Matter of Facts: Ask Me Almost Anything

Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talked prepping, guns, politics every week on iTunes, Ditcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwfpodcast dot com, on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us be a Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Raveley Andrew Nickar on the other side of the mic, and here's your show, Son of a Biscuit Eater. You know what happened? Nick? What's that? Remember that issue we had a couple of episodes ago where like the uh you forgot to start the uh the local recordings. Yeah, so here's the funny thing. I know for a fact I had that selected the last several times, and that's supposed to be a durable setting. So I'm pretty sure what happened was because did you see the stream bar just dropped a new feature in Uh, pretty sure they can. They did another update and I forgot to check this. It's all right, though we have we have a cloud recording, I have a hardware recorder. I have a full hour at full power on this enormous freaking uninterrupted power supply that's underneath my desk that I kick if. I turn the wrong direction. I think we're gonna be okay. Well, that's lovely. But if you're listening to this in audio version after the fact, the the the nice, crisp, well engineered audio will not be quite that nice as it is usually, but it might be perfectly acceptable. Who freaking knows anyway, matter of facts. Podcast, I'm Phil, that's Nick. This is an ask Us almost Anything episode. Most legal questions will be answered. So we do have to have some ground rules. First of all, there are three people in the chat. You're welcoming fire questions in Nick and I. Whoever's not actively talking or answering, will star the things that we feel like merit further discussion. And also, Nick and I have prepared a couple questions for each other while you bunch of aimless nutcases figure out what you want to ask us almost anything, nothing illegal, nothing immoral, nothing about our wives. I mean, you know, like you use kind of common senses out of real serious premium. These days, we can use. A little bit of it. If you asked me it in front of my wife, would she hit you? That should be your bar. Hmmm, what kind of a mood is she in because that I feel like that kind of colors. Kind of does. It kind of does, but oh well you take that risk. Yeah, miss as matter of fact, is not prone to physical violence. But every once in a blue moon, the Scottish and the the Italian blood or the Sicilian blood collide with each other, and when that happens, it gets spicy quick, I would imagine. So let's just take that comment right off the top from Kyle. Is coffee a good substitute for energy drinks? I say yes, because energy drinks nor coffee give me energy At this point, I am My blood is so diluted with caffeine that it doesn't even affect me, and coffee tastes a lot better than energy drinks. All right, I will tell you this. One thing that energy drinks have that coffee does not have is some precursors and B vitamins. If you have a healthy, normal diet and you're getting an ample amount of these precursors and B vitamins, you won't see as much of a difference from energy drinks. Comparing energy drinks to coffee, if you're doing straight milligram to milligram caffeine load. However, if you do not have adequate B vitamins in your body or some of the other precursors that are in these things, you can see a greater uptick of energy. Or you could just take like a be complex first thing in the morning, then pound a cup of coffee, and then maybe grab one of the like I don't know, neurotropic supplements, which shockingly effective. I mean today I drank approximately sixty four ounces of coffee while I was at work. Yeah, that sounds about right. I had, yeah, three twenties. I think I've got sixty ounces of coffee today. I mean flow that down. I knocked down a thirty two ounce tumbler on the way to work, and then four eight ounce eight ounce of coffee mugs throughout the day. Yeah. But you know, to be to my credit, that's slightly above average consumption for me, because you know, last night I just couldn't sleep. Stayed up way too you know, stayed up way too much. So you know, Yeah, Rachel is saying that she doesn't do violence. I'm not going to debate that with her. No, she does not. And see here, so Raggle, show me on the doll where the tism touched you. Yes, definitely in the brain apparently. You know, my I was talking to my wife, my daughter about this the other day, and she was she was recounting something she'd read to me that was talking about how like, you know, for the longest time, there's this prevailing opinion where autism is like a relatively modern thing and it hasn't been around forever. And then she starts and then she starts talking about like all the weird ship that like Rising and Alred Einstein and Nikola Tesla and like all these these men and the. Guys that designed steam locomotives on pen and paper. You're telling me that wasn't an obsessive motherfucker. Da Vinci, Yeah, that dude mean for that, for that, for that matter, Michaelangelo, the dude painted the Sistine Chapel, for fuck's sakes. Yeah, you don't do that without a little bit of obs Yeah. I totally understand her where she's coming from. Though. It's like autism and ADHD have been around for literal ever. We just used to call a genius. Well, the difference was is it it wasn't considered maladaptive because we didn't have children bricked into a school and locked into a desk for eight hours straight. When kids were. Going to school, it was for a few hours a day if they were going to school, but most of the time they weren't. They were apprenticing under their parents in a trade. And I tell you what. Eight year old me loved dicking around with plumbing arc welders. You put me in. Front of a task to do, I will do the task as long as I as long as I have stuff to do. And see on the computer side of things, because that's majority what I do. Like I try to I try to explain to co workers, like when they when they look at one of the spreadsheets I built, that they have to then come in behind me and like learn how it's constructed, learn how to use it, you know, Like I build the process, they continue the process. And I've had them ask me before, like how do you build this stuff? And I'm like, well, knowing, like having this encyclopedic acknowledge of all the different commands in the formulas and how macros are built. Like that's just you can google all that stuff. You can literally for anybody that struggles with microsoftic cell freakin' go to Google and start your prompt with in microsoftic cell and then just write out in plain English what it is you're trying to do. And so I'm telling you looks I get stumped. And I've been like neck deeper microsoftic cell for twenty years. I'm always learning something. I learned something today. As a matter of fact, I had a spreadsheet that so I have a spreadsheet I used to do calculations, and then I had the bright idea to actually use the information in that spreadsheet to like auto populate some can remarks that I've been copy paste into the system to explain what the adjustment is I'm doing. So the spreadsheet, you plug the information in a spreadsheet, it does calculations, and then it takes that that, that, that and that and plugs me into a sentence and then just generates your line to text. But then I noticed, because there's two spots where it's grabbing dollar amounts and if if there was a if there was a following zero, like fifty sixty seven cents, it was it was slicing off the last decimal place. Huh. And it was annoying the crap out of me because like I can put in a techt string to put the dollar sign in ahead of it, but it was still treating it like a number, not currency. And I googled it and lo and behold dollar, open parentheses, the cell reference. You're trying to grab comma to close parentheses. You just converted that number into a dollar into a currency in useful you suppose, Hell, I'm betting around with Excel for twenty years. Didn't and it never occurred to me. Well, it's one of those little things, like how how many commands are in Excell. It's got to be in the thousands, tens of thousands. Yeah, there's no way you can memorize them all. No, there's no way. But my point is, the point I was making to them was knowing all those commands you can just google that. You don't have to memorize all that. I don't memorize all of it. It's irrelevant. They used to come in a manual with Excel. But the heart but the hard part isn't knowing all those commands or know one how to reference them. The hard part is being able to like shut your eyes and conceptualize. Yes, Like it's it's like the difference between It's like the difference between a person who like restores a statue and the person that chisels it out of a block of stone. You have to be able to look at the stone and see the thing, and then remove everything from the thing you're trying to make. And that's kind of what my job turns into. Is I open up a spreadsheet and I have this blank sheet, nothing on it, and I have to create from nothing and then iterate and improve and make it more user friendly. But like you know, some of these sheets, they're the product of three or four years of just continual use, iterate, modify, use, and just continue to sharpen it up until it works better. But I can't teach a person how to be creative. No, I can't. And there was an interesting thing I learned many years ago a buddy of mine. I think it's called a fantasia where you can't visualize physical things. In your head. How does that work? You just don't see pictures in your head? Apparently there are Broadly speaking, this is a generalization, so it's probably wrong. There are three kinds of people. There are people that cannot hear a voice in their head. I don't. There are people that cannot see pictures in their head. And there are people that can do neither of those, and then there are people that can do both all of them at the same time. See, I'm allowing to be a picture person. I can do I can do pictures, tex voices, and songs. In my head, I have the ability to do all of that. And I think because of the nature of my childhood, I developed the ability to take things apart in my brain. Like if I see an assembly of something, I can I can see the individual pieces and how they go together in my head. So you would have really excelled. Did you ever take the asfab Yeah, okay, do you remember what you scored the mechanical aptitude