Welcome to Goa State of the Second podcast.
JohnI'm John, and today we're joined by Othais and May from CN Arsenal.
JohnHow are you, folks?
OthaisGood.
MayWe've been doing the traditional Southern thing of debating foods for the past five minutes.
JohnI mean, that's what it should be.
OthaisYou think it was five minutes?
MayYeah.
JohnSo let's go ahead and start off.
JohnHow did seeing Arsenal start?
JohnHow did you get into this?
JohnWhat's the whole backstory between you two?
OthaisThis one's favorite.
MayYeah, unfortunately, it really is.
MaySo actually, between the two of us, May was a shooter before I was, so she grew up with it.
MayI did not.
MayJust despite being raised in the south, it wasn't my family's bag at that time.
MayNot that my family didn't have guns, but just we didn't go shoot.
OthaisMeanwhile, for us, our family, essentially, it was a tool.
OthaisIt was just like a really good pair of scissors in the household, essentially.
MaySo I picked it up post college, sort of first job out of college, hanging out with one of the guys, went out to the farm to do some riding, some shooting, some things like that.
MayAnd that's the first time I really shot a rifle.
MayIt was a Mosin M38 carbine, and I was given Sony earbuds for hearing protection.
MaySo that woke me up a little bit.
MayI might have some permanent damage from that little adventure, but I was like, okay, this was fun.
MayAnd I think, like, a week later, his girlfriend at the time was not big on him having the rifles laying around the apartment, so he sold me, like, that, a 9130 for, like, 100 bucks.
MayAnd, you know, I gave the 9130 over to a roommate of mine and just kept the car being.
MayBecause I was like, oh, why would I need more than one?
OthaisDating you a little bit?
OthaisBecause the price on that.
MayYeah, yeah.
MaySo to be fair, at that time, that was probably not even the best price.
MayBut.
MayBut the mosins, to this day, people get fascinated by the number of markings because of all the refurbs and stuff they've been through.
MaySo I did the same thing where I was like, what does any of this stuff mean?
MayAnd I did not find the answers I wanted to.
MaySo I ended up buying books, and I didn't find the answers I wanted to.
MaySo I kind of set that aside and started working on other guns, and I became a gun collector.
MayAnd in the process of this kind of process of researching things and finding the next thing that I want to look into and buying all these books, I lost track of what I was doing.
MaySo I had to start writing notes to myself.
MayAnd since I was already doing that and I was already friends with like two photographers, I started taking photos of the firearms.
MayAnd then I would do little write ups and I would put it out on the Internet blog style.
MayAnd also Reddit was very big at the time and not as censored as it is now.
MaySo I became really popular on Reddit.
OthaisOf all things, your pictures, your photography, it like was something people had never seen before.
MayEverybody loved it.
MayAnd now it looks so terrible.
OthaisWe've gone so far beyond so bad compared to now.
MayBut I guess it was sort of a niche hobby and people weren't putting a lot of attention to actually photographing and documenting on the Internet.
MayThey were just doing it, you know, for their own magazines or trade journals or whatever you want to call them, like the hobby journals were doing it.
MayBut publicly, you know, I kind of became a gateway for a lot of guys.
MayAnd so eventually we realized, well, we kind of need to make the jump to video.
MayAnd then to be perfectly honest, my family kind of imploded.
MayMy parents were much older.
MayThey had both pre.
MayDeceased.
MayWell, they predeceased me, which they should, but much earlier than you'd think, you know, in my early 20s.
MayAnd so my siblings kind of scattered.
MayI didn't really have much going on and other members of extended family were kind of dying left and right.
MayAnd I reached that age that, you know, in my 20s I was kind of in that position where most people are in their 40s, where family starts dying and you have to start kind of reinvesting in your future.
MayAnd I went, I don't want to do what I'm doing.
MayAnd so I kind of launched the video series.
MayI gave it like a, like a one year Hail Mary out of my savings to see what we could do May invested in as well.
MayAnd you know, she came in because I can't, I can't film myself shooting.
MayYou know, I mean, you can.
MayA lot of people do selfie stuff now.
MayBut at that time it was weird.
MayI was trying to do something a little higher brow.
MaySo she became our designated markswoman so that I could film her.
MayOver time, she's learned to run the camera.
MaySo now we both take responsibility for that.
MayBut it gave me enough room to run what I was doing.
MayAnd then from there, as the show's grown and we've had more funding, she's taken over more and more roles and come in full time.
MayAnd so now we both do it.
MayFull time.
OthaisAnd then we eventually got Bruno, our animator, in like 30 something episodes in.
MayNo, it's like 60 something.
MayOkay.
OthaisI couldn't remember.
MayWe.
MayWe did.
MayWe ended up with a part time animator because we were doing 2D animations to sort of support how everything works.
MayBecause the whole emphasis of the show was to have a very visual format to be able to show people exactly how these things work and where they came from.
MayAnd I was doing these horrendous 2D animations by.
MayBy literally taking the guns apart and photographing everything and then animating it.
OthaisPretty good for 2D.
MayMonty Python esque.
OthaisYes.
MayBut they did get the point across.
MayExcept for you start getting stuff like the one that broke me was the Luger.
MayBecause the way the Luger's trigger mechanism wraps around, you kind of need to see it from more than one angle to understand it.
OthaisYou actually did have to show a second angle of it working.
MayAnd unlike a 3D animation where you define the object and then you could rotate the camera around with a 2D photo animation, I had to take photos from both directions, animate two separate animations, and then keyframe them together so that they work simultaneously.
MaySo it's like exponentially more work than just a 3D at that point.
MayAnd I went, okay, hold on, this is going insane.
MaySo I kind of voiced that actual concern on the show.
MayAnd someone who was watching the show, Bruno, actually reached out to me and said, well, you know, if you, if you want an animator, I just graduated from this arts program and everything.
MayAnd I went, okay, can you come on up?
MaySo he ended up moving over to Charleston with us.
OthaisI do love him showing up, by the way, because he didn't tell us he was coming.
MaySo now Sarah has me, who does most of the research and stuff like that, May, who does most of the editing and handles the sort of business management side of it and a lot of the camera and audio now.
MayAnd then we have Bruno the animator, and that's really it.
MayWe have other people that come in as needed ad hoc for certain sub settings of things.
OthaisBut yeah, we've got like patent researchers overseas for us.
OthaisCurrently we have some people doing little things for ammo acquiring and stuff like that.
OthaisYeah, Suze does a lot of ammunition now.
MayYes, Suz will help out with ammo loading.
MayEvery once in a while we get somebody that takes on a special project because they're invested in it and they're willing to help us out with that project.
MayBut generally, in terms of core team, there's just the three of us.
JohnSo you started what, about 10 years ago?
JohnRight.
OthaisOur first video was in 2015.
OthaisOh, okay.
MayJune 2015.
OthaisActually, we just passed our anniversary on the fifth.
MayThat would have been nine though, right?
OthaisWait, what year is it?
May20, 24.
OthaisNine years.
OthaisThere you go.
OthaisAll right.
MayNow, we've done article work and had the website up for several years before that.
OthaisYes.
JohnSo some of your first videos were all about World War I, the Great War Guns.
JohnWas it just a happy medium that it fell in right around that 100 year anniversary?
MayIt was like the worst thing I ever did.
OthaisYeah, literally the worst thing you've ever done.
MayI was a World War II collector and the.
MayWe had, we had the guys from a series on YouTube called the Great War that a lot of people enjoy.
JohnYes, I love them.
MayThey reached out to us for licensing images and I said, well, actually we're about to start doing video.
MayWould you like to do video with us?
MayAnd they said, sure.
MayAnd we came up sort of livestream idea, but the problem is they're doing World War I.
MaySo I went, well, I got all this World War II stuff here, but how hard can it be to really pull in some World War I stuff?
OthaisHow could it be?
OthaisAnd wonderful question.
MayThe problem is actually, at the time, World War I stuff was cheaper.
MaySo it was not insane to think that I could just acquire what we needed and then move it along, you know what I mean?
OthaisAnd then luckily we had a friend of ours who actually had a substantial collection in town down the road from us, essentially.
MayRight?
MaySo we're like, okay, we've got this, that and the other.
MayOh, boy.
MayBecause then, you know, Battlefield one drops.
MayThe Great War is doing well.
MayAll of a sudden the World War II stuff becomes very collectible in a way that it wasn't before.
MayAnd so it becomes almost punitive.
MayAnd then there's a lot more firearms than I realized in World War I because I was a World War II focused guy.
MaySo I just promised something that was very hard to deliver.
MayAnd I guess what made the show is that I was willing to just keep delivering because I went, no, no, no, I already said I'd do this.
MayAnd then eight years later, we were still doing World War I.
OthaisIt was literally until we could not do it.
OthaisYeah, yeah, yeah.
MayGreat War is done.
MayWe're still doing it, right?
MaySo.
MayBut we made it through as much as we could.
MayThere's still some odd machine guns and sort of rare pieces that we're struggling to get in.
MayBut we've done the vast majority of small Arms that were in World War I.
JohnWell, it's, it's crazy when you think World War I.
JohnYou just think of like it seems like the Civil War.
JohnLike it's, oh, these guns are the technology boom for firearms during that time.
JohnAnd the amount of different guns in that time, the different changes in innovation, I mean, it's insane.
MayOh yeah, we're, we're actually under a number of NDAs with current manufacturers.
OthaisYep.
MayBecause a lot of times it's easier to reach out to me to a very expensive like patent researcher and they'll just sort of say quietly like, hey, you're.
MayCould you sign this NDA real quick?
MayYeah.
MayOkay.
MayWhat's up?
MayHave you seen this before?
MayYes.
May1914.
MayYes.
May1910.
MayYes.
May1905.
OthaisDo you know the solution to this?
OthaisYeah, they solved that in 1907.
MayWhat?
MayAnd so I'll just pull up examples on that and I'll tell them this might not be the first one.
MayI just know of this one.
MayAnd they're sitting there going, I thought I invented something new.
MayAnd you're going, no, no.
MayBecause there's so many people were working on these problems at the time.
MayAnd it's just funny where the bottlenecks are.
MayIt might be a cartridge development issue, it might be a gas system issue, but there's a lot of ideas around those core functionalities that were already developed but then not implemented well until some other emergent technology comes out.
MayWe actually see this a lot in the handgun world because until you have metallic cartridge, it's kind of hard to do a lot of things that are, let's say double action.
MayBecause if you end up with a failed cook off or something like that, you get out of time and blah blah.
MaySo it's just simpler to do single action, blah, blah, blah.
MayWell, once you have reliable metallic cartridge, all these ideas kind of come back around, but they've already been patented and the patents have already expired.
MaySo now they're in the public domain and people are going insane with them.
MayAnd it's just interesting how much people were sort of too far ahead of the wave and they didn't profit by it, but they had the right idea of where we were going.
JohnWell, I mean, just think of the advances Browning made from 1899 to 1911.
MayRight.
JohnJust the amount of changes and iterations of his designs throughout those years is just insane to think about.
MayWhat's crazy is actually if you start exploring sort of the pre Browning era is how much he didn't invent, but rather deeply refined and combined there's a lot of times that Browning would end up in these sort of like either threats of lawsuit or lawsuit because the core concept actually was already out there.
MayIt's just that it wasn't done anywhere near as efficiently, which was, you know, people kind of remark on him being a genius for thinking these things up in his head and never really drawing them.
MayHaving an idea that just appears in your head that is like a core concept of how something might lock together.
MayNot that remarkable for someone that has that kind of mindset.
MayMost engineers are able to do that.
MayThe interesting thing is how that he was able to iterate on his designs in his own head to sort of say, well, wait, where's the waste?
MayAnd being able to keep multiple points of contact in his mind and sort of go, well, hold on, can I delete this and put it over here and get both functionality at once.
MayAnd he's like, yes, you can.
MayAnd he also got a lot of help, though, from, like, Winchester and Colt.
MayThey would also help refine the designs down tighter.
MayAnd that efficiency, I think, is what people really appreciate about his work.
MayThey might not voice it that way because they don't understand that's what they're really seeing.
MayBut I mean, the efficiency of, say, like most people are familiar with the 1911 of having that sort of slide locking, tipping block, or tipping barrel action, very efficient.
MayIt's hard to get away from.
MayMost handguns use that system now because it's so efficient, so crazy that you.
OthaisKnow all the way back to 1911.
MayRight.
MayBut then again, most people don't realize most modern handguns, okay, so you lock.
MayYou guys would be familiar with this.
MayYou like a Glock, there's sort of an extension over the chamber that locks into the slide, and that's your locking surface.
MayWell, a lot of people don't realize is the competitor of the 1911 at the time was designed by Whiting, who worked for Webley, and he did the Webley autoloader.
MayNow, that gun used sort of a dual camming system, like a horizontal diagonal line that would bring the barrel back and down, not tipping, but sort of.
OthaisParallel, but it locks into that block in the back of the receiver.
MayBut that gun is the first one I know of that locked sort of an extension over the barrel into the actual hole for the ejection in the slide.
MaySo your actual port in the slide that you already have to have.
MaySo Browning use separate lugs.
MayThey didn't take advantage of the already existing hole that you had to have the slide in order to kick out your spent casings.
MayWhiting did.
MaySo most modern guns are actually sort of a combination of Browning's design and Whiting's design.
MayBut we never think about it that way because we just see the Browning part of it, you know?
JohnOh, yeah.
JohnYou don't think.
JohnI mean, Browning had such a large name, Everyone still contributes him to the high Power.
JohnEven though he didn't finish the high power.
JohnYes.
JohnWhich is the same man who made the.
JohnThe fal.
MayRight.
JohnSo it's like, okay, well, Browning's just got this big name, and I think that's just because he came up with so many designs.
MayOh, he was absolutely prolific.
JohnYeah.
MayAnd extremely efficient in what he was doing, like I said before, and his ability to sort of move between and also to do iterations of the same concept over and over again.
MayWe often talk about the Winchester 97.
MayWe have one here today that I brought in for you.
MayBut around the same time, he was designing what became the, I believe, the Stevens 500, which is, you know, that sort of humpback shotgun that we're all kind of familiar with, the old Sears that a lot of people used to have.
MayIt's like nearly on top of the 97.
MayHe was already designing that and several other shotguns.
MayIf you go over to, like, we have friends at the Cody firearms Museum, There's a number of shotgun designs that are there that never got produced by anybody that were also perfectly valid ways of doing the same thing.
MaySo he had this way of sort of making multiple approaches and sealing out all the competition because he's like, well, we could do it this way.
MayWe could do it this way.
MayYou could do this way.
MayNormally it takes five inventors to come up with those five ways because.
OthaisAnd then he just patents them all, and it's like, aha, they're all mine.
MayYeah.
JohnWell, I mean, even when he came out with the.
JohnWhat was it?
JohnThe 86 lever shotgun.
JohnWhat was that?
May85.
MayI believe it's 85.
MayBut now we're doing.
JohnWe're going way back.
OthaisYeah.
