Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts http://bit.ly/ThisPastWeekend_ The Toilet Champion Brad Laskoski https://www.toiletchampion.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This episode is brought to you by Manscaped Use code THEO at https://Manscaped.com for 20% off plus free shipping Shipstation Use code THEO at https://ShipStation.com for a free 60 day trial Ridge Visit https://ridge.com/ and use code THEO for 10% OFF Skillshare Visit https://skillshare.com/theovon for 2 months of unlimited classes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Find Theo Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEKV_MOhwZ7OEcgFyLKilw ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Producer Nick https://instagram.com/realnickdavis ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music “Shine” - Bishop Gunn http://bit.ly/Shine_BishopGunn ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gunt Squad www.patreon.com/theovon Name Aaron Rasche Adam White Alaskan Rock Vodka Alex Bmayer Alex Hitchins Alex Person Alex Petralia Alexa harvey Andrew Valish Anthony Holcombe Ashley Konicki Ashley M Audrey Hodge Ayako Akiyama Ben Deignan Ben in thar.. Benjamin Herron Benjamin Streit Bobby Hogan Brandon Woolsey Brian meek Christopher Becking Cody Anderson Cody Kenyon Cody Marsh Crystal Dan Draper Dan Perdue David Christopher Dentist the menace Devin James Cornwell Dionne Enoch Doug C Dusty Baker Eric Tobey Felicity Black Gillian Neale Ginger Levesque Greg Salazar Gunt Squad Gary J Garcia Jamaica Taylor James Briscoe James Hunter James Schneider Jameson Flood Jayme Sta Jeremy Weiner Joakim Joaquin Rodriguez Joe Dunn Joey Piemonte John Kutch Jon Blowers Jon Ross Jordan Josh Nemeyer Joy Hammonds Julie Ogden Justin Doerr Justin L Kaylyn Dudich Kenton call Kirk Cahill Kyle Baker Lacey Ann Lawrence Abinosa Lea Rashka Leighton Fields LJ Logan Yakemchuk Madeline Matthews Marisa Bruno Matt Nichols Meaghan Lewis Mike Mikocic Mike Nucci Mona McCune Nick Roma Noah Bissell NYCWendy1 OK Passenger Shaming Qie Jenkins Ryan Hawkins Sagar Jha Sean Scott Shane Pacheco Shona MacArthur Stephen Trottier Suzanne O'Reilly Taryn Feingold Theo Wren Thomas Adair Tim Greener Timothy Eyerman Tito Liebowitz Todd Ekkebus Tom Cook Tom Kostya Tugzy Mills Vanessa Amaya Victor I tuck back and sit down to pee Johnson II Vince Gonsalves Vincent Gil Vlog Master William Reid Peters Yvonne Zeke HarrisSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I want to let you know about some new shows that are coming out right now.
Toronto, we've just added a late show on February 21st.
February 15th, the Gold Country Casino in Oroville, California.
Those tickets are on sale now.
Still available January 14th in Oslo, Norway.
Las Vegas, January 31st and February 1st.
I will be at the Mirage Hotel and Casino.
Those tickets are a little higher price than usual.
It's because it's a specialty weekend.
And that was the agreement that the theater would do with me.
So if it's too high price for you, that's understandable.
I'll be back in the future at a more decent rate.
And also, I want to let you know, February 28th in Oxen Hill, Maryland at the MGM National Harbor.
Today's guest is a working man.
This is one of my favorite episodes, and we're so glad that he was here.
He is a plumber and a regular man.
ladies and gentlemen the toilet champion is here plumber brad luskoski I'll split and tell you my story.
Shine that light on me.
I'll spin and tell you my story.
We're here with Brad Laskoski, and that's Polish, huh?
Oh, yeah.
Polish power, dude.
Thanks for joining us today, man.
Thanks for having me.
We, yeah, just happy to talk to a plumber man because I don't know anything really about plumbing.
Ask a way.
You know?
All right, I'll think about this.
So what is the difference between plumbing and septic tank?
I was thinking about that.
All right.
Like, sometimes you hear like, you know, you hear people have septic tanks.
I would hear a lot of times growing up, people had septic tanks, you know, or somebody got like, you know, something happened to them by a septic tank.
That's how I actually got my start was dealing with septic tanks.
I started 20-something years ago with Rotoruder.
I'm sure you heard of them.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And that's a commercial outfit, isn't it?
Largest plumbing company in the world.
Is it really?
Yep.
Wow.
So, yeah, the very first day I get hired, I gotten out of the Army.
I was 20 years old.
I get hired with this.
A Roto, huh?
By Roto.
By Rotoruder man in Algeria.
And were they enlisting people?
I mean, was there like a program from the Army to Rotoruder?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I got out of the Army and I went to work at Lowe's, the home improvement store.
Oh, yeah, I love that place.
I was actually, when I got out of the Army, I was 20 and I had applied to Atlanta SWAT.
And I was going through all the SWAT qualifications and everything else because I was kind of heavy duty in the military, you know.
So I didn't really have a whole lot of skills when I got out of it.
How'd you get out of 20?
I joined when I was 17. Damn.
So I graduated early, you know, a little smart, you know.
Yeah.
Figured some stuff out.
And hard working you must have been, huh?
Very.
Still am.
Most people will call me the hardest worker they ever met.
Dang.
So I kind of take that as a point of pride, you know.
I could see that, dude.
You're like the Joe Rogan of plumbing, dude, because Joe Rogan is, I think, is the hardest worker that I know.
That guy is busy.
Dude, I think there's nine Joe Rogans.
There has to be more than one because he's in too many places at once.
Sometimes I have kind of a daydream where he's going to bring me in a room and be like, hey, hey, I want you to meet these other Joe Rogans.
Oh, I knew it.
I knew it.
I knew it, man.
Okay, so you get out of the military.
Dude, that's a note for young fellas.
If you're like, I don't know if I could go into the military.
17 out by 20. Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
I use my VA benefits.
You know, everything's cool.
Everything's like normal.
Yeah.
I just, I joined early.
I got out of there.
I signed up for three.
I got out.
So they offered to re-enlist me, but I had just met this girl.
She was just pregnant.
You know, it was young.
Did you get her pregnant or she was pregnant?
She was pregnant when you met her.
Yeah.
Wow, that's a brave deal.
I stuck on with that crap for seven years, too.
With her and her kid?
Well, we eventually had one too, her and I. Like a few years later, her and I. My mind.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
And then divorced, 27, left.
Anyway, the point of the septic thing was dude that hires me is an old, big, old fat dude from Alabama, you know, southern as all can be.
Yeah.
Take you out on your first day.
You'll see it's not that bad.
And we go out and dig up a septic tank, which is plumb.
Do people hide them or what?
They're always buried.
Oh, wow.
So the pipe that leaves your house goes underground and it goes out to a box in the yard.
And it basically naturally decomposes everything that's in there.
Okay, so it's compost almost, kind of in a way.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's five feet deep.
It's a big box.
You could bury a lot of bodies in there.
You could.
You could.
And so it's five feet deep and it's buried in the ground.
Yeah, usually a foot deep, maybe more.
Okay.
And is it square?
It's about like this table, you know?
It's a big long rectangle, maybe a little wider or so.
It's about five feet deep or something.
I saw a dude weld one and a half one time, and I remember some of them.
They're usually concrete.
Well, then this guy kind of, I guess, welded it with like a maybe a concrete push or something.
Well, he might have used it.
He might have had a steel box.
I've seen some rustic septic tanks made out of 55-gallon drums with holes punched in the sides.
Okay, so you've seen some rural ones.
I've seen.
You've seen them.
I've seen.
You've seen fucking the Noah's Ark of fucking in-ground shitters.
You better believe it.
In Alabama, they'll do whatever it takes.
Oh, yeah.
I went to one house in Alabama.
They didn't even have a septic tank.
The pipe went down.
It went out about 100 yards, and that was it.
Oh, wow.
It just left out on the ground.
Wow.
Yeah.
Roots were all growing up into the end of the pipe and everything.
So I had to go there and cut them all off and open it out and snake the pipe out and get everything good to go and everything.
But that's no septic tank.
Just a long pipe.
Just freelance old school.
It's illegal.
It is?
Yeah, you can't do that.
Black water needs to be contained.
Okay, so that's really the rule.
Yeah, black water has to be contained.
Brown water or gray water, like kitchen sink water and washing machines, dishwasher, stuff like that.
You can actually, and I do, install a 55-gallon drum with a pump in it and separate those lines from a septic tank.
Okay.
So all that washing machine water that's bad for a septic tank now goes into a 55 gallon drum with a pump in it, and then you can water your yard with that.
Okay, so washing machine water, that gray water, you can take that into a drum if you wanted to and then reuse that.
It's actually good because it's got soap in it, and soap and the phosphates are good for your grass.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Go figure.
So that's...
But the dark water...
The black water.
Black water has to be...
Contained.
And then what do you do after you contain it?
Well, in a septic tank system, after a couple of years, all that stuff breaks down and separates.
The solids will sink to the bottom and turn to a sludge.
The things that are not biodegradable.
Like a wedding ring or something, like if a dog eats a wedding ring.
Anything that would sink will go to the bottom, obviously.
But anything that's grease won't biodegrade.
It'll collect and it'll turn into a ball, basically a hard kind of crust on the top of the septic tank water.
Or condoms won't biodegrade.
They'll float.
Oh, wow.
Man, one time I popped a septic tank open and I saw about 10,000 condoms in there.
I swear.
I mean, I didn't count them or anything, but they were all over the top of the tank.
And who was the guy?
A little Asian guy.
No, no, no.
It was the homeowner.
He was standing there watching me dig this tank up, right?
Did he have kids or something?
Like, was he?
Oh, yeah.
Because they weren't his condoms.
No way.
I could have guessed it was a homeowner.
Yeah.
He was standing there watching me.
I popped it.
Well, he called me because his toilet wouldn't flush no more, right?
And I get there and I snake the drain out and it won't go down.
I'm like, well, I got to dig up your tank.
So I dig up the tank.
And when I open up the tank and you look down, they're just everywhere.
They're coat in the wall, the pink ones and green ones and blue ones.
I mean, every color of the rain.
These are Easter colors, huh?
Dude worked at a tire manufacturing plant, the graveyard shift for like 20 years.
And I'm betting every night.
No.
She had somebody coming up.
They got a divorce actually.
So you really, so that's, man, that's crazy.
So sometimes opening up that sector tank, it's almost like a time capsule for your butt almost or for your, you know, for below the waist.
