Prepping Is Mostly Procrastination | Episode 606

0:00Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. With family, canolies, and spins mean everything. Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business. Introducing the Godfather at chumbacacino.com. Test your luck in the shadowy world of the Godfather slot. Someday, I will call upon you to do a service for me. Play the Godfather now at chumbacacino.com. Welcome to the family. No purchase necessary VGW group void. We're prohibited by law of 21 plus terms and conditions apply. Mmm, one iced coffee. 99 cents, please. For real? No way. Mmm. Ah. Mmm. One iced coffee. 99 cents, please. For real? No way. Mmm. Ah. What a deal. Your new morning groove. Ice coffee from McDonald's. Any size for just 99 cents to 11 a.m. Pricing participation may vary. Can I be combined with any other offer? Bada bada bada bada.

1:01Good morning. Hey, it's dancerstrapupunk.com. I got my opening mixed up. There's the wrong order, but anyway, good morning. On this not so chilly morning, finally starting to feel like spring. And today, we're going to talk about why most of prepping is just procrastination. Why it seems like you are being productive, but you're just fucking around. All that and more in today's episode of the Survival Pump Podcast. Before we get all that, though, let's take a look at our morning theme music. And we're back.

2:13I really need to find myself a primary care doctor. That's going to be one of my goals. I feel like it's time to stop outsourcing weight. Insourcing. It's time to start outsourcing my medical needs. I do. If you've been following along, I do have after about a year or slash few years of trying to solve my health problems. I decided to go see a doctor. I'll follow up in a couple days to go over blood work. I have some interesting blood work. Apparently, at some point in my past, I had the parvo virus. Yes, parvo that kills dogs. I apparently had that, which I didn't know humans could get. And it stays in your blood.

3:14I don't know. Some of this doesn't make sense, though. So the rheumatologist took a bunch of blood for blood work. But then also for my TRT, I took a bunch of blood. And some interesting numbers came back at 150 milligrams of testosterone per week. My estradiol had got up to fucking 70, 71 actually. So I had to go on some anti-estrogen. Maybe that was some lag. Before that, I was previously on 200 milligrams a week. So maybe it was really, really elevated and hadn't had a time to come down. So I've gone on twice weekly examestane. And I went from three times a week,

4:19injections to daily injections, which is quite literally a pain in the ass. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about today. I was just chatting because you're my friends. That's what friends do. So anyway, most of prepping is procrastination. There, one, there's a problem with people where they would do a lot of things to look or feel busy that isn't actually very productive. You can look really busy, but accomplish very little. I noticed this a lot in my job. I've seen people do it all the time. They're very busy at looking busy, doing things. And those things don't accomplish a whole lot. They just don't. Hi.

5:19And I usually, I have this thing, the main goal. So we call it four in the morning, and we work the meat and produce truck, mostly to the counter. The produce pallets, we bring them to the sales floor, and we put them up wherever we go. Obviously, you're not bringing pallets if meat to the sales floor, cold chain, can't work them quick enough, whatever. With the produce pallets, we do. And I've had meetings with my people. And they'll hit me with questions like, well, we need to do this. And what about this? And what about this? And my answer is work the fucking pallets faster. That fixes everything. I don't want to go into long explanation, but there are displayed tables of product.

6:19And management really wants those tables to be filled. And they're like, well, what about the tables? Chances are, the stuff we need for the tables is on a pallet that came in to which our job is to work. If we want the tables filled faster, the solution is work the pallets faster. Well, what about this? Work the pallets faster. But what work the pallets faster? It literally is the answer to everything. But anyway, people will break their necks trying to do something else and look busy. Same thing with prepping. Right? I'm no saint. Most of this podcast is me teaching to be myself a better prepper.

7:20It's done this a long time. I know a lot, but I'm by no means perfect. And accountability, right? Obviously, I can't just quit prepping and keep doing the podcast. So open and honest, one of the biggest websites in the survival niche based on traffic and users, social media presence was not made by a prepper. It was made by an excellent marketer that saw that the survival niche was booming and got into it to make fat fucking piles of cash. So no authenticity with that. He brings it, it's, what's the damn website? If you go on Facebook and type in survival,

8:21it'll probably be your number one results for fan pages. I don't remember the name. No, the name was totally gone. Pretty sure survival is in it. But anyway, he just, I think he has guest posts, right? And he just, he began by writing articles. You can, if you're a good writer and marketer, you can absolutely cover topics that you don't know Jack fucking shit about, right? What is, what is the someone said this? Like, if you go read three books on any topic, you're then like a top 10% expert on the topic and you can go give lectures and shit. I'm not joking. So I'm sure you guys are like, fuck I've read way more than 10 books on the whole survival topic. Yeah, me too, buddy. But anyway, it's still recording. Okay, buying feels like progress.

