If You’re Not Making a Million, Don’t Talk About It

What separates high performers from everyone else?

In this episode of Straighten Up and Fly Right, Kenny T sits down with former Navy SEAL Jake Zweig for an unfiltered conversation about mentorship, leadership, discipline, and building a life of purpose.

Jake shares his incredible journey from a difficult childhood to the U.S. Naval Academy and the Navy SEAL Teams. Along the way, he explains how mentors changed the trajectory of his life and why he's dedicated the rest of his career to helping others become military officers, pilots, special operations candidates, and leaders.

The conversation covers what it really takes to become a Navy SEAL, why so many people fail before they ever begin, how mentorship opens doors that talent alone cannot, and why discipline, preparation, and accountability matter more than motivation.

Whether you're pursuing military service, aviation, business, or simply trying to become the best version of yourself, this episode is filled with practical lessons on leadership, resilience, and success.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Growing Up and Early Adversity
00:55 Meet Jake Zweig
02:23 Childhood, Family, and Hardship
06:09 Learning to Read and Finding Direction
08:20 The Naval Academy Journey
15:18 Becoming a Navy SEAL
18:20 Why Mentorship Changes Lives
22:05 Learning From Failure
26:43 Building Future Leaders
31:07 The Rules of Mentorship
32:22 Everybody Wants to Be a Navy SEAL
35:29 What It Really Takes to Become a Military Pilot
38:04 Building the Next Generation Through Mentorship
40:49 Raising Kids With Purpose
42:12 If You're Not Making a Million, Don't Talk About It
43:41 Why Taking Action Matters
47:24 Building a Community of Mentors
50:40 The Best Career Advice You'll Ever Receive
54:24 Opening Doors Through Mentorship
57:58 Parenting, Leadership, and Accountability
1:00:25 Final Thoughts

If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and share. New episodes feature military leaders, airline pilots, entrepreneurs, and high performers sharing the lessons that shaped their careers.

#JakeZweig #NavySEAL #Leadership #Mentorship #Discipline #Success #MilitaryLeadership #Aviation #Pilot #PersonalDevelopment #StraightenUpAndFlyRight #LegacyFlightAcademy

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I was born to a career criminal. My real father did 19 years out of 43 in prison, got murdered in 43. If we didn't live in a house we lived in that had been in our family since 1910, we would have been homeless three or four times. So I tell everybody, like, I grew up black, but I'm the only black person in my family. I learned to read in college, my sophomore year. But if you asked me to communicate via written word, you talk about second grade. And I went to a ship, best experience of my life, right? Like, got to mature, went to buds a little bit older than everybody else, you know, became the sixth black officer in the community. But then what I learned, because the first couple years I was trying to help people through the military. But then I learned the best way to help them is to beat the military. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

All right, Jay Swing, man. I'm glad you're here, my brother.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

What's up, Kenny? Man, you know. I signed my kids up just the other day for the 28th of March. We're gonna get some flying in. This is our third go-around in flying. So I got to go to Southern. Do you know uh Xavier that runs the Texas Southern Flying Program? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I I went out there and spoke to his. He had kind of a combination event with the hundred black men in Houston and his flying school. Okay. So I got to speak there, and I met the black female pilot that was out here rescuing all those people in the Coast Guard. Yep. Um, stationed out of Corpus Christi. So they got to fly that day, but I told them the other day they're going to fly all day. They were fired up.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Hey, that's what's up. So yeah, 28th March, we're gonna be out here. San Antonio, we're gonna get looking like a hundred kids that we're gonna get out in the aviation. So getting the getting their first taste of flying. And honestly, man, I wanted to come, I wanted to talk to you just about, you know, a little bit about your background, what you've done, and then I know that you help people get in these high-performing careers, the SEALs, special operations forces, all those things, including flying. And sometimes people don't understand what it takes to be in that caliber of career. And I mean, you the man that I know that they can talk to it, speak to it, all that. So give me a little bit the overview of your background, where you came from, and you know, how you got here.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

So, I mean, it's crazy, Kenny. You know, I grew up first five years of my life. I was raised by my grandparents, Jewish family, uh, grandfather from Detroit, grandfather's sister in the Holocaust, heavy Jewish influence growing up. Um, my mom dropped me off when I was six months. I was born in LA. Mom dropped, I was born to a career criminal. My real father did 19 years out of 43 in prison, got murdered at 43. And so I my mom dropped me off. I was about six months old. My grandfather changed my name. I was Jomo Kenyatta Coleman. And so uh he just changed my name up and changed it to Jake. And then I was still there when they had to enroll me in the Lutheran day school daycare, put my last name on it too, like his last name on it, because I was the only black kid in Pew Alab, Washington. And so uh I grew up soft, man. I was really soft then. And then at six, my mom started dating this dude named Bob Donham, who was another did four years in prison, truck driver, hard man, but he was brilliant. Yeah. So he had a 4.0 at University of Washington in mechanical engineering and dropped out his last semester because he said he didn't want to sit behind a desk his whole life. Okay. And so that was a pivotal point because he rode me every day. It'd be two questions. Okay, you're gonna be better than me. And where are you going to college? Okay? And then every other day it'd be like, How you gonna pay for college? I can't pay for it, we're broke. Okay. If we didn't live in a house we lived in that had been in our family since 1910, we would have been homeless three or four times. Right? Like there were some times we ate the same food where we had we buy a cow every other year.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

So we always had meat and potatoes. We'd eat meat and potatoes for three, four months in a row. Because there wasn't nothing else to eat. So I grew up um a lot of chores, a lot of hard work, big hard work due, you know, um chopping wood, just chores around the house. We had a big lot, grew up hunting and fishing. Pew Olive are in Tacoma, Washington, Silicon, right there on Silicon Dock, Clyde Davidson fishing pier. I know Clyde Davidson, they named the fishing pier after him, you know. So I tell everybody, like, I grew up black, but I'm the only black person in my family. But I grew all my friends, like Tony Harris, Ammon Williams, everybody got some black in them. They all got military parents.

