The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Raising Values: Cypress Survivalist

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

https://www.facebook.com/RaisingValuesPodcast/www.pbnfamily.comhttps://www.instagram.com/raisingvaluespodcast/http://www.mofpodcast.com/www.prepperbroadcasting.comhttps://rumble.com/user/Mofpodcastwww.youtube.com/user/philrabhttps://www.instagram.com/cypress_survivalist/https://www.facebook.com/CypressSurvivalistSupport the showMerch at: https://southerngalscrafts.myshopify.com/Shop at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ora9riPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/mofpodcastGillian and Phil have been teasing something big coming. The time has come to dig into what Cypress Survivalist is, what started it, and what is coming on March 8, 2025. If you live in or around St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana, or don't mind a bit of a drive, mark is on your calendars and listen in for the Rabalais' family's next crazy adventure.https://www.instagram.com/cypress_survivalist/https://www.facebook.com/CypressSurvivalistRaising Values Podcast is live-streaming our podcast on our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Rumble. See the links above, join in the live chat, and see the faces behind the voices.family, traditional, values, christian, spiritual, marriage, dating, relationship, children, growing up, peace, wisdom, self improvement, masculinity, feminity, masculine, feminine

Welcome to the Raising Values Podcast, where the traditional family talks. You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram. You can support the Raising Values Podcast through Patreon. Bill and Gillian are behind the mic, and we hope you enjoy the show. oh hi that scared me i wasn't ready i thought the countdown was going a little bit longer. I thought we still had 30 seconds of the pre-roll. Excuse us this morning.

I didn't know that you were going to be there that quick. I really thought I had 30 more seconds to talk to Phil about something. And then you appeared in Hello and Good Morning and Welcome to Raising Values and the nuttiness that is obviously at the Ravele house this morning. I saw you hit the go live button, but I really did thought, so we have two pre-rolls. If you've been watching the show, we have two pre-rolls. One've been watching the show. We have two pre-rolls. One is a countdown to the pre-roll where you hear my voice talking about the podcast. And I really thought that I had one more 30-second pre-roll to go.

Oh, and look. There's a person in the comments that says, Raggle Fraggle says, This is my first time tuning in live. Don't let me down. He usually tunes in for Matter of Facts. I think this is his first time catching Raising Values Live. Well, Raggle Fraggle, welcome to Raising Values.

This is me. This is Gillian. This is how this usually goes. The look on your face is going to be permanently burned into my brain for the rest of my life that was you went you went from irritated wife because i was kneeling you too oh i can't tell if you're being serious or joking this morning you're just like you're just poking you're poking the right spots today that are just... Pokeable. Grinding my gears a little bit. And I wasn't ready for the world to see that. Anyway, good morning and welcome to Raising Values.

Jesus Christ. We are raising something and it is my blood pressure. That's what's been... Okay. Anyway. That's what's been... Okay, anyway. So, three minutes in, I finally am going to get myself together. I put Cypress Survivalist LLC in the title, and Gilling pointed out correctly, we are not setting up an LLC. It's a non-profit. I goofed. That's what happens when I try to do these late in the evening, and I'm drained and zonked.

these late in the evening and i'm i'm drained and zonked what's funny is though he set this podcast up i'm imagining after our very first board meeting yes yes of a non-profit by the way so yeah so um first off before we get into the whole show and what's going on we do have which do you want first it doesn't matter we can do merch first we always need to talk about the merch and that it's there and that if you want to purchase it and support tiffany and uh chris in um their small business they are in control of our merch shop and there's all sorts of fun things that you can purchase there for raising value and matter of facts and um the the information and link to the store is in the show notes and you can click there they'll purchase your stuff and support the show and support chris and tiffany and then of course we always want to

talk about the raising value signal chat for patrons so if you are a patron and we we've been getting new patrons i would say maybe one a week no one every two weeks three i mean what we've been getting some new patrons lately um this month and last month and that's really cool um there is a matter of facts uh signal chat for patrons which is always, I always like to say that, you know, enter at your own risk on that one. And then the raising values signal chat for patrons is a little more low key. We're talking about a lot of the discussions that we have on this podcast in that chat. And I would just like to say to our patrons that are in those chats, I absolutely love your feedback. Please do not ever feel like you have to apologize to me for opinions that you've

expressed or, um, things that you've messaged or whatever. I love, love hearing your feedback. Um, I understand that we're not always going to agree with the things that Phil and I put out on this podcast and that your life is totally different from ours. The way you raise your kids could be totally different from ours. Your marriage, your relationships are different. And so on this podcast, we talk about what works for us and what we go through on a daily and you can take from it what you will. But I really do appreciate our listeners that are here all the time. And then we've, we've grown and had such great friendships come out of both of the podcasts. And I love your, your honesty and your truth when you get on those

signal chats and start talking to us about different things. And a lot of times I'm going to take some of the things that we talk about and we're going to talk about them on the show. So please don't ever apologize for expressing your opinions or asking more questions. I'm speaking to one in particular. Don't feel bad about that. Now, what I will say is if you do listen to the show and you have opinions, how am I going to put this? I don't know. Please just remember that Phil and I are both human. We are not perfect.

Our marriage is not perfect. My husband is not perfect, and I am not perfect our marriage is not perfect my husband is not perfect and i am not perfect and um before um name calling uh happens has there ever been name calling though what have i been calling you all week in jokes an evil narcissist. Oh. Before that happens, please just remember we're human. And things which you see for an hour on this podcast or you hear for an hour on this podcast are small glimpses of our life. And maybe give some grace.

