https://youtu.be/dCr-xMF_CjA: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

https://youtu.be/dCr-xMF_CjA: this dCr-xMF_CjA video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is on you. This is not on the doctor. You're the one sick, not him, right? And yeah, I think that that's quite reasonable advice. And I don't know...is tis legal. Can I say that?

[off-camera]:
You're not a doctor.

Mark Rippetoe:
I'm not a doctor. What the fuck do I know? Don't believe anything I just said .

Mark Wulfe:
From The Aasgaard Company Studios in beautiful Wichita Falls, Texas... From the finest mind in the modern fitness industry... The one true voice in the strength and conditioning profession.... The most important podcast on the internet... Ladies and gentlemen! Starting Strength Radio.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho ho. Should have taken some caffeine. I didn't take any caffeine. Hey! Maybe I can stay awake for Starting Strength Radio. Friday's a good day for caffeine, you know, should have taken some caffeine. If I doze off in the middle of this podcast, that's why.

Mark Rippetoe:
Got some tea here. You can't see that now, but it's there. It's not really a source of caffeine, you know,

[off-camera]:
I was going to I was going to ask about that.

Mark Rippetoe:
There's not any caff... there's not. A little tiny bit of caffeine in tea. But if you're in one of these people that, you know, can't drink coffee after, like, noon because it keeps them up at night. People like that, it's fucked up. What you need to do, if you're like that, you need to just do a whole bunch caffeine, get used to it, because it's not normal to be kept awake at night by caffeine that you supposedly ingested 13 hours ago. That's not normal. All right. Something's wrong with you.

[off-camera]:
The cup of coffee, what is it?

Mark Rippetoe:
A cup of coffee and they're [freaky out motions]. Yeah I mean, who needs meth? Right? Guys like that, you know, hadn't even considered doing meth. Do Starbucks. It's go to go to Starbucks, get the cup of coffee. Take it out into the parking lot. Park. Turned the car off and do the coffee.

[off-camera]:
Before you get home and your wife sees it, yeah. Don't let her see it.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you get home you're all [flapping and jumping around motions]. Hi, honey. God damn this....seeem to have a lot of energy tonight.

[off-camera]:
Have you been doing coffee again?

Mark Rippetoe:
Honey, you've been doing coffee again, haven't you?

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't done coffee in years. [more tweaking]

Mark Rippetoe:
Years ago, I saw a guy come in to Wal-Mart one night real late. It is like 1:00 in the morning and I was in there buying my usual groceries or something like that. Fucking guy came in there and he went back to the paint department and he bought solvents and shit. And I mean, the guy was literally touching the ground occasionally is all he was doing. He was so fucked up. And what's amazing about those people, they think you don't know. They all think you can't tell.

[off-camera]:
They've got silver paint around their nose and shit.

Mark Rippetoe:
Nothing wrong here.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, shit. It's so funny. Uh, anyway, all right. So today we've got a program that I'm going to try to jerk out of my ass. Every once in a while, I successfully jerk a program out of my ass and we're going to talk today about you being more self-sufficient.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, this would be me preaching to you from my vast storehouse of experience. And, if I were you, I would ignore everything I say today. Because you're going to feel inadequate if you listen to the whole damn thing, but...

Mark Rippetoe:
First...it's comments from the stupid motherfuckers...no! Comments From The Haters!

[off-camera]:
That's pretty good.

Mark Rippetoe:
You think? Yeah.

[off-camera]:
There's a little bit of drama. There some suspense.

Mark Rippetoe:
Suspense.

[off-camera]:
Emotions are running high.

Mark Rippetoe:
Mm hmm. Right.

[off-camera]:
It's good. It's good stuff.

Mark Rippetoe:
Literary shit going on.

[off-camera]:
It's why you're up there and I'm back here.

Mark Rippetoe:
Right. Because I have the ability to jerk things like that out of my ass. Now the actual substance of the program, we'll see. But who knows?

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, here's a shitty comment about Nick. We'll start with that one, haha. "Nick can't say anything a white man can't say. He's not black." There are three negatives in this in this statement, and I can't do the math on that. Like if it's a double negative, it's like it's like. Minus one, plus one, right?

[off-camera]:
Right. So we're back to zero.

Mark Rippetoe:
Back to zero, but I... But the third one is... Nick can't say anything a white man can't say. He's not black." Maybe this means that Nick is black. You may be what it...

[off-camera]:
Now we're back to positive,

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, because a positive you are black and everyone knows that black is positive. Because if you don't understand that, then you're clearly racist.

[off-camera]:
So everybody else, so everybody is either black or white.

Mark Rippetoe:
Either black or white. Nick can't be anything other than either black or white because there are no, you know, in-between. Look, decide what you're going to be and identify as such, like our friend Ray Gillenwater. Now RaeyGillenwater, our friend Ray appears to be white.

[off-camera]:
Oh, what is he?

Mark Rippetoe:
He's Jewish.

[off-camera]:
Oh, shit!

Mark Rippetoe:
Does that mean he's black?

[off-camera]:
Well, if he's Jewish, he can't be white.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, he can't be white, he's Jewish.

[off-camera]:
Black, so he's black.

Mark Rippetoe:
The only people that are white are Irishman, I guess. Or Germans. The Krauts are white. Right. That's why World War Two was so damn difficult. It's hard to kill. Just looks like you're shooting your cousin right.

[off-camera]:
The Pacific part of that war...

Mark Rippetoe:
Pacific was all sorted out. That was easy. That was easy. But running around in northern Europe, how do you I mean, you know, like shooting Cousin Fritz. I'd feel bad about that, you know.

Mark Rippetoe:
OK, all right: "I don't like taking fitness advice from someone who has clearly never worked out a day in his life." This is in response to the trap bar. That continues to generate wonderful comments from the haters. The trap bar that was just...people were deeply offended by that.

[off-camera]:
More than the vegans.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, yeah. The trap bar guys are worse than vegans, apparently.

[off-camera]:
Spans all food choice.

Mark Rippetoe:
Spans all...

[off-camera]:
Food preferences, sexual preferences.

Mark Rippetoe:
Black and white. Yeah, right.

[off-camera]:
It's a universal.

Mark Rippetoe:
Spans all of that. It's a universal error. It's a broadly distributed error. And people just get...you tell people they're doing shit wrong and they just bow up.

[off-camera]:
It's their life.

Mark Rippetoe:
They just, they just go fuck, they just go apeshit, you know? Yeah, your trap bar is a pussy way to deadlift.

Mark Rippetoe:
AHAblblahac, how dare you say?

Mark Rippetoe:
Ok: "Starting Strength Racks may not be safe or deep enough, but at least they're very expensive." Eric, hey, Eric, I got some news for you, honey. They're not anywhere near as expensive now as they're going to be before Uncle Joe gets through with this economy. If I were you, I'd get...Look at it like this: They're on sale right now. All right.

[off-camera]:
Let's wait till gas is six dollars a gallon.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah. Wait til diesel's thirty dollars a gallon. Try having it shipped.

[off-camera]:
$3.30 yesterday, I think in Dallas.

Mark Rippetoe:
Diesel was?

[off-camera]:
I think so, yeah. Then like 70 bucks to fill up.

Mark Rippetoe:
Saw it at $2.79 on Beverly over there by the warehouse. Cheapest in town, bought some for $2.69 in Burk the other day.

