This Past Weekend - E392 Trauma Restoration Man

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Trauma restoration man Bobby Cotton joins Theo to discuss what it's like working in the restoration industry, where he cleans up after hoarders, fires, murders and suicides, riots, natural disasters, and more.  ------------------------------------------------ Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com Podcastville mugs and prints available now at https://theovon.pixels.com ------------------------------------------------- Support our Sponsors: Keeps: Go to https://keeps.com/THEO to get your first month of treatment free BetterHelp: Go to https://betterhelp.com/THEO for 10% off your first month Ritual: Go to https://ritual.com/THEO for 10% off your first 3 months MUD/WTR: Go to https://mudwtr.com/THEO and get 15% off your first purchase with code THEO ------------------------------------------------- Music: "Shine" by Bishop Gunn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3A_coTcUek ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [e-mail] Hit the Hotline: [phone] Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: http://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Send mail to: This Past Weekend 1906 Glen Echo Rd PO Box #159359 Nashville, TN 37215 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Colin https://instagram.com/colin_reiner Producer: Riley https://www.instagram.com/rileymaufilms/?hl=enSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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the Return of the Rat Tour. Today's guest holds a unique job in the world and it's that job when there's a fire or a murdering or a hoarder or trauma. Somebody's got to go into those spaces and clean up. Somebody's got to go do the dirty work, maybe, you know. Somebody's got to be that little Shawshank baby crawling through the muck. And we have that man here today. He is a trauma restoration man and he's out of Minneapolis and we're grateful for him. Today's guest is trauma restoration man, Mr. Bobby Cotton. Yeah, where are you from, Rob? Minneapolis. Oh, nice, dude. Yeah, we went out there and did some shows not too long ago. Minneapolis is so strange now, it feels like, like the downtown

that feels deserted. Yeah, they're making everyone like the city and the state is actually after businesses to bring people back to the cities. Really? Yeah, they want them back in the offices because there's nothing down there, it's just deserted. So like all the little businesses and shops are all closing down because no one's down there. Yeah, it's like a bunch of murals and nothing else. It's funny, it's like that everybody left and they just drew people in the buildings. Yeah, and you know, they had all the George Floyd stuff, all the Mariahs that happened. Man, it was just the whole vibe down there. Well, it was crazy. Everything got smashed out, you know, because in restoration, like a big part of what I do is like when there's a fire,

a window gets broken, I run out in the middle of the night and board and stuff up. Oh, really? I mean, I was working like 120 hours a week, boarding up all the buildings. I had, you know, 300 sheets of plywood going up a day. It was crazy. Well, so you're saying, so I'm sitting here with Rob Cotton and he's a trauma restoration man. And so you're saying that during the, and we're going to get into your job, we just started chatting. So in Minneapolis during the George Floyd stuff, you guys were going out, you guys go out and board stuff up. Yeah, yeah. So whenever there's a, you know, riot, you know, we do board up. So anytime there's a fire or there's a robbery or something, you know, you got to secure those buildings. And during the George Floyd stuff,

we were doing stuff preventatively, people were worried about getting robbed and there was a lot of looting and stuff. So I mean, we're boarding up and securing buildings, trying to prevent people from smashing the windows in. Wow. I mean, we were working like 24 hours a day taking naps in the truck. Dang. Yeah, it was bad. Were there certain things you would write on the certain boards to kind of keep people out where they're like, you know, like, was there any like kind of trickery like that, like verbal word trickery? I mean, we didn't do anything like that. But a lot of the business owners, you know, they put on like minority owned or, you know, we support BLM or lots of stuff got put on those boards. And

yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there was trickery or not. I don't know if people were maybe a little dishonest on that. But yeah, yeah, that people were putting stuff on there. Wow. Yeah. Cause I guess you, most people think that just businesses go and do that for themselves. But do you get hired by businesses to do it? Yeah. So either by the insurance or or if they're in a really high risk area, like their insurance company might call to have the boards put up to try and prevent the loss, you know, cause it's obviously, you know, when the buildings get burned and stuff like that, sometimes the losses or the insurance claims are millions of dollars. So for five or $10,000, you can get all your windows boarded up.

That could save you. Yeah. That could really be the difference between your whole business going down. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was a there was a liquor store. They, they write in Minneapolis there and they lost like $1.5 million in inventory. Plus there was a fire in the building. Oh yeah. Well, that's the problem. You get a little bit of liquor ring. You want to have somebody wants to have a door aisle or, you know, or, you know, roll up a John or something in the next thing you know, the whole place is going up. Oh, it's crazy. And I mean, even, you know, I had a gun pulled on me when I was cleaning graffiti down there. Yeah. And why'd they do it?

Uh, they were just unhappy. I was taking down graffiti. And I mean, you know, whether or not that's at a turn, I don't care if you put more graffiti up. I got hired to take the graffiti down the second I leave, you can do it again. Right. Right. Yeah. You're just doing your job. Yeah. So just just doing your job is really, I mean, your job is, um, basically like your job is basically restoration, trauma cleanup. How do you you, like, give me an example of kind of what that entails sort of, let's start. Well, so like the, the name of the industry is restoration. Okay. And so restoration could be fire, water, mold, trauma. So it can be anything from a natural disaster to a pipe burst or,

you know, the, the ground thawing outside or suicides, murders and stuff like that. Basically, if something terrible is happening, you're building where the guys would call. And do you guys go in there feeling like the ghostbusters? Y'all just feel like a bunch of, like, garbage men? Is there kind of a vibe that you feel kind of going into certain environments? No one is ever happy to see us. Okay. You know, because, you know, it's like, and fires are generally the worst. I mean, like, when you do a trauma cleanup, you're not normally seeing anyone that lives there or anything like that, because they're typically almost always gone. Okay. But like when you're doing a fire cleanup or something, you know,

and everyone's personal belongings, everything, every picture, every birth certificate, everything's gone and you're shoveling it out with snow shovels. You know, it's, it can be tough. Okay. So stuff like that, environments like that, where you're cleaning up a place and there's a lot of personal effects there, it really gets pretty, it probably, you know, it probably squeezes your heart, huh? Used to. I mean, it's, it's hard. You get really desensitized to it. Yeah. Yeah. So take, take me like into an example, like you go to a company, something's happened, you go to a business, take me into some trauma cleanup. Yeah. Well, so just to use that as an example, so as middle of the night, it was a manufacturing

facility and there was a lathe. So a lathe, you know, you make like, like, for example, like a baseball bat. So it spins a piece of wood and you're cutting on it. A lathe. Lathe. Yep. Okay. And bring it up, Riley, if you can on the screen here. Okay. So something like that. Yep. Yep. So just like that. Piece of machinery. Yep. That green one is just about the same one there. Okay. And so the guy was wearing a glove and so he ended up getting caught in that. And so it pulled his skin off from like his elbow all the way off his hand. It's called de-gloving. And so that got caught in there. So it spun around because obviously it's still spinning.

So the thing just spinning around with the... Yeah, they spin like crazy speeds, like thousands of RPMs. Wow. Red Rover, Red Rover, boy. Yeah, yeah. And... It's in Danny right over. So this thing's still spinning. You guys get called in, the guy's been... De-gloved. De-gloved. And that means... So the skin just peels off. Like if you had a glove on, you took it off, except for that's your skin. And so it was spinning. And obviously we shut out by the time we got there, but that blood was all over everywhere. So it was all, you know, the ceiling's 25, 30 feet tall. And it was a big manufacturing facility, so they didn't want to shut it down. So we had to,

you know, hang plastic all around where we were cleaning. And then all that stuff had to be scrubbed down and repainted. Okay. So you guys hang plastic around the actual site of whatever's going on? Yeah. If they don't want to shut it down. Dang, they got to keep that money coming in, huh? Yeah. So I mean, the whole time it was really crazy. You know, we're cleaning skin out of this machine. And on the other side of the plastic, you can hear people talking. And what type of... What were they making in there overall, you think? You know, honestly, I'm not sure. Okay. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not positive. Maybe like a cabinet shop or something. Yeah. It was a woodworking facility. Okay. Wow. And so you guys get called

in something like that. What do you do with the actual, do you actually take the skin, the hand? Yeah. So anything that's like affected, and there's a bunch of different like categorizations of like materials. So like wood that gets impacted really needs to be cut out and replaced. But like concrete, you can clean that. So anything that gets, you know, that we have to cut out and throw it away, you put it in these special bags and then you put that in a biohazard box and then a carrier that especially disposes of that takes it away. And typically they're going to go to like an incinerator. Okay. Oh, wow. So that thing, it doesn't get returned to the rightful owner. It gets... The skin? Yeah. No, you're not getting that skin back. Damn.

