The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Zero to Hero

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

http://www.mofpodcast.com/http://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/themofpodcasthttps://www.cypresssurvivalist.org/Support 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*Nic posed an interesting question to Phil. Knowing what they do now after years in the preparedness world, how would they start? With limited space, on a small budget, from the bottom? How does someone go from Prepper Zero to Hero with none of the resources, but decades of accumulated knowledge, and what do their suggestions say about the real starting point of Preparedness?Matter of Facts is now live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble at 7:30 PM Central on Thursdays . 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 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/prepper-broadcasting-network--3295097/support.BECOME A SUPPORTER FOR AD FREE PODCASTS, EARLY ACCESS & TONS OF MEMBERS ONLY CONTENT!Red Beacon Ready OUR PREPAREDNESS SHOPThe Prepper's Medical Handbook Build Your Medical Cache – Welcome PBN FamilySupport PBN with a Donation Join the Prepper Broadcasting Network for expert insights on #Survival, #Prepping, #SelfReliance, #OffGridLiving, #Homesteading, #Homestead building, #SelfSufficiency, #Permaculture, #OffGrid solutions, and #SHTF preparedness. With diverse hosts and shows, get practical tips to thrive independently – subscribe now!Newsletter – Welcome PBN FamilyGet Your Free Copy of 50 MUST READ BOOKS TO SURVIVE DOOMSDAY

Welcome back to Matterfax 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 Ravilley, Andrew, Nick, are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matterfax podcast. And before I forget, this episode is pre-recorded. Yes, got it more.

Yes, got it. So if you are watching this on the podcast, stream, you're welcome to come into the comments, misbehave, troll each other, troll us, have a party. I can't stop you tonight. However, if you upset the NSA bad enough, you will end up on another government watch list. Life goals. And if you think you've collected them all, they're like freaking Pokemon. You haven't got them all yet. Well, we can try. Nick, I've been trying for like 20 years as a happy little political dissonant. I'm confident. I haven't found them all yet. True. You don't send money overseas to foreign terrorist organizations. I don't because my gut my my my the

CIA already does that. Why what with my tax dollars and it's not a tax deductible donation. So exactly. Make a tax deductible. If I'm going on the list. If I'm going to fund regime change, I should at least get a break on my income tax. I mean, it just seems reasonable. It does. I mean, come on. We're saving the CIA some money. This brings up an interesting question. Could I write off the money I spent on Hollow Sun because I'm supporting a foreign government. Oh, that's a good point. Oh, that's a good point. We might be able to. If we can get a tax write off figured out for that. Yeah, that could be cool. Oh, but it gets, but it gets better than that. I mean, the only natively made like optics that I'm aware of are Trish Khan. Yes. So AIM point is

Swedish. Hollow Sun is Chinese. Most of them are Chinese. Be perfectly frank. Well, yeah, even Swamp Fox is made, I think, in Taiwan, isn't it? Yeah. With Chinese electronics. Well, and that's a beautiful thing. Is that like, so Holocon is actually not a red dot company. They're a laser emitter company. Yeah.

So with the exception, I think really of just Trichicon, like anybody else's stuff you buy, you're buying Hollisun emitters because that's where they all come from. A lot of them anyway. I mean, I'm sure there are some that are made by other companies, but not many. No, no. At least at the core electronics level. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like the old joke back in the day you buy an American car and everything under the hood is freaking made in Japan.

Yeah. Yeah, that does happen a lot. I mean, look, mass scale of manufacturing. One airbag fits in many, many cars. We found that out the fun way when we had that massive recall of, what was it, 50 million airbags or something like that. Yeah. I actually had an interesting conversation with a coworker today. We were lamenting the fact that someone in my agency got the bright idea to offshore all of our IT resources to another agency with the understanding that like, I was going to say to a foreign country.

No, no, no. You can have them, but we still get to use them. And that has not worked out swimmingly because once they got them in their org chart, they figure, well, they're going to work on our priorities first and you're second. That's typically how that happens. Yeah. Yeah, so we had a burgeoning debate about the merits of outsourcing offshoring versus vertical integration. And I pointed out to them, I'm like, you know what company has vertically integrated? Amazon.

You know what company is making money, hand over fist? Amazon. Yep. You know what companies are losing their behinds? Everyone that outsourced their shipping departments. Yes. Just thinking out loud. I mean, it's absolutely wild.

some of the things that Amazon has done in order to explode their business has been against the core thesis of big businesses for a very long time. But it works. My God, does it work? My God, does it work? When it's well organized. That's the sticking point is there are not a whole lot of corporate leaders that are really good at organizing. large scale things and amazon has hired most of them turns out so before we get to topic do you want to fill the listeners in on the uh what prompted the emperor palpatine meme that i sent you

half an hour ago because i think it's a hilarious story by the way so for those of you that have been listening to the show for a minute i have i have on and off mentioned my desire to acquire a boat not for the purpose of making farms disappear correct i already had a canoe we've lost that I've had kayaks. We lost some parts of the kayak. We got most of it back. My garage fits two cars. We own two cars.

Okay, garage is full. So I'm not going to spend, and if any of you have looked at boats, they're expensive as fuck, especially brand new. Do they depreciate? I would imagine. Rapidly. Okay. But not as much as you would think.

A 10-year-old Lund is only like $7 or $8,000 less than a brand new one. They depreciate way less than cars. They don't get the time on them. They don't get the time on the motor. So it depreciates like a Toyota. Similar, yeah. I would say similar, yeah. Or like a quality built firearm.

You know, yeah, knock 15% off the top and now you're reasonably used. Until you get like 20, 25 years old, then they really go down fast. Funny you say that my dad has a Smith and MOS and Model 39 that I am hoping I wind up inheriting after he's up this more. value not only has it appreciated a little bit but if you i he still has the original purchase receipt from like 1973 i think that's good paper and when you look at that amount of money and you adjust it for inflation it has actually kept up with inflation so smith and wessons inflation busting well i wouldn't say like plastic fantastics but like old semi-clos it doesn't mean the Okay, so like the Smith and Wesons, the 5,900 series are kind of sought after because they're really great guns.

And the 39 is actually not as desirable because it's the single stack 9 millimeter. But they're so much less common because they were the single stack that they're, it's kind of like the people that want them really do want them. Yeah. And this gun, I mean, it's old, I think 1970s blued finish. It looks like it was cut out of a piece of meat. right wood grips oh it's a beautiful it's a beautiful gun and i mean my dad's had it for 50 years squeezing the double action trigger on that thing it feels like a gunsmith has worked it over but it's just the parts have polished themselves so it's over 50 years of shooting absolutely i mean wearing it in is

is the ideal way to fit that stuff because then it's perfectly aligned and it's perfectly smooth but you know back to back to the garage idea back back to the garage idea for the boat that I need a second garage or a bigger garage all right my property that we live on is at the end of the subdivision that was built back in the 50s and early 60s late 50s early 60s there was a road proposed that would run along my property okay on let's call it the east side along the east side of my property. That road was never built. That road was never dug. It only appears on a single plat map for the subdivision. One plat map. It was pinned, but it was they never did anything with it since the subdivision closed. I think the last house was built in 62 or 63, something like

that. Since then, the prior owner of my of the property I live on bought that section of road, or acquired it somehow and built a garage on it. That's the garage we're currently using. Right in the middle of this road. Okay. Bill, are you familiar with road easements and how much the setback is from a road for most buildings? It's a little less than the garage in the middle of the road. About 30 feet on either side of the proposed road.

Okay. Not only is my garage in the middle of the road and the driveway goes right down the middle of the road, which, In the middle of the road, makes sense. County's got no problem with the asphalt in the middle of the road. The yard light, the patio, the concrete patio that we have next to the garage, the garage. And part of my house are all within the easement boundaries of where stuff is not supposed to be built. Where stuff is not supposed to be built around the road that they themselves did not build. Right.

Correct. That was never built and was never truly. intended to be built as proven by the multi-hundred-year-old trees that also line the middle of where this road never was. This sounds like some government nonsense. We have a road that does not exist. We have a land parcel that was sold to the prior property owner. And we have a building built with a permit that doesn't specify where the building was to be built.

Sounds like government. Right. now in my county at that time you just had to get the permit to build the structure and they would look at it when it was done they never measured anything they didn't check any of it so when i go to the county with my current plat of survey done by a professional surveyor in this area that has been around for a very long time excellent surveyors i know some of the people that work there great people this episode is brought to you by spreeker the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better,

Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. It shows my garage where it is, and they found the pins for the road. So they put them on the plat. And the lady at the county says, well, according to the county, that road was never, removed from the platts. So the road exists

by law. Exists. Exactly. Exists. So they told me, and now this is their words, they said, I am not a lawyer.

You need to get this road plat voided or vacated. Yeah, vacated, I think, is the term they use. Yeah. I said, how do you do that? I said, well, typically you would go to the person that platted the subdivision and have them vacate that road. Say, hey, yep, we're never going to build this road.

