Recap of Ration or Ruin Week 4 w/ FD, IC, NBC Guy & Bankster Breaker

[00:00:01] Ration or Ruin Week 4w is coming to a close. We survived four full weeks. Ben the Breaker of Banksters here with Intrepid Commander and Future Dan. We have Dave Jones, NBC Guy, but it seems some storms are coming in, ruining some reception. So Dave Jones will be communicating through some back channel chat.

[00:00:24] I'll be kind of acting as his voice, some questions going back and forth because of course week four was the Jones Homestead food, kind of the freeze-dried packaged food. So we'll get into that, but let me bring on Future Dan and James. Let's start with Future Dan. Hey. Go ahead. It's been four full weeks. Can you believe it?

[00:00:51] Yeah. I've lost 16 pounds Ben and I've learned an awful lot. So, uh, I think we're calling it index. The exercise has ended. And from my perspective, it was a success. I thought it was a big time success for a lot of reasons. We're going to get into that today. We're going to focus mostly on week four. So the Jones Homestead food, we are going to have a full recap of the entire exercise in about a week.

[00:01:21] TBD. But soon we're going to strike while the iron is hot. So James intrepid commander, glad you could join us on this Friday. What's going on for full weeks. Just the end X and the exercise we made it. It seems.

[00:01:35] Well, you know, first and foremost, thank yous are in order because you guys have done it again. I mean, this is four successive years of these challenges that no matter what kind of TV shows are out, no matter what kind of YouTube videos are out there.

[00:01:55] These things that you guys put together are the, they're the ultimate balance of, of, you know, entertaining, but also really damn hard at times, you know, and this one I didn't do the, you guys look like hell those first two. So I can't make a judgment call on it, but this one was way harder than the one I participated in with you last year. I'll tell you that much, but it was huge.

[00:02:20] It was absolutely huge. I didn't get a final weight yet. I know I was, I was really surprised to have lost six or seven pounds or whatever it was those first two weeks.

[00:02:30] I don't know why I was surprised, but I was surprised. Um, so we'll see. I, I'll probably get to the gym this weekend and hop on the scale and let everybody know what's what, what, what has come away from it. And I'll announce it tonight. I, I told the members on the members only podcast on Thursday, but I think that we're going to do a quarterly 72 hour fast network wide going forward, just going forward. We'll schedule it. It'll be quarterly.

[00:02:57] Anybody who wants to participate can participate. But I think the biggest takeaway for me on this whole thing was just the sheer, the, the, the benefits. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but when I, it just felt like cleaner to me.

[00:03:17] Like if, and also now it feels like less calories, like I'm in the midst of trying to figure out if I need to eat as much as I used to eat. I don't know if either of you are thinking that, but you know what I mean? It just feels better. It feels right.

[00:03:31] Yeah, I agree with that. I absolutely agree with the question of whether I need to eat as much. And I got to admit this is week four. I'm feeling fatigue, especially mental fatigue, especially being able to cope with things that are business and future danger, the website and other activities. It's harder.

[00:03:55] So I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm going to be running on 6,000 calories. Plus, you know, take that up to about 9,000. When, when you add the, the protein shakes, I got to bring it up. I got it. I got to come up, but I'm not going to go back to where I was at.

[00:04:11] Yeah, I agree. It definitely seems like there's, there's a middle ground. There's definitely a middle ground. I don't know. You know what else too was huge about ration and ruin from a dietary standpoint was it's shown, and it probably did this for you guys too. It's shown a light on all of the eating that I do on a regular basis that I don't even count as eating.

[00:04:35] I don't know if you had this moment where you would, out of habit, reach for something on a counter, reach for something in a pantry and be like, no, no, it's not eat day. And that's not something we can eat anyway. I don't know if you guys had those moments, but I had them a lot.

[00:04:50] You know, like that my brain, I wasn't even hungry. My brain was just like, dude, it's like one o'clock in the afternoon. You know, you should probably go grab a snack and, and hyper focusing on it after a while really opened my eyes to like, you do a lot of eating that you might not even factor into the, what you think is your daily caloric intake.

[00:05:10] Yeah. Yeah. That happens big time with me. And one thing I will eat is it seems like it's healthy. Walnuts, almonds, macadamia, nuts, healthy nuts, pistachios.