SPEAKER_03 4:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

So I grew up right next to Fort Lewis. So it was kind of a combination lifestyle. And then, you know, obviously we had that A-Team influence. We had that second bat influence. If someone would have told me that first group was at Fort Lewis, I'd have had that first group Green Beret. Because all I knew was Ranger Green Beret. So, you know, we grew up with the 60s going overhead, the AC1 or the C 130s, the C5s, because we're in the flight line from a cord. Yeah. And so they would come across. I tell everybody at night, they light the whole house up because when they came across the bay, they had them landing lights on, the whole bay would be lit up and the light would bounce in our house, and you could see them. We, I mean, I'm two blocks from the ocean, so you could see it all come across. So I just grew up in this heavy, heavily military-influenced lifestyle. And then, you know, we raided the ranger training area every weekend. We heard them 60s popping, so the elementary school backs up to the Fort Lewis. If you heard them 60s talking, you knew they was out there, so we would go raid it on Saturday and Sunday, pick brass, find smoke grenades, you know, just it was a good childhood, man. Yeah, yeah. A good childhood. And so I couldn't read though. So I just I was real disruptive in school. And I know now it was because I was a Zwig ZW, they would always put me in the back of class.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Alphabetical. Yeah. I ain't gonna lie, I get so upset when they would do alphabetical order because I'm a Thomas. And I'm like, I don't want to be in the back, I don't want to be in the last, but that's just how it always worked out.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

And so now, like, I make my kids sit in the front center, no different than I did my football players, right? We're gonna sit in the front of class, we're gonna sit front and center. Oh, teacher won't let me. Boom, I'm on the phone. Hey man, my son needs to sit front and center. Why is that? He got some attention problems. Right. I don't care what the reason is, he's gonna sit in the front center, right? And so it's interesting. I didn't learn that until college, right? I learned that if I sat in the front row in the center, I could pay attention, I could focus in. So anyway, I couldn't read. Um, I almost got had to get rolled back uh in the third grade, but I went to a reading specialist. So Bill Miller, bless your heart. He took me every day for eight hours, man. Flashcards. I still got the box, box of flashcards at my house. Flashcards, man, and I the I remember, like now I look at that box and I'm like, I was in third grade, couldn't read nothing. So he got me through the third grade, but that's really my reading level. Everybody, I'll tell everybody it's second grade. I can read really well now. I learned to read in college, my sophomore year. But if you ask me to communicate via written word, we're talking about second grade. Like that's why I communicate on the second grade level. Like, you want all that prose and all that stuff, you ain't gonna get it. But that forced me to go math and science really hard. So I was a math, a science kid of the year, all three years in middle school. And I won the University of Washington Science Fair, seventh and eighth grade, ninth grade, and I beat everybody in the program. So it was a high school, high school competition. Yeah. Like I was in the middle school, but I beat everybody. And so in the eighth grade, I got a full scholarship to the University of Washington for engineering. But I didn't understand it, right? I didn't understand what I had accomplished. Then I got in the Naval Academy as a freshman in high school, and I got in West Point as a sophomore. And that kind of, I knew that I got in those two places. And so pretty much that was the choice, right? Yeah. And then I tell everybody from one of the pivotal decisions in my life, I picked sailboats over gray granite. Cover the books, had a sailboat, gray granite. I said, shit, let's go naval cabin, got boats, you know. And then I showed up the first day. I didn't even know I was going to military school, man. I thought I was going to college for five minutes. You're like, I didn't even know what I was getting into. I had no idea. Yeah. No. Like they were yelling at everybody the first time. What is going on, man? I threatened to kill a couple people, right? I was trying to take a nap, and these dudes tried to break in my room. I threatened to kill them. And then the ice cream man came in my room, and I was like, why is the ice cream man in my room? Turned out to be a lieutenant in the Navy and summer whites, right? And then I got on and then I had a rough three-year adjustment in Naval Academy, but I was playing football, I was wrestling, and I was 3.0. So they really couldn't mess with me. You're like, my gray's good. They couldn't mess with me. Couldn't mess with me. Even though I was completely belligerent, I didn't cut my hair for two years. So I didn't cut my hair from Thanksgiving of freshman year until the end of sophomore year. Almost two years. And I was just like, I was just on, I was on one, man. Because I was not happy to be there. I thought I didn't value the education. Really, really, what I didn't value, I didn't value the experiences that I could have picked up.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Yeah, I feel you.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

And that's where I kind of make sure that all my kids get there and they understand what they're supposed to do. So I'm gonna tell you this one. This is banging, Kenny. I'm getting ready. I got to shoot a podcast with my boy Philippe up at MAPS, and my boy Brian at Naps. Okay. Brigade commander at MAPS, Philippe, company commander at Naps. All right, so what's Knapps and what's MAPS? Okay, so Military Academy Prep School, which is the feeder for West Point. Right. And then Knapps, Naval Academy Prep School. So I got two individuals at both of those schools, and both of them dudes bang, they got massive leadership roles. Okay. Philippe is an immigrant from Poland, and Brian is a six foot five, 280-pound defensive end, and they killed it. Now, here's the thing that pissed me off. We hooked my man Brian up with everybody, including Philippe, to get ready for the interviews, and they gave him company commander and not battalion commander. But here's the good part. Now we fired up to go to the Naval Academy. All right. Right here in this summer, he said, I'm gonna get the brigade commander job. Okay. So we lit a fire, but that's like that's the success we're having, right? And if we have somebody fall on Wayward Times, like the bat phone is heavy. We've been putting people in Naval Academy in West Point since 2001. Okay, so now there ain't no what if, what happened. We had our second person leave the Naval Academy or a service academy in 25 years this summer. Okay. Young man, I get a phone call from his brother who's flying in the Marine Corps right now. Hey man, so-and-so, my my brother say quitting. Okay. I'm on the phone with him five minutes later. Because my dude is a company commander at NAPS right now. Boom, got him on the phone. Hey man, what's going on? I just he felt bad because he had shin splints, he wasn't able to put out. It just didn't fit right. Okay. Now, here's the situation. Everybody I know that left a service academy, not of their own accord. So we had some football players transfer out, did well. Right. Right, right. But the guys that I let left and quit, for the most part, never got their lives back in order. Okay, would always be Rocky. Okay. This young man had a full college scholarship to a university. All right. Quit on Tuesday, was back home on Thursday. On Friday, I had him on a bus so that he could be in that office of that dean on Monday in a suit and tie. And they gave him the full scholarship bag. So now he's on full scholarship computer engineering and hardware engineering for computers. But he's on a full scholarship again. That's the that's the first time I've seen somebody quit and land on their feet.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

I think the biggest, one of the biggest reasons that happened too is the time frame from when he quit to the next big success was very short. Absolutely. It didn't give him time to fall too far. Because I think if you take, if you're already up here and you fall too far, no matter what success you get will never feel like a win. But since you got him right as he was still falling, he never got to reach rock bottom. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Yeah, so you never got to reach round. And I had my hands on him because I had three dudes in the room ready to pound him. Yeah. Like I'll, Kenny, I'm just gonna be honest with you. Like, look, man. Hey, listen, man. I'm gonna tell you, I'll tell you this story because you'll like this. So I got a young man in the Marine Corps, okay? I get a phone call, freshman in college at the Naval Academy. I want to quit. What are you talking about? You ain't quitting. You're doing good. You had 3.0, was doing good in school, just didn't like it. I said, no one likes the place. Okay. I didn't like it. Yeah, no one likes it. We stay in because of where we're going, not where we are right now. So I sent three dudes to his room.

