I’ve known Mike for years, and I’ve watched him go from a one-man shop with a lathe and a mill to running one of the most interesting barrel operations in the game. It’s been 3-5 years since he was on the podcast, so we start with the big picture of what HCA looks like now and then get deep.

We talk about the business side first: doubling the team, tripling the shop space, and why the best business ideas are the ones you can’t talk yourself out of. We also get into why a decade of relationships is worth more than any piece of equipment, and why helping your “competitors” has paid off for both of us.

Then it gets nerdy. Mike breaks down the four ways to rifle a barrel (button, cold hammer forged, cut, and ECM) and why he went the route he did. We cover what separates a premium barrel from everything else, why you can’t scale craftsmanship without losing something, and the electrochemical machining process he’s been learning the hard way.

Then the big reveal: HC1 rifling, a new gain-twist and gain-land design that Mike says is the most forgiving barrel he’s ever shot. He walks through the testing, including what happened when he pushed a 22 Creedmoor well past where it should have quit.

We finish with barrel maintenance, barrel length, suppressors, and a few elk hunting stories along the way. Mike also tells me how to get your hands on one, and now I need a new rifle. I blame him.

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Sponsors

Maven Optics
Maven is a Wyoming company that sells direct to consumer, and in my opinion they’re the best bang for your buck in optics. From rifle scopes to spotting scopes to binos, I love their stuff. The B6 is my go-to binocular. I run the 12×50, but the 10×42 is awesome too.
🔗 mavenbuilt.com | Code: TRO

onX Maps
onX isn’t just for mapping. It’s my planning tool, my e-scouting tool, and my offline maps for every trip. Now they’ve added onX SOS, an emergency rescue add-on that connects you to Overwatch Rescue for 24/7 crisis response right from your phone. I carry my InReach a lot less these days, and having this insurance on my phone is a big deal.
🔗 onxmaps.com | Code: TRO

Bridger Watch
I’ve spent the last three years developing the Bridger smartwatch, the one I wished existed. It does health, sleep, and fitness tracking, plus hunting features like offline mapping, onX waypoint integration, ballistics integration with Hornady or Sierra, and Redshift, a red-light mode that protects your night vision. The Rekken is built by hunters, for hunters.
🔗 bridgerwatch.com | Code: TRO

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Chapters

• 00:00 Sponsor reads: Maven Optics and onX SOS
• 01:45 Catching up with Mike
• 03:00 What’s new at HCA: doubling staff and tripling the shop
• 08:00 Finding problems to solve, and what you say no to
• 13:00 Advice for your younger self: patience and readiness
• 16:30 Why a decade of relationships matters
• 21:30 Sharing knowledge with competitors (and East Coast vs. West Coast)
• 27:00 The road to making barrels in-house
• 29:30 Four ways to rifle a barrel: button, hammer forged, cut
• 36:00 The art of a premium barrel and the scaling problem
• 39:30 ECM rifling explained
• 44:00 Bridger Watch (mid-roll)
• 45:00 HC1 rifling: how gain twist and gain land work
• 55:00 Barrel maintenance
• 58:00 Barrel length and elk hunting stories
• 64:00 Suppressors and big 30s
• 67:00 Gold flake barrels, HC1 pricing, and steel barrels
• 70:00 Where to buy, pre-fits, and wrap-up

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Three Key Takeaways

1. Your relationships are your biggest asset. Both of us say the same thing: the opportunities that mattered most came from a decade of relationships, not overnight moves. Mike could only start making barrels because people he’d known for 10+ years mentored him.
2. Sharing knowledge grows the pie. Mike used to guard his carbon wrap process and thinks it slowed his growth. Helping competitors and contract partners has brought more back to HCA than it has cost.
3. Barrels still need a human. Even with ECM rifling and a scalable process, Mike insists every barrel gets hand-lapped and checked by a person, because automation alone doesn’t make the best product.

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I’ve known Chris Piper for a couple years now, ever since a mutual friend put us in touch and he told me he wanted to get into the hunting industry. I didn’t think that was a terrible idea — okay, I kind of did — but this guy’s skill set is legit. He’s built marketing and ops departments for a $5 billion car company, ran point for Cody Sanchez at Contrarian Thinking, and now he’s out on his own helping companies bridge the gap between marketing and operations.