JohnEven then he was like, this is inefficient.
JohnWhy are we doing this?
JohnAnd Winchester was like, well, we make lever guns.
MayOh, oh, oh.
MayYou're talking about the 87.
MayI'm sorry, I'm thinking of the original.
MayThe original falling block rifle.
JohnYeah.
MayBut you're talking about the 87 lever action shotgun.
MayYes, yes.
MayYeah, yeah.
MayNo, because he's like, this is there.
MaySays, we want a lever action shotgun.
MayHe goes, that's.
MayThat's inherently Stupid.
MayAnd they're going, yeah.
MayBut we do lever actions.
MayHe goes, okay.
MayAnd he manages to make one.
MayBut because it's naturally like this, they're sort of mortal enemies.
MayThe lever action and the shotgun concept, it comes out terrible.
JohnBut everybody wants one.
JohnBecause of Terminator.
MayYeah.
MayOh, yeah.
MayTo be fair, everybody wants.
MayWhen everybody thinks they can twirl it, they don't realize how heavily modified the one from Terminator was that you could do that twirl.
MayWe've actually already filmed with one of those things.
MayThey're so awful.
OthaisThey really are.
MayThey really are terrible, terrible firearms.
MayBut beautiful.
OthaisBut absolutely gorgeous.
OthaisDon't care for using them?
MayNo.
JohnThey look great.
OthaisOh yeah.
OthaisCool.
MayThe manual of arms is confusing.
MayLike in terms of where your cartridges rest.
MayLike it's just anything.
MayAny gun that sort of palms a cartridge on you is not my favorite because once it's out of sight, it's like the Spencer pump action shotguns.
MayThey have a little spot where they can hide a cartridge on you.
MayThe Madsen.
OthaisOh yeah.
OthaisThe Madsen machine gu.
MayMadsen machine gun for the same reason can kind of hide a cartridge on you.
MayAnd there's nothing worse than a gun that can make a cartridge just sort of disappear in this negative space.
MayAnd then you have to keep working it and hope that it comes out.
MayBothers the crap out of me.
OthaisOh yeah.
JohnWell, I mean it's.
JohnIt's crazy to think like you pulled this out of the case when we were downstairs.
JohnI smiled like a school girl.
OthaisYou did.
OthaisExcellent.
MayFor audio listeners.
MayWe.
MayWe brought along a Winchester 97 trench gun.
MayAnd actually we brought along Remington Model.
Othais10 much they can see.
MayWell, not on the audio.
OthaisOkay.
MaySome of these guys are listening audio.
MaySo there's a Winchester.
MayThere's a World War I era fixed frame Winchester 97 dredge got in the room with.
JohnWith a matching bayonet.
MayThat's true.
JohnAnd it has brought much joy to me.
JohnHe.
JohnHe knew how to pull up my heartstrings.
MayI.
JohnIt's true.
JohnI, you know, I.
JohnI fell in the same boat as you when I first started off.
JohnAnd I'm going to date myself too.
JohnI bought a Mos and Nant 9130.
MayMany of us did.
John89 bucks.
JohnAnd then I got into the surplus game, right?
JohnAnd it's so cool.
JohnThe surplus game is so cool.
JohnAnd a lot of people just don't do it.
JohnAnd I don't understand why.
JohnBecause you know, I've got the 9130.
JohnThen I got the Nagant Revolver.
JohnAnd then I bought.
JohnI showed you guys the pictures of the ruby and all these things and you go, these are designs that are just.
JohnHave gone.
JohnI mean, just look at the Spanish.
JohnThe amount of designs the Spanish have copied.
JohnAnd you can get them on the surplus market for next to nothing.
OthaisOh, yeah, you're right.
MayI'm actually.
MayI'm struggling to find a particular Spanish gun because I can't get one for myself because they're always priced wrong.
MayThe Spanish made a lot of copies of the Merwin Hulbert, and there are a great many Merwin Horowitz that have.
MayMerwin Hulberts.
MayI can't speak.
MayThat have sold for well over $1,000 today that are clearly Spanish copies.
MayBut what they do is somewhere along the lines the markings got rubbed off conveniently.
MayAnd you can tell if you know what you're doing, but it's.
MayIt's kind of hard to tell.
MayAnd so there's a lot of very high dollar Spanish Merwin Hulberts out there.
MayNow where I'm going, I just want an actual Spanish one for.
OthaisFor the Spanish price.
OthaisYeah.
MaySo that I can talk about this period of Spanish history.
MayBut no, everybody's charging for it like it's an American one and no one knows that they're out there.
MayIt's something like 1 in 10 is not an American mall.
OthaisI wonder how many poor bastards are pulling theirs out of the drawer right now and just going, oh, crap.
MayYeah, well, look close, because if you don't have the actual US Markings as supposed to be exactly right.
MayThen it's probably that they.
MaySo if it's sort of scrubbed off blank, there's a good chance that those weren't Norwich markings that were scrubbed off.
MayIt's probably Spanish markings that were scrubbed off.
JohnWell, we.
JohnI think when we were at the gathering, that was the one I talked to you about, because that was the one I just found out about was the Merwin Hulbert, where you pull the barrel and all the cartridges eject.
JohnAnd if you look back and think about all the gun companies that have gone under over the years and the designs, they were up in quality with Colt and Smith at the time, but they were not making their own stuff.
MayThat's.
MayThat's it.
MayIt was.
MayIt was.
MayOkay.
MayWas it Hopkins?
MayI believe was.
MayYeah, Hopkins was making theirs.
MaySo it was sort of a licensed design.
MayAnd Hopkins Allen's actually made their own sort of like large frame guns that were kind of long forgotten now because they were rimfire for the most part.
MayBut yeah, there's a lot of good quality that has just sort of disappeared, especially from the history books.
MayIt's fun that we actually.
MayI'm wearing a T shirt and nobody can see it, but we actually came out with a T shirt last year for the fondue lock work, which was a Belgian patent that we managed to locate thanks to.
MayAnd by the way, we really appreciate our patronage.
MayAlmost all of our shows funded by patron dollars.
MayAnd so I took some of those funds and I paid for a friend of mine to take some time, thankfully, because if I paid an actual guy to do this, it would have been a lot more expensive.
MayBut he was willing to go over to the Belgian archives and just dig Belgian patent archives for us.
MayBecause we know that a lot of revolver history is hidden in the Belgian patent archives.
MayEverybody thinks of America as sort of revolver central.
MayNo, it's actually mostly Britain and Belgium, especially Belgium were sort of the innovators of the revolver once Colt left off.
MayAnd a lot of that history is completely forgotten.
MaySo I'll read books on Smith and Wessons and they say, oh, yeah, they were looking at these three lockworks and I can sit there and go, that's a shamelo Delvigne.
MayThat's a fanu.
MayThat's a whatever.
MayAnd they ultimately chose the worst lock work of the three for this one design.
MayAnd it's probably because they were afraid of being hit by a patent lawsuit in Europe because it was marketed the European market because it was a double action.
MayBut that's nowhere in that text, nor is the speculation in that text, because this is a person who's only studied Smith and Wessons or maybe only US revolvers.
MaySo they have no clue that this is actually a Belgian design that has just been brought over and explored because they probably got sample pieces from Belgium.
MayEverybody went to Liege for ideas in the handgun market at that time.
MayAnd so we've been unraveling that mystery.
MayAnybody that wants to see what we're doing, by the way, all of it goes onto our website.
MaySo it's like revolvers.c and arsenal.com and all the patents are there as we can get them processed.
MayWe have a guy that's been volunteering on Discord to help us access.
MayAnd we just dump them all in there.
MayI pay for them to go get found or I pay the fees to get them, you know, copied out.
MayAnd we're just.
MayWe're just trying to unpack as much as we can.
MayBut, you know, everybody likes the Colt Pythons, all the snake guns.
MayMost of the Smith and Wesson lock work that we're familiar with.
MayAlthough they did make a change in their slide rebound.
MayMost of what we consider to be modern revolvers are derivatives of this 1874 patent, which itself is just one modification of a patent that came before it and blah, blah, blah, but totally forgotten about.
MaySo the modern revolver as we know it was pretty much done in 1874 and no one's noticed.
JohnWow.
JohnYeah, that's just mind blowing.
JohnI mean, there's a lot of things that people don't.
JohnI mean, we talk about the revolver.
JohnHistory is a big one because everyone's like, oh, Colt was the first one.
JohnYeah, but it wasn't cold.
JohnThere was other ones out there before Colt even patented his.
JohnAnd even then there was arguments between him and other people on who should own the patents or even European patents versus US Patents.
JohnWe talk about.
JohnI mean, look at Browning.
JohnHe split his patents between FN and Colt for a long time because one was European market, one was American market and Colt couldn't sell stuff to the European market.
MayYeah, I mean, Colts, Colts, initial revolver seems to be some combination of.
MayThere's.
MayIt seems to, by the way, it's design suggest that he was aware of the precursor designs, even though he denies it, which of course he would because Colts ultimate appeal is that he's the quintessential American.
MayHe's a salesman who is attempting to drag the rest of the world.
OthaisGod, he's a salesman.
MayYeah.
MayHe attempted to drag the rest of the world into understanding the concept of economy of scale.
MayAnd at that time in the arms industry, we didn't have it, the idea that, okay, we need to make, we want to make this firearm.
MayIf we can use machinery and jigs and whatever to make 10,000 of it, minimum, exactly the same way, then we can get the price down and then.
MayAnd you can see it in court records and stuff at the time, because he was, he was actually drawn into a court in England when they were trying to.
MayEngland was having a debate about starting their own state manufacturing and some things like that.
MayThey were trying to get cost data from Colt on the cost to produce certain things.
MayColt's deepest secret was how much it actually cost him to make his revolvers.
MayHe was willing to sell them at a price below other people in the market for what you're getting.
MayBut he wasn't willing to sell them at, you know, a thin margin.
MayHe got a hefty margin on everything.
MayBecause being the first person to really approach this economy of scale, he should reap all the benefits of It.
MaySo he only thought about competing with the market price.
MayHe didn't care about beating the market price deeply, which would essentially have driven everybody else out of business.
MayIt probably would have been the smarter move for him to do that, because if he could have gotten his prices down, we now know discount marketing is the way to sort of kill a market.
MayBut the problem is then you permanently drive that market down.
MaySo maybe, maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.
MayThe point being is he hid his cards.
MayHowever, he did have to explain to the British, you don't understand.
MayYou have to give me almost all the money up front so that I can buy the machines to do this.
MayAnd they're like, well, let's just give you some of the money up front, and then when it's all here, we'll give you the rest.
OthaisHe's like, but I need the machines to do the thing, so you got to give me all the money so I can do the thing.
MayAnd they're going, but these other tradesmen that have been here for hundreds of years, we pay them piecework.
MayAnd he's like, yes, they've had hundreds of years to get these tools into place.
MayAnd then also they can't do it for that price in that economy because they don't.
MayThey can't afford to buy the machine.
MayIt's very interesting.
MaySo through his sort of like essentially lying, I mean, just constantly lying and overselling and pushing and pushing and pushing.
MayHe got people to understand this concept.
MayAnd then immediately after that, you suddenly see the next generation of firearms is people banding together, various prominent gunsmiths banding together to form things like fn, which was a coalition of gunsmiths in order to produce for the government so that they didn't have their manufacturing taking away from their country.
MayBecause that was the big fear after that was like, well, hold on.
MayThe first person to sort of be able to make everything, like Steyr and owg, Steyer and Austria, they're going to put everybody out of business in their own countries unless these gunsmiths band together and buy the same sort of equipment.
MayAnd so it's fascinating how he sort of pushed the industrial revolution, essentially, or at least the portion of it that would be like mass manufacturing interchangeable parts.
MayHe pushed it by essentially lying about what he could do, but that started to get the capital available to do it.
MayAnd now that's how our entire economies work.
MayLike, we do everything on the scale method now.
MaySo really innovative, but poorly understood because most people are just like, he made the Best revolver.
MayAnd you're like, okay, but that's so not what's important about Colt.
OthaisI still say Colt is one of the most fascinating individuals in history.
OthaisIf I could ever have the actual truth of a man's life, Colt is the singular person I would pick out and be like, done.
OthaisI want everything that's actual truth on him.
JohnThe amount of times Colt went bankrupt, just in the beginning.
MayOh, yeah.
MayWith other people's money, too.
OthaisYeah.
JohnLike bankruptcy.
JohnThat's the important part in the fires.
OthaisHe was truly a salesman.
JohnYeah.
MayOh, yeah.
JohnHis.
JohnWhat was.
JohnIt was.
JohnThe first one was with the Patterson.
JohnAnd then after the Patterson came out, it was the.
MayOh, he did more than that.
MayHe designed a harbor defense system of subaquatic mines.
MaySo he had these waterproof mines, and you would sit in this room.
MayThe way it was supposed to work is you're supposed to sit in this little room at the corner of the bay and have these big mirrors that would let you see the bay.
MayAnd they were grave coordinates on the mirrors, like a grid, like a game of Battleship.
MayAnd you could literally go, oh, there's a boat at C5.
MayAnd push this button.
MayAnd then it would blow up the boat.
MayAnd they tested it, and it worked so well that it terrified everybody.
MayBut the cost was prohibitive, so it was never put into place.
MayBut his harbor defense system was basically like, we'll just mine the whole harbor, but it'll all be like, it won't blow up until we hit the button.
MayAnd you just have a guy that sits there, and if an enemy ship comes into the grid, he just hits the grid button, like, literally a game of Battleship and blows it up.
OthaisJust real life.
MayHe was also responsible for the waterproofing.
MaySo in that.
MayIn doing that, he had to develop a waterproofing cabling method.
MayWell, that was actually used by Samuel Morse for the initial Morse testing for Morse code.
MayYou know, same event or that.
MayBut he was doing his, you know, telecommunication stuff.
MayAnd so he needed to run cable underwater.
MayAnd there's a famous test where he.
MayBoth Sam Colt and Morse were trying to get investors for his technology.
MayAnd so they set up a thing where they were going to communicate between an island and the mainland.
MayIt was an in lake island.
MayI can't remember which one now.
MayAnd they set everything up overnight.
MayAnd then the next day, it was a complete disaster because it didn't work.
MayWell, what they didn't know is that a fisherman, overnight, had been dredging and just hit the cable, was like, what is this?
MayHe starts pulling it up.
MayHe keeps pulling up and he keeps goes, to hell with this.
MayAnd he cuts it.
MayAnd then that's why the first, like.
MayThat's why Morse, like, had a setback on the first go and couldn't get funding for another, like, five years or whatever it was.
MayIt was him and Samuel Cole going, who the heck cut our cable?
OthaisSome dude in the middle of the night.
MayI love that.
MayHuman Endeavor was set by, like, five years because some jerks just like, what is this?
JohnWell, I mean, you think about all the military testing and how things have got set back.
JohnI mean, you know how cool it would be to have a savage in 45?
MayBecause.
JohnYeah, I mean, there's.
