John and Chris get cursed in Egypt EP 16 01:05:34

From the art of the deal to keeping it real. Keeping it real. Live from the Simply Vegas studios, it's The Power Move with Jon Gafford. The Power Move is back after our short Indiana Jones type hiatus. We're back. So jealous. Back again, but you should be jealous, Colt. You should be jealous. I'm not.

So if you have the first time tuning in, John Gafford, I am your host. With me to my left, Colt Amidon. What's going on, guys? And across from us, Chris Connell, Esquire. Chris. How you doing, guys? Man, I'm doing great. Now, I guess, is good. So, you know, I got to start with something. We'll start out with this. So the first thing I'm going to say is, you guys already know this, but we crossed a pretty good milestone. Pretty decent milestone.

We now have 10,000 people plus subscribed listening to this. To this? To this. And not like the Indian ClickBank farm or whatever it is. Is that a good thing though? That's 10,000 people that might try to cancel us. Now I'm getting a little nervous, guys. You're about to get grewed in the sun? No, no, no, no, no. Oh, what is that? And I got to tell you, of the 10,000 people that are listening to us, there's actually some decently qualified human beings.

including my sister, who is very successful in not necessarily just this medium, but in radio in general. She's one of the top female talk radio hosts in the country. She's on iHeart in Denver and does extremely well. And the first thing she tells me to congratulate me on how good the show is is she just goes, Colt's a star. Yeah.

I don't know if it's a backhanded compliment by your sister, but you know what she says to me? She goes, um, you say shit that I think, but I'd never say, is that good? No, I think it's exceptional, but you know, it's, it's funny when we do this and I listened back to some of the episodes and some of them drift into the abyss. But I think, especially if you're just listening to this for the first time, you know,

The goal here is to entertain you, obviously make you laugh, but we do drop a lot of actually good business knowledge that's going to help you in if you have a business, if you have a job, if you're in sales, if you're trying to get better. That's the end goal of what we're doing here. You talk about who we are. I own a very large real estate brokerage here in Las Vegas. We're completely vertically integrated. We own a very large mortgage company, title company, as well as mortgage and title companies across the country.

colt is one of the finest commercial real estate brokers i've ever met he's been in the business forever has forgotten more about that industry than anybody else and you're going to sound like the best uh movie no no well i mean that's the bonus we get a critic that's the that's the bonus we get and chris connell is an exceptional personal injury attorney um so if you have a personal injury case you know call chris it's not you can

Call Chris. 702 Connell. 702 Connell. I like to think less billboard, more lawyer. That should be your... Yeah. That should totally be your thing. That should be your... Less billboard, more lawyer. Less billboard, more lawyer. I like it. If your money is going towards buying billboards, maybe you should think about... Maybe. Maybe think about where it's going. But...

The reason that we're just back today is because obviously we were on a monster hiatus on our Indiana Jones adventure. And man, I got to tell you, it was, you know, again, if you didn't know what we were doing several months ago, Chris Connell, for those of you who don't know, is what we like to call a seeker. I am a seeker. An adventurist. They call me that. They call you that.

And he goes on all these cool adventures and does all this cool stuff. And at one point I say, man, you know, I want to go do some cool stuff too. So he goes, all right, bro. Then the next thing that comes up, you can't say no. I'm like, what? All right, cool. So like a month and a half ago, six weeks ago, he just essentially says, all right, time to go. You can't say no. Where are we going? Just say yes.

Like I had to say yes, I think before we actually even agreed as to what we were doing. Yeah. I didn't know where we were going. Smart move. Smart move. Strong move. So I was like, yeah, let's go. And it turns out we went to Cairo, Egypt, where Chris had somehow worked it out with the minister of antiquities to, to do what Chris, what do we do? To go on an actual archeological dig in Saqqara, the tomb of Wahati. The tomb of Wahati. The tomb of Wahati, the recently discovered, you can see it on Netflix, uh,

And we got to actually hang out with the guys on Netflix. Yeah, the dudes that were in the Netflix video was who we were hanging out with. That's who was showing us around Wahati's tomb, Tutankhamen's wet nurses. The nanny, yeah. The nanny. And then, you know, because hopefully this doesn't go anywhere past this, we actually got to see, you know, freshly discovered bodies.

mummies, mummies, a tomb looking for an entrance that you can't find yet. And you know, John and his supervisory role was there while Chris was swinging. I sat there, I'm like, is John doing anything other than just look at Chris? Okay. All right. Real quick. Real quick. Think back to the scene in Indiana Jones when they're about to discover the well of souls or wherever it is. Right. Okay. There's a bunch of dudes digging. I'm

I see Indy standing around the sunset putting his hat on. He ain't digging. Look, that's the labor. But speaking of Indy, we were dropped into a hole on a rope. Yes. And it's not – See, and I would have gone – I told John I'd have gone first. No, no. You second because I – whatever.

What if he'd have loosened up the bolts? I don't even know if there were bolts. This thing, you're telling me in 2021, they couldn't get a better rig? You're talking about five dudes on it. Oh, yeah. Lowering you down a 60-foot shaft on a rope with a foot in a basket. It wasn't a bucket. It was a woven basket. I watched that, and I'm like...

How did they not spend $1,000 and get the metal one? I mean, this thing, honestly, I wish people would go back. Have you ever been to a third world country? No, he hasn't. Just from that one statement alone, like, why did I not make the investment in something better? I feel like somebody could have donated that. No.

But anyway, it was unreal. It actually surpassed my expectations of what I thought we were going to do. I thought we'd get to maybe throw around some shovels, pick up some pottery, be like, wow, this is 4,500 years old. It was like, hey, welcome to the site. The guy's dusting off mummies that they've just discovered reading the hieroglyphics in live time. I was jealous that you guys were going, and then I saw your videos, and I was just like, wow. I don't.

It was crazy. I'll tell you this. The Dubai part of it, the In-N-Out Anthony Bourdain Power Dubai thing. So we get to Dubai. I remember we told you this, Colt. We get to Dubai. And literally, it's Anthony Bourdain. We got 16 hours. We're like, let's bang it all out. So we're just jumping on apps or whatever, trying to find places to go. The first bar we go to, best bar in Dubai, closed. Not open. It's open.

So then we're like, all right, let's, let's rip over to, you're going to love this part. So then we walk over to Trader Vic's. We walk up, guess what night it is? Latin night. Guess who's not hanging out for Latin night? These two guys. Wait, you got this out on the epic. That probably would have surpassed the mummy. No, no. So we bail on, we bail on Latin night. And then we're just like, okay, here's this bar.

The Red Bar at the Moscow Hotel. Sounds cool. Let's go. Yeah, the Red Room at the Moscow Hotel. Red Room at the Moscow Hotel. We're like, cool, Russian hotel. Let's go. This is going to be great. Right? We get there.

walk into a bar there's 200 people in this but first of all we get met at the door by igor igor and igor wants to get paid and john's like well we're i guess we have to like tip the doorman he's like it'll be you know 100 bucks each or whatever yeah and okay so we go to pay him he's like no no pay the door yeah no no no you thought it was like you pay with credit cards we felt like it was a shakedown like you got to tip me to get in here no see i feel like igor's like a cool feeling name

It's like an Arabic Igor, but who knows? Anyway, so we get in and we go in this bar. There's 200 people in this bar. Very quickly, we realize the guy to girl ratio is a little off. Good off or bad off? Which is always a sign that you're not probably in the right place. You're probably not in the right place. So we very quickly realize there's about 80 guys in there, probably 60 of which are

are like Dubai guys, like Middle Eastern guys, 20 of which are Russian gangsters. Oh, yeah. And 120 women that were all either Armenian or Russian prostitutes.