That's all I'm going to say. All right. So let's get into this. I was excited. Phil was like, what do you want to talk about? I was like, the obvious. Let's talk about the obvious. The elephant in the room. The elephant in the room. We're not quite sure how it's going to be taken for a lot of people, but anyway, it doesn't matter because this is what we're doing so the the last few episodes i have been really hard on phil about um about things and and it is all centered around not an llc but a non-profit that phil and i both started um in um with help from our other founding members, his sister and brother-in-law, or her husband, our brother-in-law, whatever.

You get it. It's family dynamics. Anyway, we've started a nonprofit called Cypress Survivalist, and a lot of you have heard about it, especially our patrons, because we've put this all throughout our signal chats, and we've talked about this getting feedback from you guys, and we appreciate that, on how we should do this.

So let's kind of roll it back just a little bit. Phil started Matter of Facts Podcast, what, eight years ago? Eight years ago this past August. Or August, Juneune somewhere in there middle year and like i i have said on the previous episodes where we started kind of talking about this with you guys the the podcast that phil and andrew and now nick have built are it's wonderful i think it's gotten a lot of information out there. Obviously, it's touched a lot of people.

It's gotten a lot of people thinking. It's really done a great job on meeting the mission that Phil originally intended. Which just to kind of like loop that in, like my original vision for Matter of Facts podcast really was coming at the preparedness community from this perspective of like a lot a portion of the preparedness community was preaching things that i had grown up doing or grown up aware of and it was never preparedness it was you live on the gulf coast you're supposed to do these things and so i started i started circling around this

idea that like there's so much of maybe not the things done in the preparedness community but the principles involved that it was never like a community or a mission or something had to be pushed it was just adulthood it was things you're supposed to do to take care of your family and I really I formed the podcast originally by myself with the idea that we have to reclaim some of this knowledge that's being lost and these mindsets that are being lost. We have to get people to understand that these are everyday normal things. Having money in a savings account is a prep. Right. I always like to use that example with people.

Right. I always like to use that example with people. Well, I tell everybody, if you have money in a savings account, if you have air in your spare tire, if you have a 401k or a retirement plan, if you have any or all those three things, congratulations, you're a prepper. You were doing things for the exact same reason as the crazy ones on Doomsday Preppers who live in bunkers. You're just doing it a different way. But that was like my original mission statement was, like, I was watching massive flooding in South Louisiana. I was watching people that weren't prepared for it. And I don't know, I just, I literally sat down on a day off of work and Googled, how do you start, as silly as it sounds,

this was the origin story. I Googled, how do you start a podcast? Podcasts for dummies. Well, but I knew, I'd listened to a lot of podcasts, but I had no earthly idea what I was doing. So, like, I just, I started. I get on a wing and a prayer and a free Podomatic account. And I don't even think I used Audacity for, like, the first six or seven episodes. I literally just recorded it, straight dumped it.

No intro music, the most amateur hack job podcast you'd ever seen in your life. But to me, I felt this pull inside of me where I was like, I have to get this knowledge. I have to get this information in the hands of people who need it. And I didn't know how I was going to do it. But that tends to, I think you would agree, that tends to be me. It's like when I feel the pull to do something, I don't care if I know how to do it or not.

I'm going to jump out there and try. Because I can't not. It's a compulsion. So that was eight years ago how this insanity started. Right. And so we've grown. And the podcast has grown. Matter of F podcast has grown monet matter of facts has grown and our reach has grown and but i think what what happened was ida hit and that really

set us back to you okay yeah i had something that was stuck in my eye why are you crying no something in my eyebrow was like drifting back and forth. It was probably the cat hair. Anyway. Ida hit the house and that kind of opened our eyes a little bit more to what is here just in our community. We love getting the message out and being a family of preppers, survivalists, readiness, whatever you want to call it. Every word you use for this type of lifestyle is going to have some kind of stigma attached to it.

And so what we realize is that we're, well, Phil and Andrew and now Nick, are, you know, on every week talking about this lifestyle. But what we realized is we didn't have a MAG, which means Mutual Assistance Group, in our area. We know that we have listeners of both podcasts in our area. We know that people listen. And we know that people in the same lifestyle listen to the podcasts and everything else,

but we didn't know who they were. We don't know where they live. We just know that they're local because sometimes they reach out to us about different things. And so I think it kind of stewed in Phil's brain for a little bit of, well, what can we do? And how can we make this better? And how can we reach out to our community to create these mutual assistant groups and know who they are and um i kind of equate it to so um because of this podcast i kind of equate a mag to um a phone tree i don't know if y'all remember phone trees um if you were ever a um a class mom

or you know you worked in your your child's classroom or maybe a Sunday school group or whatever. You had a class tree. And when something happened, the leader of the tree would call so-and-so who would then call so-and-so. And then it would just kind of roll and you would make a plan and who was going to bring this casserole and who was going to bring that treat kind of thing. So that's what I kind of feel like a mag is. It's just like a fancy prepper word now prepper i mean not now i mean it's always been but it's it's a it's a survivalist phone tree it is it is an internal 9-1-1 call yes that like that that's the way a lot of us in the community view a mag is. Is it's not, I mean, sometimes mags are like a group of people you train with

or a group of people you may barbecue with or hang out with. You know, like friendships definitely knit throughout that group. But the true purpose of a mutual assistance group is, is if I have a tree sitting on my house and one in the front yard because our Cat 3 hurricane just blew over the top of the house, I engage the mag and say hey guys anybody that can come over with work gloves with chainsaws lend me a hand i could use it if y'all are not in worse shape than i am i'm putting my hand up saying i need some help and that goes for everybody else so like if if we had had a local mutual assistance group that would have been a group of people who, if they had chainsaws, they had chainsaws, they had fuel, they had bar oil, they had fully fueled up trucks, they were prepared to self-rescue.

