The Zach and Pat Show

What do men secretly compete at that women never notice? When did you realize you turned into your dad? And what's the dumbest thing you ever did to impress a girl? No guest this week — just Zach and Pat with a deck of questions and zero filter. Who they'd fight from history, what their 16-year-old selves would roast them for, the hardest clients a realtor and a loan officer deal with (yes, includ...

Rates went from the high 5s to almost 8% in six months — and the market felt it. A full-time real estate agent and a top-1% mortgage loan officer break down what that actually means for your monthly payment, and what to do about it. No guest this week. Zach and Pat get into why "marry the house, date the rate" is dead, why listings are sitting, the seller move that beats a price cut, exactly how a...

Jeremy Fernandez is a jiu jitsu brown belt, a father of four boys (two in college, one about to turn 10, and a stepson turning 30), and the owner of JF Woodworking, a one-man remodeling business in the St. Louis area. He's also one of the hosts' main training partners at Watson's. Jeremy grew up poor in a chopped-up second-floor apartment with no air conditioning until he was 16. That's the year h...

Most Pilates instructors you see on Instagram got certified in a weekend. Montanna Michaels spent 600+ hours, and she thinks that difference is everything. Montana Michaels, a former professional dancer, and Jacquez Perry, a D1 400m runner turned mechanical engineer, join Zach and Pat to talk about building three businesses at once: RYZE Studio STL, a classical Pilates studio; a South City rental...

He spent 17 years in corporate IT and cybersecurity. Then a $4,000 detail job went so badly that he decided to build the shop he wished existed. Ron Podgorny, owner of Arch City Detail in High Ridge, MO, joins Zach and Pat to talk about walking away from a stable six-figure job, signing a personally guaranteed lease, and going from opening to full-time in five months. He breaks down why a shop bea...

Some things your parents said make zero sense until the day you become one yourself. No guest this week — just Zach and Pat running down the list of stuff that finally clicked: why dads fall asleep the second they sit down, why "we have food at home" was always right, why no plans beats exciting plans, and why letting your kid play one sport year-round might be the worst thing you can do for them....

Chad Klamen's family has been in real estate for over 100 years. Great-grandfather, grandfather, father — all house flippers. Nobody pushed him into it. His dad barely mentioned it at the dinner table. So Chad went and got a corporate job, made $70,000 with a company car, decided he'd made it — and got fired. He traveled Southeast Asia, came home, and asked his dad for a job. His dad said no: you...

Tommy Marciano started with $240 in his pocket and his mom's car. He'd seen a Gary Vee video about flipping stuff from garage sales, spent $40 of that $240 on his first buy, went home and called himself an idiot. He was too intimidated by eBay shipping to ever learn it — so he started meeting strangers at QuikTrip to do $3 deals and accidentally built a local Facebook following instead. Today Tomm...

At 45, Joe Stewart flew to Florida for what he was told was a team meeting. It was not. His father's investor group had decided to sell the bank holding company Joe was running — and nobody had told him. Eleven years later he walked away from a bank he'd grown from $60 million to over $200 million, on his own terms, at his own price. This episode is the whole arc: how a 20-year-old who wanted to w...

Katie Krispin is an estate planning attorney and a member at Adventure Unknown, and this is her second time in the chair — the first one, roughly two years ago, caught her right as she was standing up her own practice. She notes early that this podcast is how she found the place at all: she couldn’t figure out what Adventure Unknown was, kept showing up anyway, and eventually Scott laid down the l...

Stephen May is a realtor and a self-storage owner-operator, and a college friend of the guys from Missouri State. He graduated in May 2019 with a bachelor's in nursing, took a job at Saint Luke's on the Country Club Plaza, and moved to Kansas City having visited exactly once — he'd already bought a house there before he arrived. That house was a house hack: 3% down, conventional, owner-occupied, w...

What would you say if you could sit down with your 25-year-old self for one conversation? No guest this week. Just Zach and Pat going through the four things they'd change - career, relationships, money, and health - including the mistakes that cost them time they can't get back. Pat on the years he spent building a business while his kids grew up without him. Zach on three years of sweat equity t...

