The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Destigmatizing Preparedness

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

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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 Ravely. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to MatterFacts Podcast. I've already been accused of being a professional once this evening, and I'm going to do everything possible to not let that stand. So to convince everybody that this is really amateur hour,

I have the talking stick. Drew and Terrence are joining us from their respective YouTube channels. They're all part of a group I believe called the Com Syndicate. Straight me out of that, Terrence. Correct. Yep. And I figured tonight would be a fun little meet and greet. Get to know them, get to know their content. And in the process, we'll tackle a group topic with, this is arguably i think the most people we've ever had

on this show in eight years so if it all goes down in flames i will have once again proven that i'm an amateur doing this but real quick so good you're you haven't uh gone down in flames yet so um yet yeah there's always time to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Always real quick. I do want to thank the patrons who support the show. Y'all encourage my autism and support it. And y'all keep this from being a financial drain, which keeps my wife happy.

So thank you all of you for all that. And if you don't like the show, blame them, not me or blame me too, but you know. Blame them. They incentivize you. I mean, I would say encourage. Most of them are in the chat right now probably already talking smack. Let's see here. I see Dumbass Texas Redneck.

We're here. You were early for once. I know when you get to a certain age, it's hard to be on time for things, but you did good this time. You did. Black powder therapist, the resident taint connoisseur. If you don't know what I'm referring to,

you have to get to know him in the patron chat to truly understand the psychopaths that I deal with on a daily basis. And I see Jeff Jag and I see Raggle Fraggle, and Brian. It's always my fault. I mean, you sound like my wife now. To be fair, you started this. Yeah, technically I did start this. And eight years later, I haven't gotten sick and tired of it yet.

There you go. Okay, enough smack talking. So introductions first, and we'll start with our guests, and then I guess we kind of need to introduce ourselves because even though the listeners know who we are, y'all don't know us very well. So one, two, three, Roche and Bo. Terrence, Drew, who wants to go first?

I can take it. You're up, Drew. I'm Drew. I'm Drew. I have a YouTube channel called The Terminal Element. I'm a paramedic in North Idaho, and I also make videos about radios for fun and as a creative diversion. And I tell some stories every now and then that get about zero views. But anyway, if you like what I have to say here, stop on by my channel. channel called the Clarkson comms group. And, uh, I'm a, uh, project manager by trade, but, uh, I also have a channel that discusses radio topics and things like that. And, uh, we're also missing

one other guy, uh, Jared from, uh, two alpha solutions who usually joins us on a, another channel called the comm syndicate. Yep. All right. And I guess we'll just go left to right i'd say ugly to pretty but i'm not gonna let andrew and nick fight over who gets to be who but uh my name's phil i'm the host of the matter effects podcast eight years ago i was uh taking a day off of work sitting at home because we were dealing with massive flooding across southeast louisiana and i was literally watching the freaking news trying to figure out what was going on around me and about 70 miles away from me a river dumped its banks and like cut off a whole bunch of motorists on the interstate and they were stuck out there for i think five or six hours waiting for the

waters to recede and as that situation unfolded, I noticed that like, you know, they were literally airdropping these people water because they were stuck out there on the interstate in August heat. And these people had no supplies. They weren't prepared for an emergency situation. I'm surprised they all had shoes. And I had this thing click in my head where I thought to myself, like, you know, there's lessons about, we didn't even call it preparedness back then, we just called it life. That, like, I learned from my family about how to deal with emergency situations and how to plan ahead for things that people obviously didn't learn somewhere along the way. So eight years ago, I started this podcast to try to take, like, some of that old school preparedness knowledge and teach it to the generation that didn't get the message

and also try to make it normal because to me preparedness should be a normal thing it shouldn't be weird crazy people living in bunkers eating mres all the time andrew you look bored my name is andrew been with phil for eight years because he was desperate for a co-host, and he basically crashed the bottom of the barrel, and I came out. So basically, I like to make Phil have bad financial decisions, whether it's buying night vision from me or whatever. I like to try to be a bad influence. Yeah.

You also occasionally get me ranting and raving and put on government watch lists, but we won't go into that this show. Well, you never know. It's still pretty early. If you're not on the watch list or two, you're not doing it right. True. I collect on my trading cards at this point. Nick? Yeah, so I'm Nick. I'm a tool and cards at this point. Nick? Yeah, so I'm Nick. I'm a tool and die maker by trade,

raised by a family of largely blue-collar tradespeople, machinists, tool makers, heavy diesel mechanics, and stuff like that. So my background is mostly in the trades. You can see a little bit of what I do behind me. I like my job so much I bring it home. That's a 1920s engine lathe. I'm not what people would think of as a doomsday prepper at all. I'm more worried about

how do I make my life as convenient as possible when bad days happen? I don't have a bunker. I don't have a year's worth of food. I got a generator. I got enough food for a couple of months. But, you know, nothing insane. No law enforcement experience. No EMT here.

Not a soldier. Nothing like that. Just a tradesman. Just the back of America. That's all. We don't come to your house. Hey, man. There's a lot of fun stuff in my basement.

So the lathe behind you, I know you, I guess in a previous episode, you challenged Phil to figure out which levers were needed to operate it. Did he figure that out yet? He guessed correctly that he guessed that you needed all of them to cut threads uh but he's incorrect you need all but one well one day you're gonna have to demo that for us so we all know yeah i could probably maybe one of these days kick a video together about that thing once i get it all totally tuned and running right now i'm making on it some replacement parts to get it back to what it was brand new so where did you where'd you find it i actually inherited that this uh i'm the third generation of my family to own that lathe cool all right yeah i don't have anything that cool in my house so it's uh well you know uh the only reason i'm down here is because the sun comes in

through my uh my office light or my office window and just made the video look terrible. So I thought I'd throw it down. We're all in our respective areas. So we can hide from our wives. Exactly. Yes. I'm not doing a good job though, because she's on the other side of this wall.

And matter of fact, she jumped in a second ago and said, I'm here. So you best watch yourself. What's the worst she's going to do? Wouldn't spoon me to death? I mean, come on. My wife just texted

me on a radio system behind me here and told me now that she wants a bunker so you have now affected my financial decisions as well. So I will say that ever since Andrew's encouraged my own financial malfeasance the tube has been working really hard on several friends to encourage more bad decisions i say bad decisions like y'all said to bear in mind that like a lot of my background which i guess is like then the first

thing i want to go into just kind of round out like two of you especially like where y'all are coming from but like a lot of my background because cause I have a, I have a bachelor's degree in business with a concentration of like economics and finance and small business entrepreneurship. So like one of the things I really harp on with people a lot is budgeting and controlling your debt and like planning ahead for retirement and, you know know stuff you don't hear a lot about in the preparedness community but to me i always go back to this idea that like you know i have a 401k in case the world doesn't end and i make it to 65 and i don't want to work till noon on the day i die i have money in the savings account because as long as cash has value the savings account and having liquid cash is a good idea. You know, it's like this.

To me, it's this natural cross section of I'm applying preparedness principles to, I say, real life. But you do get a lot of people in the preparedness community who they don't their mind doesn't go there because they're like, well, Social Security is not going to exist. And, you know, the dollar is going to collapse. And it's all it's there's no point saving for retirement because we're not going to make it that far anyway. And then I retort with, but what happens if we do? What happens if we do? I don't want to work until I'm 80. I don't think any of y'all do either.

So my background is classical business degree, but it's also the fact that, like, I'm a military veteran, I've worked in the trades, and I've worked in HVAC, and I've worked in auto mechanics. I mean, I worked blue-collar jobs all the way through college before I started working more white-collar office jobs. So I have this weird cross-section of experiences where, like,

when Nick puts me on the spot and says, how do you get this lathe to turn threads? I have no freaking clue, but if you leave me alone with it long enough, I'll probably figure it out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess it depends on if you're naturally curious or not. And, you know, that kind of happens with, I guess, Drew, you probably run into people all the time that are interested in radio, and you try and help them out, but they don't really have that natural curiosity to take it to the next step yeah they're priorities yeah well and i mean and that's kind of the thing

of it because i know that radio is kind of a big cross-section for the two of y'all but like my whole thing about radio is like i know people that enjoy it for the hobby but then i know people who it's a tool in a toolbox they just want it to work you know their whole thing of it is like i don't care how to build antennas and i don't care what frequency it is i just want to be able to press a button and talk to somebody on the other side so i look at it as you know my chat our challenge as content creators then is making content that covers both like that person who does want to take the next level and Like that person who does want to take it to the next level and then that person who wants to just use it as a tool in a toolbox. Like if my wife

has to learn antenna theory, then radios have no use in this family. I have to, and it's not that she's stupid because she's not. She's a freaking genius about a lot of things, but that's not something she's going to spend hours upon hours studying like I did. Just because I'm curious about it.

Yeah, there's some different things within radio. I mean, Drew, I don't know, do you fall more in the emergency comms camp than, say, a hobbyist? I think I do too. Well, it's certainly a fun diversion. It's a fun activity, but it's a tool that I use. Our cell phones go down here all the time, and I don't have the money for Starlink plus a mobile Starlink setup and a sat phone. And so this was just a very economical way to occupy my attention deficit syndrome and then also have a functional tool that we can use to communicate. also have a functional tool that we can use to communicate. Phil, I really like what you said about the 401k. In that regard, everyone who has a retirement plan is a prepper already, right? Yes.

