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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rochites. I am your host. Today, I'm pleased to welcome back to the show, Stephen Harris. Stephen, welcome to the show today. Hey, Josh. Great to be back. Always a fun time. I'm looking forward to this. And if you're listening to this, buckle up, hang on, and get ready for a fun ride.

Absolutely. Today, we're going to be talking about commodities and the concept of investing in commodities, saving money in commodities. But we're going to do it in a little bit of a different way than many people are accustomed to. Steve, you're not known for holding back on your opinions, and so I think it's going to be fun because I'm also not known for that.

We get along well in that regard. And I think we're going to have an interesting conversation on the subject of commodities in a way that's not usually done. And I want to lay about 60 seconds of groundwork by way of introduction, and then we'll discuss some of the specific details.

Many people think, especially when it comes to thinking about hard times, hard financial times, many people think about the value of owning some form of commodity. But usually, that term is used to refer to precious metals, usually gold and silver coins, something like that, although there are people who extend things beyond there.

And there are great benefits in owning things like gold and silver coins. But I like to think about the term a little bit more broadly. And this has been a common theme on Radical Personal Finance going all the way back to I mean probably within the first 50 episodes, the first 100 episodes, I talked about the old book by John—what's his name—The Alpha Strategy, John Pugsley called The Alpha Strategy, where he was facing what he thought was going to be impending inflation back in the 1970s.

And he thought, "What can I do in order to prepare for inflation?" And the basic idea that he came to was, "Well, if I buy the things that I'll use in the future with current money, and then store those things and use them over time, then I'll have protected my money from the potential ravages of inflation." And that strategy is, in my opinion, one of the simplest strategies for people to incorporate to protect for inflation.

It's very hard to predict what's going to happen with a financial portfolio, an investment portfolio during a period of inflation. There are different times where portfolios are affected differently. But it's not difficult to predict what's going to happen with the value of a stockpile of toilet paper that I have in my backyard or in my back shed.

It's going to be there and it'll be used and it's still going to be just as good until we reach the end of its natural shelf life. And that's the problem, of course, with commodities, that there are certain items that you can store for longer than others. In the Alpha Strategy, John Pugsley talks about, for example, how long you can store a pair of shoes.

Well, that'll depend on whether your shoes are made with needle and thread or whether your shoes are made with glue. The glue will eventually start to break down. He talks about how long you might be able to store canned food, of course, would be an obvious example, or how long you could store an extra set of tires for your car.

And all of these kinds of things have certain shelf lives that can be extended to a certain degree, but there is a certain shelf life. And so you need to be thoughtful when you're approaching this subject as to how you're going to approach it so that you don't lose money.

Because the two big risks that you face when you're dealing with stockpiling of a commodity is the risk of loss due to something like theft or the risk of loss due to something like a fire. A house fire can be catastrophic if you have tremendous stockpiles of stuff in your home, and especially if it's not properly insured.

And then the second thing is the risk of obsolescence, either due to the product no longer functioning as you wanted to, maybe something better came along and this old version doesn't work anymore, or just simply the product has become obsolete due to falling apart, decaying, etc. And so Stephen is an extremely creative thinker, and he also has a great deal of experience in this field.

And we're going to talk about stockpiling commodities in ways that a lot of people don't think about. We're not going to talk much at all, probably, about gold and silver coins. We're going to talk about other metals, other items as well. So Steve, there's my introduction. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Okay, right away, I want to obliterate something that you mentioned about three times in your intro. All right, go ahead. And it's something a lot of people use, and it's used to marginalize experts and those in the sciences, and it's just something that is way too widely used. I had someone use it on me the other day.

And anyways, the word is opinion. I do not have an opinion. Joshua Sheets, you're not here listening to him on radical personal finance because you go, "Oh, Josh's opinion is so good." Josh does not have an opinion. He has experience, expertise, and wisdom. Now whether or not you like his experience, expertise, and wisdom, that's up to you.

You can decide to dismiss it and everything else. The guy panhandling on the street corner with the sign that says, "Want money for beer? Why lie?" He's got an opinion. You can ask him if he likes an apple or he likes an orange, and he'll give you his opinion based upon what he likes.

Opinions come from people who do not have judgment, experience, expertise, information, knowledge, wisdom, et cetera. It's used to marginalize the experts by those who do not have the ability. And it's like, you know, Josh can say something extremely intelligent based upon something that he's done and tested. It's like you went for an entire year on cash only, right?

I did. You don't have an opinion on that. You got an entire year of expertise. You talk to someone and they go, "Well, that's just your opinion. That's just your opinion. Why don't we let what other people think talk?" It's like, "Because other people didn't do what I did." And so if you're listening to radical personal finance, you're coming here for severe advice, severe expertise, severe knowledge in a subject.

And that's what I'm bringing to Josh's show. That's what Josh brings to the show every day. So when you're considering, I mean, when you want me to help you with your entire estate and backup system and food and water and power, do you want to come to me for my opinion or you want to come to me for what I've been doing for 35 years with thousands of people?

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll give just a quick plug, Steve, and then we'll get into the details. I'll just give a quick plug for your work that over the years, the reason that I've consumed so much of your work, and I think I've probably consumed, I mean, I'm sure that you've done something I haven't consumed, but I've probably consumed almost everything you've put in publicly at least in the last seven or eight years.

And I have found you to be one of the most accurate thinkers and creative thinkers with good practical solutions to the problems discussed. And it's been great because it's affected my life. And then I've been able to take many of your concepts, add some of my own spin, share them with others, share them with some of my listeners and students, and then point people back to some of your resources as well.

But I admire some of the work that you've done. Tell me a little bit about some of your— That's what I want people to do is I want them to listen to what I say. Because look, you know, people are always asking me like, "Hey, I want a list of stuff to buy and I want to, you know, I got this whole pandemic shopping video." It's five hours of video broken up into 15 different videos between three minutes and 58 minutes each.

It's me going out and doing shopping before the pandemic or disaster or whatever you want. And I say right there, "Look, my list is not your list. I'm not you. I can't tell you what to get because I don't have four kids. I don't, you know, I'm not 68 years old.

I'm not 18 years old. I'm not you, but I can go through and I can show you what I got, why I got, what I didn't get, and why I didn't get it, and why you might get it. And then you can use the knowledge and the examples I'm giving you and you can form your own conclusions for you.

And that's what I think is most – and that's what you did and that's what I think is most important, not following Stephen Harris doctrine. It's, you know, listening to what I am telling you I've done and why I did it and forming your own conclusions the same way people listen to you for the same thing on finance.

Yeah. And I'll add to your teaching style in terms of one of the things that you say as a teacher that you want people to do. If you understand how to do something and you have experience, you can understand why something works, then you can be put into different situations and you know the concepts that will work.

So, for example, Steve, you're probably most known, especially in the prepper world, you're most known for your skills and your knowledge in the area of energy preparedness, although of course your knowledge goes far beyond that. But when I absorbed your lessons and whatnot on energy preparedness, then I was able to take those lessons and bring them into my own life.

And so I left the United States a year and a half, two years ago, and I left the United States with – I didn't take, you know, batteries and generators with me. I left with about eight or nine suitcases and my children in tow and my family and we left.

And so I had to set up shop in a new country, in a third location that I don't talk a lot about. I don't have Amazon. I don't have the ability to say, "Oh, I've got to get this certain particular thing that I need. I don't have this certain part, this certain gadget." So what I had to do was when I was time to go ahead and start setting up my backups at my new location, I had to go to the store and start figuring out what's available where I am.

And because I had the concepts understood of what was available, I was able to go and put together a pretty decent, robust personal preparedness system covering all of the various issues. But I did it without ever going and looking at a shopping list of, "I have to buy this certain item." I went by what was available.

And I think that's the goal, that we want to absorb concepts at a deep enough level that you understand them so that you can go out and in almost any country and almost any place and almost any place that you find yourself, you can look around and see, "What resources do I have and then how can I adjust my use of those resources so that I can provide for my basic living needs?" Yeah, you sent me a picture the other day of a table outdoor in the beautiful weather and you said your power was out and you had a picture of two waffle makers and a Honda EU2200i generator.

And it's like, "Well, what's that for? He's going to make breakfast." It's like, "No, a waffle maker is the fastest food production machine you're pretty much going to find." Josh could make two and a half pounds of food every three minutes with a waffle maker. And no, he doesn't have to use waffle mix and pancake mix.

There's a whole variety of different things you can make in it. But he could make, let's see, well, two and a half pounds times 20. That's about 42 and a half pounds of food an hour, edible food, ready to go in a Ziploc bag in your pocket, ready to put jam or jelly or syrup or honey or eat plain.

And he could have made that out of ground flour, ground corn, ground wheat, oats, rye, rice, you name it. It's a food production machine. It's not something you'll only get at your local restaurant in the morning. Agreed. All right, I want to focus us on the financial opportunities or the financial expressions of preparedness.

And let's start with food because I think that what we're talking about is useful, that food itself can be a commodity. And in fact, it can be an extremely valuable commodity in many circumstances. Number one, benefits of storing food. Number one is that we all eat food. And so if you store food that you might eventually eat and you put yourself in a situation where, okay, I'm not going to eat this right now, but I'm going to buy several months worth of food, I'm going to buy a year's worth of food, you are protecting yourself on a guaranteed basis from changes in your financial assets.

And that food... I did it. Yeah, go ahead. Tell us your story, Steve. I did it. I did it. I did it. So, I was a research and development engineer for Chrysler Corporation in scientific labs. And I worked on electric vehicles and I was knowledgeable in fuel cells and electrochemistry and the other stuff.

And I was there from '90 to 2000 and I went independent in 2000 and left the corporation because dare damn Germans came in of Daimler Chrysler and started ruining everything. And I went independent and I was consulting to fuel cell car companies. Fuel cells were a big thing back then and still have become a big thing.

But there were a lot of interests back then, especially with vehicles, and I had experience in both of those. And I was doing a bunch of consulting and flying to California and all that nice stuff. And 9/11 happened. And just like the pandemic, everything got put on hold for 9/11 only in business change, only it was a different change than what we experienced recently.

So I had to make my mortgage payments still and everything else for my house. And I found out about DirecTV installing and I went out and became the most overqualified DirecTV installer you ever saw. But back in 2002, it was $100 per house I was doing the install on.

I didn't have to do very many of those to make a payment on a $600 mortgage because I bought a $78,000 house rather than the $144,000 house technically that my salary told me I could afford. And keep in mind, this was the early '90s. So I was living below my means, which I think is something that you would recommend.

So I didn't have to do a lot to make my payment and I could continue to do my own work on the side, which is how I developed my publishing company, Knowledge Publications, but I got really poor. I mean, if I was going out and installing DirecTVs to pay my mortgage, I wasn't making a whole lot of money.

And I ended up eating my own food storage for about five, six months as a regular part of my staple. And I had part of my staple was white flour. And I have a whole lecture, which I won't get into on white flour, but I had white flour. And one of the things I like is biscuits.

So I made biscuits every day. And I would take biscuits out with me in my pocket in a wrapper or a bag and munch on them. And I can make up dinner out of biscuits, biscuits and honey and butter and jam and jelly and peanut butter. And I would make my own bread, but I just preferred to make biscuits.

Biscuits were nice and simple. And so, yeah, I mean, a fair amount of my caloric intake was I ate my own food storage. And at that time, my food storage would have been stored for a good eight years at least. And it's not called food storage, it's called food insurance.

So there are things that you can buy. I mean, there's things you can buy that have a very infinite shelf life to them. And they're more valuable to you in the sense that you're feeding yourself or you're feeding your friends and your neighbors, because in a disaster, the people that come over, your friends and your neighbors are the resource in a disaster.

And they're not a hindrance, because you always need extra hands, extra bodies, someone to stay awake at night and keep a lookout and wake you up if something happens, be on watch. So that food insurance is good for you and good for others. Now, remember, just because you might be eating some of the Mountain House freeze-dried really good stuff and the freeze-dried ice cream every day, that doesn't mean the people coming over and helping are eating the same thing you're eating.

They can be eating the rice, the beans, and the other things that are cheaper that you stored and put away. And if they don't eat it on the first day they're there, I guarantee you they're going to eat it on the second day that they're there. And they'll be happy for it.

But as far as the commodity, foods are generally first and foremost to provide you with calories, not nutrition. If you're worried about nutrition, what I say is shut up and take a multivitamin, and you'll have all the nutrition that you need. What you're after is calories to do daily work, existing, not being hungry, et cetera.

But there's a few foods that you can put away that would be a 20-year or 30-year commodity. The only one I can think of that would be perfect-- well, there's two of them, actually. Well, three of them. Sugar, honey, and salt. Both last forever. And you go, oh, sugar?

Sugar? Yeah, sugar stores forever, just like honey. It's basically almost the same thing except for a different form. Excuse me. Honey just has a lot higher dollar value associated, which is pretty good. I got 10 gallons of honey stored, and the story is I got it for really basically for free.