MayYou say that it'd be cool because it's a failure at the time.
MayThey're just like, this thing sucks.
MaySo, like, the problem is, it's just like, they have high points in 45.
MayGo nuts, Bo.
MayBecause it's going to be the same experience.
JohnWell, there's all those things that, like the Luger and 45 that made the first trials, that everyone's like, oh, I want one.
MayAnd then my favorite is, everybody wants the.45 Luger.
MayAnd they're like, oh, yeah, it didn't work.
MayIt didn't bother.
MayNo, it worked great.
MayWe wanted them to come back and do it again.
MayAnd Luger went, no, we're so tired of spending money on you.
MayYou're going to make it.
MayThis is actually a funny thing because it's very comparable to what we had with.40 Smith & Wesson, because everything goes in circles, right?
MaySo the.
MayThe luger is in a.30 caliber cartridge.
MayAnd they're like, oh, can we make it bigger?
MayAnd it's like, well, we could kind of straight wallet, and that'll give us 9 millimeter.
MayAnd so just as a kludge, you end up with 9 millimeter parabellum.
MayLike, the 9 millimeter parallel exists because it's like, I guess we could do that.
MayAnd then they're trying to sell it the US and they're trying to do anything they can to get a cartridge that the US would accept.
MayBut the US is like, no, we want.45ACP essentially, for the precursor to that.
MayAnd they're going, if we do that, we have to build a whole new frame.
MayEverything has to be new, new tooling.
MaySo we have to run a separate assembly line just for this little country.
MayI mean, it's big geographically.
MayBy the time it was a small market, because for Germany, they had conscription.
MaySo, like, the numbers of handguns that Germany Needed at a time compared to the US Is astronomically different.
MaySo they're going like, the German army just bought these things from us.
MayWe don't have to play around with America.
MayLike, we're going to sell like 2,000, 20,000 at most.
MayLike, where are we at?
MayYou know, we don't even.
MayWe don't know if we're going to get the contract.
MayThey clearly favor their own guns.
MayThis Browning guy's ripping us off at this point because he was.
MayLet's be honest, that's the thing that makes people very.
MayIt's not Browning so much as Colt, but the Colt 1911 is clearly derivative of the Luger.
MayOn the bottom half, you can look at.
MayWe actually have a whole series on this where we approached it.
MayBut the lock work, the slide, that's all Browning.
MayBut the bottom half of that gun, it's like, oh, did it come up with a grip safety and a raked grip and a thumb depressible magazine release.
MayAnd where did I see all that before in 1900?
JohnOh, that's right.
MayLuger.
JohnWhat do you mean thumb safety and everything?
MayIt's almost like it took on all the best features of its chief competitor in order to win the trial, but also had a superior lock breach system.
OthaisHow ingenious.
JohnHow.
JohnHow dare they.
MayYeah, but no.
MaySo the problem is Luger's like, we don't want to make two sizes of frame, which is what we ran into with 10 millimeter, where it's like, everybody's like, hey, can we get 10 millimeter?
MayAnd they're like, we'll have to make two sizes.
MayWell, three sizes.
MayBecause then it would have been 45, 9 millimeter, and 10 millimeter.
MayAll the group companies got together and were like, can we just make like 10 millimeter light that'll fit in a 9 millimeter frame?
MayAnd then everybody's just like, yeah, we'll tell them it's a good idea.
MayAnd then everybody ran with it for about 10 years.
MayAnd then, wait, this was awful.
JohnWhy did we do I still 40s dead.
JohnI'm living.
JohnI'm saying it right now.
John40 is dead.
MaySmith & Wesson, anybody?
JohnYeah, anybody who wants 40.
JohnSmith & Wesson should rethink their.
JohnTheir thought process.
MayThe funniest part is that was done before when the US army wanted Colt brought a 9 millimeter.38 Colt.
MayThere's 30 ACP, not 380.
MayThey brought a 38 Colt in the original Browning lock breech pistols.
MayAnd the army says, We want 45.
MayAnd they're like, what's?
MayThe most we could do without changing the frame.
MayAnd they got 40.
MayThey tried to do on a 41, and it just wasn't working.
MayBut it's the same thing all over again.
MayIt's 40 Smith & Wesson.
May100 years before 40 Smith & Wesson.
MayLike, it's the same thing.
MayIt's like, okay, we got a nine.
MayCan we get.
MayHow close can we get to this number?
MayIt's like we could do 41, which is technically a 40.
MayLike, isn't it weird how it's just like, it's cyclical.
JohnWell, it's weird.
JohnJust like, what was it, the Prohibition?
JohnThe Colt came out with the.38 super, right?
JohnAnd everyone's like, Wow, 38 Super.
JohnWell, because it goes through corridors.
JohnHow.
JohnWell, how did it go through car doors?
JohnBecause it was faster, Right.
JohnAnd they were like, okay, that's all you need to do.
MayYeah.
MayYou could have just done that to begin with.
MaySort of.
JohnIt's the same thing, like in Europe.
JohnAnd I'm going to say it now, I watch a lot of your stuff.
OthaisSo I'm so sorry.
JohnYeah, but just like in Europe, we're talking about Everybody.
JohnWhen the 9 mil came out, everyone's like, oh, 9 mil.
JohnAnd then there's the Italians.
JohnLike, well, we want 9 mil.
JohnWe want it to feel like 9 mil, but our guns can't handle it.
JohnSo we're going to underpower it.
JohnAnd then if you grab the wrong ammo, it blows up.
MayWell, sort of.
MayThat was complete corruption.
MaySo the man behind the Glenti pistol had already.
MayHe was part of the trials board that was assessing it.
MayAnd so he's like, don't put my name on that.
MayJust.
MayWe'll call it the Glass.
MayLike, he licensed it to glisten the glass entities, calling it the Glass Empty Pistol.
MayBut it's actually this guy.
MayYou know what I mean?
MayHe's like, this is.
MayI'm going to vote yes on my own design without telling anybody.
MayI'm getting royalties on it.
MayAnd so the problem is, they get to the end and they're just like, okay, but the Germans have 9 millimeter Parabellum.
MayCan we do that?
MayAnd they're just like, yes.
MayNo, but they're going to say yes.
OthaisYeah.
MaySo they did the exact same chambering, but when it came time to do the ammo, they're just like, powder back a little bit.
MayLet's dial it back a little bit.
MayWhat?
MayBull.
MayLike, I mean.
MayAnd then you have this huge problem later on because of it, people not knowing what to Put and where and guns getting torn up and it's just like they don't blow up, but they just beat themselves to death.
OthaisWere people trying to do that with Villaprosis?
MayI want to say I've definitely seen a Villaper that was suffering from running 9mil Parabellum too often, especially because the loads have changed over time too.
MayThat's the other thing is we have a friend with an MP18 that we used on the show and it's just like, yeah, you better put 124 grains in there because that's the closest you're going to get to the old truncated.
MayAnd even then it doesn't feed quite the same because they don't.
MayNobody does truncated cone 9 millimeter anymore.
MayThe shapes are different.
MayAnd it's kind of a hard thing because people are like, why don't you do ballistic shell tests?
MayI'm going because I can't get like the exact same dimension Malachor jacket with, you know, cordite powder that burns at a very specific weird rate.
MaySo I'm going to give you a really bizarre approximation of what that cartridge can do, not the actual performance of that cartridge at that time.
JohnSo, yeah, I mean there's.
JohnThere's a ton of weird.
JohnAnd I guess I blame you for this and I don't really blame you, but I, I bought, I walked in, I watched.
JohnWas it the FN 1903 video?
JohnI walked into a gun shop and they had a husqvarna sitting there in 380 because why convert it?
MayYeah.
JohnAnd I was like, I know what that is.
JohnI'm buying it right now because it's cheap.
JohnAnd I know that when people start watching.
OthaisOh, no.
JohnYeah, Nice.
MayDid you shoot?
JohnYes.
JohnOh, 380 shoots.
JohnFantastic.
JohnThat's good.
MayIt's better at 380 than it does in the original cartridge.
JohnIt's like nine.
MayThey call it nine Browning.
MayBut it was just sort of like a long not.38 AC.
MayIt's like a.
MaySomewhere between.
MayI don't know, it's another.
MayThey call it 9 Browning.
MayIt's another 9 by 20ish.
MayVaguely similar.
MayThis is a problem in that era you have all these nine millimeter cartridges and this is what people don't understand.
OthaisWasn't it like semi rimmed too or something like that?
MayI remember now.
MayThere's so many compare because you got like Largo and Browning and then like the Roth cartridges that are around at the time.
OthaisYeah.
MayAnd then I mean like technically Largo is a Piper cartridge and then you have 38 ACP, 9 millimeter parabellum.
MaySteyer's doing their own 9 millimeter.
MayAnd really, like 9 millimeter parabellum tends to win out because of, a, how many guns were available from the German army?
MayBut B, it is shorter cased, so therefore you can have a more favorable grip.
MaySo Largo, I think, was sort of the last fighter in that category where Largo held out for a little bit because of Spanish endeavors.
MayBut it's longer, so it makes.
OthaisSo I could see how they would be the competitor.
MayYeah.
MayHaving a shorter length case in a gun that feeds through the.
MayThe grip is kind of important for keeping those ergonomics clean.
JohnWell, it just makes me laugh.
JohnLike, I showed.
JohnShowed somebody the my FN, and they're like, oh, it's just a Colt 19.
JohnOh, go.
JohnNo, it's not.
JohnIt is a Colt 1903, but it's not Colt 1903.
JohnIt's an FN 1903.
MayYeah.
JohnAnd they're like, who made it?
JohnI'm like, husqvarna.
JohnThey're like, the chainsaw people.
OthaisI'm like, yes, I got a chainsaw to match it.
JohnThey made guns.
JohnYeah.
MayMy thing that makes me really mad is the Norwegians almost adopted, like, the Colt, I want to say, the 1902 military model with some changes in, like 38 ACP.
MayAnd then there was even a brief debate about doing essentially, like, the model 1910 that came right before the 1911, getting that in sort of a 9 millimeter caliber.
MayAnd then sort of things got stalled off, and next thing you know, they just had to buy the 1911.
MaySo the Norwegians end up with their own version of the 1911.
MayBut there's almost a period in which Norway adopted, like, the Colt 1902.
OthaisWere they gonna go with, like, the nail file checkering?
MayNo, they were gonna do, like, the updated version that was available because they were doing it way late.
MayThey were.
MayThe 1911 was already kind of coming out the door when the Norwegians were assessing all the way back to the 1902.
MayAnd they're like, no, this is great.
MayWe like this.
MayAnd then, you know, the poor.
OthaisThat would have been interesting to see if they had some 1910s, though, because there would be more of them in the world.
MayThis whole fight.
MayAnd the poor guys are like, can we just.
MayCan we just buy this now?
MayAnd they're like, no, we don't make that anymore.
MayWe're making this.
MayAnd they hand them, like, a.45 ACP and they go, oh, my God.
MayBecause the entire argument In Norway up to that point was again 9 millimeter versus 45.
MayAnd so they finally settled on 9 millimeter and all this other stuff.
MayAnd they go, okay, can we buy it?
MayAnd they're like, no, we only have this in 45.
MayAnd they went, crap.
MayBecause it started the whole problem over again.
OthaisWell, that case was closed.
MayBut they were doing interesting things.
MayThey were like.
MayThey were shooting.
MayThey came up with some contraption to shoot like a bucket full because they were worried about the.
MayYou know, everybody talks about.
MayWhat is it?
MayHydra crap.
MayMy brain's locked out.
JohnHydrostatic shock.
MayYeah, hydrostatic shock.
MaySo they were.
MayThey were kind of obsessed with the same thing.
MaySo they were like shooting into buckets of water to see how much water splashed out, like to try to get an idea of how much displacement they were getting for velocity versus mass.
MayLike they were doing all sorts of weird experiments scientifically test.
MayBut that's the whole problem.
MayHydrostatic is like a really hard thing to look at.
MayWhat's big now is these like ballistic shell dummies with stuff in them.
MaySo everybody's sort of always chasing the how do I do?
MaySort of terminal performance without actually terminating anybody.
MayBecause everybody gets mad when you start slaughtering livestock like we did during the pistol trial.
JohnSomebody, the US was like, hey, 45 killed cows better.
JohnWe're gonna go with that.
MayThose trials are.
MayDon't read them.
MayDon't read them so bad.
MayIt's just like, just shoot an animal once and they just count how many hours it takes for it to die.
MayI mean, it's just awful.
OthaisOh, you had to read through them extensively for the worst.
MayLike, we get so much trouble.
MayThey did it in Europe too, there.
MayAll these terrible experiments in Europe.
MayIt's just especially because in Europe they were trying to justify smaller calibers.
MaySo they would just do terrible animal experiments and then be like, well, it died.
MayI think how many hours?
OthaisI think bowl still has the best animal experiments where they're just like, no, we just put it in the.
OthaisThe bellies of all the animals and they all just passed it.
MayOh, yeah.
MayWe took on Ballistol as a sponsor because we were already using them.
JohnYeah.
MayAnd we were doing some old reading and it's like in their own literature and it's kind of poorly translated from German to English, so it's even funnier.
MayBut their literature, they're talking about the non toxicity because balustol is derived from a medical oil, so it's extremely safe for human skin.
MayAs a matter of fact, it is an antibiotic, essentially.
MayYes, except they can't market it that way because it's not FDA approved in the US for that use.
MayThey have a product that is.
MayBut that's a separate thing because they don't want to go through it for every batch of what's supposed to be a gun oil.
MayBut if you were out in the woods and you needed an antibiotic that is not.
OthaisIt's mild, but it can be.
JohnI may keep a can of ballastal in my bag just for that reason.
MayThe wipes, really, the wipes are great.
MayThe wipes are awesome too, because for not everybody.
MayFor a lot of people, if you get like a bunch of mosquito bites and they're itching, the wipes tend to get the itching to go down a good bit.
MayBut you're kind of oily, so.
OthaisBut no talk about the animals.
MayOh, I'm sorry.
OthaisSo that was what I was thinking.
MayAbout this quote there.
MayLike, we, we.
MayWe fed Ballistol to lab mice, but the way they said, it's like we filled the mouse's entire intestines with Ballistol.
MayAnd I'm like, how did you know that you filled its entire test?
MayBut anyway, so that's like.
MayAnd then after it had some mild discomfort passing the Ballistol and you're like, was it an animal?
MayI don't understand what's going on.
MayBut apparently like they filled a mouse, the live mouse, with Ballistol, and then the mouse passed all the Ballistol and it's like, other than seem to be uncomfortable, it was fine.
MayIt lived a normal life.
MayAnd you're just like, okay, so you could just do that and you probably won't die.
JohnWell, we were talking earlier.
JohnThere's the guy on YouTube who does a history of companies and how he was talking about Zeiss and Zeiss.
JohnWhat do you make?
JohnOh, we make really nice optics in crystal.
JohnAnd they're like, what did you do between 39 and 45?
JohnAnd they're like, we don't have.
