The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: The Preparedness Mindset, and Everything It Touches

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

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Welcome back to Matter of Facts, this is not Andrew. Sorry, Andrew, but I'm a little prettier. I'm not Andrew. A lot prettier and much more available tonight. So I thought tonight would be a good night to circle back around to that topic we were going to do before, you know, the world's most horrible sinus infection took you out of commission for that week. Yeah, that was, you know, y'all know me. I'm bad with sinus infections. Yeah. Hello, everyone. My name is Gillian.

Oh, I didn't figure you needed an introduction. I don't think so. Like, you're Mrs. Matter Facts. Always have been. Now I'm Mrs. Raising Values. No, it doesn't have a ring to it. So do we need to start this all over again and I introduce you as the host of the Raising Values. No, it doesn't have a ring to it. So do we need to start this all over again and I introduce you as the host of the Raising Values podcast instead? Yeah, I need props.

Okay. Welcome to Matter Facts Podcast. This is Gillian Ravele, the host of the Raising Values podcast, joining me tonight for a lovely discussion about awkwardness mostly. Because that's what we do best, is awkward. Yes. Thanks for having me on do best, is awkward. Yes. Thanks for having me on tonight. Thank you for being on. Because, you know, you live with me.

I know. I do. So before we get to topic, just one thing I want to ask. Warrior and the Druid. Oh, yes. I'm going to get to those questions. I'm going to get to those comments in just one second. But before we get to how much further, looking through YouTube analytics, I've actually discovered that literally half the people that watch this aren't subscribed to our YouTube channel.

I think that's what every YouTuber says. Yes, but I looked up the statistics. So if you're not, please do. If you feel inclined, hit that like button, comment, you know, help us beat the algorithm that desperately doesn't want anybody to hear what we have to say every month. You know what could be happening is they're not hitting the like button because they don't want to, like, commit to liking the podcast. Yes, but this is where peer pressure comes in. Yeah, you're just, oh, yep, that's me, just subscribed. Hey.

Thank you. You know what? Social media, the gurus over there really don't like you now. So welcome aboard. Glad you're part of the team. Fight the good fight with us. Yeah. Was that my shut up honey?

No, I've just totally derailed us and we just literally just got started. So the topic for tonight is the preparedness mindset and everything it touches. Because this is what I wanted to talk to you about a couple weeks ago, which was, you know, I have these moments where i get like really reflective and philosophical and it annoys the hell out of you sometimes but i was thinking back on like i was gonna say actually sometimes most sometimes most of the sometimes 50 of the time all the time i just tune you out but i was thinking about like over the last seven years like how the two of us and if we haven't done this on raising values it'd be a cute show although i'm pretty sure we kind of have but i've been thinking about like where

how our preparedness mindset has developed over the last seven years. And then I started thinking about it and realizing that, you know, it probably goes back even a lot further than that. Like, I feel like our ideas of preparedness have changed a lot and expanded a lot over the last probably more like 30 years, if we want to go all the way back to childhood. Me? You think?

Well, I guess I had to start from nothing. Well, but he. 30 years ago was definitely nothing because I wasn't, as a child, 10 years old, I wasn't thinking, oh, I've got to be prepared. Okay. But let me tell you where I'm going with this. Okay. I have a feeling.

You probably do. You and I have had these discussions about how like when you were growing up in North Louisiana, kind of a more rural area, ice storms, snow storms, tornadoes, not really hurricanes that far north, but y'all had enough weather events that would punt y'all out of power and put y'all out of power for like three or four days. It happened regularly enough that your family kind of had to take some steps to make sure that the kids weren't going to starve in the meantime. Yes. Well, and I think too, like, okay, when you think of Louisiana, you think of New Orleans and maybe you think of Baton Rouge,

maybe you think of Lafayette, but everything north of I-20, people either they don't realize it's there and it exists, or it doesn't matter to them. So North Louisiana is like its own state, its own territory. It's nothing like South Louisiana. It's South Arkansas. Yeah, it's really South Arkansas. In terms of topography, in terms of like local culture, like it does. And not only that, but like a lot of the border area of Louisiana and Mississippi is much more similar to Mississippi than it is what people think of as stereotypically Cajun country Louisiana.

Yeah. And so North Louisiana is hills. Louisiana is hills. And I mean, I can remember, you know, boys having their shotguns or their rifles in the back of their truck, you know, going to school and boys would come to school in their camo because they just got off the deer stand. Some girls too. I mean, I was in a deer stand at five o'clock in the morning during the, you know, deer and deer season too. I mean, I was in a deer stand at 5 o'clock in the morning during deer season. So, I mean, I owned camo. And my dad likes to tell the story of me wearing pink camo. I don't remember ever having pink camo.

Maybe I did. Maybe my sisters can help me with that. But anyway, it's just a different mindset in North Louisiana. Above I-20, it's a different mindset up there. So, yes, it was. Do you want me to start going into this? Go for it. Have it?

Okay. I can tell you that our freezer, we had a deep freezer, that if you opened it up any given day, you were going to see fish. You were going to see squirrels. You were going to see quail, p to see squirrels you were going to see quail pheasants you stuff with faces yeah you were going to see deer you were going to see stuff with faces basically rabbit we had rabbit in there every now and then um and a lot of times all of those animals were processed right in the driveway i remember my first year was processed in the driveway, hanging from a cedar tree, the back legs hanging from the cedar tree.

And your sweet 16- Or maybe it was the head. I don't remember. And your sweet 16 present is still sitting in the safe and chambering 30-06. Yeah. My dad gave me a 30-06 for my sweet 16. Yeah. It was just a different mindset. And that's still the way it is up there. One of the guys I graduated high school with, his job is he's a fisherman. That is what he is. He has a boat.

He goes out and he fishes. That's what he does. Now he does tournaments and things like that. And he has sponsorships and all that stuff. But it's just you don't see it down here. You really don't. see it down here. You really don't. But to the point about preparedness, your mother and father had things

in place that if the power was going to be out for several days, y'all weren't going to starve. Like you said, you had the chest full of meat. You had to have some kind of way to sustain yourselves in a power outage because if an ice storm hit, y'all would be out of power for at least two or three days days the the ice storm i'm being conservative yeah the ice storm

of 94 was two weeks we were out of power and that was scary i remember that so what what did your family fall back on in that time food wise yeah and we ate everything with a face. Food-wise, keeping warm, keeping hydrated? We had a fire-burning fireplace. I'm not a fire-burning fireplace. Wood-burning fireplace. So we had cords of wood in the backyard. Is it weird that I knew exactly what you meant, even though you didn't use the right word? It's not weird that you knew that.

Wood-burning fireplace. We would all come into, we had a den. So we were all like sleeping in the den. It was just a big camp out basically. And mom and dad made it fun. And we roasted marshmallows and we had all that stuff. And you just lived out your pantry. It was the same thing as when we have hurricanes, you live out of what food you have. Water wasn't hard to come by because it wasn't like we had lost water. Let me think. Yeah, we ate everything in the freezer that had a face.

So that was nice. And so during a hurricane, everything gets hot and spoils. Well, when you have an ice storm. You just put everything out in the snow. Put everything outside. So I don't know if we really did that, but I know we ate really good, just like we do during hurricanes. And then I remember my mom, she would not make us take cold baths because without, I don't want to say, I know we had gas. So we had to have had a gas water heater too. But I can remember, I think it was during this

ice storm in 94 that she would run the cold water. She would run the water, but it was cold. water, but it was cold. And she would pour kettles of hot water from the stove. And so gas was on. And the houses up in North Louisiana, at least where I'm from, the houses had gas little furnaces like in the bathrooms. And so all of those were lit. They kept going. And the stove was lit. So you had the gas burning in there, but we all huddled a family of five plus dogs into the den with the fireplace going. The fireplace never stopped. I mean, it was, we're all in our sleeping bags. It was fun. The only thing that wasn't fun was hearing the sound of trees and branches falling and breaking. And, you know, there was tons of home damage. We didn't have any home damage that I can remember, but I know a lot of people had trees

fall on their houses and branches fall because the weight of the ice made everything so, so horrible. And then, so that was my fourth grade year. So five years later, we had a really, another really bad ice storm. But yeah, so also my parents are, well, my mom is a hoarder, was a horticulturalist, horticulturalist, and my dad, biologist, horticulturalist. So we had a greenhouse full of tomatoes in the winter. We had a greenhouse. I mean, the greenhouse was just full of tomatoes in the winter. We had a greenhouse. I mean, the greenhouse was just full of vegetables and herbs. So we would go out and harvest from the greenhouse. Everything in the garden was dead, but. And never once growing up that way, did that, did it occur to you that