And if they didn't need to self-rescue because their damage was fairly minor, they're now in a position to help rescue someone else. So that's the whole concept of a mutual assistance group and like you're very you're very right that that was a lot of my motivation for doing this after ida but the other thing that's really it's really been gnawing at me since hurricane ida was like i i have no illusions about the fact that a very large subsect of this community we live in, I don't like to use words that would upset them, but they're soft. They were not prepared to weather Hurricane Ida. Like in this neighborhood, as an example, we had the biggest problems to deal with. We had a hole in the roof you could jump up and down in. We had a tree sitting on the house. We had another one in the roof you could jump up and down in we had a tree sitting on the house we

had another one in the front yard we we just just those trees falling we had bigger problems deal with than anybody else in the neighborhood because from looking around i saw some shingles out of place i didn't see any major structural damage well since our neighbor across the street her a tree fell on her house too it grazed the back end of her house and kind of knocked down the very edge of her roof. So she had roof damage too, that big pine tree. But looking throughout the rest of the neighborhood at the people that stayed, a large portion of these people did not have any serious structural damage or any serious cleanup to do, but we were bumping into people who did not have food, did not have water, didn't have backup generators, didn't have fuel storage.

It blows my mind. But therein lies my thing. I understand that there are people who are not going to ride out a hurricane in their home. Cool. You better evacuate ahead of time and you better have a plan that involves evacuation. Is that an assassin bug over there? I don't know, but it's a really big bug crawling on the wall. It's raining really, really hard outside too. You could probably hear that. But anyway, back to us. But then there are people who made the decision to stay that were in no way, shape, or form

prepared to ride this out. And that, that gnawed at me because I think to myself, I'm like, okay, there were probably a dozen, a dozen and a half, maybe more people in this neighborhood who almost certainly don't listen to

the podcast. Yes, Stuart, I did not have a chainsaw. That's been remedy. He said none had a chainsaw, not just you. All, including comment of no one in the neighborhood had a chainsaw.

I trust he's needling me. Because I know Stuart. I love Stuart to death. Well and truly. Like big brother energy. But I am positive that was aimed at me. And I deserve it. But I guess that was kind of my thought process was like,

there's always people around us that I'm almost positive. Don't listen to this, to this. We could be having some technical difficulties, guys. It's we have a, I don't know if it's a cold front or whatever is rolling through. And so the weather is really bad outside. So we might be getting a little spotty i don't know anyway so like i said i feel like there's people in this local community that we're we are not reaching with the podcast that we have to make an attempt to reach and also for the purely

selfish reason of wanting to put together something like a mutual assistance group in this area like we have to figure out where the other preparedness minded people are and knit them together into a group because, you know, Stuart, Stuart and several other people said it very poignantly, which was the day after Hurricane Ida, I didn't need a whole bunch of friends six, seven hundred miles away. That's not what I needed. What I needed was four guys within 15 minutes drive of me who could come over and help us unwind this mess. And the nature of the podcast is that because it's nationwide, because it's so diversified, I don't have that.

And the problem is most of us who listen to this podcast don't have that. Like we live on an Island by ourselves and we're, we're taking to heart the things we talk about in this podcast, but you, you don't know where everybody else is who's in that mindset. And so that's what, that's what got my gears turning right after Hurricane Ida about like, how do we, how do we take this original mission statement from Matter of Facts, which was just pump information out into the internet and hope to God it reaches somebody. And how do I target it to this parish, this local area? And so your idea? And so my idea that Gilroy— idea that it evolved a lot it went from something small and then he

involved his wife who said uh-uh we're gonna make this big we can do this and then i needled him on a couple of episodes and i've already apologized and i'm not apologizing again again yeah so my my idea was to try to host local local educational events here in this area where we try to teach people i want to i really want to steep this in the in language of like practical preparedness or practical readiness like you know like you and you, like we, I think at this point we have most of a class schedule nailed down, which I have sitting on my phone so we can talk about it. But before you get to a class schedule, we have to explain what this is. So we've started this nonprofit and the reason we started the nonprofit, what? I wasn't going to talk about the class schedule yet.

Oh, you looked down and started scrolling. I'm sorry. Go for it. Yeah, I was trying to make sure my phone didn't go to sleep because it does that. No, I lost my train of thought. Okay, so we started the nonprofit. We thought about doing an LLC, which is what Phil put in the title. But we thought about doing that.

But then a nonprofit opens us up to different opportunities for grants and things like that but the reason we wanted to create an organization is to protect our intellectual property and so if anyone has a question like oh my god really a non-profit like why are you doing a non-profit kind of thing well we're putting together classes and events. And so the whole point of this organization is to host, right now, free classes, one-day events. Right now, it's going to be held at our local state park that has a beautiful pavilion that can fit 100 some odd people in there and have experts in whatever field or whatever lesson or class that they're going to teach come in and teach those classes 30 minutes 45 minutes depends on what it is and have a day where people can come who

maybe are interested in beginning this lifestyle, interested to see what it's all about, or come in and see if there's anything new that they can learn or go back and refresh some skills and things like that. And so that's our idea behind all of this. And the nonprofit gives us the chance to reach out for funding through grants. It's a little bit more acceptable for people, especially when you're working with city and state governments. And as far as donations go, people can use donations to a nonprofit as a write-off for themselves. It's just a little bit easier to navigate. Plus I've