Have you ever had an employee try to sneak off with something, sneak off with a thumb or something? Never. A rotting thumb now. Yeah. Or just a middle finger. Maybe they're just going to pull it out of the bar or something. No, no. That would be something. So you guys hang up the plastic and you guys go in there as a team if there's some type of a trauma like in a workplace or any place really. And so how long does something like that take? Like are you guys, they try to send you in in the middle of the night and get it done fast? Do they... So it really depends. So there's certain things like manufacturing facilities and stuff because like a big manufacturing facility, you know, they might be making a million plus dollars a day, hundreds of thousands of dollars

an hour in product. Oh, yeah. Tyco, I'm trying to think of some different ones. Hormel, trying to think of different, anything, Mitsubishi, trying to think of any other... I mean, there's tons of them. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, even a good buddy of mine had a call out to Florida for a machine that broke down and it was a KitKat machine. They made KitKats. Yeah. Like, and I saw a little video of it. I mean, just millions of KitKats. And you know, who's eating all these KitKats? Yeah. And they're all under, they're all stressed because the KitKat line is shut down. Like the world's going to end up don't have any KitKats. Well, squirrels love them, dude. My dad, he used to sometimes go park his car

at the park and he would get like a, he had a buddy that used to get kind of old KitKats and they were like a couple years old kind of, but they, you know, you could still eat them, but the chocolate was turning white a little. You know what I'm talking about? Fermented. I don't know if it, I mean, I don't know if it had become like alcoholic or not, but I know it had, it was a little bit decrepit. Bring up old chocolate. Aged. Yeah. Old chocolate aged. Like a nice, fine. There you go. Click on one of those, Raleigh. Oh, no, that's too old. Oh, yeah, that's molded out. Just give me something that, um, give me something that I should have had at Christmas, you know? Nope. Okay. But I'll say this is that, uh, so yeah, anyway, we would get the

KitKats, we would take them to the park and the squirrels would come eat them, man. Squirrels love them. And we would, they would see squirrels jumping from those miles away. Just in the distance, you could see squirrels just hopping over, trying to get them. So squirrels love them. But, um, so anyway, you guys get called in any type of environment, right? And so that's like an example of like a business, uh, of like a kind of a travesty that happened at a business. Uh, and what, do you have a page on you? How do they? Just phone calls. I am just absolutely trained now. I mean, you can call me at three o'clock in the morning. I'm not even awake yet. And I got the phone to my ear, you know? Wow. And so take me on, so take me on another journey of like what, uh,

what a trauma restoration man gets. Well, I mean, I would say for the most part, it's people that have been deceased for a long time. Okay. Uh, almost always it's the post carriers that are calling it in for a wellness check. Yeah. Cause no one's picked up the mail for a week or a month or whatever it happens to be. Can't get any more mail in the mail slot and they're calling for the wellness checks. So I mean, you know, you get a call and, and those aren't really pressing, you know, that's not like a three a.m. call. If someone's been dead for a month, you know, right? That's a voicemail more. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, so it's kind of wild, you know, when someone dies, first you like blowed up and, uh, then as you decompose it, like goo starts coming out everywhere.

Ooh. So it can be real bad where it's like, you know, the, might've died on a bed or a couch or something and that couch will be soaked with stuff, you know, goo. With human goo. And so that goo is what all is it? Plasma, feces, blood, everything. And then just, you know, your insides decomposing on you. Oh. Yeah. And so you guys roll in, now, now are you the first people to roll in or the police roll in first? Well, so the bodies are always going to be gone. So the police are going to do the wellness check and then the coroner is going to come, uh, to remove the actual body or whatever that they can remove. Typically they're going to try and remove like one large piece. So sometimes, you know, there's still skin or depending on how long

it's still there. Really? Shoes maybe? Well, they weren't wearing them. Right. But, uh, you know, and so, and if you died on the second floor, if you've been there for a long time and that stuff will all drip down through the ceiling underneath and then into the basement maybe. So all that flooring has to come out. So the flooring comes out, your subfloor comes out. If it's affected, like joists, sometimes you have to do some structural removal all the way down to the concrete basically. So is, and is there like legalities where if something dies in a place if a human dies, you have to do certain things to the, to the building? Yeah. So there, there's really stringent like processes that you have to do. So there's specific chemicals that have

to be used that have to meet these certain regulations, um, or standards. And so everything has to be removed. And there's a book called the S 500 that is a restoration book. So that's going to have like your processes. Like if you had a question, um, you know, you'd be able to, sorry. No worries at all right now. No, no, no, no, I'm not taking any calls right now. But, um, yeah. So there's a book of standards. So there's, there's really strict processes that have to be followed. So you can avoid liability, you know, so like, you know, on a water loss, if you have bad mold and someone gets sick and you signed off that that building is dry, uh, you can be, you know, either your business or sometimes personally brought up in like

court cases. So you have to, everything's documented. Some liability. Yeah. On a large like loss, I'm doing a hotel right now in North Dakota. Um, you know, it's 40, 44 affected rooms and I'm going to submit probably 1,100 pictures. Wow. So and then processes, moisture readings, all that stuff, you know, right? Hours and hours and hours of paperwork. So you got to, yeah, you, so you go in there and do a lot of paperwork too. It's not just you're out there, um, you know, cleaning up the environment. Yeah. You guys are doing a lot of the backlogging as well. Documentation. Yeah. There's a ton of documentation that goes along with everything. So take me on a, on a, on a journey, if you got, you got called in, give me a, take me into a story

where it was a, a mur, or deceased or something like that, you know, a non-living human. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, you know, uh, I've done a bunch from over the years, but, uh, probably the worst one I've ever done, uh, was in an apartment building and, uh, you know, so we get the call, the corners, release the scene. So everything's out. And, uh, this fella met the wrong end of a shotgun. Okay. And so it was a 12 gauge shotgun. So all those BBs went through multiple walls and through multiple apartments. So because those are contaminated and carrying everything. So you have to find like where all those holes went. So I mean, when we got there, you know, so first thing, you know, you're going to clean up as much of the, it's called raw material as you can. So you can

avoid like bug problems. Okay. So you got to get up all the, all the living stuff, whatever could have been living or semi-living the leftover. As much as you can. Yeah. So I mean, you're scraping that floor off, you know, you're using like a flat blade shovel and scraping stuff off. A day old bread, baby. You got to clean it up. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah. So then you're setting up ozone machines, uh, air filtration. You're setting up an environment. So like if we're in this room, you need plastic over the doors and stuff. So, so that you're trying not to cross contaminate anything else. Okay. So you, you tighten it up the scene. Okay. You kind of get that kind of like a plastic off the scene. Y'all use visqueen?

Visqueen. You ever use it? No. Bring up visqueen, Riley. There you go. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Barely see it because it's actually see through plastics. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just like that. Polly. Yeah. We just call it like poly and it comes in different thicknesses. Yeah. Yeah. It used to call it visqueen back in the day, but, um, okay. So you guys, you guys will kind of cordone off the scene and then what? So then you're going to set up, uh, you need to have air filtration, HEPA air scrubbers. And this guy had taken his life or he'd been shot? No, he had taken his own life. Yeah. And so then you have to go through it and find, you know, where did those all stop? And did they exit the roof? You know, and we ended up having to do some patching on the

roof too. Wow. So a guy took his own life and there's still people in the building or no? Yeah. It was an apartment building and, uh, it was real gnarly. So then after you've identified everything, you know, you're making sure the roof's not going to leak and stuff because you don't want any secondary damage. Yeah. Um, then, then it's just all about taking everything apart. So every affected stud needs to be taken out, replaced all the drywall that's affected. It's got to again be taken out. Okay. Yeah. And so what, and who's still in the place is, is the, did he have family or? No, so he was the only one in that apartment, but there was other people in the rest of the apartment building. It's not like they moved everyone out. Right. I see. Yeah,

