The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Calling All Preppers w/ Rick Austin

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.facebook.com/matteroffactspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/mofpodcastgroup/https://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/mofpodcasthttps://twitter.com/themofpodcastSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastPurchase American Insurgent by Phil Rabalais: https://amzn.to/2FvSLMLShop at MantisX: http://www.mantisx.com/ref?id=173*The views and opinions of guests do not reflect the opinions of Phil Rabalais, Andrew Bobo, or the Matter of Facts Podcast*The Godfather, Rick Austin, joins Phil and Nic to talk about layering comms, organizing your local preppers, and that annual ministry called Prepper Camp that is right on the horizon.Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices. Intro and Outro Music by Phil Rabalais All rights reserved, no commercial or non-commercial use without permission of creator prepper, prep, preparedness, prepared, emergency, survival, survive, self defense, 2nd amendment, 2a, gun rights, constitution, individual rights, train like you fight, firearms training, medical training, matter of facts podcast, mof podcast, reloading, handloading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, magazines, ar-15, ak-47, cz 75, cz, cz scorpion, bugout, bugout bag, get home bag, military, tactical 

Welcome back to the Matterfacts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. So, welcome back to Matter Effects Podcast. I swear to listeners that one of these days I'm going to revise that audio in the intro for this show, so that it actually notes that we have a second co-host, third hooligan, however we call Nick.

Hooligan works. But you know, it's on the to-do list someplace. But we're also joined by Rick Austin, who I affectionately call the godfather of prepping. And you haven't shrugged that title off yet. Like, I'm assuming you enjoy it or you at least tolerate it, because you haven't told me not to. No, I wear it with pride. It was like, oh yeah, yeah, because i do way more than gardening so it sure makes sense yeah well i mean you know rick for the audience that doesn't doesn't know who rick austin is like

um reality tv he's one time reality tv star author creator of prepper camp along with your wife survivor jane i mean like i feel like the two of y'all have really been like the gateway drug for a lot of people that have gotten into preparedness over the years because i feel like y'all were some of the y'all were some of the first people at least from what i saw that were you were trying to make preparedness more about the free exchange of information and educating people and less about come to the convention center so we can sell y'all stuff yeah we were um you know because we were on all these reality tv shows and doomsday preppers and that sort of stuff um promoters wanted us to be at their events in

these large convention centers where they'd have 5 000 people people and charge five bucks to get in. And it was a weekend type thing. And people would come to the show just because, oh, what's this prepping stuff all about? They weren't really there to buy anything, but we did realize that people were there to learn stuff. And, and, uh, that's kind of where Jane and I came in. And many of the speakers that were on that circuit at the time were, were guys that were just really trying to teach stuff. And we were there because we were a marketing draw for these promoters who weren't even preparedness people themselves. So we decided we'd like to do an event that we would want to attend

in a venue that's conducive to preparedness and trying stuff out and bushcraft and that sort of thing. And so that's how we came upon the idea of starting Prepper Camp. And we found this great campground in the Appalachian Mountains 12 years ago. And we're in our 11th year this year for Prepper Camp, which is kind of hard to believe because after the first one, I wasn't sure I wanted to do it again. It was, it was, there was a lot I didn't know that I didn't know, but,

but it worked. Well, I know that because I was thinking about this afternoon and Nick, you haven't made it to Prepper Camp because it's halfway across the country for you. That's true. But I, I want to say that's no excuse because we get people come from British Columbia and Washington State and Australia and New Zealand. I know for a fact. I was about to say, I was about to say, I know for a fact you're going to have an Australian there this year.

No, New Zealand, I think. Well, no, I know an Australian who's going to be there. I think one of the other patrons was saying he was going to try to make it. He's from New Zealand. Yeah. Yeah, I am going to try to get down there. I've been wanting to get down there I think one of the other patrons was saying he was going to try to make it. He's from New Zealand. Yeah. I am going to try to get down there. I've been wanting to get down there for a couple years. Unfortunately, it is one of the same weeks as a family

vacation that I usually go on with my grandfather. So sorry, man, Rick, you lose out to grandma. It's a family event. Yep. I mean, you could always bring grandma to a prepper camp i can try to convince him to give up some walleye fishing but that's a hard sell that is a hard sell uh comments coming in i'd like to do a version of prepper camp in the north i i've i've said before that like prepper camp

like anybody that wants to do something in the same vein as prepper camp like i would wholeheartedly celebrate i would just say to those people that like i think the most important things to capture from what rick and jane and like dozens upon dozens of volunteers whose names you all probably never heard, but they worked tirelessly to pull this event off. But the thing that I've always seen is that, like, it really is focused around the education. And not just that, but it's focused around bringing together like-minded people. Like, I've met people who listen to this podcast who live within an hour and a half of me who I've never met before. But, like, they recognize my face. They recognize my voice. They showed up at Prepper Camp.

They're like, dude, I live like an hour away from you, this and the other. And, you know, I've been in preparedness for all these years. So, you know, it's just this is the place where you can meet these people who are into the same stuff you are and even though they're not the same stuff they're into different stuff for a lot of the same reasons so like i i think that's the thing to capture from prepper camp is that you you're trying to bring together all this knowledge so it can be freely shared with the community because everyone has to be able to self-rescue or you can't help anybody else.

And it's amazing to me because I lived it for so long, but I had one woman come up to me from Seattle, Washington, and I asked where she was from. She said, from Seattle. I said, Seattle, what are you doing here? And she said, when I walked through those gates at Prepper Camp, I felt I had gone to heaven because I can't talk about what I feel and what I think in Seattle. And here I just felt free suddenly. And I just, I never thought that that was, um, I mean, that's just never crossed my mind that people would feel that way. It can be hard if you don't have a community around you. I mean, I'm,

I'm in Illinois, man. Uh, I'm a gun guy in Illinois. You know how that goes. Yeah. Well, I mean, even, even like for me living down here on the Gulf Coast where like things like survivalism and things like firearms are much more readily tolerable, I still find that like I find myself in a lot of the social groups that I'm kind of like sideways related to, mostly because my wife's more social than i am but i find that me being the crazy prepper winds up being almost like a sideshow attraction you know i'm saying like oh that's cool but like there's i'm not speaking to a near peer i'm not talking to somebody who's that interested in any of the things i know or i know how to do it's just oh that's a cool hobby and i'm'm like, yeah, I don't know that I would call this a hobby. Not when I have, you know, heavy

equipment shelves behind me and stacks of barrels and buckets in the garage. Like, this is, we're a little bit past the hobby stage here. But yeah, I mean, it's a great opportunity to meet your tribe and it's, the thing I tell people is, I go to,

I go to North Carolina every year to recharge, like just spend that three, four days with, you know, with listeners of the podcast, with patrons, with friends, with people that have become family at this point,

that three days is my recharge every year so that I can go home and, you know, deal with the fact that I'm kind of sitting on an island by myself afterwards. Which, incidentally, I know Rick is like, part of what you want to talk to about, talk about today, it was like, how do we not be that one prepper on an island by ourself? Because I know I've personally struggled with this. I have tried my best to like latch on to some of my neighbors and be like hey y'all really ought to think about doing some of this stuff and it just seemed to go in one ear

and out the other and like even after hurricane ida i had this experience and y'all forgive me for a moment but like i was i was on facebook marketplace about two weeks after hurricane ida and i was furious at the number of chainsaws and generators being sold. Because I was thinking to myself, I'm like, did y'all not just go through the same thing I did, where I had, you know, like, two trees, one tree laying on the house and two in the front yard, and we were on a generator for eight days straight?

