We live in a society in which by and large, most of the people in our society are letting the tail wag the dog.
What exactly does that mean, Salty?
Okay, the tail wagging the dog is an old expression, what it basically means is to lose track of what is truly important, and focus on small symptomatic stuff, or stuff that makes no difference whatever is a concentration of there's several different ways that you can describe it.
It's a concentration on the symptoms rather than the root causes.
Go to Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You by clicking HERE!
We live in a society in which by and large, most of the people in our society are letting the tail wag the dog.
What exactly does that mean, Salty?
Okay, the tail wagging the dog is an old expression, what it basically means is to lose track of what is truly important, and focus on small symptomatic stuff, or stuff that makes no difference whatever is a concentration of there's several different ways that you can describe it.
It's a concentration on the symptoms rather than the root causes.
Go to Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You by clicking HERE!
Hello, everybody.
Salty:Hello everybody and welcome to the show the big show the most important and critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our car. I don't know why it was just tripping breath or the word car.
Spice:It's a perfectly good car that's not requiring a lot of drama to move down the road. No,
Salty:no, it's not we got the we got the car we're on the highway is much as it is considered a highway. The big Hemi engine is sitting here perin so everything's good. We've got a guy in a brand spanking new Mustang, which are really sharp looking cars, but it ain't a GT. So I mean, come on, you're gonna buy a Mustang get gt with the big six or the big motor in it. Don't get a little six older. All show no go. Anyway, pressing right along. You know, I saw in this somewhat works into the topic for today's podcast I saw back there recently, a big three legged dog, it was hopping around on three legs, and was by the side of the road, it was watching our card as it was driving past and you can see that wistful look in its face that it really wanted to chase our car. And if you think about that for a minute, a three legged dog wishing it could chase our car. You know, some people just don't really learn lesson was not exactly the topic. Oh, they don't
Spice:learn the right lesson, little
Salty:word. The topic of today's podcast is about dogs, but not really. It's about dog tails, and society. Because right now we live in a society. And this is a this is more of a general podcast than a prepping podcast. We live in a society in which by and large, most of the people in our society are letting the tail wag the dog
Spice:tail wag the dog. What's that mean? Salty.
Salty:Okay, the tail wagging the dog is an old expression. And what it basically means is to lose track of what is truly important, and focus on small symptomatic stuff, or stuff that makes no difference whatever is a concentration of there's several different ways that you can describe it. But one of the ways is, it's a concentration on the
Spice:symptoms rather than the root causes.
Salty:Thank you. Sorry, I had to stop and was actually driving attention to
Spice:his driving.
Salty:He was paying attention by driving, there's a little pause or like, Okay, what is that weird shout, okay,
Spice:if you're focusing on the small outcomes of a situation, rather than stepping back and looking at the big picture, you're gonna try and put a bunch of band aids on all the little small problems you see. And you're going to be too distracted by that, to have a feel for what's really going on and be addressing the right things. And it's not going to work, because you can put a bandaid on all the symptoms if you want. But if you don't address the root, cause the symptoms just keep coming back and new ones keep popping up beside it.
Salty:Let me give you a for example, an example. Ignite, you bought an old car. And since there's a Mustang following us, I'm going to use an old car I had at one time it didn't actually have a leaky head gasket. So the example I'm going to use is let's say you got out you bought a 1977 Ford Mustang two with a 2.3 liter four cylinder engine in it, which almost by default means you have a car that leaks oil out every scene because that's what they did. But your particular atrocious engine has got a leaky head gasket. Okay, you got this leaking head gasket. What that means is the cylinder head there's once there's a cylinder head so four cylinders is only one has a cover on it. And between that cover and the engine block, there is a gasket and that gaskets split supposedly, except on everything on everything that is the Ford 2.3 liter made in the 70s that keeps the oil from leaking out all over your motor. It's a gasket, it's the seal, right? These things are notorious for leaking. So what do you do? The problem is you have a bad head gasket. Now you can take the head cover off and you can replace it with a high quality aftermarket gasket which won't work anymore or that would be the dog wagging the tail because you are fixing that particular problem.
Spice:If you Just keep cranking more oil into it. The tails wagging the dog.
Salty:Exactly. So the tail wagging the dog you put more oil in, but even more what you what you do is you Okay, since this thing is chucking oil out a court every thousand miles, why not just find the cheapest oil I can put in this so I can reduce the overall cost? This car has of operating Yeah, it's gonna leave a
Spice:trail of black smoke
Salty:trail black smoke behind you. Yeah, you'll get everywhere you park, you're gonna have a puddle of oil underneath it. But you know, who cares, right? oils good. Oil keeps the the economy moving. We've heard that right. That's what they mean.
Spice:Right? Sure. That's not what they mean. No, right. But here's the thing is to keep in mind why somebody might do that. And frankly, at one time early in our relationship, that's what we did.
