The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: When Mother Nature Chooses Violence

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

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Welcome back to Matter Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravaleigh, Andrew, Nick, are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matter of Facts podcast. We are already being harassed by people in the chat. I think it's hilarious though that Proud Texans accusing anybody else to being late

because he's always late to these freaking shows except for this episode and the last one. That's okay. That's okay. It's my fault. It's my fault. I got a phone call like 20 seconds before we were supposed to go on the air. But it was family related. It was.

It was well within balance. Yeah, it was either going to be family related work related or family related medical something or other. And it was family related work related so it can wait a little bit. Yeah. Okay. So we got raggle, fraggle. I see a Dr. Scary guy.

a proud Texan and a Jim Rouse. And if I miss somebody, I apologize. I don't think I did. I just did a quick little once over. Let's do admin work and let's get to a topic. First and foremost, you should promote bad decisions by becoming a patron. And if you don't know what promoting bad decisions means, you're not in the patron chat because we promote bad decisions constantly. Like, it's literally like having a big group of older brothers who are like, yes, you should go buy that new gun you really want.

Yes, you should spend $4,000 on the night vision. Yes, you should go spend a weekend camping in the woods with your idiot friends instead of going out on date and I with your wife. We are here for you to promote bad decisions and make your spouses angry. If only you will allow us. True. Sometimes detailed instructions on how to build illegal devices. Not that you would, but it's fun to know how to do. Yeah.

I would say that this little excursion comes with a VPN, but if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, If you talk to us and don't have a VPN by now, I don't know what you're doing with your life. I don't like to inconvenience my FBI handler. That, that, that is a point. My FBI handler does, I'm convinced he gets a real, a real kick out of the, um, the memes that I share around. That's exactly right guy. We're learning what not to do. Exactly.

And what felonies to avoid. That's it. Exactly. It's an educational experience. It is. Also, you should buy merch from, For the vibes from the Southern Gals, it supports small business. It supports us.

You get a funny t-shirt that links in the show description right above or right below the whole Patreon link. I don't remember what order they're in, but they're all in the show description. And if you'd like to prevent war crimes, you should check out disaster coffee. You use code M-O-F to save a couple percent on your coffee order. And if you want to encourage war crimes up to the Canadian level, I recommend whiskey in the coffee. Whiskey and the coffee is always a good decision when you're not at work. Depends on the work. Look, workman's comp doesn't pay out if they find out you were drunk on the job.

That's all I'm saying. They don't pay out if you were drunk on the job. But that Uncle Randy's front porch, my wife has started drinking that almost exclusively cold now and claims it tastes like chocolate. She says it tastes very chocolatey if you drink it over ice. Okay, so here, two things. First of all, Uncle Randy's front porch does kind of have, I wouldn't call it like, when you say chocolate, I wouldn't say it has like a milk chocolate or a sweet chocolate taste. To me, it's almost more like cocoa. Maybe.

Or like Baker's chocolate, you know what I mean? She just said it tastes chocolatey to me. And my brain said that's chocolate. Yeah. Well, the air thing is, like, whether the call, whether you drink your coffee hot or cold, whether you brew it hot or cold, whether you brew it hot or. Cole does influence the taste. So by icing the coffee, she might be bringing more of that note. Could be. Could be. She really enjoys it. So that's all it matters. Yeah. So a couple of comments. Dr. Scary guy. Yes, Krisby and the fam is Southern Gals. That's who's running the

merch for us. They do a great job. Guy the guy that comments. Yes. Learn what to learn what to do. Do not do as we say or as we do. Yes. And then there's some smart ass here that's still talking about not getting a chainsaw before Mother Nature chose violence. To be fair, he gave you way more shit about your lack of shotgun. And I have amended both of those and got no credit for either one. No, no, you never will. I never will. It's like the bridge builder all over again.

Yeah. Dr. Scarry Guy, I only use VPN to download my little pony comics. I read terrorism material in clear text. Might as well. I mean, strong move. Strong move. One more comment, then we'll get to it. Uprising blend is definitely more acidic than the darker bruise.

Yeah, like I've talked about before, Rangel, the, so in general terms, the more towards light roast you get, you're going to get more acidity, the more towards dark roast, you're going to get more bitterness. And, like, based on that, you can kind of get a medium, a medium dark, and a dark. and you can figure out what you like pretty quickly. But you can also have some influence over the acidity of the coffee with brew methods. So like if you like the taste of uprising, but the acidity is a bit much, you could try cold brewing it for one. Definitely don't brew it and then microwave it twice the next day. That makes it much more acidic.

Please don't microwave coffee. That's just sad. put it in the sink, give it a proper burial, start another pod. Besides, you buy more that way. You do. All right. So one more thing before we get to going about this. There will be upcoming reloading content because I had a person that I know,

I met through Cypressurvivalist, who's also a listener of this podcast, who called me literally yesterday and said, how fortuitous you've been talking about reloading. I just bought someone's turnkey reloading setup who wanted to get out of the hobby. Sure. And I'm not going to put his business out in the street. But he spent maybe a tenth of what he has in terms of value, in terms of like components, equipment, and everything else. He could literally start manufacturing ammunition tomorrow, except he has never done it before.

So he asked if he could ride shotgun with me on my bench, just kind of get a feel for things. Sure. I told him the next time I am spinning up rifle reloading. I will happily invite him over and, you know, we'll get him, we'll get him educated. I got a coworker that he shoots a little bit of nine mill. So I talked him into buying components and then just bringing him over to run off on my press since he will buy exactly what I told him. I said, we can just turnkey, dump powder in, put bullet on thing, put casings in the hopper, good to go. We can spend him out his years worth of ammo in like two hours. Yeah. Jim, I still like you, even though you microwave coffee. I just, I think microwave and coffee tastes like sadness. Look, my wife gets the fresh pot of coffee every morning.

I drink whatever's left the next day. Okay, but I am forced to admit that I am a bit of a coffee snob. You are. That's okay. I didn't set out to become a coffee snob, but daily repetitive drinking of very, very high-end coffee has kind of spoiled me at this point. Oh, yeah. I'm sure if I got to the point of micro-roasting my own coffee like you do,

that I would eventually hate microwave day-old coffee. But at this point, I need dark, warm, not hot, because I've never really managed to drink hot coffee. It's always room temperature by the time I get to it and somewhat caffeinated. This sounds like a parallel to the whole. reloading conversation we were having last episode where we were talking about like yeah you know neck tension might matter but it doesn't matter enough to make a difference because i don't shoot that well yeah or like i'm shooting a 1980s ramington 700 hunting weight barrel and trying to get match precision out of it i mean the barrel is kind of become a limiting factor at some point yeah i mean

the fact that i'm using a mr coffee drip machine is definitely a factor at this point now i will i will go to bad over this because there are coffee nerds and there are coffee snobs who say like drip machines are the most awful thing it's on earth. And while I will happily admit they're not my first choice, I'll drink drip coffee all day long. I actually, I like the taste of drip coffee or like a percolator. Same thing. Well, you got to remember too. It's like, that's the coffee you and I grew up on. This drip coffee. I mean, blue collar free coffee in the break room is always shitty burnt drip coffee. So anything that's, not burnt and still drip fed, probably all right.

Although I will say this much, that 80 cup Hamilton Beach that I keep over there for activities. I hear that does a good job. One 12-ounce bag of disaster coffee fills that thing enough to do 80 cups. And it makes a decent cup of coffee, I have to admit. You know, I have found, as with most cooking, coffee, tea, anything like that. chilly the larger the batch you do the better it turns out so really you should just overcook everything i have i have had the thought of like i've thought about dragging that thing out uh like a summer camp trip just because like but it it could never be one of those days where we're like we're

going into town or we're going to do stuff it would have to be a right we're going to sit around the campfire and groove off all day long because there's no way on earth even with the group we bring out summer camp we're going to drink 80 cups of coffee in anything less than like half a day i'm good for like 60 cups by lunch 68 ounce cups oh no 60 ounces that's what it is it's a little difference my bad i'm good for six i'm good for 60 ounces by lunch me and rachel need to have a discussion if you drink through um was it 60 60 times eight yeah no that'd be a lot 480 ounces You'd never be out of the bathroom. No, I just missed it my math because my, my, I, I, I went to, Yeti coffee mug is 20 ounces.

