Speaker 1: I've been thinking we need to talk to him about it.
Speaker 2: He might not listen to me, but yeah, as good
a time as any.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'll give it a go if he ever takes
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Speaker 2: Mum.
Speaker 3: Why did they call it Scottish cheese?
Speaker 4: It's cottage cheese, honey, And I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Did the dogs in other countries speak different languages?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think so.
Speaker 4: When when we get there, well, we've got to fix
the car first, but there's someone coming.
Speaker 3: To help us. Is it the man from Geneva.
Speaker 2: Not Geneva, he's from a Viva. Oh there's a van now.
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Speaker 6: Meaning a live man like this man letting butterfly flattening,
wing big down in a force. Man, it gonna cause
a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away.
Speaker 2: Man, nobody seen, nobody else you know, mean no man
the plug You follow a little story and you got
directed collect that man. Don't like a dang on pan
man matter man?
Speaker 7: All right, Hey everyone, this is a little bit different
than a normal episode. And so what I've done is
cut together three other interviews I've done with prominent gun tubers,
two a guys, not all on that topic. But these
are faces and names. You will know. Some of these
are quite old, right, Like I think the oldest is
two or three years now. My episode with Brass Facts
then Focused Trip was a little bit later, and the
hop one wasn't too long ago. So check them out.
Obviously you can find them elsewhere. But in addition to
compiling them in one place, I also edited them.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: I made the audio sound better. It's something I've gotten
more competent it. So back to normally scheduled programming next.
This is a convenient way to get all that content
in one place. And if you're new, obviously let me know.
Glad to see you. And if there's anyone else you
want to talk, want me to talk to, tell me
who done in the comments? All right, thanks guys, appreciate it.
All right, brass facts Brock, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: How you doing, man, I'm doing well. Thanks for having
me on.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 7: A funny story this. I reached out to you on Discord.
I mean this well over a year ago and completely
forgot about it didn't work out. I've been digging through
your Discord group looking to sell some gear and I
was like, oh, shoot, you shout to Broc. I should
I should follow up on that because you did a
video that was quite interesting about geopolitics. But hypothetically, my
audience may not have heard you, heard of you, So
could you describe kind of who you are and what
you do for them?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I guess YouTube's my third string activity. I
started life as a political scientist and then that didn't
really work out, so I got an engineering degree. Right
about that time, I decided, you know what I'm gonna
I need to share my opinion about gun gear autism
and made a gun YouTube channel and then kind of,
you know, the rest is history, as they say. But
my first love, so to speak, as cringy as that sounds, well,
it's probably video games. But I guess my second love
would be I really like geopolitics and international relations. I
really just that's kind of what I wanted to do.
I didn't work out for me, but you know, you
see spurts of it emerge on my my channel every
once in a while.
Speaker 7: So is that something you were you were drawn to
as a kid, or is there some kind of inciting
incident there.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I think it's to a degree. I
think it's kind of like that male desire. Did they
just see an F sixteen and they're like, hell yeah,
and uh, you know, uh, to a degree, A lot
of dudes kind of just end up being drawn to that.
And I guess I'm drawn to that just a little
bit more than than most. But I've never gotten into
a conversation like this with someone and that they haven't
been interested in it. So yeah, there's no there's no
specific moment we're kind of it mattered for me. I
think I think I saw to kind of maybe give
you less of a politician's answer. I think at some
point I saw somebody, you know, explain something in geopolitical
terms instead of just like the human factor of you know,
why did George Bush and Beta rock Well w m
D right, but then explain the actual, you know, behind
the scenes version of that. And that was very eye opening, interesting,
whatever you want to call.
Speaker 7: Well definitely And you know I watched a video that
you put out two weeks ago. This is really the
genesis of this talk, and it was called when the
United States Comes Home. And you know, I've primarily watched
your stuff just because you know, I also have a
dash of the gun autism, right, and I saw that
that really firked up my ears. I was like, oh, shoot,
like this is this is the language that I speak,
and your your way of framing that as you know,
kind of on a on a more human level than
just basic you know, ours versus d politics. It's something
that I'm really interested in, and you know, I sort
of came to that through you know, more explicit political thinkers,
you know, like Machiavelli, you know, basically looking at like, okay, well,
what how do humans organize themselves? And obviously the kind
of you know, meat and potatoes of politics certainly matters
to a certain degree, you know, but if you're interested in, okay, well,
how do these creatures called humans organize themselves? I think
that's a much more interesting conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an interesting thing, and maybe we can kind
of dive into that in a bit. But if you
meet an individual, they're going to act as an individual.
But a lot of the genesis of political science and
ir international relations is kind of this, this underlying assumption
that humans, at the end of the day, when you
view them as you know, from a far enough lens
as a group, tend to act in a very similar
or repeatable manner to a degree.
Speaker 7: Well, that's what's interesting, right if I went to business school, unfortunately,
and you hear about this Pareto principle, right, the eighty
twenty rule. But what you don't realize as the Parreto
and a number of other thinkers right developed that idea
further to how you know that that same principle of
you know, statistical analysis of you know, a business or
kind of like workers on a factory floor. It kind
of works when we look at again human society. So
in your video you bring up this idea of geopolitical realism,
and you know, political realism, which is obviously kissing cousins.
It traces its lineage right to mock uability, and it's
this idea of dealing with the world as it is
versus how we would like it to be. So do
you think that, one, first, that my definition of geopolitical
realism is even close to right? And two do you
think that that's different from sort of an ideological conception
of how the world works? Uh?
Speaker 2: Who that's a start out with a banger. Yeah, I
think to a degree. I mean there's always everyone approaches
it from a slightly different angle, right. My approach is
very much a just a practical sense what can be
learned from geopolitics. I don't truly believe that geopolitics has
all the or not geopolitics, sorry, political science and specifically
realist political ideology has all the answers, but it does
at minimum a lot of our world leaders subscribe to
this ideology. And you know the way of that way
of viewing the world, so I can understand how they think.
It kind of helps me understand why certain things can happen,
I think fundamentally. Yeah, it's it's it's useful to kind
of view the world that way.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: We always made jokes in polyside class, laughing at the
collectivists or not collectivists, the the the more. Oh I
forgot what the term is, but kind of individuous libertarian type,
not necessarily libertarian, but but those that are like, oh, yeah,
the human because I don't know how much your audience knows,
but the realist school of thought is very much more.
You know, they black box a lot of scenarios, right,
like the country is a singular unit, all that stuff,
and then you know, these guys come along and it's
always like, oh, humans have individual choice and all that,
and so it's always fun to laugh about that. What
was the second question before I completely got off and two?
Speaker 7: Oh, well, I was just gonna say, you know, do
you view realism as an ideology or something kind of different?
But I guess you answered that by referring it to
as an ideology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's it's I mean, in theory it
could be an absolute truth, but we'll, we'll, we'll will
never really know, right. You know, there's so many holes
in all of the theories that you can really only
view them as an ideology, right.
Speaker 7: Well true, And I think that that's actually another another
point to look at, right is that you know, viewing
an ideology, it is fundamentally a model of reality, you know,
and by virtue of being a model, it is imperfect.
And I think that you know, you've probably read more
you know, political science than I have, but you get
to very goofy places if you decide, you know, I
have found, you know, the one true rule for how
all people work at all times, you know. And I
think that it's it's it's important to temper this.
Speaker 2: So yeah, absolutely, I think your favorite I said, I
think you said you read a lot of Meerscheimer. I
think one of my favorite quotes from him is, you know,
this guy's on top of the ir realist world, and
he says, the best theory is only correct sixty percent
of the time, and most theories are not the best
theories or ideologies or whatever. I think that really illustrates it, right,
These are good useful tools that we have to kind
of view this world because humans need a story, a
way to view the world, and it does do a
lot in a lot of scenarios. But yeah, if it
gets very dangerous very quickly, if you refuse to view
the world in any other way, and don't you know,
acknowledge to yourself that these are fundamentally human constructed theories
to explain why we do the things we do.
Speaker 7: All right, It's descriptive, not prescriptive. And I think that's
a that's an important you know, if you were a
hypothetical person evaluating hypothetical thinker, that's a very good way
to look at someone and say, Okay, he's humble enough
to admit that this has limited application, you know, and
I think that that is a rare thing. So in
your video, and it was quite a good one. Now
I'll be sure to link it. One of the things
that you bring up is this idea of the security dilemma.
So do you want to explain what that term means
and then maybe we can go into it a little
bit from there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, let's see. How do I so maybe a
slight detour before I jump into that. A thing that
I had to really struggle with making that video for starters.
It is all mostly from memory. But the second part
was like, how do I explain something to an audience
without belittling their intelligence, but also without just blasting way
over their head and going into a shitloaded detail. So
that was so I got a lot of flack on
that video from both sides of the coin. It's like, ah,
this is so basic as to be useless, or you
didn't you know, I don't know what the hell you're
talking about. But yeah, the security dilemma is essentially this
assumption about how the world works at a geopolitical mass scale,
but it also does apply to you know, day to
day life if you want to kind of push it
that way. But it's in a I'll take the Meersheimer
version of the security dilemma. It's this fear of the unknown,
of your opposition that drives you to do certain things. Right,
that's the ten thousand foot overview. But if you kind
of zoom in a little bit more, the security dilemma
specifically is, you know, hypothetically, I'm build building up the
strength on in my country because I don't want to die, right,
because that's a thing that happens in the world. If
you have no military, you'll get taken over, and another
country does the same thing us without being able to
read that other person's mind and having any way to
truly trust them that there are no systems in place
for that. Will see his very large build up of
the military, even if it's only defensive nature, and get
nervous myself, and then you know, my side of the
table starts building up my military, and then his side
of the table starts building up the military. I start
viewing his intentions that were purely defensive nature as a
prospect for build up, and this kind of ping pong
is back and forth until you get what essentially is
an arms race or something to that effect. Now, there
are different ways to kind of, you know, apply this
to the real world, but the big fundamental issue that
kind of makes the security the dilemma spicy is that
in a lot of times throughout human history, offense was
favored over defense. So you get this thing where you
can't trust the enemy and you don't know their intentions,
and you see this build up, and then you add
the final piece to the pie of the security dilemma,
and that is offense is very much favored over defense.
So you get a lot of preemptive action. It kind
of leads to a situation where war seems to happen
when no one actually wants war to happen. Ooh, it
wasn't the best explanation, but.
Speaker 7: No, I think you did it. And one of the
things that flows from that is that idea that it's
actually very difficult to say who started a war. You know,
you hear a lot in and I think a lot
of it is sort of posturing for international opinion, right,
But it's an idea of like, oh, you know, they
struck us first. But if you look at kind of
an older understanding of this, it's like, well, he did
you really right? There's it's like what you said, there's
a build up before, there's some posturing. You know, there's
kind of both. In many cases, both societies kind of
get on a war footing. And so it's like watching
a fist fight, right, you see two guys square up,
you know, they just maybe start saying things toward each other,
and then one of them throws a punch and it's like, okay,
from like a go to jail perspective, yes he started
the fight, Okay, but did he really right? This was
sort of a usual thing, and I think that that's
that's something to bear in mind as well when we
come to that question of like can you ever really
get rid of conflict? You know, because a lot of
what we're talking about is based on this idea that
you know, they're sort of inbuilt facets to human organization,
human nature, and at least from my perspective, it seems like,
you know, as awful as conflict is, as awful as
war is, it's sort of fundamental to humans, right. I
don't think we can ever get around that. And I
think that the security dilemma and that idea of offensive realism,
sometimes it is logical to take the first swing. I
think it kind of prevents us from ember getting around conflict.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And for those in the audience that might want
to read more into this, security dilemma is a play
on the prisoner's dilemma, and the prisoner's dilemma is a
thought experiment to illustrate why when two entities are benefited
from working together. Right, So, the in the geopolitical sense,
it's not going to war, why they end up going
to war, But in the prisoner's dilemma, it's two prisoners
that are you know, they work together on a crime
and now they're being arrested, and if they neither of
them tell on each other, don't go to jail. But
the risk of going to jail. Just just look it up.
It's a it's a thought experiment, and it kind of
explains at a very basic level what exactly the security
dilema is.
Speaker 7: But I think that that's interesting as well, you know,
because obviously you're in the in the preparedness space, and
you know, one of the things that I think is
is interesting about that space, and we'll go back to
the topic at hand, is that you sort of have
kind of two expectations, right, and one is much more
popular than the other. And it's this sort of kind
of like unspecified vision of Mad Max, right where it's
like something bad will happen and it will turn into
you know, like the Hobbsey and all versus all you know,
to just be like raiders wearing like leather and eating
people's faces. And you know, when you when you look
at a situation, you know where there is scarce resources, right,
what we call an economic scarcity, and there are people
who have kind of aims confer to one another conflict
certainly arises, but again, right, at least when we kind
of like map this out, it's generally a logical decision, right,
Very few people are these kind of like absolute psychopaths.
And so I'm curious, do you see that kind of like, yeah,
a prisoner's dilemma situation. Do you see that in a
you know, in not like a hypothetical like loss of
rule of law or do you think it only applies
to these large kind of like institutions.
Speaker 2: So there, Yeah, sorry, it's it's a much more complicated
question to answer in that dynamic because a lot of
what so, the prisoner's dilemma is a very insulated you
know example, and the security dilemma kind of makes all,
like I said, black boxes a lot of stuff where
it assumes these countries are single entities and they're operating
on very linear kind of paths. When as soon as
you start bringing humans in, you begin to see the
pitfalls of these these hyper simplified theories. Right, So I think, yeah,
you could absolutely come up with a scenario where, especially
if you get a little more flexible with definitions, where yeah,
there are certain scenarios where humans don't fundamentally just want
to be left alone to do their own thing. But
in a post collapse, and you don't even need to
go as hardcore as mad Max. Post collapse, you can
go to you know, temporary loss of rule of law,
partial loss of rule of law. You can even go
to just minor civil unrest. And we've seen some of
that where you know, on one hand, we have the
fundamental truth that people generally want to be left alone,
but competing interests, competing desires, and then you know, sprinkle
in some you know, four horsemens of the apocalypse of frustration,
you know, class inequality, and you get a bunch of
people just fundamentally doing things.
Speaker 7: That are bad or against each other. Right, fair enough.
So the next point I want to bring up is
you mentioned in this that part of the reason for
this kind of desire to you know, desire to kind
of instigate a conflict, is it effectively the consequences for
losing the game of power are quite severe. So one,
what would you say that those consequences are And is
that something that has kind of changed recently or are
those you know, roughly the same over time.
Speaker 2: I'm assuming we're talking back at the geopolitical level, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, sorry, I that was a brief digression. Now
we're back to what we're actually supposed to be talking
about instead of some random question that popped into my head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no worries, No worries. I just want to be
making sure I don't go off on a diet drive
on the wrong thing. Yeah. I mean you can kind
of look at history, you can. You can, I mean,
you can even look at current events to what happens
to countries that aren't adequately prepared and the circumstance kind
of comes together and they get invaded and then they
can just get destroyed.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I think in recent history we kind of look over
certain countries that have lost war, you know, to such
an extreme level that they get you know, uh, completely defeated, right,
you know, this partial defeat and complete defeat, And sometimes
it paints the wrong image. Right, America was very generous
in the countries she defeated in World War Two. But
you only need to dial back history and realize how
many countries that no longer exist. And you know, it's
going to depend from person to person and how nationalistic
you are, how much you care about your culture, so
on and so forth. But at least from my perspective,
you know, beyond the innate desire for reproduction and the
fact that you're you know, your civilization is being wiped
out essentially, there's also you know, cultural stuff. You know,
I'm very proud of, you know, my culture. I'm very
proud of my history. I'm very proud of so and so.
I will die eventually, but that will remain. But if
your country that's destroyed, completely annihilated, you are potentially, depending
on how well history is kept and how generous you're
the state that defeated you is, you may either see
that history completely erased, modified to be more flattering towards them,
or completely altered, you name it. Right, So, I think
that's probably one of the worst things that could ever
happen to a culture.
Speaker 7: Well, and I think that you you know, you see
that even in you know, what was what some thinkers
had planned for Germany, right, you know, the the extremes
of right, the Morgenthau Plan, which is this idea that
you know, Germany would never be allowed to be a
people at all, you know, they'd be reduced to a
subsistence to agriculture. And obviously that dude was nuts and
you know, whatever you say about Neede notification, that didn't
happen or even on the ancient scale, right with the
I mean like tribal warfare, right, this idea that you know,
everyone would be killed, right, the women would be taken away,
you know, some people would be taken as slaves, and
effectively one group would completely erase another. You know. The
example I always go back to on this is is
a book called Scalp Dance, right, which is sort of
a chronicle of you know, the wars with the Plains Indians,
and that was sort of this mutual war of destruction, right,
there were these horrible massacres on both sides where effectively,
you know, it wasn't like what we would like Napoleonic War.
It's like, okay, well you know you've lost, so the
general gives you, gives me a sword. You know, we
exchange you know, sort of a salute, and then I
give you your sword back because you were an honest guy,
and you know, we signed some papers. It was basically, okay,
you've lost. Now if I find your village just gone,
you know, so there's nothing left. And obviously, you know,
I don't want to go back to that that's a
bad thing, but that is sort of the kind of
like programming in the back of your brain to avoid
losing it all costs, right, is to avoid that sort
of like genetic erasure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and who knows if we're ever going to go
back to that. Think humanity has gotten better about not
completely annihilating cultures from the history books to a degree,
I think, So it's hard to say if we're ever
going to have another you know, American you know, Indians
versus the Western colonizers situation where they just get completely blasted,
you know, for the lack of a better term, or
you know, I mean Poland eventually came out of it.