But people have been predicting the end of time since the beginning of time. And really, the world hasn't stopped spinning yet. So in all likelihood, it's not going to in our lifetime. So we should be preparing for as if the world is going to continue moving on just as much as if we're preparing for storms and services interruptions and just building our own resiliency yeah i mean like i said to me it's just the idea that like preparedness is a mindset preparedness is a set of principles and if you apply this set of principles to finances then you're going to do things in in a way that makes sense as a prepper. But to say that something has a zero percent chance of happening, therefore I'm not going to prep for it, when

there is a likelihood that, yes, the world will continue, and the dollar will not collapse, and things will stumble along in spite of themselves, then to me it's like, okay, that's a scenario we should prepare for in the same vein that i prepare for hurricanes tornadoes floods because those things all happen around here i just can't get on board with the idea that like something that has a less than zero chance of happening doesn't get any attention paid to it i mean to me it almost it sounds more to me like doom spending if you're familiar with that term where a person says like it's all going to burn anyway so i'm just going to rack up the debt

who cares yeah all right you know unfortunately i was gonna say you know finances aren't necessarily a sexy thing to talk about you know the, the Mad Max scenarios are. And I think that's unfortunately what people kind of gravitate to. And, you know, I think one of the best topics that basically reframes prepping from a fringe conversation into a practical one is finances. And, you know, I was watching several of your, uh, episodes and I think you guys do a really great job of, uh, frequently mentioning things like building financial security. And like you said, you know, that is a form of prepping. People already do it. They just probably don't think of it in that context, basically.

Exactly. You know, it, I've said before on the show and I'll say it again, Most problems in my life have been able to be quickly solved by chucking money at them. Seriously. It's true. It's so true. That's why I'm laughing. Truck breaks down? Okay. Stroke that check. Throw money at it. Exactly. We live in a capitalist society use, why not benefit from it? Well, you don't have to worry. You don't have to hunt and gather every single piece of food you need. So, you know, take advantage.

a while back. It may have been, I don't know, a couple years now. But there was an article that I read, and I think it was repeated a few other times through other news outlets. But basically, people don't have enough money, like 500 bucks for an emergency. And it's like when you talk about things like financial prepping and stuff, it's like, do you have enough savings for several weeks or months? Should you lose your job? Can you maintain your lifestyle? You know, while you look for a new job and I really do wonder how, you know, like what percentage of the population can, can do that? You know, should they lose their job? Can they continue on like they are right now? The statistic I saw the other day was that 40% of U.S. households have exactly $0 in savings right now. And your eyebrows going up was exactly my reaction. It was because of the content.

We all know how the algorithm works. The more you watch, the more stuff you get like that. And because of my background, I do watch a lot of economics and finance stuff because it's my wheelhouse and my wife knows that look on my face where i will something will crawl across my feet and my jaw will just fall and i'm like oh my god it's worse than i thought it was like i feel like my family is blessed to have put in place the things that we have so that we're not in those situations. But to read that percentage of the U.S. households, it's worse than they don't have a six-month emergency fund. It's worse than they can't deal with a $1,000 emergency.

They have nothing in savings. That's terrifying to me. Yeah. thing in savings that's terrifying to me yeah and then i think myself how many of those people in the preparedness community where they've got three or six months worth of food stacked up they've got you know 10 000 rounds of ammunition they've got more guns than they need to arm the whole neighborhood but if their car broke down tomorrow they couldn't pay anybody to fix it you know what i'm saying it's like that kind of weird short-sighted thinking that they did all these other things that were preparedness but then they missed the simplest thing which was a savings account

mr water who would frame these things in terms of are you worth less than you were when you were a baby because when you come out of the womb you you have zero debt, seriously. And so if you have racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and credit card bills, you are worth less than you are when you were a baby. So it's just an interesting way to frame that. Knowing how much I owe in my house, that makes me feel worse thanks for that right you know when they say stuff like 40 of americans it's kind of hard to cut to conceptualize how much that is so i did some quick napkin math that's 48 million households yeah because aren't there like 330 million 330 million people figuring three people per

household 40 somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 million households have zero savings which probably also implies not only do they have zero savings but they probably have reoccurring debt that they are holding of some kind you know not even not even, uh, say credit cards. Sure. Yeah, probably, but probably student loans could be a mortgage, could be a car payment rent probably for sure. If they don't have a mortgage medical debt. So yeah, medical debt. So not only do they not have a single dollar to their name, they technically have negative dollar to their name every month, assuming, you know,

assuming they can't work. So they, they have even less time than that. Cause they're carrying a balance. Yeah. Right. You know, it's Bill.

I know you brought this up on the show before. Um, there are some YouTube channels that go into this really in depth and Caleb hammer is one of them. Um, I don't know if you guys are familiar with this stuff. He does audits of people. Like has a person come and sit down and does a financial audit with them. And the spending these people have is just absolutely insane.

And I'm sorry, I missed the channel. What did you say? Caleb Hammer. Caleb Hammer. Okay. Yeah. He's a,

he's a very interesting guy. He's probably, I think he's mid-30s, and he walks through people's finances and tries to find ways to get them out of debt. Because the fastest way to build wealth is to get out of debt first. Is there a pattern that you've noticed in watching these episodes with how people spend their money? Convenience spending. I mean, one of the... Convenient spending. One of the things that I think is, I don't know,

I guess kind of predatory, and I'm sure you guys have seen this too, but there's people on YouTube that have channels. I'm not going to name any names because I don't want to start any shit or anything, but I've seen some that encourage other people to go out and max out their credit cards on preps yeah well you know and you know i i think it's kind of the reason

i say it's predatory is because you know oftentimes those content creators have a product to sell for the emergency they're warning you about oh yeah or a class they're pushing or i've seen i i think i've seen some of those and you know you're robbing peter to pay paul you know unless your country is developing into a war zone rapidly such as ukraine where pretty good odds your city's about to be overrun by a foreign country i mean i'm sure there's a situation where it could be worthwhile but long term i mean if the comments coming right you know right i mean i just that's that seems that does seem in poor taste at least i think the the risk there though is that like if you're the person that's going to advocate that and like we were having almost the same conversation in our little patrons

chat several weeks ago and the consensus was if i knew with a hundred percent accuracy that on this day money is going to have no value i'd rack up the credit cards because who cares but the problem is you can never have 100% certainty and everybody agree that doing that with anything less than 100% certainty was financial suicide because like you would you would never never dig yourself out of it

and that is one of the things I see on Caleb Hammer's show a lot when he gets into people's personal finances and how they dug themselves into debt and I don't know that i would call it convenience spending i call it there's this there's this general philosophy where it's always i will defer that i will defer paying for that until i can pay for it you know what i'm saying it's it now there is an there's an argument to be made for like opportunity costs where it's like I can go and X map debt.

I can leverage myself. I can take the risk and it pays off within a certain amount of time with certain amount of likelihood. But at the same time, I saw person after person develop this trend where people were eyeball deep in credit card debt, eyeball deep in student debt, bought expensive cars. The rule was always I want stuff now. I'm going to finance it now. And by the time the bill comes due, I'll be able to pay for it. And the first time that gamble didn't pay off, they were screwed. And now they're screwed on for years.

Yeah, and depending on when they took those loans out, they're probably paying a variety of different interest rates. So the credit card rate might be 24% your, whatever your student loan is. And then whatever the other credit card, you know, you took out, you know. Yeah. For the audience, if you really want to nauseate yourself, go online and, and like, If you really want to nauseate yourself, go online and just Google how credit card debt is actually calculated or how credit card interest rates actually work on a given principal. Google that. Apply that formula to like $10,000 in carried principal. And then look at how many hundreds of dollars a month you're spending just to carry that balance.

That will be all it takes to convince you to shred your credit cards for life. Well, it's an interesting topic because you're mentioning this guy that does audits. And it makes me wonder, do you think that people's style of prepping is influenced by how they view the, I don't know, social and economic systems they think they live in, or do you think that it's influenced by other factors? Both. Both. You see Rick and Jane, for instance. They got burned out on the rat race.

You've heard that Rick and Jane Austin. What does Jane go by? Survival Jane. Survival Jane. Thank you. Survivor Jane. Survivor Jane. They got burned out so bad on the corporate rat race that they went 180

opposite direction rejecting that and built themselves a giant homestead, which fantastic. I think some of it is driven by geolocation. Bill's got to prep for hurricanes. I don't have hurricanes, so I don't have to do any of the traditional hurricane prep seasonally. Yeah, I get tornadoes here in Midwestern Illinois. We get some blizzards and some snowstorms, but we don't have that like geographic region shattering events happening yearly.

If that makes sense. Yeah, it does. I can see being influenced by that. Sure. yeah it does i can see being influenced by that sure honestly though thinking about it at least in my experience i think the people's style of preparedness is largely governed by what right or wrong what they believe the most likely scenario is if that makes sense because like i've talked to quite a lot of people over the years and you you find you find this big bucket of people that are like they're in the we're heading to the rapture of the world

is going to end it's going to be mad max so their their their whole push is for 100 sustainability i need to plant crops i need to grow my own food you, it's everything in that vein, because the idea is because of the likely scenario, a savings account and a 401k and all that stuff that still depends on the industrialized food system to some degree, it doesn't, it's not going to pan out. And then you get people that are kind of on the other side of it, kind of where I am, where it's like, I'm not prepping for doomsday and Mad Max. I think the likelihood of it happening is fairly limited. I think it is near certainty that I'm going to face another Cap 1, 2, or 3 hurricane in the next couple of years. And within 10 to 15, we're going to get whacked with another Cap 4, Cap 5 that's going to wipe out seven zip codes.

