Prep Comms - Mindset

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

  Join Caleb (K4CDN) in this episode as he delves into the essential mind renewal required for anyone navigating the realms of preparedness, especially in the context of our program focusing on communications. Don't miss out on our show sponsor at www.hubcitymercantile.com. References and Mentions: www.hamradio360.com www.prepcomms.com

welcome back into the preps comms podcast my name is kel nelson k4 cdn my gmrs ticket is wrbr 237 yeah i said it out loud and you can go raid my mailbox at the post office if you choose to. Anyway, don't let any of that scare you. There's some great opportunities for those who are interested in communications outside the norm. The norm being back in the 80s, it was a phone that hung in the kitchen with a cord on it that you could stretch probably to the dining room. Or maybe your sister had her own in her bedroom with a really long cord that she could lock you out of the room and talk with or whatnot. That was the norm back in the day. In 1988, I went to Radio Shack, got my first job out, you know, a high school job at Radio Shack in 1988. And the very first thing I purchased was

a cell phone. I was the only one that had one that I knew outside of my store manager at that time. And there's a great story. I'll go ahead and tell it. I was in, I guess this would have been like 11th grade, maybe. I had the phone in my car and I saw the principal, the associate principal coming towards me down the hall. They had a determined look. I knew who they were looking for.

It was me. And they stopped me in the hall and began questioning me about what they had heard, that I had a phone in my vehicle. And I'm like, I actually do. I have a phone in my truck. It's out there in the parking lot. And they asked if they could see it. I thought it was hilarious because here I am a kid in high school and the principal who's, you know, the arch rival, arch enemy of myself at that time wants to go look inside my 1983 Chevrolet Blazer to see a cell phone mounted in the center console. And sure enough, it was. It was there. Later that day, class is dismissed.

I came out to my car. There they were standing. They wanted to look inside my vehicle, see the phone. They actually used it to call the office and the lady in the office answered the phone and she was, it was just, you had to be there, but it was like, oh my goodness, I heard he had a phone in his car. It was the talk of the school, which is hilarious when you think about now, but you know, this is, this is 30 plus years ago. And that became the norm. Now it is incredibly the norm that we walk around with a communication device in our back pocket or in our hand, in our purse. Matter of fact, you might be one of those

Apple users that actually has your phone on your wrist. I still have a Casio there, but it's okay. No judgment zone here. That's the current modern day norm is to have unlimited communications at our fingertips whenever. So there is no, in regards to any type of communication you wish to have, there's no limits in this day and age. Everything is available. Everything is all but free, if you will. And there's no brick wall. There's no limit. There's no, you can't use the phone after 10 o'clock because it costs more, or there's no per text fee, or there's no, I mean, everything's unlimited now. And we have sadly gotten to the point, in my opinion, where we've kind of come complacent in that. We've forgotten a lot of kids, if you will, and I mean Gen Xers, Gen Z, Gen Y, even

Gen Xers like myself, we've forgotten having the phone hanging in the kitchen with the long cord on it that stretched to the dining room. We've forgotten those days. And now we're to the point where we have no idea how to do really anything without having our phone in our hand and utilizing it for everything that we do. Now, this is not a rant show against cell phones or anything like that. I mean, I've got them. My kids with driver's license have them. We use them for work. I mean, we're like everyone else in that regard. And here's the thing. You're listening to a podcast on your phone. So phones aren't bad. It's just how we as society have made them. Our number one is kind of not the greatest thing. And that's, that's a two-edged sword that the unlimited,

extremely powerful communication device in our pockets, that's the double-edged sword because there come times or there can come times or have been times in the very recent past where they just quit working, especially if you were an AT&T subscriber. And that made a lot of folks ask a lot of questions like, if I'm at work, how can I contact my wife if the cell phones quit working again? And the thing is, is that the companies have worked so hard to make their systems so redundant and robust that that happening is very infrequent. I mean, it almost never happens until it does, right? And because of that, it kind of lulls us into a sense of complacency that they'll always work, even in a thunderstorm, even after a bad

hurricane or whatever. But it doesn't take a tornado, it doesn't take a hurricane or a severe earthquake to cause your communication device, known as your phone, that you carry around all the time to quit working. There's a lot of different ways that that can happen. And this program is not the premise of what could happen. This is just kind of the reasoning behind why I'm here and why I'm, I'm taking the time to come chat with you guys. And you're spending time with me. Hopefully we're going to be able to exchange some information here and make it make sense for you. So, um, these phones, the, the unlimited computer access that we have is completely changed society. I can't say that it's

changed it for the best. Honestly, I'm not really satisfied with how it has affected even me, even me, a 50-year-old dude from South Carolina. I'm not real happy about how the unlimited communications and draw that that places upon you or me, how that's affected us as a society. So I'm going to leave that there and go on to the next point. That being is we as preppers, if you will, have already probably begun thinking down these lines. And if you're just kind of getting into this and that's what you're here for, you're looking for some answers, just go with me. Because preparedness is really a mindset more than it is anything else. I mean, before it is buying water filters, before it is buying freeze-dried food, before it is buying guns or ammo or radios or solar blankets or anything,

before prepping is any of that. Preparedness is a mindset. I picked this mindset up way back in the eighties as a, as a boy scout, a cub scout. And you know, the motto was be prepared. And I didn't necessarily think about that, but it really did kind of strike me. And it got way down deep inside of me to the point that I grew up with that mindset, not even really realizing it, but it stuck. So be prepared has been a mindset for me for years and at different levels, different ways, different thought processes, but in preparedness, it is a mindset first. And then it goes from mindset to planning, then from planning to purchasing and implementation.

