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Mindful Prepping
17 Plays5 months ago
I had a long chat with Nutta about self responsibility; being prepared for the unexpected, and being able to take care of yourself, feed and care for your family in the case of a natural disaster or something along those lines, instead of sitting around and waiting for the government to come and save you or fix it for you. We spoke about uncertainty, the dramatic nature of the news, the creation of fear through dramatisation, and touched on topics like;
- the preparedness mindset
- generational differences
- family and community
- making do and going without
- fighting bushfires
- sustainability
- eating what's in season and sharing your bounty
- water and survival
- gender roles and the sacredness of family
- the fragility of the supply chain
- green energy and reliance on the electric grid
"We had to take time off school to move through Ash Wednesday to protect the house. Droughts come and go, things happen. But as a young man in the 80s and 90s on a rural farm in Australia, nobody was coming to help you. Like nobody came to help you. You relied on yourself and your neighbours...
That taught me that if you can't put your hand on it and you need it, you don't have it. That's right. And so the way of life of a small holding farmer, and it's always been the way, is you don't know what's coming in the future. So it's like that adage that I always use about hunting. You're going hunting for rabbits, but you're armed for bear because you don't know what the future holds...
We have two generations that have no concept that you don't actually get to eat strawberries in the middle of summer. It's only because of globalisation and the fact that we can fly these things in from who knows where, to here so that we can have it...
I remember as a kid, when there was that glut of fruit; the jams being made, the preserves, all the things. And if I've got it, I'm going to make, apple puree, apple pies, all that...
Preparedness was instilled in rural communities."
A long meandering chat that covered many 'hot' topics. Nutta has strong opinions about some things and you may not agree with him, and he is absolutely fine with that. By the same token, you may hear some things here, that cause you to take action that might hold you in good stead at some point along the way.
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Transcript
Perceptions of Prepping and Global Uncertainty
00:00:15
Speaker
Brad, it's lovely to see you this morning. Thank you so much for having a cup of coffee with me over the internet to have a chat about prepping. Now you and I have been friends for a very long time, which is why I know that you are very, very knowledgeable about this stuff and why I've invited you to chat about it. So good to see you. Thank you, Karen.
00:00:43
Speaker
knowledgeable. I mean, it's a very big term, but any who, I think let's be real, you are very knowledgeable. Well, I've been doing it for a long time. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And there is a, there's a lot of, um, negative talk about prepping and people talking about tin hats and things like that. But, um, we both know that there's a lot of unrest in the world at the moment. There's a lot of uncertainty. Yeah. I think, I think a lot of it,
00:01:13
Speaker
Um, yeah. And I don't think there's any more uncertainty in the world than there ever has been. What I think it is, is it's our instant access. Um, and the fact that we live in a society now where all your news is instant, um, all your news is, uh, very dressed up. So it has to be stimulating and very short. Our attention span is three seconds. Yeah. So like.
00:01:42
Speaker
the last big disaster, we probably can't tell you because we're already talking about the next one. So we've developed this over-rating in modern society. It's fear. Everything's fear. We've got to be scared. So I think the world's know we're closer on a lot of levels, but we've always been in turmoil and there's always been uncertainty in the plan. I think because we live in such an instant society where everything's instant,
00:02:11
Speaker
people have forgotten that you need to prepare the road. You don't know what's around the next corner. So I
Self-Reliance and Lessons from the Past
00:02:20
Speaker
think that's where people are becoming, they're seeing through the veneer. The veneer of modern society with all its technological advances and everything like that is only as thin as the electric city supply to whatever computer it is that's running everything that controls your life.
00:02:43
Speaker
We could almost go down a rabbit hole right there but we won't let's stay on track so um because I'm very tempted to do that I watch this great program on Netflix maybe we'll talk about that another time the whole electrical thing you've mentioned disasters you've mentioned electricity that things can change I'm interested
00:03:03
Speaker
What got you into thinking about sustainability and prepping, I guess, for want of a better term? Life. I grew up on, wait, we've been friends for 50 years. I grew up in Northeastern Victoria on a small dairy farm and life was
00:03:32
Speaker
I'm not going to say hard. It's hard for everybody. But I mean, so we lived through Ash Wednesday. We had to take time off school to live through Ash Wednesday to protect the house. Droughts come and go. Things happen. But as a young man in the 80s and 90s on a rural farm in Australia, nobody was coming to help you.
00:04:01
Speaker
Like, nobody came to help you. Like, you relied on yourself and your neighbours. So that, I'm talking 40 years ago, that taught me. If you can't put your hand on it and you need it, you don't have it. That's right. And so the way of life of a small holding farmer, and it's always been the way, is,
00:04:30
Speaker
You don't know what's coming in the future. So it's like that adage that I always use about hunting. You're going hunting for rabbits, but you're armed for bear because you don't know what the future holds. And that's really, really apparent. It was really, really apparent growing up because Jesus, we had no money. Um, so the, you know, like the monsters are like, Oh, I'll just go and buy, you know, I'm going camping. I'll go and buy a tent. That wasn't a part of it. If you didn't have it, you didn't have it. Yeah. So.
00:04:59
Speaker
As things came, you learn to look at things saying, hey, hang on. You know, I had that scenario where this broke and I use that to fix it. So next time I see one of them, I'll keep it. Yeah. Because I see, you know, like I understand that it's all well and good saying that I can get you and stuff like that, but I live here. It's over there. I've got to get it. It's got to come here. And in the downtime. So that was a fact of life growing up. But we ate fruit and veggie fruit.
00:05:29
Speaker
from our orchard when it was in season because it was free. Yeah. That's right. It builds on that. Again, I've got to keep on track because I could just in a rabbit hole and say why we've got to the point that we are. And that's a combination. So at the start, it was just a face of a case of the realistic review of
00:05:58
Speaker
If I don't have it and I need it, tough. You know, if you don't have it, you don't have it. So when you put that into like really basic things like milk and bread, and then you apply that across all the aspects of your life. So you start, you know, like without water, and I mean, it ties into something else that we're going to talk to about is what people say, what you can do to get into this, the preparedness mindset is that what can I control now that will be advantaged tomorrow? Yeah.
00:06:28
Speaker
And what is, and then you get into your priority. So the first priority forever in any prepared situation is water. That's right. That's the first thing that people don't think about, but it's the most important thing because without water, you're dead in three days. Yeah. Doesn't matter what scenario. If you don't have water, you are dead in three days. Yeah. And clean water. Oh yeah. Hmm.
00:06:55
Speaker
Yeah. Okay, cool. So it's really your childhood, your upbringing, and you've gained a lot of skills because of the way you've grown up on the land. And our generation too.
Modern Reliance on Technology and Systems
00:07:08
Speaker
There's a generational thing. So I'm obviously on Generation X, which is, they call us the feral generation, and it's true. We were out before the sun came out. We didn't come home until the sun went down. If you went home, you got a job.
00:07:23
Speaker
Like it wasn't, you didn't go home because your mum and dad pissed with you. You didn't go home because you got a fucking job. And it wasn't, it's not like modern days where we go, oh, I gave my child a job and he mowed the lawns. No, if you got a job, it was getting a hay. It was cutting enough firewood for the winter. Like they were jobs, they were real jobs. So we would disappear. But you didn't hang around when you had nothing to do because you got something to do.
