The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Trouble in the Mountains

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.facebook.com/matteroffactspodcast/https://www.facebook.com/groups/mofpodcastgroup/https://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/mofpodcasthttps://twitter.com/themofpodcastSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastPurchase American Insurgent by Phil Rabalais: https://amzn.to/2FvSLMLShop at MantisX: http://www.mantisx.com/ref?id=173*The views and opinions of guests do not reflect the opinions of Phil Rabalais, Andrew Bobo, Nic Emricson, or the Matter of Facts Podcast*Out of an abundance of respect for the people caught in the unfolding disaster, the MoF crew has held off from discussing Hurricane Helene and the situation it has caused in North Carolina and the surrounding areas. Now, friend of the show Eddie Davenport, joins the boys to talk about what he saw unfold in his community and beyond.https://www.instagram.com/blackpowdertherapist/https://www.youtube.com/@BlackPowderTherapisthttps://mountainmindnc.com/Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices. Intro and Outro Music by Phil Rabalais All rights reserved, no commercial or non-commercial use without permission of creator prepper, prep, preparedness, prepared, emergency, survival, survive, self defense, 2nd amendment, 2a, gun rights, constitution, individual rights, train like you fight, firearms training, medical training, matter of facts podcast, mof podcast, reloading, handloading, ammo, ammunition, bullets, magazines, ar-15, ak-47, cz 75, cz, cz scorpion, bugout, bugout bag, get home bag, military, tactical 

Welcome back to the Matterfacts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Andrew's not here. Nick is. Eddie is joining us. Let's get the admin work out of the way quickly so we can get to the point of this. First of all, happy Halloween to everybody. I'm wearing my disguise. This is not a mask. Patrons,

I always forget to, unless Nick reminds me, to thank the patrons for supporting this insanity. And thank y'all for chipping in a couple of bucks to keep the shit show going. Because, you know, this is y'all's fault. And if you're upset with the show, then I've got a list of people you can blame. And if you're happy with the show, I've got a list of people you can join in their group insanity, if that's your thing. Merch. Merch is always a thing. I am wearing the official

What Would Burt Do shirt, because anybody that doesn't believe that Burt Gummer is an excellent role model for children, I question your upbringing and your childhood. He's probably partially responsible for me turning into who I am, so thank him for that. But we should all ask ourselves from time to time, what would Bert do in this situation? And now with the admin work out of the way, Nick's with us, Andrew's not, and Eddie is with us. And Eddie, I don't really have to introduce you to the patrons because you're very well known in the patron group um to the listeners let's see here um nationally ranked black powder and

cowboy action shooter recently went to the world what was the world muzzleloader championships tv star all around like don't piss him off if you're within 700 yards of a maze holding anything made in the last two centuries. That's a good way to start. And a therapist. And a therapist. And a therapist that has recently started your own practice, which, by the way,

how is that going so far? I finally paid myself for the first month, so that was great. Fantastic. We've gone months is not having to be able to pay that is a serious accomplishment for a new business yeah taking a paycheck was nice i bet hey man it's nice when it works out that way fantastic that it works out that way yeah i um i made a mistake and uh hired a marketing firm which helped in the beginning but they are seriously not producing on what they promised,

and it's costing – they eat most of my profits. So I have two more months until I'm – I basically am on the hook for another three grand with them, and then we're basically making double what I made in my previous job. Well, you know, that's the unfortunate thing about business, man. You don't know until you try some of that stuff, and some ideas, they just don't pan out. But hey, learning opportunity right there.

A little freebie for anyone. If you ever open up your own thing and a marketing company promises that they can push your SEOs within less than a year, they're lying to you. It's a minimum a year to 18 months. So don't sign a contract. That's actually really great to know i don't i don't want to say i could have told you that but like marketing guys always yeah they i don't want to say they lie they overestimate they that's they did make me a nice website though that i get to take with me so there is that oh that's nice i mean a quality website is extremely important. Yeah. That's something.

So for those of you that don't know, Eddie was in the area affected by Hurricane Helene. Do you care if we mention what area you're in there, Eddie? My business is in Canton, North Carolina. If you Google me enough, you'll find me. I'm listed in enough places at this point. Yeah, so kind of in the direct impact area, would you say?

Yeah, everyone is focusing on Asheville, but our downtown had about, no lie, I think 35 feet of water above the banks, and the river is generally 20 feet below the bank as it starts so what 45 feet of water wow i'm not shocked by that 55 that was bad that's incredible yeah but still you know at that point you're talking about walls of water that are larger than most buildings that are going to be in the average city's downtown area. I mean, unless you're talking skyscrapers or megaplexes,

you know, that's, that's a serious amount of water. The, the worst spot was, um, um, just about,

uh, 45 minutes to an hour away from me. So just a little bit past Asheville, uh, there's a famous picture of, uh, Hardee's the waters crawl, um, way, I'm kind of going over the top picture of Hardee's, the waters, kind of going over the top of a Hardee's. So like, think of your any fast food restaurant and the water is the top of that.

And mind you, that Hardee's was nowhere near the river. I know you have said in the Patreon chat, and the patrons will be familiar with this, but for the audience, what did you expect going into this i know you've told me that you expected some flooding yeah so um what most people probably don't know um are it's left their consciousness because you know that's how the new cycle works we're already out of the new cycle anyways during this point but um we had uh we actually had a hurricane similar to this about three years ago where it was a lot of flooding. Downtown, again, flooded. The same businesses that kind of got wiped out got wiped out then. But nowhere near as bad. But the businesses learned their lessons.

There's a car detailing shop downtown. They already did everything. They pulled out everything of value. They moved out. The bar took all of the brewery that got flooded out last time. They removed all their beer from the brew tanks that they could. They removed everything from the building that they could. Thinking, okay, water will come through.

Well, it's mostly a concrete. It was an old textile building. So, okay, we'll have to swap out the mud and call it a day. And a couple other places, you know, move things out. No one was expecting this much water. And again, the problem was, like, we were expecting flooding. I told everyone there was going to be flooding. Stay out of the area.

Not to touch on another topic, but stay out of the area. There was a lot of flooding come to the area. It was going to be bad. But the biggest problem we had was that there was a lot of rain that came before it and then when the storm came over it just started hovering it just it didn't push over and it just stayed there and i mean i grew up at the um down in the beach um in a place called currituck which is right above the outer banks of north carolina so i think you know the direct coastline and it's i know phil's used to this because of the coast. But if you're not from an area where hurricanes usually hit,

storm surge is a thing. Like all the videos you see in Florida, you know, the water's at people's knees and stuff like that. Okay, not taking away from that. It's bad. It's dangerous. You can get stuck in houses, and it destroys things. But it's mostly flat ground.

Water comes in. Water goes out. Well, here in the mountains, you got to think, you it's mostly flat ground. Water comes in, water goes out. Well, here in the mountains, you got to think, you know, everything is tall. And then there's, I'm using hand things if you're not watching it, but think of a mountain, you know, then there's the valleys where everyone lives. No one lives on the peaks. Everyone lives in the valleys. Well, all that water has to channel somewhere and it all goes to the valley.

