This is the tactical redneck podcast, real gear, real life, and being ready for whatever shows up. We don't deal in hype and we don't pretend we just dish out honest talk about skills, mindset, and taking care of your own. Welcome to the Tactical Redneck Podcast. Alright guys, it is Ron Lyons. And yes, I am the tactical redneck and I am back in the driver's seat tonight. And the reason that I'm back in the driver's seat tonight after a small hiatus is because we got in a little bit of trouble a little while back. That's right. Believe it or not, we actually got canceled. We had a little t-shirt that had something on it, that culture out there decides was hate speech . Yeah, that's right. We actually got like a three or four year vacation because we got de platformed over a goofy little t-shirt that I never even sold one of, but it was on my website. It was available. The platform didn't like it, so they shut us down. But guess what, baby, we're back again. And this time we're working a whole lot harder to not get de platformed, but still bring you everything that you want from the tactical redneck. All right, let's talk about that just a little bit. Let's talk about how you can get de platformed over a t-shirt. It sounds like something that's borderline impossible, but you've gotta think about the world that we live in right now. Like we literally live in a world where people get offended by who's on the box, a pancake mix, and who's on the land O'Lakes butter, and who's the mascot of this football team And what about these statues that have been up ever since just after the Civil War? Those things are super offensive. We've gotta take 'em down. So if that's the case, if that's the world we live in and it is, then you can probably imagine that it's absolutely possible to get canceled over a t-shirt and that's what happened. Lemme give you just a little bit of background. So first of all, we used to be called Lions Tactical. It was my last name, lions Tactical, and we had a really, really large giant website. It was on the, uh, I think it's called, uh, Shopify was the platform. And we never really realized when we first started that one day our little business was gonna grow that big. So we were like third or fourth largest in the state of Texas and in the top 10 in the country. And so we had this tactical supply store online and we had multiple dealers. And there's this whole background side where all of their catalogs and the products get uploaded to our website. And it's, it's a big endeavor. It's a big process and it costs an awful lot of money and it takes so, so, so much work. And we had that. We had all of that and there was a t-shirt that one of the dealers had uploaded out of many thousands of t-shirts and it had a big giant Roman numeral three on it. That's right. It was a three percenter t-shirt. And I hate to say this, but back at the time, I knew very, very little about what a three percenter was. And we had never in fact even sold one of those T-shirts. It was just an olive green roman numeral three, no words, no anything else. And that was it. And we got a nice little warning from Shopify whenever we had that on there that said, this is hate speech. This violates our terms of use and all of that stuff. You can't have this t-shirt on there. So I don't care. We've not sold it before. It means nothing to me. There are literally dozens of other products that are way, way, way more popular than this. So it was no big deal. I went in there, I deleted it, life moves on. I think it's silly, but I understand it's your platform. You could set the rules, I just get to follow 'em. So we did that. We set everything up exactly as they wanted it and we hummed along for a little bit longer. And then that dealer did a full catalog update to the website. That means one night in the wee hours of the morning they do this automatic upload and they put all of their products back on your website and they make some changes and some tweaks and they do some different things. They remove products that are no longer available, whatever. And guess what? That three percenter t-shirt, that little roman numeral three on an olive drab T-shirt that you know cost us about $12 went back on the website and then I got my little notice via email. The store was shut down online, nobody could access it. All of a sudden, all hell broke loose because people were not able to find our website. We had pending orders, we had all kinds of stuff, but it simply did not matter. And to this day, I dislike Shopify very, very much just for that reason because there's no recourse. They gave you that one warning, then the second time they don't care what happened. They don't care why you are just done. Let's so be it. I respect that. I mean, like I said earlier, it's your platform. You can do whatever you want to do. I don't have to necessarily love it or agree with it. And we went through quite the process of thinking about where we could relaunch the website, where we could do it again, how we could do it again. And it just wasn't worth it. It had taken so much to put that thing together and we were all exhausted and we were mentally exhausted over all of the cancel culture crap that was going on at the time. COVID was still kind of a big thing, like it was still going on. And we just finally said, you know what? Let's hit the pause button. So we did exactly that. We kinda stepped away from every single thing we made, all of our orders that were still outstanding, we got all of those taken care of and stopped taking any new ones. Obviously we didn't even have a website anymore, so we didn't take any new orders and we all kinda walked away and went into different places. We did different things. We even lost the original podcast. It was called The Land's Tactical Podcast. And it was, it was amazing. It was absolutely awesome. It was a very, very good podcast. And even that went away. And so a little bit later, like fast forward to just a short time ago, and I was on Facebook or I was on YouTube, I don't even remember what I was on, but I was on something and all of a sudden this deal popped up and I was like, oh wow, that is very, very, very familiar to me. That looks like