in common there. but yeah, just being around the region In, in the Chicago area for so long we just got a lot going on these days.

and so we were, we were talking a little bit briefly, a little, little bit about some of the some of the different gun violence and, and just some of the issues that have seemed to have been plagued with Chicago for, for decades and, and doesn't seem to be too much of a end in sight with, with current policies, regulations, laws, all these sorts of things. and that, that definitely seems to be, like you were, you had mentioned briefly about even shootings.

And I, I, it's one of those things where the media can tell us that crime's down and all this sort of thing, and yet More people that we know directly related to us seem to be having issues or occur-occurrences of being robbed or being carjacked or, or I have a pretty close friend, a very close friend that was Ubering, and he was down by Chinatown, and there was an article in, in ABC News seven that he dropped some patrons off at a bar at 01:30 in the morning or something along those lines, and there was there was some people kicking the snot out of some, an old man on the ground, basically. And he's not a hero, but he decided he, if he drove up and beat this horn and flashed his lights, maybe they would just chase him off. He was in a Tesla.

And the guy turns, one shot fires, actually went through his Through his window, his driver window, through his seatbelt, into his chest, right by his nipple, across the chest on the outside of his rib cage, and stopped and got lodged in his chest near his other nipple. So you want to talk about a close call. Yeah. And he was able to speed off and, and get a couple of blocks away before he called for help, and then they, they, you know, they responded to him there, but it's crazy, you know? and you can have some different areas of Chicago that have different, that have always been crime-ridden or some, some different areas, and, you know, it's like, oh, oh, fine, the crim, the, the, the crime finally spread to you people that we've been dealing with this for years, so about time it evened out.

But obviously that's not the best attitude to have, but obviously once things hit a little closer to home, then obviously people are more concerned, you know. Everybody wants to be an environmentalist as long as the windmill's not in their backyard, you know. so that's, that's one thing that has been going on around lately. Well, what I have found is that there seems to be a misconception. it's been going on for as long as I can remember, even as a kid, questioning these ideas of more gun control will solve these issues. And, you know, time has proven out that's not the fact. Let's say pre-1980 there were handgun bans in Chicago, right? Well, 1974 was the highest murder rate Chicago ever had. It was 970 people killed, all right? That ban Doesn't stop criminals from using guns to commit crimes.

it's the same thing with the new assault weapons ban. It's, it's really a pathetic joke what people have done in, in trying to instill some sense of safety in the minds of those who are fearful. Highland Park and Deerfield and some other towns banned assault weapons before the state did. Well, Highland Park had a massacre on the Fourth of July when one of their residents used what they term as an assault weapon to actually attack the citizens during a Fourth of July parade. So the simple question then is, what good was that assault weapons ban? It wasn't. And to make things worse it has been reported that the police did not carry firearms during the parade, and some of the residents were concerned about seeing guns, even on police, make them nervous.

And so when this killer started shooting at people, and he ended up shooting 84 rounds before stopping the police were unarmed and couldn't shoot back for some time. I mean, it takes some time to shoot off 84 shots. That's three magazines at 30 rounds apiece. if the police had been armed, I believe after the 1st couple shots, they could have shot back at him, and he'd have taken cover and fled. But because he wasn't being shot back at, you know, no, no In any way trying to belittle what happened, he had a shooting gallery and no one to oppose him. That is the worst case scenario.

And many times in shootings where people have, say, gone into a mall or a store and, you know, they showed a gun, having someone there who even fired a shot into the ceiling, all of a sudden this person who was on the attack is now on the defense of, oh my God, I could die here because they have guns too. A little side note, when the Highland Park shooting happened, he escaped because there were no police pursuing him until after he had left the scene because they were afraid to pursue a guy with a gun. When you don't have one, you're not going to pursue somebody who has one, right? I mean, it's the simple logic, right? He actually dropped the AR-15 in his escape, they found that, but he went up to Madison, Wisconsin with another firearm, but he discovered something, and they don't tell you this in the media.

There were men walking around open carrying firearms, citizens with guns. Well, he turned his tail around and went back to go see mommy, and the cops caught him in Deerfield. If those men in Wisconsin hadn't been there carrying guns, you'd have had more deaths in Wisconsin. So when people say guns prevent violence, that was proof. A killer that was on the loose with the intent to kill more people saw that citizens had firearms, and he might not fare so well as he did in a community where there were no firearms, even on the police. He became fearful and ran back to the Highland Park area where he was arrested. Yeah, here's just the Wikipedia page on the Highland Park shooting.

It's it's showing 80, 80, 80, Shots fired, 83 shots fired, like you had said, and, and, you know, the only way you can stop any more damage is by stopping it as fast as possible. And unfortunately, a lot of times police are, are just respondent to crime. They can't prevent crime. They're not there before the crime happens, but quicker re-response times. And, you know, the, the gun debate has always been, especially in a, in a, in an area like this that's so blue, Chicago area, and, and, and it's just amazing that for a while, it's funny, because as a union, even as a union member, you know, I've, I've been in, we, we put people in all these different categories.

And, and, and so whether you're liberal or conservative or libertarian or republican and all, and all these different labels it's just, it's just amazing how people seem to want to identify with their tribe or whatever. But you know, at one point I definitely could be considered a pro-union liberal. And then in my experience in business, I actually went from basically non-contractual management at a trucking company to being a union member and in a union shop. So you kinda, you see the goods and the bads of both. You understand, I, I, I, it just gave me a better perspective of understanding some of the arguments from both sides of this, of the coin, because you know, we still have a business to run and safety 1st and all these other things that are always important but sometimes they get passed out.

And so the same scenario happens with some of these laws and And, and, and where, you know, you can see in other states and other areas where there are lower crime rates, but right now they, they can say that crime is down so much in Chicago, but they're not prosecuting any crimes and they're letting everybody out of jail, and so obviously there can't be a crime if there's not a, if there's not an arrest or a conviction. So convictions are all that matters. So if nobody's convicted or they get off on supervision, did it ever happen? And, and that's kind of a big problem with some of the prosecutors and stuff in the area right now, that's for sure. Well, you know, with the Chicago area too, it's, it's always been notorious, there's a lake. it's hard to prove a murder when there's no body, right?

And it's so easy for, you know, the bad guy who has access to a boat, take somebody on the lake with some, some blocks or whatever. Was there a murder? We don't know. The guy just hasn't been seen in a long time. And, you know, unfortunately that sort of thing happens. Now, One thing that I've never really understood was, was the fact that Illinois got a FOID card, firearm owner identification card, and yet they don't enforce the laws in regards to it. Let's say this young man that attacked Highland Park, he had been arrested for attacking his family with knives. He threatened to kill all of them. When he was arrested, his father revealed that he had been suicidal. Someone who's suicidal and has attacked people with weapons is not supposed to be able to have a FOID card for obvious reasons.

If the state police had done their job and made it so that this young man could not have a FOID card, of which his father helped him to obtain, okay he would not have been able to buy the weapons, bottom line. Now, same thing happened in Juliet with a guy named Romeo Nance. He had been arrested for robbing two people at knife point. He actually put a knife in someone's chest during the robbery. He was arrested for that, and then he was arrested for shooting 14 shots at a woman during a road rage incident. All those charges were dropped down to cannabis charges, and he was let go, so he did not lose his FOID card. And because the state of Illinois police weren't informed of these issues and the prosecutors didn't prosecute this guy, he ended up killing seven of his family members with a gun.

Highly preventable, in my opinion, entirely preventable if the system utilized the laws that they already have. Here's the bottom line. In the 1700s, when the Second Amendment was written in the Constitution Bill of Rights, they had simple rules. If you're a drunkard, if you're mentally unstable or insane, or if you have committed acts of violence, you may not possess a firearm. That was the gun control of the 1700s when the Second Amendment 1st came out, and that works. We don't want a drunk running around with a gun, we don't want someone who's mentally unstable and crazy, and we don't want someone who has demonstrated that they are violent to have possession of a firearm where they can do serious damage and harm a lot of people. It seems ironic that they had that figured out over 200 years ago, and yet we still don't grasp it.

In Chicago, you have Gang members running around with guns all over the place, and they get arrested with the guns, and they get a slap on the wrist, and they're let back out on the street. You hear of these guys being arrested 20, 30, 40 times, okay? How are the people being kept safe when the judicial system isn't preventing violent criminals from being in their immediate area with weapons wanting to do harm? I can't make any sense of it. And when I read the stories of how people have been arrested and they've committed these terrible crimes, and the judge somehow, you know, the prosecutor dismisses the charges, and this guy's back on the street, and he says he's going to kill somebody, he tells everybody he's going to do it, and then he goes and does it. What's up with that?

Yeah, it, it, it comes down to, like, You know, there, there's so much with, with what they call is common sense gun laws and common, you know, which is almost an oxymoron in a lot of ways. but you, you get into these positions where there's, you start another law, then you start another law, then you start another law, and then these laws conflict. You, you could almost bring it into back in a sense to the plumbing code, you know, where, where you have all these goofy codes and all these restrictions, and most of them were put in there for the right reasons as far as people thought of at the time. But you almost do need an AI or some sort of algorithm that can sort through all these sorts of laws and see which ones contradict each other, because you end up getting in a position, good example is like, is What's it called, is, is the...

You're driving, you got a speed limit on the highway, and then you can't pass in the left lane. You, you, you can only be in the left lane if you pass, that's what I was saying. So, so you get into this position where you, you, you're either speeding or you're not passing. Right. So now you're in a position to where you can be pulled over for any, at any time for any reason with probable cause, because you're breaking a law. So, you know, how many laws, and, and, and, like you said, bringing it back to the founders even in, in, in the old school days of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral or Wyatt Earp and the big hoopla in some of the films or whatever in history about you can't take away our gun rights, and their answer was, we're not taking away your right to bear arms, you just can't carry them in town.

And, and that was very confrontational at the time. Well, you know, they, they call that the Wild West, right? More people get murdered in Chicago in one year than happen in a thirty-year period in what they call the Wild West. If we take away the, the wars between the Indians and the white settlers, okay, if we're talking cowboys shooting other cowboys, think of how many stories you actually have of these, of these shootings. There's maybe a dozen, okay, which totaled in maybe 30 people, 40 people, we'll, we'll, we'll say 50 people died in these incidents. That can be a weekend in Chicago.

Yeah, and, and they continue to talk like things are getting better, and again, the numbers just don't really show it with more and more laws and but, you know, And then you get into like, like one brilliant thing that some of the union people did was, I don't know if you ever heard of the union sport, the, the union sportsmen alliance. They have a, it's a pretty good organization that's started to try to tap into the democratic side of sportsmen and hunters and campers and outdoorsmen, because that was so often a, a Republican area where most of the people were, were Republicans in those fields. And so it was one of those scenarios where these people are finally trying to tap into understanding that, that union people enjoy the Doors too. It's, you know, it's not just the environmental side of people that want to preserve.

And then obviously you could get into almost all of society that if you, if you built, if you bring up everybody, then your people are in a better position to conserve, right? So you can't be a conservative unless you have a surplus, right? So, so if you're, if you're on a very low income or borderline poverty and you're just trying to feed the kids and, and pay the bills, there's not room to, for charity. There's not room for helping other people. There's not room for donating to a political fund or an environmental cause or anything like that. So when people start being more successful, then they're in a position to where I can buy a piece of land and just not do anything with it. What is that? It's conservation.

We can grow trees and not houses for a change, you know, and just let some, something be natural for a while as opposed to always trying to manipulate things. Well, a little bit off topic, but with, with what you were saying, it makes a lot of sense. think of what happened recently with the space flight that went to dock at the space station, and that particular spaceship malfunctioned. A private citizen, Elon Musk, has his own space force and says, I can go rescue them. Never before in history has a private citizen had a space force, okay? Stuff that's better than what NASA ever dreamed up, and it looks like better than what Boeing put together. my wife has a bus that's, it's brand new, but it keeps breaking. All these different things keep breaking.

And we were joking about, it's like, you know, you can have a bus that breaks its stop arm or the radio doesn't work, but you can't have a spaceship that doesn't function. That's a problem. Well, and it's funny because, you know, it's, it's amazing that brings us almost to just the chaos in the media right now, which is just you know, obviously politics has always been known to be a dirty game. And, and, and, you know, it's killer, it's kind of killer be killed or bring somebody else down to get ahead, and it's, it's not the way I would want to do business, and it's not the way most people feel that the right thing is.

but to, to win at all costs is not a conservative or Republican view of being successful, you know, stepping on other, I think, you know, there's a, there's a great book Achieved a high cost of discount culture and, and a, a few different things that talk about, even, even that talks about business when it comes to, you know, the, the world is kind of abundant and, and there's not, just because somebody's successful doesn't mean they stepped on a bunch of people to get there, or that they cheated their employees and should have paid their employees more if they were able to make a hundred thousand dollars in three years. You know, which is just, you know, kind of ridiculous when, when they're accepting all the risk and they're accepting all the cost and, and all that sort of things.

And so the way the media portrays that has always been kind of just bizarre in a sense that Elon Musk, you know, it's, it's interesting because he's been a topic that, he's been kind of a topic that I've been kind of covering for a while only because I'm interested in the way The way the media's spinning things. And, and I talked to a person, actually, I might have him on the podcast was actually an immigrant from South Africa. So most of the time when I, when I have people that I'm talking to, I want to talk to human beings.

I don't want to talk to, to what the BBC says or CNN or Fox or anybody else, because if I can just get a story of what life is like in, in, in, in Corpus Christi, Texas from a family member, well, I'm, I'm pretty sure that that's an accurate depiction from their perspective, at least, a real, a real person's perspective. And, and Elon Musk was always a big topic for that, because early on I watched some interviews and We know, you know, he's slightly special. I mean, he's a genius, that's undisputed. so regardless of some of the having children with a few different women and all these other things, but if you can afford to raise him and you could be a man and do the, do the right thing and, and provide for your multifamily, then, you know, that, that could be a whole nother debate.

But when you talk about business ideas and making ideas happen, you can't really find any other human being on the world that, that has achieved some things. And, and what's the, what's the flip side of his, of that argument, you know, with that all, well, he, he doesn't really do everything himself, you know, but it's the leadership and it's bringing a team of good people in around you and, and finding the best people to be successful in managing those operations to be able to do all those things. It's, it's, it's, it's superhuman. That he could do not one, not two, not three. And, and everybody can just, and especially in the recent articles today, it was just the richest man in the world stuff again. And they, they posted numbers out there as if it's almost close, which it's not.

Because God forbid he went, if he went open market with the solar panels on roofs, or if he went open market with he already did with Tesla, but if he went open market with SpaceX, how, how, how, how much capital do you think that would raise? You wouldn't care what the stock came out at. You would do everything in your ability to buy as much as you could if you were smart, because, and you probably, it would probably dip, and you'd feel like you got screwed because you paid a thousand dollars a share and it dipped down to 800, but that's a long-term thing that's just, it's, you're not going to lose on that hedge. Well, the, the robots, that's going to be the big thing. When the robots come in, because think of just this one thing that's going to change Elderly healthcare entirely.

