Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'm joined here by Citizen Hush.
Speaker: Citizen Hush is a rock star on Goon Twitter, creeping up on 100,000 followers.
Speaker: He's also a successful entrepreneur and his interest in being his own boss and charting his own course has led him to a lot of the same interests we have here at Exit, namely freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, building parallel institutions.
Speaker: Citizen Hush, welcome to Exit.
Speaker: Thanks for having me, man.
Speaker: So my first question that I ask everybody that we have on the show is, if you could build your ideal detached life for yourself, where you are out of these institutions, you've made your exit, what does that look like to you?
Speaker: Huh, that's a big question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think the more interesting question is why am I trying to get away from those institutions?
Speaker: I think fundamentally, a lot of these institutions that we've come to accept as part of our everyday existence are artificial and fragile.
Speaker: They're inorganic systems that have no precedence in nature.
Speaker: You have things like
Speaker: Like debt is a really good example.
Speaker: So debt isn't inherently good or bad.
Speaker: It's a tool.
Speaker: It can be used irresponsibly or could be used responsibly.
Speaker: And we have through the monopoly of the use of force that the government has,
Speaker: we've been able to scale what we can do with debt to unsustainable levels.
Speaker: That's just like one example.
Speaker: As far as like other institutions that I'd like to get away from, like largely just the institution of the state.
Speaker: Like I personally, I'm not a very political person, though.
Speaker: A lot of the things I do and say are inherently political because of the times we live in.
Speaker: But
Speaker: I think the idea of the state is this primitive and barbaric throwback to like early days of like hunter gatherer societies.
Speaker: I don't, it's archaic and I'm not a fan of it.
Speaker: And I think that's kind of the big answer to a big question.
Speaker: Like, I think, how do you escape the state and it's over reach?
Speaker: And I think,
Speaker: There are many different ways to do it.
Speaker: And that's kind of like the distinction.
Speaker: Like a lot of my views are very similar to like libertarians.
Speaker: A lot of my views are very similar to like anarchists.
Speaker: I probably, as a shorthand with people, I'll say I'm a libertarian just because I don't feel like explaining my beliefs, but like,
Speaker: My problem with libertarians is they just tweet about things and they just argue with people and they just argue on the internet.
Speaker: And I'm more interested in people who are doing things, if that makes sense.
Speaker: No, that does make sense.
Speaker: And that leads into, I think a lot of guys who would like to create content have concerns that they won't have the credibility to speak on whatever issue they want to speak on.
Speaker: And talking about doers,
Speaker: you've chosen this gun niche where there's tons of guys running their mouths and getting clowned on for it.
Speaker: And you are not a veteran yourself, but you've built this incredible respect and following among guys who are veterans and know their stuff and don't suffer fools.
Speaker: And I'd like to know how you built that credibility and following with those guys.
Speaker: I don't, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know how true that is, but I appreciate you saying that.
Speaker: Um, I, I, I'd say like, it, it, it, it kind of just goes down to like how you interact with worlds, the world and different communities.
Speaker: So like, uh, did you play sports growing up or anything?
Speaker: Not much.
Speaker: Okay, well, so like I fought a lot growing up and like the first thing you do when you go to a new gym or a new place to learn how to fight is you don't come in walking, acting like you're Billy Badass.
Speaker: You have to pay your dues.
Speaker: You got to mop the floor because you're the new guy.
Speaker: Science is how it works.
Speaker: And with that comes a certain level of humility.
Speaker: And like, that's kind of like, I,
Speaker: the gun thing on YouTube and Twitter is just kind of a hobby for me.
Speaker: I, and I don't take myself seriously or I try not to rather.
Speaker: And I think that probably that maybe that lends itself to what you're saying where people are less hard on me than other folks.
Speaker: And, and I've talked to some of the former military folks about it too.
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: For me, like, it's about having fun and I try not to take myself too serious on camera or on Twitter.
Speaker: Like, I'm an equal opportunity firearms enthusiast.
Speaker: There's only one gun I don't like, and it's the Ruger LCP.
Speaker: Every other gun, I'm cool.
Speaker: Like, for me, it's just like we tend to segment ourselves into these camps of, like, Glock versus M&P.
Speaker: whatever, whatever brand tribalism.
Speaker: I hate brand tribalism and any, any manifestation of it.
Speaker: And for me, it's just about like, Hey, these are really interesting machines.
Speaker: They're fun to play with.
Speaker: And they're also useful.
Speaker: They're the utility factor to it.
Speaker: And, and there's, there's a political component as well, but that's, that's really just all it is just me messing around with guns and having fun with them and try not to take myself too seriously.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So if you were all alone and it's Red Dawn, what's your loadout?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'd probably...
Speaker: Probably just the AR-15.
Speaker: Any of the ones I have laying over next to me.
Speaker: A pistol and an HEB bag.
Speaker: I'll hold all my shit.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: Am I allowed to cuss?
Speaker: Am I allowed to cuss?
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: For me, whatever you're most comfortable with is probably what you're safest and best with.
Speaker: I own a lot of guns and try to be at least somewhat fluent in using them.
Speaker: Not because I necessarily think I'll need to use it or any capacity.
Speaker: I see it as a new challenge.
Speaker: I suck with AKs and I still suck with AKs.
Speaker: I'm going to pick
Speaker: a bunch up and I'm going to find out how to run one of these and make it work for me.
Speaker: Right on.
Speaker: So what is the most exotic gun that you've shot?
Speaker: Oh, that's a good question.
Speaker: Oh, a 45 70 Gatling gun.
Speaker: That was fun.
Speaker: Oh, no kidding.
Speaker: Yeah, that was expensive to shoot.
Speaker: I only, I only put, uh, I didn't run a whole, a whole, a lot of ammo through that one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: So you've done a lot of hustles.
Speaker: You've sold comic books, you've built Twitter bots, you're working this content game, you've done startups.
Speaker: How do you identify opportunities and which one was maybe the best use of your time?
Speaker: Which one was the biggest like boondoggle?
Speaker: The thing for me is like opportunity, and this is probably a really recent realization, especially when you're young and you don't have money and you're thinking about different things to do to make money.
Speaker: You and your friends always sit down and you talk about different business ideas you have.
Speaker: And like it by, by default, everyone goes to trying to shoot business ideas down on like why this won't work.
Speaker: There's no way this would work.
Speaker: That's easy to do.
Speaker: That's easy to do.
Speaker: And I see that like as an adult now, there are lots of people who do that and it's,
Speaker: it's a cop out to me.
Speaker: Like, okay, talking about why this won't work, that's the easy conversation to have.
Speaker: Let's have the conversation about how to make this work.
Speaker: How do you make something palatable?
Speaker: Like if selling comic books is a stupid business idea,
Speaker: Let me tell you about the bottled water industry.
Speaker: You can sell anything.
Speaker: Whether or not it's useful, that's another question.
Speaker: But to go to your other question about some of the more interesting ones that I did.
Speaker: So the comic books, that is probably the most interesting one.
Speaker: How that started out is I was a big comic book nerd growing up.
Speaker: I still read them a lot in my adult life.
Speaker: Not so much these days.
Speaker: But one thing I noticed is the value of the first appearance of a certain comic book character would skyrocket once Marvel was announcing Marvel.
Speaker: They're phase one movies.
Speaker: So like Avengers 1, when the first Avengers movie came out, that one surged in price.
Speaker: And subsequently, other spinoffs would follow that same pattern.
Speaker: So effectively, I just built a Twitter bot, or not a Twitter bot, a RSS feed.
Speaker: scraper so that it would scrape PR news releases for whenever a new Marvel movie was announced.
Speaker: And I created a really simple database to cross reference the first appearance, pulling the keyword of that character, finding that first appearance and
Speaker: issue.