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Okay, so yeah, take me into a scenario where you had to go where there was a where there was yeah, take me into one of the like kind of the gnarlier scenarios that you had dealing with like a human corpse. Yeah, so the easily easily the only one that's ever really bothered me the one that really kept me up was a guy unfortunately took his life in his basement with his family upstairs and he had two kids you know teenage children and his wife were there okay and they didn't leave they so the whole time that we were there working they stayed so we are carrying stuff in the room in the basement was like they were upstairs they were upstairs yeah and but no you know and normally they they would always move out right you know until everything's completed

and put back together in this case they did not want to leave so you roll up to the place and who are you with is it just you do you have a little buddy with this one was just me so I'll generally just go for like I'll check it out and if I need labor I'll call for it okay but I generally don't ever ask anyone to do these gnarly ones with me damn Satan's minion baby yeah you know I'll have people but like I never want I never like to ask other people to do this kind of stuff because it can really kind of weigh on you okay so okay right no I can only fathom that and we'll get what we'll get into that a little bit but so you get to this one locale and what's going on so like I said and generally I'm dealing either with the police or the corners

um this is the only situation where I've like met a family member at a okay like a suicide particularly um sometimes if someone's died of natural causes you know me to son or a daughter or wife or something like that um but this one I knock on the door and this lady answers it answers the door and she was the homeowner so they were still there like he's killed himself yesterday and they're all still in the house um and so you know I'm down working in the basement I'm carrying up boxes and bags of you know contaminated stuff past them wow so you're just bringing up like basically stuff that has like human matter on it yeah like you know oh it's horrendous so it's like you're looking at the man yeah he shot himself in the head

and so a lot of your head just kind of goes wherever yeah does your head go in one piece or does it go in a bunch of pieces no and it depends on the type of gun or the caliber but typically it's just gonna you know if you shot yourself with like a hollow point you'll like blow a hole out of the back of your head but if it's uh if it's like just a normal handgun or something it's actually a pretty clean hole normally oh wow but um yeah it's this was yeah so at the end of every day I had to tell you know she's asking me questions and and it's just like I you know you're looking at her in the eye and saying it's like oh we're gonna be finishing taking your husband out tomorrow you know it's crazy and did they come down and want to do any prayers or did they want to

like spend any time pray was there was it did they like the husband you know it didn't seem like they had a good connection with the who knows I was really trying not to talk to him oh you were yeah it was that that really bothered me yeah oh I can only fathom man I mean that's a man yeah I'm just trying to yeah I guess we don't know all the circumstance but if a man yeah took his life as families right there I can only imagine this how and then I just wonder if they're looking at you like you're helpful or like who knows I have no idea yeah but that man I still think about that one that one was tough yeah and did the kids try to communicate with you or anything there was no no I mean they were obviously grieving but I mean it was it was wild that they

wouldn't go to a hotel or stay with family or something yeah at least hit a damn fair field in and sweets or a days in um you know and I love Hampton and actually but yeah I can't imagine if that happened then I wouldn't want some space or maybe you want to be as close as you know I don't know I don't know but that was a unique circumstance one and only time and hopefully the last time that ever happened because it really made it it really added what like another layer to it or another yeah you know because you like I said you get really desensitized to it and and you know it's just like you just cleaning up a mess you know but when they're there it's like I'm cleaning up dad right yeah right right like our allen or whatever they got yeah yeah yeah herald or something

yeah yeah it's more I can't imagine that gosh I'd almost feel bad in a way yeah yeah really gave me the heebie jeebies and so on a cleanup like that where do you go for lunch on a day like that like what is is there do you have like uh are there some days you go for different lunches or but say if it's a you know do you have a typical spot you like to go I get a real problem with Chipotle you do yeah yeah I feel like I should buy stock in there maybe they they should give me stock at this point oh you've been there a lot a lot yeah well look I'm just saying if you know what goes with cleaning up a deceased you know I guess it's Chipotle yeah yeah or a couple of beers you know yeah and get through it yeah oh yeah God's Chipotle baby services um wow that's so fascinating

what about like living people do you do you come into like trauma where the people are still alive or is it all kind of post-life uh well so trauma probably makes up sub 10 percent of what I do on a weekly basis it's not all I do so okay restoration on it as a whole you meet a lot of strange people um you know okay so trauma is just dealing with the deceased mm-hmm yeah okay so that is specified that is trauma cleanup mm-hmm somebody's deceased yeah and if you're non-decease this could be part of restoration yep okay yeah so every so restoration covers that it's a big umbrella of a bunch of different stuff but you know I've done some really gnarly animal hoarders oh yeah really like where the floor or walls are rotting out because there's so much you know animal urine that bootleg know

is arc huh oh god I mean sometimes oh they got animal piss in there oh yeah oh dude I'll tell you this so I stayed in my buddy Johnny's house one time right I'm over there I don't know if anybody had ever stayed there except Johnny and uh hit one of his folks so they put me in the guest bedroom one of the dogs had been urinating in there for probably seven or eight years right and I don't know if anybody been in there there was like a sewing machine and like um somebody like quilted like a little thing it said like be back soon or something kind of had a sad vibe in there but anyway I go in there the carpet had like almost had a yellow dust in the air from all the piss yeah that's called urea crystals is it really yeah pull it up Raleigh yeah that yeah those those uh

urea crystals and I know a lot of bitches are buying these these days and when around the neck over there in Venice Beach look at there you go look at that boy get you a couple grams of that cellette on the beach baby that's that piss cane baby right there son yeah urine dries in that that oh and it's terrible and and they attract so every time you get humidity they attract or they kind of rehydrate so every time it gets humid you just just smell it oh that piss comes back yeah well look uh because I remember being in my buddy's place and I I would breathe and sometimes I had to blow my nose the air was so thick because I would have to I would remember being like oh my god something feels like it's like my nose is and it would be I would just be blowing animal piss

right out of my own nose yeah it's horrendous just fascinating to be a part of yeah I gotta I gotta call this is a few years ago now that the HOA required like it was like a house you know and uh the HOA had sent her complaints because you could smell it outside wow and and I got there and I mean she must have had 30 40 cats there now when you roll up are the cats on the outside or it's all it's all inside and and unfortunately I mean this lady had some something going on upstairs and the the other thing you run into a lot is nudity I just something's not firing upstairs you know okay so take me through the cat later let's walk through that a little bit so I can just have an experience of what that's like with you do you know you're walking up to the door yeah

do you know in advance it's cats do you know it's generally just animalia or what do they tell you we know that there's animal issues okay so not a ton of information so I pull I call her on the way there and I'm like hey you know this is Rob I'm gonna be there about half an hour oh and so I get there and I'm knocking on the door and she is yelling through the door who is it okay I'm like it's Rob and she's like I don't know any Robin it's like I just talked to you 30 minutes ago oh yeah denial yeah and this was like okay and so she opens the door no shirt on and she's like I just need to go get dressed real quick why don't you step in so she so no shirt tits out just tits out older lady just a set of swingers on her really and did you feel like she's flirting

you know no no no I mean this lady was in her 70s she's loose so her brain's a little bit loose yeah something's not not firing on all cylinders okay and so I step inside and I can smell it outside I step inside I mean it is so horrendous I mean the eyes of water and there is birds and dogs and cats I mean it is crazy oh everything's in there everything is in there wow and birds too yeah I mean what kind of birds was it maybe a parrot or wow parrots and cats something I think a parrots will kill a cat will you bring that up too Riley I'm sure it could get it they're mean there you go can a parrot kill a cat most parrots won't attack cats for the fun of it but may attack out of fear or self-defense even if the cat isn't actually trying to cause harm wow

that's wild so so my bad man so you're in there you got the parrots the cats you got a lot of animals oh yeah and are they just kind of running around everywhere yeah I mean they're just everywhere so she comes back in a robe and she's like I got three places I needed to clean at the time I was there I was there for a carpet cleaning call okay so I get out there and she walks me in and as we're walking I mean the carpet is wet not like damp wet like it is literally squishing under my feet and it's just like holy shit I mean it is terrible and you can smell a piss do you have on a face mask or not I should have I should have I made a mistake but you want to straight in there you raw dog yeah boy and uh they're huffing seat piss baby oh just horrendous just horrendous

and so she walks me over the landing of the stairs and as I'm walking out of the land of the stairs she's like standing between me and like the exit and I like walk up and I'm standing on the stairs and the stairs are soft the floor is rotting and she's like I just need to get this cleaned up and I was just like I I don't think that this is like carpet cleaning territory anymore like she's like well how much do you think that's going to cost and I was like well I'm going to need to get bids you know we need to get carpenters and stuff out here and she's like well how much do you think that's going to be I was like maybe 10,000 11,000 off the top of my head wow and she doesn't even blink she's like I thought I I thought I had a coupon for $179 for three rooms and I was

like carpet cleaning is not going to help this yeah and and so now it's like I'm starting to panic because this lady just yeah she's like giving me those weird crazy eyes yeah she's going to trade you UPC oh my god and the and the the piss is you know two and a half feet it's creeping up the wall it's soaking into the walls you can see it yeah and who's doing it do you know the cats are doing it can it be also human piss it could have been it could have been it wouldn't be the first time I've had to clean up a signal someone that's incontinent on real yeah okay so you got it so now you guys have to go in and what get all the animals out who do you call them for help oh well in that case she we did not do anything she just wanted us she just wanted the carpets cleaned wow

