Better Family Medical Readiness with Tom Brophy AKA Dr. Prepper

Welcome in, folks. We've got a special program for you today. I'm titling this PBN Live, which is a PBN interview with an amazing guy who we had on for National Preparedness Month, if you remember, and he's back. He gave us a really great look at kits and books in the last go-around, but I made the mistake of limiting him to 15, 20 minutes, whatever it was. And, you know, some products, they just deserve, well, first of all, they have so much thought built into them. And this is the perfect example of that, what you're going to see today. And they just deserve more time, you know, and we're going to take a deeper look at sort of the, uh, the first aid curriculum that Dr. Prepper, Tom Brophy has, has created over the, really, I guess his career, he could verify that, but I imagine that would be his sentiment and, uh, take a deep look inside of all of it so that you guys can get an idea of, uh, you know, which boxes can we check right now? You know, what I feel like the overall feeling in America is right now, we're getting hit with crazy news about wars, crazy news about Pentagon preparedness, UK preparedness, Japan prepare, everybody's prepping. And I think the average American home, there is at least a line of thought in their head right now, which is what box should I check? What box can I afford to check? What box makes sense to check and will help my family most? And, you know, I couldn't ask for a better guest to have on the show right now, so let's bring him on. Dr. Tom Brophy, man, what a pleasure it was to meet you at Prepper Camp and to have you back on for a second time here to talk about the goods. Likewise, likewise, James, and thank you so much for the kind words. I greatly appreciate it. It's an honor to be back on the podcast. Yeah, no problem, man. I think, like I was saying at the onset of the show, I know this because I'm looking at our podcast stats and they're skyrocketing at the moment because that's how these things work. So I feel like there's a sentiment in America right now, which is I want to do a thing. You know what I mean? I want to do a prepping thing because I want to feel a little bit better about this ever-changing world that I live in. And medical is one of those things. Medical is one of the biggest things that I ever did. in terms of adding to my own arsenal that made me feel like, okay, if we're on an island, maybe for 90 days, then I know that I can treat my family with antibiotics, with information, with the right gear, skills, that kind of stuff. And you are holding sort of the penultimate in encyclopedic knowledge for the average prepper or person at large, right? What do you have there under your hands? Yes, well, thank you, sir. I mean, you're exactly right. You know, people, you know, they have to navigate being prepared for, you know, my top five, I know everybody's can vary a little different, but mine is food, water, medical, security, and shelter. And, you know, if I'm dropped out into the woods, you know, those are the first things that I'm going to be looking at. And medical is the one where there's so much frustration out there for people because they're looking and it can be difficult to tell, like, what's worth buying and what's not, what's quality, what's junk, what's going to last and actually be durable and survive that medical procedure. But also then people run into barriers when it comes to prescription medications and actually getting somebody with professional level medical knowledge, like a physician, to give. Them guidance and advice. And I'd say that that's probably number one, I shared those same frustrations when I first got into prepping. I started looking around and realizing like, oh man, the hospitals that I go to as a staff member, they don't even have the N95 masks, you know, that I needed at the time. So I started putting together, you know, like my own, basically my own stockpile. Then I started organizing that stockpile. And then when other people wanted the same stuff, they wanted the same kits built for them. That's when I realized that honestly, James, probably the biggest gap is the education. And I've come. Across people who have said like, well, you know what, docs, I have a whole library of books that I've ordered. I have a Robertson Hedges. I have a Tintinelli. I have all these medical books that we're well aware of in the world of emergency medicine. But the problem is, is all of those medical textbooks of today's world, they assume that you are using that textbook in today's world. So they're giving instructions based on electricity operating and having running water and having a hospital to elevate that level of care. And prepper medicine is just simply different. You know, prepper medicine has to assume that you may not have access to all of these different elements of the infrastructure and of the world of convenience that we live in today. And, you know, I give people a very, very basic example. You walk out into your yard today, you step into a hole. And it hurts like crazy and swells up. And all you know is that your ankle is swollen. You can't put any weight on it. And you've got to now figure this out, right? So in today's world, you're going to go to the local ER or urgent care. You're going to get an x-ray. They're going to tell you if it's fractured, if it's sprained. They're going to give you some medical supplies, some crutches. They're going to then guide you on the exact steps you need to do. In a world where there's no functioning power grid, You don't have x-rays. You may not even have transportation to and from the hospital. So you have to manage that injury in a very, very different way. You have to assume the worst. You have to be doing constant traction and counter-traction. You have to constantly be setting it and resetting it back into the functional position, the anatomical position. And