Speaker: And then I'd be able to go look on eBay and filter for the buy it now at the pre-inflated price and just effectively just buy it at a pre-inflated price and relist it.
Speaker: And basically I was just drop shipping rare comic books and that scaled
Speaker: That scaled to a point where I was just buying people's entire collections.
Speaker: Like I, particularly secondary markets have always been interesting to me.
Speaker: It's like collector's markets because they're incredibly inefficient.
Speaker: There's very scarce information and data to collect and act off of.
Speaker: And where there's inefficiency, there's always opportunity.
Speaker: So people are always afraid of market friction.
Speaker: People are always afraid of volatility.
Speaker: Well, I'm sorry, but those market environments, that's where money's made.
Speaker: That's where like serious money is made.
Speaker: And I didn't make enough money to retire off of this comic book.
Speaker: It's a footnote in my career and kind of like just a fun story to talk about.
Speaker: But it was really cool.
Speaker: I became a dealer and I was on the East Coast circuit going to comic book conventions and just hustling these first appearances.
Speaker: It was crazy.
Speaker: And then what ended up happening was around 2015, 2014, the market started getting more efficient and people started doing the same thing I was doing.
Speaker: And as the market became more efficient, that opportunity kind of evaporated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in the, in the, so I'm currently exploring the just third party book sales on Amazon racket.
Speaker: And is, so is there a reason why you just stuck to comic books or, you know,
Speaker: Would you have scaled that into other avenues?
Speaker: Or why did you move on from that?
Speaker: I knew more about comic books than I know about rare books.
Speaker: I was involved in the book hustle when I was younger.
Speaker: That market has also gotten very efficient.
Speaker: It's very hard to find an edge there.
Speaker: But textbooks, though, textbooks are still pretty lucrative from what I would what I'd imagine.
Speaker: But yeah, for me, it was just what I knew.
Speaker: Like, I already had this large amalgamation of useless knowledge about comic books.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, there's money to be made with this.
Speaker: Let's apply it somewhere.
Speaker: And so that was that was a big impetus behind that and why I didn't go with like the rare book market.
Speaker: I did have I did meet a bunch of people who dabbled in both worlds.
Speaker: And particularly they were dealing with like rare first editions and things like that and estate sales.
Speaker: But like any secondary market, like just because it's hard to find an edge like right now with books, it doesn't necessarily mean there isn't an edge.
Speaker: The question that someone needs to balance is,
Speaker: is it worth my time to try and find where my edge is?
Speaker: It could be a particular subset of a market.
Speaker: It could be a particular author or whatever, but it's really just that running that cost benefit analysis of how much ramp up time do I have to make before I need to make money, before I can make money?
Speaker: And is it worth the effort?
Speaker: Like what are my margins look like?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I liked what you said about how easy it is to shoot down something like this.
Speaker: Cause I, so as part of exit group,
Speaker: I'm talking to, you know, a lot of the guys that have signed up for the group are already successful entrepreneurs and they're trying to support other people.
Speaker: And I've heard like really good ideas, really interesting ideas.
Speaker: You know, none of them are the next Amazon, but they're like making a very comfortable living.
Speaker: They didn't have to go total blue ocean and like, and like, you know, it didn't have to be this world changing idea.
Speaker: It just had to be
Speaker: better than what was already there in some kind of way.
Speaker: And so, yeah, it totally resonates with me.
Speaker: And that's something that's new to me.
Speaker: This is my first sort of jump into this entrepreneurship world kind of by default, having lost my job.
Speaker: And, and yeah, it's so encouraging to see there's just so many ways that you can make a living.
Speaker: Yeah, for real.
Speaker: And like everyone tends to like self-select out, particularly like younger people who like don't have like real world experience.
Speaker: So they don't know how to price things.
Speaker: So like our price goods and services and by proxy know what people are willing to pay for.
Speaker: So like you see a lot of people self-selecting out of even trying because it's not an Amazon idea.
Speaker: It's not a Google idea.
Speaker: Well, guess what?
Speaker: You don't need that.
Speaker: That is such an
Speaker: tiny fraction of what makes, where people make their money.
Speaker: So I tend to think of things of, can this scale to $20,000 a year?
Speaker: And my goal from the beginning was, I want to have five discrete income streams aside from W-2 income, where I'm making just 20 grand, 20 grand.
Speaker: That's an easily attainable goal with a little bit of elbow grease.
Speaker: Like if you stick with it and, and,
Speaker: refine your process, 20 grand a year, that's a little under 2K a month.
Speaker: That's not a whole lot of money.
Speaker: But if you have enough of those, it's just thinking in base hits versus trying to take the venture capital approach where you're only betting on home runs.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in addition to your day job, what sort of side angles are you looking at right now?
Speaker: What's interesting to you?
Speaker: Right now, I'm interested in... This is probably a longer term thing, but I'm interested in creating a market for secondary markets, if that makes any sense.
Speaker: So when you think of...
Speaker: like cryptocurrency that we were talking about earlier before, and you think about like secondary markets and secondary means of transactions, there's not a real easy way to bring buyers and sellers together.
Speaker: That's kind of why like we fell on money as a medium of exchange.
Speaker: It was a common denominator to make barter because barter was inefficient.
Speaker: And so something I've been playing around with in my head is just buying land to facilitate like an actual free market, like what we have in third world countries.
Speaker: I guess in the US we call them like flea markets, but like think of it like if you're able to bring together enough like-minded buyers and sellers,
Speaker: who want to get away from this fiat monetary system and exchange in... It doesn't necessarily... I'm not talking about creating like a barter system.
Speaker: I'm talking about creating an alternative means of exchange where cryptocurrency or precious metals or ammo are considered a currency.
Speaker: And like, it's always been a joke that like ammo is currency.
Speaker: Well, I mean, it kind of does meet all of it.
Speaker: It still is kind of a joke, but it's funny, especially in the last year we've seen that like, actually it kind of, it kind of does function as a currency.
Speaker: Like I've sold things for him.
Speaker: It's divisible.
Speaker: If, if, if two 23 gets into the, like the, the $2, $3 around range, that's, you know, you can carry that around in your pocket and, you know, get a sandwich and take it like, like it's, it's probably still a little too cheap,
Speaker: to be efficient to carry around, but it's getting there.
Speaker: In a pinch, in a pinch, it works.
Speaker: Like I've sold laptops for cases of 5.56.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
Speaker: But I mean, does that scale?
Speaker: Yeah, you're right.
Speaker: It doesn't really scale.
Speaker: It's more of like a flippant example.
Speaker: So like creating something like this, it's still very ill-defined in my head.
Speaker: Well, I mean, you're talking about you're talking about having more than one means of exchange.
Speaker: I mean, there are scales at which that is an efficient means of exchange.
Speaker: And so maybe you pick that one for those that that sort of range of transactions.
Speaker: And then if you want to buy a house or a boat, you use something else, you know, it's just sort of the right tool for the job.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Create, creating this market for non-traditional markets.
Speaker: That's, that's something that's interesting to me.
Speaker: Um, uh, multifamily real estate has always been something that's been on my radar.
Speaker: Um, storage units, uh, those are, that's another thing.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: One other thing, this is another long-term project, but this notion of blue-collar venture capital.
Speaker: So when we talk about venture capital, we immediately go to the Bay Area, SaaS companies and stuff like that.
Speaker: There's a lot of money that gets made in the blue collar world, like electricians, HVAC technicians here in Texas.
Speaker: The wealthiest people I know are mostly blue collar.
Speaker: And even in the ag industry, there's tons of opportunities.
Speaker: So like creating a venture capital fund that invests in these types of blue collar enterprises is
Speaker: is it also something that's been an interesting idea for probably a couple of like three, five years now.
Speaker: The problem here is like a lot of this is based on like human services.
Speaker: So it doesn't scale as elegantly as like software as a service does, but that that's a, that's a challenge.