And so that's where I like all this water just got funneled into these spots and then just over flooded these already flooded rivers. And I mean, there was I think we had thirty nine inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Wow. I mean, we're a rain. We're considered a rainforest here. So we already get a lot of rain, but we we hit our annual rainfall in 24 hours. here so we already get a lot of rain but we we hit our annual rainfall in 24 hours wow yeah the audience can't see me over here like cringing but like i remember before the storm hit that the estimates i was seeing were something already like 24 to 27 inches which yeah two feet of water yeah but i was telling my wife i'm, two feet of water here where I live would cause catastrophic flooding.

And I'm 21 feet above sea level here, which is hilarious to everybody that lives anywhere with elevation, but stick with me. But New Orleans is three feet below sea level for comparison's sake. So I'm practically living on a hilltop where I am. But two feet of water would flood most of this city. Two feet of water in a mountainous area is a level of catastrophe. I don't like, and I saw this coming, Eddie, because I'm like, if it rains two feet at the peak of a mountain, that two feet of water is going to go down to the valley. And now you're going to wind up with, you know, four or five, six feet minimum when it all piles into the valleys.

And you're right. Like, I remember y'all had that huge thunderstorm system that blew through, I think, two days before Helene hit. And I was like, great. So every basin is already filled. Every river is already maxed out. Every pond, every retention pond is already maxed out. And now you're about to put two feet of water into it there's nowhere for it to go i don't know that there's anywhere in the

country that has room for two feet of water there's no metro area in north america that can absorb two feet of water that fast nobody nobody has the infrastructure even assuming even assuming flatland even assuming flatland you know and and not mountains because realistically you're losing what probably 50 to 70 percent of the surface area where that water would normally sit due to the due to the elevation yeah well i mean raggle fraggle just jumped in he's three and a half hours from new orleans only 19 feet above sea level yep welcome to louisiana you got it you got to drive four hours to find a mountain my house where i grew up in was i think our house where i grew up in was like a foot above sea level it was extremely flat down there on the coast down the coast

but yeah man it's just i don't know it know. It makes my stomach do flip-flops hearing about that much rainfall because there's nowhere on Earth that can absorb it. There's nowhere for it to go. Yeah. I mean, so the walls of Rotter were dangerous. Let's call it what it is.

This is, so first off, I want to get the caveats out of the way so I don't have to come back and touch them. So just give me a minute. I'm extremely thankful that I didn't lose anything to my house. My business got minimal damage. There was a leak in the roof that we already knew about that it filled up a 55-gallon trash can and went over the brim. So we already knew that was going to happen. We had friends that had lost a whole lot more.

We had friends that had watched their houses float down the river. Like we, and then there's people that, you know, died. And, uh, I, there was a body hanging in the tree down below my house that I helped a cop get out, get, get out. Um, it is, so all those caveats out of the way, extremely thankful. All right, now we can move on to the next part. Um, so yeah, the, the water is was extremely dangerous um the the big thing though was the the mud and the landslides um like all this water just calls all the ground to destabilize

i mean not just thinking trees to get touched over in the wind okay because i mean that happens we all know that but like all the the reason all the highways collapsed was because the wall of water just went underneath, when they're going down the rivers, went underneath the roads and destabilized the whole road system and just collapsed whole highways. But it's no lie. I mean, I was talking to someone that's involved with the mapping area. We're going to have to have a new topographer come in this area because whole rivers have changed the routes. The whole landscape has changed. We're going have. We've had storms that have dropped, you know, a couple inches of rain in a couple of hours. And that has washed out driveways that has caused road embankments near and along creeks to wash out culverts. And this is relatively flat land. So the water can't really gain that much velocity. can't really gain that much velocity you know it's um you know we we see the pictures of the highways being gone and and you know i think that it really doesn't truly hit home until you say something like the topography of the region has to be remapped So that means that the ground level has changed,

not feet, not a few feet. In some places, what do you say, Eddie, like 5, 10 feet, 15 feet in some spots? Yeah, I mean, there's some places where, like, you know, 20 feet, the mountain is gone. One of the rivers that I'm talking about that changed this thing, it jumped its banks and now is about, you know, I think it's 14, 15 feet over from where it originally is.

And it just cut a new swath. So like that river has changed. And then down in that, it changed its course right through the middle of a school, actually. There is one I'm specifically thinking of it. It decided this new river goes through a school. Well, and the other thing that I don't even know, I don't know how long it's going to be before y'all can find out

if this came to pass, but with the sheer weight of the water that's compiling in these low-lying areas, because this is, we've started seeing this in New Orleans after years and years and years of low-lying areas and the weight of the water compact in the ground. You might find that some of these valleys have actually like lost elevation relative to sea level between soil erosion, between the weight of the water. I mean, it's which downstream of this is going to make flooding even worse in those areas.

It's like I don't know a better way to say it. Like, guys, Mother Nature doesn't take any prisoners. When she gets pissed off, she tears everything to pieces. So one of the people asking in the comments, is it a new river or a dry ancient river? No, these were active rivers. It's not like out in Texas, you know, like they're 40 feet wide, but only a foot deep. Some of these rivers could only be, you know, a couple feet deep and stuff like that, depending on where it is.

But the major rivers, they're, you know, anywhere between 10 and 20 feet deep at their deepest parts. We're talking, you know, like boulder holes and stuff like that. So, no, these were active rivers because like this is, we're known for fly fishing and trout fishing here. So, these were active um extremely like well-producing rivers so aside from the the rainfall and the road washouts and obviously the power loss what other like immediate on the ground effects were you guys seeing stuff that you know as soon as the storm passed you noticed had changed so here it

was hard in the beginning because we lost power we were i live up on a mountain um so we we were kind of stuck in the mountain um we didn't know what the we knew downtown would have been flooded and so we didn't know what we could expect and downtown would have been flooded. And so we didn't know what we could expect. And the main, what made it harder was all the cell phone service in the area just dropped. So there was usually, you know, in storms, you can rely on cell phone coverage and stuff like that to get news. There was all the cell networks died.

So it was basically, I mean, we were an Island. There was no way of accessing Asheville. I don't live in Asheville, but there was no way of accessing Asheville. Chimney Rock, legit, just, it's a little hard to say this because me and my wife took our dog there a month before it happened. But Chimney Rock, which is a cool place to go visit and camp and everything, doesn't exist anymore. But Asheville was an island. There was no way to get there. That's why they were using helicopters to take in supplies.

But there was no coverage, no news coming in and out. All the water treatment was you either lost water completely or your water is full of sewage and dead bodies and dead other things and so the you couldn't have any water and no power and and i guess this is the part where i can make it real fun for myself to top it all off a day and a half before the storm hit i threw my back out on the most um oh my god i'm old way fashionable. I sat down and my back got thrown out. And so as the storm was coming through, I'm laying on the ground, relying on, no, I told you guys this earlier,

but I'm gonna now say for everyone else, this isn't a crap on my wife thing. This isn't, she is a brilliant woman. She's getting her doctorate. She's smarter than hell. And she's the only dumb thing she's ever done in her life was marry me. But I was relying on her and giving her instructions on doing things, but she's always relied on me because I've just done it.

Um, and you know what? I'm going to call it out. Female was doing their fucking job. Okay. So shut the fuck up about that. Anyways. Um, but, um, my wife, I had to rely on her to do, um, her, uh, to get things done, but she's never done it before.