But if you're going to put money into something that other people would want, five-gallon buckets of honey, they're like $200, $300, depending upon what type you get. And they'll still be worth $200, $300 in 10 years from now on an inflationary adjusted basis. Salt is always going to be salt.

It'll never be anything else but salt. It'll never go bad. However, salt generally goes for like $50 a ton. So it's very, very bulky and heavy, and it's a widely available commodity. So I wouldn't recommend of it for financial storage, but it's good for-- I mean, there's only a certain amount of it you can store, like a five-gallon bucket will last you a lifetime.

But if we were talking about storage of a commodity, what we're basically talking about is we're going to cover different places to park your money that actually allow you to keep pace with inflation and/or ways of getting these things so you actually have an economic gain at the end of a period of time, whether it's a preparedness item or not, that you might not have thought of.

And thus, these things are going to be a little bit more fluffy. They're going to be a little bit-- you're going to need to have space for storage. You're going to need to have a place to put them. If you're living in a two-bedroom apartment, it's not really going to work for you.

But it might be something you keep in your mind for when you finally get out of the apartment and/or you find a space location where you can put stuff of value. Steve, I want to ask you a question about salt. In what form factor-- so honey, I think the form factor that's obvious and works great is the five-gallon buckets.

All my life growing up, we always had a friend of ours who was a beekeeper. And I don't remember how often it was, but on occasion, we would buy a five-gallon bucket or two of honey from him. And that was the way that my mom saved money, was just buying five gallons at a time.

And it's great. It's just a five-gallon bucket. It comes directly, ready to go, and as you say, stores forever. What form factor would you use to stockpile salt if you were going to stockpile some? Oh, well, salt likes to absorb water and become hard. It's hydroscopic. In fact, depending upon the salt you get, it's also called deliasquin.

But you're not generally eating that salt. We're talking about sodium chloride. So excuse me, something's got in my throat, and it's not the coronavirus. But no, something completely hermetically sealed, five-gallon bucket, two-and-a-half-gallon pail, one-gallon paint can. Definitely not the paper item that you buy the salt in the store, either the Morton salt tube or the bag of pickling salt.

I buy my salt from Gordon Food Service, and it's 25 pounds of Morton-type of salt, I mean regular granular salt, that is ready to use. And it's $8.25 for 25 pounds. I just pour that into a five-gallon pail, fill up the five-gallon pail, and you got a darn heavy bucket of salt.

I make sure it's hermetically sealed. And depending on how long I'm storing something, I knock down the lid with a rubber hammer, and sometimes I put a piece of silicone tape all the way around it. So that's just the best way to store it. - Okay, give a short, as we move through some of these food groups, 'cause I want you to cover sugar in a moment, but give a short lecture on how to, if you're gonna, let's say you're gonna get a bucket, right?

You're gonna find a supply of buckets, and you're going to fill a few buckets with salt, knowing how valuable it is, and I'm gonna spend $50 on salt, I'm gonna fill five five-gallon buckets. How do you treat those buckets? Talk about oxygen absorbers and how to make sure that it's hermetically sealed for a long period, and what's necessary for these different foods, please.

- Well, you know the word "salary" comes from the word "salt," don't you? - Yes. - At one time, Roman soldiers actually got paid partially in salt, and that's where the term "earning your salt" comes from. Salt was a very valuable commodity in the days of old. It was carried by camel and other beasts of burden thousands of miles from where it was harvested to the marketplace where it was sold.

Salt is sodium chloride. It is over a billion years old. It is not gonna spoil, it is not gonna go bad. The oxygen of the air does not affect it. You take a clean five-gallon pail, not wet, clean and dry, just wipe it out with a towel or whatever, pour the salt in, put the lid on, smash it down with a rubber mallet so it's got a good seal on it, and you're done.

There are no oxygen absorbers or nitrogen or CO2 flushes needed for salt or sugar or honey in the least. All three of them are preservatives. My ex-wife, I drive me crazy. Every time I turn around, I go, "Where's the jelly?" It was in the fricking refrigerator. And it's like, it doesn't need to go into the--.

Well, it says refrigerate over opening, and it's like, that's for stupid people. It's all sugar. It's a preservative. It's not going bad. And people who put peanut butter, jelly, honey, and vanilla, and vanilla is mostly ethyl alcohol, into the refrigerator drives me crazy. I have a housekeeper that comes over, and she's Chinese.

Yes, I have a Chinese housekeeper. And I say, and she comes and puts everything in, and I go, "Look." And I listed off all the stuff. None of this goes into the refrigerator. She goes, "Why not? It'll spoil." And I go, "No, it won't spoil. Don't fill up my refrigerator with things that don't need to be filled up." And plus, it's harder to get out of the container when it's cold.

Right. How did you get 10 gallons of honey for free, in terms of saving actual money, but getting stuff for free? How did you do that? I became a recycler. And I forgot how we found it, but we found this--. Oh, I know. I got a guy I buy barrels and drums from.

And he contacted me and said, "There's a bakery, and they got a bunch of barrels and drums of honey that's partially crystallized, and they can't get it out. And I want to know if you can get it out for me so I can have the barrels and the drums." And I go, "What do you got?" And he goes, "10 barrels, 55-gallon drums of honey." And I go, "Well, take it!" And he brought them all over, and we thought they were half full, but they weren't.

They turned out to be an eighth to a quarter full, mostly more towards an eighth full, but still an eighth of 55 gallons is a lot. So I got a bunch of my friends together from a Facebook preparedness group, and we had a party at Harris House. And we had to buy a drum de-litter, which is like a big can opener for a drum that takes the lid off of a drum.

And we opened it all up, looked at it, and it was crystallized. And what we did was we took a great big paint mixer on a heavy-duty drill, I mean the type of drill you have to hold with two hands, and we mixed it all up so it was homogenized and so it would flow.

Because there was honey and there was crystals in there, and all we did was mix it. And then we would upend the one barrel upside down, leaning against the fence against a clean barrel, and we just let all the honey slowly drain out while we were working on the other barrels.

And then we washed out that barrel, and we got the honey out, we scraped the rest out, and we washed it out with water, and so we had a mix of honey and water, and that went into another barrel. So we kept upending the barrels, and we ended up getting 60 gallons of honey, and we all split it up.

So that's how I ended up with 10 gallons of honey. Now we had about another 25 gallons of honey and wash water, which we knew the concentration of because we weighed the barrels before and after, and we knew the weight of the barrel. So we knew the weight of the honey, and I actually measured the amount of water going in so I know the weight of the water.

Well, now we know our honey and water mixture, and some of my buddies, they like making mead, which is basically honey wine or beer made from honey. All you do is pitch some yeast and keep it warm and let it ferment, and you got one of the oldest alcoholic drinks ever made.

So they took that home, and they made the mead and left me with the 10 gallons of honey. So I found a valuable resource. Yeah, it's probably $400 in honey. Technically it's USDA organic. It was labeled such, and I know it came from India/Pakistan, but nevertheless, it's still good honey.

It's a good story. I looked at the pictures and can prove it. We had a ball. Nice. Let's talk now about sugar. Your preparedness doesn't need to be miserable. Your preparedness needs to be fun. And we all re-crystallized it. The best way to re-crystallize honey is at about 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

I got a Cabela's dehydrating oven, countertop appliance. It's kind of tall. It's like 18 inches tall. It can hold like 12 trays. I just took the trays out, and I put in the half gallons of honey in half-gallon mason jars. And I just ran it at 140 with two half-gallons in there overnight until I...

Well, actually, I just re-crystallized two half-gallon mason jars. The rest is crystallized. And when I want to re-crystallize, un-crystallize it back into a raw, syrupy type of honey, people go, "Oh, that's freezer-burned. It's bad." It's like, there's no such thing as freezer-burned. Those are just ice crystals. Big deal.

I mean, heat it, cook it, it's just fine. And they say, "Oh, your honey's gone bad." No, the sugar is just combined into crystalline forms as it wants to do. All you do is heat it up. And you can heat it up in a bath of warm water. You can heat it on the stove.

You can heat it up in the oven. You can heat it up in a food dehydrator. You just want to get it above 140, and it'll all melt back down together. And there you go. Let's talk about sugar now. I think sugar is an interesting thing to store, because as you say, it stores forever.

It's a preservative. You can use it to preserve fruits and make lovely jams and jellies. And even in terms of an overall food preparedness regimen, sugar on top of bread makes everything go down easier, and it's useful to have. The thing I like about sugar is that, especially if sugar is stored in quantity, and if you have some other equipment, sugar can be transformed into things that are quite valuable, especially during hard times.

So talk about storing sugar, the methodology, and some of the things you could do with stored sugar. Okay, sugar, the big thing about it is, again, it's mildly hydroscopic. It wants to absorb moisture from the air and become solid. And it's not bad when it becomes solid. It just becomes a pain in the butt, because you got to break it up and regranulate it.

And a blender works good for that. I mean, a hammer and a chisel, and then you throw the hunks of it into a blender, turn it back into powdered sugar that you then use. But sugar is really good for jams and jellies. It's needed for baking, because you need it for yeast to eat, to make carbon dioxide to make your bread rise.

It adds sweetness and a taste to things that would generally be regularly not as palatable or not as pleasantly palatable. I believe you should be a spectator in disaster, like you're a spectator in a football game, sitting there and fans eating hot dogs and drinking beer and talking with your friends and watching the game on the gridiron, rather than being one of the idiots on the gridiron slamming into other idiots with helmets and shoulder pads.

They're participants. You want to be spectators. So you want to be a spectator in the disaster, watching everyone. You watch a person floating down the river at high speed, barely keeping up above the water, and you go, "Oh, I bet that sucks." And then they're gone. Call 911. But so you were a spectator.

That other person was a participant. Participants only become one of two things. They either become survivors or they become victims, decedents, dead. And just because, you know, the second you crawl out of the river naked and make it to the bank, it's like, "Oh, I finally made it out of the river." Well, you're still a long ways away from any help or civilization in the woods.

You just crawled out of the river naked. So now, congratulations, you are a participant in another survival experience, making it to help, naked, after crawling out of a river. So thus, you want to be the spectator. Sugar, it does have a need, a trading commodity value. One of the things you can do with it, you can easily turn sugar into soft and hard candy, which is going to be small, compact, and dense.

And it is going to have a trading value in a post-apocalyptic or disaster type of situation. I carry hard candies in a bug out bag and everything else just to share with other people. If I ever wind up in a shelter, I mean, a hard candy will definitely make people, you know, smile for five or ten minutes.

The other thing you can do with sugar is you can make moonshine. And I have an entire instructional video on this. It's very easy. No, you don't need to have the pods in the still. I mean, the device I use is basically a simple, looks like a coffee maker.

And you can distill alcohol directly from sugar after processed by yeast. No, you don't need corn. No, you don't need mash. No, you don't need wheat. No, you don't need to be out in the woods. No, you can do it on your kitchen table. In fact, all ethanol is come from, all organic ethanol made by a biological process comes from yeast eating a monosaccharide sugar.

Starch is a polysaccharide. And you turn starch like corn into a monosaccharide by heating it and treating it with malted barley or alpha amylase and glucoamylase enzymes to break it down into a monosaccharide so the yeast can eat it. So all yeast comes from sugar, whether that's starch converted to sugar or whether that's sugar to start with.

The easy button is just buy the damn sugar at Walmart or Costco. No one's going to look at you twice for buying 500 pounds or 1,000 pounds of sugar. Besides, just make up a little company, do a DBA and call it Joshua's Hard Candy and Sweets. It's like, buy underneath that name.

You're buying sugar to make candy, even if you're making ethanol moonshine out of it. But really, the moonshine, since ethanol never, ever spoils, you are by far better buying sugar and making the moonshine and storing it. I advocate you store it in water bottles. Buy the little, and you want to do the eight-ounce bottles, not the 16-ounce bottles from Sam's Club or Costco or wherever you give them.

Yeah, just pour the water into your mash and make your, actually it's called a wort, and make your wort out of it and distill it and then put the ethanol back into the bottles, only you put a little black dot on the cap so you know it's ethanol. You put it in there about 100 proof, and eight ounces is about three and a half, four and a half shots.

So basically, eight ounces is one really good drunk. You can trade that away all day long, anywhere in the world. I'll tell you something really interesting. I'm a consultant to different elements of government and special forces, which people know. I got this one entire group and team to, they always carry a multi-fuel stove, a pressurized one, and it runs on diesel, kerosene, gasoline, you know, Avgas, Jet A.

It runs on almost any liquid fuel, but it doesn't run on alcohol. And so there'll be like a 12-man ODA, and two or three of them will have the stove with them, but another two or three will have a simple, what you see online as the brass alcohol stove.