Like, did we not have those same shared experiences? Why are you selling all this stuff? Put it in your shed for the next year. And I feel like I have attempted unsuccessfully to bring people into the fold that have no interest in preparedness. So maybe I've gone about this the wrong way, and you can try to give me some insight. Because like you said before, we're not going to lone wolf this by ourselves it's not going to work um okay i guess it's a segue where i can go into kind of what we did and um you know we we've laid low jane and i we in our local community we don't talk about who we are and their preparedness end of things, just because I don't want 50,000 people

showing up at my doorstep coming up my mountain when the shit hits the fan. So we haven't really made that. We've kind of got a totally different persona locally versus what people know about us worldwide who are in the preparedness sort of thing. But we look at where things are going. And my concern with 30,000 plus Chinese Communist Party, CCP, military age males who are coming over the border with the same kit, same backpack, same clothes, looking fresh and refreshed. Don't look like they've walked 3,000 miles to get here. And there's no females there. It's just all these Chinese nationals. And if you know anything about the Chinese Communist Party,

they don't let anybody leave without their permission. So they're here for a reason. And I think, you know, since the Chinese Communist Party has declared war on us years ago, and unconventional warfare, we're seeing all of that stuff happen right now. And it wouldn't take much for them to take out our power grid. And if I was the Chinese Communist Party and I wanted to take over the United States and my stated mission was to be the number one in the world and knock us off our pedestal and really take us down. I would take out the power grid because the DOD war game this years ago, if we had an EMP and we had a nationwide power grid go down and it was a long-term thing. In, in two months, 80% of the population will be dead by not having resources because they aren't prepared because they end up killing each other because their son's hungry and

they're not going to look at his son's eyes and suddenly good people become bad people. And, you know, you saw what happened to Hurricane Katrina. You know, it became just chaos in a matter of hours. So I see that kind of thing coming. And I know that maybe there's nothing I can do to stop what's happening in Washington, D.C. or nationwide. But at least I can do something in my neighborhood, precinct, county. I might be able to take some control there. And so we looked at, really just kind of took a GIS tax map of the people around us and started putting Xs, red X's on the people that we knew we couldn't trust and green X's on people that might be. And we looked at their voting records

to see if they were like-minded. And we started reaching out to a few people here and there and saying, hey, you know what's going on. And our county is 600 square miles. And at any one time, our sheriff's department has only seven deputies out there. And it's not 700, it's not 600 square miles that's flatland. It's 600 square miles. It goes up, down, sideways, up, you know, around hills, around mountains. So at best, there's a 15-minute response time from these guys. So we started approaching people and saying, hey, why don't we set up a neighborhood watch so we can see what's going on? And that's kind of innocuous. It's supposed to, hey, let's start being preppers.

It's just a neighborhood watch. Um, you know, there's been a lot of meth heads that are going into the rural areas because they got cars and they're much easier targets than trying to knock over a convenience store. So, you know, there've been a lot of home invasions and that kind of stuff. So we're, we're getting people to go, Oh yeah, you know, that makes sense. So now we, well, how are we going to communicate with each other? Well, you know, what we could do is we could get on this, this signal app and it's end to end encrypted and we can create little groups and it's much, much more versatile than just doing a text message chain. And so when somebody sees something, they can say something to the group and we can all share that. And we had about 15 people in our immediate area. And selfishly, I'm looking at the more I can expand my view out from where we are, the more we can deal with a potential problem when it's not on my property and out there. So we can respond to it out there. The further away we can deal with it out there the further away they can we can we can deal with it the better off we are so um and time and distance is a huge yeah and seeing what's coming so so you know we started with just kind of this neighborhood watch and um when we after

we started within i think three weeks we had already alerted everybody in the area. Now, our neighborhood is rural, so it's not a neighborhood in a traditional sense. It's not suburban whatsoever. So lots of land, lots of people. And these people generally don't really want to know other people. So that's what was interesting to me. They're kind of looking at it like, well, you know, maybe if we band together, we might be able to protect each other or at least alert each other to what's coming earlier so I can get ready for it. cans in somebody's yard that wasn't supposed to be there, to a home invasion just down the road, to a forest fire that was headed our way, and to a tornado warning. And that was kind of proof to

everybody that, hey, maybe this is a good idea. So we expanded that out a little bit and actually worked with one of our mayors here in the county. And we approached a sheriff who is very like minded to come to find out, listens to a lot of prepping stuff. And we talked about, you know, how can we help? What can we do? And he's he understands full well that at any one time, at the most, he's got seven deputies. So he can see some stuff coming too. So he is fully in support of what we were doing. And so we started talking about comms with him and what we can do. And we eventually expanded it out to our local precinct area, our little township area, and enlisted more people. And now we've got something that's countywide, and we've moved from just being kind of a county operation to being officially a CERT, a community emergency response team, and doing the training that goes with it. So we're teaching people stuff that they can use just for their own families if they need to,

like comms and stop the bleed trauma type stuff so that people can take care of problems there and they can be their own first responder. And they feel now like they're part of a group of people who can now have their back when they need to. And because we've got medics that are part of our group, we've told people, hey, just give us a call. Let us know what's going on. If you need help, we're going to be there faster than an ambulance can be, and then we'll let them take over. So you started off, just to kind of recap all this for the audience,

you started off by doing what, oh, Jesus, Mike Shelbywood, commonly called an area study. You looked at your surrounding area, you figured out who was in your surrounding area, and what they were about. And then you started organizing, basically it amounts to a very large diversified mag, and then you added

human, or human intelligence into your area study, because now every single person in that mag that's reporting to the whole group what's going on around them becomes an ad hoc exactly and they and they have found and they go well i know this guy who who flies these drone helicopters and he's interested he's you know he's cool like we are so let's bring him into the group. Having some aerial assets that can see what's happening even further out is even a better thing. Especially someone with a lot of experience.

Exactly. Those things are not – you're not going to pick it up in five minutes. Well, but I guess that's's the benefit though of like bringing in like-minded people and then they bring in more like-minded people is that what you're doing is you're you're you're connecting skill sets because you know like i learned i learned this dipping my toe into the comms world and nick and i were talking about hyper fixation earlier like if you had that personality where when you get interested in something you learn everything about it in the first 72 hours like that's that's a great asset but most people don't have the attention span to master something that fast or master that many different disciplines

so what you do is you say hey I know how to grow food yeah that's freaking important but you may not know everything about comms you may not know everything about comms you may not know everything about intelligence gathering you may not know everything about any one subject but if you grab people and bring them into your orbit now you can all cross share those skills so now the whole group benefits from having a whole bunch of subject matter and they've already seen the benefit of it instead of yeah exactly yeah yeah instead. Instead of basically relying on what my family does a lot of time where I want to be in the subject matter expert for a lot of things. So if something happens to me, there's going to be a lot of knowledge that can leak it real fast. Do you not have a book put together, Phil, for the basic how-tos on how to utilize that stuff?

