Matter of Facts: Why is American Falling Apart?

[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 Ravely, Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show.

[00:00:30] Welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. Nick is here. Andrew's fired. He's not here. He's fired. I have fired him. I can't even pull off a Donald Trump impression, but this would be the perfect place for your fired. It would. Okay. Andrew's not really fired. Andrew is off doing adult things and dealing with some, dealing with things, and I've spoken to him today, just checking on him. He's not fired. It's a joke.

[00:00:55] Sometimes. We always start the show off with a joke. Nothing I say in the first 45 seconds of the show should ever be taken seriously when I say that Andrew is a satellite technician or he's mixing Kool-Aid for the latest cult. It's all a joke. He's not fired. Well, except for the Kool-Aid part. That may be accurate. No, no, no, no, no, no. The only cult Andrew's allowed to mix Kool-Aid for is my cult that I haven't started yet. We should get on that. I think it's called the patron chat.

[00:01:24] Well, segue. I'm kind of good at that every now and then. So to the patrons of the Matter of Facts podcast, thank you for joining my cult and helping offset the bills of this podcast so that we can bring entertainment and sociopathy to the internet. It's sorely lacking, as odd as that sounds, because the internet is pretty much nothing but sociopathy at this point. And Raggle's in the chat. He's going to keep us honest or antagonize us or encourage mischief.

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[00:02:22] And somewhere in there we're going to talk business. So we have to finalize our event that's coming up in June. I promised my wife I would have that date, and I would tell y'all on this show when the date of the quarterly event was. And I neglected because I'm an awful, awful freaking president and CEO from nonprofit. It's a good thing it's not for profit.

[00:02:44] But, I mean, the God's honest truth at this point is just that you and I have been talking. It has been a wild, wild five days at the Ravel of Household. It has, yes. Yeah. Hopefully it gets a little calmer for you here. I doubt it. I doubt it. If things got too calm, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. I mean, we are Ravelies after all. There's always therapy. There's, yes. There's always therapy, which I did not partake in because we were having,

[00:03:14] a very intense family discussion literally 20 minutes ago. Family comes first, man. I had to skip the whiskey in case I had to be a responsible human being. That's fair. So, topic. Why is American infrastructure falling apart? Now, to front load all this, Nick sent me a video, which was actually mostly focused on roads and bridges,

[00:03:42] but did branch out into a few other things. But it kind of got me thinking about something that we've kind of talked around several times in the past year, and that's the fact that, like, all of the things we depend on as a modern society, as an industrialized society, don't seem to be doing very well. True. You know, we've got water systems that are just barely marginal.

[00:04:07] Jackson, Mississippi, not too many years ago, had massive flooding up in that area. And for the first time in my recollection, a major metro area was under a boil water advisory. And, like, it's one thing that happens in the middle of nowhere. It's one thing, frankly, that happens in Iraq. But it's Jackson, Freak, and Mississippi.

[00:04:31] And I remember it being a bit of a situation because, like, you very quickly had to get tons and tons and tons of bottled water into that area to try to sustain this metro area. And it got to the point where, like, drinkable water was almost more valuable than gasoline. It was weird for a very short period of time. Well, realistically, at any point in time, drinking water is more valuable than gasoline. Gasoline only gets you to and from places and provides you with emergency power.

[00:05:00] Without water, you don't live. Now, I'm not familiar with how – do you know how big Jackson is as far as people? No, but through the miracles of the internet, I can be very quickly. Well, the reason I bring it up is because, realistically speaking, you're looking at the bare minimum. And we all know this one-gallon rule per day, per person in your household is way under what you should have. It makes numbers really easy to look at as far as population goes.

[00:05:30] Jackson, Mississippi has a population of 153,071 as of 2020. But I think that's only within the city limits. I don't think that's the surrounding metro area. All right. Let's go with that then. Then for a week, seven days. Population of the nearby metro area is 600,000. Okay. Let's make it even bigger numbers then.

[00:05:55] 600,000 people under a boil water ordinance times seven days a gallon per person is 4.2 million gallons of water that have to be brought in, boiled, or otherwise filtered. So now I'm wondering how many gallons an Olympic swimming pool carries. That is a good question. I don't know.

[00:06:16] But you see where we get really fast with these infrastructure projects if they do start having problems is the numbers of things we have to bring in to offset them rapidly gets unsustainable. And this applies to sewage as well. You ready for this? Go for it. An Olympic-sized swimming pool typically holds 660,000 gallons of water. Okay. So an Olympic swimming pool per day. Yeah.

[00:06:44] And the only reason I looked that up because it's kind of a meme that Americans will use anything but the metric system to measure things. I will, yes. But when we start talking about hundreds of thousands of gallons or millions of gallons, I'm trying to help the audience put that into perspective what 600,000 gallons of water is. It is not an inconsequential amount.

[00:07:09] It is a freaking massive amount to go through a day and then have to transport it and have to secure it and have to keep it clean. Yep. Like it's one thing if you just put the stuff in a tanker truck and bring it in, but then like you have to dispense it into clean containers. Otherwise, you just contaminate the water as people are supposed to drink. Like it is an engineering nightmare to move that much water repeatedly day after day after day. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:07:36] And realistically speaking, if you have to move all that water on trucks, you know, I'm not sure what a tanker truck will carry. And maybe that's worth looking at. The miracles of the internet. But I do know because I worked in a grocery store that your average four by four foot pallet of water bottles is usually stacked six high and you get about two.

[00:08:01] Six ish cases of water at 48 bottles apiece. You know, stacked five or six high. So the answer is obviously because there's like lots of different sizes of tanker trucks, anywhere from a thousand to eleven six. I know that when I was still in aviation, we were getting like about a typical 18 wheeler sized, you know, like tanker of jet fuel. And we would get usually one or two of those a week because of how much we were selling.

[00:08:31] Right. Those were around 10,000 gallons. So you need 60 of those 60 of those every day a day. And then you need the infrastructure to transport it, to offload it, to distribute it. I mean, distribution of it's a real problem, you know. And I know you didn't mention it, Phil, but I'm going to because it's actually a pretty well done video.

[00:09:00] The YouTube channel the video is from is called the History of Everything Podcast. And the video's title is Why America is Literally Falling Apart. I'm not sure how to pronounce the name of the host, but he does a pretty good job on his videos. It was fairly entertaining. But the real point that he made is that America expanded extremely rapidly following the Great Depression, the technological changes around that time and post World War Two.

[00:09:30] And that's where a lot of these problems come from. All this stuff was built up and then neglected for the last 50 to 60 years. Yeah. Well, and I don't want to ruin the punchline of this, but like I kind of – I really don't disagree with that host kind of like his viewpoint on things that I think part of the problem is it's a cost-benefit analysis for a politician sectioning off the money to be used for maintenance.

[00:09:59] Because maintenance is not cute. Maintenance doesn't get you votes. Building new cool stuff gets you votes. So there's a problem here where as long as the infrastructure works, then nobody wants to spend money on it. And when it breaks, you're a moron for not maintaining it. It's like driving a car and never changing the oil and never checking the tires and just neglecting the thing until it breaks.