JohnZeiss removed that history from their website.
OthaisOh, they believe that?
MayYeah, about.
MayI mean, it's because nobody wants to be associated this association game, which I find really frustrating because I don't.
MayI don't really like forbidden knowledge.
MayThings happen.
MayYou can talk about them.
MayJust because you don't have to agree with everything a government or a people are doing to understand that they invented a Volkswagen.
MayYou know what I mean?
MayLike, that's where it came from.
MayIf it's an efficiency that we can.
MayThen the idea that you should throw away all Knowledge gained from a bad situation means that you're ultimately wasting the sacrifices of other people.
MayLike, at least take something good away from it.
MayYou know what I mean?
MaySo Ballistol emerged, I want to say around 1904 and was used through World War I.
MayAnd World War II is the.
MayIt was the oil for the German army.
MayAs a matter of fact, the US almost adopted it, but World War I broke out while we were testing it.
MayBut there's actually ordinance notes of Balustal being absolutely superior to everything we had available in the US at the time.
MaySo US Ordinance was just about to try to purchase and arrange manufacture their own product, and then World War II starts heating up and they're like, oh.
MayAnd then we never really got Palistol.
MaySo it was a good.
MayIt is still a very, extremely good product because it's safe for human skin, all other stuff.
MayBut one of my favorite things is sort of in the interwar period, it became sort of a panacea because it was derived from medical oil.
MaySo there was a.
MayAgain, a medically marketed version of Ballistol that people were taking for stomach issues.
MayAnd Hitler notoriously had stomach issues.
MaySo he was consuming so much Ballistol that it was affecting his vision eventually because, I mean, too much of anything's bad.
MayRight.
MayLike, so he was consuming way too much Ballistol.
MayAnd so his doctor took him off the Ballistol because of the headaches or vision or whatever the issue was.
MayAnd then that caused his stomach cramps and pain to come back.
MaySo, I mean, maybe if we just let Hitler keep his Ballistol, maybe things.
OthaisWell, he just needed it in smaller doses.
MayYeah, I don't know.
MayAll I'm saying is we took away Hitler's Ballistol.
MayThe next thing you know, just don't.
OthaisGive him the whole bottle.
OthaisGive him half a bottle.
OthaisWhy do we have to give him a whole bottle?
OthaisHe's Hitler.
OthaisHe's not gonna know how to take the whole bottle.
JohnHe thought he knew better than everybody, so he really did.
MayWe were one gun loop away from just having Pete roll bottles.
MayYeah.
JohnSo the other thing that we.
JohnWe see in history with, at least with gun technology, is the amount of copying or.
JohnOr licensed copies or as in for the Spanish non licensed copies.
MayWell, sort of.
MayIt was legal in their country.
MayYeah, that's true.
OthaisThat's true.
OthaisIt's fine.
JohnSome of my favorites are like World War II movies, all of them using stars.
MayOh, yeah.
JohnBecause they're cheap.
MayThe funnier thing is in the US There's a Lot of sort of war movies during World War I, like silent films or early sound or whatever.
MayAnd Charlie Chaplin is famously in one, which is even weirder to see.
MayRight?
MayBut because of all the arms being sent to the front, the only thing that they could lay hands on that was a magazine repeater were crags.
MaySo you have all these war movies in black and white where they're just running around with crags in the trenches.
MayAnd especially with Charlie Chaplin is even funnier because, like, what is going on?
MayAnd then you still see it.
MayI think Hogan's Heroes still had Craig Jorgensen's in the hands of, like, German prisoner of war camp guards.
MayAnd you're going, oh, my God.
MayAnd my favorite thing about the collector's world is people trying to justify that.
MayLike, well, Germans did capture some cracks and bullshit.
MayIt's a.
MayIt's a.
MayIt's a TV show.
MayWe really don't need to try to shoehorn this into being a reality.
OthaisAlso, why would they go with that when it's not the ammo they were using then?
MayWell, to be fair, prison guard is a good use of people that don't need to shoot a lot of ammo, but it'd be more likely they have mosins or something.
MayJust sort of like, okay, just use some of this.
JohnThe other thing we've, we taught, we touched on Battlefield one, so I got to bring it up.
JohnThere's a lot of video games, especially World War II, World War I related, that have guns that weren't really used or were just concepts.
JohnSo we see, like, what was it?
JohnThe Italian submachine gun?
JohnYeah, the Villaprosa.
MayI mean, they were around.
JohnAnd then the other one was the.
OthaisThere's another one that they had in there, though.
MayThey had a ton of stuff in there.
MayThey had a bunch of weird prototype stuff there.
MayBattlefield 1 suffers from the fact that they.
MayThey're trying to do like the Battlefield 3 formula, where it's like, okay, we got these classes.
MayThe class comes with this kind of like, it has to have this fire rate with this distance, with this sort of power per round is the vague category that they've created for themselves.
MaySo then when they look at World War I, they go, oh, that's not really how World War I was actually more in terms of small arms.
MayIt was very symmetrical.
MayAnd then it became weirdly asymmetrical towards the end.
MayAnd there's not as much to pull on the axis side is what you'd want.
MayThere's definitely not as much to pull from sort of the lower powers as you'd want.
MayIt's only really the US and Germany that are doing super weird stuff.
MayMaybe a little France in there, a little bit of Britain, but you know, Italy's got some oddball that you can pick from, but it's not enough where you can go, okay, everyone's gonna get this submachine gun class.
MayYou're like, there's literally one.
MayLike there's just one.
MayThere's technically, there's technically like four submachine guns, but in terms of ever finding one on the front line, there's either this dual barrel, two man thing or there's this thing that Germany came out in the last couple months of the war, right?
MayAnd that's really about it.
MayI mean, yes, the OVP existed, but who the heck knows if you ever saw one.
OthaisDid Battlefield ever have more than one anti tank rifle in there other than the.
MayI think it's just the T gear.
OthaisOkay.
MayWhich is.
MayWhich is fair.
MayBut they only needed one.
MayIt was a special Class 2 in Battlefield 5.
MayI haven't played five at all, to be honest.
MayI played one just to try.
OthaisI played two minutes of it and then I decided that was enough.
MayFive kind of took it to a whole new level.
MayIt's like everybody, the stuff that people complain about in Battlefield 1, they're like, oh yeah, we're gonna do it harder.
MayAnd then wasn't it five that one?
MayThey're like, if you don't like it, don't buy it.
MayAnd then nobody bought it.
OthaisOh yeah, that was funny.
MayLike, it's weird, but they want to treat history as a playground, which is great.
MayJust make it.
MayI've always said make it 1946.
MayLike with battlefield one always said, just make it 1919.
MayYou know, just pretend the war kept going.
MayThen you can shovel anything you want in there.
MayBut they want to play this game of like legitimacy and entertainment at the same time.
OthaisWell, legitimately, when I shoot in Battlefield 1, sometimes I shoot the whole cartridge, like case and all, all at once.
MayThe artillery shells.
OthaisOh my God, that was so funny.
OthaisI captured a screenshot of that way back in the day.
JohnI just want to know who was running around with the clevery.
MayOh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MayI want to know who.
MayI really want to know who came up with the gun choices for that game.
MayBecause the hell Regals were the most famous one, the Austrian belt fed submachine gun, because they included that game.
MayAnd when I saw it, I went, this is very surprising to me because I only knew about it because I manually went through an Italian archive of captured Austrian documents and that's where I first saw it.
MayAnd I still don't know what book or website or whatever referenced it.
MayThat this guy, whoever was in charge of picking their designs, he came across it and it's been come across a bowl for a hundred years.
MayThat's fine.
MayBut where did he see it?
OthaisYou kind of want to talk to.
MayThem literally go to the same Italian archive I did or did he.
JohnWasn't there one there where there was just one picture of somebody shooting the gun and they made a model out of it.
MayThe Hell Regal.
MayThere's essentially two pictures of the Hell Regal.
MayThere's one of it sitting on a table with its drum sort of set aside.
MaySo you could see that has sort of a chain link feed or a weird feedback.
MayI don't know that it's chain link.
MayI have to go back and look at it now, to be honest with you.
MayIt's been a while.
MayIt has a sort of weird belt system, but then there's a picture of a guy holding it.
MaySo there's actually like one quarter of the gun we don't have any photos of, but you can kind of make some inferences.
MayBut the problem is, looking at it, it's very hard to determine what the internals would actually be.
MayIt seems to be sort of like a double return spring setup maybe, but we're not really sure.
MayBut yeah, the Hellriegel was the one that they cloned out, which I thought was fascinating because I don't know if an ex didn't copy that gun.
MayWe just have the photos of it existing in Austria at the time.
MayI'm sure it sucked.
MayLike the fact that we don't see it ever again probably means that it didn't work very well.
MayAnd looking at it, it looks very convoluted for what it's doing.
MayBut.
JohnWell, see what made me so I play a lot of Battlefield five.
JohnYeah, I know.
JohnWhat made me really mad is they have an achievement.
JohnThey're like, oh, you have to kill so many enemies with ally powered weapons.
JohnSo I'm using a Jungle Carbine.
JohnAnd they're like, oh, that doesn't count.
MayWhy does it not go?
JohnThey're like, well, you can, you can use the mark, the mark 5.
JohnYou can use the top, the 1928 Thompson, or you can use an O3, but you can't use the Jungle Carbine, even though it's a derivative of the first one.
JohnBut no, because it's a Jungle Carbine, it doesn't count.
JohnI got so mad because I said I'm very confused.
MayYou talk about that you can use like a number four Mark one.
JohnYes.
MayBecause I haven't even played the game.
MayI actually don't know what guns are in five.
MayI stopped paying attention after battlefield.
JohnThere's a lot of like.
JohnLike weird junk.
JohnI mean just like.
JohnLike they had an original.
JohnThey have a.
JohnSo the M.
JohnThe M2 is in there which was not widely used.
MayRight.
JohnThey have the.
JohnAn M1 carbine with a.
JohnAn old school original concept night vision scope.
MayRight.
JohnThey have a.
JohnJungle carbines in there.
JohnThey've got the Johnson in there which was not very.
MayRight.
MayStolen from the Dutch.
MayYeah.
JohnAnd then they have.
JohnThey have like all these different.
JohnLike there's a Japanese submachine gun that I even know about that's in there.
MayOther than it's not a Type 100 or whatever.
JohnNo, I think.
JohnNo, it wasn't the Type 100.
JohnIt looks kind of like a bullpup, but it's got like a.
JohnThe magazine is long.
MayI know.
MayActually weirdly know which one you're talking about.
MayI can't remember the name of it now, but yeah, not really.
JohnThere's a lot of.
JohnThat's the thing.
JohnThey.
JohnThere's so much weaponry during World War II too.
JohnBut they.
JohnThey've picked out like the really like for some reason the rubies in it.
JohnI'm like, why is.
MayI mean there were a bunch laying around, but why didn't just reskin it to be a unique.
MayYeah, that would make more sense.
OthaisYeah.
JohnBut it was just, just so many weird.
JohnThe only cool thing about it is that if you use an M1 grand in that game.
MayRight.
JohnYou reload too quickly.
MayYeah.
JohnYou get Grantham.
MayOh, do you?
MayYeah.
OthaisI like that.
OthaisOkay.
MayBut in theory it shouldn't really.
MayWell, yeah, I'd have to see the animation.
MayBut it's.
JohnIt's every once in a while that if you reload too quickly, it.
JohnYou put in and then you hear your player start screaming, ow, ow, ow.
JohnAnd I was like, what the heck is that?
JohnAnd then I look down and his thumb is in the action and he's like trying to yank it out.
MayWe haven't done the Garen yet, but I wonder how much like I wonder how much that was really happening.
MayBecause when they're fresh, they're not supposed to do that.
MayThey're supposed to actually lock open.
MayBut then as they got older, they don't do.
OthaisI can put on some gloves and we could try it no, I'm not sticking.
MayWell, mine actually, weirdly, the one I have doesn't eat people.
MayIt's pretty good about locking up.
OthaisYeah, I remember I've shot that before.
MayAlthough the gas tube was messed up so.
JohnWell, that's the other thing.
JohnLike guns.
JohnI wish somebody would bring back some retro World War II production guns.
MayThe problem is we can't.
MayIt's lost.
JohnTechnology is that way.
MayIt really is the milling, the milling again, it's an economy of scale.
MayFirst of all, let's be fair to the people.
MaySo everybody says they want, like, let's go, we'll go simpler, type 1A case.
MayEverybody wants a type 1Ak.
MayThe Russians didn't want the type 1Ak because it was.
MayThe whole point was to be this folded, mass produced, whatever.
MayAnd it turned out that what they were getting for what they were, the effort they were putting in wasn't worth it and they had to move over to milled, whatever, right?
MayAnd a lot of the stuff that we see in terms of, you know, think about Lee Enfields is extremely, painfully difficult to make a Lee Enfield the correct way.
MayBecause when they tried to do it in Canada, they just gave up and went to the number four.
MayThey went, you know, by the time, by the time we spin somebody up and have this sort of inherited knowledge of how to get this process done just right, we should pick a different gun.
MayAnd so you have the sort of simplified number four version of Lee Enfield.
MayIt's the same problem.
MayEverybody's like, oh, Lugers are so expensive.
MayI want them to bring back the Luger.
OthaisYeah.
OthaisDo you know how much that would cost to be more expensive?
MayWe still have not hit peak Luger.
MayLike this is.
MayThe funny thing is the talent, the knowledge pool and talent and the industrial capacity is diminishing, right?
MayAt a rate higher than the cost rising on the originals.
MayBecause to go back and have that reproduction made, it's going to cost you thousands of dollars to have a brand new one.
MayYou could spend thousands of dollars on an original one.
MayIt's actually got the history that's always the problem.
MayKnow a lot of guys that have tried to do this.
MayI mean, I mean, I've been friends with guys that have tried reproductions and unless you can sort of build them with existing parts kits and you're only building part of the gun and the rest of it, stuff that you're making that you find, then you're kind of stuck, you know.
MayAnd any compromise you make on the design is going to infuriate the core people that Want to buy it anyway.
MaySo when you try to make it in 9 millimeter instead of 30 carbine or whatever, some people are happy about that.
MayBut you better have a low enough price point because no one's going to spend big money to have it not be exactly right.
JohnWell, I'm just surprised nobody's done the.
JohnThe Garen yet.
JohnAnd there's too many in the market.
MayThough I don't think we reached saturation.
MayNo.
MayBecause what's the Garen go for now?
JohnLike 12, 13, 1400 bucks?
MayI think nowhere near.
MayIt would cost you more than that to make one because look at what's it cost for.
MayLook at dsa.
MayThey do the foul.
JohnYeah.
MayDSA files are somewhere in that same price range at the low end.
MayAnd then the cool stuff is getting into the 2000s.
MayIt's going to cost you at least that much.
MayAnd especially the wood.
MayNobody can do wood right anymore.
MayThere's no, there's no old growth walnut available anymore.