portion? No, but I remember I scored very highly on the test. Generally, I scored a purpose and they found out I had asthma. I scored a perfect score in the mechanical appsitude portion, which is literally just here's a mechanical system. If I make this thing turned this way, then twenty seven years later, which what happens over here? Like that's the long and the short of it is. It's looking at the mechanical system and being able to tell in your head how it works based on looking at it. So anyway, how do we get. I think Ragel was shooting that at you. Regan wants to know if you can have a conversation in your head, because some people will see the conversation in their head as text, like a text scroll. So my wife, my daughter, and I had this conversation recently, and they asked me if I had an internal monologue, and I don't. I just do. I do constantly? Well, but I don't. I just I don't know. I think of things And I. Guess that's also a form of a fantasia. Yeah, it's just how your brain is wired to process information. It's there's there are some negative consequences to certain forms of a fantas. My my buddy, he cannot see pictures in his head. He cannot visualize spaces in his head. So if he gets lost extremely easily because he does not know that what he's seeing in front of him is that same view flipped one hundred and eighty degrees. It's almost he was coming the other way. Ah, yeah, it's wild. We went to a convention center one time, and leaving the convention center, he had to turn left to get back to the hotel. He left the convention center, thought to himself, I went right when I turned into the convention center, turned to the right. He got lost for hours. Oh yeah, it took a couple of phone calls and us driving around to find him. Look, it's nothing against him, brilliant guy, a phenomenal software coder, cannot navigate to save his life. Let me loop back to a couple of these before we move on to the questions. Stewart's saying less than two thousand commands and functions. He's been exceled geeks since I graduated high school. Actually I graduated in O one, But the point is, oh yeah, and there was one other doctor. Scary guy, say conditional formatting never wants to work, right, I will say conditional formatting has gotten better in the more recent iterations of Excel, but it's still specific. Yeah, and it's I wouldn't say it's buggy, but it is very easy to screw it up. Like. It's also kind of limited in its functionality. In my opinion, I find a how to make it better, though. I find that the best use for the best use I've found for conditional formatting is to make simple visual check cues. So, in other words, right, an orange turn blue? Yeah? So like what I what I like to do in my spreadsheets when I'm doing a lot of a lot of different calculations and everything is if there's more than one way to calculate a thing, I like to have your main calculation run like in front of you, this and this and this and this, and then somewhere else on another tab or maybe on some hidden cells, I'll calculate the opposite direction and the compare, compare this to this, and if they don't match, it lights this. Up and it's a good use for it. And in uh, there's this redshet I built that was literally just used to do payroll computations. So like if a person was supposed to make sixteen dollars an hour, they got paid fifteen dollars an hour because they didn't get a raise on time. You could plug in the hours they worked, what they made at the time, verify that those dollar amounts match their payroll listing, plug in the new rate, and it would recalculate all, you know what, the what the rate should have the pay rate should have been break down by all the TC codes. It would calculate the difference in their benefits. It calculated difference in their life insurance, their four to one K, their retirement print pension. It did all of this based on plugging the schedule you worked. And this, by the way, was not like a single pay period thing. I you. This thing had nine hundred and ninety rows. The longest salary adjustment I processed on it once was fifteen years, and it's. That's hell of a back payeunk. It was nine hundred and sixty five, nine hundred and seventy rows of data. Once I plugged it, it took me through days, I would imagine it because because I had I had to literally after I plug all this in, I had to verify that, like what what my spreadsheet was generating as far as what they got paid originally matched what they did get paid originally, to make sure all the differential amounts were great. It was a lot. It was a long process. But the point is one of the things that sheet does is if any of the subtotal amounts don't add up, it starts lighting stuff up and red And that is specifically because there's a part of this spreadsheet where you have to plug in all of the TC CODs used throughout the entire sheet so that it can give you line by line, all of your base pay all of your night differential, all of your Sunday differential. It has to break all it up by the actual time codes because those are all used in the payroll system to make sure that your E and l's and everything else getsjusted properly, because all it gets tracked. So if you forget to put in one of those amounts, or if you get to put in like one of those TC coats, the whole sheet starts lighting up in red, saying this is wrong, this is wrong, this doesn't match, this is a match. Well it's it's great for error spotting and stuff like that. Yes, but even I was quick to warn all my coworkers, like, it works reasonably well, but you cannot trust it one hundred percent because name everyone, there were times bruh, where like this thing would start lighting stuff up in red, and I will go in and independently redo the math with a calculator and it's it's to the penny perfect. But condition for a managers got pissed off that one time. Huh. I wonder if it's some kind of overflow error. Huh, I error, be honest with you. The only way I ever managed to clear. It was by going in and overriding the formulas in that cell and plugging in the exact same number, and it cleared it. That's got to be some kind of internal rounding error. But it's not rounding because round to the second decimal place is on every single formula in the entire sheet. Because it's all dollars and cents. Stack overflow error. Bro I spent I spent four years building and tuning this spreadsheet, and still I processed literally thousands of pay adjustments using it. Interesting and it just gets mad sometimes every now that it gets a little. Pissy I get that, man, I get that. Morgan Hoarde, what is your opinion on IRAQ eighty eight eighty eight? Have you been Have you been following the gun Tube non drama label. I have been largely not watching gun contents on YouTube. For a very long time. I used to follow his videos quite a lot. Back in the day when I was just getting into shooting, because I was like, I know nothing, this guy's reviewing all the guns? Was it when Barry was still around? Yeah, yeah, Verry Sill Barry was a national treasure. Yeah. I watched for a little while after Barry was gone. And I just sort of I got to the point where I felt that my ability to sort the data myself was good enough that I could come to the right conclusions about different things. I liked his burned down videos. I liked the different times he would show off rare or obsolete weapons systems, and then I found forgotten weapons and I get pretty much all my fix on that from him. Yeah, because I mean, the videos are amazing. I think what Morgan Horde is probably referring to is recently there's been some kerfuffle on social media about how supposedly this guy like divorce either cheat on his wife or divorce's wife and started to hanging around a gun buddy, and then they got married and she took him to the and took all this money. And I don't know, like I've heard so many different versions of all. A guy made a bad mistake in dating. Great, well, yeah, but this some of us hasn't. But this comes on the heels of like grand Thumb leaving his second heck and wife and cheating on her with all kinds of other married women. Isn't now Grand Thumb's a military vet. Yeah, yeah, Rack Vet eighty eight, eighty eight military vet. Gee, why not necessarily as a group known for necessarily the healthiest marriages or mate selection. Pattern I am kind of an anomaly apparently. I mean, look, I. Despite having the beard, the book, the tattoos, and the coffee company. I look, everyone here has heard that the old joke that. Like the Guilt Team comes with the movie deal. Well, D two fourteen ruined credit and divorce. Every veteran must have two, and oddly enough, the only the DD two fourteen do I have. Like I'm I'm happily, faithfully married and with excellent credit, So I somehow have avoided all the pitfalls of being a vet. Look, there's reasons why military marriages don't often go well. You could be away from your spouse for a long time, and any of us that went away to college with a high school girlfriend knows exactly how well that tends to end up. One of you tends to do some walking out or leaves. Look, it just happens when people are separate. These things happen when people are not living together all the time. They can develop coping mechanisms that aren't really healthy or useful when you. Are together all the time. Yeah, I mean, I understand where Morey's come from with Iraq veteran eighty eighty eighty eight me personally, Like I don't know. I stopped watching him years ago because kind of the same things that Nick is echoing, Like I don't watch a lot of gun tube anymore. Like I'm a faithful follower Forgotten Weapons because I'm a nerds because I bes nerdy bastard and would have a beer with that guy. Oh in a split second, it. Would probably ruin my credit though. And I watched like Ultimate Reloader Johnny's Reloading Bench, like I'm getting back into reloading content just because I'm standing my reloading gear backup. But like, I don't know, there's just there's not a lot of like gun content I watch anymore. And I think a lot of this is just down to like one of the questions I have for Nick, which come up in a minute in the bastard spoiled it by looking at the notes ahead of time, I do not remember them good, that's the right answer. But like I'm at a point where like until my father in law willed us a couple of firearms or not willed, he stole alive, but like you know, gave us a couple of his old firearms. I was actively talking myself out of buying more guns because I currently am I