20 times three, 60. And then I forgot to convert it back. Anyway, the whole point of the episode was to talk about when mother nature chooses violence. Because, you know, it is, it is April. We're getting back into spring and some spring storm season. And we've already had some listeners get storm damage. Yep. Winter is receding.

The air is beginning to warm up. The thunderstorms are getting more energetic. We probably are out of the range of blizzards up where y'all are, I'm assuming. I know nothing about blizzards. No. We have had blizzards up until a week from now. That is the dumbest bull crap have heard my life. The year my wife was born, her mom went into the hospital.

It was at 85 degrees. And when they left with her in the car, it was. 25 in blowing snow. You live in hell. Yes. Yes. I literally do. And that's that's completely discounting the politics of the region. No, just just the weather you live in hell. My family decided, hey look, you know, the East Coast kind of shitty. We don't like it. Fuck it. We're going to go a little bit further. They got to the Midwest and they went, you know what? This is absolute hell. But I don't feel like walking anymore. So we're staying and nobody ever left. I can't talk too much smack though, because you're thinking about where I live. Like when,

When the Rabelais family came here in 1732, it was nothing but frigging alligators, mosquitoes the size of chickens, and swamp land. And these bunch of kouillon's looked around and thought, this is the place to set up shop and live here for 290 freaking years. Or the French dropped them off and they forgot to continue walking. My wife is correct. Illinois has already had 59 tornadoes this spring. So it's been a interesting spring. Yeah, but that is

Raggle. Couldn't hear anything over my screaming child. Isn't parenthood? Turn the volume up. Yeah. Turn it up. They'll appreciate it. Or they'll learn something.

One of the other. It might be something you don't want them to learn depending on the level of spice of the episode, but you know. So, yeah, I mean, that was what we decided to sit and talk about today, 15 minutes and we've been bull crapping the entire time.

But it really just comes down to, like we're getting back in the storm season. We're probably a couple months off from hurricane season. We are at least down here. Like we are well within the range where tornadoes might start to be a thing. We actually had a couple of spin off of a thunderstorm just a couple weeks ago down here. And we're always at risk of major thunderstorms, which around, I don't know what thunderstorms are where you are, Nick. But down here, a good strong thunderstorms like that's street flooding, that's roads impassable, almost.

immediately in the New Orleans area that sometimes is it won't usually immediately lead to like homes flooding but it will drastically reshape your commute home in the afternoons because like whole sections of the city are just no longer accessible because the roads are flooded 18 inches deep so it depends on what we're getting um like last week we got five inches of rain in about two days, which for around I know it's not as much by you, but around us is quite a considerable amount of rain pretty quick. It looks like people are saying

the stream stopped. Huh. It shows it up. Nope. Nope. It says YouTube is live. Huh. Now it's showing nobody's on. Interesting.

Guy the comment. See, here's the weird part, though, is they're still commenting. Mm-hmm. And we're still... Which means it's been... I don't know. We're still streaming to YouTube. It shows everything I'm...

Somebody just dipped over to Facebook, though. That'd be the weirdest freaking thing. If Facebook... No idea, Garrett. Yeah. No idea. No idea. How about I talk and you poke your head in at YouTube and see what's go.

What's up? Can do. All right. YouTube streaming. is having problems. Of course, YouTube's having problems. It's run by idiots. But anyway, so actually, the first time we were going to have this cool little, this cool little, what's called it, a poll for everybody to participate in, and now nobody can participate because the stream got shut down. But we'll throw it up anyway and see if anybody

actually can get in. So there's a poll up right now. If you are watching, this live on the stream, you can type a one, two, three, or four in the chat and you can select which type of storm most concerned you. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzard, or other because I'm not listing all

15,000 different types of frigging problems you could run into, but you know, participate if you feel, if you feel led to. I'll leave that up for a couple of minutes. So it looks like it's just frozen on YouTube. I don't know. I don't know, guys. When I tried to log into it on my end. It just showed it

buffering. So maybe YouTube is upset with us. Don't know. If you see this, Rumble, Facebook, somewhere around there. So we'll see. Nothing we can do about it from our end. It shows our data is good. So what can we do?

That's all right. If anybody's watching, the poll is now live. So, Garrett, you're going to have to type your one again because I had forgotten to start it by the time you typed one. Oh, no. So part of why I want, I recommend to Phil that we talk about this a little bit is when you do get storm damage. There are a few little quick fixes you can do to prevent it from getting worse after the event due to additional storms and whatnot or animals getting in. Obviously, if you can prevent the damage ahead of time, that's always best.

So, Phil, I know around you guys, you get quite a bit of warning for hurricanes. You get a few days warning, right? I mean, so here's the thing. I've made a little secret of the fact. It's not exactly a state secret that you should know that a hurricane's coming into the Gulf at least several days in advance. Excuse me. Got a frog in my throat and he wouldn't hop out. But you at least know that a hurricane's coming into the Gulf.

You don't always know exactly where it's heading initially, but you should be well aware that there's a hurricane coming into the Gulf that has potential to threaten Louisiana coastline several days in advance. Sometimes you may not know until like 48 hours out. It's going to beeline you or it's going to beeline somebody else. So, you know, up around us, it's more tornadoes, blizzards. Blizzards, we get a fair bit of warning for. How does that work?

From a person so. For a person who knows, fuck all about blizzards. All right. So the way it works is they'll be tracking a stormfront, just like with a hurricane. They'll be tracking a weather front. And it's, say, following a pattern where there's a lot of moisture built up in the air. And, you know, just like they predict rainfall, they can predict estimated snow totals. And what they'll do is a couple weeks out, they'll be like, hey, just, you know, there's probably a winter storm coming.

And as it gets closer, you'll see. there are a couple of models. There's like the European and the North American model for predicting weather. And if you see those two models, at least in our area, if you see them trending together, that usually means you will get no snow at all, regardless of what they're predicting. If they wildly deviate from each other, you will get one or the other. You will probably get somewhere in the middle of the two. But for the most part, what causes blizzard,

conditions isn't the amount of snowfall. It's the amount of wind you get alongside snowfall. So I believe it's 40 mile an hour winds or more and three or more hours of snowfall coinciding at the same time. So essentially between them being able to predict precipitation, so they'll call for say, well, the most recent list that we have, we got about a foot of snow. but it was a foot of snow with 45 to 60 mile an hour winds. So foot of snow around here, not really an issue. The fact that the wind was picking up so much that it was lifting the snow up off the ground and creating conditions where you couldn't see more than 100 yards in some cases,

sometimes even less. It's only about 75 yards from the front of my house to my neighbor's front of their house, and they always have their light on out front. we couldn't see the light on their front porch from our front from our front window. So, you know, with with blizzards, there's not a whole lot you can do other than not being out in them to prevent damage. Because you're just going to get the snow you're going to get. It's going to pile up on your house where it piles up. But the reason I brought up the warning for you, tornadoes, you don't get a warning.

Not really. You get a few hours. Maybe you get a warning of, hey, there's going to be a severe thunder. storm event coming through. But for the most part, tornadoes form very quickly and they end very quickly and they travel very fast. You know, you don't have a few days where you're like, okay, there's there's a, there's a tornado happening and it's coming this direction.

We know where it's coming, where it's going. No, I mean, down here at least, at least about the best we get is that we'll usually get some forecasts maybe a day, maybe two prior. that like there is a serious thunderstorm coming in. There's enough energy to be potentially tornadic. And then obviously we're like around here, most of the weather's coming in from the west. So we're looking westwards towards Bat Rouge,

towards Lafayette, towards Lake Charles and East Texas, to kind of give us a forecast of. Like if it's making tornadoes over there, it's probably going to make tornadoes around here too, potentially. Yeah. Yeah, that's very typical. I mean, we'll see usually by us, if a stormline's going to break up, it'll break up in the western half of the state. If it doesn't, that's usually a severe storm for us.