But Poland's kind of the to a degree, it's not
a joke of history, but a good example of a
country that on paper is fundamentally very powerful but keeps
kind of getting the shaft for you know, fifty to
one hundred year increments.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're very There are very few worse positions to
be and than Poland. In the last two hundred and
fifty years, they've really got that. They really good. Yeah. Yeah.
So one of the other things you mentioned is this
idea of ed Jamah. Can you explain what you mean
when you say that phrase. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, in geopolitic geopolitics, typically stuff is divided into major powers,
minor powers, and then occasionally regional powers, and that that
distinction is essentially right, like I don't know if you've
ever played Hearts of Iron, Right, there's some overpowered countries
in some underpowered countries, and then there's some really overpowered countries.
And you know, I think everyone fundamentally understands it, right,
A Germany or a UK or France is fundamentally just
a you know, from a military standpoint, which is what
a lot of geopolics geopolitics care about, is fundamentally just
a quote unquote better nation than a Grease or a
you know, Denmark. Right. So those would be the you know,
the distinctions between a minor power and a you know,
major power. And then you get to something like potentially
like a regional power, which is the kind of an
extension of that where it's able, you know, the major
powers in the regions aren't just competing, but one of
them is able to kind of get to a point
where it is the dominant power of that region. An
important thing with a regional major power is it's still struggling,
you know, it still has got to contend with the
fact that all the other major powers are going to
pounce on top of it and kill the shit out
of it should they ever mistake a misstep, you know,
become weak whatever.
Speaker 7: I mean.
Speaker 2: Look at look what happened to so many other nations
like Spain, the amount of times people tried the dogpile
on Britain, China, to sort of a lesser degree, a
lot of the levant nations. And when you get to
something like called a hedgemon, or at least a regional hedgemon,
is when that that major power, regional major power, you know,
did a line of cocaine, and now that thing is
so powerful that it not only can you know, dominate
its own region, but it's so powerful that it can
you know, it's like the cartoon where it's got one
hand on the like one person and then puts the
hand on the other person. It has now become so
powerful it can handle its own region and not be
worried about being destroyed by its own region and begin
influence seeing other regions. Right, And that's a very useful
thing to have as a state, because it means well,
I can't die to my own region, but I can
also dibble, dabble and mess around with other regions, such
as those other regions never get strong enough to contest
me here at this region. And that is a very
powerful thing to have because it means, you know, your
longevity is secured. And then we get to the what
is what some people, you know, obviously very debatable, get
to what America is, and it's a global hedgemon. Everyone
everywhere is America's backyard, functionally speaking, more or less. Right,
there's some areas where America is more powerful, some were
areas where America is less powerful. But America doesn't need
to be worried about, you know, South America invading it.
It doesn't need to be worried about Canada invading it,
partially because we're allies, partially because that would not be
a fair fight for anyone involved. But we're also so
powerful that we are influencing multiple regions in the world
to our liking, so on and so forth, and you get,
you know, hedgemont.
Speaker 7: So I think that that's a really interesting way to
describe it. It is something that you know, has become
popular in my circle as well. They use the term
the global American empire right to kind of describe that.
And I think one of the ways you can see
it is in cultural terms, right, American culture is everywhere.
You know, our kind of tastes are reflected the world over.
So what are some ways in which you know America
has sort of established itself as an empire? Say, I'm
not convinced you know that America is an empire? How
would you convince me?
Speaker 2: I mean, starting with what you you just said. You know,
the realists won't like this nearly as much. But America's
winning or has has won the culture war per se, right,
because that term means something nowadays. But like you said, America,
American culture is has become most of the world's culture. Now,
you might say, you know, Japan's Japan, you know Britain's Britain,
but we've influenced them in such a way that it's
not even considered anymore. So on that vein alone, America
is already dominant, right, But then you can get, you know,
to keep it in a realist vein, you can get
in kind of a military perspective of America being dominant. Now,
I think people are going to keep looking for the
situations where America is not dominant, and there's always small
little idy bitty bits that you can find anywhere. But
you can play a game of what geo guests are
and just put a pin on a random point on
a map, and chances are you're within missile range of
an American base or you're within striking distance of an
aircraft carrier strike group within twenty four hours. Right from
that perspective, From the hard power perspective, America is there,
and you can kind of meld those two together, soft
power and hard power to get just really something that
we haven't seen ever in human history. Right, Like we
talk about the amount of times the Gulf of Four
Moves has been, you know, under attacked by regional powers
in the area, which always are going to have a
home field advantage, and then a couple days later America
shows up and that's not a problem anymore. But the
soft power aspects combined with that military power, you know,
a country just take gets the worst earthquake in human history,
and America is able to show up with a force
to kind of provide humanitarian aid on a level that's
never been seen before. Right, No one else has that
level of funding, willpower, and ability to just drop like
something like war's amount of funding per day just on
a whim out of goodwill. So there's so many aspects.
It's hard to actually answer that question in a lot
of ways because it's so self evident that it becomes
hard to describe. Well.
Speaker 7: And there's an infographic it's gone around the internet for
a long time, and it's a map of the world.
It's a heat map, right, and it shows the distribution
of Roman currency, right, So obviously it's around the Mediterranean,
you know, everywhere in the Empire, but as far away
as you know, China, India, you know, they're kind of
like the west coast of Africa, East coast, west coast.
I get it mixed up the other side of Africa.
And what's interesting in that is you see also the
the commercial aspect, right that you're you're one hundred percent
right about the soft power that is culture, you know,
the hard power. I feel like it is incontrovertible, right,
It's like who else has twelve aircraft carriers? But I
think that there's something too as well, which is like,
you know, until relatively recently, the American dollar was accept
it was accepted everywhere, you know, with with notable exceptions.
And I think that you know, being that kind of
like you know that the economic powerhouse, the cultural powerhouse,
and the military powerhouse. I mean, okay, maybe you don't
like the term hedgemon, but it's pretty hard to argue
that America is the biggest dog on the or the
biggest kid on the playground.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it's important not to get emotionally invested
in some of these terms because I think people view
this like good guy, bad guy, or you know, like
a like a narrative in a you know, when when
you say America American ooh, sorry, drinking some soda, so
I've gotten some burps. When you say America is a
world hedgemon, I mean that that's kind of more of
an objective fact. It's not like I'm rooting for them
or I'm not rooting for them, though you know, I
obviously have my own personal preferences. Or when you say
American culture is universal, you know that that might be
a good thing, that might be a bad thing, but
an important thing. With political science and any science, you know,
some scientists might be upset that I just called political
science and actual science but you know it's important to
view it, you know, objectively from a third party, thirty
party perspective, because data to be gained there, right, And
this is.
Speaker 7: Why I started this off with this idea of you know,
we're dealing with what is not what what is what
we believe ought to be? You know, you and I
are not saying here and we're you know, sitting here like, yes,
you know, America should rule every inch of this planet.
And actually I got into this with some more shall
we say, some more baby boomers. I wrote a piece
for The Blaze and I mentioned this idea of America
as an empire, and I was I was treated to
this this kind of emotional response is like, no, America
is not an empire or republic. I'm like, okay, that's
not what I meant. You know, it's not what I meant.
And I think that it's a It's glad that you
brought that up to kind of take this away from
you know, the emotional frame you know this is this
does not mean empire in the Star Wars sense, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, American empire is very different from historical empires,
Like there is American land isn't like physically ruled over land.
Isn't significantly larger than it's ever been, and in fact,
it's it's gotten smaller in a lot of ways. But
it's a very it's something we haven't really seen before.
It's it's it's the conjunction of a build American just
extreme military might combined with an economic system that we
make very strong strides to keep operational good or bad,
combined with the American soft you know, cultural reach that
is also just by as like a side effect, kind
of spread out everywhere. Is it literally an empire? No,
it's not an empire. America doesn't literally rule the world.
No one thinks America literally rules the world. But it's
the closest we've ever, you know, been to something like this.
So empire is used because the English language is imprecise
and it gets the point across.
Speaker 7: So what is the term rules based international order mean
and how is it relevant to this conversation?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's a I mean that that's a very
long topics. I'll try to keep it very dense and
dense and concise, concise, and in order to understand what
rules in international rations, you kind of have to approach
it from a philosophical point of view of before major
powers are before you know, hedgemon and regional powers existed
in that there technically are no rules, right you wind
the clock back far enough. And I'm not talking like
you know, Stone ages or something like that, though technically
would apply then to.
Speaker 7: Somebody's dragging Hannibal before the Hague, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's no systems, there's no rules back then,
and I think you know, most people might be thinking
about the UN, but it's it's even simpler than that, right, Like,
if let's just pick a generic country, right, if Japan
invades Korea in the sixteen hundreds, fifteen nine, whatever, not
that they did. But you know, if country A invades
country be, you know what's the ramification. There are no
ramifications other than country C being like ooh, it's my
time to strike. But that's not rules, right, that's just
opportunistic stuff. So there really aren't any rules in the
international system because there's no one to enforce the rules,
and all that really happens is you know, action and
then you know reaction, and then action reaction, action reaction.
Speaker 7: So for a lot of.
Speaker 2: Human history, we kind of use this phrase that international
politics or in geopolitican is a thing or system of anarchy,
not in the sense that you know, everyone's going around
mad Max style, but in the sense that there is
no system in place to punish bad behavior other than
if a country wants to do that, but then there's
probably likely other reasons. So that gets us to the
you know, rules in the international system. How do you
have rules in the international system? Well, for a while
there there really was no way other than you know,
countries coming together and agreeing to certain things. Right, how
warfare should be fought was a big one. But funnily,
at the end of the day, there wasn't there. You know,
the rule breaker was was rewarded.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: You know, if you have a rule about fighting war
in a very humane way and then you come out
of the gate and you fight the most brutal war
in existence, you have a head start because wow, you
didn't give a shit about those rules and your enemies did. Right.
There is no higher power to enforce these rules right
in the same way where you and me, as you know,
citizens of a country say what you want about it,
there is a monopoly of violence in that country. And
if we break the rules as outlined, we get our
peep slaped hard with bullets. So that gets us to
international relations. What is that higher power? Well, turns out
it's America right now. America has done its best effort
to kind of codify these rules and something that's a
little more fair and a little less you know, authoritarian.
And we have stuff like the Brenton Woods Institutions. We
have you know, the UN as a whole where a
lot of you know, countries come together and agree upon
what those rules might be. But at the end of
the day, you know, the jokes about the UN are
based on some degree of fact. It is ultimately backed
up by the United States and her allies and mostly
just the United States of like, hey, if you do
something bad, we're gonna punish you. And we see that, right,
you do something bad, sanctions, you do something bad. Sanctions,
you do something bad. Oh my god, that country just
got more funding than the you know, the last forty
years of American funding combined, right, Like, you know, that's
that's what it looks like. That's what rules in the
international scene look like.
Speaker 7: Well, I think one of the things that is, and
this is perhaps question we will get we will get
too later. But the questions I wonder, is does that
you know, because I think that you're you're right that
that order that you know, rules based order is basically
America in France? Right, is that that does that order
outlast the American Empire? You know, which I realized that
opening up a whole can of worms. We can maybe
get into later. But I do think that's an interesting question,
like have we managed to create something longer lasting than ourselves?
Speaker 2: Depends on who you ask, right, It depends on who
you ask. Like some people will argue that, you know,
the the Western the Western ideology, the Western way of life,
the Western way of thinking, you know, secular thing, all
that stuff, you know, has surpassed America, and if America
got thanos snapped out of existence, that other countries in
the world would keep that. And there's certainly some strong
argumentation for that. I think that the strongest version of
that has been like democratic peace theory, right, democratic nations
don't fight other democratic nations because the people get pissed
off when you do that, because they're so interconnected. And
then there's arguments, you know that globalization be utter extreme,
you know, at like the granual level, granul level. Well,
I can't talk. Interconnection of the economies of different countries
has made it so war that we've seen in the
past could never happen again, and that that globalization is
kind of an American ideal. So even without America, globalization
has the potential to persist and prevent you know, a
return to you know, a pre America world. You know,
not literally pre America, but pre global hedge amount America.
So there's a lot of argumentation that, yeah, yeah, America
isn't required into this anymore because America is everyone's got
a little American in them too. You know, it sounds
kind of stupid, but yeah, like people agree of most
of the world has come to agree on the system
being valid, so it doesn't need America to kind of
perpetuate it. But then there's the more realist perspective of, no,
this is as cool as this is. The only reason
this is going on is because there's a guy with
a really big stick running around and every time you
break the rules in her eyes, you get hit with
the stick, and that's what's keeping everything going. So yeah,
it depends on who you ask on if it's going
to outlast America or not.
Speaker 7: Well, well, Brock I think you need to All you
need to do is take a look at my profile
picture and you can probably get my general outlook on
the Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Most realistic are of the opinion that maybe not complete
collapse of the system, but a return to like a
multipolar world of sort, which probably is going to have
a lot of similarities with the world we live in,
but also not right, certain systems are propped up by America.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it seems to be that the chat has fundamentally misunderstood.
You were naming two sides of an argument, not saying
two things in complete contradiction that you believe. So we're
just sing the death of nuance in real time in
the chat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first thing I talked about is
generally considered a liberal point of view, and not liberal
in the sense of American liberalism, right, not that liberalism,
but like geopolitical liberalism, which is very ideas based, and
you know, as I described, right, that's that's political science liberalism.
They believe it's kind of surpassed the state in some ways.
And then you know what the version two, where you know,
the system can't keep going because the the gen the
thing that's keeping the system going is going to die,
right America or potentially will die, And that's kind of
the more realist point of view.
Speaker 7: So, uh, why do you think that first world countries,
particularly you know, countries involved in NATO are are and
obviously this trend that I guess is kind of reversed
in the last two years to a prominent real world happening,
but have historically spent very little on their own defense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's how what's the simplest way to
put it, I mean, why would they write? You know,
militaries are comically expensive. It's one of the most expensive historically,
it's one of the most expensive things five percent of GDP,
ten percent of GDP. And then the reality is you
kind of need to train with that military. Militaries are
very expensive. And then the hilarious thing about militaries is
they kind of just atrophy. Right, if you don't keep
investing into your military with R and D training and more,
you're going to have a really crappy military. You know,
look to current events for that one. Right, The military
is a consistent investment and if you don't use that military,
you know, retroactively, you look back at it and you're
like Wow, those last thirty years of military spending were pointless. Right,
That could have been spent towards hyper you know, charging
my economy, That could have been spent on humanitarian stuff,
That could have been spent on you know, progressive things, right,
like less taxes, you know, medical or whatever.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 2: But historically you have to have a military. It was
non negotiable. But what if you exist in a system
where you know, there's a couple, you know, a couple
half dozen bases in Germany with the biggest military of
all time, like in that base, what why bother building
a military your military like the full deployment strength of Denmark, Sweden,
It's almost nothing by comparison if this military shows up.
So these countries are very much incentivized not to do
that because frankly, why would they. Right, they're not going
to be the lynchpin in the defense of the nation.
Now I'm not saying they don't have a military, but
they're not going as hard as they might would if
you know, all the European nations were responsible solely for
their own survival.
Speaker 7: Well, I think also if they were at all worried
that other European nations would sort of come knocking, right,
like the idea that I don't know, Denmark would invade
Sweden in current year, it's almost laughable to say it, right,
No one's actually concerned about that anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the more interesting version of that is, you know,
Germany versus France versus you know, England, right, these were
the countries that have never happened before. I don't I
don't think that's purely hypothetical. But these countries have historically
been not the best of homies, and you know, we
would think they would be militarizing against each other, but
fundamentally they've they've all been kind of put on the
same page, at least in the short term, right or
not short term. It's been decently long. But at this time,
you know, they're all homies, that they're not afraid of
them attacking each other. And there's also that collective aspect.
Even if there was an America, you know, NATO slash
EU is a very large conglomerate of military power. Someone
would have to be really stupid to attack at this time.
Speaker 7: So we've sort of obliquely referenced the idea that the
US Empire kind of could or is in the process
of you know, losing its status as a global hedgemon.
Do you see this as something that's happening. Do you
see this as sort of an inevitable occurrence in any empire,
or do you think that America is just going to
kind of keep sailing as you know, the ruler of
the world.
Speaker 2: I mean, you you got to kind of approach this
from two points of view. I think historically looking back
will know the answer. But right now we don't really
know the answer. So we kind of have that we
can kind of throw some stuff at the wall and
kind of, you know, guess to that effect. From the perspective,
like perception based, America is absolutely losing ground big time. Right.
You mentioned Europe not spending any you know anything. They're
starting to spend stuff now, right, They're starting to build
up their militaries and that in small part, you know,
it's not all of it, but a small part of
that is loss of trust that America is going to send,
you know, ten plus divisions over the ocean, you know,
if something bad happens in Europe to the point where
that's needed. Right, some of that is based on the
fear that America won't be there. Look at Japan. Japan
is very very happy to not have a military, right,
It's been very useful for them to have a micro
military relative to their economy size, especially now right Japan's
not doing so hot economically, you know, over the last
like thirty years or so, so you know, they'd love
to not have the military. But what are we observing.
We're observing the exact opposite. When I was over there,
I think the Shinto abe was, you know, doing slowly
at first, and then more and more and more, pushing towards,
you know, re militarization, pushing towards overturning the part of
the constitution that prevents them, you know, from having a
military creatively reinterpreting the constitution. Why would they go through
all this effort if you know America is going to
be there to save them. Well, some of it is hedging, right,
They're like, well, we're not one hundred percent sure if
America is going to be there now. It's worth noting
none of these militaries are at like ten percent GDP
growth rate at this time, so I would argue most
of them still think America is going to be there.
But you don't go all in on a single thing.
