Silvercore Podcast 138 Matthew Griffin Combat Flip Flops

https://www.combatflipflops.com

[00:00:00] Travis Bader: I can't seem to shake this feeling that, in some way or another, we are all connected. Kind of like in that game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. I saw the funniest commercial show up on my social media feed. It was for a company called combat flip flops. If you're into creative marketing, I highly recommend go check it out.

[00:00:28] Travis Bader: Google it up. You won't be disappointed. Hilarious commercials. I reached out to the owner of this company. He lives on the big Island over in Hawaii. And we chatted about Canadian distribution of his products. And I put him in touch with a company that I know will serve him. Well, fast forward a week and I'm chatting with a friend of mine.

[00:00:47] Travis Bader: Telling her about this, not only does she know the owner well, but she's able to provide me with background and backstory and prep work for this podcast here. There are a couple things that I take from this. First, mind your P's and Q's. Comport yourself in the best possible way, especially when you feel that nobody is watching.

[00:01:08] Travis Bader: To treat everybody as if there's a possibility that you are somehow connected. Because if you look hard enough, there's a good chance you likely are. And to be good to one another, because what goes around, comes around. I've got a warehouse, I can handle distribution, but that's not what fuels me. Instead, I called somebody who I knew, would do a good job with this, and I made that connection.

[00:01:33] Travis Bader: A rising tide. Finally, nothing says summer like flip flops and shades. Silvercore club members get 25 percent off all products at Combat Flip Flops, and they get 15 percent off precision eyewear from Fortnite Optics. That basically covers the cost of your membership right there, and you still get all the free courses, the extensive discounts from other brand partners, The insurance and, oh yeah, meets RCMP club requirements if that's something that you require.

[00:02:05] Travis Bader: If you find value to the Silvercore Podcast, please consider subscribing and sharing it with others. It means a great deal to us and it helps us more than you likely know. Without further ado, Let's get this podcast rolling today. We have an extraordinary guest who embodies the spirit of resilience and innovation, former army Ranger and founder of combat flip flops joins us to share his remarkable journey from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to the boardrooms of a groundbreaking business.

[00:02:35] Travis Bader: He's dedicated his life to empowering communities in conflict zones. His story is one of turning adversity into opportunity, using entrepreneurship to create jobs and fund education in war torn areas. He's a West Point graduate, a Henry Crown fellow. Welcome to the Silvercore podcast. Matthew Griff.

[00:02:54] Travis Bader: Griffin. 

[00:02:55] Matthew Griffin: Thank you very much, Travis. I think I'm going to hire you as a professional. I think that was the best intro. Everybody's well done. 

[00:03:02] Travis Bader: Hey, I got no problem hyping you up. You've done some pretty amazing things. I've researched on the internet, looking at different things you've done. And by chance, you know, you and I were chatting a little bit and a friend was over here.

[00:03:15] Travis Bader: We're doing a couple of things. I just mentioned to her, Oh, you know, I'm chatting with this guy Griff and she says, you know, I know him. And so she starts going into backstory, man, the amount of cool things that you've done that I've heard from other people or read about, I know this is going to be a fun podcast.

[00:03:33] Matthew Griffin: I hope so. I live by the mantra. I just want to do gangster shit with my friends. I love that. And, uh, it, it, it just adds up over the years. And it's funny cause every, you know, every now and then somebody says, Hey, remember that time we did this and you totally forgot about it. Like, yeah, that was, 

[00:03:48] Travis Bader: I actually get that a fair bit.

[00:03:51] Travis Bader: I've, you know, most of my youth, is this a great big question, Mark. I've, I don't know if I've intentionally blocked most of that out or what, but people will come up that I haven't seen in years. And like, remember when you did ABC and like, actually, I don't really remember it. Like, no, no, it was pretty impactful.

[00:04:07] Travis Bader: You did. And they get into it. Um, it's fun. It's fun though, to lead a life like that, where you can actually forget certain things that were, were pretty amazing. 

[00:04:19] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Well, I mean, on the other side of it too, is like with it comes a little bit of responsibility. Yeah. Because people can start asking you questions and they just come up to you on an off day or whatever You just have some random conversation A couple of years later, like, remember when you gave me this advice?

[00:04:33] Matthew Griffin: I was like, no, I don't. I'm so sorry. Sounds like something I'd. Yeah. 

[00:04:40] Travis Bader: Yeah. No, it was a good advice that yes. Yes. That's me. Was it bad advice? No, I think you got it mixed up. Yeah, I had a guy reach out recently. He's like, I don't know if you remember, but we're chatting, we're in the hospital. Your daughter was getting stitched up and I was the guy hit my head on the plane.

[00:04:56] Travis Bader: I'm like, of course I remember you. But when he brings it up, of course I remember that. Um, it's interesting, the impact that we can have on people's lives and not even know it and not even know the extent of that impact. And when I look at some of the things that you've been doing, I mean, holy crow, you've been having an impact on people's lives all All around the world.

[00:05:19] Travis Bader: I want to kind of talk about that. I want to get into it, but I think we would be doing that a disservice if we didn't rewind a little bit to get a little bit of a flavor of who you are, what you're about and you know, what made you want to be all you can be. 

[00:05:34] Matthew Griffin: Uh, . It's funny, I I usually use that tagline.

[00:05:39] Matthew Griffin: It's like, you know, I grew up in the eighties, right? And I know kids can sing this song along with me if you're a Gen Xer, but be Oh. But you can be, get an edge on life in the Army. Me, and, uh, you know, I grew up with that slogan. Slogan and, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Commando and Rambo. Mm-Hmm. . It was the eighties, right?

[00:05:58] Matthew Griffin: It's just the 18 every bit about it. And so, you know, every young male wanted to join the military and then my dad was in the military, but my grandfathers were on old war too. So it just happened to be one of those things. And, um, where it was like, where it was a foregone conclusion. And yeah, I would say I'm from, I was a military brat.

[00:06:17] Matthew Griffin: I bounced around a lot, but I say that's where I went to high school. Uh, it was just great place to be from great experience. I'm super thankful to have spent some significant time there because it taught me how to work hard. How to be a part of a community and really put your head down and just do good for others And I ended up, uh, you know having to face the option of graduating high school was getting a scholarship You know getting a job or joining the military.

[00:06:44] Matthew Griffin: So I did all three. Uh, I applied to west point I got in Graduated the class of 2001. So June of 2001, thinking I was going to go to Fort Lewis and just drink IPA, you know, in the Northwest and fight fake wars. And then four months later, September 11th, um, I was already on the path to go to ranger school, but this increased my resolve, like, Hey, I'm going to go to the ranger regiment.

[00:07:09] Matthew Griffin: I'm going to be a ranger fire support officer. And. There's only at any one point in time in the world, there's only nine of those guys in existence. And so it's, it's a really hard job to get to qualifications, even get there to qualify. And, uh, I had to go to a conventional unit first, which was at Fort Lewis, five 20 infantry, uh, was there for nine months and, you know, and then I applied to go to the regiment, went down through selection and I made it to be a.

[00:07:34] Matthew Griffin: Ranger company fire support officer with second range of battalion. 

[00:07:37] Travis Bader: What are they looking for? 

[00:07:39] Matthew Griffin: That that was well, first of all, you need to be an artillery officer, right? So artillery officers are pull string go boom. And so there's very few Artillery officers that are fire supporters So fire supporters are the guys you see on the movie the dude on the radio calls and then all of a sudden Your artillery starts coming in or a plane drops that as a fire support officer or a forward observer, right?

[00:08:04] Matthew Griffin: So the normally most guys when they join the military, if you're artillery officer, you have to go serve six to nine months in an infantry unit as a fire support officer before you go back to a battery and learn how to do all the weird math to Shoot artillery rounds and smoke and illumination. Um, but I liked staying with the infantry.

[00:08:24] Matthew Griffin: I wanted to be in the action. So I, the, the best fire support officer job in the army is with a Ranger battalion where you get essentially every play toy that you could see in the movies are at your disposal on the radio. And I was like, yeah, I, I want that job. Um, so I got there in July of 2003, deployed to my first deployment to Afghanistan in 2000, November, 2003, uh, which was operation winter strike.

[00:08:52] Matthew Griffin: And if anybody is in a ranger battalion and they hear this, they immediately start freezing, like you get cold to your bones, so, and somebody's. Infinite wisdom. This is the second year of fighting the war in Afghanistan. They said, well, we know these Taliban fighters are going to these super high altitude villages where we can't get to them.

[00:09:12] Matthew Griffin: And they hang out there all winter, lick their wounds, hang out with their wives. And then when the spring comes back, you know, the warm weather comes up, they call it fighting season. And like all the guys come out of the mountains and they fight again. So in somebody's infinite wisdom in the Pentagon, they said, we're going to deny them their winter vacation.

[00:09:27] Matthew Griffin: And we're going to send Three Ranger battalions from sea level up to 10, 000 feet of elevation to go hunt them down through the winter. Um, so we, we did real rangering. We were the first, I think, looking back on the timeline, I think we were the first guys to really push past the Korongal Valley, if you're familiar with that Valley, we lived in villages.

[00:09:48] Matthew Griffin: We slaughtered sheep for dinner. We did the whole thing, man. It was legit rangering and then came back, uh, did another deployment to Afghanistan that following spring. Came back for a month, went back, did another deployment to Afghanistan that summer, came back for six months, and then I did six months in Iraq, in northern Iraq.