Um, and it was kind of the whole thing. So like, you know, I was sitting there thinking, I forget the name of the series, but the one where he makes that survival book, you know, where, um, he like everything he writes down the one that lives in the cave and everything, like they take over the Valley. You know what I'm talking about?lin horton is it yeah the franklin franklin horton series but he makes like he makes a little uh survival book that like everything he needs to take care of is in this book so if i'm not home you just rely on the book that the first thing i thought about after this was like okay cool i can this is something i need to do so like if something goes wrong I can do this but like we we had food okay we have a generator but what I didn't have was gas I had one gallon of gas

in fact we're now dealing with the fact that she um she spilled gas in her car because again this is not a crap on my wife thing but she has never touched a gas can in her life she didn't even know how to open up my gas cans. So she actually broke one of my gas can lids. And when I told her, Hey, I need you to go buy gas before the storm. I was sent there thinking, Hey, okay, you're gonna fill up every single gas can I have, there's a five gallon, there's a five gallon one behind the helm, go grab every single gas can she bought,

she brought one gallon of gas. But if you've never done it before, I can't Mark Leary, Well, if you don't know you don't know well that's a that's a perfect learning point for anyone listening to this show if you've got a spouse if you've got a girlfriend if you've got roommates at least have them walk through the basics of some of your most key things you know how to start the generator how to start the generator, how to fuel the generator. Maybe if they're mechanically inclined, how to do an oil change on your generator,

because after a week of running it, you're going to need that done too. Yeah. And if it, like in your case, Eddie, your back's blown out, you're not going to be laying on the ground,

dumping oil out of a generator. Yeah. And the fun thing about that was that, um, my generator, the, cause you know, they all have, they all have fuses in them, and they automatically trip in case something goes bad.

It had tripped, and because I can't see it in person, I can't tell her why it's not working. And so, I eventually had to work my way over there and re-trip the RFIC outlet. Oh you know the the rfic outlet oh yeah you know the one that you can put beside like the waters yeah gfi thank you yeah so i had

to trip that and it and she was actually pushing the button and it wasn't working and reason why is i forgot that one is extremely it's extremely hard to do like i actually have to usually take like a metal pole and stick it in and push it because it just it's a hard to do like i actually have to usually take like a metal pole and stick it in and push it because it just it's a really hard button to re-trip yeah i mean and so the generator we have will run the whole house but like that was another thing like i had um been it was on my to do list of go ahead and like you know so that i could um plug the line in i don't have i can just flip switches and plug the line in. Well, I hadn't gotten to it yet.

So we realized, then I realized that the, my power cords I had, I only had one heavy duty power cord. Excuse me. The heavy duty power cords, like the 220 volt cords I have weren't the, wasn't the right, wasn't the correct plug for the generator. It didn't fit the thing. So I was using regular 120 volts to run my freezers and fridges and stuff like that.

I could do it, but I had to cycle them because I couldn't have them all on the same lines. That makes sense. It was just a cascade of failure and stuff. Things worked. We didn't lose any food, but it was just all these cascade things piled up on top of each other.

Not to mention then like, only thing we had was a little bit of food. Sorry. No, you're good. Now it's time for a moment of honesty. The last hurricane near miss we had here at the house a few months ago, I actually had got an interlock kit installed on the house so I could hook up a 220 line for my 5k straight to the house and then I discovered that evening the power hadn't gone out it did not go out but we were getting ready because we kind of saw it coming I discovered that my generator had a NEMA 20 20 amp outlet on it and the entire interlock kit the cord and everything was a NEMA 30. That is a very different plug. Yeah.

It's different enough that they ain't gonna go together without hacking that I probably shouldn't do, so needless to say, my wife and I pivoted very quickly to get every extension cord in the house. And fortunately, we have enough, because that's how we had dude after Hurricane Ida, but

yeah, Eddie, totally feeling your freaking pain. First time i had to use my generator under pressure the battery was dead so never freaking fails yeah the thing that like got me was that i was just i i had never checked to see if that plug worked because the generator was a gift it was a gift from my father-in-law because he upgraded his generator to a propane well um a multi-fuel but he's propane up in pennsylvania so he could run it all to house propane and he asked me do you guys want this generator because all i had was like a little tailgater i'm like absolutely i'll take this generator and so um i had this power

cord and you know what call me stupid whatever but i didn't know that the 220 plugs were different i thought they were all the same so like like I felt, cause I grabbed this, I grabbed the plug that I keep out of in my camper. I grabbed the line that I have that and I brought it back home. And I was like, oh, look, this doesn't fit. Cause it was one of those heavy duty lines that ends in like five different receptacles.

So I could plug in everything off that, you know? I just figured we're good. Cause like we put the generator outside our kitchen window, open up the screen a little bit, and run it through. It was like, oh, cool. We'll be good. Yeah, it didn't work that way. Yeah.

Unfortunately, that's the way it is. I mean, this is why I like to tell people that the best time to try out your generator is when it's 65 and sunny. That way, you're not having to try to do it in pitch black. You're not having to try to do it when it's freezing cold. You've got gloves on. You've got time. And then you can assess these problems in advance and try to compensate for them. But hey, man, it's a perfect example for people, man.

And fortunately for you guys, it sounds like it worked out pretty okay. I mean, you were able to make use of the tool. It wasn't down entirely. You had a fallback plan that's fantastic but you know that's these things are complicated like when i bought my generator i had no idea how to hook this thing up to my house so i brought an electrician out and i had him show me how to use the entire panel system that's on the wall over to my left i mean fortunately i knew a guy that was very good at these things that could walk me through it because i am not an electrician but you know yeah yeah i mean there

was there was definitely some lessons to be learned one of the things that we were really happy about um granted um so we had friends that lost um stuff we had a they didn't lose their entire house but they lost uh basically their bottom half of their house uh water just came flooding through their house um and that and they just finished like making it a um um i forget the name of the word but uh you know if you take a basement and you make it livable um finish the work but they basically finished it there we go they had just done that and finished it like a month prior and then all the stuff came through um so we were over there helping them with stuff but um we i this again this isn't a crap on any of my friends or anything but like

i guess because coming from the hurricane stuff i was used to these things um i just i felt thankful that like you know we could give people generators. We could give stuff like this. My wife learned a painful lesson that I happened to be out of town doing some stuff. And when she finally got the generator back, because power came back on, don't try to take a generator out of your car by yourself. Because she wrenched her shoulder. So we both learned lessons.

I mean, good on her for trying, but dadgum. Those things are heavy. We both learned lessons. I mean, good honor for trying, but dadgum. Those things are heavy. Those things are deceptively heavy. No, I mean, I think some of the biggest things that like the biggest lessons on the ground here is like you can't prepare for you can't prepare for this sheer amount of water. The other thing that I'm not going to share some of the stories I've heard directly, but like the mud here is different than mud that you can't prepare for this sheer amount of water um the other thing that um i'm not going to share some of the stories i've heard directly but like the mud here is different than mud that you can think of like where you're at unless you live in georgia in this area it's that red clay georgia mud so yeah so it turns like the mud here is like it's caustic it'll actually burn um if you get it

on you long enough uh just because the minerals that are in it, um, it, it, it'll start to create heat on the body and it will also, it acts like quicksand. So the mud was actually like sucking people under. Yeah. Um, I, I, I've definitely heard stories that like, um, I'll tell you guys afterwards cause I don't want to traumatize the whole show, but it is things that like I don't know if I could go on living if that happened. Some of the stuff that I've heard involving the mud. I've heard stories come in that are heartbreaking. Yeah, that's not good. Yeah, the mud aspect, I think, was the biggest thing.