A lot of times we have a large glacial deposit to the west of us, to the west of my county. It's a large ridge of glacial deposits. And that alters some of the local weather patterns in a pretty. nice way for us. A lot of the major storm systems that we get break up or divide across that ridge for whatever reason. It has to do, I think, with the wind currents. But occasionally we'll get storms that don't come out of the west that come out of the east. Those are always catastrophic for this area because they almost get stuck at that ridge line and just hover over our county. Just hammer it with wind and rain and sometimes tornadoes.

So with a blizzard, is it, I guess I just always assumed it was a snowfall. That was the biggest concern, but you're laying it out. It's the wind. The snowfall is a problem. And yet, like 12 inches of snow is a problem. But the problem is that the snow doesn't just land and stay where it is. It's the fact that it cuts visibility down so much. Well, it cuts visibility and the snow continues to drift across the roadways.

Okay. So if you're getting, say, 12 inches of snow in three hours, great. The plows wait for the three hours sometimes. Like if school gets canceled, they'll wait until the snow's done and then they'll plow it all off the road. One shot. Good, great, done. Snow comes in the middle of the day. School's already in session.

The plow trucks will run intermittently keeping up with the snow. But around here, we have a lot of wide open farmland, especially in the winter. So what you can get is you got that foot of snow spread out. over 10,000 acres, all blowing across the only highway between two towns. And so every five or 10 minutes, you could have another foot of snow dropped on the road. So you have low visibility, you have slippery road conditions, and you have piles of drifting snow, sometimes several feet deep, even if you only get three to four inches of snow. So what's an ounce of prevention for roads impassable because of several feet of snow.

So it really is just a hunker down, a weighted out kind of situation. Yeah, for blizzards, there's really not much you can do to prevent it. I mean, afterwards, there is a little bit of prevention you can do. Clearing the drifts away from your house, especially if you have. So our house, we have a chimney in a fireplace. So all of our exhaust for any of our natural gas appliances goes out above the roof. Okay. My old house had a powered vent that came out about three feet off the ground.

So if we got a lot of snow or a lot of blowing snow, you would have to go out occasionally, move that snow out away from those vents so you don't build up carbon monoxide in your house. Makes sense. That's one kind of prevention you can do. You can also get that snow away from the house or just knock the drift. down so that it's not piled up against your siding, that can cause water intrusion and ice damming up under your siding or up under your shingles. Makes sense. And see, kind of the analog to that on the hurricane side is that usually with hurricanes around here, it isn't like, it isn't usually the hurricane itself that causes the most deaths. What usually winds up killing a lot of people as bad as the sounds is falling trees.

smashing through the roofs and hurting people. And I hate to say this way, but there's no polite way to say it, but people who have no functional understanding of how generators work, lighting them up inside an enclosed area and asphyxating themselves. That happens a lot in winter here too. Unfortunately, we usually get, if we get a really nasty winter storm that knocks out power,

there's usually a couple of people in the county that either fire up a barbecue grill inside their house or they fire up their stove, their natural gas stove, leave the door open or fire up a generator in the house or a kerosene heater without proper ventilation. No, pre-sulting.

You must read the question for the audio listeners or Stewart will get angry with you. Garek's asking if presalting driveways works. Sometimes. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Part of the problem you can get if you pre-salt your driveway is the first round of snow melts and then freezes

again. And now you have ice. under the snow. That sounds like a gigantic pain of the ass. It can be. Or you can get a slush layer where that snow just keeps compacting down into a denser and denser amount. Then you get what some people call heart attack snow, very heavy, dense, wet snow that caused you to have to do more physical exertion when shoveling it. Oh, now I see the heart attack part. It's been known to trigger heart attacks and kill people, especially the elderly or the less physically active. Yeah, it's it's not good. Yeah, I just saw somebody duck back into YouTube and then duck back out. So I'm assuming that stream is just frag for the night.

Probably is. You know, what can we do? We'll probably get some kind of notice about it later. Uh, maybe, maybe not. But this is why we stream to Facebook and YouTube and Rumble. Because if you can't find us in one of those three places, then the Fed's got us.

Yeah. But as far as like ounce of prevention for like hurricanes and that, that really tends to be like my biggest concern down here is you know like obviously be aware of the weather be aware of the storm's track um make rational reasonable plans whether or not you're going to ride it out or you're going to evacuate if you're going to evacuate do it damn well early enough that you can get out before you get stuck on the freaking roads like no duh and if you're going to if you're going to if you're going to opt to ride a hurricane out in your home like make sure it's a defensible position make sure you have a low enough flood risk that you don't think you're going to have to evacuate the middle of the hurricane. Make sure you have enough food and water to be able to ride it out. And I feel like that applies a lot to like blizzards too. Like if you're going to stay at home, make sure you got the things you need to stay warm and stay sheltered and stay fed. Now for tornadoes, I mean, I don't know what y'all do.

I'm assuming y'all probably huddle up in the basement as probably as close to being at a bomb shelter as possible. Well, we don't, you know, we don't have basements down here. Like you and I've had that conversation. That's the thing. If I had a basement, it would be an in-ground swimming pool under the house. It would. You know, for tornadoes, the best thing you can do is if you have a stormfront that is coming towards you. And this is kind of, I would like to say common sense, but a lot of people ignore it.

There's nothing common about common sense, Nick. It is 2026 now. That's true. Get out before the storm gets there. Take all of your random shit on your yard. and put it inside or put it on the leeward side of the house, the side of the house away from the wind direction. Don't leave a bunch of missiles line around in the yard for the wind to pick up.

The worst thing you can do is, well, one of the worst things you can do is to have loose debris in the yard that can get picked up easily in thrown. So because that stuff will go right through the side of your house. I mean, my wife, Sant and Uncle lost a good portion of their fence because the neighbor refused to stake down their trampoline. and it decided in one of our recent storms that it was going to migrate from two yards over through his fence. Yeah, I made it a point. So my wife has a thing about wind chimes.

She absolutely loves them. Yeah. I make a point every time we have a severe thunderstorm coming through to grab those in. At a bare minimum, I'll hang them on the back of like the chair. So instead of being at head high, they're at like knee high. They're nice on load of the ground. Or window smashing height as it is known. And I mean, we have some.

pretty good size windows on the back of the house. So they could probably still threaten the windows. But by being lower, the idea is that if they do get blown off the backs of the chairs, they have less room to go before they hit the ground. True. But for like hurricanes, yeah, we drag all that in. We pack literally. So the way we prep for Ida,

we took everything off the back porch and we either put it in the shed, which we thankfully had extra room because we took the generator out of there and, you know, that kind of stuff. So everything off the back porch except for the barbecue pit, which I figured was heavy enough. We were going to be okay without that. But we packed the shed full. Anything that stayed on the back porch that was fairly heavy was pressed up against the house. So it didn't have any room to like get a running start before it hit the house.

Cleaned everything around the whole outside of the house, undid all the hose bibs. Like we did anything we thought could get picked by the wind got secured in the garage or in the shed. We did not take. the extra step of plywooding over the windows. Honestly, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I go back and forth with it every single time because on the one hand, a broken window would be another thing to have to fix after a hurricane. True. But on the flip side of things, those windows are all old enough at this point that they pretty much need to be replaced anyway. You know, that's reasonable.

I mean, I, I, I would love and, and, and Garrett brings to such. in the chat. It'd be great to build functional shutters for your house. The way my windows are set up, I cannot put shutters over my windows because they're usually set up in banks of three and they're quite wide and fairly short. My windows open in like a tilt out style instead of a swing to the side or slide up just because of the just because of the style of my house. And so you can't can't get a shutter on the middle window. With tornadoes, we really don't have time to go out and put boards up over windows. And generally, the best, the best play for a tornado, yeah, get down in your basement.

The most sheltered portion of the house, if you don't have a basement. If you have a big heavy cast iron tub, that's not a bad place to be. No, but here's, here's a thought. What would it, what would it cost? I don't mean cost is like monetary. but time-wise to take some heavy-duty moving blankets, put some fairly heavy-duty grommets in them, and then screw some hooks into the outside of your house

at the corner of those windows, so that you just throw the grombs over the top and hang them in. At least now you have a soft-sided covering so that if something hits, you have a chance to, like, release that energy before some just smashes into your windows. You could. Kind of a soft-sided... would it help maybe with some small stuff?