then you have to know what meds to take and how long to stay off of it and all those kinds of things. And so. What I've done with this stack system and these medical products that we sell is we give people the highest quality supplies and medications, but really what sets us apart more than anything is we put the education behind it. And as you can see, I have this pile of five textbooks here, and this is how we provide that education. Now, I've been doing emergency medicine since 2005, so a little over 20 years here. I could not pack all of that information even into these 1,000 pages of instructions unless I did it in a very specific manner. So one of the things we do is we tell people like, listen, there are some catastrophic things. Like if you have an aneurysm that ruptures in your brain, you have a massive heart attack or stroke. that's not going to be manageable in a post-apocalyptic world without electricity and a power grid and all that kind of stuff. But we still tell people, we still give people the right way to care for those people. Like these instructions even include palliative care and end. Of life care. Which is huge. That's right. Because you're going to have to make some difficult decisions. And we teach people about triage and how to triage. But really what we've done that kind of took this from a, an over 3,000-page textbook and condensed it into five textbooks that come to 1,000 pages is it's an integrative system. So these books are broken down by color code, okay? So red is for injury because red's the color of blood. Green is for infection because of gangrene and the green color of pus. White is for exposure because of the white snowy tundra, white vapors and smoke, white hot radiation, all the things that you could be exposed to. Blue is for metabolic because that's kind of everything else in the big blue ocean. There are certain things like a random headache or pregnancy. They may not be related to infection, injury, or exposure, but you're still going to need a way to manage these. And then the black book is all of the skill sets and inventory. So What these books do is they are constantly referring you back and forth to a skill set that you need to manage that medical condition or a product in the inventory, which is what we have in our big stack towers. And as you can see, the color coding matches. Now, one of the things that your listeners are likely to be very interested in is about two months ago, we had such high demand for these textbooks. that people just continue to request, like, hey, can I just buy the books? Like, I'm doing my own thing as far as, you know, stockpiling things. I have my own resources, you know, where I get different medical supplies. So we actually modified the books to make them to where they can stand alone. As a set. And we did that in the back of the skill sets book. We'll go through some of these so people can see how they look. But in the back of the skill sets book, there is an itemized inventory of every single thing that is in those stack towers. And therefore, every single thing that you are constantly referenced to throughout the textbooks. So this allows people to just buy the textbooks. And a lot of them are saying the same thing, James. They're basically saying, they're like, listen, The world is getting scarier and scarier. By the day. I'll take my chances on having to find different products and medications and supplies, but I'm not taking any chances on getting that education where a legit board-certified emergency medicine physician like myself took all of the ways that we manage things, even the complex things, you know, that might require, you know, electricity in today's world, but broke it down and gave preppers a fighting chance. That's what that's what this book set does. It does not replace the modernization. health care system. And we tell people that, like, hey, it's not for just because, you know, the line's too long in the ER or you got to get your kid to practice tonight. You know, like that. That's not what this is meant for it. This is designed for when help is not coming. This is designed for when people don't have access to medical care. And I have a lot of the other medical preparedness books. They're good. Some are better than others. There's limited info. But I haven't seen anything quite like this. And I think your listeners will agree. So if you want, we can kind of go through it. We can go through a patient care scenario. We can go through what it would look like you know, if you're coming on scene with a real emergency, I can, you know, grab the corresponding treatment module from the tower. Um, however, however you think your listeners would, would best appreciate and enjoy this stuff. Yeah. I want to go back to that inventory list because what I think a lot of people need to understand and what I didn't realize is if you buy, Oh my God, we got comments all like crazy. If you, if you buy a medical kit, like I did years ago, a nice one, you go, uh, I don't know what half this stuff is. Oh, exactly. The average person. And what I saw, I didn't know this existed until now in your inventory book is you have item name and it looked like description next to it. That's right. If you're starting from scratch, man, and you think you're going to use a book to grab a thing or you're going to buy a book and buy a big ass kit and sit it in the pantry until you need it, you're going to open that thing up and go. Yeah. What do I do with this? One of the most. Confusing things for me, Doc, is bandaging. Yes. Like when you get a kit, you get 15,000 kinds of bandages. And it's like, OK, I mean, I guess the size goes on the side. You know, you know, you know. There's so many questions like, you know, so many questions. Adhesive, non-adhesive, you know, antibiotic confused, not. And that's where, you know, what I did with this is I had so many buddies of mine, whether they