00:07:49
Speaker
So we would disappear, which made us very, very self-reliant and able to put up with ourselves and our own company. So we didn't need mobs of people around us and you overcome things as they happen. And then you take that forward by 20 years or 30 years or 40 years, the same situations apply. We're getting different input and we're getting the input, the information in a different way, but you always revert to,
00:08:18
Speaker
We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. So, and 40, 50 years down the track, you realize that all of the people that said they're going to be there and that your tax money is going to help you. And this, this government organization is going to come in and in the event of, and you look back because they tell you this repeatedly and repeatedly, but a normal person, your listeners are the same. They might not be as far down the rabbit hole as me, but they'll see and they're picking up on it. They don't do what they say they can. After 50 years, you realize, hang on.
00:08:49
Speaker
Sure, I've got this insurance. Sure, I've got this. Sure, I've got $400 million in the bank, but it's all electronic. And if you haven't got your hand on it, look what happened during our last four-year-ago social experiment that we did. All the things that we said would never happen in Australia overnight, overnight.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah. And even just that bleep that happened a few months ago and people couldn't use their credit card machines and the system and the supermarket and buy their food. So because we're close to names. So remember like we were in high school when they brought out debit cards. Yeah. Everyone ran to get a debit card.
00:09:36
Speaker
The Australia card, that was another great one. They're going to give you this ID card and oh, no, no, we don't want that because back then we wouldn't stand for half of the crap that we have to stand for today. And they went, oh, well, we'll give you this number, this tax volume, which is what they wanted to do all along so that they've got us. And I mean, the way that they've driven technology to surveil us for our own protection, even the most
00:10:03
Speaker
indoctrinated or mainstream person now start and say, hang on, hang on. They don't though. They tell us they're going to do these things for us and look after us and make us safe and all this, but it just seems like, hang on, everything's going out. All my money, all my rights, all my freedoms seem to be going away and nothing's coming in. As a society, we're waking up to that. And this obviously gives rise to
00:10:32
Speaker
people starting to ask these questions and this interest in prepping. And then prepping's a whole industry as well. Like anything in life, some people got a hold of it and they can make money out of it, like telling people what to do. Doing things like this for money.
00:10:52
Speaker
And really, this is not something that's new. I mean, I remember as a kid, your mum, you know, when there was that glut of fruit, the jams being made, the preserves, all the things. And if I've got it, because like my orchard, you know, it's got mainly apples. So I'm going to make, you know, apple puree, apple pies, all that. And you distribute that because you've got potatoes.
00:11:19
Speaker
Because in the summer, like the old Mr Barton, he grows watermelons to feed his stock. But we get some every year. But he gets out, you know what I mean? And preparedness was instilled in rural communities. There was all, like, where we grew up in northeastern Victoria, across the road and down a little bit. There was an old lady, she was in her 90s back then when I was a teenager. And I used to go and mow a lawn. She raised 13 children.
00:11:49
Speaker
And every time I went down there, I'd come home. I'd come home with a bottle of preserves or something that she's made for me to take home. And that is like a currency. You know, it wasn't expected. It just happened. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, the mindset behind it is it's cool. Let's hope that we never need it. Yeah. But I might want to have a peach in the middle of winter.
00:12:18
Speaker
It's only today that we've lost,
Historical Lessons and Societal Behaviors in Crises
00:12:21
Speaker
and very quickly in our lifetime, like the seasonal vegetables, we have two generations that have no concept that you don't actually get to eat strawberries in the middle of summer. In the normal world, it's only because of globalization and the fact that we can fly these things in from who knows where to whom that we can have it. Well, all of that's, there's a very real chance that all of that's going to go away soon. Anyway, that's another,
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah. And it could, I mean, if there's so many things. It's all preparedness into community because personal experience. Yes, I've been in prep. The theory behind prepping with us is that it's just to smooth out the road. There's so many indicators about so many potential threats. And when I say threats, it's just to the way of life that we have today.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I don't know if the systems in place, like the organized systems in place that we have as a society are going to work because I keep seeing evidence of them not working. Plus, I've been to some pretty horrendous natural disasters. I was involved in East Timor. I was one of the first tractors that actually went on the ground over there once they let civilians in. And during the course of my career as a linesman dealing with
00:13:49
Speaker
natural bushfires and floods and stuff, putting things back. So I've got a bit of experience in that as to the discrepancy between what we are told as a minion, a taxpayer, through the media, if you can call it that. A member of the public. What actually happens? So I've seen it in action, and there's a discrepancy there. So that's where our theory comes from.
00:14:17
Speaker
Because nobody's going to come and knock on my door and say, hey, I see you've run out of toilet paper. Here's a roll of toilet paper. We've seen how society acts. Not that long ago. A lot of people are starting to just ask a question. Why did that actually happen that way? That's not what they told us.
00:14:40
Speaker
It's interesting, I've seen on TV, just a bit of a flash that it's, we're coming up to the 50 year anniversary of Cyclone Tracy in Darwin. Now I'm quite a bit older than you. And I remember as a little girl, that happening. And so Christmas Day, Darwin was wiped out now.
00:15:03
Speaker
In this country that we know and love and have always called the lucky country and felt lucky to be here, even back then, 50 years ago, people behaved in really appalling ways. And that is in un-Australian ways, because when they were faced with such trauma and such, you know, went into survival mode, people did some pretty weird stuff.
00:15:33
Speaker
And that's something that in the normal course of life, I know for somebody like me, I don't like to think about people behaving in unpleasant ways. I agree. I'm actually rocking a couple of less we forget flags on my car at the moment because we've forgotten. We've forgotten as a society, we've forgotten a lot of the lessons that we learned.
00:16:03
Speaker
And what you're saying is true. In the 1970s, yeah, there were some people that did some horrendous things. We both lived in Darwin, we both know the history. However, I would argue that in 1971 or whenever it happened, the ratio to good people to honorable people would have been a lot better than today. We live in an instant society now. Nobody thinks about tomorrow because everything's instant through
00:16:34
Speaker
the phone. We're so reliant on technology. And some of the cracks are appearing in, because of a lot of the scenarios, and I'm talking big picture scenarios that we've gone, the war in Ukraine. The war that's brewing in the Middle East. So we're told, this is what's happening, this is what's happening, this is what's happening. And then we see things on the other side, and people are actually starting to hang on. Is it really?
00:17:04
Speaker
But we've lost so much trust. And I'm not just talking in Australia, I'm talking globally. Look at how everybody
Challenges in Modern Systems and Preparedness
00:17:11
Speaker
reacted to Donald Trump getting in. I mean, it's not even our country. People losing their minds here. And the world model that we've been operating on since 1945 has changed.
00:17:35
Speaker
People are aware of that, like globalisation has changed. And people aren't stupid, we're very dismissive of big groups of people because of the herd mentality and we tend to do well, we've seen. We do go with the flow, the whole metronome thing where everybody starts to move in the same direction just through the power of numbers, yeah. But we've seen,
00:18:02
Speaker
natural disasters, are they getting bigger or is it just our awareness of it getting better? Yeah, with this instant, again, everybody's got a recorder in their pocket, everybody's got, you know, a potential news device in their pocket. And so, yeah, we can get a lot of information. It's a good information. So now the arguments around the misinformation bill that they're trying to push through, the way they're doing these things,
00:18:30
Speaker
People look at them, whether you agree with the way that they do it or not, don't you think? Is that right? Yeah. You know, so people are losing, well, not even losing focus. People are just asking questions. That's right. They are asking questions and that's always a good thing to question. It doesn't mean that you are going to go this way or that way, but to question is, it's an indication of intelligence, I think.
