The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Hunger Strike

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

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Welcome back to the Matterfax podcast on the Prepar 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 Ravley, Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. And welcome back to Matter of Facts podcast. I'm Phil, this is Nick. And we have just a couple of topics after a little bit of admin work.

Mm-hmm. And no effing around. This is going to be a professional show this time. I will not touch the buttons. I was waiting to see how long Nick was going to hold that smirk you trying to hold back. Last time it was me hitting the buttons. That was a problem. Well, it's not you hitting the buttons.

It's when we both try to hit the same button at the same time that things go off the rails. Correct. Okay. So patrons, if you are patron, then you already know the deal. And if you're not a patron, you should consider it for a dollar a month. You can contribute to the delinquency of not minors, but not majors either, but are delinquency. That's definitely within balance. That does make sense.

And I'm sure the patrons are responsible for more than a few fiscally irresponsible decisions over the years. Well, I mean, the Secret Santa Gift Exchange is one of the big reasons why I eBayed a taper attachment for my lathe back there so that I can make, instead of linear canon profiles, I can make a nice, smooth, tapered profile. Yeah, Nick has started a Secret Santa Arms race with the patrons. And unabashedly so, too. He completely screwed up the curve on that because everybody else is like... I stayed within the budget. It just so happens that I have access to cheap and or free materials. You might have adhered to the letter of the law, but you certainly didn't follow the spirit of it.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct. But yes, the patrons are responsible for malfeasance and questionable life decisions. And the, and the Brandon family is responsible for the merch at the Southern Gals. So that's shirts, coosies. I floated the idea of, you know, stocking spiked cod pieces, but I was told that it was probably going to be a no-go. I mean, it would sell. Maybe not to our audience, but it would sell. I question that.

I think some people in our audience would actually like go for that, to be perfectly honest. I mean, you'd sell at least two of them. Oh, definitely. I mean, me and Eddie. Well, I mean, if the hosts are buying them, what has to? The host are buying. How do you think this works?

Oh, God, my wife and your wife are in the chat. So this is, they are. We're going to have to behave ourselves. Mrs. Matter of facts is correct, though. The Secret Santa Gift Exchange is coming up. If you guys have not emailed, well, Stewart, if you have not emailed Stewart in the Patreon chat, has sent you guys a link. hit him up, let him know whether you're in or out.

If he doesn't hear from you, he might assume either way. It's hard to say sometimes. If you don't respond to him, you're totally at his mercy, and at his age, he doesn't have much. No. And he has a very long memory, so he will probably remember where you are. Yeah. Your wife's asking about hats. I don't think we have hats.

I like hats. Well, we did talk to him about hats, and they said that they were kind of working on that idea. So we'll see. I like me a nice hat with nice baseball cap. This is true, but I don't think hats are on the menu for right this moment. I mean, I could just get you to send me another patch and then get a Velcro front hat and put the patch on the hat. I mean, yeah, you could have asked me for like five of them when we saw each hour a few months ago. Yeah, well, I didn't think about it at the time.

we'll deal with it later maybe next summer camp i'll remember maybe that'll be your secret santa gift oh there you go that'd be great i'll put those patches on everything cypress survivalist that's the nonprofit my family started to try to spread the good word of preparedness in the local community we're actually spinning up for a family camping trip in two weeks i want to say and um i I've been instructed by the other members of the board that there should be some kind of educational component involved. So I'm kind of thinking I might have to bring the man pack out to that. Could be fun.

Well, the man could be a good way to test it with multiple users too. Well, the man pack, the 30 foot mast, I could put it into repeater mode. I can tell you conclusively there are no other registered GMRS. repeaters within miles of that place. Oh, it's a perfect test. Yeah, should be able to stand it up on whatever repeater frequency I want, wide open, no tones or anything, and everybody dial into it, just play with it and see how it works.

Yeah, that actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys can really, you can actually have it be useful as well as have it be educational. Gillian, we, Gilrab, we could do all sorts of things during the camping trip. That's true. Yes, I'm going to bring a lawn chair and a bottle of booze and a box of cigars and that's going to be like, you know, a substantial portion of my camping trip, like most camping trips are. If you cannot smoke a cigar while you're teaching, are you really teaching? You raise a good point.

And last but not least, and then we're done with admin work. Code MOF and disaster coffee. Get you a couple percent off your order. It's good for everything in the store. I recently ordered two more boxes of our, sorry, we can't call them K-cups because copyright and all that nonsense. Single-use coffee pods that are compatible with your common coffee makers. I'm using the air quotes for the audio listeners. I bought two boxes with the intention of donating them to my wife's school and come to find out they don't have a cure there.

So instead they're going to have to come to my office and get consumed. Oh, whoops. Whoops. Good thing I bought the two flavors I like the best. I mean, you're not going to buy bad flavors of coffee. Why would you buy bad flavors of coffee? Well, and I will say that at the disaster store, there's a few rows that are not like my personal cup of tea, but they're not bad. Sure, that's fair. Have you ever had any disaster coffee? I'm going to put you on the spot.

I really need to get some, but I just forgot to cancel the five pounds of coffee that just auto shipped to my house. you mean like you mean you had like a bag of like bunker beans that was on um are you talking about bunker beans or what no no no i've got uh i've got black rifle coffee on auto ship to send me five pounds of coffee every three months i like they're just black coffee it's good it's good i i like they're just black coffee i think it's good we tried their pumpkin spice coffee that was dog shit that tasted it horrible was not good even my wife was not a fan of that and she likes pumpkin spice coffee i mean to me it just tasted like bad coffee i don't know i will have to get some of the disaster coffee though i keep forgetting to cancel that stupid fucking auto ship and i for one

will not leave coffee on drank that shows up at my house so well i mean that that's just responsible you know it's cold out and it's bring it in get it warm exactly you can't leave it out in the cold or in the basement too long but yes m o f a disaster coffee and uh if you want a coffee recommendation i don't just reach out to me and i'll i'll i will try to figure out what your taste profile is my personal i mean i i guess i really should push like uh dark humor because that's that is the matter of fact's official blend but honestly my taste in coffee is slit a little bit i am more in like the medium dark range these days i really like a bare blend oh okay it's not quite as smoky

as dark humor. Dark humor is still absolute peak if you like a dark roast or a French roast, but I don't actually know what kind of roast I like. What do you normally drink? Well, the

black rifle coffee just black or Fulger's red can that's at work. So Fulger's red can is like the basic bitch medium like right down the middle yeah that makes sense um have you ever had a breakfast blend yes did you like that better or not better i thought it was good i've only ever had them at like christmas you know for dessert coffee

kind of thing breakfast blend for dessert okay look my my family are not really coffee people so the fact that they had coffee at all i consider to win that that's that's fair that's fair but yeah so breakfast blend is usually referred usually called breakfast blend because it's a lighter roast and the lighter you roast the more caffeine hence breakfast blend wake up in the morning with all the caffeine that typically typically the darker you roast you lose some of your caffeine you lose yeah but to get more flavors out of it not exactly see here's okay you you've done it to a point I'm sure coffee autism so the thing of it is is that I like coffee everywhere from a light roast to a dark roast you have flavor What happens in where a lot of people have this conception in their head that, like, you get more flavor or, you know, the dark you roast is because most people have been conditioned, I think, culturally, to prefer a bolder coffee and their taste buds just kind of interpreted as, oh, this is really weak when they don't taste what they're expecting to taste. Like, if you grow up drinking a lot of really dark, bold coffee, a lot of dark rose, a lot of medium dark roast, if you drink light roast, it's going to taste almost like tea. because you're not tasting you're not tasting the smoky roasty flavors you get to have

dark roast i think probably what'll have to do is just buy all three that's and drink them until i'm happy i mean honestly what i recommend everybody is is that when you're when you're just getting away from like you're off the shelf coffee i recommend you explore a couple of different couple of different roast within one roaster and then like just try them now some people are very coffee agnostic where they don't care like they don't have a preference coffee is coffee and that's fine i've drank a lot of coffee and i know exactly what i like and i roast like when i roast coffee every week or twice a week i roast exactly the way i like it because i that's how i like it but i have roasted those same beans everywhere from i've roasted literally as light as you can get away with without it

making your stomach hurt all the way to like on the verge of it being burnt sure i've i've roasted everywhere you've got the luxury to experience to experiment with it because you roast your own yeah and the flavor's changed dramatically over that over that range so that's why i tell everybody like you have to try you have to try a lot of different coffees to really find like the one and if you're not that much of a coffee person then you just drink coffee and enjoy for what it is that's probably that's probably why I stuck with like a medium roast because my wife will do she'll she'll she'll jish him up with with her creamers and flavorings and all that stuff and then yeah yes we should do a coffee episode I do need to do a coffee episode I threatened Nick with it as Phil a coffee episode y'all just y'all you'll just have to understand that like you know the spectrum is a thing and I'm definitely on it someplace and and fortunately we benefit from that when Phil comes to camp and makes us coffee. Yeah. And I mean, I like coffee better than most people, to be fair.