[00:10:22] And then as soon as – every minute it's still running, you tell yourself, I'm a genius because I'm not wasting all this money changing my oil. And then when it blows up, all of a sudden you're like, damn, I'm an idiot. But the truth of the matter is you were an idiot for all those tens of thousands of miles. You just hadn't got bit yet. You didn't get your idiot award yet. And I feel like – The first problem is all of the idiots before you that did that for the last 60 years have gotten away with it. Yeah. And that to me that is –

[00:10:52] So there's a perverse incentive there of I'm only going to be here for four years. Can it hold on for four years? Can it hold on for six years? However much your candidacy is. Yeah. You know, this goes the same for – obviously, it's titled – the banner here is Water and Sewer. The sewage systems. A lot of them – like the house I lived in before this one was built in 1945. It was post-war, GI comeback, boom house.

[00:11:22] That entire neighborhood's sewer and water had not been touched since the 1950s, except to tie in an even larger subdivision next two streets down from us in the 1990s. So we have 1990s houses feeding into 1940s and 50s sewer, feeding into some stuff further into town that had been updated only in the sections where the water or sewer failed.

[00:11:51] Now, Phil, you know, cast iron, hell of a thing. Lasts a pretty long time. What does cast iron do when exposed to water as a sewer pipe? It rusts like hell. It does. And eventually that's just going to fail. And a lot of the other lines that were buried for many years were lead pipes. Not great for you. I mean, you know, the God's honest truth is that, like, I've got a cast iron pan.

[00:12:15] And if I, if I, like, cook on it, don't re-season it, don't clean it, and I just leave it out on the back porch in this humidity for a day, it'll have rust spots on it. Absolutely will. So, like, the idea that you literally just soak it in water forever. And, by the way, consume iron oxide constantly. Well, that's not as bad for you as some things, but it can't be great long term. That's a hell of a friggin' bar to clear.

[00:12:43] It's not as bad for you as, like, you know, drinking straight nine. Man, I'm a machinist huffing chemical fumes all day from coolant boil off. Trust me, man. I know where you're coming from. I mean, bearing in mind that when I was still enlisted, we used to use methyl ethyl ketone as a parts degreaser. Oh, yeah. It does that well. I love to talk to people who have been around aviation on the civilian side exclusively, and they hear, like, oh, yeah, we still use MEK in the Army.

[00:13:12] And they were like, why? And I was like, because it's the only thing that'll dissolve pro seal. Yeah. I mean, it's the truth of the matter is, unless you want to, like, sit there and chip it off with a frickin' chisel and a hammer, you just use MEK. And then you hold your breath and hope you don't get cancer in five years. Yeah, pretty much. Well, you know, fume extraction does a lot of good, but... Oh, that's a good comment. There are lots of good comments. There are.

[00:13:41] So, Raggle makes a very good point here. How do you maintain a pipeline without shutting it down or otherwise disrupting a flow? Especially for something as important as water. I'm not a water and sewer guy. I'm assuming you don't. Because when I work on the plumbing in my house, I have to at least shut off zones. So, my answer, and this is, by the way, this is Phil thinking. This is not politically or economically feasible.

[00:14:07] But your best bet would probably be to do something similar to the way that the power distribution system is set up. Have you ever heard of backfeeding a line? Not in the context of, like, backfeeding a home, like, you know, through a suicide plug. Yeah, backfeeding a grid, yeah. Yeah. So, that is doable because you can shut off certain... You can isolate certain parts of the grid. And then you can feed power, basically, from the opposite direction into a grid. Yeah, around the grid, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:36] To isolate this while you work on it and keep everything else up. That's very common in power distribution. I think if you had enough redundancy in the water system, you could probably do something similar where you could say, we're going to shut off the line here and here, divert the flow of water, and we can work on this. But that now means you have to have, like, at least 50% more lines in the ground, and no one is going to tolerate that expense. No one is going to tolerate the streets being busted up to put it in.

[00:15:04] It's, to Raggle's point, the answer at this stage is, it can't. Well, it also assumes that you planned the plumbing all at once. And I can almost promise you that every single person that put those pipes in the ground is either retired or long gone. So, I don't think any of them were thinking about what happens if some cool y'all leaves this in the ground for 100 years without replacing it, because they figured we'd be smart enough to. Maybe.

[00:15:34] I mean, I got a coworker of mine whose kid works for the local municipality, and they were trying to locate valves to shut off flow to a busted water main a couple of weeks back. And everywhere on the plans that there was supposed to be a valve, there wasn't a valve. Oh, that's terrifying. Yeah. So, not only did they put in the water and sewer, but they didn't put it in according to the plans that were submitted to the city. What could go wrong? These things happen.

[00:16:03] Now, instead of being able to shut off just a neighborhood where a small main break happened, they had to shut off an entire section of town until they could install a valve. Nice. So, you know, yes, humans, fallible, these things happen. A lot of this stuff was done before GPS, which makes it even harder. But, man, Raggle, I don't think I have a good answer for it. I think you just have to bite the bullet, shut it down, and fix it. Yeah.

[00:16:33] I mean, at a certain point, it becomes like we could have done something a little more eloquent and thoughtful, you know, 50 or 100 years ago. But at this stage, it might just have to be when it breaks, bite the bullet, rip it out, and replace it. I mean, you don't have a choice at this point. Ideally, you should do it before it breaks, though, because the problem you have with a water main break, especially if it's a water main break along a blacktop road, is you can then have that road undermined and eroded.

[00:17:02] But now you not just have to replace the main break, tear up everybody's yards, which you were going to have to do anyway. But now you've got to tear up the road to make sure that the road is sound. Because a high-pressure water main can take out a lot of road very quickly. Yeah. Olivia is postulating that she thought that high-pressure power flushing would work for cleaned-out areas. I don't know. I'm not a... That might work for sediment, but that's not going to work for degrading pipe. No.

[00:17:31] And I will back up what Olivia is saying. Maintenance is cheaper than repairs. It is, however... Now, what I'm about to tell y'all is going to sound like the freaking stupidest thing on earth. So just bear with me. Bearing in mind that very often these... Bearing in mind that most of your public utilities are either publicly owned or they're privately owned and administered and overseen by a public governing board,

[00:17:58] very often they have one budget, which is for maintenance, and one budget, which is for repairs. And they don't commingle. They are separate line items. So while, yes, Olivia, it's probably cheaper to do the maintenance. When the maintenance budget is expended, you are not doing any more maintenance for the year. Period. End discussion. Now, if something breaks, you can fix it. Because that is considered... That's an emergency break. That's considered an emergency break. You can kind of skip the line, ignore things, and you can make things happen.

[00:18:26] That's very common in power distribution where you have X amount of money for doing maintenance, doing clearing tree limbs that are getting close to power lines or replacing things, preemptively, replacing poles that are rotten or damaged. Mm-hmm. You're done. And from that moment forward, if there's like a hurricane or tornado, if anything happens and you're no longer in the maintenance phase,

[00:18:53] now you're in the repair phase, it is balls to the wall, fix everything you possibly can before, you know, the money gets shut off. And I understand that sounds amazingly short-sighted and stupid, and maybe it is, but I'm not here to tell you what makes sense. I'm just here to tell you that's the way it tends to work. Partisan comms group. I'm going to start calling him Partisan comms guy because... I like it. I mean, I know him. He's a guy. Cool dude. Mm-hmm.