worked in nonprofits most of my entire career. So I kind of know a little bit of the back and forth between nonprofits. And I feel like a nonprofit really appeals to me personally, because when I, as I, I don't know if it was before after i'd kind of like start voicing you but like in my head i've been rolling around like what do i want this event to be like what do i want to feel like and i'm very i'm very laser focused and i'm very i've been very argumentative towards you and the rest of the board about like being very insistent on like this event have a certain look and feel to it i don't i don't want this event to be impersonal i don't want it to be convention centers i don't want it to be corporate i don't want it to be a

big huge i think that's cricket no babe that's cockroach, I believe. Is it? Yes. I love bugs. I have worked as an entomologist. And I have done a lot of things with bugs. You talk. I'm going to go get something to murder. I do not like cockroaches. There was an exhibit that I had to work at when I was at the insectarium in New Orleans. And we had to service this exhibit on the daily and it was the cockroach exhibit because

cockroaches are everywhere and especially in New Orleans it's dead you're good I physically can't I just I hate cockroaches I hate cockroaches. I hate cockroaches. Anyway. Okay, I've saved my wife. I've been watching that thing crawl on the wall over there. So where was I? A nonprofit appeals to me because the entire mission statement here is really focused on providing a service to the community. is really focused on like providing a service to the community and about you know like this this isn't intended to be like a money-making one of us is going to quit our jobs type of thing this is really intended to be something where like i see a need that the community is not having filled and maybe that's because there's nobody else around that is in this lifestyle and maybe

that means because there's a bunch of people, then nobody's just taking the leap. But as I did eight years ago where I didn't know what the hell I was doing and I just took a leap, I'd be here we are again. We're going to take the leap again. Although you know far more about this than I do. Because I've worked in exactly zero nonprofits my entire life. Yeah. But I think a nonprofit works in this capacity i mean we really are

trying to provide an educational resource to the community and the whole idea here is to make it as low cost to the attendees as possible because i don't want i don't want the difficulty in traveling hundreds of miles to be the thing that keeps them from coming, which is why we're really going to focus marketing in the local area. I don't want ticket costs to be the reason people don't come. I look at this very similarly to a lot of other parallels where everyone has a need for this information, even if they don't recognize it yet. And everyone has a right to have it. So any business structure that allows us to pursue grants, to pull in money from other sources so that we can offset the ticket cost of the attendee,

that's the direction I want to go. And to Raggle Fraggle's point, I wouldn't say this is another prepper camp. See, this was also another thing that we've talked about probably way, way, way down the road. But I do not believe that having a few large events in the nation that promote this lifestyle is the way to get the point across. I think you run into problems if you have an event on the East Coast or the West Coast or way up North or way down South where a lot of people can't attend because it's too far of a drive. You know, like for us, it was a 10 to 12 hour drive. It was three days off of work. Commitment for us to go up there and back. It's a commitment.

Yeah. And now I think it's worth it, but it's a hard sell for a person that's just getting into this lifestyle to make that commitment. So what I think we can do here, our cat is trying to wake up our daughter. But anyway, I think what we can do here our cat is trying to wake up our daughter but anyway um i think what we can do here is we

can do a small a smaller scale event in the local area where we can reach people and then we can try to provide some kind of a blueprint so that we can take this event and we can do another one elsewhere in louisiana and do another smallscale event for that local community and bring those people in. What I see here is basically it's the idea of diversification. We're taking a very large, very well-run event, and we're breaking it up, and we're going to put a little bitty one in all these different places so that we can reach more people. No, let's correct that statement. We're not taking anything prep or camp.

No, I guess what I'm saying is I'm taking the concept. Which there are others around the country that do that. There's quite a few, actually. And the thought process, which Phil hasn't said yet, is start small first. We're going to start small in our community and kind of work the kinks out and figure out what needs to happen. And then what we would like is to, what we would like is for people to feel like they can reach out to us and say, hey, I really liked your event. Would you come do one in our town? Or we can say,

you know, if you want to do one in your town, here's the backbone for it, which is another reason why we made it a nonprofit. So we have more legal power to say, no, this is our brand. Yes, you can use it or whatever. We can set something up in your town, but it's ours and we run it and we get to call the shots about that kind of stuff. So small enough and compact enough that it can go from place to place and become a traveling way down the road, a traveling sort of educational day or maybe one or two days, depending on the location. but um just something where you can get a small amount of groups together and talk about different subjects in this lifestyle and i think it's important because just like you said we i i was already having trouble with taking three days off i get eight days off a year i know i get holidays and summers and all that stuff but between sick kids and me getting sick and whatever needs to happen, you know, if I want to go on a field trip, that eats into my eight days for the year.

And so I was already starting my year off with five days because I was taking three days off to go to another event. So anyway, I think it's important to stay small as long as we can. And then if we do grow, we just make it smaller pods. We just keep the smallness of it. And there was something, yes, Garden Girl said small scale can also be a lot less intimidating for newbies. Because we're very much aware, and and Nina I know you're aware of this too and I said this the last time on the podcast and I will say this every single time and if you ever attend an event you will hear me say this this lifestyle is overwhelming and there's a lot

there's a there's a lot to it and how do you eat an elephant one One bite at a time. And I think these little bitty events that we want to create and host are the small bites. They are just five to six hours of a class with little things mixed in kind of thing. Little activities that participants can do in an area where you're not tied down for a long amount of time. It's just, it's just a five hour, like, what am I trying to say? Like it's hammered into you really quick kind of thing. Anyway, I think, I think it's going to work. I think we are just in the beginning stages. And just like some of our friends have said, we're not going to, we are not going to look at the first event and say, Oh,

only five people came. So we, we have to stop doing this because we're not going, the next event will be bigger and bigger and bigger. And we want partners. We want people to come in and be like, yeah, I want to do this in my area.