Speaker: That's not something that makes it not worth pursuing.
Speaker: If that makes sense.
Speaker: I mean, that's,
Speaker: That's music to my ears.
Speaker: So the, for the first thing that we've the first project that we're doing at exit is I've got a friend who is a professional landscaper and construction contractor.
Speaker: And I asked him, you know, what is the easiest way for somebody who's not going to go to college to, you know, build a life for themselves?
Speaker: And he said, well, bar none, it's landscaping.
Speaker: You go out, maybe you scrape together a thousand dollars and you go get your trailer, your mower, your blower, your weed whacker.
Speaker: And it's just this incredibly scalable business from like the smallest amount of startup capital.
Speaker: And we're actually building a curriculum that's like, all right, lesson one, go get a polo and khakis, go get a trailer, like the basics.
Speaker: And then all the way to
Speaker: here's how you hire your first employee.
Speaker: Here's how you hire your 15th employee and a, and a supervisor.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's the idea is take it from a thousand dollars to a million dollars.
Speaker: So, uh, I totally agree.
Speaker: Like we're seeing, uh, I mean, like I'm not seeing now, but I'm seeing for the first time, you know, I grew up in, in, uh, a school that was like, we're not even going to have shop classes because you guys are all going to go to college and you're going to have to pay somebody else to do that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And so I'm watching these guys who, you know, he has one friend who worked for like four years in like high school.
Speaker: And then they were able to like kick back and hand the business to somebody else.
Speaker: And they're just pulling it in as passive income now.
Speaker: And it's like the scale of possibilities are in that blue collar space, just unreal.
Speaker: So bottom line, that seems like an awesome idea.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Speaking of hustles, that was probably my first hustle.
Speaker: I remember 1993, 1994, I was in third grade, I think, maybe give or take plus or minus one year.
Speaker: But the Mortal Kombat movie had just came out, and I was begging my dad to take us to see it.
Speaker: My dad hands me a Lowe's bucket and goes, go knock on the neighbor's doors and see if they need their weeds pulled.
Speaker: And so I would just go around the neighborhood pulling weeds and like, I think I did like one or two yards to buy my ticket to go see Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: But that turned into a hustle, just pulling people's weeds for, I think I charged by the bucket of weeds and like, I would show them the bucket before emptying it.
Speaker: But yeah, that was that was that was how I got my start for sure.
Speaker: My dad was a hustler, too.
Speaker: Like he used to he used to his parents grew up in the Great Depression.
Speaker: So that kind of rubbed off on him.
Speaker: My mom's from a third world country.
Speaker: And so they my dad used to pick up me and my brothers when we were little and put us into dumpsters to go dumpster diving looking for it.
Speaker: My dad was so cheap when we took out the trash, we would have to bring the bag back.
Speaker: Oh, no way.
Speaker: Grind set, man.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And really, it's very similar to like going to the gym.
Speaker: Like having money is a formula that's very similar to losing weight.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or rather, it's the inverse formula.
Speaker: Bring in fewer calories than you expel.
Speaker: That's the formula for losing weight.
Speaker: And the opposite is true for making money.
Speaker: Bring in more money than you spend.
Speaker: And it's pretty like my dad's on the projects and he figured out how to do it.
Speaker: It's not that hard.
Speaker: What's hard about it is discipline.
Speaker: That's unfortunately something you can't really teach.
Speaker: And that's where having that discipline.
Speaker: And I think, I think that's why you see a lot of folks who do well in business usually have some sort of foundation and some hobby or skill that involves quite a lot of discipline.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So I feel like there's a lot of guys in our space, in the church, frugality is really common.
Speaker: entrepreneurship is not.
Speaker: And I almost feel like there's, there's a lot of guys who will sort of scrimp and save at their day job.
Speaker: And they have no context for like, okay, now what do I do with this money?
Speaker: How do I make this money grow?
Speaker: And so they like put it in the S and P or whatever, but they don't like this.
Speaker: There's no, there's no creativity to it.
Speaker: And so like, that's a, that's a big piece that I'm starting to learn for myself is like, you know, it doesn't take a ton of money,
Speaker: to start something and to make something happen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And like, not to knock like the index approach.
Speaker: Like I give the index people like all sorts of shit all the time, but like that's a perfectly valid thing.
Speaker: Like at least it's not sitting in a savings account.
Speaker: It is working, but like it's really that cost benefit analysis.
Speaker: Like, are you the type of person that wants to get your hands dirty or do you just want a day job and keep off your index funds?
Speaker: Like, yeah.
Speaker: And depending on your opinions of like capital markets and things like that, like, is that gravy train?
Speaker: How much longer does that gravy train last?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But and.
Speaker: But one thing's for sure is owning your own business is like we're seeing it today with the Biden mandate here with vaccines.
Speaker: Like you have a certain layer of independence being self-employed that you don't get from being a W-2 employee.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes, 100%, 100%.
Speaker: And I mean, that was a big part of my kick out the door was looking at my 401k balance, just go up and up and up and be like, what are the odds I'm going to see that money ever?
Speaker: What are the odds that's still going to be there when I'm 65?
Speaker: You know, you look at what could happen in five or 10 years and it's just, so yeah, part of starting this business was like, no, I need to start accessing some of these resources that I'm just sort of piling up and do something with them while something can be done.
Speaker: So you mentioned before that that citizen hush got started as a bot account.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That you were building followers more of as an experiment and you were sort of selling the account.
Speaker: Obviously, the technical side of that is something people can Google, but can you tell me a little bit about your strategy with these accounts?
Speaker: Were they all just vanilla meme accounts?
Speaker: Did you chase particular demos?
Speaker: Do you have any facts that you apply now?
Speaker: No, it's gotten a little less efficient these days.
Speaker: I don't really run a bot.
Speaker: So in the early days of Instagram, I was, this is like pre-Facebook acquisition.
Speaker: I was building Instagram bots to auto-like, auto-engage, auto-follow people based on keywords and their captions and hashtags they use.
Speaker: And even geotargeting based on where they tagged people.
Speaker: And I would just have an account that would just go through and interact with them.
Speaker: Instagram's rules have gotten way more strict over the years, but I would churn out a meme account with 20, 40,000 followers and then I'd sell it.
Speaker: It wasn't a lot of money, but I was a broke graduate student, so whatever.
Speaker: It was fairly easy to do.
Speaker: And the same thing would happen on Twitter.
Speaker: I would just build up these accounts.
Speaker: Twitter accounts were a little bit... The market for those isn't quite...
Speaker: I would say companies still haven't found, figured out how to make Twitter work for them with a handful of exceptions.
Speaker: So the value proposition of Twitter is a little bit more confusing to businesses.
Speaker: And my personal account was just a bot account, scraping memes from Reddit and posting them as my own.
Speaker: And it was around 2016 when like I started just messing around on Twitter on my own account, just started throwing things out there or 2015.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And then that's when, and then since I had built up this following, I think at that point it was like, just like 14,000, 20,000 followers.
Speaker: I was getting an engagement on some of the stuff and that's when the dopamine hooks got in, man.
Speaker: I was like, Oh, this is kind of fun.
Speaker: And then I remember going through a couple iterations.
Speaker: Like originally, originally I was posting mostly just art.
Speaker: I'm actually blocked by Google street art, the account, because I would,
Speaker: I created a bot to auto post the artwork that they would post as my bot was curating it.
Speaker: And so Google Street Art blocked me.
Speaker: And then it started going into like video games and stuff like that.
Speaker: And it wasn't until 2018 that I kind of cut off the bots.
Speaker: And that's when I came out as a gun owner.
Speaker: And I lost like five or 8,000 followers like overnight.
Speaker: And then like, I remember the great, the great purge of January 6th, 2021.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I was like, oh,
Speaker: I was at a I was like 114,000 and then I was down to like 92,000 or something.
