Matter of Facts: Reunion and Story Time

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravelet, Andrew, Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show.

[00:00:30] Welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. I have Nick back, which means I had to demote my wife to, you know, wife of the host instead of co-host. But I got Nick back, so I'm excited about that. It'll work. It'll work. No offense, you're not near as cute as my wife is as a co-host. Can confirm. Can confirm. Can confirm. Hey, Jeff, I see you in the chat. I'm just going to say hi, though, and not make y'all listen to the sound of me tapping on keys.

[00:01:00] So, admin work, super, super quick, and then we'll talk about the last week of both of our lives, which were exciting in various ways. If you're not a patron, there's a link in the show description. You can consider becoming one. If you are a patron, thanks for supporting our sociopathy and keeping the show semi-on-the-rails for another month. If you would like to have a look at our merch, there's a link in the show description, Southern Gals Crafts. It is a small business. It is run out of Southern Alabama.

[00:01:29] And it puts money into the hands of a patron of ours and his wife and food into his kid's mouth. So, if you like to support small businesses, that's worth considering. And then Cypress Survivalist, which we'll talk about after we talk about Nick's adventure, had our first event last week, last weekend, had a ton of fun.

[00:01:50] If you're anywhere in the region of Southeast Louisiana, even into Mississippi, even across Louisiana, or maybe up into Mississippi. If you're in that region and you're interested in finding out what we're about, those links are also in the show description. There's a Facebook page and there's an Instagram, and there'll probably be a website at some point in the future. We had a lot to get done before this first event, and now we're kind of like catching up on all the things that didn't get done before the event.

[00:02:22] That's admin work. All the admin work. All the admin work. And you just created more for yourself with this event. Well, now you have administrative work to do on the backside of Cypress Survival. Thank you, Nick. My wife literally asked me like 20 minutes ago. She was like, so did you ever think you would start a nonprofit? And I looked at her and I'm like, honestly, when I was a kid, I didn't think I'd have done half the things I've done in the last 20 years. Didn't really think I'd be going to war.

[00:02:51] Didn't really think I'd be writing a book. Didn't think I'd be starting a podcast. Didn't think I'd be starting a nonprofit. I mean, to be fair, writing books and starting nonprofits is like GWATVET 101. I mean, do you guys not get a book deal as soon as you're released? Time out. I'm not a SEAL. All right. But I've seen a lot of GWATVETs writing books. I'm not a SEAL. Not a SEAL. So no guaranteed deal. No.

[00:03:16] If you did cool Special Forces door kicking stuff, then you write books, you do movie deals and all that kind of stuff. I am very happy to admit that I was a POG, which is a person other than Grunt. I was a helicopter mechanic. I was really good at my job. I was the nerdy kid in school that thought learning to fix an eight and a half million dollar helicopter was just the coolest freaking thing on earth.

[00:03:38] And I was all excited about doing that and then eventually becoming a pilot, which would have been a great idea if I hadn't have had Vertigo, which I realized after I enlisted. Kind of shot that whole helicopter pilot career to pieces. But it was a really good idea. At a point. Sure it was. I mean, being a pilot is pretty cool. Working on helicopters. Still pretty cool. Yeah.

[00:04:00] I mean, the best thing I can tell you is, is that if you ever like played around hot rod in cars when you were younger, imagine for yourself playing around with a 3000 horsepower car with a rotor head on top of it. It's legitimately like kind of cool to learn how to do. I bet. Anyway, raggle fraggle. We'll talk about the event first. If you want to talk about that first, you go right ahead, man. Ah, okay. I'm cool. I will reorganize these things.

[00:04:29] So most people that have been watching, listening for a while will know that Cypress survivalist first event, which was called Get Ready North Shore. That happened last weekend. It was the culminate. It was a whirlwind that culminated in a whirlwind. It was some of the most stress I've been under since freaking literal combat. Like my wife and I, so in the name of full disclosure, because you got to tell, we got to tell the story.

[00:04:59] The whole week before this event, my wife was off school. She's, she's a school teacher. So she was off work. She was home. She was putting in two, three hours a day minimum, nailing down last minute stuff. We were running around like chickens with our heads cut off after work. Most days picking up stuff.

[00:05:18] Um, uh, the Wednesday before the event, we had kind of had an inkling that there was some, the chance of inclement weather was picking up the closer we got to the weekend. And I had told my wife, I'm like, well, if, if the rain chance goes up any more than it is now, we're sunk. Like we're going to have to figure something out. And I think it got up as high as 80% chance by Wednesday. So I was like, okay, doing this thing outdoors is no longer viable.

[00:05:45] Like there there's no, and it wasn't even just the risk of rain. There was a slight chance of like high winds, 25 mile an hour gust, possible hail. Just the longer we went down this road, the more we kept looking like a really irresponsible decision to try to have this event outdoors. And I wanted to have it outdoors because first of all, I like being outdoors. Absolutely.

[00:06:08] I really like, we had originally envisioned this event in a specific location where we would have an area to do the classes. And then we would have some kind of some area on the side with some grills so we could invite everybody to like, you know, cook their lunch out there. We would have some area segregated away from the classes to do like mess with ferro rods, which we never even got to do because we went out of being indoors. And ferro rods indoors are a bad idea for a lot of reasons.

[00:06:36] We had to pivot this whole thing on a dime. So we found Gillian told me that there's actually a, a meeting room available at the state park. Capacity is maxed out at 50. Okay. There were some pluses and minuses to that. Um, it being indoors, we totally lost the ability to like do fire started. We lost the ability to, we didn't have a segregated area to do some of the more hands on, um, medical stuff that. Sure.

[00:07:06] My sister who was teaching the, the, uh, the medical class was going to do like outside of that class where it was going to be more hands on with the attendees. Uh, we, we just, it, it, it required a lot of reconfiguring. Sure. But there were some pluses. We were, we were indoors. We had much more control over the noise level because the original place was a pavilion right next to a kid's playground.

[00:07:30] So we could have wound up in a situation where we can, we were competing with the, you know, the area around us for noise that wound up not being a problem. Obviously. Um, we had the meeting room included a kitchen included. I mean, it included, uh, bathrooms. It had a really, really large flat screen TV up on the wall that accepted a USB drive.

[00:07:55] So my wife was, my wife was able to, instead of us just like announcing the classes, she was able to put together a slideshow that had the class schedule that had all that information up, up there. Um, this wound up turning into a much different event than the one I'd originally conceived in my head. But I think it worked out better. Um, the only downside is it's a raised building. So you either walk up two flights of stairs or you have to take the accessibility lift. That was unfortunately out of order. Okay.

