Published April 11, 2024, 9:01 a.m.
9am How to Fix a City with Chris Dardzinski. Chris was born in Wyandotte, MI and became fascinated with politics at the early age of eight. Chris has spent an entire life-time fighting many good fights, authoring or co-authoring legislative proposals, working within groups, by himself, affiliated and non-affiliated. Now, at the age of 50 he is finishing up 3.5 years on Lincoln Park's City Council. 10 am Be Prepared at all times - Off Grid Communications. Ralph the IT Guy and Karen the Riveter X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1YpJkwWmmVmJj Rumble: https://rumble.com/v4oup4t-bnn-brandenburg-news-network-4112024-fixing-cities-chris-dardzinski-and-off.html https://rumble.com/v4ouosx-bnn-brandenburg-news-network-4112024-fixing-cities-chris-dardzinski-and-off.html
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Brandenburg News Network. I am Donna Brandenburg and it is the 11th day of April 2024 today and welcome to our show. This morning I have Chris Dardzynski on and he has been on the Lincoln, let me see, let me make sure I get this all right. I don't think I've had enough coffee yet. So the Lincoln Park City Council for three and a half years. And he's also running for office. And so we're going to have him and talk to him because he's written books, many books. And the one that we're going to talk about today, I have a copy right there, is America 101, How to Fix a City. You know, we've talked a lot lately about people running for office and And as vice chair of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, which is the Constitution Party in the state of Michigan, we have been asking people to please step forward, even if we could fix things and remove all the treasonous people who are going to be nice, the traders in office, we have got to have good people to replace them. And this is like calling all honest people, step up. It's your turn. We all have to step up and take an office and get in the game and not have a lot of excuses for why we're too busy to do it or why we're not qualified or anything like this. If you're honest, you're qualified. That's all I have to say. is that that honest and true and authentic people you're qualified right there you we we really can help each other learn the process and and during we can learn what we need to do during the process and there's lots of people that will stand with you and help you so and then after after chris we're having ralph and karen on and we're going to be talking about and I really feel like god is is steering us in this direction a little bit and it's really amazing how he starts steering you in a direction He equips you and brings people alongside of you who have either similar visions and or who have complementary skills. And that's what I'm absolutely seeing is happening. So we're going to be talking about off the grid communications. Let's just say that there's a huge crash and things fall to the ground, flatline, everything. What are you going to do to communicate? So we're going to talk about different strategies for communication. And tomorrow I have Dr. David Kent on and we're going to be talking about at home first aid. So that what we need to do, he'll be talking about how to suture someone. If you're stuck somewhere, what you need to know. And so we're going to have David on repeatedly. He's got a great story. And asking him questions and finding out what do you do if there's no doctors around or you need to improvise a little bit, how to deal with these situations. So we're going to continue to go into a mild proper course here today. and or answer questions or give people things to think about so that maybe if we do have this huge crash, which I kind of believe we're going to have, because all you have to do is look at the financials and where this is going, the course is already charted on this. I don't see a way out of this without having some severe interruptions in the things we see as normal. So with that said, I'm going to bring Kristen in right now and we're going to talk about how to fix a city. Hey Chris, how you doing? I'm doing very good. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming. Thanks for coming on. Chris was at the, at the, um, I'm not even gonna call it a debate. The forum we had this week in, in, uh, the, on the East side of the state there in, in Dearborn. Yeah. Dearborn and the presidential candidates. What did you think of the, what did you think of it? Um, Well, as always, I'm always hopeful that there will be more people that attend in person, but I don't know how many people were online, so that's good. But I was glad to see the people I did, and I was glad that Randall Terry actually showed up in person. That matters to me a lot because... I've only been a member of the Constitution Party since a little after 2000, around 2021 was when I joined. Before that, I was an independent voter my entire life. So to actually give my membership and join a party was a big thing. When it comes to a presidential candidate, it matters a lot to me that you show up in person and are really willing to put yourself out there. And I understand for candidates at our level, money is always an issue and everybody's got the resources that they have. But he showed up. So Randall Terry, all of them were very serious constitutionalists. And that's, of course, everything that we're about. But the fact that he showed up really, really makes me want to support him as much as possible. Now, you've got a lot of experience being on city council in Lincoln Park, and I'm really curious to hear. I think that you've got a lot to contribute here to help teach people who want to run for a local office what the process kind of looks like and what are the biggest lessons that you've learned being on city council that uniquely qualify you for running for office again, perhaps a different office, so that you can help us understand. Okay, so I came about local politics kind of in an inverse fashion. Up until around 2007, anything that I was involved with was pretty much national or international. That's where I put most of my time and my resources as far as being involved in legislative proposals and working with different groups and working with different parties and being involved with different people and think tanks and like that. So, but then, but I always kept up on local politics in Wyandotte when I grew up there. And then, of course, when I moved to Lincoln Park in 2000. So I watched the city council meetings. They were talking about the police and fire pension funds and that they were underfunded at about 19%, 23%, which is tremendously underfunded. Now, I spent 31 years in international trade, which is a lot of economics. Plus, I've studied economics my entire life, and I've been very involved and just always educated myself on economics. Plus, I have actual formal training in engineering and and I'm along that line and political science so so I've got a pretty good engineering brain so when it comes to solving a problem um that's always been my kind of iso look at things is what's the best practice how okay we want to solve this problem what are the 10 steps we need to solve the problem? What are the resources we need? Now let's go back through and think about that and refine it and then start. And now that we've got this plan, let's just don't all congratulate ourselves that we have a plan. We actually have to work the plan. So 2007, I saw where the city's finances were as far as the police and fire pension funds. I said, you know what? I can help these people. So I started attending the city council meetings. I said, okay, I'll get to know the people on city council. And I'll get to... I'll get to know them a lot better. They'll get to know me. They'll see I'm a genuine guy, and I can help them. I'm not going to charge them for any independent economic or political consulting. I just want to help my city. So I attended for about three and a half years, and I saw what you see. I mean, this is not a disparagement against Lincoln Park or any city. This is local politics. You have a lot of retired people. You have people that are concerned about one small thing in the city and they'll work that. But essentially what you have are part-time local legislative bodies and part-time mayors who honestly do not understand the finances or economics of how a big system like a city works. And a city is a very big system. Linkin Park's current budget is about $25 million. And that is a big system. And to understand all the layers that go into how a city functions and how you come up with community and citywide ideas and plans and guidelines that are going to benefit your city. Most people elected to public office don't know that. What they know is I'm retired, or I've got one thing that I want to be involved in, or somebody in the city asked me to run, and I kind of like these people. So this will be fun. I'll get involved. Now, every now and then, maybe one person out of the seven that are elected is genuinely working their butt off. to um to uh to improve the city and believe me those people are marginalized because what you have and this happens at every single level in government and it starts right at school boards and city councils what you have is a good old boys culture and that and it's not limited to just boys believe me there's there's there's there's there's there's women involved in good old boys culture too so it just it just happened literally new year's eve 2010 Me and my friend Polly, we're going to head out for tonight. And she's very politically involved in her city in Allen Park and very aware. And she's telling me about, you know, the candidates who are running in her city. And I'm telling her about the people running in my city. I said, is anybody good running in your city? She goes, no. And I said, yeah, same here in Lincoln Park. So I'm. and this is again you can say this about just just drop the name in of any city across america and that would be the same thing so um so I said I said why don't you run for mayor and she says why don't you run for mayor so um so literally the um new year's day um before I had to go do some other stuff I jumped on the city website I looked to see what the unqualifications were, and it's dreadfully and painfully too little. You have to be 18 years of age. You've got to live in the city, be a resident for at least 30 days, and you've got to get 25 valid signatures on a petition for a ballot petition. So I told my friend Polly, I said, you know, I think I'm going to do this. So I spent the next three months putting together an entire website and breaking down, okay, these are the four things that I'm going to work on as far as developing an economic policy for the city. um this is where I'm going to work on as far as road funding so forth and so on and I campaign my butt off I walk I i do I do what everybody says that that they want to see in a candidate I walk hey lincoln park is six square miles um about at the time about 38 35 36 000 residents and um so I walk the entire city door-to-door with my flyers I attend every single forum that's out there um Now, because of my political work, I had a very, very well-developed media contact list. I send out relentless emails and press releases on every single thing that I want to do and work on. Please give me an interview. I'll talk to you about anything. And I should back up a little bit. Before I sent out my first press release – now, I guarantee you, you haven't heard this very often in your life. Before I sent out my first press release – I sent my campaign website and a very nice email to the current members of city council and to the mayor. And I said, here are all the ideas and all the plans and all the details of everything that I will do if I'm elected to city council. I goes, please take my ideas now. I goes, I'm happy to work with you right now behind the scenes on all of this stuff. You can take all of the credit. These are things that will benefit the entire city. Please work on these things. Please take my ideas. Not one person even replied to say, thank you. Okay. So that's how I got involved. Um, 2011, we had a primary, I got 19% of the vote and, um, Then, thankfully, a good friend of mine, Patricia Krause, became mayor. She was an outsider. She became mayor for two years. She did a lot of good, and I was able to help her on some things, and she was the kind of mayor that you would want in any city. Then in 2013, I run for city council. I lose by three votes. I come in seventh place by three votes. So to everybody out there, listen to me very, very carefully. If you take anything away from this, every vote matters. Every vote might not count. There might be something invalid or wrong with your ballot that might disqualify it, but every vote matters. Because at the end of the day, if I would have had five or six more flyers or one more yard sign, I might have gotten in sixth place. So let me tell you, voting matters. And at the local level where you've got maybe 11%, 12% that show up in a primary, your vote is premium. premium. And honestly, the only people that vote in a local primary are people that are already involved in the city. So as luck would have it, Deborah Henderson resigned from city council for health reasons in early 2014. And I got appointed to fill her unexpired term. And then I got reelected in 2016. So I served about four years altogether. That's awesome. That's really awesome. Your experience seeing what's happening in local government, it's just a smaller entity, but it's the same structure of corruption that you have at the higher entities. That's what I've seen. Anyhow, there's a lot of people that are in it for self-gain. As you're talking about the single interest or single focus, such as like developers or realtors, that's what I see. Yeah, here in Lincoln Park, and again, drop in the name of your city, any city across America, when I say a good old boys club, what you usually have is a city manager who's managing the city on a daily basis, and then you either have a strong mayor position or maybe someone behind the scenes. In our city, the power bases always flowed from the city from the city attorney's office, the municipal attorney. A lot of cities will use a municipal law firm and they will be their client. That's always a better way to go because this way you're treated like a client. In our city, the city attorney was involved when the city incorporated in 1925. We've had three city attorneys since 1925. That's 99 years. So everybody, you tell me, where does the power base start and end in the city? In Lincoln Park, the power base has always been centered around the city attorney and the immediate people that surround that person. And This would happen in any city. It's always been that way. Breaking that good old boys culture and getting people to run. Everything you said in the setup was literally what I was going to say. For four years, I cannot tell you how many times people would stop me on the streets or wherever I was in Lincoln Park or wherever I was in Down River saying, hey, aren't you that guy on City Council in Lincoln Park? I said, yeah. I had my speech down so refined. After a few minutes, I would say, hey, you seem like a pretty smart person, and I can tell that you care. Why don't you run for office? Oh, I'm too busy. That's an excuse. It is not a reason. That is an excuse. Or someone would say, oh, I got too many skeletons in your closet. Big deal. Everybody's got skeletons in their closet. And honestly, honestly, most people that are really concerned about their city really don't care about what you think are skeletons in your closet. Those are those are the two biggest excuses. And I want to make sure that I really punctuate that it is an excuse. That is not a reason that that you're that you're not running for city council. OK, so at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I am about a month left on city council. I said, you know, I'm. I could have written the book before I even got on city council because I knew what I was going to do on city council. I knew how I was going to do it. I knew the people I had to align myself with. I had all that. I knew who my enemy – well, I knew most of my enemies at city hall. You would think in a town of 35,000, 40,000 that you wouldn't have any enemies, believe me. And you would think that you wouldn't have people that would literally want to destroy your life to protect their very small power base and As they're the big fish in this very small pond of Lincoln Park. But let me tell you, it does work like that. So if you really want to change things, you've got to be willing to make that leap. I mean, for any office, but even locally. So I said, you know, I have to put together a very short tutorial booklet. And my booklet, that's 20 pages long. Even a slow reader, I'm a slow reader. Even I can read it in about an hour and a half. I decided, okay, let's walk someone through how you pick out and put together several small things that you want to work on that you can work on by yourself. One medium-sized thing that you'll need some help with, and then a large community-wide thing that you'll need a full buy-in from the entire city council, the mayor, and the upper echelons of the city staff. and then how you refine those ideas and then how you put the put your your details together of the steps you have to take and then your timeline for what you think you'll have to accomplish this it's very important to pick out a timeline then you set it aside for a couple weeks and then you go back and you refine and rethink all of that because I want to be very specific here there was one big thing that I wanted to work on an economic conference for all of down for all of wayne county that we would host here in lincoln park I thought it would take me a maximum of six months to put that together. And believe me, Donna, I had refined my thinking and my process on that. It took me three years, three years to accomplish that. Now that's from somebody who has been politically involved her entire life and knew exactly what they were doing to put it together. It still took me three years. And do you know why? It took so long because at the end of the day, nobody else in the city wanted to do it because maybe they don't maybe they don't have too many maybe they're a decent person and they'll go along and work on parks and work on this and that but at the end of the day if they don't have any big diaz they really don't have anything against you but they certainly don't want to work on your big diaz so that they look marginalized and smaller than you and that's just the pettiness of the human condition and and behavior Well, what I find is that the true heroes are usually the ones that work real quietly behind the scenes and they don't want a lot of attention. They just want to see things done right. And they establish a lot of trust with all of us, the true heroes that just carry the operations in all areas, like administrative assistants and people who are willing to take a second seat, third seat, or a back seat in order to see things go forward. That's, that's truly somebody that, that deserves a huge amount of respect because it takes all, it takes all kinds. So yeah, that, well, that's, that's really interesting. Were you seeing, were you seeing people that were trying to stop it, not just because they didn't want to jump on board, but because they had other interests that they wanted to see that were more self gain or was it more like people that just were trying hard, but missing the mark? Yeah, there was a couple of people that had very specific things they wanted to work on, and I supported them completely because they were good ideas. They were smaller ideas, but they were still good ideas, and it still moved the needle of getting the city to move forward. Then there was the Good Old Boys Club. where you have literally five or six people. And at the end of the day, again, I'm being very specific here in a city, this size, let's say a city under 50,000, that's always my mom, you know, a weight, a weight size there in a city of under 50,000, 50,000 or less. You can have five or six people