Invariably. So how did the rest of that go? Two Americans. Well, we had already paid for the drink. So you had to sit down and have your drink. So I'm like, this is going to make... So I immediately ascertained a couple of things. Number one, it's kind of like... Number one, I figured out... This is what I processed in my head very quickly. It's like, number one...

It's that weird across the room stare you get at strip clubs when they're like looking at you like they're going to come over and try to hit you for a table dance. You're like looking at your shoes or your watch the whole time trying to avoid that. And then I very also quickly realized that at some point these Russian gangsters are going to hit us with the, why you come in here? If you don't, you come in here to look at your shoes, why are you here?

so very quickly we're pounding these drinks down as quick as we can assuming they were what they were supposed to be john's lesson from that was not only one now he knows how he would do in a in a prison shower situation yeah terrible not good terrible eyes down good yeah terrible eyes down no eye contact second thing is read trip advisor before you go because as soon as we walk out we pull up trip advisor for this bar and it just says it really said that

discotheque for prostitutes. So that's hilarious. Yeah. You guys remember before that bar, what you guys did? Yeah. We walked out on Latin night. No, you guys called me. Oh, did we call you? Yeah. You guys called me. It was like midnight over there. It's noon. I'm having lunch with the client and I get a call from these two and I'm like, Oh shit. Something's bad. It's like midnight one o'clock. What's going on? They're calling me.

Hey, top five sandwiches, which I think we need to go over that in the second half of this because I don't even know where that came from, but I love this list. So next, after this first segment, we can get into the list of my top five sandwiches. No, I mean, Colt, why not now? What's your top five sandwiches? Oh my gosh.

Number five, just that classic country club club. You know, that big three-decker. That thing's phenomenal. Can you ever eat a whole one of those? I don't think you can. Number four would just be a classic, like, meatball hoagie. That's number four. Three, a grilled Italian panini. That's number three.

Number two, grilled cheese with a cup of tomato soup. We went over that. We got to hit that one. Number one is a chicken parm anything. Bagel Mania has a chicken parm. You'll appreciate this. Yeah. On top of a pretzel bagel. Oh,

That's impressive. Oh, my gosh. That's Colt Top 5. Bagel Mania, if you want to give me a free drink for that. It's a lot better than your movies. So anyway, if you just tuned in here at Colt's Top 5 Sandwiches, you can go and tune out now. But back to the Egypt trip, Colt, if that's okay with you. That's all right. I thought that was interesting. I thought you guys were really held hostage. And I'm like, get my credit card out. Like, what's going on?

No, you weren't. You were planning podcast guests. I'm like, hell yeah. You thought the takeover was about to be complete. The power move with Colt Amidon. Super nice ring coves. So anyway, so we leave. Other than that, Dubai, we just kind of bounced around in Sightsaw and we couldn't do anything we wanted to do. We went to the top of the Burj. Actually, midpoint of Burj Khalifa. It was way up there, but we did the midpoint of that. We tried to go shark diving. They wouldn't let us do it because we had to fly.

And then what else did we try to do? We tried to go skiing at the indoor mall. Yeah. And it was just, we didn't have time. You know, to John's credit, everyone, if you want to travel with somebody that's actually about stuff, call John, go with him. There's a lot of people in this world. You go places like, Oh, well, can we go here first? I got it. And John's like,

Hey, there's a ski hill indoors. We have 35 minutes. How much is it? $200 each. Let's go. We're only here once. Let's probably try to go skiing. Let's go. By the time we put our like, you know, booties on. You got to turn around. I think from the whole trip, the thing that I must've said more than anything else was when we'd be dead tired, hadn't slept like jet lag, like crazy three hours drinking 1% alcohol beer, whatever it was. And I'm just like, I look at Connell. I just say, Connell right here.

Right here. This is when our competition quits. This is when they quit. We're not going to quit. We're going to push through. This is when they would give up. Not us. Oh, man. Was Dubai pretty impressive? Amazing. It's impressive. It's a first world situation with a lot of third world, you know, sort of realities and attitudes. So, yeah.

The dark secret of Dubai is it's basically built on slave wages, slavery, like effective human slavery and trafficking goes through there. A lot of Pakistani and Indian, I think 50% of the people that live there are from the Indian subcontinent. And a lot of things, employers, there was allegations that they'd go and work and they wouldn't give them their passports until this, that, and the other. Oh, God. Wow. It's got a dark history of how it got made, kind of like the pyramids. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the building was amazing all the way up. But I will tell you this. We skipped over one of the most important parts, the flight. Oh, yeah. Look, and we're going to talk about this. This is going to segue out. We're going to bounce in and out because I do want to talk about something real quick. This is going to jump in, which is crisis management in business. If you're listening to this, we're going to jump into this because this is a good point because we flew over to Emirates. We flew there on Emirates.

And man, that business class, I would rather do a 15 hour flight on Emirates business class. - Than a two hour on Spirit. - Than a two hour on Spirit, any day of the week. It was, I mean there's a bar in the back, you can walk up and just hang around the bar like you're at a bar. - Absolutely. - It was crazy. The food was amazing and it was just, I mean honestly,

And the wine list was amazing. I don't even remember, like we were pounding wine in the Emirates Lounge in LA. Just pounding. That's the other thing too, right? You get the use of lounges. Yeah. It makes the travel experience. So much better. How often do you travel in a year, a big trip like that once? And people, they kind of skimp on maybe that part of the experience. I'd rather have a crappier hotel and a nicer flight. Well, I was going to say, you can't though, because you realize that you were there a little longer than I was.

than I was. But the time that I was gone, 33% of the time that I was there, I was traveling to either get there or come back. Right. Over a seven-day period. That's a lot of travel. But that brings me to this point about crisis management because there was a little crisis this weekend with Southwest, and I was directly affected by that. And so if you didn't hear, look, I don't know what it was. I don't know if it was a planned walkout amongst the pilots. I don't know if it was Southwest planning

doing something internally. I don't know what it was. It was the weather. No, it was not the weather, but whatever it was, it was handled incredibly poorly for thousands of Southwest flights got canceled. This weekend we took our kids back down to Anaheim. Yes. I went to Disneyland again against my better judgment, but it was for a trick or treat thing. So it was limited people in there and it was actually very, very nice. But when we flew down there, we're on the plane going down there and a lady that was some older lady was sitting next to my wife and you know, she was like,

I'm trying to get to Florida. They keep canceling my flights. And the flight attendant was like, yeah, the weather's been very bad. It's been very bad. And the lady's like, looks at my watch and goes, that's fake news. And we immediately thought, this lady's off a rocker. Fake news about the weather. Turns out it was fake news. Because they were just making this stuff up about everything. So anyway, we go down there so much to Orange County that I just didn't have an immediate drive again. So I'm like, here's what I'm going to start doing. Fly drive, fly drive. We'll go back and forth. Tickets are dirt cheap to get back and forth. Sure.

So we did an Orange County. We do our thing.