[00:08:24] We did have, we did have one attendee that was, you know, I wouldn't say upset. She, she regretted she wouldn't be able to attend because she's wheelchair bound. Okay. I mean, I would have meet me and my brother-in-law would have grabbed, grabbed her behind by the wheels and hauled her up two flight stairs. So that's what it took. If she would have showed up, but without the wheelchair lift, she was kind of out. Her husband did come and he had a great time from everything. I could tell he was asking questions. He had a lot to contribute.

[00:08:54] Um, I cannot say enough good things about how this event came off. It was a stress sandwich, but we learned so much in the, just in the course of just doing it. Things we could not have learned any other way. We learned where we're going to have quite an extensive discussion amongst the board about some classes we're going to lengthen. One class we're going to totally can, and we're going to roll a little bit of that content into another one.

[00:09:23] Like we're going to do a major overhaul of the whole thing. We're going to expand the slideshows for more visuals. It's, it was a learning experience. It was a great experience. And in the course of that, I think we maxed out at like 20 attendees, which for our first event, even if you discount the people that were there, that were like family members that came out to support us. We still had a very large turnout for our first event. I frankly was shocked. Well, that's fantastic.

[00:09:49] I mean, you know, there are some things, like you said, you can only learn by doing things, by trying and having them not go perfectly. So getting that first event in the books so that you can start to do your after action analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what you want to change to make it smoother next time. That's, that's a big step in the right direction. I mean, you mentioned you wanted to cancel one of the classes and that you did have a medical one. What were the other classes you did?

[00:10:16] So we did, I'm probably going to forget something, but I'm trying my best not to. So we did a, we did, we did, I did a class starting off, which was called practical preparedness. And it was kind of like that, you know, anything like this, you know, that part of your audience is always already going to be very deep into the preparedness community. And I wanted to make sure that there was enough information in there that even the person that's in this lifestyle would find something of value there. But the whole point of this class is a base layer.

[00:10:45] It is, you are, if you are brand new, I have a lot of concepts to get into your head so that you can correctly orient yourself into the rest of this class. Yeah. Your basic one-on-one. Yeah. Well, you, you could learn first aid and it not be for preparedness. Well, you could not consider yourself part of the preparedness community, which was actually like the very first thing I talked about. I was very upfront about the fact that like, in order to be in the quote unquote preparedness community or lifestyle, there's only two requirements. The first is that you have to recognize that there are threats that apply to you and your family.

[00:11:15] And if you don't think there are, I don't know why you're here. There's nothing else I can teach you. You think that the world's never going to throw you a curve ball. And the other thing is you have to acknowledge that you can do something about them. Because if you think there's threats, but you don't feel like you can influence them, then you're just a worry ward. But when you have those two things put together, you start looking at the world in terms of these things are coming my direction. I can do things so that they don't screw me over when they get here.

[00:11:41] Now we have a baseline that I can start to teach you different things, different concepts, different skills. And you can apply them to this idea that there are threats. I mitigate threats. I move on with my life. So practical preparedness was one. After that, we went into medical one-on-one. My sister taught that. She's been a paramedic. Jesus Christ. I mean, she will go back to when she was an EMT. I want to say she got her EMT certification when she was like 17. Damn.

[00:12:10] Young lady has been doing this a very, very, very long time. I have the right to call her young lady because I am 10 years older than her, which she reminds me of frequently. And she's been an EMT and a paramedic for a very long time. She currently works on the management side of things. She is an absolute, like every time that her company gets called for a jump team to go into a natural disaster, she's the first one to put her hand up to go. She's a self-admitted trauma junkie.

[00:12:41] And she genuinely loves her job. Perfect person. That's the person I want jumping out of the ambulance is the person that wants to be there and nowhere else. Yeah. Because they're probably going to be more dedicated to doing the job well. Yeah. And a lot of what she was teaching was, you know, like first thing she did was she took a store bought Amazon. Actually, no. The first thing she did was she took her personal medical bag, which is stuff she's put together.

[00:13:10] She unpacked it, talked about everything that was in it, why it was in there, why it was packaged the way it was, what her thought process was. She took one she bought off of Amazon, unpacked it, said what she thought went well, what she thought was crappy. She was not happy about the tourniquet that was included. Shock and awe. Yeah. Cheap tourniquets are bad tourniquets. Yeah.

[00:13:29] And then she went into a whole discussion about like how to treat very common injuries, like how to split if you sprain a wrist or break an arm or if you twist an ankle. Or she did eventually she had a one of the little medical dummies that simulate loss. Yeah. And she had people that were volunteering, like coming up saying, hey, put this tourniquet on, crank down on it until this. See how hard it's coming out of this tube.

[00:13:58] So you can see how hard you have to crank on it. It was a phenomenal class. It was one of those things that we determined very early on would benefit from like kind of an extra session either, you know, in the afternoon or another time where she could have more time to go over that kind of stuff and expand it. But it was a good base layer of this is what you this. If you already know first date, this is where you need to start looking at your skills and taking things.

[00:14:25] Man, I'd love to to talk to her about that, about her medical bag and the list of what she has in there and how she has it packed. Because, man, I will admit my bags, they are not packed probably the most efficiently they could be. I'm not a medical expert. Not many of us are. Right.

[00:14:46] I mean, as I am one to admit, and I admit to her frequently, like, you know, I have probably more trauma training than the average person does. Sure. But most of that training is centered around very specific things like gunshots and mortar attacks. And it's all 20 years old at this point. So, like, her knowledge is constantly being refreshed because she has to keep on the cutting edge of that skill set.

[00:15:14] But it's what she does for a living. Right. You know, and that should be expected. I mean, she's dedicating however many hours of her day to it, plus continual training on the side that I'm sure she's doing above and beyond if she's that dedicated to the craft. And man, you know, if she'd be willing to do a write up on that bag, I think that'd be really valuable. I think I could probably smooth talk her into something. Nice.

[00:15:43] Hell, maybe I would get her to come on the show sometime. She actually, she came on this show probably, like, I think the first year. Okay. That I was running way, way back in the day, and I haven't had her back on since. I think that'd be really valuable. Like, even just to, like, compare and contrast what she did different then to now, the new things she's learned in that that we can apply.

