CD103: Guns and Bitcoin with Fenix Ammunition

Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch.

The show focused on actionable Freedom Tech and Bitcoin discussion.

As always,

dispatch is a interactive live show with no ads or sponsors. It is purely funded by our wonderful audience.

So huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to support the show with Bitcoin. Easiest way is to go to seal dispatch.comor

seal dispatch.com/

donate. You can donate with on chain Bitcoin or lightning.

You can also support the show via podcasting 2 point o apps, such as Fountain

or Breeze.

Those apps work just like a regular podcasting app. Search still dispatch, press the subscribe button.

But you can load up your wallet with Bitcoin, and you can choose how much Bitcoin per minute you think the show is worth. That Bitcoin gets sent directly to my node,

gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that you guys care about the content,

and also gives me sats that I can spend at a later date. So thank you all for continuing to contribute.

Part of podcasting 2.0

is a feature called boostograms.

Boostograms allow you to attach a message

to a stack of sats that you send to the show. I read the top 4 boostograms from the last episode,

every episode

ranked by sats. We have at sawzal

with a 100000

sats

saying, as with most things, I couldn't more strongly agree with Matt in saying, this was a fucking awesome conversation, gents.

Thanks, Adam, Jack, and Matt, for your time and dedication towards helping the next billion

adopt the best money.

Open source stage was lit. Hope to visit Bitcoin Park someday.

And until then, we'll stay humble in Stack Sats. Great advice. We have at Eric 99 with 50,000 sat saying, stay humble, Stack Sats. Thank you, Eric. Great advice.

We have at 8mithrandur

with 21,000 sat saying, hashtag, we're still early.

Every good meme is based in reality. We are early. And we have at scare city with 21,000

sats

preboosting because I will be listening to this on a plane and not streaming sats value for value. Thank you for the pre boost. Thank you to all the freaks who continue to support the show.

As always,

dispatch is streamed live

on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube,

and Bitcoin TV.

Joining us live is also a great way to support the show. We have a unique live interactive chat,

where we get to participate directly with the guests

as we're on air. So that's a great way to join us and,

Thank you for the previews. Thank you for the opportunity to support the ship.

I just heard that echo,

Justin. But before we you're good.

I just lost my train of thought. We're streamed on all the platforms. Go to siladispatch.com.

Share with your friends and family. I know it's a recession. I know it's a bear market. If you can't spare sats,

just

subscribing and sharing it is a a huge

boost to the show, and I do appreciate it. So with all that said, we have a very unique guest on today.

We're gonna be jumping,

into a slightly different topic than we're probably used to here. It's a topic that I wanna talk about a lot more,

which is guns and which is firearm culture in America in general.

We have

Phoenix Ammunition here. I guess his his actual name is Justin. I know him by his company's name and his Twitter handle, which is Phoenix Ammunition.

They are a

small business ammo manufacturer out of Michigan,

that accepts Bitcoin using BTC pay server,

and it's an honor and a privilege to have Justin join us. How's it going, Justin?

Oh, hey. Thanks for having me. The pleasure is mine, and, yeah, that's a that's a pretty fair introduction. We're,

Phoenix Ammunition. We're a small business, about 25 minutes northwest of Detroit.

I'm the CEO. I work with my brother,

as the vice president. We have 5 other employees,

and we make ammunition for the militia industrial complex.

So, that was

not something I made up, but a phrase I have really come to enjoy.

You know, we were sort of become famous because

we have our focus completely on the civilian market. We're really not interested in doing business with, military or police,

And,

you know, some people really like that, some people don't.

But in any case, it gets people thinking. So we're happy to happy to play our little role in this,

very large industry.

Well, I have to say,

you make a great fucking product.

I bet you. And,

I appreciate that you can ship it to me directly that you do ship it to me directly for Bitcoin.

But I would I would appreciate it even if I had to pay dollars for it.

Your product specifically has this you know, it's

it's a special relationship you have with consumers because the thing is blowing up in my face. Like, I'm real I'm really counting on it to work.

It's not some, like, chintzy fiat product.

But, I mean, to get started here, Justin, I'm kinda curious.

I do you have any competition? Like, are there other

direct to consumer

ammo manufacturers in America that, like, that I can just, like, go to their website and just have it shipped to my house?

Sure. Yeah. There there are.

I would say

of companies our size, many

don't really go the route of, web sales as their primary

method of distribution. So, like, us, for example, when we were first getting started, we just didn't have the brand recognition, the web traffic to make that sustainable. So,

we sold mostly at gun shows,

we sold to the local ranges, you know, pretty much anybody who we could sell to, that's who we were going to sell to.

And my goal was always to generate enough interest, build an email list, get web traffic, you know, build a brand that eventually we could stop doing those things because,

those were dependent on the amount of hours that I could spend out selling.

And so it's just not really scalable in the long term. And so I I knew that right away, and I also knew that most of the under most of our competitors in the industry,

were happy to be in that business model and weren't really interested in changing,

and myself being a little bit younger

coming into this industry

than many others, I would say that kind of gave me an advantage because I could see I felt like I could see something that they were missing.

And so

to me, I thought, you know, this

would I rather be at a gun show all day and deal with the customer in

that sort of a format, or would I rather do it indirectly via email, which I can do from anywhere? Right? So and then I'm not limited to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then try to knock on doors at these ranges, and there's a limited number of those anyway. So even if I can generate a lot of volume,

it's just

not really what I wanted it to do in the long run.

Yeah. No. That makes sense to me.

I But I I guess to answer your question, I kinda went off there a bit. There are some, there are definitely some brands,

that have recognition as being more of an online seller. I would say our brand is a bit unique in that we are more or less have said we're not interested at all in doing business

with really anybody outside of the civilian market,

and here are our reasons why.

And so I don't think there's anybody

that can say they've taken that sort of unique niche within the niche, if if you will.

Yeah. I mean, you're you're very outspoken to say the least. I,

Yeah. I guess my question was more

I don't know. It's a it's a very interesting model. It's a model that I,

I would like to see more of just across

American society, maybe not even just in the firearm industry.

But it also seems very unique in the

within the industry. And I I even like the,

you don't sell, like, little boxes of ammo. Right. You sell, like, the big bags.

Bags. Which is, like, ridiculous. Like, why would I ever wanna buy

rounds in, like, 50 round boxes, and then I have to open all the boxes just to store them or move them around. It makes no fucking sense. Yeah. It it generates a ton of waste,

you know, then and it just takes time to take everything out of these boxes, which end up going in the trash anyway. And, you know, frankly, I just looked at it and I said, especially on the Internet where you're gonna have to pay shipping to some degree or and, you know, shipping's built into the cost, Put it that way. You might not be billed for it, but it's there at some place. It's being accounted for, to be sure.

So,

really, why would who who buys 2 boxes of ammo,

and then pays $15 to have it shipped? I mean, unless it's some really specialty router you just can't get anywhere. It's very uncommon.

And right in to the beginning of the business, you know, so we got a quick quick story of kind of how that also came to be. We got started,

right before the 2016 election, and so, you know, everybody knew Hillary was gonna win, and so the world like, everybody was freaking out. The gun shows were packed,

People were kind of going crazy a little bit, not quite to the degree that they did in during COVID, but pretty crazy.

So things are going okay, and then, you know, Trump wins, and everyone's like, holy shit. Like, I can't believe it actually happened.

And then everybody kinda panicked in the gun industry because all of a sudden, it's like, well, this guy's not gonna,

pass any kind of gun control. He seems to be this, like, MAGA, super, like, patriot on steroids guy.

So, we don't have anything to worry about, and so all of a sudden, all that business dries up. And also, know, gun shows tend to to taper off in the summer anyway because who the hell wants to be inside of a fucking gun show when you could be outside shooting or doing any literally anything else. So,

that started to dry up, and I thought, oh, man. We better figure something out. I don't know what to do because the we're not we don't have near enough web traffic to let that have any, you know, percentage of our real sales.

The guns the gun

stores now are gonna become very price conscious because,

there's gonna be this glut of ammo, and they're gonna try to work us down. They already do that anyway, so that's

not sustainable in the long run. I don't really wanna do that.

So where do we go? A friend of mine invited me to a 3 gun competition.

It was like March, I think, so it was absolutely freezing cold.

But

I literally packed my trunk full of ammo, went up there and sold it to the tried to sell it to these competitive shooters. And that's where I started to understand

what they wanted. They wanted something that was low recoil,

with a heavy grain bullet so that you can still knock over steel plates if you don't hit them towards the center, things like that.

And I said, okay. Well, here's a niche. And they're willing to pay a little more for it because it's not something that you can go buy the day before at Walmart if there's ammo available. It's just not gonna be there.

So, alright, now we can find a niche where we don't have to rely on sense per round. These guys are interested in performance, and they're willing to pay a little more

for a more quality product. And so if we can find a way to do that, then I think we've got something here. And, oh, by the way, the round count for this match was like 200 rounds, And these some of these guys are shooting another match the next day, and then they were gonna shoot 250 rounds during the week to practice or whatever.

And I thought, okay, this is this is what I want. You know, it's great to sell ammo at a gun show to some guy who's, storing it in his basement for the end of the world. Right. And these guys are doing that too, but they're also consuming

product on a constant basis. Right? There's turnover.

And so I thought, alright, this is where let me investigate this niche more and figure it out, and so then I started getting into competitive,

shooting myself as a as another hobby.

And part of that was to do some soft marketing, you know, you're on a squad with 10, 12 guys, and, oh, you're the guy who owns Phoenix Ammunition. Yeah. That's me. Okay. Like, and then they see me shooting, and so it was an encouragement for me to get better at it. For one thing, it it it has vastly, dramatically improved my pistol craft, you know, my rifle work, all those things. So I got all those side benefits. I I could be at the range,

developing skills and something that I personally wanted to be better at anyway.

But in the meantime, I'm interacting with this customer base. They they can see the product works because I'm getting better at it. They can see that I'm not having any failures.

They can see it with put their hands on it, and that's how I'm gonna start to build this from the grassroots.

And,

so in any case, then

that's kind of what led to the packaging. Alright. Well, everybody here has got all these 50 round boxes. There's all this trash. You know, they're hauling away bags and bags of empty

cardboard boxes and plastic trays.

And then, you know, over a couple of years, as we started to develop more of our sales through the website,

you start to get analytical data, and you look and you say, okay. My average order is 500 rounds of something. That's a that's about the average, and and the average cart is this many dollars That equates to about 500 rounds.

So why don't we do everything in increments of 250, and that way people can just get how much they want. We can structure our pricing to work better that way. The more you buy, the more you save, all the stuff that you guys like Yeah. I don't have to work with it.

Sure. You don't have to generate a bunch of coupon codes and then deal with, hey. You know, this coupon code expired. Will you still honor it? Hey. I put my order in last week, and now you're doing this July 4th sale. That's bullshit. You know, I want the 10%. Okay? Like, I guess I'll give it to you anyway, you know, because

I I want the revenue. So

it just eliminated all that. A lot less work on my part, and it's easier from a packaging perspective.

You know, automating

having automated equipment to

put all of those,

cartridges into a tray,

is expensive, or it has to be done by hand. And so do I pay somebody to manually put all these rounds into these boxes face up and slide them in the box and do all this shit? Or do we eventually get to the point where I can try to automate, and that's where we are now. So we have, an automated bagging machine that, after the ammunition comes out of our

automated quality control equipment,

it gets fed down a conveyor. It counts out 250 rounds at a time.

It's extremely accurate. It's much more accurate than the, weighing systems that we were using before, so it's, you know, plus or minus 1 round and almost never that.

