Riley Bowman: And welcome to the Concealed Carry
Riley Bowman: Podcast, part of the ConcealedCarry.com network, brought to you by HK.
Riley Bowman: Today is Thursday, June 13th. Oh, I was going to say 13th, 11th.
Riley Bowman: I'm off. Totally off here today.
Riley Bowman: June 11th, 2026. As of recording this episode, I'm your host, Riley Bowman.
Riley Bowman: Failing at host, doing host duties. Maybe I should have just handed it off to
Riley Bowman: Jacob. All right. I hand it off. Jacob.
Jacob Paulsen: And I'm your host, Jacob Paulson. And I'm also joined here today by Riley Bowman.
Riley Bowman: There we go. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jacob Paulsen: Riley's wearing his Boulder Boulder shirt. Riley ran the, I think it's like
Jacob Paulsen: the second largest road race in America or something.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, because I think the peach tree one in Atlanta, Georgia is the first biggest.
Jacob Paulsen: Riley likes to run. It's his thing now. And he ran the Boulder Boulder,
Jacob Paulsen: so he's got the shirt to show it.
Riley Bowman: There you go.
Jacob Paulsen: It says the shirt shrunk on him. It did. So it's feeling a little tight today.
Jacob Paulsen: I told them my shirt's a little tight because I'm just filling them out more.
Jacob Paulsen: But welcome to the Consile Carry podcast by ConsileCurry.com network.
Jacob Paulsen: And today we're going to be talking about, well, frankly, it's a very self-centered episode.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, very much so.
Jacob Paulsen: Some of you are going to be like, I'm out. Skip this one. But stick around because,
Jacob Paulsen: I say it's self-centered because we're going to be talking about us.
Jacob Paulsen: But we're going to be talking about how we have enriched and redone the free
Jacob Paulsen: elements and tools that make up ConcealedCarray.com.
Jacob Paulsen: Over the last, call it, three to six months, we've invested quite a bit of energy,
Jacob Paulsen: time, resources into updating the website.
Jacob Paulsen: It's not crazy different. At first, I think you'd be like, oh,
Jacob Paulsen: this looks kind of like what I remember. But we've made a lot of changes intended
Jacob Paulsen: to make it more valuable, easier to use, and easier to access the tools that we're known for.
Riley Bowman: That's the idea here and you know for a long time it's been
Riley Bowman: kind of the ethos of our company really since the beginning to create a bunch
Riley Bowman: of useful easy to access and you know take benefit from uh resources and tools
Riley Bowman: uh through our website so we've had a lot of tools for a long time
Riley Bowman: some of the tools we're talking about today i mean they've been around a long
Riley Bowman: time but we've done a lot of work.
Riley Bowman: I should say really Jacob especially has done a lot of work over the last month
Riley Bowman: or two to make some significant changes to the website. We're really excited about it.
Riley Bowman: Changes to some of these tools to make them easier, better, all that.
Riley Bowman: Just much easier to use and follow and get the benefit from them.
Riley Bowman: So I think most of the things we'll talk about today are actually available for free.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, I think all of them are. I mean, there's a couple of things that I'll
Jacob Paulsen: call freemium. where there's sort of like an upgraded version or something.
Jacob Paulsen: But yeah, I think it's, yeah, I like what you said about our ethos.
Jacob Paulsen: Our ethos is to be useful.
Jacob Paulsen: That's kind of been the way we've been doing it for a long time.
Jacob Paulsen: And I'm excited about what we've achieved with the website. I think our next
Jacob Paulsen: phase is to kind of make some of these same changes in our app,
Jacob Paulsen: but that's for another project, another day.
Jacob Paulsen: That is to say it's in progress, but today we want to share with you the changes
Jacob Paulsen: that have been made on the website so that you can take advantage of them so
Jacob Paulsen: you can get all the benefit out of them yep exactly.
Riley Bowman: Today's episode sponsored, brought to you by us, ConcealedCarry.com.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, that seems fitting.
Riley Bowman: We hope that you'll visit our website. You can see it right there on the screen
Riley Bowman: if you're watching. ConcealedCarry.com right in the front center there.
Riley Bowman: And, of course, right here and all that. So ConcealedCarry.com.
Riley Bowman: Check it out. Check out all these free resources and our online store and everything
Riley Bowman: that we're going to talk about here today.
Riley Bowman: But also along with that, many of you probably already know,
Riley Bowman: many of you listening and watching are probably our members already.
Riley Bowman: But we hope that you'll also consider taking a look at Guardian Nation membership,
Riley Bowman: which is the membership that we have at concealedcarry.com.
Riley Bowman: Guardian Nation membership is within that and is an opportunity for you to get
Riley Bowman: even more access to more resources, more tools, more content, more gear even.
Riley Bowman: And, you know, we still ship our quarterly boxes to members and a bunch of other
Riley Bowman: great benefits, discounts and so forth are a part of Guardian Nation membership.
Riley Bowman: So if you appreciate what you can already do for free on our website and you
Riley Bowman: want to take it to the next level, then consider Guardian Nation membership.
Riley Bowman: That's the next level. So if you want to learn specifically about Guardian Nation
Riley Bowman: membership, you can go to GuardianNation.com to learn more.
Riley Bowman: You can also just see it if you're on concealedcarry.com and you navigate in
Riley Bowman: the top bar there, you'll see Guardian Nation membership mentioned.
Riley Bowman: I think up in the right corner.
Jacob Paulsen: Throughout, yeah, up in the right-hand corner, anywhere on concealedcarry.com.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're signed in, it'll tell you.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're a member, it'll say active member. If something has happened to your
Jacob Paulsen: membership, it'll say something like renewal failed or whatever the thing is.
Jacob Paulsen: But otherwise, it'll just say join Guardian Nation. And you click on that and learn more.
Riley Bowman: Project 1868, I appreciate you being here. You've been a regular for quite some time.
Riley Bowman: He asked the question on YouTube, who are the top 10 handgun instructors in America?
Riley Bowman: And unfortunately, that's not the topic that we're going to get into here today.
Jacob Paulsen: I also don't think it's answerable. If you said who are the top 50,
Jacob Paulsen: that actually would be easier to answer. Maybe another day. That's fair.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, yeah. Top 10. Yeah, that's definitely a debate for sure if we were to go through that.
Riley Bowman: All righty. Let's jump into the topic, Jacob.
Riley Bowman: In fact, folks, you can reference it. It'll be in the show notes,
Riley Bowman: too. There's a link to, you know, Jacob did a write-up summarizing the different
Riley Bowman: improvements that have been made to the website and talking about all these
Riley Bowman: different resources and things available.
Riley Bowman: So that's available in article form. You can go to concealedcarry.com and title
Riley Bowman: the article. It's New and Easy Resources for Concealed Carriers.
Riley Bowman: We're going to go through this step by step, kind of talk about all these major
Riley Bowman: changes and improvements to concealedcarry.com.
Riley Bowman: So first up, core menu navigation changes. So check this out.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, you know, our menu has been, for those who are watching visually,
Jacob Paulsen: or if you want to go watch the video of this podcast, you'll see that Riley's
Jacob Paulsen: sharing the screen and you can see what we're talking about.
Jacob Paulsen: But for those who have been with us a long time, I could tell you many,
Jacob Paulsen: many company meetings have been had where we've discussed how difficult our
Jacob Paulsen: site navigation has been.
Jacob Paulsen: And in the article, you can see the old versus the new. Of course,
Jacob Paulsen: if you just go to the website, you'll just see the new.
Jacob Paulsen: But man, it's hard because we try to be a lot of things to a lot of,
Jacob Paulsen: well, I shouldn't say to a lot of people, But we try to be like a one-stop shop
Jacob Paulsen: for concealed carriers that's led to a world where our menu was...
Jacob Paulsen: It looked like somebody vomited into the header of our website.
Jacob Paulsen: There was just so much going on. And now we've cleaned that up a lot.
Jacob Paulsen: Do you want me to kind of keep going?
Riley Bowman: Yeah. No, I mean, if I was just to, I guess, comment on it, this is a commentary
Riley Bowman: show after all, is exactly right.