Hmm. So there's that. But anyway, topics, topics, topics. Nick wanted to talk about Halloween safety. And, ah, actually, it came up in the Patreon chat. Oh, it must come up in the patron chat while I was out walking with my wife. And that's why I didn't see it. Yeah, one of our patrons brought up an interesting conundrum or debate I guess he's having with his wife regarding safety especially around this time of year

Phil are you familiar with 80s slasher movies? Fairly. Okay. Top, pick the top three ways people get killed. Let's see if you can

get what I'm going for here. Top three situations where the people end up getting Slash or movies, right? Yeah. They go into a dark, they go into a dark room or a basement by themselves. Right.

So going somewhere by yourself. They're in the woods off the beaten path. Off the path in the woods by themselves. Third one, third one, third one. I don't know. I can go a lot of different directions with that because I've seen a lot of old slasher movies. you know what one of the most common first murder scenes in those old slasher movies is

if it's not the person going in the dark by themselves shower uh in the shower spooky guy behind yeah psycho and all the psycho spin off shots like that so it came up in the patron chat shower guns guy because guy the comments that's a different that's a different episode that's true that's only if you're a teen though if you're a teen have having pre-marital relationships. Premarital, pre-marital relations, you will probably die. So it's best to be armed then, too. But specifically what came up in the Patreon chat was the idea of shower guns.

I knew it was only matter of time before we wound up here. Look, I personally, especially this time of year, and let's be honest, most sker, most slasher flicks happen in or around this time of year. We all take showers. I shower gun makes sense I mean they make these nice waterproof cases you can mount suction cups on them you can mount that thing right below the shower head what do you think

are you pro or anti shower gun Phil I'm not anti-shower gun because you know Merca and you freedom and free men don't ask permission and all that but I do think that rather than having a shower gun, we should discuss being in committed relationships and having an on-hand fire team to guard you while you shower.

Yeah, I mean, but like, usually I get home from work covered in coolant and hydraulic oil. My wife's still at work, taking a shower. You have a dog. That dog is not a guard dog. That dog barks at ghosts. She does. She will bark at everything, but she won't do anything about it. She will alert you that someone is in your.

your house inappropriately sure and what am i going to do if they don't have a gun in the shower just gonna you know run out naked and scare the people away that's not how that happens my wife just said show loud once we've redone the bathroom great phil when do you're so what are we doing we're not we're not we're talking about here it means it only took me like six months to do mine yes you know how to rebuild a bathroom i don't it's not that hard yeah the other problem is is that I refuse to sink an inordinate amount of money into this house knowing that my intention is not to be here within like five or six years. Okay, that's fair.

My issue is that I will not spend money on the house if I'm not going to recoup the investment. So like maintenance, stuff that needs to be fixed, fine. But before I'm going to spend like 20 grand on a bathroom, just to get 20 grand back on the cost of the house, I'd rather have that 20 grand sitting in the interest. bearing a bearing account that's fair yeah especially if you're if i know you've talked about before you you want to build a house i mean so that that costs a lot actually and you know gillian we're well you got to buy the land beforehand gillian and i were actually talking about the other day because i i mean with with the cost of new construction and with as crappy as new construction

home seemed to be right now honestly what i floated by her was i was like why don't we look at like rural developments where it's a property and a house and the house probably going to need some work, it's probably going to need some updates, it's probably going to need the systems redone, you know, the electrical and the plumbing and everything, but the house is standing and it's old and it was built at a time when people were expected that their houses were going to outlive them. All right, Phil, have you ever rehabbed an old house? No. Did I ever tell you what I found inside my kitchen walls?

on my first house. Well, it wasn't cocaine and hanging $100 bills, or I think we'd have, we'd have a much different discussion. If it was, this would be a different, yeah, this would be a different podcast. No, what it was, was a four foot wide section of the kitchen walls

where they clearly had run out of studs. And they had used random cutoffs pieced together to make up the wall. Yes, but you could find that exact same feature in a house built in the 90s or the 2000s. God, you could have that. right that's exactly my point you will find that in any house old houses seem better because the ones that were super shitty either burned down collapsed or sank into the swamp you know what i'm saying

like gillian said we'll be paying i should do it you say that until you see the quotes yeah let let let's get there and see if the world hasn't collapsed by then yeah i'm you know i'm just saying that not all not all old houses are better than modern construction would you like to comment okay it is entertaining i would not call remodeling a house type two fun it is type two fun yeah it's definitely not type one fund because uh i have a 312 attic and for those of you who know what that is the peak of my roof is considerably shorter than i am and it uh and it stays that it stays very very small all the way out to the eaves and a lot of bathrooms are on an outside wall and if you need to put a bathroom vent in you have

to fit a person my size and phil i'm not a small guy no no you're you're decidedly average to above average. Yeah, I had to drop my chest down in between the ceiling joists in order to scoot far enough out towards the eaves to hook up my bathroom vent because the house was built in the 60s and they didn't put bathroom vents in. They put windows in. It gets cold here in the winter. Having a window open to get the moisture out of my bathroom in the winter is a terrible

idea in February. It's terrible. Guy of the comment says attic gun. I am in favor of attic guns. Check your attic. There's probably a type 99 up there. That seems to be what everybody finds in the attic. Great, googly, miggily.

So we started shower guns and we ended up at attic guns. Well, I'm just saying, you see, anytime you're in a, you know, a small dark room by yourself, attics are usually dark and uncomfortable, basements, dark and uncomfortable, have a gun in all of them. you know that i've i've never in my life lived in a place that hadn't had a basement well if you find yourself in a basement in louisiana phil you're probably in a horror movie and trapped in some kind of alternate realm so you should probably bring a gun with you yeah i mean what with your water table yeah i mean literally i could dig a hole as tall as i am and hit water in some places around here oh i believe that

you can do that actually around me too there's uh there's some sanding gravel basins left over from the glaciers that the water table's only like four feet down didn't i tell you what the what our height above sea level is like right here at my house mm-hmm it's less than the difference between the between the hill my house is on and the bottom of the valley in my backyard 21 feet above sea level sounds crazy to anybody that's off around here but like raggle fragile lives not down here but down here and he understands that like in this area 21 feet above sea level is practically on top of a mountain

well I mean where you are you're in a coastal area it's going to be lower lying unless you know like the cliffs of Dover or something crazy like that also a swamp true true well France

is kind of swampy in that no one wants to be there so it made sense why the french would go to louisiana is what i'm saying no one also wants to be in louisiana man don't talk too rough about my home look i will talk terrible about my home i'm going to do the same one's because chicago's a hellhole i'm not in chicago the entire state is chicago 70 or 80 miles the entire state of illinois in chicago it's really not in fact if you go if If you go like 45 minutes in any direction from Chicago, it's nothing like Chicago. And yet, you are all cooked by that fat bastard in the governor's mansion.

Yeah. We're working on that. Have you heard of the new Illinois movement? They want to make a whole new Illinois and just basically leave Chicago on its own. I feel like every state wants to do that. Well, let's let's be realistic here. Why? Because the way the system is currently set up with state representation, the major population centers run the state. And that they are run for the benefit exclusively of the major population centers.

Like right now, let's see, it was 25 new taxes have been instituted in Illinois just this legislative session. And there's 15 more that are on the docket, all of which to pay for Chicago's falling apart and un well, really mismanaged a public transit system for the most part my wife is telling me to be nice that this entire state is not new orleans she's the nice one in the relationship guy the comments is right on the money though tyranny by the majority it is it is unfortunately but you know that is why the gerrymandering problem in illinois is one of the worst in the nation yeah i'd actually heard that uh apparently that that trial is i mean that that that case is getting ready to go to trial it is and um you know what's interesting phil there's one uh there's one little representative area in illinois that actually extends two thirds of the length of the state from its southern

for a narrow little strip right yeah just to hit one little section of town see this is one those moments and this was not a topic but now it's a topic this is one it is because our next topic is also very political this is one of those moments in time we're like i really have to scratch my head at the group of people who are trying to defend this obvious gerrymandering to the literal death when the the crux of the court case is basically stating that you cannot you cannot take into account racial demographics as a component of like, you know, doing this districting, which sounds like the most common sense thing on earth to me, but they had to do the same damn thing with the college admissions and people scream bloody murder about that for

freaking years, that year since. So it's just because they think it's useful to them. But that's why we're in the conversation we had when we talked about rules for radicals. My problem is that because I think the way I do rationally. I have this built in blind spot where I expect other people to think rationally. And then when they don't, it confuses me. You do. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a problem. And the, the more you attempt to be a rational actor, the more it upsets the irrational actors. That's what's always going to happen. Yeah. Because unfortunately, reality is pretty brutal. brutal and that if you ignore it for too long, it will catch up with you and reality will win. Physics pretty much always wins.

Nature always wins. I guess it's just frustrating me because like I intrinsically think to myself that like racism is bad even when it benefits someone. Well, racism always benefits someone. It's always benefiting the person that is using it. But my point is it's always bad. Yes. Oh, it absolutely is. And yet some version of it's being defended as a justification to prolong these policies.

And it just, it, it, it kind of makes me like force with a cry, people. Well, it's, it's part of postmodernism's attempt to bring down the power structures that existed in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. That's really what it is. And one of the things they want to do is break up the nuclear family and break up communities. in order to drive conflict, because when people are in conflict and scared, they tend to vote more power to whoever is in charge. So now we have to have a coffee episode and a postmodernist episode. No, you don't want to do that.