It's almost like a time capsule for what you, or anything you've been doing in your home.
Yep.
Yep.
I mean, that actually happened twice.
That instance caused a divorce.
The next time that it happened where I found condoms in the tank, it was a young girl.
She was like 14 or 15. And it was her grandma's house.
And the grandma was standing there watching me.
And whose were they, you think?
They were the granddaughters for sure.
Oh.
I mean, it was just those are the only two ladies living in the house, is the 14-year-old girl and the grandma.
And the grandma's like, they ain't mine.
That's going to be an awkward game of go fish that they play later in the night.
Where'd you get all these?
Why are they in here?
So that's why you started in Alabama.
Yeah.
You worked with a man.
Do you remember the gentleman?
The guy who hired me?
Oh, absolutely.
We still talk.
Oh, that's cool, man.
Yeah, he's a good man.
He is.
And so now, what was like your vibe when you started working there?
Were you like, oh, this is a career that I want to make?
Or were you like, this is just a job that I want to do?
What was kind of your goal, if you had any going into it?
You know what?
The money.
I didn't really have a goal going into it.
The money just sticks you.
Plumbing pays well.
Yeah.
And it always has.
And they say, I've heard, this is a saying in the universe, that plumbers make more than lawyers.
I believe that.
You do?
Yeah.
And how does that break down?
Because why?
Lawyers ain't working 40 hours a week.
Right.
You know what I mean?
They get paid a lot for what they do, but they don't do it all the time.
Right.
So that's great that they get $400 an hour three hours a week.
Right.
You know, I work 50, 60 hours a week every week.
Right.
You know, I'm only charging $100, maybe more or whatever.
But you add it up over time.
Add it up.
That's the way they do it.
Yeah, because you always hear that.
You always hear that lawyer, that plumbers make more than lawyers.
That's just like a thing I've always heard.
Or doctors.
I heard it as doctors, but I mean, same thing.
I went to a university professor's house years ago, and I handed him the bill at the end, and he just flipped out.
Like he was just, couldn't believe it costs that much.
You charge more than doctors do.
Do you realize it took me 10 years to learn how to do this?
Right.
You know, it literally is a 10-year program.
It's as hard, I think, of course, because I went down that road as any eight-year doctorate or master's degree that you're going to get.
To become, yeah, I mean, anything you're gaining knowledge.
Yeah.
To become a well-rounded plumber anyway.
Yeah.
And so you start this job, you got the guy with Rotor Rooter.
Yeah.
And so you work there for how long?
With that guy for five years, a little over five years.
Dude gave me a thousand dollar bonus for every year I worked for him.
Did he really?
So second year was two grand, third year is three, fifth year was five.
That was later in his Christmas bonus discussion, too.
I can already tell.
Fuck, man.
I was hoping to fuck.
Bro, that's God working right there because he's been on my mind.
And then you bring it up.
Dude needs a little bit of help every day.
This is the hardest worker.
He's the hardest worker I know.
He works very hard and he really is, man.
Well, hook him up.
And he's very good.
Yeah, I agree with you.
That's all right.
We do our best.
I saw on one of your other shows, you were talking about if it came down to killing him or killing you, you might not even kill him.
That's a pretty big step, I think.
I forgot I said that, but I still agree with myself.
Okay, so, and also with plumbing, if it's a holiday, then those prices are higher, right?
You have to do it, don't you?
When I was working for the commercial companies, yeah, they did.
Now that I actually quit doing the, working for commercial companies mostly because I was tired of hearing the complaints from the customers about how much it cost.
Oh, really?
You know, I'm going and doing the work, and I'm getting paid from the company, but not very much.
Obviously, not as much as now.
But I mean, you got to understand any large company, they got overhead, they got insurances that are humongous.
Yeah, you just have to advertise for having a place.
Dude, my L and I just for myself is almost 20 grand a month or a year.
A year.
And if I had to add on like an apprentice or something, it doubles.
It's wild, isn't it?
That's why I do everything by myself.
Right.
Yeah, no, it's interesting.
Yeah, it's like you got to get, yeah, I just realized We have to get a policy in case anything like errors and omissions policy we have to get for podcasting now.
You have to get Workman's Comp and EPLNI or some similar type of policy that they just sent me something for the other day.
It's like, I don't even know if I can afford it.
So it's like, but it's interesting.
Yeah, once you start to, if you want to build something bigger or add more, there's more costs and liabilities that are incurred.
And they say, you know, California is the hardest place to run either a small business or to get a startup going.
There's so many restrictions and so many fees and regulations that government.
It's crazy.
It's almost too much.
It's like, what's even going on here?
When I was in Hawaii, I was rolling in money.
Yeah.
Just didn't have to worry about nothing.
Now, how do you plumb in Hawaii?
Because slower.
Everything's slower.
Well, it seems like you have all the water pushing on the island.
It's going to push everything back up the toilets.
Nah, nah.
I mean, their infrastructure is significantly improved from way back those days.
Everything's built up.
Everything's feet off the ground and all that.
They have sanitary sewer systems, which is the name for, you call it sanitary sewer.
I don't know why, because it's not fucking sanitary at all.
It isn't?
There's turds floating down.
This pipe that leaves this building is called the sanitary sewer line.
Okay.
It's full of turds.
It's not sanitary in any way.
I have no idea.
I saw that they don't know.
They're everybody's.
Everybody in the building, you know?
Oh, everybody in the building.
We were like, fuck, I just thought we were like the X damn fucking on the side.
The X of this building has one great big pipe that leaves it from all the smaller pipes that come from each toilet.
Okay.
They all join together and make one big pipe.
That pipe goes out to the street, which is a bigger pipe, probably 12, 14, 24 inches, who knows?
A city like this is probably big.
Okay.
And all the turds are floating down that.
It's a constant stream.
It looks like a river.
If you were to open up a manhole in the street and look down there, it's a constant stream.
And that's a black water?
Yeah, that's black water.
Contained.
That's contained.
But they call it sanitary.
And in my whole life at Plumbing, 25 years or whatever, it's always been called sanitary sewer.
Yeah.
Why?
I think probably to give people a safe idea, just like, oh, in case they see the pipe, they're like, oh, yeah, we're doing our best.
It's sanitary.
It's down there.
Yeah.
It's out of the way.
It's sanitary.
It's hidden.
So all that goes to a sewer treatment facility where they process and treat it and then release the clean water into a stream and out to the ocean.
Okay.
And is it really clean when it gets out there?
You could be honest.
It passes EPA standards.
Right.
We'll leave it at that.
I wouldn't drink it.
I wouldn't drink any of the water near it.
What if you made an ice tray cube of trays, like an ice of it?
Would you put one cube like in a soda or something?
Fuck no.
Come on.
Nah.
Come on, dude.
Nah.
Nah.
Bro, you got to get a little more polis in that, man.
I have been around enough turds in my life, man.
Have you?
After like 11 years of that, I had to give up on the Rotorooter thing.
And the Rotorooters deals mostly with feces.
Now, what is the, let me ask you, what's the term that's comfortable to use?
Like, because every time if a plumber comes over, I don't know if I say shit, do I say poop?
Do I say turds?
Okay.
Whatever you like.
You know, they all work.
Okay.
I had this guy in Alabama one time.
I knock on the door and everything, you know, Ruder, Ruder, man, I'm here.
And he opens the door and he goes, thank God you're here, man.
I've been fighting these turds all morning.
And I go in there and he's got just water sprayed up all over the walls.
He's been plunging the shit out of this toilet for like an hour and making no headway.
I said, give me that.
And I take the dude's plunger and he goes, that ain't going to work.
You're going to need something way more than that.
And I put it in there and hit it like two, three times, pop.
It goes away.
How the fuck do you do that?
Man, I do this for a living.
This is what I do.
Do some people, like, is it uncomfortable?
I feel like it's uncomfortable if you go into a place.
Does the guy, do you, like, does somebody be like, okay, I pooped in here?
Does people just kind of vague about it?
Hey, somebody shit in here.
Sometimes people are super embarrassed and they're like, I'm really sorry about it.
That's how I would be.
Yeah, I would too.
Hey, if it were me, I'd get to turret out.
Yeah.
I mean, if I didn't know what to do.
Right, put it on a paper or something, run it outside.
It's out there.
Fish scoop it up.
Or whatever you got out there.
Do what you can.
See some rose petals in Arizona, you know.
So I can't call this lady out.
She's probably dead by now anyway.
But I used to have this one customer.
It was the sweetest, nicest lady.
I went to her house probably three years, you know, constantly.
I was going to her house like every month, once a month, I'd go to her house and unstop both of her toilets because I know it's a little graphic, but she would shit baseballs.
Oh, wow, really?
Just round balls of shit.
I'm not sure what was going on with her intestines.
We used to talk about it, the Rotoruder guys.
You would be like, what's up with this lady?
How does this happen?
She's got the Walker Bueller colon right there.
She's got something out they go.
That Joe Musgrove.
I'm wondering, if she's shitting baseballs, how fast do they come out?
Could we clog these things?
Yeah.
Oh, and it must be so intense.
Is it like a curveball?
Slider?
It's probably a slider.
It's probably a slider, man.
So anyway, they would clog the toilet.
And so, and you get in there and what?
So if you can't hit it with a plunger, which these turds were solid, man, they were packed.
They were well-built turds.
And do you think she's eating something unique?
She is.
Whatever her diet is, is creating this.
Like grass, maybe?
Like paste turd.
So we had a snake for the toilet, right?
That you stick in the toilet to unstop it.
It'll grab things, too.
This snake would like go through the turd and just put a little hole in it.
And then once you pull the snake out, it's like the turd would close back up like jello.
The turd would just close back up.
Like terminator.
Yeah, like the liquid terminator, you know?
So you'd basically just have to run that snake back and forth and back and forth till you could break up enough of that turd to get the water helping it out to flush this thing all the way through.
How far does that rotor thing go?
That one would only go through the toilet, like four or five feet.
Oh, wow.
Just right to the, yeah, because the toilet will go down and then up and then down again, and that's about three feet by the time it finishes.
Okay.
That's really all you need.
Right.
Because if it's any farther than that, you need to pull the toilet off the floor and go after the pipe.
Okay.
You know what I'm saying?
So at that point, yeah, once you do, after that three feet, you're going into the pipe.
Into the sewer system.
It's a different ballgame.
Yeah, it gets a little more expensive after that, usually.
Okay.
And why does the pipe on the toilet go up and down like that after?
It would seem like a straight pipe would help out better.
It's a trap.
It has to go down and up like that so water always stays in that portion right there.