like all of those are aspects of preparedness? No, because we, I mean, I guess at least in my house, it wasn't a question. Like, I mean, not a question. It wasn't a thing. It was preparedness. Wasn't a thing. It was just a way of life. Like you, you all went hunting. You all, I mean, if you didn't own a lease to go hunt, like a hunting lease, you knew someone who owned a hunting lease or you rented or, you know, paid monthly for a hunting lease. Everybody went hunting. In the spring, me and my friends would go crawfishing. We would all set our, bait our traps, put them in the springs and pull up crawfish. And we would cook our crawfish. And I mean, it wasn't like a huge boil, but you know, we just all knew what to do. I remember my sister, I mean, we would walk outside in the backyard. This is how rural the town is that I grew up in. My sister, and we lived in town. My sister would walk out in the backyard with her

pellet gun and shoot squirrels off the fence. And then those squirrels would go to the freezer and we'd process them or whatever. And then they go to the freezer and we'd process them or whatever and then they go to the freezer so i don't know i was five years old when i first sat under a tree no four or five years old the first time i sat under a tree with a pellet gun and your father told me that i mean it wasn't a successful trip no because you had two five-year-olds two five-year-olds two five-year-olds were going and making so much noise the squirrels never came down i've heard this story so before i get to kind of how i grew up and again the similar theme of like these were just things we did and we never thought it was anything out of that

because everybody did this um yep that's me thank you you for subscribing. Josh, same to you. Yes, Kyle. Eight squirrels live off the grid. I mean, this is like in the Venn diagram of culture where you have rural living and preparedness. You do get this really healthy overlap where people just know how to get stuff away from the industrialized food system. So that when things start shutting down, they can still feed themselves. Thank you, Tim. Yes. Makes me happy.

The wifey has been whooping me. We've both been pretty focused on our health and our waistlines, which we'll get into a little bit later on. And you are down how many pounds? Almost 40. Almost 40. I am down 28 pounds. So, she's she's putting it on me working hard we're both working hard but she's she is dropping the weight a little faster than i am which has never happened ever in our marriage by the way yeah seriously every every other time we've

tried dieting i've shed weight faster than she did so i'm glad that i'm just glad she's encouraged by all this and funny thing kyle said that north louisiana has drive-thru liquor stands down here they have drive-thru daiquiri shops and for anybody that's not familiar with the daiquiri it's literally like kool-aid and booze mixed together for goodness sakes i can think of a couple of places that have where i don't know if they're still there, but when I was growing up, yes, they were drive-thru liquor stands. They're not as common in North Louisiana as you think they are. Maybe they are, I don't know. But once you get above 520, you get into the Dirty Protestants, which is what I am was. And so, you know, those Baptists

aren't all about drinking. And so, yeah,, those Baptists aren't all about drinking. And so, yeah, you have your drive-thru liquor stands, but it's nothing like South Louisiana where you can just go down to the daiquiri shop and get a daiquiri. Down here where all the Catholics are. We believe in drinking. Thank you, Joe. We believe in Joe. Hi, Chris.

Thanks, Joe. Kyle Wilson. Growing up, i thought everyone prepped i thought everyone would have chainsaws tractors 500 gallons of diesel on hand we didn't we just had faces but y'all had a way to feed yourselves now conversely i grew up i grew up in a tri-city area in south in east texas, I mean, you've been there. It's not exactly a metropolis, but I mean, you know, Port of the Poor Nature, Nederland, Groves, Orange. This whole area is like between Bridge City and Beaumont, Texas, and it is a much, much more urban area than where you grew up. And it's, I mean, it's probably about on par population density with what we have with where we live now. I mean, I lived literally half a block away from the only hospital for three towns.

So, like, I had, I got the speech. Same. Yeah. the speech same yeah but i got the speech very early on about how like do not go off the street that direction because there were ambulances just flying through there all times day or night but i digress so like growing up in a more urban area because my father worked for the power company in beaumont like we didn't have a chest freezer full of meat. We didn't hunt. But I do have very distinct memories of being young and my mother and father, every about May, maybe early June at the latest, we'd go through the exercise of getting the hurricane supplies ready. So we had a bin and we literally would make sure we had batteries, make sure we have flashlights. We'd make sure we had like peanut butter and any,

any, not anything that did require refrigeration, anything you could use to keep a family fed for several days to a week. If everything in the fridge went bad, we had water stored up, like not water like you and I have stored now, but the theme I saw when I was growing up was like, this is a minimum amount of stuff you have to have because we live in a place where hurricanes hit all the time. And I never thought it was anything odd. I never thought it was preparedness. To me, it was just all of my neighbors have the bin of hurricane stuff. it was just all of my neighbors have the bin of hurricane stuff. Every time I went into my friend's houses, their family had the same bin we did with different stuff in it. It was a normal thing to have those supplies. It was a normal thing that when you found out there was a hurricane

seven days away from making landfall, you went out and gassed up at least you went and gassed up all the vehicles you owned and you didn't let it get let them get below three quarters of a tank until that hurt we knew the first fact that hurricane wasn't going where we thought it was going to go like there were just there were certain things that i grew up watching my parents do and i never thought i never thought that was preparedness i didn't even i never even heard the term preparedness later in life. That was just, that's what you did. Because we lived in a place where hurricanes were such a common occurrence. That was just like default way of life.

Yeah, I like how Chris put it. We didn't call it prepping either. It was just country life. That's just how you did things when you lived in the country. Yeah. And even living in the city, we didn't call it prepping either it was just country life that's just how you that's how you did things when you lived in the country yeah and even live in the city we didn't call it prepping we called it if you don't want to get rolled over when a hurricane shows its butt to you you better you just you better be ready for it so i think that i and the reason i i go through that whole exercise is because like to me i feel like preparedness i feel like preparedness gets

a lot of people think of preparedness as like this group of activities or this singular activity and to me it's not an activity it's a mindset and when i look back to like the way you and i grew up i see that i see that as my parents never would have called what they were doing that as my parents never would have called what they were doing preparedness or being preppers or any of that. I jokingly tell my father all the time, half joking, that half the stuff I do for this family, I learned from him, at least the concepts, if not the way we do it. And he would never call himself a prepper, but I learned most of this from him it's just the same it's the basic ideas of i know that there are emergency situations i've assessed my area and know what emergencies are more likely to happen than less and if that emergency happens i would like to have a plan a

that doesn't involve sitting the front yard wait for fema to show up which you know 30 years ago fema wasn't a thing if you, if you lived in a rural enough area, you might be waiting a week or more for the parish, much less the city to like unscrew enough of their own problems to come out and check on y'all. So you had, you really, I guess I'm saying is like when we were young, there was much more, I feel like, intentionality about having to care for yourself and your family because of the safety net wasn't there. And from my perspective, looking at like, frankly, looking at state and federal emergency relief operations, I don't have a lot of faith in waiting around for FEMA. So like my plan A is always what do I have to do to take care of ICE? And I feel like that is a lot where the preparedness mindset comes from.

It is, if I'm worried about a house fire, I get a fire extinguisher. If I'm worried about home invasion, I need to take some steps to secure my home. If I'm worried about the power going out, I better have some non-perishable food. It becomes the lens through which we view things, not the activity. Tread, yeah, I agree with you. The rural, you can put that up there. The rural, rural, rural, rural communities took care of each other back then

and I believe, I believe they still do. I haven't been to my hometown maybe five years, maybe less. But before that, it was like 10. It's been a good hot minute. Yeah. So I believe that they still do. And down here, we see it a lot, especially during hurricane seasons or when a natural disaster occurs. We do still see people taking care of each other.

I mean, that's what happened during Hurricane Ida with us. We had a big drop off of supplies from my cousins in Alabama. And we were good. We didn't need anything else, but we knew that the couple down the street didn't have any water. And we knew that they needed some, you know, supplies and some other people needed some supplies across the street and things like that. And so we were able to walk those supplies down because we, we analyzed our situation of what we had versus what we were just brought. And, you know, it was just, that's just what we needed to do was to share those supplies. Well, and I think it's also worth pointing out that, like, the whole reason why we were able to distribute those supplies

that your family was very gracious to bring us was because they weren't coming to a couple that was had in hand like we had already had a pretty reasonable setup and that was before your sister and your brother-in-law came in from out of town to help us out and they live in a some I mean they're from a very rural part of the state too so that's where I grew up I know okay they're still there but what I'm saying is like they came down here basically ready to live in the front yard out of a tent if that's what it took they came in with their own fuel they came in with their own propane chainsaws i mean they came down they came down here ready for war because they didn't know what our setup was and they didn't they didn't want

the addition of those five people to take from what we already had they wanted to bring more in and because of that they really brought everything they needed to sustain our to sustain themselves so our supplies weren't supporting eight people they were supporting three like it was meant to yeah we just supplemented you know like they like i'm thinking about the first night that they came down, and their feet hadn't hit the ground outside, and Micah was already on the roof, and my sister was already cooking dinner. Point of order, we didn't get on the roof until the next day, because we couldn't get to the front of the house. Okay, well, y'all did something. We were running chainsaws, trying to clear a path to the front door.