Why? Postmodernism will just make you upset. Coffee makes you happy. I mean, we could do coffee and postmodernism at the same time. Or you could talk to me about postmodernism, and I can be drunk for that. episode. There are so many people that are more intelligent and educated than me that can talk to you about that. I will try to get someone on as a guest for that. You know what? I wholeheartedly support that, but since you've used the word on three separate podcasts, now I want to know more about it.

Oh, all right. I'll get you some literature. It's going to hurt your, you're going to hate it. You're going to hate every bit of it. I mean, okay, added to the list of things that I have learned, Nick, that aggravate the crap out of me all right communism socialism feminism all those things irk the crap out of me just add this to the list why not got the comments pretty good point here the violent mugging spike in la county and lo and behold the anti-gun people want easier concealed carry they were also very upset during covid when they couldn't walk into a gun store and get a gun like all their politicians told them they could can i just say that Two-week waiting period in California was looking pretty dog shit.

Can I just say? So between me and the audience, and Nick, you probably know this already. Most of the patrons know. I really do try to be a good person. Like, I screw it up constantly, but I really, really do try. Like, I wake up some days and think to myself, today, I am not going to be the whole problem. I am not going to choose violence. I'm going to go to work and be happy and be pleasant and professional.

and I am going to be the bigger person today. And then I have days where I decide, nope, today I'm going to be the bigger asshole today. I'm going to choose violence. I'm going to be the entire problem all by myself. I am going to be spiteful and mean-spirited and snarky and sarcastic, and I'm going to find every open wound I can to rub salt into it. Be the reason HR changes the manual. And when I heard about all these people in California,

you know, all these places of waiting periods, losing their crap because they finally realized that their politicians lied to them and like, what do you mean I have to wait? What do you mean I can't buy a gun? I have to go through a background check. Once they found out all those things, Phil woke up and chose violence that day. And I was giggling like a lunatic. There was no, there was no being the bigger person at that moment. There was there was there was we told you this was a problem. There was no amount of like, oh yeah, that sucks dude, you know, learn from. experience we'll we'll we'll we'll do we can to get you taken care of you know we got to work we got to change the laws there was none of that there was nothing but gloating and antagonizing for at least a week i was the most unhinged jackass on the internet for that week do i regret it's not even a little bit no because the only way they're going to learn is if they're hit in the face by the reality of the laws that exist and the realities of the situation as it is Guy that comments, I always wonder what I'd be like if I went full evil genius. I don't know that I'd say evil genius, but I would, I definitely chose violence that whole week.

Every time, every time on every social media platform, anybody would say anything. I was there to be a part of the dog pile. I had four people in real life come up to me and ask me how quick I could get them a gun. And I said, do you have a FOID card? What's a FOID card? And I said, well, you're in for a 90 day to six month wait. So here's the application. Bill it out and call me when it comes in.

And then I'll take you to the gun store and help you buy a gun. I'll walk you through the whole process. But three to nine months, how long you're going to wait minimum because you haven't even got your permission slip yet. As much as I hate the Floyd card system. Yeah. But you, you handled some of them with more directly voted for it. You handled that with more grace than I think I would have managed. Well, to be fair, several of them were family members.

And. Oh, Nick. That's precious. You think that would have been a deterrent to me. I know, but they were family members. I actually like. So it's like, well, this is the reality of the situation at hand. Here's what you got. The one co-worker of mine that is no longer working with us, he's a good dude, but very much a traditional union leftist.

And I told him, I was like, look, you voted for this. You've been voting for this your entire life, man. I can't help you here. You did this to us. So. And these are all the reasons. If you want to buy a gun illegally, hit up one of the gangbangers because I'm not doing that. These are all the reasons why Nick has more people on this earth that will talk to him than I do.

well some of them i the audience of them i do pay for services the audio audience can not see the look that was just on your face yeah yeah that's that's true i mean i can be diplomatic at times probably more so than you and it might look at me the eye when you say that i can actually you did it again you keep looking away i do because i can't your wife is watching this she will keep you honest

Oh, I know. I know. I can be a colossal asshole at times. It's, what are you going to do about it? It's too much fun. But no, these, they were actually people that I liked. So I was attempting to teach them through the process, you know, and actually talk them through what's going on. Jeff, Jag is right. Isn't part of rules for radicals forcing them to live up to their standards and forcing them to comply with the bullshit that they asked for. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, off the rails, back on the rails, 33 minutes in and we're one topic remains. It's fine. And if we haven't already pissed off a substantial portion of the audience, let's just dive straight into Snap and EBT going away. That's true. My wife would tell me for years to be nice and to use kind words.

And I always said no as I walked out the door. I don't. my wife doesn't she doesn't try that on me it sounds like something she would say to her students but my wife does does like have to give me a pre-flight talk before we go meet certain family members and he has for years I think mine has given up on the pre-flight talk I'm going to meet family members I just sort of do what I feel like my wife tells me make good choices make fun choices no fun choices are not always good choices nick fun choices are great oh oh jesus christ oh god grocery store pep talk so before we get this i also hate the grocery store before we get snap and snap in ebt so

it is grocery related no no this is this is definitely grocery stores and hopefully this doesn't become the situation in the near future but um She's just throwing stuff at me that we have to talk about. If you're not in this live chat, it's not, you really should, because there's like 11 of y'all watching this and me and Nick's wives are like actively stoking the fire. Yeah, my wife is correct. I am no longer allowed to go to a grocery store unaccompanied. So my problem is I was raised in such a way as to believe that like you have a built-in social obligation, social contract, right? sure not to inconvenience and piss off your fellow man by impeding their forward motion so like where I come from if you if you got to if there's like a walkway and you need to stop for some reason like you need to read a to the side go to the side move your buggy over to the side don't stand there in the middle of the aisle jamming it up for everybody else picking your crack and your nose and everything else or having a conversation with your high school roommate or whatever for 15 fucking minutes in front of the goddamn Sam, pasta.

Yes, those two things aggravate the crap out of me. And Phil left of his own devices will loudly bellow out, excuse me, like with the intention of startling them and communicating loudly and proudly, I want them to get the hell out of everybody else's way in addition to mine, because I'm trying to do things here. So now, my wife, after witnessing this behavior multiple times, will literally stop in the parking lot before where she allows me to go in and say, we are not rushing and we are not running people over with the buggy well it's insane i got the

same theory of the protesters standing in the middle of the highway if you keep going they'll don't stand in the middle of the road don't stand in the middle of the road you're not a car yeah but i i have to i have to take a deep breath and control my chill and yes gilling is right uh She did tell me this past April that I was off my leash and I was now free to say whatever's on my mind to certain members of her family. Oh, the holiday season's coming up too. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I had a moment at her grandfather's funeral where quite obviously based on people's reaction, there was a non-inconsequential number of her family that seemed to be under the impression that I was some kind of a push-upy. over because I'm usually very quiet and you know like I try not to start crap with people and I

just keep my peace and that particular day they tripped over my last nerve and I pretty well let every last one of them know what I was thinking what I thought of them the behavior that I thought they were that I was demanding they showed awards my wife from now on I let it all out that's good that's good that needs to be done that needs to be done yes well it seems to have had an impact because Several members of her family haven't called her or bothered her since, so apparently I got what I wanted. I would consider that a win. Having heard some of the backstory, I would consider that a win. Yeah.

Well, it makes me happy, and it doesn't stress her out. So win-win. Perfect. That is a win. Now, snap and EBT going away. So for anybody that hasn't been around lately, apparently the EBT funds are- Yeah, see, being assertive and telling your wife's family off is sexy. Well, to be fair, I'd wanted to do that basically since we met.

I should have done it earlier. She's giving you retroactive permission, too. Well, yes, but I didn't get the retroactive permission until we'd known each are for 20 years. Yeah, well, I'm just saying you probably would have gotten forgiven. 21 year old guillian has the combination to your gun safe doesn't she yes 20 okay then 21 year old guillian was not as forgiving as 40 41 year old gillian is I was going to say do not overestimate that no I'm having to do the math because like I just turned 43 and she's a year and some months younger than me yeah that is accurate like not very long into me and my wife date

I told her mom off pretty good in front of her whole family. I mean, I told my mother-in-law off and my wife made me apologize to her. I was never requested to apologize. No, I was. And I wouldn't. I was directed. Ah. So, you know, live and learn.

Truth. But anyway, I learned I can get away with it. And now the wheels have come off the buzz. They have. But, you know, another reason why. I wanted to throw the Halloween safety thing out there was because of the snap and EBT going away. We joke around a little bit. Sometimes the shower guns, I don't actually keep a gun in the shower.

It's outside the shower. Serial killer can get me before I get to it, whatever. But there has been a lot of things posted on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, some even in my local Facebook groups about people that once snap an EBT, stop being fun. they're going to get theirs and they're going to take it from you because you owe them society owes them and they in their words are not getting a job and they will not be working and you will continue to pay for everything they desire yeah there is that and if the if the threat of potential of like violent altercation and home and like property crimes and home break-ins isn't enough to like concern you like the thing that I the thing that I am a little bit concerned about

at this point is not just the potential for poor behavior because like where I live the likelihood of people breaking into people's homes and you know looting grocery stores is is minimal. I live in a I live in a fairly affluent town. It's very high cost of living. It's financially crippling to live here. My wife and I manage it because we keep our debtor in control. But, you know, low crime rate, great schools. Like, there's good reasons to stay here.