[00:16:06] I mean, you know, me growing up, at least when I started getting into first aid more seriously, the first serious first aid class I took was a Boy Scout Wilderness first aid class. Tourniquets? It's nowhere to be seen. Purpose built tourniquets. Give me a rough idea what year that was. So, that would have been 2003.

[00:16:30] Which makes perfect sense, because that was one of the things we talked about in class, because it turned out there was another Army vet that was in there. He was a bit older than I was. I think he had enlisted in the 80s, right about the time I was born, actually. Sure. And he had made the comment that, like, the combat action tourniquet that Becca was really kind of, like, leaning on everybody saying, this is the standard. This is what most of y'all should consider. He had mentioned that that wasn't even a thing when he was enlisted.

[00:16:59] And I'm like, well, I was enlisted from 2006. And those things were still not in common use in the field, even in 06. Like, they were getting out into the field, but, like, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pushed so many aspects of trauma response so far so fast. They did. And we as a million students get to benefit from that, unfortunately. Oh, absolutely. Well, I know. I think it is fortunate.

[00:17:23] I mean, if these terrible things are happening, let us try to make something good out of it to hopefully save more people in the future. Now, Jeff, gauze and electrical tape, I'm not advocating this. I'm not signing off on this idea. But I have used paper towels and electrical tape as a bandage in the past. It can be made to work.

[00:17:52] It's just not the preferred method. It's not best practices. It's also not sterile. So depending on the wound, probably not great. Better than nothing? Absolutely. Will it do in a non-permissive environment? Sure. Well, considering that the time I had to employ it, my hands were covered in brake dust and brake fluid. It wasn't sterile. Definitely a sterile environment right there. Yeah. I'm sure.

[00:18:20] So after that, I think my wife was up next. She did a harvesting from nature class, which we readily recognized has got to be an hour long class in the future. Like she talked about medicinal herbs and plants that are native to Southeast Louisiana, which was one thing I kind of lean on her about. I'm like, I really want this to be specific to this region.

[00:18:44] Because like we noticed when we were, when the last time we did prepper camp, they have a lot of classes like that around mushrooms and herbs and everything else. But it's native to that area. It's native to North Carolina, South Carolina, the Appalachians. Does you know good where you are? And to be fair, like this was always conceived to be a local event. So it's got to be stuff that's pertinent to these people down here. And if we ever do one of these in another region, we'll tweak things for that region.

[00:19:11] Yeah, find a local plant and animal expert or something like that. Yeah. But Gillian did a half an hour talk about that. And if I'd have given her another half hour, she could have talked for another half hour about alternative protein sources, different insects, different things that are available to eat. But like there was, she has so much knowledge in that realm. I could give her an hour. She'll talk for an hour. I gave her a half hour because initially she told me she thought that's about what she had.

[00:19:41] And then like as we got closer and her notes turned up, she's like, I could almost do an hour. And I'm like, if you want an hour, I'll pinch a half hour from somewhere else. And she said, no, no, no, I'll take the half hour. Well, that needs to be an hour long class. That makes sense. I mean, while that wild edibles is such an expansive field, even if you're just narrowing it down to your parish or your state. I mean, you're talking hundreds of plants, probably thousands of species of bugs and animals. Yeah.

[00:20:09] And I think Gillian only covered like maybe her favorite dozen. Okay. But she was, you know, probably the most prevalent dozen is always a good way to go to the most recognizable dozen. Hey, Joe, I saw you pop in. Okay. So after that, we broke for lunch. Lunch was fun, honestly.

[00:20:32] I wound up manning the grill while Gillian and Ross, who's my brother-in-law, he taught our youth sports class. That was right after lunch. The two of them kind of worked the room, talked to everybody. My sister had to go run home to let the dog out to go pee. And some people decided, like, you know, go ahead and leave for lunch and then come back. Some people just stayed and hung out. It was a really cool vibe to have everybody just talk.

[00:21:00] I have decided, though, in the future, if I have a volunteer, I'm going to get them to man the freaking grill to cook for, like, you know, the volunteers and those that are presenting so that I have time to actually go and talk to people. I did want to have a good hour-long conversation with one of our patrons, Scott Hernandez, who is one of our local ham and GMRS guys.

[00:21:23] So he and I were talking for a good long while about this repeater that's not far from us and some things that might be pertinent in the future regarding it. But, you know, we just talked and visited while I was running burgers over the grill. After lunch, Ross taught the youth sports class, which is another one that probably needs to be an hour. And I going into that, I had no idea what Ross was going to present. I didn't know how he was going to present it.

[00:21:47] But it wound up being a almost an open forum discussion, which I told I told Gillian, we have to we have to market that differently. We can't call that a class. It needs to be called use of force forum or use of force. Whatever. Yeah, because what what Ross was really doing was because, you know, like, again, and other states might be similar to this.

[00:22:10] Forgive me if they're not, but like Louisiana's self-defense standards are really based on what would a reasonable person do. So there's a lot, a lot. There are instances in these self-defense scenarios where, like, the law is crystal clear. You are cleared weapons hot. You burn the guy down. Discussion over. Right.

[00:22:31] But then when you get when you get when you back off from that point just a little bit, you get into these weird gray areas where it's like, what would a what would a jury of your peers determine? Were your actions reasonable or not? And that's that's where Ross was really reaching out to the community, to the attendees saying, what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts? What are your questions? What scenarios have you been in? What scenarios have you thought about? And we're just saying, well, what about this scenario?

[00:22:59] And he was like walking not he wasn't giving super clear cut yes or no answers because he was very upfront about the fact that I'm not a lawyer. You should go talk to a lawyer. You should probably retain. Oh, yes. But absolutely. But he was talking them through. This is how that's going to be perceived. You know, like, here's maybe how you're not perceiving this the way it is. Like, you see a person out on the edge of your property. You know, you don't have the right to go over there and punch him in the nose. I don't have the right to take a shot at him.

[00:23:27] But maybe maybe what you want to do is just observe for a minute. Maybe you want to, like, get on your porch so he can see you and maybe he'll he'll buzz off. Maybe you call a local sheriff and say, hey, there's a dude standing out here on the edge of my property. He's just weird me out. Can you come over and take, you know, have a word with him? Yeah. Why not use all the resources that are available? Hell, you pay for the sheriff. You might as well have him come out and do something. Yeah. But that was a lot of what Ross did. And I it it was not how I thought that class was going to go.