Sign up a piece of paper. We're never going to build this road. Great. That guy's been dead for 20 years. As they do. The company has not existed for longer than that. As he returns. These things occur.

People retire. Folks die. So I tell that to the county. And the county. planning and zoning board says, well, we don't know what the process would be in order to avoid that in this case. So I happen to be very lucky and I live down the road from the township road commissioner. The guy in charge of all the roads in my township.

And I call him up because we're friendly neighbors. We stop buying chit chat now and then. And he says, well, that road doesn't exist on the township flats at all. meaning the person that planned the subdivision submitted the road to the county did not submit it to the township, which they would have had to do in order to start building the road, which means they never intended to build the road because they never submitted that road plan to the township. Because of that, the township doesn't know if it can void the road. The county cannot void the road because they don't have.

jurisdiction over township roads. So we get the township supervisor to come out to my property this afternoon. This has all happened since lunchtime today. You get the township supervisor over. And he looks at the plat, looks at my garage, looks at the plant and says, this is the most retarded shit I've ever seen. There's never going to be a road here. There never would have been a road here.

He said, I'm going to have to call around other townships. He said, I'm sorry. I started this job like five years ago. this has never happened before. I have to call around to other townships and find out how we void a road that doesn't exist. That's... So that's been my afternoon. I got a decent workout in, which is great, made me feel a little better.

I have half of what I poured for whiskey after the workout left. So I'm going to get my garage. Come hell or high water, I am getting my garage. It just so, it just... We're going to have to go through some mid-level government fuckery that shouldn't happen over a road that has never existed to build a garage to someday buy a boat so that I can eventually go fishing. So, Nick, where exactly is the line between angry little libertarian and rabid anarchist? Honestly, man. At this point, I'm writing that line.

I could have just built that fucking garage and not told anybody because the county never comes out here the fucking township wouldn't give a shit because I drink beer with the township road commissioner nobody would have known or cared until I sell this place in 30 years why the fuck I try to play

why the hell I try to play along with the rules I will never understand I know a guy that owns a skid loader I know a concrete crew I can make all of this shit happen faster than the county can stop me if i wanted to okay but there is a certain personality on the autism spectrum that just inherently wants to follow rules because they're rules i know what the policy is i know what the rules are

i know how to build a building i can do all of this i can subcontract it we can be done with this it it could be so easy all i wanted to do was say was get somebody to say yep there is physically space for the building here, start getting bids for the concrete. So what I'm hearing is that the next time you want to do something that involves permits, you might just choose violence. Honestly, man, I, this is why I tell people that I am really riding the edge of tolerating what the government has decided and decreed to be the good. I know how to build things well beyond code.

I can do electrical. I can do plumbing. I can do foundations. I can do roofs. I can do rough and finish carpentry. Hell, I can even lay tile turns out. But can't paint for shit because I don't see colors right. But because fuckwits are too dumb to do it correctly.

We have to have this mid-level bureaucracy telling me, sorry, that thing that doesn't exist is in the way of. the thing you want to make exist. Oh, but, but that's not all they told you. They told you that your garage that has been there for how long? Since 1979. Is intruding on their imaginary road. Correct. Yes. Yes. And that if something were to ever happen to that garage, not only should I not be allowed

to repair it, I can't replace it either. So instead of allowing me to build another garage, increasing the taxable value of my property, which is a net benefit to the county. Paying people to build the garage on my property, which is a net benefit to the county. Now I have to get in a pissing match with, well, the township people are actually on my side about this. They think this is dumb. I have to get in a pissing match about the county. I've got the township people in a pissing match with the county trying to figure out who's actually got jurisdiction with this. I've probably got to get a lawyer involved to draft some bullshit. And I got to go after the title company who didn't find this problem.

in the first place. So this, what should have been a 10 minute visit to the county courthouse turned into about an hour of talking to like four or five different people about this. And then a series of phone calls that lasted the rest of the afternoon and a couple in person visits from local government. This is totally unnecessary. None of this needed to occur. Yes. Well, your level of outrage is pretty close to mine because. I recently had to teach myself how to do the tax documents for a nonprofit in this country.

There's a reason why I do things for profit. The taxes are easier. And not, yeah, and that, that annoys me 10 times as much. But not only does it involve filling out an extraneously long, stupid form to say, we made money, we spent money, and you can't tax any of it because 501C3. We did all that paperwork already. But then there's a little footnote to the bottom and says, if you are a 501c3, you also have to fill out this other form.

And I went and got that air form. And it is basically a retelling of the reason why we are, we qualify to be a 501c3. Because we're a 501c3. I'm out. I'm out. But I have to fill it out and explain, these are all the reasons why.

And these are the things we do. And I have to file that form with the tax form every single year. You know, they're going to change that form between this year and next year. So you can't just copy paste, right? I'm I God's honest truth like

this this whole experience like all of the headache in starting this nonprofit and keeping illegally above board has convinced me that freaking cocaine dealers are the smartest of all of us because they just decided up they just decided up front screw it we ball

we don't we're not we I am not skirting your rules I am not bending them I'm not even breaking them I'm just not acknowledging they exist and I'm going to do what I want. Honestly, man, it is, it is very hard for me to emotionally justify to myself obeying the rules anymore because satanic cannibalist pedophiles are apparently above the law because they're important to government. Well, they always have been above the law, not important. But a road that

doesn't exist requires me to get a lawyer and to go to a township meeting and for township to possibly derive a policy that doesn't exist to remove a road that never existed at all but satanic pedophiles that's that's okay but a fucking two car garage built to code with stamped engineering plans which is my entire plan to do that's that's what that's the true evil of fucking two car garage is the true evil i'm glad you finally understand and accept that oh it just honestly dude i i have i have made i've joked with my wife before that i should just start cooking meth because honestly it would be so easy to do i

had a chemistry professor in college and i think i've told this story on the podcast before he was a Soviet scientist that defected back during the Cold War. And he used to, one of the things he did for the Russian military was make meth. And the show Breaking Bad was very popular at the time. And a couple of us were talking about it before class started. And he said, oh, that show, that shows ridiculous.

You don't need all of that stuff. Let me tell you how to make meth. And then he goes up to the chalkboard, turns around and says, are any of you currently addicted to methamphetamines? And nobody says, good, don't start. And then he begins to write out the instructions for how to make methamphetamines, lab grade methamphetamines. And I'm like, I guess I take notes. I don't know if this is on the test.

So I have that somewhere. Good Lord. I mean, I don't know, like following the rules or attempting to follow the rules has become burdensome. Beyond reason, in my opinion. Yeah, especially in Illinois. My God. I was about to say I seven levels of government. I want to say Illinois is probably.

I want to say Illinois might be worse than most. But Illinois has one of the densest as far as stackings of governmental organizations for for any like individual. Because there's city, state, county, township, and then district. So you could have up to five, possibly six or seven. because alderman can get involved, um, levels of government that you have to deal with whenever anything happens at all. Yeah,

that just sounds like dumb to me. Oh, it's, it is, it is frustrating beyond any reasonable level. Is this, it just, it's straight up shouldn't be a problem.

I pay taxes on the entire square footage of my property. I just measured it out with the town. supervisor and he said, yep, you're paying taxes on this entire property. In my opinion, as the township supervisor, my professional opinion is you can do what you want with that building, as long as you are 10 feet from any of the other structures. I mean, and it's 15 feet from the property boundary, and not the road one. I mean, you know, my whole end on this. It's like, I pay for the property. I should be able to do with the property pretty much what I want up to the moment that I endanger my neighbors. If it's unsafe,

Up to the moment I endanger my neighbors. Exactly. I understand easements for the sake of firefighting, for the sake of fire spread and danger to that. I understand having build height limits as far as like aircraft shit goes. I get it. Can't have planes running into buildings. Goes bad for everybody involved. Not cool.

But it's a two car garage in the middle of my property. No matter how it fell, the only people it's going to hurt is me, my wife or my dog. Yeah. dangerous can't allow that much for i know right hell it it is a hundred and forty feet in any direction from from the nearest inhabited building other than my home that's practically on top of somebody i know it's terribly dangerous a bit of dust could potentially endanger and i'm i'm glad you understand it's just i will get my garage that is not an option at this point i found out that my neighbor behind me doesn't own the property that she's been maintaining for her section of this road.

I'm going to get her that property for free now, too. Just to be an ass. Oh, yeah. You know, you've made it my problem. Fine. I'm going to be the entire problem because this is stupid. See, every now and then righteous indignation can be used as a force of good. Yeah, she's a nice lady.

Her daughter is the sweetest kid ever. You know what? They're getting an extra quarter acre of property now. Fuck you. They get it. They've been maintaining it for long enough. They get squatters rights. Guess what?

I'm motivated now. And 25 minutes of screaming about government, as is par for this show. God damn government. So we had said, first of all, again, for anybody that came in late, this episode is pre-recorded. So we're not ignoring you in the comments. We're just here in spirit. We are here in spirit. I will try to be here in comment form to res.

you back if I remember. I mean, cool if you are, I might be in here in comment form. Who freaking knows? I mean, yeah, you never know. We'll see. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen.

