Real Leather, Hides With Crazy Backgrounds and Real American Made - AG Gregoroff

AG makes the most expensive and strongest flip-flops on earth. Sounds insane, but I like his business. This is a conversation about authentic materials, the economics of making something real, why almost everything in your life is fake, and what happens when an environmental group comes after you with a campaign.

AG is the founder of Toehold, a Las Vegas-based company that sources elephant, hippo, crocodile, shark, and zebra hides — old-world vegetable-tanned leather, made in America, by hand. We get into the murder hides specifically: a bull elephant called the Red Ghost, a man-eating croc, and hippos that have trampled people. From there the conversation expands into why real leather smells the way it does, why your car seat isn't what you think it is.

We finish the conversation with a discussion about spearfishing and freediving. 

Guest: AG Gregoroff — Founder/CEO of Toehold. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

But not only can you have a pair of flip-flops made out of the best hippo on the planet, you can actually own an item that's killed another human. And that's extraordinarily rare. Extraordinarily rare. Right now we have a hide, we call it the Red Ghost, because it has a very rustic, like a rust colored tone to it. And it killed three villagers in Zimbabwe.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

All right. I have got AG from Toehold On. Dude, I uh I went and visited you. I guess it's now it's been a couple years. Really cool to see your place, to see the hides. And man, I think that you've got a really unique perspective on that part of our world. Like I've I've been I've been around processing hides, salting hides, turning them, having taxidermy done is a huge part of my business in life. My audience is very familiar with that. But you do cool shit with hides. So I want to talk a bunch about that. AG, I uh there's a bunch of things I love about just your business and everything else, the American-made side of it, everything. But dude, welcome to the podcast first. And then I want to hear the murder hippo story.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Yeah, well, thank you for having me. Um yeah, the uh the hides are it's a unique thing because nobody understands it more than than than my friends at Hunt. But if you get outside of the hunting community, I mean you're talking like you're talking another language to the common folks. Like they don't understand that these things exist, they don't understand how they come from. They think that you're going to Africa and killing an elephant just for its hide. I'm like, dude, that's like cutting down uh a redwood tree to get one piece of fruit at the very top. Like the efficiency of that would be so horribly, so horribly upside down. Um, but yeah, so with these, so so what we do is we make the most expensive and the strongest flip-flops in the world. It's very, very simple. Um, the quality is all that matters. You can get flip-flops from literally hundreds of thousands of other companies around the world, and every one of them is going to be cheaper than ours. So if you're a flip-flop guy, if you like to wear flip-flops around the campfire, when you're in Elk Camp, when you're in Bear Camp, and you're just done hiking for the day, you have endless amounts of choices to choose from. If you want the best, that's what we do. And we only do the best. So there's zero regard for price. There's zero regard for anything else except absolute highest quality. Um, and that's our filter. It takes, they take a long time to make. Um, they take a lot of steps to make, they're expensive to make. They're expensive to obviously buy the hide. The whole process is really, really expensive. And right with the like the the murder hides specifically, so we'll jump forward quite a bit. So, you know, we get elephant, we get zebra, wildebeest, giraffe, crocodile, hippo, all the all the major hides, really anything except kind of like in in the deer species, deer, elk, um, antelope, stuff like that. It's it's a little bit too squirmy. It's great for a satchel, it's great for a bag, maybe some work gloves, but it's not indicative to the strength we need in our in our flip-flops. Um, so having sourced the best, and and here's the thing: you can go on eBay and track down like a crocodile hide, and you can go to some of these um leather tanneries and find pieces of elephant. That's not what we do. We're finding the absolute best pieces on the planet, only the best. So if there's only 10 hides available and I don't like any of them, we don't get any of them. It's not that we have a demand we have to fill it, uh-uh. We only look for the absolute best, highest quality. So, in that, occasionally, you know, we've built long relationships with um game wardens, tanneries in South Africa, Zimbabwe. Um, you know, we know people who guide throughout um different regions of the southern area of Africa. And occasionally they'll come across a hide that was from a um we've had several hippos that have killed people. Obviously, it's one of the creatures, it's one of the animals that kill the most people over there. So not only can you have a pair of flip-flops made, or or wallets or belts, you know, we make a few items, but not only can you have a pair of flip-flops made out of the best hippo on the planet, you can actually own an item that's killed another human. And that's extraordinarily rare. Extraordinarily rare. Right now we have um, we have a hide, we call it the red ghost, because it has a very rustic, like a rust colored tone to it. And it killed three villagers um in Zimbabwe. It's just trampled them. It's a hippo. Oh, it's a this this one's an elephant, a big bull elephant, huge. We call it the red ghost. And there's a story that came along with it that some of the, you know, the game wardens had shared with us. And it, I think it might be on our website still under uh the you know, man killer elephant or red ghost. We have a couple names for it. Um, but you can own something that not only killed somebody, but it's beautiful. The elephant hides, if you guys are familiar with the elephant, the best leather in the world is elephant by far. It's soft and it's supple, but the abrasion resistance on it, it's like trying to wear out a tile floor. Like you you're never gonna, you're never gonna wear through it. Um, and then with that, there's the story. And we have things that we consider expensive, you know, in our society, like a Louis Vuitton bag. And they're beautiful bags, they're handmade for the most part, they're beautifully made. But from for a Louis Vuitton bag, when you see that brown, um, what most people think is leather, that's a rubber-infused canvas. And they'll tell you to it, they call it like their special fabric. But that's a man-made material that could supply the whole world if if they wanted to. There's no endless amount of that material. Nikes, we've seen Nikes, not really in our community, um, but we've seen like people that are in the basketball community, they'll pay hundreds of dollars for Nikes, even thousands of dollars. Those Nikes cost between three and four dollars to make, and they're made out of man-made materials, they're synthetic, and there's no limit to how many they can make. So they they build in a fake scarcity to their products. And a lot of companies do that. And a Louis Vuitton bag, which costs thousands of dollars, is just made out of mostly man-made materials. So if you wanted to spoil your wife, you know, for your anniversary, you go buy her a $3,000 Louis Vuitton bag, and I could do the same thing, and a listener could do the same thing. But we're buying exactly the same product, so there's not really any scarcity in it. You can come to us and buy a bag for your wife that's actually that's just made out of the most beautiful leather in the world, but it can also, in some occasions, be an item that's killed a person. We have a crocodile that's a man-eater, and uh, if you buy a pair, I'll text you a picture of the hide, and it's cut down the belly at night, it's spread open, and they're taking an arm, a chewed-up arm that's just ripped apart, punctured, it's all swollen and and like, you know, it's waterlogged. And they're pulling an arm out of uh out of out of the belly, and you can own a piece of that. You can own a wallet, you can own a pair of flip-flops, and that factor's cool, but for people that really appreciate something, we have a specific niche for those guys.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

And then it's kind of to me, I don't mean to interrupt you, AG, but no, please. I I'm trying to figure out in my in my head what the attraction is to this sort of thing. And I and one thing that you're hitting on is there there's this there's this scarcity to it, and it's weird, AG. I feel like just for me personally in my life, and and tell me if you see this within your customers, for some reason, man, when I turn the quarter of 40, I've all of a sudden become more interested in this kind of stuff. I don't know if it's like R, I don't know what it is, but you know, like I've looked at even my hunting gear, man. I got kydex mag holders, right? I've looked at them and been in my mind thought, you know, do I really need kydex, kydex? Do I really need that utility? Because I'd rather have leather. Like I'd rather have even a friend make me a leather magazine holder, right? And it's weird. I've shifted that way, and it's almost uh, I mean, I don't, it's it's like, am I is this an art thing? Is it is this is like is this like the like finally my mind I kind of understand art a little bit. I don't I don't I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_00 8:52

Yeah, I do. I don't think it is. I think it's biologically built into us because we've evolved for literally however long you think people have been around, whether it's thousands of years, hundreds of thousands, or millions of years, however long people have been here, what have we always always used? Wood, leather, and fire. Those are the things we've always used. And it's kind of built in. You can take the biggest city slicker and you can take them out to the woods, and you can sit them down by a campfire, and they'll just be mesmerized. And you get that kind of you know what it's like. You take somebody, it's built into their DNA. When you put somebody under the stars, you put somebody next to a campfire, it's just genetically built into their DNA to be something that resonates with them. And it's the same thing why so many people love like woodworking or they see like something well made out of wood, because that's what we used as a primary means of building throughout almost our entire existence. And before wood, guess what we used? Leather. And leather's been around for forever in one form or another. And one of the things we do that's special, I mean, everything we do special, but one of the components is the leather we use, it's still old-world vegetable tanned leather. So they take tree bark, roots, tannins, and they soak the it's a comp, you know, it's it's uh it's a long process, but they, you know, for the short for the sake of the story, is they soak it in this natural um solution, which tans the leather. And they tan it the same way that it's been tanned for thousands of years. And if we were, if we had a time machine and we were to go back, let's say 150 years, and we, you know, we we ran across the you know, some of the early cowboys, their gun belt, their boots, their saddles would be made exactly the same way our leather is made, the cowhide leather that we use. And if we went back further and we came across pirates, pirates would have their sh their their sword sheath and you know, their boots and and uh items that they had on their body would be made out of that same type of leather. And then we go back to the Romans and the pharaohs and the Aztecs and all these different cultures around the world. That was the item and the same way they used it. And it had to be broken in and it molded, shaped, and contoured to the specific use. And our flip-flops do exactly the same thing. When you get them, they have to be broken in, they have to mold, shape, and contour to your specific foot. And most corporations, they'll use what's called chrome tan leather. A chrome tan piece of leather takes about a day to make, and it's soaked in chromium, and it's highly, highly toxic. And like I always say, we don't we don't ever play the toxic, the health factor. That's kind of that's kind of gay. But people know that it's not good for you, you know? Sure, yeah, yeah. Um, but something that happens to our flip-flops a lot is you go out, you buy a pair, they cost you $500 or $1,000, you take them home, and your dog, who has never chewed anything in its whole life, gives them up because that's the first time dog's been exposed to real leather, you know, and for hunters, probably not, but for the normal public, that's the first time most humans have ever seen real leather before. Yeah, and we don't call it genuine leather. Genuine leather is actually a grade of very, very low quality leather, but it's real full grain American tanned leather. And the grain is very important because just like wood, you could go to IKEA and you could get something that's made out of real wood, but it's not in the wood's natural form. It's been shaved down, it's been particle board, and it's you know, it's been pressed. That's how most of the leather you're gonna get. You know, if you buy a Kenneth Cole belt, you won't find any leather in it. You might find a little bit of fragments, like shards of leather. It's a piece of cardboard that's sprinkled with leather, so they could say it's made with quote unquote with real leather. Um, even something like if you look at the seat of a Ferrari or the seat of a BMW, and you see that kind of really cool pebbling in there. That's not a natural pebbling. That's a hide that had imperfections on it, and they sanded that hide down, stretched it, wetted it, and then pebbled it to give it that uniformed look. That's not a look you see in nature. The only time you'll see that look in nature is with like shrunken bison. You get a big bison, you stretch the hide, you wet it, you heat it, and it'll stretch and give you that really cool pebbling. That's the only time you really ever see that as far as in a natural looking form.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