[00:23:56] But now, again, having done it and seen how it works, I now have a really good idea of how to market that next time. And we need it. We need to give him an hour because even if it doesn't last for an hour, we'll find that time to do something else. But exactly. Yeah. Like, I mean, I find if you have a room full of people and they're discussing something, it tends to take longer than shorter. You know, even if it's just a back and forth question and answer kind of deal, you can easily eat up an hour, hour and a half. Yeah.

[00:24:25] And the thing of it was, was that that class was going so well, we just let him we just kind of like kept kept letting me. And he wound up burning about 15 minutes into the next time block, which was supposed to be my financial prepping or preparedness class. Yes. That's the one that we just because my wife told me, she said, you've got 15 minutes max or we're going to blow the schedule. So I like very quickly tried to abridge it.

[00:24:49] And it occurred to me as I'm given that class, like I don't think that merits its own time block. I think I could take the guts of that and shove it into practical preparedness and make it be like a five minute chat instead of a 25 minute chat. And I think it would work better there and then would free up that half hour to do something else because like, you know, I feel like with a financial preparedness thing, like you're going to you're going to get into two situations.

[00:25:17] Either a it should be a five minute talk or B you're going to get it so deep into the weeds to really start finding value for the attendees. Not always an eight hour class, it's an eight hour snooze fest. I mean, how long can somebody talk to you about budgeting and money before your eyes start to cross? I mean, it depends on where you're at in life. I mean, like when I was younger, I could have used it, but I wouldn't have listened anyway because, you know, younger and dumb. That's my point.

[00:25:46] And if I slipped out of things, you're multiple hours in meetings with my financial advisor this year. Well, last year. Yeah. And raggle fraggle to your point that this is prepper camp light. Not quite. So I'll put a pin in that. And Nick, don't let me forget to talk about that before I hand this back over to you. So you're after that.

[00:26:11] It was my wife did a half hour class about prepping with kids, which she and I both agree. Like that's a class that's going to be a little polarizing because like if you have small children in your life, a lot of things we talk about were super on point, super important, really, really good. But if you don't, then it's kind of it kind of just goes over the top of your head. So Gilly and I agree that probably need to stay in and just accept the fact that part of our audience is going to kind of like start playing with their phone. You know? Well, sure.

[00:26:39] Yeah, because they don't have children or they don't have family members with children. I mean, that's pretty rare, but it does apply to some people. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's just the way it is. And then I rounded out the afternoon with a comms class, which. I've talked about comms on this show before. I actually get together with the guys from comms syndicate every now and then. I mean, everybody has kind of heard all my spiels on that. It was, I thought, useful.

[00:27:09] What I should have anticipated was the fact that of the people who were still in attendance at that time, I had. Three ham operators. Two of which two of which have active GMRS licenses as well. Nice.

[00:27:29] So I'm going to have to take another look at that class and think to myself, like, OK, if I'm in a room where there are no ham GMRS guys, I can't let this get too deep in the weeds and go over people's heads. Right. On the flip side of things, if I have a room full of freaking ham and GMRS guys, I need to have enough meat here to keep them engaged. Because if if if this is just basic one on one, here's a radio.

[00:27:59] This is the end of points up in the air. I'm going to lose all those guys. But on the flip side of things, if I start getting into, like, really complicated stuff in a room full of newbies, it's just you can't do antenna theory with somebody that doesn't have a ham license. Yeah, it's just not going to be appropriate. And truth be told, like, I don't know if this is the forum to really get into something like antenna theory.

[00:28:20] I may maybe there that that is a discussion I will probably have, like with you offline, with the patrons who who are often my sounding board for things. I will probably have this conversation with Scott because Scott's my Scott is one of my nearest, you know, like radio nerds. I'll probably talk to my dad about it because he's been playing with radio since before I was born. I mean, he has a still has an active ham extra class license, if that tells you. Oh, geez.

[00:28:48] And a boy talking to space and a four digit call sign. Yes, that's around a minute. That's usually the one that cocks people's eyebrows when six digit. Yeah. Well, he's been doing this longer. They've been alive. He knows more about radios than most people I know. He's I mean, my I give my dad his due. I can't I can't talk him up too much because, you know, he'll start to hold it over me.

[00:29:15] But my dad knows a crap ton about radios as he should. He's been around the block a few times. I mean, I think if you do what you remember, we did an episode on radios a little while ago. We talked a little bit about comm security, how to use radios, not necessarily what radios to use or what equipment to use. You could keep it to that level. And it's generally applicable to the majority of people. I mean, guy walks in with a ham extra class license. He knows how to use radios.

[00:29:42] He probably understands comm security, at least at a thousand foot view. Yeah. And that was actually a lot of what I really hammered on. Like, oh, I talked through the different radio services very, very quickly. I very quickly told the class, like, you know, I think ham has some merit, but ham only ham is only as useful as can you get your entire group to buy into it? Because I told him, like, the whole reason I have a GMRS license is because my wife and my daughter do not and will probably never get ham licenses.

[00:30:12] So if I can't talk to them in it, if I can't talk to them on it, it's not that it's useless, but it's less useful to GMRS. Where I can get one license, my whole family's covered. We're golden now. So, you know, it's like we talk about anything with gear. Mission drives the gear. Yeah. But the other thing was we probably spent a good half hour, at least maybe even more talking about comm security and signals intelligence. And like I was telling the class, I'm like, this is not a radio discussion.

[00:30:41] This is a communications discussion. This applies equally to social media. This applies to typing stuff into your cell phone because there are three letter agencies that can read every single thing you type into one of these little murder screens. Like, I was emphatic about the fact that discussions about comm security and signals intelligence apply to every bit of communications infrastructure around you. Mm-hmm.

[00:31:06] So if you don't want to be given information out for free to people who might misuse it against you, regardless of where that information goes, you should apply comm security principles to it. And in the inverse, when you're looking for free information, you apply signals intelligence concepts to it, which, by the way, is every single thing people that don't understand comm security screw up. Mm-hmm. Like that's- Absolutely. That's- I think that may have been how I explained it. I'm like, this is comm security. This is signals intelligence.

[00:31:36] They yin-yang together because if a person's comm security is perfect, you have no signals intelligence. Yeah. And if their comm security sucks, you have all the signals intelligence in the world, like the two feed, the two wrap around each other. Yeah, they really do. I mean, yeah. Couldn't say it better. Yeah. But that was the long and short of it. Now, back to Raggle Fraggle's comment about how this is Prepper Camp Lite.

[00:32:00] So, it is probably important at this moment to like tell you, to remind, well, remind some people and tell others. Like what I had originally, first of all, like I've had this idea of doing local classes. Like this has been cooking back in my brain box for a couple years now. Probably more than a couple years.