All you do is pour in the denatured ethanol or marine fuel, which is denatured ethanol, and it's a simple little alcohol stove. Alcohol stoves are just simplicity, they're just so simple. It's a little bit more expensive of fuel, but they just work so beautiful. So they'll carry that, and they were carrying denatured ethanol that you get at Home Depot as a backup fuel, about a pint of it or two pints of it.

And what it is, it's 98% ethanol and 2% methanol. It's called denatured, so it's not natural, so you can't drink it because it will literally make you sick or blind or poison you if you drink denatured alcohol. And I told the guys, "No, no, stop doing that." They go, "Why?

What?" I go, "Go get Everclear." In the United States and most states, not all states, you can buy 190 or 195 proof ethanol. And so that is basically 95% ethanol, and the rest is water. In some states, it's 150 proof, and it won't work, but if you can get 190 proof ethanol, Everclear, I said, "Carry that as your stove fuel." I said, "And it's actually cheaper than the marine alcohol." Wait, no, the marine alcohol is cheaper.

But anyways, I told them to carry this, and they go, "Why?" I go, "Well, one, you can medically use it to disinfect things, needles, sutures, wounds, et cetera. Two, you can use it as a stove fuel just beautifully. Three, you can use it as a trading or barter item.

And four, you can use it as a trading or barter item because you can drink it." And I said, "Let's say you get into a bad situation. You get a bullet through the leg. Your buddies do T-Trips-C on you. They put a tourniquet on you, bandage you up, and you guys now have to do a three-legged race for the helicopter.

That's three and a half kilometers away, and you are in, oh my God, horrible pain, and your medic's not there. There's usually two medics and an ODA." And I said, "Now you got something that has been historically a proven anesthetic for severe pain. And it's like you can drink that alcohol, and you can get yourself a little bit drunk or a lot drunk depending upon your medical situation, and it might allow you to overcome the amount of pain that you have to get through to make it to your ex fill.

Otherwise, you're going to become a prisoner or dead." And these are people operating in hostile areas. It's not big army or the big Marine Corps. So there's an example of what you can do with ethanol as a commodity or as a storage device. You can use it as dope fuel.

You can use it trading and bartering. You can use it as a medical disinfectant. You can use it as an internal analgesic. - Right. That's what I like about the idea of thinking about things that you could store. So I don't buy much into the idea that the world, there's this idea that some people have that, "Well, everything after the zombie apocalypse, then we go back to 1800s technology." I don't buy into that idea, but I do know that there can be times when society as normal, it doesn't exist for quite a while.

And if you want to find one of the historically most valuable things to have, alcohol has always been at the top of that list. And so if you think about the value and you say, "Well, maybe I could store some sugar." In a moment, we'll talk about putting money into alcohol itself, like alcohol that other people have made, but the cheapest way to do it is, as you say, you store the sugar, you possibly go ahead and distill the alcohol yourself and store it, and that can have significant value, and is really worth considering as one reason to store significant amounts of sugar and also to accumulate the appropriate equipment that would allow you to properly distill it safely.

>>Ted: I would not do it post-event. I would not make alcohol post-event. The type of alcohol I would make post-event is what they do up in Alaska, because a lot of the Inuit city areas up there are dry, is you can take yeast and sugar and water, and you can make a wine.

You just ferment it, and it makes a wine/a beer, whatever you want to call it, and you can drink it straight. It's going to be about 11% to 16% ethanol, depending upon the yeast. If you use Red Star Baking Yeast, it's going to be about 11% alcohol, and you can drink that directly.

I would not use my valuable energy for distillation of that post-apocalyptic, because your energy is by far too valuable, and don't go, "Well, what if I got a solar panel?" It takes a fair amount of energy to distill. It takes a fair amount of energy to distill ethanol. I would not use solar power, solar energy, gasoline.

If you had an abundance of hydroelectric, sure, but other than that, no. It takes a lot more energy than energy you have in your battery bank to distill even one gallon of ethanol. So, on the same theme of things that store forever, most distilled spirits will basically store forever, and some distilled spirits can actually grow in value.

I noticed an interesting headline a couple weeks ago, beginning of September. The headline is, "Son sells birthday whiskey collection worth over $53,000 to buy his first house." His father, basically every year, spent about $6,000 total over 28 years, and he would give his son a bottle of McCollin single malt whiskey as a birthday gift.

He did this from the very beginning, and at this point in time, he now has a collection worth about $53,000, which he's planning to sell through a broker, through an auction of some kind, and be able to use that money for paying a down payment on his first house.

So, Steve, what thoughts do you have around storing distilled spirits as a way of having inflation-proof assets? Sounds pretty bad to me. Six thousand times 20 is 120,000, and he's selling it for 50,000. Sounds like a bad investment to me. No, no, no, no, no. It was $6,000 total.

All of the bottles have cost about $6,000, so the $6,000 spent, because of the time that they had sat on the shelf, the $6,000 had grown to be worth about $53,000 in today's dollars. No, I wouldn't do that. The only thing I would buy is, if you want to buy a bunch of Costco vodka really cheap and have it as something, you can't put enough money.

It builds up too much space in terms of volume versus dollars, which is what's nice about gold is that one ounce is small and you've got a lot of monetary value into it. The problem with it is it's small and you've got a lot of monetary value into it.

You can't make change with a bar of gold, but you're really not going to make money on gold or silver. It's just an inflationary-proof place to park your money for 10, 20, 30 years or more or to pass it on to another generation. If you happen to make money on it, great.

I know a lot of people have lost a lot of money on gold and silver. People are losing money on gold and silver right now and people are making money on gold and silver right now. The whole idea of, "Oh, well, in a disaster, I'm going to go take my gold and silver and trade it for a loaf of bread." No, you're not.

Stop listening to the idiots on the net. I know people that have gone through the entire inflationary period and the collapse of Venezuela and people who have escaped Venezuela and gone to other countries. I dealt with people working for me doing web work and other type of work. He was an MD.

He was a doctor. He was making more money working for me for pennies than he could make in Venezuela. You can't buy a loaf of bread with an ounce of gold if there's no loaves of bread. Don't think there's anyone that's going to trade you a loaf of bread for an ounce of gold because they won't because they're hungry.

Hungry is one of the most powerful motivators. After thirst and breathing, hunger is one of the most powerful motivators of human beings. When he left and his parents were still there trying to get entry visas into other countries, she would have about one meal a day. She'd get two gallons of gasoline every three days.

That was allotted to her. She would wait four to six hours each time for that two to three gallons of gasoline. There was nothing in the stores. There was no currency because the currency was devalued beyond description. There was no one buying trading with gold or silver. None. Zero.

If you don't have it before a disaster, you're not going to get it during or after. That includes your food, your water, and your other needed supplies. I paid him electronically through a system called Payoneer. It's like a worldwide version of PayPal. I paid him through Payoneer. He went to a black market person.

He transferred the money to him in Payoneer. Then the black market guy transferred his money to his bank account in Venezuela. Everything was purchased on debit cards. Everyone used debit cards. Everything was purchased with debit cards because the inflationary index was already accommodated for that day in the bank transfer.

He actually used his debit card so much over a period of two and a half years that wore out. I said, "Go get a new debit card." He goes, "Yeah, well, I'll have to be in the bank waiting all day." I go, "Take a good look. You need to have a working debit card." He only had one.

You can't buy food or anything. You can't buy anything without your debit card in Venezuela at the time, which became really bad when they had the countrywide power failure. Then they couldn't even use their debit card. Everything was done by debit card. I asked him, "What would you do if you had gold or silver?" He said, "I'd have to take it to the black market guy to get it transferred and put into my bank account as monetary units in my bank account to use my debit card to go buy something." He says, "He would charge me more than half." If you had $1,000 US dollars in gold, he would only give you $500 for it because it was such a pain in the rear end for him to try to turn that back into something that was useful to him as a black market person, some type of fiat.

This myth of, "I'm going to go buy my bread and my stuff with my gold and silver is in I'm buying these little pieces I can break off into one gram slices and I'm buying one tenth ounce gold pieces." Bull crap, bull crap, bull crap, bull crap, bull crap.

It's not going to get you nothing. In fact, during the pandemic in the United States, you couldn't buy stuff. It just wasn't there. You went to the grocery store and there just was no bread. There just was no meat. There was no milk. There was no eggs. Depending upon where you were and what time during the pandemic, there was none.

We are fortunate as hell that we had power and that we had electricity. We had gasoline. We had electricity. Imagine the pandemic without gasoline and without electricity. It would have been a lot more and not being able to go to the store, not being able to go to the pharmacy.

One of the things we were going to talk about, Josh, was other forms of commodities that you could store dollars in. You're looking for places to park your money. It's like a slow drizzle that fills up your rain bucket. We're not looking at a thunderstorm. We're not looking at trying to move your life savings of $600,000 into gold or into silver, which is absolutely kind of impossible to do at the moment, even if you wanted to, which is why you talk about how to survive the upcoming financial problems by using foreign banks and different banks.

You got a whole beautiful strategy worked out for it. But there are things that you can get. If you got space, there are things that you can get that are reasonably dense that you can park your money in and you can get them for a bargain. You actually might make money on them in 10 or 20 years when you go to cash them in.

You're not going to be just like cashing these things in on the street. It's not like you're going to be able to go to liquid instantly, but you're going to be able to go to liquid and go to profit. But it's not like, "Hey man, I got some silver.

You want to buy it?" You might be going to a company or to a market or to a scrapyard or something and turning it in. Some of it might take you a month to convert it. Some of it might take you a day to convert it. But this started, I do a lot of work in the industrial world and I was on Facebook Marketplace, which is a great place to buy stuff.

It's basically taken over Craigslist. And this guy had billets of a special stainless steel that's used on a CNC or a lathe or a mill to make stuff. And they were about six inches long by four inches by four inches. And they were a specific type of labeled stainless steel.

And anyways, he said they were $144 brand new. And Detroit is a fairly industrial area where I live. And he says he wanted $70 for each of them each. And obviously he was selling them to people who wanted them for their own CNC or mill work. And I was looking at it and I was like, "Gee, I bet you if I bought them all, I could get them for 50 bucks each." So brand new, 144 in year 2020, selling them at basically half price.

I could probably get them even cheaper. And what you need... And there was like $10,000 of them. He had 200 of them. And so $10,000 of them at $50 each. Well, if I had a spare $10,000, that was like a small fraction of my income that I wanted to park.

And we're talking what, what would you say, Josh, 1% or 2% of your income, 1% of your income that you wanted to park. So whether that was $1,000 or $10,000 or $150,000, that's up to you. I could have bought these billets of steel. Now you want the certs with them.

You want the sheet that comes with them that says what they are. And usually they're going to be marked with a paint pen that says 3003 on them or whatever the type of steel or metal that they are made out of and what their formulation is. And you want the certs or the XRFs that come with them.

But that's fine. You can take those and you can just put a coating of WD-40 on them and you can put them into a plastic tote that you hermetically seal with tape. So no moisture gets in there and corrodes them past their WD-40 coating. And if you got a barn or a place to store them, bury them, whatever you want, in 10 or 20 years from now, those things are still going to be worth $144 times the inflationary adjustment for when you go to sell them.

So they might be worth $215 or $250 each in 10 or 20 years. But it is a commodity. It is steel. And it is a specific flavor of steel that has a higher value to it because it's used in the machining business for the manufacture and making of parts from custom machining shops or something.

Now, can you just go down the street and say, "Hey, dude, I'll trade you this hunk of stainless steel for bread." It's like, "No." But we're not talking about that. We're talking about parking money for an inflationary proof storage and/or an inflationary proof storage plus profit method. Now it's a roll of the dice whether or not you're going to make your money beyond inflationary adjustment on gold or silver, right?

Correct. It all has to do with demand. Right. No, I mean, this is a regular commodity that is always going to be in demand even 20 years from now. And if you got the room, you can buy it and you can store it. And it's a place to park some money other than gold and silver.

And this, like I said, this will probably have return on it. One of the other good things is I deal with scrappers and they go and scrap things and they take it to the recycle yard and get money for it. Well, I tell the scrappers that I want bar stock copper, like the copper that comes out of the back of a big industrial circuit breaker panel.

Not the thin stuff, not copper wire. I want stock bar stock copper and I'll pay them 10% over what Great Lakes Recycling will give them. And to be honest, I don't want fluffy copper. I want dense copper. I want copper that's easy to store. So I'm buying it at recycle price, which is well below commodity price.

And it's in a stocky method and I already have an industrial shop and a storage unit. So I got a place to put my copper. And if you took a priority mail mailer box and filled it full of copper, and I have, you can barely lift it. It's like 80 pounds.

Copper is a dense metal. Now that copper I can take to any scrap yard in the country and they will give me cash for it. And there's scrap yards in every city, everywhere that you go. So I can turn my copper back into cash and I can have an inflationary proof method of storage for my money.

That is not gold. That is not silver. That has what we call a completely different signature to it. I mean, gold or silver, you're only going to sell it to a private person or you're going to sell it to a dealer. And you're going to have to find a dealer or a private party.

