The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: The Last Prepper Standing

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

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Welcome back to the Matter Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwfpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Rabelais, and my co-host Andrew Bobo is on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to the of Facts Podcast. There is nobody in the audience, which is probably my fault because I think we forgot to tell the hooligans that we were going to stream tonight, but you know, fire me for being the host if you want, I guess.

But me and Andrew are here and Lenny, the last prepper standing, has joined us from Instagram and I just realized like 10 minutes before the show started, you have a YouTube channel as well. Very light YouTube channel. I've kind of like I deleted a lot of old content on there, getting ready to kind of relaunch that eventually. So that begs the question, I guess, to kind of get you up to speed with the audience. Like Last Prepper Stands for yourself explanatory. But like who are you?

How did you come to preparedness? Like what's your perspective like let's just kind of talk it out man i mean this is much an opportunity for us to get to know you as our audience yeah absolutely so um kind of my origin prepper story kind of starts with katrina into 9-11 and then you piggyback into the financial crisis of 08, kind of all those events together, plus just kind of growing up how I grew up. You have the background chatter about your freedoms and UN troops and all that stuff. And as I got older, I just kind of finally put all the pieces to the puzzle.

Those three big events kind of really woke me up to start preparing, and I've been on that journey kind of ever since. How I kind of entered the area of being a talker of preparedness was on Instagram with the American Preppers Club. That's probably my biggest page. And then kind of doing YouTube videos and just doing, you know, your traditional gear review videos, prepping technique videos. That's why the YouTube channels kind of shut down right now. I'm trying to think of something unique and different to add to the prepping community versus a little bit of the same old, same old, um, content that you see. Yeah. So since you brought up, um, since you brought up those three key events, two of which I kind of share with you, honestly,

how were you impacted by 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina? Did you watch it from afar or did it show up on your doorstep? Well, 9-11 was from afar. I was living in California at the time. most i was from afar i was living in california at the time but you know just just getting close to just over 18 or just turned a little past 18 at that point so that's kind of a freaky moment when you're thinking man i might get drafted into some sort of war especially the way they were ramping it up at the time right and then katrina i was not impacted by it initially, just watching it unfold on TV. But my mother, she worked with a lot of the people who had to evacuate New Orleans.

So I got kind of a firsthand experience interfacing with those people who had to leave and get relocated for jobs. Some of them initially thought it was going to be temporary. Some of them never ended up going back to new orleans where they had lived their whole life so i met several people uh firsthand accounts who were impacted by that and just hearing their horror stories and then you know i think as a collective whole as a country we watched that unfold and just the straight up shit show that that was from the government because when the government gets involved it's never going to work out how it should. Yeah, well, I mean, nothing will make the point faster that you should be prepared to take care of yourself

like watching a FEMA response to a natural disaster. Right. And up until 2020, I always referenced know your your current modern world um playbook about how things are going to unfold from the way they responded to coming to confiscate guns and that people thought they had lawfully everybody's worried about gun confiscations and that happened during katrina um and it's just some amazing stuff that you could break down just from that one event that could should and could convince anyone to be prepared yeah i mean i've talked about on this show a handful of times but the reason i said we kind of share some of those things in common is because like on 9-11 i was enlisted i was up at you i was up at a newport news at Fort Eustis, Virginia in AIT the morning of 9-11 happened.

And it wasn't until about the end of 2003 we finally got our marching orders to go to Iraq. And we got back in February of 2005. And then when Katrina happened, I was in Louisiana National Guard. So I was here 25 miles north of lake pond on the north side of lake pond train away from new orleans when katrina ran here wow so you're you're part of the response team to that then yeah we were part of the response team we were i was part of a blackhawk helicopter unit so our unit was not was not uh directly tasked with like grabbing people off their rooftops because we weren't set up for medevac rescues we had a sister unit that came in from pineville louisiana so they would grab

people off their roofs and bring them to high ground and then my guys would grab them from high ground and move them further out of the area and just kind of do kind of do a chinese fire drill to get people out of the city as fast as we could and we stood up on orders until december 31st wow yeah and you know i think uh know, you look at Katrina, too. There's obviously some stuff that you just can't prepare for when it when it's a mass destruction like that. But there's things you could do on the peripheral to kind of help you rebound and regain your life together. And just to see how many people weren't prepared to do that from, you know, not having money to go to hotels, not having any sort of insurance money. There's just a lot of things that go into preparedness that are, you know, you think your food, your guns, your ammo.

But there's a lot of stuff that you could do to set yourself up for even a catastrophic disaster to at least be able to bounce back quicker. And those are some of the lessons I took away from that, too. Yeah, well, I mean, the lessons to me, like I put the war in Iraq and hurricane Katrina together because from my perspective, those two events happened so close to each other. I mean, that was, that was my life from age 21 until I was 23.

You know, it was like that two year span, a lot happened. But when I was in Iraq, I got a really up close look at at what a truly broken country looked like. Like, you know, no police, no fire department, no frigging hospitals. Like, you know, the Department of Defense did what the Department of Defense does. We turned that entire country upside down trying to get after Saddam.

And then rebuilding it took time. So for that period of time, the people that were stuck there, because where the hell else were they going to go, they had to figure their own lives out. They had to figure out how to protect their families. Although having Saddam's Republican Guard sweeped off the board at least meant that you didn't have a large armed force

shooting you over nonsense, trying to take your stuff. But it just meant that that got replaced with the insurgency that would do the exact same thing and then on the heels of like all that experience because like when i came home from iraq i looked at that experience and i was like that that was a war zone that could never happen here and then after hurricane katrina hit new orleans i got into the city and i started looking around and I'm like, oh my God, this looks just like Baghdad again. Like this looks exactly the same. Like there's no police, there's no, there's no fire, there's no EMS, there's no power, there's no running water, there's nothing. This entire city has been destroyed. And like coastal Mississippi got hit worse than New Orleans did in some places.