behind the scenes who control most of the political power within the city. It's actually as long as they're there long enough and as long as they're always looking out for each other. And then after 10, 20 years, they bring in another person with into a certain position and then they groom that person. At the local level, Donna, it's the same at the county level, the state level, and the national level. The local good old boys culture and club is the same as the political establishment at the very top in D.C. So, yeah, I saw it daily. I lived it daily. So after 2018, I finished my second term, and I started doing other things. I started a business in the city. Then I still sent my ideas to city council all the time and said, hey, Here's something I can help you with. You know, I'll work with you behind the scene. And, um, the DDA, the downtown development authority, I still went to all their meetings and I said, look, let me work on this with you. You guys can have all the credit. I'll help you behind the scenes. I did that constantly. And then, and, um, And then I saw again in 2019, I saw that there was nobody that was going to run against our city mayor. I thought, really? Again, we're not going to have a primary in this town and we're not even going to have two candidates for mayor. So in 2016 and in 2018, Our city mayor ran unopposed because he was part of the good old boys culture. But more importantly, because nobody just even wanted to get 25 valid signatures and put their name on the ballot. I mean, this is how a good old boys culture goes when people are that apathetic that they won't even put their name on the ballot. So in 2019, I said, okay, I'm going to run for mayor again. Again, I'm going to do this. And simply because our mayor is running unopposed. Our mayor at the time, I mean, he was just a standard mayor. I didn't have anything against him. I didn't have anything for him. You can't run unopposed. So I got 40% of the vote just because I put my name in. Wow. And again, when I sent out my first – before I sent out my first press release to run for mayor again, I sent my entire new website, all my ideas, all 26 ideas, I sent them to the city mayor and to the city council. I said, please take all my ideas. Please work them. Please use them. I said, I will help you behind the scenes. You can have all the credit. But here's the thing. All my ideas and all my plans for the city, they involve one thing. Work. The big word, work. They involved a lot of work. There were a few ideas that were actually complicated that needed to be worked on a sophisticated level, but most of it just involved getting together enough people to work the plan. It's not physics. It's not figuring out the space-time continuum. It's working on the economics of a six-square-mile city. It really is not complicated. And I, and I, so after 2020, that's when I, um, um, oh wait, and, and that period I had, um, in 2019, I briefly considered running for, uh, the Wayne County commission, um, commission. And, um, and I met with Mark Sosnowski, our, uh, our committee chairman here in Wayne County. And I met him for the first time. Then literally that week, my dad died. And so, yes, thank you. So, so every, so, you know, your entire life changes and everything. So I, I had set aside that, but then I ran for mayor in 2020. Then a few weeks after the election in 2020, I said, this, this, this can't change. This, this can't go on like this. This, this, this has to, the dynamic here is kind of, so I called Mark Sosnowski again. I didn't even know if he would remember me cause we only met the one time, you know, and I said, um, I said, Mark, I'm in, I said, I want to, I said, um, I goes, I I'll run, I'll run for Congress. Um, in the, um, in 2022, I said, I'll join this party. Um, I started attending the state central committee meetings and, um, and, you know, for, for me personally, when, when I, to do join a party, um, I mean, all of you are patriots. All of you tremendously understand the Constitution very well. you're all you're all christians and you're and you're and you're warriors for jesus christ on a daily basis all of that matters to me but what I was really concerned about is are these good people that are going to have my back if I dive into this race and and am I going to like these people enough now all that's very important to me because I never joined a party before so um so I so I joined and and and now I'm in 100 um I'll I'll run I'll run in 2020 I ran in 2022 I'm going to run again. I'm going to run again this year. I'm working on my camp paperwork now. So for everybody that hears this podcast, let me kind of capsulate this one little thing here. If you have one good idea, I used to make it three, but I'm a desperate man now, politically. If you have one good idea that you absolutely positively know that you can work on, and you know the resources that you're going to need, and you know the relationships you're going to have to build, and you know that you can accomplish this, if that's an idea for a school board level, local, county, state, or federal organization, whatever it is, you can't sit on the sidelines. Donna, what you said was absolutely right. And governments from school board and local all the way up to federal and all these governments that we have here in America, if good people aren't in office, the only thing that's left to be in office are people who are bad and people who, quite frankly, have had evil tendencies and people that just want to accumulate money and power and control for themselves. Because those people will run for office because they know that being in a public office at any level is a way for them to get the kind of connections and to have the kind of influence so that they can gain power and control and money. And that's why they do it. And so anytime that one of these bad people resigns and is gone, A good person has to be there to replace them because this is how we move the needle in America and get the entire nation back to a constitutionally limited republic. You have to have good people that are in these offices because now you have one less bad person and you have a good person, and then you get more, and then you get more. And this is the way it works. It is a matter of hydraulics. Take it from an engineering guy. It is a matter of hydraulics. And once you get enough good people involved, they're not marginalized anymore. Now they are in control, and they're looking at, okay, how do we get as much government out of people's lives and let people run their own lives? And all these governments, they do only what they're supposed to do at their level as far as being a government. And 95% of this is local. 95% of all the problems we need to solve politically in America, it's a matter of math. 95% of our governments are local. So that is where 95% of people need to place their attention if they're going to get involved. And people can do it. Well, and I think that there's sometimes people see it as an overwhelming thing to do. And people such as myself never wanted a career in politics. You don't have to have a career in politics. You just need to step up and say, I'm going to go in and I'm going to, we're going to get this thing under control. And then I go back to my life. And I mean, that's what the founding fathers did. They didn't plan on being in politics forever. They had farms, they had businesses and such. And I think that if we had good people that stepped forward, we could right these wrongs, move forward into a limited government, because that's really what we need. We need some hatchet people out there that are willing to say, you know, what about 90% of the nonsense that we're seeing out there needs to be cut, nullified, disqualified from being on the books because it's in congruent. It's in, it's in, uh, uh, word I'm looking for. It's in conflict with the Constitution, the highest law of the land. Because even the positions that people get in in office when they're looking for a political career, they want to get in and they entrench themselves. And then all of a sudden the usurpation starts and they jump off of their stated job description, per se, and they're all over the place. And then the next thing you know, it's complete and utter chaos. Nothing gets done to serve the people, but it sure does the politicians, right? This is exactly the way it works. Maybe I watch a little too much C-SPAN, but I see all these elected officials. They've been there 10 terms. And they're talking about this and talking about that. And they're self-congratulatory. Wait, you've been there 10 terms. You've been a member of Congress for 20 years or you've been in the Senate for 24 years. If you've been in the Senate for 24 years and you haven't and if you're not working on something like, oh, I don't know, a single rate tax system, you know, eliminating taxes. 74,000 pages of our 75,000 page tax code. If you're not looking, working on something at that level, honestly, you're just there doing the work of lobbyists and, and, and influence pedals and the power brokers. That's what they're doing. They're there. And then you can ask yourself a further question. Are we really that, stupid to believe that they're going to change or that they want to change if they haven't done anything. It's like Biden get in an office after 50 years. If anybody thinks he's going to make any difference after he has made no, there's been no performance up to that point in time, other than he's a nice person, but he's never done anything. What is ever going to convince us that he, or what could possibly change that? Just to have a title change that there's going to be any difference made. There isn't. There is no changes that are going to be made with people that have been in office a long time. They have failed to perform. Right. And if they're never challenged and if good candidates never step forward, then they'll just keep on failing to perform and they'll just get rewarded. Because at the end of the day, what they're doing is they understand their place within the establishment. And I'm going along. I'm part of the establishment at this level. And as long as I continue to have the back of everybody around me, they will have my back. We're all going to increase our power. We're all going to stay within our insulated political culture. We're all going to be rewarded. And the most important thing is you just do nothing or as little as possible. And I look at how many laws and how big the laws are. From 1993 to 2005, I went to Washington, D.C. six times a year. of my own accord. I put together my own legislative proposals. Most of this was working on fiat money and getting us back to a gold standard. But I also brought other legislative proposals with me as well. I used my own money, my own vacation time. And so for six times during those 12 years, I was there on the ground. And so everybody, again, listen to me because this is a very, very clear crystallized point here. When you're in Washington, D.C., and you take it all in, especially if you've been politically aware in your life and you look around, let me tell you, folks, inside those hallways, inside those meeting rooms, those committee rooms, and all around Washington, D.C., when you see huddles of political people talking with other political people and other public officials and all that, this thing about, you know, the culture has changed in the last 20 years, but back then from 93 to 2005, There's no such thing as Democrat or Republican. It's a uniparty mentality. It's all establishment. I've literally stood there feet away from watching a committee staffer talking with a lobbyist out in the hallway making notes. I've seen it with my own eyes. And if every adult American... had had seen what I've seen in washington dc these these two major parties would be gone they would be gone because there would there would be a crisis of conscience within within the american political psyche and people would realize but see that's that's not going to happen because because it takes so long for people to come to the self-realization um that they have not educated themselves on politics, on government, on economics, history. And people, they get into their 40s and 50s and they realize, most people realize, okay, I haven't. They get scared to admit to themselves that they don't know. Everybody likes to think that they know more about things than they actually know. And nobody wants to admit that they actually know. know a little bit about a few, they know a lot about a few things, but most of us don't know everything about a lot of things. I mean, that's just a human condition. That's just our own frailties as human beings. You can't know everything. Exactly. Exactly. So people get in their 40s and 50s and they realize, oh, I don't know these these these big systems in these state, these big things. And so they just they just go on. Now, some people have have have will have a crisis of conscience and become more aware and more educated. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day. We've gotten to such a gulf of a lack of leadership. That's why I called my website Leadership for America. And that's why I made my book so incredibly simple and precise to work on, because it really is an entry point for anybody to say. Also, I wanted the book to be something that could just be handed out, handed to people. And so that when they say, oh, you know, I'm too busy, then I could just push back immediately and say, hey, you know, here's my book, you know, read this and get involved. Nice big type. What is about 14, 14 point type or bigger? Yeah. Yeah. Again, it takes like an hour. It takes like an hour to read it. Okay. So this is what I want to do. Cause you came to the meeting and you had a whole box of these things that Chris put together, did all by himself as a Patriot. And I think that, that he should be commended for this. And then let's go through this. Cause I find this to be individual work that people do. I, I, I find fascinating. I just, I'm fascinated by it. So you've got to stop. You've got different steps in here. So let's, Let's go through these steps, and I'll read the first two paragraphs in step 00, and then we'll go to the next one. Does that sound good? So I'll read it, and then you can comment. How's that? Okay, yeah, you broke up a little bit there, but I got where you're at. Okay, so step zero, zero. If you were in a relationship of any kind, you need to sit down with that person a year before the primary start. You need to have a very honest conversation about how your lives will change, even if you're running for a part-time city council position in a city of 38,000. That is a very, very good piece of advice. Yeah, because it affected me directly, and I'll put myself out there 100%. The woman I was in a relationship with at the time, she was a very political person. Her ideology was different to mine, but she was a very political person. She understood how important it was to vote and be involved and all that. And, um, and I, and I, and so when I got, so, and when we started dating in 2013, I was literally in the middle of running for my, uh, running, running for city council. Plus we had worked together and we worked in the same office in 2011. And, and she was right there, uh, listening to me complain about being a complaint and talk about the city when I was running for mayor. So plus, uh, When we got into a relationship, we had been friends for 20 years before that. So we knew each other's political views. We knew each other's religious views, social views. We knew each other very well. So when I got appointed in 2014 to fill the unexpired term, I told her categorically, I said, look, I'm taking care of my dad and I'm working full time. And I said, look, I know exactly how much time I have to put into all of this. I goes, I says, I can, I can do that. I said, I, I goes, I know I can physically do everything I need, put the time into what I know what it's going to take and all that. I said, I said, This is going to be our lifestyle. This is the way it's going to be. And it's not going to be, oh, we're going to get invited to these nice little parties in the city and all that like that. So I thought she was completely on board. I really did. And I'm telling you, she wasn't. And it really affected everything. So, folks, believe me when I tell you, take it from a guy who's been on the other side of the fence. I'm bearing my heart to you here. You have to sit down with your life partner, your wife, your husband, whoever, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your betrothed. Bonus points for using the word betrothed. You have to sit down with that person. If you truly love them and they love you and they have to have 100% buy-in because if they don't, it will affect your relationship because you'll be doing exactly what you said you were going to do and they'll be thinking that you're ignoring them. When you're not, you're just doing exactly they and and you need and you need that person. You need that person to be your confidant. You need them to be your advisor. You need them to pick you up a thousand times. You need them to be honest with you when you're doing something, when you're off track, and they'll shake you up and say, hey, get back on track. You need that person to be your cheerleader. You need that person to be around town when your name is being dragged through the streets of the city because you're a good person. Only because you're a good person, you need that person to be a warrior out there and telling people to stop. That's what you need. You need that at every level because local politics is dirty. It is dirty, dirty, dirty. I've lived it. Yeah, I think that's a good piece of advice because definitely things pop up and you have to adapt and adjust when you're running. So there's events that pop up, there's people that need help. It's a service industry. So it's not like something that you jump into and it's like, you go right down the list. There's down the list and then somebody pops up here that needs help and somebody pops up here that needs help. So you're kind of like all over the place. And you also have to prioritize a little bit too, as getting in and saying, what are the strategies I think that we're going to employ in order to have some time together and keep our relationship strong. So there's, there's a, but it's gotta be very honest. Yeah. I, I, I, um, I have a part of that in the, in the, in the booklet too about that. And it's true. Um, this, this, this happened, this happened to us all the time. Um, If you're going out to dinner, and it is this simple, if you're going out to dinner in your city when you're a public official and you're with your wife or your girlfriend or whatever and everything, people are going to come up to you and they're going to interrupt you. They won't give a damn that your meal is getting cold and everything. And they'll talk to you for five, six minutes. And I swear to God, they'll say this to you. One hour. Yeah, or not exactly. Or an hour. And I'll say, hey, I just wanted to say that real quick. I don't want to interrupt your meal. You know, thanks. And they'll leave. Well, you did interrupt my meal and my food is cold now. And now I've got a very, very angry girlfriend, you know. And and all and all that. So so so so if you if you have the kind of relationship and almost all relationships are this way, you you have to you have to have your time between you two. And if if if your if your thing is as simple, I think this was the example is if your thing is as simple that once a week or once a month. that you guys just go to the movies and go to dinner. Make sure you pick a restaurant that's outside your city where nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn about you so that you can sit there and be with just the person that you're in a relationship with and your time and attention is devoted completely to them. It'll strengthen you, it'll heal you, and it'll save your relationship. Trust me, I've been there. I know precisely what I'm talking about here. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. Okay, step one. All cities have some version of a good old boys club. You need to be careful and completely identify who they are, how many there are, and what their strong points are. I think, too, what are they gaining? The good old boys now, they're always in it for gain. Take Goshen, for example, and what happened up there in Mecosta County with the people on the board who own property that were getting paid huge amount of money for their properties that they had up next to this invasion by Goshen up there. So what do they have to gain? Developers, realtors, they have a lot to gain. Yeah, I was actually, you know, Don, it takes a lot to surprise me politically. In fact, you know, you really can't surprise me politically. I was actually astonished at how much money those people were getting. I was like, wow, this is just a state level. These people are getting multiple millions of dollars. I thought, wow, that is a lot of slush money being pushed around up there. Tremendous, tremendous. And I want you to go back to a point that you said, that Lincoln Park is a six-square-mile park. city and it has a budget of 24 million dollars yeah this is this is I i mean put this into perspective people how much money these cities have I know personally that we had an overage because I i was listening I was next to somebody in a restaurant that was having a conversation on it so I didn't believe this to be true that we had a 30 million dollar overage in the city which they found a way to spend on things that just only benefited them from what I could see. They just had to keep building bigger castle and blah, blah, blah. Our township offices had a great big building project. And I would love to know the contracts and who this went to, because I'm guessing it's part of their club of somebody that's in there. because it is a crazy thing. And then they hit a tax bill that we had, took us three times down there. We didn't even know it existed, that we thought we were current on our taxes, and we went down there for three times. Couldn't get this tax bill because I own some property here. And the developers want it. So I will allege that somebody hid that because to surprise the person behind the desk after our third trip down there, she's like, oh my God, here it is. And it was hidden. Their staff couldn't even find it. If anybody thinks that that was coincidental, I got a bridge to sell you. I just don't know who did it, but somebody did it. There's no two ways about it. Yeah, that's a good point for me to dovetail off of. There's a very specific thing that happens as far as what you get involved. If you get on city council, become a mayor in your city, the one thing you have to be aware of is your large contractors that provide professional services to you. The law firm that is providing you municipal law counsel, You might have a separate law firm that is providing you labor law counsel for negotiating with the labor unions. You'll have a specific contractor who does your auditing for you. It's Plant Moran here in Wayne County that is the accounting auditing firm that provides accounting and auditing for a lot of the cities around here. And I noticed that Plant Moran doesn't go into certain areas of Michigan. That's because accounting and other auditing firms have locked up the cities in those areas. So and then you have and then you have then you have an engineering firm that that does the unless unless you have all your engineers in house, which is almost impossible unless you're a very large city and even a very large city would have engineering. You'll have an engineering firm that handles all of your all putting your plans together and, you know, for for roads and infrastructure repairs and all that. Now those are very large contractors that have continuous contracts and, and you've got, and you have, this gets into the sophistication level. You've got to, you've got to stay on top of those contractors and all that, because what happens at the end of the day, um, with plant Moran, the accounting auditing firm for Lincoln park and, um, and the, um, and the engine Hennessy engineering here, um, that, that does our engineering for us. And then, um, And then the other their contracts continue, continue, continue. Well, then these same people after 10, 20 years, 30 years, they develop very close relationships with and become part of the good old boys culture here. And their contracts just continue, continue, continue. So that's where your power base also starts with these major contractors. So, yeah, contractors continue. You have to stay on top of them because they will be related. They're either related in some form or another, or I've heard something that this guy goes to my church or this, that, and the other thing. And they use things that should be spiritual, truly connected to God as a way to connect. And it's, it's, I've seen that enough, not enough times too, but they're all connected. I've seen it happen here. Yeah. And then they, they, they find ways to kick back parts of that money to the people that are in power, be it through, another supplier. Somebody in office may have a supply chain connection to the contractor. I mean, there's all of these connections you have to really look down. And it's kind of evil and and crazy, but it's fun to find. In Wayne County, I'll give you a specific example. Okay. We have 1.8 million people, 2 million around in Wayne County. And in Wayne County, when it comes to infrastructure, the real value of the contract is the maintenance part of the contract that we will do maintenance on this road for five years or 10 years after we've built it. Well, That's why we never get polymer-based aggregate. I'm going to talk like an engineer now. You get aggregate-based, you get polymer-based aggregates and concretes that where a road can heave and hoe and bend and be elastic with the seasons and all that. You never get that kind of constructed road or where you have shredded tires that have a 10% mixed into aggregate Because the real value of the contract is we want to maintain this road. Why? Because the contract is then based on jobs and labor. I'm guaranteeing jobs for my crews of this contract for the next five to 10 years of maintaining this road that should last 20 years, but actually after two years, because it's taking so much salt and so much pounding from the axle weight of trucks and all that, that it's going to be needed. It's going to have to be repaired after two years. Oh, you were singing my song here on this. We've been talking about this. Yeah. We brought up yesterday. Ralph brought up yesterday because we're, we're nerds. Okay. We're, we're nerds. They were into construction and we're, we're all nerds. Right. And I said this for a long time. When you look at how they do road construction, the only one that's really making the big money is the guy that has the barrel contract. And then the maintenance contract after the road is built, because they build in deficiencies and go, I don't know how this happened. We had a road over here that they forget to put an additive in. Oops, it's past the warranty. My bad. And then they award the contract to get to the same contractor that made the problem the first time. And then the guy that gets a cushy little government job as being mayor of say, oh, I don't know, Kentwood. There you go. Yep. Yes. The contractors. I'm going to have to have you back on to talk about this whole, this whole road base thing, because, because this is a discussion I very much want to have. I've looked at this for a long time and, And why are we not using flexible materials? Why are they not sealing these things? They're not sealing anything. Of course, in Michigan, we're going to have ice. It's going to heat. It's going to expand when it goes into ice. And you're going to crack the whole road up. And then we're going to sit here and drive on the Whitmer roads that we've had for years. And then she's not going to do anything except for have 20 miles of barrels sitting out there with maybe, oh, I don't know, two low level pieces of equipment. I saw this. I taped it when I was on the road to to like real small pieces to make people think they're doing construction. Nada is getting done. Yep. Yep. Yep. For months. It's absurd. The rest of us would be broke with this sort of thing. Okay. Exactly. So we've got, we've got a bunch of steps here. We've got three, four, five, six, seven. I love this book. Eight, nine, 10, 11. Then we have part one, part two of how to run a campaign. And this is awesome. So I tell you what, you know what? I want to have you back on again because we talked about the dynamics of cities, but now we're going to go to, this is the first step. You got to run for office, everybody. We've got to release these criminals that are in office because I'm going to say it, and I've said it before, every single person in the legislature His committed treason. And nobody wants to talk about this. This is not, these are not small. Oh, we're going to charge him with a felony. No, who's going to say that? The prosecutor, because they're all in the same club. So we're going to give him an easy fall instead of, instead of going, bam, come down with a hammer and, and be done with this. But in order to write this, The answer is we, the people. We have to step forward. We have to run for office. I don't care. The only qualification you need, in my opinion, is are you honest? Are you honest to you? If you kind of have interest, you can figure out what the job is. And I think we need to write a little bit better job descriptions because that is apparently a hard thing for people to understand. that, you know, say, let's say you're the attorney general, you don't have any interaction with disputes or problems with people. That does not go there. This is for commerce. And the sheriffs are the ones that are involved at the county level. So They don't even know what their jurisdiction is or what their delegated duties are. It's incredible to me. So we need to haul that thing back in real quick. And it's not as difficult as what you would think. And I think if you actually had people who were true leaders that aren't in it for their own self-gain, they would get into these positions real quick and say, that's done. We're done with that right now because you've overstepped what your abilities are. and or your oath of office, and we're going to haul this thing back in. And if we had people that were willing to nullify about 90% of the nonsense that are on the books, think about how simple that would be. Exactly. Precisely. That's what I say all the time. Yeah. So let's look at it. Would you come back on again? Absolutely. This is a great discussion. What a great interview you gave. This is awesome because there's so much that we can talk about. And as part of the Constitution Party and you're running for office, I'm going to give you a voice because I know nobody else will. You will absolutely be silenced. And your information is incredible. So you've got all kinds of things in here. Departmental consolidation, mental illness, COVID, China, community disaster plans. Okay, I'm looking at that one right now. Because this is awesome. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for putting this together. It's truly, it's a gift. I mean, this is amazing. So I do what I do with the Lord. I do what the Lord tells me to do on a daily basis. That's where it starts. That's that's awesome. Well, do you have do you have any other things that you want to talk about here today? I've got I've got Karen and Ralph backstage and I'm really bad at holding to a schedule when people talk. I try to let them talk as much as much as they have on their hearts because the short answers don't cut it. We need to give people the time. to really explain themselves and not just go to a headline. And I'm thoroughly enjoying this. So anybody that wants to pursue local office further, quite simply, it's a very simple email address, leadership1776 at yahoo.com. That's leadership1776 at yahoo.com. Shoot me an email, and for $3, I'll mail you a copy of the book. Or if you want to discuss anything. And... My phone number will be there. Anybody that runs for local office. I'll help you with your campaign. I will bounce off. You can run your ideas by me. I will help you think through it. Anything you need that I can help you with, I will help you with. Because if you're willing to run, then I'm 100% in behind you. Wherever you are in America, it doesn't matter. Because, again, that's where 95% of the governments are. So that's where 95% of the problems have to be solved. Well, this is just extraordinary, and I sure appreciate you coming on today, Chris. This is very insightful in the way that local governments work. We need to understand that. We need to understand the problem in order to address it and find ways around it. I was looking at your posters in the background, too. You've got Star Wars posters up. Are you a Star Wars fan? Yeah, I'm pretty much your standard sci-fi geek, yeah. Oh, that's cool. That's kind of fun. Yeah. So it's really nice to get to know people and know what they're about, what they like, no matter whether it's their public face or their private face, because you really, really need to be the same in both places. And I appreciate so much your honesty coming forward with information and just letting us let everybody know that you're just you're a real person. Donna right back at you because, um, and I want, and I want, and I really want this to be part of the ending of the podcast. So that, so that people understand when, um, when you got, when you got shafted by the, um, by the, by the Republican insiders and all that, and you left and you left that party and you, and you came to run, um, run for governor, um, on the constitution party here in Michigan. Um, I'll be completely honest. I was, I was a little trepidatious as I am, as I am with anybody that leaves any party and comes into this party. And my real concern is, okay, I'll vote for her on November 8th, but what is Donna going to be doing on November 8th, November 9th? And on November 9th, your commitment to this party at the state and at the national level, folks, has been 100%. And so, Donna, whatever office you decide to run for in the Constitution Party moving forward, you're going to have my support because you've earned my trust politically. And believe me, that's a credential because I give that very, very sparingly. But you've done the work on a daily basis. You've done the work on being on the committees and all that. And everybody, Donna had no idea I was going to say this today at all. But I knew if I had an opportunity, I wanted to say it because you're the real thing. And you're a genuine Christian. And that means a lot to me as well. I really appreciate that, Chris, so much. That's just really nice. And when I was asked to run on the Constitution before I went on the Republican Party, because I was really not attached to any party, I hated everybody at that point in time. And I thought, well, thinking it out, there's more people there. If I can make it work there and write the state just as a citizen, just as a person, and not somebody who is looking for a political career, I thought that might be my best chance. What I saw within that Republican Party is such a shameful, shameful display of non-patriotism. It's incredible. And it was really a gift from God that they were all involved in this to make sure that the only true outsider that was there was kicked off because I won by losing. honestly. And so the, the constitution party was, you know, several people said, come and run with us. We need a strong candidate that can run. And I'm like, when I give my word to someone, I, my word, my word is as good as a, as a contract and a signed contract. And I believe we should all have that kind of integrity. So when, when the party went forward and I'm like, okay, we're going to see, and there was someone who committed a felony, that is still concerning to me, but not in the party. And I said, we clean this party out or I'll burn it right to the ground because I'm not going to play ball with people that don't uphold the law or even include people that are doing that. We can't have that. The party cleaned itself out and I'm like, all right, You know, I'm your girl right now. What do you need done? I will say yes to anything. So they needed somebody to step up as vice chair. I'm like, yep, I'll do it. And so I got nominated. Nobody runs for anything in the party. Nobody runs for it. It's different. And so I just, I was nominated and they, you know, they were surprised, I think, that I said yes. But I am very, very, very loyal to people that I know are good people. I have a boss level loyalty built into my personality. So somebody nominated me and they're like, would you accept the nomination? And I'm like, yes, I would. And then we needed somebody for the communications committee for chair. And I'm like, I will take that position. Membership committee, yes, I will take that position. If we need somebody to fill these positions, I will take it and I will try to make it work and see if I can get other people to join into those to help into those areas and build teams in those areas so that we can accomplish what we need to. And I sure appreciate what you had to say. Well, you do the work. And that's, you know, when you get involved, it's about doing the work. That's how we accomplish all this stuff. So, again, everybody out there, it's a very simple email, leadership1776 at yahoo.com. Just shoot me an email, and I'll get you a copy of your book for a few dollars. Would you like to put your phone number out there? I put my phone number out there all the time. Oh, sure. Yeah. 313-550-8922. That is area code 313-550-8922. You want to run for public office, especially at the local level, give me a call. I've done all this before many times, and I'm happy to answer your questions. I'm happy to help you walk through the process and think through the process. But if you call me, be prepared for brutal honesty because you're going to get it. Yeah, I love that. You know what it made me think is maybe we should set up a couple of Zoom calls that people can join in and publicize that where they can come in and take part of a Zoom call and we can talk to anybody that wants to run for office. and help them develop a group of us that go through what we know and how we can help. And if they need something, they can call us and say, they say, okay, I need, this is something I need in this area. We could jump behind them as a group and really help. And I know Mark Cisnowski would be absolutely thrilled if we did this. So when we get offline today, later in the day, let's talk about how we can include more people into this. Put together just simple. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money to do this sort of stuff. We put together a Zoom call and we can go through your book and then get people thinking and how what they need to do and how they need to do it. The traps that they set out there for you when you're running because they are trying to stay in power. They do not want outsiders in. So if we do that, I think that could be an extraordinary way to address this problem and maybe get more people comfortable with feeling, you know, comfortable that they're not going to be alone. I'm on board, 100%. Let's do it. Fantastic. You're an unbelievably outstanding individual. Thank you so much, Chris. Have a great day. We're going to jump into the next hour of Brandenburg News Network, and I'm going to have Chris back on again. We're going to do this repeatedly because we got to talk construction stuff. That's the fun stuff. So anyhow, thank you, Chris. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome to Brandenburg News Network. I am Donna Brandenburg and it's the second hour of our show, April 11th, 2024. Welcome to our show and thank you so much for joining us today. Wasn't Chris amazing? That was such a pleasure to meet somebody who has worked his way on the ground into a city council, actually understands the workings within it. And it's kind of like, you know, not real happy with the way things are run in politics and is honest enough to tell the truth. I'm going to bring in my next guest, Ralph, the IT guy and Karen the Riveter. Thanks for coming on today, guys. You guys are amazing too. Just regular people. We don't need any rock stars. We need regular people who are willing to step up and do something to help. So today we're going to talk about, I just put it out there because I had a short conversation with Ralph and a little bit of one with Karen, who is starting to feel better after, and I appreciate you coming on today. about communications, off-the-grid communications. And we're going to do some prepper things because we're all farmers. We have the ability to MacGyver our way through just about anything. So how are you guys doing today? Good. Good to have you back, Karen. Yeah, I can't stay away. It's too much fun. I miss my friends. And we really are friends. I don't throw that term around lightly, but I'm going to tell you what, I just love both of you so much. And it's really nice to be able to stand with and have friends that, you know, on my last day. And, you know, I know you guys will be there and I would be there for you on your last day, no matter what it was. And we would look at each other and say, this has been a great ride. Time to go home to pop. I'll have the cookies baking for you when you guys get up here, you know. Welcome home. I want to, I want to say something about what you just said. You were talking about learning to MacGyver. I just had a conversation with my husband not long ago. I said, you know, when, when you have a homestead, if you want to call it that we, we weren't the originals here, you know, but we, we're, we're trying to do things in a homesteading way of doing things. And, um, You learn how to, MacGyver is a good way to put it. You learn how to solve all kinds of problems that you may never have thought of before or come across. You learn how to use things in a different way. Upcycle, you might say. Recycle. And I think every kid should have that in their life. It's something that gets missed out on and everything is handed to you or you just buy it off of a shelf. It's an intellectual aspect of things, and maybe homeschoolers have a closer connection to that too, that I think is great. When you raise your own animals and all the things that come with that, there is an intellect and a common sense that comes with that. So with you saying that, I just brought up something that I think is fun. When I grew up, my mom always had these books around called Pack of Fun Books. And what they were is they were here. I'm going to go ahead. I just found this. I just put this up here. This is not planned. We don't plan anything here. Planning is for noobs. And so, uh, so, uh, let's look at this, but what that would be. And I just like comb through these things all day long, right? Looking for what you, what you could do with ideas. And so here you go. We've got, we've got all kinds of things out here. We've got 75 recycled art projects, looking at things differently. How can you reuse, recycle, make something fun and When you do that with kids, they learn to look at objects not as the end object, but as building blocks for making something new. I think that's an extraordinary ability to have. And when kids are little, they're learning ways to think. Now, I homeschooled my kids, so my kids were constantly learning. challenge to build things or do things differently. And there's a skill set there that goes along with it. So anyhow, look at this one. I just pulled this up. I mean, that was literally a type it in while we're talking on the fly. I turned it into a Jonathan Brader runner election scenario right there and just brought it up off the side. But I mean, this is something that's great. So we know what I'm working on right now. I don't like my horse. You just created a new phrase. You just created a new phrase. You braidered it, but you made it a positive thing. That's so funny. We've got MacGyverine and we also, I'm going to turn Jonathan braider into an, into a verb here. We're going to braider things. Okay. So that's like, whenever you hear me say, we're going to, we're going to braider things. It's making things up on the fly, pulling it out of our behind. Not knowing what we're doing. No rules. It's not nothing. I suppose that should only really be the correct term for it if there's a proper way to do it that you're disregarding. Yeah, we should actually create a meme. Karen, you're a meme maker. So we need to have a meme about braidering. We're going to braider something and then do it like a definition. What does it mean to braider something? Or an active verb, braidering. What is braidering and what is braidered something, okay? Or the act of braidering something. That's going to be our new thing. So I need a couple memes. Would you make me some memes on that? I've done that before, but I can't remember what word it was. This is what I do. You can call it Brandenburgian things. I like make up words for things all the time. People are like, they'll look at me like this and go, what did you just say? And I'm like, well, you know, just, I just kind of made the word up. I think one of my favorites comes from. I don't even know where I'm going with that. I didn't plan to say it. One of my favorites comes from Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live when he was doing George W. And he said, he said, strategery. And for some reason, I still think that that's just a fun word. Oh, that's fun. I like that. So that's just fun playing with things a little bit. I think that's extraordinary. So there you go. So yeah, there's a lag. Ralph just said that there's a lag behind things. So yeah, sorry if there's a little bit of lag. We cut out there for a minute because I said braider. Wonder how the algorithms brought that up. The ones that, oh, I don't know, control like Eric and Titan with SysA and all those wonderful things. Watch this thing fall apart because we can't talk truth here. Thank you to the braidering that's going on behind the scenes. Yeah, so sorry if we talk over you a little bit. There's a fair amount of lag coming through on this end, so it's hard to tell when someone's done talking. Oh, I'm froze up. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you, but you're froze up on and off too. And now she's gone. Well, I guess the topic of the day is off-grid communications, and right here is an excellent example of why we need that. My computer just... So, yeah, off-grid communications. Lots of ways to do it. But starting from probably the lowest level, do you know your neighbors? Have you gone out and actually met them? Do you know who's around you? Am I... You know, in an emergency situation, you're probably going to want to mostly communicate with the people nearby. Am I on, guys? Off and on. Oh, this is funny. So I guess I can't say that word. I got to add that to the words that they're going to censor me for. Over the target. Now we have to make a meme. Totally hilarious. Yes, I have met most of my neighbors. Am I there? You're on. We're trying to intermittently continue the subject of discussion. I am there now. Not really. You're kind of like once in a while here, but you've got about probably an 8 to 10 second delay, I would guess, and you're dropping out quite a bit. Yeah. Must have made somebody mad, huh? I wonder who that would be. Speaking out about the elections, that's a real problem, isn't it? Yep, and got to keep speaking about it. I'm going to leave and come back on. How's that? Is it going now or not? Not well. You should probably. Okay. I'll leave and I'll come back. Okay. Talk amongst yourselves. Yeah. So meeting your neighbors, what, what did they, how can you all help us help each other out as a community? You know, you got a neighbor that has eggs and, You've got a vegetable garden, you know, probably be a good idea to make those connections before something bad happens and get to know people. Hey, you're back. How's that? Did it work? That's working a lot better. Should I poke the bear again? Perhaps. Cause we all know that's kind of fun. Do we, do we talk about braidering? Let's see what happens. Yes. This is almost too fun. It's become a game for me. Yeah, so another communications option that, you know, if you've got a way to communicate, if you know people locally that you want to communicate with, CB radio is still around. There's an awful lot of that equipment out there, and it's cheap. And there's a lot of people that still use it. Not as many as there used to be, but there's still quite a few people out there. And it's easy to assemble that kind of stuff to use CB radio, and you don't need a license. What is the range on a CB radio? You know, I'm not really sure. I'm going to say it's probably somewhere in the range of about five miles. It's going to depend on your antenna system. Okay, now listen to this. I'll type. We're all going to type to look it up. Oh, it says between two base stations, you have a range of about 20 miles. Interesting. What about a truck? Usually truck signals, if they're in trucks, they're like, what, a couple miles? Yeah. SCP allows for a maximum of four watts of output for CB radios to avoid... Hang on, this is taking a minute. So I want to estimate up to 50 miles if you've got decently cooperative terrain, like if you're on a mountain. Okay, it says that you've got one to two miles per foot of length of your CB antenna, if all other figures are configured correctly. 15 miles. Is there, because if there is, and I'm sure that there could be developed easily, but is there already in existence a CB or a ham radio network designed specifically to send messages across the land? To a certain extent. With most of that, okay, so this is going to get into a little bit of technicality on ham, but for ham radio, you're not supposed to use it for broadcast communications where you're just sending a general message out to anybody. You're supposed to be communicating more of kind of in a two-way fashion with someone. And part of the reason for that, as I understand it, is that they didn't want ham radio, just like how you can't have music if you're using ham radio. You can't transmit music. They don't want ham radio communicating with the commercial operators, you know, AM and FM broadcast stations. That said, there are repeater networks in the ham radio community where... they link multiple towers together. So you can talk, you know, you talk to your local tower, it relays to another tower somewhere else in the state and transmits out from there. So you can talk to people at a very great distance using short range radios. Even with a technician license, you can do that. It is somewhat dependent on the repeater networks infrastructure staying up. But on the other hand, you've also got a whole bunch of dedicated hands trying their hardest to make sure that that communication system stays up. I'm listening to the tapping in the back. It's like flintlock wood, you know? Yeah. So one of the wider ranging ones here in Michigan is the W8 IRA repeater, the Independent Repeater Association. And they've got a whole bunch of linked repeaters all up and down Michigan here. I'm going to send you a link here, and it shows a coverage map. Okay, so I'm going to read something here. Given the variables, the range, there's a whole article about it. The range of a CB radio can be anywhere from 3 to 50 miles. However, the general rule of thumb is that CB radios have a range of 3 miles to 20 miles depending on the model antenna and external factors. The ideal conditions with a high-quality setup, the maximum range can reach up to 15 miles. So there you go. There's your answer. Cool. So, yeah, that's a great option, though, because it doesn't require a license. It doesn't require really any kind of knowledge or anything to use it. You just basically just kind of jump on there and use it. And so you can have a whole bunch of people in your community that are outfitted with CB radios and talk to each other. I mean, that's what it's designed for as citizen band is for people to just talk. First link or the second one? The second one is a map, and we're jumping back and forth a little bit between CB and HAM. HAM radios, you have to have a license for that. And the second link there is a coverage map for the IRA repeater system for HAM radio. And this is kind of going from CB and going into HAM. HAM radio is... amateur radio, you have to have a license for it. But the license is I think right now it's like 35 bucks for a ten year license. And yeah, there you go. So if you have even just a technician's license, which is the first level of ham radio license, you can use this IRA repeater system. You don't need a higher level license to be able to use this. And the radios anymore, you can get a radio on Amazon, a ham radio for like 20 or 30 bucks. Then that's, it's like a little walkie talkie style radio and it's enough to reach a repeater network like this. And that's pretty awesome. Yeah, and these are basically all linked together. So if you talk on one, you can be heard by someone on any of the rest of them. So you can actually have a round-robin conversation of four or five people in completely different sections of the state, all talking to each other at the same time. It's sad that there's none in the southeast part of the state, around Detroit or south. Yeah, well, really, this used to be more of just a West Michigan thing. So I think, if I remember right, I think the... What is it? Looks like Vanderbilt, Mount Pleasant, and Flint ones, and Jackson. I think those are all new. So they must be kind of expanding out a little bit and must not have reached that area yet. But, yeah, so... You got CB radio, you got ham radio. Something that I hear a lot from folks doing preparedness is that they'll get a ham radio, but don't want to get a license because they don't want to get tied into the system. Well, that is a really bad idea. And I'll tell you why. It's not so much about being tied into the system is that just like if you've got a firearm, You don't just want to buy a firearm and never go test fire it, never get any kind of practice in with it, never do any test firing, sighting in, none of that, just because, well, at least you have the firearm in case you need it. Same kind of thing with a ham radio. If... If you don't get a license and you just keep it around in case you might need it, and in an emergency I'll just transmit and do whatever I need to with it, it doesn't give you the opportunity to practice with it. You don't know the range of your radio. You don't have any contacts that you've made on there that know who you are, that know how to help in case there's an emergency. There's no practice involved in that, and that practice is a key component of really any kind of a disaster preparedness plan, you have to practice it. I mean, there's a reason we have fire drills. You don't want to get to the point where, oh, it's an emergency. Now I need to figure out how to use it without any kind of resources on how to do it. You want to make sure that you're well-practiced in it so that when the time comes, you know exactly what you need to do with it. You know, if you've got a ham radio, you want to have it filled up with all of the different memories for all of the different frequencies that you want to be able to talk to well ahead of time so that all you have to do is turn the radio on and maybe flip between the pre-programmed channels that you've got on it. That's true for everything. You need to practice ahead of time before a disaster, whether it be to train with a firearm if you have it. Nobody should have a firearm that they haven't trained with. that you need to get trained on each firearm and become really proficient at it. Right. You have a responsibility there to have a good knowledge of how to use it safely and effectively. And the same is true of radio communications. And if you can get that license and Like I said, it's like a 10-year license for, I think it's 35 bucks. So, you know, can you afford to spend $3.50 a year for the ability to communicate all over the place? I mean, technically, if you're proficient with Morse code, even with a first-level license, you can transmit pretty much worldwide. They don't want you doing voice communications with a first level license, a technician license worldwide, because there's too much of a possibility of you stomping on other people's communications without realizing it. But you can then upgrade your license to a second level license, a general license, which gives you all kinds of privileges to talk all the way around the world with just really a huge amount of transmit power if you needed it. And then you've got the amateur extra third level license, which gives you even more privileges. But the general license, in my opinion, is the most useful out of the three. Okay. You mentioned a $25 radio. Do you have any links that you could post for that? And we can put that up so that people can see that. Yep. Here, I'm going to mute myself. So my typing isn't bothering. It's not bothering. It goes with the character. Okay. Yeah. Let me go find a couple of them then. That's cool. I'm going to read some of the things in the chat here a minute. Charlotte says, yes, people have the attitude, even neighbors that want to suck the joy out of you. This is going back to when Chris was on. Yes. And out to kill capitalism, you have to be a big company or give kickbacks to the political monster. I think Whitmer achieved it with her union deals, healthcare companies and her dealings with NGOs like China and And H-A-I-S. Morning Lab. Maybe we should get Representative Huizenga, John James, Molinar Wahlberg, Rashida Tlaib, and Stab You Now, Joey Andrews, and Tate. The list is too long on the show, and ask them why. Hey, what do you know about Bill Huizenga? I would like to throw that out there. Anybody want to weigh in on this? Because I've got a few questions here, and I would very much like to go down that little rabbit hole. Maybe get the school board on and see what kickbacks they're getting from CRT and LGBTQ cults also. I heard that there's a couple of them, at least one locally. They got a $25,000 payment to keep the masks in place. Can't confirm. I didn't see the receipts, but seems to be from a good source. Hey, Tom, how you doing? That's why I keep learning from Tom. Charlotte says judges golf games is more than a game. And the quality of supplies are cheap. You get what you pay for, as they say. UP and Canada have great roads. I know, right? I'm asking the same thing. Why can Canada build roads? Why can we have good roads in UP? And why is the rest of the state crap? Why do they go to pieces all the time? Don't know. Tom, the vagabond is made of pure steel. and has absolutely no maintenance required. I'd like to hear more of that. Thank you, Charlotte. I'm a little better today. The shock is a little less. Let's see. We need to dig into that a little bit. Too many fools want power and can't get control of their own lives. Thanks, Charlotte. She is mine also. Vote for Donna Brandenburg. Yay! Thank you. So Charlotte says, Steve Carr is a legislator still going after the 2020 selection, but he's asking for $50 donations for attorney fees to fight this stuff. He isn't in office to fix stuff. Good point. Whenever you look for money, that's always a key that we might have a problem. And oh, wow, Charlotte, she upset the apple cart. Yes, they took me down. My whole computer went black. I got one talking about money, raising funds. So I think I shared with you the other day that the township board or the township itself, I'm not sure which, has decided to set up a GoFundMe to fight Goshen. When I saw that, I was like, oh, what? Is it the township itself that set up a GoFundMe, or is it an organization? Because that's what the local news put out in the media, and I was shocked with the concept of a local government body starting up a GoFundMe. First link did not come through. Okay, here we go. Now we're cooking. Okay, so here's an Amazon from Ralph the IT guy, Nerd Tech Supreme. Here you go. $25. Are you kidding me? $25 for that. Long range. That comes with an extended battery and it's waterproof. Whoa, okay. We know what we're going to be doing today, don't we, boys and girls? We're