And depending upon the dealer, if it's a coin deal or something, you're going to lose a certain amount of money above spot to get it. And he's going to pay you a certain amount of money below spot for it. And depending upon the amount of money, there may or may not be a paper trail behind that that you may or may not want, depending upon how you were doing your business and your personal finances.

So copper is good for that. In the world of copper, there's bright copper, number one copper, number two copper. Bright copper is stripped copper wire. Number one copper is copper from copper wire. And number two copper is like copper pipe. And any other type of copper, enameled copper, et cetera.

And wire is fluffy. There's a lot of airspace in wire. And that's why I wanted the bar stock, because it's already as densified as I'm going to get it unless I melt it and cast it. Melting and casting copper is a world of difference from melting and casting aluminum, because it's melt and pour temperatures up around 2,000, whereas aluminum is between 1,200 and 1,400.

Speaking of aluminum, I would not recommend the storage of aluminum, because it becomes what we call too fluffy. It is too cheap and it takes up too much space. Right now, aluminum is about 30 cents a pound at the scrap yard. And that is an awful lot of volume of aluminum to be able to store and turn back into the scrap yard in the future.

One of the ones that I do have a lot of experience with is lead. Lead right now is between 85 cents and $1 a pound, depending. It depends upon the antimony content of it. You can get lead in all sorts of forms, from tire weights to range lead to lead sheet scrap.

You can get lead in all sorts of forms. But the neat thing about lead is it's really easy to melt. It's melt temperature is 620 Fahrenheit. And generally, you pour it around 700. And you can pour it into ingots. And actually, for some professional work I've done, I got some 80-pound ingots of lead.

They're not that big, and darn, are they heavy. But actually, the funny thing is when you get above the 80-pound ingot, you get into 1,000-pound blocks of lead. They're called sows, like the pig. So it's easy to melt and pour. And the thing about lead is it's impervious to about everything.

It just does not want to react. There are lead roofs on churches in Europe and in the UK that are over 1,000 years old. Lead was the first metal that man ever started to work with. And over time, it forms a layer of lead oxide and eventually lead carbonate on the surface.

And it's basically like a scab on a wound. It protects itself. And the layer doesn't go very deep. And we've actually talked about-- we got one of the people who works for the lead company has a big farm someplace. And he's got like 200 acres. We literally talked about the idea of just putting a million pounds of lead-- that's a million dollars in money-- out in the farm field, just in a pile.

That's the storage method for it. And it's like, it's not going to go bad. It's not going to get bad. It's not going to change. And it is going to be very, very, very hard for someone to, one, recognize what it is, where it is, and then to get it out of there.

How are you going to move a million pounds of lead? A semi-truck carries 40,000 pounds. So you're looking at 25 semi-trailer loads of lead just to move it. But again, we were hypothesizing that as an inflationary proof storage method of lead. Now we think over the next 10 to 20 years, lead is going to become more invaluable than valuable because of the rise of the lithium ion battery and the less use of the lead acid battery.

And we think lead use is going to actually go down rather than go up. Incidentally, lead is, on a percentage basis, lead is the most recycled metal in the world. The most recycled metal in the world by volume is steel. The most recycled by percentage is lead. So we talked about actually doing that with lead.

You can take lead down to your scrap dealer and they will buy it all day long. You're better off, scrap dealer might give you 30, 35 cents for it. And an industry person, and I found a couple in Detroit, they're small lead foundries. They melt and pour lead. They will give you 70 to 85 cents for the same amount of metal.

And they're going to zap it with their XRF because they want to know what the antimony content is of the lead, which determines its hardness. Or if it's pure lead, or what we call 3% or 6% with the antimony in there. And then they're going to buy it from you.

Again, not as easy to dispose of as gold and silver, yet it is another method that is an option for you to consider based upon what you have, where you're at, what your priorities are and what your availabilities are. I mean, if you've got a front end loader, you can load, put bars of lead into your field all day long and get them in and out easy enough.

If you don't, it's a pain in the rear end to do it by hand. So again, this is information from Josh and me that you can utilize for what you have and what's available to you. If you're in a two bedroom apartment, you're not storing ingots of lead in the closet.

You're going to do something that is available to you. So lead, it was an interesting commodity. Aluminum, we said it was too fluffy. What else is there that you're thinking of, Josh, that we can talk about? Oh, I have, I got kerosene. I got in the 1990s. I got it for $1.35 a gallon from the gas station and I stored it because I decided kerosene in the 1990s was going to be my amount of fuel.

I wanted one fuel that would do the most. I can heat with kerosene. I can cook with kerosene. I can illuminate with kerosene. I can even do some transportation, a vehicle on kerosene, which is a longer story. So I bought kerosene. Well, that kerosene is now $4.50 a gallon.

So from 1995 to 2020, did I have an inflationary balance or gain? Yeah, probably. Yes. But really it was meant for my own usage rather than for trading. Yet it could be a good trading item. But I have a saying from my 35 years in the energy field, never go long on energy, ever.

Decade by decade, average basis, energy is always cheaper. So what do you mean, Steve? Gasoline used to be $0.32 when I was a kid. That was 50 years ago. Okay. Josh, you want to do the inflationary adjustment from $0.32 on a gallon of gasoline to... I'll look it up, but I'm tempted.

I was like, "Oh, we could bring in some peak oil conversation." I bet Steve would have some quite salacious words to say considering what you're saying right now on that topic. There is no such thing as peak oil. Peak oil is bullshit made up by people who want to motivate you.

They want to motivate you by fear. It's always the sky is falling. I mean, literally I have books from 1910 that talk about when are we going to run out of coal. I kid you not, 1910, 1920, we're going to run out of coal. It's always the same thing.

We're always going to run out of something. We're going to run out of air. We're going to run out of water. We're going to run out of oil. We're going to run out of whiskey. We're going to run out of something. It's like Ron White was doing a comedy routine and he's talking about going back to his doctor in California to renew his marijuana card.

The doctor goes, "What are you taking marijuana for?" He goes, "Anxiety." He goes, "What do you get anxiety about?" He goes, "Not having any pot to smoke." I ran the numbers. I mean, it's just a continual always thing of someone trying to motivate you by fear that has no experience in the field.

Right. I ran the numbers for you. In 1950, if I purchased an item for 35 cents, then in 2020, that same item would cost $3.77. I mean, that's almost an exact analog for gasoline. You can't store gasoline that long. That's a long conversation. You can diesel and kerosene, but that's an exact analog for almost what we got.

In fact, right now, diesel fuel is $2.15. I got a bunch of diesel fuel stored because actually I got it for free. I had to have a big generator moved and it had 450 gallons of diesel fuel in it. It's like, "We got to get rid of the diesel fuel." It's like, "I know how you can do that.

How's that? We got to pay the guy to show up with the truck and pump it and everything else." It's like, "I'll take it for free." I mean, so there you go. I remember gasoline being 85 cents in the early '90s when I was working at Chrysler and I had a Geo Metro that got 55 miles to the gallon.

Now we're talking about gas being $1.75 a gallon to $2 a gallon. You do an inflationary adjustment between, "Oh, it was 89 cents when I was working at Chrysler in 1992." Do an inflationary adjustment between 85 cents and $1.73 in 2020. I bet you that 89-cent gasoline was not so cheap as you think it is.

It's cheaper now than it was then. Natural gas crashed in price. Oil crashed in price. I mean, there's always going to be spikes, but I'm talking on a decade-by-decade average basis or a decade-moving basis, energy is always cheaper. There's always that oil spike to $150 a gallon. Well, that was artificially induced reasons, et cetera, and a bunch of other things.

And you notice the price of gold went up because the price of gold is directly tied to the price of diesel fuel because it takes their remote mining and everything and all their equipment runs on diesel fuel. So the more they pay in diesel fuel, the more the price of gold is going to be because the cost of mining has gone up.

But you can talk about that later. That's a whole other paradigm of the way things work. So don't ever go long energy in any form economically. Now, there's something intelligent you can do with energy. I have a friend, and he had trouble with a propane company, and he said, "Screw it." He went out and he bought four 1,000-gallon tanks, and he bought them used reconditioned from a reconditioned place, so basically as good as new.

And he has the propane company come and fill them up every year in the summer at 95 cents, and he uses it all through the winter when propane is above $2. And he's made his money back on the price of the tanks in like four years. So there's a short-term thing you can do with energy.

It's like I tell everyone, "Look, you're on Facebook Marketplace. Buy your air conditioners in the wintertime, and buy your heaters and your wood stoves in the summertime. You will buy them all for bargains at each time, and so what? You got to wait six months, but that six months will happen.

That six months will occur." And there was a great wood stove, beautiful $1,500 wood stove with the glass in the front and the legs and everything. And it's just premium stove like you'd get a tractor supply store for $150 on Facebook Marketplace from someone who just said, "I just want to get rid of this thing." They spent the $1,500, you spent the $150 and got it for a bargain.

But yeah, so you can be smart with energy and you can like your propane because propane never goes bad. So now he's got two years, literally, more than two years of propane on his property, which in his generator runs off of propane, his stove runs off of propane, his furnace runs off of propane, his water heater runs off of propane.

They all run off of propane. So he went monofuel with propane and he buys it cheap in the summer. He got the tanks reconditioned used. And so he's making money all day long on that aspect of propane. I think these are good examples. And I want to talk for a minute from the financial perspective about what you will, if you think about people often have significant opinions around things like gold and silver.

And it's… There's the old word again. People have hot feelings around gold and silver. Some people say, "I believe in gold." Some people say, "I don't believe in gold." And I remember the first time I went to go and buy… I was trained as a professional financial advisor in a fairly mainstream viewpoint.

And I remember the first time I went and decided I was going to buy a gold coin, I felt like I was committing some heinous crime. I felt I was looking over my shoulder going into the coin shop and I just felt like, "Wow, I don't know what am I doing here." And it was all a totally opaque world to me.

I didn't understand. And when I left, I looked at this little coin and I thought, "I spent $300. I think I bought a 10-ounce gold eagle. I spent $350 on that." And then in time, I became more comfortable with the topic of investing. But what I've often identified and seen is that if you understand a marketplace, you'll see that that marketplace has distinct advantages and distinct disadvantages.

So as a way of example, gold and silver being commodities really should perform just about like copper and lead being commodities, which means that they should in time keep pace with inflation generally speaking. Now because of the emotions that are charged with it, because of the market, so for example, you have arguments, you know, Stephen's talking about the lead marketplace, people using lead.

Well, there's all these arguments about the silver and the silver, you know, people using up silver in the industrial system. There's arguments about gold. Gold is extremely- I hate that on TV. It's like, "Silver, we can't make silver. We can't make solar panels without silver. Silver is going to go up.

Alternative energy, your cell phone uses silver. Now silver is advertised as being antiviral and antimicrobial and we're in a pandemic and buy silver and I'm screaming at the TV, 'Shut the F up!'" I hope that your blood pressure is okay, Stephen. Either that or you're going to turn off the TV.

Oh, no. No, no, no. You know, Jack Spierker always said that, you know, Harris should go on medical marijuana. No, no, no. No, no. It's just, you know, I have passion and enthusiasm for what I talk about and I speak about it in a passion-enthusiastic method because a lot of the stuff I'm dealing with is life and death, okay?

When I'm teaching different elements of the military, special forces, I'm teaching different things about batteries. Look, if their battery dies and they can't make that call and they can't get their evac, they're captured or they're dead. When I'm talking to you about preparedness and about food storage and food making and different tools and everything else, you know, if you go, "Oh, Steve, I thought you said blah, blah, blah." No one ever says, "Steve, what did you really—what do you really think?

What did you really mean?" No one ever says that. I come across clear as a bell because your life depends upon it. It's like, "Oh, I thought you—I got, you know, you wanted me to buy bleach. Oh, well, I bought ammonia. Won't that purify my water?" No. You know, I'm talking about life and death subjects here, that, you know, literally your life could be dependent upon what I say based upon a situation that gets thrust upon you in the future.

There's an old saying that says, "Leadership has never found one or acquired. It is always suddenly and violently thrust upon you throughout history." George Bush, 9/11, good story. He was elected president. He was the president of the United States. You think of him as a leader. No, he was never a leader until 9/11 happened and leadership was suddenly and violently thrust upon him.

No matter what your feelings or stories are about 9/11, I'm using that as an example of how leadership is suddenly and violently thrust upon you. Well, you can be in a situation—it could be the pandemic, it could be a hurricane, it could be an earthquake, it could be a blizzard, you weren't monitoring the weather, and all of a sudden it's suddenly and violently thrust upon you, and you're going to fall back on your lowest level of training, and your lowest level of training is Harris yelling at you because you don't forget it.