[00:10:07] Matthew Griffin: You know, by then, um, it was time for me to go. I'd already been at the Ranger Battalion for a couple years, which was a really long stay for a company fire support officer, but they knew that I didn't, you know, Want to go anywhere. So they just kind of kept 

[00:10:20] Travis Bader: it up and I was good at my job. 

[00:10:23] Matthew Griffin: Um, and then, you know, and then by the, by the last deployment, I really started to see the, the M immoral side of the war on terror kind of evil by 

[00:10:34] Travis Bader: that, like, I have an idea, but what do you mean by that?

[00:10:39] Matthew Griffin: So I went to the Academy 1997 to 2001. So that's on like, you know, people are still getting out of windows 95, right? So this is when they were looking at their force projection and they just started coming up with UAVs and they would bring in all these military leaders and had to say, and it was a big discussion when I was there for four years.

[00:11:00] Matthew Griffin: And autonomous warfare was a major subject of discussion. And I sat in all of these lectures for four years and not one military leader, philosopher, moral standard. Anybody could justify shooting kinetic weapons off of an unarmed area. They couldn't do it. So that's why you had guys like me, we would get a mission brief.

[00:11:25] Matthew Griffin: We would jump out of an airplane, climb over a mountain, sit in a hole for a week if we had to. You know, to verify minimal civilian casualties, identify the target. And then we would do an airstrike on them. That's that was my whole job. That was it. And I recall like on the tail end of the Iraq deployment, there was some guy we were, we were chasing.

[00:11:46] Matthew Griffin: He was up there in the food chain. And, uh, we found out that he was staying in a place outside of town. And, um, like, okay, like, so we're going to go get him tonight. Right. Like, let's go get him. And like, no, they're just going to drone it.

[00:12:04] Matthew Griffin: And, uh, and then we started seeing like the negative ramifications. Oh, there were women and kids there, you know, and like that just went on, but it all just kept getting washed under the rug in the warfare. And, uh, I just was like, you know, I just, I don't want to play this game anymore. I saw it in 2005 and it's, it just continued to get worse.

[00:12:25] Matthew Griffin: Um, so I was like, all right, I'm just going to get out and be a civilian. Just like that. It's fine by me. Okay. Just like that. Yeah. Uh, took a job building the homes in, um, the Northwest for a major home builder called syntax homes. So I went from knowing nothing about construction to managing. Like 20 homes a month, like getting finished out and sold to customers, to executives at Microsoft and Amazon.

[00:12:50] Matthew Griffin: So that was a, a major shift, you know, going from the military to, you know, working with trades to dealing with tech millionaires. That was a, that was a pivotal time in life, but you know, like everybody's getting out, you're still struggling with the stuff and then 2008 happened. Um, I lost my job because I was a homebuilder and then I went to work for a company called remote medical international and they're a a company that supplies doctors, paramedics, EMTs to people working in difficult areas.

[00:13:25] Matthew Griffin: So offshore oil rigs, seismic research vessels, Antarctic research facilities. If you need a medic and a clinic, you know, they would provide all that stuff, ship it there and then service the organization with medical. 

[00:13:37] Travis Bader: What drew you to that job? 

[00:13:38] Matthew Griffin: And then that's just Okay, fair enough. Yeah. And I mean, I, I was the company headquarters platoon leader at a range of a time, which means I had the medics underneath me, but.

[00:13:53] Matthew Griffin: And then when I was down range, whenever we got into a gunfight and we had to call for a casualty evacuation, I had to shut down all of my air operations, you know, dropping bombs and shooting bullets to get a helicopter in to pull a guy out and then, you know, to get them in and out. So I wanted that one to be as efficient as possible to increase their.

[00:14:12] Matthew Griffin: their save rate, but to like, so we can get back to the war. And, um, I just, that was just part of our protocols and part of my job. And I, I learned enough from the medics and I knew enough about military medicine to lie my way into the job. And I became the director of military operations for remote medical international.

[00:14:32] Matthew Griffin: And I spent the next couple of years bouncing around the world, you know, Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia. Uh, the Middle East putting in clinics and supplying, uh, government contracting agencies that are working in these areas for the wars, uh, with medics and medical services and equipment. And, uh, I feel like I'm talking.

[00:14:54] Matthew Griffin: Oh, you're good. You're good. I, I 

[00:14:56] Travis Bader: Honestly, I'll interrupt you when I've, when the ADHD kicks in and I want to hear something, but I, uh, I want to hear this background because, you know, you've done a lot for people around the world, like putting yourself as an army Ranger, you're putting yourself to serve even that job in the medical world there.

[00:15:17] Travis Bader: That's you're, you're helping people again, what you've been doing with combat flip flops, you're helping people. You know, there's a bit of, in the back of my head, that's wondering. What drives a person to always want to be out there helping other people like this to the point where you're putting your life and your livelihood on the line in order to ensure that other people are, are, are living well and, uh, and just trying to get a bit of a flavor for that because not everybody is like that.

[00:15:40] Travis Bader: And although you probably look around and would say, yeah, yeah, that's normal. That's what somebody would do. Not everybody's like that. 

[00:15:48] Matthew Griffin: I mean, I guess it's just faith, karma, whatever you decide to call it. You know, I was given a certain set of skills in this machine and like all of the bits and parts and pieces that are made me and like.

[00:16:00] Matthew Griffin: The things that are most fulfilling are these adventures, helping other people. And I got no reason to stop because it's really fun. And it just, every time, every time you go somewhere, you learn something, you get better at it and it only amplifies. I 

[00:16:13] Travis Bader: subscribe to that a lot. And I look at people quite often.

[00:16:17] Travis Bader: I've heard the analogy. Okay. You got to put your oxygen mask on before you help other people. You got to take care of you before you can take care of other people. And I guess, you know, in certain circumstances, that's going to be true. But I found personally for myself, I've gotten way more. Myself out of helping other people, helping other people succeed in their business, helping other people, uh, when they need it at, at pivotal moments, at inflection points within their life.

[00:16:43] Travis Bader: I find that fuels me and, uh, I'm getting the sense that you're probably kind of the same in that respect. 

[00:16:53] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, I, uh, It does fuel me, right? And I was actually thinking about this this morning randomly just totally unrelated, but everybody sits around and bitches about the state of the world. Oh, this is going wrong and that's happening and this is, oh, ah, ah, and they just complain, complain, complain.

[00:17:10] Matthew Griffin: Like, well, what are you doing? And we're not saying you got to run for president or you have to start some nonprofit or do these other things, but if you helped your elderly neighbor, Take the garbage out. If there was a struggling single mom that's struggling to feed her kid, like drop off some finished meals to make life easier on her and get that kid food.

[00:17:33] Matthew Griffin: Like, does a kid need a ride to a sports team? Cause his mom doesn't have a car. All of those other things are things that every single human being can do to improve the life in your community. And that's how this stuff starts, man. That's how all of these adventures started. They just started as dumb little things, trying to help somebody else.

[00:17:50] Matthew Griffin: And then they just snowball into helping more people and. I really wish more people have had that mentality. 

[00:17:57] Travis Bader: I learned when you're talking about, you know, a lot of people want to complain. There seems to be a learned victim hood, victimness amongst people where I like, I look at our society and kind of how it's set up here in Canada.

[00:18:13] Travis Bader: Let's talk about like, I'm, I'm in the gun industry, I'm in the gun world and. And people are always complaining about gun control and they say, you know, when, when seconds count, the police are minutes away. Like the government says, don't worry, we'll take care of you. Okay. So we will set up police. You give us your tax money.

[00:18:31] Travis Bader: We'll set up police. Don't worry. We'll set up hospitals. We'll take care of you. Don't worry. We'll, and I think a lot of people buy into this idea that there's always going to be someone out there that's going to be able to take care of them. And if it's not being taken care of properly, Well, who do I complain to, right?

[00:18:46] Travis Bader: As opposed to where's my personal agency that I can. Take upon myself to be able to make that change. And I found that compounded with, you know, the fear of failure that seems to be being bred into younger generations. Don't worry. You came in eighth place, but you get the purple ribbon, right? Or you get the black ribbon.

[00:19:11] Travis Bader: Everyone's a winner. Well, no, not everybody's a winner. There's going to be winners. There's going to be losers. And guess what? It's awesome that you lost, learn how to lose in a way where you can then get up again and try and lose and try and lose, and finally you succeed. And I, and I find from my observations, and maybe I'm being optimistic about it, but I think there's a change that's happening.

[00:19:33] Travis Bader: Where people are starting to get fed up of, um, that lack of personal agency and realizing that they can actually affect things around them, fed up of their fear of failure and realizing that failure is not fatal. I think there's a change that's happening. I don't know if you're seeing anything like that.

[00:19:53] Matthew Griffin: You know, I hope so. Like I'm starting to see more positive movement in, in agency, right? I think people, my, my buddy from runs a company called 30 seconds out Navy seal guy, Sean evangelista. But he's got a patch. He's got a flag, everything else. He's got a t shirt. It says, no one is coming to see you. No one is coming.

[00:20:12] Matthew Griffin: It's it's up to you. I think that's the line and and maybe I learned that just from growing up like I was a You know kid, you know pretty much a latchkey kid and no one was coming to like help me out when I fell off my bicycle in the middle of Nowhere, you know get home and figure out how to get blood stains out of my clothes, right?

[00:20:32] Matthew Griffin: because mama just bought me these jeans and fixed my own bike and and and like we had a bunch of agency and I think that Maybe over the last 20 or 30 years, we've seen a lot of that taken away. And it's, it starts when they're young, you know, we, we, you get these kids dependent on everybody else for everything.