Because I live on the Gulf Coast, that's what we deal with down here. I mean, hell, Andrew, he and I looked it up a while back. He had a hurricane up by him in Michigan. I don't remember which one it was, but it was one that cruised all the way through the middle of the country and actually made it all the way to Michigan. Oh, yeah, I think that hit us, too. It was just a lot of rain, though. So you see, hurricanes could happen up where y'all live. Yeah. Wow. Just a lot of rain, though. So you see, hurricanes could happen up where y'all live.

Yeah. Wow. The storm surge of the ocean joining us here in Illinois is going to have to be a hell of a storm surge. Looks like we got Jared popping in. Hey, Jared. Jared from 2Alpha Solutions joined us. Hello. How you doing, sir? I'm well.

How are you? We're doing good. We have already done introductions. I'll go ahead and loop you in and then we'll just keep on rolling. All right. Sounds good. So apologize for being late. I got held up at an appointment and got home and I had to get cleaned up. I was covered in blood from a horse and everything else. Better than your blood. Exactly, exactly. My name's Jared. I have a small YouTube channel called Two Alpha Solutions. Hi, Jared.

I am so sorry. I punched a button by accident. That's all right. I have a small YouTube channel called Two Alpha Solutions. Do some comm stuff and some gun stuff on there. I pretty much have junk content on there right now. Let's see. Retired law enforcement.

Retired fire department volunteer. And now I shoe horses. Shoe horses. It sounded like shoot horses. Everybody says it sounds like a shoe horse. Especially when you just come on talking about being covered in horse blood. I mean, we have to. No, so.

Like Jared, this one didn't even have a broken leg. What are you doing? What's that? I said this one didn't even have a broken leg. What are you doing? What's that? I said this one didn't even have a broken leg. What are you doing? I had a broken foot. That's harsh. Amateur radio since I got my license in 94.

And here I am some, almost 30 years later, I guess. Nice. Alright, so somebody remind me where we were before we had to welcome Jared in. We were talking about finances. Oh yeah, financial

preparedness is a key pillar. No, we were at Hurricane in Michigan we were at the hurricane in Michigan. Oh yeah. Hurricane in Michigan. That too. Yeah. I can,

we got the shooting horses. Yeah. Which honestly is probably a better mix up than when you tell people that you're a farrier. Yeah. Anyway, most people don't know what that is and they come to their own conclusions. Yeah.

That's alright. I'm assuming somebody that operates a ferry. That'd be a ferryman. That's a horseshoer. Blacksmith, the horseshoer. Yep, okay. Very cool. Eddie is talking smack in the chat.

No, we're not just letting anyone in. This was our third guest that we were waiting for. You mouthy little SOB. That's all right. He just wants to come back on and talk about what's going on down south one of these days. You know how many different contexts I could have when we're talking about Eddie? Oh, I know. Yes, you do know.

I'm setting him up for that one no the um so what uh we were talking about before was whether or uh what was it world was it worldview or well it's basically along the lines of well you were mentioning uh what people choose to invest in as far as perhaps they're concerned that's right is location and then you know i guess kind of the subtopic is just that you know like are the differences in people's economic statuses you know individually is that what you know influences their decisions as well? Which I guess it's probably both, right?

I mean, how do you explain the toilet paper purchases during COVID? Oh, Jesus. How do you rationally? There's no other way. There's no other way to wipe your ass. Terrence, there's no other way. Well, I've asked a few people that have done it because I was very curious about it. You know, this was after the fact. And basically, it was people that the couple of people that I asked, and I know that's a small sample size, but, you know, they bought things like toilet paper as well as ammunition because those are

things that they thought they could trade with later on. Well, you know, people were, I mean, I know that sounds crazy. Maybe it is, but that was the answer that I was given by a couple of people that were stacking toilet paper to the rafters. But people are also used to living in excess too yeah you know and it's uh a panic thing for them oh i can't get toilet paper i can't get this so for me to or for somebody to continue living life, in their realm, in their world, they're going to need all this excess toilet paper because they don't know when they're going to get it and they don't know how to

ration or they're not willing to ration. Well, I think there was quite a bit of buzz on social media about that. If I recall correctly, there was either a Facebook or buzz on social media about that if i recall correctly there was uh either a facebook or an instagram story of a guy going into walmart and there being no toilet paper left on the shelf in just this one walmart and that went viral and that triggered a bunch of other people in a bunch of other places to go in and start clearing stuff out have you guys ever worked in a grocery store i haven't no no no but i i hear i hear stories about the fomo whenever whenever there's a storm coming all the milk and bread go away i i believe that as an explanation more than somebody who tells themselves a wonderful story that they're going to use it as post-apocalyptic currency. I believe that that person said that, but I don't believe that they believe it. That just sounds like a wonderful face-saving story. They were scared and they didn't know

what to do, but they knew they wiped their ass every day. And so that was the thing. Oh, there were people that panic bought toilet paper for sure i mean i remember going into my grocery store and you know the frozen uh pizzas were all sold out and i'm like we're gonna frozen pizza our way out of this or what and you know you're right like it's people that probably some of them didn't know what to do oh i'm sure some of them didn't know what to do they're probably scared yeah i mean honestly i think i'm i i think i'm kind of withdrew on this i think the whole we're gonna barter with it was probably a story they concocted after the fact because like when covet first started and i see a version of this every time we get a hurricane in the gulf like the level of absolute insanity

down here as people scurry around like cockroaches when the lights come on trying to get the last minute stuff you should have got weeks ago. It never fails and it never gets any better. Like, I've told my wife, I told my wife years ago, I'm like, the moment there's a disturbance, not even in the Gulf, as soon as it looks like something might go into the Gulf, go get your gas tank filled up. Don't let it drop below three quarters of a tank. And you're going to ride that. Because the last situation I want to be in is from my wife and I, a day before the storm gets here or two days before the storm gets here,

to be sitting in a gas station when a fist fight breaks out between two guys at a gas pump. sitting in a gas station when a fistfight breaks out between two guys at a gas at a gas pump it's like i know that the minute you get that many freaked out people in one confined area someone's going to do something dumb and i don't want to be stuck in the middle of it so i always go back to this idea that like if you were waiting in line for stuff you should have done this earlier you know i'm saying like we we great point it's not It's not just a factor of I need enough X to outlast the emergency, but I need enough X to outlast the panic right before the emergency happens when everybody's running around trying to get it. And the supply chain disorder for sometime thereafter, right? Yep.

Yes. That's actually something I point out about. And again, hurricanes is just my thing because where we live. But like it's something I point out about hurricanes. It's like when a tornado, not saying the tornadoes are fine, but when a tornado hits like your home, you can go three blocks and it's still civilization. You can get gas. You can get groceries. You can get stuff.

civilization. You can get gas, you can get groceries, you can get stuff. But if you're in the middle of where a Cap 4, Cap 5 hurricane went, you might have to drive 150 miles to get things like gas and plywood and tarps. There's no way to properly explain to people the fact that the devastation is so widespread in some of these situations. Or like you said, in something like a pandemic where it affects the entire nation, things get bought out so quickly, you might not be, if you don't have those things by the time the flag goes up,

you ain't going to have them afterwards. It just goes back to the idea that, like, you got to keep some of this stuff on hand. I mean, there's a reason why I just finished ordering, like, 20 pounds of green coffee beans, and I've got 10 more pounds in the mail because I'm trying to bulk up. I don't plan to go through the apocalypse without the coffee and I want to have a lot on the shelf. Because, you know, there might be a port strike in a couple of months.

Yeah. This is one of our patrons who is down in western North Carolina. He lives down there and he's confirming they had no supplies within 150 miles. Just goes to show you it happens. Eddie, what's the outlook on how long it will take before roads get reestablished and cleared and

you can even travel that 150 miles? We'll see. I'll let him definitely get back to you. Yeah. No, I mean, like, once things in that area have calmed down enough that he's comfortable coming on the show, like, I'd love to have Mon to talk

about, from his perspective, what's going on in that area, but it's one of those things where it's like I don't want to push him onto the show when he's still in the middle of dealing with it, you know what I mean? That's considerate. Right.

I do consider him a friend. He refers to my wife as mom. Forgot about that. Yeah. This looks like you call him son. Jokingly, yes. Which is weird because he's not that much younger than I am. It's. which is weird because he's not that much younger than i am uh years for major highways months for smaller roads asheville still does not have water so what's that three weeks now uh at least yeah not great but you know that's that's just it is

this this can happen probably anywhere. Is it going to be a hurricane? No. Could be an earthquake where you are. Could be a tornado. Could be a blizzard. I mean, not that long ago, I think it was 2010, northern Illinois had a blizzard. We got two and a half feet of snow.

That's a lot of snow. My aunt and uncle's house outside of town was out of power for a week and a half because you just can't get crews through a foot and a half, two feet of snow my aunt and uncle's house outside of town was out of power for a week and a half because you just can't get crews through a foot and a half two feet of snow now it takes some serious time to move all that i mean knowing all i mean we're talking about tornadoes and uh hurricanes earthquakes all that stuff these are all things that happen on a frequent basis and knowing that why do you think there's still such a stigma about prepping? Someone was peeking at the banners. Hey, they're there for a reason.

