The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Learning From Doomsday Preppers

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.facebook.com/matteroffactspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/mofpodcastgroup/https://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/mofpodcasthttps://twitter.com/themofpodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/cypress_survivalist/https://www.facebook.com/CypressSurvivalistSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastPurchase American Insurgent by Phil Rabalais: https://amzn.to/2FvSLMLShop at MantisX: http://www.mantisx.com/ref?id=173*The views and opinions of guests do not reflect the opinions of Phil Rabalais, Andrew Bobo, Nic Emricson, or the Matter of Facts Podcast*Continued from last week, Nic and Phil discuss the below linked article, “Six Things I Learned From Doomsday Prepping.”https://crimereads.com/the-six-things-i-learned-from-doomsday-prepping/Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices. Intro and Outro Music by Phil Rabalais All rights reserved, no commercial or non-commercial use without permission of creator prepper, prep, preparedness, prepared, emergency, survival, survive, self defense, 2nd amendment, 2a, gun rights, constitution, individual rights, train like you fight, firearms training, medical training, matter of facts podcast, mof podcast, reloading, handloading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, magazines, ar-15, ak-47, cz 75, cz, cz scorpion, bugout, bugout bag, get home bag, military, tactical 

Welcome back to the Matterfacts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. There's lots of people asking me questions in the comment section, and Nick asked me one right before I clicked the button. So no, we haven't been banned from Facebook yet. There's two people watching on

Facebook, and I checked right before while the show rolling was going on. So we haven't been nuked off social media yet. So that's cool. Raggle Fraggle and Andrew was on a business trip. I was texting him earlier today. He's just now getting back into town. So I believe we'll get him back maybe in a week, maybe two. He's been adulting and I can't, I can't give him. He was talking about going on a hunt as well, wasn't he? Yeah, I think he was doing, I think.

So I know he had work and I know he had an elk. I think it was an elk hunt with his dad. And I mean, I can't begrudge a person wouldn't spend time with their family. I'm just not wired that way. Or hunt elk. I i mean elk be tasty okay on second thought i do begrudge the fact that he's going elk hunting and i'm not so you know damn him yeah i'm i'll be honest with you i keep in touch with him as much as i'm able i miss him too i mean he's he's he's a fun guy he's just been busy as hell but maybe i should maybe i should start every

show with you know like some variation of like yeah andrew andrew is like you know handcuffed to a toilet in a mexican prison or the cia gagged and bagged him and we may never name it we may never see him again or um we enlisted we are currently banking patreon funds for the rent yeah we we enlisted him in the uk banking Patreon funds for the. Ransom. We enlisted him in the Ukrainian army. God only knows if he will ever come home. Like, you know, just that's what we were going to do from now on. So that's going to be an action item for me is to invent a new reason

why Andrew is not here every single show that I might have some fun with that. That'll be good. The classic hot mic bit. Yeah, it might come to that. That'll be good. The classic hot mic bit. Yeah, it might come to that. I guess let's get through the admin work. Thanks to all the patrons. As usual, the merch is

available at the link in the show description and it's on sale through the end of the month. So if you've been holding out on buying a shirt from your favorite autistic idiots, now might be a good time to do that. I want to say it's 15% off site-wide, but I know the minute I say that out loud, I'll be wrong. I believe you are correct. And I believe for the patrons, there was a special discount code sent out in the patreon chat so i must have missed check back i must have missed that honestly like i've spent the last

i can send it to you the last four days up to my freaking eyeballs in work matter of fact i was literally like rushing through traffic trying to get home today so i could join y'all hey we appreciate your presence yeah and cy And Cypress Survivalist. This is the nonprofit my wife and I started to try to do some readiness and some community readiness and preparedness events here in Southeast Louisiana. I will tell y'all if y'all watch

and if y'all are local, like in the vicinity of Southeast Louisiana, maybe in Mississippi, depending on how far of a drive you want to make. I mean, I don't think it's worth driving cross country for, but we're looking at March 8th. And that date is going to be pretty hard because I've already rented a venue. So I'm going to be there smoking cigars and drinking bourbon, whether any of y'all show up or not. But I think it'll be a fun thing. I mean, you know, Gillian and I were talking about it cause she's been beating me up for

social media posts to try to like get the word out about Cypress survivalist. And, um, honestly I went through like, cause I, I built all the classes I was going to teach and bullpoint them all out. And I was like, I mean,

I've got like six or seven weeks worth of posts right here because I've already built the curriculum and it's most of the stuff I don't have to look up. I mean, if anyone's been in the preparedness community for any length of time, some of this stuff is going to be kind of like, no duh. But a lot of what I'm trying, we're trying to do with this course is we're trying to, we're trying to make it accessible to brand new people. So we have to kind of start at square one and still offer something for the people that have been around for a little while and maybe say, maybe this is something you haven't dabbled in, but maybe you should think about it.

So we're trying to, we're trying to have like a good prepper base layer and then some, some subjects that are specific that not everybody will have knowledge of. So what you're saying is grab your non-prepper friends in a six pack and show up. Grab your non-prepper friends, grab your spouses, grab your boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, grab your neighbors. I mean, to me, it really just comes down to like the whole idea of this is that, and we will talk about in this article because it was one of the bullet points from it. But like, I feel like a lot of us in this community, we make a habit of like keeping to ourselves and not letting on to our neighbors what we're into. And I feel like for those of us who are comfortable doing it, we have to kind of like, we got to start to let it out a little bit. We got to start talking to people.

We got to start to let it out a little bit. We got to start talking to people. We have to start trying to influence the communities around us because if things ever go bad enough, your neighbors are going to be right there with you eating the shit sandwich. So it's a question of do you want them to be hungry and scared and freaked out or do you want them to be part of the plan and be like, hey, you've got a month worth of food and you've got a month worth of food. So you two are not going to try to steal my food. You know? Perfect. Anyway.

Okay. Admin work out of the way. So I left the audience with homework, which I guarantee you none of you lazy ass-o-biggies actually read that article that we left in the the last show or that we linked in this show it's down the show description but it was an article that was i believe it was titled learning from the doomsday preppers which before we get started can i just get nick can you and i mobilize like gagging and bagging and deporting anyone that refers to people in the preparedness community as doomsday preppers. Like the very term aggravates the hell out of me. It's catchy. It's catchy,

man. And with the show being out there, I get it. They were writing a blog post. They're trying to get clicks. I can't fault them for trying to monetize their themselves. It's catchy. But how many preppers do you know that are doomsday preppers that are actually looking that are actually planning for a fixed idea of doomsday?

Like how many have I like how many have i met in my lifetime yeah how many that you've actually met less than five rick and jane don't count because they're they're not preppers they're homesteaders i will allow on the doomsday prepper show i will allow that there is some bleed over between homesteader and doomsday prepper because there are a lot of people so i i'd argue there they are there is only because there there can be but i don't think it's like a guarantee no okay that fair distinction but i guess i'm saying it's like you left this farm the venn diagramp does this oh yeah yeah for sure it touches but just just like there's doomsday preppers with nothing but guns. They're idiots, but they are.