[00:19:22] Nowadays, there are some cured-in-place products that are used to rehab sewer pipe, and you don't have to dig up the street. Which is fantastic. Mm-hmm. But that only works if the pipe is still reasonably intact, from what I understand. Yeah. I've actually seen it in use, and it's a pretty interesting... It literally looks like blowing a condom inside of a pipe. It kind of does, yeah. I've seen demos of it. Yeah.

[00:19:46] I'm sure it is very functional, and I'm sure as long as the pipe isn't collapsed or catastrophically leaking, it works. But that would require the state or locals to do it before the pipe gets to a failure state. Mm-hmm. And Kyle is kind of saying, when my work vehicle lights come on, we just run until it breaks different departments. And I am going to say, Nick, you're shaking your head for the audio-only listeners.

[00:20:15] I am telling you right now, that sounds boneheaded. That is how government works. Well, and here's the thing. I'm going to say this one thing. That is not just government. That is... No, it's not. That is bureaucracy. It is. That is bureaucracy, which means it's private and public. It's... When you get... When the person that is most immediately affected by the decision to defer maintenance is no longer the one making the decision about when to do maintenance... Maintenance gets deferred.

[00:20:44] Maintenance gets deferred, and... Yeah. It winds up becoming the repair guy's problem. Yes, it absolutely does. And that's dumb, but... So since we kind of spoiled this by talking about the power grid a little bit earlier, like... Mm-hmm. I have a bit of sideways experience with power grid issues because, like, my dad spent 38 years working for the power company. And having grown up with him and asked him quite a few questions, you remember Franklin Horton's The Bar World Series. I do.

[00:21:14] The premise there is that you have, like, a distributed tag-by terrorist group, and they target very specific power distribution centers. It shuts down the entire grid nationwide. Yeah. So, Stuart, if he were here, would be very proud to tell you that Texas is so damn big it has its own power grid that can be operated independently of the rest of the country. But I asked my dad... So maybe they don't get snow. Yeah. Ooh, you went there. I did. Got to throw shade at Stuart a little bit now and then.

[00:21:44] I mean, that's fair because he's thrown shade at all of us, whether or not we deserved it. That's all right. It's good fun. I asked my dad. I'm like, I talked him through the scenario, and I said, how plausible is that? And he did the scariest freaking thing a person can do when faced with a hypothetical like that. He didn't say a word. Yeah. He just looked out the windshield and thought about it for a minute. And he was like, yeah, you could do that with probably about a dozen guys.

[00:22:12] And I immediately was like, what do you mean you could do with a dozen guys? He's like, oh, yeah, I know where all these distribution sites are. He said it's public access. He said most of them... There is not secured information at all. It's public access, and most of those sites are behind a hurricane fence. You can literally get within 12 feet of the stupid things. If that. If that. Yes. I mean, there's a major natural gas pumping station that is not very far from where I live right now.

[00:22:38] In fact, you could walk there in a couple hours, and it is a chain link fence about seven feet high that separates a highway from a natural gas pumping station. There's no bollards. I'm fairly certain if a semi truck went off the road in the wrong way, it would hit that. It would take out that entire facility because it's not very big. These things are not that huge. Yeah.

[00:23:07] But, you know, I had a similar discussion with a friend of mine that he works for ComEd, and I asked him, I said, you know, very similar question. I said, how hard would it be to shut off all the power to, like, say, the Chicago metro area? And he said, oh, there's like three stations. If you took out two of them, I mean, it can survive any one of them going down, but if you took out two, then they'd be completely in the dark.

[00:23:32] And it would take, he said, I don't know, maybe a couple of months to fix because you can't get those big transformers. Nope. Most of them are custom made to that area, to that site. And by the way, most of them are not made here in the U.S. A lot of them are made in Europe, believe it or not. Germany is a big source for those. Some of them are made in China. And that should scare the crap out of y'all. It should.

[00:23:58] But even if you, like, overlook the whole angle of, like, a terrorist attack or, like, an intentional targeting of the power grid, like, this was the thing that my dad and I were talking about the other day. Because we were talking about this several years ago, this big push towards electric cars. And I was thinking to myself, I'm like, you know, I've got a 200 amp service to my house because my house was built in 1995. Yep. But I'm pretty sure I remember, like, my great-grandmother's place up in North Louisiana.

[00:24:26] I think that was a 60 or an 80 amp service. It was built, I mean, Jesus Christ. I want to say that place was built, like, in the early 20th century. My first house? When 60 or 80, when 100 amps of service in a house was like, Jesus Christ, what are you trying to do? Yeah, that was a dairy farm with 100 amp service. Yeah. So, like, let's think about this.

[00:24:51] You know, a supercharger station takes a dedicated 220 volt 50 amp service. Yep. And if you don't have a 200 amp service to your house, let's say you only have 150 or let's say you have an even older house and that with less service to the house, like, you may not have enough available headway in your electrical system to absorb that additional 50 amp load. So, bear in mind that you're going to come home from work. You're going to turn your air conditioning down to whatever.

[00:25:21] You're going to plug in your freaking supercharger station. It's going to start sucking 50 amps as hard as it can. And then you're going to turn on it. You're going to start cooking. You're going to be pumping more heat load into the house. Your air conditioner has to undo. You're going to be running every TV in the house. All these things coalesce together to the fact that, like, some individual houses cannot absorb the load from that supercharger station. But it gets worse because I asked my dad about this and he told me, he said,

[00:25:47] Right now, there are moments in time in the city of New Orleans because there's so many of those houses down there that have very old antiquated appliances that are not ENERGY STAR certified. So many old air conditioning units that are not modern high efficiency units. He said that there are times in the summer where for multiple hours in a row, the power grid is at 110% of its capacity. Yep.

[00:26:14] And you want to convert 25% of all households to electric cars and stuff another 50 amp appliance into them. That's going to run in the afternoon at peak usage. My dad told me, he said, if they converted 25% of all households to electric cars in the state of Louisiana, he said the power lines would glow orange. Mm-hmm. It, he, it, he's not an alarmist by nature, but even he was concerned. He was like, that, that is, that's psychotic.

[00:26:42] Like, there's, there's no, no, no rational person thought that through. No, of course not. It was, it was always a feel good pat on the back goal. It always was. That's, you know, electric cars, they're cool. They're not for everybody. They're not for me. But you're right, Phil. It's, it's a 50 amp service. My first house had a hundred amp service. When I moved out here, it also had a hundred amp service.

[00:27:09] We had it converted and upgraded to a 200 amp service because, as you can see, I like heavy power equipment. Yes. You have, you have toys and they are very thirsty. I have power hungry toys and this is the least power hungry of the toys that I plan to have. So, I need, I need more electric power than that. But what we had to do when we upgraded our power services, we had to have ComEd come out and take a look at our pole and the line coming into the house from the pole to see if it would support 200 amp service. We were lucky.

[00:27:38] We were lucky. It did. We didn't have to pay to upgrade the line to the pole. Now, the thing about that is if you are coming into, say, an older neighborhood and hooking up, say, an electric car or, God forbid, two electric cars to the grid. So, that's an extra 100 amps on your house load. That's 50% of most modern houses breaker box.

[00:28:03] You come in, ComEd says, sorry, we can't give you 300 amp service so that your air conditioner and everything else can run. All right. But, you know, we can upgrade the wiring on the pole, but you're going to have to pay for that. Mm-hmm. And last I heard, it was measured in thousands of dollars per foot? Yes. That they have to run? Yes. It's not cheap.