were, you know, army buddies from back in the day or they were medic buddies or they were, you know, state troopers, local police, military. There's a certain demographic of individuals that you and I are very familiar with because we either come from that demographic or we know they are the self-reliance demographic. They're the ones who know. It's built in. Yes, it is. It's built in. It's so hard to transition someone into that. But if you're built that way. then you know exactly what we're talking about. And so what I did is I would have my buddies come over, the ones who really wanted one, and I would say like, okay, show me how to do this. And then giving them the. Instructions to see like how well is this gonna work? And that was a huge part of it because there were certain parts that as a physician, I may even have been making some assumptions like, oh, well, people are gonna know how to measure vital signs. A couple of guys were like, no, man, I can take your heart rate and your respiratory rate because I'm just counting you breathe or counting your pulse. Like, I don't know how to do all that other stuff. So like even in the very first three skill sets of that book, it's like it's going to be very hard to move forward if you don't understand the first three basic skill sets, which is CPR. and stop the bleed and measuring vital signs. Because if you can't quickly apply pressure and stop a bleed or you have no idea how to even attempt to manage arterial bleeding versus venous bleeding, by the time you've read the instructions, that person bled out, right? Well, yeah, that's it. You open a kit and you don't know what's in it. That's what you're, you know, and not to mention the fact that if it's your kid or something like that, they're looking at you and going, oh shit, dad doesn't know what he's doing. Oh, exactly right. You know what I mean? And let me show you this inventory list. I'm going to pan the camera down a little bit so that you guys can see a little better and move it towards the light. So all of the books here, as you kind of open them up, They're all set up the same exact way for simplicity. The first page is just going to give you a little bit of warning. The same thing that we talked about, it's not for convenience. It's meant for serious situations. Then you get into a reminder of the general instructions. If you need a reminder of how to use the color coding system, or how to quickly and easily find the skill sets and medications, which, by the way, are always listed in that border on the right-hand side. So this, of course, is the skill sets book. But if you look at the other ones, you see medications and skill sets are always listed in bold along the right-hand side. To make them easy to locate. Say again? It said full color pictures. I didn't know that. Full color pictures. And if you open up the black book that has skill sets and inventory right on the front. Whenever you open it up and you go to that table of contents, it'll tell you exactly where to find that appendix with the itemized inventory list. So you're going to go right back to page 165. And from there, you are going to see everything that is in the injury treatment module. It breaks it down by the class, the name of the medication, the brand, the quantity, how much of it will you find in that stack tower, a photo of it so that there was really no room for confusion, and then the description and uses. So for instance, we'll pick one here, Coban. A lot of people that have never worked in the medical field have no idea what Coban is. But here you would see it's a Coban roll. It's the color 10. It's one inch. By five yards. It's made by 3M. You get two rolls of it in the kit. You see a picture of it, and then it explains. Coban is formed from the words cohesive and bandage. Hence, Coban. It's a stretchy material that has mild elasticity and an adhesive quality, allowing for multiple outer layers to stick upon each other, helping to form a moisture barrier and protective outer layer when bandaging skin injury wounds. Two Coban rolls are provided that are one inch wide and unravel to five yards each. So, Something like that is something that, you know, you're not going to get that in a basic medical supply kit. But it's huge when people are grabbing like a certain type of forcep, a certain suture material, a certain type of splint. And then as you can see here, again, all color coded, making it very easy for people to know that they are in the injury section. And then you get into the gold for the advanced care section and all of that medical equipment, the green for the infection treatment. section, the white for the exposure treatment section, talks about the gas mask, the CBRN canisters, you know, the 20-year shelf life, you know, those kinds of things. And then metabolic, of course, as well, and blue. And maybe show everybody that stack one more time so they can connect the dots. Yeah, absolutely. As he's going through this color-coded book, you're seeing these color strips. The importance of these color strips is right here. That's right. So on the stack tower here, you can see that we break down the tower the same way, red for injury, gold for advanced care, green for infection, white for exposure, and blue for metabolic. And what I can do here, James, is even a little bit better of a demo. If you have an injury, so let's say that you have an injury where you burnt your skin or you cut your skin. Well, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to get your injury instruction textbook, and you're gonna get your skillset and inventory textbook, okay? So you have those here, then you're gonna disconnect and you're gonna open up this portion of your stack tower. And I love this injury kit because it opens up into a great little workstation where you have everything that you need Right on hand here. Let me just show. It's like a first aid kit tackle box, man. Yeah, it