I am I am positive that she got moved out of that yeah yeah I mean that's that's a situation where social services gets involved yeah the HOA rder baby that's hoarder huh is that order yeah that's an animal hoarder yeah and so is it a mental well is it mentally unwell do you see what's caused it is it loneliness did you do you get any idea what the root cause of it is it's some sort of mental disorder okay yeah and they want the cats and are they enjoying the cats are they petting them or is it more just they they're trying to have a little little jungle do you get any idea what they're trying to do no idea it yeah like I said I mean it's just it's compulsive they just keep bringing them home and they can't care for you know sometimes you know you find

in an in hoarder situations you know you'll find cats or dogs that have been dead for a long time and they don't even realize they've been dead you know you'd be clearing stuff out and all of a sudden you come across a little corpse really yeah and nobody and you'll say hey your cat's dead and they're like oh yeah I threw a ball and it didn't get it you're something yeah well you know they don't even have names for all the cats you know oh man yeah we had this lady when I was growing up she used to give us a dime right to go get her cats right this older lady so she said yeah I got like 30 cats you know bring them in here to me I'll give you a dime for each one y'all catch well she only had three cats but we'd let we go show her the cat get that dime and then

let that bitch loose and then go get it again and we just kept running these three cats till we had probably a buck 50 and then go get us a little video we'd do a video rental or sometime you get a video and a pound of shrimp over there they had a place called Pat's video and shrimp bring that up rally Pat's video and shrimp Pat's video and shrimp Covington Louisiana I don't know if he's still got a video store going on out there yeah oh that's a good point yeah I just thought they might have some old imagery yeah wow man so you really are kind of like a do you get a feeling that you're like a rescuer or that you have does it start to create any kind of feeling of like a social or human responsibility in you or does it just feel like you are when

it's dealing with with humans does it just feel like you are kind of like a does it feel janitorial does it get human at all some of the feeling of it no no never and I mean I joke about this a lot with my buddies but I just never say no and it's just like all these jobs have just escalated and I just work for myself like I don't have any employees or anything I work as a subcontract for other companies typically as like a project manager and so I'm using their people so I mean I just never say no and you know so it's just the the jobs over time have just gotten worse and worse and worse and worse you know yeah this is like so like when companies don't have anyone that feels comfortable doing like a small restoration company they they don't have anyone

that maybe wants to do trauma or something like that they'll call me Bobby cotton the unfasable bob bobby cotton dude they call you bobby or not uh regularly I bobby kind of get often the unfasable bobby cotton man and they call you in and so tell me like an example or something have you ever found anything unique in a property you done did some flooring or something find a treasure find a skeleton or something not anything I wanted to find okay yeah I mean like I said I found a lot a lot of small animals you know um found like a significant amount of money that like someone had left before and hidden yeah yeah god I like that yeah so what about some more like human take me on you a call you get you go to a place and there's a human there and you have

to interact with with a human and maybe uh something outside of animalia maybe well I got another hoarder call okay this is on Christmas eve of this year and uh so we get the call early in the morning it's a sewage call so that just means there's different categories of water losses so water clean water gray water sewage okay um so this one was uh sewage and so we get the call and I get out there and I got one other guy coming with me and so I get out there first and I walk into the desk and it's a condo building and uh they're like hey I just want to let you know that the source unit is up on the like 10th floor or something he's kind of a character okay it's like so alarm bells are already going off and do you keep a piece on you roll no never yeah um so

you know check it out I look around you know a couple different floors and so I gotta go check to see the source unit now so I knock on the door and it's an old folks home and I knock on the door and the guy answers the door he's in a diaper wow so he's in a t-shirt and a diaper and it's like and the smell from in here is just horrendous and it's a grown man definitely yep yep yeah man's maybe 75 years old oh yeah and so walk in and I ask him like where's where's the where where did it start from he's like oh the toilet backed up okay it's like okay and man has a diaper on man has a diaper on and does it seem like he's well and he has a diaper on does it seem like it's just hot it's a hot day or does it seem like he's oh we'll get there okay we'll get there so we walk in

and there's piles of newspaper piles of mail and the floor is soaked so again you're just squishing and uh so walk in and he's gonna he's like oh it's back here so I'm following this man's diaper is full saggy really yeah he's always walking me back there you think it's piss or duty it is duty and so who walks and this thing is swinging no oh and so we're walking past and we walk back into the back bedroom and there's a batch on him a pile of diapers okay sitting in this water a pile of them two feet tall and uh and everything these newspapers are all sitting there so now he shows me where it is and this toilet is just oh so now I'm looking for a broken toilet because if you've ever backed up a toilet it doesn't just keep flowing over that's that batch of dirty diapers oh yeah

oh and so this the original cornhole game I think it looks like the living conditions in here are horrendous and so I look at the toilet I'm looking for it to be broken okay it's not broken and I asked like well so how did all the water happen he's like well it is it plugged up like 10 o'clock last night and and I was like well how did it flood everything he's like oh I just kept flushing it so for like six hours this dude is just flushing this toilet over and over and over again and like it's a like a video poker or something huh he's just sitting there playing it yeah just over and over again so and just winning just just winning his own money just winning his own just winning shit back and I mean so it's right there so it's you so it's a full it's a toilet

and there's duty in it oh everywhere it's covered I mean it's just like somebody shotgun blasted duty all over everything oh man so we're going and we we we're we are shoveling all this stuff in the bags because it's all sitting in all this water everything's garbage I mean we're talking years of newspaper years of mail this guy's just got piled up and it's all and all the water kind of has a little bit of feces in it so so we finish everything out we cut out all the carpet everything and the last thing we've got to do and my buddy's there now and the last thing we've got to do is pick up these diapers so he's holding a bag and he's like trying to do it we're in full Tyvek suits you know so we're in plastic suits respirators everything and he's standing he's like

I can't do it I'm like all right I'll try and I'm staying there because we were like arguing about who's gonna do it and you know so I go down that reach for the very first diaper and I'm wearing gloves and I I go to pick it up right in the middle like and it's like a burritos oh and this man is now naked from the waist down watching us so he has lost the diaper and he has told us that he can't wear the pants sometimes because he has to go to the bathroom real fast no way so so what the pants prevent him from doing it I guess I don't know I don't know what is and you could see his wiener or not oh yeah right no one eyed will he just hanging out and what style of wiener was it was it like a real old one really saggy yeah bring up um you know what they do have a chart

telling people use sometimes I've seen a bring up a mushroom chart if you can rally a mushroom if it's a pecker if it's a pecherini or whatever zoom in on that a little if we can get some names off this bad boy because yeah oh this is a poisonous mushroom chart it was in fact a poisonous mushroom why that's a good point huh man that's not really one go back again rally sorry that's too poisonous I think let's just look at the let's look at it one more hey go down a little wish I had something had some names on it okay go up maybe go over to the left move something so I can see something yeah just move somewhere on there

are we to the left or not okay yeah hit on that one then let's see what we got that looks like those look like realistic ones yeah let me see on that can you make that one big zoom in on it there we go zoom in more let's see if we can see some of the names on there that's shaggy main right there that that fly agari what they got that honey cup what are we looking at here you think uh Rob if you had to look at one oh if you go over to the left there go to the left uh like like something uh like that go poor porcini oh damn okay yeah there you go

