State of the Second

PTR vice president Bill Gentry joins hosts John and Kaylee in Myrtle Beach to break down the suppressor technology PTR is built around: PIP, or purposefully induced porosity. It is a 3D-printed approach Gentry describes as titanium foam or inconel foam, built as a single monolithic piece from nose to tail. He says it cannot be machined and could only be 3D printed, and that on a nine millimeter th...

Dustin from Derya joins John and Kaylee on State of the Second to explain how a firearms brand can stand up its own name and start making guns in the United States in record time. He came to the gun industry through an accounting background. He is a CPA who worked big four public accounting at PwC after college at the University of Nevada, then joined Arms Corp / Rock Island through his longtime f...

Yehuda, known online as the Pew Pew Jew, joins hosts Kaylee and John on State of the Second to trace how he went from a spoiled LA kid who thought only police, military, and bad guys could own guns to one of the most recognizable voices for Jewish gun owners. He explains that he got into the industry by accident. After his parents had what he calls a Chernobyl meltdown over learning he owned a Glo...

John and Kaylee sit down with Zach, the owner of Tactical Advisor, to dig into a question every gun buyer has asked: can you trust a paid gun review? Zach explains why he built his channel around a 30-second breakdown that hands you the verdict up front, so you can leave or stay and hear the reasoning. He works by himself, films out of his closet, and treats research like a discipline. The convers...

Rich Angstadt, president and founder of Angstadt Arms, joins State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee to trace how a personal want became a company built on innovation. Angstadt's grandfather got him into firearms young, and his family history runs back to the 1700s and 1800s, when the Angstadts were master gunsmiths crafting Kentucky long rifles and smooth bore muskets. Around 2011, after e...

Goat Guns build scale model guns you assemble and display, and on this episode of State of the Second, hosts Kaylee and John talk with Anthony from Goat Guns about how a video game idea turned into a fast-growing brand. Anthony explains the origin story: founder Brad Lunt started the company in 2017 after noticing that gamers pay real money for weapon skins in first-person shooters, and figured pe...

State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John sit down with Sean Patrick Terrio, a tech executive and digital privacy advocate who co-founded mark37.com. The conversation opens with rapid fire questions and turns into a full primer on why the phones, watches, cars, and smart-home devices we carry every day are, in Terrio's words, surveillance tracking devices. He frames the whole problem with a g...

Matt from Magic Prepper joins John and Kaylee to make the case that preparedness starts long before a firearm, and that one of the most valuable tools you can own costs about twenty dollars. Asked for the best prepping tool under $20, Matt names a water filter, pointing to the Sawyer Mini, which he says can filter up to 100,000 gallons and attaches to a smart water bottle, a bladder, or runs on it...

John and Kaylee sit down with Tim, the founder of 2A Bourbon, for a conversation about how a retirement plan turned into a Second Amendment bourbon brand built to give money away. Tim is a lawyer and lifelong serial entrepreneur who has owned a nightclub, a bottled water company, and a digital label company he ran for 16 years. He says he will turn 75 next month, and he explains that the idea came...

Gun Owners of America hosts Kailey and John sit down with Nathan Mitchell, owner of Mitchell Defense, for a deep look at what actually makes an AR reliable. Nathan comes from a military background as a Recon corpsman and an oil field background, where he ran a pipe inspection business and learned how corrosive, high friction environments get engineered around with coating technology, spring techno...

State of the Second welcomes back Adam from Canik USA, the company's VP of Business Development and Marketing, for his second appearance on the show. Hosts John and Kaylee open with a round of rapid-fire questions before moving into where handgun design is heading. Adam walks through the arc from bulky high-capacity pistols to the micro compact wave that Springfield Armory and Sig's 365...

Isaac Botkin of T. Rex Arms joins Gun Owners of America hosts Kaylee and John to talk about why a holster company spends so much of its time on Second Amendment advocacy. The company is owned by four brothers plus a brother-in-law and operates out of Centerville, Tennessee, about an hour west of Nashville. Eleven years in, T. Rex Arms sells holsters as its flagship product but has grown into nylon...