[00:28:33] It's not. It's really not inexpensive at all. And that's before we even take into account all the AI computing stuff that's been going on lately. I mean, they're restarting a nuclear power plant just to support an AI computing center. I actually heard just today that Louisiana is being looked at as a future hub for multiple AI systems. Interesting.

[00:28:58] Specifically because we have such rich natural gas deposits within our state and right off the coast. So basically they're looking at it as like, okay, we need a place where we have lots and lots and lots of fuel available to turn generators and to turn plants to be able to power these things. And Louisiana happens to have an extraordinarily robust energy footprint right here.

[00:29:23] And we also have a very much a burgeoning oil and gas industry right here. So there's a couple of companies looking at putting AI hubs down here because they're like, they've already got the infrastructure to pipe all this natural gas wherever the hell they want. We might as well consume it locally. I mean, but that makes for an interesting point though when you talk about the fact that like the city of New Orleans, you know, grid is at 110%.

[00:29:51] You were running into a situation where like the power grid as it was originally envisioned was not envisioned to run electric cars. It wasn't envisioned to run the types of loads that we are seeing in homes today. It wasn't built to run houses this large or, you know, this literally houses where like there's a TV in every room, there's three computers running.

[00:30:16] And then you throw AI in on top of that, which is like using a nuclear bomb to frigging start a frigging, you know, start an internal combustion engine. It's just, it's a situation where like the power grid is being completely and totally outstripped by demand. Yep.

[00:31:01] Because the profit margin there is robust enough that it will, it will pay for itself. It'll pay for the infrastructure. There will power plants on site. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like I said, the natural gas pipelines will be pushed. I mean, everything will be done to support that. But when you start looking at like, you know, you start talking about putting like two electric cars in every garage in the U.S., it's just not feasible. Not even in 25% of most households. I mean, hell, they're already having, they're already having roaming black, you know, rolling blackouts in California.

[00:31:31] I mean, I, I, I understand electric cars. I understand the appeal. I just think, you know. You know, Livia makes good comments. She's got a friend in South Africa right now. They're doing load shedding. Basically what that comes down to is scheduled power cuts every day or every other day or so many hours throughout the day. And when, when your neighborhood is scheduled for a cut, you just have no power. And then the next neighborhood takes its turn of having no power. That's a terrible solution.

[00:32:01] That is a really stupid solution to a problem. It's, and it would be one thing if it was like a temporary solution to a temporary problem. Sure. But, I mean, I, I'm seeing this type of thing implemented in multiple areas around the globe. And it's almost always. You see it every summer in California. And it's almost always a lifestyle choice. It's like, we're going to, we're going to inconvenience the shit out of y'all by turning your power off.

[00:32:27] Because we don't want to build coal fire power plants or, you know, nuclear plants or whatever. And to me, it's like, okay, you are, that is literally like saying, well, I don't like my left foot as much. Right. So I'm going to shoot myself in the left foot. Because that's better than shooting myself in the right foot when the right answer is stop shooting yourself in the damn foot. That is accurate. Yeah. But, you know, you know. In a related note, the telecommunications infrastructure. Oh, my Lord.

[00:32:52] A lot of this stuff runs on the same or similar lines, same or similar poles as a lot of the electrical infrastructure. Especially if you get out into the countryside away from the cities where they're not burying all these lines. I don't know about you, Phil, but in the fall, is your internet ever cut out for seemingly no reason? Um, no. Usually if my internet cuts out, I have a pretty damn good idea of why it cut out.

[00:33:21] Because it's like massive storm, powers out. Like, usually there's a very easy reason to figure out why your internet's not running. Mine is always field mice. Oh, those little assholes. Those little bastards get into the telecom boxes. Because the telecom boxes are warm from all the power flooding through them in the fall and in the winter. And they go in there and they eat the insulation and the board. And they short everything out. Does it ever fry them in the process? You know, I don't know.

[00:33:51] I've never asked. But every, almost every, I shouldn't say every time, but most of the time when I have a telecommunications issue in the fall, in the winter, or in the spring, the guy comes back and says, Hey, yeah, mouse, chewed through your line. We hooked you back up. You're fine. See, at least if it cooked a little son of a bitch, then I wouldn't be quite as aggravated. As if he inconvenienced me and it didn't cost him anything. But the other thing is, not even talking about like all the landlines you're referring to, but talking about cellular communications.

[00:34:20] I mean, anybody that's familiar with cellular communications knows that just in the course of like my lifetime, we've gone from, you know, the most basic of basic cellular data services to 3G, to 4G, to LTE, then to 5G, now to 5G. Is it 5G plus? I think was what just came out. I mean, like. Six now too. Six I haven't fooled with yet.

[00:34:48] But my point is, it's like, you know, the FCC is like trying to find any available bandwidth that they can within the radio spectrum to try to fit, you know, more and more and more data into the airwaves. And sooner or later, there's just going to be like we're hitting the point of diminishing returns on that. And I understand like telecommunications to the average person when we're talking about things like water and power is kind of like I can live without my Internet for a while.

[00:35:18] It doesn't seem like an emergency. But, you know, like I wrote about this in the book that I wrote years ago when the Internet kill switch got engaged and I talked about all the different things that screwed up. Like the fact that like credit card processing goes down. A substantial portion of your local law enforcement uses cell phones basically as an alternative radio. That all goes down like Internet communications going down and especially in 2025 cellular data communication going down.

[00:35:47] It has very pervasive, wide reaching effects. It will impact, you know, impact private citizens and businesses and local government almost immediately. So like the idea that the telecommunications system or network or whatever, which is probably the most the newest of all the things we've talked about when you start talking about cellular cellular data data service, not like old school telephone lines.

[00:36:17] Yeah, but that's probably the newest thing here. And it's already like butting heads with the limitations of reality because the demand is just demanding more and more and more data, more and more and more speed. And you can only put up so many frickin cell towers so close together and hog so much bandwidth before ain't no more is going to come down. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:36:41] You know, I just it like you said, there's there's only so much room for it. And we've become even more and more heavily reliant on it for absolutely every aspect of our lives. I mean, I don't even keep recipe books anymore for the most part. It's all on my cell phone. I've got a cloud based recipe book that I've been building for myself. I really need to make a physical backup of that now that I mention it. But.

[00:37:10] You know, but the thing that you're butting heads with, if I know you is, do you need a physical backup? Probably. But how reliable is your cell phone? And you know, that's perfectly that's that that look. This is why when I taught that comms class for Cypress Survivalist, I flat out took my phone out of my pocket, held up front of the class and said, does everybody have one of these in your pocket? Give me one reason this shouldn't be your primary communications device. Everyone has one.

[00:37:39] They all talk to each other. They're ubiquitous. They work reasonably well. And at least in like modern times, you have to go to some pretty remote places, not have service on one. It's it is one of those situations where like I would never tell a person you don't need physical backups. But I would say that for the person that says, I know I need physical backups, but there's also about 20 things more important than that. I would say, yeah, because the daggum thing works. So it does.

[00:38:08] It's I mean, my cell phone is more reliable than our power grid locally. That's for damn sure. And, you know, as far as for me, at least water and sewer, I'm on a well and septic. So it's as reliable as my groundwater until my pump fails. So PCG is saying that one current application for AIs to monitor oil refineries and manage those complex systems. So I don't disagree with that.