[00:05:26] I'll eat those as a mid afternoon snack or even like a seven or 8 PM hour to after dinner. And, uh, those are, you know, four, 600 calories, maybe even more. And you could, you don't really expect that. So I haven't had any of that recently. And I had some weight loss too, possibly just from that, but throwing it all together. Um, I agree with you guys all around. Yeah. I, I definitely realized that like, like,

[00:05:56] getting, um, I'd say like up to probably the beginning of this challenge up to the beginning of this challenge. I had this thing in my head that was like, you know, you're almost 40 years old. You probably looking as good as you're going to look. And, you know, it is what it is. Who cares? You know, I don't necessarily work out to look really good. It's all about fitness and all that, but, um, I don't mind it. But what I noticed after two, three weeks of really cutting back calories was,

[00:06:26] dang, I could look a lot better if I just focus a little more and, you know, maybe a few less fruity pebble bowls at night before bed. And I think the quarterly fast is a great idea. I'm going to participate in that. The 72 hour fast once a quarter is about right. And what I've done the last year.

[00:06:47] And also I think, uh, at least one day a week going forward, I'm not going to eat anything. So that'll be like a 24 to 30 hour fast once a week. Otherwise though, I'm going to go back to my normal calories, normal food, but try to be more focused on a little more focused on portion control and what calories are in there. So that was actually, this is a good segue right into the Jonestead food.

[00:07:14] We got some great freeze dried package food. We had kind of a chicken super stew. We had a beef stew and we had eggs, right? But they didn't come with the normal nutrition label you see. So it took some effort and guesstimation to understand, okay, what might be in this?

[00:07:38] What is rationing of this? Cause part of rationing of ruin is, Hey, if stuff hits the fan, we don't want to eat too much of our, uh, our rations or our stash. We won't, we're trying to prolong that. So I'm going to go to future Dan. Um, you kinda, I mean, you came up with the name rationer ruin and a lot of the ideas behind it.

[00:08:00] Could you take us through the difference of the homestead food compared to the other three we had, and maybe just a little bit of background of, of the exercise as a whole?

[00:08:13] Yeah. Yeah. To recap the exercise, the idea it's sort of an extreme situation, right? Where you've come to a point in a, you know, where there's a restriction on the food, right? You know, you don't have sources of food that you normally do and it's getting, it's gotten extreme. So you need to ration. Right. And one way to do that is alternative day fasting, which we, we practice in the main.

[00:08:42] The other choice would be just to eat smaller amounts every day. And we didn't test that. We did it a different method, but point being is putting ourselves into, you know, for one month, what would happen if you had to eat emergency food?

[00:08:56] And this is the fourth product review. Although it's quite a different type of product review. It's, it is, we're going to take a look at it side by side with week one, ready hour week to mountain house last week, week three, the XMRE product. Now we're doing what I'm calling the Jonestead or for an abbreviated term, Jonestead emergency food.

[00:09:22] And it scores completely differently opposite in most cases than, than the, the, the manufactured brands. I think then. It really is a little bit of a mirror. So while you run us through, if you want, and we can talk about your scores and James, I want to hear your kind of comment on the attribute and I'll throw mine into, and Dave Jones is also standing by.

[00:09:48] If we have questions for him, if we have questions for him, let me know for kind of, you know, ask the question and I'll put it in chat. Future Dan longevity. You gave it a two out of 10. Yeah. And that's mostly because I'm, I'm not sure what the longevity is. Anybody got any ideas?

[00:10:10] I know that Dave said actually on a daily auto cash, like this week that they are packaging go forward using mylar. I believe in a little bit more long-term packaging, which goes with your packaging score of a five, a little bit later on. And the longevity though, that's a great question. Dave, if you could hear us, what, how long would you trust those freeze dried eggs and the, and the stew and the soup? Are you thinking a year, five years?

[00:10:40] What's your thoughts there? He says five to 10 years. I do know he stores this in really nice, dark, cool conditions. So that probably has a, as big or bigger effect on this than even the other three options we had during ration ruin. Intrepid commander, any thoughts on the longevity?

