The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: The Comms Syndicate

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Phil joined The Comms Syndicate for a long and wide-ranging talk about a host of topics from what constitutes an emergency all the way to current events in the news cycle.https://www.youtube.com/@TheCommsSyndicatehttps://www.partisancommsgroup.com/https://www.youtube.com/@PartisanCommsGrouphttps://www.youtube.com/@RANTStrategieshttps://www.youtube.com/@2alphasolutionshttps://www.youtube.com/@TerminalElement

You're watching the Com Syndicate Livestream. It's 11.59 on Radio Free America. This is Uncle Sam with music and the train is still going. Right now, I've got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone. The chair is against the wall. We'll do it live. We'll do it live! I'll write it and we'll do it live! Alright, welcome to the livestream. And I, let's see, give me one second. Let me turn my audio up. Hopefully I'm not over-modulating and blowing you guys out.

We've got Drew from the Terminal Element and Jared from 2Alpha Solutions. We've also got two special guests. We've got Taylor from Rant Strategies and Phil from the Matter of Facts podcast. For those watching who are active on amateur radio, you can also send us your comments or questions via JSA call. I guess, Drew, we're running 40 meters tonight. That's right. I'm on 7078 JSA call. Send a message to at TCS and I'll read it on the air.

All right. And I'll put that at the bottom so people can also find that. So on this episode, we're going to discuss a few things. One of them will be what qualifies as an emergency, what also qualifies as emergency communications, and then we'll jump into some current events, the aftermath of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, and is that a sign of things to come? Also, a topic that everyone seems to be really interested in would be the recent drone sightings. And, you know, there's some questions and a lot of theories out there. Are they being flown by the U.S. government, or are they being flown by foreign adversary aliens, or is it just one big hoax? So that's basically what we've got planned for tonight. But before we jump into our topics, I wanted to get started with introducing our two guests.

Taylor, I'm going to start with you, but you've got a YouTube channel called Rant Strategies. Can you give us a summary of what Rant Strategies is and what kind of content you have on your channel? Sure. So Rant Strategies is now completely embedded with medicine in bad places. And we are a tactical medical and rescue training company. training company. And basically what we have done is all of your, if anybody's familiar with EMS stuff, your National Agency of Emergency Medical Technicians, we do all the NAEMT classes. So your TCCC, your TECC, your bleeding control, all that stuff is primarily handled through medicine medicine in bad places. Ranch Strategies is pretty much the like specialty course provider for medicine in bad places. And we have our canine medical operator course, which is basically

everything you can do that a paramedic can do to a human. We teach you how to do to a dog. I have a professional connection with canines. So that's one of my classes that I only have is a live fire TECC type class. And then we also have a woodland tactics, which neither have a tactics based emphasis on it or a medical based emphasis on it. And then a, a rope rescue technician course. Which course is the most popular the canine one for sure we have done the canine one um in in multiple states up and down the east coast indiana ohio new jersey new york We actually did the Pentagon Police, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island Police Department,

the United States Park Police, and then everything from Philadelphia SWAT, Philadelphia K-9, New Jersey State Police, just everywhere in between. That is the most sought-after one, and everybody from a handler to a paramedic that comes to that course is like, this is one of the best canine medical courses I've ever taken. And forgive me if I missed it. So your background is kind of a dual role law enforcement and paramedic. Is that right? Yes. So current law enforcement, state level, I do some specialty, you know, in one of our special units there.

Prior to that was a New York City firefighter. I worked in Manhattan. And everybody knows being a firefighter is the greatest job in the world. I only worked eight days a month. When I wasn't there, I worked part-time in Jersey City as a paramedic. Before that, I was actually put the first paramedic engine in service for Washington, D.C. And then in my still current kind of contracting role for the government, I do wildland firefighting, rope rescue paramedic, which people commonly refer to as REMS,

usually in the month of August and September every year. in the month of August and September every year. So for people that are looking for Rant Strategies website, it's rantstrategies.com. And then it looks like you've also got an Instagram. And let's see, I believe that is rant underscore strategies. So that's how they hold you on Instagram. And then as far as the YouTube channel goes, so that's kind of i i'm pretty much responsible for the youtube channel um people

will often ask us once they get talking to me and see the content like do we do a communications course and i don't that is just from the start of my being i've always had an interest in communications that is such a vital part of every single thing in public safety that I've ever been involved in. And I kind of realized early on how critical it is in all situations. So everything you see on the YouTube channel as far as communications type videos goes is just my passion and kind of nerding out on stuff. Well, you're going to get a chance to nerd out in a little bit because we're certainly going to dig into emergency communications and what that all means. We'll jump over to you, Phil, next.

And so Phil runs the Matter of Facts podcast, and he was kind enough to invite Jared, Drew, and myself on an episode, and we had a lot of fun with him, Nick, and Andrew. Phil, do you mind giving us an overview of your channel and your podcast and what you do? Yeah, man. I mean, the short version is Matterfacts podcast was born eight years ago out of this very very obvious gap i saw in like my generation and for for the purposes of the show i mean i'm 42 years old i am like one of the oldest millennials there will be but i saw this huge gap between my generation's knowledge i've had to navigate emergency situations and what i felt was required and appropriate for the average person so eight years ago i was sitting at home from,

you know, home from a day of work. And I was watching a lot of my neighbors dealing with a lot of flooding in Southeast Louisiana. And these people had no earthly idea not to drive in flooded areas, not to wear closed toed shoes, not to have food and water in their vehicle, like they were completely unprepared for the situation that they found themselves in. And for whatever reason, I looked at that situation and said, you know, there are things I learned as a child from my parents that they taught me to be ready for emergency situations. And we never called it prepping back then. We never called it was never anything weird. It was you live on the Gulf Coast. You're going to eat a hurricane every two or three years. You might as well be ready for it. So you're not

completely hung out to dry by it. So I started this podcast by myself and then later on took on Andrew and Nick as co-hosts with the intention of trying to normalize the preparedness community to the average person, to try to show people that the things that they thought they knew about the crazy preppers and the tinfoil hat wearing people weren't accurate and show people that there was a lot of things that this community knew and wanted to teach other people that were very very relevant to people's everyday lives so we've spent eight years trying to trying to make practical preparedness an everyday part of more people's lives just to get people thinking about these things and get them to wake up to the idea that like you know preparedness is not a thing you do

preparedness is not this weird fringe activity preparedness really should be just everyday part of your life it's it's as simple as having air in your spare tire and a little bit of extra money in your savings account carrying cash and it gets as complicated as you want it to get and your website is mofpodcast.com for those who want to check it out and i would be remiss if i didn't mention the uh disaster coffee which uh i guess you can purchase from the Matter of Facts podcast website. It's like you've got dark humor right now as your main product. Yeah, so that link actually takes you to DisasterCoffee.com, which, you know, in the name of full disclosure, I'm a part owner in that company now. But Disaster Coffee is co-owned by myself, Andrew, and James Walton. And it's a brand that we've built around this idea of like, you know, mixing our intense enjoyment,

and I would say a sociopathic need for coffee and caffeine, with kind of the tenets and the ideas of preparedness. So it is a premium coffee. It is small batch roasted to order when you order it from us we immediately notify our roaster and the order comes gets roasted the next day and sent out to you as fast as possible this is not off the shelf store-bought folders in a red can that's been sitting around for months on end it is the freshest cup of coffee we can possibly provide to y'all and the product that we sell a fair bit of that i tend to recommend a lot is so-called bunker beans which is green unroasted coffee beans so for the person that wants to store coffee like

in your long-term preps already roasted coffee and ground coffee has a certain shelf life to it whereas green unroasted coffee beans is a dried grain so it is ostensibly 20 to 25 year shelf stable as long as you keep it dry and out of the elements. Personally, like I think I've got like 25 pounds of it sitting back there on the shelf. I roast all my own coffee from scratch. And I believe you've got, forgive me, I forget, I've forgotten the name, Cypress. That's another initiative that you have going for trying to get people,

I guess, that are not necessarily technologically savvy to, I guess, to get them into prepping. Is that right? Yeah. So Cypress Survivalist is a nonprofit that my wife and I started just a couple of months ago. And we're still in the process of standing it up and getting that first initial event off the ground, which we're looking at like March 8th in southeast Louisiana. But Cypress Survivalist is just kind of an outgrowth of the podcast. It's this realization that we have this huge community that's all around us that just judging by how they reacted to Hurricane Ida, this is a group that is not prepared for massive emergencies.

They are not prepared for horrible hurricanes. This is a group that desperately needs to kind of like apply some of the tenants of preparedness to their own personal lives so they can take better care of their families in the event of an emergency. And I just, I came to the realization that we're not going to reach all these people with me and a couple of my friends on the internet. It's just not going to happen.

We need to start, we need to start transitioning to some in-person events just to reach a different audience and to try to build a model here that, like, if I can build a framework and a curriculum and everything that works here, then I think it's something we could potentially pass off to other people so that they could run a similar event using a similar curriculum in their local area. local area. It's an attempt to take all this off of the miracles of the internet and put it in person so you can actually talk to people face-to-face who are going to be your neighbors and they're going to be the people you have to depend on in an emergency. Excellent. Well, let's jump into our first topic, I guess, with that.

And so first one's what qualifies as an emergency. I think we've got some pretty good subject matter experts here for that. But one of the things that we were talking about offline is not everyone has the same definition of what an emergency is. And an event that's considered SHTF for one person may not have to consider a definition for another. So we can start with, you know, a very basic question is, what do you think qualifies as an emergency? And I guess, Taylor, maybe we'll start with you, and then we'll go around the room. with you and then we'll go around the room sure so i think one of the you know most basic ways that i deal with all that on a routine level is so my responsibilities is as a search manager for missing people but when you go down your missing person search existence criteria

it's pretty amazing to the fact of if a person is not where they're supposed to be, if they're essentially missing, we start asking questions, well, how old are they? Because if they're really, really young or they're really, really old, that changes the criteria. If they are familiar with the area or they're not familiar with the terrain, that changes the criteria. If they have appropriate clothing for what the weather is at that time, that changes the criteria. they have appropriate clothing for what the weather is at that time that changes the criteria so you can go down this list and get your numbers to see and it almost helps you figure out is this an emergency as far as a missing person is concerned or is it not and i think if you apply that to emergencies in general it comes down to the fact of, is this person capable of dealing with this

situation or are they not? You know, again, most of us in this room here, probably everybody's has a public safety background. If you're in a minor car accident, probably not a big deal. We know how to handle that. We pull off the side of the road and call 911. We know that, you know, appropriate people are going to come, no big deal. But we've all dealt with those people who are in a very, very minor car accident, and it's damn near the end of the world for them. That is a true emergency for them.

So I think it's hard to quantify without putting who the emergency is affecting into the equation. Fair enough. Phil, what are your thoughts? So I'm going to throw a pretty wide net here, and I'm going to assert that I think an emergency is any departure from the norm that has a has a a a notable impact on either a person's life or quality of life so like let let's let's look at how big of this net i'm trying to toss here like obviously if you have a cat5 hurricane that drops

trees on your house like what we dealt with after hurricane ida in the middle of the event when the trees were falling we could call that emergency there was the possibility the tree would have come through the house destroyed our shelter we would have had big problems to deal with the day after the hurricane you know we had food and water fall back on we had alternate ways of keeping cool we had alternate ways of keeping cool. We had alternate ways of powering things. We had alternate ways of maintaining ourselves. So we weren't in an emergency that was life or death, but our quality of life had obviously been impacted. We had severe, we had some damage to the home that had to be remedied very quickly. We had to shift to using a lot of alternate methods of sustaining our basic needs. We had zero water pressure, so we had to fall back on an emergency water supply that thankfully I had the thought process to put

together before the hurricane. Now, if I hadn't have had the extra food, the extra water, the generator, the jackery, the, you know, all those things, then that would have been, that would have threatened our life much more quickly. But as it stands, I'm going to toss a wide net and say that if it impacts your quality of life, you could probably call it an emergency. In the event of the car wreck that Taylor was referencing, even if you can handle that, you can call EMS, there's no immediate emergencies, you can call a wrecker, you can get a towed, your vehicle's been messed up, your plans have been screwed up, you might have some injuries that have to be dealt with, you might just have to go home, take a day off of work. That could cost you money, that could

cost you time, it could cost you leave if you're in that position. So I say if it compromises your quality of life, you can call it an emergency. It may not be as severe of an emergency as if it compromises or threatens your life itself. But I feel like to truly like encompass what is an emergency, we got to toss a nice wide net here. So that way we can catch those things that may not threaten your life, but they still screw your day up real bad. I guess we'll go to Jared and then Drew next. All right. All right. You know, over the past 20, 30 years, the media especially has dramatized any kind of weather event, whether it's rain or snow.

Back in the 90s, it snowed all the time and they didn't make a big deal out of it and now anytime they talk about the chance of flurries it's this this huge drama thing that's just drawn out for for days prior and and and afterwards um they send these these reporters out to these locations and tell you how and try to show you how bad it is i'm like well it's just a normal everyday thing. So I think a true emergency is whenever your life or somebody's life is in jeopardy or of being hurt or maimed or whatever. I'm going to disagree with Phil just a little bit just because trees fall in your backyard and and they might hit your house that might be a bit of emergency um it's really not a true emergency just so to speak because if the event happens nothing's happened to you now the only thing that you have to worry about is making sure the power to the house is off And now the only thing that you have to worry about is making sure the power to the house is off or that you do have power. And you might have a hole in your roof that you might have to fix, but it's not really a true emergency.

It's a priority, but it's not an emergency. So I think the definition of emergency has really, it's a very perceptive thing to each individual. But I think the definition of an emergency has changed over the years too. It's very dramatized anymore. Fair enough. And Drew, I've saved you for last because you are a passionate guy. So fire away, sir. No passion, just all business, all facts. Anyway, I was actually really surprised to learn when I looked up the actual definition of emergency,

it did not include things like life, limb, or property. But in my mind, that is what is required for something to be an actual emergency. And I guess I think, too, I'm sure when every single one of us was a child we we had some sort of horrifying you know we saw a bug or something and it was a you know the end of the world and and uh i'm sure all of our mothers said something to the effect that well are you bleeding well no so it's not really that bad and so i i i while i recognize that the official definition in the dictionary doesn't include some sort of life threat, I don't personally consider something to be a true emergency unless life, limb, or property is on the line. So maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

But for my purposes, that would be what constitutes an emergency requiring an urgent response and an emergency type of communication method. Taylor, hit it. Taylor, shoot. Well, I think one of the things there is what this boils down to is the fact that verbiage matters. And I look back to early on, you know, doing vehicle rescue work. I remember there was a guy who made it a very, very hard point to drive home the fact of

not everybody stuck in their vehicle is entrapped. They may be inconvenienced and need a door pop, but they're not necessarily entrapped, even though we usually dispatch an accident like that as entrapped to the same point of that active shooter is now the hot topic and if you monitor police radio you will hear you know almost you know what areas you're monitoring it could be on a weekly

basis an active shooter situation and i always when i'm doing courses on active shooter work i like to make the point homes like guys you know just because you know the the person who called in or heard shots being fired or use the officer on the ground hear shots fired that's not necessarily an active shooter it could just be the drive-by shooting the gang related shooting the gang shooting that occurs in a school. We have to delineate to the fact of things like active shooters are there's a large number of victims and or a large number of potential victims. And the event is still ongoing. So just trying to put it home that exactly to this topic was an emergency. Our definitions of these words matter. I think that's a great point.