Everybody told you the pain is where it hurts. Stephen Shinn has built an entire practice on the idea that it almost never is. Stephen is the owner of Revive Wellness Company, and he works in the gap nobody else covers — the space between rehab and fitness that he says both sides fundamentally misunderstand. He's gotten people out of wheelchairs, taken a paralyzed bricklayer from five years of fai...

Everything in the block below goes straight into the YouTube description field. Wes Hoffman has written over 50 songs in a year, toured 924 Gilman, and built two music communities from an Instagram account. He also says the thing most musicians don't want to hear: good songs will only take you so far. In this episode we get into what actually grows a band, why Spotify monthly listeners are a lie,...

Jack returns a year on to trace how much has shifted in the business and in himself. On the business side he walks through the full subcontractor life cycle he's now watched play out over five years, why he's productizing fencing into a simple, scalable 'Chick-fil-A' menu under Faster Fences, and the honest fear of letting go of operational control that's the single thing capping his growth. On th...

Dalton is a realtor at CRS Belt Nichols — and the "bonus dad" to co-host Pat’s two boys. He and the guys cover his path from car sales to real estate, the mentors who shaped him, the realities of the sales grind (lead sources, pre-approvals, listing strategy), and some genuinely wild listing stories. Then the episode turns into its best self: an honest, moving conversation about co-parenting after...

Dr. Jessica Nieva was born profoundly deaf and grew up isolated — raised to read lips, not sign, in a Filipino family that pushed medicine. She didn’t hear clearly until a cochlear implant at 30, an experience she calls life-changing. In this episode she and the guys talk about the first sounds she ever heard, running 60+ miles a week to cope with loneliness, building Benton Family Dentistry while...

Stephen Burton is the owner and educator of Foundation Rescue in St. Louis, with 35 years and $100M in foundation repairs behind him. In this episode he pulls back the curtain on an industry with no licensing test and no standards: why homes really fail (gutters and downspouts, not "your walls falling"), how to avoid getting ripped off, the $175 inspection he’ll do before you spend $30,000, the di...

In 2018, a truck exploded just feet from firefighter Aaron Burlingame. He came back. This one’s about leadership, culture, faith, and what the worst days teach you about what actually matters. Aaron Burlingame — Battalion Chief with the St. Charles Fire Department — sits down with Zach & Pat on leading vs. bossing, building a culture people choose over higher pay, first-responder mental health...

Today we are excited to sit down with our first ever tattoo artist AND shop owner with Derek Heidorn! Part of TAC Team through Revive BJJ, Derek has long had a spirit that sought out fulfillment through defiance. He saw the molds the world tried told him to fit in and this led him to forming his own path starting first in contracting work and then transitioning through his creative spirit towards...

Today we are pleased to bring our new friend Nicky Robertson and all the chuckles that come with it! New to the Adventure Unknown family, Nicky sits down with us to discuss her experience in the service industry, how she parlayed that into an ever evolving career currently now with Fresh Markets STL - a group focused on bringing clean eating options to large scale management operations. A lot of e...

Today we are excited to be joined by the very woman who has painted most (not the mural behind us though) of the art that hangs in our studio - the one and only Rachel Hinz! Rachel is a transplant from Michigan who has spent the last eight years making St. Louis her home and contributing to the artistry that our community is widely recognized for. She does all this while maintaining a career and b...

Today Zach and Pat catch up with a quick cameo from Murph as we break down our recent travels, the reality of maintaining ones own rental properties, the awesome UFC Freedom 250 card, and of course we give a big thank you to all those who tuned in, left a comment, or shared the show as we recently broke our 500 subscriber goal this week! We appreciate you for being our audience and promise to cont...

Today we are excited to bring Jen Bardot to our table to talk about her endeavors in building communities, publishing international best sellers, and what it's like being an entrepreneur raising three young men! Loads of experience going back to her days working for Enterprise Bank, Jen has taken her skills from the days of getting folks approved for loans to fund their dreams to writing multiple...

Today we are so excited to bring you one of the top 185 lb bjj competitors in the world (18th to be precise) Nick Mataya fresh off his win at CXBJJ here in St. Louis only a couple weeks back. Having wrestled most of his youth, Nick felt the gap that was left from the sport while he was studying to become a physical therapist at Mizzou. Now only six years after getting into the sport - Nick has mad...