00:19:00
Speaker
So what, again, because I've been, a lot of my preparedness personally came from doing without as a young man. So like, I've got a few issues, like a lot of issues, but like I've got a big bucket of socks because I always used to get my father's hand down socks and I always had holes in them. So I've got a psychological issue about socks. I've got a big pile of black socks and whenever I get a hole, I throw that sock away, but I keep the other one.
00:19:30
Speaker
because I've done without, I don't know, stupid shit like that. But I also know because I've done a lot of remote work, you get out into a place that's removed from modern conveniences and you don't have a razor blade. You don't have a sock. You realize then, hang on, the veneer of modern society is as only as thick
00:20:00
Speaker
as everything that goes into the supply chain to bring it from where it was manufactured to you. When you start thinking about it like that, when you think about Hang-On, so there's a boat that's got to pick this up. There's a truck that's got to pick this up. And you start putting the dots, you go, Hang-On, this is a huge system. So before, pair of Blunstone boots was made in Hobart. So we kill the animals here in Australia.
00:20:29
Speaker
Leatherwork tanneries would tan the leather. The leather would be processed. There'd be a synthetic manufacturer that's making elastic. All the products that would go to Hobart would be assembled, and then the boots would be distributed. And back when I was a kid, you know, the grand total was $40, you'd get a pair of one stone boots that would last you for two or three years. Today, the leather comes from Chile.
00:21:00
Speaker
or South America. It's tanned in India or somewhere where they've got really shitty safety standards. The leather then goes to Taiwan or Vietnam or wherever the latest, you know, Blumstone shop is, factory, put together there. Then it's put on a boat. Then it goes to, let's say, Perth, and then it's distributed from there. All of those things,
00:21:27
Speaker
have failed at one stage in the last couple of years. And people have seen that. There's a lot of steps and opportunities for things to fall down, hey? And then you can't fix anything. Nothing's fixable. We don't, like we live in, everything's designed obsolescence. Yeah. I'm driving a 30 year old car because it's the only thing that I've got a chance of fixing. I'm not a, I'm not stupid. I'm not a mechanic, but you know, simple basic stuff.
00:21:57
Speaker
We can't do that with a modern car. And I know because I tried it, I bought a brand new car and we got burnt because everything is plug a computer in. And there's another, computers. Computers were meant to, like our generation, it was meant to make life easy. Okay. It did on the surface, but it didn't underneath because there's no, we've got
Energy and Economic System Skepticism
00:22:21
Speaker
this illusion of instant control. Everything's like my whole, um,
00:22:28
Speaker
situation, my whole surroundings can be controlled through this electronic device, which is great when it works. Yes, when it works, and it doesn't always. Electricity. Everything today relies on electricity. People living in the cities can build up areas. And I think like the consciousness, people are starting to wake up. So we've been sold the... No, let me be
00:22:58
Speaker
Nice. There's a push for this net zero. Everything to go to clean electricity. It's a fantastic concept. It's an amazing delusion. It's a wonderful theoretical goal. It can't be done practically. Not any time soon. Well, it's just a simple fact.
00:23:28
Speaker
I've been in high-voltage lines, and as you know, I worked for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria back in the day, back when the electricity system was actually maintained. And I've worked with the transition to privatisation, and I've seen how our infrastructure has been raped for a better world. Just used and used and used, never maintained, everything's band-aided. Well, simple maths.
00:23:58
Speaker
If we go to, if we go to Albert Easy's net zero, how are you going to get the power from where you want? First, we can't make it because we don't have the facilities to make it. And people are waking up to the fact that wind is a fast, a wind turbine causes more carbon footprint to build it than it will ever give back. It just can't. The fact that the unreliability that tokens
00:24:27
Speaker
It's never on the right time when it's producing the fact that we have no reliable way of storing it in such volumes. All of these points people can debate, but the facts are we can't and we don't have the technology to do it for it a cost effective way. Yeah. People, even if they don't understand the concept of it, they're starting to ask the sort of hang on. And then the next step of that is, is that everything in modern society is controlled by electricity. So if you live in a city, your water, your food,
00:24:57
Speaker
Your heating and cooling, your lighting, your sewage, everything is controlled by electricity. And now we don't have it. What do you do? It would create madness, wouldn't it? You can't get fuel. You can't get toilet paper. How do you alleviate that? Well, instead of buying two rolls of toilet paper, I buy
00:25:25
Speaker
40 rolls of paper, and I always buy more than I use. So what we're talking about is how do you get started in it? Is it like you buy one extra? Yeah. And where am I going to spend my money? Do I need an
Community Resilience and Preparedness
00:25:44
Speaker
extra air fryer or do I need maybe some bottle of water and maybe a 20 litre drum of petrol in the garage just in case? Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
It can be very daunting. Yeah, but it can be simple as well, can't it? Because it doesn't necessarily have to be, I have to support a family of five for the next five years. It can really be about getting over the hump where there's just say, for example, like, I mean, you're in WA. So if there's a flood and the roads go out and the trucks aren't going to get deliveries through to the supermarkets,
00:26:24
Speaker
you know, there's a timeframe for people who say live in Perth where they need to be able to feed their family for that week or two and not be under pressure because the supermarket shelves aren't full. Absolutely. And another reason why in our family it's such an important thing, as you know, well, listeners won't know, we live for quite a number of years remotely. So we did approximately 10 years in Weeper, which is right at the top of Australia.
00:26:53
Speaker
So we would get our, like we had a supermarket, but as you can imagine, the prices were ridiculous. The food during the wet season would only come in once a month on a barge. We would do big orders because it's a month, you know, and you don't know what's going to be in the supermarket. You don't know what's going to get through this month or this week. So you bought, I wouldn't say in bulk, but you bought enough to get you through. And if next month's a lean month, well, we can stretch through.
00:27:23
Speaker
Um, and when you start, it's not about end of the world, you know, we're living in a bunker 30 years, spam, which is quite funny because I've got a bit of an addiction. Every time it's on special, I buy spam, but that's just me. Um, but yeah, you, you, you continue from that and people also from a, I'm trying to use a big word from a community-based thing is that when you think about if,
00:27:52
Speaker
If you can look after yourself just a little bit, that frees up the really important stuff for the people that, like the people that have really messed up and that frees up resources for them. Yeah. Next stage to that is like when you've been doing it, sorry, not for as long, but when you get into, like we recently came into a financial part, we paid our house, which was huge. So the first time in our life we were debt free, which allowed us some spare cash to make some, uh, uh,
00:28:20
Speaker
changes to our house. We did some re-boggling and we put in a big pantry. So we were able to go to the next level. But in that, with our local community, we've been able to help people. We became aware of a neighbour who was at a bike action. He was doing it rough. He's the main breadwinner, dah, dah, dah. Without even big song and dance, we were able to drop off a 20 kilo bag of rice. We process a lot of, I do hunting, so we process a lot of meat, some canned meat, some staples. No big deal.