Someone, let's say you spent $50,000, you're gonna take care of mom. You got the money, you spend the 50. This thing is awake 2047, never goes home, never goes to the bathroom, and has one job, take care of mom, okay? Compared to what you'd pay to have someone coming in and coming out, and you don't know if you can trust them, or are they stealing stuff? Let's face it, a real bus ain't gonna steal a damn thing, right? And they don't have any, you know, creepy ideas of what they're going to do. but the thing that Elon doesn't get any credit for, and I always like to, you know, when people don't like Elon, I'll say, why do you pick on my favorite African-American? And they look at me, I go, just because he's white doesn't mean he's not an African-American, okay? He did come from Africa. Now... And now he's teamed up with an Indian.

So, so, you know, the Indian and an African team is, is, is really creating some ripples in the, in the mainstream. The bigger point is, do you know why he left Africa? And he doesn't get any credit for this. As a boy, 18 years old, he says, I don't want any part of abusing the African people in this apartheid nonsense. I'm going to get the hell out of here. And he went against his father's wishes. He had to use his mom's connection as being a Canadian citizen or something in order to be able to escape. What's more admirable than that? He did not want to be a part of abusing other people, black Africans. He saw that that was completely wrong. He and his brother, let's get the hell out of here. And they did.

Now, they went to Canada, and now they're in the US, and he supports the First Amendment very strongly, but Twitter paid twice as much. Now they call it X. And really exposed what the federal government was doing to us with their censorship and their control of outfits like Facebook and Twitter, et cetera. He brought that all into light, and so no one could deny it. They couldn't say, oh, this is, you know, this is a hoax, this is false information, fake news, whatever. No, here's the names, here's the documents. This is where this agent ordered these people to close these accounts because they didn't like what they were saying. His position in defense of the First Amendment, to me, he's like one of the greatest Americans we've had in the last 50 years, and he's an immigrant. Not natural born citizen, an immigrant.

And it always really strikes me. How people who are built born here take for granted these rights that we have that don't exist in other countries. And if they traveled and they went to other places, believe me, they'd find out, oh my God, let me get back to the good old USA. He understands, because he lived in places like South Africa, he understands what a constitutional right means and the value of that. And the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, I've argued with two of my college-age daughters about this idea of hate speech, and I was like, you know what? If someone wants to spew some ugly rhetoric, I will let them, you know, I'm not talking about go kill people, I'm talking about, you know, somebody just being a jerk, let them. I want to know who they are. Let them show you who they are.

When I was a kid, we'd say sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will never hurt us, right? So you can call me whatever you want. You're really just making a jackass of yourself, okay? And thank you for letting me know that we're never going to be friends. Well, you're not at this point. Like maybe, you know, a lot of times people hash out because they got their own problems and their own things going on at home, and bullies just a lot of times just need a hug. And, you know, you, you, you can, you can look at that perspective too, and, and it's one of those, it's just this weird catch-22 that the world, we are soft in this country. There's, it's unquestionable, and, and we have it pretty damn good.

And, and, and to write a gratitude list once in a while instead of just complaining on social media all day long would probably do most people some good. You know, you even mentioned even some about the mental ailments when it comes to a FOID card or, or guns and, and all these other things, but that's one thing that I brought up so many times is, is that, you know, after the shooter's dead, they pretend like they have these FOIA rights of, of their medical information and stuff. And it's like, how come we never hear about toxicology reports? What kind of medications are they on? Are some of these psychotropic medications helping to cr-make people snap, or are they actually helping people? You know, and, and to get that sort of thing immediately censored is not great. We have to have that conversation.

We have to have nonpartisan 3rd party, non-paid for by the corporations and by the pharmaceutical companies that are the federal government and the FDA and the CDC are supposed to be doing this stuff for the benefit of the people, and that has been lost, and I think most people know that. I think most people over the cause, cause just watching the temperament change over the last eight or twelve or ten, twelve or 15 years even, it's been incredible because it always used to be, whether it's election integrity or voter fraud or, or, or pharmaceutical companies or crooked politicians or conflict of interest, We always just kind of knew that that always happened. Like Rogan says it best when, when he's like, you know, how much election fraud is there?

It's not zero, you know, and we, we've joked about it for years being in the state of Illinois for, for Christ's sake. Chicago especially. Yeah, dead people voting, your grandma's voting from the grave and, you know, it was always a joke and there's systems in places and you could go be a poll worker and you can see that they do a lot of, you know, checks and balances and there's a lot of very legitimate things and, and it's designed to not only Be legitimate, it's sure designed to look legitimate, but you're not seeing every step of the process. And at some point, one break in the process with this illusion of how, how, how ironclad it is, it's impossible to cheat because of this, that, and the other.

But the way things are documented and the way things are sealed and the way things are, are what the chain of custody is on all these boxes and, you know, all these different sorts of things, one misstep is a, it, it could be a huge difference in, in whether this was a huge swing election of the people that, that said their voice with the popular vote. And then, you know, they want to come out and say lately, it's like, oh, it might not actually be 50% of the vote, but it's still the popular. And, you know, just any excuse to try to push for their narrative. Well, help me with this. The state of Illinois does not require voter ID. But in the state of Illinois, if a police officer wants to ask you a question, the 1st thing he asks you for is your ID.

So, so the, it's, it's, it's actually funny because I just made a comment earlier because, so, so just like you said, you have a right to be an asshole in this country, right? And that's what freedom of speech is about. But you're not supposed to libel and slander, right? So my, you have the right to the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness until that pursuit infringes on somebody else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So no, you can't threaten somebody. No, you can't. But, but that's where, like, what is, what is, what do you think the, the difference is when it comes? So, so I think there's, I could probably do a little research on that in, about, I think public figures and politicians especially are a little bit more exempt from libel and slander. For because they're public figures or something.

There's some protection, I think, for mostly for the TV networks so that they can't get sued for everything that they say if they're just stating an opinion. But like on... It was interesting because there was one... I'm, I'm, I've always been middle of the road. I, like I said, you know, I don't want to talk too much about myself because I'm going to do some live streams once a week and kind of tell my stories because, because I don't, you know, I don't... People don't need to hear me jabbering on about myself for sure, but, but at least they can see where I'm coming from. But always left, always a democratic union family and, but always kind of like a scout. I was in scouts, so I enjoyed outdoor activities and archery and, and, and gun sports and different things.

And so that's where you start saying that all the narratives don't have to mesh. I don't have to agree with all of what you agree on, and we can still be cool. You know, and, and that's the whole premise of Flipside Frolic is just, God forbid, we get a little bit better understanding of where people are coming from by, by looking at it from their perspective and maybe even debating their perspective. That's my, my big claim, my big vision was like in college, you would be assigned a topic and a position in a debate. You don't get to just debate how you feel. Right. And, and you're entitled to your opinion by all means, but reading a headline is not enough information to have an opinion.

Or, and, and so an uneducated opinion is yeah, I guess it's, it's your right to say what you think, but you might just let everybody know you're an idiot or, or that you're ill-informed or whatever the case may be. And like the carts would, I, one of, I think it was the carts that said, like, you know, most of the time, Your answer should be, I don't have enough information on this subject to have an opinion. Let me do some research and I'll get back to you with my thoughts, not just read one headline on a social media site and then all of, all of a sudden think you're an authority because that's what CNN said and they're the trusted media of the New York Times and how often they've said some blatant lies lately. And, but you can see how they choose the words very carefully.

So I've gotten myself in trouble ever since I was a kid because I, I would speak my mind. I was a big, I guess you'd say constitutionalist from grade school on up. And I would, I would do things that would end me up in the office, but the principal would be looking at the teacher going, what do you want me to do? give you, for instance, a 4th grade, we had a simulated election. And me and three guys were to put together a ballot And we, we put together a ballot for the Democrats and a ballot for the Republicans. Guys, let's have some fun. For the Democrat ballot, we're going to say Satan the devil, okay? And we're going to say Stalin, and we're going to say Adolf Hitler, okay? Those are the three candidates of the Democrats. Then we did the Republicans, right?

And we made sure that, that each one of those names had a really big D next to it. Do you know that 80% of the kids voted straight down the line D, D, D? They didn't even look at the name, okay? That got me in the principal's office. So the principal says, Dan, Satan the devil? I go, I said, I wanted to see if anybody would even notice. We're gonna vote in Satan the devil, cause he's got a D next to his name. I believe that's how a lot of voters vote. They just go straight ticket, D. They don't even look to see who it is. They know nothing about the candidate. This is 4th grade, okay? And I'm talking politics. Yeah, that would be considered an, an uninformed voter at that age, you would think. He was looking at me, you know, like, kid, where are you coming from? I go, I watch a lot of news, okay? I'm bored.

But I would get in trouble for that sort of stuff all the time. We went to a museum in Chicago, and, and they had I'm gonna get in trouble for this topic, but there was this big framed thing on the wall, and it showed all the embryos going in like a seashell kind of circle, and I ripped it off the wall, and I got in big trouble for that. But the guy at the museum With tears in his eyes, said, I'll take that. And you know what? It didn't go back up on the wall. And when they hold me and they're going to expel me, I go, look, the way I saw it, there was over a hundred human lives that were being stuck up on that wall for us all to look at. I wouldn't want to be stuck up there on the wall. Yeah. And that's, that's the sort of thing where I'd take a stand and I'd get myself in trouble. And you know what? I didn't care.

It was, it was, it was one of those things that where you just know what's right. Yeah, I definitely have my share of those too. And I think, you know, sometimes people that think outside the box a little bit or think a little differently or, again, they're labeled into this other category. And, and it's so weird just, just in, in like right now, we were talking about kids a little bit, and, and, and you're blessed with beautiful children, a beautiful wife, you got a lot of great things going for you, but you had a lot of estrogen in the house growing up, so.

You know, four daughter, you know, three daughters and, and a wife and, and, and, and, and it's, it'll be in, it, it would be interesting to see what some of the views are of some of the people, even in your, in your family, with some of the issues with women's right to c- healthcare right now, which is obviously a big topic in the way that they word things. And again, just like most topics, that so many things are, are specifically designed to divide people. Oh, yeah. And because it's a moral issue, it's one of those things where, yeah, okay, you could choose to judge a person's character based on how they feel about this subject. But we're not going to solve this subject.

There's only one person that truly knows what's right or wrong in these instances because it is very complicated, especially in some of those fringe areas that, that, you know, it's never just black and white. It's, it's never just one or the other, you know, and, and, and most people are pretty reasonable when it comes to those, those borderline things. But, you know, and, and I think it's one of those things where I bet you more than 80% of the people agree on 90% of the issue. Yeah, there's, there's some disbelief when, when we talk about some of the extreme things that happen, and that, that can be troubling. I actually, you know, spoke to someone, I said, what if you put this into a, into a movie, okay? And they're like, I don't know, Dan, you know, we'd, we'd probably both end up dead.

a guy finds out that his wife who's Former householder guy decides she doesn't want to have his baby. So in the 9th month, she goes in for an abortion. The guy finds out she's going in for an abortion. The baby comes out before the dr. aborts the baby, and they set the baby on the shelf like they're talking about in Virginia. And the father comes in right as the doctor's about to kill the baby, and he blows the dr. away. Did he commit murder or did he protect his son, a newborn infant, from being killed? That would be one hell of a scene because you're left with a moral dilemma of, he was the dad of that, of that child. He had an obligation to protect that child. Did the dr. have Really a legal way to have, what is that, infacide? What do they, what do they even call that when they kill a kid after it's been born?

Or, or, well, or the, what, what a lot of the topic right now is like, or they're left there to die, they're just not gonna medically intervene. Yeah, that's humane. And that, and that, that is for when they were attempting an abortion and, and, and, and the baby still lives. So how damaged is the baby? What are the long-term detriments?

And even with diseases or different mal-malformities and different things, and yes, there's every human, every human life can be a gift for sure, and, and there's plenty of, there's a, there's a, some people out there that have gone through that and turned out to be some wonderful people, and, and that's, that, that's where it comes into some of that, that, that the luck of the draw of that we just happen to be born in the country we are with the parents we had or the, the neighborhood we were born in or whatever the case may be.

It doesn't make it easy for everybody, cause more, more money, more Problems in a lot of ways, and you could go look at some of the suicide levels at some of these prestigious universities because these kids have all this pressure on them from their parents and, you know, and, and you think that because you're struggling and poor and he's rich, how could he even be upset? But, you know, a person's, person's biggest problem is their biggest problem. It might, you know, it might be a, a stuffed toe or... Our biggest problem is always us. Yeah, well, that's always the case. They say when you go to your biggest problem is go look in the mirror. Yeah. I definitely cause most of the trouble for myself, that's for sure. And that's something I've learned over the years.

and, and part of just giving back and part of charity work and working with veteran organizations and working with... So, so basically even as a union member, I... There could be guys that just want to sit around complaining at the shop, and, and... There's always guys complaining. Look at social media. It's a, it's a good example. And but God forbid I, I'm the one that puts the water cooler out of business because there's no more water cooler talk in a, in an office building or something, you know? Right. but I just feel if you, if, if you're not going to show up and try to be a part of the solution, then you should just keep your mouth shut, you know? And so show up at the meeting and voice your opinion.

If you think the unions are corrupt, then show up there and listen to the treasurer's report and look over documents and do your part to be the transparency and be, be a part of the process so that you can say, wait, wait, wait, what did you, what, what's going on here? Why is this bill this or that? Well, you know, you, you catch flak, okay? You know what I mean by flak? That, that's old, World War II reference. Being a troublemaker like I am, you know, is wanting to right the wrong. I always, I always tried to see if, if there was something wrong, I would be the person who would have the courage to stand up and say, I'm sorry, but that, that's not going to fly here. And I lived in the village of Mundelein for quite a few years, and I would find things that weren't right.

And I would go to the village board meetings against my wife's wishes, and I would raise a lot of cane. I've heard some stories over the years. And you know... True, true statement, folks. I did get some illegal ordinances knocked down and, and different things. And what I'm leading up to is people in the community would be angry@me.why are you giving the mayor a hard time? She's taking away your constitutional rights, which she's trying to. Do you understand what it is that she's... I don't care. I like her. You don't care. What she does, you just like her. That's a pretty arg- a pretty hard argument to fight, you know, because it's like the proof's right here. Personal feelings over actual results, you, you, you gotta split that. Exactly, you just walk away, right?

we had an incident where they, they were trying to pass what was called the right to entry ordinance, where they could come to your door at what they called any reasonable time. They tried to use the plumbing code to create this ordinance, and I, and I caught it, and I, I raised a lot, lot of cane about it, but what really broke the camel's back for them was they went to enforce it and use it before it even, had even been passed. A man who lived across the street from me was a pastor at a church, and he'd have Bible studies on Thursday night. You know, like 20, 30 people would show up, and cars would be all around the block. Nobody cared, they're all good Christian people. And they were doing, I guess, in these circles.

I never attended one, but from what I heard, they sit in a circle of Bibles in their laps, and they, they talk about scripture and write notes and whatever, you know, drink water and tea and socialize. Well, the village thought it was a dope party or something, and they raided the place. This guy, just the day before, said he wouldn't sign the petition that I had to stop this ordinance. Talk about, you know... Change of heart. Things happening For the right, for, for, for magical reasons. The next day, he's at my door wanting to know where those petitions are, and there's other people with them, and they want to know what they can do. And this is where I, I get mad at people like Black Lives Matter and other violent, you know, protesters.