If I may. That's a great point about the extrication. I used to work in a state that had a trauma system where if somebody required 20 minutes of extrication time, it was a high priority trauma system entry. And not everybody who's just stuck in the car who requires 20 minutes to get them cut out is going to die imminently. So there's so many factors that go into that. And the bean counters don't like it when you exist in that gray area. If there's no mechanism of injury. Right.

I've had people, their car rolls and they're just kind of sitting on the roof of the car and they're fine, but they just need help out. And sometimes that takes time. And not all the time do we need to race to get that person out maybe that's that creates even a more dangerous situation than what we're dealing with now so maybe taking our time and going 20 minutes or longer on that extrication is it's just totally appropriate and indicated but yeah you try to explain that to the bean counters at the state who evaluate these things and it gets a little funny sometimes. You know, going back to the perception thing, too. I'm sorry, Phil.

Go ahead. Well, I was going to say somebody that's following my feed actually is – they said something that kind of resonated with me. They said that my life is threatened every day, but I don't think I'm in an emergency situation. I know that gentleman. He works as a prison guard, so fair point. But what I was going to ask was like, I'm going to make an assumption, but how many of y'all by show of hands have families, wives, kids? I can't be the only one. So the reason I say I bring that up is because does what you consider to be an emergency change, whether it's affecting you or your loved ones? Because I know that, like, for me, I'm a military veteran.

I will sleep on the ground under the stars. I will skip meals. I will tolerate some pretty horrendous conditions that I would not tolerate for my wife or daughter for a moment. It's not palatable to me. Whether or not it's going to kill them is really irrelevant. That's why I said earlier, if it impacts quality of life, if my kid is hungry and if I'm hungry, I don't count that as an emergency because I know that I can miss a meal or two, but my kid being hungry, missing one meal is not acceptable to me. So I feel like part of this also, like when we're

talking about what is an emergency, it kind of depends on who it's impacting. If it's impacting someone that we place their needs or their wants higher up the scale than ours, we're going to naturally kind of elevate whatever is concerning them higher up than we normally would if it only impacted us. I can say that, you know, to the point Taylor was making earlier about talking about vehicle accidents, if my child is hurt, I can be bleeding like a siff. And I'm pretty much just going to suck it up, apply pressure, and very calmly collected, like, okay, I'm going to deal with this. But if my kid is hurt, it's an emergency immediately. She's my daughter.

So I think that's also worth bringing up in this conversation, is like, depending on who is facing that peril, we're going to naturally want to elevate things further up the scale very quickly. Sometimes. That's very close to what I was going to say, Phil. Like if my dog runs off, I mean, to me, that's the end of the world. That's an emergency to me, but that's family. Exactly.

You know, so I'm going to spend however long it takes to go find my dog. If he runs out in the woods, I'm going to go find him. You know, not that he's ever done that. Or if he gets hurt, that, to me, is an emergency in my perception, in my world. This is what we were kind of getting into offline, was the fact of

you losing power at your house may not be a big deal. You're prepared, or you have blankets, whatever. But your next door neighbor who also lost power, who has a trach, who's on a home vent, that's quite honestly, you know, maybe they have a battery backup. But they are heading towards a dire emergency dealing with the exact same set of situations that you are. So, again, it's kind of who it is affecting. I can say after Hurricane Katrina, it was brought to my attention by one of my fellow soldiers that they knew someone in the local area that was on a home dialysis setup.

Now, when power's been out for two weeks, and the only thing keeping your family member alive is that little Honda Jera run of the home dialysis,ysis fuel is not a it'd be nice to have air conditioning it is a life or death situation after hurricane ida when the power was out me getting my generator running was really like it'd be really nice not to have all the food in my fridge spoil but if it does i've got six months of dried goods stored up who cares you know it's it's degrees of an emergency and that's why i always go back to like to try to define this in as i hate to say in as loose a way as possible but so that it can apply in as many directions as it has to like if it impacts a person's quality of life even if they'll survive it it sucks bad enough we probably shouldn't allow it to impact their quality of

life and if it threatens their life that is dependent upon the emergency and the person. I mean, whether it's home dialysis or even around here, we have this situation every time we get a power outage in the summer where at least one or two very old people pass away, unfortunately, because they can't tolerate the heat in the middle of August in Southeast Louisiana, as well as some people that are younger can. What becomes an emergency is what has happened and has that applied to you directly i guess i'm confused then i so we're talking about life or limb situations here you can't you're you're dependent on that oxygen concentrator or home dialysis these are immutably dangerous situations for those specifically fragile people. But

we seem to be drawing a demarcation between those situations and that quality of life situation where your ice cream melts in the freezer. I got to say, I personally don't think that's an emergency if somebody's ice cream melts, even if they really, really wanted that ice cream. Maybe that's something that they deal with urgently, but you wouldn't call 911 for that. I would expect consequences if somebody called 911 for that. People have called 911 over a lot less. Oh, yeah.

Someone called the local radio station after the last bad hurricane we had down here after Hurricane Ida. 48 hours after the hurricane, they were called in the local radio station to ask when bad hurricane we had down here after hurricane ida 48 hours after the hurricane they were called in local radio station asked when the grocery stores were going to open because they had no food in their fridge okay i mean so that precipitated something that could be potentially dangerous for that person definitely uh just through their their lack of planning but i don't i don't think the i don't think the specific act of the power going out is the emergency but it could precipitate situations that are urgent for people and i understand when

i say quality of life i'm not talking about i'm not talking about something that like upsets you or inconveniences you i'm talking about something that is maybe not immediately life-threatening but it's going to harm your ability to care for yourself it's going like if everybody knows most people can make it a couple of weeks without food, right? Like that's pretty reasonably accepted. But for, you know, Phil here who has hypoglycemia, a couple of days without food is going to have a very rapid, it's not going to kill me, but it's going to very rapidly impact my ability to do labor and to take care of my family.

So it's one of those things where it was like, is it threatening my life? Not immediately. Is it going to, is it going to make other things more difficult for me is going to make certain things impossible for me. That's why I use that umbrella term, like quality of life. It's not a,

it inconveniences me because I don't have my ice cream. It is. These things will not kill me immediately, but they are going to impact my ability to care for myself and others. Happens every summer and winter around. I guess this probably qualifies. Is that a matter of fact, Nick? Yeah, Nick.

That's my co-host, Nick, who lives in Illinois. And that's one of those things, it's also, a lot of this dictates as to how you live your daily lives and a lot of a lot of that is influenced by where you live when i was in new york and manhattan when we had the blackouts hit new york you know that's one of those things people don't understand you know you have residential buildings that are 80 stories tall well when the power goes out and the elevators shut off now you have people that literally can't get to their house anymore because they can't walk up

80 flights of stairs or they are in the elevators and now the doors don't open so they can't get out not to mention the emergency response that takes place from that where literally every single elevator in manhattan had to be located where it was, the doors opened, made sure it was clear to let these people out. So, you know, it's kind of one of those things we were talking before, too, as well as, you know, how this does the mission dictate your gear, does the gear dictate your mission? And, you know, my stance on that was no mission, mission dictates all. And then you have to act accordingly to that. And I think even just trying to define the storm emergency relates directly into that to show it depends what the emergency is and how it's affecting you for how you are going to or what you are going to need to deal with that.

That's why we pre-plan so many things and have operating procedures. Yep. many things and have operating procedures yep i would i would go so far to say that gear definitely or mission dictates gear gear dictates response because i know from my time in the military like there were plenty of times it would have been really cool to have this thing for this one specific situation we found ourselves in but without that thing we figured out the next best thing lots of redneck engineering if i'm being perfectly honest anybody that's ever look anybody that's ever been in the military or first spotter knows that moment in time where you have like duct tape super glue and shoelaces and you just make stuff work right with what you have and not what you want exactly so i mean i would definitely say

that like if you have a mission you should definitely make the gear meet the mission there's no justification for charging in a battle with shoelaces and duct tape when you could have the thing you really should have for that mission. But we also know, you know, George Patton was a genius. I think I can attribute that quote to him that said that no plan survives first contact. So once the emergency starts, you're no longer in control of the situation, and you might have to figure stuff out and make do. But I get frustrated when people, like, they want to luck their way through an emergency, and it's like, no, no, no.

There were steps we could have taken prior to this emergency to make this suck less than it is going to already. Yeah, and you know, the whole reason we're talking about this particular topic is it's basically going to segue into our next one, which is what qualifies as emergency communications. And perhaps this comment, I saw it a little while ago, so I'll put it up. How do you think the ability on the new iPhones to send text messages via satellite help in emergency situations? I mean, I think for most people, a cell phone is going to be your first line of defense anyway. It's not going to be necessarily a radio. But the reason that, you know, we brought this up is because there is a place for radios and emergency communications. And I know that some people kind of use that interchangeably, but there's a lot of talk online

about ways to set up emergency communications. And there's a lot of debates as to whether or not amateur radio or GMRS repeaters are well-suited to handle traffic during or after an emergency. So I guess the question- Can we talk about Kyle's question before we move on to the next topic? Because that, I think...

We can, yeah, if you want to expand on that. So that's been going on for years before the iPhone started getting satellite capability. And so I have seen many of these calls come in recently where people have satellited out. I think that's really cool. But this is not new to the iPhone. satellite it out. I think that's really cool. But this is not new to the iPhone. The Garmin inReaches, especially the help buttons that didn't have any sort of ability to send a text message, those have been problematic because, for example, in the Grand Canyon, I read about people were punching those buttons because they ran out of water or their feet were tired.

And then they have to mount mount like a 20 000 rescue to go even find make contact with these people and and get aircraft in the air you know all the things that you got to do to find somebody and um you know a lot of these things were definitely not emergencies and so i think that's why a lot of people have have tended to drift towards those devices that where you can actually communicate some substance in that, in that contact to say, Hey, you know, we're fine. However, we're out of water and we're going to be in a tight spot here soon. But I I've seen a number of these these contacts based on satellite here

recently. And I'm fascinated by it. I haven't had a chance to play with an iPhone that has that yet. And I'm really curious how effective the two way communication can be with that. And I think T-Mobile even is coming out with a device that can interlink with Starlink satellites here coming up. So not a new question, but it's definitely not going away. And there's a lot of ambiguity there as to what people consider their emergency and how we respond to it in a way that's, you know, financially responsible and, you know, doesn't put people in at undue risk because somebody has a blister. Well, I guess before we move away from the definition of what an emergency

is or what we think it is, it looks like Pacific Northwest Minuteman has a zone. So an unforeseen combination of circumstances or the resulting state that calls for immediate action. That's what I read as well. And it doesn't list life or limb. I was really surprised to discover that. It seems like it should be in there.

Unless the inference is that, unless it's life or limb, it doesn't require immediate action. I mean, leave it open to interpretation as what do you think requires immediate action? I'm going to tell you that when I have an angry wife, chocolate requires immediate action. But, you know.

Well, if you're a diabetic with your insulin in the refrigerator, refrigeration requires an immediate action. Right. Yep. But as far as the satellite communication goes, as far as the iPhone goes, I think that, once again, we have to take advantage of technology. That is an awesome capability to have. But when you look at that as going, you know, everybody's familiar with the PACE plan.

Primary communications is our cell phones. There's no denying that if you're out there saying your cell phone shouldn't be your primary communicator, I don't know what you're thinking, but let's be real with ourselves. That is the case. However, one of the biggest things is as far as emergency communications go, is it has to have some sort of ruggability. And people make a lot of money repairing iphones having insurance plans on iphones replacing iphone screens so for

relying on your iphone as your primary means of communications plus your emergency means of communications just because it has the satellite feature into it that's kind of foolish because of how delicate of a piece of device that it is and on top of that yes it does it that's kind of foolish because of how delicate of a piece of device that it is and on top of that yes it does satellite it's awesome i can tell you this past summer i was at the klamath mountains up in northern california and even with the starlink because of the sheer way the cliff faces are you still have to be able to face a satellite to get in contact with one and there were miles and you know, long stretches that your satellite wasn't in the right spot for you to get a signal. Wasn't that the issue with Marcus Luttrell trying to call for help in Afghanistan?

Oh, yeah. There you go. Just couldn't. Yeah. So, I mean, personally, I take a view of what constitutes emergency communications, and I prefer to use the word backup communications, kind of going to what Taylor was saying about PACE plans. Like, to me, everything is about having layers of preps so that when Plan A falls apart, and Plan A probably will fall apart, Plan B is right there. And if Plan B falls apart, I'm going to keep going down the list until we get to improvisation or until something starts working. So to me, what having, you know, satellite-based communication built into the iPhones, which was part of the reason I got a 15 Pro when it came time to upgrade, because I saw that as another

tool in the toolbox. And I wouldn't say it elevates a phone to the point of being like your preferred emergency communications. But to me, what it does is it broadens out the usability as a primary communication source. There's no reason not for your phone not to be your primary communicator. Everybody has one. They're reasonably secure. They work reasonably well. And even the event of like, you know, moderate power outages, at least around here, all these cell towers have backup generators.

So they're going to run for a while. It's the exception, not the rule when the cell phones stop working. So I think if you have the ability to use it in a really off-grid situation using satellites, that just makes it work a little further into the woods as a primary communicator. I don't think it means you can throw out the radio and everything else and say, woohoo, I have satellite. I don't need backups anymore. It doesn't make it idiot proof. It just makes it less failure prone, I would say. Hey, we got a GST check-in. Sorry, I thought you were done. Oh, no, I just had a pause. But I would just say that the one thing that a lot of people don't talk about when they talk about emergency communications that I always bring up is, I'm like, sometimes communication is not always a positive thing. Sometimes it's as simple as, like, ahead of the emergency, telling a person, this is where I'm going to be if you need to come looking for me, or this is how you can reach me.

It's that whole aspect of planning ahead of the situation before you wind up in it. And sometimes communication isn't pick up a radio or pick up a cell phone. Sometimes it's drop a letter in a friend's mailbox or it's communicate with them verbally ahead of the emergency. I just think that it gets overlooked a lot.

JSA checking. We got a message from K7. K7 JLJ. Just a comment here. He says, TCS, enjoying the show. Awesome. Very cool. Bill, you brought up something good,

and I found a graphic that is published by APCO that covers that. It's a cycle of emergency communication. I sent it I sent it to you, Terrence, I don't know if you were able to get that on your computer. But APCO actually includes that in their emergency communication cycle that that pre planning, the pre planning portion, and then prior to that mitigation, and I believe, refining plans. Yeah, anyway. Oh, you did. Yeah, anyway. Oh, you did. Yeah, you know what? I'm sorry.

I did not include that into... No, it's all good. So APCO is an organization that manages emergency dispatchers. So they, if anybody, have got this dialed in. And so that's, I think we're drifting into the same lessons that they've learned. That preparation is part of the emergency communication cycle. Offline, we were, sorry, this thing's buffering a little bit. Offline, we were kind of talking about, you know, a lot of the things that you see on YouTube and stuff like that,

where people are kind of promoting what they think emergency communications is. And we started debating as to whether they're using these terms interchangeably with backup communications. Do you think people who say MCOM and emergency communications, do you think they really just mean backup communications? It's totally reasonable to have layers of comms. That would be your cell phone and probably

maybe ham radio if you're into that and a CB and who knows what else. Those are all just backup solutions. I think it's probably a reasonable explanation honestly like to me something anything that you use to coordinate call for help or to mitigate an emergency is emergency communications it's like the difference between me having a generator because i just don't like being hot when the power's out and i have a generator because I can't have this life-saving piece of medical equipment die on me in the middle of a power outage. If you use it for an emergency lot of people in the preparedness community. But I always tell everybody, I'm like, if you use it for preparedness, it is preparedness stuff.