Special Operations Wounded Warriors (SOWW) started the way a lot of good things do: a few guys around a campfire with a problem to solve. Joel Pellici, one of the charity's five founders, tells hosts Kaylee and John how a feral hog problem at a hunting club near Fort Bragg turned into a wild pig hunt for wounded special operators, then grew into a charity that has touched lives in the hundred...

Clay from Bullet Vault joins hosts Kaylee and John on Gun Owners of America's State of the Second to walk through the idea behind his company: an alternative currency and payment system built on bullets, recorded on the blockchain. Clay's argument is that an American-made, full metal jacket, consistent grain weight 9mm bullet fits the textbook definition of money. In his words it is a pr...

Tre'Von Barber joins State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John to make the case that firearms training is an investment in your life, not an optional extra. Barber walks through his own path: born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he grew up wrestling and in Boy Scouts, wrestled through college at USC Upstate, and got into guns at 21. After a back injury ended his wrestling, he went st...

Joe from Desk Pop joins hosts Kaylee and John on Gun Owners of America's State of the Second to talk about how he built a firearms YouTube channel, why he sees gun content shifting from grim duty to genuine fun, and the phone call from the ATF that nearly ended both his channel and his freedom. Joe describes growing up on creators like FPS Russia, working as a gunsmith building custom rifles,...

State of the Second welcomes Mark from Vortex Optics, who walks hosts Kaylee and John through a career that started in a Washington State hunting and fishing family and ran through outdoor retail and a copywriting job at Cabela's headquarters in Sidney, Nebraska before he found Vortex. He has been with the company a little over 16 years, started in the days he calls "old Vortex" whe...

State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John sit down with Alyssa Seymour, known online as GunnyGal, and her husband Tanner. Alyssa runs a firearms YouTube channel covering competition, education, and concealed carry, with a side passion for fitness and CrossFit. Tanner is the one behind the camera and works in commercial and automotive content, including rally work and shooting in the firearm space....

State of the Second sits down with Kurt from TCRT Targets, the company behind self-healing rubber targets built for the home range. Kurt walks through how the product came to be. TCRT spent about three years on a proprietary rubber formulation made specifically for ballistics, rather than repurposing rubber from another use. The targets are rated for roughly 400 rounds of 5.56 per square inch, and...

State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Jared from Sonoran Desert Institute (SDI) for a conversation about the state of gunsmithing in 2025 and how new people get into the trade. Jared is SDI's chief academic officer. SDI is an online college that teaches gunsmithing and uncrewed technology like drone piloting and fleet administration. The episode opens with a rapid fire segme...

State of the Second hosts John and Kaylee sit down with Grant from Mantis, a firearms training company that uses technology to help shooters get better. Grant explains the core idea behind the products: assess your trigger press, tell you what you're doing wrong, and tell you how to fix it, all to improve marksmanship and gun handling. Safety comes first and effectiveness second. He walks thr...

Tracy Lee, known online as Tracy Guns, joins John and Kaylee on State of the Second to talk about how she found her way into firearms and what the industry still gets wrong about women. Tracy grew up in Texas until she was 8, then in Sacramento with a liberal mother, and moved to Las Vegas to expand a business sending photographers to nightclubs. She traveled the world with the UFC as a cage-side...

Arrowhead Tactical founder Alexander joins State of the Second hosts Kailey and John to tell the story of a brand that started with a real problem he could not solve as a customer. Living in Atlanta and going to the gym at odd hours, he wanted to carry his firearm before, during, and after a workout, but elastic waistbands and drawstrings are not built to hold a gun. The belly bands and free-float...

Otis Technology CEO Bill joins State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John for a deep talk on gun cleaning, the science behind lubricants, and why so much common maintenance advice is wrong. Bill opens with his favorite Otis tool, the Ripcord, which uses Nomex woven over the cable to handle a smoking hot barrel up to 700 degrees, and explains how he runs it through the ejection port between competit...

Pete Brownell of Brownells returns to State of the Second to talk about where the firearms market is headed and why building your own gun has become a statement about who you are. He tells hosts John and Kaylee that the industry has moved past the pandemic scarcity buying, when people loaded up the gun vault with AR-15s and pistols. Now owners are pulling those guns back out and customizing them....