0:01 Autobots, I cannot come on this ride. [Laughter] [Music] And welcome back. We have not only special guest of the careful boys out here, an amazing future chief. Wee-ooh. Wee-ooh, wee-ooh. You're our chief. You're our chief. Wee-ooh, wee-ooh, wee-ooh. And chief strong. Esteemed Chief strong. Esteemed professor wee-ooh, wee-ooh. And and he's a yeah, professor strong. of freaking things, man. A lot of hats, a lot of different hats. He wears many hats. But also social media phenom. You guys have just taken embellished everything. I don't know. I don't know, you know. Social media
0:51 I put my hand on the Bible before we started this. Yo, we got to talk about some of this social media stuff cuz you just brought up this Kiki challenge thing that I think we all saw but I didn't know who you were. Man, I wanted this video to go away so bad. It's coming back. But yeah, it goes to it's a good lesson that whatever you post never goes I deleted it from my page so but it's still out there. So um Repost it. Yeah. I I I can't now. you before you say anything about it, just show it first. Kiki So we can so that everyone can see it no context. I think it was in my feelings challenge. And Asian cop. I it's hard to find it. Dude, this is I I have seen this. It's on a lot of reaction videos. There's one now. Maybe that one. You have lived a lot of life, sir. No. Check on YouTube. All right. Meanwhile, this guy just does jujitsu. I have no challenges, dude. I got to do start doing some challenges.
1:42 Should do the beehive challenge. Asian challenge. Do the Asian challenge. Punch the beehive and run away. Do the hornet challenge. Yeah. Hornet's nest challenge? What's that? Put your head in a hornet's nest. Run around for a little bit. Stand next to hornets and do the hornet shake. You know how everyone puts gasoline in a hornet's nest? I want to try that so bad. I got some gasoline. But I don't have any hornets. When I when I moved to Vegas, I'm going to I'm going to force you to do the locusts in your house challenge. Yeah, when there's locust season, you should just leave your doors open. I know. I'm going to I'm going to make a way for them to enter your house. Yeah, it's like for a week or two it's like on every single sidewalk. Like as you're walking, there looks like there's like hundreds. And then they just randomly all go away
2:33 for some reason. Have you ever come up with For you, when you walk, they hop away from you like a wave. Yeah, that's cool. to collect them in a big bag and then just like put them in your pool. Where do they come from? West Virginia. All right, in the meantime, what are the other things you were bringing up? The Transformers? Yeah, there's this there's this video clip of him in like a voice session and JK fans send it to us all the time. All the time. It's our inbox is full of it. It went big on TikTok. So yeah, when I first started social media, I did it cuz it was a good distraction from what I I talked about earlier with what had happened to my mom and stuff like that. I decided when I went on social media to make people laugh. It made me laugh. It made them laugh and it was it was therapeutic, right? So I did a lot of I I was a class clown as a matter of fact at the academy and instead of getting the award for
3:23 like the best athlete or best report writer, I got the class clown award. And that was just me and I still have a sense of humor but you know, it's it's dwindled with age and experience and things that have happened in my life. It's refined itself. His comedy's like next level now. Honestly, with the reason why I I transitioned from comedy stuff was we were having a lot of civil unrest between cops and police officers that I felt like the direction my page was going was more useful if I helped people understand what we did. And just laughing about the job and making fun of the job felt counterproductive. It just added to the cops are idiots. Oh, you didn't want them to use you as more as an example to support their argument. And I'd gotten in trouble a couple times already by my staff. They wanted to protect my first amendment honor my first amendment rights but at the same time they were like, you're never going to promote at my agent at our agency if
4:13 you still do stupid stuff. So one of the first things and I had at the time I had time on my hands to be a little bit more creative so I set up a a little boom mic and and the mic wasn't even working. I put a wired lavalier mic on it and a a black drop screen and I pretended to do a voice cuz I used to like to do impressions and stuff and one of the ones I could do was Optimus Prime voice. Dude. Especially on a microphone, it would sound a little better. Oh, there it is. You want to watch it first? It's better than than me describing it. Sean, let's give it a go. Here we go. Autobots, I cannot come on this ride. [Laughter] What that was. A little less ah, okay. Try something
5:05 different here. I got you. I got No, no, I I got it. Cannot come on this ride. It's still funny. I wasn't expecting that. Those are my daughter's headphones, too. Autobots, I cannot come on this ride. Uh yeah, Aaron, I don't even know what that was. Try it here, okay? Be still and place it here. Okay, let's stop that. I feel you. Okay, hold it. There we go. Okay. Autobots, I cannot come on this ride. So stupid stupid stupid me. Your humor is like exactly what this room is. That's our chief.
