This is where like we have to make choices.

Is this what we tolerate or not?

I think actually the response recently was pretty good.

We even saw Alex Jones trying to get on my God.

He's not, you know, Alex Jones.

When Alex Jones is the voice of reason in the room, something's gone wrong.

Right.

And so he was literally trying to say, you know, it means like you can say their uniforms are cool.

Right.

But like not Hitler.

And it's like he's literally like, I love Hitler.

There's no way to misinterpret that.

No.

And you're just like, all right, we know where we're at here.

Right.

That's going to get taken out of context.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to the A Better Way to A podcast with Andrew and Jordan.

This week, we are here with Carl from EnRange TV, a very famous Internet person who we all love.

We do much, much beloved and not controversial at all.

Not at all.

Everyone loves me.

Absolute darling of the Internet.

Never, never heard never heard anybody say, say, say an unkind word about Carl.

I would say that you're a pretty good litmus test for like, yeah.

How whether I'm going to agree or not with the guy.

Yes.

If we're going to get it.

Yeah.

And I think that's pretty cool.

Somebody posted something on Twitter the other day saying, like, if you how do you view John Brown and a as a as a like a badass or whatever, or as a traitor?

And there were people who were like, oh, he's he's treasonous scum.

He betrayed the United States of America.

I was like, there are people who don't like John Brown.

Like, I was blown away.

I was like, I thought we were unanimously in agreement that he was a badass.

Like, and some people think he's crazy.

But but even even the people who was unhinged are still like, yeah, he did a good job.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think you got to be a little crazy to do something as you know, as as as as wild as he tried to do.

Right.

I mean, it's like, yeah, sir.

Crazy, isn't this I mean, a bad thing.

I mean, you got to be.

Yeah.

You got to have some fire in your belly to try to do that.

Right.

So yeah.

Yeah.

But but yeah, that that is true.

It's a very interesting litmus test.

The fact to think that anyone would actually see John Brown in a bad light is disturbing.

But we know that exists.

Well, that was the predominant point of view at the time.

But, you know, I like to think that we as a society have moved past that that kind of a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'd like to think so.

Yeah.

I think there's an episode coming out on in range next week on Wednesday.

It I ran into some amazing topics when I was out in Grinnell, Iowa.

We were running the Cornfield brutality with Brownells.

And I didn't know at the time until I did some research that Grinnell, Iowa was found as as an abolitionist town and was one of the major depots of the Underground Railroad.

And not only do they have a lot of a lot of ties to John Brown there, but not to not to ruin the episode that's coming up next week.

But one of the things I ran into, which was not as well covered, which I think should be covered more, was a 1860 race riot when some of the quote unquote fugitive slaves were stayed behind in Grinnell and the local abolitionists put them in the public school system to help them become literate.

And that turned into an interesting problem with some of the community.

So that's the story coming out this week.

Yeah.

That's that's awesome.

Well, I love the man.

I love the vignettes, man.

I mean, I don't know if I don't know if Jordan told you I'm a I'm a big fan.

I'm actually a huge fan, so I'm super excited that you're here.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, I love the historical vignettes.

I just I think that's so cool.

Yeah, definitely.

And we're so far we're doing a better job than we were when we started interviewing a tactical girlfriend and couldn't figure out how to talk.

Oh, my God.

I was so intimidated.

So intimidated.

Well, it was our first I don't know.

I wouldn't say our first I don't know.

I don't like I don't I don't like making anybody feel like comparing follower accounts or anything, but no, just just in terms of.

Oh, no.

Just in terms of like, you know, we have like crazy imposter reverence for people.

Yeah, you know, it's it's it's weird to like it's weird to like talk.

If I could just like fangirl for a moment, it's weird to like talk to people that you respect.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

I can tell there is that it's also probably weird just to talk to someone you may have been watching for years or whatever, because yeah, that's it.

There's that there's that interesting parasocial thing, and I'm not using that as a negative thing.

It's like I'll be out in public sometimes, and I'm like every once in a while, someone will recognize me usually more from my voice than from seeing me.

And they have been watching the show.

So they'll come up and they'll introduce themselves as though they know me.

And yes, and you have no idea who you're talking to.

But they do.

They do.

They do know me because me on my channel is me.

I don't really have it.

There's not there's no like there's no character there.

But at the same time, the there's a differential of understanding and that I've never met them before.

So they're a completely new person to me.

Right.

So you're at like a huge disadvantage, you know, and.

Do you watch my show?

And they're like, yeah, I'm like, oh, I because I'm trying to figure out.

So you can kind of slide.

Have you been following me for?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, like following me, not following me.

Right.

Yeah.

Was that you that took a left back there when I took a left?

So speaking of that, well, I don't know if you saw she put out a video from Desert Brutality or yes.

Recently, a couple of days ago.

Yeah, I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but but that's cool.

That's very exciting.

She had been she had been talking to I don't know if it's on the podcast or otherwise, but she had been talking about wanting to do more like whole match footage.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, we finally got that we had that opportunity.

She shot the whole match and and that video is all seven stages.

So finally have to pull that together.

It was really cool.

That's rad.

Yeah, I'm excited to watch that.

I haven't I haven't seen it yet, but I was looking forward to her posting it.

And it sounds like it was an awesome time.

I've never so we asked people, what would you like to see a better way?

Do next year?

And we had like multiple people say to do brutality.

Brutality.

Yeah.

Yeah, which is so intimidating as somebody who like I have I have been so out of practice since since the pandemic began.

I have really been a shut in and and I have very, very seldom like actually been to the range.

So like thinking about like it's so daunting thinking about like getting out there and like doing competitions again when I haven't even like casually shot, but a few times in the last like couple years.

Sure.

Yeah, I mean, the the brutality matches are really interesting.

I think in that they're obviously there's a competition there and it's a match and there's all the divisions and all the cool gear and all that stuff.

But they have more and more and every year and I really like this part of it.

They have more and more turned also into a community event because like the people coming out the gathering of all sorts of cool like minded or even sometimes not like minded, but at least friendly folks already the gear for like with the same goal in mind, which is to support one another and shoot a good match is something that is to be honest, I feel is really a little bit unusual.

Like the vibe at the brutality events is very positive and really cool.

And I've noticed that and on the discord too.

I really like that.

And the fact that we're having such a great amount of diversity of people, walks of life, identity, all at the same event.

Not only not only competing together, but getting along positively, like literally bridge building is super positive and dope.

And I really love that part of it.

And every every brutality match, it's just more and more palpable.

And that's that's something I'm very humbled.

Yeah, it comes through in the way that people talk about it and the content that people make for it.

It was it was that your intention when you started doing this this two gun action stuff, was that your intention to like build a community of like minded people or did that just happen?

No, I mean, some of what's happened with in range has been just the nature like a natural accident and just being honestly myself.

But so when I started doing the two gun action match stuff, which is what brutality came out of, my intention then was to have something that was different than a lot of the other practical shooting sports that just weren't necessarily my bag.

Like I shot lots of different types of competition.

I shot three gun.

I shot cowboy action shooting extensively.

Actually, I still do that sometimes.

I shot across the course high power.

I shot F class.

I shot small bore.

I've done all this stuff.

And and I felt like there was like a little bit of a of a niche that was missing, which was a competition that allowed you to do this stuff you would normally do at like a training event, but on the clock safely.

And that was the whole premise of two gun from the beginning was there's nowhere this happens.

Like like I'm not I'm not talking negatively against anything, but like three gun typically doesn't have you do the kind of stuff we do at a brutality event, right?

And so yeah, that was the intent.

And the intent of in range was to do cool firearms content.

And and then I started getting my historical interest kind of blended into that.

And then it turned into by just speaking my being myself and being hopefully, you know, approaching the topic honestly.

How I see it.

Accidentally is not the right word, but not neither is intentionally.

It just opened up the room to have to leave airspace for people who otherwise normally wouldn't have a place to go.

That wasn't my intent.

I wasn't like trying to market that way.

It was just doing the topics that I cared about naturally open that space.

And that turned out to be the best way of all.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, dude.

We were talking about that with with tactical girlfriend.

Yeah, there's going to be a lot of parallel.

Yeah, like between this conversation and that one, which is cool, because, you know, we we always talk about like Andrew and I disagree on some things and we like disagreeing with our guests on some things like it's just normal.

We try we strive for this not to be an echo chamber, but we also want to have dope ass people on and like if we agree with dope ass people like that's awesome.

And we just happen to agree with you on this.

So like that's that's a mission statement, by the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If we agree with dope ass people, that's awesome.

And one thing that we said with her was like, I think we asked her, like, did you go into this trying to to like represent like any specific group of people or community, or did you just want to give the information out there?

And based on our answer, we pretty much just said, it seems like when you go into something because you enjoy it and your your personality and like who you are bleeds through, it seems way more authentic, like authentic than going in with the target on the back of the board and trying to hit it and like constantly adjusting to hit the target.

Yeah.

Like I was like appeal to to subscribers and get this follower count.

And I want to, you know, I want to hit this metric so that I can build ad revenue.

And, you know, like, I feel like when you're trying to do that, people notice.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, and obviously in certain circumstances, you can see a lot of different content creators out there.

And there's certainly people who have done that, and they've achieved amazing numbers and success.

But success, let me put that in air quotes.

What does that mean?

Like is success subscriber numbers, is success views, is success the money you're making to me?

Obviously, yes, I want my project to be sufficiently self-sustaining that I can continue to do it.

Don't get me wrong there.

But success for me is more like what I was talking about earlier, which is hopefully bring honest and legitimate to the topic, providing space and air in the room for others to have a conversation that would otherwise maybe not.

And like the brutality events aggregating and becoming a community driven thing as they are, to me, that's far more success than having a hugely growing subscriber count.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

But you got to get enough mass behind you to be able to make that happen in the first place, right?

If no one's watching, no one's watching.