going to be getting on Amazon and getting ourselves ready to talk to each other. If things go down, maybe getting a junk microwave, throwing this in the microwave, unplug, cut the cord off just as a EMP proofing strategy. Or a gun safe. Or a gun safe. Wow. My first one cost me 50 bucks. Yeah, they've come down a little bit. Mine, I think, did too, because this is a newer model. And I've heard a few complaints about this, that it doesn't transmit quite as far as it should, but it's waterproof. And that also adds a lot. And see, that comparison that you've got just left of there. The other link that I sent you was for the UV5R. The UV5R... That's one that's been around for many, many years now and is very well known. You can pick those up and they're not waterproof, but there's a ton of 3D printable accessories and all that kind of stuff for them. The UV9R is a little bit newer. It's USB-C chargeable. So it gives you more options for being able to charge it. But both of those are pretty decent radios. I mean, they're not going to be... You're not looking at a Kenwood or an Icom radio here. They're definitely going to be kind of a lower quality radio than something you're going to spend $600 on. But on the other hand, this is a great way to get started. And... It's a great way to, you know, if you have five or six of these things that you've got around for people in your community, you know, that are also hams, it's a great way to outfit a whole bunch of people with a set of these. And you can all talk back and forth on these, basically like a walkie-talkie by using them not in a repeater mode, but just in simplex. which is, I think, the default mode for all these is simplex. So this makes it pretty easy to get started with these. All right, let's see what they say here. That's a gutsy move. Channel 2. Sounds like they're speaking Chinese. Yeah, this is a Chinese company that makes these. Alright, Americans, get out there and start producing stuff. Well, if you want that, you can go with the more expensive radios, because the ones that are made in America... Okay, so do you have any more expensive radio? Yeah, there's like the Kenwoods, I think are largely Japanese made. Icoms, I think most of those are if not made in America, at least engineered in America. Um, one of those things, as soon as we get somebody in office, that's willing to, uh, restore manufacturing in the United States of America. Yeah. So, um, like if you want to really, in my opinion, one of the coolest radios out there for ham radio is the ICOM IC 705, which there's a link, uh, Um, these are a little on the expensive side. I'm not going to lie. They're, they're, they're pricey. This is not going to be what you're going to want to have probably as a starter radio, but not a casual person, casual user. Yeah. But this thing is the most capable radio I've ever seen. Um, it can transmit on the super long range, uh, ham bands. It can do digital modes. It can do all kinds of stuff. You can link these things to a computer so that you can have computers talk to each other directly without the internet. Oh, that's cool. That's a fun thing to play around with because you can use just minute amounts of power. Tiny little tiny little moments of transmit power and reach all the way around the world. Really? What's the cost? Uh, cost is I think somewhere around 1400 bucks right now. That may have seemed like a silly scenario that they put in the video, but I was in a training event. I'll just put it that way. And, uh, One of our leaders for the day was standing on a dock as a boat came in. He had his radio on his belt clip, and something happened when he reached over to help somebody. Their boat was stalled. It was coming in. He reached out, and the radio went boop, flew right into the water. Did I share that page? Was that up for a minute, or did I take it down, or was it not up? Which page? The one that showed the icon. I didn't see it. Oh, I was sitting here scrolling through this thing and forgot to share it. Well, the good news is I was able to jump right into the water and follow the bubbles down and get his radio out of the muck. And I found out later that he was able to get it dried out and it worked. Nice. Yeah, so this little radio here, the IC705, it's battery powered, so you can run it, even though it's not really a walkie-talkie form factor, you can bring it out to some place like top of a hill or something like that and increase your range quite a bit by just taking advantage of the terrain. That's cool. And the other, probably the coolest feature about this is they call it a waterfall display. where if you look at the screen a little higher there, keep going. Okay. You see the kind of blue on the bottom there? Yeah, right there. The way that works is that you can tune the radio to around the frequency that you're interested in. And then you can actually look at that little blue display there. It's got the little kind of like bar graph. And then it's got the display underneath that shows a history of that bar graph. And you can see where other signals are around where you're looking. So if you get near a signal that you want to listen to, you can then just look at the, the waterfall display there and then tune back and forth to, to tune into it. And that is one of the most helpful features I can think of on a ham radio is Let's see if we got a promotional video here. Let's see what we got. And this one, I believe, is Japanese engineered and made. I got a bunch of videos here. So we know what we're going to have to do with that. I'm going to have to be watching videos this afternoon. Very fun. Basic function. I wonder how long it is. You're such a nerd. I am a hopeless nerd. I knew that. I laughed because I know that's not really a, he's an offensive term for you. Okay. So I'm not, I don't speak Japanese, so we got a problem. I won't be watching the videos. So a lot of the, a lot of the, uh, I would say some of the best, uh, radios you can get at this point really are Japanese ones. They've been out of the curve for how many years? Yeah. They have a lot of the chip foundries over there to be able to do their own custom silicon pretty much right there. Some of the American stuff is pretty good too, but I would not steer away from Japanese radios because a lot of them are very, very good Um, but getting started, those little bow things are a great way to get started. They're, they're not perfect. The signal coming out of them is not always real clean, but you know what? The, the only people that are likely to care about that are going to be other hams and it's, it's, Even then, there's a lot of us hams that still think that regardless of how clean the signal is and if it's perfect or not, this is at least getting more people into ham radio at an affordable price point. And the widespread distribution of communications capabilities is more valuable than the absolute perfection of it. You know, it's better to have more people doing it, perhaps slightly less with perhaps slightly less quality radios. It's better to have more people doing it than to have just a few people that have perfect, expensive radios. Decentralize everything. Exactly. So, I mean, those ones are cheap. It's a great way to get started with a little Baofeng radio like that. But get your license, get a call sign, and get practicing before there's an emergency. So another option that you've got, and this is one that has, well, I'll go through a couple other options. We went through CB radio, doesn't require a license. Another one that doesn't require a license, FRS radios. It's the family radio system, I believe, or family radio service. And FRS radios are just little walkie talkies. They're low power little things. And they're really designed for families to be able to talk to each other as a walkie talkie system. So they don't go very far, but they're cheap. You can pick them up like at Walmart or pretty much any big box store has FRS radios. Here, I'm just going to throw this out here. So here's a bunch of them. I just did a search. Do you have a favorite one? Not really. They're pretty much all pretty equivalent. There's a whole pack of them. I mean, look at this. They come in packs and such. Yeah, there's a couple that are at Cabela's. These should be FRS radios. It doesn't actually say it in there, but they're going to be FRS radios. And FRS doesn't require a license. Just get a couple radios. A lot of them run on double A's. Throw some double A's in it, and you're good to go. You tune both ends to the same channel, and you can talk to each other. $70 for two. Yes, ProShop and Cabela's. But yeah, there's tons of these things. You can pick them up pretty much anywhere. And anything that's FRS can talk to pretty much anything else that's FRS. FRS is both kind of like a channel allocation system as well as specification for how to... make them communicate. So it doesn't really matter the brand, you can combine these things. So wherever you can get them, another good option. And, you know, we're talking about multiple different ways of doing this. That should be another part of your communications plan. Don't rely on one method of communication. Because let's say you want to talk to somebody, you're a ham, and you want to talk to somebody that's not a ham. Well, Be open to other options. Don't rely just on ham radio. I mean, it may be a good idea to have maybe a local network of CB and a local network of FRS radios and have a few people in the community that are ham radio operators that can operate on the long range bands to be able to reach people in other regions. You know, have multiple options. So FRS radios are not a bad way to go. They're cheap. They're readily available. You can get them pretty much anywhere. And what's the range on most of these? I miss it because I was typing here. So what's the range? It depends on like how many trees and stuff you have around you. So you have a sight line? More or less. Yeah. Like if you've got it in open air, I think it's something like 30 miles. If you've got a lot of trees around you, it's probably closer to about two miles or less. That's still pretty good range for an inexpensive radio. Yep. Yeah, they're not bad. And I've got a couple of FRS radios that I've probably had for, I'm going to say, almost 20 years. And they still work. I can imagine seeing reels like this. Excuse me. Right now, like... There was a fire at a restaurant in my local community. And that kind of thing or an accident where everybody hears sirens and they're like, what's going on? Well, I can turn on my radio to the scanner feature, and if there's still communications going on through the sheriff's department or a fire department, I've got those channels in it, and I can maybe pick up on that. Sometimes by the time I hear sirens, they're really done with their communications, and I'm not likely to pick up on any real news. But something like that, you know, you reach out to your neighbor and say, hey, did you hear what's going on? And they say, yeah, I know so and so on Facebook posted it. That's that's an example of having a different kind of network that I don't have. They tapped into and figured something out. And now they've shared information with me about what's going on so that when someone else reaches out to me, did you hear? I can say, yes, I heard this. And that's how information swirls around the neighborhood. I would like to have a church bell. We've got a big, a fair sized pole building. And I think it would be great if just a local area, you know, just a number of neighbors, if there's a centralized bell somewhere and a protocol to use it. If somebody's got a fire, if somebody's having a medical emergency, you run to the bell and anybody around can hear it. Um, neighbor across the road had a truck alarm going off and it was repeated. And it was like, I think I finally thought it's not an accident. I texted him and there wasn't any communication. And I thought he can't reach his phone and maybe one of his cows kicked him or something. And he's down, and what can he do? He's got his keychain with him. And he's hoping that somebody like me is going to pay attention to it. So after the third round of honking, I opened the front door and I said, Hey, you held out his name. And it turned out his neighbor had gotten a friend that had been helping out when he was gone. locked himself in one of the outbuildings and that's all it was. It wasn't a medical emergency, but it was the noise that attracted him to it and was able to get the help that he needed. Um, so what if we set up something like that? It doesn't require any electronics. It just requires, like we started out, have you talked to your neighbors, you know? Yep. That's a great idea. Just having, having an audible, uh, communications method. And I'll have to talk to you later because I know where to get it. I know there's at least two of them that I know are available right now. Sweet. My parents had one before they were moved. Good to have friends who are nerds and resource junkies, right? Yeah. So another radio communications thing, and this is one that has become... uh, quite popular lately with off-roaders and Jeep people is GMRS. And, uh, GMRS, uh, I think that waterproof bow fang, I believe that is also capable of doing GMRS, uh, radio. Um, but GMRS, what you do is you get a, it's a license thing. So you get a license, but there's no knowledge test for it. Like there is for ham radio, um, GMRS, you just pay for a license. And once again, I think it's 35 bucks for 10 years. And that license covers you and your immediate family. Um, and there are a whole bunch of, uh, a whole bunch of different things you can do that with that for like additional privacy so that you're only really talking with your family. Um, but that's another good option. And those radios are also cheap FRS where it's got multiple channels. It's much FRS is much like CB radio and that it's got multiple channels, but they are all completely open to the public. Um, GMRS is a little bit more locked down, a little bit more private. But anything that's electronic can be hacked, no matter what it is. There is no bomb-proof system for avoiding all hackers except for maybe an active phase array. Active phase arrays are pretty darn cool, aren't they? They are cool. That's a really cool thing. I'm picturing Mrs. Olsen at the switchboard listening in to everybody's business. I mean, this is old, old, old school. It's always been happening, right? Yeah. We should get into active phaser. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They, my screen's going to go black on that one too. They're going to knock us right off if we get into that. Oh no. If we talked about one particular active phased array antenna built, several decades ago which has never been admitted to as an active phased array antenna and I'm pretty sure you know which one I'm talking about yeah I might know which one you're talking about which I find is really funny they're all going is she gonna say it no I won't say it because watch my screen go black yeah no need to harp on that You're hilarious. So, yeah, GMRS radios, really popular with Jeep people. So if you get a GMRS radio, you know, if there's going to be a lot of people, particularly there's a strong overlap between Jeep people and people who are generally a little bit preparedness minded. Preppers. Yeah. Survivalists. Survivalists, that's probably a better term for it because a lot of them will actively go off on, you know, go on trails and that sort of thing where they have to be self-sufficient, at least for a time. Adventurists. Yes. I know some people like that. Yep. So GMRS, you get into that. Well, you've kind of also filtered down the target market of or the, you know, the communications targets, the people that you're going to be talking to are probably going to be fairly prepared to be able to give help, receive help and generally cooperate in a method that's kind of off grid, you know, somewhat like ham radio. A lot of ham radio people are like that. Um, so that, whereas FRS that that's going to be everybody CB radio, that's going to be everybody. So GMRS ham radio, you're probably with them being licensed, being a little bit more limited to the people that are truly interested in that sort of thing. It's going to kind of filter out. There's a filtering method there a little bit. so and then I guess one other off-grid communications thing and this is one that I am very much looking forward to trying in the near future because I have not tried this method but it looks really cool is a system called meshtastic and meshtastic has gotten quite popular lately it is non-licensed you don't need a license to use it And what it allows you to do is basically like texting off grid. It's for text communications. The range on it is enormous under the right conditions. And the neat thing about it is that every Meshtastic node can also act as a relay point for other people's messages. So you're really creating a communication web with Meshtastic. yes it doesn't require any infrastructure in between and as the you know it's in the name mesh it creates a mesh of uh of connected nodes so you can transmit a message and it might hop to somebody else and then somebody else and then somebody else and then to the destination so it it extends the reach out and the more people that are on the meshtastic network the better that range and the better that coverage is. And, uh, those right now, it's not really like an off the shelf kind of thing. It's kind of a, you're going to be doing a little bit of work to set up a mash tastic radio. Um, that said it's, it's not overcome, it's, it's, it's not even really a difficult thing. Not only is it an overcomable step, but it's not a terribly difficult thing to do. You just, you order a board, you go to the Meshtastic website and it walks you through how to download the firmware to it. You have to program them to talk to each other. You know, there's a couple more steps involved rather than go to Cabela's, buy two radios, turn them on and tune to channel nine, you know? You have to pass the password test. Yeah. What is your favorite color? Yes. What is the velocity of an unladen swallow? Yeah, so there's minimal effort involved there, but there's a little bit of effort involved there. And that's one that I'm looking forward to experimenting with shortly. I just got a couple of the boards for that because what you do is you order basically like a, there's a couple of companies out there that make ready-made circuit boards for them that you order the board, it's got all the components on it, and then You order a battery, and you plug that into the board. And you order an antenna, and you plug that into the board. And then you program the board, and then you're good to go. And then if you want, you can 3D print a case for it, or you can use it without a case. As you would. Yeah. It's a little bit do-it-yourselfish right now. But on the other hand, it's something that you don't need a license for. Normal operation for everyone out there, Ralph. I'm just telling you. yeah so if the ham radio licensing thing is scary but you're okay with a little bit of do-it-yourself work that's kind of a cool situation because you can that the the mesh tastic system the range on it's incredible like I think in open air there was somebody that transmitted I think as a test from I'm gonna say it was like england to finland without any hops in between. So you can get a, you can get a huge amount of range out of it, but yeah, it's one I can't say that I've got firsthand experience with, but boy, it sure looks cool. But you will. I'm, I'm convinced of that. So I want to go to the chat a second, going back to the church bell. Tom always learning says they ban church bells in Byron center because all the drunks are hung over on Sunday morning. Yeah. That's funny. That's really funny. So, well, this is wonderful. Do you have any other things you want to talk about? Well, as for me, on a totally different subject, I got to get with you on some gardening things soon. You know what I want to, okay, we're going to do that because I want to show you how to vertical garden. I would really like to do some tutorial videos