like coastal Mississippi got hit worse than New Orleans did in some places. And I looked at the devastation that was caused, and it hit me. I'm like, this is what a war zone looks like on my own soil, and I can't get on a C-130 and fly out of here. So, like, if this happened again and I was stuck here and I wasn't wearing an American flag on my shoulder, what would I do? And that was what got me into prepping. Yeah, and that's a good perspective. perspective I mean that's probably the best perspective because it probably drives you crazy seeing how this country's starting to go right now in some of these major cities I'm sure it's pretty reminiscent of

of what you were looking at there because I left uh northern California in 2016 to move to kind of semi-rural east Texas and that was because of this the continued decline of society around us and that wasn't that wasn't brought on by a natural disaster that was brought on by politics and that's a lot of what i pushed back to against too is because you're just seeing these politics slowly turn us into these third world countries where they're saying defund the police and like you just said when there's no police around what happens chaos yeah and and like this this is one of the because like because of the varied friend group that andrew and i have like across this community like we we get everybody from your neocons and your traditional progressives all the way to anarchists and everything in

between and like you know like politically i'm about this far away i'm i'm an anarcho-libertarian in most respects like leave me alone let me do what i want to do as long as i'm not hurting somebody else and we're going to get along just fine but the one place i break really hard away from my friends that are hardcore like classical anarchist is this idea that we have no state no police because i'm like guys i've seen that i have seen state, no police, because I'm like, guys, I've seen that. I have seen no state, no police. And it ends poorly for the people who are not prepared to use violence to protect themselves. And I totally get the personality that says, well, I am able to protect myself.

I don't need police. And I'm like, well, that's great. But I have a wife and a daughter and they're not wired the way I am. And I want them to be able to walk across the street without worrying about somebody hurting them. And I've, and I've been like of that mindset too. Like I kind of, like you said,

like more of like an anarcho capitalist, but when you, when you get older and there's like, how are you going to defend yourself then? And it's just, it just leads to, you have to have some sort of rule of law that is kind of, you know,

a little bit status. Sure. But protects the vulnerable at the end of the day and puts kind of like moral principles ahead of everything else versus just a free for all and survival of the fittest. Yeah. Well, I mean, but you look into it, you look at the, I mean, what was I just saw a quote from something that was import third world become

third world and all the immigrants that i mean look at new york they a couple cops got beat up by immigrants or illegals i want to say and uh they got let go and then they one of them just got arrested in phoenix yeah again and so one it's like one how in the heck are they getting across the country so freaking fast? Who's funding that? Besides, I mean, Democrats and Soros and all that stuff, I suppose. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing is you have a flood of illegals coming over the border and you talk. They're talking to them. And it's like, well, who are you voting for? Biden.

Well, you're illegal. You can't vote. No, that's it. They're trying to They're trying to push that path of citizenship before the election. Right. And that whole thing in New York is crazy. And that's really that, you know, that's part of what I wanted to talk about, too, when we're on here, because you see these migrants coming across are not migrants. I was just going to say I get caught using that word, too, because we've been conditioned to say that it's illegal immigration.

And that's really where the first rule of law starts to break down is just the fact that they're even here. Everything after that is just kind of additional breakdown of the rule of law. There's a whole system for them to come here. My grandfather came here legally, served in the U.S. Army. Like he went through the whole process to to immigrate here and he went a step further he didn't even allow um the kids in the house to speak spanish because he wanted them to assimilate versus trying to subvert the culture if that makes sense he wanted them to assimilate to the culture and be proud to be where you're at now because he went through it the right way so there's a lot of pride that comes along with that.

But as you see the military age men, a lot of preppers and a lot of people are talking about that. And they're highlighting that problem. And the thing that it's inspired me to do is to really focus on myself. Because if you're preaching and yelling at the top of the roof about how there's military age men coming in, you probably should be getting yourself ready for a military fight and taking it a little bit serious. And I don't think you see a whole lot of that in the, in the prepper community. And, you know, myself, I'm about 30 pounds overweight, but I've been hitting the gym harder than I have in a long time because there's military age men crossing the border right now.

It's a silent red dawn, in my opinion. Yeah, and the thing of it is, I've seen a lot of the same things in the prepper community, and I would like to be semi-charitable and attribute that to the fact that, like most preppers I know, they tend to be very much the live-and-let-live, keep-to-myself type. But I've also tried to encourage the preparedness community like you have to at a certain point become an advocate for the lifestyle you preach

like that's the whole reason we started this show eight years ago seven and a half years ago because i was looking at the world around me and i was saying there are people that apparently didn't get the memo i did when i was young that you're supposed to do certain things, not because it was prepping, but because that's what responsible human beings do. You know, like when it's hurricane season down here, you are obligated as a result of your zip code to go get a couple of cases of water and a couple of bags of dried food that don't require refrigeration. And you're required to get some flashlights with batteries. Like if you don't do those things, people look at you weird because you live in a hurricane alley. Why don't you have like the bare minimum stuff for hurricane season? And then after hurricane season, all the fuel that you saved up for your generator, you dump it into your vehicle and burn it up.

The hurricane snacks, you go ahead and you eat them until the next hurricane season. Like that's how we grew up. And I look around at the people from just a couple years ago when Hurricane Ida hit us, and the number of my neighbors that didn't have those bare minimums shocked me. Like I literally was asking some people like, how did you not get the memo? You've lived down here your entire life. I've lived on the Gulf Coast 41 years. This is not news.