I protested in what I think was the most nonviolent, but yet very effective manner you could ever imagine. I said, this is the phone number to the village hall. This is the phone number to the mayor's office. Everyone in the congregation called that number at least once a day and asked to talk to the mayor about what happened. You have a constitutional right to address a grievance against the government, and anyone who can physically go to the village hall, go to the village hall to talk to her in person. They took the phone off the hook. They unplugged the phone. And they put a sign on the front door because people showed up by the hundreds, and they said only three people at a time would be allowed in the village hall, and the mayor would not come in to see anybody. But she got the message.

But yeah, and then you, and you are seeing a lot of those constitutional rights sort of videos even on YouTube and stuff when it comes to law enforcement and being pulled over. And it is amazing how there is plenty of people out there that don't know the law. But, and, and obviously you get more with wine than you do with vinegar. And if you're a young kid and you get pulled over, put your hands at ten and two and roll down the window, yes officer, no officer, you be polite, because they can make your life hell. And, and, and even as a kid growing up, you know, you want to smart off and, you know, those stories existed, you know, now you got a broken taillight, now you got another ticket with their baton, but, you know, your, your war against theirs or whatever. And, and so that's the fine.

I was just talking to a police officer the other day too and I, and I have, we're working on, I, I, I actually have two or three that are on the list to come in because it's like the, you know, this fine line between, you know, this power that we're giving them is a lot of power. And obviously the right temperament for somebody to wield that power is, is necessary. But in the same token, PTSD or, and, and that's the other thing, all cops get lumped together, right? And if you're an inner city Chicago cop working in, working in Garfield Park or Lawndale, and you're a sheriff in a, in, in a western suburb of Chicago, you might work a thirty-year career and never even pull your gun with the intention of using it. That's not the same thing as a, as a police officer that's pulling his gun every day, necessarily even.

Not, not like some of these videos where, you know, A guy was pulled over and the female officer pulls a gun or whatever, it's like, whoa, whoa, like, was that necessary? So escalating the situation is part of that Highland Park story in a sense that the, the idea of having these community service officers that are more trained in, in psychology and different family counseling and stuff, because what's the majority of a cop's duty and, and, and what's the percentages of the calls they get? Domestic violence, what's usually as a result of drugs and alcohol, you know, or, or whatever the, the case may be. But sure, going in with a bunch of guns blazing is just going to escalate a situation.

So, but how many of these nice social workers that go to these sites that get hurt or killed, is it going to take before you think, well, maybe we should not be sending unarmed people to these very toxic situations with, and, and, and the idea that It, how fast things turn very bad. Oh yeah. And, and, and people don't quite understand that either. And if you're in a situation day in and day out where at any moment you're not going home, that's not an easy thing for people to address. So, so then you had this tough guy mentality. So there are already tough guys. They're trained, hopefully trained to be tough, and maybe some should be more trained with hold techniques and, and restraint things or whatever.

But then you kind of got the tough guy thing that doesn't want to talk to a counselor, which is probably necessary some, in, in a lot of scenarios, or at least to be able to talk openly with your buddies as opposed to feeling like a tough guy and you just got to bottle this stuff up, because that's not usually the best thing either. And then there's kind of a blue code, like somebody might be doing something wrong, but you don't want to snitch on your buddy or whatever the case may be, instead of more of a see something, say something scenario. So where is the, where is that line in between all of those complicated places that's best for society?

Because there's still a social contract that we have, because, you know, if we didn't agree to mostly follow the law as what we would consider good upstanding citizens in this community, there would be no you, you, you need that. Oh, you'd have chaos. And that's... Some might want that. That's why I said when, you know, these, these different incidents happened and my, my kids would get really aggravated about it. I go, look, it's 1st reports. We don't know what the truth is. Let's let the dust settle and find out what the facts are before you go off on a, on a tangent. But I did make sure that all of them understood. I said, there's one thing that I want you to understand. You do have constitutional rights, okay? And there's a federal law that came about, it's called Title 18, Section 242.

And it isn't just cops, it's any person in authority as a governmental official, not necessarily like a principal or, you know, somebody like that. We're talking governmental, who knowingly violates your rights and uses their authority to do it. They can be prosecuted under federal law. So I've had an incident in my youth where a cop was, was violating my rights, and I simply said to him, are you aware of Title 18, Section 242 of the federal code? And he stopped and looked@me.i go, you're violating my rights right now. If you cease, I'm not going to have a problem. But I'm ready to go. He goes, I don't have any problem with that. And we didn't have any further discussion. I hadn't done anything wrong, and he was holding me with no reason to be holding me, and that was violating my rights. Yeah, so, so I had plenty of...

The, the main story that comes to mind was not even all that long ago. So I went to... I might even have mentioned it on an earlier podcast, because one of my previous guests may or may not have been involved in this scenario, where we're, we're at a bachelor party, and then we're going to a Bears game, and we had tickets, and, and the tickets got colors on them. But the tickets, the signs, the, the signs were like, is that blue or is that purple? Because the purple and the blue was almost like the curtain behind you there. Is that blue or is that purple? And we couldn't really tell. So we're standing in this long line and we thought we had pretty decent seats, so we were supposed to be in more of a VIP parking. And then so we asked one lady, like, is this blue or purple? And they're like, just go down all the way to the end.

You know, so we pulled out of line, went in the open right lane and went way down to like the next entrance. And there was another police officer standing there. And he comes hard ass, right? And he's like, get, you go back around and I'm going to make you wait till be last. And we're, and, and, and my, my friend was very, being so polite, he was a, a, a veteran and, you know, he just, listen, sir, the, the, the last officer told us to come up here and blah, blah, blah. He's like, and he, then he's, he may have swore, he's like, I don't give a fuck, blah, blah, blah. And I said, and then I'm just sitting there like not trying to get involved. And we had a couple of old school people in the back of various, it was a diverse crowd, let's say.

And so, but they were younger, and, and you could tell they, they didn't really encounter situations like this in a way that would benefit them in most scenarios, something like that, whatever, however you want to say it. But, but I, I, I said, what did you say from the other side, from the passenger seat? And cause, cause he, three times he's like, excuse me, sir, but, you know, he's being nothing but polite. Then he started swearing. I was like, what did you just say? I was like, I was like, get your watch commander over here. You just got a CR number. And then all of a sudden now, now, now his, his, he, he just immediately shifts. And it's like, no, no, don't, don't stop talking and get your watch commander over here right now. And then finally the supervisor comes and we're talking and blah, blah, blah.

And sure enough, we want to ride in, we'll ride by our parking spot. We are less than 40 yd away. We're tailgating for an hour as he's just looking@us.like, keep an eye on that guy cuz he might come over here pissed off, you know, cuz they don't like losing the fight. No, he's looking, he was looking for something. Yeah, and, and, and it was like, God, just don't be a jerk, man. It's like we're not, and, and that's where, you know, that gray area, you know, there's no reason for not, not being polite. And you do see so many videos where you can't even imagine how the guy could be polite for that long.

And then when, if you want to talk constitutional law in a sense like that, that's like one, when it comes to protests and stuff, that, that it does spin me off into like three different places here because there's a book on the shelf right here, Labor's Untold Story. And I cannot finish that book. I've tried. And it is so brutal and dark because you know there's plenty of cited resources in this book. It, they're, it's not fiction, and some of the labor struggles and some of the provocateurs and some of the pix, you know, the, and some of the, the Pinkenchers or whatever they call them, that there's ads in the paper about provocateurs to, to, to get paid to come rile up these strike workers so that they can call the cops in. So they're provoking you.

And it happens on both sides because you, like a per, perfect example is when I was off injured, I, I'm pretty sure, I got to check this timeline once again, but the Occupy Wall Street thing was happening. And that was us against the two percenters, right? And, and tough fight, and you sure know that the top three percenters don't want anything to do with this organization growing some speed. Yeah. And that's where they were camped out in parks downtown. And I went there for, cause I was off of work, and I was like, I want to be a part of the cause, and this is something that I could get behind, because, you know, there, there could be some reforms in how the top 3%, you know, whatever.

And it's not just steal from the rich and give to the poor, but, you know, there's some excesses and, and different things when it comes to the, the, that corruption from that, from that level and how it's hard to, once you get to a certain point, it's hard to beat that. But either way, so we're, we're on the front lines of an active protest. Where most parents would say, just stay away. You know, you don't need to be involved in that crap. And if things start going sideways, you got to have an out. You got to have your head on a swivel. You got to get the hell out of there. You don't, obviously, I'm not going to be the guy that's charging or whatever the case may be, but on the front lines, there's always anything that's grown, that's been around for a while, there's lawyers there. Yeah. They're advising you, this is what you can't do.

This is what you can't do. You can't this, you can't Touch them, you, they can't push you back, but you can't push on them, you know, and so how a peaceful protest can just remain peaceful and a very large is very possible. Now, things weren't always nonviolent either that stimulated very positive change in this country. So violence is never the option. Okay, yes, in a vacuum, but, you know, I'm not saying I want to punch somebody in the face, but sometimes people deserve to get punched in the face, you know, and, and, and it's not my responsibility.

In, in, in the old days, things were a lot different with hot tempers and, you know, all this kind of stuff, and today with family and all this kind of stuff, there's a scenario where my my daughter has an African-American friend from school, and, and they're both eleven years old, and they're biking around our neighborhood. And then I happen to have a four-wheel drive truck. It doesn't make me a Republican. It doesn't make me a Nazi. God forbid I have an American flag on it or something like that. but again, we could get back to the labels, but there was another guy down the street, and it was one of those scenarios where my daughter comes up and said she heard him say the N word, and he purposely said it loud enough for them to hear.

And it's like, okay, and the old me and the new me and the, there's a lot of different me's in that scenario on what should happen here, but at the end of the day, that's part of that freedom of speech that you were talking about, that he just exposed himself as somebody that I'm not going to have my child sleep over for, for, for overnight party or whatever the case may be. But no good can come from me thinking I could go over there and teach him anything. Right. So that's where you have to draw the line and just say, well, there's sick people around there. All you could do is pray for the spiritually sick, and it's probably a better course. Well, what happened after the Kenosha riots? I went up the day after. I was like in shock. Kenosha burned. I'm watching this news like at 10:00 at night. I'd worked all day.

I was like, I got to go there. So at 06:00 in the morning, I'm cruising Kenosha in my, in my car, which happened to be a Dodge Challenger at the time, blaze orange, can't miss it, right? And a municipal vehicle pulled up behind me. It wasn't a cop. It was like a public works one, but he had a radio and he's calling in my plate. It's an Illinois plate. They can tell by the plate I got a concealed carry license. I was like, well, he's not a criminal. He wouldn't have a concealed carry license. But it was so eerie. The place was empty. I didn't know there was a curfew. I wasn't supposed to be there. Okay, nobody told me. So I parked the car and I get out and I'm walking around and I'm looking at these buildings. All these buildings are burnt out now. You've never been to Kenosha.

there are lots of little shops and above the shops were apartments. Now, either the owner of the shop lived there or they rented it out. One way or another, people lived in the top half of those buildings and they were burnt. And there was beds, mattresses, cribs laying in this ash inside of what was left of the store, the windows gone, doors gone, you know, it was like a, like a bombed out shell. And the embers are still burning. I mean, I still got, you know, the smell of smoke in my nose as I'm walking around and I, I see this one building like in the middle of all these other buildings that were burnt in this horseshoe shape. And I'm going, what the hell? Not even a window's broken. What the hell? All of a sudden, a guy shoved his head out the window, what are you doing?

And he looks like somehow The Walking Dead, cause he's been up all night. And I tried to be as polite as I could. I said, sir, I'm in shock of what happened to Kenosha. I love Kenosha. I've been there many times. I got a question for you. Why is your building not touched? And he shoved a twelve-gauge shotgun out the window. He says, cause all night long, I was shoving us out the window saying, if you set my house on fire, I'm going to burn you down. And obviously, that's where a community watch little group or something would, would have been in some ways beneficial. But, you know, that's where there, there's such a difference in the way that they could have, the media could even have changed the words. So again, words are important. Definitions are important.

We start changing definitions of words that are, have always meant a certain thing, and it gets really complicated because you talk about the rule of law. And obviously, we have enough lawyers in the world. Do we need more in order for a judge to be able to evaluate? So almost with, you know, the argument of at the time when the Constitution was written, what was their intent at that time? And what was the definition of the words at that time? So we're just trying to make things more complicated now, you know, because too many lawyers to, I mean, changing these definitions, though, it changes the, the law, and that wasn't voted on by the people, but you just changed the law. Well, let me tell you what ended up happening. So, you know, I, I spoke with him for a little while. I spoke with some other residents.

And I left and I went back to Libertyville, and as I was driving to my shop, I was driving down the street in the downtown area of Libertyville, and I saw these Black Lives Matter signs. Huh. So I stopped, I'd taken videos with my cell phone, and I had went up and knocked on the door of a house that had the sign, I said, I want to show you. These are the houses, these, these are the homes, you see that bad burning right there? That's what those folks did in Kenosha, and they'd slam the door on me and tell me to go away. Well, you know what I found out? Those signs make one hell of a frisbee. I would pull the sign and I would chuck that baby out in the street. I got five signs, and I went door to door to door, and every time, you know.

This one young girl, I'll give her credit, she's like 16 or 17, she came out of the house after she saw I chucked the sign. She was being nice, but her mom came to the door and told me to get the hell away from the house, so I chucked the sign. And she's walking by me, she says, sir, why, why did you throw my sign? I don't understand why you threw my sign. She's a sweet kid. And I turn around and I said, cause I'm protesting for Kenosha. They burned down Kenosha. And if people wanna protest, I don't have a problem with that. I didn't burn down your house, and I'm protesting. Well, about this time the cops come, and I got taken in, and, you know, they Is super, super nice. I got to give them credit. They, they didn't ask me to come with them with cuffs or anything. They asked me to drive to the station. I drove to the station.

They walked me in. Basically, they wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy. I sat in an office for about 20 minutes. They gave me five no-return trespass warnings, okay? Do not return to these residences. And they, they, one officer tried to say I was stealing the signs, but the other officer said, no, he said he was relocating them. That you not hear a sworn testimony. Well, it's funny because like political signs are supposedly against the law to remove those. Obviously, that's, I don't know if they would be able to interpret if that was a political sign or not. Well, it wasn't a political party. But during the election time, it's technically, I think, against the law to remove other peoples, even if. And I was doing it during a protest. Yes. I get it.

But, you know, part of that, even like with the, the freedom of speech thing, like there was a situation where, again, now it's like, you know, people are saying most people are shifting right, and the reality is, is they're not really shifting right. We're just staying where we've always been, and the rest of the parties seem to be changing. They don't understand that the Mitch McConnell, GOP, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, old man Senate majority, grand old party Republicans is not what that is right now. Just like the Democrat party is not what the Democrat party is.

And then you could go into history and talk about who was the Democrats during slavery and the Republicans, you know, all this other stuff, but this right, left, right, left, and the tribalism, it's, there's a great book that talks a lot about, like in sports especially, you know, it's amazing if you listen to people talk and the words that they choose to use. Are teams winning? Yeah. Man, they suck. So whenever it's negative, you don't want, you, you, you disassociate from it. But when it's positive and you're winning, you're a part of that winning. And that's why it's so intoxicating to a lot of people. Well, you know, a woman asked Albert Einstein in an interview once during the sixties, it was on some TV show, I don't know if it was CBS or what, but of all the countries, when you left Germany, why did you choose the United States?