Okay, go ahead. Tell your story. No, that was it. Just that her feet hadn't hit the ground yet and she was already cooking. She was frying chicken in the front yard or pork chops or something. And rice. I mean, I think we had rice and peas and chicken. It was amazing. It really was. But yeah, and then whatever we needed to supplement, we did.

Yeah. Okay. But like I said, I feel like because they came in with a very similar mindset to ours, that was what they, they came, they showed up exactly like i would have had a setup if the situation went from first like if if they would have called you and said hey we just got hit by a big tornado we got trees down all over the place we need help yeah i would have made sure that when we loaded that truck up we'd have loaded up like we were going camping yeah we would have had the tent we would have had up, we'd have loaded up like we were going camping. Yeah. We would have had the tent. We would have had cots. We would have had sleeping bags.

We would have had water, food, fuel, chainsaw. We'd have left out of here with everything we needed, possibly even taking two vehicles, depending on how much stuff we had to bring. But I would have made sure that we had everything we needed to sustain ourselves independent of them because I don't want their supplies now have to feed three extra people. I mean, that's my mindset. That was your family's mindset. And that's the mindset that doesn't make you just, you know, jump in your truck and drive off and not know what the situation is, not be prepared to deal with whatever you find.

So now that's kind of how the two of us grew up. We never really called it preparedness because it wasn't preparedness. It was just what you're supposed to do as a responsible human being to take care of your family. I can't honestly remember, like, when I first heard the word, first heard the terms preparedness or prepper or anything like that, like I can't remember when I first heard it. But I do remember that the more I learned about the preparedness community, a lot of this really sounded familiar. You know what I'm saying?

It sounded very much like we never called that preparedness. But I mean, we were doing that when we were kids because that's just what you were supposed to do like how is this new which was about the moment i started realizing that there were a lot of people that didn't grow up doing a lot of people our age forgot the lessons that they were taught as children maybe that's because society has been so much more stable maybe that's because most people don't live in areas where the social services break down so quickly and easily as often. I don't know, but that's when I became aware of like, okay, these things that I learned when I was young that I never really forgot, a lot of people don't know about. But in the early years, like when my preparedness journey really started in

earnest i guess it really would have been like after hurricane it had been it was after iraq and after hurricane katrina so on the back of let's call it what it is literally being in a war zone for a year and then being in a mini war zone for about six more months. Right. You know, like I was very, I had come face to face with how incredibly fast a society will break down. I'd come face to face very quickly with like what happens when the power is out for three days. I saw the after effects of looting and home invasions i mean every night you'd hear gunshots ringing out you know for miles it was a situation where like in both situations i was as safe as could be like i mean i was on i was on a military base both times one of those times i was getting mortared three times a day.

But, you know, that's neither here nor there. Their aim wasn't that good, thankfully. But it was just one of those situations where, like, I was very maybe over-focused. Excuse me, y'all. There's a mosquito. This guy here. Well, when he flies, like like right in front of my face but i was very laser focused on home defense that was my big

no stewart i know you just got home i'm sorry i cannot start over tell your work you need off early anyway where was i katrina oh yeah so after after katrina after iraq i was very very concerned about home defense i was very concerned i was very laser focused on it maybe even over focused on it but a lot of that comes from just my experience of seeing homeowners post kat down in New Orleans and the police response time was days. Yeah. Day, like you would. I think it's still that. Well, it's, it was, let's, let's say it was very, very, very bad.

If you call, if, if you could get a call out to 911, and that's a big if, if you could get a call out and if they answered, if you could get a call out and if they answered and if you told them i am in my front yard i am being shot at as we speak as i'm on the phone with you you might get a response in 12 hours this was during katrina this was this was like in the in the weeks after katrina going out to about the six week mark when once the power started getting restored once they got most of the water pumped out of the streets like once once the damage control portion of post katrina was over the police came back social services started coming back online things started stabilizing the city but up to about that six week mark it was it was the wild wild west it was i mean i i talked to homeowners i talked to neighbors of some of the soldiers i was down there with who were from who were from the new orleans area and they told me flat out

they said it is the wild west like if you if you are not prepared to defend your household then you shouldn't be here. I remember that. So coming from that experience, the biggest thing I was worried about post-disaster was, I know police response is going to be many times greater than normal. I have to be prepared to defend us. And that was the focal point of all my preparedness efforts for probably the first several years. This was when, you know, a couple of firearms purchases were made. This is when I started reloading ammo, even though I was, I liked reloading anyway as a hobby.

But this is when, like, I started buying stuff in bulk, we'll say. Like, to this day, I don't know if you're aware of how much powder is on the other side of this wall i mean i know i see it it just doesn't it doesn't faze me she'll have to explain that to y'all one day how i pulled that trick off but suffice to say like i started i started leaning more heavily into reloading specifically so that I could... Kyle said, goodnight guys, it's taco time. Oh, I can't hold that against him. You would ditch this for tacos. I would, in a heartbeat.

So, I started leaning more heavily into that, so I had more ammunition in the waiting to be made. This was about the time that the first IFAC got built. And this was right about the time that the body armor showed up, which is when your alarm bells went off full blast. It is true. But again, now, as, like, you're now seven years into this journey with me. And after having heard that explanation, is it, I guess a little understandable, like where my mind was and the,

the admittedly low likelihood threat that I was preparing to deal with. Because again, I've told people before, I'm like, you know, you can say I'm crazy for prepping for something that's never happened, but you can't say I'm crazy for prepping for something when it happens again. So I tell everybody, I'm like, I watched it happen. I watched it with my own two eyes.

No one will ever be able to tell me I'm crazy for prepping for it happening again because I watched it happen. Wait, was there a question in there for me? I watched it happen. Wait, was there a question there for me? Do you look on those activities now in a different light than the way you did then? Because back then... Yeah, because back then I thought you were crazy. And I wasn't quite sure. And I've said this multiple times on your show before.

I think even on Raising Values of having the conversation with your dad and saying, I'm not quite sure what's going on with Phil. And I'm getting a little concerned. These are the things that I'm seeing. And these are the things that he's saying. And I'm a little worried. And do you think I need to be concerned? And your dad talked to me off the ledge.

And I was like, all right, well, we'll just see how this plays out. We're still married, So you must have, well, now, now I'm the one that's like, Hey, you know, this, this, this, and that is about to happen. Or, or I, you know, I'll see something and it's some, something's forecasted, not necessarily weather, but something is forecasted to possibly occur in the United States, or you might, we might see this. And then, so I'm like, we might want to go get, um, you know, check on our stuff and see where we're at and let's go through the deep freeze or the canned goods and see where we're at. And you know. So when would you say that, like you finally got onto the preparedness train

to, from, from my perspective it was about four years ago yeah i would say about four years four or five years ago so what what was your like what were you what were i'm usually very what was what was my like turning point like what was the the straw that broke the camel's back. Yes. But then my immediate question after that is like, what, what was your, what were your thoughts? What,

what was your focus? What were your, what was your wheelhouse? Like, what were you, what were you concerned about preparedness wise when you first started out? Cause the next question is how we more, how we got from there to where we are now.

My, well, initially, so my, which is, I think what you're trying to do with this episode, is when I first started prepping, it has totally evolved. Don't be in the punchline. We don't want to get to how it's evolved.

Okay, so when we first started, my main concern was comfort and Piper and making sure that we had the emotional preps ready. Not just the food with the rice and the beans and all that stuff, but the emotional support that we were going to need during a situation. Bearing in mind that at this point, we hadn't quite gotten to the point we're at now. So like most of my attempts at preparing us for a food shortage were like three buckets of Mountain House, which is thankfully pretty good. But after that, it was just rice and beans. Right. And so I wanted to make – That idea was vetoed.

Well, it wasn't that it was vetoed because we still have rice and beans. Oh. And so I wanted to make... That idea was vetoed. Well, it wasn't that it was vetoed because we still have rice and beans. Oh yeah, five buckets. But I have supplemented that with some things. I told Phil that he is... Well, at this point I said, eventually you're going to have a teenage daughter and you already have a grown woman in the house and so chocolate must be a necessity um or we will figure out a way to push you out of this house to go find chocolate even if it means you have to make it from a cacao cacao cocoa tree cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cacao cuckoo bird how do you say it cacao tree cacao no cacao anyway um so what i told phil was that

he needed to start adding to the preps where you know it was just dry ingredients that we could make cookies or brownies or a cake or you know whatever or all three together. And I was going to make sure that I had coloring books and crayons and board games and cards, like card games and things like that, that we could use to keep, and at the time Piper was younger, so it was things to keep her entertained and sufficient in her emotional, mental capacity of that age. And so now it's changed and she's sitting over there on her iPhone, which is not a phone, actually. It's just an old phone, just so y'all know. She does not have a phone. It's just a phone that she just plays games on.