It's like Andrew always jokes about because he lives up in Michigan. Every year, Andrew, there are blizzards and the Grand River floods, right? Every single year. Yeah, especially right now. It's crazy because right now it's February, and we just hit 60, if not, I think, close to 65 today. February and we just hit like 60 if not I think close to 65 today and and that's why I sound like crap because my freaking allergies and sinuses are going like nuts right now because they think it's spring um but yeah our the Grand River that I cross every single day to go to work it's uh it's finally going back down uh it's really interesting because when I cross the bridge

uh every single day i look at it and i can tell like right now they of course they have the dock out but during the summer and stuff i gauge i can look if i can see the dock all right cool you know it's about normal height uh if i can see more you know if i can see the legs a little bit more okay it's low if the dock is covered it's high and like uh recently um i mean the entire boat launch was flooded and it was actually going up the hill like it was only a few feet away from the bridge uh from uh being at the being at the edge of the bridge uh the bridge so and because of all the rain and the runoff and the melting and all that stuff that we've had because it's been so warm uh yeah it's it's pretty crazy but that being said people are still

surprised people are still shocked the holy crap the grand river flooded it freaking floods every single year some years are worse than others just like we get snow it's that first snow of the year it you i i try to stay off the road if i can but it's i'm i'm not watching the road i'm watching people around me because they forget how to drive. Yeah. And it's nuts. It's crazy to me that they're shocked that, oh, man, it snowed. Well, it's end of November, end of December.

Well, no crap. It's snowing. It's going to melt, and then we'll get a hard one like in January, February, which we got hammered on January. And I was hoping it was going to keep going, but no. February has been a heck of a warm month so far. Right. And, you know, like what you guys are saying,

I've seen the same thing in my area where people seem less prepared and less ready for stuff that they know is going to happen, right? And I think people get in that situation because the way the economy is you know getting prepared ahead of time when you're barely surviving right now might be a little bit hard to do so you back burner that or your attention isn't on that and people are just you know the football doesn't stop the basketball doesn't stop the continued distraction you're always there to and then you add on the hardship of just trying to survive through the inflation that's going on all the the job market economy all that stuff people start back burnering that

because they feel like oh i've got through before it hasn't been a problem before i don't need to prioritize it and then you look up and the whole problem ends up being way more catastrophic than it ever needed to be because you didn't incorporate preparedness into your lifestyle. And that's what I'm really trying to focus getting people on is not, hey, buy some beans here, buy some ammo here, but really like incorporate preparedness into your lifestyle. If you're worried about a wave of illegal immigrants coming through, bringing violence to your city, well, you know, one of the ways that you can be prepared for that is just to be a little bit more fit and be ready to protect yourself,

be a little bit more engaged on what's going on. If you're struggling in the economy and you know that it's just going to get worse because of the current politics, start living a preparedness lifestyle versus, you know, going and watching football and hanging out. You could do something to start a podcast and create a site also for you to get a little bit more money to be more prepared. There's a lot of options to preppers out there, to people who say they're preppers, but then they fall in these categories where they're just as unprepared as your average Joe. And that's what I'm really advocating against and want to talk about. Well, and the thing that I really push back against what you just said, like I understand like that i i really push back against what you what

you just said like i i understand like that's what people are saying but i don't buy it just because i know in i know in my own lifetime i grew up a lower in a lower middle class family dad worked mom stayed home we didn't we never had a lot of extra money but we always managed to make money available for the things that were necessary. And like my wife and I now think by the grace of God and promotions and hard work, we make double what we did when we were first starting out together with, you know, with a young family. But even back then we still had bare minimums, like, and preparedness was always a bare minimum because, again, this idea that like – what is a polite way to tell people you spend money on what's important to you? And I'm not the genius that came up with that. I am directly quoting Clint Smith who is like the lead – the guy behind Thunder Ranch and a hell of a firearms instructor.

But he said people spend money on what's important to them. If it's really important, you'll find dollars and you'll find time and like andrew and i have gone through this like i i started this podcast not long after i really got hardcore into prepping and he's seen a lot of my efforts and a lot of them have been shoestring it's been shoestring budget it's been figure stuff out as i go it's been do it the cheap way because that was that was what the money would allow for and some of it failed and we had to start over but i don't know i just i kind of kick back at this idea that like you have to have x amount of money to be prepared because my point of view is is i'm like the canned food aisle nothing in there is Bags of rice are dirt cheap.

I think people get an idea in their head of the bunker and the cases of MREs and then the stacks of ammo cans and the $10,000 worth of AR-15s and cool guy stuff, and they think to themselves, I can never do that. Well, they look at it as a whole, and that's what we talk about.

One, you build it up over time and two you start somewhere and like if you start prepping today tomorrow you'll be more prepared than if you'd sat there watching nfl and drinking beer and not doing it exactly that that's what i'm talking about a little bit you don't see you see the highlight reels even in the prepping community it's a a lot of really curtailing the content to be like every other social media influencer out there. It's just all Highlight Reel driven. I don't think anyone puts a video out of them stacking two or three cans a week, right? And I think that's something that I'm looking towards showing. That's kind of where my mind's going when I relaunched the YouTube channel. It was just some simple stuff like, hey, today I bought four cans of soup and I bought five pounds of rice.

It's going to go in this closet right here. Look how much I got over the last two months. So people don't have that overwhelming feeling because that's one thing I went through, especially being young when I first started prepping. And it turned me away for a little bit. And I just kind of more focused on the conspiracy rabbit holes and all that stuff because I said, man, I can't afford any of this prepping stuff. I can't even afford the, you know, Berkey water filters or thousands of dollars or hundreds of dollars, which might've been

thousands of dollars at a time. But yeah, people can be pretty innovative. You're right. And they do just use excuses to not do anything well and that's i mean that's one question that i think we've gotten quite a bit is okay well where do i start and it's just like well when you go to the store if you're going grocery shopping or whatever or if you just so happen to pass in a store on the way home just get in the habit of maybe every friday or every thursday or whatever just stop in there and, hey, we like this kind of fruit or we like this canned vegetable or whatever it is. Pick up four or five of them.