the stuff that I used to do. And I don't remember, it was like a video or something like that. And I was like, that's super cool. I'm gonna click on it. And I did. And guess what? It was one of our videos. It was something that we had done and it was right there still existing in the world of YouTube or Facebook or whatever it was. And I thought, okay, this is super cool that this is still out here after all this time. So I went and looked at the numbers on it and the numbers were absolutely ridiculous. There was so many views and or likes or whatever it was. It was just out of my comprehension. It was super, super cool. So that is what made me think, you know what, we can come back, but we don't have to come back the same way. We can come back a little different. And that's what we're doing right now. Now things are very, very different than they were before. I mean just like 1000% different. We are not striving at this point to be the same thing that we used to be. We're not trying to be the third largest in the state of Texas. We're not trying to be in the top 10 in the country. This is very different now. What this is now is just for fun, just for you, just for us. Very, very, very small compared to what it used to be. Will it grow? I don't know. That's largely gonna be up to you. You're gonna make that decision. We're focusing on very few products. We're doing a lot of reviews right now and we're staying very budget conscious just because one of our best performing levels that we had in all of the tactical stuff back in the day was kind of the economy stuff. Sometimes it's not the most durable, sometimes it's not the longest lasting, the most well made, but that was the point to try and search through what is available out there and find the good stuff, find the hidden gems in the midst of all of the nonsense. Now you can go almost anywhere now you can go onto the Alibaba and the, I guess TikTok shop and all of that stuff. And you can find things. I was looking the other day at a pair of tactical boots, that's what they were called, tactical boots. And literally they're the most hilarious things you've ever seen in your life. And they're all over the TikTok shop. There's just like tons of them on there, but they're nothing like what you or I would appreciate, nor like. And I understand that there's some very high level brands out there for things like tactical boots, things like that. And I understand that there's mill spec stuff and there's a lot of different perspectives on those things. Some people are like, you know what, if that's not mill spec or if that's not five 11, or if that's not made by so and so, okay, I'm not interested. And that's fine. And maybe you have the budget to spend 250, 350 $500 on a pair of boots, but other people are out there who only have a hundred bucks. So what do they do? And that's kind of where we had that sweet spot. So we would sort through the stuff that wasn't your high-end at name brand stuff. Find the ones, find the combat boots, find the tactical boots, find whatever that would be durable and that would last and bring those to the forefront. Put a spotlight on those and be very honest about it. So if we found something that wasn't good, then we would show that it was absolute garbage. And so I'm kind of back to that right now. I'm definitely doing reviews on different products and we've already had just a little bit of trouble. I already got on Facebook. There's a thing called whether or not Your Page can be recommended. Okay? And I don't fully understand all of this stuff. I'm not like some Facebook or TikTok expert or any of that kind of stuff. Uh, literally we didn't focus on all of that too much back in the day. And that's why when I saw some of the numbers on whatever that was opposed to video, whatever that was originally that I saw. Again, that's why I was surprised 'cause we didn't have numbers like this in the tens of thousands or whatever. We didn't have that. Yeah, here it was years later and it had been humming along on its own. And so what we're doing right now is we're kind of doing the same thing. We're trying to kind of hand select curate, if you will, some of these items. And we'll go to places that everybody can go. We'll go to Tractor Supply or we'll go somewhere like that. We'll find different items because you know, they're big on like sog and some of those things. We'll buy them and then we'll test them. We don't have affiliate links, we don't have any sort of a profit that we can make if you purchase something that we review, well, we just do it and tell you about it so that you can go then and hopefully save some money if you decide to buy something that we reviewed and recommended or maybe didn't recommend. So where do we go from here? Like what's the, what's the future look like for the tactical redneck? And well, that's easy because it's not super complicated. We're intentionally not doing anything too complicated. We're gonna keep it basic. We're gonna keep it fun and we're gonna keep it something that we believe always provides value in some way to you. So if you have a place to go where you can gain knowledge, you can read articles, you can find blog posts on things that are important to you, be it prepping or survival stuff, tactical stuff or law enforcement, whatever it is, then you're gonna enjoy going there. If you don't have to pay money to get that, it's free. All you have to do is come and read or watch the videos if you can find a place where you can find reviews and not just on the high-end stuff, not on the very, very expensive things, although sometimes we might do that. But on the more affordable things, the more real life things, the things that most of the people that we know that we hang out with, that we relate to those things that they can afford, that's what we're gonna focus on. So you're gonna have a place and the website, it is tactical redneck.com, we have that fired up. It is functioning. There's not a ton of products on there. You're not gonna be able to go, well hey, I'm gonna build a a new bug out bag and I'm gonna go to tactical redneck and check out their selection of, you know, bug out bags and stuff. Nope, we don't have them. We