But anyway, so the coloring books have gone away, and we make sure that we have enough battery banks so that she can do whatever on her phone. Markers, she loves to draw. So we just make sure that she has those things to keep her emotionally sound. And then for us as an adult, I, I turned to food. I mean, obviously that is, that is how I got in the situation that I was in about six months ago. So, um, but I wanted to make sure that if shit hit the fan and life turned really hard, really, really hard, that we were still able to have good moments. Daddy could make cookies. We could have the chocolate. Daddy is a baker.

Daddy is the baker. And whatever. I just wanted to make sure. So now our preps have come full circle, I think. Maybe that's not the right term to use. But we have stuff in our preps now that I don't think Phil ever would have gotten to. Maybe he would have, but I don't think he would have gotten to had I not come in and said, Love what you're doing, babe. But we've got to do something else. Because I lived on rice and beans the first year and a half that we got married. Rice and beans and expired pork chops.

And I don't want to live on rice and beans ever again unless I absolutely have to. So that was one of the motivating reasons that I was like, hang on. I'm going to help you with your ingredients over here. And we put things in there. I was like, spaghetti. Spaghetti is easy. You just need, and I gave him the ingredients. I just put the noodles in there, and then all I need is this, this, and this to make my own spaghetti sauce.

So, yeah, so that's what I did. Now, is that where you want me to stop for now? Okay, I'll stop there. I'm trying to think if there's any other intermediate steps between like when you, when you got into, because yes, when you got, when you finally got bit by the preparedness bug, you, you shifted a lot of my efforts in a different direction. And I don't know that I even want to phrase it as like you were prioritizing comfort. Because to me what you were prioritizing was to maintain as much normalcy as possible in an emergency. Like my ideas of preparedness started to change from based on your input. started to change from based on your input they started to change from how do i keep everybody alive to how do i how do i minimize this impact to my family in totality and that like that was a that was a radical shift in my thinking because again like going back to a lot of my experiences

from like you know katrina and from iraq like comfort was kind of low down the priority list most of the time we we slept on cots in open squad base we slept on cots and hangers we slept like we never prioritize comfort because comfort is what you get when you're home on your own time does that make sense yeah we never we never oh, I need chocolate and guess I have a craving. None of that stuff mattered. Everything was about survive, get the mission done. And I hate to say it, but you know this about me. In many

ways, when I'm left to my own devices, I do kind of default back to my military mindset a lot of ways, which I'm happy to admit is a very narrow way of thinking. And is needed in a lot of cases.. And is needed in a lot of cases. It's absolutely needed in a lot of cases. Yeah.

But it is one of those situations where it's like, I'm only able to think of as much as I am when I'm left to my own devices. And then when you came into this preparedness mindset with me, you brought a completely different experience and a completely different idea about it's not just enough to live like there might be a time we have to eat rice and beans that's why there's five or six god only knows how many buckets of it out in the garage because if we exhaust but here's the thing not to beat myself to the punch but if we get through everything else we have

stored up the the rice and beans will keep it sustained for a good long while. Yeah, I joke about it. But the point is not the first day the flag goes up, go straight to the rice and beans. Like have some intermediate steps. No, and I do think that there are other things that you can prep that's not rice and beans. So think about some of your favorite foods like kyle is going to go eat tacos and i'm kind of jealous of kyle and holly and tonight but that's okay we're actually going to get a rolling pin in the near future and start that's what i was about to say is we know

how to make our own tortillas we already prepped the meat we've already prepped cheese. We keep cheese, eggs, and meat in a constant. I mean, we have so much in there. It's crazy. But I do think that we could have more of all of it. You and I need to go through the chest freezer and do a good inventory. But, I mean, so we think about, you need to think about what are your comfort foods? Because you're going to have to have a mental release at some point. And if you're like me, comfort food is going to help have that mental release. It's going to give

you that little bit of normalcy and home and comfort. I mean, it's called comfort food for a reason. You know, I just thought of if the power is out, we can't run that stove. It's gas. But it still has an electronic system that drives it. Turn it on and light it. Not the range, the oven. Same difference. Turn it on and light it.

You can't, honey. The broiler? No, the whole top panel is electronic. You can't, honey. It's not a good... The broiler? No. The whole top panel was electronic. Okay, wait. Wait a second. Help me. No, no, no.

I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll unplug it. I mean, uh... I'll plug it into the Jackery. We'll see if the Jackery can fire it off. Because you're right. It is gas, so it shouldn't take much power just to make the electronics turn the valves. Wait. Say it one more time.

I said you might be right. No. You might be right. We don't know yet. We'll try it sometime. At least until I get the 5K wired into the house, and then we can just, you know. Nina, you're supposed to be on my side. I know you can light the stove top.

You can light the stove top. The range. You cannot. Without power, that oven is not going to work. And this is an old one. This is not a new one. The reason I'm. I think this is to the house. Yeah, it's probably mid-90s vintage.

But the reason I'm bringing it up is because I've got a whole thing of baking supplies out there. But if we don't have a working oven, then we have no way to bake. I will find a way to bake. All I need is a fire and that, what is it called? Cast iron and make a Dutch oven. I will make something. Have you ever made Dutch oven cookies? I will do it.

I guess we'll figure it out. We'll have to try it someday. I've made Dutch oven biscuits. It can't be that much harder. I guess we'll figure it out. We'll have to try it someday. I made Dutch oven biscuits. It can't be that much harder. So now that y'all got to be involved directly in our preparedness discussion.

Sorry, y'all. See? Nina said Dutch oven. Thank you. Actually, she said Dutch OVEB. Leave her alone. That's my friend. Jo-veb.

Leave her alone. That's my friend. Jo, in a power outage, you're going to hear 15,000 generators running throughout this neighborhood. If Hurricane Ida is any indication, every single person had a generator running. Yeah. Everybody did. Yeah, and you want to know the really crazy thing joe is after the power came back on all they all were selling them every almost every single one of these people who went out right before ida hit went out and bought up all the generators within like a 60 mile radius at about

25 markup by the way as soon as their power came back on, they were selling them. Selling them. And it's like, you're an idiot. You deserve what you get. You're an idiot. You know what the fun part was? You're selling one of the biggest preps that you ever need for a hurricane. The crazy part to me, though, was all the chainsaws that got sold.

I mean, y'all. It's a wonder that there are people still living in the South. I spent three months watching Facebook Marketplace for chainsaws. Because, like, at that point, I just got my first chainsaw. And I kind of want, still to this day, kind of want a bigger one. But all the ones I was seeing sold were, like, the size of mine or smaller. And I was like, I don't need another one like this. So all the guys with the big boy chainsaws were holding on to them.

All the cuillons were selling the little bitty ones apparently was what was going on and the generators. It was ridiculous. But I digress. So when we first came into preparedness, we kind of had our lane or we had our focus. We had our idea of what preparedness was. we had our focus we had our idea of what preparedness was and the the crescendo to the 47 minutes of us sometimes arguing with each other or picking each other yeah y'all actually got to

see that that whole conversation that was real by the way yeah that was not staged at all that was like just had a sudden brain fart about uh how do i make cookies without an oven? I'd better get that squared away before the apocalypse starts. This woman will find a way. I'm sure we will find a way, but I want to try it before we wind up in that situation. You just eat cookie dough. You don't even need to cook them. You just eat the cookie dough.

Never mind. I don't know what I was thinking. So anyway, but I feel like the point we're at now relative to where the two of us started as far as the preparedness mindset i feel like it has really morphed because like my my ideas of preparedness start off very very one-dimensional and have really broadened out over the years i became much more interested in things like solar generators, something so I have a renewable power source and I'm not immediately tied. Or when I first started

off in preparedness, my thought process was first day the power goes out, everything in the fridge and freezer is ruined. So my entire preparedness idea was straight to the non-perishable food. Because again, this is how we prep when I was young. We didn't even worry about what was in the fridge. It was all going to be spoiled. Like, you would eat like a king the first day and clear the fridge out. And then after that, you were into the hurricane food. So that was where I started.

And think about that hurricane we went through and piper was like six month hunts old i think you know like we we just accepted everything the fridge is gone and we didn't even attempt to save it now we have such a substantial food investment in the house we have systems in place to keep that food yeah if the power's out we have things in place to kind of lift that along a little further i'd like I'd like to do some more work in that vein, but our thinking about that has evolved. We now have a seven-cubic-foot chest freezer that, like you said, is probably 80% full at this point. I mean, we need to do a good inventory on it and get this stuff in the very bottom out and then cook it and maybe do some reorganizing and, you know, making things make sense in there. Cause right now it's just kind of a, it's kind of a hell of a mess.