unknown 13:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

Sent three dudes to his room, goons. He said, Oh man. He said, when I saw them three dudes show my room, I said, this dude ain't playing around. Because I told him, I said, I'll pound you every day, bro. I'll send some ninjas in your room every day to beat your ass. Right? This is non-standard Naval Academy practices, but it's very effective. So he called me back. He said he was crying. Called me in on one of my Wednesday night Zooms that I have on Discord and said, hey man, I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. He said, I'm going Marine Corps Aviation, and it's 100% because of you. And I said, hey man, listen, I said, this is the deal. It ain't because of me. I just know what it takes to get you to where you want to go. So you're willing to pay the price, I'll get you there. But see, a lot of cats, they they falter in a doorway and they get shot. Right? They get to the precipice of success and they're not, they're not willing to take that next step. And so I tell everybody, like, I gotta, it's either a a bat, a goon, or a pistol, and I'm gonna put you across the line, right? Like, I'm gonna make sure you take that step. And that's part of like the mentorship that we have now. That's why we're growing so bad. So you asked me where I came from. Like, I went to the Naval Academy and I was probably the worst misshipment in the history of the Naval Cabin. I was on restriction 275 days. Almost a whole year I was on restriction. I had the ability, so we got marching tours. I don't know if you're familiar with marching tours.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

I know what that is.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

Okay, we have they had the marching tours at the Naval Academy, and I would get 30 marching tours on a Friday. I would be done by Saturday afternoon going on Liberty, laughing at everybody. Because you could march five tours in three hours and 45 minutes. I'll march all the way through the night. I just keep marching, I just bang them out. I have 30 done by by Saturday evening, Saturday, maybe Sunday morning, but I be going on Liberty and all my upper class would be pissed at me. But you're not gonna control me with hard work. But I was a bad misshipman, and I don't have any bad misshipmen. Like I don't, I got cadets at the Air Force Cabinet right now at West Point. We don't have no bad ones, right? I won't allow a bad one. I got an idiot up at West Point who's a genius. He got popped on some dumb stuff. I sent some goons to his room, including an 06. I said, you do this again, man. We go, I'm I'm gonna take you out in the woods out here, you're gonna have a problem. Right? He said, I don't want none of them problems. Okay then. Like stop doing dumb shit. Right? You know that kid got problems and got in trouble. You don't walk with that kid no more. You know, because I know how much it hurt me long term just to be myself at the Naval Academy. Right? Like I wasn't beating nobody, I was just losing long term. I, you know, it made me go to a ship. So I went to a ship for two years because they wouldn't give me a seal billing, even though I crushed the screener. And I went to a ship, best experience of my life, right? Like got to mature, went to Buds a little bit older than everybody else, you know, became the sixth black officer in the community. And then I went, I had the first two and a half years were on fire. I was murdering the community, and then I got a bad officer, right? I got bad leadership. I got punished because a dude on the West Coast filed this big racial grievance, and they punished me because they said I was involved in it, because I was on every page of it because the kid was in my bud's class. Yeah. But I wasn't involved in it at all, right? And so they punished me, gave me this bad leader, and I didn't have mentorship. And that's why I focus so much on doing what I do now. Because if I had mentorship, Kenny, you in the military, you know. If I told you, Kenny, you are the only pilot in the United States Air Force for 11 years right now. You would say, Oh, oh my God. I could do anything I want. I'm gonna make 06. Correct?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

I'd do my best.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

I'd be out here and do anything I want. I could pick my job. I could do crash my plane and I'm still gonna make it. And they gotta, they gotta, they gotta still promote. I'm gonna make 06, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:33

I didn't understand that. You didn't grasp the, you didn't grasp the gravity of because I didn't have anybody to tell me, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:39

Tell you, hey, get out here and win because it's yours. No, like, like if they would have told me that, because I got a bad fit rep, right? I got fired as an AOIC by the shitty dude. I lit the candle, blew the blew the I blew the casket up, right? I'm lit fire to everybody, filed a big grievance because I had been dealing with a ton of stuff, right? I just kept it quiet. So nah, nah, no more. Blew everybody up, but all it did was really piss everybody off and make everybody mad at me. Didn't help you the way that that you may have thought it would have helped you. I thought I was gonna help the people behind me. It didn't help them at all. Maybe a little bit. Personally, with a couple people, like another black officer showed up in 03 to a SEAL teammate, and a person I respect greatly told him that, you know, I'm gonna look out for you because we fucked the last black officer that was here bad. And he was a rock star. And so I'm gonna make sure that we don't go down that same path with you, right? And so it was just interesting. But then what I learned, because the first couple years I was trying to help people through the military. But then I learned the best way to help them is to beat the military. That's it, right? Like, so there's two black Oscars between 99 and 2010 when I made my first one.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 19:01

All right. And so one of them is at Dev Group, he's an all-American or uh national championship wrestler, great dude. Yeah. Phenom had a great career. And then there's another dude in there who came in. But after that, then we've been we've been cooking with Greece. We're not cooking with Greece because the the quality changed or the person changed. They just have mentorship. So now, now we got so many, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Because you don't have to be now trying to do it on your own, you almost have to be perfect already.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Already.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

With mentorship, uh you have to be really good. But with mentorship, you're now as good if not better, as far as the result as that person is perfect.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

I like to tell this story. This is one of my best, like for the military cast to understand how mentorship helps you win long term in the military. Okay. I got this young savage from the Naval Academy, and I mean savage, okay? Four-time national champion, boxer, just a gorilla monster. Okay. Yeah. He goes SEAL team intelligence officer, murdering it. Okay. Got a combat deployment. Comes back from the combat deployment, calls me on a Friday afternoon, mad as hell. So it was a big award ceremony. He didn't get no hardware. He said, I'm gonna file, I'm gonna, I'm I'm losing my mind, Jake. I got shot at, I was in the stack. Pump your brakes on my boy.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

I said, they testing you. They're testing you, bro. I said, I said, don't worry about it. You alright. Just let it go.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

Let it roll. I said, it's a test. I said, you're failing the test right now. He said, What do you mean? I said, they tested you. They want to see if you're gonna open your mouth. I said they if you open your mouth, they're not gonna give you nothing. He said, really? I said, Yeah, that's how this works, bro. They're not gonna award the ensign intel officer a bunch of awards. You know you earned them, but they're not just gonna give them to you when they give everybody else their awards. And you black, and you Muslim in a SEAL community? Nah, bro, they ain't doing that. Fast forward nine months, Friday, call me screaming, I got everything, combat action, mama. That's mentorship, right? I was in that same place seven years before, and I didn't make the same decision.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:40

