NPM 15: The Urban Prepper

Well, hello, everyone. 15th. 15th. We have reached the halfway point here, National Preparedness Month. And, hey, man, it is something. It is something to behold. We were going to have Cliff on the Urban Prepper today. I don't know where he's at. No clue. We scheduled it. Changed the time last week, I think it was. And maybe you pop in, maybe you won't. I don't know. The show must go on. This is a 30-day, 30-live stream situation. You know what I mean? And, man, have we had some awesome people on. So I think what I want to do for you guys today is the questions that I was going to pose to the Urban Prepper, I'll pose to you and expound upon for about 15 minutes. And then we'll go our separate ways for today's broadcast. I may be on 9 p.m. Eastern tonight with another guest. But we'll see. I'm going to leave it at that. What makes people prep, man? What is the call to action that fires off That really and truly makes people prepare. This is the question. You know what I mean? This... Not what makes people read books about the apocalypse. Not what makes people watch videos to learn survival skills. Not even... And this can be prepping to some degree, but not even what makes a person purchase an item that's related to preparedness. But the question I have at my age with my experience in the prepping world as a writer, as a podcaster, as a whatever I am else here. My big question and the question that may remain unanswered because it's probably impossible to answer for everyone. It's just that. What is it that makes people prepare? And maybe... I. Want to say hit milestones, and I want to say what makes a person prepare in a way that is lasting, right? In other words, 2020 rolled around. We saw a lot of people do a lot of things out of fear and desperation. Then... We kind of watch it come back, come back to normal. You know what I mean? So at the end of the day, when I talk to people who have a lot of experience in this world also, when I talk to people who know a lot of preppers, what is it? What is it really makes a person go from living life, you know, sort of as we're programmed to, excuse me, as we're programmed to, And then all of a sudden, start looking at the world, start looking at their plans, start looking at their fridge, their pantry, their backyard, and go, we got to make some serious changes. You know what I mean? We got to make some serious changes. One of the big things for me was having kids. I know a lot of people who've gone that way. Brian from Be Prepared Solutions. Oh, look at that. Got the discount down there. Go to Be Prepared Solutions, man. Play around, okay? Play around. And if you're at Instagram, go to my link in the bio and check out our awesome PBN Brain Search. We have this massive search of the Prepper Broadcasting Network archives that allows you to ask it real true preparedness questions. You know, how do I prepare for blank? Click the button, search. It's going to pull you episodes from our archives, and it's going to chop them up. into usable bits. You're going to be able to listen to excerpts from the episodes. You're going to get great information out of that thing. That link is in my bio. When I had my son, I was woefully unprepared and we got hit by a hurricane. And I remember holding him in the dining room, watching the hurricane outside the windows and thinking about baby formula and thinking about gasoline and thinking about chaos and thinking about the road, right? and all those kinds of things. And just kind of, that was a moment in my life where I put a, uh, I put a flag in, in the hill, you know what I mean? And said, all right, I guess we got to get prepared. We got a treat for you guys. The urban prepper is with us. How you doing, man? Sorry for the cold boom. You're on. No, not a problem. Uh, and sorry for the delay. I, we have a newborn and, He wasn't having me do it live stream. But we got him. So, yeah, happy to be on. And sorry again for the delay. I'm looking forward to chatting. Fair enough, man. I appreciate you joining us today. I was just going over the question that I had in store for you today, which, you know, it is kind of the question of the ages, particularly for people like you and me. But in your experience, like what– and we did a little bit of a monologue on this, so everybody's kind of briefed. what do you think makes people really start prepping and stay prepping? And when I say prepping, I don't mean buying books and reading them or watching YouTube videos and that kind of thing, but in your experience dealing with a lot of people, meeting a lot of people, I mean, is there a formula or is there a sort of situation? Kids do it a lot. I was just telling my story about the kids, but your experience, what do you think? Yeah, I think a lot of people... The people that get into prepping, I think they always had kind of a prepping bug to them. They were always mindful of it, but they didn't take that first step to it. I usually think that to get going with it, it usually is driven by some kind of fear that they have. So something worries them enough to where they make that first step. And the first step's the hardest to really do. For