Matter of Facts: Zero to Hero

Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, politics every week on iTunes, Ditcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwefpodcast dot com. On Facebook or Instagram. You can support us be a Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Raveley Andrew Nickar on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast. And before I forget, this episode is pre recorded, so yes, so if you are watching this on the stream, you're welcome to come into the comments. Misbehave troll each other, troll us, have a party. I can't stop you tonight. However, if you upset the NSA bad enough, you will end up on another government watch list. And if you think you've collected them all, they're like freaking pokemon. You haven't got them all yet. We can try, Oh, Nick, I've been trying for like twenty years as a happy little political disson and I'm confident I haven't found them all yet. True, you don't send money overseas to foreign terrorist organizations. I don't because the CIA already does that. Why what with my tax. Dollars, and it's not a tax deductible donation, so exactly like IKE a. Tax deduction, I'm going to get on the list. If I'm going to fund regime change, I should at least get a break on my income tax. I mean, it just seems reasonable, that does, I mean, come on, we're saving the c some money. Just brings up an interesting question. Could I write off the money I spent on Hollow's sign because I'm supporting it foreign government. Oh that's a good point. Oh, that's a good point. It might be able to if we can get a tax right off figured out for that. Yeah, that could be cool. Oh, but it gets but it gets better than that. I mean, the only natively made like optics that I'm aware of are yes, so aime point is Swedish, hollow Sun is Chinese. Most of them are Chinese, to be perfectly framed. Well, yeah, even swamp Fox is made I think in Taiwan, isn't it. Yeah, along with Chinese electronics. Well, and that that's the beautiful thing is that, Like so, hollow Sun is actually not a red dot company. They're a laser emitter company. So with the with the exception, I think really of just trigacon like anybody else's stuff you buy, you're buying hollow sun emitters because that's where they all. Come from, a lot of them anyway. I mean, I'm sure there are some that are made by other companies. But not many. No, No, at least at the core electronics level. Yeah. Well, I mean it's it's like the old joke back the day you buy an American car and everything under the hood is freaking made in Japan. Yeah. Yeah, that does happen a lot. I mean, look, mass scale of manufacturing. One airbag fits in many, many cars. We found that out the fun way when we had that massive recall of what was it, fifty million airbags or something like that. Yeah. I actually had an interesting conversation with a coworker today. We were we were lamenting the fact that someone in my age that got the bright idea to offshore all of our IT resources to another agency with the understanding that, like I was gonna say to a foreign country, no, no, no, you can have them, but we still get to use them. And that has not worked out swimmingly because once they got them in their ORG chart, they figured, well, they're gonna work on our priorities first and your second. That's typically how that happens. Yeah. Yeah, So we had a burgeoning debate about the merits of outsourcing, offshoring versus vertical integration. Now I pointed out to them, I'm like, you know what company has vertically vertically integrated? Amazon? You know what money? You know what company's making money? Hand over fist Amazon, Yep, you know what companies are losing their behinds everyone that outsourced their shipping departments. Yes, just thinking out loud. I mean, it's it's absolutely wild. Some of the things that Amazon had has done in order to explode their business has been against the core thesis of big businesses. For a very long time. But it works. My god, does it work? My god? Does it work when it's well organized? Mm hmm. That's the sticking point is there are not a whole lot of corporate leaders that are really good at organizing large scale things, and Amazon has hired most of them. Turns out, So before we get to topic, do you want to fill the listeners in on the what prompted the Emperor Palpatine meme that I sent you half an hour all because I think it's a hilarious story. By the way, so for those of you that have been listening to the show for a minute, I have I have on and off mentioned my desire to acquire. A boat, not for the purpose of making farms disappear. Correct. I already had a canoe. We've lost that. I've had kayaks. We lost some parts of the kayak. We got most of it back. My garage fits two cars. We own two cars. Okay, garage is full, so I'm not gonna spend. And if any of you have looked at boats, they're expensive as fuck, especially brand new. Did they depreciate I would imagine rapidly? Okay, but how much as you would think that ten year old lund is only like seven or eight thousand dollars less than a brand new one. They depreciate way less than cars. They don't get the time on them. They don't get the time in the motor, so it depreciates like a Toyota similar, yeah, I would say, similar, yeah, Or like a quality built firearm, you know, yeah, knock fifteen percent off the top and now you're reasonably used until you get like twenty twenty five years old. Then they really go down fast. Funny you say that, My dad has a Smith and mos and Model thirty nine that I am hoping I wind up inheriting after that appreciated value. Not only has it appreciated a little bit, but if you he still has the original purchase receipt from like nineteen seventy three, I think that's good paper. And when you look at that amount of money and you adjusted for inflation, it has actually kept up with inflation. So Smith and Wesson's inflation well, I wouldn't say like plastic fantastics, but like old semi clag doesn't mean the mo okay. So like the Smith and Wesson's, the fifty nine hundred series are kind of sought after because they're really great guns there, and the thirty nine is actually not as desirable because it's a single stack nine millimeter, but they're so much less common because they were this single stack that they're it's kind of like they're people that want them really do want them. Yeah, And this gun, I mean it's old, I think nineteen seventies blued finish, looks like it was a piece of medeorite. Would ribs, Oh, it's a beautify it's a beautiful gun. And I mean my dad's had it for fifty years squeezing the double action trigger on that thing. It feels like a gunsmith has worked it over, but it's just the parts have polished them shelves, so it's over fifty years of shooting. Absolutely, I mean wearing it in is the ideal way to fit that stuff because then it's perfectly aligned and it's perfectly smooth. But you know, back to the garage idea, back back to the garage idea for the boat, that is, I need a side garage or a bigger garage, all right. My property that. We live on is at the end of the subdivision that was built back in the fifties and early sixties, late fifties, early sixties. There was a road proposed that would run along my property. Okay, on call it the east side, along the east side of my property. That road was never built. It was never doug It only appears on a single plat map for the subdivision. One plat map. It was pinned, but it was They never did anything with it since, like the subdivision closed. I think the last house was built in sixty two or sixty three, something like that. Since then, the prior owner of the property I live on bought that section of road or acquired it somehow and built a garage on it. That's the garage we're currently using, right in the middle of this road. Okay, Bill, are you familiar with road easements and how much the setback is from a road for most buildings. It's a little less than the garage in. The middle of the road, about thirty feet on either side of the proposed road. Not only is my garage in the middle of the road, and the driveway goes right down the middle of the road, which asphalt in the middle of the road makes sense. County's got no problem with the asphalt in the middle of the road. The yard light, the patio, the concrete patio that we have next to the garage. The garage and part of my house are all within the Eastman boundaries of where stuff is not supposed to be built. Stuff is not supposed to be built around the road that they themselves did not build. Right, correct, That was never built and was never truly intended to be built, as proven by the multi hundred year old trees that also line the middle of where this road never was. This sounds like some government nonsense. We have a road that does not exist. We have a land parcel that was sold to the prior property owner and we have a building built with a permit that doesn't specify where. The building was to be built. Sounds like government right now. In my county. At that time, you just had to get the permit to build the structure and they would look at it when it was done. They never measured anything, they didn't check any of it. So when I go to the county with my current plot of survey done by a professional surveyor in this area that has been around for a very long time, excellent surveyors. I know some of the people that work. They're great people. It shows my garage where it is. And they found the pins for the road, so they put them on. The plat. And the lady at the county says, well, according to the county, that road was never removed from the platts, so the road exists by law, exists exactly exists. So they told me, and now this is their words, they said, I'm not a lawyer. You need to get this road plat voided or vacated. Yeah, vacated I think is the term they use. I said, how do you do that? I said, well, Typically you would go to the person that platted the subdivision and have them vacate that road. Say hey, yep, we're never going to build this road. Sign up paper, We're never going to build this road. Great, that guy's been dead for twenty. Years, as they do. The company has not existed for longer than that. It happens, these things occur. People retire, folks die. So I tell that to the county, and the County Planning and Zoning Board says, well, we don't know what the process would be in order to avoid that in this case. So I happen to be very lucky, and I live down the road from the township road commissioner, the guy in charge of all the roads in my township, and I call him up because we're friendly neighbors who stop buying chit chat now and then, and he says, well, that road doesn't exist on the township Platts at all, meaning the person that planned the subdivision submitted the road to the county, did not submit it to the township, which they would have had to do in order to start building the road, which means they never intended to build the road because they never submitted that road planned to the township. Because of that, the township doesn't know if it can avoid the road. The county cannot void the road because they don't have jurisdiction over township roads. So we get the township. Supervisor to come out to my property this afternoon. This has all happened since lunchtime today. You get the township supervisor