Go home, put them on the shelf. Next week, go and pick up another five of something else or six, I guess, if you're like my uncle who's a CDO and he has to get you know multiples of two but uh but um no i mean it's so that's the thing is that's where you can start and that's so a lot of people it's like okay well we're what can i do and i a lot of times i i try to equate like the preparedness stuff to i mean saving up for something i especially like if i don't have the cash that i want to drop on it right away like so for example

for my truck I want to get the deck drawer system for the back of my truck I don't have $1,500 well I mean I guess I do have $1,500 sitting in my bank account do I want to drop $1,500 no I donate plasma I like to sell my body in that way

and save it up so over the last four months or so I've been saving up money from BioLife. And it's just every once in a while, it's ticking away. And so every time I donate, I look at it. I'm like, all right, I'm that much closer. And that's the thing is like when I was talking to somebody else at work who doesn't donate or anything, but they're like, well, I really want this pistol. And I go, okay, well, how much is it?

And they told me. I'm like, all right. Well, I said, we're getting a bonus soon. And I said, we're getting taxes back. I said, are you set? Like, do you have bills paid? Do you have things covered? Yeah. I said, all right, well, take a quarter of what this pistol costs and put it in an envelope

or put it in a bank account somewhere that you will not touch it. Okay, what do I do next? I'm like, every check, try to put $50 aside. Try to put $20 aside. Just every single check, if you want to and you're dedicated to it, just put a little bit of cash aside every so often and

it'll add up. And before you know it, you'll have it. And yeah, some weeks you might be able to put $100, some weeks you might be able to put $20. But, you know, every time you put money aside, you're that much closer to an object if you want it. Same thing goes with prepping. If you're like, okay, well, I really want to get next month. I want to put enough money towards a couple, like maybe three buckets.

Say you want to put three buckets aside for storage. All right, well, what do you want to put in it? I want to put beans, rice, whatever. You get your list. Okay, now price it out. How much is it going to cost you per bucket? Okay, it's going to cost me this much per bucket, this much for all three. All right, start putting money aside. When you get that much money, go and take that money and go spend it on three buckets of food, which if you do it right, it can last you a month of food. If you do it right. So that's three months of food that you have right there.

Simple solution is most people go to the grocery store every week. Buy an extra five-pound bag of dried beans, an extra five-pound bag of dried rice. Keep loading in the bucket until the bucket's full. Chuck in an oxygen absorber. Slam the lid shut. Done deal. Move on to the next one like right but yeah it's just taking away at it and i really like what you said because

that's that's that to me is like a great thing to talk about for kind of living that preparedness lifestyle is is that delayed gratification so and then giving people some ideas about go the bio life i never thought of that idea before that's a great idea i might do it just because i got inspired by this and hope someone listening to this uses that to let me know so you can get so i can get the referral bonus oh hey after this you text me whatever link you need to do and i'll make sure i use it but that's a great great point because that that's what i'm saying like in tomorrow we have like have a little online community that's off of like all the social medias it's through um the mighty network and in there like we're inspiring each other sharing our little workout stories and one of the cool things that i shared

with them because people were talking about where do i get started prepping is kind of expensive so between bio life and i'll shout this out i have no affiliation to it is the crazy crazy coupon lady. Like you could go on to that website and you can request a lot of free samples. I just got stocked. You're talking about allergies. I just got like five different companies worth of free samples of allergy medicines. And all they had to do was fill in my email, fill, uh, drop my phone number. I haven't even got any spam texts or spam emails from, and eventually it just showed up in the mail a couple weeks later which is like there's little nuanced things out there between delay gratification little side hustles to me that would be like you know shoestring prepper

or something on youtube and you walked them through every single trip of you going through the bio life and then at the end of it you could do the install video of the deck which i'm good luck are you gonna do that on your own you're gonna pay someone to do that because that looks crazy uh but in my a buddy of mine's a mechanic he actually has a youtube video or youtube channel and uh we're gonna film it for his youtube see there you go it actually it actually is not too bad from the from the install videos and stuff like that but um yeah no and that's the thing is the delay gratification and if you save up for something it means more when you get it and it's like because hey i've been putting money aside

for the last six months for again for this pistol for this rifle whatever it is and you get it and you're like all right cool like what's the next thing like you like that feeling of okay i did this and you're and the thing is you're disciplined enough to not touch that money because it is hard when you're disciplined enough to not touch that money. Because it is hard when you're sitting there and you're like, well, I do kind of want to go to the bar tonight. Yeah, I really don't have any extra cash. And you look at the savings account that might have like two grand in it,

this extra account, and you're like, I could take 50 bucks out of it. And if you don't, I mean, that's good discipline. I mean, you're kind of sacrificing something for another thing, but yeah, it's, it's just, it's the prepping community, the prepping mindset, I guess it's just, it's give and take. Um, obviously I would love to be on 15 acres and a small little miniature farm and raising chickens and have eggs and all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately, I'm not there yet. Do I want to be there yet? Do I want to be there? Yeah. Is it a goal of mine? Yes. And is it something that I'm kind of trying to build towards? Yeah, eventually.

And it'll be awesome to get there. But it's not in the cards right now. I mean, I wanted property, but I had to settle because of budget and because of the housing market. I settled to where I was at, where I'm at now and stuff. So it's just give and take. And you got to learn to be happy with what you have and you want to strive to be better.

So, Hey, this month I'm going to go buy this this month. I'm going to go and put this aside. And, and I mean, and don't just focus. That was my big thing was cause I always had apartments.

Don't focus just on ammo and guns. Like I did that for years. I have, I, I'm turning to a collector and it's like, okay, going back. It's like, okay, could I years. I have, I, I'm turning to a collector and it's like, okay, going back. It's like,

okay, could I, could I have, instead of buying this gun, could I have gotten this or like this much water, this much food, uh, whatever,

whatever, you know, uh, a Berkey water filter or stuff like that. Yeah, I could have. And now I'm tailoring that towards, okay,

I want a filter. I want a Berkey water system. Like I want this kind of stuff. So now I'm putting money aside fororing that towards, okay, I want a filter. I want a Berkey water system. Like, I want this kind of stuff. So now I'm putting money aside for it. So, okay, I'm pretty happy with my guns and ammo. And I guess you could always use more ammo. But, you know, it's just one of those things where you just try to strive to be better. And you look at what's going on.