Trouble with tornadoes is that they tend to throw stuff like two by fours through brick walls. This is part of the reason why like in a perfect world, I would love to be in the situation where like, I would absolutely love to be in the situation where I have true, motorized functional storm shutters and all the outside windows. That'd be great. but I also know that like rationally realistic, this is part of the reason why like I've talked myself out of the generator upgrade

and I've talked myself out of a lot of the storm prebs. I was looking at it for a while is because where I'm at in my job right now, I, if there's a major hurricane about to hit this area, I get deployed. Right. And that means my family comes. And a lot of times sounds like if it's bad enough, your family comes with. Well, if I'm getting deployed, my family is coming with me. I'm not leaving them behind even to ride out a cat one without me.

No, there's no reason to. It's just, it's that kind of situation where it's like if there's no one here to man the generator, if there's no one here to like make sure the stuff in the fridge and the freezer doesn't de-thaw. If there's no one here, if I pack up the most important things in my life, my wife, my daughter, the cat, the damn cat. And like, you know, a couple boxes of really important hard to replace paperwork and some things like that. then quite frankly, you know, putting aside an extra $1,000 earmarked just to restock the fridge and the chest freezer when we get home. And hell, most, I know at one point, as a matter of fact, yeah, my homeowner's policy covered. Like they put up, I forget how many hundred dollars towards replenishing any food that was lost during Idaho. Oh, really?

Huh. It wasn't a ton. It was not an, no, but it was not enough to. Probably an average week's groceries. It was a few hundred bucks. But it was, it was, it would not have been enough to completely refill that chest freezer full of all the meat that would have spoiled. Right. But, you know, it's just one of those things.

That's just, that's, that's, um, Garrick, I'm still confused about what you do. So in the most general terms, humanly possible, because I don't like to talk about my employment in a public setting. I work in the public sector and I do things that have to get done 24 hours days, seven days a week, three or six, five days a year without fail. And therefore, if my primary workplace is to be inconvenienced or threatened by a major event, a storm of some sort, then they have, I think, 150 to 175 seats prepped for us. in an alternate work site about a five-hour drive away. Yeah. One thing that some public sector jobs do very well is they keep the core must-do functions able to work from multiple locations should the facility be damaged or destroyed.

Yeah. And especially when you're talking about servicing like 635,000 employees. saying your paychecks in the mail will get to it when we get to it is not really an option. Your paychecks in the mail is in the private sector world, let's call it, covert speak for get a new job you're not getting paid. Yeah. Guy that comments, no, not FEMA. No, not. He's not one of those feds.

No. I do not work for FEMA. but suffice to say that like that that is the constant fight that I'm have with myself of like I could do this and this and this but if no one's here to turn the freaking switch on then what does it matter and you know here's the other thing to think about too though Phil how strong is the exterior wall of your house strong enough that an oak tree hit it and it didn't shift any of the beams strong enough that the wind speed during Ida, the wind speed clocked at the foot of the bridge,

which is about three quarters of a mile from my house was 130 miles an hour. Right. So the thing about shutters is depending on how they're constructed, they can do one of two things. They can deflect damage or they can act as a full like an actual shield across the window. Old school storm shutters around me did not act as like a shield for the window. That wasn't their design. They were really more for keeping rain and wind deflected, not debris. Because when we get a tornado through here, if you get a near miss from a tornado on your house,

it may shift your roof a foot off the house. Oh, my. Like your roof is still there. You still technically have a roof. it's not where it's supposed to be. It might just move a few shingles off your roof. It might shift your entire house off the foundation or say rotate at 90 degrees. I've seen that.

Happens. You take a direct hit from a tornado. Your house will not be standing, probably. Cat 1 or F1 probably would be still standing. You'd get rough damage. F2, you're probably losing most of the house. F3 or above, you're losing the entire house. So now is the appropriate moment before we dovetail this end alike.

Because we're we're crunching steadily towards how to fix damage. What's the spiciest? If it was a tornado, it was a tornado, but like, what's the, what's the spiciest storm you've personally had to deal with? I have watched a tornado jump the house that I was in. I've watched a category three jump the house that I was in or an F3 jump the house that I was in. So I was in my grandparents' house. So it's at this house, passed you over and zap this house, in other words. No, no.

Thankfully, it hit no houses at all. It hit a cornfield across the street. We watched it come across towards the house. About 200 yards from the road, it lifted up, passed the neighborhood entirely, dropped down behind him, and then just tore off through a nature preserve. Fortunately, it hit no houses. It hit a couple of businesses. but no one was there. Garrick, do we anchor our houses to the foundations?

Yes, we do. It's not enough. It's not enough. I'll put it that way. So I have to throw the poll back up. It's actually been running in the background. We got four votes of what type of storm concerns you the most. Seems mostly.

Yeah, Hurricanes has it four votes to zero for everybody else. honestly for me it's tornado so if you haven't voted you can put a one two three or four down in the comments and it'll log right there and we'll see who won this argument at the end uh garrick you know here here that's not familiar with tornado damage uh google joplin missouri it's a town that no longer exists well it was wiped entirely off the map so during that tornado i will say that in terms of like ferocity of storm i will give it even odds between Hurricane Ida and the F3 that wiped out my workplace 10 years ago. Mm-hmm.

I was at work when an F-3 tornado, like, flipped cars over in the parking lot, ripped one entire wall off of this office building. Mm-hmm. And, oh, God, I mean, that's just my facility. It, it demolished a warehouse that was across the street from us, and they never rebuilt it. it severely damaged the Fulgers coffee plant that was at the end of the road. Like,

it tore some crap up. Garrick, you might actually remember the, um, the pictures from that. Yeah, the tornado that went through, um,

the Mishute area of New Orleans, New Orleans east back in 2016. Yeah, I was ground floor when that, I was ground floor of a facility when that went right over the top of us. So, you know, Phil,

you said I'd have had like 130. mile an hour winds. That is below the bottom end for an F3 tornado. Yeah. And I, and I'm aware of that, but the reason I put it, I'm just saying like it, 130, 150 is usually like an F3. The reason I put those toe to toe is because that tornado was literally like from my coworker yelling get away from the windows to the noise stopped was like five to six minutes. 30. Yeah. I mean like, you, it was it was over before we even fully realized what was happening

whereas that's tornado whereas ida was it started late in the evening uh the power got knocked out after about an hour and then it just whooped on us literally all night until maybe two three o'clock in the morning was when it finally started like pull past us and gillian didn't go to sleep until i think seven o'clock in the morning was when she You said like, it finally stopped. Yeah. You know, for for around us, Phil, have you ever seen a tornado turn the sky green? Mm-mm.

So one of the ways, at least one of the old wives tales ways to know that there's a serious possibility of tornadoes is that the sky starts turning weird colors. It'll go from like gray storm clouds to all of a sudden. you'll see like a green hue through the sky. I'm not sure why. I think it has something to do with the updraft and how that's moving the water in the clouds. I'd believe that. When we were, when me and my wife were first living together, we had a friend of mine living with us and we did have a pretty nasty storm.

Fortunately, it didn't drop a tornado in our town. It dropped three tornadoes outside of our town where, you know, we were looking out the back, window and it goes from quite a lot of lightning to zero lightning and the sky turning green. And then in that green glow, you could see a funnel cloud. So the start of a tornado starting to come down out of the out of the cloud. From that to the storm being completely past us was probably about 20 minutes. Max. So you really don't have a whole lot of time.

And even at that, our tornado sirens didn't go off until the funnel cloud was past our house. So we wouldn't have had any warning had we not been looking out the back window. Oh, geez. You know, I just remembered the first Matter of Fax camping trip. I wasn't there for that one. You weren't there for that, but you didn't hear about it. I might have. Maybe it slipped my memory.