is. It's kind of like, you know, like that tactical approach, you know, so you can see everything is here. You know, right. Oh, sorry about that. Right at your fingertips. Right at your fingertips here. You have all your stop the bleed stuff right on top. You've got your trauma shears, and these are the good kind. These are the kind that actually cut through like fireman's pants. You have your lidocaine to anesthetize wounds. You have your needles and your syringes to inject the lidocaine. You have non-surgical skin repair options like Dermabond and SteriStrips. You've got your hemostatic lock. Everything you need quick access to is right on top. Everything that you need to spend a little more time with, like as far as suturing wounds, there's different types of suture packets in here. There's a couple of 36-inch SAM splints. There's lidocaine cream, silvadene cream, more gauze because you can never really have enough gauze. You got your sterile surgical instruments to tie the sutures. You got your staple remover and several staple guns that have 35 staples each. You got a sling. So this is what I mean, man. The stuff that we have in this kit is very much not your kind of starter prepping material. This is for people who are looking for something significantly more capable and advanced. And when you have all of this out in front of you, you then also have all of the information that you would need. So what I would do is having this all opened up in front of me, I would then open my injury book, to skin injuries. Again, it's all very uniform to avoid confusion, right? So you go straight to injuries and you're going to look and you're going to see skin injuries, musculoskeletal injuries, spine and back injuries, cranial and facial injuries, foreign body injuries, blunt trauma, penetrating trauma. It's all broken down. So you're going to go to skin injuries and let's say, you know, a laceration. So you're going to go to C for lacerations. You're going to follow that across to page 23. And then you're going to go right to page 23. And when you get there. It is going to teach you all about lacerations, including how to identify different types of lacerations, which ones you can close, which ones you can't close. It's gonna go into more details of how to even prepare the wound, how to practice. There's a page in here on just purely practicing before you even get started on things like fruit and suture boards And little things like that. I'm sorry, that's on the skill set. So as you're going through, you see laceration. Every single medical emergency in the treatment books is broken down into four sections because we want to make it very easy for people. So the first section is how do I diagnose this condition? That's why there's lots of photos. That's exactly right. So recognition and diagnosis is the first section. The second section is how do I treat this condition? Okay. So obviously equally important. The third is what complications do I need to watch for while treating this condition? So for lacerations, that's going to be like, you know, something that's still bleeding, something that gets infected, you know, a suture that ruptures and bursts. All those sorts of things. And then the last section, which again, this is only relevant to preppers, as is everything in these textbooks, is what happens if I don't treat it or I miss it? Because preppers are going to be dealing with limited information and a finite number of resources. So a certain medication might run out. They might have used a medical product on their kid six months ago, and now their other kid has a medical problem. So Knowing the risks and knowing, and a classic example I give. Uh-oh. Folks, we lost Dr. Tom. Not sure what happened there. Maybe the phone died. But we'll carry on till we get him back. So the way I see that thing, like, what's up, US Ditch Doc? How you doing this morning? The way I see that thing working, man, is, you know, you hand the kid off. Whoever's the medical, sort of the most well-medical trained goes and gets the kid, right? And then instead of sort of, this is how I would do it. Instead of dealing with, I got to manage the books and the kid. You tell your son, your other son, your wife, whoever it is, open this book up, tell me what I need, and then open up, you know, the injury book. get us to the page where we have the problems, right? Delegate that responsibility off to somebody so that you can get the kit open and get ready to do what needs to be done while someone else is looking over sort of the image and seeing what's what on that side of things, because that's important. You could definitely delegate some of this stuff off, particularly the inventory piece, right? And you'd be in a really good position to focus in on what you're what you're going to be doing with the medical side of things. That's right. I don't know what happened there, but that's no biggie. We can get right back to it. Are we back on? You can hear me. We're good. Yep. We got you loud and clear. Sorry about that. Yeah. A phone call came through and it knocked off the mic for some reason. But anyway, I was just talking about the delegation of maybe delegating sort of like the book part to somebody. And I think that's beautiful. If you have somebody there. I mean, listen, that's the way we do it in the emergency department. Right. Like I'm not a standalone provider there. Like other people are handing me things. They're grabbing things for me. And that's the way emergency medicine goes, because sometimes you need to move quickly. And that's what we kind of designed this really for, you know, that rapid deployment, you know, that piece where like, you know, you've got to move quickly. And that's why we have all the color coding and everything like that. You can drill it too, right? Oh, absolutely. We do. We actually drill it all the time because it's like any other device. Period of