over and he looks at the platt, looks at my garage, looks at the plat and says, this is the most retarded shit I've ever seen. There's never going to be a road here. There never would have been a road here, he said. I'm gonna have to call around other townships. He said, I'm sorry. I started this job like five years ago. This has never happened before. I have to call around to other townships and find out how we avoid a road that doesn't exist. That's so that's been my afternoon. I got a decent workout in which is great. Made me feel a little better. I have half of what I poured for whiskey after the workout left. So I'm going to get my garage, Come hell or high water, I am getting my garage. It just so. It just we're gonna have to. Go through some mid level government fuckery that shouldn't happen over a road that has never existed, to build a garage, to someday buy a boat so that I can eventually go fishing. So, Nick, where exactly is the line between angry little libertarian and rabid anarchist? Honestly, man, at this point, I'm riding that line because I could have just built that fucking garage and not told anybody, because the county never comes out here. The fucking township wouldn't give a shit because I drink beer with the township road commissioner. Nobody would have known or cared until I sell this place in thirty years. Why the fuck I try to play Why the hell I try to play along with the rules, I will never understand. I know a guy that owns a skinloader. I know a concrete crew. I can make all of this shit happen faster than the county can stop me if I wanted to. Okay, but oh, there is a certain personality on the autism spectrum that just inherently wants to follow rules because they're rules. I know what the policy is, I know what the rules are. I know how to build a building I can do all of this. I can subcontract it. We can be done with this. It could be so easy. All I wanted to do was say was get somebody to say, yep, there is physically space for the building here. Start getting bids for the concrete. So what I'm hearing is that the next time you want to do something that volves permits, you might just choose violence. Honestly, man, I this is why I tell people that I am really riding the edge of tolerating what the government has decided and decreed to be the good. I know how to build things well beyond code. I can do electrical I can do plumbing. I can do foundations, I can do roofs. I can do rough and finished carpentry. Help I can even lay tile. Turns out it can't paint for shit, because I don't see colors. Right, But because fuck wits are too dumb to do it correctly. We have to have this mid level bureaucracy telling me, sorry, that thing that doesn't exist is in the way of the thing you want to make exist. But that's not all they told you. They told you that your garage that has been there for how long since nineteen seventy nine is intruding on their imaginary road. Correct. Yes, yes, and that if something were to ever happen to that garage, not only should I not be allowed to repair it, I can't replace it either. So instead of allowing me to build another garage, increasing the taxable value of my property, which is a net benefit to the county, paying people to build the garage on my property, which is a net benefit to the county, now I have to get in a pissing match with Well, the township people are actually on my side about this. They think this is dumb. I have to get in a pissing match about the county. I've got the township people in a pissing match with the county trying to figure out who's actually got jurisdiction with this. I've probably got to get a lawyer involved to draft some bullshit, and I got to go after the title company who didn't find this problem in the first place. So this what should have been a ten minute visit to the county courthouse turned into about an hour of talking to like four or five different people about this, and then a series of phone calls that lasted the rest of the afternoon and a. Couple in person visits from local government. This is totally unnecessary. None of this needed to occur. Yes, well, your level of outrage is pretty close to mine because I recently had to teach myself how to do the text documents for a nonprofit in this country. There's a reason why I do things for profit. The taxes are easier and not Yeah, and that that annoys Mede ten times as much. But not only does it involve filling out an extraneously long, stupid form to say we made money, we spent money, and you can't text any of it because five on one C three we did all that paperwork already. But then there's a little footnote at the bottom says, if you are a five on one C three, you also to fill out this other form. And I went and got that air form and it is basically a retelling of the reason why we are we qualified to be a five to one. C three because I'm out, but I. Have to fill it out and explain these are all the reasons why, and these are the things we do. And I have to file that form with the tax form every single year. You know they're going to change that form between this year and next year, so you can't just copy paste right. I'm God's honest truth. Like this, this whole experience, like all of the headache in starting this nonprofit and keeping illegally above board, has convinced me that freaking cocaine dealers are the smartest of all of us because they just decided up. They just screw it. We ball we don't, We're not now. I am not skirting your rules. I am not bending them. I'm not even breaking them. I'm just not acknowledging they exist, and I'm gonna do what I want. Honestly, man, it is it is very hard for me to emotionally justify to myself obeying the rules anymore because satanic cannibalist pedophiles are apparently above the law because they're important to government. Well, they always have been above the law. Not but. A road that doesn't exist requires me to get a lawyer and to go to a township meeting and for township to possibly derive a policy that doesn't exist, to remove a road that never existed. At all. But satanic pedophiles, that's that's okay. But a fucking two car garage built the code with stamped engineering plans, which is higher plan to do. That's that's what That's the true evil. Yes too, car garage is the true evil. I'm glad you finally understand it, except that it's just honestly, dude, I have I have made. I've joked with my wife before that I should just start cooking math because honestly. It would be so easy to do. I I had a chemistry professor in college, and I think I've told this story on the podcast before. He was a Soviet scientist that's defected back during the Cold War, and he used to One of the things he did for the Russian military was make math. And the show Breaking Dad was very popular at the time, and a couple of us were talking about it before class started, and he said, oh, that show, That show is ridiculous. You don't need all of that stuff. Let me tell you how to make meth. He goes up with the chalkboard, turns are any of you currently addicted to methamphetamines? And nobody says it's good, don't start, and then he begins to write out the instructions for how to make methamphetamines lab grade methamphetamines, and I'm like, I guess I take notes. I don't know if this is on the test, So I have that somewhere. Good Lord, I mean, I don't know. Like following the rules or attempting to follow the rules has become burdensome beyond reason. In my opinion. Yeah, especially in Illinois. My god, I have I was about to say, I I seven levels of government. I want to say Illinois to deal with this, I want to say Illinois might be worse than most, but Illinois. Has one of the densest as far as stackings of governmental organizations for for any like individual, because there's city, state, county, and township and then districts. So you could have up to five, possible six or seven because Alderman can get involved, levels of governments that you have to deal with whenever anything happens at all. Yeah, that just sounds like dumb to me. Oh, it's it is. It is frustrating beyond any reasonable level. Is it just? It's straight up shouldn't be a problem. I pay taxes on the entire square footage of my property. I just measured it out with the township supervisor and he said, yep, you're paying taxes on this entire property. In my opinion as the township supervisor, my professional opinion is, you can do what you want with that building as long as you are ten feet from any of the other structures. I mean, and it's fifteen feet from the property boundary, the extreme property boundary and not the road one. I mean. You know my whole end on this. It's like, I pay for the property, I should be able to do with the property pretty much what I want up to the moment that I'm dangered. But it's unsafe up to the moment I endanger my neighbors exactly. I understand easements for the sake of fire fighting, for the sake of fire spread and danger to that. I understand having build height limits. As far as like aircraft shit goes. I get it. Can't have planes running into buildings, goes bad for everybody involved. Not cool. But it's a two car garage in the middle of my property. No matter how it fell, the only people it's gonna hurt is me, my wife or my dog. Yeah, dangerous. Can't allow that much for it, I know, right. Hell, it is. One hundred and forty feet in any direction from from the nearest inhabited building. Other than my ouse that's practically on top of somebody. I know it's terribly dangerous. Abeat of dust could potentially endanger and I'm glad you understand. It's just I will get my garage. That is not an option at this point. I found out that my neighbor behind me doesn't own the property that she's been maintaining for her section of this road. I'm gonna get her that property for free now. Too, just to be an ass. Oh yeah, no, you've made it my problem. Fine, I'm going to be the entire problem, because this is stupid. See every now and then, righteous indignation can be used as a force of good. Yeah, she's a nice lady. Her daughter is the sweetest kid ever. You know what, They're getting an extra quarter acre of property. Now, fuck you, they get it. They've been maintaining it for long enough. They get squatters rights. Guess what I'm motivated now in twenty five minutes of screaming about government as is par for this show. Damn government. So we had said, first of all, again for anybody that came in late, this episode's pre recorded, so we're not ignoring you in the comments. We're just here in spirit. We are here in spirit. I will try to be here in comment form to ras you back if I remember. I mean cool, if you cool, if you are, I might be in in here in comment form. Who freaking knows, I mean, yeah, you never know. We'll see. But you know, you proposed an interesting hang idea for this this episode, because we didn't want to talk about anything that was like two time sensitive, and you brought up like kind of the idea of like getting started in preparedness from the bottom up, Like if you have everything working against you humanly possible to start in preparedness, where do you start? Say, like, you're a new homeowner, you got your first apartment, you're the kid that went off to college. I mean I've literally been that. Me too. I have been all those things except