have, I have plenty, and I have enough to arm the entire neighborhood if I want, like I don't, I don't need more. What I would like to have more of is ammunition and time to train. Yes, that's the big one. The time to train is the real is the real sticking point. I am finally getting out to the range with this ten twenty two that I bought yep, and I'm bringing way too much stuff with me. And I think that becomes the killer of those like for the guys that do amass these huge arsenals and these huge gun collections, Like it's almost like having a big classic car collection. You know, at a certain point you have to invest time in keeping the stupid things from rusting into the pavement. Which, if you're a gun tuber, your livelihood is that massive collection of firearms. I get it. My livelihood requires a massive collection of metrology tools, but I. Will probably never stop gaining them. But the problem to having the enormous gun collection is that there's a certain amount of maintenance and rust prevention and care and feeding them must be done to them. And that's before we talk about training with all of them. Like when I go out to the range Saturday, I'm bringing I'm bringing my my uh my eighteen h ar with the bipod in the one to six because I've got I really just want to spend some time shooting and confirming via got a question for you about the seventy seven grand load that I have for it. And I am bringing my three away Winchester route that I haven't shot in three years well and to and two boxes of precision loaded ammunition. I intend to convert all that shit into noise because I just do not have enough time behind this gun. And it's one of those things where it's like for all this for in the in the interceding three years, you know, And I've spent a lot of time doing not going to the range, first of all. And when I would go to the range, I would prioritize shooting my care my daily carry gun, because that's a priority. I spent some time shooting my my twelve gage to get used to it, spent some time shooting my my car being with the red Dot. I spend time shooting all these are things, because those were kind of like I had to prioritize what was most important, and the most important things were the things most likely to be used in a home defense scenario. And the freeway Winchester that can stack four rounds on top of each other at one hundred yards ain't the thing to use for door kicking. It would be. I mean, guys have used bolt guns for door kicking, bigger balls than I've got. You have to have some real good faith in your shot placement at that point. Yeah, yeah, no, hard pass door kicking is for fools that are on government healthcare, So. We won't be doing any of that. Yeah, let's clear a couple of these out. Then we'll get to fire questions of each other. I'm about to let these questions pile up, Morgan say, and his latest videos don't add up. His body language and story does not add up. I'm gonna tell you, and I'm gonna I'm gonna say this with the understanding that Nick and I are on the Internet. My assertion is that most people in the land of social media are not who they claim to be or portray themselves as correct. I by virtu of the fact that this is a hobby. Do not care enough to portray myself as anything other than what I am. I'm very open about the fact that I am a family man, i am a gigantic nerd, I'm a computer nerd. My hobbies are well known to everybody. I am deeply, deeply shy and introverted. Like I can do this because I'm just talking to Nick and all of you people in the comment really comment section really don't exist. But if I thought for a split second i'd stand from talk to like two hundred people, I'd be in the quarter in the fetal position because I'm just I'm an introvert. I'm not the guy that does public speaking. I'm honest about who I am. But I'm gonna tell you that most people on the internet, you have no earthly idea who they are because they've built they've built a career around being a person and playing a role exactly. And that's the thing I think more people need to not get used to, but they need to take a step back from the social media and say, Okay, just like Mel Gibson, just like Danny Trejo, just like the Rock they're all playing a character to sell to their audience, their content. Now you see this especially in. A lot of the niche the niche communities like prepping, for instance, everything is doom all the time forever with the big prepper channels. You know who I'm talking about, you know who you are. It's always the end of the world there, because that's what sells their content, that's what gets their their advertisements out to the most people, that's what pays their bills. Look, I get it. I don't make fun of them for that. I don't hate them for that, I don't dog on them for that. I just point out that they are a person playing a character, playing a role for the content they are delivering. Do you really think that, you know, I don't want to even I don't want to even use their name. Do you really think they're like that in person? Probably not. I mean maybe some of them are. I would be willing to bet Ian from Forgotten Weapons is exactly the nerd you think he is, because I don't think he cares enough to play a role. He just wants to show you look at the cool thing I found, or somebody let me play with. But having met a few a few other people that are on social media, I am pretty big into D and D. I'm pretty big into Warhammer. I've been to the conventions, I've met some of the social media people associated with those groups. They are not typically the personality they play online. Thing. Yeah, yeah, well not so much. Not that they're bad people, it's just that they're not the character they portray online necessarily, you know, especially when it comes to a point where you get so big, you get audience captured, and you end up having to play to the type to continue growing the audience or. To maintain the audience. It's it's a hazard that anybody runs getting into getting attempting to get big on social media. That's fair. So we have questions for each other while we let the I have one for you. Is it gonna be about the thing we talked about today? It is gonna be, Well, it's gonna be about one of the things we talked about. Phil you mentioned the one to six scope on your air Yeah, I did. You also mentioned to me today that you're considering increasing the magnification of the optic on this rifle. And what was my response. I don't remember exactly what you said, but I interpreted it as what are you trying to do with it? Correct, And what we ended up discussion was how do you determine how do you personally determine how much magnification or which type of optic your rifle requires. So I think it's worth pointing out first of all, that like you can make an argument that a red dot helps you aim mm hmm, it is because your your aiming surface is in a single vocal plan onlike iron sights. It is inherently quicker if you train with it. Yeah, if you train with it. But magnification, whether you talk about a magnifier behind a red dot or a scope, doesn't help you aim better. It helps you see further. Correct. So my perspective, like when we talk about like defensive weapons, is you don't need I mean, like with a five five six there, nick there, they're good to what he's five hundred yards. I have seen people reliably reliably. Shoot I would say human torso size targets at five six hundred yards. I know of a guy that shoots prairie dogs at three hundred yards and those are significantly smaller. He is also a wildly above average marksman. Here's the problem, though, can you possibly identify one human being from another at five hundred yards without magnification. Probably not, No, unless they're unless they're drastically different in building, probably not, or with my vision anyway, Or. If you're talking about like in a military context where you note the opposing for the OP fours uniform, looks like you can really be shoot anyboy you wear in that uniform in a combat zone. Assuming they're silhouetted or brightly illuminated. Probably, But when when are soldiers who are in an active conflict willingly silhouetting or actively highlighting themselves. But here happens. But here's the trick. See this is also where like my experience from the military kind of feeds into this because like I was try i enlisted in two thousand, I was trained using the doctrine left over from the end of the Cold War. Sure, where the idea was we were going to be defending Western Europe from like human wave attacks of communists coming in from the East. You really don't need to be concerned with who's in front of you. Everybody is either left to right. Or behind you. That's if they were coming from that direction, and they were they were wearing a uniform with a big red star on the top, you just cannoe and be don't smoke away. Yeah, exactly. And as a result, at the time, there was not a lot of prevalence or a lot of thought given towards magnification because it wasn't necessary. You can hit targets. You can hit man sized targets at three four, five hundred yards with iron sights. It's with my with my unmagnified red dot, I have a vortex. I think it's a spitfire. It's the times one, so it's unmagnified. But you can't do a magnifier behind bit fire or strike fire. Dude, I get those two confused all the time. It's the prismatic one. Is it? Is it the micro with like it? Does it look like an rm R or does it look like an old an old. It looks like an old style aim point. But it's a prismatic. Oh, I forget which one that is. It's an etoretical prismatic. I always get those two confused. Whichever one's the etched prismatically so you can get in times one or times three. So it's not the spitfire or the strike fire. The strike fire looks like an old ame point, like a T one and the spitfire looks like an rm R, and I forget what they call the one you're talking about. I don't know there, you know, I get it doesn't matter. But the point being is, with that red dot, it's really not it's an etouretical optic, non magnified optic. It's it's it's prismatic optic. It's a little different. I can reliably make headshots on a one third scale lipstick target at three hundred yards out of an ar It's not a difficult task. One of the things I always used to do when I did shoot that right, I could shoot that rifle all the time. Can't anymore because it's illegal in the state. I would take new shooters out and I would get them to do headshots at three hundred yards within one magazine