Opens up the bag, seals it. We can print the information right on the bag, so, you know, the packaging doesn't have the packaging's gonna end up in the trash. Put the money in the product, don't put the money in the packaging. Right? And people, I think, can see

that that's a better use of their dollars. That that's that's what I was thinking. As as a and all of these are things that I could see as a consumer. Right? Having

benefits really basic.

Exactly. It seems seemed basic to me. And so I again, I was thinking to myself, man, this is like such a pain in the ass. I can take all this ammo out of these boxes. I go home and I take them all out. I dump it into, like, a 50 cal ammo can. Exactly.

And, now I gotta now now, you know, the the trash guy comes and he's like, fuck, man. This guy's got this oh, he's got, like, a entire

50 gallon trash bag full of empty ammo boxes. Okay. Now that's, like, not so good for operational security. Right? How Yeah. You buy, like, a case you buy a case of a 1,000 rounds, and it's, like,

you have 20 boxes and 20 little plastic things. And it's not even it's it's

the company is loading them all into they're spending time to do it just for you to spend time to remove it and just put it in the app. That's so stupid. Right? Yeah. So

yeah. That's Yeah. So that makes

that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that is cool that I think that you just understood the consumer. Right? Like, that is,

and and then the idea of of the scaling the prices with, you know, adding

you buy more, you save more. Right? And, like, that's just a very obvious incentive match between,

the user and and and you guys.

Yeah. That makes sense to me.

Yeah. No. I think you hit on you you hit that right on the on the head. I just I just it's such a simple thing. I there's a there's a hardware wallet manufacturer in Bitcoin,

that's called Coldcard. I don't know if you're aware of that. I've heard of them. Yep. I've heard of Coldcard. They do the like, not the same thing because it's a little bit of different situation, but, like, all the competitors have, like, these fancy boxes and stuff and, like, they ship it in a sealed bag. Right? They're like, you're just gonna perfect. Right. You're just gonna open it anyway. Let's just save everyone time and money on both sides of the equation, right, and just ship it in a ship it in a bag.

And then I think the other thing to unpack there, with your answer is

something that

I think you

focused in on pretty quickly.

I'm gonna try not to fanboy too much here. Thank you for coming on the show.

The are all, man. Honestly.

Is that there's a whole branch of the industry that is straight,

sats per round or cents per round. Right?

Like, how low how cheap can I get my round for? And, like, that's all they care about. There's, you know, ammo seek. Like, there's websites that are just

strictly focused on people trying to get the lowest price

around. But you honed in on this idea that there's a whole

quiet group,

I think,

that is that is completely price insensitive. Like, if you if you rip us off, like, I'm gonna stop buying ammo from you. Certainly. But, like, I'm not I I'm not that sensitive on exactly the you know, it doesn't have to be the cheapest round possible. Like, I don't want something dependable. Like, I'm gonna I'm I'm it like I said, it's blowing up in my face by design.

Like, I need it to be dependable whether that's competition, whether that's defense, you know, what whatever the situation is.

And you realize that there's a price

insensitivity

there. You don't have to just drive the margins all the way down to 0 and everybody wins.

Yeah.

So

I thought I could do 2 things in this industry, and that's

what that's kind of why I do just about everything I do. The first is, as you said,

most most of the industry has trained the consumer to look at only cents per round, and AmmoSeq is, like, the worst at that, but, you know, they weren't they're the worst, but they weren't the first.

So,

I looked at getting listed on AmmoSeq one time and, you know, basically, as an ammo company, you have to pay a monthly fee to even be appearing on their listings. And so that that actually, again, as a consumer having come into the industry, I always thought, well, this guy's just like a an an aggregator. Right? He's just running a sort he's just pulling everything off the Internet. Well, no. That's not true. You're only getting the things that people are paying to be exposed to. So you as a consumer may think that this search engine is not biased, but it is. You're not seeing,

even somebody who has a lower price but doesn't pay their, you know, fucking ransom,

who you know, the protection money that MOC, you know, Hey, bro. You got a nice ammo company. I didn't know that. Shame if no no if you had no web traffic, and it's like, well, man, fuck you guys. I'm not playing that game. And I looked at it and I just said, look. I I if I'm not if you're not on the first page, you're never gonna get seen. Everybody knows that. Again, analytics, that's how the Internet works. You gotta be in the top 3 or 5 on and if you're not on the first page, you basically don't exist. That's just how the industry has trained consumers.

So we were never gonna be able to compete with those kinds of margins. We didn't have the economies of scale. Didn't have the capital. You know, this business was entirely self funded by me, so I didn't have access to

5 to $10,000,000

to develop a bunch of high speed high speed equipment right away

and leverage being able to buy 50,000,000 primers at a time. You know, I had to buy from middlemen, so my margins were already thinner than everyone else's

anyway. So

I can't compete on that. Okay. So what can I do? I can make a better product. Well, who's gonna care about a better product? Right?

Most of

the consumer base

sees it as consumable. I mean, if you go to an indoor range, and I've, you know, seen this many times, you have a mostly uneducated, untrained consumer who's renting a handgun for an hour. They're gonna shoot a 100 rounds and do a piece of paper at 5 yards. They have literally no idea what they're doing. They're not training anything. They're not developing any skill.

They might as well,

honestly, have dry fired in their living room and they could have gotten way more out of it. So if they have a, quote, jam, right, they don't really know what it was or why it happened or they don't really care about it. What do they do? They get the round out of there somehow, they put the gun down on the table, they do some fucking

shit that you're looking over at the bay from the bay next to you thinking, Jesus Christ. This guy about to point this gun at my head. Like, what in the fuck is he doing?

And they dropped around on the floor and they don't care. Right?

And when they bought the ammo, the guy at the range counter

sold them the cheapest stuff that they had.

So that's not my market.

So

where is my market? It's these people who are doing what I saw as important things, people who are taking

real training classes, right, with something like somebody like Haley Strategic,

Warrior Poets Society,

Cog Works, like, these these brand name, like, companies where they they're gonna go through a 1000 rounds over 2 days,

and these people are serious about their craft. Like, they

I have a lot of experience as an athlete. I wrestled in college. I'm a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt. So I've spent a lot of time around, like, very high level athletes.

And so that's the way that I looked at the gun community.

The guys who are grand master USPSA shooters,

I mean, you know, you can say what you want about it, but, like, watch Goran Thumb shoot. Okay? That guy is like a world class shooter, there's no doubt about it. I mean, you

say what you will, like, that's just a simple fact. And you don't get that way without a lot of practice,

and understanding of basics and fundamentals and just doing drilling reps, drilling reps, drilling reps, working on your footwork, your presentations,

site picture, all these things.

And to me, like, that's what I wanted to do. Even as a civilian,

as a civilian, I found that to be extremely important, and I didn't really

understand that I had access to those kinds of

training and instructionals,

so now that you see that that stuff's available and then you start to meet people who are very take this very seriously,

you understand that, hey, this makes sense for everybody. If, if a USPS a shooter has a failure with my product on a Sunday, I'm gonna I'm gonna hear about it Monday morning in a in a nasty email.

And

similarly,

if we're gonna make defensive ammunition,

and even if we don't, like you you know there are people who put FMJ ammo in their carry guns and and so your ammo might be used in a self defense situation whether you intended for it to be used or not.

My worst fear would be, you know, somebody is found dead with their concealed carry gun in their hand and in the chamber is one of my rounds with a dented primer.

I

I don't know what I would do. I I would probably quit. I would probably close the company, to be honest with you, because I I don't know that I could live with that. I that would that would weigh extremely heavily on my conscience. And so,

for both of those reasons, it has to work

absolutely every time.

And having been around a lot of manufacturing companies in my previous career,

having been exposed to things like 6 Sigma and,

understanding, you know, statistical drift and your quality and ISO 9,000

and madcap and all these, like, high level certifications that you need to make aircraft products.

And then I come into the firearms industry, which you would think would be comparable,

and looking around and saying, Jesus, like, these are the tolerances? These are insane. You know? These aren't even to, like, a 100th of a of a decimal point. Like, this is what you guys think is acceptable?

Well, this is easy. Like, these guys just, like, don't aren't very good at what they're doing because they see it as a consumable product.

They're trying to get the cost down. They're not interested in upgrading their their tooling or their technology or,

automation, things like that. And so I don't have the money to do it now, but I'm gonna start working on a way to get to that point. And so I'm a 100% sure I can make a better product.

That's no problem. I'll I'll figure that part out. And the second thing that I think I can do is I think I can build brand loyalty.

Because what I can see is that the consumer I'm looking around at these,

competitions,

and, you know, the top level guys shoot what they like, but most everybody else is just shooting whatever they could get. And I thought, alright. Well, how do I build brand loyalty? Right?

I'm looking around and

discovering that that's like these gun companies don't really exist

in the sense of

they don't really put much thought their marketing is very canned and generic.

They don't have any personality, and part of that is because they can't. Right? They they can't be boisterous and loud and cause controversy because

they're trying to get these big dollar military contracts. And as a result,

they can't they can't get too far out of the neutral edge. Right? I mean, like, look at fucking Raytheon. They got,

you know, like,

that's the whole, like, meme. Right? Is the the Raytheon drone flying in with the, LGBTQ

flag on it. It's like, you know, are you fucking serious? Like, these guys are get get get out of here. Like, this is this is hilarious. Just be who you are, you know, just a bit. Like, I think everybody would be happier if you guys are just like, yeah. We, we fucking bomb, you know, kids overseas, like but we're really good at it, you know. I mean, we hit the target every time. Own it. You know? Own it. Right. Just be good at it. Like, be be who you are. And so I thought, alright. Maybe I can just be authentic. Like, I'm I'm not

I'm not former military. I'm not former law enforcement, so I don't have those chops. I don't have those connections.

So so I'm behind the curve there.

But I do think that I understand

this this gigantic market of,

civilians who are interested in guns

from the perspective of, like, self sovereignty and protect like home defense and protection.

I have never been hunting in my life. My parents didn't own guns

until after I was out of the house. I wasn't even allowed to play with toy guns because my parents wanted me to be, like, raised right. You know? I I shot 20 twos and boy scouts and stuff like that,

but

my introduction to guns was,

alright. I'm 22 years old. I'm living on my own now.

I'm an ex college wrestler, so I'm I'm, like, I'm pretty sure that I can handle myself in most situations. But I'm also smart enough to know that sometimes,

the situation, you know, is not always up to you and that, you know, people do in fact carry things like guns and knives and baseball bats and weapons,

and then all bets are off. And so I I need to expand my understanding of,

martial arts,

and that's really what using a firearm is. It's it's a martial art, and anybody who thinks it's not doesn't understand anything about martial arts. Alright? I mean, the American

gun craft is

basically as beautiful and as much the same as Japanese sword craft. Right? But people don't think of it that way. So, I got my CPL

and carried a gun for many years with very little actual real training, and I look back and I think,

I definitely

overestimated what I thought my capabilities were going to be.

And so I I'm glad that I'm where I'm at now.

But, again, kind of going back to my philosophy as a company,

let's try to work with these training companies. So, like, this is another untapped market. You know, people who are consuming large amounts of ammo are working with these training companies. Let's reach out to these training companies. Let's let's try to solve a problem for them, and the problem is

they need ammunition

for like, they have high round count classes, but you can only fly on a plane with so much ammunition.

So if I can make it easier for their students to have ammo delivered on-site and it can be guaranteed ahead of time, then it can increase the number of students who are taking their classes,

thereby increasing the amount of exposure I have, thereby increasing my, you know, sort of passive sales with these training companies who are really doing the selling for me. And in the meantime, I get to go train with these guys, I get to increase my skills,

and so it's like, you know, one hand washes the other. And,

so that's that's kind of the niche that we've fallen into.

And,

you know, as the years have gone on, there's been plenty of opportunities to kinda highlight

why we think that's a good idea.