He said, well, I visited the United States. He says, and I found something very unique. I was in New York, and a man and a woman were on a corner, and they were arguing about politics. And when they were all done, they shook hands and said, well, I guess we agree to disagree. I'll see you tomorrow. He goes, where I come from, they kill you. Yeah. Okay. Well, We aren't in that place anymore where we look at each other and say, I guess we have to agree to Disagree, and I'll see you tomorrow, and by the way, you're still my friend, okay?

And, and, and part of that is the main mission statement of this podcast, that, that, you know, it's like, I can easily agree in a lot of different ways, and, and, even, and, but we got Thanksgiving coming up, and, and the idea of how can we get through a dinner with our families without starting a protest or, or having a riot or a fight or whatever. Or having somebody feeling like they're being disrespected and leave. Yeah, well, I'm sorry if you're offended, but, you, you know, the, the one problem with the super far left is that somehow, even if you're an activist, and, and, and as you obviously are, as, as, as a mindset to fight for what you feel is right, you don't have a right to be offended for somebody else. Right. And, and, you know, when I was in Kenosha when Trump came through to see there was a Black Lives Matter march.

I actually confronted the leaders of that group and, and the one man who, husband and wife, who seemed to be the, the leaders of the group. And I asked him straight up, I said, now we're standing next to a parking lot of cars, about 50 cars that got torched. I said, I met the brothers who own these parking lots. They were men of color. I said, are you aware of that? And he says, no. I says, do you know when that flagpole right there flew a BLM flag? I saw the picture of it. The man showed me the picture. You burn down a car lot and your own flag? I go, that's like you know, really trying to It's anarchy.

I mean, it's just trying to destroy the whole system of everything and to hate people that are successful because they busted their ass and they worked their whole lives to build a business, and whether it was COVID that the government chose to shut down, to con-conglomerate more of the corporate interests that were essential businesses at the time. And, and, you know, again, you throw the dart and you happen to be lucky if you're one of those people, and I happen to be one of those people working on on sanitation and snow removal equipment that I was an essential an, an essential employee. So, you know, thankfully, I didn't struggle as much as a lot of other people that were put in very difficult positions during all of that.

But the same thing, it's like you're fighting for a cause, and sometimes it's uneducated, it's the uneducated voter in a sense the same way, that sometimes if you're passionate about something and you think you're fighting to change it, you're doing more harm than good sometimes. There was an example in the Illinois, in Chicago School District that state funding is based on the 1st attendance at the 1st day of school. So because the Northside schools or these other area schools were so much better than our schools that we're going to do a lockout and we're going to, we're not going to show up to school the 1st day. It's like, well, why didn't you do it on the 3rd day? Because now you just screwed yourself out of a lot of state funding. Yeah, so sometimes there's that.

but, you know, even kind of getting back to the labor struggle and the labor history and, and, and, and these murders and, you know, violence and all these different things that happened for various reasons, that's the whole idea of the provocateur works, you know, and you can make good people follow along. Who... Well, I think it was a, you know, so I, I listen to a lot of different shows. I do try my best to get a wide range of information from various sources. I'm not a CNN only or an MSN, NBC only, or I li Megan Kelly is phenomenal because she, she was an attorney. So when it came to some of the Trump cases or some of the lawfare, she really has a great perspective because she knows the law, you know? So, so she, I, I, I, absolute shout out to Megan Kelly for sure.

but also I, I, I look at some of the farther right, like a Dan Bongino show or something and listen to his perspective and, and he's always got that 48-hour rule, like same kind of, just like the principle that you said, that, hey, let's give this a couple of days. It's a headline. We don't have to react because people, we have to realize That the mainstream media and now independent media or independent citizens that have a louder voice because they can stream out to millions of people or hundreds of people, more so than what they were able to do yelling from a soapbox in, in the middle of the Times Square or whatever. But we, we, we, we have this, this, this opportunity to have this voice, but, you know, we have to choose to use that in the right ways. Right.

Well, I didn't get to finish with, with the gentleman I was speaking with was, was the leader of the BLM movement. I said, now, I imagine this other group of people that you associate yourself with knows Antifa, was probably responsible for more of this than the people who actually follow your BLM movement. But when you walk hand in hand with the devil, you can't plead innocence. I said, are you okay with this? And I pointed at the cards. Are you, are you all right with this? And at 1st he shouted out, yeah, because sometimes, you know, you gotta, you gotta do some damage to get some attention. And I paused for a 2nd, kind of looked off to the side, and I said, well, in that case I wish you well. And I went to leave, and he goes, wait, wait, wait. He looks at me. I'm not okay with it. Okay? I'm not okay with it.

And I came back, and we fist bumped, gave each other a nod, and walked away. And I thought, I thought that was a good ending to it. He, he realized if that's your position, we don't have anything further to talk about, and that wasn't the position he wanted to be in. I think what happened there and happened in other places was things got out of control of the people of, that would want to do, you know, just to march. You can't control everybody, and that's a danger of those kinds of groups. You, you can't control everybody. No, and there's this, there's 10% of people just looking for anarchy and looking to stir trouble and looking to be a, a, a rile, you know, just to, or create chaos and think that that's fun or whatever. And, and, and it's kind of up to the, the more, the smarter majority to not allow that.

So, so that's where you'd see some calling out people like, wait, who is that? Because they're going to get us all in trouble and all tear-gassed or beat or whatever. And, and, and I do have some friends, I've had some online conversations and mutual acquaintances with regards to the idea that sometimes you got to burn things down to build it back up and, and from whatever authors and whatever areas that that idea comes from. And obviously the Boston Tea Party wasn't a peaceful demonstration. so there's some truth to that. Even back when they were trying to do the soda tax in, in Chicago, I was like, you know, same kind of thing. My idea was let's go get a bunch of cases of Coke and throw it off Navy Pier and do the new tea party, you know, the, the, the sugar party. And how would you get all that pop? Are you going to buy it?

Or are you going to go and steal it from some store and, you know, or whatever? So by breaking the law to make this statement, when is that acceptable? When is it not acceptable? But the idea of burning down citizens' businesses, Can't ever be right. So, so it was almost like an w-w-was it Minneapolis when they, like, took the police station or whatever? Now, if your fight is against the municipal police and the government, and you go and take a government building, so to speak, as protest, well, that's almost justifiable because at least you're targeting the, the, the organization or the, the leadership or whatever you want to call it, the entity that, that is oppressing you or whatever is, is harming you. So even though you don't want to condone violence or, or vandalism or property damage, that, that's a little bit more debatable.

Well, see, that brings us back around full circle to the Second Amendment because that's what happened in Kenosha. The police protected all the government facilities, and they left the citizens to their own. Now, the Supreme Court in two separate cases has said that the police Have no obligation to protect you as a citizen from imminent harm. And they even cite, that's why you have a 2nd amendment right to bear arms, to defend yourself. So in two cases, the Supreme Court, that's been stated, and so it's like, you know, this is law. A police officer, say like in that school shooting, who hid behind a tree while kids were being killed, did not have an obligation under law to charge in there and risk his life and possibly be killed to protect the students.

Now, I know many police officers who would have taken action, regardless of what that would have been. They're very courageous and dedicated people. I'm not saying all police are like that coward. but by the co- by the Supreme Court rulings, the cops know they do not have to protect you. And The Supreme Court in both cases said, that's why you have a Second Amendment right, because it's really impossible for a police officer to, as you say, be there. Instantly, anytime any crime happens, you have that time of arrival. You have to get the report of the crime, where is the crime, and get to the crime. So it's left to you to have the means on which to defend yourself against that imminent harm.

Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll push back a little on coward for an officer that doesn't react to a situation, because it's like, that's a little bit more from a veteran perspective of you can train thousands of hours a day on various things, and until that moment happens, that fight or flight gene, whether... I talked to an army general about this, pretty trippy, that, that a friend of mine actually previous podcast host was having a a wine tasting thing at his house, right? Where you have the people come over and do the demonstration and have the talks and all that. And so he was in the army at the time, and he threw it out there to the generals as, as he was just walking by, like, hey, I'm having, you know, just to be polite, like as if they're going to show up, right?

And then almost like the celebrity thing that they're just people too, they, they, they're just normal human beings like the rest of us, so sure, two of them show up. So it was one of those scenarios where you, you know, like I got chills just now, because it's like, how, how often do I feel a guy like me has the opportunity to sit down and talk to a general? You know, like it was crazy, and it was great conversation. We were talking a little bit about that, this fight or flight kind of gene scenario. And, and that was at Desert Storm. so it was like when we got out, maybe it was Iraqi freedom, I got the timeline. but it was the scenario where it was more than four years after the war started.

So the people in Operation Desert Storm, particularly when I got out in 91, 92 prior to that, these people were not thinking that were going to fight anybody for anything. They ran out of money for college, decided to join the military to get some money or didn't have any other options back home, whatever the case may be. We had a male, 18 years old, maybe six one, pretty tall, pretty thin, hundred and 45, hundred and 50 pounds, pretty thin, could not lay on the ground and push himself up for one push-up. Wow. And me and my, I went in with the intention of being a SEAL, because I was a maniac, and, and I thought that that would be a good route for me, and, Obviously, it didn't really work out that way, mostly because I can't swim, is probably don't want to be a seal if you can't swim. I, I swim decent, but I, I never had a organized swim.

The swim test to get to Buds was, was too much. I, I, 14, 500 yd in less than 14 and a half minutes or something was challenging. and then various other exercises, but the whole point was, is like the same thing that after, we were thinking that once that group of four-year enlistments is gone, and now anybody else coming in has an understanding, a little bit more of a prerequisite knowing that they might be going to Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever the case may be, should help some, instead of somebody that definitely wasn't expecting that.

And, you know, and, and, and so that was interesting, but then again, all the training in the world can be there, but that moment, kind of like You know platoon or whatever full metal jacket, whatever, when, when it might be the geeky guy that's storming that hill and the, the big muscle tough guy is the one crying in the corner. You just, you just never know. Well, a lot of the troops, as I understand it, I saw some of them were from Illinois, these National Guard units are being called up. These are people who thought, I'm just going to be a weekend warrior, okay? Might, might go to college, maybe some benefits with the VA. I'm a play soldier once a month, and the rest of the time I got my life. And the next thing you know, they're going over to a combat zone. Yeah. men and women.

And so that was a whole new experience for the military, I think, seeing what would happen if you did that. And I will say, I think most of them adapted and Did a good job. Yeah, it would, and that, that could go into a whole bunch of stuff with the military too, because even with, with private contractors and some of the facilities that are available that used to be just a tent or used to be Army Corps of Engineers that would go in and set up bases prior to. So you got all these private contractors going in and spending a bunch of government money and, you know, so trace the money, but at the end of the day, there's some pretty good, pretty good situations for our soldiers to be in.

But, and some, we're talking about that even a little bit too, because being able to Skype or, or, or FaceTime your family every night or once a week is that helpful? Yeah, what do they call those, the green zones? Well, mo, I mean, a lot of the communication facilities were available. So maybe, I don't know how often in, in Vietnam you were able to get to a place that had a phone to call home. But you sure weren't FaceTiming, right? And, and, and if you were, you know, they didn't have cell phones, right? So you're not going to get a sat phone because they're using that for communications. If they even had too many of those, mostly just radio packs, yeah.

So, but the idea of like getting, getting in a state of mind and being, falling into this primitive war something that exists, especially for those people that have that something, as opposed to the fight gene staying in that zone for a while is probably, might be better than having to Cause like mail call was a traumatic time in a sense, cause that you weren't thinking about your family, not that you didn't love them, but you had a task, you had a thing to do, you had a mission, you were more focused on the mission and to, to get distracted for that by seeing your family might just not be helpful, even, or it might be, I don't know, you know, but... I think it all depends on the situation, especially if there's something going on@home.yeah.

Well, for an emergency situation, obviously you want to try to be a part of the conversation, but you know, that's, that's the same thing. We think we know so much, we learn all this stuff about the inner workings of the brain and chemical balances and psychology and, and, and we don't, the more you, I, I always joke cause I say it all the time and I, I like reading, so the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know, so I try to get dumber every day. You know, if I can just get dumber every day, I'm, I'm in the right place. And most people agree with that. You're a Cro-Yard idiot. You know, but, and, and, but so, so even just a quick question on constitutional law, I assume you might know a little more than me because I've never been down that rabbit hole too much.

Obama was a constitutional attorney, so obviously he knew how to skate the line or how, you know, or, or, or whatever. But even on Facebook, there was a situation where there was some misinformation out there with regards to some of Trump's quotes. And there was a left-wing person that was upset about something Trump, and I just said, okay, just did you know that this is actually what he said or whatever. And, and then it was like a d- almost like it doesn't matter, you know, so they, they immediately would get to the name-calling stage as opposed to like trying to have an educated debate or... That's when you know you've won, by the way. When they start calling your names, it's game over.

Yeah, and I don't need to win, but you know, it, it's, it's not for ego or anything else, but it's just kind of funny that it was like, and then straight out, you are a racist Nazi. And so that's not the case as far as I know, in my perception of my life. But that's what they go with, the misogynist, racist, Nazi, they love the Nazi. Nationalist, religious. And you know what, that, that one, that nationalist, you know. I don't understand that one specifically. Am I a nationalist? Well, I did join the army to protect my nation. I guess I could be a nationalist. I fly my nation's flag. I asked, I asked one person to debate that, or, or not to debate it, but to define it, because that's a... Yeah. Once again, when we talk about the definition, can you tell me what that means to you?

Because if we don't, if you, if I don't know what you mean by that, we can't even have a discussion about that. Well, it's sort of like the guy who, who told Elon that he was a speciesist because he picks the human race over AI. And he says yeah, I guess I am. So if you were to say, I'm a nationalist, would I fight for my country? Yes. Do I believe in my constitution? Yes. do I believe that my government does everything right? No. Well, I think, I, I, I think the main point came to, it was the white Christian nationalists. Oh, well, see, that's a whole different ballgame. That's the problem. Not just some nationalism or some proud to be an American, even though that seems to be pretty lacking right now. That's all about the definition, right.

And so, so is that, is it okay for me to put an American flag in front of my house on Memorial Day or on, on Fourth of July and call myself proud to be an American? And it's like, disclaimer, folks, me saying that doesn't mean that I agree with everything that this country and this government and the people And the government have done over the years of its inception. But it's an experiment in self-governance. The Constitution is undisputed, the, the, the best document ever penned in the world, and, and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. And, and so to, to understand that this system is probably the better system of anything else that exists right now. And again, it's almost like at a union meeting or anything else. If you have a problem, then you, you know, I, I'm, I'm responsible for the effort, not the results.