[00:11:01] I know you've done a lot of content about Homestead food and I don't know about freeze drying per se, but the longevity five to 10 years, it seems pretty long. That seems legit to me. It sounds good to me. It's not just the fact that it's freeze dried, but it's freeze dried and vacuum sealed. So I think all you'd be really worrying about is protecting the packaging. Like if you could protect the packaging, I don't even know that to be honest, cause it's vacuum sealed.

[00:11:29] I don't even know that an oxygen absorber in there would make that big a difference. Yeah. I don't think you're getting, I don't think you're getting all the oxygen out and those are raw eggs. Maybe, maybe frozen for 10 years, but shelf stable. Raw eggs for 10 years. Personally, I would hold onto that stuff as long as it was on the shelf and the package was all right.

[00:11:56] And then I would check it out as I prepared it because if something went wrong with the eggs, you would know there would be, you know what I mean? If you, and the thing about it is there's no moisture and the, and the whole thing with things going bad is, you know, one of the biggest things anyway is moisture. And so, yeah, the freeze drying product, but Hey, I guess the important thing is there's no guarantee. Whereas we have something of a guarantee from the other brands. I don't know.

[00:12:26] You know, I can tell you personally, this coming from the guy who ate a raccoon over the last month, I'd eat it. Well, as we know, there's a push pull with all of these attributes. You can't score a 10 all the way across literally even NASA spending millions of dollars on their space food. Can't hit a 10 all the way across.

[00:12:51] So additives feature Dan, you gave it a 10 out of 10, meaning no additives, meaning a 10 is really good. Cause there's no negative nitrates and other crap in there. So that's huge. So even if it's only, let's take the low end of like five years with no additives and other scores here that are pretty darn high. And we'll get into those. That's nice. Not, not have those additives for sure. Intrepid commander.

[00:13:17] You ever, on your storable food, you add, you know, additives and Dave, if you can hear us, you know, did, was any extra additives added to the salt or, uh, was any extra salt or additives added to the stew? Uh, it tasted great. Didn't taste. I'm guessing. No, I'm guessing. No. Cause I had, I added salt. I needed a little bit of salt for flavor. Okay. All right. So I've been complaining this whole exercise about taking in all these toxic chemicals.

[00:13:47] No toxic chemicals coming out of the Jones that I loved it. Uh, the traffic commander nutrition and taste nine and a nine from future Dan. I give the nutrition and the taste a nine or a 10 as well. I mean, it's better than that. I'm right with that. What do you think? I'm right there with that. I loved it.

[00:14:08] After, after the weeks of a limited eating period and eating like, I'll tell you what though, the XMREs, they weren't bad, but coming off of all that stuff. And then having that Maria stew on Memorial day, that was nice. That was a treat. Heck yeah. Oh, so good. Um, and I've been pushing, been pushing Dave that, Hey, I want to buy more of all the, all of it.

[00:14:36] The chicken, the, the beef, the eggs are, but this goes to the variety that we'll, we did only get three packs and they were all like entrees. So in contrast to the MRE, which had an entree kind of a sub entree as well as a snack or two. So four different things per MRE. And there was multiple types of MREs a little bit. That was like a five or six of variety.

[00:15:01] I believe we scored it, uh, future Dan, you want to go into the variety and Dave, what else? Can you guys make a lot of other options? Are you guys, I know you guys tried some chicken in or a rabbit and rice though. So future Dan on the variety, what'd you think? Yeah, I give it a two, but it deserved a three because there was only three different types of food. So that's the hard part.

[00:15:27] I think when it comes to freeze drying, homemade food, it's going to be a challenge to get a broad variety compared to store-bought. Yep. Yep. And I think they're going to be experimenting and expanding. I think that rabbited rice in of itself would knock this variety up to a five or six, but you're right. You're right. There's only so many things you can have. Uh, I'm going back to those MRE mini cookies.

[00:15:56] That was one of the best things I had all week. And it's just like little snacks like that little chocolates or snacks as part of your prepper pantry. Just, uh, for morale purposes. What do you think, James? Oh man, I'm still, like I said, supplements, protein. Those are my, those are my sort of, and I mean, shelf stable protein. Um, those are my sort of focal point probably going through the rest of this year.

