Prepping Got Soft...

You're listening here, you'll pay us back just to be y shirt. Well, hello everyone, what's up? What is up? Let's get comfy before we get into this interesting topic of today, because it is it is something that is undeniable. It's been on my mind. I'm a part of the problem, right, which a lot of these types of videos. That's the thing that the the revelation that the speaker has is like always remiss to bring up right. Something is not right, And I'm gonna tell you all about it, and I'm never gonna admit that I'm a part of the problem. Prepping has gotten soft. It's gotten soft. It's gotten solved for a number of reasons, both good and bad. And it happens slowly and methodically, and a lot of it had to do with trying to get traction, trying to make the door into prepping, the access point into prepping a little easier, you know what I mean, a little more accessible if you will. Now, I remember many years ago, when I first found out about prepping, it seemed highly inaccessible, particularly if you were not a military, very veteran. Right. It seemed like this place with all these people who knew all these things that were like, you were like, who are they? How did they learn this stuff? You know what I mean? Like what do they grew up in the backwoods or they were in the military for years or whatever kind of special sort of training they took, you know, to be able to do this stuff, know this stuff, practice this stuff. I never looked at the prepping community as paranoid very much, you know. I never looked at him and went like, ooh, you know, but I think in the prepping community we both cursed ourselves and we also built up a level of insecurity within the community that I don't think ever needed to exist. I really don't for a long time, Like I don't know when was, I don't remember the year exactly, but there was like a clear movement in the prepping community, bunches of people making all kinds of money and content around prepping who were like, I'm not a prepper, do you know what I mean. It's sort of like a It reminded me of like a flag football player saying like they're not a football player or something like that, you know what I mean. Let's start with Let's start with PBN. Let's start with PBN and talk about it right before we go making fun of others. Because again, there are some things right like back to the beginning, the gateway to prepping seemed littered with military trip wires and special training, like you could get in and you could learn things, you could buy books off of experts, you could buy trainings off of experts, like there was a real like gatekeeper kind of feel. But the thing about it was with the integration of homesteading. Right, this is really where prepping changed in my eyes as I was watching it all take shape. There was an integration of homesteading. There was an integration of sort of the pantry, the canning, the pantry, the freeze drying, the food preservation. And what these two things did to prepping in or survivalism right, because really it was kind of survivalism dominant until prepping started to weasel its way in and from the pop culture excuse me side. Right. What it did, and I've said this in the past, is it rounded the sharp edges of prepping and survivalism and allowed people to say, why I do a fair bit of preservation and have a nice garden and a nice pantry, so I'm a prepper too. You know, maybe I don't own the short barreled ar pistol outfitted with all the cool tactical stuff. I mean, I don't even know what you would do with that, but you know, in that time, these were big dogging points, right. I got the optics and I got over the other big things are always like the neck knife. We've got the you know, the every subsequent wave of like for every year, I guess it is, or every couple of years, there are these like very real trends that run through the tactical prepping survivalism communities, this rounding off of the sharp edges of prepping and survivalism. Tada, that's me. That's why I'm here. That's how I got here, you know what I mean. That's that's how all this started. You know what I mean. Before then, there was a guy like me. Did not be long right in groups of people like this. You guys know my story. You know that I was a guitar playing chef, masquerading as a father, husband, doing my best, but not really it didn't really know how to be effective in a lot of realms. Right. Of course, you guys changed all that prepping, survivalism outdoors, you know all that I changed all of that stuff man really did. I was just a dad staring out a window, you know what I mean, at a hurricane, going like, oh, life is happening. It's real, it's happening, and I'm completely unprepared for it, totally unprepared. Like that. When I moved into my home. I've told the story a million times. When I moved into my house, my father in law handed me my first hammer, Like I'm a homeowner, I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I don't own a hammer, right, I mean, this is the situation. So because because I entered at a softened entry point for prepping, I was able to dive in and I remember going into prepping forums and posting things early, early, early, and getting just eviscerated for