[00:20:50] Matthew Griffin: And so now that you've got these 20 or 30 year olds that are just expect somebody else to take care of something. And, um, conversely. They're also the same YouTube generation where they have more information at their fingertips and do any skill they want to in their entire life. So if they just take like one further step and start using that side of it versus everybody gives me everything.

[00:21:15] Matthew Griffin: I think we're going to be in a much 

[00:21:16] Travis Bader: better spot. Yeah. YouTube, man, you can learn anything. You can do anything. You can be the guy who says. Just like you said earlier, I knew enough to kind of lie my way into the job. They bought it. We're good, but you didn't disappoint them. You're able to succeed. You don't need to have certificates behind your name in order to be able to do something.

[00:21:34] Travis Bader: And I think that's another place where I see a lot of people have a stumbling block. I can't do X, Y, Z because I never went to school. I can't do X, Y, Z. Cause I don't have my red seal in, in whatever it might be. Like, I'm not going to, uh, I'm not going to name, uh, The company, and I won't, uh, uh, out myself too much, but I'll tell you this much, uh, 20 something years ago, Photoshop sure helped me out to get some, some different job opportunities that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to get.

[00:22:04] Travis Bader: And, and I killed it. I did an awesome job at that without having the, the actual piece of paper. 

[00:22:12] Matthew Griffin: I would rather take somebody without paper that is coachable and dependable than somebody with a piece of paper every single day. Every day, I would rather take somebody that is coachable and dependable. A hundred percent.

[00:22:25] Matthew Griffin: If you can learn, yep, I will take the time to train you, I will train you how to do it right. The standard is you need to be better and faster than me. And then you know that you can move on to the next thing. I would, I would rather do that. And then, uh, the line that always bounces, I heard this like a decade ago.

[00:22:44] Matthew Griffin: I don't know where I heard it, but it says the master is not the one with the most students. The master is not the master is the one, the one with the most students. The master is the one that creates the most masters. 

[00:22:56] Travis Bader: Oh, I like that. I like that a lot. Yeah. Cause you don't need a bunch of. 

[00:23:02] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, 

[00:23:02] Travis Bader: you don't need in a bunch of number twos, a friend of mine, he's a, um, he's in his eighties now, um, ex strategist for, uh, uh, a large Canadian rail company.

[00:23:16] Travis Bader: Uh, quite, quite a smart individual. And, uh, but he had it saying that he'd always say to me and he says, you know, a number, One person hires a number one person to do a number one job. A number two person hires number three person to make them feel like a number one person. And that, you know, it's always kind of stuck in my head.

[00:23:37] Travis Bader: Don't hire. Don't don't have a bunch of students around you so that you can feel like a master, have a bunch of people that can do way better than you. And that rising tide will float all boats. 

[00:23:50] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Like being pushed as a good, and it's like, and we were discussing it earlier about failure. And people always ask me, I did all these, I did a lot of fun stuff in the military.

[00:24:00] Matthew Griffin: People ask me, what's the one thing you learned in the military? It's like the military taught me how to fail. I like that. It literally taught me how to fail. And then they're like, what do you mean? It's like, well, you think we learned how to do all of these like cool guy tricks and we just get it right the first time and then it's just muscle memory.

[00:24:17] Matthew Griffin: We do it like we're breathing. Like now they beat it into you over months and years, right? And you'd be like, you know, I I can still remember this i've like behind the bush some like ranger getting smoked in the florida phase You know, or I said, you know how people learn son ranger. He's like, uh fear pain humiliation repetition You're getting a mix of all of them right now and It it It really made me think, but like, you know, how do you really learn something?

[00:24:46] Matthew Griffin: And it's like, I either scared myself to death. I'm not going to do that again. I hurt myself so badly. I'm not going to do that again. I got humiliated so badly. I'm not going to do it again. Or I repeated it to the point where I couldn't get it wrong. Those are like the inherent, like your body will not physically like let you go back to the old ways.

[00:25:05] Matthew Griffin: Because you had one of those four mechanisms and um, And just learning how to fail is is critical to being successful Like you will take beatings along the entire way like, you know, washington for the united states was left less than a 50 success rate But he did that right across the delaware. I mean he I think he was like three to one losses or four to one losses You know u.

[00:25:29] Matthew Griffin: s. Colonials versus the the british that dude knew how to fail, you know Like and like It's what you gotta learn. You gotta learn how to fail. But again, that was a great digression from the story. And I appreciate the multiple little divergence. Thank you very much 

[00:25:44] Travis Bader: for that. Anytime you need a little bit of ADHD divergence, you just, you just point at me.

[00:25:51] Matthew Griffin: Oh, I'm just getting a swirl out now. Um, yeah, so going, going back to the story, I was at a remote medical intern and I started flying around to these areas, but I didn't have a Ranger platoon with me, I didn't have. You know, 30 to a hundred heavy hitting dudes and machine guns and armor and hand grenades and rocket launchers.

[00:26:13] Matthew Griffin: I didn't have any of that. I had a passport, a visa, some cash, a backpack and a laptop and a Berger phone. And I had to get my job done and I had to get home to my family and being a, being a map guy, an artillery dude, and we get the nightly briefings, but like, if you're down in range in combat and you're working in an area, they.

[00:26:33] Matthew Griffin: Pull up a brief every day. I'm like, all right, here's where all the gunfights and explosions were, right? Here's the overlay over the one month and the three month calendar. So you start to see nodes and clusters of areas that are, More violent than others and you know, just safety sake says, well, I'm just not going to go to those areas.

[00:26:52] Travis Bader: Yeah 

[00:26:54] Matthew Griffin: Really? Yeah, the statistic says if I stay out of these areas I'm more than likely going to be safe and I did that and I found the the three areas are typically around military compounds and convoys uh embassies and reporters if you stay away from those three You're generally going to be safe and I found that the areas that were flourishing with small businesses You Local small businesses with the ones that were not having any security issues because those business owners know if anything happens on the street It's bad for business.

[00:27:23] Matthew Griffin: It's bad for family. They don't let it go down and it's like right now So I'm gonna stay at the grocery store. I'm gonna stay in the local hotel. I'm gonna have the local driver fixer And everywhere I went, it was the same story, whether it was Africa, Southeast Asia, wherever I went, it was the area that was flourishing with local small business was the safest place.

[00:27:45] Matthew Griffin: And the thought kept like getting shoved in my face by the universe. It says, why aren't we investing more in this, in a country for? Less than the price of one MRAP we could turn around like multiple city blocks in a developing nation. Yeah Yeah, and and one day I walked into a combat boot factory in Kabul, Afghanistan.

[00:28:06] Matthew Griffin: I saw a combat boot outsole with a flip flop thong punch through it and Words combat and flip flops came together and there's a few other details in there you can read about it in our book, but there was so there might have been some expletives or swearing but You know for three or four hours later Yeah, I called my ranger buddy who I served in the Rangers with.

[00:28:28] Matthew Griffin: I, you know, he'd done some online work. He'd worked for a shoe company before. And I said, Hey man, let's start making flip flops on a combat boot factory in Afghanistan. And he said, let's do it. And I said, it's combat flip flops. com available on GoDaddy and GoFigure. Nobody ever put those together in the history of the internet.

[00:28:45] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. So for two 99, we got combat flip flops. com and that's how our business. Awesome. What year was that? Yeah, 

[00:28:54] Travis Bader: 2000 and. 2009. Okay. So 2008, everything's crashing, 2009, things are just still kind of not in the greatest world and you're like, okay, let's, let's start up a business. Let's make combat flip flops.

[00:29:08] Travis Bader: But you went a little further than that. You had a bit of an ethos behind doing combat flip flops. You wanted to be able to help the communities and help the, uh, help, uh, help other people with it. Or did that start right from square one? 

[00:29:21] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, it's, uh, you know, it, it did. Um, you know, our, our main thing was just putting food on tables.

[00:29:31] Matthew Griffin: The, you know, when you're an army Ranger or a Navy SEAL or a green beret, you snatch a lot of bad guys. We snatched a lot of bad guys over the last 20 years. And every night, you know, we'd unload them off the trucks. They'd go into the detainment facility. They'd get pushed in their interviews. And as a young soldier, if you want to see what's going on, you can literally go sit in the interviews with the interrogators.

[00:29:53] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. And you'll ask, and you'll hear the interrogators ask these guys, why are you doing it? Is there some ideology? Do you believe in this mission? And they go, no, we're hungry. We have to feed our families. There is no other jobs here. What else are we going to do? Some guy gave me a few hundred bucks to shoot at you dudes.

[00:30:09] Matthew Griffin: I'm going to take that and I'm going to buy groceries for my family. So our first mission was really like, if we just create jobs, each one of these factory members has five to 13 family members. So in the 300 person factory that we were looking at, that's 4, 500 people that we would be supporting. By keeping one, like you just, you just see those numbers.

[00:30:30] Matthew Griffin: I don't equate our products to profit. I equate our products to impact. I always have. 

[00:30:35] Travis Bader: I like that. 

[00:30:36] Matthew Griffin: I guess we create X, this happens. Um, and you know, eventually we really started, uh, we started growing. We started doing well in 2013. I got, I reached out to you by a woman named Hasina Sherjhan, who was running an organization called Aid Afghanistan for education, and And her view is that educated families are harder to radicalize.

[00:31:01] Matthew Griffin: If you educate a girl, you will educate a family and educated mother will not allow her children to go uneducated, nor will they allow them to be radicalized. So. If we really want to get on the long game We have to start educating the young girls right now so we can solve the problem. Yeah Just how I agree with that.