But I guess like the reason why the term doomsday prepper frustrates the devil out of me is like, I think first of all, I don't like the connotation because people get an idea in their head, but it's also more the fact that like to me, like preparedness is so much more than being a doomsday prepper. Like preparedness is it's like it's this fact that like, to me, like preparedness is so much more than being a doomsday prepper. Like preparedness is, it's like, it's this idea that like, I'm getting ready for anything that might come into my world and screw it up. And that's, there's miles of that before you get to the end of the world, like peak oil, you know, society, societal collapse without rule of law, like the, the, the extreme

end of preparedness, but you get into things that are really basic. Like my, I blew a tire and it's two days to payday. Do I have enough money in the savings account to like go put a tire in my car so I could drive to work for the next two days? It's, it sounds like that's a really like, it sounds like that's a really basic scenario, but it's a likely one yeah and and it's ones that it's one that i have had friends that were not ready for you know blown tires happen to everybody i mean yeah you know it's like those iceberg videos you see you see people do on youtube

every now and then well in reality very, very bottom of that iceberg should be doomsday prepping. Once you've covered all of your other bases, can you begin to entertain things like that, in my opinion? But you kind of got to get through the basics first. Because if you don't and you go to that extreme, number one, you're probably going to get discouraged and just stop. Because the financial investment is massive on some of that stuff yeah number two

you're probably going to do it wrong because you haven't learned any learned any lessons along the way and you're jumping into something say buying 30 years of of food and storing that up all in one one year or six months great it's 30year shelf life food that's all going to expire at the same time. Yep. It's going to do you a heck of a lot of good when it all goes bad at once. So, yeah. Thank you for indulging me in my rant. I personally detest the term doomsday preppers. I hate it when someone refers to me as a doomsday prepper. I'm not that rich thank you no i'm not either but in the name of full disclosure like at my work i've there are people that know

about this show and the things i'm into because like my last name's not hard to google no and let's be honest your co-workers probably have you social media, at least one or two. I try my best not to allow that, but probably. I mean, even by, you live in the same general area, chances are a friend of a friend's also a friend of yours, and they see posts or whatever. It happens. Yeah. But all that being said, I cringe when someone first says, oh, I didn't know you were a Doomsday Prepper. And it's like, I'm not. I'm not getting ready for Doomsday.

I really don't. Like, my game, my hope is that if there is a rapture, I go out on the first wave, and the rest of y'all just get to figure your lives out. Just saying. Right, congrats on my cash. You guys can have it, and I won't need it. Yeah, but, like, to me,

it really just comes down to this idea that like, you know, like I understand preparedness is a big, big tent and the doomsday preppers are the ones that get a lot of the attention. But it frustrates me to see like the entire preparedness community associated with getting ready

for doomsday or zombies or any of that nonsense because to me it's like, okay, that almost trivializes the fact that this is a really big tent and there's a lot of people in it and we're not all getting ready for doomsday but i digress yeah but this article was written and nick and i read through it i actually read through it on my breaks today so like it's fairly fresh on my mind even even though I had to speed read it. I've got some notes. Thank God one of us wrote

notes. I was horribly underprepared for this given the week I've had to work. That's all right, man. We'll manage. Yeah. So the people that wrote this article, it was the show or the feature TV special film American Blackout.

So if anyone has seen that, these people went through a whole bunch of government documents to determine what they think would actually happen if there was a nationwide blackout in the US. And they based their movie off of that government information. So take that for what it's worth. Trust the government for what it's worth. Give the film a watch. I was entertained. I was entertained. It wasn't world-class acting,

but you know, give it a watch. Yeah. Anyway, uh, let's see. You brought this one up. There are more preppers now than there used to be.

I will wholeheartedly agree with this. I can't disagree. And here's the thing of it. I can remember, bear in mind, that I'm 42. remember a time when like survivalists were a thing but they were mostly like you know that the crazy old guys with the 22 living in a cab live in an off-grid cabin in the middle of nowhere like the preparedness community was a very it was a very narrow hallway at the time if that makes sense like everyone kind of fit in between these two walls and they were not anything even approaching mainstream if you could say preparedness has become mainstream although i would argue that during covid it kind of did i mean i saw i think and i don't know if it's like i don't know whether

to attribute it to that slow march of people kind of waking up. Or if I attributed to the fact that like COVID was a huge wake up call for a lot of people that very abruptly had the, the wool ripped off of their eyes and like, Hey, look at how, look at how dependent you are on these systems that are way outside of your control. And if they shut down,

it screws your life up. I don't know if it was because the cracks in our society were exposed. I don't know. I don't know what to attribute it to. in our society were exposed. I don't know. I don't know what to attribute it to. I only know that like from my perspective, I've met more people in the last five years curious about preparedness that never would have asked before that. Never in a million years.

My sister is the furthest, you know, my sister who, by the way, is one of the founding board members of that nonprofit who's going to be teaching a class at the event that we have yet to name, she, five years ago, thought I was a nutcase because I was a prepper. During COVID, she came to me and was like, so I don't want to be mocked, but how do we start a food stock? And I was like, just like this. This is what I think you need to do.

And I just walked her through it, but five years prior, she never would have come to me with those questions. But during COVID, it was kind of like, all of a sudden that crazy older brother I have is starting to make a lot of sense. I think we have three things that really led into this the financial crash of 08 that was painful where a lot of my generation watched their parents

struggling really hard for a variety of things not going to rehash what happened you all probably know if you don't look it up financial financial collapse, financial crisis, I should say. Yeah. I would say that if you're like, I would say before you go to number two, like if you are like 25 years old or younger, you should really do some research because like you weren't. You should. You weren't old enough. No offense to have lived through that at the level. Like I graduated college in 09.

My wife graduated graduated 08 so like we saw that face first as a lot of people in our age rough age range did but if you're like 25 years old you've probably heard you may have heard of it but you didn't live through it so i digress no it's all right man uh number two is the internet number two is the Internet. Number two is the Internet. Unless you were involved in one of the communities that was big into survivalism or one of the people that really bought into the news around Y2K and whatnot, you probably didn't have any resources. You probably didn't have any people to contact. But nowadays, Reddit, Facebook, podcast, you name it, you can get this information fairly easily. I mean, when I started getting into prepping, I found a message board that had a list of, hey, if you live in the Midwest, here are a list of stores that stock bulk items that store really well long term. Fantastic. I didn't even have to do any research.

All I had to do was a quick Google search. Wonderful. And number three, I agree with you, COVID. The COVID pandemic, whatever you want to say about it, whatever you want to say about the government response, it proved the fragility of the system at a scale that could not have been anticipated. And can't really be argued with right exactly there there's no arguing away what happened there there's no naysaying it we have we have the data and i think that's the thing that makes covet like that big watershed moment for our generation is like if you fall into the camp that thinks covet was severely overblown and it was the pandemic if you fall into that camp then the fact that government shut the country down based on that,

you know, based on that proves that we should all be self-reliant. And if you're on the other side of the fence and you think, oh no, it was, you know, like it was whatever it was, it was really deadly,

killed a lot of people. We were all in mortal danger. Then it proves you should be self-reliant because I tell, I've told this story before the first week, the first week of the lockdowns, nobody had any data. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew nobody could because there wasn't any data. All the information we were getting was come from China and nobody believed them. So we were kind of going into this pandemic blind. And my wife asked me, what do we do? And I literally told her, I'm like, for the next week, five to seven days, we're going to stay home.