and I don't know, I guess I could do it on Instagram or something like that where I'm walking people through the process of how to do some of these things. Like what does it take to keep chickens? What's it, what's important on that? How do you grow things? How do you intercrop? How do you companion plant and such? Um, It's actually fairly easy to do that, but I am going to be actively involved here because I've decided this is one of my projects besides figuring out how to build a better horse feeder right now. They're pathetic, okay? Any engineers out there, we need to talk about this horse feeder crisis we have going on because you know what? Crisis. Yes. It's a horse feeder crisis. You cannot find or buy a decent horse feeder that those animals of stall destruction will not put everything they have into it to destroy your brand new horse feeders. Okay. And they're not built for long-term solutions. You know, they do. vacuum formed horse feeders they do the the metal ones they have sharp edges can't do that with horses okay so you've got to figure it out so I am in fact going to have taken this on as you know you remember when I couldn't when ariat decided to make a song and I was I was pissed off for months over this I spent like five and a half hours on the phone to ariat telling them why you do not put what is their audience okay all right the name comes from ariat secretariat Their target market is people that ride horses, right? So they decide to get real smart on us and move to the non-cowboy people who go to concerts and want to dress up as a cowboy. But they're not functional cowboys. And that's okay. I'm not going to take it away from them, okay? It's okay. I respect that. Not a problem. However, we got to have an option for people who are actually horse people. So they decided to put zippers on the inside of the legs, which you don't ever have unless it's like a, like an English boot or something like that. Yes. Where you cover that. So you don't screw up all your tack by scratching it all up. Right. Yeah. So what did I do? I get into making shoes. I'm like, I'm going to figure out how to make my own boots and shoes because I They can't make one. We're going to figure this out, and I'll either make my own or make a company and put them out of business. So anyhow, horse feeders suck. And a horse can destroy any of the horse feeders on the market. They're about $180 a piece at a rate of, oh, start the clock running when you put it in their stall, right? So I decided that right now my next thing, stupid autistic thing to obsess about, It's figuring out how to build a better horse feeder. So there you go. If somebody wants to jump on with me with creating a better horse feeder and come up with some ideas, I'm all ears because I'm sick of paying the $180 to replace a completely destroyed horse feeder that somebody just was too bored and decided to tear the horse feeder apart for no reason whatsoever other than to sit back, laugh at me as I spend money for the horse feeder. Anyhow. No, they like to scratch their brains on it. They like to chew it with their teeth and pick it up and let it spring back in order to like dislodge any little tiny bit of grain that they think they can get their teeth on. And so, yes, it's a it's a it's a crazy thing, but it is a real thing. So another thing, though, I want to look at, honestly, is and I started in on doing some research on this is what if. The power goes out. Okay, we've already been through water to a certain degree. But what happens if the power goes out and you have no sewer? What if you can't flush a toilet? There are some great options. And actually, I found a really good video on how to make a makeshift toilet and separate the waste products out because urine is sterile. They used to put that out around their trees and such as, and it sounds gross to us in the way that we live our lives now, but if things melt down, where are you going to go to the bathroom? And those things are things that we need to think about. The other thing is, where are you going to go to the bathroom that's not going to pollute your water source? And how are we going to deal with that? So I found some portable toilet options. But there's also ways of doing this very, very simply using an existing toilet in your house, taking all the water out of it, and being able to deal with it fairly efficiently that way. There's other ways of dealing with it. And I think this is something we have to talk about. I mean, for years, all of these subjects that have been taboo, okay, Christians can't talk to Jews and Muslims and and blacks and whites and whatever categories they have. We can't talk about, you know, we can't talk about these things about getting rid of waste products. Well, you know what, because they've taken us so far away from what life was really like and what it used to be like that we, if we unplug from the system, that we've become so dependent on, there's a lot of things that would be a wake up call for everyone. Civilization has some great, great conveniences for us, but what happens if they go away? And I think we should really be prepared for that. So back to the garden. Okay. I'm going to give you a, I'll give you some homework. Okay. And then we'll, we'll go through. Okay. We'll go through some. So, okay. Okay. So first thing, first homework I would like you to think about is what are the products that you are familiar with eating? What do you like to eat that that is a produce product? type of a product, fruits or vegetables, something that grows, herbs, that sort of thing. Make a list of it. Then we can look down on that to see, okay, what kind of soil do you need? How do you need to augment the soil to help them grow better? How can we intercrop it with other crops? How can we companion plant to get rid of the pests? How can we make this work to conserve space and whatever your space your space constraints are, that sort of thing. We will go through all of that. And then where do you get the good seeds? Because you can buy crappy seeds anywhere. Crappy seeds are little puny, puny little seeds and such. Good seeds will be big fat seeds that have all the nutrition in it to really get that plant going well quickly and sustain it because they haven't cheaped out on on varieties that don't give you a good seed for productivity. We could also go through foraging for food, too. I have a decent amount of knowledge on that so that we can prepare people in case the grid goes down. But that's off the grid survival techniques. And I think that the three of us actually are pretty well equipped in that from preserving food to all that. So what could I do to help you, Karen? Well, our focus in the last week has been preparing for our meat garden, as I like to call it now. We know how to do that. It's just been dealing with what winter has done to that shelter and cleaning it out more because it used to house goats, too. So now we are just about ready to start our meat chicks. And eventually, within a couple of months or so, we'll be doing our first harvest. And this year, I would like to learn about canning. I think is one alternate thing. And I know you have experience with that. My husband just bought me a book online, I think, on that topic, too. I've got a bunch of books here on gardening. So I'm in the first stage of gardening. Reading about and thinking about what do I want to grow and how do I want to grow it? Because planning before we start is the step that I'm at. We want to do containers. My husband would like to do... vertical garden or a upright garden so that I don't have to bend over for the majority of it and hurt my back on a daily basis weeding and all that. I think we'll do some container for things like strawberries, tomatoes. Tomatoes is his specialty. I have started trying some sprouts and I'm learning about that and what type of sprouts do I want to try growing because I would like to do that soon, but I'm trying to figure out how to eat the different types and find out what my taste would be before I invest in starting to sprout or microgreen. And, um, and I want to do some herbs, but I don't know how to use them. And I don't know what type of herbs to get that. I have another book on that one that I hadn't gotten into yet because those things can be helpful for dealing with health issues. And, um, That's a whole other topic that I haven't explored very much, but I would like to try. Oregano works really good because you can use that, the oregano oil, as an antibiotic, which works relatively well. So oregano, basil, chives, there's quite a few of them, but I wanted to show you this. Garlic does too, doesn't it? Garlic does too. So this is canned chicken right here in a quart jar. Okay. Okay. So the fat comes to the top. That's the fat. And I, I don't take that. This is, this is, um, this was chicken thighs. Now I don't eat meat, but I, I put up food for people around me too. So, um, the chicken thighs work really good when you, when you cook them, that's a, that's a, uh, put them in the canner. That's meat is one of the easiest things to put up because, um, because of several things. When you start mixing ingredients, especially vegetables, vegetables are a little actually harder to can. The reason being is you've got to stabilize the enzymes in the vegetables. Where meat, you don't have to do that quite the same. But I would encourage you to get a digital canner if you've never done this before, because you can do it a couple of ways. There's a water bath canner, like just doing a hot water bath that doesn't have any pressure in it. There's the old style, which, I canned in for years, which has a weight on the top, put a weight on the top, and you have to really watch it. There's a pressure gauge on it too. So you have to be present when you bring that up to temperature to make sure that that temperature gauge or the pressure gauge sits right where you want it to be and you adjust the heat in order to keep it at that temperature. It takes a little bit extra work. However, the new pressure canners that are out, which I am a huge fan of because I bought one, wanted to try it out so I could tell people whether it works or not. It works spectacularly. And I have a few friends that have bought them, and they absolutely love them. There are so many safeguards built into it. So like when my grandma used to can, she had the kind where you brought the clamps, you clamped them down. And those things used to explode on a regular basis when my grandma was using them. There was a lot of people that got hurt off of those old canners. Anymore, they have so many safeguards built into these canners, especially the digital ones that you don't have to be quite as knowledgeable to make it work. Follow the instructions, do it the way that it says to do it. They'll come with a card and tell you how to do it. in my ability to use this, but also know the old methods for canning, it is almost fail-safe. Now, with that said, if you operate it outside of what it tells you to do, you're probably going to run into problems. But they have good seals on them. They don't have the old rubber gaskets on them. There are silicone seals on them. They don't have like the lifespan. You have to look at it at them. You cannot open them. You cannot open the canner up if it's under pressure. Silicone is an amazing material. So you can't, you, you will, you will save yourself a whole lot of trouble, but they're wonderful. Presto makes a really good one. I like the Presto canner. So if you want to get into canning, that would probably be in my first, step to tell you if you want to come over someday, you can come over and we could actually record this and we could, we could do some canning together. And I'll, and I'll show you, I'll show you some charts and what works and what really doesn't work and why, why you do things a certain way, because there's just these little tricks, you know, it's like when you're around people who do this sort of thing, there's these little tricks that a make things either easier or it explains, Oh, that's why I do that. so good to have some of you yeah vertical gardening too so what what you know you and I were talking about this what what I'm going to do is is we're going to make a couple of vertical gardens for you together so that you can just take them home and you're all loaded and you'll you'll see why this is such a such a great thing and you can do it relatively cheaply in in my um In my experience, if you want to do, say, like a four foot by four foot garden, you can do a vertical garden with that, with, I'm going to say, if you don't have any supplies, and you know somebody with horses that can actually give you good compost and such, you would be able to do that. Now, I have a supply of things here, so it's not going to cost you anything, right? But if you had to buy the supplies... You probably could do it just by salvaging things, honestly. So you could really do it for almost nothing. Just have some good seeds and know what you want to plant. But you've got to know what you want to plant first. Salad materials work really, really well with a vertical garden because you're not having to accommodate the roots. Say it's like for carrots or radishes or something. Radishes are actually growing it too, though. because that's a small root somewhat. They put a tap root down, but you can make it work. So with that said, oh, gosh, we've got a, they turned down the volume on the Howell Church Bell. Sad. OJ dead at 76 after a battle. Oh, wait, OJ Simpson died. Interesting. 76 years old. Hmm. Wonderful. Okay, I'm going to shut up now. I was going to be real smart, Alex. We have our condolences for his family and the people who love him. So there you go. Anyhow, that's true, but he has been in his name has been in the news lately. So that is kind of interesting because At least at least in the form of a meme I remember seeing a meme when P. Diddy went running and They they took an old picture of the Bronco on the highway and they put his face in it and said Oh Jace Which is funny at the time But, you know, it made people think about those days, back in the days when the celebrity went running on the highway when they were charged with a crime. And the really unfortunate part of it is that when somebody does the wrong thing, none of us should be happy about that and the far-reaching implications of that There are people that actually think about this as mom and dad, they're probably gone by now, but there are people that love other people who make bad decisions. So the real sad thing is the people that are left behind still have to deal with the fallout of someone who made bad decisions and they love that person. So it's a real tough thing. You know, you can see this stuff in the news, but there are real people behind these situations, and we have to keep in mind that. So I'm going to go back to my canned chicken here. So here's the canned chicken, right? Now that you've got canned chicken, and you'll notice that there's all sorts of juices around in here. We'll call it broth from the chicken and how you put it in there. What do you think you would use that canned chicken for? Because once you have it, What do you do with it? Got any ideas? I think you could probably make a soup really easily out of it. Very easily because you've got the broth and you've got the starter right there. So what else could you do with canned chicken like this? You can shred it. You can take the broth out. I will use the broth. So if I'm fixing this for my man's man of a husband because he is a He is a let's go, let's go deer haunting. And he's that guy. My husband's a man's man. Right. So he likes he likes meat, gravy, potatoes. He's that kind of guy. Right. He'll eat salad and that sort of thing. But he loves meat and potatoes. So for this, what I would do is I would open this up and I would pour it into a a a. pan of some sort whatever whatever pan usually for something like that I would put it into a a regular you know a saute pan or some sort of a pan with with all of the juices in it including the fat actually I'm not adverse to the fat I think we need more oil in our diets so put it all in there warm up the meat because it's already fully cooked you so you it conserves once you have it it conserves energy So once you're in a situation of needing food, you want to think about conserving your energy. If it's already cooked, you could eat that. You could open the can up and eat it the way it is. You don't have to cook it. But if I'm going to make it for my husband, what I will do is I'll throw it in a pan, a saucepan of some sort and heat the meat up. Then I will take the meat out, get some cornstarch, mix it up in a little bit of water, pour it into the juices that are left and thicken it, throw in some. some salt and pepper, and you've got, you've got a very, very nice gravy to put on, put on potatoes with your chicken. He absolutely loves it. So, so does the people around me who eat meat. They, they love that sort of a meal to comfort food. It's filling and it gives you a lot of nutrition. You can, and you can make it once it's canned. It takes it 10 minutes to make dinner. I also like that one thing I appreciated about it when I started looking into it is that you can do it raw and no salt. So it can be fed to your dogs if you fed raw, which we do. Yeah. you don't have because for us when when we're slaughtering we do all our own chickens that's a lot of work just the slaughter and the butcher process so adding in breaking it up and and doing a canning process adds another stage of work so that that was where I was like oh okay so that is more work but it is doable and that was the first question that I had in my mind was Am I going to have the energy to do this? But it sounds like it's actually quite easy. It's very easy. You have to have the jars. You want to buy extra lids, just the lids to go because, you know, there's the ring around it. And I can actually disassemble this for you because the ring doesn't really do anything. Actually, when I was a kid, we always took the rings off because if you're going to have rust on a ring, if you're going to get any rust on it, it'll come from the ring and having trap moisture. So we took that off when I was a kid. And so you don't need to have that held on. And I've got cool little labels to put on it and such. So I date it and such. But you need more of these lids. So you want to have extra lids around in case one of them doesn't seal. And it's just a good idea to invest in some high quality lids and canning jars and that sort of thing. So that's good. I'm gonna put up a canner that this is the canner that I absolutely love this canner. It's a little smaller than the old pressure canners as far as you used to be able to get in seven jars. And in a water bath canner, you can do seven jars for canning in your water bath canner. This one does five, it does five quart jars, does like seven, I think it's seven pint jars and 12 half pints. I think that's what it does. I could look it up here a minute, but that's, that's what, but this, this little baby is absolutely fantastic. I've used it a lot. Oh, you want to have these materials too, because you got to be able to take your jars out. This helps to, to load your jars and such. I never use the rest of this, but those two I use and, and I do, I do use tongs because you've got to be able to pull your, pull your jar lids out of out of the sterilization pot because you have a separate pot for sterilizing your lids. So those are the things that you really need. But this is a wonderful canner. I've had friends that I recommended it to, and it literally walks you through the process by the display on the front. You secure the top. When you secure it, you put it on the unlock position, rotate the lid, you have to put this little stopper here. They did a really good safety feature in this too that it's well designed. So you cannot open that lid because that little stopper has to go behind the pressure release valve. If that pressure valve is up, you cannot open the lid. So it will not open if it's under pressure, which is a really good safety factor for somebody who has never canned before. And I highly recommend