[00:16:22] If I had one nutritional prep that the commander will be focused on is that supplements for everyone for probably six months. And then, um, and then I want, I want shelf stable protein because the one thing that happened, what was it? I don't know. Monday, Tuesday is we've, we got raided. We got raided by a Fox and he ate all the quail and a bunch of chickens and that's it.

[00:16:53] I mean, like in a, in the real ration of ruin scenario, you know, where you're not going to run to Southern States and grab some chickens. You're not going to leave your house because it's dangerous to leave your house. If that happens, which it happens to everybody. If that happens, then all this, and that's your premier protein source. Now you're screwed. You know what I mean?

[00:17:15] So I'm, I'm definitely, I like the protein powder idea, but I think I'm also going to look at the, uh, some more of the canned, I forget what the brand. There's a brand called cave food. Cave food. Is it called caveman? I don't know. There's two brands out there. One of them is Keystone and they do these really, I mean, better than supermarket canned meats. And it's just straight up meat in a can.

[00:17:44] And I think I'd like to have a lot of that as a backup, you know, no, not, don't have to worry about freezer. Don't have to worry about power. Don't have to worry about anything. We know we got protein. We know we got powdered protein. And then, you know, if a black bear wanders into the yard and eats everything that's walking around, we still got protein, you know? Or nuclear fallout blows over. You might not want to. Yeah. Compromise. So the inside is important.

[00:18:14] Yes. Yes. Uh, NBC guy says almost anything they can freeze dry. Essentially. They're just getting started. We were doing rabbit and eggs. Lots of it. I know that it's better to run that freeze dryer in the cold. So maybe after your huge harvest, I'm sure you're going to have knock on wood, uh, this fall. You'll be probably trying a lot of things, preserving a lot of that.

[00:18:38] Um, yeah, I think in my opinion, the number one reason the nutrition was out of this world was because the protein per, let's just say protein per a hundred calories. There's twice as much in the Jones homestead food. Oh yeah.

[00:18:57] And it was all whole food protein, not soy protein or some wheat protein that doesn't really count compared to like actual chicken from homestead, actual egg protein. So like way more protein per calorie. And that protein quality is much, much higher. So that in of itself is awesome. But it had like mushrooms and herbs and spices. Like it was awesome. The nutrition. I have a confession to make.

[00:19:26] I've got a confession to make about the vegetarian taco. I never, I never ate it. This is a sound great. I believe it. I never ate it. It wasn't good. I looked at it. I heard remarks in the back channel. It was Friday. I was going to eat it after our show, but we didn't do the show. And then the night went on and I was like, I think I'm just going to have some eggs. You can call it. And I still have it.

[00:19:52] So, I mean, and that's important to the listeners because that means like, you know, there is a chance. And I think another thing that we couldn't have pulled off, even if we had to, is we chose to do this challenge and we chose to suffer through some of these fears. And it's important to remember that your kids, your spouse, they might say, I'll pass. I'll pass on eating this tonight. I don't want it. I don't care how hungry I am.

[00:20:20] You know, like the cheesy broccoli soup might be one of those things. Important to consider. Ben, I'm not a chemist or, you know, prepared food, you know, expert, but it seems the amount of protein you get in Jonestead as a product is directly, you know, relates to the longevity.

[00:20:46] I think those other brands to get to the 30-year mark, they just, you know, MRE, you know, those are liquid. Yeah. Yeah, they're not going to last as long. Those were like five to 10-year rated as well. I think like 10-year. So, they weren't 30. The Mountain House and the Ready Hour were 25 or 30. So, those definitely were. But great point. Great point. And same with healthy fats.

[00:21:14] Healthy fats go rancid no matter what at some point. Yeah, the longevity on fat is always one that's overlooked. You know what I mean? Like a long-term fat plan. I think that's one of the things I love so much about pig lard. You know what I mean? Because it is a renewable kind of and insanely delicious fat source.

[00:21:40] Because, you know, once you're done with your cooking oils and your coconut oils and your, you know, all that, it's like if they don't go sour, if you have too much of them, right? If they don't go sour, well, eventually you run out and then you don't have fat. And that's, you know, there aren't too many wild animals running around that are just fattened up. Sure. If stuff is going sideways, there ain't going to be that many running around at all because everyone's going to turn into a hunter over and over again.