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. But, you know, you proposed an interesting, hang idea for this episode because we didn't want to talk about anything that was like too time sensitive. And you brought up like kind of the idea of like getting started and preparedness from the bottom up. Like if you have everything working against you humanly possible to start in preparedness, where do you start? Say like you're a new homeowner.

You got your first apartment. You're the kid that went off to college. I mean, I've literally been. that. Me too. I have been all those things except for the apartment. Gilling and I, when we first got married, we lived in a thousand square foot apartment. Yeah, that's tight. My first house was 938 square feet, I think. It gets, it's small. It's tight. It gets better. That thousand square foot apartment had a kind of a walk-in closet, like right across from the front door. And that was storage for a spare set of wheels and tires for the car that I raised.

And my tools, because I literally, like, I moved into this apartment with all my toolboxes and everything. I was a little, I was a little concerned about whether or not they'd fall through the floor. Thankfully, they didn't. I mean, I don't have, okay, I don't have like, you know, a $50,000 matco toolbox, like a professional. Right. But I've got a reasonable number of tools. Well, they add up quick. They're steel.

Yes. So, you know, space was at a premium. Really, though, I didn't start prepping like really hardcore until I got here to this house and had the space to do it. But even in that apartment, like we were doing what we could with what we had. So I think it's, I think it presents an interesting topic because I've long said that I don't feel, I feel like the people that say I can't prep because I feel like it's kind of a cop out. Because there's a way. I think sometimes sometimes it is and sometimes it's a lot. It's being overwhelmed by the information that's out there.

That was my problem when I got started. Because at the time when I got started, let's see, this would have been, that's good, 2014, 2015. That's a good question of when, okay, so 2014, 2015, when you started prepping. That's when I bought my first house. Gillian and I got married in 2008. So that's when we, that's when we were in that apartment together. I mean, you could argue. that on a very basic level

we were prepping them, but we didn't start like really prepping in earnest until we moved in here, which would have been 2011. Do you remember what the online community with regards to prepping was like in that time period

2011 to 2015 somewhere on? Tinfoil hat shit. It was quite wild. If you were not if the zeitgeist of the time was if you were not living on a multi-acre ranch out in the country with sustainable power and a well and growing your own food you were wrong there was that aspect of preparedness and there was also the people that

said like if you didn't have an underground bunker you could live at it for the next six months like that was that was the two then don't bother that was the two extremes was either you like you grenade build a bunker in suburbia you grenade your entire life as you know it and you either build a bunker and you're prepped for like war war three cuba missile crisis shit or you you're prepping for like little house on the prairie living like it's the 18th century again and there there was no middle ground there was no prep for a week prep for a month there it really was that extreme at the time and there might have been it might have been some content creators that were trying to like push it was limited yeah it was i was about say they were definitely the fringe they were pushing they were

hard from the fringe as a extreme. We can there can be baby steps. There can be gradual increases. Like you do this over time. And I think that's what I struggle with the hardest, not me personally, but like with other people was they looked at it as if I can't get to this goalpost right now, then I'm preparedness is out of my reach. And I've pointed out to people over the years. I'm like, no, no, no. It, like, I am within our little group of friends, probably moderately prepared compared compared to most people. Sure. Certainly not the most.

Certainly not the least. Absolutely not. But it's still taking years to build this. It absolutely does. It really, really does. I mean, when you, I remember in particular a YouTube video that I came across. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to knock the content creator because this was the zeitgeist of the time.

This was the common knowledge of the time. Their advice was to go to one of the freeze-dried companies and buy between one and five years of freeze dried food delivered on a pallet. That's cripplingly expensive. A year at the time, I want to say, it was in the neighborhood of like $2,500 for their one year food palette. And when you crunch the numbers on the calories. One year, one person. And not 2,000 calories a day, I bad.

No, it was like 800 to 1,000 calories a day. Starvation. I'm a big boy. Well, I eat more than that. Well, and not to mention, like, we talk about this whenever we have a talk about, like, food prepping. Like, if you're, if we end up in that situation, as much as I don't think it's like the first thing you should be preparing for. But if we end up in that situation where like the power grid goes out, it's never coming back on, right? You are going technically possible.

You are going to burn so many goddamn calories because everything you do is going to be a lot harder than it used to be. There will be no, there will be no, like, push a button on a microwave and food comes out of it. Everything gets harder. And this is like the reason why I enjoy camping, because when you're camping, yeah, I mean, you go out there, you have your food, you have your fridge, you have a jackery, you have all that stuff, whatever you bring to camping. You're in like, it's not exactly like living like Mad Max, but it's still a good analog for preparedness because everything's harder. everything takes longer. The simple act of making breakfast now involves setting up a stove, pulling out all your stuff, cooking, boiling water to make the coffee.

The camp chores are not just take it to a sink and then wash everything out, put in the dishwasher. It just everything takes longer and everything takes more work, which means that whole. It's good practice. But that means that that whole 2,000 calories a day is a baseline now because you're going to burn a lot more than that. I think if I recall correctly last time I saw a statistic. on it. Your average, like, through hiker goes through like four or five thousand

calories a day. I wouldn't even begin to know off the top of my head, but I know that after that after a Hurricane Ida, I mean, dude, we were eating like we were starving. And we don't understand. We had plenty of food. But we were

like the first day afterwards, we didn't really eat much because it had been a wild night. Nobody had slept well. We were kind of just like, nobody was hungry. You were stressed out. But the next day, when, my in-laws showed up and we got in that front yard, started running chainsaws on a haul and brush. We ate like we were starving for the next three days.

Because we were just burning ourselves down. We were busting our butts. Yeah, you absolutely are. But, you know, I think that that was extremely disheartening for me. Trying to get into preparedness. Yeah. Well, not so much information overload, but the bar being set so absurdly high.

and the only focus being on, and this is why I stated, I attempted to join a couple of different mutual assistance groups, preparedness groups at the time. And why honestly, I ended up falling in with a militia group for a little while. Because the preparedness focus groups were, okay, everybody needs to be working towards getting their properties ready to sell. We're all going to buy a large communal property. We need to find a doctor. We need to find a dentist.

We need to find yada, yada, yada. We need to get farmers. We need to get enough young people into the group for labor to do manual farming, which I don't know if you've ever tried to do manual farming at scale, Phil. I haven't. I haven't. I haven't. It's horrible.

It doesn't look fine. No, it's not. Even if you have animals. I mean, these people were talking about buying somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 acres of either farmland or undeveloped woodland and then building an entire off-grid community. for this, which at the time, that is what a lot of people were talking about. Whether anyone actually did it, I don't think many did. Because it's wildly out of reach. I mean, their stated financial goals were like $300,000 per person in liquid capital to begin this project. To begin it.

And then if anything doesn't pan out, you've yeeded your entire life savings and all your net worth into this thing. And it's all tied into a corporation of these people. Now, okay, maybe that is the ideal. Maybe the ideal is a survivor Jane and Rick Austin. Build yourself a self-sufficient homestead. Maybe that is the ideal. But for most emergencies I've ever experienced, and you've ever experienced, it seems like it's not been that bad. If you can keep yourself alive and fed and in reasonably good repair and decent hygiene for like 8 to 12 days. Yeah, two, three weeks, Max. You're straight.

Yeah, you're probably going to be okay at the very least for weather events. You're pretty well solid at that point. Yeah, and I mean, even like looking back on when I first got in and prepared, it's like Hurricane Katrina was my bellwomen. weather. And as far as hurricane, this episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You

record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people. listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. As far as hurricanes and post-hurricane efforts go, Katrina was kind of a high watermark in my lifetime.

It was. Like, people that are older than me that remember like Betsy remember hurricanes that were much worse that hit this area. But like, or the recovery effort was not as well executed. Yeah. And it, because it really like to me, I guess that is that's that's why Katrina remains remains my bellwether because like it's not the hurricane itself. It was the weeks of fuel being hard to get a hold of building materials being hard to get a hold of tarps and plywood and nails and scrubs. cruise and like scorching heat, abysmal humidity, no access to clean water. Yeah, that was the parts that were better. But at the same time, the worst of it started to unwind itself, especially on the fringes. Like a lot of people don't understand. Like if you're talking about like the ninth ward where the levees breached and the city flooded, like that area took a while to come back from for obvious. Yeah, but that's a couple, that's a couple square mile area.

But if you look, you could walk out of that, you could. Yeah, but if you look at like the surrounding areas, like Slidell where my family lived and this area and Hammond, where my wife lived at the time. Like, if you look at those suburbs around New Orleans, they came back within a few weeks. Like once, once the trees were cleared off the power lines, the grid was restored. Right. As soon as they started getting fuel trucks into those gas stations, that whole area just roared right back to life. Right, because everybody had fuck all to do, but fix stuff. Yeah.