And that's why I am extremely verbose, communicative, boisterous, loud, straightforward, blunt, you know, and to the point on things when it comes to preparedness because, you know, this is a life and death subject. I mean, you're talking about stuff with—in radical personal finance that dramatically affects the quality of a person's life now and in the future, okay?

It's not really life and death. It could be when it comes to, like, using money for, like, medical treatment and everything else and stuff like that. It could be life and death, but you're talking about stuff that affects more of a lifestyle, and I'm talking more of things that go along with what you're teaching.

You know, we're being smart financially. You should be smart with food and water and power and self-reliance and independence. You know, financial independence, food independence, water independence, energy independence, those are all just different types of independence. But when that event happens, when it is thrust upon you and you go, "Holy crap!

How did that happen?" I'm talking about something that, you know, very well might mean life or death to you. Literally, if you don't take my advice or you didn't have my counsel, you might end up being dead. This could be everything. It's like I carry a tourniquet. I carry a RATS tourniquet everywhere I go.

I have for, like, the last six years, ever since I had a T-TRIP-C class, which stands for Tactical Combat Casualty Care, which teaches you how to use tourniquets, and they use live animals. They're anesthetized. There's a vet there and everything else. And sometimes it's called the goat lab. Sometimes they're pigs.

Sometimes they're different things. But they're given in certain places around the world, and you learn a lot very quickly. I mean, I have stopped three pumping arteries from a six-inch long, four-inch deep wound into the flesh of an animal. I have stopped the bleeding within 20 seconds. That is a very, very, very powerful thing to learn, especially when you go out on the battlefield as a warfighter, which I have never had.

But the people I was working for, they're all SEAL Team guys, and they're all about cross-training. And I came into the environment of teaching battery and power and energy because you used to only have to have bullets and water to complete your mission. Now you need bullets, water, and batteries to complete your mission because you got to take a soft lamp, put a laser marker on the top of the hill, call up to the orbital cafe above you, and have them pickle a 2,000-pound JDAM that goes right onto that spot that you're looking at.

Well, that requires batteries, both for the Special Operations Forces laser acquisition marking device, the soft lamp, and for your radio to talk to the satellite, to the bird or to the bombers of whatever type, from F-18 to B-1 to B-52s, the B-2s above you, to drop that bomb and hit it onto the target.

If you don't have batteries, you can't complete your mission. So the military got serious about batteries and power, and all the next thing I knew, I was roped in. And the team guys are going, "Hey, you been in the military?" "Nope." "You ever done this?" "Nope." "Ever done that?" "Nope." "Nope." And he's yelling, "Hey, Gunny, throw the frickin' engineer in the class with the guys." It's like, "Where am I going?" He's like, "You're going to the machine gun class." I go, "What?" He's like, "Yeah, there's a five-day machine gun course on the .50 cal and on the M60." And I was with a bunch of Marines and other people, and I got to take a part and put it together and shoot thousands and thousands of rounds of .50 cal and .30 cal out of a M60 machine gun.

And it's like, I like this cross-training. They just did it so I would have more familiarity with what my students had to do. And so that's how I got into the T-Trip-C class. We were teaching a government law enforcement group, and they were deploying to Iraq. And it looked at me, it's like, "You got three days?" I go, "Yep." I got thrown into the T-Trip-C class.

But anyways, so I forgot. Ever since then, I carry a tourniquet because, one, if you're a concealed carry holder, you're more likely to use your tourniquet on someone else than you are to use your firearm. You're more likely to be near a shooting, around a shooting, not there at the time of the shooting to engage the bad guy with your firearm.

You might be there at the aftermath. Then I was in law enforcement for five years, and I always carried a tourniquet because I can get shot. My vest only covers a certain area. And so I actually might have to self-administer a tourniquet to myself. We just had two cops shot, sheriff deputies shot in San Diego.

And she actually, the guy had a head wound. It was a strike across the forehead, not into the cranium. And she was shot in the jaw, and she could barely call in Officer Down, which was a 998 code in Los Angeles. She could barely say 998 into the radio to get the calvary coming to her.

But she actually used her tourniquet as a pressure dressing to stop the bleeding on the guy's head wound. There's a joke about using a tourniquet around someone's neck to stop the bleeding, and it solves the problem. You don't use tourniquets around the neck. Use tourniquets on extremities. But in this case, it's actually a perfect use for a tourniquet.

She had something to stop the bleeding, which could be a T-shirt, a rag, a paper towel, a Curlax, sanitary gauze, could be anything. She put that onto his head laceration, and head lacs bleed like sons of bitches. Smalls head wound looks like it's a bullet strike, blood falling in your eyes and everything.

So anyways, he had a bad head wound, and she put a compress on it, and then she used her tourniquet, which you can pull tight on it. She just pulled it tight around the top of his head to put pressure on the bandage to hold it against his head because she may have been using her pistol, the radio, or applying first aid to herself.

So if those people who taught me, and they're very distinctive in the way they teach as well, it's a little bit less than a drill sergeant, but a lot more than your college professor in terms of intensity. Because if they failed to teach me how to use that tourniquet, and it was not permanently in my mind, in my muscle memory, the lowest level of training that I'm going to fall back into when I'm shot, when I'm bleeding, when I'm in pain, when I'm cold, and I'm hurting.

In moments of stress like that, you will forget your mother's own name, literally, let alone their phone number. If you cannot repeat that exercise under stress, then you may very well die because you have failed to put that tourniquet onto your leg, and your femoral artery was hit, and you'll bleed out and die within three minutes.

So that's the level of seriousness, life and death seriousness that I've been taught with since 2004. And so by reputation and nature, and by stealing the best practices that I've been taught with in teaching, I have naturally adopted that into my preparedness teaching, because I believe it's a life and death subject.

I believe it's deadly serious. I get myself in trouble. 10% of the people out there hate me. Oh, they loathe me. They'd walk a mile to piss on me if I fell down. The other 90% are rabid followers of Harris. They want to hear what I have to say.

They want to hear what I'm talking about. They want to ask me questions. And they take what I'm telling them as dead ass serious that they then utilize. And like I said, take what I say and apply it to yourself. Maybe you only have-- maybe you're missing an arm.

It might be a little hard for you to use a tourniquet. You might have to do one arm. I don't know. That's a poor example. When people actually try-- when someone's trying to do preparedness, and they say, oh, that's stupid. You shouldn't do that. Oh, why do you want to do that?

You're a survivalist. That's crazy. Why would you ever-- someone's trying to protect their family with preparedness-- food, water, energy, medical, everything else. And someone else is trying to talk them out of it. I am rabidly aggressive against that idiot trying to talk him out of it. In fact, I personally consider it attempted involuntary manslaughter.

There's no question that it definitely matters. And I agree with you. It's funny that it-- I-- Beat me up, Josh. Come on. No, no, no. I don't disagree with you. I just-- obviously, it's sobering words when you just say that. Obviously, it's why it takes a moment to think about whether that's true.

But certainly, I think that preparing for-- protecting and providing for yourself and for those that you love is a primary responsibility that we all have. And anything that we do that diminishes that can have very significant and dire consequences, as you say. And I never want to be in the situation where I look back on the other side of a tragedy and say, "Well, I could have done more and I was just too dumb or too lazy to do more." Rather, if I look back from the other side of a tragedy and say, "I did everything I could," fine.

We'll deal with the results. But we owe it to ourselves and to those we love to do everything that we can. Let me talk for a moment-- big picture-- about comparing these commodities. And we'll close with a few final examples. But what you see when we talk about these commodities is-- I was thinking about the tourniquet.

A tourniquet is an extraordinarily valuable thing at a certain time. And it shows how-- it's cheap and easy to find a tourniquet. It's not that hard-- 20 bucks for a decent one and it's probably shipped to your door. It's not that hard to come across a tourniquet. But when you need one, its value is inestimable.

When you're actually in a situation where there's blood pumping out of an extremity and you need to apply a tourniquet, it's invaluable. And I think that that's often how it is with many physical items. That physical items, for the most part, are generally in abundant supply for most of us.

Most of us don't worry about is there going to be food at the grocery store. Most of us don't worry about is there water going to come out of my tap. Most of us don't worry about these things. But what happens is markets change. And when markets change, then all of a sudden those things can dry up.

The power can go out to your house for-- Oh, I'm sorry. I got one more for you, Josh. We got to cover this one more item I forgot. You just triggered me onto it. Hang on. Hang on. Bullets. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That was going to be on my list because that was going to be a shortage I was going to talk about.

So hang on. Let me finish my commentary and then we'll go to things like that. So when you look at things that are-- so all of a sudden what you're used to having can disappear. And when it disappears, its value increases enormously. And so the question is, are you prepared to provide for somebody when they're in that time of need?

In general, a six pack of beer costs six bucks-ish. But when there's a hurricane and you're trying to get somebody who's a crew working across the street at the end of the day, you've got one tree that's down in your yard and you've got a crew across the street that's working.

If you can walk over and you can say, "Hey guys, listen, I got a cold six pack or a cold 12 pack of beer. Would you be willing to come over and just real quick cut down this one tree for me?" That's something that you would be charged a couple hundred dollars for.

But in the right set of circumstances, that cold six pack of beer buys you the world. And almost all of these items that we talk about have those characteristics. Now when we put this into financial planning, that's where things become difficult because I like that we talked about gasoline and how the gasoline hasn't really grown that much.

And when we talked about if you store a million dollars worth of lead in a field, we're not saying, "Oh, it's going to become worth $10 billion." It's just going to be a million dollars plus whatever generally the rate of inflation is. And so that shows the downsides and the upsides of stockpiling things.

When you stockpile physical goods, you have certain inherent benefits. You have big benefits such as, "Hey, this is available. Hey, this can't be manipulated by currency fluctuations. Hey, I'll have this if the whole financial system falls apart. I'll have this if a corrupt dictator goes into power and destroys the economy or there's a global pandemic.

I'll have this." But there is a downside. The downside is, "I'll have this, but it's probably not going to be worth all that much more except by the rate of inflation probably." And so we accept that. So when you think about gold investing, and people talk about how Warren Buffett says, "All the gold in the world wouldn't fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool and I'm not investing in gold." Well, he's right because if you compare investing in gold, which can't really grow by all that much because it's just sitting there, and you compare that to investing in something that may be able to grow at 6%, 8%, 10%, 20%, 200% per year, well, you'd be a fool to put all your money in gold.

On the other hand, the fact that gold just sits there has a huge value to a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. And so when financial markets collapse, when companies go bankrupt, when you need the ability to get money and transport money to other places, then all of a sudden that gold is really valuable.

And what I love talking about some of these commodities is it even helps you to see why are things like precious metals, which we're not discussing in today's show, why are they so valuable? So let's talk about, you know, Stephen's million pounds of lead example. Right. Go ahead. Let me back you up for a second.

But if you live in a two-bedroom condo, okay, and you have no space and you have nothing else you can do, and you need to park some of your money for inflationary purposes, you can put a quarter million dollars worth of gold into a safety deposit box and be reasonably assured that it's safe.

It's not going to be stolen. The cost of the box versus the cost of the gold is very low and that you have an inflationary proof head. Now, if you ever bought $40,000 in gold and $40,000 in silver, you find yourself saying, "Oh my God, where am I going to put all this damn silver?" Right.

You know, so the density of gold is the good thing and I'll let you go on to the lead, but when has anyone other than Josh Sheets and Radical Personal Finance ever talked to you about a commodity you could put in a field for 20 years? Exactly. So let's, like, the lead is a good example.

So if you think about, if I'm going to buy $800,000 worth of lead, I'm going to put 800- And guess what? Guess what? I can actually, right now, Josh, I can actually have you call a place. And one of the places is called Dole Run. I can actually have you call Dole Run.

You can wire them $800,000. They will send you 20 semi-trucks full of lead. No joke. Right. This week. Right. I mean, that's actually, I mean, can you do that with gold? Can you do that with silver? Not at your local pawn shop. Delivered on a truck. Right. So, delivered on a truck this week.

It's like, fine, guys, pull it. I got the forklift. Pull it up to the barn. We're going to put the lead in the barn. Go ahead. Right. So, to finish this example out, if you compare lead to gold, you want to invest $800,000 in lead. You can wire $800,000 to the company.

They'll send 20 semi-trucks. You can dump the lead in the corner of the barn. You can dump the lead in the field. On the other hand, you can, if you can get your hands on one, you can purchase one, the standard good delivery bar, the 400-ounce bar of gold that you see pictured in a movie when you see a stack of gold.

That's the basic commodity of gold. There's no seniorage expenses. It's just gold. It's a bar of gold. Well, in today's world, that has a market value of something like $800,000. But that 400-ounce bar is about 27 pounds. Right. So, you could take that 27-pound bar. You can stick that into a backpack on your back, and you will walk around with $800,000 of physical money or something that can be turned into money in any corner of the country or the world.