Last day, which is yesterday, we're coming back and I'm looking at the flights and it got delayed. Right. I'm like, not feel good about this. And then we're there a little bit later. Got delayed a little later. I said, babe, the Southwest flight's going to get canceled for sure. This is done. So I'm like, let's, let's get ahead of this. So we went ahead and we canceled the Southwest flight. We killed that one. And then as soon as we killed that one, we turned around and booked against, again, my better judgment, we booked Spirit.

because they had a flight. I'm like, ha ha, I win. So anyway, spirit starts pushing our flight just because, I mean, they're just spirit. That's just what they do. That's not any outages. No, no, no, no. That's just what they do. So we ended up having to rent a car last night at like 10 o'clock to drive back from Orange County because my kids at school today. But that was probably the best move ever. I sat there, I lost power last night.

these planes seriously moving a hundred yards in the air. I'm like, they were, and you would just see them keep circling and trying to make that. It was a crazy windstorm. It was, it was humming. Even driving the RAV4, which was, we had the four banger just wound out on the way back. Three and a half hours back from, from SNA to here, which is pretty good. Yeah. But,

My thing was this. Like, look, dude, one of two things happened. Either the pilots knew they were going to do this or Southwest knew this was coming. Sure. Either way, you have got to warn your customer base that there's going to be a problem. You can't be surprised that this happened. I mean, I understand because here's the deal now. If it was the pilots, I'm mad at the pilots. But to punish the pilots because I can no longer count on Southwest because they knew this was coming. Either the pilots knew or the company knew. They didn't tell me.

So now I'm going to take my money elsewhere and hopefully Southwest loses money and puts the pilots out of business anyway. So Southwest is a garbage airline. It is possibly my least favorite airline to fly. My wife loves it. People love it.

But there's this thing, they did such a good job in the beginning of developing a good reputation for customer service that it still lingers because airlines are so traditionally bad at providing customer service, right? It's just, if you're not on an elite, if you're not on Etihad or Emirates or something that has a reputation to maintain, they really couldn't care less, right? So Southwest had developed this lingering reputation. You always hear that it takes a moment to ruin a reputation, but it doesn't in airlines for some reason.

I don't know how Allegiant's still in business. Spirit's still in business. Well, if I'm Allegiant today, I am literally licking my chops today. So management of those companies got so lean, they tried to make everything cost-effective, cost-effective, cost-cutting, cost-cutting. It's a profit-driven center, right? So Southwest was riding on that reputation for a long time.

But it's gone now. They've failed themselves. Herb Keller had that as one of his driving principles of customer service. And the airline back then did, it focused on that. When's the last time you got on a Spirit Airline flight where they actually did any of those things they used to do that were customer service oriented?

It's been years. Yeah, I can't remember. And Southwest also, the last crash and then the oil crisis and everything, they bought their gas out for so many years. They were able to do $49 flights, which just kept them alive. But, you know, there's no way in hell that...

It did not get linked, leaked to the upper management that this was going on. There's no way. People are like, they were shocked. They didn't know. There's absolutely, there's out of thousands of pilots, there's going to be that one. Hey, just FYI, this is going down. Zero chance. Remember, save me in your grace. That was way too organized of an event for them not to know about it. But to your point, John, it's a great point. Nobody, when I was waiting for my flight back, because I had a similar thing, I flew back a couple of days later than John. Mm-hmm.

and spent another night in Dubai, but I flew back on a Southwest flight from Los Angeles here, and my plane was delayed. It was my 21st hour of flying that day, and it was delayed and delayed, but it was delayed like an hour or something. But that's it, and it's fine. I don't care. I'm not a fussy flyer, and I put up with time delays, but why not communicate? Not a single moment were they ever saying, hey,

We're experiencing issues right now. There have been delays. I'll try to keep you updated, but this is what's happening. This is the information I have. At no point did they do that. They just let us line up and sit there, delayed,

for an hour. People are standing there waiting to board and everybody's like, "What the hell is going on?" - Well listen, right now we are in the midst of a global supply chain issue. Which is affecting pretty much if you're in any type of a business, somewhere somehow you're feeling that. Right now I have a situation here at the company. And again, back to how to deal with crisis.

Where we have one of our buildings next door, the ACs are just tanked. They're just cooked. Thank God it happened today and not in June when it's there. It's going to take 10 weeks to get the ACs. It's going to cost 20 grand to fix them or to replace them. I got to spend 20,000 bucks to replace these things in 10 weeks. I don't care about any of that. What I care about is the people that have to work in that building every day.

So I've been walking over there every single day telling these people, and keep in mind, this is a real estate company. The agents are choosing to work with us. They're not employees. They're independent contractors. They can take their license anywhere they want. They choose to work with us. So I'm over there every day saying, guys, here's where we are. Right. Right? Like, here's the bids. Let me show you this. I am doing everything I personally can to get this done. Literally, if it gets hot again, I will break one of the windows out. We'll put a wall in it. Right. Like, I don't even care. Right.

I'm going to do whatever we can to make it done. But I'm communicating the issue in a way that makes sense back. I'm not throwing my hands up going, sorry, guys, COVID, it's just taking too long. I'm like, here's a global supply problem. Here's how this works. These come from China. They have to get on a boat. There's a backup at Long Beach that goes all the way down to Newport Beach for the port. They can't get stuff off the boats. It's a 10-week backup to get the units. This is where we are. So I'm just not –

Sorry. You know, you're just not doing that. You look at Southwest, I mean, especially on a Sunday, NFL Sunday, people don't realize there are a lot of people that travel for these games. Sure. And so not only are they pissed because maybe it cost them a couple hundred bucks that they'll get back, but no, they missed out on selling their tickets for $600, $700 to $1,000. If you'd have told them 12 hours ago, hey, this is going to happen, they'd have been like,

okay they could either a find a different airline or b sell their tickets like you're better off of just being upfront and honest i always tell people

You will not know if there's a problem unless it's a problem I know is going to be an issue. Yeah. That can't be fixed. And if you know you're having a walkout, there's no way in hell you're fixing that in 24 hours. Then you tell people. Let's say they didn't know. No, there's no way. There's no way. Give them the... Suspend disbelief. All right. Suspend disbelief. Let's say they didn't know. Don't come up with the weather. At the end of the day, come up...

Tell me after what's happening. Why the fuck is this happening? Yeah. Even if you didn't know, right? The weather was a pretty piss poor experience. Especially when it was windy. No, it was beautiful weather except for like maybe 0.5% of the country. You cannot blame. You can't blame that one. All your hubs, it's all. No.

Not when Delta is showing up and United's come rolling in. Everybody's at point, point or 2% of, you know, flights canceled and you're at what? 30%. Yeah. I just, you know, again, moral story is communication is the key to your customers and treat your customers like you might actually lose them. And so many people right now are just not doing that.

I mean, for example, I, you know, and again, guys, this is not, I don't want you to think that our podcast is designed for me to just sit here and just complain about businesses. Cause it's not, except for you Chili's, you Chili's Salt Lake city. I will always complain about you and your suck ass service. But anyway, no, the, the point, like I go through McDonald's the other day. Right. And I have an imaginary blacklist where if you just completely, if you do me wrong or, you know, cause I learned from my mistakes. If I touch the stove and it's hot, I'm not going to touch it again. Right. Right.