Did you guys get a tornado? Yeah, we had a tornado on the ground. So before we Before we get to the last bullet point here So it was our it was the first matter of facts Camp trip it actually wasn't summer It was back in the spring time back then we moved it to summer To accommodate like people for school yeah I mean

The whole reason we did it during spring was because Easter and spring break And like we were trying to plan a trip when people could bring their kids When families would normally be taken off you know we're It's trying we're trying to plan a family event Sure and we very quickly realized that the problem was about half the families that we know their kids had the opposite week off. So it kind of screwed all that up. Yeah, we've got of the four school districts around us, two of us are one week.

Two of them are the other week. But that's why we moved to the summer. But anyway, so we were out there with, let's see her. Josh and his daughter were out there that year. We hadn't met his oldest daughter and his son and his wife. yet. Tommy and his crew were out there, although I think it was just him and his wife and the Wieners.

They hadn't brought the kids with them yet. The Wilson family was out there, but they were staying at the lodge. They were kind of on the air side of the property from the rest of us. But we're all, you know, in our, in the yurts, in the middle of the night, sleeping as you do. And my wife wakes me up and says, hey, honey, there's a tornado warning. And we knew there was a pretty bad thunderstorm coming through that evening, but we weren't that worried about it. We're in a hard-sided yurt. We're probably okay.

But the minute they started talking about tornadoes on the ground, like the text mess just start blowing up amongst all these families. Like, uh, guys, we're in like a canvas-sided yurt. There's no fixed structures anywhere around here. Where's a good place to hide from a tornado? know. So I made the snap decision of like the nearest hard-sided building to us right now is the bathhouse. Yeah, that's a good spot. Everybody usually. You know, like y'all do what y'all want to do. My family is going to the bathrooms. So we like jumped in the truck, hauled butt down the street, you know, parked in there. And as we're as we're like, you know, running into the bathroom, it like the rain is coming down and it's getting harder and the wind's picking up. So this is probably like one of those fun. little moments in time but like when you go into a bathroom nick what bathroom do you normally go into the men's room or the ladies room men's room traditional all of us totally without saying anything

self-segregated men in one side of women of the other just like because it's what we are social conditioning as it's finest i mean look the pavlov couldn't plan this better we all said okay we're go to the bathroom and the ladies went in one side and the men went to the other and i swear to god me and Tommy and Josh, I think we were in there and Josh had brought his daughter in there with him because he was like, I'm not having my, you know, like, oh, no, this is a scary situation. But we're all looking at your, we're like, why the hell do all this? Why did all the women run into the other bathroom? Like, how did this decision get made totally spontaneously? And then right about that time, the ladies come into our side. They're like, we are not riding out a tornado in there by ourselves. And that was about the moment that the power went out. And then, you know, the couple families of preppers, everybody has either a lantern or a flashlight or something under pocket.

So we pull all those out. We're just sitting there listening to the wind, just BSing, like watching the weather radar, watching where the tornadoes are going. Turns out we were safe. Yeah, that's good. But then, you know, the wind picks up. The rain gets harder. Then it starts hailing, not huge hail, but like, you know, about pebble-sized all over the place. and before we leave the bathroom,

because we're waiting for the tornado siren, you know, the tornado warnings to go away, we're waiting for the hail to stop before we get back in our vehicle as we go back to bed. One of the campers, not one of our campers,

but just another random camper, comes into the men's room, looks at this, this conglomeration of people, men and women in the men's room, and it's like, what are y'all doing in here? And we're all looking at him,

like he's got two heads, like, did you not hear the tornadoes, sirens. Yeah. It wasn't the tornado sirens. It woke him up. It was his bladder.

Well, you know, some people, they don't hear them. I mean, they try to keep, they try to build them at a pitch that most people hear, but some people's hearing is just screwed. Well, I mean, uh, he seemed less concerned about the tornadoes and more

aggravated about the fact that there were women in the men's room. Well, you know, it's like, it's like I said earlier. It's that social conditioning. It's just, it, it violated his sense in arms around around, around here for us. Oh, spring. Yeah, her thunderstorms coming. Probably going to be a tornado. Probably going to be hail. Did not expect to see new record hail this spring, which we did. I think the new record for the state of Illinois is over six inch hailstone now. So that's fun. Let me toss us poll back up and then we'll get to the last bullet point. The hurricanes had it with four votes to one for the tornadoes.

and no one's throw one in for me for tornadoes I mean honestly Lizards you can sleep through I think you can sleep the best thing you can do yeah Stuart saying

wife hates that I sleep through hurricanes Gillian has told me on multiple occasions that we will not be riding out any more hurricanes in this house for as long as she lives fair yeah I don't that's fair Ida was a little bit spicier

than I think any of us we're expecting. But, you know, with the understanding that, like, there are things you can do to armor yourself against a storm if you have warning once coming. If you do, yeah. There are things you can do during the event to keep yourself out of worse trouble than you'd be in otherwise. But after the event passes, there's got to be a mitigation strategy to deal with, like,

any after effects of that storm. And it's not all just damage. like down here you know we've talked about this for hurricane passes your power's going to be out hurricane's didn't happen in the summer when it's hotter than

fuck you outside so keeping cool is a problem keeping hydrated as a problem keeping your food from spoiling as a problem and that's all assuming you have no damage your house by the way that's just the downstream effects of it's August it's 95 degrees and 200%

the relative humidity and the power is going to be out for three days. So having a generator or having like a strategy to keep cool and a strategy to keep yourself fed and condition and keep yourself from getting overheated is life saving post hurricane. Yeah. And if you have damage like what we had, you know, to Stewart's, to Stewart's point earlier about the fact that I blew off having a chance on until I really needed one, I had never been in a situation where I couldn't solve a problem without, you know, with, I couldn't solve a problem with anything more than like my axe and, uh, and a, and a bow saw and a pole saw.

And to be fair, I'd cut down some trees with an axe. Like I'm not a small person. I can swing an axe. But when you get two oak trees sitting on the side of your house, we're outside of axe territory now. Well, yeah, at least in any reasonable time scale, you're outside of tax territory. And that's really what you got to, what you have to get down to for damage mitigation is you need to get it down to a reasonable time scale and a reasonable amount of labor because you're going to be short of both in that situation. Yeah. So one thing that I like to do 15 days power. Yeah. And to be fair, like after Ida, our power was out eight days, I want to say. Yeah, I think I remember you saying that, which I mean, after after Katrina, there were parts

New Orleans that we're out of power for weeks and weeks. Yeah, sometimes when we get winter storms, we'll have areas of town where the power's out for two weeks because it's just there's too much damage. So they fix the biggest line breaks first. And if you happen to be like us in the subdivision with 20 homes and only two of the homes are out of power because the trees down in the line before the last two houses, guess who's getting fixed? Dead last. Yeah. Well, and, you know, this sum that Gillians recounted to me is that in the part North Louisiana, she grew up in ice storms are their biggest problem. And if you get hit with a bad ice storm, your power is going to be out for seven days as a starting point.

And if you're in a more row areas. They have been known to rip down miles, yeah, of lines. And in miles of lines in a row. Yeah, Raggle. It looks like YouTube is back up. I see three of y'all on the YouTube side and two on the Facebook side. So who knows, but science. Garik said a cheap window unit to keep one room reasonably cool is a godsend.

Yes, it is. I will also say that if you're willing to run it all day and shut off some rooms that aren't necessary, I know from experience that a 5,000 BTU window unit will cool half of a 15-hundreds to our foothouse. It won't be happy about it. It's going to run. Your generator won't be happy about feeding it. No, but I will say that in the situation we were in, you know, we had the three of us plus my in-laws and their three teenage kids. It's like we had eight people worth of, we had eight people worth of manpower to do storm cleanup and take care of the neighbors and everything.

Keeping everybody cool so they could sleep at night seem like a worthwhile tradeoff, especially because for the fuel that we had, they brought in, like they're, they're from North Louisiana where they're used to getting smacked around with like tornadoes and, ice storms and everything else. So they brought in more fuel in case we didn't have enough. So literally, keeping a generator run 24 hours, day, seven days a week was not a problem. So, Phil, what do you, have you ever had your window blown out by a storm? A window blown out? No. Yeah. So we've had that happen. Not, not me and my wife, but family members of mine have had that happen. And, um, they've actually come up with a pretty good way of quick patching that. So, you know, my house is brick house. Awful hard to just drive some wood screws into the brick.