Mark Rippetoe:
So they're not, this is a privat... Nick and I are talking about local shit here, right?

[off-camera]:
It's probably $4.80 in California right now.

Mark Rippetoe:
I hope so. Just have to hope, I mean, that's what they voted for. They voted for five-dollar diesel.

Mark Rippetoe:
Good. That 30 dollar sandwich, they voted for that too, they just don't know it yet. That's what they voted for.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right. This this is a real good one: "Rip is so cute when he tries to educate those people with degrees. His entire system is literally one part of one class of one semester and is entirely covered in one chapter of a degree in exercise science."

[off-camera]:
There you go. I was just thinking, you got to...some you got to read these as the guy who's typing them.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, I that's the way I read that one. Yeah, he's sincere. He's sincere in his belief that....

[off-camera]:
Oh, I think he's very sincere.

Mark Rippetoe:
Totally sincere. You know, you can be stupid and be sincere. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. It happens quite frequently on Comments from the Haters!

Mark Rippetoe:
But...to continue. All right. OK. "Mark should follow Rusty's lead and grow a man bun to cover up his pink scalp."

Mark Rippetoe:
So now here's an example of why these people are the bottom three percent. Way, way over on the left hand, kurtotic flat spot of the intelligence curve, right? If I've got a pink bald scalp, out of what should I grow the man bun?

[off-camera]:
If it was over on the side...I'm laughing because I'm picturing a side..

Mark Rippetoe:
That's a comb over now! Here let me try that...[brushes his hair over]... help? Maybe the other side...[passes hand over his pink scalp going the other diretion]. Still looks the same, doesn't it? Uh, all right. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
Here, this is this is a lengthy one: "Rip your...Rip Respect your Rip comma, respect your strength training regime and coaching, but I just can't go along with you after you even expressed an anti-vaccination sentiment and you disparaged my state of New Mexico in addition to calling our governor a silly bitch." Which she is. I'm just calling her what she is. "Is just a reflection of your own state's self aggrandizing and need to demean in order to cover up a sense of inadequacy." Listen to all that psychology. Psychological analysis. This gentleman

[off-camera]:
He's smart for a New Mexican.

Mark Rippetoe:
For a New Mexican who's never had psychology. "Please see this url for data showing New Mexico leading the nation in covid response." Well, I don't think New Mexico is, in fact, leading the nation in covid response. If by covid response, you mean locking down the entire state of New Mexico for months and months and months. That is it...that is leading the nation and covid response,

[off-camera]:
The entire state. I've driven all the way east. And I've driven most of west in the last year. That's the most fucked up state for covid propaganda.

Mark Rippetoe:
It is every every one of their road signs is just some baldfaced lie on the sign again. You know, and he believes all this. He believes what he's told by his fucking silly bitch of a governor and... Note how lacking Texas is. Got a...did you see the....

[off-camera]:
Well, our cases are spiking, aren't they? Oh wait..

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, wait! They're dropping off. Three weeks ago oh, somebody posted an article today and I put it up on the website. And its taking about Mississippi and Texas and what their what their death rate and their, quote, case, quote unquote rate has done. And it... They're just they're just tailing off, going away, going away. Three weeks after everybody that had access to a keyboard was saying that Greg Abbott is a murderous thug. He's massacring the...the Blood bath, you know, one hyperbolic bullshit statement after another about how everybody's going to die.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you know, that's not what...That's not what happened. It's not what was going to happen. Uh. And then this guy has the balls... His link is to an NPR story. [Laughter]

Mark Rippetoe:
"After 10 years of association, I am unsubscribing. Thank you for the gains."

[off-camera]:
It's rough when they unsubscribe.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's rough when they unsubscribed because you haven't been able to subscribe for 10 years. Oh that's association, he says. So yeah man, that's tough. That really stuck it up my ass, didn't it?

[off-camera]:
I'm sure you're feeling that loss.

Mark Rippetoe:
Oh, it's just, you know. Fuck. What are you going to do? Go along with the lies? Well, we can't do that.

Mark Rippetoe:
All right, here's the last one. This is a good one: "Mark looks like an obese diabetic, Kurt Russell. But Kurt Russell in Tombstone, if Kurt Russell couldn't ride a horse on account of his weight and not being to feel toes to get them in the stirrups."

Mark Rippetoe:
Now that is a classic Comments from the Haters! Y

Mark Rippetoe:
Yes, all this mess...up in there and just had to get it out one way or another, get it out some form or another, just get it out. Either comes out as diarrhea or vomit. He doesn't care, but it's got to be released.

Mark Rippetoe:
As you may have noticed, the past year has been... I... to call it a cluster fuck is to insult cluster fucking. Right. I mean, it's been so far past that. And a lot of people I had ever thought about this before have been dragged to the conclusion that possibly they were not really prepared for this. You know, they weren't really prepared for the situation that developed.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, you can say what you want to do about why the situation developed, who caused it to develop. I have my own theories about it, but none of that actually matters because once the situation has developed and it certainly as hell has, you have got to deal with it and. Lots and lots of people weren't prepared to deal with this craziness. Either either physically, in terms of preparation, or psychologically. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, the psychological is probably the harder of these things. The psychological preparation for this involves your understanding that you are being lied to virtually 24/7, 365 and expected to believe it. You're being lied to and when I tell you that you're being lied to, that may well be the only thing that you'll hear all day that's not a lie today.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're being lied to, my friend. You're being lied to. And one of the hardest things for you to do, because you know our upbringing here in this country, is understanding that you're being lied to and that you're being lied to, even though that's not supposed to be the case, is it?

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, we were raised nice little boys and girls. We were taught that everybody's honest and when somebody tells you something, they they mean it. And that you've got you've got to assume the best in everybody. And if you don't have something nice to say, don't talk at all, that sort of shit. You know.

Mark Rippetoe:
This this rosy scenario thing that we're all raised with. And it's it takes a quite a bit of reorganization to get past that doesn't it? You've got these...as a result of that upbringing you have built into your brain the willingness to believe what you hear. That's just part of society. It's part of our society. It's not part of everybody's society. But in terms of American culture, it's it's part of what we do.

Mark Rippetoe:
We just you know, you say you'll be here at eight thirty, then you'll be here at eight thirty. And what you have to understand is that if somebody tells you they're going to be here at eight 30, they may have no intention of being there at all, much less not being there at 8:30.

Mark Rippetoe:
You... We hit we are being lied to on a repeated basis every day, all day long about virtually everything and I refer back to the article that we we talked about a couple of shows ago about the Big Lie versus the small lie.

Mark Rippetoe:
The small lie's told with the... For the purpose of getting through a situation that exists right now. You show up late to the house, you tell her, "I've left my phone on the desk had to turn around, go back and get it and stuff." And, you know, little bitty bullshit, things like that.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you don't want to call attention to the lie. So you immediately tell the lie and then you say, "so what are we having for dinner?" You just gloss over it and go on about your deal. That's the small lie.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the Big Lie's a whole different animal completely. The Big Lie is told for purposes of establishing a new reference point. OK. Global warming is going to wipe out all life on earth. Right. And and, you know, covid-19, is got a... It kills virtually everyone that gets it, so it's important to take your vaccine, which is totally safe. It's been proven to be safe and effective. In one lie right after another.