[00:31:21] Matthew Griffin: That's that's it. Yeah, and her logic made a lot of sense to me So I said hey for every product we sell How about we'll just donate to put a girl in school for a day in afghanistan? and Between 2013 to 2021. Um, actually the, the summer of 21, we got our first comma and we, we put a thousand girls in school for a year in Afghanistan 

[00:31:45] Travis Bader: in the summer of, 

[00:31:47] Matthew Griffin: and then 21.

[00:31:49] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Right before everything fell apart, like we were running our math and everything, and I had a personal goal of a hundred thousand. And we got our first comma and that was a big deal for us, you know, getting a comma, you know, and you, when you think it's just 1, 000 little girls, if you were to line them up, then you had to be the range.

[00:32:08] Matthew Griffin: And so when you, when you, when you just look at like numbers like that, you're like, all right, you're really starting to. You're making an impact little by little. And it didn't start with a thousand. It started with a couple of guys having a stupid idea at a few hundred bucks. Cause I sold some guns to make a shoe company, right?

[00:32:25] Matthew Griffin: That's, that's how it started. Like, like you never know how it's going to go. If you're listening to this, like I literally started my company by selling the guns my grandfather gave me and a motorcycle to pay for samples. I had no cash to do this and look at us now. We're, you know, we're on a multimillion dollar business.

[00:32:42] Matthew Griffin: We're, you know, we're operating in multiple countries. We're doing great partnerships. We're sponsoring veteran surfers. We're clearing landmines. We're doing all these other things just because you had a dumb idea. And I still have the napkin that we had. I literally have it. I have it. Yeah. You got a, you got 

[00:33:01] Travis Bader: a framed or something.

[00:33:01] Travis Bader: You're just sitting in the door. 

[00:33:03] Matthew Griffin: Uh, it's, it's, it's in plastic and a file folder, but I have it, you know? So it's like, those are the things that matter. Yeah. You have this dumb idea next thing you know, like, you know, we could manufacture footwear in Afghanistan, just logistically. It doesn't work. They don't have any rubber trees, leather tanneries.

[00:33:22] Matthew Griffin: So we started making textiles in Afghanistan. We shifted our footwear production to Bogota, Columbia. We have worked with a jewelry company making. Landmines in Laos who print all of our stuff here in the U. S. We've made knit beanies in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon. We've, I mean, we've done like weird stuff all over the world.

[00:33:41] Matthew Griffin: You know, just do doing our best to put food on tables and honestly represent America and Americans positively, because our government has not been. 

[00:33:50] Travis Bader: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, in our government too, um, I think there's some, I think there's a lot to that. Like I remember when I was younger, trying different business ideas and looking at different areas that I could, I could build a business.

[00:34:04] Travis Bader: Am I, right? My concept was never to be rich. I just wanted to build a business because I wanted to be able to have fun. Time is your most precious commodity. So I wanted to be able to do something that would provide me more time. Essentially. And we'd sit around at the pub, having a few beers and, you know, everyone's got great ideas after you've had a few beers, but I noticed there's a trend the next day, nobody did anything with those ideas.

[00:34:29] Travis Bader: And so I'd bring a little notebook with me, or at one point, my, um, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife or sister gave me a state of the art palm pilot, and, uh, I would write this stuff down. 

[00:34:40] Matthew Griffin: I love those things. I miss them so much. 

[00:34:42] Travis Bader: I'd write it down. 

[00:34:43] Matthew Griffin: The little shorthand you had and everything else on there for 

[00:34:46] Travis Bader: that.

[00:34:48] Travis Bader: So I'd, I'd write all these notes down and buddy would have an idea. And I'm like, that's a great idea. Are you going to do anything with it? Uh, probably not. Okay. Do you mind if I do something with that? Yeah, no, go nuts. Okay. Next day I'd go out and I'd start putting it into action. And maybe by the end of the day, I'm like, yeah, that was a dumb idea.

[00:35:06] Travis Bader: Maybe by the end of the week, I'm like, okay, I don't know if this is going to work too well. Okay. Oftentimes, what I would find is you can basically make anything work if you're not making profits, your primary concern and profits are very often the natural by product of the hard work and effort that you put in.

[00:35:28] Travis Bader: And it's a crazy ideas that people have, the ones that everybody says aren't going to work, that tend to be the ones that later on, everyone says. Oh, I knew it'd work. Oh yeah. I mean, you just got lucky because of ABC or whatever it might be. Cause it, those crazy ideas offer a niche where other people aren't playing.

[00:35:47] Travis Bader: And I've built my business around, uh, not looking at the money. Cause I feel if I'm trying to chase some money, I'm always going to be behind it. But if I can chase a quality product or a product quality service. That the money will come so far. It's worked. 

[00:36:07] Matthew Griffin: Well, maybe you're better at it than I am. Right.

[00:36:10] Matthew Griffin: Uh, 

[00:36:11] Travis Bader: I feel, 

[00:36:11] Matthew Griffin: I feel a lot too for, yeah. And then that, that whole thing, I'm like, oh, I'm going to start a business, so I have more time. It doesn't work. That's a total fat lie that Timothy Ferris can go, you know, um, that four hour workweek thing. That's what totally sold me and got me started on this. And.

[00:36:36] Matthew Griffin: It's a total lie. It's a lie, 

[00:36:38] Travis Bader: but the work that you're putting in, you enjoy and you want to be there because I worked at jobs that I got up in the morning and I was like, I don't want to go to work, but here we go. Cause I have to, and I'm like, I don't want to live my life like this. If I'm spending eight hours sleeping, hopefully eight hours a day working.

[00:36:56] Travis Bader: And then the rest of my time I'm doing what driving back and forth, commuting and trying to get things done. 

[00:37:02] Matthew Griffin: Washing dishes and doing laundry and oil changes and everything else. 

[00:37:06] Travis Bader: Is that a good life to live? I would rather live in a cardboard box and enjoy what I'm doing than live in opulence and be just plugging away every single day.

[00:37:19] Travis Bader: No, 

[00:37:20] Matthew Griffin: I agree. You got, yeah, but I mean, eventually you'll get there, like, you don't, you, it never gets easier. You just get better as one of our other lines, it never gets easier. You just get better. Like the. You know, something that like somebody will say, Oh, we missed a shipment of this. Like five years ago, I would have lost my mind.

[00:37:39] Matthew Griffin: Now I'm okay. Call this guy, call that dude. Like, let's figure out like how we can get stuff moved around. How do we make this work? It, it, you just get better at it. There's nothing you can do to solve the problem other than solve it. And you find 

[00:37:51] Travis Bader: tomorrow still comes. And what you felt was the end of the world when you're younger is like.

[00:37:57] Travis Bader: Okay. Well, we'll do better next time. We're going to put these things in place. So hopefully it doesn't happen again, but here we go. Next piece. 

[00:38:06] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Often it feels like that meme about that dude cracking a beer, sitting on a burning couch. That's what most entrepreneurship feels like. That's what it's often.

[00:38:15] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. I know everybody's seen that meme, but that's honestly what it feels 

[00:38:17] Travis Bader: like. Yeah. I can relate to that. You were on Shark Tank as well, and that's kind of a cool experience. What was that like?

[00:38:27] Matthew Griffin: It was super fun. We treated it like a ranger mission. You know, we watched all the episodes. We profiled all the sharks. We, we took the measurements. We saw how many paces the guys would have to take back and forth between the first door and the second door, the second door and the mark. Uh, luckily, you know, I was in the veteran community.

[00:38:46] Matthew Griffin: So there's a bunch of other veterans that are on there. So I just. I'm relentless when it comes to running people down. And, uh, maybe the Rangers taught me that it's like, you know, we're, we're just going to find you and we're going to get ahold of you, but now I get to do it in a more peaceful way. And I called all of the businesses that I saw on shark tank.

[00:39:03] Matthew Griffin: I just got their contact information and I got ahold of a few of them. And Eli crane, who's now a U S congressman, he was running bottle breacher. He was. Really helpful in responding and talking me through the process and we trained up for it for months We dropped our sales all of our marketing. That's all we did for two straight months was trained for short tank 

[00:39:23] Travis Bader: I like that 

[00:39:25] Matthew Griffin: and we we set our left and our right limits and uh, just funny story You can read about it in the book But the producers are always trying to mess with you for entertainment's sake And we were going in on the very high end of reasonable on our valuation We were going at it.

[00:39:41] Matthew Griffin: I think a 1. 5 million dollar valuation And he wanted us to go for like three, right? Which, which would have caused a lot of drama, but Lee and I and Andy, we'd already made our business plans. We knew our numbers, we knew our acceptable, unacceptable, everything that like, you know, we were, we were ready to do, we were set.

[00:39:59] Matthew Griffin: And, um, the producer comes up, he's like, Hey man, I really want you to do that. The 3 million valuation. It's like, well, I'll paper, rock, scissors, you for it right now. And literally the woman is like blotting makeup on my face. And I'm talking to the producer right here as I'm like looking at her. And she's like, what?

[00:40:16] Matthew Griffin: I was like, All right. You're the rep ready? And I lost,

[00:40:22] Matthew Griffin: I lost producer looks old. I think, I think I chose scissors and yeah, trusty 

[00:40:31] Travis Bader: old rock. 

[00:40:31] Matthew Griffin: And, uh, he's like, do you want to do three? I was like, nah, dude, we do this. We do it live. We go one, one and done. We're over. And, uh, so he gets all giddy and jumps up and like runs back to wherever the producers hang out.

