Bob Parsons
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
They had VC or NVA come out of a spider hole and threw a chi-com at this guy. He picked it up, went to throw it back, and it went off in his hand. Arm gone, side of his head gone. People were starting to, they were a little uncertain about the war, but they weren't like they were when we came home. Guys coming home, throwing shit, with signs and names, Nazi.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
How did I hear about psychedelics? You know, when I was a kid in the 60s, You know, there was LSD around and, of course, marijuana, marijuana. I don't consider it psychedelic. There was – and then you had guys talking about mushrooms and other stuff. But I never did any of that then because, number one, I just – I didn't feel the need to.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I didn't – I was a little afraid of it because I didn't know much about it. You know, you had all these rumors that, you know, if you took LSD, you might try to fly off a building and, you know, shit like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So, I didn't pay any attention to it, and I didn't even think about it, that it would have the medicinal properties that it would do, even though in spite of, for millennia, we have other cultures that have used it to handle problems that we have all the time, and they don't have at all, because of their wise use of psychedelics. So the thing that made the difference for me was in 2017.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It didn't happen until 2017. I read Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind. And Michael Pollan's book is a treatise on psychedelics. And, you know, and it talks about, it doesn't talk about iboga even though that is, that's granddaddy of them all, baby.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I mean, you know, I haven't. And maybe one day, but I don't. I haven't so far. But I read his book and, you know, and I was fascinated. First, the book reads like a novel. Reads like mine reads. I could not get over that that could be a solution for me. And so I told my wife, Renee, that I would like to try this. And she had me fixed up within two weeks. Are you serious? Dead serious.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She had me hooked up. And it just so happened that she had been talking to a friend who had a journey like this and on and on and on. And it's just everything just dovetailed together. And so she introduced me to these people and two guides. work under the radar, of course, and I met them in Hawaii. And I did, for three days, I did three different types of psychedelics.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
First day, I did ayahuasca, and, you know, that's different. Yeah, you would never buy that at a soda fountain, would you? Nasty tasting stuff. But anyhow, you know, it is what it is, and some people swear by it. The second day, I did... Let's tell you a story that is funny.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
My guide, he had this teapot, and he said, this holds three large cups, and I made it very strong, this magic mushroom tea, so you'll only need one cup. Now, I swear what I'm going to tell you is true. I drank all three cups. And I ate the tea bags. And I was righteously stoned. And I was here, there, and everywhere. And did I have a journey? Yeah, I did. And it was all positive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Some tears and so forth. But it was all positive. And then the next day I took off. I took a break and that day my wife and I went and played golf. And what I liked is it felt like the fauna, like the bushes and the grass and the trees. It all knew I was there and I was alive and what I've been doing and it was supportive. And I never putted that good in my life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It was like whatever green I was on, it was like the grass would say, He didn't hear Bobby. And I waited. He bent right around into the cup. I mean, it was incredible. Now, it never happened again or since. But it happened that one time. And so it was a great experience. The next day, it was LSD. And the LSD, I took a strong dose of it. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It was, you know, had the same impact the other two did. And, you know, I didn't have any hallucinations on that. But I sure had a righteous buzz and was happy to talk and felt good about things. And when it was all said and done, my wife noticed it first. She said, you're different. You're easier to talk to. You're easier to get along with. You don't have that temper.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
That edge about you is gone. And then I could feel it too. And then the people that I worked with also knew it. They could see it. And so I made a sharp turn away from PTSD at that point. I'd like to say at that time, it had been 49 years since the war for me, and I finally came home.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, brother, I had an edge about me that I didn't like. And I would lose my temper. And I just would hate myself for it. You know, because there was no reason. It's always something stupid, you know. And so, I mean, it was always under a quest. I knew that, you know, at first, you know, I had a battle with some depression. I had fought... fought this hard temper that I had.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I just never liked being around people. I liked being alone, you know? And that's not a good thing. At least if you can overcome why you're like that. You know, it was terrible for me when days like the... like the days the trees fell. And that was an experience I had in Vietnam. And I would always go back there on the 4th of July.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I would do whatever I could to avoid fireworks, to stay away from that sort of thing. But it's stuff like that. You know, my wife is my third wife. I mean, I've been given my walking papers twice, and it's never a pleasant time. And I knew that the women that I married both times were good women. I mean, there wasn't nothing wrong with them. But the problem was me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
What do you mean the day the trees fell? Okay, I'll tell you about the day the trees fell. We set up for ambush one night in a graveyard in Vietnam. And we saw Vietnamese are buried sitting up, at least most of them are that I'm aware of. And so... We had a squad, a couple of cliques right of us, a couple of cliques left of us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so I was facing just inward to this area where all these trees were. And I was leaning against the mound. And there was... All of a sudden, on the right of us, there was a firefight started. And then there was a firefight on the left of us. And there was bullets. You've been shot at many times. You know what it sounds like when a bullet goes by.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, it sounds like beef or something flying by. But, I mean, it was like... It was going like crazy. So he couldn't stand up. And then... One of the guys in our squad, probably George, called in artillery. It must have been NVA moving towards us from the front of us area I was facing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And all I could see was I could see, you know, I don't know how far out it was, maybe a couple hundred yards, maybe a hundred yards. I don't know. But it would be like everything would light up. And then you'd see these trees, these palm trees, just falling down, falling down. And then... And then on and on and on. That must have been for like 15 minutes. And then quiet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And that's what I'm talking about that particular night. That night was crazy. And what was crazier about it, that particular graveyard, there was a squad of ours a month or so before I got there that set up in that graveyard, and they all died. because the Vietnamese somehow or another.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No, they weren't buried. They were just mutilated, like sometimes happens. But none of us were hurt that night. Just the trees, just the trees were.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, it does. It does. But, you know, I can tell you what the painful thing is. What I decided was early on it might have been a good thing that I wasn't always around.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, temper. I mean, I never got physical, never, never once. But she was verbal and loud. I'm happy that with my angel, I'm past that at least 99%.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Grandkids, not as much. Great-grandkids, haven't met them yet. Haven't met them yet? Haven't met them yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
They're, I think, two and a half and one, something like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I will, but I will when I'm ready. Dad?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
What did I see in my ayahuasca journey? You know, I've seen less in the ayahuasca journey than I did in the, um, mushrooms, and the LSD. And I think the reason for it is maybe it'd give me a lighter dose.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
In the ayahuasca? You know, if it was anything, it's that, you know, I needed to change and I could change, and there you go. But... That is it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Psilocybin had the biggest difference on me a number of times. And it seems to work good.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
What did I see? Well, I had that flashback of processing those guys to Vietnam. And then I told you when I was in troop processing, just before I rotated home, that, I mean, I could see those guys like I was there, like they were yesterday. I mean, like I was sitting here with you now.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, it's just, I seen the horror of it. I mean, the... Just how that bullshit happens and these guys are walking into that and they don't have a clue. I mean, I've seen that. And I mean, if I had to tell you what my most stressful points were to cause PTSD, I would have never picked that. I just wouldn't have. because I buried it. But it came out, and it was one of the most profound.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, Vietnam, the war is rough for me. Being a kid is also a rough time. But see, I was never, when I was a kid, I was never abused. I was neglected. And it's just as bad, maybe worse, I don't know. But I don't know. Both times bother me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Early on when I was talking about the introduction and that letter I wrote myself, I mean, it was everything I could do to tell you about it without crying totally. And maybe one day I will. I'll be able to talk about it, but I mean, it just wrenches my soul every time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, no and no. Self-worth, maybe. Maybe. You know, it's tough to know what I was. I just know I love doing it. And that's an area that I think was a big advantage for me. I just loved it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so, you know, I was willing to channel my energy and time into it and use that as a release to kind of self-treat or self-medicate PTSD, if you will. I mean, you know, when you don't work 60-hour shift followed by eight-hour sleep followed by 60-hour shift followed by, you know, for a few months, unless you're a bit of a workaholic, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. Well, that's what it was. But I loved doing it, but I didn't do it because I hated doing it. I used to look at my watch, and I never looked at it and said, oh, it's 4 o'clock, I got another 12 hours left to work. I would look at it and say, oh, it's 4 o'clock. Oh, man, I only have 12 hours I can work. I mean, that sort of thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, you know, I think... You know, it had to be in the sense that I grew up knowing that if I really wanted something, I better be working for it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
All right? So that in itself is a driver.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
As opposed to somebody that's working with a silver spoon, right? And you're born with that. You know, they might not, you know, have that discipline.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You act differently with one of those.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
LSD has been a different type of drug for me. I think it's been helpful. I tend to get A little with LSD, a little nauseous with it. But never so nauseous that I purge and then move on to the next step. Just nauseous. So knowing that, I've avoided it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
But I still think having LSD, at the same time I had the combination of ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, or psilocybin, and LSD, I think that is a powerful combination for me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, she seen I was kind of the guy she wanted to be married to. There you go. So, you know, it's like, I was told once that every young couple that gets married, right, the husband thinks that, you know, doesn't want his wife to change. And the wife doesn't want her husband, no, wants her husband to change. And often they're both disappointed. Well, she was happy to see that her husband changed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, I have, but I don't. I don't. I mean, I haven't in a while. My wife did a journey not too long ago with her sisters. They had some family stuff they were dealing with, and it's been great. And I'll tell you what, I mean, I love the woman tremendously, but since her journey, I love her even more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Oh, we have. We have. We have done MDMA. And done it twice, I think. But it's been a while.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No, I did because it was there. I thought maybe I could still be better.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I have, and let me tell you a story with that. I've done that, and that's the kind that you smoke the, right? Toad butt. Well, I've smoked it and did it three times, smoked it. Felt nothing. And my guide, who is my dear friend, said, there must be something wrong with this. And he took a puff of it and was on the roof. So for some reason or another, that stuff doesn't affect me. No kidding. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I don't know what it is, but it's the damnedest thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Semper Fi, Nate. Well, buddy, listen, the way I've always done it was I did what I liked. I did what I liked, and my dad, for all his faults, I mean, he had a lot of good ideas, you know, about certain things. But one of the things he said, he said, is you always should do what you love, because when you love something, it tells you all its secrets. And I believe that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I understand the reason, Nate, because when you do what you love, you're going to work harder at it. And you're not doing it just for the money. And, you know, depending upon why you're working, right, why you're doing what you're doing, that's going to determine how successful you are. And you'll never be successful if you're just working for the money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I think so. I think it is one of the answers. I think when we start doing it as a people, should we ever start doing it as a people, it would be a renaissance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Why did I decide to do it again after the initial experience? You know, the first time it was I wanted to fix the problem. Second time, I wanted to get better, keep getting better. See, and now I feel I'm, you know, probably about as good as I'm going to get. So, you know, not doing it as much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Might. Hope so. I'd like to do it with my wife again.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Nature. Nature is one. It's hard to go wrong with that. And friends.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Not in the sense that there's something that I'm looking for. No, no.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No, no. You know, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me... You know, I was with one of the guides who was... He was the guy that did my first journey in 2017, him and his partner. And I had thought about what I wanted to accomplish when he was there with me. And we went ahead and I had a journey and so forth. And I never thought I'd accomplish anything. but I accomplished everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I know you're going to ask me, you're going to say, what is it you wanted to accomplish? I don't fucking remember. And you're going to say, well, how do you know? Well, I did at the time I knew, but now I got my brain just, I've been eating chocolate chip cookies and they've clouded my thoughts.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