Salty:Well, first of all, sometimes the tail wags the dog, because you'd have no other choice. Yeah, we could not afford to get the engine fixed. What was we could afford to get the fixed, I got the engine fixed,
Spice:yes, but there was a period there when it just we just did not have the money. So but you could afford to chunk a new quart of oil at every thousand miles.
Salty:And that's called Getting by half to
Spice:Yeah, but it's very easy to get in that mode, when you don't mean to, because your task loaded. Other things are going on, you're trying to deal with a lot of the rest of your life, the oil light comes on in the car fine, you stop and give it a quart of oil and go on. And then you get distracted.
Salty:And the next time the oil light comes on, you
Spice:give it another quart of oil.
Salty:And while you're doing that, you pick up a couple extra courts, because you're at the Dollar General Store, or the cheap store. And you know, if you have to stop at a gas station, they're gonna charge you 910 bucks for a quarter oil, whereas you can get a $3 $2 quarter oil at the dollar store. So you're just gonna pick that up there because it's cheaper. And you're gonna start stocking the oil in your car, instead of fixing the problem,
Spice:you're letting yourself be run by events focusing on the immediate fire to put out because it takes intentional time and effort to stop back and think of the bigger picture. One example I've been looking at this from a prepper point of view, is watching the forums lately. Of course, I'm on some prepping forums, that's no big shock, right? There's a whole lot of people focusing on, okay, they're reporting to each other, what things are getting scarce on the shelves in their area. So people can go out and buy that thing before it disappears. And for one thing, most of the stuff that's getting scarce, these guys, things are not necessities, okay? The things we're used to having the things that are handy, but they're not necessities. And they're certainly things you don't need to stock up whole bunches of in case they disappear down the road. But what they're not doing is stopping and taking a look at, hey, what we're seeing here is a bunch of small, scattered, but frequent supply disruptions. And if our economy is throwing a whole bunch of small, frequent, dispersed supply disruptions, what underlying problem is it having that I can do something about? I'm not trying to go into the politics here. It's not about the politics, it's about what you personally can affect. So I'm seeing all those supply disruptions. And I'm thinking about, okay, if our economy gets really bad, how are we set for long term going forward? And what can we do about it? For example, if you carry debt, reducing the amount of debt you're carrying, makes life in enormously easier during financial disruptions. If you're looking for something to do for a living, choosing things to do for a living, that are likely to have long term value to other human beings, even in difficult economic times is a better choice than doing something involving luxuries that people are going to drop. So you think about what is the dog attached to this tail? And what can I do to make friends with this dog, rather than just worrying about what the tail is knocking off the table right at the moment?
Salty:Sounds? sounds exactly what I was trying to say. And then there's ways that you can, if you're smart, and if you're thinking, there's ways that you can game the system to get ahead, because you see what, like, for example, you're talking about shopping, I don't care what they're short of now, what are the long of what is cheap, which
Spice:is a good buy, that is cheap.
Salty:That is a long term storage item that I have the space to store that I can afford, that I could pay for without going into any debt, what is cheap
Spice:that I might need, for example, if we lost jobs or something like that,
Salty:or is so disruptive, or is something that we absolutely use anyway, like for example, if buckets of long term storage Oh, meal. We're cheap. Yeah, okay, we got a basement, we'll put them in the basement by a couple buckets. We're good because we're gonna she, she told me, she likes her girl, it will use it.
Spice:I'm going to eat that if there's emergencies, I'm going to eat that if there's no emergencies, it's just a thing I eat a lot during the cold months of the year.
Salty:By the way, I'm not saying the Archie, I have no idea whether cheaper I've looked, because we bought it.
Spice:Yeah, we have plenty. When it was cheaper, we stocked up. If something is cheap, and you don't need it, it is not cheap to you.
Salty:As my old friend Paul told me when I was a young kid, a bargain ain't a bargain unless you need it. But I think that's something legit to remember, a bargain ain't a bargain Unless, you know, I like that Highland High School. We're driving past Highland High School in northeast Missouri. And they installed a jumbotron at their football field. When they redid their football field. They went to turf and all that stuff. But one of the interesting things they did they installed their jumbotron so that it actually also works as a large billboard for the school for the highway. So they can put all their school messages on the jumbotron. And people driving past can read it. They just had a happy holidays. thing, but they also put like, when they have honor students and stuff like that, see, that's thinking ahead.
Spice:For teacher training on blah, blah, blah, exactly. So everybody
Salty:can see it. As long as you're heading towards doing not away from you. If you're heading away from healing. Well,
Spice:that's what you get for leaving time to be clueless.
Salty:Totally beside the point. But you we always have one digression. There we go. So that was that one of the thing? Excuse me, I don't have the COVID. At the moment, I just get a little look clumped right talk. One other thing on, you know, I'm a car guy, everybody's got their thing. I'm a gun guy. I'm a car guy.
Spice:He's a camera guy.