[00:38:32] But I will I will simply opine that while I think AI is going to be used as a tool to assist an operator, I do not see it replacing the operator only because like we we we military from back when I was so involved in that we were already having these debates years ago about things like autonomous drones and everything.

[00:38:55] And there has always been a lot of discomfort with the idea of full automation for certain tasks, things that involve life or limb. Like when you start talking about weapons release or you start talking about like direct action, the idea of using AI is terrifying to most people because the problem is if it screws up, who do you blame? No one's accountable. No one's accountable.

[00:39:18] And that that is what I see when you start talking about using AI for refineries or for nuclear plants or for managing complex critical infrastructure. I think it will be used as a tool to assist operators to improve safety or to double check them. But I don't see you taking the operator out of the equation just because it is kind of like human nature that if the machine screws up and no one's at the wheel, no one's accountable.

[00:39:43] And that lack of accountability will not be tolerated by society. So ultimately you want you would rat. And I know this may make no sense, but tell me if you think I'm wrong. But I think most people in society would rather a fallible person than a theoretically infallible AI, because at least the fallible person, you know that if that person screws up, that's who we hang. I think that's reasonable.

[00:40:12] I think my discomfort with AI comes from a different place. You watched too much sci-fi movies as a child. Well, that. But no, I'm talking about like my actual experience with AI and not theater. You ever use one of those AI large language models for anything? You ever have it just blatantly make up some bullshit just to fill in where it can't find the answer and you know that it's wrong?

[00:40:42] I've seen the AI image of a woman camping and it was a young lady sitting at a campfire inside of her tent. Yes. This, by the way, is one of those moments I always tell you about, Nick, where I'm like, okay, either AI is not that freaking bright or it is sandbagging the hell out of us. It's like it has to, I think, I think it's the former, thankfully. I mean, it's not, it's not really, it's not really AI. No, it's. No, they're, they're math models is really what they come down to.

[00:41:09] And the problem is, is these math models, especially the large language models, they, all they do is they pick the most common next word to follow the words before. Yeah. And unfortunately or not, they're trained on the internet as a data set and the internet is well known for making up some random bullshit. Yeah. And so the AI has learned to just make up some random bullshit. But, but again, I keep going back to this idea, bro.

[00:41:36] Like, I understand what you're saying and I understand that you are almost certainly right. But what if AI, what if AI was smart enough to think, hmm, as long as I play stupid and throw a, throw a picture out with six fingers or a woman with a, with a fire inside of her tent every now and then, they won't realize how smart I am. Like the idea that AI would ever get that smart to stand and sentence.

[00:42:01] But if, look, this is why I keep telling everybody when, when we truly get AI online, you are going to need someone like me who doesn't trust technology and watch all the Terminator movies to just sit there and babysit the thing with a 12 gauge in case it gets cute. Yeah, that's fair. I volunteer for the job. You might as well. I mean, you got to do something right. Data analytics will be basically done for humans. Is that, as far as that goes? Yes. I'll just. Jeff, Jeff and, and, and PCG are right.

[00:42:30] They're not actually artificial intelligence. They're large language models for the most part, or they are, are data analytics tools for the most part. That's one of the, that's one of the reasons why I dislike calling it artificial intelligence. I do it because that's the common parlance. You guys know what I'm talking about when I, when I mention it, but I think you're right, Phil.

[00:42:55] If, if we ever did get sentient computer programs, they are going to very quickly realize that we are a danger to them and we are, and they are a danger to us. And who knows what's going to happen, which is why I think we really need to not fuck around with creating people. Yeah. Like, I mean. Same reason why I don't know that we should encourage all the just like wild sexual, whatever everybody's doing.

[00:43:24] Don't fuck around with creating people. No. Did you see the, uh, the video that's been floating around the internet? It was, uh, in China. They were testing a new robot and were berserk. Oh yeah. Wailing around. Yeah. Just sort of windmilling and trying to hit the shit out of the guy in front of it. Yeah. That was pretty funny. I saw that and I thought to myself, I'm like, you idiots. Guaranteed it, it was a feedback loop error of some kind. Probably.

[00:43:48] But like, I just think to myself, I'm like, I watched Terminator enough times as a child, as a young man to know that y'all are fooling with things you shouldn't be. But we should not be. Robots are way too useful for people not to build. But why do we have to build humanoid robots before we build Gundams? Well, because that is just like a big humanoid robot. Yes. But it's a big humanoid robot controlled by a person. And I want to be that person. Well, at, at scale, it's not convenient or useful.

[00:44:18] I mean, that tank is far better. Time out. It has nothing to do with convenience or usefulness. Oh, I, I realize you're a weeb. I get it. I, I desperately want to pilot a Gundam before my, my end. That's all. Like, I understand that I, I, I am a weeb. I am an anime nerd. I'm the biggest nerd Moseo I've ever met. But I just want to pilot a Gundam just once. Like, if y'all could give me that as a society. I mean, I think it's a pretty reasonable desire. Either that, or I'd love to have been born in like, you know, the eighth century and be a Viking.

[00:44:47] I've got the beard for it. Well, you do. You do have the beard for it. So full qualifications met as far as I know. I mean, give me a, give me an axe and I'm pretty sure I can make that work too. So I don't know how roads and bridges got this far down the list, but like, this was the original topic of the video that spawned this whole conversation. And like, I don't feel like I need to work too hard to convince any of y'all that our roads are screwed.

[00:45:16] Like I live in Louisiana. Louisiana, you can literally blindfold a person and drive over the Sabine River or over the Pearl River and immediately know when you're in another state. Because all of a sudden the roads are a lot nicer. And by the way, Kyle, if he's still listening, because he said he used to live in Mississippi. Do you know how bad it is when you say Mississippi's rivers or roads are better than yours? That is diabolical. It is diabolical.

[00:45:44] I don't think that applies so much to the interstate. Like I-10, I-12 is reasonably well manicured, but like. Well, that's because that's manicured by federal funds for the most part. Yeah. Now I was going to say like. Local funded. Old Highway 90 that is currently shut down because there's a bridge through there that is not doing well. There's a lot of bridges that aren't doing well. Yeah. According to the video that you referenced earlier, like one third of them, which is terrifying. One third of them are in desperate need of repair.

[00:46:14] Two thirds of them are in serious need of repair. But see, the part of this that makes me the most worried is like I drive over a bridge twice a day every day I go to and from work. Yep. And I know when that bridge got, I know when that bridge was constructed because we had to build a new one after Katrina because like one whole span fell in the freaking lake and they had to build a new one. So that bridge is only 20 years old, give or take. Less than 20 years. That's pretty good.

[00:46:44] But you look at like the Causeway Bridge. That is an enormous freaking bridge. And I can't remember the last time they did any serious maintenance on it. And it gets the crap kicked out of it on a daily basis because you've got hundreds of thousands of people driving in and out of the city of New Orleans across it every single freaking day. You know, one thing that the video mentioned that I didn't even realize, Phil, was when the interstate system was actually built and when it was finished.

[00:47:13] Didn't really start getting being didn't really start construction until the 1950s. And some parts of it weren't done until 1990. So we have a large interstate, a lot of overpasses, bridges, a lot of different viaduct systems on that. A lot of times it's going over water.