because you won't do the things you need to do to be successful because they're counterintuitive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Or how do I find it?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
How did I find it? I think it takes an effort for me. But... You know, there's a saying, there's no atheist in a foxhole, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, no atheist in a foxhole. And, you know, I mean, that's the best I can do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I think so. And I'd like to think that I haven't been able to really get in there as deep as is there available for the getting. Now, the one thing I can tell you, under the supervision of a doctor, of a physician, I've taken a strong injection of ketamine and have an absolutely total hallucination, almost geometric and stuff like that. Don't think I'll see anybody again, and I mean...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Pretty heady stuff. But coming through that, you know, I don't have any particular thing that I come away with other than love solves most things. Violence solves nothing. And those particular things would be what I came away with that as.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I do know when I spend time and I study Christianity and I read about it, I get a feeling that I don't get from anything else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Thanks, brother. Well, I appreciate being here. You're quite a guy. You've had quite a life, and... You know, God bless you. I mean, you know, you could be an angel.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
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Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I grew up in East Baltimore. I had a younger brother, younger sister, mom and dad, of course. And we never had much. Mom and dad were gamblers, and neither one of them was that good at it. And so we were always broke. I mean, always, always broke. And if dad bought anything, it was always with credit, and they always would— Goose him with the interest rate, which means we even had less.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So if we needed to have anything, we had to figure out how we were going to work and earn it and how we were going to make money and get what we wanted to get. And we did things like newspaper routes, shoveling snow, running errands, working in phone stations, construction, all that kind of stuff. But my first business is an interesting story. It was a lemonade stand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so one day, I'm probably about eight or nine years old, and I go ahead and... It's one of those hot days that they get in Baltimore that you could see the heat wave off the tar street, you know, asphalt street. And when I did that, I decided, man, I'll make lemonade. I'll have a lemonade stand out here today. Well, Mom wasn't around. It was just me. I was the only one at home.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I go ahead and get this picture out that she had. And I knew that Lemonade was lemon juice. and sugar and water. So I get this bottle of lemon out, and this is called Real Lemon, and I fill this thing up with lemon, and then I put a lot of sugar in it, and then I put water in it, and I mix it all up and mix. No matter how I made it, it just didn't taste quite right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then I get the idea, maybe that's the way it's supposed to taste. So I just put more sugar in it, right? And I just keep mixing it up, mixing it up, mixing it up. And so I go outside, I put this, had this little table, I set this little table up at the base of her porch, and I put this little sign up, lemonade, five cents, and the lemonade pitcher looked beautiful. I mean, it looked beautiful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It had like a little sweat on it. I mean, it's just perfect. Well, this is back during the days, back during the late 50s, when the insurance guys, life insurance guys would walk debit routes, right? And they'd collect the weekly premium because that's the only way you're going to get it in East Baltimore. You go knock on somebody's door and they get it from them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So this guy, his name is Mr. Hill, H-I-L-L, and he's got this little pork pie hat on. He's got his sports coat slung over his shoulder, got his tie undone. He's walking, he's squatting like a hog, right? So he says to me, he goes, and kid, I says, he says, man, can I use... Can I use this today?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I fixed him a lemonade, and he gives me a dime, told me to keep the change, and I couldn't believe my luck. So he takes and he knocks this lemonade back, and he seems to wave. And he's waving it around. His eyes bulge. He spits his lemonade out in the street. And he goes, that's good as the worst fucking lemonade I've And he goes storming away. I thought, maybe it just isn't that bad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Maybe he don't know how it tastes. So the next day, a girl across the street, Suzanne, she comes over. She buys a cup of lemonade, takes it over home, comes back and says, my mother says you have to give me my money back. So I gave her money back, and same thing, and then nobody would come near my lemonade stand. So a guy comes over. Later, my mother comes home, and she says, what are you doing?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I said, I'm selling lemonade. She said, you're selling lemonade. I said, yeah. She said, how did you make it? And I showed her. I said, I took the lemon bottle and I poured it in the thing. She goes, I keep vinegar in that bottle. Oh, shit. So I made lemonade with vinegar. And she helped me make a better lemonade that actually tasted good. Nope, weren't already done. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Nobody even wanted it for free. Nice. So anyhow, that was my first business. Utter failure.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Anything they could? Anything. Horses, sports, numbers. I bet that mom would go to bingo all the time, but that was a more social thing than a pure gamble. But, you know, that's what they would do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, he was in Guadalcanal, Bougainville, the Fijis.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did. And he was – had all these pictures and – And he told me, he says, yeah, it was a rough, miserable place. Had a picture of his ship that he took from the beach. And the Japanese suicide sub, two-man sub, screwed into the side and blew it up. Oh, wow. And I said, how were you there? You knew they were going to take a picture? He says, yeah, we knew it was there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
They couldn't do anything to the sub because the moment they touched it, they would blow it, right? So they just all got off the ship. And it wasn't that they waited for him to get off the ship, they just were able to. And so he had that. Part of what he did was drive a bulldozer, I believe. And he said, they sounded like the Japanese Euro, sounded like washing machines.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
He said the Marines had it the toughest. He said, but he helped build the airfield and stuff like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I know I was, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I was a terrible student, terrible student. And I failed the fifth grade, and nobody can ever take that away from me. But when I failed the fifth grade, Sister Brenda, I was in parochial school. Sister Brenda was a nun, and she didn't talk much, but she sure hated me because she kept me almost every day after school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She would just turn around, and I'd think, man, I'm going to go home one time. And this kid would say, hey, Robert, can you hand me that? Or something, I would. I'd hand it to him. She'd go, Robert Parsons, you're staying at school. So anyhow, it was the last day of school. And me, this kid named Frankie, this kid named Anthony, and everybody got their report cards.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I've always been a dreamer. So it was when I was taking an inner child workshop one time trying to find myself. This was way back when. And I had to write myself a letter And the letter was from me now, or then, to when I was a young child, when I was a young boy. Wow. What would I say? And then how would I write back? So I did that. And then I had to write about myself, the different parts of me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It was one of them Baltimore days, hotter than shit, you know? And it was maybe June or May. And I went to St. Elizabeth's of Hungary. And so all I was looking for was a nun-free summer. Sister Brenda handed everybody their report cards. And then said to me, Frankie Nancy says, you three wait here. I'll be back later. And as I take his line out, then I'll. You know, and there you go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then I'll process your whatever's going to happen. But she didn't say we failed. So Anthony's saying, I remember him saying, I wonder what Sister Brenda wants us to stay back here for. And it occurred to me, I said, it's because we failed. Oh. And so she took everybody out to meet the parents. And the way this was set up, St. Elizabeth occupied one big city square block.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And she would walk out if you were facing... I don't know the direction, but if you face in one of the directions and you go at the left side, you go all the way down and you go, you turn by the nunnery or the convent and take all the way down and then across the street is where she'd meet the parents. Well,
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
My father, every year on the last day of school, he'd pick up me and my brother and my sister. Later, she was involved in that. He'd pick us up, and he'd take us over to the Sporting Goods store or something, and we'd buy something for passing, and he'd bring us home. So... I was thinking there is no way I'm going to tell my father I failed. So as soon as she left, I left.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So she's going left, I go right. And I run through the schoolyard, down around the side over where the parents are, up around the side of the convent and up against the wall. the wall or this black fence where it was fencing off the convent. And I could see Sister Brenda in the class coming down, walking down with them. And everybody's happy with their report cards and so forth. And I said to her,
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, the thing I had in my favor was I knew about Sister Brenda. She was a very lazy nun. I had some inside information. She would never, during a few times when I would go home one time with everybody else, she would break off and go right into the nunnery. She never walked the class all the way down. And so she did the same thing with this.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She took and let the class go, and not arrange the class turn right, and she's going to walk now by herself. And she went back to crucify the unholy threesome. Right? So I just stood and, you know, and I was, you know, halfway wondering, worried that the class was going to see me and the people were going to go, what are you doing? So forth. They didn't even notice me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I mean, I could have been one of the Bushes. So they were too worried about themselves and the report cards. So they started away, kept walking. I followed them and I go down the block with them and across the street. where my father is. My father's already there with my brother looking at his report card. And my father says to me, Robert, where's your report card?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I said, dad, sister didn't give me one. He says, you didn't give me one? He looks at me like a dog that heard strange noise, you know? And I says, I said, no dad, this year, if you passed, you didn't get a report card. That's when the lie came out. I says, no, no. Keep in mind, he's holding my brother's report card. And he goes, he's smoking Tarrington's right then.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
He takes a puff and he says, I get in the car. And he says, not a problem. So he takes us to the Sporting Goods store. I know I'm in the Sporting Goods store. I'm on death row. So he says... My brother's got a bunch of stuff. My father's going to put most of that back. Just pick one thing you want. And then he says to me, Robert, don't you want anything? I said, Dad, I got plenty.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I had nothing else. So he says, I'll get something. So I got this first baseman's mitt, you know, for a young kid. And so we go home. The same thing happens with my mother. My brother comes in, gives him his report card. Here's a report card. And then he gives me the report. You know, she says, where's your report card? Same thing, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And she says, I never heard of such a thing that, you know, if you pass, you didn't get a report card. And I said, I pulled it out. I said, my call sister. And she said, I'm calling that sister. I said, well, if you think you should feel better, call her. So I went and sat on a sofa, and I waited for the school to call. But the school never called. No kidding. They never called.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I waited all summer long, and they didn't call. All summer. So I'd have my buddies that I'd be playing ball with or something. They'd say to me, Robert, what's wrong? I said, nothing's wrong. They said, oh, something's wrong. I said, nothing's wrong. Now, I knew if I told one of them, It'd be all over the place. So I didn't tell anybody. So fast forward to the first day of school.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