So perception wise. Oh and then of course you look
at look at look at how America is perceived in
the world. We're perceived like shit, relatively speaking. So even
on a you know, a ground level, America's you know,
influence and strength and whatever you want to call it,
is being perceived is way less than it's ever been,
maybe even even though we have a shipload of military
victories under our belt. So from the perception, you know,
the perception point of view, yeah, we're losing ground big time,
right and then okay, not to get into that, but
very lightly touching on it, there are other countries in
the world that are gaining ground. And at least from
my perspective, I view this whole thing as a zero
sum game. If country A gains ground, it means country
B has to lose ground. And we're seeing a couple
of countries in the world really gaining some ground, at
least perception wise. Once again, well, and a harder question.
Oh sorry, gun no, no, I'm glad you brought up
that point zero sum game. It was on the tip
of my tongue, but sorry, back to you. What you
to finish that thought? Yeah, then the much harder question
because it actually you know, means putting your foot down.
Is America actually losing physical not physical but like is
it losing ground as its ability to be the world hedgemon.
Now that's a really tough tough question to answer. On
one hand, No, we're we're still turbo powerful, right, like
we could wipe the floor with any nation in the world.
In fact, you know, the current war that's going on
illustrates that, right. Like everyone thought Russia was something that
could take on all of Europe, turns out probably not right.
But the flip side is, we know America is still
very capable in you know, direct warfare. They're like a
lot of people that don't study the the Iraq War
from a military history standpoint, don't really understand this. But
it was both of them, the Gulf and the Iraqi
Freedom were just landslide victories by proportions that don't can't
just be explained by we got bigger, better planes, right.
It wasn't just that, right, And these wars have completely
overturned how modern countries fight wars. The answer in the
past was always mass was the quality, right, you need mass,
and these wars completely flip that on its head. And
it's like it's not about mass anymore. And it turns
out America is functionally the only country in the world
that has that ability to fight this new modern style
of war under its belt. Now, you know, there's tons
of argumentations of Iraq was shit, blh blah blah blah blah,
but I think we've seen, like you know, even winning
against even winning in an overmatch scenario is much harder
than you'd imagine. So from that perspective, no, America is
doing doing swell. We're doing we're doing quite great. But
then you look at the zero some game perspective, zero
some game perspective, and it does seem like we're weaker.
Right there are other countries that are getting stronger, our
economies not doing as hot as it, you know, used
to We're not. We're still winning, but we're not winning
as fast as we used to be winning. And that
gap seems to be closing. So I don't think anyone's
going to be like America is not a hedgemon anymore,
but it's starting to seem likely that we probably won't
make it. Definitely not to the end of the century,
but what about you know, to the halfway century. Point
hard to say, but it's it's not looking not looking great, right,
There's no real answer here, right, Like I would be
making a lot of money as a political scientif as
that I could come up with a really good answer here, right,
But no one really knows.
Speaker 7: Well, there's an idea in economics, right that the amount
doesn't matter. It's all about your trends, you know. That
really is that it's the direction the lines are going
that that matters more than any one data point. And
I think that you know, you're view of it as
a zero sum game is astute. And again, I just
want to reiterate this for the umptyque time that I'm
not saying that out of some kind of like deep
seated hatred of America. You know, I'm not like sitting
here saying like, oh, I can't wait till there are
tanks rolling down, you know, at Washington Avenue or something.
But I think it's important to temper this all with
the realization that America is a country and there's no
one country that wins forever, right eventually, you know, and
who knows it maybe fifty years, it maybe three hundred years. Yeah,
you're no longer on top and I think, given kind
of current trends, that seems to be in the cards
at some point in the future. And I think that
one of the things that's important about this is that
to a certain degree, perception becomes reality. Right. You know,
there's this dumb idea from forty k Right, there's this
race of aliens, and you know that their will put
together is so strong that if they believe something, it
becomes true. Right, if they believe that painting something red
makes it go faster, if you get enough of them together,
it actually works, right. And that's a stupid example.
Speaker 2: But again, do they put like decals on their cars?
Speaker 7: It's literally that. And so what you see again is
you know the classic example, right of the prison guard
with a gun and there's thirty prisoners and he's got
ten shots in his gun, and so if they rush him, right,
at least some of those guys are going to get whacked,
but he can't get everyone. And obviously, you know, that's
not exactly how international relations goes. It's not like, you know,
someone says, I don't want to use the dollar anymore,
and we just nuke them, you know, at least I
don't think that's how it works, but nonetheless there is
this kind of as you set up incentives right to
leave the US system, people react to that. And I
think that's what you've you've seen with the kind of
and obviously bricks has not been quite what it is
cracked up to be. But nonetheless, the idea that bricks
is being floated and seriously considered tells us I think
how world leaders are feeling.
Speaker 2: If you see what I'm saying, Yeah, yeah, it was.
It's almost at least how I view bricks. It's it's
more of just like a hey, this is a thing
right where we're pushing back on the soft out power front.
It's like, what what's up right America? Like, please let
us have more at the at the dinner table, you know,
not in that tone, but you know, countries do this
all the time. They possure, they possure back and forth.
I don't think, at least personally, not yet, I don't
really think bricks is a serious thing per se.
Speaker 7: So this was a this is a really interesting discussion.
Thank you for sort of outlining you know, your sister's
thought here. But I want to bring this back to
kind of your bread and butter, right, which is preparedness.
The two a stuff. How do you view you know,
what you've just said, How does that affect your your
kind of preparation for disaster, your beliefs about you know
that sort of thing. Are they related?
Speaker 2: Yeah, to a degree. Maybe I'm gonna go slightly slightly
off tangent here since I'm reading some of the comments,
but I think it's an important It's like reading the news,
but like a more expanded version of that. Like me
viewing geopolitics is distinctly in a lot of ways detached
from my day to day life, right like you know, uh,
I'm not. I might be before America, you know, being
a world hedgemon, I might not be for America being
a global hedgemon. But I think it's fundamentally important to understand,
you know, what that means and implications of certain things
because you can kind of understand why certain things are
happening in the world. And a big reason why I
made that video on a channel that has nothing to
do with geopolitics is I think it's important to understand
vectors for change our life, right in our life, to
big change, right, not just little ady bit change, but
big change. This has the potential to be one of
the the American retrenchment. Whether you like it or not,
completely irrelevant, does not matter. It will change your way
of life massively. So it's important to understand what the vector,
you know, why it exists the way it does nowadays,
and what some vectors might be for that to occur.
And if you can recognize those themes, well, you are
in a lot of in a much better position than
ninety nine percent of Americans to recognize situations well before
they happen. Right. You know, some people might see Japan
completely removing their their you know, the limitations on the
constitution and really gearing up, or we might see some
American bases being removed from certain parts of the world.
Most people are going to be like, yeah, about about time,
And maybe it is about time, But if you're informed
on the subject, that's a huge red flag for oh
my gosh, the people in power are consciously thinking about retrenchment,
and at some point that may click, that may just
completely click over world perception wise, and in a very
short timeframe, we can see a vastly different change to
our day to day life. And I think it's important
to a minimum be mentally prepared for that, right, that's
an important thing to do in life. Even if you
don't do any physical prepared being mentally prepared for things
helps you not be blindsided into default into normalcy bias.
So that's kind of how I view, at least geopolitics.
It's also fun to talk about, right, you know, no,
fifty percent of this stuff is going to be wrong, but.
Speaker 7: You know, oh yeah, because it's it goes back to
that point about the best mental model is sixty percent, right,
you know, it's like you'd hope to be at least
close to the top of that. Well, I think about
it with the COVID stuff because regardless of your opinions
on COVID particularly, it did really change things. And you know,
it's kind of a news junkie. I was watching, you know,
and like I think it would have been like the
year before it hit, like twenty nineteen, the end of
that year, December, right, Yeah, watching the videos that I
think all of us saw out of China.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not everyone interestingly, but yeah, like some
people didn't, so they have very very different perspectives on
COVID than I think. From what I'm guessing here, you
or I had the perspective.
Speaker 7: Of COVID right, well, definitely, and so at least for
those first couple months, like before anyone else was noticing,
it was kind of this soft like wait a minute,
like is this it? You know, there's this thing happening
in China that no one's talking about. And that means
that when it finally came around, you know, when everyone
else is losing their mind, you're like, Okay, well, I
mean it's probably bad, but at least I'm emotionally prepared
for the end of the world, which.
Speaker 2: Is certainly something.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a really interesting thing you brought up.
It's not geopolitics, but for those that were actively watching
world events, you know, COVID started for us in about
November December roughly speaking of that timeframe, and you're watching
the cases out of China and it looks and you know,
everyone's gonna be like, yeah, COVID's a cough whatever, shut up.
Back then, we didn't have good information.
Speaker 7: We knew nothing, We knew nothing.
Speaker 2: All we knew was that China was getting bent over
raw because they were in ill equipped to handle this stuff,
and their solution was welding people into buildings. So you
know when when people are being welded into buildings like
that's a what like, you know, everyone.
Speaker 7: You look at that and you're like, well, logically, that
has to be really bad.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 7: I wouldn't do that unless it was literally like the
Rainbow six virus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looked terrifying. And then I'm like, oh god.
And then you know, within circles, we're talking about like,
how do we deal with this thing? It's respiratory and nature.
I'm talking to some doctors like this is how you
can handle with over the shelf stuff, this is how
you build a clean room. Like I bought some of
these things, and then oh god, January came around and
that little COVID tracker that was on like I think
John Hopkins or whatever with rgis one dot in America,
two dots in America, and it's like it's over right,
it's here now. Turned out, Yeah, okay, didn't end up
being that big of a deal, but you know, relatively speaking,
it's still one of the biggest events in our lifetime.
But you know, not to thegree most people thought. And
I think that's an inch analog, right, I could have
very you know, you know, add an extra zero to
the mortality rate of this thing, and things could have
been vastly different and no one really knew at the time.
And I kind of view it the same way with
you know, looking at geopolitics, it's good to understand this stuff.
Good chance it's going to be like COVID where it's like, ah, okay,
psych I overreacted, But it's good to keep your ear
to the ground and.
Speaker 7: Definitely brought we're running out of time. If people want
to find more of your work, what's a good way
for them to do that.
Speaker 2: I mean, my name's brass facts. You put it into
into YouTube and then the dog with the night vision
goggle shows up and you can click on it. Admittedly,
though most of it is not going to be like
this conversation. In fact, the vast majority of it it's
not going to be like this conversation. I focus mostly
on like gun reviews, gear reviews, and then philosophy of use,
of how to use something that in a prepared context
to a extreme autistic degree. But yeah, if you want
to check that stuff.
Speaker 7: Out, well, definitely, and I highly recommend your stuff. I
really have to blame you for an astonishing number of
poor financial decisions. You made me buy an acog and
I will never recover from it.
Speaker 2: But I can't wait till you buy an elcam.
Speaker 7: Don't talk to me about it anyway. If you guys
want to find my stuff, this podcast available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you listen to podcasts. You can also check out
my substack and my sponsor Axios Remote Fitness of Coaching
if you're interested in preparing yourself for unfamiliar times. Jd
the owner, personal friend of mine, absolute physical specimen, genuinely
frightening human being. He's pretty good at it. He can
help you get that set up. And again, Brox, thank
you so much for your time. Thanks for having me
and everyone at home. Remember keep your head up, but
I can't last forever. Good night, all right, focus trip,
Welcome to the j burd and show how you doing.
Speaker 2: Man, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me own sir.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. This is my
roughly quarterly adventure into gun tube. So obviously you know
I know what you do. I'm a fan of your work,
but some of my audience might not be familiar with you. So,
so who are you and what do you do on
the Internet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 6: Focus Trip I run the Focus Trip YouTube channel. I'm
also a contributor on thegun dot Deals channel. I also
own Focus Shooting LLC. Most of what I focus on
is gun content reviews. Recently been doing some semi controversial
live streams as well. Yeah, basically make content that interests
me in the gun space, if you will.
Speaker 7: Yeah. So, I've followed your work for a while, and
really what I find valuable in it is that you
take a very different attitude towards product review than show
we say a lot of your compatriots. So I'm curious, right,
could you tell me, you know, how you approach reviewing
a product and maybe contrast that to what's more popular. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So, if you watch my channel like five years ago,
maybe even six or seven years ago, at this point,
the old content's really bad, really crappy content. Didn't exactly
know what I was doing. I was just having fun
with guns and basically posting it online, which is fine
for you know, like very low tier content. But as
I got better, as I kind of knew what I
liked more and liked less and developed higher standards for
actually reviewing product, and you know understanding what I liked
about a product, didn't like about a product, and what
I thought was a waste of money. My emphasis changed
from essentially shooting something and talking about it to very
critically looking at a product, what it does well, what
it does poorly, and does this actually provide benefit to
the end user. Now, a lot of my compatriots in
the tow a space online or at least the gun
review space let's see it say they focus mostly on
selling product. They emphasize the pros of a product, what
it does well. Very rarely is there an analytical look
at what something does, especially compared to other products that
may or may not be better. And we'll get into
this later. I'm sure about the consumerism side on it,
and how it's all designed to push more and more product.
Whereas most these people rely on companies to get more
product to keep the reviews coming, a lot of them
get early access to product. I try to not stand
with companies, but stand in between companies and the end user,
because I don't believe that these companies, just for the
mere fact that they exist and produce a product, deserve
access to my viewer's wallets. Right where a lot of
my fellow gun tobers appear to be happy to sell
out their audience for a couple bucks.
Speaker 7: It's an interesting, interesting thing you bring up there because
and I feel like this is something that you gain
with enough experience, Right, You've been around the block a
few times, and you start to notice this kind of
like cyclical pattern, right, which is new product comes out
and even actually, in many cases before it's released to
the public, there's this kind of like interior ring of
media figures who get access to it right before anyone else.
They drop a review the day that it becomes available
to the public. They all say it's amazing and it
is the hot thing, right, you need to get it,
and if you don't, you're gay and lame and everyone's
going to make fun of you. And then two months
pass and everyone's forgotten about that old thing, and the
cycle continues. And so you see that happen enough times
and you start to look around and you're like, wait
a minute, what's going on here? And yeah, so maybe
could you speak to the way that companies tend to
that tend to interact with kind of firearms influencers.
Speaker 6: Oh, one hundred percent. So the cyclical nature of This
goes way deeper than just new product. Get excited for
new product. Forget about that product, We're onto the next thing.
If you look at it, there's waves of different styles
of products like red dots, lpbos, you know, magnifiers, prisms,
lever guns, revolvers are hot again for some reason, all
sorts of different cycles. But you see the same faces
repeated over and over and over again. Because these actors
are reliable for the companies. They have the appearance of
being unbiased. Some of the time, they have the appearance
of being objective, right, But at the end of the day,
the reason why they are still on these companies short
list of influencers is because they're reliable money generators.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: For example, a few times when I was accepting products
for review, I would have something negative and then I
would post a video about it. I would get an
angry email, and then it would be like, Okay, well, hey,
we can't send you any more product if you're going
to act like this, and it's like are you threatening me?
You know, it's like I guess I don't want product
from you at this point. So a lot of the
times you see the same faces because they make reliably
high quality videos with generic talking points. They'll say it's
great and amazing, and then two months later, new product
comes out and then they're saying the exact same things
about that product, and it's like, well, hey, what about
that thing you just reviewed? And they're like what, what
do you mean. It's almost like there's a short term
memory that a lot of these people have, and you'll
see it. There's more of an awareness of it at
this point, since people like me and others have been
calling it out, and I mean people like not in
Fancy if you look back, he's been calling it out
for a decade now, which is why he's been ostracized
from the larger gun community, if you will. But people
who get review guns, who are on short lists tend
to behave in a specific way towards these companies. And
you'll even hear rhetoric like this on podcasts where people say, hey,
you know, if you ever have an issue with your product,
you got to take it to the company first and
give them a chance to fix it before you go
public with an issue. And my approach is the opposite
of that. If there's an issue with the product, you
need to inform potential buyers of that, like right away,
because people are going to be buying that in the interim,
and I don't believe that companies have a lot of
them anyways, don't have a great financial incentive to actually
fix issues. It's much cheaper, it's much faster just to
throw an issue under the bridge and then move on
to your next big thing.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: Well, it's especially interesting because you've seen that kind of
like should we say, like shoddy consumer practices go much
farther up the chain than you would expect, right, Like,
I hate to say it, but you buy a low
end product, to the bottom of the barrel price, you
kind of assume that, right, it's not great. But you know,
I bought a seventy dollars Amazon red Dot for my
t X twenty two because it's a twenty two and
if it breaks, I kind of know what I'm getting. Right,
It's a Chinese company that probably doesn't exist a week
after I bunch. But when you see that to companies
that you know, not only charge a premium for their product,
but also you know, go around to governments and say, hey,
look at my new, my new you know, whiz bang product.
It's the best ever. And take that same attitude to it.
It's a revealing I'll put it that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 6: I mean, if we want to talk about companies that
government contracts with without somehow putting out a decent product,
I mean, like sig I.
Speaker 7: Was about to say, you could figure who I was
talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 6: It's like, okay, so you got you know, hundreds of
millions or I don't even know if the contracts are
up to a billion yet, but just so much money
for these different products. Surely it's not killing people in
the you know, by accident, you know, not intentionally killing people.
It's injuring their own users, right, I think actually talking
about Sake, I think yesterday or today they lost a
lawsuit against somebody for eleven million dollars for it going
off in somebody's holster again, So I mean there's litigation
to back this stuff up that these companies. And what's
funny is too, like ten plus years ago when the
three twenty was coming out, you had the same wave
of positive reviews, everybody loving it, everybody that's saying it
was the best thing ever. And then you know, your
reports trickle out here and there, and then ten years
later everybody's like, actually, it was a terrible gun all along,
bad design from the start.