So right.

That's an interesting delicate balance.

That's that's not.

I mean, let's be let's be realistic.

Like so the in range has evolved over time and the content on there's evolved over time.

It's still basically the same thing.

But there's topics there that weren't there in the very beginning.

Like when I started doing a lot of the historical vignettes or even more so the confluence of civil rights and firearms, which really isn't discussed well anywhere.

I don't it's like one of those topics that's been ignored for a long time.

Yeah.

Isn't that weird?

I wonder why.

Well, but the stuff you find that blows my mind, like I said, I always call it the induced amnesia, which is intentional.

But the one that really blew my mind was something.

I'm a person that's interested in these topics and has been pursuing them for a long time, history in general.

But then I find things such as the Red Summer of 1919 that I was vaguely aware of, but not not not intrinsically aware of.

I didn't grok it like I to use a Heinlein quote.

But like I I was aware of it, but not really aware of it.

And then when I started really digging into Red Summer 1919 and finding out all the intricacies about it, that one just might.

I don't know how to put it.

My there was an epiphany to me because something that big and that severe and that culturally relevant and has still resonates now in terms of history of civil rights and firearms and and and racial relations.

But that topic isn't just intrinsically known by everyone that's an American tells me something super wrong because of that one.

Yeah, that one's not on the tip of our tongues.

What the hell else isn't that we're not talking about or thinking about or whatever?

And for people that aren't familiar, the Red Summer refers to a series of I don't know if they were coordinated, but but a series of white supremacists, basically terrorist attacks and, you know, murders of black men that happened across the United States, not exactly simultaneously, but, you know, in like a cluster of time and over the summer of 1919.

Yeah.

So like so I have there's like a two episodes on in range about it.

One of them is about a local town here in Arizona, Bisbee.

But the thing that's so when I the more you dig into the Red Summer of 1919, the more the more that we don't the fact that this isn't common knowledge is really concerning because the premise of it, if people haven't watched this aren't aware of it, was during the American expeditionary forces to World War One, we were still a segregated military and Black Jack Pershing didn't want to didn't really want to have command over the black soldiers.

So he essentially commissioned them over to the French.

The French got command over the black element of the American expeditionary forces, and then they came to find out that the French were at least slightly more enlightened than the American forces and were treating them like regular soldiers.

And a letter was written literally from the US military to the French colleagues saying don't treat them that way.

They'll expect it when they come home.

And yeah, yeah.

And and the French were so embarrassed by that letter that they tried to burn them and erase the history of it.

But W.B.W.E.B.

Du Bois got a copy of it and printed it in his newsletter.

And that got it out into the general understanding.

And when these soldiers came back from the war, they did expect to be treated differently because they were treated like normal human beings, or at least to some degree by their French command.

And that turned into, as you said, a lot of white supremacists, revolts and mass lynchings and murders across the whole country as a way to quote unquote, put them back in their place.

And the fact that that's not something that's on the common knowledge, tells me, like I said, what else is missing?

And there's a lot.

Yeah.

Well, I'll be honest, I had never heard to it referred to as the Red Summer of 1919 before.

So I was like, you know, I'm the perfect example of somebody who did not have that committed to common knowledge.

And I had heard about those incidents before, but never referred to it like that.

And it is it is absolutely crazy that we don't learn about things like that in school.

And that it's just it's I'm sure there's other people out there listening to this right now thinking the same thing, but I'm glad you guys explained it because I was that person also.

Yeah.

So like one of the episodes I have on the channel about it here in Bisbee, which is the little town on the border here in Arizona, was there was a contingent of these black soldiers from Fort Huachuca on leave and they went to Bisbee to just get some R&R.

And while they were in Bisbee, some altercation occurred.

And of course, one of them was accused of essentially sexually predating on a white woman and the local law enforcement issued the order to disarm all black people in all of Bisbee, including the soldiers, which turned into a firefight in Whiskey Row in Bisbee between.

Yeah, like you do.

Black veterans and the local law enforcement.

And that was one of the Red Summer events.

Wow.

That's that's pretty cool.

That particular one to do is for people just to be honest, knowing the gun community.

And I'm putting that in air quotes because that's such a broad statement.

No, no, I know exactly what you're getting at.

They're big fans of veterans and they're big fans of law enforcement.

And now you've got a problem where you've got racist law enforcement attacking veterans from World War One who happen to be black.

Who do you side with?

That's an interesting question, isn't it?

I think it's an easy question, but you know, I mean, that's, that's me, right, someone who is not aware of for.

So, yeah, I know where I side with this.

I'm not I'm not asking that was a rhetorical question.

No, no, no, I know.

I know exactly.

Someone who comes across that video unknowledgeable of the topic.

It could be challenging.

Sparks fly in your brain, right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, a perfect example.

Have you ever read about Waco on the ATF website?

I don't think I've actually read about it on the ATF website.

No, I I forget what I was looking up.

It was a question about the ATF website.

I was looking up it was either Waco or Ruby Ridge.

But if you read about it on the ATF website, the narrative is significantly altered from what you might have.

Come to learn from like a documentary or something like that.

It in two.

And there are people who I'm sure believe that kind of stuff, like there, especially, you know, if your parents are law enforcement or what was it different?

Just very like it paints.

It paints the well, for one, it paints the agents as like the heroes essentially like they're memorialized and how they how they gave the ultimate sacrifice and things like that.

And, you know, just like the buzzwords and, you know, America, the beautiful and all that all that fun stuff.

But I read like six or seven lines of it and I was just like, oh, it sounds like I'm reading like a foreign news source like.

Right.

And that's what's a contemporary event.

That's not from something like before the internet.

It's on a government website.

Yeah.

Well, but but but if you can imagine how the collective memory of of of like a like a like a race massacre from 1919 might be erased even more easily than it is today.

You know, when people don't people all they have is like, you know, newspapers and word of mouth.

Well, one of the very first to go first of all regarding Waco, I've actually been to the Davidian compound and there are still Davidians living there.

They have a new church and there's a memorial there with stones of all the people that were lost in that conflict.

And they have memorial stones not only for Davidians, but also for the agents equally represented, which I find interesting on the behalf.

Yeah, that is interesting.

But in regards to like people not talking about this sort of history, if you go back to the 1811 quote unquote slave revolt in which a number of plantation plantation and slave people raised up rose up and tried to march on New Orleans.

One of the very first examples of really demonstrable gun control was the fact that there was an edict put out by Governor Claiborne in Louisiana to ban the ownership or essentially the possession of firearms by any people of color regardless of if they were free people or color or not because that was a yeah thing at the time and the sale of powder and ball was also restricted and like people don't talk about these things, but we're talking back in 1811.

An example of gun control being highly racist.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and that was a if I remember this event correctly and this says something about the history of America that there are enough events like this that I may be mixing some of them up.

But if I'm remembering this correctly, the disarming of of black people marching on New Orleans was a precursor to white militias gunning them down.

Well, you can essentially shooting out people.

That's not that's pretty true.

So like the the revolt actually started in a place called the Destrehan plantation.

There's a video up on the channel on this and I did a collaboration with Autun Shea on this as well.

If you look at his channel, but they they armed up as best they could they broke into the militia or at least an armory and had a small number of of of flintlock muskets that they could arm with, although the predominant amount of the revolt was armed with just like literally cane knives.

But they had drums.

They put on some uniforms and they walked from plantation to plantation with the goal of increasing the size of the army.

Yeah.

The goal was they were going to sack New Orleans and and change everything but due to the fact that the local actually quote unquote, well, let's put this out there regulated and trained militia got armed up and there was pretty much an interesting like military campaign where they tried to evade each other and eventually turned into a insurmountable odds where the militia had like extensive firearms training and dominated and then squelched the revolt and all of a significant number of the people that were involved in the revolt or led the revolt were then taken to essentially a kangaroo court for lack of a better term at the Destrehan plantation immediately charged with of course all sorts of criminal things and the result was they were executed their heads were cut off and put on poles all the way down River Road all the way into New Orleans.

Geez.

Yep.

But anyways, the clayborn insult, clayborn the local government gun control affected not only the revolters but essentially all people of color at least for a duration of time after the result of the revolt.

Well, not like what a lot of people don't realize is is using past pretense as a as a constitutional measure for whether or not certain laws now are constitutional.

So many laws back then were based in actual racist ideas and because they have such a significantly long history of being enacted.

Yeah, you can find similarly racist whether it's not intended to be racist now is using racist laws back then to be used as as qualification to prove that the law now is constitutional.

So today they're arguing it's not unconstitutional to restrict these people's freedom because we did it in 1811.

Well in 1811 they didn't think they were restricting people's freedom.

You know, yeah, the fucking Constitution protected citizens which were human beings which were whole people.

Well, that's not how they viewed racial minorities at the time.

So, you know, you're not saying the thing that you think that you're saying, you know, when you when you when you base your argument in this historical context.

No, exactly.

And when people say they want access to your social media to determine whether you're a crazy person or not, you know, what did they do?

What did we do to the indigenous population here when we labored that labeled them undesirables and we said we know no no firearms should be possessed by any black people or undesirables or anyone undesirable and it was completely subjective and it's essentially the same thing.

You're you're deeming a group of people undesirable and there's historical pre there's historical precedence for that's the word I was looking for.

But we were speaking about this in the b-roll before we actually got going on the podcast when you talk about declaring people or marginalized groups or any group as a specific undesirable it was like one of the things I mentioned in the b-roll was you know, the passion plays in Europe which were were a drive to cause pogroms against Jewish populations and now we're seeing I believe very much we're seeing when we see people especially in people in government using the phrase groomer it is a new form of a passion play which is attempting to invoke a pogrom against a different group of people the LBGQ community.

It's exactly the same thing.

I am always harping on this shit.

It's the same tactic.

It's just a different target.