Basic? Sure. How basic do you think you can make all the stuff I know about? Well, no, I'm not talking about comms necessarily. Well, yeah, sure, comms. Let's just take it from a very basic level. How to hook the jackery up to various things. How to hook your generator up.

How to turn on and set the radios to whatever channel you need. Because you've got the radios all pre-programmed, right? Yep. Okay. And every radio in this house is programmed exactly the same. So it should be pretty easy to write a fairly basic, say, five or six bullet point summary of here's how you power the radios if the grid's down.

Here's how you turn the radio on. Here's how you set to whatever channel you need. Here's how you change the channel if you need to yeah kind of thing you know you could get you can get shockingly basic and have a pretty good say just hand it to your teenage daughter and she'll be able to at the very least be able to pick up the radio and use it at a bare functional level yeah she's not going to be able to program new frequencies into it with chirp, but she doesn't really need to. No, I mean, that's a good point. I think a lot of times, and I'm happy to take my lumps,

I think a lot of times I fall into the classic trap that a lot of people in the preparedness world do where they are either the only prepper in the family or they're just the primary one and most of us in this lifestyle have this mentality of it's not getting done i'm going to take care of it like rather than rather than sub that workout to somebody else i'm just going to get it done and i fall into that worse than almost anybody i would say and that if i see a hole I'm going to fill the hole but sometimes what I forget is to to go deal with the other two people that are in my

group by default and be like hey guys y'all need to know that this hole is plugged and what was used to plug well that that kind of leads but I mean even even my wife has admitted that is that like the hard part about the hard part about this family's preparedness lifestyle sometimes is the fact that, like, she happily admits that she relies on me to do a lot of things, things that she doesn't want to do. Like, when we go out, I am always carrying a firearm, period, end discussion. She doesn't. She's not comfortable carrying a firearm. She's hell on wheels with a deer rifle.

I have no doubt she could put a bolt between your eyes at 100 yards or better. Not worried about her ability to shoot. But the idea of carrying a gun on her person every day just makes her nervous. Not for everyone. And it's not. And she relies on me for that. But she's even flatly admitted there have been situations where I couldn't be there with her. And she's kicked herself and said, God, I wish I could get over this so I could do this um back to the comms thing with what you were talking about earlier phil um you know we

we went from signal to figuring out how we could use gmrs radios and and most of the people in our group um their eyes glaze over when you start talking about channels and you talk about the different frequencies and it's just like, okay, you, you have to dumb it down for them and you have to make it easier for them. And you guys know chin, right? Chin Gibson. Yeah. So he's kind of like a comms guy. And I told him, look, you know, we've got to dumb this down for people. So he, he came up and he did all the programming for these TID radios that are GMRS and ham and basically can listen to everything. So he did programming for all that. And the beauty of these particular radios is you can, you can have one that's programmed and make that the master and then turn the other ones on and set a couple settings, and they become slaves, and suddenly they copy over all the channels.

So now we've got a list of channels and give them a piece of paper and say, here's the ones we're going to talk on when we need to use it. So all you have to do is turn it on and push the button and let it off so you can listen to people. So we've really kind of dumbed it down so that, because all I want to do is this is a device that has a purpose. I have a problem. I need to be able to use it as a solution. I don't need to know how the channels work. I don't need to know what's the difference between FRS and GMRS and MERS and all that stuff. I don't need to know

the difference between FRS and GMRS and MERS and all that stuff. I don't need to know. Just tell me what channel to turn it on to. I can push 03. I can do that, and then I can talk to somebody if I have a problem. Rick, do you know what radio that is? I'd be curious to look into that myself. It's either the H3 or the H8.

I can give you guys a link later. I don't remember off the top of my head, but it's amazingly easy to program, and it's like $65 for two of them. I would venture it's the Tid Radio H3. I think it is the H3. It is the H3, yep. Exactly. Probably the ham version, though,

because they don't distinguish the model number between ham and GMRS, and the GMRS ones are locked down from that. Yeah, it looks like the ham radio ones are about $7 to $10. And you can select all to have all. So you can do that, and even though you're not supposed to be using a ham radio if you're using gmrs um you know it's there so you can listen to what's going on if you don't have a ham license um and of course in the shit hits the fan scenario all bets are off anyway um but uh but the thing you mentioned rick is the same thing it's the

same response i've gotten from some of our listeners when they when i talk about off-grid comms and they're like phil i don't care how you build nintendo i just want to know how to talk to my wife a mile and a half down the road you know it's it's like it's like you don't have to know how to assemble an engine to drive a car and i car. And I think that's what a lot of these subjects, like when you get really, really involved in them and realize how complicated they are, I think sometimes we forget that not everyone is going to be the expert at that subject. And we do have to – I don't like the term dumb it down, but we have to simplify it so that it's a tool, not a doctorate to be pursued. I mean, like you said, you don't need to know everything under the sun

about radios in order to be able to use one. Like that's, personally that's what kind of corralled me into GMRS when I looked at ham versus GMRS is because I'm content to take the time to learn how ham radio works and get a license if I decide to.

My wife and daughter are not going to do that. So I need it in GMRS because it's channelized. Because it is more constrained, it is so much simpler for the layperson that just needs a tool in the toolbox. And that's why I've started kind of leaning on people about, hey, if you want to get a ham license, get a ham license. But get a GMRS license, too, because that license covers you and your entire media family. And I can teach my 12-year-old how to use GMRS radio in 30 seconds. Without having to, like, you's just it simplifies things to me if i'm gonna if i'm gonna say what's the use of gmrs it's because i have a very small group of people that i need comms with

and if i need to reach outside a small area then i might be in the realm where i need to be fooling around with ham radio although the thing you brought about having something as simple as a signal chat is something i've always also point out to people because i tell everybody i'm like you know as it is we all have a long-range communication device sitting in our pocket it's called a cell phone there's no reason not to use these things as long as they work because they work yeah fairly reliably well and two you know even if you don't have cell coverage say the cell towers are down locally a lot of times the the internet lines and the old phone lines that it runs over, at least out by me and the boonies, they're buried. They tend to be a little more resilient than the power infrastructure and the cell towers.

Now, granted, a lot of the cell towers around here, because we're out in the boonies, do have backup generators on them. But I think they're only good for like 8 to 16 hours without refueling. I don't know about... So there was a particular day, and I don't remember what the issue was, but we had an issue in this local area where AT&T's cell circuit

started acting up one day. You couldn't make a phone call. Like, if you tried, it would dead-end you, and if you tried to text, it would just sit there and spin and spin and spin. It wouldn't go anywhere. And yet, because my wife and I both have Signal, and she has Wi-Fi at her workplace, and I have Wi-Fi here, I was able to just shoot her a message through Signal and be like, hey, phone lines are down. Hit me on Signal if you need anything.