damn he had that beat that ballpark frank on him oh oh yeah okay so okay yeah so this guy's just now completely naked from the waist down he is donald ducking it okay and do you have do you feel the responsibility to stay in there can you leave do you feel like the guy is like gonna attack or anything like that nothing like that i i feel confident in my ability to fend off a 75 year old man okay um so i pick up i go to pick up the very first diapers now there's probably 75 of these things we gotta pick up and they're all sobbing wet and because it's sobbing wet it is lost its structural integrity so i go to pick it up and my fingers just sink right into it and it is oozing out and i'm just i've got a strong stomach after doing this for a long time and it

i'm i'm losing my lunch so i i rip off my mask and i just like take the one step over the toilet and i just open this toilet it's just covered in shit we didn't clean the toilet first and i am projectile vomiting into this toilet and i look over to the guy my guy i'm working with is standing there and he's like and he tries to get his mask off and he pukes straight into the mask and he runs over to the other bathroom so we're both just vomiting pukes straight in your mask that's like a frat party oh god so he just puked straight into his mask yeah oh it's terrible and so puked right into the toilet that was already i'm trying not to touch it oh it's horrible and so then i look up and i'm on my hands and knees on the throne up in the store and i look

over the door again and this dude is standing in the doorway so i'm on my hands and knees i am right looking this dude's willy right in the eye and he started jerking off no no no you just stand in the way he started jerking off no no but it's like he's the ryan sandberg of creepy shit he started doing that just unfazed like this is the cycle then baby yeah this is this is just like a normal tuesday afternoon for this guy just watching just and do you think low-key he he had people come all the time and created this kind of scenario i have no idea i mean it was just it was that's one of the worst ones i've ever done and so how does that scenario get from right there to actual some sort of solution well i mean so everything has to be taken out so like all the flooring all the

carpet all that concrete needs to get cleaned um and then you know you just rebuild it so all that drywall it gets cut out you know you just got to replace it repaint it new carpeting so at some point you guys left that premises and it was nice again and you put the man back in there yeah wow yep man that blows my mind yeah that was terrible and how much what how much uh are you wearing like are you what kind of suit are you wearing are you like an astronaut or are you like uh well so that's so like the ones the ones that you pump air into so like if you're dealing with something like really hazardous it's called a positive air suit okay um uh you know if you're doing like somebody dropped a vial or something of some dangerous disease i mean i've i've done that before but um

we're wearing what's called a tyvek suit so it's got boots it's just one continuous suit with a hood on it and then a respirator and a set of rubber gloves wow almost like a walter white wear it's kind of yeah just like that that is a tyvek suit that's what those are so do meth has ever rolled up to you while you're going in and out of the building trying to holler it like is there ever that kind of eye where people think you're making drugs no no nothing like that but you know it tends to attract attention yeah you know you're carrying boxes out or bags out in a full tyvek suit people want to know what you're doing yeah yeah i bet i'm sure you get a lot of onlookers or people that are stopping you know you want curious folk oh yeah and and you never

tell them anything really yeah because you don't like the the property owner doesn't want people to know that someone's died or that there's been a loss or even some uh even some customers like big customers they've got like stealth protocols they don't want any company vehicles parked outside they don't want you to wear anything that says a logo on it or anything they don't want people to know that something's happened yeah because i guess people don't want to mess up their resale value or get a lot like maybe uh somebody or if it's a product if they're making you know honey baked hams or something and somebody loses a limb they don't want people saying oh they got limbs in the ham or whatever you know like you know people don't anyone claiming that there's a fingernail in

their ham you know yeah yeah yeah they don't want people yeah they don't want people kind of uh i guess just ruining their business you know that they work so hard for wow hair loss scares people sometimes you wake up and one of your sideburns is on your pillow or your mustaches on your wife's back or somebody that's scary that's hair loss and two out of three men will experience some form of hair loss by the time they're 35 that's true keeps is the one who can help you they offer affordable stress-free ways to keep your hair the treatment plans started just 10 bucks a month and keeps offers generic versions of the two FDA approved medic medications to prevent hair loss i'm on the generics to be honest that's where i am on that cheap skate

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we need our therapy to meet us where we are that's sometimes what turns people off about therapy is they're just afraid they're afraid it's going to be overwhelming too much this past weekend listeners get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.com slash thio that's b e t t e r h e l p dot com slash th e o it's more affordable than in-person therapy and can be met and you can be matched with a therapist under 48 hours this podcast is sponsored by better help that's better h e l p dot com slash th e o so are there jobs that you won't do i know you said you'll do anything has there been a job that you said you know what there there's been things i've regretted taking okay yeah um you know when you're waiting through you know four feet of sewage and like chest waders uh yeah

there's been horrendous ones and when you're doing that do you feel like god is with you or you feel like you strayed from the pack do you feel any human response like a personal like okay maybe i'm making some choices that are kind of wild do you do you think like that you're kind of like the bare grills of like of like you know uh duty and and and and death well um i feel like i should have finished high school yeah did you finish no no never did i've been i've been joking about getting my gd for years but uh you know i i've got my life together real well and i was joked that you know people with gd's uh you know they always used to say that you know if you only have a high school diploma or a gd you make a million dollars less than if you went to college and i was like

why don't i want to do that then yeah you know i don't want to oh yeah you don't want to go why go get that if i'm gonna guarantee make a million less yeah exactly you know just not have never hear anything about people that don't finish high school dude well that's freaking interesting man because you really have kind of it seems like carved out your own space um yeah take me on a little bit of a journey of like what are some of the calls that you like you you wish you hadn't done is there any other one oh there was where are you walking sorry go ahead well i mean the one i was just telling you about uh there was a a pump station so in the where i live at there's a river the miss or the minnesota river and they pump sewage to a facility on the other side of the

river okay so there's a gigantic pipe that for whatever reason got plugged up and so this pump is running and there is one cul-de-sac before it goes across the river so there's only like six seven houses on it that's on the other side of the pump so everyone else is on you know the this side of the pump then the pump goes across and there's one more spot where it goes in okay so it plugged somewhere under the river so this pump a gigantic pump is pumping and because it got blocked up it ended up forcing the sewage into those houses so when i talked to the guy that lived there he said they were sitting around in the house and then all of a sudden there was like a noise that came from like the sink and it was like shooting up like a fountain out of everywhere

out of the toilets out of the sink set it everywhere of dirty water uh yeah sewage yeah oh and and it ended up like those chocolate things they have some i'm at a wedding yeah oh yeah chocolate fountain of goodness um and so it was like shooting up and hitting the ceilings and like spraying out and then ended up filling up this guy's basement oh so we got big you know pumper trucks and uh so they're taking it away and so i'm in chest waders holding this hose like sucking stuff up and it keeps getting plugged from stuff in there so i'm i'm i'm in a tyvek suit in chest waders so the hose keeps getting yeah so like i'm i'm down there like holding it because if you just let it go it'll get stuck to stuff and i mean oh god it was terrible and uh yeah so i'm wading through sewage like

six feet of sewage yeah it was pretty awful and do you have any other little hints man that roll with you kind of or you said it's kind of you roll in and then work with like do you then like subcontract other guys to help you how does that kind of go yeah so like i said i generally i'd never work under my own contract so is like if you if something happened here yeah and i showed up and you called whatever restoration company you'd never know that i worked for a different company or that i'm self-employed because i just typically manage those projects okay um but i normally show up on the data loss and stabilize the situation then there's a lot of cleanup that has to happen demo drying whatever that needs to be um so i'll typically use either their labor or their subcontract

labor um so i don't typically ever hire anyone personally i'm using their resources do you notice when it comes to more of the people that have some real issues right is it more men or women do you notice like do you have any clue where the mental unwellness comes from do you start to get any any grasp on what could have happened to some of these folks yeah i i really don't know if it's like a trauma thing or if it's uh you know just something's never quite been right upstairs or something i i really don't know but uh the the common the the common thing is it seems like people like start like they just can't take care of themselves and when they don't have like the resources or the family to to help them everything just spirals out of control and and i mean there's

just the the living situations that people are in i mean we really need better mental health something around here but uh yeah we need i mean i need everybody's world trying to get it um what about take me on another journey something like uh with some of these hoarders what are some other things that you see people hoarding because you had the man with the duty diapers and um um what are some other things that people keep that you notice it tends to be like dated stuff so i mean a lot of times it's like just knickknacks or something like that it's like they go to the garage sale and buy the whole garage sale it feels like um otherwise it's like i said dated stuff so newspapers are really big mail is huge and i mean it's like yeah sometimes like rooms full of newspapers