Yeah, and the kids are always the the the scapegoat, you know, that's whether it's what I've said this before whether it's metal music or or drag shows, you know, it's always protect the children violent video games Marilyn Manson.

It's because you can't say any argument against the children is oh you don't want to protect the children and you are the bad person and we are the good person even though you know there the argument is fundamentally wrong that because if there's no danger then what are you protecting the children from and that's the argument is that it's it's a fabrication of danger and it's it's it's I think it's intentionally used to conflate.

Maybe maybe some shred of of truth like, you know, somebody sees a picture of kids at a drag show somewhere.

So now all members of the LBGQ community are groomers and well, you saw this picture.

So obviously it's true and yeah, you saw you saw the picture of like suggestive caption creating content.

There are shitty parents everywhere and we don't go around to like straight parents and say like you did this with your kids.

Therefore like that we have to protect kids from straight parents like it's not that's that's I think I saw my first stripper when I was 13 years old and that was that was unintentional and my dad I don't know if it was unintentional or not, but my dad brought me to his friends his girlfriend's friends birthday party and they hired a stripper who who yeah, is that your dad a groomer?

Yeah, that's what I mean.

But like that's okay, you know taking your kid to Hooters is okay.

But you know if it was two dads people would have a problem with it or two moms people would have a problem with it.

And I think that's crazy moral panics are recurring thing, right?

I mean you had absolutely like it's interesting if we go back if you look at the history like and this is not a complete thing at all because there's so many of them and it's not only an American thing, although Americans are particularly good at them.

When you look at when you look at moral panics you go back to one.

Well, I mean like kind of because you go back to you can go all the way back to the Salem witch trial.

That was a moral panic.

That was a yeah, I was a social delusion and a moral panic that cost people lives the second like the most second the second one that was prominent would have been the red scare and McCarthyism was a moral panic.

Then you have the third wave probably which is the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s that cost some lives and put a lot of people in jail and a lot of stuff that was nonsense was considered the was fact right, but the Salem witch trial was was protecting children.

I don't know about McCarthyism the satanic panic definitely was and we see some of what we're going on now, whether it's Q or this groomer thing also using the same pretense of there's this group of people that are dangerous to our children.

But the reality is the ones that have been historically very obviously dangerous to our children.

I know this is a cliche thing to say.

I'm not trying to offend anyone but like we know for a fact that parts are significant numbers of the the Catholic Church have moved around predators within their own organization.

Yes, yes, not this is not fiction.

This is not delusion.

We know this no no, we've Jordan's posted about that on this page, but no one's talking will not know one but they're not worried about them, but they're worried about a kid at a freaking like drag show which statistically is not the case.

It is interesting how people can be convinced where the good and the bad is based on moral panic.

I think that's where we're at right now.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean because it's people.

Yeah, there's a conflation of details people think that you know, obviously there are certain things that you shouldn't bring kids to but I would say them.

I mean all the drag shows that I've personally seen would be family-friendly events.

Yeah, they weren't they weren't like strip.

They weren't shows.

They weren't like like was it there's a wide variety of them, right?

You know, I know ones that you wouldn't bring kids to exactly.

That's that's what I was going to say is like there's there's drag shows that I've been to that are like very not appropriate for kids and you know, but but that's that's the same as like there's comedy shows that I've been to.

You can say that about any form of entertainment, right?

I mean, that's just yeah.

And by the way, like I said, even though like we know that there's been significant parts of the Catholic Church that have moved around and protected predatory people that doesn't mean all Catholics are child molesters.

That's ridiculous.

But we know the organization has a problem within it, right?

So it's interesting to see these like this interesting is not even the right word.

It's sad.

The to see it is significant to see well, I mean, let's be I don't know what to put it.

It's hypocrisy.

It is.

It's exactly what it is.

And but there's definitely people using phrases like that for their own really disturbing means now whether or not they believe it or not.

I'm not I can't tell you but they're certainly causing really dangerous environments to exist that will ultimately result in more of what we just saw like there was a recent one and there'll be more and the more that rhetoric is ramped up by people who are seen as leadership.

They're culpable.

They're absolutely culpable.

Yeah, I agree.

It's it.

Yeah, it is definitely you know, we were talking about social media and technology before the times like this.

I wish we just had, you know, the the the capital of Facebook just get hit by any MP or something like that and everyone's Facebook and Instagram.

Right.

Well, that's what we were talking about.

There's great stuff that happens from the internet and from social media and you know, I would never trade what I've gotten to do and I met Andrew online.

I've never met Andrew in person.

He's he's he's an internet friend.

He probably doesn't even exist.

He goes to a different school.

You know, I'm real but yeah, I'm mostly real.

I know his kid like I know his wife like this is this is all I've made on social media and the internet and I would never give that kind of stuff up.

But then I you know, we see the we see these people hopping on Twitter these these these influential people and just giving these shit takes that are absolutely going to influence people in the wrong direction.

Well, it's a force multiplier.

It allows the communication of an idea to transmit faster than it ever has within human history globally.

So like going back to the original wave of moral panics you go back to the Salem witch trial.

It was it was regional reasonably regionally constrained because that was the as far as the concept and the delusion could get but then as technology improved the red scare with McCarthyism was of course much broader and more essentially us across the country because of television and now it's social media a good idea but also a bad idea can hit more susceptible vulnerable minds faster and that's that's the problem is it's like it doesn't it's not a small fire anymore.

It's a giant wildfire and it happens fast.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's all more fuel.

We're all closer together and that's and we and that's why it's so important all of us myself included to be very careful as much as we can be because we're all as humans were all susceptible to delusional thinking all of us not me right.

It's the rest of you guys.

Yeah, you're the exception but most of us are myself included and that's why challenging yourself as much as possible in my opinion is like a very important thing.

Absolutely.

I you know, I've definitely said this before but my grandfather before he died till I was arguing about something stupid with him and because I was 13 years old and it probably was stupid.

I don't remember what it was.

He said, all right, you've got five minutes to come up with an argument against what you just said.

And I looked at him like he had two heads and he said if you can't argue against your beliefs, then you're ignorant to the other side and you don't deserve your opinion.

And I like that was dude that was we're talking about Christopher Hitchens earlier.

That was a hitch slap for my grandfather.

Hey, and I was like, yeah and ever since then not actually ever since then it was years after that that I actually took it to heart.

I was probably not until like my mid-twenties that I actually really started paying attention to that and practicing it.

And and I still catch myself often, you know, like not as often as I used to because I'm kind of surrounded by the same issues because of what I do but you know, I I find myself in situations like that and I think it's absolute.

It's like exercising.

It's supposed to be uncomfortable, but it's because you're getting better at something.

Yes, that's so true and people don't like discomfort.

That's why people don't exercise.

That's why people, you know, sit on the couch all day as I'm as I'm sat on the couch all day today.

No, actually I wish that was true.

We had a leak in our basement, but that's a whole different story.

I don't exercise because I get sick for two weeks at a time because my son's daycare is filthy.

Every day cares filthy.

Well every day I think they're clean.

It's just the kids that are filthy.

No, this one's gross.

We're actually we're going to we're going to pull them out and probably look for a different daycare because we're really not but that's how that's a different thing.

That's not for the podcast.

I wouldn't be surprised if we got onto that.

So as far as the almost of the advent of technology with how arrival of technology the computer is here.

Technology being the way that it is in ideas and misinformation and and and everything being the way that it is.

Do you see it as being something that is generally good for the gun community?

Or do you see it as kind of like a and I know it sounds like an easy question and it probably is but or do you see it as like because I see these same social problems in the gun community.

I see gun owners that are that are saying other people shouldn't own guns because of what they believe politically and their their arguments for them are are based on the same like unsound logic that they use for other social issues.

Well, those are the most common ones.

Those are usually the same people that will like smash their hand down on the table and talk about rights and constitutional rights.

But the minute you say you believe in constitutional rights, whatever that means and then espouse that someone else because of their belief system should not be afraid or should not be afforded those rights.

There's only one phrase for that and you're a damn hypocrite.

You're a liar to your own cause and saying that you believe in rights and constitutional rights.

No, you're not.

You're an authoritarian and you're an authoritarian of whatever flavor your particular flavor is.

I don't know.

But the minute you believe that those rights exist for you and not for someone else based on some arbitrary thing, you're a hypocrite.

There's no good answer other than that.

That's God's truth.

And to branch off of that because I agree 100%.

I think the consistency of values is something that like people need.

People don't practice nearly enough or don't realize that they're being critical.

Even to their own detriment, you know, to the destruction of their own ends, you know, the if that makes sense, you know, like the that that.

Like, you know, they they they it's it's like working backwards, right?

But it but it undermines their their their arguments for their own rights.

Well, I mean, it's it's it's the very cliche picture of the giant pickup truck with the thin blue line and the and the and the come and take it sticker.

The Mola Mola on me or whatever.

Yeah, it's like, well, which is it like?

Because if you believe that the because if you believe that you can't.

Those are those that's magical thinking.

Those are common tread on me.

Yeah.

No, well, I mean, I know it's a cliche statement, but it's true.

And you see a lot of that.

And it's real.

You see it often.

It's very inconsistent, right?

So which is it?

And yeah, sometimes certain things can't coexist in the same space.

Not not not correctly.

And so I think that that's another topic that comes about quite a bit.

But when someone.

I don't I don't.

If you believe in if you believe in this concept of rights and constitutional rights or I definitely believe in human rights.

And then argue that someone else shouldn't have them.

I think you need to sit back for a moment and reconsider your point.

Like, yeah, how do you how can you?

If you want to say I'm an authoritarian and I completely believe that these rights should only be for this subset or Venn diagram, because that's the only power that should be.

You're at least being logically consistent, right?

Right.

You're being honest about.

Fine.

You're that you're a tanky, you're a fascist, you're whatever you are.

But at least you're consistent.

