Episode 386 - That Pesky Supply Chain

0:00Good morning, this is Emma waiting for the traffic so I can and here comes another one. Can't just hop out on a highway where the speed limit is 70 and hope to not get run over. Anyway, today is Monday, March 30th. We're almost through this month. Well that went quick. January took probably at least three years but the rest of the year has been. Maybe where in March have like better blur. Okay, so what are we going to talk about today? We are going to discuss the supply chain. We kind of did that on Friday when we did the original energy crisis but we are going to take it from our general angle because an energy crisis then has an adverse effect on the supply chain so I'll start out by how it came up with this topic and then we'll go from there.

1:10Over the weekend I listened to an episode of the Provident Brepper. It's a husband and wife and they are very good. I enjoyed their content. I think they put a lot of effort and research into it. So they're not, you know, your hair is on fire and the world is going to end tomorrow. But they do talk about the fact that things don't look good at this point. Just kind of true. And so they interviewed a man named Mark Rush. He has written a book called After the Flash which that's a sobering title. And he is a former, he is a veteran of the Navy and he worked on ballistic missile nuclear submarines.

2:14And he worked in the nuclear world. And so it's basically his book. I am not read it. I need to do that. Is about how what we think nuclear war would be like and what it actually would be like is different now. I had raised books. I'll take that with a great solve. And I guess because I am a baby boomer and we were the original duck and cover generation unlike our friends in Gen X would like to say they are. They came along at the end of the Cold War. Not at the beginning of it. We are the generation that are that literally that's what we did is get down in the 80s when Gen X was around. I was teaching school and we weren't doing a duck and cover at that point. We were doing duck and cover in the 60s when I was in school.

3:17I was six years old during the Cuban missile crisis. And I do not remember it sister remembers it because she lived in Dallas at the time. But my whole my entire life has been overshadowed by the possibility of nuclear war. And in the past we used to look at that as you know as they call it mutually what's it called mutually assured destruction. The reason why we never had a nuclear war is because we all realized that if we did we would destroy the planet and it wouldn't make any difference. We don't we go at that point. Well now apparently we think we can you know we're all we all and I don't just mean us personally in the United States.

4:18I mean all of the world all of a sudden all the nuclear countries we think we're big enough to do this. And we're now talking about it like it's next week's football game and I that is a very dangerous place to be. I don't even know I don't have words for that to be able to describe the series season of that problem. However back to the splodging we if somebody decides to kick off a nuclear war there's not pleasant thing the Christmas could do but if we wanted to. So let's go back to something we actually have control over and that would be our reaction to the supply chain. And this the fellow that I would I'll put a link to the episode in the description and you can listen to it for yourself. I thought it was well done. He is not an alarmist contrary to the title of his book but he and he says in his interview he says it's if he was having this.

5:31He was having this conversation with people from Israel it would be a different conversation than the conversation he had with Jonathan and Kylie on. Excuse me that allergies are really bad today. What he said was in this country because we are far enough away fortunately that we you know we're our risk is not zero but it is less. And but if you're talking about Israel there's is much higher because they're much closer to Iran. That in case he said in our country that the most the biggest thing that we have to worry about at this point time and and this is not small okay the biggest thing we have to worry about in this country.

6:36From the actions in the Middle East at this point our disruption to the supply chain and financial issues okay both of which can be very catastrophic so there's them. And so his the whole point was if the supply chain is compromised which is a real possibility at this point that we need to be preparing accordingly okay so that's what I did I put together some stuff to talk about the supply chain. Now if you're and you know I don't even know that we ever even had this cut we we never I don't think I ever did talk about the quote supply chain unquote until COVID because you know we had storms and yeah you go in and all the milk and bread had been gone and that was just the joke that everybody was going to go home and make French toast.

7:37But we didn't you didn't go into the store and there was nothing there and that was what happened in COVID and as I said that was one of the reasons why I got into prepping in the first place is that day I stood in Walmart and I looked at the meat and cheese out and it was completely empty all the way from the front of the store to the back of the store. And then the and then the shelves were all the canned goods were even the bad soups were gone and I thought who is going to eat those because those are nasty so but anyway having preventive you needed some toilet paper because that wasn't available. So all of a sudden the supply chain became an issue and honestly in many ways it has never recovered completely. There have continued to it's like it got out of scene and it has never been able to rethink itself well what's going on in the Middle East is not going to help that situation in any form or fashion because it is going to disrupt a lot of things in a lot of ways.