You'd have to get out of a hammer drill. Yeah. It's pain in the ass. And you've got to retuck point your brick. So what my grandfather showed me that he has always done for that storm damage, he'll cut a piece of plywood that fits into where the broken window is. Easy enough, right? Then what you do is you go and you grab out of your bolt bin a couple of eight-inch carriage bolts.

you have one person hold the plywood on the outside, push the carriage bolts through two holes in the plywood. You have another person on the inside with a two by four that's got two matching holes drilled in it. And just sandwich that across the window span and you bolt that down from the inside. The reason you use carriage bolts is it can't be unbolted from outside without destroying that plywood. And making a lot of noise. And making a lot of noise. Now, granted, you can still smash out. the plywood, but you can more easily smash out a window.

So it does a little bit more to prevent, uh, looky lose and animals getting in more than anything else or teenage kids from dicking with it because they're bored than just a normal bolt. And the carriage bolt tends to have a little bit bigger head on it. So it's less likely to pull through the plywood. Mm-hmm. No, I mean, that that makes total complete sense to me. I know that, uh, I know that around here like,

I would love to say this is common sense, but I literally just jumped on you about how common sense isn't common in 2026. But like around here, even just a little cup full of roofing nails and a couple of parts is something you just ought to have on hand. Like, Phil, are you familiar with the flanged, the plastic flanged nails?

That's what I'm referred to as roofing nails. Is that not? Those aren't roughing nails. Those aren't? Well, that's what we call them around here. Those are, those are repair,

roofing nails. No. Roofing nails are typically, you know, they're about yay to yay long and they've got a wider head on them, but the big plastic disc flange that you're talking about, those are for holding down like foam or felt or fabric. They also work really nice for holding

down tarps. They do. Although pro tip, for when you're fixing your roof after a hurricane. Pro tip, if you're going to do that, listen, if you have to do this because you have a hole in your roof or you're missing a whole sheet of shingles, your roof is screwed anyway. So let's not

be shy about doing what I'm about to advise. But if you break your roof, it's your problem. Lift the shingles up, slide the tarp underneath it, and then nail that bastard down underneath the shingles. What you want to do is, you want to catch the water as it sheets off of those shingles onto the tarp, and then the tarp

at the bottom will lay over the top of the shingles. You just want the water to go over the hole and stay on the outside of the roof. Just mesh it into your roof like you see the lay of your shingles. So you've got the visible part of your shingle, which is say this part. And then your next layer laps on top of that as you go up. So you're so that the water is always dropping down a level to the next shingle.

In this case, your tarp. See, Rag was on my side. We've used to roofing for decades. I just, you really, you really shouldn't. I mean, not with the plastic flange on, unless you're just patching. If you're patching holes with a tarp, they work great for that because it spreads out. the pressure on the tarp. Well,

I'm not a professional roofer, and that's all I've ever used them for is patching roofs. Yeah, roofing nails. Those are not roughing nails. Well, that's what I'm going to continue to call them, and everybody around here is going to know exactly what I'm talking about.

Oh, I'm sure they will because for what, for what your guys' purpose for them is, absolutely fine, but you should not attach shingles to your roof with those nails. Yes, well, I'm in no position. to advise a professional roofer, so they'll know what I'm talking about.

Rag was going to start a fight. Tell that to the professional roofer as I've worked with. I mean, I've only done a half a dozen roofs, but I've torn off a lot more, and I've never seen those plastic flange nails used on the roof that was put on properly. But hey, man, you know, maybe your code is different down there, maybe because of the prevalence of hurricanes. they put those flange nails on roofs just to spread out the, uh, the tension and to help the shingles stay on the roof longer,

perhaps. I honestly don't know. I just know that like I've used them and I make a point of keeping a bucket lying around and hell. I also have a whole pack of shingles because when they were doing my roof, they overordered as you typically do. And, uh, I literally told the, uh, told the guy that was putting the roof on. I was like, hey, that as they were cleaned up on my,

hey, that already opened pack of shingles. You're charged me for that whole pack, aren't you? He said, yeah, and I'm like, leave it right there. Yeah. I basically told him, I'm like, I'm not telling you to do anything. It's going to get you in trouble with your boss, but I know Dame going well that if you open that pack, I bought it.

So leave it on the ground where it is. And that is in my backyard, just in case, God forbid, I ever need some shingles. So Raggle. Props to those professional roofers. That is the code in Phil's area. And Raggle's probably. is probably subject to the same code because he's similar code.

I mean, I'm guessing it's because of the weather differences because here if you take a near hit from a tornado, you're losing a good portion of the house. You take a direct hit, you're losing the whole house. You guys take a direct hit from a hurricane once a year. You may or may not lose part of the, some of the shingles. And maybe that makes all the difference. I mean, I know that when Hurricane Katrina went almost directly over the top of my parents' house years ago, they lost three shingles off the roof. Yeah. Hey, that happens. Sometimes we'll

get straight line wins that tear half of the shingles off a rough. You know, it's, uh, and sometimes the house right next door room will have no damage at all. Yeah, but other than being, uh, Stewart's best, Stewart saying those nails are code here too, which you know, Stuart, Stewart's over in South East Texas. So yeah. But, you know, still in the same latitude. to get hit by the hurricanes. I mean, up here, I'm assuming it's got to be a code difference probably due to the weather.

I mean, we don't use strong ties on our roofs up here. What do you mean by strong ties? So it's a, I think strong tie is a brand name. Is that like the thing that holds the roof to the steel ties holding the roof to the wall? We don't use those here. We call them hurricane straps down here.

Yeah, hurricane straps, strong ties, anything like that. those are used to hold decks to houses. Okay. Here. We don't use them to hold our roofs down. I'm finding this hilarious though. You know this by a brand name and me and

me and Sue are like, oh, those are hurricane straps. Yeah. Well, because I think the reason being is because you use them to strongly tie a deck to your house. It's why I remember it. But like I said, most of us, most of our roof issues

are snow load related. It makes total complete sense. So it's extra pressure down on the roof, not pulling the roof up and off. Yeah, we don't. I mean, has your area ever been hit by a hurricane? We have had the rain off of a hurricane. Like, so the hurricane that hit some friends of ours down like the Carolinas that, that hit Eddie in his area. We got rain left over from that.

But it wasn't a hurricane force winds. Oh gosh, no. No, by the point, you got to remember, I am 1,500 miles from an ocean. But the reason I ask is, years ago, Andrew and I were unpacking this exact same topic. And he foolishly said, Michigan has never been hit by a hurricane. And I did research. And Michigan has been hit by a hurricane. Michigan had, I cannot remember what hurricane it was, probably one.

Well, but hear me out. But it was a hurricane that hit down here in the Gulf Coast. Sure. And it ate the ass out of the Mississippi Valley all the way into Michigan. And it was still a cat one as it hit Michigan. And then immediately dropped. Well, it's possible then. Yeah.

It's possible we've had one. But it would be so extraordinarily rare. Well, the number of hurricanes that have hit Michigan stands at one. Let me see. I'm now curious. The number of hurricanes that have hit Louisiana is like, I don't know, probably four or five a year since forever. Illinois has been hit by four hurricanes. So what you're telling me is there's a chance.

There is a chance. And by hit Illinois, it was technically within the bounds of the southernmost portion of Illinois that's like 400 miles south of me. Okay, technicalities count. It counts, man. Illinois is one of the few states other than Texas. You can drive for eight hours and see nothing but corn and windmills. So what I'm gathering is that like your biggest concern coming out of blizzards, other than the potential of like having a window blow out or having.

No, you won't get windows blown out from blizzards. Blizzards are just an irritation and potential. power. But it's really. Tornado is the biggest problem here because that it, look, I don't, aside from having a generator for the powers out after tornado and having some emergency food laid up water, flashlights and that sort of thing, there is no tornado preps other than having a basement. Because if you take a direct hit from a tornado, the house is gone. Your preps are gone. You'll be lucky if you're alive because it's going to drop a house on top of you in the basement. Mm-hmm. Or you're going to get some minor damage to your house and your best prep is your insurance policy and your checkbook. You have said on occasion that there are very few, there are very few short-term emergencies that cannot be solved by judicious application of cash. You know, even long-term emergencies. I mean, look, you lose a job.