So you get these materials and um and it really it's there's so much to it, but it's built into our DNA that this is something that you just naturally desire to use. You walk into my shop and you smell the leather, every single person comments on it. Yeah, smell is built into your DNA, the smell of a piece of wood cooking on fire, it's built into your DNA.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

It's it's interesting, man. And it swings back to the story behind it too. But I'll I'll I'll I'll capture this with my my experience with some of these items. So you built me a pair a couple years ago, and what's weird about them, AG, is I they're getting older and I use them more instead of getting beat up, like say my old rainbows, they're getting they're getting a patina. It's almost like I like them more, you know? And I don't I don't know if you remember it, but when I visited your shop, I was I mean, I just like seeing all the hides, but I was actually wearing a pair of Jim Green boots, and I showed you the sole, and you commented something about the quality. Like you're like, you know, those are actually pretty good quality or whatever. The reason I bring that up, the two pieces of footwear I have that I kind of I don't know how to describe it, dude. I'm just like, oh, those are those are like a part of my like thing. I'm gonna keep those for my whole life. Like I'm sure I'll have to resole them or or whatever. But there's something about those two pieces of footwear, it's like, you know, I've I've put bear fat into my gym greens, you know, to to treat them or whatever, and they just have like this look. It's like I'm never getting rid of those, you know? And I think it comes from this idea that they're as close to or organic as possible. But your your thoughts on why we have this obsession is interesting because man, I bet you, and it goes back to your the stories of your hides. I bet you like the historical use cases, like if you would have met some old cowboys back in you know 1800 in the West or whatever, all the leather they were wearing, I bet you for the most part they'd have stories about it. Like I'm sure there was commercialization that went on, but in general, it was like, oh, so and so made this for me, or I killed this buffalo, or whatever. And I think we like that too, man. I think we want stuff to have a story.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And when we have um a specific height, something that just having a piece of elephant is is remarkable, but when there's a story behind it, it does, it does even better. Um but people have gone, we've gone through this big commercial industrialization where everything nowadays, it's it's all cookie cutter. Everything you buy is made exactly the same. And how many guys have you seen start hunting companies and they're buying the same blanks or the same shirts from the same factory, and they just put their logo on it? It's all just the same stuff. But we've really kind of shifted. There's been a there's been a group of people in the country that have shifted to wanting to know where their vegetables come from, where their meat comes from, where their water comes from, where the stuff that they wear come from. They want to know the guy. They want to know who their butcher is. You know, they want to know who that person is that they're getting their stuff from. Personally, I'm the same way. You know, we still buy a little bit of meat from the store, but there's a ranch in Arizona. I go down, I buy a whole beef, you know, every two years. I know exactly where my meat's coming from. You know, and what anything else is something that I killed or something my buddy killed that he shared with me. So I think we inherently like that. Um, as people, and as you get older and you get more educated, you realize how important that is. And the commercialization is one question we get asked all the time is like, how are you going to scale? I don't want to scale. Yeah. You know, we scale a little bit and we'll, you know, we'll get a little bit bigger, but when you scale something too big, you lose that personalization and you lose the ability to really be able to manage the whole system. And when you have investors, investors want to scale because they want more profit. And every company does that. We've seen these big companies, big hunting companies, and coffee companies and shoe companies, boot companies, energy drink companies, we've seen them all do that. And we all know exactly the moment the quality changes, and the moment it becomes commercialized, and the moment that we lose our passion for that brand. And as far as I'm concerned, as long as I'm alive, our brand will never do that. You know, you can always message me, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of followers we have, even millions, you can still message me directly and place an order personally with me. Um, and we don't want to get it bigger than that. And it and you know, the question gets asked a lot is how do you kind of keep the volume and keep the quality? Well, or how do you scale and keep the quality? That question's backwards. The question is we keep the quality, and if we can if we can maintain that quality and handle the higher volume, then we'll produce one more pair that day. You know, if we're producing 20 pairs, then we'll do 21. But we'll never produce more pairs and hope that the quality catches up. And that kind of mindset is what makes our company so much different than everything else. And to go back to the very beginning is we never, I never did this to start a company. I did this because I was tired of my flip-flops breaking when I'm out hiking. I go hunting, I go hiking, I do everything in flip-flops. Most of the pictures of the elk on my wall or the pigs I've killed, almost every one of them, short of like a deep winter hunt. I'm in flip-flops. It doesn't care what the train is. I'm doing it in flip-flops. And there's no reason why you can't. I mean, think about how many indigenous people around the world hunt in flip-flops. You could totally, you could do it barefoot if your feet are if your feet are durable enough. And um having done it, you know, in a or doing it in a pair of flip-flops, when I would hike originally in a pair of flip-flops that weren't toe holes, they would always break. At some point, the song's gonna pull out, at some point, something's gonna, you know, fall apart. So I set out on a just mission to make my own pair. And then a couple guys asked for a pair, and a couple more guys asked for a pair. And I was like, eh, you know, maybe I'll make you something. And I start off with zero experience. I just learned completely from scratch. And I've just always had this obsession with making them the best they possibly can. And 27 versions later, or 27 generations later, you know, we have something that holds world records, they're beautiful, they're strong, they're absolutely the best. I got flip-flops that'll outlast a pair of boots, and they're stronger than most boots that are made. Um and with that, that we I kind of started, I was like, oh, maybe I'll give it a name, and maybe like I'll start on Instagram. And then eventually the demand got so high that it just became a business. But it was never originally designed to be a quote business. And, you know, there's a couple things that because I make everything by hand, and because we make everything in America, it needs to be the absolute best that it could possibly be. It can't ever have that badge that says made in America and it'd be like, uh, it's it's okay. You know, the rest of the world can make okay things. In America, we can't make okay things. We have to make things the absolute best. And if it requires them to be expensive, it requires them to be expensive.

SPEAKER_02 21:02

Yeah, dude. And I think I mean, I know me and you have had this conversation uh uh a bit, I think, oh in the times that we've chatted about this this subject, but dude, it's abused, right? Like there's a lot of companies that use the market I hate it, I hate it. They're they're using it really for just marketing. And then their shit is subpar. And it's like, look, I I would rather you charge more and retain like the essence of America, you know, US USA also means the best. I would rather you do that than try to like essentially use it for marketing and then try to compete with stuff that's cheap, you know.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Yeah, I I literally get mad at companies when they do that. And I see the products they're using, like the leather is low quality. You had mentioned rainbows, and and I don't want to say anything bad about rainbow because rainbow was really good to us when we first started. No, um, those guys over there, you know, they're really nice guys. They make some of their stuff in America. They make a handful of flip-flops in San Clemente, California. But most of their stuff comes over from China. If you go to a surf shop and you look at the label on the back, it'll say made in China. But all their materials are made in China. And the qualities, it's a budget flip-flop, you know, but they're really nice size, you know. They may they made them for like local surfers. Um, but the um the quality of the leather is so much different. And you can't put made in America on something that's not going to be of the highest standard. Because like for us, we've been counterfeited like I think we're at six times now. Different companies around the world have tried counterfeiting it. And what they don't realize is people aren't buying our flip-flops because of the way they look or the design or our logo or anything like that. They're buying them because they know my uh my psychotic obsession with perfection. And they're willing to say, hey, I'm gonna give you all the money, you're gonna put in all the time, all the effort, all the work. And I know that the product that you're gonna spit out is gonna be the best. And sometimes I'll get to the very end, like let's, you know, the the flip-flops we made for you with the with the free diver on there. Yeah, I made those like three times because I just didn't like that the logo was tilted or something wasn't bad. And we could have easily sent you the very first pair, and you would have been like, dude, these are the best. But I I care. And if they're not the best to me, then I'm like, uh, they could always be better, but I got this psychotic obsession. And and that's the thing. It's not the logo, it's not the branding, it's the fact that that person is psychotically passionate about doing something. And that's how we are. It's it's literally one of the only things I care about in the world is just making this product the best. And if they cost $10,000 for a pair because we figure out a way to make them even better, then that's what it costs. Yeah, you know, and and we know we're not for everybody. And and funny enough, we get a lot of people hate that the fact that they can't afford our stuff, you know? Sure. And really, we're the first brand, we're the first flip-flop brand to ever be kind of quote high-end. You know, we know watches are expensive, and we know boots can be expensive, and cars could be expensive, and houses can be expensive. There's all these different things that we know could be expensive. But if you never knew that a pair of flip-flops could be expensive, you might get mad when you see them and you're like, dude, those are freaking sick. I need to get a pair. You go to our website and you're like, oh my gosh, you know, they're more than I thought. That person might get mad. So we get a lot of haters online, which is awesome because it just lets me rip on them and make fun of them. And it's really one of my favorite aspects. Two aspects I love is making fun of people who can't afford them. And listen, I grew up super poor, so I understand not affording something, but I would see something that you had. If I was, you know, if I was still, if I was as poor as I was when I was a kid, and I seen you as something nice, I would be happy that you had that nice thing. I'd be stoked for you. I wouldn't be mad at you for having that. So people that have that mentality, you know, it's it's a it's a bad characteristic. So we make fun of them. But there's a lot of guys that are that are cops, military, that could that own our stuff. And there's a lot of guys in that same field that can't, you know, maybe they have three kids, you know, their mortgage payment, whatever it is. And we get it, we totally understand. We're not for everybody. Um, but so we make fun of people that are like haters. We make fun of liberals online, and um, and then the other aspect that I love about our company is our customers are some of the funniest people I've ever met. We meet the coolest, funniest customers ever.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Yeah. Well, well, and we can we can touch on it, AG. I think that I mean, maybe, maybe I have a misunderstanding of your marketing, but that's kind of like the whole the it's kind of like the whole thing, right? The the the whole thing is a little bit of a it's not a joke because you put a lot of effort into it, but it's a it's a like, hey, I'm gonna use beautiful women, I'm gonna focus on the best flat uh uh flip-flops, I'm I'm not gonna really tolerate you know people that are bitching and whining about the price. Like, that's the whole thing. And it's a bit of like why people enjoy it, man. That's why I enjoy your marketing because it's like it just makes me laugh, right? Uh, because it's like, oh, this is just it just it just kind of jives with the people that are interested in it, you know what I mean? I and even then, I'm sure there's people that'll that'll listen to this and then they'll look at your marketing AG and they'll be like, why, why, why would Cliff have him on? There's you know, they have like a a negative tilt about you know the fact to use like hot chicks, right? There's gonna be that vibe, and it's like, well, that's that's part of the whole brand, man. You know, I don't know. Am I looking at it the right way?