Yeah, absolutely. And among them is the fact that St. Tammany Parish sheriffs do not freaking play with anybody. And if you do dumb stuff in this parish, you're going to prison. Not to jail. Not getting let off by the DA. You're going to freaking prison. This place loves to put people in prison. We have police and laws for a reason.

Yeah. And like, You and I were talking about the other day, not only do we have that reputation of if you do dumb stuff here, you go to prison, but this, this parish also has one of the highest per capita gun ownership and gets a weapons permit in the state. So if you do dumb stuff here, you might not go to prison. You might go to a pine box. So I'm not, I'm not as immediately concerned that like, we're going to get rolled up in the grocery store. But I did tell my wife, I'm like, we probably need to plan on going grocery shopping. like some other day other than Saturday on November the 1st,

or we need to go very early in the morning, very late in the evening. Like we need to, we don't need to be in the store during peak hours with high traffic. We need to, we need to modify our behavior a little bit just to minimize risk. Are you familiar with the fact that my state got rid of bail for everything but some of the pretty extreme violent crimes? I had heard that, yes.

It sounds like a phenomenally dumb idea. Instead, they just let you out on your, own recognizance after 24 hours or whenever you're hearing is sounds like a really bad idea it is a really bad idea crime has increased because of it who'd have thought largely property crime and shoplifting i think that this is going to just increase it because a lot of the same demographic judging by their behavior on social media and their claims that they are going to rob you at the grocery store or going to rob the grocery store I would have to imagine they are probably the same group of people that are currently robbing whoever when they feel the need or desire to.

You know, this kind of harkens back to the conversation I had about Hurricane Katrina years ago because, like, literally as soon as the hurricane even begun to pass and the wind slacked off the least little bit before the levees broke, you already had property crimes and drug deals and, you know, and shootings all up and down the parts of New Orleans where the. those crimes always happen every day anyway because that's that some people there's some portion of society that they are spring loaded to the I'm going to do hood rat stuff because that's just how soon as you can get away with it yeah well you know if if you think you're going to have a higher chance of getting away with a crime you're going to do it then then when you have a lower chance of getting away with it why why do you think most um drive by shootings happen in the very early morning or very late evening. You're more likely to be able to get away and hide and get away with it.

And in this case, I question whether or not we're going to see like this big upswing on November the first or if it, if it like ratchets up over time. But like, I'm not as spun up on like the spending and the storage habits of people who rely on SNAP and EBT for their food. Like I don't know what that looks like. In other words, like if on November the 1st, their coverage of bear and they got to go get food that day and they were waiting for the car to get refilled or if ostensibly they would have a little bit, you know, lingering around and maybe the second, third, the fourth, fifth on the proceeding days, something starts. So when I was working in the grocery store in high school, one of my, one of my jobs in high school was working at the grocery store. And you knew who was on SNAP and who was on EBT. It was the same people all the time. You know, a local small town grocery store, you get to know the people.

can kind of tell who it is when they're coming and going and one thing I did notice with the people that were on those programs was the day that that money hit their card they were in the store the day that money hit their card now whether that is because that's just that just got to be when they could do it so you know how like I'm sure your family has a about about every this many days we go to the store because we're out of X, Y, or Z, whatever, coffee, cream, or whatever. I mean, my family goes to us every two weeks. My family goes to store every week, but that's because every week we're restocking up to a certain level so that if that's the last time we go to the grocery store, we started up, stocked up, and we're going to whittle things down

over time. But I understand your point. It's kind of like probably a similar trend to people that are on fixed income social security. End of the month, beginning of the month, when all the social security funds come through, that's their time to, like, go get groceries, go get gas, go get needs met. But it makes me ask the question of, is that a Pavlovian response? Like, I got the money, therefore I can go grocery shopping, or is it almost like a, not a cultural, but like a, almost like an unintentional programming thing where it's like, because November the first is when I get my money, that's the day I go grocery shopping. You know what I'm saying? Like, in a word, they, I think it's a little bit of both. I think it's a little bit of both. Say you're unemployed for a couple of

months and it takes a month to get on to one of these programs. All right. Great. You haven't had any income coming in for a month. You've been really cutting back on your expenses as you should when you have no income coming in. So say the first of the month rolls around. Okay, you finally got those credits to go to the store to get the groceries. You're going to go pretty close to when those benefits hit. So a little bit of it trained probably a lot of it probably necessity because I mean you can't spend the money when it's not there. And I think some of it just gets to be habitual. Does that make sense? No, it does. It's a chicken and egg kind of problem. You know? Yeah, I think for some people it starts at had to go on this date. And then you're

and then it turns into your way through it and have to go on this date. yep exactly yeah you know um jeff brings up an interesting point is it not cultural at this point many of them have been on welfare generationally that is correct i think at at a certain point um if your mom and her mom and dad or whoever else up the line has no history of getting a job it's going to be a lot harder for you to go out and get that job and to feel the motivation and to feel the motivation to do that especially because once you're on those programs it is somewhat hard to get off of them because the benefits on them are better than the base level entry jobs in a lot of places so i'm looking at a comment raggle fraggle through up um he was asking

what's the upper limit for snaps and e bt unemployment for louisiana if i remember right is 470 a week i'll take your word on that has been a very long time since i've been on uh ragel i don't know about about uh down there but i know up here where i'm at in illinois it's a percentage of your prior income so so like if i lost my job now i think it's like 60 to 70 percent something like that for your unemployment or snap for unemployment okay same here but they're still he was saying unemployment yeah i believe there is a cap on it but it's it's usually if you're below the cap, it's pro rated to like 60% of your previous monthly income. Yeah, but he's asking about the

caps. So the cap for Louisiana SNAP benefits, for our single single person household, it's 298 a month. And it goes up to a maximum of 9.94 month for four person household. So it scales roughly like 250 to 200 to 250 per person, basically. Now, I don't know about your, about costs for groceries down by you. obviously, because I've never grocery shopped down there, but gosh, that could feed me. So our monthly grocery budget is 600 a month, and we're not, I mean, we're dude, we're,

we're buying meat, butter, eggs, steak. Like, we don't buy cheap junk because you, you've had, you and I've had this conversation. Food is medicine. and if you put bad shit into your body, you get bad outcomes. Same thing as engine oil. Put crap in, you get crap out.

So I continue to tell my family, like, we will find places to cut money that does not involve eating crappy food. And 600 a month feeds the three of us easily. Yeah. Matter of fact, I think we're,

I want to say, if you took out like hair care, household goods, stuff like that, just the food. I would bet we were closer to probably 400 to 450 a month, something like that. So not a huge difference, not a huge difference between the two areas. Yeah. But, I mean, therein lies the thing of it, with Snap and EBT not being funded, you know, like, I'm of two minds about this.

You know, my daughter and I were having a conversation just the other day. We were batting around different like political positions, social positions. and good she's 13 but you know quite frankly i've started talking to her about most of the stuff when she was much younger because the fact that she's willing to have the discussion at that age is an excellent sign yeah and i'll be honest she and i do not agree on a lot of things and that's fine all i've ever told her is i'm like i don't want you i don't want you to parrot what i tell you i want you to think and figure it out for yourself because if if i teach you how to think you will learn you'll learn what to think oh absolutely ragel brings up an excellent point

and i did see this a lot when i worked in the grocery store a lot of what is purchased on snap and e bt is garbage of the highest degree i could not agree more i it was a pretty rare individual that was walking out of the grocery store that wasn't that their cart wasn't mostly soda and junk food yeah which drives me freaking crazy when you consider what the overlap is between I mean, people that are on SNAPEBT and people that are on Medicaid. Yeah, that are obese or very unhealthy, also smoking, a lot of times alcoholics. And this is, this is the reason why every time I see one of these reels pop up on social media where somebody is flipping their freaking lid, screaming, yelling about how their state doesn't let them spend SNAPEBT on sugary drinks or snacks, because my kids deserve it. I'm just like, if your kids are, if the taxpayers have to be responsible for making.

sure that you and your kids don't starve. We can debate whether or not society should do that. That's a debate. But I'm not willing to enter into the debate where I say that if I have to give you money to feed your kids and that's what these programs are, like you can, you can mental gymnastics your way around, oh, it's money from the state. I pay taxes, blah, blah, you can do that all you want. But at the end of the day, some portion of what's feeding your kids comes out of my

freaking pocket. And if it's my money, I get to dictate what you get to spend the money on. You don't get to buy sugary crap for your kids because I don't think it's good for you. And if my tax dollars have to then turn it on pay for your health care, you absolutely don't get to buy sugary crap that gives you diabetes. Go put the fork down and walk around outside so you don't friggin' screw me twice. Not to mention that. And that's not even to begin to get on that the healthier raw food ingredients are cheaper overall than heavily processed food. You pay for every process that goes into that ho-ho. You pay for every additional piece of process that goes into the frozen dinners.

