The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Doomscrolling until SHTF

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

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Welcome back to 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 mwfpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Rabelais, and my co-host Andrew Bobo is on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matterfacts Podcast. For those of y'all that saw the post on Instagram and Facebook, we had a little bit of a technical difficulty with last week's show because, you know, for a podcaster, a case of laryngitis is kind of a career-ending injury and that's where I was last week. On the day that Andrew and I

were supposed to record, sounded like mickey mouse that would have been really funny oh it would have been hilarious i i honestly that morning it wasn't like completely gone y'all could probably still hear it i'm not still not at 100 but i'm much better than i was but like that morning the reason i didn't throw the penalty flag out first thing that morning and say, dude, we're done, is it sounded bad, but if I kind of like, if I didn't push my voice, if I whispered a little bit, I could still, I had most of my voice still, so I was like, okay, I can do a roll in and say, this is the Matter of Facts ASMR episode, and you know, turn my gain up a little bit, and you know, whisper into the mic, bit and you know whisper into the mic and i thought i could pull that off and then by the afternoon my voice had completely and totally gone i mean

even whispering for more than about 50 or 20 seconds and my vocal cords just quit so needless to say um this is the most talking i've done in like three days which my wife has been very appreciative of the peace and quiet i was gonna say she's probably like holy crap like really quiet yes yes everybody knows i'm a talker that's my personality but it's given me lots of time for quiet reflection because there was no loud reflection going on does uh does every once in a while does gillian like does she say you know from uh zombie land she goes does she ever say hey phil do you ever play the quiet game no you should play the quiet game no although my sister that you met uh this past year the matter of fact had the uh the matter of fact's camping

trip she sees the post on instagram and says hey if you need anything holla at us and i was like oh you butthead just text her in all caps i need this it was one of those moments in time where i was like all you could do is just giggle you know because who who can you rely upon to give you crap in your moment of weakness but friends and family? Right. So that's where I was.

But we've got a couple of little topics to hit up today, one of which is actually coming straight out. The very last one is actually coming straight out of the, matter of facts, the patron group because they kind of got my gears turning with something that Kyle Wilson has taken over for us recently. But we'll save that for the end. So I guess to start with, like, what have we been working on? Because, you know, we used to do this thing forever ago, it seems like, what are you doing in prepping? And it was a weekly mini topic of like, what are you doing in prepping and it was a weekly mini topic of like what are you doing and

then i think we got out of the habit because we had a couple of weeks of just not really much happening like adult stuff came up so i don't think that's going to be a weekly thing but i do think it merits talking about when there's like something we're investigating, working on, working towards. And like most people know that recently, after years of procrastinating, I finally started dipping my hand into off-grid communications. And there's a lot of ham operators out there that have already taken me to task pretty hard for not getting a basic ham license, which it's on my radar. I'm

going to do it for myself. But my problem with ham is that the barrier to entry involves testing and involves studying and things that, A, I am unlikely to get my wife to do, and B, I am not going to get my 11-year-old to do. So if there's a radio system or set of frequencies that requires that for me to be able to talk to my wife and daughter, regardless of how good it is from a technical standpoint, it does not suit my needs. As opposed to getting into GMRS, which I recently did, which was a $35 license figuring out the most abominable 1995 CompuServe website I've ever seen in my life. And, you know, to criticize the federal government for just a moment, but for the amount of taxes we pay, y'all could really update the FCC's website a little bit to make it more user-friendly. Just saying. Just putting that out there, that stuff, that was ridiculous.

Yes, Holly, we love you too, and, um, Stuart, no, we're not going to start over again, you just missed it, but it was just us BSing anyway, so, you know, no great loss there. So, yeah, I did recently get a GMRS license, picked up a pair of radios, and I've been dipping myself into that a little at a time. I mean, like we've talked about on this show before, financial responsibility is a thing, and I do have a monthly budget that I stick to when it comes to spending money on quote-unquote prepperish stuff. So it's going to have to be done in stages i've actually got a uh an upgraded antenna sitting back there that needs to go on the truck with the adapters i need to plug it into this handheld so i can get a little more range out of it and that will probably be the solution over time until i can put a dedicated probably like a 15 or 25 watt rig into the truck.

But again, it's all the idea that like GMRS is what fits my needs. Mostly because the barrier to entry is fairly limited. And I can get my entire media family legally licensed under my license. So my wife, my daughter, if we're out camping with my sister, my brother-in-law, I can throw them a radio. They can use my call sign. Like that's what fits my needs. Ham, I'd love to get into eventually, but if I can't get everybody else in my, my immediate group to get licensed with ham, then that just doesn't serve me you know what i'm saying bud yeah um i mean it still doesn't hurt to i'm not you know you have the gmrs radio but i'd still

get a ham radio uh just to listen because you can listen and you don't have to broadcast without a you with without a license you can have you don't need a license to listen so um and and then in those cases of extreme emergencies uh you can broadcast yeah we'll call over the radio but we'll call it what it is i know i see what you're saying i mean if you're if it fits your if it fits your needs it fits your needs so you know the gm gmr-R-S. Yeah. Still waking up. But, yeah, so, yeah, no, if that fits your budget, if that fits your needs rather, then so be it. Use that. More power to you.

Yeah. And I actually, I do have a tentative commitment from a listener of ours to come on the show and, like, talk to us about Ham and GMRS because he is familiar with both of them. At least the last time i talked to him he was a little shy about having his face or his last name be on the podcast which i totally understand i get like for for people that are not in content creation they usually like to maintain their anonymity and i am a-okay with that but i've been looking for somebody that come on the show and talk to us about ham and GMRS because I know only as much as I know. And I feel like I could talk semi intelligently about it,

but I'd much rather have somebody that knows it better than I do. You know what I mean? Yes. Stuart. Yes. Yes. Yes. I plan to get a UHF VHF radio as well.

I plan to get a UHF VHF radio as well. I plan to get my technician class license, but everything is always in a priority list. And my priority list was get this set up first because this is what I can use to talk to my wife and kid. And the fact that it will piggyback onto those FRS radios back there just makes it all the more useful. Because like we still use those when we're around the neighborhood, and I know that those FRS radios, range-wise, will reach from one end of this neighborhood to the other. I am still waiting for an opportunity to stretch out these GMRS radios and see what kind of range I can get out of those in this environment.