Yeah. I want to do that in my area. You know, we've talked about five years in, in the future, do this in my area. Yeah, I want to do that in my area. You know, we've talked about five years in the future, 10 years in the future, what would this nonprofit look like? And I'm hoping, you know, I'm hoping that as a nonprofit, we're really here to just help people because of the intimidation of it,

because of the stigma of this lifestyle, and because of there are people that gatekeep the information. And this is not information that should be gatekept. Gatekept? I was picking up what you were putting down. Past tense? I'm trying. Anyway, so. Well, and I also think that, like, there's an opportunity here to make this,

because we're targeting something that's so much smaller. I think there's also an opportunity to make this much more personable. Well, that's what Raggle Fraggle said. To be fair, I think it's to be fair. I think it being regional is important because prepping looks different from place to place. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, like I had said when I first started talking to the team about this, that like a lot of the coursework, I've really built a lot of this coursework out with some input from like you and the other two directors. And I'm leaning into y'all's areas of expertise, but like a lot of my coursework, it's a lot focused around hurricane preparedness because why wouldn't't we look where we live so i agree with raggle fraggle completely like i think that making this more of a regional event and if we choose to

partner with someone to move that move that event somewhere else then we have someone in that region who can kind of like bring us up to speed on what kind of coursework works up here like if we did i think joe mentioned what about doing one in Arkansas at the campground that we go to a couple of times. We've gone to a couple of times. And if I was going to do an event up there and partner with someone in that area, I would ask him, what kind of problems y'all deal with up here? Hurricanes, probably not as much, probably tornadoes though. Maybe floods. I don't know. I don't live in Arkansas. So to me, the opportunity here is to make this

a much more targeted event to the local population. But also what I meant by making it more personable is that I really want to make sure that, and this is something we talked about very early on, I don't want to do TV screens and PowerPoints. I don't want to do, I want to take every opportunity to try to make these classes as interactive with the group as possible. I want questions. I want volunteers. I want hands-on demonstrations. I want, I want this to be an opportunity to break down that traditional barrier where it's like, I stay on this side of the line and I talk and y' I stay on this side of the line and I talk, and y'all stay on that side of the line and y'all listen. I want this to be something where the audience feels as though

you're not being lectured to for an hour, but you're being invited to join me and let's learn about a subject. So again, it's hard for me to describe, but like, I know in my head, my heart, what look and feel I want for this. And I just want something that feels kind of like the podcast in real life, honestly, where I grab a person by the hand and be like, Hey, do you want to learn how to put on a tourniquet? Let's come over here and check this out. And I just, yeah, hands-on skill building is what the event is really shaping up to be a lot of hands-on things that um like activities that we're going to do um not just

in the classes themselves I mean those will be hands-on as well some of it will be lecture it has to be because it's gonna I mean we have to talk about this kind of stuff. But the breakdown of it afterwards or the breakdown of it during or whatever. And the way I kind of see it is, well, actually, I could see it like this. But the pavilion we're at, it's all picnic tables. And so people are going to have to sit at picnic tables which is fine but i kind of see it as um an interpretive ranger or an interpretive guide um leading you down a path kind of thing that we're not going to have i mean we

might have one class where you're walking out in nature and looking at different things but um that one person is talking to smaller groups and you know giving all this information to the small group who's maybe sitting in a circle around a bonfire kind of thing she's just intimate and personal and not overwhelming and overbearing and here it is here it is here it is kind of thing it's just a very um softly grab you by the hand and say come on little guy let's go this way um this is what i want to talk to you about tourniquets are scary but let's use them learn how to use them so yeah stewart said i'll volunteer to teach people how not to be a dumbass oh he didn't say not how to be a dumbass with a mirror and being an asshole oh minor minor sorry we can't read um so yeah so that's what cypress

survivalist is i kind of want to talk about the name too because the four of us oh that's we went around and around and around about what we wanted to say we've had some we had some friends stewart being one of them um we didn't want to use the word prepper um or um or survivalist frankly and we didn't want to use those in the event name but for the for the non the name of the non-profit we were struggling with, like, what's us? Yeah, and what happened was, so we're Googling all these names. I'm in the Secretary, who is it? Secretary of State?

Yeah, the Secretary of State. For the state of Louisiana. For the state of Louisiana, going through, and you put in the business name, and you see if the business name actually is there. But we're Googling all these names that we wanted to do and they all exist. And which is great because then it really opened our eyes to, wow, there are these little pods all across the country of these prepper survivalist things, whether it's a blog or it's a podcast or these local little small events, kind of like what we're doing. Anyway, so Phil was like, what if we were

just done with trying to name this organization? And he's like, what if we're like pine tree survivalists? So the reason I just threw that out there is because I got frustrated. I leaned my head back in my chair and I was looking out into the woods behind the house we were hanging out at and there's just pine trees. And I was like a pine tree survivalist. And everybody's head kind of craned around and looked at me, and I was like, oh, God, did that just stick? No, well, it kind of did. The pine tree didn't, but it took us down the road of Cypress survivalist. Yeah.