We're not going to go out. We're not going to visit friends. We're not going to go do anything. We're going to self-isolate. And we are going to watch the news. because in the next seven days, either New York City and Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego. Chicago.

Chicago, but I was mainly looking at the big port, the big international hubs at either end of the country. I'm like, either those cities are going to implode because if you have a pandemic with a high enough kill rate, those cities will implode. It will turn into the third world. The hospitals will be overwhelmed immediately. because if you have a pandemic with a high enough kill rate, those cities will implode. They will,

it will turn into the third world. The hospitals be overwhelmed immediately. Yeah. Those are going to be our canaries in the coal mine. And in seven days, if they haven't burst into flames and fallen into the ocean, then we have data we can operate on. But the only reason we had the ability to do that is because we had enough

food and water that you could have shut off our utilities and we could have stayed here. But if you only have like three days worth of food, you can't stay home for seven days. If your default method of nutrition is to go to Chick-fil-A every day, you can't stay home for seven days. So that's why I always go back to this idea that like, you know, if you have resources at home, if you are self-reliant, it gives you options you don't have otherwise. So there's no downside to it. And now I have to go back to something I saw raggle-fraggle drop in here because we were talking about the 2008 housing, 2008 financial collapse.

The big short is a good one and Margin Call is another. They kind of show very different perspectives on what happened, but they both definitely drive home the causes as

simply as you can make it into an hour and a half long movie. Because the financial system is complicated as hell by design but those two movies margin call and the big short great movies to watch and then you can just go down that rabbit hole to your hearts to contend but yeah i mean i feel like i agree with this part there's a lot more preppers than there used to be this this went from being a very small tent to a very very big tent in a couple of years i've met people i never would have thought getting into prepping some of which won't even won't even call it prepping but that's what they're doing

oh yeah and and if you look back in the past yes there were probably a higher percentage than there are now but it wasn't called that that's just how you had to live there was there was no other option well i mean you and i've talked about the fact that like going up growing up here on the gulf coast or growing up where you do where you get blizzards every so often like there there is no reasonable option to not be prepared because if that if you roll the dice enough times you're gonna you're gonna to you're going to you're going to see you're going to net one. And the minute that happens, you're screwed. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, we've been we've been very fortunate for the last few years. Yeah. I'm going to. Yeah, I'm going to take my hands off of the banners and let no no only one of us can do it because otherwise i'm gonna wind up because you you hit a good pause there yeah uh no i'll let you do it i'll watch i'll watch the i'll take care of the comments then uh so the your government is

prepping too there was an interesting line in there that i want to i want to read if you got a minute phil go for it uh let's see uh these government and university studies uh also had modeled timelines for the collapse of civilization from day one to day 30 and pinpointed the exact moment at which the military must seize control to take over and enforce martial law and these were case studies from a number of different nations yep so what that tells you is there are fixed timelines that the government has established for or probably fixed red lines based on various things in association with the timeline before they are going to implement martial law yeah even if they're not fixed timelines, they're definitely like hallmarks to keep on the lookout for.

But like, you know, it's not exactly a state secret that like most of like, even if you want to, even if you want to like equate this to your most basic level. Nick, most people are aware that there is a contingency plan in effect for if the country were to get invaded or nuked. You move the entire cabinet to a secure location, probably NORAD. There are several others around the country. It just depends on which one Air Force one can get to the quickest. But they literally load the entire executive branch into a bunker, or better yet, multiple bunkers so that they're separated. And, you know, you don't have all your,

you don't have your entire military chain of command in one place, but they have those plans in place already. Now, yes, you could make the argument that is to protect the president, protect the cabinet, yada, yada, yada, but the point remains that your government has plans in place to deal with all sorts of emergencies, and among them is having enough food and water and provisions to take care of themselves for a period of time. I know multiple agencies that do that, that have squirreled away somewhere in the back storeroom. They have food and water just in case. So if your own government is preparing for a really, really bad day, what's your justification to not? And, well, realistically, they have a responsibility to do so.

I mean, a crisis only gets worse if you have a political collapse on top of it. That doesn't make the situation better, as much as we might not like the government i was about to say i might have to fight you on that one i could think of a couple situations that a complete government collapse would definitely not make worse not many it'd be entertaining entertaining's not better it is for me look anything that entertains me makes my life betteraining's not better. It is for me. Look, anything that entertains me makes my life better. That's not the kind of entertaining I want. Yeah, some of us, when something's on fire, can't help but come along with a bucket of gasoline just to see what's going to happen next. Well, there's that.

So one of the things they mentioned in this section was positive feedback loops. So one of the things they mentioned in this section was positive feedback loops. So things like, you know, a power grid collapse in one area leading to strain on a power grid in another area causing a further collapse, causing a cascade failure. And kind of how these positive feedback loops can kind of add on to each other. That kind of reminds me of the stuff you see down south with the hurricanes phil you know you see you've got the damage from the hurricane in the in the affected zone i'm going to call it and then zone one so call that zone zero zone one outside of that all right you didn't get damaged by the hurricane but everybody who did is now coming to you to get gas and plywood and tarps and food and everything else so that impacts your

supply chain and then outside of that area you're you're having to deal with a very similar phenomenon of people now having to move further out to get those supplies and you also have this in regards to like trying to get materials into zone zero because Because one of the things we deal with post-disaster down here for a hurricane, because again, a hurricane will wipe out five zip codes. It's not saying that a tornado is nothing, but the thing about a tornado is that a tornado can wipe out this street and leave this street completely untouched. But a tornado says, all y'all. All y'all. So the problem becomes like you need materials into zone zero to try to stabilize things.

You can't get stuff into zone zero until you get fuel close enough that people can make the return trip in and back out. So it becomes this. I refer to it as the snake eating its own tail. It's like I need I need to get stuff in here to unwind this situation, but I have to get fuel here so that the trucks can get from here to here and back out. Because if the, if the trucks can't make it all the way in and out on a load of fuel, then they can't get stuff in zone zero. So the trucks are first, first have to stabilize zone one. And if they can't stabilize, get to zone one, they have to stabilize zone zero. So the trucks first have to stabilize zone one. And if they can't get to zone one, they have to stabilize zone two. And the problem just cascades out from there. And this is why things like positive feedback loops are so damning because

it really turns into a situation very quickly where the goal is A. But before I can get to a, I got to deal with B, C, D, E, and F in that order, because these things have to be done in that order.

There is no, a is the point of the highest need. So I have to get there first. It's like, I can't get there. I have to do all these other things first. You get into situations where you need to clear debris so you can get the fuel truck in to refuel the fuel station so you can get the supplies in to clear the debris to get the fuel truck in to fuel the yeah you want to know what it was a damning situation in new orleans after hurricane katrina so you're you're you as i'm

sure some of the audience are aware like new orleans is an average of like i think a one to three feet below sea level right it? It's a punch bowl. And when you get a lot of water in the city, like a hurricane, we have these huge pumps that pump the water from the city back out to the other side of the levee, right? They're electrically

driven. Oh, that's problematic. What happens when the power goes out and you have have and the places where these pumps are are flooded you have to pump the water out to get power water out you have to get power restored turn on the pumps and there's your positive feedback loop like it's literally like it's which came first the chicken or the egg egg? Yes, both at the same time. Because the answer is yes.