You know, it's, but I guess that's kind of my thing is, like, my experience with emergency situations is that the majority of them, a week, two weeks, four weeks, had four weeks on a high side. As long as you've got enough water and everything to handle yourself for that period of time, you're probably going to be okay. That's why for people in my personal life, and I've advocated it on this podcast as well, I think three months, if you can do. do three months, you've covered yourself for 99.999% of whatever could happen.

Yeah. If you can cover yourself for a month, you're probably set for 95% of what's ever going to happen. Yeah. And I think that's what I've tried to really, that's what I've tried to impress on people that just get started in preparedness is like if you're, if you're long term outset, like you're prepared to do like Stewart and spend the next 30 years. And, you know, bear in mind that like, Stuart is nearing retirement age. And he's been into this lifestyle since I believe he was a late teenager. So that's what I remember him saying. He's literally, we need to get him on here.

I've said that a few times. But like he's, I will harass him. He's been into preparedness as long as I've been alive since 1980, freaking two. Yeah. And if you want to take that long, that long lens and say, my eventual goal is to be able to just like, nail my front and back door, and live in this home out of what I have put away for a year. Cool.

But you don't have to get to a year to have achieved something meaningful. Oh, I would agree. If you can get to two weeks, you've achieved an exceptionally meaningful resiliency. If you can get to three weeks, you've just covered 90% of your emergencies. When it snowed down here, and I understand, eight inches of snow is hilarious to most y'all. Eight inches of snow and we're doing birds. Turnouts and donuts in the Walmart parking lot, bud. But eight inches of snow in New Orleans.

Oh, I know. You have no blocks. It's literally the apocalypse. It's literally the apocalypse. The whole southern half the state shut down. And rightly so. Yeah. But here's the thing of it.

As long as we could have kept ourselves fed and warm without going to the grocery store or without problems for the next three days, that problem is going to unwind itself. Because it melted. It all wind away. And if the power had gone out, as long as we had. a method to keep the house worn, keep the pipes from freezing, keep ourselves fed. Fortunately, we're in a situation where we have gas service to the house. So, like, we're going to run the stove. We're going to run the fireplace. Like, we're going to be fine.

Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be uncomfortable. But you'll sort it out. It's basically just winter camping, which my family also doesn't do. That's understandable. I've been winter camping camping more than a few times. And it can get, it can get rough. I think the coldest I've ever had this family on a camping trip, It was like high 40s and my, I was, my marriage was threatened. When I was in scouts, we had a kid that moved up from Florida and joined our trip. Oh, that poor bastard. I was in middle school.

And he came up, he moved in in December. And in February, we did our winter camp out. The first day we got there, it was like 28. And we got 12 and a half inches of snow. the next day the cold front came through and it dropped down to negative 11. Oh God. And blowing wind. And we were there from Friday night to Sunday morning.

You don't take pity on the poor bastard, right? Oh, we did. We piled everything we could on top of that kid. His winter jacket that his parents bought him was what I would call like a light fall jacket around here. He just wasn't ready for it. He wasn't ready for it. They had no concept of how cold it. was going to be he had like a 30 degree sleeping bag which was nowhere near sufficient oh no he didn't

have under armor or anything like that but we we set the kid up just fine because every one of us brought like three extra sweatshirts so we piled him as you do it was fine as you do you got to look out for your friends right and hell what are you going to have a you want to have a cold casualty that you now have the first aid as a boy scout troop that's going to look like shit having prepared friends is a blessing it absolutely is But, you know, I've always said to people that getting started in preparedness is boring. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio.

If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show. Upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it.

It's boring. You know, it's, I think the first thing. you have to do, that you take an inventory of your house. Take an inventory of your house. Look at what you do and don't have. If you find yourself going through your house, and I don't mean a right pen and paper inventory, I'm not talking about an Excel sheet. I'm talking just, go into every room in your house, open every cabinet, look at it. If you don't find a fire extinguisher in your house, period, you have a problem that can be addressed for under $100 and can potentially save you an insurance claim on a kitchen fire burning half your house down. You know, everybody has electronic devices on them constantly right now.

Do you know what the number one cause of house fires is right now, Phil? Unattended electrical devices plugged into charge. shitty cheap chargers lighting on fire on wall out. I know two different families when I was in high school and a third since high school that have had their house either burned down or partially burned due to a gas station $3 charger. Now, one of them was for an iPhone. One of them was for an iPad or no, iPhone iPod. And I think the other one was, I want to say it was for, it was a knockoff cordless tool battery charger. And they left the battery plugged in it.

And it just, the whole thing caught fire. The lithium went up and then the house was gone. It's boring. Make a list of all the foods you normally buy in a one week period. And then the next week, just buy a little. lecture of the non-perishables. I encourage everybody to take that that whole idea of an inventory just one step further, though, more than just look and see what you have.

Look at everything with the thought in your head of, is this, are these things mission critical or not? And when I say mission critical, I don't mean, like, nice to have. And I don't necessarily mean makes life pleasant. But I mean, like, am I going to be significantly screwed over? if I don't have this thing. And the answer is yes, and you only have one, is the amounts you have sufficient to last one week, two weeks, whatever your starting point is.

Yeah, because if it's a cast iron Dutch oven, I mean, you could hit that thing with a hammer and it's fine. And likewise, if it's a big old five pound bag of rice, one five pound bag of rice is more than plenty to last couple of weeks. But if the five pound bag of rises down to this much, now it's a problem. If on the other hand, you have like several bags of pasta, we can switch from rice to pasta. Maybe the little bit of rice left over isn't that big of a deal.

Maybe it is. But like that's the exercise my family goes through even now after all these years of preparedness is when we're about to go to the grocery store. I make a point of taking a lab through the garage going past the can rack, going past the overflow storage, pulling open the chest freezer, looking in the pantry, looking in the fridge freezer. I look at all that stuff just at a glance and I'm like, okay, what do I only have one of? Because those are the things I should have more than one of. Or the things that you eat all the time. What do you got less than three of? Here's the thing.

The can rack literally is one of this where like you put a can in the top. It goes all the way to the back and loops around. It comes back around the front. You don't see any cans up top? Time to refill. Exactly. And when it comes to the, we have this huge bin and it is just second pantry. It's not.

everything in the pantry, but it's like extra pasta, extra rice, extra baking supplies. And all of this, by the way, is the stuff that goes immediately into the pantry or into ready use. That's not talking about the eight, five gallon buckets that are sealed up that have more flour, more rice, more of all that in there. That's the deep storage. That is breaking case of emergency. We're going to have to eat out of this for the next six months kind of situation. But it's all dried goods. A lot of the stuff that we keep in the can rag and an overflow, it's stuff that probably isn't going to make it two,

three years at a whack. It's stuff we really need to eat within six months to six to 12 months. But the point is if you're down to canned goods, canned goods, you're solid for years past the expiration date, at least from a safety standpoint. Yes, the nutrition content does go down over time.

Yes, the taste. and the texture does go down over time. Let's not ignore that because for morale, it's important. Yeah. I mean, I literally have a morale bucket and it's nothing but baking supplies. And that's perfect because that's a community activity that you can do together with your wife or your daughter. That's a good comfort food that your wife and daughter both love because you and I, I would eat the same sandwich every single day for decades.

I have been eating the same breakfast every single day, barring when there's no toast and barring when there's no eggs, because I've forgotten to get them, for the entire time I've lived at this property. So over five years. My wife and I were married for almost 15 years before she would start buying pork chops again because we ate them so often when we first got married because they were cheap. Yeah, man. Sometimes you got to do that. And the minute money wasn't that tight anymore, she swore off more pork chops. swore off pork chops for like 15 freaking years and it's only been really recently she's been like why don't we buy pork chops anymore i'm like because you won't eat them i'm going to let you in on a pork chop recipe later i'm going to get you a pork chop sandwich recipe that she will love uh you can get your pork chops again i mean she started buying them again so you know we just had to get her past the uh the training scar i guess but yeah like we used to there was a grocery store across street

from our apartment and if you went there in the afternoons they would take the pork chops that were like basically going to expire the next day and they put them at the very end of the cooler and they were discount them 50% off or so so we would go buy these big old packs of about to expire pork chops put them in the free you know bag them up a couple of time put them in the freezer and we would just we ate pork chops peanut butter sandwiches a red beans of rice six days a week but look at work got you i mean it kept us out of debt and it kept us fed it does it does and honestly that's that's the important part is that it kept you fed i mean Look, I'm not going to tell anybody to go out, to not go out and build a bugout bag.

No. I'm not going to tell them not to buy tactical gear because I have plenty of it. I have spares. I have more than I probably should. As I sit here and there's an old plate carrier belt over there, a new play carrier and belt here behind me and apothecary med bag back there. And there's, you know, MERS over there. And then there's, yeah, I mean, I have. have a 64 gun safe that is very full of random tactical shit.