So that's kind of what i've been yeah there was uh of course now i'm now his stuff does not pop up at all on youtube um but uh there's a i cannot think of the freaking name of the guy um basically it's a ham I cannot think of the frickin' name of the guy. Basically, it's a ham crash course. Ham radio crash course. Ham radio crash course, yeah. I thought about reaching out to him as well. I actually, before I crashed my phone, and by crashed my phone, I forgot my password and had to manually do a whole reset on my phone.

my phone i forgot my password and had to manually do a whole reset on my phone uh before all that happened and i lost access to instagram again i uh put it out there about you know who to get on and he came highly recommended uh from multiple people sent messages uh saying this guy so i was going to reach out to him and about uh about coming on too so we got options i just just needed to and after the show i need to get my uh access back to the instagram for the show because yeah i like um you don't forget you forget the password on your phone and had to manually do a manual reset i lost everything. You're too young to be doing that, man. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. There is no statute of limitations on forgetting stuff that screws you over.

As soon as I started seeing gray in my beard, I started playing the senile man. You know what? I mean, it may not show on camera, but if you get up close enough, there is some salt mixed in with this pepper back here and then of course you know the my you can't see anything there my male pattern baldness is just in full effect that's the annoying part about going bald in your 30s and 40s though is i still have enough hair on the sides that it shows it's just on the top that it's bald so you should shave your head i told my

wife i'm i'm about this close to getting a skull shaver or something and just doing it every day and keeping it up because like do it you know when my hair was thin on the top but i has hair on the sides i could go like a couple of weeks and then buzz it all down real short and now i'm at the point where like three days after she cuts it you can plainly see that i'm just bald as hell on top so it's like what what am i doing here yeah it's i i have hair and i it's i get sick of it so i i shave it off you can't shave it off yeah well i shaved it off for years and then it got so pissed off at me it stopped growing that's my that That's my going theory.

Stuart saying, also try to get someone on that knows about off-grid mesh networking. I've been looking into mesh. Yeah, that is interesting. Okay, so Gotenna and Meshtastic I've looked into. My immediate, my gut check reaction when I looked into Gotenna was that I think, and I could be wrong, but it seemed, in the back of my head, I remember searching that very late at night. And I seem to remember the price point being like, that sounds like something good for a mag, but for a small group or an individual, it seems prohibitively costly. But for a small group or an individual, it seems prohibitively costly. And I could be wrong.

I could have been thinking about something else. But what got me looking into mesh networking was actually ATAC and iTAC and all that, which if you're on an Android, you can make it work with mesh networking and radio. If you're on iPhone with iTAC, you can't. That's a whole other discussion. iTac and ATAC, for anybody that's never used either one, they're interesting programs. They have really cool use cases. I just don't know how much they fit into the average preparedness scenario. You know what I'm saying? I mostly dabbled in them because it was interesting technology and I'm wired that way.

If something's interesting, I'm going to look into it just to satisfy my curiosity. But we've gotten way off topic. Do you want to let the listeners in on what you're working on or do we just save it for later? No, it's not. I mean, everybody knows I bought a truck. What? So, yeah. Andrew joined the Hilux gang. no i mean well i mean it's so i mean everybody knows i bought a truck uh what so yeah andrew and uh joined the high lux gang everybody ahead it's going to convert their shit into technicals when the shtf kicks off i've been looking at what it would take to mount a 50 in the back

so a friend with a mig welder right so no i bought so i have i bought the deck drawer system uh i installed that uh and then which it took me a lot longer than uh i wanted it to it basically was an all-day project uh i was by i was doing it myself um and every once in a while it was funny because i was doing it because it basically it got delivered the it got delivered the friday or like the day i was going up north to my parents it got delivered so i ripped the the friday or like the day i was going up north to my parents it got delivered so i ripped the box apart threw everything in the bed of the truck and then drove up to my mom and dad's and installed it the next day uh and so every once in a while like my dad come out and he would kind of look and he'd make fun he's like hey you're still working

on this blah blah blah and in the directions it even says like you know get a friend and have beers kind of thing and i so i asked him i said well i didn't have any help he goes you didn't offer any beer i was like that's true but no it was it was good because uh the one thing i'm looking at and and i mean so yeah so anyway i got the got that installed i'm looking at or i have the bed rack in the garage that i need to install and then i also just got the rooftop tent delivered so I have everything set up I'm looking at because a buddy of mine are talking about going camping at the end of this month so I think I'm going to try to I need to try to get it set up for the end of

this month but anyway one thing that I'm working on is I'm looking at starting my own YouTube channel basically basically what it's going to consist of is the truck and I'm looking at starting my own YouTube channel. Basically, what it's going to consist of is the truck, and I'm just going to, as I buy modifications for it, it's basically the one thing that I see on these YouTube channels recently or that are out there right now is, yeah, a lot of guys, you do see some stuff that are, okay, I'm in my garage, and I'm putting the rooftop tent on, or I'm putting this on, or whatever. But when it comes to putting aftermarket bumpers on read you know doing your shocks and uh your the leaf springs and all kinds of stuff like that like for something you don't

see anyway i don't anyway for like on the toyota for the toyota side i see a lot of stuff that are they're doing it in like almost professional shops like they raise the truck up they have the lift they have everything you need to everything you need imaginable um one of my good friends he does have he's a mechanic he does have a small shop nothing like crazy like what you see online but him and i and he's a youtuber as well uh and he's got his own channel, Carswell Customs, and he, like, posts all that kind of stuff too. So in collaboration, I think I was looking at starting a YouTube channel, just basically taking the truck, doing some camping stuff, trying to review some gear, just doing my own little setup. And then doing some aftermarket, like there's a few bumpers that you know

i'm looking at different bumpers now i'm looking at a couple um the front rear bumpers and just basically showing in a normal shop that guy that might just everybody has like if you have these tools uh and then just kind of showing how to do it and without the lift and all that stuff. So I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there's stuff out there, but it was just an idea. And then just, I don't know, I'm just trying to figure out something else to get my interest just because my crazy work schedule, it's hard to record and it's hard to keep interest in something when you can't do it as often as you want.