And mainly, one of the stories that we kind of attribute it to is we went on this family camping trip, we kind of attribute it to is we went on this family um camping trip and sight unseen we uh booked a large enough camp campsite for the two families so it was um ross and becca who were now directors on the board for this non-profit and then us and piper and we get there and not only are we literally in a water swamp but there's cypress knees everywhere and so we had to set up our tents there was a camp pad but the camp pad had cypress knees in it like they obviously this site had not been maintained for quite some time because the cypress knees were coming up through the tent the tent pad um and then we had to camp up on the road because there was nowhere else to go we were in the water yeah there was there was kind of a wooden boardwalk on the side of the road and like that's that's what we we set the tent up there, and then we had to tie it down.

I think if I remember right, I tied ropes around the tent stakes and then dropped them down between the gaps in the boards and then yanked them to pop them like that. It was an operation to get that tent set up on a wooden boardwalk. But we got it done. So anyway, so that's a funny story that we always share about camping with it being sight unseen before we put our tents down and all that stuff. And so Cypress is also obviously a plant that grows or a tree that grows naturally. All around here. Yeah.

So that's it. That is Cypress Survivalist, 501c3 educational nonprofit. Not an LLC. Not an LLC, like in the name. I'll take my beatings later. I was trying to do that, and then the pre-roll ended. And everybody got to see me all upset with you. I might clip that out and make that an Instagram reel because that was peak hilarity.

That was funny. I might clip that out and make that an Instagram reel because that was peak hilarity. That was funny. We hope that you are all excited with us. Maybe you won't be. I don't know. I don't know why you would be watching this podcast if you're not. We do need to talk about the class schedule. Oh, okay.

Let's do that really quick. I was just going to say, like, you know know join us in this excitement kind of thing yeah so in this i wouldn't say this is like set in stone for the first event but it's it's getting pretty firm at this point so um we're talking about doing just like a real base layer i call it a preparedness one-on-one, but that's probably not going to stick. But I really... Practical prepping. Practical prepping. That probably is what I should change it to. But I'm really just thinking about like, you know, talk about the mindset, situational awareness, assessing threats, and then your actual base layer preps. Like, you know, your food, your water, your self-protection, your shelter, and so on and so forth.

And what I'm really trying to do is take a 50-minute block of instruction to take a person who is brand new and tell them, look, these are all the areas you need to cover. To what degree is up to you, but you need something in every one of these buckets. And also take the opportunity that if there's a person who's in this mindset, but they missed one of those buckets to point out, hey, you really need to put something in that bucket for later. Because, you know, that's something that like we on the podcast on Matter of Facts have been very open about is like, we look back on where we first started preparedness and

realize, oh my God, I had all these gaps I didn't even know existed until I went a little further down the road and realized it. But anyway, so following that, I think we're looking at a medical one-on-one class from my sister Becca, who is a freaking brilliant paramedic and has been for years. And she's going to, I don't, I have some basic bullet points here, which I think she's going to integrate into hers, but she's still building out that coursework. She really wants to try to take a person and basically tell them, these are the things you have to be able to do to keep someone alive long enough to get them to an emergency room. You know what I'm saying? Which, it starts with CPR and it ends with, like, you know, more advanced trauma care. It starts with CPR and it ends with more advanced trauma care.

It's a lot of the same things that I learned in the Army, but outside of the military or first responders, there's a lot of civilians that don't learn that knowledge that probably should. Harvest from Nature is one of your two classes. So you're going to instruct people in all of the stuff out there in nature that they can make use of, that I know absolutely nothing about. Yes. Except goldenrod is a phenomenal anti-inflammatory and will cure a sinus infection.

I wouldn't say cure a sinus infection, but it definitely helps. Well, I know it worked a lot better for me than everything that came out of a pharmacy the last time I had a sinus infection, so I'm going to say it cures. than everything that came out of a pharmacy the last time I had a sinus infection. So I'm going to say it cures. Financial preparedness, which would be a short 25-minute class from me. And, you know, like I restrict myself on Matter of Facts to like once a year doing a financial preparedness class because I feel like if your finances are not in order, it makes everything in your life much more difficult. If we had tons of debt

right now or like maxed out credit cards, we would be drowning in this economy. And the reason why we've been able to make things work is because we don't have a lot of debt. You know, we did a lot of foreplanning on the front end. A use of force class from Ross. So he's going to talk through like the legal principles of self-defensedefense specific to the state of Louisiana, which was very important to me that that class has to be taught state by state because state laws vary from state to state. And he's a sheriff's deputy. Yes.

And I believe he's also a training officer. He is. He's been in the game for a very long time. Gray man, which, you know, the philosophy of gray man, hiding in plain sight. Basically, there's a time to make it known who you are and what you're about. But most of the time, you really just want to blend your community, which sounds hilarious to a guy that looks the way I do because having a beard this long, people literally refer to me around town as the guy with the beard but i swear to god if i shaved no one would recognize me

including you two probably please don't ever do that i've thought about it i didn't say i was gonna do it i just thought it'd be funny to mess with everybody but then we'd be doing this for like 18 months to get back to it but anyway uh emotional prepping which is your other class um managing emotions during after the event trauma post-traumatic stress disorder coaching your kids involving your kids in your preparedness plan which all of that i feel like you're well you're well equipped to talk about and try to like try to get the audience to understand that like there's an aspect of an emergency situation that's going to involve managing emotions because you can't just bury them down forever sooner or later they come feel like that so i've talked to

um i was a guest at a conference uh women who prep conference last year and that was what i spoke about there and then when i go on different podcasts or whatever, that's usually what people want me to talk about is the emotional side and prepping with kids. Um, because it doesn't get talked about enough. Yeah. I mean that emotion. And again, because for so many years preparedness has been a mostly male dominated sphere and most men are very comfortable with the idea of like emotions put those in a freaking bag tie it off throw them way over there we'll