Yes. Like I have, I have plenty of it. It's fun. But, and this is a big butt, you're not going to need it in a three-day emergency, in a one-week emergency. Probably not even in a two-week emergency unless there's looting. And see, for the purpose, whenever I talk somebody about like starting off and preparedness, I approach this from a little bit of a different perspective than I think most do. Like, I look at it as you need to be prepared for X number of days because that scales really nicely.

Like to me, you need the same things. Whether you're preparing for a day, a week, a month, or a year, you just need a lot more of it. And once you have a rotating pantry, you've got that baseline to evaluate and build off. But to your point about like tactical gear and firearms, like you do not need enough AR-15s and ammo. to outfit a fire to turn your entire neighborhood into a fire team. You definitely do not need a duffel bag and a half of 30 round stand eggs. Yeah. It's fun.

Although if Hillary Clinton runs for presidents again, you can make a tidy profit. Yeah. But I would say, like I have always told people like if you're, if you're just starting off and you are you are just starting off, go get yourself a nine millimeter handgun. Yeah. Yes. three magazines a lot of them will come with three

most of them come with two you want to get most of them come with two now i say get three because i like i would say so because i like to have first of all like for a belt system i like to have one plus two one of the gun and two spares but even at a it's a good system but even at uh like let's say you're you're the concealed carrier and you're only going to carry one spare mag now you have one mag in reserve for one of the other two mags breaks or you ejected on the ground and the the uh the base plate breaks in half or something

stupid a feed lip gets dented I've had to pound out feed lips more than once yeah so now you have basic get that get 200 rounds of 9mm meter ammo 200 rounds of ammo will solve a whole lot of problems

if someone is trying to threaten your safety and your livelihood in your home I would argue that for the vast majority of civilian use case for self-defense the statistics have been

bared out pretty well on this one. Most of the time, you draw down on somebody, that solves the problem. If it doesn't, a couple rounds judiciously applied solves most problems. The ones that it does not solve,

most people mag don't. And then that solved the problem. And the reason why it ended at one mag is because they paused to reload. Yeah. and reevaluate the situation. But again, I'm starting at three days. Let's say it's not quite mad max, but it's a three-day emergency.

You need to have enough ammo to deal with problems. The next three days, the first magazine you burn down doesn't mean you're totally out. You need a little bit of extra for training time here and there. So start with the nine-mill, get three mags, get 200 rounds. Get that, get enough food and get water figured out for three days. Assume that you're home. Non-perishable food for three days to a week. Non-perishable.

And for anybody that says you have to go out and get like the really expensive freeze-dry crap, go get a five-pound bag of rice and a five-pound bag of dry beans and learn how to frigging soak them and soak them and you'll be fine. Honestly, if you have a pantry with five or six different types of canned food and you have a couple of each and a one-pound bag of rice, you're good for three days. Yeah. But do that as long as there's some kind of canned meat in there for protein to bulk it out, rice, some vegetables, some fruit, stuff like that, you're probably okay because you've already got what's in your fridge that's in your normally consumed. And you're going to eat what's in the fridge in the first two days anyway, so it doesn't go bad. And assume that your house is a viable source of shelter. This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need,

explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker. Helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com.

Spreaker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Yeah, yeah, that's a fair assumption, I think. Figure out sanitation. Like, that's one thing I don't think a lot of people, like, a lot of people, when they get into preparedness, you know, they're laser focused on the guns. Maybe their brain goes.

Well, guns are fun. Maybe their brain goes. Night fishing is awesome. So the medical stuff. Maybe it takes a detour at the food and water, but most people totally forget about what you do with all the human waste that comes out of y'all's bodies. And if the water pressure... Do you know what my most used prep is?

Hmm. Baby wipes. Extra case of toilet paper. Oh, yeah. Extra case of toilet paper. Because every time something happens... Toilip paper disappears. Anytime anything happens, fucking toilet paper is out of stock.

And bear in mind that we... We kind of frontloaded this talking about like worst case scenario for preparedness to start off at apartments. A lot of people don't think about this, but if the water pressure goes to zero, the higher up off the ground you go, the faster your water pressure goes down. So if you don't have water pressure, then you have no way to fill the toilet to make the thing flush. This is one of those moments in time where like you just, you need to think to think ahead and you need to have a backup plan. personally I've got a 35 gallon trash can off the back of the house that's tapped into the downspouts every time it rains I got 35 gallons out there and that's 35 gallons for bucket baths for flushing toilets for whatever else I still to this day I have most of the stuff I need I need to pick up some supplies and everything and figure it out how I'm going to do it but composting toilet no I've got 200 gas I've got two 55 gallon rain barrels and I don't want to tap them into the downspouts on the house because I don't want to tap them into the downspouts on the house because I don't have a good way to do it and not have it be like a total freaking eyesore which let's be fair you live in an urban area or suburb so you it needs to look respect yeah let's say or commonplace enough

that it's not going to draw a ton of attention so what i'm thinking is is that i have a garden shed in the backyard fairly decently decent sized one and i saved a a a non-destroyed piece of gutter when when I had the gutters redone after Ida. So my plan has been to affix that chunk of gutter to the back side of that shed. That'll work. And then downspout that and run that like, you know, kind of like, I haven't decided yet if I like dig, dig under the ground. So it's easier to mow around or however I do it.

But like tap into that to fill those two 55-gall rain barrels. I'm just. Because it will. You get enough rain. Yeah. I mean, even the garden, even just half. the roof of that garden shed, it's going to be enough. But my point

is that, especially for your most common emergency, which is hurricanes, you get too much rain. Yeah. And you know, to be perfectly frank, like, in all the years we've been here, we've only lost water pressure a couple of times. Like, we've had bowl water advisories, but that's also why we, that's also

why we have like a 20-day supply of bottle water sitting on the shelf. Because that's potable. Yes. You wouldn't probably want to use that for sanitation for the most. But that's also the reason why we have the non-potable water source. And in an emergency, I do have like burkey filters and food grade buckets. And I have all the things off on the side to make an ugly little burkey filter.

Yeah. But it means very doable for for inexpensive. The filters are the most expensive part. Plastic buckets, maybe not so great for you. They're beat me and my wife try to avoid plastics and their food grade. It's as good as it's going to get. They're BPA-free and their food grade, but buddy, look at all the stuff that's in there that they have not said as bad for you yet. I'm, yeah.

Look, I work in the plastics field. There are material safety data sheets for every single plastic. And there is a maximum exposure threshold to the volatile chemicals in all of them. I'm not trying to say, don't use plastics for anything. Plastics are extremely valuable, extremely useful. And they will pay for the garage that I am damn well going to build. But we try to minimize our expose. Yeah.

And I mean, that's all. Just try to be sensible. And that's why it's for emergency use and not set up sitting on the counter for daily use. Because the stainless steel big burkey, that's expensive. That's a few hundred bucks. Yeah. And my bigger issue is just that once you buy it, it's kind of already assembled. And what I have is compacted together to where it doesn't take as much space.

Right. It's a double-stacked five-gallon buckets like that big. It's not an issue. But anyway, so like I said, I mean, for a three-day emergency, honestly, I say go get enough freaking, like, go get enough water bottles. Get a couple of. Yeah, two, three cases of water. Yeah. Figure a case of water per day per person.

Probably not a bad start. Me personally, I would go the extra step of recommending like one or two of the big five-gallon, like NATO water water cans that I have. Absolutely. They're heavy duty as hell. And they will last a lifetime. time we have them for short-term power outages where I'm I can't be bothered to wheel out the generator I'm not talking with the fuel cans I'm talking about the water cans oh I know I have those water can yeah too and and what we'll do if we have a big storm coming that we're like we're gonna

lose power for a minute because I'm out in the country we're not a priority for com ed yeah I get it we fill up two of those and at the very least we can flush the toilets like five or six times per camp. Yep. And if you, that's, and 10 flushes of the toilet, plus there's three toilets with two flush,

with one flush each in there already in, in the house. That's a lot of pooping. And worse come to worst. I mean, if you absolutely have to use one for sanitation, jump in the shower and get your significant other to sprit on, you know,

sprits over the top of you. I mean, honestly, the day after Ida, when we were working out in the yard, that's what we were doing. We would take a five gallon bucket of water into the shower with us and just give ourselves a bucket bath.

Yeah. Yeah, that works. I mean, a rag and a shallow bowl of somewhat warm water. Yep. That was how it was done for a very long time. Yeah, you're probably still going to smell bad. Suck it up. It's going to be probably a few days to a couple weeks. I mean, frankly, that's how we used to do field sanitation in the Army, and it wasn't that long ago.

You learn really that way out on maneuver. Yeah. So if we're talking about, like, basic amounts, food, water, sanitation, get a thing. of wet wipes. I don't care if you smell. I don't care if you smell like a baby. They just, especially if you're if you're, you're grimy and grungy and sanitation, you're already struggling with sanitation. Baby wipes just make things go so much nicer.