Just keep in touch. And if you don't want to use Signal, Snapchat, believe it or not, fantastic for that. Yeah. But I guess that's the joy, that's the benefit of having a layer of comms plan where it's like,

we have this, this, this, this, and this, and this. If all five of these things don't work, then we have a whole different set of problems to deal with right now. But the odds that a mesh network's not going to work and a GMR's radio isn't going to work and your cell phones are going to go down and the Internet's going to go down and a landline phone goes down. When all of those things go down at the same time, there are probably aliens landing on the White House front stage right now. Probably did a long time ago. I'm convinced that there are lizard people in Congress

right now, and no one's going to convince me otherwise, but I digress. That would explain a couple things. It would definitely explain some of the loose skin and the crazy looks oh that's just the elderly now what's the average age of congress 63 now oh i thought it's closer to 80 nick if you start me down this road i'm gonna get people mad at me um so we you know we said okay we're anticipating a really bad if we're anticipating

a bad situation and we need to be able to communicate um and let's say we don't want to be doing it over gmrs which can be triangulated and people can hear what you're saying um what else can we do and so let's say the cell towers are down and let's say there's there's the grid is down completely um and so we ended up with um setting up a mesh tastic network um which is basically these little these little radios let me see if you can see this these little radios and this bluetooth to your phone which you use all the time and you you can send text messages. You do everything that we're doing on Signal. So we can set up groups in different groups for different places. We can set up a master group for everybody. And every one of these little radios is also a repeater. So it's encrypted end to end. You're sending something through maybe through 20 of

these other things and you're sending it to an individual person. The people that you are going through as a repeater never know that that message went through. Only the person that you specifically or the group that you specifically targeted gets that message. And one of the other great things about it, in fact, besides texting people, is that even when your phone doesn't work because there's no cell service anymore, you can see where all of your people are on a map. So you can see who's moving, who's whatever. And one of the great things about this for Jane and myself and anybody else on the mountain that's, that's working, if we got 55 acres and, um, I don't respond and there's something wrong and I've got this

little radio in my phone with me, um, they can find where I am. Let's say I cut myself and you know, I'm bleeding out. So, I'm bleeding out. The more of these things we can get out there, the better. That makes more nodes, more repeaters. When we told the sheriff about this, he said, well, how much are those? He said, my guys, my deputies ought to be using that. I said, it's 65 bucks, 65 bucks for this little radio. And they're carrying around their cell phones anyway. So, um, that's a standalone kit like that. You just buy that little thing,

box there, buy this little thing. In fact, I'll be talking about it at prepper camp Saturday night, telling people they need to be on this mesh, mesh tastic thing. So is there, what is the model of that little device you have there? If you go to MuziWorks, that's M-U-Z-I dot works W-O-R-K-S

that is a website and it's a guy that we have been working with now and he's made probably a hundred radios for us already. He turns it around quickly. That one, I'm guessing, looks like the H1. If you're a

techie nerd and you want to put your own together, you can do that. You can buy the boxes and you can buy the little Lora radios and do all that kind of stuff. Again, I'm dealing with people that just want to, hey, I don't even know how to set this up

and set up the groups and that sort of stuff. So we do it for them. We set up the groups for them. So it could be a local group for their own little neighborhood watch, and it could be part of a master group that we're doing for the entire county and now everybody can talk to each other from far out and and these little things you can put in a box um in a waterproof box and you can put a little solar

panel up on an antenna and this thing will stay charged all the time. And the sheriff actually has a huge tower that he uses for all his comms. And he said, I'm just going to put one of these damn things up there. And I'll use the long antenna or longer antenna. And I'll be able to talk to everybody throughout the county. Yeah, I have a small little, it's like a rural subdivision with about 20 homes within about half a mile of us. Most of my neighbors are elderly, 65 plus. There's a few younger couples that are moving in with kids now as the older couples age out and move into retirement communities. This is a fantastic solution for that because we had an ice storm a couple of years ago where our

neighborhood lost power for almost a week and it was cell service was kind of spotty um it did go down for a day but it was up after that and it was very hard and kind of unsafe because of how many downed power lines there were to go knock door to door and find out what elderly neighbors had a gen set and which ones didn't. This would be phenomenal because if it's a plug and play solution that they can just tap a Bluetooth on their phone, they already do that for their car. Yeah. To add a curiosity, what's what is roughly the range from one of those mesh tech testing nodes to

another? Cause I was googling while y'all were talking and I see this thing operates at about 900 megahertz. Which makes it almost impossible to find because it's basically at the same same megahertz as all the smart devices in

people's homes and that sort of stuff. So it's like a needle in a haystack if someone's trying to find you because everything runs off of that. I was going to say like cordless phones for those of us who still have not a cell phone but a cordless phone in the house. They all operate on 900 megahertz. I mean most things do. It's about –

It is one of the most congested radio bands in a neighborhood in the United States of America. Like there is, there's no shortage of stuff. If you were to look at this on a waterfall, like a radio nerd, there's no shortage of things blasting RF around. Which makes it fantastic if you're trying to be hidden. And, you know, if one, if one node goes down, somebody in your group goes down and they get captured or whatever it is, whatever that scenario is, you can still bounce around through other nodes to get to somebody else that you're talking to or your group. So it's really a beautiful system. And the real testament to this thing is almost the entire city of austin texas if you can believe

it is hooked up somebody some multi-billionaire said i want these things out everywhere and they they've hooked it up and done proof of concept for a whole for a whole city um where people have these things so again you know it's 60 Looks like line of sight is 10 miles with these. And, of course, depends on your terrain, you know, that sort of stuff. Absolutely. Your mountains are going to be in the way. Tall structures are going to be in the way. Hill, valley.

But, yeah. I've got one of these on my truck. Although, like you said, because every… I carry one in my pocket. So, that's, you know, the one in my truck is going to be able to be a repeater for, to get me if I'm inside Walmart or whatever, I've got one in the attic of my house. So that's at a higher point. So, you know, you've got an opportunity to, you know, bounce off a lot of people and, and see what's going on. So.

I've got a big, big antenna in my backyard. I'm going to be turning into a ground plane ham antenna. So I could mount one up there. That'd be pretty great. I'd be, I'd end up being like, I think it's 40 feet above the highest top in my area. So 40, 40 feet.

If I remember right from doing line of sight math recently, 40 feet of antenna height is supposed to be like eight miles reach yeah that's that's eight miles if i'm not already on a 250 foot ridge yeah that's assuming that's assuming like you know the earth had the earth has nothing on it it's just curvature and flat yeah so actually my above the general elevation it'll be like 190 feet i will tell you that um there's there is an open channel on the meshtastic thing so it's it's the long fast channel and everybody can use that channel and um we got we got a plane going over and um we got a message on all of our mash tastic saying hello down there and I'm going what the hell the hell is that plane what you know how does he know

we're down here and chin looked it up the guy was 536 miles away and three of 3,500 feet up. So I'm like, holy crap. Height is height. Fantastic. I actually saw some guys who were experimenting with a Baofeng, just a UV5R ham radio, hooked up to an

Origin Data Systems SR1 Simplex repeater, which just... You hook it up to a radio, and i've actually got one running in my pack but it just takes takes in a message and then parrots it back out that's how that's how it works well they put one of these things in a waterproof case hooked it up to a drone and then put it up in the air as high as it would go and start doing range testing on it and i was i was impressed at the incredibly nerdy display I was seeing. Cause like, I mean,

I don't know how long you keep a drone up in the air while it's hauling a payload like that. But I, I did think to myself, I'm like, well, let's take, let's take this out of the concept of a drone and let's stick it.