my ignorance, you know what I mean. But I guess my main concern now is, you know, I just got done doing Red Beacon Daily News over at the Prepper Broadcasting Network, and one of the stories was the fact that the largest the Five Eyes. You know what, The Five Eyes is the largest military intelligence coalition in the world. It makes up New Zealand, the UK, Australia, the United States, and Canada's intelligence. They just released a insane warning about artificial intelligence. I guess I should bring it up and show this audience. It's hard. You do so many shows in a day. It's you don't want to like beat people to death with things that they already heard from you on your earlier show. But it's a big deal. It's a bit. I mean, it's real. You know, you can't argue, you can't deny it. You're the largest intelligence agencies in the world coming together and saying, hey, you better pay attention. I'll show you the article. I didn't show the article off because we're fundamentally an audio situation over there. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because I think we find ourselves in a situation. Of course, we need to a band aid ad in order to get everything going. We find ourselves in this weird situation where like, this is where we're at. This is where we're at in real time. Do you know what I mean? AI models capable of devastating attacks on governments and businesses months away. The Five Eyes. They don't come out, you know what I mean. It's like they come out and do a daily podcast. This is a massive coalition post World War two coalition of intelligence agencies that keep their eyes on things. It's one thing to have AI creators come out and warn us. It's one thing to have you know, tech guys come out. The biggest intelligence agency of all time, coalition of all time, comes out and says, yo, we could be months away from significant attacks on US governments. Right, and this is where the leveraging of the power of AI is becoming very apparent. Right. A whole of organization and a whole of society response is required, said the Five Eyes. It's a very interesting thing. Man. You know, we should not downplay this. We should not look at this moment in history as a time to let the foot off the gas, or a time to say prepping is here's the old, here's the line that softened prepping. Right, Prepping is not about the apocalypse. It's about hurricanes, rain, tornadoes, flooding. This is what took prepping from where it was when I entered the stage into into where it is now. First aid kits, blackout kits, seventy two hour kits. Right. It took prepping from the fantastic. Well, no, it took prepping from the apocalyptic and to the unthinkable. It took it from the unthinkable realm into a more digestible for the average person, you know, a year to year preparation for disaster. And what's interesting about that is that we never needed it. I didn't need it. I didn't need a gateway into prepping when I was completely a loser, you know what I mean, completely in the in the masculine sense of the word, right, in the masculine sense of the word. I was pretty much a loser, you know what I mean. I was just unprepared, just wholly unprepared. Couldn't fix anything, couldn't do anything, didn't have any real training quality, like I don't know, just on my way in a very long staircase of becoming a man. But at the same time, because our society is so great, you have the ability to become a man, get married, buy a house, raise a family before you're really effective. I don't think it's that much of a problem, because I think a lot of guys get there. The point being that I didn't have a problem stepping right into the prepping. I didn't have a problem looking at the world back in twenty twelve, right, twenty eleven, twenty twelve and saying this is a damn mess, and things are going to go real bad, and I have to be prepared for that. I didn't have a problem envisioning a pandemic and the effects that would happen nine years later, right to the point where you would look at grocery store shelves and go, oh, things are missing, food is becoming scarce. That I didn't need the helping hand to get in there, and I don't think that people do either. What I think happened with prepping, first of all, partially was captured by government, right FEMA showed up and hey, we're gonna help. We're here to help. Don't help those people with the Trump signs though, but we're here to help. Don't help those so and I was a part of this as well at PBN. At PBN, we because look, we do something here at the Prepper Broadcasting Network that I think is amazing. If I'm not for myself, who will be If I'm not for my friends, who will be? Right? These people come week in and week out. We put out amazing shows on incredible topics, and we want people to be more prepared. And the people that listen to us regularly are the members of PBN, the are more prepared, insanely prepared, right. They emails, they tell us about their lives or things. Like a guy put a message in our chat the other day it was like, I think I'm done. I think I've done it all. Then he listed all these things that he has done. I'm very impressive, you know what I mean. And it's just these are the type of this is what can