I mean, like, we go back to Katrina. And the idea that so many people were stranded on their roofs and stuff like that. I mean, it's people didn't bug out fast enough and they didn't leave. Maybe they didn't want to leave and maybe they just were like, no, I won't be that bad kind of thing. But Murphy's Law showed his head and they showed you what was up. But that and that's the thing is, is i mean you can take your that's why i always like to have like the backup plans and that's what going back to uh what's you know if you have to bug out well phil and i've talked about this before is you have a thumb drive an

encrypted thumb drive or a hard drive and have birth certificates marriage certificates have the mortgage have stuff about mortgage insurance have all that stuff on this thumb drive multiple thumb drives even and have them stationed in different places have one sent to like maybe somebody you know up north if you have family that lives in a different state or something has have send it to them i mean yeah it's encrypted so you don't have to worry about it but at the same time it's like well if something were to happen and you lost yours you have a backup backup. And that's where the whole prepping mindset too to me is having backups. And having backups. I mean, I always say that two is one and one is none

because it holds true in every facet of life. That's a very smart idea with sending it to other people to hold for you. They have like legacy accounts for Apple and all that stuff too. And I have a lot of my personal data in there and I've shared that code with people. So that's a good prepping tool for people to use too, just so people can have access to that information. Or if you have uploaded to the cloud, you don't even need the hard drive. You get somewhere safe, you could go back and check it later. Those are great ideas.

And then with saving up, like you said too, when you incorporate that into your preparedness lifestyle, you're going to value those items that you got a little bit more. You're going to take care of them a little bit more. You're going to understand exactly how hard it got to get it. And a lot of people that's kind of gone from our culture right now is even the value of things mixed in with the instant gratification comes the lack of value of stuff. And that's part gratification comes the the lack of value of stuff and that's part of why i think there's a lot of cultural denigration because people don't know how hard it was to build up this society because it was already here for them so as it crumbles they're not worried about it i definitely think there's something to that though like

my observation and like i said i'm 41 so I am like among the oldest of the millennials. But like my observation of my generation at least has been that I look around at my peers and I see a group of people who grew up, you know, for the large part. And I hate to say this because I know a lot of people had it pretty rough growing up. But like as an average, my generation grew up in a level of wealth and opulence that the previous generations could not have imagined. My generation grew up at a level of relative peace on the world stage and relative lack of hardship that the previous generations just couldn't imagine. And I feel as though we have forgotten what it means to intentionally and graciously suffer. And, like, this is – I was talking to my daughter about this the other day. And my daughter has grown up with two preppers for parents. So, like, she's – I don't think it even fazes her at this point.

She just accepts that her parents are a little odd. But, like, I was telling her the other day, I'm like, do you know why I take you and mom out camping? And she was like, why? And I'm like, because it teaches y'all how to be uncomfortable. And then she immediately fired back with, well, but, like, you know, we have cots and we have 12-volt fridge, we have all this stuff, and, like, we're not uncomfortable when we go camping. And I'm like, but you don't have air conditioning, you don't have a bed,

you can't, like, everything when you're camping is harder. It takes longer to is harder it takes longer to cook it takes longer to do everything you have to walk to go to the bathroom i am teaching you how to be uncomfortable because there might come a time and there has in her lifetime during hurricane ida where you're gonna have to be uncomfortable and when that moment comes you can either embrace it with a smile and get over it and move forward, or you can sit there and suck, and it's going to suck to suck. And, like, the greatest story I always tell people is, like, the day after Hurricane Ida,

and bear in mind that, like, regardless of what the news says, I know that there was a weather station half a mile from my house that logged 130-mile-an-hour wind gusts when Hurricane Ida went over the top of my house. So you can take that whole it was a cat 2 argument and blow it out your nose it was cat 3 when it hit us and it was it also was 35 to 40 miles east of where we thought it was going to go so where we thought it was going to go on the other side of baton rouge it hit us like i looked at the uh the storm the eye of the storm went almost directly over my parents house

and they're about 10-12 miles west of us so it was ugly and it was a lot worse than we thought it was going to be the day after Hurricane Ida we weren't worried about how we were going to bathe ourselves we had a 35 gallon rain water catch on the back side of the house it was filled filled to the brim by the way we weren't worried about how we were going to drink water because the water pressure was zero, but we had, you know, a 28-day supply of bottled water sitting on the shelf. We weren't worried about how we were going to feed ourselves. We had plenty of food and water, and we had propane. We had everything we needed to cook.

We weren't worried about how we were going to take care of our basic needs. We had all that handled. My daughter was in the front yard flying a kite because she was like eight, nine years old at the time. And she was like, Hey, the wind's good. The wind's blowing really good. Let me go get my kite. And she flew a kite in the front yard when there's three trees sitting at two trees sitting in the front yard and one on the house. And this is the level of resilience that like, I tell people, try to build into yourself and your wives and your kids and your husbands and everybody else, because it's not enough just to be uncomfortable. You have to be

comfortable with being uncomfortable. You have to get used to sacrificing. You have to get used to doing without sometimes, because if you can't do that, you'll never be able to save. You'll never be able to defer to gratification. Like it's the old story of the ant and the grasshopper, guys. Which one do you want to be when the winter is coming? You don't want to be the grasshopper. Yeah, but again, I feel like there's a lot of people out there, again, because that's the world we've grown up in, where everybody wants everything right now. Everything wants what feels good or what's fun.

Nobody wants to be uncomfortable, and I get that, but sometimes, frankly, you have be and that's you know i'm the same i'm the same age as you too and i i'm glad you touched on that a little bit about how our generation like we we saw the pre-internet right we're just old enough to remember that we're just old enough to experience that and so we've watched this whole thing get developed, and we've gone with it. My kids are 19 to 13, and I get them out there too. I do the same things with them. I tell them, you guys don't know how easy you have it. It is extremely easy because they seem real put out when we've got to do camping also.