I think it's because people don't like to admit that they are not in a good place. Regardless, you see it. You see it with people that are in big debt you see it with people that are that are in the middle of a bad situation an abusive relationship anything like that admitting that you are in that terrible place or that you're in a not great place is really hard because you have to admit that you have been wrong up until now. I think a lot of people are complacent too. They forget very quickly of catastrophic events that have happened. A lot of the people, I mean, if you're decentralized from a catastrophic event,

you'll think about it, you might talk about it for a couple days. But after that, life goes on for you, even if it's still affecting somebody else, like the North Carolina hurricane thing going on down there. You know, just like you guys were talking about earthquakes and blizzards. Two years ago, we had a blizzard

come through here in central Virginia. It knocked out power to the entire county that I live in. And there were parts of the county that were without power for upwards of about four weeks

because they just could not get it fixed quick enough. We were without power here at our house for three to four days, if I remember right. And we have a backup generator. It's not a standby that kicks on. I have to take it outside and gas it up and turn it on, plug it in. But it runs the entire house. And I had just enough gas to get us through that four days it goes through about 10 gallons every 12 hours so it uses quite a bit of gas and we were able to get out on the fourth day

to go out and get more gas we had to go outside of the county to get it because our our local town still did not have power inside the town and there was no internet um the the gas station there actually had to bring in um one of their emergency response generators on a tractor trailer one of the big ones to run the gas pumps there but then they were only taking cash they didn't have any internet to be able to take credit cards or debit cards or anything like that. And then going back to the earthquake of 2011, I live right now pretty much right on top of the epicenter of where that earthquake was in 2011 that affected Virginia and Washington, D.C. I did not live here at the time. I was still living in

pittsburgh um but that was widespread damage around the county here um and it was kind of intermittent some some places had a lot of damage around the county some had none but it was still i mean we got two brand new school uh schools out of it the high school and i in an elementary school that had to be completely demolished so just my my take on on localized disasters well jared how long did it take for school to get back in session after that do you know offhand now being that you live in the area now i can't remember i think think it was, I think the earthquake happened right around the first part of August in 2011. And I think they went back to school once they got kind of reestablished. FEMA brought in a lot of trailers for the students.

You're going to trigger Drew by saying that. Right. You're going to trigger Drew by saying that. Right. Drew has very strong opinions about FEMA. I've never noticed. Did you hear me screaming internally? I did.

I could see it on your face. Did you see how intently he was looking at the camera, just waiting? Let it out, Drew. It's okay. This is a family podcast. This is a safe space, Drew. We'll probably all get shadow banned, but it's okay. It's fine. I think it was at least a month, maybe two months.

Like I said, I didn't live here at the time, so I really can't speak on it. I'm surprised it was that quick. It was. I think they had to take a lot of the students and put them into other schools across the county, and they worked pretty diligently on getting them back into school as quickly as they could. Nice. Yeah, I mean, that was... I was just going to say that that's a lot of what they had to do in this area after Hurricane Katrina was they had so many students whose families lived in areas that flooded that they displaced up to the north side of Lake Pontchartrain,

where I live, and they ended up filtering into all of our local public schools. So, like very very quickly we had to open up enrollment mid-year and then we had to like just influx all these kids and it was like i was at a high school by that point i was actually in bell chase with the louisiana national guard at the time but my younger brother was still in high school and uh it was chaos i I mean, it was... And that's not to say that, like, my town didn't get hit by Hurricane Katrina. We were just

above sea level instead of below it, so we didn't take it on the chin quite as bad. But, um... You know... I'm going to... Sorry. Go ahead. I didn't see who was talking. I'm going to posit that there is no stigma against prepping okay i'm interested here's why i say this how many conversations have you had with

people who then say i'm coming over to your house when there's when something happens right if you're talking to somebody who's not quite dialed in they say i'm coming to your house we can discuss whether that's uh going to be welcome or not. But they don't say, ew, you creepy weirdo, get away from me. They are actually intrigued by it. So there are, I think there's a widespread interest, curiosity about it, even amongst people who aren't interested in preparing themselves. What I think we're seeing is not a stigma that prevents people from preparing. I think we're seeing more of the face-saving excuses that we were talking about with the, I'm going to be a toilet paper dealer in the apocalypse.

That's not a real, it's not a real thing. It's a beautiful story that they tell themselves. So my friend, Jeff, who's a huge fan of beautiful story that they tell themselves so my friend jeff who's a huge fan of your podcast by the way um yeah let's talk after the show i'll give you how much did you buy there excuses well anyway i i think um i i think we're seeing face-saving excuses. I don't think people are not preparing because of the stigma.

So my friend Jeff, who's a huge fan of your podcast, he sent me a podcast of Jack Spierko last year. And he was asking me what I thought of it. And he was talking about amateur radio. And one of the things that Spierko was talking about was that no normal person can pass the amateur radio exam and that real people have lives and jobs and kids and so you're not a normal person if you take it past that test and that's absurd I have I have children and a job and I have obligations I have professional certifications I have to upkeep. Somehow I was able to take that test. And my wife who was feeding our infant daughter in the middle of the night while she studied for the test was somehow able to pass the technician's exam.

So hamstudy.org. I passed the test after a week of dicking around on the internet. Right. It's really simple knowledge that most adults should probably have anyway. So if somebody doesn't want to do that, that's fine. But what I believe I was seeing there with a guy who makes it his living to distribute information about preparedness came up with a really beautiful excuse for himself about how he's a normal person. He's a more normal person than any of those ham weirdos who take that test that no normal person can pass. And so I think it's endemic. I think it's a false premise to say that there's a stigma that prevents people from prepping. People who value it, who see value in it, who want that, they're going to investigate that, and they're going to learn and prepare.

A lot of people still rely on the government, whether it's local, federal, or county government, or state government, I mean. Well, that's a separate issue, that normalcy bias. It is. I don't think those are the same people going, oh, those weirdos, I'm not going to do that weird thing. But see, Drew, I agree and disagree, because I hear what you're saying.

I'll allow for normalcy bias. I'll even allow for the person that says I pay taxes. The government should be here to help me. Like that's a bold strategy, Cotton, but I'll let you have that one. But I have personally individually encountered stigma around preparedness. And to my perspective, I think a lot of what has really, like, screwed the preparedness community. And I'm going to make an analogy to back when I was still in, like, the car community. freaking high school kid had a wing slapped on the back of his Honda Civic and they were driving like morons all over town. So all of a sudden, everybody that modified a car or legitimately street raced, all of a sudden

was lumped into that crowd with all the morons with the shopping cart wings on the back of their Honda Civics. And it took a decade for the perception in that community to change from neon lights and fiberglass body kits. Back into modifying cars. For high performance use for race on the track. Or in Mexico. Or Minecraft.

And I see a lot of the same thing. That happens in the preparedness community sometimes. Where sometimes the loudest voices. Are the nutcases who live in bunkers. Or in like abandoned missile silos. And they have. Ro rooms full of mres and cans of ammo but then they don't have a 401k and a retirement plan you know i'm saying it kind of sounds awesome though i mean it kind of sounds it kind of sounds like an awesome man cave if i'm

being honest like i would love to have a friend who has stuff like that so i can be invited over but i guess what i'm saying is like i do think that there is some stigma cost sometimes because sometimes like we may not do the best job possible policing our own community and saying that guy might be preparing his way but i don't think that's the most rational way to do it that's why a lot of times like i try to i try to wrestle these topics back down to earth and say you can prepare in a way that makes sense and doesn't make you like you know the the bearded weirdo living in the woods way it's ready for the apocalypse or the zombies well i think too is like like i said before there are people that are afraid to be wrong and offended by anyone who points who points it out just by their existence and i will allow i know someone exactly

like that like i yeah i bet you've all met somebody like that well my put it this way my wife literally unfriended somebody that we knew because every time we would go hang out with this husband and wife that wife would start chirping in my wife's ear about stupid husband doing prepping yada yada yada wasting money wasting time and wife eventually was my wife even in your area huh yeah even in your area where people like thousand people drowned in hurricane katrina and the whole towns go underwater when the levee breaks and even in your area where they they have that pain so up close and personal yep yeah still behave that way and as a matter of fact like this this family lives in a house that had to be raised i think 10 feet because they live in a floodplain i think what you're saying ties into a video you

guys did i guess about six months ago and ago, and you were talking about basically people shaming others, which is kind of what you're saying. Like this particular husband's talking about shaming you for being a prepper, essentially. And I think that in that episode, I think you guys mentioned there's people in the 2A community that will shame other people, basically. And I think that's where part of the stigma comes from as well as people just you know doing that unfortunately and that's part of what's wrong with amateur radio uh right now is we do unfortunately have some people that will crap all over you because they don't like the gear you have or um you know they don't want to share certain pieces of knowledge with you for instance and you know i i don't think it's as prevalent as everyone thinks but um you know it's certainly

out there and i think that also exists with what you're talking about it doesn't take many people though that are that act that way i mean you could have yeah you can have one guy at your local ham club for instance that just shits on the new guy because the new guy can only afford the 30 radio or the 150 base station same i'm sure happens in car racing and everything else well and you guys mentioned people who are perceived as warpers for instance in instance, in that podcast episode I was talking about. And, you know, it's like I think you mentioned it was it's LARPing until it isn't. It's always LARPing until it isn't. Right.