SPEAKER_00 26:52

No, there's a lot of people like that. There's a lot of people that are ashamed that they like hot chicks, or there's this weird stigma with hot chicks, I don't know what it is, but it's the weirdest thing ever. You know, it's almost like it's almost like um the Bible says tits are bad or something like that. It's a really weird mindset people have. It's really like some internal guilt, is um, we have a lot of guys, you know, we joke, or or Andy Stump jokes about this all the time. He says that we probably have three million followers online, but most of their wives won't let them actually follow our account. So way more. Way more people know who we are than we actually have as followers, which is hilarious. Yeah. But think about that too, is why can't you why can't you look at a hot chick? Why can't you look at a hot car? Why can't you look at a beautiful house? Just weird society stigma that we have. And really, only in America. You know, one of my one of my buddies was like, oh, dude, if you use hot chicks, it's gonna cheapen the brand. I'm like, that's crazy because Ferrari in Italy back in the day used to have topless chicks. Remember, in Europe, they'll show nudity on their commercials. Ferrari used to have topless chicks driving their cars. Now, would you look at Ferrari as like a cheap brand? But that's just a cultural thing. So uh Mercedes in Europe has super hot chicks, you know, in their commercials. So it's just kind of a kind of a cultural thing. Because we have this weird shame about hot chicks. But remember, the age me and you are, we grew up with Budweiser just showing hot chicks and bikinis, pounding beers, you know, and like Reef magazine and all that type of stuff we watched growing up. Nowadays, for some reason, it's weird. And the reality of it is if I only showed flip-flops, how long would it be before people got tired of looking at that? And I'll give you an example. There's a brand, I won't use their name, but there's a brand of flip-flops that's veteran-owned. They make everything offshore, you know, like in Columbia, um, Vietnam, and you know, in in Asia. Um, they were on Shark Tank. They have a shark as a business partner, and they post all politically correct stuff, and they got like 40,000 followers. And we got like 650,000 followers. So there's a big difference on what you think could be cool. And that brand's not cool at all, but they did all they checked all the all, they they checked all the marks that an investor would say you should check. Like a business advisor would say, Hey, you should go on Shark Tank. Hey, you should go offshore, it'll be cheaper. Hey, you should be veterans, hey, you should this, you should that. And really, they're just not cool. Their brand's kind of lame. And most brands are like that. They're their brands are kind of lame. Yeah, our brand is super cool, you know.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

Yeah, and it and it's dude, there's magic in that in itself, regardless of it's if it's how you do it or somebody else. Like, I wouldn't like say the are you are you familiar with the company Pit Viper, the the goofy sunglasses?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yes, yes. I I own a pair of those.

SPEAKER_02 29:55

Okay, yeah. I mean, it's like they're obviously their product is along a different line than yours, but their marketing is its own magic, man. They've made it cool, they've made like these dorky, ridiculous, a little bit non-politically correct jokes. Yeah, it's cool, you know, and it's just kind of style. Yeah, yeah. It's the same same deal, man. So I I uh uh, and maybe that's just a a function of you know, having a little bit of social media exposure myself and understanding that, hey, dude, like this is it ain't easy to make that magic, you know, and it's a big, big part of the stuff. But anyways, dude, I kind of got you you sidetracked on that, dude. Um I do I do want to eventually hear the rest of the murder hippo story, dude. So I might have to like like drag you back into that.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

But I uh go ahead wherever you were at. Yeah, with the marketing, I mean, really marketing is about getting people just to look at your stuff. And sure, and it's kind of it's weird because I have to be two people. So, me as AG, you know, I just want to sit in my shop, I want to make products, that's it. But as a CEO of the company, I have to go on podcasts, I have to talk about the brand, I have to go and do the do do the roles of the job. You know, if we have somebody who wants to invest in our company, the answer is always gonna be no. But as the CEO, I have to at least listen and entertain that offer before I tell them no. So there's certain roles you have to have as, you know, as the duty of being the chief executive officer of the brand. So um the the marketing side is how do we get people to look at our brand? And if we if we post flip-flops, our customers will like, if we post one clip of a flip-flop in our in our feed, the customers will be like, dude, what is this? Why what is the like they'll start making fun of the fact we post a flip-flop? You know, but it's literally just be like a hot chick, there'll be just big tits, like nice abs, and you'll scroll down to about to see the flip-flops, and we'll just cut it. You know, just say no hold. If you want to see our flip-flops, go to our website. But yeah, sure. You know, it's it and social media is so crazy nowadays is how do you get people to tune in? Everyone's trying to figure out that recipe. Well, you know, you get sign up for all these different courses, and guess what? We figured it out. And we needed to do something because I'm I'm extremely unremarkable. I don't have like a I don't have a military background. I'm not a veteran, I don't have like any big accolades. You know, all of our buddies are like ex-Special Forces or ex-MMA fighters. They had all these big accolades or their TV stars, you know, world champions. I don't have any of those things. I'm a seventh grade dropout that owns a multi-million dollar company that simply just makes the best products in the world and shows tits. That's all we do.

unknown 32:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

Well, you need to get the word out on the good product. That's just the majority.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Because of that, like we've blown past, you know, all these major brands, but it really comes down to at the end of the day, we make the absolute best stuff. And and this the product speaks for itself. Um, so that's kind of one of the big factors. There's all the joking aside, and all the if we sold a terrible product, but our marketing was, you know, what it was, the company wouldn't be as successful as it is. It's kind of the blend of of both things.

SPEAKER_02 33:20

Yeah. No, no, no. I I I totally get it, man.

SPEAKER_00 33:23

Um, but with those, with those murder hides, so the um there's not really an actual story necessarily with like the the hippos, but the way we get those, or and I'll be right back.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

Yeah, that's that's more what I'm what more what I'm interested in, AG, is I shouldn't say the story. I'm I'm interested in understanding the like supply chain, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

Yeah, so there's a few different ways it it happens. And one of the common ways is you know, you can go on a hunt in Africa, and and every every everything's a little bit different, but this is kind of like this is the blend of the most general um ways that we tend to hear is let's say you go and you, you know, you do a hunt in Africa and you're going after a big bull elephant. And what'll happen is they'll have these nuisance animals, and the villagers will have um an elephant come in, and and and and and I'll speak generally because some of your some of your listeners will already know this, but in case you don't, so elephants in Africa are considered an a nuisance animal, similar to how we look at pigs in in Texas. They just destroy crops, they destroy everything. You can kind of kill them on site. Well, Africa is not too particularly different, except you can't necessarily kill them on site, but the same damage is done as far as like you have a farmer, and that farmer is an extreme destitute, extraordinarily poor, and they might plant some seeds and some just you know really terrible soil. And then what'll happen is they'll grow a little garden and one night an elephant will come in and just destroy their entire property. They'll destroy everything. Imagine a pig, but the size of a bulldozer.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

And you know, you might come out in the middle of the night and try to shoe off that elephant in the dark, and that elephant tramples you to death. And there's really where you're gonna run into your, you know, your hut. They'll just trample the hut too. They knock down giant old trees with one push. So you're literally talking about a bulldozer. The well, the villagers will want to gather and they'll want to wipe out the entire herd of elephants. Some of the game wardens, the local officials, um, you know, their version, quote, of the fish and game, which is very, very loosely you know put together, is they'll say, hey, listen, we'll take out that one animal that did the um the damage, and we have a hunter coming through next week, and like maybe we could get him to kill one. So you'll go over there and you'll do a hunt, and you'll get a couple extra depredation tags along with your trophy because you don't want to, when you go into this village, the locals will, you know, might beg you to please kill this animal, please kill this animal. He killed my husband, he killed my wife, he killed my kids. Or here, you know, he or she, the the elephant. And you don't want to waste your tag and your hunt and your money you've spent on, you know, maybe some juvenile male or whatever it might be. So you'll go out and you'll, you know, you'll you'll um you'll take down these two, these two depredation tags, and you can still go and target your particular, your particular male. Well, that elephant, um, the villagers will gather, and we have some videos that's really cool. There'll be sometimes hundreds of villagers will gather. They'll skin it, they'll take the hide, and if it's your trophy, you know, that'll be your hide. But if it's a depredation ones, in most situations, they're going to turn those over to the government, and the government will tag them, and then the government will go, will send them to the local tannery, and they'll go through a tanning process, obviously. The meat is all distributed to the local villagers, and then they'll take the bones. Um, in a lot of situations, they'll take the bones and they could sell them to different museums, and scientists will want them for different research reasons. So there's really a monetary value built into the whole entire animal. And then obviously, if that's an animal that's killed somebody, the some of the money that's recouped by the government from us buying the hide, a little bit of that money will trickle back to the family as kind of like a um is like a reparation for the the death of the you know, the death of the of the loved one, you know, and it's a very small amount, hundreds of dollars, sometimes a couple thousand dollars. And that's only in particular regions. And keep in mind Africa is extremely loose with everything they do, you know. So, you know, one part of Zimbabwe might off operate completely different than the other side. So it's it's it's very loosely ran and it's very, it's a very fragile system out there. Yeah. And with this, with this economy of having the hunters go over there and hunt and having people like us buy the hide, who else are you gonna sell you know an extremely expensive elephant hide to? Who else is buying that? Nobody. Yeah, it's us and it's some people in the in the boot making industry, and that's it. Or that stuff has no value at all. But the money that's pumped back into that economy from the sale of or from the sale of the leather that pays for the game wardens, pays for veterinarians. Um, you know, you'll see uh uh a poacher might snare an animal, and the animal gets out and has just a big chain or big wire around its ankle, and they now have money to dart that animal and take the snare off, clean it up. Otherwise, that animal is just gonna walk around and suffer. So kind of really what we look at standard game management in the US, they have the initial in some places, some parts it's very rudimentary, in some places a little bit more advanced for Africa, but they're able to have a little bit of a funding operation that could do that now. That wouldn't happen if it wasn't for programs like ours, where I mean, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in elephant hides, and that directly goes back to the local economy.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

All right, guys, and some of my content you're gonna see that I've been using this chest holster from Invader Concepts. This is with my 10 millimeter. I also use it with my Glock 19 and even a PMR30. I'm gonna do a bunch of content here in the next couple months on that around bear defense. It should be interesting. It looks a little awkward to have your gun under your bino harness, but if you test out all the different variations, it is the best and you have it on you all the time. I do have a discount code, it's CliffG, and it's for 10% off. Go check them out. The thing that's interesting about to me, AG, because a lot of the stuff you're you're talking about is also inherent to just hunting, right? Like it's a form of utilization, it brings money back to the communities. You know, it's a story that's told within the hunting community quite often and applies to a lot of different situations. The thing about an elephant hide or a hippo hide or those sort of things, in my mind, I'm imagining fairly remote places, and you're talking about a process that takes money to deal with just in terms of the process, right? So if if it if there's not buyers for this stuff, if there's not utilization for this stuff, they're just gonna leave the hide there. Not necessarily because they don't want to use it. I'm I'm just assuming that the process, I mean, uh what I mean, an elephant hide has got to weigh five, six hundred pounds. Maybe a thousand, I have no idea. I'm clueless on it, but somebody's gotta like take it to a tannery. This is not this is not something that can just be done in some, you know, in a village, and they're gonna be able to just utilize it to its fullest extent. So there has to be money in the system just for there to be any sort of pipeline. Do the it's almost go go ahead, man.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