But trying to argue that you're pro freedom while simultaneously saying that that person shouldn't have that freedom because I don't care for their identity is.

What do we curse on this show?

I don't know is effing.

Oh, yeah, you can say the bad ones.

I guess ridiculous.

And at that point, I don't know how you have a conversation with a person like that anymore.

They are they're the one not allowing there to be air in the room for others.

And they're not they're not there in good faith.

No, they're not there in good faith.

No, that's the thing, right?

If you have a bar and you just have a regular bar and you have and you allow a Nazi bigot to be in there and you don't do something about it, eventually you have a Nazi bar because he tells all his friends.

That's the bar to go hang out at.

And no longer.

Yeah.

No longer is there room for anyone else in that bar that isn't part of that ideological belief system.

That's why some that's again, we mentioned this in the B roll.

It's the paradox of tolerance.

You tolerate intolerance and eventually you have nothing but intolerance.

Yeah, we have a live example of that in the town that I work in.

There's a bar, not a not a Nazi bar.

It's a dive bar that has been trying to turn into a like which I love dive bars.

Don't get me wrong.

But it's been trying to turn into like a legitimately nice restaurant for about a decade.

And it's just like a like a revolving door of of businesses.

It's because the same clientele keep coming back and they're like fighting the new the new customers and like, I don't know, sitting on the bar and doing dumb shit.

And it's literally the same bar with different.

You're not going to class this joint up.

This is my god.

No, no.

100 percent.

But that is 100 percent like the Nazi bar.

If you that's like a that's like a labor strike, but for like a fucking getting shit faced.

This is why when it comes to the content side of stuff, it's like allowing for authoritarians to exist in the space who are actively seeking the harm of others means you can't have room for anyone but authoritarians.

And that's why I think it's like if you don't actively address it, you just essentially collect a bunch of the old same stuff.

This is why so many other I'm not going to mention names, but like when you go to a lot of other content creation sites or people or whatever, not all of this.

It's the same shit over and over again.

You go look at the comments within three comments.

You're going to see a comment about you're going to see something hateful.

Jews pick a group.

Right.

Yep.

Yeah.

And yeah, doesn't take long.

And that's because even if the content created themselves, doesn't adhere to that belief system, which I think many times they do not.

If they don't actively do something about that in their audience, that is the audience they're going to have.

Right.

Because nobody wants to hang out with a bunch of fucking Nazis.

I don't.

Or in a room with them, even if you're not hanging out.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I like to use the word authoritarians because there's so many flavors of that, like I said earlier.

Yes.

Yes, of course.

Yeah.

These are no different.

They're just as bad.

Yeah.

Agree.

And so and that's no.

I don't want to say that.

No.

Yeah.

No, no, no, no.

Go somewhere else.

Yeah.

And I think I think there's two things that come to mind when I hear you say that.

One, that's why I hear you get so much shit from a traditional conservatives and from like hardline fucking red fuzz on the Internet.

And two, that's why your community is so fucking vibrant and positive.

You know, I think that those things go hand in hand because because you seem really active in like not necessarily being explicit about your politics, but being explicit about your values and policing your community and you see the results of it.

I mean, the the the it's not just the comments section on your videos.

It's your your competitions that you host in your discord.

You know, it's very popular and it's getting more popular all the time.

And people have a good time when they go there.

And I don't think that that would be the case if it was.

I mean, again, I don't really want to like name names or like drag people through the mud.

But, you know, if a certain other large gun tubers had some sort of like, you know, big meetup, I think that the vibe would be very different.

Well, I think you.

Yeah, I mean, I thank you.

I take that as a compliment.

And that is that is that is hopefully how things will continue to be.

And that is definitely a space that I want to be that way.

And it's been it's been growing more in regards to that to that goal every year.

And that's a wonderful thing.

And so you mentioned a thing about politics and values.

It's interesting because I think you can have values regardless of your politics and your values can be positive regardless of your politics.

You might have a different way of getting there.

But if your values are ones that put people above everything else, like then then we can talk because that's the point.

Your mechanism for getting to a good race might be different than mine.

But the reality is like as long as the goodwill is there, then that's a space to be had.

It's when the goodwill is missing or the values are different.

Like if at any time you're saying such and such identity or person is less than human, we can no longer have a conversation again.

Yeah, exactly.

That's kind of my hard line.

Our values are so different at that point, we have nothing in common.

And and you're a danger, frankly, not only to those people that I care about that are my friends or whatever, maybe to me as well.

Yeah, because what's to stop them from labeling you in that group?

Yeah, you know, because I'm a pretty I'm a pretty normative kind of guy, but, you know, you never know when they're going to decide you're just a little too fucking weird to exist in their society.

Well, I mean, well, I mean, like, I mean, not I'm not trying to be like, I guess this is cultural more than political, but we're seeing that already.

Right.

So we've seen we've seen so many people in the country, right.

So we've seen we've seen so much of this sort of horrible, authoritarian, hateful stuff growing.

And it's going and it's like most recently the mask has come off in a certain degree about a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff.

And that part's been kind of, oh, yeah, it has been tapped down a little bit.

Right.

It's been mostly groomers, LGBTQ protect the children.

But the last couple of weeks, oh, wow.

We're seeing exactly what we knew this always was the whole time.

They were just a little better about keeping their mouth shut on that particular thing because that's not very palatable.

But that's recently kind of become very obvious.

Anyone that was paying attention would have known that.

But this is the progression.

This is the progression of that stuff.

And this is where like we have to make choices.

Is this what we tolerate or not?

I think actually the response recently was pretty good.

We even saw Alex Jones trying to get on.

Oh, my God.

You know, when Alex Jones.

When Alex Jones is the voice of reason in the room, something's gone wrong.

Right.

And so he was literally trying to say, it means like you can say their uniforms are cool.

Right.

But like not Hitler.

And it's like he's literally like, I love Hitler.

There's no way to misinterpret that.

No.

And you're just like, all right, we know where we're at here.

Right.

So that's going to get taken out of context.

The progression of this stuff.

And that's what's.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's it's absolutely wild.

And I do think, you know, I'm not defending Ganya by any means, but I think there's he's got some underlying like, well, OK, so I hear this a lot.

I hear this a lot, you know, like always.

Maybe maybe I don't know shit like and I'm not a doctor, but listen.

No, no, no.

So I think he does have some some mental health issues.

But I've met a lot of people with mental health issues that don't say they love Hitler, even at the height of their mania and schizophrenic delusions.

I mean, this is the same thing they try to pin on to spree shootings or whatever.

They're always like, yeah, mental health.

Whatever.

That's not like a vast.

But yes, he's a little bit.

That's not the problem.

First, first of all, find an American after the pandemic that doesn't have a mental health issue.

Let's be real.

Yeah.

But like, but but or not after because it's not after.

But you know what I mean?

We're still got that going on.

But but it's it's it has affected us in ways we're not even sure yet.

But that's that's not a fair statement.

And I always go to this with that.

It doesn't matter to me if someone someone horrible trained their dog to be a fighting dog and it attacks me on the street or that same dog was trained to be a loving family dog, but has rabies and attacks me on the street.

It doesn't matter.

There's a dog chewing on my leg.

The cause for that sort of irrelevant.

Yeah, yeah, I guess I get that way to put it.

So with the the craziness in mind of of Kanye being pro Hitler and the resurgence of literal Nazi worship in.

Yeah, and trying to trying to keep shitty people out of our communities and things like that.

We were talking earlier about how your competition seemed to have just like a general positive vibe.

You were mentioning that.

Do you think that the competitions like brutality and other tactical games have like a role in defining like a newer gun culture?

Well, I think that there's nothing.

I mean, as much as we live online and are terminally online, all of us, I think there's something to be said about sharing actual meat space where we're actually doing stuff together in the real world.

And there are some of the differences that are so palpably distinctive online and seem like critical stoppers aren't so much that when you're all together shooting a match together or having a good time.

Like some of these differences that seem insurmountable.

And I'm not talking about ones in which you cause harm to others.

I'm just talking about other weird little things that make people do the things they do online.

When we get into the same space and we're all shooting that same drill or throwing that stupid kettlebell or whatever, there's there's there's friendship.

Well, there's there's camaraderie and friendship that can be built there that I don't think is the same way possible online.

We can make friends online.

I'm not saying that's not possible.

Of course I have.

But doing that stuff together builds community in a way that doesn't exist any other way.

And so having a space where people of all walks of life that are kind and have at least similar values can share that space together, build something positive.

And that is really important.

So could it so I guess to answer your question, does it have a space to help build a newer gun community?

I don't want to hype my own stuff in a way that makes it sound like it's the answer because I don't think that's fair.

Well, maybe like in general, like like sort of grassroots shooting competitions.

I think in general, yeah, I think it does because it's it's it's it's kind of like is it Mark Twain that made the statement that like travel helps cure intolerance or ignorance?

Yes, I think it was.

Yeah.

Getting together in that space and shooting together, we share at least one common ground.

We're interested in getting well, at least we're shooting guns and we either like guns or want to get better at guns.

That's commonality right there.

There's something.

And there's probably a hell of a lot more.

And that's the stuff that builds when you're together doing that together.

So, yes, I think it can for sure.

There they go.

Do you feel like smaller competitions?

I don't want to say smaller competitions, but but more sort of grassroots organizations are distinct in any way than than like like like big organizations like USPSA.

Or do you think that that that what we're talking about here applies like regardless, like any anywhere that people are getting together to shoot?

I think it can help anytime people are together shooting together, as long as the place they're going to isn't intolerant of them.

That's the challenge, right?

So some of these spaces aren't friendly to everyone.

I'm not saying USPSA, that's not what I'm saying.

But some of these spaces are not.

So it's very important for people who are creating these spaces to make sure that those spaces are inclusive.

And then that's where the magic can happen.

If it's if it's already not inclusive, then then you're going to have an echo chamber, right?