And we also need, we also need to really look through there very closely. We also need to look through it very closely and figure out what are we short on and spend some time intentionally putting things in there and not just randomly throwing stuff excuse me one second you are not taking a nap this late in the evening okay don't fall asleep you can go get in your bed and go to sleep okay yes ma'am okay okay sorry mama had to mom dad had to give the dad look Okay. Sorry.

Mama had to mom. Dad had to give the dad look. Anyway. So, yeah. I mean, and so we've become much, really, I'd say probably since about midway through COVID, we became very, very concerned about the industrial food supply. So we started loading up a can rack. We got the chest freezer. We started loading up on meat and cheese We got the chest freezer. We started loading up

on meat and cheese. Paper products. Yeah. Well, we were always pretty good about keeping extra paper products. I guess what I'm saying is we really expanded the idea of two is one and one is nine. Have our shelves two and three deep. We really expanded that into home goods, into food, into everything we could think of because the idea always was in the event of an interruption of some sort, it's not about how do we live through this. It's about how do I minimize disruption. So when that jug of laundry detergent runs empty, I've got one more in the garage.

It's going to go on the shelf. We'll go get another one. Like everything in this house is too deep because what happens if the day we run out of laundry detergent, that happens to be the day that COVID 2.0 drops. Everybody's locked down. Nobody can go to the stores. Now we can't wash clothes until it's over. Like I'm just, I'm not prepared to accept those interruptions to our daily life. Right.

So my thinking about preparedness has really broadened out. And the number of things and the types of things that I am concerned about or putting effort towards used to be all in on this one lane. And now it's very diversified against all these different avenues. And whenever I feel like, okay, I'm good over here for right now, I'll skip over to this. Like that's what I've done recently because I feel like at this point our stockpile of food is at a reasonable level. I think we need to organize it, maybe do some intentional adding of a few items, but I don't feel the pressure like I did, say, a year ago, where it was like every spare dollar I have needs to go into bulking this up right now.

I don't feel that pressure anymore. I feel like we're at a good stasis point. So I've started shifting things over in another direction a little bit. But I don't do preparedness in terms of all in on this one thing right now. Everything is always a little here, a little here, a little here, a little here, and it's spread out across everything. I feel like it's a more well-rounded idea of preparedness than it used to be. Yeah, I agree. I think that too. And I've, my, my mindset has evolved too. So I do still focus on Piper and I do still focus on the emotional preparedness. But what I've now started focusing on and really it started when I went to prepper camp. So it was a year and a half ago, a year ago in some months, is medicinal herbs and things that you can forage.

And, you know, look, making sure that we have the things near us that I can either make a tincture out of or a tea or stuff like that. And so like, I've got stuff all in the fridge and I've got stuff, I've got, um, eucinia, lichen, uh, the, the moss stuff on the counter I need to process. But, you know, it's, you've heard of the golden rod tea. You've heard of all the stuff that I tried to plant over the summer. And my one chicory plant did come back. But learning more and more about medicinals and what the earth has to give us and what is in our front yard and what is in our backyard. And when we go camping, what can I bring home? you know and it's stuff which I'm super proud of that my daughter has started to pick up as well so when we went camping

a couple of weeks ago this child foraged for her own ingredients for her own tea that she started making and so she was pulling pine needles off of a tree and she found some goldenrod that was just in bloom and beautyberry and so she so she started making her own tea in the mornings during our camping trip. I'm going to have to get her her own teapot for the camping setup. That would be a good idea. Because I was double-purposing the coffee pot to make her tea. Yeah. But so she's picking up and she's looking at things and she's saying, oh, and persimmons.

We had persimmon trees everywhere. But she's looking at things going, mom, can we eat this? And mom, what about this? Is it toxic and will it hurt you? And, of course, I've got all my field guides and everything with me. So we're looking it up as we go. And this is what this is and that's what that is. And don't touch that mushroom, but that mushroom's okay.

as we go. And this is what this is. And that's what that is. And don't touch that mushroom, but that mushroom's okay. And so I have started, as Joe calls me, really getting into my druidness and learning what I can forage for my family. And I do think, I mean, if you think about it, hunting in a way, maybe I'm wrong, maybe you'll disagree with me, is a way of foraging. I mean, I'm going out into nature and I am harvesting animals from nature to bring home to eat. And also, and this just popped into my head, and I've taught her this. And so she goes to school and she'll tell this to the boys sometimes. But my father always told me, don't kill something unless you intend to eat it. And so there was, there's never an intention of, and let me finish one thought. There's never an intention of going

out and just killing, killing, killing. So, I mean, if you're a hunter, you understand you're, you're hunting because that animal is going to provide you the energy that you need to live. And I'm also one of those people, and you can think that this is crazy, but I've always talked to plants. And I've always thanked an animal for their life. I've always, you know, as crazy as that sounds. If you're crazy, the Native Americans were because they did that. Yeah, but I did. I remember crying over a dead squirrel's body one time because I had killed it.

But it was delicious. And, you know, and my dad was the one who instilled that in me. You know, like like sweetheart we we killed this animal because we needed the food we need the sustenance from this animal it's given its energy to us anyway so um i still do that i still i still talk to plants like when i'm harvesting from them you know thank you for whatever. I don't know. I just go through the whole motions of things. But anyway, so I think that's how my preparedness has evolved is I still focus on the emotional aspect of it, but I want to learn more and more and more. And

I've become quite the nerd, I believe, of learning what is around us. And I believe that God put everything on this earth. And it says so in the. And I believe that God put everything on this earth. And it says so in the Bible, that everything that God put on this earth was intended for our use. And I probably misquoted that somewhere and some Bible thumper is going to go after me. But everything that we need in our life is on this earth. Everything that we need in our life is on this earth. And we have a lot of ancestors and Native Americans and people from many, many, many thousands of years ago that probably learned the hard way. Just like some Kuyon picked up an oyster and said, this looks great.

Let's eat this. Or a crawfish and said, yes, that's for dinner. Kuyon for you non-native Louisianians is a fool. And that's about the most polite translation for what a kuyon is. It's a dumbass. Yeah, it's a dumbass. so um but you know i that's so that's where i've i have um evolved i guess you could say what i do still like to focus on and what i get the question a lot is prepping with kids and that is actually what i was asked to talk about for the conference coming up in april self-promotion no no i won't even say the name no but yeah so i i think i brought such a difference to your prepping and it you you were thinking of piper during your preps but you you weren't thinking wholly does that make sense like entirely about all aspects of a child i i was i i i happily admit

i was in soldier mode i was in keep her alive happiness comes later mode yeah like and yeah and i'm and like i say that kind of like poking fun at myself like come on moron how'd you miss that but like you know especially when we first first start, when I first started this out, I really felt like I was more by myself in this. So I was prepping like the best way I knew how by myself with very limited funds and comfort was an extra expense that I just couldn't stomach. Once you bought in with me, I feel like that's when you brought your perspective and I was able to look at things and say, oh, that makes sense. Maybe I

should do that instead. The other thing I wanted to mention was this whole six-month journey of trying to get our health under control and our weight under control and strengthen our bodies and take better care of ourselves. I feel I feel like this has been like the newest avenue that the preparedness mindset put us into. Because, you know, like you've talked before on this show, you have a, how can, what's a polite way of saying severe ankle injury? Catastrophic? Yeah.

Catastrophic ankle injury owing to a car accident when you were 18 or 19 years old. Yes. And it, I mean, there is no good long-term prognosis for it. It's going to do nothing to get worse as you get older. And there's no way around that fact. I have been told that eventually I will have to have my leg amputated below the knee eventually. Yeah. But there were some things we could do to delay that.

And to make it to where if you get to that point, you're able to recover faster. Okay, so here's my thing on this. We've been working out and eating healthier and doing better. I'm 40 pounds down. About six months now? Six months. The end of November will be six months. And I told you this yesterday on our walk. My ankle doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to get out of the bed in the mornings when in six months ago even, when I woke up in the mornings when in, you know, six months ago, even the, when I woke up in the mornings, I literally had to will myself to put my ankle in socket. I have noticed you haven't seemed to struggle with that near as much lately. I used to announce to Piper and Phil when I got in the bed

that I am, I'm like, I used to say I'm releasing my ankle, meaning that I was going to let it slide out of socket for the night so that I could go to sleep. And then, um, which meant mom is not getting out of the bed because I'm not putting this thing back in socket because the pain is so excruciating. Like it only needs to happen once a day. Like, and that's only because I have to go to work and get paid. Um, but I, I have felt, I've never felt stronger in my life since the rec. You know, I played softball from t-ball to coach pitch to fast pitch senior year in high school. And I was so strong. And then I had my rec the summer of my senior year. And I don't feel like I've ever been as strong as I am today since then. And today in my 40-year-old body, you know what I mean?