They seem real put out when it's, you know, we're not doing video games today. We're hanging out as a family. We're going to cut some wood. We're going to get this stuff prepared for winter. We're doing this today it's part of what you have to do you're going to survive it's just a couple hours out of your time but when that power's out like it has been before and you guys are complaining about how cold you are we're going to have some wood because you chopped it yourselves so that but yeah our generation is like i think our generation is kind of the last hope to kind of bridge that gap for people so i think people in our generation have a little bit bigger

responsibility because you know you get much you get a little bit older than us they're kind of too old to really be in the fight you get younger than us they don't really know how it was when all this stuff didn't exist yeah well and the other thing I think that our generation has been really and I try to be like cognizant of the fact that like I understand that like income wise and standard living wise, like I'm doing a lot better

than most of my generation. I think a lot because of just decades of freaking hard butt kicking work. But like I feel like a lot of our generation has kind of given up on the idea of ever accumulating of ever being able to retire of ever being homeowners i mean i'm sure y'all y'all probably looked at what the statistics are as far as like that age range like from about 45 down to 35 but like 44 of our generation can't doesn't have a thousand dollars for an emergency

i forget what the percentage is. Don't think they'll ever be able to retire. The homeownership rate in the millennial generation is just absolutely in the toilet. And it's a combination of low income, bad credit and everything else. But I don't know, like it's depressing and shocking to me. I guess I just, this is also why like Andrew and I, at least once a year, we force ourselves to do what I call the financial prepping episode where we talk to people about how preparedness is not just like beans, bullets, and Band-Aids. It's also – it's a 401K, and it's a retirement account. It's a savings account. It's a home budget.

It's all this nerdy crap that our parents frigging did because that's how you prepare financially. how you that's how you prepare financially and outside of prep or fiction you know most most periods in history where things have gone gotten really really bad they didn't happen overnight it happened in slow motion right and you're gonna have to go back and rely on those things now to say what you said about the our generation when i left northern california the san francisco When I left Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, moved to East Texas, two years later, I was able to purchase a home that was about, at the time, it was $800 less than what I was paying in rent. So I got a four-bedroom house with a pool for $800 less than what I was paying for a two bedroom apartment. Sounds about right. So, but you don't have, but with this generation, right? There are a lot of people in our generation and the generation behind us,

they're scared to venture out of their comfort zone because they've been in the rooms, they've been on their TVs, they've been on their video games, been really conditioned for the comfort. It was very hard to come out to East Texas and not know anyone, to not have any safety net of my friends or anything like that. But to have that mentality where like, I need to build a future for myself

because not only am I going to be able to buy a home, but later on, I'm going to use that home to help fund mine and my wife's retirement and thinking a little bit ahead because I'm not going to, as these rents are increasing, my brother was just telling me, I mean, he's paying $3,500 in rent for a two bedroom house right now, which, which is about $1,500 more than what my mortgage is. So that that's just

mind blowing to me. And I don't know how that's sustainable for him, uh, going forward as he gets older and he's able to work, he's not able to work as much and then the prices are just only going to increase over that time so prepping is a lot of like going out there but getting getting yourself out of those comfort zones too i think that's lost on a lot of these people because it used to be like go west young man to build a future right you don't see people even leaving to go to other areas to build futures for themselves anymore and i think we can kind of get back to that would be very cool too. Yeah. And then you're in the boat that like me and Andrew are,

where it's like, I can see my neighbor and I'm not happy about that. I want to live further out of town. I mean, I don't think either one of us is there yet, but that's our goal is to basically move. I tell my wife all the time and she giggles and rolls her eyes because she knows who she married.

But like my goal is to be able to pee out of the front door of my house and not get arrested for indecent exposure like i want to be that far out of town and my neighbors be that far away i love that that see that's the ultimate goal for me and that was kind of the uh the idea when we came out here but we settled for kind of like a happy medium for the time right now but we definitely got away from the major city we got away from the chaos of of san francisco bay area and we're in this just it almost feels like sometimes i gotta pinch myself and be like man i i actually accomplished something that really put us in a better situation even though i'm not

homesteading on the level that i wanted it to homestead, this is somewhat better. And I think some people, they won't make that compromise. So I won't ask you while we're live, but after we get done, remind me. I want to ask you where exactly you live because you mentioned East Texas several times. And I was raised outside of Beaumont, Texas. So there's a fair bet I probably know exactly where you are. I like that. Yeah, I'm actually, I'm comfortable with it.

I'm like in the Tyler area. Oh, yes. I know exactly where you're at. You're actually not that far from a buddy of ours who's also on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. Awesome. Maybe we've got to use that to link up. So, Lenny, like, we've been talking for about 45 minutes. Like, what would you say, like, your focus is in preparedness?

Because I feel like everybody, I feel like anybody that really considers themselves to be a part of this community, like, they try to do everything because you have to do everything. But most people say that they have a wheelhouse. Like, what do you feel like is your calling in preparedness or the thing that you feel like you stand out in? community to just be a little bit more fit, take care of your health, get out there and do it for not only yourself, but for your family and for your preparedness and survival goals are going to require you to be fit. So I post a lot of that on my personal Instagram, 5am wake up times, getting the workouts in inside our preparedness group. We have monthly challenges where the other guys and gals too in there, they'll post it and just kind of rallying each other up to be living examples of being prepared. To me, there's nothing

funnier than, you know, one of the first things I do when I work with some people and they're reaching out for some kind of fitness advice and stuff and they have their 75 pound bug out bag and say, hey, I don't want you to do anything other than, you know, walk three miles each day with that bug out bag on and then, and then get back to me. And that is a task that is not completable by pretty much everyone that I've put it on when they're first starting out. So that that's kind of my wheelhouse and what I'm going to be working towards in the future is really just trying to cultivate a culture of fitness in the preparedness perspective or in the preparedness realm i mean that's going to be a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow but i mean it's something that andrew and i have also kind of i know he's been pushing himself and