So I'm trying to find something just to keep that interest. And then it's going to be fun. I mean, yeah, so yeah. And then, like, he's getting into Michigan just passed some stuff about spearfishing and everything. So he's buying, like, spearfishing gear. So we're talking about a couple trips that we're gonna make to the great lakes and do some spearfishing and stuff like that so i don't know it's it's just a kind of in the phase right now the planning phase i'm still trying to come up

with like a name uh for the youtube channel and stuff like that so uh so yeah so that's kind of in the works i don't expect it anytime soon or if at all i don't know it might just fall through the cracks but we'll see um but other than that the other thing i'm working on is i just put the paperwork in for another suppressor and this is number what for you let's see i have a 30 cal when you have to count five five six four yeah let's think number four uh so yeah so i'm buying this is going to be it's a 45 uh it's it's rated for full auto 45 uh um god i need to wake up sooner So I get the fog on my head. Um, basically it's a 45, uh, but what's nice is it's going to cover obviously nine millimeter.

Uh, and my biggest one though, is I need to look into it, but, uh, 45, 70 government. So I have a lever action, Marlin lever action. I need to look into getting that, uh, threaded the barrel on that threaded. I need to look into getting that threaded, the barrel on that threaded, and then I will hunt with a suppressed.45-70, which is silly quiet. It makes you giggle for everything I've read on it. If it'll work for.45-70, it would ostensibly also work for.458 SOCOM, and you've got enough lowers you could build an upper for that yeah but I don't want to

do another caliber so your 458 SOCOM upper is still on my list somewhere it's just my hold up right now is that given the state of the reloading community and the availability of components and

power and everything else, I am so adamantly opposed to getting into another cartridge I have to stock for and reload for when I'm already trying to build up my stockpile of things I already have. And that's what keeps me out of 458 SOCOM. On top of that, what would me out of 458 socom on top yeah no i mean i can run what would i do with it right no i mean yeah i can run 450 socom uh 460 roland uh 4570 450 bushmaster 45 long colt 45 super magnum 44 special 40 40 caliber um 20 you know 22mm, 300 blackout, which the 300 blackout wouldn't be too bad either. I do have parts that I gutted from another AR build. When prices went through the roof, I gutted my 300 blackout build. So, but yeah, so anyway, I mean, and then the one thing, I know this is going to be

kind of a bigger, a larger suppressor than what it's needed, uh i i like to buy for multi-kail and then buy specific later on so i might still buy like a nine millimeter or something like that down the road i don't know um i don't see it right now but uh but like i got my my scorpion and then i have a strybog as well and so i was looking at uh like the scorpion um set it up for kind of more of a close quarters uh sub gun and then uh but you know maybe something i could throw in the backpack set it up for night vision uh and then also put a trilogic trilogic adapter on it and then that way i can throw this can on it and this can uh you can it does actually it does have the ability to kind of shrink actually in size so i had you know it's just like the the 22 can from rugged that i have basically there's a section

that you can actually unscrew the the top unscrew it and then you can make it actually more modular so it actually will come down and it's not by much but uh it is so it but the downside is is it does uh decrease your baffles so when you're losing baffles you're losing it's not it's not going to be ass suppressed so but going for it what's that well i was going to say remind me on your scorpion it's it's not a micro right it's a it's like seven and seven and a half inch barrel no it's no it's the the shorty so you got the micro with like the five and a half inch barrel okay hb industries i am 99 sure they sell the five and a half inch barrels with the tri-lug already built into them instead of having like an adapter the screws on and then you have one more thing that could potentially work its way loose

just yeah i mean i guess yeah I have a tri-lug. I have an adapter already that I haven't put on anything. So I'll probably do that. I know talking to one of my good friends, we were talking about it, and basically if it's something that's going to be permanent, I'm just going to not basically get some of the, well, not JBL, but basically get some of that rock set yep and put some rock set on it and it's not going anywhere true uh so that was my idea was

do something like that especially if it's going to be permanent which probably will be uh but yeah so that's what uh that's kind of what i've been working on and then obviously just Obviously, just still trying to, yeah, I don't even know. I was just working on so much crap. I thought I had my area around my safe and stuff. I finally had it kind of organized, and then I brought a bunch more stuff. From when I moved, I stored it at my parents', and so now it looks like my safe area, it looks like something threw up over there again.

So I need to reorganize, but it's all good. Dude, joining the ranks of homeownership is not a move in, get the keys, and you're done process. It's a multi-year, unfudging your area process. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yeah. So I'm throwing this in because this came to my attention just yesterday um you may not be familiar with twin bros 3d printing or hoffman tactical or what the super

safety is but stop me if you are continue okay so there's a youtuber called hoffman tactical and he 3d prints shooty things that that's like if you're curious about him go look up on youtube he actually has a lot of pretty cool content um psr print shoot repeat has also done a lot of content using his products inviting him on the on the that show and you know anything farm related i'm gonna at least pay a little bit of attention to because that's my wheelhouse but um one of the things hoffman tactical recently designed and released the files for is the so-called super safety which it is a push button safety for the ar-15 platform that replaces the traditional rotating safety selector and what it does is it engages the safety anytime the bolt is out of battery so let's think about this

you pull the trigger the bolt starts to move comes out of battery it flips the safety on which resets the trigger and like pushes your finger forward it then if you continue to hold rearward pressure when the ball goes back into battery it releases the safety and you can pull the trigger again so what he's done is basically in what i think he set out to do even though he didn't specifically front it this way is i think he has attempted to create a device that is the force reset trigger taken to the next level where because it is literally engaging the safety between shots there is absolutely no rational argument that the atf can make under the existing framework of the laws to say that this is a machine gun part because it does not fire multiple shots per function of the trigger because it