you know for these older folks and you'll find newspapers from the 80s wow is it pretty cool some of them yeah i've definitely flipped through some of those newspapers has been kind of neat and what about any pornography you notice anybody hoarding that kind of stuff or not really yeah i mean you do find you do find weird stuff uh you know i've definitely found a plenty of like playboys and stuff like that another thing i've noticed is men hoard sex toys really yeah i've definitely run into that a couple of times i mean we're talking 200 dildos or something wow really and is it gay men or straight men do you get any idea if it's one of the other i don't know yeah i'm not sure but something phallic they want to have that that sort of deal that's a weird one

sex dolls sometimes sex dolls as well yeah yeah like the big ones like that i forget what they're called and what do you mean like bbw like kind of thicker ones are you talking about like it's uh no it's like a full-size person they're like a real doll or something like that oh i see what you're saying and what are they made of they're probably made out of uh feels like skin oh it does damn and so you've been in a place where guys had a couple sex dolls in there damn another weird thing is in that movie came out um 50 shades of gray a ton of people started getting like red rooms and it's like a sex dungeony thing and and a lot of people kind of got off on like showing you that and it's like oh sorry i forgot to shut this door oh you mean if you go to a place yeah

people will have that just in their house yeah they'll like leave it open on for on purpose like they get excited from you seeing that or like stumbling into it have you had a lot of like uh is there ever been in a place where somebody's trying to get you in there just to attract you or something or do sexual or something like that no uh like i said i do some carpet cleaning too i used to be really weird so i'd clean a lot of bars you'd show up at bar clothes and i oh my god people would ask me oh what are you can i help you over clothes oh i'm here to clean the carpets i i must have had 200 women said oh i hope you're here to clean my carpets really oh yeah it's terrible beating joke so you think you could have probably had sex with them though or at least

tried to engage if they probably could have engaged on that yeah but yeah that was just a weird thing it happened all the time like i'm here to work yeah and it's like i'm sure you're there's plenty of men here at this bar for you to talk to but like i'm this new person coming in at bar clothes time i don't know i could see that the worker comes in i'm here to clean the carpets it's also such like a you know it's almost a pickup line that a guy at the bar would be used yeah yeah and ah it was just it was so bizarre i don't i don't know what that was about either and what about like urine do people keep urine as well i know you've had a lot of the uh yeah people keep jars of urine that's not that's happened more than once where i've run into somebody

who's got like shelves and jars of urine yeah what is that i don't people just have like a fixation with like bodily fluids yeah i wonder if they don't want to let part of themselves go or they because it's fascinating because a lot of college people do it too a lot of dudes will pee in a jug or something they don't want to take it to the because it's laziness yeah yeah i think anyway um but yeah i always wonder why do people keep so much piss by on some folks uh yeah i mean and it'll just be like jars and jars and jars like small jars like a baby like a nice well oh okay mason jar really yeah just right off of god still baby that freaking uh yeah kidney i mean that's happened at least three times damn we run across some good piss out there oh yeah

it is an experience oh i bet man it's crazy enough to even see somebody peeing in the bathroom really closer you know but to see them standing over the couple jars of their own piss i feel like seems you know we've really lost that experience since we're getting rid of all those troughs that like the stadiums oh we are and so yeah they're not anywhere anymore oh that team pissing yeah yeah we really experience another man pissing right yeah you're right there yeah the craziest part is when his arm is touching your arm and you can kind of feel the vibration if he's really got a fucking you know if he's really doing really connecting with strangers yeah you can really feel like how each other's kind of flowing it's almost like a little go kart race kind of

i feel like we're losing our community based on you know everybody wants to piss on their own separate space and the future they're just going to give you a jar when you walk into a jets game you're gonna have to you know keep it to yourself basically yeah take me down another road there take me down uh yeah so i was in north dakota for another job on saturday so i'm sleeping in this this you know motel and so i wake up and i'm sleeping with another guy in the room and he's like it's wet and i was like what do you mean it's wet and and he's like the floor is wet and and i swung my feet off the bed and i put my feet down into puddles and i was like you've got to be kidding me like it's chasing us yeah and i was like did i fall asleep on a job site

i'm having a nightmare right now you know and so i walk out in the hallway and there's an inch of water in this entire floor and i was like you've got to be kidding me right and so i jokingly text one of the contractors at work for is like hey i found you a job and he's like what's going on i was like oh you know i fell asleep at the motel and it's flooded you know and uh so and i'm just kind of joking with him about it like someone local take care of this you know and so we me and this other guy hop out in the truck and we're gonna go we're gonna go out to breakfast you know and so as we're pulling out i see a restoration company pulling in so i like hop out of the truck i'm like i'm gonna go talk to that guy real quick and so i go and i talk to this guy and i'm not gonna

say the company name but i was like oh i'm in town of this restoration company he's like you're kidding i was like no he's like will you walk through this job with me i was like yeah sure and so we go and we walk through the job and the guy's like oh i just i don't think i've got the resources to do this right now it's all flooding in grand forks right now and he's like is this something you think you can do and i was like really he was like yeah i'm like okay so i call that contractor back that i was i'm like hey we're gonna do this job up here and it's gonna be a six figure job wow and he's like and i'm like this is why i'm your favorite subcontractor i bring my own work and so but we had to get equipment all shipped up from iowa and generators all up there

oh yeah and you know my guy at sunbelt rentals really pulled through um yeah i mean it's a rental company and what kind of stuff do they rent for folks everything you can rent a lawn mower from them or you can rent a generator big enough to power a skyscraper i mean you can they rent everything forklifts bobcats whatever sunbelt rentals is the company yeah shout out to rick what's up rick damn baby damn rick is usually somebody that's rick can go either way i met some real dicey ricks and i met some real quality ricks yeah that's where i'm going back after this though really oh you're going back to north dakota i gotta finish that job up and then i'm down to phoenix for a job and so what's is it hard to keep a personal life do you have a wife or children

no i got two roommates to take care of my house wow yeah so do you uh do you feel like you could stay in restoration forever uh does it wear on you as a human after a while or at a certain point it's just kind of yeah i mean i i definitely can't do this forever i mean the hours i work sometimes i mean it's not uncommon to throw in a hundred hours in a week um so i mean i've got to like have a retirement strategy i'm i'm putting money together by real estate right now yeah um that's kind of my exit strategy to start buying apartment buildings and then once i've got enough income from that i'll just manage those wow and i guess you get so much recon and research because you're in and out of them all the time i know what to do yeah you know how not to get screwed on insurance

has it been hard to uh date during that with that type of a lifestyle or do you just kind of met you just i mean has it been hard to have a serious relationship yeah yeah it's definitely hard you know i was like i don't know i'm on a i'm on those those apps a little bit and you know i've met some girls and then you know it ends up now working out you know i'm gone a lot i'm working a lot you know so you think someone would like that kind of a man that's all you know you know here you know here he's here and then he's there you know yeah yeah and and i mean the money's great in this industry but yeah there's no personal life so it's like we can go on vacation really ball out of control but it's like i'm not going to be home every weekend or at the end of the night every

night you know well shoot if we have some ladies watch this man we'll have to have him charm in if you ladies want to chat with rob cotton and uh you want him to come over and and restore something you know clean your carpets there you go yeah you could definitely do that dude um yeah i had a a question i'm thinking of is how do you think that you could hide a body do you learn anything from this type of stuff do you think i am positive that i could make a body disappear wow yeah uh yeah it's something that's doable yeah yeah and what gives you that knowledge just like doing it like how you clean up a body like i mean you can just yeah i mean yeah i mean it just like doing it you know it's like if you can clean blood and guts off of walls or a floor you can just clean

in the same way if you actually took someone's life yeah i mean not that i ever would obviously but uh i think that the actual like the actual like logistics of making a body disappear i think is pretty easy and pretty practical but obviously it's it's the making someone disappear yeah it's the difficult part right do you ever like look at a corner or someone like that who comes in before you on a human trauma site and think like man i wish that that like do you ever want to get into that line of work is there anything about it that makes you think that you kind of moved a little further up the food chain kind of of death no no i mean i like i said i'll just i just never say no so i mean to me work is work i have no real interest in restoration really i if i was