It's almost always shipped to South Africa at that point, which has to go through obviously importing, and there's a lot of there's a lot of regulation that that goes on between that, but you're right, it's it's extraordinarily heavy, and obviously a a wet hide with fat and flesh on it. It's gonna be super, super heavy. The one thing they have a lot of in Africa is they have a lot of virtually free labor. So, you know, they might get 10 guys, load that up into a truck, and they'll drive it across almost the whole entire country to get to a place where they could salt it, store it, and then ship it down to South Africa. And and they know what hides are coming in. There's, you know, elephant hide is a lot of leather, but there's not a lot of elephant hides coming in. It's actually getting harder and harder to get. It's getting more and more expensive. So they know specifically when that new batch is coming in, they know, oh, this is coming from that village that killed the guy, or this is coming from the hunt from so-and-so. They they kind of it's it's it's not like the beef industry where there's hundreds of thousands of hides coming in. They have no idea where anything came from. They know exactly where these hides come from. Um, and they're all sideties tags and regulated tags regulated. So the process from going from in the field to killing it to to salting it to traveling to the tannery, to our brokers going over there and looking at it and grading it and purchasing it to it shipping to the US and being imported, the whole process is extraordinarily expensive. Yeah. And then with that, we're only taking out of the out of the the best hides they have, and you might get a piece that's the size of like a queen size blanket to give you like some reference. You know, some of these hides are huge. Sure. We're gonna look at that hide and we're gonna pick out the best portions of that hide and only the best, and we're gonna make our products out of the best portions, and we're not gonna use that whole hide. We're only gonna use the best parts and the parts that are left over that don't meet our quality, you know, we'll just discard that stuff. So again, a big corporation, sorry, a big corporation will want to utilize every single inch of the fabric, and that's not what we do.

SPEAKER_02 42:53

Well, be and I want to dive into that, AG. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just have a question before we get off of the elephant deal in terms of in Africa, because I'm curious if you know the answer to this. So I'm from I, you know, I have clients that are elephant hunters. Uh I've looked into it a bit, and it's a very interesting um type of hunt, and it's also super dynamic, as you mentioned. Like it's always reg regulations are always changing. But one thing in the hunting world is you there's exportable elephants and there's non-exportable elephants, and you actually see this in other species too. There'll be non-exportable hippos, non-exportable cape buffaloes, even. There's all these, you know, there's this category of non-exportable. And in the hunting world, it usually means the hunts are cheaper. And I think they're basically what you're alluding to, they're usually depredation hunts. But but they keep the animal. Are we talking about the same thing? Are those the hides that end up in the system commercially? Do you do you know that?

SPEAKER_00 43:57

From my understanding of the way you describe. It yeah, yeah, they're not farming, they're not farming, you know, elephants out there and bringing hides to that way, obviously. And um, you know, in certain situations, they'll have to call the herd. If a herd's just too big, they may get a helicopter and go shoot two or three of them just because they're they're overpopulated. But most of the time they use the hunting model um to bring them down just because there's no initial fund. Somebody has to put the money up to the initial funding to go out and take out the animal or to call the animal. So that's usually done through the hunting process, but it's not a hundred percent. Like I said, Africa's a giant gray.

SPEAKER_02 44:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, it's a gray hair. Yeah, I get it, man. And it's a hard question. I was just curious, like as you as you told it from your side side of things, in my mind, and and you know, maybe listeners can comment to this video and fill us in if they have the the input there, because I know I've got some South African pHs and and Zimbabwe pHs that listen. Um, maybe they could fill us in. But I wonder if these ex these non-exportable, like usually elephant hunters are really talking about ivory, right? When you hear exportable, non-exportable, they're talking about can you bring the ivory home or not? But yeah, it it really means you can't bring anything home, is my understanding. I'm guessing that those elephants, or I I hope, I hope those elephants are utilized through that type of system. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 45:25

Yeah, you would hope, and there's definitely a portion that are left behind, but those are, you know, just because it's Africa, not everything's gonna go through, obviously, the government. Um, there's probably people shooting them, taking pictures, and leaving them just because it's Africa. You know, it's yeah, who knows?

SPEAKER_02 45:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:42

It's half it's half lawless, you know, for the most part. And you know, we have a lot of friends over there, a lot of a lot of people that work in the industry over there, and it's almost every story from each one of them is so different on how each thing, how, how each thing works. And um have you have you been, AG? Have you been to Africa? I I haven't. There was I was gonna go this August, um, but that's kind of getting I was gonna go with some of the guys from Black Rifle Coffee, but that looks like that might not um come to fruition just with a lot of like work type stuff that they have going on. Yeah, I guess. But I want I want to go over there. I got this crazy fear of crocodiles for obvious reasons. And being a being a free diver and being a stupid diver and stuff being around the water, that to me is like the scariest creature on the planet. I mean, I think that's pretty legit, dude.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

Like they're not gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

With what me and you do, you know, yeah, it's it's a legit fear, you know, having a big giant dragon trying to eat you in dark, dark, muddy waters. Yeah. Um, so that's my fear of going over there is I don't want to cross any rivers. I don't want to be in some little canoe. I'd be like, no, it's safe, it's fine. Get out of here. No way.

SPEAKER_02 46:55

Sure. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm I'm with you on that, dude. Like, I'll I'll dive with just about anything, but diving with a crocodile is isn't on the on the menu for me either. I I ask because dude, my experience in Africa is limited to South Africa, but I I know what you're getting at, man. Like I I love Africa. I I I love I love so many things about it, but there's an edge to it, man. It just feels like particularly when you get off the beaten path, you know, culturally and and all of that, and you and you start to be inquisitive about things, it's it's the wild west still. That's just the reality of it. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 47:32

And money, money talks, you know, money talks.

SPEAKER_02 47:35

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

You know, and unlike the US, if if me and you are if me and you are deep, deep anywhere in the US, if we're deep back in the woods and we come across a hide that was like uh a wasteful hide, you know, we'll we'll we'll report that to the name. They're gonna try to solve that. Over there, you come across a pile of 10 elephants and people are just gonna keep driving, you know, like unless you work for the government, nobody nobody cares what goes on over there, at least from what I kind of hear on a on a pretty regular basis. So programs like what we do help build a little bit of an economy over there. And here's the problem is if programs like this stopped, or if that particular like region stopped hunting, a lot of those game wardens might turn into poachers because those guys are gonna feed their kids no matter what. Yeah, you know, and then what they're going up against is you got guys that are in extreme destitute, you know, guys that make, you know, not the game wardens, but a villager might make, you know, 20 bucks a month, seven bucks a month. They make nothing. And someone approaches them and says they're gonna give them thousands of dollars to kill a rhino, and that thousands of dollars can change the course of their entire family. That's a very hard thing to try to stop when you have somebody so motivated to look after their family. So the whole system over there is really it, it's really, it's really tough, you know. Yeah, dude. It's really tough.

SPEAKER_02 49:04

It's a super interesting subject, Aging. I've got a couple of guys, uh, one in particular I'm gonna interview here this next week, who's got like an extensive um experience, extensive experience on the anti-poaching front. South uh he's not South African, he's actually, I believe, from Zimbabwe. But anyways, one thing that I noticed with him and other guys who have really like worked in the depth of the anti-poaching thing, if you really dig into it with them, they have empathy for some of the poachers because they know what you're talking about. Because they can you can put yourself in their place, right? I mean, what would you do? You know, I mean like you you can't it's not like we're talking about people that are making a horrible moral misjudgment, you know. If you had if I had to AK 47 an elephant and its baby down to feed my wife and my kids, like I'd fucking do it right now. You know what I mean? Like uh so you have to have some level of empathy, and I think that plays into the you have to provide, like having these programs makes it even more important because then you you you don't you block it so everybody has to go nobody has to go down that path, or at least less do, you know. So yeah, um I think it's important to realize that that like poachers in Africa are not necessarily human like horrible humans by their nature, you know. Um, but the these systems are what make make the difference, I think. You know.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

For for most of them, there's not a method for them to get out of being extremely poor. There's not a lottery. Like hard work, hard work doesn't get you out of out of being destitute out there. Like hard if you work super, super hard, that's just barely making it. You have to be an extraordinarily hard worker just to stay afloat and not die of starvation. Yeah, so you can't work your way out of poverty there. You know, it the only the the really only option is something like that. That's their lottery, that's their golden ticket, that's their their one way out of poverty is killing that rhino or you know, or getting an ivory or whatever, whatever task they might be hired to do. And then, like I said, trying to stop that is extraordinarily hard. And we've been lucky to meet some of those same guys that are like the anti-poaching guys, and some of them are really high speed, like the stuff they're doing with thermal drones and the work they're doing, it's it seems fun. Like, I I would love to go over there and do it. Yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_02 51:37

But my my talking to these guys is I have the exact same, you know, the exact same feeling. AG, when you talk to them, you realize, oh dude, this would be really fun to to the anti-poaching thing would be very fun to be a part of, you know. I mean, it's it's horrible that it has to exist. Okay, I acknowledge that, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be fun because, dude, it's super complicated, man.

SPEAKER_00 52:00

I mean, talk about difficult, you know, to and then from a competitive standpoint, the guy you're going against, you don't get somebody more motivated than someone trying to feed their family. Yeah, that's the guy you're trying to stop. So from a competitive standpoint, you don't get, you know, you could go to war with somebody, and that guy may or may not want to be there theoretically. Sure. But the guy going there to kill that rider, that elephant, you can't get more motivated to succeed when your wife and kids' future is on the line.

SPEAKER_02 52:29

Yeah, yeah. No, totally, dude. I'm I'm in line, I'm aligned with you. That you know what I tell people, man, if you think this world is fair, go to Africa. This this world ain't fair, you know what I mean? And and and just by I mean, sure, you can people can shit talk certain things about the US or whatever, but just by our nature, dude, we won the freaking lottery. Like we won the lottery compared to the I agree. It's just life is not fair, man. Like people there, you know, this this is what they gotta do, you know. So uh anyways, it's a long way of saying, like, these systems are important. Do you do you get do you get a lot of uh anti uh I guess in your case it wouldn't be anti-hunting, but do you get the the PETA, the anti-leather, anti-elephant hide? Like that is there is there specific hides that get them lit like lit up?