Riley Bowman: That we've had all these resources. We're talking
Riley Bowman: learning resources, stuff to learn, to teach you stuff,
Riley Bowman: laws legal resources uh summaries of different you know state laws the reciprocity
Riley Bowman: maps business directory of course we have our online store which is really important
Riley Bowman: it's actually you know a big chunk of what keeps us in business
Riley Bowman: is the ability to sell product and you guys buy product which we appreciate uh
Riley Bowman: video content uh our editorial content i mean you take all that and you're like
Riley Bowman: how do you put this in a format that uh makes sense that's navigable
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah it was brutal So before we kind of had like two menus, basically,
Jacob Paulsen: what we used to call like a primary menu and a top menu. And it was just a mess.
Jacob Paulsen: It was just so much. And it felt like we can't get rid of any of it.
Jacob Paulsen: I was like, well, all these things are important. You can't get rid of it.
Jacob Paulsen: So what we basically did is consolidate it and add some things too,
Jacob Paulsen: but mostly kind of consolidated all the menu items into what I call six core hubs.
Jacob Paulsen: So these hubs, I mean, everything that was there before is still there.
Jacob Paulsen: Is just part of one of these six hubs.
Jacob Paulsen: And so when you land on the homepage, all you see is one menu.
Jacob Paulsen: It's really clean. It's a lot easier to manage.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're on a mobile device, then when you open that up, you'll see sub-menu items of each of those.
Jacob Paulsen: But on a desktop, when you click on one of those, it will then create a secondary,
Jacob Paulsen: what I call a hub menu, a menu specific to that hub.
Jacob Paulsen: So it's pretty, a lot simplified.
Riley Bowman: Do you want to walk us through as an example here? Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: So, you know, shop is pretty straightforward. I don't think we need to get into
Jacob Paulsen: that, how that works. But though we have made some pretty significant improvements
Jacob Paulsen: in the shop, though it's worth mentioning, you should check it out.
Jacob Paulsen: But like we created a Learn Hub, for example. So before, yeah,
Jacob Paulsen: we had a link for our articles. We had a link for our podcasts.
Jacob Paulsen: We had a link for videos. We had a link for courses. Now it's like,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, all that is in the Learn Hub.
Jacob Paulsen: And it's not just like, hey, here's all this stuff in the Learn Hub.
Jacob Paulsen: We actually created a experience that it makes it easier to consume that stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: So when you land in the Learn Hub, you can see some featured content.
Jacob Paulsen: You can immediately filter by a type of content. Like, oh, I just want to see
Jacob Paulsen: articles or I just want to see a podcast episode. Okay, no problem. Click here.
Riley Bowman: For instance, I can click on articles.
Jacob Paulsen: Boom, yeah, and you're just going to get articles that way. But within the Learn
Jacob Paulsen: Hub page, it's really cool because you can even look by topics.
Jacob Paulsen: If you scroll down a little bit past kind of the initial stuff,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, we have, I think right now, how many do we have? Like 12 topics or
Jacob Paulsen: something? I think there's nine there. Nine. So we have kind of nine initial
Jacob Paulsen: topics. We can add these, and we might as we go.
Jacob Paulsen: But kind of like, hey, no, I want to start with beginner content,
Jacob Paulsen: or I want to start with gear. I'm interested in medical or the legal stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: And by doing that, it will further kind of filter it down.
Jacob Paulsen: And you still can say, okay, I'm just interested in legal. Now I just want to
Jacob Paulsen: see articles, or I just want to see videos about legal.
Jacob Paulsen: And it'll just keep on. You can keep filtering it down. So it makes it easier to get to stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: This website's been around for over a decade, we have thousands of blog posts.
Jacob Paulsen: We have near a thousand podcast episodes and we have well over 2000 videos.
Jacob Paulsen: And so, you know, just trying to make it easier to get to what you're looking for.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, so I've just been poking around here, those that are viewing online,
Riley Bowman: either live or after the fact.
Riley Bowman: I know some of you are listeners only, so we're just doing the best we can to explain this to you.
Riley Bowman: But if you go to the website, you can explore this for yourself and kind of
Riley Bowman: see what we're talking about.
Riley Bowman: But I've just been, you know, kind of navigating through some of these different
Riley Bowman: topics, if you will, under the Learn Hub podcast.
Riley Bowman: You know, you're on the podcast right now, so you can click on that.
Riley Bowman: You can see all the recent episodes, just like you could before.
Riley Bowman: It's just a lot more better organized than it used to be.
Riley Bowman: I can click on courses, but that's going to kind of, we'll come back to that.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Courses and videos we'll come back to. Yeah. But even like the podcast
Jacob Paulsen: is consolidated. Like we used to have a separate website for the podcast and
Jacob Paulsen: it just like, why, why are we doing this? Like, why are we making it harder?
Jacob Paulsen: So just consolidating that down, making it simpler, putting it all in one place.
Jacob Paulsen: Those are all elements that we've been talking about the learn hub. There's a train hub.
Jacob Paulsen: You know, the train hub is cool. Like the train hub just kind of breaks down
Jacob Paulsen: all the training resources you can get to on our website.
Jacob Paulsen: We created kind of a sub page just for dry fire because we think that's an important part of training.
Jacob Paulsen: We, you know, within the train hub, you can go right to our class directory
Jacob Paulsen: where you can find classes that are being offered by instructors that are part of our network.
Jacob Paulsen: You can from there go, of course, to online courses, which we'll talk more about.
Jacob Paulsen: And, of course, the Guardian Conference is covered in the train hub.
Jacob Paulsen: So just, again, easier to kind of say, well, why am I at this website right now?
Jacob Paulsen: Oh, I want to learn stuff. Okay, cool. Like go to the Learn Hub and then go from there.
Jacob Paulsen: Oh, I want to train. Okay, cool. Like what kind of training are you looking for? Here you go.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, that's exactly...
Riley Bowman: How i how i read this you know if i was trying to view this as uh you know it's
Riley Bowman: obviously not fresh to my eyes since this is our website but
Riley Bowman: if i was coming to it it's like okay train oh you know how do i want to train
Riley Bowman: what am i looking for here well there's lots of different ways in person well
Riley Bowman: great awesome online courses awesome dry fire hey you know we're
Riley Bowman: so often i've been on other websites of other companies including competitors
Riley Bowman: of ours and you you see training you think
Riley Bowman: i'm going to find training courses both virtual or in person something to that
Riley Bowman: effect but i like the idea that we've got this dry fire category as part of
Riley Bowman: this with dry fire specific training resources
Riley Bowman: all under this this portion of the of the hub the website hub
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah i think we've invested far more into dry fire i think our commitment to
Jacob Paulsen: it as a concept is pretty deep if you haven't been following along.
Riley Bowman: Agreed, agreed. What else?
Jacob Paulsen: So the legal hub, on the menu it's just called laws, but I call it the legal hub.
Jacob Paulsen: And this, again, is taking several resources that are popular on concealedcare.com,
Jacob Paulsen: in fact, some of the most popular pages on concealedcare.com,
Jacob Paulsen: and putting them in one place.
Jacob Paulsen: So now when you land on this legal hub, the first thing you'll see is,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, you're looking for your state laws?
Jacob Paulsen: So that's the number one thing people are looking for. So trying to make that
Jacob Paulsen: as easy as possible, like, oh, hey, pick your state. You're in Ohio,
Jacob Paulsen: Texas, whatever it is, click here and see it.
Jacob Paulsen: And that page has been dramatically improved too. So trying to make it easier.
Jacob Paulsen: So we've kind of taken a lot of the top questions people have about their state
Jacob Paulsen: laws, and we pulled those out of kind of this list format and put it at the very top.
Jacob Paulsen: And then immediately, here's your
Jacob Paulsen: reciprocity map. Let's talk more about reciprocity maps here in a bit.
Jacob Paulsen: And then a lot more color coding, a lot more things designed to make it easier
Jacob Paulsen: to navigate the laws. In fact, something we've done, and we're still kind of
Jacob Paulsen: taking advantage of it from the back end.
Jacob Paulsen: In fact, I don't know if you know this, Riley, but we've basically made this
Jacob Paulsen: now for every legal topic we –.
Jacob Paulsen: We keep track of, we've created the option of a short and a long answer.
Jacob Paulsen: So if your question is, you know, does Texas allow open carry?