But this episode isn’t really about business tactics. It’s about the whole arc — losing the fighter pilot dream to asthma, racing Formula cars and street racing through his teens, becoming a dad at 21 with zero parenting rights and fighting his way back from that, and grinding through corporate America to build the life he actually wanted. We get into whether buying “boring” small businesses is a real path to freedom or just a fancy way to buy yourself a job, why being a generalist beats being a specialist in the AI era, and what losing a neighbor to a sudden brain tumor taught him about “someday.”

We also talk hunting — his first elk hunt, what he picked up from a week at Cliff Gray’s Elk Camp, and why patience in the mountains is the same skill as patience in business. If you’ve ever felt like you’re behind, or like you’re waiting for “someday” to start living the life you actually want, this one’s for you.

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Sponsors

Bridger Watch This is a project I’ve personally been working on for a long time — a smartwatch actually built for hunting. Everyone told us we couldn’t take on Garmin, but I think we’ve built something amazing. The standout feature is the mapping. On top of all your normal smartwatch stuff — health tracking, fitness tracking, texts — Bridger Watch has the best mapping capability of any wearable out there. You can save offline maps, send them straight to your watch, and pan around right on your wrist with a screen that’s genuinely impressive. And because we integrate directly with onX, you can share your waypoints, tracks, and markups right to the watch — so if your phone dies or you lose it in the field, you’ve always got a backup. We’re not trying to replace your phone maps. We’re trying to give you redundancy in a wearable you’ll actually use every single day of the year.

bridgerwatch.com

Maven Optics (Note: the ad copy for Maven wasn’t in the transcript I was given, so I’ve written this based on Maven’s general brand positioning — swap in the actual episode read if you have it.) Maven builds premium hunting optics — riflescopes, binoculars, and spotting scopes — and sells direct to the hunter instead of marking everything up through a retail middleman. That means you’re getting glass that goes toe-to-toe with the big legacy brands, at a price that actually makes sense, backed by their unconditional lifetime warranty.

mavenbuilt.com Use code TRO at checkout for a discount.

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Chapters

• 00:00 – Cold open: onX Hunt’s new Go Track “share your location” feature
• 01:00 – Sponsor: Bridger Watch
• 03:00 – Welcome Chris Piper, how they met and reconnected
• 05:15 – Chris’s original dream: Air Force pilot, shut down by asthma
• 08:30 – The street racing years — the helicopter chase story
• 12:30 – Becoming a dad at 21 and the custody fight that followed
• 17:00 – Choosing responsibility, insurance sales, and the climb into corporate America
• 21:00 – Director of Market Strategy at DriveTime and the biggest lesson from his 20s
• 25:30 – Chasing money vs. mastering a skill — building a “Swiss Army knife” career
• 30:00 – Generalist vs. specialist in the age of AI — why curiosity is the real edge
• 35:30 – Leaving corporate for Tucker Max, moving the family, and near-jail custody stress
• 41:00 – Joining Cody Sanchez at Contrarian Thinking, buying “boring” businesses
• 47:00 – Is buying small businesses real, or are you just buying yourself a job?
• 53:00 – The most successful (and surprising) small businesses to own
• 57:30 – Specialists vs. operators — why the best welder shouldn’t run the company
• 1:00:30 – What Chris wants his 40s, 50s, and 60s to look like — the forever ranch and an elk tag in every western state
• 1:04:00 – Losing a neighbor to a sudden brain tumor and why “someday” isn’t guaranteed
• 1:07:00 – Where the audacity to go get what you want actually comes from
• 1:08:30 – Wrap-up: Cliff Gray’s Elk Camp, patience in hunting vs. business, and where to find Chris

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Three Key Takeaways

1. Disappointment comes from unmet expectations, not from reality itself. Chris talks about resetting his expectations daily instead of holding himself (or his team, or his family) to a fixed standard 24/7. Some weeks call for going all-in on the business; other weeks, the win is just showing up as a present dad. Adjusting the bar to the moment isn’t lowering it — it’s being honest about what’s actually needed right now.
2. In the AI era, being a curious generalist beats being a narrow specialist. Chris didn’t get ahead by mastering one skill — he stacked social media, SEO, PPC, PR, and operations, then learned to move fluidly between marketing and ops. The real leverage now isn’t knowing one thing deeply; it’s having enough taste and curiosity to judge what AI (or anyone else) hands you and say, “that works” or “that’s BS.”
3. Buying a small business can absolutely change your life — but it’s still a job, just a different kind of hard. Chris saw thousands of people go through the acquisition process at Contrarian Thinking. Some genuinely built freedom and equity; others just bought themselves a demanding new job with their name on the door. The difference wasn’t the business model — it was whether the buyer had real operating leverage (sales, marketing, or ops chops) going in.