me, I think I always kind of was mindful of that, but I never wanted to really go all in on it because i think it had a stigma to it that i was worried about this is back before you know in the 20 in the early 2000s uh for me it took little fears here they're building up so uh like for me when uh in 2008 2009 we're having economic issues i was worried about job loss and that was like oh i better start looking into this and then then i got married and then oh i'm uh i i'm I have someone else that I'm responsible for. And then for me, it was having my first kid that was like, Oh, okay. I have to go all in now because I have a whole other human being that's dependent on me for protection and for providing and for, uh, you know, emergency situations. And at the time I didn't have a first aid kit or anything like that. But I think that for people that get into prepping, there's usually some kind of fear that eventually ignites through something, uh, whether it be, uh, going through a situation or that maybe an emergency happened and they weren't prepared for it. And then they're, they would never want to do that again. And they're, they're so fearful if it happened again and they're going to do everything they can to be more prepared. For me, it was being responsible for, uh, for another life was the one for me where I had to, I had to go all in on it. And then the problem is that a lot of my local people, they, uh, they don't want to talk about prepping. So fortunately there's outlets and, you know, live streams and things like that, that people could, uh, go out to for resources. But again, I think the formula is you always have the itch. It takes that for that first step is the hardest step to take. And then something scared you enough or worries you enough that makes you want to go, go in. And for some people, they're scared of an EMP or some people are scared of zombies come in, or some people are scared of having a job loss or having a medical issue, whatever, whatever it takes is it. That'll usually is what I've seen help for that first step. You bring up a good point with the fear. fear was definitely a part of it for me for a long time. I feel like if we were able to admit that we were afraid, um, well, let me speak from my circumstance. I feel like if I were able to admit that I were afraid of the more, uh, severe and serious types of things that could happen, I would have got started a lot earlier. Yeah. I felt like I was kind of like really enjoying the sci-fi and, uh, you know, sort of like late nineties, early two thousands depictions of, um, Doomsday and Apocalypse and those kinds of movies. There's a lot coming out around that time. And probably in my heart, I was like, oh, man, that could happen. What would I do if that happened? But to your point, there's a stigma, right? If you start telling people, hey, I'm afraid that a comet's going to hit the Earth and it's going to be real hard to live and eat and drink and all that kind of stuff. And people are like, okay, I wouldn't worry about that. Yeah, they'll kind of ho-homet. Actually, I mean, after COVID, I mean, if you're not a prepper already, what's it going to take? Yeah. Uh at least get your pantry going but uh yeah i think i think some of the movies help inspire too like it might get you an interest but it kind of romanticizes some of some of Like a lot of people jump right into making bug out bags because they want to go Mad Max style and be, live in that kind of situation. For sure. Or I always liked, I remember I liked watching Tremors and I liked it. There was like that, I don't know if I can get their name, that prepper couple that had all the firearms and the, the underground, the basement and everything like that. I always thought those, I always was inspired by that, but I was at the time I was younger, but yeah, that was like a fringe punchline. Yeah. That group of people was like a fringe punchline probably till Sarah Connor or something like that. Yeah. Sarah Connor made, you know, kind of like the whole weapons. Yeah. Pretty, pretty cool. Judgment day to see when they go down to Mexico to the weapons cache. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty cool. And even like, even like kids now, like, like I was watching this movie with my, my daughter, the movie Trolls, which was the Pixar movie. And they had some, they had a prepper on that. No way. His name was Troll. Yeah. His name was Branch. And he had like, he was like the worry word. Everyone was making fun of him because he was worried about different things, but he had an underground bunker and he said like 10 years of supply of food and water and supplies. Phenomenal. And then the problem that happened, which is would be the problem with us too, is that he, he let the, this other purpose, I think the character's name was Poppy. I don't know how this is all coming back to me, but he let that other character know that he had a bunker. And so then emergency happened. And then the entire troll, they're all standing. They rate, they rate it. They took it over. And he's like, Oh, I have 10 years of food. It's only going to last, uh, you know, two weeks with this people here. So, You