don't have a big inventory. You might go on there and find an article about how to build a bug out bag, or you might go in there and find a bag, something that we have for sale. But you're not gonna find a big giant selection, at least not now, not in these early days. So it's more like a place, it's more like a club for you to kind of come and hang out, learn. And we do hope that you support us in some small ways. One of the things that you can do is maybe buy one of our T-shirts. We are really, really big on our own brand right now. So the tactical redneck brand, and it's super cool. We're only creating and making things that we love, things that we would enjoy. We're not just pushing products out just for the sake of pushing them out. But I think right now, if you went to tactical redneck.com and understanding that we're in the very early days of our Regenesis, if you will, of this business, of this namesake, tactical redneck, you're gonna find maybe one hoodie, four or five T-shirts, you're gonna find an Under Armour embroidered backpack. That's pretty badass, if I should say so myself. It's super cool. And then you might find, I think right now we've got some, uh, some deployment boots that are like, uh, a little over a hundred bucks and you get a free T-shirt whenever you get those boots. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. You wanna go over there and look for a holster? You wanna go over there and look for, you know, five different types of boots to compare and choose. Nope, not there. We don't have it. We may down the road. We're not there now. Right now. We're gonna keep it fun, we're gonna keep it light, we're gonna keep it efficient and we're gonna keep it where we are giving you value in some way all the time. And I hope that's something that you can appreciate. I hope it's something that you can respect and appreciate and I hope it's something that you'll want to be a big part of. We're always gonna want a lot of feedback. And believe it or not, let me just say this, just in this little bit of time that we have actually been back. Here's the crazy part. Here's the crazy part we've already caught. There's, it's just, it's a different time right now than it was even five or six years ago. We have already had one or two of those real big, loud mouth type people that just have to come along and shoot holes in whatever it is. And it's ridiculous. I used to love the fact that we had so many former military, former law enforcement and, you know, survivalists and stuff like that in the group. And man, there was so much respect and everything was so good, it was so solid. And now it's like these people are taking what they're getting on social media. You go out there on Facebook and you start arguing politics and all this kinda stuff, and then you want to come back to YouTube and you want to get in the comments under a video and you want to go out there and completely jack wagon yourself out. And I don't get that. So I'm really, really, really hopeful that we can avoid a lot of that. It's not that I can't take criticism and stuff like that, I get it. But if we're doing a review on a $15 pocket knife, there's somebody out there, there's a lot of people out there who a $15 pocket knife is, it's kind of a big deal that may be really, really hard for the them to do with their budget. So when you sit there and do that, like run that product down and say, you know, how crappy and awful it is and stuff like that, you're literally kind of speaking to the people who were kind of on that level and needing that and looking forward to that. And so I'm really hoping that we can avoid all of that. I don't know that we can. I hope that we have a culture that's better than that. I hope we have a culture that supports each other, that lifts each other up. I mean, we can have debate, we can disagree, we can do all of that stuff, but I just don't want to turn into the, the kind of nastiness that you see out there in the world and on social media now. It's literally, it's just a terrible world out there right now. And the only way that's ever gonna change is when you and I decide that we're not gonna participate in that. We're not gonna be a part of that. We're gonna be better than that just because we don't love the world that way. We like it a different way. I would love it if it goes straight on back to the way it was in my grandfather's day when everything was totally different. A handshake meant something. You looked a man in the eye. You gave him his, his your word, he gave you his word. Everybody was in agreement and things were just better. That's not how it is anymore. Now we jump on social media, we keyboard warrior the hell out of it, and we treat each other like crap. So I have a lot of hopes and I have, uh, uh, an awful lot of ambition towards getting this thing off the ground and making it great. So you know what? Here's episode one. All I'm doing is giving you a little bit of background. It's not the most exciting episode in the world, but it's giving you a little bit of background so that you kind of understand where we're at, where we want to go, and how we want to serve you moving into the future. So I hope you've enjoyed this guy's. Definitely. Again, just like always go follow us on our Facebook, go follow us on YouTube, go do all of those things that we all know to do. Find us, submerse yourself, immerse yourself into this culture, into tactical redneck, be a part of it. Help us shape it, help us turn it into something that you think would be amazing. We're gonna work our asses off for you and hope that you enjoy it and in turn will support us, us in ways like that. But anyways, guys, that's gonna wrap it up today. Just a what, like 21, 22 minute podcast, something like that. Not too bad. We're gonna be back again. We're gonna bring all of this stuff back, like the fiery phoenix baby. We're coming back from the ashes and we don't intend to get canceled again. So we're gonna, we're gonna work hard to avoid that. So yeah, you may see me wearing a three percenter t-shirt at some point, but I'm not gonna be selling it. So anyways guys, we are gonna wrap it up right there. Until next time, stay safe. God bless.