someone offered me five more dollars an hour to dig ditches i would dig ditches right so to me it's just about the compensation i can't think of a a different industry with my set of you know circumstances or qualifications that i could make more money doing right um what yeah what can a restaurateur make if they have a good business going well i mean as a company i mean i think one person like with no employees if you were just subbing everything out you could probably do seven figures a year wow um that's if you really base it well and do large loss restoration because a ton of it is just equipment and you know if you've got good demo companies and stuff like that to do like actual flood cuts or anything else like that i think practically

one person could probably clear seven or seven hundred or a million dollars a year and how far how far away can you smell piss from you think honestly i like i i can it really bothers me when i like walk into a house because i'm so dialed into like that that ammonia smell a long ways away a long ways away like like if your dog goes outside into the backyard and you're like i can like i feel like when i walk into a yard i can tell if a dog lives in that house wow that's a skill man yeah that's a skill to be able to smell piss from so how many feet would you say i don't know uh 20 i don't know 20 feet 20 not that far i mean it's it's pretty good distance smells piss but yeah i guess that's true actually my bad yeah that is true my bad man um yeah i

yeah i guess i was hoping for i guess part of me honestly was hoping for more as a quarter mile i don't know yeah i was like oh yeah he could snout a batch of frickin body sauce at a quarter mile um um do you think there's a time of year when more trauma happens that you notice more human trauma is there is there winter time really yeah like especially around the holidays that's when i get the most suicide calls for sure i wonder what that is you think i mean i guess that that's kind of a known thing that people take their life around the holiday maybe they're alone some or yeah i think it's just like you know people are depressed and you know they're not happy with like their family family situation or whatever and if people do in suicide do they do more do you ever see any

rope suicide still or is it all gun work generally i'm only going to get calls for gun stuff because there's not generally a lot of cleanup if you hang yourself okay yeah it's kind of crazy i mean this is kind of dark but it's really inconsiderate to kill yourself with a gun in in a house you know because like now someone's got to deal with all that yeah yeah yeah people don't think about that you know people just think about themselves when they're killing themselves you know unfortunately and uh which is part of the issue anyway why you know they're just kind of stuck in their own head and what's in their own pain um what about birds and bird shit you're running any things like that like extensive because i've seen bird like i do diamond one time i parked over by i guess i was

going into a sava center or something or uh it could have been uh what's that place called um um i'm not folks like to go all the time rouses so it could have been a rouses market but anyway i parked dude i swear to god i was in here probably 16 minutes i came out and birds had completely shit up my vehicle do you get a lot of stuff like that is a bird feasty i have never gotten a call for a bird issue really never my ones hmm so i don't know if you can just like scrape it off or something and you know you don't ever need like professional intervention but i guess i'm thinking in a business if birds have been like sneaking up in an area and defecating for so long oh yeah i don't know uh yeah i'm trying to lure falls in or something you know it's like or you know a

ceiling come in you ever see the birds at like home depot yeah how do where's all that shit go i've never seen a bird shit in home depot that's a good point there's lots of birds maybe they have another different level of respect for the place i don't know that's a good question actually a good guest yeah yeah yeah that is a good guest what do you enjoy doing on your personal time brother i've really gotten into raves lately really early like edm music okay yeah i'm looking forward i'm i'm planning on going to uh edc which would be music festival nice that's gonna be good and we all do like a lot of pay you do you get into some of the drug culture the pill culture it's kind of popular yeah yeah you'll get out there and have fun oh yeah you have a good time have you

ever had any drug experiences we had to call nine one one on yourself never i uh although i i almost have yeah i mean shed i i've gotten myself into trouble with too many like edibles oh oh my god you know you're you're contemplating life oh yeah when you start i can't believe i got a call for that hey we got a guy over here who's just had too many edibles that happens a lot yeah i had a buddy in my fantasy football league it was the night before the draft he ate like a little bit of an edible up in uh toronto and next thing you know he was just walking in a circle for about an hour and a half in his room drinking orange juice and milk not doing well dude and those things sneak up on you yeah holy shit and that's not fun i don't think doing that having those beverages

and just keep moving like that you know to me that's not a party no no uh who do you like rufus the soul do you like stuff like that or do you like like are you getting into some like real uh nordic kind of german trance stuff or what are you into no no i mean definitely my favorite for sure is timmy trumpett he is spectacular live is it can you pull him up there rally timmy trumping it's a man yeah mm-hmm yeah he gets up on stage with like uh an actual like trumpeter trombone and i mean yeah that's him right there okay yeah he is spectacular like uh i'm seeing steve aoki and minneapolis in a couple a couple of weeks that's fire yeah it's gonna be a good time nice man and uh so you just kind of travel around and do this this is what you do mm-hmm will you

travel how many different places will you go any year um i don't know i mean that nothing too crazy i generally stay in the midwest um this this one is like the first one i've done in arizona um i used to before this before i did this i uh i uh i built and like maintained water towers mm-hmm that was a lot of traveling oh really you mean like in towns that have water tower smaller towns mm-hmm yeah and then transmission towers and television towers like changing light bulbs that was like four cities a week that was like a traveling comedian it's like that so you climb up those towers mm-hmm wow yeah so what's that like take me through a water tower so a water tower like in a small town or i get does it matter small town or big city does it

um i only worked in small towns i mean obviously they have them in large towns but you know it was a lot of times they would like just kind of put them on a hill and it wasn't even really a water tower just like a big tank on a hill okay um and it's full of water though mm-hmm and the reason for it it creates the pressure that's how so like the reason the water tower is up in the air is because that's what provides the pressure to your house okay it's not like there's a pump or anything the pump pumps it up in the air and then it's just gravity is how you've got your like your pressure at your tap so a lot of people don't realize that if there were no water tower in their town they wouldn't have any water pressure mm-hmm is that the same in cities and in smaller towns well if

you're that small of a town you might have a well and then you'd have a pump but if you've got like city water yeah that's how that works interesting so even the water here you think yeah it's probably because there's a water there's a water tower in the area yeah okay and so a larger place will they have more water towers per population or yeah and then when you get into a big enough town like in like New York City or whatever the water towers that provide the uh the water towers are on top of the buildings it's like those tanks that are on top of the building yeah that's the provides the water to that building oh I see so it'll even get more localized to the actual building where you get that little tank up top mm-hmm that top tank dang and so take me through that so you get to a

small town you roll up on a water tower and there's a lot of bees and stuff I bet huh yeah there's bees and then the wind is what really kills you it's really not that bad because I worked on a service crew so we didn't generally build them okay so a lot of it was just like doing inspections and and I didn't do the inspections I just like support um or changing light bulbs you know you know those those red blinking light bulbs on tall structures there's heavy fines if those go out oh really mm-hmm so who finds the people who who would find a town oh oh I mean I wasn't in sales I mean there was full-time sales guys they would right but who finds say if the water tower light goes out mm-hmm who gets fined for it oh the whoever owns that structure so like if it's a

water tower would be the city and that's fines from the FAA oh like if you don't have functional lights um transmission towers are going to be owned by like the radio station and the television station so once you get up to the actual tower you get is there usually like a platform around the base of the actual water bowl or bowl yeah uh so it depends but uh generally yes there's like a walkway okay on the top and on around the like outside um and then it's just a stick ladder up wow and what kid how do you get on to the top because it usually rounds up bring up a water tower brother which what kind are we talking about here um so generally worked on those top ones okay um where it's like a metal tank there you go let's link on one of those there really

yeah so there's going to be a walkway and then there's a there's two walkways there okay and then there's a ladder between them and then there's generally an access panel on the top can you large enough that yeah so that one doesn't have the second that that one doesn't have the second walkway but there's going to be a ladder on that tank so there's a ladder that goes up there and then there's a second ladder that'll take you from the platform to the top okay and then if you zoom way in on that picture up at the very tip top that should be an access panel right there i see yeah and when you get can you get into the water yeah so when they do the inspections they actually scuba dive in the tank you would have to do that well i didn't but yeah