It's the intent that makes it emergency communications. But I would say that it's all backup communications until there's an emergency. Now it's emergency communications, if that makes sense. That's fair. I agree with that. Drew, you look like you're screaming inside. No, no. I do have a lot to say, but I want to make sure I'm not stomping on everybody else.

No. I do have a lot to say, but I want to make sure I'm not stomping on everybody else. But I definitely think that there's an inappropriate intermingling between those two terms. And no greater example of this is the heavy focus of HF on MCOM. By the way, MCOM in the public safety world is not a word that is is known or used at least what i've seen and i my experience is not all encompassing but this is a word limited to i think ham radio folks and probably more specifically youtube i don't think it's a bad term to use but it is it is not something that actual communications professionals use so i just wanted to let folks know that if they're if they're not familiar with it. So if somebody is really hammering MCOM at you, sometimes I think maybe that person doesn't have a whole lot of experience

in actually working emergencies. And that's, that's not wrong. They probably still have some good information to share, but it's, it's just a perspective that should be that people that consumers should keep in mind. So in the professional realm for you know paramedics firefighters police officers what terms do you guys use for that it's never anything that i've i've heard a term for a taylor jared can you guys chime in here i've it's just you get on the radio and talk it would be communications because you're essentially talking on it because you're doing emergency communications that's just this is our method of communicating just what we do yeah yeah it's it's not a thing that that needs a special term

that i've ever heard maybe that maybe there's some department out there that uses the word mcom a lot but would it's just the thing you do when you're working emergency i was trying to figure out what where the origin of that came from and i was wondering if possibly it came up during somebody's pace planning or something i don't know i mean we'll get into uh something jared brought up uh nim's and ics in a moment but it is interesting because i don't think i started seeing income until maybe a few years ago i don't know that has i think i think the more ham radio got involved which appropriately so with emergency operations centers and being hubbed out of there the term emergency communications mcom kind of became their title their nomenclature exactly but but drew i wanted you to elaborate on the HF for emergency communications

because I didn't give you my response offline. So I wanted to explain your title on that so you can get your position on it so you can go a little bit deeper into it. Yeah, sorry, I didn't tie up that thought. I see a massive emphasis on HF, which is a lot of fun and has utility in managing emergencies. But in general, anyone I would contact on HF is so far away, except for a niche circumstance, that they probably can't help me urgently, rapidly. Now, I think perhaps if you are in an outpost in Antarctica, you're on a

ship at sea, you're in an airplane, a lot of these places have professional HF radios, but HF of any type could be useful. But still, that rapid response, that person's probably going to be so far away. And you brought up a great example of where HF might be useful, and I'll yield the floor to you here. Well, so I was saving the best that I kept offline, but yes, my response to you on that initial one was, you know, your response was, you know, how, how would that help me in an emergency right now? And my response was if I was truly your lifeline for an emergency you were having, and I was, you know, a thousand miles away,

but because I could tell you, Hey, you're having a heart attack, go ahead and take 324 milligrams of aspirin go ahead and take 0.4 milligrams of nitro if you because you can send you know pictures over it if you have access to an ekg machine at least let me get a picture of it i can read it for you and you know do a 12 lead and kind of diagnose you just over that and one of the other things you had commented was, you know, you related it directly to friends and family. So some of your friends and family will have skill sets that are important, they can play a role. My bigger position on this as far as communications

goes, which is what I was kind of saving was the fact of the fact that you know, it's a friend or family, the fact that you can authenticate that just because you know, then you know their voice, you know where they are, know where they're located if we look at emergency just a little bit broader than our local area to hey there is an event or situation going on and for whatever reason the intelligence that's being gathered from the media from public officials isn't necessarily liable or we don't know too much of what's going on outside of our window being able to contact somebody across the country in the middle of the country across the state line to say hey here's what we're experiencing are you experiencing the

same thing and i think if you looked at it as far as a intelligence gathering tool as far as emergency communications goes it's vital in that perspective that's that's a little further down in just kind of managing the disaster though not the not the initial rapid response so but it could but it could it could dictate how you're going to manage it because hey if everybody you talk you talk to somebody in california and this just happened and then oh here it happened in arizona and then oh here it happened in tennessee and it's making its way across and you're getting real-time live info from trusted sources because you know them it could it could dictate how you responded to it or when the aliens start nuking cities it's how we spread the word.

So if I sounded too arrogant over text message, I certainly apologize for that. I don't know everything. We forgive you. We got another JSA comment, but Phil, why don't you go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I typed in the private chat but i was going to say i get the exact opposite of this whenever i talk about gmrs is usable usability for the preparedness community a lot of people comment that you should get ham

you should get fhf gmrs too short range there's too few people on it yada yada yada yada and i go back to the same thing i said earlier if you're using it for an emergency purpose and you've planned appropriately, which means you should know who you're reaching out to. They should know what channel to listen for you on. You should have a communications plan built around you and these people you're trying to contact. If it fits that need, then it's useful for an emergency. And if it doesn't fit that need, you need another piece of equipment that does. piece of equipment that does. Like, I guess to me, like I'm very equipment and very agnostic on a lot of topics. Cause to me, it's like, does it, does it fit your need? If the answer is yes, then rock and roll with it. I don't care what the internet says. Like there are, there are people who I know

who live in the literal middle of nowhere and UHF, VHF, GMRS is not going to be useful to them. They're too far away from the people they need to contact in the event of an emergency. They really need to deal with HF to get the range they need, or they need to look at satellite messaging or something else. But like my communications plan in the event of an emergency centers around me, my wife, and my daughter. We live together. We live in a mid-sized town. If I can get a signal four and a half miles across town from my house to my wife's work, that's the furthest I need to send a signal. And as long as the local repeaters are still up and running, and a couple of them are on backup power, I can get a signal 40, 50 miles away

through these GMRS repeaters. So again, does it fit your need? If the answer is yes, then it's, by default, it works for emergency communications. And if the answer is no, then go look at another piece of equipment. I don't like the blanket statements that this doesn't work for anybody or this does work for everybody. Because the minute you use the words always and never, I get to poke holes in it. True. I see that a lot. There was this video. This guy dressed up like a bozo uh and a in a bow tie

and he was like ham radio can't work for or whatever and anyway um nearly every public safety agency in the world uses uhf or vhf handhelds which is very closely mimicked with the gmrs system or any any VHF amateur radio system. So it just seems odd that somebody would say GMRS can't work for you in an emergency when your police officers might be carrying nearly the same equipment. So what's the public safety part of that deal? They have infrastructure behind that to support it. They have repeater sites.

They have satellite receivers, not satellite in the space, but separate receivers across an area that are all tied into one repeater or two repeaters. Are there not linked repeaters on the amateur side? Of course, they're not on GMRS,

but they're still GMRS repeaters. Well, there are, yes. I'm not defending in one way or the other here. I'm just – Yeah. Well, but to your point, Jared, I think what I would say then is that it's not about a single piece of equipment but about a cohesive system. Exactly. Because that's what you're describing.

It's the radio. It's the repeaters. It's the whole system working together to an end goal. And the people behind it, too. And that is – this is something that I hammered on a lot of my audience about recently when we talked. We had a whole hour and 20 minutes talking about communications theory. Didn't talk about equipment hardly at all. Didn't talk about specific pieces of radio gear. But it was like the principles of a comm plan, the principles of guarding your, of comm security and signals intelligence.

It was just principles. It was stuff that you could apply to any communications platform. But it's this idea that like the planning, the, you know, the standardization of a plan, the radios, the things behind the radios, the operators having the knowledge to use it, it's all part of the system. And if the system works, then it works. And if the whole system as a total doesn't work, it doesn't work. And by the way, like the, the, the loose nut behind on the, uh, this side of the radio is usually the weakest link in every system. True. Well, one, one thing you're saying, you know, that's, that's the thing where

everything that kind of cements this together is number one pre-planning and you guys just mentioned that the only thing you know and this is as a as a general class name radio guy i think one of the biggest things that turns me away for ham radio for essentially emerging communications and the reason that i favor what gmrs is or how it's established is the fact that one of the things that I will preach to people is have a channelized based system, not trying to remember frequencies and offsets and this and that. No, no, no. And one of the best parts about that is if you're even doing it on the ham side, but you're having a radio program that way is you have some ambiguity there. If I tell you tell you hey we're you know

we're on two meters i say hey go to 160 well you pretty much know if you're listening in where you're going but if i say hey go to channel 23 you have no idea what that means because that could be any frequency exactly and that is like the one weak point of gmrs that i'm very quick to point out to people is like it is a channelized surface. There's only so many channels. So the ability to hide in that mountain of noise that is the radio band is fairly limited because if I'm trying to find a GMRS operator, I've only got 22 channels to scan. I'm going to find you eventually. It doesn't matter how short your transmissions are, how much you burst, or how much you spread them out.

I'm going to find you sooner or later. There's no doubt about that. And I'm going to cut into your comments. But I think for its ease of use, it is a greater benefit than a negative. For the fact that any public safety radio out there, you will never hear any law enforcement agency, fire rescue agency saying, hey, go to this frequency. It is a channelized system. Yeah.

And that is the reason I recommend it to so many people in the preparedness community. And I'm really pushing. I don't push against ham. yeah and that is the reason i recommend it to so many people in the preparedness community and i'm really pushing i don't push against ham i just tell everybody put this tool in the toolbox because the difference between a ham uhf radio and this thing is that i can teach my daughter how to use this in 45 seconds i can get her to change channels in 45 seconds i've got every radio in this house i've got the radio and that man pack back there on the floor and I've got the radio in my truck all with the exact same code plugs in them across the board. So every radio

you pick up in the Rabelais household, they all have the exact same channels in the same order. They work exactly the same. And that means that because of the way GMRS works, because for anybody that doesn't know, you get a radio license and that license covers you, your immediate family, a lot of your extended family, basically everybody except the dog.

And I can pass a radio to my brother-in-law or my parents or my wife or my daughter, anybody. We all operate off the same license. So it allows you to arm the laypeople around you with radios and spin them up very, very quickly in a way that I think is much more prohibitive. It just has a higher buried entry than ham does. Like, I won't debate it may or may not be a more capable radio service, but if you're not willing to invest the time to learn how to use it, it's useless to me. I'm getting buried in JSA messages here. Go ahead.

I'm sorry. First message we have here. Actually, all these are from K7JLJ. This message is for our FDNY calendar, Chad, there. It says you're nailing it. He obviously agrees with you. I appreciate that. I see.

I never mentioned the calendar, so okay. Oh, sorry. That's out of the bag now. Oops. I don't know where we find that calendar. Anyway, that the, the other message you said VHF won't get this message to you, even SSB voice. And I didn't understand this part of what you wrote a case of in jail. Jay, you said the term is quote my job unquote.

I don't know what that means, but I guess my, my point is there's like, you're sending a message to me over HF. There's very little I could do for you right now. If you are having a true emergency, maybe I could provide some sort of guidance or something. But you know, Taylor, Taylor did jump into that and pointed out that he was nailing that that topic home. Yeah, there's there's certainly a role for HF. I just I personally don't think it's your it's your most valuable or primary means of communicating an emergency raising an alarm

in a situation where your needs outstrip your resources to handle that situation. So, and then the last, this is a bit longer paragraph, same sender, my family's 260 miles away. I'm contacting HIMSS in their neighborhood to provide comms in SHTF. Short of satellite, there's no other way to communicate other than HF and preferably digital modes And I think we sort of talked about that and in maybe that's something of a backup Communication rather than an instant emergency because if they're 260 miles away, you definitely can't Come to their aid right off the bat to your... I'm not following. Say comments.

Oh, I get what he's saying. People call it my job. He's basically a volunteer firefighter who says, oh, I work at... You ask them what their job is, they say they're a fireman. But it's like, no, you actually work at Best Buy. You're a Best Buy checkout guy.

That's your job. Gotcha. Not to diminish their valuable service that they provide us. I guess I wanted to kind of go... I don't think Terrence was planning on us going this far down this rabbit hole. Yet here we are, Alice. Oh, no, I was. I actually wanted to circle back to something that you had brought up Phil

because it's going to segue into our kind of next set of talking points but basically you were talking about explaining theory and principles to people and I think that's probably one of the most important things you can do because one of the hardest questions to answer is what kind of radio should I get and it's like well what are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? Who do you want to talk to? And I think that you are probably one of the few people aside from, you know, the other guys here that actually talk about that kind of thing. There's plenty of people that are willing to recommend a radio, but, you know, they don't really take the next step of, well, what are you trying to do with it? And I think a lot of people kind of get frustrated with radio because that's really

the first thing you should be looking at instead of, you know, what cool gear should I buy first? And offline, Jared, I guess, you know, back to kind of Phil's point about theory and just principles, offline you were talking about NIMS and ICS and how many people when going down the path of setting up emergency comms infrastructure, they may not have much knowledge about that. And I can share this just briefly. So NIMS, that's the National Incident Management System. That's a program at FEMA. And the approach is for incident management for emergencies that range in size and scope. ICS is the Incident Command System. And that's, I guess, a model for helping managing resources during emergencies. But a lot of people don't really talk about the principles and theories. And is there a way,

I guess I could start with you, Jared, first, since you are the one that originally brought this up. Is there a way to apply these concepts for those wanting to go down the path of setting up an emergency communications infrastructure? The first thing you have to do, FEMA has all these courses lined out. And you can go on, they're all online, or I would say a majority of them are online. You can go take all the online courses that you want, but if you don't take those and actually implement them into practice in training and utilize these NIMS and ICS courses, you're going to be completely lost with them. It's a tool to help you manage a situation, a fire scene or an accident scene or a large wildfire scene, you know, and NIMS and ICS can, can grow and shrink as, as the scene or as the emergency grows or shrinks. You know, the,

the bigger the, the incident that you have, the more resources you're going to have coming in. So now your, your NIMS and your ICS has to, the way you manage it has to grow. And then as you start to demobilize an incident, your NIMS and ICS approaches kind of shrink down along with it as well. But you have to go out and experience the management side of these emergency scenes that really see how NIMS and ICS plays a role. And even then, it can be a little confusing for a lot of people. Well, and I think a lot of people, you know, well, I should take that back

because I don't want to speak in too much of an absolute, but I see a lot of folks online and just in different circles that will promote the whole man-pack thing that we've been talking about and beating to death and HF for communications. but there's not really like a, you know, pace plan or an SOP behind it. And, you know, there's a lot of emergency preparedness circles who include HF as part of their overall comms plan. But is that focus proportionate to its usefulness in all emergency scenarios? And I think that's something that Drew previously was asking in our offline conversations. Is it proportional so i mean i was just gonna say like i i i'm always very careful how i weigh into the situation because i never i never want to like disparage anyone's use of anything that fits their particular need i am extraordinarily anal retentive with a lot of people,

a lot of people I collaborate with, my audience, friends of mine, about asking the questions of, like, what is the thing I'm attempting to accomplish before you haul off and go buy 10 tons of, you know, manpacks and radios and antennas and all the stuff that you post on Instagram to impress all the people you're never going to meet in real life. But like to me, it just comes down to like, do you need to make that 200 mile, you know, contact? GMRS is probably not the thing for you if you need to reach out and touch someone from that far away.