Speaker: Lost a lot of good people that day.
Speaker: We absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah, we did.
Speaker: We did.
Speaker: Gone but not forgotten.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: So so Citizen Hush was not originally like a you weren't you weren't targeting like the gun community.
Speaker: You came into that later.
Speaker: I did initially when I lost those initial thousands of followers when I came out of the closet as a gun owner.
Speaker: It was the same thing, targeting based on keywords, hashtags, and geolocation.
Speaker: So I would filter out anyone...
Speaker: any account outside of the US.
Speaker: And then I would target anyone with like the 2A hashtag.
Speaker: And then I would go to other large gun accounts.
Speaker: So like some of the more popular YouTube accounts, and I would have my bot explicitly target
Speaker: the followers of those accounts and just go engage with them.
Speaker: And Twitter's gotten a little more strict with their rules too.
Speaker: I've gotten my wrist slapped a few times in the last couple of years.
Speaker: That's why I really turned it off.
Speaker: And like, I've been open about, like, if you go to my Twitter account, I'm following 64,000 people.
Speaker: I didn't sit there following 64,000 people.
Speaker: Yeah, and it was just an interesting social experiment.
Speaker: And I actually saved a lot of the data to look at the conversion rate of different hashtags and keywords.
Speaker: And it was really interesting to see what converted because I wanted to create a formula of like,
Speaker: what does it take to build an automated social media following?
Speaker: And this is kind of like still the nascent days of social media.
Speaker: And so you could get away with a lot more back then.
Speaker: Nowadays, it's a little dicier to try and do some of the things I did.
Speaker: Yeah, so you're kind of...
Speaker: Like for an account like mine where like I have painstakingly gotten up to 10,000, it would be kind of betting the farm to automate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Risk.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I've personally turned it off.
Speaker: I turned it off a few years ago in my personal account just because it just...
Speaker: it stopped being worth it.
Speaker: I kept getting like flagged by Twitter, detecting like automated behavior.
Speaker: And I was just like, all right, whatever.
Speaker: And also like people, people started like pointing it out and I was like, yeah, dog, I'm open about this.
Speaker: Like I, this was a social experiment.
Speaker: Like I'm not trying to hide nothing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, so as far as, as far as the way that you personally approach the account,
Speaker: Um, do you, so your, your social media, is that something that you are really just doing for fun or are you, are you attacking it from with like a, a, a growth kind of like, I want to build a following.
Speaker: I want to take this somewhere.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'll be honest.
Speaker: Like I don't really have a plan.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a whole lot of just throwing stuff out.
Speaker: Like you can see it like on my timeline.
Speaker: Like I think last night I tweeted communism, like one word, like what?
Speaker: And that's kind of like my, that's kind of my entire shtick.
Speaker: I think like I'm just this stream of conscious guy that just occasionally says something funny.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah, for me, it's more of just a means to an end.
Speaker: Like, I make money from those 2A deal alerts that I tweet out, like through affiliate links and stuff.
Speaker: It's not a meaningful amount of money, but I like to think that I'm not entirely wasting my time on Twitter.
Speaker: But I definitely am.
Speaker: I definitely am.
Speaker: But like, the flip side to that is I've met tons of cool people from it and built lots of really good relations.
Speaker: Like, I write for Guns America now because of a relationship I forged from Twitter.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, I've never I've never like directly made money from Twitter, but I got the job that I got fired from from Twitter.
Speaker: Oh, OK.
Speaker: So that was some money.
Speaker: So in a couple of podcasts you've done, you refer to parallel systems that make gun control impossible.
Speaker: From what I understand, the idea is to get enough 3D printed guns into enough hands that confiscation becomes impractical.
Speaker: So is the thinking that if enough Americans own guns, that like it'll be politically impractical, like electorally impractical to ban them?
Speaker: what's the thinking there?
Speaker: So I think my old stance was create as many gun owners as we can to make gun control impossible.
Speaker: And now with the advent of 3D printed guns, P80 guns, stuff like that, now it's gotten to the point where like, okay, even if you did go door to door, the information's out there.
Speaker: And I'm
Speaker: I'm adjacent to the 3D printed gun community because like I, I, I've printed my own guns and I've shot my own guns.
Speaker: I'm friends with Control Pew, Vin, and those guys.
Speaker: Vin stays at my house a couple of times now.
Speaker: And like for me, like I'm, I wouldn't consider, like I wouldn't try and steal their thunder.
Speaker: Like that's their baby.
Speaker: Like they're the design, them and their legion of developers who are creating these designs.
Speaker: Those are the folks that like,
Speaker: That's the 3D printed gun community.
Speaker: All I'm trying to do is help give some legitimacy to what they're doing in the mainstream firearms world.
Speaker: Because one of the things you're noticing is a lot of traditional gun manufacturers are like closeted supporters of what's going on with the 3D printed gun world, but none of them will come out and vocalize support for them because it's a political hot topic right now.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So I'm just trying to normalize what they're doing.
Speaker: Like creating your own guns, creating your own ammunition, like that's about as American as it gets.
Speaker: Like there's nothing, there's nothing
Speaker: that should be kind of seen shady about that.
Speaker: Like I went to the 3D Guns and Bitcoin conference and spoke there in April.
Speaker: And like if the media were to try and profile the types of people who would go there, you'd think it would just be like gangbangers, criminals, stuff like that.
Speaker: No, it's just a bunch of really interesting people who like playing with this technology and like creating this technology to make it accessible to other folks.
Speaker: That's all it is.
Speaker: Control Pugh and Vin and Ivan, I've met these guys, hung out with them in person, and they're some of the most genuine, kind-hearted people you could ever...
Speaker: I told Vin when he came on my YouTube channel, the stuff you guys are doing and working on with your anonymous developers, y'all are doing founding father stuff right now.
Speaker: They're putting themselves at risk, not just physically, but also legally, given the climate we're in.
Speaker: And they're doing it in the name of, hey, the state shouldn't have jurisdiction over what we do.
Speaker: And it's really humbling to be around these guys.
Speaker: And like, it's...
Speaker: They're moving the needle.
Speaker: They are moving the needle for freedom and liberty in the world far more than any blue checkmark account does yelling at Twitter because they're actually doing something about it.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: And you're watching as the legitimacy of the institutions that oppose this are collapsing and just trust in the media is collapsing.
Speaker: And that is...
Speaker: a good news story for these guys because it's, it's, it's making it less weird, less fringe.
Speaker: Even, even in our, our little group, you know, I didn't want it to be like, like a right-wing ghetto where it was like, you know, weirdos who wanted to just say slurs.
Speaker: But I'm finding that with the Vax mandates and, and just, just the everyday sort of infringement on your Liberty all the time.
Speaker: that more and more like regular successful put together people have had enough.
Speaker: And, and, and so it's, it's really interesting to watch.
Speaker: I wanted to go back to one point you made about the gun manufacturers.
Speaker: I'm kind of surprised to hear that they support this given that it it's it's competition.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I, I, I think it's more, I, I, and I'm getting out of my lane a little bit here because I've,
Speaker: I my my observation because like we can see who likes posts and stuff.
Speaker: My observation in the public sphere has been like, oh, yeah, these companies find the footage that the catalog folks that turns dispense folks are putting out like they like it.
Speaker: They like it.
Speaker: They think it's cool.
Speaker: But they're not coming out and defending these guys.
Speaker: They're not coming out supporting them financially in any way.
Speaker: Not to say that they should and they have a moral obligation to, but we tend to put ourselves into tribes when really we'd be much more effective.
Speaker: We have a common enemy here and it's politicians.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what the folks at Gatalog are doing, like that's, in my mind, that's complimentary.
Speaker: Like the folks at Gatalog are guaranteeing the existence of a gun industry.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that's true.
Speaker: And in a big picture perspective, I mean, these guys could sell as many guns as they could possibly produce.