And so Yeah. I mean, you can't even I think it's empirically been a good idea for you guys because, I mean, my biggest complaint as a consumer is that you can't keep stuff in stock. So, I mean, you're not even Yeah. You're selling them quicker than you can produce them.

Yeah. Part of that is the supply chain as well. I mean,

you know, supply chain and capital, and, you know, we're a small business again. So, you know, we're kind of at the point where if I really wanted to bring my cost down, I would I would have to be doing more, like, direct.

There's a couple of things that we don't get direct from a supplier,

that we could try to bring that margin up, but it's very complicated, and it takes a lot of upfront capital.

And it's unfortunately just not something that we have the ability to do.

So,

yeah.

I mean, I think of the relationship almost like, my relationship with, like, a local farm, like a CSA or whatever. It's like Exactly. Yeah. Maybe we just ordered that. Buy whatever's made made this week. You know? Yeah. Tomatoes are in stock. Yeah. Tomatoes are in stock. I'll buy tomatoes. Maybe next week, cucumbers will be available. I'll get my cucumbers. That's right. Seasonal.

Yeah. We do that. Like, there are some calibers up here in Michigan. There's a caliber called 450 Bushmaster, very popular.

We have some limitations,

that below a certain line, you have to use a straight wall cartridge for hunting.

So, it's basically like a straight wall cartridge that can be chambered in an AR.

And so that's a that's a seasonal thing that we make. We don't really have much penetration in the hunting community, but it's very, like, area

specific. So we can churn that out for maybe 2 months, get some good margin because it's not a common caliber. People know they're gonna have to pay more for it. Then they can get back to our bread and butter,

which is the competition ammo, frangible.

You know, we have a lot of we have a narrow narrow lineup of calibers,

but we have a lot of variety within those calibers generally, which I think people like.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me.

Awesome.

I mean, so

I mean, you said you said you think of you think of firearms as, like, an extension of martial arts. Like, the way I kinda look out of it, it it's a tool. Right? It's a tool that empowers individuals.

Right? And,

it requires obviously a lot of education and training and but to me, that's where, like, on the overlap with Bitcoin comes into play because I think of it kind of as

one element of this, like, freedom tech arsenal, like, this this toolbox that people have available to them. But they need to actually realize the need, and then they actually have to go and train and educate themselves and use the fucking tool. It's not gonna just do it for you.

So I'm kinda curious, like

like, where did Bitcoin come into this picture?

Sure. Like Yeah. Yeah.

So,

I mean, I I can I can start all the way back? I mean, I I remember hearing about Bitcoin

shortly after it was invented

or released, you know, whatever you call it. Many such cases.

Unleashed upon the world, you know, whatever.

But I'm not was I'm not like a huge tech guy in particular, but sort of more of like a freedom type. So I remember hearing about it thinking, oh, it's pretty wild.

And then, I remember hearing again in the news sometime later, some guy was, like, trying to acquire a Bitcoin to buy a house with, or he was trying to sell his house, but he he wanted to only accept Bitcoin.

And so then that, like, okay. Well, this thing's been going on for a little while now. How come we can't get enough of it? You know, like, like, what may why is that? And so I I remember reading the white paper back then and it kind of going over my head maybe a bit. And then couple of more years pass and you hear about Bitcoin mining and what's this and okay. I got a crawl space under my house. Maybe I could take that old lap that old computer I had from college

and overclock it and mine some Bitcoin, you know. So, again, I passed.

So, you know, this is, like, the 3rd time now that I should have been a billionaire, but, you know, because, you know, as always, like, everybody, you know, everybody's got that kind of progression. And then so that finally,

how did it come in for business? So Yeah. Fast forward to

2018,

I was redoing our entire website.

We were starting I we're starting to make this is kind of after we discovered the competition crowd, and I realized, okay. We really need to put more effort into having our website be found. So how do we do that? My brother had programmed the initial website very quickly, you know, just kinda threw something up on, like, Squarespace or whatever. So I said, okay. I'm gonna, like, immerse. I would say what I am I'm a

I I think of myself as the true, like, jack of all trades, master of none sort. Yeah. So I said, alright. I can't afford for somebody to build a great website, so I'm just gonna have to, like, immerse myself in this topic for a month and learn everything there is to know and figure it out. So I rebuilt a whole new website, took all new pictures, you know, learned about SEO and what words were important, like, sort of looking at analytics. Okay. You know, who where where do I think we can be in, like, the top 3 or 5 of a particular keyword? Like, how how do I reach these competition shooters?

And so I spent a lot of time getting into it, and so as part of building a website, of course, you gotta connect your payment gateways and all these things. And so even,

I would say a couple years before that, I remember trying to find a payment gateway to be able to accept credit cards on the website and finding that,

in the terms of service of almost every, you know, PayPal, Square,

Stripe, all these companies,

they all had restrictions for,

against what you know, being able to do transaction with firearms.

So I was like, wow. There's only maybe 2 or 3 credit card

processors,

and that's like a whole web of that you have to go down. Like, so what so what what is it exactly that you guys do? So, like, you're the gateway or you're the processor and, like, all these things. So I'm kinda figuring out how that works,

and it's like, man, this is just,

that's kinda crazy. There's only a couple people who will even allow me to accept credit cards.

And then I'm building the new website,

and that was the first time I saw that it it, at that point, allowed you to be able to accept Bitcoin through Coinbase Commerce.

And I thought, okay. That's interesting. You know, maybe maybe I'll start to set that up, and I'll offer it as just like a gimmick in a way. I'm curious to see if anybody's actually using this fucking thing to buy things. Like, at this point, I don't own any. I don't, you know, I don't have a a wallet.

So I set all that stuff up,

let it run, and,

you know, for the first, so that would be what, like,

February,

March 2018,

I think that would be.

I think we probably wait 5, 6 months before we did one transaction in Bitcoin. You know, it was, like, very, very few and far between.

But over time, we started to get, like, one more here, one more there. And you're using Coinbase Commerce at this point? Yeah. At this point, we were using because, again Yeah. My my technological

understanding

of Bitcoin and the technology,

and That's fine. Yeah. What KYC, all this stuff. Yeah. I was I just thought to myself, like, I'm literally the only person in the firearms world who will even accept Bitcoin. Yeah. So that that has novelty in and of itself, and when I find the time to really, like, get into the nitty gritty of this stuff, then I really should do that. But for now, I've got 10,000,000 other things to do. This is a plug and play solution. It'll just work. Okay. So we're 6 months in. You're using coin Coinbase Commerce. You've had maybe one transaction.

Yeah. So then fast forward to,

the start of the pandemic. Right? So, you know, Bitcoin kinda had that situation where it went up to 20,000 and everybody bought some, and then it sank back down to, like this is, like, pre pandemic.

Well, March 2020, we hit 35100.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So so then the pandemic when the stock market collapsed. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So the so then so the pandemic happens and everything collapses. At this point, I don't even know what the price of Bitcoin is. We were we were the busiest we had ever been because everybody thought that the zombie apocalypse was Well, everyone needed rounds at that point. Everybody needed rounds right now. So we're shipping stuff as fast as we can,

And all of a sudden, I noticed, like, we're getting all these Bitcoin. People are just buying with Bitcoin all of a sudden. We're getting, like, 2, 3 a week. This is kinda weird. And that went on from,

you know, April until kind of the end of the summer fall.

Why? Because people were selling their Bitcoin when it was low,

and buying ammo with it for some reason. Well, I joke that you sell stable coins,

the real stable coins, because people think, like, oh, like, I need to get, like, USDC or whatever as a stable coin. It's like, no. Like, let me get some 556 and I thought about my Bitcoin today. I thought about, coming up with a coin that's backed by ammunition. Like, when you buy warehouse space and, you know, for every every coin is No. 1,000 rounds. Stick to Bitcoin only. Stick to Bitcoin. You you have you're on the right track. Don't get distracted. Yeah. Okay. I won't get pulled to the dark side. Yeah. So people were buying people were buying a a ton of Yeah. So people all of a sudden are are buying a a ton of, Bitcoin. Not a ton with, with Bitcoin, but, like, definitely more. And It was spiking. Time we also it was spiking. We also took Ethereum at that point. We took, like, a Commerce.

Yeah. Yep. Exactly. All all the kinda, like, big ones that Coinbase Commerce would accept. And so, it gets toward the end of that year in 2020, and of course, these coins are starting to come back up at this point.

And that was the time at which it was getting ready to do, like, end of year accounting, and so I thought, you know, I should log in. I haven't logged in to Coinbase Commerce in, like, 6 months. I should log in and kinda see what our balance was. And in my head, you know, I I I have a master's in finance, and so I I keep the books pretty good. And so I I thought in my head there's probably, like, 20 grand in this account, you know.

So I log in and it's at, like, 75. It's like, oh, shit. How how do there's no way I log how would I lose track of this much money? And that's when I looked and I said, oh, okay. Well, that's because they all increased by, like, a 100% in the last 6 months. Like, what the fuck is going on? And so that was the point where I thought I need to really get serious about this. I I need to get a much better understanding of this of what's happening here,

than I do. It's just not just a speculative asset. Like, I really need to get into the tech of it. So that kind of began my journey where, okay, well, what's a node? Well, this is what okay. That that makes sense. Like, why the hell did they call it mining? Like, it's just a stupid word. Like, if I think about it this way, I totally understand it, but I can totally understand

why people don't know what it means. And so then it's like, okay. Well, you know, now you're getting into,

you know, at some point, I probably stumbled into, like, KYC versus non KYC, and then you're like, okay.

Now I'm really understanding what this is. This is this is not what I thought it was, or it's so much more than that. This is I I really need to get, to get into the weeds more.

And so that was maybe,

you know, that that kinda went on for about a year where I sort of dabbled in the tech and and, okay, let me look into mining. Alright. How does that work?

You know, that's something maybe I could do as a side business. Alright. So you get that and then, okay, well, why would you run your own node? Okay. Well, this is why you would run your own node. Well, how do I do that? I don't really wanna build a Raspberry Pi computer. Let me see what off the shelf solutions I can find. And so that kinda went on for, like, a year or so, and then what really made it click and what really kinda settled me into where I am now was going to the Guns and Bitcoin conference in Miami

that ran the same week as the actual Bitcoin conference, and that would have been 2,022.

That would have been basically It was last year. Yeah. Last year. Yep.

And so that's when, you know, I meet these guys from Samurai Wallet. You talk to the guys at Ronan Dojo,

and and I look around and it's like, okay. These guys basically

have a digital AR 15. Like, this is actually better than an AR 15 because you can kill me and take the a r 15 from my dead hands,

but you can kill me and my 12 words will die with me and go fuck yourself. Yep. And there's nothing that you can do about it. And so long as

so long as I believe in myself in the sense that you can torture me to death, but I'm never gonna say those 12 words in the order you want me to say them,

then that's amazing. Like, that to me

is really why I got into business for myself. I wanted to be able to tell more people no. But I I mean, I say this, like, I'm the kind of guy who actually loves to say yes,

but I always like the option to say no. That's what got me into martial arts. That's what got me into wrestling as a, you know, kinda overweight,

not so popular kid in middle school.

I didn't wanna get bullied by

kids and, you know, I wanted to be able to,

you know, kinda also hang out with the nerdy kids and not sort of have that stigma over me because,

I kind of didn't really fit into either of those groups perfectly.

And so being able to be able to beat the shit out of anybody in school who wanted to mess with me was my ability to be able to say no.

And so,

that's just kind of always

I can look back at my life and see how that's manifested in many different ways leading up to, well, ultimately, like, that's the reason you own a gun because

the government can do anything they want to you until you say no. And you can only say no if you had the means to back it up. And that's why it's such a contentious topic. The government does not like to be told no at the end of the day, and they have the right to kill you for doing such.

