Zack Knight

Zack Knight was a cop in Atlanta, then an Army officer, and he now runs a nonprofit for veterans whose careers ended before they were ready.

The introduction came through Rick, a Marine Knight met in a professional organization and hands a crayon to every time he sees him. Rick is thirty something years older, was Schwarzkopf's right hand in the Gulf War, and is one of the civilian mentors Knight leans on hardest. Knight came into the studio a little over a year into running ATL Vets, which he had just expanded into seven states, and spent most of the hour arguing that veterans should be held to a higher standard rather than a softer one.

ATL Vets is built on four pillars: marketing, mindset, movement and money management. The programs aim at colonels, lieutenant colonels and senior enlisted rather than first term enlistees, and none of them have a graduation date, because Knight says the next stumbling block is always coming. VETOPS, the mastermind, runs two workshops in Atlanta and two virtual sessions a month and costs $97. Everything streams so a veteran in another state can join. The workouts are the easiest door in: sandbags with handles, because sandbags are mostly what they had in Afghanistan, worked in teams of three or four. His partner Taylor runs those and owns a corporate wellness company. One of them took place at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, with the tour afterward and families invited.

Knight deployed with the Green Berets in 2019 and came back with nerve damage in his arm. He could not carry a rifle or shoot accurately any more, so the Army offered him a desk or the door, and he was medically retired at 32. Over there his unit ran ops every four days and lost two men in the first four weeks, while back home almost nobody realized anyone was still fighting. Five days after leaving Afghanistan he was on his own sofa, in a house where four women had a year's worth of routines he had no part in. He had petitioned the commanding general to keep his men together for thirty days and got nowhere. They scattered instead, into something like twelve divorces, a couple of overdoses and DUIs. Knight spent the next stretch angry at all of it and calls himself a tumbleweed in the wind.

He learned to say yes and instead of but in couples therapy, after fifteen years of being the man in the room who was always right. He is in the gym by 5:30 every morning and says his mindset is in the toilet on the days he skips it. Most of his mentors are civilians, and he insists on having them in the room, because the guy who has done thirty years in a corporation can teach him something the Army never will. Veterans push back on the $97. That is the mindset he is trying to break.