literally you pull the trigger the the super safety turns the safety on and then releases the safety and then you pull the trigger again like it does not allow you to use the legislation as currently written however he designed and printed these out of p out of uh pla and that doesn't last very long so twin bros 3d printing which uses metal additive manufacturing started manufacturing and selling these things made out of metal and apparently yesterday the atf kicked in their front door there's a chunk of the audience hey hey raggle fraggle there's a chunk of the audience that is probably out there along with a good chunk of the internet by the way that is like rolling their eyes like you literally were selling machine gun parts you morons how did you think you were going to get away with this but then there's a chunk of the internet that says the law is written the way it is and this

does not fit the letter of the law so what's the atf doing so i don't know i the atf is going to atf i mean yeah that was that's the thing is they they're they they're going to take into account of what they think their law, since they rewrote the definition. And it's going to be interesting because we'll see the bump stock ban, the bump stock hearing of the Supreme Court still has not been, I have not seen any judgment yet. There hasn't been. Yeah. I have not seen any judgment yet. There hasn't been. Yeah, and so it'll be interesting to see what that, when that comes out, what happens, because that'll change a lot of stuff, especially if they get FRT and even this and stuff like that.

But still, even then, I mean, whether you think they're selling machine gun parts or not, like, I mean. The NFA should be done away with regardless. Well, the NFA, yeah, the NFA should be done away with faster than the ATF should be disbanded. But, yeah, that's the thing, though, is they're exercising their Second Amendment right. And if you look at the way this trigger moves and operates rather it moved like it forced reset yeah the just like the frts your trigger or your finger does move forward and you have to pull the trigger again it's literally it's going by the definition of what the atf and congress and all that crap is

what they and what they deemed to be a machine gun versus not a machine gun uh just because that we found a workaround the people found a workaround and everything it's just it's pissing the government off and so they're sitting there and they're like well what can we do more to stomp the boot and yeah they don't want anything resembling or even close to having they don't want the common man to have a a machine gun that they have anything close to it that they have they don't want other citizenry to have the same technology that they have because it then it puts them at a level even a level plane playing field and they don't like that they want the government wants

to have the upper hand and because if something were to happen they don't want the people to be able to fight back see the only thing about that scenario not that i completely disagree with you that that makes me curl my lip up is this idea that if the common man had super safeties or frts or whatever else that puts them on par with the government and the government's need to stomp the boot harder is to maintain a uh maintain like a um oh jesus i'm drawing a total blank on what the word i was trying to use uh basically like the government in order to maintain our safety or maintain their own safety really has to have a has to have superior fire power over the common man but then i always point out to people i'm like

okay let's think about this for just one moment the state the government because i don't i i lump all elements of the state in together at this point i don't care if we're talking about the atf the fbi the cia i don't care if we're talking about the secret service i don't care if we're talking about the the standing military i don't care. You are all part of the same big conglomerate. And one day you're probably going to get an order that's going to cause you to have a stroke of conscience and you're going to have to decide if you want to buck that or not. But all that being beside the point. But we're talking about the people that, like, if you piss the government off bad enough, they will put a freaking bearcat in your front yard with a SWAT team. And if that doesn't get the bad enough, they will put a freaking bearcat in your front yard with a SWAT team.

And if that doesn't get the point across, they will send the freaking National Guard to your address. Like, the state has limitless resources to pour into a single area to fix a problem their way. And their way is always to stomp on people until they comply. I mean, look at freaking Waco. ways to stomp on people until they comply. I mean, look at freaking Waco. If anybody wants, if anybody, because that came up on my radar more recently, Wendigoom on YouTube did a really, really good job of breaking down that whole debacle. And I think probably the most fair way humanly possible, because like, let's call it what it is, David Koresh was probably not a great guy, but the government was so worried about him touching kids that

they burnt down a building full of women and children. I'm just saying, a little odd. was probably not a great guy, but the government was so worried about him touching kids that they burnt down a building full of women and children. I'm just saying, a little odd. So I cast out this idea that they need a firepower advantage to maintain control of the populace. My point of view is, if the laws you were trying to enforce are so egregious and so unpopular that you have to literally point a gun at people to enforce are so egregious and so unpopular that you have to literally point a gun at people to enforce the majority of them, your laws are probably wrong, and you are too. And that's kind of where I come down on this whole issue of like the super safeties and the FRTs and everything else. Obviously, there's a large enough proportion of the gun community that thinks that law is stupid.

And every little workaround they can find to get around it and comply with the letter of the law, they're embracing. And every time they do that, the state has to stick their boot on their neck because they can't tolerate dissent. Instead of having that moment of, are we the baddies? Yes, y'all are the baddies. Yes, the thing you're trying to force people to not do is immoral on the face of it. I just, I'm not going to get into a rant. I don't have the voice for it today. I'm just well but what i'm saying is like and what i'm saying what i'm referring to is when

i'm saying like you know they don't want the people to have even close to what the technologies they have as far as like photo and our belt fed all this crap like you i know like what you're i feel like i get what you're saying, but at the same time, but that's what I'm trying to say is, like, they don't want anything close to it. Yeah. Like, they don't want a single thing that could even resemble or give even the slightest advantage or, you know, yeah, advantage. We're never going to have an advantage over a, that's something that's a full auto.

It's never going to have an advantage over a, that's something that's a full auto. It's never going to happen. But giving the idea that giving the people something that could even resemble or give them a kind of like get their foot up off the ground a little bit to be able to do something more, no, that's not going to happen. So, yeah, so that's what I'm saying, and that's what they don't like. And so you're seeing it's going to happen more often. And if you look at some of the states, I think Oregon, Washington State, one of the two, I don't remember now,

there's a bill that basically guts FFLs, completely guts them. I mean, here in Michigan pass they pass laws that make it harder uh for people to buy a firearm if you don't have a cpl uh now is do i do i think that everybody should have cpls yeah it should make it makes things a lot easier to purchase a firearm do i think cpls are needed no i don't think we should i don't think we need to pay. In Michigan, we got to pay $115 every five years just to get permission to exercise our right, really, to conceal carry. It's ridiculous. Now, what I could see is, is now that this happened, this law passed, I could see them jack up the price for CPLs. They would never do that.