I was like to say it's a free country and you're free to leave. Well, that works too. You know, so, so, so like, like in, in, in some of the various things like Ben Shapiro, very smart, okay, very conservative. Jewish, what, you know, what, so he has a great perspective because go to a Jewish source if you want to learn some about the history of the region in Gaza and Israel and all, and all the craziness that's going on over there. And, and so it's one of those things where, where he talked brilliantly about the immigration issue, saying they're immigrants just like you, you, you weren't born here, or you, you, you know, your family didn't come from here unless you're a Native American, you know, like Elizabeth Warren or something. But just kidding.

but he said, yeah, but the propaganda, the lies, the advertising, Free land, free opportunity for all these poor people that struggled, scraped every penny they had to find any way to get here for a better life. And fight off bandits that wanted to kill them. Well, they show up in Boston, and then they'd get a wagon, and then they'd get, they'd start buying some supplies, and they'd be like, well, how much ammunition you need? And they're like, guns? Why would I need a gun? Well, the Indians will kill you. And they're like, whoa. And, and the bandits too. Yeah, well, sure. There was, you know, and, and you know, another, you know, Native American thing with all the tribes and all the craziness that was here before. But, but the point was is that they were leaving a socialist system.

They were leaving a place with healthcare, with hospitals, with government cheese, to come to a place that had nothing. Yeah. And when you got 50 mi outside of town. Nothing but freedom. You get freedom, but freedom obviously always has a cost. Yeah. And, and so you go west until, and then you break your leg, you mend it. You, you know, you had to be your own hospital, you had your... Then at some point, a group of fellow community cit-citizens or whatever get together and form a town and have a town hall, and then maybe get a school, and then maybe have a dr. that's on call. You start getting some of these amendments as you build your own community. So a little different than somebody incentivized to come illegally to this country for a free check, and, and, and that's not the same.

And, and so somebody coming to this country for a better opportunity, obviously we can't... And that's why this, this, this guy that's talking about being the border czar, that's saying, come through the gate. I've, I've been saying that for, for decades. Like, I don't understand You're right. Why would a mother and their infant feel obligated to swim through a river? Well, I'm not going to name any names, but I had a conversation with somebody at my home on the anniversary of 09:11, and he made a remark of, you guys and your effing constitution. That's, that's a tough one. And he's, he's an immigrant, and I was so proud of my son.

He just got up, he looked me in the eye, and he went in the house, because he's like, I don't know what you're going to do, Dad, but I'm going to get the hell out of here, because I'm not going to listen anymore to that. I don't want to be a witness. And the young man said, did I say something wrong? And I go, well, if I have to explain it to you, I'm really worried about how much you drank tonight, but it was the equivalent of me going into your mom's house, climbing up on her bed and taking a shit on her pillow. Is that clear enough for you? He got the message. so many people, and I blame our educational system for this, the Chicago system, especially, because my daughter works there, I can say this is very un-American in how they present our history.

You will get nine months' worth of slavery history, and you'll get one month of history of how this country was founded. And with my daughter being in the school system, and she wanted to argue with me about what she knew because she had been taught these things, I go, do you realize the man who actually wrote the Constitution before Jefferson took it and made it into what we know it to be laid in bed and did not want to produce the writing of what he thought the Constitution should say because we still had slaves. He was against it. It should have been aborted. It should have been ended at that point. It should have been terminated, however you want to say it. And there was actually a vote to get rid of slavery at that time, and I think it failed by like one vote. Okay? We're not perfect.

We never claim to be perfect, but we did change the world. What was it? 1776, July 4th, 56 men signed a document which essentially was their death warrant. The King of England put out a warrant for all them to be killed, and all their property seized. That's the amount of courage those men had in order to make this country. And many people don't realize that that Star Spangled Banner, okay, that flag was still there. the reason that flag was still there, that pole had been shot down twice. And what was holding up that pole in the morning when the sun rose and they saw it, it was being held up with the bodies of the men who had died at that fort. They piled their bodies around that flagpole to hold the pole up. And that was with men who were of all races, creeds, and religions, black, white, Native Americans, you name it, they were there.

Those same men were there in 1812 Battle of New Orleans. There was I believe 900 African American men in that battle. There were seven tribes of Native Americans. There were hundreds and hundreds of volunteers from Tennessee, and as I like to tell my son, I go, there were French guys there that were pirates, okay? They were the original black ops, okay? Now, when the British commander came to the, to the one pirate's place, I can't remember his name, forgive me for that, I'm getting old, and he said, you can join with, with us, or we're gonna come here, we're gonna seize your farm, we're gonna lock you up, and we're gonna take everything you have, or you can be made governor of what's gonna be the new state here. And you'll have thousands of acres, and you'll be in charge of all this. And he tells this commander to leave.

Well, the commander had soldiers with him. And he says, look to your left and look to your right, don't get any bad ideas. And, and amongst all the woods were men with rifles, free men with rifles. You know, they did happen to be pirates, but I think of them as the Navy SEALs of the time. Although some, somebody was doing an analogy of like, like you know the sheep following the status quo are usually, nobody ever wants to be them, right? So like even in Star Wars, the rebellion, the good guys are the, were the good guys. So the re, the rebellious ones that were standing up against tyranny, and those were all, you know, always the side that, you know, people would hope that they're on.

But mesh psychoshis delusion and even some Jordan Peterson stuff and talk about Trump derangement syndrome and there, there's so much of it is, and God, it's just like, no, I don't have to like everything about the guy. And there may be some, some moral inadequacies or whatever, but we have to make a choice based on something other than just going straight down that D line. Well, why can't we celebrate the wounds? Well, that's, that's exactly, you got, you got to focus on the, the solution. And so, so that's a tip for Thanksgiving, obviously coming up. And, and so I have found that if you stay solution oriented, I want to hear your ideas on how to fix this problem. I don't want to just complain about the problem because we can all agree there's a problem.

Well, it can be very difficult though, because like I When people let their feelings overrule their logic. When I was at Chuck's Gun Shop, there's a big protest there by Father Flager and Jesse Jackson and the Brady campaign people were there. Anyways I met a young man there named Phillip. Now, it was a crazy situation. They had us in a parking lot that was like in a fence, okay? So it was like we were in jail. We were inside this fenced-in area. And Phillip comes over, and he motions, you know, to me as I'm standing there talking to somebody, and I come over to the fence, and we started having a conversation. Now, we had this conversation for like 45 min, and I'm explaining to him Phillip, I don't understand.

Do you not realize that the people who want to close down Chuck's Gun Shop and take the firearms away from Chicago are funded by people like the former mayor of New York, Bloomberg? He goes, what's that got to do with anything? I said, have you heard of the Aspin report where he showed up at this big millionaire billionaire Aspin event, and he said that he thinks all young men, African American and Latino, until they're 25 should not be allowed to own a firearm. Do you not see that as a little bit racist? Do you think I should have more rights than you because of your race? He does, and he's the guy funding this. You want to look it up on your phone? Well, we've talked for quite a while, and this is where things get weird, okay? He's saying to me, you know, I have a mixed race nephew. I'm like, excuse me?

He goes, well, my sister, you know, she's black and her husband's white, and it's a mixed race, you know, child. I said, I don't understand. He goes, what don't you understand? I go, I don't understand why you're saying that. It's a little boy. Now, when I say boy, don't get the wrong idea. I mean, as in age, we call them boys and girls until they grow up, so please don't get offended. I said, little boy. What's the little boy's name? And I'm not going to repeat it. I'm just going to say, you know. Okay. And I use that name from that point forward. I go, that child is the absolute proof that Martin Luther King was perfectly right in what he said. He dreamed of a day when a black child and a white child would walk down the street hand in hand and love one another.

Your sister and her husband love one another, and they have proven that there is no race other than The human race. If you could breathe, then we're the same, right? That's how it works in the animal kingdom. Exactly. The fact that you want to judge people based on the pigment of their skin, I'm looking and going, do you not realize that's racist? And he looked at me and said, are you a psychologist? I said, no, I'm a plumber, man. I'm a plumber. I'm not Joe the plumber. I don't need to be a psychologist to understand that we should not be basing how we feel about each other based on race. Now, let me ask you, is his brother-in-law, is he a good guy? Yeah, he's a real good guy. Has he treated your sister well? Yeah, he treats her real well. And what the hell is the problem? You should be loving your nephew.

You have a nephew, and he's probably in perfect health, good kid. What's the problem? So, so one problem that kind of comes to mind in, in, in a sense that We can all breed with each other until there is only one race, because everything's so mixed. And if that's the epitome of perfect to some people's ideals, great, I don't really care. Again, because it doesn't matter. It's like, you know, I, I could see, you know, beautiful women of all race, colors, and creeds, and, and, and, and choose who I marry based on, you know, the personalities and, and, and, you know, coexisting capability and all this other kind of stuff. But, you know, this idea, again, of nationalist, and then especially, of course, when it comes to white, and the idea of the, the anti-white racism, of course, and then as this idea of the oppressor and the oppressed.

So like the, this idea that the oppressed almost can't be wrong and so on. I have a few guests in, in, in mind that I've had some conversations with, with that topic because I really want to learn more about it.

Like I, I have a few I, I took the suggestion and, and, and read a book that explained a little bit more where that position was coming from and I could see where they're coming from in some areas of white fragility was the book and, and but it, it's like one of the best things about Chicago for so long was the neighborhood system and that we had Chinatown and we had Pilsen and we had the South Side African American community and we had more Jewish communities up north and then we had the Korean area up, up, up north by Broadway and So yes, when immigrants come to this country, it's nice to settle with more people that speak your language and help you assimilate to the American culture. Hey, whoa, can we even say that anymore? The idea of assimilating because you came here. Now, if you want to just come here and bring...

It's almost like, it's like almost, almost like a veteran thing. Like, like you, you get... So basically Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraqi freedom guys all start coming back. And then they want to form a community and they want to... The old guys smoking at the VFW was not what the twenty-somethings wanted. And, and just, it's just a different culture. So they were going to start their own thing and to start a nonprofit and this and that. It's like, hey guys, just start showing up. Right? So, so, and it's weird. I'm, I'm kind of battling in my, in, in, in, in, in a little mental gymnastics thing in my own head with this because That was the recommendation, was like, just, these guys have been doing this so long, they need some fresh blood in there.

And, and as our, we were almost starting what we call the virtual post of the American Legion with a, a shout out to the Post 623, the Paul Revere Post 623, American Legion Post. But we, we, and we would go to other American Legion posts, and we were young guys who were motivated, a lot of great guys there. And sometimes we'd be like, you know, the only reason anybody came to visit another post was to sell their raffle tickets or their tickets for their barbecue or their pasta dinner or whatever, fundraising. And so they're like, you know, what do you, what do you want? You know, joking around like they knew why we were here. We're like, we don't want anything. And they're like, what are you doing here? Like, well, we wanted to help you. Like, I've been doing this for 40 years, kid. Like, what do you think you can do to help us?

It's like, well, did you know that less than three quarters of a mile from this very building is Triton Community College, and there's 2500 registered veterans there? Like, they're not going to walk in here. How can we help you to go talk to them? And go reach out to them. And go help them to know their benefits and what, what, what benefits you can get of being a member of the American Legion or whatever the case may be. So it was powerful because you're just kind of set in your own way and routine and they get a building and they're worried about paying the bills and keeping the lights on. And, and, and 90%, I don't want to say 90%, but a large percentage of the effort for these volunteers was fundraising and getting the dues collected. And that was in the old days that you're chasing down a check from somebody.

Like, dude, get, get a JVZoo account or like automatic credit cards processing or something. Pay the fee and let's not waste all this time just running down dues for next year, you know? And, and so just a lot of different things like that. So the point was, close the, the point was that if you just show up and start helping out, Within a year, you guys are going to be in charge because everybody's so tired. Everybody's been doing it for decades. So don't, you don't have to start your own thing. You could just get involved in something that's existing. So on the flip side of that, if you get enough of your buddies to come to the United States as immigrants, to change it the way you want it, is that wrong? Or are we supposed to come to this country, appreciate some of the things that this country has to offer and the freedoms?

Obviously, knowing that some things ain't great, we can work on fixing some of those, but you have to assimilate to the, to the culture in some, in some ways. Well, I think there is a great deal of latitude that we give, especially here in Chicago, to, to all ethnic communities. We try to be very accommodating and understand, okay, that's, that's your culture is what we'll And having some pride in that, and having your community museum, and having ethnic foods that you cannot find better food than Dan showed up with a big bucket of pierogies from, from his favorite Polish deli down, not too far from here. And, and again, the ethnic foods, we all love them, you know, and, and to, to, to be proud of your heritage, there's nothing wrong with that.

But now we're in a place where, all right, well, I'm a white guy, what am I supposed to be proud of if I'm not, if I'm 5th Generation Polish. Well, h-here's the thing. Proud to be an American, is that okay? It's not, it's not okay to be white in America today. what I was talking with someone just last week was saying, okay, I'm speaking with a gentleman who's on the back of his shirt, it said Black Truckers Organization such and such. And I, I caught his attention, and I said, sir, I need to ask you a question. I want to be very respectful. I just want to understand. On the back of your shirt, it says Black Truckers Association. He goes, yeah. He's starting to get aggravated. Please, please don't get aggravated. I'm just trying to understand. I grew up in a, in an era where I was told by Dr.

Martin Luther King that we shouldn't judge a man by his color, but by his character. Are you saying you want to be judged by your color? Or your occupation? Are we, are we segregating according to the color of your skin? I mean, if you saw somebody had a white truckers association, that'd be kind of offensive, right? I said, when I was growing up, I remember calling one of my dad's friends a black trucker, and he was offended. He says, please don't call me that. I'm a trucker. So I'm confused. I just need you to help me. What is it that I'm supposed to feel or understand that you want to segregate yourself because of your race? Am I getting it right? And he held up his hand and he said, I don't have an answer for you, but I got to go think about this because I'm not offended. You've made me think about what that stands for.

And we shook hands, and we were, we were cordial about it, and, and that was that because it is confusing. Now imagine being a kid trying to sort this out, okay? What what am I supposed to do? Is it okay to call you black? Okay, or do I have to call you after a mare? And some people don't want to be called one, and some say, I'm not from Africa. Yeah. My brother's wife's Jamaican, and she's about as, you know, they're, they're, they're about as dark as you can get, and they're not Africans. They might, you know, they might have originally came from there, but so it's amazing. I, I, I don't even, I don't remember if I told the story on a previous episode, but I, my nine-year-old ran into a situation in, in an organization. I don't even want to call out the organization. I don't want to call out the people.

I don't even know if I could tell the story again without Somebody being offended. You might want to rethink this. So, so whether, what, what, you know, I definitely have some, some good conversations about racism and white privilege and all these different things in, in, in the past and coming up episodes because I worked hard to educate myself in this area because I didn't understand. There was a situation where one of my guests coming in happens to be white, happens to be married to an African American. They're both, I believe, attorneys. They're both very educated. And, and I was getting in a back and forth on, in the comment sections on a Facebook post or whatever, and I didn't understand why I was being attacked because I am very careful with my words. I don't name call.

I don't, I, I challenge anyone in the comments below or wherever, try to find a link to any post that I've ever did that was very disrespectful to an individual. It's like it doesn't exist. I don't do that. And, and so I was confused and even My sister interjected one time, and that was part of what she suggested reading this white fragility book, because it's like, you don't really have a place at the table for this conversation in a sense. And I'm like, I'm just trying to help, but that's not always the, the right thing in some of those circumstances, looking at it from their perspective or whatever the case may be in certain circles and, and, and different mentalities. but the guy ends up messaging me and like, hey man, you want to like tone it down a little bit with my wife there?