As a matter of fact, one time I went to tell my dad what was going on. And then he goes, he's got the newspaper up as hot as there's no air conditioning in the house. He's sitting on his sofa that is covered in plastic so it would stay nice for my mother. He's sweating his ass off. and smoke and dirt and so on and so you die. Dad, I'm going to tell him. Dad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And he drops the paper, and I see these eyes bulging out, sweat running down his face. I said, never mind. I'm out the door. So anyhow, so first day of school, I get in. We go with Miss Molly, the neighbor lady. You know, she had this little red beetle. She was this big, large woman. And it looked like there was 100 kids in that car. You could hardly move. But anyhow, she pulls up. We all go in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And that's where I, just sitting in my hotel room at night, when I was writing this for the next day's class, I just remember thinking, I believe I was born a dreamer, and I was. And so that's how that came about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I get in line. And St. Elizabeth's had one class for each grade. And I get in a line with the sixth graders, and I didn't know what else to do. And I look over in the fifth grade class, there's Frankie and Anthony, and they're motioning me to come over. I'm going, I don't even want to look at them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So they ring the bell, and then they start moving in, you know, the first graders, second graders, third, fourth, fifth. And then time for the sixth graders, and I'm at the end of the line, or none that year, is Sister St. Thomas. She pulls me out of that line, she says to me. She puts me against the wall. She's got her nose about maybe two inches from mine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She says, Sister Brenda told me what you did. And I thought, all right, there it is. And she told me what she did. And I said, I didn't say anything. And she says, she didn't know what to do, so she passed you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So that's how I failed the fifth grade, but I didn't have to repeat it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, and she said to me, she said, if you give me any trouble, you're going right back into the fifth grade. I said, I won't, sister. And I wish I could tell you I was a lot better. I was a little bit better, right? And I remember when I got my sixth grade grades, I showed them to my mother. And she goes, well, it's nothing to be proud of, but you did pass.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I like it better when you get a report card. I said, so do I, Mom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I got interested in the Marine Corps one day at the end of gym class. I was a senior. It was probably March or April, and I had discovered alcohol, and I had rediscovered the opposite sex. And neither have ever been known to help grades in school, right? And so I took in with that I was sure I was going to fail. I mean, at this time I wasn't going to be able to pull it off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I had two buddies say to me that they, you know, They were going to go talk to the Marine Corps recruiter on Conklin Street. Would I go with them? And I said, sure. I got nothing to do. So I went with them. And there was a guy named Mike and a guy named Aggie. Agaris is his name. He was a Greek guy. And we take and go meet this recruiter. And he had us at hello, buddy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so I joined right with the boys, right with them. And my mother had to sign the papers for me to join.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, sure, it has. And as a matter of fact, I used that paper that I turned in. That is the introduction to my book, or the preface. And the letter to the little boy and the letter back, and then about myself. And the letter about myself starts exactly with that, I believe I was born a dreamer.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And she said, and maybe this will be what you need. And it's during the height of the Vietnam War. That was in 1968. Man, it was – the war was rocking and rolling then. And so –
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I went and showed all my teachers when I finally got my orders because the Marine Corps recruiter said, you know, we check your grades and this and that and the other thing, you know, and, you know, we won't take you unless you're top notch and so forth. And so I thought, you know, probably not get in, but I'll do it anyhow. Well,
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I could have had no head, and they'd have took me back during those days. And so, you know, I got accepted, and there you go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I thought I was. And then, you know, like the idiots that young guys can be, you know, we all said, man, we hope it's not over until we get there. And, well, we got our wish.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
0311, buddy. Nice. Is the number familiar?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I was in 0311. Aggie was in 0311. Michael was in 0311. And then crazy shit happens and we come home. Aggie gets in a tussle at a bar his mother owns, gets stabbed to death. So he never even went. And then me and Mike went. I went to Delta Company, 26 Marines. We were in Quang Nam Province. And then Mike, he went to the 1st Marine somewhere. And I don't see him anymore. And there we go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. You know, one thing I'll say is, you know, it was... You know, they did more for me than I ever did for them. And everything I ever accomplished, ever accomplished, I'd have never done it without the Marine Corps because they give me direction. They give me the importance of understanding responsibility.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
They give me, you know, the fact that, you know, to believe in myself and that I can accomplish more than I ever dreamed possible. And... I always hoped for that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I signed the documents probably in April, maybe May, April, May. And then I went, I was inducted in in August. And six months after August, Vietnam.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
murderer, baby killer, don't forget baby killer. Feel like your soul coming out of your chest.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Did I say to my young self?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, it said that, you know, I'm writing to you for many years in the future. And I know more about you than any other person alive. I know everything there is to know about you. And I know that you're going through a tough time in your life. I know that... My mother was insane. And... Dad wasn't around much. And so I just never understood it as a kid. But I was scared most of the time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
But after a while, I got adjusted, which is fine, you know. I mean, the food was great. And I still remember that ice-cold chocolate milk. And, you know, for me, it was the food. The food at Parris Island was stuff up. And so, you know, I liked it. I was able to do it, and I would have been a rifle expert.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I was a rifle sharpshooter, and I was doing okay until I had, like, two rounds left, and I had a drill instructor, Sergeant Little. He said, Parsons, you better not even scream in my ear. Ha ha!
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, you know, my dad said he wished he could go in my place. And mom, mom, you know, you have to understand, my parents are a very different mom. My mother was, when she was a young girl, she was beat a lot by her father and so forth. So she was abused in that sense. And so she didn't have a lot of, she had a lot of love beat out of her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I remember when it was time for me to leave to catch the plane at Friendship Airport, which was not Baltimore, Washington then. And I'd go to Friendship Airport. And before then, I was out that night before, and my mother comes in and she says, Dad just got up and went to work. He didn't even say anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No. And then Mom said, Well, I'm going to the racetrack, Winnie and Bert. Don't get yourself killed. That was it? That was it. And off they went. And so I called my brother. I mean, not my brother, my cousin. And he gave me a ride to the airport. And they had a lot of guys there. They had their... girlfriends and sisters and family and mother, signs and all this sort of thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And with me, it was just me. But, see, the hell of it was, that's all I was ever used to. So it didn't bother me too much. And then to Pendleton.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No. Me and my brother.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I'm first, my brother second, and my little sister. And now they're all passed except for my little sister and me, and she and I are close.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, yeah, they'd write letters. And mostly it would be my brother and my sister would write me letters and my buddies. Some of them would. And once in a while, parents would write me a letter, but not much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, man, I tell you what, that place smelled different than any place I ever smelled in my life. It smelled like rot. So we spent our first night guarding the rear area, and that It's just some place to put us, you know? So they trucked us out to our unit, and we were with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 26 Marines, 1st Platoon, 2nd Squad. And I got to my squad, and we're in Quang Nam.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Rice Paddy's as far as you can see, right? And it was... It was quite a place. I remember the guys were staying in a tent, a canvas tent. And so I had a bunk and a couple guys. I think it was like a Marine Corps rifle squad. It's about 12 guys. And there was not 12 guys in the squad. There was like... Seven or... Yeah, seven.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And maybe even less because it was just the guys that were there and then us. And what happened is that they were ambushed a couple days before, you know, we were sent out there. We were sent there as me and a couple others were sent there as replacements for the guys that were killed in this ambush. So they were killed and... There was four of them were killed. One of them was seriously wounded.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And to a man, it was all the senior guys. So the guy who was the senior man, the new squad leader, had just turned 19 and had been in the bush for six weeks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, at first, you know, we were going out on our first night's ambush. And I sat down and, I mean, I went outside the hut. And we had this—we're at the very top of Hill 190. And, you know, it means it's Hill 190. The number says it's 190 feet above sea level. So we're at the top of this. And right at the top was this old French— fort there, this wall with shells in it and stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I guess the French were overrun there. And I sat on this wall, and I started thinking about, how the hell am I going to survive this? Because the Army, Navy, and Air Force, their tours are 12 months. Marine Corps is 13 months. I don't know shit from China all about this place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
The guy who I'm replacing, you know, I mean, the guy who replaced the squad leader, you know, he don't know either because, I mean, he hadn't been here much longer than I do. And so it didn't look good. So I started, you know, I got scared for just a little bit. And then it occurred to me that... I probably wasn't going to survive it. I was going to die there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I mean, it was a hard thought at first, but then after you accept it, then nothing bothers you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I told my younger self to hang in there because you know more about the right thing to do than anybody's going to tell you. And to just hang on. And And that one day, you know, believe in yourself and never stop dreaming, because more than anything, that'll be your salvation.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, it takes the fear totally out of it. But what it does, though, is you can do your job.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You could do your job. And so that night, we went on our first ambush.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I did. Wow. Because I've been in so many different types of situations, you know. And it's just, you know, it's just, this is what it's going to be, you know. And so anyhow, so that's a thought that I had. And the interesting thing is I'm friends with most of the guys in that squad. There's seven of them that, Five, five of them. And most of them tell me the same story.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And they said, I never told anybody. I mean, one guy who's a squad leader, the guy that was the squad leader, he turned out to be marvelous, but he had the same thing. He said, how can you do your job if you worry about whether you're going to live or not, right? And he says... That's just not your problem at the moment, right? And the machine gunner, same thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, this guy's name is Brandy. He lives down in Austin, Texas. I love the guy. So anyhow, but none of us told each other.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. We just had that mindset. So anyhow, so we go out. We get our first ambush. We have a corpsman with us. And in a sister squad, we're just outside a village in a pagoda.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
A pagoda is just like a little religious place where they have altars and stuff like that. At least that's what we called them was pagodas. And then about a couple clicks from us was another pagoda, and we had a sister squad set up there. And after we were set up on a sandwich
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