deal with them later but that doesn't work as well when you're dealing with children or when you're dealing with you know not stereotype but a lot of women you have to manage the emotions in the moment and you have to manage the emotions on the back end even i mean like post-traumatic stress disorder to me is if you don't manage your emotions like as a combat veteran for long enough your emotions are going to manage you so it doesn't get talked about very often i think that's why you get asked to talk about it so much because within this world there's not a lot of people that talk about it certainly not openly yeah and then the last one is communications which would be my last class and last class for the day and i want to

start out literally start at this is a cell phone you should be using this because everybody has them and they work and go all the way to like alternative methods of communication. And I even want to involve things like controlling your digital footprint, controlling your information on the Internet, like being careful what you put out on social media, how you, if you're talking on a radio, everyone around you can hear you, so how do you not give away information you don't want other people to know? What I want to focus on in a lot of these classes is not just here's what you do, but here's why you do it and teach the principles behind these

things. Because I could show a person how to use a, you know, Baofeng GM-15 radio in 45 seconds. It's not complicated. But if I teach you the idea behind like signals intelligence and comm security and those principles, then you can apply that to any radio. You can apply it to a cell phone. You can apply it to posting on Instagram because the principle cuts across everything. So a lot of what I want to get into with these classes is I want to teach the principles behind the reason why we do the things we do. Because I feel like those principles, people can apply them in their daily lives. Yeah. And then when, so if a class is going on and that person doesn't want to attend a class, there'll be activity tables that they can

go to. And so those are going to be things like learning how to use a ferro rod to start a fire. learning how to use a ferro rod to start a fire. I think you had medical bag rodeo. So Bex is going to take her first aid kit that she's building for her class and open it up and break it down. There will be a way that you can get a list from her for all the things that she has in it, where to purchase it, how to purchase it, all that that stuff and then how to build your own medical bag she might also because she and i talked last night about the possibility of her having like her medical bag from the class and also her go bag that she keeps in her vehicle which is that med bag on steroids and then also having like the

ifac i keep in my truck or the ifac je, so that way we can kind of show people different form factors, different levels of equipment, different quantities. Because, again, it's about – Becca's point of view is I need to teach people how to use the stuff that's in these bags. Because if there's stuff in these bags they don't know how to use, it's useless. Right. But, yeah, she talked about putting there like an amazon an amazon list and we can put that into a qr code so that if a person says oh yeah i need that stuff

here yeah and or everything on the list and you're done yeah and then we thought we'd have fun with tourniquets and have a tourniquet tournament where you're we're teaching you how to apply a tourniquet and then you know who can do it fastest and who can do it correctly and who can do it whatever. I'm going to tell at least one person to apply a tourniquet to their dominant leg with their non-dominant hand one-handed. That will be entertaining to watch. Those are just some of the activities that we're looking at doing while the classes are going on but you know we don't want this to be super big maybe eventually one day we'll have vendors out there but we don't want to muddy it up like we want people to just come in and get the information that they're looking for and then they can go home for the day or they can camp at the

state park or do whatever um uh there was something else i was going to say but now i can't remember so i don't know i can't remember what i was going to say i hate it when that happens anyway sorry yeah it's okay anything else there was something else i think well anyway i don't know i like i appreciate everybody taking a minute to listen to us decompress all this, because this has been two weeks of absolute like. Oh, I know what it was. What was it? Go ahead.

Nope. You go before you forget. Facebook and Instagram, I have been trying to begin that process of building a social identity on Facebook and Instagram. I know that we need to get to TikTok and YouTube and all the other places. Those links are also in the show description. Yeah, and see, I'm going to go back to Stuart's comment just now.

He said, I hope never vendors. That is really what will be different for a lot of events around the country is we're not going to do vendors. And we're taking a two-hour lunch break. So you can either use a grill at the state park, or you can go into town and get something to eat, or you can bring your own. You have enough time to do that kind of stuff. We want it to be very personable.

We want people to go away personable. We want people to go away feeling like they've met their people. Again, with what Holly said a long time ago in what I've put in a post is that we are normal. It depends on who you ask, I guess, if we're normal or not, but we're normal people. And we want people to come to this um kind of going back to garden girl nina's comment is not be intimidated by the whole process and know that there are people who we just took it one step at a time and we um you know we just want you to understand that we're here and there are people out there like you and i think I think what I have always been so thankful for with these podcasts is we get to go hang out with our chosen family,

people who have the same thoughts and do the same things that we do and things like that. And so it's nice to be able to build that kind of community with other people who may just be sitting at home going, I wish, I wish. Now, hopefully, we'll give them an opportunity to actually go out and do stuff. To Rackle Fraggle's point about what's going to be your revenue source, I know that we're going to be pursuing some grants and some donations. But to current, what's funding this event is me. Like, literally Adam and I.

The four of us. Yeah. The four of us are funding this right now. You know, I was thinking about this the other day. Because, like, I've been very pointed about, like, and you put this as an action item for me, that I need to develop a budget. Which right now is, like, the budget is zero. I know. I said that in the meeting last night.

I was like, by next meeting, Phil, you need to introduce a budget, and we need to accept the budget. And I got this look like I had four heads. And it was like, no, we really do have to have a budget for a nonprofit. I have to turn that in. Understandable. Even if there is a zero amount that we can pull from a budget, we still have to list things that we're purchasing for the nonprofit. But, you know, I was thinking back to, like, Matter of Facts when I first started that, and I ran the podcast at a loss the entire first year. The whole first year, everything was out of me.