Right? And so I try to help. That's the whole goal is to make sure nobody walked the path that I walk. Because my path wasn't a path. That shit had cliffs in it, you know, avalanches. I was out in the middle of the ice with no shoes on. And now, but that's I tell people that story because. He waited nine months and he didn't let it eat at him. I tell everybody, don't get in your own head.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Don't get in your head. You know? So I go back to like if I had someone had just said that, hey, man, you're the only African-American officer in the SEAL teams for 11 year groups. I don't care if you get 1-0 fit reps, you're gonna get promoted. You're gonna make those. I wouldn't have gone nowhere. Because it was the best job in the world for me. Like I got shot in high school. So like shooting and shooting, I was all about that. I mean, that's that's why I was there. You you could be as violent as you want to be. Fist fights were an everyday occurrence, and you got to compete every day, you know? And so it's interesting. So that's where I came from, right? And then I got out, I went to business school in Michigan, I went and ate in corporate America, hated it, consulting, almost took over my company. I had a I had a gangster plan to take over my company, and then I got a GA job at Maryland, and then I stood on the sidelines of Maryland for 18 months to get that job. I went from $250 a year to $7,000 a year. Another big mistake I made. I got a job offer two weeks later after I got this football job from Oprah Winfrey for $2,700 a day. And I turned it down. And my wife, who was with me at the time, will say, you know, we talked about it. And I'm like, but did we really talk about it? And she said, you were the happiest I had seen you since business school coaching football. And I loved it. Football was awesome. Yeah. But now I understand, right? Growth mentorship. I got this book out there. I tell everybody to go read John Elliott Overachievement. It says, if you had taken that job with Oprah Winfrey, you probably would be a head coach of an NFL team now.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Yeah. Right. Like when you really, when you take this, when you look back and ask yourself, this opportunity would have opened so much more for me. So much more. Right?

SPEAKER_02 23:57

But you don't, like I tell everybody, man, I'm a first generation rich kid. Okay. I almost lost shit, almost half a million dollars in taxes a couple years ago. Right? Running a big business, killing it. I was crying. My wife was trying to console me, saying, hey, it's our first time having to pay a $500,000 tax bill. I said, I don't give a shit. I'm responsible. Right? I'm the person that's supposed to understand this game. And I'm not writing a check for $500. I'd already wrote the check. It was already at the IRS.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

And so she's like, What are you gonna do? I said, I'm gonna fire the accountant. I'm gonna go find another one. And so I did. And then I got a big chunk of money back, a massive chunk of money back, right? But like that's problems. How you how you gonna do it? You better have some good mentorship. Right? I called three or four people and said, hey man, here's the problem. They're like, what do you mean he wouldn't let you do this? My dude was like, fire that dude immediately. Right? So even at 52, we still coming up at stuff, right? So my dude, I told you about, we talk about we at the top of the pyramid. We leading each other at this point, right? Even though we got some guys that are are kind of bigger than us, they not they not like us. They're not willing to take the risk we're willing to take. So I'm trying to buy a company right now, right? Like I want to buy an electrical company. But now I'm kind of like, man, I had the opportunity to buy 11 liquor stores in town. I don't drink. That was six months ago. My opinion has changed. Am I okay making half a million dollars a year with 11 liquor stores, right? Like, maybe so. So now as you mature and you grow, like your opinions change. What you can do changes. So that's the whole mentorship thing. And now, now I'm making leaders initially. Whereas before I used to mentor for the first three or four years, now you're getting turned over. So, like I told you, young ladies going to West Point.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

She got a lot of smoothing off to do. We gotta, we gotta polish the rock a little bit, okay? I got her in contact with Philippe up at West Point, right? He'd he's at MAPS, he'll be in her class. She got two other dudes in her class. I got three sophomores, like five juniors, and I got a senior uh Asian female up at West Point, and she's Asian. Yeah. I'm gonna hook the two of them up. I got her hooked up with my female at the Naval Academy to talk about relationships and men, right? So now what I'm really doing is teaching all them other people leadership. Right? I'm not, it's not that I'm not mentoring anymore. I'm just forcing leadership down. So now we're learning leadership as a freshman.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:43

We're learning leadership, right? Like, hey, if I call you and I say, hey man, I need you to go over to this room and take care of her, they're gonna go over there, what's the problem? Right? So I just had this happen. So I'm gonna say this poor people, okay, not not race, gender, people without means tend to be really closed off to getting help. Yes. And I don't understand why. Because I'll tell you exactly why. Because poor people don't want people to know they're poor. Black people don't want the people to know their problems because they can use against them on the slave plantation. Okay? Hispanics are very proud people, right? They don't want nobody to know their problems. Okay. Most of the Hispanic people come from poor backgrounds for the most part, right? You talk about all the Caribbeans. None of the Caribbeans got no money for the most part. Okay. So you look at that demographic, and then nobody wants to ask for help. And so I tell everybody that's probably one of your biggest barriers when you're mentoring socioeconomically disadvantaged young people. It's getting them to understand that they got to raise their hand and ask for help when they need help. So obviously, you know, I make a ton of pilots. Like we got 14 people in the Navy Aviation pipeline right now, two people in the Air Force pipeline. We got seven SIF pilots right now. Well, not SIF, but seven people in the Air Force or in the Army pipeline. We got two commissioned officers and we got five warrants. Yeah. Including a 19-year-old who already got 100 hours in a helicopter. Savage. Savage. Okay. So I get a call, let's say, let's say Friday evening from my one of one of my guys. Hey, what's going on, man? How you doing? He said, Oh man. He said, Jake, I think I'm gonna get kicked out of flight school. So you taking tests right now. He said, Yeah, I'm not doing very well. I don't think this is for me. I said, Well, let me break this down to you. I said, in 25 years, we haven't lost a single pilot. We have not had a young man or woman start flight school and not graduate. I said, So you ask yourself, do you think you're gonna be the first kid to not graduate out of like 400 pilots? He was like, I just don't think it's for me. I said, Well, do you you know my approach? Do you want some people to show up? Because I sent some people to his room at the Naval Academy sophomore year. He didn't want to do his schoolwork. Okay. He said, no, I would I would prefer another method. I said, okay. Have you called Jay? No, I haven't called Jay Jay. Why haven't you called him? Well, I'm embarrassed. Come on, man. I said, okay. I said let me ask you this. What is worse than getting kicked out of the flight program or dealing with a little bit of embarrassment? Right? He said, I know the answer. It's just hard for me to do. I said, okay. Hard for you to do. I said, but you gotta be able to do hard things if you want to get anywhere in life. And he was kind of like, all right, cool. So I said, all right, you do what you gotta do. Hung the phone up, called him back 30 minutes later. Hey, have you called Che yet? No, I haven't called him yet, Jake. I'm I'm gonna call him here in a minute. Okay, I I had three guys coming to visit you right now in your office. Because you ain't listening. Yeah, they're coming to see you. So uh let me call you back. Okay, get off the phone. He called me back. Hey, I talked to Che. I'm meeting him in the library tomorrow morning. So I called Che. Che said, Jake, I got him. Che is a genius. I'm not talking about like random genius. I'm talking about real genius, heavyweight brain power. Okay. Spends all day in the library with him Saturday, all day in the library with him Sunday. Calls me Sunday night, he's good to go, Jay. You got him fixed? Oh, yeah, we're good. My man doesn't miss a point on another test for the rest of flight school. He's flying helicopters right now, he's getting ready to go. He's going to Osprey, so he's flying helicopters right now. He ain't missed a point. He went from failing the first two academic tests in flight school to now not missing a point. Just because of mentorship. Right? Just because somebody took the time to spend two 12-hour days with him, 24 hours, and make sure that under the individual knew exactly what he should know going forward.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