8:43First of all now in this country we produce we we are an exporter of all products and not a now we do import apparently some refined products but we do not. If we had to we have plenty of all to support ourselves that is not the case in country other countries and many I do have a significant number of listeners thank you again very much that you've been willing to listen to this crazy woman from Texas. You you are not in a net exporter of petroleum products okay some some countries don't have their own petroleum products hardly at all and some only have specific kinds and so it is that in itself is a problem now we can get into go down the rabbit trail of the green energy and all that kind of stuff. The problem is that petroleum products touches every single solitary part of our lives as I sit in my vehicle on my way to the office I am holding onto a steering wheel that has a bottle coating my Fitbit you know has plastic components.

10:06My clothes have synthetic fibers my phone is covered up with plastic I mean it is plastic there is nothing that we have in our lives that does not have some petroleum product in it. I don't care how low carbon footprint we want to say we have it's not humanly possible at this point okay. There is actually in the in the TV show Landman and it may be in the first or the second episode of the first season have to go back and look at it. The guy who plays Landman which is Billy Bob Ford. He has this very young lady who is a lawyer who has come from Houston so she's always been in she's always lived in the city and you know she's all about green energy and all that kind of stuff.

11:11Going to work for it may work for the insurance company that they are insured with anyway she's out there to investigate something and he takes her out to a drilling rig and has one of those big giant windmills and she said you've got a windmill and he said yes I have windmill he said the windmill he said because there's no electrical lines out here in the middle of nowhere. So the windmill helps run the rig so the rig can pump the oil he said and the windmill will not last long enough to pay for itself okay. So he gives a big olong speech about why oil is important and there's a lot of truth to what he says so it's one of those things that everybody should be required to listen to just to have a especially people who are not who have never had any dealings with the oil field as a person who grew up I guess I could at least say oil field adjacent since that's a term now.

12:18The cause of my father was a welder and that's what he did was put pipelines together to transport oil and actually work on the rigs themselves but he was in as part of the infrastructure. You know that's and it takes is it permeates so much of the culture here because it is a big deal. There's no way to get around it now we're going to ever run out of it which you know whether we are not kind of iffy. To some folks say we are some folks say we're not and we continue to drill and when we get shale and figured out how to do the shale technology that I mean we opened up another level of oil we've never had before. So it is what makes our world at this point in time and the technology that runs our world function without it it is a basic substance of life at this point.

13:20So having said that die drive I'll move on. Nothing gets transported without oil and if nothing gets transported without oil then the supply chain becomes a real issue. One of the things that is apparently a really big deal in the stride of hormones is fertilizer. And fertilizer is not coming and you know there are those that will go we should all grow organic without fertilizer. Maybe okay until you don't have anything to eat. There's a reason why people develop the ability to use fertilizer because of it increased production. That is it a long term solution on a it's kind of like solar energy I love solar energy on a small scale. It's really good if you're using it personally for a large scale project it's not that great.

14:24Some places are going to be sunnier than others sometimes of the year going to be sunnier than others. You are dependent on whether or not sun shines okay well that's not necessarily a good thing to hang your hat on for energy. This is the same way you fertilizer is what has caused us to be able to produce the amount of food in the world that we do. At the level that we do and it's one reason why the population is much bigger than it used to be. Well that may come to an end if we if we can't feed people and in this country that is not going to be a problem. It ours is going to cost more and maybe a lot more and we may not we may adjust what we eat accordingly but starvation is not going to be a problem here but it is going to be a problem in some other places. So the fertilizer is a big deal if you are starting to garden this year and I have a lot of listeners from up north which again I appreciate that.

15:33We'll listen to this crazy woman who takes this you're you're just now getting ready to start your gardening season. At that being the case fertilizer is not a bad thing okay you might want to have some especially if you not ever garden before. If you've got your compost composting system down and you can do everything organically more power to you I'm hearing the gold standard but the rest of us are going to need some help and so I do not I do not have a problem using fertilizer. But we also have to be cognizant of the fact that it may become in short supply we can't get it or not get much or it may cost a lot of money. Okay so what else do we need to talk about with the supply chain well okay so if it's hard to get supplies because you know the drugs can't get diesel or whatever they need.

16:34Then we need to think about what kind of supplies can we start to slowly accumulate so that we have the things that we need. Now most of the time we talk about food and yes that's true however and I've mentioned this guy's website before. There's a guy from Austin that I really like to read his content his name is Paul T Martin M.A.R. T.I.N. and his website is PaulTMartin.com and on his website he has a blog which is very interesting to read but in addition to that he has a lot of really good resources for free. And some of those are list list of things you should think about you know kind of putting some aside. I'm not even going as far as saying stop piling I'm just saying put some get a little bit ahead on some things.