With Bitcoin, to me, it was the same thing.

If I have the ability to say no, I want that to the nth degree. And so, you know, then I spent some time, like, sort of rebuilding everything or or trying to rebuild,

what I thought I had done with Bitcoin through Coinbase Commerce and these things. Okay. Well, how do I start to slowly, like, unravel all that and build it back,

to be more concerned about privacy and to be have as much main non KYC Bitcoin as I can because that to me is like,

you know, having a spare a r 15 buried in a waterproof case somewhere in a public park.

I may have done that. I I I'm not sure I can potentially admit to that, but, yeah. There there may or may not be a few of those. And so, like, that's your backup plan. Right? I mean, nobody wants to turn their guns in, but, they may come and take them while I'm at work. And I may come home and there's no guns left in the house, and then we find out that, you know, they're lining up everybody to face the wall. It's like, okay. Glad I buried that one.

You know, that that's kind of how I thought of it. That's how I got into it.

Okay.

Lot to unpack there. Yeah.

So

so first of all,

I love the guys at love love the guys at Samurai and Ronin Dojo. Like, they're my

they're they're they're good people. Right.

So it does not surprise me.

And most of the guns in Bitcoin crowd, like, they're they were great people. So, like, it doesn't surprise me that they

they they hit you hard and fast with the freedom money pitch.

Depending on my mood, I'll call Bitcoin freedom money or fuck you money. And I think they both they both fit. And I I could tell that your perspective is the same. So when did you switch to BTC pay server?

So,

basically, right when I got home from that conference, I said, okay. We we need to get away from Coinbase Commerce completely. Like, I need to do that. I'm pretty sure the Coinbase Commerce terms and conditions say, like, no firearm sales probably. I I they probably do. And, again, like, then you start looking at it like, alright. I'm not gonna be able to get away with this for so long probably. So what what do we do?

So I started looking into okay. Well, what options do I have? And, unfortunately, like, our website is built on a platform where we have to work within their boxes. It's Shopify. Right?

Right. So we have to work in that box. What what can I do? So the BTC pay integration is a little tougher. I I had tried a different company's node. I won't, you know, I I'm not really interested in, like, you know, trashing those guys or anything. The work node works fine for what it is. I just found that it did not work. It did not

work, with BTCPay the way that they said it would, and BTCPay

bay basically said, yeah. Like, we know that this isn't gonna work very well, and, like, we'll do our best to try to help you out, but, like, this is not The customer needs to, like, use Tor or whatever. Like, it's not Yeah. It was, it just I found it impossible to connect. Could not get it to work. And so,

for a while, I just kinda let that go. It's like, I don't have time to deal with this. I got a million other problems going on to solve. Yeah. The market was kinda turning COVID,

logistics, all this shit.

So then,

I finally was able to get BTCPay

to work, in some capacity, you know, and then

now I'm getting to the point where it's on its own node,

on its own server,

put it to its own node, and and so it's, you know, it's disconnected as as I as you can get it. That that's that was always the goal. So,

it was just a matter. I think, you know, unfortunately, I do like BTCPay, but again,

I think, like, we're at a weird

early adoption type stage where I just think

eventually there'll be better options that are like, right now, I find the hard part is for a layman like myself, I'm not a tech guy. Right? I have an ammo company to run. Yep. So for me, I still like, I'm a and I'm a very mechanical guy. Like, you know, I work on cars. Like, I I build my own rifles. Like, I'm a very mechanical guy, but I'm not a software guy. That's I just I don't have the knack for it. My father, my brother are both software people.

It's just not for me. So I I find it difficult to to be doing any kind of coding or stuff like that, and I, so I I could also look at it from the perspective I I can see why other companies in the gun industry don't aren't using it because they just really don't know how to make it all work. And from a tech perspective,

we're pretty behind

the curve, and so,

yeah, that

Yeah. We had we had a we had an audience member,

when his shout out on the last episode. He's like, we're still early. Like, we are very early. We are we're still early. Like, I

before BTCPay

existed,

it was very bad.

I wanna be I wanna be clear. Like, most people were using stuff like Coinbase Commerce or BitPay, which have the same exact issues with all the other centralized payment processors and credit card land.

So, like, the fact that we have a tool like BTCPay available to us is massive.

I will say the team at BTCPay knows that they need to make it easier, that everything needs to be easier. I think, like,

I'm not gonna take full credit for it, but I think, like, 3 years ago,

for my other podcast, Rabbit Hole Recap, we actually

our developer

set up the first Shopify, BTCPay

instance together and, like,

got the ball rolling on on on relatively easily integrating Shopify with BTCPay.

Oh, wow. That's how that's how, like, quick this our side of the industry is moving, and and the Bitcoin land is in a matter of years, we've made substantial

improvements.

But, yeah, it's we're definitely still early. Part of the reason I wanted you on the show is because you're accepting through BTCPay.

Right. Because you're accepting Bitcoin in a sovereign fashion. You're actually using it as freedom money, and you're actually hold I I I mean, like, it's not auto converting to dollars. Like, you have to manually sell it if you wanna convert it to dollars, which is what I think leads the next leg of of merchant adoption, which is this idea of

actual small businesses

that have a use case for Bitcoin. It's not just, like, publicity. Maybe that's how you started. It sounds like that's how you kinda started.

But,

but, like, they have a desire to to stack freedom money. They they want they want to they want customers to pay in it,

and they wanna do it in a sovereign fashion. So, I mean, you kinda mentioned, like, the difficulty of setting it up. Do you like, part of the reason I asked you to come on the show is because you

you were feeling quite passionate on Twitter about the fact that more companies in the firearms industry do not accept Bitcoin.

Right.

Like, it seems like such an obvious I mean, like, there's operation choke point. There's, like, obviously, very hard to get a payment process. It seems like a perfect fit. I mean, they like, New York regulators recently, like, pushed the thing where, like,

my the credit card companies will all, like, market as I'm like, I'm paying to a gun store. They're, like, setting up merchant code. Correct. They're, like, setting it up to start, you know, blocking the payments. Right? It's like the first step and

so it seems like the industry.

Right? Like, it it seems like the industry that should be moving into Bitcoin,

and is not.

Like, what are the like, why?

Why? Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Well, a lot of reasons. Number 1, the industry is just very old.

It's fucking loaded with boomers, and they just don't understand it. And and I hate to be that guy, you know, like, it's such a played out, you know, boomer.

But, the industry is you know, they've been around for a long time. They

things are working pretty well. They're they kinda do what they do.

So there's just not really a lot of incentive to change. I I was actually at a

event this weekend with one of the marketing people from Brownells, which is a huge website, obviously. Yep. And I said, Roy, you guys gotta take Bitcoin, man. You get you guys gotta do it. Because if you guys do it,

I think that'll put a lot of pressure on other people to do it because

I'm just, you know, some fucking guy, Brownells, you you know, you guys have got the 300 This is the spot. Real deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is like that's where I first learned how to build an AR 15. I mean,

I watched all the Brownells videos. Like, you guys gonna do it. And and he yeah. I don't know that it'll happen, but he's like, I know exactly who you need I need to talk to. Like, I'll mention it to him, you know, if they have any questions. I said, I'm sure it'll be expensive for you guys because you got a very complicated website,

but you also have a lot more resources. And so if you if it's gonna cost you, say, $30,000

to have it programmed into your site, just to pick a number off the top of my head, like, you actually couldn't spend that money. Like, you you

I think you'd get a return on your investment just from the marketing standpoint. Like, see it as a tech upgrade and also see it as part of your marketing budget. You know? And that way, you're spreading it out over 2 line items, and you can make it make more sense to somebody,

on your finance team who's, like, you know, really being a got an hawk eye out for those kinds of expenditures.

So

I I think it's just a matter of

they have to see

they and and also, like,

we have a lot of suppliers that are very hesitant to even give you, like, 30 day terms. Like, these people are it's like a cash only kind of business. You know? They're very old and established.

But that's why Bitcoin is useful there.

I agree. I agree. A proud of Bitcoin.

And and also, you know, I I so, guys, you got you have to see the writing on the wall. You know,

at the end of the day, there's no way to accept a credit card without the blessing of Visa and Mastercard

and then also the banks that are even above them. And so you can reinvent the wheel however many you can call authorize.net

whatever you wanna call it. You can call it parallel economy. You can call it whatever that which is exactly what it is. Like, you know, people on the right are all, like, hyped up about parallel economy this, parallel economy that.

And that was a point I made,

which also related to, like, why do we accept Bitcoin? It's like, guys, this is just a, you know, this is just like freedom

repackaged in freedom.

This is the same credit card company that we personally have been using since

2016,

but they wrap it in a flag and they call it parallel economy, and they and they make you think that somehow they are getting around the same banks,

and the same, you know, Visa and Mastercard,

but they're just not. They're just not. Bullshit. It's just it's all bullshit,

and I'm sorry, but,

this is the only way to do it. And so if we can get people if we can if we can encourage it to be used more,

then we can encourage more people to go into

developing the software and the technology that we need to make it work better. And so

if in my limited capacity, I can find a way to make this make sense to the layman in the gun community who doesn't really understand what it is, like, these are guys that like to deal in the physical world. Right? I want a rifle in my hands.

So, like, to try to get the guy to imagine, like,

a digital AR that's in the cloud, like, that's that's I've tried to have it that way, like, you know, how do how do I make this make sense to people? And so, you know, I I tried to relay some of the ways that, like, Michael Sailor has described it as digital energy,

things like that, but sort of put, like, the second amendment spin on it in a way, like, you know, this is actually like a digital AR 15, like but it's better because they can't take it from you. And so, you know, everybody remembers their Social Security number because that's what we were taught when we were a kid. So this idea that, like, you shouldn't be able to remember 12 words in a row, like, that's bullshit. Like, anybody could do that, just like you could learn 9 digits. Right? Like, you should be able to do that. And, frankly, if you're not willing to do that,

then maybe this isn't for you, and that's fine right now. But in 10 or 15 years,

like, it's gonna be foisted upon you probably whether you like it or not. Like, this this the digitization of money is going to happen whether you like it or not, just like we went from checks to debit cards,

and what have you, gold to, you know, fiat paper currency, wampum to from, you know, wampum to gold, whatever. Like, it's gonna happen whether you like it or not in the same way that you would never get into a gunfight with a spear or a rock or a stick. Why? Because it's ancient technology. That's why you shouldn't carry a revolver. Like, this is ancient technology, guys. We've we've moved on to, like, magazine type weapons. You know?

So that's

that's what Bitcoin is to me. It's the next evolution of of money, and so,

the faster you get on board, probably the better off you are, and certainly for us.

Yeah. I mean, first off,

consider this me offering to donate my time to help Brownells

accept Bitcoin.

Honestly, I If if they need the help, I'm happy I'm happy to help. Right. I agree that would be massive.

There's a little bit of a disconnect. I mean, first of all Yeah. There's there's a lot of overlap. You mentioned the idea of, like,

you know, if you're not willing to take the personal responsibility, then maybe Bitcoin's not for you and, like, massive overlap there with firearms, obviously.

There's so so much overlap across both tools. But,

it's an interesting disconnect because if you go to, like, a local small

gun store,

like, they realize credit cards are a problem,

and they push you to cash. They they push you first to debit cards

and then to cash, because debit cards are are slightly better in terms of of, I don't know, payment processing and whatnot.