00:28:49
Speaker
No breaking of the bank. When you put a package together, discreetly dropped it off. See, to me, that's far more tangible than saying, oh, I'll ring this number. Oh, get in contact with this government department. Oh, you know, go and get your tax money back through some relief because you've got to put it, just go and give the people some food. Let them get on with their life. Yeah, not have to jump through hoops. And that's, I mean, that builds community in a sense of,
00:29:17
Speaker
um belonging and there's so many good things that come from that even for the person who's um the beneficiary on one occasion because of their own experience they're going to feel so affirmed and when the boots on the other foot or if they have the opportunity to pass that on they will because they've experienced that themselves
00:29:39
Speaker
And you can't, you can't teach that. You can't, like, we can't, as a modern society, we're trying to legislate, you know, like, oh, I'm going to use your tax money and we're going to send it to the Ukraine and I'm going to give it to this group. Well, I guess that sounds great. It's kumbaya. You know, the world's a big melting pot and we're all going to get along. Well, it's not true, though. It doesn't. Reality's not like that. So we're thinking on a global level, which is wonderful. Great. Very
00:30:03
Speaker
philanthropic or whatever it is, the big word. But the person who lives next door to me is doing it really, really hard. But I don't know, because I'm too busy looking at my computer, because I've never bothered talking to them, because I've got my head in this, because what Elon Musk says on the other side of the planet is more important than what my neighbour's going through, because I've never bothered to ask.
00:30:24
Speaker
People are waking up to it. So from your perspective, community is very important. It's everything because the modern technological society has us all as individuals connected through an electronic app. Look at couples that go to the restaurant and they're sitting on opposite sides of the table. They're phoning Jesus Christ.
00:30:50
Speaker
Oh, look at this. Why don't you talk about what you did? Talk about your kids. Talk about the weather. Talk. Be present with each other. And the impartiality then, because we've done it to two generations and they don't know the other side that you and I know. What are they going to do? People are waking up now. So the system that's meant to save us doesn't work or didn't work to the way that I thought it was going to be. So I'm waking up a little bit. And then they get daunted.
00:31:19
Speaker
Because it is, when the shields are lifted back and you see society for what it really is, not what we say it is, but what it really is. They don't come together. No, that's right. So we've dealt for the best part of 30 years, I guess, in Kumbaya. Another theory that I have is that the reason that we've done that is because values have been
00:31:45
Speaker
So we've got distracted and we've divided our community over crazy stuff, sex, men and women competing. Where did we get that wrong? We are better together, male and female, but let's not go down the outliers of sexual probation. They can do whatever the hell they like. On the whole, men and women do very, very well together
00:32:13
Speaker
in a traditional family unit where the man is the protector and provider and the woman is the nurturer and raises the kids and looks after the home. Now, we can argue forever in a day that, you know, that's not the modern way and dah, dah, dah, it works. Like, regardless of what anybody says, it works. And men and women are not the same. That's true. We can do different things. And, you know, you can go to this super, super strong woman and a super,
00:32:41
Speaker
It's all outliers. The only reason we've got focus on that is because our values are full. They don't worry about sub-Saharan Africa because they're too busy worrying about what they're going to eat next, where they're going to sleep next. Are they going to die during the night because somebody robs them for the kittens that they've got? We've been, for 75 years, in World War II, we've been shielded from that. Yeah. It's funny when you talk about the gender thing and the traditional nature
00:33:09
Speaker
of it working well. I always think about my chickens. And I know I'm such a basic little puppet, but I live in suburbia. I'm not supposed to have a rooster. And of course I did for a while. And what I noticed is that my chickens laid more eggs.
00:33:28
Speaker
because they were being chickens. And I sometimes use that little story when I have clients who are talking, you know, because I'm a therapist.
00:33:41
Speaker
talking about issues with their partner, you know, because really the job of the rooster is to protect and they don't necessarily have to lay the eggs, that's not their job, they just wander around looking tough and strong so that the chickens can do their thing. We keep chickens obviously, we've got, I'll leave just so that you know, we've got 13 acres of
00:34:08
Speaker
really bad ground, coffee rocks, slab granite, lots of trees, rough coral, can't run animals, but we keep chickens and we've got a garden and that sort of stuff. We lost two roosters a couple of months ago to foxes. Look, we lost two roosters to foxes. Now what a lot of people don't realize, the reason we lost two roosters is because the roosters ran to the front and were jumping all over the front of the, because I actually saw the second one go. Yeah.
00:34:38
Speaker
They're at the front, in front of the thing, you know, trying to scare this thing off, knowing fully well, they're screwed. Their role. They didn't think about it. They didn't have to have a discussion about it. Nobody had to write a memo about it. God did that. He imprinted it in. This is your role. So you don't have to lay an egg and you get to, you know, have fun with these chickens. But when the time comes, you're sacrificial.
00:35:07
Speaker
You pretend. It sounds really basic, but I honestly believe that is a man's role. Why do you think men die in wars? Women and men are different. Our thought processes are different. The way that we use logic and common sense are different. And we can talk about what we think it should be.
00:35:36
Speaker
And then you get into your faith. So then there's the concept
Economic Realities and Environmental Narratives
00:35:39
Speaker
of, uh, like, uh, nurture, virtues, nature, and what God intended and stuff like that. And that's, that's what everybody's personal view is. Yeah. But at the end of the day, the purpose of life is experience and procreation. Yeah. So like, don't get me wrong, all your IBF and ICF and all of that crampy shit that they do, the CRISPR and they can make this a satellite. You need a man and you need a woman.
00:36:06
Speaker
Like we can artificially do it so well, but that's not the way it's meant to be done. You need a man and a woman, and they need to come together and they need to stay at the unit, because that's how you get good kids. We can talk it up, right? We can talk about, it doesn't matter. There's what we think should be, and then there's what is. And that discrepancy between what, like in our lifetime we've seen, like we would, like the thought of
00:36:36
Speaker
flying car was, you know, late 70s, early 80s. Whoa. Well, now we've got flying cars. They make flying cars. We realize that they're stupid. We realize it's pointless. We realize that the technology is unsafe. So we haven't gone down that path, but we're still going with solar and wind. That's a great idea. Make it make sense. Yeah. Make it make sense. Yes. And I think people that are listening to you and look, they're going to disagree with me and I'm not right.
00:37:06
Speaker
In fact, I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm 100% wrong. But 50 years now, and you say, this is going to happen. And they say, oh, it'll never happen. And it just did. Yeah, we are seeing a lot of changes. I mean, natural disasters, they're happening. They do seem to be more occurring. Maybe it's just about the media, but I don't know either way.
00:37:36
Speaker
We could go down on that, but I think we've always had natural disasters. I mean, it's very interesting. So two days ago, I think it was New South Wales started load shedding power because we had a day of 35 degrees. So that's national news. It runs around the country. And people start and ask sensible questions. It's 2024. It's not summer.
00:38:07
Speaker
We're not in summer. We've had 40 degree days. We used to go to the swimming pool as kids, come home with blisters, sunburned blisters, but the size of 50 cent coins because we weren't sun-snuck, right? It was 45 degrees and we're lying in the sun. That was 40 years ago. Now we're load shedding in Australia, but people go, oh, we had a bush fire. Dude, it's Australia. We burn every year.
00:38:37
Speaker
And if we don't burn, we flood. I think it's the perception and the fact that we throw it on the news and the fact that most of our society now lives in a city and they've never actually got dirt on their hands. So they don't realize the cycle. Is the world getting hotter? Possibly. Is it getting colder? Possibly. It's a living organism. Things change. You know what I mean?