What is kind of like a little bit, I guess, enlightening, heartening, whatever word you want to use is. So with all the stuff going on, we had a flood of people come in. Females on the ground day one. They weren't in the official capacity because we didn't have roads. They can't bring in the big semis because there's no road. So they were on the ground day one, um, airdropping and supplies. And then the, the Cajun Navy showed up that afternoon. Um, the Redneck Air Force showed up. Um, we had, um, the coolest thing was we had, um, uh, um, mule teams, like old timey mule

trains actually were showing up and delivering supplies, but all these people are showing up day one. Um, and one of all the, the host of, you know, first responders and everything, the local therapists stepped up. They were doing pro bono cases, working with the first responders, trying to help them just digest the trauma they're seeing. But in that, they've actually started, I sent, actually, I think I put it in the Patreon chat, the screenshots of people just talking about, hey, how to be, these are things that you should probably have on hand for a storm because people doesn't even have the basics like you know cans

of food um the actually i can use one of my friends because she doesn't listen to this one she'll never hear this she um we found out like during the storm she doesn't keep food in the house she buys her meals daily if she's gonna to cook, she buys everything she's going to cook that day. It's wild to me to think that, but when everything went out, she had no food. The other thing that was a little interesting, because everything was cash only

around here. Most people don't keep cash on them. The only reason that I was even good at it is the sad part is it was in my business, and my business was cut off from the house because of the, the, you know, the sheer flood of water going through downtown that was still actively running for three days past the storm. Uh, I had, um, I had like a $500 cash deposit sitting at my desk at work. So we had to find a way to get to work so that I could get the cash. Then we could actually use it on various things. But most people don't have cash.

And we actually went to one store and we bought some more canned goods. Not so much that we didn't because we didn't have food, but I was tired of eating expired MRE. And if she basically had to eat one more thing of spaghetti, she was going to murder me. she basically had to eat one more thing of spaghetti she was going to murder me um but while we're there something that you know um if you know if say um that you're addicted to like alcohol or something like that and you know are your caffeine like no like but these are things that you have to have in your system think about having more of it before the storm hits because like there is guys you know basically tweaking because they haven't had their beer and they're going through withdrawals and all the stores are shut down now if i under now i've never been

addicted to something so i don't know you're being a therapist maybe you do isn't alcohol withdrawals potentially fatal yeah uh the the bins from alcohol after all can kill you and it is it is physically painful. I believe that. That's why, like, if anyone tries to, like, go off alcohol, they generally recommend that you check yourself into a hospital because they're going to titrate you off and give you pain meds. Wow. Jesus.

Man, that's a heck of a time to be laid up, you know, in a disaster scenario like that especially over something like your alcoholism or your caffeine addiction or whatever like i yeah hey i'm the first one to admit i function well in the morning because of coffee anymore which is why i have 10 pounds of it it's sitting over there it. Yeah. It was wild just thinking about these things, you know, and just seeing the different stuff. But like a lot of people,

you know, they just didn't have the basic supplies. You know what? It kind of even told us like, wait a second, we don't have a radio because who has a radio these days? You know, I get it.

Like if you're listening to this, look, I have a radio. Well, you know what? I don't have a radio. And the closest thing I had to it was something in my garage that you had, like, it was like an old, but it had to like be plugged in it had no battery capacity and like i was thinking man i have a battery powered radio of weather bands but it stays in

my camper that's up in winchester that right when i because i have i own two campers one that's a travel camper the other is up on center blocks that up a place that i go to multiple times a year for a shooting competition because I don't feel like pulling it back and forth nine hours. But everything else, that's there. All my battery-powered stuff is there because everything in that camper is battery-powered. Hey, man, that's something that people don't think about some days. I'm going to tell you that most people don't think about a lot of these things until you're faced with them head first. That's usually when the thinking starts.

I've been very frank on this show and in person for years about the fact that I'm not a rocket scientist. I'm not the smartest guy alive, and I'm certainly not God's gift to preparedness or storm readiness. Most of the stuff my family does, we do because I learned this the hard way by eating the

suck sandwich and realizing it didn't taste very good. And then be like, you know, I should do some of these things so it doesn't suck as bad next time. So like there is no shame whatsoever in hindsight. What I have been doing is that I basically just opened up a Word document on my laptop in the middle of this, like when, because we had power. So, you know, I could use my laptop for no internet, even though no internet. But I was just basically just typing out ideas of things to fix. Like why, like in the moment, okay, this is something that needs to be fixed now.

So that way I don't forget it in hindsight. Perfect. I mean, anytime you have a scenario like this, if you think of something, well, it's top of mind. You got to write that stuff down because by the time you get through everything, you're going to be exhausted and there's no way in hell you're going to remember the first thing you thought of, you know, day one of the storm. So how about, you know, after the flooding went down,

after the initial damage was all done, what kind of major effects did you see? I mean, obviously, intermittent cell towers, I'm sure, intermittent power, water. What did you notice? about four to five days for us to get out of our mountain just because of the town came in and there was power poles down everywhere.

So they basically contracted the big wrecker company in town to just park their wrecker trucks blocking roads and just to stop people from going downtown because there was a lot of looting going on. So just trying to because there was a lot of looting going on. So just trying to, like, shut down on the sheer amount of looting going on.

And, you know, to try to keep people out of the immediate danger zones. So once I finally was able to get out, we started helping friends. And a lot of, again, that's a lot of what I noticed was just, I don't know, just the sheer amount of devastation. was just um i don't know just the sheer amount of devastation um there is still like people's entire houses are just gutted and just you know stacked 20 feet on the curve in front of them and i don't know the uh i know this isn't part of the actual question but like uh like the survival aspect was really it was real um when when i remember when we got um i got self we got cell phone coverage back um and not like um not even internet like cell phone coverage back i'm sitting there i was laying in bed watching youtube and just you know trying to think of something else and all of a sudden he hit me

like i'm laying in my bed watching youtube and there are people that don't have a house tonight because they watched it float around the river and man that struck me so hard i just couldn't sleep that night because of that. I can't imagine. No, but I mean, survivor guilt is a very, that's a very real, very palpable thing for people that go through any kind of traumatic, shared traumatic experience because you, and Eddie, you're the therapist.

I'm just the guy that, you know, got treated for survivor guilt decades ago. But like, you do get in your own head about like why did that storm take them take them out and not me why did it destroy their home and not mine you start to feel guilty because you didn't get screwed as bad as everybody else did and for anybody that's never lived through it i mean you can rationalize it but there's my experience has been that there's nothing rational about the after effects of trauma. It is purely emotional.

And even for the most rational, hyper-organized, type A, neurodivergent person you probably have ever met, I can't control my emotions when it comes to traumatic events. It gets into you. It's going to go where it goes. The thing that I've really seen that I've been appreciative of is, I'll probably rabbit trail on this thought, so pull me back if I go too off course,

is the sheer amount of on the ground, grassroots people helping. The government is the government. It has red tape. If you want to try to bring down your track hoe and your back hoe to help the government, the government is the government. They has red tape. Like, you know, if you want to try to bring down your track hoe and your backhoe to help

and you go through the FEMA camp, well, they have to make sure that, you know, your license and insured and stuff like this, because, you know, it's just, you do something, you mess up. They it's, and you were, you say you were helping at a FEMA, then you could make the situation worse. And so there were a hundred percent people coming down. They weren't saying anything. And trust me, we, I was part of the some of the people that was helping get people down here that was like, all right, hey, this person just needs help.