Sometimes they're lower. But they try and push you to cash. The smart small gun stores try and push you to cash. Right. And then you have, like, this whole online

firearm industry

that is pretty much dominated by credit cards because they feel like there's no other option. So to me, like

Right. Bitcoin is a natural like, Bitcoin will take longer, I think, to get adopted by the small gun stores as long as cash isn't, you know, fully banned. I mean, it's it's Correct. I agree. I agree. I don't even know if they'll fully ban cash because most people just choose not to use cash. It's, like, it's just whatever. Especially, like, in our age range and and younger, like, most of my peers just don't use cash. They just they'd rather use Venmo and their credit card and Apple Pay and all this shit. So maybe, like, a cash ban doesn't even happen, and those small gun stores will continue accepting cash. But on the online side,

that's where the real

Right. Value lies. And to me, it should be relatively

I mean, I I agree that the tools are difficult,

and they could get easier, and they will get easier. And a lot of us are working on that, but,

it seems so obvious on the online side as an alternative

credit card. I hear you. It really does. And and, that's a good way to think about it, you know, and that's sort of where those two things happened in conjunction. We we were yeah. I used to be I used to make large cash deposits because we'd get home from a gun show, and I might have, you know, $15,000

worth of a $100, $20 bills.

But as we got away from those, I stopped making cash deposits because we just don't really get that much cash,

and it's not scalable. Right? I can't I can't,

I kept getting emails from these guys like, hey. Can I send you a check from Arkansas

and, you know, like, buy the ammo

hell, bro, I don't have fucking time for that, man? I I honestly, that that would be cool, but I just can't do it. I just I do not I cannot do I'll I'll die. I'll kill myself. Like, this is it's it's gonna be too much. I don't have the energy for it. I really wish I could. Know, I mean, I guess, can I send you a cashier's check? Can I Yeah? A money order. Can I pay with money order? Yeah. Can you mail it COD? Like, oh, I don't know.

So,

yeah. Then it okay. Well, this is a way for me to,

in a way, accept cash. Right?

A a non a non credit card currency

via

wires and electricity.

And so, yeah, it makes sense. And and,

you would think, but you just have to get over all the other stuff, but

but it's not real.

Well yeah. I know. But do do you think your dollar like, what do you mean by real?

You know, like, it's like you're talking it's like that scene in the matrix. Like, what what is real exactly? You know? Like, you think your bank, like, you think your bank account is real? No. It's software and numbers floating in cyberspace that they can

alter, change, delete,

anytime they want.

So,

you don't seem to have a problem with that. Like, you

you you trust the computers that move those digits between your bank account and whoever else's bank account that you're transacting with, but you don't trust a decentralized

set of

multinational companies and oligarchs who don't fucking care about you and are probably getting ready to, like, you know, set off some kind of device and, like, go to their bunker in New Zealand. Like, that's, you know,

that's who you trust,

but you don't trust your own node. You don't trust yourself to be able to remember these 12 words and, like, do just a modicum of of research and work. Like, to me, that's the same as, you know, these are all people who,

you know, the trad culture people on Twitter and the Internet who are all, like, raising their own chickens and digging their own water wells and all these things, and, like, I love that stuff. I do I have solar panels. I've got my own water well, my own septic system, so I want my own fucking money. I want my own bank account. I I want I want a system that is more in my control than it currently is.

And,

I saw Bitcoin as the that was the obvious answer. And so, yeah, I think part of it is just

again, like, you know, I'm I'm 38, so I'm sort of like a boomer millennial. You know, I'm like at the top end of the millennial spectrum.

I had a cell phone when I was, like, 14, but it had, like, a 200 minutes and, like, 50 text messages and I couldn't use it or my parents would fucking kill me, you know, it was like only to call for emergencies.

So, like, I lived through that, you know, and now I'm just like everybody else, I got a a, you know, modern phone and technology. So I I can see how much that progressed over that small period of time.

And so to me, it's easy to see the inevitable flow for the future, but I think for some who are older than me, it's very difficult for them to grasp some of these concepts, like, you you really have to take it you you you have to figure out ways to make analogies very simple and, like, not sometimes people criticize me because it maybe I don't get the analogy exactly perfect when it comes to, like, well, what is mining

and, you know, like, how does a node work and fine. But if that means that I can talk my mother into,

you know, getting a Bitcoin wallet. It's just like, mom, here, I'm gonna give you this, passport.

You need to remember these 12 words, and, like, that's all you really need to know about it right now. Just know that I'm gonna be putting some things into here and, like, you know, this is what you need to do. And then eventually, you, like, work their way into it little bit by little bit.

But, yeah, I think that's, that's what I that's what I think I try. I've always been good at explaining things, I think, and you get that way from

years years years of trying to convert anti gun people into pro gun people. Right? You have to be very you have to figure out very concise arguments,

and you have to figure out how to read people

and understand, like, what makes sense to them. And so I try to do that with Bitcoin. Like, what's the one nugget I can put in this guy's head that maybe isn't the full picture, but it's gonna get him enough to, like, start thinking about it and maybe do some of his own research, which is exactly what I did, you know.

That's how I got into it, and so I think in our in our world, there are, you know guys will watch, like, 15,000

grand thumb videos trying to figure out, like, what optic to buy. They never fucking shoot, but, like, they watch, you know, 10 hours of of, you know, reviews on optics. But it's like, you won't watch a one and a half hour podcast where, you know, I I think I I people criticize Michael Saylor for a lot of things. I think I think he explains Bitcoin very well.

And so I I try to send those his podcast to people in general

because I think he does a very good job of kind of laying it out in maybe an hour. And it's like, if you can't, you know, just take an hour. Just listen to it,

and and you'll get it, I think.

Yeah. I mean,

once again, lots of overlap.

I mean, we have that in the in, like, the Bitcoin world, right, where, like, people will spend, like, 10000 hours watching, like, philosophy Bitcoin podcasts

and not actually learn how to hold their own keys and use their own node. Correct. I mean, like, actually train as unit using it as freedom money.

I mean, my my zen

one's overlap. Like,

I think

I think the zen on on on Bitcoin to me like, I call it,

doomer optimism.

So, like

like, my zen on Bitcoin is that, like, as censorship increases,

like, people will figure out that they need it. Right? They'll need they'll need money that can't be blocked and can't be that cannot be easily blocked and cannot be easily seized.

And it's very similar with the firearm industry in that regard.

And, specifically, with the firearm industry using Bitcoin,

like,

we are in the trend where credit cards are gonna start censoring

firearm purchases

and and ammo purchases and all accessories and everything.

And as that starts to happen, it'll wake up to people. Like, you know, owners will realize business owners will realize, like, I need to start accepting Bitcoin because it's I have no other option.

The frustration part comes, and I can sense it in you. The frustration comes when you can see it clearly,

and it would be way less painful if people

prepared for it ahead of time.

And so many ignore that potential opportunity to prepare ahead of time.

But I think, you know, I think, ultimately, like, as censorship increases,

people will will will move to Bitcoin because they have because they have no other option. It's just frustrating

how clearly it seems sometimes, and and and people just don't don't necessarily listen. Right?

Right. Yeah. I think, again, like, looking at it from,

I wouldn't say that I'm, like, some kind of a real serious prepper in the way some of these people think that they are. But, I certainly am a a prepper to a degree. Like I said, I I'm interested in,

a lot of different things. I have solar panels on my house. I I I grew up with my own water well and septic system, so I thought everybody lived that way. Right. If you get older and you realize, like, yeah, this is actually really good. I can I control more of my own stuff? You know, when there's a boil water warning, I don't have to worry about it.

And I always wondered why that was as a kid, and then my dad explained it to me one day, and again, I just like, that seemed to be the way to live to me. And so you're prepping for all these things. You're prepping for, like, an EMP. You're prepping for the,

you know, Yellowstone volcano eruption and all this shit.

But you're but you're not prepping and and you are prepping for what you think of as a governmental collapse and maybe you don't think that's because the country's gonna get engulfed in, like, a civil war or anything.

But,

the reality is,

like, money has a lot to do with that. Like, money and the economy,

look at other countries where they have hyperinflation.

I mean, it can happen for any number of reasons. Right? It doesn't it doesn't just happen because of a dictatorship or whatever. It can happen because of an internal civil war. I mean, all kinds of different things. And so you're prepping for all this other stuff and and this is the one that you just won't take the time to understand, like, yeah, that's for sure a little bit frustrating. But again,

I so

but to me, I see that as an opportunity. So Yeah. Here here's a community I can tap into

where maybe I'm not the best at this, so I'm gonna go learn from the people who are much better at it than me, the Bitcoin people, and probably what's gonna happen along the way is I'm gonna find a lot of Bitcoin people who don't own a gun and who are the exact same but from the other side. Right? They're prepped to the gills that got, you know, a 1000000 cold wallets everywhere. You know, they these guys, like, you know, they they they practice the like, they can memorize a 100 words in a row because they got, like, 10 wallets and all this shit, and they got their, you know, metal cards are all stamped out and, you know, like, they got, half the passphrase of their cabin and this and that. But it's like, you don't even own a fucking gun. Are you serious? Like, do you in that case, you better you better hope

that,

you've got enough intestinal fortitude to be literally tortured to death and not give up your passphrase.

And looking at some of you guys, I frankly,

I pretty low.

So,

I think the minute that, you know, they put the towel over your face and they pour Mountain Dew on it, you're gonna be screaming those 12 words,

pretty quick. Oh, that's a new one, Mountain Dew waterboarding?

Mountain Dew boarding?

Yeah. That's actually what you're supposed to use, because of the carbonation.

The the carbonation is, like, 1,000 times worse. Noted. You learn something new every day.

So, anyway yeah. So it's like,

so I see the same thing from both sides. And so I think, well, you know Does the sugar help, or is it like, can I just use soda water, or is that a I don't know about that? I think,

I mean, Mountain Dew is, like, fairly caustic too. I mean, maybe Coca Cola would probably be worse. Like, the acid and the that's interesting. Okay. Sorry. I derailed you. We'll we'll have to try that later. No. It's okay.

So,

and one thing that I find the gun industry is bad at is technology.

Right? So,

I wanna be around these people who understand the technology side, and maybe maybe these people can solve some other problems for us as well. So here's an alliance that we can build. I thought the same I feel the same way about,

the marijuana legalization community. Right? Yep. Regardless of whether you think that's a good idea or morally acceptable,

whether it's your thing to do, whatever.

You know, I don't think people should be smoking crack in the streets, but, like, you know, I do think marijuana should be federally legal. I think that's,

it's going to happen whether we like it or not.

So People should be able to make their own decision. And also, another great fit for the Bitcoin industry. Yeah. I'm like a small l libertarian.

So here's another industry that has the same problem. Right? They can't accept credit cards. They have problems accepting money.

But they're a very powerful industry. There's a lot of money there. There's a lot of investment capital. It's a booming, growing market in many states.

So here are sort of 3 industries that share it's like a, you know, a 3 circle Venn diagram. There's, like, all this stuff in the middle that we have

problems that we all have together

that we can help each other with.

You know, I I think it's be you know, there's a lot of people with a,

a marijuana charge on their record who illegally can't own a gun because of that. So Right. How about we all team up and get on the same side and start trying to work together and figure out a way to, like, build alliances between those three industries. And so that, to me, like, that's why I went to guns and Bitcoin. I wanted to be,

I wanted to learn. I wanted

to go into the a room where I thought I was the dumbest guy in the room and just listen to those guys for a weekend and come away with a few nuggets that I thought I can I can work with as a business, but this will make me better at explaining it to other people? Right? Like, they'll when you when you really learn something hands on, you're much better at teaching it to others,

and that's that's, that's what it was for me. Well, just because it's infuriating and you kinda mentioned it, you can have a marijuana charge so you can't own a marijuana business, which is really fucking insane.

The craziest.

Yeah.

I, so talking about overlap,

one thing I think is interesting

is

the firearm industry in America, and you've been very outspoken about this on Twitter lately,

is obviously

a massive target for regulation.

And it's a industry that, you know, I can't imagine running a small business in it.