They are more expensive dollar to calorie and dollar to nutritional value than whole raw products. I will just say sample size of one, I eat less. I eat better. You do. Because the nutrition is there. Your body isn't starved for certain micro and macro nutrients. Yep. Not to mention, I'm going to tell you right in here now, if I had to pay for insulin every

month on top of my food, it'd get expensive real fast. Oh, absolutely would. And that's what I look forward to if I don't control my eating. Mm-hmm. You know, the real shame is that instead of having any level of gratitude, it has completely gone away from that and become an entitlement. And I'm not talking about entitlement as in like social security work. You paid into the Ponzi scheme your whole life and now you finally get to withdraw a little bit out and hope that maybe you, you might be able to get enough back that it was worth the investment.

And entitlement in that these people feel as though they are owed it for existing regardless of if they've ever done a second of work in their life. There was one lady in particular that came across my Instagram feed that one of the pages I follow was commenting on how ridiculous she is. She said she hasn't worked in 15 years and she ain't going to work because she's got five babies from five different dads and they can't get any of them to pay child support because they don't make any money and they're all on benefits too. So now nobody's going to eat and she's not going to work for free doing the 15 hours of community service a month, I think they were asking for some of the people that were,

I would say unwilling to work, not so much unable to work. And point of order, it was if all of your children are school aged, you had to work 15 hours a week of community service. They're not even talking about, like, if you got like a little baby where you got to stay home with them, if all your kids are in school and you have ostensibly six and a half to eight hours in the middle of the day to do fuck all with, you got to go do community service, pick up trash on the side of the highway or something for the thousands of dollars you're getting in food assistance, rental assistance, and health care.

Yeah, and they called it working for free. She said, I ain't going to work for free, was her exact phrase. Well, I don't know about you, Phil. Have you ever calculated how many hours you work for free after the tax money is all taken from you? Oh, Nick, I calculated how many hours I worked just to be able to afford to drive to work. because you know autism spectrum but yeah once you start figuring out how much how many hours you have to work to afford taxes listen to me every you're fine for being employed every young person every young person should be forced to experience what you experienced when you got your

first on paper job where you walked into it thinking oh 10 bucks an hour this many hours i'm going to make this much money and everyone should have that experience where you get your paycheck and you look at how much freaking theft takes place. Nothing will turn you into a libertarian faster than like the government screwing you without a reach around. This is why I am very pro-child labor. Because honestly, I think by the time, if you have gone your entire life up until your early 20s and never worked.

and then you get into college and you get out of college and you take your first job. I think it is a much different level of shock than a 13 year old that's done, you know, you know, 10 to 13 year old that's done mowing lawns, 25 bucks a lawn, whatever, 20 bucks a lawn. I forget what it was when I was doing it and collecting the cash. And then a year later, you get a job and you see all that money stripped away. And you didn't have any say in that at all, that shock factor is, I think, much more significant. One days. And it really, it really makes you think more at that point.

Can you imagine what young teenage Phil's reaction was when I got my, I had my first little bout of taxes with hell for me when I was 17 years old. And I literally, I'm sure you were irate. Oh, I wasn't just irate. I reached full-blown indignant because I literally sat there and I'm like, I am getting taxes withheld from my check. and I'm not legally old enough to vote for the policy that does this. Taxation without representation. This is literally taxation without representation. It is. It is.

I actually, I don't know that you could be able to lawfully tax minors. Now, for some of the things, for things like Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, that kind of stuff, I understand that because they take a lifetime total of what you paid in and that helps that determines how much you're paid out and how many years you've paid in and all that. But I hate that that program exists, but if it does, then the kids should get the benefit of paying into it earlier. Nick, have you ever thought to add up or estimate how much you're going to pay in Social Security over the course of your life? I have a pretty good estimate, and I know that if I had been allowed to invest that myself, I would have squandered it, number one, because I was a dumb kid. Let's be, let's be real.

I would have squandered it. But you should have been allowed to squander it. Exactly. I should have been allowed to. But I figured it out from the time I started my retirement account to theoretical 65. And what it would have turned into had I invested in the market versus what it would have turned into, what it will have turned into, giving it to the government. And it's on the orders of millions and losses. And I don't make that much money, Phil.

Yeah. Anyway, I may do okay, but that would have, that, that amount in difference would have guaranteed an extraordinarily cushy retirement for my wife and not. Probably would have guaranteed y'all could have retired early. Probably retire, would have been able to retire closer to the 50s. But the government needs their way. Early 50s. They do. They do.

And, you know, my parents try to justify social security to me in that I'm paying for my grandparents to be. able to retire. Hors shit. One set of my grandparents were very successful business owners that sold that and they are living just fine off of that money. My other grandparents were union members and paid into a pension for many years and the one got horribly injured and he is living off of the benefits of his job. So he is also living off of his personally accrued retirement. Yes, he does get paid some Social Security. It's a pittance compared to what the union gives. See, my ultimate argument, every time social security gets brought up and then I want to go back to SNAP EBT because I have thought. Go for it.

But what I always fire back with whenever Social Security gets brought up is I've heard this, it's not an argument, it's a moral appeal. You're paying, you're paying so that your parents and grandparents can live comfortably in their homes and they don't get, you know, pushed out. whatever but two things first of all asshole phil says my parents have and should have prepared adequately for their retirement so that they could live comfortably in their home until they're dying day which they can because my parents weren't morons right what everybody makes those choices but also I'm a millennial you're a millennial I'll never see a dime social security not the point don't be even to the punchline Who bought your first house?

Did you buy your first house? Did you inherit it from your parents? Did your grandparents say, hey, like, hey, you can live here. And when I die, the house is yours. Did any of that happen or that's your house? Nope. Nope. I bought and paid for it myself.

So I did get a first time homebuyers grant to help with the down payment, but I didn't need it. Okay. The first time homebuyers grant was not a chunk of money from your grandparents. No. No, no, no, no, no. So, oh, I think my grandparents did give me a houseworming gift, which paid for part of a new floor. And when I put down some laminate floor. And I understand.

Which was very, very generous of them, I thought. And I'm not dogging out anybody's parents or grandparents. I am only pointing out that this, this moral argument, I continued here trumpeted, trotted out over and over and over, by the way, falls completely flat for millennials and Gen Zs because we, there was, by the, the time we've entered adulthood, there was no expectation of multi-generational housing. there was no expect there was no expectation like the days where like mom and you live with mom and dad until you got married mom and dad let grandma and grandpa stay you know stay in the house they inherited from their parents by the way and they lived their dying days there and mom and dad you know mom stayed home back when you could have only one working spouse and not two mom stayed home took care of the grandparents all that crap went out the window and it went out the window in the 1940s well i was going to say most part. Well, it was definitely out the window by the 90s. Well, you got to remember the GI boom and build. Yeah. But the point where when everybody came back with all their all their back pay.

But I guess my point is that whole argument that like you are you are somehow indebted to pay for your pay for your grand, your theoretical grandparents or that generation to stay in their houses to their, you know, through their retirement falls completely flat with me. Because ain't nobody helped me put this together except me and my wife. A little tiny bit of help from my parents. Like my dad bought me out, bought me a lawmower when I moved in here. Now, to be fair, he would have helped me out if I'd ask him to, but I didn't because like I handle my own things. Right. But it was, it's expected of you to handle to handle it yourself.

Yes, because that's who that's who he raised. He raised a man to go out, make his own way and struggle and save and do what he was supposed to do. So this idea that we should chain an entire generation. of working poor to the retired just completely flies over the top of my head to the generation that had the largest booming economy for the longest time in their lives and wrote the largest wealth creation that the world has ever seen to the top while simultaneously voting for one generation of politicians after another who devalued.

our currency so dramatically that it is worth a pittance of what it was 40, 50, 60 years ago. Yep. So yeah, forgive me if I'm no longer. Since 1913, I believe it was the dollar has been devalued 93%. So forgive me if I'm not in a giving mood. You know, I feel the same way about SNAP and EBT. Phil, are you familiar with the National Park Service's advice about wild animals? animals. As are most people on this show, I'm sure. Don't feed the animals because then they will

become dependent on people. There is a certain point, I think, at which charity creates diminishing returns. And I think that that needs to be assessed on a person by person basis. And what is the thing that government can't do? It cannot determine on a person by person basis. Not designed to. True need. No, it's not. And it functionally, it can. number one it's too big there's too many people that won't work it's not decentralized enough but also from a equivalency aspect they have to apply the laws you know basically in the same ideally in the same way for every single person but this is where phil says we used to have a system before snap and eBT and it worked very very well keeping people from starving and it also

worked very well at getting people back into the workforce yes it did what was that way nick uh private charity private charity usually family a lot of church sometimes your neighbors but here was the one and sometimes it was it was local townships that were doing it too there there were in large metro areas they were there were workhouses there were boarding houses for the working for yep ragle emphasis on working raggle raggle is only about 10 seconds behind behind us, but that's because, you know, there's a little bit of a delay between you typing and us seeing it. But no, but here's the thing.