That's the problem.

So I that's the that's the interesting, diligent part of it is it's not just going to shoot together.

You need to create a space that is that is open where people will feel comfortable to attend for that to happen.

So I don't think brutality is the only place that that's the case.

And I think grassroots, as you used the word, is a really good space for that to happen because yeah, whether it's a two gun event or some other event or even getting together a group of people of like mind to go practice together, that builds community.

And I think community is going to be as these communities as separate communities, perhaps aggregate in terms of value.

That's where we're going to see a paradigm shift culturally.

And we are seeing a paradigm shift culturally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the firearms ownership community.

You know, and this was to go back to tactical girlfriend again briefly.

She said something when we were talking to her about how she doesn't believe in the idea of a larger gun community at all, only in these little these micro communities that people form amongst each other.

Do you think that that's true?

Or do you think that there is a sort of underlying camaraderie that all gun owners kind of automatically share and participate in and contribute to?

It's shifted for me.

I used to think there was a thing and I think there is a thing.

And I think the thing that is generally called the gun community is frankly not something I'm a member of.

I think we have to form our own community that is going to be not part of whatever that was.

I think that that thing has become so so what's the word identity driven in that.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

That I'm not part of that.

And I think I don't want to speak for her because that's her words, but I think we need to do is build our own community that might have firearms as part of the focus, but we're not part of whatever was called the conventional gun community because I've come to realize a good chunk of that community will never accept us and that's fine.

We'll go do our thing then.

Yeah.

And, you know, you almost get the sense that it's, you know, that that that when it's this sort of I guess what we're referring to is the traditional gun community or the old gun community or old gun culture.

You almost get the sense that it's more performative than it is ideological.

I don't know.

I can't speak to that.

I think there is a lot of ideology there, though.

I mean, that's I that's why I think it's interesting to put out content.

And this is what I hope to try to do with some of the content is is is there are people that are on any topic.

Pick one.

It doesn't matter what it is.

It doesn't matter if it's Glock versus Smith and Wesson or Ford versus Chevy.

Right.

There are some people that are so ideologically tied up in the identity of a thing that they will never, ever even give a chance of letting their thought processes.

Yeah.

But there are people that aren't there, too.

And so like we kind of touched on earlier in the podcast, bringing up topics, whether the historical or cultural or even just training that kind of cause sparks to fly in your brain with cognitive dissonance for a little bit.

There's that's where that's where minds are changed.

And sometimes culture is built in a better way.

Like if you ask a really hard question and someone is willing to think about it.

That's where that's where you might change a heart or a mind or someone might go a better way than a worse way.

Right.

There is instead and and and.

Being accepting and being willing to listen, again, within reason, there's a place and time where there's no longer.

Yeah.

The ability to do that.

Don't get me wrong.

But if the ability is there to do that, I would much rather try to have a hard conversation that helps shift things in a more positive way than to have than to exile someone where they will likely land up in the arms of an extremist thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, I get what you mean.

And that's why I think it's so important to offer a safe environment.

Like you were saying, it's it's politics aside, if you have an environment where people can feel safe and feel vulnerable and comfortable, then you can open it up to the possibility of having conversations like that and and being being honest with yourself and being honest with the people around you without fear of judgment or fear of like retaliation.

I mean, which you would definitely have in some of these places.

And that's that's a question that we get all the time, you know, from people who don't have large online communities that they're part of.

And I think that's a really important point that we have to be aware of is how to find people to shoot with.

And it sucks for a lot of people who live in different parts of the country or I mean, even in Connecticut, where I live, like the ranges that are I would say I live in a very fairly progressive area for a blue state.

And the range right around the corner for me is like full of fuzz.

I wouldn't feel comfortable bringing bring like a trans friend there.

And it sucks because for a lot of people, that's their only option.

And that's not a safe and welcoming environment for those people.

And I think when you when you have.

Competitions like yours, even if not openly and explicitly saying like this is a safe space or anything like that, people generally get that feeling.

And that way you have people from different backgrounds with different beliefs, feeling equally safe there, whether whether they're on the right side or the left side, that they could say things without being attacked verbally or physically for saying those things.

Because I think putting out a sticker, like literally putting up a sticker that says this is a safe space probably is performative.

That's that's absolutely that I would be very I would be very suspicious of something like that.

It has to be real.

And I think real is palpable.

And and putting up a flyer like that is it would at least make me suspicious.

But to a certain degree, like.

I don't know how to put this into the way like it's hard.

This is like this comes back to the gun community statement to me earlier about what tactical was saying.

We're not maybe we're not part of that, but that means we have to make our own.

And so and that's hard.

That's not easy.

And you have to like it's been even hard at the local level.

Like I'm not going to say from a bigoted perspective, but like running the two gun action challenge match just from the perspective of challenging the notions of what a match can be, never mind any of these social or political topics.

Just what a match is has been a struggle.

And it's it's it's it's been over a decade of having to wrestle with the local range to do the things that we do, which are arguably safer than what other matches frequently do.

But it's different.

And as a result of being different, anything different is met with hostility.

And so it's been really kind of have to force.

Force our way in to to make the space we want to have.

Yeah, I think that when it comes to the firearms community, I don't see an alternative left, but if as we as we grassroots grow groups everywhere, working together with, again, shared values, maybe not even always shared beliefs, shared values will be where we can make a new space that is separate and distinct and different from the old.

And if we succeed at doing that, well, the old one might become sort of defunct and will become the new gun community.

They'll be the counterculture.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

And it's not going to happen fast.

This is slow.

These things are these things are these are these are gradual movements.

But in the last decade, in range, running in range and running matches, frankly, I think I am going to say I'm pretty positive about the amount of progress we've seen of making it possible to have a separate space that can be that and.

I think we're seeing more and more of that.

And that's a really cool thing.

You just I mean, you see all these groups, these these very small groups in relation to the general gun community and doing air quotes for that that are popping up over the last even just the last couple of years, like since the beginning of the pandemic of all these new shooters that are equally saying, I don't have a place to go.

And then finding people like them with with shared values and, you know, whether it's the area that they're from, you know, black women, these the largest growing group of gun owners over the last two years.

There are multiple black women owned gun groups now, whether they're instructors or or like social clubs that they're just inviting people from the community to come shoot that we didn't have 10 years ago.

We just got the first black owned gun store in Connecticut ever.

Like nice two years ago or something like that.

Now I think we have another one up in Hartford.

But like, that's wild to me that we we didn't have a black owned gun store.

And I think when those communities start popping up in such like small percentages, but like like a large volume of those small groups, those small groups find each other, they're going to find that they have more in common with the groups around them, end up creating these like slightly larger communities and then those communities that are going to intersect different beliefs, different different backgrounds and regional differences are going to find that they have more in common with with the other groups out there than they may have had five or six years ago.

Yeah, I guess I guess we keep coming back to the community thing, but it's a very big and important element to me in this regard, because like so much of well, I mean, like let's look at the old gun culture.

It's like so much about the emphasis on the rugged American individual, right?

Down into including the media, like like what's what's an iconic if you go back to the old the I'm going to put air quotes old gun culture, think of the iconic people that are that are really revered in that one of one of the obvious ones is what John Wayne, right.

And all of that stuff is based on this idea of this individual defeating all the odds with all on their own.

But it's that's a lie.

It's always been a lie.

Historically speaking, the things that's either when people come together and work together for the benefit of all.

And so these communities forming in small groups around and then aggregating together.

And I would say aggregating in spaces, whether it's a brutality match or somewhere else to come together and find those like values that they share, is going to grow a better a better firearms community tomorrow.

And it's not the individual.

It's the aggregate that makes this better.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I don't think you need to necessarily reject individualism altogether to accept that that is that that is true and necessary.

You know, I mean, we're all individuals in our own accord, but it's the individualism that we're all in our own accord.

But it's the it's but it should not be at the cost of the whole.

That's the difference.

Yeah.

And there's this in a sort of like sort of language sense, I guess.

There's a there's a distinction when people talk about individualism and rugged individualism, right?

And there's this sort of like worship that happens of like the lone strong man.

Like you're saying, like, you know, one man against the.

Carlson had promoting sunning your taint or whatever.

So, yes, exactly.

That guy that started them.

Yeah, it's like the manic conclusion of this of this like madness, you know, this this, you know, believing this lie that like you can't exist as an island by yourself and and and find, you know, find like victory against the world, which is against you.

You know, that's all bullshit.

So it's social Darwinism versus Kropotkin mutual aid, right?

Mutual aid is where actual evolution occurs.

It's not the individual thing doesn't generally survive.

But when an aggregate working together for the general benefit, they do.

And that's where that's where real progress happens.

It's like technologically speaking, too.

It's it's like, yeah, let's go.

Let's go ahead and use the guy that everyone likes to talk about right now.

Elon Musk, right?

So I'm not even going to talk about his skills or what he's about.

What I'm going to say is whether you think that that guy is a genius or an idiot.

The reality is the people building the stuff that works like SpaceX seems to be working.

He building that by himself.

He's got an army of people doing that together to make that thing work.

It's not an individual making that happen.

It's it's an aggregate effort.

Now, whether those people are being treated right, all that, I'm not going there.

But the point is, it's not an individual doing that.

Yeah, for sure.

And that's and society is definitely not an individual doing that.

Like these are all group efforts.

And that's why the to make the gun community better.

It needs to be a group effort.

I love that.

Yeah.

I think people are going to hear this and and.

It's going to cement in that.

Chilling at your matches is where people need to be.

Watch a better way to a podcast is going to increase the the the attendance of the brutality matches by 200 percent next year.

With our wide view, our wide listener base.

Oh, y'all got to come out and join us sometime.

We've got a whole bunch more on the agenda.

We've got we got midnight brutality, which is the first ever brutality event.

It's going to be low light, no light.