It's like five seconds after all hell breaks loose, the crazy prepper looks like the smartest guy in the entire parish or county. But five seconds before the flag went up up he looked like a nutcase that spent way too much money on freeze-dried food and ammunition but five seconds after all hell breaks loose he looks like a genius well everyone in the preparedness community gets lumped into one bucket you know frequently you know so you've got you know homesteaders and preppers and just all kinds of different little factions within that i I guess, community, if you want to call it that. But they all, in reality, have basically their own agendas and varying ideas as to the world that they live in

and how they should prepare for it. Like with the hurricane down in North Carolina, Tennessee, and all that, no amount of prepping would have done a lot of those people any good because it just all washed away. True. Literally the entire, their entire life washed, washed down the hillsides down there. And, um, it just, it's, it's just a sad situation in that even the ones that were prepared weren't prepared. It's just a sad situation. Even the ones that were prepared weren't prepared.

Yeah, I think that's true. There are some situations that are not possible to prepare for if you get hit at ground zero. Exactly. But that being said, there is one aspect of preparedness that would have saved some of those people. And I hesitate to say it because like eddie knows where i'm coming from because he and i've talked about this offline like my worry is that i never want i never want to look at a group of people that went through a disaster and then monday morning quarterback from the perspective of like you idiots you should have done what i said and you would have been fine because that's not it it's more of a hindsight's 2020 we can learn lessons

from what happened and we can apply that so we don't get caught in the future. But the one thing that a person could have done in that situation was not be on the X. Like that. I think it came so fast and out of nowhere that they didn't even they didn't even know what hit him at first. For some, yes. But I will say this. My wife and I go through this every year for hurricane season. Every hurricane that gets into the Gulf,

we have to flip the coin in the air and decide are we going to stay here where we have a hardened structure, we have preps, we have a community, we have a support system. We have all these things stacked in our favor here. Or do we load this family up with what we can take into two vehicles and we get the hell out of the way? And we have to flip that coin every time a hurricane gets into the Gulf.

Because the wrong decision means we're here for Hurricane Ida and a cat-4 hurricane slams in here and wipes out five zip codes. And we're stuck in the middle of it with eight days with no power. We made it. We survived. The house survived. But we had a big old bucket of suck to friggin' deal with for eight days. And for weeks afterwards, because the supply chain was so screwed up, I have questioned myself for years since then about, did I make the right decision to stay should we have bugged out and then come back after it was unwound I don't know like it worked out we

got away with it we got away with it if it was a bad decision but that is that is the only thing I can look at that situation say like you're right there is a point where a person all the prepping in the world will not save you except to admit that this position is not defensible. Therefore, we need to relocate. Well, wasn't a lot of the damage up in the hills with this hurricane kind of area that you would think that you would leave the coastline and go to? Might have been pretty difficult to predict. Well, it was in areas where historic flooding has occurred. Oh, OK.

Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Yeah. And I'm sure we'll talk more about this when Eddie, the local that we know in that area comes on. There were a number of locals and a number of people in that area, even government officials, that were saying, hey, the flooding could get bad if this does get here. officials that were saying hey the flooding could get bad if this does get here now nobody predicted 25 30 foot walls of water because that is a serious anomaly but they did predict severe flooding and severe wind damage yeah i mean i i know that like as early as tuesday as early as that tuesday they were already predicting like 30 inches of rainfall in asheville and like i used like i was telling people i'm like 30 inches here

where i live is a problem 30 inches in the mountain is a catastrophe because water doesn't stay on top of mountains it goes down into the valleys and then you wind up with like six feet seven feet eight feet of water flowing where there were no rivers before like it's it's a catastrophe it cannot be mitigated there's no amount of drainage there's no amount of preparedness that will save you from it except to get out of its way it's the only especially given that the point all the settlements in the area all the towns in the area are not built on the highland they're built on the low valleys in between yep i mean i'm sure there's probably people that can't escape in certain situations as well you know and one of the things that you guys have talked

about in the past um was physical fitness and i think that you know if you're into prepping that's probably got to be one of your top priorities because that could make a dent whether you survive or not in a situation like that yeah i have a question for you phil um being that you live down in the gulf and i've never really had to deal with hurricane evacuation with the amount of traffic that is trying to evacuate from an area how long are you looking at being on the road trying to evacuate an area with millions of other people doing the same thing so there's not a direct answer that question because it is dependent upon when you like how far out from landfall the hurricane is.

Like, if you evacuate, you could have maybe a 10-15% increase in your evacuation time, time on road, if you leave 24 hours earlier. Or if you leave 24 hours later, it could double the time you spent on the road. Like I know for Hurricane Katrina, my entire family and at the time my girlfriend, now my wife, we evacuated ahead of the hurricane. But even by the time we left, like it took us – it's normally about a four-and-a-half-hour drive to get from where I lived to southeast Texas where I had some family. And we were on the road for 10 hours. And that was not unexpected. I mean, it took us, I don't even know how many hours just to get across Baton Rouge.

Because you had this huge intersection of everyone that was on I-12 coming from the east side, and everybody from I-10 coming up from New Orleans, and it all funneled into Baton Rouge and just turned into a gridlock. So, I mean, it's... There is no straight answer to that because it depends

on when you get on the road. If you get on the road early enough, you can make great time and you can get out of the way and that's kind of the coin flip I was talking about earlier with hurricanes, is that there is a certain point where if you haven't already gotten on the road and got out of this thing's way, it's too late.

You will be stuck on the interstate when it comes through. So at that point, you're just kind of committed. And that was kind of where I was, what I was getting to is, you know, not, not ever being in that situation for having to evacuate for a hurricane. There, I don't think I would want to be stuck out in the interstate with millions of other people whenever the hurricane hits that that specific area because now you are just literally stuck and nowhere to go raggle fraggle sunset bridge and donaldsonville i actually was coming from from slidell at the time so i was nowhere near donaldsonville

raggle fraggle round is a valid shape indeed yeah terence terence you're right um fitness is huge you, like I've said before, like I said earlier about being able to stroke a check. Well, sometimes that, that check might be just your ability to endure the situation long enough. You might not have, you might have to move fast or you might have to move for a long time,

but you should try to make yourself capable in either aspect. You know, I'm not telling you guys to be an Olympic athlete. Look, I'm, I'm as out of shape as most people here. I recently dropped like 60 pounds just because I got tired of feeling like crap all the time.

And you know, it, you will be amazed at how much better you feel on a day-to-day basis, let alone the benefits in an emergency. It's an investment in yourself, just like retirement is an investment in yourself. Just like having a couple of weeks or a month worth of food laid up is an investment in yourself and your future.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, you're right. And I didn't bring it up to, you know, um, give anyone a hard time or anything. It's just, I know that as I get older, you know, it's harder for me to recover from injuries and things, you know, I'm, I'm 44. So, um, you know, I worked a long time in construction and, you know, I, I don't think I could go back to doing that as a profession. And, uh, you know, even if I gotten, you know, killer shape now, and I, I just bring it up because it's like, you do need to take care of yourself as you get older.

Uh, just like you need a savings account and a 401k and you need to you know make those adult preps basically and your physical health is certainly one of them because if you if you die or something god forbid you know you're going to leave your wife and kids and it's going to be it right you know and then everything gets harder when your health is worse. Especially if you've got like insulin dependent diabetes, something like that. Perfect. Which can in some cases be reversed by paying attention to fitness and losing some adipose tissue. Or at least, you know, maybe no longer have to take insulin anymore. You can take a different medication potentially by lessening that insulin resistance so if not completely reversed at least mitigate it a little bit how

did you lose 60 pounds what did you do honestly all i stopped doing was eating candy and drinking soda ah that was it that was really sugar well yeah dude sugar is the worst and the cravings for that stuff is nuts and then you know got me and my wife were doing a little bit more outdoors that's all it really was a lot of hiking a lot of kayaking stuff like that it wasn't a big change uh cut down from two pieces of toast in the morning to one with my eggs and corned beef hash i mean i still eat a rather extravagant breakfast every morning but now has it shifted into another vice like have you taken up smoking no no thankfully not but no it's it's one of those things small changes over time can compound into excellent

things just like with finance just like with learning a new skill small incremental steps i mean how many calories are in a can of Dr. Pepper Rago brings up? I don't know, probably 220 or something like that. That's a tenth of what you need in a day. How many people are drinking three to five a day? That's actually a shockingly good estimate. I was thinking 240. Yeah, just a guess.

240, 260, something like that. But, you know know go ahead well i was gonna say but like the other thing that i think a lot of people discount about paying attention to your fitness and pay attention to what you eat is staying out of the damn doctor's office because like that's that's something that that's what motivated me personally because like i've been fighting with hypoglycemia since like my late 20s and it's always been one of those things where it's like i know what that progression is hypoglycemia it's pre-diabetes and then sooner or later you wind up you know you want to go down a path that's not a good place to

go and so a lot of my dietary changes was like cut out the junk food cut out the sweets cut the carbs cut the rice cut cut the potatoes. And it was never about like I can never eat these things again because sometimes you just want pizza for God's sakes. But it was about I know if I eat more fats and more proteins, I'll stay fuller longer. I won't get the shakes. I won't get the cravings. And I started making all these small dietary changes really with the goal of I want to control my blood sugar in a way that doesn't lead down the road of daily medications. And I haven't had what I would call like a blood sugar related issue.