I'll just say what it is. So the Masons, the Masons across the country really stepped up and they already have the court, all the lodges are thing. And so probably about 80% of the supplies you see that came to this area were donated by Masons are, were handled through Masons. And the, the, the National Guard actually was, has been working directly with the Masons on the ground because of all the, most of the warehouses here are owned by Masons. So it's been, been kind of an interesting aspect in that. Seeing what it's been really cool seeing all the people step up and help and all the donations come through. And I mean,

it's, I think I shared, I shared this with Nick, but the coolest thing I think is going on right now, like I'm in my office in downtown Canton, right behind me, they're doing those trunk or treat stuff. Well,

you know, if you've lost your entire house, you don't really have the bandwidth to buy your kid a Halloween costume. So a group of people came down and had Halloween costumes for kids and artists showed up and are doing face painting for the kids and they can, so they can go pick out a costume, get their face paint and then go trick or treating. It's fantastic. I mean, I'm sure, I mean, little things like that, that we just haven't thought about.

Right. I mean, I don't have to tell you, I do, you know, better than probably either me or Phil that the kids, the kids are going to be hit really hard by this because I can't imagine they're back in school for most of them. Actually, so Nashville started back this week. Really? They lost 27 days. Wow. That's impressive. So a lot of, I forget the name of the organization. And if someone – I'm going to describe it. If someone knows it by all means, please say something.

But it is – it's a Christian church nonprofit that their whole mission is they give water to like peep areas that don't have it. Like they supplied water to Flint, Michigan. Most of it, they go to third world countries. Like they can set up like filtration systems and rivers that's basically pure mud and give fresh water. Well, they went around and hooked up these water filtration systems to every single school because Asheville currently has water. But when you turn it on, it's brown and they tell you it's 100% not potable. And to shower with it probably still feels bad. But these filtration systems can like make fresh water so soon as the schools had fresh water they immediately started um getting

kids back in school just for the normalcy of it i mean my wife's a teacher and i'd heard um and her school actually surprisingly did not lose internet i don't know if they're a satellite internet or not but as soon as they had power, they had internet. So they were opened up as a community hub almost like day four or five, they opened up. And they may have had a Starlink system. I don't know, because Elon Musk donated a lot of Starlink. That's his big thing.

He always donates the satellite internet. But regardless, they had it. But I remember hearing one of the seniors say, I lost my freshman year to COVID. I can't lose my senior year to this. We need to be back in school. Very fair. That's pretty big. It is huge. The thing that I always think about is that

this is football season. Football is pretty big to these kids around here. It's big to the town. The game they were able to finally play a game back last week was the first game they played and a little little pride moment the the town that i live in they they beat their rival um 49 to zero i think those boys had some aggression to get out a little energy but there's a lot i mean there's a lot to be said for Return to Normalcy, and

I don't know, out in the audience, how many people have lived through an event this serious, or they had this far-reaching set of After Effects, but there's a lot to be said for just wanting to get back to your normal routine. And it is

the littlest stuff that makes things more bearable like you brought up you know people being addicted to substances like there's a reason why there's 25 pounds of coffee on that back shelf and like two pounds of pipe tobacco over there because if i have to go through this disaster i want to have my you know my smoking pipe and my coffee. That's just my comfort. But for these kids, it's their routine. It's school. It's sports. It's talking to their friends.

It's all those things that kind of adults don't think about because we're thinking about big problems. And I think sometimes we totally overlook the fact that for these kids, they're dealing with the same thing we are. They just see the world differently. I mean, the day after Hurricane Ida, my kid was flying a kite in the front yard because the wind was really good for it. Perfect way for her to decompress after spending a night sitting in the hallway with us listening to a Cat 3 hurricane blow the roof off. Absolutely. Yeah, the return to normalcy is definitely something. Absolutely.

Yeah, the return to normalcy is definitely something. I mean, I used to – so when my wife hurt her shoulder, the reason I was out of town was because I have access to some honey land about five hours away, and I just went hunting. I decided, like, our personal house was good. We had power. We had water. We had food. And I need it. And I've been, at that point, a week working with the first responders and then just clients coming, filtering back into my business. Like I need to go sit in the woods.

And so it was good. It was perfect for me to go sit in the, in the campground. Well, we call it a campground cause I, we've built a small campground in these woods, but go sit around a fire, you know, shoot the shit with my friend and then sit under a tree the next morning watching deer. It just, it was the return to normalcy for me. And now speaking of that, which is kind of interesting, um, something I haven't really thought about till actually probably a couple of days ago, most of the meat that I eat honestly is cause I harvest it myself. And at this point, generally in like the hunting season, I've already put two to three deer in the freezer. I haven't gotten one yet because of the storm. and most of the places i hunt don't exist anymore because i always hunt at the

riverbeds so like i so like i think i'm gonna have to actually buy hamburger for the first time in years which is not gonna be fun it's gonna be a change for sure you know yeah it's this is a little bit of a backtrack but you you're talking about how nobody can be ready for a 35 foot wall of water and we were talking with the guys from terminal element and a few of the other shows that we had on a couple weeks back they were saying one of them brought are there events that you just can't prepare for and and i think this is one of them but what you can do and what i think you were able to do and some other people down there were able to do is they were at least able to care for themselves and lighten the burden on the other emergency response communities. You know? Yeah.

If you have the ability to feed yourself and water yourself and not have to go pick up supplies, then you leave the supplies to someone who absolutely needs them. And, you know, maybe was less prepared or maybe just they could have been all the prepared in the world, but their house got floated down the river. I mean, if my house got taken out by a river, it doesn't matter how prepared you are. All that stuff is now 50 miles, 100 miles downriver. You're not getting it back. Yeah. But that is kind of a key point, though, is that if you are the person that takes what we talk about in the show seriously and you have dealt with your own family's preparedness, you're right, Eddie. You aren't one of the people that's scrabbling for supplies at the last minute. But if your neighbor or your friend's house gets taken out, you're now in a position to care for yourself and potentially help them too.

into like, these people should have prepared better. They wouldn't have been screwed because there's the truth of the matter is, is that there is a certain point at which there is literally nothing you can do to avoid. When I was, when I was enlisted, we always used to say that the best you can hope for is to avoid the bullet addressed to whom it may concern. Right. But if it's got your name on it, that's it. It's your turn to go. There's no getting away from it. So it is what it is. But the goal is always the reason you keep your head down, the reason you, you know, you look for cover concealed. But the reason you do all the soldier stuff is to avoid the bullet addressed to whom it may concern. And that's kind of the way I look at these kinds of storms of these disasters.

Your goal is to avoid the storm addressed to whom it may concern. goal is to avoid the storm addressed to whom it may concern. But if that river picks your house to move or that tornado picks your neighborhood to flatten, you're out of luck. That's it. But the goal is that if you're not, now you're in a position to care for yourself. You're in a position to care for yourself and your family. You're in a position to help your neighbors. You're in position because you have the things. And that's also like one of the reasons why I've, I've been shifting focus in the last several months towards trying to educate communities, because if you have a whole community of people that think the way we do now,

if any one person's home gets wrecked, everybody else can help. But like you said, Eddie, you know, like day one, y'all had all this help screaming in that area but there's there will there will almost never be a situation where there's enough help

for the number of people that need help so if you could take yourself out of the realm of i need help then you lessen the load for everybody else yeah there's a couple thoughts there i mean like some of the houses i got i mean there's definitely areas i got flood that like flooded last time so they knew we knew they were going to get wiped out. Unfortunately, they're usually the poor areas. Like the trailer park got wiped out again. We knew it was going to happen. Most of the people that live in the trailer park are the migrant workers.