Yeah, it's, but it is really one of those situations where like, you know, the government has contingency plans for all these different things. But the one thing I've always noticed is that those contingency plans don't usually include you. They include the government. It's for continuity government. Someone in the comments correctly pointed out like their goal is to maintain order. It's not to maintain every single citizen. So I'm not saying that government is evil and doesn't give a damn about you. I'm just saying that if they have to pick between feeding themselves and feeding you,

you're going to be hungry for a while. Well, it's a physical impossibility for the government to stockpile enough food for 300 million people. It's an organizational nightmare that's probably not solvable, realistically. The problem is just too large. but if every individual or every individual family takes a little bit of that burden, it way lightens the burden on emergency services and on the government. And the whole situation becomes a lot easier, which is why FEMA recommends two weeks of supplies on hand.

Uh-huh. And as we proved a couple episodes ago, um, hand uh-huh and as we proved a couple episodes ago um i think our prices for like a week's worth of supplies for a single person range from like 150 down to 105 bucks so it's not it's not a sum of money that is impossible you know like it's just not no no it's just not. No, no, it's really not. I felt this next item. You will always miss one item on your list. So those who have gone to Prepper Camp multiple times, as I'm sure anybody that's gone camping before can attest to,

we always wind up playing Prepper Bingo. Yeah, Prepper Bingo. Where somebody's like, oh, I left my something at home. And then everybody's like reaching into their pack, seeing who can come up with the item first. And somebody has it. Usually everybody has it, except for the one SOB that left it at home. But you will always miss one item on your list. If Stuart's watching, chainsaw.

I'll save you the trouble. But the point remains, like, you're not going to think of everything. You're not going to have everything. You're going to improvise things, things that have multiple uses. Like Nick, if you give me some hand tools and a pile of scrap wood, it's really hard to keep me down because I'm going to figure out how I'm going to figure out how to build whatever it is I'm trying to make. Like if I don't have it, I'll make it. Exactly. I'm going through that right now with the lathe behind me. I'm building a steady rest. I'm building a radius turning device. I'm building a vice attachment so I can do millwork on my lathe. If you give me the materials and the tools, I can probably make it happen. But this is why you need to practice with your preps. That's the big thing that you and Andrew

have always preached. And I'm not going to be changing that on here you have to do trial runs of this stuff i'm not saying shut your power off and shut your water off for two weeks and see how you do i mean you can it's not a bad idea to test it but you can get so i forget who who was telling me about this but a buddy brought this up to me before it's like i can't remember the exact numbers but you can but you can get most of the benefit of doing something with not quite as much effort as you would think. Is this like the 90-10 rule? You get 90-10. 90-10 rule, that's what it is.

90% of the results with 10% of the effort. Right. So if you can shut your power off for a day and you can work yourself through a day and make a list of what went wrong and what went right and how to change it great now just multiply that over two weeks i mean it's that's that gets you most of the way there and you can do it fairly easily try your generator when it's not 3 a.m and raining and the thing i usually encourage people to do is just good old-fashioned war gaming like i did this with a co-worker recently because she was at

she was we were talking through like hurricane preparedness and you know we started going down that road of like oh yeah i've got this and i was like i think she she said you know she cooks a lot so she has a lot of like raw ingredients i was like well that's great i'm like how are you going to cook it the power goes out she said well you know, she cooks a lot. So she has a lot of like raw ingredients. I was like, well, that's great. I'm like, how are you going to cook it? The power goes out. She said, well, you know, I've got a Coleman stove and I've got some propane. I'm like, okay, how much propane? She said like 10 or 11, like with a little one pound green cylinders.

I'm like, okay. She'd cook forever on that. Yeah. I'm like, okay. I like where this is going. I'm like, do you have water? And she was like, well, I mean, I've probably got like two or three gallons. I'm like, that's not going to be enough.

And she was like, well, I mean, I've probably got like two or three gallons. I'm like, that's not going to be enough. Like the point of the exercise is to go down this road of I've got this. What about this? I've got this. But what about this? And you continue to what about until you find the link in the chain that breaks. And then you're like, that's the next thing for you to work on.

But a lot of times this is where like having that community of prepare of preppers around you or having people that are in that mindset can help because they can help you find the things you're not thinking of. I give full credit to my wife that when I first started prepping, I had way too much time and effort invested in ammunition and literally rice and beans, which I was content to eat red beans and rice pretty much until the day I die because I mean, it's my birthright, but also because I'm just like, I don't care. Like it's food. It'll keep me sustained. It's whatever. But when I brought this up to my wife, she was like, um, you better plan for a couple other menu items unless you want a very unhappy

wife and daughter on your hands. So that's when the prep started expanding. And yes, we still have a ton of rice and beans. Cause why wouldn't you? It's dirt cheap and it works, but we also have like, and it lasts forever. But now we also have like a chest freezer full of meat, you know, with like lots of ground beef and chicken and sausage and bacon put back. Cause bacon and sausage make everything better. And we've got, it does, you know, we've got lots of canned goods. We have lots of, we have a whole

five gallon bucket that is all baking supplies. I can literally go into my preps and I can make cookies and sugar cookies and brownies and all that. I've got powdered milk. If it comes down to it and we don't have regular milk for baking purposes, like I can do all that stuff. But it was my wife that said, Hey dummy, if you don't start thinking about something or the rice and beans, I'm going to be upset. So sometimes you're going to die of a stabbing,

not starvation. So sometimes, sometimes you need that extra, sometimes you need that extra set of eyes that X, that other, that other, other your background it makes sense military military mindset you need food for sustenance doesn't have to taste good you just need to be alive yeah the problem is i like red beans and rice so that's like

threatening me with a good time me too but i mean on. Some people can't stand to eat the same thing for 45 days in a row. Yeah, I think they're called spouses. No offense to the wives out there. Hey, man, they make our lives better that way, don't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can't argue with the results, but I guess what I'm saying is like, it is definitely in your best interest to have an outside perspective to help you like round the corners off of your prepper plant. And yes, raggle, fraggle.

I agree. Bacon is men. What is women? However, if I put bacon in my air fryer right now and that smell starts wafting through the house, I will have two women that follow their noses straight to the kitchen. Can't blame them. Yeah. So this was something that really resonated with me. Not that I think I've ever been,

I was probably guilty of this when I first started, but now I feel like I've kind of like broadened my perspective, but beware apocalypse swapping, which if you think about it, you probably know somebody that's guilty of this. Like, you know, today they're all freaked out about, I don't know, like EMP or nuclear war. Because that seems to be the hot button thing right now with everything that's going on in Ukraine and Russia.

But I digress. But a couple of years ago, the hot button was pandemic. And a couple of years before that, it was financial collapse. And a couple of years before that, it was financial collapse. And a couple of years before that, it was something else. And this is the person that you know, who is constantly switching from one emergency to the other to justify the thing they're doing. Instead of what I think is a healthier way to approach preparedness, which is like this cohesive idea of I need food, water, and shelter, or I'm not going to live very long. So I should do what I can to ensure those needs are met. As opposed to, I'm getting ready for this black swan event, which is something I really want to sneak in here right now,

because anybody that's not familiar with the term, a black swan event is by definition unpredictable, cannot be predicted. So when people start talking about these one-off events that like crater the whole world, and we are all back to little house in the prairie days, I don't believe those events can be predicted. And I believe that their onset would be so sudden. There is no getting ready for them.

