From Trauma to Triumph: The Journey of Psych Ward

Zack Babcock came on the show, and his story is one of those that doesn’t sand down easy. He’s the guy behind Underdog Empowerment, a podcast he describes as being for alpha underdogs. He’s also one of the people who helped me get connected with Travis Ritchie to push Nightmare Success into over 200 prisons across more than 750,000 tablets. So I owe him for that. But I wanted to get into how he actually got here, because the path was ugly.

A Kid Who Got Handed Things No Kid Should Get Handed

Zack’s dad died when he was seven. He told me he doesn’t remember crying. He remembers checking out. “I was literally disassociating from the experience,” he said, though he didn’t have a word for it back then. He just knew he wasn’t feeling it the way he was supposed to.

From there, he said his life started “pale spinning.” He was getting told by adults that he wasn’t going to amount to anything, that he couldn’t focus, that he was the problem. By nine, his mom put him in a rehab. He got kicked out for being the youngest one there. Then she put him in a psych ward.

Five days. He said it felt like five years. Nine years old, kids laughing in the corner, staff yelling, getting restrained, woken up at two or three in the morning with a needle going in his arm for blood draws and whatever else they were pumping him with. That’s the world he was learning to survive in before most kids learn long division.

School slapped a label on him. ADD, ADHD, take your pick. “ADHD, ABCD, EFG, all that shit,” is how he put it. Looking back now, he says he doesn’t actually have a problem focusing. He has a problem focusing on stuff he isn’t passionate about, which is a different thing. The reason he couldn’t sit still in a classroom was that he was carrying a load nobody had helped him put down.

Numbing It, From Weed at Nine to Heroin

He started smoking weed at nine. That’s what got him sent to rehab in the first place. He was using it to numb out. By seventeen he was graduating to harder stuff. Ecstasy, coke, and before he knew it, he was overdosing on heroin and smoking crack. The drugs were just the tool. The job was to not feel.

The legal trouble tracked right alongside it. In and out of juvenile detention through his whole adolescence. At seventeen he caught a case. He and three friends were stealing out of cars in nicer neighborhoods, finding garage door openers, then coming back and cleaning out garages for tools. He told me they didn’t even need the money. They were bored. He took the rap for all four of them. That bumped him into the adult system.

The sentence was seven years out of Missouri. He went in at nineteen.

Eight Months in County, Then the Walk to Prison

Before he ever got to prison, he sat in county jail for eight months waiting to be sentenced. He told me he wasn’t sleeping. He’s not a small guy and he’s not soft, but he’s also not built like “some big debo,” as he put it, and he was running every worst-case scenario through his head the whole time.

A guy in county who’d done real time gave him three rules. Mind your own business. Stand on your shit, meaning don’t pick a fight but don’t let anyone punk you, and if you say you’ll do something, do it. Stick with your own. Zack said the racial separation inside is just the way it is. White with white, Black with Black, Mexican with Mexican, and if you sit at the wrong table, there’s a problem. He took the three rules and ran with them.

His mom showed up. Every visit. He was honest that she had been part of why he was traumatized in the first place, putting a nine-year-old in a psych ward will do that, but she also kept telling him he could do anything he put his mind to. He said she genuinely loved him. Both things were true. I get that. The outside connection is what keeps you from getting all the way swallowed by the inside.

A Captain’s Office, a Phone Call, and Three Days Alone

In 2010 Zack was two years into his sentence. Twenty-one years old. He’d been thrown in the hole for tattoo violations. The guards called him out to the captain’s office, and his first thought was that somebody had snitched on him or somebody was trying to get him to snitch on somebody else. So he walked in with the attitude up, telling them he didn’t have anything to say, put him back in his cell.

Then the captain told him his mom had called. His sister was dead. His mom had broken into a bathroom with a screwdriver and found her on the floor with a needle in her arm. Heroin overdose.

He asked to be put back in a cell by himself. The hole wasn’t full, so the guards gave him that. He told me the next three days he could only think about every mean thing he’d ever said to her, the fact that he couldn’t say goodbye, and the picture of his mom at the funeral burying her only daughter while her only son was locked up.

Then on the third day something shifted. He told me the question he asked himself was, “God, I don’t know why I’m here, but there is a reason because I’m still breathing. What can I do right now to find happiness and peace?” The answer he got back was to keep his space in order. He started a routine in that cell. Same things, same times, every day. He said OCD didn’t have anything on what he was doing in there. It gave him a piece of his mind back.

He was in the hole for two months on that routine. He told me when he came out, he was a different person. Before all that, he’d been doing stupid things to get accepted by the cool guys inside. After, he could say no. “Hey man, let’s go do it.” “No, man, I’m cool. I’m not doing that.” That was new for him.

Out, Then Back In

He got out February 28th, 2012. Twenty-three years old, a little over four years done. His mom picked him up in the same outfit he’d had on when he got locked up in 2008. Size 44 waist, and he wears a 32. He could fit his whole body in one leg of the pants. They went to Target so he could get clothes that fit, and he had a small panic in there. Everyone smiling and talking, doors that wouldn’t open the way he expected. He tried to walk out through the cart return door and it wouldn’t budge. He told me it felt like he was getting locked up again.

He was drinking. Not full alcoholic, just socially at first. He got a sales job at a clothing store he loved. Third day on the job he sold three grand in a six-hour shift when the whole store did nine. They promoted him into management. Then HR called. Convicted felon. Kick rocks.

That broke something. He started drinking from ten in the morning straight through. He got a DWI. His girlfriend was pregnant with twin boys. A few weeks after the DWI he was out drinking again, tried to pick a fight, woke up in Ferguson jail with a parole hold. Twenty days before his sons were born.

That phone call, the one where he found out he wasn’t getting bonded out, is where he says his life actually changed. He told me, “I don’t care what it takes. I’m moving in this direction from now on.” He did eight more months.

People, Places, and Things

When he got out the second time, he had a plan. Change his people, places, and things. He said it plain, and I think it’s the best piece of advice anyone leaving prison can hear. Different inputs, different outputs.

He didn’t have a job lined up. He had an idea for I Heart Ferguson wristbands and t-shirts that never got off the ground. He ended up in network marketing selling a natural energy drink, which sounds like the setup to a joke but worked. He got up to almost two grand a month residual. For a guy fresh out who can’t get hired anywhere, that wasn’t nothing.

But he knew it wasn’t his thing. In early 2017 he jumped, and as he put it, grew wings on the way down. He started watching Gary Vaynerchuk and decided he wanted to make content for a living, even though he wasn’t sure how anyone actually got paid doing it. He spent a year and a half struggling and learning funnels at three in the morning.

He launched the podcast in April of 2018. Got it ranked by day three. Had Billy Gene on it that next week. He went from people leaving his messages on seen to interviewing names he’d been trying to reach. He was still only pulling two to eight hundred a month from affiliate stuff, water shut off at the house, four kids, credit cards maxed. He took out a title loan on his Chrysler Aspen for four grand at terrible interest to get into a mastermind that taught him how to actually build an offer. Everybody told him not to do it. He did it anyway.

That’s the part of Zack’s story I keep coming back to. He keeps a note around his room that reads, “I’m here to get everything you said I couldn’t.” That’s the engine. Underdog Empowerment is built on it. He’s not done, and he’s not pretending the road was clean. He’s just still walking it.