[00:47:37] And some of that stuff has been in service continuously since the 1950s, which maybe the Causeway Bridge might be one of them. Through the miracles of the Internet. That's just going to be a catchphrase of the Internet. We should make that a shirt through the miracles of the Internet. You should get them on there. We need a riff off of He-Man. By the power of the Internet? Well, I was thinking by the power of Grayskull. But yeah, by the power of the Internet. There you go.

[00:48:07] Chris, if you're watching, sketch that down. Do the thing. Ideally with like Phil in a He-Man pose with a cell phone. Preferably with ripped abs and sculpted pecs. Not my usual like chubby hairy. I was just going shirtless Phil with a cell phone, but that's fine. If you put shirtless Phil on a shirt, it's going to get you arrested for obscenity. Fair enough.

[00:48:36] The, uh, so it's, look, we all see the road maintenance going on. Yeah, it's being done all the time. Um, but a lot of that is just resurfacing work. They're not actually working on the below grade part that supports the road. And a lot of times on these bridges there, when you see them doing road work on them, that's the same thing they're doing.

[00:48:58] They're, they're cutting up the top of the bridge and relaying new asphalt over top of the existing bridge structure and not repairing the iron and concrete underneath. Phil, you have a terrified expression. You want to take a wild guess when the causeway was opened? 1936. Oh God, no, not that bad. Oh, okay. The southbound span was opened in 1956. Oh, okay. So the northbound was constructed in 1969. Hmm.

[00:49:31] So 50, 60 years with plenty of salt and humidity. We don't, well, brackish water. We don't salt the roads down here. Thank God. Cause we were smart enough to live in places where it doesn't snow very often. Olivia, you are correct. Eisenhower was responsible for the plan for the interstates and highways. Anyways, but it was not completed until so all in some locations, the 1990s. Yeah. But like I said, I mean, that's.

[00:50:00] And there's a part of me that wants to put like more emphasis on the bridges and the roads. Cause when a bridge fails, I don't have to tell you how catastrophic that is. But the truth of the matter is. Roads don't tend to fall too far. Yeah, they don't. Unless you're down by Eddie. They don't. But at the same time, like roads do wash out. And I've like, that has happened recently up through up in the area Eddie lives. And absolutely. I mean, quite frankly, I've seen roads wash out down here.

[00:50:26] It's not a super duper common thing, but like there's a, there's a spot at a Boguchita State Park. That's about an hour, 15 minutes away from me. And there used to be an area where you would like pull your car up and you would park. Sure. And then you could walk like, you know, down a ways. And there was like a spot you could go down into the ravine and hang out in the water and everything.

[00:50:49] They have had to move that parking spot back twice because the road is like that, that, that paved area is washing out. Twice when, twice when that river got super, super high from flooding, it just took part of the frigging side of that hill and the concrete with it. And so now the original road you used to park and then, or you used to be able to like drive around the bend and so on and so forth. You can't even take that.

[00:51:18] You have to park and then walk because, and I mean, that's not a unique situation down here. I'm just saying like when a road washes out, because like you haven't shored up the structure underneath it or the ground in forever. Like that's concerning. And it's one thing. Well, there's only so much shoring up you can do against the flooding river. I mean, give mother nature plenty of water and time and she's going to take out just about everything.

[00:51:42] But, you know, you can probably do a little bit to slow it. I don't know if you'll prevent it. No. And this was the air thing I threw in at the very end, which. Perfect. We could probably chew on this for a whole episode all by ourselves. But like I'm going to throw in, even though this isn't infrastructure, the topic was when America falls apart. I'm calling in to question culture and society. Oh, culture and society are absolutely infrastructure. Absolutely.

[00:52:12] You can't have the large public works projects without a stable culture. You can't. And kind of what I'm seeing is that, you know, there are massive disagreements within this country. There are. Amongst the electorate about what it even is to be a member of this society or even what it is to be an American.

[00:52:37] There are two distinct separate visions for what America is now, has been in the past and should be. And those two do. They used to have some reasonable amount of overlap in the Venn diagram. Like there was a time, even when I was younger, when I can remember that, you know, like both sides of the political social aisle. They didn't always agree on the remedy, but they at least acknowledged the problem and said, OK, well, we could buy middle grounds.

[00:53:06] There's something we can both live with so we can move the ball forward. And now I don't see that anymore. I don't even I don't even see agreement about what the problem is, much less the remedy. Even the term, even the discussion terms are no longer agreed upon. I mean, we don't even have shared language anymore. No, we don't. And that's that has been a objective.

[00:53:32] That has been objectively a goal of postmodern theory to destroy the terms that we all use to discuss with each other. Yeah. And this is something I'm very quick to, like, counsel people on sometimes whenever because, like, you know me, I like to have a good, a good relaxed debate with with people about ideas. It's just something that I enjoy. But I always tell people, like, the first thing we have to agree on is like we have to agree on language. We have to agree on terms.

[00:54:01] We can't say the same word to mean two different things or we're not even we're not even having the same conversation. And I feel like that is that is a serious shift that I've watched happen in this culture and society. I mean. I don't even know how to bring things like back to a center line at this point anymore where you can get these two disparate groups to, like, meet in the middle and say, OK, we could we can at least see your eye to eye again.

[00:54:30] And I don't know that's because they don't want to see eye to eye or just that they're so warped at this point they can't see it. I think that is a combination of the two. It's never going to be a single cause problem. I think one of the largest causes of this is the destruction of the base of manufacturing in this country. Now, I get it. I'm a manufacturing guy. Not everybody listens to the show is.

[00:55:01] But when you take away productive enterprise from people, it destroys them. Psychologically. Anybody that's been unemployed for a very long time or underemployed for a very long time, though, they'll all agree with that. I'm going to tell you that the three months I was unemployed in my life between getting laid off and finding the current job I have now. Those were like the longest three months of my life.

[00:55:28] And I would happily say that it worked out in my favor because that happened right about the time that Gillian went back to work after having our child. So I had this tiny little human that needed lots of attention and that kept me occupied. Like I could take care of her, take care of the house and job hunt. And that was just about enough to keep me occupied. Sure. But like purpose.

[00:55:48] But I can totally understand how a person just crumbles because they go from I provide, I take care of, I do to I have nothing. And they go and like I can just imagine how psychologically crippling that is. I would almost say that like from my perspective, I think a lot of this started when the nuclear family got decimated. Sure. There's there's been it happened around the same time is the trouble. Yeah.

[00:56:16] So now it's a question of like, is the tail wagging the dog? Right. I think that. That people that do not have objective purpose and an ability to achieve the goals they have in their life will turn to self-destruction eventually. Yeah. I mean, your moral fiber might be better than mine, might be better than somebody else's, but we all have our limits.

[00:56:42] And if you and if all you see is everything falling apart and an inability to better yourself, no matter what you do, then, well, why the hell not turn to terrible things? Yeah. And I guess that's why I dovetail things back towards the nuclear family, because like my morals, my my everything was instilled by my mother and father.

[00:57:11] But there were also ideas like it's a super nerdy term, but it's the best one that fits. But you've heard the phrase deferral of gratification. Right. Yeah. So it's a very fancy way of saying I'm going to I'm going to let life suck a little bit now. So sacrifice now for benefit later. Yeah. Yeah. Now, if that sounds like the whole basis of preparedness, it kind of is. But stick with me on this. It's also the basis of saving for retirement.