And this is the friend that was actually a friend on Facebook through mutual friends from veteran organizations or whatever. And and I was like, oh, bro, I'm like, dude, sorry, I didn't even know, you know, that was your wife, because women are a little more cautious with their names, and, and, and it wasn't the same name or whatever. And and I was like, no, that's cool. And, and, and again, there's, there's another, a couple of situations where I have, after reading that and after I, having some black friends, of course, and, and, and, and pretty close ones, and trying to understand from their side a little bit more that, that, you know, there might be times when they're offended from something you said, even though you, they know you didn't mean it that way. Does that make it right? No.

It makes you uneducated, but it's a very complicated place for even that person to be in, because if they say something, oh, you're going to be like that, like, like you're super sensitive or this and that, you know I didn't mean that or whatever. So you really have to be active and upfront with a friend to where I have sat down and had the conversations that, hey, look, because even like, hey, look, bro. Okay, maybe that offends some people, but even I'll call anybody bro. Is it different because you, you happen to be black? Some people are too sensitive. And, and if that's the case, that's, I, again, it's almost like the transgender thing and everything else that I'll call you whatever you want. Maybe your name, I don't care what your name is, I'm not going to call a boy a boy or a boy a girl or a girl a boy.

If you want to make up a new word like trans or whatever the case may be, and that's what you want to be referred to as, then okay, I don't have a problem with that for adults, you know, but. I grew up in the late sixties, mid, through the seventies going to school. So there was a great deal of racial tension, obviously. and my father was a, was a racist. There was no two ways about it. And, and he he made it very rough for me because people just assume That the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. And I would be in school and, you know, I had a general rule. I didn't care what color you were. I didn't care how old you were. If you were a jackass, we were going to fight. And I would, if I were ever in a fight with a black cat, I always say, I want you to understand something. It's not because you're black, it's because you're a jackass.

And word got out, don't be a jack, my last name being Cox. You know, sometimes people make a little fun of that. And just like they don't like being called certain names, I don't like my last name being made fun of. So I would make an example of somebody and nobody would call me those names again. And word got out now, there was this one incident where a girl, you know, you can't hit a girl, right? She is all up in my face. She's, she's skinny as can be. I, I'm practically malnourished. She's so damn skinny. I won't say her full name. I'm going to say her, her name was Patricia. And she got right up in my face and I just, you know what, I know I'm going to solve this, and I just grabbed her both my hands and gave her a big fat kiss. Shout out to Patricia. And, and she was just like, oh my god, this, this honky just kissed me.

I said, I think you're cute as hell on those lips. I just, I couldn't resist. Well, you couldn't call me a racist now, could you? Her, her boyfriend kicked my ass, but that's a whole nother story. Yeah, that, that's, but, and, and, and, and, and, and again, yeah, that's where culture changes, generation changes, words change, word usage changes, and this idea that we can just agree that, okay, that's a, not a great word. So it's nice to wish it out of existence, but history is still history, and, and, and that's where it gets tricky when you want to edit. Here's where it gets, gets really bad is, okay, and this is something I question then, I still question now, why are you still calling each other that?

Well, that's, that's obviously, that's their culture, not ours, so they get, that gets complicated too, but, but for sure that you, that you're making it even more confusing for, even for children, because like, and then like if my Nine-year-old listens to some rap and likes some music and this and that. So that was going back to that story that I was saying in an organization where he ended up using that word in front of other people. And my daughter came to me and said, "Hey, such and such, Connor's using the N word." I was like, "Really? Get him over here. Bring him over here, Connor. Are you using the N word?" He's like, "Yeah, it was a song. It was it." Stop. Don't use that word here or anywhere for that matter or whatever. And, and we can talk about it later or whatever. So he goes off, starts playing.

And one of, one of the adults comes by and says, "I have to talk to you. Your son is, I don't, like I heard about it. My daughter told me about it. I addressed it. it's not going to happen again. I apologize." No, I mean, what else can you do? It's a child. And he stand, he stood there as if that wasn't enough. Yeah. And then he said, when I asked him about it, He said white people made that rule, word, so white people. Could use it. And I look at him like, really? That doesn't sound like a kid. So I, I'm like, all right. And I run off, or I'm like, I, I loop, he's running around and stuff, I grab him, like, get over here. I'm like, did you say white people made that word so white people can use it? And he said, no. I said, why would white people use, make that word if white people can't use it?

Okay, go back and play, because that's completely different. Yes. So now I was like, this is a learning experience now to where it's an educational moment as opposed to an offensive moment. And again, we can't even, two grown adults at 50 plus can't figure this out in a conversation on a podcast, obviously with white to white perspective or whatever, but How would you expect a ninety-year-old to understand something? Well, that's what I'm saying. It's very confusing. I mean, there was a, a Malcolm X video that when I saw it, it's like, oh my God. Okay. All I'll say is that he was referring to a time when there was slavery and there were slaves that lived in what was referred to as the master's house. And what he said, you'll never hear in any history class because it's so offensive.

And Malcolm X had a lot of really great stuff that he wrote. I read his book and honest truth is reading his book actually saved my life once because I ended up on the south side of Chicago at about 01:00 in the morning after working in Greektown and my brother-in-law Mike told me the wrong directions to go. Anyways I ended up in this place trying to figure out where is there a gas station that's open at this time of night, and let's just say some gentlemen that belong to a gang came in, and they let me know I wasn't welcome there. And I got out of there by the skin of my teeth because they, they asked me a lot of questions, you know, and wanted to know whether or not I was a racist or whatever, and I'm trying to convince them I'm not.

And I started quoting some stuff from Malcolm X, and one guy looks over at the other and says you ever known a honky to know Malcolm X? Not at that, not at that time. Let that guy go, man, he's okay. What year was that? He's not part of the problem. That was back in like 94. And I got to leave. It's all worked out well. That's good. So, so to cl- to close the story on the nine-year-old thing, it was kind of funny that, you know, once again, it kind of goes back to that premise from earlier. Do we have the right to be offended for somebody else? right? So, so it came down to that, that this was an organization, and next thing you know, there's an email. Like, hey, the disciplinary committee met, and they wanted to have a chat with you about the occurrence. And I was on a Zoom call, you know, so I was like, okay, no problem, whatever.

When are you available tomorrow? 07:00, let's do, you know. And then we get on the Zoom call, and there's like nine people on the call, like the whole committee's on the call. And I, and then it was like they already had made up their mind about not having th-this child as part of the organization. Yeah. And I was like, and this is, again, Like how many, there was zero, there was no black people even there, 1st of all. So, and it's like, he's got black friends, which maybe made it a little more confusing because he might be able to use that word with his friends or whatever the case may be. How many black people do you know? Because it was a all white organization in a sense that's offended that much by this word.

And, and, and, especially, and then I, I stated my case pretty solidly about this was an educational opportunity, and I feel that, you know, you guys are actually more of the racist in a sense to even, you know, be in this situation. I talked to some friends about it too, because again, you know, I have a couple of friends that I, I sat down, I said, I'm really trying to learn, and, and I, I, I will not think any less unless I'm requesting that even in a joke or even in passing, or if I just say something that in any way offends you, I'd really would like to know about it because I'm trying to get better. You know, and cause we, a lot of us had parents that weren't as, you know, welcoming or whatever, absolute racist. Oh, mine, mine was terrible. Mine was, you know, mine was always nice for sure.

but it, there, there's, you know, there's plenty. So I don't want to dwell on racism too much cause it's nice to get, I guess, to, to white guys' perspective, but, you know, there's enough of the patriarchy or, or, you know, the, the oppressor's side. but, but either way, it's, it's our perspective and it's, it's, it's where we're coming from. But it, it kind of goes back to social media, like the idea that a word or a definition and how it changes through culture or through time or history, and then to Reprimand or try to cancel or to destroy somebody's life or to shit all over somebody for the use of something that may have been normal-er at the time is crazy talk. Well, I'll tell you what happened to me when I was in basic training.

I was playing cards with some guys, and I had three aces, and I went to put them down, and I went, wop, wop, wop. I never heard a calling Italian's WAP in my life. Without passport. I didn't, I didn't know what the hell this guy was getting so mad about. I go, dude, you know, it's sort of like WAP, WAP, WAP. And he's like, you know, we got a knock down, drag out fight over it. And I didn't even know what the hell I had done. So, someone explains. Ignorance is no excuse. They're like, where are you from, man? I said, I'm from Illinois. Is this a New York thing? Cause he was from the Bronx. It's closer to Ellis Island, so that's where it originated. And so he explains to me that his dad said, if anyone ever calls you, I go, did you see me looking at you? Have we ever, I didn't even know you were Italian. Okay.

I, I, you know, I pled my innocence and, and it was, it was honest in that I was just playing cards, man. But, you know, but the past, you know, Letting go of some of the past, but learning from it and not being afraid of it. So even we had some German machinists that came in, and we had one guy that, you know, he would... maybe was into World War II history, maybe was a little more, had some Nazi memorabilia or whatever, you know, whatever. Again, freedom of speech, man, do whatever you want. He's not, he wasn't a KKK member, but maybe he did it just for attention to piss people off or whatever, whatever the reasoning is, who gives a shit?

Well, he was excited to learn that we had these German, like, engineers come in to do this training, and we were talking to this one guy that was actually from Switzerland, but worked with a company in Germany often, and, and we talked about it before, because it was like, how does German teach German history, right? Are they a... Do they try to just pretend it never happened? No. You know, they don't. They're not proud of it, but they sure as hell want to not let history repeat itself. They get really... They get very offended. They get really crazy about it. I mean, even numbers that could relate to what the letter is that would spell Nazi, you can't have those numbers in a series. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff to do with it. I mean, they... Well, it was funny because this...

Yeah, this guy was almost like, oh, I can't wait to talk to these guys. Like, if he thinks he's got a friend in the Germans, you're going to get a rude awakening. Yeah. So, so when it comes to that, though, like teaching history or, or whatever, you know, I, I don't believe classic literature should be changed, but education needs to be there on why that word's used and it's not used today, or whatever the case may be, whether it's Huckleberry Finn or whatever, whatever it might be. But to try to cancel somebody from history because they own slaves. Like if you weren't there, and, and, and it was at ni- and, and just because it was a different time doesn't necessarily make it right, even though it may have seemed right at the time from certain people's perspectives.

But the main point is, is that what if, you know, to just do a, a little, a, a little thought experiment, there was somebody that really felt this was wrong, 100%, and some of the, the way some of my neighbors treat these people makes me sick. Fortunately, I'm fairly wealthy, and I do need this work tilled, if I'm a plantation owner or whatever the case may be. So I'm going to buy as many slaves as I can, because I know I'm going to treat them very well. And, and so if that was the case, And then now, 150 years later, you're going to try to take this person's name out of the history books or, or cancel Eleven hundred and fifty years later because he was a slave owner. That was my understanding is what happened with Jefferson. He was given these slaves when he married his wife. It wasn't something that he wanted. He didn't buy them.

He was given them. And okay, you've been giving these individuals who do not have citizenship. If he had cast them out, someone would have taken them and put them into hard labor as slaves. Is a terrible, terrible predicament. It's my understanding he actually took one of them as his wife, and that wife bared some of his children, and I saw his great-great-great-grandson saying that he's very thankful that Mr. Jackson had such a humanitarian spirit. He's living on the plantation that Jackson left to all the people who were so-called slaves on his property that he treated as family. So there's a lot to that, and there's a lot that people don't really take into consideration. Like, I say, okay, prior to July 4th, 1776, we were under the control and ruling of the crown. Do you know what the word subject really means?

We were slaves to the crown, each and every single one of us, and we did not have property rights. The United States, this is what I was trying to get through to that one young man on nine eleven, the United States changed the world. It used to be England, France, Spain. They ruled the world through their monarchies. When we defeated the English, well, the French said there goes the French crown. Pretty soon, there goes the Spanish, and we now have a free world. Prior to that, we were controlled. They could come into your house and take your daughter, and you can say a damn thing about it. And if that isn't slavery, Now what is, when they can just take your children when they want to?

Well, unfortunately, your perspective's coming from a small business owner that makes his own rules, and so how much slavery still exists today when you're working for some other person. Oh, yeah. And then even, it's funny, cause I believe even Rogan was mentioning that to, to, to fact-check how many slaves existed when slavery was abolished, and how many slaves exist today. Why aren't we talking about this? And, and, and it's, you know, we have these cobalt mines, and we have these different You know, mineral sources and, and where it's one hundred percent absolute and total slavery as we're whining about our Cadillac problems on a social media site with these fifteen hundred dollar phones in our hands. Well, you know, when they were talking about reparations, my daughter's talking about it.

I says, well, when you get that figured out where we're supposed to sign up, she goes, what do you mean where we're supposed to sign up? I said, my great, great, great grandfather was an Irishman, and he was an indentured servant who actually worked for a black slave captain. yeah, a slave ship. And he, he was like a slave on that ship. Yeah, that, that, there was a pretty popular clip that's just going viral right now about somebody talking, when was a white person ever oppressed?

And it's like, You know, the, the, the Irish was worse than the blacks when they first came here after the potato famine, and the, the, the Italians and all the Polish jokes that you ever heard all stem from starting as an Irish joke before and, and an Italian joke with the, without passport swap scenario before, and, and, and so a lot of different cultures have been through those sorts of things. So that's the one argument from the, the Flipside. The other side is like some cultures have been oppressed and have gotten over it and succeeded, and so it's not necessarily just a culture issue at that point. Something I'd looked into, and I was like curious, okay, England had slaves. Is there an issue in England with... That's the col-colonialism, right? That's where it started.

With the, with the, the black population in England feeling like they should get repatriated from the British crown or anybody? No. And, and I looked up, okay, so who's, what's the discrimination like over there? And to this day, it's still the Irish that feel that they're being the most discriminated in England, much more so than African Americans or people, you know, from, from that hemisphere of the world. I would imagine that the entire Irish, you know, and, and, and interestingly enough, France, a different culture, again, and where's the blue note? The blue note was in France. And, and, and when jazz was really taken off in this country, a little jazz history, it might have been jazz performance, but and love jazz.

But when these Musicians would go to France, they were treated like royalty because they were incredible at their craft. Yeah. And they, a lot of them stayed in a lot of ways because or went back or loved to go there because they felt like they were being treated more like human beings than they were in, in this country. Well, here's, here's the Flipside of that, okay? Caitlin Clark, the WNBA basketball star. She's been treated so badly here that even NBA players are coming forward and saying, this is straight up racism. You would not treat another black player the way you're treating Caitlin Clark. So she's actually leaving the WNBA. She's like their number one player. set all kinds of records as a rookie, okay? Fantastic basketball player. She's gonna go to Europe because they treat her better, they treat her nice.

No one, no one runs across the court to knock her down on purpose, and the ref looks the other way kind of thing, you know? Yeah. You still watch a lot of basketball at home? Is the wife still in? I, I watched your wife play a basketball game. She was... No, no kidding. She was a pretty good athlete. She, she was and still, still tries to be a good athlete. Wow, she's fit. She, she's a Bears fan, and I like the Packers. So it's a house divided. That's all right. And she was very upset about the last game. I can imagine that any, you know, Bears fans, it's a tough life. It's a tough life for Chicago. I think she lost what, it was the last three seconds or something of the game. It should have been a slam dunk easy, kick the goal. 1985 Bears is like, you know, just kind of funny, and, and, and that was a while ago. Yeah.