Yeah. Well, but yeah, but I guess what I'm saying is like, you could put one in a frigging little bitty weather balloon and then tether it to the ground. We've talked to the sheriff about doing that very thing so that he can reach the entire county as long as it's over the highest mountain. Yeah, because this is like three ounces what I'm seeing here with batteries, three ounces.

That's nothing. The GoPros weigh two or three times that, and they mount those things on drones and fly them for hours. weigh three times two or three times that and they mount those things on drones and fly them for hours yeah well and conversely if you wanted to do something like this with like with like gmrs i mean even a light even a lightweight radio is going to weigh a pound and a half yeah absolutely i'm going to drop that that web page in the comments for everybody Good. Comments for everybody. If you use PrepperCam 2024, I think they get a discount too.

Nice. Very cool. Yeah, this is rapidly moving to the top of my to-do list. One thing at a time, guys. And you can, if you have a series of channels that you want to use, it actually has a QR code for those channels. The other person just needs to take a picture of it on their phone, and suddenly all those channels, they've got it. So if you're talking about older people, having them program that, that's never going to happen. So if you can do that for them.

No, but I can program it five minutes that way. And so, yeah. Okay. So your layered comms plan is, you know, like basically cell phone signal groups, chats. Right. GMRS. Exactly. Meshtastic.

Interesting. And I love that you've gotten the support of your local sheriff. Like, I wish I had a good, warm, fuzzy feeling that I might be able to pull up that hat trick in the suburbs where I live. but it sounds to me as though you've stumbled upon or directly targeted a way to bring together a pretty decent cross-section of your local community into basically what amounts to a big old, I don't even know if I would say a mag. Like, I don't know, and I don't know if you know

what the technical capabilities of these people are, but the simple fact that y can that y'all are all in communication and sharing information that by itself is a huge step forward i mean that at least that at least lets you know what's coming up on the horizon and i'm hopeful that as they're able to reap the benefits of knowing other people who can help them out in an emergency. Maybe it tilts them towards, maybe I should do this myself next time. Now realize that where they have spent years here in the rural community that we're in, not knowing people and not necessarily wanting to know people, now there are people that they can reach out to that they've been communicating with

regularly on signal um so there's that habit is started already and there's an issue or a problem or somebody sees something suddenly everybody knows about it and they see the value in that and and now there's some camaraderie that would never have been there before. So when the shit really does hit the fan, there's a lot more people they feel like they can rely on. And to be totally honest with you, there's a lot fewer people that I feel I have to shoot to protect my family. Well, that's always nice. Well, you know, it definitely beats the old strategy of taking your dogs for a walk and your dog and accidentally let them run loose to meet your neighbors yeah well and and you know we we in the preparedness world say kind of tongue-in-cheek but we kind of mean it like

the more prepared people the fewer people i have to shoot even though it's a little dark well the less people you have to rescue true at it's a little dark. The less people you have to rescue at the very least. And this is the thing that I latched onto during Hurricane Ida was because during Ida, and Ida was not

like world ending EMP power grid down forever. It wasn't that. But it was a Cat 4 hurricane that wiped out five zip codes. It's a bad month is what it is. Punted the power grid down forever. It wasn't that, but it was a cat four hurricane that wiped out five zip codes. Punted, punted the power grid around here for eight days and dropped a pine tree on the, uh,

the, the water storage tank that services this entire subdivision. So we woke up the next morning with no power, no, no water pressure and living like it was a little house on the prairie. Now, what my family did was we grabbed the Jackery and the solar panels, and we'd used it to run a box fan just so my wife and daughter could keep cool that night. It was the end of August.

It was screaming hot around here. But I was blowing a box fan over the two of them to keep them cool that night. The next morning, I brought all the solar panels out in the front yard and started recharging that, put up a pop-up tent out of our camping gear to keep the sun off of them to keep them cool that night the next morning i brought all the solar panels out the front yard and start recharging that put up a pop-up tent out of our camping gear to keep the sun off of them pulled water bottles out of the stash started cooking like we just set up camp here at the rabbley house and we we really didn't there was other than the trees on the house which was a serious problem that had to be dealt with with chainsaws and help, we didn't have any immediate concern for our well-being. Our immediate needs were being

met. Even to the point where we had a 35-gallon trash can tapped into one of the doubt spouts on the house, so we had 35 gallons of non-potable water to give ourselves bucket showers with. We were fine, but our neighbors were screwed.

So my wife, out of the goodness of her heart, was walking around the neighborhood checking on people and even some people we didn't know and found one old couple had literally no water in their house, found a woman that we know very well who had

six little 12-ounce water bottles and a couple bags of chips to rename and here we were like okay we legitimately have enough stuff to take care of others so let's do that and i think that's like that's the lesson i came out of hurricane ida with was you know there is an emergency bad enough where i'm going to tell my neighbors you're screwed because it's every man for himself at a certain point but if we're not at that point i know we're going to be rescuing a lot of people because we have a heart and we can't just sit here and watch neighbors that we know just do without because we're just too stubborn too proud not to help but like that was a lesson i came away with

was whether you want to be the rescue or not you might end up being the rescue at a certain point just like a car accident you might be the only one there well I mean how many times have I told that story about

I've pulled a handgun on one person since I got out of the army in anger one I have been on I've been the firstgun on one person since I got out of the army in anger. One. I have been on, I've been the first on scene at four different car accidents in 20 years. Four times, no ambulance,

no police, no one on site. I either watched the accident happen or I just pulled up on it. There's a smoking car on the side of the road. I'm like, Oh Christ. That's, that's the thing about living out in the boonies where I do. Chances are at 4.30 in the morning when I'm driving to work,

it's me and two other cars on the road. And then you find out really, really fast who's ready to deal with an emergency and who isn't because... Most of them blow right past. I will say that there was one time I saw an accident happen as I was on my way home from work and when I parked

and like you know jumped out of the truck and went running to the vehicle I got to the vehicle at the same time I want to say an off duty paramedic and an off duty nurse all three of us showed up but I was the only one that had the presence of mind

to snatch my eye fac off the roof of my truck as I ran out the door. So, fortunately, the person wasn't hurt. They got banged around by the airbag and everything else, but if they needed a tourniquet or anything, I was the only one that had care. Yeah. Thankfully, I had

a nurse and a paramedic to be like, here's my bag of toys y'all are the experts have fun i'll buy new ones yeah we had uh we had one of our cert members our community emergency response team members she came up on an accident and so the guy in the car was really bad off and it was it was a really bad accident. And he was bleeding and just looked terrible. And she's trying to keep him calm, trying to relax, you know, get him to relax and, you know, waiting for the, quote, professionals to show up. And some lady pulls up behind her and she comes over and she sees the condition of this guy and she starts screaming. Oh, it's so awful oh i'm like screaming

and she had to actually pull the woman away and say you need to get away from here you know i'm trying to keep this guy calm and you're making it worse so yeah that is not helpful at all. No. Spectators are not welcome in emergency situations. You can either help or you can go sit over there away from me. You know, there's one thing that I have learned from my buddy who is a nurse is that if someone is in critical condition, the last thing you ever do is tell them how bad off they are. Tell it to their family. Tell it to the professionals. You do not tell them how bad it is

because half the time, people die because they gave up. Exactly. It's just kind of like the story of why little kids can be walking around with a finger stamped sideways or an arm hanging out of a socket and have no freaking clue because they haven't seen it yet.