Otherwise, you're going to smell shit coming out of the pipe all the time.
That water there prevents the smell from coming back.
Ah, so that's why it has that kind of snake, that S curve.
P-trap.
The P-trap.
Yeah, same thing underneath your sink.
You see that little U-bend underneath that?
And so it stinks, but it's stuck in the top part of that pipe.
Well, anything downstream of that, where that water is smells really bad.
I see.
That water is what blocks the gas, sewer gas, from coming back at you.
Oh, wow.
You ever go into a building that just kind of smells like shit?
Yeah, yeah.
Like the whole place smells like sewer and you can't figure it out?
Usually what that is is a dry floor drain somewhere.
Because floor drains, even in the bathrooms, they have that same P-trap in the bottom of them.
But if nobody pours water in them, that'll evaporate.
Here's a free tip for like everybody out there.
That'll evaporate and then you'll get that sewer gas smell coming in.
It's coming in because there's no water there to block it from.
Correct.
So a lot of times you just, I mean, so many times I'd walk into a building and I know that smell well.
We got this smell.
Oh, yeah, I know it.
And then I'd just search around and find a dry floor drain, pour some water in there and give me my money.
Yeah.
Dang, I'm out.
Right.
So a lot of this probably over the years, you learn these different ways of like, oh, okay, instead of, you know, going through every pipe in the building the first time to the thousandth time you come in, it's the smell.
You find the dry drain, boom, and I'm done.
Oh, man.
You know, after 20 years of experience pays tons.
It really does pay tons.
And it should.
Well, yeah.
And it should because you put in the time.
So is there certain points where, like, do you feel, oh, I'll interrupt you about the story with that lady.
Or was that it?
She just had some wild turrets.
She just had wild turrets, man.
And we used to talk about it.
We would never, you know, shame her or embarrass her.
Just go there and take care of it.
We're sorry to, you know, give us a call when you need us.
We gave her a super discounted rate because she called us all the time.
Right.
Eventually.
And she used to give that the first lady that I married, the kid, the daughter that she had that wasn't mine.
Right.
She used to give that girl presents, little dolls and stuff.
So she's almost like, you know, family, a little community.
Here's for your daughter.
So after like three years of feeling guilty on stopping this lady's toilet every month, I'm like, look, on my day off, I'm going to come over and I'm going to install you two pressure-assisted power toilets for free.
Dang.
You pay for the toilets.
I'll give you the labor for free.
I went over there on a Saturday.
I jerked her old toilets out that were, you know, obviously not up to the challenge she was putting on them and put in these, you've seen those jet toilets where you flush them.
They just sound like a jet engine going off.
Yeah, I put two of those in.
She never called us again.
Wow.
Fixed.
Good to go.
She did call us like a year later because her kitchen sink was stopped up or something like that.
But how many thousands of dollars did that just save over the lifetime of all that?
Yeah, you got to do that every once in a while.
Yeah, you help out, man.
You help out where you can, especially if you notice those patterns.
Yeah, you know, you're like, at some point, it does get to be like, oh, I'm keep giving this person, this person keeps giving me business, but at a certain point, I can just be helpful or something.
You almost feel like you're robbing them after a while.
Yeah.
I like having that thing inside of you that feels like that because then it tells you when to like be one way and when to be another way.
And that's why I do it by myself now.
I can't do it for a company.
They charge too much.
And so you did Rotor Rooter for how long?
11 years.
And that was in Alabama?
No, no, no.
Five years in Alabama and six years in Tacoma and Seattle.
Oh, wow.
So when I got divorced in Alabama, I moved to Washington, which is where I was born.
And that's higher altitude.
And people are sea level.
Oh, it is?
Yeah, I was right on the water, right in Seattle.
It is sea level.
Huh.
I just feel like overall, Nick, we just looked that up.
And I'm not challenging.
I'm just curious myself.
Is Seattle what the difference in land elevation is?
For some reason, I always think of the south as being like a lower.
I'm not sure what it was in Alabama, but when I was in Alabama, I want to say they were a couple hundred feet up where Seattle is.
I mean, there's water right there, right in front of you.
Right.
That water is sea level because it's the Puget Sound.
Oh, yeah, that's the dang sea.
Yeah.
You're right.
So base elevation in Alabama, probably a couple hundred feet, maybe.
Oh, 500 feet above sea level.
There you go.
I mean, elevation is like 500 feet above sea level.
Highest point in Seattle is 520 feet.
Yeah, you got some hills for sure, but the lowest point, which is sea level.
Wow.
Gang, bro.
Average elevation is 170.
All right.
So anyway, everywhere you're driving around the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, and all the surrounding areas, a lot of the area, you're looking at water, you know, at the sound out there.
So not elevation so much, but cold, rainy, wet, gray.
And how does that affect plumbing?
Like, is there different type of plumbing going on?
That's what I want to know.
there are different plumbing going on in the Pacific Northwest that we don't know about or something as opposed to what's going on like in Alabama.
In Alabama the rules what Got a lot of pages in it, maybe 100 pages or so.
National Plumbing Code, pretty simple.
Do what you want as long as it works, basically, and don't leak.
I moved to Washington and they, as California does now too, but back then they didn't.
Uniform Plumbing Code, which is the gold standard.
And that book is like this thick.
And it's got addendums and additions and replaces.
My God, it's unreal.
It's crazy.
It's everything out west.
Once you get out here, there's so much paperwork and this and that, and you gotta, and nobody, if somebody doesn't want to work at all, you got a fee, you gotta fucking buy taxes or more.
All that.
The farther west you go, the harder it is on the working man.
Yeah.
It really is.
So they say Washington's the hardest state to get a license in for plumbers.
Michigan's the second hardest.
Really?
Yeah.
You'd think people would be doing a lot of shit in Michigan and they would need more help.
That's what all their shit freezes.
Oh, really?
You know, I mean, they have.
Oh, I didn't even think about that, dude.
Imagine now it's frozen.
Frozen shit.
You got a whole different battle, bro.
You can't run a sewer cable through frozen shit.
Fuck, what do you do, dude?
Restrictions are different in cold weather climates.
I've never been to Michigan, but I'm going to guess that they're going to be somewhere similar as to like Colorado.
And I did do Colorado plumbing.
Wow.
And all their shit's buried eight feet deep in Colorado.
Oh, all of their septic tanks and everything?
Everything's buried eight feet deep.
All the water lines, everything.
That's the rule.
Yeah.
Eight feet deep is to keep it warm enough?
Yeah, to keep it from freezing.
Wow.
Yep.
Interesting.
Washington is 24 inches, so two feet deep.
I think California is 18 inches.
And Louisiana, I think, is just right out the window, basically.
Alabama was ground level.
Was it?
Yep.
One inch deep.
Just don't let your lawnmower hit it.
Yeah, that's crazy, bro.
Dude, that's wild.
So, and yeah, because I remember they had like a neighbor when I was growing up that they would just, they had like a shit line that just went off into the woods.
And then at a certain point, I remember we ran back there.
And when you're kids, you don't know you think it's like a little river or like a little lake or something.
So cool.
And so, yeah, people are jumping around, skipping rocks off of shit.
Just, you know, making little boats.
We used to make little school boats and like push them out into like this like kind of duty canal kind of just when you're a kid.
You sick now?
I'm not doing great, but I'm doing this year.
I'm feeling okay.
But generally speaking, throughout your whole life, are you a healthy dude?
Yeah.
Me too.
You know why?
Why?
Because you played with shit.
Yeah.
And you got dirty every once in a while and you didn't give a crap about washing your hands every single time you went to the bathroom.
Oh, yeah.
I'd hear like everybody, I saw some woman get a bunch of hand sanitizer and wash her son's neck with it the other day when I was at the bank.
That can't be good for him.
What the fuck?
That kid's going to fucking get hit by lightning.
Yeah.
That kid's definitely.
That can't be good for you.
Yeah.
Just letting that alcohol soak into your skin like that.
Yeah, and just like, at a certain point, everything has diminished.
What is it called?
Diminishing returns.
Diminishing returns.
Everything does.
It's like, okay, you want to get so clean and everything, then fine.
You know, something small comes along, a breeze with a little bit of cigarette smoke in it.
And now your kid can't fucking see for two years, you know?
Carlin said some stuff years ago about, you know, you spend so much time washing this and scrubbing that and making sure you're so clean that when something real does come along, your immune system is not going to be prepared for it.
Yeah.
And you're going to die.
Yeah, your immune system's at like a four-star restaurant or something.
Yeah.
And then some little bitch hiker comes in, you can't fucking handle them.
Right.
You got to build it up.
You got to do something to kind of strengthen your immune system somehow.
So go play with some turds every once in a while.
Amen, bro.
Look, I'd watch people do it.
Yeah, you don't do it yourself, though.
Mario made you do it.
Oh, yeah, dude.
When I was young, they had a kid in my neighborhood.
He used to make me bury his duty in his yard for him.
Or I couldn't play with him.
And he was a tough kid.
Like, beat the crap out of you?
No, he would shit in his yard and I had to bury it.
You know?
And I didn't, you know, I didn't.
I did it, man.
I just did it, man.
I fucking did it, dude.
His mother was a librarian.
I thought she was a nice lady.
And he died, actually.
He drove a bass boat into an embankment in the middle of the night.
Damn.
If we can look that up, Mario Raffino and R.I.P as well, man.
R.I.P.
What's some, I want to know some good tales, man.
We have some great video questions that came in for you that we'll get to in a minute.
Yeah, I want to know a tale from the founded Chafuncta right there.
There he is, right there.
Six-day search, man.
Damn.
Chufuncta.
What city is it?
What town is this in?
That's Covington, Louisiana.
And Chufuncta, how it got its name, it's a famous Indian river.
A big Indian threw a big rock in there.
And that's a sound it made when it went in.
That sounds about right.
It is.
That's crazy, isn't it?
By the overpass, man, I knew a fucking kid who jumped off that overpass one time and fucking hit a boat when he fucking went in.
Is that where you're originally from?
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, man.
Well, then you know the sound.
We all prayed and we just knew God was going to let his body surface so we could take him out and give him a proper burial and get proper closure.
Man, Mario Rafino traveling upstream at high speed just after midnight.
That'll do it.
Man, what's he doing driving a boat in the dark?
Smashed into the overpass.
Had he been drinking?
I bet he had.
It says Rafino was last seen at a bar right there.
May have had a beer or two.
That's what they put in there.
But man, I'll tell you that boy lived at top speed from the moment I ever fucking met him, bro.