[00:40:43] Matthew Griffin: And then, you know, we're getting ready. Like we're standing there, like, look over at lead. He's like, what are we going to do? It's like, we're going to execute the fucking plan, man. Let's go. Same as always. Let's go. Let's let her rip. And, uh, a three sharp deal, more than our minimum metric that we had set for ourselves.

[00:41:00] Matthew Griffin: And, uh, we got in, we got what we needed. We got out like true ranger fashion. We're gone. And then that turned into probably one of the scariest six months to a year of my life. Why? Yeah, we, cause we filmed in June expecting to be on the, um, they usually air the veterans episode around veterans day would make sense.

[00:41:29] Matthew Griffin: So we went and we leveraged all of our cash. We'd given up our sales from the season. We came back in June, had to catch up on production and everything else. We stacked. As we borrowed as much money as we could, we put as much inventory on the deck as possible for this new Veterans Day episode, November 11th, November 11th came, November 11th went, no episode.

[00:41:53] Matthew Griffin: So now bills are due, no sales, no cash. It was tough. Like, what were we going to do? And we had based our pricing on standard wholesale, thinking that stores would pick us up, but nobody was. It's just, you know, 2000. 15. This is like the, really the golden age of social media and online e commerce. This is the wild, wild west.

[00:42:18] Matthew Griffin: This is a ramp up and it's like, screw it. Let's just change our pricing to be competitive. Let's drop wholesalers. We're not going to sell through any stores. Let's just go direct overnight. Our volume tripled, all the lights went green across the dashboard, and then we sold through everything through the holidays.

[00:42:36] Matthew Griffin: Wondering what we're going to do, you know, January, I go down to shot show. I'm helping, uh, a nonprofit organization called team five foundation, where we send special operations medics to developing nations, new clinic and aid work, and literally standing at a fundraiser as the MC and my phone rings. And it's a producer from shark tank that says, Hey, you're going to be on shark tank in two weeks.

[00:42:59] Matthew Griffin: Literally, I had no cash. Thinking I was going to put my company under, all of the inventory that I own would sit on my very small desk to my right. Sorry, my pup is, uh, is bothering me here. Long in this interview. Oh, good. Kiko, you want to give a little appearance? Yeah, come on in. There you go. There's a nice pop.

[00:43:16] Matthew Griffin: There's the Kiko little Catahoula Catahoula blue healer. He's a good boy. First dog was follow him on Instagram as 

[00:43:23] Travis Bader: a blue healer and border Collie. That's my first dog. But your dog's got an Instagram account. 

[00:43:29] Matthew Griffin: Kilo Niner dot Kiko. Yeah, you can follow him. Um, so, you know, I'm, I'm standing there, I got to finish this fundraiser and I got two weeks until the largest retail event any American small business could ever have, which then goes into, okay, I'm going to call every rich individual I know.

[00:43:50] Matthew Griffin: And like I said, I'm relentless about running people down if I miss something. And I won't come after you like selfishly, it's like, Hey, we're going to do something fun. It's going to be good. You'll be smiling at the And, uh, I, I, there was a ranger buddy who I knew was doing well and I called him. I was like, dude, I need 50 grand right now.

[00:44:08] Matthew Griffin: He's like, what? I need 50, 000 transferred into my account right now. I know your CFO is sitting in the next office over. I want you to yell at him after I get done talking. And I want you to tell him to wire me 50 grand. I'll give you 10 percent back in 30 days. Like this will be a good return for you.

[00:44:25] Matthew Griffin: Let's do it. And um, and he's like, no, no, I was like, look, man, if you don't do this, I'm going to get in my car. I'm going to drive to my office and I'm not going to leave until like, and he was good for it. And he ended up hosting, he ended up hosting the shark tank debut in his office headquarters, you know, and, uh, ta group.

[00:44:47] Matthew Griffin: Um, John Syracuse, the guy's name. And then, you know, we have all the dashboards, it was set up like a command center, but we had our Google analytics, uh, you know, everybody like long table with rows of laptops. And we had 50 grand written on the board because that was the only number that I was worried about was taking care of what I owed somebody 

[00:45:05] Travis Bader: else.

[00:45:05] Matthew Griffin: That number came, came and it went right. Like we wiped that number off the board when the sales hit, we popped bottles of champagne and Yeah, it was, it was good. It was fun. Um, and then, you know, we back ordered, we aired February 6th or seventh. We backorder on the initial night. We back ordered it full production to the end of May.

[00:45:27] Matthew Griffin: Then they rerun us at the end of May, and then we backorder till the end of August. So we had tens of thousands of orders that we had to get out and. I did my best. We were still fulfilling out of my garage behind my kitchen. Wow. Like literally Trucks would roll in with boxes We'd break everything down inventory at all hit the print button All the pick tickets would come out everything would go into boxes Truck would roll by four hours later ship out and we'd stand there at the end of the day And y'all look that's five little girls going to school.

[00:45:58] Matthew Griffin: That's so cool. That is so cool You know, every day, you know, getting to have that satisfaction and like looking at the team and it's not, Oh, like, Hey, we did all this work. It's like, that's five little girls. Going to school for you. Yeah, right. And like everybody kept coming back day after day, and I think they really get it.

[00:46:18] Matthew Griffin: If you work for us or with us, you'll understand this is a real intent. Like our, our operations have an impact, you know, and I often talk to people about our And they go, that was the first thing we ever did as a company. Like we help entrepreneurs affected by conflict. You know, we empower the mindful consumer to manufacture peace through trade.

[00:46:40] Matthew Griffin: And there's a few other things in there, but persistence, creativity, and respect, you know, through persistent creativity and respect, we empower the mindful consumer to manufacture peace through trade and. The reason the mission statement is so important and why I explain this to other people that are thinking about writing a mission statement for their business is eventually you're going to have them and your employee at some point in the future is going to be unsupervised out of contact and needs to make a decision.

[00:47:09] Matthew Griffin: Do they have a binary statement that's in there that goes, does this help? Does this decision drive us closer to the mission goal? Or does it not yes or no, any decision, whether it's a marketing photograph, whether it's production, whether it's, you know, logistics or finance, anybody on any one of my teams can read our mission statement and go, does this help them make the mission?

[00:47:33] Matthew Griffin: Does this make the mission happen? Right. And that's, and that's what we do is we just, we just kept doing that and like people get it and they, we just been driving on, like just chip away at that 

[00:47:44] Travis Bader: North star 

[00:47:45] Matthew Griffin: without the help of, yeah, without the help of the U S government, any aid agencies. It has been a debacle, like, and I've spoken at the Afghan embassy multiple times, I've spoken, you know, with heads of Department of State, I mean, like, congressmen, representatives, senators.

[00:48:04] Matthew Griffin: Nada. We are the most successful business that has come out of this operation and we still continue to be the only Finnish cashmere maker in Afghanistan and we cannot get any support from any aid agency. It's been really frustrating. That's crazy. But the soulless in that. Right. The big middle finger to the man is that all of this impact has been created because of the faith and the support of people like yourself, you know, like anything that we have done, it's not us.

[00:48:36] Matthew Griffin: It's our customers that have made this happen. And we're so thankful for the people that support our mission, where our product. And encourage others to do so, you know, so we're, we're having a good time with it. Right. And we just got more for your gangster show. I 

[00:48:49] Travis Bader: love it. And I think you might have a Canadian distributor now.

[00:48:54] Matthew Griffin: We do DS tactical. Those guys up there, they, uh, just waiting on their opening order. So maybe you just give them a buzz and tell them to shoot over that PO. That is the, the Canadian market has been really understanding of the mission. It's it's interesting except with the exception of the french. 

[00:49:11] Travis Bader: Oh, yeah.

[00:49:12] Travis Bader: Well, don't get me started. I will get 

[00:49:13] Matthew Griffin: on and I

[00:49:17] Matthew Griffin: I'll tell if any french canadians listen to this like don't be such a dick on social media right like I'm gonna tell you like stop being a dick in the comments. Nobody enjoys it Um, but the generally the Canadians they've for years, they purchased stuff from us at a severe detriment to them because it's more expensive to get the product because of the taxes.

[00:49:37] Matthew Griffin: They, they've got, you know, all the shipping and since 2020, the shipping to Canada is just gotten. Stupid expenses. Yeah. And then we, uh, so we're really thankful we get double hose too, because 

[00:49:46] Travis Bader: we have brokerage fees like on UPS and FedEx and the brokerage fee has got nothing to do. Like you can ship a refrigerator for $1 and they'll charge you a brokerage fee on the dollar or a diamond ring at 10 grand and the brokerage fee will be based on the 10 grand.

[00:49:59] Travis Bader: It's got nothing to do with the size, weight, or whatever it is. And really, it's got nothing to do with any. Any, uh, government, uh, taxes. It's just the company saying, we want a bit more money. So that's, uh, that's a tough one when we're buying stuff. And when you and I first started talking, you're like, Hey, you want to be a distributor?

[00:50:19] Travis Bader: And I'm like, I don't even know what a distributor does. Right. It's super easy. All you need is a warehouse and like, well, I got a warehouse, actually, this is in the warehouse that I've converted into a studio part of it. And, uh, yeah. But I said, you know, I know somebody that I texted Martin from a DS tactical.

[00:50:40] Travis Bader: And right away he said, yeah, he'd do it. But I didn't tell you that. He said, yeah, right away. Cause I didn't want to speak for him. I didn't want to, who knows what was going to go happen. But, um, I said, this guy's Griff, you got to talk with him. He's amazing guy. He's got a great product. He's got a great thing going.