maybe an hour or 45 minutes or something, but it was before we did a first move, you know, because we would go out, we'd set up an ambush, we'd wait a while, let it get good and dark, and then there'd be a first move, and then we'd set someplace else, and then there'd be another move, and then we'd set in for the night. And the deal would be to move so... nobody knows where you're at.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So anyhow, that was the thought. So this squad, our sister squad, is in this other pagoda. And all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose where they are. And we get the radio call that they sprung their ambush. They had a fucking... VC or NVA come out of a spider hole and threw a chi-com at this guy, and then he picked it up, went and threw it back, and it went off in his hand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, so he's pretty fucked up. And so to get there with the corpsman, because they didn't have a corpsman with them. So we get there, we run through this fucking rice paddy. Ever walked through a rice paddy?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I'll tell you what, a rice paddy is the shittiest thing in the world to walk through. I think God put him there to say, don't walk here. So the mud would be like about... Water would be like about maybe a couple of feet deep, and then the mud would be a foot or deep or so. So you'd go down in it, and every kind of vermin you can think of is crawling around in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So that's that letter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So we're running through this rice paddy. I got my gear halfway on, halfway off. It's my first night in a bush. I don't know. Anyway, that it ought to be. It's choking me. His magazines are choking me. I got them in like a bandolero like you see in the Old West, you know? Stupid. But nobody was there to show me. Yeah. Right? So we get there. This guy is hurt horrifically. Not dead. Arm gone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, didn't write much. We had to write it with the left hand, you know, our non-dominant hand, so it looked like a young child. And it basically wrote that... Thank you for writing to me. I cannot wait to be you. And I'll see you when I grow up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Side of his head gone. They're trying to check an eye that's not there with a hand that's not there. I mean, it's crazy shit, you know, that you see in war. And the squad leader is this guy named Blackwell. And he starts just standing in this rice paddy. And he's thrown up, and then he's just standing there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And it's this helicopter that's coming in, this Huey's coming in, and it's going to land right on him. So I see it. I run and grab him and push, push, push, push, push, and misses him and misses me. But we hit a rice paddy tank and go, and he snaps him out of it. And then I saved his ass, and then saved my own ass. But...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So then we took and they told us to go back out to a different ambush place. And after this guy Hunt gets taken back, you know, medevaced back. And by the way, it didn't kill him. He didn't die. I've seen him at a reunion. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. And so I take in the—we set in with the sister squad, which we weren't supposed to do at all, but we thought we'd get some sleep. So the next morning, the sun breaks. Nobody's answering the radio. It's where we are. And the hell we're at. What the fuck? We're firing a .50-caliber machine gun over our head. Then we motorbike, and they threw their ass out. That was my first night in the bush.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, it didn't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No, pretty much, yeah. Pretty much, but the thing was, the crazy thing was, is that those guys were the first family I had. Just that little bit of time, I fell in love with those guys. I mean, they were my brothers. I mean, it happened like, boom, like that. So to this day, I'm still close to him. I talk to him once a week, certainly once a month.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
That was it, yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Oh, not a lot, not a lot. I mean, I was in a bush for a month, and then I got wounded. And then I got wounded, and then I hit a chi-com, Chinese communist grenade, we call them chi-coms. It was set up as a trap, and my buddy, what the fuck's his name? because my mind just went blank, but he'll kill me. I forgot his fucking name.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So anyhow, he steps over a trip wire, and I hit it. And so I caught shrapnel in both legs and left elbow. And then I got medevaced out all the way to the Naval Hospital in Cusco. So I was there for a couple of months or three. I don't even know how long.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
That was for an inner child workshop. And I was just trying to get rid of my PTSD and deal with it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
We were walking on ambush and Brownie. sees all of a sudden where we're at. We're going through this village, right? And it just got dark, right? And we're going through this village, and two NVA soldiers, both with NVA rifles, black pajamas to all mine yards, come running right at us. He turns with his M60 and takes them both out. I mean, and they're dancing like dolls. And...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So, yeah, so, and then that night, right then, you know, we sweeped towards the area where we had the activity come from. And my place was, I was sweeping towards where there was the hooch that I think that they came running out of. And I took a hand grenade and threw it, right? And only it didn't go as far as I thought it was going to go.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And it landed, but it landed on the other side of a rice paddy dike facing away from us. So when it blew, it blew away from us, right? Guys, Ligotic and George, the squad leader, I turn around and go, did you just fucking throw that? I said, yeah, I did. And they go, well, don't throw any more tonight. And so the next day, George tells me to don't throw any more hand grenades.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I said, do I still have to carry them? He says, just give them to somebody else to throw. And I said to him, suppose you're getting over a run. And he says, then you can throw them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Oh, God, it had to be in the 90s sometime.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, where we were, the only time I went through the jungle was during the day because there was rice paddies on one side. There's not a lot of jungle on rice paddies located. And then the other side is where there was jungle and so forth. So I never spent, I spent some time there, but it was all during the day. But it was mostly just quiet, quiet and being in the dark.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, seven and then 10 and then 12 and then that sort of thing. And then, I mean, it's just so many things. The first night I was there, I shot a snake. You know, we would sweep and body count was a big thing. So we'd sweep through the rice paddies and we'd put up illumination, you know, that comes down on them parachutes. And we'd look for bodies. So, of course, we didn't find any.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And because this is an NVA that we did kill, they always would have something around, a piece of rope around her neck to be pulled away by somebody else.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Good to be here, Sean.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yep. Wow. So, I mean, these guys have more stories, a hundred more stories than I do, a hundred times. But, I mean, so we start sweeping, and I look, and there's this big fucking snake... and the water is swimming right towards me. I mean, it's swimming right fucking towards me, right? And it's my squad and this other squad, So we take in this snake.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Anyhow, so the snake's coming down, and it's just when it's about two or three feet, because I'm thinking, surely it's going to go left or right, right? This thing is coming like it's going to bite me in the balls, right? So I put my rifle on automatic. I'm going, brrrr! And all this water comes flying up and it hits me in the fucking eyes and I'm moving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I look and I get my eyes clear and I look left, left, right. Nobody's there. They're all underwater. Oh, fuck. But I didn't hear the end of that forever. And then George was nice about it later because the next day he said, next time don't shoot the snake. So anyhow, that was that night. So just crazy shit had happened. I remember one time we were on a day patrol.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
For some reason or another, the whole company's coming out and it's a day patrol where the whole platoon, I forget what it was, but me and two of me, Proctor and a guy named Pavlovich, were sent to get water. So we go into the village and we get water, right? So we go into the village, we got everybody's canteen. Right? And so we go in, and just when we go to get water, we see this kid.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
He's coming out. He's got, like, one of these trays in front of him, like a small coke's come in, the wooden trays, and he's got a burlap strap holding it up, and he's got burlap covering it. You know what he's got in there? I swear to God, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to fucking believe me. And Proctor and the other three are dead, so it's... Vanilla popsicles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
He had fucking vanilla popsicles. He did. He did. And so I take, and we take, and before you know it, this kid had everything we had of value. Bread, cans of bread, cigarettes. I mean, we're just eating one popsicle after another, right? Pravalovich goes, suppose these are poison. And then Proctor goes, who gives a fuck? Right? So that's one of my happy, happy stories about the place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
But crazy shit, crazy stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, the one that was the most was we surrounded this village, small village, and somehow they figured out that there was a squad or part of a platoon of North Vietnamese in the village, and we caught them there during the day. And so we're in there. And we're on the side, and there's a machine gun on the side that we're at.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so Brownie is on a little knoll not too far from us, and George says, get you Parsons. And... Bryant, the guy's name is Bryant. He goes, you and Bryant run the machine gun ammo over to Brownie. And so we did, and then this fucking gun starts shooting at us. We dive, we're laying against this dike and it's shooting over top of us. We get up, we get this stuff over to Brownie.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And the funniest damn thing happened is I've thought about that night, that day, many, many times. I cannot remember what happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so I go to a reunion. I ask one of the guys there, I said, you remember what happened, right? And he says, oh, we killed every fucking one of them. I said, did we? I said, I was there one night. He said, yeah, you were there. I said, anything unusual happen? No. I don't remember. I mean, it's like it didn't happen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I remember giving the ammo to Brandy and his kid, Goodwin, who was right where his egg on her. And no, that's it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Nope. Nope, didn't. And that is the only, to the best of my knowledge, the only incident like that. And firefights exchanged rifle fire a couple times, but Not a lot. I mean, I've seen light combat, I mean, compared to most guys, especially the guys who were up around the DMZ. And, man, when I got wounded, I think that about, that probably saved my life.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I don't know. I mean, how would you know?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I mean, they weren't close like me to you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Right? Or, you know, like when Brandy took those two NVA out. I mean, they come. Yeah, I mean, I could see that. But I didn't do anything like that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I think so. No, no. It was one before that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
One before that, there was a bunch. There was some NVA about maybe... a football field or two away from us in a village, and we started firing one, and they were firing that back, and nobody got hit, and to the best of my knowledge, we never hit anybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No, they weren't Americans. They were NBA.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, in some ways it was exhilarating. Some ways it was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, I was like part of the team. I mean, it was just, that was, I mean, that was it. I mean, I didn't do much for the team, but I was part of the team.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, the condom story is when I was a... It was a junior or a senior in high school. I had never been with a woman, you know what I mean? We talked about it day and night, but I had never, never, never, never been with a girl.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And, you know, and to be honest with you, the stuff that, some of the stuff that I've seen that fucking rocked me was stuff that happened Happened later. I wasn't in combat, you know? I mean, it was just the whole idea of the war. I mean, I remember seeing those two guys who looked like dolls, dead dolls, right? But their legs were all contorted and shit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It was the same episode. Oh, okay. Yeah. Same episode. If you're looking for a war hero, brother, I ain't the guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, so I got a whole story. When you're ready, you want to take a break or whatever.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, so I go to, one of the things I have, I've got a good memory, which is unusual, me not remembering anything on that. At the time, me and Bryant were running an ammo over I remember they carried me back and they couldn't get a... Another night, a guy got wounded. A point man hit a trap that was walking on a rice paddy dike, right? And I helped carry him back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And the reason we had to carry him back is because his legs were hurt. And his legs were hurt. And he was obviously going to live. And the war, business of the war was really good. Some other place and all the choppers were busy, at least that's what I was told. And when I was wounded, it's the same thing happened, right? Only I wasn't walking on a dike. I was walking on a path through a village.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I take and get... They get me to this road, and there's these two guys in a robe, and they just shoot me full of morphine, I think it was. I didn't give a fuck about anything. One interesting thing before that, which is a fun story before that. I get sent back because I got a cut in some barbed wire or something. I cut all my fucking fatigues up. I only had one pair.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And this is, I'm growing up in East Baltimore, so my buddy Danny Thorne, who's a year or two older than me, who was my total advice on, you know, he told me everything I needed to know about women. Most of the stuff, totally, totally wrong. Like he told me, he said, you know, when you go down on a woman, right? And I say, I don't even know what it looks like. He says, you go down on a woman.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So the company sent me back to the rear that day, and he said to get a whole new set of fatigues and to get a haircut and then come on back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, it did. I had that. Did I get it all cut? So I go back. I get my hair cut. And then I go to where the fatigues are. And there's these two rear area guys who were in storage fatigues. And it's this big warehouse. And I said, I'm here to get some fatigues. And they said, well, you need a chit signed by the colonel. I said, well, where's the colonel?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
He said, well, he's up in Dong Ha, which is hundreds of miles north. And I said, well, I got to go back to the bush. And, you know, his pants are all ripped up. So they said... You know, brother, they'll hang us if we give them to you. So we can't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So finally after, you know, it was useless arguing with those guys, I start walking back, and I start walking back, and I go through this area where there's the Quonset huts. Well, it must have been there. One of them was there in one of the Quonset huts. I opened the door up, and I go in, and it's like fucking Candyland in there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I take and open one of the lockers and it's got a brand new set of fatigues in it. I try them on, they fit me. I take mine off, put them on a hanger, hang them in there. And then I go ahead and I look on one of the mattresses, it's a rubber lady and an air mattress. Not a rubber lady like you get at the pad shop. What the fuck? Just a rubber lady.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I take all the air out of it and then put it under my arm and then I take and start with all my new pockets. I start stuffing Marlboros and Winstons in it because those motherfuckers would take all the Marlboros and Winstons and then send us out like L&Ms and Sins. and cans and nasty-ass cigarettes. All the shit. So I go back, and these guys are saying, where the fuck you get that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I said, never mind, I just got it. So I gave him some cigarettes and so forth, and I blew that rubber lady up. And so I only had it for like two days, and then I got wounded. So I'm going away, and they say, hey, Parsons, who gets your rubber lady? I said, you guys decide.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