So the McDonald's right down here, right down for the business. I'm not a huge McDonald's person, but my kid kicked ass at lacrosse practice the other day. He's like, I want McDonald's, buddy. You earned it. Whatever, whatever you want that he's got you covered. There's a time and a place for McDonald's time and a place, right? We're going to get to that too. Talk about that. We'll talk about Disneyland anyway. So, uh,

We go through McDonald's drive-thru. It's one of those ones. Now they have a double lane one where you're trapped. Right. I got you trapped. So now I'm trapped. From the time I got in that line to the point where I could knock it out, it was 45 minutes till I got my food. From the time I ordered my food at the little, at the little thing to the time I got four cards ahead to pick it up was 17 minutes. So me having history in the restaurant business, I called the manager and I said, Hey, um,

17 minute ticket times the drive-thru dude. He goes, yeah, we only got six people. And I'm like, just don't run out there. Why don't you close one of these lanes where only so many people can get through? So me as a consumer can look at it and go, all the lines too long. We're not going to go there. Save 45 minutes of my life rather than trapping me and having me furious and everyone to come back. And his response was, they won't let me do that. Right. And I said, who's they? And he goes, corporate day. Yeah.

And I said, okay. Well, you know why? Those are designed to keep you in. To trap you. They're designed to trap you. Yeah. They have more funneling. If you notice, why do you need to, it's not the parking. They actually had to negotiate that and pay higher in their lease for that.

Yeah. Right? How many parking spots did they have to give up? You know when you develop. No. How many parking spaces are at a premium in malls? But you do that. But you look at it this way. So you go to restaurants, though, and you see a bunch of tables that are open. You're like, can I get a table before they're going to be 15 minutes? Yeah. It's because they don't have the staff to take care of you. Everybody's short staff right now. Everybody is. So if you are in a business, only, again, crisis management.

If you're short staffed, only taking the amount of customers you can actually serve at a high level. Don't bring in a bunch of people, piss them off. It doesn't make any sense to do it that way.

If you are having a crisis, a supply chain, you can't get your product. You can't get something people need. You need to be honest with them. You need to tell them what's going on and you need to let them know what's going to be a problem before it's a problem. Because for example, Chris, if you need widgets to run your business and I sell widgets and my widgets happen to be tied up, if I tell you, Hey, look, here's the deal. My widgets are tied up on a thing. I need you to find another widget supplier for the next month. But when I come back and I get my widgets, I'm going to give you a great deal and get your business back. Right.

I have taken care of you as a customer. I'm risking losing you. But if you run into widgets and you can't do your business, I'm guaranteed I'm going to lose you. So that's what I have to say about widgets, and that's what I have to say about that. But I will say this as we jump all over the place today. I'm going to save that for episode two. Let's wrap up Egypt. We've got about four minutes left for this, but I will say this. All the stuff we saw in Egypt, and there was a lot we saw, is primarily one thing, and here's what I learned.

Number one, let's talk about your takeaways. Remember what? Driving was insane. There's 3 million people, four traffic lights, and- There's 21 million people. I'm sorry, 21 million people. There's literally four traffic lights. It's the population of New York in a city with no traffic lights. Really? Yes. Think about that. Survival-

You learn to survive. It's spawning upstream, Sam. Yeah, it is. That's what it looks like. It's like salmon spawning upstream. And at one point, a guy came flying by us on a motorcycle. Heisman. A straight-up Honda with a probably four-year-old on the front, his wife behind him carrying a baby like the Heisman football driver. Wow. Yeah. We saw a kid get hit. We saw a kid get hit.

He was off to the side with the bloody face and all this stuff. And people were just like, get that, get off the road. That was your fault for being in the road. And we asked our handler guy, we said, dude, you know, cause all the cars are just banged up. Everybody's just got bang fenders and bang tents. I said, do you guys even stop if there's a wreck? He's like, excuse me.

We are not uncivilized. Of course we stop. We stop and we fight. We fight each other. And he goes, and then someone that sees it says, no, it was this man's fault. And he goes, and then we decide how much it costs. And then we pay each other. Pay him right there. Pay him, we're done. Really? So shout out to Hussein, by the way. Shout out to Hussein. Amazing. I'll put a link to him in the bio here for what you want to see. Hussein, if you want to go to Egypt, that's your guy. I was talking to JJ, the guy that helped us set up this trip up, and we can deal with that later about that kind of thing.

but he goes, I need a Hussein everywhere. Yeah, no kidding. You need a Hussein sometimes. Everybody needs a Hussein. Our man in Egypt was great. So the traffic was incredible. The level of abject poverty in that country. Remarkable. Remarkable in the fact that those people are just living and existing in that level of poverty. I mean, it's bad. And the point being is when I saw that, I immediately thought, if you are lucky enough to live in this great country that we live in,

I don't care if you're dumb enough to put, you know, you can argue with the politicians all you want. You can, you can hate on, you can do what you want. If you are God lucky enough to live in this country, you have absolutely nothing to complain about. You won't realize that though until, until you see how bad it is for the majority of human beings. Yeah. I mean like the fact that we can chew our eyes.

Drink our water. Well, that was a whole nother thing, but no, but I simple simplistic. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Well, here's the one caveat to that, John. You go to Dubai airport, then you go to Cairo airport, then you land in LAX and that piece of shit. You go...

Where am I? Where am I? I thought I was just deceiving third world countries. But no, Egypt is a remarkable, fascinating place full of treasures from an ancient civilization. Thousands of years ago, they were doing things that were beyond remarkable. It's not aliens. No. Literally, you go, John, you see how they did stuff over time. They have the evolution of pyramids there. It wasn't somebody dropping one down. That's the dumbest thing you ever heard once you go see it. But

to the point about poverty and about appreciating what you do have,

There's nothing more you should invest in than a trip to a third world country and really go see it because a lot of those people are very happy anyway, yeah They're not they're living their lives. They live it. They're just they don't need your sympathy. They don't need your whatever Well, it's just like it's you don't realize how little I didn't need. Yeah. Yeah, you don't need a lot. You want a lot? Yeah. Yeah, well, that's what you want. My wife grew up super poor super poor like

crazy poor for American standards. Not that right. But she goes, everybody else was super poor around us. Like you don't know any better at that point. And like I said, people confuse wants and needs all the time. Yeah. And in this concept that people like, yeah,

the government should pay for, you know, they should pay for my student debt. Dude, be happy you got to go to school. And I'm not talking about college. I'm talking about like elementary school. Right. It's just like clean without, you know what I mean? You go to other places too in India, you see people amputated. You see, like there's all of these issues that we don't face, right? You're so cocooned from the reality of how this planet actually works. Yeah. In a lot of ways.

in a lot of ways. Now there's other countries that do things well, and I'm not saying be complacent, right? You can always improve. You should always want to improve your system. - But you know the thing I love the most about Hussein was, we talked about this, was Hussein believes in his country. He loves his country. This is a guy that's a little bit short of a PhD in Egyptology, super bright guy, and obviously very much care, like he has, he's had opportunities to go to London and work there and do his thing there. And he doesn't want to leave his country. He believes in his country.

which I love about him. So let's take a quick break. We're going to pick up more about Egypt. We're also going to talk about a couple of things, including just all kinds of stuff. You know, I want to talk about parents' responsibility in the weight of their children because obviously I was at Disneyland this weekend. And yeah, let's talk about that.

Hey, it's John Gafford. If you want to catch up more and see what we're doing, you can always go to thejohngafford.com where we'll share any links that we have things we talked about on the show, as well as links to the YouTube where you can watch us live. And if you want to catch up with me on Instagram, you can always follow me at thejohngafford. I'm here. Give me a shout. Back again from the break. Back again. Guys, did I even tell you? Did we talk about our subscriber count? Did I even mention that? Yeah. Yeah. Did I tell you how many we have now?