[00:22:11] I think it's probably worth mentioning to the audience about overall, we all did pretty poorly on any kind of protein procurement in the wild. We did not do well. And I think that people should wrap their head around that because I'm telling you guys, like, now I did do some stupid stuff that my kids will never let me live down. But I'm not even talking about the raccoon.

[00:22:40] I'm talking about throwing fish back in. Like one night I was out, my son caught a nice bass, but I couldn't eat it. It was too big. I said, put it back. It's going to make big babies. And my little son, he just laughs at me every time we talk about it now. But all that said, I thought that I was going to mop up. I really did. And one of the things that really got me was it rained like crazy and it was windy as hell.

[00:23:04] And I also got into this mode in fishing where it's almost like I'm out there fishing. I'm relaxed. I'm having a good time. I'm here to fish. You know, this is my hobby, yada, yada, yada. That, James, is just way better at fishing than one of the things I would do is I would catch like a bluegill. And I'd catch another bluegill and I'd be like, oh, shit, the bluegill are here. So then I'd stop using the bait I was using.

[00:23:32] I'd put on a bobber and a float or a float and a hook with a worm. And I'd be like, all right, I'm going to pull these things in one after another. And then I wouldn't catch anymore. So I think changing things up hurt me a lot. The weather is something that we'll never know. So we got to keep that in mind, right? You think you're going to jump out into a spring and the spring is going to be the way that it is. And this also has to do with your garden, too, right? You think you're going to have a garden because it's June.

[00:24:00] You're always going to have a garden in June or whatever the situation is. And then you have these weather situations. Yeah. Like I said, I love having the gardens. I love having the ability to do the outdoor stuff. But I do think I need to focus a little more on what is. And I got a lot of stuff in the house already. But protein related, that kind of stuff, I need to focus on more because it wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. And it really surprised me.

[00:24:28] Probably surprised me more than anything else. I think it comes down to layering your systems, all your food. You could have a very baseline 25-year, a few buckets. But you want to have a lot, you know, multi-layered, multi-faceted. And that's one thing I foresee and hope to make a nice deal with Dave Jones and Maria about. I want to buy a month, two months, three months worth of this food.

[00:24:57] And I'll eat it within a year or two and just kind of, hey, I'll eat it like one of these soups every week or every other week. And then I'll buy some new, you know, six months later and just rotate it out. You ought to hitch a ride with them to Costco also. Well, apparently this might be for sale at Prepper Camp. But you want to put a Prepper Camp plug in real quick, James? 25% off tickets till the end of June. Get on it.

[00:25:27] Get on it because it's going to be an amazing year, man. We are about to – I have interviews lined up with like I think 10 speakers. We're doing a whole Prepper Camp speaker series. It's going to be diabolical actually because they're going to be short to the point, 15-minute interviews. And you really get to – for the first time I think on PBN you'll get to hear the level of talent that's at Prepper Camp. A lot of times we gush about it, you know what I mean? We're like, oh, it's such a fun time.

[00:25:57] There's all these classes. There's all these experts. But one of the things that I never really do is get the people on that talk, you know, that do the classes. Outside of, you know, half the damn hosts that do them. But outside of those folks, a lot of people who listen to us talk about Prepper Camp don't really know those people. And they're, I mean, insanely qualified. It's going to be good. It's going to be an awesome year. Awesome. Legit. The cost. Yeah.

[00:26:26] Dan, you put a question mark. I have not done my cost analysis yet, but I will before we do our full recap in like the next week. But talk about cost or we can have a couple questions for Dave about cost if you want. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let's have a bigger, you know, thought experiment about this. You're homesteading like with what David and his wife have going on. What's the value of that labor? And also, what is you do?

[00:26:56] A moment ago, Ben said that you buy some from them. Perhaps, you know, you work this from the bottom up and build it up like, you know, their time's worth money. The inputs to that economic production have a cost. So, how much is product valued at? And, you know, once you can do that, you can get down to, you know, cost per calorie. Or you can do market value.

[00:27:22] And you are a buyer, not the only one potentially. But so maybe for now, what would you value the same? Now, let's just take, for example, the dozen freeze dried raw eggs. What's that worth to you? Oh, I love it. Great question. I'm going to, this will inspire me to work both top down and bottom up on my price analysis.