Speaker 7: So I'll put in a little bit of backstory on
this because you know, while you and I are are
you know, incorrigible gun off, my audience is not, at
least primarily basically, what happened is six Hour, not the
German one, an American company with a similar name, release
this this new gun, right, it's gonna be the best
thing ever. It had some admittedly innovative features that you know,
we won't need to get into, but very very quickly
upon coming out to the market, it revealed a charming
new quirk where it would just go off in a holster,
which is a focused trip. You could back be up
on this suboptimal for a gut and okay, fair enough,
a new product comes to market that's you know, and
it's bad. That happens quite often. But what was really
suspicious is despite it being bad, and not just bad
as in sometimes it would go off. But even if
you have a perfectly working version of this gun, it's
not very good. Like it's fine, but it's certainly not
worth the downside. All of a sudden magically, different nations,
different you know, police organizations all started adopting it, uh,
including right the US military, And you know, there are
people who go deep into the specifics of this, uh,
but it seems extremely likely, uh that SIG's Hour basically
paid off people so that they would be selected because
they did not meet any of the criteria by which
the you know, the relevant guns were selected. And so obviously,
you know, scummy companies are scummy companies. But my point is, right,
these products are not or these problems right with consumer
practices are not just limited to the kind of like
bottom of the barrel, you know, like fly by Night companies.
It's kind of endemic.
Speaker 6: Somehow, the more government contracts you have, the less you
care about quality control. Now, talking about SIG and their
government contracts, you know, there's Aukham's razor, right, everybody knows
what that is. But I have another concept called Okham's
retard and that is what the government operates on when
picking out handguns or rifles or anything. Whatever the most
retarded decision could be, that's the one that they're going
to make. So going with the three twenty was absolutely
a combination of bribery, and back door shananigans, and you
ended up with a subpar handgun that people have been
trying to get away from now. So yeah, that whole
situation is just an absolute mess.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I also want to return to the reviewer
side of it, right, because look, I was a little
bit I was a little bit young for gamer Gate
wasn't really on the internet then, but I sort of
became aware of it in college. I've told this story.
My audience has heard it, you know, so many times
they're rolling their eyes. But I went to college and
took a class called game theory, which I naively assumed
was was like economic game theory, right, Prisoner's dilemma and
all that. It turns out that it was the critical
theory of video games, which means I just got an
entire crash course from a three hundred pounds feminist about
gamer Gate and got to pay for it. And so
point is right. The reason I bring that up is
to say that that was an industry where you saw
a similar problem, right, where there were journalists who were
being paid to deliver unbiased information who had a financial
should we say, a financial stake right in companies or products.
And so I'm curious. Right, you mentioned earlier that people
are more aware of it. I mean, do you think
that there is sort of a gamer gate esque situation
in the firearms community.
Speaker 6: It will never be to the same level because game
journalists are the lowest of the low, right, So in
the tiers of journalists, right, they're all peons, but game
journalists are like shoot on site, right, the worst of
the worst. If you're a game journalist, I'm sorry that
you exist. For the most part, in the firearms community,
you actually do have some standards. So for instance, recently,
TFBTV was doing a video on the new magpole slash
zev folding pistol thing in the jig. Right, the entire
comment section is calling them out for how poor of
a fluff piece video, Like it's obvious, it's just the
most biased, ridiculous puff piece ever imagined. Like it was
painful to watch. And so this sort of thing is
is very noticed in the gun community. I think partially
because it's a more storied industry. It has more prestige,
if you will, It has a lot of history there,
a lot of the writers there, a lot of the
companies do hold themselves to slightly higher standards. So I
don't think you're ever going to get a Gamergate type
situation where you know, you suddenly find out that people
are getting paid to do certain things and whatnot. That's
kind of an open secret. But even a company like
TFBTV that doesn't accept money, that is very clear in
their literature and behind the scenes and whatnot, they do
accept early access and flights and soy monetary incentive isn't
just money. There's a lot more to it. It's access,
it's all this other stuff that you lose when you
go against the grain.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that's an interesting thing to talk about, right
that oftentimes the quid, the quid pro quo isn't even
like a you know, a bag of cash with a
dollar sign written on it. You know, it is exactly
what you said. It's the combination of you know, because
of the way the internet works, right you, you were
incentivized to be the first out with something, and if
you lose out and all of a sudden you're trailing
two weeks behind, you've lost the algorithm. And so it
seems like from the outside looking in, companies can kind
of use that and hold.
Speaker 2: That over your head.
Speaker 6: So a lot of guys that are new to the
firearms industry, specifically content creation. I get these messages all
the time of how do I get access, how do
I start?
Speaker 2: How do I do this?
Speaker 6: And it really sucks to tell them that you kind
of don't want it. Because nowadays, if you watch a
day one gun review, you're gonna notice the like to
dislike ratio is way worse. The comment section is full
of like shill, shill, shill, shill, shill, right, and then
people like hey, I'll wait for the you know, the
brass facts review or I'll wait for this review because
they know that, yeah, it's going to be two weeks late,
a month late, but they know that they're going to
get actual, like good information, right versus these corporate puff pieces.
Which is why I think, or all of the gun
industry's many faults, it is in a much better space
than a lot of these other industries. And it's because
for whatever reason, again, the gun people, myself included, are
more apt to call these people out right. Something that
I used to be a part of is more car
centric stuff and computer centric stuff as well. The computer
space is actually also really good about calling out companies
for different poor behavior. For instance, MSI was essentially bribing
people or holding things above people's heads for negative reviews.
So that is something that other industries also do well,
and the gun industry is not the worst at but
it is something that definitely still is there and that
people need to be aware of. But by and large,
if you're kind of autistic about it like we are,
like you're gonna notice it. You're gonna know who the
players are, who's going to put out the day one reviews,
who's gonna get early access and fight to keep that access,
because I'll be honest, a lot of these guys are
only relevant because they have a day one review that
some normy is going to click on. Right, So even
if nobody watches the rest of their content, if they
get a video out early enough, you know, they'll get
a couple hundred thousand views off of that, and that's
what they sustain for the you know, four or five
major product launches in a year.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's an interesting point. One of the things that
I have noticed, uh, and this is especially apparent since COVID,
is the impact that social media has had on gun culture,
right because as someone who grew up in this and
don't get me wrong, they're pros and cons to this.
It's gotten way way bigger, right, and the emergence of
I don't know what you would call it, but like
hype culture, drop culture, which I don't understand. I deleted
my Instagram in twenty twenty, so I don't get it,
and I feel like an old man. But that's a
very new, I mean relatively speaking, development, because when I
grew up, right, gun culture was you know, some crazy
baby boomer at a gun show, sitting out in the
parking lot, you know, passing out. You know, what's something
that is either definitely or at least possibly going to
get you on a government watch list, or ranting about Waco.
And it was insane. It was fun, right, but it
was a very niche thing. And so I'm curious, right,
what have you have you seen in your time in
this kind of part of culture. How was social media
affecting it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: No, social media absolutely is responsible for a lot of
the good and bad growth in the gun industry. So
my family was never super into guns. My dad was
in the military. I have a couple brothers in the military,
but we never like owned a lot of guns or
went shooting all the time. I really only ever went
a couple times before I was eighteen, with like my
brother or something like that. But popular media, I think
Modern Warfare one and two, and of course subsequent games
as well were huge for that sort of things because
ever since you know, two thousand and nine and whenever
Modern Warfare two came out, the ACR has been my
favorite rifle. Then you know, fifteen years later, hey, I've
owned four of them.
Speaker 2: Not a great gun, but I've.
Speaker 7: Owned Okay, you can't make fun of me for having
an LCN if you have had four acrs. We have
both made horrible emotional decisions.
Speaker 6: I acknowledge that the ACR is bad, though I'm still
loved it.
Speaker 7: It's deep in the closet. I have not admitted at it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the thing.
Speaker 6: I like, you can I there is that culture right about.
You see something in a video game and then you
click on a Grantham video that shows off like I
think he just did a video a couple weeks ago
on the whatever the new? Is it like black Ops
six or something? That's a crazy thing to say, isn't
it black Ops six? Anyways, So you see something in
popular media and then kids now they have access to
all of this information and all of this high quality content,
at least in terms of looks. So if somebody wants
to see, hey, you know, I remember PUBG was big
for this too, because there was like pubg videos of like,
you know, something bouncing off of a frying pan, and
then that video would have like fifteen million views or something, right,
somebody basically recreating something in real life that you would
see in a video game. So I think social media
absolutely has brought guns to a younger generation because I
do remember what you're saying about a gun show was
a essentially the average age might be seventy years old
on the inside of a gun show, right, And now
if you walk into your local gun store in a
you know, at least mildly populated area, maybe that's come
all the way down to like thirty five as the
average age. You know, you still got your boomers, of course,
but man, I know a lot of eighteen to twenty
five year olds who are getting into guns, and like
my audience, I think forty percent is under twenty five
or twenty five and under. So it is a huge
demographic for young people, which is fantastic.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 6: They're coming into this space. They want to be part
of it. The downside is that they're young people, right.
You know, I'm only twenty nine years old, so I don't.
Speaker 2: Look down on people.
Speaker 6: But you know that this type of culture that the
hype culture. You know, oh gosh, I got this in
Flecktarn Camo, right, or like Noveski and like they're having
like naked models for a gun launcher something like that,
and it's like, okay, that's like marketing from like nineteen
ninety four, you know, on like a beer calendar.
Speaker 2: Or something like that.
Speaker 6: But you have this weird amalgamation of hyper young people
who love the hype beast culture. They like the drops
a limited run you got to buy bye Bye. Now,
I have buddies who are in the shoe thing, and
that's what shoe culture is about. It's all about limited
run drops, getting that colorway that only comes around like
once a decade or something like that, and then you
resell it, right, And so I think it's it's a
good thing, right because you're getting a lot of people
into the industry. But at the same time, with those
people coming in, it's also they're not hyper mature, you know,
they're hype beast not hyper mature, and so they are
very consumery and they're also very low effort. So it's
not like us necessarily, I don't want to speak for you,
but like I'm like, hey, the Secondmendment very important, the
original intention of it, you know, that needs to be protected,
that needs to be propagated. And then a lot of
these new guys are basically like, I don't know, man,
guns are cool, you know, and that's as far as it.
Speaker 2: Goes for them, right, Yeah, I definitely see that.
Speaker 7: I mean in the YouTube space as well. Right, it's
pretty easy to see the kind of different tiers of this,
right where it's like there's the kind of like very
surface level and look, this stuff is really important, you know,
it gets people interested in it. That's like I'm going
to shoot X with Y, you know, like substitute. It's
like mad lips, right, substitute your favorite you know, object
and combination of kinetic forces, right, And that's pretty much it.
And that's like there's not a lot of information to
be had, you know, It's it's entertaining, right as popcorn whatever.
I don't book grudge it to anyone. And as you
get kind of like further and further in until you've
reached the stage where you're like, well, if this channel
has more than five thousand subscribers, and I can actually
hear the guy talking over the massive fan in this
machine shop not interested, you know, which is obviously like, Okay,
you've probably over rarefied your taste. But I think it's
a it's a more healthy spot because you know, one
of the things I really remember in the kind of
like mid two thousands was just how far how hard
it was to get any sort of information whatsoever. And
so I remember, like you get my grandpa's house like
thumbing through like soldier of Fortune magazine from before I
was born, and like, I don't know, like guns and AMMO,
it'd be like, well, I guess, I guess the best
gun there is is a Kimber forty five. And I'm
eight years old, you know. Where it's like you just
don't have reputable information.
Speaker 6: M Yeah, And that's definitely changed. And like you said,
I think it's important for all those facets to be
in place, right, because you almost have the the normy too,
like prepared citizen pipeline, if you will. Right, So there's
this super low level propaganda that might not even be
like strictly pro to A propaganda or pro gun propaganda,
being you know, like movies and video games, TV shows
and whatnot that might tangentially get a few percentage points
of people interested in guns. And then you have your
your normy slop content, right, which is like, hey, are
these boobies? These fake boobies? What to do is like
will a twenty two go through these? Basically like you said, right,
we'll ex penetrate wire whatever it happens to be. You
have the more high level, which is like a little
bit more entertaining, a little more information focused. And then
like the next step up is like the hyper like Okay,
we're starting a militia, we're prepared citizens, and we're doing
that right, and as long as there's a pipeline there
to get people into like the more pro to A
side of it, I in general am fine with the
entertainment style content, but I also don't want that to
just be the only thing, and that's where people stop.
Speaker 7: Right. Well, my favorite dark pastime is so YouTube shorts abomination.
I'm mad that it exists. However, have you ever been
down the rabbit hole of ghetto YouTube? Shorts exactly as
regards firearms.
Speaker 6: It's the worst I know can do this, and it's
the one step above actual ghetto YouTube content. But there's
enough of it there where you could make a react
style video once a week. It was very entertaining. It
would get a lot of views, and it's just it's
essentially like this is gonna. I don't think I can
say this, but it's like going to the zoo.
Speaker 7: It's like David attenb.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you look inside, you laugh, and then you leave.
But in this case, you're the tour guide, right, so
you're just bringing your audience through this zoo. Everybody points
and laughs, and then you come back next week.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: That content, that's like it's still low level content, but
that would be so easy to monetize, right, because it's
so painful you watch this.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 6: There was the one clip floating around where the guy
like shoots his floor with an ar and then he
explains how he's doing it, and then he does it again,
and it's like.
Speaker 7: Off camera shot his floor in the apartment.
Speaker 6: Right, and then you do it again. All right, people,
This it's it's amazing content, true, is one of the
things of all time.
Speaker 7: One of the other great sub genres is uh aspiring
young astrophysicists shooting off full auto glocks in residential neighborhoods
and then posting it on the internet with their face.
Speaker 6: My one is the one where they combine those super
cheap tracer rounds so it looks like a light show
is going off.
Speaker 7: You know, they just spray it into a lake in
the middle of the neighborhood.
Speaker 6: I believe this was unintentional, but in one of those
shorts that I've seen, the audio comes off and it's
like unintelligible. You know, it's talking that has these subtitles
and they're speaking, but the subtitles are just unintelligible.
Speaker 2: And I don't know that.
Speaker 6: Just that it doesn't know what they're saying. I don't
know if there's any generator but.
Speaker 7: YouTube AI, No, that's that's like one of the one
of the And honestly, this is why I met up
with another guy who's been on my podcast a couple
of times, went out, you know, shot guns, had a
good time and we were talking about the absolute horror
that is shooting at public ranges. Right. You know, I'm
lucky enough now to have you know, multiple pieces of property,
I can go on and shoot at it.
Speaker 2: It's great.
Speaker 7: But in the town that I went to college in, right,
it was kind of a small rural town, big state
school in the middle of it. There was a free
shooting range and it was just chaos, pure chaos at
all times, all genres. And the last time I ever
went there, there was a big It was an engineering school, right,
so there was a big Chinese population, and there was
this Chinese kid there first showed up with one of
those kind of like gamer twenty two rifles they used
for like Olympic sports or whatever, not that interesting. So
I'm shooting, you know, I got my target in front
of me, and I hear this.
Speaker 2: Just deafening boom.
Speaker 7: I look over and this kid has pulled out this
like massive nickel plated revolver, and I'm like, well, that's
that's disturbing. And then what I realize is more disturbing
is he has not brought a target. He is shooting
at my target, and he is three to four lanes
down from me, And the misses start to get closer
and closer, right, Like the first one is like low
a foot in front of the target than like six
feet in front of the target, and I'm like just
watching this triangle shrink and I was like, all right,
I'm gone, I'm never coming back. That was the last
moment I went to a public range. And I'll put
it this way, that is not an atypical story. So
I'm curious, right, do you do you shoot on private land?
Have you had similar horror stories?
Speaker 6: So in Washington where I live, I was there for
twenty seven years before they basically tried to shut down
my business. But there are there's so much public land
in western Washington and even eastern Washington when I was
going to college there that you can basically kind of
find a place within thirty minutes. Like I had Capital Forest,
I had some old rock quarries that I used to
shoot at, so they were public spaces, but maybe once
every couple months, as somebody who shot all the time,
I would run into somebody else, but usually it's not
a big deal. Out here in South Dakota, there's no
public land, so I have to drive three hours to
go to the National Grasslands in Pier and there's one
public range about an hour and a half from me
that I do go to somewhat often. And in South
Dakota fortunately, especially rural South Dakota, there's almost never anybody
there at its beautiful lanes, no trash, you know, and
it's your own space too, because there's basically berms in
between each set. So I think there's a twenty five set,
a fifty set, and then two one hundred yard lanes
where you can essentially it's like fifty feet wide one
hundred feet wide on some of the bigger ones, so
you can kind of do whatever you want. So, I mean,
I've talked to cops out there because they'll stop you
and like, hey, you know, how's it going. They'll just
chat with you. And for me, it's like I'm always
having SBRs. I have suppressors, I have binaries or FRTs
out there, So I do get the odd look every
now and again, especially when you're like kit it up,
you know, with a camera sitting next to you and
people are driving by and they're like, what's this retard doing?
Speaker 2: And yeah.
Speaker 6: So, I mean, my interactions out here in South Dakota
very pleasant. But if I were near a big city,
I think I would have a very different set of
experiences with the clientele of these free ranges. I have
heard all the horror stories, so it is quite fun
to think about that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, see, I had a slightly different problem. I just
had like crazy Chinese expats and then like rednecks, which
is its own separate variety of an issue. But it's
actually it's funny bring that up. I knew you were
in the Pacific Northwest just from write the geography of it.
I went up there for the first time in my
entire life a few weeks ago for a conference, and
that is a beautiful area of the country, ruled by
the worst people in the world. Deeply sorry about that,
but I understand the appeal. It's it's genuinely beautiful out there.