00:39:06
Speaker
A lot of people I think are losing the war on drugs. We've been fighting the war on drugs, a war, like a really, really expensive war for my whole life. And you can buy better, heroin, cheaper on the streets of Melbourne today than you can in 1978. That's insane. Let's not go down the drug road. I know, but what I'm saying is that that's just one.
00:39:36
Speaker
And there's 100 examples like that. Medicare. Bob Hawke told us, 1% of your wage will never pay another medical bill. Hang on. I remember that. I was there. You know, people are waking up. Yeah. We're sending all of this money because, you know, oh, the war in Ukraine is such a big thing. Yeah, okay, cool. And I get it, dude, any war's bad. But we shouldn't be encouraging it for one.
00:40:05
Speaker
because we've forgotten our lessons past. But the second one is, hang on, how many billions of dollars? But I nearly ripped the front wheel off my car because I hit a pothole on National Route 1, it's the Australian National Highway, and then we tore the front of my car off. That doesn't compute, we're sending billions towards, but we can't fix our own roads.
00:40:36
Speaker
or keep
Essentials for Home Preparedness
00:40:37
Speaker
women over 50 in housing. I mean, there's a massive issue with that now, but it's crazy, crazy. So let's talk about this whole, you know, being prepared for challenging situations. So in the home, what,
00:41:01
Speaker
I mean, are there special, is there a certain knowledge that we need to have? Are there certain resources, special tools? What's a list of things that we should have or could have to get us over the hump should one occur? Okay. So with, I call it triage, with any scenario I go in, what's the, we can't do without. So the first thing that you can't do without is water.
00:41:30
Speaker
So you need to take care of your water. And that's drinking water. I'm not talking about washing your socks. I'm not talking about cleaning the car. I'm talking about water that you can drink. Salt survival. So you have to find it. And it has to be unreliable on anything else. So it's either bottled water, or here we've got a number of big tanks. I can't pump the water from the tanks, but I can walk to the bottom of the tank and turn open the tank.
00:41:57
Speaker
So there's, there's, there's two things that we're going to preparedness. You can do it on a small scale where I'm just going to ride out, you know, the two week powers out and you start at the top water, shelter, shelter. Actually I put shelter above food funnel enough because you can live for a month without food. It's going to be uncomfortable, but you can live for a month without food. If the weather's bad in Australia, like if we're either hot or cold, you've got a couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah. So.
00:42:27
Speaker
whatever you are and your priorities, but I go water, shelter, food, and then I look at, I go back to water again. So I've got water for the two weeks or whatever period of time I'm looking to combat. How do I pass that? So one of the things that we're doing for that personally, yes, we've got water tanks, we've got a lot of storage on the ground, but we can't pump it into the house. So we're putting in a tank on a stand that's nine meters tall
00:42:55
Speaker
so that I can gravity feed the house and I'm gonna bring up the solar pump. Because solar's not bad, it's just not good enough to do what we think it can do. It'll want a little pump on a pressure belt, fill it up, so I'll always have water in the house. You gotta get your priorities and then you address it to the level of the threat that you believe that you're gonna perceive. And then you can add to that. Yeah, okay. So, water,
00:43:26
Speaker
shelter, food. So if we're looking at, go on. The other thing is, that's to keep life. Now you can personalise it a little bit. So somebody who's a diabetic, you better have your insulin. Where are you going to keep it? Because, I don't know, it's insulin temperature sensitivity. Because now you're a fridge.
00:43:55
Speaker
because it's no good having, do you see what I mean? You have to look at how am I gonna keep this in the condition that it has to be in to the point where it's usable in the worst case scenario. Now it's very daunting, but you're not curing cancer. You're not going for Armageddon. You're going for, this is gonna make me, like the power's out for a week
00:44:25
Speaker
Okay. It's going to be a pain, but you know, I can, I've got food, I've got drink and I've got a roof over my head. Yeah. Now we can look at the rest of the shit. Now I can worry about charging a phone and all that other crap. The other thing that I think a lot of people need to do with the privilege is they're waking up with the fact that they say, Oh, I've got money. I've got money. You've got money in the bank. Well, in that case, you know, people are waiting under the fact that if you can't put your hand on it, you don't actually have it.
00:44:55
Speaker
You may own it, but ownership and having are two completely different things. Because when the power's off, I don't give a shit. You can have $400 million in the bank, but you're not getting any of them in my food. You can promise me whatever the hell you like. If you can't give me something tangible, we're not playing. Yeah. That's right. More like the illusion. Yeah.
00:45:24
Speaker
Basically you're saying that if money is going to be necessary, you need to actually have it available to you. Not too far, but just fair enough. So one of the things that we're being told at the moment and like the narrative is driving down the throat is that we've got to get rid of cash. We've got to cash is a bad thing. We've got to get rid of cash.
00:45:52
Speaker
You know, cash is messy, it's expensive, it's dirty, it's all these things, okay? But we get rid of cash, so we make our only modicum of trade electronic in today's society. If you can't see a problem with that, like as a person, if you can't see an issue with that, and the thing that gets me about it is
00:46:21
Speaker
So I no longer work in the electrical field because I can't do DEI. Diversity, equity and inclusion. Because whereas the principle I don't disagree with, the application and the way we've applied it is a fast. It's destroyed the working environment for most of the workers. It really happened. I don't care what anybody says. Been there, done that, 35 years in and
00:46:50
Speaker
It's an unpopular opinion and that's mine. And I have a right to have it. But I've been, so I've removed myself. I was in a lucky position. I was able to remove myself from that system, which I don't believe works. But a lot of people are trapped in that and they see it. And that gives rise to another layer for you because they realize that the system that they're in is self-perpetuating. Once you're in, it keeps you there. You need to have this. So you need to go into debt. So you need to have this.
00:47:18
Speaker
So you need to do this. To be, to be here, you know, you must meet this criteria. You know, you've got to have this ticket, this thing, be clean. But that person
Societal Values and Consumerism Pressures
00:47:31
Speaker
over there who's standing right beside me in the queue doesn't be because of race, religion, gender. Or something else entirely here.
00:47:43
Speaker
Yes. And that whole thing about being feeling caught. I mean, a lot of that's driven by consumerism, isn't it? I mean, we've got to have the latest car. I mean, I've got a car that's 10 years old. It ticks along beautifully. Well, why would I change it? We as a society have made these things, right or wrong, whether we've been manipulated or wrong, but we've put onus on these things.
00:48:11
Speaker
I drive a 30-year-old car. I'm never going to show you a picture because it's a joke, but it goes and it takes me to the places that I need to go. But my friends have all got brand new cars, but when I raised them, what are we going to do about this when we're out in the middle of nowhere and this sensor goes? What happens to your car? What shuts down? What happens to your car? I don't have the sensor.
00:48:39
Speaker
I got pulled over by a uniformed revenue taker. And the only thing that he could go off at me for was because my wife was sitting in the passenger seat with her feet on the dash. And he had to go up and he said, oh, I am. Tell her to take her feet off the dash. I said, why? He said, oh, the airbag goes off. I said, what airbag? GQ. Airbag. The only airbag in here is me.
00:49:10
Speaker
Do you have a giggle? Um, afterwards, not at the time, because I was really, really paid because he pulled me over for something stupid. And again, we can get into that, you know, like the police, in the middle of a huge advertising campaign in Western Australia about the police telling us, and it's all about like, we're going to stop you because you touched your phone, you know, and you spared, you looked at us funny and it's because we're trying to save your life. Okay. You can keep telling me that bullshit, but I'm not believable.