You know, they're good, hardworking people that, um, they're here to provide for their family. Their kids go to these schools. They're, you know, they're, they're hardworking people. They just live by the river. Cause that's the cheap, that's a cheap area. It's funny that living by the river is the cheap area, but's because it's it's the trailer park you know but regardless of that but a lot of people um that lost stuff like my friend that had their basement flooded and a lot

of other people um they lived you know a quarter mile from the river you're not expecting water to hit you when you're this far from the river so like a lot of people who lost stuff just like what how do you prepare for something going through your basement when you're that far from the river? But going to, you know, trying to help for people, this was kind of like the enlightening eyes open moment for my wife. Because like she, we have lived through hurricanes before where she has, you know, students who had to tell her like, hey, they had to get carried out by boats from, you know, the, the, the, you know, the project housing because that's where they were in like the town didn't care, but like, it was so impartial to her because it was, it was a student and yeah, she, while she, my wife is incredible empathetic and she cares for all her kids. It was her student. She, she didn't really know them outside of just, it's a student, if that makes sense. But when it happened to friends and when she's actually, when she, I think helped her,

it's no longer a professional barrier. When she helped our friend basically grab her wedding dress and go, I guess we'll throw this away because it's ruined. That, I think, it kind of hit her. So right afterwards, I remember that night after we, the first night of helping our friends, you know, clean up their, just throw their whole life away because we're just stripping everything out. just throw their whole life away. Cause we're just stripping everything out. Um, she comes to me, she goes like,

Hey, I want to, um, start keeping cash on hand in the, um, the, the, the safe.

I want to start a, once she basically like equated preparedness, not to the crazy gun guy. And we're just, we're stockpiling guns because, um, because you know, for the third world war and actually going like,

Hey, if we would have had these things, we could have be in position to help our friends more because we've already taken care of ourselves. That's when I think she started getting on board with everything. And I can't, again, fault her because she's the better person with money. So in order to do all this, we have to be better with money, and that aka means Eddie has to be better with money.

So by her wanting to jump on board gives me a reason to be better with money. I think you just kind of made my point though, man, because like she's, she's look, it sounds to me like your wife is looking at us from the perspective of like something that is very, obviously very important to the two of y'all,

which is helping your friends taking care of, you know, the people that are in your lives. If preparedness is a route in that direction, she's on board. And that's why, that's why i know you would express this to me like some weeks ago and i had said you know i hate that this experience has been so frightening for her yeah because it is oh my gosh but my hope is that something good

comes out of it you know like this is this is as a, of a, of an experience as it was that the downstream effect is that it's a change in lifestyle towards something that might benefit the two of y'all, you know? Can I do like the mental health aspect of this for a minute, please? Absolutely. So like, um, she won't be, she won't be mad that I share this, but she had, she started experiencing panic attacks when trying to lay down, like, like last week. So we're what, three, four weeks removed from the storm. She started experiencing panic attacks while sleeping and like, she couldn't understand why. And so like the, the, and then I've been hearing these from other people and clients, you know, just like the, the, now that they're starting to wind down, that's now when the panic is hitting. And that's pretty common. Actually, the. The human body is really good at trying to keep it together when the shit's hitting the fan.

Not everyone can do it, but the human body essentially wants to live and wants to survive. That's why we think of suicide as such a taboo because it's so hard for a rational brain to go, I'm going to end myself. And so that's why the rational brain go, I'm going to survive the storm no matter what. And if that means I need to block off certain emotions, then that's what it's going hard for a rational brain to go, I'm going to end myself. And so that's why the rational brain go, I'm going to survive the storm no matter what. And if that means I need to block off certain emotions and that's what it's going to do. It's not healthy when the brain does that for the record, but it's how the brain views it as I'm going to protect, protect the host, which is you. And so when things start sliding down, that's when your brain starts trying to decompress and work on everything that's going on. And if, um, and that's, and that's when like brain starts trying to decompress and work on everything that's going on and if um

and that's and that's when like a lot of people start experiencing these panic attacks and i'm gonna can i share a technique that i've shared out that'll save you guys you know 100 dollars from going to a therapy session it takes honestly guys 30 seconds you're willing to share it takes 30 seconds and what it is so i gotta do a slight build-up so we understand with the human brain we have the left hemisphere, right hemisphere. We have the prefrontal cortex, and you have the central nervous system, basically the part of the brain that is the sleep, eat, kill, fuck part. It's the animal part. And yes, I understand I say the F word a lot for a therapist.

I'm not on duty right now. Get off my butt. He's a better therapist. I did 10 years of fire EMS. I did 10 years of fire EMS. I did 10 years of firing EMS. So I, my first, my first boss was a Navy chief.

So I know all the words anyways, the, um, so we understand that the left hemisphere, right hemisphere, the brain doesn't like to communicate across the hemispheres. And we, we know that for a fact because it's just,

um, because we can shut down one half of the hemisphere and the, the body can, you know, act's not trying to communicate and try to make up for it. So what we do, though, is to get the body to communicate. It involves two techniques. It's called a thing called box breathing. And essentially imagine it's when you breathe in through your nose and you're out through personal lips. And you do it for four seconds. So you count, but you breathe in.

That's one side. You hold for four seconds. You breathe out and you breathe back and you hold and you just keep going. So imagine you're basically building a box and just in your head because it's the four steps. Well, you, if you're right-handed, you put right over left. If you're left-handed, you put left over right. But you cross your feet, your arms, you bend over like you're sitting down, like you hunch over. You put your eyes on the ground, bend your head down, and then close your eyes. Essentially, you do a lot of different things that you don't normally do.

We call it pretzel breathing. But what it's essentially doing is because you're crossing all these different aspects, your body recognizes you don't usually do this. And so it starts sending signals all across the brain and up and down the central nervous system, aka that like core survival part of the brain. And you count for you count to 120. While doing this breathing. And what it does is that we know for a fact two

minutes recess the central nervous system. And so why so while resetting the central nervous system and being cross and making your body send signals back and forth, it will essentially make your body figure out what's going on and release the quote unquote negative, even though emotions are neither positive nor negative. They're just emotions, but it releases the negatives that are holding hold on you, resetting the system and allowing you to almost take a breath. Interesting. I've actually heard that before. I've never had to do it, but I've heard it. It's essentially EMDR because EMDR involves rapid eye sensation and movement,

basically making the brain communicate. But this is, it's a light version of EMDR. Interesting. And if like, and the other thing that you can do is that, I think I forgot to mention this part because when I said cross, you basically you take your right hand or left hand if you're right handed because I am. You grab them like you're I can really, really show it holding a video. So if you guys can think of a better way of showing this, you can. But you put over, grab your hands, put it to your belly, flip it up. So you're kind of crossing all these different things in a weird way. And then you do the bending over.