Jacob Paulsen: Well, we could have a short answer like yes. Yeah, right. But then we could
Jacob Paulsen: have a long answer like, but only if you have the, you know,
Jacob Paulsen: license to carry LTC, whatever.
Jacob Paulsen: So, you know, that's the kind of thing that we're trying to do.
Jacob Paulsen: And this is important because the same information is in our mobile app.
Jacob Paulsen: It's also available in a book format if people want to buy these believe it
Jacob Paulsen: or not from us in a printed version so sometimes we want us of the long version
Jacob Paulsen: of the answer to any given law and sometimes we want the short version.
Riley Bowman: Yeah and by the way we and we've had this kind of interactive version for a
Riley Bowman: while but as was mentioned you can choose from this drop down and find your
Riley Bowman: state you can also click right here browse the interactive map
Riley Bowman: and it's a quick way of you know if i wanted to go to utah for instance i can
Riley Bowman: just click on the state of utah there it's going to take me to that same page
Riley Bowman: where i can see okay here's my map here's is the reciprocity for Utah.
Riley Bowman: Okay, so green states are states presumably where
Riley Bowman: my permit's honored, I can carry, or it's constitutional carry,
Riley Bowman: or constitutional carry is, in this case, South Carolina, for instance,
Riley Bowman: is specifically called out there as permitless carry, and it's in a yellow
Riley Bowman: color there, as opposed to these
Riley Bowman: other states that are green that presumes there's reciprocity involved.
Riley Bowman: And then we got our, all of our different like kind of legal topics,
Riley Bowman: if you will, or questions, or I don't know exactly how you want to,
Riley Bowman: you know, categorize those.
Jacob Paulsen: I call it, I think for me, it's legal reference material. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: So we're keeping track of things like, are there any laws relative to guns for hotels?
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. What about transportation in your vehicle? What about open carry?
Jacob Paulsen: What about campus carry? You know, what, do you have a duty to notify?
Jacob Paulsen: What is the deal with suppressors? You know, all that kind of stuff we're keeping
Jacob Paulsen: track of for all 51 states.
Jacob Paulsen: And 51 because we include D.C. And so, yeah, just making it easier to read,
Jacob Paulsen: easier to find the information.
Jacob Paulsen: So that's the first thing you find in the legal hub because we think it's based
Jacob Paulsen: on our data, what people are looking for immediately.
Jacob Paulsen: But there's other things in the legal hub from there. If you just want to learn
Jacob Paulsen: about constitutional care, you can.
Jacob Paulsen: If you want to see our self-defense insurance comparison chart thing,
Jacob Paulsen: you can, and that's substantial.
Jacob Paulsen: That's actually one of the most popular pages on our website,
Jacob Paulsen: Right. People researching, you know, USCCA versus CCWSA versus,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, whatever, second call defense, et cetera.
Riley Bowman: Yep.
Jacob Paulsen: So that's available from the Legal Hub. Also from Legal Hub,
Jacob Paulsen: we actually have state-specific websites you can go to. So if you want to go
Jacob Paulsen: to the Colorado sub-site, we call them sub-sites, you know, the Colorado site
Jacob Paulsen: or the Texas site or whatever, you can do that.
Jacob Paulsen: You immediately will see also a thing there called gun law topics.
Jacob Paulsen: So sometimes instead of researching a thing by state, oh, I want to know about Colorado.
Jacob Paulsen: Sometimes you want to know by topic. I want to learn more about duty to retreat,
Jacob Paulsen: or I want to know about duty to notify. And so from this topic page,
Jacob Paulsen: you can click on any one of those topics, and you'll get a quick summary of all 50 states.
Jacob Paulsen: You get a nice map, and it breaks it down state by state. What's the deal in that state?
Jacob Paulsen: You'll also, from those pages, get any articles or videos that we've published
Jacob Paulsen: that tag that particular topic at the very bottom.
Jacob Paulsen: And that's true on the state pages, too, by the way. I didn't mention that.
Jacob Paulsen: But if you're on the Texas page, for example, then you're also going to get
Jacob Paulsen: any articles we've published that tag Texas. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: So I just clicked through on a couple of those that you were talking about,
Riley Bowman: some of these different topics. State parks, yes, this is an interesting one here, right?
Riley Bowman: Which is kind of an interesting thing that I don't think a lot of people understand.
Riley Bowman: But basically, state by state, you're going to have different states that either
Riley Bowman: permit or don't permit carrying of a firearm open or concealed or otherwise
Riley Bowman: in state parks within that particular state.
Riley Bowman: And so you can see right here, I've pulled this up. This is,
Riley Bowman: I think, very relevant right now because it's June. Some people are going outdoors, going to parks.
Jacob Paulsen: And if you know your laws because you pay attention to stuff,
Jacob Paulsen: then you would also know that this impacts national parks in those states,
Jacob Paulsen: right? So I don't know if I can name more than one or two.
Jacob Paulsen: I can name two Colorado State Parks, but I can name all five national parks
Jacob Paulsen: in Colorado. So it impacts all of that.
Jacob Paulsen: Yep, good stuff. Yeah, so Legal Hub is really cool.
Jacob Paulsen: I think it just makes it a lot easier to find answers to legal questions.
Jacob Paulsen: And people are looking for that all the time. We're dealing with this all the time.
Jacob Paulsen: And so these pages are much more easier to find, much more easier to read and consume.
Jacob Paulsen: A lot of effort went to making sure that they're easy to navigate and read also
Jacob Paulsen: on a mobile device because that represents a significant amount of our web traffic.
Riley Bowman: So, so far we've talked about the, the learn hub, the train hub,
Riley Bowman: the laws hub. What's under resources here?
Jacob Paulsen: So resource kind of a catch all of things that don't make sense anywhere else
Jacob Paulsen: on the website, but, you know, there are things that we make available.
Jacob Paulsen: So, you know, like we have free downloadable things. We have a ton of targets
Jacob Paulsen: you can download and print off your printer and other downloadable resources.
Jacob Paulsen: We have, you know, links there to our mobile app, the state specific resources
Jacob Paulsen: I mentioned earlier as well.
Jacob Paulsen: And our business directory, which is something we probably don't talk about
Jacob Paulsen: very much, but maybe this is a good segue because it's listed also in my little
Jacob Paulsen: article about things that have had a significant makeover.
Jacob Paulsen: So maybe we come back to it, but I think that that's part of the resources hub.
Jacob Paulsen: And the last hub is the help hub. So help is important because we get a lot
Jacob Paulsen: of the same kinds of questions all the time, questions about how do I apply
Jacob Paulsen: for my permit or how do I renew my permit?
Jacob Paulsen: But we also get questions that are specific to us, things like,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, how do I check my order status? Or how do I download this course or this,
Jacob Paulsen: e-book that I purchased from you guys? Or how do I return a product or exchange
Jacob Paulsen: something because I got the wrong size belt?
Jacob Paulsen: We get a lot of those. People should read the instructions when they order a
Jacob Paulsen: belt. Just throw that out there.
Jacob Paulsen: So those kinds of things are all in the help.
Jacob Paulsen: The contact form is going to be in the help hub. So yeah, shop,
Jacob Paulsen: learn, train, laws, resources, and hub. Those are the four links in the menu
Jacob Paulsen: now, basically beyond, you know, being able to go right to your cart or go to
Jacob Paulsen: your user dashboard. Right.
Riley Bowman: Very good. Very good. Let's talk next about the user dashboard,
Riley Bowman: which is kind of another major improvement for the site.
Jacob Paulsen: User dashboard. So we used to have this big, huge, gaudy, ugly,
Jacob Paulsen: red button link that said user dashboard.
Jacob Paulsen: And now we just have that little profile icon that everybody knows what it means.
Jacob Paulsen: So click on your user dashboard. And I guess visually you're going to have to
Jacob Paulsen: log in if you want people to see what it looks like. Yeah, so what I'm going
Jacob Paulsen: to do is actually go to the article where.
Riley Bowman: There's a little image
Jacob Paulsen: That we can see. Right in the middle. Oh, geez. So the user dashboard is really,
Jacob Paulsen: really cool because I just think our old user dashboard sucked.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, it just really wasn't very good.
Jacob Paulsen: I thought it sucked really bad. So it was hard to navigate. You were like,
Jacob Paulsen: if you were looking for order status, hey, where's that order I ordered?