We've got we've announced handgun brutality, which is going to be a specifically handgun event.

The rules are now, but as a little sneak preview to people out there listening, it's going to be pretty cool.

Honestly, you're going to be able to shoot handgun brutality with anything.

I mean, you could actually shoot the match with a cap and ball all the way up to a modern roll in special with a red dot.

Like it's going to be it's going to be a lot of fun.

Like it's going to be it's going to be really cool.

We've got Woodland brutality, which will be coming in West Virginia.

We've got cornfield brutality, which will be in with with with brown owls.

And we're going to be telling as well.

So I mean, this is all happening.

So hopefully we'll we'll see all sorts of cool people coming out to not only again build community, but also build their skills at the same time.

Yeah, that's that'll be a lot of fun.

That's that's on my list Woodland brutality next year is on my list.

So I hopefully see there.

I have to upgrade my kit a little bit and actually go out to the range and start doing some stuff.

I don't remember the last time I threw a kettlebell and watching the video from this year.

I think a lot of people can't remember the last time they threw the video.

I think it was you doing it and it's sinking in the mud and talking about how like the hearty that felt the farther it's a set.

I was like, I felt that in my soul.

Like I was like this this because I know what it's like to run mud.

I know what it's like to throw a kettlebell, but I've never done both at the same time and then tried to shoot afterwards.

And I was like this I've never had the the competitive gene to like feel miserable and want to like be fast at the same time.

Like when I feel miserable, I want to sit down.

And but it but it's there's a part of me that's like I really like I want to do it and it sounds like it looks like a lot of fun.

But I know it's going to suck.

I think that is actually cool is that everybody experiencing the same thing together does build like a cool bond.

Right.

There is some truth.

Yeah.

Shared misery is, you know, trauma bonding.

Right.

But like everyone can say about hazing ourselves.

Yeah.

But everybody consider.

But one of the things I do love about the events, the brutality events, is we've always encouraged gentle gentle teasing and people yelling from the audience, but also supportive supportive community group.

So like so many matches you go to where it's like, okay, they're going to shoot.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Brutality events, you're yelling your screaming your clapping.

You want an honestly, I've never seen anyone at a brutality event that doesn't want the person they're watching to do well.

Like it's it's you want to do well, but you also want to watch the person you're watching do well.

Like it's it's really it's it feels good to see other people succeed.

And and it's all about I mean, obviously, there's going to be a winner because that's just how it works.

But but even the first the person out there for their very first time, they make it through the match without dequeuing.

That's awesome.

Like you've done something cool.

Right.

And everybody is there.

Everybody's there.

Yeah.

And it's a positive environment.

Everybody's there to like cheer everybody else on.

And that's that's really cool.

Have you ever seen somebody get down on the pronen and immediately vomit all over their optics?

We've had because you're going to.

We have had people throw up at the matches a number of times and we consider that a point of pride, but never, never necessarily prone on their.

They normally step off the side of the business.

That's a kind of marine joke that we don't know.

No, but I just see myself doing that.

I just I see myself like you get you get the warning a couple steps before you throw up usually.

And then I've only thrown up all running once and it's not a recommended activity.

We've had people we've had people hurling on the side of the bay.

I don't think anyone's ever thrown up on their gun.

Like maybe while running the range.

I don't remember that happening, but maybe someday an interesting form of camouflage.

Yeah, you'd have to have.

Yeah, not an effective one, depending on what you ate.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun.

It it definitely sounds like something that I'm going to have to make the drive out for.

It's not that far.

Virginia's like five hours away from me.

Oh, that ain't bad.

Yeah.

And by the way, that range, the Echo Valley Training Center is it's really beautiful.

Well, you saw it in the footage, but yeah, that place is really nice.

It's a really cool spot.

One of the things I like about that range is it's not just square bays.

It allows us to do some like actual natural terrain stuff.

The Casarda drill was actually in this wooded area with mud.

As you said, the the long range stage was just in this open grassy field.

It's it's really nice.

It looked like a runway.

Yeah, no, that was just this open grassy field that just was cleared there.

But there's a couple of square bays.

There's some square bays, but a whole bunch of the stuff we shot there was just natural terrain, which was really cool.

We also this wasn't in the footage.

I don't think I don't remember.

But at the last World in Brutality, we had a really neat side stage that you could shoot if you wanted to.

And it was force on force with with some simulation.

No, no, no.

Oh my God.

I can't think of the word the military laser thingies.

Oh, Mount.

No, Mount is is the training center.

Oh, no.

It's like.

I forget the name of it.

Yeah, the best that you put on the lasers bother me.

Yeah.

Is it like this is the one where they clamp on that bright orange.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miles, no, that's a that's a miles miles miles.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it was really cool because we had there was a person like 50 yards away and you'd start there and as you saw each other, they would essentially.

Wave the flag and then you would break apart and break contact.

And if you tagged the AWP for you would have a bonus to your score and if they tagged you, you would have a penalty to your score.

So it actually had repercussions.

It was pretty cool.

That's so cool.

Are those is that is there just like a laser bore site in those things that yeah, so they attach they attach a dude ad to the very front of the muzzle and you're firing blanks.

But every time you fire the blank, it shoots out that laser beam and the vest you're wearing is advanced laser tag.

It will register a hit.

It'll also register in your miss.

It actually tells you.

Yep.

So when someone if they're shooting at you and it doesn't quite hit you, the beam isn't a direct beam.

It's kind of cone.

And so the edge of the cone will tell the miles gear that it was near you were almost hit and you'll get different beeps whether you were almost hit or if you were hit.

So it's pretty cool.

That is really cool.

Sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah, we did that last year.

I don't know what we'll do for a bonus this year, but it was really neat.

That sounds like way more fun than some munition, to be honest.

I've done some painful.

That's what yeah, I I I definitely think it's an invaluable training tool, but it's not fun to get shot with.

No, in fact, as a interesting so depending on how people, you know, if you're going to in my opinion, if you're going to be a person that's going to carry a firearm, you should seek out a good bit of training because that is a very interesting and significant responsibility to take on to oneself.

And I have a sim round sitting over here on my bench from a illion years ago when I took ECQC from South Nart, the extreme close quarters combat course.

And you went out there and it's real.

It really is a revelation because the first day of that course, there's a bunch of evolutions where you do well, I guess it was the second day evolutions where you're doing scenarios.

And as a gun person, you'll be really interesting how often you think.

The guns, the problem is the solution to the problem.

And at ECQC, it frequently was not.

And in that class at one time, I whipped out my concealed carry piece.

Not only have it taken away from me, but I was shot with my own gun.

And that round is sitting there on my table because I'll never forget that lesson learned.

And those are the lessons that you get from training, which is these things.

These guns are, you know, guns are not magic talismans against evil.

In fact, using them inappropriately or not knowing how to use them while carrying them can be more of a detriment than a benefit.

And so taking training like that is quintessential to being responsible, in my opinion, in knowing how to do this properly.

I'm not saying you have to have this to be successful.

Yeah, that's not what I'm saying.

But if seeking it out can be very revolutionary and educational and that spent sim round sitting there on my bench is a definite memory of the day I have my own gun shoot me.

I think making making statements like that are are kind of like healing to the to the gun community because I think we're so used to being on the defense with people who are vehemently anti-gun that are arguments for guns kind of.

They kind of like lose faith.

You know, when you say when somebody is trying to take quote unquote, take your guns and you're saying, you know, like something.

I don't know what's what's a what's a trope like an armed society is a polite society.

I catch myself saying that often because I think the concept of everyone can be armed makes the society polite makes sense.

But I think in reality, like you said, if if you're armed, but you have no idea how to use your gun, you're not any safe.

You're not safer.

You're you're more of a danger to yourself and others.

Yeah.

Especially as when we're arguing with with with like people who are anti-gun.

We're very we're arguing from like a position of like, you know, in an ideal world, right?

Yeah, but then it's still it's nice to hear from someone who's you know, it's a little safer and more comfortable to hear from someone who's obviously pro gun that, you know, you know, maybe maybe this this fantasy world isn't isn't the place to to to live all the time, you know, well, because we know that, you know, training is good.

But when somebody who's anti-gun says, I think anyone who wants to own a gun should have to go through 24 hours of training.

We're like, fuck you.

I don't want no.

I want to give my six year old a gun right now.

And it's his right.

Like that's that's it.

You know, but that's not what we actually want.

That's just what we're used to arguing.

And it doesn't actually do us any good to argue like that.

And but but we're we're arguing against our best interests.

If we say, yeah, I believe everybody should have to do 24 hours of training.

Well, you know, you should be doing it.

It's a good faith argument again, right?

So like, yeah, the opposition makes that statement about training.

They're trying to use it as a wrench to prevent you from owning the thing.

And the the pro gun side, whatever that means, saying that that they shouldn't require training is an understandable counter argument to someone trying to take away what is, I believe, a human right, which is that to self-defense.

Absolutely.

But the reality is neither one's right.

And the truth is, getting good, proper training means you're a much more responsible person with a responsibility of taking on the reality of carrying a lethal weapon.

So absolutely.

And so it's like, am I saying that we should not have literacy tests to vote and we shouldn't have required?

Yeah.

And we shouldn't have requirements that are unreasonable to prevent someone from having the right to own a gun.

I'm not saying that at all.

That's that's the opposite.

But I am saying that if one takes on the decision to carry a weapon, perhaps you should seek what that means.

Yeah, I think that there's I think there's a big gulf between saying you should get training if you if you want to own and carry a gun and saying you have to get expensive training if you want to even buy a gun in the first place.

Yeah, I think that these are different statements, you know, and I think that one is is is bad faith and I think the other one is well intentioned.

That's fair.

I think that's fair.

Yeah.

And so, anyways, taking that class was very educational and I totally took away the any left anything left of the mythology of the gun being a magic talisman was erased because it is not and it is it is a valuable tool.