[00:50:55] Travis Bader: And, uh, so. On day one, when I contacted them, you had the green light. So I was just holding my breath, making sure that nothing happened in between that was going to, uh, to jinx that one. But that's awesome. 

[00:51:09] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Well, they, they should be shipping here soon, fingers crossed, but I will tell my Canadian brothers and sisters.

[00:51:16] Matthew Griffin: Before winter comes, when we ship our cashmere, buy the cashmere. It is the best cold weather product that I own. I'm telling you, buy two because your wife is going to steal one. It is a great product, you're going to love it. 

[00:51:31] Travis Bader: Well, you know a bit about cold weather because you lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while, right?

[00:51:37] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, I did. I lived in the Seattle area for the Northwest. I was one of the first guys to ski, uh, ski off the tallest mountain in Iraq. I've summited Mount Rainier. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a mountain guy in cold weather. So I get it. I do a lot of archery, hunting, all these other things. And that one piece that has been uniformed throughout all of those adventures has been my cashmere, my cashmere, 

[00:52:00] Travis Bader: it 

[00:52:01] Matthew Griffin: goes with me every order 

[00:52:02] Travis Bader: that one.

[00:52:04] Matthew Griffin: I'm telling you guys, if, if you buy one of these things and you listen to this podcast again and think that I'm lying to you, you would be the first person. They are phenomenal. You will really enjoy it. 

[00:52:14] Travis Bader: Well, Rainier, that's a bit more of a technical mountain. That's, uh, that's, that's kind of a sketchy mountain.

[00:52:22] Matthew Griffin: Uh, I did it with veterans adventure group. So they're a group that helps, uh, veterans do more positive activities in the outdoors. So they do mountain climbs, they do skydiving and. They sponsored me to get my, uh, AFF certification for skydiving. So they helped me learn how to skydive and I felt the need to repay them.

[00:52:42] Matthew Griffin: And so I led a, uh, led a climb on Rainier for them, I think in 2017 or 2018. I let it climb for them. And we did it in early June, which I would have to say if I were going to do Rainier again, I would do it as early season as I possibly could. Uh, just, there's not as many crevasses, the path is shorter. Um, there's usually less tourists, you know, and, uh, the summer climbers that are there, so, you know, we just had a, a group of veterans and I trained this, uh, a friend of mine, one of my mentors, actually a business partner, uh, She turned 50 that year.

[00:53:15] Matthew Griffin: She's like, I don't want to climb right here. So we trained for months and I'll tell you what, she absolutely went out and put the wood. To those other veterans. Like she was like the first one up to the base camp. She didn't bitch or complain all day. She did. She managed her, her lines. Well, she just straight up crush it.

[00:53:32] Matthew Griffin: And I like really made me proud as a coach, right. To see here, this 50 year old female veteran, just go out and just kill these young guys. It was awesome. I loved it. That is 

[00:53:42] Travis Bader: really good. That the group that you were, you're working with there, they deal with veterans and mental health as well. Don't they?

[00:53:52] Matthew Griffin: Uh, veterans adventure group, uh, not so much. I think just their primary focus is getting guys, you know, outside that is mental 

[00:54:01] Travis Bader: health 

[00:54:01] Matthew Griffin: is being outside. 

[00:54:03] Travis Bader: That's my mental health in a nutshell is just get out, get out in the ocean, get out in the mountains, get outside. 

[00:54:10] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. I mean, every great article that I've written or done or anything creative like that has always been.

[00:54:17] Matthew Griffin: Outside 

[00:54:18] Travis Bader: who was 

[00:54:19] Matthew Griffin: my ted talk. I wrote while cattle hunting here on the big island, you know All I just sit down you got time to think about nothing while you're waiting around. Yeah Yeah, all that's when all the thoughts I didn't 

[00:54:30] Travis Bader: catch your ted talk. How did I miss your ted talk? Tell me about that 

[00:54:36] Matthew Griffin: uh I was at nike at a veterans advocacy group And I just happened to sit down around a table and this guy sitting next to me goes.

[00:54:44] Matthew Griffin: Hey, man, i'm You know, I'm, uh, I'm doing this Ted talk, uh, in Tacoma. Would you like to be a part of it? All right, cool. Like we'll hire you a professional speaking coach and you can talk about it. And, uh, I was like, how long is it? You got a couple of months. I'm like, it's fine. And you know, then I typical range, right?

[00:55:06] Matthew Griffin: Deep dive into the science of a Ted talk. I look at all the graphs and the best ones that work. And then I start like penciling mine all out. And when the coach showed up, I had my. My sign wave and graph on the board with my talking points on it. And he's like, you'd really thought about this one, huh? And I'm like, yeah.

[00:55:21] Matthew Griffin: And then, uh, they ended up making me the closer for the event, which is cool. And it's just a great piece of, uh, of content because it holds true today as it ever did, right? Like I still feel the same way I do about Afghanistan. I still feel the same way I do about our mission. I really think if. If we're all creative, respectful and persistent, you know, we're going to make it through a lot of these challenges that we face, whatever they may be today in this world.

[00:55:48] Travis Bader: So, 

[00:55:49] Matthew Griffin: and we're just an example of that. 

[00:55:52] Travis Bader: Archery is something that you're passionate about and it's something that I'm just kind of learning about. I grew up a gun guy, rifle guy, and I picked up a Matthew's bow not too long ago. I've been practicing with it. You turned me on to, what was it? Slick trick.

[00:56:07] Travis Bader: Slick tricks. Got some of those. 

[00:56:11] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Slick trick broadheads. Yeah. Have you got to put them to use? No, 

[00:56:15] Travis Bader: no, I just got the, well, I think they just came in the mail, the slick tricks, uh, about a couple of weeks ago. And I, uh, then I was out of town. I was in Nova Scotia and then over to Toronto. So I haven't played, played with them yet, but, uh, I'm looking forward to the, uh, the fall when I can see if I can get close enough to an animal and, uh, do my work with it.

[00:56:36] Travis Bader: That'll be, uh, it'll be interesting. I might have to talk to you about, uh, not if, 

[00:56:42] Matthew Griffin: not if, 

[00:56:43] Travis Bader: all right, when, when, you know, I got a draw for moose this year. So we'll be doing a moose hunt. I think that, I think that'll be a rifle hunt. Uh, but I'll be bringing the bow just in case. Uh, we've got a, uh, son got a deer draw and then we've got a couple other hunts that we've got kind of lined up.

[00:57:02] Travis Bader: But you do a fair bit of hunting over there on where you're at right now on the big island, don't you? 

[00:57:08] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. We've been, um, we've been hunting a lot lately actually. And that's one of the major reasons I moved here is because you have the majority of animals here are invasive and they want them gone. So the, the hunting tags are non existent.

[00:57:20] Matthew Griffin: You just go out and hunt, you know, you have your limits per area, but it's every day of the year, you can always go hunting out here. And I really just, I enjoy it. So we've, uh, you know, last couple of weeks you brought down, you know, a turkey, a couple of pigs, a few cattle. You know, i'm still after a big old mouflon sheep here, which I haven't had the opportunity to get yet But that'll come here.

[00:57:39] Matthew Griffin: Just need to spend spend some more time outside. You have a lot of the 

[00:57:41] Travis Bader: mouflon. 

[00:57:44] Matthew Griffin: Uh, there's a lot Yeah, they're they're an invasive species so much So are they like every couple years they have to shoot a few thousand of them? 

[00:57:51] Travis Bader: Okay 

[00:57:53] Matthew Griffin: Like they just, they, they tear up the environment. They hang out at high altitude, you know, six to 10, 000 feet of elevation.

[00:57:58] Matthew Griffin: So it's, it's hard for hunters to get up there to, to, you know, keep them in. 

[00:58:03] Travis Bader: And 

[00:58:05] Matthew Griffin: there's no natural predators. 

[00:58:06] Travis Bader: And you don't have access to your, on that island, do you? 

[00:58:10] Matthew Griffin: We do not know. And there are another super invasive species. But I am looking forward to getting over on Molokai. Going and getting some of those.

[00:58:18] Matthew Griffin: Cause I, I hear they're really. 

[00:58:20] Travis Bader: Yeah, they're fantastic. I was over last year on Molokai there and got some access to here. That was actually my first out of country hunt. And it wasn't at all what I was expecting in the way of a hunt. And, um, like I, I don't do the guided thing, although I'm sure I could learn a lot.

[00:58:35] Travis Bader: Naive Josh. Gone out and learn myself or talk to more experienced people. And so I, I did my recce. I'm going around. I'm checking the places out where the deer are at a few days ahead of time. They're kind of neat. When you sneak up on them, they'll bark at you. That's, um, I haven't had deer bark at me before, but that was, that was neat.

[00:58:53] Travis Bader: So I, uh, meet up there's a, I think there's a couple of companies, but there's one company over there, really nice family owned company. Great guy. And, um, Anyways, they get you in a little side by side and they drive you around. I'm like, okay, we get out here and we hike over the next mountain. Do we, no, no, no, we'll, we'll drive you over there.

[00:59:11] Travis Bader: I'm like, well, I kind of want to get out and move around. Right. I kind of want to put some work in and I guess they're used to just driving people up, sitting down. There's a deer, go ahead and shoot them. So, uh, 

[00:59:24] Matthew Griffin: there is something to be said for those types of hunts. Um, Where, you know, like, you know, we're going to do a service like that out here.