Speaker: It's not like there's a really constrained demand for this stuff, artificially constrained by regulation.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: Yes, that makes sense.
Speaker: I wanted to ask you about, so I talked to a small ammo business.
Speaker: One of our guys was like, hey, what about getting into this business?
Speaker: And I saw, I was like, well, I'll go find the guy and we'll talk about it.
Speaker: And he said, you know, the primer industry, the people who make the primers, because it's explosive and it's toxic, you've got EPA, ATF, OSHA,
Speaker: all kinds of regulation on the primary issues, only four players.
Speaker: And it's the big, you know, it's Winchester.
Speaker: It's the big ammo manufacturers that are allowed to play in that space.
Speaker: Do you think that there is a potential solution to the ammo issue in the same sense that we found a solution to, you know, the 3D printing guns?
Speaker: Yeah, and I believe there's a lot of really promising prototypes that are being developed here.
Speaker: Like DIY ammo, not necessarily strictly in the sense of like reloading, like Atlas Arms is developing something like kind of homebrewed ammo.
Speaker: That would actually be a really interesting conversation.
Speaker: He came on, the owner of Atlas Arms came onto my YouTube channel to talk through about that.
Speaker: That's also getting out of my lane.
Speaker: I'm not a reloader and I'm like a elementary level competency 3D printer.
Speaker: I know enough to print enough failed guns to post videos of people making fun of me.
Speaker: To be clear, like I say, and I'm explicit in my whether it's a P80 video or a 3D printed gun video, like the weakest link in the process is the human assembling it.
Speaker: Like it's not the printer's fault that you didn't get your settings right the first time.
Speaker: That's my fault.
Speaker: And with the Polymer80, it's not Polymer80's fault that like you didn't remove enough material to get your weapon to reliably cycle.
Speaker: And it's like my failures with 3D printed guns is not a condemnation of 3D printed guns.
Speaker: It's more of a reflection of my ability to build one myself because I've shot ones that function flawlessly like,
Speaker: And I would say it's, it's still a very young, young process and industry.
Speaker: But like, when you look at where we are today, relative to where we were just three, five years ago, like we have made exponential improvements and in how easy this is to be able to do.
Speaker: And all credit goes to the,
Speaker: the folks on the front line who are actually creating these designs, putting this out there for free.
Speaker: And like that's, that's a, that speaks testament to like these people's like character.
Speaker: Like they're doing this like out of passion, not because someone's paying them to.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So you've mentioned that you've had several that have failed.
Speaker: And I, you know, I'm not trying to scare anybody.
Speaker: In fact, I'm kind of trying to do the opposite.
Speaker: So if you've gone through some failures, and you're still doing it, then that says to me that like the scale of what's likely to happen in terms of 3D printed gun failing is
Speaker: is tolerable in terms of like, it's not just going to explode and kill you.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When I said, yeah, thank you for clarifying that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like I printed a DD, DD 19.2.
Speaker: It's a 3D printing block design, one of the newer ones.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: my layer height on my printer was, I screwed up the settings.
Speaker: And what ended up happening is like when I went to do test fire my first round, the frame just cracked in my hand.
Speaker: That's all that happened.
Speaker: Like the only thing that happened, like, so like when the slide cycled after the first round went off, I'm assuming the force against my grip, like the frame just cracked in half.
Speaker: Like
Speaker: there was no pain.
Speaker: Like all I noticed was, oh, my frame.
Speaker: I knew this didn't look right, but I went for it anyway.
Speaker: And like I successfully printed a DD 17.2 and also a Hellfire, Anderson Hellfire AI.
Speaker: as well.
Speaker: The AR actually, I was able to get the first, that was actually my first print that I did.
Speaker: I was able to get that working pretty, pretty flawlessly early.
Speaker: But yeah, it's, it's, it's really like when, if you're a lot of my gunsmith friends, like they, they get first time builders who come in and they tried to build their first Glock or build their first AR-15.
Speaker: They come in like, yeah, they just did something stupid.
Speaker: That's why it didn't work.
Speaker: And it's usually the human is the common denominator is when it comes to this assembly process and I mean the barrel and the chamber and the slide those are all still metal parts right so there's not like that you're not like firing up the explosion is not happening there right yeah yeah it's you you're just printing a frame.
Speaker: Now, there are, with like the FGC9 that was just released, I think a couple months ago, like that has like a DIY barrel that you're able to create yourself using just metal rods.
Speaker: And I forget what the process is called, but you're using electricity and water to rifle it.
Speaker: rifle it yourself.
Speaker: We're getting closer.
Speaker: I don't know how that would be a better question for Control Pew and Vin and Ivan and those guys.
Speaker: But the idea would be like it shouldn't be purpose built firearm parts.
Speaker: You want to get to a point where it's kind of more or less like household materials, Home Depot type materials.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And that effectively democratizes self-defense.
Speaker: Like the this information is out there.
Speaker: It's not going anywhere.
Speaker: And that's that's what I like about it.
Speaker: They're doing some they're doing something about gun legislation like you've got great groups like Gun Owners in America, Firearms Policy Coalition, who are fighting like the traditional route, like within the confines of the system.
Speaker: And then you have an asymmetrical approach, which is just ignoring the system and saying, screw you guys, we're gonna we're gonna figure out a way to do it on our own.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, you know, so door to door confiscation, probably not feasible, even without 3D printing.
Speaker: There's just a bazillion guns in this country.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't, I don't, I think the fact that we can't even get an approximate tally is pretty indicative of how many guns there are in this country.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But, you know, they, they still can do the whack-a-mole approach where they, they come get you if you discharge it, you know, right.
Speaker: And do you see a future for a way around that?
Speaker: Or is it going to have to be just sort of, we have to get this thing popular enough that the political system won't create laws like that?
Speaker: I don't know the answer to that, man.
Speaker: I don't really follow the news too much.
Speaker: The news that gets to me is just what shows up in my feed.
Speaker: I don't read the news.
Speaker: I don't watch the news.
Speaker: I cut that out in 2013.
Speaker: My life has been very peaceful since then.
Speaker: and uh you're just looking at the technical solution you're looking at you're looking at this is an engineering product and yeah yeah and i'm i'm yeah and i'm just interested in people who are doing something about the problem whether it's uh what the work that firearms policy coalition is doing or goa they're more on the policy side and like uh filing legal cases and stuff and that's not that's not my cup of tea quite frankly but yeah the the
Speaker: Specialization.
Speaker: The fact that they are good at it is incredibly valuable to me.
Speaker: Me, I'm just good at running my mouth and shooting guns and just creating more gun owners.
Speaker: That's really what I want to do.
Speaker: Just get more people involved in this by just being a friendly, approachable dude that won't gatekeep if you have a loose interest in firearms.
Speaker: Roger that.
Speaker: I want to talk about Bitcoin.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: What's up?
Speaker: So you've said if people think US government can shut down Bitcoin, they're just showing they don't know what they're talking about because they'd have to shut down essentially the internet.
Speaker: And I am not a Bitcoin pessimist.
Speaker: I have a decent chunk of my savings in Bitcoin, Ethereum.
Speaker: I'd really like to have to share your confidence.
Speaker: And so can you explain what you mean by that?
Speaker: Can they not just monitor the network?
Speaker: and go after anyone performing non-KYC transactions.
Speaker: Like... Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: The most effective way... And we have precedents for the government doing things like this.
Speaker: So, like, I forget what the executive order was when...
Speaker: effectively became illegal for citizens to own gold basically.
Speaker: And I think that's actually a good precedent to compare that to.
Speaker: Like what was the compliance rate with that?
Speaker: Well, it was, I think, I believe it was less than 20% compliance rate.
Speaker: Now KYC versus non KYC.