must have been freaking out watching that. You must have been like, oh my gosh. I was like, my daughter likes it because it's Trolls for me. I was like, oh my gosh, this is a horror movie. Somebody really thought that through and knew what they were doing in that writer's room. Yeah, Branch from Trolls is one of my favorite preppers. Wow. I might need a Branch. I wonder if they sell them. That's a good idea like it's a good be a good logo but you could you could watch the first 30 minutes of that movie and then get you'll get an idea of what and like that that whole i because a lot of preppers we don't even want to talk about it because like i'm worried about people doing the same thing that to me we're raiding all the supplies that take years and years and years to build up and you're trying to provide for you and your family but it doesn't it doesn't scale well to Others, usually. You might be able to do a little bit, maybe 10% of your supplies. Maybe it could be used for bartering. But for the most part, you wouldn't be able to take on a bunch of other people trying to pick it up. There's always limits, right? There's always limits. You're in the tech world to some degree. How do you feel about, or has AI affected your prepping at all in terms of, because I'm sure it has to some degree, but in terms of like, the prepping that you have been doing or are doing not necessarily leveraging it to your, um, you know, to your benefit, which I'm sure you're doing because there's a lot of opportunity there, but you know, have you, you know, all the, all the, I'm sure you're privy to all the news and that kind of stuff. And people are freaking out as per usual. Cause that's what we do as a society. Now we freak out. I don't know if it's colored you at all in terms of like, what do I need to focus on a little more now that this could be a thing? Yeah, for prepping, I mean, I use AI for a tool for a lot of different things just because it's like, again, oftentimes right here, like I'm by myself, like it's just a one person operation here. So sometimes it's nice having that bot, like kind of like a Jarvis or whatever from Iron Man, that person I could talk to these things to plan out various things. But for specifically using it for prepping, not really other than doing research for different topics. So like I was doing one where, I was trying to improve some of our wildfire preparedness and I had it going through, I had the AI go through and search, you know, all these different articles and like to help me stack rank the items that I should include based off of firefighter reports. I mean, having it do a research and analysis for you for various preparedness topics, I think is good. Also like for safety type stuff, like, Hey, I have, I have 10 of these these new, smoke detect like i've been upgrading some of our smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors in the home and and hey where should i put the what's like that that kind of. Stuff ideal locations okay. Ideal locations at heights and all of those things so like having it be like my research assisted for preparedness related things but as far as like you know in general probably you know probably not i think you probably preppers are usually pretty distrustful of things like that so like oh for sure yeah i don't know like even like taking a photo of my pantry, like, Hey, Hey, can you, uh, organize this? And you, and I don't, I'm not too comfortable. I don't even like having a room. I don't want to have a Roomba in the house, let alone a Tesla robot. But the other day, uh, the other day I was thinking like about the Tesla robots because everyone's worried about those and taking, uh, both like white collar, blue collar jobs. I had no job to say for the most part. Uh, But I was like, if I did have a Tesla robot for preppers, and let's say it wasn't like reporting back to a server and it was totally jailbreak, like a de-Googled phone kind of, I was like, what would I have that Tesla robot do for prepping? And there's a few different ideas that I had as far as it'd be nice to have. Yeah. I'm looking at my backyard and seeing a bunch of things you could do. Yeah, I'd love to have it do my backyard garden, like gardening and like harvesting and doing– pressure canning of the heart, just that alone would be, oh, that'd be kind of cool, actually. Or you could have them for all different things. You could have them for security and surveillance. Of course you want that, right? You all want a Tesla security robot army. A comms expert having that, hey, you're my comms ham radio operator of the family. I need you to do this. Theoretically, if it was a jailbreak one where I wasn't reporting back all of my metrics back to some server somewhere, I guess it would be kind of cool, but again, I don't even like having a Roomba or having internal cameras in the home, let alone having some. I don't get that. I do not get the internal cameras in the house. I don't understand that at all. I've done it. I'll put one in if we're on vacation and then we're not in the home type thing, but even that... It's scary even what the AI could do with Wi-Fi signals. It could totally see where