It was like the whole world was at, I mean, he was just at high speed, that kid.
You know, if you were to ask him right now, he probably ain't got no complaints then.
Oh, man.
That guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He didn't.
I mean, I guess I was.
He didn't believe in plumbing.
I fucking remember that.
You know, dude, I got this fucking, yeah.
Oh, we're going to save a lot of money, mom and dad.
I'm going to have some kid bury our poop.
Oh, that's right.
What's some wild stories that happen out there, man?
Oh, man, wild?
Like.
Or tell me something.
Gross, crazy.
You know, I got them all.
Chicks trying to have sex to pay off their bill.
Is that true?
Oh, yeah, that happens.
I never did.
Because you're a handsome guy.
I'm sure you go in there and there's the opportunity for sex every now and then.
It has happened.
You know, I had a lady in Seattle.
She's good looking.
It took forever for her to come to the door.
I still remember it because she was trying so hard.
I mean, you can tell when somebody's coming onto you, right?
Yeah.
You know, I'm blind and all, but.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a dude.
We miss most of those signs all the time.
A lot of times you miss them, but so if you don't miss them, if a regular dude doesn't miss them, it must really become a strong.
That's what I realized.
Dude, this chick answered the door in a very thin white t-shirt.
Okay.
And that's it.
Wow.
And that t-shirt was just long enough.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
And then her stuff was upstairs.
So I'll show you, you know, follow me.
So I followed her up the stairs, staring at her ass the whole way up so I could plunge her toilet in 30 seconds and fix it.
And then she has me sit there for like 20 minutes, I bet, while she sings karaoke to me on her little private karaoke machine.
No way.
Still in this little t-shirt with great big titties that you can see every bit of.
She didn't even need to be wearing the t-shirt.
Both of the tits, you could see them?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the shirt is so thin, you can see right through it.
Oh, yeah.
But the point was, I knocked on the door and I got there and I got no answer.
And I knocked again.
I knocked again.
It took her like five minutes to come to the door.
And were you getting scared?
What do you think she was doing?
I was thinking she wasn't there.
I heard her at first when she first came up.
I heard her come to the door.
She looked through the peephole.
She saw it wasn't an old fat dude, probably, you know, because you don't know what plumber's showing up to your house.
That's true, huh?
So, and then it was, I kept knocking.
I'm like, so I called dispatch because at the time, was this Roto?
You were going to Roto?
Yeah, yeah.
At the time, this was before cell phones.
So all we had was next tail.
Oh, yeah.
So beep, beep.
Yeah.
You know, hey, can you call this customer that I'm here at her house and I've knocked.
I hear that she's in there.
She ain't answering.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So they call him.
Oh, okay.
She's coming to the door.
I'm like, cool.
Thank you.
And she answers the door like that.
I'm like, now I know what the fuck she was doing.
She went, got all ready and put her makeup on and whatever else.
And was she wearing sunglasses or anything?
Nope, nope, nope, nope.
She was slightly a little bit on the heavyset side, but good looking.
Yeah, and it's afternoon.
Is it morning?
It was morning, probably 10, 11 o'clock in the morning.
Who cares what anybody's body's like in the morning, you know?
Right?
South African white chick.
So that'll kind of.
She had an accent.
Oh, yeah.
You know, but still, you know, I'm on the job.
Right.
Your professional.
Are you wearing a uniform?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And at the time, I was single.
And still, you don't shit where you eat, no matter what.
You don't fuck where you clean shit.
Or you don't fuck where you clean shit because that's true, too.
But I don't know.
Something got instilled in me years ago.
Don't ever have anything to do with anything with work like that.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Don't fuck your clients.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's still a bad thing, man.
Once you put sex into any work equation, it all becomes uncomfortable.
That's why I'm meeting Nick.
Is that why you guys don't get along?
That's why we go to separate rooms and touch ourselves.
No, we've never done anything like that, man.
And we never will, Nick.
And that's why it's working so well.
Yeah, that's why it works so well, dude.
Look, I promise you, the second me and him have any sexual interaction.
It's over.
It is over, bro.
It is over, and I think he would agree to that.
So I moved to Washington.
No, so the lady, you're there.
You're in the place.
Oh, that was it.
I hate, you know, it's such a, it could have been so karaoke music, though.
That's what I mean.
What karaoke music was.
Oh, she's singing like love songs and stuff and trying to like sell me her voice, basically.
And, you know.
Why was she saying that she used to do music?
She considered it.
And she was totally into music and she wanted me to hear her sing.
She was trying to get me to nail her on the couch right there.
Wow.
And where was the karaoke machine?
This was after Unstopping the Toilet.
I had gone back downstairs to write the invoice.
I'm sitting on the couch.
She's next to me on the couch.
Oh, yeah.
I've given her the invoice.
She's got the checkbook.
And instead of writing me the check so I can go to my next job, she spends all this time singing, trying to seduce me, basically.
And I'm trying to be nice.
I'm trying to be cordial.
I'm not trying to sing, though.
What song?
Yeah, 20 years, man.
This is literally 20 years ago, I bet.
15 years ago.
I just can't remember.
Was it rap music?
I don't know.
I want to say it was like slow, like...
Yeah, something, you know, something softer than that.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Sexual healing.
Mervin Gaye.
I think you got it.
Wow.
She was pulling out all the stops to try.
I had another lady in the same town grab my junk and come in and grab me and kiss me.
And I had to literally, I was married at that time.
So I, you know, you said, hey.
Well, even if I wasn't, get off me, pay me my money, let me go.
Right, let me go.
Mostly, I'd be so scared, you know, we're in an age of lawsuits.
Yeah, now we definitely are, though.
But 15 years ago, people.
I think we still were.
And what if it don't work out?
Say this girl kisses me and I throw her on the floor and just ravage her and we have a great time.
Yeah.
And then I don't call her back.
And now she calls my company and says, he rape me on the floor or whatever.
Don't even go down that road.
Don't even cross that bridge.
Yeah.
I mean, in hindsight, do you ever fantasize about having had a romantic instance, though?
Obviously, the South African one kind of stands out.
If I could have gone back now being single, I probably could have taken a run at that and had a good time.
And all would have been fine.
But hey, mate.
Yeah.
I don't think they say that something.
Yeah, that's true, actually, man.
I think I need a fucking plumber in my head.
What's one of the wildest?
Yeah, we got to ask, like, how much shit is out there, really?
And how much shit is the middle of the earth just filling up with shit all the time?
Like I say, it all gets processed, cleaned, and then jumped back into the ocean.
But the septic box, that thing.
The septic box is even more environmentally friendly.
Wow.
Better for everything.
It contains, it decomposes, it leaches clean water out into your yard.
And that's why you see those green lines in a lot of people's grass because that's where the septic tank leech field is.
And it makes the grass a little bit greener in those areas.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
and does it sift the sludge or just the sludge builds up?
Because, really, in the end, it's very little solids, right?
Right.
A perfectly working septic tank, if it is working, it has active live bacteria in it that are constantly breaking down the solid material, separating the solids from liquids.
They sell this product called Ridex, but you can use buttermilk.
You can use cultured buttermilk or cultured yeast, I mean.
All these things work to promote the bacterial growth of your septic tank.
Oh, interesting.
Bleach and other chemicals tend to kill the active bacteria that are doing the job.
So you don't want that.
So you want those cultures.
Yeah, you want to have like a little ecosystem.
Yeah, live bacteria.
They're doing the job.
My grandma and grandpa were, I mean, they had people coming over to their house, but they lived in the same house for like 25 years.
And when the guy came, because the law says when you sell a house, you have to have a septic tank pumped, no matter what.
Oh, wow.
So that's when you start over.
Yeah.
So when the guy came to pump their septic tank after it had been buried for 25 years, he said, it looks like brand new.
Wow.
This didn't need to be done.
This tank is working properly.
And if they are working properly, a true working septic tank will never have to be pumped.
Dang.
Huh.
That's amazing, really.
Yeah, it's a completely self-contained system if you do the right things.
You can't just ignore it and let it build up.
You've got to treat it.
You got to take care of it.
You can't put the wrong things in it.
Now, have you ever had to go looking for something that someone flushed that they needed back?
Like a tooth or like a wedding ring?
$20,000 diamond ring.
Really?
At midnight?
Yep.
And were they on drugs or something?
No, no, no.
It was a lady at an apartment complex.
She was the manager of an apartment complex years ago.
This was in Alabama.
The boss calls me and says, hey, man, this lady, and we know this apartment, it's one of our clients.
You know, they got 1,500 apartments in there.
We're going there all the time.
Hey, she dropped her wedding ring down the toilet at the office.
Can you go get it?
So I get there and she's just bawling, crying.
Do you hug her?
What do you do?
Just go and you don't hug?
No, I don't hug.
I'm a plumber, man.
Nobody wants to touch me.
And I got a rotor.
I probably got turd somewhere on me.
Yeah, that's awesome, bro.
So I go in the bathroom and I take the toilet off the floor and I give it a shake and I can hear it's in there.
Oh, that's good news, man.
Because if it makes it down the pipe, I got to send the camera down there.
And I got to basically really slowly with the camera until I find it.
And then I got to chase something down like a snake with a hook on it to try and get it out.
And that's like an endoscopy almost.
How much does that cost?
How much is that upcharge when you get that cam out?
It varies by area, obviously.
In this area, I think a camera is around $500.
Yeah.
So back in the day, this was like I say 15 years ago.
I want to say we would probably charge her around $200 to do that.
Fortunately, I found it in the toilet.
So I didn't have to go that route.
I had the camera in the truck, but no need busting it out.
Nice.
So I go to shake it, and I'm like, it's in there.
So you shake the toilet, you can hear the pipe, you can hear it rattling.
I can hear the ring rattling around inside.
It's a neat way to think about it.
Instead of just looking, listen first.
It fell out.
I got it.
I put it on my finger, on my pinky finger.
I put the toilet back together and I go back into the office because it's midnight.
She's still waiting for me.
I'm like, I couldn't find it.
Oh, no.
No, no, no, I'm kidding.
Here it is.
Here it is.
Did you get down on one knee?
No.
Oh, man.
Here you go.
She gave me a $100 tip.
Oh, that's nice.
Because it was an overtime midnight thing, I think the bill was probably like $85 15 years ago in Alabama.
Here, that same midnight charge would probably be $400.
Yeah, $400 or $500.
Wow.
From a commercial company.
For me to come to it, I don't care about overtime or late night or whatever.
It's all the same.
Is there anything you notice about people, like just in different areas, going into different areas over time?