with that rifle. Because it's a rifle, it's going to put the bullets pretty consistently, and at three hundred yards it's it's a it's a sub quarter m a rifle with with most loads. Morgan, he was saying, it's a vortex, it's a vortex. It might be a I'll look it up while while we're talking here. But Phil, anyway, to your original point, like the philosophy us behind this weapon really and truly was I wanted bear in the mind that, like I tried not to specialize firearms too too much, and I already have a car being that's got like two pounds of tactical bull crap on it for night vision. So the idea behind this Atenich rifle was really kind of like the do everything rifle if I only had one. So I've got a bipod on it if I'm shooting from arrest, but it's a very lightweight bagpole bipod that bolds a bat of the way on the end of a very long rail, so it's way out of them away if I don't want to use it. It's got a one to six, so I could sensibly dial it down the one X using a quick throw lever and use it like the world's crappiest red dot if I had to. It's got illumination on it, so I can turn that up to ten and it looks just like a red die on one X. I can turn the illumination off, dial it up to six, and use it like a fairly decent six x magnified optic. But it was really meant to kind of be the do anything ar and for that, for the for the reason I originally built it, six X is really enough magnification. Right, But here's where I get bound up. I get behind that three away Winchester with a twelve X magnified optic and bearing in mind that even though even though the whole rifle is nothing really special or awesome, I mean, it's an off the shelf Ruger, you know, Ruger Hawkeye. So it's an M seventy seven, yeah, with with tuned reloads. It's with a very with with a mildly worked over trigger that I polished up myself with a free floated barrel, because I inleted the stock myself, as you should, with a not not expensive at all Vortec's diamondback, not even a diamondback tactical, but just the straight diamondback scut so not the first vocal plane one, No, this was this was when the diamondback first came out, yep. But with that, it's still been capable of having four holes touching at one hundred yards absolutely, and every now and then I get that in my head of like, if I had this much mag if I had twice the magnification on that ar but then it it means it would me move into like a mid A midpower veriabloptic, losing the one X, which then kind of pushes that rifle out of the position where I could use it at close range if I had. It's a designated marks rifle at that point. But there lies, there lies the thing I bind up on. I've already got a six inch car being, and if i wanted to shed some weight off of it, I'd rip the magnifier off the back, rip the laser box off the front right, and I could shed pounds off of that rifle to make it a much more running gun capable weapon. So I could push that other rifle into more of a DMR role. But does it make sense because I've had this gun together for too long and I want to screw with it? Well, I think I think there is a certain point where having a gun and screwing with it is fun. It is fun, and if that's if that's your purpose is having fun screwing with it, that's fine. Change whatever you want, but know going in what your purpose is. The scope I'm talking about the vortex spitfire rism. So they named that on the specifire one's one's a prismatic and one's not. That's annoying. Yeah, well, you know that's almost as annoying is as one of our patrons recently clew me in and we told you. Yeah, c Z apparently decided to flip flop the names on the PO nine and the PO seven because it used to be the PO seven was to compact one and the PO nine is the full size, and they fucked around with that so that the PO nine is the little one and the PO seven is the big one. And that is gonna make magazine selection the biggest, most gigantic pain in the ass for no reason now, because you're gonna say I need PO nine magazines, and they're gonna be things that won't that won't lock up in the freaking PO nine because I bought a PO nine back when it was a PO nine. Yeah, I I I understand where the issue would be. I mean, I get why Vortex is doing what they're doing. The difference is a single piece of glass. Yeah, So it is an option on. That scope, It's just like picking a different radical on any of their on any of their other scopes. You can say that all you want. On the news, doctor scare guy says you're wrong. The news says you have to be a sniper to make one hundred and fifty yard shots. I don't. I don't accept gun knowledge from people with less roundtown range than I. Have, correct. I mean I I have had quite a high number of roundstown range compared to your average shooter. Which is why you take gun advice from perilously few people. I'm assuming I do. I mean, there are there are definitely shooters that have less rounds down range than I do, that are better shooters than me in certain disciplines. Any even newscasters, not that I'm aware of. But it's entirely possible that means Reeves. Has more rounds as many roundstown range as me at this point. So maybe, yeah, I don't know. But he's also not a douche canoe. I've never met him, and that's a That's another point I meant to make when they were talking about we were talking about Iraq at eighty eight eighty eight. I've never met the guy I don't know is wife. I have no skin in his game, dating or relationship wise. That's that's about it. Okay, Draggle might have a point. I was in the military, and Nick is a competitor. Your round counts are far by marriage, but I'm. Not currently a competitive shooter. I will be getting back into that though, and. I'll push back on that. I literally went shooting with a buddy mine behind that I was enlisted with, like years after I got out, and his question to me was, why the hell couldn't you shoot this good when you were enlisted, And I said because I Well, first, okay, so first of all, when I was enlisted, my job wasn't to kick doors and Fellujah. My job was an aircraft mechanic. So it was kind of more important than I knew how not to kill the four basters flying on the black Hawk than it was to know how to freaking like you know, bullseye four rounds in touching at one hundred yards. It kind of is on the front line shooting at people. Things have gone terribly. Wrong, yes, but that's also the reason why it literally wasn't my job, And it wasn't say that I didn't take it seriously or I didn't I wasn't familiar with ar fifteens. I was. It's just to say that, like I was not going to put anywhere near the level of training in at the time, not being Tip of the Spear Special Forces or inforty or anything else. My job, my primary function, was to make Blackhawks fly yep, And that's what I spent a lot of my time learning to. Do, and rightly so it's just like it's just like any private sector or public sector career field. My job is to take a drawing and make a piece of steel that represents that drawing. I don't get trained necessarily on how to design the piece. I have gotten into that side of it because it's a natural outgrowth of what I do. But when I was just to make the steel to the shape, guy, I was not trained on design work. So I shouldn't be good at design work at that point. So yeah, to polish off your question like that, that is what I struggle with, is like I think about, yeah, I'd like to put this in and the other on that weapon, But then I go right back to the philosophy of us and I'm like, it already does what it was built to do. Yeah, it it osten choice, it can change, yeah, but it really hasn't because the thing of it is it is like, if I needed a weapon to operate at night, I have one that's already built specifically for that. If I needed something that was more compact, I have something for that. If I wanted something that has longer legs, I've got something for that. This thing was really meant to be the Goldilocks gun that could kind of like do everything. Okay ish, Yeah, Like if I if I had to get rid of every ar I have, and I would really hate to tear apart that night vision rifle because I've really spent a lot of time tweaking and turning and screwing things to make it fit exactly the way I wanted to. But if I had to, if I could only keep one that eighteen h A r probably bee it, yeah, because it's one It's. A do all platform. It really is. At that point, That's what it was meant to be. And that's why I'm really hesitant sacrifice that one X, because that one X lets me lets me engage from point blank to three four hundred yards. Yeah reliably, I would say three hundred yeah. Yeah. Anyway, So for me, let's have an argument. Good, what do you think is the minimum number of firearms to recommend a person have one. Okay, defend your answer. Okay, I'm gonna disagree, but. That's fine. If you have the budget for a single firearm. And you and your use case. In this case, I'm taking it as. I didn't from the questions. I didn't frontload the question properly. I'm gonna front load the question. Budget. Budget, budget was not part of the equation. Oh okay, Well I'm the milk. Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me pull this back. Let me let me, let me take it back. It's not a money problem. It's not a space issue. Okay, it is what is the minimum number of firearms you would recommend a person has so that they are like mission capable, however you interpret mission capable. Okay, it's not. A budgetarrier go with. I'm gonna go with three. I bet I already know where you're going. But let let it rip. I'm gonna go with semi automatic AR platform, pick caliber. Why it's Stewart, I corrected myself. He did, Stuart, you can come on next week, can argue with us all you want. He will to go with a semi automatic rifle, ideally an AR platform, just because of availability. Pick your caliber could be an AR ten and three oh eight, could be a three hundred Blackout, could be a six Grendel, do whatever you feel, you do. You it's a semi automatic rifle. You can put an optic on it. If you need to reach out and touch somebody, you can take your optic off if you don't want to. You need a sidearm, You need a pistol because you can carry that every day, everywhere, all the time. And you need a shotgun because there is no game on this continent of North America. You cannot kill with a shotgun loaded appropriately. So my answer is only two. Okay, slightly different though, go for it. I think you need at least one AR fifteen with a sixteen to twenty inch barrel. Sure, nothing really short, nothing really special, nothing really crazy, mid tier, something solid, something that functions well. Something you can put a couple thousand rounds through and you're not gonna have to worry about it sheering or breaking or tear it shit up. It has to be chambered in five five six. It has to u standard magazines period in discussion. And the reason for that is because if you've probably heard the old quote from Vietnam that by the time. The reason why, like a lot of the Special Forces guys carried a case was because when. By the time you need more magazines, there's plenty of dead enemy around with them. Yeah. Well, here in this country, if we're ever in a situation where weird things start happening, weird things, it's. Glock nineteen's, glock nineteen mags and AR megs. Well, these days may not be glock nineteen mags. It'll be sig M eight and M nineteen mags or whatever the hell of the army is issue in these days. But the point remains, you will find AR magazines in five five six literally everywhere you go, and you'll be able to salvage plenty of it from anybody you come across who no longer needs their ammunition for a variety of reasons. So it has been AR sixteen to twenty inch chambered in five five six period in discussion. And then my other answer is going to be the largest handgun in any caliber that you can comfortably and not comfortably, what's word to look for here that you can consistently conceal. So, in other words, like if you're a really big guy, and you can frigging like strap a freaking desert egle to your hip. You go go forward and do great things. I'm not that big of a guy. Despite being a big guy. A nine mil double stack compact is like perfect carry side for me. If the biggest gun you can get away with concealing is like a Smith and Wesson shield or sig P three sixty five whatever, But you need one concealable weapon, sure, and it should be the biggest gun you can conceal because you don't get points for it being small, cute, light, or comfortable. Bigger guns have bigger magazines. Bigger guns have longer sight right radius is. Bigger guns have more meat in the frame. Bigger guns can are easier to shoot better. And if you don't believe me, every son of a bitchin military and police force in the world issues bigger guns to people. They don't need to conceal them. They do. Yeah, they they always are. They're almost always four and a half to five inch full size pistols. Yeah, unless the unless the user cannot physically grip them, well, then they'll then they'll give you a different gun. Because I have seen that occur. And in this case, I say that if you cannot conceal that a gun of that size, you drop down to this biggest size you can conceal. You want the biggest answer, you want the biggest gun. You want the biggest gun you can shoot well, but you get one it's smaller if you can conceal it. Because I'm gonna tell you that in the weirdest of weird times, you're gonna need that AR fifteen. Yeah, probably a semi automatic rifle. As king shit. In everything leading up to the weirdest of weird times, the moments where you're still going to work, you're still going to the grocery store, but weird shit's happening, you're gonna need that head. You're gonna need that head handgun because it's gonna be concealed and you're gonna be able to carry it. Every a gun that you don't have with you is worthless, yep. But and then you don't have with you is worthless. So but the only purpose of a handgun is to fight your way back to your rifle. Oh, it absolutely is. And I will not dispute that. Because handguns suck at killing people and things they do. People get shot with them all the time. Look at the gang bangers in Chicago. They are shooting each other constantly with handguns and now AR epistols, which is actually upping the death tolls a little bit. Surprise, surprise. But so yeah, to your point about the shotgun, I totally understand where you're coming from. But I think unless you're talking about hunting, I'm talking about hunting too like a game. Yeah, there is, there is. There are very few scenarios where a shotgun is gonna beat an AR fifteen with a thirty round magazine. Yeah, I would agree with that one. You know it, My state sucks. Can't have an AR with a thirty round bag unless you're on the register of the mag and the. Rifle or dissobate the law. True. I opted for a semi automatic twelve gauge with almost a pound of lead in it that I can unload just about as fast as I can an AR. I will say, there is something satisfying. There is something moderately arousing about being able to dump like eight friggin twelve oun hounds, slugs or buckshit hot shells on somebody as fast as you can pull the trigger. Look, it's a. Thing there are very few assailants that will continue advancing into twelve gage shotgun fire. There are also very few assailants that will continue advancing into thirty rounds of five to five to six very effective either way. A half pound of lead is a hell of an attitude adjuster. Oh, it absolutely is. Look, everybody has to make these decisions for themselves on what they think is the most effective that they are comfortable using. Look, I will admit my wife will never probably be comfortable firing full power double lot. She probably won't. She will. I'm very certain she will never be comfortable firing one ounce slugs out of a semi automatic shotgun. I will say that my dad is probably the best part of I don't know, two sixty five, two seventy's. He's he's built like I am, but he's a couple of inches taller. He's a big man. And your dad's your dad's also seventy seventy two seventy two, so he's getting he's getting up there in age. He did not like my twelve gauge. He know what he was. He was interested when I told him that Breada was bringing the eight three hundred patrol out in twenty gauge. But when I told when I when I let him pop off at twelve gauge twice, he literally shot it twice, put the safety and put it on the deck and said, I don't like that. Look, it is not twelve gage shotguns are not a light recoiling firearm. No, they're not. No, I don't care who you are. You're lying if you say it's a light recoiling firearm. There are shooting techniques that can mitigate the recoil, and proper technique makes a massive difference. There's also some people twelve gage shotguns until I took trucks class. Really, yeah, it's just I was. Never taught how to shoot one, right, I've never I don't know, maybe I'm just not terribly sensitive recoil. But like I've never I've never fired recoiling rifles. I mean, the heaviest recoiling rifle I've fired is my three toh eight though, you god. Unless I'm getting rid of that three hundred wind. Mag unless you're talking about select fire. Okay, Now, no, that's not fair. That's not fair to compare. That's completely different. That's a completely different ballpark. That's a lot of little bitty pole impulse. It's not one big impulse though. I should see if if Sue will let me borrow her for sixty weather Be to bring to Kentucky. I would. I put four dollars around. I will buy a box. We won't get. Through the box. Phil, it's a Safari weight Ultra light. I'm for sixty weatherby. It sucks and it's ported. I'm somewhat aroused. You should be. I might talk to Sue. We'll see, we'll see. Anyway, Did you have another one for me? Because I have a two parter, go for it. It's guaranteed to be a to be a debate. I do. I do have a good one for you if we've got signed a fun one for you. If that sign, but go go with yours. I can give you half an hour two parter. What is the most important and least important prep Sky's limit all the whole preparedness world. What's the most important and what's the least If we say the same thing, I'm gonna frige of throw my mouse. Well it's not going to go that far. But still the most the most important, in my opinion, is a well funded emergency. Fun we didn't go to the same place. Okay, good, good call. And I would say the least important is NBC equipment nuclear biological chemical warfare equipment. Oh, we didn't go to the same place at all. All right, I'll tell you why. The purpose of the nuclear, biological and chemical warfare equipment is to keep you alive just long enough for your replacements that were never exposed to make it to your defense. It's a position and you will get you out of the affected area. Die. Well, that's true. I mean, the entire idea behind mission oriented protective posture or mop gear is so that your soldiers in the fox hole keep shooting at the enemy while they're advancing until you can bring up reinforcements that are probably less likely to die. Now, why do I think the emergency fund is the most important. It's hard to argue with you about that because I walked into it. But go ahead. Look, I've said this on the show before, I will say it again, probably as long as I'm on the show. There are very few problems in modern life that cannot be at least mitigated by shoveling scoop shovels full. Of cash at the problem. The more you pay the faster you can get services. Typically, if you have a problem, if your roof is fucked, and you tell the roofer, I don't care what it costs, put a roof on my house. Any roof on my house. They will show up and put a roof on your house. And you write the check and there you go on your way, hunky dory happy. If you have to wait for insurance to approve it and then get the roofer out to quote it and then get them to put the roofer on your house, now you. Have more water damage. Yeah, but if you can pay the roofer and say, hey, look, insurance is going to pay me back for this, I don't care. Take all the documentary pictures you can because I'm not. Getting up on that roof. Let's do that. The roofer will come in, show up, do the rough oh, Ragle, I am having fun with that. Raggles. Ask me how the shed is coming? Okay, so we quick update and I'm clicking it's too long. The county and the state's attorney have determined that none of the existing procedures for sure for realsease allow. Us to remove that road from the plat map. They have all agreed that there is no existing procedure within the law to remove this. Now, what we have come to is what I assume to be petty bureaucratic ass covering territory, yes, where. No one wants to make a decision, so they. Keep incrementally kicking it up to the next person and the next person in the next person, until eventually somebody's gonna be like, just do this, and then it will work its way back down to me sometime in the next two to three years. I'm guessing that's now my new timetable. I will