That's what I could see happen. The government has your best interests at heart. Well, it's not like the government doesn't have a well-documented history of applying a quote-unquote tax to something that they really want you to stop doing. It's like, no, no, no, we're not trampling on your rights. You can have a machine gun. You just have to be able to go through an FBI background check, pay a $200 tax stamp, and then pay anywhere from like, what, $12,000 on the low end up to well over $100,000 for a legit transferable machine gun because we fixed the

supply, which jacked the cost up through the roof. You can have your rights. You can conceal carry a firearm, no problem. You just have to jump through all the hoops, and you have to pay the freaking money, and you have to do all the crap we said. We're not tamping down on your rights. We're just taxing them. I mean, after saying all this, I think, I mean, it is funny because, like, I just put in for, what, my fourth suppressor. So I'm paying a $200 tax stamp per suppressor.

But it's one of those things where I like my hearing, and so when I go shoot, it's nice to have a quiet gun. And that's the thing is you've got to pay to play. And if you want a suppressor, you've got to do it. Something that should be over-the be over the counter not regulated at all uh is so yeah so i don't know it's it's definitely um it'll be interesting to see where this goes because obviously they rated them uh they're probably going to sit there and be like well we want your guys's servers and we want your guys's uh uh your they've already said they

didn't keep any customer records good they should i mean that's the thing is they'll go to their shipping company and get them from them but you know yeah or credit card i mean it's they're they're already like uh if anybody's not familiar with it they're that it came out that there's a whole another list uh that basically the government has been keeping uh basically putting the american been keeping a list basically putting the american people on a list again basically building dossiers and profiles on american citizens and they're they're and they're using every tactic imaginable i mean they're looking at history like i mean they're probably looking at search history they're looking at

purchase history they're going to credit cards you're going to banks and they're actually they're not even presenting a warrant and these banks are actually just here you go here's the information they're requesting the information without a warrant and these companies are just handing it over because they're shitheads well no they're they're handing it over because they don't they want to they want to be on the side of right right being all they think is right well no no i was saying that sarcastically they want to be on the side of right. Right being... All they think is right. Well, no, no, no. I was saying that sarcastically.

They want to be on the side of not having their own business turned upside down because they tried to stick it to the man, which is cuckoldry of the First Order, but that's just... Well, I mean, you see what's happening when that when that happens i mean the new york uh the new york mayor uh even though like as much as i hate that dude and he's a freaking d-bag uh he's he's been speaking out recently about the biden regime and the uh the immigrants of the or the illegal immigration and all this crap and lo and behold

he gets raided and there's some charges up against him now and all kinds of stuff and you know whether he i i don't like care for the guy at all but still i mean that's exactly what they're i mean look at trump i mean i'm not the biggest fan of trump but they're they're doing everything they can to not to make it so he cannot run uh if that's not election interference i don't know what is i mean the fact that leftist states and leftist uh attorneys and judges and all kinds of crap were pulling him off the ballot based off something that he wasn't even convicted on it it that right there that is election fraud like you can't tell me it's not.

So anyway, that's a different rabbit hole. It's not when the party in power does it. Right. So this was actually what we were going to talk about last week. But then, you know, cold and flu season decided to pay me an unscheduled visit. You're trying to be a sissy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I should have called you up just so you could i should have recorded it what i sounded like it was it was entertaining well it was no it was hilarious because let's call it what it is like you've

met me i don't have like a super deep boomy voice but i sounded like mickey mouse it was again would have been funny it was hilarious and frustrating in equal parts. I would have pulled up some clips of Donald Duck to go along with it. Okay, the next time I get laryngitis, we'll do that. But yeah, doom scrolling, the pit of worry. I happen to be... I don't do it often because Reddit is a cesspool of humanity, but there are a couple of communities that have pretty good information on Reddit.

And those are the ones I tend to stick to. There is actually an r backslash prepping that I have completely just shed because I don't know that that that group there. I don't know that that that group there there's a broad spectrum of preparedness and I just don't feel like most of the people in that group are my people personally but um I did notice a thread pop up and they were talking about like prepping for specific emergencies and then this inevitably started the downward spiral of people that were like, oh, well, have you heard about this? And have you heard about this? And have you heard about this? And it was just like this litany of people who are very obviously scrolling through Instagram or TikTok or whatever your flavor of social media is.

And every little bit of fear porn that popped up in front of their face was the new thing to be worried about. And that became their focus. Like we're going to get nuked tomorrow. I need, I need, um, what the hell is it called? The little thing that makes the clacking noise when the radiation.

Oh, Geiger. Yeah. I need a Geiger counter. I need gas mass. I need this. I need that. And it's,

it turns in like this, this, the snake eating its own tail of rushing headfirst from one emergency into another and just as soon as you start to prep for that emergency you find some new bit of fear porn in your doom scrolling and you got to go prep for that too and this got me thinking about like some introspective thinking about our own community because like i have really tried really really hard to never fall victim to that and to push back against that because my point of view is we all have the same base needs at the end of the day we need food water shelter you know and we

need the ability to maintain ourselves so that's security and medical and like if you focus on i need to cover those base needs, then the emergence you're prepping for should be a secondary concern. And I really, I really get uncomfortable with this idea that there's a, there's a population of people out there that are just scrolling through one, one scary thing after another, scaring the hell out of themselves and indulging in doom scrolling. I don't think it's productive. I think it is actually directly unproductive because I think what it does... Okay, so forgive me, I'm going to date myself, but you remember the Looney Tunes skit when

a Looney Tunes, usually I think it was Daffffy duck he'd get hit with a hammer and when the hammer would lift up there's like five little five little ducks running around you know in a melee before they all come back together that's the way i envisioned this oddly enough it's like you get so frazzled and and your your attention is going in so many different directions that you just don't do anything you turn into this chaotic little creature that can't focus your attention and can't focus in a direction to do something positive because your attention is so distributed in so many different directions. You become reactive, not proactive. You stop being a prepper and you start being a person with a debit card and an Amazon account that is freaking out over one thing after the other and then buying stuff to prepare for something. And then you're never going to practice with it or use it or make it useful because by the time it shows up in the mail, you've got a new thing to be scared as hell about.

