Avery Truffleman

I was like, Oh, this is actually like a lot more complicated than I thought it was because I was under the impression that, you know, these companies,

Okay, so a lot of the outdoor companies that are very famous, that we all know and love, do a lot of military contracts, and a lot of them really do not want you to know.

They really bend over backwards.

The most obvious example of this is Patagonia.

They did it under a separate company, and they even changed that company's name, and the company is technically independent, so they're like, it's not us.

What does Patagonia make for the military?

Jackets, a lot of these are for special ops, for these elite, high-level soldiers.

Outdoor Research does it.

Arc'teryx does it.

And even a lot of the places that don't do it now used to do it in the past.

Almost all the outdoor companies have some sort of connection to the military.

But you really, they hide it on their website.

You sort of have to know about it.

And so in my mind, I was like, they're clearly getting buckets of dark money from the government.

This is what's going on.

And while they are occasionally getting these major, major government contracts, it's actually more nuanced than I thought it was because they have to go through these huge government bureaucracies and everything has to be made in the United States for the military because it's a national security risk if you are...

let's say we fought a war with China and our uniforms were being made in China, then they'd have a huge tactical advantage over us.

They could just like stop sending uniforms or like lace all our uniforms with something or like, I don't know.

It's a huge, especially given how high tech these clothes are now, it's a huge tactical advantage for any company to like manufacture our clothes.

So they all have to be made domestically.