happen to people who really get into this stuff. You know, and trust me, the guy who said I'm done is not prepping for a hurricane, you know what I mean. He doesn't mean I'm done prepping for the next blackout, the next power outage. Nothing wrong with it. The base level preparedness is essential. I'm just simply saying to me, it looks like prepping has gotten a little soft, and I'm part of the problem. Right. And what is most sort of annoying about it, or maybe most telling about it, that is, you can see the threats are only increasing. I was trying to get I was trying to get a collection of stories for you, like a headline breakdown, because one of the accusations I have for the average person this day and age is that you're living with a news feed that I used to live within twenty twelve, but I had mine by choice, by choice, I would seek out these devastating news feeds that told you all of the horrible things that were happening in the world and all the horrible things that could happen. Now, everybody's eating that stuff up every day because AI is taking over. There's wars, there's rumors of wars. There's you know what I mean, there's economic struggle, collapse, downturn. Your president is a fascist nightmare who's gonna grip power and never take it over and send his shostaffing to come get you and your family and throw you out of the cuntry or worse like This is the reality that people live in now. And the big difference is I took the burden of news like that on by choice. Most people are not. Not only did I take the burden of that new zone by choice, I used it as motivation to start my own prepping, you know, endeavor, to begin preparing for a future that was uncertain. And now we sit in a moment in time where a digital god is being born before our very eyes, capable of basically anything it wants in the digital realm, if not beyond right, we're building its army right now, we're building its army and testing it on humans in Ukraine, in Iran. Right, we've got we've got boats, we've got drones, we've got planes, We've got all kinds of stuff autonomous. We built the Terminator Army, and we we have the brain to power it. It's coming into you know, coming into fruition. It just feels like at any day Claude will become anthropic, will become groc will become all one entity right before our very eyes, and we'll go, oh, there are no strings anymore. I guess my point is there's never been a better time to prepare for the apocalypse. Right. That was sort of the that was sort of the old tagline or you know the word, right, SHTF apocalypse whatever. World without rule of law was a big one. Right, these eventually, these unthinkable eventualities, these moments in time. I think one of the reasons we got desensitized to the end of the world as we know it is because we watch crazy things happen and come to an end. Right. We watched twenty twenty happen, all the things that happened in twenty twenty, we watched the pandemic itself take its grips and then go away. We watched the Black Lives Matter riots happen all through the summer of twenty twenty over a dead drug dealing monster, and we watched all that take place and then end right, And I think those endings are what kind of you know, make people say, eh, you know, it'll get bad for a little bit, but it'll be okay after that. Meanwhile, you know, you got preppers on YouTube and prep the prepping community at large and disaster preparedness, emergency preparedness at large. Right, Yeah, they're over there saying things like what build an emergency kit, prepare for a blackout, prepare for a seventy two hour kit. Right, Prepping is not about doomsday. Prepping is about Tuesday. Some yeah, some, right, I mean some are like that, Some things are like that, some situations that prepping requires can be that way. But the truth of the matter is, like, the reason this thing came to be, it was built out of survivalism. It was built out of Cold Word era Cold War error terror. Right, how do we get nuclear prepared for nuclear war? How do we survive in a wasteland. How do we survive when water? And I think we've lost something, Guys, I think I've lost something. Actually, I know i've lost something. I've lost a bit of an edge in the now, in the skills and the fitness and the knowledge and the gear. Even like everything's upgraded, everything feels good, everything feels right. Where I think I've lost my edge is in the overall threat analysis, do you know what I mean? In the broader picture of the threat analysis, and and in the imminent threat that exists. In other words, the prepping community always felt like and guys would get on you know. I'd watch guys like Baar Independent, I'd watch guys light And it could be the nature of me not watching preppers very much anymore either. But it's not just me. It's the prepping community at large. I see it, and it's people. It's people as well, right, it's people who are living this life in this moment and going ho hum. The level of preparedness right, like, it also one of those things. Here's a great metric. Right back in the day, it was like six months two year's worth of food. You gotta have it, right, six months to a year's worth of food. You gotta have it. You got to be