And the reason I go down that road is because like, I'm a business guy by trade, but in a far off time, I used to, I was an engineering student. And the first thing they tell you about engineering is that all systems seek balance. They seek stasis. So if you have a scenario where like, there's an oncoming financial collapse,ation's going up, currency's being devalued, yada, yada, yada. Things naturally the pendulum swings this way, and then eventually it starts trying to come back this direction.

It might overcorrect, but all systems seek balance. If there's a pandemic, this was something I pointed out during COVID, if there's a pandemic and the mortality rate is above X percent, you don't have to force people to stay in their homes. They'll be too damn scared to go out in the streets.

Oh, absolutely. Because the system seeks balance. People will apportion the risk they're willing to take based on the perceived risk. And that's all systems. That's all systems, no matter how complicated. And that's all systems. That's all systems, no matter how complicated. So when people talk about, oh, well, my worry is financial collapse. I it wasn't like 1920s and 30s Germany. It wasn't a barrel of Deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. It never got that bad. And even if that is your high watermark, it wasn't the complete, irrevocable, permanent destruction of the

financial system and the economy. So I guess what I'm saying is no matter what you look at, all these systems seek to self-correct. Absolutely they do. The only time they don't self-correct is when something happens so fast the system cannot balance itself back out. And I don't think those scenarios are really predictable. I got to throw this one up there. That was what was making me laugh.

That's a good one, Jeff. Black Swan event. You know, when you're driving along and collide with a black swan that comes through your windshield. Yes, I would say that is a black swan event. But, you know, I do have a little bit of a problem with this one, though, with the apocalypse swapping. I think that, yes, when taken taken too far it's a bad thing but i don't think there's anything wrong with and i think people really should do this they need to do a risk analysis a rolling risk analysis so right now we're getting into winter

all right i don't have to worry about tornadoes right now probably but damn sure i have to worry about blizzards yep ice storms uh power outage stuff like that uh yeah sure uh i can see why people would be more worried about world war three nuclear war right now we got a ground war in europe that always goes well for pretty much everyone involved. I think I read about this in a history book. Right, exactly. There was a movie about it. Definitely don't get involved against a Sicilian when death is on the line or a land war in Asia. Well, we've got a land war in Asia, so it's probably not going to go well.

But I do believe that taking a rolling risk analysis for your area could change over time if it is a rolling risk analysis and it's it's anchored in some kind of like rational thought absolutely like like i said this is a go too far yeah this is my most likely threat this is the thing i should be prioritizing i am emotionally at peace with that but when a person swap when I'm talking about the person who goes from one highly, highly, highly unlikely, almost fantasy scenario to another highly, highly, highly unlikely fantasy scenario and understand when i say fantasy i'm not saying impossible i am saying so improbable i'm not going to put a lot of time or effort towards it or at the very least so damaging of an event that you're probably not likely to survive even if you put your entire income at it. I mean, there are some events you just cannot be ready for.

You can't. Well, call it what it is. If we had like the big one, the lights go out and they're never coming back on. Understand that like it will kill 90% of the population of America within 30 days. Yeah. Within 30 days. I think it was three months wasn't three months i'd have to go back and look i thought it was 90 days by the point it was 90 percent of the population in 90 days yeah but understand it's good it's going to be that level

of devastation so you have a one in 10 chance no matter how prepared you are that your name's on that list and i'm not saying this to discourage anyone from being into preparedness. I'm only saying this because like, if you are point of order, if you are not preparing for retirement because you're trying to dump all your money into seeds and everything in case, in case of world war three, you're missing a step because I always tell people, I'm like, like, that like, that's my justification for having a 401k and a retirement plan is I have these things in case all hell breaks loose. I have these other things in case it doesn't. Because that's the tenet of preparedness.

There are a few things more terrifying than being an elderly person that can't afford care. I'm literally watching it right now with some people that I know. And it is horrifying. It is all the motivation I need in my life to ruthlessly save for retirement. I've told my wife, I never promised her we'd be rich, not in the cards. There are things I could do for money that I'm just not willing to because they take away from my family and I prioritize things differently. But I have promised her we will retire comfortably. And I do not care if that means I have to drive that truck in the driveway for 10 years. I don't care if that means we have to forego the toys and the boat and the vacations and the crap that I see so many people my age indulging in. We will save for retirement and the discussion is over because I am not going to be the person who has to make my daughter drop her family and rush to their aid all the freaking time. I'm just not willing to do it, I guess. Hey, sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes things also go just fine.

And you live to 75 or 80. Sometimes things do go wrong, but I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that things when things go wrong, I'm able to deal with it because that's preparedness. It's a hell of a concept. It's like I do things to prepare for things to go wrong. And then when things go wrong, it's not the end of the world because i've already got a plan in place to deal with that you got to prepare for things to go okay too yeah exact well and like or at least not terribly well but let's call what it is like they given that what is the average life expectancy right now it's's like 79, 81, 73.

Is that low? 73 or 75 for men. Yeah, it went down again. It was 78. Call it 75 years old. The odds are you are going to live long enough to retire. Would you like to pass away sitting on your stoop as a Walmart greeter because you can't retire? Or would you like to have the last 10 to 15 years of your life be comfortable and provided for and happy and be able to spend some time with your loved ones before you kick off this mortal coil? I say that the likelihood of us making it to old age is infinitely greater based on statistics than of you know having an apocalypse but that's just me yeah i agree but then again i also have you know beans rise and ammo just in case i'm

wrong y'all can all y'all can all tell me when we get there exactly i'll i'll take that hit of having lost some money in my 401k or my IRA if it means that on the off chance I lived to 75 I'd do okay Preppers are not panic buying, they're buying what no one else is thinking about so this sticks with me a lot because like during the great toilet paper pandemic, or the great toilet paper apocalypse of 2020 which i will forever call it the great toilet paper pandemic you know apocalypse it was set off by

one stupid internet video yes and every stampede is started by one scared animal running the wrong oh it is that's how that's how herd dynamics work work. But I digress. That's just a perfect point for why you should have some of this stuff. Because one dumb internet video of one guy that saw unstocked shelves caused a cascade failure. But here's my question.

Were you out of toilet paper when that happened? Oh, God, no. Were you fighting with Meemaw and Jack and John and everybody in the store trying to get that last case of toilet paper.

We were cracking jokes about which wine pairing we were going to do with dinner since it was in fact trying times. Yes. See, Andrew has told the story several times on this podcast about how there was a blizzard coming in and him and his friend were like, um, we're kind of low on bourbon.

We should probably go handle that. We're low on bourbon. So, yeah. So they went to the store. I believe it was a Myers, but he can correct me when he comes back. I believe you're right. He went to the store and people are freaking the F out, fighting each other over like, you know, bread and milk and toilet paper and tampons or whatever the hell else you people. Tombstone pizzas, I think you said was a common one too.