[00:59:33] Matthew Griffin: I'm helping another veteran started guide service. And a lot of people are just intimidated by hunting and they want to get into the sport, but they don't have anybody to. You know, take them out to a safe area, know they're going to get a shot and then walk through the process. The part of hunting that nobody ever talks about is how do you break down an animal?

[00:59:48] Travis Bader: Well, that's pretty huge. 

[00:59:49] Matthew Griffin: Like, how do you feel dressing it? Yeah, and like everybody just focuses on the gun side of it. And Now, this is the part of hunting that nobody talks about is when you're, you're all sitting around and get done taking photos and you're just laughing. You got the tailgate down, got some music on, drink a cup of coffee, you know, you get the knives out and the meat bags and you're just, you're there for an hour or two, just hanging about, you know, just getting ready, everything ready.

[01:00:12] Matthew Griffin: And then you go home and then you have to debone everything. If you don't debone it in the woods and you got to get the silver skin off, and then you got to cut up all your fillets and steaks, then you got to vacuum seal everything. Like If you take down an animal, there is another 10 to 15 hours of work for a newbie, maybe three to four for an experienced guy.

[01:00:31] Matthew Griffin: And the ability to go on one of these guided hunts, where they teach you how to do that will only encourage you to be out in the, in the outside more, which I'm, I'm a 

[01:00:40] Travis Bader: fan. I can see a lot of value to that. Um, I did end up getting out and saying, look, I'm going to just go through this valley here, I'm going to hike on through.

[01:00:49] Travis Bader: And we got some game in there, which is amazing. And the guide said, Hey, that was a pretty neat trick. We haven't had somebody do that before. I think we'll try it again because we had some, some decent sized ones bedded down in there. Um, you know, for somebody, if you've never done that before, I mean, that's, there's massive value to learning with somebody over your shoulder and if you're putting it in, if you're doing it the hard way, I mean, you're just reducing your odds of actually finding something and being able to get, to learn those other pieces of the puzzle.

[01:01:20] Travis Bader: Tell me about this business that your friend's setting up. I want to learn more about this and I want to know how I can get involved with that. 

[01:01:29] Matthew Griffin: Uh, so, um, he's a native Hawaiian, uh, Marine veteran. Who loves being outside and he hates his current job. All right, so you know you hang out with me enough I will like keep seeding like oh, you maybe you should do this for a business or maybe you should do that Or here's how the math works out and people run it.

[01:01:48] Matthew Griffin: Well, we don't have any land to hunt Well, i've got a friend who's got 60 acres private acres here And he's got tons of pigs on the property that he wants off his property you know if we just go out there and clear down some brush and set up some shooting lanes and cut him a commission like We now have 60 acres of private hunting land Then we can safely go and bring people to, you know, off a gravel road.

[01:02:09] Matthew Griffin: You'll pull your car out. We'll either give you a ride out to the blind, or you can walk out to the blind. Yeah. We'll, we'll know where the animals are and we can shoot one, bring it down, take all the photos and somebody can go back and have their vacation with their family. They go snorkeling at the beach.

[01:02:23] Matthew Griffin: They can, you know, go cruise around, do the hikes, go to the observatory. And then all of a sudden at your hotel, you're going to get a cooler full of vacuum sealed, frozen stuff to fly home with, right? So you guys can enjoy this trip for, you know. So, you know, so you just keep reliving that and that's the experience you want to provide.

[01:02:43] Travis Bader: So he's going to do well with that. That's going to be a popular, are there a lot of other companies over there that are doing that? 

[01:02:50] Matthew Griffin: Uh, there are a lot of other guide companies out here, but they're typically the higher end ranch hunts where you're paying 1500 to 2000, they go out and shoot a big, big ram or, you know, a big goat on somebody else's property.

[01:03:01] Matthew Griffin: But, you know, I'm more aimed toward the father, son, father, daughter, you know, a woman who wants to learn how to hunt. You know, creating that kind of teaching experience where it's not one of those fancy hunts, but it's something where you're going to get a good animal, a tasty animal. You're going to learn a lot and hopefully you'll come back and recommend other friends.

[01:03:21] Matthew Griffin: That's cool. 

[01:03:21] Travis Bader: Well, we'll get links to that up when the business is up and going, we'll get links to that, we'll throw it in this podcast. Anybody listening and watching, we'll be able to see what that's all about. And, uh, you know, maybe I'll just fly over there and take a few pictures myself and see what we can do.

[01:03:38] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, we'll have to do a podcast from the wine. I think. So get that done. Yeah, that'll happen. Yeah. 

[01:03:43] Travis Bader: Yeah. I've got the, uh, the full remote kit that I've, uh, I was just, uh, back east with it and I was supposed to be doing a podcast in Nova Scotia. Uh, the individual got a little shy and so we didn't do it there.

[01:03:55] Travis Bader: That's fair enough. Uh, had a fantastic time. All you can eat lobster and, um, smallmouth bass fishing. I'd never done that before, so that was, uh, kind of neat. . 

[01:04:06] Matthew Griffin: Smallmouth or fun? My favorite freshwater fish to fish. Yeah. They're so aggressive. Are, are they ever, they hit so hard. 

[01:04:13] Travis Bader: Well, we head out. Okay, so this fellow, he.

[01:04:17] Travis Bader: Uh, owns a company called ATI armament technology. They make wicked scopes. People have probably heard of them. They do Tenebrex scope covers and they got tangent theta and SAI and really cool company. Very family oriented, which I like very core values. And so out at the, the owner's cottage, we go in the boat and it was me and him and my wife is with, with his partner.

[01:04:41] Travis Bader: And. Uh, she comes over and hands a little book. Like, what's this for? Oh, you got to keep track. She says, what do you mean? You say, well, how do we know who's won here? Who's got the most? I'm like, okay, so this is a new thing for me. You, I, I don't go out and keep track of how many, man, the bite was on. We're doing pretty good over there.

[01:05:01] Travis Bader: It was, um, uh, pickerel. Of course, we've got a bunch of those, uh, smallmouth bass. They're an aggressive fish. I mean, they're invasive from what I understand in our, in our waters. But, um, at least over here in the West, but they're a fun one. 

[01:05:20] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, they're super fun. Yeah. My, uh, my favorite like family oriented fishing is pink.

[01:05:26] Matthew Griffin: Okay. That's. Just the little garbage ones. 

[01:05:29] Travis Bader: I like pinks, you know, every, every odd year they'll run on inside or outside, even years inside, odd years outside. Right. And so right around the corner from this location, when he used to be our office, I got a new office, uh, in Ladner for people who know the area.

[01:05:47] Travis Bader: But, uh, I've got fishing rods in the, uh, in the next room over here. And when they're running, man, we just go out there right on the river. You can cast from the side and you go home with a few pinks, throw them in the smoker. They're fatty. They're, they're a fantastic fish to smoke up. 

[01:06:06] Matthew Griffin: I like saltwater fishing, you know, I like, I've had them out of freshwater, but when the first time I did it, I think it was like 2015 or 2017, but we had a 14 foot Zodiac with a, I think a 15 horsepower motor on it on the back.

[01:06:20] Matthew Griffin: And, you know, we saw him out jumping and it's like, I know they hit buzz bombs and we had a couple bass rods. So we just, you could see the school skim in the top of the water. So we just ripped right in front of the school, toss them in. And next thing you know, the whole boat is erupting and laughter and, you know, just, just, you know, there's four fish on at a time with four people in a 14 foot Zodiac and everybody's tried to do everything and get them in.

[01:06:43] Matthew Griffin: Right. And then once we get them all in and like in the bottom of the boat and they're like, there's schools over there and you're like a Navy SEAL team with all your fishing rods, everybody's strapped to the bottom of that boat. And I was literally out there with like, you know, little girls and my, you know, my friends.

[01:06:58] Matthew Griffin: And just these kids and like they knew for the next three days that we were up in the San Juan Islands But like they knew where the tide changes were like when's tide change And like they were ready and like standing by the boat with their fishing rods and their buzz bombs ready to go Because we were gonna go out and kill it It was just such a fun little experience and then We'd go out and we hit our limit every day And then we'd have salmon for months and every time you break one of those things out of the freezer you laugh about the story that you had when you were out fishing and reminiscing and pulling up the photos and You I just think it's a much better way to live and to consume your meat is to have that connection to it.

[01:07:33] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. 

[01:07:34] Travis Bader: Yeah. I think people would do a lot better to, you know, I, I get, I get the idea behind veganism, the people who don't want to eat meat. Sure. I get where they're at, but, um, if you're going to consume meat, having a more intimate connection with. The cycle, the life cycle, it sure makes a difference in my life and my family's life.

[01:07:56] Travis Bader: I can tell you that much, you know, like my kids, we, at a young age, brought them up friends farm. They were there for everything except for shooting the thing in the head, the Berkshire pig, drag it around the corner through the snow, hang the thing up, butchering it, um, They're there for all of it. And I think like appreciation that this animal was alive and now it's dead and you were a part of that process makes them appreciate their own life better.

[01:08:24] Travis Bader: It makes them appreciate, I'm not going to waste this food that's on here. And yeah, I know it's not for everybody, but I think that, uh, people should at least experience a portion of that. 

[01:08:39] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think I just, I honestly think it's more ecologically friendly. You know, the math never pays out kids like guys, you can lie to your wife and say, Hey, no, I'm going to shoot this moose.