So, I mean, it's a different strength. But my leg is stronger. My muscles are stronger. My ligaments, tendons, everything is so much stronger. I don't limp. I do not limp anymore. And so, yeah, I mean, this is definitely preparedness. Yeah. And from, and from, well, Tred just said losing the weight is great for the joints, but I, and I agree with that, but I also think that in your case, you have also just flat out strengthened so many of the little muscles and the tendons and ligaments around that ankle

that like your leg is better able to support itself now than it was six months ago and this call it what it is this didn't involve a gym membership this didn't involve a personal trainer it didn't involve a crash diet didn't involve any weird supplements you have literally we have literally done nothing but change our diet stop eating eating so much crap, and walk, I don't know. One to two miles a day. Yeah. I mean, call it average about eight miles a week. Sure.

Eight to ten. I mean, you know, we're not doing anything that I think is really like outside the realm of possibility for the average person. No, it's just we get 30 to 45 minutes of cardio a day. We take two days off now. Whereas when we first started, we were only taking one day off. And I was in such a go-getter attitude that I wasn't taking any days off because this was a thing that needed to happen and it had to happen. But during the school year, you had far fewer things going on too. Well, not only that, but during the school year, I'm walking and moving a lot more

than I was in the summer. I think we said what, like two and a half to three miles just during the workday? Just during the workday, yeah. Yeah. But your impetus for we need to get away to air control, we need to do, was your general health and that ankle. For me, I have struggled with hypoglycemia for years. Like, I feel like it really probably first started rearing its head in my late 20s. And just within the last couple of years, it has gotten bad enough that I was getting genuinely concerned about it. Because like, you know, when for anybody that anybody that has never experienced hypoglycemia,

literally, you have an overactive pancreas that says, woohoo, all the insulin every time you eat anything even remotely bready. And it causes your blood sugar to constantly be in a state of crashing. And when you get people are very familiar with the symptoms of your blood sugar to constantly be in a state of crashing. And when you get, people are very familiar with the symptoms of high blood sugar. They're not as familiar with the symptoms of low blood sugar, but low blood sugar for me would cause a migraine. It caused nausea. Sometimes I'd throw up.

Sometimes I'd pass out. It would really depend on how bad it got before I managed to arrest the forward progress of that falling blood sugar. So for a long time, I made a point of having peanut butter crackers. I always had something to quickly prop my blood sugar up if I felt it start to drop. And I was very cognizant of the early warning signs that something really bad is about to happen. But the frequency with which I was dealing with it was escalating. It got to the point of about once a week. And that was where I was getting very alarmed. I know that being pre-diabetic is something that I'm just genetically predisposed to, and there's no way around that. is something that I'm just genetically predisposed to and there's no way around that.

So when we made this decision, my motivation was not even any worry about weight loss. Wasn't on my radar. Wasn't the thing I was worried about. I was very concerned about how do I stabilize my blood sugar? How do I make my blood sugar? How do I make my body healthier? Because like you're trying to push back against the, I don't want to say eventual, because I feel like if you continue on the trajectory you're on, you may not ever face that amputation. Thinking that, and I wanted to say that, but then I forgot to say that. I wanted to say that, but then I forgot to say that. I think if I were to continue this and then really, I would like to lose 40 more pounds and keep it off, but continue working out and continue getting my legs stronger. And it's not just my ankle that needs to be strengthened because with the ankle, you have a domino effect.

So it's my knee. It's my hip. have a domino effect. So it's my knee, it's my hip. Also, that leg is a little shorter than the other one now because I lost so much of the bone after the wreck. But I'm noticing that the entire leg is strengthening and the hip is strengthening. And anyway, yeah, I think if I can continue this and I plan on it, I may not have to get my leg amputated. Yeah. And my goal would be really nice, but then you won't get to call me Peggy. I'll live with the disappointment somehow. But my goal, my goal truly is that I don't want to get into my 60s and be on insulin. I don't want to get into my 60s and be on daily medications.

I do not want what I know is waiting for me at the end of that path that I was on. So my whole motivation was purely, it's like I told my dad the other day when we were talking, I told you the same thing before. My goal is not, I want to live to be 80. My goal is I want as many ambulatory years as possible. So like if I make it to 75, but I'm bedridden and living on daily pills and can't take care of myself, can't scratch my butt or anything without assistance, that's not a win for me. I want to get to 75 and be the 75

year old putting 40 year olds to shame, out walking the neighborhood, running a chainsaw, lifting stuff out the back of the truck, going camping. I want to be that guy who everybody looks at and says, I don't know how he does that at his age. And I know, I know how to do it. It's work, it's effort. It's a change in lifestyle. It's a huge change in eating habits, which we've accomplished. But here's where I, where I kind of wrap this all together with a bow. Time out. Tread, I want to, um, I want to talk about your comments in just a second. So hold me to that. Yeah.

I'm going to zip through the comments after I finish this one little thought. But to me, this has all been preparedness. This has all been preparedness related. Because you are at the point now where your leg is strong enough that you're making it through an average day without pain. Without difficulty, right? I'm not in pain, yes. But the goal now, and this is also like... Andrew Bobo's online. Hey, Andrew Bobo.

My co-host has arrived. He's in the chat. You should give him nonsense. He's on Facebook, though, so if you're on YouTube, you won't see him. Anyway, finish up. Well, but my goal for the two of us moving forward down this path of eat better, taking better care of ourselves, strengthen our bodies, is I want us to be able to be prepared for a bad day. To be able to be prepared for a bad day. Not just an average day.

Not just a day of chasing kids at school. Or a day of me sitting in my computer chair for eight hours. I want us to be able to conquer a bad day. A day like we had after Hurricane Ida. Where we were running chainsaws and running axes and running saws. And hauling brush for three days. I want us to be able to... I still have this thing where I really want to be able to, I, you know, I still have this thing where I really want to hike the Tammany Trace.

I don't know if you're ever going to be able to do 17, a 17 mile hike with me, but I would love for the two of us to be able to go out and do some two, three, four, five mile hikes, which I know I can do. And therein lies,

therein lies my point. I want, I, once we've gotten to the point where like we've made huge progress. I've lost almost 30 pounds. You've lost almost 40 pounds. We're in much better shape. Our bodies are much stronger.

My blood sugar is freaking fantastic for the first time in my entire life. The other day I forgot to eat until dinner time, which might sound like that's not good. It's not good. But here you stick with me on this. They have nothing else to do. A year ago, a year ago, if I had woken up in the morning and hadn't eaten until dinner time, I would have been passed out on the floor someplace. That's true.

But that day, I got to about 5.30 in the afternoon and I was like, why am I so hungry? Oh, I completely forgot to eat i woke up i drank coffee i ran out the range i ran out the door to go to the gun range my dad came back ran errand clean guns loaded magazines ran around doing lot you doing housework and i just told it like a knucklehead it slipped my mind i didn't even think about it but a year ago my blood sugar would have reminded me at about 12 o'clock like hey fat boy it's time or i'm gonna hurt you so like i'm i'm looking at i'm looking at all the effort we've been doing recently as far as working on our bodies yes yes andrew i know my wife is gorgeous.

Why do y'all make me blush on this thing? But like I said, that's where I want us to push this from here forward. I want us to prepare ourselves for a bad day. I want to see us continue to get stronger, continue to get in better shape. And yeah, I mean, I'm 41. You're about to turn 40. And I want us to charge headfirst into 50 and then 60 and still be this strong and this able to do for ourselves. I don't – I want to do this for the simple fact of having all the preps in the world means nothing if we're not able to execute those plans for ourselves. So this journey of like, you know, from the outside, it might just look like a midlife crisis. They're both working

out a lot and losing weight. You know, the Corvettes coming next and the plastic surgery. But for us, it really more is an issue of like, I want to take better care of myself so that I'm able to enjoy the rest of my life and not be, you know, not be hooked up to machines by the time I'm 55. Somebody actually has asked me if I was having a midlife crisis with all of the exercise and, um, you know, all that stuff. Am I having a midlife crisis? And I, I told you that and you said, what did you say? You said something like, no, a midlife crisis would be doing something detrimental to yourself or to others. And you're only doing positive.

So, see, I'm not having a midlife crisis, but kind of am. Yeah. So, let's go backwards through the comments in reverse order. Eddie, I posted this in the Patreon chat that you must not have been paying attention to. Obviously you didn't do your homework, Eddie. Andrew, glad you could join us. Yep, I got Gilly to cover for us. This was the episode I was

going to do with her the last time that you and I couldn't get together because you were being an adult and then she got a sinus infection so I had to run a show solo without her because she couldn't really talk much. Nina said she wants to get off blood pressure meds. I'll look in my book.

I know there's things that you can do. Obviously, I'm not a doctor. Please don't take what I say. Don't go get off your blood pressure meds or anything like that. But there's things. There are natural homeopathic ways around blood pressure. Yeah. And, Nina, I would also say, like, you have contact with her some kind of way, right?

Okay. I was going to say getting in touch with us, but never mind. You're already on the Gillian Express. She's my soul sister. All right. So Tread had a couple things. And then sort of like Tread, yeah. He said he has the high sugar too. Walking is good to help stabilize the sugar.