someone on the crew would yeah and that's a licensed scuba person wow mm-hmm so somebody goes in there and what are they looking for they're looking for corrosion generally okay uh corrosion any like foreign materials but yeah generally it's just an inspection on the welds or the bolts make sure that it's not corroding okay so somebody goes in there and inspects it and you guys ever find anything in those things um not really i mean sometimes it would be like something that got pumped up like some debris or a stick but almost never but nothing like the level of stuff you're finding now no no the the transmission towers were worse you know the transmission towers you know there'd be 1100 1500 i think the tallest one in the united

states is in north dakota um and that one's like i might be speaking at a turn but it's like 2050 feet oh feet up in the air yeah so these you're not at a ton of risk up there for like well you said wind is a little bit issue when you're on these water towers if it's a windy space then you you yeah you got to really do you kind of like uh attach yourself as you're going up yeah like a carabiner or something yeah you you're you want to try and keep like 100 connection so like you've got a uh a harness on and then it's got a y hook onto it and then the that y hook so you hook one up and then you climb a little bit you hook the other one up so you're always connected even when you're moving it yeah like like a clerk like that boy like clerk have you seen

in the alpinist no i haven't oh man it's good um and so when you get to the transmission towers that's even that's way up there and what is that you bring up a transmission tower rally yeah look up television tower television transmission tower yeah so the taller your um like antenna is or your broadcast pole the less power it takes to go further so if you get that you go up there yeah no what damn y'all up there huh and can you hear television when you're up there no no you can't hear any of that but a lot of times they'll have cell phone towers or like cell phone antennas on there you got to be careful about that because normally they'll only want to shut off one side so you get to climb on one side um and if you accidentally climb in front of one of those

like cell phone transmitters you'll get a sunburn through your clothes yeah because they work on microwaves i think so like just for like a second you're like you go in front of it because they're so high powered you you're like microwaving yourself no way so you'll like take your shirt off your sunburned from just walking through the pathway if you stayed in the path could you die i'm sure you could i mean i would probably take a while but it'll be a crummy way to go and what's going through you just all the calls and everything all the information yeah what yeah all that stuff yeah so that was pretty nutty they find you and you just have a nikey advertising on your chest you just have something for yeah for butcher box wow bro that's bananas yeah that was terrible

dude you've done some pretty unique jobs man just don't say no wow and is that a motto years overall in your life kind of a little bit yeah i really do try um you know it's like you know that's that's the only way that i feel like i've been able to like maintain like a um like my personal life is just like i'll work like a long time and you know it's like well my friends are going to a show or something like that and so we'll go out and go to the show shows done at like 130 and then i'll go back to work sometimes yeah i mean that's happened you know but it's like if i if i don't just do it then it's like you just not gonna have a personal life and it's yeah it's the same thing you know it's like when you work like a lot of times i work seven days a

week you know it's like i still want to go out to brunch and stuff like that you know and even if you're tired or whatever it is like but if you don't like work to maintain it it'll just go away you know i love that man yeah because i find sometimes i'll get too caught up in what i'm thinking or feeling instead of just staying busy with my work you know yeah and a lot of times just staying busy will keep you out of like you know i'll get caught up in like self pity you're just thinking about myself too much it's like i guess the busier you stay it really does just kind of keep things moving yeah yeah and this is like i've tried a lot of stuff i'm i'm always down to try stuff i mean it's crazy that i'm here right now yeah it's like yeah it's this crazy man it's

awesome dude it's so fascinating to hear what goes on who does this kind of stuff because a lot of times we think that things just get done somehow yeah you know it's like oh that just gets done yeah um but to think that somebody actually comes and and takes care of certain things yeah it's interesting man because a lot of us would never know what that's like well and it's like my my next step what i really want to get into is i'm working on getting into large loss so like you know million dollar projects and stuff like that but i really want to do cat work and that's like the hurricanes and stuff so i mean like when there's the hurricanes rolling through louisiana someone's got to clean up all that stuff i want to be at my buddy giddy does that and i

think my buddy tully does that from growing up they travel around if there's a big hurricane or storm and they do i guess loss but that might be insurance loss or something like that there might be an insurance adjuster do you want to get in there and really do the uh i want to do the work yeah you want to do the work yeah like i got a good buddy of mine um uh that they were down in texas for that real bad freeze up and so like there was apartment buildings that the every water pipe burst and so i mean you're talking about an apartment building's got three four hundred units in it and every single one's wet and molding and all that stuff's got to get gutted like that's what i really want to do is i want to do like the real large loss stuff wow and what's fascinating

about i mean i guess obviously it's a higher paying job yeah and i mean it's just like the idea of like doing the larger jobs where it's like i've got one job for like the next month instead of like the traveling around all the time and the middle of the night calls and stuff like that is i'd really like that i think and how uh what do your folks think of your work um it's it's kind of funny so uh my father just passed away oh but yeah thank you i what happened with him a cancer oh it just ate him alive yeah it was st patrick's day this year no way oh man was he pretty neat pretty pretty neat guy oh super cool i mean he's got a really crazy life story too family and everything wow um but so when i was in high school when i was really

kind of fucking things up um he's he pulled me aside one day and he says you know there's only three ways you can be successful in this world you can do things better than anyone else can do it you can do something no one else can do or you can do things that no one else wants to do and i was like that's what i'm gonna and that was not how he meant that but uh you know they did that's a really fat it's a really good square way to kind of communicate with your child yeah these are sort of the options because it sounds very like okay that that makes real clear sense yeah yeah i mean that he was a well-spoken dude and he was in an aircraft mechanic and my mother's a therapist and where they meet each other at through a through a fedex driver oh damn yeah that's

that's a yeah so the my mom was working at her mother's business and their fedex driver was my dad's friend okay and so you know he's meeting this pretty girl at the fedex thing he's like you could have meet a friend of mine and so literally the fedex driver set them up they were married for almost 30 years that's delivery baby that's dang yeah dude and look fedex i've always thought first of all obviously they're doing great things for people i don't think amazon's really making love like that but fedex man they should do airline because there's been times where i've mailed a package somewhere and then i tried to fly this commercial airline and you i could they're like we have a la something that flies too late or whatever yeah but the package is that thing goes

out every time yeah if it doesn't get there in a day they'll refund you dude if fedex did an airline i would be all over that like a commercial airline it'd be so sick yeah well i bet your dad was really proud of him how you became just so uh have so much of your own ingenuity you know and just taking control of your own destiny yeah i mean there he definitely shared with me that uh you know because i moved out you know and i just dropped out of school i moved out of the house yeah those are like warning signs to a parent yeah they were like oh we really weren't thinking that this is going to work out you know and like well made it work somehow do you think there's any way to avoid trauma in the world we'll just finish with this question like i said man i just think that

there's got to be better mental health something i don't i don't know the solution i don't pretend to know the solution but just like more care for people that can't get care themselves yeah you ever roll up but anybody in there in a costume or something like that they're dressed like uh you know they got a crown on or anything like no nothing nothing crazy like that but like i said i deal with some people that uh maybe not firing on all cylinders oh yeah and uh nudity is the is the thing that happens a lot like that's the first thing you know yeah if somebody's new you kind of yeah if you're oh answering your door and you're naked there's something not going on right yeah there's a glitch there's a little glitch in the system do we had a guy bus he used to he used

to poop in this va he had like a vase in this town or vase or vase and uh in his house and he would tell us go look in the vase right and we'd be pooping there and we'd always be like there's not still going to be maybe like a year or two later dude and every time there was still it was like oh come on man but it's crazy how many times you'll go back to the well sometimes when somebody's tricking you you know shit tricking you um booby cotton dude thank you so much for coming in man good luck out there at the raves um and thank you first of all i just want to say thank you so much for just uh for getting things back to their original form man thank you for repairing things that need to be repaired in the world yeah and thanks for having me i really enjoyed this yeah

this is awesome man thank you so much for uh for your time man and um we'll share rob socials if you guys want to hit them up and yeah that's trauma cleanup man rob cotton thank you bub thank you time for me to set that parking brake and let myself on my shine that light on me i'll sit and tell you my story shine on me me and i will find a song i will sing it just for you and i've been moving way too fast on the runaway train with a heavy load of my past

and these rills that i've been riding on they want something that they're damn they're gonna go now they just want being a fit influencer isn't just about having a six pack and 60 000 followers it's about hitting the gym and trying your best even on the tough days it's about inspiring somebody along the way even if that somebody is you find your inner fit influencer at goodlife fitness that's the good life