MayLike, you know what the cost is on that wood now and then trying to make it.
MayAnd then also a lot of it's sort of the final hand fitting on the wood.
MaySo your labor cost is going to be huge to do wood.
MayThat's why nobody does it.
MayAnd then I got guys that do reproduction stocks.
MaySome of you might have noticed there's been reproduction Craig Jorgensen stocks finally available on like ebay and stuff like that.
MayThat's a friend of mine that's actually been doing that project and he's still like trying to get it even better.
MayHe's getting it closer and closer to original.
MayBut they can't get good old dark American walnut.
MayYou're gonna have to stain it to kind of look like that.
MayYou're not gonna be able to have.
MayI mean, you can get American walnut, but it's not gonna be as tight of a grain pattern.
MayIt's not gonna be, you know, because where you.
MayHow do you get it at an economical price?
JohnYou know, Same issue I ran into.
JohnI bought a Enfield in 3006 and it was borderized, which I was like, oh, why?
JohnBut so I went.
JohnI found the original lower stock.
MayRight.
JohnI could not find the handguards.
MayYeah.
JohnAnd it's just.
JohnAnd I, I'm like, I want to make this period correct there.
JohnI had already cut off the ears.
JohnSo trying to find.
JohnFind those to match is just a pain in the butt, you know?
MayYeah.
MayWe were talking about a.
MayI have a.
MayI've spent years putting back together Remington Model 10 trench coat.
MayAnd I got Very lucky to find the pieces for it.
OthaisBut that has been years.
MayOh yeah, it was.
MayAnd that's like, look, I have a part time job of just looking at auctions and stuff that go by with a very keen eye.
MayAnd so it's.
MayMost people can't commit those kind of hours, like I have had to do.
OthaisRight.
JohnWell.
JohnAnd that's, that's what, that's what I love about collecting because you find things that are sporterized and you want to bring them back, but you can't.
JohnBut then you find things that are in original condition.
JohnWe were talking downstairs, I bought a Carcano, a 1918 Carcano trip special with the ladder sight.
JohnAnd I started cleaning it up and somebody had lost the original front sight and just shoved a piece of brass.
JohnAnd you know, I've got.
MayThat's at least an easy repair.
JohnYeah, it's an easy repair, but I've got like, I've got two Carcanos.
JohnI've tried to try to collect as much as I can because when you find them for a good price, that's when you, you jump on them.
JohnBut then like, even I bought a Arasaka type 99 and I'm like looking at the dates on it, trying to look it up.
JohnI'm like, please don't be a last dish.
JohnPlease don't be a last ditch.
JohnAnd I pulled it up and it's like, okay, so this happened.
JohnThis was first of the last ditch in 44 before they went to the last of the last.
JohnOkay, it's still good.
JohnAnd then trying to find ammo.
MayYeah, at least you can make that a.30 06 though.
May7.
John7.
MayYeah, 7.
May7 is easier to make than some of the other cartridges, but you're going to have to make it.
MayPayloading is huge now actually, because of.
MayYou think about it.
MayManufacturing capacity has been deeply limited by the production of primers.
MayAnd so you only have so many primers.
MayI assume that regulation around opening a new primer facility is what's really killing it.
MayBecause that is an explosive.
MayExplosive.
MayIt's not like everything's a gunpowder, you know, and you're like, no, no, no, no.
MayPrimers are sensitive.
MayThat's the tap and boom.
MaySo transporting, manufacturing all that stuff, that's the big.
OthaisThat's gotta be crazy.
MayYeah.
JohnAll right, I gotta, I gotta ask this question.
JohnOne, one from each view.
OthaisOkay.
JohnAny gun that's not produced anymore, what would you bring back?
JohnIf money was not a cost, what would?
MayTo the commercial market or for myself?
JohnFor yourself.
OthaisMyself.
OthaisI could just have it an original one.
JohnNot original or none.
JohnJust bring back and make it yours.
OthaisI would probably do a colt 1910 just so we can have the damn photography, so we could have the complete collection of the.
MayWe know where one is now.
OthaisWait, now we went.
MayWe went looking for a colt 1910.
MayAnd after we.
MayA week after the episode was in the bag, I got an email being like, hey, what's this?
MayI went, oh, my God, It's a cult 1910.
MayWhy?
MayI've spent three years looking for this and somebody asked me what it is a week after we make the episode.
MayThat made me so mad.
OthaisIt's okay.
OthaisWe're going to go out there at some point.
MayYeah.
OthaisAnd then for me personally, oh, it'd be so satisfying.
MayAlso the really crazy rarity of all the guns anyway.
OthaisWhat's that?
MayYour one that got away.
OthaisOne that got away.
MayYeah, we, we.
MayWe actually saw an auction.
MayWe might have been able to bid on it, but then we had the land stuff come up and everything.
OthaisYeah, I kind of want a tiger.
OthaisIt made an impact in more ways than one, but it, it was.
MayIt's because you're a little boy and it's the biggest gun.
OthaisIt was the biggest gun.
OthaisIt's the dumbest gun because it's literally just a car 98.
OthaisSomeone just went control and just like stretched it out.
OthaisAnd then that's pretty much what they have.
MayBut single shot action.
OthaisYeah.
OthaisIt's stupid and funny.
MayIt was designed as a hedge.
MayThey were trying to make an automatic version of a Maxim and they're like, well, if this takes too long, we need something in between.
MayIt's just like, okay, just make a big Mauser.
MayThey did.
MayThey just made a big Mauser.
OthaisI don't know what yours would be off the top of my head.
MayReally?
OthaisNo.
OthaisBecause I'm thinking about it and it could be something.
OthaisIt's probably a revolver.
MayThere's definitely.
OthaisIt's probably a revolver.
OthaisOh, it is.
MayI can't.
MayI can't say what I'd actually want because then somebody else might find it.
MayBut that's the problem when it gets down to, like, there's one or two known that are floating out there, but they're unknown.
MayIt's one of those things, like, I know what it is.
MayThere's a number of firearms I've found that nobody's looking for.
MayAnd then we do an episode and everybody's like, that was a thing.
MayAnd you're like, yeah, it turns out that was a thing.
MayAnd there's a few Little pieces that fall into the cracks that I'm looking for from very obscure countries that hopefully I'll just find them and I could have them.
MayBut in the meantime, I will say what I would love to get my hands on is like a Fedorov optimat to actually shoot, because that is a very interesting.
MayIt's the right crux of interesting, obscure, and yet really well known.
MaySo it's hard to find.
MayThere's only a couple of examples, as a matter of fact.
MayThe one that supposed.
MayThere's supposedly one in the US that was part of, I believe, the Aberdeen collection that has just gone missing.
MayIn terms of all the curators I know, everybody that I've made contact with, no one knows where that gun went.
OthaisThat's in grandpa's basement.
MayAnd yet it was known to be an inventory in the US at some point.
MayAnd I'm like, can I get my hands on that?
MayIt's like.
OthaisOr Grandpa's bunker.
MayNobody knows where it went.
MaySo I'm probably gonna have to go to Russia to lay hands on one.
MayAnd I doubt that that's gonna happen anytime soon with the way things are.
MayAnd I'd love to shoot one just because it is sort of a first for a lot of things.
MayIt also has extremely, extremely bizarre lock work.
MayThere is.
MayIf anybody wants to see it, There is a YouTube channel in Russian that just did a video with an author named Chumak.
OthaisYeah, you did just.
MayChumac is a wonderful writer on Russian firearms history because he doesn't.
OthaisIt's all in Russian.
MayReading about Russian firearms history has always been difficult because it's so politicized.
MayAnd this guy sort of cut through a lot of that, and he's actually gotten down to the.
MayThe bare bones of why.
MaySo after doing CNR channel for, like almost 10 years, I finally found a man who just recently wrote a book like a year ago on the mosins that actually explains why the mosin is the way it is.
MayBecause I couldn't.
MayIn English, there was no answer.
MayPeople would say stuff, but it was observational.
MayIt wasn't causal.
MayYou know, it wasn't like, here's the why.
MayIt was just sort of, this is the what.
MayAnd so this guy finally gives me the why.
MayAnd I go, oh, my God, that makes so much more sense.
OthaisThere's a man over in Russia that you love and he has no idea.
MayYeah.
MayAnd I really hate to do this because I can't remember the exact name of the channel.
MayIt's like either Hex Tactical or Hexagon Tactical.
MayIt's, it's something like that, but it's a Russian channel.
MayI'll.
MayI apologize.
MayI'll just tell you later so that you can put in the notes or something.
MayBut they do take a part of Fedorov in detail.
MayThat's right.
MayAnd unfortunately it's all English.
MayIt's in Russian, but you can put the subtitles to English and I'd love to get a hold of one to do a proper animation on it.
MayProper teardown.
OthaisSo make Bruno cry.
MayActually, it wouldn't be that bad.
MayIt's, it's, it's fairly sensible gun.
MayIn, in some ways it just, it didn't last.
OthaisYeah.
JohnBut now the next question that I've got for both of you is who, what gun inventor or what gun was made before its time and if it was made today, it would do well.
MayOh, today, yeah.
JohnIf it was made to.
OthaisIn general, today's technology though.
JohnYeah.
MayI don't know, I feel like you could say it before it's time.
MayDefinitely.
MayI can name a couple.
MayBut to be fair, all of it would exist by today.
MaySo I can't really say because now we know.
MayRight.
MayWe've either ignored it or not.
MayYou, you could.
MayI guess that would be a different question of like what's the most underappreciated thing but the.
MayWho was the most ahead of their time.
OthaisThere were some triple action revolvers that were done all the way back.
OthaisYeah, yeah.
MayPre Civil War, the Beaumont was a pretty smart gun, but it couldn't keep up with itself, I would say.
MayActually it's, there's a number of like piston operated mitrailleuse, sort of mechanical, like the Gatling gun kind of thing.
JohnYeah.
MayBut there was a number of guys.
MayMaxim's the most famous, but there's guys trying to do self loading technology before smokeless.
MayAnd so smokeless became this big thing.
MaySo it's kind of hard to pin it down to one design because there's actually like, there's like 20, 30 years of people knowing how to make a machine gun, but they can't technologically because black powder is just gumming it up.
MaySo they could make some cool stuff, but it would jam up after like 50 or 100 rounds or 200 rounds, which is still not enough for a machine gun.
MaySo it's hard to pin it down to one design because of that.
MayBut boy, the number of people that had machine guns figured out before the powder technology caught up is absolutely wild.
MayAnd a lot of people don't understand this Smokeless powder Did not happen overnight in the sense that somebody just invented smokeless powder.
MayI've locked on his name.
MayLaBelle.
MayLaBelle cooked up a method for observing the detonation of the powder and the pressure curve from the powder over time.
MaySo before it's like, oh, we put it in a case, we squeeze it down, we light it off, it goes boom.
MayThis is how much boom we get.
MayAnd he managed to ascribe the boom over time.
MaySo you get, you know, sharp initial boom, and then the pressure falls, or you get, like, heavy.
MayYou know, you get light pressure at the beginning, and there's a spike in the middle, but then you have this sort of falling pressure.
MayThe point is, he could track the curve of the pressure in the chamber, and then that allowed him to rapidly run through a bunch of combinations of, like, nitrocellulose and stuff like that.
MayAnd it let him sort of hone in.
MayAnd he did what would have taken another 50 to 100 years inside of, like, months.
MayAnd then, boom, you get.
MaySo we were always trending to smokeless powder because we were making powders more efficient.
MayBut we were doing this sort of by the trial and error.
MayAnd then all of a sudden, he could just rapidly isolate segments of it, and then, boom.
MayOvernight, you do this rapid advancement because you can now observe what you're doing right.
MaySo.
JohnWell, that bring.
JohnThat brings up a good.
JohnAnother good question, because you guys deal with so much throughout the years.
JohnWhat caliber should be brought back?
JohnThere's dead now.
MayOh, I have deep opinions on this.
OthaisYou do have a lot of deep intermediary cartridges.
JohnWe see a lot of cartridges like.
JohnLike what?
JohnThere's cartridges that you could argue like, okay, it's seven.
JohnSeven Japanese.
JohnIt's six.
JohnFive Creedmore kind of thing, sort of.
MayIt's like a three or three rimless.
MayBut, yeah.
Othais35 Remington.
MayBut it's still around technically, but I think it's underappreciated.
MayYeah, I agree.
MayMay and I are big fans of 35 Remington as a North American game cartridge.
OthaisAnd also, like, it's pretty dang decent.
MayIt's just weird because, like, everybody's pushing.300 blackout and stuff.
MayAnd I know why.
MayBecause it's the whole sporty Smith and Wesson again.
MayLike, I make people mad.
MayI'm like, 300 blackout is the.40 Smith and Western of Ars.
MaySorry.
MayLike, you just.
MayYou're just trying to get away with the same manufacturing, only unlike.40 Smith & Wesson, you can cause some severe problems with that car.
OthaisYou can.
MayIt's like, even even when they did.338 special, they're like they tried to make it so that you couldn't put it in a.38 Smith & Wesson.300 blackout just sends it, you know.
MayBut the, the one I favor.
MayOh God.
MayMy blind just went blank on this for a second.
MayI had it right in my head.
MayNo, it's actually the other, the other sort of turn of the century.
MayWell, early automatic cartridge.
MayI don't know that I specifically would say I want.
May351 Winchester back, specifically that cartridge.
MayBut I think that's the gap in the market right now.
MayAnd I think a lot of that actually comes down to the nfa.
OthaisWhat do you mean gap in the market?
MayWe have.
MayWe need a sort of.30 35 caliber intermediate cartridge that is not quite throwing it because in the current market we have seven.
May60 by 39 is sort of the closest to that.
MayBut it's still.
MayIf you shoot AK pistols, you know.
MayYou know what I mean?
MayIt's still not exactly what you'd want out of it.
MayBut it's sort of a.
MayWe've really become obsessed with pistol caliber carbines.
MayBut pistol caliber carbines are a little too pip squeaky.
JohnRight.
MayAnd then you go up to a full intermediate and it's like this is a little bit hot and we need the locking action.
OthaisSo you're just looking for something that's solid in the middle.
MayYeah, I think if you had sort of, you know, if you have like a radial delay or a roller delay and you have a sub sub 76235 caliber like if it's going a little slower but it's a little beefier.
MayThat being a sort of a man slapper or even for a lot of game is going to be great.
MayIt's going to be pretty flexible for moderate game and human targets.
MayWhich is what people tend to think of as in terms of defensive.
MayI think.
OthaisI think I'd say that's moderate game.
MayI like pistol caliber carbines, but I feel like we're missing just a little bit something and people like it.
MayPeople like.30 carbine.
MayYou know, people love M1 carbines.
MayLove them to death.
MayWhere's that energy?
MayYou know what I mean?
MayWhere's this sort of like better than pistol but not quite rifle cartridge.
MayIt sort of vanished.
MayWe don't have one in that category right now that I can think of.
JohnThe only one I can think of.