Mark Rippetoe:
And these things are not just told to get somebody out of a, you know, being late from work. It's.. They're told to reset the paradigm. This is Orwellian. 1984 kind of things, and you people are going to have to get used to the idea that you're being lied to and that you don't just swallow the hook.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, I mean, it was baited with stink bait anyway. You shouldn't have been attracted to it. You should have been smart enough to understand this bullshit when you see it first, but some of you have swallowed the hook. You can't do that because then they own your ass. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
And so I think a lot of what I'm about to talk about involves you coming to grips with the truth of the matter, that there is very little truth going on right now. And if you don't know it to be true for sure, then it's probably a lie.

Mark Rippetoe:
Anything you hear on NPR or the BBC or any of the broadcast networks or Fox News is a baldfaced lie. If PBS if NPR tells you that the sun is coming up in the east tomorrow, demand the peer-reviewed study. Because it's bullshit. And. And you've got to you've got to turn all this shit off, those of you that leave the TV on all day and just let that let this sewage run into your face. It's.... Even if you don't believe it, like you'll sit there and tell me that you don't believe it, it's affecting you whether you want it to or not, it's programming.

Mark Rippetoe:
And this is one of the interesting reasons why in 1984 you couldn't turn off the view screen in your house. Remember that part of it? You couldn't turn it off. The elites were allowed the freedom to turn off the view screen, but not you, because if it's running into you all the time, it's changing your brain.

Mark Rippetoe:
So the first thing to do is be aware of that. All right. Stop. Stop letting them lie to you all day long. Turn it off. It's all bullshit. There's nothing on there to learn. You want to learn the news, get online and read and be careful about that. Because the fucking "qanon" fuckers are just as destructive to the reality of the situation as the mainstream media and the state run media and pravda. They're just as fucked up. They're taking advantage of this situation. And they know that you'll believe the worst, but if if you believe what is not true, then it doesn't matter who told you the lie, you know.

Mark Wulfe:
So that having been said, what are you going to do when - and I'm not talking about one shit utterly hits the fan, I'm just I'm just concerned about what you're going to do to put some distance between yourself and dependency on these people that are lying to you. There is a way to approach your situation that does not entail being dependent on multinational corporations for everything. And. And that doesn't marry you to someone else's schedule and someone else's ideas about what you ought to be doing. You ought to be able to do things for yourself.

Mark Rippetoe:
And in order to do things for yourself, this requires a certain amount of physical independence from the system. OK, if you have to go by Wal-Mart on the way home every night for a little something that you think you need you're dependent on the system. You know, you got to learn to make plans.

Mark Rippetoe:
So about a year ago, everybody decided that toilet paper suddenly was an essential item him to have in the house. Suddenly, wiping your ass became of great interest to everybody. Now somebody that had planned better, like we did, already had toilet paper in the house. I keep 100 rolls of toilet paper at the gym and the house anyway.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, not just covid-19 is going to, you know, eradicate human life from the planet, but because you're supposed to have enough sense now that in the event of something untoward happening, you still need to wipe your ass, right? So you keep things like toilet paper around.

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, that should have provided a wake up call for those of you who had not made had not made plans. And it should have been a situation where other things started going through your mind. So we're going to talk about some of these things today.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I think the best place to start is with the most expensive, most important thing. And that's where do you live? What is your housing situation? OK, now, if you live in Manhattan, you're fucked. You've been fucked for quite a while. You have decided a long time ago that other people were going to be in charge of your existence, and I guess you're fine with it if you're still there. People I know got out a long time ago.

Mark Rippetoe:
But, more importantly, if you live in Manhattan, you live in an apartment or some version of an apartment, you're crammed in close to everybody around you. You know, big cities all over the world are the same exact way. If you live in a big city anywhere, you live in London, you live in Jakarta, you live in Buenos Aries, Buenos Buenos Aries. You like that? You live in Mexico City, for God's sake. Did I say that right? Mexico City. Ciudad Mexico. Is that how they...

[off-camera]:
You're like an NPR broadcaster.

Mark Rippetoe:
Almost. NPR. You notice that...

[off-camera]:
You just switch. You use the proper accent...

Mark Rippetoe:
For but only for Spanish language words, right?

[off-camera]:
It'd be fucked up to do it for anybody else. Can you imagine? The...bRing up a Chinese name, right? Oh shit.

Mark Rippetoe:
MRENFIE. You know. Yeah, I wish that NPR interview me because I would insist on having my name pronounced SHARL MARC RIPDEAXU, because it's a French name.

Mark Rippetoe:
No, I insist. I mean, why this why the Spanish surnames, Garcia, we have to be Garcia, we can't be Garcia. Because everybody whose last name is Garcia insists on it being pronounced as though the person addressing you was also Hispanic, right?

[off-camera]:
It's a good point about the Spanish. I never noticed that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, yeah. It's only it's only only Spanish names, because that's all they had figured out at NPR.

Mark Rippetoe:
Nonetheless.... OK, if you're in a big city, you're all right, you've already fucked up. OK, and just you know, you've learned this year that you've just had to deal with that because there are giant limitations now. A lot of people have decided that that was wrong and a lot of people have bailed. Try buying a rural piece of property damn near anywhere in the United States right now and see what has happened to the price of it.

Mark Rippetoe:
I mean, here in the most ridiculous little hundred thousand market in the United States, in Wichita Falls, Texas, houses are going for 10 percent over list price. That's stupefying. We are stupefied.

[off-camera]:
We sold ours the night that we listed it,

Mark Rippetoe:
The night you listed...

[off-camera]:
The pictures weren't even up yet.

Mark Rippetoe:
And it sold. And Nick moved out into the country kind of. But the idea is that if you live in Chicago, Wichita Falls, the middle of town in Wichita Falls is kind of like being in the country, isn't it? And if you live in Wichita Falls, Iowa Park's kind of like living in the country.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now I moved out of town when I was 19. I never liked being in town and I've been out in the county ever since. There was a period of a couple of years I lived in Wichita in different apartments, just throwing around trying to decide what to do, then moved back out into the county and have been there, you know, basically I'm 65. I've been out in the county. 45 years of my life.

Mark Rippetoe:
It never. Never wanted to be around a bunch of other people, especially when I was trying to sleep. Hotels really creep me out, but what are you going to do, you know?

Mark Rippetoe:
So your housing would be a good place to start taking stock of its viability. And the viability where you live varies with where that is. If you're stuck in the middle of Brooklyn and are less impressed with how hip that is now, you kind of have missed the opportunity to get out of there cheaper, but you still have to get out of there. You know.

Mark Rippetoe:
That that whole thing up in New York is... If they closed down three tunnels, you're there, right? Is it three tunnels or four? I think it's three tunnels the fuck off of that island. You're there. They shut down those three, let's say some clever young lad figured out a way to blow up all three of those tunnels and those people couldn't get out, they'd be eating each other. Human flesh would be for sale on the sidewalks of Manhattan within two weeks.

[off-camera]:
How many people are there? Three million?

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't know that the total population, I believe, of New York City is about eight eight 1/2 million. That's all five boroughs. Manhattan Island, I don't know. I have no idea. You you've got that marvelous device there. Consult the Oracle and we'll see how many are there.

[off-camera]:
One point six three million.