Jacob Paulsen: Or, you know, can I get the tracking number? I lost the email, whatever.
Jacob Paulsen: That's one thing that you, you know, might be doing user dashboard.
Jacob Paulsen: You might be looking up courses that you're in progress that you've been working
Jacob Paulsen: on, online courses, things like that.
Jacob Paulsen: You might be, you know, looking to see when your permits expire because,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, they're in your wallet. But, you know, you can also keep track of that on our website.
Jacob Paulsen: So you can get renewal reminder emails.
Jacob Paulsen: Do I have store credit? Do I have open coupons I can use? What guardian level
Jacob Paulsen: am I at? Which is sort of like a curriculum-based educational progress thing that we keep track of.
Jacob Paulsen: What badges have I earned? What are my payment methods? I want to swap out my
Jacob Paulsen: payment method. I want to change my default shipping address.
Jacob Paulsen: Things like that. Or maybe I want to use access to my business listings that
Jacob Paulsen: I've listed. These are all things that previously were kind of everywhere.
Jacob Paulsen: And you can still navigate to those things independently.
Jacob Paulsen: But we built this sort of like, I'll call it like landing dashboard page.
Jacob Paulsen: It's got all that stuff in one place.
Jacob Paulsen: So it's just much easier to just find your stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: Just find your stuff, figure out what's going on. A really common thing that
Jacob Paulsen: we used to deal with a lot on the customer service side was Guardian Nation
Jacob Paulsen: members trying to change their payment method or change their shipping address or things like that.
Jacob Paulsen: And so it became very apparent, like, our site is not user-friendly in that regard.
Jacob Paulsen: So all that kind of stuff got overhauled. I mean, just it's much cleaner.
Riley Bowman: This is,
Riley Bowman: that's really what it comes down to, is making it so much easier to see,
Riley Bowman: to understand what you're looking at, and to have it all in one place.
Riley Bowman: Like you said, this is fantastic. I mean, yeah, like you, one good example,
Riley Bowman: this happens all the time.
Riley Bowman: People need to update payment methods, and I think that was very hard for them
Riley Bowman: to do before, and now you can just see it is right here. It's easy to find,
Riley Bowman: easy to navigate, easy to manage. You can come in here and add a new payment
Riley Bowman: method or delete one if you need to or whatever.
Jacob Paulsen: So yeah, just quickly, in case anyone's concerned with their privacy,
Jacob Paulsen: you should know we don't store your credit card info on the site.
Jacob Paulsen: All that's stored on a third party merchant provider system.
Jacob Paulsen: So the site is just referencing your data from there. And all that it'll ever
Jacob Paulsen: pull back for you to see is the last four numbers.
Jacob Paulsen: So you can say, oh, that's the card we're talking about.
Jacob Paulsen: But something, you know, a tool that's actually in here that most people don't
Jacob Paulsen: know, it's always been there, but it's just, I think, no one knew to look for
Jacob Paulsen: it or didn't see it before. But you can keep track of your permits in here.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. So you can go in, you can say, oh, I have a permit from such and such
Jacob Paulsen: state. Maybe you have multiple permits.
Jacob Paulsen: I have two currently. And so, you know, you can see that in the little example.
Jacob Paulsen: And in the article, you can see my Colorado permit.
Jacob Paulsen: When you put in your permit, you can say if it's resident or non-resident.
Jacob Paulsen: And you can also indicate the expiration date. And our system will email you
Jacob Paulsen: at 120, 90, 60, and 30 days before that expiration date. Be like,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, yo, renew your permit, man.
Riley Bowman: Very cool. Fantastic. All right. Let's now talk about...
Riley Bowman: We talked about the hubs, actually. So we talked about navigation.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, I'm going to make two other quick comments about the navigation. One is the search bar.
Jacob Paulsen: And I think that might be something we brought up a month or two ago.
Jacob Paulsen: But the new search is huge. I mean, I don't know. Like, there was just some
Jacob Paulsen: day where I don't know if I hit my head on something. And I was like,
Jacob Paulsen: oh, wait a minute. How come we don't have a search bar that's any good?
Jacob Paulsen: But the search bar on concealedcarry.com is so much better than it used to be.
Jacob Paulsen: So please take advantage of that.
Jacob Paulsen: But also, I'll add that that navigation now is universal across everything.
Jacob Paulsen: So it used to be that we kind of had one navigation for the main site,
Jacob Paulsen: but then if you went to alaska.concilledcarrie.com or you went to the business
Jacob Paulsen: directory, these are kind of these, we call them sub-sites, and the navigation looked different.
Jacob Paulsen: And it was maybe a little bit confusing. You're like, wait, what happened? I thought I was here.
Jacob Paulsen: And now it's like one clean, universal, global navigation for the whole website.
Jacob Paulsen: And that makes it a lot easier, a lot less confusing, and a lot,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, just better to get where you're trying to go. Yep.
Riley Bowman: Probably the next thing is let's talk about Guardian University.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, this is the biggest thing. And, you know, the challenge,
Jacob Paulsen: of course, to tell you about all the things we've improved is also admitting
Jacob Paulsen: how bad they were before.
Riley Bowman: Right.
Jacob Paulsen: But video content was one of those. It truly was because...
Jacob Paulsen: I guess the best way to say it would be, it was a scattered mess.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, I think that people already more or less go to YouTube,
Jacob Paulsen: right? Like, I don't think, we're not under some weird, like,
Jacob Paulsen: false belief that we're going to be able to compete with YouTube.
Jacob Paulsen: But that said, there are plenty of people out there who don't want to give their
Jacob Paulsen: time and money and attention to a website that traditionally doesn't respect gun rights very much.
Jacob Paulsen: And we have a lot of proprietary content that's not on YouTube.
Jacob Paulsen: And so we, you know, over the years, as that kind of library has grown and grown
Jacob Paulsen: and grown, I've many times asked myself the question, like, how do we make it
Jacob Paulsen: easier for people to find and consume the video content?
Jacob Paulsen: And you can kind of think of it like there's three categories of video content.
Jacob Paulsen: We have videos that make up our courses.
Jacob Paulsen: So, hey, you know, the home defense course has something like 44 videos in it or something.
Jacob Paulsen: And then you have videos that are standalone, but the standalone videos are
Jacob Paulsen: still split into two different subcategories. You have standalone videos that
Jacob Paulsen: are public. Anybody can watch them.
Jacob Paulsen: And then you have standalone videos that are member only.
Jacob Paulsen: And so this creates this environment where historically we're sort of always
Jacob Paulsen: like, how do we get there? How do we put all that in one place and make it navigable?
Jacob Paulsen: And Guardian University, which we've always called that Guardian University.
Jacob Paulsen: But Guardian University was kind of this broken, fractured experience, and now it's clean.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. So let's take a look at that now. This is something I'm really excited about.
Riley Bowman: Easiest way to get there is click on Learn, and then on the sub menu there,
Riley Bowman: you'll see Learn Hub, Articles, Videos, Guardian University. Click on that.
Riley Bowman: And here we are on Guardian University. So very, you know, kind of more modern
Riley Bowman: in its approach, kind of Netflix-y.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, I mean, that's what we told the developer. I was like,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, people know how to use Netflix, so make it like that.
Jacob Paulsen: So, yeah, immediately you kind of have some featured content.
Jacob Paulsen: There's a little menu at the top, which we should talk about.
Jacob Paulsen: But then, you know, as you scroll down, you get all the courses,
Jacob Paulsen: and then you get, you know, most recently added content.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're logged in, then after that you'll see my list because you can kind
Jacob Paulsen: of mark and bookmark videos, you know, for later reference those go on your
Jacob Paulsen: list and then from there it's all about topics you know you scroll down like
Jacob Paulsen: here are all videos that we have on the site about draw here are all the videos we have about,
Jacob Paulsen: you know movement or holsters or you know what aiming or what you know whatever the thing is.