you're at in the house. Yeah, it sees everything because of the way the signal works. And it's able to analyze all that data instantaneously. Again, a lot of the movies, I think back in retrospect, there's one called Enemy of the State with Gene Hackman. I remember that. He had his whole, like, lab office, like, in a Faraday cage because he didn't– to avoid that kind of stuff. It didn't have Wi-Fi signals and all those kind of things that you kind of think back as far as, man, they're really talking prep and stuff right here. And I just didn't know it at the time. But, yeah. I think about that. I think about it a lot, too. I think about the– I definitely– The advice I've been giving our audience is, you know, get way more comfortable and make it easier to switch from your on-grid life to your off-grid life because I feel like that's kind of the worst case scenario, short-term AI transition, right? It's like the computer doesn't work or, you know, most of what I do on the computer doesn't work because the AI agents are out there, you know, running amok. Or the internet, you know, there's just a myriad of things that could go wrong. And I just feel like that, that leap from you know your on-grid life to your off-grid life if you're if you're in a situation like you and me which is suburban urban you know that's probably a good thing to focus on in terms of preparing for subsequent situations with artificial intelligence yeah. And we're just only in like the infancy stage of this like this is just very still very early what's it going to be like in 10 years from now let alone like in the next couple years so it's uh I think practicing like actually the last 48 hours we've been, I've been, this is all the power that you see here is power. And even the internet is powered by a, I have a power station. I'm doing a 48 hour power. Okay. Like, okay, how would we do this during a, and this is just for test purposes for me. It's kind of, again, this is stuff that most of the normies don't care about, but I, if, if there was a problem, like, and let's say the, let's say full on like matrix style where they, I remember there was a speech there. Oh yeah. We, we don't know when exactly the matrix was formed, but we know that we were the ones that stopped the, the sunlight that we were trying to block this on because they were relying on solar. Like I think about that kind of stuff now for like, so, okay, well let's, okay. I have a, I have a power station in, uh, an EMP, uh, Faraday. I have a trash can that it's. Yeah. Okay. Could, could we still get by if that were to happen? So I think what would that look like? Yeah. Yeah. But it's, uh, uh, it's the genies out of the bottle. So it's hard to put it. You can't really put the AI thing back now. It's, it's out. There's models out there that often run offline. They're getting more and more intelligence, more human like behavior. Uh, it's just people need to do their research for sure. And, uh, like it's it's definitely a very very valuable tool for businesses and for individuals and start a business like if you're not starting it with ai like what are you doing like uh because you can move so much the people that are using ai are becoming 10 times more productive as the normal people that aren't using it so i definitely see the value of that but it's also scary and i feel like uh the way that our society moves and like government entities and stuff they move too slow for like oh that's what it feels like right what do we do it like why are we going so fast on this we don't even know what we're we're dealing. With yeah it just i mean i think the scenario that people should have in their head is just very similar to emp That's kind of what I think. You know what I mean? You would know maybe even better than me because you're in the tech world. But it just feels like that mentality of you wake up and this digital world that you've depended on for the last 20 years is sold off. You know what I mean? It's all gone. So now what? Now you got to have your plan to bridge the gap between getting back to making money, getting back to doing all the things that you do for work or another version of work, you know, to make money and that kind of thing. I mean, that just, that seems like the most likely scenario. I don't see him like launching a bunch of, you know, judgment day nuclear weapons off in the sky and killing us off, but I could definitely see him wrecking the whole internet, just going out overboard one night. Yeah. That's the whole like dead, dead internet theory. And like, even like being a, I'm a YouTuber, like being a YouTuber and like, yeah, I could still crank out videos, but I can't compete with some bot that's cranking out millions of them on the same topics and everything. So there's the whole dead internet theory, but yeah, I don't think that they would be a, Judgment Day-style thing where they're using, like, destructive weapons. It'd probably be a biological thing. We don't even know about it. Yeah, if you wanted to do it effectively, that's what you would do, right? Yeah, if they really wanted to. And most people, I mean, we all get blood drawn and everything like that. I think