Mark Rippetoe:
On Manhattan Island. You know, and the place just isn't that big. That's a hell of a bunch of people all breathing the same air. An amazing thing. Amazing why that fascinates people I don't understand..

[off-camera]:
Look, it doesn't even have to be the it doesn't even have to be the tunnels or the bridges, a power outage...

Mark Rippetoe:
No, that's just, you know, a metaphor. If you're stranded in a situation like that, there is too much pressure on now artificially limited resources, and that is a recipe for cannibalism. I'm telling you. It's. It's a you need to be thinking about this, it's the first thing to consider. Where do I live? How long can I stand to stay here in adverse conditions? And if that can be improved, how do I improve it?

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I realize that by the time you get to be 60 years old, by the time you get to be 45 years old. Moving gets to be a whole lot more difficult than it was when you were in your 20s and 30s. If you're in your 20s and 30s, moving doesn't bother you, but the older you get the more serious any perturbation in your schedule is, and this is just the way people are, all right.

Mark Rippetoe:
If you're 80 years old and you're living in Brooklyn, you aren't going anywhere. You can't even conceive of that. You know, it's a if if you're 80 years old and somebody makes you move, it's like the end of the fucking world, you know, it's just a giant, giant... You more scheduled, more old you are, the more scheduled you are. The more you'd begin to depend on daily routine. I know this from personal experience. Daily routine becomes precious to you because it's stability.

Mark Rippetoe:
And when you're 25, you don't give a shit about stability, you want the challenge, you want things to be different. You want to dig in and experience as many different things as you can. So 25 year olds move all the time. But what you're old, you can't do that.

Mark Rippetoe:
So if I'm talking to you and you're 40, you need to give some serious consideration to what the hell's going on before you stay there another 20 years and the situation deteriorates even more than it is now. Now, this is a good time to point out the fact that here we are a year into this shit, right- and you know, you might think and you may be absolutely correct that I am doomsaying and being unnecessarily pessimistic.

Mark Rippetoe:
Not one thing I'm going to tell you today doesn't apply to everybody. Everybody's situation, whether or not it's the end of the fucking world, OK, it's better to be self-sufficient and as independent as you can stand to be just because it frees you from constraints that people who are under the thumb of other people have upon them. And you don't want that. A

Mark Rippetoe:
nd I understand if you don't think like this, that's fine. Turn me off. Because, you know, I. I'm just you know, I'm not going to agree that the greatest city in the world is a good place to be. Never has been a good place to be. You get used to it. But there are too many things you can't do, like drive. Right?

[off-camera]:
Well, you got to remember that it's it's life is always tradeoff. So the problem is it a lot of people haven't even thought this way about their situation. So if if you know you know, obviously if you're in if you're in a situation where you can't where you have to be in one of these places, at least understand the problem.

Mark Rippetoe:
I understand that you have to be there, not that you should want to be there, A lot of people figured that out about six months ago, and that's why you can't give an apartment away in Upper East Side Manhattan right now. The damn things are vacant because people figured out you don't have to actually live there to work.

[off-camera]:
Yeah, everybody learned that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Everybody learned that the hard way.

[off-camera]:
Using your Big Lie analogy, it's the it's the idea that you were going to be taken care of. And that's the lie. You know, we all we all think that everything's going to be just fine and that it would be great if that's actually what occurs. But you have to realize.

Mark Rippetoe:
It might not. You know, right now, I didn't start behaving this way, way I behave, where the things somebody described you today, last April. You know, I've lived out in the country basically, the majority of my life, because I didn't want to be subject to the whims of neighbors and you know, it may turn out this year that that was a real smart thing to have done a long time ago. You know, but even if it doesn't turn out that way, I still like it better out there, it's worthwhile.

[off-camera]:
You've lived this kind of lifestyle for a long, long time and for somebody who's never thought about it...

Mark Rippetoe:
I've done all the thinking for you.

Mark Rippetoe:
So let's say you've you've, you know, moved into a situation where your your housing situation is not at the mercy of a bunch of fucking idiots. All right. And. And you don't you're not beholden to anybody else and you've got your you're happy with your housing set up.

Mark Rippetoe:
Several of the things that that you have to have in your house need to be thought about. All right. Electricity, for example, is a wonderful thing to have. Ask anybody in the eighteen sixties what they think about that, and they'll tell you that, yes, it's better to have electricity.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, where are you going to get your electricity? Well I my situation in particular, I have I have two places. I have a place here in Wichita County way out in the county and I have on grid electrical out there. And I have a place in Colorado up in the high country in Colorado, and I'm off grid up there. Both places have electricity. Two completely different systems, two completely different sets of calculations about what system to have.

Mark Rippetoe:
In in here in Wichita County I'm hooked up to the electrical grid. I have a service that runs down my little county road that I had to pay for when I when I built the house The electric company put the line up my hill to the top of the hill. They put in a pole transformer and then buried the service up to the house.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then I set up my house just with regular house current. And I've got I got a couple of 220 breakers, they used to have an electric range in there when I first built the house, I've talked about more of that later, but it became apparent a long time ago out on my hill that if there was a thunderstorm and we took a lightning strike on that on that pole that it would blow the fuse on the pole and I'd be out of power until Oncor could come out and fix the thing back up.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's their equipment on the pole that doesn't belong to me. So they're responsible for maintenance on the thing, so. It occurred to me that, yeah, I could get on the cell phone and call on Oncor and wait. And they're pretty good really. They show up within an hour usually and turn everything back on.

Mark Rippetoe:
But what if I'm out of town? What if I'm out of town. I've got freezers full of meat, I've got a refrigerator inside. All that stuff's off and if I'm gone for three or four days or a week or two weeks or whatever. And I don't have a way to back up that electric power. Then I'm going to lose all of that, all of that investment, so I bought a backup generator.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's called a standby generator and it sits on the on the pad outside your house right next to your electric service. And the way these things work is they sense the drop in the power coming off the pole. And usually it's about five seconds after the drop in service to give it time - wometimes the service wavers and stuff and it's not really an outage. So they wait five seconds and then they turn on and there's a there's a battery that starts the engine. That operates an electric generator.

Mark Rippetoe:
And what you want is one of these things that is powerful enough to generate enough current in the absence of of the grid power to at least power your freezers and run your air conditioners and stuff, because, you know, you've got kids in the house and the power goes off in the middle of August, it's going to be 98 degrees in the house around here, here pretty quick. So you've got it.

Mark Rippetoe:
You've got to accurately assess your demands and you've got to match your generator output for what might actually need to be run in the absence of power from the grid.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, typically, these generators run on propane. You can set them up in town to run on natural gas to. And depending on your situation, either propane or natural gas are probably going to be the the fuel that you're going to operate this this generator on. N

Mark Rippetoe:
Now they make big, more expensive units that run on diesel, but that's going to require you to inventory a bunch of diesel in a tank. And one of the problems with that is you've got a 2000 gallon diesel tank or a 500 gallon diesel tank, and you don't run the generator that often, that diesel gets old and becomes kind of a problem and doesn't work very well.

Mark Rippetoe:
By far, the more efficient way to do this is to have a propane tank. Natural gas, if you're in town, is fine because the natural gas is gone. Problem with being in town is, is that I don't know of any municipal jurisdictions that will let you have a propane tank on your property. I don't think they want propane tanks in town, some unincorporated places probably were fine with it, but for instance, here in Wichita Falls, you can't have a propane tank. A big propane tank, you have one to size, operate your gas grill, obviously, but a big permanent 250 gallon, even 250 gallons of small propane tank mine at the house is a 500 gallon tank.