9:23Instead of doing any of the other important parts of prepping, granted to be a prepper, you have to prep things, you have to spend money. However, spending money is absolutely a dopamine hit. And it feels good to go buy preps. I mean, it does. I'm not going to sit here one. I'm not going to say don't buy anything because clearly you're going to fail at being a prepper, right? There are a lot of preps you can do without spending any money. Some of them are more productive than others, but you do have to, right? Like, you can't have a deep pantry without spending money. A deep pantry, though, necessarily, isn't them? Like, I feel like if you were to like to list

10:27the flashiest, most exciting parts of being a prepper slash survivalist, I don't think building a deep pantry is on that list, right? Buy a palette of MREs. That, that is fucking, that's cool, right? You can tell all your prepper buddies. Would you do this weekend? I bought a fucking palette of MREs. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Practical, MREs are fun. I have, I need to buy, want to buy. I want to buy another case of MREs. I want the standard military. Friend of mine, sit me in Amazon listing. I think it was Amazon. To humanitarian aid, MREs, there are meat free. I think they're lentil based.

11:28They're good. We ate one. But I like my meat. Variety, though, is the spice of life. So not like I have regrets for buying this. And to be honest, had I bought a case of military issued MREs, I liked them too much. And we would have eaten them, right? Flip side, I would have eaten them. So it's fun sometimes to do things like go on a day hike and take an MRE or two or three with a family and you stop and have MREs for lunch. It's fun. So that's definitely something that I'm going to do. My daughter has never had an MRE.

12:30I think she may have had some of the stuff that we sampled in the humanitarian one. But she's never had a normal MRE. And I think, depending on the flavor, we could get her to try some stuff. She's getting better, but she's six. And sometimes it's hard to get her to try stuff. She's better when she was like young. She would eat everything. Duck, curry, everything. And then she went through a real, real picky phase. And we've encouraged her to branch out. She's real suspicious of sauces. And I'll get that. Anyway, buying stuff. Not always the most productive thing, right? Firearms. Another flashy, high dopamine hit thing to do, right? Buying firearms. Fucking love firearms.

13:32Really, I'm really tempted to purchase another firearm. I thought about getting a subcompact carry. I'm thinking, what is it? Is it a Sigma P30? There's a couple of firearms that I've definitely looked at. One of my buddies has one he's trying to sell. We would make a good excuse to visit up that way. We have a bunch of friends up north, Michigan and Wisconsin. And if we were to do that, we would have to try to find a way to visit all my friends up there. So save on hotel rooms, just crash on everyone's catches, do a survival punk northern visit. Anyway, if you're buying more firearms and you haven't had any training or any training in a long time, and I fall in this category,

14:33it's been a while. I absolutely need to take a pistol course in the near future, which I don't know if you guys follow it on YouTube. I don't know if he's still there. I need to look. The T-Rex Arms is right down the street from me, like maybe 20 minutes from my work is the T-Rex Arms shop. And I absolutely should have been in there. Like a million times. If they have a storefront, I don't know. But I need to take a firearms class. A couple, I mean, I've never taken a rifle class. I've only taken pistol classes. And even that has been a while. I have a site on my AR 15 that I've never even

15:34got to go try. I need to check the batteries. Well, I mean, I need to replace the batteries. That's, I would say, classes aren't nearly as flashy as just buying another gun. But way, way more important. If you own firearms in the kind of four, five basic categories you should be owning firearms, you definitely need to be taking a class before you buy another one. And even if you don't, like, so if you have whatever you have, you probably need to take a class in. Unless the only thing you have is a shotgun. Shotguns are great. And they do have shotgun courses. I'm sure, but I would, if that's the case, I would maybe Dutch you towards getting a handgun

16:36and taking a class for the handgun. Next up, watching videos. This kind of also goes into like analysis paralysis. Let's make sure we're still recording. I'm paranoid about that sometimes. Yes, we were recording. Anyway, you can say things like, oh, I'm just, I'm just doing my research. I'm just, I'm watching YouTube. And then I'll know how to do things. There is some merit to be had with that, right? YouTube. And I watch a lot of YouTube. My wife is so perplexed by this, right? Me and both of the kids watch an inordinate amount of YouTube. And my wife's like, I've never met anyone that watches what's YouTube is y'all. My daughter, son, me, we all watch YouTube. The majority of the viewing pleasure that I have partaken is YouTube.