And this is the thing that I have, I've preached over and over and over for years. And a matter of fact, it, when my wife and I first got together, it was one of those many things. I don't think I was able to articulate in a way that she could understand. Sure. Like, so bear in mind that, like, I grew up, I grew up Catholic and left the Catholic church in my early 20s. And Gilling grew up Southern Baptist.

Protestant. So like we were already kind of like at loggerheads with our perception of social social ideas and religion when we met. Sure. But like I always said I'm like, you know, like one of the tenets of Catholicism and Christianity is like you're supposed to give without an expectation of return. Like if you expect a return, you're not really given in the spirit of giving. Yeah, exactly. But what I used to challenge people was I'm like, I don't expect a personal return, but I do expect a return of effort. If I'm going to give to you, then I expect you to take the thing I've given, the help, the aid, the gift, the food, the money, the resource, the whatever, and use it to springboard yourself to a better position. I expect you to not squander and waste my gift, my effort, my resource, and I certainly don't expect you to wallow in it and come back the next day with your hand back out.

I expect you to take the thing I've given you and use it to not need my help again. Not because I mind giving it, but because I want you to be self-sufficient. I want you to do for yourself. I want you to dig yourself out of this hole. I want you to be in the same place I'm at where I'm self-sufficient. I'm able to take care of myself. Like, that's what I want for you. And I'm willing to help you get there.

I am not willing to, I'm not willing to give you crutches if your legs work. I'm not willing to. There's no reason to you. Well, but it's worse than that. What happens if you spend too much time sitting down and not enough time walking and working out and maintain your body? You atrophy, you get weaker. Yeah. I'm not willing to teach you how to be crippled.

I won't give you crutches if you don't need them. I'm going to tell you, get up off your lazy ass and get your legs working and let's go. And if you're not willing to do that, then you sit there until you don't like hike the way your legs feel anymore. But I'm not going to give you crutches if you can walk. Well, I look at SNAPEBT and I look at all social welfare in this way. If there was a way to ensure that a government program would give it only to the degree that the person receiving it is willing to use it to springboard themselves to a better version of themselves tomorrow, I would sign off on it. But I have no faith in the government's ability or will or want to do that. And at this point, the experiment has resulted in generational welfare.

very obviously this whole thing doesn't work from a conceptual point of view yeah of course it doesn't work i mean when there's when there is no when there is no social standard that you should be improving gradually because these things aren't fixed overnight when there when there's no enforcement of the need for you to improve you won't but i think i think it's deeper than that i think it's I think it is a fundamental I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the point of social welfare is because like when you when you if you spend time in the halls of government which unfortunately I am forced to sometimes you hear the talking points from people who are involved with these programs and it's a point of pride how many thousands or millions of people benefit from these programs like the goal is to get more people on the benefit. because that's how we, I justify that I'm doing my job properly. Sure. Now, I understand the misconception.

If your assumption is there's people out there who are who fall on hard times and I have gotten them the benefit they need. Therefore, the number went. Fantastic. Yeah. But that is a, but in my opinion, that's a misconception. Yeah, it's not what's actually happening. The goal should be this many people came on roles, this many people came off roles. More people came off than went on.

unemployment's going down more people came off and are now gainfully employed and self-sufficient and that is why I say I think this I think this program I think most social welfare programs were flawed from the outset they were oh they were they were flawed because whether or not they were created with altruistic intentions they have turned well let's be honest they were they were created as part of the great society to buy vans to buy vines to buy for a very particular party i'm allowing that perhaps just perhaps there's those people out there that like hadn't drank the kool-aid and they just thought well it sounds really good on paper because like oh i'm sure there was at least a few bearing i mean there are definitely

politicians out there that think they're doing the right well and bearing in mind where i live and i'm sure you're in somewhat the same boat i am surrounded every day by like old school blue dog Democrats. Man, there's not many of those in Illinois. Well, okay. But what I'm saying is not woke, not morons, not identity politics, not closet communists, but like old school. Those have gotten very much Democrats.

And admittedly, maybe there's more of them because I live in the deep south closer to Orleans where it could be, you know, like that's, that's not an inconsequential number of people. But I meet comparatively few crazy loony lefties down here. I meet lots of like, you know, social Democrats. And they tend to vote for these things. They believe for the right reasons. Like we don't want kids to starve.

We don't want mothers to not be able to feed their food. Oh, I agree. And I totally get that. But I also think you got sold a bill of goods because this program is not doing what it was intended to do. Well, it's not doing what you think it was intended to do. It's like the conversation my wife and I had the other day about this exact topic about the EBT. I said, you know, the left does have. have a point. We need to care for the for the least successful people in society because if you

don't, you can end up at a problem where you've created an underclass that is going to create unrest and going to destabilize the system. Well, what happens when you give people absolutely everything? You get crack addict Hunter Biden. Yep. You get the child star that's doing cocaine everywhere and turns into a complete rampant degenerate you can mean that you get the exact same problem from the solution to the initial problem by over applying the solution so you've i'm sure you've heard the pejorative you could take the girl out of the trailer park but you can't take the trailer park out of the girl i'm going to tell you and this is not a popular sentiment amongst a lot of people but there are two competing schools of thought here and one of them is just

frankly, wrong. I said it. I'm going to say it again, wrong. But behavior is not always caused by social economic conditions. Correct. Maybe once in a blue moon, I'll give it to you, but I'm going to tell you that I've met a lot of people throughout my years that had money hanging out of their ears, and they were just as big of a prick as when they were poor. They were just as trashy, just as low class. They were alcoholics and drugs. Bronx and wife beaters and everything else. And they'd have been the exact same asshole in a broken down old Chevy living in a trailer if they didn't make six figures.

They'd have been the exact same person. To some extent, the more money you have, the more your poor behavior can be expressed. Because you have more opportunities to express it. You're better able to insulate yourself from the consequences of those actions. That too. Ragula is correct. They created a permanent underclass with the system. Yeah.

And they did it to create. create a voting block that was tied to the system that had to support the people that were continuing the system. Oh, I'll go one step further than a permanent underclass. They created a slave class. Exactly. Pre-that was the idea. Pre-Civil war in this country, we had a permanent underclass that was basically enslaved to keep the machine that was agriculture in this country running. And somewhere along the way, we got the bright idea that we could enslave people.

a lot easier and you won't need guys on horseback with rifles to watch them if you just give them money to sit there. And for anybody that thinks I'm just completely out of touch, because, you know, me, poor, dumb white man, I'm going to tell you that there are people out there right now who are talking about looting and raisin hell and stealing stuff from stores and people because they're going to get what they're entitled to. I'm entitled to anything I can't afford And I afford things because I work for them

I earn them I give my labor for resources But there's a group people out there that don't believe that They believe that they're just They exist therefore the stuff should be theirs Yep They exist therefore society must care for them Well I am all for society caring for people

That are trying to better themselves I am Raggle was being diplomatic I can't spell that word most days. Yeah, diplomatic can be hard. I try. I try to be diplomatic. It doesn't always work out.

It often doesn't work out, especially if a cashier, can't do math. And doesn't know how to read an ID. So not that I feel like I'm going to give any like sage advice for the people that are on Snap and EBT and have been for a generation. And they're currently flipping their freaking lids because the orange man. is taking away their money. But he didn't. But just in case you're... Do you know who took away their money, Phil?

Because the Republicans have been voting to fund this. All of them have. But we need 60 votes in the Senate to pass the budget. The Republicans do not have 60 delegates. I am forced to admit that the Republicans have voted multiple times for a clean CR to keep the government open for a few weeks. while they figure out this kerfuffle as shocking as that is because let's be honest i am shocked that it was as relatively clean as it was i mean i'm not because let let's call what it is like there are not many conservatives that are that conservative when it comes to fiscal policy

that's you got massey and rand and i think massy was yeah no vote massy was and i i cannot remember why he said he voted no on it because i think it was because there was not enough cuts to certain spunding because they weren't cutting crap yeah i mean which they should literally literally they were just reverting back to pre you know pre-covid spending which massy said this is bull crap which pre-covid spending would be great compared to what we have now yes not bad but to mass yes let's take it further if we can but to massey's point pre-covid spending was still catastrophic astronomical oh yeah we need we need to go back to like pre-1980s government spending yeah it would be great even inflation adjusted that'd be fine that would be a serious

improvement but i will just say that like personally i do think that there is a remedy for this kind of problem and let's not talking a job no no no no no whole because it's 42 million people looking for not that are on snap benefits right now and there's like 70 million jobs that do not require a college degree that are open currently in the trades So let's table that for a moment Because that's the Still another 30 million extra jobs That's the good long term solution

But in a more of a short term solution Let's say you're not in the position Let's say you actually You do work But you just don't make crap And that's why you have SNAPEVT Let's say you're in that point And there are people like that

There are families that get into that position I mean there are also people Whether it's through job loss, injury illness, whatever There are also people that are, quote, unquote, underemployed. Like, I used to have a good job. Now this is all I can find. I'm only working 15 hours a week because I saw my employer give me. I'm looking for a better job.

Like, there are people in that transitionary period. There are. And that is completely different. True. Here's what you should have done a while ago, though, because it's the same thing I do. Anybody comes to my house is welcome to walk through my house and look in my pantry and I will show you where all the goodies are hidden. You should have more than three days of food. in your mother effing house.