In a very rare set of circumstances.

Which is fine, like quite honestly, more importantly, I took like medical training, honestly, the odds of being able to the need to use basic first aid is is higher and much more likely to save a life.

And so does that mean you should know the gun that shouldn't take fire?

No, it's not.

But in the as humans, we're not good at risk analysis.

Yeah, yeah.

And and the truth is knowing how to use a tourniquet or a bandage is probably more likely to happen to you than needing to use a gun.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have the gun.

That's not what I'm saying, either.

People love to take those things and turn them into something else.

It's not what I'm saying.

But knowing how to use.

But but on the statistical reality, knowing how to use a tourniquet is probably going to be more likely to do something beneficial.

Yeah.

I don't know when it comes down to it, too.

I mean, it's like you're thinking about a threat to your life, you know, you you want to you want an accurate threat model, right?

So the having having basic first aid skills, yes, is important.

You know, like eating vegetables also very important.

I know for a fact, a lot of young guys don't do that.

You know, it's like you want to stay alive.

You want to keep your loved ones alive.

There's a whole wide range of activities and habits that you need to develop that, you know, a lot of people just skip right to the end.

They're like, no, I want to be ready with a gun on on the in the least likely circumstance, the you know, the worst case scenario.

Which floorboard am I going to hide this shotgun under?

Yeah.

In the event that I'm in a in a safe room type movie situation.

You know, who else does he need vegetables?

Jordan Peterson, he eats no vegetables.

Is that true?

Is that true?

Yes.

Oh, my God.

Oh, look at that.

What a fucking moron.

It's super crazy.

He's on this like meat only diet.

The craziest thing I ever tried was paleo.

And even then it was like the the people that were doing paleo.

I was like, you guys are weird.

Like I'm trying this out, but this is not a way of life.

This is a crash diet.

There are definitely, you know, I would say I've tried keto before and I personally can't I don't have the self-control to maintain that.

I'm convinced that keto killed my my wife's uncle.

Yeah, you were telling me that.

It is we've we've talked about this before.

You know, my wife has a lot of success with it and she she feels genuinely better when she does it.

But I don't think every diet is for every person.

I don't think like or even all of the time, right?

No, no, no.

And that's if you eat the same thing every day, you're probably not going to only.

What the?

Yeah, that's why.

If you Google it up, you'll find out Jordan Peterson's on the meat only diet.

That tells you a little bit more that you probably didn't want to know about that interesting person.

I'm going to need that little trivia fact at some point in my life.

And I'm going to thank you for it when I do.

Yeah.

How do you even hold on?

No, I want to back up the same.

How do you even get enough meat?

Like how do you even have enough meat to just like have a normal amount of calories throughout the day?

How much meat are you taking in?

I know that in and of itself is a pretty privileged existence because I'm sure it's pretty expensive.

That's a shit ton of meat for for like a for like the average person for like just basic caloric maintenance.

I'm astounded.

I just can't I can't believe that.

We're going to have to do some research into this and figure out how.

Yeah, we'll crunch the numbers.

We'll get back to you.

Absolutely.

Carl, unrelated question, but something that I was wondering, because we see these internet personalities and all we know is is you as an internet personality.

But do you have any hobbies that don't involve guns?

Or do you have like a full time job or anything like that?

Or that's you know, that's another interesting point.

It's funny because I do I do gun stuff all the time, right?

Like like my channel's firearms centric and I shoot competitions and I've got collection and I've got historic black powder.

I'm like I love guns and I do guns a lot.

But I would like to think that anyone that knows me would say that guns are not my identity.

It is something I do.

It is the when any one thing becomes your identity.

I wonder about that.

And like, you know, how many how many of us know the gun person that you go look at their social media and every picture of them is not with not with a friend, not with a family, not out doing something.

It's with a gun like like the guns.

The family member.

Yeah, weird.

Anyways, do I do other stuff?

Yes.

I really love my wife, the gun.

Right.

Right.

I think I think people listening to this know what I mean by that.

But yeah, so it's not my identity.

It's something I do.

So, yeah, I really do love a lot of stuff.

I love going to historic sites.

I love going into back country to like back country to old like ghost towns, ruins, cemeteries, that kind of stuff.

Oh, that is so cool.

I do a lot of that.

Have you ever been to Saturnalia?

Yeah.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, that's I've never been.

But I feel like if you're into that, that's a place you got to go.

I want to go there.

And I would say that.

Oh, you mean Centralia in Pennsylvania?

I'm sorry.

Saturnalia is that that's a song, isn't it?

Saturnalia is a holiday.

I don't know.

It's an old Roman religious holiday.

Oh, it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Where did that come from?

So you're thinking about it.

I have I have not been to Centralia, Pennsylvania, but that's the one that you've been to Saturnalia.

I've been to a Saturnalia party.

Oh, right.

Right.

But there's a there's the central area is the old coal mining town.

Yeah.

With the fire.

We're burning fire in the mine.

Yeah.

Absolutely wild.

I haven't seen it all movie fire down below.

Most of my most of my ghost town stuffs in the southwest, like New Mexico and Arizona.

Oh, yeah.

Like Western Old Western.

Yeah.

Old mine.

That's so cool.

Old mining camps and old cemeteries like there's actually a video in in range.

It's way old now.

I don't remember how many years ago it is where it took me a couple of years to find the abandoned cemetery for a ghost town called Charleston near the San Pedro River.

And the cemetery was on an old topo map from 1880, whatever it was.

And I didn't have that map.

And I knew the cemetery existed at one point, but couldn't find it.

And then one day I stumbled upon an old 1880 something map and it had the cemetery on it.

And then I superimposed it on a modern map.

And over time, cemetery turned into ruin, which then disappeared off the map.

And it wasn't there anymore.

So I got the GPS coordinates roughly from an 1880s map on a modern map and then had to bushwhack out to the site.

And the actual GPS coordinates didn't quite match up with the cemetery, but I did find it and it was like, oh, shit, we overgrown.

And there's a couple old cribs and a couple of headstones.

And yeah, I'm into that.

That's like really cool stuff.

That's so cool.

How how hard is it to like how off the beaten path is because I'm assuming there was a road through it at one point, but obviously not a modern road, I'm assuming.

Well, you know, Charles, this particular ghost town went ghost in 1886.

So it's been left in a ruined state for quite a long time.

It was used briefly in by the military in the 1940s as a World War II training camp.

They actually did live fire training there and shot up a bunch of the ruins with bullets.

Wow.

And you can still find old World War II ammunition out there, like old 30 out six cartridge cases and stuff.

But the cemetery had been left to its abandoned state since 1886.

So it was completely overgrown.

You had to legitimately like machete into it.

That's going to be a pretty like gratifying feeling to actually to go through the work to find that and actually come across it like that.

Yeah.

When you find it, when I found it, it was really rad.

That that's one thing I definitely love to do.

I do spend a lot of time when I'm not in Arizona in New Orleans.

I love that city.

And I love the culture there and have friends and also do collaborative videos with Atenche if you've seen any of that work with him a little bit once in a while.

So that's a cool thing.

I love going out there.

And that's a little bit change of pace because Arizona, my Arizona life is quite rural and quite remote and isolated.

And New Orleans, of course, is just the opposite very much a very urban space.

What else?

Cooking's cool.

I like listening to music more than making it, but I do like both.

Yeah.

I didn't know you were a musician.

A little bit.

I mean, I don't know if the word musicians, right?

I can play.

I was trying to find out if that was a guitar strap or an ammo belt behind you this whole time.

Oh, that is an ammo belt.

My guitar is in the other room.

But yeah, no, I play I play guitar.

I don't play it as much as I should.

I'm reasonably decent at some classical guitar and pretty good at some some frankly like metal guitar.

That's fun.

Yeah.

What else?

Read this a lot of read a lot of history stuff.

Obviously, the old West stuff kind of dovetails into in range work, although the old West that I read isn't necessarily always about.

In fact, usually isn't about gunfights.

It's other stuff.

The gun stuff just happens to crop up once in a while.

When you read, do you set aside time every day to read?

Or do you just read like when you get around to it kind of thing?

I get bursts of interest and then they disappear, comes and goes.

Yeah, I've always struggled with finding the motivation to read.

I'll find a book that I really want to read, but I'll read five pages in and I'd be like, this ain't it.

Yeah, it's kind of a weird sine wave for me.

Once in a while, I'll be at the peak and I'll be like, I'll just destroy a book and then it'll be a long time where I don't don't.

And then when it comes to the history stuff, I have a pretty on the other side of the wall, we have a pretty good history stuff.

On the other side of the wall, we have a pretty significant collection of of of quote old West history content from a wide and diverse level of when it was written as well as authors.

And I don't necessarily always read each book individually all the way through.

I frequently use them to cross reference specific events and try to get multiple perspectives on one thing.

And it's real interesting how different the perspective is from one book to another or from a different viewpoint.

Yeah, that is really cool.

Especially when it was written in a time where you could lie and it was fine.

You know, yeah, yeah.

You know, people were we obviously and for good reason, we're concerned about our media now and our mass media.

But the old West yellow journalism was the rule.

Like the newspaper was absolutely didn't even try to be unbiased.

It was they would write an article saying such and such is a scoundrel and a trash human being.

I mean, that wasn't the.

I wasn't that wasn't an editorial.

That was like the article, right?

That was like how they wrote.

That was the we should put that on the shirt.

I am a scoundrel and a trashy trashy human being.

Oh, like, I mean, going back to the famous OK, Karel Gunfight at Tombstone, there was two newspapers, there was the epitaph and the nugget and the epitaph was pro or and the nugget was pro quote cowboy and all the articles in there are completely biased one way or the other, depending on which one you read on the same topic.

That sounds like it is there anywhere you could find the text of that?

Yeah, you can actually you can Google some of that.

In fact, some of it's online.