[00:27:49] I'll give a good range for market price, for what I would pay for it, for looking at it that point of view. Simply put, the mountain house, like bacon and eggs mixture, was only one-third or one-quarter as many eggs, you know, volume as one of those packs. So, there's only like four eggs, I think, in the mountain house, maybe five. And there were 12 in the Dave Jones.

[00:28:17] In that mountain house, I got to do my full spreadsheet comparison for all four. That's what I'm going to do by our next recap. But that mountain house is like $10 minimum. So, you could value those dozen eggs upwards of $15, $20 for one of those packs. So, at least, you know, $1.50 per egg minimum. And maybe more. Hard to know for sure.

[00:28:43] Now, whether the cost and the time and all that, how that works out. You got to do it at scale. I know the freeze dryer is not, or yeah, the whole machine, the whole process is expensive. The bags are not cheap when you're doing the Mylar type that he's going to be going over to. Not just the vacuum seal bags. So, it's great. I'm looking forward to it. I would pay at least, yeah.

[00:29:09] Let's just, you know, round number, $20 for the dozen egg packs. Seems pretty fair market price, I think. Yeah. That's why I had the question, Mark. We got to figure it out. I don't know if it's cheaper than the other options. I'm not sold on that. It depends on how you value your time, right? What other economic production you could be in instead of that, right?

[00:29:38] Definitely not cheaper. You mean from like the production side or the purchase side? From the production side, I know Dave will attest it. There's no way it's cheaper. Well, final cost, right? You know, what everybody does, can I make it or do I have to buy it? And if I, you know, where does that fall? Is it about equal? Is there a discount? Is there a discount from doing it?

[00:30:01] It's certainly great to have a discount on fresh food, but for emergency long-term storage food, is there, you know, how, if there's a benefit, how big is that benefit? That's what I want to know. That's a good question. Because you can get right now at number 10 can of freeze-dried cooked eggs for probably 70 bucks. And I've got to imagine that's a lot more than 12. You know what I mean? Yeah. So to your point, what do you, I guess it really does come down to that.

[00:30:31] What do you value? Do you value the fact that you know these eggs are top quality from the Jones homestead, so on and so forth? Or do you value, I want the most eggs for my money and put them on the shelf for 25 years because they're already in a number 10 can with an oxygen absorber and so on? All makes sense. I think a big portion of the cost will be, how often do you use it?

[00:30:59] If you're putting out, let's just, for round number, $10,000 worth of freeze-dried food, you'll be more efficient than $1,000 worth. Because that freeze-dryer, I think it's a couple grand or something. So you've got to at least produce 10 times the cost of the freeze-dryer to even start to break even on the capital investment, let alone your labor and other startups.

[00:31:28] So we're looking literally at a capital project that, like a 10-year horizon, not cheap, but the flexibility that it provides you personally might be perfect. And I think the Jones homestead is perfect for them. Dave said $2,500. Yeah. $2,500. So even at $2 an egg, right, you'd have to do more than 1,000 eggs.

[00:32:00] Probably you'd have to do 10,000 eggs over five years to make it quote-unquote profitable. You don't need to make it profitable in that market point of view, but maybe it's not worth selling at Prepper Camp because you wouldn't make any money back even at $20 a pack. And maybe people want to pay that much. Hard to know. Hard to know. Any other survival takeaways that you were prepping? Takeaways that you guys kind of addressed that are outside of the food?

[00:32:28] Sort of like sort of mine with the fishing side of things? Like it seemed like a shoe-in, but it wasn't. Maybe need to work out a better or an alternate game plan for things like that? Did you guys look at anything in your prepping world and say, you know, if it came down to a rash and a ruin situation, I'd need a crossbow. You got a crossbow, right? You know what I mean? Those kind of threats. That's simpatico because I was literally in my head.

[00:32:57] I was like crossbow because I saw varmint as well as multiple deer just outside my window. Oh, I thought you had one. Boom. Future Dan does. Future Dan's got the crossbow. I need to get one immediately. It needs to be done. So, future Dan, though. Go ahead. Any other thoughts you had now on James' question? Well, if it was bad enough, you know, game laws would be secondary to survival, right?