[01:08:50] Matthew Griffin: It's going to generate X amount of weight. Right. And if you go to the store and try to buy this, it's, it's, it's a 4, 000 worth of meat versus if I go hunting and the trip's only two grand, like you never, the math never works out guys. Like I understand this lie, go for it. Like it's a little light one. I want you guys to be out there in the woods, but, uh, It never works out, but you know, we, when we take our animals here, you know, we use everything, right?

[01:09:16] Matthew Griffin: The, the heads get saved. They get turned into art, you know, all the neck meat and all the off cuts of meat gets turned into dog food, all the steaks and everything else. They get to go into the human consumption. All the silver skin goes into a broth for the dog to go over the top of their food and grind up the organs for the dogs.

[01:09:33] Matthew Griffin: Like we try to use. As much of the animal as possible. And you know, you're not getting that in with store bought stuff. 

[01:09:41] Travis Bader: No. 

[01:09:42] Matthew Griffin: So I 

[01:09:42] Travis Bader: feel better. Yeah, no, we've, I've heard the horror stories. We've had some professional butchers on the show here before talking about, uh, some of the horror stories. Um, yeah, being a part of the, the process and, uh, actually.

[01:09:56] Travis Bader: You know, like you're saying, you're doing all your own butchery. I think that's another piece of the puzzle that people should, uh, should experience. You don't just go out and harvest an animal, shoot your animal, and then drop it off at the butcher and come pick it up later. The butchery process is a big part of that too.

[01:10:15] Matthew Griffin: I'm going to say there is nothing wrong 

[01:10:16] Travis Bader: with dropping it. 

[01:10:17] Matthew Griffin: If that still gets you outside and it, it, it. Gets you providing clean, organic meat to your family. I think there's nothing wrong with it. I just, I just enjoy the whole process. 

[01:10:27] Travis Bader: I'm not going to begrudge somebody for it, but I do think they should experience that.

[01:10:32] Travis Bader: And they might find it's not as difficult as maybe they thought it was. And, you know, I'd like, we've, I've been on group hunts, um, we had a moose group hunt and they wanted to bring it to a butcher. Fair enough. And we had the backstraps and around the campfire, and then we'd go to the butcher and pick up all our stuff.

[01:10:50] Travis Bader: We've got our backstraps again. I'm like, how'd that work out? It's gotta be somebody else's. So there's, uh, more control over what you have and it's a good experience. I'm not saying everyone's got to do it, but it's, if you haven't done it, it's a good thing to experience. 

[01:11:09] Matthew Griffin: Agreed. Yeah. And again, this just goes back to YouTube.

[01:11:12] Matthew Griffin: I remember there was this English guy talking about like a gourmet butchering a deer. And he had this 30 minute tutorial about him taking apart a whole deer and explaining what the cuts look like. And, um, I have that video saved. And if I ever have a question, I want to make a neat cut. I just literally got the phone or the laptop up in the kitchen.

[01:11:32] Matthew Griffin: You know, play that section, right? This is how I do it. And you ended up coming up with professional looking stuff and your first couple of animals are going to look like garbage, your fillets and your cuts are not going to look good. So just get used to it. It just forces you to go out and 

[01:11:45] Travis Bader: do it. I was a little bit lucky as far as my wife's a red seal chef and has done professional butchery courses.

[01:11:51] Travis Bader: So she's better at it than I am. I always lean on her for that one. But the one thing I did learn on the hunt over in Molokai He would dress the deer out, the axes, deer, uh, the gutless method. And I thought, okay, that's kind of interesting. And, um, uh, so he went through here, the thing dressed out in no time flat, obviously he's done a lot of them and, uh, there is like very minimal wastage on the animal.

[01:12:19] Travis Bader: So that was kind of an interesting way to do it. I thought that was a good learning point. 

[01:12:24] Matthew Griffin: I still haven't figured out how to get the tenderloins out with the gutless method, which rib I got to go through and how I got to get that thing separated out and going from the I filmed them doing 

[01:12:33] Travis Bader: it. Um, I 

[01:12:35] Matthew Griffin: haven't, I haven't figured that out yet, but, uh, no, it's, it's a, it's a great method.

[01:12:40] Matthew Griffin: I generally will do that. I will at least save the gut pile for last, you know, so I'll take all the quarters, backstraps, all the brisket and I'll take everything off the animal. So I'll have the carcass there and just less it. And then I'll, you know, quick, get the, you know, open up the cavity. you know, grab the esophagus, pull everything down, like pull it out the back, go get the tenderloin.

[01:13:02] Matthew Griffin: So at least I've got the, like the intestines and all the parts that we're not using up there. They're just connected in one thing. So it's some animals not going to drag off the bones and the intestines. So you're not going to make a mess if you're Near anywhere residential, 

[01:13:15] Travis Bader: you know, that was the other thing I saw the animals, how quickly they, um, break down over in your heat over in Hawaii wheat, there's a, um, a deer that was hit by a vehicle.

[01:13:25] Travis Bader: And I'm sure there's tons of them on Molokai that would get hit by vehicles, but scroll by one day, there's, there's one on the side of the road. It was hit. And I think by day two or three, you'd barely know there's anything there. I mean, the, the heat and the bugs and everything, it was just gone. 

[01:13:41] Matthew Griffin: Oh, it's.

[01:13:41] Matthew Griffin: Yeah. It's, it's primarily the pigs, the pigs will eat everything. We, we, we, we shot a, a cow, uh, about two weeks ago and we were, you know, just being really quiet and we were butchering everything. And all of a sudden this 70 pound hog, you know, she was downwind of us, like walks up, smells, thinks she's going to go get dinner.

[01:14:01] Matthew Griffin: And then she ended up being dinner for 

[01:14:04] Travis Bader: us. 

[01:14:05] Matthew Griffin: So 

[01:14:06] Travis Bader: good dinner. So is there anything that we haven't talked about that we should be talking about?

[01:14:16] Matthew Griffin: See here, we talk about Afghanistan, the story, just to reiterate guys, like we make stuff cool shit in dangerous places We do that with the intention of representing America, Americans, the Western culture well In areas in which we typically haven't, or we put people to work, put food on tables, we create a great product and we haven't talked about our lifetime warranty, but any product you buy of ours, if it breaks a manufacturing, some manufacturing issue, we replace it.

[01:14:41] Matthew Griffin: Like we, we literally have, you know, very similar to vortex. If you're in the gun industry, the zero questions asked policy. If we did something wrong, we will fix it. We promise. Um, so we try to add a great value on our products and. You know, we still continue to help. We're, you know, I was on a call this morning talking about, you know, educating girls in Afghanistan that are forbidden from going to school.

[01:15:05] Matthew Griffin: So we get them computers and an internet connection and they learn at home, you know, under the guise of the current government, we still help, you know, organization clear landmines. We work with one more way of a non veteran nonprofit, which helps wounded veterans get in the water and surf further.

[01:15:23] Matthew Griffin: That's cool. The guys who lost some, some appendages. You see, you see all those cool photos of the guys with the cool prosthetics. You don't think about it, but those prosthetics will punch holes on the top of normal surfboards. 

[01:15:34] Travis Bader: Yeah. Good point. 

[01:15:35] Matthew Griffin: So they have to have Kevlar line. They have to have Kevlar Leo fiber across the top of their boards for a line.

[01:15:41] Matthew Griffin: And we've got a guy who's got a left arm. He's a Marine veteran, Jose, and all he has is a left arm and he's flying all over the world, winning world adaptive surf competitions. He's really, and it's a great community of people. Yeah, they're, they're awesome. You guys should check them out one more way. 

[01:15:56] Travis Bader: Yeah, we'll check that one out.

[01:15:57] Travis Bader: Yeah. 

[01:15:59] Matthew Griffin: Uh, and other than that, like we're living the life here, good flip flops, slippers, as I say, here in Ireland, getting some hunting and fishing done and looking forward to hosting more folks out here. Uh, once you come on out and do the initial podcast from the blind. 

[01:16:14] Travis Bader: Well, we'll definitely do that one.

[01:16:15] Travis Bader: And if people haven't checked out your ads yet, do yourself a favor. Go on social media, check out combat flip flop ads. They're fricking hilarious. I do like those ones. Griff. 

[01:16:28] Matthew Griffin: Yeah, there's, there's a new one coming out, which I am Really excited about. And all I will say is slow mo revolver. That's, that's, that's, that's the only two.

[01:16:40] Matthew Griffin: That's the only teaser I'm giving you slow mo revolver. 

[01:16:45] Travis Bader: Do you ever worry about these things getting pulled or flagged by, uh, cause I mean, you'll show guns and stuff in your, uh, your ads. Meta doesn't seem to like that, or at least the AI doesn't like it. Does that ever happen? 

[01:16:57] Matthew Griffin: You know, we, Oh, it happens to us all the time.

[01:16:59] Matthew Griffin: We had to change the name of our AK 47 flip flop, which was our number one selling flip flop to the AK because they thought we were selling guns. You know, our, our shoe, our first shoe that we came out with, we did in 2019, we called it the Mark 19. And those who familiar with what a mark 19 is it's a 40 millimeter automatic grenade launcher and facebook thought we were selling 40 millimeter automatic grenade launchers because it was a mark 19.

[01:17:26] Matthew Griffin: It's so dumb. It really is Um, but that being said like our most recent ones with robert and tacticon And a few of those other guys they've just They've gone really well. They've got guns in them. And I think the community is responding, which makes us happy. 

[01:17:41] Travis Bader: Griff, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[01:17:43] Travis Bader: I really enjoyed talking to you and I'm looking forward to chat with you in the blind. 

[01:17:47] Matthew Griffin: Travis, looking forward to it. See you, buddy.