SPEAKER_00 53:20

Yeah, we used to. Um when we first started in the early, or not when we first started, but the ear the early years, we got a big um ocean environmental group that came after us for using shark leather. And I'm like, bro, I've I've got 6,000 dives. I know more about the ocean than most of these guys. I spent more time in the ocean. So um the person that was behind it is is well known. I'll probably I probably won't share their name because they might be friends, you know, might be friends with people, but I I'm I'm I'm imagining in their mind, they probably thought that we were behind some gigantic like fishing netting operation that's just designed to catch sharks and kill them. Or like that's not the way this works. So with the sharks, particularly, they have to be line caught, they have to be sexed, and um they're usually like um gray or blue sharks off the off the Pacific coast. You know, that's that's where most of those come from. And there's like the occasional bull shark will come across, occasional hammerhead. But if you sex the shark incorrectly, it's a $10,000 fine. If you if you pull a male, it's $10,000. Um so these fishing boats are like, I'm just not gonna do it anymore. It's not worth it for them for the hide. But when they were doing it, we'd get these um one, two, sometimes three hides line caught from a shark. Um, and they would take the meat, they would use them for tacos usually, or you know, they'd eat the meat. So these are small operations. We'd take those, they would tan them, send them over to us, and we'd make flip-flops out of them. So we had this, I'd call them an environmental group. That's what they call themselves. But for me and you, those aren't environmentalists, those are kind of radicalists. But what they were doing is they were sending us these kind of like um, they had these pre-made letters that were like designed to kind of scare the boardroom. It was like, hey, we were looking at buying your products, but after learning that do you use shark, we decided to spend our money elsewhere. Like it's the most, you know, phony bullshit ever. So they sent that out to us, our email address, all that type of stuff. And then we had a bunch of athletes at the time we were sponsoring, and they sent them out to each and every one. And anybody of influence on our page, they would they would send these to. And then they started doing this campaign, and you know, we're gonna report you to this organization and that organization. And I asked my buddy, who's been doing leather work for a long time, and I said, Hey, how do you how do you deal with these types of people? And and he says, they just have to know that you're not a corporation and that you're completely unreasonable, and they'll stop messing with you.

SPEAKER_02 55:56

So you're like, I can do that.

SPEAKER_00 55:59

Bro, you've you've come to the right place. So the person that's the the head of this, you know, I had read their message, but I hadn't responded, you know, and I just responded back to them with a dick pic. And bro, bro, I never heard from them ever, ever again.

SPEAKER_02 56:21

Well, dude, it's good tactics, though. They they knew they knew, like, all right, this is this one's not gonna go anywhere.

SPEAKER_00 56:30

So that's how we dealt with that.

SPEAKER_02 56:32

Yeah, I mean, what a the the shark thing, it it again it goes back to kind of the original one of my original questions on this specific hides, right? To me, the shark thing, like that being the hide that flips a switch for people is like comically idiotic. I mean, me and you both dive, dude. Like, I the shark, there's no I mean, of course, I can't generalize to every place on earth, but the idea that some of these sharks are like are gonna are going or all these sharks are going extinct is insane, man. You know, but I but I guess it harkens back to everything. It's the same with the elephants, right? People think every elephant is from an endangered population or something.

SPEAKER_00 57:18

They yeah, they think that. So the elephant is is another one too, is whenever we bring up elephant, the first thing we do is explain to people how how we get them. And and one of my favorite things to do is to come across somebody who's an animal lover, right? They're an animal lover. So I'll ask them, I'll be like, oh damn, that's crazy. You love animals? Which animals do you love? And they'll bring up, well, I love everything. I love deer, I love this. Like, oh, you love deer. What do you know about deer? Tell me anything about deer. How long do they live for? How many teeth do they have? What's their average weight? What's their gestation cycle? Anything you could tell me about the animal you love, they know nothing ever, every single time. They're always the least educated person, you know, in that in that topic. So we knew early on, like in the very early days, we knew that that those types of people were never going to be our customers. And we knew that, like, for the most part, liberals were never going to be modern liberals, we're never going to be our customers, um, just because we use leather. So from the get-go, we always just kind of made fun of those people. And, you know, we've just always been in our camp. So we weren't ever, and besides that one situation, we were never in a situation where they thought that maybe they might have some leverage over us. And we've had our Instagram taken down and brought back and taken down and brought back a bunch of different times. But realistically, our stamina is too strong for them to stop us. Yeah. So if our Instagram goes down, we still do really well. If our Instagram comes back, in fact, when our Instagram went down the first time, we had a huge spike because it kept me from answering thousands of messages a day and let me focus just completely on the business. And we came up with some of our best products during that time. Our Instagram was down because I had so much extra free time. So it really made our company stronger by taking down our social medias. And then when it came back, I was like, oh, now I gotta go back to answering thousands of messages a day. We literally get thousands. It's crazy. And it could be anything from like, hey, that's cool. What do you do? Like, where do you, you know, how much does this cost, or people placing orders, or just, you know, guys want to talk and kind of get the first initial, you know, conversations in. But um, as far as those groups being able to stop us, they can't. They can't, and they won't.

unknown 59:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:30

Well, and the other thing, man, like I I've seen like on your pages where you sell you're selling whatever type of hide for a for a flip-flop or whatever. You you give a logical explanation. Like the information's there, you know. I I think most people, I mean, you always hear about because because I I get it all the time. You can imagine, AG, like I have, I have a perpetual amount of anti-hunting shit because there's no I can't explain it away. I or I'm not there's no reason for me to try to explain it away. If you just hate hunting, you're gonna hate my stuff. So there's I you know what's the point, right? Uh, there's no explanation that I need to make, or I feel just or I feel like you're gonna like make me waste my time doing. But in your business where you're selling a product that uses uh uses an animal, um, there may just be people I think there's a lot of people who just don't know and they might have some concern and then they read your paragraph and they're like, Oh, okay, cool, I'm in.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:26

You know, I think there is, I think that's the majority of people, man. I like flipping people too. I like people that don't know and then flip them over to be believers.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:36

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, for you, for you, you know you got them good if they if they buy if they buy a product, right? You can have an auntie. So you've had people come to you, they're anti about something, you explain it, and they'll actually become uh become a customer.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:49

If they can't afford the product, they'll at least be promoters for us, or at least they'll understand what what we do. And a lot of times it's customers' wives, you know, that you know, we have a guy who follows us and he wants to buy a pair, and she's like, What? They use elephant. Then when she they come by the house and they see, you know, they come by the shop and they see the explanation and they talk to me, then they're on board. Um because for what they know is they're expensive flip-flops, they kill elephants and they show tits to my husband. So that's our big that's our big hurdle as a company, but it's so worth it.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:25

Yeah, dude, I love the fact that you you let and I and then I I I guess I should uh say I don't know if you can if you still do this, but I love the fact that you'll let people come by and like see your your setup. To me, that's it's really cool, you know, just to go in there because it is, I mean, it's the reality of your business, it's not the it's not the marketing side, right? You go to your business and it's like, oh, this is cool, man. Like, this is guys doing leather work. They've got all this, they got the hides here. You see the whole process. I thought that was this was cool, man. I'm sure at some point as you grow, uh, it'll be hard for you to continue to do that. But man, uh, I think it's cool that you guys are willing to show people.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

The shop looks so much better since last time you were here. We've put in so much more equipment. We've painted, we've changed the lighting, we've okay kind of remodeled the whole thing. So we're every week I'm changing something. So if you don't come by for three or four weeks, you're gonna come back and see changes. Are it's always, always, always changing. Yeah. That's one thing my girl always says, she's like, I was here yesterday, you changed like three things. I'm always changing, improving stuff. It's just in my nature. So yeah, if you're a Toehold customer and you're in Vegas, you're always welcome to stop by. If you're not a customer, then you're just a stranger, right? Yeah, and then you're not and then you're not welcome to come by. So if you're a customer and and you don't come here to become a customer, you're a customer first, and then you're invited, you know, if you're in Vegas, you're welcome to come by.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:48

Um yeah, which just so people know, like that's more than fair, dude, because I mean it's a pretty intimate shop, right? I mean, it's like you know, it's near your home and that sort of thing. Like, I I I can understand that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

And we don't stock anything. There's like a four-month lead time. If you place an order today, you know, you're getting your flip-flops, you know, the end of August, the end of summer. Um, the end of August, people are starting to place orders for Christmas. So you're always, you know, months, months out whenever you order something from us. And then we we started this new thing, this Patreon program. Do you use Patreon at all?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:21

Uh no, I use another system. I used to use Patreon. Um, and honestly, I have I have mixed feelings about changing, uh, but I'm familiar with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

Are you um did you regret leaving Patreon? Are you you you have to Yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:36

So so yeah, dude, I'll give you the the the quick quick and dirty on that. So I I don't know if I regret it or not. Patreon kept things simple. I think I think their platform and software sucks. You know, at least when I was using it, it did. Um, but it kept things simple and there was it was there was almost it was almost simpler to communicate with people who were in my audience and followed me and guys that you know really wanted to some support me. It was good that way. You know, if I was doing, you know, th in my in my world, AG, things like say, say I'm out shooting animals and I'm showing people the wound channels, right? So gory stuff. I have to distribute that kind of stuff on a platform like that, uh, because there's none of these other platforms will just cause me all sorts of problems, right? So I think is there it was good for that. I moved to a uh system called Mighty Networks, which there's like way more functionality, but it's also way more complicated. So that that's the I I think in general the model of uh you know either one is work works great. I I more have like a functional gripe between the two, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:48

Yeah, Patreon is definitely very, very simple. And from like a management standpoint, like we can't manage you know customers' accounts. I just see who's active, who's not. You know, someone's like, hey, my credit card needs updates. Like, dude, that's 100% on your end. Yeah. But when our Instagram first went down, we set up a Patreon and it was just a means to communicate. If you guys are unfamiliar with Patreon, it's just another app, and it's just you're only following um people that are creators. So you're not seeing a feed of other people. So when we post something, it goes directly to your email and it goes directly to your phone. So you don't miss really anything. Um, the big thing with Instagram is sometimes we have hides that are so small and exclusive, you know, we might get one or two pairs out of that hide. And by the time that I show that hide, it sells, we make them and we show them. Guys are like, dude, I would have bought those. Those are perfect, but I never seen them just because it's lost in the algorithm. So Patreon was cool for that. And then what we did too with Patreon is we set up a VIP program, just different tiers, you know, where you get free shipping, you know, just some discounts. Then we set up this crazy tier. And it's probably a bad idea financially on my part, but our customers love it. You pay like 300 bucks a month, then you get like a huge discount, free shipping. And every like 90 days, we send you free products. Oh, I got it. So financially, like for the persons who the people who get that, they love it. But for us, it's like uh most of the stuff we're breaking even on, but it's still a really cool program. Um, but that has built like an entire new kind of channel for us of business. And we got some mega VIP, like we got the head of Formula One on there, and we got like some really, really huge, huge customers on there. And it's just such a cool platform. So anybody who's like a business owner, um, definitely look into incorporating some Patreon stuff, you know, in into your network.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:42