i've been pushing myself um so during covid i went i went to working remote and prior to that like just my apple watch according to that was saying i was getting like two and a half miles a day of walking at a desk job. And that was just from the parking lot to the facility, back from the facility, back to the parking lot, walking around the building to get stuff done. And after we started working remotely, I promptly swole up from 242 pounds to 255 pounds and I topped out at 262 and I'm five foot 11. So I was, I was massively overweight. I knew I was, but I really didn't get my motivation to do anything about it until what was it? Andy Prepper camp 2021. Our buddy Jordan got a picture of me in perfect profile and I looked like eight months pregnant, like just all beer belly. And I came home from that and hung my head and said, okay,

we got to start doing something about this. So my wife and I both went on a journey to completely rewire the way we eat, change our dieting. we started walking like 10 miles a week about two miles a day five six times a week and i'm down to 230 to 235 depending on what time of the day i get on the scale and that right and that little lady has lost 50 pounds nice yeah and you know it's it's incremental things i myself have struggled with weight at times um just even right now i'm 230 i'm about the same height as you so we probably got about the same type of profile but i'm up 30 plus or actually 40 plus pounds in a very short period of time i completed the 75 hard i don't know if you guys are familiar with that program from andy facilla

but i completed that program I was down to 190 and then just slack and got right back up because I wasn't living the the mindset Day in and day out and I was just that's where I think a lot of preppers can improve I think there's a big thing there. I mean the number one Cause of death is heart disease, right? And if we're being real with ourselves Cause of death is heart disease, right? And if we're being real with ourselves, just like you're talking about the 401ks and all that stuff, our fitness as preppers should be kind of right up there with everything else.

Well, and the thing I put on people a lot of times, like completely separate from preparedness, by the way, this is just like general life philosophy is I tell everybody that life expectancy means nothing to me. What I'm worried about is how many years I can run a chainsaw, how many years I can rip my truck apart and do a brake job, how many years I'm physically able. Like the day that I am too sick and too fat to go on a camping trip or go day hiking is the day that I have a problem. So I always tell people, I'm like, I don't care if I live to be 100.

If at 65 I'm so old and broken and fat I can't do anything with myself like that, that the next 35 years doesn't mean anything to me. I want to be that 70, 75-year-old man who's working the 30-year-olds into the ground, leaving them for dead, breaking down a car in my front yard. Ripping it apart. Working on brakes in front and suspension. I want to be that guy who makes the guys half my age. Look like there's a problem. Because I'm just.

It's not even about having the biggest muscles. Or the narrowest waistline. It is totally about. I want to make sure that I have the most number of years. Available to me. Where I'm able to take care of myself and the people around me. And that is, I think, like a message to the preparedness community of if you're 35, 40 years old and you see the waistline starting to get a little bit

bigger and you see your health starting to decline, that's your wake-up call to say, it's not about what can I do today, it's what am I going to be able to do in 20 years? And if I don't do the work now, I'm not going to be able to do the work then. Right. And I think especially too, if you're in a position where you're trying to influence people to be prepared, I mean, that's, that's, you go look up prepper memes. One of the first things comes up is, you know, the meal team six and making fun of fat preppers and this and that. Like you, I think if you put yourself in that that area, that arena, you better make sure you're looking the role in the part. And that that is part of why I dialed some of my stuff back. And I really want to make sure that I'm I'm living the lifestyle that I'm preaching.

And you could and I'm trying to do that by encouraging people because we're all going to start out somewhere. We're all going to have to build ourselves up to where we want to be. And that can be an overwhelming thing in itself, just the fitness. And you add prepping on top of it. That's where community and all that comes in handy too. I mean, again, to me, it all comes back to this really holistic viewpoint that I had that I, and I'm pretty sure Andrew, you know, based on I haven't known him as long as I have, I feel like we both have this very holistic viewpoint of prepping.

Like there's all these things you do and it's all like preparedness is not an activity. It's a mindset. And once you develop the preparedness mindset, everything you do is in service to preparedness. Like the difference between the guy that works out so he can hike five miles with a rucksack and the guy that works out so that he looks good in a Speedo, they might do the exact same thing, but the reason they do it is totally different. The preparedness person does it for one reason and the other guy does it for vanity. And the prepper is going to do a savings account so he can take care of his family in hard times when inflation is way up and the bills creep up. And the person who saves money because he wants a vacation is doing it for a totally different reason.

Like that's always been my mantra to people is if you're a prepper, everything you do is in service to prepping. You might do the same thing everybody else does, but you do it for a different reason with a different viewpoint. So like my whole thing about cleaning up my diet and staying away from carbs and you know refined sugars and all that and god almighty you know just processed food is really the fact that like i've struggled with hypoglycemia since i was in my early 30s there is no secret where that leads if you let it go long enough, you become insulin resistant, you become type 2 diabetic. That road is paved in front of me. So I have the option to either say, I don't want to be insulin dependent, so I have to do these things.

Or I just eat the crap and do what I'm not supposed to do and take insulin and be in that situation. Which, unfortunately, I know people who are insulin dependent, and they pretty well accept the fact that, you know, 30 days after the lights go out, they're gone. They cannot live without it. It's just, I guess to me, it's a really sobering experience to realize, like, you know, the age-old adage that nobody's coming to save us. Nobody's coming to bail us out when everything really goes bad. Everybody's going to have to be able's coming to bail us out when everything really goes bad. Everybody's going

to have to be able to take care of themselves. And sometimes taking care of yourself means everything within your power from the way you diet, the way you take care of your body, all the way to how much money is sitting in the savings account. All those things go towards, can I take care of myself because no one else is coming to save me? Right. And that's a good way to put it, a holistic to it and i totally dig that that's what i'm going for myself again interview style what would you say is your weak point because everybody has one uh my weak point really when it comes to to prepping is going to be um maybe actual um survival and like harsher elements.

So from being, being in Northern California and the city and then living here in East Texas, if I was in a survival situation that was really, really in the elements, you know, I hike, I backpack, I camp,

but like my, my true raw survival skills could definitely use some refreshing and more practicing. What about you, Andrew? I'm going to dime you out. Just probably besides, I mean, one of the things is I've been trying to build ever since I got my house is food and water stash.