[00:32:18] This was something that I always wanted to do specifically in the local area because I suspected, but I couldn't put hands on them, that there was a preparedness community in southeast Louisiana. I never thought it was as well entrenched as probably some more rural areas. But I know that in the New Orleans metro area, there's got to be people down here that think the way I do. I cannot be the only one.

[00:32:48] You can't live through that many hurricanes without having at least a basic knowledge of disaster preparedness. You would hope so. But what I really wanted to do was to act as a focal point for those people and also to try to bring in people that weren't in this mindset yet and like get them to start thinking about and buying into it. Like I don't care if their level of preparedness is a flat of water and, you know, like a couple of things of freeze-dried food.

[00:33:15] I don't care if their idea of preparedness is a six-month food supply. You do you, Boobaloo, but for Christ's sakes, do something so that you're not like the knucklehead who called the local radio station two days after Hurricane Ida and wanted to know when the grocery stores were going to be open because he was hungry. That is a true story, not an exaggeration. I heard the phone call on the radio and I looked at Gillian and my jaw dropped.

[00:33:42] I couldn't make my brain, you know, like my brain would not process that. I couldn't figure it out. That is willful incompetence. No, it's willful. There's got to be a word more incompetent than incompetence. I don't know, man. That is deliberately choosing to put yourself at risk. Yeah.

[00:34:05] It's not like where we're at where it's like, oh, we get a bad blizzard maybe every couple five years, sometimes 10 years will go by and we don't have one. Now, you guys get hurricanes or tropical storms every single year I've known you. I mean, you could go back and look through National Hurricane Center. I'd be shocked if there was a single year since they've been collecting data that the Louisiana coastline didn't get hit by something. Exactly.

[00:34:32] At that point, you are actively choosing to put yourself at more risk. Yeah. By not doing anything. Yeah. But like I said, like to me, that is the mission statement of Cypress Survivalist. It is, first of all, to bring people into the fold that are not currently there.

[00:34:52] And it is also the intention, like I'm not being shy about it, of telling these people who come out to these events, like, listen, if you would like, I would like to have their names and phone numbers and have some continued discussions about where do you live? What are your skill sets? What kind of equipment could you bring to bear?

[00:35:12] Like, if somebody ends up in the situation I was in after Ida when I got two trees sitting on the house and I can call four guys with chainsaws to help me out of the problem, that would be freaking cool. If I can be one of those guys with the chainsaw, that would be freaking cool. If somebody has a situation where like, hey, we lost all of our food because the power was out for so many days, we didn't have backup power. That's a problem I could probably help fix because I got enough five gallon buckets of beans, rice and extra stuff.

[00:35:42] I can either cook for you or I can just bring you a bucket and be like, hey, do you have a do you have a method of like, you know, do you have a pot and a way to boil water here? This is going to keep you from starving until things get sorted out. Like, yeah, it might not be the best food, but it's food. Yeah. So like that is that is the point of Cypress Survivalist. It is it is to to bind this local preparedness community together because local connections.

[00:36:10] Yeah, because I talked to one gentleman who I won't out on the show, but like he was very upfront about the fact that he's in a mag. He's got seven families. They all kind of look out for each other. They're they're looking to either roll into a larger mag or add to their numbers. They're they're in the same boat. I am. They're looking. They said, OK, this is that the seven of us where we have each other's backs, but we need a little bit bigger community. We need a community with different skill sets, more skill sets. They're looking for the same thing I am.

[00:36:38] And he approached me and was like, I would like to keep in touch. This this sounds like something I meant we'd be interested in getting affiliated with. We've had people reach out to us about who are curious about the organization itself and wanting to volunteer. Nice.

[00:36:52] I have an action item to discuss with the rest of the board of are there local are there local people like in the parish in the city who we could interface with if there's a natural disaster and they need extra hands, whether that's handing out meals or whether that's doing storm cleanup or whatever else. Because my my perspective is the whole point of Cypress survival is is to bulk up and to bind together the local preparedness community.

[00:37:22] If that winds up being 10 families. Cool. If that winds up being 100 or a whole lot cooler. If this thing winds up being the thing that makes more people in this area come into this lifestyle and start to realize that this is not living in a bunker, eating MREs and doing stupid stuff. Like if this is the thing that makes this area truly build a preparedness community that is open and that is acknowledged, then it will have accomplished what I set out to do.

[00:37:50] So I guess what I'm saying is like to me, the whole teaching the classes and everything, the annual event, which it's probably going to be annual from now on. That's like the gateway drug. That's that's how do I reach out in a local community? I get y'all to come in. I can give y'all a base layer. I can teach y'all the basics of all these different disciplines. And then that be what brings you into the fold to be like, hey, I want to keep in touch.

[00:38:15] So when we do those further quarterly, probably quarterly events, we have a little bit of an opportunity to, you know, to sit down, to talk, to visit and also to do more advanced training. And I that's my goal. That's that's where I envision this going. We have an absolute great goal. Crap time. I have work to do to make any of that a reality.

[00:38:39] But like just based on based on how well this first event went, I I see this on an upward trajectory. I didn't think this would work as well as it did. I didn't think we would have anybody show up, to be honest. So I think the longer you do it, the more you're going to be shocked how many people you find coming out of the woodwork. Yeah.

[00:39:03] And the truth of the matter is, I'm like, you know, I would be the first to admit that there are people in this community who would probably even look at like some of the things I've done in the name of preparedness and think that might be a little over the top. That's kind of turn the dollar to 11. And like, I'm OK with that. But my point of view is it's like I told it's like I told the group. And I said this when we did our introductions because we all introduced ourselves. Mm hmm.

[00:39:31] I've come to realize that my preparedness journey has been an attempt, a continuing attempt to reproduce the capabilities and the systems I had access to when I was enlisted. You know, I I lived in two austere environments while I was enlisted, one being Iraq, the other one being Katrina. And I looked at the things I had around me. I had pouts of MREs because some supply nerd was like, y'all need a pout of MREs. You have stuff to eat.

[00:40:01] We had a pout of water because some supply nerd said, y'all need water to drink. We had our job, which was fixing helicopters. And we had all the spare parts, all the stuff, all of this and the other. We had infantry guys standing watch because they were doing their job. I look around, I think back to those days and I look at all this, all the things that were in play. And now I'm thinking to myself, OK, how do I reproduce those things as a civilian?