able to stand on your own two feet for a year. Food storage, fill a cloud, pick a closet, fill it up with with some dry food storage companies direct, and now you'll eat right And it might not be great, but you'll eat because the world's going to come to an end and you've got to be prepared for it. And when you say it like that, and even now they're even coming out of my own voice, it sounds crazy. But what would a massive AI cyber attack that that crushed governments, government payments, governments, government payouts i e. Welfare, solid security, snap benefits, and then also you know, hampered the UH, the ability for businesses to do transactions, hampered, maybe GPS hampered, Like it would only take a few things, a few massive cyber attacks to really cripple your day of day to day life, your way of life. How about gasoline? How hard would it be to stop the flow of gasoline if you had an incredible like if you were Iran and you had an incredibly powerful AI at your disposal, We're worried about uranium. If you had an incredible powerful AI at your disposal and you said, you know, America came over and really did us bad. So we're going to, uh, we're just gonna shut down their ability to pump gas or traverse gasoline from one place to another, or maybe even refine it. Whatever the situation is. Wouldn't be that hard, and it's getting easier every day. It's getting easier every day. You know, it's hard to believe, but like one day, if not already, monstrous entities like ISIS are going to have laptops with immensely powerful artificial intelligence systems on. It's crazy to even say it out loud. How do you make right? Yet I feel like in this moment where the threat is very real and we're also seeing radical unrest, we're seeing levels of Islamic takeover in Europe and the United States like you couldn't believe. I would report on one off sort of situations about the Islamic takeover happening in the United States. One off situation, Remember, Charlie hebdo when I searched twenty fifteen news stories because I was going to read you some news stories from back then so you could see the difference of what people ingest today and what they used to Charlie Hebdo was at the top. I don't know if you remember, Charlie Hebdo, but it was a magazine and they publish a cover. French magazine company published a cover with the depiction of Muhammadan there and some dudes showed up and killed people, killed three five people something like. I can't remember exactly, but they killed a lot of people in who made the magazine, at the headquarters. It was one of the great warnings. You know, if France could go back in time twenty fifteen, you know, ten fifty, eleven years ago, I'm sure they would have there'd be some changes made, you know what I mean. But now the numbers have grown unbelievable, The influence has grown unbelievable. Kirs Starmer is out in the UK and I think that what's coming next from the Labor Party is going to be even darker. We exist in right now. This is what's weird about prepping going soft at the moment, and I think it's because people have been a little bit overwhelmed. Prepping has gone soft at a moment where uh, we have a greater audience than ever before, right, we have a greater audience than ever before. PBN preppers at large. Do we have that audience though, because we've censored ourselves and limited ourselves and toned it all down. Man, we have a bigger audience than ever before. Yet we seem timid. We seem timid, myself included. I think now, you know, I don't mind touching on hot wire topics and that kind of thing, but I do feel to some degree timid at times to be able to come on and say the end is nigh. The artificial intelligence is here. Nobody knows how to stop it. Nobody can stop it. We've also tethered our military to it, so now it is completely and totally unstopped. We've literally made the mistakes of you know, Skynet. We've made the terminator mistake. Immediately. We made it. As soon as we could do it. We did it. It was like we were waiting for the mistake. There was like a mistake hiding behind a bush. It's like the word mistake behind a bush, shivering, and we were just waiting for it to come out from the bush. Ah, let me make that mistake. We made it immediately out of fear, of course. But it's weird that America made it because how much artificial intelligence would it take for Chinese superiority militaristically, militarily speaking, right, But it doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't matter. What matters is it's here. What matters is Europe and probably parts of the United States are headed for absolute blood. I mean, we're getting to the point where it's we're dealing with the people in radical Islam that are convert or killed. That's their game. And they're building and building and building and building and building these mosques and communities that are you know, just in capable of assimilation with our founding documents, completely incapable of it, you know what I mean. Freedom of speech to a woman in a heat job is hilarious, like your first Amendment exists. Come on, So we find ourselves in it. Not all right, not all but you know what I'm talking about, right, there are undoubtedly women