And I think too, it's also when you're a mentor, you gotta be, you gotta be kind of forceful in your mentorship, especially if you care about the person and they already accepted that they're gonna take your mentorship and however it comes. Because I'm like, if someone ain't gonna accept what I'm gonna give them, I can't mentor them. I need you to be able to take what I'm gonna give you, or I can't deal with you if you're gonna be like, I don't wanna do that. I need you to do what I'm gonna tell you we're gonna do, or I don't need to so relationship ain't gonna work.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

So, Kenny, I got two rules. Okay. I'm not ever gonna tell you no bullshit. And you're always gonna do what I tell you to do. Okay? Now there's some times that when they get a little bit older, it ain't it ain't as clear cut, right? You got you got a this or that. You gotta make the choice, you a grown man at this point. Right. But early on, I need you just following. I'm gonna tell you, I'm not gonna give you no BS. I guarantee you I'm never gonna tell you to do anything that's not incredibly important to your path. I said, but you're always gonna do what I tell you to do, right? If you don't like those rules, then this ain't the program for you. So a lot of people beat me up on the internet, right? Because they say, listen, Jay, like you're too hard on these kids. And I said, No, I said, you gotta understand what life looks like.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

They're trying to be pilot, special. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Army Rangers. They want to do things that's up here. How are you gonna tell me I'm too hard on them? They want to do this level of stuff. Now, if you just want to do this level of stuff, I'm not your mentor. So, Kenny, you love this one. I know you're here. I want to go fly fighter jets.

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Okay, cool. You you willing to put in the 400 hours of flight time you need to go before you go to flight school? No, I'm I'm just gonna, no, I'm gonna get fighter jets. Okay, so listen, let me understand, let me help you out there, young man. You're gonna have three dudes in your class that are commercial airline pilots with 1,500 to 2,500 airtime. Okay, you're gonna, those three dudes are gonna outfly you every day of the week, no matter what school you come from. No matter how hard you try. You can't you can't beat them. Okay. I said, then you're gonna have one dude from the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, who literally has been wanting to do this since he was two. His dad's an airline pilot, and he got 400 hours.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Then you're gonna have somebody who was a backseater on a fighter already, already switched over to become a pilot, who's now there like, cool, let's go.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

And so you you want the prize, but you're not willing to do the work. Well, I don't think that's right. Okay. Well, it's not about right. It ain't about right. It's about your skill set. So we just sent a young man. I I'm I'm starting a Hall of Fame, bruh. He's gonna be the first admittance into the We Build Champions for Life Hall of Fame. My man lived in a Honda Fit for three years while he's building his flight hours. Okay. We popped him into a National Guard unit out in Riverside. For not like we had to get some big time help. Got him in. Okay. So he had 500 hours. He went to flight school. He skipped six flights in flight school. They offered him F-22s. So he went to flight C-17s, they offered him F-22s, and he turned it down because he just had a baby, and the C-17s are in Riverside in his hometown where his kid is. And then he got to aerobatics and hated it, like was throwing up. And so then he was happy. Then he picked up. But I'm just saying, like, we had a dude who had the options. 500 hours, showed up, murdered flight school, and had options. And so everybody wants those options. So I tell everybody right now the problem we're dealing with in America. Social media has given you access behind the curtain. And it and and also we make it look real easy. But that's social media, right? I don't see the blood, sweat, and tears. I just see the F F-18 dude, or like Growler. Do you watch Growller? Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like we landing on aircraft carriers. He makes it look easy, right? Or the C the C2 pilots is landing on carriers and they're giving the shout out, right? Like, hey, we enter into break. Hey, we're gonna do a hot shot landing on the back, hot shit landing, right? And everybody's like, oh, I'm gonna go do that.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Right? It's like you ain't got time to fill out your phone when things is going really bad. That's the thing. I said, I ain't got time to pull up my phone when everything's on fire.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

Hey, bro, I, you know, it's interesting. You know you're a pilot, you know how much checklists, right? So it's interesting because you got guys, and they they ask me, well, what's the number one thing to get pilots? I'm like, eight hours of studying a day. What? They're like, What do you mean? What about flying? So, no, I said, it ain't about flying. It's about knowing every checklist, everything cold.

SPEAKER_00 35:51

Knowing the system, eight hours a day. Understand the systems, the procedures, the airspace, the regulations. Everything. Everything.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

So last October, we made an F-18 pilot, F-35 pilot. This is another funny one. So both of them were commercial, uh, one was commercial airline pilot, the other one's dad was a pilot. Okay. Both of them got them when they were young. When they want, what do we gotta do? You gotta study eight hours a day. You gotta be the coldest dude in your class. Both of them. What do you done for the last three years? I've done nothing but study. Okay, so this is where it gets good, though. So this is right before the Red Sea popped off, right? And so in the Navy, that they said, or the Marine Corps, they send their brand new pilots to weapons school. And then the top kid in the class, he goes right to combat. So my dude called me, it's like, yo, Jake, I'm going to the show. I said, hey man, you know, and they obviously there's some some reserves, but it's like, hey man, like that's what you signed up for. Yeah. Right? He said, What do I need to know? I said, here's my top three things for a pilot to stay alive, right? When you get shot down, you better be able to run. Now, your legs might be broken, better figure out how to get going. Okay. And so we had that conversation, right? Like, you get shot down in the Middle East, it's a bad day. Okay. It's a bad day. So I do everything I could not to get shot down. Right? Right. And so that was a conversation we had, but you know, he went over there for six months and got it in.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

There it is.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

You know, and that's why, like, it's just like, oh man, but did everything right. All they did was listen. So I went to their winging, and it was pretty cool. That's what's up. Yeah, it was pretty cool. That's what's up, man. Because they all get winged down there. All the all the fighter boys get paid for the Navy down in Corpus. Yeah. So I made that run down there. So, you know, it's just mentorship. But that's where I, you know, like that's where I am. We're mentoring. I'm getting ready to drop these two apps. It's Navy SEAL app, and then uh uh Army Ranger Green Beret app, and then I'm gonna drop a Service Academy app. And I think it's gonna be game changer because right now I've been giving a lot of stuff away for free as far as my PDFs and my workouts. And but now I'm basically gonna have an AI coach to kind of help the process, and we're putting it all super Gucci so it'll be like super clean to learn and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

That's good because that gives another way for especially the newer generation coming in, another way to get into it. And I think, like you're saying with your PDFs and your and your apps and everything, the workouts, giving them something to have to get started. Because they're like, where do I start? Because people ask me, where do you start? And you're like, this is where you start. Make this small investment, start here, and if you can do this, now we had the next conversation. Yep. And as much as I hate to say it, it's like sometimes you gotta have them put a little bit of skin in the game for them to really to really know if the sift through people who just looks cool, I think we'll do it. All right, well, you've been working out.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

Oh I love it, Kenny. I love it when they call and say, Hey man, this PDF's too hard. I said, Well, hey, listen, I'm just gonna tell you this the baseline. Yeah, we're not in the hard stuff yet. What? I said, listen, this, this, this, this PDF is a breaker. Because if this ain't, you can't do this, this is the baseline. This ain't even kindergarten. This is like being born at birth. This is we have a conversation. Yeah, we're trying to go to the NFL. Like, there's a lot of miles between here and there. And that's that goes back to like this current culture doesn't want to do no work. So I just read this the other day, man. This is crazy. Video games are cutting brain capacity by like 20%. So the brain development is having like 10 to 20% less development pre like 25 when a person's brain stops developing. And so they're seeing, they're calling it uh adult adolescence, where 18 and 19-year-olds have the brain size and capacity of a 15-year-old because they're playing so much video games on social media.