00:49:39
Speaker
You're doing it because you want money. That's it. Because a policeman, like where we grew up, John Mason was the cop there for at least a decade, at least a decade. I don't know that we should actually drop names like that, but nevermind. A police officer that was a local officer was the local officer for well in excess of a decade, which means he was part of the community, which means he was given a mandate
00:50:07
Speaker
to apply the law in a way that best serve the community. And he did, I can give you a number of examples that he did. That doesn't happen today, because what are we looking for? What can I ping you for that gives me money? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And there was an understanding about who the people were, what was going on. There was care and concern. But there was an unwritten social contract about it. So look what we've just done as a nation to our soldiers.
00:50:37
Speaker
our national broadcast on falsified information to call our soldiers into district. What have we lost? But where's the honor? But we honored our soldiers in the past because like men, they went to the front to die for us. Now, whatever goes in, we can get into another story. But World War I, those guys actually believed that they were
00:51:05
Speaker
saving the planet. And to a certain degree, they work in today's day and age. Like, you can sign up to go to the Ukraine just to die? For what? For what? But the information about the whole war is there. Go and look at it. Like, don't listen to me. Just go and read. The discrepancies and that's throughout the broader community now, is that because information, and this is where things like the misinformation build
00:51:34
Speaker
so glaringly obvious what they're trying to do is because this freedom to go and get information from any source, you can't have that as a government or as a controlling body. You can't have the free information because then people are informed. And when people
Mindset Shifts for Preparedness
00:51:56
Speaker
are informed, they'll call you out for your lies.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah. So all of that free access to information does make people question. I think that's where the uncertainty, I mean, one of the things that I see is more
00:52:17
Speaker
generalized anxiety in people as a rule. And I guess that whole thing about preparedness, being able to, you know, ride the bumps, or something bigger, if something bigger should occur, is that it gives people that sense of, oh, what's the right word? Control. Exactly. I'm a semblance of control. And I guess this is the core, I guess we've done, this is the course is that having
00:52:46
Speaker
the sense that, hang on, I got this. I don't need to rely on whoever or whatever. And again, I think a lot of it's gender biased, I don't know what the terminology is, but men seem to, because we think in a linear scale. So I'm hungry, therefore I need to eat, therefore I'm not hungry anymore, therefore I can forget about. You know, we're very linear, women,
00:53:15
Speaker
more feelings, more emotive, and every thought's connected to every thought, which is really fantastic. That's why we love women so much, but it's crap in a shit situation. So when things go wrong, you cannot have that style of thought process. Well, it breeds anxiety. Let's just put it that way. To my concern. Whereas if you've taken care of a preparedness from a man's point of view, again, we're getting into sex, it's like, I don't care, whatever. From a male-dominated perspective,
00:53:45
Speaker
that common sense linear approach is I don't have to worry about water because I've taken care of that in these scenarios. For the next two weeks, I know. So that helps me mitigate my anxiety. That's right. And so it's a very left brained approach. It's like dot, dot, dot, ticking the boxes. And it's funny because, again, your viewers don't know. We've been, my wife and I,
00:54:13
Speaker
Jasmine have been married for over 25 years now. No, we're just coming up for 25 years. So it's quite a lot of time. And we don't think about this the same way. My wife had no concept of prepping before we got together. And we have over the years, we have had different ideas on how far, but it's a balancing act. One, when the kids were small and the mortgage was needing pay, I didn't have a lot of money. Did we do some prep? Yeah.
00:54:43
Speaker
How did we do it? Well, things like firewood. So we live in an area where you can still burn firewood. I must be sitting on 30 ton of firewood, because that was within my control. So I went out and I cut 30 ton of firewood, sitting just outside the door. So I don't have to, you know, like the power goes off. Okay, cool. I'm luckily enough in the position that we've got to generate. When the money was good, we don't have to run a lead. I put a switch that we've hardwired it incrementally.
00:55:14
Speaker
because from a, and I'm quite an anxious person because I overthink everything. I can section that off. I can put that in a box and I know that it's in the box and there's a label on the box that tells me, you know, I've got two weeks worth of, so I don't have to worry about it. Then I'll worry about the next thing on my list or the next thing on my priority. And that helps me with my
00:55:43
Speaker
the world's going to end tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. So for people who are just beginning to look at look at this concept, and I mean, one of the things that you and I've talked about is this is about being responsible for myself, or being responsible for the people that are in my care or under my protection. So it's an act of maturity. It's not
00:56:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's not about fear mongering or anything like that. It's just about taking care of business and making sure that we're looking after the people that we're looking after. So even, you know, for somebody like myself who just is responsible for myself, I'm then not a burden on someone else. We know that's really what it's about. That's a generational thing. So you have to remember that our generation thinks like that because we don't want to be a burden.
00:56:39
Speaker
Right. We've got, I see glimmers in the latest, what do they call them? The zoomers, I think the 20 year old, I'd say because the millennials got sold a different lie to the lie that we were sold. They embraced it a hundred percent and it just, it didn't work at all. Like all the stupid stuff just come to the forefront. So the next generation, the zoomers like can say the fuck up the generation before me is still making a lot of them. It's more of them are asking questions.
00:57:08
Speaker
but they've never been so cool. They've never had to, but they've been told their whole lives that they're special. They're, they're incredible. They're, they're amazing. Um, they're entitled to this, that, and the next thing they're going to get, you know, go to the, a lot of lies and it's very, very blatant today. And that's where a lot of the discrepancy comes in is because everybody's so narcissist. Yeah, but I don't have
Technological Distractions and Community Values
00:57:37
Speaker
water.
00:57:38
Speaker
Well, did you put water? Yeah, but I don't have water. Did you put some away for future? No, no, no, but I need it today. And again, it's a societal thing. I think a lot of it came from this blind embracing of technology for the sake of technology. It's like some of the discrepancy we get around artificial intelligence today. You don't have to look very fast. There's a very real and tangible
00:58:07
Speaker
opinion that says that we've gone too far already, we're already in danger. And we see that, like the greater community sees this, you know, the news can be telling you, oh, Elon Musk is such a bad person, he's da da da da, okay, cool, cool. Or Trump, even better, Trump's Hitler. 60% of the people in his country, 60% say he's not. And you're still screaming that he is. I don't know.
00:58:36
Speaker
You know? Yeah, interesting. It's, yeah, challenging times and things are shifting. So. And the old systems are failing. So globalization is over. That's right. I've just recently had a broken bone in my foot. So I've had the interesting experience of dealing with the medical system and seen that, you know, you mentioned Medicare before about we pay a percentage and we'll never pay another dollar.
00:59:05
Speaker
I don't think I'm the only person who's discovered that's not quite correct. So things are changing, as you said earlier, people are seeing that. It's not just that, Karen. They're not just that it's not working. They made us get private health insurance and now that's not paying for this. Talk about a moving goal post. Yeah.
00:59:30
Speaker
it's not just that the systems are failing, it's like the second-tier systems are failing and people have seen that and they're going away. Yeah, and what do we do? So sometimes when there's so much, as you said earlier, it can get overwhelming and I mean that's part of the reason for us to have this this chat is like how do we
00:59:51
Speaker
How do we address these really big concepts, these really challenging things, and move it into a space where we can start to deal with things in a step-by-step way? Which is what you were saying before, the obvious things, water, shelter, food. Yeah.