Yeah, I'm the yeah, the private network side of things, man, like well, you deal with it, you know, uh in a different way than I do. AG is people who don't deal with it, they don't understand that all these platforms it you can hate them, but they have so much leverage on you to some extent, right? I I know I understand that you've kind of built beyond it, but in the long term, you're gonna be dependent on them or everybody is somewhat dependent on the distribution of your content. And it's it's it's like if if I could figure out a way to move to only having a a big enough private network, I would. I I I'm at the point, dude. Like, if I could get that, I would quit tolerating YouTube's bullshit, Instagram's bullshit, all of that. Because for me, dude, uh everything they hit me on, yeah, somebody could argue with me about it, but it's complete bullshit. Like, like it firearm related, I don't do anything that's remotely illegal. You know what I mean? It's not even nothing, right? And I don't do anything that's remotely even like morally questionable from my standpoint, right? But I I deal with this shit on a daily basis, man. Uh, you know, being the as if I feel like from a social media standpoint, I'm like, what do I run? Am I am I a guy running a strip club or something in a in an unzoned area? Because that's what I feel like as a guy producing, you know, firearm and hunting related content. It's it's it's crazy, dude.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:16

Yeah. And then the other side of that too is if you're not on those platforms, it's nearly impossible to find new a new audience member. We used to make a post just a couple years ago that would get millions of views. Now we make that same post, it gets tens of thousands of views solely because the Instagram has been taken over by obviously the algorithm, but mostly AI. So, like I follow you. It's I gotta go to your page to see your stuff. I gotta go, I got five accounts. I have to go from one of my accounts to that account directly to see the content. Like it won't share, yeah, it's it won't share the content just because they want to put something else in front of you that either someone's paying for. So that portion of it um makes it a little bit more difficult social media-wise, but you still gotta have it, you still gotta make your posts, you know. And with what you do, the hunting, yeah, you get I get regulated on on the sometimes we'll post a girl in a bikini and the algorithm will think she's naked. Sure. So it'll strike us, and then you know, we have to go through a whole rebuttal process. But with you, you know, if there's any blood on your page, you know, even like blood on the ground, you know, I'd imagine the algorithm picks that stuff up. I know when I've shown hunting stuff that I've been in, like I've shown like a puddle of blood on the ground just peripherally in the picture, and the algorithm picked up on that and deleted the post. So oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tough tough. Yeah, it's almost like you gotta Photoshop that blood to like a green or a different color.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:49

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a constant thing. I think inherent to my world though, there's a part of me. Look, I mean, there's there's guys in the hunting world that have just they literally just took all the hunting part of their world and they don't show it anymore, right? I I'm that would be the smart way to grow. I I just I refuse. Like I'm not going to I'm not going to say, hey, I'm just not gonna show firearms in anything in any of my content. To me, that would be ridiculous. You know what I mean? Like I can't have a YouTube channel that is firearm free. Like I'm I'm a hunting guy, you know. Do you use Twitter at all? Yeah, and I've been trying, I've been trying to to figure it out and grow it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:38

We we started using it too. You could post anything on Twitter. It's harder to kind of build the audience there, but you can literally show anything. The stuff I see scrolling on Twitter, even me growing up on the internet, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they showed that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:53

No, I'm with you. Yep. But it's a different crowd. You probably notice that. It's a little bit, it's a different crowd. I mean, maybe it's growing and changing, but it's a it's a little bit different crowd too. So so they're all they're all different, man. It's uh it's uh it's it's interesting stuff, dude. But I uh uh I I just I I like the idea of your your there's so many aspects of your business that uh that I like, man. I do have to ask, and I know what your answer is, but dude, why don't have you ever thought about going down the the path of extend extending products into like you know you know ammo sleep like leather ammo sleeves or sheets or any of that stuff?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:35

Yeah, so the um we would have when we make something new, we have to give something up.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:42

Because the our greatest resource is our is our staff. So, you know, we get guys message us all the time. Hey, can you make me an Apple watch strap? Can you make me a sling for my rifle? And as um, I'll give you an example. So whenever a customer has had an idea and we've tried it, it's always failed. Yeah. And whenever we've had an idea and we've tried it, it's been extremely successful. And I'll give you an example is we've had a lot of, we have a huge law enforcement um following, you know, we're really pro-law enforcement. And we've had guys ask, hey, can you make me an elephant badge holder wallet? And we've got asked hundreds of times. So we said, yeah, okay, we're gonna do the RD. It takes a long time to make, a lot of different renditions you got to do, and you got you got to pull staff just to work on that project. You know, you're it's cost thousands of dollars. We made them and we sold zero of them. Yeah, and I knew we would. Like I just knew in the back of my mind that we would. Um, but then we make like something else. Like we decided to make a fanny pack because I wear a fanny pack. And sight unseen, you know, we sold tons of them before we even showed a picture. Um, our cowboy boots that were that we're running, we have like 75 in the queue, and they're like $3,000 to $7,000. Sight unseen. So there's certain things that we can do, and we have to really balance, balance it. Because our main business is flip-flops. And our flip-flops have, you know, we make wallets and belts, and they're all really like here's a here's an elephant ear belt, bifold wallets. Oh, okay, nice. And then obviously the vegetable tan.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:16

Now, now though those small items are are those uh are those partly for utilization of your hide? Like, is it is it functionally like you have chunks left that you can you can't build flops with?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:28

Great question. So if there's um when the hide's left over and the flip-flops are done being utilized, and off a big hide, what we'll do is every pair has to mirror each other. So, like, for example, if there's a good piece on the far left of the hide and another good piece on the far right, we won't use it because the grains aren't going to intersect with each other. I gotcha. So if if if you look at our flip-flops, you can they look like they're from the same quote piece of wood. You see the texture crisscrossing.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:57

So if you set them down to down next to each other, they match.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:02

Exactly. Exactly. And because of that, the the utilization of the hide is is changed quite a bit. So we might have pieces left over that we can't get flip-flops out of, but I can make a couple wallets out of. And if we get a new hide, we don't, and you can't call me up and say, hey, I want to order a wallet out of that. The wallets are not orderable until that hide is done with flip-flops, and then we'll say, Hey, we might get two wallets out of this hide, and then then those are available. And then everything else, maybe a couple key fobs, the rest goes in the trash. So that's the way we utilize that that whole process. Um and then, like with the elephant ear wallets, or I mean, we make a bunch of different wallets. Um, we make like a vertical wallet, a minimalist wallet, a passport wallet. We make a f a few different wallets. Um, but anytime we want to do something new, it really takes away from something else. You know, we have, like I said, we have a four-month lead time on the flip-flops. We have you know, a hundred plus in the queue. Um so the balancing the time is is is really the the biggest aspect of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:13

Yeah. Um, yeah, and it's talk about it. It's not your core thing. Like, I I I get that, man. Uh go ahead, AG.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:19

Let's talk about some free diving before we run out of time.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:22

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, dude. I'll I was gonna hit you on on the uh let me ask this one question on cowboy boots. Do cowboy cowboy boots seem complicated, man. Very complicated. Is there is there is just give me the quick answer on that. Do do you do you have somebody like are you is there a competence thing that you already had to build them? Like, why did you do why did you do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:44

Our shop manager has 22 years experience of making cowboy boots. And to give you an idea, is like a guy who doesn't know will look at a pair of cowboy boots and they'll look at our flip-flops, and the flip-flops are just flat and like they look super basic. Yeah, the flip-flops are extremely complicated to make because they look so basic. Like an iPhone is just a piece of glass on the front and the back. It's like, dude, this is easy to make. The um guys who make cowboy boots, when they come over to work for us and they make flip-flops, they're like, holy shit, dude, I didn't understand how much goes into making this little piece of leather. You know, there's a there's a lot that goes into. And our straps are, I mean, there's 550 steps that go into making one pair of flip-flops. And then if you get into like stingray and some of our more complicated stuff, you're getting into like 800, 850 steps. So very, very complicated. Um, boots obviously require a lot of material, but you're incorporating machines. So you get sewing machines and and you know, stacking heels, you're hammering stuff, and there's a lot of sanding and grinding. So boots are very complicated to make as well. There's a lot of symmetry to the foot that's complicated. Um, where the flip-flop, the stretching of the straps and the contouring of the leather is gonna is gonna shape itself. It's gonna shape to the foot itself. A boot needs to fit snug on your foot, a boot, a shoe, it needs to fit snug all the way around those foot, or it's gonna defeat its purpose. So the reason we did boots is the only thing I really wear is flip-flops and boots. I guess and I went to I went to a wedding. Uh, my shop manager made me a couple pairs of boots, really nice boots. We got these like giant hides, alligator hides, that are like 90, almost 100 years old. So they date back to like these alligators were born like early World War II. That's how old these hides are.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:36

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:36

And um, and I had a pair of like red zebra boots I wore to my buddy's daughter's wedding. And I thought, man, I need some zebra boots, bro. These would be these would flex even harder. And I looked online, nobody makes zebra boots. So I was like, well, let's just make them ourselves. And that was the initial idea, and then it just turned into it, you know, its whole thing. And the thing with boots is there's this old traditional way of making them. And sometimes they just make them more complicated for the sake of making them more complicated. And there's things you can do to modernize them to make them more comfortable, and there's certain things you could do to keep them traditional, to keep them strong. So um, I see guys that make flip-flops, and I'm like, dude, you've made that so weirdly, you went such a weird way to make that, and it sucks. Like you took longer, you you worked longer to make a worse product.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:29

So I think with boots, we'll be able to kind of refine a couple steps, and they need to be high quality, but most importantly, they need to be comfortable. And I've seen a lot of guys make boots that aren't comfortable. And I've bought boots from other manufacturers. Most boots in the US are made in Mexico, like most boot companies are made in Mexico. La Casey, most of their stuff is in Mexico. They make a little bit in the US, but they produce most of it. Tony Lama, all those guys to make the stuff over in Mexico, and they and they do good work, but they're not at the quality. When you know what you're looking at, the quality is not there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:04

So But Mexico's kind of the the leather, like they they there's a skill set there for on the leather front. Is that what yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:14

Yeah, very much so. Um, and that there's still some old timers that make good boots in the US, um, but those guys are getting older and older, and there's getting fewer and fewer of them. And in boots, we won't be able to scale. You know, maybe we'll make a hundred pairs, you know, a year. Maybe, maybe, maybe not even that. Maybe we cut that in half. Um, but they're gonna be really nice, they're gonna be comfortable, they're gonna be durable, and they're gonna look sick.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:39

Yeah. All uh cattle leather, or is it are you doing it in a lot of other things?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:44

We're starting off with elephant. Oh, okay. We're going right to the top. Yeah. Elephants are most durable. And and and cowhide, vegetable tan, cowhide is always, you know, the base of what you're standing on, the heels, vegetable tan, um, but the uppers and you know, that's a mixture between like a um, like a really nice suede, and then the uppers will be elephant, and then the toe, you know, will will be elephant too.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:11

Yeah. Dude, briefly, we will talk about diving, AG, but could you, because I know my audience is probably thinking this, can you briefly describe why deer hide and elk hide doesn't work for a lot of stuff? Because people bring this up to me all the time, like, oh, why don't you use those hides to make, you know, belts or wallets or or or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:31