SPEAKER_00 39:49

Social media, I think, adds to it too. Because I'm like, what changed with video games when we was growing up? And you add social media to it. I mean, you add that to it, and it's not even just being on it sometimes, it's that as people go for their dope fix.

SPEAKER_02 40:03

So, so uh, you know, our dude at Apple uh didn't let his kids even play with a tablet. Didn't they get to play with tablets? And so it's interesting because I've been cutting back in my house, right? We're down to like an hour on the weekends and nothing during the week. And I just read that, and my wife is like, yo, I feel like you're a responsible Fortnite player. I said, I'm gonna have to get rid of Fortnite, right? Like, if I can't, if they can't play video games, I'm not gonna let them on a computer, then I'm not gonna be on the computer. Because I also want to set a certain example. Somewhat, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

So you know I'm grown sometimes. Right, but but in some level, you're like, I know what I say, but also I also know that y'all are y'all are looking and seeing what I do. Yeah, they are. You know, y'all watch them, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 40:49

And you know, I got three boys. Oh, yes, yeah. We're turning it on at the house right now. Like, I got a little scared that my 14-year-old wasn't where I wanted him to be. So I've kind of put foot to ass here lately. And it's it's my fault. I'm raising them. But now we're making some some changes. Yeah. And they're going very well. So, you know, I just get scared when you ask a kid what do you want to do, and there's not an answer.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

That for me right now, when I'm when I'm talking to young people, that's one of those things I'm like, one, it's a challenge. The thing I know is when you're 18, 19, 17 through 19, you're like, hey, what do you want to do when you grow up? And the problem is this they have no work experience. They don't really know what it means to pay a light bill, so they understand why it's important. So what they fall back to is, well, I like video games, I like playing basketball, and I like to rap. That's usually where it like circles around. YouTube. I like YouTube. I like YouTube, I'm a big YouTuber. I'm a big context real. Influencer. And the first thing I ask any of them in any of those things, I'm like, are you the best basketball player on your team? Well, and where's your basketball? Because if the basketball players, I knew they were the best, they had to basketball with them almost all the time. I was like, show me your how many, how many uh followers you got on YouTube? When's the last video that you made? Yeah. You know, drop me a hot 16 right now. And it's like, well, I said, you ain't there yet. And they said, that's okay, but there's so many more other things.

SPEAKER_02 42:12

My thing is, if you're gonna do any of that, I need a million dollars by the time you get in ninth grade, uh, 11th grade, 12th grade. I need a million dollars a year. If you ain't making a million, I don't want to hear shit about it. Because you ain't it. No, you ain't doing it, right? Like you saying something to appease my ass. Right. What do you want to do? But like I say, like this, Kenny. When I was that age, I want to go fly fighter jets, right? I want to be F-14, I want to be Maverick, I wanted to like that. I'll watch that movie every day. But then I was watching Full Metal Jacket and Platoon every day, right? I had them three V tapes. I would watch both of them. And then, you know, I got to the Naval Academy first day, uh, second they were there. Jim Galladay, who's the first SEAL to graduate from the Naval Academy, got a bronze star for Panama. So, what does them do? So, them the Navy SEALs do, they crazy.

unknown 43:01

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 43:02

And I changed just like that. Now, I don't know if it was for the better, because I believe flying is easily the best job you could ever have, right? But I made a change, but I was at the Naval Academy making a change, right? Right, right. I wasn't sitting at home on my couch, right? Not taking action towards becoming a better person.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

I I tell people, they're like, I don't know what I said, well, get a degree, then be a bum. Don't be a bum and then try to be like, well, I want to do this because now you got four years ahead of you. Yep. Go do something, get a skill, something, and then if you decide, I'm gonna be a bum till I figure it out. Then when you decide you're gonna do something, you at least got some credentials, some training, something behind you to take you to whatever next is.

SPEAKER_02 43:41

Yeah. You know, like one of my boys, this is funny. So he got a 14 year old Daredevil. Yeah. Female. And I said, What's she doing? He's like, Oh man, dog, you don't wanna hear this. I said, What's she gonna do? She said, She ain't going to college. She said, Dad, you're gonna start paying for flight school this summer because I'm going to fly. Immediately. I don't need no degree to fly. Dad's like, God, you know, he's thinking about the bill. He makes, he, he a captain for you now. He's doing well. Yeah, he right. So it's like, but or Delta, he a captain for Delta. And uh he's like, I can't believe this, man. I'm like, well, I mean, what are you worried about? He's like, nothing, but like she's gonna jump like 15 rungs on the ladder. Like he went to the Naval Academy, he spent his 11 years flying, then he got an airline. He said, she's gonna be 18 years old. Yeah. Going to fly for the airlines. Good, right. I said, it's a dream to have the kids. I told him, I said, look at it this way. You'd rather have that than pregnant at 17. Yep. He said, damn, I didn't think about it that way. Yeah. Right? Like, like she just wants to go be a pilot. You gotta pay for it. She's 14 right now. I said, man, just start writing the checks, bro. The checks. And she a savage.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

She got the you don't have no, because now you don't have, you have, you're building in that she's gonna be good. Absolutely. And now you ain't worried about um I had to pay for the.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

She good. She good. Cause you know, I mean, the pilot lifestyle ain't running people out of it. Flying for the airlines, right? Like, like, like it's a pretty chill lifestyle with a big paycheck attached to it. And it only gets bigger the longer you do it. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

It just gets easier. The longer you do it, the more they pay you, the the easier the schedule gets, everything. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 45:26

Like I just read an article. Uh, I didn't know about this. So there's a I guess there's a bunch of hacks when you become a senior pilot, right? You take a little flight to Phoenix that no one wanted, then they gotta pay you for a day to come back. And like it was a bunch of, so this dude was talking about he made, he worked four days and made the whole month's salary in four days. So he took a special hop to Phoenix, and then they had to deadhead him back to San San Diego, and then something happened in San Diego. He took another deadhead out to Frisco and came back, and he got credit for his whole like basically crediting him up for the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