Speaker: Like there are people out there like a Conor Alchemist who, you know,
Speaker: way more about this and ways to circumnavigate that system.
Speaker: But I think the component of shutting down the internet to be able to shut off the network, that's one problem.
Speaker: What they're trying to do now is going after custodial fiat on-ramp.
Speaker: So things like Gemini, Kraken, Coinbase, things like that.
Speaker: where they can do ostensibly do chain on chain analytics and effectively triage who, who owns what, because you have that identity tied to your wallet on a custodial exchange.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The other, the other notion too, is like, if they were going to come down with some draconian law to shut down these exchanges, right.
Speaker: The time to have done that was five to eight years ago.
Speaker: Right now, we are in a multi-billion dollar industry.
Speaker: We have multiple publicly traded companies that are playing in the space.
Speaker: We have multiple institutional funds that are invested in these companies and actually have their own holdings of cryptocurrency.
Speaker: We have Fortune 100 companies that are putting cryptocurrency on their balance sheets.
Speaker: Like the economic ramifications of, okay, hey, guess what?
Speaker: Coinbase, you're going to have to take one for the team.
Speaker: What you do is now illegal and facilitating what you do is now illegal.
Speaker: And Coinbase, I believe, is the number one facilitator of institutional transactions in the United States.
Speaker: So like Tesla used Coinbase to facilitate their acquisition of Bitcoin.
Speaker: And now you have the network effect has reached the institutional level.
Speaker: You now have you now will crash the economy and whether or not the federal government would be OK with that.
Speaker: You can make an argument, a compelling argument that, yes, the federal government would take that bullet to protect the dollar hegemony.
Speaker: But the odds are increased like every every day that goes by that this doesn't happen, the network effects.
Speaker: get stronger because this is an organic system that developed from the ground up.
Speaker: This wasn't a command control system.
Speaker: And so like, I would say...
Speaker: It's something I consider, but I consider far less likely.
Speaker: It keeps me up at night way less than it used to a handful of years ago.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's I think that's a great that's a great argument for the survival of the network because, yeah, they're not going to they're not going to nuke Visa.
Speaker: They're not going to nuke, you know, Harvard, which I understand has a significant impact.
Speaker: investment in Bitcoin.
Speaker: Yeah, the endowment.
Speaker: But can't they turn that into a walled garden where everybody's on KYC and everything's tracked and monitored?
Speaker: They could.
Speaker: They could.
Speaker: But then you're just creating another secondary market because that's what we already have secondary markets like local Bitcoins.
Speaker: You've got Bitcoin ATMs, I'm assuming would go away if that became a thing, but you have different approaches to acquire non-KYC.
Speaker: Like I've sold firearms for cryptocurrency.
Speaker: It's perfectly legal.
Speaker: In-person sales in Texas are legal, and I just opted to accept cryptocurrency for it.
Speaker: Same way that I also sold firearms for silver.
Speaker: It's no different.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's, yeah, I think the more real risk is making accessibility a challenge and accessibility within the confines of a walled garden.
Speaker: I think that's probably the more realistic threat, but that doesn't stop it.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: making that claim that the government can flip a switch and shut it off, that's where I'm just kind of like, okay, so you've read a couple headlines about that.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: I'm with you, Derek.
Speaker: There's like some magical server rack where like Jerome Powell can just walk in and hit the off switch and it's dead.
Speaker: Yeah, that's not a real threat.
Speaker: Roger that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You mentioned in another podcast about working in the tech industry and sort of what
Speaker: components of the tech industry are more meritocratic, sort of easier to have wrong think opinions in.
Speaker: If you were advising someone who wants to get into the tech industry now and they're starting out and they have, you know, some no-no opinions,
Speaker: would you tell them to go like deep into the backend?
Speaker: What kinds of languages and components of development would you tell them to try?
Speaker: Yeah, I think more importantly, like...
Speaker: Being safe with your political views, I don't think that should guide your career decision.
Speaker: I think it should be a consideration because quite frankly, it does get really annoying to just be constantly bombarded by this leftist echo chamber.
Speaker: But first, I get this question all the time from folks in college, but what do you want to do?
Speaker: What's interesting to you?
Speaker: And
Speaker: The answer to that question then informs, okay, well, you want to be a JavaScript developer because you like building pretty web applications, or you want to be a front-end developer because you like design.
Speaker: Well, unfortunately, that's where the bulk of the echo chamber lives.
Speaker: And then, but like if, and one thing,
Speaker: Thankfully, the folks who have more liberty minded opinions tend to be more interested in the more abstract side of the tech world, which is on the back end engineering side of things as well as InfoSec.
Speaker: And
Speaker: the shining light there is that is very much still a meritocracy.
Speaker: It's not so much about how many conferences did you speak at and how loud are you on Twitter about your outrage of the day.
Speaker: It's solely pretty much about like, can you do the job or can you not?
Speaker: Because the skills gap between how many people who can do, and I'm using the backend engineering is a very broad term, but like,
Speaker: And so like the amount of people we need with that skill set and the amount of people with that skill set is so far wide.
Speaker: Like there's a lot more willingness to overlook wrong think in the echo chamber.
Speaker: And like particularly within InfoSec, like InfoSec is probably the least...
Speaker: the least of an echo chamber as far as the tech industry is like even in the back end world you still get some remnants of it but it's definitely far more muted like a lot of the folks in the back end world aren't extroverted by nature to begin with so they're going to be less vocal about their opinions whatever those opinions are and they're much more concerned with like can you build this yes or no yeah
Speaker: So one of the things that's challenging about the sort of emergency preparedness and self-reliance space is people have wildly different opinions about timing the decline, right?
Speaker: We see things changing pretty dramatically.
Speaker: And if it goes Mad Max in the next five years, then you should loot your 401k, go buy bullets.
Speaker: But if things stay on this sort of glide path and maybe you and I
Speaker: get old under the present conditions, the investment strategy changes quite a bit.
Speaker: And I know that like nobody knows for sure.
Speaker: I'm kind of asking you just for your guess.
Speaker: What are you hedging?
Speaker: Where do you think it's going?
Speaker: And what do you think is the best way to prepare?
Speaker: Do you have like a hedging strategy?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, like hedging, hedging in the sense of like the traditional financial term.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Like I come from a finance background, but I would, to me, like what's, what keeps, what's always been like a thing that kept me up at night was like, what will make financially, what will blow me up?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I want to remove the ability to be blown up.
Speaker: And that's, that's, and I don't know anything about timing.
Speaker: So like, I, I've never, I've never been a directional trader in that regard.
Speaker: So like timing doesn't really concern me.
Speaker: What matters to me is like how diversified are your,
Speaker: Skills and your income streams Everyone like Everybody I've talked to about like Any type of doomsday scenario Immediately goes to like this red dawn Kind of Scenario and Like there's People and like you see this like prepper Communities and stuff like dudes who are like Stockpiling food for to last The family for three years Water for three years ammo all this Other stuff solar panels and I'm like
Speaker: dog, you a hundred pounds overweight.
Speaker: Maybe you should prep for that one.
Speaker: Or like, yo dog, you, you, you, you got 20 grand in credit card debt.
Speaker: Maybe you should work on that one.
Speaker: Like the amount of intermediate threats and there's, it's not, it's not particularly well thought out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I get, and I'm kind of poking fun at the prepper community and like,
Speaker: And like, I've learned a lot of really great things from the prepper community.
Speaker: And, but that is, that is a stereotype for a reason.
Speaker: And for me, I think it's just like, don't fixate so much on like, what will, what this, what the end, what the end doomsday scenario will look like, because then you're going to anchor to that.
Speaker: I think the better question is like, how do I diversify myself, my skills and my assets and,
Speaker: to not be a liability to other people.
Speaker: And when you reframe that question from what does the end of the world look like and how can I become a warlord at the end of the world to like, how can I just be a more useful person?