Do you notice any difference in people in different environments or anything like that?
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
California is tough.
I hate using the word liberal because I don't really like that word.
Well, it's very liberal out here.
Yeah.
It's very people out here are pussies.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I don't know how else to say it.
There's a lot of labia out here that I like to say, dude.
A lot of freelance.
The vaginization of California has taken place.
Soft.
So soft, man.
And that's what makes it tough being here, too.
But then there's also beautiful side to it, too, because, you know, the weather is so nice.
There's so many great people that come here to chase their dreams, to do things.
Like there's so many types of people.
It's tough, but yeah, this shit gets you soft out.
It's tough, but it's also the best.
You know, it's the best and the worst.
You got to take the bad with the good.
There's that soft side of a lot of people, but also there's tons of good people.
And if you hook up and you meet with the right ones, then you can kind of get set here.
Yeah.
You know.
This is a...
Yeah.
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When I was young, the plumbers came because my mom had been flushing coffee grounds on the garbage disposal and the little paper thing that was in the coffee pot.
Oh, no.
She'd been like putting that in there just in the morning because it was easy.
She was on the go.
And she was like, do not tell the plumbers that I've been doing that or we're going to have to pay and the building won't have to pay.
And right when the plumbers came in, bro, I was such a rat, dude.
I was like, my mom has been flushing coffee grounds and the paper things.
They would have found it.
They would have found it anyway.
Fuck, man.
I never even told anybody that till just now, man, but I feel so bad.
I fucking threw my mom right under the bus.
Did she have to pay?
I don't think she did, man.
I think the plumbers knew that she was a single mom and stuff.
And we're like, oh, well, you know.
I've done that before, actually, where, you know, so you go to an apartment complex or you go to a rental, you know, a lot of rentals I'd go to where the owner would say, hey, if the customer put something in there that they weren't supposed to, I ain't paying.
Right.
Like tampons or, you know, paper towels is a big one.
We get a lot of paper towels out of drains, baby wipes.
Oh, yeah.
Baby wipes seem impossible to flush.
They don't break down.
Yeah.
So if they get down there and they get caught on something, they're just going to pack up and other stuff's going to pack up on them.
Here's a couple of good tips.
You know, for years they would say coffee grounds is okay in the garbage disposal.
Eggshells is supposed to be good for it.
No.
Don't ever put pasta.
Don't ever put rice.
Don't do eggshells.
Don't do coffee grounds.
Those are not good for your garbage disposal.
They go in the trash or in the compost.
Your garbage disposal is for the tiniest little bits or whatever's left on your plate is what your garbage disposal was originally designed to do.
Chunk that stuff up, mix it with some water and send it down.
What about fat?
Like if you're cutting the fat off of a chicken, like you're getting some chicken pieces?
I mean, if you got one or two fat off, get it in there.
But don't carve a whole chicken and throw all the extra stuff in your garbage disposal.
That's not going to be good for it.
You're going to call a plumber.
What about bones?
No.
Okay.
No bones?
One lady called me because she stopped up her garbage disposal with a whole steak.
She called.
Her son was going to come over for dinner.
He called.
He said he couldn't make it.
She got pissed off and she threw the steak down the garbage disposal and it didn't make it.
Oh, and she hadn't cooked it.
No, it was raw.
So, yeah, that uncooked meat won't go down, really, huh?
No.
Well, I mean, it'll chunk up, but once it gets through there, it's just going to pack up.
Right, because it's that weird consistency at that point.
So garbage disposals come in different power.
You know, some of them are really strong.
I went to this frat house in Auburn, Alabama.
Tons of frat dudes.
And they needed a new garbage disposal.
Their old one had taken a crap or whatever.
War Eagle.
Yeah, War Eagle.
War Damn Eagle.
Damn, my bad dude.
Yeah, you're right.
So I get him this one horsepower garbage disposal and I put it in.
And the head of the frat house is there.
And he's like, is this a good garbage disposal?
Is it strong?
And I'm like, they actually advertise this garbage disposal will chew up a beer bottle.
Damn.
And he's like, word?
I'm like, yep.
And he's like, that's awesome.
I'm like, okay, cool.
Bye.
Give me my money.
And I left.
Like a week later, I had to go back to that same fraternity house because all the pipes underneath the garbage disposal and the whole main pipe underneath the house was packed full of broken glass.
Because they had a party that weekend And dudes were going, watch this, and just dropping beer bottle after beer bottle down the sink.
Have you ever seen a gas-powered garbage disposal?
No.
That'd be pretty cool, though.
That'd be pretty cool, huh?
I think that thing would work.
I wouldn't want to connect it to my sewer system, though, because that's just going to send too much nastiness down there, you know?
Now, if you run out of Draino stuff, can you pour gasoline down your drain?
Don't pour Draino down your drain.
Really?
No, man, that stuff's bad.
Is it?
Honestly, dude, sometimes when I'm not even feeling good about myself as a person, I'll go get a couple things of Draino and pour it in all the drains in my place.
Why?
I think it just makes me feel like something's being done, even though I'm not feeling good.
Do you own the house?
No, it's an important thing.
Man, fuck it.
You're pipes.
Yeah, but I just like, I don't know, something about it.
It's like, oh, man, I can't unclog my own life, but I'm going to do my best on these drains right now.
You know, I think it's kind of a, anyway, it's anything with hydrochloric or sulfuric acid.
Pipes are not designed to handle that.
Wow.
It might eat through the clog, but whether it does or not, there's going to be some residual acid left in your pipes.
I have grabbed pipes, solid cast iron pipes that people had used Reno on, and I can crush them with my hand because they're so brittle.
Or plastic pipes that just have the whole bottom channel where the water runs gone.
Just melted away.
Yeah, that's what we had.
Growing up, it would be plastic piping right through some plywood, right?
Right through a hole in a piece of plywood or something.
You think getting a drain is unstopped?
Or you think getting a drain unstopped is expensive?
Try replacing a pipe.
Yeah, that's when it gets pricey.
Right.
So you want to spend $20 on some Draino to try and save yourself $100 or $200 on a plumber for unstopping your drain?
That Draino might cost you thousands in the pipe repair that comes down the road or the damage that the water leak will cause because you're not going to notice it right away.
It's going to do some wood damage first and some mold and rot.
Fuck, that's crazy, bro.
I can't even.
Yeah, because I guess I'll stop getting it.
And sometimes I get the expensive one, the little gold bottle.
There's better tricks.
Boiling water works really well.
Really?
Yeah.
Boiling water with a little bit of vinegar in it keeps your drain smelling good and it keeps them running clean.
Dude, what's crazy is in the morning when I get up, I get some warm water and put some vinegar in it.
There you go.
See, I mean, you're already.
I drink it for myself.
Oh, and drink it really.
Yeah, like it's like a popular thing.
We look that up, do you mind, Nick?
How's that work?
It works good.
I feel like it makes me feel...
It makes me feel like kind of...
I don't want to say fresh, bro, because that's kind of a bitch word to use.
But it makes me feel kind of like...
Yeah, I'm masing from the top, bro.
That's that fucking Mansengill.
What's coming up a lot is apple cider vinegar.
Yeah, yeah, that's the one I use.
All right.
Yeah, sorry, not straight up, like dye your hair vinegar.
Oh, my girl was doing that for a little while.
Yeah, you know, like that and something else.
She said it didn't taste very good, but it was supposed to be pretty good for like a hundred.
It does not taste good.
Yeah, yeah.
It does not taste good.
I just read on there, though, that it relieves nighttime leg cramps, which is...
Potassium.
Oh, and honey.
Damn, I fucking want some right now, dude.
Because I got on these compression socks because my legs hurt.
What is the most complicated septic system that exists out there?
or the most complicated one that you've ever come upon?
Hmm.
They are not complicated.
They're not.
No, it's hard to find one like that.
Usually the most complicated thing I run into is when people try and they don't know what they're doing.
Day before yesterday, for example, I went to a house where the guy called me and said, this is going to be a big thing, but do what you can.
And I go in there and the plumber couldn't, he wasn't a plumber, the guy couldn't put the toilet pipe in the center of the space where the toilet goes.
So he didn't.
And he installed it over in the corner and he put the toilet on a diagonal coming out funny.
And it didn't sit right.
It didn't look right.
It was not proper.
Not only that, but he didn't use the right material.
So the toilet wasn't even stuck to the floor.
It was just kind of non-functional.
Yeah.
It feels risky.
Yeah.
And as soon as I start moving things and I get in there, I'm like, had this not have taken place in the first place, it would have been so much easier for me to fix.
But that I have to undo the problems of somebody else and then recreate from, you know, basically, I got to undo all this before I can go back to the beginning.
So when it gets complicated is when somebody tackles a project they probably shouldn't have.
They should have just called a plumber in the first place.
Right.
So yeah, instead, if you get brave ideas to just kind of Lewis and Clark your fucking shit future, change it up and hire somebody that knows what they're doing.
Yeah.
It's worth the money.
I mean, some of these companies, you know, I can't be everywhere, so you're not going to get me.
And some of these companies are not very cheap, but it is worth the money.
These guys have learned a lot over their, however many years it took to be a professional plumber.
What's your company, Brad?
It's called Toilet Champion.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Hell yeah.
Do you like it?
Bro, it's crazy because in my mind, I'm like, this guy is a toilet champion.
Yeah.
I won a contest.
You did?
Yeah, it was putting a toilet together.
It was a plumbing supply store in Washington was having this contest.
They had a shitload, haha, shitloads of toilets in the box.
Like everything is in the box that you need to put this toilet together.
Oh, wow.
And the contest, they had a barbecue and everything, and they had like vendors there that were selling tools and stuff like that.
And this was the contest.
Whoever puts a toilet together in the fastest amount of time, you get like a trophy, you get $100, and there was something else involved in it.
And I did it in a minute, 54. Damn.
Out of the box, fully assembled, no leaks.
So I get this little trophy with a dude holding a toilet up over his head.
I'm like, I'm the toilet champion.
That's awesome.
It's been the name of my business ever since.
Dude, that's beautiful.
And toilet champion is based where it's here in Los Angeles.
Yeah.
A specific area of Los Angeles?
I tend not to come into LA too much.
I kind of stick more toward the valley.
And Thousand Oaks see me.
I mean, I'll move around where, you know, dude, I went to Cambria a couple of weeks ago and repiped a whole house.
That's four hours away.
So you'll do some adventures.
You'll do some stuff.
The toilet champion, bro.
Toiletchampion.com, man.
It's its own website.
I love it.
We got a question right here from a guy who has a beard.