[00:40:31] Sometimes that was a non-infinite budget. Sometimes, sometimes the answer is crippling, crippling purchases of things like horrible mounds of credit card. No, I don't do that. I do not have any credit card debt. But let's just say that, you know, the year that I bought Andrew's night vision from him, my savings account would have filed assault charges against me if it could have. That's all right. But, you know, but sometimes that is the answer.

[00:41:01] It's you got to have you got to buy the gear. The gear costs a crap ton of money. It is what it is. Sometimes the answer is I don't have Johnny B. Medic to go to. So I need to learn how to I need to learn how to deal with deal with wound care and deal with more of those problems. Myself, if that next level care isn't available, I need or at the very least to to have you last long enough to get to next level. Yes.

[00:41:26] But that that's that's kind of where I've come to realize, like my preparedness journey has been aimed at. But it's aimed at I had all these I needed all these things around me in an austere environment. And I need those things reproduced to whatever degree I can in whatever degree to whatever degree is helpful. I need to have those things available to me again as a civilian. And that kind of dovetails into like the larger.

[00:41:57] I mean, there there is a not small segment of the community that believes that, like in the spirit of the Militia Act, in the spirit of the earliest days of this nation as a country, like every family has to have the ability to take care of themselves, to act in the common sense, do all those things. And that dovetails really cleanly into a lot of things I'm looking at. Like if we're going to it's like I told somebody during COVID.

[00:42:23] What's a six month supply of food and water is, is the ability to tell the world around you F off. Because you can't come in here and push me out of my house. Bad things will happen to you. You can't starve me out because I can sit here for six months flipping you the bird eating beans and rice and you can't do squat about it. You can't drown me. You can't take my water because I got all that taken care of. But like having preps in place is the ability to tell the world around you buzz off. I'm going to do what I want.

[00:42:52] I'm going to do what I think is right. And you can't stop me. You don't have a lever you can pull that makes me come off of my position. And the absence of those things means you are at the whim of society around you when they attempt to impose their will upon you, so to say. Oh, absolutely. You absolutely are. So that's, that was, that was Cypress survivalist and the get ready event.

[00:43:21] I'm not going to lie Sunday. I didn't even want to put pants on. I just, I was so freaking tough, dude. Sounds like a standard Sunday. I was. So I've told, you know this and I've told people before, like I am an incorrigible introvert talking in front of a crowd like I did last weekend. It's not a fun experience for me. It genuinely just makes me nervous as all hell. It always will.

[00:43:47] I don't think I'll ever get totally comfortable with it. And for that reason, Sunday, I didn't want to speak to anybody that did not have my last name. And even most people that have my last name, I didn't want to speak to them either. I just wanted to be, I wanted peace and quiet. I stayed at home. I did the taxes because it had to be done that day. That was like my one homage to adulting was that I had to get the taxes done.

[00:44:14] And so little known fact, but most of y'all who don't, who are not self-employed, y'all have till some time in April to do your taxes. But self-employed taxes had to be done by this Friday or Saturday, I think. Yep. The 15th. So yeah, by Saturday. So I had to be an adult and put pants on. I didn't have to put the pants on, but I went ahead and did it because it feels weird to walk around in my pajamas the whole day.

[00:44:39] But yeah, I didn't, I was exhausted in the best way possible. And then by Sunday afternoon, Monday afternoon, I was right back to telling my wife, like, we need to do this. We need to do this. We need to do this. Like I have a, I have a list of stuff in my phone that Gillian just turned into, just turned into a, an agenda for our next board meeting.

[00:45:07] Cause we have, we have so much, fortunately I'm going to propose and I bet everybody will buy into it that we do this event annually. Which means. Yeah. We have 11 months till the next one, but there's just, there's so much, God, there's so much to do. There's so much. Oh, absolutely. And, and, and yes, guy that comments, um, calling bullshit on the $200 SKS is though you can't get those.

[00:45:36] I was trying to think of a polite way to say, I would drag a very sensitive part of my body over broken glass for $200 SKS. Yeah. Like those are hard. I'm trying to keep the show family friendly, but 200 bucks. I remember buying crates of Moses for 79 bucks a piece for the Moses, 10 of them in a crate. I'm just saying like 200 bucks for a good Chinese or Russian SKS. Yeah. Tell me when and where.

[00:46:06] And if I have to wear a clown suit or lingerie, I'll be there in a couple hours with cash. It'd be a deal at this point. Yeah. Estate sale. Well, well, that does me no good. I don't know any cool guys that actually, I was about to say they were selling their guns for a good price. I mean, that's how I wound up with most of my, uh, most of my reloading components was unfortunately. Just got to watch for funerals.

[00:46:35] I hate to say it, but man, no, seriously, that's how I ended up with all of my reloading stuff too. I mean, a friend of my buddy of mine's passed away and he had a pile of reloading stuff in the back corner and nobody knew what to do with it. And I was the friendly gun guy. I mean, I'm the gun guy at work when, when, uh, when a parent or a grandparent dies and somebody finds boxes of ammo, they show up at work with it and ask me what the hell they do with this. Put it in my truck. That's pretty much the way it comes down to.

[00:47:05] I mean, what do you know? I mean, the ammo of unknown condition and unknown quality. So risk it for the biscuit, I guess. All right. So what excitement did you have last week while I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to play event coordinator? I, all I remember was like, you seem like you were having fun.

[00:47:33] And the next thing you know, you're like, oh, by the way, I had to evacuate. I was like, what for, for what? Why? What? So, uh, for those of you not in the Patreon group, uh, my wife and I and my wife's family all went down to the Great Smoky Mountains to do some hiking and to find some moonshine. Both of which were successful. Congratulations to us all.

[00:47:54] Uh, additionally, there were some fires that sprung up while we were down there, one of which was within three miles of our cabin. Now, uh, for you guys that are not in the area, middle of last week, they had some pretty nasty weather pop up. I believe it was Tuesday night. Yeah, it would have been Tuesday night.

[00:48:19] So Tuesday night, there was a fire that started due to some high winds taking out a power pole and maybe blew up a transformer. Started a fire somewhere in the Pittman Center area. It's near about Scatlinburg, Seaverville, Sevierville, somewhere around there. Um, that fire started at about 943 in the evening.

[00:48:43] Now, by 1115, that fire had reached 200 acres and the sheriff's department was pushing out emergency notifications to, uh, to evacuate some, a small area. So basically what it was, was on the Google maps, there was the road that they were evacuating for the fire and directly upwind from, uh, from that was us. About three miles away was the next road upwind. So we were, yeah, upwind.