Speaker 6: No, it is the most beautiful place Western Washington, White Pass,
no quality, all that stuff. If you ever get the
chance to drive that during winter time, check out what's
that place Levenworth, which was like an old German town
up there, Absolutely beautiful, but can't stand the people, so
absolutely ruins the experience.
Speaker 7: All.
Speaker 6: I like a lot of places like I mean, California's gorgeous, right,
everybody would love to live in California, great weather, great beaches.
Can't stand the people.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm I'm actually here's here's my thing with that area,
and it's uh, I've only been to Portland. Right the
way people described Portland, I was expecting mogadichu right like
I was. I was expecting it to be unlivable.
Speaker 6: Well, wered you wrong?
Speaker 2: Why would you over it?
Speaker 7: Yeah? I went over like the whole city. I was
there for a couple of days. You didn't have much
to do it. Don't get me wrong, it's not great.
But what tips it over from just being like a dirty,
crappy city with a punch with a ton of homeless people,
which I hate to say it is not a rare
thing anymore, is the Pacific Northwest. Lib Tart is a
very specific breed. And it made sense because I have
been to other places that felt like they were dressing
up as that, like that's what they aspired to be.
Speaker 2: And I felt like I.
Speaker 7: Saw the original. I was like, oh, this is who
you're copying, and there's somehow even worse.
Speaker 2: Somebody else is just a cheap knockoff.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: I have to drive into Portland every week for an
outside sales job that I had, so I am very
familiar with the downtown areas in there. You know, I
would I would like walk the Capitol at night and
do stupid stuff like that with my friends, and it
was a we probably didn't realize how stupid that was
at the time of nineteen nineteen, walking around just just
homeless people like surrounding you everywhere, and like, oh, this
is it's like going to the zoo again. Probably don't
do this. It's bad, it's not moral. But at the
time it was like entertaining, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it was twenty nine. I'm like, okay, no,
this is just really sad, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah. The UH I had a similar experience. I lived
in kind of one of these like crumbling urban centers
in the UH in the American South, and UH there
was this there was this old theater, like really really old,
like you know, maybe twenty uh like twenty screen theater
that had been boarded up on all sides, but the
upper windows had been like smashed out, and every night
when I lived there, it was like a zombie movie.
Like it would get dark and you'd see movement and
people would just start like pouring out of this theater.
And it was like one of the creepiest things ever
because like you you would kind of do the math.
You're like, that's like it's probably like seventy eighty people
just in there, like in the dark, cold day, And
uh yeah, I'm very happy to live in a place
where there are no homeless people. Now.
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny you say that.
Speaker 6: It's like it's twenty six out here in South Dakota
now and I live in a town of like seven
hundred people, So there is actually zero homeless people here
because homeless people cannot survive here.
Speaker 7: That's the advantage of living in the far north. It
gets too cold.
Speaker 6: Well yeah, and there's there's no big city for forty miles, right,
so there's like there's literally nowhere for them to go
well out of you That's what lot about that, isn't there.
It's like there's no chance to be homeless, so therefore,
you know, like people people have to find a way
to not be homeless, so they end up not.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's an interesting, interesting thought process. Yeah, yeah, it's uh,
I definitely don't miss it having you know, lived in
a bigger city for a for a portion of my life.
You know, if you have the same interest that we do,
you just realize, why do I live in a place
where every thing I want to do is illegal and
everyone hates me, you know, right, Yeah, it's a pretty
easy trade to make.
Speaker 6: And so like the move to South Dakota was like,
people are nice.
Speaker 2: Everybody waves at you.
Speaker 6: Like a year and a living year. People are like, oh, yeah,
you're the new guy. You live over there on Second Street,
you know, or whatever it is, because they recognize you
because you haven't been there for thirty years.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: It's just so such a different dynamic and a different
type of person in the rural farmlands, you know, than
like these people who do actually hate you, right, and
especially as you know, I have a wife, I have
three kids now, three little kids. I'm just never living
around people who I don't trust. It's just not worth it,
you know, to so what I don't have a twenty
four hour gas station five minutes away, you know. That's
that's the main downside. Life isn't as convenient, but it's
one hundred times better.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. You know. It's something
I talk about a lot about a lot about on
this show, right, is that like, yeah, sure, like they're
there's no free lunch. You're gonna have to give something up,
which actually weirdly enough, is something true both in your
living arrangements and your choice in firearms and firearms accessories, right,
which is like, at a certain point, like you can't
have it all, you know, you have to make some
sacrifices and having you know, lived in a point in
my life where I was, you know, working a good
job in a cool area with lots of things to
do and to buy, but also living in a place
where there's like a you know, decrepit movie theater full
of like one hundred crazy meth heads, and everything got
stolen and I'd walk outside and see human poop everywhere.
You're like, you know what, maybe I don't care about
a fresh market on my block. You know, maybe there
are other things in life.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's something more important than this. I don't know
if this is healthy for anyone to live like this, Oh.
Speaker 7: One hundred person. I mean, look like you go there
and you see the people there, They're not healthy. So obviously,
you know, you and I could probably talk about, you know,
cities for a long time. I genuinely hate most cities
in America. But you know, one of the things that
I think would be useful for for my audience, who
isn't necessarily super interested gun stuff. So let's say you know,
you're a guy, you're out of school, you've got a
decent job, no experience with guns.
Speaker 2: Where do you start, right? If you're in that situation, well,
you see, you.
Speaker 6: Start with a five thousand dollars night's armament and you
call it a day. Then you strap on like a
two hundred dollars Strike Eagle Vortex Strike Eagle, and you're
good to.
Speaker 2: Go one hundred percent.
Speaker 6: Look, the most important, the best advice that I give
to people is please do not ask me about other platforms.
It's going to be an AR fifteen. You're going to
buy an AR fifteen. If you have a little bit
of money, you can start with a bottom of the
barrel PSA. It might work for a couple thousand rounds
and you'll probably end up upgrading some parts. But that's
a good learning experience. I wouldn't recommend it as a
I'm never going to train with this and I'm going
to defend or you know, depend on it to defend
my life with the life of my loved ones with.
But if you just need something to start with, it's
a good start and you can upgrade if you have
a little bit more money, I think there are better
brands out there. BCM gets thrown around a lot, but
there are some smaller builders out there as well that
will put together a really high quality AR fifteen for you.
I've heard really good things about like Munition Works and
bare Arms, who essentially use off the shelf parts, but
the assembly is very important and there are people that
do it really well. And so if you have a
little bit more money that BCM, some of these other
guys are going to do a really, really good job
for that.
Speaker 7: So I'm curious, does that mean that your first your
first purchase is a rifle.
Speaker 6: Well, it depends, I guess. I guess it depends on
where you live. Most people would should start with a handgun.
Handguns are more difficult, they're less useful, but you can
carry them everywhere. So if that is your primary concern, yeah,
start with a handgun. Now, when it comes to handguns,
obviously glock is the big one. I don't particularly love clocks,
but if you want something that's reliable and that you
can train with and get better with, a glock is
a great way to start. You can also go an
M and P two point zero fantastic option be a
Walther PDPs, great option, CZ's great options. You don't need
anything fancy. You can find fantastic handguns for in between
four and five hundred dollars that are gonna dependably and
reliably get the job done. But most of what I
do is rifles because I hate handguns. I hate shooting handguns.
It's just something I'm forced to do because it's a
necessary skill.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, you.
Speaker 7: Sound you sound exactly like my uh, one of my
main shooting buddies who has been dragged kicking and screaming
to be even semi competent at shooting a pistol because
he hates it. I enjoy. I certainly get your point.
It is, by every objective standard, a worse weapon. Really.
The only advantage is I could put this in a pocket,
and you know, even in an eleven to five is
show we say, somewhat inconvenient to fit under your coat.
Speaker 2: Suboptimal inside of your pants for sure. Now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so if your audience isn't familiar handguns, they just
require a lot more time and intentionality to get good with. Essentially,
so they're not easy to control the recoil, especially if
you're somebody with reduced to strength. Whereas with almost any rifle,
you can basically just point in the direction, pull the trigger.
You'll figure it out very easily. But handguns do take
a lot more intentional training, time, energy, and unfortunately money
to get good with because you're going to end up
spending if you want to actually get good, You're going
to spend a lot of time dry firing, and you're
going to spend a lot of time on the ammunition.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's an interesting point, right, But buying a gun
is sort of similar to the actual, like listed price
of a house, right, which is like it's a significant portion,
but that is not your final total, right, Like you
need to budget for all.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I would say it's like the down payment on
a house.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly right, Like that is a component, right, and
it's important, but you know, so many people I think
it kind of like obsessed with a certain dollar amount
as like all you're going to spend and there's no way,
there's no two ways about it, right, it is at
a certain point, it's expensive. It's going to cost you money.
Now do you need to spend you know insert x,
you know incredibly overpriced you know, gun price, like no,
you don't something you know, cheap and cheerful work. But
I mean I think that you know, if you're not
already interested in guns, like if it doesn't tickle your autism,
it's just a useful skill to have, right, Like you
should be dangerous, you should be capable, and that's something
that can be done. It just requires a little bit
of work, right, It's a it's an extremely perishable skill
and if you're not you know, constantly brushing up on it,
it's going to go away quickly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, one hundred percent. Again, it's just one of those
things that budgeting is important, right, especially if you're somebody
onlimited funds like most of us are, so you're probably
not going to go out there and you know, spend
three thousand dollars on your STI or whatever they call
it now. Or you know, most people, unfortunately with the
consumerism thing, having the item is hot and sexy. That's
what they want to have and show off and take
pictures of it, and then they're like, oh, a case
of ammo is you know, two hundred and fifty bucks,
that's way too much money, right, Or they just don't
have the time to go out and train, so it
really does come down to being able to put in
the effort. Now, fortunately, dry fire is free, and if
your audience doess no what dry fire, that's basically practice
seeing weapon manipulations with no ammunition, So like finding your sites,
pulling the trigger, reloading, you can do all of that
stuff without ever firing a single round, but recoil control
and actually like using it in live fire is super important.
But you can fortunately kind of mitigate some of those
costs by spending fifteen twenty minutes a day dry firing
doing stuff like that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that's definitely something you know, I've I've seen
in my own kind of progression, right because look, we've
talked about the kind of like rampant consumerism you need
to buy this or you'll die kind of stuff. But
there are things that are just objectively better, right, Like
it is, shooting a handgun with an optic is for
pretty much everyone. Once you get used to it, going
to make you better. But it's a very difficult thing
to do right, at least as you're picking it up right,
And so that process of just like it sounds stupid,
but getting your reps in right, going through the motions,
figuring out how to do it is free. You get
to make you know, gun noises and point a gun
at yourself in the mirror. That could be kind of fun,
but you actually do get a genuine skill out of it,
and you can take something that you know, ordinarily people
would say, oh, it takes you this many hours to do,
which could cost you a lot of money, or you know,
you can just run the reps yourself and basically skip
the front half of that learning curve.
Speaker 2: Right, Like, it's not.
Speaker 7: Super entertaining, you know, it's not like the cool thing
you want to take photos of and potus on social media.
But if your end goal is actually getting better at
the skill, that's how you do it well.
Speaker 6: Right, In some ways, it's like working out, right, So
if you work out once a month, once every six months,
you're going to have exactly zero progress. But if like me,
you're working out, you know, four times a week at least,
and you're trying to get a five hundred pound deadlift,
a four hundred pound squad and a three hundred pound bench,
well you're going to have to put in some work,
and you're gonna have to be not only just put
in the work, but be intentional when you're doing it
to have goals. You know, for shooting, if you want
to use that analogy timer works really well, so you
can actually measure how fast you are, you know, take
note of how your hits are, use smaller targets, shoot
a further distances, all that sort of stuff to kind
of stretch your capabilities if you will. You know, it's
just it's like a lot of things. You know, if
you want to get good at performance driving, well, guess what,
you're going to have to spend some time on the
track and spend some money. You're gonna have to get fuel,
You're gonna have to get tires, do all this sort
of stuff. So I think that it is very important,
especially for all of us here in America, that we
actually not only have these rights, but exercise them and
get good with them so that you know, because again
you can own the things, you can buy the things,
but if you don't have the skills to back it
up or to actually use them an application, you're just
going to be a high value loot drop for somebody
else who has put in the work.
Speaker 7: We at a certain point, right like when when lefties say,
you know, people treat guns like fetishes or magic objects
in many cases not actually that wrong, Like people kind
of treat them like dream catchers, right where it's like
I'll put this under my bed and it will protect
me from the evil eye. You know, which is this?
This like will simply by owning it, it has granted
me protection. And yeah, that's not true, right, It's a
it's a tool with a skill associated with it. I mean,
it's like saying, well, I own boxing gloves, therefore I'm
gonna fight Mike Tyson or not current Mike Tyson the
like currently you probably have a pretty decent chance anyway,
not to make fun of the elderly. But it is right,
like it actually there's.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 7: I like how we as a country we're like, yeah,
it's too mean to make Biden be the president, put
Mike Tyson in the ring and make him suffer. I
think this country is just addicted to making old people suffer.
Speaker 6: Well, if you want to talk about like a form
of degeneracy is when our decadence is when the entertainment
becomes so it has to become wild and just insane
in so many different ways for to actually like impress people.
I suppose you know, like boxing is too boring now,
so now we're gonna do mma. We're gonna increase the violence.
And if it's boxing, it needs to be a spectacle
of some famous person beating up another famous like we
have to we have to combine things together. Right, So
I'm gonna have a movie star box a TikTok star
and that's gonna be it because a regular boxing match
is no longer exciting enough for us.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: Well, look, as uh, maybe this is a situation I
should not comment on. Is the number one fan of
the police Activity YouTube channel? Uh so, but no, I
get your point, right, I'm actually just talking with my
wife about this. Uh because and this is gonna be
difficult to say for the sake of YouTube, uh because
it's a little bit untowarded. But one of the weird
trends in movies, right is, you know, ever since Game
of Thrones, the like edgy cool thing you could do
right to sh that you were really out there. So
first it was like full frontal nudity, then it was
full frontal mail nudity, and that was like a progressive thing,
like oh, we're you know, abolishing the nudity gap in
a movie like the recent one. And again, forgive me
for saying this. Understand it's a little bit untowor it,
but it's it's relevant to the conversation. Is that, you know,
there's this movie that came out, it's called like Salt
Burn or something, and there've been a kind of like
a couple of copycat films which you've basically been showing
like a forcible male sodomy right on screen, like, oh,
that's the that's the thing, right, And you see that
even over the course of my life right there, like wow,
you know, Game of Thrones is so shocking and edgy.
Two you know, ten years later, it's like, well, in
order to get that same visceral reaction from people, you
have to like really really jack up, you know, the
amount of shock value to it. And so, like we
were talking earlier about, you know, like the downsides of
living in the city, and you know, one of the
things that I noticed that I didn't really like about
myself living in a city is that I got incredibly
callous to like just human suffering. Right, Like I saw
like a horrible say, but like I saw a guy
overdose and die in front of my apartment, and I
just walked past it. I mean, like to be fair
that the ambulance was there, he was very visibly already dead.
It's not like I could do anything right, But like
looking back on that, I was like, I don't like
how that just didn't affect me at the time. And
you know, some of that people do to themselves, right,
like with media or entertainment, but another part of its environmental,
and like I don't know, one of the things is
like that instinct is in you for a good reason, right,
and just deadening it on this kind of like meaningless
stimulus is probably not good for you or good for your.
Speaker 2: Soul one hundred percent.
Speaker 6: I mean culturally, we have become desensitized to so much
like like you said, like with the progression of degeneracy
in media, with the you know, quote unquote TikTok what's
it called brain rot that's out there where there needs
to be a constant dopamine hit, and if there's any
sort of negative emotions, we just suppress it and walk
by it.
Speaker 2: Basically.
Speaker 6: Funnily enough, I've heard similar stories to what you just
said of people living in cities and they'll be a
helpless guy odd on the ground and it's like do
I help him and get stabbed with a needle, or
do I just walk on by? Do I call the cops?
And then a lot of people choose just to do
nothing in that situation, right, And it's it's a dangerous situation,
but it's also at the same time it's like, well,
we're both human beings. We should try and help each
other out, surely, but society's gotten to a point where
it sounds callous to say, but it's like it's almost
not worth helping out our fellow man. For the ramifications
like if we do something wrong, if we injure somebody,
you know, it comes back on us. The easiest thing
is to do nothing.
Speaker 7: Well, that's the whole like Daniel Penny thing, right, you
know he restrained the guy who's flipping out on the
subway trying to hurt people, and I mean he's he's
on trial for murder, right, you know, And you see
that happen a couple of times, and you're like, all right,
not today. You know, I'm not going to help anyone out.
And like what you were talking about living in a
small town is you live among people where you are
one hundred percent sure that will never happen for let's
just say a multitude of reasons.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 6: You know, there's like bikes and whatnot outside of our
you know, there's like one apartment complex in my little
bi in my little town and there's you know, like kids,
bikes and everything just laying on the outfront. And that's
because there are no bike thieves out here, right, It's
just what it is.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: So, you know, I'm at church at a place that
we haven't been going for very long, and my kids
are running around and they're like four and two, right,
and I don't feel any sort of like, uh, where
my kids go. They're not on my side. I can't
see them, you know what's going on. It's like, no,
they're just over there playing with like ten other kids.
Speaker 2: It's fine. Who cares.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that kind of high trust society. You can't put
a price tag on it, right, No, not at all.