who are suffering like women shouldn't suffer in the United States right now, in places like Texas, So we have to be aware of that. In what I hear from preppers probably has a lot to do with money. But what I hear from preppers is check out this new thing for the next hurricane season. You know what I mean, and like I said at the top of the show, I'm just as guilty. I'm just as guilty because we all sat down and we all said, let's make this thing a little more accessible. But I think in the making of it more accessible, we've also made it a little soft, too soft to where we are a natural disaster preparedness entity rather than preppers and survivalists, or at least we spend time in that mind frame in order not to scare people off. And I think that's what needs to change. That's what will change from me. I can promise you that I remember times I wanted to mention this earlier but I got it routed. I remember times when I would talk about uh or no, I'm sorry. I would be listening to people like Bear and Dependent over at Patreon or Viking Preparedness over at Patreon, you know what I mean. And I'd be listening to these guys and and I don't know how often it would happen, but every so often. I don't know if they still do it, you know, Basically, I had to stop listening to those guys for a number of reasons. Sometimes it just got monotonous. Sometimes it got too h you know, over the top for me personally, for where my life was at the time, could have This also could have played a part in, you know how why my brand of prepping gotten a little soft in terms of the big overarching threats. You know, like there's no shortage of me talking about the daily news, just like we did with the Five Eyes discussing AI. But what used to happen is i'd leap frog from that too. Know, Skynet is upon us, and not in a joking way, right in a this is real, get your ass in gear because it is reel no, not Israel, Israel. So I used to listen to these guys a lot, and and you know, I even Dave Jones, the NBC guy j ferg here at PBN myself would get these weird moments that happened throughout prepping the prepping community where people would say things like, I feel like something's about to happen big, like I feel it. I feel that something is about to happen, something very big is getting ready to kick off. Now you can look back on those videos and those feelings and say, well, what happened. We don't know enough about enough to know if maybe something did happen, you know what I mean. The world's a big play, but it wasn't the thing. It wasn't like something's gonna happen. The banks are gonna I'm going to take extra cash out, you know what I mean, because the banks are gonna collapse. I can feel it. But every so often this sort of prophetic moment would happen in the prepping community with prepping content creators or even amongst friends, and we would oftentimes do shows around it. We do roundtables around the sort of feelings something's not right spider sense, and uh, I don't see that anymore. I don't feel I don't even feel that anymore. I don't know if I've dampened that down within myself, you know, like like calm down, buddy type of thing. All these parts and pieces that I'm talking about are like inextricably tied to prepping though, you know, they make up what prepping should be. They do. They make up what prepping should be. And of course there's layers to everything, there's depth to everything. So we should keep the lobby, the prepping lobby, clear to some degree so that people can get in and go, hey, what the hell is going on in here, you know what I mean. But at the same time, I don't think we need to make it so soft that people can say to themselves like, well, what can we do to prepare for the worst case scenario future? Because the other question I have is we see a lot of you know, domestic terror. We do, there's a lot of It's not things blowing up all the time, but it does feel like we're headed there. It does feel like there's a lot of people in a lot of groups out there in the world plotting and planning and scheme. I mean, what's going on with the reflection reflective pool at the Lincoln Memorial, Like, what is that? Where does that come from? I think I know where that comes from. I think that comes from Kah. I mean, not to put it on the prepping community, but I think that comes from there being no larger, grander answer to the woes of a future that people are feeling, seeing and reading about every day. Right, you could argue that the news really does a poor job at, like, you know, telling people how good things are and what great things are happening. But at the same time, I don't know. I do think there's a lot of value in being able to say, if shit goes to the fan, here's what you can do to survive. You know, I think that that to some degree, we've kind of lost that a bit. We've lost the constantina wire in our constitution, and I mean the prepping constantue. We got to get it back. Prepping has gone soft, and we got to get it back. We got to bring it back. We got to just got to course correct just a bit, you know what I mean, There's no doubt about it. We've all as a content creator here at prep at PBN, and you know, I know other guys out there in the