[00:33:24] So, fishing with a net where it's not allowed would definitely be on the table. Taking game out of season, if it was a dire enough circumstance, right? But let's say you're in an excessive rule of law kind of environment and food's limited, but you're not going to go out doing that sort of thing. You know, it's still against the law. How do you handle this?

[00:33:50] Well, I think the ultimate takeaway for me is don't get to the point where you have to ration, but always be prepared that that's an extreme, you know, point where if you're not ready to do it, you might want to exercise it. Maybe not for a month, but give it a try. But possibly the biggest takeaway is, you know, just this driving urge on my part to make a buying decision. I'm shopping right now.

[00:34:17] And all four products and others are, you know, within the selection range. And I'm just, you know, trying to get the right balance of all those factors we talked about, you know, just maximize my investment for the security that I'm looking for. And that whole activity is more urgent than ever. That's my takeaway. Nice. I like it. I definitely like it. Yeah.

[00:34:46] They, uh, one of the hidden benefits, I don't know if that, you know, I don't want to go on and on and on, but this is the final shebang. So I want to try to wring it out as best I can. One of the hidden benefits that I experienced, um, with my family invested, well, it was a benefit and it was a, it was a problem also.

[00:35:04] But the benefit side was that I got out a lot more, um, doing silly stuff, like looking for mushrooms and looking for forageable foods with my youngest than I otherwise would have. You know? So like he was invested in, let's try and find dad something to eat. And that got him, you know, got us to go look at things we wouldn't know.

[00:35:30] Like if, if it were a Wednesday evening and he had done school all day and comes home and wants to chill out. And I'm like, Hey dude, let's go look for mushrooms in the woods. Like he'd probably be like, I don't think we're going to do that. You know what I mean? And so that was one of those added benefits I thought was the family was more invested in it. And even though they didn't participate in it, um, I think they learned a lot too. You know what I mean?

[00:35:56] Because they watched it, they watched it and kind of wrapped their head around like, you know, why we do all this crazy shit. That's awesome. Definitely. Anything else, future Dan? I'm pretty much, I think I've got a lot off my chest over these last four weeks and I've learned a lot. Any final thoughts on week four here? Yeah.

[00:36:22] So we're going to wrap it up with a more economically focused cost benefit analysis with some numbers. Perhaps we can see your final, uh, uh, charts of your personal journey through ration or ruin Ben, uh, proverbial happiness chart, but other things like your, your hydration and your weight loss. So there's a more, I guess, I guess it's a more quantitative analytical, uh, final program on rational ruin.

[00:36:51] But for the week four wrap up, I think, uh, I'm calling it a success. I'm glad you guys found all those benefits from it. I definitely did. Thank you, Dave, for contributing. And, uh, I guess we got to start looking at what Azure Highland five next year might be, but this was a good one guy. Big time. It definitely was a good one. Good work. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. Uh, we got to get together.

[00:37:19] Hopefully next week we had to postpone this weekend. Hopefully next week we can get together. But if not, I mean, we got to strike with irons hot. We got, Oh, you know what? We got to do some other things. Go ahead. Real quick. And I, I can handle this part. You don't have to bring him on to, uh, to the show or anything on. Cause I know you guys have like your show all organized. We got to get fire wolf on fire wolf did his own thing on this. And he, he struggled through a lot of this too.

[00:37:48] He's one of our listeners who's often in chat. He's the guy who does all of our hammer talk membership, blacksmithing content. And he's got some stories to tell. Yeah. He, he didn't do exactly what we did, but he did, he did a really cool challenge. So what I'll do is I'll get him on to talk. I love it. He was, he's not here right now, but he's, I think he was at every other ration of ruin as well as Patriot power hour in the last few months. So yeah, he's shadowed the firewall for you to actually come on.

[00:38:16] We will, I'll definitely podcast with him. Yeah. The big highlight for his was they did nothing that they couldn't make for the month. Food wise. They didn't go to the grocery store and then they didn't eat anything that couldn't be made. Even that's eyeopening. Yeah, definitely. I want to hear all about it. All right, gentlemen, I think, uh, and X very successful. So we'll talk to you soon.

[00:38:46] What do you say? Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining Dave. Great weekend. Yeah. You guys too.