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Man, this one’s special. Doug Champion is back on the show for round two, and honestly, this is exactly why I love doing this podcast — you meet someone, you have a great conversation, and a year later you’re picking right back up like no time passed at all.

If you don’t know Doug, he’s the guy behind Champion Living, building the first real athlete development system for rodeo — fitness, nutrition, mental training, the whole thing — because for way too long rodeo has been behind the curve compared to sports like motocross when it comes to taking care of its athletes. His brother Richie Champion is a legend in bareback riding, nine-time NFR qualifier, and Doug just watched him ride his last horses ever at the Calgary Stampede. That story alone is worth the price of admission — chills, dude.

But this conversation goes so much deeper than rodeo. We get into the real stuff: what it actually costs to build a business that’s bigger than you, the guilt of missing time with your kids while you’re out chasing elk or building something for your family’s future, losing a dog that raised you into adulthood, and the discipline it takes to stop lying to yourself about why things keep going sideways.

We also get into hunting — my brutal 2024 season, tracking a bull nine miles after he got up and walked off, Doug’s buddy Travis and the giant mule deer that got away (and then didn’t), and why I’m changing my whole approach this year to actually see more animals instead of just walking more miles.

This is one of those episodes where we start talking about rodeo and end up talking about life. Grab your coffee, settle in, and let’s get after it.

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Sponsors

onX Hunt Big shoutout to onX for this episode. They just rolled out a new Share feature inside the Go Track section of the app — think old-school Garmin Rino “see your buddy on the map” tech, but done right for 2024. You and your hunting partner can now share your live location with each other right in the app (works when you’re in service, so keep that in mind). It’s a small feature but a genuinely useful one if you hunt with a crew. 👉 Check it out at onxmaps.com and use code TRO for a discount on your membership.

Bridger Watch This one’s personal — I’ve been building this thing for a long time and I’m proud of what it’s become. Bridger Watch is a smartwatch built specifically for hunters. It does everything a normal smartwatch does (health tracking, fitness, texts) but the mapping is where it separates itself — best-in-class offline maps on a wearable, and a direct integration with onX so you can send waypoints, tracks, and markups straight to your watch. Park your truck, drop a waypoint in onX, send it to your wrist — now if your phone dies or you lose it, you’ve still got your way back. It’s not trying to replace your phone maps, it’s the backup you didn’t know you needed. 👉 Go check it out at bridgerwatch.com

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Timestamps

• 00:00 – Sponsors: onX Hunt’s new Share feature & Bridger Watch’s smartwatch/onX integration
• 03:30 – Welcome back, Doug! Catching up a year later
• 05:00 – Doug’s all-in on hunting now — the struggle of finding time to scout with a growing business
• 10:00 – Burnout, growing a “lifestyle business” into a real company, and redefining what leveling up looks like
• 14:00 – The guilt of stepping away from the kids, and why the newborn years might actually be easier
• 18:00 – The 40th birthday Baldy lap story — missing fireworks, and what your kids actually see when you chase big goals
• 21:00 – What’s driving the business boom — investing in mentorship and the Alex Hormozi workshop
• 24:00 – Richie Champion’s final rodeo at the Calgary Stampede — the 90-point ride, the old horse, and an ending you couldn’t script
• 30:00 – Losing a 16-year-old dog, leaning into faith, and the journaling/affirmation practice that changed everything
• 36:00 – Business wins piling up — the Hooey collab, PBR partnership talks, and the new Montana State rodeo development program
• 39:00 – Why rodeo culture is behind other sports on fitness (and the motocross parallel)
• 44:00 – What actually separates great athletes at 22 — fearlessness, trainability, and coming to terms with risk
• 47:00 – Doug’s comeback from a broken back — seven years off, CrossFit, and the best ride of his life
• 50:00 – Cody’s rough 2024 season — a release malfunction, and tracking a bull nine miles after a bad shot
• 53:00 – 2024 plans: Utah spike hunt, general tags, Travis’s giant mule deer story, and using LandTrust to find new ground
• 56:00 – Closing thoughts on staying present, choosing positivity, and where to find the Champion Living x Hooey collab