You have a ton of bureaucracy. I I saw someone in the comments asked,

specifically, like, do you have issues with, you know, selling larger round amounts?

But,

I'm curious. Like,

I think this is a blind spot for a lot of Bitcoiners. I think,

you know, we talk about I don't know who said the quote.

Was it Gandhi? I don't fucking know.

That, you know, first first, they laugh at you, then they fight you. There's a middle there's there's 3. That that then then they

something, and then you win. Right? And then you win. Yeah. 1st first they laugh at you, then they fight at you, then you win.

Something like that. There's a like, there's something in between.

Yeah. Anyway, I got that. General direction. Right? I think a lot of Bitcoiners think of then they fight you stage has already happened.

And I actually get a lot of flack within the

all. Not at all. And I think I think,

like, the firearm industry

understands the risk. They understand the risk of of of government overreach,

and they've been fighting it for a long fucking time.

And even things like,

every every regulated Bitcoin company right now,

we have doctor Drake. First, they ignore you. 1st, they ignore you. That's right. Yeah. I knew that. Then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. There you go. Okay. We nailed it. Thanks, team. So, like, in the in the Bitcoin industry, every single regulated Bitcoin company is keeping lists of Bitcoiners and our transaction history.

KYC. Right? That's why we call it KYC.

In the firearm industry, we've seen that as a as a red line. Right? This idea that we don't want,

we don't want lists of

of gun owners want lists. Because that's the first step to confiscation. Right. Yeah. Now I don't think

the firearm industry has been necessarily

very successful on that front, but at least large. No. But Right. I mean, but,

but But that's but that's something that they and and they The threat is recognized. Right? Correct. Right. The threat is recognized. So I'm curious on, like, your perspective. You're running a small business in the firearm industry. You're very outspoken about political issues on Twitter.

Like, how should Bitcoiners be thinking about like, from your perspective, like, how should Bitcoiners be thinking about this? Yeah. So, I mean, we are sort of in a very parallel situation here. So,

Bitcoiners

and if if you own guns, you know, you what you need to think of is where we are with Bitcoin similarly

is, like, for example, here in Michigan, they just passed what they call a universal background check law. So in most states, this this was not it's not a loophole. Everybody knew that this is exist that this existed and it was intended to exist.

When they when they passed the law to require

background checks from a, to purchase a gun from a dealer. Because remember, like, in the sixties, seventies, you could buy a gun from a Sears catalog, and it could be shipped directly to your home.

Serial numbers were not required to be on a firearm until 1968.

Okay? So there's, like, a shit ton of guns out there that have literally no serial number, and it was a real problem.

So,

what happens is incrementalism. They make you put a number on the gun in 1968, and then they get up to the, the background check, the the Brady law,

and now you have to get a background check to buy a gun from a dealer.

But in the law, there was a provision that if I was selling a gun person to person, if I you hand me $500 and I hand you a rifle, there's a background check there. There's no forms. That was in it was intended to be that way. That was that was the compromise that the, anti gunners always say, well, you guys never compromise. Can't you can't you just compromise with us? That was the compromise. And now here you are in 2023

in Michigan, for example,

taking that compromise back away. And so they just passed a law in Michigan where

now,

that you you can't do that anymore. If you

are doing a private sale for a long gun, person to person, you have to go to a dealer and the dealer has to do a a background check and you have to do a form 4473

Oh, shoot. When it's all recorded.

So in most other states, and well, I should say in many other states, it's been that way for a long time, but, like, that was something that we I really held on to about Michigan that made us actually, like, one of the better states from a gun law perspective.

We did lose the private sale of chimps on on handguns some years ago and that was a disappointment,

But, you know, most states, it was bull.

In any case, now we can't do that anymore. In reality, it's sort of unenforceable because

they have no record of where those guns were at this moment in time. And so I could always set say, I sold that gun 5 years before the law passed, and there's no way for them to actually know.

Again,

but that's where we're at. Dangerous laws tend to be the vague ones where they can safely enforce. Exactly. And so, you know, basically, now they are where we are with Bitcoin in the same fashion where, hey, we need we need to start KYC ing all this Bitcoin. We can't we can't have people running around with unregistered Bitcoin because God knows what they would do with it. The like, take out the word Bitcoin and insert firearm, and you'll find that it's exactly the same argument. Well, we can't have guys running around with unserialized guns. You can't be 3 d printing your own guns because,

we just don't like that, and we don't know where they all are. So,

yeah, you can't do that anymore. So

we're kind of in the same situation with both of these technologies

right at the same time, and government, luckily,

is, you know, by and large comprised of people who are just some of the most unimpressive people

in the world. Right?

Honestly, very, very low IQ folks,

people who,

couldn't hack it in other industries. I mean, it's it's like the profession of last resort, I find. So

they're they're dumb enough to not really understand the technology, so it's taken them a while to get brought up to speed to be able to figure it out. But eventually, they're gonna figure it out, or I should say, say, they're gonna figure out how to write a law to make it hard for you to do.

Again, kind of we're in that situation right now with the the pistol brace ARs. Right? I mean, you know, they're probably gonna be

I probably shouldn't say it out loud but, like, you know,

obviously, everybody knows why we did that. It's to get around the to get around the the, SBR laws. I mean, plain and simple. Like, it it may not have started out that way, but everybody

everybody knows that that's really what that was about because SBR laws are bullshit, and they shouldn't be here to begin with. And so it's not our fault that we read the law.

And when you guys wrote it, you were stupid enough to not write it in a way that this could, couldn't be figured out. And we're smarter than you are, so we figured it out, and go fuck yourselves. Suck on it. Like, choke on it. But Right. Now you have the ATF writing their own regulations

and trying to insist that they have the ability to,

classify all these things as SBRs.

And, you know, it's it's May 30th.

So,

in 2 days, unless you're a member of the Firearms Policy Coalition or the Second Amendment Foundation or you own a specific type of brace,

if you have it registered that in less than 48 hours, you are going to become a felon.

So

what happens when the same thing happens on the Bitcoin side? You have, we've passed this law, and in 6 months, all of your Bitcoin need needs to be KYC. You need to turn you need to turn in your Bitcoin.

So what do you do? And for me personally,

I've decided that,

look, there's a lot of things I would love to own right now that I can't. I think there should be no problem with being able to to own a machine gun. I think you should be able to own grenades, rocket launchers, you name it. Right?

But

I have decided at this point, like, I'm not going to accept anymore. So regardless of what gets passed, whatever brace law you pass, magazine pass, etcetera, like, I I'm definitely not complying with any of those, and I may not be able to do anything personally to move things in the reverse, you know, deregulate

suppressors, deregulate machine guns,

these kinds of things. I may not have the political will or the capital to be able to do that,

but I'm my line in the sand is I'm certainly not accepting

anything more. So I'm not registering my braces.

If they if Michigan, you know, Michigan actually has control of the legislature and the governorship on the Democrat side right now. If they pass a bill that says you have turn in your AR 15 tomorrow, I'm simply not gonna do it. And everybody knows that I've got them, and,

they can decide what they will. Wait. Really? You have AR 15s?

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Like, what a surprise.

So, yeah, for me, I I think,

that's that's just the bottom line. Like, you have to decide what your line in the sand is. And I think for Bitcoin people, that time is going to be that time is already here. And as a Bitcoiner, you should be thinking about that yourself. Like, what exactly is my line in the sand, and what have I prepared

so that I can actually say no in that situation and have the ability

to not have to,

comply. Right? Like, how do I set myself up as best as I can so that I don't have to comply with them? Like, do I have the ability to,

you know, move things around in wallets without being connected to the Internet? You know, like, I was looking at Gotenna's product,

and was kind of interested in that. They're using, like, UHF. Don't waste your time. Waves. Though oh, yeah. May may maybe it's not good, but, like I was I was excited about GoTenna. Like, I I'm excited from the sense that I'm glad people are thinking about it in ways that I can't. So I wasted my time on GoTina. So I'm just trying to save you your time, Justin. Oh, that's fair. And I appreciate that. And I'm always willing to learn. Like, I'm certainly no expert in what the best technologies are. I I guess I would say I'm I'm glad that somebody out there is thinking about it because I'm trying to do the same thing from my end. Like, how do I how do I manufacture ammunition that is literally untraceable?

How do I manufacture ammo that can

both, you know,

like, for,

I I can talk about something more in length, but looks like you had a question. I just wanna,

Oh, no. First of all, on Gotenna, Gotenna's proprietary. It's not an open platform,

and they make majority of their money on military and police contracts. Like, you can get a better version of Gotena if you're the military or police. Old version. And then we get, like, we get the cucked version, and, like, it's not open and interoperable. But, like, mesh in general, I'm very excited about.

Yeah. Mesh technology. I should say that. Yeah. I I I use, Kleenex instead of Oh, no. I'm I'm just trying to save you time because I wasted my time. I was

I was an outspoken I I I spent a lot of hours on Gotena.

First of all, I had a freak reach out.

Gandhi did not say that quote. Just thanks to the freaks to I think I've never been seeing it being attributed to Gandhi, but I He didn't say the quote. Quotes that everybody said, but nobody said. Yeah. Yeah.

So to me, the overlap

the word of the day the word of the podcast is overlap.

I could see it going I could see Bitcoin going the path, and I know you said good words, and there's a lot of respect there with Michael Sailor.

But Sailor

I agree with a lot of things that Sailor believes, but then also, to me, he's this new,

like, more status entrant into Bitcoin.

I can see. I'm sorry for that. I can see where we start to see restrictions getting put in place, and the sailor camp of Bitcoiners are like, this is regulatory clarity. This is what we need for the to come into the world. 100 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. The overlap I see is I could see it being very similar to silencers, which is it's it's amazing to me that to buy a can,

like, you have to

you have to pay the federal government,

and then you have to get on the list, like, the primo list. Like, there's you know, like, that that is the list. It's a lot. The list of lists,

to to be on to get the suppressor, and then you have to wait

a year to receive it.

And most people just accepted it. Right? Like, that is just like, that is how it is. And I could see a similar situation with Bitcoin. It's like, okay. Like, you pay you pay them your fee.

You, you know, you buy the Bitcoin. You register the Bitcoin with them.

You know, maybe it gets delivered to a Bitcoin dealer or something. Maybe it doesn't. Right? But then then you're you get your address that yours is assigned to you, then you put it in your address, and then you're allowed to hold you could even hold your own keys.

You know? Like, don't worry. You can hold your own keys after the year, and you you pay your you you pay your amount. But, like, we know exactly where it is at any given time. And if we wanna retroactively ban in the future, like, you're on the list, you're tagged, like, we know exactly where to go. And I think there's a whole group of Bitcoiners

that would, like, support that. They would be like, we're getting regulatory clarity. We're gonna have BlackRock come in. They're gonna put 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars in. It's gonna pump the price of Bitcoin. Maybe maybe,

you know, and if Michael Sailor was, like, getting ready to write me a big check, sorry, like, my apologies.

But, but you could I I could see you viewing Michael as, like,

Jeff Bezos

in the early days of Amazon where it's like you would be an idiot not to listen to the guy to a degree because you're, like, revolutionizing this industry. But at the end of the day, you know that this guy's gonna turn into, like, an oligarch and pull the ladder up underneath him and make sure that nobody else and, like, I I fully see that because that's how the firearms industry is. You know, with these mechanic companies at the top, they would. That's why they don't give a fuck about your business as a civilian. Right? Is they,

make their money mostly on military and law enforcement contracts, and selling to the populace here is the cherry on top. But they don't get to do that in any other country.