Mark Rippetoe:
And on the rare occasions where the power goes out, we got backup electricity from the generator. And I wouldn't be without that. I wouldn't be without it. I would use it all the time. It's terribly important if you're going to be out in my situation to have a standby generator. Now, here's a little helpful hint. There are two main manufacturers of propane standby generators in the U.S. in the United States, Kohler, and Generac. Do not buy a generic. Do not buy a Generac.

Mark Rippetoe:
The worst customer service in the industry. Their owners manuals are unintelligible gibberish. They do not support the electricians that actually install the shittiest products. The one I bought, the first one I had up it up at the cabin the day that thing was installed, it started leaking oil. And I had those guys come back out about four times and they couldn't get it to quit leaking oil. Always a giant mess all over everywhere

[off-camera]:
brand new?

Mark Rippetoe:
Brand new. Brand new. Leaked oil first day. There's no excuse for that shit. You know. So I replaced that with a Kohler up there, love it. Just got a new Kohler here. So if I was buying one, that'd be what I'd do. I'd get a Kohler. And again, propane, if you can find it, if you're allowed to own it, you want your own propane tank.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, if I were you, I would have a 500 gallon propane tank. I would not have a 50. They can only fill a propane tank to 80 percent. Because of the because the pressures involved in a completely full tank, they'll only fill one to 80 percent. So a 250 gallon propane tank with a 250 gallon in internal volume holds 200 gallons propane, a 500 gallon propane tank holds 400 gallons propane. And that's all they can get in it. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if you're if your standby generator comes on and has to run a couple of days, you're going to and you're the least bit low, a 250 gallon tank is going to be right at the limit of its capacity pretty quick. So I would have a bigger tank.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, most of the time, you can rent a tank from the propane provider and it's real reasonable, like continue to own the tank. You rent the tank for sixty dollars a year or something like that. Or you can find a used one and buy it and own the tank. That's probably the better way to do it. And yeah, I would I would immediately have plans made to do that where I going to have a situation like I'm talking about.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, our situation in Colorado, we're off grid up there, we have a solar power system up there. Solar power has gotten cheaper recently. It's much more reasonable than it was 10 years ago. Solar cells are being manufactured at at a higher volume and they've come down quite a bit in price up there. I've got a 3000 watt array on the roof of the house and I've mounted it on the roof of the house because the orientation of the house is such that that angle is good for the sun.

Mark Rippetoe:
And when you start talking about solar power, these things become critical. That angle of incidence from them, from the sun has got to be within a certain tolerance and 90 degrees in order that the cells operate efficiently. It's interesting that up there, the the position of the sun across the sky during the during the day is more efficient for generating power in winter than it is in the summer. Is it more coming in, more of a straight line in the 90 degrees to the solar panels.

Mark Rippetoe:
And then what you have to have in addition to that is a place to store the energy that you're that you're collecting off the roof during the daytime. And this means you're going to have to have a battery array. So I've got an array of eight six volt deep cycle batteries just changed over from wet batteries to AGM a couple of years ago. And this is what allows you to operate for two or three days in the event of a snowstorm that covers up the solar panels. And allows you to store power for use at night.

Mark Rippetoe:
You still have to be prudent with your use of electricity in a situation like this, but we haven't really had a lot of problems with it. And especially these new batteries have been really good. I'm real happy with these now. We also up there have a propane standby generator exactly like we like the one we have in Texas, because in the winter, if you get a snowstorm and the roof is covered with three feet of snow and it doesn't clear itself off that tiny little bit of electricity I'm using in the house over the winter is going to pull the battery array down after several days and this one is set up to to kick on the generator kicks on when the batteries drop down below about forty nine volts.

[off-camera]:
That generator charges the batteries?

Mark Rippetoe:
Generator charges, the batteries. And charges them and it cycles on and stays on until it gets the battery array back up to I think it's 56 Volt. Their six volt batteries, but 48 volts is the nominal voltage of that system. But, you know, they'll hold more than. So those of you electrical guys know more about this than I do. But the the thing comes on, it fully charges the batteries. And then you you're back up to operating at full battery strength again and you use some propane. And so I've got a 500 gallon tank up there.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, why would I not put a solar system on my house in Texas? Because it doesn't amortize. It doesn't amortize. Even with lower prices for solar cells right now, you've got to have a bunch of infrastructure to operate one of these systems. You've got the panels themselves. Those have to be installed. You've got to bring them down to bring power down off the roof and stick them into your battery system. And then the batteries which make DC. power, the solar cells which make DC power have to be up converted to AC in a system that also is necessary for using AC power in the house, because all your appliances are AC and you're going to have to have AC power.

Mark Rippetoe:
So there is transformer type equipment. It's called an inverter. And it changes the DC battery power into AC power and powers to the house like that. All of that's expensive equipment. I think you could probably buy the system I've got right now up in Colorado for probably fifteen thousand dollars.

Mark Rippetoe:
But look at it like this. My home electric bill in Wichita County last month was fifty six dollars. It's going to take me a hell of a long time to pay for a fifteen thousand dollar system rather than just stay on the grid for 56 dollars a month. In fact, the way I've got my house built - I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second - the way I've got a house built, my biggest electric bill last summer in 100 degree plus temperatures was like one hundred eighty five dollars.

Mark Rippetoe:
So these are some considerations now, wind power, I wouldn't even consider wind power for a home thing. It's a mechanical device and those things break. They just fucking break. You know, but moving parts, that sort of shit, they just break, I wouldn't even think about a wind turbine generator system for a home application. Not at all my house.

Mark Rippetoe:
Better do this for I forget about it... I live in a house that I designed and built back in 1999. It's got... it's a stonehouse, it's got 18 inch thick stone and concrete walls. There's a hundred and twenty five yards of concrete in the slab. In the footings, in the in the carport, I got it's a hell of a bunch of concrete in it all, the whole structure, it's not going anywhere.

Mark Rippetoe:
Thick walls like that make a heat sink. And it's very easy to keep that house cool if you don't let it heat up. Very easy to keep it cool. I've got a double metal roof on it, a double insulated double metal roof. And it's the house is just like an ice chest. I've got... I don't even have actual windows in the house, I have glass blocks, double thick glass blocks and where the windows used to be.

Mark Rippetoe:
So I've got a pretty energy-efficient house. I'm the greenest guy in Wichita County. Doesn't that make your heart warm to know that? So this is, you know, we'll put that back in the first category of housing. If you got the option of building a house, there's ways to build it that don't cost a lot of money up front because this was cheap house to build.

Mark Rippetoe:
I built it out of riprap, you know, construction limestone and concrete, relatively cheap. At least it was at the time. You dig a house into the side of a hill, there's a lot of ways to do it that don't involve one of these multi gabled, you know, all this attic space to heat and cool and everything. Looks stupid. Looks like a hive, you know. Gable Farms, I call them.

Mark Rippetoe:
So what do I do about water out there? I have never had a water well out there. When I built that house, I built it with the intention of using my roof to catch rainwater and gutter the rainwater into a water tank of a tank that is used to hold drinking water for household use is referred to as a cistern. So I have- I started off with one and I've got two systems out there now that sit on concrete pads above the ground.