You probably need to look at HF. But if I need to contact my wife and daughter who are at the other end of the subdivision hf is not only overkill it's not going to work so I just always go back to this idea that like if you ask me what should I do what should I get I'm going to ask you what you're trying to do and like that's the conversation I started having with a lot of like my patrons when when I started diving into communications was what are y'all trying to do guys like i built everything i everything i built in this communication system that i'm implementing is all based around the idea that there are two people i primarily need to be in touch with i do not expect them to be

more than five miles away from me i can cover that with gmrs just fine i've got some people in a little bit further area that i'd like to be in touch with, but they're not required. So I started with this is my requirement. What fits the requirement? What fills the need? And it's got to be that way for communications. It's got to be that way for home defense. It's got to be that way for everything in my mind. Like I just I don't get into this idea that anyone who does not know your situation can give you blanket suggestions for anything.

Yeah. I think that's fair. Absolutely, Phil. And I would say, you know, I think for 90% of the situations, I'm not going to go too deep into this. We've kind of moved on. But I think simplex communications is usually the 90% mark as to what is probably most important to you. And then you can go into whatever radio you want to use to fill that role, go ahead and explore. But as far as IMS goes, and incident management, it's

kind of torn. So Jared, you know, you'll know this in your heart, you know, long from doing both sides of law enforcement, horrible at IMS, we don't practice it, we really don't do it. Is that one of our things we you talk about, like freelancing as being a bad word in the fire department. In law enforcement, your job is basically to freelance and see where you fill in. On the fire department world, I think for 90% of the country, we've taken it too far because it's kind of been mandated to be enforced you know quite honestly from my point of view in this when i hear you know my city pulling up to a one or two vehicle car accident and there's nothing else going on

with it and they establish command and do the whole nine yards it's like i don't need to talk to command at that point being able to call you by your you know unit designator that you are the other 99 of the time it's perfectly appropriate. Your span of control is literally the guys you work with all the time. All within 50 feet of you. Right. There's no real need to implement IMS in that situation, and I get it. It's good

practice, but it's a lot of overkill. Now we take that and I go to the wildfire scene, and the first wildfire I went to, I literally took selfies standing in front of what they call these tent cities because it was the entire IMS system in real life. I'm like, oh my gosh, there's a logistics tent, there's planning tent, there's the finance tent. And it stretches for a mile on either side. Yeah, I'm like, I couldn't believe that it actually existed. Of all the FEMA classes I've ever had to do, I'm like, what is this stuff?

I'm never going to see it. And then all of a sudden, one day, I'm like, here it is in all its glory. So it does exist, and it is appropriate in certain situations. But a majority of this stuff, we're really kind of, you know, put that square peg into a round hole, and it's just not needed. Right. You know, for Drew, I would do... So what would be your recommendations for... I would say use common sense and I would equate this to Drew to be like, for the same reason

we don't walk into a medical patient's call or, you know, the single car accident and issue them triage tags just to practice because there's no need. Sure. Well, I mean, so I think how we. If I could, if I could already kind of originally be a little petty. Yeah, I think that stuff's occurring anyway right if i have a car crash that i'm responding to and the law enforcement are in charge of that scene i don't leave that scene without checking in with them first and racing off with their their witness right so that person is the incident commander even if he hasn't gotten on the radio and

declared incident command a triage is occurring i definitely am not going to be issuing triage tags to everybody but a triage is occurring as to my my response and then if simultaneous calls come in i'm deciding if that one is is uh urgent enough that i need to peel off so i mean some of this stuff's occurring informally even if it's not totally declared but it's informally and ims is a very formal system because i i would always guarantee like like yes we understand a car a car accident is a crime scene law enforcement technically is in charge but at the same time the engine that pulled up on that scene most likely went on scene two vehicles middle of the road engine 7-1 will have the you know whatever road command and it's like well sure almost to contradict you it's's like, well, no, no,

you're not in command. Law enforcement is, but law enforcement doesn't really do IMS. And that's one of my whole things is to in 90% of the situations, it's not really needed and it adds complexity for no reason. We can go all down that rabbit hole too,

Taylor, between command, between law enforcement and fire, because there's always pissing matches between the two. Always. What? Always. Yes. And I would follow both of y'all by saying two things. First of all, someone said common sense.

We should strict that entire phrase from the English dictionary because it's not that common anymore. But the other problem I find is that I find this more prevalent when you're dealing with a person who's not really confident in their craft. But sometimes you'll get a situation where a person applies the way it's supposed to be done, like incident command, to a situation where it's probably not required because that's the way they know to do it. So one of the things we face a lot in the military was this idea that, like, do it. So one of the things we face a lot in the military was this idea that like you will always collapse down to your lowest level of full training or your lowest level of competence.

In other words, like if I'm really good at this skill, but then this slightly more advanced skill I'm not that good at, when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, I'm going to collapse back down to the stupid stuff I learned as privates because that's the thing I know the best. And for a lot of people, if they're taught incident command, if they're familiar with it, they might try to apply it in a situation where it frankly just doesn't work because that's the way they know to do it. That's the square peg. There can be too much bureaucracy wrapped up in IMS for a very small scale incident. a very small scale incident yeah or even if it's not small scale a very fluid incident because like one one and again i spent a short time in the military i learned very fast that as much as i love my army it is a bureaucracy at heart and bureaucracies excel at doing a fixed number of things semi-efficiently they do not excel at handling unique or new situations so a lot of times when you have

this highly bureaucratic very rigid system and you throw a monkey wrench into it the whole thing jams because you're you're asking it to do a thing it has never done before and never encountered before and it will just freeze while it tries to figure out what's going on it's it's the ultimate it's the it's the it's my ultimate plea to always tell people, like, stop trying to shove the square peg into the round hole when what you need to do is find a round peg. You know, just like assess the situation and find the tool that works best for it. And not be and be agnostic enough that no matter what the situation calls for, you'll go find that tool and not just default to the one that you're most comfortable with. We should point out before we move on from this topic that we should never lose sight that the incident is not the need to talk

on the radio. So we need to keep it in perspective of the incident is some other task that needs to be managed. But radios support that mission. They're not the mission. And I think if we... Well, you can make it the mission. Right. And that's kind of a wrong attitude to have, I think.

And so I think we always need to make sure that we keep that in perspective, that the radio communications support the mission, even though we love radios. I think everybody here just loves radios and the nerdy nature of it well and where can you incorporate it when you have knowledge behind it and you're like hey yes we could verbally communicate all of this and it will take you know a minute to communicate

or we could use jsa call and it's a 10 second data burst and everybody now has a such a hard copy of the message that would have tried to take a minute of memorization to you know understand it is vital where appropriate you know if you're talking if you're saying a two second sentence you're trying to say okay there's no reason to try to take that out put it through jsa call so everybody has a copy of you saying okay. Fair enough. I wanted to touch on the HF radio thing real quick. I think it would be appropriate to bring in outside resources from a distance, like with the hurricanes down south here earlier this year if you're if you're

set up in a command post and you have no other means of communicating with your organization outside of that area say two or three states away i think that might be a very good good thing to be able to have that link established on hf to be able to say hey we need 25 pallets of water down here and we need diapers and for the kids and and stuff and coordinate that to some some degree but i think a lot of the like with fema they have the infrastructure and the in and whatnot to be able to facilitate that without the radio. They bring in their own cell towers, their own internet. But that's just another tool

in the bag is all HF is for bringing in outside resources. Well, and I think what you said, the hurricanes and stuff too there is whether, no matter which, as far as HF goes, the Maui wildfires are the perfect example. You're literally on an island hundreds of miles off the coast. You need to get back

to the mainland, communicate back to the mainland somehow. But, further to that, what I was going to say is, you know, one of the things with all these emergency communications groups and systems and implementation that has to be acknowledged is the fact of

we always talk about pace and redundancy and this and that. But when it comes to communications, there needs to be a lack of redundancy, not in your systems, in the actual messages coming across. For example, hey, if I tell you over HF, hey, I need 25 pallets of water, but then I also tell the guy on some other net that's on the local repeater, hey, I need 25 pallets of water, and now both of you are trying to get me 25 pallets of water, we have a problem.

And I think from the... You're going to be well hydrated. Yeah. Or they're going to send 50 pallets of water to another island somewhere else. There you go. And I just think from no matter if it's Hurricane Helene, whether it's over HF4 Valley, from the emergency preparedness mcom

base type systems where again helene is the example you had an entirely civilian base command structure established um we need to acknowledge that those can exist and pre-plan that to the fact that there is one central point that will prevail that everybody knows that it has to go kind of through this and then be disseminated. So I got a chance to help an owner of a tender company coordinate a response for a tender to go to a fire near Reno. And we were in Idaho and I none of us had satellite I mean he means water tender which is a yeah I'm sorry to those here on the East Coast tanker I thought tanker was a aircraft yeah when I heard

tender I was like oh where's East Coast. Tender loving response. Anyway, I'm sorry. It's water tender. It's a vehicle that carries several thousands of gallons of water typically. And so they're needed on fires to refill tanks and wildfires. And so, yeah, we were out in the woods and nobody had satellite. I mean, the overhead had satellite. We're not allowed to use their satellite, their Starlink.

Otherwise, everybody would be overloading it and they wouldn't be able to do their job. And it was tons of trees anyway, so I'm not even sure how well it works. But I had my radio with me, my true SDX, and I was able to help coordinate that for him. I don't know as if I would consider that absolutely an emergency, but it had a role in managing the duration of the incident. That is the next step in that APCO communication cycle after the alarm and the response.

There's that duration of the incident prior to the resolution of the incident. I think that's probably where HF shines the most in those resource requests like you're talking about, Jared. Yes. Everything has its place and everything doesn't have a place either

in situations depending. Well, I've really learned a lot tonight, because I thought HF was only really used for telling each other signal reports and sharing medical ailments like Crohn's disease. Yeah, like if you're going to get a colonoscopy yeah you need to let people know on each step if you're going to get your list right liquids i think everybody here and everybody probably watching this is you know there are your there are your traditional ham guys which are into building antennas and doing, seeing how many contacts they

can make and this and that, hey, kudos to you, dude. It's a hobby. I'm all for it. I think there's this other group that are more operationally focused, and we are looking at ham radio as a tool, and we are more interested in streamlining and making our communications as efficient as possible. And it's just one of those things where, viewed in that sense, it is a very powerful tool. But I think that community as a whole needs to kind of find its own way so that, hey, listen, you guys are into doing

what you're doing, that's great. But if we host a net, our net is going to be information-based and information-sharing, not how's the weather in wherever you are. Okay, so I just saw

a comment come in from PNWMinuteMan. Need to look at HF in the Katrina event. Save lives if that ain't AMCOMs. I don't know what it is. I tried. i tried i'm gonna tell you something so i'm gonna tell you something that i know because i live 25 miles from new orleans and i was here in louisiana national guard where katrina happened and my father has been a ham radio operator since before i was thought of. So I know this secondhand, but give me that. But there were a couple of local repeater owners on ham frequencies that changed the tones on their repeaters

because they were getting too much traffic for emergency purposes during the storm. You've got to be kidding me. Now, I'm not saying that's across the board. I don't want to cast that as a disparagement against the entire ham community. i'm just going to illustrate two things with that first of all to taylor's point yes there is a sizable segment of the ham community that it's a hobby it's their little playground and they don't want the emergency guys the preppers or anybody else playing in their sandbox that doesn't do ham the way they think it should be done. Same applies to GMRS, by the way. I've gotten that six ways from Sunday from that community

because I come from the land of the crazy tinfoil hat people. But I would also like to point out that this is the reason why I always tell people, I'm like, if part of your communications plan in the event of an emergency depends on those repeaters, you need to start looking at alternate methods. Because, like, part of the reason, you know, Terrence and I have talked at length about this man pack that I built. And part of what I built into it was kind of quasi-repeater-heater abilities. Because I was looking to be able to stretch out the legs on a bunch of handhelds. So I've got a 40-foot mast and a high-gain antenna and a couple other things I can hook up to it to basically turn it into a parrot, a store forward repeater. For no other reason, a 40 foot antenna is not going to

give me like 40 miles of range. That's not the point. The point is that that repeater that's 600 feet up in the air, the next town over goes down. This is going to let me use my radios in a much wider swath than I would get if I was just in Simplex. I just it really is one of those situations where, like, yes, I do think it's important that we integrate into those communities because they have capabilities and there's gear there that we want to use for our purposes. But we also need to be very, very aware of the fact that these communities are not always welcoming to people that don't do ham the way they want and listen and to that i would obviously never advocate for any illegal activity to take place or condone any sort of illegal activity but if you are one of those people that does that i hope your antenna gets struck by lightning because karma is a bitch and there is no need in an emergency situation for you to try to flex your mic that you took a test and paid $35.

You should be dealt with later. Yes. I would also just point out that a lot of radios are capable of tone scanning. You should learn how to do that. It's kind of fun. When your repeater owner wants to play Peekaboo and you get to play Peekaboo with him. It's kind of fun. When your repeater owner wants to play peek-a-boo and you get to play peek-a-boo with them. It's not hard. No.

But that goes to the point of, we were talking earlier about how the equipment is only as useful as the operator is trained and there are a ton of people out there with radios on their hips that do not know how to manually program them. They don't know how to manually scan frequencies. They don't know how to scan tones. It's a skill set to learn how to do a lot of these things from the faceplate.

Like I'll be the first to admit, I'm very spoiled programming radios with a computer. It's quick, it's simple. And when you got four of them, it's a lot faster, but I still keep the instruction manuals for all my radios with the radios because I've been in that situation where I found out I'd literally, I was in the next town over and I found out about a new repeater that came online. So I got the tone and the frequencies, pulled the manual out of the center console of my truck, and popped a new frequency into my truck right there on the side of the road. But most people don't know how to do that.

So I tried really hard to find... Nice. I tried really hard to find an after action for Hurricane Katrina from a radio communications perspective, and the only thing I could find was that some Ares members had staffed a

shelter, and it wasn't anything radio related. So if you've got some information, I am 100% interested in reading it. If you've got a link, please drop it in the comments so I can take i can take a look i'm really looking forward to an after action from this hurricane season as well i know they had that that storm net i listened in for a little bit but all they were just kind of doing was exchanging weather reports they weren't like requesting supplies or anything that that i heard so maybe that stuff took place like on winlink or

something that i wouldn't have been able to see. I even heard a guy from Arizona check in on the storm net for Florida, which I thought was really weird. I can tell you with fair certainty, because I got this secondhand from a

very reliable source that I would trust to shoot my mouth off. But I do know that in Hurricane Helene up in the Appalachians, there were a number of people using every ham frequency on Earth and GMRS to call for help to some of these communities that were stranded up in the mountains to coordinate aid, to coordinate resources being brought in, fuel deliveries, because cell phones were completely out and there was no other way of getting signals in and out. I know that a lot of amateur radio and gmrs frequencies were being used between a couple of civilian relief groups that were in that area that were just trying to figure

out who was still alive and where they were to try to find these communities on a map what i what i heard was that vhf and UHF really ruled the day there. Not so much HF. So I don't want to ever – I'm not trying to diminish the use of HF. I just think we should keep it in perspective. Taylor, did you mention like 90% or something? You made a statement about 90% of your tactical comms are going to be VHF and UHF, and I think that's – you shouldn't be moving on to HF unless you've got a really solid VHF and UHF capability.