for the apartment. Gillian and I when we first got married, we lived in a thousand square foot apartment. Yeah, that's tight. My first house was nine and thirty eight square feet. I think it gets it's small, it's tight, it gets better. That thousand square foot apartment had a kind of a walk in closet, like right across from the front door, and that was storage for a spara set of wheels and tires for the car that I raised, and my tools because I literally, like I moved into this apartment with all my toolboxes and everything I was I was a little concerned about whether or not they'd fall through the floor. Thankfully they didn't. I mean, I don't have okay, I don't have, like, you know, at a fifty thousand dollars matt Co toolbox like a professional. But I've got a reasonable number of tools. Well they add up quick. They're steel, yes, so you know. Space was at a premium really though. I didn't start prepping, like really hardcore until I got here to this house and had the space to do it. But even in that apartment, like we were doing what we could with what we had. So I think it's I think it presents an interesting topic because I've long said that I don't feel I feel like the people that say I can't prep because I feel like it's kind of a cop out, because there I think sometimes sometimes it is, and sometimes it's a lot. It's being overwhelmed by the information that's out there. That was my problem when I got started. Because at the time when I got started, let's see, this would have been. That's good. Twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. That's a good question of when. Okay, so twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, when you started prepping. That's when I bought my first house. Gillian and I got married in two thousand and eight, so that's when we That's when we were in that apartment together. I mean, you could argue that on a very basic level we were prepping then, but we didn't start like really prepping in earnest until we moved in here, which would have been twenty eleven. Do you remember what the online community with regards to prepping was like in that time period twenty eleven to twenty fifteen, somewhere. Wro on tinfoil hatshit. It was quite wild. If you were not. If the zeitgeist of the time was if you were not living on a multi acre ranch out in the country with sustainable power and a well and growing your own food, you were wrong. There was that aspect of preparedness, and there was also the people that said, like, if you didn't have an underground bunker, you could live at it for the next six months. Like that was That was the two you don't bother. That was the two extremes was either you, like you grenade build a bunker in suburbia, you grenade your entire life as you know it. And you either build a bunker and you're prep for like World War three, Cuban missile crisis, shit, or you you're prepping for like little house on the prairie, living like it's the eighteenth century again. And there there was no There was no middle ground. There was no prep for a week, prep for a month. There. It really was that extreme at the time. And there might have been there might have been some content creators that we're trying to like push it was limited, Yeah, it was. I was about say, they were definitely the fringe. They were pushing. They were hard from the fringe just to say we don't have to do this as an extreme. We can there can be baby steps, there can be gradual increases, like you do this over time. And I think that's what I struggle with the hardest, not me personally, but like with other people, was they looked at it as if I can't get to this goalpost right now. The preparedness is out of my reach. And I've point out to people over the years, I'm like, no, no, no, it it like I am within our little group of friends, probably moderately prepared compared to most people. Sure certainly not the most, certainly not the least. Absolutely not. But it's still taken years to build this. Oh it absolutely does? It really really does. I mean when you I remember, in particular, a YouTube video that I. Came across, and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna knock the content creator because this was the zeitgeist at the time, this was the common knowledge of the time. Their advice I was to go to one of the freeze dried companies and buy between one and five years of freeze dried food delivered on a pallet. That's cripplingly expensive a year. At the time, I want to say it was in the neighborhood of like twenty five hundred dollars for their one year food palate. And that's and when you crunch the numbers on the year, one person, one year, one person, not two thousand calories is bad. No, it's like eight hundred to one thousand calories. So starvation. I'm a big boy. Well, I eat more than that. Well, and not to mention, like we've talked about this whenever we have to talk about like food prepping, like if you're if we end up in that situations. As much as I don't think it's like the first thing you should be preparing for, but if we end up in that situation where like the power grid goes out, it's never coming back on, you were going technically possible, you were going to earn so many goddamn calories. Because everything you do is gonna be a lot harder than it used to be. There will be no there will be no like push a button on a microwaven food comes out of it. Everything gets harder. And this is like the reason why I enjoy camping, because when you're camping, yeah, I mean you go out there, you have your food, you have your fridge, you have your jagger, you have all that stuff whatever you bring to camping, you're in like it's not exactly like living like Mad Max, but it's still a good analog for preparedness because everything's harder, everything takes longer. The simple act of making breakfast now involves setting up a stove, pulling out all your stuff, cooking boiling water to make the coffee. The camp chores are not just take to a sink, and then wash everything out, put in the dishwasher. It just everything takes longer and everything takes it to work, which means that hole, it's good practice, But that means that that whole two thousand calories a day is a baseline now, because you're gonna burn a lot more than that. I think if I recall all correctly, last time I saw a statistic on it, your average, like through hiker goes through like four or five thousand calories a day. I wouldn't even begin to know off the top of my head, but I know that after that, after a Hurricane Ida, I mean, dude, we were eating like we were starving. And we don't understand. We had plenty of food, but we were like the first day afterwards, we didn't really eat much because it had been a wild night, nobody had slept well. We were kind of just like nobody was hungry. You were stressed out. But the next day when my in laws showed up and we got in the front yard start running chainsaws on hauland brush, we ate like we were starving for the next three days because we were just burning ourselves down. We were busting our butts. Yeah, you absolutely are, but you. Know, I think that that was extremely disheartening for me and for me to get into preparedness. Yeah, well, not so much information overload, but the bar being set so absurdly high and the only focus being on And this is why I state I attempted to join a couple of different mutual assistance groups preparedness groups at the time, and why I honestly I ended up falling in with a militia group for a little while because the preparedness focus groups were Okay, everybody needs to be working towards getting. Their properties ready to sell. We're all going to buy a large communal property. We need to find a doctor, we need to find a dentist, we need to find YadA, YadA, YadA. We need to get farmers. We need to get enough young people into the group for labor to do manual farming, which I don't know if you've ever tried to do manual farming at scale. Fill, I haven't. I haven't, I haven't. It's horrible. But it doesn't look fine. No, it's not even if you have animals. I mean, these people were talking about buying somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty to three hundred acres of either farmland or undeveloped woodland, and then building an entire off grade community for this which at the time, that is what a lot of. People were talking about. Whether anyone actually did it, I don't think many did, because it's. Wildly out of reach. I mean, their stated financial goals were like three hundred thousand dollars per person in liquid capital to begin this project. To begin it or then if anything doesn't pan out, you've yieaded your entire life savings and all your net worth into this thing, and it's all tied into a corporation of these people. Now, Okay, maybe that is the ideal. Maybe the ideal. Is a survival survivor Jane and Rick Austin build yourself a self sufficient homestead. Maybe that is the ideal. But for most emergencies I've ever experienced, and you've ever experienced, it seems like it's not been that bad. If you can keep yourself alive and fed and in reasonably good repair and decent hygiene for like eight twelve. Days, yeah, two three weeks, mats you're straight and that, Yeah, you're you're probably gonna be okay. At the very least for weather events. You're you're pretty well solid at that point. Yeah. I mean, even like looking back on when I first got into prepared and it's like Hurricane Katrina was my bell weather and as far as hurricane, as far as hurricanes and post hurricane efforts go, Katrina was kind of a high water mark in my lifetime. Like people that are older than me that remember like Betsy, remember hurricanes that were much worse that hit this area, but like or the recovery effort was not as well executed. Yeah, and it because it really, like to me, I guess that is that's that's why Katrina remains remains my bell weather because like it's not the hurricane itself. It was the weeks of fuel, being hard to get a hold of, building materials, being hard to get a hold of tarps, imply wood and nails and screws, and like scorching heat, abysmal humidity, no access to clean water. Yeah, that was the parts that were But at the same time, the worst of it started to unwind itself, especially on the fringes. Like a lot of people don't understand, like if you're talking about like the ninth ward where the levees breached and the city flooded. Like that area took a while to come back from for obvious. Yeah, but that's a couple that's a couple square mile area. But if you you could walk out of that, you could. Yeah, but if you look at like the surrounding areas like Slidell where my family lived, and this area and Hammond where my wife lived at the time, Like if you look at the suburbs around New Orleans, they came back within a few weeks. Like once once the trees were cleared off the power lines, the grid was restored. As soon as they started getting fuel trucks into those gas stations, that whole area just roared right back to life because right because everybody had fuck all to do but fixed stuff. Yeah, you know, it's but I guess that's kind of my thing is, like my experience with emergency situations is that the majority of them a week, two weeks, four weeks, had four weeks. On a high side, as long as you've got enough foot, water and