prepping world, and we've all we all made a push to make it more accessible. There's no doubt about it. We all leveled things off to make it more accessible. If you have a business in the prepping world, if you create content in the prepping world, if you do a thing in the prepping world, you reach a point where you say to yourself, is this the ceiling? And how do we reach more people? Right? And some people move into like camping and overlanding and that kind of stuff, and that's all good. That's fine. I ain't knocking anybody for running a business and making a living, you know, but I do look at prepping and say, let's get back in the left lane. You know what I mean. We went from the middle lane to the to the right lane, and we've been sitting there, driving slow, waiting for everybody to catch up for a while. We've been driving slow, waiting for people to catch up. And the domestic terrorists are they're whizzing by now because they think the only thing that the only option they have is to bring it all down, you know, Antifa style, in encrypted signal chats, planning drone attacks and so on. Right, if you think that's going to get me better, I think it's time that the preppers get back in the left lane, you know what I mean. Let's get back in there. Let's look at the unthinkable. Let's look at the worst case scenarios for humanity at large, for the planet itself. And there's some of you out there who are going no die. I do that all the time, but I needed as much as I think a lot of people needed to hear this prepping has gone soft. We've fallen into a bunch of things. You don't fallen face first into a bunch of things. It's easy it's too easy to get distracted. When I started doing these podcasts, I do whole podcasts on like, Okay, how do you survive in the MP? Literally? And you started out going like and most of it is ignorance because I had no idea the devastation. I didn't really know how to quantify the full fledged devastation. But then again, there was a level of fun and exploration in that because it was like, you know, you can LARP a little, right, no doubt about it. What's up, common sense, practical prepper? How you doing, man? How are you so? What are your thoughts? Has prepping gotten soft for me? It seems as though prepping has gotten soft over the ages over the last decade or so. And it's not to say that it's all bad, right, A lot of people have gotten into emergency preparedness and prepping it large and are in a better place because we sort of, you know, tidied up the lobby a bit, right. You could come into the prepping community and you wouldn't see like zombie apocalypse right at the front desk, you know what I mean, and things like that. So I think that's important, man, That's an important piece of the puzzle. What makes me most nervous about it all though, is just like the story I read at the beginning of the show, the AI threat is real. I mean, it is real. The things that will happen, the things that will happen are going to do a hell of a lot more damage than a Knick's celebration parade in New York City, you know what I mean. We're talking about systems that are gonna shut down and maybe never come back on. We're talking about government systems that are maybe even military right moments in time, that are gonna make you gasp and go, oh my god. And this is just one thing to concern yourself with, you know, It's uh, it's just one of those things contemplated if you are a prepper, cause chances are this is the funny part. If you take a single prepper and get into their mind and look at their preps and their you know, how their life is lived, then you'll see that the average prepper that I know anyway lives like he knows hell on wheels is coming. That's the way that the average prepper that I know lives. That's the way that that's what their EDC looks like. That's the way they carry themselves, that's how they prep with Prep four and those kinds of things. But I just think what comes out of the average prepper, particularly those of us who are creating content, those of us who are out here doing this thing, writing the books. You know. The other thing is you write the prepping books. I'm writing a prepping book right now, and all of this stuff has an effect on the overall message and the overall feel, right, And I can't tell you, like several times the publisher goes like, can you tone that down a little bit. I do a little bit of scenario fiction in this prepping book. I'm writing to set up topics, and that's a little a little scary, you know. One in particular was about a terrorist attack in the United States and the scaling back of those threats and those potentialities, right, is exactly my problem with the message coming out of out of the prepping world. I feel like we're closer to threats than we've ever been. We're closer to the threats that we've been talking about for ten years than we've ever been, right, and here we are trying to like, yeah, don't worry about it. Hurricane seasons coming soon. Make sure your batteries are charged, and your flashlights are ready, and your oil lamps are all stocked up. And the part about it that bugs me is like, well, there's a bunch of parts that bug me, but one of the big ones is that's