You know what's the king of that? The unscented baby wipe. Oh, yes. Because nothing smells worse than a dude that's been out in the woods for three days. And then the baby wipe smell on top of stank ass. Yeah. It's bad. It's just, I don't know what it is about that, that particular smell combined with swamp ass.

It's nauseating. It is. The unscented ones cost the exact same. Get them. Yeah. You will thank me later. Hopefully. But once you've covered food, water, sanitation, basic self-preservation, like a little bit of medical.

A little bit, a little bit of medical. And here's the thing. it would be really, really easy for me to say, you know, you should just by default have an IFAC in the house. But I'm going to tell you what I have used a whole hell a lot more than I've ever used a blowout kid in this house. Bandades. Bandades, alcohol prep pads, and like gauze and medical tape. Ibuprofen, acetamethin, and your favorite antidiary. Benadryl.

Benadryl is a good one. Benadryl. I actually have a box of emodium. Actually, you know, I have a, the little tubes of draming. Yeah. So I take those and then I take emodium. You know how emodium comes? It's like the huge card and the little tiny pills and the grid cell pack.

So I take scissors and I cut very, very carefully around those, around those so that like I turn that that big old huge blister pack into just, just barely enough to keep the pill contained. And I put those. in a tube with with uh dramamine oh that's a great idea because here's the thing if let's say you are violently ill and you're having a case of upchucks and down chucks at the same time everyone's lived through that at least once it's not it's not pretty especially when the power's out a double dose of dramamine not always but usually will arrest the throwing up it will at the very least minimize yeah it may not on the level of like what's the prescription stuff?

On to C-Tren. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my wife was given that for something. No. No, I think she was given dramamine for that. Yeah, there's a, there's a prescription stuff, and it's escaped me right this minute. But two dramamine isn't quite to that level, but it's pretty close.

And if you mix, if you pair that up with an emotium, it will stop the upchucks and the downchucks. Or at a minimum, it'll minimize it. So, like, I actually keep that in my work. bag because if I'm an hour away from home and I become violently ill, the last thing you need when you're on the freeway. Yes. Everybody's been there too, man. Anybody that's been on a road trip and ate in bad food from whatever restaurant has been

there. Yeah. The gas station sushi was ill-advised and will have its revenge. Honestly, though, if it's a Casey's, the gas station sushi is probably safe. More than likely. We don't have Casey's around here. Their food is very good. Would eat.

Around here, it's the gas station fried chicken, which sounds like an awful idea to anybody that has never been to the deep south. Dude, I would trust anyone from the deep south with fried chicken. That just sounds like a recipe for a great time. I mean, bear in mind that Popeye's chicken is originally from New Orleans. It is, isn't it? Yes. The franchise was started by Al Copeland himself,

before he started the Al Copeland restaurants and cheesecake and cheesecake bistroo room or cheesecake factory I forget anyway something with cheesecake yeah but I honestly man I think three days is an excellent goal for anyone starting because we did a what was it a one week of food for under a hundred bucks or 150 bucks one week per person uh I came in at like 90 something bucks and I was on the low end and I think it was you were Andrew had the high end it was only like 120 I was on the high end because I had fruits and veg but even your even your menu was only like a hundred and fifty I thought it was closer like 128 or something like that or hundred 25 could have been I mean canned fruits and vegetables at Sam's Club is not that expensive yeah it was

perfectly reasonable but more than just reasonable cost wise to put all these things together the amount of space we're talking about taking up is not that much you're talking about figured it out it was less than three square feet three cubic feet for the food but also add in okay 200 rounds of ammo less less than half a shoe box bulk pack the water smaller than your box a three day supply of bottle water that's going to take up a little bit of space but still not not looking at a few cases of water yeah if you go the if you go the least convenient route for storage a box of like band-aids and your basic medical stuff most of that stuff is probably already in your uh in you know in your back And what I have underneath my sink is literally just like it's like it's one of those like collapsing fabric. Yeah. You know, containers. And it's just filled to the brim with extra band-aids, you know, like bulk packs of stuff. Because I'm looking at it as not prepping for three days, but like if let's say you just can't buy band-aids at the store anymore.

Like society hasn't shut down, but just no, but you just got some supply chain disrupt. which we have seen recently. Which we have seen recently. And it pays to have over the counters and band-aids and toilet paper and things like that on standby. But Phil, do you have REI near you? We have a Massey's outfitters, which is kind of like REI. It's so it's like a slightly rebranded REI. All right.

Nationwide, here's what I want you guys to do. If you do not have an IFAC in your house, if you don't know what to put in one, and you don't feel like doing the research, North American medical. Excellent source. Skinny medic. Excellent source. Skinny medic store is medical outfitters.

Medical outfitters. Thank you. Thank you. I forgot with the name of it. Refuge medical. That's excellent source. Yeah, Bear's a great resource. Dark Angel.

Dark Angel is great. But my point is go to an outfitters, like an REI or a Cabellas or a Bass pro or whatever you've got and find a store employee and say like hey i need a medical kit for a two week backpacking trip it's going to be yay big get to them and you'll have some trauma care you'll have your basic wound care you'll probably have some tweezers you'll probably have a splint you'll probably have a few other things in there that would be useful for most common injuries in hiking which are also a lot of the most common injuries you get dicking around in your house when you're doing yard work. Yeah.

It's an easy place to get it and it doesn't have as high of a markup as some of the emergency stores. Like you see something like the stuff branded for preparedness on Amazon or at Walmart. Unfortunately, like you and I have talked about the night vision tax. Yeah. And there's a huge tax. And the preparedness tax is massive. The preparedness tax, the Second Amendment tax. the tactical attacks.

Yeah. I mean, if you and there will be some markup involved, even at something like an REI or a camping place, but if you're truly getting started and you don't know where to start and you're not prepared to do your own research, you could do worse. And the thing of it is that once you could do, you could do way worse.

Once you get that kit and you can say, this is baseline, this is the stuff that's on in this kit, now you can go get extra. I do most, I do most of my medical, my medical prepping out of our local, see out of our local drugstore. Because believe it or not, our local Walmart has shelves full of all the various gauze and ab pads and trauma pads. And they even have the bulk boxes, the cellulox stuff.

And bulk boxes of rolls of Cobang. Oh, yeah. Dude, Coban is amazing for so many things. Oh, dude. I mean, it's great for field repairs or holding stuff together in a pinch. I mean, it does all kinds of things. But I guess my heck, holding a screwdriver to your arm while you're in a terrible position and you can't, you cannot drop that screwdriver.

Great idea. Wrap that shit with Coban. Good to go. But all that to say like, This episode is brought to you by Spreaker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now.

editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Sprinker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Sprinker distributes it everywhere people listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousins swears are the next big thing. Even better, Sprinker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. You can get off the beaten path and you can get most of the, you can get, first of all, 99% of the stuff locally to you.

There is a gun store within a reasonable distance of you. There is a grocery store. There is a drug store. You don't have to go get the preparedness stuff. And you definitely don't have to go get the current best. version of a 9mm handgun. I'm going to tell you that if you go to a gun store and you literally, like, walk in and ask, do you have anything as police trade in?

It will be. They'll probably have one or two. It will be carried often, fired minimally, and it will have more holsterwear than wear on the internals. It probably will. I mean, very rarely do you run into a cop that shoots as much as like you or I do, even now, as limited as my shooting has come down to. Yeah. But honestly, like, I don't personally see the barriers that have been advertised to me about preparedness.

And a lot of it's also because like the community itself has changed. Like there are more. It has. There are more. When I started this podcast 10 years ago, I have to keep reminding myself, it's been 10 freaking years podcasting. Jesus Christ. Phil, do you want to know which episode of yours got me into your show? Oh, I'm curious because I've never asked.

It was called prepping in the suburbs. No shit. It was called prepping in the suburbs. Wasn't that like, my first year, maybe second year? Was Andrew? It was your second year. So Andrew, come on the show by then. The first episodes that Andrew was involved in.

And I was trying to find somebody that was living in town that didn't have 15 acres that wasn't telling me to buy a commune. start a cult. I mean, I'm not trying to talk you out of starting a cult. There are pros and cons. Personally, I think cults are a great decision as long as you're the leader and not one of the units. Of course.

That goes out saying. But, dude, that is surprising because I just assumed I was on YouTube. I just assumed I was a total crankpot for trying to start a show that was talking about reasonable preparedness to a reasonable level when the rest

of the community was dead set against it. it was there was only two people i found at the time that that discussed preparedness from a standpoint less than total collapse and it was you and i think it was was a brian duff maybe i think it was brian no bryan duff was a little bit later yeah i found him well he was frankly he was still work for the d o d when i first started he was um it might have been patriot nurse at the time oh that is a total blast from the past before she before she got really into the government will totally collapse and that's not the dog on her i think i think a lot of the info she gives out is fantastic yeah i have not watched her stuff

in many years but a lot of her early medical videos were amazing yeah and if you can and you can go back in youtube and watch those early medical videos excellent excellent advice on how to build a medical kit. That's how I built out my medical kit. And then my buddy Dave ended up a really high-end nurse. And I had him go through my medical kit. And he tuned it up really nice. Yeah. After I took my first ad building my first medical kit, I sat down on this show with my sister, who's a paramedic, who's a freaking amazing paramedic. And she, we should have her back on for a medical top of it. It's going to get trickier, though, because she moved across the state. So like, She used to live in the same town as me

And now she's like two and a half hours away That's fair That's fair Although I think I am currently 17 hours away from you About that She probably lacks as much cast iron As I have it behind me doesn't she Considering she had

They heard my brother-in-law Downsides from their house Into a tiny home To make the move Yeah They definitely don't have a thousand pounds No they're in the process of looking for it.