5:55 It's in there still, man. Come on. it, dude. Come on, dude. It's there. The most recent post of that went 6 and 1/2 million views, right? My mistake is that I cut it off at 59 seconds cuz in order for it to be monetized, it has to be a minute long. So I didn't get any No, I just need a little e. So many people were sending that because they didn't some of most people didn't know that was you. They were sending it because they said it looked like you. And they were saying it as a joke like, check it out. It's Aaron Cho. You're like, holy ████ that's really him. Yeah, and I was like, I think that is him. That is freaking funny. I got to find that in my feelings one, though. Oh, dude. That was crazy when I when I really realized that was you. I'm like, I think that's actually him. When was that? Uh I want to say 2015, 2016.
6:45 Oh, wow. And then the Kiki challenge I don't know when that was but I was actually I was sitting at home. My wife we're going to have a date day and then I just I get like I got to do this. People people messaged me and said, you know, the cop dancing videos are really good. I'm not a good dancer. I'm like but as I'm getting in the car to leave, I'm like, Liz, you have 5 minutes? She's like, yeah, I'm going to just change into this I have a fake cop uniform, too. You have a fake cop uniform? Yeah, cuz I can't use departmental stuff. So I have a black uniform that no patches with a fake badge. And just go with me on this one. And we it literally took 5 minutes cuz I knew I wasn't going to dance. So we put the car in drive. I live in a quiet cul-de-sac and it crept. I stepped out of the car to do it and I it kind of I leaned back like I fell and I tweaked my sunglasses when I got back in the car and went to go turn off the tape. I said, all right, let's see how it goes. I posted it, changed and went back and
7:37 then like my phone blew up. Like, oh my gosh, this this thing is everywhere. It's on reaction videos on YouTube. Yeah, so that was the one that took me I had like maybe 7,000 followers at that point and that one took me like 10 or 15, you know, that's what really And I I always tell people that want to get big on social media, hit the 10,000 mark. I think that on Instagram for at least that's what kind of makes the difference, I think. Cuz if you follow a page and you go to the guy's profile, it's like, uh 5,000, 6,000 but if you see 10,000 followers, I I maybe it's worth following. And so I think that's what happened. A lot of people said, oh, he's worth following. So that's where it grew from there. Another renaissance man in the building. I again, luckily if I would have just been a regular guy doing that and did nobody would pay attention to that video but because it was a cop, but the niche thing really did help with my following.
8:27 Man, dude. I want to see more videos where you're doing dope ████ like that. Lieutenant Lieutenant Cho. What other impressions can you Can you do Bane, probably? No, I think that was it. That's that was really the only one I could Can you still do that with your voice? Maybe with a mic. Like, Autobots, transform. That's pretty crazy, though. That's pretty wild. How does he get You should do that through the police intercom when the next person So I did get in trouble for doing that at work. When this was going out, I I made it I I said, I can make I can do it at work, right? And record somebody or have somebody record me doing that through the by through the mic and say something stupid like make a full and complete stop, you know. And so I did I did something like that and I posted it and the chief said, okay, you can't do that on duty. So I took it down. So
9:17 Was this already Almani? Yeah. Damn, they didn't have that humor there? I thought they would be like What if they didn't want other copycats? If they didn't have humor, they would have made me get rid of it all together but it's using department property and I didn't even think about that. I'm like, But when you become chief, you could do whatever the ████ you want. You're probably going to have a comedy squad just for I You could be your comedy squad. But the the reason why it was mitigated was was because it was received so uh positively yeah, through the public. Too much of too much attention? No, it's good. It was good. It was Good publicity in a tough time. So I think um if your if your uniform was like Reno 911, would the guy with the short shorts, what's his name? Lieutenant Dangle? [Laughter] But but you also see cops that kind of
10:08 go too silly like the Tik Tok cops, right? Tik Tok cops. And then you lose credibility from the other cops, the real cops. And so I was kind of towing that fine line where I was like, I still want the respect of cops, especially the cops I work with cuz one day I may want to be their supervisor and how are you going to take your supervisor seriously if you're not respected by your guys cuz you're dancing to to popular songs and stuff. But what if it was like the other way where catch some bodies for a while and then you get You do reach like a high point and then you become a dancing fun cop. Yeah, you know, maybe. I just I The reason why I can't see it now is because um as I gained my following, I felt like I was responsible for the image of the profession. And I got really lucky um as I started getting more notoriety, this this group called Humanizing the Badge which was made up