Riley Bowman: Yeah ballistics here's you know a ballistics category that's kind of interesting
Riley Bowman: i forgot about that medical a lot of a lot of good medical content there drills
Riley Bowman: yeah good stuff there dry fire again we've talked about dry fire earlier
Riley Bowman: um you know maybe it's not your intent to talk about right now but we've been
Riley Bowman: adding partner content as well and you'll see some of that popping up here now
Riley Bowman: too like a higher line podcast that's our our buddy mickey shook
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, yeah. So if you go to the very top and you click on shows and topics,
Jacob Paulsen: so across the top, you kind of have home, courses, shows and topics, then GN exclusives.
Jacob Paulsen: If you go to shows and topics, this is another way to kind of see the content.
Jacob Paulsen: And here you'll see partners who we've worked with to bring their content into Guardian University.
Jacob Paulsen: Because we think that this is, we want this to be an experience where people
Jacob Paulsen: can get an education, where they can learn things and stay up to date with what's going on.
Jacob Paulsen: And that means bringing content beyond what we as a company can produce alone.
Jacob Paulsen: And so when you get there, you'll see that we have Greybeard Actual,
Jacob Paulsen: Matt Little. We have his podcast, Wiz and Training.
Jacob Paulsen: We have Mickey Shook's podcast, Higher Line podcast.
Jacob Paulsen: We're pulling in on agreement all the videos from Cecil Birch,
Jacob Paulsen: Immediate Action Combatives, Defenders Live USA, which is a great podcast.
Jacob Paulsen: And Forge of Freedom is another show that we pulled in recently.
Jacob Paulsen: And there's other kind of content things that are us specifically.
Jacob Paulsen: So, you know, the Conceal Carry podcast or if you want to just see our content
Jacob Paulsen: from SHOT Show or just unboxing videos and things like that.
Jacob Paulsen: There might be more series like that or shows that we add in the future.
Jacob Paulsen: But, yeah, I think that this is a really clean way to consume content.
Jacob Paulsen: And if you scroll down, then you kind of get all the topics that we currently have organized.
Riley Bowman: Similar to like when you're on that main page, you can scroll down and see all the topics.
Riley Bowman: This just gives you a simpler way of, I just want to see, you know,
Riley Bowman: some of the specific shows. I want to find, you know, Matt Little's podcast,
Riley Bowman: for instance, and you can very quickly get yourself right to that content right there.
Riley Bowman: Okay. Also at the top, Jacob, we got a category here called courses.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. This is also important because we kind of had to do some consolidation
Jacob Paulsen: here. There were like three different places on the website you could find courses.
Jacob Paulsen: You know, like, oh, this is the place where Guardian Nation members go to see
Jacob Paulsen: their courses. And this is the place people who aren't Guardian Nation members
Jacob Paulsen: but who have purchased courses go to see their courses. And,
Jacob Paulsen: like, you know what I mean?
Jacob Paulsen: It was just a mess. And so this new single courses page is everyone's destination.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're logged in, then it's going to show you what you've already purchased.
Jacob Paulsen: Or as a member of Guardian Nation, of course, it's just going to show you everything
Jacob Paulsen: that's available to you because it's all included as part of membership.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, it's simple. Also, if you're logged in, it's going to show you all the badges you've earned.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is kind of the gamification, you know, kind of hub of the whole website
Jacob Paulsen: of concealedgrade.com.
Jacob Paulsen: What badges have you earned? What badges can you earn?
Jacob Paulsen: What rank level are you at? Oh, I'm at Guardian level two or three or four, whatever it is.
Jacob Paulsen: All that will show up on the courses page if you're signed in.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're not signed in, you'll still see all the courses and you can click
Jacob Paulsen: those and view those, et cetera.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. As you'll note here, this red bar at the top, since I'm not currently
Riley Bowman: signed in on this computer, it's basically prompting me to do so if I would
Riley Bowman: like to sign in I can join Guardian Nation for instance to have access to everything
Riley Bowman: and or track my progress so there you go
Riley Bowman: And then you mentioned how you can also, or this is a GN exclusives.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. So this is another thing that was important to us is sort of like,
Jacob Paulsen: hey, let's throw all the video in one place.
Jacob Paulsen: Let's not say, oh, member only videos over here on this part of the website
Jacob Paulsen: and public videos. It's like, no, all the videos are together,
Jacob Paulsen: but then there's got to be some indicator of which videos are member only and which ones are not.
Jacob Paulsen: And this is important for two reasons. It's important because if you're not
Jacob Paulsen: a member, it's pretty annoying to click on a video and then get a message that
Jacob Paulsen: says, sorry, you can't watch this.
Jacob Paulsen: So if you're not a member or you're not logged in, all the member-only videos
Jacob Paulsen: will have a little lock icon in the corner so that you know.
Jacob Paulsen: It's like, don't bother clicking here.
Jacob Paulsen: If you're not a member, you're not going to be able to watch this.
Jacob Paulsen: But if you are a member, this is also beneficial because from some of the members
Jacob Paulsen: we were talking to, they're sort of like, well, I get the sense there's not
Jacob Paulsen: a lot of member-only content. That it's kind of all just what's on your guys'
Jacob Paulsen: YouTube channel. And it's like, no, no, no.
Jacob Paulsen: There's a ton of member-only content.
Jacob Paulsen: And now you'll notice that too. If you're logged in, instead of the lock icon,
Jacob Paulsen: you'll see the Guardian Nation member logo.
Jacob Paulsen: And so that'll be your indication of saying, oh, this video I'm about to watch
Jacob Paulsen: or that I could watch. That's only for members.
Riley Bowman: And I'm not currently logged in, so I can't access my list or whatever.
Jacob Paulsen: Yes, correct. But it's straightforward. Just think of it like you would Netflix.
Jacob Paulsen: You can bookmark or add to your watch list.
Jacob Paulsen: Think of it that way. And so that's how it works here too.
Riley Bowman: Uh, so yeah, that's something we could never do before. Right.
Riley Bowman: Uh, so it's pretty cool that you can, you know, you're watching,
Riley Bowman: uh, you know, say this video right here, random video in the middle of the screen
Riley Bowman: I'm picking and you're like, yeah, I want to add that to my list.
Riley Bowman: Uh, I think that's awesome
Jacob Paulsen: To be able to do that. Yeah. Click on a video. Let's see. Cause the video experience
Jacob Paulsen: itself is also significantly upgraded.
Jacob Paulsen: So I, I, while like the homepage of Guardian University, I described as Netflixy,
Jacob Paulsen: the single video page experience I described as YouTubey, you know so your video
Jacob Paulsen: description like share add to list uh,
Jacob Paulsen: comment you know you comment you want to see more videos like this one you know
Jacob Paulsen: all that is there and if you if you happen to click on a video
Jacob Paulsen: that is part of a uh part of uh our podcast then it'll
Jacob Paulsen: prompt you to subscribe if you happen to click on a video that's part of a course
Jacob Paulsen: then they'll say oh this video is part of this course do you want to see the
Jacob Paulsen: whole course so things like that that
Jacob Paulsen: just make it more more congruent and organized I'll see you next time.
Riley Bowman: And, of course, we're watching right here my fairly recent video about the new
Riley Bowman: Noxon Anarch flashlight, which I've got in my pocket. I think I saw you had
Riley Bowman: one in your pocket. I do. So, yeah.
Riley Bowman: Great little light. You can watch my review on that right there.
Riley Bowman: And you guys can see here as I scroll down, you can leave comments right here.
Riley Bowman: So you can comment on the videos. You'll see those comments pop up here.
Riley Bowman: And then over here on the right, again, talking about kind of the YouTube-y navigation.
Riley Bowman: Uh want to watch more from this category essentially that's what this one here
Riley Bowman: is saying a more from from more from gear the gear category we'll click on that
Riley Bowman: one there and you'll see it takes us over to a fun range day with the taurus tx22
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah my last comment on this because if you're listening to this whole podcast
Jacob Paulsen: you must really like us because this is about as boring podcast content as you
Jacob Paulsen: could possibly get from us but um it is it's self-serving but again And we think that there's value.
Jacob Paulsen: But anyway, if you're listening to this, I guess my thought would be we don't
Jacob Paulsen: believe we're going to beat YouTube.