Yeah, whatever y'all fight over when there's a blizzard coming. I don't know. We don't do those down here. And him and his buddy grabbed their favorite bourbon and went and checked out and then left. Because he was like, we got everything we need. Like, we're fine. Exactly. But this really resonated with me because not only yes we're we in that boat

of we don't need toilet paper so we're not getting into fistfights with idiots over it but i can also think of times during covid where like things showed up on my radar like sudden supply shortages that the average person wasn't buying like there was a point at which i saw the ubiquitous five-gallon mountain house buckets sold out. I saw those sold out nationwide. And as soon as that happened, I told my wife, I'm like, something is fixing to pop off. Because somebody who knew something bought a whole bunch. Somebody that knows something bought a whole bunch.

Occasionally, within our. Or, you know, occasionally, like within our friend group, the patrons, somebody who's in a certain line of work or certain people in the know will say, hey guys, you should probably do this right now. And everybody listens. You may want to stock up on XYZ. Yeah.

But I guess what I'm saying is like, rappers are not the people running around fighting each other over toilet paper. They're the people buying the stuff nobody else is because they're ahead of the game. Like our default or base layer is I've got toilet paper. I don't need more toilet paper. You ain't going to see me fighting anybody over a bag of rice and a bag of beans, because if I got to fight somebody over a bag of rice and a bag of beans, we are like months and months and months into whatever situation we're in.

You're just, you're not going to see me and my family indulging in any of that because we're ahead of everybody else. We've already done all those things. We've already put all that back. I'm right now, my big, my big squabble with my wife and daughter is feminine products. I got, I intentionally went to the store and I bought, I think, two or three extra cases of their stuff and put it on the shelf. There's no reason not to. It's like toilet paper. It doesn't go bad. Well, but here's the thing. You remember

there was a port strike a couple months ago, right? Yep. Guess when that agreement runs out? Hmm. January. It does. Guess what? Phil is going to have all kinds of stuff loaded up in his garage before January, because if anything you need, if, oh,

well, okay. So paper goods, I'm going to have a bunch of that put away. I mean, really? Oh, the other one,

the big one. And a matter of fact, medical supplies, consumable meds, over the counter meds, coffee beans. Those are one, the big one, and a matter of fact. Consumable medical supplies, consumable meds, over-the-counter meds. Coffee beans. Those are important too. 100% of coffee in this country is imported. It is not grown locally anywhere in North America.

Prove me wrong if you don't believe me. I'm a coffee nerd. I can tell you where most of it comes from. We don't have the right climate to grow this stuff in North America. 100%, of your coffee is imported. If you don't have at least a couple of weeks supply of coffee put back on the shelf come January and that port strike happens, we might have a set of problems on our hands because it's not as if on that day, all coffee will disappear. It is the fact that when the big

roasters like Folgers, which is right down the road from my house, when they can't get green beans imported, sooner or later, they're going to stop. And then that means the stock that's on the shelves is eventually going to run out. And if this situation lasts long enough, y'all are going to have some problems on your hands. But I'm sitting here with 20 pounds on that shelf, and I'm probably going to order another 20 pounds because 40 pounds of beans will keep my little roasting operation going for a very long time. So, yeah, I think panic buying annoys the heck out of me.

I think I just scared your wife. No, she, she, she was saying we weren't fighting for toilet paper. I think, Oh, I thought that was like,

no, because I said something about coffee going away. Oh, no. Yeah, she is a fan of coffee as well. No, we keep a pretty healthy stock here. But look, any consumable, any over-the-counter medication. I mean, look at what happened in the wake of COVID. How many over-the-counter prescriptions were hard to get for a little while there, especially cold and flu?

We're going into cold and flu season. Do you guys have enough to get through a couple of people? Maybe all the people in your family catching a cold for a week or the flu for two weeks. And that's not even to me, that's not even a prepper thing, though. That's no, it's a basic thing. Well, it's a good time to check. Well, but what I mean when I say it's not even a prepper thing, that's a common sense thing, is because the flu

is highly communicable. We'll all agree on that, right? So if one person in a household gets it, the rest of them are probably not too far behind. And let me tell you, there's nothing on Earth more miserable than y'all having to play Rochambeau for who's the least sick to go to the store to get more NyQuil when everybody is down with the flu.

We had one person at work that went on vacation, and when he came back, he came back with influenza B. Within four days, all but two people were sick at work. Had two people left in the building. Not shocked. Not at all. No, no, highly communicative.

And like, like we, we started, I started off saying this at the very beginning of the show, preppers are secretive. And I agree with this wholeheartedly. And there's, there's two reasons for that.

I think, first of all, a lot of it comes from, you know, this idea that like, I don't want everybody to know that I'm how I'm the door you need to knock on when you're hungry and, you know, scared and things are blowing up. But I think there's also an element of this where like a lot of people, I don't want to say they're ashamed of it, but like we all acknowledge that there is a certain stigma around preparedness. Most people are, I want to call it sensitive enough to social stigma that they will avoid it where possible.

Then you have people like me who are like, don't care. Don't like me. Don't like me. Piss off. You know, my front, my door, my door swings both directions for a reason. You can leave just as easy as you came in. But like most people are not wired like I am. Most people are wired like a lot of us are. Like we are naturally going to be very coy with other people about topics or about activities that they would take a dim light on because human beings are social

creatures and we don't like being part of the out group. And I think some of that stigma comes from there is always going to be the person in the group or in your town that if they see someone doing something and they're not doing it and they're not sure why. But they don't want to be wrong, so they're going to mock you regardless of what it is. Everybody knows that person. You're like, well, it's wrong because I'm not doing it. If it was right, i'd be doing it yeah those people are pretty loud and they're irritating but i think a good portion of where this this secrecy of preppers comes from is a holdover from the survivalist doomsday days the uh soldier of fortune magazine days I saw somebody bring up in the comments.

Not our finest moment. Hey, we all do cringe stuff, man. It happens, especially when we're younger. But some of the prepper media, too, doesn't make this any better. Because every single one of them is, oh, the second they find out I've got got this now i've got to end up killing people probably that's not going to happen because more than likely it's not the total doomsday probably what's going to happen is like what happened when we had a blizzard here i texted my neighbor to see how she was doing she said they didn't have any water and i was like well like do you want me to bring you some i've got some five gallon jugs and i took her over some water she was grateful now she has she's buying

a generator for her house for when we have storms right that's the more likely thing that's going to happen but that's not what our media portrays that's not what these prepper books portray i mean some of the authors you guys have had on this show their books don't portray don't portray that granted it doesn't sell us you know your neighbor coming over and borrowing five gallons of water doesn't really sell a book but gunfights do i mean having published a book can confirm yeah i mean hey right i read your book it was a good book i enjoyed it i recommend it yeah but sometimes see sometimes books are written purely to like sell themselves sometimes books are sometimes books intentionally blow things out of proportion because they're trying to like point something out

via the absurdity of it absolutely but you're right i think that there's i think there's a lot of i think there was a time when the preparedness community did not do a good job of policing itself or a good job of its own, like public image PR, if you want to use that terminology. And I would like to think that there have been a lot of efforts more recently, say within the last 10 years, to really make this more mainstream and more common. And I don't like to use words like more rational, more realistic, but really just to like, bring this, take this down a level because there are people that I can convince to get

into preparedness. Eddie had the best example for us not too long ago. Eddie's spouse is like, was not on board with preparedness until she drew the link between, Hey, if we had, if we were more prepared, we could help our friends in the situation they're in right now. And the minute, the minute that link got drawn, she's on board and that's awesome. Yeah. And I think, I think it's standard community building.