Now, can you cut your hair and flush it down the pipe?
Yeah.
You can?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, that's all right.
Don't do it in like large quantities at once, but I mean, little bits, it'll go through.
It'll go through fine.
Have you ever found something in a pipe that you thought this person could be a murderer doing something dangerous?
Like some bonage or anything like that?
I found a baby in a pipe once.
Oh, you didn't?
Yeah.
A baby what?
A baby human.
Oh, damn.
Yeah.
That was a pretty sad day.
I had to call the police, though.
You did?
Yeah.
So she miscarried.
He beat the crap out of her.
She miscarried, flushed it.
So it wasn't very large.
It was just barely bigger than the size of your hand or so.
But fortunately for her, their sewer line was already stopped up.
So when she flushed it down, it didn't go all the way.
And a couple of days later, they had called Rotorouter.
And when I got there and undid the cap out in the front yard, the baby came out.
And I'm looking.
I had to look at it for a couple of minutes because I've seen so many rats in pipes.
Right.
So a rat that has been drowned or it will lose all its fur and it'll also be white and very small and have bones.
So you got to kind of look it over.
It was not dissimilar from that, minus the tail and all that, but it was definitely a human baby.
Wow.
And I'm like, oh, so.
And what do you do?
Did you feel something like spiritually at that point at all?
Yeah, I felt horrible.
I didn't know what was really going on at the time.
I think I was like 21 or 22. You know, I was very young.
So I picked up the next tail and I called my boss.
Lamar, man, a baby came floating out of this drain.
What do I do?
I'm way out in the country, out in the middle of nowhere, you know?
And he goes, you pack up your shit, get in the truck and leave right now.
Don't unstop that drain.
Don't do nothing.
So I did.
I packed up.
I didn't even talk to the lady.
I just loaded up my stuff and drove away.
They called the police.
The police showed up.
They did their thing.
The guy went to jail for beating the crap out of the lady.
Oh.
So at least that happened.
So sad story and all that, but at least you don't get smaller justice.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe they don't find out.
Right.
And maybe he continues beating the crap out of her.
You know, it's funny.
It's almost like a little bit of a euphemism for life.
It's like you think you can put everything into the hide everything inside of yourself or in the, you know, in the drains, you know, in our emotional drains or in the ground or wherever, but it all comes to the surface.
Eventually.
Eventually, it's all going to pop out.
You can't hide it forever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
R.I.P.
man.
It's so sad, dude.
What kind of baby?
Was it a boy or girl?
Do you know?
I couldn't tell.
It was, like I say, it was so small.
And it had been in there for a while, so it was already starting to kind of, and it was fully developed and all that.
Yeah.
Say it, man.
That dream baby, and it was Alabama.
That was in Alabama, yeah.
I found an alarm clock in the toilet.
I found an Elmo in the toilet.
You're familiar with that, dude.
You're late for work.
You're not late for work.
That was exactly it.
The alarm clock went off.
Dude threw it that way and it went right down the toilet.
He's like, shit.
And he was right.
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That's ridge.com slash T-H-E-O and use code theo for 10 off and corey huff i promise i'll be sending you you yours soon brother i'm so sorry i know that uh that you've had that little baby for a while now um the link is in this in the description that's ridge.com slash theo for that front pocket carry uh let's go to this video question that came in right here what up pimps uh i was wondering
if it's true they called the day after thanksgiving brown friday in the plumbing world they really do know gang gang gang bro they do busiest plumbing day of the year for service plumbers and that's just based on sheer volume of feces i mean it's just called brown friday it's to to be honest it's mostly kitchen sinks ah yeah potato peels 80 of it's going to be potato peels in the garbage disposal they you know you got a big
thanksgiving dinner you just peeled 20 potatoes they all went down the drain they didn't go very far right yeah so yeah yeah uh yeah potato peels they have they just have that same consistency it's like a little layer of skin they can just gather up yep so uh they call it yeah he's right though they do call it brown friday man i one year i did 14 service calls in one day the day after thanksgiving and is it mostly shit related or is it like a mix of things it's well you said a lot of it's food like i say right out of those 14 service
calls i think 12 of them were kitchen sinks so it's just food particles and everything and the other two are mainlines and do you go to places where sometimes people are embarrassed like they'll they'll like come in but they'll never even look you in the eyes it's over there oh yeah wow well not only that people have a lot of shame around feces and around shit i i so it went beyond that because um uh several years after quitting with rotorutor i started working for one of the largest luxury hotels in the world wow
i don't know if i'm allowed to say who it is oh you're certainly allowed four seasons in seattle i'm working for four seasons in seattle and and those toilets stop up just like any other toilet but these people are fancy and they don't want to interact with the common folk who is coming to unstop their toilet yeah the plumber's a strange guy to them well i actually worked for the four seasons oh wow so yeah yeah i was specific one or for like kind of an area eventually i worked for three okay but one at a time i worked four seasons
seattle for three years as their uh overnight maintenance so it wasn't just plumbing i was doing drywall repair and painting and all this other you know whatever needed to be done including you know all the building maintenance and handling guest room calls so yeah most of the time if a guest were to call with a stopped up toilet that guest would not be in the room they'd just dip out let you fix it they don't want to yeah you know you already got to smell their shit they don't want to talk to you yeah for the most part there was some small occasions where they
would be in there and they would just be it it's in there right yeah lady i know where the bathroom is i i work here have you ever had anybody like put on a mask or something so they don't see like because people have so much shame surrounding like body you know activity and stuff uh they do but no i i had one lady anybody hiding behind their hand or any like anything that's no no i i had one lady open the door with the robe and the robe was open oh yeah i mean just everything was showing damn nice looking or not yeah real nice looking i ain't trying to lose my job right uh i
i can't come in i'm sorry wow she's like no no no it's okay come on in and i'm like no i can't her husband pops around from the corner and he's like yeah it's okay come on in i'm like no it's not okay yeah like surprise me with the man that ain't gonna help no no no no y'all trying to invite me in here for some freaky stuff i ain't down let me fix your toilet have you ever had anybody offer you yeah just straight up point blank here's a couple hundred dollars watch me bone ronda or whatever you know like watch us do something man i might get down on that but no i never had that i
i mean if i just got to stand there and watch it'll come man i'll tell you this man when you guys hire the toilet champion you throw in 300 he'll watch you guys bone for a half hour for the answer look man i guarantee you somebody will hire you now to come do it hey hey man money is money you don't pay me 300 i ain't got to do no hard work i just got to stand there and watch drink it's still plumbing you're watching bro somebody's laying pipe get that half a sandwich dog here comes a white guy from with a question ooh from seattle
from your old uh stompy dad you got a nice hat on and i will say before i play this one uh we got more questions for you than we have in a long time for a guest but like two-thirds of them were have you ever had sex on the job did anybody ask you to clean your pipes a lot of that type stuff yeah a lot of euphemisms oh yeah we covered that pretty in depth what's happening at theo ryan from ohio just wanted to ask super mario there he uh when he's cleaning out toilets um cleaning
a real nasty drain does he glove up the hands or does he go in raw used to work with his cat in pittsburgh he's from pittsburgh just thought i'd throw that in there from pittsburgh he uh you know we worked on the river together on the boats and anytime he was cleaning the shower cleaning the toilet he never gloved up the hands i always called him nasty he said it was because he used to be a plumber and you know all plumbers did that i just wanted to know if super mario there did that and he'll probably try to lie to you and
say he didn't because he got him on the spot right now so just don't shake his hand when he goes to leave gang gang gang gang brother thank you ryan was that ryan from oio yep ryan boyer oh thank you mr boyer i appreciate that's a good question it is uh yeah uh first four or five years no gloves yeah that's my toilet champion and and still if if i don't have gloves i don't give a yeah i mean if i have them i'll use them but
if not i know how to wash my hands yeah i'm not trying to stick my hands in my face or on my eyes or shake hands with people or anything yeah it's work but here's the other thing i went to cooking school for a year so that was an everyday four hours a day thing and and the biggest thing that that that they teach you in cooking school is to wash your hands and and such good cleanliness habits with your hands so i can understand the difference you know you know what i'm saying that
It's okay to stick your hands in poop if you know you're going to wash your hands before you shake somebody else's hand or stick it in your mouth or whatever.
But yeah, yeah, no worries.
I don't care.
I'll put my hands on turtle.
Yeah, you got good hand etiquette.
Yeah.
You got hand plans.
You have plans for your hands.
I'm not trying to touch food right after cleaning out somebody's toilet.
I probably wash my hands three or four times before I do that.
Yeah.
You ain't going to clean out a shitter and then fucking polish off a thing of deviled eggs immediately.
Most likely not.
Yeah.
But back in the day I did.
Amen.
In the first five years, yeah, I'd go unstop somebody's thing and then go eat lunch without washing my hands.
Hell yeah.
I didn't know any better.
I was a kid.
And at that time, it's wild how when you're young, you can spare a couple years.
You're like, oh, I get lymphoma.
I get, you know, carcinogen or whatever.
I'll be fine.
You know what I'm saying?
I'll fucking lose a limb.
I'll sprout another.
When you're young, you have that in your head.
Invincibility attitude.
You're like, oh, whatever, dude.
I'll fucking have a, you know, I'll have a couple spare ribs and fucking half a turd for lunch, bro.
Now I got to be careful when I get out of bed because it's a ways down, you know.
What do we have, Nick?
Let's get to a video question.
I'm not.
We actually had a, Yeah, I would have just assumed, yes, they do wear gloves.
So that's very interesting.
We actually had a message from someone you might know.
Uh-oh.
It's a voice memo, actually, not a video.
So let's hear this.
What's the biggest turd you've ever seen while plumbing?
That's my father.
Is it really?
Yeah, I know that guy's voice.
Wow, that's like Luke, I am your father.
That was like very Star Wars-y in there.
I know his voice.
Yeah, one more time, let's hear it.
What's the biggest turd you've ever seen while plumbing?
Oh, that's awesome, man.
You know, it has to be the one I was talking about earlier, the lady with the baseball poops.
Yeah, this colin Ryan.
That's what they call them.
It's great.
Thank you, bruh.
It's great.
It just came into my brain, man.
I'm going to have to get a hold of my friend in Alabama and tell him that.
He'll laugh.
He'll remember.
Buy him a Houston jersey.
That's what you got to do.
Colin Ryan.
Dude, this Thai Young Award winners.
That's what I'm talking about.
Now, I mean, yeah, that was the biggest one while plumbing.
But I was walking down the streets of Seattle like, I don't know, 10 years ago.