[00:49:12] Now, for reference, uh, at the time we were under a red flag advisory, which I don't know if that translates, but in Tennessee, it's an extreme fire risk. Humidity was very low. It was below 15%. I believe that day we had sustained 40 to 50 mile an hour winds with 80 mile per hour gusts. We had, um, drought conditions because it hadn't rained there in a few weeks.

[00:49:39] So there was a lot of dry foliage, especially the leaf litter load from the fall that had not burned or decomposed much. Um, and that wasn't the only fire. There was another fire in C in Sevierville that was smaller that started as a controlled burn that kind of got out of hand. Um, so around 1115 in the evening, we got that notification.

[00:50:08] It woke me and my wife up cause we go to bed relatively early. Uh, my in-laws and my wife's sisters were up watching TV and we're kind of keeping an eye on what was going on, but they really didn't. They weren't really sure what to do. I will. I got woken up by the notification on my phone. I did some searching around, figured out where the fire was, what direction the wind was blowing. The fact that we would be in the direct path of the fire if it continued to grow, which it has.

[00:50:37] Um, and just told my wife, I said, we need to talk to your family. We need to pack up and we need to start getting ready to go because we are, we would be the next evacuation line if they called for it. Now, I don't know about you guys, but, um, when you go on vacation with your in-laws, stuff is scattered all over wherever you're staying. Right. So we had eight people, two dogs, food for a week, all of our clothing and hiking gear.

[00:51:07] Um, the in-laws took it pretty well. You know, they, um, they agreed with me when I said, Hey, we need to leave. We are, we are directly in the path of this fire if it does, you know, get out of hand. Uh, so within about 45 minutes to an hour, we had all three of the cars packed, both the dogs in the cars, all of the food, clothes, everything ready to go. And we started to head for Knoxville.

[00:51:33] Uh, just because Knoxville happened to be sort of out of the direction of the fire, about an hour away. So more than far enough, and they have 24 hour gas stations and rest stops. So we went ahead and moved out to one of those. Thankfully, the rain came in from that storm front that we had that day. And they dampened the fire down enough that they were able to cancel the evacuation orders, but not until like 415 in the morning.

[00:51:59] So from 1115 to 415, we were waiting to find out if we would have had to evacuate the cabin anyway. But this put us well ahead of the game and well ahead of everybody that waited till they got traffic to start grabbing the road closures. And we did have to detour around a couple of road closures due to down, uh, down trees and down power lines.

[00:52:24] Um, unfortunately for us, for getting to Knoxville, we had to go through a couple of back, back roads, small town areas, a lot of debris on the roads, a lot of high winds. Fortunately, I think only two structures were destroyed by this fire so far. It's up to just almost 1100 acres right now. But my concern and they do have it mostly contained. It's like 90% contained right now. So it's probably going to be fine.

[00:52:53] Uh, my concern was a repeat of the 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfire. Phil, I don't know if you heard about that. It might come back to me as you talk about it. So in 2016 in, in the fall, so November, December area, they had similar weather conditions to what we had that week when we were down there last week.

[00:53:17] Um, you know, 15, 15% relative humidity and lower 40 mile an hour sustained wind gusts. Um, multiple small fires that all of a sudden escalated very rapidly. Uh, ended up burning about 17 or 18,000 acres and burned something like 2,400 buildings. Uh, if I recall correctly, the death toll was, I know it was over a dozen, but I don't think it was much more than that.

[00:53:44] Um, so my concern was we had a, we had a multiple fires in our general area too. We had, uh, heavy sustained winds and very heavy gusting winds. So possibility of more fires starting due to more down power lines or the fires escalating very rapidly. You know, I, did we need to leave? Turned out.

[00:54:13] No, our cabin was fine. All the cabins around us were fine. We did end up losing power for most of the week we were down there. So we did get moved to a different cabin, but you know, why it took 45 minutes to an hour of rather rapid packing to get everything in the car. And get ready to go. So had we waited and had we gotten the evacuation notice, we would have probably been leaving things behind. Almost certainly. Whatever it happened to be.

[00:54:43] Right. You know, well, I mean look at Trek story from just a couple of weeks ago where he talked about how when he was on a protective detail in California and that situation turned from moderately concerning to just about an emergency extremely quickly. Yeah. And I mean, you know, and that's an area he had, he had sufficiently scouted was paid to sufficiently scout and plan for.

[00:55:10] Now I had knowing the fire risk that was going on in the area where we were going. I had looked at a few different routes to get out of the area. I did a tertiary evaluation to figure out what was places to the north, to the south and to the west that we could go because to the east is a great Smoky Mountains National Forest. Probably not a great place to be if there's a fire. Number one, there's no place to go there. Like there's no place to stop.

[00:55:37] There's no gas to get until you get completely to the other side of the thing. Um, and that's where the fires are most likely going to be. So we ended up going to Knoxville to 24 hour rest stop. Yeah. I mean, that is the great double-edged sword that comes from a scenario like you're describing is like if you, if you stay to the more populated areas, you have fuel, you have services, you have all those things.

[00:56:05] But you also have a lot of people that you also have to contend with. It's like, you know, if you go through like the small towns and everything, you probably have less traffic, less junk. But then you've got less people on, less, less emergency services on hand if something goes wrong, like trees down blocking the road. It's. We didn't have any trees blocking the route we took. We did have our route limited by road closures due to downpiling. So, and fortunately those were already pinned up on Google maps.

[00:56:36] You know, I do have to say our signals intelligence. I do have to say like, as much as I rightfully refer to these things as doom screens and murder screens and everything, because like I'm convinced that between self smartphones and AI, like we are going to be the death of ourselves as humanity.

[00:56:55] But I do have to admit the ability to, in most places, have available data, pull your phone out of your pocket and have that level of access to information. Frankly, it's intoxicating. Like it makes you think about how did, how did they do these kinds of things before? Like you wouldn't, there wasn't even a smartphone to get a notification on to let you know that they're evacuating the area on the other side of the road.

[00:57:23] Like how would you, when would you find out? How much time would you have to get out by the time you found out? You wouldn't find out unless someone called you personally, you wouldn't find out. Or the sheriff can beat on your door. Right. Sheriff can beat on your door. A fire truck goes by. Within five minutes of the emergency notification, I was able to determine the wind direction and patterns to be expected. The exact location of the fire down to the address where they believe it started.