Yeah. I mean, I will just ask if anybody thinks that's the tail wagging the dog because y'all know how this works out. Like, what is the proportion of people in the ham community that you think have UHF, VHF capabilities versus HF? I would say it's, I would say that a majority, I would say that probably everybody who has a ham radio license has a UHF VHF radio. Maybe only half of them have an HF radio. So is UHF VHF going to be more common just because there's more radios out there? They're cheaper, they're smaller, they're more common. And that's why they got so much more use in Helene? Or is it because they were truly the best tool for the job because of the short to intermediate ranges being used?

I think it's probably a bit of both. So I think, so you see the comment there from Dale. Yeah, I actually, there's one of the videos on my own page. I did a radius for rescue hurricane Helene, and I actually recorded a lot of what was going on and then played it. And that was all the net control that they established on their, you know, VHF, UHF, or peer that they were using and it was really impressive at the same time i did a very similar video or tried to do a very similar video

for the hurricane that hit a week later in florida and uh you talk about you know a refreshingly anti-climatic thing to listen to it was weather reports, people being like, hey, I just lost power, yep, I just lost power, nothing urgent and I think that goes back to almost the thing that we started this video out with in the fact of look at the difference that being

prepared for a situation makes compared to something catching you off guard and you could be like, look two major hurricanes, two separate areas, one's those hurricanes all the time, the other doesn't. Yeah, I was just reading that. Wish ham guys and preppers could find peace, but egos flare

on both sides. I hate that licensing is a thing, but you can't build a bridge without stoking a bonfire. Well, I agree with you. I wish everyone could just chill the fuck out and get along, but that's not reality, unfortunately. And there's a lot of people

that... Everybody always gets into the whole licensing debate, and it's free airwaves and the whole bit. And listen, I could not agree with you more. I'm with you. It shouldn't be. It is what it is. Can you buck the system and say, I'm not getting a license. I'm not paying for that.

Screw you. I'm using GMR. You should never catch me. Yeah, you could. But when you look at the bigger picture, even if we're talking GMRS stuff, or Simplex hammer stuff, it's fine. I'll give you an example where let's just hypothetically say there are a thousand

licensed GMRS users in the United States. Well, now the government's putting pressure. The FCC's coming in saying, well, listen, hey, we want to cut down these channels that are allotted for GMRS because there's only 1,000 of you using it. Well, in reality, there's 8,000 people using it,

but 7,000 people never bothered to get a license, so you're not giving the FCC a leg to stand on to make the argument to defend the reason for the ban but need it and multiply all this times 10,000 because that's what it is and it just helps to have a little bit of skin in the game for the little bit that it is

to make yourself relevant because even if you have a complaint and you go to the FCC website to weigh in as to what your complaint is the first thing you want to ask is what is your call sign because are you you know even really making a legitimate complaint? Yep.

And I would also say that the reason I encourage – Sorry, man, I tripped all over you. No, go right ahead. The reason I encourage everyone to get licensed in whatever radio service they choose to use, unless somebody doesn't require a license, is because I firmly believe that in order to be emboldened to use that radio service, you really should do it 100% above board. For GMRS, I encourage people to get licensed because the easiest way to completely screw up GMRS or anything

as something you're going to use for preparedness purposes is to not practice with it, which is why I got a GMRS license. It covers my family. And every single time we go camping, the cell phones go in the pockets, the radios come out, and we all use them exclusively around the campsite because it is the only way I'm going to ever teach my wife and my daughter how to use these things to an appropriate level where if we have an emergency situation, we can use them to keep in touch with each other. Because otherwise, they just sit in dad's office and they don't get used. And then I'm trying to have that conversation when all hell is breaking loose of how do you make this silly thing talk to

you. It is ultimately incumbent upon the user to learn how to use the equipment. And you can apply that to radios, to firearms, to medical equipment, to anything across the board. If you don't practice with it, it's not going to serve you very well. We got a comment on JS8 at about a 1,000 offset, but I didn't see the call sign. It didn't decode on my system, but it just said good event. I'm sorry. Good evening, gents. Good discussion.

Anyway. Thank you. Yeah, no, I mean. said uh good event i'm sorry good evening gents good discussion anyway thank you yeah no i mean to scruffy mcscrufferton that's a great name by the way uh i mean to your point like i i hear all the arguments about licensing versus non-licensing stuff like that like i mean i don't want to get into that argument i mean i think that there's certainly a place for licensing and there's some good arguments for it and there's probably a good argument on the other side for it's the people's airwaves i get all that but um the part about people chilling out and finding peace and getting along that's kind of And that's kind of, I don't know, I get tired of, you know, all the politics that go with it. Because there are a lot of ham guys that will poke their nose into the GMRS space as well and start getting on GMRS repeaters and telling those guys how to conduct their business too. their business too and you know it's generally people that they've driven away from ham radio who are like fuck it i'm gonna go to gmrs now and you know those same people jump on the gmrs

repeaters and and and do the same thing so i think there's like a really toxic cultural thing that needs to probably change within amateur radio and i know people will probably get pissed off at me for saying that but i don't really give a shit because it's true no i mean i i wouldn't even i wouldn't even stop at saying that's that's you in any way unique to the ham radio community i mean or to gmrs like me and my co-host have talked multiple times about how like when you look at the firearms community it's a freaking dumpster fire every thursday about the guys with the bcms that talk crap about the guys with the palmetto state armories and all this nonsense where the community just wants to fillet each other over the most

meaningless crap instead of focusing on the idea that, hey, you're armed, you're training, you're able to protect yourself. That's like two thumbs up and a happy meal. And we ought to all be excited about growing this community because whether it's firearms or whether it's radios or whether it's medical equipment or whether it's backup power, solar, it doesn't matter to me. I think those are all knowledge bases that need to expand and everybody needs to know if it applies to their situation, they should know how to implement it. But the only way we ever do that is if we acknowledge that there are people coming in this community that are not going to stick around if we're a-holes about everything. Like you have to meet a person where they're at and gently steer them towards proficiency and, you know, like fully integrating into the community.

towards proficiency and you know like fully integrating into the community but we don't do that if we start jumping on a person because they use phonetic alphabet instead of plain speech for their call sign and just meaningless nonsense like well and you know don't get me wrong i i mean for all the ham guys that are listening right now i mean i i'm a ham guy too but i'm not trying to bash anyone it's just that I think that amateur radio has a bit of a public relations problem for the reasons that you're saying, because instead of lifting all boats, like you like to say,

they're going and sinking your boat because you've got a radio they don't like or you're not doing it right. And it's like, well, maybe instead of lecturing people, maybe get involved and try and you know help them instead of being a dick about it this is this is just a human problem phil you're absolutely right about that i mean if if you've ever gone to a church you're going to encounter toxic people there's nothing about radios or or church or any any specific group of people that makes all of them good. This sounds more just like an adult competence issue.

It is, but I think it's incumbent upon the community to self-police. That's one of the big things in the preparedness community. I've fought tooth and nail against this idea that there are certain people that are anointed and they get to hold the information and they get to dispense it and they get to choose who who is and isn't part of this and i've seen those lines drawn across socio-economic political lines and everything else and i'm like it doesn't matter it's information people need it like let's quit being idiots about it and let it out but i think that's incumbent upon the community to say hey elmer you're, you're not allowed to, you know, talk crap about the guy because he has a Baofeng.

Just shut the hell up for a second. Or, hey, Phil, I understand you think everybody should have, you know, backup power and six months of food and water. But if this guy only has three weeks, we don't treat him like crap because he's not prepared enough. Like we as a community have to police each other. because he's not prepared enough. Like we as a community have to police each other. And sometimes that's going to mean a little bit of tough love to smack somebody in the back of the head and be like, you are not God's gift to this and you need to be a little more welcoming

and not be an a-hole about everything. And if we don't police each other, huh? Sorry, go ahead. I stepped on you. If we don't police ourselves and police each other, then the community is never going to grow. Life of J.M. Arme, you know, about tribalism. And, you know, that certainly exists not only in the gun community, but amateur radio and probably just about everywhere you look. So that's a good point.

And the last thing I want to bring up, too, is the fact that I think, you know, what's kind of funny is everybody in this room, this is kind of like, I mean, Jared knows it's, you know, finding guys in law enforcement that are also EMS related, fire related. You start to kind of, you know, narrow the field of people you're dealing with. Everybody sitting here is a prepper, which I don't like the term, emergency preparedness minded. And they're a ham radio guy and a comms guy. emergency preparedness minded and they're a ham radio guy and they're a comms guy and i will say the one thing that i have noticed is i think those that are pure that are pure preppers when it comes to the communication side are a little closed-minded and you know it's the big you know again the free airwaves i don't need a license the whole bit and i think part of the ham side is the fact that you generally have a little bit of a,

not necessarily even a higher knowledge, but a higher understanding to the fact of, especially since we were talking about HF, in addition to having skin in the game and justifying why we need this bandwidth and how many people are on the system, the other thing people kind of forget is the fact of, and this applies to GMRS as well as ham, is the fact that your radio waves propagate nations' borders. So you have to be understanding that these radio transmission permits are closely monitored by nations' governments because you're literally talking outside of your country into another country. And usually the permits and privileges granted to your licensees, even though they vary from country to country, they generally follow that international guidelines

established by the International Telecommunications Union and the World Radio Conferences. And that really plays a role when it comes to your HF radio self. But I also know with GMRS, there's a couple of channels you can't talk to if you live within a couple of miles of the Canadian border because you're restricted from it. So just having that deeper understanding, I think, would make people more able to get along because you understand where each other are coming from and not just thinking, well, you're a moron, you don't understand, and I'm going to write you off.

So back to use cases. Scott S. I've been an emergency responder for over 30 years. About 15 years ago, I got my tech license as I saw it as an additional response tool. I've only used two meter and 70 centimeter for any type of emergency communications. I mean, if you think about it, you know, most of most of the people you need to reach out to in the event in the event of an immediate life threatening emergency are going to be local and regional. They're not going to be people across the country. I mean, yes, I guess you could say there is a narrow use case for that. The problem I had after Hurricane Ida was that I was the only able-bodied man on the entire street that was able to help a storm clean up or check on neighbors and everybody. I was busier than a prostitute on a two-hour happy night. It was bad.

But I was the only one. There was nobody else. I didn't need 30 or 40 friends, three, 400 miles away. What I really needed right then was two or three friends in the local area that I could have called on a radio and said, Hey guys, I could use a hand over here. That would have been infinitely more useful to me. And what I found out, yes. But what I found out as soon as the cell phone towers came back online was that I had literally dozens of messages from people I knew through podcasting and other content creators and friends that were all very concerned about my well-being, none of them close enough to offer immediate assistance. So like, I totally echo the idea

of UHF VHF. That's got the right range to get to people that are in your local community that hopefully you've talked to before the flag goes up. So you know you can depend on them, and they know that you'll be reaching out to them. Well, the other thing, too, Scott, in that comment underneath the one he just put, he put at this point he can only receive HF, and you may have missed it earlier, Scott, and kind of went into the fact of that's fine. You don't necessarily need to talk to make the communications effective. Just being able to intelligence gather by listening to what's going on by those that are dealing with it can can pay you dividends

so one EMP and mines will change about that I guess that's in reference to uh HF to HF you know that's true I mean a lot of the discussion about HF for emergency use really kind of originated, you know, with events from the Cold War. And, you know, what would happen in the aftermath of, you know, if, God forbid, the Soviets attacked us with nukes and, you know, how would we all communicate with each other? all communicate with each other and um i think that's probably a true chair against the wall scenario where you you're trying to get messages across over over from radio free america over into the occupied zone right and i'm always really careful to dismiss scenarios like like high altitude emps and everything i always like I tend to lean away from that in my content just because I lean more towards the idea that, like, what is, perfect example, I have a concealed carry permit, I carry a handgun everywhere, I'm not going to go to

prison for 10 years if I get caught with it. Let's just leave that out there. In all the years I've been driving around on the roads, I have had to use my handgun exactly zero times to save my life while commuting hundreds of miles a week. I've been the first on scene ahead of fire and EMS four times because I just happened to pull up on an accident that just happened, and I was the first one there. And it was me and some tourniquets and a well-stocked IFAC that thankfully didn't have a life-threatening emergency, but it very well could have been. So I always go to this idea that what is the most likely thing you're going to encounter? Is it possible that China or Russia is going to send a nuke over our borders and EMP us to death? It's possible.

It's much more likely that I'm going to have a Cat 3 to Cat 5 hurricane to contend with in the next five years. more likely that i'm gonna have a cat three to cat five hurricane to get to contend with in the next five years it's much more likely i'm gonna have a neighbor who falls out of a tree and has a bone sticking out of their leg that i have to turn it get off like there's there's this there's this span of different potential emergency scenarios and i'm going to focus on the ones that are the most likely to occur to me individually and then i'll branch out from there so by the time we get to emps zombies and other i don't want to call them fanciful but call them less likely events by the time i get to all those i'm going to be so well covered on the day-to-day stuff it'll be ridiculous but i'm not going to invest in stuff for an emp airburst at the expense of your most

likely scenario like if you don't have a hundred band-aids under your sink, you probably don't need to go out and buy a couple of tourniquets. Like start with the small stuff you're going to use all the time. So we're just talking about a disproportionate focus. We need to keep

in mind a proper proportionate response with our prep. is that what you're describing that that's what we've said good no i mean that that's that's a good way of putting it i mean to me it just goes it dovetails right back into the same thing we've said 10 different ways it's always like the mission drives the equipment and i think the mission is going to be dictated by is going to be dictated in order of what's your most likely scenario. I know, going back to my time in the military, the things we planned for were the things most likely to happen,

and the things we planned for that were less likely to happen, we dealt with further down the road. And especially for those who are no longer in the military or we're talking about making civilian preparations or we're doing this as a layperson. I don't have Lockheed Martin and KBR on speed dial anymore to give me as much a pallet of ammo whenever it suits me. I don't have the Air Force I can call in and say, hey, put a Predator up in the air. I need some intel. Those things don't exist to me anymore.

I have to do these things on my own budget that's funded by the sweat of my own brow and so because of that i'm going to prioritize things very carefully and narrowly so i'm not wasting time energy and money in the pursuit of the near impossible you're much better off with the blanket in the trunk of your car than you are having a handheld radio in the trunk of your car in a faraday bag 110 and you brought up medical can i plug a product real quick is that okay do it absolutely go right ahead it's not my show but yeah so this is a great strategy it's original um anybody knows so again medical is huge obviously drew's got a pretty you know decent medical background same same as mine, both being paramedics.