01:00:19
Speaker
People are waking up with the fact that if you look at it, because all of our problems are huge. They're monstrous, the war on Ukraine, millions of people are dying, the war in the Middle East, hundreds of thousands, da da da. It's daunting. We can't do that as an individual. I can't do anything about that. So I'm stripped of any power. And the stripping of the power is the illusion. Because I do have power. And what people are, well, arrogant. What I believe is,
01:00:49
Speaker
If I act with honor at my little level, if I change stuff at my little level, and I act with honor at my little level, nothing else. People can't say that I didn't have a go. You know what I mean? I take responsibility. Nobody takes accountability and responsibility for their own actions. And with men, when we do that, we get
01:01:18
Speaker
a dopamine hit, I don't know what it is, because we're like Pavlov's dogs. We are very simple creatures. People dress it up and it's crap. We are sin. A woman that treats us nice, is kind to us, is good with the kids, and is a friend, gives me peace more than she gives me, badda da, is gold. And real men see that. We will do it, why do you think we die in wars?
01:01:48
Speaker
It's not that we're competing with women, we exalt women. We put women on a pedestal to look after, but we ask, demand maybe, I don't know, but we have to be treated. You can't kick us all the time. You can't tell us the problem of everything and then expect us to fix anything. Because men can sit in a room and do literally nothing. Women can't understand that. That a man in downtime, that's it.
01:02:16
Speaker
All the boxes are back in the shelves. There's nothing going on. And this is another thing I think that's very important that we need to accept in human nature. Women's thought process is like a ball string. Every thought, every impulse, every emotion is connected to everyone. And that's not a bad thing. That's a wonderful thing. But
Survival Instincts and Societal Evolution
01:02:39
Speaker
when you're dealing with people's feelings and how your kids are emotionally and stuff like that, let's be honest, to a greater degree, men, we don't care.
01:02:47
Speaker
Do you have food? Do you have shelter? Do you have love? Do you have water? Is everything put together? And will it be there tomorrow, the day after? Will you get to the point where I can die and you will survive? And see, we've forgotten that. We've forgotten that. That's our whole role. And that's the reason why you'll see things on the internet. The guy that's going home after 48 hours, he's ratchet tied.
01:03:16
Speaker
He's been taxed out the arse, he's wooden, and he's crying because his daughter's standing at the door every day when he gets home to welcome him. I'm well enough with tears to talk about. We've forgotten that. That is so fundamental. So we dress it up, you know, boys can be girls, bullshit, bullshit, so bullshit. Yeah. The preparedness comes from, we fluff up from anxiety,
01:03:46
Speaker
whether we recognize it or not, because we're hardwired to protect and provide. So if you're not fulfilling that rule, what do you think men are walking around, topping themselves, jumping off bridges, I've been getting stuffed up on drugs and stuff like that because they've lost their honor, the purpose, the real purpose, not bullshit purpose. Purpose is a very, very integral thing to our mental health. There's no doubt about that. And yeah,
01:04:16
Speaker
It's a key thing. And it's funny. So for your listeners, because I'm a hypocrite, total hypocrite, my wife still works in the mining industry and earns mining industry money. I work now with two trades and four cert fours and 35 years experience around the world. I work as a casual farm hen. One of the reasons I do that is that I can't go back to my trades
01:04:45
Speaker
and do that job and feel like I am acting in an honorable way. My job as a farmhand, I act, I get to act and I'm working for the government, which is unusual, shouldn't have said that anyway. They give me a task and because I am the way that I am, they leave me alone and I get the task done and they're very, very happy about the way I get the task done and I said,
01:05:14
Speaker
You've learnt the secret. You give me a job, and then you go away. You give me the respect that I deserve as a 56-year-old dual tradesman who's been around the world and done stuff to level out a pad to put a water trough on without some 12-year-old child telling me that I didn't do a JHA. This is the concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:05:42
Speaker
We've made certain scenarios in industry, I believe, unsafe by making them safer because we've done it down and we've made it so safe that the morons survive.
01:06:00
Speaker
Actually, it's interesting. Sorry for cutting you off. It's interesting that you say that because I think that's true. In nature, those that don't have the smarts to survive, the tricky situations, actually are gone. And so it's only the ones that are the high performers that survive. And that's natural selection. Well, I have a theory to how we ended up
01:06:30
Speaker
in this scenario across the web. I'm just realizing how long we've been chatting. Doesn't matter, you can rip it apart later. All right. I don't know about you, I'm quite enjoying it. Do you want to start? Yeah, no, no, that's fine. We'll go for a little longer and then we might wrap it and get together again and continue the conversation. What was the point that I was just talking about? You've thrown me now. Oh, I'm sorry.
01:07:00
Speaker
I actually mentioned about natural selection. Oh, so when a lot of the stuff that I believe is not working well in today's society raised its head, I believe the reason a lot of it got through was people, practical people. Is that arrogant? I don't know. People that deal in
01:07:30
Speaker
Tangible stuff, not theories. We were busy. We were busy. We were raising kids. We were paying mortgages. We were working 80 hours a week. We were holding down two jobs. And when somebody said, oh, we're going to let a woman go, whatever. Dude, I'm busy. I've got shit to do. I've got a family to raise. I've got responsibilities. I don't have the headspace to deal with your purple head brigade.
01:08:00
Speaker
That was our fault because the Purple Head Brigade got in and then they got into the positions because we were too busy where the metal hits the meat. We were making shit work. We were down in the sewers digging poo. We're digging post vault. We're putting up fucking power. We're not worried about, you know, whether a girl can do what a bloke can do. And when they turned up on the job, they were just like, all right, it's just another thing that we got to deal with. And we didn't jack up enough.
01:08:30
Speaker
Well, they're running the show now. And the fact that it doesn't work, they will have like the Green New Deal. They're driving us into the ground. We're stripping off the tops of National Park Mountains to put in a wind turbine that's going to last 10 years. Normal people are starting to ask like, what? This doesn't make sense.
01:08:57
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't. And there's, there's so many issues around, you know, what, what that does to the, you know, to, to nature. I mean, nature has been around a long time. We've got to protect that. And the strong men or the men, I will say the strong men, the men that are strong in their sexuality. Let's go that way. I don't know. It's probably the most politically incorrect thing to say. And I really don't care. I don't care. But we were too busy doing practical stuff at the time.
01:09:25
Speaker
So the people got in and now they're telling us things like a boy can take a drug. No, before he takes a drug, he can decide that he's a girl. He can discuss it with his teacher, which used to be an honorable position. They are going to encourage him, but not tell the parents because this boy's got rights. But what?
01:09:54
Speaker
None of this makes any sense. I'm just really, I'm really mindful of how that is a really big topic all of its own. That's a really big. And that's the
Practical Steps for Self-Sufficiency
01:10:07
Speaker
travel. Yeah. And it is very difficult to separate these things because they are, they're all parts of keeping the community cohesive because when
01:10:24
Speaker
When the family unit is challenged, it challenges the fabric of the community. I mean, but I guess what I'm trying to say is I think that something that topical that blow up a ball is probably worth us talking about in a separate conversation because it's. And again, it's only one. Yeah, it's just one thing. Let's call them challenges.