everything to handle yourself for that period of time, you're probably gonna be okay. That's why for people in my personal life, and I've advocated it on this podcast as well. I think three months, If you can do three months, you've covered yourself for ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of whatever could happen. If you can cover yourself for a month, you're probably set for ninety five percent of what's ever gonna happen. Yeah, And I think that's that's what I've tried to really, that's what I've tried to impress upon people that just get started in preparedness is like if you're if you're if you're long term outset, like you're prepared to do like Stewart and spend the next thirty years, and you know, bear in mind that like Stuart is in during retirement age, and he's been into this lifestyle since I believe he was a late teenager. Yep. So that's what I remember him saying. He's literally we need to get him on here. I've said that a few times, but like he's I will harass him. He's been into preparedness as long as I've been alive since nineteen eighty freaking two. And if you want to take that long, that long lens and say, my eventual goal is to be able to just like nail my front and back door shut and live in this home out of what I have put away for a year. Cool. But you don't have to get to a year to have achieved something meaningful. If oh, I would agree, I, if you can get to two weeks, you've achieved an exceptionally meaningful resilience. If you can get to three weeks, you just covered ninety percent of your emergencies. When we had that, we had when it's snowed down here, and I understand eight inches of snow is hilarious to most. Y'all eight inches of snow and we're doing burnouts and doughnuts and the Walmart parking lot. But but eight inches of snow in New Orleans, Oh no, it is literally the apocalypse. It's literally the apocalypse. The whole the whole southern half of the states shut down, because there's rightly so. But here's the thing of it. As long as we could have kept ourselves fed and warm without going to the grocery store without problems for the next three days, that problem's gonnaunwind itself. Because it melted, it all went away. And if the poets and if the power had gone out, as long as we had a method to keep the house warm, keep the pipes from freeze, and keep ourselves fed. Fortunately, we're in a situation where we have gas service to the house, so like we're gonna run the stove, We're gonna run the fireplace, like we're gonna be fine. Yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be uncomfortable. Yeah, but you'll sort it out. It's basically just winter camping, which my family also doesn't do. That's understandable. I've been winter camping more than a few times, and it can get it can get wrong, it can't get right. I think the coldest I've ever had this family on a camping trip. It was like high forties and I was my marriage was threatened. When I was in Scouts, we had a kid that moved up from Florida and joined our trip. Oh that poor bastard. I was in middle school and he came up. He moved in in December, and in February we did our winter camp out. The first day we got there, it was like twenty eight and we got twelve and a half inches of snow. The next day, the cold front came through and it dropped down to negative eleven. Oh god, and blowing wind, and we were there from Friday night to Sunday morning. It'll took pity on the poor bastard, right, oh, we did. We piled everything we could on top of that kid. His winter jacket that his parents bought him was what I would call like a light fall jacket around here. They he just wasn't ready for it. He wasn't ready for it. They had no concept of how cold it was going to be. He had like a thirty degree sleeping which was nowhere near sufficient. No, he didn't have under armour or anything like that. But we we set the kid up just fine because every one of us brought like three extra sweatshirts, so we piled them. As you do is fine. As you do. You got to look out for your friends. Right and hell, what are you gonna have a you want to have a cold casualty that you now have to first aid as a boy scout troop, that's gonna look like shit. Having prepared friends is a blessing, It absolutely is. But you know, I've I've always said to people at getting started in preparedness is boring. It's boring, you know, it's I think the first thing you have to do that just take an inventory of your house. Take an inventory of your house. Look at what you do and don't have. If you find yourself going through your house, and I don't mean like a righte pen and paper inventory, I'm not talking about an Excel sheet. I'm talking just go into every room in your house, open every cabinet, look at it. If you don't find a fire extinguisher in your house, period, you have a problem that can be addressed for under one hundred dollars and can potentially save you. An insurance claim on a kitchen fire burning half your house down. You know. Everybody has electronic devices on them constantly right now? Do you know what the number one cause of house fires is? Right now? Phil? Unattended electrical devices plugged into charge, stiddy cheap chargers, lighting on fire on wallout. Yes. I know two different families when I was in high school and a third since high school that have had their house either burned down or partially burned due to a gas station three dollars charger. Now, one of them was for an iPhone, one of them was for an iPad or no iPhone iPod, and I think the other one was I want to say it was for it was a knockoff cordless tool battery charger, and they left the battery plugged in and it just the whole thing caught fire. The lithium went up, and then the house was gone. It's boring. Make a list of all the foods you normally buy in a one week period, and then the next week just buy a little election of the non perishables. I encourage everybody to take that whole idea of an inventory just one step further, though, more than just look and see what you have. Look at everything with the with the thought in your head of is this you are these things mission critical or not? And when I say mission credible, I don't mean like nice to have, and I don't necessarily mean makes life pleasant, but I mean like, am I going to be significantly screwed over if I don't have this thing? And the answer is yes, and you only have one is the amounts you have sufficient to last one week, two weeks, whatever, whatever your starting point is, Like. Yeah, because if it's a cast iron Dutch oven, I mean you can hit that thing with a hammer and it's fine. And likewise, if it's as if it's a big old five pound bag of rice. One five pound bag of rice is more than plenty the last couple of weeks. But if the five pound bag of rise is down to this much, now it's a problem. If if, on the other hand, you have like several bags of pasta, we could switch from rice to pasta. Maybe the little maybe the little bit of rice left over isn't the big of a deal. Maybe it is, but to like that's that's the exercise my family goes through, even now, after all these years of preparedness, is when we're about to go go to the grocery store, I make a point of taking a lap through the garage, going past the can rat, going past the overflow storage, pulling open the chest freezer, looking in the pantry, looking into the fridge freezer. I look at all that stuff, just at a glance, and I'm like, Okay, what do I own have one of? Because those are the things I should have more than one of, or the things that you eat all the time, what have you got less than three of? Here's the thing. The can rag literally is one of those where like you put a can on the top, it goes all the way to the back and loops around, it comes back around the front. You don't see any cans up top time to refit exactly. And when it comes to the we have this huge bin and it is just second pantry. It's it's not everything in the pantry, but it's like extra pasta, extra rice, extra baking supplies, and all of this, by the way, is the stuff that goes immediately into the pantry or into ready use. That's not talking about the eight five gallon buckets that are sealed up that have more flour, more rice, more beans, more of all that in there. That the deep story that is breaking case of emergency, we're gonna have to eat out of this for the next six months kind of situation. But it's all dried goods. A lot of the stuff that we keep in the can rag in an overflow, so it's stuff that probably isn't going to make it two three years at a whack. It's stuff that we really need to eat within six months, six to twelve months. But the point is, if you're down canned goods can goods, you're solid for years past the expiration date, at least from a safety standpoint. Yes, the nutrition content does go down over time. Yes, the taste and the texture does go down over time. Let's not ignore that because for morale it's important. Yeah, I mean I literally have a morale bucket and it's nothing but baking supplies. And that's perfect because that's a community activity that you can do together with your wife or your daughter. That's a good comfort food that your wife and daughter both love because you and I I would eat the same sandwich every single day for decades. I have been eating the same breakfast every single day, barring when there's no toast, and barring when there's no eggs because I've forgotten to get them for the entire time I've lived at this property, so over five years. My wife and I were married for almost fifteen years before she would start buying pork chops again because we ate them so often when we first got married, because they were cheap. Yeah, man, sometimes you gotta do it and the minute money wasn't that tight anymore. She swore off, swore off pork chops for like fifteen freaking years, and it's only been really recently she's been like, why do we buy pork chops any board. I'm like, because you don't need them. Let you in on a pork chop recipe. Later, I'm gonna get you a pork chop sandwich recipe that she will love. You get your pork chops again. I mean, she started buying them again, so you know, we just had to get her past the training scar, I guess. But yeah, like we used to. There was a grocery store across the street from our apartment, and if you went there in the afternoons, they would take the pork chops that were like basically gonna expire the next day, and they put them at the very end of the cooler and they were discount them fifty percent off or so. So we would go buy these big old packs of about to expire pork chops, put them in the free you know, bag them up a couple of times, him in the freezer, and we would just we ate pork chops, peanut butter sandwiches, and red beans of rice six days a week. But look at where it got you. I mean, it kept us out of debt, and it kept us fed. It does it doesn't, and honestly, that's that's the important part, is that it kept you fed. I mean, look, I'm not gonna tell anybody to go out to not go out and build a bug up bag. No, I'm not gonna tell them not to buy tactical gear because I have plenty of it. I have spares, as I have more than I probably should. As I sit here and there's an old play carrier belt over there, and new play carrier and belt here behind me, and a pothcarry med bag back there, and there's