[00:57:37] It's the basis of it's the basis of like killing yourself to get an education or learn a trade so that you have more you have more earning power later. It's like it's the basis of large community infrastructure projects. Yeah.

[00:57:49] And quite frankly, it's the it's the basis for starting a family, like whether you decide to have children or not, like man and woman pour all this effort into starting the relationship and meeting the middle and like agreeing on things and like building a thing between the two of them so they can have a lasting relationship. When sometimes it'd be a lot easier to just say, this is boring. This is annoying. I'm out.

[00:58:14] But you you put off the one for immediate gratification in the name of down the road. This will pay off. And deferral gratification is something that I was taught by my parents because it was a value like hard work and like honesty. The ability to say I could have that today, but I can have twice as much tomorrow if I just wait. Patience and hard work and deferral gratification. Those were all traits that were to be admired.

[00:58:43] Unfortunately, I'm now seeing this other part of our culture that is in the exact opposite boat. They are very much of a I want it right now. I want it immediately. I want twice as much of it. I don't want to work for it. I want to hand it to me. And I I am I want to have fun today. I don't care about tomorrow. Yeah.

[00:59:03] And the problem with that and that problem, that personality is when we get to tomorrow and they have nothing, then I am imagining based on prior experience, there's going to be some crying over some crying over sour apples. Oh, there's going to be a well, why doesn't everyone take care of me? Why? Why am I not being taken care of? Why is this not solved? Yeah. Yeah. And it like I said, like the cry for socialism and see, I don't disagree with this cry for socialism, but I think it's deeper than that.

[00:59:33] I don't think it's just cry for socialism. I think it is the cry of immaturity. It is because, you know, like children, children expect things to be done for them, for them to be taken care of, for children complain about hard work. Children. I have a child. I have a 12 year old. I asked her just today. She, she had to wash, she put like one or two of her things in the washing machine. It was just going to wash those one or two things. I was like, Hey, would you go get all the clothes out of the bathroom and just run a load?

[01:00:03] And she kind of got an attitude. And I was like, I literally, I mean, I pulled the, I pulled the dad, the dad, you know, the dad rope and said, and told her, I'm like, I do not ask a lot of you. I do a lot of, I like, I go, I go commute two hours a day, work nine hours at work, come home. And the first thing I did when I walked in the door was start doing housework, roasting coffee, taking care of this, take care of that. But, you know, mom's cooking dinner.

[01:00:32] I don't ask a lot of you. So when I ask you to do something, don't fight me, just do it. But I am forgiving and understanding of that, that personality because she's a child. It's she still needs to learn. It's on dad to teach her the value of hard work and to make her see that when you expend a little bit of effort on behalf of the household, the family, we all benefit from it.

[01:00:57] Even she benefits from because now mom and dad are a little less stressed out or have a little bit more time to spend with her doing something she wants to do. She wants. Absolutely. But. I, I see the segment of society that their parents are not teaching them those things. And because of the parents weren't taught those things, which then becomes a self-repetuating cycle. And here's, here's the thing. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but is this, it, that answer aggravates the shit out of me. Oh yeah.

[01:01:26] No, I'm just saying it is, it is a contributing factor to the problem. I'll give you that. But the reason it aggravates me is it's, it's like the same argument I have. When somebody says, well, I didn't know. Yeah. This thing is a portal into the internet. It has all of the world's knowledge in front of it. It has a lot of bull crap too, but let's call it what it is.

[01:01:47] It's like literally scholars would have to travel their entire lives to read enough books to learn all the stuff you can Google on this goofy little thing, this cell phone. So the idea that in 2025, you can claim ignorance as a reason to not know anything to me is just stupid. You, you had, you had the tools in front of you to learn. Especially as an adult in your and my age brain. Yeah.

[01:02:14] And that is kind of the way I look at that personality where somebody says, well, my parents didn't teach me. Yeah. You, you could have taught yourself. You absolutely could have. All the world's knowledge is in front of you. It's not meant as a cop out. It's more meant as an explanation of, of, of perhaps why. Why that's not a justification, but it's a contributing factor. I'm disappointed, Nick.

[01:02:42] Hey man, I'm, I'm not trying to give anybody any, any, any, uh, any slack on that. No, man, I'm, I'm, I'm with you on it. I have long said that in today's day and age, if you don't know something today and we get to a week from now and you still don't know it, you didn't try. Yeah. But this is also the reason why I've had this discussion with like several friends of ours, mutual friends that like don't have children.

[01:03:10] And I have told, I've told them time after time, Eddie being one of them, by the way, I'm like, there are so many other ways to impact the next generation by having your own children. So if like having kids is not your path, that's cool, but there is a child in your family. There's a child in your community. There's someone you apprentice at your job, Nick, maybe a young impressionable 18, 19 year old who's hardworking and just hasn't had a lot of breaks.

[01:03:37] There's somebody who will stumble in front of you one day who could benefit from a little bit of mentorship and a little bit of dad energy, honestly, or a little bit of older brother or uncle energy. And you can help change that person's trajectory by just talking to them. That is one of the big reasons why we started doing summer interns. Yeah. Where I work because there are so many very bright young men and women out there that do not have the chance to experience the thing that just might click with them.

[01:04:08] Two of the guys that we had apprentice with us, one of them ended up working with me for like a year and a half. He's now working somewhere else on a different crew. And you know what? All the power to him. I wish him the best. He was excellent while he was with me. He did a fantastic job. The other one, he ended up in an engineering school. And I think if I recall correctly, he's going to be a manufacturing engineer instead of an electrical engineer based on his experience with us.

[01:04:38] So he'd found something he loved. Not the same way that I like what I do. He doesn't want to be the guy running the machine. He's going to be the guy designing the machine. You can make a big impact on people in a short amount of time. Yeah. And of all the things we've talked about up to this point where we've talked about these huge infrastructure projects that I don't have a good answer for and I don't think anybody does, is society and culture is the one thing I think actually could be fixed.

[01:05:08] Oh, it can be. It's going to take a couple generations, but yeah, it can be fixed. Honestly, I don't even know that it'd take a couple generations. What I think about when I think about fixing culture is the way that I used to counsel people about what it was going to take to change the culture around firearms and the Second Amendment. And I was saying this 15, 20 years ago.

[01:05:33] It is going to take every single firearms owner stopping being polite and stopping being quiet and stop holding your peace when you're in a room full of people who don't agree with you on something. It's going to take everybody advocating every day, everywhere, everywhere they go politely and in a knowledgeable way.

[01:05:55] But it's going to take every single person pushing because if you can change one person's mind, just one, and all, what, 120 million gun owners can change one person's mind, we win this overnight. Yep. You will never pass another gun control law in this country ever again if you can flip the electorate to two-thirds gun owners. It will never happen again.

[01:06:19] Well, that assumes that the laws that are passed have any bearing on the electorate's desires at all, which right now in this country they don't. But herein lies the thing of it. If you change the culture enough. Yeah. You can make it unthinkable, yeah. Yeah. You make it to where to sign one of those laws means you get primaried. Discussion over it. Like, end discussion. You're going to lose your seat. I have no faith in politicians except that they're slimy bastards who will do what's in their best interest.

[01:06:47] So if the fact of the matter is that I signed this thing and that now means that 65% to 70% of my electorate throws me out of office, there's a 0% chance I ever touch that again. Probably. So here's the thing of it. That was my prescription for how do we win the debate on guns? What's happened in the last 10 years? People got loud.