All right, well, the thing I remember the most is these guys driving me with no headlights on through these dirt roads, right, to get to the field hospital. And they had some country-western music going. I remember that. They were singing. I thought they were fucking loaded. And I didn't really give a shit, but, you know, they were— As long as they were there taking me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So they take me to the field hospital and immediately cut all my clothes off. And then they do a triage. And I guess they determined I was not seriously wounded. And then they put me inside this big tent. I mean, and it was cold as shit. I mean, it was so cold in that tent. And because it was going from outside, it was like 80, 90 degrees inside, 60, 70. So I remember they kept moving.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I was laying on just a canvas cot. And they kept moving it closer and closer. And it had all these buckets of water. And they put me on this x-ray machine because I was wondering what the water was for. And when they took me off the x-ray machine, they washed it off. And then the next thing I know, I was in surgery. I don't remember anything after that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
There's a lot of ways to do it. He says, you move all that hair to the side. This is back before they shaved, right? Move all the hair to the side. And you kiss. You're going to see something that looks like the baby Jesus kiss it. So anyhow, that was the advice I grew up with. Nice. So Danny was getting home-based action from this girl named Toni. And Toni, she lived with her mom.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Then the next morning I wake up, bed is soaked, pissed all over it. And the corpsman says, don't worry, brother, you were just so busy, we didn't have time to put a catheter in you. And so I put one in me and then changed sheets. And then a colonel come over and said, congratulations, here's a verbal heart.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I hit a trip wire. Hit a trip wire. Head trip wire was on the left side of me, and it caught my shrapnel here and in my left elbow. And I remember the surgeon saying, you know, you had a piece of, big piece of shrapnel go into the joint and didn't damage it. Wow. So I was lucky. I mean, I was lucky as I can be.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
A little bit, just a little bit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Oh, the explosion. Yeah, I was conscious most of the time. I didn't go out. I just remember when that fucking thing went off and I went down on the ground. I turned to George because I was learning to walk point then. And so Bryant was walking first. I was walking second. And I said, Jesus Christ, it fucking hurts. And then it didn't so much, and then it did, and then they shot me with morphine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Of course, I didn't hear it so much as seeing it, you know? I didn't know what happened at first. You're disoriented totally.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I thought I would. Thought I fucking would. Oh, God. And the guys I was with got pissed. They started fucking putting a zip code to this village. And... He says they got... George's squad leader got in a little bit of trouble for that. And he said he was in trouble. And then... The North Vietnamese had a big push through the area that we were in.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I wasn't in it no more, but we were in, and they forgave him because he was a good fucking Marine. Jesus Christ, he was good. Like about a couple days after, they set up on this – set up on this bank in these reeds. And they seen a squad of NVA come through and started coming out, started coming out of the water. They opened up on them, they killed them all.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then they were ordered by our captain, Captain Moorhead to go all the way down Just go about a mile or two out of sight and then turn around and go, you know, a couple clicks in, then come all the way back and reset up in the same spot. And they did. And when they did, an hour or two later, the company, the rest of the company came through.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And, of course, these guys, being the fucking knuckleheads as they were, opened up on all of them. And they said, George said, there was a fucking hell fight went on all night. Damn. And there was a fucking gunship was going around. And when the sun shone, he says, there was bodies everywhere. And where there weren't bodies, there were drag marks. Wow. Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
We've got to talk about the hospital first.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
There you go, buddy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It was her and her mom. And her mother was going out of town for the weekend. And so Danny arranged with Toni that he and her would have the upstairs. And Toni's girlfriend, Pauline— said that she was ready to plunge ahead and I'd be just the guy that she wanted to do it with. So I thought, oh my God. It's here. So I'd go ahead and it sounds good to me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yep. Well, I'm back at the hospital, and think about a military hospital. In wartime, you see a lot of fucked up dudes, boy. And... Oh, man, it's just really, really screwed up. And... seen this young kid who was a Marine recon. And he was out on some long distance, Lerp they called it or something like that, long distance.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Reconnaissance, yeah. And he hit a bouncing buddy. You know, it's the only time I've heard of one or heard of anybody hitting one, but I heard about them all the time. But never actually anybody, you know, falling victim. But that's what he fell victim to. And, you know, bouncing Betty, it's a rocket on the inside of a pressure plate. Tread on it. As soon as you tread on it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
As soon as the weight goes off, that rocket's coming up. And it's, I mean, you're fucked. That's just, there's just the utterance to it. And it blew his ass off. And he was completely paralyzed. And the guys would take turns. He was sandwiched between two boards. And the device that had, you know, opening for his groin and this was his tail.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And we would take turns turning comic book pages for him. And I felt so sorry for that guy. And I mean, and other stuff you'd see, you know, it's just so fucked up. Thing I remember, one of the hardest thing is about that. I mean, whatever brought the war home, that did. I mean, you know, you spend some time in a military hospital, you'll see.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So the first thing I did the next day was a Monday. I remember I went to the pharmacy, and I had just enough money to buy one condom, so I bought one condom. And so I'd go home at the end of the day, and I'd have his condom squirreled away, you know, and I'd pull it out, and I'd sit it on my dresser, and I'd look at it, and it'd look at me, you know, and—
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And Navy lost my payroll records, so I couldn't go off base. I used to say to some of the guys, I had to have some civilian clothes and some money to go off base. And I'd say, can you loan me some money and your civvies so I can go on liberty? He says, I like you, man, but not that much.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So many things happened that I just come out okay. Like another time we were in a firefight in a village, Right, again, nobody's hit, nobody's done anything. Me and this dude named Pavlovich, we go into this hooch, searching for Christ knows what. And in there is one of these little tables. And it's a long table, it's about maybe four feet, five feet, four feet tall.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And on it is a bowl, one bowl. And in the bowl was an undetonated tonk ring from the night before when we had this guy named Cook. And Cook was one of these guys go to jail or join the Marine Corps for stealing cars. And so he, you know, that's back on the Marine Corps. It was doing what it could to, you know, fill the ranks. And so anyhow, he fired it, didn't go off. Somehow landed there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
But our boy, Pavlovich, moved his fat ass and tipped the bowl. And they had this wooden floor put in. I mean, this kind of a crappy wooden floor on an altar. And this thing hit the wood. Didn't explode. Now, that got my attention.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. So I go outside, and I go, there's no way I'm going back in there, period. And so Cook goes back in there, and they used to have on their helmets, they'd have these big black rubber bands, straight pieces of rubber, and they would keep bug repellent. Bug juice in them, right? Well, Cook put the M79.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, so he puts the M79 round in it, and we're walking back, and you could see he's got about two, three guys walking. And then one guy watching him, and he's back about maybe 20 yards. And then 20 yards, and he's walking with this thing on his head. I kept waiting for his head to just.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I did. I did. And I still do. And, you know, it's just stuff I've come out of. Like, for example, for example, I'll give you this. Okay. I'm on Okinawa and I get sent to Okinawa to get processed back to Vietnam, back to the unit. And it's been a couple of months or maybe three months. And I really don't know. But it was around then. Okay. So I take and...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, and each of us is wondering what the other one's thinking. And so finally the day comes where it's Friday, and I come home. It's 3 o'clock or so, and I go ahead and take a bath. We didn't have a shower, so I took a bath. And I got all ready to go out and meet Pauline, so I put on my best clothes. They weren't much, but they were my best.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
get to be his doctor there, got to be friendly with me. I thought he was a good dude. And so when I got to the point where all my wounds were healed, I said to him, I went and I said, doc, I'm ready to go back, you know? And he said, You ready to go back? He says, Parson, you don't have to go back. He says, I'll keep you here for the rest of the war. And I said, no, I want to go back.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I want to be with those guys. I mean, they were my family, right? I loved them more than I ever loved a lot of mine. I mean, we were closer, even though it was just a month. So he said, okay. And he... He signed off. And the day that my orders come through to leave for the next day, a payroll record showed up. A payroll record showed up. And so he said, go off base. Enjoy yourself.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
They might have given me $700, $800. I don't know how much they gave me. Might as well have been, you know, $20,000. You know, Okinawa beer was a dollar. You know, it's just do anything you want. I mean, it's just a lot of money. So I take in—you might have figured it out by now. I'm never much of a rule follower. Yeah, you figured that out? I'm figuring that out. Okay. All right. So I go off base.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I'm supposed to be back at midnight. It's about three in the morning. And I'm walking down the street. And it's raining like hell. It's almost coming down sideways. And there's a guy walking back up the other way, coming right towards me. It's Blackwell. It's that guy I saved during the first night. Are you serious? That serious. And he told me that was his third heart.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And he didn't have to go back. So he was in G2, which is orders and all that sort of stuff, intelligence. And he said, I can get you. The guy that runs this little printing press and goes back and forth and delivers orders, I can get you that job. He says, because the company Gunny and I are tight. And he said, and by then, I think he was staff sergeant. And... He says, I'll get it done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And he says, when do you go back? And I said, I'm at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning. And this is like 3 in the morning. He says, I don't think I can get it done that soon. And I said, brother, that's okay. That's okay, because I was kind of looking forward to seeing the guys anyhow. So... You know, we part. I tell him where I'm at, so forth. We part, and he goes this way. I go mine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I go back, immediately get arrested. They take me to the officer today. officer today. He goes, you know, he's this young second lieutenant that's got the shit jobs, talking to buttheads like me. And he's going, why can't you be Packer? And I said, I'm going back. I just was in Vietnam. And I was wondering, I got to go back tomorrow. And I lost track of time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And he goes, get him the fuck out of here. So they take me back. And I fall asleep. I slept for maybe an hour. And then I fall asleep, fall out with the hangover from B. Jesus L., And I had orders stationed on me. Blackwall got it done.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. I mean, that happened. I mean, to me, that's—we're like the fifth grade. I mean, it just repeatedly have happened like that. And I think my angel's there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I think so. I think hopefully I'll meet him or her or it— And it'd be kind of nice one day. I know whenever I meet her, she's going to look more exhausted than I do. Oh, man. I get pictures just going, fuck. I was going to take the night off.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I go ahead and do that, and then I pulled his condom out. And I guess by then it's 4 o'clock. And I pulled his condom out, and I said, shit, I'll take it out of the package right now. And I look at it, and I go, wow, that's it. So I'm looking at it, and again, it's looking at me. And I remember thinking, and it's my first time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Coming home was hard. I'll tell you what I did. When I had just about two months left they disbanded my unit I was with, 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade, and marched them, didn't send them home, sent the guys in it that were coming in, the new guys, transferred them all to that unit, and they all went over to Vietnam, right? And this unit, the guys coming home, they put them in,
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