you know, merse over there, and then there's yeah. I mean I have a sixty four gun safe that is very full of random tactical shit. Yes, like I have, I have plenty of it. It's fun. But and this is a big butt. You're not going to need it in a three day emergency, in a one week emergency, probably not even in. A two week emergency unless there's looting. And see for the purpose. Whenever I talk to somebody about like starting off in preparedness, I approach this from a little bit of a different perspective than I think most too, Like I look at it as you need to be prepared for X number of days, because that scales really nicely, like to me, it does. You need the same things whether you're preparing for a day, a week, a month, or a year. You just need a lot more of it when I and once you have a rotating pantry, you've got that baseline to evaluate and build off. But to your point about like tactical gear and firearms, like you do not need enough AR fifteen's and AMO to outfit a fire to turn your entire neighborhood into a fire team. You definitely do not need a Duffel bag and a half of thirty round stantags. Yeah, it's fine though, if he'll Clinton runs for presidents again, you can make a tidy profit. But I would say, like I've always told people, like if you're if you're just starting off, and you are, you are just starting off, get yourself a nine milimeter handgun. Yet, yes, three magazines. Most a lot of them will come with three. Most of them come with two. You want to get most of them come with two. Now I say get three because I like, I would say, because I like to have first of all, like for a belt system, I like to have one plus one of the gun and two spares. But even at a good stuff, but even at a like let's say you're you're the concealed carrier and you're only going to carry one spare mag Now you have one mag in reserve for of one of the other two mags breaks or you ejected on the ground and the the the bass plate breaks in half, or something stupid happenings. I had to pound out feed lips more than one. Yeah, so now you have basic get that. Get two hundred rounds of nine mili mir ammo. Two h rounds of AMMO will solve a whole lot of problems if someone is trying to threaten your safety and your livelihood and your home. I would argue that for the vast majority of civilian use case for self defense, the statistics have been bared out pretty well on this one. Most of the time you draw down on somebody, that solves the problem. If it doesn't, A couple rounds judiciously applied solves most problems. The ones that it does not solve most people MAG dump yep, and then that solved the problem. And the reason why it ended at one mag is because they paused to reload and reevaluate the situation. But again, I'm starting at three days. Let's say it's not quite mad maxim it's a three day emergency. You need to have enough AMMO to deal with problems. The next three days. That if it had the first magazine you burn down doesn't mean you're totally out. You need a little bit of extra for training time here and there. So start with the nine meal, get three mags, get two hundred rounds. Get that. Get enough food and get water figured out for three days. Assume that you're nonperishable food. Now, yeah, for three days to a non perishable And if for anybody that says you have to go out and get like the really expensive freeze dry crap, go get a five pound bag of rice and a five pound bag of dry beans and learn how to frig in soak them and boil them, and you'll be fine. Honestly, if you have If you have a pantry with five or six different types of canned food and you have a couple of each and a one pound bag of rice, you're good for three days. But do that as long as there's some kind of canned meat in there for protein to bulk it out, rice, some vegetables, some fruit stuff like that, you're probably okay because you've already got what's in your fridge that's. In your normally normally consumed and you're gonna eat what's in the fridge in the first days anyway, so it doesn't go bad. And assume that your house is a viable source of shelter. Yeah, yeah, that's a fair assumption. I think figure out sanitation. M M. Like, that's one thing I don't think a lot of people, like a lot of people, when they get into preparedness, you know, they they're they're they're laser focused on the guns. Maybe their brain goes, well, guns are fun. Maybe their brain goes this, fision is awesome. The medical stuff. Maybe it takes a detour at the food and water. But most people will totally forget about what you do with all the human waste that comes out of y'all's bodies. And if the water your most used prep is baby wipes, extra case of toilet paper, Oh yeah, extra case of toilet paper, because every time something happens, anytime anything happens, fucking toilet paper is out of stock. And bear in mind that we still we kind of frontloaded this talking about like worst case scenario for preparedness to start off at apartments. A lot of people don't think about this, but if the water pressure goes to zero, the higher up off the ground you go, the faster, your water pressure goes down. So if you don't have water pressure, then you have no way to fill the toilet to make the thing flush. This is one of those moments in time where like you just you need to think to think ahead, and you need to have a backup plan. Personally, I've got a thirty five gallon trash can off the back of the house that's tapped into the downspouts every time rains. I got thirty five gallons out there, and that's thirty five gallons for bucket bass, for flushing toils, for whatever else. I still to this day, I have most of the stuff I need. I need to pick up some supplies and everything and figure it out how I'm gonna do it. But composting toilet, no, I've got two hundred gap. I've got two fifty five gallon rain barrels, and I don't want to tap them into the downspouts on the house because I don't have a good way to do it and not have it be like a total freaking eye sore. Which, let's be fair. You live in an urban area or suburban suburb, so you it needs to look respectful, let's say, or commonplace enough that's not going to draw a ton of attention. So what I'm thinking is is that I have a garden shed in the backyard, fairly decently decent sized one, and I saved a non destroyed piece of gutter when I had to have the gutter's redoune after Ida. So my plan has been to fix that chunk of gutter to the backside of that shed. That'll work, and then down spout that and run that like you know, kind of like I have this idea if I like dig dig under the ground so it's easier to mow round or however I do it, but like tap into that to fill those two fifty five gallon rain barrels. I'm just because it will you get enough rain, yeah, I mean even the gardens, even just half the roof of that garden shed, it's gonna it's gonna be enough. But my point is. That, especially for your most common emergency, which is hurricanes, you get. Too much rain. Yeah. And you know, to be perfectly frank, like, in all the years we've been here, we've only lost water pressure a couple of times, like we've had bowlwater advisories. But that's also why we that's also why we have like a twenty day supply of bottled water sitting on the shelf because that's poddible. Yes, you wouldn't probably want to use that for sanitation for the most but that's also the reason why we have the non poddible water source. And in an emergency, I do have like berkiey filters and food grade buckets, and I have all the things off on the side to make an ugly little Berkie filter. Yeah, but it means very doable for inexpensive the filters and the most expensive part, plastic buckets. Maybe not so great for you. I'm there. Beat me and my wife to be PA free and their food grade. It's as good as it's going to get you. They're they're BPA free and their food grade. But buddy, look at all the stuff that's in there that they have not said as bad for you yet. I'm look. I work in the plastics field. There are material safety data sheets for every single plastic and there is a maximum exposure threshold to the Volvo chemicals. In all of them. Yeah, I'm not trying to say don't use plastics for anything. Plastics are extremely valuable, extremely useful, and they will pay for the garage that I am damn well going to build, but. We try to minimize our expose. Yeah, and I mean that's just just try to be sensible. And that's why it's for emergency use and not set up sitting on the counter for daily use. Because the stainless steel big burkie that's expensive. That's a few hundred bucks. Yeah, And my bigger issue was just that once you buy it, it's kind of already assembled, and what I have is compacted together to where it doesn't take as much space. Right, It's it's a double stacks five gallon buckets like that. Yeah, it's not, it's not an issue. But anyway, so like I said, I mean for for a three day emergency, honestly, I say, go get enough freaking like, go get enough water bottles. Get a couple of two three cases of water. Yeah, figure case of water per day per person. Problem, bad star knee. Personally, I would go the extra step of recommending like one or two of the big five gallon ate like NATO water water cans that I have. Their heavy duty as hell and they will last a lifetime. We have them for short term power outages where I'm I can't be bothered to wheel out the generator. I'm not talking about the fuel cans. I'm talking about the water cans. Oh, I know. I have those water cans two And what we'll do if we have a big storm coming that we're like, we're gonna lose power for a minute because I'm out in the country. We're not a priority for COMMAD I get it. We fill up two of those and at the very least we can flush the toilets like five or six times per cam yep. And if you that's in ten flushes of the toilet. Plus there's three toilets with two flush with one flush. Each in there already in the house. That's a lot of pooping and worst come to worst, I mean, if you absolutely have to use one for sanitation, jump in the shower and get your significant other to sprits on you know, sprits over the top of you. I mean, honestly, the day after Ida, when we were working out in the yard, that's what we were doing. We would take a five gallon bucket of water into the shower with us and just give ourselves a bucket bath. Yeah that works. I mean a rag and a shallow bowl of somewhat warm water. Yep, that was how it was done for a very long time. Yeah, you're probably still gonna smell bad. Suck it up. It's gonna be probably a few days to a couple of weeks. I mean, frankly, that's how we used to feel sanitation in the army. And it wasn't that long ago. You you learned that way out on maneuver. Yeah, So if we're talking about like basic amounts food, water, sanitation, get a thing of wet wipes. I don't care if you smell. I don't care if you smell like a baby. They just especially if you're if you're you're grimy and grungy and sanity, you're already struggling with sanitation. Baby wipes just make things go so much nicer, you know. It's the king of that, the unscented baby way. Ah. Yes, because nothing smells worse than a dude that's been out in the woods for three days and then the baby wipe smell on top of stank ass. It's bad. It's just I don't know what it is about that that particular smell combined with swamp ass. It's it's nauseating. It is the unsentsed ones cost the exact same. Get them. Yeah, you will thank me later, hopefully. But once you've covered food, water, sanitation, basic self preservation, like a little bit of medical, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit of medical. And here's the thing, it would be really really easy for me to say, you know, you you should just buy default have an eyepac in the house. But I'm gonna tell you what. I have used a whole hell a lot more than I've ever used a blowout kid in this house. Band aids, band aids, alcohol prep pads and like balls and medical tape. I'd be profen a sated of metaphine and your favorite anti diary. And a drill and a drill. I actually have a box of emodium. Actually, you know, I have a the little tubes of dramamine. Yeah, so I take those and then I take emodium. You know how emodium comes, And it's it's like the huge cars cell pack. So I take scissors and I cut very very carefully around those around those so that like I turn that that big old huge blister pack into just just barely enough to keep the pill contained. And I put those in a tube with the with the dramamine. Oh that's great, because here's the thing. If let's say you are violently ill and you're having a case of upchucks and down chucks at the same time. Everyone's lived through that at least once. It's not it's not pretty, especially when the power is out. A double dose of dramamine not all ways, but usually will arrest the throwing up. It will at the very least minimize it. Yeah, it may not on the level of like, what's the prescription stuff on the sea trend? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, my wife was given that for something she no, no, I think she was given drama me for that. Yeah, there's a there's a prescription stuff and it's escaped me right this minute. But two dramamine isn't quite to that level, but it's pretty close. And if you mix, if you pair that up with an emmodium, it will stop the upchucks in the down chucks, or at a minimum, it will minimize it. So like, I actually keep that in my work bag because if I'm an hour away from home and I become violently ill, the last thing you need when you're on the freeway. Yes, everybody's been there too, man, anybody that's been on a road trip and ate bad food from whatever restaurant has been there. Yeah, the gas station Sushi was ill advised and will have its revenge. Honestly, though, if it's a Casey's, the gas station Sushi's probably safe. More likely we don't have cases. I'm just saying their food is very good. Yeah, would eat around here. It's the gas station fried chicken, which sounds like an awful idea to anybody that has never been to the Deep South. Dude, I would trust anyone from the Deep South with fried chicken. That just sounds like a recipe for a great time. I mean bear in mind that Popeye's Chicken is originally from New Orleans. It is, isn't it. Yes, the franchise was started by al Copeland himself before he started the al Copeland Restaurants and Cheesecake and Cheesecake Bestro, Cheesecake Bestrow, or cheesecake Factory. I forget anyway, something with cheesecake. Yeah, but I honestly, man, I think three days is an excellent goal for anyone starting because we did what was it a one week of food. For under one hundred bucks or one hundred and fifty one week per person. I came in at like ninety something bucks, and I was on the low end, and I think it was you were. Andrew had the high end. It was only like one hundred. I was on the high end because I had fruits and vegio But even your even your menu was only like one hundred. Hundred and fifty. I thought it was closer for like one hundred and twenty eight or something like that. Or I mean, canfruits and vegetables at Sam's cub is not that expensive? Yeah, it was perfectly reasonable, but more than just reasonable cost wise to put all these things together. The amount of space we're talking about taking up is not that much you're you're talking about figured it out. It was less than three square feet three cubic for the food, but also add in okay, two hundred rounds of Ammo, less less than half a shoe box, bolk pack the water smaller than your box a three days supply of bottle of water. That's going to take up a little bit of space, but still not not looking at a few cases a while. Yeah, if you go the if you go the least convenient route for story, a box of like band aids and your basic medicals stuff. Most of that stuff is probably already in your in you know, in your bathroom. And what I have underneath my sinc Is literally just like uh, it's like it's one of those like collapsing fabric, you know, containers, and it's just filled to the brim with extra band aids, you know, like bold packs of stuff. Because I'm looking at it as not prepping for three days. But like if let's say, you just can't buy band aids at the store anymore, like society hasn't shut down, but just. Now, but you just got some supply chain disruption which we have seen recently, which we have seen recently, and it pays to have over the counters and band aids and toilet paper and things like that on standby. But Phil, do you have ari I near you? We have a mass these outfitters which is kind of like ari I. It's so it's like a slightly rebranded ari I. All right, nationwide, here's what I want. You guys to do. If you do not have an IPAC in your house, if you don't know what to put in one, and you don't feel like doing the research. North American Medical excellent excellent source. Uh, Skinny Medic excellent source. Skinny Medics store is Medical Outfitters, Medical Outfitters, Thanks, thank you. I forgot what the name of Refuse Medical. That's that's excellent. Sorce Bear bears a great resource. Dark Angel Dark Angels great. But my point is go to an outfitters like an ari I or a Capella's or a bass Pro or whatever you've got, and find a store employee and say like, hey, I need a medical kit for a two week backpacking trip. It's gonna be yeah big. Get two of them and you'll have some trauma care, you'll have your basic wound care, You'll probably have some tweezer, you'll probably have a splint. You'll probably a few other things in there that would be useful for most common injuries in hiking, which are also a lot of the most. Common injuries you get dicking around in your house when you're doing yard work. Yeah, it's an easy place to get it, and it doesn't have as high of a markup as some of the emergency stores, like you see something like. The stuff branded for preparedness on Amazon or at all. Unfortunately, Like you and I have talked about the night vision tax, Yeah, and there's a huge tax and the preparedness taxes mass, the preparedness tax, the Second Amendment tax, the tactical tax. Yeah. I mean if you and there will be some markup involved, even at something like an RII or a camping place. But if you're truly getting started and you don't know where to start and you're not prepared to do your own research, you could do worse. And the thing of it is that once you could do, you could do. Once you get that kit and you can say this is baseline, this is the stuff that's on in this kit. Now you can go get extra. I do most I do most of my medical my medical prepping out of our local seat, out of our local drug store, because, believe it or not. Our local Walmart has shelves full of all the various gauze and ab pads and trauma pads. And they even have the bulk boxes the cellulox stuff and bulk boxes of rolls of kobang. Oh yeah, dude. Coban is amazing for so many things. Oh dude. I mean it's great for field repairs or holding stuff together in a pinch. I mean, it does all kinds of things. But I guess holding a screwdriver to your arm while you're in a terrible position and you can't you cannot drop that screwdriver. Great idea. Wrap that shit with coban, good to go. But all that to say, like you can get off the beaten path and you can get most of the You can get first of all, ninety nine percent of the stuff locally to you. There is a gun store within a reasonable distance of you. There is a grocery store, there is a drug store. You don't have to go get the preparedness stuff, and you definitely don't have to go get the current best version of a nine millimeters hand. Now, I'm going to tell you that if you go to a gun store and you literally like walk in and ask them do you have anything it's police trade in, it will be probably have one or it will be carried often, fired minimally, and it will have more holster wearean than wear on the internals. Mm hmm, it probably will. I mean very rarely do you run into a cop that shoots as much as like you or I do, even now as limited as my shooting has come down to. Yeah, But honestly, like I, I don't personally see the barriers that have been advertised to me about preparedness, and a lot of it's also because like the community itself has changed, like there are more it has there are more. When I started this podcast ten years ago, I have to keep reminding myself it's been ten freaking years podcasting. Jesus Christ and Phil, do you want to know which episode of yours got me into your show? Oh, I'm curious because I've never had It's called Prepping in the Suburbs. No shit, it was called Prepping in the sun. That like, cause my first year maybe second year was Andrew. It was you. It was your second year, so Andrew come on the show. First episodes that. Andrew was involved in, and I was trying to find somebody that was living in town that didn't have fifteen acres that wasn't telling me to buy a commune and start a cult. I mean, I'm not trying to talk you out of starting a cult. There are pros, and personally, I. Think cults are a great decision as long as you're the leader and not one of the users. Oh of course that that goes out of saying, but dude, that is that is surprising because I just assumed I was it on YouTube. I just assumed I was a total crank pot for trying to start a show that was talking about reasonable preparedness to a reasonable level when the rest of the community was dead set against it. It was. There was only two people I found at the time that that discussed preparedness from a standpoint less than total collapse. And it was you and I think it was. Was it Brian Duff? Maybe I think it was Brian. Now Brian Duff was a little bit later. Yeah, I found him, well, he was Frankly, he was still working for the d D when I first started. He was. It might have been Patriot Nurse at the time. Oh, that is a hortal blast. From the past before she before she got really into the government will totally collapse. And that's not the dog on her. I think. I think a lot of the info she gives out is fantastic. I have not watched her stuff in many years, but a lot of her early medical videos were amazing. Yeah, and if you can, you can go back and YouTube and watch those early medical videos. Excellent, excellent advice on how to build a medical kit. That's how I built out my medical kit. And then my buddy Dave ended up a really high end nurse and I had him go through my medical kit and he tuned it up really nice. Yeah, after I took my first ab building my first medical kit, I sat down on this show with my sister who's a paramedic, who's a freaking amazing paramedic, and she we. Should have her back on for a medical top. It's gonna get