JohnNo, because it's not even that because technically 350 legend would be more of a more of a 9 mil maxim kind of.
MayYeah, but I mean it could be applied that way, but nobody's.
MayYou don't see it.
MayYou're not going to PSA and getting something chambered in that for like 700 bucks.
JohnRight.
MayI feel like the market could stand to have a.
MayPersonally, I get a lot of flak because I like the Celtic sub 2000.
MayThere's problems with, with it.
MayThere's problems with it.
MayI've broken one before.
MayBut conceptually this sort of fold away, efficient blowback design is great.
MayAnd if you could get something like that that had just a little bit of a delay in it and a slightly more powerful cartridge that you could displace, say a service rifle sized thing, then for most people in a home defense scenario, that and some hollow point, something that's compatible with hollow point two would be really good.
MayThen in a home defense scenario you're looking pretty good.
MayBut I think we've sort of, we're sort of geared to think in terms of either rifle, carbine or pistol.
MayAnd then we already have our categories for that because we derive all of them from.
MayThis is another thing is these days we derive a lot of our civilian cartridges from the military.
MayWhereas before it used to be the other way around.
MayThe civilian market would create cartridges and the military would sort of look at them and either adapt them or make their own.
MayNow we tend to think in terms.
MayMost of the guys out there that are shooting are shooting 9 mil Parabellum, they're shooting, you know, NATO cartridges, they're shooting, you know, Soviet cartridges that have held over.
MayAnd we're starting to see it.
MayWe're starting to see, you know, you just said legends.
MayPeople are starting to wildcat again.
MayBut it's more individually driven instead of business driven.
MayYou don't have any companies trying to do, I mean not, I mean not none.
MayBut you don't see this big market.
OthaisThing where like there's no big market push for it.
MayYeah, you'd have to see like it'd be the equivalent of Glock coming out with like 35 Glock all of a sudden.
MayBut that's what they used to do.
MayThey used to just come out with their own cartridge.
JohnWhat about like 30 super carry?
MayThat's new.
MayThat's actually, I mean, that's.
MayI mean we can compare it to previous cartridges like everybody likes to do, but that is actually a new concept.
MayI don't know that everybody was that like people got kind of into it for a second.
MayBut then I think every kind of backed off because I don't know, that had the utility point we thought, because 9 millimeter subcompacts are actually doing pretty well right now.
JohnYeah.
JohnAnd I mean the only thing I can think of when they came out with that was, okay, you're trying to hit a market where you can't sell military cartridges.
MayRight.
JohnThat's, that's, that made the most sense to me.
JohnAnd it just didn't seem to kind of take off from where it was.
MayThis also kind of touches on what we started to say before.
MayRemember I said primers are sort of the limiting factor for ammo production.
MayWhat we've seen is.
MayI was trying to say at that point we don't see people reproducing the old ammo anymore because why would, why would they.
OthaisYeah, it's not worth the money.
MayYou have to stop your manufacturer for.
OthaisHours to then change out the dies and everything.
MayYeah, right.
MayAnd then you start producing it.
MayWell, in those hours, how many thousands of dollars did you lose?
MayBecause you have pre sold every 762 NATO cartridge you've made for the next 10 years.
MayIt's all pre sold on contract.
OthaisYeah.
MaySo we're going to take down the 762 NATO making machine to make 77 Japanese that will sell at what rate?
MayFor what dollar amount?
MaySo.
MayAnd everybody's mad because like why does it cost me 40 bucks a box?
MayAnd you're going because they gave up several hours of just money printer to make like subsidized money printer.
JohnYou know, there's one cartridge that I want to come back and take off.
MayWhat's that?
JohnYeah, 762 Tokarev.
JohnThat's in a modern pistol.
MayTalking about 30 Mauser Plus P.
MayYeah, exactly.
JohnBut in a modern pistol.
JohnSo when I, when I got my Tok river, you know, you do a bunch of research on ammo and things like that.
JohnAnd then I think it was a company out of China was shipping them to Canada, only it was P226 clones and 762 tokeras.
MayOh yeah, yeah.
JohnAnd I was like, I want one.
JohnAnd then you're like, I can't get one because of import restrictions and nonsense.
MayOur animator has a.
MayOh, good lord.
MayIs it a Bernadelli?
MayIt's a very steeply raked 70s 1970s era.
MayI want to say it's a wonder nine.
MayI want to think it's a single double.
OthaisI can't remember.
MayIt's.
MayIt's a modern handgun, slide operated, that runs 30 Luger, I believe.
MayAnd.
MayOh my God, is that so fun to shoot.
JohnWell, I believe.
MayAnd I would bank on it.
MayI would bank on like 30 Luger is not as good as 9 in some ways, but I still like in terms of recoil and on target and just dumping rounds and I think have beautifully swept grip and everything.
MayAwesome.
MaySo I could see the same thing.
MayBut to be fair, you could.
MayI guess that's what they're trying to do with the 30.
MaySupercare is the same concept, but I just don't think people are ready for it.
JohnWell, this brings up another question that I think is it's been bugging me and I want your opinion on this, both of you.
JohnSo we have Colt, we have Remington, you know, Browning, you know these names of gun designers.
JohnThe last big one that I can think of is Glock.
MayRight.
JohnWe don't know.
JohnWe don't have it Seems like everything's designed by committee.
JohnSo is there a name an individual.
MayFirst of all, barrier to entry is huge.
JohnYeah.
MayAnd this is legislatively too if you think about it, because I talked to a lot of firearms guys.
MaySo I actually came up with a firearms concept based on something I've seen in history that hasn't come back around I think needs to be done.
MayAnd I don't want to say too much about it because I would like my friend to be able to work on it before going to market.
MayBut we haven't done NDA.
OthaisBut yeah, we prefer to try.
MayYeah, yeah, no, it's.
MayLet him have first crack at the concept.
MayBut I had an idea and I was talking to him about it and it came down to can we design it in such a way so that it is a non firearm and therefore can piggyback the current firearms market.
MayBecause the minute it becomes a firearm, what do we have to do so much.
MayAnd I think that's a big part of it.
MayAnd so because of these sort of legislative.
MayNot only it's, there's, there's the law and then there's the fear of the law and then there's the fear lawsuit.
MayAnd so I think it drives a lot of engineers into working for the bigger companies.
MayAnd then when the engineers work for the bigger companies instead of launching their own insane madhouse ideas on their own, they get where they're sort of anonymized.
OthaisWell, they're also, they're not having to front a bunch of money themselves to get all set up to be able to do that stuff.
OthaisThe company's paying for everything for them.
OthaisSo it's making convenient.
OthaisOh look, it's so convenient.
OthaisYou can make all these ideas for us.
MayEven if you're an innovator for that company, they don't want to put you on the front face of it because they're trending on their old name.
MayRight.
MayAnd so they're going, well, we don't.
MayWe don't want to put Randy on the face of everything, because if Randy leaves us, then we're screwed.
MayYou know?
MaySo a derivative of Glock would be Bubbit's.
MaySo he designed what is the Steyr M9, which is.
MayOr the M.
MayWhatever.
MayBecause the L9.
MayThe S9.
MayGod.
MaySteyer.
MayGive it a name.
MayI think he want.
MayI think I read that he wanted to call it, like, the Draconi, and they wouldn't let.
OthaisOh, that sounds cool, right?
MayHe likes.
MayI think he likes mythical creatures, but he did the Caracal as well, and the BB tech, I believe there's a couple of guns, and they're all fairly innovative handguns, but they kind of went to.
MayFirst of all, he took the M9 to Steyr, and Steyr did not push that pistol, which is actually a very smart pistol in a lot of ways, but they're not pushing it.
MaySo it doesn't.
MayNobody does industry coverage of the Steyr M9, like, because they don't.
MayThey don't play the game, and they don't get out there in front of everybody, and they almost seem reluctant to sell it.
JohnWell, they're not even owned by themselves anymore.
MayYeah, it's all.
JohnOr rx, whatever you want to call them.
MaySo, like, I would say Bubbitz is a good modern inventor, but then who.
MayWhat, you don't see them putting them out front?
OthaisI honestly, I didn't know that name until you said it just now.
MayYeah, I might be getting it wrong, to be honest with you.
MayI don't.
MayI hope I'm not offending.
JohnI mean, George Colgren, maybe.
MayOh, yeah.
MayBut see, Kel Tec runs itself, which is good.
MayHe branded on himself.
MayBut then I'm trying to think of, does he individually say that I invented each of these pieces, or do you say Kel Tec does now?
MayBecause how much of it is Kelgren himself now got him saying, like, what's.
MayI'm not entirely sure what Kellgren did himself versus who else at this point, with some of the designs, they've come out more recently.
MayI'm not sure, because they tend to.
OthaisAnonymize how much of it is him and how much of it was extra parts from other people assisting.
MayYeah, I mean, to Be fair.
MayI have a friend that's involved in the accessories market and also is a quiet firearms designer who does it on license for other companies.
MaySo you never know.
MayThere's.
MayI can name five companies that have sold his firearms, but you wouldn't know they're all from him.
MayThey're in different companies.
MayAnd it'd be nice if he could trade on his name, but he's NDA'd out, and that's how they do their payments for whatever, and it's all obscured.
MaySo it's just the way the market works now, I guess.
JohnI mean, and that's sad, though, to me.
JohnThat's sad that you don't.
JohnBecause we have all these legendary gun designers.
JohnYou know the name.
JohnYou know the Samuel Colts.
JohnLike, you know the John Moses Brownings.
JohnYou know all these legendary names, and now you just don't.
OthaisThe company's also protecting themselves with that because the individual, let's say they have some political affiliation.
MayI mean, you can look at Browning's history.
MayYou understand?
MayOh, God.
MayLike, because when he stopped working with Winchester, it was a disaster.
JohnOh, yeah.
MaySo it would have been smart for Winchester to never let anybody know that he was the man behind it all.
MayBut luckily, he thought to put his own name on it as part of his contracts.
MayYou know what I mean?
MayIt's like Browning's patent.
MayThey led with it, but now I think they're a little more savvy than that.
MayI don't think they want you to know who's doing their inventing work, so.
JohnWhich is.
JohnI just find that sad.
JohnLike, I don't know.
MayIt is.
MayBut it's self protection, though.
MayThey don't want their designer walking out and causing.
MayAlso, to be fair, we have a very reactionary society now.
MaySo if your lead designer goes out and does something that nobody agrees with, then all of a sudden you're in hot water.
MaySo if nobody knows who the designer is, then he can go get arrested or charged with whatever.
MayHe could say whatever bigoted thing he wants, you know?
MayNot that I know is a bigot, but, like, it's weird, but if you think about it as a company, it must be scary to say, like, you know, if Randy over there gets a head injury and just starts yelling about, you know, conspiracies, we're going to catch so much flack, right?
JohnOr if you ever find out who redesigned the R51.
JohnI really wanted to love that.
JohnI really did.
MayYeah.
MayIt didn't.
JohnIt didn't.
MayI had a buddy that was actually.
MayWe were Talking about him before.
MayHe runs a little channel called Phoenix Fart.
MayHe was deep into that gun, and that was such a disappointment.
JohnOh, I got really deep into it.
JohnI.
JohnI bought one and I.
JohnI'm probably the only person who put like, 2, 000 rounds to that gun.
MayNo, no, he did, too, I'm sure.
OthaisOh, yeah, he probably did.
JohnI really wanted to love it.
MayHe, like, sent his back and everything and got it tuned up.
JohnOh, I.
JohnI did the same thing.
JohnI sent it back, got tuned up, still ran into issues.
JohnThey sent new magazines.
JohnIt's like, now.
JohnI can't blame anybody because they don't exist under the.
MayI was kind of offended by that gun.
MayNot because of the internal problems.
MayThat's its own issue.
MayI did not like the slick grips.
MayIt just felt too smooth.
MayI'm going.
MayI thought we moved into texturing because I deeply.
MayI like painful texturing.
MayLike the.
OthaisIt's true.
OthaisThe most aggressive checkering you can have.
MayThe Steyr M9A2s with their, like, modular grip stuff.
MayFeels great to me.
MayLike, anything that hurts.
MayI mean, just the more aggressive, the better.
OthaisTo remind him of one person who.
JohnWanted, like, the sandpaper from Smith and Wesson on the.
MayI've got a CZ75 compact with G10 scales on it that are just.
MayMost people will pick them and be like, ah, God, how can you shoot this?
MayI'm going.
MayIt doesn't move when I shoot.
MayWho cares if it feels a little pinchy?
MayLike, when I shoot, my hands don't slide.
JohnI.
MayWhen I.
MayWhen I reach to draw, I'm on it.
MayThere's no.
OthaisWe also do come from the Charleston humidity, so we are used to cover being covered in sweat all the time.
OthaisIt doesn't go anywhere.
OthaisIt doesn't evaporate.
OthaisIt stays with you.
OthaisSo you need the texture.
JohnI live in the desert.
JohnI don't have that problem.
OthaisOh, yeah.
OthaisYou can leave your bag of chips open.
JohnYeah.
OthaisAnd not care.
MayNo, I can't even.
MayMine go.
MayMy chips go bad if I open them every time I reach in there.
OthaisYeah.
JohnOurs just goes stale real fast.
JohnIt's about it.
JohnBecause there's no humidity.
OthaisOurs just gets soggy.
MayYeah, soggy.
OthaisEverything just gets soggy.
MayEverything gets soggy.
MayEverything's covered in mold.
OthaisWe are.
MayDid you.
MayYou stop.
MayYou stop scrubbing the outside of your house down here for like, a week?
MayAnd it.
MayIt's reclaimed by nature.
OthaisAnd the way to work, in the sweat, too, in the heat.
OthaisYou have to learn how to operate differently in this Charleston.
JohnIt's the same thing in the Arizona desert.
JohnYou go there and you're just like, okay, I'm good.
JohnIt's a great day.
OthaisIt turns out you should been drinking the water.
JohnYour body's just like, okay, you're done.
MayWe had that.
MayWe had Ian over.
MayAnd it's so funny comparing notes, because out in the desert, it's like, if you just.
MayIf you can keep the sun off you and you can keep hydrating, you can keep going.
JohnOh, yeah, sure.
MayAnd we were trying to tell him.
MayI was like, I know you think, you know this heat.
MayStop jogging.
MayYou know, it has to be like, just stop jogging.
MayAnd he's like, what do you mean?
MayI was like, your sweat is.
MayBecause eventually he realized.
MayHe's like.
MayBecause he's having to wipe sweat off.
MayHe's like, it's not evaporating.
MayI was like, right.
MayWe're at 98% humidity.
MayThere's nowhere for it to go.
MayIt won't evaporate.
MayYou're not cooling off, period.
MayThere's no cooling off.
MayYour temperature cannot be.
MayYou can hydrate all you want.
MayThe temperature won't go down.
MayYou know, we get the thing of, like, lazy Southerners.
MayAnd it's like, well, hold on.
MayBecause once you jog and your body temperature rises, you can't get it back down until you find shade or water or something and.
OthaisOr ac.