You can find old copy from both the epitaph and the nugget.

Sorry, I thought I was unmuted.

I couldn't figure out how to hit the button.

Oh, that's cool.

That's I love reading old articles like that were written in the in the time that the event happened.

Like I I recently went on ancestry dot com and not my account, but my cousin has one and she found the shipping the passenger manifest from my grandmother coming over from Germany in World War two and has her name.

I have no idea how they do this.

It has her name written in and pen or pencil or whatever it was.

And they found and they found it somehow.

And that stuff is just wild.

Yeah, it's absolutely nuts.

And no picture or anything, but it's got her, her brother, her and her parents all written down in the manifest, like in the passenger log.

Yeah, we've got we've got some, you know, family legends about, you know, the are fresh off the boat Norwegian namesake, you know, becoming a frontier Texas ranger and then a and then a judge in Fredericksburg.

And, you know, it all sounds really cool.

And there are a lot of judges and cops in my family.

But, you know, I don't know how much of this it's hard to it's hard to find, you know, the the like real documentation of what of what this guy did.

So it's hard to be sure how much is sort of like, you know, just like family lore.

And how much it really happened.

Yeah, I mean, I'm so I'm a second generation Norwegian.

And I was able to find I was able to find my grandparents, like literally their Ellis Island papers and a picture of the ship they came out came over on, which is kind of cool.

That's neat.

That is really cool.

That's neat.

That is really cool.

That's the they use the same ships like was it the queen?

Like my grandma came over on the Queen Mary.

Both my grandmothers did really the actual Queen Mary, the one that's like docked in Long Beach right now and like, I guess, wow.

The one that's like haunted because it ran over another ship.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's really haunted, but and the ship.

Yeah.

It just rolled it.

Well, it was it was some navigational error and a smaller ship ended up, you know, ahead of its prowl and the Queen Mary is a big ship.

And it's like, we can't do anything.

We can't stop.

Sorry.

It was like no balls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's like I think there's like two or three haunted stories for the Queen Mary.

There's that one.

And there's another one where they were doing some training exercise.

And one of the one of the workers on the ship got crushed through one of the watertight doors.

Wow.

That's stuffy.

Yeah.

Every ship is haunted, though.

It seems like it, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, yeah.

So like that kind of stuff, I kind of I don't personally believe in that stuff, but I do love like cool haunted stories and all that.

They're they're always really interesting from.

Oh, yeah.

They're always really interesting from even a history perspective, because the best ghost stories come from actual historical events.

And so you can listen to the ghost story and frequently get a cool historical event out of a ghost story.

We had to make it.

So I got no, I was just going to say and just make it generally creepy.

Yeah.

I you know, I don't know.

I don't know how how to describe how I believe in in ghosts and shit.

And I want to say like, you know, I'm a pretty empirical you know, skeptical person, but I've also sort of like seen an experience and things that, you know, it's difficult to to kind of get my get my head around.

And I would think that, you know, Carl, you spending so much time out in the out and out in remote places and visiting ghost towns, you know, not literal ghost towns, but, you know, ghost towns and and that you might you might have run into some things or seen and heard some things that kind of defy explanation or kind of, you know, mystify you.

But, you know, it doesn't sound like that's really part of your experience.

I have it now.

I mean, sometimes some of these places when they're remote enough can get it can can can get up on you because it's creepy and weird or whatever.

But yeah, in terms of actual experiences, no, I haven't.

But you know what shit freaks me out is is like the myth of skinwalkers.

Oh, yeah.

Like that's such a meme for gun guys, those.

I know.

I know.

I don't know where this came from, but I kind of I kind of for with it.

Yeah, it does.

It's for the paranormal board on 4chan.

OK, oh, good to know.

Well, I mean, skinwalkers, skinwalkers are a real belief system amongst like the indigenous populations.

I don't mean like the the term skinwalker, but the but the way that gun people conceptualize skinwalkers and the threat of skinwalkers.

Yeah, is is really a unique product of of of, you know, message boards and and and memes.

Was that like a creepypasta kind of thing?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Like it was.

That's something that I would love to bring to like a fuddy gun range and just show up in full kit and just be like, I need to know how to fucking murk these skinwalkers.

I need to know how to kill skin.

My dog got up on two legs and bent over backwards and I filled them full of lead and just be like, hey, guys, my membership pass yet.

Yeah, I killed my neighbors.

I killed by a skinwalker and it turned back into my neighbor's dogs and now in deep shit.

We kind of we kind of went down the fun path with the midnight brutality divisions and patches.

So the patch for the match, because it's in West Virginia, is Mothman.

And that's cool.

The light fighter is a werewolf.

The night fighters, a vampire, the infantry, which is the active night vision is a ghost and the the predator or the hunter is based on predator night vision.

It's a Sasquatch in thermal.

So that's kind of.

That's awesome.

Are those the the the divisions or the.

Yeah, the division patches.

So Mothman is the patch for the overall event.

And then the divisions are light fighter, infantry, night fighter and hunter.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Man, that's going to be so cool.

Can't wait to see all the footage of just, you know, black spaces with somebody going to have some recording.

You saw my promo video for it.

I am.

I have.

I yeah, I got I don't know if you saw this.

So you saw the night vision parts where we were I was shooting active.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I got to know it's going to look cool.

I was just joking.

I got a cool camera called Brain Exploder.

I'd never heard of it.

Well, it was recommended to be led by less from the one Shepard tactical crew, but it connects to the back of the night vision kit and slides off to the side and it's got a prism on it and it records right through the through the night vision.

And what?

That's how I got that footage.

And it's really cool.

Yeah.

That's sick.

Yeah, so you essentially you're so I'm going to be filming the match through through the night vision with my brain, Exploder camera, and it's pretty rad.

You should post your next promo of it and have it just be sound against the black screen.

Wasn't that a great video?

Yeah.

Did you see?

Did you guys see that?

Yeah, you guys see that?

So you're sure that's awesome.

That's awesome.

Well, I think we've we've gone through most of like the really big questions and.

Sorry, I have two monitors and I keep clicking the wrong monitor and then I can't talk.

Sorry, the continuity of this interview is great.

I swear we're professionals, but Carl, before we let you go, we're going to hold you hostage for like another couple of minutes.

We ask everybody who is, I guess, on the show before they leave.

If you were to give a piece of advice to somebody and it could be gun related, it could just be life advice, little nugget of knowledge.

What would that be?

Just something that you think people might be sleeping on.

Well, I mean, to be honest with you, I think I don't mean to be redundant, but I'm going to go ahead and go with something we talked about earlier in the show, which is to always doubt yourself.

Don't ever take your beliefs to be something that are not something that are a product of what you've been trained or thought or your environment, and therefore always be skeptical.

Even of your own thoughts and beliefs and make sure you test them regularly.

That's the thing I would say is the most important thing, in my opinion.

Hell, yeah.

Brother.

Hell, yeah, brother.

That's awesome.

I really I think we'd be in a much better place if people practice that more often.

I think so.

People, you know, you imagine sitting down to watch the news and hearing them say something so fucking off the wall that you just say like, there's no way that's true.

Like that that makes ero sense.

And then it just doesn't go any farther than that.

Can you imagine that?

Like what would happen to Q if people just like thought critically?

Like, wait a second.

They've changed their the goal.

They've they've changed the date of all the information flooding out into the open six times.

Maybe maybe the sources incorrect or something.

No, no, no, no.

It's all part of the plan.

I so I do.

I that's a that's a solid, solid nugget of nugget of advice.

And easier said than done by a lot of people, but I'm sure myself also.

Oh, I'm not saying it's easy.

I just think it's a it's a goal to strive for.

Absolutely, man.

Maybe for you guys, I'm always right.

Yeah, we already know.

We already figured that out earlier.

Yeah.

Well, this is awesome, man.

I we really appreciate you coming on late.

And I know it's it's a couple hours earlier there, but it's we were we were super pumped to have you on.

And this was a lot of fun.

Man, can I just say I miss Arizona time?

I know we don't we don't we don't.

I hate that you guys have the only it's it's this.

It was so nice.

I agree with it.

I think no way they don't think we should have daylight savings time anymore or at all, like I think it's I don't know anyone that wants it.

So, yeah, I should know.

Yeah, it's like what is it?

It's like Kinder eggs.

Nobody goes to the store and wants to, but they still make them.

I don't know why.

Stop making them.

Get rid of it.

Who's buying this?

Nobody, nobody.

Anyway.

Well, I wanted to say thank you for having me on.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you for the support.

And it's always nice to have an opportunity to talk to other people and talk about different topics that aren't necessarily the same stuff we that we do on in range.

So it's that's a nice opportunity.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, man.

We're super happy to have you on.

And hopefully we see you at one of the brutality matches next.

Yes.

Yeah.

You'll have to come join us.

I have to.

I have to.

I'll tell my wife that you said I have to.

And no, no, it's I don't know.

I don't have a choice.

No longer.

Carl, this guy from the Internet, we were watching YouTube videos of you earlier because I was I was trying to show my wife who you were and what.

Like it's a big deal.

Seriously.

She's just not into guns at all.

And it's really funny because like I'm like, isn't this cool?

And she's like, I I don't know.

Like it's it's it's it's super humbling.

Like when I'm telling somebody like what I just spent eight hours doing on my Saturday, you know, what like orders and posts and all that stuff.

And they're just like, so you're on the Internet a lot.

Yeah.

It's like somebody somewhere.

What you do with your week means nothing.

You say like guns.

All right.

Cool.

Great.

OK, cool.

That's neat.

But anyway, yes, we'll let you go now because I'm awful at these.

I'm awful at goodbyes.

I'll probably walk in the same direction of you as when we say goodbye.

All right.

As I'm doing right now.

This is the way.

Hold on.

He's got to say goodbye like six more times and then change the subject each time before I actually believe.