I firmly believe that any exercise in any amount to any degree is pretty universally good for your body in a variety of ways. Yes. And he said that would be a big side of a different prepping if you have to store insulin. So I'm not going to name the person because he's not here to defend himself, and I don't do that. But I know a person who I genuinely care about, really nice guy. He's about this close to being family to me and uh he is here he is insulin dependent and he has told me very nonchalantly that um

his preps are for his family if the flag ever goes up he is he is 100 insulin dependent he knows to the day how long his insulin will hold out. And he said, when that day comes and goes, I'm gone. These preps are not for me, they're for my family. It is like the most heartbreaking thing on earth to know that this man is literally, he's done all these things so that his family will outlive him. And he knows there's,'s he's he's already said there is no way i can beat this and yeah i told i i i totally well there may be there may not be but like i that is why i was so dead set on do whatever i have to do to not get to that point

because i know that if you get to the point where medically you are insulin dependent, you now have a big old bucket of extra problems to deal with in an emergency. Yeah. So anything I can do to avoid that, don't care how hard it is, don't care how bad it sucks, give it to me. Let's go. So I, and I know who you're talking about. I'm not like totally like sure of his case or whatever. And again, I'm not a doctor. I don't believe in many doctors, but, um, for blood sugar, cinnamon, um, tread, this is what I wanted to tell you. But if you started to incorporate cinnamon and turmeric into your everyday, like you can drink it as a tea. I don't, I don't suggest you just like eat it cause that's not fun. But, um, turmeric and, uh, cinnamon will help to regulate blood sugars and keep,

keep you level. So just FYI on that. I also like Andrew's idea. Have a list of pharmacies in your area to visit when the flag goes up. This is a joke for legal purposes. Where are you going? I'm just looking to see if there's any we missed along the way. We didn't. Oh, well, there was this one. Nina saying, I'm trying to get the hubby and

working out with me eating better it is hard to change i'm i'm gonna tell you that gillian and i have both tried several times to do this and each time we got going on on for a while and then we fell off the wagon and we fell off the wagon like we fell off the wagon we lit it on fire we took we took the insurance money and used it to buy tacos like every single time we fell off the wagon we just fell off the wagon and never looked back and then it'd be some years of treating our bodies like amusement parks and dumpsters and we'd finally say oh i can't do this forever i need to do better we'd do better for a while and fall off the wagon again so i really feel like what's changed this time is that i think finally like we've both had kind of the wake-up calls of it's not as if the worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to be a little pudgy. If you continue doing what you were doing before, you're going to lose your leg.

If I continue doing what I was doing before, I'm going to wind up on an insulin pump. I just got so tired of hurting. I was always in pain. Yeah. So I guess what I'm saying is I feel like we finally slammed face first into the wall. We both said this cannot be this way and at that point what i feel like we did which you've kind of flirted with the line a little bit i i've just dug my heels and refused to but like i said from the word go that any diet that requires

counting i will not even attempt because i'm not i'm not going to sustain it. I know I'm not. I'm not either. The reason why I was counting my calories, I was- She knows exactly what I was talking about though. Yeah, because that's the only time during the last six months that I've counted. I was trying to figure out where my macros were. I was trying to think of, okay, this is about how many calories I think I'm eating in a day. What if I bumped it down to this? And it didn't work, and I didn't feel great. And so I just focused on eating smaller portions.

I don't eat breakfast, but more protein. And then the other thing is, for any women that are listening, so it's not super healthy for women to totally come off of carbs. Our hormones actually are regulated by a lot of carbs. Not a lot, like don't go eat a lot of carbs. But what I'm saying is women need carbohydrates in order to regulate our hormones. our hormones. And so that's why when the Atkins diet came out, doctors were really against pushing it onto women, even though women could lose a lot of weight really quick by just doing Atkins or carnivore or keto or whatever. But women just need carbs. We have to have carbs

in order to regulate our hormones. So, well, and I'll say that I tried keto about that time. I couldn't do it because like at the time I was working as a pool guy. So like I'd be, you know, I, I'd be, I would be working out in the, out in the sun, usually for about eight to 10 hours a day, several days a week, and by the time I'd get to about two o'clock in the afternoon, I was falling over myself. I was dead. I had no energy. So, like, I came to the conclusion very quickly that, like, this diet's not for me. I think what we're doing now, which I explained it to everybody as my diet is purely a choice of A or B. A is something that's better for me. B is something that tastes good. I can have B every now and then. I just need to have A more often. So I always tell everybody, I'm like, the dieting to me that turns into counting calories, counting carbs, counting macros or anything, don't move it. I want to – Tread pointed out that he asked a question and we missed it. It's right there and I don't want to lose it again.

Oh. So like I don't want to be forced to count stuff because the minute that I'm forced to count stuff, I'm going to get frustrated and I'm going to quit. And I just know that about myself. So I prefer to set up like a loose set of guidelines and then live within those guidelines. Like today for dinner, we had pizza. It was in pizza with like six ingredients. It wasn't preservatives, wasn't much crap. It was like kind of a deli pizza. So it was at least as healthy as pizza could be. But for lunch, I had two slices of sourdough bread.

I had some bacon. I had some fried eggs. What? You made bacon? I made bacon yesterday. I told you I made bacon yesterday. Paper! I told both of y'all I made bacon yesterday.

Nobody had any. Anyway, so the point is, everything I had was high fat, high protein, very little carbs, no sugar. And then tonight I had two slices of pizza, and I don't feel bad about that. So that's my spiel on dieting. I like the pizza, but I need to eat the other stuff other than pizza more often. And as long as you make more of these decisions than these decisions, you can have the pizza every now and then. Everything ends up being in moderation at the end of the day.

But I do want to loop back around to Tred's question because I missed it. And way down in the chat, he mentioned that he had asked a question we missed. With the prepping of rice and beans in bulk, do you use those materials now and replenish as you rotate stock? Or is it beans set aside for if, when, SHTF? So, yes. And the reason I say it that way is that we have a set of buckets that are set aside for long-term preps. They're non-perishable. They're sealed with oxygen absorbers and desk and packs. They are ostensibly going to be fine for, I think I've got them on

a schedule for about every three years, pop them, assess them, pull some things out, put some things back in. But the things like the baking bucket, that's all dried ingredients. That's as long as oxygen and water and pests don't get into them. I mean, flour is going to last virtually forever. and pests don't get into them. I mean, flour is going to last virtually forever. So is baking powder and everything else. The chocolate chips will have to come out probably every couple of years. But everything else in there should be good long term.

Rice and dried beans will last 20 years in a good environment. Dried oats, oatmeal, grits. The coffee beans are going to have to come out every couple of years even the way we have them packed i mean i've been told though they're 20 year shelf stable but i'm gonna have to test that before i can believe that we got tea bags in there the short version is we have a we have a section of our preps that i am targeting on say 20 year shelf stable for a lot of it. And every so many years, we open it up. We make sure everything in there still looks good.

We put new oxygen absorbers in, new desks and packs, seal it back up. We have another section of our preps that is like the can rack, the chest freezer. Sorry. That we're constantly rotating through. Whenever we grab a pack of sausage out of the fridge, we move the one from the freezer into the fridge. We move one from the chest freezer into the main freezer. Like this mid-tier level of our preps is constantly cycling into the pantry and our main fridge. So it's like having three refrigerators instead of just one so yes three three pantries yeah so what it boils down to is that there there are certain things based on not even really based on like how often we eat them but it really is more of how long

will it hold for there are certain things that we will never try to store long-term because it just doesn't make sense to. And there are certain things that I will put away for 20 years and not really think twice about it. But I would say that the mistake you can make with that is you can hinge 100% of your decision making on the expiration date. Because I point out to people that the FDA requires that a bottle of water have an expiration date on it. So, like, think about that a little critically.

Or, like, when you see an expiration date on a bag of rice. Think critically about that. But you do need to do your research and figure out what is an acceptable candidate for long-term storage and what's your idea of long-term. But the stuff that's not, I mean, like we go to the grocery store every week. And a lot of that's because, you know, like my wife and I both have a espresso and latte habit. So we go through three gallons of milk a week. Well, and I have my own coffee in the morning. So, yeah, we go through a lot of milk. We go through a lot of eggs.

Bacon, when somebody wants to cook bacon for us all. Sausage, beef, chicken. I mean, we just... We eat our tacos. Yes. We don't give up tacos either in this house. Andrew. Yeah, so Andrew mentioned he's been working on eating more steaks, following the carnivore diet.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with carnivore. I do think that a little bit of dietary flexibility is a good thing. You know what I'm saying? Like, have a carb every now and then. It's not going to kill you. Well, sure, you can say that. But if somebody is going to eat the way that they want to eat, then that just needs to be what they want to do. True.