Mark Rippetoe:
I have a total water capacity of 7,100 gallons. Which is, you know, under shitty circumstances, about a year and a half for the water, if you are careful with what you have to be in a situation like this, I'm not on the water grid. They can't turn me off, in other words. They can turn off my power, but then I've got a backup generator and they can't turn my water off.

Mark Rippetoe:
They... I have my own sewage system, so I'm I'm totally self-contained out there. One of the things that I that I did do that was, well, I got some good advice from my plumber is when I set my cistern up and I set my septic tank in my leach lines up, my leach lines are only 100 feet long. We only got 100 feet of each line. And up there on that hill, that's plenty.

Mark Rippetoe:
Most systems that you have now pump the... They use a two stage tank and then they pump the effluent out and broadcast it out onto the onto the yard where it evaporates. Is that what yours is? Those things break. Mine is just a simple gravity flow system by leach lines are over a bed of gravel and 100 foot long trench.

Mark Rippetoe:
Never had two minutes worth of trouble with it because my gray water goes out on the ground. My washing machine water goes out on the ground, my the gray water from showers and lavatories and kitchen sinks goes into the sewer because you got to keep it wet, right? Black water from the toilet goes into the sewer, but the gray water from the washing machine with soap and bleach and shit and it goes out on the ground, down the hill.

Mark Rippetoe:
The bleach is what fucks up your septic tank. If you put a bunch of bleach in your septic tank all the time, you're going to have to have it pumped out. My septic tank has been operating for 22 years without any maintenance at all. They theoretically can go forever without any maintenance because they're self-contained units if they're designed correctly. So keep that in mind.

Mark Rippetoe:
Also, you'd rather not have to be hooked up to a sewer, to a city sewer, because any service they provide you, they can take away. Right. So that's the water, I don't filter my water, it's just rainwater, distilled water. You know, it's one word of caution, distilled water will eventually, over time, eat through galvanized.

Mark Rippetoe:
I'm going to have to replace that first, the 22 year old tank needs to be replaced. I've got some little weepy spots coming through because distilled water is thirsty water. There's no ions in it. So it will automatically pull the shit off the side of the tank. And that's their little some rusted through spot and that's just going to get worse. So I'm going to have to deal with it here pretty quick as the next major project out there.

Mark Rippetoe:
OK, now. Let's see, that's all of the housing shit, most of it, if I think of anything, to go back and throw it in now. Let's talk about food, food's important, everybody likes to eat, right? In my opinion, the most important thing that you can have. And. It once you get this. And you understand how free it keeps you from the grocery store, you will wonder how you got along without it is a chest deep freeze.

Mark Rippetoe:
They get down to 15 below. They're terribly, terribly useful, terribly useful things. I've got an 18 cubic foot, which is a big one, they make it bigger than that, but most people don't have room on a wall for a bigger one than that. I've got a nine cubic foot. I've got a couple of those. I've got a total I own a total of one, two, three, four chest freezers. And I try to keep them full all the time.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, chest freezers operate way, way colder than the freezer on top of your refrigerator. Those things get down to about five degrees or maybe zero if they're not not disturbed. But if you want to keep a whole bunch of meat in a in a viable condition for a long period of time, they have to go down way colder than that. You can get a chest freezer down to 15 below.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, this allows you the luxury of buying meat on sale in big quantities. You repackage it so that there's not any of the meat that's not in contact with the wrapping material or little freezer burn freezer burn as a dried out piece of of the cut of meat while it's in the freezer. And that has to be cut off and thrown away.

Mark Rippetoe:
If all of the meat, when you bring it home. Let's say you find a bunch of hamburger on sale and you bring you buy five five pound chubbs of hamburger meat, you bring it home, you divide it into one and a half pound packages and you put that on a piece of plastic wrap, get all the air out of it and wrap it up real good and tape it shut and package those packets. Make them flat so they'll thaw out fast when you want to use them. Those things will keep for a couple, three years, maybe beef freezes very, very stably for years at a time. And venison does the same thing. Venison keeps basically for... I've eaten five year old venison out of my freezer and it's fine. It's perfectly fine.

Mark Rippetoe:
The trick is to store it correctly. There can't be any air. There can't be any broken seals, can't be any air in contact with meat itself or a little freezer burn at freezer burn will grow down into the meat and you're going to waste a bunch of it if you do that. So when you buy it on sale, bring it home and make sure that it is wrapped up correctly, and you're going to put this in your deep freezer.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, I don't like a stand up deep freeze. A lot of people prefer those because they have better access to all the stuff to the shelves and shit. But they don't hold as much meat. They don't hold...there's just not as many square feet and things. And every time you open the door, all of the cold air falls out in the floor. They don't operate as efficiently as a chest freezer does.

Mark Rippetoe:
You ought to be able to find a chest freezer for a little one. Four hundred and eighty five dollars and bigger ones for four for fifty, something like that. They're worth every penny of it, because once you get into this and you make contact with somebody that that is in the whole beef business, you can buy a side of beef at a time and have it processed and take delivery on it and put that in your freezer.

Mark Rippetoe:
And the first time you buy an entire beef - and when I say an entire beef, I mean a steer. If you buy a beef, you're talking about buying an animal, the whole animal. The first time you do that and you pay a dollar twenty a pound for him on the hoof and then you have him killed and you have him processed. Fourteen hundred pound steer turns into probably five fifty six hundred six hundred twenty five pounds of meat, wrapped and frozen.

Mark Rippetoe:
The first time you do that, you've paid for the freezer probably twice over because the amount of money that you have saved, having bought the thing on the hoof. Right, and yeah, you'll make money with that freezer over the years. You know, what you do is you get divorced from the meat department at the grocery store. You start making other connections and buying your beef elsewhere.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, those of you that have out to my house and eaten with me know that I keep mutton, sheep meat. I keep sheep in the freezer. Uh. And everybody around here that's participated in this little habit I've acquired will tell you that their aged, mature mutton is better than any beef they've ever eaten. It's the amazing those sheep chops, those are the goddamnedest things you've ever had.

Mark Rippetoe:
And I'm paying three hundred dollars apiece for those for those sheep. Hundred and twenty five for the processing. And they hang for two and a half, three weeks, and it's the best shit you ever had, the chops are indescribable how good they are.

Mark Rippetoe:
And, you know, there's other other things you can do. There's other things you can do. You can put game, you shoot there and depebding on where you are, elk. Antelope, all of that meat keeps very, very well at at a very low temperature for a long time. It's a stable source of protein that makes you independent of the grocery store. And it allows you to more thoroughly control the quality of the food you're eating too.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now keep this in mind, pork does not keep. Like the other red meat does, pork does not keep that low. You can put a pork roast in the same 15 below chest freezer that you got your beef in and a year later, it won't be any good. So if you're going to buy a pig, eat him pretty quick, don't don't wait around on him. He's not stable like beef is.

Mark Rippetoe:
You can buy show pigs. So you'll get plugged into the into the 4H community, and if you become known as somebody wants to buy a steer, they'll call you after show season. They got to sell all those animals. And you have to develop a relationship with a custom kill plant, as it's called custom kill, where they where they kill the animal for you and process it, hang it as hang the side you want them to hang while we do a whole show on beef aging like we talked to Eric about that when we did the beef show.