not what you're thinking about, you know what I mean, some imaginary person in some imaginary setting, we're sending a message out to hey, don't be too afraid of the future, don't be too worried. Buy a little food storage, buy the thing I'm selling, you know what I mean, And do all those things, get yourself prepared, but don't be too worried about the chaos. Don't be too worried about the prospect of the unthinkable happening until it happens. And then come back to me, and I'll give you the answers, a very digestible sort of message. Right. So that's the diagnosis, largely, that's the diagnosis. Do with it what you will, you know what I mean. It's a message both for you and for myself. It's a message to really sit down and ponder and say, what is prepping for here? You know, do we have to be do we have to be the greeter for all of emergency preparedness. Do we have to be the most digestible we can be or can we just go back to saying, you know, today, like on Tactical Tuesday here at PBN, today we're just going to discuss, you know, working and sabotaging behind enemy lines, just because that's a fun and tactical sort of aspect of prepping. Because and here's here's the most important part. And this is something I've talked about in the past with Ryan Buford from the Next Generation, and this is the superpower that is prepping because you know, you can I've talked about some of the great events that we've done at PBN, some of the great sort of hands on learning nightmares that we put ourselves through. And because of the nature of the cynical Internet, I've gotten a lot of comments and stuff about like, you know, you guys are just running around LARPing in the woods, pretending to be survivors, pretending to be military. I see a lot of guys who kid up on the Internet and a lot of comments on them. Guys too, they get the same thing, right, You're just pretending to be a soldier out there in the woods. Whatever. You can't. You can't discount what an effect that has on a person, not the comments, who gives a shit about the comments, what effect a little LARPing has on a person truly, And I'm talking about literal live action role play, like literal LARPing, like going out and doing a bug out scenario with your buddies, testing your gear, imagining that something terrible has happened, and you have to get from point A to point B under these conditions, with these situations, and when you get there, you have to make fire and shelter and eat and drink and purify water, whatever it is, whatever the hell it is. What I told Ryan Buford all those years ago is that for me, prepping was this great river with many tributaries. That's what it was to me. It was a river of many tributaries that allowed me to course down this wiver of prepping and say, maybe I want to go down this traditional archery route. Why don't because I want to because in my head it's a way to be a better prepper because I can shoot food with stick and string, right, or maybe even self defense. And then you get back into the big, wider river of prepping and travel down and down and you see the forge and you think to yourself, well, maybe I'll play around with the forge. You know, I'm not very scared of hot metal or fire getting burnt because I've was a chef in a past life, so I've been there, done that, been burnt severely. So maybe I'll play around in the forge, you know, And maybe I'll smash some metal with a hammer and see how good I am at that and shaping and the patience. And you know, I'm strong, so I could. I'm sure I can handle the workload. And I'm doing that because perhaps one day I'll have to make a knife, or maybe I'll be able to repair something for someone and barter my skill set for food or for things that we need in this hypothetical world. Otherwise what otherwise? For the average man right on an income and a budget, it's rarely gonna say I think I'll start blacksmithing this weekend. Why, I have no idea, no clue, just want to do it. It's a big leap, but with a little push from the idea of the end of the world behind you, like that little idea that oh could all go south, I better have a certain skills set I better have. I better learn some things, better try some things, better invest my time and money into some things, because you know, I might not always be able to run the Walmart for X, Y and Z. All of a sudden, you wind up amassing all these skills, doing all these things. And I look back on my life and I say, like, if not for prepping, if not for the belief in the unthinking, if not for the belief in the world without rule of law, there's a long list of things I never would have tried done right. I never would have tried or done numerous things because I would have been in the same mindset as everyone else. What are you doing running around pretending to shoot a recurve bow? Or why they make compound bows? They make guns dummy they make but smaller, easier to aim, more accurate. Distance is incomparable, Power is incomparable. Why are you shooting a bow and arrow right? Why are you out there carving sticks into a figure fall dead figure for dead fault trap? Why? What what do you think you're gonna do with that? And it's just been a hell of a lot of fun, And I'm saying you