Speaker: It becomes a much more healthy conversation and it becomes more productive, quite frankly.
Speaker: Because the,
Speaker: that type of allocation translates to the world we live in today.
Speaker: And if the world goes down the toilet tomorrow, it also translates into the Mad Max realm also.
Speaker: So like, I'm not talking about like skills, like sure, like bushcraft and stuff like that.
Speaker: Like that's a cool skill to have.
Speaker: It's useful.
Speaker: I get it.
Speaker: And it's useful today and it's useful in an apocalypse scenario.
Speaker: But I feel like most guys will
Speaker: without much prompting learn the cool stuff.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You don't need to, you don't need to like try real hard to teach yourself the cool stuff.
Speaker: Like you'll just pick that up.
Speaker: Maybe focus on the practical, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's why I use bushcraft as an example.
Speaker: Like I think bushcraft is really cool.
Speaker: And I think that's like an awesome skill to have, but it's also one that I'm not interested in.
Speaker: So like, um, like that, that's not a skillset that I actively cultivating or anything.
Speaker: If that's a hobby that someone's interested in and it also compliments like one of their concerns or whatever, then sure.
Speaker: Go for it.
Speaker: If it's perfectly natural to have a hobby like that, and I'm not going to knock it, but like.
Speaker: And a huge, it's so much harder to diversify internally when
Speaker: it's a lot easier to just make some friends.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: That's the other thing too, like social skills, like you have dog, you need to work on that a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How many gun guys I meet who will not stop talking or listen into a conversation, not because they're interested in what a person is saying, but looking for a way to inject their own opinion or something about themselves into the conversation.
Speaker: I'm just like, dog, just shut up and learn how to talk to people, man.
Speaker: Yeah, no kidding.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: So that's good.
Speaker: That covers it.
Speaker: Are you at all familiar?
Speaker: This is my last one on sort of parallel systems.
Speaker: Are you familiar at all with URBIT?
Speaker: URBIT.
Speaker: URBIT.
Speaker: URBIT.
Speaker: Is that how it's spelled?
Speaker: URBIT.
Speaker: So I don't know if you know Moldbug.
Speaker: So he's t he, he was just on Tucker Carlson.
Speaker: Very interesting, very smart guy.
Speaker: But he's obsessed with politics.
Speaker: I'm not surprised you haven't heard of him.
Speaker: Well, but he created this essentially.
Speaker: He says it's supposed to replace the Internet.
Speaker: What it is de facto right now is a an encrypt an encrypted peer to peer social media network.
Speaker: And it's it's intended to be a decentralized solution for social media when everybody gets kicked off.
Speaker: And it's like you own your ID and you like have to buy it with money and then it's yours.
Speaker: So it's kind of in that same lane of personal accountability, personal ownership, you know, staking out space of your own.
Speaker: But it's definitely doesn't have the penetration, obviously.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: since you haven't heard of it.
Speaker: It's definitely not something grandma's going to use anytime soon.
Speaker: But yeah, I wanted to see if you'd heard of that, but since you haven't.
Speaker: Yeah, I've heard of other projects, particularly like in the crypto world.
Speaker: Like I believe, the name's escaping me.
Speaker: I think it's Algoroland.
Speaker: I might be mistaken there, but did you ever, have you ever heard of that game Second Life or basically?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like that for Web 3.0.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Where like you can buy digital real estate and like that is your plot of land and you, your identity on Web 3.0 is like your entry point to many different social networks.
Speaker: I may be speaking out of my lane here also, but I think that's the gist of it.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I remember I've been in crypto for so damn long.
Speaker: Like I learned my lesson many years ago on like trying to follow all the interesting projects.
Speaker: Like you'll go insane doing that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I may be misspeaking here, but I'll double check myself on that.
Speaker: I think it's called Algoroland.
Speaker: It's similar to that.
Speaker: I mean, like, no, I'm all supportive of people.
Speaker: Like everybody will kind of like the side hustle and entrepreneur thing we started talking about with like, it's easy to tell people why something will fail.
Speaker: I want to encourage people to keep trying.
Speaker: Like 95, we're so early in this game, 95, 99% of you will probably fail, but I want you to keep trying, keep trying.
Speaker: Cause that's like, everyone thinks of like innovation as this big bang innovation.
Speaker: We're like,
Speaker: But a bunch of smart people get together in a room like we're going to build a thing called Google.
Speaker: No, that's not how innovation works, dog.
Speaker: Like it's stochastic.
Speaker: Like there's lots of failure along the way.
Speaker: There's lots of going back to the drawing board.
Speaker: Things never work the first time.
Speaker: Sometimes things don't even work out the way you think they work out.
Speaker: And that's why I try to be a cheerleader for all these different things, whether it's in the crypto world or whether it's 3D printed guns with the catalog folks and stuff.
Speaker: Just encouraging them because like they've got enough people shitting on them already.
Speaker: Like they don't need my voice criticized.
Speaker: And probably themselves internally, you know, they're thinking of it.
Speaker: They're obsessing.
Speaker: all the doubts and all the fears and yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And like, that's, that's kind of like my whole identity on the internet.
Speaker: Like the, the nice guy who is positive or tries to be positive all the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In terms of what, one of the things that I'm most excited about with crypto is,
Speaker: like industrial applications, ways that it's going to be actually sort of used, not just as a token of value, but, you know, industrial applications, finance applications.
Speaker: Is that a world that you're interested in?
Speaker: And do you see anything cool coming down the pike there?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that was probably my earliest.
Speaker: So DeFi on the Ethereum network, my injection point, but in crypto years, I'm a great grandma at this point.
Speaker: But in 2017, 2018, I think, I had been involved with Ethereum and Bitcoin for years before that.
Speaker: But I remember when MakerDAO first came out and then compound.finance, very simple things like collateralized debt.
Speaker: You put up...
Speaker: You put up a certain amount of money as collateral, you're able to pull out equity from that.
Speaker: Debt markets are indicative of a highly functioning economy.
Speaker: Well, fast forward three years or three or four years from then, and now the credit market and crypto is hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker: And it's...
Speaker: DeFi has reached this Cambrian explosion.
Speaker: I think it was last year because I remember opening up my first compound up finance account for a high yield savings account on stable coins back in, I think it was 2018.
Speaker: And now we're getting into all sorts of different yield farming liquidity.
Speaker: The things that we've done in DeFi and that we're seeing roll out in DeFi are things that took decades to develop in the traditional financial world.
Speaker: And it's like we are getting into exotic derivatives territory in DeFi.
Speaker: And these are just regular everyday people who just find these projects interesting.
Speaker: That's, I think DeFi is what drove the last run up that we saw in the fall of 2020.
Speaker: And to be quite frank, I do, DeFi is the first like multi-billion dollar, potentially trillion dollar application that's within blockchain.
Speaker: because traditional financial markets, particularly illiquid derivatives markets, like that's where Goldman makes their money.
Speaker: The spreads in some of these exotics are enormous and that's Goldman making those markets, capturing those spreads.
Speaker: And what we're doing is we're automating that and we're creating a trustless layer.
Speaker: And that's fascinating that
Speaker: things have progressed so quickly in such a short span of time.
Speaker: And like at this point, quite frankly, I can't even keep up with it.
Speaker: Like, I'm just, I'm just this boring dinosaur at this point.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: I wanted to talk to you real quick about, you know, you're a celebrity, like it or not.
Speaker: You're famous, people know you.
Speaker: And we can see your face.
Speaker: And you,
Speaker: I know you say you're apolitical, but you do talk about some bad guys that are out there.
Speaker: Do you think that that creates vulnerability?
Speaker: So I'm in this position myself where my name and face are connected to sort of my online identity.
Speaker: And I'm just now starting to navigate what that means.
Speaker: How have you handled that?
Speaker: And has it been something that's concerned you at all?