this unit, and they brought it home. So it was like they brought it home, but they didn't. It was a farce. Did you follow me there?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Okay. So I take in – I get sent over to the – I get sent over for processing where I get to get processed to go back to Vietnam. Now, I didn't want to go back then. And the reason I didn't want to go back then is because I had been in touch with the guys. I had seen them. They were on a helicopter ship just offside Barrier Island.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I told him, I said, guys, I had put two requests to go back, to transfer, to leave this unit that I was in. Because I wanted to be with him. I'm so fucking bad. And Blackwell left. He left. And he says, I says, why? He says, goodbye. I said, are you going home? He says, yeah, I wish. He says, I'm going to go back. And he says, I can't stand it here. He says, at least I understand it there.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I said, see you, buddy. And so anyhow, I take in both times the company Gunny that he told me about. My request to transfer got approved by everybody. It gets to him. He calls me to his office, rips it up, says you get yourself killed. It never got approved. And so I was getting ready to go back, but I didn't want to be with a bunch of new guys. I want to be with them, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I'm in the processing area, and this place is like a zoo. And this is one lieutenant, first lieutenant, and then he's running around like he don't know what's going on. So I go over to him. I said, Lieutenant. I could do this job. You need some help here. And I said, you know, and I'm going to rotate a couple months anyhow. And he said, all right, we got the job. He said, where's your ID?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I gave it to him. He says, I'll get it all taken care of. So I went right away and started processing guys. And what I would do was I would take guys and put them on planes that were coming back. And so they could go home. And guys that were coming there, I would confirm their units. And one of the things that bothered me so much is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I would see these guys that were assigned to 9th Marines and guys going up around the Z. I mean, there was no place there that was a walk in the park for the Marine Corps, but there were some places that were much worse. And while I wasn't that much older than these guys, if I was older than them at all, I had the experience, which aged me a bit.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And also from being intelligent and knowing what was actually going on there. I would just look at these guys and I'd feel terrible. I mean, I would feel terrible because, you know, they had this little tinge, you know, where they're a little excited and so forth. And they're walking straight into fucking hell. Man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I remember that. And then I, time went up and I went home. And then when we went home, it was a different place. Different place than when we left. When we left, I mean, people were starting to, they were a little uncertain about the war, but they weren't like they were when we came home. There wasn't anybody taking it out on the guys coming home, throwing shit with signs and names. Nazi.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And you can just picture the condom saying to me, it's my first time too, right? So we take in them. As soon as I pulled it out, I have a heart as a rock. I mean, I'm thinking about this. I'm ready to shoot through the roof, right? So I take this condom, and I think, I wonder what it feels like with this thing on. So I put the condom on, and I put it all the way on, and I thought, you know what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
murderer, right? Drug addict. And yeah, ironic, you know, fucking in on war crime, calling us drug addicts, those fucking dope addicts. And on and on and on. And baby killer, don't forget baby killer. And then on and on. So, I mean, you know, it's just, and then those of us that weren't confronted with that, we see it on the news anyhow. So, you know, it's just, it's just, it's just,
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
feeling like your soul coming out of your chest. Yeah. And, you know, at the time, I knew it bothered me, but I didn't think it bothered me to the extent that it did. You know, because I got to the point where I had people come up to me and they'd say, hey, weren't you in the Marine Corps in Vietnam? Sure, I'd start crying. That's when you fucked up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so, and then one of the things that I found, I was doing the book and I took some mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, when I was working on the book and I had a flashback. I had a flashback, baby. And it was a flashback, not to Vietnam, But to when I was in troop processing, seeing those guys, I mean, it bothered me to the core. And, you know, well, you know, I'll never say I haven't cried.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I have. But I've never cried like that. And then I don't cry over it again since. I mean, it purged me. Somewhat. So anyhow, and then I just went to work in a steel mill, shoveled steel. And it was a hard job. And then I got another job, applied for a job as an apprentice.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
machinist apprentice, and this guy that sent me up to hire was this old guy named Roy that was with the union so long that he had, you know, he had tenure. He couldn't be fired no matter what. And the guy wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't talk to me. You know, I'd say anything to him, he'd say, leave me alone. And he would set his machine up every day. So he was running this huge turret lathe, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So he was milling down these lathes for ships, seagull liners, right, to do propeller shafts. And so it would come all the way up but never touch it, just go back and forth, back and forth. And my job was to help him.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so after a couple months of this, I went to, I'd seen an ad by the University of Baltimore where I could go there with the GI Bill and I didn't have to take any of the entrance exams. My high school grades didn't matter. I mean, I couldn't have got into Harvard with an A.R., So I went to the University of Baltimore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I go into the registrar's office and I said to him, I said, I want to register for college. He said, what do you want to major in? I don't know. I said, well, you know, nobody in my family went to college. So I went, he says, go see this counselor. And I did, and it was a huge line to see this guy. I'd about have been just getting to see him today if I... Got into it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I mean, I never got to see him. And so I went back, and the guy at the registrar's office says, if you can sign a waiver, you can pick your own major. I said, why didn't you tell me that? I said, you have a list of majors? He gave me a book. I opened it up. First one, accounting. I said, what's accounting? He said, well, do you like numbers? I said, yeah. He says, you go with math?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I'll just leave it on. And that's why when we get ready to have sex, I'll be ready. So I go up and meet them and so forth. That was about 6 o'clock we were going to get together, and I had done went flaccid then. And when I went flaccid, the condom, rolled all the way up, and it rolled up in my pubic hairs. Right? So I'm there with Pauline. Danny and Tony go upstairs. We're on the sofa.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I said, reasonably. He says, you're interested in business? Yeah. He says, you should make sure you're in accounting. So that's what I did. And, you know, had I opened it up backwards, I'd have been a zoologist. And I said to him, sure. And it's got to be a very fortuitous choice because I loved it. And it was, you know, very solitary. I liked that. And I graduated magna cum laude. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I'm now one of the school's biggest benefactors. Wow. You see, you're me.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I did that, and I went to –
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No. It wasn't that you didn't want anybody to know. You just didn't talk about it. Nobody asked you about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
No, no. I mean, one guy lives in New Hampshire. Another guy lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Here's the other guy that hit the trap. He lives in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Another guy, two of them live in Florida. Another one lives in Iowa. And Brownie, Brownie the rascal, he lives in Austin.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, the thing I did was I worked hard and I buried myself in my work. Everybody that has any degree of PTSD self-medicates in some way, shape, or form. I think they do. And my self-medication was always my work and my studies. So I had to turn things around when I was in college. And then when I eventually... I worked for a firm that commercial credit leasing corp. Worked for them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And they would send me to schedule the assets of companies they were looking to buy. And then I'd schedule the assets, schedule the leases, and then come home. And this was in the 70s. And what I did one day, another day, another fortuitous thing, was I was looking at this company in Redwood City, California. And I was going to...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
get my work done and I had a 12 hour layover until I was going to catch a flight and so I wound up on a Stanford campus and I went to the bookstore and I bought a book on how to program in the basic computer language and I bought it and um went to the airport I um Matter of fact, at first I went to Fisherman's Wharf and looked at a charcoal and
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
showed this little Chinese kid lighting a firework and a bunch of other kids standing by, some older kids holding their hands over the little kids' ears. And she said, oh, I miss you, you know, and it's just wonderful. The guy just caught it, an artist named Y Ming. And I asked the guy, the guy said to me, he said, you know, this, this, this, and so forth. I said, how much is it? He said, $10,000.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And how many might as well have been 10 million. And so I, see you later. And by the way, when I did the deal on Parsons Technology, I bought that painting.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I tracked it down, baby.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I have it in my bedroom, and I see it every day. Nice. Yeah. And not only I bought it, the original is now in a museum. I bought an artist's lithograph or so forth, which is, I'm told, the best you can get and It didn't cost nearly 10 grand, but the memory is what matters.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. So anyhow, so I read the book or the salient parts of the book while I was waiting and wrote my first couple of programs on the way back. And based on that book, I taught myself how to program. And I eventually switched to the Pascal language, sold my Apple computer and bought an IBM, and then started my first business, which was called Parsis Technology.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Just work, baby, work. And then when I first started getting Parsons Technology off the ground, I wrote the code for a program that would take care of home finances. I called it Money Counts. It got to be pretty good. Then I quit my job. I started this leasing division for this company. And if I had stayed there, this was like November, no, October.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Had I stayed there through the end of the year, I'd have got $50,000, would have got a bonus. I quit. And the reason I quit was... I figured I had just enough time if I worked hard to write a tax software program, do a 1040. And I got it done. But to get it done, I would work 60-hour shifts. I would come in. to work, let's say, 8 a.m. Monday morning, work 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, 8 a.m.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She's got this little club basement, you know, fixed up. And so we're on the sofa there. So I reach over, and I kiss Pauline, and we start smooching. And, man, that thing was like a switchblade. But the only difference was, Sean, it didn't unwrap the way it wrapped up in the pubic hairs, didn't let them go. So instead, it hung on to every one, and it just pulled with the force.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Wednesday morning, and then work half a day. And when I say half a day, I meant half a day.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. And then I would know I needed to stop by— The reason I needed to stop was because I started to hallucinate. I'd like to see a dragon walk across my desk.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. For sure, for sure. I mean, that was the only thing I was interested. I talked about it. I mean, I don't think I owned a Marine Corps cap. I mean, anything like that. Not that I denied it. I didn't. If somebody wanted to talk to me about it, I'd talk to them about it. But that wasn't going to take care of my family, put them where they needed to be, and so forth.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
To me, that was the only way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Home parcel technology? That first year I did the tech software.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
One year. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was doing it for a couple of three years before that because it took a while to build it and know how I wanted to do it and what I wanted to do for the software to be right, you know, and, you know, it couldn't be buggy and on and on. It couldn't be, I couldn't make my lemonade with vinegar anymore. Right? Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, so anyhow, all those things, you know, I needed to have things just so. Yeah, and so it took about three years, three years for that. And so that third year, when I got the tax software done, I made a quarter million dollars that year. I'd never seen that kind of money in my life. Quarter million, I mean, yeah, $257,000. Wow. The next year, I made $2.5 million.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
The next year, I made $5 million. Next year, I made $7 million. I mean, I've never missed too much since.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. Me and a group of other people together. Yeah, together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
More of that than anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
The first ad for what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It felt like somebody took my pubic hairs and glued them to the bumper of a Chevy in Florida. Wow. Oh, my gosh. So first I said, I'll just tough through this. I'll just tough through this. And I did, and then it got blinding. And then the season's bye would have talked. So I went right to the floor, and they had this little bathroom with this little –
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Okay. Yeah, first ad. And let me tell you how I bought it. Okay. I'm in the basement. And this is, I'm still working the other job. And I have this magazine call me. And they say, now, one of the things I always did, I always paid my bills. Always paid them. And they said, taken the Let me see. Let me see. Okay, they called me. It was called a computer bargain line out of Fort Dodge, Iowa.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And this was a rag. I mean, one of them little rags would look like a magazine cover. I mean, a cheap magazine cover. And inside it'd be like print, like newsprint. And it'd have different stuff for sale. It was cheap. All sorts of deals, right? And that's what it was. So... So they said, we have on the outside front cover, we've got that ad. It's normally like $12,000, $14,000.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