And probably I've had one in the last two years. It's fantastic. Yeah. But here's the thing of it is whether it's I'm overweight, whether it's I eat crap, whether no matter what the problem is, if you pay attention to your health with the simple goal of I want to stay out of doctor's offices and out of hospitals like that pays dividends in so many different ways. Even above and beyond like the preparedness community. But just simply the fact that like like my goal is I get into older age being, I just turned 42 the other day, but like my goal is to be as capable as I am today for as many years as possible. I don't want to be that guy who's 65 years old and has to pay somebody to mow my lawn or has to pay somebody to work on my truck. Cause I can't get out there

and rip it apart with my bare hands. I want to maintain the same level of strength endurance I have for as many years as possible. And then I want to fall off to the smallest degree pot that I can over the years. But I see way too many people my age with twice the beer belly I have and with half the calluses. So I'm just like, I'm not saying we all have to be these blue collar outdoorsy types. I'm just saying like, you know, a little bit of attention paid to taking care of our bodies, get it to old age. It'll help a little. who I think would identify as preppers, where they want to go,

instead of maybe focus on health and physical fitness, they want to eat cinnamon to control their diabetes or take the essential oils. I think that is the exact same kind of person that's going to embrace every get-rich-quick scheme out there instead of control your debt, pay stuff off early and live within your means. I think that there's a there's a group of people out there and they branch across all different communities where it is they want the lowest hanging fruit, the lowest effort, the lightest lift possible to do what they think will accomplish their goals. lift possible to do what they think will accomplish their goals and instead of just accepting the fact that sometimes to get what we want involves some pain and involves some work and involves doing without um we were talking about finances earlier and the one thing that

the one thing that like to me really defines preparedness is this concept of what's called deferred gratification. And that is... The marshmallow test. Yes. The marshmallow test. But it is the idea that like, I want X, but if I don't have it right now, I can have twice as much tomorrow. And that is finances.

That is absolutely your health and your fitness because what would I rather do right now? Would I rather sit on my back porch with a whiskey and a cigar and just goof off or do I really need to get my big butt off the couch and go for a walk or do something productive? It is just this constant battle of I want stuff right now or I want easy or I want leisure but I know I need to do something else and I think that really tends to define people in the preparedness community. But like you pointed out, there are those people who they'll eat cinnamon,

but they won't stop eating. They won't stop drinking Dr. Pepper. You can still have those things as long. I mean, I shouldn't speak in moderation. Well, I mean,

I'll have things that, you know, are guilty pleasures, but you know, I make sure that I earn them, you know but I make sure that I earn them. I make sure that I at least work out so many times a week. And I don't mean lifting weights heavy or anything like that. It could just be going for a walk with the dog.

Yeah, go for a hike. Hop in a kayak for a little bit. You know, Drew, I think that like what Phil said, there are people that are looking for shortcuts. And I think that the medical necessities of others enable shortcuts that at least in their mind for themselves. And I think that's kind of where it comes into a little bit. You know, shortcuts are like the cinnamon thing. I'm sure there's some truth to it but it's gimmicky it's very gimmicky and there's always some truth or some basis in those gimmicks

because it worked for somebody else or they've they've manipulated it into something that they can work with because it's easy and it's not always that gimmick's not always going to work for everybody out there it might work for one or two people but for the masses it's not going to work in an emergency it might be a stop gap exactly yeah exactly yeah for sure all right guys well let's throw this one last topic. If I could just get these freaking buttons in StreamYard to cooperate with me. Let's throw this one last thing. You need to get a stream deck.

You do. Please don't incentivize any more bad financial decisions. Andrew, tell him he needs a stream deck and be a bad influence on him, please. I will start harassing him in the private chat. Andrew, be nice to me i am not a professional i am i am this you you have run a no you've run a really great great podcast so far you haven't messed up once uh but we still have time we're not done yet we can still lose the audio so let's let's go around the horn as we wrap this up and answer the question like how do we destigmatize

preparedness for everyone because i do and maybe destigmatize isn't the right word maybe incentivize preparedness for everyone but like how do we make preparedness more universal than I think it is? Because I even have this debate with like my dad, my dad would, he would never identify, identify himself as a, as a prepper ever for the rest of his life. He, I, I'd have never heard him call himself that. But a lot of the things I've, a lot of the principles, like I grew up knowing I learned from him because we always had like the box of hurricane food. We always had the batteries from the flashlights. Like we always did certain things to get ready for hurricane season. I

learned all that from him. But then when I, when I jokingly said like, yeah, you were a closet prepper, he's like, no, it wasn't. And it's, it's one of those things where it's like i wonder is it the term is it a stigma is that a preconception but how do we how do we make these these principles of preparedness universal so that like everybody every household gets into this mind frame you know 50 years ago 75 years ago 100 years, this prepper stuff was a way of life for everybody. It's how people lived. I mean, if you didn't stockpile food a hundred years ago and you didn't eat, you know, during the winter time, or it was very hard to eat. So a lot of this is complacency.

It is, I don't want to say laziness, but technology in the times of today have made prepping, so to speak, not a necessity or anything that people really think about too much anymore. not a necessity or anything that people really think about too much anymore. Drew, what are your thoughts? I'm just going to go like left to right and then we'll loop back around.

Sure. I think we exemplify the positives. There's, if somebody were interested about this and they got on YouTube and they typed in prepper, they would probably see a lot of really creepy, weird things that would turn them off. And I think we need to reject that. But unfortunately, that's what gets the clicks, right? That's what really generates the traffic, the thumbnails that are terrifying. The doom porn essentially is what it is. People get this dopamine hit from watching these videos

that are basically useless. They don't provide any sort of real benefit. They have no educational value. But if we exemplify the positives of being prepared for, like in your situation, Phil, that hurricane that wipes out 150 miles of infrastructure and how much easier your life is going to be if you just have some basic foresight to prepare for something like that that is a very real and repeatable situation in that in those in those areas i i think that's how we win the hearts and minds of people we just be normal guys and we and we represent the positives of you know in my case one of the the biggest theme of my channel is uh communications preparedness constantly the the comms are down here and i'm just a normal, and I want to be able to communicate with my family, and I'm not, I don't perceive that I'm doing anything particularly weird. I've just set up a really neat comms system for my family, and I try to tell stories of positives.

Whenever we have some sort of positive use of that, I was able to help a fellow on the wildland fires this year. I was able to help him coordinate some tender response to another wildland fire by using amateur radio over HF. And so I shot a really quick video about that. I did an interview with him and we talked about it very positively. Just normal guys getting work done. And there wasn't any doom porn thumbnail, although I'm sure it would have got a lot more clicks had I had I stooped to that level. But that's that's how I think we win the hearts of minds of people. Show them the positives. And I wish more organizations that tried to promote this would do that. I understand that there's the amateur radio emergency service and they claim to provide a really essential service for communication in emergencies.

I haven't ever seen one press release from them talking about a win. I would love to see that. Sell me on why your service is beneficial and why I should participate in this. But I haven't seen it. So they haven't won me over. Well, we hear about success stories here and there, but but do we i i can't think of a single one i'm really excited to hear the arl uh news feed sometimes they'll post little stories like that like there is one where some guy helped save some other guy's life but i don't know. Every time there's a natural disaster or something, you know, an HF or whatever, it's all people asking for signal reports. Right.

And so they have the hurricane net. Very rarely are you hearing. Go ahead. So I was listening to the hurricane net and I was waiting to hear like somebody calling for resources for a team or something of that nature all I heard was people talking about the weather so if they did do some positives maybe I just didn't hear it I'm really looking forward to the after action from that but promote it promote the positive maybe we missed it I didn't hear anyone calling for assistance or mutual aid either and um even even handling resource requests

processing resource requests would have been great and maybe a lot of that happened behind the scenes on winlink and uh systems that we aren't going to see typically but could have been possibly but you know in in this type of culture we we don't often just put ourselves out there we're not often out there for self promotion and so a lot of people keep to themselves so that even is a that's a stumbling block to getting the word out there as well terence what you think i think you're right about normalizing it drew for sure and i think that um one of the ways that you do that is make it relatable um i think you know you guys in the matter of facts podcast you do a great job of doing

that by you know putting it in terms of finances and um that's something that everyone can relate to or should in theory be able to um and i think the other part of that is probably not going outside of you know your experience and so um i think that's when we see things like drew mentioned about you know some of the fear porn stuff you know they're just throwing out videos to get clicks and they're not necessarily substantive. They're not really informative videos. They're just scaring people. It's more of an entertainment thing than an educational thing. But certainly normalizing it through making it relatable,

I think is probably one of the keys to success. Nick, what do you think? I think a big one that a lot of people will overlook because of the push for opsec that you see online is helping your neighbors we had we had a nasty ice storm i mean it was two last winter uh we lost power for three four days around me my neighbor up the hill from me didn't have a generator so i was shuttling water to and from her house for her and her daughter made her life easier you know what she did the second we had power back on she called me up and said who made your generator and how do i get one installed in my house?