They don't know how bad it is, so it doesn't hurt. We'll be having a class on that in Prepper Camp about mindset. The greatest survival tool you have is a positive mindset. And yet the hardest thing to teach,

like before Nick joined us on this show, Andrew and I a couple of times over the years have tried to unpack that subject of how do you teach that survival mindset? I keep coming up blank because I don't know how. I had it beat into me

by the Department of Defense. You're not allowed to quit. You're not allowed to give up. You're going to, you're going to get through this one where they still have a mission to accomplish. But I don't know short of beating the crap out of somebody for 10 weeks. I think, I think hearing stories, stories about people who most people would have given up, but they didn't. And they just, they, they ended up lasting long enough until somebody could find them and help them. And you got to want to live.

You can't give up. I think a lot of it comes down to, though, is teaching a person just basic skills to build the confidence in themselves. Because, yeah, you can take in eight weeks and throw somebody through boot camp. Absolutely. That's the expensive way to do it, and you can only do that with willing participants. But you can definitely take your kids and teach them some basic life skills and some basic problem-solving skills and then let them apply them in non-life-threatening situations. And then throughout their life, they'll be like, yeah, I don't really know what I'm doing,

but I've got enough basics that I can probably at least, it's not going to end catastrophically badly until I can get to somebody that can help. You know? Like, yeah, the kid might only know how to change a tire. They don't know how to put a jack stand under a car that, that the, has had a total blowout, but they might be able to muddle through it.

No, you might be on some there that confidence sometimes can give way to that. I have the confidence and I have confidence in what I'm doing. Therefore, I'm not prepared to give up yet. Or at the very least you have confidence in the fact that you've gotten out of other situations before on your own or at least you've persevered through a difficult situation before yeah and i've also had the experience i've also had this experience which to me like very clearly very clearly identified that like society

as a whole is very much bifurcated into two groups. But several years ago, I was actually parked in line waiting at a security checkpoint to get into work. We have to go through a gate guard and all that. And while I'm sitting there in the oncoming turn lane, come to find out it was one of my coworkers that I didn't realize at first, but she went to make a turn across traffic and apparently didn't see the 18-wheeler that was coming down the road and hit her, like clipped the back of the car. He kind of skittered on down the road.

She spun around and wound up in a ditch. Now, I don't yet realize this is a co-worker that I've known for like four or five years at this point. I don't know that yet. I'm just, I saw a car get hit by an 18-wheeler go into the ditch. So I yanked my emergency brake, turned the car off, bolt across the street down into the ditch, and I'm there with, by the time it takes me to do all this, I'm down there with four other guys who are all like trying to, you know, like yank the door

open, cut the airbag, get her out because she's literally in a ditch. And none of us even stopped, like none of us coordinated with each other, none of us said a word to each other. We literally were all just focused on the immediate problem of there's a person in a ditch,

we need to make sure she's okay we need to get her out of this car that's in this ditch so we can assess her and know she needs medical attention and it wasn't until we got her out of the vehicle up the bank of the ditch and on the side of the road that i looked at her face and i said holy christ and i that's when i realized it was my co-worker who works who sits 15 feet away from me that I'd known for years. But I look back on that moment, and I think about the fact that here's me and four guys in this ditch. None of us knew each other. And I look back, and there's that line of cars still waiting in line for the security checkpoint,

driving around my car that's parked in that lane because I jumped out, just going on with their lives. Nobody stopped. Nobody stopped to help. Everybody said, oh, they got it. And a lot of people are told, don't do that. Don't stop to help. Wait for the professionals.

And that's a problem, I think. First off, that can really be a problem because what are you telling kids in elementary school? Raise your hand and wait for the teacher. Don't solve the problem on your own. Yeah, and that accomplishes nothing but breed an entire race of people who are just spring-loaded to wait for the expert class to show up and fix the problem. Do you think that's accidental? It's not.

Of course it's intentional. The Germans figured it out prior to World War I. And everybody in the Western Hemisphere uses their education model. It was done to create good little subservient citizens. Everybody that is under 35 really those people just don't have critical thinking skills they just don't it's not everywhere well it's not it

definitely depends on how well they grew up for sure because we've definitely had a couple interns and they are rare come through that you set them to a task and if you don't watch them, they're going to do the wrong thing because at least they're going to do something. But yeah, I mean that's that whole conversation about like people just sitting around waiting for somebody to save them or waiting for somebody to save somebody else just always makes me the craziest because

again, I came into this lifestyle preparedness from the perspective of like you know the day after hurricane katrina there were only a couple of police around and they had a whole lot of problems to deal with and like i was in the louisiana national guard at the time and we were well briefed that if you get into a gunfight anywhere you better be able to fight your way out of it because NOPD is not coming to save y'all. They don't have enough people to come and save y'all. So we literally

got sent into the New Orleans metro area being told act like you're back in Iraq. That was the mentality they sent us in with. And then I look at that situation and i apply it backwards to all the other emergency situations that like could have happened or have happened to my family and i keep thinking to myself no one is coming to save us if someone does that's great but i have to assume nobody's coming to save us because we've been in the situations where nobody could and it like that's

that's the thing i wanted to try to cross off the list with you rick before we wrap start wrapping this up but like how how do you i'm sure you had to have encountered a couple of neighbors who are probably like they'll call you on a radio, they'll send you a text, but they're not preparedness-minded people. They're not going to do something to prepare for a bad time. So how do you reach those people? Because I have people all around me that, like I had these conversations after Hurricane Ida about, hey, you didn't have a generator. Wouldn't your life have been so much easier if you had?

You didn't have a chainsaw. I had to come chainsaw some stuff off your lawn. Wouldn't your life have been easier if you had a chainsaw? Like I've tried to plant these seeds in people's heads and then watch the seeds not get watered and shrivel up and die because they just weren't going to do it. And I don't know how to reach those people, but I have a whole neighborhood of people around me.

I would love to be able to depend on an emergency, but I know I can't because they can't even say those things. We have regular CERT meetings, so the Community Emergency Response Team. So we're meeting regularly, and I always buy pizza. That always makes it good for people to show up. And I learned that, you know, when I was in business to keep people at work instead of leaving at lunchtime. And, you know, we're teaching them first aid stuff and we're teaching them calm stuff and we're teaching them what to do when you come up on an accident and how you can be helpful in a, in a, in a bad situation. And, and there's,

there's training that's required of, um, of the people at the airport, you know, every year they have to do a drill, something, something happens. You can, you can go there and you can be one of the injured subjects and you can see how they treat you and, you know, understand, oh, wait a minute, why do I have a black tag on my foot? Oh, I'm, I'm dead. But you get to see them in action. So you're learning really by watching them and that's helpful too. And then there's others that, you know, said, yeah, I'd like to be part of this whole neighborhood watch thing. And OK, I'll I'll sign on and, you know, you'll help me with a radio or something. But that's as far as they go. And if that's as far as they go, that's at least one more person in one more location that can let me know something's happening before it gets to me or anybody else in the group. So yeah, there's going to be some

that just don't do much and some that aren't capable of doing much just because they're that in that stage of their life. But we're trying to help people do stuff that, you know, if they're not capable, maybe there's something they are capable of doing and that they're good at. And like you said earlier, Phil, there's people with certain skills that we didn't know until we started talking to people. It's like, oh, yeah, I know how to do that. And one of the guys is a former special up Delta Force guy. Well, guess what? When we need that kind of expertise, we're going to have it and he can train us. Guess what? When we need that kind of expertise, we're going to have it and he can train us. You know, when when people from Charlotte say, OK, we got to get out of here, let's head for the hills.