If you can get me creative in a couple of three days, it's $5,000. Now, so they thought I had money. I never had the money. So I took it and I says, I'll let you know in the morning. So I looked at it and I called my wife and I said, I just got a feeling that this could be it. So I said, let's do it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then I said, and if it turns out it busts, because every ad I ever had run up to that point was a bust. So we decided to do it. And I pay, I get a local ad firm, and they do an ad, and I sold my software. I had sold it for like $99, $79, $69, on and on and on and on. Now, I was selling it for 12 bucks on this ad, 12 bucks. And... and then said, no shipping, no... No, it's not copy protected.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Remember copy protection? It says it's not copy protected. It's not copy protected. It used to have agreements that you had to be part of if you used it. That would signal that you could only use it like a book. You couldn't make copies and give it to people on and on and on and on. I said in mine, you do anything you want to send me $12. So the ad said, money counts, but it only costs $12.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, first couple of days, I mean, after the magazine come out, there wasn't anything. And then there wasn't anything. And then there was, you know, half a dozen orders, then a dozen. And then you ever see these ads where you see the mailbox of stuff with orders of checks? That's the way it looked. And then there was a box, they had to sit a box next to it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so, oh my God, I think I made 20 grand on that ad. And then I took my wife and I and the kids, we took and did a mailing, and we broke every direct mail rule there was, just mailed, had that ad printed up, and mailed it to everybody that ever inquired. We got a 30% return. Wow. So then I... I took and I think I added a $3 shipping charge, didn't matter.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Then I added, I made it $16 instead of 12 and made the shipping charge $5 and left it that way for a couple of years. And I would get big ads made up in all the big magazines. And that's how Parsons Technology made it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
It was right after I quit my job. I'd have to quit my job actually before that a little bit, and my wife would have some of the neighbor ladies would help her, and they'd all be down there taking orders, and they'd all have their hair in curls. Dungeon. But they did a good job, and they were happy. They made some money. I was happy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Little, you know, door with a little latch on it. It's just a makeshift toilet, right? So I go crawl and get into there and shut it and latch it and try to get this thing off. I can't get it off. I mean, it won't come off. You know, my penis is like... And I'm saying how Mary's, our father's, I'm doing everything I could think of. And I mean, nobody ever talked to me how to get rid of a heart.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I was launching this company and then eventually, eventually I had, oh my God, I had a thousand employees. Holy shit. Yeah. A thousand employees? Yeah, it might have been 500. You know, I had to think about it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I sold it to Intuit. My wife and I, we got together, we decided we would sell it for $40 million if we were ever offered it. And Intuit offered me $60 million. I knew enough to tell them I was insulted. But most I could get them up to was $64 million. So I sold it for $64 million. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I started in 84, sold it in 94.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, it's just working, trying to make a living.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, really, there was none. That sounds crazy. What happened was... When I did the deal with parts of technology after that, my wife didn't want to be married anymore. And to be honest with her, I wouldn't be married to me anymore either. So she finally, she took all she could, and then she fucking booted my ass. So I moved to... Phoenix or Scottsdale, so I could work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And, you know, I just had a non-compete assigned. I had to honor it. Only their non-compete was I couldn't work, period. So I honored it. And when that thing came due, came up, I started working and started my own job, started, you know, to start a company. And I like being in the In the hunt. I like being out in the business stream. I like doing stuff.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I like being active and having myself on the line.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I like that. I like that. And I like to risk, but not too much risk. So I started that. And at the time, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew the internet was going to be something. I knew that was going to be an area where there was going to be opportunity. So what I did was I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know exactly what. So I hired about maybe 10 or 15 people.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And we tried a bunch of things. I named the company Jomax Technologies, believe it or not, after a dirt road. Now, why did I name it after a dirt road? Name didn't matter. We didn't do anything. I would send people to, they would go to a business meeting at the Chamber of Commerce and people would ask you, what do you do? And I said, we don't know yet.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I said, you know, I have never talked to anybody that don't know what they do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I just would look for people that were looking for work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I was thinking of Mother Superior, who was the nerliest woman I ever seen. Thinking about, maybe what it'd be like to have sex with Mother Superior. Didn't matter. So eventually... I mean, she knocks on the door, Pauline knocks on the door. She says, is everything okay? I said, sure it is. I'll be right out. I'll be out. Don't worry. I'll be out in a minute.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Not really. Not really. I mean, people that knew a little bit about tech and that sort of thing. And they were the people that I hired. And some of them actually were with me till the last day. Not many of them, but some of them. And so I went ahead and we tried all sorts of things. We tried buying... building intranets, extranets. We tried doing education.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
We tried selling other people's software, tried selling hardware. None of that stuff worked, but one thing worked. And the one thing that worked was building websites. We could build websites and make some money, not a lot, make some money. And the money that we made when we start doing these websites, there was one problem with them though, and that is they didn't scale.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You had to do the work of building a website in order to make the money. And so what we did was we built, a software program called, we called it Website Complete. It was the very first one. It was one of the first companies and guys in the world to do this. And that would be, you could take and do, just put some fill in the blanks and this and that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I just think you'd write the code for a website, very primitive, but you'd have a website. So we'd do that. And then the next step was where things looked like they were gonna, Joe is, every website needs a domain name, needs an address. needs seanryan.com, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So then what we did was I found that I went to all the website companies, I mean, all the domain companies, and they were all a pain in the ass to deal with. So we had one of our engineers went ahead and just filled the applications to do that for us so we could become a domain name registrar.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And a domain name registrar is not in a sense where you take and you have to buy a bunch of domain names to resell, although you could do that. It's more like the DMV selling vanity license plates. Once you get a vanity license plate at the DMV, it's yours as long as you pay the annual fee. That's the way domain names work.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
The only difference is you have companies that can do that, and they're called domain name registrars. So we started doing that. And then what happened was the dot-com boom. And the dot-com boom, there was so much noise for the dot-com boom, nobody didn't even pay attention to you. Not even close. And so...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I mean, the noise, you could see like these Super Bowl, stupid Super Bowl ads where they were playing a piano like chopsticks because they didn't have time to run an ad, but they bought it. I mean, make an ad and stuff like that. And it got to the point where it got to be, it just got to be stupid. And then... What happened was when I did that, I had about 38 million. I split it with my wife.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She deserved every nickel she got. And I moved to Arizona, best move I ever made. And I then worked on making this company work and renamed it GoDaddy. And then the way that came about was I was just, you know, the name Jomax Technologies is just very forgettable, means nothing. GoDaddy doesn't mean much more, but at least it's fun and easy to remember.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So eventually, I think it took me 20 minutes to get it off, but I finally got it off. Hair's everywhere. And I put it back on. And we pulled ourselves together, went outside, and she's long gone. She left. You lost her. I lost her, yeah. That was the first. So I lost her, and I still remember my buddy Danny. I never told anybody what happened way back then. Never told anybody.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so me and a gal that I still work with, we come up with that one night. After about a third night, we tried it. It's Fat Daddy, take it. Big Daddy, take it. GoDaddy, using the AOL Go keyword and the word daddy available. Bought it for $8.95. Damn. Yeah. And so that's what I did. And I started with $38 million. And then I started losing money.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I said, I'm not going to worry about this company until I get down to 30 million. Then I said, 20 million. 15 million. I don't know why. Sorry, I'm choking up here. No, it's all fine.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So anyhow, so I decided I was going to, until I get down to 15 million, then 12, then 10, then eight. And I think eight or six, I decided I'm going to close the company down because it didn't look like there was no balls, chance in hell of this company ever making the turn. And then so what I did was, I sold my original company.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I mean, sold all the furniture and stuff, had really nice furniture. Stupid. Furniture don't make you no money. And moved, bought a horse farm, an area where it was legal for breeding horses, but it wasn't legal for developing software. That's a fucked up sauce. The phoenixes, right? So I bought this big sign, had it painted, called it the Go Daddy Ranch sign. right on the wall.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then, um, and then I decided I went to, went to, um, um, Hawaii by myself. And I was going to decide how I was going to, going to shut it down, how I was going to pay any severance, how I was going to pay my creditors, and then what I was going to do. Um, so I, um, went to, went to Hawaii. I, uh, I went to Hawaii. Epiphany happened. More and more I was there. I didn't want to shut it down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Epiphany happened where all of a sudden, one day, this guy comes up to me. And, you know, he's happy as can be. Throw the keys in here. Hey, Ole Miss Parsons. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And I said, I'm doing great, buddy. And I mean, and I think, this guy's parking cars, probably has nothing, right? He's the happiest guy in the world. I got six or eight million dollars. I'm miserable.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Now, what's wrong with this picture? Ah, so I decide at that point to go back home And I shut it down. As the company goes broke, I'll go broke with it. I decided I could always park cars. But then I decided, you know what? I'm not a big-time gambler, but I like craps. I said, I'll go to Vegas and just work on a table. It sounded like a fun life. So I...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
We'll just do that, and then this is about January, February, and then October, or maybe later that year, the dot-com crash happens. And when the dot-com crash happened, GoDaddy was born. And then I had, instead of guys, waiting in line to... I mean, instead of not refusing to sell me anything at any price. I mean, every week, at least one or two companies were doing business with Vanish.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then so we take, and then in October, we wait, and they, we turned the company, we became cashflow positive, and never missed a month since.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yep. And so I sold GoDaddy until 2011 and sold 71% for $2.3 billion. Damn. And then sold the other 29% for Almost two billion.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
He said, how did you fuck this up? He says, it was a sure thing. And she told all her girlfriends that I, what we were going to do. And then we sat down and I kissed her. And then I ran into the, locked myself in the bathroom. And then, of course, I was.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Not bad for a young guy from East Baltimore.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, so anyhow, I mean, the ads all, they all happened. It was just funny as shit how that came about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You want me to tell you the genesis, how that happened?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So I'm running GoDaddy, and I am never quite sure why our business just stalls where we got a – 16% market share worldwide. I said, we got the best prices. We got the best systems. We got the fairest policies. We got the best customer service. What are these other dogs? Why are they still right in business? So I hired a market research firm to kind of look at it for us.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And they come back with an answer. They said, the reason those people aren't doing business with you is because those people don't know you exist. You only advertise on the internet. These people are only reachable on direct media. I mean, on conventional media. So what I did was, that was in August, I said, All right, well, you know what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I had a $10 million war chest built up, and I decided the Super Bowl was right around the corner. Let's make a Super Bowl ad. Damn. And then, you see, the Super Bowl ad back then would cost you $3 million. It costs you way more than that now. It costs you like 10, 12, something like that. Maybe far more.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