Because it made my life and hers because I had one so much easier. Now, I don't know if she got one installed. She said she was going to. I believe her. She's a pretty honest gal. But I think, you know, similar to what Drew said, share the wins. Share the wins. Show your neighbors that it's working you know my neighborhood has well we're out in the boonies and out of the let's say there's 16 18

houses out by me better than two-thirds have standby generators so we knew when we bought this house we were probably going to need one. So took a look around, saw what everybody else was doing, thought, all right, I'm not going to be the idiot without one. Bought one right off the rip at a generator panel installed by my electrician buddy. And that helped. And that was able to help our neighbor up the hill for me. I think little things like that. I didn't give her a lecture on why she needed a generator.

I didn't give her a lecture on why she was wrong. I said, hey, I don't hear a generator up at your house. Do you need anything? And I help you. And I was able to help her. It's not doomsday. I'm not going to run out of propane. My generator happens to run on propane so I can store quite a lot more than I can of gasoline,

which is very nice. I approach from a what can I do to help perspective. And I think that broke through to her without a lecture. Nobody likes getting lectured to. They really don't. What do you think, Andrew? The first thing that we need to get away from is the zombie shows. And, I mean, you still hear people talk about Doomsday Preppers like it was just on yesterday.

That stuff was entertainment. Doomsday preppers like it was just on yesterday uh that stuff was entertainment doomsday preppers especially it was entertainment uh and i think that actually did worse for the prepping community than help uh it made people look at the prepping community and have that uh bad idea of what it entails because you see these people like they the tv show demonized uh pretty much did a good job of just demonizing you see these people like they, the TV show demonized, uh, pretty much did a good job of just demonizing it. Maybe these people look weird,

uh, kind of thing. So that's the kind of stigmas, the stigmatism or stigmatization, whatever the fricking word is. And, uh, so the biggest thing though is taking,

okay, like, I mean, Uncle Randy, again, my Uncle Randy, what's your zombie? Uh,

he took the walk, the walking dead and, you know, the whole zombie, like, I mean, Uncle Randy, again, my Uncle Randy, what's your zombie? He took the Walking Dead and, you know, the whole zombie show, and he's, what's your zombie? I mean, for Phil, it's a hurricane. For me, it's snow. For, you know, Nick, it might be, it's something different. And so that's the thing, and that's what cracks me up, is back when I, one of my old roommates I lived with, we had an apartment, Michigan, we got hit.

We're not, I mean, we didn't even get hit with it. It was just the meteorologists were like, we're going to get 17 inches of snow. And people started panicking. We looked at the coverage. We're like, what are we missing? Whiskey and Coke. So we went to the store and while people are panic buying bread, milk, I mean, mean cereal all kinds of other stuff we walked around i'm like i like this whiskey so we grabbed a fifth he grabbed you know i grabbed a fifth he grabbed a fifth and we grabbed some coke and we rode out the storm i mean and we only end up getting like maybe eight inches or so if that but we ended up riding out riding the storm out and we were fine i mean i you know i uh we, I, uh, we, there, I lived with another, uh, friend of mine

that we lost power and both my roommates came home and I'm making chili and they're like, well, how are you making chili? We have an electric range. I go, my camp stove. Like I pulled my camp stove out and was making chili. So stuff like that, like, and so what's your zombie and then take that and then normalize it. And how can people relate to it? So, and it's not necessarily saying you guys need to do this. You guys need to have four years of food and water and all this stuff set up. It's, it's like, what can I do to get through and make it?

Because honestly, if you look at the preparedness lifestyle, like my girlfriend and I, we've been talking about doing, uh, next year, we really want to do a garden, uh, get a garden, uh, installed at her, at her place. And we were looking at doing some chickens, some, uh, meat chickens that, uh, in the spring, uh, to butcher and put away and a bunch of stuff. And we're okay. Well, what can we do? I'm unfortunately my, like my smoker, uh, my smoker broke down. So I'm, I had to order a new panel for that. So once I get my smoker up, we're talking about taking like my smoker, uh, my smoker broke down. So I'm, I had to order a new panel for that. So once I get my smoker up, we're talking about taking, like buying some meats, buying all kinds of stuff and we're going to smoke it. And then we're going to, we're going to put it away for, uh, for over the winter and stuff

like that. Uh, we're, her and I were trying to, we're looking at getting into, like, we want to get into canning and everything. And so that kind of stuff, it's just like with the groceries, the price of groceries and everything right now, you can take that, you can take somebody and say, okay. And like with the average price of groceries on just an average, just going to the store once for a family of two or three, it's, it's astronomical and it's crazy. And so if you're, you know, and if you sit there and you kind of break it down to them and say, well, if you guys, if you guys did this, this, and this, well, we live in an apartment. Okay. Well, and it's crazy. And so if you're, you know, and if you sit there and you kind of break it down to them and say, well, if you guys, if you guys did this, this, and this, well, we live

in an apartment. Okay. Well, you can still, you can still grow food in an apartment. It's a little harder. It might be a little harder, but you can still do it. People do it a lot. And if you, especially the community farming and stuff like that. So just break it down to them and just try to relate to everyday issues that's going on and just relate to how if they were to do this one thing what could it do and how could it make things easier on them in the future and i think that's how we kind of get through that and to round out the way i think we destigmatize preparedness is why do i see andrew big as hell on my screen all of a sudden there goes the professionalism there it went it was very well lasted it was a great illusion while

it held out so i think we beat the stigma by everyone who counts themselves as a member of this community meeting everyone who wants to join this mindset, meeting them where they're at. Like, you're going to have those people who, based on, let's say, budget constraints, they can afford this, but they can't afford that. Guide them towards the things they can actually attain financially instead of pushing them towards the things that are so far out of their grasp they just give up. If you have a person who's concerned about flooding, help them figure out a preparedness plan that accounts for that. If you have a person who, let's say certain parts of the country, certain social circles might be a little squeamish around firearms, rather than just write them off and say, well, if you don't get a gun, then you're not a prepper, like meet that person where they are and try to bring them along you might find that over time you might bring them more and more into your lifestyle to where

they start to regard things they once regarded a certain way differently kind of like we were talking about earlier with the ham radio community that one loud mouth can run off a whole bunch of newbies by telling them if you bought a baof, it's junk and you shouldn't be here. Or you need to go buy a $200 Kenwood or a Yaesu or you're not part of the club. As opposed to saying, hey, just so you know, this is good to get your feet wet. Down the road, you might want to invest in better equipment. But for right now, you're in the game. Like, let's figure out how to get this program.

Let's get you running. for right now you're in the game like let's figure out how to get this program let's get you running i feel like if we as a community make an effort to meet people where they are and take them from wherever they're at and bring them to where they need to be in a welcoming non-judgmental non-gatekeeping way i really think we can make preparedness more universal and less of a stigma and we don't we don't create this really exclusive club where you have to wear the right clothes and speak the right language or you're not part of you're not part of the group because like my whole the story i tell from prepper camp several years ago was when i first went to that event it looked like a bunch of people that were

into preparedness and then a couple of years ago after covet we started like a bunch of people that were into preparedness. And then a couple of years ago after COVID, we started seeing all kinds of people showing up that didn't seem like preppers. I sat in a class that was about small unit movement tactics taught by a former army ranger. I was sitting behind an older lady, probably in her mid late fifties, looked like she was dressed to go to a PTA meeting wearing flats and a silk blouse and pearls. She was taking freaking notes on how to assemble a fire team. Stood out like a sore thumb.

Good for her. No one believed. Damn right. But here's the thing of it. No one gave her any crap. No one said a crossways word to her. Everyone said, you're interested in this? Cool, let's move you forward. And I think that there were there,

if ever there was that moment where someone was going to say, you don't belong here, that's an opportunity for the rest of us to smack the guy in the back of the head and say, everyone belongs here. Everyone belongs here. We all need the same couple of things to survive for the next five minutes. So let's just figure out how to get everybody those things. And we only had one booger up on this whole hour and a half long show.

I think that's a win. Well, good. I think so so and i know you guys think that comms are sorcery and i'm referring to a couple of episodes so if you ever need any help with comms uh the three of us are more than happy to jump in and help you we definitely do jared and andrew i volunteered you guys along with myself. Very nice. I have a hard time staying interested in comms. Going back to the very beginning of the show. I have my ham license. I have two Bay of Fangs.

I think I have a Yesu somewhere in a box. From when I moved two years ago to my house. It's still somewhere. I don't know where it's at, but I know I got it. I used to be on search and rescue. We had to have our ham license. got into it got into it got out of it got my i renewed my license was thinking yeah i want to get back into it took a good ham class uh intro to ham kind of thing and i was like okay cool this is gonna be good and it's just life got in the way and it's one of those things that got put in the back burner uh so it's it's one of those things that it's like man it sounds really fun

you know we got the license that's the hard part yeah you did the biggest i mean comms can suck if you don't have anyone to talk to but if you've got people to talk to it's a lot of fun yeah that's my biggest thing i have nobody to talk to up here uh i think there is a local the there is a local ham group i guess i i mean maybe i need to look into it or something but it's just one of those things i just never yeah i don't know i just don't know one of the things that i hear a lot of people that discourages them is that you know i've got my license you know i'll get on a repeater you know locally but that's it as far as you know, I'll get on a repeater, you know, locally, but that's it. As far as, you know, it's as far as a lot of people go.