Jacob Paulsen: Like that's not the objective here. But we do think we're creating an environment
Jacob Paulsen: that is gun-friendly compared to YouTube where, you know, when you do see ads,
Jacob Paulsen: they're going to have something to do with gun stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: That, you know, you're going to be able to watch a video and know that,
Jacob Paulsen: you know, the other videos being recommended to you are related,
Jacob Paulsen: that they have to do with gun stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: And more importantly that everything in here is vetted I mean some of it's very
Jacob Paulsen: old so maybe if we went back and watched our videos from 12 years ago we might
Jacob Paulsen: be unimpressed but at least it's vetted you know like we're not putting content
Jacob Paulsen: you know with YouTube you sometimes just don't know what you're going to get yeah.
Riley Bowman: Good stuff. All very, very exciting. We've been very thrilled with the improvements
Riley Bowman: to Guardian University.
Jacob Paulsen: Well, and the feedback's been amazing.
Riley Bowman: Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. People love it.
Riley Bowman: Let's come back now to that business directory, Jacob.
Jacob Paulsen: The business directory. So another one of those things that I kind of think
Jacob Paulsen: that the majority of our students, consumers, listeners, followers don't know
Jacob Paulsen: about, but we have this business directory.
Jacob Paulsen: You can find it in the resources hub.
Jacob Paulsen: And the business directory is what it sounds like. It's a directory of gun-related
Jacob Paulsen: businesses and also of gun-free zones, businesses that prohibit guns.
Jacob Paulsen: So it's kind of split into kind of two broad categories if you want to think of it that way.
Jacob Paulsen: But it will – assuming your browser allows it, it will identify your current
Jacob Paulsen: location. It might prompt you like, hey, are you okay giving up your location to this website?
Jacob Paulsen: And then it will sort businesses that are near you, where you are located.
Jacob Paulsen: So right now we're seeing like us because we are sitting in our office,
Jacob Paulsen: so we see like Mount Man Medical here and range tech shot timers so so it's
Jacob Paulsen: pretty straightforward that way but it's really easy to filter so at the very
Jacob Paulsen: kind of you know top-ish there's a search bar you can search that way or below
Jacob Paulsen: the search there's a little thing that says filters think of it like a,
Jacob Paulsen: In fact, the directive to the developer was make it look like Airbnb.
Jacob Paulsen: So, you know, really easy to click on a filter and say, oh, I just want to see
Jacob Paulsen: gun stores or I just want to see shooting ranges or I just want to see firearm
Jacob Paulsen: instructors or trainers or lawyers.
Jacob Paulsen: There's not very many lawyers in this directory at this point,
Jacob Paulsen: but there are, you know, something like 30 or.
Riley Bowman: I think there's
Jacob Paulsen: Something like 60 to 70,000 gun businesses in this directory.
Jacob Paulsen: The vast majority of which are gun stores, they're FFLs. But I think there's
Jacob Paulsen: something like 8,000 gun ranges in here.
Jacob Paulsen: And it's free to add a business. If you're listening to this and you're part
Jacob Paulsen: of our community, you're part of our industry professionally,
Jacob Paulsen: then you can come in here and add your business too. It's right in the menu. You can add a business.
Riley Bowman: Look at the things you learn just by visiting this. Like I've never seen this
Riley Bowman: even listed before. Denver Muzzle Loading Gun Club.
Jacob Paulsen: Now you know.
Riley Bowman: I don't even know what that is.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah, but they are a thing and they are 1.5 miles away.
Riley Bowman: Apparently that's not an actual shooting range, even though that was...
Jacob Paulsen: No, apparently not.
Riley Bowman: So some of these may be miscategorized depending on however they were initially...
Jacob Paulsen: Input, yeah. I mean, some of this was scraped, right? Like we scraped some data
Jacob Paulsen: from some sources. Some of it's user-generated. Someone just came in here and added a business.
Jacob Paulsen: We're trying to moderate that. Like I delete listings all the time.
Jacob Paulsen: I get an alert every time one's added, and sometimes they go in, I'm like, no.
Jacob Paulsen: And I just delete it. And I'm talking about like truly spam stuff.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, if it's a legitimate business in our industry, you know,
Jacob Paulsen: we want it in the directory.
Jacob Paulsen: So, yeah, it's great. And if you want, you can toggle over to gun-free zones.
Jacob Paulsen: And now you're seeing businesses that prohibit guns.
Jacob Paulsen: And some of this is corporate. Like we, for example, we know that every Buffalo
Jacob Paulsen: Wild Wings prohibits guns. So at one point in time, we went and grabbed every
Jacob Paulsen: one of their locations. We imported it here.
Jacob Paulsen: Others are added by individuals. Like I see the Denver Zoo was added there.
Jacob Paulsen: You know, so someone added the Denver Zoo. It might have been me.
Jacob Paulsen: I don't remember. But anyway, that gives you some sense for how that works. Right.
Riley Bowman: Good stuff. Yeah, we hope that things like the business directory are useful for you guys.
Riley Bowman: That's part of the reason why we put it there is so you can find business-friendly
Riley Bowman: and anti-friendly businesses for your sake.
Riley Bowman: I mean, that gun-free zone one I think is pretty useful. Sometimes just knowing
Riley Bowman: ahead of time before you go somewhere, it's like, oh, you know,
Riley Bowman: what's the policy there?
Riley Bowman: What am I going to find when I get there? It's good to know ahead of time.
Jacob Paulsen: And we encourage you to add stuff. So add gun-free zones in here,
Jacob Paulsen: add gun businesses in here. And you can also review.
Jacob Paulsen: You can't review a gun-free zone. It's like everybody would give it one star and say it sucks.
Jacob Paulsen: But you can review gun businesses. So that firearm trainer you work with or
Jacob Paulsen: that gun range you like to go to or the place you go shop for your guns.
Jacob Paulsen: If you had a bad experience or a positive experience, we'd love to come in here,
Jacob Paulsen: find that business, and write a review.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Go to our businesses and leave a good review,
Jacob Paulsen: Please.
Riley Bowman: But just kind of showing how this works. you can scroll down and see reviews
Riley Bowman: right here. So you can select a star rating there and type in your review.
Riley Bowman: Uh, let's see. Is there anything that we've missed, uh, talking about,
Riley Bowman: uh, the improvements to the site today?
Jacob Paulsen: Oh, geez. Um, I don't remember.
Riley Bowman: I feel like we've kind of covered, uh, most of it here.
Jacob Paulsen: Uh, yeah, no, we, we talked about the user to ask for, we talked about search.
Jacob Paulsen: We talked about the menu. We talked about the new hubs, garden university,
Jacob Paulsen: legal summaries. Let's talk about the reciprocity map in a little bit more detail. Okay.
Jacob Paulsen: Let's do that. So that's in the legal hub and you kind of just go to reciprocity
Jacob Paulsen: maps there in the legal hub.
Jacob Paulsen: So we've always had in fact, it might be one of our earliest utilities,
Jacob Paulsen: for lack of a better word, that we put on our website is our reciprocity map builder.
Jacob Paulsen: And it's gone through several iterations over the years.
Jacob Paulsen: It's one of the tools that's available in the mobile app as well.
Jacob Paulsen: And the common issue we have been running into for years and years,
Jacob Paulsen: is that we get emails from people who are basically upset because they generate
Jacob Paulsen: a reciprocity map and it says that they can't carry in Maine or something.
Jacob Paulsen: And they get upset because, well, but Maine's constitutional carry.
Jacob Paulsen: So why is it red on this map? And we're like, oh my gosh.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, sometimes it's frustrating because we want people to understand that it's different.
Jacob Paulsen: But also, it's sort of feedback to us like, okay, people want that to be taken
Jacob Paulsen: into consideration. They want that to be factored into their reciprocity,
Jacob Paulsen: even though it has nothing to do with reciprocity.
Jacob Paulsen: And so that's a new rollout to this map.
Jacob Paulsen: So now, instead of saying green-red, you know, state does or doesn't honor your
Jacob Paulsen: permit or combination of permits, now you see green-red-yellow.
Jacob Paulsen: And you referred to this earlier when we were talking about the state legal summaries.
Jacob Paulsen: But this is important because it's now represented in a three-color tone.
Jacob Paulsen: And I think that has a lot of value because, yeah, I do want to know states
Jacob Paulsen: that don't honor my permit.
Jacob Paulsen: But I also want to know states that don't honor my permit, but they do have permitless carry.
Jacob Paulsen: And it's not the same. So if you just pull the Colorado – no, this is not Colorado.