intensity, right? Like when we're dealing with medical students, we have them drill it before we let them actually work on a real patient, right? And same with law enforcement, right? Like you're gonna drill that thing again and again and again, because not only is that gonna prove that you are efficient and competent, but that neuroplasticity, those neurons are going to align to make it where you're more automatically reaching and grabbing for those things without having to put all the extra thought into it, which just makes you more frazzled. One of the things that I've noticed, Doc, when people get hurt, particularly when kids get hurt, this might not even work for you because, well, you have kids, so you've seen the look in their eyes, I'm sure. But there's a thing that happens when kids get hurt where they have a blank, they have no experience. They have pain and they have no idea if it's I stub my toe or I'm dying. Yeah, right. And one of the things I notice when you're treating a kid is the more proficient you are, the more at ease they are. That's probably patients in general, but I just see it with my, so if you're drilling, if you're using a stack kit at home to drill with your kids and your family, then I feel like after a certain amount of time, they're going to know when somebody gets hurt, we open the books, dad gets the plastic kit, opens it up. And then everything is there. Like I have that whole safety net underneath me. And I just feel like in the chaos of an emergency or disaster for if someone gets hurt, And they go, oh, here goes the process. It's happening. You know what I mean? Books are opening. Hits are opening. I'm going to be okay. That's right. It's that familiarity. Because otherwise it can be intimidating. Seeing all this stuff can be intimidating. But with that familiarity, and I always tell people, like, listen, this is something I teach people in the ER, like medical residents and students, like, if the general panics, the troops panic, right? So if I'm in that leadership role, and I'm the one providing. That medical care, if I'm flustered and panicked and yelling, and I mean, I know doctors, unfortunately, who do that, and it turns the whole place into chaos, because you have to be that voice of reason, that calm, collected, like, I understand this, this isn't my first time looking at this or doing this, even if it was practice runs. And so, So speaking of, so like if somebody were to be doing such a drill, you know, they would come to page 23, they would see lacerations. They should, the more they do beforehand, the better, right? Because they're going to be better at recognizing and diagnosing. They're going to be better at already knowing exactly which medications and equipment they need out of the treatment module. But they can go through, they can learn all of that important information about how long do you have to close a wound? When you close a wound, how long do sutures stay in? How long do staples stay in? And all of these different complications to look for, including infection like this, wound dehiscence, where the wound splits apart like this, and then they have a way to at least try to mitigate and give themselves a fighting chance when it comes to managing that condition. But as you see, like the books, like we talked about, the medications are listed on that right-hand side, and the skill sets that you would need are also listed on that right-hand side. So we have everything from application of a pressure bandage for a wound that might be bleeding heavily, to basic wound care, to the. Surgical closure of wounds. And so You know, if I want. To look how to surgically close a wound, you know, it's telling me here in bold and cap skill set eight, surgical wound closure. Well, then I am going to open up my skill sets book and same thing that the setup at the beginning is all the same. I can go straight to that table of contents just in the first couple of pages. I can go directly to skill set number eight, which is surgical wound closure. I can follow that along. I see it's on page 57. So then I'm going to open up my book, page 57. When I get there, it's going to tell me everything that I need to do as far as wound closure. So I could even go a step before that, learn how to irrigate the wound out first. But when I get to surgical wound closure, it's going to tell me exactly what I need to do to surgically close that wound, everything from skin preparation to the practice. You know, you can practice on fruit, you can practice on suture boards, you practice on things where the stakes aren't quite so. High, right? Of course, yeah. Then we talk even about how to load the needle driver onto the needle holder and how to not push the needle through, but curve the needle through. how to tie the sutures so that you get those nice knots right at the top of the wound and all along the same side of the wound. We talk about how to do a double loop for a wound that has a lot of tension across it. So, I mean, there's so much valuable information in these textbooks because they are designed to take decades of medical education and experience and emergency medicine experience and convert it into useful medical education for people in the preparedness community. You know, a lot of your listeners don't know this, but I'm known in the education community for neuroscience. I do a lot of neuroscience education, everything from the neuroscience of addiction to the neuroscience of self-improvement, the neuroscience of mental health, including at Prepper Camp. You know, I gave some neuroscience lectures. But education is my thing. I mean, education is something that I'm so passionate about everything from firearms education, ethical hunting and trapping and snares education. Education is how you empower people. Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved that statement. Give a man the fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll feed himself for the rest of his life and his loved ones too, right? So I have benefited from the education of so many other people that have that elite level of education and experience. I mean, like you, I have certain guys I follow online that I know I'm never going to have 20,000 hours of experience like that person has. If they're a good educator and they can take some of the very valuable stuff and at least pass those skill sets on to me, that's honestly what set me off on this whole journey is not only having friends do that, but I realized that I was benefiting from so many other people out there that are at the top of their field. And how could I translate that over into a way I enjoy helping people? I like being somebody who's useful and helpful to others. Um, and, and this allows me to do it and, and, and build a business around it and, and, and get to interact with, you know, great people, um, like, like you and your followers. This is a demographic that, that I am a part of personally and, and that I love being a part of professionally as well. Yeah. You're my favorite kind of guy, man, because you're pushing out this great product, but I see you over there on Instagram, teaching your kids and doing drills at home and showing. You know, practicing what you preach. I mean, that's, that's, just a little tiny bit of that goes such a long way. You know what I mean? One of the, my favorite one in all honesty was you showing the kids where the fire extinguishers were. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you simple thing and people don't think of it. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, and, and, and I am also one of those people. That I constantly try to not only learn from my mistakes, but Hey, why not learn from other people's mistakes too? You know? And, and, and so, If I being an emergency medicine physician, I am often on the receiving end of, you know, hey, we didn't prepare for that. Yeah, we thought we should grab a fire extinguisher. But, you know, none of the kids knew where it was, you know, all of those kind of things. I just I log the mentally and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to make I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen to me, you know, in my family. And those little tips, man. And the kids eat it up. I'll have one coming out pretty soon. I had them doing some radio comms, you know, out in the field. Oh, cool. It's cute. Yeah. So I'll put that up. Very cool, man. Yeah. I mean, it's like you said at the beginning of the show, you talk about, you know, food, water, shelter as sort of the primary when it comes to preparedness to some degree, right? Everybody's got their own list, but they're up there. They're always in the top. And maybe one of the best things anyone could do to preserve their shelter is that, right? Make sure everybody in the house knows where the fire extinguisher is and how to operate. That's right. Yeah. And my top five, you know, I already mentioned. And then my sixth one immediately after that is education and skill sets, because I don't want to just stockpile a bunch of stuff, you know, like and that's true of food. That's true of water. That's true of medical equipment. That's true of shelter and security. Like if I can't maintain it and keep it in a functional capacity, you know, and I can't go out and acquire more of it when something bad happens to my stockpile, then I'm only as good as, you know. sometimes even luck and fortune, you know, can, can affect your, your plan. Um, but if you can, if you can, if you have the knowledge, if you have that education, if you have the skillset of how to rebuild that structure or how to acquire new fresh, you know, um, sources of, of, of clean water, you know, and edible foods and things like that. So, so for me, it always comes back to that education, James, like skillsets and education that they, they are what, lifted me and my family out of poverty, right? Like going to medical school and becoming somebody that has a higher earning potential. I believe it's how you lift people out of everything from ignorance, racism, stupidity, it's naivety. All of these things, if you educate people, you empower them to actually be a solution to their own problems. And nobody understands that as well as the preparedness community. And these textbooks, you know, they are such a great way to empower people with that education. I get it. Not everybody can afford, you know, the big towers because like you and I talked about, like it's all hospital equipment supplies in there. It's really high grade stuff. And I get that other people, they may be OK with with preparing, you know, buying cheap stuff, you know, from overseas that might break. I'm not. And so I don't sell my products with that stuff in it. But I understand that everybody is doing a calculation there. Everybody's risk mitigating, you know, like how much how much time, energy, money, resources do I want to spend on being prepared for this versus the risk of it happening tomorrow and me being unprepared for this? Sure. So I think something that people should consider is group purchasing on something like this. If you're in a community, if you're in a community where you have, you know, of a variety of people who are all kind of on the same page when it comes to preparedness, you know, and then, and what I would do if I was in that position and I was going to say, look, me and my, and I have neighbors who maybe even could come up, um, But if I were in that position, I would look at things that were, I don't know what the right word is, but you don't want to buy a kit and say, we have one set of antibiotics for everybody. You might have to say, we're going to invest in this kit, but we're going to also bring to this medical stack all of our own antibiotics. We're going to have all of our own antibiotics at home and look at the kit and sort