But anyhow, so what we would do is we took and I could not understand how you would give people's attention. people to look at your ad and want to buy, because they're at a Super Bowl party, your ad is only on for 30 seconds, right? And then after 30 seconds, they're talking, they're drinking cocktails. Some are, some aren't. They're certainly competitive.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
A lot of them aren't even paying attention to the television and all that. How are you going to capture their attention? And then one day I was with my second wife and I'm watching television and I seen an ad from Mike's Hard Lime Aid and I knew, I knew. And what the ad was, you got three really good looking women at the end of a bar. Right? And catty-cornered him is this guy.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
This guy's hunched over. It's Mike Hardlaw made. And he's got a little bit of drop in the bottom. And he's looking around, looking around. And instead of him, you know, holding it up and letting it run down, he sticks a 12-inch tongue down and swirls it around and then pulls it back. And the one... The bartender says, ladies, what do you have? And they point to him. We go, we like one of those.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I said, that is it, baby. Oh, God. I said, that is it. And so we did our first ad. We did a spoof on the GoDaddy girl. She didn't even have a name then. The media named her the Go Daddy Girl. We named her. And she was at a hearing by a Super Bowl board of censors or whatever she was. And they were, you know... kind of trying to decide if they're going to approve her being in an ad.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And she was going to be in an ad, and it was just hilarious because the guy, the The guy running the whole show, his name was Booth Coleman. I think he's passed. But he was an older guy. And he says, ma'am, what are you going to do on the game? And she stands up and she goes, I could do something like this. And her tank top strap snaps. And it was a spoof on Janis Jackson and Justin Timberlake.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I killed the deal totally.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Right? And she stops it. And it's just, it doesn't go, you know, all the way. So you see nothing. You see nothing. And, you know, you look at it, you know, it's filmed at a distance. See things at a, blurred the cleavage, on and on and on. A lot of the ad is shot from behind. So... Fox News said they would do the ad. And then when we sent them the actual ad, they said, no way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And so, you know, we said, you know, we had guys with me said, well, why don't you just say they denied it? You can, you know, people might want to see that it didn't get approved. No, no, I wanted to run it because I had bigger aspirations. So anyhow, so we went ahead and do that, all that, then minimize the ad, shoot it from the distance and on and on. And so he's taking oxygen.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I'm hoping someday, I don't know where she is, but if she is, I hope she gets the book, or she says, that's what happened.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And they go, yeah, we got a spot open just before the Super Bowl. And it could be a very good ad or a very great ad. And I think it was... Buffalo playing Philly or something like that, or Patriots. But whoever it was, one of them was on a one-yard line just when they did the two-minute warning. This ad was gold. And then our ad doesn't run. Doesn't run.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And I mean, and we were like, maybe it's the next ad, maybe it's the next ad, maybe it's the next. Never our ad, our ad never runs. So I get a hold of the president of Fox Sports, and I ask him what happened. He said, your ad was out of tenor. With the rest of the ads, we had to pull it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah. It was out of what? He said it was out of tenor. What does that mean? It means it just, it wasn't, it was, it shouldn't have been approved. All right, so, yeah, I know, I felt the same way. But I turned around to my buddy that, you know, he's my chief of staff, and I said to him, can we be this lucky? We'd be just lucky that never happened before.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So what they run instead of our ad, I'll tell you what they run. They run a picture of Simpsons and Bart Simpson, right? He goes in and he's stabbing a baby in a crib.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Much more acceptable than a breast. So anyhow, that's what happened. So I get in touch with the president of Fox Sports. And so... here's what happens he takes and he you know we go back and forth because we had our attorneys working on it and so forth and so we got a deal we got a deal with him so I don't have to pay for the ad that didn't run I don't have to pay for the ad that did run and
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
You know, life is good. I mean, basically, the market share worked. It went from 16% to 25% a year and held. So, I mean, it was just great. So, anyhow, so we take and I'm there sitting them at the table and these guys are on a conference call. And I know, ask for anything. Anything, I'll get it. Anything, I'll get it. I can't think of anything. I can't think of anything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So here's what I think of. Are you ready for this? It was the best I could do. I said, tell you what, give me a game ball, two game balls from every Super Bowl, and we got a deal. And they go, good!
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And that's how it came about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
So the media named her the Go Daddy Girl. Bill, I mean, it's just funny how it all came together.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
IndyCar with Tatika Patrick. I was playing golf with her Sunday, by the way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, she's a buddy of mine, and so was me and my wife and her and another friend. And I had a nice time. Are you into racing? No.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I was up in... I was up in the Arctic, and I was hunting. And I was talking to the two guides. And these guys, I mean, they're nowhere. And they were talking about the Indy 500 and Danica Patrick. And I said, wow, she's young. She's in a man's sport. She is drawing a lot of attention. I said, she ought to be our spokesperson. So we reached out. We hired her.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
And then we were partners for eight years. Wow. Yeah, eight years. And she's now a member of my club, Scottsdale National.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Golf, yeah. Golf and motorcycles.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Why not? I'll ask you.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, I like it too. I haven't worked for anybody since 1984. I just worked hard.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yeah, my wife and I, we move a million to charity. Every other week.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Yep, every 14 days. And I think we've given a total of a couple hundred million, I know. Oh, and we helped Semper Fi Fund. I've done 10 million a year. We just crossed 120 million a year with them. I mean, 120 million with them. And, you know, when it's all said and done, probably it'll all go to charity.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Well, I have a staff at our foundation. It's run by a very sharp lady by the name of Laura Mitchell. And she's been in that particular end of business for a long time, been with me a long time. And she has staff, so they sort it out. I mean, you know, if you're in a foundation, you're giving away money, your product, everybody likes it. Yeah, so you do have to be careful. But what we do is...
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Given the money to whatever the organization is that we're donating money to is only part of the contract, we're also in touch with them monthly and they're assigned an individual from our foundation to be in touch with them and to help them in any way that they can.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
and to also report back to us when the next time comes where they knock on our door if they did what they said they were going to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Overall, close to 100%. And, I mean, do I have little disagreements along the way? Yeah. Yeah, but, I mean, I'm there to work it out. I'm not there to, you know, it's different than buying a pair of shoes that you don't like.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
I decided to do it. I bought Scottsdale National, and that was the first thing. When I did the GoDaddy deal, I decided I was going to buy either football team or a really, really nice golf course. And praise the Lord, thank my angel, I bought a golf course. So I love it. Do you play golf?
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
She has her moments. Yeah, she has her moments. But, you know, I bought Scottsdale National. It's one of these deals where it became available. It is right now is $750. 30 acres in prime real estate in Scottsdale, surrounded on three sides by, what is it? Three million acres of land. Wow. Government set aside. Has one house on the property. You guessed it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#197 Bob Parsons - Vietnam War Veteran / Founder of GoDaddy & PXG
Which I didn't bring any.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Hi there. Oh, real pleasure to be here, Oprah. Thank you. Good to see you. Hey, Bob. You know, Oprah, there's something I got to tell you before we get started. Tell me. Over the years, I've done a number of interviews. And every once in a while, I would get asked, they'd say, Bob, if you could share a beer with anybody, or have a beer with anybody, who would it be?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
And my answer was always Oprah Winfrey.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
All right.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Well, you know, like so many of us, particularly you, I grew up tough. and uh you know i carried you know probably carried some ptsd from that when i was 17 i joined the marine corps and this was back in 1968 and i was um well i was in vietnam six months later carrying a rifle i was in combat for a month and i was i was wounded And the guy who went there was different from the guy who came home.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
The guy that went there was pretty happy-go-lucky, was easygoing, loved being out and about. The guy that came home was none of that. The guy that came home had a flash temper, suffered from depression, didn't like socializing too much.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Exactly. Well, they would call it shell shock. Yes, yes. So anyhow, you know, this went on. It cost me two marriages. Both my wives, which were a wonderful woman, you know, they tolerated me as much as they could. Then they gave me, you know, my walking papers. And eventually I was married to my third wife, Renee, and I read Michael's book when it first came out. What made you read it?
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Well, the title, How to Change Your Mind. Oh, okay. I thought it would be very helpful because I knew I needed to do something different. And back then, the dialogue for PTSD had started. Yeah.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Yeah. Well, you know, you know, a little bit of talk therapy, which I don't, I don't think works too well. And, um, you know, it's the only things that would ever help would be if I connected with the guys I served with in during the war.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
And, um, you know, spend time with them, I would come away just feeling just wonderful. Yeah. But that would only last for a while. Yeah, because you'd be validated. What I did was, after I read Michael's book and I learned about psychedelics from that, you know, before that, I had never taken anything like that.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
You know, I, like most people, thought that, you know, if you took psychedelics, you had to worry about jumping off a building. Right, right, right. You know, Michael dispels that pretty quickly in his book. And so reading the book was like reading a novel, Oprah. I mean, this thing just reads so quick and it just pulled me right through it. So I told my wife I'd like to try it.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
She had me hooked up with two guides within two weeks. And I met with them in Hawaii. And I did three different types of psychedelics over four or five days. And after I was done, my wife could not believe the change in me. She was the first to notice it. Man, now I was happier. I liked going out and about. My temper was far less. And I was a better guy.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
All right. All that. You know, the first day I took ayahuasca and a lot of tears, a lot of reliving and a lot of, you know, seeing it. And then I took the second day, I took psilocybin. And when I did sell Simon, the guy fixed the teapot, and he says, you know, this teapot holds three cups, and I made it strong, so you're only going to need one cup. Well, Oprah, I swear this is true.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
I drank all three cups, and I ate the teabags. Well... So I was righteously stoned. I flashed back. I actually seen things that happened, and... Righteously stoned. The next day we took off, and my wife and I went and played golf. And when I was out on the golf course, it was like, to get back to your earlier conversation, it was like the trees knew I was there. The plants knew I was there.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
And, you know, I could feel like a kinship there. When I caught it on the greens, you know, It was like the grass said, hit it here, Bobby. And I did.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And it's not finding love, it's knowing how to be loved. Oh. Because when you suffer from PTSD, man, you don't feel that way at all. Yeah. And so that was big.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
I am hoping that we're going to see this gradually made legal. everywhere and becoming a normal treatment because when we do, I think it will be a renaissance in the country. I mean, we could have people in jail getting out better than they went in. if they're treated with psychedelics, because it'll get at the root causes, whatever all the ugly stuff that is causing them to be like they are.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Well, you know, I have went through the process another time with two guys that I served in Vietnam with, the squad leader and the machine gunner. And so I went through it again, which reinforced what I did the first time. And, you know, I'm happy to tell you that, you know, when I had my psychedelic experience, it had been 49 years since the war. And I like to say this, I finally came home.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
And, you know, I'm going to tell you that when I went through it with the machine gunner and and the squad leader, they both came home. And I'm aware of a number of others who have went through it that I had nothing to do with. And, you know, the totally different people afterwards.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I cannot think of a better gift to give the United States or the world than to fund this stuff.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
All right. Maybe we'll have a shot and a beer, Oprah.
The Oprah Podcast
Oprah and Harvard Professor Share How Psychedelics Are Actually Healing
It had been 49 years since the war. And I like to say this, I finally came home.