Does any of that sound like an unfair characterization? I mean, I mean I know. I'm just kind of like letting my thoughts out here. I found a Geiger counter. On ready made resources. If you want one. Not really. No I mean.

Fear sells. And honestly. Why did we get into preparedness? It's, it's not necessarily fear, but it was just preparing for something down the road that is just the possibility of happening. I mean you you know keep a spare tire kit and you're a spare tire or inflatable kit and whatever you had whatever have you you know you're in a sense in a proper but but that's the thing is like fear sells and so and that's what a lot of these you know some of these shows and stuff like that they they want to build on that fear and they want to get that that little nugget in the you know in people's heads because it's like well hey uh it's gonna it's gonna sell so it's just a matter of having the willpower and having that discipline to kind of sit back and all right what do i need what do

i what do i do not or what don't i need uh because you know that's that's the most that's the way it should be i mean when my brain started turning after watching like the show jericho and then thinking okay or you know it not necessarily um nuclear disaster nuclear holocaust or whatever something new whatever it i was thinking okay if the power were to go out what what's gonna happen what do i have what can i do stuff like that now does that does my brain go to well if the power goes out and never comes back on like well yeah it travels to that often uh but uh at the same time it's like you keep it in check and and that's the thing is you just you're okay well what can i do right now okay well i can get my food in order i can get my water in order your guns ammo your medical check. And that's the thing is you just, okay, well, what can I do right now? Okay, well, I can get my food in order. I can get my water in order, your guns, ammo, your medical supplies. Like

that's just every day. I mean, having, working on your food supply, working on your water supply, especially if you live in the city. I mean, heck, even if you don't live in a city, if you, if you have a well, I mean, you should have have you should have a water supply in case your well goes out uh the water the city i mean that's i'm building up my water ever since i moved to ionia uh it has a i've been building my water supply just because of if a if the city water goes out uh if there's a if there's a pipe burst or if something's going on and you get a, uh, you get a contamination, something happens in the water's contaminated. Uh, and so they have a boil advisory, stuff like that. Well, I'd rather, I'd rather not pull, like, I'd rather be safe than sorry. So I'd rather not pull water from the tap if I have to boil it rather than I

can just go downstairs and I have two liter bottles. I have a five gallon jug that's full. I have all kinds of stuff that, you know, I have water set aside to where I don't need to boil it and I know it's safe. So I can just go ahead with my day and I can drink it. I can, you know, I can go to work and bathe if I need to, stuff like that. So it's just, yeah, that worry, I mean, it's good to worry. It's good to think about worst case scenario and try to prepare for certain things but keep it in check just have an idea and then just you know don't let it snowball that's my biggest thing is you just don't let it snowball and if you buy gear i mean i know people with geiger counters i know people with the the

smaller ones that it's basically a tablet. It's basically a, I think if I remember, I think it will turn a certain color if it detects radiation. It's like simple stuff like that. You don't need a full-blown Geiger counter because you have to calibrate it. It should be calibrated. So, yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, and honestly, to each their own.

If you have the money and you're you're panicking and you're buying like crazy buy do it like if you have the money go ahead and do it but for the average american we don't have that budget of hey i'm just gonna buy this this and this all right now so and that's the thing is upgrade i you know like I just upgraded my stove, my camping stove. Uh, and the, the old one, it might, I might actually kind of pay it forward a little bit. This one was given to me when I didn't have one. So I might actually pay it forward and give it to a friend or something who needs one and, or keep it for inside the house. Uh, and just in case, you know, in case the power does go out and I can't. However, I do have a gas range.

However, there are some places, some cities and stuff, they have the ability to shut your gas off. If the power goes out, your gas will get shut off. Well, if that happens, what are you going to do now? Think about that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, actually, I mean, I guess he's not wrong. Prep for comfort, not fear, which is correct. And, you know, that's what I'm saying is don't let your fear get the best of you.

Let it kind of help you build that list and help you kind of think of scenarios or think of, okay, what do I need? Because that's when sometimes you get ideas. But make sure you keep it in check. I guess that's the part I'm critical of. Like I just, I don't sign off on the idea of doing things that are fear motivated. Like it's like I've told people before, whenever, whenever I get to talking about preparedness and somebody starts to say, well, that's crazy.

That'll never happen again. Or that'll never happen. And I always point out to them, I'm like, you know, what got me started preparing was Hurricane Katrina. And you cannot tell me that a Cap 4 hurricane slapping a major metro area will never happen because it has happened. And you can't tell me it'll never happen again because you're not God or Jesus Christ and you don't know. And you can't tell me it'll never happen again because you're not God or Jesus Christ. You don't know. And Hurricane Ida proved a couple years ago, yeah, it did happen again.

So, like, I personally think that to, not from a fear perspective, but from like a rational, a calm, rational perspective, say, I see this threat on the horizon based on the likelihood that it will befall my family i think we should do x and y and z so that we're not screwed if it happens and then like it goes back into that whole conversation we've had with um um is he sam or mike ford observer i always mike mike mike's his real name not his um his stage name i i i get so confused these days but anyway like so like mike always talks about doing an area study which i like because i think it's a very data-driven rational way to assess your environment and what threats are likely and what-driven rational way to assess your environment and what threats are likely and what you need to do to prepare for them and i like that approach and i think that's where i try to direct people is like make a list of all the things that could

possibly affect your family and zombie apocalypse should be down towards the bottom of the list if we're taught if we arrange them by in order of likelihood and in my case hurricanes are at the top of the list because well hurricanes and tornadoes because guess what there's a more than 100 chance that a hurricane or tornado is going to befall this family on a long enough timeline it's going to happen it's where we live and then based on what the likelihood is, I think I should prepare for these things in this order. But like, I just, what worries me about doom scrolling is that whatever is the emergency or the fear point of the moment is what gets focused on. And that is very often such a low likelihood event that people invest a lot of time and attention in that thing rather