17:37And my wife is like, she's just not a YouTube person. She will watch some, I have YouTube channels that I watch only with my wife. And she enjoys those on occasion. She, my wife is a Pisces. And if you know or love a Pisces, then I probably don't need to explain anything. She is, what's that word? Yeah, fickle, fickle's a good word. She is fickle. She does not like doing the same things often. She does not like routine. She is chaotic in that way, but really rigid in other ways. And I don't understand any of it.

18:41So, yes, learning things, reading books and watching YouTube is important. However, at some point, you need to do stuff. You can't just amass knowledge without implementing it. Yeah, it's good to know stuff. But if you're watching a video on the top 10 plants to plant this spring, or you're listening to the episode I did on perennials, you need to go implement that. Have a time frame. I've gained this knowledge on this subject. Now, go do it. At least have a plan in place. That's the other thing. Having a plan, you can absolutely sit down and make survival plans.

19:41And it's not flashy. And it's not super fun. Unless that's the way your brain works, right? If I were to task my wife was making a bug out binder, she would fucking kill it all day long. That's organizing and just planting. That's her superpower. She would be great at it. I would want to off myself. I have made bug out binders and survival plans like that. And I've thought about making it as a product to sell. I really want to have a physical survival punk product. Something besides a survival punk army. I want to get into the physical things. Yes, I've done like merchandise in the past. And I don't currently have any. I might run another T-Spring project, a T-Spring shirt at some point in the future.

20:42I don't know. Some new design. My last thing was a tread on evil. And that project was OK. But then the shirts didn't look. The design didn't work out all that well. Now with AI, though, I can just whip out new designs and have them up in no time. But anyway, it's good to learn. It's good to learn. But activity doesn't equal progress. Motion feels like action. You can spend years prepping without improving your life. Buying gear and still building skills, watching videos instead of practicing. There's a lot of things you could do that don't involve money. You can watch a video on making a figure for a deadfall trap. But if you don't go practice it, it doesn't matter. You can absolutely have the theoretical knowledge of building a figure for a deadfall trap. That doesn't translate into building one. You need to actually practice that skill.

21:46If you say, oh, James, I've seen like 100 videos on figure for deadfall traps. I can go make one. Fuckin' go do it. Because I too have seen a bunch of videos on it. And I have made figure for deadfall traps. And unless you do it often, you'll forget. And you'll fuck up. And they are finicky. So practice that. Also, don't let yourself forget the actual daily problems, right? Waiting for the right time to start. That is a dumb idea. So it's easy to buy gear, make lists, watch content, and talk about scenarios. It is hard to fix finances, get into shape, learn skills, change habits, and face real world weaknesses. So this has been James from soilpunk.com. DIYs survive these guys. I'm gonna fly and live my friends. DIY survival's trend, rock, rock, never ends. I'm searching for a set of broken strings.

22:48Rubble, songs, and what it brings. Back to the basic simple things. Freedom, face, it's wings. It was rock, all right. Let's rock it, roll tonight. Through the dark and light, we'll keep the fire bright. Three sheets and leather coats. And our key in all our notes. Survival folks, what's our vote? We got our inner thoughts. What for all ain't no fault for one? We'll keep marching till it's done. In this battle, we'll have fun. Right in like the sun. It was rock, all right. Let's rock it, roll tonight. Through the dark and light, we'll keep the fire bright. Three sheets and leather coats. And our key in all our notes. Survival folks, what's our vote?

23:50We got our inner thoughts. One for all and all for one. We'll keep marching till it's done. In this battle, we'll have fun. Right in like the sun. Sick was rock, all right. Let's rock it, roll tonight. Through the dark and light, we'll keep the fire bright. Toilet Redic here from 2311 Racing. Another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Jamba. Jump in at JambaCasino.com. Let's Jamba. No purchase necessary. VTW Group, Voidware Prohibited by Ma, CCNC, 21 Plus.

24:52Sponsored by JambaCasino. Hey, I'm Josh Speagle, host of the podcast, Lunatic in the newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and gasp and horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today.