10:58 of other uh popular cops, Mike the Cop, Officer Daniels, uh Deputy Hookem and Bookem. Um they had reached out to me and said, "Do you want to join our group? We travel the country." And I'm thinking to myself, "Sure, I'd like to travel the country." And the first place I went to was Detroit. Oh, wow. And Detroit was heavily hurt by not just the the disparity between cops and the public but the economy. I don't know if you remember, Detroit was like a booming auto Mecca and those houses those a lot of those communities were abandoned and I got to see that first hand. And I saw the um the and the and the cops were really demoralized. And I'm like, they don't have to know who know who we are, but they knew who we we were and we showed up to these different precincts. It just I mean they they their faces lit up and they were motivated. Oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. That's the impact we have. And then some of these other guys that still stayed in the group, um they felt
11:48 like that was um their mark on how to improve law enforcement and I didn't really see myself that way. I always felt like I could give something more um and right about that time um you know, we had the Ferguson, the uh St. Louis, and Missouri, and all that stuff. And I'm like, yeah, I just don't want to make fun of uh the profession anymore. Um I want to do something a little bit more meaningful. So I started Bless you. Bless you. Uh don't ever do that again. Just kidding. Uh I wanted to do more of the historical um like uh the Night I Know videos that I do now and uh that's what really actually catapulted my my stuff. I was stuck around 25, 30,000. And now I'm like 122 and and I a lot of those videos I I learned that people not only want to be entertained but they want to learn something, right? And if you It's called infotainment. Yes. And infotainment will
12:40 will just and people go, "Oh, that's worth following. I learned something today. That's worth that that added value to my life. It's more useless information." And so yeah, I try to come up with those videos now. Algorithm loves it more, too. You are a guru, man. I don't know what that means, but if that means I know stuff, I'll take it. know what it means either, but that's why I'm not one. Yeah, I just lucky lucky circumstances. Nah, dude, you hustle your buns, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes to the detriment. If it wasn't for my wife pulling the reins back uh cuz otherwise I'd chase every rainbow, right? This is how I'm I'm kind of programmed. I want You know, a lot of people don't know that 911 Strong was actually a supplement company. Did you Did I tell you guys that last time? Yeah, 911 Strong was uh America's first online supplement company dedicated to our nation's heroes. So we're like bodybuilding.com. So a lot of military people, probably
13:31 around your time, they like to get jacked, right? Jack3D. But they a lot of the uh online stores wouldn't send it to the APOs or FPOs. And I figured out a way to do that through the US Postal Service and the biggest distributor was bodybuilding.com and they wouldn't do it. A lot of times families would have to buy it and then the families would send it to the APO/FPO bases. And the reason why bodybuilding.com wouldn't do it cuz their big warehouses were set up for UPS or or and then it was just been more time and money for them to do APO/FPO. So I got hooked up with a company called NRG-X who sold uh something called Tren 13 Ethol which was like a you know, a uh prohormone that was really popular. Tren. Yeah, and I talked to the talked to the owner, uh his name was Joshua Smith. And I told him, "Hey, I'm a cop. I'm trying to start this online business and this is what I want." He says, "No problem. Uh once you get your retailer license, um I'll hook you up to uh large
14:23 volume wholesale prices." So I became a really cheap avenue to get Tren 13 Ethol and some of the other products that that company sold. And then I also uh sold Jack3D. Sick. I went to the post office and said, "Can I send these things?" They said, "Yeah, absolutely. The military hasn't banned it and you can send it as long as the military hasn't banned it." So APO/FPOs were only taken. I did. Little by little military They talk. local cops were like, "Hey, you can get Jack3D uh through 911 Strong." So I said, "I'm going to start an Instagram page." And people started following that. I think I I got up to 3,000 and for the business and I was kind of proud of that. And then there was a guy in 2000 I don't remember. 2012, 2000 13 named James Board. He was the European World Series of Poker champion. He was an English guy and his best