And that was back when, like, you know, money was tight. We didn't have a whole lot of extra, but my extra money got spent starting a podcast. So I went down that road, and I think it was, I'd have to go back and look at the records, but if I recall correctly, I think it was just shy of the two-year mark. We actually had enough coming on a regular basis to cover costs for the year, we actually had enough coming on a regular basis to cover costs for the year, which ever since then, I've been very, very directed about making sure that the revenue coming from the podcast covers the cost. We don't have any shortfalls.

We don't have any massive overruns. But I've kind of come to peace with the fact that to get this nonprofit and to get this event off the ground, it's going to come out of my pocket, which I'm okay with. I know that Ross and Beck have offered to help shorter costs, and that hasn't been necessary at this point, but I feel so strongly that this needs to be done, that if it ends up being a couple hundred dollars out of my pocket, okay, I've blown a couple hundred dollars on junk in the past that I don't feel like did as much of a service to the community as this could.

And, you know, with that being said, if you're a local listener and we wrote into the bylaws that we would have a board of eight members. We only have four. If that's something that you want to volunteer for, remember that it's your volunteering for that, hit us up and let us know. And we can talk about positions that are still available on the board as a volunteer. I am going to be putting out a call for volunteers for event days. And, you know, I'm going to be looking for people like Boy Scout groups that, you know, maybe there's an Eagle Scout that needs some volunteer hours and this would be a perfect opportunity for them to come out and get some volunteer hours and things like that. We are still in the baby stages of this. We don't have a bank account set up yet that's coming. I didn't realize, but when you get your EIN number

for a nonprofit, it actually takes two to three weeks before it becomes an actual thing with the federal government. We are an entity with the state now, but as far as the federal government is concerned, we don't exist just yet. It hasn't been processed. So we have to wait for that to process in order for us to go and get a bank account and all of that stuff. Eventually, we will open it up to donations. I will be applying for grants. I can't tell you how many grants I've written in my life, but we will be applying for grants. And I think it's really important to say that this is not a moneymaker for us.

Right now we're in the negative by a lot. Not a lot yet, but, you know, a few hundred. Okay, by March it will be an amount that we weren't expecting when we first, whatever. Anyway. It'll be worth it. So, yeah, so we will be an amount that we weren't expecting when we first, whatever. Anyway. It'll be worth it. So, yeah. So we will be asking for that. And you don't have to. And no one really has to be involved.

If you want to just come hang out for the day if you're local. Or, I mean, if you want to drive and come to South Louisiana for an event. But the event will be on March 8th. It's a Saturday. We're hoping for good weather in March. And that is the weekend right before Mardi Gras. So, you know, come hang out and get some practical survival skill knowledge and then go to Mardi Gras. I don't recommend it, but go to Mardi Gras.

So March 8th. It is an all-day event. But we're doing some finalizations on that event. And then after Christmas, you'll start to see some advertisements for the event, and we'll have two months to advertise for that event. We'll be going on radio stations that are local, hitting up some. We're going to be introducing ourselves to the parish officials, letting them know that we're here.

So there's just a lot to do. But back to Instagram and Facebook, one of the easiest and free things that you can do for us is to like our pages, like our posts, share them if you feel the need to share them, but help us get the word out about cypress survivalist and what we're doing and what we're building and be a part of it that way if that's the only way that you can be a part of it um it is a community non-profit and uh you're part

of that community because you listen to us welcome surprise uh so. So you can volunteer to do that part for a nonprofit. Yeah. And I would just say that, like, if you believe like we do that this is something that is well-intentioned and very necessary for the community, like, any amount of support you can lend to us is a huge blessing. And support starts with very simply just telling people especially people you know in this area although not only people in this area that we even exist because for eight years it's been matter of fact's podcast and the raising values podcast but the whole point of doing this this way is that there's people outside this door that don't know we exist and we have to figure out how to reach them so our uh you know no one is asked which i think is probably indicative of

the fact that they just have confidence that the podcasts are not going away because that's not what we're doing here to me it's more of a the podcast matter of fact started to serve a mission statement oh i was started to serve a mission statement. Oh, I was going to read our mission statement. Every time you say mission statement, I keep pulling it up. Matter of Facts was created to fulfill a mission statement. I feel like Raising Values also fulfills that mission statement in a slightly different manner. This is another avenue to fulfill that mission statement. is another avenue to fulfill that mission statement.

Like as corny as it might sound to people, like I truly believe that like there are people who are called to do something and they cannot ignore that calling. And I just feel, I feel called to try to try to spread information and knowledge that I feel like people can benefit from. And I couldn't tell you why I got the calling, just something knocked on my door and I was like, okay, fine, I'll go do it. I love that. And we'll leave you with this because we know that we're past an hour now, but this is the mission statement, just so you can kind of take this

home with you. At Cypress Survivalist, our mission is to empower individuals and communities through accessible survival knowledge and skills we are dedicated to disseminating critical information that fosters resilience self-sufficiency and preparedness by providing expert resources hands-on training and a supportive community we aim to equip everyone with the tools needed to thrive in uncertain times together we build a safer, more prepared world. Yay. All right, guys, with that, we're going to head out. We've got some things to do today, as I'm sure you do too. Thanks for listening, as always. Again, thanks for always commenting or carrying on the conversation,

whether that's in instant messages or in the signal chats for the patrons, we really do appreciate that. And I was kind of joking a little bit when I commented about the message that I got this week. So yeah, go do you and we'll do us and have a great weekend and have a great week and we'll see you next. No, we won't see you next week. My sister's getting married, so we will not be here. So we'll see you in two weeks. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Thank you.