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Three Key Takeaways

1. Discipline beats intensity, every time. Both Doug and Cody hammer the same point from two totally different worlds (rodeo and elk hunting): the guys who succeed aren’t the ones grinding 80 hours a week or hiking 20 miles a day — they’re the ones being methodical, controlling what they can control, and getting a little better every single day. Effort without direction just burns you out.
2. Presence is a practice, not a personality trait. Doug’s shift toward journaling, writing daily affirmations, and consciously catching negative thought patterns didn’t happen overnight — it took months before he noticed a real shift. The takeaway: rewiring how you show up for your business, your family, and yourself is trainable, even if it feels slow and unglamorous at first.
3. The guilt of chasing your goals doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. Whether it’s missing a birthday for a training run or being gone during hunting season, both guys wrestle with feeling like they’re stealing time from their families. But as Doug’s own kid showed him — sometimes what looks like absence to you looks like inspiration to them.

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Alright, so this one’s a good one, dude. I sat down with my buddy Reid Cross — former Army Green Beret, ODA commander, and now the author of Nation Fall — and we get into it. Reid’s got one of those paths you don’t see every day: went from being, in his own words, a full-blown 22-year-old alcoholic bombing around Chicago in outside sales, to walking into a recruiter’s office in a cheap suit and eventually commanding a Special Forces detachment. We talk about that whole transformation, what it actually takes to get selected, why he thinks the ODA is the best job in the entire military, and how that “figure it out with what you’ve got” mentality from the teams translates directly to being a better hunter.

Speaking of hunting — Reid tells the story of his first elk hunt out in Arizona, and it is an absolute heartbreaker. Bugling bulls everywhere on night one, a 320-class six-by-six at 71 yards on the last morning… and a homemade arrow fletching that picked the worst possible moment to fail. We talk trad bows, why some military dudes never touch archery, bowhunting versus rifle hunting out West, and the mindset shift you need to actually be good at either one.

We also get into his new book, Nation Fall — a novel that pulls straight from his time in some of the roughest corners of the world and asks the question: what would it actually take for something like that to happen here at home. Reid gets real about how he wrote it (three months, three to four hours of sleep a night, while working full time and still hunting season), his “burn the ships” mentality, and why he thinks more guys should just start writing instead of overthinking it.

Oh, and he’s about to be a dad — to twins. So we open with a little bit of that too. Buckle up.

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Sponsors

onX Hunt

This episode is brought to you by onX Hunt. If you remember the old Garmin Rino days where you could ping your buddy’s location on the map — onX basically reinvented that with their new share feature. Head into the app, go to the Go Track section, and hit Share Your Location With Friends, and you and your hunting partner can see each other on the map in real time. Only works when you’re in service, but for the hunts where you are, it’s a genuinely useful new tool.

👉 Check it out at onxmaps.com

🔭 Maven Optics

This episode is also brought to you by the good folks at Maven Optics — a direct-to-consumer optics company out of Wyoming that I’ve personally run for years. Binos, rangefinders, rifle scopes — Maven consistently delivers the best bang for your buck because you’re skipping the big-box-store markup that comes with most glass. Great optics, great people, great company.

👉 Shop Maven at mavenbuilt.com and use code TRO at checkout for a special gift.

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Timestamps

(Note: adjust final timestamps slightly once you drop this into your editing software — approximate placement based on segment flow for the ~65-minute runtime.)