Did I tell you? No. No. God, you know, it's funny. I started at the beginning of the show. I was going to mention that, and I forgot to even tell you what it was. We have surpassed 10,000 subscribers. Amazing. 10,000 people. Thanks, Colt. I know. We're listening to this. 10,000 people are listening to the, are tuning in weekly to listen to the mind of Colt. Yeah.

Like I said, he's the DJ Khaled of the podcast. It is. Another one. He really is. If you want your podcast to blow up, you should really just have Colton for a while, and then there you go. You look at what happens. Yeah, 45 minutes. No, but here's the thing. I got friends in the podcast game, if you will, like my buddy Travis Chappell. I was talking to him. He's got a really highly rated podcast.

podcasts on Apple. And I, and I said to him, I go, bro, I said, you know, we're just past 10,000 subscribers. How, like, how is that? He goes, how many episodes do you have? I'm like, I think we're recording like 14 or 15 now. He's like, dude, that's amazing. That's great. So yeah, man, I just, I hope you guys are entertained. I hope you guys are listening. I hope you're entertained. I hope you're picking up some, some, some helpful stuff in life and business and everything else. Cause that really is why we're doing this and what we're doing here, but back to Disneyland, back to Disneyland. So I got to tell you, man,

When I was at my mastermind group last time, and one of the guys was up there was talking about mastering mind, spirit, and body, and the whole deal, right? And he said, like, if you go to an airport and you look at like 100 people, you know, 80 of them will be terrible, and 10 of them will be somewhat in shape, and five of them will be really, and then there's like maybe one or two people out of that 100 that are like, that dude's really in shape. He's like, that's what you want to be when you get there. Anyway,

So as I'm at Disneyland, I'm sitting there at one point. I'm just like, I just picked a line in the abyss, right? And I said, I bet it crosses. This is going to be mine. This is going to be the line, right? I just want to see what we're working with here as America. Let's get 100% samples that we're doing.

i saw not one super fit person now great you are in disneyland yeah well hang on well let's be defensive i'm not i'm not dude i'm not super in shape i'm not i'm not i'm not i don't have an eight pack i'm not ripped but i don't feel that myself i don't look at myself as obese either and i'm not based on the bmi scale i'm not but as i look at this like if you're an adult you want to be super chunky man that's your business you want to eat cheetos all day yeah that's your business but here's here's my issue my issue is this

So many of the kids that I saw were, I mean, you would just consider them obese by any like dangerously pediatric diabetes type of ease. So my question is, my question is twofold. And we're gonna talk about this. My question is number one, what is the parents responsibility and the way to the kids and how much is the current climate?

of you're beautiful just the way you are, love yourself, everybody's perfect. How much is that actually, or is it, damaging kids in the long run? So to answer the first part, it is 100% parents' responsibility for the weight of their children. We've started to watch, see things like weight in this country as something...

subjectively problematic. It is an objectively problematic thing. 100%. It's not a matter of

you're beautiful. You're this and that. Yeah, you are. You're a great person. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, but optimize your health, optimize your body. And then you'll get the apologists that'll say, well, there can be a healthy fat people. It's like, yeah, but it's not good for your joints. It's like Norm MacDonald with the talk about smoking. Well, what about that one guy, uh, Ned, uh, Heiderson that led to be 85. He smoked every day. It's ridiculous. Like, uh, John and I would talk about it. I I'm, I'm an athlete. I've been a lifetime athlete. I'm

I'm currently on a process of lifting as heavy as I've ever lifted. But I'm in the gym three days a week on top of other stuff. So I'm on my program for what I'm trying to accomplish. Now there'll be a point where I'll lean down. But I'm 41. I'm not beholden to anybody. My body shape is something I work on and I figure it out. But as children, they're not buying their groceries. They're not the ones doing it. It is an absolute parental responsibility. Now, John, to your point, I've been to Tokyo Disneyland.

Okay. At Tokyo Disneyland. I've been to American Disneyland, obviously, several times. And then I went to Tokyo Disneyland. You want to talk about a human experiment? Yeah. They thought you were a character. Oh, it's Shrek. No, they definitely. No. It's something about the Japanese I've always really, really appreciated. They are amazing in terms of just how they operate. Their daily lives I've never felt more.

I've never felt like I fit in a place better because fast people are on the left and slow people are on the right. It's just assumed. Get the hell out of people's way. You're considerate of others. They are world class in being considerate of others. There's no garbage cans in Disney. There's no garbage cans in Japan. People just don't create waste. They just don't. They don't litter.

I would eat off the floor of a bathroom in Disneyland Tokyo. It is spotless. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. You would not understand it. You go and it looks the same as American Disneyland. There's a Tower of Terror. There's all these things. But everybody's standing in line politely.

Now, I always use this as an analogy. You get that big fat guy in Disneyland who's stomping and waddling up on a cart, who's grotesquely obese, and who's just taking up more space than usual and unaware of other people. And then you go to Tokyo Disney, and it's everybody politely in the line that they should be in. Exactly. Perfectly straight. Or playing nicely with each other. Phenomenal. It is remarkable. So you see those children. Not a single one is obese.

Not a single one of them. So it's pure lifestyle. It's pure habits, pure how we operate. They have tablets too. They're not without technology. But I don't know what it is. Do you know, well, so I was having dinner with some family in from, I have some family from Lebanon. And we're in the restaurant. It's a quiet restaurant. They're like, everybody here is fine.

yelled it loud and i just sat there a golden crowd no it was a nice restaurant right and i just sat there and i looked around and i'm like i mean yeah i guess they are overweight and then they called me two days later and they're like do you know why everybody's fat there we just went to a grocery store you guys have like four aisles of nothing but sugar foods and stuff they go you'll never see that it

Which was crazy to think of that. But the whole kid thing, it's a really touchy subject with people because my kid was a little overweight, right? And so I had to deal with this. And when I would be there at a restaurant or around a group of people and tell my son, hey, that's probably enough. You don't want to overeat. And I'd say it nicely. People would give me the evilest looks like, you're being mean to your kid. You're calling him fat. And I'm like...

And I used to pull him aside. I never called him fat. I go, it's an unhealthy weight is the word I use. I go, and the only reason I wanted to...

say this, I don't care about appearances. I care about you when you're 30. I care about you when you're 50, you when you're 60. And this goes for me. And it took him a while, but he's dropped a lot of weight now. And my daughter, you could give her everything she's got, metabolism, a burn. But the way people would pull me aside and go, you can't do that to your kid. I go, what, you want me to let him be overweight and have a health issue and confidence issue? Confidence. My dad would just be like,

put the food down your fat like it was very very direct so but i i would i'd get nasty looks i had multiple people be like i can't believe you do that to your kids he's a kid i'm like 13 years old he's 15 years old our hormonal changes absolutely well and let's and let's back up like

Because my kids have undefined short stature of which they get HGH every day. I know people probably like, oh my gosh, that's crazy. You're like six feet a million and your wife's 5'10". But yes, they do. You have to shoot them up with HGH and it has nothing to do with how tall they are. It has to do with their hearts or lungs, all that stuff coming together as it is. And when we go to the endocrinologist, you see some very heavy kids there. And some of that is genetic issues with the kids. So there are exceptions. But the problem is, I think...