Riley Bowman: This is Montana.
Jacob Paulsen: Okay, Montana. There you go. So we're looking at a Montana reciprocity map right now, for example.
Jacob Paulsen: And it you know we see two yellow states maine and south carolina so maine and
Jacob Paulsen: south carolina do not honor the montana permit and so you know months ago you
Jacob Paulsen: know before we made the changes they would have been red on this map and now
Jacob Paulsen: they're yellow and that's relevant,
Jacob Paulsen: uh i think this is better because i don't i don't want to show them as green
Jacob Paulsen: because it's not like permit less carry is not the same as an honored permit,
Jacob Paulsen: it's it's they're just not the same like it does not mean you could do everything
Jacob Paulsen: you could do if you had a permit that was honored there.
Jacob Paulsen: You might have restrictions that are set on people who carry under permitless
Jacob Paulsen: carry or constitutional carry allowances, right? Or authority.
Riley Bowman: You could come into play with things like...
Riley Bowman: You know, coming within a thousand feet of a school.
Jacob Paulsen: That would be a good example from a federal perspective, but given states often
Jacob Paulsen: have their own flavor of things, you know, given state might say,
Jacob Paulsen: Hey, we have permitless carry, but these are restrictions we have,
Jacob Paulsen: we impose on people who carry without a permit.
Riley Bowman: Right. So, so maybe, I don't know this for a fact, I'm just throwing it out
Riley Bowman: there, but, you know, since we mentioned it earlier about like state parks,
Riley Bowman: for instance, maybe you have a state where
Riley Bowman: if you have a permit, you can carry in a state park and or national park,
Riley Bowman: But if you're operating under their constitutional carry authority, maybe you can't.
Jacob Paulsen: Right. There's lots of things like that. Campus carry is a thing that could
Jacob Paulsen: vary based on you having a permit or not having a permit.
Jacob Paulsen: You said state parks. Restaurants that serve alcohol is something that could
Jacob Paulsen: vary based on whether or not you're carrying under the permitless carry authority
Jacob Paulsen: or with an actual permit.
Jacob Paulsen: So, yeah. So any given state is going to have those things. So you need to know
Jacob Paulsen: the difference between am I going to the state under the guise that they honor
Jacob Paulsen: my permit or am I going to the state under the guise that they have permitless
Jacob Paulsen: carry, whatever you want to call it, permitless carry, constant carry, same difference.
Jacob Paulsen: And so that's why we wanted to make it different but still reflect it somehow.
Jacob Paulsen: So I think to me it's the color coding is stoplight.
Jacob Paulsen: Green for go, red for stop, yellow for caution. That's the thinking here of
Jacob Paulsen: the color code of the new reciprocity map.
Riley Bowman: I've never in my life selected Massachusetts as my residential permit.
Riley Bowman: I mean, obviously, I have no reason to.
Riley Bowman: But as you can see, there's some states that a lot more of them are yellow now
Riley Bowman: because these are states that have a form of constitutional carry.
Riley Bowman: So you could carry most likely in those states under that authority,
Riley Bowman: but they clearly do not recognize Massachusetts permit.
Riley Bowman: Right. Because, well, Massachusetts doesn't like anybody.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, the logic, like the logic for the code here, the software is if the
Jacob Paulsen: state honors that permit, show green. So that's the first like filter.
Jacob Paulsen: So show all the states that can be green is green.
Jacob Paulsen: And then second, if the state does not honor their permit, then if they have
Jacob Paulsen: permitless carry, show yellow.
Jacob Paulsen: And then we get all the yellow. And then finally, if the state does not honor
Jacob Paulsen: their permit and does not have constitutional carry, then show is red.
Riley Bowman: Isn't it amazing that you got a state like massachusetts uh of course a great
Riley Bowman: state in the history and the founding of our nation oh
Jacob Paulsen: I get sad about this.
Riley Bowman: But most of the states around it you know new york uh connecticut rhode island
Riley Bowman: i think the jersey pennsylvania pennsylvania you
Jacob Paulsen: Know all right like.
Riley Bowman: Sorry tough beans
Jacob Paulsen: Well i mean massachusetts itself is a bit of a travesty i i i,
Jacob Paulsen: I was about to call it religious. Maybe a better word would be sacred.
Jacob Paulsen: I had a sacred experience in 2010 walking the Freedom Trail in Boston.
Jacob Paulsen: And, I mean, truly, personally sacred.
Jacob Paulsen: But it was tragic. Like, that trail starts in Boston Commons and it ends at Bunker Hill.
Jacob Paulsen: And as you're going through that experience, you're seeing, like, Fennel Hall and.
Riley Bowman: Like, just this
Jacob Paulsen: You know benjamin franklin's grave like just crazy cool stuff and and the whole
Jacob Paulsen: time i'm thinking to myself like this is the birthplace of freedom and today it is the antithesis of,
Jacob Paulsen: freedom yeah it's tragic man yeah yeah.
Riley Bowman: Of course they just had that uh shooting we covered on the podcast uh there
Riley Bowman: in boston a couple weeks ago that crazy guy with a some kind of ar walking around
Riley Bowman: shooting randomly at people and cars and delivery vehicles.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. I think it was kind of a suicide by cop game. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: It didn't quite work out for him the way he probably had envisioned.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Anyway, sorry to derail there a little bit, but to your point, I mean...
Riley Bowman: Yeah, so many freedoms removed from law-abiding folk, but of course,
Riley Bowman: yeah, it doesn't fix all the problems.
Jacob Paulsen: No, no it doesn't. But, but, this
Jacob Paulsen: year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: And today, this, you know, March 17th of this year, 2026, would have been the
Jacob Paulsen: 250th anniversary of Evacuation Day in Boston, Massachusetts.
Jacob Paulsen: So not a national holiday, but I don't know if Bostonians get it off work or
Jacob Paulsen: something. That'd be cool if they did.
Jacob Paulsen: But evacuation day, just thinking about running all those cannon to the top
Jacob Paulsen: of Dorchester Heights and the British waking up and seeing that and being like, oh, we're screwed.
Riley Bowman: They have us surrounded.
Jacob Paulsen: I guess we better get out of Dodge. Cannon, yes. And they all just get up and
Jacob Paulsen: leave. Like that was 250 years ago, March 17th of this year.
Jacob Paulsen: Like that's, that's intense. Like if, if you stand up, you know,
Jacob Paulsen: when Dorchester Heights kind of doesn't exist anymore, but if you're in Boston
Jacob Paulsen: and you're thinking about that stuff and you're looking at the harbor,
Jacob Paulsen: like if you're standing at Bunker Hill and you're looking at the, the, the monument,
Jacob Paulsen: that is there and you don't tear up a little bit, like I just don't know if you're American.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Sorry. I'll get off it now.
Riley Bowman: Yeah. Yeah, so we're here today because we wanted to share with you some major
Riley Bowman: improvements, navigation improvements, user, you know, interface improvements,
Riley Bowman: improvements just overall to how the information is presented and how you can
Riley Bowman: find it and understand it, make sense of it, share it.
Riley Bowman: You can still, I mean, I was, you know, we were on the
Riley Bowman: uh the reciprocity map there you can still uh if you go down a little bit you
Riley Bowman: can download your specific reciprocity map
Riley Bowman: okay and if you're logged in with an account you can get an embed code to embed
Riley Bowman: that on a site somewhere if you'd like to do that
Jacob Paulsen: And we encourage that you know so if you're a firearm instructor and you have
Jacob Paulsen: your own website you know have gun will train massachusetts.com,
Jacob Paulsen: or something and you want to keep an updated reciprocity map of the of the massachusetts
Jacob Paulsen: permit on your website like come to our site generate that map,
Jacob Paulsen: click embed get the code go put it on your site and every time it updates it'll
Jacob Paulsen: automatically update on your site so you don't have to deal with that yeah.
Riley Bowman: Yep super cool we've had that feature for a long time it's been improved here
Riley Bowman: and there and for a while there people were uh taking advantage of that uh and
Riley Bowman: you know in a way that wasn't giving us credit uh i think we've got the code and that kind of figured
Jacob Paulsen: Out. Yeah, we kind of forced it to give us credit.
Riley Bowman: Yeah, good stuff.