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3 Key Takeaways

1. Persistence beats talent, in the mountains and everywhere else. Reid’s first elk hunt is a masterclass in things going wrong — six days of rain, a busted stalk, a fletching failure at the worst possible moment — but the real lesson is that the guys who succeed (in the military, in hunting, in business) aren’t the lucky ones. They’re the ones who keep absorbing failure and adjusting instead of quitting.
2. A rigid plan is a fragile plan. Whether it’s a Special Forces operation or a week-long elk hunt, the plan is never what actually happens. Reid’s take: plan hard anyway, because the planning process sharpens your ability to improvise when — not if — everything falls apart.
3. Identity crossroads happen more than once in life, and you get to choose which way you go. From leaving a directionless sales job to join the Army, to leaving active duty and finding a “void” that led him to write Nationfall, Reid’s story is a reminder that big life pivots (military transition, career changes, becoming a parent) come with a real risk of drifting — and the antidote is throwing yourself fully into the next thing instead of half-assing it.

Dude, this episode hit different. I sat down with Jacob Albaugh Tenet, founder of Tenet Products, and what started as a guy from Ohio racing four-wheelers turned into one of the wildest entrepreneurial grinds I’ve heard on this podcast — and that’s saying something.

Jacob was a national champion ATV racer before he ever picked up a rifle. Then he had a kid, watched his buddy crash at 45 mph, and walked away from racing cold. He poured that same obsessive, pro-level mentality into western hunting — and that’s where this story really takes off. After blowing out his eardrums on a mule deer at 32 yards, losing an animal off a cliff because he couldn’t spot his own shot, and surviving a blizzard SOS situation in Idaho that he says changed his life, Jacob became convinced there had to be a better way to hunt suppressed without sacrificing accuracy.

So he built one. In his garage. With a grinder and a welder.

Five years, 87 iterations, seven pending patents, and a lot of 20-hour days later, Tenet Products exists — suppressors that combine brake-level recoil control with real suppression, at weights (5.1–5.9 ounces) that sound made up until you see the data. We talk about the midnight idea that led to the patented Horizon Brake System, why he thinks outsiders solve problems industry veterans can’t, the torture testing that’s put over 1,400 rounds through a single can, and what happened when Tenet showed up to Joseph Ewing’s massive 145-suppressor shootout in Montana against every serious competitor in the space.

This one’s part origin story, part engineering deep-dive, part conversation about grit, faith, and what it actually takes to build something from scratch when nobody in the industry believes you. If you’ve ever thought about running suppressed in the backcountry, or you just love a good underdog build story — this is a must listen.

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This Episode Is Brought to You By:

onX Hunt

Remember the old Garmin Rino days when you could see your buddy’s location on the map out in the field? onX just brought that idea into the modern era — and made it way better. Head into the onX Hunt app, go to the new GoTrack section, and hit “Share Your Location” to see exactly where your hunting partner is on the map in real time. It only works while you’re in service, but for the hunts where it applies, it’s a total game-changer for staying coordinated with your crew.

 Check it out and get outfitted for your next hunt at onxmaps.com
Use code TRO for a discount at checkout

Bridger Watch

Full disclosure — this one’s mine. Bridger Watch is a full-feature smartwatch built by hunters, for hunters, made for the entire hunting lifestyle, not just the hunt itself. No compromise, no fluff. It handles your training, your mapping (the big one), your text messages, and it’s built with the kind of battery life that actually survives the backcountry — because we know battery life matters when you’re days deep with no outlet in sight.

 Learn more and grab yours at bridgerwatch.com

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Episode Chapters

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Three Key Takeaways

1. You don’t have to choose between quiet, light, and controllable anymore. For decades, suppressor design has forced a trade-off — get recoil control from a brake, or get hearing protection from a suppressor, but rarely both without adding serious weight. Tenet’s approach of engineering the suppressor itself (not just the brake) for shot control is what let them break that curve.
2. Passion-driven problem solving can outperform decades of industry expertise. Jacob had no suppressor background and no entrepreneurial ambition when he started — he was just trying to fix his own hunting setup. His point that someone solving their own problem out of obsession will often out-innovate someone doing it as a job is a great reminder for anyone building something in any industry.
3. Recoil management matters more than caliber size for accuracy in the field. The current trend toward smaller cartridges (6.5s, 6mm) exists because lower recoil equals better shot placement. Jacob’s insight — that you can get that same manageability out of a 7 PRC or 300 PRC with the right muzzle system — means hunters don’t have to give up knockdown power to get accuracy anymore.

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