If you have to go to the grocery store November 1st because you are literally running out of food in your house, you were doing it wrong. We've talked before on this show, me and him and Andrew a while ago. No, Stuart, we're not starting over. Jesus, Stuart. I'm not going to remember half of the things I said. It was a really good episode, man. We can't reproduce this. Nope.

Got to do it live. But anyway. so that's that bastard made me totally lose my train and thought it was a really good damn we have I know where you I think I know where you were going with this we did that episode yes me and Andrew not too long ago the three of us did an episode we talked about how to prep for a how to prep for a single person for two weeks wasn't it and how I believe it was two weeks for one person and how cheap it could be done and you I think either you or Andrew were the high water market, $125 for two weeks of preps for a single person. And that was food and water.

And I was, and I fruit, vegetables, meat, water and I think multivitamins I even included in there. Yeah. I had the low, like, I had the low water market like a couple of pennies over a hundred bucks. And I mean, admittedly, it was like mostly like, you know, canned meat, rice and beans and stuff like that. But I also went. But it was, it was also the goal was it had to be shelf stable too. Yes. Now, if you have refrigerator you can do this even cheaper true because you can buy a shitload of chicken thighs for like twelve dollars and that's a lot i mean i don't know if you you probably don't have jewel osco down by you but you can get a six pound pack of chicken thighs for like 12 to 14 bucks

sometimes so that's that's so side note i still have a couple of gallon zip log bags of chicken thighs in my freezer that i got for free because over by over by uh One of my in-laws, a couple hours away, chicken cracklins are a big thing in that, in that part of the state. So they, they buy chicken thighs just to strip the skin off to make chicken cracklings. Sure. And then they basically give away the skinless chicken thighs. Oh, sweet. So, yeah, she brought us a couple of gallons of all bags full of it for free 99.

And I was like, I mean, you all go in the freezer. If you can get it. Exactly. I mean, why would you wouldn't pass, I wouldn't pass that up. hell no free chicken but but my point is i think i think last time we went to samms club a 10 pound bag of boneless skinless chicken breasts was like 23 dollars for 10 pounds ragel knows where it's at ragel actually actuallys are good doesn't live too far from uh that area where i'm talking about nice but um yeah man i mean to me like i can never come up with a good justification you

and i kind of had this conversation the other day we were talking about something semi related But, like, I have never found a person who can convince me I cannot afford to prep. I have never met that person. I have had people try to lay that on me, and I have ripped their finances apart right in front of them and prove to them. You have the money. You just don't want to prioritize it. There is a lot of misallocated spending in this country. There is.

The one thing I'm going to say. you and I say it's misallocated. Sure. My point of view is very simple. People prioritize what's important to them. And apparently what's important to them is not driving to get their own McDonald's. Yes. And by all means,

like if you're, if you tell me you cannot prep because like you smoke and you drink beer every day or whiskey and you door dash stuff all the time, like I'm going to tell you, you have the money to prep. You just have to prioritize it. And if you don't choose to prioritize it, that's fine. But when your snap car gets turned off, you starve.

I'm just saying, like, this is all actions and consequences. But giving it to me, just give it to me. Everyone can afford to put aside a couple weeks of food for every member of your household. Everyone can entirely on it. Everyone can entirely unemployed and on SNAP benefits, you still can afford it. You still can afford it. Dude, that money we were looking at. $300 a person.

for a month that's i i feed a family of three really good food for 600 a month so yeah easily and probably quite a variety of food too yeah i mean quite because you can quite frankly if you went to a a meat a grain some kind of fruit or veg you could probably cut that budget down quite a bit well Well, okay, so to be fair, like recently with everything that's going on in the world, Gillian and I had had that, that check-in about finances and like, hey, if your paycheck evaporated for a period of time, would we be okay? And I sat down and said, look, I've got, we've got X amount in the emergency fund. That equates to X number of months of like bare minimum spending, pay the mortgage, pay Piper's tuition, pay the bills. and, you know, put gas in my tank so I can drive to and from the job I'm not getting paid to work at because, you know, reasons.

Sounds like a violation of labor laws, but I'm not sure does. Who are you going to sue? The people that enforce the labor laws? Good luck. Yeah, let me tell you how many OSHA violations. We've investigated ourselves and found there was no wrongdoing. Let me tell you how many OSHA violations there are most government buildings and why they're never going to get fixed. But I digress.

Oh, God, no. But, you know, and the thing I pointed out to her was, I'm like, look, we know we spend six. hundred bucks a month on groceries. We could cut that down to almost nothing because we've got several months worth of food stocked up. I mean, admittedly, once we run through the stuff in the fridge and stuff in the pantry, we get into the deep storage, it's going to be a lot of rice and beans and canned vegetables and like canned meat. It's not going to, we're not going to be high living anymore. But once we get back. We'll be living. We'll be living. We'll be eating. And I'm going to tell you what once we get into that deep storage

Bubba I've got powdered milk I've got baking supplies I could be we could be in the middle of the apocalypse I'm still going to be making brownies and stuff we're going to eat so my point of view is like if if you're that person that says I'm in the situation

SNAP EBT is getting held up because of the gridlock in Congress no matter who you blame for it my argument always is what can you do to insulate yourself from this and it's the same thing I tell everybody every single time. The reason why I advise people have a stockpile of food is so that you are semi-independent from the system that is the grocery store and just on-time delivery.

The reason why I advise you to have a stockpile of food is so that you are semi-independent of the system that is SNAP and EBT and the industrialized food deliveries. You know, food delivery system. Yeah, because you have an extra layer of dependency there. Yep. In that case, which means you need to insulate yourself even more than others would. Yeah. And, I mean, quite frankly, I've met people in this lifestyle who grew up literally dirt floor, you know, dirt pour on dirt floors.

And every one of them will tell you, the things that I propose people do when it comes to like having food, having water, having this things put back in the shelf, that was just everyday life to them. they knew they were going to have periods where dad lost the job because he was drinking on the job or you know somebody could somebody's benefits got screwed up or something happened or it was a seasonal job yeah they knew but they grew up knowing there were going to be periods where like okay whatever we have in the house it's all we have to eat for a couple of months so I don't feel like this should be a controversial recommendation to make I will just say that like it's been talk to death it's been recommended to death and all I'm going to say is like at the end of the of the day, you're making a decision to either live hand to mouth dependent upon whatever you're dependent upon, or you're making a decision that when things don't go according to plan, I don't immediately fall upon hard times. And I personally don't want to have to look at my wife and daughter in the eye and apologize because they have to go hungry. Yeah, I won't do that. No, there's, there's going to be some neighborhood pets going missing if we get to that point, but there's going to be a

there's going to be a whole lot of things get eaten before I have to go snipe the neighbor's chihuahua actually I mean sometimes you do live near the bayou there's plenty of swamp puppies you can eat are you for in alligators yeah swamp puppies I don't play with the

I don't play with the dinosaurs man oh I'd be fine you just grab by the tail I saw Steve Irwin do it Nick I know you're being sarcastic. Just. I mean, there's a reason I live up here. Alligators are terrifying.

I would not go into water with alligators. Just, just, just, just, uh, listen, bud, there ain't many animals. I won't, you know, just like walk around with total impunity. I'm not scared of much, but I don't play with the alligators. No, some of them are pretty strong. That's for sure. Well, I mean, they can sprint their own body length in, I forget, like 25 miles an hour or something crazy. like they are um very very dangerous over short distances yes ragel they are delicious they are also

um they're also extraordinarily angry and aggressive if you get too close to their nest so you know they're an apex predator that that has not changed since the cretaceous period there's a reason they're still here you should be very alarmed by any animal that hasn't hasn't evolved at all in millions of years because it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. Nope. Turns out big armored and slow works. Yeah.

I was going to say, thank God they're herbivores, but then you get into alligator snapping turtles. Yeah, fuck those things. Yeah. We have a lot of those around here. I don't play with those things either. We used to go fishing out in the swamp

behind my parents' place. Every once in a while you'd step on a rock, the rock would take off. It was almost always an alligator snapper. my wife has a point there are we find rabbits in our front yard like literally every evening for long you know i've actually mentioned that like all the rabbits and the squirrels are constantly around our house like they might end up in a stew pot if times got hard and she keeps telling me no because they're cute but i'm pretty sure if she gets hungry enough they won't be cute

me yeah i made squirrel chili for my wife shortly after she moved in they she didn't even notice i've told her later and she was mad but she she she like the chili at the time. Whoops. I'm not lying, Gillian. I have witnesses. I'm sure I have it recorded someplace. I have bugs all over the house to record conversations.

Got to have those. Just prove yourself right now and then. Well, you know, to incriminate. That too. Okay. So is there anything else we can unpack here that might get us banned or scrubbed off of the social media and the internet's because we dare to question the the wonderful brilliance of our social

welfare system you know i don't think that anything we've said except for maybe my extreme favoritism for child labor is that extreme listen Minecraft has shown us that the children wish lust for the minds they yearn for the minds i mean the the happiest most well-adjusted people i know well maybe not the most well-adjusted the happiest most successful people i know all started working at a very young age. So if that tells you anything. I mean, I distinctly remember, God, how old was I? It was while we were living here in Louisiana.