We're on the way. So we need to stop them before they get there. We've had people talking about the sheriff talking about, well, maybe we need to think about taking out a bridge because we can't handle 2 million people coming our direction. People are starting to think. It'd probably be hard to handle 20,000 people or more. The hard part of it is that

you and everyone else that tries to go down this path is going to run into two primary problems is that there's going to be those people who don't believe it ever could happen but then you're going to run into the people that know damn good well it could but they're going to tell themselves it can never

happen because it's like the kid that the kid whose arm is hanging by a thread but they haven't seen it yet as long as i don't look at the problem it's not a problem yet and like that's that's the experience i've had with a lot of people where i'll sit there and talk them through something and be like or hurricane ida it's not is it going to happen it's when the when is it going to happen again because we've already had we've lived through this experience together people but they just say oh i can it wouldn't happen you know they're they're the people that have normalcy bias and just don't want to know

and then i actually listened to a podcast today from john lovell the warrior poet society he was talking about people look at you and you're prepared and they downplay you, belittle you and say you're stupid because in reality, they're afraid that they're not prepared. And that's just a fear can be paralyzing. It absolutely can. yeah my wife and i are actually not friends with with a couple anymore because every time we would get me and the me and the husband were we know injure since high school but every time we would go over and hang out with them his wife would start putting her little lips in my wife's ear about you know your husband's doing all this and it's stupid blah blah blah he's wasting money and your husband's doing all this and it's stupid, blah, blah, blah.

He's wasting money. And my wife was finally like, uh, our retirement accounts plumped up. Our bills are paid. We have no debt. Money's in the savings account. My daughter and I aren't suffering for anything. Yeah.

So if my husband, if my husband buys a couple buckets of beans and a couple extra cans of ammo, what business is it of yours? And I explained, that's exactly what I explained to my wife. I'm like, the problem is she doesn't want me to be right. Because if I'm

right, then she's not. She's wrong because she's not doing the same thing. So it's easier for her to convince herself I'm the nut job than it is to admit, if I can't go to a grocery store for six months, we're not going to lose any weight. As long as I don't go to a grocery store for six months, we're not going to lose any weight. Yeah.

As long as I don't run out of Tony's satchelries, then my wife, my daughter will refuse to eat anything. The good news is that preparedness is becoming mainstream to a large degree and people are looking at it and going, well, maybe those doomsday prepper guys weren't, weren't that freaky or weird after all,

you know, maybe they, maybe they figured stuff out before we did well rick i'm pretty sure i've told you this story and nick i don't know if i've told you some of the listeners have probably heard it before but a couple years ago i had this experience at prepper camp so i can fairly say in this company that there are certain people that dress the part look the part you know scraggly bearded prior service military guys stick out like a sore thumb in prepper camp the people in the camo stick out like a sore thumb um but i i was sitting behind your um your small small units tactics class taught by a former Army Ranger, I was sitting behind an older lady, probably like mid-late 50s,

wearing no crap, low heels, and freaking the string of pearls like she'd just come from a PTA meeting. And she had a notebook and was taking notes and drawing diagrams. Love that she's there. I literally like i and

no one no one gave her a crazy i gave her a crazy look but it wasn't intentional it was just like wow this was not on my bingo card today but like that was the moment at which i tell people i'm like i saw prepper camp start to change it it had out, from my perspective, like five, six years ago, it started out as a place that people that were already in the lifestyle were coming for more information. And over the years, I've seen more and more and more people who are

brand new. And I know, Rick, you and Jane have done that, where you say, how many of y'all, this is your first time at Prepper Camp, and the proportion of hands going up has gone from maybe a tenth of the class to more like 89% of it. It's just Prepper Camp is morphing more and more into the first stop. Not a one-stop shop, but the first stop that people are making when they say, I need to get prepared. This is a place to get my feet wet.

people are making when they say i need to get prepared this is a place to get my feet wet and like that's been that's been encouraging for me because most of us like a lot of us got into preparedness for our own our own devices our own means but a lot of us that got into like you know organizing event and content creation and all these different things we got into because we wanted to share that information and i'm finally seeing people waking up to the reality of what preparedness is that it's not bunkers and MREs and, you know, tinfoil hats, but it's just an honest admission that, Hey, sometimes life sucks and I don't want to suck quite so bad. So we can do some things to make life not suck as bad.

You know, one of the great benefits to the coven pandemic true that right there i can't tell you how many people i know that complained to me about not being able to find things in grocery stores simple stuff canned food and stuff like that the things that they would normally have for comfort food for a little while there it didn't it never got to the point where you couldn't eat not even clubs but it got to the point where your favorite brand of cookies were out of stock and that was enough of an inconvenience that they started considering having a deeper pantry and if all they do is have a little bit deeper of a pantry so they can go a week without grocery shopping if they have to. That's a huge win.

That's seven days where they're not panicking. And not being able to wipe your ass because you don't have toilet paper. That affected people too. Oh, yes, it did. Wait a minute. How can there not be toilet paper? There's still trees, right? How can there not be toilet paper?

There's still trees, right? It is the hardest thing to ship in stock because it is light, it is big, and people don't have to buy a lot of it most of the time. Yeah. Not that anybody cares. It's actually a loss leader in almost everywhere. Oh, my gosh, yes. almost everywhere. That's the reason that paper goods, paper towel and toilet paper have gone up so much in price is because following the COVID pandemic, all the stores realized we

can't sell this stuff as cheap as we have been because we've been losing our butts. No pun intended. We've been losing our butts on the unit price because it takes up so much space and everything. The shipping cost of it kills the profit margin.

Well, in all what it is, there's never been profit margin in it. You have to have it in stores because if not, people will go get their entire order somewhere else rather than go to your store and go somewhere else for toilet paper. Anyway, I guess let's start

wrapping this up I mean prepper camp is what is it three weeks last week in September so what is it 25th 6th and 7th or I can't remember exactly what it is but that weekend Friday Saturday and Sunday so

yep so I know that you and Jane and your merry little band of nutcases Sunday. Yep. So I know that you and Jane and your merry little band of nutcases are all absolutely going ballistic right about this time of year because y'all still have to pull together the class list. You still have to organize everything. You're going to have at least three people drop out on you in the last second. Well, I've already had that happen.

You had one guy who's gone out of business or going out of business and just decided that he's not going to teach two classes. So, okay, see ya. But at least he told me now instead of the day before. And we had somebody else who really is what they say they are. And he said he'd get called up by the State Department so he can't teach to go someplace. So do something. So that does happen. I mean, I had my speakers and all the classes really nailed down in February.