of a group way to manage that kit so everybody has some of the things that they need with the things that could potentially run out. That's right. And the other thing that we allow people to do is order additional supplies. And so, you know, like we customize every kit because it's filled with, you know, prescription items that have to be prescribed to that individual. You know, that's why it takes us a couple of weeks, you know, to get one of these in somebody's hand. But that's also an opportunity where some people will say like, hey, I actually want three rounds of every medication that you have in there because I want a set for myself, a set for my spouse, a set for whoever, like whoever I may be. That's perfect. And we've also had some groups, groups of like there's a militia, you know, that has purchased some of ours. There's some hurricane relief folks, you know, that have purchased some of ours, you know, because those are the people that are either preparing for a world where they won't have access, you know, to hospitals or even just temporarily. You know, a hurricane comes through. It's often three to five days before something. Organizations like FEMA even have boots on the ground. And if you're depending on FEMA, you're. Already losing, right? There's more education that we need to provide for you there if that's your plan. But even if that is your plan, you're still going to need to figure out the early time period before they get boots on the ground and have help set up. And that's where, you know, these can absolutely thrive for a group. Like you said, like, you know, we've had some VFWs reach out, you know, and again, as long as like they understand this isn't for today's world inconvenience, you understand that like this really is for those times. But most people in those communities and demographics, they have a very good understanding of that because they're involved in that day to day world where in an instant, you know, your life can change. And if you're not well prepared, you're already set up for failure. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. Yeah, there are ways outside. If you're a typical family of four, five, six, and you're looking at the system in its entirety and going, that's a lot, there are definitely some ways to figure out how to spread that cost out. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. If you can modify the kit like that, I mean, that's kind of perfect for a mag or a. Or a group or something along those lines, or even a collective bug out location. You know what I mean? Yeah, right. Groups that have collective bug out locations. We're going to wind up at this place. So let's invest in rather than you got to grab your medical stuff. I got to grab mine. We got to throw it all into cars and travel. Let's have a stack sitting there waiting for us and build it out, collectively share the cost so that this thing, this little mini doctor's office is waiting for us when we get there. That's right. We have that solution. Yeah, I mean, it's designed to be an emergency department in a box. And it gives people, you know, the ability to manage everything from the skin injuries we talked about to like a respiratory emergency, you know, their anaphylaxis, there's EpiPens. I mean, even the stuff that nobody ever thinks of, right? Like delivering a baby, like, you know, everybody thinks of all these. other prepping scenarios, but what if someone in your prepping circle is pregnant or, or becomes pregnant? Like, how do you check a cervix? You know, like all of that information and, and so much more, you know, is, is in these textbooks and, and, um, and, and then everything that you need to manage it, you know, is in the tower. As you know, James, we have smaller medical kits. We have things that are a little more portable, a little more affordable. The stack system is how you achieve that highest level of medical preparedness. I built that because I scoured the planet and couldn't find anything that existed that was this comprehensive. And I knew it was needed. I knew it was something that I would enjoy building and that I would enjoy providing to other people to empower them. But yeah, we can customize them all the way down to the smaller bags that just have meds and some simple instructions. But selling the books on their own as their own unit has proven to be a very good decision because they're selling like hotcakes, man. Yeah, the books make sense. And again, the books can be a family purchase too. They could be another group purchase type thing also to outfit a certain area or a certain home. You know what I mean? That's right. If you're looking at the books and going, I don't know if I can swing it, that's something to consider, right? Yes. But, you know, one of the things that really hit me just the other day, which is so, I'm glad you came on and brought an encyclopedia collection of books like that is, what you're holding in your hands is one of those things that's, either disappearing or has disappeared from a lot of American homes. Like growing up, we had, we had a bunch of collections of books for a variety of things, gardening, you know, a maintenance, home maintenance, that kind of stuff. Encyclopedias. I got books. I don't have any of those kinds of books that are in a big giant set. You know what I mean? That can be passed down and just here's the medical thing. You know what I mean? Like this is what you need. So I love seeing those kinds of things coming to life again, because I think, this brief interlude, uh, you know, like this digital interlude that we've had is, it's definitely just a, uh, I don't know. It's a blip, you know, we're going to be back to hard information again in no time. And having stuff like your collection of books is it's just vital and they're done better. You know, like there's no medical books out from 1930 that are as good as that. You know what I mean? It