So

they just don't really care. They're not gonna put any marketing effort into you. Their marketing is, hey. We sell,

you know, it's like like look at Trijicon, you know, right down the street from us. I love Trijicon optics. But, like, their their selling point is our prices are really fucking high and the military uses it, so don't be a poor and pay the money. And, like, so h and k is the same thing, like and, you know, they actually fully acknowledge it. And so

it's like, these guys, they are at they are the top of they are what the you think of as the military

industrial complex. Right. And, like, that for me is what kinda got me into using that phrase, militia industrial complexes. Hey, you know,

that's really what this second amendment was written for, and all these companies that got founded back in the 1800s who had that at their heart are very far from that now. Winchester, Federal, Remington, you know, Ruger, all these, like, very old, storied companies,

you know, they pay a lot of money to lobbyists, and they play the government games just like everybody else.

And so you really can't trust them any more than you could trust the people who are truly on the anti gun side, because most of the anti gun legislation

that we've had over the last 34 years

was,

more or less allowed by those entities.

They didn't fight back. They didn't speak for you,

because, to be honest, you know, they don't wanna lose your business, but they're okay to not have it either.

So,

yeah, I I kinda forgot where we were, going with that particularly,

but,

oh, as far as, like, regulation and and and what have you. Yeah. I mean, I I see that everywhere I go in this industry, and so,

again, that's that an influence

into the way that I try to do things, and so then I can kind of see it again within the Bitcoin sphere. Yeah. So I can see how,

maybe that's what Michael sailors there's probably somebody. Right? If it if not him, then it's there's definitely somebody, and and I'm not knowledgeable enough

of the, say, big players in the Bitcoin world to know who's the shill and who's the fed and who's the, you know,

the guy, like, working in the background. Maybe they're all feds. Who knows? Where and in that that case

The only safe assumption is that everyone's a spook, Justin.

Exactly. And if and if that's true, then, like, you know, then the rifles will end up cutting out, and I'm alright. You know? I I'll figure it out. So, you know, I'm not giving those up either. So

No. I mean, I I think

I think the cool part about Bitcoin is it doesn't matter

it doesn't matter what someone like Sailor's motives are, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase,

because it doesn't matter how much Bitcoin you own. You can't control the protocol of the network or the money. Like Right. That's the key value prop. The key value prop is it and and,

you know, the

the metaphor over on into the gun industry is, like, it doesn't matter that HK doesn't care about selling to civilians,

as long as civilians are able to obtain their own firearms somehow Right. Or print them and then train how to use them,

it doesn't matter. This this one company cannot necessarily control the whole industry.

I think on on Bitcoin, it's a little bit more,

you know,

Bitcoin is is young.

The firearm industry is very old.

Yes. And there's a lot of, you know

and we see this a lot.

We see this a lot that just our our government in general is so intertwined with

large corporations.

Yeah. That that's where you start to see,

like, the American

the American libertarian right

and the American,

like, Bernie bro left

agree on certain things because one side is anti government and the other side is anti corporation, and they're just all intertwined.

Right. At this point, and you see that in the firearm industry. That is my point. And I I start to see that grow into the Bitcoin industry where we're just so young that these large corporations haven't had enough time to necessarily intertwine themselves with corrupt politicians.

But we're starting to get there, and we're starting to see these early signs of that, And and Bitcoin is growing up as a result,

but, it's just something that Bitcoiners I just wish we're a little bit more aware of and a little bit more vocal about, but there's there's very little financial incentive

for public Bitcoiners to talk about it. I I tell people, like, if you if you wanna turn your super socialist,

like, universal health care for everybody friend into a pro gun person,

have them watch the movie John Q.

Right? And so those who haven't seen it, Denzel Washington is the main character. He's the father of a son with a heart condition, finds out that the son needs a heart transplant, but he just lost his job, and so

his health insurance company denies him. And so, basically, he fucking loads up a gun,

comes up with a plan, goes to the hospital,

and more or less, like, at the beginning, you think he's gonna go on a shooting rampage, and this is gonna be like some kind of vengeance movie. But in reality, what he's doing is setting it up so that he's effectively putting the gun to his own head and holding himself hostage. And, basically, at the end, like, that's the deal he thinks he's making is that he's gonna kill himself and he's gonna donate his own heart to his son to save him. And it it doesn't work, you know, spoiler alert, it doesn't have to go that way at the end.

But, you know, I remember watching the movie the first time and thinking, like, oh, man, this is, like, a really leftist movie. Like, these fucking universal health care people, they're trying to make it seem like every corporation is bad. Like and I I love that. I I watched so many leftist I've watched every, like, pollution,

like, evil multi you know, DuPont killed people by dumping waste in this river. Like, I've watched literally every leftist,

framed documentary that you could possibly imagine on corporate malfeasance.

I went down to occupy Wall Street when it was down in Detroit, when I worked for an insurance company at the time. And I remember thinking, like, you know, you guys

actually have a big

a lot of you guys have have a have a very salient point,

but, most of you are, like, a bunch

of socialist college kids that are here sleeping in, like, you know, north based tents. So, like, how about we just get rid of those guys and, like, the 20% of you that are actually serious, like, yeah. Let's go, kick down the door at JPMorgan here and, like, you know, grab some bankers by the necktie and, like, see some real shit. Like, yeah, this is a bad situation. Like, I work for an insurance company. I see how it looks behind the scenes. Like, I know how much money there is here. Like, I see that this is a problem, but then that all got derailed with, you know, woke I mean, wokeism

was more or less invented right, when occupy Wall Street was happening to distract them from the real issue, which was the banks and the multinational corporations. And so then on the on the pro gun side,

we have exactly the same kind of problem. Like,

the gun companies

are happy to have regulations that they already have the capital

to,

get around

and taxes that they can afford to pay, and they can pull the ladder up from underneath them. And if there's no way for us to get guns and ammunition, then they can sort of starve us out of existence. And so we have to try to decentralize that to a certain degree as much as we can, and there some of that is not feasible because of the scales of the industry you need to make things like, say, gunpowder or primers. But there are people in the 3 d printed gun community who are working on that, like electronic ignitionless primers, piezo electric primers.

We're working with a company that's using a 3 d printed bullet jacket.

All kinds of stuff. I mean, there's some things that there are some problems that are gonna be harder to solve than others Yep. For for sure. But we're we're doing as best as I mean, you can 3 d print a suppressor now.

I've personally done it. And so, like, the technology is advancing faster

than what they can regulate,

and that's what we have to keep our eye on the ball. We just have to keep advancing this technology,

and forcing them to play defense and trying to invent new laws

that regulate this and regulate that. And then eventually

eventually, they come up with some kind of untenable law that everybody looks at at and says, this is this doesn't make any sense. This is way too much government control.

Even people who are, like, sort of the normies will look at it and go, wow. That's, that's pretty fucking radical.

And if you can get some of those people on your side, now you're making gains. Right?

Right. So I'm curious on your opinion because,

I mean, before, like, I, like,

discovered Bitcoin and the, like, the greater open source movement, I I was I would, like, classify myself as, like, a disenfranchised youth.

I

I was like, politicians are corrupt. There's no adults in the room.

They're lying to us.

Hope is lost. And I see this among my peer group all the time, people I went to college with, people I went to high school with.

And then I found

tools, like, actionable change, like, actual tools. You don't have to go and lobby a politician.

You don't have to go lobby a politician for them to actually do the right thing. You can just take matters into your own hands, use the tools, and and have actionable change.

Now in the in the in the firearms industry,

there is real regulatory pressure. I mean, there's there's extremely

intense regulatory pressure

where they can

they have essentially criminalized certain aspects

of of using firearms.

How do you, like, think about the balance of

lobbying governments? Right? Like like, actually trying to get politicians to pass sane

or or not not do anything. Maybe don't don't even touch anything. Just stay out of our fucking way versus

focusing on the tools, focusing on on shipping ammo, focusing on education, focusing on,

you know, printing. And, like like, how do you is it is there a balance act to you? Is are both important? Or is it

Yeah.

They're both definitely important. I think you need to fill you need to find people who can fill both of those roles separately. So, you know, unfortunately, our industry, we don't have, like, a like, who's the George Soros of the gun industry? Like, we don't have one. I wish we kinda did. You know? Like, we don't have a Danny Warbucks anywhere who's, like, just like, I'll spend a $100,000

to, like, get this

DA elected in this town and just, like, totally fuck everything up. It's like that got like, I wish I had that kind of money, you know. I think some people on our side hope that it's Elon Musk.

Not so sure about, so we'll see. Makes a lot of noise, but,

I've yet to see anything that I can rely on. I would say the same thing about Trump. A lot of people,

who voted for Trump,

either both time or the first time, thought that there were some things to be had there. But in the end, we didn't really get much out of it. And in the firearms world, what we what we got was a bump stock ban, which eventually led to this pistol brace situation that we're in. And whether you like Trump or not, look, I will fully admit I voted for him both times. Why? Because I wasn't gonna vote for Hillary, and

I just, you know, I thought it was gonna be hilarious the first time. I just, like, I I didn't think it could possibly happen and but before that, I voted for Ron Paul. You know, I mean, I I voted for Ron Paul over,

John McCain,

over Mitt Romney. Like, I was gonna vote for those guys. So,

yeah. I I think the balancing act for me personally, because I don't have the

resources to spend money on lobbyists. That's not my arena.

Yeah.

My my method is to

try to bring back the idea of deterrence. Right? Like, think about back in the day when you had small cities and your elected representative lived in a very small community,

and if they went and voted for a bunch of shit that fucked up your life, they had to come home and sit in the tavern.

They had to walk into that tavern and have everybody turn over their shoulder and look at them and be like, what a fucking piece of shit this guy is. Like, can you believe what he did? And we don't really have that anymore. Our politicians are,

completely

they they sit, in most cases, behind guarded doors. We never see them. They don't really interact with the communities very much, certainly not at the at the federal level. Right. They look more at the state level. So for me, I said,

I kinda got sick of the gun community trope of I'm losing all my guns in a boating accident. And I said, okay, well, you know, that's precisely the problem. If they don't think that we're serious, if they think that we're just gonna throw all this shit overboard

at first sign, then they have no reason to keep to stop doing what they're doing. So rather,

how about I keep posting up pictures of

50 to 75000

rounds of ammunition in one day being shipped out all across the country

and, pictures of people's rifles and pictures of guys training in full equipment, with night vision and armor plates.

And, just say, hey, look guys,

the situation is this. We have all this shit and you're not getting it back, and you don't know who has it, and

this should be deterrents.

Like,

this should speak enough for you to say it's not a good idea for us to pass any more gun control regulation. And we have to stop hiding in the shadows, and we have to be honest about it.

And, unfortunately,

we can't

rely on these major corporations to talk that way because it's just not financially

there's no financial incentive for them to do so.

So I'll try to do it as best I can and and try

to find other people who will do that along with me, you know, like Maj Tray at Black Guns Matter. That's why I started,

to, check I I reached out to him years ago, and I said, look, man. I don't know I don't know what you got planned, but, like, let me know how I can help contribute to that because I think what you're doing is great and, like, you're reaching a crowd I know that I can't reach in a way that I can't speak.

So,

let's figure out a way to work together, like, because what I do know is that our ideologies are perfectly aligned,

and that's good enough for me. So let's find other people who are gonna be a bit more, you know,

maybe not brazen about what they say, but just honest about the whole thing. Yeah. And and let let that,

do the talking. Let that be the deterrence.

Right? Instead of instead of trying to spend money on lobbyists that I don't frankly, I just don't have I just don't have. Right? And I don't trust those people to speak. Right. I mean, they're just as corrupt, if not more they're playing the game. They're just as corrupt. Right.

Can we go just real quickly, can we go what is the deal with the Black Guns Matter? I'm not familiar with this. Oh, Yeah. Maasture runs,

like, a nonprofit organization called Black Guns Matter. And so, he's based out of Philadelphia.