You know, I, I can remember I we actually You had to be a pretty young kid back then. Yeah, that was sixth grade. Yeah. I might have known some. We're going to forget that story for now, maybe another time. But there was maybe some beer bought with a fake note. Because it was a good opportunity to say, hey, do you have this Miller beer or something? Because all our dads are watching the game and don't want to leave. So we were out on the streets during the game because we didn't give a shit about football. Yeah. And the streets, I remember it being like a ghost town. Yeah. Like Cicero Avenue at Fullerton was like there was no cars on the street, just crazy because everybody was watching the game, but that's pretty interesting, so.

Yeah, I remember somebody came up with the bright idea that we'll have a universal all-at-once toilet flush, and then the municipalities went nuts, like, don't you dare. We're going to get some, some of those lead joints might not hold up to the pressure. Very possibly. No, we were going to talk about diets. We never, we never hit on that. Just, just to, just to hit on that a couple of key points I'd like to hit on so that people are awareness, you know, awareness is always good trying to help. one out of ten Americans over the age of twenty years old Will come down with type two diabetes, and one out of four people over the age of sixty-five. So when you add this all up, it ends up being seventy percent of the population at some point in their life is going to come down with type two diabetes due to our diet.

I myself went in for a blood test, found out I was pre-diabetic, and took immediate action. And this is where the, the story really, you know, has some meat and potatoes to it, you might say, is that I went from having a fasting glucose level of six point two, and I've dropped it down to under three in a matter of less than a month of exercising and changing my diet. And here's the thing, I still eat bagels with honey and cream cheese on. I still eat white bread, hot dog buns, you know. I just do it in moderation. what I do avoid is any kind of energy drink, cause they'll have literally, you know, tons of sugar in them. And for those folks that like to drink Starbucks coffee, a Frappuccino. Chino has the equivalent of 40 teaspoons of sugar.

Well, and, you know, this is an area that I've been down a few rabbit holes and have some life experiences with because I, I, I did do some training events over the years, and I lost 40 pounds in 15 weeks twice, at least, in doing training. one time was six square meals a day, food measure out in advance, every two and a half hours I was eating, balanced with carbs, no simple carbs, no sugar, no salt. and, and s-some start, you know, some potatoes, sweet potatoes, some, some but no butter, no fat, no salt and, and that worked. So it worked. It's, you get that metabolism burning to where you, in Twenty, after you're in that zone, 15, 20 min before it's time to eat, you're ready to eat somebody's arm off. And so it was like, Carl's, it's time for Carl to eat, because everybody would just want, they knew.

If I, you get that insulin spike and you get crabby and you get, you know, those mood swings because you're hungry. Yeah. And then this one, this other time, I, I have a friend hopefully if he's in town, we'll, we'll get him on the podcast but he was getting heavy to the point that I would see him maybe once a year sometimes twice a year. And it's one of those where you're like, oh, fat shaming and all this other stuff. Like at some point, God, am I supposed to say something like, bro, I love you, man. What the, what's going on? And, and, and then he Dr. Eric Berg was a chiropractor, but he was, had some great videos online about the keto diet and stuff.

Low-carb diet like that, and it all stems from the Atkins book originally with their science behind it, folks, you know, it's, it's not, it, it was always true, and it's the same science that's just kind of being regurgitated. Right. And everybody knew the book, and everybody, oh, could you see bacon and cheese and, and lose weight? Nobody read the book. It's, it's like, I, I joke because it's like men are from Mars, women are from Venus, everybody heard of the book, but I got it, I read it.

It's a great book, and, and, and, and so it's one of those things where what the, what I did the keto thing because of this guy, and, and shout out to Matt Peterson, he's brilliant, he's an editor at an art, he's, he's big into saltwater aquarium hobby and fish breeding and all these awesome things that we've done over the years with breeding saltwater aquarium fish, but but he's very Was a flash coder and stuff, so he, he could type faster than I could think. You know, and he, we'd be on the old chat forums back in the day where, where you'd post a question and then people would answer, and sometimes you'd have to wait three days to get your answer because you checked the forum and nobody answered.

But this Reef Central was a very popular forum at the, at the time for saltwater aquariums, and the fish breeding forum on there, there was like always 250 people actively on those forums. It was crazy. So as a newer hobbyist to the saltwater aquarium industry, you, you can ask a, you can ask a question and, and almost be instantaneously answered. The beginning of the issue is with social media, in a sense that most people are good people, and most people want to help other people. And so in a situation where I'm trying to educate myself, I want to hear your life experience. That's why the podcast resonates with me, to have people show up and have conversations and talk to each other about various issues and hear what real people think about these things, more so than what we are spoon-fed or whatever.

And so as that, you might post a response from something you read in some article or from something that you read online somewhere that may or may not work for the problem that I'm having. And it was at the point where it was like, listen, if this isn't your personal experience, just shut the hell up. Because then it got to the point where all these online experts would come on and start, you know, if you can't cite the resource, I could go read the article. So you're not really helping. Just give me the link. I'll go read the article. I don't need your interpretation of the article. And so It was like then it got to the point where a lot of people that really knew the true experts that have been in the field for a long time would post what they thought and would get shredded by all the online experts that say that can't be true.

You can't tell me, this is my personal experience, asshole. I had this just last week with a guy asking about pulling a cartridge out of a, a Mullen shower valve that had broken off, and his name was Brian Cox. And so I said, hey, brother from another mother, I've got your solution. Having been in the business 35 years, I know you take a needle nose pair of ice grips and you, you know, you, you cut the, the tip off so that you got a little bit more meatier jaws and you can shove them in there and bite this portion of the cartridge, twist it, and pull it out. And so I had his solution for him, and you wouldn't believe the stuff the other guy actually tried to tell him. Oh, go in there and drill it out. Oh, yeah. You know, if...

Imagine if you have a shower cartridge, and you drill, and you get just a little bit wrong, well, now you're into the brass. It's over with, right? You're just cutting drywall and replacing valves in the wall. But that's the beauty of the internet in today, that if you reach out to the right people and you catch them at the right time, you can get answers to damn near anything. And when we... I was a kid, you see, one, that none of that existed. Two, you couldn't just go to the library and find a book on this particular thing, because maybe a book hadn't been written about this particular thing yet. So all you could do was try and find somebody. And this is where your network came in. You guys would laugh at the idea of Rolodex cards, okay? But that's what we had because we didn't have anything electronic.

And you would call everybody to see if they knew somebody that knew somebody that might know somebody that would know the solution to your problem, and then you would drive to their house and bribe them with some beer or pizza or something, tell me how I fix this. That's how much things have changed. Yep, yep. The encyclopedia that our parents mortgaged the houses for, for a set of books that you can understand it was quality print, it was nice bindings, the photo... Beautiful. Photography was not cheap if you're going to have quality photos and, and giving, you know, with this, the way everything is you know, plagiarized and stolen photographs and credits not given and, and so it's getting complicated in the internet, but, you know, it, it brings up that point that, that The, the gifts, I almost, I, I tell this story a few times.

I hope I didn't repeat it too many times yet, but I guess I can't. There's not that many episodes on Flipside Frolic yet. but I, I dabbled in magic a little bit for a, a few years, so we could get a deck of cards and I can shuffle the cards and there's a few key card movements that you can use and if you practice them, you can get pretty proficient at them and then there's some trick cuts and shuffles and all this kind of stuff. And then you, you might just find that you have a gift for this, that it seems to come easy for some reason, which, not to get too sidetracked, but as a parent, I think our main obligation is to provide opportunities of experiences for our children. And then for some reason, something resonates for some reason.

Whether it's past lives or whether there's genetic information that was passed down, whether, who knows where this stuff comes from and why we're just drawn to something that's passionate. And if we could fan that a little bit, that's kind of, I think, the best we could do it. I think a lot of it is, isn't something that, that complicated. I think sometimes it's a matter of you connect with someone else. And being out there and you come in contact with somebody and there's an energy and, and you just feel it, that this person is like me. You know, you've heard of the kindred spirit kind of thing, okay? Or we had a connection. I could tell right away we had a connection. Love at 1st sight, even. I mean, there's just some magic going on that we don't understand. Me and my wife, bingo. You got it.

So when that connection happens, There is something that, let's say there's this pilot that ended up being the person who helped us develop aircraft carriers. And he actually went overseas with his dad and met a German pre-war, German pilot. And the pilot took him up in a flight and actually let him have the control of the plane for a little bit. And this is a little kid, we're talking like twelve years old or something, right? And the German That was so impressed with how mature the young man acted. He says, look, I'm going to give you my address and you can write to me and ask me questions and whatever, you know, and I'll, I'll, I'll try and help you, you know, whatever, because you seem like you're really interested in aviation.

That German didn't know he helped develop our aircraft carriers, which helped, you know, eventually win the war. it's funny how that one chance encounter changes everything, and not just for him, but for everybody else too. That's, it's amazing how, you know, what you're doing here with Flipside Frolic is, is wanting to get people to get together, get people to talk. Too much we've got our faces in a screen and we're losing that human connection, and it's the human connection that we feel a bond and a connection to. We will never, ever be able to really fully connect to somebody through a device, okay? I mean, something as simple as a handshake, the looking the other person in the eye, just the feeling you get in their presence, that energy they're giving off, okay? we can't lose that as a human race or we're going to lose our humanity.

Yeah, I think I I know my sister and a few other places and then even in a few books where they even talk about, you know, CEOs and very successful people and, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting yeah that they would do like a little focus group where they'd be like, here bring somebody to this meeting that I've never met before. And even like if you look on meetup.com is a pretty interesting tool where there's a lot of marketers or mutual people in photography or hobbies. And that's one of my the Get a hobby.org was some, a blog that I was dabbling with cause I was in so many hobbies, but I find that I found an organization that taught me the meaning of the word altruistic. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't understand why anybody would do anything like that. For what? What am I getting out of it?

So if you're selfish and you're stuck in your own world, the idea giving to others doesn't seem rational or logical, right? And then until you do that, like sometimes, you know, women might have bad pickers and they always choose to pick these same jerks all the time and, you know, all these kind of things. And it's like, or if you don't think there's good people out there, you're a plumber, I'm a plumber, guess what? Go out to Habitat for Humanity on a Saturday and there's going to be 30 people there. Three of them are probably court-mandated for community service or something to be out there. But there's a whole bunch of people out there that, hey, they're just there to help build veteran housing. And they're dedicating, they're giving their time on a Saturday away from their families to do this thing.

And it's crazy how good people can be, and, and if you search in the right places for them or whatnot. Well, I had an opportunity to go out to Redwood, California. I was invited out there by this company called chill.com. And to cut a long story short, I, I was in this startup grind event, which is by invite only. You only get in if you got the, the big placard thing on your, on your neck. And I got to rub shoulders and talk with people. They were literally billionaires. And it was cool as could be. This one guy comes up to me. And he says, what do you do? I said, I'm a plumber. I'm from Chicago. I'm Dan the Plumber. Oh my God, he gets his phone out. I got to get a picture with you. And he's telling me how he started up these three different companies. I'm not going to name them, but you would recognize them.

I'm going to get a selfie of Dan the Plumber from Chicago. Next thing you know, I got a couple of, who is this guy? Cause I know him. Who is this? That's Dan the Plumber from Chi- I'm doing group shots. I've got probably $10 billion on my shoulder, okay? And they're just the same as the guy next door. You know, people are people. And what, what you're talking about is a hundred percent correct. And here's the thing that they said, and it was uniform. It's those who want to help other people that are successful. You don't get rich by wanting to get rich. You get rich by wanting to help as many people as you possibly can. That was their message. And so in wanting to help as many people as they possibly can, it's like an energy, you know, for every action, there's a reaction, there's a reciprocation.

You're giving everything you can, and whatever you're giving it to, it's as though it wants to dump it right back in your lap saying, thank you, we're grateful. Yeah, Bob Proctor wrote, You Were Born Rich. It's a, it's a kind of on manifestation principle a little bit and, and power of positive thinking and, and all this stuff is the same magic. It's spirituality, and sometimes it's through religion, and sometimes there's the Sermon on the Mount from Edmund Fox that talks about some of the principles of the Beatitudes, which is Pretty funny, because I was born and raised Catholic and lost my faith at a certain time, and then at another time, it saved my life undisputedly and, and, and getting me through dark areas and dark times with alcoholism and, and different things.

So I've been sober over 20 years, and, and it's it's been unbelievable, and it's something that p- other haters can believe what they want, it doesn't matter. I just know that this way works. The other way didn't seem to work, and I'm just going to keep doing it this way, you know? And so, but, but with, with most world religions and different things, because I did go through a spiritual journey, I, I know you've had some journey with, with spirituality and religions and different things too, some good, some bad, and, and, and, and that be an, an interesting story to tell too. But for me, I, I remember, and again, What our memory is and what actually happened may or may not be the same.

So I was like in 6th grade, and I can remember the person, it was a brother in a Catholic grammar school, and I was questioning my faith, which is kind of what confirmation's supposed to be about, and that's kind of when you start thinking for yourself a little bit. And I said to, in my own head, so you're telling me that some guy in a tribe in Africa that always helped the other members of his community, never cheated on his wife, was always good, never lied, is going to burn for all eternity because he never heard the name Jesus Christ? So at 6th grade, I said to myself, my God wouldn't do that. Right. And this brother said, yes. That's why we have missionaries to go save these people. And I was like, huh. So that was the start of my falling from faith because I didn't believe that. Right. I didn't believe.

And then to close, to, to, to close the loop on a story, then I find spirituality in, 20 years ago and, and clear, clearing up some issues with alcohol and life problems and all these kind of things. And then two years later, go to get married to my wife and we go to a pre-cana cause she wanted to get married in her church in Roselle. And, and I was like, I go to the pre-cana and I was like, all right, father. I'm like, I, I need to be just brutally honest with you. I'm like, I have a few resentments against the Catholic church. There's a few things that I don't agree with, and I will not pretend to agree with that and just say what I think I'm supposed to say to get through this little thing and get married in the church and give you your check or whatever the case may be. I said, I will not lie.

And so whether it's get promising to raise my children, you know, just certain things that I don't know if I can make that promise right now. And he's like, great, cool. Let's do this. One at a time, bring them up. Let's go. So it's like, this is what that process was supposed to be, not just everybody faking it just to get through it. And so I tell him that whole little story about the priest or the brother, and he goes, wow, that's an interesting story. And he goes, you know, the Catholic church doesn't actually teach that. And I'm like, what? So it's almost like the earth is round. You know, so, so we have these dogmas and we have these beliefs, and actually, even on the whiteboard up there, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. So an action plus a belief equals an emotion, right?

So we can't change our emotions, and we can't change the action, we can only change our belief. And so some of those things are, are just funny. so, so it was like, wow, I mean, it was a little eye-opening that through all these years I was carrying around inaccurate information that created a belief structure that was not true. Right, and that's, that's, what's the old saying is there's let me just 2nd, look it up, because I wrote it down. I thought this would be really good for this particular subject. you're not the product of your circumstances, but rather the product of your decisions is one, and here we go. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it's the illusion of knowledge.

So when you're, you know, you have this illusion that, that you think you know this thing, Willingness to be wrong and humility to say, wow, I never thought about it like that. So there's definitely plenty of situations where I had a belief and it's now different, and it could be because new information, and obviously with our lawmakers, that's a huge one, right? Because sometimes you believe something and your constituents told you this, and the lobbyists had this really pretty color point presentation with graphs and everything, and it looks so official, and how could I not agree with that? So I'm going to vote that way until you're presented with the right information or the truth or a different perspective.