They're looking for like rural property to really kind of have what they always wanted and what I would love to have one day. They're just making that move in coordination with her career relocating them quite quickly. Hey man, real life costs a shitload of money.

Yeah. We all got to pay for it somehow. I do it with molds. She does it with everybody that fucks up. Yeah. But I mean, in all honesty, I feel like that was something that made

the show kind of an odd duck when we first start out was just this idea that like preparedness. I mean, the title of the show is from zero to hero. And really what I meant was like you come in off the street, you have no earthly idea what you're doing. And I think the perception is that you have to go to Mad Max all in one jump. Like if you're not, if you're not Burt Gummer levels are prepared, there's no point in even trying.

And I've always pushed back against that so hard because the idea, That was an actual sentiment put out by a number of big content creators back in the day. And I've, that I am so glad it has gone away. Well, you say it's gone away. I actually, um, the last year, is it not? The last year I went to prepper camp, I was literally talking with a, um, so I don't know if you remember, you haven't been to prepper camp. So there's another pot and I probably will not go. I like our summer camp.

There's more dogs. Yeah. I pet many dogs. So there's another podcaster that started coming out to that after we did. It's Doomsday podcast. I don't think I've actually listened to that one. Should I? I mean, I gave him a list and I kept in touch a little here and there.

His content's not my wheelhouse, but most content isn't my wheelhouse, to be perfectly honest. That's why I do my own thing. That's fair enough guy. Anyway, one of his buddy. Oh, I'm sure. One of his buddies Content creator I've made has been pretty cool. One of his buddies who

I don't even, I didn't even catch the guy's name. That's how little I want to interact with him ever again. Literally told me that if, like, if you're not prepared to sell everything you own and buy 100 acres of farmland tomorrow, you're not a prepper. A hundred acres of farmland around me costs. Like, depending on how bad the farmland is two and a half to twelve million dollars yeah well

this that was this guy's whole selling point was like none of y'all are real preppers because none of you like raise your own food and live off grid and great great yeah that i'm not a real prep and i try i try it's okay i try to like talk him off that ledge and he just he did not want to hear and i was like okay well and then you and i just don't agree and we're not going to agree but the difference to me is that I've always looked at for the perspective of like the reason I started the show by my damn self after literally Googling how to start a podcast. Like, How basic can we?

Listen, when I tell y'all that this was a shoestring effort that I pulled out of my fifth point of contact and had no earthly idea what I was doing, I googled how do you start a podcast? Maybe that's a, maybe that is like endemic of the generation I'm from where everything's on the internet if you just look it up. But I had no earthly idea what to do or how to do this or how any of this worked. And I just, or even how to post it. I mean, it's not something you're born knowing.

You've got to learn somewhere. But after researching and figuring out how to do it and just starting with no earthly idea whether or not I was going to be successful or not, I started from the perspective of there's someone out there who's going to be screwed if they don't get this. Not in the information, because the information was out there. I honestly feel like most people just needed the nudge. Like they needed to be told you don't have to be, you know, farmer brown living off grid.

You don't have to be Burt Gummer. You don't have to live in a bunker. You do not have to do any of those things. They need to be told that Honda inverter generator that's going to run your fridge. That's a hell of a good start. Yes. They need to be told that the jackery and the solar panels that you bought for going camping because you like to run a 12-0 fridge.

is in fact a preparedness item. They have to be told that you don't need enough rifles to equip the whole street. You probably just need one rifle and like a combat load of magazines and maybe some web gear to carry the magazines. And even that is more than entry level preparedness. I would say entry level, pistol, holster, three max. Yes. That's a great place to be.

But I feel like people had to be told that that was the entry level. The entry level is not Burt Gummer. The entry level is something much more reasonable and much more mundane and much more every day. People had to be told that all the old hands of preparedness, while their idea of preparedness wasn't wrong, it was not a baseline. It was not required. It can be an end goal. It can be an end goal. Hell, it could be a beginning goal.

But it's not, there is no zero or a hundred. It's zero to a hundred. And I've always told people how far you take your preparedness journey is an individual decision. I will probably never take mine beyond three to six months. I still take, look, I still put away in a retirement account and I still take my family on vacations because it is, there is that perspective that says the world is going to end. We have to get ready for it. Every cent we have spare goes into preparedness. That's fine.

I will be divorced if I try to do that. Most people will. I would be depressed if I tried to do that. You know, because honestly, man, this episode is brought to you by Spreaker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives,

and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster. The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads,

meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Every couple of years, I love going to the Smoky Mountains and just dickens. sticking around on the trails. You know, years ago, I do.

Andrew and I had it, we're having a discussion about, about money. It was probably one of our annual finance episodes. And he was kind of weighing out the benefits of like, do I clamp down super hard on my finances so I can put more way for, for retirement or pay off my student debts faster? And like,

I really want this new gun. I really want to go, go on that vacation. I want to do these things. But if I don't do the things, I can put the money towards my debt faster. And what I had always told Andrew was, I'm like, it's not a question of do I do this or this 100%.

It's what balance point makes sense for you? Like if you want to take the vacation, take the vacation, just do it knowing that the opportunity cost for taking that $2,000 vacation is I don't pay off $2,000 of debt. For fuck's sake, if I find out one of you is paying for a vacation on a goddamn credit card, I will harass you in person or online. whichever is more convenient. If I find out that one of you is financing extraneous, non-life-threatening things on credit cards at current interest rates, I will cry. And then scream.

For fuck's sake, a $2,000 vacation, there's 52 weeks in a year. I'm going to do that math because I am. While you're doing the math. I've caught a decent buzz. While you're doing the math, do you know what the percentage of people is last year who were financing a vacation that had not paid off the finance vacation from the previous year please tell me it's not more than 10 it was 36% oh for fuck say i've not had enough to drink for this 36% of families were financing a second summer vacation that hadn't paid off the one from

the previous year bill you want to know how much you have to set aside every week this year to take a two thousand dollar vacation next year uh two thousand dollars 52 weeks in a year years like 40 bucks 38 46 so 37 39 dollars put 39 dollars you can take a $2,000 vacation hell you could first under $75 a year you can take a $4,000 vacation every year if you just don't do it the first year I'll do you one better than that you could put away $50 a week and now you have some slack for when bills get tight like around or birthdays or holidays and things like that. $50 a week.

Yes. That's where it starts. I mean, I, you know, I got into an argument at one point on Reddit with someone and I realize arguing with people on Reddit is like punching children. Wait a second.

There's no good outcome here. So you're not that old, but that is, this is an old man screams at Sky moment. You were arguing with people on Reddit? Oh, I was over finances. And I,

they were at, I was, I was subbed to a financial advice subreddit at one point. Okay, because I was trying to better myself. And one of the people on there was, he made $150,000 a year. He had like $250,000 in debt and he was paycheck to paycheck. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. $250,000 in debt.

Yes. I'm hoping something of that is a mortgage. None of it was a mortgage. So we're talking with like, suit and, like, student loans three cars an apartment and two people's student loans two adult drivers three cars was he seeking financial advice or giving financial advice both okay at different times no one listen to me lind does if you take financial advice from person who has more non-mortgage debt than they make in a year, you should slap yourself hard.

You really, really should. I mean, like my God. And the thing I advocated for that started this argument, that attracted this person to shit on my argument was that if you cannot at the end of the week, put $50 in a savings account, after your bills are paid, at the end of every week, $50. time to sell something you have either a had some terrible luck which can happen with medical things this stuff happens you might lose your job bad shit happens to good people all the time but if you are gainfully employed in a career track and you've not had some kind of like catastrophic thing happened very recently and you can't put $50 away at the end of every week you need to reevaluate your lifestyle. There is something in your lifestyle you're overspending on. And this guy with three cars,

making $150,000 a year with $250,000 in debt, decided that I was the idiot because some people are living paycheck to paycheck just like him. Nick, what have I told you about arguing, about playing chess with pigeons? Oh, I know. But I was probably, I had probably fired off that $50 a week comment while pooping at work. You know, you make those social media comments while you're doing something else, and then you fuck off back into reality because you have a real life with real things to do. Touching grass, yes. And yeah, and internet firestorm ensues.