in some cases from what I saw, like I'm watching the parents diet, watching what they're eating at Disneyland and they're mirroring it. And it's not even, it's not even a thought process to what's going on. And I just think it's, I think, I think just like poverty is a generational problem. Right. I think obesity in this country is rapidly also becoming a generational problem. You learn these habits from, from your parents. And I think, you know, it's just, it's amazing to me that,

I pride myself in being a pretty good parent, but some of the lessons that some of these parents are teaching their kids is just nuts. Not even about food. Like, okay, case in point yesterday, um,

We go to, what was it? We had some time to kill because obviously our flight got delayed. We had some time to kill, so we went to Knott's Berry Farm yesterday, right? And I'm like, okay, we got four hours or whatever we had there. We got to blaze this through. We got to get it done. So they have like a FastPass thing, whatever you can buy. And it's not cheap. And God bless, I'm in a situation where I can do that, right? And so we bought the FastPass thing. Like, no, you just go to like this side little thing, FastPass. And as we walk up,

as we're waiting in line to buy the fast pass thing, there's a long line at guest services and I couldn't figure out what was going on. Everybody's going to guest services and they kept walking away with these blue sheets, sheets of blue paper. I'm like, okay. And as we got in line to go with our fast pass, everybody in front of us had the blue paper. And I very quickly figured out what the blue paper was. It was, I'm handicapped. And dude, my, when you, okay, listen, if you fake being handicapped for any reason, yeah,

I'm going to tell you right now, it may sound terrible. I hope you become handicapped in some way. To the point where I told my wife, I said, here's what we need to do. We need to write a horror movie where a bunch of teenage kids go to the fun park during fright nights, fake to be handicapped so they can get, and then the killer doesn't kill them, maims them all. Yeah. Mames every last one of them. I mean, it's just such a piece of shit move. And dude, and I'm not talking about like three people. You're talking about,

Tons of people were doing this. I will be honest with you, my wife...

This is a terrible thing. My wife slipped and broke her ankle chasing after a two-year-old. And so we've been going to the Raiders games with her boot on. And it's like VIP treatment. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's acceptable. Thankfully that there is, you know, the facilities and things like that have. But it's, okay. You actually have. Of course. Yeah, you have a reason. We were at Gray Wolf Lodge because that's where we stayed because the kids want to stay at the water place. I mean, if you've ever been there, it's a cool place, whatever.

And my wife is on a, is on a raft with my daughter on one of the slides, sticks her foot out. Cause my wife is, you know, she not the not clumsiest person in the world. She sticks her foot out to try to stop them and stuck her foot in a great and rip two of her toenails completely off. Oh, geez. She did that. We went to Disney that night and then we went to not to reform the next day. And she never even thought about saying, I need to get like a, I'm a handicap thing. She's a, she's a good human being. Yeah. Yeah. Because she just, it just, it,

Yeah, if you yeah if you do that if you're ever with a handicapped person though God and so you know how there's people that will park in those white hash lines beside hand you can't that's so that doors can open a piece in their wheelchair wheelchair if you've never been John this goes back to people not a real country shading stuff Yeah, if you've never been somewhere where there's abject poverty, you don't understand what it is experienced having somebody who's been you know disabled in some yes, right and

your able-bodied experience, I know you don't want to wait that extra five minutes to do whatever and you want it now because you're a petulant child, you know,

At the end of the day, you may be in a position, like you said, I don't wish anything upon people, but you may be in a position one day where you become legitimately handicapped, and only then will you truly understand why these things exist for people that are... I dated a girl at 18 years old, and you're at that young punk age still, right? Her dad had major MS. Yeah.

Right. And the one thing he sat there, I was like, ah, I'll be a while. Cause he parked in a handicap and I was pulling up and I go, I'll be a bit, the parking lot's packed. Uh, I might have to walk across the damn, you know, street and go park over there. And he goes,

Just remember, I would love to be able to do that. And that comment changed my life. Like I great. I need to stay in line for four hours. God bless that. I'm able to stand for four hours. Right. Like that's like working out too, though. Instead of I got, I got to work out today. I get to, I get to work. I got to work out. No, I mean, you know, we were one of my wife's dear friends, uh,

Her daughter just went through like the Walker Walker with the, with the kids during the fight. My, one of my wife's friends from high school, her daughter had that same exact cancer and just got cleared from it. Like, Oh good. A month ago till two days ago. Oh,

And she needed brain surgery. So, you know, she went through brain surgery yesterday. She's out now. She's stable. She's fine. And, but the point being is all day yesterday, it's like anything that inconvenience, the flight's getting canceled, all of this stuff that did get inconvenienced. It's like, dude, at least neither one of my kids is in brain surgery right now. Yeah. Yeah. If you can, it's hard to keep that perspective though. You know, people, um, and this goes to business, this goes to everything. Everybody,

Everybody, the world is relative. Your happiness is relative. Everything's relative to what you have, right? If you take a kid who gets $100 a month in allowance and a kid who gets $1,000 and you cut the kid with $100 to $50 and the kid with $1,000 to $500, they both suffer the same amount of psychological stress. Yeah. So...

It's not always fair to shit on people either that are overprivileged relative to underprivileged people, right? Because their stress is real. What's good is to implement those kind of reminders or those experiences that allow you to understand how it could be. Well, I think back to talking about kid raising, whatever. For us...

A couple things. It's all about moderation. It's all about everything in moderation. I mean, well, our kids, like my son, the lacrosse, he wanted McDonald's, fine. Am I gonna feed it to him every day? Absolutely not. Do they eat a good balanced diet? Yes, they absolutely do.

But I think more to point of that is I tell him, I get like, like my son is playing lacrosse. My daughter is in cheerleading. But the point being is, it's like, I don't care what you, what you do, but you're doing something. You got, you got to do something. You can't do nothing. And way too many kids in this country right now are doing nothing, but, but thumbs at a screen, but that's their parents. Yeah. Or their parents will say, Oh, well, uh,

They play piano. It's like, no, no, no, it's not just an activity. Your body's connected to your brain. When one is out of balance, so is the other. I hear people online all the time, and again, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not dealing with people clinically all the time, but I will tell you this. I bet you, and I'll take that $10,000 bet, John. I'll put out my own $10,000 bet. You take everybody that has a lot of problems with

I'm on SSRIs. I'm on all these things. I'm depressed. I have anxiety and stuff. And I will guarantee you that more than 50% of them don't live a physically healthy lifestyle, right? And weren't actively involved in sports as kids.

Because something like women that play sports as kids have the lowest rates of teen pregnancy. They have the highest rates of being like straight-A students. It's all these things because if you can exhaust your physical body, then at least your brain can, you know what I mean, function in harmony with it. Yeah. No, I just agree. Colt? No, I totally agree. I mean, my dad was the same way. You're doing something, right? Right.

We play a sport. Right? Like, well, no, we did. We would sometimes leave because our football season, if we made it in playoffs, overlapped with basketball. I mean, we were playing all the time. And, you know, it kept us. The kids that did not go. So I'm from Utah. Utah has a huge drug problem.

People don't realize that Utah's the epicenter for, you know, Oxycontin and stuff like that. That's not against the rules for Mormons. No, no, because you can't smell it on their breath, right? Like you can weed, like you can alcohol.