than some that's much more likely to affect them and the other thing is even above and beyond finances i don't like doom scrolling and i don't like to watch i try to push back against doom scrolling because there is a definite there's a definite possibility of burnout from that. Like the human brain is not meant to be scared constantly. I'm a military veteran. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a well-known thing. There's a lot of veterans that came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. We all have a certain level of stress we are able to endure before something bad starts to happen to us. And we really need to get Eddie to come on the show and talk about stress and trauma and all that that because that's his area of expertise and

it applies in this world but like that's what doom scrolling is it's not the same level of fear or of stress as like something literally happening to you but it is a latent amount of stress and i worry that over time people that are constantly working themselves up into a lather over doom scrolling, it's going to have an effect on them, an emotional one. And that's harder to deal with. Like people can work hurt. They can work sick. They can work through a physical injury. But when the injury is psychological and emotional, that can be very difficult for a person to work through. So like that's's that's my whole spiel on doom scrolling just don't do it like if you're gonna prepare prepare from a rational standpoint and don't just fall victim to the latest and greatest thing that's designed to

scare the hell out of you yes as a marketing strategy to make you buy stuff. Please don't do that. And raggle-fraggle, like personally, I think it's all a marketing strategy because let's call it what it is. If you're seeing it on social media, with very few exceptions, it is designed to either get you to spend money or to get you to pay attention because the attention is money for them via advertising dollars. That's all 98% of social media is, unless you get some knuckleheads like us who just don't do this expecting a paycheck and we do it because we enjoy doing it because we get to interface with a community that we identify with. So recently, one of our patrons kyle wilson we by the way we do have a group of patrons that help support the show they kick in a couple of bucks a month you know to to whatever they're able to it pays for things like the bandwidth that we use and the StreamYard and the podcasting and all this stuff.

And it's not like it buys us PMAGs and suppressors. We have day jobs for that stuff. But it definitely offsets the cost of the show so that we don't have to spend a couple thousand dollars a year running it, which I'm infinitely grateful for that. Because I ran this podcast at a loss the first two years. But anyway, so one of our patrons in our closed chat, he has all the conflicted card decks, I believe. And he offered recently to basically pick one out of a deck at random every day and drop it into the patron chat as a way to kind of spurn conversation. And some of those conversations have been interesting. But the one thing it got me thinking about was what will SHTF look like?

Because the thing I noticed about, the thing I noticed over the course of a week watching this is that when there are instances which I feel like are much closer to our current reality like the card that came up the other day was um the government has basically cut off like ebt social security all the you know all all of the benefits programs and people have started attacking grocery shoppers as they're leaving grocery stores and stealing food from them. What would you do? And it was interesting to me that every one of the patrons, me included, all of us in this group all said almost exactly the same thing. Plate carriers and rifles, roll up into the grocery store, you know, like get the groceries and then get back in the car and leave.

And no one is going to pick a fight with, you know, a group of armed people in plate carriers with rifles. They're going to go find somebody else to F with. And every one of us said some version of that. Until you have another group with plate carriers and rifles. That's when you invite more friends. Anyway. you have another group with the plate carriers and rifles and that's when you invite more friends anyway but the thing of it was i think there was one person also mentioned like local militia group stationed in the parking lots outside the grocery stores to basically say looters y'all need to go

find a place to be or some bad's going to happen to you but it was all some version of that now here's the thing i find interesting i could see that being a scenario that would happen after a major hurricane or a major disaster where you do have small scale looting and people who are open carrying or sign of force are going to naturally be less likely to be victims of that because people that steal other people's stuff tend to not like to do a lot of heavy lifting or hard work. They're going to look for a victim, and they're going to victimize that person. And yet in other scenarios that I would say like on the timeline of a collapse, this would be fairly early in the collapse.

And then in other cards or other scenarios that are much further along in the collapse, like six months to two years, I noticed that our answers really spread out really wide and far really fast. And so it got me thinking, Andrew, like, what would SHTF look like? Because I'm getting the impression that like, everyone has their own internal idea of what SHhtf would look like and maybe that is a timeline or a perspective but like i've said before that like i think shtf in the initial stages is going to look like post katrina new orleans it's going to look like venezuela where there's still some kind of working government and law enforcement but there's going to be chaos in the streets. And it's going to be a slow progression towards something.

But what is that something? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, honestly, I don't know. It all depends on pick your scenario, whether nuclear. I'm leaning more towards economical. Something's going to happen to the economy. But no, I mean, like the whole thing with the EBT cards and stuff like that,

you shut that off if something ever happened to that, that right there is going to cause riots. The fact that when people can't uh if their ebt card goes to crap and they can't use it and they have or they don't have any money or something like that that's that's your that's going to cause some issues and that's when you're going to see a lot of looting and stuff like that too uh but yeah i don't know i mean honestly it i don't even know i mean it can look like so many different things uh that it's it's i mean you talk about doom scrolling and not letting it get to your head i mean this is basically the same thing it's it's good it could look there's so many

different scenarios uh for this that you can't it's hard to even focus on just one. But I know for a fact that I will not be, I'll be gone. You won't see me in the city. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like these are moments in time where I try to draw parallels back to something I have some kind of experience with. And, you know, my experiences again are like post-Katrina Orleans, Iraq. I mean, I haven't personally experienced Venezuela, but we've talked to a man who did, and that was quite some years ago, actually. He's gone on to have quite a successful YouTube channel talking about modern survivalism.

But, you know, like I try to draw a parallel to something that actually happened and use that as my signpost. Like history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And that's why I think about, you know, what a collapse would look like. And I don't really believe collapses happen suddenly, not in most cases. Like some people will point to like the fall of rome and the city getting sacked and all that and i'm very quick to point out to them that like rome was in collapse for years before the you know before gang who was it before the huns showed up and sacked the city

like the whole the whole thing that people hear me say every now and then about bread and circus to keep everybody entertained while the world's falling apart like that comes from rome so i don't believe collapse is typically happening very quickly i think they happen in slow motion i think things get slowly worse and worse and worse and i think things finances economics get tighter and tighter and tighter to push more people out of the middle class back down into poverty. If any of this sounds familiar, stop me while I'm ahead. And I think things slowly over a period of time get worse. I see Jim saying, I think today's time collapse would happen would be faster and the only reason

i'm willing to give a little bit of credence to that is because in in older times like the last time we had a true collapse you could argue was the great depression you could argue was the Great Depression. You could argue that. It wasn't a complete collapse. It was the closest thing we've seen in modern history. But the critical difference now is that now could not do previously to continue to blow air into this balloon even though there's a hole in it. And that means that eventually the balloon is going to pop all at once economically. Either that or you let it deflate.