01:10:53
Speaker
that people in modern society, and I mean all people, regardless of whether you agree with me or not, doesn't matter. You are facing the same challenges that I am. I went to buy a packet of mince pies. I'm a sucker for the mince pie. They're $5.50. Two years ago, they were $2. That's fact. Yeah. You can't argue that.
01:11:21
Speaker
So they can tell us all the bullshit they want in the world. These was $1.75. Three and a half years ago, I would drive on the way to Perth and I would pick it up at 85 cents a litre. So it's fact. My wage hasn't gone up 50% or 100%.
01:11:40
Speaker
That's right. It's now I'm going to try and bring us back on topic. OK, because we've been chatting for an hour and a half, basically. And and although we are scintillating conversationalists, we probably need to sort of put a point to it.
01:11:58
Speaker
the pointy end as in the dot. You know, what you're talking about there, the cost of living, is just another reason why we need to look at that preparedness. So, you know, things like having a vegetable garden. I mean, when we grew up as kids, everybody had a veggie garden in the backyard, pretty much. And we've lost those, well, I haven't, you haven't, but many people actually don't know how to do that anymore.
01:12:29
Speaker
So one of the questions that you asked me earlier, and I'll go back to it, was how, how, what resources. So what I found personally, other than my life experience, and I had a lot to do with older people, like Mrs. Barton and stuff, so I saw it as a kid, was YouTube, especially around depression. People that survived the depression. Because a lot of the modern prepping is modern as in
01:12:58
Speaker
You've got to buy this, you've got to buy that, you've got to buy this. If you go back to the Depression and you look at what they did, they had behaviours. So that's how I got into canning, which is putting low acid foods such as meat into bottles in a way that makes it shelf stable. So you don't need to refrigerate. So I learnt that by reading books and YouTube.
01:13:27
Speaker
Most of the prepping that I've done, and this is where the discrepancy for people have just started to get into it. Look at it from a point of view. Can I do it with electricity? Can I do it without electricity? And what I mean is, can I do the processing? Can I do the storing? Can I do the, do I need electricity? Or don't I? And that'll give you an indication of how good a system that's going to be. Because if it requires electricity at the storage stage, it's no good to hear. One of the first things that you're going to be combatting against.
01:13:57
Speaker
because it's one of the most fragile things in the infrastructure that keeps us alive at the moment. If we had gone back 150 years, it would have been coal gas in the UK. That's what I meant. So today, electricity is the thing, but it's incredibly fragile. The veneer, I think that's the thing. The veneer between what we think is advanced Western society
01:14:26
Speaker
And what could happen really quick? Again, look at the UK. That didn't talk long. Yeah. And when you start small, the reward is small. But it encourages you to do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And then you get to the point where it actually becomes fun. Yeah. Believe it or not.
01:14:56
Speaker
Jasmine and I were in a certain chain the other day and they had tins tomatoes at 80 cents. We bought everything that they had, everything. We bought like seven slabs of tin can. And we were laughing a bit. I now have probably five years worth of canned tomato. And I started by buying an extra can.
01:15:26
Speaker
And it's a fun thing. Like joking with my wife, she comes home and there's two slabs of spam sitting on the kitchen bench and she said, you couldn't help yourself, would you? And I'm like, nah. I think some people get a bit funny about that.
01:15:46
Speaker
you know, I went into the supermarket the other day, because I haven't been in for a while, and there were empty shelves. Oh, look, I'm talking too much now. And that, um, and I, I said to the guy, I said, because it looked very COVID-esque, you know, empty shelves. I said to the fellow, I said, Oh, is something going on? It's surprising. And he said, Oh, didn't you know, there's a transport strike, their drivers are on strike. And, um,
01:16:17
Speaker
He said to me, don't panic by, don't panic by. And I said, oh no, I'm not in a panic, no problem. But they, you know, the staff there are concerned because people panic by.
01:16:28
Speaker
And then it knocks out supplies for everybody else. But I guess what you're talking about is just as a matter of course, in your regular life, when there's a special or when there's an opportunity, you buy extra. So it's not knocking it out for other people. There is always enough. You're just buying extra each time. So it's not like you're taking away from someone else. Cause I think that's what people get into.
01:16:55
Speaker
Yeah, so the difference between what we do and panic buying is you're buying stuff and you're buying everything when everybody wants it today. I'm buying the shit when nobody wants it. Supermarkets don't put shit on special because they're thinking of the community. They're getting rid of that tomato because they tried to sell it at $2.50 a can. They couldn't sell enough of them. They've been sitting there for too long, so fuck them off at a cheap price.
01:17:24
Speaker
I don't agree with that side of that argument. And of course, what I do eliminates panic fire. It protects you against, there's no need to panic fire. And like when the Kung Fu flu hit and toilet paper, like toilet paper, there's a level of retardation I can't understand. People were hoarding the last part of the process
01:17:54
Speaker
and not doing anything about the first part of the process. And this is another thing that you get to with prepping. It's part of the mindset, right? You need to buy products that you're going to use, that you use now, because it's no good buying Indian naan breads that will last for a hundred years if you don't like it or you've never eaten. And the second part of it, if you've got a supply of stuff, you don't feel the urge to go
01:18:23
Speaker
and do a panic buy, or if you think, oh, maybe I'm a little bit down in spam or something, and it's a panic buy situation, I'm only going to buy half a dozen tins because I've already got five at home. Yeah, that's right. What happens is fear kicks in, which it happens all the time, and your viewers will be aware of it, since the reason they're watching this, and they go, it's here.
01:18:47
Speaker
So now I'm going to throw money at it and I'm just going to grab it because they're grabbing that. So I'm going to grab a baby formula because it's, you know, because I watched the YouTube thing and it says it's high in fat and it's really good in protein and it'll keep you locked. Yeah, but it tastes like shit and you're never going to use it. But you've just bought it all. So now three kids starve because they're giving them cow's milk because they can't get the formula that you ordered. Yeah. Where's the honor? Where's the community responsibility? Yeah. Yeah. On the aquifer.
01:19:17
Speaker
I'm the guy that they come to because I can't get, could you spare me because I need it because of. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Right. Okay. A very good weaving, meandering conversation. But it's an interesting concept to start with. I don't know if you'll be able to pull some balls out of that, but
01:19:48
Speaker
Have a review, see what you want, see what you can use or what you can't use, and we can revisit. We'll just go back and... Yeah. At some point in time, I think we'll have another conversation because I think, honestly, we'll just leave it as it is because it's interesting and people will take what they want from it and that's been good now. That's the other thing too, Karen, is that people have to be prepared to take the information. Information is just information. And my point of view is just my point of view and it really doesn't matter.
01:20:19
Speaker
If people are prepared to take what we've put out, well, tough. No problem. Yeah. No problem. And that's a part of my view is in modern society, we need to let the dead. And it's not a, we need to stop going out for the outliers and we need to look at the bulk of the community. The government, we're serving two ends of the community and not the bulk of the community. The bulk of the community sits in the middle. And we're too busy just worrying about what we're going to eat next.
01:20:48
Speaker
How are we going to keep a roof over our head? I'm not worried about your gender. I don't give a shit about your pronouns. Do whatever the hell you like. But just let me look after more. That's where the bulk of Australians are. The trouble is the media is controlled. Government is so obviously controlled and it's not democratic in any way, shape or form. It doesn't matter how you dress it up. And the systems in place aren't there for the community. And it's glaringly obvious.
01:21:11
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Good chat. I'm going to press the button. Press the button. All right. It's been real. We will chat again.