I was plumbing a building, actually, and we were just taking it because we were commercial plumbers doing high-rise buildings and kind of got out of that turd chasing business.
That's what they call rotor rotor, man.
Turd chasing.
Turd chasers.
Yeah.
So I got into the new construction, high-rise, clean pipe, no more dirty hands.
Right.
And we were walking downtown Seattle, headed to Whole Foods, like we did every day to have our 10 o'clock morning 15-minute break.
And we passed, I kid you not, a one-foot turd.
Oh, wow.
I mean, in diameter, it was a pile of poop.
Shit squats.
A foot in diameter.
Jesus.
And where'd they get it from?
You think it came directly out of a body?
You think it was a group of people?
One human turd.
And it was just kind of like one of these, kind of soft-serve deal.
Yeah.
That's a thing, though.
That's a homeless thing.
I don't know if you knew that or not.
Homeless in major cities shit on the sidewalks on purpose.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I knew that.
It's like they're fuck you to society or whatever.
Yeah.
So it's not uncommon to see a big turd.
And I almost think like they're kicking back, like, hey, I got a three-day turd built up.
I got to go find a sidewalk, you know?
Yeah.
And then we'll kick back and watch all these people walk past it.
Oh, I bet.
It's got to be.
And honestly, you can't fucking find entertainment.
Nah, come on, man.
That's free entertainment.
That's amazing.
Imagine laying just a real snake in the basket heater across the way.
And then you and your buddy crack open a couple natty lights and sit over in the corner and fucking watch a fucking firework.
I saw that in Hollywood like two months ago.
And people had stepped in it.
So there was like foot tracks going away from it.
It was crazy.
That's insane.
You know, it's interesting too, because at a certain point with bodily functions, we become almost like animals in a way.
You know, it's like we mark our territory.
When I was young, I used to be real scared and I would urinate in places in my bedroom.
All right.
You know, and I think in hindsight, I never really knew why I did it, but I think I was like scared that something was going to come get me.
So I would mark my territory.
You know, I don't think it was a choice that I was making.
I felt like it was a not involuntary reaction, but just something that was more on the animalistic DNA of me.
Did you ever outgrow that?
Yes, I did.
Well, I have not yet.
Really?
Wow.
You'll just do it sometimes.
I get in trouble with my girl and my fiancé a lot for peeing inappropriate areas.
Wow.
That's interesting.
Do you think that's any reason why you got into plumbing?
No.
No.
Uh-uh.
But drinking sometimes comes into play with the peeing on the floor or whatever.
Oh, yeah.
On an ironing board in a hotel room or something.
Yeah.
You never know.
Yeah.
I mean.
So you'll do some wild pissing.
But also, more to your point, like you're saying, kind of every time I move into a new place, I got to pee on it.
Yeah.
And somewhere.
I'm going to pee on that house sometime.
I don't know why.
I just have to.
Dude, my buddy's dad, when I was growing up, used to get on the roof sometime when he'd been drinking and he'd let us watch him piss down the chimney, dude.
Down the chimney.
To come inside.
And then mom, they wouldn't know.
We'd sneak up and then the mom would fucking get so mad.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they just can't understand why you can't go use the toilet.
Yeah.
Well, because I don't have to.
Because I don't have to.
Because I don't have to.
Dude, you're supposed to be in the toilet, but you can also pee wherever you want.
Exactly.
Wherever you want.
In a suitcase, on ironing board.
Do you feel like it's territorial for you?
I think so.
Yeah.
I hope.
I don't know if I'll grow out of it.
I don't care if I do or not, really.
It's not really a the only bad vibe I get from it is from the message.
My fiancé, yeah.
She's not comfortable with it.
Well, look, dude, that's when you break out that trophy and say, Hey, lady.
I am the toilet champion.
And the toilet champion's gonna do what the toilet champion is gonna do.
I need to get a belt, too.
Dude, you really do, man.
I'm not joking, bro.
I probably could.
Get one of the kids when you go into the house and they're in there.
That's awesome that your dad called in because we didn't know that he was going to call in, right, Nick?
Right.
I just recognized the last name.
Yeah.
Puskowski was on the lineup of just people that had called.
Yeah.
That's pretty awesome.
That's cool.
Did you and your father ever work together?
No.
Well, yes and no.
Not really.
So I'd have to say no.
I got a job working at the same company as him, but for a very brief period of time, we weren't doing the same thing.
We weren't even working in the same area, but it was only an in-between until I could.
Construction plumbers get laid off from time to time.
You know, you hit a big job or whatever, a high-rise building.
When that building is over, a lot of those plumbers are going to go on unemployment.
I see.
That seems to be the way of it.
And I don't like to sit still.
So my old man had a company he was working for, and they'll hire anybody.
They don't care.
It's barely better than minimum wage, but it's money.
So I went and worked for him for like a couple of months.
But like I say, him and I never really, him and I do different things.
He's a painter.
And you guys, it must be pretty close.
So if he called in, that's pretty cool.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, since we've become adults, yeah, we're best friends.
You know, he's my best guy friend, I think.
My fiancé is probably my best real friend.
And your dad is a pretty hard worker himself.
Oh, yeah.
He's 62, 63. Been working his whole life.
So instilled some good values, I would say.
Yeah, it sounds like it, man.
How do you get from, so for the young plumbers out there and plumbers' apprentices and young men that are like, well, what do I do?
Is there a way up, out, through that business?
How did you, you know, tell me how to get that those young men can get from starting working from a company with a rotor root or a commercial group, some outfit like that, how they can get to that next level of being now a toilet champion.
Or self-sufficient.
Or self-sufficient.
Yeah, because there's a lot of, there's pride in that.
Even though there's other expenses that come in, it's nice to be able to have something that feels like yours, to piss in your own fucking yard.
Hey, make no mistake, I got to work hard for it and I'm always out there hustling still.
I mean, I've not hit Easy Street by any means.
Oh, and there never really is.
The more work you bring on or create or that you're a part of, the more work there is.
It's like growth begets growth.
And it's a blessing and a curse.
There's a law diminishing returns.
It's like, it's never, it's great, but it's different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So to answer that, I would say to start, and if you're in your own, I mean, pride, I want to say pride in your own abilities or your own work ethic.
You know, how hard I work and how I want it to look is what drives people paying me.
They pay me because what I put in looks good and it works.
I don't charge a fortune, but I'm not the cheapest out there either.
I pick what works price-wise for me and I try to be as completely open and fair with my customers as I possibly can be.
And that seems to work well.
But whether you're doing plumbing or carpentry or, you know, treat people right.
Treat them honestly.
Don't rob them and you'll get customers for life.
I've got people that call me from five, six, some 10 years ago.
Hey, you still in Seattle?
I got some plumbing.
No, I'm sorry, man.
But they'll hold on to your number forever if you did them right.
That's so true.
You save it in there.
Yeah.
Sad plumber.
If you're to ask how to succeed by yourself, treat people right and don't rob them.
And you'll be fine.
What commercial plumbing companies are charging, I understand the overhead and the expenses and the insurance and everything else and advertising and all that.
But it's still, you know, the owner is making money for doing very little.
Right.
You know, it feels egregious.
It's a little too far.
So at some point, you got out, though.
You started to do your own thing.
What did you do?
You started an LLC.
You started to do.
I have an LLC.
And then you started advertising.
How did you go about that?
I'm just trying to get some of these young guys who may be curious about that sort of stuff, how to get out of somebody else's toilet.
Yeah, yeah, and get into their own.
Hoist up their own.
Fucking, yeah, at least pretend yours is a birdbath for a little while.
Yeah, Craigslist was a good way to start.
That's how I got my start.
There's a couple other avenues like Angie's List, and there's a couple other apps that you can use that will send you work, but you have to pay for it.
So Thumbtack, Angie's List, there's a couple of others that will give you job leads, but if you were to accept those job leads, they can be quite expensive.
And all they are is leads.
Right.
So if the customer decides not to go with your price, then you're out that money.
You're still paying for that lead.
Yeah.
And that bill started getting so expensive that it wasn't worth it for the return I was getting out of the jobs that would hire me.
I see.
So it ended up being, you know, a guy needs a new water heater, for example.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah, I can put in a water heater way cheaper than they can put in a water heater.
But it cost me $100 just to tell that guy that.
And what if I tell him and he decides to go with somebody else?
I'm still out that $100.
So I gave up on all those.
They are an option if you're small time, really small time, and you're only doing the minimum bids, then it's probably not going to be too expensive.
But if you're out there and you're trying to make it a business, Craigslist works pretty well because it's $5 per post and that's not very expensive.
And you do, you get one job and you got your return on that.
Yep.
And word of mouth, I think, is probably my best.
And that seems to work better than anything.
And I've been here a few years, so I have enough built up now that I rarely do, but I do post every once in a while on Craigslist.
Matter of fact, that's how Gianni found me.
Oh, really?
Yeah, and Gianni, everybody knows, is the beautiful little Twink.
And I'm not sure he's a Twink, but he is a nice young man who's on a new actor.
He's going to be on a new television show called, what is it?
He was just in the sixth season of Power.
Power.
Yeah.
He was just in the Sixth Season of Power, but he has a new show that he's taping right now that we can't talk about.
Yeah.
But we just did.
Oh, we don't know what it is yet.
Yeah, but also we have insurance.
Come at us, G. Yeah.
Come at us.
Hey, if I'm paying for it.
Have you ever seen kids?
Like, I knew we'd go over to these kids' house and sometimes they would flush the toilet, obviously, and then use it as like a little bit of like a pool or something for one of their kids.
Oh, yeah.
You see that a lot?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Kids will swim and whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the toilet.
Or we had this one kid, small Alan, and he could fucking literally, bro, go all the way under the water and hold his breath, man.
In the toilet.
Yeah.
That's gross.
It was beautiful, I thought at the time.
But yeah, now in hindsight as an adult, if I saw him in there, I'd be like, get the fuck out of there, Alan.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Overflowed upstairs tub on purpose.
Yeah, the tub was that big toilet.
That's a big one to see happen a lot.
Or bobbing for apples, people ever doing anything like that.
Have you ever seen any crazy somebody a lot of tits?
You have to pee?
Oh, go pee.
Is that okay?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, dude.
Don't pee in here.
I got to mark my territory somewhere.
Just mark it in the bathroom across the hall.
There's a key right on there, and Nick will get it for you.
Today's episode is brought to you by Toilet Champion.
Get that shitter, baby.
You feel me?
Oh, man.