Mark Rippetoe:
And you can. You can take. You know, sheep, goats, you can probably do. I don't like goat meat, but there are there are meat goats available. There's lots and lots of options. Once you get plugged in to a custom kill situation and you can you know, you can find cheap. You can find. Uh. If you're not picky about the quality of your beef, you you expand your your resources quite a bit of.

Mark Rippetoe:
For instance, a, you know, dairy breed stear, he's not going to be any good for anything more than hamburger, but if you want five hundred pounds of hamburger. You know, he would be easy to buy you and several of your friends can go in on it because now you guys have got a place to put a whole bunch of hamburger meat if you've got your chest freezer.

Mark Rippetoe:
So think real hard about buying one of these things and have some room at your garage for it. And by all means, if you've got a chest freezer, check it every once in a while. Every once in a while, the compressor fails, you know, especially if they're older. You need to check them and make sure they're still running and have backup juice hooked up to the things that would be the best plan there is. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
What else in terms of food do we need to think about? I think the Mormons have it all down with the grain storage thing. Wheat, oats, rye. You can use it as the berries or grind it and flour. What else? Those are their real stable for storage materials, put a five gallon bucket of wheat. It put a piece of dry ice in the bottom of the. Put the wheat in on top of it. And set the lid on top of it, and next day you set it down and the CO2 is evaporated, have driven all the oxygen out of the wheat. Now you've got a real, real, ultra stable 20 year plus long unit of, you know, bunch of wheat.

Mark Rippetoe:
And that's a real good way to to have grain. I mean, grind it into bread, bread and hamburger. You have hamburgers. Not cheeseburgers, but hamburgers, yeah. So these are some things you need to be thinking about, but you have to have the tools and the deep freeze. The chest freezer is the is the primary tool for these things.

Mark Rippetoe:
Water we've already talked about now what do you. There are storage items that you need. That you ought to have on hand all the time, you ought to have some bleach on hand, a couple of gallons of bleach because bleach sterilizes things and there are circumstances under which sterilization might be very, very important to you.

Mark Rippetoe:
I would keep a couple of gallons of bleach. I would get the normal bleach, not the thickened kind that doesn't splash. That's got other shit in it, but I would when I get my two storage gallons of bleach, I would put those things in a plastic tub like a rectangular plastic dish tub. And the reason you do that is because every once in a while, a bleach bottle will leak. I've had it happen. You may have had it happen. And you want that to leak, not all over everywhere, but just into the tub where you've got those two gallon bleach bottles stuck. All right.

Mark Rippetoe:
I would certainly do that. Keep those things in a gallon in a...What would that be? A five gallon washtub? Plastic. Yeah. That plastic that would be that be what you want to keep these things in .and the you'll find uses for the bleach. I think I'd also have some iodine around just for first aid purposes. If you have to sterilize water, if your water becomes contaminated, you can sterilize water with either sodium hypochlorite, which is bleach or iodine. And the instructions for doing that in terms of the dilution are all online.

Mark Rippetoe:
But you can make water safe to drink even if it's contaminated using both of those substances. And it's important to think ahead like that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Tools. As a general rule, any time you need a tool for a little job buy the damn thing. If you need a tool for something, buy it, chances are very good you're going to need it again. Don't borrow tools, buy your own tools. And collect them. Even if you only use it once every five years, you might be in a situation where you don't have the opportunity to go by it next time you need it.

Mark Rippetoe:
I would have tools. I would have an air compressor. I would get an air compressor, air tools are useful, you need to be able to blow up to inflate your tires. There's all kinds of things you use an air compressor for. Um. You can buy those things at Lowe's or Home Depot. I've got.... I had a pancake one just with one tank. I had one of those didn't seem to be particularly sturdy, had to end up giving that away. So I bought one of the what do they call the thing with the two tanks that are stacked on top of each other.

[off-camera]:
I don't know if that has a different name.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's not a it's not called pancake.

[off-camera]:
A pancake is just the little flat one.

Mark Rippetoe:
It's the flat. The little flat. When it's light duty home, do this thing that I've got. Well, you can run paint guns and anything else off of it. You run probably torque wrench off the thing. Yeah. Air wrench. But I blow things off where there's all kinds of things you use it for. You need one of those, you need one of those.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if you got electrical back up, you'll always have that compressed air. You can air up a flat tire. You ought to get one of those are going to be a couple hundred bucks, but they're worth every dime of it. It's one of these things you're just thinking ahead.

Mark Rippetoe:
OK, dog food ought to have a supply of dog food. You know, unless you're in Manhattan, in which case feed your neighbors, feed, feed your neighbors to the dogs. A little bit at a time, it's kind of rich, you don't want to make him sick on the puke all over the floor.

[off-camera]:
Put the rest of the neighbor in the deep freeze.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, process to rest of the neighbor. Once again get all of the air out of the package, so he doesn't freezer burn. I'm in fact, I'm being funny, you know. Look, I'd eata neighbor if I had to. Mm hmm. I know how to cook a neighbor too.

[off-camera]:
Depends on the part, right?

Mark Rippetoe:
Depends on the cut. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sure does.

Mark Rippetoe:
Medicines, you have supply of medicines and. That's an interesting thing, if you're really inventive and you really want to do this, you're what you're going to do is come up with a little list of medicines that you'll actually need. For example, you ought to have a supply of doxycycline, commonly very useful antibiotic. You ought to have some doxycycline. You ought to have some Bactrim, which is sulfamethoxyzole and trimethoprim. It is a it's an older antibiotics, very good for all kinds of things.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're going to need three or four different antibiotics, because not everything to respond on all diseases, respond to the same same treatment. So Cipro would be a good one to have if you really, really needed it. Macrodantin is a good thing that's used commonly for urinary tract infections.

Mark Rippetoe:
All these things are prescription medications. But what you're going to do is be clever and you're going to get them from the the boys that call you on the phone every evening about six o'clock that want to sell you Viagra. That's who you buy these things from when Canadian pharmacy calls and there's an Indian gentleman, an Indian gentleman on the other line calling from Canada, he's going to try to sell you Viagra.

Mark Rippetoe:
You ask him how much is doxycycline? And he'll say doxycycline. Hold on. And say those are 50 cents apiece, well I want one hundred and eighty of those. And he'll take your order and you give him a list of these things, and he's no more interested in you having a prescription for these than he is and you having a prescription for the Viagra. And he'll sell it to you.

Mark Rippetoe:
OK, this is inside secret, don't tell everybody this, but those guys are useful, you know, use them to build up your store of medications at home because you you if you get strep throat, you don't need to. And it's Friday. You don't need to wait till Monday to get to the doctor to get medicated for strep throat. You need some in right now or everybody in the whole building is going to be sick.

Mark Rippetoe:
So you go ahead and have that with you and learn how to learn what to do with the stuff you're going to have to get educated. If you're going to have this stuff, you have to get educated. But we have the tools now to to have the information we need to effectively use this stuff.

Mark Rippetoe:
And. Oh, yeah, and I'm telling. Yeah, right. The doctors are not all pissed off at me. But since when is that bothered by us? You know. I'm pissed off at them. You know. Yeah, I'm telling you to keep a supply in the house of antibiotics that you have bought on the black market, that you have taken the time to learn how to use and use them correctly, this is on you is not on the doctor. You're the one sick, not him. Right? And, yeah, I think that that's quite reasonable advice. And I don't know if this is legal. Can I say that?