So we'll talk about all of those things throughout this conversation, maybe not today, but in this broad conversation of prep comms. So you go back in time to 1988, 1989, somewhere in there. I was in high school. I had a cell phone. If you don't know this, the reason they called them a cell phone is because it only worked within side of a cell. Meaning that, let me just explain it this way. We had maps. Someone would come into our store and they would want a phone for their car. And we would say, great, where will you be using this phone? And they'll say, I'm using it on the West side of town. And then you get the map out and you see the town

and you're like, oh, well, we've got some service there. You see this big blue circle on the map? Your phone will work inside that circle. It may not work anywhere else until you get into another blue circle that you see over here on the east side of town. But in the middle, you may not have any service. Just drive faster.

Just kidding. And that was really how it was. The cells were tied to the towers and there was not a lot of meshing back then. And they were, the networks were so new and so fresh. That's where cell phones came from. And myself as a salesman back in those days, I found it kind of hilarious because people would want these things and they thought that they were going to have a house phone in their car. And it was really nothing like that at all. You could be driving along and the next thing you know, your call is gone and it doesn't just pick back up. You've got to go three or four miles in one direction or another to find another signal. And if it was a competitor, then you could roam, but that's going to cost you, you know,

a dollar and 50 cents a minute. So people are laughing because they remember paying by the minute. I know, I know it's a, it was very expensive back in the day, but that set us on a path where we were able to be contacted a lot easier. And it really did build a false sense of security in inside of us. I remember, um, not having a phone before, you know, working for Radio Shack, or my parents didn't have one for years, and they would get up in the morning and go to work, and they would be at work all day, and they'd come home. You never thought about talking to them in the middle of the day

unless you called the phone office or you called the bank, but there was never like, I wonder what my mom's doing right now. I think I'll send her a message. It was never anything like that. And now we're just so interconnected through communications. People really freak when you tell them they can't talk to somebody. And again, that's why we're putting this show together. That's why I've put the network together. I've started this program back up. Well, started this program, I guess, if you

will, not back up. I'm not going back to 360. I'm going to let it sit over there and just do what it does. But the thing about all of this is, is that there's a lot of alternatives out there for you. We're going to explore as many of those as we possibly can on a show by show basis. So don't get excited and think that this is going to be, you know, one stop, you listen to one program, you know, everything there is to know, because I don't know everything there is to know. And you're going to go out there and make all the best decisions and buy all this stuff that's going to make all of your communications problems go away. Because the reality in all of this is, is that there's going to be communications issues. Not every, not nothing has a direct

replacement, if you will. And even if it is a replacement, you're still, it may cost you more than you want to spend. It may take more time than you want to give it. There's a cost associated with everything. And I just want to, you know, come out and make that clear that as awesome as the alternatives are, there's really not a direct replacement for the cell phone, if you will, that you've gotten used to over the last 10 years. some ways to communicate with our loved ones, our families, our friends, our co-workers and whatnot that may not be necessarily cell phone related, but it'll be an alternative that if it's adopted in enough places and, you know, enough ways around the block, if you will, that there's some communication, some semblance of normalcy could be there. But even then, I think it goes back to a mindset. And we really, in my opinion, need to shift or, you know, kind of swap up our mindset to get away from thinking that we have to be so interconnected. And that's coming from a dad with five kids, almost four of them driving now.

And of course, you want to know where your kids are. And of course you expect to know what they're doing or you, you want to know where they are and if they're okay. And when they're on their way home, all these things that my parents never really thought about because we were just kids and we did what we did. We went to work after school and came home, but it's different now. We've done it to ourselves. We're addicted to this unlimited communications and it is not the greatest look for us, but here we are. So what do we do? And one of the things that we're going to talk about here in this program series is to kind of renew our minds to some extent, to get away from that dependency on these communication systems that have kind of

kind of log jammed us into complacency. They've log jammed us into laziness. They've log jammed us into a mindset and a thinking process that has really dumbed us down and distracted us to the point that we we're not thinking about alternatives because who needs an alternative when your primary works so well? So I'm going to go this time. Quick episode. Again, thank you for coming by here. Check us out at prepcoms.com.

Think about the mindset. Think about going through your day and how much time you focus on communicating with others through the device in your hand and then maybe the device on your desktop, because that's really where we're living right now. And I can't tell you that I have a great replacement for either of those, but I can tell you that we're going to talk about some alternatives that can give you some hope so you're not

fearful of one of those failing or not working, right? And I think that's really where we are. People are just so concerned that if something quits working, they can't do X. So we're going to talk about all sorts of things we can do as humanity to have some common sense solutions for the what ifs. And I think that's pretty much needed in my opinion. And that's why I've created this program. If you do have a water filter need, if you, if you're looking for a stainless steel water filter system for your countertop, please check out hubcitymercantile.com. Links in the show notes, links on the website. It's our company, mine and my wife's company. We've had a couple of years, we're an official than official, but it's an author. We are an authorized dealer for British

Birkfeld Barks and all the filter systems they sell. Would love to help you there if we could. Thank you for listening and hope you enjoy this program. Hope you're sharing it with your friends and letting people that you know who are interested in communications, give them an idea that we're doing this over here. Bring them in, share, like, all those things. Thank you guys so much. We'll see you next time. 73, y'all.