Last count, and I'm 38, so how long have you been out? 20 years. Okay, so last count was probably a decade ago. I think I had 21 kids that I knew from my senior class OD'd, right? And out of those 21, 19 to 20 of them were ones that didn't play sports. I'm telling you. Absolutely. You can draw a line. And just like everything, you know, you ever hear that, it's like Norm MacDonald smoking thing.

It's like, yeah, I can always find you the outlier of whatever, okay? But think about averages. Look hard enough, yeah. Think about the averages, right? You can always say, well, I know a guy that he quit college and became a millionaire. It's like, yeah, but most millionaires you know, right, were in med school, which was difficult. Yeah.

It's one of those things where you can't bank on the outlier. Here's the question. Is it okay to talk to people? Is it okay to say, dude, you've got to get your kid in sports. What are you doing? Is that taboo? Is that off the table to have an honest conversation? People you know that are friends of yours, if it's your niece, your nephew, these people, is it okay to have that conversation? I think there's probably good ways, and that comes down to psychology. How are you persuasive without being off the table? How to be persuasive and say, hey, why don't you get your kids playing soccer with mine? They really enjoyed it.

Because you're right. A lot of times these parents go, well, they really haven't said they wanted to play sports. They like to sit in their room and play on their iPod. Well, I know they do. Of course, I'd like to sit there and eat ice cream all day too. Because I think the problem is our kids are our pride and joy regardless of, you know, trust me. I mean, everybody can look at people's kids and be like, ah, you got a good kid there. What's going on there? But everybody thinks their kids are wonderful because you should. That's the love you feel for your kids and it's how it is.

But I think when it comes to stuff like that, people just, their ego takes over faster than their brain. And they're just like, you don't understand. They have whatever or they have this. And it's like, maybe they shouldn't be eating Kentucky Fried Chicken four or five times a day. Right, right. Well, yeah, you know, John, that's actually a good point too. How many people do you meet where their kids have some ailment and they go,

Have you really had them? Are they physically exhausted often? Yeah. Oh, he can't because he's got this. Parents will make up the excuse to protect your kids. Not to protect their kids. It's to protect them being a bad parent. That's what it is. There's a reason I'm laughing. It's because I just realized Kentucky Fried Chicken was my go-to unhealthy food. And why was Kentucky Fried Chicken my unhealthy food? Because this is another Egypt fun fact.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, why is Kentucky Fried Chicken an absolute delicacy in every part of the world? I mean, dude. Have you had the new chicken sandwich from there? No, I didn't know. It's phenomenal. But I'm telling you, we're listening to this music while we're in Egypt, right? And I'm not talking about one guy. Everywhere we went, we heard this music and it was like,

Okay, we're going to play something for you now. This is a banger. The banger. The elders don't like it. Yeah, this is like Elvis. This was Elvis pissing off the old people. The elders do not like it. I almost got to pull my phone up. Don't get me started. Do you guys like Elvis? No, no, no. They're like, you know, the lyrics are just...

little out there really and so here I'm going to give I'll give you a little while you go on that you really like Elvis Chris I thought I'm going to give you a little all right here we go big pep all right so this is a banger in Egypt right here that's a banger it should be a banger here

We cleared an ASCAP VMI. Okay, right. No, to the point where literally in my Uber yesterday in Anaheim, my driver's from Egypt. I'm like, oh, you're from Egypt. He's like, yeah. And I'm like, oh, do you like Iquati? He's like, oh, Polaroid was phony. Polaroid already had it. Right. The lyrics to this song include such massively offensive things as I'm riding in my car with my orange cat.

My orange cap beside me. I just bought him a liver sandwich and a hot dog, and he did not take a sip of my Pepsi. There's that. Then there's... Calm down, John. I know, I know. It's for kids. And then there's... And then now it gets a little racy cold. Here it comes. You ready?

I might, my mind is a hair salon. People come in and out. This only does heard the song. We looked up the words enough to know what the words are. My mind is a hair salon. People come in and out. I see you. I'm going to make you my mother-in-law and at our wedding, Kentucky fried chicken for everyone. Nice.

for everyone. The best part of it though is he goes, I only make friends with tough guys even if you have a Ferrari. Wow. Now I see. Maybe that's going to be, they don't want to screw me in the Olympia and I'm going to become a rap war rapper. We made this comment, they did not find it funny. You got to remember, it's so funny because

this is what we call chinese math here's another business lesson um not to bring it back but people always think that if this works here it will work there right people don't understand necessarily culture and customs why it works so hussein love him but he likes that old classical egypt he says i'm into classical music and i'm thinking like mozart no like not at all they he has old arabic

you know, Islamic songs. And that's what he listens to. He's a, he's a 38 year old guy. You know, he's not listening to bangers. No, it's in a club music. He's listening to old. And it's because as a kid, that's probably what he heard in his house. That's why a lot of times people like country in my estimation. Yeah. And the whole time I grew up with it. So they're familiar with it. And in the front seat, the whole time he's dancing like this.

He's loving it. So if you can't see me, you're going to have to check that out on YouTube. That's a thing called Chinese math. If I can get one in a thousand people here, I can have a million customers. You look at Hasselhoff. Look how big he is in Germany still, right? Have you heard the music? It's terrible. It's awful. That music in Egypt, a lot of it is unlistenable. Oh, yeah. It's awful music. You can't listen to it. Right.

For them, it's got this. So you can't just drop a Ludacris song in the middle of Egypt and expect it to take off. No, you can't. You can't. They don't even hear music a lot of times. Although, you know what, though? I think Ludatren sends. I think Ludatren sends. Talk about a bad performance at the football game. Well, on halftime, no one talked about it, so I was wondering if it was that bad. What an effortless. But I'll tell you who was a great actor and who gave a great performance was you in Egypt. And here, let me tell you about a story that Chris gave the performance of the year, and here's what happened.

So, of course, we find out the beer is like 1%. They say 4%, but it's probably 1%. No, it's literally like trying to get drunk drinking O'Doul's. We're pounding this stuff. I can't do it. Because it's not haram. And a glass of Jack Daniels at our hotel, which was very nice, was like $40 American. $45 for a glass of Jack Daniels. I don't want to drink that bad. Really?

Really? I don't want to drink that man. So Chris gets on whatever app you were on. Well, this guy tells me. Oh. The drinkies. Remember the guy? Oh, we run into a dude at the casino there. That's like after talking to this guy, he's from New York. That's a whole story. That's a whole thing. After talking to this guy. Okay.

Rule of thumb, if you produce records for the Wu-Tang Clan, lead with that. As opposed to, yeah. Don't drop that two hours later. I'm here doing sound for an Egyptian show that's kind of going to be like the blacklist. Yeah. All Egyptian actors are like, cool, so we're talking to this guy. He's like, yeah, there's this app you can have alcohol delivered to your hotel. I'm like, oh, cool. Anyway, what's your name? Yeah, blah, blah, blah. His name was Billy Music. And he goes, oh, yeah. I'm like, oh, you produce music of other songs? Yeah, where you at? Oh, yeah, yeah. I do all the Wu-Tangs out. I'm like,

We've been here this whole time. For two hours. And you're not dropping the Wu-Tang Clan on this? You're like, wait, wait. Oh, yeah. He's like, yeah, I did RZA. I did Method Man. We're like, what? Raekwon's last time. Yeah. And this is like the widest dude in Egypt for sure. Really? Yeah. At a casino where they give you in Egypt American money to play with. But now I know why. Because it's haram. It's haram.