If that hurts because your wrist just cross over your arms and tap your shoulders. Like the idea is that the more movements that you can do, the more things that you can incorporate into it that you don't normally do. Your body will start trying to figure out what's going on. You can also, if you're having a distressing memory nightmare, do this with your kids, for the record. If your kids are having distressing thoughts and stuff, have them think about that distressing thing while they're

counting to 120. If counting to 120 is hard, set a timer. What it will do is your brain will essentially try to figure out what's going on. It's the same thing if you've ever fallen asleep and woken up with an eureka moment, it's because your subconscious has taken over the brain and figured it out.

Interesting. And yes, this is basically stemming. What stemming is, it's making the brain use more signals firing back and forth. But the idea is that we're resetting the system and getting yourself out of that fight or flight mode. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So you're hard rebooting your brain.

Yeah. It's a hard reset. And it's really good if you work like jobs or, you know, like it's really good for first responders, but it's really good for jobs where like it's go, go, go, go. Because when you're done going, you can't just stop. Like if you take a long road trip when you get home, even though you're exhausted, you can't just fall asleep because your brain is go, go, go still because you've just been awake. So it resets the brain, allows it to calm down and go to sleep or, you know, get out of the panic mode. You would have been really handy to have around about 20 years ago when I got back from Iraq. Thanks, Eddie. Yeah, you found it different. You're welcome. 20 years ago, I was graduating high school. Well, thanks.

I was demobbing and going to college, so I wasn't that far ahead of you. I was in, I think, eighth grade. Oh, thanks for that, Nick. Yeah, I mean, so that's essentially i just saved you 150 bucks from going to a therapist i mean don't get wrong i'm a therapist i love our profession but like a lot of the stuff that we try to gatekeep you don't need to gatekeep these this information is out there to better your community that's fantastic but if you do need a therapist or you just want to talk to a therapist eddie is available if you live in his area yeah in north

carolina and i'll can i do um i'll do this plug because I know you'll be okay. Absolutely. If you're looking for like a pro-gun therapist, look up Walk the Talk America. It's an organization I sit on the board with. We are the intersection between guns and mental health. We work with the firearm companies to basically be pro-mental health. And we train therapists to understand what basically is gun culture. But what we have there is we have two things. We have a free and anonymous mental health test that you can take that doesn't get reported, but you can take it and go, hey, these answers are indicating that you may be suffering from anxiety, maybe suffering depression. There's a whole host of other things, but for record, but I just use those two off the top of my head. if and if you would like to learn more we have a basically a list of therapists um like you can filter by state that have taken our um taken our trainings and based in like uh the trainings

evolve all the way you know learning all the about gun culture it's all and also it's like a five-hour training but you can take the you've gone through our training that are not not essentially pro-gun some of them are but they're they're you know they're not anti-gun essentially so you can go to them like hey what do i do to relax i like going shooting because you know a lot of people are taboo to say that i'm not gonna go into the reasons why you guys can probably figure it out but again it's walk the talk america um it's and the the the test it's wtta.org slash love you know it we talk about physical health on this podcast a fair amount we talk about financial health on this podcast a fair amount mental health is no different

if your body and your mind and your finances aren't in order it's going to make everything in life harder so if you're having trouble you should address it in any of those aspects. And to that note, the person that I went off on earlier about FEMA, I do apologize for the shortness of it. But you hit it. You struck a nerve there because I'm personal friends with some of the people on the ground in those camps. So it struck a nerve. I understand they're not perfect, but it did struck a nerve. Well, you know, unfortunately, like you said earlier, Eddie, the government has red tape.

We all know that. And in this case, unlike in the Gulf Coast, on the East Coast, you guys aren't used to that many hurricanes or that severe of a hurricane. So the infrastructure can't handle it. And if the road doesn't exist the truck can't drive down it and then you're stuck with hurricanes or with helicopters and there's not a whole lot of places yeah yeah you're not a whole lot of not a whole lot of places where you can land a helicopter in a mountain community especially if the roads are all screwed the harley davidson harley davidson unit over in hendersonville became um uh improm impromptu airport because they had a big field.

So they would land, drop all their supplies, and take back off. And there was a constant rotation of helicopters just landing there. That's fantastic. That sounds very familiar. Yeah, disturbingly familiar, I'd imagine. Yeah. Well, I mean, having lived through Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Ida, that sounds familiar. Yeah.

The one thing that I saw the other day is that we do have special forces on the ground, including the other, like, you know, the National Guard. But they're there, honestly, providing security for the workers because of this. We had militia units show up in the area. Some of them was overblown, but we heard more about that actually coming up. People were actually looting and attacking the camps, trying to steal supplies. So the Special Forces unit showed up

to provide security for basically the people living in these camps. Because the cops are overworked. So these guys, they can blend in the camp and not be seen. But I noticed some of the stuff, and I texted a buddy of mine, and he's like, hey, are some of your friends here? He goes, yeah, where are you at? I told him, he's like, yeah, they're there.

I was like, cool. Fantastic. Love to have them. If anybody's going to be providing security in its special forces, that's a win. I noticed a guy with a pistol and a beard that looked way too military, i just texted him a green beret i'm like hey i got some friends you know yeah you mentioned the looting and and this comes up after every major natural natural disaster there's always terrible people taking advantage of a terrible situation.

But it sounds to me like the vast majority in this case, like with most cases are people trying to help other people or at the very least trying to not get in the way. Yeah. I mean, we have the people that are taking advantage of all the free stuff going through there and getting everything they can to resell. We've already seen that.

And I will say this, we actually had one when the gas stations started getting turned back on, two of the stations in the town started trying to price gouge. All the politicians immediately called him out and put him on full blast on the internet and everything and shut him down. Governor Cooper, you know, whether you like a Democrat or not hate a Democrat, he's our Democratic current governor. He's kind of a lame duck guy because he's heading out. So because he's lame duck, he decided to use emergency powers on this one. And he suspended the gas tax in western North Carolina. So all of our gas is super cheap right now because you don't have money.

Hey, you know what? If that makes the difference for people, I'm glad that he was willing to help. You know what? If that makes the difference for people, I'm glad that he was willing to help. Well, I mean, if you think about it rationally, that money is supposed to go towards fixing the roads, which are all currently destroyed. So what good is that money going to do now? I've definitely heard some bad stories like that. I mean, one of my clients there, I'm not going to go into too far specifics on this, but their boss essentially lied to him and not paying even though he's salary and said, oh, we can't pay you because you're not at work, even though their salary and pulling a bunch of other shady stuff. I've heard more people, more stuff like this happening. But to that end, there is a, if you happen to be in

this area, in the Western North Carolina area, look up Pisgah Legal Services. They provide free and pro bono work right now to anyone affected by the storm a lot of what they're doing actually is helping people navigate the fema uh stuff because it's confusing it's especially because like sometimes you can get turned down because um because it was a government like you know it was a computer error or something so they're helping people just navigate that stuff and providing the lawsuits and other stuff the companies that are you know gouging people so i mean it's just it's cool to the amount of the people that are stepping up in their own professions it's fantastic i mean we all have skill sets and

mine is definitely not handling government paperwork so i would i would be lost it's not a skill set to be proud of i pay a biller to handle my insurance stuff. Yeah. No, I pay people to be experts in those fields. Exactly. I mean, unfortunately, right now, I'm sure you guys are still probably having network connectivity issues and stuff like that. So it's probably difficult to even research this stuff. Yeah. Okay.