Speaker 6: Well, and it's funny because, yeah, in the old days,
in a high trust society, whinter time was coming, you
cannot be ostracized from the group, right. That is essentially
a death sentence to be ostracized from the group. And like,
you know, the fifteen hundreds or something during winter time, Right,
you get kicked out of your village, and it's like, okay, well,
now we just starve and die horribly over the next
couple of weeks, it's gonna be fantastic. So there's kind
of a not a social contract, but there's a an
underlying understanding that we all depend on each other and
what one of us does affects the others, and we
need to not break each other's trust, right, because otherwise
we are going to be excommunicated and have serious negative consequences,
where now there's almost no consequences. Right, So you can
go out, be as degenerate as you want, get kicked
out of bars, and then just do it the next night,
the next town.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: Well, the way it's a one hundred percent correct. And
I think one of the things that and this I'll
trigger our shall we say more kind of like conservative
or libertarian friends by saying this, right, is that you know,
when we talk about freedom, that's a term that has
a lot of definitions, right, And the kind of freedom
that basically runs you know, freedom is you know, my
ability to fulfill myself in any way whatsoever with no
like moral limitation. Right, like whatever, you know, combination of
stimuli and stacked genitalia. I choose that's good because I
consent to it. Well, one, how free does that make you?
And two that really destroys the ability of people to
have a kind of, you know, a more restrained form
of freedom, right, which is like, okay, your ability to
do that destroys my freedom to walk around in a
safe neighborhood, right, or my freedom to you know, let
my kids out at that right because you know, you
are doing things that make you feel good but have
a massive knock on effect on others. And so you know,
I do get a little bit frustrated with the kind
of like the language around freedom because in many cases
they're they're saying something in very good faith they mean,
but oftentimes they don't understand that. Like, if you take
that tow its logical conclusion, you don't get people like you.
You get people like Portland, or you get people like
you know, New York and anyway, this is maybe a
discussion for another time, but yeah, it's something I It's
something I think about a lot as I just kind
of chin stroke on the internet, but focused for I.
Speaker 6: Do want to touch on that right before we get
off here. So I'm a Christian. So one Peter two
sixteen is a great one for this. Anytime somebody brings
up the concept of freedom and it essentially says as
free yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice.
And that's what a lot of people say when they
mean freedom, like the more degenerate side. So I should
be free to be as evil as I want to be.
And it's like, well, you're evil, unfortunately affects the rest
of us. So we're we're gonna put a stop to
that now if you don't mind.
Speaker 7: Well, this is something that like, look, I'm I'm not Lutheran,
but I've read some luther right, And when he talks
about you know, when he talks about crime and punishment
and forgiveness, right, he basically says that there are kind
of like four levels of forgiveness. You know. The worst
is basically to you know, to hate someone personally and
just let it go.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: Then it kind of goes up from there of you know,
forgiving them personally. But the ultimate form of that is
to both you know, personally forgive someone and then also
turn them into the authorities and have them face the
full force of the law. And the reason is because
one like that kind of like sense of hatred and
revenge is personally poisoning to you. But also because it
is good for both society but also that person to
be punished. Right, that's the right and ordered nature of things.
And you know this idea that you know, the way
to be you know, good and kind and nice to
people is to let them do whatever they want to,
Let them just smoke crack in the street all day,
because it would be mean to ask them not not to.
I mean, it's very clearly produces an awful society. I
don't feel like this is an argument we need to
deal with anymore.
Speaker 6: You don't even have to because it's like, Okay, let
the guy smoke crack. It's like, yeah, but he has
a wife and kids at home that he's leaving, so
maybe he shouldn't be able to do that.
Speaker 7: You know, Yes, his his turt.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: Maybe you're sleeping around with other women. You know, I
don't I don't know if that's you know, applicable to
anything going on right now.
Speaker 7: But maybe you're on a breeding fetish.
Speaker 6: Uh yeah, again, maybe your actions have consequences that lead
to multiple broken homes and maybe we shouldn't do that.
Maybe that's going to lead to a half dozen kids
not growing up with a father and then whatever. You know,
we can look at the statistics, right, we can pull
up the statistics and see how fatherless kids do compared
to their counterparts.
Speaker 2: It's not great, well.
Speaker 7: One percent, man, But honestly, dude, thank you so much
for coming out. This was a much better conversation than
I thought it would be. Uh again, I know you
mentioned it before, but where could people more of your stuff?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So on YouTube.
Speaker 6: Focus Trip and gun Dot Deals are the two channels
of which I upload content too. And then my company,
which you don't need to check out nothing zims soock
it's a hypebeast company, but that is Focus Shooting LLC.
Speaker 7: Again, highly recommend his video reviews. He's one hundred percent
wrong about the LC Inspector, the best optic to ever
be created. I can mute you so you can't respond
to that, but nonetheless his YouTube channel is very good.
Highly recommend it. As far as my stuff, The Jay
Burden Show is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you
listen to podcasts. If you want to support us, you
can either do that directly through the links in the description,
or check out our sponsor, Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching
if you want to also be a well muscled chad
who can deadlift five hundred pounds Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching.
Best way to do it again, Focus Trip. I appreciate it,
and to everyone at home, keep your head up. Well,
I can't last forever. Good night, Welcome to Jay Burden Show.
How you doing?
Speaker 2: Man? Doing very good?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. I've had a
few guys from the gun tube side of thing on
my podcast and been a fan of your channel for
a while. I think you and I share a similar
I don't say proclivity, but maybe mental disease. That is
an affection for Ruger P series pistols, and so I
think I found whenever you did that video three four
years ago, and I've been watching ever since. But obviously
I'm familiar with your work, but my audience might not be.
So who are you and what do you do? So?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have a YouTube channel all about guns. It's
just called pop Now. You used to be called hopliphile,
which is a really esoteric insight joke that everybody assumes
it's a dog whistle for something, but it's not. It's
also possible to spell, so just look up hop and
then keep scrolling soil you see something with a gun
in it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I like I do.
Speaker 4: I think I do basically everything. Like I enjoy every
aspect of firearms and like the gun community. I like
current done history, so I always like to know what's
coming out. I like to review new products. I like
to do high end stuff like night vision, and I
also love old stuff. I like the history of where
we came from, so I have like, you know, old
pistol reviews like the Regardview series and yeah, tactical gear.
I don't know, I like everything about it. I think
it's all one you know, it's all one hobby to me.
I don't really see the distinction between you know, new
products coming out and old products from twenty thirty years ago,
because something that's coming out tomorrow is eventually going to
be twenty years old, and it's like it's.
Speaker 2: Valuable to know where it all comes from.
Speaker 4: So yeah, my channel is insanely eclectic, and luckily I
am able to put together an audience of all these
different groups of people who will enjoy some videos and
tolerate other videos.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's sort of an interesting thing, you see. You
see somewhat similar dynamic in other sort of like hyper
technic hobbies that cars are the same way, where you
have like the guys who are just care all they
care about is like the new thing with big numbers, right, like, oh,
the new Mustang has x percent more horsepower than the
old one. But then also you have the guys who
are into weird eclectic stuff, and there's every sort of
micro niche and uh, look like guns are tools, they're practical.
There's a certain bare minimum level of functionality you need
to be considered something you can bet your life on.
But like many people, you sort of reach that floor
relatively quickly. You know you've got the one rifle, the
one handgun, and then the next question is like, okay,
what do I do after this? And while certainly you
see those people who sort of make like endless variations
on the same couple things, after that point it's kind
of like, well, what are you into?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 7: And obviously late nineties service pistols, I guess they're a
pretty popular destination.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there is, I guess I can understand the perspective
of somebody who's like, I'm really interested in the newest,
cutting edge stuff, Like why would they care about, you know,
a Rigord p series it's discontinued, Like sure, maybe you
can find one cheap in a pawn shop and that
might make it a bit of a relevant thing where
you're like, I'm really hard up for cash and I
need a good pistol. Then you start looking into sort
of the you know, the cheap classics you can find
on the pawnshop shelf. But for the most part I
get it, Like, as somebody be completely uninterested in old
handguns and old firearms history, that's okay to a certain extent.
There are people who are so disinterested in the history
of the industry or firearms technology or whatever that they
just are lacking context and they'll, you know, they'll be like,
oh my gosh, one X prism sites. Primary Arms came
out with this whole series of one X you know,
essentially non magnified prism optics, which is an uncommon thing
to see, and everybody was like, Wow, this is a
revolutionary game chaker.
Speaker 2: It's not a new thing. I have one.
Speaker 4: I'm working on a video loophold made that twenty five
years ago, and it wasn't popular then because it wasn't
it's not a good idea, you know, it's not really
a good optic for most people. So it's like everything's
been tried before. If someone is really trying to sell
you on like brand new technology, be skeptical because it's
probably old technology that was unpopular for a while. So
I would suggest that anybody who's really really into guns
should at least look back a couple of years to
see how things have actually changed and improved. But if
you're not interested in the fifty you know, fifty year
time span, that's understandable. What's completely insane to me is
people who are only interested in the retro stuff, because
I'm like, it's retro.
Speaker 2: You know what's retro?
Speaker 4: It's it's it's the golden age of your childhood. So
I will admit that my keen interest is in the
nineties because I was a kid in the nineties and
I would see all the stuff in media, But obviously
I didn't get to buy or shoot guns because I.
Speaker 2: Was a poor child.
Speaker 4: But anybody who's like really interested in history, you know,
g Watt is now becoming a retro. So there are
people who are fixated on the g WAT and they're like,
I love this historical firearm new ars, gross mlock, that's gross.
But it's like, well, quadrail, there was I'm sure at
a time at which people were like, ew, quadrail gross,
Like what why do you need that?
Speaker 2: What's wrong with the plastic? Yeah, my climow works great, exactly.
Speaker 4: So if you like the history of firearms, I think
you should be into the whole history of firearms.
Speaker 7: That's my yeah, And I think that to your point
about the historical context. One of the things that I
appreciate about your work, and this is actually the thing
that drove me out of because look, they're sort of
like the dark trifecta of male interests the cars, guns,
and watches, and if you have all three you just
have no money. Your life is ruined. So you have
to kind of pick like one to two legs that
you can you can sort of spend time on. And
you know, someone who grew up around guns, it was
something that was in my life but not a primary interest.
And the thing that really drove me away from cars
is hobby was honestly, social media completely ruined it because
one there's a finite number of cars past a certain era, right,
they don't make any more two thousand and six Niece
on three fifty's ease. And once the whole thing became
sort of a hype game, right, like what can you
do to attract attention, it kind of ruined the fun
of it. Whereas the thing that I admire about your
work and the thing that sort of attracted to attracted
me to it relatively early is obviously there's very much
a gun hype culture. I'm not on Instagram, haven't been
in years, but even five years ago there was the
should we say, very esthetics focused version of gun culture,
where honestly, it has no more relevance to the actual
mechanics of the product itself. It's it's sort of a prop,
right in the same way that you know, I don't
know anything about fashion, but streetwear was in you know,
twenty eighteen to twenty twenty, right, it was a series
of branded item you could photo, your photograph yourself next
to sort of increase your like online. I guess like
clout would be the term the kids use.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that certainly makes sense.
Speaker 4: There is an aspect of what we'd call it, like
conspicuous consumption or something. I remember something that I learned
when I was in college because I have a degree
in Japanese nonsense. But one of the things that I
always thought was really interesting was that during period of
time in Japan bling was the Ado period, so like
the eighteen hundreds ish I'll probably get this all wrong
because that's more than ten years ago, but there were
austerity measures in place, and so it's like nobody can
be seen to be flaunting wealth, but certain things were
not regulated, and so you would have like a little
cigar or like a tobacco pouch and you could have
a little bead on there, and the bad would be
of just exquisite craftsmanship, and it would signal to other
people that, like, you have a lot of money. So
it's like, even in an environment where austerity are enforced strictly,
people still find a way to show to flash some
cash in public, right, and social media is going to
be that same way. So when you look at like
an AR fifteen, there's really cheap entry level AR fifteens,
which could just be trash blasters or you know, a
defensive firearm for somebody without a lot of money. Then
there's the mid range of stuff, which is like high end,
serious duty grade firearms, but you can spend as much
money as you want, where you get into stuff that
I would consider like a luxury firearm, sort of like
a luxury watch. Like you can spend four thousand dollars
on an Novesci. Is a Nobeski rifle more than twice
as good as a BCM. No, it's probably a little
worse than a BCM, but it costs way more. And
people see that logo and they see that paint job,
and they're like, damn, that guy has money. And I
sometimes I will admit, like when I put on the
body armor in the helmet and the night vision, I'm like, dude,
I'm wearing twenty grand right now, Holy crap, this is awesome.
Speaker 2: I try not to do that too much.
Speaker 7: L can owner so I to go, h.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and people then there's other people that are a
little more sensible who will be like, why would I
ever pay six hundred dollars for a scope? My whole
rifle only costs eight hundred dollars. You're like, yeah, I
can see that perspective, but I can also I can
also remember some like old advice you would get from hunters,
like if you go on Snipers High or something these
old forums, they'd be like, your scope needs to cost
at least as much as your right If you're going
to get a good piece of glass, it's got to
cost at least as much as the gun. So these
attitudes change over time, and they also changed, you know,
depending on where you are in the community, and some
people perceive value in different ways. So one of my
favorite online memes is somebody with a Daniel defense rifle.
It's a two thousand dollars rifle, very good duty grade,
high end AR, and they care a lot about their ar.
They really want it to be good, high quality. They
probably don't mind showing off the cost of it a
little bit as well. But then when it comes to optics,
they just don't know. They don't know what the difference
is between different scope companies or different types of scope,
and so they just slap a two hundred dollars four
tech strike e on top because to them, the optic
is just it doesn't interest them. They've never been told
about the you know, the hype of it. If they
were a little more well educated, they might as well
just buy that Elcan money probably not really a thing
for them if they're buying Daniel Defense rifles just casually.
They just don't realize that there is a whole world
out there of Elcan stops and if they knew, they
would not be put in a strike you go on
top of their precious Daniel Defense.
Speaker 7: Well, I feel like the area you see this the
most in it is twenty eleven's for the non autistically
inclined double stack. Nineteen eleven's widely variable price. And when
I'm talking widely variable, I mean five hundred to two,
as you said earlier, as many thousands as you want
to give someone, and obviously you have the extreme diminishing
returns right where it's like, okay, this is a cool
thing to have. You know, I like nice handguns as
much as the next guy. But at a certain point
you reflex it, right like okay, hey, yeah, you got
the one that you had done exactly how you wanted it,
and it's very clearly like this, you know, kind of
like transformer abomination of like sharp curves and different finishes,
and it's like, okay, there's nothing wrong with it, but
let's not delude ourselves. Why we're here. You know, you
want to see you want to be seen to be wealthy.
And to your point about the the Edo period and
tobacco boxes, which I'm gonna go ahead and assume you're
completely right and all the details there and we will
be corrected later. But this is something you even read
about with the Greeks, right, there were again all of
these sort of sumptuary laws, as I think that the
term in British common law right where it's like, okay,
we need to put some sort of check on this,
because it is if we don't want an immense amount
of resources going to flexing. And again, life finds a way, right,
there will be some way to sort of artificially or
non artificially organically reinforce that hierarchy. And it's funny to say,
see it over and over and over again, because if
you've been interested in any hobby whatsoever where there is
gear involved, there's immediately gear snobbery. And it's kind of
interesting because one of the things that I appreciate in
the analysis for you from you and Brock is this
idea that look, not necessarily obviously, there are things that
are too cheap to be usable, things that are too
expensive to be usable, But what matters more, right is
effectively where do you find yourself on that trade off curve?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 7: Like, you can buy as much capability as you want,
assuming you have the bank account to balance it up.
The question is one, can you use it? Do you
need it? And is there a better option? And look
like I got an equally useless finance degree, right, I
learned absolutely nothing because it was COVID and nobody learned
anything but the idea of effectively there is no solution.
You're simply making trade off some kind of a multi
variable equation. It's something I see in guns all the time.
Like I'm sure you're aware of the current obsession with
like three to fifteen scopes. It's a little bit pass
a now, but it's this idea of well, a one
to sex LPBO is good, and if that must be good,
surely a one to eight or one to ten obviously
two to four x better. Therefore, and obviously a one
x is basically a two x, which is basically a
three X. And you see the scope creep literally, and
all of a sudden we've reinvented the sort of like
forum joke rifles of the twenty tens, where it's a
quad rail with every slot filled up with some random garbage.
And I think that that's another sort of interesting kind
of human foible you see in this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there is a lot of Yeah scope group's a
good term four, But there's also just the cyclical nature
of trends, you know. That's like you can see this happening.
The discussion will shift every couple of weeks on gun
Twitter or gun Instagram or whatever community that you happen
to be on. But somebody will rediscover a coogs. They'll
be like, you know what, actually, the a COG is
still the best optic you know, And you're like, no,
well that okay, maybe it is, Maybe it isn't. The
fact of the matter is it's it's been a beloved
optic since it was introduced in nineteen eighty seven. It's
it's incredible, it's been around for a very, very long time.
How many times have we gone through this cycle, you know,
kind of like mass effect for You're like, you're young,
You've only been doing this for a handful of years.
I've been doing this for ten years, or people been
doing this for forty years, and they're probably well beyond
the point of rolling their eyes that the well, actually
A cogs are still good argument because they've probably have
seen it every five years since nineteen eighty seven, and
they're like ridiculous. And those generally come from people who
are either they've had the A cog all along and
they're sick of seeing all these trends pass them by,
and they're like, hey, wait a second, you guys, my
optic is still good. And they're correct, their optic is
still good, but no one ever has the self restraint
to say, you know, this is still an option. Instead,
they got to be like, no, this is still the
only way to do it conveniently. The way I'm doing
it is still the only way to do it, and
you guys are all the same. But yeah, you do
get that constant espialation of like, well one to six lpdo.