On the one hand, it's untold more valuable than the lead because of its portability. On the other hand, you can look at that portability, and you could say, "Anybody in the world can put a gun in my ribs and can say, 'Give me your backpack,' and now I've lost that," whereas somebody is going to have to work really hard for them to come and get the million dollars, the $800,000 of lead that's stacked out in the back 40.

So any— And that's why I want people to take what you and I are saying and make it their own and utilize it for their own personal situations. I'm not telling you what to do. We're just giving you examples. Modify as you so desire. Right. So, any physical item has certain benefits, certain characteristics, and those—sorry—any physical item has certain characteristics, inherent attributes.

And in one circumstance, they can be benefits. In another circumstance, they can be drawbacks. And so portability is an inherent attribute, but it's either a benefit or a disadvantage based upon your perspective. And that's the mindset that many people have—that do not have about all kinds of investments, be it gold bars, gold coins, boxes of ammunition, boxes of stock certificates, mutual funds, insurance policies.

These things have attributes, and it's these attributes that when you understand them, you can see how in some circumstances, these attributes are positive and they're benefits for you. In other circumstances, these inherent attributes are negative and they're drawbacks. So what I want to do is list out a few more things.

We talked about some interesting things. We started with salt and sugar and honey. These are valuable— And ethanol. And ethanol. These are valuable for you and your family, but you're not going to put a million dollars in salt, right? You're never going to do that. You're not going to put a thousand dollars in salt.

But yet, these things are very valuable. And so you can see that these attributes are useful, but they have a limit. Now you move on to something like— But— Go ahead. But you could put $5,000 in honey. Right. You could, certainly. Maybe not $10,000, but if you had a barn and stuff, you could put $5,000 in.

That's a pretty powerful statement. Sure. Sure. And if you think about it right, what I hope to do in today's show is to get people to appreciate physical assets. Now I'm a globe-trotting, suitcase-towing person, and so physical attributes, physical things for me are very difficult because I'm moving around and I'm changing things all around.

So physicality, which is an attribute, is now for me something that's difficult. I still have physical assets, but I have to engage—I have to think more creatively about the storage and the maintenance, and they become difficult. But for somebody who has physical space, somebody has a house, somebody has a garage out back, somebody has a barn, all of a sudden now these physical assets are important.

And physical assets have the attribute of being less affected and/or unaffected by the vagaries of the stuff that happens on TV. So if you've got a pallet of honey out in your back shop, when you walk out there you're going to see the pallet of honey. And something like that, it would be an unusual thief who comes and says, "I'm going to take this pallet of honey." And so physical things are very, very useful.

And so then you could take it. And so, you know, you were talking about bullets. Almost any physical thing has benefits—or sorry, has attributes that can be advantageous. So in the past when I've talked about commodities, certainly—we haven't talked about salt and sugar and honey—but those are genuine commodities that are useful.

But usually you think of metals. We've talked about different approaches of metals. But then things like bullets, it's a commodity. I've talked about storing commodities such as AR-15 lowers. Well, if you had done that when I talked about it three or four years ago and you'd bought a box of 10 or 20 lowers, and then maybe you were cooped up in your home during the lockdowns for the pandemic, and you went ahead and built 10 lowers into genuine rifles and sold those, now you've got genuinely a high profit return with a basic commodity, an AR-15 lower.

Bullets have their own markets. My experience, guns around the world are not that difficult to find, even in places and in countries where they are not legal. So people are always worried about laws. My experience traveling is that I think I could come up with a gun in just about any country in the world if you give me at least a few days.

But what's hard to come up with is bullets. Bullets on the other hand can be very, very difficult. And so stockpiling those can be very useful. Right now, if you had just, a couple years ago, you just systematically gone to the gun shop once a week and purchased 1,000 rounds of 9mm, you could easily flip those boxes of 1,000 rounds of 9mm ball ammo on Craigslist for a significant healthy profit if you had stocked up when they were a bargain.

Actually, ammo is not allowed on Craigslist, but people do do ammo. I mean, there's ways around it, but 9mm right now is going for 80 cents to a dollar a round in the United States right now. That is stunning. If you can find it. Yeah, that's stunning. And you can't find it in any decent quality, in any decent quantities at this point in time in retail gun shops anyway, right?

That's right. Now, I actually have a friend of mine who is a weapons professional and he has, through his career, he has made money through a lot of hard work and a lot of talent and perseverance. And he has a large space and he actually has a semi-trailer sitting on his property and it's innocuous, secured in more ways than you would imagine.

And he will literally spend half a million, three quarters of a million dollars on ammunition over a short period of time. It's like two years ago, you know, after Trump was in office, we're going ammunition is just way too cheap. Everything is just way, guns are cheap, ammo is cheap.

And he did this pre-Obama, post-Obama, pre-Trump, post-Trump. And he literally had like 30 million rounds of 22 and 223 and nine millimeter, all in multiple, one or two semi-trailers. And when Obama ran the prices up, and Obama was the best gun salesman in the entire world. So when the prices went up during Obama, he sold all of his, most of his ammunition that he had for sale, he's got his own, he's got his ammo for sale.

He sold it at two to four times what he paid for it. And then he took that money and he waited and Trump was elected and everything got so cheap. I mean, we're talking like, you know, 12 cents a round for nine millimeter or something like that. And he bought another couple of semi-trailer loads full of ammunition and he's been selling it all during pandemic, the riots, and now the upcoming elections.

And so, you know, he's making 50%, a hundred percent, 200%, 300% on his money. And yeah, it takes five, six, eight years to do it, but you know what, where can you get bank interest like that? - Right, and sometimes those kinds of markets are clearer to people, especially someone like that who's involved in the business, your knowledge of the market.

- He's an industry professional, most definitely. - And so what I think many people should do, I mean, I used to know electricians, right? Electricians, they keep wire and they know the market and they just stockpile it in the back of their shed or whatever copper scrap they come across.

And then when the price gets high, they go and sell it because they understand, hey, the price is back up now. This is common. And so what I think we should do when it comes to physical items, there's lots of things that have their benefits and sorry, have their attributes.

And again, those attributes can be an advantage or a disadvantage. So that the attributes, if you have a decent pistol or if you have a decent AR-15, that's a very, very compact form of wealth. That's always going to be very, very desirable and will never lose its desirability. And just like a gold coin, it can be put someplace and it doesn't talk, it doesn't have any registration associated with it, it doesn't send out digital signals that the IRS collects, it just sits there, right?

It doesn't have that. But on the other hand, it's very hard to take that thing across the border. It's very hard to put it in your back pocket and walk onto an airplane, very, very difficult. And so on the other hand- - The gold, gold coins. - No, I'm talking about the gun.

The gun doesn't work very well. On the other hand- - Oh yeah, the gun, yeah. - The gold coin can. And so now if you'll capture this way of thinking and you'll say, "I see the benefits of these things that I may not previously have seen," you can now come back to your life and you can say, "What makes sense for me?" And for somebody it makes sense that for the first time in your life you buy a five gallon bucket of honey and you'll never sell it, right?

What you'll do is over the next three or four or five years, you'll use it, you'll put it in your bread, you'll put it on your pancakes or whatever you do and you're like, "Hey, I saved some money." And that's the thing about physical things is that you can buy them when they're on sale.

And so when you move into bulk buying, which is often what you do when you move into when you're stockpiling things, you'll save money. And if you buy things for your use and you develop a diversified portfolio of physical items, then at any point in time you can go and you can say, "Okay, this thing I'm gonna sell over here and I can access this market over there.

So I need to make a mortgage payment. I need a thousand bucks. What I'll go ahead and do is I've got a thousand bucks worth of stainless steel. I'll go ahead and flip this on Craigslist or on Facebook marketplace right now or I'll take it to the machine shop and I'll see if they'll buy a thousand dollars worth of my steel." And you go and you liquidate something and you move it and you solve your problem.

The last thing I wanna point out, which is something that I'm intensely conscious of is how advantageous physical items are from a financial planning perspective because they're unusual. And so imagine a guy who's just a general trades guy and he's purchased some physical items. He's got some cash saved.

He's got some money in his 401k, but for whatever reason, something went wrong and now he's headed for bankruptcy court. Do you really think that the bankruptcy judge is gonna come out to his house and say, "Hey buddy, listen, I see those five things of stainless steel over there.

Those are worth $600. Those need to be on your statement. And over here I see you've got two buckets of honey. And that's worth $400 and that's gotta be written down. And I see over here that you bought a chest of tools, of machinist's tools on Craigslist when some guy just had to move or mechanics tools, he had to move.

And so you stocked up on these tools and by the way, those gotta be there." That's just not the world we live in. And so even in a financial situation, having physical assets that can be bought and sold easily without paper trails, that can be stored easily, that can be strewn around can allow you to generate significant levels of wealth that protect you.

And you can walk into bankruptcy court and come out the other side with your buckets of honey. And you've still covered your honey supply. And so that's one area where these physical items have a tremendous value. And now when you mingle that with a mixture of a knowledge of financial planning laws and the value of having money in a 401k and the value of cryptocurrency and the value of this and that and the other, now you can build a very, very robust financial life that sees you through almost any kind of imaginable situation.

And I want to comment on that because I think the financial, I'll back up a couple of things. One, there's an old saying that is the counterpoint to what you just said. And again, I'm not criticizing what you said. I'm just putting the counterpoint for other people out there to consider as they're listening to you and I and developing their own personal strategy is there's a saying that's very true.

You don't own your things. Your things own you. And so having a lot of things can be a detriment and it can be an asset to just what you said. And in some of the cases, what you're talking about with the buckets of honey, it's a metaphor for whatever that item or that vehicle is that you want, which is a very good one if you're facing bankruptcy.

But the amount of personal, I think the wealth, the sound financial strategy you're teaching some people, there's some teenagers listening to you, you know that. And there's some people who are like 80 years old going, "Damn, I wish I knew that when I was 18." And there's people in their 20s and 30s and me in my 50s and you're helping us build our platform for our railroad.

I mean, you're helping people cut down, map out, cut down the trees, then you got to build up the railroad bed, then you got to put gravel down, then you put down the ties, then you put down the rails and now your train can run on it. And the financial basis and the financial education you are giving people is what is enabling them for their train to go down the tracks.

And if you don't have that, you can't drive your car down the road, your train can't go down the tracks, you can't walk down the trail, you're immovable. And the financial freedom and security you are teaching people is letting them walk down that trail, drive the car down the road and their train down the tracks and fly their airplane through the air, all of which are metaphors.

And that allows people to have the freedoms, like the old saying, you know, what's the hardest thing to make in your financial future? And the answer is the first million dollars, the rest comes easy. And I got a good story for you of where your personal teachings have personally benefited a really good friend of mine.

He's what I call a classically repressed genius. He didn't go to college, he didn't get PhDs and everything else, you know, but society, there's a war against smart people out there by the normies and by society to repress genius and to repress intelligence, which is a whole nother lecture.

So anyways, he's a part owner of a company, it's mostly a blue collar job. The guy can basically fix anything, understands anything, learns anything quickly. And I saw this and when the pandemic started, I said, "Hey, Sean, there's a shortage of freezers out there. You can't buy freezers, they're gone in the United States.

You can't get them in the store, you can't buy them online. When they are used online, they're very expensive. I mean, your $170 freezer is $350 to $600." Well people would just put freezers up for sale on Facebook and it's like, "Oh, $100 freezer, don't need it, come get it." Well, he'd come get it, turn around and sell it for $300 to $400.

And then he taught himself appliance HVAC, how to fix freezers and refrigerators. He went online to a YouTube HVAC university, taught himself HVAC. He bought all of his tools used, the really good ones off of Facebook and Craigslist. So he didn't pay the high dollar for them. He recovers his refrigerant from people down the street that need to have the refrigerant recovered out of the appliances that they have to scrap before they can scrap them.

So he's picking up the refrigerant for basically free. Now he's going out and he's getting freezers, chest freezers and upright freezers, not refrigerators, freezers. And he's fixing them. Sometimes it's a starting capacitor. Sometimes it's a starter. Sometimes it's a new compressor, rarely is a new compressor. Sometimes it's find a leak and suck down and recharge the thing.

So he's paying people 50 bucks to haul it away. Or they're saying haul the way doesn't work and he has a tall van and he's got, he bought a really nice appliance dolly so he can move anything himself upstairs as one person, even a heavy freezer. And he takes them home, fixes them sometimes in five minutes, sometimes in like five hours, lets them run for two weeks, puts them up on Facebook and sells them for 300 to a thousand dollars each depending.

And he says, Oh three, you know, 90 day warranty guaranteed to work and you know, delivery available and people love that delivery available. So anyways, he calls me up and he goes, Steve, I averaged out everything I was doing. And I go, yeah. He goes, I'm making $750 a week on the side above his job of, you know, he's a part business owner above his job and his salary.

And he goes, this is stupid money. I go, yeah, it's only going to last so long. You need to reinvest it. And we got other things for you to do. And we do, but that's another story. So anyways, you're going to love this. I taught him about the coin inflation website, which I'm sure you know.