Oh, and for the record, because I know I said I'd mentioned, I am on a hotspot right now. And so we have essentially used in this hour of streaming 1.5 gigabytes of data. So use that for information if you ever need a backup hotspot. Nice. That's good to know. That's about what I expected. That's a little more than I expected. Interesting.

Huh. I mean, for like 1080p video streaming, that's about on target that's good fantastic all right eddie all right one one more quick thing phil sure what's the what's the biggest thing you think you need to assess for yourself to change before next time what's the biggest thing you need to assess? I have an escape plan in case something goes wrong. Okay. Well, we knew a plan.

My plan, essentially, I need to – my plan involved the main highways, and the main highways didn't exist. Fair. And then so that's plan number one is to have multiple routes in and out of this area in case we had to leave because, like, a camper we could have gone we could have like packed up the dogs and the wife and you know if like if we didn't have power and water and we and stuff like that we would have hiked and didn't have a jinner we would have hightailed it to pennsylvania to her parents house um not nothing against my parents even though in north garana but her parents have a fenced in yard we have have dogs. It's kind of makes it easier with dogs. Um, the,

but I don't know, I would have had to, um, I don't even think I have a paper map of the area. I think I would have had to like load up a Google map of just a static image and just try to use that to get out of the area. Just cause I don't like, cause all the roads that I know, the secondary roads I know don't exist either. So like, I don't exist either. So I don't know how it would have gotten out of the area. And then I know you only asked one, but priority number one, I've already told the wife, is I'm going to hire an electrician to put in things that I can disconnect my generator to.

I know that I can probably do it myself, and there's enough knowledge in our Patreon to go through it. But when something that's going to connect straight to my house, and if it goes wrong, wrong my house burns down i think it's just worth a couple hundred bucks to pay i paid for it i mean i i had them do i pay for it but i had them do a full panel swap and a generator hookup and it was like 1200 bucks for the peace of mind that's worth it and that was with a full panel yeah i mean for me what i for me what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna have it hooked up to my barn because i have power i have a sub panel in my bar that runs back to the house so i'm just gonna have it hooked up by the barn so that way the generator is far away from the house that way you're not you're not even here the day never never have to move the chickens are gonna hate me but whatever they're annoying the chickens can yeah and you can't hear that anymore exactly because of the generator yeah all right yeah

and no that that was the thing um it was and it was it was kind of surreal to kind of um think about the difference between this hurricane the hurricanes i experienced when i was living at the coast um and not like the word grip like the hurricanes near pembroke right when we were there is that i even though there's looting stuff like that i didn't ever feel in danger from my wife or i did like my previous place because the previous place they've locked down everything because um i've only had to pull a gun a few times in my life and that was one of them after a hurricane we had a group of like six guys trying to come into our yard to rob um and if it wasn't for the fact i had like an ar

strapped to my chest, my wife said I was overkill, but those guys showed up, they saw, they saw the gun to my chest and I specifically heard them say, not this house. They have a gun. They went three houses down and unfortunately I robbed and raped a woman

and took all her stuff. So like thinking back on it, man, like I wonder if like shooting first was in a problem issue there, but probably in the time, but you know, unfortunately that's like here I didn't, I didn't feel in danger. So like it was on it, man, like I wonder if like shooting first was an issue there, but probably in the time. But, you know, unfortunately, that's like here. I didn't I didn't feel in danger. So like it was it was it was a weird dichotomy of, you know, like, hey, we don't have stuff.

But like my neighbor is all my neighbors. I trust. It's so weird just like being in this area versus somewhere else. You know, you know, it's that's a lot to be said for having a quality community around you. That's a lot to be said for having a quality community around you. And if you do have the luxury to relocate to a place with a better community around you, money can't really, I mean, money can buy that, I guess. But there's not a value you can put to that, to me. Yeah. I mean, like I have left the house before and forgotten to lock the back door just because I went out and threw the trash the night before.

And my first instinct when I got home wasn't to panic, oh, my God, what's stolen? I was like, oh, you idiot, why didn't you lock the door? Like, that wouldn't have been a thing at my previous place. I mean, I left my car unlocked one night, came out, and, like, they stole CDs. Like, who steals CDs these days? They're like $9. What are you doing? Things you can get away with when you live in the country.

Yeah, there's a benefit to it a little bit. The storm was enlightening. It definitely was more devastating than we thought. And a lot of the stuff is just... The build back from this is going to be rough. I read a report the other day that because the lack of power and the lack of water, a lot of restaurants just can't be open right now in Asheville because you can't cook with dirty water.

And so a lot of the, a lot of the people in Asheville are service workers. So if there's no service, they're leaving the area. So there's mass droves of people leaving and which then the housing, this area is already insane. And instead of all these people leaving and making it better i've already seen the reports that what housing does exist the land

wards are like tripling the rent to try to get money from people that's unfortunate which i get it is your prerogative to do so but like it does suck there's at a certain point there is a moral obligation there to not be a complete shit bird. Yeah. The hard part to me, as we start to wrap this up, because I hear giggling little girls in my house, which means the pre-Halloween festivities have begun. Oh, no. So Phil's going to become a giggling little

girl in a second. Got it. Phil died. I think we lost Phil. Alright, so the girls, so if you're listening to this your own screen what I see is a little hand coming into the screen the girls are taking over right now

all right so I think we have lost Phil I do believe the girls have pulled his internet in order to send him probably trick or treating early we'll find out we'll see if he comes back here uh eddie do you did you want to plug your practice um sure if you're located yeah i mean if you're located in north carolina um my practice is called a mountain mind counseling um my only ask is that

you i can't be direct friends with you. There has to be some clear separation, but feel free to look it up. It's Mountain Mine Counseling. My website's mountainminenc.com. Awesome. So that's mountainminenc.com. Yeah, feel free to do that. Oh, God, the terrorist is back.

So did they rip your internet out of the wall to force you to go trick-or-treating? No, the power blinked because we have a storm front that's getting ready to pass through, and Stuart is going to absolutely fillet me for this, but I still do not have a full battery backup on the podcasting desktop, so when the power goes out, this is the backup plan. But I didn't want to just say goodbye without thanking Eddie for coming on the show and giving us his perspective

because you and your community have lived through something pretty serious and I think for a lot of people around the country that aren't there and don't really have a good signpost for what that is, it's hard to put into... It's hard to put into,

it's hard, it's hard to envision. You know what I mean? Absolutely. It is. I really appreciate you coming on, Eddie. Yeah. I appreciate you guys having me and letting me kind of share their perspective. And again, like, I know I shared the practice, but if you guys have questions and stuff, like more, the techniques, feel free to reach out through the email link. And I can at least try to help you direct find someone that like, okay, hey, maybe you live in a different state and you want to seek help. I can, I'm generally really, basically what I'm offering is I'm really good at like reading Psychology Today profiles and like reading through the BS and saying, yeah, this is a person you can trust. This is a person that's blowing smoke up your butt. Fantastic. Glad to hear it, man.

I think, Phil, you can't control all the buttons, can you? If I hit end of stream, will that play the ending video? Yes, it certainly should. Thank you for joining Matter of Facts Podcast. Fantastic. We'll see if I screw this up. It's been good having you on, Eddie. We'll see you guys next time.

Thanks. Bye, guys. See you, guys. Thank you.