So that's the kind of stuff that makes me tear my hair out because now I've got to find replacements and now I've got to put up new speakers and new classes on the website, which is a pain in the ass and takes forever to do. And I was just telling Jane today, I said I get people who want to be speakers. Here we are five weeks from the event something like that and people that want to be speakers and want to be vendors suddenly

and i'm going don't have a lot of time to do is i got two or three vendor spaces left i think um but uh we've you know i've really tried every year, I try to look at what's coming, what I think is coming, what's going to happen. And I try to, you know, game that out. And I try to have classes and speakers that are going to teach stuff besides the rudimentary stuff like like growing your own food and first aid and those kind of things stuff this year is more like um how do you survive martial law um what's guerrilla warfare like um some mesh-tastic comms when there's no grid some mesh-tastic comms when there's no grid. So stuff like that that is in addition to,

because we have at least 20 new classes every year, so I try to find stuff that I would like to know about and that people probably need to know about before it happens. And so those are the kind of things that we're offering this year that we didn't have before, but, um, 64 classes a day, eight classes an hour, eight days, eight hours a day. There's just, there's no way anybody can see all that stuff. Plus I was talking to Jane today about it too. You know, I said, I said, you know, really nobody can do what we're doing.

It's just amazing. The stuff that we have. Aside from all those classes, we've got demonstrations every day. The guy with the military-trained defense dogs doing demonstrations and bite work and all that other sort of stuff. And I bought two dogs from him, by the way, who are doing great with protecting my goats from bear and other things. Nice. And, you know, we've got all those demonstrations going on, and we've also got four movies during the event. What other place has all that stuff and all that information?

And then we've got our keynote speaker is Professor David Clemens, who is a guy that has been on Mike Lindell's podcast or Mike Lindell's thing where the stop the steal, the election fraud stuff. And he's got a movie that he's just done, which is Let My People Go, dealing with the J6 people. So he's going to be really good. And Five Times August is coming back to play, and he has literally been around the world and had audiences with some some pretty high level people including somebody whose name starts with a t um so it's just uh you know it's it's pretty amazing that he you know toured a little bit before prepper camp came to prep camp and now three

years later he's been literally all over the world and he's sought after and and in fact after he gets done playing at prepper camp on saturday night he has to leave to go to washington dc for an event so um it's it's it's amazing that the people that we have and the speakers that we have who are the the very best in their skill sets that are teaching just because they believe in what we're doing. They want to give back. They are trying to help people out. And it's so different than any other event. And then there's just the aura of the place, just stuff that I have nothing to do with that you can just feel God's presence there in so many ways. And people feel it. So it's, and this is why it's Jane's and my ministry.

You know, we're doing it. 10 months of work for us on top of everything else that we do every single day with 130 animals in a homestead and you know a full garden that right now needs to be harvested um but uh we're we're trying to give back to people and um we'll see what happens come november because we may be more in a civil war at that point than not. So, God forbid, but it could happen. I think we're all going to have to hold our breath and wait and see how that one pans out. But that's why I wanted to kind of end the show talking about Prepper Camp. Because the first year that me and Andrew came, we didn't know much about the event other than kind of what we saw on the website. And that first year, it was just me and

him and Uncle Randy. And every year we've come, that group that comes gets bigger. You know, Randy started bringing his entire family. My wife and daughter have come with me one year prior, and they're coming back with me this year. And the group keeps growing. And then when Andrew and I brought Matter of Facts into Prepper Broadcast Network, the big dysfunctional family got even bigger. And now, like, Gillian and I kind of regard going to Prepper camp every year as like going to a family reunion almost. Like, that's that's the feeling i get and even if you don't know anybody there if you're just i mean like to the to the listeners who are going for the first time if you literally are just like the

tiniest little bit friendly and open right you're going to start to meet people that you're going to vibe with because we're all there for the same reason. We're all there to learn. We're all there to improve our preparedness. We're all there to bring things home that we can use to take care of ourselves and our family. And, like, that is the event that Prepper Camp is. And I just hope that, like, I hope that everybody that attends has a real appreciation for, you know, Rick and Jane and the, the, the army of volunteers, chin being one of them that are going to be running around like ants on an

anthill to make this thing happen. Cause like I know from watching that none of y'all rest the whole, but from about two days prior until the day after it's, it's all hands to battle stations the entire time. So I'm looking forward to it though, man. I, uh, stations the entire time. So, I'm looking forward to it though, man. Like I said, I'll have my man portable GMRS

repeater that'll be standing up out there see if I can get anybody to jump onto it and like you know, like Matter of Facts podcast going there has always been to kind of commune with the tribe and since we're inhabiting a vendor's area, we don't go there to sell stuff.

We really go there to like run a podcast and record content and invite showgirlers to sit down with us and be part of that podcast, which then turns around and informs the rest of the public about what goes on there. So we're just trying to bring people in and give them a little taste of what this world really is. If I can just get a couple

of new people not to be scared off by the big loud guy with the beard. My wife's coming this year. She's prettier and warmer than I am. I'll use her as bait. I just have to hide them from my daughter because she's spicy. Yeah. Well, now that I'm on here, I probably ought to make it up next year.

I mean, we can start bullying you now. I got 12 months to really pour it on. You do. And my wife is halfway interested in coming too, so it shouldn't be too bad. Dude. It is. It is. Yep.

I was about to say, I just saw the tail. Happy puppy. Yeah, the wife just got home, speaking of. So the pup's doing laps around the house. Well, I guess we'll go ahead and punt this episode out the door. Rick, I appreciate you coming on. PrepperCamp.com, SecretGardenOfSurvival.com. And, yep. And good luck with that that group you're setting

up there man i mean it's um yeah it's well it's super encouraging to hear that you've actually had success with that because like i feel like so many of us have either not managed to get over the mental hurdle of i have to help myself as a crazy prepper to do this or just haven't had a lot of success because maybe we're going about this the wrong way but like maybe that's the way to start is just to use use the gateway drug of neighborhood watch to lure them in and then buy pizza pizza who wouldn't want to know what's going on in the neighborhood oh there's a there's a criminal there's there's a meth head there's whatever. Yeah, I'd like to know. Yeah, I'd like to be tied into that.

Sure. No problem. But you're right. That's what's getting them in. And now we're talking to each other and we're taking classes together and they're learning stuff. And they're learning prepper stuff in spite of themselves. And it's working beyond what I hoped it would do. And hopefully, if we do have that end of the world as we know it scenario, there's going to be a lot more people that we can rely on.

And we can rely on each other and fend off the really crazies and psychopaths that will be left. And you know what? Best case scenario, hey, maybe you find a new car mechanic. Exactly. That you're actually friends with you. Exactly. You always need people with skills you don't have, even on your best day. For sure.

All right. Let's send this one on out to the listeners. If you haven't got tickets to go to Prepper Camp yet, the window is shrinking extraordinarily fast. If you have already kind of made up your mind you can't make it this year, you should start thinking about coming next year, and you should make that decision right now so that you can start making arrangements as soon as Prepper Camp wraps this year. If you miss it this year, I can assure you that we will be recording episodes out there in the vendors area and they'll be posted on youtube and rumble in this podcast afterwards so that y'all get a taste of what it's like and if my wife like can keep me on task i'm going to try to do a better job of like taking

pictures and videos and everything of what goes on out there because last year she wasn't there with me and i just got overloaded you know had one too many things in the brain pan and that one slipped out but matter of fact podcast going out the door good night everybody Thank you.