But then I'm still going to put a red dot
on top because I want to use I want to
use it for you know, close range shooting and potentially
pacidating with night vision. Well, as long as I got
that red doll in there, I don't need the one
X on the LPVO anymore. Someone as will go to
a two to ten, Well, yeah, two is basically three
and ten is basically fifteen, So let's go ahead and
just go to a three to fifteen. Well, four to sixteen,
that's a little bit more, and those scopes have some
other advantages, So yeah, it can just keep theory crafting
your way into almost any setup that you want.
Speaker 7: Well, And I think another relevant factor is sort of
the impact of the sort of like ever changing face
of social media, which is, in order to make content,
you need to constantly have new things to talk about.
And the problem is, you know, you mentioned optimization, and
obviously you can always fine tune those variables, but if
you're a normal person, right, you have like one or
two systems to optimize.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: I realize system is a weighted word if we're talking
about guns, but let's let's go with it. How long
can you really draw that process out for I mean,
like someone like you and I years, you know, just
by constantly changing things. But if your genuine goal was
just to figure out, like what is the best one
time financial purchase for me, there's only so much discussion.
But in a world where like we need more Reddit posts,
we need more videos, And I say this is someone
who himself releases a lot of content right, So I
recognize the sort of hypocrisy in it, but it seems
as if that mixed with that desire to sort of
signal status, creates this kind of like ever tightening spiral
of need new things to be what everyone is talking about.
And can you see what I'm getting at.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's also a disconnect that I see between guys
who treating firearms as a part of their other hobby
or pursuit. There's a lot of like the guys who
are into the miniman thing, you know, or you're just
like really focused on defensive shooting, and they're like, why
do you need all this stuff? You know, like nobody
needs anything. Man, Like, you need a block forty three
probably at a maximum, and you'll be good to go
because it's going to cover all your use cases, which
is having a defensive firearm every day in your regular life.
But if you're really interested in escalating that to you know,
a different level of preparedness, if you're one of these
minutman guys, then you do want to have you know,
a nice gestureak setup or plate carrier helmet, a nice
rifle well set up. You don't need more than two
for three firearms maximum. So for you, it would be
totally acceptable to say, why do I need to keep
chasing this? And the answer is you don't. Like you
can make one workable setup and then stop worrying about it,
because concern over optimization is a bit of a fool's
errand everything has trade offs, and the only issue is
if you're if you are not strong willed enough to
disregard the trade offs. You know, you see someone's like, well,
I have more magnification than you. You're dang, my scope sucks.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't.
Speaker 4: They have more magnification than you. Trust me, there's a
trade off. They made a trade off to get that.
You're still fine with what you got. So if you
truly aren't actually that into firearms, then go ahead and
get your one gun, set it up the way that
it works for you, and then you know, use it
and become proficient in it. But most of the people
who are doing this and we're watching these videos and
making these posts are more into firearms in that they
enjoyed a hobby. Same with car guys. It's like, if
you really don't care about cars, you're not like watching
every episode of regular car reviews because you just have
your commuter vehicle, and it's like, that's the only.
Speaker 2: Car you need.
Speaker 4: Dean versa is exactly what you will need exactly. If
you're watching regular car reviews, then you're into cars more generally,
and that doesn't mean that every single car review video
you see is a commandment for you to go purchase
that car. Sameting with guns, you know, if you're interested
in guns, I watch a ton of gun YouTube. I
don't immediately buy every single product. I don't immediately tear
my stuff apart every time I see any video. I
like to just know what's out there and have that
knowledge in the back of my mind because at some
point I will be buying a new scope to try it,
and there are a lot of people doing that, and
so I think railing against the received consumers nature. There
is absolutely a consumer's kind of aspect to it, but
for the most part, it's like this is just information
that you can take or leave. You don't have to
be buying everything that you see on YouTube. You don't
have to be trying to keep up with guys who
do this for a living. You know, for everything is
a tax right off. If you're just into guns, you
can just watch the video, So you enjoyed them, you
know that that is possible?
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think that that Yeah, I mean it
reminds me very much of the and I'll forget the
number on this was it? But is it the nothing
fancy second type of cool right where it's like, look
like you can just like things. That's entirely you were
allowed to say. I think it's just neat, you know.
And as the owner of, should we say, a rather
unfortunate amount of inherited converted black powder Old West guns, right,
it's like, I'm under no allusion to whatsoever that a
Italian made dubiously converted Walker cult revolver. Is it all
a practical thing to own? But it's kind of cool, right,
It's just it's a neat thing to have. And I
think that one of the sort of interesting things about
the gunsphere as a consumer but still an outsider, right,
Like I don't know a lot of these people. But
is the the sort of blurred line between do I
like this or am is this something I am buying?
And maybe and will debate how how sincere this argument is,
but to prepare for something, right, because those are that's
sort of a line that's blurred, right, because obviously there
are things that are incredibly practical, right, Like you don't
really own, you know, level four plates because you know
you're collecting them. I mean, I'm sure that guy exists.
I don't know if I really want to meet them,
but I'm sure that there's one of them out there.
It's a certain degree at risk calculation, and uh, with
some other things, I think it gets a little bit blurry.
And maybe that's just how do I justify this extremely
absurdly expensive purchase, which you know, fair enough, but it
is an interesting thing to uh, to sort of, I
guess observe. So one of the other things I wanted
to talk with you about is the evolution of gun culture. Now,
a certain amount of this is generational, right, boomer bashing
is sort of the internet's favorite favorite pastime one that
I want to engage in. But as someone who sort
of came into gun culture early in the sort of
twenty and tens, I joked earlier like in the in
the transition from the quad rail to kimod Era. You know,
it's anyone who was there will know exactly what I'm
talking about, But it was fundamentally a very different group
of people now part of it. It was forum based.
That's different than social media, both good and ill. It
was much more based in print journalism. But I'm curious, right,
when did you come into gun culture and what changes
you've seen since you sort of started here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I started getting I started really focusing on
and paying attention to guns and gun culture probably in
two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine, I
was in college. But I didn't really start actually getting
into shooting until I graduated, got my first real job,
and all of a sudden I had money. It's like,
oh man, I can actually finally afford to buy a firearm.
So yeah, not until maybe like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen
is when I actually started shooting and really getting into
you know, the more the defensive shooting aspect of it.
You know, my got my first handgun, got my concealed
carry license, started practicing shooting handgun drills a lot. I
used to be almost exclusively a handgun guy, and I
didn't really care. I didn't really think about rifles as
anything other than kind.
Speaker 2: Of a curiosity.
Speaker 4: So like all my all my first ar bills were
embarrassing Reddit teer meme cringe where I was like, I'm
gonna build something so cursed it'll ruin somebody's day. Uh,
And that's that still happens out there, but that's not
as common as it used to be. A lot more
common people just like I'm gonna make something so stupid
it'll trigger people. You're like, well, you're really only playing yourself,
as Paul Cogan says, you're working yourself into a shoe
while you're doing that.
Speaker 7: Jokes on them. I spent one hundred ye, yeah.
Speaker 2: Exactly, jumb Yeah.
Speaker 4: I always call it it's a it's farming for performative outrage.
You know, you want to post something on Reddit and
then someone's gonna be like, oh my gosh, that's bruin
my day.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 4: They don't mean that. It didn't affect their day at all.
They probably chuckled slightly and hit the upvote, so them
saying ruined their day, and you're like, h I ruined
that guy's day. Now you're all just playing a weird
little kabooki theater thing. But yeah, So I started initially
just getting into handguns, and since I kind of like
historical stuff and the trout in the nineties, got into
old pistol or older pistons. But yeah, I just kept
my interests kept escalating. I started getting into, you know,
the gear side of it, the rifles as well, and
then yeah, eventually, I think, if you spend enough money
in enough time in the industry, eventually will become involved
in the industry. So that's when I got I got
picked up by TFBTV in twenty nineteen, I want to say,
started going to shows and then meeting people, and at
that point it's it's too late. You're just way way
too deep, way past the event horizon of.
Speaker 2: Industry. Like culture, I would say, yeah, culture wise.
Speaker 4: I was involved from like two thousand and eight to
twenty nineteen, very much an outsider, interested in the industry,
following the industry, reading the discussions, watching all the videos
on YouTube and everything. There wasn't until maybe about twenty
twenty when I started attending industry events and meeting people
actually inside the industry that I, you know, fell to
that even deeper level.
Speaker 7: Two things. One again as an outside observer. One of
the funniest gaps to me is people who are enough
of a hobbyist to say, oh, I want to go
to this trade show to see all the cool new stuff.
And the other group, which is people who have ever
been to a trade show. We're like, no, you don't.
And obviously if you know people, it's certainly different. But
there's a I won't say who, but there is a
recurring guest on the channel who works for a should
we say a legacy American manufacturer. And I never know
when shot show is, but I can always tell Shot
Show because he's miserable. He's just absolutely looking for a
way out. And obviously that's different if you're a reporter,
you know, if you're there to look at interesting stuff,
or if you're stuck in a booth for you know,
fourteen hours a day.
Speaker 2: I can even mentioned, Yeah.
Speaker 4: I would say I enjoy a shot show. It's still
a really hard week. I mean, it's all we also,
at least when the TFBTV crew goes to shot show,
we're doing more work than almost anybody else on the
media side. Still not as much as the guys who
have to put up the booth two days before and
take it down two days after. And I mean they're working,
they're actually working a real job. We're doing a fairly
high effort media job. Still it's not the same party
experience as it is for a lot of people attending.
Speaker 7: Well, see you mentioned earlier the two thousand and eight
to twenty fourteen timeframe, which means, I assume you remember
the great twenty two shortage, right, just an absolutely inexplicable event.
So if you could, I guess this is something that's
memorable to people like you and I, but that might
not be to my audience per se. So do you
want to just speak to a little bit that kind
of not to get too political, but like the post
Obama gun culture because it was a very a very
specific I guess air to it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's these all these different like eras, and so
as I was getting into guns in general, that was
as like, for example, the AR market was really starting
to explode, and I remember the first channel that I
watched extensively was nothing fancy, And I remember watching all
of his videos at that time. In the right around
twenty ten, when Obama was first elected, guns were sounding
like crazy, and ars had semi recently come off the
assault weapons band assaultits ban sunset in two thousand and four,
and so all of a sudden you could get all
these assault features again, which really is just normal features
on a rifle. Rifles were sometimes banned during the Assault
Went's Band. They were banned based on just the name
of the gun in very rare cases, but that was
such a difficult thing to do and keep up with that.
A lot of the band was just based on features.
And so what you do is you say we want
to ban every single air fifth team. Well, there's an
infinite number of manufacturers, because a new one could just
pop up and say this is not the Air fifteen,
this is the a X fifteen.
Speaker 2: You didn't ban that.
Speaker 4: So instead you say, okay, we're going to ban flash hiers,
we're going to ban bayonet lugs, we're gonna ban high
capacity detachable magazines. So when that expires, all of a sudden,
the ar market is accessible again. And it took a
couple of years to catch up. But when I first
started watching that fancy I remember he would be reviewing
entry level ars that cost like twelve hundred bucks, and
that's in two thousand and ten money, and then he
would be talking about like aks. And there was also
a big military surplus thing around that time where you
could get like you could buy four Mosen Negants for
one hundred bucks ship straight to your door if you
had to see an our license, which is a curioid
relic license for collecting antique firearms, and like that's that.
The money side of it really did have a huge
impact on what people were into and what people were
talking about. And then you know, I think people have
described Barack Obama as the best gun salesman of all time.
People certainly thought he was going to at least attempt
to reenact in assault weapons band. They never pulled that off.
But the gun industry during the Obama years was white hot.
I mean absolutely, selling record numbers year over year over year.
And that is another piece of interesting like gun industry
history that people don't necessarily know if they're on the
outside looking in. That people didn't expect Donald Trump to
get elected in twenty sixteen, so there was a massive
investment to you know, we're going to invest in more
manufacturing and we're going to take loans out, and we're
going to continue cranking guns and selling record numbers of
guns year over year during the Hillary Clinton administration and
then that didn't happen and it was a blood bath.
And right now we're in blood bath too, Like the
industry is just creatoring again, So yeah, it is. You know,
a lot of gun buying is politically motivated. People buy
stuff based on fear, like I'm worried I'm not gonna
be able to get this anymore.
Speaker 2: Same thing with.
Speaker 4: OVID rolls around and everybody's buying toilet paper. You know,
is if you hear a weird little rumor, you might
just think, like, I maybe I should get on this.
Speaker 7: Well, and to speak to that, because I turned twenty
one during the middle of the whole COVID thing, and
buying a gun is just impossible, literally impossible, and so
I ended up with what turned out to be a
really horrible life choice. This is how I ended up
being a cz fag is the only thing I could
ie was a CZ eighty two, which is kind of
a cool gun, right, It's sort of like a fancy macrov.
I've told this story of foreign air, so I won't
regale you with it. The only gun I've ever used
in a defensive context and it worked, So you know,
props to that two hundred dollars piece of complot garbage.
But you very much see those those trends where there's
sort of this external thing like, obviously we're sort of
past it, but you know, the big AMMO shortage from
COVID and immediately afterwards that absolute justmbshell. That is the
ak market right post sort of Russia sanctions, where there's
sort of this this push and pull where something happens
creates a shock and then the industry reacts. It's sort
of this bizarre I guess lack Like, let's be honest,
it seems as if, from my vantage point, the reasons
that that thermals are so cool to have now is
everyone has seen that somewhat harrowing footage of guys getting
wasted with thermals from Ukraine. Now, obviously that also creates
a scarcity because every thermal in the world that's worth
anything has been shipped to Ukraine. So that also creates
that sort of like that scarcity and that I mean,
honestly hype we were talking about earlier. But it's sort
of an interesting microcosm of culture more generally, right, this
sort of pattern of decision made two years later, what
has it resulted in? This is actually a question I
don't know the answer to because I was thinking, like, well,
what was after this sort of grete twenty two shortage,
and in my mental timeline, the very next thing is
the zombie craze, which I was sort of too young
to really understood where it came from. It was just
something that existed. But these show I always think is
the like the green Tip, not that green tip, but
the Hornity Vmax or zmax, right, the special zombie bullets.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I can't remember the exactly crazy stuff timeline on that,
so I believe if I remember correctly, the twenty two
shortage was like one of the weird major things that happened.
I think after that was the Sandy Hook shortage. After
the Sandy Hook shooting, there was a massive shortage of
firearms and ammunition. That's when I was buying my first
hand gun, and I had done a lot of research
for what I wanted to be my first handgun, my
first carry gun that I was going to learn to
shoot on. And I was also trying to save some
money because I was still relatively freshly employed and still
pretty much broke.
Speaker 2: But I couldn't.
Speaker 4: There was nothing. There was nothing on the shelves at all.
So I ended up with my like third choice, which
is a Generation three Block nineteen and now I'm a
massive I will always be a block fag basically forever.
Speaker 2: So it is yeah, funny, how look.
Speaker 7: You made a much better desperation choice than I did.
Speaker 4: But I basically I end up I had to stretch
my budget more than I wanted to, you know. I
think my first choice is a SR nine C, which
would have been probably like one hundred and fifty Twitter
bucks cheaper than the Block nineteen at that point, but
they were just gone, you know. So, Yeah, it's weird
how that stuff happens.
Speaker 2: And then zombie.
Speaker 4: I feel like zombie craze was happening throughout that entire
time from my perspective, maybe I'm wrong. I feel like
the whole zombie craze was kicked off by the Zombie
Survival Guide, the book by Max Brooks Nick Max Brooks,
which is just an awful, awful book. It's full of
completely nonsensical firearms advice coming from a guy who probably
didn't even google it.
Speaker 2: He probably just assumed.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I think that was patient zero to coin
phrase that it started all the obsession with the movies
and games and this whole.
Speaker 2: There's still this. This might dox me if someone has
seen this truck.
Speaker 4: But in my hometown there is still a lifted second
gen Chevy Tahoe with all the Zombie Zombie Survival or
Zombie Response Team stickers all over it, and it's got
like the big sticker on the windows is med kid
inside break glass.
Speaker 2: Like that was something people were doing for a while.
Speaker 4: They were like, if you need to break my window
to get my med kid in an emergency, do it, brother, No,
So that was a good time.
Speaker 7: Funny story.
Speaker 2: Whoever that guy is.
Speaker 7: I think there's at least one of them in every
small town because.
Speaker 2: It's a distributed network. They've got a lot of coverage yet,
and some of them.
Speaker 7: Are like Japanese soldiers out in the jungle where it's
like they're top. The war is over. It's been thirty
years and they're still just ready to go.
Speaker 4: They're like, hey man, we're not doing zombies anymore. And
they're like, what are you talking about.
Speaker 7: But you know, wife gets a flat tire, you know,
use the space saver or whatever, you know, near kind
of a rough area of town, so you know, aware
of the surroundings, will put it that way. So I'm,
you know, in the process of changing the tire and
i look over my shoulder and I see this like
it looks like the boomer wojack, like tall white socks,
everything just tilted forward, sprinting towards me, and and look
like he's necessarily fit the profile of who I would
be worried about. But still it's a large man kind
of running towards you, and so I sort of, you know,
get up, kind of prepared for some sort of altercation.
And he is out of breath with one of those
like you know, those giant like off road jeep jacks.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the hijacker lifts.
Speaker 7: Spray painted lime green to get my wife's two thousand
and nine Volkswagen Rabbit off the ground, and he is
having the time of his life in front of I
realize the zombie response cheap right, which looks exactly how
you think it does. And I just made that guy's day.
I was like, all right, dude, obviously you are much
more prepared for this than I am, so i'll, you know,
I'll let you do it. But yeah, those guys are
it's sort of as a weird. It was like the
less I don't want to say less serious, because let's
be honest, a lot of these guys weren't exactly our
our best and brightest, but it was sort of like
the redheaded stepchild of the prepper movement. You know, it
sort of splintered off where it's like you're preparing for
I guess something, and maybe if this gets you to
do something that you may use later in life, it's
a net positive. But it wasn't this kind of like
bizarre I guess, kind of like culd sack of like
gun culture, prepper culture, and then also like a certain
era on the internet too.