this canner. Cool. Very cool. Let's see. We've got another one here. I think, is that the same link, Ralph, or is this a different one? Yeah, no, that's the same link. Yeah, and it works a little bit like the Instant Pot does. I like an Instant Pot for cooking, too. You want to do ribs quick because normally if I cook ribs, it'll be about an 8- to 10-hour process. To cook really good ribs, you've got to be real patient, cook at a very low temperature, and just let them cook, right? Or a brisket, something like that. An instant pot is another way to really conserve energy also because you can cook things in that in a fraction of the time. So let's just say you're making ribs. If you use an instant pot, it takes you – I've had them done in 25 minutes. Wow. throw them under the broiler for a few minutes, throw some barbecue sauce on it under the broiler, and voila, you've got extraordinarily wonderful. So I've been told. I used to eat meat. I don't eat it anymore, and I'm not opposed to it. I just don't eat it because of some health concerns I have. But from everybody around me that does eat meat, they say there's some of the best ribs you'll ever have because when you cook under pressure, it changes. It really changes things. So pressure cooking is quick. If you do it right and you got to have something that is fail safe so that if you're not used to it and you haven't practiced, you want to have something that's going to keep you safe because pressure canning can be a little bit concerning. You've got to follow the instructions. And knowing that there are people out there that will sue for a cup of coffee coming out of a window at McDonald's or, and I know that that's up for, conjecture because they put the coffee out way too hot. So I get that. But you've got to be able to think when you're doing some of these things and looking at our lack of education that people have had, it's a really good thing to have somebody around you that's actually done it. Maybe I'll do classes this summer. What do you think? Should I do classes this summer? I could set that up and, and teach some, teach like a weekend homesteading class. Yeah. That'd be really cool. We could go through all sorts of things. We could cook things. We could can things. We could show how to dehydrate, how to do things in different ways, different ways to do things. And you're not dependent. Once you realize that you don't have to be dependent on a system, a lot of that fear goes away from people. And I think that's a really good thing. You don't have to be afraid. There's a million ways. to do things outside of the system. You just MacGyver your way through it, figure it out, nerd yourself around until you do enough research to figure out what's out there and figure it out and find some really good friends that you can say, hey, do you know this? And somebody will know something about this. Somebody else will know something about that. So. We have a friend that and her husband, who were thinking about their health and learning about how people do their own meat by raising chickens. And they were really, really serious about it, but they weren't quite sure that they could do it, especially the last step. And we said, well, when we do a processing, why don't you come on over and we'll show you. what we do and if you want to get hands-on you can if you don't if you're not comfortable with that we won't pressure you to and we showed them the whole process and at the last bird I i handed it to her and said you do this and the husband jumped in with my husband and Since it wasn't her chicken, it was a little bit easier to get hands-on and to learn about it. And then they went ahead and raised their own chicks and borrowed our plucker for the first time. And then they went and borrowed a second one, their own. They bought their own when they did their second batch. Do you have one of the pluckers with the little fingers on it? Yep. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know you had one. Yep. We took ours over there. And guided them through a little bit. They already had a pretty good setup and they knew what they were doing. And she got emotional because she was carrying each bird over to her husband to do the next step. That's how it usually works with myself and my husband. Because we have our area that we get to be specialties with. And he does the slaughter part because he's a little bit more comfortable with it. But also... many many times he can do it more swiftly and more appropriately for the bird it's it's faster and easier for the bird than having me try and you'll maybe make a mistake or mess it up a little bit And so it's also efficient for us the whole process where we kind of team up. We both know how to do everything, but we have a step-by-step process that we work as a team together. And this couple, we help them to learn how to do that for themselves. She got a little bit emotional, but she felt really good overall. They knew where their meat was coming from and how it was treated, how it was handled at every step. And because we were friends and doing it together, it was also fun. it's like a barn raising you do something with a group of people it takes a lot of the work out of it and it becomes a fun activity they learned and the next thing I knew it wasn't very long she's showing me how to do something she got some some bags online and and did a little video and showed how she was using them to seal up and preserve the meat which was a little different than our process for our purposes But it was great to see her taking another step and sharing what she had learned with other people. And gone was the nervous trepidation. And that's kind of how I feel about gardening, except the plant isn't going to squeal in pain if you do something wrong or if it dies on you. It's not quite as personal as an animal, but whatever. But I, you know, I'm, I'm a little, it's out of my comfort zone a little bit. And because it's just a lot of it is new to me, but at the same time, it's, I know that it's good for my health. And this year, I think for our health, for our marriage, for our spiritual health, getting outside and doing more activities that are supportive of all of that is a really good way of moving forward in life and being a little less dependent on Hey, decentralizing, there's another use for the word, becoming more capable of handling things on our own is a confidence booster too. Yes, it sure is. My dad taught me how to process chickens. And the way that we did it is he put a two by four in the back of the pickup, hung the two by four off to the side. And what we would do is we would take the chickens and turn them upside down and hang them by their feet. and just give it about 30 seconds, maybe 30 seconds. They, they, they, they like pass out because all the blood runs to their heads. And then all you got to do is reach into their mouth and cut, cut one of their veins. It's not, and they don't jump around the yard. They don't get crazy of all these things. They literally go to sleep and you just, you just, uh, make one really, really tiny little cut. And the, the meat is a pure white at all. They all, um, You know, they all clean out right then and there. And it's a very nice way to treat the animal at the end of their life. Because there's no trauma. When you take an animal's life and there's a minute that they know they're dying and it is a panic, so you're eating all those hormones. So you really want to do it for their sake and for yours. You want to not create pain or harm or anything to anyone. But that one, if you haven't tried that method, that method, because I don't eat meat, but I know you do, If you want to try that method, that's a really nice process. Absolutely. And, you know, people who haven't witnessed it or maybe watch something online because it's all over on YouTube. You can look up how to butcher rabbits or how to slaughter chickens online. There's a lot of information and a lot of different ways to do it. And sometimes it starts with kind of an experimentation a little bit, what method would work best for you and your animals. I usually am the one that fetches the animal out of the pen. Because I'm able to do it with a little lower energy. And they're not used to being handled because we don't treat them like pets like we might with chickens. You know, you pick them up every now and then. Some people do a lot. And, you know, handle them and talk to them and all that. So they don't like being handled. It's a little frightening sometimes. And as their population goes down, they're like, something is up. I don't feel comfortable with this. When I pick them up and they start squawking and squirming and I position them in my arms and I talk to them and calm them down a little bit before I leave the pen. So that the other chickens can calm down too. And then I walk away and I talk to them. Look at the, here's the sunshine. Look at the gray. You haven't seen this part of the yard before, have you? You know, because I don't want, I don't want a bad experience for the bird, but I also don't want those, um, adrenaline laden hormones in the meat unlike you know some people that like to torture other people in order to gain from their hormones in the most horrific way we don't treat our animals that way and we don't want that in our bodies and we don't want them to experience that ever and so um we try to make it as most pleasant and relaxing an experience as possible Yeah, it's like I can't, you know, ours turn into pets for us, all of them. Yeah, mine have a tendency to, like, line up. If I go into their pen, they have a tendency to line up to be petted, where they'll come over and stand on my foot, and I'll pick them up and pet them for a little bit. Then I'll put them down, pick up the next one that's now standing on my foot to be petted. They're all, they're all pets at that point, you know? So I feel dressed a deer, um, at one point that was, that was interesting. So, I mean, all of these skills that we should have, if we're going to, if we're, if that's what we eat, cause I use, I was a three, three, uh, times a day steak girl. I love steak. Okay. And, uh, so I would, I, uh, I like the deer brats and such because I knew that that there was a less chance for them to have some complications. And I knew where they came from. But all of those things that if we have them in our lives, we should be able to figure out how to do them for ourselves. Be it spin wool, have sheep, that's next on my list, and alpacas and such. Some of those things that we can kind of train ourselves to and you know, you don't have to learn it all. I think it's really, it's unrealistic to think that you're going to catch up to somebody who say my age is 60 years old, and be able to know all of this stuff overnight. I've got, I've got darn near 60 years of this in my past because my family did it. So I grew up this way. I grew up I grew up knowing how to do this stuff and, you know, help and scrub pickles when I was a little big kid and, or the cucumbers to get the little, little hard nubbies off of them and then pack them in the jars and, you know, tie up the dill and put them in there and with your, with your spices and such and things to keep them crunchy and, and how you, what you put in so that they don't turn brown in the jar for some of them, how you stabilize things with, with ascorbic acid. I mean, this is, this is 60, 60 years, almost 61 years. of having that be part of, you know, my history. And you learn from people that are older. And my husband was bringing this up recently. We're having a discussion and we were talking exactly about this subject. And he said to me, he said, no, it's really crazy. He said, you and I are at the end of the generation that knows how to do this stuff. And it's kind of like, it's kind of an amazing thing. So if, if you're, if everybody's out there, you know, somebody who's older than you, that's probably in the 60 year old range. Some people in their fifties know that, but when somebody is in their sixties, the things changed a lot for us tremendously, but we grew up in an age where we did these things. We, we were in sewing for age. I was, you know, I was in, I was in sewing. I knew how to sew from the time I was, oh gosh, I was playing with a sewing machine at eight years old. I had one available to me and I cut things out and make little pillows or whatever, you know, that you, you just made, you made things up out of what you had. If you, if you, this, you, you cut this apart. Sometimes you braided it. Yeah. Sometimes you just, yeah, you braid it, kind of make it up on the fly. Right. Watch my, watch my computer screen go black again. But, yeah, you know, you cut things apart, you recycled it, you reused it, you found other uses for it. And I think that that's, that's kind of a fun skill. And it really, it really changes your ability to critically think and improvise in any situation. You know, that's something that I very much liked about, you know, kind of early 2000s, early to mid 2000s ish, I guess. I'll be right back. Okay. When the maker movement really kind of got going. Oh, that was cool. It was cool to see because a lot of it really was about younger people going and learning the craftsmanship techniques that were either lost or becoming lost and and rediscovering those techniques and learning to make things again. And I think too, with the increase in mechanization and then the decline of industrial production of things here in America, Um, a lot of that even got lost as, uh, as professionals, you know, the, the professional knowledge of that got lost. So a lot of the techniques that were being rediscovered really were kind of like the early more amateurish techniques of ways to do it that didn't require all of the heavy industrialization and could be done on an individual level. And it was really cool to see that develop. I think you just made a new slogan. Make America make things again. Yeah. That's about right. That's awesome. I love that. I like that, too. And that kind of, you know, this is going back in somewhat ancient history at this point, but that also dovetailed in with the steampunk movement and that a lot of the steampunk people got into doing, like, leather work. and sewing and all of that kind of stuff to do recreations of historical garments and what's that making shoes yeah and then that kind of dovetailed into now there's a whole field of people doing uh historical garment reconstruction and that's really cool to see some of that kind of stuff too because they're relearning all of those techniques that have been kind of lost to history And in a lot of cases, they're digging them up out of old books that haven't been published in like 150 years. And it's really cool to see some of that stuff coming back around again. And so while there's a lot of that knowledge that was lost, the interest is still there. And it is gradually being rediscovered by people that actively want to know that information, which is really cool to see. Yeah. And right now for people like me, it's not just a casual interest or a historical interest. It's a how can I survive or how can I feed myself better than what the government has taught me how to do? You know, how can we have more control over what we eat? How can I eat healthier food? if I know where my meat comes from and I know where my vegetables come They're going to make it more healthy than what the government is providing. And how are things constructed? I mean, if you look at processes and how things are done and how things are constructed, okay, this is one of those weird things that I like. I love watching how things are constructed. And it gives you ideas. Like you can figure out how to make patterns just by watching things like this. So this guy does a really good job. And I love how he does it. He shows you how to bevel. things and how to put shoes together so if you watch the videos on it how to finish off a soul every single one of his shoes is handmade and you know from inspecting the leather and they're it's kind of like watching a drone footage actually because just music pretty peaceful you want to go to bed at night and have your brain all relaxing watch something like this this is great and how he cuts it but everything's the old way He is really interesting to watch, too, because he's so skilled. It's not just the cutting of a pattern. It's how did he bevel that? He learned from experience how to get it just right. That's the art of it, which is really fun. I like to watch when I got into doing scratch board. I watched other people in a Facebook group for scratchboarding for a year before I ever got supplies. I was doing white charcoal on black paper. So I was familiar with the negative aspect of that art. And I really wanted to try it. But I waited like a year. And once I got my own scratchboard supplies, it was like, this is what I made for for it because it was so much fun and so easy but I had trained my eyes and in the other field before applying it and then I had to learn a whole new set of skills with new tools and how I might do that might be different from how someone else did it but again I watched how other people were doing it and learned from them and from asking questions along the way. He's got a really slick babbling machine there. I just got to tell you that some people will do a hand babbling, but he's got a machine that does some of the babbling and then he goes and he does the fine tuning off to the side. Was that a sander or was that a burnisher? Go back and look. Let's find out. I've never seen a machine like that. I think it's a babbler. I think it's a babbler. Because I got a friend that worked for a shoe company and we were talking about how this is done. Because I don't know. Why do I like this kind of stuff? I don't know. I'm weird. So he's babbling it. Looks like it's sanding it down. Or if it's, you know what, it's cutting it. That roller's cutting it. Okay. But it's cutting out a babble. So it's a babbler machine. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Yeah. So I've got, you know, as I always talk about, you should have a library of physical books on how to do things. I've got a book from... It's actually from a YouTuber named Bernadette Banner. The book is called Make, Sew, and Mend. And it really is a cool book for showing... she goes into like why you would use different types of natural fibers. Cause she does historical garment reconstruction. And so she talks about like, here's where you would use wool. Here's where you would use cotton. Here's where you would use linen. And here's why. And, uh, all of that information, you know, people back in the day, they, they weren't stupid, you know, things exactly for a reason. And they studied things very, very closely. Isn't that cool? He puts the liner, he's got the liners in there. He, I mean, this is, this, he's, he's a fun one to watch. He's one of the channels I like to watch every once in a while. For a while there, I was watching anything I'd get my hands on. So now I have, I've, uh, decrease the amount of shoemaking videos because I understand the process enough to improvise if I need to. Ran out of them, huh? She became an addict. Custom shoemaking addict now. Give me a subject. I've probably been obsessed about it at some point in time or another because I love this kind of stuff. So isn't that cool? so that's a good video if you look this guy up he's he does a good job it's uh handmade derby shoes here let me see if I can bring this up so you can watch it here is handmade derby shoes and embossed cordovian leather and the channel is uh s-i-r-e-o-s-i let me see s-i-r-o-e-n-o-y-o-s-u-i that's cool that's just just fun sorry it's cool The shoemakers do a really good job of showing you how to make a live or a custom pattern. They're good pattern makers off of a last. A last is what they call the shape of a shoe. It's like a mold of a foot. Have you looked into this at all? Yes, I have. You were talking about doing it, but have you taken any steps actually to get started on it? Or have you just been distracted by, you know, the thousand other things that you're into? Well, I've done enough research to know everything I need to do it. And so I've got a couple of things that I probably have. I've got a really good sewing machine, but I think I want to get a single stitch sewing machine so I can practice on this. and got all my resources and I put together some people who have done this. So I've contacted some people to have resources to actually talk to people. So I don't come out looking like, I don't know, I made it out of a box with a box, a Kleenex box or something. So, so yeah, and I got into, I've got a friend who, who professionally used to tan hides. So all of these background things that you need to connect to the central issue, I think that your success rate, if you have a broad base of knowledge, not just, ah, let's just make a pair of shoes today, but put this together and know what, why you do things with the tools and then, then, uh, be able to put it together. But I fully intend to make myself a pair of shoes, probably a pair of cowboy boots, custom. I have tanned rabbit hides. Um, yeah, I did. And I still have them. I, they're not, they're really stiff cause I didn't work them enough. And I could probably soften them up with a lot of work and some oil. And then I learned about parchment paper. And I actually created a parchment paper out of rabbit hide. Did I show you that? No, you didn't. Seems like I might have. I showed somebody fairly recently. I drew in pencil a rabbit that I had done in other media. on a rabbit hide. I called it rabbit on rabbit. I drew a rabbit on the rabbit parchment paper. You showed me that. Yeah, I thought I did. It was not easy because it's not like cow hide or even deer hide is thicker and more sturdy than rabbit. Sheep, they have made Of course, lots of parchment paper out of sheep hide. But, yeah, it was a learning experience, but not something I'd want to do on a regular basis. You know what, where most of our leather and the clothes that we wear, do you know where most of it comes from? Have I told you that? I heard it on another video you did, hogs. Yeah, pig hide. It's hog hide. Most of our leather is from pigs. which is interesting, you know, in our belts, belts and shoes and such. So, so I'd like to figure out more about weaving because like most of the, most of the really good looms and really, you know, scaling up from that, most of the good textile mills that we had in the U S are not in the U S anymore. A lot of that equipment got bought up, you know, by either India or Pakistan and, And even a lot of the European stuff now has gotten bought up by India and Pakistan. And a lot of that machinery for all of that, we don't even have in the country anymore. Well, I think it's a better way to do things, everything. And decentralization is the key right there. So we need to employ some of the technology that we have in order to help with cottage industries. So like there's an ability to use like CNC machines to make a lot of products. And I know that there's an ability to put cotton in at one end of the machine and have a finished garment come out of the other. That would be cool. And relatively, you could probably do it with a few families that decided to get together and work together on something. If everybody can learn to get along, just get along. Right. Get along. I mean, ways to work together. There's one thing I got to figure out how to how to source now, too, because so I have an old car that as part of the transmission uses cotton friction bands. And one of them is starting to get worn out. And I went to buy some more of this cotton material. It's like a tight woven cotton. It's a pad. It's woven, but it's a pad. And it's intended as friction material. Well, you used to be able to get that up until a couple of years ago, and now nobody has it. And I made some calls, and it turns out that the one company on Earth that wove this one particular type of cotton friction material isn't doing it anymore. So now I'm going to have to figure out a way to... Either weave this. Yeah, I'm going to have to figure out a way to either weave this myself or the other alternatives are to use a modern synthetic, which has some drawbacks. Or you can actually change it over to wood, which, believe it or not, is probably closer to the original cotton material than the synthetic in some ways. Be interesting to use hemp. Yeah. Yeah. But one way or another, I got to figure out some way to do this. So that's going to be an adventure I'm going to have to figure out here pretty soon because I've already got parts that are wearing out. So now I got to figure out how to replace those. Because you have to. Yeah. Yeah. And I'd rather stick with cotton because it should be cotton. It was cotton and it should still be cotton after I'm done with it. Of course. Yeah. I was thinking about cotton the other day. Because I was pulling a cotton ball out of the bag and I was thinking about how it's called a cotton ball. In the South, they have cotton balls growing in out of the ground, but they're not spelled B-A-L-L. They're spelled B-O-L-L, cotton balls. And when we lived in Tennessee, I picked some up from the side of the road because it strays and it grows everywhere. And I pulled some seeds out of the cotton and I planted it when I got back to Michigan and I grew it in a pot by the window in my bedroom. And it lasted a couple of years and I didn't know how to grow it. So I probably didn't get enough sun and enough warmth and enough of the proper nutrients to But it did produce cotton balls. So I was able to pluck my own cotton off of it. And but it was really cool because I remember at one point I had to learn. I wrote a report when I was a kid about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin business. That was a really big step for America because they were able to mechanically pull the seed out of the fiber, which is really hard to do. And when you pluck it out of the field, it can be hard on your fingers. But when you're plucking the seeds out of it, it's just time consuming. It's just there. It's kind of like maybe a comparison would be if you get some thistle stuck in your pet's coat, a dog or a cat, and you got to pull it out of there. It's kind of like that, like a burr. But it's not quite as hard on the fingertips or something like that. But it's interesting to think about how they would have had to take that fiber out of the field and make it into... a material that you could make clothing or whatever out of. Most people today have no idea how it grows. Or how to card wool, how to card wool and do that sort of thing. I mean, this is like a mystery to everybody. It's really not that big of a mystery. You got to get fibers going in the right direction and as such, or you're going to turn it into felt. You know, this brings to mind an interesting thing. Did you ever, speaking of the way cotton grows, did you ever see the Chinese fields of rocks on, fields of white rocks on rebar? What? No. Okay, so in places where they're supposed to be growing cotton. Oh, yeah, I have seen that. In some places, they have had some trouble growing cotton. And so to make sure that they are seen as being properly fulfilling their government quotas on different things, there are fields of rebar sticking out of the ground with rocks on the top of them, white rocks, so that from a distance it looks like cotton. Wow. Here, watch me go dark here. It's going to be like, put something like that up and it's going to be, oh, there goes Donna again. Went blank again. She's going to say the CCP is going to come in and get you if you don't hit the quota there. Let's see if I can find some. Well, it kind of takes you back to where we started the show, our interview part anyway. The concept of the cabal, let's just put it that way, the cabal getting in the way of communications. I've seen some small indications over time, like censorship on Telegram with one of my followers. Tried sharing a couple of my memes and it would not go. And she started to beep. Censored kind of like a Facebook jail where she could not share things to public channels. There's censorship on Telegram, but less than that. And so there's a little bit more and a little bit more of that coming out. And I think we're heading in a direction where we won't be able to communicate socially online. We won't be able to learn about what's going on in the world around us. And we'll be stuck at home wondering what's going on. And in some ways, that's okay if it happens. We've talked about that before. I know Donna has. That it might be a protection for us while the good guys are doing whatever they have to do. Because if we can't communicate, what else are we going to have to do? There was a tornado in Wyoming a few years ago. And I went down there as part of a... organization I was a part of to assist with the aftermath. And one of the major aspects that I noticed was the whole neighborhood was outside. Everybody was helping everybody, checking on everybody and getting to know their neighbors all over again because there was nothing else to do. The power was out and there was cleanup needed and it just brought the community together. And so here we are talking about how can you start that process before you have a tragedy or your power goes out, your communication system goes down. Are you prepared to communicate with your neighbors before you need to communicate with your neighbors? It's a good question to ask. You know, how well do you know? I know that I have a neighbor really close by who is a nurse. I know that I'm certified in CPR. Probably not anymore, technically. It's probably run out. But I have CPR, AED, first aid training. I even know how to do it with pets because I used to teach it. I was certified to teach all of those things at one point. CPR on a dog? Sorry? Yes. CPR on a dog? Yes. Okay. That's kind of cool. I've seen CPR on cats before. What? I've seen CPR on cats before. Okay. It can be done. And it can be done and it can revive a pet. It's like people, if you're in a crisis situation, it may not be likely. But if you have like a brief drowning incident or a fire where a dog passes out, you'll see firefighters putting oxygen on them and doing a CPR and they revive them. That's mostly where I've seen it is firefighters. Mm-hmm. But wouldn't you want to know if you had a neighbor who maybe has revived calves because they raise cows? And they know how to handle some medical situations because they've done it in their livestock. And you or someone you know has a drastic injury. And you can't go anywhere or do anything to ask for help except go to your neighbor. But if your neighbor has a skill set like that based on simple life experience, hey, I'd go for it. But you won't know that if you don't talk to your neighbors. You know, the only communication we have is one down the road. I left them a note after knocking on their door. They were new here. And it was right after the bear had come to our chicken coop. And... I wanted them to know that there was a bear in our immediate area. So I left them a note and then they put a note in our mailbox after that. Thank you for letting us know. It was very sweet. So I've been thinking I should maybe go down there and knock on the door again and say, hi, who are you? What do you do for a living? Are you retired? What kind of skills do you have? And, and share a little about ourselves and Hey, if you need anything, we're right there. You know, That kind of communication can go a long way in anybody's sense of emergency. We have a text group with a few people in the area that never gets used unless, you know, somebody's dog goes missing or, you know, when the restaurant burned down, that was one of those things that, hey, did you hear what happened? That kind of thing will cause a prompt to text in the thread that, But otherwise, in here in Michigan, I find that a lot of people just tend to mind their own business, especially in the rural area. That's why a lot of people come out to the rural area. They want a little sense of privacy. You know, we know our neighbors' names and say hello and communicate with them from time to time, especially when there's a big event of some sort. But we don't get involved often. too much you know we'll let them be and do their own thing it's kind of the tendency that we have but we should at least get to know them a little bit and you know maybe have a one of those forms of communication even something like a church bell that can gather people together in an emergency scenario it's simple and cheap and quick and yeah I love the bell idea that's that's a great idea Well, I used to watch Little House on the Prairie, like I mentioned Mrs. Olsen a while ago. It's one of those things that kind of carried over. They used it from time to time and got everybody's attention. They came running. And when a child went missing, you know, everybody got together and went looking. And we don't have that kind of setup anymore. Why not? Because we call 911 and depend on the sheriff and you never know when they're going to show up. Because we sit in our houses by ourselves instead of reaching out to other people that could really, really need someone to come by this day. Yep. It's truth. You know, we sit in the echo chambers of our churches and sit in our known groups instead of inviting people and say, come on in. Everybody's welcome. and get to know each other because those people may desperately need to talk to us this day. So to reach out to other people that are alone, that's a mission in itself. It doesn't have to be a big thing just to say, hi, how you doing? See how people are doing. I find that when you do that, quite often you'll get people that really need to just get everything, just talk because they're so alone that it's an act of love just to listen. And there's an awesome power in a listening heart that truly does listen to people. I believe saying that it's 10 after 12 today. I, you know, I can say, this is nerd TV right here, people. This is what this is. And we get past some of the other stuff. The core of this is nerd TV. So welcome to nerd TV. Not only do we have a bloodbath news network registered to get this thing out there, bloodbath news network as a hat tip. to the rightful president of the United States, President Donald J. Trump. Crowds go crazy, right? So anyhow, I think that this Nerd TV thing is kind of a cool thing. Should do all kinds of videos. That would be fun. Yeah, I think we should. I think a lot of people are like me sitting at home today thinking about my gardening adventure. A lot of other people are starting to do the same thing. A lot of people are getting chickens and learning, you know, base level. That's a good base level way of starting to learn how to self-subsist in gardening. I think a lot of people are really interested in all of the things that we talked about today with gardening, raising animals, and what can I do? I'm starting simple. It shocks me that a lot of people don't even know how to cook. So like, you know, let's do a blindfold test here and throw a bunch of ingredients on the table, whatever you have, and then open your eyes and what can you make of this? No matter what's in it. That would be fun. That would be fun. You know, I think they might have some shows like that on TV, but I don't watch TV. I'm sure somebody's come up with this before me. But, you know, can you, in fact, have somebody put two to three, four, five, six, eight ingredients in front of you? And could you make up a dish with those ingredients? There is a sort of a show like that. I give them more options. You have to have this and this and this kind of thing. Yeah, they give them a bunch of different ingredients. How would you define them and what ratios and what's the chemistry behind it? How do the ingredients work together? I don't see them using cookbooks. I don't know how they do it. I don't know how the kids do it. I've seen that there's kids shows, cooking competitions. And these kids, they have a cooking vocabulary that is completely foreign to me. So, yeah, I would fail. I'd take that challenge. I would see. I think that'd be a fun challenge. So, well, with that said, guys, it's after 12. It's time. So you want to say prayers or you want me to say it? Go ahead. Okay. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this beautiful day and this wonderful time just to sit and talk with friends. It's a wonderful life when you can explore the world that you created with people that you love. You've given us everything. What a great playground you made for us. It's a riot. It's like you gave us a whole table full of Legos, but the Legos are things like food and and things we can grow and animals and friends and things that we can do for each other along the way. What an awesome experience. It's just amazing. So we thank you for everything you've given us this day. I thank you for Ralph. I thank you for Karen. And I thank you for Chris, new friend that has so much knowledge to share with us. And it's a beautiful thing when this, when your puzzle of putting all of your children together, working together to, for a long, wonderful, wonderful celebration in a great, great place that you've given us to just enjoy life, enjoy the day, enjoy the wonderful things that you've given and created for us, like, like the sky and the clouds and seeds that are coming up and our animals and, and the beauty that you put in each and every person. It's a great adventure. We wouldn't miss a minute of this. This is awesome. And all the things that you've taught us, it's along the way, it's amazing. And that the people that are willing to share their knowledge with each other freely, without conditions on it. What a great time. This is a great time. So thank you so much for everything. We love you. You've been a great friend to us. We want to be a friend to you. Whatever it is you ask us to do today, whether it's an easy path or a difficult path, we're up for it. Just ask us. And with your strength, your help, your provision, and your leading, we can do all things through you, through Christ who strengthens us. We thank you for this day. We love you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. There we go, guys. I'm sure our faithful followers are still there, but we've probably got two bullfrogs and a cricket watching us anymore because it's a long show. But so be it. Anyhow, since I'm the only one with hands, except for this rendition of Karen... So let's see. I don't even have anything to set it on. So you're going to have to imagine Karen with hands. So anyhow, go to brandonburfordgovernor.com. I'm the best non-conceiter who has ever not conceded in the history of the United States. And I work hard with roots, which is a bonus points for me. There you go. So I'm still not conceding to liars, cheats and thieves. that have stolen our elections, who have lied to us and have had an attack, not on necessarily the president of the United States, but on all of us. This was an attack on the office of the president. This is an attack on every single American out there. And we're not going to quit until we finish this fight. They started it. They picked a fight with the biggest mutts on the planet. Mutts are the toughest dog in the pack. We're mutts. Americans are mutts. Guess what? We're going to finish this fight and it's going to be awesome. then the best is yet to come. So with that said, God bless you all. God bless all those whom you love and God bless America. Make it a great day. Come back tomorrow. Find something, something crazy that you find that you want to play with or you want to look at or something like, like, I don't know, like handmade shoes or something crazy like that and put it in the chat so I can have something else to obsess about for a I got to have something to think about. I've got way too much energy for a normal person. So have a great day. We'll see you tomorrow. Dr. David Kent is on tomorrow. We're going to be talking about prepper stuff, which is always fun. And so we're going to be talking about what do you do? And he is a doctor. What do you do if you're at home and you can't get to a doctor or the system kind of falls down? Home first aid. This is going to be fun. This is going to be a lot of fun. Have a great day. See you tomorrow. And thanks, Ralph and Karen. Thank you.