Can you can you so it has to do with the the density of the of the the fibers? Um, some fibers are really tight and strong, just like wood. You know, we know what we know what oak is and we know what a softwood, we know we know the difference between a hard wood and an extreme hardwood and a soft wood. So that's probably the easiest way to kind of explain. And then through the tanning process, um, how the fibers tighten and harden over time through the tanning process. So to make a pair, to take a cow hide, for example, um, there's different steps in the process that could be to make them more supple or to make them firmer. So um, to do like a pure vegetable tanned um hide, it's gonna go through a three-month process to make one hide. So all of our hides take three months to make. Where, like I said earlier, chrome tan takes you know, a matter of hours to make. A lot of those hides are chrome tanned. When I when I took my buff, when I killed that buff, that American uh buffalo, um, I sent it to the tannery and they chrome tanned it. And when I got it, I opened it up, smelt it, and I literally opened the bag and walked it right to the trash and dumped it. Yeah, it smelled so bad, and it's just it's soaked in chemicals. It it's awful.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:46

Well, you're you're you're used to your your tanning. Like I I know the exact smell. You're I I think all the big wholesale, like taxidermy tanneries, I'm sure they chrome tan, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:56

Yeah, yeah. It's cheap, it's easy, and just like the the time that goes into it. There's only I think there's a couple smaller ones. There's only two big tanneries in the US, and these guys are like 150 years old. They've been doing it the old world way. There's Herman Oak and there's Wicked and Craig. Those guys are the are the best. And there's there's another brand um up in I think the Chicago area, I forgot what they're called. They're they're good too. We don't use them. And then once it goes to the tanning process, there's a lot of different things they can do. They can oil them, they can heat them and put oils in them. And but anyway, so back to the um to the hide, most of the way those are tanned, they're just soft, supple. It's a very thin skin, it's a very elastic skin. It's just not something particularly strong. Um, it's good for liners. Like pig skin is really durable. It's soft, supple. It's good for a liner. If you want to put it like on the inside of a glove, it's great for that. If you were to make something that had maybe a strap that goes around your chin and you wanted to have a really nice liner, you could use a pig skin liner. A deer liner would be nice. It just the fiber doesn't have the rigidity it needs. It's considered a very supple, a very supple um uh uh skin. And that's the crazy thing with elephant, is elephant is extremely supple and soft, but it's abrasion resistance. If you come into my shop and you take your fingernails and you just scratch it as hard as you can, all you'll do is wear off the tips of your fingernails.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:23

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SPEAKER_00 1:24:05

It won't affect it won't, it won't, you won't even make a tiny little dent on the leather.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:10

Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, because that's uh uh I have a couple thoughts on that, man. Like some people, because there are guys that are that are making wallets and stuff, then they're targeted, they're targeted towards hunters. I I'm not sure that a lot of because I've had guys show me like, oh, this guy made made this out of this bull I shot, and they'll hand me the the wallet. And uh, it's not a knock on the product. Like I still uh totally understand why a guy would use it, but I can feel the wallet and like flip it open and realize that all they've done is put they've put a chunk of the elk on the outside, and then inside of that is be is cattle leather. Like the wallet's actually cat cattle leather, it's just it's just the outside, which I'm there's nothing wrong with it, but I I think people don't realize that that that's the that's the most they can do with it because it's not the right leather for the function, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:00

Yeah, and we and everybody does that. We do some of that, some of that too, is and but the thing is with the outside is the elephant's abrasion resistance. So when you're standing on the elephant, that's the part you're rubbing your foot on. That part's not gonna have that's not that part is gonna show zero wear. You know, years and years and years it's gonna show you zero wear. The cow height underneath is what molds and contours and shapes, and that's where the real beauty comes in, is a blending of both of them together. American beef, American uh cow leather, um vegetable tan, full grain, like from an old world tannery, it's the best. It's it's it's nothing else is even close to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:40

In terms of just like the usability of it for making stuff, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:44

Yeah, I I I I totally get it, man. All right, dude. Free diving. Have you been have you been have you been spearing? I know I got I gotta make a trip down there. That's still we haven't done it yet, dude.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:55

We gotta do a Colorado trip. It's it's been a little while since I've I've been out. We went to Cazumel um and did, I don't know, maybe 20 dives or so. Okay. But yeah, um, I need to get a little bit in better free diving shape. Um, some of the guys in San Diego have been inviting me out um quite a bit. I just need to make the trip. And you know, doing the four-hour drive, you get out there, you can have bad conditions, you're like, oh, you almost need to live at the beach to know when exactly to go out. Are you still in Puerto Rico?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:24

Yeah, yeah. So right now I'm in Puerto Rico. I I've I had I've had a bunch of family-related things going on. So I haven't I unfortunately I haven't dove near as much as I uh as I do in years past, but I've been diving a little bit. Um I've got a I've got a big Mexico trip going. My butt I usually the last few years I've been going to Panama this time of year. My buddies are there right now, and it's like it's the one, it's the one year that looks like the big tune or like it's like the thick of it right now. So I got major freaking FOMO on that, but that's how that's how life goes. Um but it's uh it's one of those things. I know we we talked about it a lot, and and you come from like the more serious scuba diving front. But have you been talking to I'm just curious? Um, oh, what's his name, dude? Uh oh, with the knife company. He's a diver, huh? Um oh half-face blades from half face-blades, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:21

Yeah, those guys are tuna divers, right? Yes, yeah. I talk to them quite a bit. Uh, we we uh we collab with them a lot, you know, very similar mindset. Really cool guy. Um the the guys he goes out with uh mess are the same people who message us about. And if you guys don't free dive, if you're a hunter and you don't free dive, so in my opinion, hunt free diving is the pinnacle of hunting, it's the most difficult, it's the most dangerous, it's the hardest to get good at. Um, it's it's basically archery in the water. Yeah, and um, and I you know, I'm With a lot of really famous hunters, and we joke about it all the time. I'm like, oh, dude, you go up a mountain. That's cool. What'd you what'd you do? You walked, you walked over and shot something. And obviously, I hunt too, but I always bust their balls on like land hunting. So if we go out and we go on a deer hunt or an elk hunt, maybe we'll see a bear. Maybe we'll see a coyote or a wolf. You know, maybe there might be something there. Like most for the most part, they're going to run away from you. And you're relatively pretty safe in most in most situations. Obviously, being in heavy bear countries, its own element.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:33

Yeah, but it's not even close to what the ocean is.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:38

In the ocean, you're surrounded by monsters and you're sneaking amongst them. And there's a lot of monsters that nobody's even heard of before, you know, in in the ocean. And the moment you put your head underwater and you, you know, you take that breath and you go down, you're as far away from, you might as well be on Mars. You feel so far away from humanity. You're 35, 40, 50 feet underwater. And you can be 20, you know, you could be 10 miles, one mile, you could be, you know, a few hundred yards offshore, and you feel like you're as far away from mankind as you could possibly be. Yeah. Um, so you have to be good at swimming, you have to be good at at um at free diving, which is just the the act of holding your breath and being able to move through the water, keep your heart rate down, and kind of maneuver through the water. Then you have to be good at the hunting part. And hunting in the water is much different. So we know on land, animals can see you, they can hear you, and they can smell you. Um, is there anything I'm missing? It's it's they see you, they hear you, and they smell you, you know. That's about it, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:29:47

That's it.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:48

Yeah. In the ocean, there's electrical energy you give off that they can pick up. So they can feel you. They could feel your heart rate, they could feel your energy. That's why you've seen guys like when they when they're fishing, they catch a fish. That fish isn't bleeding, but immediately all the sharks tune in on that because it's heart rate, the electrical energy has changed in that animal, and it's completely sent everything in overdrive. So when you're free diving and you're free diving around sharks and you're in that kind of greenish, tingy water, and you're in great white country and you know they're there, but you can only see maybe 15 feet before it kind of fogs out. Um, if you're scared, they're gonna feel that you're scared and they're gonna come over and see what's scared in their water. So you're scared, but you have to hide it. It's almost like your heart's a giant, you know, bleeping sensor, and you have to cover it up. And if they see it, they're gonna come over and explore and see what's scaring them. But then now you have to hunt and you have to kill something. And when you shoot that animal, everything in the area knows something's dead and they're all coming for it. Yeah, they're all coming for it. So anytime you shoot an animal, imagine if you shot something on land and every polar bear and every coyote and every wolf and every fox and every badger and every eagle and everything you can imagine would just completely bum rush that area at full speed. That's what it's like in the ocean. Yeah, so that's you know, it's a myth.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:19

That's a good way to put it, A.G. It'd be the equivalent of like shooting an elk, and then all of a sudden, grizzly bears come over the ridgetop, 16 eagles come, start circling, like but immediate, right? It's it's immediate, yeah. Instantly, yeah. I I think like with the predator thing, another dynamic that's different is I think how how a land predator perceives us, they perceive us as like maybe food, but mostly a threat. In the ocean, you're competition and maybe food. That's like that's immediately when you get in there, you're just competing with all the other predators around, and they know that. And man, you did a great job of explaining what I always describe as just the that they that in the ocean, the animals immediately understand your intentions. Like they can read your mind. Like, sure, they're using all those different, you know, those quantitative metrics, you that they can your heart rate, the electromagnetic, all that stuff. But in the end, what it comes down to is they immediately know your intentions. And uh, and that is a dynamic that I don't think most land land hunters they can't even relate to it, you know what I mean? Because it's you you get you get a little tinge of it, right? Like you you can look at it. I I think there is a thing where you know you've you've walked past uh a deer five days straight with no intention of killing them, and then it's the last day of the hunt, and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna I'm gonna kill this one for just to have some meat, right? And immediately when you decide that and look at him, he knows that and runs off. I I think that I think that exists on land, but it's much more distant and it's more it's doled down in the ocean. You know how it is. Like you look you look at something with the intention of killing it, you're not gonna kill it because it it it knows, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:04

When we were free diving in the um in the East China Sea, like off of off of Okinawa, there was a few fish species that you would go down to the bottom, lay on the reef, you would put your spear backwards pointed towards your towards your fins, and you would just stare off into the distance and maybe like kind of click some rocks together, like you were kind of doing something. And then when you were when you were reaching your maximum bottom time, you would grab your spear and just turn around nice and slow and try to shoot the fish that are coming up behind you because they know where your head's at. Like they know the danger. You're you're the same thing as a seal. Like you're a lazy, slow, you know, semi-retarded seal to them. So they know exactly what you are. They don't understand you have a spear gun, but they know something's moving in the water. And if you look at them, immediately they'll bolt, especially the bigger they are, the smarter they are, the harder they are to kill. So, yeah, free diving is is to me the ultimate hunt, but it's also the ultimate consequence that if you mess up, you even shoot a small fish, you know, you get wrapped up in your line, you can drown, you can black out, you get bitten by something, get stuck in the current. We went free diving um in Okinawa at night one time. Dude, such a mistake. We went out immediately. There was a strong current that was coming off this big uh, it was like a 35 feet down to the reef, but off the reef, there was like a 200-foot drop-off.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:33