The best thing you can have is an emergency fund, a three to six-month emergency fund. Yeah. I see this, and this is a pet peeve I have with some of the prepping forums and boards, especially Reddit. Cash will be worthless, invest in lead, yada, yad. No, no. Whenever anybody comes on that's new to prepping, everybody always says, get two weeks of food, get a month of food, get this much water, get a gun, get this, get that, get the other thing. the thing that I never see mentioned is is your insurance up to date. Do you have an emergency fund?

Do you have your insurance documents in a place where you can readily access them? I'm going to tell you, and like we haven't talked about this on the show, that is probably going to be like a raising values episode for the future to talk about all the nonsense that's been going on in my personal life and Gillian's personal life. But like having to go through a person's house and find very important freaking paper. when they had no concept of how to store it in a in a cohesive fashion is the most is like the ninth circle of hell as far as I'm concerned I've told Gile and on multiple occasions if I'm ever not here and you have five minutes to get out of this house I've literally I've told her multiple times grab my daughter grab the cat grab this one box of paperwork from underneath the bed and then grab the the the the the the roll of emergency cash out of this drawer.

And that's it. Everything else... That's all you need. Everything else in the freaking houses is insured. All this camping crap behind me, the freaking night vision, the gun collection, all that crap. It can all be replaced. Let it burn. I don't care. Get myself. Get my daughter. Get the cat.

Get the cash and get the paperwork. Because that one box of paperwork is birth certificates, marriage license, social security, all my paperwork for when I was in the army, which is not impossible to replace, but no, but it would be inconvenient to need to replace, especially during, during an emergency. Yeah. And fortunately, when it comes to like the homer's insurance policy and all that, that's all online these days. It's all digital. So, you know, like we can very quickly unasked the house,

get only what is necessary, and we can rebuild. It can be done. And, you know, Stewart is saying, I have a single go bag with all that. I have a go. I have a go box. But the point is that it's in one place. Your spouse knows about it. This has been one of like, this is one of those, this is one of those moments where even the most art and prepper can really drop the ball.

If you're the only person in the house that knows what the plan is or where the stuff is, a guy that comments cash burglars love cash listen that role of emergency cash is the last thing in this house I'm worried about getting stolen there's there's enough stuff in this house if somebody want to roll me up

that would just be beer money after they get done with anything else but the and this is another thing about that is if you are going to keep cash in the house keep an amount of cash in the house you are comfortable with losing yep

your bank account is FDIC insured Uh-huh. Chances are pretty good. You're going to get your money out of that. If your house burns down and you have a safe stack full of 20s and they all burn, you're never getting that back. If your entire savings plan is a mattress stuffed with money, that's a bad way to go. To me, to me, the cash is like one of the tiers in the plan when we can't get into our savings account. We can't get, you know, our debit cards are lost.

We need cash so we can eat and have a play, have a roof over our heads for. for a day or two to unwind the situation. That's what the emergency cash is. It is a pretty rare situation where if you can get out of the immediate affected area, you cannot access your bank accounts. It's an extremely rare situation. It can happen. Not impossible, but rare, which is why I do advocate for people keeping some cash around

in the house. But like I said, keep an amount you can acceptably lose. Stewart or comfortable with the wife spending when she's mad. Well, there is also that. I mean, you impulse spending because there's a really good deal from a buddy on Facebook. This is one of its moments of time where I wonder if my hobbies are cheaper than your hobbies, because you like large pieces of machinery.

And I like small pieces of machinery. But my small pieces of machinery cost a lot. My current hobbies involve me having to fight the state. attorney over a road that doesn't exist so I can build a garage and raise my taxes to put my hobbies in a different spot because my other hobbies are pushing them out of the hobby space. It'll come through. First world problems. Yeah.

But like that that is the one thing that I will challenge everybody here to when we talk about how to deal with hurricanes, how to deal with tornadoes or blizzards or any kind of a weather-based emergency is does your does your significant other unless you live alone if you live alone like you know that's on you if you live alone does your executor of your will and you should have one does your executor know where to find these documents or better if you live alone and you truly have no one else that would come looking for you if you just disappeared for a couple of days unexpectedly. I encourage you to make really good friends with a neighbor. If for no other reason than the fact that like you two have a buddy system or something where it's like,

hey, if I go silent for a couple of days, you come check on me and vice versa so that, you know, I don't sit here in this house and my pet eat me. That'd be pressure. Yeah, there's that. Or have the dog die dehydration or something. That'd be horrible. So like have a safety net in place. My safety net is my wife. My wife knows where, number of, my wife knows what to grab. She knows what needs, what's important. And more importantly,

she knows what's not important. Like, if you have five minutes to get at the house, don't worry about trying to clear out the gun safe. I don't give it in. Grab a firearm for personal protection, get the important stuff, get out.

The rest of it's insured. But you wouldn't believe how many people I know that they haven't told their spouse because they know where it is. And in their mind, and I'm guilty of this too, by the way, in their mind,

I'll always be here. to take care of my family. Sure. That is a natural impulse we fall into is that I'll be here. I'll take care of things. I'll take the load. But what if you're not? And realistically, this is probably one of those lowest barrier to entry things that you can do to get a spouse started into preparedness, even a little bit.

Just have them know where the emergency documents are. Yeah. And I will tell you that. in in all but the weirdest of circumstances you will have a much easier time convincing your non-preparedness minded spouse to get involved in things like hey do you know where the fire extinguisher is hey do you know where the insurance card is do you know where the insurance card is do you know where the cash is do you know where the things that are normal everyday normal stuff in air quotes and then you maybe dip her toe a little or his toe a little bit at a time into you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the basic stuff. Everyone on this block has a fire extinguisher under their kitchen sink. Do you know where ours is?

Do you know if it's charged? Do you know, you can get the charge in your fire extinguisers checked for free at the local fire station if you have not recently? Most jurisdictions, at least, most the ones I've lived in, all the ones I've lived in, if you take your fire extinguisher down to the firehouse, they will check it and test it and verify that it is still functional. They would much prefer to do that than have to roll a pumper truck to your house. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

And if it's not functional, usually they have them for sale there as well. Or they can put you in contact with the company that will recharge it for you. I mean, they, so I know, Phil, I don't know about down by you, but up here by me, uh, fire code, any industrial building, any business has to have their fire extinguishers checked and tested yearly. I'm assuming it's the same down by you.

I don't know off the top of my head, but I've literally like, I know some of the works for a company that's what they do is they check commercial fire mitigation systems. Because there's this interesting thing that'll happen when you have a bunch of employees. If something lights on fire, they tend not to tell management that they've used the fire extinguisher. They tend to just try to make the mess go away, especially when it was maybe done through employee negligence. Oof to. Yeah, it's been known to happen.

And then you go to use the fire extinguis for next time and it's empty. Big oof. Yeah. Now, these things happen, especially when you work with industrial petrochemicals and idiots, flammable metallic compounds. It's not happened at our corporation, fortunately, where I work, but do you have some wood to knock on? Well, yeah, I do.

And it's actually my desk. but one of the companies I do some freelance work for was doing some aerospace parts out of zirconia, metallic zirconium. And if you have a low volume, high surface area piece of zirconium, and you get it wet or it gets humid, it can oxidize fast enough that it auto ignites itself. That's exciting.

Just sitting there. That's exciting. Yeah. It got really exciting in their back, in their, uh, their back, uh, material handling station. Stewart is, uh, Stuart is offering that when he installed irrigation sprinklers, he installed three on the roof ridge. That way of his neighbor has a house fire. He can use those to keep the roof, roof wet. That's not a bad idea. Might also not be a bad idea if you live in a place where forest fires are common. True. You know, I have heard of some houses having that stuff installed

and their roofs in California lately. I mean, I can't imagine why. Yeah, that's fair. It wouldn't help me much since the woods are like 12 feet away from my house. You'd be surprised, though. It depends on the wind direction a lot when you've got that kind of distance. I mean, when it comes to forest fires, the best thing you can do, obviously, is get distance,

but the second best thing you can do is keep everything wet. Yeah. Because green stuff does not burn as easily. yeah all right so is there anything else you want to toss in here as far as like mitigating either before or after a storm here's when we forget sometimes do you know where your natural gas water if you're on city water and electrical shutoffs are in the house ooh everybody in your household should know where the water main shut off is because that's perfectly safe for even a child to dick with. Turning it back on can cause damage if you just slam it back open and you get a water hammer.