just doesn't exist. And, and, and, you know, the, the, So many people have asked, like, are we going to make an e-book or a digital version? And I always tell those people, I'm like, you're kind of missing the point. You know, the point is, is.... There are so many things that can eliminate electricity from our lives. From somebody hacking the grid with a virus to a random natural event like a solar flare. And people just don't understand that 200 years is not a very long timeline. We've had electricity for 200 years and in our hubris and ignorance and naivety, we're. Like, oh, we're just going to have it forever. This is just ours. Guaranteed. Yeah, I mean. Like tap water. Oh, man, and even that in itself, right? But I even look at it as it doesn't even need to go away forever, but it could very easily go away for a year. It could very easily go away for six months because a couple of strategic transformers were taken out. I mean, when you go down that rabbit hole and you start learning about the susceptibility of our power grid, then you start to very quickly realize how quickly. trash will pick up on the curbside. That exposes you to infections. That exposes you to parasites like hookworms and pinworms and tapeworms. And now your animals are eating out of trash and then coming into the house. Your children are wandering around touching things like And people that have never been in those disastrous situations or have never been in third world countries or have never tried to deliver medical care in a third world country without access to those things. Like those people are in for a very rude awakening and likely an untimely death simply because they didn't recognize the importance. Of having the things right. Before the disaster hits and having them in a form that you can access them, that you can carry them with you physically and hold them in your hand and open them up and even make little notes inside if you need to, or dog-ear certain pages. We try and make it so simple that people don't have to do that. But I encourage people to interact with these textbooks and get familiar with them because that's when you are at your absolute best. When you've had some familiarity, You've done a couple of practice runs. Then the real thing happens and your brain is ready to rock and roll. Yeah, that's huge. That's huge. No doubt about it. Yeah, like I said, with the kid itself, being able to do those drills and those reps is huge. But you could do it with the books too, right? You could say, all right, go grab the books. Dad's got a whatever. Try to find it. And what do we have to do to fix it type of thing? That's right. That could be huge too. And with that inventory list, you know, they can always look and say like, okay, well, I don't have that exact medical supply, you know, that I would have if I had purchased the Stack Tower, but I have something similar. And the instructions, you know, like we realized that over time, even some of the products had to change. You know, like for instance, like there was a product that we used to use in the hospitals that they stopped making, right? So we had to swap it out for the equivalent. Then there was another skin adhesive product that actually like several times, again, I put people through drills and there was a complication where people couldn't get it to come out of the opening of the ampule. So we switched because people could use the other one way better and it had... equal or better ratings whenever I would do the research on it. So we're constantly, you know, modifying and therefore what we teach in the books is not hey, when you see this, grab this drug from this manufacturer or this supply from this manufacturer, because we may have even needed to modify that. We teach the principles though, you know, like you need to apply pressure here. You need to bring the wound edges together here. This is the method of how you do it. And by the way, this is where you find that supply that will help you do it in the stack tower. So what that inventory list does is it allows people to kind of prep on their own terms, you know, as far as like what supplies and medications they want to get, as long as they're getting something equivalent. And when I give you the item, the brand name, a photo of it and a description of it, then that allows people to even do their own little research. And maybe, like I said, maybe they find some cheap item from overseas. They want to take a chance and buy it because, you know, it's 10% of the cost of what we have in here. Well, that's a risk that they have the freedom to make. And we appreciate those freedoms, you know, so we like that. Yeah, no doubt about it. No doubt about it. Well, Dr. Prepper, Dr. Tom Brophy, thanks so much for coming on today, man. I've got some ideas. Thanks for having me again, brother. Thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. It's always a pleasure talking to you. Always. And I got some ideas about how we could maybe integrate the kit into PBN a little more often. I'll talk to you offline real quick if you. Got a minute on that. That sounds great. Sure do. Yes, sir. But PBN family. You know, this is the deal. Everybody is looking for a checkbox, is looking for a thing. I think it's a good time for you to start thinking about overall preparedness and moreover the expansion of that preparedness, right? We have the resources. That's all I can tell you. We are the Prepper Broadcasting Network because we are a broadcast network, but also because we have a network of people around us like the good doctor here today that, you know, these are immeasurable people, man. You know what I mean? They're vital for the time. So stay tuned. Spread the word. Let everybody know what's going on here at PBN. And America will be stronger for it. There's no doubt in my mind. I'll talk to you guys soon. Don't miss the rest of the day's programming, PrepperBroadcasting.com.