Speaker 4: I think it was it was a level of irony
that allowed people to do something that they they maybe
they just felt like inside they wanted to do, like
they probably felt good about being generally prepared, but they
could sort of couch it in this sort of like, ah,
you know, it's just a it's just a funny bit
that I'm doing. And you know, Zombie's rival isn't that funny?
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 4: I suspect, like you know the Doomsday Preppers show where
they they they trop people out and they essentially cumulate
them on TV for their weird beliefs. I don't think
you could do that same thing with the Zombie Survival guys,
because they would just be too fun and the show
wouldn't have the same impact. I mean, maybe they're on
The Doctor Preppers. Yeah, like they're in on the joke
and you're like, but they're still doing exactly the same thing.
They're still stocking rice and beans and cases of the
twenty two long rifle because it bounces surrounded the skull
and destroys the brain.
Speaker 2: And that's as you all know, what was supposed to do.
It believer and big believer. He propagated that that mint.
Speaker 4: He also said the best survival firearm was the M
one car being because it's it's lightweight, reliable, and the
ammunition is powerful enough. And you're like, where do you
where's this thirty carbing anbul coming from?
Speaker 7: Dude?
Speaker 4: And he also said you should never use a crow bar.
I remember he was anti crowbar, I think, because he's like,
it'll just get stuck in the skull.
Speaker 2: Okay, you hit him on the other side.
Speaker 7: Then I don't know, man, this isn't rocket science. Yeah,
I remember. And this was even as a kid because
I this, I have a very very vivid memory of
having that book confiscated from me at school because obviously
it had you know, very kind of violent drawings in it,
which is like a teenager, you're like, this is awesome.
There's a dude stomping some guy's brains out, and you know,
a very reasonable, concerned teacher was like, hey, Bud sitting
in the back of class drawing pictures of people getting
curb stomped. This is a red flag.
Speaker 2: But French coat collar flipped up around your ears.
Speaker 7: See ow to private school, so we had uniforms. But
point is the thing I always remembered, and even as
a kid, I was like, this is cope was there
was a section in that book on body type and
he's like, yeah, the best body type for survival is
being fat, So really being fat is an advantage. And
even as a kid, I was like this is Are
we still talking about zombies or is this you proving
a point to someone?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Well, then.
Speaker 4: Bombie Land comes out and they're doing all their like
the rules to survival, and one of their main rules
is cardio and I was like, yeah, that's probably that's
probably the smartest thing in any zombie movie ever. It's
like you need to be able to run really fast.
That movie also has rave zobbies, so maybe maybe Max
Brooks's zombies were the slow type. Yeah, I think I
got that book. Yeah, the classic zombie. I think I
got that book at like like a bookstore at a
midnight event. Was like, hey, you know, young people, come
on down to this midnight event instead of going off
and partying or whatever. And then I think that book
was like brand new at the time, and so we
Roisie Miller on the bookstore, like, you know, look at
it books and card games.
Speaker 2: And stuff like that, and I picked them up.
Speaker 4: It's like, oh, man, look through and I read a
handful of pages and I was like, I'm buying this
for sure, and I read it eventually I read the
entire thing. Was like, no, wait a second, I have
a lot of bones.
Speaker 2: To pick with this guy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I remember, And again it was very much kind
of like of the age, but all of those kind
of zombie properties. I feel like we're filled with fudlore
mostly applies to guns, but just the craziest collection of
bizarre urban legends kind of combined together in one like
I remember, and maybe it was Zombie survival Guides or
World War Z those are those books are basically merged
into one thing in my brain, so I'm not entirely
sure where.
Speaker 4: Yeah, World War Z was the was the novel about
the fictional zombie apocalypse. Zombie Survival Guide was written, wasn't it.
I think so, yeah, And it tells the story of
like the reconstruction of humanity afterwards, whereas Zombie Survival Guide,
I think was really presented as if it was a
serious document like that in the world of World War Z,
the Zombie Survival Guide exists and is like printed and
handed around, like if you're in that world, you've you've
definitely been familiar with this.
Speaker 2: It is your bible in this in the world of
World War Z.
Speaker 7: I think, but this was definitely World War Z because
I remember his grand the authors how we beat the
zombie hordes. It was basically just taken straight from Napoleonic warfare.
It was like, yeah, we just have guys standing a box.
Speaker 4: And riplemented a box formation, and they have this custom
gun that they made where every bullet is a is
exploding incendiary, and it's like, yeah, they just they just
stand there, they have ranks and they just shoot zombies
in the head with these these I think they're called
cherry pie bullets.
Speaker 7: Oh man, it's all right, fair enough, it's entertaining. I'll
take it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's World Wars is a fun zombie story. The
Zombie Surpival Guide is uh, just to pack lize.
Speaker 7: Well, that's honestly something I kind of miss because okay,
here's a here's a rant. Millennials and gen z love
to talk about fudlore making fun of baby boomers, and
yet they have done literally the exact same thing, just
with a slightly newer set of myths, like like nothing
has changed, time is a flat circle. All we've done
is found a new group of old men to make
fun of and propagate the exact because I mean, I'm
sure you can think the same sort of like modern Internet.
I guess what would you say, like like rules of thumb, right,
they're just equally as wrong. And it drives me nuts
because you mentioned much earlier than discussion the sort of
like uh like Reddit performative outrage. But you see the
exact same thing that they are these sort of like
unwritten rules that you just are not even unwritten. The
rules you don't violate, and you will induce a massive
chimp out if even for a very good reason you
sort of like bend or modify them. Like the easiest
example to hand is the is the Reddit finger. Right,
They're like very performatively, like sticking your finger like ludicrously
far away from the trigger just so you can be
one of the cool, good guys who knows about safety.
And obviously that's you know, that's something else. But at
the same time it drives me nuts that whole conversation
because again it's like we have not moved on, like
this exact same thing still happens. I'm sure you can
think of a couple examples of that, kind of like
modern flood law. Right.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, nothing's spring to mind immediately, but I have.
I've definitely noticed that when I go back and read
like old magazines. That's something I've started liketing recently is
trying to learn or trying to find information about old stuff.
It's it's difficult just to begin with, but there's also
the aspect of how was this received the time or
how is it perceived at the time. So I'm interested
not just in just basic facts about guns, like what
year did it come out, because that's often hard to
figure out, but also like what do people actually think
about this? And what I've learned is that nothing changes
that then thirty years ago as now there were shill
articles and there were real reviewers, like you can read
reviews of a gun that is now historically recognized as
being dogshit, like the Cold Double Eagle, for example.
Speaker 2: I go back.
Speaker 4: I have a bunch of magazines from the era with articles,
and in some of them you can tell the guys
like a serious probably a pretty good shooter, a very
serious reviewer, and he's pointing out all of the philosophy
gun and another one the guy's just like, whoa cool
new gun. This is the best thing. And you're like,
that's just thirty five year old magazine slot content. It's
literally no different. So people are like, everything's just like,
you know, just an advertisement, just third party advertising.
Speaker 2: It's just slot.
Speaker 4: You're like, everything has always just been slot man, Like
the nuggets, the diamonds, and the rough will always exist,
They're always going to be there, But the mainstream is
just going to be.
Speaker 2: People who are like, oh, this is awesome, it's cool,
it's new.
Speaker 7: Well, I feel like you see the same thing. I
spent a lot of time on forums as a kid,
learned a lot about a lot of things. For instance,
learn how to swear from random forums, which is a
very cool thing to pick up at nine. But point is,
there is this sort of like rose tinted glasses of
looking back and only remembering just the best information. Right,
the thing that you found was exactly what you needed.
But if you're sorting chronologically, like you're digging for something
kind of specific and like a eighty to one hundred
post thread, you realize, no, again, this was just as
much garbage. It's just slightly easier to search a garbage,
which I'll admit is an advantage. Right, It's why I
keep going back to those forums. But people treated those
exactly like red you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can find flame wars between two fifty five
year old men who are just like and they're doing
the same Reddit thing. They're like the point by point
rebuttal of the post, like you called me. You called
me this, like I didn't call you. That's like, well
you implied, Well I didn't imply anything, And you're like
the thread is about like what's the ballistic coefficient of
a cartridge? You know, And it's just two retired guys
just like sniping at each other as if it was redded.
Speaker 7: My favorite nothing this is a very specific one. But
there's a couple of really early six or five Grendel
threads on Sniper's Hide that are just pure rage on
all sides. It's just like a war of all against
all debating completely irrelevant points. And my favorite one, I
wish I could find it, but it's the classic listing
out which logical fallacies you have used in response to
as you've said, a very niche discussion of like ballistic
coefficients of like what was then a largely experimental round.
And it's like, you know what, the Internet never changes.
It's just a constant.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the enthusiasts are are nuts. There is a lot
of like yeah, secret hidden juicee details on there, Like
I always search ar fifteen dot com orcom anytime I'm
trying to find, you know, the historical record, like what
do people think about this at the time, which takes
a lot of searching. Consiner it's busted now. But what
I've also figured out is that it's really tough to
trust people's memory of what happened because a lot of
people don't remember years particularly well. I mean, we had
we had a hard time. We talked about Sandy Hook earlier.
I don't remember what you're that if you asked me,
I'd say twenty twelve. That I might be wrong, So
it's like.
Speaker 7: Yeah, let's go with that, because I also don't remember.
Speaker 4: Yeah or twenty maybe it's twenty fourteen. But you see
on like forums or you ask people, or I receive
comments from this all the time where they're like I
was there, you know, Like I will have comments with
people being like I had one of these back in
nineteen seventy six, and I'm like, that company didn't exist
until nineteen eighty nine, So what is it that you
think you remember? Like you're confused, I'm sorry, sir. Like
the historical record may be off slightly, but it's not
off by that much. So you have you remember or
you've constructed a memory that it's just untrue and you
can find all that stuff there. So just because it'saw
on arc common doesn't mean it's true. Though most of
the time, most of the time, Rfcom's pretty good well.
Speaker 7: And that's sort of the sad thing about you know,
whether you want to call it like dead Internet theory
or whatever. But you mentioned earlier the Internet getting more
and more broken, is it? In regardless of your area
of interest. If you dig deep enough, you'll very quickly
realize you've you've sort of like gone into the geologic table,
but too far back, like it's just bedrock. You know,
it's gone. And it is sort of a sad thing
because and again this is very much the kind of
rose cul glasses, but I remember the time which if
you wanted to find something, it was almost undoubtedly there.
And to have something not just not have a record
of it, right, we don't know, but to be like, oh,
we did know like three years ago, but they stopped
paying for the domain, so it's all gone. Is It's
sort of a haunting thing when you're looking for something
and it's just like, oh, it's just a ghost now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I don't I don't usually try this, maybe it's possible.
I use like the Internet archive a lot to find
old versions of stuff, but like my favorite is to
find old versions of manufacturer websites. You know, you go
to the you go to EOTECH's website, you go to
their red dots page or their you know, reflex sites
page or whatever. They've probably done a pretty good job
of keeping that link consistent and they just update that page.
So the URL if you put it into the wayback machine,
go back fifteen years, it's gonna be a page, an
active page on our website with products or fifteen years ago.
So like you can learn a lot of stuff there.
But like you used to be able to google something
or just certain whatever MetaCrawler or whatever your search engine
of choice was, and you'd get pages of and crafted
enthusiast content essentially, like there were used to be. Like
I remember when I was a kid, you could go
Google Perfect Dark and there were like a dozen fan websites,
just homemade websites, angel Fire, GeoCities, whatever, all these little
like niche hosting services, and people would like have secrets,
they have screenshots. They'd be like, here's the secret on
this level, here's you know how to beat this level. Here,
just had to get this achievement or whatever, like and
unlocked cheek coats and goldennye or something. I don't know
if those websites exist. I assume they don't because they
were on weird fly by night hosting services that either
don't exist anymore or somebody stopped paying for them, so
the website's probably gone. They may be on the Internet archive,
but I don't know. How to find them because I
don't remember what the specific you know, GeoCities dot pd zefanpage,
dot joy or whatever like some weird at url I
can't remember. Then let him write them down, Like a
lot of this stuff would would be cool to see again,
but we're never gonna see it again.
Speaker 7: Well, and I think that the trend, I mean, over
the entire life of the Internet has been towards consolidation, right,
and when when with that consolidation comes that sort of
like massification where you know, much like the sort of
like really bizarre like Chinese movies that you see every
once in a while, where it's like this is a
movie made for forty percent of the globe, so it's
not really about anything. It has no cultural touchstones. It's
sort of just generalized entertainment, right, you can imagine being
like almost industrially produced. But there's been a similar thing
with any one of these these sort of interests, you know,
these hobbies where you know, as it goes kind of
higher and higher up the food chain gets to bigger
and bigger as kind of like aggregation sites, the sort
of specifics about like okay, well, let's say you're in
a form of a thousand people, obviously there's a pyramid
ninety percent lurkers, so we save one hundred active users
half of them are stupid. Some means you've got fifty people. Okay,
those are fifty people that you may not know them personally,
but that's well under Dunbar's number. Right, that's a group
of people you can sort of weigh their opinions on anything.
Whereas okay, now you're on you know, let's just say
the AR fifteen. Do you say boards on Reddit? I
don't use Reddit enough to know the terminology subreddit. That's
the right word, subred. I probably could have figured that
out if I thought a little bit about it. But
that's a one completely open to public, and two how
many users are on that? I assume tens of thousands yep.
And so if you're interested in something very very specific,
not just you know, the whole big topic, what your
ability to find that information quickly is largely gone. And
I mean regardless of whatever your hobby is, you sort
of see the same thing that as it gets more popular,
there's certainly benefits to that, but you sort of lose
the resolution, right, It becomes more and more difficult to
find the specific information, and uh, obviously, you know, it's
kind of social media has passed me by, and there
are new and scary forms of technology that I don't
understand that that trend just kind of continues apace. Like
the moment I realized I was old is when I
started seeing gun asmr tiktoks re uploaded to YouTube, and
I was like, I not only don't understand, none of those.
Speaker 2: Sports are in the Bible.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly when King James wrote the Bible, you never
said any of those and so, uh.
Speaker 2: But sorry that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, fair enough. Well, dude, this is I guess sort
of a more morbid note to end things on. But
work fast approaching time. If people want to find you
and your work, what's a good way for them to
do that?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, your best bet is to go to go to
YouTube and search Hop night Vision, because that'll that'll drill
it down pretty far. If you just search Hop, you're
gonna this weird like animated kids show channel about a
rabbit that's.
Speaker 7: Not I assumed. I assumed that's what the dog whistle
was for. This was like a secret furry thing.
Speaker 4: Oh no, I wish that'd be a lot a lot
more well accepted among the aforementioned separated.
Speaker 7: That being a Marathon fag exactly.
Speaker 4: Like, Uh, I'm still embarrassed. I don't have a Macintosh
copy of Marathon too, the PC box and it's square,
it's not triangular, so it really does look out of place.
Speaker 2: So I am a fake Marathon fan.
Speaker 7: See this is exactly I mean, speaking of kids not
understanding yesterday's technology effectively, Golden Eye, I can get. I
was a little before my time, but I've got it. Marathon.
I felt like I was like like they were asking
me to speak Mandard. I was like, what are these controls?
What am I doing? And so I gave up.
Speaker 4: Impenetrable would be a good way to describe it. I'm
absolutely adore Marathon. It's a fantastic game, and people try
to compare it to Doom, which is its biggest contemporary,
and it just doesn't compare to Doom because Doom has
no story. Marathon has all a story. Doom has phenomenal
gameplay and level design. Marathon has perfunctory gameplay and mixed
level design. Some levels are okay, a lot of them
are not great. So playing Marathon is hotile like it
is even if you play on an easy difficulty, it's
still it just doesn't doesn't feel right, Whereas I feel
like almost anybody could play Doom, even with the old
school Doom controls, and be like this is fluid and awesome.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's it's not that you had to be there,
it's just that you have to look. You have to
look well beyond the presentation and the and the surface
level aspects of the game. And I don't like remakes,
but I think Marathon maybe could use a remake, not
this weird extraction shooter nonsense that they're that they're probably
going to fail to come out with anyway.
Speaker 7: So yeah, yeah, it's sort of an interesting point. And
not to drag us back into deep esoteric Internet waters,
but to your point about barriered entry, it was sort
of the same thing, you know, in an earlier era
of the Internet, when both actually getting on the Internet
was a difficult thing to do, relatively speaking, and also
to both get to and contribute to a discussion around
a topic required some effort. Like don't get me wrong,
as you said earlier, there was still plenty of garbage
out there, but it was sort of a filtering mechanism
on the front end to keep out at least some
amount of nonsense that you see.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 7: I know it's sort of an interesting thing, your comparison
from Doom to Marathon. It's completely off topic, sort of
my exact feelings about the Dark Messiah games or sorry,
the hears of Mike and Magic games and the Elder
Scrolls games. But this is a conversation for another time.
That if fifty percent of my audience is introt in guns,
zero percent is interested in my opinion on early two
thousands computer RPG games. But anyway, I'll be sure to
link your stuff in the description. It was a good
conversation man.
Speaker 2: Thanks for coming on, Sylany, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 7: If you like my stuff, the best way to support
it is to find me on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere
you listen to podcasts. If you want to support us,
Axios Remote and Fish Fish, I'll edit that out. Axios
Remote Fitness and Coaching is our sponsor. Sure to check
them out. JD is an absolute animal, intimidating human being
and you wouldn't want to make him angry again. Hop
I appreciate it, and everyone keep your head up. I
can't last forever.
Speaker 6: Good night, that's isogail art A programs,