trickier though, because she moved across the state, so like she used to live in the same town as me, and now she's like two and a half hours away. That's fair. That's fair, although I think I am currently seventeen hours away from you. About that. She probably lacks as much cast iron as I haven't behind me, doesn't she? Considering she had they her and my brother in law downsides from their house into a tiny home to make the move. Yeah, they definitely don't have a thousand pounds lie. No, they're in the process of looking for They're looking for like rural property to really kind of have what they always wanted and what I would love to have one day. They're just making that move in coordination with her career, relocating them quite quickly. Hey man, real life costs a shitload of money. Yeah, we all got to pay for it somehow. I do it with molds. She does it with everybody that fucks up. Yeah, But I mean, in all honesty, I I feel like that was something that made the show kind of an odd duck when we first started out. Was just this idea that like preparedness. I mean, the title of the show is from zero to Hero, and really what I meant was like, you come in off the street, you have no earthly idea what you're doing. And I think the perception is that you have to go to at max all in one jump, like if you're not, if you're not Burt Gummer levels are prepared, there's no point even trying. And I've always pushed back against that so hard because the I that was an. Actual sentiment put out by a number of big content creators back in the day. And I've that I am so glad has gone away. Well you say it's gone away, I actually the last year, is it not? The last year I went to Prepper Camp. I was literally talking with a So I don't know if you remember, you haven't been to prepper camp. So there's another pot And I probably will not go. I like our summer camp. There's more dogs. Yeah, I put many dogs. So there's another podcaster that started coming out that after we did, it's doomsday podcast. I don't think I've actually listened to that one, should I? I mean I gave I gave him a listen. I kept in touch Lawy here and there is content. His content's not my wheelhouse. But the most content isn't my wheelhouse, to be perfectly honest, that's why I do my own thing. That's a nice enough guy anyway. One of his buddies, Oh, I'm sure one of his buddies content creator I've made, has been pretty cool. One of his buddies who I don't even I didn't even catch the guy's name. That's how how little I want to interact with him ever. Again, literally literally told me that if, like, if you're not prepared to sell everything you own and buy one hundred acres of farmland tomorrow, you're not a prepper. One hundred acres of farmland around me costs like, depending on how bad the farmland is, two and a half to twelve million dollars. Yeah, well, this that was this guy's whole selling point was like, none of y'all are real preppers because none of you like raise your own food and live off grid, and great, great, yeah, that I'm not a real prepper. And I try. I try, so I try to like talk him off that edge, and he just he did not want to hear it. And I was like, okay, well, and then you and I just don't agree, and we're not going to agree. But the difference to me is that I've always looked at for the perspective of like the reason I started the show by my damn self, after literally googling how to start a podcast? Like how basic can we listen? When I tell y'all that this was a shoestring effort that I pulled out of my fifth point of contact, and I had no earthly idea what I was doing. I googled how do you start a podcast? Maybe that's maybe that is like endemic of the generation I'm from, where everything's on the internet if you just look it up. But I had no earthly idea what to do or how to do this or any of this worked, and I just or even how to post it. I mean, it's not something you're born, No, No, you got to learn somewhere. But after researching it and figuring out how to do it, and just starting with no earthly idea whether I was going to be successful or not. I started from the perspective of there's someone out there who's going to be screwed if they don't get this, not even the information, because the information was out there. I honestly feel like most people just needed the nudge, like they needed to be told, you don't have to be you know, farmer Brown living off grid. You don't have you don't have to be Burt Gummer. You don't have to live in a bunker. You do not have to do any of those things. They need to be told that Honda inverter generator that's gonna run your fridge. That's a hell of a good start. Yes, they need to be told that the jackerie and the solar panels that you bought for going campaign because you like to run a twelve ol fridge is in fact a preparedness item. They have to be told that you don't need enough rifles to equip the whole street. You probably just need one rifle and like a combat load of magazines and maybe some web gear to carry the magazines, and even that is more than entry level preparedness. I really I would say, I really feel like entry level pistol Holster three max. Yes, but that's a great to be. But I feel like people had to be told that that that was the entry level. The entry level is not Burt Gummer. The entry level is something much more reasonable, and much more mundane, and much more every day. People had to be told that all the old hands of preparedness, while their idea preparedness wasn't wrong, it was not a baseline. It was not record. It can be an end goal, it can be an end goal. Hell, it could be a beginning goal, but it's not. There is no zero or one hundred. It's zero to one hundred. And I've always told people how far you take your preparedness journey is an individual decision. I will probably never take mine beyond three to six months. I still take look, I still put away in a retirement account, and I still take my family on vacations because it is there is that perspective that says the world is going to end, we have to get ready for it. Every cent we have spare goes into preparedness. That's fine. I will be divorced if I try to do that. Most I would be depressed if I tried to do that, you know, because honestly, man, every couple of years. I love going to the Smoky Mountains and just dicking around on the trails. You know. Years ago I do Andrew and I had we're having a discussion about about money. It was probably one of our annual finance episodes, and he was kind of weighing out the benefits of like do I clamp down super hard on my finances so I can put more way for a retirement or pay off my student debts faster? And like I really want this new gun, I really want to go go on that vacation. I want to do these things. But if I don't do the things, I can put the money towards my debt faster. And what I'd always told Andrew was, I'm like, it's not a question of do I do this or this one hundred percent, it's what balance point makes sense for you. Like if you if you want to take the vacation, take the vacation, just do it, knowing that the op opportunity cost for taking that two thousand dollars vacation is I don't pay off two thousand dollars of debt. For fuck's sake. If I find out one of you is paying for a vacation on a goddamn credit card, I will harass you in person or online, whichever is more convenient. If I find out that one of you is financing extraneous, non life threatening things on credit cards at current interest rates, I will cry because in screen, for fox sake, a two thousand dollars vacation, there's fifty two weeks in a year. I'm gonna do that math because I am. While you're doing the math, I've caught a decent buzz while you're doing the math. Do you know what the percentage of people is last year who were financing a vacation that had not paid off the finance vacation from the previous year. Please tell me it's not more than ten perces thirty six percent? Oh, for fuck, so, I've not had enough to drink for this thirty six percent. The fambly is we're financing a second summer vacation that he had paid all the one from the previous year. Bill, Do you want to know how much you have to set aside every week? This year, to take a two thousand dollars vacation next year. Two thousand dollars fifty two weeks in the years like forty bucks, thirty eight, forty thirty eight, forty six, so thirty seven thirty nine dollars. Put thirty nine dollars away this year. Every week, you can take a two thousand dollars vacation. Hell, you could first under. Seventy five dollars a year. You can take a four thousand dollars vacation every year. If you just don't do it the first, I'll do you one better than that. You could put away fifty dollars a week, and now you have some slack for when bills get tight, like around Christmas or birthdays or holidays or things like that. Fifty dollars a week. Yes, that's where it's started. I mean, I you know, I got into an argument at one point. I've read it with someone and I realized, arguing with people i've redded is like punching children. Wait, there's no good outcome here. So you're not that old, but that is this is a an old man screams at sky moment, you were arguing with people on Reddit. Oh, I was over finances, and I they were I was. I was subbed to a financial advice subret at one point, okay, because. I was trying to better myself. And one of the people on there was he made one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. He had like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt, and he was paycheck to paycheck. Wait wait, wait, wait, two hundred fwo thousand in debt. Yes, I'm hoping something of that is a mortgage. None of it was a mortgage. So we're talking like student loans, three cars, an apartment and two people's student loans, two adult drivers, three cars. Was he seeking financial advice or giving financial advice? Okay? At different times, no one listened to me, lindas, if you take financial advice from person who has more non mortgage debt than they make in a year, you should slap yourself hard. You really really should. I mean, like my God, And the thing I advocated for that started this argument that attracted this person to shit on. My argument was that. If you cannot at the end of the week put fifty dollars in a savings account after your bills are paid at. The end of every week, fifty dollars time to sell something. You have either a had some terrible luck, which can happen with medical things. This stuff happens, you might lose your job. Bad shit happens to good people all the time. But if you are gainfully employed in a career track and you've not had some kind of like catastrophic thing happened very recently, and you can't put fifty dollars away at the end of every week, you need to reevaluate your lifestyle. There is something in your lifestyle you are overspending on. And this guy with three cars making one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt decided that I was the idiot because some people are living paycheck to paycheck just like him. Nick, What have I told you about argue about playing chess with pigeons? Oh? I know, but I was probably. I had probably fired off that fifty dollars a week comment while pooping at work. You know, you make those social media comments while you're doing something else, and then you fuck