Back when I was,

talking with him originally, he was going across the country, basically teaching free firearms training classes in mostly minority,

urban communities in LA, Philadelphia, Chicago, all these places where all the crime and murders are,

and where, you know, it's a very underserved population because,

most of the time concealed carry permits are are expensive, so they're they can't afford it. They don't have access to,

training because training I mean, this is an expensive hobby. Right? Fire off. You're literally shooting dollar bills out of your fucking ride. Good training is expensive. If you don't have a place to train, which most, you know, Chicago, they say, they don't have gun ranges. There's there's no gun range in the city of Detroit. So he was going across the country,

taking these free classes, and I said, well, I know you need ammo, so how about we help you with that? And that was kind of the beginnings of it, and he's grown. He's got his own center in Philadelphia now where they do all kinds of, like, life skills lessons in addition to just

teaching shooting classes.

That led me into a whole another group of people who are doing similar things in various communities that I know personally I'm not as well equipped to speak to.

So that for me is like, that's where I spend my lobbying money in a way. It's like Yeah. That's awesome. Like, that's my version of lobbying because I don't have the money to affect anything in DC, but

I can donate 40,000 rounds of ammo to,

a group in Detroit

who taught a 1,000 women over 48 hours on a weekend

some simple firearms instruction

and kinda got them into,

got got them into the bug of owning a gun and being able to be their own protector.

And that for me was a extremely powerful event,

very emotional. It it was a a world that I just, you know, like, not really there's not a you don't really have a lot of exposure to, like, the

female side of the firearms community from a

consumer standpoint to, like, what it means to those people that I can't really understand because, I'm not one.

So,

that to me, I'm I'm getting the benefit of doing some soft marketing, but also I'm getting the intrinsic and altruistic benefits of advancing the cause,

and I'm finding people who could do that for me, but, again, at the grassroots level. Like,

Yeah. That's actionable change. That's real change. Though that those are my communities. That's closer to home for me than donating money to some large political organization that, know, only so much of that money is gonna get spent on real, activism. I mean, look at the NRA. Look at how much money they they get in versus how much is actually spent doing useful shit. Very little. Well, the NRA is a corrupt regulatory captured

organization. But,

and freaks, don't donate to politicians. You're just wasting your money, and you're just gonna put you on a fundraising list forever.

Justin, this has been awesome. I've really appreciated the conversation.

I I will say one more time that I really I really appreciate the product and that you offered. I I know it can be frustrating sometimes that,

you know, other peers in your industry haven't accepted Bitcoin, but this is my thesis. My thesis has always been that, like, the small

the small challenger,

that's trying to do things different is the 1st to adopt Bitcoin. Right? Like, we'd like, Genmo didn't adopt Bitcoin first. Like, Cash App adopted Bitcoin first and forced their hand.

You know, Apple didn't adopt Bitcoin. They haven't adopted Bitcoin yet, but, like, Microsoft started accepting Bitcoin. Right?

You you see the challengers do it first. I wanna see small biz I expect small businesses to do it first.

And just seeing you actually accept it with Bitcoin,

with BTC pay service, Sovereign Bitcoin ownership is

fucking awesome. And at the end of the day, like,

how many you know, it'd be nice to have more

ammo suppliers,

Right. That ex that accept Bitcoin. But if it's only you, for the meantime, like, your product's amazing. So That's okay. Yeah. I mean gets the job done.

To me, it made sense and and it,

like,

I've spent a lot of time thinking about other ways to try to make it more anonymous. Like, unfortunately, you know, we're shipping a physical product and it and it can only be shipped to an act it can't be shipped to a PO box. Right? And so some level of anonymity that simply can't be solved with an online business in that way. But I thought, like, you know, imagine a decentralized

version of Amazon Prime delivery. Right? Where, like, you give the guy the box and then it Yeah. They're close. With the Amazon boxes, they're just a surveillance company. So it's like

Well, right. Like, I imagine Whirlpool,

but with your,

which, you know, your ammo shipments. Like Well, my real dream is, like, the onion routed drones. So it's like one drone drops off to another drone. Another thing I tell freaks

another thing I tell I call my audience freaks, by the way.

Sure.

The another thing I tell them is, like, if you're renting a house,

I I say this with Bitcoin hardware, but if you're renting a house, get a bunch of stuff shipped to the house right before your lease ends. You're about to leave anyway. Yeah. That's a good idea.

Just something to keep in mind. But,

I mean, I think part of what what is also cool about the firearms industry is that,

there's still a lot of mom and pop. It's because of, like, regulatory stuff, but, like, there's still a lot of mom and pops, small gun stores. It's, like, one of the last

bastions of, like, small business in America.

Also, just, like, quality product.

Like, American companies don't make quality product anymore except in the firearms industry. You start you still see, like, product that should outlive us. Right? Like, not something that just dies in 6 years.

Like, there's like, you're starting to see the,

like, the early stages of, like, the fiat economy come into the lessons,

you could say. Yeah. To a to a degree, I mean, but at the end of the day, again, it's like it has to work every time. And so, you know, you might be annoyed that, you know, you bought a Glock 43 and then the 43 x came out 6 months later. Like, fuck. Like, why did you guys even sell this? This is so stupid, like, why didn't you just, now I gotta buy the, you know, it doesn't use the same magazine. This is bullshit. This was planned obsolescence

by,

you know,

Glock. Like, okay. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but

the thing still works. I mean, it's like The thing will work for a decade and more. I'll take a Glock 43

in the handover or a slingshot. Like, if you don't think so, go ahead and stand in front of it. You know? Like, because I said, like, that's the joke, and everybody everybody makes fun of their the caliber they hate, 22 or 380 or 38 special or whatever. You know, it's a boomer caliber. It's for the funds. It's like, you know, but at the end of the day, when somebody points a barrel at you, a, you don't really know what the caliber is, and b, there isn't a single person that's gonna stand in front and get shot by a 3 80.

So it it's Yeah. I like to play in those jokes and those memes, but, but it's a very serious product in a very serious industry. So yeah. There's

Well, anyway, Justin, it's been a fucking pleasure.

Before before we wrap up, I'd like to end with final thoughts.

I'd like to put a little spice on the final thoughts for this one. First of all, I want you to answer my question of

if, if a freak has never fired a fired a gun before and they live in a noncut

American state that allows them to actually

use firearms,

what would be your advice?

And then second, wrap us with some final thoughts.

Sure. So I would say for most people,

do again to, like, different regulations and laws in your area and just the nature of,

like, where where you would

most typically probably have to actually use a firearm.

I would concentrate on getting really good with a handgun.

There's a lot of training available out there.

Most of the big name training companies are extremely accepting. You know, even with basic equipment, you can go take a an 8 hour training class, and you will go from knowing absolutely nothing to knowing, like, 50 to 60% of, like,

you won't even be able to believe it. You'll you'll be so much better and so much more confident.

I would warn you to get sucked into the typical

path of the gun owner, which is you buy a gun and you shoot at indoor ranges.

I I know a lot of good indoor ranges and good owners, but the problem is you just can't do the things there that are gonna really make you good at what you might have to do in real life, drawing. In the real life, you're not gonna be just standing in a lane shooting at the camera. Like right. It builds I think that they build bad habits. There's a table in front of you where you can, you know, kind of, like, put the gun like, take the mag like, you need to get used to doing these things in the environment where you might need to do it. So the best place to do that is at an outdoor range.

We need to keep these outdoor ranges alive. Most of these clubs have been around for a 100 years. The population is built up around them, and so the minute that they have a lawsuit or they have not enough members to pay the bills, their the land is gonna get bought by a developer, and we're never gonna have outdoor ranges ever again because they're getting zoned out of existence. So I would recommend you join a local you know, most of them, it's, like, $200 a year. And so cheap. Yeah. Even if you don't use it, like, you're you're doing more by contributing that $200 to that outdoor range than you would be giving that $200 to the NRA or any politician or something like that.

And

I would also say I would very strongly encourage you to look into

basic competition shooting with a handgun. In particular, IDPA, I think, is the most approachable of the 2.

And while you may have no interest, you may have no competitive bone in your body, look at look at it instead as

2 or 3 hours of practice time on the range

where you're doing realistic things with your weapon. You're manipulating it as it goes empty. You're being forced to shoot at challenging targets,

and it's something that you can measure as well. If you do that for a season,

you will see by the end of the season how much better of a shooter you are. You'll be around very good shooters, people who will help you for free.

You'll get a chance to see other people's equipment where you can see what works and what doesn't, what works and is cheap and still affordable,

and what works and might be a little bit more expensive, but someday you can afford if it becomes a hobby that you wanna do. So I found that there are some of the most enjoyable people to be around on a Saturday or a Sunday.

You can still go to church, go to a barbecue, do all the other things that you might do in your life. But, I'm I personally, again, as somebody who's, like, 38 years old, and has a bunch of hobbies, I find it hard to make adult friends. I'm not really, like, a bar guy. I'm actually kind of an introvert by nature, so I don't really like those kinds of social scenes. So I'd much rather be someplace where, hey, everybody is got running around with guns, so everybody there's a certain level of respect

that I I just love about being around those sorts of people, and it's a chance to make some good friends. I've made great business relationships there.

So, yeah, that's what I would encourage somebody. Like, that may be too much for you to think about. Like, you may just be thinking about, like, what the hell kind of gun should I buy? And, like, that's okay. Honestly, I would say the same thing. Like, go to a competition shooting match and just watch. They won't charge you. Just just hang out for a bit. Have some conversations.

And I think that will be better for you than me telling you to go to an indoor range and shoot, like, 5 different guns. You could go do that for free at a competition. Guys will let you shoot their guns for free, and you can actually see, like, what people buy in the real world versus, like, what the gun store guy is going to sell you because he thinks you can afford it or because he thinks, you know, a woman shouldn't is is not capable of operating a magazine pet handgun, so you could sold a revolver that is, like, the absolute worst possible thing you could buy. You know, get around people who do this

as a serious competition. Yeah. I see somebody in the comments mentioned steel target. That's actually probably the easiest thing to start with because there's no moving. You're standing in a fixed point, and you're shooting targets for time,

but there isn't movement involved. So that's, like, basic, core, simple,

just to get the idea of, like, shooting quickly and hitting small targets. That's an even easier way to start. So,

yeah. That's, that's my advice.

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think it

word of the day overlap.

Like, the worst thing you can do, right, is just buy a gun and just

Yeah. Maybe stack some ammo and just, like, leave it in your basement and never fucking touch it until you actually need it. And then at that point, you're fucked. Same with Bitcoin.

Don't just buy Bitcoin, leave it on an exchange, never think about it, and then 5 years when you need Bitcoin, not know how to use it because you're gonna be fucked in that situation. That's that's the that's the that's the allo that that that's a Bitcoin person who has a a a non custodial coin based wallet and

just cut they're always the people that are buying, when it's high and selling when it's low. Right? And so And they don't know how to use it if there's government pressure or any kind of fucking pressure whatsoever, and they're just

they'll they'll freak out and panic, and that's, like, the worst case scenario.

Justin, this was a fucking pleasure. Thank you for joining us.

Well, thank you. Keep keep doing what you're doing. We all appreciate you. Oh, well, I definitely appreciate you, but I think a lot of people appreciate you, and, there's a lot of mutual respect there. So thank you, and a huge shout out to the freaks for joining us again for another live show. Thank you for joining us in the live chat to all you freaks who came in from YouTube or Twitch or our matrix chat, thank you. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. There'll be another dispatch tomorrow,

with Christian,

Corral, c k, from BTC Magazine.

We're gonna do a debrief on the conference tomorrow at 2 PM EST.

I don't know what time UTC that is.

You know, it's been a long day.

But thank you, Justin, for joining us, and thanks, Freaks.

Cheers. My pleasure. Thanks, guys.

Stay humble and Stack Gats.