Well, you know, like as you're growing up, things will happen, and you get older, like me, much older, and you look back on that and you're like, oh man. But then you realize, you know what? When I was 1st born, I was crapping in my pants because I didn't know any better, okay? You're not born knowing all this stuff, and we're real hard on ourselves thinking that at the age of ten, I should have known what I know now, okay? If you were never taught, and even at that age, could you comprehend these things, like we're talking about race. I mean, there's a lot to try and process. You have to be able to forgive yourself for the mistakes you made, because you know what? You were doing it in ignorance. You didn't know. Like, like your son made that remark, and you know... How is he supposed to learn if he doesn't fall down once in a while?

He doesn't know. You're not gonna, you're not gonna do it with some skateboard trip. You can't fault him for that. And, and the point I was getting to is we have to sometimes, you know, Give ourselves a break that we did this thing or we said this thing and, and it hurt somebody's feelings or whatever, okay? We didn't know any better at that time. And it'd be the same as though what you're saying this person in Africa who didn't know, Jesus didn't even exist yet, so how could he even know he existed, okay? How could you hold that person accountable? God wouldn't do that. That would be absurd. So it was interesting that through, through the, the Sermon on the Mount, Emmett Fox was a religious scholar and philosopher, religious philosopher in late 1800s, early 1900s.

And, and his book Sermon on the Mount was basically the 1st half is the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father, and its interpretation of the meaning. The 2nd half was the Beatitudes and his interpretation of the meanings from Matthew or whatever. And I'm reading this book after being It's kind of funny, I just told the story a couple of times in, in out, outside, in other circles and stuff, because it blew me away. And it blew me away. I learned about these Beatitudes, and I had this 12 years of Catholic education and Catholic high school, and I was like, was I sick this day? Like, how is it that I never learned this information? Now, when the student's ready, the teacher presents himself, or sometimes, you know, I can read a book many times and say, how could I miss that line? This is jumping out to me.

And, and sometimes it masks or actually charts our spiritual growth, because something that didn't make sense before makes perfect sense now. So how did I... Of course, I didn't highlight it. I didn't understand it now, but now I have a better understanding. It's wild to watch that happen in real time just by looking at a book. And, and so I've had that experience as well, but the 12 Beatitudes, it was like... So, so it was like, I don't care how you get there. I am on my knees every morning and every night, asking for help to be a better person and saying things@night.and all the other semantics, if, if, I don't believe are all that important other than getting to a personal relationship with this magical power of the universe that people, none of us really understand.

And we continue to seek, we continue to seek, we continue to try to grow, we continue, continue to try to get better. And that seemed to be one of those Beatitudes, which growing up, I heard of them. I can't cite them like I can maybe most of the Ten Commandments. Why is that? And Jesus was against some of the organized religion and some of the high priests, and it was like, kind of, it doesn't matter how you get there, get there. Find some way to get this relationship. And that might be, not be other people's belief. There were some Bible thumpers that we were at the VFW were, were at, and they, they actually did some work with veterans and some heroin addicts in treatment centers. And I said, oh, I do some work with 12-step work and with, with different various organizations in treatment and stuff.

And I, and, and they said they teach how Jesus can save them. And I was like, I got nothing against Jesus by any means. I, I, I can, that, that could be a whole nother four-hour podcast because, you know, there's, there's some interesting ideas about how all of that. But I said, what if they use this higher power thing that some of the programs talk about, as opposed to the name Jesus Christ? And this beautiful petite woman just says, well, they could burn for eternity. And I was like, whoa. I was like, wow, really? Okay. So obviously I'm not convincing this person. And so I said, I read this book that, you know, from Emmett Fox that talked about the twelve Beatitudes, and it seemed that Jesus was kind of teaching, like, it really doesn't matter how you get there. You just get there and, you know, have this relationship with this power.

And she's like, he never said that. And I was like, oh, okay, well, maybe the book was wrong. I don't know, but I'm not going to argue with people over, you know, that sort of thing, because personal beliefs are pretty, pretty hard, pretty strong and, and, and hard to chisel away if they might be in the wrong place. People have a lot of different ideas, and, and, and this is where the, the problems come in, is that they'll be taught that it's so rigid, you know, and that if you don't do it this way, well, Some places it'll cut your head off. that's where the problem comes in is in the interpretation, okay? Now, for me, my mom was a Jehovah's Witness, and let me tell you, that makes for a rough childhood when your dad's a, like a homicidal maniac, you know, and your mom's a Jehovah's Witness, it's like, oh, brother, you know?

people have no idea. I was talking to somebody a pastor, you know, and just this last Thursday about it. He was talking about a kid that was an outcast, and I go, well, that was me. And he's like, what do you mean, Dan? I go, well, you ever thought of being the son of a Jehovah's Witness, what that's like? When the Vietnam War is going on and you're not standing up for the Pledge of Allegiance and kids in the classes, you know, their dad's overseas fighting a war and you're the jerk that's a communist because you won't stand up. I'm a communist, but, you know, I'm not standing up for the pledge. There must be something wrong with me. And that no Christmas, no birthdays, no nothing, you know, you're a freak. Makes for a rough life as a kid, man.

I, I, I, and I honestly don't even know much about the, the practices of that specific denomination, let's say. It's, it's a cult. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of those. Some good, some bad, whatever. But I, I, you know, my mom's was in it since before I was born. She's still in it now. She's 90 years old. And I asked her a question. I'm, I'm pretty rough, you know, even with my mom. I'm not brutal, but I'm rough. I'll say, Mom, if we live to be 500 years old, And Armageddon still hasn't come. Would you start to question, you know, that this thing's right around the corner, like you've been telling me my whole life? You hear the pulses switching, right? Did you hear about that? I heard a little story about something that way. 50 mi a day? This is happening pretty quick. Here's, here's the question I had for you that just drove her nuts.

I'd say, okay, your whole premise of this religion is that you want to live forever and, you know, all that. She says, well, why wouldn't anyone? I go, well, why did Adam and Eve give it up? They had it, and they gave it up. She'd like to ask him why. Oh. Blasphemy. Boy, I was in trouble. Well, and, and that, again, in my spiritual journey, I kind of was dabbling with learning about getting more information about various organized religions, because one past relationship was a Baptist, and it was like, well, that sounds good to me. I don't really care. It seemed like pretty cool, and they had some pretty cool things, and the way they invite the children up at Lutheran services, and, you know, they're a little more, it's not so structured and so, you know, so old-school Latin style. So whatever, again, whatever works for you.

And so some of these different things I was looking into, even Buddhism and, you know, all these different things, and, and and it was amazing that, that, but that's kind of closes the loop even on the Constitution. And some of the values of what, why freedom of speech is so important, there was a, a nun that would tell me that she remembered, like, as a little girl, they were walking from school, and they would, they would cross to the other side of the street so that they didn't walk in front of, like, the Protestant church as Catholics or something silly, you know, and, and that's part of censorship too. Like, it was against the law to, to, to go into another church. Why? Because God forbid you might hear something that resonates with you or something that makes more sense than what you do, and you might lose a practitioner.

So yes, there's corruption, and yes, there's the money, and yes, there's the this and that with everything. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's hard to argue with, you know, 27 million, you know. Well, I, I have a relationship with God, and it aggravates the hell out of my mother because it's not really in any organized religion. I pray to him all the time. I argue with him sometimes. And people say, well, how do you know he's listening? I said, cause he speaks back. And they're like, are you losing your mind, Dan? I go, no, he speaks back every day. Things like, I'll pray to him, you know, this ankle is really hurting me, God. And you know what? Like- Taking ibuprofen. No, like within a minute, that damn thing will pop, and the pain is gone. And I'm like, yo, thanks, God, that, that's really fast. It don't always work like that.

But I had an incident with my son James when he was going to high school. I was sitting in my dump truck, it was a few years back, he's a college graduate and working now, but I'm sitting in my truck, it's a rainy day I think it's like this time of year. And you know, you get like the beads all over the, the mirrors, and you can't see a damn thing. And all I can see is his headlights on, on the Jeep, and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting for him to back up so I can leave. And I put my truck in reverse, and, you know, kind of like signal like, you know, I'm backing up now, and still the Jeep is still there, and I'm thinking, I, I, I got enough room. If I turn my wheels, I can go around, and clear as day, something said, if you stop, James will be okay. And I'm just like, what was that? So I put my truck in park.

It's like I'm shaking. It's like, what, what is going on? If I don't move the truck, James is okay. I get out of the truck, I walk around to the back. I find that James has opened the door to the Jeep. He's on his knees. Looking under the driver's seat, trying to find his cell phone. I couldn't see that door in my mirror. If I'd have backed up even a foot and a half, that door would have closed on his body. God knew I couldn't handle that. It'd be too much. If he brought it to you, he'll get you through it, but... So he says, if you stop, James will be okay. So imagine me, I'm standing here, I'm shaking, I'm going, oh my God, I almost killed my son, you know. James, what are you doing? Why are you down there praying? What are you, what are you, what's going on? He said, I lost my phone. It's, it's under the seat.

Here's a flashlight, you know, and I just went back, I turned off the truck. And I went back in the house and I just like took the rest of the day off. I was like, I'm not going nowhere. I'm ruined for the day. Well, it's amazing that, you know, everybody's got those stories, man. You know, and, and people want to dismiss them because they don't, because they don't understand it. You know, it's almost like, like, like some of the quotes were awesome quotes and, and self, whether it's self-help or, you know, it's like the idea of if you want to soar, the eagles don't wallow with worms. Obviously, it, it's a lot easier if you soar, if you hang with people that are doing better than you, something's going to rub off, whether it's a business idea or management or an a resource or whatever.

So fr- another friend of mine, we talked all the time about just, it's about giving value. So, so like we get value out of certain things too by giving and, you know, all these other things, but it was like your income will be directly proportional to the amount of value you give the marketplace. But you know, it isn't even... The Trilla folks got, I think, it mixed up. It's not the income. The income's different. There's a different, how should I say, philosophy to it for me, because, you know, I know a lot of rich people that are really, really miserable, okay? depressed, sad, whatever you want to call it, and they've got, you know, tens of millions of dollars, but they, they don't have lives in which they're happy with. And I know people that are what we'd consider somewhat poor. They're some of the happiest people you'll ever meet.

They're singing, they have great relationships with their wives and their kids and their community, and they just wake up feeling like the sun is beaming on them. And it's a matter of their spirit and where their heart is. When your heart isn't seeking all these rewards of the world, You get blessed with all these other things, and what you find out is that these people, everything that, that you want, okay, I want this beer, why do I want this beer? Because I want to know how it's going to make me feel. I want this car, why do I want this car? Because of how it's going to make me feel exactly, you know, over and over and over again. Relationship with that girl, okay, who looks that way. It all comes back to how you feel. Well, these folks may not have all this stuff, but they have the feeling.

They wake up in the morning, a clear conscience, they haven't been doing bad things, loving their heart for their family, so happy to see them in the morning, I'm blessed. They give gratitude, which is huge, giving gratitude for what you have, not always asking for what you can get. And in giving that gratitude, what I've found is, is it's sort of like your kids or anyone else, if you give somebody something, And they're just like overwhelmed and thankful and showing you and expressing gratitude to you, you want to give them more. Sure. But if they just take it and go, oh, is that all? Yeah, I wanted the blue one. You never want to give them another thing as long as you live, right? Well, that's us. No, no. If we're not showing gratitude, why should anything more be given to us? Yeah, a gratitude list is, is immensely impossible.

There's a lot of people, those struggles they found amongst themselves through journaling and found their own path. I would say my guesstimate through of the percentages of those people that you're speaking of that have some purpose, some inner peace, some happiness and love for others. More than likely are involved in some sort of religious entity of some sort, because it gives them some sort of structure and makes them remember and remember to be thankful and remind us that we're not really in charge. And the more I think I'm trying to take the reins and want it my way, then something happens. Like, you think you're in charge, Carl? Watch this. And then you just kind of look up, like, my God has a sense of humor. He laughs at me all the time. Well, they say man makes plans and God laughs. Yeah. It's, it's the truth. He's a comedian.

And, and, and, in my experience, that was the one thing that was lost, like, that, that I didn't understand, that the foxhole prayers never work, get me out of, conditional prayers don't work, you get me out of this jam, I'll do this, that, and the other. Working out a deal, you know, negotiating the contract with God doesn't work. No, I, I can't say that's true. Well, it's my experience. And so what I did find, though, was, was if I ask for things to be taken away. So I had an advisor that told me, you can't pray for Yourself, you pray for other people. And if you pray for them, the things that you want, they'll be given to you kind of thing. And, and, and so what I found is what really works is when I ask things to be taken away.

So if I sincerely ask through inventory process or whatever else to find my defects, and, and, in the beginning it was, God, take away this compulsion to drink. That's all, that was enough. And then that left. I don't know the moment it left. I, I, I remember the moment I realized it was gone. I know you're in apology Oh, that's not how it's at. I brought over beers and I didn't know. No, it's all good. Okay. No, I, it's just because the compulsion is removed. I had the problem. You don't. Nobody else does. People, we serve wine, we, you know, whatever. It's not, it's not me. And, and, and so the, it's amazing because that may not have been the case had that not, that obsession not had been removed.

And then, so then you just work on the next thing, you know, take away, take away my potty mouth in front of the kids, I'm trying, my wife's getting pissed off, you know, and, and I'm doing the best I can, help me with this, it's challenging, you know, or, or all these different things. But it, it really seemed that when you honestly say, I have this thing, it's not helpful to me or others, take this. And, and then help me to see what your path is for me or how I can help others or whatever. It seems to work a lot better than the old way. Well, I say that the deal, I, I think it works because I said to God, you know, just let me have this girl named Patty. I promise you I won't do anything bad, you know, like, like really bad ever again. And well, it's been 35 years, and I think I've been pretty good.

Well, shout out to Patty for putting up with Dan's shit for all these years, because you are an angel. That, that is undisputed, and the world knows it now. She knows it too. And five kids later. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a beautiful thing, so. Hey, man, that's, that's been three, it's been 3 h. Well, I really enjoyed it. Sounds like a good place to wrap up. I think we had a good, a good session. I love you, brother. It's it's, it's always, you, God forbid, you'll, you, you feel a little closer to that connection and the personality and the people. And then we got a few Flipside Frolic things. We got a, a, a laser and gri, a laser and Gretsch. oh, very cool with the episode number. Let me make sure you got the right one. Oh, I got the episode number one. I like it. Yeah, so it's the only one in the world, and I'm number five.

You are number five. Let's make sure here. Yep, that's the one. Very cool. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. Yeah, we'll do it again, because, you know, we could have went three more hours, I'm sure. You know, you get these little tree branches and... I'm going to say to all the fans out there, you know, if you want Dan back, you just say, hey, we want another pierogies and beer episode. Nice. That's what we call this one, the pierogi and beer episode, for sure. So, okay, awesome, folks. We'll catch you later. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks for joining us at Flipside Frolic. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and maybe learned a little something about other people's perspectives. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and throw us a like on the video. Comment if you have any questions, and we'll see you on the next episode.