Work-wise, getting out for any sort of higher risk scenario, kind of unacceptable to not have med on us because something is wrong. You're the one everybody's looking at to help them. And you guys that are wearing, you know, any sort of duty belt, battle belt, whatever you want to call it. you guys that are wearing you know any sort of duty belt battle belt whatever you want to call it if you want to carry a med pouch if you have a med pouch that you're carrying where are you carrying it and pretty much everybody i talk to it's it's always in the small of their back which is great that's where i wear mine if you're not in a patrol situation where you're driving around all the time because as you know you know something as small as your handcuff case in the small your back in 10 minutes your lower back pain is excruciating so being in that had a dude that

made slings hit him up and i'm like hey man here's my idea can we make one of these we had a prototype done got a patent got the trademarks everything's good so this is called the belt rapid attachment kit and basically this is a metal bar that you would put around the belt usually in the small of your back and you can see it's really thin and the velcro is either hook and loop or you know whatever side you want to wear if you're not messing up your shirt this would be on your belt all the time the other side to it i didn't want to make a pouch that was proprietary it's just a molly mounting plate and basically whatever what's the brainchild was, an IFAC, whatever IFAC you're running, you could stick this on your transport cage,

the headrest mount that you have for it, whatever's metal. You get out, you stick that to the back of your belt. It's 180 pounds of pull. So it's real easy to kind of just grab one, take off, stick it on, go do what you're going to do when you get in pop it off and it's you know easy as can be people starting to think outside the box we actually got hit up by a swift water rescue team that bought a couple of these because they wanted them for their like rescue straps that they were wearing and they're like hey if one of our guys gets caught

in a strainer they could just rip it off and it comes right off so these we do have they come in black they come in green they're pretty awesome bunch of guys are wearing them they're we go to swap conferences people seem to like this everybody's like why didn't i think of that they've been dealing with lower back pain for however long and that's kind of the solution we came up with can you go over what you keep in it so in my personal life hack um yeah it's not in here so i can tell you of course the uh chest seals as far as chest seals go i am a russell chest seal fan the reason why is the fact the the hydrophobic gel that they use on there is the only one that works it's the one that works the best on dog hair so i got a nice chest seal for me I have a nice chef seal for the dog if I need

it it also comes in packs of two which some of your chest seals only come one per pack which is not a good idea because there's one hole in there should be another hole coming out hopefully so you can seal that of course the tourniquet um the tourniquet of choice if you guys are familiar I think snake staff or snake systems make this everyday carry tourniquet. It's got the little chemlight in there. It's like a really, really shaved down, slim cat tourniquet. So that's my go-to tourniquet. Of course, the nasal airway. For the wound packing stuff, I use the Silox Rapid, which is just your hemostatic agent and impregnated gauze. The reason for the Rapid is, once again in my mind, is rather than a three to five minute hold and pregnenetic gauze. The reason for the rapid is, once again, in my mind,

is rather than a three to five minute hold time, like in your combat gauze, if you're treating a dog and you can't really tell the dog, hey, lay here for three to five minutes, that has a 60 second hold time. So you're getting your clotting factors going in the quickest time possible. In addition to that,

most people like to carry like a pressure dressing i don't do a pressure dressing if i need a pressure dressing i have a roll of battle wrap which if you guys haven't seen that google that it is like a you know 10 mil thick saran wrap that number one you can see through it so you can monitor your wound number two it sticks to itself but it doesn't really adhere to anything you can use it as a inclusive if you needed it but more so for my pressure dressing purposes if i didn't need to wound pack something i just needed pressure dressing it take the combat goals out or the uh sea locks wrap it out stick it on wrap it with the battle wrap i do my pressure dressing in addition to that i carry pepto advil band-aids

Pepto, Advil, Band-Aids, and like alcohol perhaps in another little separate container. Gloves? And gloves, yeah. Okay. You left out the tampons on the whole. No tampons. No tampons.

Do you have any gaming specific IFACs, Taylor? So, as far as, again, we have our proprietary stuff. As far asspecific IFACs, Taylor? So, as far as again, we've kind of, we have our proprietary stuff. As far as the IFACs goes, go to Medicine in Bad Places. That is all stuff, you'll always

get the warnings. Get it from a reputable distributor so you know it's made in America the whole bit. Medicine in Bad Places. Try time-tested, approve the whole nine yards. They're good to go. And also, what we'll do is for everybody that's in here,

give me till tomorrow and we will have a, if you type in, we'll do TCS. So, you know, Tango, Charlie, Sierra, TCS. There will be a 25% off anything in the Medicine in Event Places store.

Give me to DeMar to get that code entered in there. Question came through JSA about your product from K7JLJ. Did you say there was a metal bar in that kit? That's what is actually what you're wearing on your belt. Okay. Is that uncomfortable? Talk about that. No. It is super thin.

There's actually a little piece of kydex that helps make it even stiffer when it's stitched in there. You don't feel this at all. It is a very, very thin piece of metal. It is just to give the magnets something to mount to. Okay. Magnet, not Velcro. Got it. Correct. Velcro, you something to mount to. Oh, okay. It's a magnet, not Velcro.

Got it. Correct. That's what, which is, you know, Velcro, you have to line up. Sometimes it tears, it makes noise. This was the quickest, easiest thing I could come up with to make a quick mounting solution for your IFAK. Gotcha. And that doesn't pull off just through normal work.

So I wear tested it for a year prior to making it. This is actually, you can see this one's like camo. It's all ripped out. This was the, this is all different colors. This was the prototype. And this went through about seven variations, kind of refining and refining. And the initial one did get ripped off.

And we would make a little less material, add a little more material here, put different stitching in different places this is the final product and this we've had no issues or reports of getting ripped off um so yeah and the other good thing too is the guy who makes this uh is confident in the fact that for as long as he's around if something happens to it if rich tears whatever it has a lifetime warranty he will fix it for you and taylor i'm glad you brought up the over the counters for the uh for the ifac because like that is one thing i try to encourage people is that by the time you get to by the time you get to the headspace where you're going to carry an ifac on your person at all times i always ask a person i'm like okay do you have a box of like band-aids cobang an ace bandage tylenol ibuprofen you know do you have a boo-boo kit in your vehicle because

again like going back to that going back to that idea of like we ought to deal with our most pressing concerns first when i put a literally just an old tupperware container full of like band-aids and tylenol and ibuprofen and Benadryl and things like that in my truck when I put that in there it wasn't in there a week and a half before my we were driving someplace my daughter had a headache and I was fishing Tylenol out of it we didn't we didn't it well it wasn't two more weeks before I was fishing Benadryl out because you know somebody had a case of hives it's like when you when you start looking at things in terms of like this is the lowest common denominator. This is my most common use case.

I have never had to strap a tourniquet onto a person in anger in all my years as a civilian. But I have dispensed God knows how many Band-Aids and Tylenol and Ibuprofen and Pepto-Bismol. It's just it goes back to that idea that like these are the things I'm going to need literally, if not every day, but pretty freaking often. Excedrin is a lifesaver when you have a migraine type of problem. Correct, and all that stuff. I'm not carrying bottles of anything. It is four Pepto-Bismol chewables and two Tylenols and stuff like that.

But I can tell you, if you're stuck on a perimeter on the side of a house and your belly starts to rumble, it's a bad place to be. And being able to whip out, you know, two chewable Pepto and buy yourself a whole bunch of time is worth its weight. Yeah. And the whole reason I started carrying all that stuff was because, like, you know, when my family goes camping, most campgrounds are not in the middle of suburbia. And, you know, you're usually a little are not in the middle of suburbia and you know you're usually a little bit out in the middle of nowhere so it was always a rip based around this idea of like okay if somebody has an upset stomach the thing to do is not to have to drive 15 miles into town

because we need pepto-bismol i should have that in my truck like we should be able to self-rescue to a degree it's the same reason why i encourage people to look at things like having a patch kit for your tire and having a tire inflator and having the little jump packs that you get off of Amazon. It's this idea that if there's these things we can do ahead of the, I don't want to say emergency, but ahead of the incident so we can self-rescue, that's infinitely faster and more convenient than being screwed and having to call roadside assistance. Because I'm at a campground 15 miles from anywhere else else and I have a flat tire or a dead battery. Yeah. Or driving a puking, screaming child 15 miles into town because I don't have Pepto-Bismol. I mean, I don't want to be graphic, but I can imagine that situation.

That's why me and Drew have sublingual zoophorens, so that helps too. friend so that helps too now i i i carry a swat t tourniquet in my edc and i realize that's not a code t triple c approved item but i don't carry pepto in my pockets i figure i can get to the car and get my first aid kit but you know i there there is some additional layers of planning i think that that go into that. If I need a tourniquet, I need it right now versus the Pepto I can probably get. No, you're talking about, you know, on the job, Taylor, if you're stationed, you're stuck somewhere, you probably need that stuff. So, you know, I guess I don't want to downplay the importance of some of the more important stuff. It goes back to what's your mission, what's your environment,

what are your parameters? If Taylor's expecting to not be able to get back to his vehicle for hours on hand, I don't want to say gurgling stomach is an emergency, but I think some people would call it the next best thing to an emergency. If it's a cold day, you can't. That's where you can warm up, I guess.

Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to say that if you're in that situation where going back to your vehicle is not convenient or possible, a gurgling, angry stomach is about this close to an emergency. So in his case, having Pepto on his person is probably a good idea. For me, I can run out to the vehicle, so I wouldn't keep it on my person. It always goes back to that idea that if you look at every single thing in your kit and you ask yourself, how can I justify this? If you have to go to some really weird, extreme niche, you know, scenarios to justify it, you probably can demote it from on body carry to vehicle to home to whatever.

But if you only have to go like five steps to get to, oh no, I could could totally see myself needing this all the time, you just need to on-body carry it. Sure. Yeah. You know, I carry a pretty substantial first aid kit in my truck, you know, because I'm dealing with animals and sharp objects and knives and stuff. and sharp objects and knives and stuff. And I'm constantly getting cut. There's a potential of getting stabbed with a nail as I'm nailing a shoe on. And if it hits a vein or an artery or something,

that could be pretty life-threatening pretty quickly. My hands and my arms are scarred up from being cut and scraped up and burnt. And then I have my dog with me every day. He goes to work with me every day, so I have stuff in there for him. I carry activated charcoal. I carry hydrogen peroxide if he eats something. I can give him 60 cc's of hydrogen peroxide to allow him to throw throw up something if he eats some rat poison or something at a barn taylor what's the uh the website so as far as where the store is uh medicine in bad places.com

no and talking about like where we have our gear stashed i'm reminded of a situation i wound up in quite by accident um so i was putting myself through college working as a uh as a lineman which working at a fixed base operator for commercial for a commercial and civilian aircraft basically an aviation gas station for private aviation and i was fueling a ec-135 helicopter which i found out very quickly has a well-deserved reputation for if you try to shove fuel into it too fast it burps which means it regurgitates jet fuel straight up straight up into the air and straight up in the air happened to be directly into my face because i was holding a flashlight in my teeth trying to look at the fuel level so i'm on a flight flight line. Thank God the aircraft's, you know, rotor head was spun down. I didn't have

that to contend with, but I had a very short amount of time to get from where I was standing to the eyewash station across the ramp at a high rate of speed before both my eyes swole shut. Now, thankfully, we kept the eyewash station in the line shack which was like right centrally mounted on the ramp it was easy to get to you could get to it from anywhere in the facility pretty quickly but i cringe at what would have happened had i not had that eyewash station quick you know close at hand and known where it was up you know in advance and then i'd have we'd had to have ems show up to deal with me because both mods were soiled shut from getting a face full of jet fuel. Now, does it make sense to have an eyewash bottle on my person?

Maybe not, but I'm going to tell you what happened right after that. I refilled that eyewash station, and then I bought one for every one of the fuel trucks because I learned my lesson very, very quickly that sprinting across the ramp with your eyes with your eyes full of tears was a bad idea when i should have had one sitting in the truck nice but you know live and learn well this is probably a good segue into current events and our next topic since we're talking about IFACs. And let me jump over to that. So most people by now have likely heard of the story about Luigi Maggioni, who was arrested

for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was pretty brazen. He shot him right there on the sidewalk. But during the search for Maggioni, as well as after his arrest, there's many online who have expressed sympathy and happiness over the CEO's murder. One of those was Taylor Lorenz, who's a former Washington Post reporter, and she was recently interviewed by Pierce Morgan. And if you watched the interview, Pierce Morgan did push back on her comments about feeling joy over the murder. But why do you think so many people are making

a hero out of this guy? Widespread mental illness. To oversimplify it, I mean, personally, I think there's something a little bit sociopathic about taking pleasure in any human being's death. Like, I'll be the first to admit that there are situations in which I could totally sign off on taking somebody out of this universe and sleep like a baby afterwards. But those all pretty much involve, like, immediate threat to life or limb. You know what I'm saying? like immediate threat to life or limb you know i'm saying so i think that i think that what we're honestly looking at right here where there's this contingency of people the public that is like excited about this very wealthy man passing away purely because of his wealth or his perceived social status it really just alludes to the fact that like we've we've been we've been suffering

with a rash of political and social and to a degree economic tribalism for quite a number of years. And I feel like it's starting to pick up speed. Like we're starting – the hill – we're starting to get to a decline in this where we're going downhill. Do you think this is a left or right issue? I don't think so not anymore because i'll be honest like i i have i have heard and bear in mind that like i i've been politically homeless for at least 10 years so i kind of count everyone from i would say fairly progressive democrats all the way to like damn they're anarchists as friends and i've heard this weird cross-section

of people that are all kind of that i wouldn't say are going as far as to justify the man's death but they're certainly kind of like they're certainly kind of saying like i mean i can kind of understand why somebody be upset with them you know which is weird to me i guess well they're rationalizing it to a certain degree. Yeah. Rationalizing might be a better word to use than justifying. But there's a difference there, though. I can understand why some people may be upset with him.

But to make the end result of that, that you go and kill him and justify that, that's where we've just gone completely off the rails. You can not like anybody for any reason, but we don't have the right to take action against that person simply for not agreeing with them. I don't think he was killed necessarily for who he was or his social status. I think he was killed for what he represents. A lot of people people thousands of people die because of inadequate

health care and because the insurance there's so much bureaucracy in insurance and insurance providers are out there playing doctor telling the doctors what they can and can't do and I think he was killed because

of what he represents not necessarily who he was. Do we do we have any evidence? I haven't heard the case for that. Do we have any evidence that he helped to craft some sort of horrifyingly horrifying crime against humanity type type policy? Do we have the CEO? Do we have some some case studies from people who died or had really poor outcomes for United Healthcare rejecting their claims. I haven't heard that component of the argument. I've just heard this kind of ideology, this kind of just toxic ideology that he just, you know, CEO, some people died, and I don't see the connection in between. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen a whole lot on it,

but I heard or saw at some point that UnitedHealthcare has the most rejections of procedures and whatnot. I think it's like 30% or something like that. It might be higher or lower. I don't remember exactly. I think it was like 32%. Maybe, yeah. I'll agree with you on that.

I do just want to point out that I feel like this is kind of like, I don't want to say logical in the word, to insinuate that any of this is logical, but logical outgrowth of the idea that words are violence or microaggressions and this kind of language that

tries to insinuate that things that are not immediately and directly threatening to you are threatening by proxy or by extension or by association. I feel like that's where a lot of this really stemmed from is this idea that like, well, this guy runs this company. Next step over is this company denies insurance claim. Next step over is the denial dial those insurance claims meant no medical treatment and then you six steps away from the ceo you get to this person hypothetically might have passed away because they didn't get the medical procedure that hypothetically they may or may not have needed

and then someone is drawing that link all the way back to this guy killed this person because of this it's like six degrees of separation from kevin bacon except instead of instead of knowing a person it is this person is indirectly responsible six steps away from this person's untimely end and therefore some people feel inclined to commit acts of violence because they perceive violence being done by proxy and there may not even be six degrees of separation he may have been on the board that rejected a claim, but the response is to not go and kill that person. The response in free market society is to go,

no, let's form a petition, whatever. And all these companies that are subscribed to UnitedHealthcare no longer purchase healthcare from them. And then when you drive them to bankruptcy or to change their ways and that's how you affect change not by going out and murdering somebody i agree so hardly except for one thing anytime we bring the free market and for for the sake of argument like i'm a libertarian so i think free market is the answer to almost every problem we can agree we can can disagree, but whatever.