There's there's so many things when it comes to like premium pay, where you get paid extra for picking up trips that people don't want if you're available, if something cancels and you can still pick up a trip on top of that. There's so many things you could do as you're just there longer and have availability. And there's people that choose, I'm gonna make more money, and there's people who choose, I'm gonna just have more time off and get my whole check. Like it's it's like choose your own adventure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's it ain't a bad life.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

My my my uh one of my football players from the Naval Academy flies for Southwest. And so I we were recruiting his son up at Illinois. Son's at Oklahoma, graduated from Oklahoma last year. So we we recruited him in Illinois, and uh I said, How do you do it? He said, Oh man, I work all June and July. And then I take off August, September, October. He said, I'm gonna fly a little bit in November, and then I'm good until December, end of the season for football, and then I go back to flying full time. I pick up the rest of my hours, those seven months. He said, That way I can go to practice, I can come to every game. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:13

And it's like it's it's always to do it. It's a dream, man. So, man, that's a lot, man. We we've been out here. I got a couple questions, right? So, one, how do people find you?

SPEAKER_02 47:24

It's easy to find, Kenny. My name is Jake Zwig, ZWEIG. If you put it into Google, everything's gonna come up. I tell everybody, we got uh Wednesday night discord slash Zoom on Discord. It's also streamed on YouTube. We've got Friday night preppers course. So I'm doing a 10-week preppers course because I had a bunch of people ask me about prepping, and I grew up in the preppers lifestyle. My dad was a big survivalist. So we're doing that. That's hitting on Friday nights at seven, and then Sunday at one, we're talking about some current events and then hot topics from my consortium of 100,000 followers, what they want to talk about, right? So last week we talked about Goggins going to PJ school. We talked about Iran and what what's really happening over there, the fact that we mobilizing a bunch of troops of whole like seven states' national guards got mobilized last week. So we talked about that on Sunday. So Sunday is kind of one of those in between a little bit of YouTube, a little bit of Discord, uh Wednesday nights all Discord questions. We answer a ton of questions like personal development, military development.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:30

Um, I encourage everybody to go on our Discord. I don't know how you find it other than to Google me or send me an email. I don't know nothing about Discord. Some dudes put it together for me. Shout out to 2K. But we have uh we literally have a bunch of rooms in there. So we have I have a full-time Army recruiter attached to my channel. So we have the Army recruiting room, Army we call it the recruiting station. We have Service Academy Admittance, so we have all the service academies. We have obviously the special operations list, all the special operations. We have OCS room, we've got a medical, so we got a dental and medical school admissions room ran by the dean of a medical school. Nice. Um, we got EMTs and firefighters and Leo, so we got police officers, and that's also the three-letter agency room. Um, I'm missing one. Oh, we got the money room, so we got financial education, real estate, really just money, real estate investing. Um, and we got the general advice room. So, like I encourage everybody to jump on there Wednesday. You it's free. You ask all the questions you want, but we answer a bunch of questions, try to keep people going in the right way. But really, what we're doing in there is we're fishing for talent. So every week I get rock stars.

SPEAKER_03 49:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

Somebody comes on, like you were talking about, right? Doesn't necessarily know how to do what they want to do, but I know how they want how to do it. Yeah. So I take them. Like I just ran in a kid yesterday working at the YMCA, man. He's been at the YMCA. This is his third year being at the YMCA. I said, man, what are you doing? I said, are you wasting your talents? Like and I he got great grades, 3.7 GPA in college. I said, man, I need you to, I need you to go on here. You know my name, yeah. I need you to go on here, go through this Discord and find something you want to do. I said, I want you to look at the pilot programs. I don't know about the military. Listen, you can be a pilot. You ain't really in the military, you fly in planes, okay? But here's a young man that's kind of like bobbing through life, got a lot of talent, and like I'm gonna grab him, I'm gonna shake him, I'm gonna point him in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

So, on that note, if you were to give real quick advice somebody trying to figure out what they want to do, what do they do?

SPEAKER_02 50:48

I tell everybody the same thing. I only take advice from somebody that is where I want to go. I don't take advice, so I'll give you an example. I don't take advice from a poor person if I want to be rich. All right? I don't take advice from somebody that's telling me well, I Googled it or I Gemini did it, I chat GBT it. This is what I think you should do to become a Navy SEAL, right? I'm going to the dude that has 150 Navy SEALs, 200 Navy SEALs, right? I'm going to the dude that got 400 pilots. What do I need to do? Here it is, right? The good thing is we got we got basically a study guide for everything now. Like I was telling you before we started, right? I got a whole study guide. I got a genius, maybe a whole study guide. Every aviation program in the United States military, I have the complete study guide for. It will get you a damn near 100 on the test, right? You got the remote right there, right? Yep. That's one of them things. Hey, man, you got to spend $300 and go buy that remote because that remote is going to allow you to win on the test. It is. And it's in the thing. First in the thing. Picture of it right there in the front thing. Hey, man, you got to buy this remote before you start this program. And so that's what I say to people because a lot of people, now with the internet, they don't think they got to ask for help or need mentorship.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Because they get, they get the Google, they get the Chat GPT that gives them a list of stuff. But what they don't understand is that's so surface level. It's like, yeah, they'll tell you this, but you don't know how deep that one bullet point, that's a deep bullet point that you got to get deep into to understand it. So, like, you know this, Kenny, you in the Air Force.

SPEAKER_02 52:24

Y'all don't take no pilots. Right? If you're gonna go fly in the Air Force, someone's gonna have to help you get in. They're not picking nobody off the street. They not, I don't care. You're not searching for nobody enough. If you can show up, I I I tell this story. I sent three African American females with 3.8 mechanical engineering degrees to the Air Force to fly, and the Air Force did not return their calls. Two of them are flying in the Navy right now. Okay. And so I tell people the mentorship and doing what you're supposed to do is only half of it. The next half is making sure that someone can open a door for you to get in where you want to go. There you go. Okay, like I told you, we had to help my kid at the C-17 squadron. Okay, there was a dude that has some stars on his shoulders that opened the door for us. You still got to perform away. And my guy ran through that door. And now what that allowed us to do, hey, do you have any other people? So now I got a couple other dudes that are going to fly C-17s, right? I got a couple other dudes that now, now we got the door open, okay? We're not gonna run through it. I tell everybody, I only send my best places.