keep pestering. Them on a regular basis. I will also be pestering my county board members on a regular basis about this, because if you don't continue to pester them, they will not continue to elevate your issue to the next highest authority. So I will just say one thing, not that there may not be some petty bureaucratic ass covering going on, but this is to a certain degree just government bureaucratic ask covering. Because like you and I have had this conversation before about how when when these governing bodies were much smaller, and it was like Edna and Leroy in an office together and whatever they said went right. There was no procedure. I think Leroy got to write whatever they wanted. But now that there's hierarchy and bureaucracy and levels and YadA YadA ya yah, everyone knows if I just like stamp this shit to make because the right thing to do here is to make the fucking road go away because there's no fucking road. There's never going to be a fucking road. But if I do that and my boss finds out, they're gonna be pissed about why didn't you come talk to me about it. You don't have the authority to do this. And if the boss finds out and somebody actually needs that road ten years. From now, no no, no, no bruh from the person that works in the public sector listening. It has nothing to do with whether or not listen. Jesus could come down from the out and say, no one needs the road. I have decreed it. I have lightning bolted it onto a stone tablet. There will never be a need for this road. You are clear, my son, my child, Just make the road go away. They will not do it because their boss will get pissed that they exceeded their their office and exceeded their sore and not telling you that's right. It's just it's how bureaucracies work. And you know what, that's fine. Look, I have a long time ago attempted to bring myself to a place where I accept what is. There are things in this world I cannot change. Bureaucracy is one of them. What I can do is pester people until the bureaucracy inevitably reaches the end goal, which is this road going away, which everyone who I've talked to, and I've talked to seven levels of local government so far about this, they've all agreed this is dumb. There should be a simple solution for this. So everybody is technically trying to help me. They just don't have the authority to. They're pretty sure. But that's because the simple solution involves necromancy. It does, it does. A simple solution does involve awakening of property developer from the nineteen fifties. Is a seance an option? I don't think a seance is considered legal testimony in my county. You can find out. But wait, wait in Illinois, dude, like there's been a weirder shit. No, No, that's just voting you can vote if you're dad. Oh oh, you just can't give legal tests. Thanks for clear that up, Nick, I get a little confused about it. You canot give legal test, but they can't vote, Stuart, I wish I could. And I think I've told you this before, and maybe I've told other people on the show before. I have a neighbor. I have a neighbor that is in a dispute with the county over some wetland inter interference. He has been dredging, digging and relocating lots of things in what is recognized wetlands. There is a county drone and an Army Corps guy that shows up about every two weeks and does a walk around or flies a drone. There are a lot of representatives from local and national government that occasionally are in my neighborhood. They would notice the shed otherwise, honestly, man, my township told me put up the shed and pay the fine. Deal with it on the back end, because what are they going to do make you tear it down? What is the fine? Usually it is three times the permit cost. What's the permit cost? Like one hundred and twenty five dollars brah. But for under four hundred dollars. Ah, Nope. If your construction is not complete, they can find you that fine by the day the building or temporary very construction area exists. So you just have to build it so fast that they don't realize it's there until it's done. Correct now, the fact that I have people coming out every week every two weeks. Look, dude, I'm trying to play square here. Bruh. Listen. If the Mormons can stand up a freaking barn in an afternoon, you. Can't concrete foundation. Look, I would have to. There is your property. You are too smart of a guy to not get creative about this. I know there's I could, I could. I am purposefully trying to color inside the lines on this property. You're trying to be a good boy. I am trying, especially because I know the county is out here every other week. But the way my property is there is a large hill. I will have to do some quite considerable earth moving that's not going to get done in a day. The concrete work is not going to get done in it day, and you need to let that concrete cure for about a month before you put the building on top of it. They're gonna see the foundation there. That's probably all fair, but just just so we can move on past the point and you and the audience can understand the look that they can't see, because you know, the audio listeners can't see the look that was on my face. But you know what I always say when I hear somebody say there's a fine. Yeah, that means it's legal for a fee. But you have to remember, remember what I said, there is a fine per day accessible. I don't need any more reasons to dislike your government. I know, but look, I would like to look, I'm probably not gonna have the opportunity to move. In the near future. I will have to deal with. Whatever good or ill will I generate in this county, probably for the next decade more than likely. So you're you're trying to be a good boy. I'm trying to color inside the lines, because look, there are things that I'm gonna be doing in that garage that my neighbors probably will hate. That's that's that's fair. I am probably because I just found all of the blueprints for a twenty two l R gatling gun. More coming on that, and gatling guns are not machine guns. They're technically not machine guns, and they're technically not magazine fed, they're hopper fed. So I'm not quite sure how that plays with the noise laws. We're gonna find. Out how positive you'll still go to prison. I have so many questions for my lawyer, but I'm pretty sure your lawyer is going to recommend an abundance of caution. I am going to end up eventually with with this garage one way or another. Pretty much everybody has agreed with me, even at the county level, has agreed with me about this. I'm gonna end up getting the permit for this. We just have to work the process and get through the process. And then when I put all of my machinists stuff in that garage and I'm making hollacious noises at eight point fifteen on a Saturday morning, and the county comes out or the sheriff comes out, I can be like, look, all this has been cleared. We're all good to go and pass the noise ordinance. All this is in the green, it's all fine, everything's up to code. You can't tell me to stop because I color inside the lines with these things. That's fair, all right. Let me answer the question I asked you, and then we have a steward, and I think that might be it. Go for it. So most important prep I'm going to say is knowledge. Okay, that's fair, because. To your point about being able to solve a roof leek with a lot of cash. You can solve just about any problem with enough money. But if I have a tarp and some roof and nails and a little bit of knowledge of how to use them, I can fix that myself. But if you're an eighty five year old married, color. Emergency fund solves that problem, true, without having to get an eighty five year old up on a roof. But the reason I say knowledge solves a lot of problems is I'm looking at this kind of broad spectrum from pre emergency to post collapse. Knowledge always ends up being the thing that separates the person from back in do for themselves from the person that cannot. The difference between the guy with the enormous gun collection and the guy that is lethal with it is the one who knows how to use it. The difference between the nerd who runs around with all the tactical gear and the guy who knows how to move through the woods without making noise. The guy who knows how to freakin you know, navigate with over the land, the guy that knows how to use his radio, the guy that knows how to use his weapon, the guy that knows how to use the things is training and knowledge. So I keep, yes, Rachel, I am not encouraging him to go to prison or jail away. Encourages me to follow the rules. But but what I heard him say was for four hundred dollars, he could he could avoid two years of beer crack nonsense. And I can't speak for everybody, but I would. Pay one hundred dollars a day. Well, but that's assuming you didn't get done in one day. And I still think there's a way to get this done in one day. They're they're not the size I'm planning. Well, I'm I'm sure there's a way to get this done in two weeks before uh oh. May maybe and you know you could. I am going out of my way to try and do this the right when. Okay, if if you say, if you finally lose your taste for that, I have an idea. It's devious. It's devious and underhanded, and it's probably concealable. I have. I have an idea based on the road Runner cartoon, and I've pulled it off before. Anyway. Most important, I'm saying, knowledge slash training. Training is how you get knowledge. Knowledge is you know so and so forth. Absolutely least important guns, least important prep guns. Yes, And I'm gonna tell you why I've used this analogy before whenever I talk about, like why I have a blowout kid in my vehicle, why I have band aids in my work bag and I keep ibuprofen and et cetera and so on and so forth. In all of the years that I have been out of uniform, I've had to pull my gun on one person in anger because they somehow thought stepping into my home without my permission was going to end well and a forty five point in between the eyeballs convince them to go somewhere else. But in every other fast of my life, I have needed my first aid kids and knowledge. I've needed copious quantities of band aids and alcohol prep pads and antibacterial stuff. I've needed to rely. I've needed to fall back on my foodstock several times. I've needed to fall back on my vehicle maintenance supplies and my tools. I've had to fall back on all these different things. I included this huge umbrella that's preparedness. One time. Have I needed a firearm? You know, twenty years now. Part of that could be