But that's my lens. But in order to get to the point where we can talk about free market solution, we have to unwind government bureaucracy that makes free market not free market. And when we talk about health care, when we talk about insurance, it's important to recognize the fact that the Affordable Care Act exists. It's important to recognize the fact that the Affordable Care Act exists. There are legal requirements and bureaucracy a mile high surrounding all these issues. And in order to get to the point where you could theoretically harm this insurance company out of existence by just a mass refusal to purchase the product, you then have to make it to where someone else could step in to fill that void via entering the market and free competition, which we don't have. And you would also have to make it to where a person doesn't get penalized financially

for not purchasing health insurance as a total product. Because let's say UnitedHealthcare is a bad product. Well, if Blue Cross Blue Shield and all these others are no better, then the problem is not this one company. The problem is the entire industry. But you can't refuse to purchase it without having to pay a fine. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. None of this is a justification for this man's death. That's not my point.

But we can't – I can't – in order to agree with you about free market solution, I'd say, cool, I just want free market. But that means you've got to get the daggum government out of it. Listen, that's what happens when you involve government with anything. You have essentially one choice on how to mail a letter in this country, and yet that is one of the most mismanaged and bankrupt organizations that are government controls. Like the post office is always in shambles. It's kind of like the mafia, come to think of it. Except the FBI didn't protect

the mafia. The mafia was certainly more, certainly a lot friendlier, too, a lot better dressed, more polite. They'd only break your knees if you stopped paying the protection money. I want to test this idea. So Taylor Lorenz said that she felt joy, right?

She felt joyful. And then she tried to walk it back. And the whole interview was just creepy. Her weird smile the entire time while she's talking about the death of somebody was just beyond cringe. But I want to test that idea though with an extreme case when osama bin laden was shot they raided his compound in pakistan and they shot him a lot of people felt really happy that that he had died and because he had murdered a lot of people. Was that wrong to feel joyful about Osama bin Laden's death too? Well, those aren't moral equivalents.

The CEO of UnitedHealthcare and Osama bin Laden. I agree, but those people don't agree. They see it as roughly equivalent. I would hazard a guess. Those people are wrong. Correct. There's no polite way to a guess. Those people are wrong. Correct. There's no polite way to say it. Those people are idiots.

I mean, if the CEO... Well, that's what's beautiful about this country is that I can call somebody a moron and I have the right to do it. But at the end of the day, if the CEO of UnitedHealth hired a bunch of people and taught them how to fly airplanes and crashed them into a building, then I would say, yes, blow his head off in public and let's all have a party. Let's all smoke a cigar over his ashes.

Like screw him. But to run a company, let's be charitable to the opposite ideological side and say he ran a company he ran a company in a very dishonest manipulative did he not illegal but definitely no i'm just saying like let's give him all the rope okay thought experiment okay thought experiment because he's not i think it's important to point out he's not here to defend himself everybody's yes well let's say for a moment he is let's say for the moment he is the most crooked heartless bastard that has ever worn a suit he he delights in the fact that small children can't have heart transplants because it saves it lets him stick an extra quarter into the parking meter like anything he can do to screw his

customers and makes him an extra buck so he can waste it on whatever nonsense using 100 bills to light up his cigars just puts lead in his pencil every morning. Let's say he's the worst human being on earth. It still doesn't justify somebody shooting him in the back. It just doesn't. Let's say he's the worst human being, but he didn't harm someone directly. He didn't commit murder. He didn't commit mayhem.

He's just a dishonest scumbag of a business owner. murder he didn't commit mayhem he's just a dishonest scumbag of a business owner then he should go out of business or potentially face some legal action if it can be proven that he did something to harm someone directly but if you can't prove that he did something to harm somebody then i'm going to say that the the moral justification to commit harm upon that person doesn't exist but that's just me valid commit harm upon that person doesn't exist. But that's just me. Valid. Yeah.

Now, someone been lotting, hired guys, crashed airplanes in a building. I understand where y'all are coming from, that there's a group of people that would put these two side by side, but I just say mental illness is a hell of a thing. It just seems like in in the mind of taylor lorenz she she equates this man with murdering people who can't get their procedures

authorized by insurance or something and i'm just i'm just trying to explore this topic and the make sure that that i don't personally have any double standards here also consider the fact that we're assuming she believes it. Because there is a large group of people out there, especially in media, especially when they get paid lots of money to be members of the media. And they don't believe half the things they say. They say it because they get paid to say it. I'm not saying that applies to Taylor Lorenz. I don't know.

I'm just saying we are operating from a potential false position that she believes that in the first place well we can't speak to the operation of her mind that's true but that was a hell of she didn't state it she didn't say in the interview yeah she stated that she was she felt joy and it was because of i think she she quoted like 10 30 000 or tens of thousands of people had died or something like that. So I'm drawing assumptions, but just a little, because she outright stated her intentions.

You're taking her at her word. I get that. You know, there's a line between wanting to have somebody die and not showing any remorse though either. You know, just because somebody dies doesn't mean you have to be showing any remorse though either. You know, just because somebody dies doesn't mean you have to be remorseful for it either.

You know, you don't know. I never even knew who the guy was until that happened. So, is there remorse there? I don't know. I doubt it. The trial's going to be interesting. So that guy wasn't even, he'd never even been a subscriber of that insurance company. I believe I read.

He wasn't even directly harmed by them. That I don't know. Yeah. That from what, from what little I've heard and I haven't looked much into it cause I'm just, I'm not super emotionally invested in it, but from what little I've heard,

apparently the man was kind of raised in a lap of luxury, like A-lister parents, very wealthy. I don't think he was missing out on any medical care because of, you know, canceled insurance claims. That's why I suspect this was more ideologically driven, which is a damn dangerous thing. We've got a JS8 message from KD9SUV. It just says, greetings, gentlemen. What's going on? I love the JS8 involvement and engagement here in this live. I do, too.

I don't think we've had quite so much before. Yeah, a lot of fun. Yeah, we're getting quite a few. It's cool having that as part of the show. Well, I think we've probably beaten that one to death, no pun intended. But we'll move on. Well, you know, somebody's got to provide some color commentary here. But we'll move on.

And I think this is probably, Drew, your favorite topic. And we're going to talk about these drone sightings, damn it. Aliens. Well, we're going to get into all the crazy theories and ideas, and we're going to talk about all of them. And we're in the homestretch. I know we're just over a couple hours here, but hang in there. So, as we all know, over the last few weeks, there have been reports of drones flying all over New Jersey.

Some of them are described as being up to six feet in diameter, sometimes traveling with and without their lights on. Basically, these mysterious nighttime flights, those have raised quite a few concerns among residents and some officials. We'll talk about that a little bit. But part of the worry stems from the drones flying, I guess, over Picatinny Arsenal. That's a military research and manufacturing facility, as well as over Donald Trump's golf course, Bedminster. So I guess there was also a claim by a New Jersey congressman. We kind of talked about this offline, but drones coming allegedly from an Iranian vessel off the East Coast.

Basically, a Pentagon spokesman denied that, said it was BS, and there was no truth to that allegation. Further, they also stated that there's no evidence that these activities are coming from a foreign entity or that they're the work of an adversary. So some of the theories, I guess, is it a modern version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. So it being a hoax is one of the going theories. Are they government drones?

And this is all part of a special access program where everyone is on a need-to-know basis, and they're using drones to search for something like a suitcase nuke. That was one of them. Or perhaps they're probing and testing a city or state's ability to counter a drone threat and wargaming the future of warfare, which will likely include drones. Perhaps it's intended to divert attention away from something else that's going on, something unknown that hasn't been stated. Or is it like Alex Jones says, and they're just setting up for a Project Bluebeam, and they're just setting up for Project Bluebeam and they're going to fake an alien invasion?

Yeah, it's a lot to digest. What are your theories? I think we're all going to die. Someday we will. On a long enough timeline. I think it's some of these aviation companies that are testing. And it's all a need to know. You know, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon.

There's other drone aerospace companies out there. They all have so-called FAA lights on them. I don't believe any of the videos I see. I don't believe what the government says. I don't know that anybody has died from them. so i'm not too worried about them at the moment well to kind of add on to that so you mentioned you're not believing what the government says i don't think a lot of people are at this point uh or really started out that way but one of the interesting things is the uh belleville new jersey mayor i guess his name is michael melham he stated that the state of new jersey um i guess they got

guidance that if a drone is downed they were immediately called the bomb squad of their county and second their fire department has been instructed to make sure they wear hazmat suits as if it's like an attack on the homeland and what i'm reading you is what i pulled out of uh this article but um but that was that was guidance that was provided to them i don't know so i i don't know how true a lot of this stuff is because there's so many theories and speculation going around it's really hard to really figure out what's real and what isn't and i guess maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle i don't know that sounds like a very prudent response though does it not no it sounds like a very government

bureaucratic we have no earthly idea so we're going to overkill everything response well hold on you you you find a backpack that's left you know at the front door of something i don't know whatever i mean doesn't doesn't this just just uh a few years ago well maybe more than a few years ago there was a uh um somebody detonated a backpack at a, or they didn't detonate it. I'm sorry. They left a backpack full of explosives that they intended to detonate in a crowd in a city nearby here. I mean, sometimes these things can have nefarious purposes.

And so is it not prudent to have the bomb squad respond? And if we don't know what on earth is going on right now don't you think that they should have some sort of hazmat protection where did that come from through say again i'm sorry um terrence where did that order come from saying that they need to have a bomb squad response and hazmat suits and uh let's see luckily i do footnotes and I cite all of my all the things that I read to you so let's see that was from a Breitbart article and they're usually reposting that stuff from other news sources I don't think they're getting the article on the right.

I believe that's where that came from. Is that that article where it reads Pentagon denies GOP lawmakers claim that Iranian mother mothership is launching mysterious drones. So that is where I got that information from, you know, an order like that to me just sounds like it's all encompassing to wear your PPE and take every precaution because we don't know what it is. Or what the hell it is. We're going to deny everything that we know about it and just approach a situation with full regard to anything that could be possibly dangerous so if a semi carrying a bunch of liquid spill you know jackknives spills everything all

over the highway and that is there we go and you're not quite sure what that is. It's the rule of thumb. And you're not quite sure what it is. Would they respond with hazmat? Yes. Even though it could be just a giant tanker full of water. It's called the rule of thumb. First of all, the tanker would be marked.

We stay back far enough that we could cover the entire scene with our thumb until we can get more information about what could be in it. A bill of lading or look at the placards with binoculars. Yes. 100% people have died and hydrocephalus would be a really great example of, of a, of a toxin that could kill you dead right now.

If you know, even a tanker truck full of milk is considered a hazmat incident because it's an ecological hazard. I mean, people have killed themselves by mixing cleaning products in their sink and making mustard gas. I'm not even exaggerating a bit. From face value, from working in Manhattan, responding to unintended packages, possible explosive threats was somewhat commonplace. And if that is the whole document of the guidance they received, they missed a lot to add in there. really concerned about explosives or had or you know some sort of has been incident then they the guidance they got either missed a lot purposely because they know there's really nothing to worry about they just wanted to seem like they were giving guidance or they're not really that concerned about um and i think from my point of view as far as what they are where

they're coming from i think it's suffice to say we just don't know and and prior to i think drew you shared the link of the story it was the ocean county police department flying their drone who said that you know their chief was up there it wasn't giving off the thermal uh you know any thermal value so if you're looking at it through fleer obviously motor is going to generate heat that's interesting. And then when they actually tried to approach the drone, their $10,000 commercial drone was easily evaded by the drone they were monitoring. It is something advanced. I think it should just be some place to say, we don't know at this point. And I think the government knows a lot more than they're saying. But at the same time, to me, based on guidance like that, they're also not too

concerned about it. They're just not ready to say what it is yet. Doesn't that cause a lot of panic though? And isn't the speculation probably just adding fuel to the fire because they're really not giving anyone anything. They're just letting the public speculate and run wild with this. And I know you're probably – it's hard with reporting because you're probably damned if you do and damned if you don't. What better PSYOP program is there than to let the public generate their own PSYOPs? Yeah. And I will just make this comparison to like during the Cubanan missile crisis and the cold war like there was a lot of guidance given out about setting up a bomb shelter and how to you know like tell me

tell me somebody here has seen pictures of like the old nuclear weapons guidance like if you're if you're in a car like pull over on the side of the road and get behind your car all this stuff that most people with common sense realize like you'd be better off bending over grabbing your ankles and kissing your bucket bike because none of it's going to save you from a nuclear blast if you're within the blast zone and if you're outside the blast zone you just need to get the hell away from as fast as possible or cover yourself so you don't get you know touched by the fallout eaten alive by alpha and beta waves but the guidance was given to people so that they had a false i would would argue, sense of security

because they knew what to do, even if the thing that they were being told to do wasn't going to save them. So, I mean, I personally think that if the government wanted to ease panic, they would come up with a story that was moderately plausible to about 70% to 80% of the populace, release it, and the 20% that are conspiracy theorists are going to talk it up no matter what. I think the fact that they're not saying anything says they don't know what the hell it is, which is only moderately concerning because I don't have a lot of faith in the government to be able to figure much out these days. I mean if brains was gunpowder, half of them couldn't blow their nose. But I don't think they know what's going on. And that should be terrifying. I don't think the people that are reporting

know what's going on because they don't have a need to know. Yes. That. I am convinced somebody knows. Yes. But that somebody is not telling the troops and the people which...

Even congressmen and senators and committee members in congress and whatnot they don't have a need to know so they're not going to know what will be interesting though is because of the panic this is inducing somebody ultimately is culpable for this if this is some sort of you know knowing the whole time what was going on they just refused to release it so you know if that is the case somebody somewhere has to be sweating to be like oh man like once once we make this come out like i'm i'm in for a rough ride i mean honestly historically our government's been pretty good about keeping that information

compartmentalized until that person is either so old or so dead it doesn't matter if it comes out i mean look the people that that were involved in the tuskegee experiment that sat there and watched you know people die from syphilis in an experiment nothing happened to them when that came out because they were all already dead or retired or just so old that nobody cared to put them on trial you know like by the time we by the time we people find out what the government is doing behind our backs. It's so far too late. It's ridiculous. And again, like I said earlier, like I am a very ardent libertarian. I don't think the government should work that way. I tend to think nothing should be classified.

People should have free information, access to everything the government knows because it's our government, it's our people, and it's our money. I'm really idealistic like that. But I'm also a realist, and that's not the world we live in. And I'm sure somebody knows exactly what's going on. Let's look at Biden's pardon list and start there. And see, that's the other side of this that I haven't said yet is I'm not really even that focused on this because I always ask myself in moments like this when something really incites the mainstream media,

you know, cycle is bread and circus. Sure. Why, why is this the only thing anybody wants to talk about right now and what's going on that nobody wants me to know about. So like, this is the reason why,

like I always, I always ask myself that I always, it's a mantra to me is bread and circus. Don't get stuck in the bread and circus. Don't get stuck watching the news. Don't get stuck in the bread and circus. Don't get stuck watching the news. Don't get stuck watching NFL. Don't get stuck in the bread and circus. Keep your eyes

open and look around and see what's going on. So, drones over New Jersey? I mean, if they really wanted them out of the sky, they'd be out of the sky by now. But I got a hundred things to worry about right here in southeast Louisiana that don't involve drones over New Jersey. So I'm going to give it up.