All right, we got a couple more questions for you that have come in here from listeners, man, and then we're going to get you on your way, man.
This guy is just trying not to get a bid.
It's a very specific question for him.
Hey, Theo, man.
This is JD.
I'm out of Pittsburgh, Kansas.
And I see you're getting on with the plumber.
So I got a plumbing question for you.
I turned my bathroom sink on.
It just can't keep up.
The drain gets full.
I can't leave it running, you know.
So I'd like to ask the plumber, what should I do about that?
Gang, gang.
Gang, bro.
Thank you, Bradley.
Was that his name?
It was JD.
Sorry.
JD Bradley.
I'm Bradley.
Right.
But still not someone.
I was trying to convince myself about that.
Thanks, JD.
That's a good question, man.
That's a really good question.
So, yeah, he's in there in the morning.
He gets it going.
And then he's like, oh, shit, I'm trying to shave and stuff.
Now I got to wait and let it go down.
What's going on there, Brad?
That's happened to every college house I've ever been in.
And almost immediately.
And then you just live with it.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Such a simple fix, too.
Really?
Yeah.
I love this.
I love this question, JD.
JD.
Five-minute fix.
He's back in business.
He can either grab that stopper and pull it straight out, but sometimes they're connected to a rod that's behind the pipe.
He has to reach behind there and undo that nut, pull the rod out, and then he can pull the stopper out.
And there'll be so much gunk and hair and nastiness on the bottom side of that stopper.
You throw that in the trash, put the stopper back in, slide the rod back in, and tighten that little nut that holds it in place.
You're good to go.
So what's going on there is the problem is if he pulls the stopper up, it won't come all the way off, right?
That's the issue.
The pipe is like this, right?
And there's a rod into the pipe and the stopper is connected to that rod.
That way you can't pull it out.
So that little nut, you just, it's finger tight usually.
90% of the time, it's finger tight.
And you just undo it, pull that rod out to release that stopper and pull it out.
Clean it all off.
A lot of times, what I'll do is I'll clean it all off and put the rod back in without the stopper and then just drop the stopper in so it's free-floating.
You can use it as a stopper.
It still works, but if you want to take it out, you can't.
More manageable.
Wow.
Dude, that's awesome.
Thank you, JD.
That's a great question.
And I hope that that's a fix for you, my friend.
And I appreciate you calling in and leaving.
That's a great one.
And also, I was thinking about the reason why you're here today.
We thought about like, we just wanted to have like just more norm, just people in the world.
You know, like it's just more fun sometimes to talk to somebody that, you know, not having to talk to like celebrities or try to get celebrity.
It's fun to just, I don't know.
Celebrity life is a little different for sure.
Yeah.
And we're just glad you're here today.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Oh, thanks, man.
Thanks for having me.
And what I want to say is, so you talked about putting an ad even on Craigslist every now and then.
And that's how we found you.
Like our idea was just we want to have somebody on.
We want a plumber.
Yeah, let's do it.
We're trying to get an illegal alien to come on.
Nice.
So we're like, we want a plumber.
So we go on Craigslist to look.
And because you put your ad out there, you are searching for business.
You are doing your job.
Then that's how we found you, right, Nick?
Yeah, and we were just talking about like toilet champion, at least website traffic.
Maybe it's not local people who can actually hire you, but it's going to blow up.
And I bet you'll get some TPW fans in the valley hitting you up.
I'm hoping.
Dude, I'll drive out there and shit and call you, bro.
And I'm fired up.
That's so cool, man.
But just the way that you put yourself out there and work hard, man.
And that's how we're here today because you don't put that ad out.
We don't even know about you.
And this has been an amazing, it's been an amazing time, dude.
It was fun.
Just learning about it.
So real quick, I told Nick this story.
You got to hear it, man.
It is the funniest thing that has happened in the end.
It's worth it.
I wanted to introduce it, but I didn't want to step on it, so I'm glad you said something.
All right.
Awesome.
So I moved, I transferred from Rotorouter, Alabama to Rotorouter, Tacoma.
Okay, and this is the toilet champion story.
No.
Okay.
I told you that one.
That was just putting the toilet together and winning a trophy in $100.
Right.
Okay.
So I shouldn't have interrupted you.
I moved, like I said, transferred.
I'm working for Rotorouter in Tacoma, and we get a new dispatcher.
And the new dispatcher that gets hired is going to come on right-along with somebody.
Excellent.
So she can kind of learn, or he can kind of learn what we do in the field.
Experience.
So this girl, Nikki, she comes with me.
And we go, you know, she sounds cute.
Is she cute?
Yeah, she's cute enough.
Yeah, she's cute enough.
Great big old boobs on her.
Both of them, bro.
Yeah, they were both big.
Oh, yeah.
You don't always get that, dude.
Yeah, sometimes you get that fucking, you know, that lazy Susan.
So anyway, we go on, you know, two, three, four service calls or whatever it was, go eat lunch.
So I have kind of a rare form of colitis, and my stomach can just blow up at any time.
Yeah, it sucks.
It's weird, too.
You would think.
But in all the years, even with bad guts and all that stuff, I've never used a customer's toilet because to me is just bad etiquette.
I'm here to fix it.
I'm not here to use it.
But this instance, I had to use it.
But I couldn't because everything in the house was completely stopped up.
Their toilets were full of water.
Their tubs were full of water.
Everything, they needed their main sewer line on stopped.
And I cannot hold this anymore.
You got that boy on, huh?
I got to shit something fierce.
I know when I really have to, when my eyebrows will start shaking, that's when I can't take it anymore.
I start sweating.
Oh, yeah.
Because it's about to happen.
It's going to sweat out of your body.
Yes.
So what can I do?
I jumped into the back of my Rotorutor van.
I grabbed a bucket and I shat very explosively and very loud with her sitting in the passenger seat.
No way.
Nikki with them tits.
Smelling and hearing every bit of what was going on.
Did you tell her first?
I said, I'm really sorry.
I don't know what she's like, just do it.
And she's got the windows rolled down.
You can tell she's not happy about it, but she suffered through it.
The worst part was the people still had the plumbing problem.
So after I finished blowing up that bucket, I had to leave it there and go fix these people's plumbing for another 30 minutes, leaving her with the bucket of shit.
In the car?
She got out for most of it and just kind of hung out outside.
You got to get out and get on your phone or something.
So I finish, I get the drain unstopped and everything else.
I get back there.
I rinse out the bucket and clean it all out and everything.
And we drive all the way back to the Rotorouter office in silence.
Just not speaking to each other.
But so much chatter going on in y'all's heads, man.
We ended up living together for three years.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
She was my girlfriend for a long time.
Praise God, brother.
That is fucking like miracle on 34th Street.
Obviously, she didn't mind the smell of my shit that bad.
Wow, guys.
So do you want to talk about how to meet a lady?
Man, that's crazy how the vulnerability of something brings people together.
Right?
It really does.
I mean, could I have been more vulnerable in that situation?
Yeah.
You know, I'm almost in tears.
Like, I'm so sorry I have to do this.
You know.
And what did you tell her to look the other way?
Was there any rules you gave her?
In a service man, you got that bulkhead wall right behind the seats.
So, I mean, it's a steel wall, but there's holes through it.
So, I mean, she's facing forward.
She can't see.
She can hear everything that's going on.
Like gunshots.
She could probably taste.
She could probably damn near taste everything.
Oh.
Man, bro, you're crazy, man.
Hey, you got to do what you got to do.
Dude, you got to do what you got to do.
You're crazy, man, but you're the best, dude.
That's awesome.
You've been a plumber for how long, Brad?
I started when I was 20. I'm 43. Are you really?
Yeah.
You look like Daniel, too, from our cartoons, doesn't he?
A little bit?
Yeah.
That's beautiful.
Dude, you look like this kid I grew up with named Daniel, dude, who ironically used to drink off the hose.
He would put the hose in his mouth, bro.
He'd put the hose in his mouth and then have you turn it on, even if it had been sitting there all winter and take that first hose hit, bro.
That fucking hot hit, bro.
I don't mind the taste of hose water.
It's all right, but not the hot hose water.
He would get that fucking hot hit.
He would go sometime and lay the whole hose in the yard, bro, on the hottest day and let that bitch heat up for a couple days sometimes, dude.
Let spiders get in there.
That'll boil you.
Dude, he'll put a fucking right to the dome, bro.
Why?
Just taste the Lord, bro.
That dude was, he was about the spirit, man.
You know, he just, I don't know, but unbelievable, dude, that you have bad plummet in your body and you deal with bad plumbing in the world.
Right.
And then I became a cook so I could like deal with it coming in and coming out.
Full service, man.
Brad Lukosky, the toilet champion of the Valley and maybe of the whole world, dude.
I think that's a good thing.
Is a trophy worldwide?
I think so.
Why not, Nick?
I've never had anybody try to take it away.
Come take it off him.
Come take it off, man.
Come get this.
I dare you.
We will see you.
I got insurance.
We will see you in these shit streets, man.
Yeah, thank you for being here today, man.
I'm so happy your dad got to be a part of it.
And just an inspiration, man.
Working hard and just doing what you do, dude.
And we're going to pay you.
I don't know what the time is, but we're going to pay you $500 for being here today with us.
Oh, shit.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
No, we appreciate it, man.
A lot of our listeners are hardworking people.
And we're just happy to be associated with you.
So thank you so much.
Hey, you ever get any further questions?
Shoot them my way.
I'll answer whatever I got.
Look, I'm going to save your number, bro.
I certainly will.
Toilet champion, thank you.
Hey, thank you.
Now, I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.
I must be cornerstone.
Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of mind I found.
I can feel it in my bones.
But it's gonna take a little time for me to set that parking break and let myself on wild shine that light on me.
I'll sit and tell you my stories ladies
and gentlemen, I'm Jonathan Kite and welcome to Kite Club, a podcast where I'll be sharing thoughts on things like current events, stand-up stories, and seven ways to pleasure your partner.
The answer may shock you.
Sometimes I'll interview my friends.
Sometimes I won't.
And as always, I'll be joined by the voices in my head.
You have three new voice messages.
A lot of people are talking about Kite Club.
I've been talking about Kite Club for so long, longer than anybody else.
So great.
Hi, Sweet.
Is it there?
Anyone who doesn't listen to Kite Club is a dodgy bloody wanker.
Jamain.
Hi, I'll take a quarter potter with cheese and a McFlurry.
Sorry, sir, but our ice cream machine is broken.
I think Tom Hanks just butt-dialed me.
Anyway, first rule of Kite Club is tell everyone about Kite Club.
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