And it's unfortunate, you know, that there's not enough people trying to advocate. Here's what the next step should be and keeping people interested. And, you know, I hope radio doesn't die someday. and, you know, I hope radio doesn't die someday. And, uh, you know, the few of us that are left that are actually trying to, you know, make it positive and make for a positive experience, hopefully that'll be enough to kind of keep the ball rolling. You know, repeaters aren't where it's all at either. You know, I can't remember the last time time I talked on a repeater. I use VHF, UHF, Simplex, and Sideband, and

make contacts all the time. So I think there's a lot of stigma that if you're if you get your hand licensed that you're restricted to repeaters, and I'm not against repeaters by any means, I just, I don't use them very often, especially here at the shack.

When I'm mobile, once in a while, I'll get on a repeater. If I'm bored and can't find anything to listen to on YouTube or whatever while I'm driving. Well, with a tech license, you can get on six meters, I believe, and also 10 meter for data. Right. I think I'd have to go back i haven't well you can you can do voice on on 10 meters with the tech license yeah i think yeah you're probably right yeah and yeah yeah you know but it takes it does take a financial commitment because there's equipment involved and some of it's not cheap. And I think people are overwhelmed with the information that they're given, even if they just have their tech license. And they're really not that aware of what all they're capable of doing with that license. So I think you're right.

That's where it's at all the time. Yeah, I think you're right. Repeaters aren't where it's at all the time. Yeah, I think you're right, Jared. And a lot of people, when they start out, you know, their first question is, you know, what radio do I get? And it's like, well, what are your goals? What do you want to do? Yeah, what do you want to do with it? Who do you want to talk to? And, you know, someone that you want to talk to is pretty close by, you know, maybe talking on the repeater will work.

But if they're several hundred miles away then you're looking at like hf right or what do you think i don't i don't think people realize or really know how to answer that question they're interested in it they don't know what the capabilities of of radio are they don't know everything that's out there what all you can do with it um so they don't really have any answer for themselves as to what they want to do with it because they don't know what it's capable of andrew what do you think it would take to get your girlfriend interested in getting a amateur radio license because who cares about talking to randos on a repeater about their colonoscopies and the weather i mean really

utility is being able to stay connected with the people closest to us so is that something that she'd be interested in um i probably not um i'd have to talk to her i don't know if she would be or not but i mean like my parents uh that's the biggest thing is uh i mean my parents are roughly two hours away uh give or give or take uh and so it'd be nice to be able to uh reach them uh if if needed and that's one of my that was one of my main goals is uh reach them and and they i mean they don't have like i mean i'm sure they could probably get my hamlet or their ham license and i know my aunt uh my aunt went through the whole thing and she got her ham license and so it it'd be really good. And she lives over, she lives next to my,

you know, close to my parents. So it'd be really nice to get a system or do something to learn how to, you know, talk to her and, and communicate in case something were to happen. So I think one of the best ways to learn is like them together now. Yeah. I was going to say one of the best ways to learn is probably just getting

into GMRS. And Jared, you mentioned linking GMRS repeaters or something yeah i was being suspicious because there was a big thing about linking gmrs repeaters there was yeah yeah well actually if you go to my gmrs.com they've got a linked system there's like a map or there was i don't know if they still have it so so i don't know if they got a letter from the fcc or not but okay so since i am very deep in gmrs i think the map you're referring to is probably not all linked repeaters it's just their database of repeaters that are nationwide but i know that like several of the big link systems have voluntarily taken themselves offline since the FCC is now chirping that it's not permitted.

That's the thing they finally care about. Jeez. And you're right. So there's a map where you can filter and see what repeaters are in your area. But at one time, they were touting some sort of link system and talking about the equipment and some of the forms that you can use. There were a couple. Roadkill Radio Network was... Because they operate one of the repeaters down

in New Orleans, and I know before they delinked that system, I was talking to people all around the country. There were people setting them up on Zello, too. Interesting. Neither here nor there, though. I mean mean like i said gmrs wound up being

the radio service i bought into mostly because if i can't talk to my wife and my daughter on it then it the utility for it for me goes down really fast and i'm not going to convince my wife to spend the time or the effort to get a ham radio license, especially when you consider the fact that like a technician class license, I can get most of the capabilities of that in GMRS. A hundred percent. Being all UHF. Right. I mean,

as it stands, I forget, I know who Terrence, you and I talked about, but like I built a man pack radio system and I have a 40 foot telescoping mast. So I was able to sit in my backyard on battery power and tag the repeater in New Orleans 34 miles away. And you're one of the few people I've seen

that actually built a man-pack for that utility for that reason, other than people just doing it because it's a fun, cool thing to do. I i mean i like to build them too but like you actually do have a purpose for what you built which is which is good yeah do you think we're gonna we're gonna see the fcc allow data modes on on gmrs at higher wattages here in the future or or even data modes over repeater that'd be outstanding honestly i don't think the fcc is going to go down that road. And I think even if they do, I think the community is,

I don't think the community is going to embrace it. Because what I've seen at the GMRS community, and we're going like way off topic, but y'all got me there. You're welcome. What I'm seeing in the GMRS community is this huge schism that's developed where like half of them want to push the radio service to do more and have greater capabilities, and the other half are continuing to trot out this line of,

well, if you want to do that, you should get a ham license. And I see that big split in the community where half say, why don't we push to be able to do more with this? And why don't we be more experimental? And the other half is just kind of like not embracing that. Well, the half that wants more, you know, features and privileges, just form a lobbyist group like the ARL and go lobby your politicians. Oh,

just what I wanted to hear. The idea of lobbying anybody for anything just makes my stomach twist, even though I'm mature enough to understand that's probably how things get done in this world, but I still don't like any part of it being that they can't even update their, their website from 1942, the fcc i don't see them ever doing anything with you guys i mean they have their original 1942 website is that what i just heard i do believe their website to get logged in and and go through that licensing process is a little bit clunky.

A little bit clunky. I'm trying to be nice. Do you know what the joke is in the GMRS community? That the FCC's website is the test. Yes. If you can navigate their website, you can have a license. Congratulations.

One of the Facebook GMRS pages or whatever, I put out a while back that if you guys don't like the website because everybody complains about it, talk to your congressman. You know, they're the ones that are going to get the FCC to update the website, if anyone is. And basically, I was just laughed at and and they they said well we just won't get a license we're just going to operate without a license their website is a deterrent it to such a degree that's like I mean yeah I wrote out and I post this on my website there's like a blog that I did about but I I I wrote out the actual instructions on how to navigate their website because so many people were like, what do I do with this?

And it could be better for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, it's been an hour and 40 minutes, and I'm surprised my wife hasn't knocked on the door and checked for signs of life. She's either ignoring me or she's watching me. Either would be well than balanced.

She's studying for her ham test. You know what? If she is, I'll be impressed and she'll probably beat me to it, but I don't think so. Anyway, left to right, Jared, Drew, Terrence, where can the listeners check out y'all's content, even though it's kind of, you know, for those of you who are watching, it's on the screen, but we also have audio-only listeners who can't see what channels y'all run.

So my channel, Two Alpha Solutions, it's on YouTube. It's the number two. And then Alpha spelled out in Solutions. Like I said, there's not much on my channel. There's a little bit. I have grand plans of making videos, but my everyday work keeps me

pretty busy, so I don't get a whole big chance to make videos like I want to. But I do have some videos whole a big chance to make videos like I want to but I do have some videos on a crossband repeater Some of those tactical TRI PRC 152 radios. I was doing a tutorial on them. I Do have some more videos that I'm gonna do on those as well. I think I have two of them out If you want to check out my my my radio shack that i have here it's on my channel i have a i think it's a 20 or 30 minute video of a tour of my shack and and my

tower setup that i have outside i have a about 100 foot tower nice with all my antennas so um and then actually i i built it so it can lay over flat. A friend of mine brings his tow truck over and I made this big lifting and lowering device contraption for it that I fabricated and welded and everything. And we use the winch on his tow truck to lower it and raise it back up. So it's, it's kind of a cool thing, but two alpha solutions. Nice. Drew. Well, Phil, Andrew, Nick, but two alpha solutions. Nice. Drew?

Well, Phil, Andrew, Nick, thank you so much for having us on. This was a lot of fun. It was great meeting you guys. I'm Drew and viewers can find me at YouTube at Terminal Element or you can go to terminalelement.com and it'll redirect right to my YouTube channel.

I also have an ex and Instagram with a small following. I make videos and tell some stories about calls sometimes and I have a lot of fun doing it. So come check me out. Nice. Terrence, last but not least. So mine is Partisan Comms Group. You can find me on YouTube. I also have a website. It's PartisanCompsGroup.com and sometimes I'll post some me on youtube i also have a website it's a partisancomsgroup.com

and sometimes i'll post some blogs on there every once in a while uh if i find something that i think is worthy of it and uh again that you know to echo drew thank you guys for inviting us on it was a lot of fun yeah i appreciate y'all joining us. I really did not expect this to go an hour and 45 minutes, but... I expected it to go long. Yeah, I didn't expect it to go this long, but... I got a lot to say. You get this many podcasters, content creators together, and I guess chatting is going to come with the territory,

but we'll go ahead and punt this one out the door for the eight people that stuck around to the end. I'm impressed. Y'all need therapy, but thank you for hanging around. I think one's your wife, dude. Uh,

no, she, she probably signed off an hour ago. All right, guys, stick around with me for just one minute while the outro and everything clears. I can make sure we get your audio and We'll talk to everybody in another week.

Bye, everybody. Later. See you. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Outro Music