I live in a really safe place and I try not to inject myself into places where stupid things happen. But I'm not saying don't have guns. Your guns are not important. I'm just saying, if your whole preparedness plan is I have all the guns and all the bullets, you're gonna be dead in a week because there's all things up to the sht, all the f's, there's all these things that are gonna happen before that you can get your way out of if you have things at your disposal, But you can't shoot your way out of most of those problems. I have also only ever had to pull a gun in anger once. Ideally it would it would have stayed at zero. But well, but we don't always get to make that determination. I sure didn't. But to your point, how many times have you had to dip into your emergency fund? Oh, Christ, twice a year, twice a year minimum. Not to put all our business out in the street because one day, Missus matter of fact, is going to resurrect raising values and we're going to talk about why that show has been a highatus for a while because there's been a lot of personal crap going on in her life and life. But yeah, her life and my life by extension. But needless say, I've dipped into my I've dipped into our family emergency fund like twice a month for several months, and it's never been like a rated down to zero, Oh my god, we're broke. But it's been like a you know, we have a budget and that budget does not account for multi hundred dollars unexplained, unexpected things that we have an emergency fund and we've had it exists and we've had to tap that multiple times per month for several months to cover out of pocket expenses we're expecting to get reimbursed for it happens. Yeah, and end of life care is wildly expensive. So is settling assets. And settling settling assets and property is that's a whole motherfucking Selling houses turns out expensive, Yeah, especially when you find years of deferred maintenance that didn't get done properly, which is. What happened today. Yep. I actually know it's happened today for the third time. Good anyway, So yeah, my answer is knowledge is most important. Guns is least important. And not to say the guns are not important, but I'm gonna tell you that knowledge has got me out of a lot more problems than guns have agreed. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. That's a good one. All right. How how in the hell are there three Steward questions and one guy that comments. Because Stuart's on two separate accounts post the question. I unstarted the Facebook one because that was just due of one of the. Yeah, I think we can bank these other ones for doing it a different time later. I bet we can hammer these out. We got about twenty minutes, Sure, I have about twenty minutes. Do you have twenty minutes? Yeah? I can be on till night. Excellent. I am just a neebrate enough that we can let this flow. Good Stewart, How do you build a local community network without compromising your operational security? You don't. Don't build it as a prepping group. Well, but whether you call it a prepping group or anything else, like, you're going to have to expose yourself to some degree. It's kind of an extension of the same conversations that you know Andrew and I had years ago, and now Nick has taken part in. Because like to put yourself out there on social media into a spouse, an idea or a lifestyle or whatever, you do give up a certain amount of your Antiymy, if Nick and I were doing this under assume names, and someone dug hard enough, they would figure out who we were. I mean with facial ID, with voice pattern recognition software being easily accessible, and it really is, they're going to find out who we are. I mean ten ten years ago, if somebody would have dug hard enough, somebody would have figured out who I was. Yeah, you definitely could have ten years ago, especially one years ago, especially. With I think this episode like four hundred and seventy six, with four hundred plus episodes spread out over ten years in the pipe. If somebody really wanted to figure out who I was, they would just dig back through everything and like piece together all the. Clues sooner or later. Have you heard of geoguessing. I haven't. It's where people take a picture of a random location or pseudorandom location with no context, no written signs, and the goal is to get down to the exact meter if you can of where it is on the planet. I know what you're describing. I've just never heard of geo guessing. Yeah, the subreddit was called geoguessing. Yeah, but like I said, I mean they. Found Shilah Buff's flag within what an hour every time he started flying it. But yeah, how do you build a local community without compromising housing your op sec? I think at a certain degree you can't, like sooner. Maybe maybe you can expose it a little at a time, But I feel like I feel like to maintain one herbson. I feel like you have anonymity and you have this group you're trying to build, and you're gonna have to trade one commodity for the other. Yeah, I mean if you if you couch it in. Community preparedness or say community response to various things, you can minimize the potential sect issues. But if people come to your house and they see a goodly portion of your house, they're going to be able to tell that you have more food than normal, a bigger gun, safe than normal. If they go to the range with you, or go to a training class with you and you've got body armor, they're gonna ask a question, because most people don't own body armor. I guess my people. My point of view, though, is that by the simple act of expressing interest, you're kind of you're kind of putting a flag up in the air. It depends on how much that person's paying attention. For the person, For the person who's looking for all the crazy tinfoil hat wearing preppers in an area, they're gonna notice. Yeah, exactly. Granted, your average your average soccer mom and white collar dad, blue collar dad, probably not gonna notice. But but the people, the people you would be worried about guarding your OPSTEC from, they will notice. They are they are so. Well trained and so well attenuated to finding people like you. I would say that guard your guard the information, dole it out as slowly as possible without arousing suspicions, because if if a person's trying to, like, you know, buddy up to me and they're being really cagy, that's gonna kind of set off my bullshit detector. Yeah, but if you want. To like not you know, invite amin and show him like the whole spread all at once. I get that. But you're gonna have to make peace with the fact that you're gonna have to give up your anonymity to get that group together for some degree like it you maybe you maybe you hold back twenty percent, but you're not going to maintain one hundred. Yeah, guy, the comments, is the Epstein stuff overblown since regular folk do sex tourism on the rig? Ugh? Do I think it's overblown, like exaggerated? No. I think what he's asking is. He's saying that there are there's a notable percentage of the population. I don't know what it is that will engage in sex tourism, going to places for prostitutes, for what would be in this country or in certain areas underage individuals. No, I don't think it's I don't think people how mad people are about it is overblown. I think, if anything, their reaction is not strong enough. Mm. The just because a large number of people are engaging in it does not excuse the bad behavior, the moral behavior. Slavery was wrong, it was wrong the entire time. Just because everyone was doing it doesn't make it any less wrong. And abusing children will always be wrong. Yep, No, Yeah, nothing else todad Yeah. I think I don't think it's exaggerated. I think that I think. Anything, it's only going to get worse the more that comes out, and it will all eventually come out. And see, that's the part you and I don't agree on, because I think that I think that the people who stand to lose something by the information coming out would sooner nuke the world twenty times over in ash maybe than be inconvenienced. I don't think they are good enough at keeping secrets. I don't think they are either, But I think that they would start World War three tomorrow and burn half the world to the ground. Why do you think there's a war with Iran right now? Why do you think it didn't just get pushed off a little bit like it has been for the last twenty years. Distractions right Anyway, I don't think it's overblown. I think that I think that people that hurt children should be hung by their ankles, gutted like pigs and used for human pinattos. And that's before we castraight from the chainsaws. I don't think there is ever a justice. I don't know that I have ever seen a justifiable reason for abusing children, and I would be startled if anybody could convince me otherwise. I'm also pretty sure. Our legal tradition in this country precludes me from doling out what I would consider to be an appropriate punishment. True, although, well, given the amount of people that seem to be involved in the list, it would no longer be an unusual punishment cruel, perhaps unusual, not necessarily anymore. I will enroll the dice on that and be the executioner. Sleep like a baby afterwards, smile from my bug shot. True, it would be pretty hard to lose sleep doing things to protect children. Yeah, I'll take that all right. Two Stuart questions what role should civilian militias or neighborhood defense packs play during a prolonged civil collapse? So I'm going to refer back to the Militia Act plural, all three of them. It was always from the original founding of this country conceived that the body of non political people in this country, the common man, would compose the militia. And with subsequent rewritings of the Militia Act, we have the most current iteration in which there's the organized and unorganized militia, the organized militias, the state appointed national guards, and the unorganized militias. All the rest of you fuckers that are not in politics, or in the National Guard, or in the active military, so on and so forth. So if you don't hold political office and you're not already wearing a uniform, you're part of the unorganized militia. And I believe it is central and crucial to the fact, like to the founding doctrine of this country, the idea that we would defend our home, we would defend our homeland, we would defend our community from threats inside and outside, and to all that, and to the point of all that, I kind of believe that the idea is that you know, me with my ar