And I taught him about gold and silver and buying silver on Craig's list and what he wants in silver, which is, you know, basically, I mean, starting out, you want junk silver or silver Eagles, and those are two most recognized forms of silver in the United States. And but silver Eagles are going for $10 over spot.

And he found people on Craig's list that were selling, you like war, nickels, Kennedy, half dollars and a regular junk silver. And they were just wanting spots or very close to spot. And he started buying silver at 17. Now it's 27. But I mean, that's not the point. The point is that I want you to put 20, 25% of the cash that you're making into an inflationary proof method of storage, either for when you go to go buy land or your son has to go to college, whatever, an inflationary proof method, he goes, okay.

And so he goes off on Craig's list. He starts buying, you know, silver that people are selling that, you know, basically at spot. And he goes, Steve, well, what should I do with the rest of my money? It's like, well, we got to do something better than bank interest.

We need to find something that we can buy cheap now that will sell, sell for a lot more soon and that's relatively dense. It's not big and fluffy. So we came up with propane and kerosene torpedo heaters, especially the really nice ones like you use on construction sites or in your garage, because they're, you know, they're, they're, they're fairly compact, you know, compared to a furnace and he's buying them for 40 to $50 each right now.

I mean, he's only, he's cherry picking the nice ones off of Facebook marketplace and he's stacking them up in his garage on shelves and everything else. And he cleans them, makes them look nice, checks them all out. They all work or he fixes a few of them. No big deal.

Some of the ones he's got for 40 bucks are worth $400 brand new. Some of the ones he's got for 50 bucks are worth 150 on the use market in the winter. But the point is he is going to double and triple and quadruple his money that he's paying for now.

And we started this in July, August, in January, February, when it's frigid cold in Michigan and everyone wants a heater for whatever reason, he is going to be getting way better than bank interest on that six month turnaround. And that's all because of the teachings that you teach people on radical personal finance that we took and modified for our own purposes.

So thank you, Josh. My pleasure. I love it. I would say to any listener listening that don't, so first, awesome for him. He's going to do great. And what will happen is let's talk about the life cycle that he will go through in his life. Right now, $750 a week is life-changing money for him.

And his ability to do this with heaters will grow and he'll be able to grow it. If he continues doing that, he will run out of heaters to buy. He'll saturate the market, the numbers will get too big. And so you'll take then now the same method of thinking and you'll apply it to something else, to a bigger market.

But if you are already in the bigger market, let's say that you already have an income higher, et cetera, make sure that you recognize how easily you could teach a 15-year-old, a thoughtful, intelligent 15-year-old how to do what that man is doing. And if you teach that 15-year-old how to do it, just think from now on when they're offered a job and someone says, "Hey, listen, come over here and I'll pay you $12 an hour," and they look and realize, "Well, I can make $100 to $300 profit per freezer that I flip," all of a sudden you've dramatically transformed the ability of a 15-year-old to generate income for themselves.

And that sets someone free for life when they know how to buy and trade and sell. So do it yourself and teach your children to do it. And Sean went and learned HVAC for appliances online on YouTube, bought the stuff, second-hand surplus used online. But I mean, it was the quality stuff.

It wasn't the Harbor Freight stuff. It was like the really good stuff. So he bought it for $0.30 on the dollar and then he tested it, played with it, and taught himself further just on a unit that he got. And it's like, "Okay, I'm going to suck this thing down and recharge it.

Okay, I did that. I'm going to find the leak and repair it." This is all stuff you can teach yourself. You don't need to go to a trade school or a university to do this. This is stuff that you can do that is under your own control. And that is the important lesson.

And when I went to an abbreviated law enforcement academy because I was in the sheriff reserve, not a full-time sheriff deputy, I was law enforcement. I was uniformed and badged and had a gun and arrest powers. But I was only a sheriff deputy when I was on duty versus a regular LEO, law enforcement officer, as a law enforcement officer all the time.

So I went through an abbreviated academy because we don't have to do traffic stops and everything. We're doing crowd control and other civic engagements and stuff like that. So anyways, I had really, really great instructors. Some of the best instructors always took their time to come and teach the reservists because they wanted us to have the best training because we were backing up and helping the regular police officers.

And you're never going to forget this, Josh, and no one ever here listening is going to forget this short story. There is a lecture that he called "Turning the Wheel of the Boat." And the premise is, what if the guy behind the rudder wheel of the Titanic moved it just a smidgen to the left three days before they hit the iceberg?

They would have never hit the iceberg. They would have gone south out of the iceberg area, a little bit more southern route to New York, and they would have never entered the iceberg field just because they turned the rudder a little bit three days previous. Well, the same concept applies to people.

And this is done in law enforcement. It's like, what if I take an extra 30 seconds with this young man and talk to him? What if there's a kid in trouble, did something bad? Well, I'm going to take the extra 30 minutes and I'm going to handcuff him. And he's going to be cited and released.

But I take the long way and I walk him through the worst portions of the jail or the prison where the people are hooting and hollering and yelling at the young kid and saying awfully mean sexual things to him and letting him feel like the piece of meat he's going to be as a fresh fish going into the incarceration field of a prison or a jail.

And it scares the living crap out of him. What if I did that in an effort to change the wheel a little bit for that young person's future? Will I ever know what he avoided because I did that? No, I never will. And hopefully he avoids a life of crime and goes into something that's not a life of crime and has a wonderful, prosperous life.

So that's the analogy in spending an extra three minutes with a woman who's being abused who does not want help. I mean, what can I do with an extra three minutes to change her life and her children? What if I get a shelter on my cell phone and it's called Marjorie, I got a lady you need to talk to, hand her my cell phone, they talk to her.

And so she talks to her woman, the woman for three minutes, and she goes, okay, I'm going to come on down. That's what we call steering the wheel. You're doing the same thing with us financially by teaching a 15-year-old how to buy something cheap or learn a new skill or do something that they've never thought of before.

A lot of people don't do things in this world because people don't tell them, you can do that. I was told that all my life, you can do anything you want. Just go learn and go do it. And that's what you and I and in your regular class and in my preparedness classes, I'm telling people, you can do this.

It's under your own control. Go do it. You have nothing to lose. Even if you fail, you're going to learn. Steer your own wheel. Change the direction of the boat for your children, for your grandchildren, for your 20 and 30-year-old kids. The guy I'm talking about is 32 years old.

I'm 52. He's a kid. I'm changing his life dramatically with what he's doing because I'm actually turning his wheel pretty radically. He's putting sails up and everything. He's going full speed ahead, which is a rarity in people. I think that is one of the great values of what you are giving to your people and I'm giving to my people is we're getting them to turn their wheel a little bit so they never have to deal with the Titanic hitting the iceberg, sinking and lifeboats and flares and radio calls and everything else.

That bad thing never happened because they steered the wheel 10 years, 3 years, 1 year before they would have hit it. Now that you got that financial security, you got the freedom to actually do more things. Your son wants to learn HVAC. He needs $450 worth of equipment. He needs a used set of gauges.

He needs a vacuum pump. He needs a refrigerant recovery bottle. He needs a bottle of refrigerant and everything else. It's like, "Oh, grandson? Yeah, go find it on Facebook. I'll buy it." You don't care about $450. You just throw him the $450 and say, "Go have fun. That's your education." I used to tell people in the 1990s and early 2000s, they go, "Steve, what's the best thing I can do for my child's education?" I go, "Buy any book they want." At the time, the website was called Half.com.

It was used books. They're gone. But there's still Libris and Abooks and Amazon. We didn't have as much digital media. Now YouTube didn't exist then either. It was like, "Buy your child all the books that they want." It's like, "Well, just let them loose on the used bookstores." "Well, there's a library." "Yeah, the library's not on your shelf at 2 a.m.

that you can go look at and read." I have a saying for a long time. A person's wealth is not measured by the numbers in their bank account. The person's wealth is measured by the size of their personal library. But that was something I used to tell people back then.

"Buy your children books." Whatever, $100 a month, $50 a month, $30 a month, whatever they want, buy them the books. It's the best thing you're going to do for them. The other thing I got into was someone they were talking about. They wrote to me. It's like, "Oh, I lost my job." I go, "You didn't lose your job.

You just got set free." He made the excuse that, "Well, it's my Christmas present to buy my USB drive," which we'll talk about in a second, "full of preparedness knowledge." I go, "What do you mean? You can take what's in there and you can start making battery banks and inverter kits and everything else.

You can sell them to people using the California wildfires. It's an investment in your future. Why are you making an excuse?" In this world, you don't make money by pursuing money. You make money by pursuing knowledge and ability. If you pursue knowledge, information, knowledge, ability, experience, and eventually wisdom, which you only get when you're into your 50s, if you pursue those rather than trying to pursue money, as in the slave to the wage, the money will follow you.

If you have the knowledge and the ability, people will try to throw you money to get you to do things for them, and good amounts of money. Okay, I'm done lecturing. It's true. I was earlier going to mention, and I think we'd be remiss in talking about commodities and investing in storing stuff if we didn't.

What are your thoughts on storing nickels? I think it's an internet thing. I mean, technically, it's illegal for you to melt them down and to turn them into a commodity, and they actually watch and look for that. The same thing with copper pennies. You can't convert them into a commodity because they're already in a different form that's illegal to convert into a commodity.

The famous Pawn Stars on the History Channel, the old man who died of Parkinson's recently, he had 55-gallon drums full of pre-83, pre-82 pennies that were all copper. You're just waiting for the time when he could melt those down and turn them in because copper was four or something, or $5 a pound on the commodities market.

He died before he ever could do it, and he did it for decades and decades and decades. I think it's worth talking about. Let me make the positive argument for investing in nickels. The basic idea is, when Steve talks about going on Facebook and buying junk silver, what he means is buying pre-1965 US dimes, quarters, and half dollars.

Prior to 1965, those coins were made of 90% silver. They've since been adulterated, so they don't have any silver content, right? I don't think they have any silver content now. None. None. None. Zero. In fact, pennies are mostly zinc. Right. Agreed. So, very quickly, people started to recognize when they changed what was in the coins, and they debased the metal value that was in the coins.

Very quickly, people recognized the value, and they pulled those coins out of circulation. So now, if you want to buy silver coins, one of the simplest ways to do it is just to purchase that US currency. It has some advantages, some significant advantages. The first advantage is that it's very recognizable as currency.

If you can just simply look, you know what a quarter looks like, you know what a dime looks like, and you look at the date, and it says before 1965, you know, okay, this is 90% silver. But they trade in value based upon their silver content. However, because they are so small in both size and in value, it's really not worth anybody's time and hassle to try to counterfeit it.

People will try to pass off a counterfeit one-ounce Krugerrand, but I've never heard of anybody trying to pass off a counterfeit US dime. And so you get basically a counterfeit proof, although it's not necessarily proof, but you've got a very hard to counterfeit coin that has a certain metal value in it because of it.

So that's US dimes, quarters, and half dollars. And I think that that's worth it. I think it's a good argument. It's an easy way for someone to purchase some silver at a low cost where they can recognize it, etc. The problem is, of course, the denominations are rather small.

And so if you're going to have $1,000 of this stuff, I mean, it's not that big, but when you get into the tens of thousands of dollars, it becomes really, really significant in terms of the storage space. That's just the case with silver. Now if we fast forward, you have still two other things.

So first you have old pennies, which is what Steve just mentioned, that had high copper content. That is no longer the case. But the one thing that you do still have, the one single US coin that does still have its base metal being very high, is the US nickel, which has a high percentage of nickel in it.

And so you can calculate the melt value, which is something like 80-ish percent of the coin is made of nickel. And so right now, a current melt value, if you took a US nickel that you can buy for five cents and you melted it down, in theory it would have just over four cents worth of melt value of nickel in it.

And so the argument is that if you purchase nickels, and by purchase I just mean you take a dollar and they give you 20 nickels, you can store nickels and those nickels will have the face amount of the currency. So you're not going to lose anything with your investment amount because it's always going to have the face amount of the currency.

Five dollar roll of nickels is worth five dollars, whether that's today or five years in the future. It's worth five dollars. It's never worth less than five dollars. But if you move into an inflationary period, and if that inflation adjusts the value of nickel, then in theory the nickels would start to trade.

You would guess that the mint would change the composition of nickels, and then the nickels would start to trade based upon their metal value, not based exclusively on their face value. So that's the positive argument. Well, they're not made out of pure nickel. They're 75% copper and 25% nickel as of right now.

Okay, so but they still do have the melt value of the nickel is still four cents. So I was reading the melt percentage of the nomination figure from coinflation. So whatever the actual formula is, they do have the nickel value. And so the argument is that it's a basically a can't lose proposition because either you always have the face value of the coin, which is a totally fungible coin, or you have the melt value of the nickel.