Put more of that aside. But my MAG, my mutual assistance group, that's one thing that I think everybody needs, every prepper needs. You can't lone wolf it. There's no way you'll survive. And so that's the thing is having like-minded individuals that are preparing as well and someone that you can link up with.

I mean, I have a bug-out plan, and it entails hiking up north and all this other stuff, but what if you can't get up north i mean what if you are stuck uh in the area uh for a period of time i'm by myself and so finding that group of people that hey let's get together and either a this guy has property let's make a plan let's all go there or let's all convene in one house or whatever that whatever have you i would say that's probably like my my weak point i think i think mags are tough for a lot of people to touch on that real quick one of the things with um the the group that we have online um through the mighty networks the shout out to eric my buddy um he lives in dallas but

we met each other on Instagram. He ended up signing up for the Preppers Club. We developed a little bit of a relationship online. And now we meet up regularly. We go out to his property in Oklahoma. But for a lot of Preppers, the mindsets that we have, it's really hard for us to meet and make new friends, even though we really need to be around like-minded people.

You know, I met him at, I think it was one, two o'clock in the morning out on his property in Oklahoma. It was a three hour drive for him, a three hour drive for me. And we were both hoping that we weren't serial killers about to kill each other. Or FBI agents. Right. One of the two, but you know, he still might be the jury's out on him i know i'm not but well that's what you uh you guys you know you bring that up and you know if you say something about hey what are the odds of two serial killers finding each other they got to be pretty low right right so yeah but it's a mag a mag is a great point i don't i don't think mine's super great out here i got some friends that you know through hiking through shooting through that stuff we have some common shared

stuff but you know only being out here for eight years um making new friends was definitely a priority for me and making friends who were of that like-mindedness is definitely a key thing so i encourage people like if i think a lot of preppers struggle on that mags, but you have to make yourself uncomfortable if you want to make that mag work. And I think it's hard just for guys our age to probably even make new friends in general. I don't know. I have a very small group of people in this local area that I know I can call on and say, hey, guys, I'm boned.

I need help. Fortunately, most of them are family. And that family is, if not like-minded to my degree they're close enough that i know that you know when the lights go out they're not going to be immediately screwed but i think that my weak point all in all honesty and this might sound funny because you know mag is a small one it's sustainability because like i live in the suburbs so there is absolutely zero opportunity for me to feed my family off this tiny little plot of land we live on and everything in my preparedness is really based around a a fixed period of time and being able to

weather it until things kind of unwind themselves you know it really is based around my experience from hurricane katrina and hurricane ida and other natural disasters where it's like as long as you can stay at your home and hold out for say a couple of weeks and we're prepared for well more than that but if you can stay there long enough eventually things are going to come back you're going to be able to get gas you're going to be able to get food you're going to be able to get building materials like the thing that makes me nervous and thankfully it is probably the least likely of the shtf scenarios that preppers think about is the lights never coming back on and i think that's probably an outside possibility it's not impossible but like those are the moments in

time where i feel like even amongst preppers% of us are not ready for it and probably will never be ready for it. Yeah. As a whole, I think that's, to me, the lights going completely off falls in that catastrophic event category where you're probably not going to be able to get resupplied. You're probably not going to be able to do a lot of things and you're going to have to have a bigger force or a community come together to turn the lights back on. Yeah. But even oddly enough, like even, even amongst the people I know in this community that are like homesteaders and they live off the land, they

still have food stockpile because their point of view is, is like, you know, I've got enough food coming in to sustain my family, but if I need to scale up to support the, you know, the, the rest of the mag, the families around me, I'm a harvest away from being able to do that so i need enough food and the rest of my mag needs enough food to basically be able to hold out for 9 to 12 months until we can get crops in the ground and crops out of the ground it's this i it's this idea that like even for the people that are focused around sustainability you still have to be able to hold out until sustainability kicks in. Right. That's what a challenge, right? And that's why we prep. Yes. 110%. So we're coming up on right, right around an hour. I mean, Lenny,

do you have anything else you want to chuck in here for conversation before we start wrapping up, heading out the door or. Man, I just want to thank you for, for giving me a chance to get on your platform and even talk and even get my voice out there you know at the start of uh the new year i think we all set goals and one of my goals was just to get involved in the community more um to interact and interface with people more because i never know who's close to me i never know like you said you know somebody who is kind of close to the area i don't know what connections i could possibly make and have

and i won't get those unless i put myself out there so just to come on this platform was a is kind of close to the area. I don't know what connections I could possibly make and have, and I won't get those unless I put myself out there. So just to come on this platform is a treat for me. It's checking off one of those lists at the start of the year goals, and I really appreciate you doing that for me. It's not trouble at all, man. It's been a great conversation, and, I mean, certainly keep in touch because I am curious to see what you do with your YouTube channel, because I kind of get the impression you're talking about short form preparedness vlogging.

I don't think that's really been done much. I mean, YouTube is a YouTube is a general rule doesn't seem to hasn't seemed to really reward the short the short form vloggers for a long time. But I think there's definitely room and preparedness to kind of show the real the real small scale nitty-gritty day-to-day work because anybody that's been in this community for any length of time knows that this is something that we live and breathe this stuff it's every day like you don't get here if you don't do it every day yeah i think that just that is a good way to kind of encapsulate what i think i'm going for all right well we'll go ahead and punt this one out the door. If you would like to follow Lenny,

Last Prepper Standing on Instagram, remind me the other Instagram, American Prepper Club, American Prepper Club and Last Prepper Standing here on YouTube. I have both the Instagrams linked down in the show notes. If you're watching this on stream, and if you're listening to this, then I'll also have the YouTube channel down in the show

description so go give Lenny a follow keep up with him because we're certainly going to from here forward and we'll wrap this one up and talk to you all another week bye everybody see ya We'll be right back. Thank you. I'll see you next time.