It's one or the other. Right. I was talking to a friend of mine right now. Right. I was talking to a friend of mine right now. Or not right now. Sorry, I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday. He's actually over in France right now. He's a professor over in France. And we were just kind of talking back and forth about everything. And it was interesting because we kind of got talking about Franklin Horton, his books,

and kind of went down that rabbit hole of the post-apocalyptic book series and all kinds of stuff. And, yeah, we got talking about just what he would do if something were to happen because his family lives in the States still. And so it's like, well, how would you, if something were to happen, what would you do? And we got going down that rabbit hole. And, yeah, he made a good point of right now technology. I mean, we live in a very safe, relatively safe time and very comfortable time in our life. And within, like, the human, I mean, besides, like, some third world countries, I guess, relatively speaking, most Americans or most humans live pretty comfortable, pretty safe. But it was interesting because he was talking about how technology makes it so that we feel that way. it so that we feel that way so it's you know a lot of it is yeah there's still something you know it's not as physical as it used to be but meant to like

psychological the technology that we have today helps with the psychological of it of of a collapse possibly or what's going on you know we're all feeling the pinch of the inflation and we're feeling the pinch of the inflation, and we're feeling the pinch of the bionomics and stuff like that. But technology makes it so we can get online. We can look at Amazon. We can shop around for deals. We can shop around for certain things online. But if you take away the technology, if you take that away, what do you have?

take that away what do you have uh and that's and that that's going to be interesting to where if something were to happen to where uh technology is taken away to a certain point where you can't get online where you can't you know basically if pick your was it 1984 i mean you have uh the think police or you know and then you have the the fact that you have to tune in every single day at a certain time to watch the presidential brief and what they're gonna say and all kinds of crap uh otherwise it's work camps and stuff like that i mean think it's that i mean i who knows whatever is going to happen with that but i mean if you think about 1984 and the book and uh what's going on now it's uh not too far off but uh but yeah so i mean that's the thing is uh we have the technology to where it makes life a little bit more comfortable uh and again do

away with the technology and see what happens well and the problem with the post-industrial society is that technology becomes tiered at a certain point like the internet depends upon power first and foremost it depends upon distributed communications. It depends upon networked systems. Like, the technology that enables us to have as comfortable a life as we do is all sitting on top of another technology. So the problem becomes, in a collapse, those systems start to fail. And if the system at the bottom fails everything above it fails so like that is that it at the end of the day is like what what worries me is that i i see us living in a world that yes is very safe and we are very

comfortable compared to our ancestors and even though some people would balk at this, the flat fact of the matter is the level of relative comfort we live in proportionate to the amount of labor that we have to do is so lopsided that like 200 years ago, people would have, for again, walked over fire to have the life we do with the relative lack of manual effort. the life we do with the relative lack of manual effort but we're in a situation where like this great society we have built is at a certain point a house of cards and the worry the worrying thing to me is not doom scrolling but the worrying part of this is if something shakes the table, the whole house falls. If the card at the top of the table falls, does that cause the cards underneath it to fall? If the cards at the bottom fall, everything above it falls. So we're in a situation where we've built this wonderfully complex system that is enriching society today. And if that system stutters, what happens next? But this is also why I tend to,

I tend to like eschew doom scrolling in the name of what do you need to sustain your family? Those are the things you should have personal individual custody over. You need water. You should water, you should store water or have a well. You need food, you should have food growing in your garden or food stored. You need these things and you need to make sure that your dependence on those things, which you cannot avoid, does not also make you dependent upon a system that by its very design is precarious. So like that's why I throw off this

idea of doom scrolling and like the next great emergency we have to get ready for. It's like, no, there is no next great emergency. There is only how do I sustain my needs independent of something or someone else. And any way you can do that is a net positive, and any way you are dependent upon the internet, the grocery stores, the power company, the system, the whatever, you need to start hedging your bets against. Just in case, because here's the thing of it. No one can tell me I'm crazy for prepping for hurricanes. It's happened twice. The first time I was attached to the DOD, so I had a safe place to sleep and I had food in my mouth. The second time I wasn't, I was here and I had problems to deal with here on the home front.

But we were pretty well prepared to deal with those problems because of the things we'd done for inundation preparedness. So like my whole spiel to everybody is, if you're preparing for something that is likely to happen, don't let the naysayers tell you that it could never happen again and if you are preparing for literal the walking dead i would encourage you to turn off your tv and do some introspective thinking because i think there's probably things you should be a little more worried about i'll holly amen sure sure on the uh before we wrap it up i do want to say if you are interested in the conflicted card game uh they're running a sale right now apparently they're rebranding a bunch of uh rebranding their um basically the game so uh so yeah head on over there they got a

a code that you can use um 30 off so. So pick up, deck one is sold out. Deck two is almost sold out. I might, maybe this week I might pick up a couple of decks just because they're fun to play around a campfire. But, but yeah, head on over there and check them out.

Yeah. It makes for a fun drinking game. And if Andrew's around, then put a, put a, put a couple of glasses of whiskey in them and pull out that deck of cards. And you're going to get him, say, kill him and eat him at least once. It's a good time.

Maybe. No, not maybe. Definite. Weren't you the one that made the comment about chicken nuggets? No. I said that with a group of small kids. I said it was like veal. I'll refresh your memory later.

Bye. All right. So, matter of fact, this podcast is heading out the door. It's been a beautiful Saturday, and thank everybody for joining us that did. My voice is mostly back, and it'll be more back later.

So, for those of you who were in any way disappointed that y'all missed a week, I apologize. It really couldn't be helped. But, talk to y'all missed a week i apologize it really couldn't be helped but talk to y'all another week bye everybody Thank you.