15:13 friend was a business partner named Jamie Watmo. And he was a a British Special Forces guy. And they were partners, entrepreneurs. And they would buy acquire businesses and they made me an offer and um it was really good offer to take over the business and uh it came with a 1% royalty. So bought me out but they but they wanted an American face to run the the business. To run the social media because they liked the message behind 911 Strong and 911's an American thing, America's military. And they wanted to tap into that market but they knew that I'd kind of developed myself as a face for the company and they wanted to keep it that way. So I'm all, "Yeah, I'll take that lump sum and that forever 1% as long as I all I have to do is post about the company." After they acquired it, a month ran by. Nothing. Two months went by. Nothing. Three months I'm like, "What are you
16:03 guys doing with my business here, you know? I'm I'm ready to transition it." "Oh, we're getting back to you." And then James Board stopped talking to me. He wouldn't respond. So Jamie, Jamie, what's going on? "Well, we're having a falling out and we're just trying to figure out how we're going to separate the businesses." But you already got your lump sum by then. Yes. And um so now a year's gone by and I'm like, "What do I do here?" So I contact an attorney. And I'm like Can I have it back? I'm like, "Do I give them the money back? You know, I've already spent some of it." And they're all, "No, they actually after um I forgot the period was but it was definitely under a year. It's considered abandoned and you have to send them a letter asking them their intent." And so I sent them a a letter saying, "Hey, uh I'm declaring that you guys abandoned the business. Please get back to me within 30 days." Six I forget what the letter said that they turned and prepared and they never did. So it just stays abandoned? Stays abandoned. I had the business. I I
16:53 killed the business cuz I was kind of just in limbo and the business was suffering now because I wasn't continuing cuz they were supposed to move operations and take over the logistics and everything. And I didn't want to invest more money to it thinking that this is their responsibility. So the business died. Um I made more money from it than I ever thought I would ever as a retailer anyway. With the getting the lump sum. That's nice. And um I could have cried about, "Hey, you guys are in breach of contract. I'm I'm entitled to the 1% estimated." But I never did. I was like, "I made out, you know." Yeah. And they had probably bigger problems they were dealing with. And I I have um 911 Strong as a social media page that already had 3,000 followers or something like that. And per contract and and the fact that the thing expired, you were allowed to keep it. Yeah. Right? Still to this day no no content from no a contact. That was, you
17:45 know, over 10 years ago now. Never heard from them again. Yeah. So after everything happened with my mom and everything, I decided to jump on social media. I never had a public page. Um and I said, "Better What better page than to use 911 Strong that already had a head start to make that my page to make funny videos and stuff." So that's how that started. That's Dang, you never ran into either of these guys in No, cuz they're British. They're English. Oh. And to them, what they paid me was good money to me. But for them it was probably chump change. They probably chopped it off as a loss. Geez. Yeah, whatever was going on in their life probably was like all they were thinking about. other acquisitions going on or whatever. And then really because of the international thing, it uh makes things very difficult. But the but the the company that they used is a I forget the name of the company but my video my testimonial still on there about how smooth the transaction went.
18:36 Oh, damn. So from the outside probably everything probably looked pretty good. Yeah. No, I mean it everything was on the up and up. I I contacted an attorney because I didn't want to be I I eventually I planned for the money which was eventually to buy another my our future house. And I was like is my am I going to lose my house? Am I going to have to give the money back? And because Thank god you didn't have to give it back. So um they abandoned it. That's exactly what they did. Good thing that there's something in like already in precedence for what happens in this case and it's very like clear cut. Right. I don't think business is ever clear cut but the one advantage I had was it was international. Oh, yeah. that really uh circumvented some of the If it had been within the states, it would have been a different story. It's harder for them to pursue. Yeah. Your life is interesting, bro. I've had a blessed life, man. I've had a really blessed life.
19:27 We didn't even talk about how I was a national points leader for BMX racing when I was 12. Your BMX stuff. What the heck? Well, luckily you're going to come back another time. Yeah, yeah. All all BMX day. Why don't we all race him at the Whittier Narrows? Oh, dude. Thanks for coming, man. Yeah, that was awesome.
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