Riley Bowman: All righty. Well, it's probably about time we wrap it up here.
Riley Bowman: We appreciate you guys for going on this tour with us of the new and improved website.
Riley Bowman: I'll highlight again that one of the, I think, the best things that we've done
Riley Bowman: in recent history is the search tool.
Riley Bowman: I have relied on that a bunch since we've implemented that because,
Riley Bowman: you know, as many things as we have resource wise, articles wise,
Riley Bowman: content wise, it's so challenging sometimes.
Riley Bowman: Like I don't remember nearly as well as it seems like Jacob remembers or some
Riley Bowman: of the guys on the team remember where it's like where's that thing on the website
Riley Bowman: and the search tool does such a great job now of finding things
Riley Bowman: and being able to filter it by product or an article
Riley Bowman: or a video for instance and just being able to enter in what I'm looking for
Riley Bowman: filter it as necessary and bam usually I'm able to find things within just a
Riley Bowman: few seconds it just is such a great powerful improvement to the website.
Riley Bowman: All these things, you know, this is just part of what we try to do at concealedcarry.com
Riley Bowman: is to bring useful, valuable resources and information to you guys.
Riley Bowman: It's part of our mission. It's part of what we do.
Riley Bowman: We hope that you'll make use of our site. I mean, one of the things is we hope
Riley Bowman: when people are thinking about concealed carry and firearms and training and
Riley Bowman: all that, that concealedcarry.com is one of the things that
Riley Bowman: is sort of top of mind, that it It is a valued and trusted resource for that kind of information.
Riley Bowman: And hopefully by making it easier to use and easier to navigate,
Riley Bowman: it becomes even more so is our hope going forward.
Jacob Paulsen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, take advantage. Like the stuff is there for you.
Jacob Paulsen: We do it for you. So go and.
Jacob Paulsen: And, you know, leverage this tool that's been built. Yeah.
Riley Bowman: Again, reminder of today's episode sponsors, obviously at ConcealedCarry.com.
Riley Bowman: And more importantly, probably, we really hope you'll consider membership in Guardian Nation.
Riley Bowman: That is a huge value, we think. We think we deliver on that and bring members
Riley Bowman: a lot of value for what they pay into that membership.
Riley Bowman: At the very least, you're going to get it back in the form of quality,
Riley Bowman: useful, relevant gear to you as a firearm owner, and especially as a concealed carrier.
Riley Bowman: We work really hard to deliver on that. You're going to get a huge discount
Riley Bowman: off of being able to attend things like the Guardian Conference,
Riley Bowman: which is later this year in September, of course. And we hope to maybe see you there.
Riley Bowman: Even if you're not a member, we hope to still see you there.
Riley Bowman: But you're going to probably see there's, it's pretty hard to argue with the
Riley Bowman: discount you get off of attending Guardian Conference just because you have
Riley Bowman: Guardian Nation membership.
Riley Bowman: So it's a good idea to look into.
Riley Bowman: GuardianNation.com to learn more and hope that you'll give that a shot.
Jacob Paulsen: That's right. Yes. Very important. Very valuable.
Jacob Paulsen: And today we kind of hovered over a lot of the values and benefits Guardian
Jacob Paulsen: Nation members get within the site, right?
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, they save 10% off everything we sell all the time. They get access to
Jacob Paulsen: two annual member-only sales that have heavily discounted product.
Jacob Paulsen: They get access to all of those videos that are member-only,
Jacob Paulsen: not to mention access to all the courses that are otherwise you'd have to buy a la carte one by one.
Jacob Paulsen: Guardian Nation members get the huge discount at the Guardian Conference,
Jacob Paulsen: as you mentioned, not to mention VIP treatment while they're there,
Jacob Paulsen: and, of course, the box, which, a little teaser, getting ready to ship the box
Jacob Paulsen: this month. The box, well, hopefully it'll be this month.
Jacob Paulsen: In theory, it'll be this month. It might be a couple of days late because that
Jacob Paulsen: seems to be how we roll. But anyway, we are shipping a brand new product in this quarter's box.
Jacob Paulsen: Brand new. No one has one. No one's ever seen it.
Jacob Paulsen: It was brand new. And Riley and I had, well, I don't know if it's fair to say
Jacob Paulsen: we designed it, but we certainly had a lot of input on the design.
Jacob Paulsen: It kind of started as kind of a base product, and then we kind of tweaked,
Jacob Paulsen: modified to get it to how we wanted it to be.
Jacob Paulsen: It's a really good product. very excited about it really pumped about it so
Jacob Paulsen: anyway and and another product also will be in the box so yeah that's that's
Jacob Paulsen: worth the cost of membership to your point 120 minimum,
Jacob Paulsen: worth of stuff that we ship to you four times a year,
Jacob Paulsen: that pays for the for the membership by itself and for us we don't want you
Jacob Paulsen: to focus on the stuff we think that way more valuable is the content it's the
Jacob Paulsen: training it's the community it's the conference all that kind of stuff but yeah
Jacob Paulsen: getting the gear in the mail probably doesn't hurt.
Riley Bowman: Awesome. Well, there you go. That's sponsors. That's today's episode.
Riley Bowman: We appreciate you being here with us and being a part of it.
Riley Bowman: We are really looking forward to, in fact, before we go, I'll tease just a little
Riley Bowman: bit. We got something really exciting planned for Independence Day and our Independence Day sale.
Riley Bowman: And so, yeah, we were just looking at this a little bit ago and reviewing something
Riley Bowman: that is really, really cool.
Jacob Paulsen: There's going to be a free gift, free bonus thing. I'm pumped out of my mind.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, the free bonus gift is the coolest thing, but what I'm really pumped
Jacob Paulsen: about is 250 years of America. Like that's depending on when you want to measure
Jacob Paulsen: it. So 250 years is the anniversary of the voting on and signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Jacob Paulsen: And it's kind of the critical, we call it the spirit of 1776 for a reason.
Jacob Paulsen: So it's the anniversary of that. And I think it's a big deal.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, I was not alive for the 200th anniversary, and I don't plan to be alive
Jacob Paulsen: for the 300th anniversary.
Jacob Paulsen: So this is the big one in my lifetime. This is it.
Jacob Paulsen: I mean, whatever you normally do on Independence Day, like, you've got to up
Jacob Paulsen: your game, and we are due.
Riley Bowman: You don't plan to be alive for the 300th?
Jacob Paulsen: No. 50 years from now, I'm out.
Riley Bowman: I'll be 93, man. Nope. Or close to me. Yeah, I will. Yeah.
Jacob Paulsen: I would be 93, but I'll be dead. I'm planning on not being alive at age 93.
Riley Bowman: I hope I'm still running 10Ks at 93, man.
Jacob Paulsen: Maybe you and I will both die on July 4th and 50 years from now.
Jacob Paulsen: And then we could be like Jefferson and Adams. Yeah, yeah.
Riley Bowman: There you go. Cool, cool. I dig it. Well, guys, look forward to that.
Riley Bowman: We'll have more info coming up in the coming episodes, actually,
Riley Bowman: of the podcast about our plans for Independence Day, Independence Day sale,
Riley Bowman: and everything else we got going on with that. So until next time,
Riley Bowman: a reminder to train right, train often, and train safe so you can fight hard,
Jacob Paulsen: Fight fast, and fight true. Take care.
Riley Bowman: We'll see you.
Riley Bowman: A reminder that laws vary from place to place, and we encourage listeners to
Riley Bowman: seek local legal advice to understand applicable laws.
Riley Bowman: Concealed Carry, Inc., its brands and properties, and the Concealed Carry podcast
Riley Bowman: is not a legal service, nor are we attorneys at law.
Riley Bowman: We make our best faith effort to share Concealed Carry-related insights and
Riley Bowman: information about firearm-related incidents and the laws pertaining,
Riley Bowman: based on our own understanding and experience.
Riley Bowman: But things can be different where you live, or laws may have changed by the
Riley Bowman: time you listen to this. We cannot be held liable for your actions based on
Riley Bowman: the information shared in this podcast.
Riley Bowman: Please exercise care with all things pertaining to firearm use,
Riley Bowman: concealed carry, and always practice following basic firearm safety rules.
Riley Bowman: More information about safety can be found at concealedcarry.com forward slash safety.