Very rural Virginia say right over my town saying that there's drones overhead and they're freaking airplanes. Yes. Well, but in this case, we do have some really credible people making these observations. The law enforcement officers at that city in New Jersey. The life flight crew over in Oregon

saw some really, really weird stuff. Right. But there's also been like 10,000 suburban Karens who have nothing better to do pointing out air traffic from the local airport. It didn't start. I'm not saying the drones

are not a thing. I'm not even saying they don i'm not saying the drones i'm not saying the drones are not a thing i'm not even saying they don't exist but i i have to question at a certain point exactly what jared was leaning into which is like okay there's definitely a drone over there but these three sightings over here may not be a drone they might just be somebody that can't tell an airplane from a drone and those all all 20 of those over there are stars in orion's belt sure but look start start buying your urls now because 10, this is going to be the commercial of if you served at Camp Lejeune from this state to this state and drank the water, you're entitled. If you followed Jerome over New Jersey, you may be entitled to an accusation.

Exactly. Hill, you brought up the possibility that the government doesn't actually know what's going on. And I think Hanlon's razor would support that possibility. I don't think that's an unreasonable conclusion to come to because Hanlon's razor dictates that we should not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. It could very well be that the government is incompetent to figure out what's going on. Well, I think it's also important to recognize that, like, again, we talked about bureaucracies earlier and government is like probably the greatest bureaucracy ever invented and bureaucracies historically are very much like siloed they're very compartmentalized and it's extraordinarily easy and i deal with this in the organization i work for it is exceedingly easy for the right hand to not know what the left

hand's doing because in order to get from here to here you got to go through you know wrist elbow shoulder across the chest and everything else and there's all these choke points for information to get all the way across now in a perfect world an organization would have free flow of data and information and share and everybody hold hands and kumbaya and it would be much more efficient that way but bureaucracies do not work that way and government does not work that way so even if let's say hypothetically the president or the head of the cia or the guy sweeping the floor at the white house if any one of them knows what's going on that does not mean that that information is widespread or widely known or that

anyone's telling anybody else the state so when i say so when i say government doesn't know that's that's talking about like one big you know monolithic thing let's say that the people in government somebody knows but i'm going to say the majority of them probably have no freaking clue the statements that we're hearing are also seemingly carefully worded too they're saying things like we don't have any evidence that it's this or that well that doesn't mean that it's ruled out it just means they don't have the information yet it's called plausible deniability sure i didn't say i didn't know i just said i didn't have any information i could release that doesn't mean i have no information just that i am not authorized to release and it's not exclusionary anybody anybody that's ever listened to a

congressional hearing knows that anyone that's been at a certain level of government long enough, they know exactly how not to say anything in 10,000 words or more. Oh, I'm sorry. Wasn't the famous, did I wipe it like with a cloth? Yeah. I smoked pot, but I did not inhale. Oh, okay. I did not have relations with that woman. I mean, I wasn't around for Nixon, but I'm sure

anybody old enough would have some stories to tell from that, all the nonsense that came out back then. Ratchet, man, I'm seeing I got at TCS at a 1900 offset, but the last frame didn't decode, so it didn't ping at my station. But all I got was

I thought the drones were nukes s i'm guessing he means nukes sniffers and i do have some opinions on that if that was you ratchman i didn't see a call sign associated with that so what i also have noticed recently on 40 meter is there's some really big skip zones opening up at night so if you're anywhere near idaho uh i might just not be receiving you. But can we talk about that? The hypothesis that they're nuke sniffers? Let's jump into that, yeah.

Let's jump in. So this sounds really alarming, but I think if we look at this scientifically, we can probably rule it out. First of all, I saw that the, the map, the radiation map that people upload their, their own data that they collect, they upload it to a map. I saw that claim that there were some increased radiation levels being measured in certain places. I don't find that credible. And here's why I actually have one of these devices that people are using to generate that information. This is a company called GQ. i don't know what that stands for but my device is the cmc 300e so this is a geiger counter geiger counters are able to measure low levels of

radiation they actually will go blank at really really high levels but i looked at that map and i saw the way that people were that some of the readings that people were uploading. One of the biggest smoking guns I saw was in Brooklyn. Somebody had posted a reading days and days prior to when I looked at it that said they had a count of 222 counts per minute. Well, also when you hover over that, they've measured a radiation level of zero micro sieverts per hour. Those two measurements don't go together. If you have high counts per minute, you would be measuring some level of radiation greater than zero. So that is either just a false reading or a fabricated reading or something. And the smoking gun was that reading was right over the top of another reading of like 14 counts per minute.

And it had a proper background radiation level right next to it. And that timestamp was on the same day. So I suspect a lot of these high readings on that map are just false. I'm going to discount that completely. And in fact, one of the funnest things you can do with this is set it on like a smoke detector or something and detect the beta particles coming off the americium. Your smoke detector is radioactive. It is a very, very low level of radiation. And so you can trick these machines out easily.

They're also not calibrated. Taylor pointed that out to me. pointed that out to me. Unless you have a really sophisticated test source that you know the precise amount of radiation coming off of it, and you can calibrate accordingly, you're calibrating these based on hypothetical figures that you get online. I had to do that when I replaced the Geiger tube in this. I replaced it with the Chinese one that's glass that it came with, broke very, very shortly after I purchased it. I had to replace it with a Soviet tube that was made of metal, and I had to just calibrate it based on hypothetical inputs that I got on the internet. So I don't know,

these aren't high quality devices to begin with. Again, we're also you're saying all of them are calibrated based on hypotheticals. Well, if I'm sure they want, I'm sure they received some sort of calibration initially, when from the factory, and I don't know, I can't speak to the quality of that. I'm sure it's fine. I have no reason to doubt it, but over time, the calibrations drift in these types of things.

They need to be recalibrated. And so... If you didn't spend an absolutely asinine amount of money on it, you can just go ahead and assume it wasn't well calibrated. Yeah, I think that's also a reasonable expectation. These are just hobbyist devices. I bought it because I just find radiation really interesting.

So the other aspect of that, in terms of sniffing out an actual nuclear weapon, is that normal nuclear weapons materials aren't great gamma emitters. They typically will release alpha particles. And alpha particles and even beta particles, they don't travel very far. If it's inside of a house or a car,

alpha and beta are probably not even exiting the vehicle. So you would you would only be able to detect gamma rays and your rate highly highly enriched uranium and plutonium just don't emit a ton of gamma there. They're only trace gamma emitters they they need the security of the ports. Those the people in charge of security at the ports, they have to actually bombard shipping containers with neutron beams to basically induce some fission so that they can measure the gamma rays

off of any sort of uranium or plutonium. So I don't think it's reasonable that even a low-altitude drone could detect a nuclear weapon. The rumor i had heard was a soviet nuclear weapon smuggled in the united states unless this thing is detonating and undergoing fission it's probably not detectable from a drone same with like also even even a fuel rod in a nuclear reactor right before the reactor is started up you could probably hold the uranium pellets in your hand and be relatively safe. They have to insert a neutron source into these cores

to initiate that fission to begin heating the water to spin the turbine. So let's pretend for a minute. All right, so I think that you've got a lot of good evidence and a good argument as to why it wouldn't be some sort of, you know, dirty bomb or, you know, some loose nuke from the Soviet Union. it's not that that it's a you know conventional weapon and they're looking for it with the drones maybe through like flare or whatever and and that was another theory that was thrown out there what do you think about that one flare you're gonna have so many just think of how many heat sources are in your home i haven't used flare extensively You guys should probably chime in on this, but I would think that'd be so difficult to detect a nefarious object with FLIR,

but I don't know about the emissions from, I don't know. Can you measure the nitrates from the air? I don't know, but you know, maybe, maybe there's a gamma emitter that's attached to a conventional bomb to make a dirty bomb.

And maybe that's detectable. I don't know. But typically, well, I've read some articles about this. There is a company that uses drones. They were experimenting with detecting radiation hotspots in contaminated areas, but they had to fly the drone about three feet off the ground, even with gamma sources. And they had to fly the drone about three feet off the ground even with gamma sources. And they had to fly it really slowly.

I'm not... I don't think this is the likeliest explanation. I don't either, honestly. Just going back to a use case, my experience with... I don't want to call them drones. Call them unmanned aircraft

heft in Iraq was that at the time we were using a lot of Predators and those were mostly used for standoff purposes. Like they were armed. They were mostly used for recon and basically as like area deterrence. Like, I don't want you to come over here because I'm going to tell something with a big, big gun attached to it to murder you if you come over here. So whenever they'd see Predators flying overhead, they knew better not play FAFO over there. So I could see a use case for intelligence gathering. I could see a use case for a conventional weapon like small grenades,

pipe bombs, or anything, only if we were talking about a terror application just to scare the hell out of people and cause a panic. I don't think i i don't think nuclear just because like anybody knows anything about the periodic table knows that plutonium and uranium are extremely dense and therefore heavy and there's a payload limitation with a drone of any reasonable size honestly like the thing that i'd be the most frightened about and i don't think this is necessarily an outside possibility but just spitting it out there would be something like a chemical or a biological weapon attack which drone would be an interesting delivery system for either for a biological weapon

because normally you just infect a bunch of people and let patient zero run around in a subway and that solves that problem pretty easily for delivery but if it was something with a very rapid onset, you wouldn't be able to patient zero it because the patient zero would die before they got into the general population. You would have to directly administer something like a fast onset biological weapon. and drones are probably pretty efficient at that because all you really need is a couple of small canisters that are glass that break easily, drop them off the drones all over a populated area, and there's your chemical weapons dispersion. That would worry me much more than the possibility of a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb.

I just think it's probably more feasible. Or biological dispersal devices. Yeah, but again, bioweapon, like nine times out of ten, when you want to do a, not that there's ever been like mass, not that there's ever been a mass use of a biological weapon, unless you think COVID was, which we could debate. That's another show. That's

three hours of a debate right there. But like, I don't think there's ever been a historical application where there's been a widespread bioweapon used. But if it was rapid onset, it would have to be administered directly. You couldn't just, like, infect a person and let them run around.

Because by the time they got into the general population and contacted enough people to spread it, they'd be dead. Well, and historically, bioweapons aren't widely used because due to the viruses, due to the bacteria, they're generally hard to disperse in a weapons format without destroying exactly what it is you're trying to disperse. Exactly.

They are the very definition of playing with fire because they'll burn your house as easily as well as anybody else's. So there's a comment from DumbassTexasRedTag. A lot of great names tonight. I like it. This is actually a very good friend of mine who I'm glad showed up for the show. Well, all right then. Look at the radio code.

It's a portable radiation detector that can be carried by a drone. Santa, I'm not familiar with that device, but I'm sure it could detect gamma rays. But in just addressing the Soviet smuggled nuclear warhead rumor, it's probably not such a device is probably not releasing anything greater than just trace amounts of gamma rays. So I don't know. And another comment. I don't know.

And another comment. Whatever the drones are, the government knows exactly what they are and why they are being deployed. The silence leads me to believe it is or will be nefarious, just waiting for the big reveal. I mean, it's kind of an interesting comment because what is the defense budget? Like $850 billion or something ridiculous like that and the idea that they're not able to defend the skies of new jersey is probably not likely with all the assets and things that the united states military and just government in general has so especially after 9-11. They lost an F-35 over South Carolina. The Pentagon has never once passed a financial audit. Never.

Never. Never. Never. They cannot account for all the, they cannot account for the money they allegedly got given. It's just the issue, though, of this is not the response of a government that seems panicked by what we're seeing, which is the best thing. They probably do know what they are. Well, and they weren't panicked over the spy balloons last year either. I was going to bring that up.

Correct. Except for how it was eventually handled. Like, again, ineption is not, you know, an excuse either. But it's just they're not they don't seem panicked by it, where at least the drones, it was like, no, no, we're surveilling these and then shooting it down. This is we're going on weeks of this occurring. I think they waited to shoot the Chinese spy balloon down until it got over water so nobody else could get to it. Well, and I think that was probably also bending the public pressure because, I mean, I truly believe that nine times out of ten, our government will not do what most people think they ought to do unless an appropriate level of hell is raised. They're very content to sit in the ivory tower and treat us like morons as long as we allow them to. KK7 OPX, I got your check in here. He says that he was trying 5 watts before, but now is getting through

on 40 watts. Hey guys, listen. This is awesome. This has been a blast. I unfortunately had to jump off of here. Well, that's alright. We're getting on 3 hours almost. We're probably going to wrap it up.

Thank you guys for having me. Hopefully I can get back on here again. Firefighters need their beauty sleep. We understand. Alright guys, I appreciate it. Thank you guys for having me. Hopefully I can get back on here again. Firefighters need their beauty sleep. We understand. All right, guys. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Have a good night. You too. All right. Well, we're getting into Joe Rogan

three-hour territory, so it's probably time to wrap this up fairly quick. Except we're better. We are better than Joe Rogan, aren't we? I don't know, man. I've seen him cook off some impressive rants in my day. He's

really captured lightning in a bottle, hasn't he? He would have been interesting to moderate the debates. That's why it never happened him and alex jones just let him run wild god we we did an episode of matter of facts recently where like me and nick gave our picks for different people in trump's cabinet and we both said alex jones for press secretary

i just wanted so he screams and yells at the media like every morning for four years. He doesn't even have to say anything intelligent. Just like every time they ask a question, start talking about space lasers and frogs turning gay and just meaningless nonsense. I would pay-per-view that. It would be awesome to watch. It would have been a hell of a show. But, you know, maybe next time,

maybe the next, uh, election cycle. Well, I guess, uh, I guess that's it. We'll, uh, we'll wrap it up. There's probably a good spot to end the show. We made it. This is the longest one we've done two hours and 48, almost 49 minutes. So, uh, thank you guys for joining. I really do appreciate it. Since Taylor had to jump, I will let you guys know where to find him again. So you can find him on YouTube if you look up Rant Strategies. And I believe we also dropped the website in the chat in case you guys want to check that out.

He had some things that you could purchase, and I think he's going to set up a discount code TCS. So he said, give him a little bit of time on that. And Mr. Phil from the Matter of Facts podcast, thank you for joining us and sticking it out. Really do appreciate it. And we had a lot of fun when we joined you, Andrew and Nick. And tell us again where we can find that coffee. So disastercoffee.com. If you can't figure out how to spell disaster coffee, Google is really good for that.

MOFpodcast.com. You can search for Matter of Facts Podcast on YouTube, Instagram, Google, and 10,000 other things. And if you're in southeast louisiana and march your schedule is looking pretty clear look for a cypress survivalist because we're going to be having our first annual preparedness event we're expecting a one day like a one room schoolhouse whole bunch of classes one after the other taught by myself my wife my sister and my brother-in-law we're going to give everybody as much information as we can and try to get

them ready for hurricane season. Awesome. Looks like Drew's busy on JS8. So Jared, is there anything you'd like to close out with and then we'll go to Drew? No, I think I'm pretty good. Hopefully this coming year, I'll have some new things going on for, for my YouTube channel.

I'm in the process of building a website right now. I just bought the domain name for Two Alpha Solutions. I'm hoping to offer some classes and some retail stuff. Awesome. So you know that plays out. So stand by for that. Well, Drew can give you some advice on setting up your website because he's pretty good at that.

Oh, no, not websites, but I do know some DNS tricks that we can make sure we got your DNS records locked down. Anyway, I'm Drew. I run the Terminal Element on YouTube. If I haven't pissed you off completely by now, check me out there. I've got some videos on how I've set up my family's backup communications strategy using VHF digital modes. And I've got some videos on HF for where I think that shines in the, in the overall, overall realm of backup communications. So look forward to seeing you there. KK7OPX just said that to have a great evening. Excellent thank you and thank you everyone who uh jumped

into the chat and uh all those uh who joined to watch really appreciate it and i guess we'll catch you next time so that's a wrap