MayYeah, well, now ac.
MaySo, yeah, you gotta.
MayYou gotta pace yourself.
MaySo it's funny, but, you know, it might look like I'm.
MayThe younger guys will go out with me sometimes because they don't.
MayThey're not as outdoor oriented, even if they're from here, you know, And I'll go out, and I'm 40 now, and I'm just.
MayI'm just walking around and they're hustling, and they think they're out running me.
MayAnd then within three hours, they're.
MayThey're.
MayI mean, they're lucky the last three hours.
OthaisOh, yeah.
MayAnd then I'm on hour six still just walking, and I'll just.
MayI'll bury them by just wandering my butt around, because I know how to pace what we're doing in this heat.
MaySo.
JohnYeah, well, the.
JohnLike, Ian said, you don't.
JohnIn the desert, you don't sweat because everything just evaporates.
JohnSo when I go out and film and shoot, like, you'll go from like.
JohnLike, I'm really good.
JohnIt's a good day, drinking water, and the next thing.
JohnNext minute, you know, you're just like, oh, oh, I'm done.
OthaisLike, I don't feel bad.
OthaisI feel bad.
OthaisSit down.
MayYeah, I've heard.
MayI've heard horror stories about some of the guys out there taking, like, Californians out for industry work and just being like, oh, my God, this guy might actually die because he didn't remember to drink water while we were working.
OthaisDid he bring a single bottle?
OthaisThat's 24 liters only, or 24.
JohnOh, yeah.
JohnI bring four or five water jugs just to stay hydrated.
MayAnd you're just like, oh, I'm so under.
MayI would die.
MayBecause, I mean, I'll take one water, like, one bottle of water, and it'll last me almost half a day.
OthaisRemember that one time, even in the.
MayHeat here, because it's like, well, I'm not.
MayIt's not going anywhere.
OthaisOur first film session, we were really stupid.
OthaisAnd we didn't realize that the weather was cooperating with us and making us believe that we didn't need water or food.
OthaisWe were fine.
OthaisThe very next time, we went out, blistering sun.
OthaisWe were stupid, didn't ride any water.
MayThe first test footage we did outdoors was overcast, so it looked great.
MayAnd then we went out to film.
MayFilm our second session.
MayAnd we went.
MayEverything looks like, what is going on?
MayOh, God, the sun is bad.
MaySo now we've had.
MayWe did this last week.
OthaisYeah.
MayPartially cloudy days are the worst.
JohnOh, yeah.
MayBecause you sit there and you just.
MayYou go, okay.
MayAm I filming in highlight?
MayOkay, get all the cameras adjusted.
MayHit record.
MayBecause we run, like, five.
MayWe run a bank of, like, five cameras.
MayYep.
MayAnd then you hit record and the cloud comes over and you're like, crap.
MayBecause now it's just pitch black in there.
MayAnd now the cloud's better.
MaySo you end up playing this game of, like, watching.
MayI'm gonna have holes in my retinas.
MayCause I just watched the sky waiting for a big cloud.
MayAnd I go, big cloud, big cloud.
MayHit record.
MayAnd, like, hit record.
MayShe gotta run through the whole scenario under one cloud.
MayOr maybe we have to stop in the middle and then wait for another cloud to finish filming.
OthaisYeah.
OthaisWe try to make our segments look as consistent as possible, but sometimes it's more than one segment.
JohnOh, yeah.
MayYeah.
JohnAnd between ISOs and ND filters, your friend real quickly.
MayYeah.
MayI feel.
MayI think other guys are just running auto.
MayThey just let it run auto and I can't.
MayContinuous auto never plays right.
JohnOr does it?
JohnDoesn't look great at all.
MayNo.
MaySo we use.
MayWe use, like, four cameras to capture four or five cameras, depending on what we're doing to capture everything May's doing.
OthaisYep.
MayWe run.
MayWe were talking about this before the show.
MayWe run four layers of stereo, so eight channels of sound.
MaySo we have, like, a lavalier on her hip that's set fairly sensitively to pick up the clicks and pops.
MayYep.
MayWe have two shotgun mics set further back to catch the sound of the firearms.
MayBoom.
MayWe have an omni mic that's sort of set for average human hearing that's just sitting there picking up the boom as you and I would normally hear it.
MayAnd then we have a.
MayAnother omni mic that's set up that is dialed way, way down.
MaySo it's very insensitive.
MayLike, you have to get.
MayYou'd have to scream into it to get it to really hear you, but it's picking up that round sort of top of the crack of the gun.
MayAnd so if you ever watch, like, a CN Arsenal shooting video, we've gotten tons of compliments on the sound because it sounds much more like a real firearm.
OthaisAnd actually, we've been doing that since.
OthaisSince probably episode six or seven.
MayYeah.
MayWe've got it designed so that it basically, as one mic caps out, another mic, starts collecting data, and then that way we have the full sound of the gun going off.
OthaisIt's beautiful.
JohnYeah.
JohnI learned a lot about audio and realized, like, if you've ever filmed and then you're like, oh, this audio sounds awful.
JohnI really wish I ran a backup.
JohnYou know what I'm talking.
OthaisThat's also the cameras, actually, Weirdly, sometimes we're like, I wish we had a sixth camera sometimes.
MayYeah, Generally.
MayGenerally we have four.
MayEvery once in a while we have a fifth.
OthaisSo we can't waste ammunition.
OthaisWe can't be, like, someone running around with a single camera.
OthaisThis area, this area.
OthaisThis.
OthaisNo, no, no.
OthaisWe capture it all at once.
MayWe have to get it all set up.
MayWe have to wait for the light to be right, and then we.
MayI have to go around, turn everything on, focus at everything, get it all ready, and then turn it off, because they'll cook in the sun.
JohnOh, yeah.
MayAnd then I have to sit there and wait until we get the right moment, and then I run around and turn them all on.
MayAnd then I have to do a back check, too, just to make sure they're actually recording.
MayBecause you never know.
MayYou.
MayYou turn it on, you go to the next camera, and then it has a memory card error or something.
MaySo I actually.
MayI'll sit there.
MayEvery time I rhyme to myself, I'll go one.
MayLike, I'll set them all up, one, two.
MayAnd then we have two audio channels to record on.
MaySo I'll go buckle shoe.
MayAnd then camera three and four.
MayAnd then if I have a fifth one, I'll be like, all right, shut the door.
MayAnd then I'll do sing the rhyme back again the other way just to make sure they're all recorded.
OthaisJust him checking.
MayAnd it's like.
MaySo that takes.
MayI mean, yeah, that's like 30 seconds of running around for a second, you know, and then she starts doing her thing and it's over in less than five minutes, hopefully.
MayAnd then we.
OthaisLess than five minutes.
OthaisWhat am I doing?
JohnSo we normally I run three cameras.
JohnI set up the one time we were filming.
JohnI set up a shot, B shot, and then I got this dope angle on C.
JohnI'm like, cool, this is going to time up perfectly.
JohnSomehow it got set to slow mo.
JohnSo the whole day it was just all slow mo footage from this dope angle.
JohnI'm like, great.
MayHow much data was that?
OthaisHad to be a ton.
JohnThat's the harder one of data.
JohnAnd I was like, why?
JohnWhy is like, the camera all full?
JohnWhat is happening?
JohnAnd that's when we found out everything was run slow.
MayWe run into that problem too with data because everybody, like, we have so much data because all of our photos, all of a video, we run a big nas.
MayAnd then I don't really want to cloud store all that stuff.
OthaisNope.
MaySo I have to have a second nas on a different location and sync it to the first nas.
MayLike, it's a whole mess.
MayI.
MayI come from a technology background, thank God.
OthaisSo, oh, yeah.
MayI.
MayThat's how the show exists is because I basically came from a technology background.
MayI was like, I guess I'm gonna learn how to film and animate and edit and all this other stuff, and I'm gonna have to learn.
OthaisAnd then I learned what I could from him and YouTube.
OthaisAnd then now this is what we do.
MayYeah.
MayPoor May came in and did not know this stuff.
MayAnd I was like, here's the template.
MayAnd she had to hit the ground.
OthaisAll I'm really good at is being a bulldozer.
OthaisThat.
OthaisThat's.
OthaisI'm gonna say that's consistently.
OthaisI am an excellent bulldozer.
OthaisIf you put me on a task, I will go and go.
OthaisI'll forget to eat and drink water along the way, but I will just not go until the task is complete.
JohnThat's shot show.
JohnI'm a bulldozer.
JohnLike, I'll go.
JohnMy boss, the co host, Kaylee, who normally is here with us, she's.
JohnShe wasn't doing well today.
JohnI set up meetings for shot show, and I'm a bulldozer.
JohnI'm like, I will take a meeting whenever I can.
JohnShe goes, did you look at the locations before you took this meeting?
JohnI'm like, no, I'm taking a meeting.
JohnOh, you should see a meeting.
JohnAnd she goes, you have to drive.
Othais30 minutes that way, an hour.
JohnShe goes, what the heck are you doing?
JohnI'm like, well, we're on the main floor.
JohnWe got to go to Caesar's next.
JohnAnd then we got to come back to the main floor.
JohnAnd then we did like 20 miles just on the floor.
JohnAnd she's like, why did you set it up that way?
JohnI'm like, because I'm.
MayWe got to get done.
JohnWe're getting it done.
MayWe've done this.
MaySo the same.
MaySame thing.
MayWe.
MayOur big show is usually like, Louisville, because that's a big collector show.
MayAnd in Louisville, every third person talks to me, so I end up meeting hundreds of people and wandering around, which is weird for me.
MayThe first time we went to Louisville was insane because we're in South Carolina.
MayYouTube caught on a little late here.
MayPeople were more outdoor oriented.
MayThere's not as many old gun guys necessarily, and if they are, I can.
OthaisCount on probably just two hands.
OthaisHow many times I've been recognized in.
MaySouth Carolina even today?
MayYeah, well, it depends.
MayGun shows are slightly different outside.
MayOutside of a gun show, I've only been recognized, like, 10 times in this state.
MayYeah, I will go to even, like, Virginia and just get recognized out, you know, just randomly.
MayI mean, I've probably been recognized in Virginia 30 times, and I haven't even been to Virginia about three times in 10 years.
MayBut then we at the South Carolina gun shows, everybody already knew me before the show.
MayI already was that guy that wandered around, talked to everybody.
MaySo almost no one that's a vendor thinks anything of me as a slate.
MayEvery once in a while, once a year, one of them figures out what YouTube is and goes, you got people following.
MayLike, all of a sudden they're like, yeah.
OthaisOne of them saw the Patterson video the other day, and they went, oh, man, I saw you on that video.
MayEven though we probably told him 20 times.
MayYeah.
OthaisAnd they were like, yeah, yeah, sure.
MayNow that the younger guys are finally coming around, like, the zoomer generation came in.
MayEvery once in a while, I get recognized by zoomers, but that's really about It.
OthaisThey're interesting.
MayAnd that's at the gun show.
MayMy favorite is, did you ever.
MayI don't know the Gundies.
MayDid you hear our whole Gundy debacle?
MayThat's a great.
MaySo we went to the Gundy's that one year, and nobody knew who we.
OthaisWere except they were, like, so confused.
MayThe only people that knew us were guys that already kind of knew us because Brandon Herrera's from around here, so he knew who we were.
MayAnd then I kind of know.
MayI know at least one of his dirty secrets.
MaySo I sneaked up on him, so now he really knows me.
MayBut he won't forget you.
MayHe's a Southern boy, so we knew him.
MayIsh.
MayYou know what I mean?
MayAnd then I had Ian with me.
MayI made Ian McCollum come with me and Matt Larosier from Fud Busters, which is the best combination because Ian is a very.
MayLike, when it comes to public handling, he's a very center of the road, don't make waves, calm kind of guy.
OthaisWhich is pretty good going.
MayMatt and I are chaos agents.
MayLike, we're both.
MayWe're both Floridians in every sense of the word.
MayI often say to people that Florida is America's PVP zone.
MayIt is.
MayIt's like PvP and PvE.
MayBut we.
MayThere's this thing.
MayI keep running into other Floridians out there, and we have this like.
MayLike 80s and 90s Floridians have this manic.
OthaisIf you say the word likewise one more time, I'm going to staple your mouth shut.
MayWe have this manic energy around negotiation and fun.
MayAnd I actually was talking to a friend of mine about this.
MayAnybody that grew up with this, this is why Florida people are the way they are.
MayWhen we grew up as kids, it was the DARE program.
MayDon't do drugs, right?
MayBut every adult around us, like Uncle Ted or whatever, was on cocaine.
MayThey're all using coke, but we're told, okay, you got to keep up with that guy.
MayAnd they don't tell us he's on cocaine.
MayThey just tell us that's how it is.
MaySo don't do drugs, but keep up with him.
MaySo what do we do?
MayWe develop this mania about, like, work and, like, focus, and everything's up for negotiation because it's very good.
OthaisI've heard all those likes, right?
OthaisI'm just teasing.
MayYeah.
MaySo we go.
MayWe're very aggressive in this weird, friendly, friendly, aggressive way.
OthaisIt's true.
MayAnd we like chaos.
MayWe're completely fine with things that make other people uncomfortable.
MaySo it's us with Ian.
MayWe stuck him in the back of the.
MayFor the event.
MayFor the Gundy's, you go to this hotel, they put you in a bus and drive you, like, 45 minutes to the event.
OthaisYeah.
MayAnd we put Ian in the middle of the back.
MayAnd then Matt and I start trying to sing sea shanties.
MayAnd it's.
MayIt's causing people to be upset.
MayExcept for.
MayI think Herrera was the only one that joined us.
MayEverybody else is.
MayThey don't know any sea shanties.
MaySo Matt larosi is egging them on.
MayAnd so we're winding everybody up.
MayWe're making them irritated.
MayThey have no clue who we are.
MayAnd it's actually really funny because I think most of them are like, Instagram guys or whatever.
MayI think Herrera and I were the only two in the bus that had over 200,000 people at that time or something, because we were in the other bus.
MayAnd so I'm going.
MayI'm like a 500,000 user channel, which is not huge, but it's bigger than a lot of what's here.
MayBut they have no clue because we're in this little market that nobody knows about.
MaySo I'm anonymous.
MayNo one at the entire event recognized me other than, like, three people.
MayYou know, it's like, I know Rapid Fire Rachel personally.
MayNot because she.
MayIt's cause her dad watches.
OthaisYeah, her dad loves ocean, so.
OthaisWell, she likes us too.
MayYeah.
MayI mean, she's friends, but.
MayAnd it's like just a handful of people knew us.
MayBut otherwise I'm completely anonymous in an environment where everybody's competing to have a quarter of the views that I have, which made me laugh.
MaySo, like, this is my perfect chaos.
MaySo by the end, we had tried to force a bus into yelling sea shanties and embarrassed Ian so bad that he avoided us for the rest of the night.
MayI got her hair to drunkenly sing a few bars of some songs that he shouldn't know.