Salty:He's got a camera guy. But I'm a car guy. And I could give you a perfect example of if somebody were paying attention, understanding what is going on, and looking to find a solution, long term solution to a problem. There's all kinds of examples out there. And I'm going to give you one that's that's correlated. Everybody who knows anything about United States built automobiles over the last 25 years, specifically 90s to 2010, in that range of cars, knows that the Cadillac Northstar engine had a fundamental and hideous defect in it, the bolts that hold the head on are not or the the head mounting system is not robust enough for an engine of that size and power. So over time, usually at 90,000 miles, sometimes it can happen sooner the break, and this is an expensive repair. Okay, this is this is not a cheap repair, because they break and the head gasket starts to leak. This is not a valve cover gasket. By the way, like I was talking about before. This is a head gasket. This is a there's a whole different level, especially on one of these cars, which means you have to build an engine, there's a fix for it. And the fix is properly done by skilled mechanics. But they basically they remove all the old head bolts and the old systems, I drill them out they put in new ones that are robust enough. Basically, it's a 2500 to $3,000 fix. Now why in the world would anybody fix a 1999 Cadillac sedan DeVille was a $3,000 fix. Let me tell you why. Because once you do that, you have an engine that will get you another 250,000 miles because that's the only thing wrong with that motor and they die so early in their lifestyle that you can get real bargains the cars are basically there. They're maybe 20 years old, but they're just hardly driven at all because they start overheating and people can drive them around town but they'll overheat because of this this this problem. And you can buy these cars for nothing in mint condition can buy for 1000 bucks in mid condition. As far as when you get them fixed. You know oh by it's fixed the head gaskets fixed You got this. My car is worth what I paid for it. But what you have is a luxury well built automobile that will last you 10 to 15 years. For four grand insurance is dirt cheap. parts are dirt cheap. Are you partially things all over the place?
Spice:That's a broken one.
Salty:Okay, why would I go through all this trouble? Listen to what I just said, that is eight to 10 months of car payments on what most people are paying with a car, and you're not, you have a car that you can drive another couple hundred thousand miles, thinking with your head, as opposed to letting the know, oh, I'm having trouble my car, I better go buy a new car,
Spice:not letting yourself be run by an immediate sense of urgency and panic reaction to the current situation, preferably thinking ahead of time, before you have you know, the car leaves you somewhere overheated, preferably thinking ahead of time and getting the problem addressed before you have the major error. But even if you do you don't let yourself be stampeded by the immediate surge of events. But take a moment to stop and think about it. Where did this come from? What can be done about it that's within my reach, bothering to take the longer term view instead of letting yourself be stampeded. And to do that you absolutely need to not spend all your time on media sources, any media sources, letting people tell you how dramatic and awful things are at the moment. because let me tell you, every media source out there, that's reporting news, and knows the blood makes the front page. They all like to emphasize things that make you afraid and make you worried. And
Salty:and it's important to understand why because that gives you clicking that gets you viewing and that makes them money. And that's all they care
Spice:about. They're doing it to get you to pay attention to them and get you to pay attention to them, they have to make things sound as dramatic as possible. So they emphasize the worst of the tail wags, they put the tail wags in the worst light they possibly can, which tends to encourage people to pay attention to the Wags, it's more important to pay attention to the dog that's doing the wagging. But you won't do that if you just sit around listening to the people talk about the tail wags. So don't spend less time doing that. Or
Salty:if you're gonna do it, if you're bound and determined to do it, do it in a way where you are doing the wagging by you look at this thing. You're watching this thing and you say, okay, where does this leave me the opportunities to excel? What How does this if everybody's being convinced of this? How do I move against the grain and have an opportunity to profit? either personally or financially? From the situation? How do I go across the grain? Because going across the grain is prepping, you know, prepping is all about doing across the grain stuff? Because that's just what it is. Okay, go ahead.
Spice:No, let's I base that was basically what I wanted to say that you need to be asking the questions that are important, rather than just listening to the answers that somebody else to the question somebody else wants to talk about, right? And think about what's driving things and what you can do about them and where it might be heading. Don't just spend all your time trying to grab the vases, that the dog's tail is knocking off the table
Salty:exactly where you're the key to the whole how, okay, you say Don't let the dog or the tail wag the dog, how do I do that? Will you be proactive? You be? You don't live in an echo chamber, you'll look around, and you'll be proactive. And you decide where the opportunities are for you to excel and succeed and thrive.
Spice:Because that's what it's all about. A lot of times, that's an asking the questions that other people aren't bothering to ask at the moment, because they're focused on the tail.
Salty:And oftentimes, it's nothing more than Yeah, okay, there's all kinds of noise out there. But none of that really affects where the rubber hits the road. So let's just concentrate on where the rubber hits the road. Let's concentrate on what's going on in my life around me what I see what I what I have going on in my little world. Let's concentrate on that. And then we'll let them guys just talk be the talking heads.
Spice:I think it's time to let them go feed the dog.
Salty:All right. Talk to you later.
Unknown:Bye bye.