off back into reality because you have a real life with real things to touch and grass then and yeah, in internet, firestorm ensues and then everyone is yelling at you. So you decide to take it personally and you argue with every single one of them until they quit. Well that's what happened. Start small, Start anything, any good habit that you're gonna build, And preparedness is kind of a habit. I exercise this kind of a habit. Start small, Start easy. I mean I called build that, build those little winds. I call preparedness a lifestyle because it's something that, like, once you integrated into your life, it starts to influence parts of your life you don't expect, but it. Preparedness was part of the reason why I managed my finances the way I did back in the days when It's why I started saving for retirement. Back in the days when I made substantially less money than I do now and money was really tight, I budgeted my money. I am known to have both road rage and a case of lead foot. And back then I had a little four cylinder compact car and I pinned the friggin. I used to pin the crew control at seventy miles an hour on the dot in the far right lane and I baby that God help you if you were in the way, dude, I was. I'm being serious though. I used to do everything I could think of to try to save a couple of bucks, because if I could save a little bit more money, then I could put a little bit more towards preparedness without taking away from anything else. I literally, and like to this day, I'm wired this way. I don't throw out clothing until they have holes in them. I don't throw stuff away if it can be fixed. I do a lot of. My wife has to talk me into throwing away clothes because it's still. Good work shirt. Yeah. Well, there are such thing as low moowing pants. Unfortunately, I had to get rid of a pair of low mowing pants when the crotch blew out of them, because look. Do you own a staple gun. Yes, those pants are still fine for one more mile. You can staple that shit together and get back on. The mowor nick. The reason why the crotch blew out was because so much sweat and friction had worn the fabric between my thighs so thin that like literally the act of pulling them up caused them to just disintegrate. You know what really helped my pants last longer I dropped sixty pounds. Yeah, well I'd had these have been my lawnmowing pants for like four years. Oh I believe that, And that was lawmowing pants when they were no longer serviceable for you know, go to work pants. Yeah. Yeah, those are eight year pants. Yeah, as it should be. Anyway, Off the subject of pants, The point is pants are important. Pants are key? Pants are optional? Well, that depends. I had to go into a government building today and they had a sign that said no shirt, no shoes, no pants, no service. You know my theory on signs, right, signs are optional unless they're enforced by weight of law. No, the fact that they had to put up a sign means that someone made them put up a sign. Well, there's someone walked in that office with no pants. Hence why it's on the. Sign now, knowing some of the people in my county that would have been coming to court in that courthouse. Believable. The pants sign was not necessio. I don't know. Like that's my whole spiel on like preparedness. If you're starting out dirt ass poor, live in an apartment, you don't have farmland, and you don't have you know, a gun, say full attactical gear. That's fine, it doesn't matter. The point is probably most of us. Yeah, Because the truth of matter is like most of us live in an apartment, or we live in the suburbs. If we're fortunate, we live on the outside of town where we have at least a few less layers of governmental bull craft to deal with every last Like, very few of us are former Delta operators with a safe full class three weapons. Like, let's call what it is, very few of us. I wish I had a safe full of class three weapons, but that would kick my ammal budget way through. Yeah, And very few of us are sitting on like formal land out behind our house with b of burdens hitched up, waiting to drag plows like just to let alone the knowledge to use it. Good God, just be realistic. Most of us are not in that boat. And yet, preparedness is not about only preparing that one way. Preparedness is about being able to take care of yourself and sustain your family for a period of time. Whether that period of time is three days or three weeks, or three months, or three years or thirty years. Is totally up to what level you think is appropriate. I say three months is a pretty good place to get to. But if you started three days and you scale up from there, then you are you. First of all, you're not going to be the knuckcae, the knucklehead that's looking for a grocery store when the snow stars falling and everybody else's hunks out of their house. You can just go home and crack a beer with the dog. I mean literally, like in the very in the very first, the very first day COVID hit here in the US, when I can truthfully say we didn't know what we didn't know. There was no reliable information, nobody'd trust anything China had to say, and our own government didn't really have any great base of comparison to start from. So my wife and I had discussion about what we do, and I'm like, well, we're just go to shelter at the house. And we could make that decision because we had toilet paper and food and water and all the things we needed. We didn't have to rush out to the grocery store to go deal with people. We didn't have to go rush out looking for stuff. We had everything we needed. Yeah, exactly. It gives you layers of options. And even if that's only three days, hey, great, you got three days to solve the problem. That's a lot of time. You can do a lot of thinking in three days. You can do even more in four. I will say that the day after Hurricane Ida, when we had, like you know, a tree laying on the house and two trees in the front yard, and we couldn't ope, We couldn't you open when we opened the front door, we couldn't see anything because we were looking at a tree. And we opened the garage and then and the tree burst into the garage and we had to push the branches out and shut the garage to dore and go out at the back of the house. And the power ended up being out for eight days, and we had zero water pressure the next morning because a tree hit the water tank. With all the problems we had, and we had a lot of problems, but I can comfortably say that because we were as prepared as we were, we had a lot of peace in our hearts too, because we knew we weren't going to starve, We had pottable water, we had all the medical stuff we could possibly need. Looting ended up not being an issue except for a couple of dirt bag neighbors who were like skulking around, and we made it very apparent they should go find their own place to cause problems and not do it on my street where I was. You know, it turns out most people don't want to play fuck around and find out. Well. All I can say is that most of my immediate neighbors know that I am the de facto warlord on my street, and it would be in your best interest not to give me reason to act on that impulse. I'm the crazy gun guy. Yes, I thought that went without saying exactly. Oh hey, Popper, my dog decided to visit. I keep hearing a noise and I can't tell where it's coming from. No, it's a whining noise anyway. Huh. But anyway, that might be my dog you're hearing through your headphones. It's not dog much what it is. I'll probably hear it as soon as we sign off. Anyway. Check your refrigerator, could be your compressor. No, it's it's wife and daughter are doing something in the house. Ah fun anyway, I'll uh, I mean, I guess we'll go ahead and sign this out. It's been an hour and a half and I did not want this to be a super long episode. But oops, oopsy poopsies. We did spend half an hour talking about governmental stupidity. So there is that. Yeah, but we had case only need a proper good anti government rant. Even though my at the local level, my township people are being very helpful. I mean, this is true. Hey, look man, the more active, the more people you know in your local small levels of government, the more people are on a first name basis with you, the more likely they are to want to help you. This is true. Sometimes it pays off. And what the county, those bastards, Yeah, they'll get their come up ins, Oh they will, And I will have my garage. And as far as the topic goes, I mean, the best thing I tell you is, you know, like preparedness is like a savings account. It is the best day to start is yesterday, and the second best data start is today. Yep. Absolutely, But I just I really hope that, like in the year of our lower twenty twenty six, I would hope that those voices that said be Burt Gummer or be old male, old farmer brown have been largely drowned out by the people that are saying, no, we can be prepared, we can be preppers and not do that. Like there are more there's more than one way. Yeah, absolutely, and quite frankly, like I know that there's a lot of apartment there's a lot of apartment goers that are in urban areas, and I would rather see all of y'all prep the way I started out, prepping in a little bit one bedroom apartment, so that you can take care of yourselves for a short period of time. Then to say, if I can't, Burt Gummers, there's no point doing it, because that's exactly that's not the message to me. Any little bit. You can take off of the recovery effort yourself by looking out for yourself, the faster the recovery occurs. Yeah, and for purely selfish reasons, I trust FEMA like gas station him MET, like gas station Tacos zero percent. So instead of sitting in your house hoping and praying that someone government actually manages to do the right thing by accident, you should probably have a plan to take care of ourselves that doesn't evolve things outside of our immediate domain and control. Absolutely couldn't agree more. All right, Well, this is going to go out to the audience on March the twelfth. I told Stewart, you know, like, I'm not going to share it on public, you know, in the public realm, but I'll probably tell the rest of the patrons, like you know, I've got some family stuff going on, which is why this episode is pre recorded going out to y'all. I didn't want to leave y'all hanging, but I have a suspicion that on March twelve, I'm going to be up to my eyeballs and personal things. So we occasionally do this where we pre record an episode. It's not my preference because I don't get the pleasure of y'all in the comments, and there's something lost there when you don't have that organic back and forth. There does seem to be for sure. I mean, hey, it's like it's like you and I always say on this family comes first and life happens. We do these when we have to. We go live every other time. Yep. So we'll roll this one out the door. If you leave comments even here on like YouTube, Rumble of Facebook, wherever you're watching, I can't promise you I'll see them, but I might yeh, never know. But if this happens to be an episode that you caught, and you don't catch us every every other week, you should probably stick around because it's Thursday, seven thirty pm Central, eight thirty Eastern, and we'll be back in another week. Cant night to everybody again, Ber