And then everyone is yelling at you, so you decide to take it personally. And you argue with every single one of them until they quit. Well, that's what happened. This episode is brought to you by Spreker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones you don't need, explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives, and saying things like, sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio. If this sounds familiar, you're probably already a podcaster.

The good news is Spreaker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreaker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and about a dozen apps your cousin's swears are the next big thing. Even better, Spreaker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your performance. podcast might someday pay for, well, more microphones. Start your show today at spreeker.com. Sprinker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. Start small. Start anything, any good habit that you're going to build. And preparedness is kind of a habit. Exercise is kind of a habit. Start small, start easy. I mean, I call build that, build those

little wins. I call preparedness a lifestyle because it's something. that like once you integrate it into your life, it starts to influence parts of your life you don't expect. Preparedness was part of the reason why I managed my finances the way I did back in the days when I- That's why I started saving for retirement. Back in the days when I made substantially less money than I do now and money was really tight, I budgeted my money. I am known to have both Road Rage and a case of lead foot.

And back then, I had a little four-cylinder compact car. and I pin the friggin, I used to pin the cruise control at 70 miles an hour on the dot in the far right lane and I baby that God help you if you were in the way. Dude, I was,

I'm being serious though. I used to do everything I could think of to try to save a couple of bucks because if I could save a little bit more money than I could put a little bit more towards preparedness without taking away from anything else. I literally, and like to this day I'm wired this way.

I don't throw out clothing until they have holes in them. I don't throw stuff wave, it can be fixed. I do a lot of... My wife has to talk me into throwing away clothes, because it's still a good work shirt. Yeah, well, there are such thing as long mowing pants. Unfortunately, I had to get rid of a pair of long mowing pants when the crotch blew out of them. Because... Look, do you own a staple gun? Yes. Those pants are still fine for one more mow. You can staple that shit together and get back on the mower. Nick, the reason why the crotch blew out was because so much sweat and friction.

had worn the fabric between my thighs so thin that like literally the act of pulling them up caused them to just disintegrate you know what really helped my pants last longer i dropped 60 pounds yeah well i'd had the these have been my long mowing pants for like four years oh i believe that and that was long mowing pants when they were no longer serviceable for you know go to work pants Yeah, yeah. Those are eight-year pants. Yeah. As it should be.

Anyway, off the subject of pants. The point is, pants are important. Pants are key. Pants are optional. Well, that depends. I had to go into a government building today, and they had a sign that said,

no shirt, no shoes, no pants, no service. You know my theory on signs, right? Signs are optional. unless they're enforced by weight of law. No. The fact that they had to put up a sign means that someone made them put up a sign.

Well, there's that. Someone walked in that office with no pants, hence why it's on the sign now. Knowing some of the people in my county that would have been coming to court in that courthouse. Believable. The pants sign was necessary. I don't know.

Like, that's my whole spiel on like preparedness. If you're starting out, dirt, as poor living in an apartment, you don't have farmland and you don't have, you know, a gun safe full of tactical gear. That's fine. It doesn't matter. The point is probably most of us. Yeah. Because the truth of matter is like most of us live in an apartment or we live in the suburbs. If we're fortunate, we live on the outside of town where we have at least a few less layers of governmental bullcraft to deal with every last like very few of us are former Delta operators with a safe full of class three weapons. Like let's call whatever. it is. Very few of us. I wish I had to say full of class three weapons, but that would kick my ammo budget way through the roof. Yeah. And very few of us are sitting on like farmable land out behind our house with beast of burdens hitched up waiting to drag plows. Like just to let alone the knowledge to use it. Good God. Just be realistic. Most of us are not in that boat. And yet preparedness

is not about only be preparing that one way. Preparedness is about being able to take care of yourself and sustain your family for a period of time. Whether that period of time is three days or three weeks or three months or three years or 30 years is totally up to what level you think is appropriate. I say three months is a pretty good place to get to. But if you start at three days and you scale up from there, then you are, first of all, you're not going to be the knuckhead that's looking for a grocery store when the snow starts falling and everybody else is hungry that in their house.

you can just go home and crack a beer with the dog. I mean, literally, like, in the very first day, COVID hit here in the U.S., when I can truthfully say we really didn't know what we didn't know. There was no reliable information. Nobody trusted anything China had to say. And our own government didn't really have any great base of a comparison to start from. So my wife and I had discussion about what we do, and I'm like, well, we're just going to shelter at the house. and we could make that decision because we had toilet paper and food and water and all the things we needed.

We didn't have to rush out to the grocery store to go deal with people. We didn't have to go rush out looking for stuff. We had everything we needed. Yeah, exactly. It gives you layers of options. And even if that's only three days, hey, great, you got three days to solve the problem. That's a lot of time. You can do a lot of thinking in three days.

You can do even more in four. I will say that the day after Hurricane Ida, when we had like, you know, a tree laying on the house and two trees in the front yard. And we couldn't open, when we opened the front door, we couldn't see anything because we were looking at a tree. And we opened the garage and then the tree burst into the garage. And we had to push the branches out and shut the garage door and go out the back of the house. And the power ended up being out for eight days. And we had zero water pressure the next morning because a tree hit the water, the water tank. with all the problems we had, and we had a lot of problems.

But I can comfortably say that because we were as prepared as we were, we had a lot of peace in our hearts too, because we knew we weren't going to starve. We had potable water. We had all the medical stuff we could possibly need. Looting ended up not being an issue except for a couple of dirtbag neighbors who were like skulking around. And we made a very apparent. They should go find their own place to cause problems and not do it on my

street where I was, you know. Turns out, most people don't want to play fuck around and find out. Well, all I can say is that most of my immediate neighbors know that I am the de facto warlord on my street and it would be in your best interest not to give me reason to act on that impulse.

I'm the crazy gun guy. Yes, I thought that went without saying. Exactly. Oh, hey, Puppert. My dog decided to visit. I keep hearing a noise and I can't tell where it's coming from.

I'll stop. No, it's a whining noise. Anyway. Huh. But anyway. That might be my dog you're hearing through your headphones. It's not dog. I'm not sure what it is.

I'll probably hear it as soon as we sign off. Anyway. Check your refrigerator. Could be your compressor. No, it's wife and daughter doing something in the house. Ah, fun. Anyway, I'll, I mean, I guess we'll go ahead and sign this out. It's been an hour and a half.

And I did not want this to be a super long episode. But oopsie poopsies. We did spend half an hour talking about governmental stupidity. So there is that. Yeah, but we occasionally need a proper good anti-government rant. Even though at the local level, my township people are being very helpful. I mean, this is true. Hey, look, man, the more active, the more people you know in your local small levels of government,

the more people are on a first name basis with you, the more likely they are to want to help you. This is true. Sometimes it pays off. But the county, those bastards. Yeah, they'll get their comeuppins.

Oh, they will. And I will have my garage. And as far as the topic goes, I mean, best thing I tell you is, you know, like preparedness is like a savings account.

It is. The best day to start is yesterday. and the second best day to start is today. Yep. Absolutely. But I just, I really hope that like in 2020, in the year of our Lord, 2026, I would hope that those voices that said be Bert Gummer or be old male, old farmer Brown have been largely drowned out by the people that are saying, no, we can be prepared.

We can be preppers and not do that. Like there are more, there's more than one way. Yeah, absolutely. And quite frankly, like, I know that there's a lot of apartment, there's a lot of apartment goers that are in urban areas. And I would rather see all of y'all prep the way I started out prepping in a little bit one bedroom apartment so that you can take care of yourselves for a short period of time than to say, if I can't burnt gummers, there's no point doing it. Because that's exactly. That's not the message to me. Any little bit you can take off of the recovery effort yourself by looking out for yourself, the faster the recovery occurs.

Yeah, and for purely selfish reasons, I trust FEMA like gas station, like gas station tacos. Zero percent. So instead of sitting in your house hoping and praying that someone in government actually manages to do the right thing by accident, you should probably have a plan to take care of ourselves that doesn't involve things outside of our immediate domain and control. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. All right. well, this is going to go out to the audience on March the 12th. I told Stuart, you know, like, I'm not going to share it on public, you know, in the public realm,

but I'll probably tell the rest of the patrons, like, you know, I've got some family stuff going on, which is why this episode is pre-recorded going out to y'all. I didn't want to leave y'all hanging, but I have a suspicion that on March 12, I'm going to be up to my eyeballs and personal things. So we occasionally do this where we pre-record an episode. It's not my preference because I don't get the pleasure of y'all in the comments. And there's something lost there when you don't have that organic back and forth. There does seem to be for sure.

I mean, hey, it's like you and I always say on this, family comes first and life happens. So we do these when we have to. We go live every other time. Yep. So we'll roll this one out the door. If you leave comments, even here on like YouTube, Rumble, Facebook, wherever you're watching, I can't promise you all see them, but I might. You never know.

But if this happens to be an episode that you caught and you don't catch us every other week, you should probably stick around because it's Thursday, 7.30 p.m. Central, 8.30 Eastern. And we'll be back in another week. Good night, everybody.