You cannot gamble with Egyptian money. So they give you American money. Well, that's a currency. And it's on the third floor of our hotel. It wasn't even a bad little casino. It wasn't. It was like a cruise ship casino. Cruise ship casino. But we weren't expecting there to be one because there's nothing else to do. We went up there one time. And they had drinks. Does it make it right to use loopholes like that? No, no, no, no, no. But you cannot go in that casino if you're Egyptian. Yeah, we had to show our passports to get in. We were not Egyptian to even get in the casino. In our hotel.

How do you feel about that? About there's religions that free market guy, I believe that you should be able to have sins and vices. I don't gamble really. I gamble twice a year. Maybe I've spent less than, you know, a hundred bucks a year lifetime gambling for as long as I've lived here. When you were doing what I told you, you're making, you're winning. I'd like to point that out in the bank. So, but it's one of those, I cried. I cried. I cried. What were you playing?

I was playing, uh, I was playing deuces on a machine and the, and the, and the video poker machines were super rigged for the house. Like, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

I won like 300 bucks. I put on a hundred. Oh yeah. I went to a hundred cash out 600. So, and that was a whole thing for a ski trip, which was good, but no, but, but, but back to the, back to the acting job. So he meets the Wu Tang dude. It tells him we're getting, we're getting booze delivered to the room. And I'm, I think I'm asleep when he's doing this. Cause I mean, cause literally it was like, just sleep when you can. I mean, I felt cause we were so jet lagged and you're like, your sleep here is four hours there, two hours here, whatever. It all adds up.

So I think I'm sleeping. He's like, I'm going to order some booze off this app. Like, what are you talking about? What app? He's like, no, no, no, no. I get whiskey. I get vodka. Like, what kind? He goes, it just says whiskey vodka. I'm like, okay. So he orders it and shows up and it's like, you know, a Controy, whatever it was. But it was like a decent, I mean, it was a glass bottle. It wasn't plastic. It was a nice glass bottle. And they came like pretty quick?

Five minutes. Yeah, it was fast. Wait, what? It was fast. Yeah, it was fast. We just delivered to our thing in 10 minutes. Yeah, 10 minutes. So we get it and then Chris calls down. Here's the acting, right? And then Chris calls downstairs and he has some Cokes and some Sprites sent up. He says, oh, bring me a bucket of ice. Brings the ice. I'm sitting there and thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it.

I shows up, Coke shows up. I'm looking at this whiskey bottle. I'm like, dude, I don't even know what kind of, I don't even kind of booze this is like, I don't even know what this is. It just says whiskey on it and some Arabic writing. I have no idea. And, uh, he's like, no, no, it'll be good. It'll be good. I'm good. So he, so first of all, he starts pouring a drink and I go, man, I don't know about that ice. I don't know about the ice. He goes, no, we were in a nice hotel. I go, I don't know about the ice. So this is the acting job. Chris does. He calls down to the front desk and this is all I hear.

Yes. We just got some drinks and some ice delivered to our room. I just want to make sure that the ice is filtered. Filtered. Filtered. Ice. Ice. Ice. Cold water. Filtered. Filtered. Filtered. Filtered.

And he hangs up. He goes, yeah, it's filtered. I'm like zero chance that dude understand a word. He just said, no, yeah, it's filtered. It's fine. You guys both look a lot leaner now. He said, what? No. So, so anyway, this is filtered. Yes. Okay. Yes. Filtered. Yes. He needed no clue to say good to go. Okay. So here's the problem. Me. Now this, now this goes back on a personal responsibility and life choices, right?

I knew the guy didn't know what he was saying. I knew he was overconfident in the quality of the ice. So what do I do? I drink the damn drink. Well, I took technically one sip of each because they both tasted like straight gasoline. It was. And like the next day, I'm like, and we ate some roadside duck. Yeah, I'm thinking it was the glasses in Alphium.

I didn't really see a lot of hygiene when he was sloshing water around it with his bare hands. It's like vacation. Can I help you with that Kool-Aid? Please, Vicky. Please can I help you with that? Note to self, drink out of those paper cups. Don't ask for glasses. Yes. Anyway, so the suspect, it was either the road duck or the ice. I don't know whatever it was. But the next day, I'm kind of like, you know, everything's fine. You're like, oh, wait a second. I'll gargle it over. Dude, dude.

And then, you know, you have upset stomachs. You're like, oh, that's all. I'll be fine in a couple of days. It'll be fine. It'll go away. Blah, blah, blah. Dude, like I try, I leave to travel home and it's still bad the whole way home. I get home and it's, I'm five days into it now. Two days later, I'm like, I gotta go. I can finally do the now clinic. And the lady's like,

yeah, you need some pretty serious antibiotics. He's like, we're going to get up with the double Z-Pak, get you 500 milligrams a day instead of 250. I'm pounding that. I'm texting him who's still in Egypt. He's like, man, this is brutal. I'm like, bro, you're not going to get any better. Like you need to get ahead of this. He does this. Yeah, it was...

Now, first of all, it was totally worth it. But still, it was as bad of an upset stomach as I have ever had. Is the airplane the worst place to get an upset stomach? I feel like it is. No, I'd say Egypt in general. Probably not a lot of public restrooms. Not a lot of toilet paper going around. You just don't feel great. I mean, that's the thing, right? You're introducing yourself to different environments. Wherever it is, you're eating foods with different chemical and bacteria makeups.

Yeah. Even if it's part of the gig. Yeah, part of the gig. Well, to wrap it up again, if you ever get a chance to go to Egypt, our guy Hussein is definitely the guy you want with his union man there because here's another thing. And if you're worried about it, we didn't talk about this. And one more thing about it before we jump off. If you're worried about traveling to Egypt at all, don't be.

Because some American tourists got killed I guess by the Muslim Brotherhood back in 97 and that's a good thing and here's why it's good Not so much for their families. That's a cold comment Tourism to Egypt died for like three years completely Americans stopped going because brother they were killing them So the Egyptian government came back and said here's what we'll do as long as you're with a licensed tour guide

We will provide an armed military or police escort everywhere you go. Yeah, we had police with us the whole leg.

Right. From where we were to the middle of the Saharan desert, where I would like to mention, we did get self service somehow enough that we could pay, play back in black by ACD. Yes. Which was awesome. I still can't get in. That was one from Odin to me there. Cause it was something very, it was, it was, it was pretty cool. So if you're, if you're worried about it, don't be, if you go with a licensed tour group, you'll have a police escort everywhere you go. Also, if you're a Nazi pilot, I would probably stay at a certain. Yeah.

Yep, that's true. That's true. They found they found a body of a Nazi pilot Buried in one of the caves in the middle of Sahara and he'd carved in this iron cross into a rock and his numbers and they shipped his remains back to back to Germany and

And sort of one of those things I'm like, man, that would really suck to have your last days being in the Saharan desert, but maybe don't be a Nazi. All right, guys. Well, if you like what we do, make sure you tell a friend and, uh, have them tune in and subscribe as well. If you hate what we do tell two people, why is that? Three people? It doesn't matter as long as they keep talking. It doesn't matter what the other talking as long as they're talking.

Maybe don't be a fuck. Maybe don't be a fuck. It's John Gafford. If you want to catch up more and see what we're doing, you can always go to thejohngafford.com. We'll share any links that we've things we talked about on the show, as well as links to the YouTube where you can watch us live. And if you want to catch up with me on Instagram, you can always follow me at thejohngafford. I'm here. Give me a shout.