Yeah. But I think it's that PR element that was missing for the preparedness community for a lot of times. I think a lot of times the preparedness community portrayed itself or people within the community portrayed themselves as being like very antisocial, very standoffish, very braggadocious in ways that just did not market well to potential preppers. ways that just did not market well to potential preppers. And I think that as the tent has gotten bigger and we've brought in, you know, we've brought in more people, we've brought in millennials, we've brought in Gen Xers, we've brought in Gen Z, we've brought in women, we've brought in minorities, we've brought in all these different people with all these different ideas about what preparedness should be because they've made it individual to them.

with all these different ideas about what preparedness should be because they've made it individual to them. And we've continued to market the community as, hey, we're normal people. We just see the world around us a little differently and we plan for things differently. But we're still pushing that idea that like we're very open and we're very outgoing and we're very willing to talk to other people in a reasonable way that doesn't start in with don't come to my house or I'll have to shoot you. Garden Girl 84. So you don't plug it enough. I don't plug it enough. And part of there's a there are reasons for that.

Like I'm not it's not like I'm unhappy with the book I wrote. You have to bear in mind that I wrote that book. It was 2018. I think it was 20. I think it was 2018. Anyway, I wrote a book, American insurgent back in 2018 at a time when my career path was kind of

going down one road. And I had, I had lots and lots and lots of extra time and energy at the end of every day to devote to different things. That was a time when I was hosting this podcast and producing it. I was co-hosting another podcast. I was doing regular guest spots on a third podcast. I was writing a book. I was doing YouTube content.

I was invested in so many different things because I was bored at work. And it was a, it was a job that just involved lots of financial calculations, which sounds horrible to most people. But for me, I can do it with my eyes closed. It's my talent. You can power through it. Yeah. I mean, you sit me down in front of it in front of Microsoft Excel and I'll just like Zen out, go brain dead and do my job for eight hours. It doesn't bother me. And that's, that was the time at which i was invested in all these little passion projects and side projects and my intention was write this first book and then immediately pivot to writing a sequel and i was i i had been mentored by a couple of other authors in potentially making authoring a kind of a second career.

Yeah. And then my day job resulted in me getting a promotion at work. And I went into a career field that was literally double my compensation. Like I'm, I have, I'm infinitely better able to take care of my family now that I was then we have far more access. I'm putting away a ton more for retirement. It's all positives, but the downside is I am so exhausted at the end of an

eight to nine hour day because it is so mentally taxing. I didn't have the extra energy to devote to any other things. I stopped co-hosting their podcast. I hung up writing. I held onto this podcast by the skin of my teeth because I love it and I didn't want to let it go. And it has taken some years to like get, get to a place where like starting this nonprofit is viable. But even that's been a lot of work on my wife and a lot of work on my brother-in-law and my sister, because I can't do it all by myself anymore. My job is taking too much from me. So that's the reason why I really don't promote the book,

and maybe I should. But it's just the idea that it has become this one book that I wrote that a lot of people really enjoyed, but it was supposed to be the first in a series of books, and I feel like that book kind of just left everybody hanging because i've got maybe maybe in a few years you can come back around to it man i mean never never close that door because realistically if you wanted to pick it up and start writing again i'm i'm sure you could given the time and energy i've got two-thirds of a sequel written there you go i mean no one's i mean

hey look at george rr martin everybody likes his work but the book comes out every every 10 years or so yeah i don't know it's it's not like books expire no i know it's i don't know it's one of those things that like i i haven't thrown away the manuscript I started. I could probably pick it up. Part of my problem was that I started writing it. And then because it took me so long to write it, I got, I got to a point where like, you have to bear in mind, I write books that I enjoy. because I'm not going to expect anybody else to buy it or read it or anything else. If I don't, if I, the author don't like it myself. And I got about halfway through writing the sequel and then I put it down for a little while and I came back to it and I hated the way the book was going. So I literally like ripped it apart and start all over from scratch again. And that time I got about two thirds of the way through it.

And then I got sidetracked at work. I put it down and I picked it back up and lo and behold, I read it and I was like, this is not believable anymore. Like part of my frustration is that at the time that American Insurgent was originally published, I could kind of see, I was looking down a road at,

you know, like if the gun control movement continues the direction it's going, I could see it ending up here. Eventually one day we've turned a different corner. And that's part of the problem is that after like my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,

my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, card after a pandemic and after everything else has happened is like the last four years have been so freaking wild i don't know how to write fiction anymore because things in the real world keep happening you're telling me that the apprentice host running for president three times and winning twice was not on your bingo card brother the last four years have not been on my bingo card so i guess what i'm saying is like the last 12 haven't been on mine i mean jesus yeah but the last four have been even wilder than the previous eight that's true and jeff brings up a good point here he'd rather stay quiet and not

be the outsider because if something happens he doesn't want to be known as the outsider with all the stuff and and that that is a fair point. That's really valid. That's a valid point. That's hard to argue with. I understand. I have one argument against it. Well, I didn't say I didn't have an argument against it.

Just I understand the argument. But I also have to like, I have to kind of, and I might steal your thunder on this, Nick. But like I have to couch this in the same language of like the nonprofit that my wife and I might steal your thunder on this, Nick, but like, I have to couch this in the same language of like the nonprofit that my wife and I are starting. In the same language that, in the same conversation that she and I had eight years ago when I started podcasting. I feel as though the message, the tenets of preparedness are so important and so vital and so, so life-saving to other people. I don't, I feel as though some of us are going to feel driven or compelled to try to share it, even if it means outing ourselves, even at our own personal risk. I mean, I won't fault anyone

for not feeling that, but that's the whole reason why I started podcasting eight years ago. Cause I looked around me and I said, these people are freaking screwed if they don't start learning some of this stuff. And now I'm looking at the podcast and the podcast goes out into the world and then it reaches. I don't know. I did the numbers the other day and I think. 300, 400, I mean, you could say 800 to 1000 people a week is not unreasonable per show by the way because raising values a matter of facts one of those two shows a week basically doubles right the reach but i'm sure there's audience overlap there has to be because i know i listen to it yeah i'm sure on it but it's one of those situations where it's like it goes out on the

internet it reaches those people. But then there's all these people. There's my neighbors, there's people in my community, there's people 15 miles away from me. And it doesn't reach a lot of them because it goes out in the internet. And so that's why I decided, okay, we have to be willing to blow our own cover and start talking to people in this community. And yeah, there's probably going to be people with a, with an opinion and,

you know, F them, feed them fish eggs. I don't fish heads. I don't care. Right. The message is more important than my anonymity. I don't,

I just, I feel that way. And I don't blame anybody for making a different calculus, but like, that's, I feel that some of us have to be willing to speak up. Otherwise, this community will never grow. This information will never get out.

Nick muted himself. I did. My furnace just kicked on. I don't know if you can hear that. Oh, I was about. Hey. Oh, no, I heard it loud and clear. You guys in the comments can hear it? Let me know. I was just about to ask if the Oh, no. I heard it loud and clear in here.

