I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanino show for the first time.

Long overdue.

Darrell Cooper.

How are you doing, Darrell?

Great, man.

It's great to be on here with you.

Like I told you before the show, I'm a big fan.

So, yeah, a long time coming.

Same here.

Same here.

Tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

So I'm pretty much a regular person. I grew up all over California, mostly in inner cities, from the Central Valley down to SoCal.

Spent a little bit of time my high school and college years up in Montana, which was nice to get a different

glimpse of that. I come from a family of veterans, and so I joined the Navy after I was done

with college and did 10 years doing air and ballistic missile work, defense work, and then

got out and worked as a DOD civilian for 10 more years doing the same

thing basically, Aaron ballistic missile defense engineering stuff. In the meantime, around 2015,

I started doing a podcast just sort of on a lark, really. I was a fan of Dan Carlin's hardcore history back then, and obviously he takes six or eight months between episodes, and I would always bitch about that.

And pretty much all I do, you know, I moved around a lot when I was a kid, and then in the Navy I moved around a lot.

And so my continuity was always books. And so ever since I've been a little kid, I just, just you know I've had my nose in a book pretty much during all of my spare time every day and

you know my girlfriend at the time and my friends were tired of hearing about the books that I

recently read and so they told me to go start a podcast and so I did. I did that for a few

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