That's the argument. Now there are a number of downsides, right? So the point you made, Steve, is that it's illegal to melt them down. So and nickel is not nearly as valuable in terms of cost per weight as something like silver is. And so you wouldn't really expect someone to melt them down, try to purify it, etc.

They're also extremely bulky. You know, if it's hard to store silver dimes and quarters, it's even harder to store nickels. But it's an interesting thing to think about when it comes to commodities, and I think an interesting argument. The 1946 to 2014 nickel, the five cent nickel is worth right now as of September 17, 2020, it's worth 4.1 cents.

Right. And I can't even, I can't find the value of the 2015 to 2020 nickel on coin inflation right now. Right, right. Yeah, so the argument is that it's never going to be worth less than five cents. And you have a 20% range between the face value of the coin and the melt value of the nickel.

So, you know, if you have a 20% increase in values, then now you're in depositive territory with the nickel. So anyway, we don't have to spend too much time on it. It's an interesting thing. The biggest problem with it, as with any commodity, is that it's hard to store the things.

And the nice thing is it's easy, it's not so easy to spend nickels, I guess though in the current coin shortage, maybe it's easier than it once was, but you can spend nickels. It's hard to spend ingots of lead at a store, but still at the end of the day, you know, you're filling ammo cans or something with nickels, and it's pretty, pretty heavy stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I think the best thing we've talked about is the inflationary proof methods of storage of money other than gold and silver. And the actually the ways you can buy things on the used market surplus and actually have something that is going to be worth more money. It's worth more money right now.

If I bought all those pieces of tool steel at $50, I could go someplace else and sell them for probably a hundred dollars. But I mean, you're starting off to the positive. And the other thing about, you know, being a world traveler like you are, you got a Honda EU 2200i generator.

Now those are about $1,100 to $1,200 brand new here in the United States. You actually couldn't get them for a while because of the stupidity of Honda and recall. But let's say you went to a Latin American company country and you bought one of those very good condition used and you paid $700 for it.

Well now let's say you're going to move down to Peru for whatever reason, and you can't take your stuff with you because you don't own your stuff. Your stuff owns you. You can't really take it and drive that distance with it through those countries to get there. So you go and it's like you go on to your, you go to the, what's it called?

The bazaar or the flea market or whatever you have, or whatever your equivalent of Facebook marketplace or Craigslist is down there. And you sell your $700 generator. Well you will, you'll sell it for $650 or $700. So you got your money out of it. And at worst you lost 50 bucks on it because that Honda generator is always going to have a value for it.

That Honda generator is sought after around the world. You know, if, if, if anyone is going anywhere out into the wilderness and Alaska and they're all using the Honda generators, it's recognized around the world as being pretty much the most reliable generator there is. That's a gasoline or propane or natural gas based generator.

So if you buy it used and it's like, yeah, now you've got that bulk. I mean, you got that thing that you need at your location that you're in and you know, it's there for when you need it and you needed it at the other day. But yet when you go to move or travel again, you can reconvert it back into a Fiat, travel to your new place and buy another one on the use market and very, very good condition.

And now you, now you got your generator back and it was by far cheaper than all the expenses you would have gone through of shipping or hauling it, you know, to the other location. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the value of physical items and where if you get comfortable, I mean, I think a basic skill that we should help everyone to develop, whether they always use it or not, that's up to them.

But a basic skill that we should help everybody to develop is the skill of buying and selling things in the local markets. And this has become so much easier with Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and whatever other versions there are. I mean, my little quip that I've used for years is simply store your stuff on Craigslist.

That if you just simply store your stuff on Craigslist, you can always go back and get it up, but get it back if you need it. And I have several times given advice to people. Recently I was talking to somebody who was trying to move. They were trying to move from Florida to North Carolina and they were trying to figure out how they could split a moving truck with somebody.

And I just said, "Look at the stuff that you have, okay? None of this stuff is worth moving. Just simply sell all of it and move in your car, right? Load up your small valuable items that you can move with in your small car, sell all of this stuff, move in your car, and then when you get to North Carolina, replace it little by little." And you're not dealing with sales tax.

You're not dealing with... I mean, you can do it very easily. And even if you lose a few hundred bucks, you still are better off than paying a lot of money for a moving truck. And so... Seventy-nine cents a mile. It can be done. And it's cheaper to take your car and pay a little bit extra.

And what you'll do the next time through... Some people often think, "Man, what a relief it would be if my house burned down because then I could start again." Well, a move can be that chance that you can start again. And the next time around, you buy better, you buy smarter, you buy more patiently, and you get better deals.

It's a skill that you can build and develop. So I think that's... And you get the newest version of whatever you had. Yeah, it's true. All right, Steve. I think that's two hours and 21 minutes. It's a pretty mammoth show, and I think we got some good stuff. Anything that we missed or anything that you'd like to cover before we close?

Yes. Steven Harris Preparedness is available through a link that helps support Josh. And I got a couple of things up there, and I'm changing everything around with the way I sell things and deliver things. But if you want to go see the best of what I have, and you go to RFP for Radical Personal Finance, you go to RPF1234.com.

That will automatically drop you onto the right page on my site via what Josh is doing. And you can take a look at all the stuff that I have and decide what part of my educational system you want to go into. There's plenty of stuff up there for free.

Basically, you can listen to almost everything for free if you want to see the videos, and then you end up purchasing the videos from me. But I mean, some of my videos, stuff you're going to learn from me, I'm very detailed on my videos. And do you think, how does three bucks an hour sound, Josh?

Is that like too expensive for a quality education? Josh Cote I guess what I should say that will be a louder testimonial of your stuff than anything else is very simple. I think I have bought previously, like I told you, I think I've bought every product you've ever sold.

And I think I've consumed, at least of everything I've ever found on your websites and stuff that you've found, I think I've consumed all of the public stuff that you've said. And so if we were to total that up, let's see, I bought all your earlier videos, your bug out bag video, your battery backup video.

And then when you launched a membership site, I joined that as I was one of your founding people with your initial membership site. And then I lost my credentials and we got mixed up with all of that. And so then when the pandemic came around, I saw that you were doing more stuff and I went up and bought another, I don't know what I paid for.

Anyway, I think I've sent you at least probably four, I don't know, five, $600 over the years. So the point is that I have never regretted any of the money that I have spent with you. And I consider you to be a very thoughtful, intelligent teacher who is able to focus on systems that work rather than specific solutions.

And to me, that's a powerful way of thinking. When you understand systems and you understand that knowledge can be applied in many circumstances, it has basically allowed me with other stuff, right? I spend lots of money on education. I take a certain percentage of my income and I always spend it on education.

So I'm in some ways an easier sell than some other people. But what it's helped me to do is it's helped me to feel incredibly confident in almost any circumstance. I mean, you did stuff on food preparation, right? And a while ago, you did a thing about making corn into food and you did this whole big video about it.

And so what that gives me the knowledge of is as a father of four children, I know that if I'm in the United States and I am running low on money, I can take my car, I'll go find a grain elevator somewhere where I can buy sacks of corn and I'll buy sacks of corn and my children will never go hungry because I know how to take it and how to make it into food that they can eat and that they'll enjoy eating.

And so that knowledge, if for no other reason, having the confidence of knowing how to do stuff is extremely valuable and well worth paying for. So I've never regretted any of the money that I've spent with you. Yep. I bought in the pandemic shopping video, I went to Tractor Supply Store, which is a little bit more money than buying from the grain elevator.

But I bought 800 pounds of corn. They even loaded it into my truck for me and I bought it for $105. That is awfully, awfully cheap food. And the number of things you can make out of corn is extensive. I mean, it's huge. I mean, the food that fed the slaves and the poor in the 17 and 18 and 1900s was corn.

That's what they ate on a daily basis. From hoe cakes to Johnny cakes to polenta to cornbread. It was the grain. People would raise and they would raise and grow wheat and they would sell their wheat because it was three times more expensive than corn. And then they would go buy corn for their family from a different person.

And that was their food for the rest of the year. But even when they grew the wheat, they sold the wheat and bought the corn. And I'll tell you why that kind of stuff is so important to me. Just like you, I don't want to eat corn every day.

Although I could and I could make it good. I don't want to. I eat a lot of meat and my freezer is packed full of meat. That's my primary food method, preparedness plan is a freezer full of meat. But what I use the corn for is of course to know and I would eat it if I were hungry.

But what I use it for is an inexpensive way of me supporting people that I care about that I can't get to take care of themselves. And so I have a very, very large network of people that I care about that I would never turn away from my door hungry.

But how on earth do I afford to provide for dozens of people if there are shortages, if there are needs for food? I can't afford to have fancy food for them, but I can afford giant piles of corn. It's not hard for me. Okay, I spent 500 bucks on corn, but I could feed 100 people for weeks and weeks on that.

Okay, I'm sold. And so to me, that's one of the reasons why things like that are so valuable is it allows me to be prepared to care for people in my network that I need to care for who are not going to, either they're not going to or they're not going to be able to care for themselves.

And I can do it by mastering these methods. Yep, yep. And like I said, people are the resources. Well, you and your wife are sleeping peaceably all night. You know, you're the people that are helping you that you are feeding and everything you go. Dave, John, Steve and Joe, you're on watch all night, you know, two hour shifts, you know, 12 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 6, 6 to 8.

You got the night vision goggles on and you're sitting out there on the porch with a shotgun just being quiet, keeping an eye out. You know, if any if anything happens, you push the button on the bow thing and you go, wake up, wake up, wake up. And you know, I'll wake up and we'll wake everyone up and get armed up and you know, watch what's going on or it could be the same thing if you're on a farm.

Now you're out there watching the cows like someone's coming in to steal your beef. You know, someone needs to be on overwatch all night. You're dealing with harder methods of food and water and labor and you need strong backs and skilled minds and everything for all of that. And it's a lot easier with a lot of people and all you had to do was buy $100 worth of corn and you got help for all the help you need for months with it.

So that's a pretty powerful currency. I mean, that's a very cheap way of hiring labor when you need it the most is with food like that. Because I guarantee you, what did I tell you? Your first priority is breathing. Your second priority is hydrate. Actually your first priority is breathing.

Your second priority is temperature, either staying cool or staying warm. Your next priority is thirst and your next priority is hunger. And for most people as base needs in human beings. And so all those things will happen to people. They're going to, you know, if they're cold, tired, thirsty and hungry, they'll be showing up at your door.

And if you can satisfy any part of cold, thirsty and hungry, you got people who will be very happy to you because they don't want to go back into those states. It's like, "Hey, can you help me with this? Oh yeah, you bet. You name it. I'll help you all day long." Right.

And people are the biggest resource that we have. All of your and my problems are always going to be solved by people and all of humanity's problems are always going to be solved by people. And so the more people you can have on your team, the better. And so sometimes stockpiling those basic supplies, if they go short, those can make all the difference in the world.

And when you have the intelligence of a group of people and you can meet a few basic needs, you're well set up. So RPF1234 is an affiliate link. So if you'd like to do that, I would highly encourage you to go to rpf1234.com. Check out all of Steve's products.

Again, I think I own everything you do. If I don't, I'll buy it. And I have benefited immensely from it. I've tried to get Steven to get more stuff. Recently we were talking and I tried to get him to start creating more stuff because he's got more, as is my problem, you know, both of us have more knowledge in our head that we had struggled to get out because of the difficulty of getting it out in a form that it can be consumed.

And so it's really, we've got to keep on streamlining that and getting more stuff out so you can get the knowledge out into a form that it can be gained by other people. Yeah, I'm going to die with 20 lifetimes. 20 lifetimes of inventions never, never done. Well, at least get a few of them out.

Well, Steve, thank you for coming on. RPF1234.com. Any closing thoughts as I wrap this up? No, no. Again, take what we have taught you and make it your own. Modify it for your own purposes and by all means do it. Okay. I don't care if you just do one step today.

As long as you take a step forward every day or every week that you can. And don't say you don't have time for it because you do have time for it. You can make time for it. And even if it's 10 minutes this week, that 10 minutes of taking what we've advised you on making it your own and doing it.

I have become so belligerent in the pandemic, literally berating people. We're dealing with a life and death situation. They ask me a question and then they immediately find a reason to not do it. They immediately talk themselves out of doing the advice that I'm giving them. And they find it, I call it, they find a reason not to do it.

Start finding reasons to not do it and start finding reasons to do it. Agreed. Totally agree. And if you capture the knowledge, then if you are behind, if you're behind, I mean, you sell at the, you know, rpf1234.com, you're selling the USB stick, right? That is available with all the stuff.

The nice thing is that even if you find yourself caught behind the curve and you promote a lot, Steve, when there's a hurricane coming, the hurricane has several days of lead time. And if you know what you would need to do if a hurricane were coming, even if you have a few days, you can take action.

But even so, you don't want to do that. You want to take action quickly. So, all right, we've preached enough. Steve, thank you for coming on and rpf1234.com, rpf1234.com and I'll be back with you very soon. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Meet the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale.

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