17:34And one of his list is called a list of consumables. Now obviously food is consumable but there are other things as well. Laundry detergent is consumable. Dish detergent is consumable. Deodorant is consumable so there's a long list. One of the things I think is helpful is kind of how I did this as I think they call this a fault exercise is to as I am getting ready for the day. Be aware of what product I'm using at the time. Like you know I use soap in the shower. I use shampoo to wash my hair. I use hairspray to you know get a grip on it before I go out the door. Make up I'm probably not going to stop piling that but if you know I need it too. In the great scheme of life that's not going to be how on my list but it might be on somebody so we'll just leave it there.

18:40Okay so what else do you have to have? Well you might need like for example I take my lunch every day so I need to have put aside some ziplot bags for my lunch. So you look at the things that you use every day and then apply those things. These are things that I might want to have like an extra okay one extra. Might have two extra just to be it. And these are things that you can begin to buy one at a time maybe instead of getting one of them you get two of them and that will help out. I'm here with the train at least the train is moving. I am going to at least give it that okay. One of the things that he that and this wasn't him he was just saying you needed to look at things that you might want to stock up on.

19:48But when I googled this and I got what I don't know what googles is it Gemini is there AI I think it is. Anyway it said you know stock what you use well that that was what I did I went through and made a list kind of like as I got ready during the day as I was doing things during the day. What was I using to do that okay store water we talked about that because we could have a problem with water. I'm not on a municipal water system however my pressure switch went out the other day and we didn't have water for it was on the weekend of course because there's like a law about that. We didn't have water for about day and a half okay fortunately we had water stored so that we were able to just you know we didn't we didn't really miss a beat we didn't take a shower but other than that we were good. And of course it was Sunday and my hair was dirty and that really irritated me I can get my other times but I hate it when my hair is dirty.

20:55That's just me that might be a first world problem. Okay one of the things that he he mentioned and was on this list as well is medications and we hear this a lot when it comes to prepping because medications can be crucial if you are taking something that you have to have. Then trying to stock up on that a little bit as best you can would not be a bad thing. Unfortunately the vast majority of our pharmaceuticals in this country are produced in other countries and some of those other countries are going to be in trouble with a energy shortage. Okay and the energy shortage while it might not affect us directly is going to affect us indirectly through that. So it's very important that we look at that as an option if we can at all possible to try to get some things ahead.

22:05As far as medical supplies having a medical supplies for a first aid kit wouldn't be a bad thing either. And those are good any time because we could have a weather event and you know when we had snowmaged and we weren't moving we couldn't roads were impossible. I couldn't even touch you where the works and where the road signs were. And I realized in northern cities and states like Minnesota and Massachusetts and some of these other places that people listen to me. I realized that you think about what we call snow is you know you're like really you got a problem with that. We're not we don't have the infrastructure okay that's the problem. And so dearest number getting if we had a problem we would have been in trouble because I don't know how we would have gotten to a medical facility.

23:08Okay one of the suggestions was to buy local and I think that's absolutely true especially as it comes to food. You know find a farmer's market. Find a local producer if at all possible of and sometimes you find these on the internet that are individual it may not be like if you're in a city or something it might not be close by. But it might be something that you could work out of deal and that is to source meat locally okay. First of all your meat is going to be better if you source it locally. Now one of the things we have and I'll stop and talk about this because that's the price of beef. And we talked about that a little bit and I will say it was last fall. I did a series of episodes where I talked about you know we've always been told that if we had an AMP or you know the grid went down or whatever that we would revert to the 1800s.

24:10Well honestly I don't think we will revert to the 1800s. We may revert to the 1500s but I don't think it's going to be the 1800s. And my evidence of that was a book that was put out by I want to say good housekeeping. And it talked about how this it was a couple fictional couple and how they set up housekeeping and you know all that kind of stuff. And it talked it was a lot about cooking and so it had a lot of things about budgeting and how much it cost for various things. Well first of all they got shipments at least twice a day in this town for all the various goods that they needed. These people did not live on the farm. And so the price of you know inflation taking in consideration inflation our price of beef right now was way out of line to theirs. All the other things were fairly comparable it just they cost more but they cost more across the board they were all the same.

25:11Our price of beef was like no more clothes because they you know that was one things that this lady was fixing and putting in her food budget was various and sundry cuts of meat. Okay well that's great but nowadays beef is extremely expensive and one of the things that we have to realize is I've heard this multiple times. The beef herd in America it has not been as low as it is right now since the like 1950s. Okay that's like when I was born so that's a long time. We have a lot more people in this country than we did in the 1950s so that in itself is a problem. In addition to that we have had like for example the droughts have caused farmers and ranchers to get you know to reduce their herds or get out of the beef business altogether some of them.