SPEAKER_03 53:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:36

I'm not sending you some average poo-button, right? Like Naval Cabin. We ain't lost nobody in Naval Cabin. We lost one kid. We had another kid quit in 05, right? But like he had a 3.5 GPA and decided he wants to go hang sheet rock for the rest of his life. I don't know what you want me to do about that one, right? Like, like that's a hard one for me to take. Yeah. He's killing it and just decided he wants to hang sheet rock. And that's what he's been doing for 25 years now. You know? So you asked me about how to get a hold of me and all that stuff, understand the mentorship. Like, it's all about finding somebody that's been where you are, want to go, and then somebody that knows the path. Everybody asked me, how are you mentoring all these people in medical school? I said, listen, man. I got somebody who I got 17 dudes through medical school so far. Well, how are you doing that? I said, because I put them in contact with my doctors.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

And you know what? And that's like with Legacy Flight Academy, we do the same thing where it's like we have all these people that we mentor, and people call me, and the first thing I do is call this person. Yeah. Hey, call this person. Because this person, I may know a lot generically about a lot of things, but because I know that, I know the person that works at that school that you're trying to go to. I know the person that's going that exact path you're going to, and I connect you with that. Because I don't have all the answers, but I know how to get you there, and I know what doors need to be opened and who you need to talk to.

SPEAKER_02 54:54

And the other big piece of it, and I tell people this in the military, there's a hierarchy. So I tell people, I said, what you do when you come into our crew, you got protection at every level. Okay. So we had a kid down in Army Flight School stumbling a little bit. I hit the bat phone. Got the 81-year-old dude. I think I called you, right? And then we got we got an 81-year-old dude who's like, I got it, Jay. I got taken care of. Boom. Next thing I know, I'm on the phone with a light colonel. What you need? Here's the deal. He said, I'll be up there tomorrow. Showed up the next day, everybody was like, oh, okay. Young man got tightened up. All of a sudden everything smoothed out. So that's the other aspect of things in the military. You better have some top cover. So in the military, I tell everybody, but my guys get out. I need a five-year mentor, so a senior 03, I need a 10-year mentor, a senior 04, and I need an 06. Preferably one that's gonna make general. Because those guys, when I call about Kenny Thomas to the CEO of the command and say, hey, how's my boy Kenny Thomas doing for you? Oh, uh, that's your guy? Yeah, that's my guy. He's doing okay. What can I tell him to do better? Bill, you know what? Let me let me get back to you in a couple of weeks. Next thing you know, Kenny Thomas has got some people giving him some attention. And all of a sudden, what was bad is now good.

SPEAKER_00 56:26

And and you put it a really good way too, right? You didn't call, say, you said, how can he do better? Because at the end of the day, when you make that call, you're like, I'm trying to make sure that he works good for you so that y'all look good too. Instead of how people think you call and and you're like trying to talk down to people, what you're doing is I'm trying to make sure that you're how can I help improve his performance so that you have the product that you want from him.

SPEAKER_02 56:50

Absolutely, right? What because I I tell everybody, right? If someone would have got a hold of me in the SEAL teams, I I was not handling a bad leadership situation very well. Yeah. Okay. And if they had pulled me in and said, hey man, here's how you're messing this up, then I have to fix the problem. Right? Now, if I'm still getting fired and everything else, then it is what it is, right? But at the end of the day, my dude that was killing me got thrown out of the SEAL teams and got his trident taken. So they wouldn't have looked at me like the bad guy at all. They'd have been like, oh shit, Jake, Jake, good. We known it for three years, he's killing it. It was Keith Burney had the problem.

SPEAKER_00 57:28

Right. Right? But you but without having that, you don't have as much as people don't want to understand like the politics of it is people need to know that you're there for the team and that you got somebody that that's watching your business.

SPEAKER_02 57:40

And you're not there by yourself.

SPEAKER_00 57:42

Right.

SPEAKER_02 57:42

You're not there by yourself, right?

SPEAKER_00 57:44

I think about that, like when it comes to my kids, I needed to go to school so the people know somebody is watching these kids closely. So you ain't gonna do the same things you do to everybody else, because I got eyes on them. So I had a kid get in trouble.

SPEAKER_02 57:58

Uh December. Yeah. The phone rang, I answered it. The lady was like, as soon as she picked up, she said, Oh, this is vice principal. I said, someone in trouble. So put the phone on speaker. My wife, we work in the same office. She says, uh, so she's telling us a story. She about three sentences in the story. I said, I'll be there in four minutes. Pull up on the school four minutes later. I'm sitting in the office. I said, we have a little conversation. She said, uh, we gonna, you know, we got this in school suspension deal. In school suspension?

SPEAKER_01 58:39

What is that?

SPEAKER_02 58:40

Well, he'll sit in a room by himself, do all his homework, he won't go to class that day. I said, No, I want him to suspend it. What?

SPEAKER_01 58:49

Vice principal looked at me, she said, Well, what?

SPEAKER_02 58:54

I never had a parent ask for this. I said, That's fine, go talk to the principal, you know. I got a good relationship with her. Go let me know what I gotta do. He coming home with me. Yeah, because he got to get it. Right, if he's messing up, he ain't dealing with this easy way. Yeah, yeah. So, long story short, though, it was interesting. So I got him, right? We took him home. He had some, he had some physical labor to do, a lot of it. And I went back to school two days later. So he was out of school for one day, went back to school two days later, and I talked to the vice principal. She said, I've never had anybody come up here and care that much about their kid. And I said, Well, I said, I'm raising three different kids.

SPEAKER_01 59:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:34

And I said, You mean to tell me that you call parents and they don't She said, I call parents all the time. They say, Okay, that's fine, no problem. They say, Okay. In school suspend, okay. She said, I suspend the kid. They'd be like, okay, all right, no problem. Just send him home. She said, You showed up in four minutes. So yeah. So they know, right? And I got three of them. You know, and that's that whole thing. Like, you can't fake Karen.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:01

You cannot, they, you cannot fake it, man. Man, yeah, that's the truth. You can't fake it. Can't fake it, bro.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:08

Like, you either you either are about that life or you're not. You're not. That's it. You know, and I know for me, like I made a lot of concessions in my life to raise my three kids. And if I'm making concessions in my life to raise them, then I gotta make sure they're getting that 100%. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:25

Yo, I feel you. Man, man, it's been great, man. But I can sit here and talk. We talk for hours, man. Let's go, Kenny. Let's go, baby.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

You know, I hit everything in here cinnamon rolls, Starbucks coffee. I'm rolling, bro.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:38

I ain't coming here on low energy today. Oh, man. Well, shoot, man. That's our that's our time for the day, man. But we're gonna have to have you come back again. We're gonna have to definitely chop it up some more. There's so many things we we could, so many topics and so many things, and make sure everybody y'all check out, you know, check him out everywhere he's at, get on his talks on Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays. You know, this is the man right here. So hey, let me give a pub.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:01

I'm doing more public speaking. Okay. I kind of have my calendar blacked out for public speaking. I'm back. I took a took a couple events here in the next couple of months. I'm just gonna open it back up for public speaking opportunities. You know, I lay fire down. Okay. If you want low energy, I'm not your guy. Okay, but if you want to like fire, learn about leadership, life, mentorship, I'm your guy. So I'm opening that back up. I'm starting to do a little bit more of that now. And we headed down the tracks, bro. We're gonna be successful no matter what, and we're gonna grind it out. All right, there it is, man. Appreciate you. All right, Candy. Thank you, brother. Yeah.