and my neighbor with his dear rifle and the other neighbor with his nine millimeter pistol. If things that are weird start happening and they threaten our homes, it's on us to defend our own homes and our own families from that threat. Scale that up to the point where it's now the whole neighborhood has to defend the neighborhood, or the whole city, or the whole parish or the whole state. But the point remains, I think that the idea, like I feel like, I feel like the board militia has got really really charged over the years. It kind of has carrying it is carrying around some baggage with it. But at the end of the day, what a militia really is is a group of people acting in the common defense. Yep. And I feel like. Like that is the end line. That's the last line of defense. Realistically, you know, I don't even I disagree that it's the last line of defense. It's the first. What do you always hear me say about police officers? Yeah, that's fair, I would. I guess I was phrasing that from a national standpoint. Even from a national standpoint. But let's let's let's say again, like I prefaced, a lot of this weird shit starts happening, right so you live in like southern Texas or southern Arizona, right up against the Mexican border, and all of a sudden, the narcos just decide, we like that first one hundred miles of the United States, we're taking it. And that one hundred miles includes your ranch. Guess who is gonna be the first line of defense. It ain't gonna be your local sheriff, it ain't gonna be the National Guard. It's not gonna be the actiduty military, and it's probably not even going to be border patrol because those fuckers are too spread out to be manning every inch of that border. You know it's gonna be it's gonna be the freaking pot bellied rancher with his frigging like many fourteen right in side by side around his property that see of these dudes comes come scuirlling out of the woodline looking to take his shit. That's a good point. Yeah, it's a very good point. Yeah, I'll concede that the first line of defense. Yeah, uh, take it down to a micro If it's not if it's not the narcos crossing the border or the Chinese paratroopet into your backyard, you know what it's going to be. It's gonna be some dude that kicks in your door three o'clock in the morning because he likes your stuff better than his life, and the only thing between you and a really bad evening is going to be your firearm and your ability to use it. Yeah, So you are the the militia is people. Those people are their first line defense because when when a violent act threatens your family, you are already the first responder, because you're the one there. That's fair. You get to decide how that first response works. True. True, Yeah, that's a good point. And for Christ's sakes, I have an answer for this if you, if you before we get to that last one, listen to me. Guys, like, if you have children, teach them this shit. If you don't have children, make friends with someone who has children, and then to teach them. Like, everyone needs to understand that at the end of the day, you are. You do not have the right or the ability to abrogate your self protection to another person. Be the crazy uncle. You don't. You don't have the right nor the ability, in most cases to depend upon the police, the military, or anybody else to come writing to your rescue, to play Captain Sabajo. It doesn't work like that reality. Yeah, that's true. It's Captain writer of report. And we need we need to impress that upon the next generations so that they grow up understanding this is a personal responsibility. I need to be responsible for myself and my own security. I have to take steps to be able to protect myself. We have to beat that into these kids or they're gonna grow up repeating the exact same stupid shit most of our generation did. Yeah, which for the sake of argument, God, we. Hold on. I'm gonna write that down. It's a topic. We will need. This topic. Millennials are annoying because both of us are millennials. Yes, but I think. We are probably the least millennial millennials in the history of millennials. To be fair, I was mostly raised in machine shops, welder fabricator shops, and on construction sites in heavy equipment. I was raised weird. Turned out well well. I mean I turned out to be a mostly productive and somewhat independent member of society that is barely restrained into good behavior by my wife. So yeah, yeah, I say it turned out very well. I would say, all right, the last question, anything else that comes in. I don't think there's anything else. You didn't see any but I could be wrong. Oh, best fueled a stockpile. We'll get that one later. Yeah, all right, Stewart's got the last question. Then, what is your official tactical strategy for dealing with a sudden, localized aggressive raccoon uprising? I have a furry mark. I don't know. I don't know if he's using raccoon in. The literal or the proverbial sense. I was thinking trash pandas. Well. I mean, if I have a literal uprising of raccoons, I'm going to feed them and I'm going to indoctrinate them in my ways and teach them to take people's luck. Nuts. Oh, you train attack raccoons, or or you deploy your very murderous and adorable pitbull mix. She likes to murder everything that is her size and smaller. It's phenomenally effective, except with possums. That's because possums are awesome. You shouldn't kill them. Well, no, it's because they play dead and they don't squeak when she bites them, so she gets bored and then just rolls in their poop. That makes sense, Super helpful. So yeah, if we're. Talking about literal raccoons, my vote is I teach them how to use diagonal cutters and cut people's brake lines that I don't like. Yeah, and if we're talking about proverbial raccoons, so random rabbit animal attacks can two legged rabbit as oh? People. If he's talking about in the literal way, well number one is if if localized is not where I live, then I'm gonna stay the hell away from them, because they can go do stupid stuff over there with stupid people do stupid things, yes, and leave my area alone. And if localized means threatening my area of operations, then I called the people in the polyester pajamas and tell them you have five minutes to get over here and deal with this before I feel threatened enough to deal with myself. The one time I had to pull a gun, was it a raccoon or was it a a It was a poor romantic relationship that I was not involved in. That led to six men showing up looking for somebody who was not me, and they didn't know who he looked like, what he looked like. And I told nine on one dispatch, I said, there are six people outside with what appears to be bats, and if they come through that door, I'm going to shoot all of them. It took forty five minutes for the police to arrive. They did kick the door in, they saw me standing there down a hallway with a rifle and a plate carrier. They chose to reverse course immediately and they all got to live unshot. Now, that was a stupid situation. I was in because I was living in a stupid place with stupid people. There's a reason why I am very concerned with avoiding stupid people and stupid places anymore. But the best case scenario, sure the police get there. In the scamoy. Worst case scenario, you're gonna have to justify your actions, so act diligently m hm. And you cannot decide beforehand what is going to happen, because look, they kicked the door. None of them entered the house. The guy kicked in the door saw me standing there, determined that I was probably not to be fucked with at that point in time, and decided he liked to live. Perfect. Everybody went home. Sounds like learning happened. Look, everybody went home. That's the best possible answer, except I had to fix the door that was a pain in the ass, and I filed the police report. The people that needed to learn in the situation, I'm not sure if they did. I never saw those six guys again. That tells me they learned well. At the very least. I moved out very quickly after that happened, so there was not ample time for a repeat performance. But they they learned very They learned that it was not conducive to their long term health to pick a fight with the guy who was standing on the other side of the locked door with the rifle and the play carrier ready to yeat people out of this universe. Yeah, it turns out when you post up down a hallway and there's no cover, most people figure out real quick it's a bad idea to charge an entrench position. Yes, all right, Well there are other questions, but I'll tell you what I'm gonna do is, once we wrap, I'm gonna go back through those. I'll catch them and I'll store them and maybe we'll do like well, we could also do like you know every now that we do like a bunch of many times. It needs to be perfect for that. Sure, we can do that. All right. But for those of you who left questions we didn't get to do, I will take them down. I'm gonna do my absolute best to include them next time. But I'm not making any promises because I don't over promise under deliver, including about doing the admin work, which we totally forgot. But you know, you should buy a shirt, you should buy coffee, you should be a patron yet. Yeah, yeah, Phil, remember not to lecture me about coffee this month. Yes, after doing it three months in a row, I finally remember, like, oh, that's. Right, learning has occurred. Learning has occurred. All right, Well, matter of facts podcast is going to go out the door. Phil and Nick are going to go bye bye. He's going to the range tomorrow. I'm going to the range on Saturday, and maybe we'll have a post range report next show. I'm bringing so much stuff to the range. Just remember, on the streams, we are not allowed to touch or hold up firearms because it pisses off the YouTube overload. So it'll be at the range that the photo was taken. So do you remember? Oh I don't remember, because this is. The intro that got us canceled for a minute. I had to change the intro and outro because it included footage of me shooting at a gun range at a gun range, which is simple within YouTube's rules. But they killed that stream like six episodes in a row before I finally took the intro and outro down. Yeah, that's right, they did, I guess. So, no, there is there's absolutely no touching of z firearms. Imagine that's thirty percent optic by volume. Yes, it's it's definitely compensating. It's definitely compensating for my vision. We'll go with that, all right, matter of facts going out the door and out our body righter