Our Struggles Make Great Content for The Podcast Class

We're so interesting.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

When I was eight, we were hit by “not a tornado.”

Nobody in my neighborhood said the word “tornado.” But we all knew we’d just lived through something powerful. We simply didn’t know which words to use. Whatever it was, it felled a dozen trees across the roads in our subdivision. It shredded roofs and bent basketball poles in half. We spent weeks cleaning up the destruction. In the end, words didn’t matter. The thing didn’t need a name.

It was a force of nature.

Life lessons can work into us before we even know what life lessons are. For me, it was simple. When you go to bed, the world doesn’t shut down. Forces of nature continue to act. They’ll send threats your way in the dead of night. It doesn’t matter how safe you think you are. It’s a trick we play on ourselves.

Safety is a bedtime story.

Still, you do your best. You adapt. You develop knowledge and skills to meet the world you live in. The world we live in now requires different tools from the ones we needed ten or twenty years ago. We call those tools “preps,” but they’re not so different from the way earlier generations lived.

Forces of nature are ripping through the world now, from energy crises to assassination attempts. The podcast world is finally getting riled up over reality, talking in very urgent tones and throwing around words like famine and genocide, and yet you can hear it in their voices. You can see it in their faces. Sometimes, they even say it out loud: They don’t believe they’ll be affected. They think it’s just going to happen to the rest of us, the ones working two or three jobs, the ones who don’t have six figures sitting in bank accounts, the ones who don’t have a line into the world of insider trading and polymarket grifts.

For them, it’s another topic.

So, word on the street is that the oil buffer that kept things relatively sane over here in North America is officially gone. It’s a matter of days before things get really bad. The Trump regime has been lying about everything from ceasefire deals to oil production, running pump and dump schemes through warfare, and preparing to saddle us with the outcome after they cash out.

The stock market has priced in TACO (Trump always chickens out). But as analysts have explained, you can chicken out of tariffs. You can’t really chicken out of a war where your opponent now holds all the leverage, and they’ve now realized the best way to ensure their own safety is to keep a vital transportation route closed until our military no longer poses a threat.

Nobody knows where it ends…

It’s a strange thing to watch everyone finally get so worked up over the things you’ve spent years preparing for. You and I prepare because we know we’ll be affected, and we know something else: Nobody is coming to save us.

We’ve seen it from Katrina to Helene.

These forces don’t simply end. They change the world. For example, Helene carved a path of dead timber through the South up through Appalachia, turning the entire region into a “ticking time bomb” of dead timber that’s now fueling forest fires during record droughts. You see how it works?

One record disaster paves the way for another. A hurricane from two years ago, which the podcast world has already forgotten, fuels wildfires today.

Even as the podcast world finally catches up to the Hormuz crisis, finally starts asking the right questions, we see them offer up the most worthless solutions. They tell us to buy crypto. They give us investing advice. Why? Because it’s all they know how to do. They would be completely useless during a real emergency. The only kind of “prepping” they do is filling bunkers with gold and food buckets. If the end of the world didn’t kill you, the food would.

Meanwhile, what am I doing?

Earlier this week, we stocked up on cheap wood shavings and pine bedding for an emergency compost toilet. We rigged up a dew catcher with PVC pipe and a leak diverter. We cleaned up our water generator. We picked our first strawberry of the season. We started shopping for a barometer.

This weekend, I’m going to start learning how to fix a bicycle. I’m learning about which bicycles are the best, the cheapest, and the most suitable for different emergencies. We might even get a roof rack, not because we’re adventurists, but because if you’re trying to bug out during a wildfire, and you end up in a traffic jam, then a bicycle just might save your life.

This is the kind of prepping we do.

I’ve read about preppers who charter helicopters or collect dirt bikes for emergency bugouts. I’m not the kind of prepper.

I’m the bicycle kind.

We’re not looking for opportunities to get rich. We don’t have a portfolio to protect. We’re living in the real world. We’re preparing for the forces of nature that the podcast class feels insulated from, the kind of events they dissect endlessly in their interviews and financial fearmongering.

Me?

I’ve lived through almost every kind of disaster now, even a brushfire, and my preps are responses to real situations, like picking my kid up from a mountain that caught fire and shut down roads last year.

That’s what I’m preparing for, to rescue my daughter from a burning mountain. I don’t prepare for this by sitting around pontificating about geopolitics. I gather information. I assess threats. I prepare.

I share what I’ve learned.

That’s a part of life now.

Many of you live this same life now, and you get it.

Strangely, the very podcast class that sits around predicting famines and energy crises will look at the kind of prepping we do and call us doomers and fearmongers. They sneer at our victory gardens. They tell us to peel open a can of spam and deal with it. For years now, I’ve wondered about this double standard.

Then it finally occurred to me:

It’s class warfare.

The podcast class doesn’t want us to be ready for these catastrophes. They don’t want us to develop resilience. They don’t want us to grow our own food. They don’t want us to make fire escape kits or rain catchment systems. They want to sell us their solutions, which sometimes include overpriced gadgets. They want us to stay glued to their feeds and their channels, clicking on the doom until it finally swallows us up, and then we die. They believe that by the time the famines finally come for us, they’ll be safe on their fortified ranches. They believe they’ll get invited to some billionaire’s bunker, because they interviewed him.

Would “what kind of bike is best for escaping wildfires?” ever wind up on a podcast like that? Probably not. It’s too practical. It’s too responsible. You’re not supposed to actually know what to do during a wildfire, a drought, a tornado, a famine, or a hurricane. You’re just supposed to sit around and worry about its impact on your 401K or the value of the dollar. You’re supposed to listen to them talk in circles about it. You’re supposed to clap for Mark Carney or King Charles when they say something halfway truthful about the state of the world. You’re supposed to bash Trump for the collapse of the petro-dollar, even if the petro-dollar is what got all of us into this mess in the first place. The minute you connect this or that crisis to the larger picture, the minute you suggest we would be in deep trouble even without this reckless war, the moment you try to save lives rather than simply predicting death tolls and furrowing your eyebrows, you become the fearmonger.

It’s interesting…

If there’s one upside, it’s that many of us who’ve been taking the warnings seriously are more prepared, materially and emotionally, for what’s happening now. I’m glad, because it’s perhaps the only upside…

As for the validation of those “I told you so” moments, that turns out to be a myth. There’s no real validation to be had. Even if you predicted all this, it doesn’t matter. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you anyway. The ones shouting about it the loudest now, the ones who suddenly discovered it was a bad idea to make the world dependent on fossil fuels, they get all the credit. The MAGA conspirators who suddenly had a change of heart, the agents of misinformation who are finally telling the truth for clicks, they get all the praise.

It’s almost like the world rewards you for being wrong.

And punishes you for being right.

There are many excellent writers and researchers on this platform who warned us about the energy crisis weeks ago. These podcast bruhs? Even as they throw around words like “famine” and “genocide” now, they still don’t believe it’s actually happening. You can tell. You can tell by the way they talk about all this. You can tell by how long it took them to say the word “genocide” in the context of Israel. One minute, they’re mocking you for wearing an N95 mask. The next minute, they’re encouraging you to hoard antivirals.

Watching them, listening to them, you get the sense that none of them have dealt with a real emergency. They just like to sit around and talk about other people’s emergencies, our emergencies, our disasters.

Our struggles are interesting to them.

It’s great content.