MayAnd then you stole a golf cart for, like, half the day from the venue.
OthaisI stole a golf cart.
OthaisI found out golf cart.
MayAnd then everybody thought she worked.
MaySo May's running around and everybody there.
MayI wanted to go, think she works for the venue.
MaySo she just started playing Golf cart Taxi driver, and they think she works for the table.
OthaisI met a lot of nice instant people.
MaySingle person was like, aren't you May?
MayNo, no.
MayThey don't know who she is.
MaySo, like, we were just, I mean, pure chaos.
MayAnd on the way back, there's this Horrible drunken fight on the bus.
MaySo some woman got engaged and then.
OthaisOh, God.
MayThat she wanted to sit next to her now fiance, but they didn't have the seat openings the right way.
MaySo she arbitrarily decides this one guy has to move so they can play the shuffle game.
MayThere's some other way to solve it, but she fixates on one guy.
MayHe's like, I'm sitting with my friend.
MayI'm staying here.
MayInstead of moving on, she starts arguing with him.
MaySo now it's like a 20 minute argument in the bus.
MayAnd it's right next to Matt Larose here from Fudbusters, and he's an attorney, so he's like, no, you just need to understand that this is.
MaySo he starts trying to do like negotiation.
MayHe's like, just offer him 20 bucks.
MayAnd she's like, I'm not giving him 20 bucks.
MayAnd he's like, I'm not moving for 20 bucks.
MayHe's like, okay, 25.
MayAnd like, he's like, he's like, he's escalating this argument.
MayShe goes to throw a drink at him and ends up smacking some of it onto my animator who's behind him.
MaySo he's like, oh, great, now I'm covered in whatever.
MayAnd the whole time, rabbit fire.
MayRachel has remembered the shanties.
MayShe heard about the shanties in the morning.
MaySo she's like, I want to sing shanties at night.
MayBut nobody.
MayNow they're drunk and they don't know any shanties.
MayAnd also she doesn't want to shanties.
MayShe's like, I want to Yellow Rosa, Texas.
MayI was like, these guys are not gonna know Yellow Rose of Texas.
MayBut she's.
MayShe's in the seat in front of me and she spun around, so she's like.
MayRachel's leaned over practically in my lap, trying to like, yell in my ear so I can hear her over this, trying to get her, her.
MayThe other girl's friend's trying to get her.
MaySo now basically all the females on the bus are like pulled around where we are.
OthaisI guess technically I was there too.
MayYeah.
MayAnd you're with me.
MaySo like, all the girls are like right in the middle of the bus, in the middle of this weird, insane argument.
MayMatt and I are egging everybody on and the rest of them are going, who are these guys?
MayWhat the heck is going on?
MayThey've gathered every bit of attention on this bus and no one, like, no one can figure out who we are.
MayAnd again, I left nobody.
MayI don't think anybody Ever figured out.
MayI think there was, like, a fist fight right after the bus.
MayI mean, we wound it up so bad.
OthaisThat was interesting.
MayAnd then just peaced out.
JohnWell, I think.
JohnWhat was it?
JohnIt was IV88.
JohnThe one year I met you.
JohnI met you first and then I ran into you because.
JohnPause.
JohnDerek was talking to you.
MayYeah.
OthaisYep.
MayOh, that's her buddy.
JohnOh, he's fantastic.
OthaisI love Jeremy.
JohnI love Jeremy.
OthaisYeah.
JohnJeremy and I grew up 20 minutes from each other.
OthaisOh, my God, that's so cute.
OthaisOh, man, they're cute.
JohnYeah.
JohnBut when I go home, I'll drive down to a shop and hang out with him for a little bit and drive back home.
MayYeah.
MayHe had a baby.
JohnYeah, he's had several babies.
MayNo, but recently, I meant.
JohnYeah.
OthaisCongratulations on baby.
OthaisOh, yeah.
OthaisCongratulations on babies, people.
MayShe was here right before baby, right?
JohnYeah.
OthaisShe still had baby.
MayI think she still make friends with her on Facebook.
MayI see this stuff, but I think.
JohnShe announced the pregnancy.
OthaisShe did.
OthaisShe did some pregnancy.
MayI talked to her dad more than her.
JohnHer dad's an interesting guy.
JohnYeah, really interesting.
OthaisHer mom was really nice, too.
OthaisAnd her sister.
MaySister, Yeah.
MayI don't think I've met her poor sisters.
MayI haven't met the brother her mother, I love.
MayHer family's much more introverted than her, except for maybe her dad.
MayYeah.
MaySo her.
MayWe were having dinner with the parents, and because they just breezed, I found out I was talking to Rachel about something with the machine gun shoot, and I was like.
MayI was like, what's your dad up to?
MayAnd she's like, actually, I think he's in Charleston.
MayI went, can't call me.
MaySo then I have to go call him and be like, are we getting dinner?
MayAnd he's just like, oh, I didn't even think to call you.
MaySo I go with her dad and mom without her.
MayAnd so now we're gossiping, and she's like.
MayAnd their other daughter's very quiet and, you know, calm and not public.
MayAnd so I'm not sure what she.
OthaisThought of me when I came out.
OthaisOh, my goodness.
OthaisHello.
OthaisNice to meet you.
MaySo we're talking.
MayWe're having a great time with the parents.
MayHer mom's like, yeah, we don't know where she came from, because no one else in the family is that extroverted.
MayBefore I came on here, I had to review the podcast because you guys sent me the email.
MayI was like, oh, I haven't heard that podcast.
MaySo I went to listen to some episodes, and I was like, looking for people I knew.
MaySo I saw Liberty Doll was on here.
MayI started listening to episode.
MayImagine my surprise when I was mentioned in that episode.
MayAnd you guys did not know that I was mentioned that episode.
MayIn that episode, she said when she first moved here, she was, like, at a gun show in a group, like, five people.
MayJust, like, way later, and it was like, hey, we know who you are.
MayIt was us.
MayYeah, we were the ones.
MayThe reason we're five is because I can't go to a gun show without five people following me around now.
MaySo, like, it meant to be just me.
MayI was just gonna be like, hey, I'm.
MayI saw you moved here.
MayIf you ever need anything, I'm down in Charleston.
MayYou know, I'm.
MayI'm aware of you.
MayYou know what I mean?
MayLike, I've seen you in the industry.
MayI don't know if you watch us, but here's my contact.
MayBut the problem is it's me surrounded by people.
MayAnd she's, like, so panicked.
MayAnd I was like, oh, my God.
MayI didn't realize how small she was.
MayShe's very tiny.
OthaisShe's very tiny.
MayIt's me.
MaySo I'm just, like, hulked up to her.
MayI was like, oh, hey, Liberty Doll.
MayI'm.
MayBlah, blah.
MayAnd she's like, I guarantee you from her expression and the story she told you.
MayI started explaining who I was, and she just heard, like.
MayAnd so it's really funny because I listen to that podcast, and even before I send an email, I was like, hey, sorry for Waylay.
MaySo we actually had a conversation about her mentioning.
MayBecause I'm the jerk in the story that showed up and was just like, I know who you are.
OthaisWith a posse of five.
MayI think the other person with me that I don't even know, I don't know if she registered.
MayI think I want to say the person that was standing with me was such double lot, because he also goes to that show with me.
MaySo, like, it's like, such.
MayAnd I hang out in Greenville, so I bet you he was in that group at that time.
JohnWe need to get him on, too, at some point.
MayHim?
JohnI think they did, but we.
OthaisI think his daughter handles his contact usually.
MayYeah.
MayYeah.
JohnThere's a few people I wanted.
MayDid you need somebody respectable to reach out to him?
JohnI guess so.
JohnI don't know.
MayOkay.
OthaisSo not you.
OthaisThat would be me.
MayOh.
MayI mean, to be fair, the family loves you.
OthaisYeah.
JohnWell.
JohnAll right, we're gonna wrap up again, guys.
JohnThank you so much for being on.
JohnI've had a fun time.
JohnI got to nerd out with this awesome shock trench gun in front of me.
JohnI'm so happy that you brought this.
JohnI know we didn't play with it while we were talking, but it was.
OthaisSuch a good yelled at.
JohnOh, it's very.
JohnI was getting yelled at.
MayDo we need to.
MayDo we need to record another one of these so we can actually talk about what we're supposed to talk about?
MayWait, we're supposed to talk gun policy or something?
MayWe did.
JohnWe touched on it briefly?
MayNo, we just talked history and then gossip.
JohnOh, yeah.
JohnWell, here.
JohnHere's the.
JohnSo I am not the policy guy.
JohnI come from the industry.
JohnI'm the gun nerd of goa.
MaySo we need cable.
JohnSo Kaylee's the policy person.
MayShe should bring, like, she wants to ring your neck when she hears this.
JohnIt's okay.
JohnWell, we touched on it.
JohnWe touched on a brief bit of policy.
JohnTalking about designing new guns a little bit.
MayBut, like, if you want me to yell about the government, we can do another hour.
JohnDo another hour.
OthaisSure he can.
OthaisI'll just leave and just let you guys yell.
JohnBut yeah, appreciate.
JohnI really do appreciate you guys being on.
JohnWe will have to have you on again to do more policy talk because, I mean, we had to get the gun nerd stuff out because this would have been.
JohnShe would have gotten mad at me while I was staying here because I would just gun nerd for like an hour.
JohnBut appreciate you guys coming, really do.
OthaisThanks for having us.
JohnGuys.
JohnMake sure to, like, share and subscribe.
JohnWait, before we do that, where can people find you?
OthaisOh, my goodness.
OthaisWho are we?
MayIt's unspellable, so don't worry about it.
OthaisNo.
OthaisC and R.
OthaisS, E, N, A L is our name.
MayC and Arsenal.
OthaisC and Arsenal.
MayOr just go on YouTube and look for your favorite World War I firearm.
MayI'm sure we're in the top three recommendations on whatever it was.
OthaisGod, I would hope so.
OthaisIt's the long documentary one.
MayYeah, it's the ones that are an hour long that nobody watches because they're just like, who's got an hour to watch?
JohnMaybe one person watches if you want.
OthaisPeepaw, who doesn't know how to spell that very well.
OthaisOld gunshow.com.
MayOh, that actually is true.
MayWe did.
MayWe did grab the domain oldgunshow.com because then it will just redirect to us.
JohnYeah, I like that.
JohnThat's.
MayYeah, I forgot.
MayThank you.
OthaisOld gun show.
OthaisOld gunshow.com.
Othaiswe.
OthaisWe got that for peaw.
OthaisWho can't?
OthaisWho's having a hard time?
MaySeriously, we're having.
MayC is the worst name I ever came up with because nobody can.
OthaisWe regret that.
OthaisYou know, we did think of simpler names at the time, and we totally just went, nah, let's go for Old.
MayGun show was free.
MayWe could have just done Old Gun show and we'd have been millionaires.
OthaisBut no, now we stole the door domain.
JohnThe sad part is, I.
JohnI've looked at your logo so many times.
JohnIt took me, like, up until six months ago to figure out that was a clip from a grand.
MayNo.
MayI've learned.
JohnI thought it was a bunch of books.
MayI.
MayI was so deep.
MayIt's supposed to be a book and a Garen clip.
OthaisIt's an embank.
MayI'm too.
MayI was being too esoteric.
MayLike, I.
MayWhen I started this, I went.
MayI had all these ambitions about being highbrow.
MayAnd then I found out what people on the Internet are like.
MayAnd I would still love to do the highbrow, but unfortunately, I won't make any money.
MaySo I should have named it Old Gun show with gun Professor McBeard face.
MayAnd it would have been way easier.
OthaisLike, oh, yeah.
MayI mean, it's sad, but the.
MayJust the dumbest thing.
MaySo much better.
OthaisYeah.
JohnLike, so from now on, go to comment Gun Professor McBeard face.
MayYeah.
OthaisFat Ian, you have been called that.
MayYeah.
OthaisThat actually is unfortunate.
OthaisYeah.
MayOh, we get confused for cotton weapons all the time.
MayThe crowning achievement of my life is that we were at the Cody.
MayThere's a Winchester show in Cody.
MayAnd Ian comes up to me.
MayI'm at the little commissary that's over there, and Ian comes up to me and goes, well, I know what it's like to be you.
MayAnd I went, what are you talking about?
MayHe goes, I was talking to a nice gentleman over there.
MayHe's going on and on about how much you love the show.
MayAnd then he said, yeah, and I like the way you got that woman that shoots all the guns for you.
MayYou.
MayAnd I went, it finally happened.
MaySomebody confused Ian for me.
OthaisDid Ian look at himself, be like, did I get fat?
MayHe was so dejected about it.
MayI was like, welcome to my pain.
OthaisEverywhere, all the cars.
MayEverybody thinks I work for Ian for some reason.
JohnI mean, I feel like the guy.
JohnWho's the guy in Britain?
MayJonathan Ferguson.
JohnYeah.
JohnI feel like everyone thinks that he works for Ian, too.
MayOh, yeah.
MayTo a degree.
MayTo be actually proudly.
MayI was in the room when Jonathan Ferguson show was Invented.
MayYeah, because we were at a museum conference and we were talking about outreach, and, you know, there were some doubts in the room, and I kind of made a sales pitch about, no, no, you should be doing this kind of outreach.
MayAnd, you know, Ian backed me up on that too.
MayHe's like, yeah, you guys should be doing this kind of.
MayYou have the research.
MayYou should do it.
MayThere's no reason not to do it.
MayIt doesn't hurt us if they do it.
MayBecause it's like, if three people make a video about the Winchester, 97 people watch all three.
MayIt's not a zero sum.
MaySo it's like he went back and, like, I mean, like, eight, nine months later, they started trying to put the episodes together, and then they kind of came out the next year, and I was just like, yep, I was.
MayI definitely remember his facial expression.
MayHe's like, you know, I should really be doing that.
OthaisAnd he's done a great job.
OthaisThe whole team has.
MayWe send him snacks.
JohnI just.
MayCrap.
OthaisI still have to send him.
MayWe have.
MayWe literally have a.
MayJonathan, if you're listening, we have a box for you that's been in my house for, like.
OthaisI've tried to send it four times.
JohnHe's listening to this.
JohnI want him to come on, and I want to be friends.
JohnThat's.
JohnThat's my.
MayOh, he's.
MayHe's love.
MayI love John.
MayHe's a genuinely friendly person.
JohnI think he's.
JohnI think between all three of you guys, you guys are all my favorite people to watch because I love nerd.
OthaisNerd stuff.
MayYeah.
MayThat's a Royal Armory's channel if you want to see John.
MayYeah, he does.
MayHe's a researching curator, too, because, like, I currently am, like, eight emails deep into some BS Revolver stuff with him right now, so.
MayI love Jonathan.
OthaisThey're besties.
MayThey're best.
JohnWell, all right, I got to wrap this up.
OthaisYes.
JohnGuys, make sure to, like, share and subscribe.
JohnHit the little bell.
JohnFor notification.
JohnGo to on all podcasting hosts.
JohnLeave a five star review show over.