you'd probably have some targeted one for specific... Oh, I'm sure. It could just be. We're going to take every... we've analyzed all the DNA of the humans and we, these preppers, they have a certain DNA pattern. So let's get rid of these preppers first. Like, you know, contagion style. That's another one. Live streams like snotting and coughing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that for sure. Yeah. So that's, um, you know, it's, it's something to consider. There's always something to worry about, always something more to prepare for. It seems like, I mean, you have, uh, Let's give you some kudos, man, because you– who did I have on the other day? I was saying something similar. Oh, Keith. Yeah, Keith from the Common Sense Practical Prepper podcast. You guys represent like the– just the easiest doorway in, man. You know what I mean? Like you guys are very clear. You're very calculated, but you're also super welcoming, calm, and that's valuable, man. I think that's a really valuable thing in our world because when I started in prepping, I felt like I'm not a military veteran, and I felt like– I should probably be a military veteran to be in with this group, you know? And this was, you know, a decade ago or more, but you, you do a great job with that. It's sort of a welcome, making a welcoming place for people to go, well, maybe I will get into prepping. Yeah. At the time, like, uh, there's, there's a lot of like closet preppers out there that are too worried to like going out even, even further because they're worried about the stigma. And I've tried to make my channel at least be a gateway into prepping and maybe one-on-one that's like, I talk to everyone and all. I don't cover anything that's controversial. I don't even cover weapons or anything like that. I don't talk about anything political or religious or anything. I just want to bring as many people into prepping because I feel that the more preppers that we have, the less of a strain on the overall grid there is when bad things happen. I don't know how many preppers are out there in the United States, but when something like a COVID situation happens, the preppers were just fine. We, it was the, all the, the normies that were, uh, you know. They're fighting for toilet paper. Yeah. But if 25% of the population was preppers, like, uh, I don't know if we'd have someone like the same, uh, there's still be problems, but, uh, it'd be better. Uh, so I definitely be better. Yes. I try to, uh, you present stuff in a way that's welcoming. And I, uh, even in like the comment section, like, uh, you, you know, putting yourself on the internet, you're opening yourself up to, uh, critique and armchair. I don't, I'm pretty lenient on the comment section too. Even if someone wants to say, say I'm stupid or something like that. Hey, thanks for the feedback. I try to, because sometimes those people that come and troll you, going back to the trolls thing, but sometimes when those people troll you, originally, if you come back, come back with kindness to them, they, sometimes they become your biggest fans and they're like, Oh yeah, this person was cool with me. So I've always, and that was by, I had some mentors at the time when I first started that, they'd follow that model and I just kind of followed that suit with any kind of taken on that, that approach to preparedness. And again, I try to avoid anything that anyone that could, that could split my audience. So if I, as soon as you cover a topic, whatever it is, maybe it's a political thing or something like immediately you're out, your audience splits in half. So I try not to, I try to avoid that and do very like a practical preparedness to help bring in more of these closet preppers that you wouldn't even know that they're preppers. They don't wear cargo pants and they don't have parachute, uh, paracord bracelets or stuff like stuff. They're like, just like look like normal people, especially out in the city where that's where I work. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's an essential thing and, uh, I appreciate you for coming on today. I appreciate what you do guys. We got, uh, we linked to your, your website. Is that okay? Yep. Yeah. Uh, the website works and most people go, go to my YouTube channel, uh, which is just the urban prepper. I've been doing it since 2011 and working on more videos now. And it's, it's just, I never would have thought like just taking that first step. And at the time I was seeking out other people to talk to. And then I had no idea I'd start a channel and I'd get to meet so many people. I get to talk to you now, like prepping and like putting yourself out there to open up so many doors for me. And I'm just really grateful for it for sure. Feel the same way, man. It's definitely been an awesome journey. There are much worse journeys to be on. That's for sure. Well, Cliff, thanks so much for joining us today, my man. I appreciate your time, and I'll let you get back to the job and all that. Yeah, I'm going to go. Change some diapers and then go to work. But, yeah, thanks for all that you do. This was a fun conversation. 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