I mean, if you can get away with the carnivore diet, then do it. I mean, obviously. I'm just suggesting like. I'm trying to take up for you, Andrew. Why? Because you said I was pretty. I say you're pretty all the time. You give me hell.

I'm still married to you. Oh. Anyway, no, I'm just suggesting that no matter what diet you want to attempt or subscribe to, just give yourself a little bit of grace. Because the most toxic thing I can think of in a diet is to cheat on it one time and then beat yourself up saying, oh, I failed. I might as well quit. I mean, I eat chocolate almost every night. But here's the trick about chocolate. Because like Piper got her a little ration of chocolate today. You eat a serving size and that's it.

Yeah. I have always said to you, and I've said it to Piper, like, if I get a craving, I really just need a taste of it. Like, if it's chocolate, if I have a chocolate craving, I really just need a taste of it. If it's a s'more, I need the whole s'more. But I understand, like, I calculate that into my calories for the day. Like, I don't count my calories, but I do. If I think I'm going to eat a s'more tonight for dinner, I'm not going to eat as big of a portion for dinner. Yeah. And I think for me, like I'm the opposite. Like I don't have cravings very often,

but when I have a craving, I'm like a fat kid on a birthday cake. Like I want, I want all of it. You don't get cravings and that's what makes things so hard. But the other day when your daughter was like, hey, Dad, can we have ice cream? In that moment, dadgummit, I wanted that sea salt and caramel ice cream. Something freaking awful. Dadgummit. Dadgummit. You got it.

I did. I ate the whole freaking pint in one sitting. And I won't have ice cream again for probably a couple of months. So, I mean, that's my definition of everything in moderation. If you go on a bender every, like, you know, three or four months, then it's like spreading the alcohol out over time. That's a pro tip. Okay. Your cardiologist will not agree with that, but, I mean, that's how I think it works. But I guess let's go ahead and wrap this up.

I mean, we've been going for a good hour and a half, which tends to happen when you're sitting down with me because I talk a lot, apparently. I mean, you do have a podcast, so. Yes. I don't know how Andrew does it. Andrew must tone you out, too. He does a lot. I know. I can see it in his face when I'm watching.

I wonder, do I look like Andrew sometimes? Sometimes, yeah. What's Phil talking about? Why is he still talking? I got to clue in every now and then. I got to pick up keywords so I can stay in the conversation. I'm so abused. So before we round this out, for anybody that's made it this far in the show,

only about half of the people that watch our streams are subscribed, so if you haven't subscribed, please hit the subscribe button. Do it for raising values if not matter of facts. Ugh. If you like the show, hit the like button, give us

a reaction, drop a comment. Press that notification bell. Press the notification bell. I am happy to start pushing. I need to do a better i mean any that notification bell anything you press the notification bell i am happy to start put i need to start pushing i need to do a better job of pushing that because we need all the interaction we can get to try to help this channel grow so i do appreciate y'all sticking around with us for a very very long hopefully entertaining show but um preparedness is a mindset boys and girls like this isn't um this isn't doomsday preppers this isn't crazy people living in bunkers

with tinfoil hats tinfoil hats are fun and all but it's not a feature it's this is mindset it is the expression of wanting to be prepared is no more no less than acknowledging that bad things happen and when they do I don't want to be prepared is no more, no less than acknowledging that bad things happen.

And when they do, I don't want to be screwed. And it's no more, no less than that. But I really feel like once you, two things have to happen before a person buys into the preparedness mindset. They have to see threats and then they have to believe they can do something about it. But once you cross those two lines, you're laughing at me. I'm listening. No, there's two things. Once those two things happen, preparedness becomes the lens you see things through.

You start managing your health because I'm into preparedness because I want to be prepared for an emergency, Because I'm into preparedness, because I want to be prepared for an emergency, not only because I would like to be back down to size into 38 waistline pants. I want to have extra food, not because I just like to have extra food lying around. No, it's because I'm trying to be prepared. I want to have extra ammo because it seems like every four years in this country, you can't freaking buy ammo for any amount of money, any reasonable amount of money. So I think once you get to a certain point, preparedness becomes your mindset, and it starts to govern how you approach everything in life. It does.

Everything. It's all-consuming. Yes, Tread. The great toilet paper shortage of 2020. And yet, I'm still shocked at how many people don't have more than like a day's supply of crap paper in their house. Or alternatives

to toilet paper. Perry bottles. Nina knows what I'm talking about. Hyniehydrant? Yeah, little handheld bidets. Anyway,

there was something I was going to say. Oh, I know what I was going to say while we still have five people on here, even though we did get up to, I think, 14 people at one point. The merch store. Oh, yes. Down in the show description is the link to our merchandise at the southern gals and uh gillian actually just sent them a new t-shirt idea like literally two hours ago and it is freaking adorable and i kind of want like, even not even just to support the show, but it's just a genuinely really cute T-shirt idea.

Yeah. I actually just posted on the Raising Values Instagram and Facebook. So if you like it, I want to know so I can send that off, like, for final touches for a T-shirt. I think it's going to be, I think it would be a cute T-shirt. But, yeah. So, yeah. So yeah. So there's that. Can I do a plug?

Sure. Okay. So in April, because I'm not on here as much as, you know, except when Andrew is a slacker. I love you, Andrew. I'm joking. And he knows I'm joking. In April, I will be a part of the Women Who Prep Conference, and I will be talking about prepping with kids.

And a lot of what I talked about tonight, just going to expound upon that a little bit more. So that's April 21st through the 24th. I think I'd have to go back and check those dates. But it is in April. The tickets are on sale now. It is online. Go follow.

Hang on. Phil, don't be upset with me. Go follow This Prepared Life on Instagram. And you can also follow Women Who Prep on Instagram. And you'll get all of the information. There's going to be a lot of really amazing women who are coming together to talk about Women Who Prep. And all of the different ways that you can prep and all that stuff. And it's not just for women.

You can be a man to watch it too. And I think men are actually involved. Anyway, that was my stick. That was my just throwing that out there. Yep. And if you want to keep in touch with Matter of Facts Podcast, we are on Facebook. We are on Instagram. We are streaming our show on Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble.

We have an audio podcast that is on just about every podcast provider I can think of. Like, if you search for Matter of Facts Podcast and Raising Values Podcast, you will find it. Go find us on Instagram and Facebook and Rumble and YouTube and like you're on now. And like those pages, please, because we are so shadow banned. And if we can get some people to start interacting with our posts a little bit more, I think it'll help. And we would love to, you know, continue providing really awesome content because we're awesome people.

Duh. Yep. And also give a listen to the prep and broadcasting network. They are, they are network. They are a network. We are on 15 others. I think it's 13 shows,

15 other hosts. And much like how Andrew and myself andillian all have a slightly different perspective on preparedness when you get 15 of the of us in a room like we all come from different develop different directions with different experiences with different levels of expertise in different environments it's a it's a huge collection of knowledge and i wholeheartedly encourage you that like if you've listened to Matter of Facts before, if you like the kind of stuff we're into, give PBN a listen. You will probably find at least a couple of our shows on the network that tickle you.

We love our little family of preppers. But it is 8.07. Baths need to be had. A little girl might already be asleep. I think she probably might be asleep. And Mama's tired. So this Daylight Savings Time crap is getting to me. Yeah.

Y'all have a good night. And Andrew will be back on the next show. Not me. But I'll be back, I'm sure. Because Andrew's a busy, busy man. Well, and I've kind of got a... I've got a... Built-in sub.

I was going to say victim of Stockholm syndrome, but you know. Yeah, that's going to be the next episode. Check those comments before we leave. But y'all have a good night and thanks for watching. You can't say good night and then tell me to check the comments. Oh, Tread. What's the Raisingnight and then tell me to check the comments. Oh, Tread. What's the Raising podcast? Don't see it in the description. Okay.

Oh, good to know because... I don't have Raising Values linked in the Matter of Facts or vice versa. I don't have Matter of Facts stuff linked in Raising Values. We were trying to keep you from getting Shadowband until you got Shadowband because how dare you espouse... I didn banned until you got shadow banned. I got shadow banned. Because how dare you espouse.

I didn't just get shadow banned, though. I got knocked off 20 weeks of content. Well, we both did. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, so Raising Values and Matter of Facts run on the same Rumble channel, on the same YouTube channel. They both run on the same podcast distribution. The only place they are

separated is social media. So Raising Values has its own Facebook page and Instagram. And if you have trouble finding them, I mean, I'll put it this way. Wherever you are watching this or listening to this, if you go a couple of days back, you'll find a Raising Values episode and the show notes for that the show description of that includes the links to all those social media sites. So the two run in tandem because you know, Mary and all that. Raising

Values podcast. Yes. That's all. Now we're really going to go because I'm really tired. So see you when I see you on Matter Effects. Good night, everybody. Good night. Thank you.