We moved here in 95. And I was done with it by Thomas started high school. So it would have been 95, 96, maybe into 97. Yeah, every summer, I was up and down my blog. hustle that little lawnmower. My dad told me I could use the family lawnmower as long as I kept up with the maintenance. I had to put gas in that too.

That was included, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize how expensive gas was or how far the walk was to the gas station. Oh. But I did learn two interesting things. Dairy Queen is right next to the gas station and Dairy Queen takes cash. Excellent.

But no, I mean, I wholeheartedly. think that, you know, like I, I am willing to entertain an argument for a system that administer some kind of basic temporary assistance for people that are struggling to get them back up on their feet. I can accept that and understand the necessity for it. I just, I just for once wish that the conversation would revolve, would like circle back around to this idea of like accountability for the people receiving the assistance. And back, in the day we used to have that because the person given the assistance had to like you know kind of believe you were worthy of the assistance but the minute we let government get involved in that

decision making that went out the freaking window at mock nine so now we are where we're at yeah i think rego brings up a good point uh do we know of anything else of consequence ending on account of the shutdown you know around this november first so not november i know there's there's some more there's more government employees that are going to be going without pay yeah so last forgive me but for because a lot of y'all won't give a damn but today's today's the 30th last weekend um that would have been a pay week for the government yeah so that was the first paycheck straight and missed by federal employees the one prior to that um so like two thirds wasn't Well, as of the 1st of October, the appropriations lapse.

So any work that a person would have been working from the first on, they missed out of that many days of pay. And for the, for the audience, it isn't aware, the majority of government employees are hourly employees. Like, there's a misconception that they're salary. They're really not. It's the way the time system is built, but they are hourly employees. So missing out on a couple of days of pay means you're not on salary. you are absolutely missing out on pay. But as of last weekend,

anybody that wasn't in exempt status is now missing pay. And next weekend, they're going to miss their second paycheck if people don't get their act right by then. The other thing that's happened in addition to the SNAP and EBT benefits, though, is,

I mean, you probably are aware of this. There's any number of companies that literally their bread butter is government contracts. And by the way, And a lot of those are ending. A lot of those are, well, a lot of paused. A lot of them are paused because there's no money to appropriate, therefore there's no money to pay those contracts.

Or the deliverable stay, but you just don't get paid. Yeah. And that's the dirty. There are some manufacturing contracts for the military that, congrats, you must continue your deliverables or you'll be removed as a supplier. And you will continue until we reappropriate. And then you will get back paid. Yeah. Maybe.

theoretically. Unless the program gets cut. But that's that's the that's the more a large that's that's the ripple effect behind the government shutdown though is that it's going to impact I mean it's going to impact any major metro area that has a lot of government employees are going to see a dip from that eventually like you're going to see it at gas pumps. You're going to see it at restaurants. You're going to see it everywhere that those people would normally spend.

money in and around that commuting area. You're going to see it touch government contracting firms. You're going to see touch government suppliers. You're going to see those ripples. A lot of research grants aren't getting paid out right now. Yeah. So a lot of the federally subsidized research and development stuff is not being done. I think the estimate I saw and I don't have it look far and of into it to know yet if I believe

it 100% or not, but it was something like it costs the U.S. economy. like a billion dollars a day every day the economy, that the government is shut down. Now, on the one hand, that's alarming. It's only a billion dollars. Well, it's only a billion dollars, but it's a billion dollars a day. But like, on the one hand, it's kind of alarming that the government employs enough people and does enough things so that it's shutting down has a billion dollar a day financial impact. But I don't know, the hard part for me when we get to this.

discussion is that like while I will happily admit that there are a whole swath of the federal government that probably shouldn't exist because they do stupid things or nothing at all or nothing at all which is better than stupid things but there's also certain government functions that like most people most middle of the road centrist even most conservatives anybody but like hardline libertarians would say we probably should fund that because that's kind of necessary And there's a lot of And even if you have those people They're working in that in that

That industry or that agency that you don't think should exist It's still a crap ton of middle class jobs They're going to evaporate of that agency goes away Like you probably heard the statistic before That like the median The median government salaries like $88,000 a year Yeah something like that You know how averages work right

Mm-hmm Yeah, that's like that's like The mill the bell curve. There's a lot of people making it an awful lot less than that. Yeah. There's a few people making a ton more. And therein lies the problem. When you think about the number of GS, probably 14th, 15th, SES' Congress is factored into that number.

And that skews the statistic upwards pretty heavily. When you consider the fact that like some of these agencies like NIH that are technically NGOs, I've seen their salaries get factored in here some kind of crazy-ass way. But it really comes down to the fact that, like, you know, your average person, if anybody is curious, Google, because these are federal employees,

their salaries are literally public not. They're public record. So you can go online and Google Office of Personnel Management GS-567. Those are your, mostly your entry-level employees. and look at how much they make with one, two, three, up to about seven to ten years of service. Look at that.

There's a lot of people making not a lot of money who are going to be really dramatically impacted by the government shutting down. Yep. And I will be the first to admit. I have an emergency fund. I think it's a smart idea. I think you're kind of dumb if you don't have an emergency fund. But you would be shocked the number of people, especially people that have been to the government for a long time that kind of came into it with this with this conception of like it's government

it's stable i don't need as much of an emergency fund and then when something like this happens they're flat-footed well to be fair for a long time government jobs were touted as exactly that the infinite job that never goes away yeah this government never does and for this by the same token like there is even though i understand that there's a misconception that like all government employees are horribly overpaid. Like, I can tell you that I personally know a lot of skill sets and a lot of people that work in the government that could easily make more work in the private sector. They could, but then they'd be held accountable for results in a lot of the cases.

And here's the trick of it. There's a lot of people that have worked in the private sector very successfully. It came to the government, not because they didn't like the accountability, but because the work life balance is better and that you get a lot more time off, a lot more leave accrued, so on so forth, better health benefits for people that are getting older. Like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things in the, in the public sector that lure people in. And the, the, oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Where's the, what's the phrase I'm looking for here? The incentive structure is very different from private sector. True. Very, very different.

So there are people who do come to the public sector and they have that expectation of, I'm going to make less money, because especially for those who went private to public and had a pay cut, we've been there. Not going to throw around numbers, but like, you know, I had to give up 30% of my salary to go from private to public sector. That is a very significant change. I've made it up over time. Sure.

But with given my skill set and my, given my skill set and my years in, like, if I'd stayed at any mid-sized company 12 years and applied myself the way I have, I'm confident I'd be making more money in the private sector anyway. I'd probably be working 60 hours a week like I did in the private sector and that's why I'm not there anymore because I like being home with my wife and kid. Yeah. But I digress. It's just it's like I try to look at a lot of these issues and I try not to take a hard line stance on a lot of them. I try to like see things from multiple perspectives and that's the hard part about looking at the government shut down. from a dispassionate, even-keel perspective.

I totally understand the impulse of screw it, shut it down, never reopen it. I get it. I don't know if I agree 100%, but I get it. There are some things the government does that needs doing. 100%. And just like the SNAPEBT discussion, I would love to have a conversation about what the government does and doesn't do that involves accountability for the people doing bad stuff.

But I don't think government has any will or any want to have that conversation. Oh, gosh. No. Oh, gosh. Why would they? I know. Silly things like being accountable to taxpayers, man. Mm-hmm. It would be nice. Oh, in case anyone was wondering, that whole being able to Google your public sector employees pay, that applies to your state, county, and township level as well. Take a look at what some of your county employees are making. Some of them, it's atrociously disgusting. I don't recall at the top of my head what the compensation was for our school board president, but when I found out, I kind of wanted to campaign against him. If I remember correctly, last time I checked, not the school district running currently, but the one we were in before, it was approaching 400K.

Yeah, that's a town of like 20, well, 35,000 people now. That's a nice little gig. I'd love to know how they justify that I don't pay taxes in that school zone anymore or I probably would be finding out exactly how they justify that I mean are you familiar with how government works yeah

I bet I could do a better job the school board precedent for that kind of money but I hate to say it but if you were electable before you join me as co-host you are unelectable now I wasn't electable then I grew up in a small town everybody knew me No. Okay. At least, at least we're self-aware.

Oh, yeah, dude. I, uh, I had somewhat of a reputation for being a fun individual. Fun individual. You did hood rat stuff. Look, that either the statute of limitations has expired or there's no evidence, so have fun. All right. Well, let's go ahead and punt this one out the door. We have gone on for an hour and 45 minutes. There's still eight sociopaths watching and I appreciate it. But if you wouldn't mind dropping us a like or a comment, share this with your friends. Ductape your spouse to a chair and make them watch it. I'm not here to judge. Just spread the word because we are so shadow banned Helen back and no one will take any of my money to promote the show or advertise. So the only way we reach people is if you tell other like-minded knuckleheads about it. And I appreciate that. Me too. All right. Matter of fact. going out the door. Bye, y'all. Stay out of trouble. Get into trouble. Get out of trouble. Do whatever y'all do. Talk to you in a week. Bye.

Tonight. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.