But turning it off usually, unless the valve breaks, won't cause any problems. Your breaker panel should probably wait until the kids are old enough. Usually they're higher up enough that children can't go dicking around with the main breaker. But know where your main breaker shut off is and know where your natural gas shut off is inside or outside your house. Because if you do get damage to your house and say a pipe is damaged, you can prevent it from getting worse by turning off the water. You know, that's same with electric, same with natural gas. That's a fair point. I can guarantee you my daughter doesn't know, and I bet my wife doesn't either.

Your daughter is old enough that it's probably probably ought to be time you show her those things. Yeah, the trick there is figuring I had to get her to pay attention to something. it's not a cell phone or her boyfriend or an electric guitar well you know i approve of the electric guitar not sure how i feel about the boyfriend in the cell phone i hate that i have a smartphone she is a child of the 21st century and as far as the boyfriend thing more worried about her eating him not the other thought that was my concern too because she was going to gut catch gut and eat small minnows at the summer camp camping trip. The girl's a savage. Yeah. His safety is the concern here. I, I, I've done my,

my, my level best to raise her in my own image and, um, congratulations. Yeah. For those of you who've met that little girl, she's, um, she's a, she's a, she's a, she's a, she's a chip off the old rabble. Oh, yeah. But yeah, you know, guys, if, if, if the word, if the only thing you can manage to do is to stop the situation from getting worse by just turning everything off and then getting a professional in, you're a step ahead of the game because then at least your house isn't going to explode from natural gas. It's not going to get more water damage from flooding. And it's not going to electrocute someone from having live wires laying around. I have to address Stewart. I do not recruit for the Taliban. ISIS? Not them either. Smart ass.

y'all y'all all think that this beard means that like that i'm it's too well groomed for the taliban yeah i mean come on you're missing the hat as well i remember there being a hat i don't i don't do hats very often no but the taliban do anyway yes thank you raggle fraggle mullahs that's the one anyway no i i i i I hope we've given her by some food for thought. I mean, we are charging right back into storm season, although I guess for those of you who are susceptible to blizzards, like you've been dealing with them. Stewart actually threw in the chat like 15,000 comments ago that this year is supposed to be a super El Nino cycle, which means low risk for really bad hurricanes, very high risk for lots and lots and lots of thunderstorms down here, lots of precipitation.

And simultaneously, that usually comes with a drought further north. it does yeah unfortunately so we're well i'm actually somewhat looking forward to that i have some trees i need to take down that are near a very wet portion of my yard and lumber jacking in muck boots is not as enjoyable as doing it in my red wings i mean that's fair but yeah i mean my whole standpoint on weather and everything really is like whatever it comes it's going to come and we're going to have to suck it up and deal with it because down here in louisiana as it is with most of our parts of the country, like you're going to have some kind of weather event

to look forward to every year. Down here, it happens to be usually where we're back and forth between tornadoes one year and hurricanes the next. This might be a tornado kind of year. Who knows? Well, it's definitely a tornado kind of year in the Midwest already.

Yeah. I mean, we've already had a day where we've gone from the low 80s back down to the 30s overnight. That's what true. triggered those six inch hailstones and the, what, 15 tornadoes one day. I'm hoping we don't have that to look forward to. Usually once it gets to a certain temperature down here, we're not going to get any more cold snaps.

And lately it's been like mid-70s to low 80s. Well, that's nice. I think we're out of the range where we're going to get another, like, really serious cold snap. Yeah, it looks like we're going to have 80 degrees next week, followed by 40. the next morning. Yeah, that's good, good. Fricking Midwest problems. Hey, man, we get all the seasons, usually in one week, sometimes in one day.

I mean, you and I've had that conversation. We've done it down here, too, where it went from, it went from like high 60s back to below freezing in 24 hours. I think the most temperature swing I've seen is 102 degrees. that's because you live in hell in a day yeah it was terrible it was really really terrible all right well let's go ahead and round this out i do have a uh a video to make it will probably wind up on youtube at rumble to uh talk over the finer points of rifle reloading mostly for that one person that reached out and asked for it and also just as a companion piece to the uh pistol reloading video that I put out breaking forever ago.

It's actually still on YouTube. I thought it might have gotten knocked down, but it's still up. Surprisingly enough. Nice. But I have no earthly idea what we'll talk about next week. You and I'll have to do some disgusting, especially because. Discusser, Nathan. Well, and week after next, I may or may not be out of pocket Thursday evening for work.

I'm still waiting on a firm word. All right. Let me know. we can always do a prayer. There is a chance. I might be getting released Thursday morning, and if that's the case, I will be home well in time for us to do our normal stand-up.

But there's also a chance that I'm going to be held until Friday morning, and if that happens, then I cannot commit that that evening I'll be free at all. So I just, I don't know. apparently you cannot comment we like ideas on YouTube they blocked me commenting we like ideas why I don't know it just says YouTube has rejected our comment

it says I said do it we like ideas because he said I'll send you the idea we had maybe they think the idea is terrorism I don't know I'm so freaking apparently apparently thinking is bad on YouTube thinking is bad on YouTube moments like this I get just about frustrated enough to just say

to hell with social media and pack all this up but I still enjoy it for the time being true it's fun yeah it is fun when we're not getting jerked around by our tech overlords what are you going to do

bitch about it get over and keep on keep playing in the king's court by the king's rules Yeah. All right. Matter of facts, is going to go out the door. I don't know what we're talking about next week. So if you have a topic, you should get in touch with us one way or the other and let us know.

Because if not, you're going to be depending on our lack of judgment to cook up something. Usually I will text Phil on Tuesday when I realize we haven't talked about anything yet. I try not to let that happen, but that's been happening a bit lately just because, you know, personal crap. Family, family life will do that sometimes. Being an adult, do be hard on occasion. We should talk about being an adult sometime. While not acting like adults.

Hmm. Yes. An episode about acting like children while drinking like idiots. We can do that. I like that idea. I'll have to get more whiskey. I'm currently out of whiskey again. Oh, you failed at adulting already. I just keep forgetting to go.

I would have to. So, Rachel, please, please go by. this man booze. I go to the bank. I go to the bank on Friday after work and then I get hungry on the way home and I go like, well, I could go to the liquor store or I could get a sandwich out of my fridge and then I end up with a sandwich and then I get distracted and then I never go get the booze I was going to get. Nick, I mean this with all the love and admiration in my voice that I'm capable of. We're going to have a freaking episode about being neurodivergent one day because you have you've got the most raging case of ADHD of anybody I know I might I might my wife

thinks I'm more autistic than ADHD but I am heavily caffeinated pretty much all the time you could be both I could be both you could be all D all D HD is a thing I definitely have been known to get distracted and forget things exist for months at a time uh Rachel said if you're acting like your children than no drinking. What? That's no fun. I'll light things on fire in the backyard then. Guyly comments, induced autism, ADHD. Right. Yeah.

I mean, I definitely did just find about a 250 page PDF about manufacturing miniature steam engines in your basement. I might have to build miniature steam engines because you can do it all on a lathe layth layth layth yeah that way you ye might have a small case of the tism tickleitism i believe they call it technically tickletism a ticletism all right matter effects podcast going to have the door if you want to hear us talk

about tisomying ADHD and all that nonsense you should let us know and if not then we're going to find some other trouble to get into, which will probably be equal parts entertaining, terrifying, and disappointing. I still need to finish up my plans for the diesel power desk fan. You should get on that. I really should. I got distracted by the new range. All right.

Let's kick this one out the door before this turns to an Irish goodbye. Good night, everybody. Tonight.