[off-camera]:
You're not a doctor.

Mark Rippetoe:
I'm not a doctor. What the fuck do I know? Don't believe anything I just said. I was kidding. Don't do that. Only doctors know how to use medicine. Right?

Mark Rippetoe:
And let's see, I'm kind of the basic commodities. Oh, what kind of car or truck do you drive? Now, I'm of the opinion that if you're going to have one vehicle, this, of course, you city people are going to disagree with, you're going to have one vehicle, you need a truck. You carry people and stuff in a truck if you've got a car or you can carry people. Right.

Mark Rippetoe:
Here, if you don't have a pickup then chances are sometime this year, you've borrowed one of your buddies' pick-Ups. Get your own you know, you need a pickup and your second vehicle should be a car. Now what kind of truck do I have?

Mark Rippetoe:
Well, depending on where you live and where you travel to, obviously the most universally useful vehicle is a four wheel drive, three quarter ton truck, three quarter ton truck towing vehicle. If you have to pull a trailer, you can pull a trailer behind your three quarter ton truck. A half ton truck is basically a car with a bed. I'd get a three quarter ton, four wheel drive truck.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now opinions vary about whether diesel's more useful than a gas engine. Again, this is going to depend entirely on what your what your situation is, where you're going to use it. If you live in North Dakota, where it's 40 below zero, diesel is hard to keep running in those kind of conditions because of the nature of diesel. The fuel will gel in extreme cold. Gas is useful at pretty much all temperatures, but I prefer for driving around on a highway a lot, I prefer diesel truck.

Mark Rippetoe:
I've got a four wheel drive, diesel truck, and again, this's a three quarter ton truck, it's a it's a four door. Long wide, bed, i'ts a big truck. Long wide bed is a four by with between the wheel wells bed. And and I've got a two wheel drive truck that is also a four door diesel, both of them are four door diesels. They're Dodges, and they got the five nine Cummins Diesel in it.

Mark Rippetoe:
This is a...wen he's running it's a damn good engine, it runs the...that four door the two wheel drive truck I've got runs down the highway nicer than any Cadillac I've ever driven. And it's a it's a it's a nice, nice pickup for the highway. Long wheelbase, it's very stable. Just drives down the highway nicely. It's 21 miles to the gallon, which is decent gas mileage.

Mark Rippetoe:
You know, now the four wheel drive truck doesn't get anywhere close to that kind of gas mileage because modern four wheel drive trucks are turning the - all of that assembly in front is is turning as it rolls down the road. It's not engaged to the engine unless you put it in four wheel drive. But nonetheless, all of that assembly in the front is still spinning and there's a lot more friction, a lot more resistance, a lot more weight. So that that truck gets about 15 miles a gallon.

Mark Rippetoe:
But if you need a four wheel drive truck and sometimes you will need a four wheel drive truck, then a two wheel drive, a truck will strand you and require a tow truck when a four wheel drive truck will not. So this is something to keep in mind.

Mark Rippetoe:
Now, if you live in Florida and you're good about staying out of the mud, you don't really need a four wheel drive truck. But if you're going to be anywhere where it snows, this ought to be something that you consider. Four wheels is is way, way -- it's amazing how much more effective that thing is when the road is slick than a two wheel drive truck, just absolutely amazing. You never had one, never driven one. You just have to experience it to see.

Mark Rippetoe:
I wouldn't go back to not having a four wheel drive truck. And then if you want your want, your truck is all straightened out. Then if you want a car, your car, you know, get a car gets pretty good gas mileage. You know, I my personal preference for cars and trucks is that manual transmission, I don't own anything with an automatic transmission.

Mark Rippetoe:
I don't you know, that's I'm hard headed that way. Manuals are a lot cheaper to fix. We have to fix them. Clutches are cheaper to install than whole new automatic transmission. So. These are just some some considerations.

Mark Rippetoe:
Let's see in terms of tools you ought to have two chains and a floor jack, and some stuff like that that allow you to get out of there and work on the thing. And make sure you;ve got good spares for cars and trucks. You know, every time you change tires, you all take the best tire that you're changing off of the truck and have that mounted as the spare. A

Mark Rippetoe:
nd I've recently taken the carry in my spare tire in the bed of the truck. Because if you need it, you know, thing's sucked up under the bed of the truck.

[off-camera]:
Takes 15 minutes to get it out.

Mark Rippetoe:
Takes 15 minutes to get it out if you can get to it. If you're not stuck in the mud, you know. It's a giant pain in the ass if it's up under there and get the mud thrown up on it all the time and you never think about the spare, you never check the air in the damn thing. And 90 percent of the time it's going to be flat if that's where you carry it. So I plan B is carry the spare in the bed of the truck.

[off-camera]:
Anyway. What else? What am I leaving out?

[off-camera]:
We'll be good to have stuff to dig yourself out.

Mark Rippetoe:
Yeah, if you're going somewhere where there could be an issue, if you're going somewhere where you anticipate using your four wheel drive, you ought to have a shovel with with it. No doubt about that.

[off-camera]:
You can get those those tread things, little mats you lay down. Well, if you got four wheel drive you probably don't that.

Mark Rippetoe:
Probably don't need that. If you're stuck in a four wheel drive, that's not going to work. But you ought to have a shovel. You got a shot at it with a shovel. Uh, keep good tires on the damn truck, put ten ply tires on your truck. Load range E is what that's called load range E, the 90 pound tires. Don't put shitty tires on your truck.

Mark Rippetoe:
Uh. Again, the type of tire is going to depend on the use. I sure do like Toyos. Those damn things are. They're middle of the road in price. Those are the best tires I've I've been driving Toyos for 25 years. And they're just damn good tires. For the money, they're the best thing you can do. Changes the whole feel of the of the ride. Amazing how good those are. You know, for the fast cars, you can't put them on there, but the damn things are good tires. For less money than you would pay for Michelins. And they probably roll better than Michelins.

Mark Rippetoe:
What other helpful bits of advice do we have today? What I wanted to do today is just to get you started thinking about what you're going to do if things get worse than they are right now. And they may not. They may jus...t everything may just be just as right as rain by the middle of next week. Could be. But none of what I have told you is a bad idea anyway.

Mark Rippetoe:
If you've got to go buy Wal-Mart every day before you go home because you have not made better plans than that, you need to start thinking a little bit differently about the time spent on these, on these little chores that you don't need to do, you don't need to decide about dinner 30 minutes before you going to eat it. You know, you got to make plans for these kinds of things.

Mark Rippetoe:
And if we've given you any helpful suggestions, I hope we have I encourage you to think carefully about all the stuff we've talked about and start implementing some of these ideas into your particular situation, improve your situation if you at all. Can those of you that are getting these stupid assed fourteen hundred dollar stimulus checks from the criminal cocksuckers in D.C., that's not even that's not even declared as income. Don't spend it on beer, OK, spend it on something useful, some of the shit on this list that I've talked to you about today.

Mark Rippetoe:
You're going to need it eventually and you might as well take the opportunity now to buy it when it's less painless. If you had to buy the shit when you have to have it, that's not as good an idea is buying it now when you don't have to have it. OK.

Mark Rippetoe:
Thanks for joining us on Starting Strength Radio and watch your ass, all right? Later!

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