don't get there. You don't get there. If you get some kind of diet coke prepping message about preparing for hurricane season or blizzards, nothing wrong. It's essential. It's an essential piece of the puzzle. And you only got to live through one really bad hurricane to go. I probably need to get better at maintaining my generators. I probably got to get better at using the chainsaw, you know what I mean. It doesn't take a lot of that. But at the same time, there's an aspect of prepping that has been filed off a little bit that takes the possibility and takes the full sort of capability of someone getting into prepping and diminishes it. Diminishes it in a very big way. Let's get a little more to you, twaki. Right, let's get back to the end of the world as we know it. Let's get back to the foreshadowing piece of prepping, right, the part about prepping that no one ever talks about. They talk about the paranoia, they talk about the guns, they talk about the stockpiling and the hoarding. But the credit that preppers in the prepping community never gets is the crystal ball. It's the ability to foreshadow what could be and what could come to use history, to use serious intelligence that exists in this community, to use history, to use data, to use trends and patterns, to use your ability to literally digest information and transform it into a scenario where you foreshadow the unthinkable and then lead right and then lead your people or even just your family to a place where you'll be better prepared to weather that unthinkable situation where the skies are lit up with AI powered drones and the forests are filled with AI powered drone dogs with rifles on them. You know what I mean. This is the stuff that we as preppers have always done, and and lately it feels like we just talk about camping gear, you know what I mean, and and ball jars, and in order to get people to come under the tent, right, you don't need the all of us don't need to smooth the edges anymore to get people to come in the tent. In fact, I'd argue that this softened level of prepping has probably pushed more people away to look for other things. And I think that's why the radicalization of so many people's taking place, right because we're all radicals in the prepping community anyway, might not be your brand or the popular brand. Would it is, But that's just what we are this show, I was supposed to talk about our incredible news sponsor, hydro Blue. I want to show you guys the Sidekick water filter. I want to show you guys the amazing Sidekick three stage water filter that is ten times better than the more popular, unfortunately life straw. Look at this thing. Here's the pen I write with every day. Have you ever touched a life straw? This thing's actually the same size, damn near. And this is a small pen. This is not a full size pen. Unbelievable. I saw this thing in action almost ten years ago and I was blown away by it. And my light is too close and too bright. But you know, let's go real close and see if it'll adjust. Nah, not happening. But anyway, it's an amazing product. We're gonna have to set different lighting up when we go over all these products. What I have next to me and what we're going to talk about tomorrow on Surviving America is some incredible products by hydro Blue. I've got amazing things. I'm gonna give those sidekicks away. A couple of those sidekicks are going to be given away to our members. Throw them in the kit, throw them in the bag. You know, it is what it is. I want to thank Hydro Blue for sponsoring PBN. Now. It's a big deal. We'll talk about it more tomorrow, but it is a It's a long standing goal of mine. It really was. I wanted those guys to be a part of PBN because I believe in their products. I think their products are the dark course of what are filtration? You know, I really do. They do amazing stuff. We'll talk about it tomorrow. We'll get into gear tomorrow. The message is what it is. It's been a long time since I've done nearly an hour, but I just felt it necessary to get this off my chest today. You know, prepping has gone soft and we can change it, change it, There's no doubt about that. But I feel like we have been lulled to sleep. Therefore, the population has been lulled to sleep, and the threats have never been near, They've never been more dire, and we just have to be aware of that. You know what I mean. Thank you for joining me today. Folks, wherever you are subscribe to us, you know what I mean. If you're over there on kick we're on a lot. We're new over at kick but we'll be on a lot. We'll get you prepared, we'll get you in order. If you're over there at X, if you're over there at Rumble, subscribe to us. If you're listening to the podcast on Spotify, iTunes, whatever, please like us and leave us a review. You know what I mean. Let the people know what you think about the show. If you're on iTunes otherwise, just leave us a nice five star review over at Spotify if you've enjoyed yourself. It helps us a lot. It helps us reach all the people, knew people. We want to spread the word. We want to do incredible things here at PBN, and something tells me we will. Well, we already have. But even more, it never ends. Have a good day, folks, see it