26:14In addition to that we've had a lot of problems with wildfires in several years ago in the panhandle thousands and thousands of cattle were wiped out in the wildfires it was horrible. Well now right now that's happening in Nebraska and it's the same issue thousands and thousands of cattle are dying in these wildfires. So that is a problem but if you can buy local and you can afford it then that's the way to go. Another suggestion was to watch your finances and get out of debt that's easier said than done actually. But there are ways to do that that reminds me of a friend of mine that I had a long time ago. And the problem wasn't she was not she was not irresponsible with their finances but her husband was and so she had told me at one point in time say and this was this was 2001 I guess that was a long time ago.

27:22That they were had like thirty five thousand dollars and unsecured credit card debt and I thought I think I would probably have a heart attack I would not be able to breathe if I had that kind of debt burden and so you know it was important to her to get out of debt. Unfortunately was not as important to her husband but that's you know just telling somebody to get out of debt when they feel like they're under a boulder of debt is that's that's a bigger deal than it sounds like it is it's one statement but that does not it's it's it's big but it's important. And so there are ways to do that and there are people who have done it so that would be if that if that pertains to you I would say start looking at people like Dave Ramsey and other folks that have systems about how to get out of debt.

28:28Another example another suggestion was to learn DIY skills and that is actually a pretty good suggestion. A good example is you know several years ago and I've talked about this multiple times several years ago I took a class from a local high school that off it was a plumbing class so you could come and learn plumbing from a plumber who was the teacher at the high school he was the career and technology teacher for the plumbing classes. And so he taught these night classes for free and it was like six weeks and we went twice a week and it was very interesting. I think it was sponsored by some company in the town and pretty good size manufacturer and I think they felt they were going to get some applicants out of it the vast majority of the people who took this class this class were old. They were like me anyway the problem with that was that I don't think it helped them he had talked about giving a plumbing to class and I really wish he had but anyway the plumbing one class introduction to plumbing was good and it actually I actually was able to use the information that I learned because before the class was over I had a problem with my sink in the kitchen.

29:54And I needed to replace a part in it in the faucet and because I had had this plumbing class and I knew what the problem was all I had to do was order the part from Amazon which I think it cost about $15 and it took me about five minutes to replace it. And if I had not known how to do that it would have cost me several hundred dollars for a plumbing bill for the for the plumber to drive all the way to my house fix it and then drive back so you know they would have charged at the at the least they would have charged an hour if it hadn't been more than that but they would have also you know and the labor so there's it was a whole lot cheaper to do it myself. Some things you can some things you can as I said I watch the well guy change out the pressure switch I know what he did because it was so hard for him to get it off I don't know if I could physically do it because I mean he had a hard time and he was kind of like my directions for when I built the house for the cats outside that the direction said need strong man he was one of those I am not.

31:05Okay make sure you do the maintenance on your car and your house and keep that up so that you don't have things kind of snowball and also this is something that I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make sure that I do not let the gas in my vehicle get below gas tank get below three quarters of a tank. Now currently the gas in Texas is not all full I know it's worse in other parts of the country I want to say when I bought it yesterday it was three thirty three that is a little over a dollar a gallon more than it was when before excuse me before all this mess started. And the problem is you know as I said Friday when I talked about the original energy crisis my father was convinced that the energy crisis was a hoax in in the seventies this one may be a hoax as well or it may be contrived which that's a robust building but it really doesn't matter at this point all that matters is we're having to deal with it.

32:15And that could also that's that could also apply to the supply chain so those are my thoughts on the supply chain. I'm trying to make sure that we have it's easy to miss something in this that's the reason why having a list is good idea because every once in a while we'll run across something and go wait a minute we don't have any whatever. Well we used it all and we didn't we didn't pay attention to the fact that we don't like for example chicken broth. Now yeah we can do our own chicken broth or own chickens and there's that but I happen to buy something wasn't on the grocery list. I went ahead and got some Friday and lo and behold nice needed it to put in some purple whole piece this weekend and we didn't have any except for the ones that I had purchased on Friday.

33:17So it's it's important to kind of keep up with your inventory and that that goes along with the supply chain if you're going to put things back you have to know what you have. That's a whole nother subject for another day we might work on that on Wednesday. Okay tomorrow's tool of the week it's time for me to go to work and I got all kinds of stuff to do today some of which is to follow up on some of the fun I had on Friday but I won't go into that. Have a good day and I'll talk to you tomorrow.