Speaker: Yeah, 2018.
Speaker: I used to go by my real name on Twitter and I had a few people attempt to dock.
Speaker: They had a few people tag my employer in some of my posts.
Speaker: That's when I went with the Citizen Hush name.
Speaker: And that's what Citizen Hush is nodding to.
Speaker: It's just a joke to stop snitching.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, it probably occupies maybe 1% of my mental capacity at this point.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: at this point, like I'm not doing anything illegal.
Speaker: I'm not saying anything overtly inflammatory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And like, I'm all, I'm all for free association, but like, um, D platforming people and things like that.
Speaker: Like my, my stance on that, like I used to have a very like free market approach to that, but like, I think seeing the extent of D platforming and what that does and the ramifications of it, like I've reached a point where I'm like, actually now,
Speaker: You are a private company in name, but the moment you start accepting public money in the form of funding from direct subsidies or funding from institutional sovereign wealth funds from any state, not even the United States, any state.
Speaker: Or even just the regulations that make them de facto monopolies that put out their competition.
Speaker: I mean, they're so...
Speaker: The levers of state power have infected the corporate world so deeply that it's hard to say that they're separate things.
Speaker: And that's what's scary.
Speaker: That's what scares me the most, actually, because that's the literal definition of fascism.
Speaker: And yeah, the moment you lobby for you spend private resources to lobby for special favors, accept subsidies in the form of either direct subsidies or investment from sovereign wealth funds.
Speaker: Like you're no longer a private company.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: You, you are benefiting from the economies of scale that come with government and government force.
Speaker: And the moment you start doing that, you don't get the same benefits a mom and pop shop gets.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: That's kind of how I feel about like these social media companies and things like that.
Speaker: Like it's a,
Speaker: Yeah, not anymore.
Speaker: Not anymore.
Speaker: And like for me, like my identity, like I've reached a point now where I'm close enough to financial independence to where it doesn't really, it doesn't phase me too much.
Speaker: Like it's a, it'll push back, it'll push back the champagne bottles popping a couple years.
Speaker: But I mean,
Speaker: Nah, that's kind of the thing.
Speaker: Like when you, like what we were talking about, like this doomsday thing, like when you have done enough to build enough fail-saves from an income perspective and from a skills perspective, like,
Speaker: You're not beholden.
Speaker: You're not beholden to a single employer.
Speaker: And like having W-2 income was always terrifying to me because it's very similar to like what you're seeing with the government today with the vaccine mandate.
Speaker: If you if you don't want the vaccine, but you take any form of government service that you need.
Speaker: provides a basic necessity, whether it's healthcare, education, whatever.
Speaker: Well, you got to do what the government tells you to do.
Speaker: And it's the same thing with W2 income.
Speaker: If you are beholden to your W2 income from an employer,
Speaker: they have leverage over you, quite frankly.
Speaker: And you are going from being an independent person to an indentured servant.
Speaker: And that has always been something I've tried to diversify myself away throughout my career.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, the biggest sort of awakening from my experience of being doxed and fired was the realization that
Speaker: you know, even if they couldn't send the police to kick in my door for the things that I've said, they could take away my kid's health insurance.
Speaker: You know, my kid was having a weird medical issue that we were concerned about.
Speaker: And all of a sudden I don't have insurance.
Speaker: And, and, you know, we were blessed that we had enough runway to, to, to make this new project happen.
Speaker: But like, I think about all the guys who don't have that kind of runway.
Speaker: And so for them to like,
Speaker: keep their head down and their mouth shut, I'm like, I totally get it.
Speaker: And what I want from what I'm doing is to get them in the position that you're talking about where they just, you know, maybe it stings a little bit, maybe it slows some things down, but they don't have this existential terror of being, you know, caught in those gears.
Speaker: So yeah, totally understand.
Speaker: I'm with you a hundred percent.
Speaker: Yeah, it seems like that's an unintended consequence of this push of we've created this unintentional
Speaker: manufacturing plant where we've created an economy that's so tied to having a college degree and we've pumped in cheap debt to help finance college degrees artificially making college degrees more expensive.
Speaker: So you need to take out each generation has to take out more debt to get a college degree in order to get that job.
Speaker: And now we're at the point where the college debt is so high per capita that like it is creating existential crisis with people.
Speaker: When you, when you have a hundred K in debt as a 22 year old hovering over your head, I, that was me.
Speaker: When I left grad school, when I left grad school, I had like 90 K in student loans.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: And when you have that hovering over your head, that's a scary feeling.
Speaker: And your principles are a little more flexible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: Power will find whatever pathway.
Speaker: It's an evolutionary process.
Speaker: If people can't coerce you one way, they're going to find another.
Speaker: And right now, the way they're doing it, because we technically still have the Constitution,
Speaker: is, is there, they're using employers.
Speaker: And it's so interesting to me, the way that, uh, you know, you, you talked about mom and pop shops, like the, the corporation is so big that when you're defending that corporation's rights, you're not really defending any human autonomy, any human agency.
Speaker: There's nothing behind it.
Speaker: It's, it's just a system that's totally separate from any one person.
Speaker: And whereas if you're defending the mom and pop shops right to exist, then you're really defending mom and pop.
Speaker: There's human beings.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I mean, I definitely had a so I'm an econ guy myself and I definitely had a libertarian spell.
Speaker: And and it sounds like, you know, like you said, you're using that word as a shorthand because you don't want to get into it.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But like, yeah, you know, if you're smart and you're paying attention, you see that there's nuance there and that the state doesn't just mean the state.
Speaker: Yeah, it means all of its tentacles and all the things the tentacles touch.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting too, because like we've meant, if you look at the distribute, like we've effectively erased the middle class because we've allowed, we've created all these government special favors to corporate interests, where now you can't really, yeah, like what you were saying, you can't defend a corporation as a small business because it's not really like,
Speaker: It's not the same thing.
Speaker: It's a legal entity at that point.
Speaker: We've effectively erased this middle class that was the bedrock of the American economy, which was entrepreneurial in nature.
Speaker: As you can see, entrepreneurial activity in this country has gone down.
Speaker: What we've done is we've created more and more debt slaves who are beholden to corporations, who are in bed with the government.
Speaker: They
Speaker: It's a nasty, nasty, vicious cycle.
Speaker: And like, I don't think that there was like, there's no nefarious design into this.
Speaker: I just think it's an unintended consequence of the incentive structures over the course of decades of cheap debt and government intervention.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When you talk about, I mentioned this on my sub stack a little earlier, when you talk about laissez-faire and a huge portion of the economy is run by these sort of
Speaker: rapacious artificial intelligences that are like, like a corporation is in a sense like a profit maximizing artificial intelligence.
Speaker: It's not, it's not really run by the CEO.
Speaker: It's, it's this really distributed network.
Speaker: And so when you're talking about laissez faire, let them do,
Speaker: Who are you talking about?
Speaker: You're not talking about human beings.
Speaker: And that's my attitude is I believe in freedom for humans.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And I'm with you.
Speaker: And so whatever it takes to maximize that, that's what I'm interested in.
Speaker: I heard it.
Speaker: I heard a trace of Frederick Hayek in that one.
Speaker: You know, I haven't done the reading like I should, but that sounds great.
Speaker: I did just read the Wikipedia actually reading us reading the Austrian economists is painful.
Speaker: They're terrible writers.
Speaker: Well, this has been a great conversation.
Speaker: It's so good to meet you.
Speaker: People can find you at Citizen Hush on Twitter or your YouTube channel where you're doing your gun videos and podcasts with some really interesting folks.
Speaker: YouTube is Citizen Hush.
Speaker: If folks are interested in what we do here at Exit, you can check us out at patreon.com slash exit underscore org or follow us on Twitter at exit underscore org.
Speaker: Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker: Yeah, man.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: It's a ton of fun.