[00:57:51] I was able to plot a route around that and another fire as well as around any current road closures that were known. And set up more information gathering by tagging into the local sheriff's department Facebook page, Twitter, stuff like that. I mean, I was able to in five minutes gather the amount of data that an army's intelligence officer in World War II would have murdered for. Oh, yes.

[00:58:21] In five minutes. I didn't even get out of bed yet. So, you know, did we need to evacuate? Probably not. Were we ahead of the game if things had gone south? Absolutely. And all it cost me was a mediocre night's sleep in the front seat of my car.

[00:58:42] See, the only thing is I hate to even take that position of it wasn't necessary because, you know, I've told people before, I'm like preparedness minded people are always nutcases when there is nothing going on. And geniuses the minute something goes wrong. And that's, I guess, kind of why I that's why to me, the fact that the fire did get tamped down by mother nature, thankfully, can't be the measure by which you say if your actions were appropriate or not.

[00:59:10] It's more of a what was what was the propensity or the possibility of that action saving you and your family's lives. And the truth, mild inconvenience to save life and property intact. Yeah. I'll take that. I'll take that exchange every time. Yeah. I mean, that's that's the moments in time where you roll the dice and you say, if we do nothing, then something really, really bad could happen.

[00:59:40] And if we do something, then we just have a story to tell later. We spend the night eating gas station food and chilling in the car with the dogs. OK, so that sounds like most of our 20s. Exactly. I mean, it wasn't that out of the ordinary. Yeah. So was the rest of your vacation fun other than that? Oh, it was fantastic. It was fantastic. Wednesday night, we got snow and 30 degrees.

[01:00:08] So we went from mid 60s and fire weather to snow up on the mountains. So Thursday and Friday, we got to hike up to semi frozen waterfalls, which was pretty sweet. We'll hold up. Wait, what's a semi frozen waterfall? It's a waterfall with half of it being ice and half of it being still moving water. Yeah. I think I'm just going to stay down here with the waterfalls. Don't send me freeze.

[01:00:37] I got to say the hike up to Rainbow Falls in mixed ice and semi frozen mud did get a little bit sketchy for a minute there. There's a bridge you have to cross made of stone about 10 inches wide. That was a solid sheet of ice. Probably should have had crampons with us. But, yeah, it was all right.

[01:01:02] Yeah, I'm definitely going to stick to, you know, hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes and all that and not have to deal with. Oh, it was a beautiful hike. It doesn't sound beautiful. You just told me that you went from wildfires to wildfires to semi frozen waterfalls in one vacation. To be fair, the waterfalls were probably semi frozen during the wildfire, if that makes you feel better. Nick, you were like four or five thousand feet above where the fire was. You live in hell.

[01:01:32] No, this was in Tennessee. I live in Tennessee. I still live in Tennessee. I just vacation. Vacation slightly south. It violates some rule. Some law of physics to have a wildfire while things are frozen. That is that that's right. No. I mean, so when we started the day for those those cold hikes, it was like thirty five degrees down in the valley.

[01:01:58] And it was probably fifteen to twenty degrees up at the falls because you are going up a few thousand feet in elevation. The temperature drops fairly rapidly. Yeah, you're not selling me this idea. You don't like cold weather. It's all right, man. If you were if you were up there, you'd say it was. No, no, no. I'll send you pictures. No, no, no. I don't mind cold weather. But what y'all have up there is not cold weather. What I have down here is only halfway up to me.

[01:02:29] I mean, dude, it's no ten inches down here. And that was literally a four day long. Like shut the entire. It was gone in like three days, man. You didn't even really get to play in it. We built snowmen in it and you didn't do donuts in the Walmart parking lot. I couldn't get to the Walmart parking lot. The freaking roads were. It sounds like a personal problem. No, it sounds like never slowed me down.

[01:02:58] No, we'll get you into the winter one of these days. I'll bring you up here. We'll do donuts in the Walmart parking lot. We'll go and grab some apple cider donuts. It'll be great. Okay, apple cider donuts. That might be worth talking about. Apple cider donuts and small batch hard cider. Oh, yeah. All right. I guess we'll go ahead and start wrapping this one up like it. It was it's been a freaking wild. We both had a wild week for totally different reasons.

[01:03:27] I mean, most of my week was extraordinarily relaxing. Yeah, most of mine was most of mine was that that week you were out was a stress sandwich. And then a really cool event. And then right back into work. So, you know, we can Jeff Jack, we can take the motorcycles with ice tires. Yeah, basically you run sheet metal screws from the inside of your tire out.

[01:03:57] They call them ice studs. And then you can drive on ice with your with your dirt bike or your or your motorcycle. Yeah. You know, somebody once mentioned to me like, oh, wow, y'all should have a pair of a set of snow tires for your vehicle. And I was like, I would have to drive 500 miles to find snow tires. Just just buy some like just buy some Cooper AT3s and put them on your truck. I've got all other tires. I've got Cooper AT3s on my truck. Me too. Don't worry. Those are fine.

[01:04:25] Oh, those are good until you get really cold. You're not making me feel better about this situation. A moment snow and ice. You've already got snow tires. It's fine, man. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I would count those as snow tires, but hopefully I'd never get the chance to find out. They're all weather tires. They're just fine. I run those things on my truck year round and I don't have a problem except when I'm trying to have a problem. Except when I'm trying to have a problem.

[01:04:55] Oh, man. If you're not whipping shitties in your pickup now and then, you're not really living. And with that, Matter of Effects podcast going out the door. If you, we'll get the shit show back on the rails next week, maybe, but probably not. Well, there'll be less wildfires this week for me. It's wet here. Yeah. There's supposed to be a pretty gnarly storm blowing through pretty much from me all the

[01:05:25] way up to frickin Atlanta, Georgia. Well, tomorrow day after. Oh, is that why I'm supposed to get 60 mile an hour wind gusts? Yeah. Awesome. You're probably going to be getting that tonight, tomorrow, huh? That's all right. Let me know how. Tomorrow's a Friday. Let me know how it works out for you. I have a crawfish boil to go to on Saturday. So, um. Crawfish boil. Yeah. I'm just hoping that, you know, the weather doesn't get spicy enough to cancel it because

[01:05:54] my wife will cry. Yeah. I mean, rightly so. Yeah. You don't boil crawfish during a, like a little storm like that? Um, they're talking about a risk of tornadoes. Oh, well. I don't know if it's going to be a little storm. Spicy crawfish boil. Yeah. Spicy crawfish boil. Spicy crawfish. Anyway. Matter of fact, this podcast is going out the door. Bye, everybody. Night. Night.