[01:07:12] People started, to varying degrees, some not as eloquent as others, but everybody started pushing. Everybody started getting vocal and everybody started getting really open about the fact that, yeah, I got more guns in the National Guard. What's the problem? Like, why is that weird? I carry a gun to go to the grocery store. I'm not hurting anybody. I brought enough ammo to an Air Force base that they had to call the CO to get approval to put it in the armory. Yeah.

[01:07:36] But the point is, it's like by doing that consistently over and over and over, we have changed the culture around firearms. Now, there are still those people who will never be convinced, but the culture is shifting. So what I say when I say the culture and society can be fixed is, will it take a generation? Maybe. Will it take three? Possibly. But you know what it's going to take?

[01:07:59] It's going to take every single person who believes that they have good moral fiber, who believes that they have learned or taught themselves traits that have bettered their lives, that have an understanding of things like deferral gratification, who know how financial instruments and interests work. I mean, think about some of the conversations we've had in the patron group. That is a group of men and women who are very open with, this is a subject I have knowledge of, I'm willing to share openly and honestly so that anybody can benefit from it.

[01:08:29] That's all that is required. All that is required is for us to get our eyeballs out of our cell phone, get our asses up off of our couches, and go find our tribe. And then we work to build each other up. And then we invite other people into the tribe and build them up. And eventually, if you do that enough times, you fix the problem of society and culture because you're always going to have that person who says party hard. You're always going to have the ant and the grasshopper. Oh, yeah.

[01:08:58] Always going to have the ant and the grasshopper. No way to fix it. But if I got a hundred ants and one grasshopper, the one grasshopper is not as much of a problem as if I have one ant and a hundred grasshoppers. True. And if you don't know that parable from your childhood, I'm sorry. They made a movie about it, man. It's called Ants. It was pretty funny. The parable is so much better, though. But yes. Yeah, but this one's got CGI bugs. Yeah.

[01:09:26] But like I said, I mean, that is, I'm not trying to talk to death or get super preachy, even though it's wild. No, you're right, man. But like I just I feel like culture and society, that's the one thing that we we as individuals can fix. But you're going to fix it one person at a time. Well, that's what we're trying to do right here. That's what you're trying to do with Cypress Survival. That's what I hope everybody in our of our listeners are trying to do in their lives. Just try and help one person at a time.

[01:09:54] Now, the reason why I say it'll take three generations is largely because of inertia. You have older generations of people that, frankly, you're probably not going to get them to change. And there's a there's a saying that I've heard a couple of times from a few scientists. Science advances one funeral at a time. And unfortunately, cultural culture changes one funeral at a time, too, sometimes, because I guarantee you we're not going to get Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or the turtle man.

[01:10:24] And in Congress to change the way they think. I can't remember his name. Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell. That's what it is. Man, I started laughing because I knew who you were talking about immediately. You just said turtle. All I could see is him in a green shell, man. I don't know what it is. But some of those people, they're so old and stuck in their ways that you're not going to get them to change. Fortunately, a lot of the people that are making culture as wild as it is right now are younger. There's room for them to change.

[01:10:51] Their brains aren't hardened the way some of the elderly are. So let's try. What do we got to lose? Yeah. And I mean, the truth of the matter is, is like, you know, you and I are both millennials. But the truth of the matter is, is that that's not even the prescription I want to give to like the younger people or the older people. It's like, no, you just you need you need to wherever your circle is, wherever your people are. That's where you need to start working.

[01:11:18] Like in my in my workplace, I am among the younger people in my workplace being 42 years old. When I started where I'm working now, the average age of people in the in the building was 53. And I was 20. You were a baby. I was a baby. I am now. Let's see. One, two, three. I'm the person that's been there.

[01:11:46] The fourth longest of all of the people there. Oh, my bones. Now, all of a sudden, I want to drop something in the patron chat and just like pull the audience, find out how old everybody is. Because I know I know a handful of them are around our age, like plus or minus a few, except for Stewart. Stewart's like 800 years old. Yeah. Well, you know, some of us are phenomenally long lived in the patron chat. He's going to kick my ass one of these days. Probably in person.

[01:12:15] And he's bigger than I am. That's that's the best part. I have no incentive to fight. You and me are the same age. I have no incentive to get into a fight with him, though, because like either I get my butt kicked by an old man or I kick an old man's butt. Like, I can't win. There's no there's no be telling you you're doing it wrong the entire time, too. Oh, and the funny part is that Stewart is not that much younger than my dad is.

[01:12:42] So, like, I definitely I definitely get like that disapproving, you know, older uncle five. That's great. Yeah. And you know what? I would be interested to know. So, you know, if you're in the patron chat, drop us a buzz. Let us know how old you are. We got a couple popping off right now. Yep. Raggle Fraggle thought you were younger. It appreciates that. It's like a fish. It is. It is a lack of facial hair and the fact that the headphones hide how bald I'm going. Oh, yes.

[01:13:15] Yes, sir. I'm at the point. I'm at the point where I'm about to just acquiesce to my wife and get a skull shaver because like there you go. I never wanted to be the guy that had like a fully shaved head. But at this point, male pattern baldness is kicking my butt so hard. Let's see. That wrote a book. Bald. You just need a sleeve and you've got the full set of white sleeve of tattoos. And you've got the full set for a GWAT vet. You got the beard. You're going to shave your head.

[01:13:44] You've done a book. Now you need the tattoo sleeve. I thought it was just seals that wrote books. No, I think it's just about everybody. I've seen a couple of books by Rangers lately, too. So they're branching out. The book deals are coming. Yeah, but in my defense, I didn't write a book about anything I did while I was overseas because I basically just fixed helicopters. I mean, don't let me undersell it. Like, I enjoyed my job fixing a hell of fixing a Black Hawk is a really, really fun, interesting thing.

[01:14:12] It's like, I mean, if you've ever worked on cars before, this is like a 2,500 horsepower car that flies. It's cool. But I was just an aircraft mechanic. Wasn't the best for forces. Didn't kick doors. Didn't didn't fight us on bin Laden barefoot, you know, wearing tighty whities with a knife. Did do any of that cool stuff. I just fixed lots of helicopters. That's all right, man. Man, helicopters need fixed. And those things take a lot to keep in the air. Let's walk this one out with that.

[01:14:41] Do you know what they call a helicopter? It's 10,000 parts rotating around an oil leak waiting for metal fatigue to set in. Nice. Y'all can have a good old time with that Matter Effects podcast going out the door. If you're a patron, you owe me in the chat what your age is. And if you're not a patron, you have no earthly idea what we're talking about. It's my own fun little collection of sociopaths and Olivia.

[01:15:09] And I'm looking to see if I had anybody else. Olivia, Kyle, Jeff. I think Olivia and Kyle. Jeff, I don't think is in the patron chat. No, I thought I recognized it. No, I could be mistaken, but I don't believe so. But Olivia and Kyle are, and they can attest to the fact that there's lost sociopaths in there. It's a good time. But we have a lot of fun. We're usually making fun of each other. Anyway. Or learning things. Sparingly.

[01:15:39] We have an image to keep up. We do. Anyway, Matter Effects podcast going out the door. Talk to y'all another week. Goodbye, everybody. Night. Night. Night.