And just the way the current hit the island and moved at night, like we were getting pulled out. We all got separated. It was dark. Like we were, you know, we had swum out. So we're out in the East China Sea, we're probably about a mile offshore. We went different directions, and then you just chill out and just you know, keep finning. If the current's pulling you, I tend just to go with wherever the current's taking me and kind of kind of like an escalator. Like if you walk with the escalator, you'll get where you're going way faster. If you walk against it, you'll just get fatigued, stay in the same spot, and eventually die. Yeah. Um, so I wound up coming around this cove. You know, there's you know what it's like at night when you look at short. There's like someone's porch light on, and I wind up coming up on this like just remote, rumbly someone's backyard, and you know, had my spear gun, took off my fins, had to jump their fence, and I don't even know where the hell I'm at. My phone and all my personal stuff is a couple miles somewhere else, you know, brand new to the island. So yeah, I just had to cruise around till I found, you know, until I found somebody that could call somebody, but you know, that's the things that happen when you're when you're free diving.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:40

Yeah. Well, it's like the the way I would put it, or it seems to me, is that in most everything we do, we kind of have a couple chances not to die. Like you almost you almost always have to compound two or three things in order to actually for it to result in death, unless you just have some absurd bad streak of luck. But in the water, it only takes it only takes one thing. It only takes one thing and you you're fucked.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:05

Yeah. Like on land, like you could eventually get cold and die. You could eventually dehydrate, but in the ocean, like you're always getting cold. You're all your temperature is always dropping, even in the tropics. You're holding your breath. So if you stay down there, you will die. So while you're hunting, you always have this fuse that's going that's constantly trying to kill you. Um and then just and then obviously you need to know what you're shooting. So you have to make the decision to be able to shoot it, get it, manage it, and then you keep it with you. So now you've shot something, it's tied to your body, it's bleeding, it's still thrashing for a little while until you pull its gills out or you, you know, you stab it through the head. Now it's attached to you, and you're gonna keep your hunt going in most cases. If you're if you're refishing, um, and then you see a lot of creatures that you don't know what they are. Like we feel like we know what's in the ocean. You don't. You have no idea. You have no idea what's out there. There's so many things that have come by me that somebody asks, What was that? I was like, no idea. I've never seen that before. I don't think a human have never seen that before.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:10

And it's always changing, right? Like here seasonally in Puerto Rico, like we're getting all the inshore and we have all this sargasm coming in, and it's like a totally different ecosystem has just rolled in, you know, with the water temps changing. It's it's amazing how that changes. Did you uh because I know you have a a long history of of diving too on tanks? Uh, did you interact with great whites much?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:35

They're around, but not a lot of not a lot of interactions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:39

Uh the question I was gonna ask, man, and and uh I'm curious your thoughts on this, the shark deal, right? The other thing that I notice about sharks is they are very readable. Like I haven't interacted with great whites ever. I've I've interacted with tigers and then all the reef sharf sharks, but particularly reef sharks, you can tell when they're pissed, you can tell when they're hungry, you can tell when they go from totally not a threat to like, hey, this is like it got serious real quick. I just wonder the reason I was asking is I kind of wonder if the bigger sharks are like that or not, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:13

From the series. Not firsthand experience, but a lot of videos I've watched, you know, I've grown up watching Great Whites my my whole life. I think from San Diego, it's a nursery of great whites. So the big females come through. Um, they usually kill off any predators that can, you know, that can harm their their babies. They'll they'll drop off, you know, they'll they'll give birth, they'll hang out for a little while, and then they'll usually go up the coast and they'll feed in like the what they call the red triangle, which is northern California, like the Bay Area, like the fair lumins and yeah, exactly. Um, so you're constantly crisscrossing giant female great white. Um, and then you have tons, I mean, I'm talking about hundreds and hundreds throughout Southern California of juveniles. And the juvenile is from like a six-foot to like a 12-foot. And once they switch to kind of that 12, 13 foot range, they switch to marine mammals, and a lot more people get bit than what you realize. A lot more people. You know, we think we hear when there's a big shark attack, they're all the time. They're all the time. Um, like I give you an example, New Smyrna Beach in Florida is a shark bite capital of the world. Um, we went to the beach right next door, and we went free diving, or not free diving, we went uh um body surfing, and I stopped counting at 20 sharks just in the waves. 20 sharks coming by. Guys get bit all the time. There's a little clear, there's a couple of little clinics there. And you know, you're on vacation, you go by, you get your foot bit, your hand bit, your calf bit off, you go to the clinic, they stitch up, you jump on a plane, you're back home to Idaho or wherever you live, and that's it. You know, it doesn't make the news, it doesn't make any anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:52

You're just saying they they just don't get publicized.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:55

They don't at all. It happens all the time. And let's say this this the odds. I love the odds. So me and you are out freediving, okay? The odds of us getting bit are calculating all the humans on the planet and how many people get recorded. So me and you who are in the ocean are in the same calculation with some dude who lives on top of a mountain in Tibet, right? That guy has a zero chance of being bit by a shark where he lives. There's only two chances. There are only two people for like 50 miles in the water. It's me or you. Yeah. The thing with the ocean is the whole ocean is connected. Okay. If me and you go hunting in Nevada, where I live, there's a zero chance we'll see a polar bear. It's just not, there's no chance. In the ocean, anything could come up to you as long as the temperature changes. And I'll give you an example. So there's this horrifying creature called the Humboldt Squid. Are you familiar with it? Yeah, vaguely. Yep. Dude. So it's like a six, seven foot-long squid. It's highly aggressive. They hunt in packs. So it's the size of a person. It hunts in packs. And its tentacles have these little have teeth around it, kind of like a like a um, like a garbage disposal. And if you go Google, Google Humboldt Squid, they grab you, they attach to you, they bite you with their beak, but then their tentacles rotate and burn and take chunks out of you. They hunt in packs and they hunt in night, and they live in the Sea of Cortez, which, if you look at a map of the United States, it's the Baja Peninsula that comes down below California. You make that curve and it's that ocean right there. Well, that's where they live, okay? San Diego, one night, some um divers are out in La Jolla Cove, which is over a thousand miles away, and they get attacked by Humboldt Squid. Because the temperatures changed, the El Nino came in, shifted the food source, and the squid came up with them. And it's guys like me and you that are gonna bump into these creatures first. There's not a scientist, there's not a camera down there. It's guys like me and you or other free divers that are in the water that run into these creatures that then report it back to a biologist. A biologist is like, oh, that's cool, that's interesting. But there's nobody out there to find these things except us, just like hunters. A hunter is gonna be the one that sees a new creature. Or if you're in a if you're in a place that wolves aren't normally there and you see a wolf, it's gonna be a hunter that discovers that. Yeah, that's how it is with free diving. The issue is those creatures are horrifying monsters in the ocean.

unknown 1:42:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:29

No, no, for sure. And I always wonder, man, I I wonder not to be too woo-woo about it, but a lot of the things where a swimmer goes missing, somebody gets drift, you know, drifts off, don't get you. You wonder how many of those are just just they just got bitten bit in half, you know. You know what I think?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:46

I think it's mostly all of them, bro.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:50

Remember that video. Uh, if you haven't seen this video, don't look it up because it'll ruin your day. It was like in Egypt, this guy was swimming and he got attacked by either a bull shark or a tiger shark. And it's only young guys. It's in a bay. I don't know how old he was, but it was right off, it was right off the jetty. And the cameras, you can see him, and he's screaming. And if that camera would not have picked that guy up being eaten, um, he would have just been a guy that went missing. You know, he went missing, persumed drown. That happens all the time. Yeah, all the time. But luckily, we were able to catch that, or that guy that got attacked by the Great White off the coast in um in um Australia, he was eaten by and that shark sat there, circled him, and ate him. That uh that one in Egypt, that shark circled him, ate him, ripped him apart, chewed him up piece by piece. Yeah, so that happened, and only because that was caught on camera do we know what actually happened. So you're absolutely correct. That happens, in my opinion, that happens way more than what we what we believe.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:55

Yeah, well, and I think that's one of the fundamental differences too, AG, is that these predators like predator attacks with you know, grizzlies, lions, that sort of thing. If you really look at the the situations, typically it doesn't appear to me that they have the intention of eating the whole person. There's exceptions to that. You know, I I think a lot of it is defensive, just a reaction, some sort of like they miscalculate a threat sort of thing, whatever, right? But most of the time I don't think their intention is to eat the whole person. When a shark gets aggressive and tries to bite you, its intention is to eat your entire body. That's my you know what I mean. And that that is a big that's a big difference, man. It is uh it's funny because I I I've dealt with them so much, I'm sure as you have, like in the reef situation, they don't scare me, but I also check myself constantly, and I try to with my buddies too. I mean, I dive with some guys who uh they've dip they've dove with them so much they're una they they become unaware of the threat. I mean, a a six-foot reef shark, if it gets pissed and it just like bites you on accident because you've got a fish on your belt or you're chumming or whatever, you're you're fucked. Yeah, like it's you know, so it's it's you it's easy to forget that that thing has got some weapons in its mouth, even if it's only that long, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:22

Yeah. We miss we misjudge them based off of their size, and maybe it's because of movies. But if I said there was a piranha in a pond and it was gonna bite you, a hundred percent of people would say, I don't want to get bit by that piranha. That piranha has a tiny little mouth, you know. Maybe let's say it's big, it's gonna be the size of a teaspoon. You don't want to get a teaspoon portion of your body taken away. A reef shark that's like two feet long that has a big mouth. And that's gonna take, you know, that's gonna take like a softball size account. Yeah, a six-foot reef shark will take your whole calf off and you'll bleed to death. Yeah, you know, or take your arm off, you know. You don't want to miss your hand or you don't want to miss anything. Yeah, you know, if a wolf bit your calf off, you know, or a bear did it, or anything like that, people would lose their mind. A small shark is designed to cut off large chunks of meat, and they do it just fast. Yeah, just something like a bull shark. Oh my god. Yeah, a bull shark and crocodiles are probably the two most horrifying creatures on the planet.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:23

Yeah, no, I I totally agree, man. Well, uh, AG, let people know where people can follow you. I really appreciate your time, man. I've I had you almost for two hours. Uh we'll have to do it again in a round because you have some epic stories that we really didn't want to dig, or we no, I wanted to dig into, but I also wanted to touch on all this Hyde stuff because I feel like you you have such a unique, unique experience in business in that regard, dude. So thanks a lot, man. Where where can guys follow you?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:49

Yeah, so um shoot us a message on Instagram. It's T O E underscore H O L D. So just Toe Hold on Instagram. You can go to our website, which is shoptoehold.com. Um, you can email us, we respond right away. Um, you can message us on Instagram, we respond right away, or just Google Toe Hold and we'll pop up first. Sweet, man. Thanks, dude. Appreciate you. Good talking, Ero.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:15

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