I was just let me know. I was just about to ask if the Black Tahoe's it showed up outside your house. No. The so my my big counterpoint to Jeff's, I suppose, is that what if you don't have to be the outsider? What if we can make this so normalized that your average, say, city block, 50% of the houses have two weeks or a month worth of supplies? Now you don't have to worry about that. Now you're not the outsider. Now you're just Jeff down the block, who's one of half of the people that do this. I mean, I would say, I mean, granted, given the economic outlook we have right now,

not half of people have a retirement savings that's fully funded, but it'd be great if we could get everybody to that point. I mean, I would like to see prepping as normalized as a 401k or an IRA. I think that that's a reasonable, reliable, reasonable, achievable goal. Whether or not you and I can achieve this, Phil, I don't know, but we can definitely show off that it is an achievable goal for everyone. I mean, I guess my perspective really just comes down to like, how many people changed how many people how many people in history

can we say change the entire the direction of the entire world in a positive or negative way like let's preface it that way maybe a dozen you could say truly change the course of world events on their own oh a dozen, maybe two dozen at most. Hitler, Marx, Caesar. The Khan. The Khan. I mean, yeah. Again, in a negative or positive direction, but in a great way,

in a huge way, change the course of world events. But I'm going to share with you a little known fact, or a little thought of fact, but I believe in making huge changes in a small way. So like, if I can make my community, if I can raise awareness about preparedness in my own community, that may not impact Illinois. It may not impact our friends in Michigan. It may not impact our friends in Wisconsin or Texas or anywhere else. But what it will do is it will ensure that these people in this community are prepared to take care of themselves and therefore prepared to help each other. And that is worth more to me because of proximity, if nothing else, than changing the course of the entire world. Because if I can influence... If nothing else, it improves your safety in the short term.

But the other thing of it is, is that if I can make that influence in this community and you can make that influence in your community and everyone else can make that influence in their community, it's like the old analogy of the light in the dark room. Light a candle in a dark room, it's really bright, everybody can see it because it's one candle in the dark. So I guess my point of view really comes back down to like the idea that

if you can alter that demographic in your own community, that is a great change in that community. And if everyone takes it upon themselves to advocate for the lifestyle and the things they believe in, and I've made the same argument about like gun rights. If you advocate everywhere you go for gun rights, no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how unpopular, if you are a constant, reasonable, eloquent voice for the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and the preservation of liberty, then that eventually does move the needle. You may not move it all by yourself, but if you and a million other people advocate for something, it does move the needle. You may not move it all by yourself, but if you and a million other people advocate for something, it does move the needle over time. So I think that's like my appeal to all of you out there who are like, I don't want to be the outsider. I've been the outsider for a lot of years now, and I just don't care because I think that this juice is worth the squeeze, no matter how painful it ends up being. Right. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. You know, it's

even if the only thing that you can do is be that helpful neighbor in a minor emergency, maybe all you do is, is, is change one person's opinion or give them an idea they never would have thought of and then okay great and if they do that to the next person that moves into your house or the next person in the neighborhood they move to i mean there's no downside to it other than maybe looking a little weird hell i i go play warhammer and dnd at my local game store i look a little weird all the time so come on it's not that bad yeah but like i said i mean i i felt like the article on the whole wasn't it wasn't awful i kind of it was it was it was well written i thought yeah i think if i had one criticism of the article as a whole, I just, I continue to push this idea that like the way to make preparedness more mainstream is to make it more approachable.

You know, it is to lean away from the discussions about, oh, we have to homestead because World War III and the supply chain is going to break down or the lights are going to go out and they'll never come back. And, you know, yada, yada, yada. And we have to lean more into this idea that like, you know, we're probably going to catch a hurricane down here because you can't argue with that because it happens every freaking year. Or Nick, you're probably going to catch a tornado or a blizzard. You probably should be ready for that. You know, Andrew is notorious for saying every year the Grand River floods and every year people in Michigan freak out like they've never seen the river flood before.

And it floods every freaking year. Near me, it's the Fox River every spring. But that is your gateway drug to convince people to get into this mind frame because you could be like, hey, you remember when the river flooded last year? Yeah. You remember when it flooded the year before? Yeah. You remember when it flooded the year before that? Yeah. You should probably plan for the river to flood because it seems to do that a lot. And then if you get them going down

that road of, hey, do you have an alternate way of getting in and out of the area? Do you have food and water in case you get cut off? Do you have this? Do you have that? You don't have to freak them out and make them start thinking about homesteading for the end of the world. But if you can tell them, hey, how long do you think you'll be stuck up here at home? Oh, a week. Why not have like two weeks of food and water? Congratulations. You just made that person able to frigging stay at home for two weeks without being your problem because they can take care of themselves now. But we can we can make these things approachable to the average person so that they buy in. And I have found that most of the time, once people buy into this mindset, it's terminal.

There's no going back. I agree. As long as they don't get thrown into the deep end of the paranoia that you can sometimes see. I do believe this community unfortunately can attract people with, I would say, untreated anxiety or paranoid disorders. And you'll run into them online on the forums now and then. It's the person that's all capsing you in the comments telling you that you're going to die if you don't have enough Tyvek to seal up your entire house from the next pandemic. You know exactly who I'm talking about. The person on Reddit that is claiming that Cincinnati will be underwater within three months because of global warming or whatever.

Pick their apocalypse. I don't care what it is. But unfortunately, I think that that's a lot of where our negative press has come from over the years. Because you didn't have, say back in the early 2000s, you didn't have the guy like you and the guy like me or guy like Andrew here on a podcast saying, look, Ben, do what you can do. If you can get a week worth of food, fantastic. Now you're set for a week. Baby steps. Work your way into it no what you had was the

guy writing articles in soldier of fortune or on a blog post saying everyone's going to die from people from peak oil collapse and having no energy and the entire world economy is going to come to a screaming halt because those are the most motivated people to shout out to the ether unfortunately yeah i guess that's probably a good place to round this out um we did all the admin work at the front of the show so we can just punt this one out the door um if you have a friend in your life who you think could benefit from this lifestyle i encourage you to like slowly lean into it just a little at a time and feel them out see if they're a little bit prepper curious. If there are other kinds of curious, I'm not an expert in any of that. You'll have to deal with that on your own. But I think you'd be surprised how many people would be at least open to the conversation. And if you feel like you're not there yet, you're not ready to be the weird one or the outlier, that's cool too. You're not ready to be the weird one or the outlier.

That's cool, too. Just please, for the love of God, realize that within your friend group, the people you can truly trust, there's someone in that group who would never make you the outsider. Your family, your close friends, people that know you, and they need to know what you know. So, like, worst case, point them at us. We'll be the weirdo. You know what? I've been the weirdo for about 41 and a half of my 42 years of life. It's working for me.

I kind of enjoy it. It makes highly experienced, weird, highly experienced weirdo. All right, y'all don't forget the mergers on sale, 15% off the links in the show description, Cypress survivalist. I appreciate if y'all give that a watch,

mark your calendars for March 8th and we'll start really, hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we'll have really firm details on that. I'm just not quite ready to let that missile all the way out the silo yet until we get a couple of other things dealt with. And we will talk to y'all in another week. You hoodlums take care of each other, take care of yourself, stay out of trouble. And if you can't do that, then don't get caught. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Thanks for watching!