Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You
Beans, Bullets, Bandages & You
Episode 221: Echo Chambers
Echo chambers. We have talked about this subject several times before, but I'm not sure we're making any traction on it. So lets revisit the dangers of living in an echo chamber if you're a prepper.
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Hello, everybody.
Salty:Hello everybody and welcome to the show the big show's most important and critically acclaimed podcast. Oh, that is recorded in our car and today we are in the Hemi studio. That's right, the Hemi powered studio is everything is better with a Hemi in it right?
Spice:Including podcasts, apparently including
Salty:podcast. That's right. We're in the we're in the daily driver, the overpowered daily driver and we're going to town to pick up some supplies. It's just like they used to do back in the day except for they'd have to hop on the wagon and went to town to pick up some supplies. We're going to a little further away than just our regular town. We're going to a town that actually has more than one store. Whoo. Whoo. They even got fast food restaurants,
Spice:big town.
Salty:And check this out. They have stoplights that change colors change color. They're the only only town within 50 miles of us that have stoplights to change color. You might think that means we're in a pretty rural rural area and you would be correctamundo a little Spanish for you there. Maybe
Spice:not really. Okay, I
Salty:don't speak English he did. spelling is one of the 10 languages. I wish I spoke. Probably the blank I wish I spoke the most was English. But today we're having a mystery episode. What is a mystery episode a mystery episode where is the subject of the episode is known only to either myself or my lovely co host spice?
Spice:I sure hope he knows what this one's about.
Salty:You can you can guess by what what the topic or the the lack of topic from my beautiful co host spice that it is my mystery episode. And today we're going to talk about one of the things that over the last year has become more and more apparent to me as one of the most if not the single most dangerous thing to preppers. And I think as 2020 which right now we're in November of 2020. As 2020 drags on, it's December. We just heard December, we just turned us over. I forgot. Okay, is now December of 2020. Finally, finally, as December is 2012 drags on this one topic has just really become more and more prevalent in my mind, and apparently not many others. I know spy certainly has seen it too, as the overriding single problem in the prepping community with prepping and the focus of preppers. And that is echo chambers. We have just we've talked about this several times before, but I'm not sure we're making any traction on it. Hello, the danger of living in an echo chamber. If you're a prepper. It is it's just it's beyond me how people are just willing to believe any old doggone thing, if they hear it from somebody who they agree with, on other issues, no matter how stupid it is, no matter how how little actual evidence there is, as long as it comes from a source that agrees with my politics or agrees with my religion or agrees with my worldview or agrees with my culture. And they say it enough times. And they say it enough times. But if you see it everywhere, because it's an echo chamber, everybody's echoing the same information, same absolutely bogus information over and over and over again and it builds.
Spice:The problem is
Salty:no, I want to make one thing for sure. This is not a political post. This isn't about politics, even though there's a lot of political echo chamber going on. And this is on all sides of the spectrum. It's not just one side. Yeah, everybody's doing it.
Spice:You see equally ridiculous conclusions. No matter which way you look, if you check out different echo chambers. The deal is, many individuals stick to their own echo chamber. It is human nature for us to feel more most comfortable with people who are otherwise like us. And we're more attracted to conversation and socializing with people who are otherwise like us and getting our opinions from people who are otherwise like us. So this is a flaw that's built into human psychology, but it is nevertheless extremely detrimental to actually being prepared for the real world as it is because none of the echo chambers is willing to look with clarity at changing situations. They have their position. They like their position. They're comfortable in their position and they hang with their position as in formation changes in the situation changes. And most important, I think, at least, to understanding how echo chambers work in 2020, their positions, make the money,
Salty:their positions make the money, the people who run the echo chambers are getting stinking, filthy rich, off of them. It is cause they know what their market is, and they know how to sell to their market.
Spice:It's ultimately commercial, but the commercial part of it is very well hidden, absolutely, under a belief system, because it's the belief system that sells and then they've got a captive audience to sell to. But as long as they disguise it well enough by, for example, only making their money off of selling information lists and selling ad access, and they don't actually try and sell you things directly themselves. As long as they've got the commercialism well hidden, then people don't notice. And they just think of it as if it's an information source, instead of a commercial venture, wearing the coat of an information source.
Salty:Not only are the echo chambers dangerous from getting your news from them, but the reinforcement that people are getting from these echo chambers is clouding their judgment across the board. It's making the most ridiculous ideas they have seemed real, presume appropriate, is taking an evidence based person and making them into a drone. Got a perfect example happened last night on one of those social media, a friend of mine posted that she was surprised there was a significant jump between late November in early September or December in the gas price at her local station. And immediately, I mean, he mmediately it was off to the races as to which political candidate or party's fault this was. I mean, it came down to well with so and so gets into office, it's just going to get 10 times worse. What do you mean? Well, blah, blah, blah, and it was they were off and they were starting to throw? They were throwing facts around all over the place are just absolute nonsense, non sense. Now, here's what a prepper needs to do, in my opinion, would looking at stuff like, Okay, wow, the gas prices are going up. I wonder why. Okay, so forget politics, Forget it. Forget democrat forget, publican, liberal, forget Democrat, any of that stuff, set it aside, doesn't matter for what we're looking at, right? We're looking at gasoline. Now, we may come back to the fact that there's been some new taxes put on it. Or we may come back to the fact that, you know, this type of fracking has been outlawed in this oil field that may be down the road, what we find out when we start to research, why the gas prices are going up, if we really care, because you know, they're going up, you're gonna pay what you're going to pay. But let's say we do care. So we start thinking about it. Well, what could possibly be causing the gas prices to go up? Well, this is a capitalist economy, which means we know that supply and demand
Spice:dictates relation to each other. Yeah,
Salty:dictates pricing. If demand goes up, and supply doesn't go up, prices go up. This is how it works. If demand drops off, and supplies become plentiful, the prices go down. This has nothing to do with Donald Trump or Joe Biden, nothing, absolutely nothing. This is how it has worked for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Spice:Gas prices always go up at the beginning of December, barring significant underlying weirdness, which does happen. The trend over the years has been prices go up after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Salty:Yeah, they just have. Why? Because demand is starting to rise for a little bit and also something that most people who don't just don't, who listen live in echo chambers instead of actually trying to understand the real world don't realize, and this is something that is important for preppers to realize is on September 15, or shortly there before but the switchover happens on September 15. We switch in the United States, from summer gas to winter gas. It's a completely different formulation. Summer gas actually is has more energy in it than winter gas,
Spice:but it has more tendency to pick up water to understand
Salty:Yeah, there's Yeah, there's there's this there's that there. Either there's a reason they do it. It's more volatile. Yeah, there's a reason they do, which is why it's always better to store winter gas and not summer gas. So if you're going to store gasoline in a metal can, for example, first of all, don't store half a gasoline in a metal candle, or half a tank of gasoline in a metal cam that seals but recently seen, that's a very bad idea. Good way to destroy a $30 can. But anyway, beside the point, the storage that you do, should be a winter gas, because the formulation last longer summer gas. That's why you have to put stabilizer in summer gas more than winter gas, even though you should stabilize both in kunstraum. Long term. It's just a different formulation. And it happens on September 15. Okay, now there's a switchover period. But once the switchover period has been done, the winter gas is cheaper to produce. So the prices generally fall along with the fact that there's less demand because there's much more demand for gas in the summer. So your best pricing is going to be in October. It's just when the best price year in year out. This is just the way it works. It's worked that way for years. Now. Other factors come into play. Where are our refineries while they're on the Gulf Coast? Okay. Have we had any significant hurricane activity on the Gulf Coast this year? Yes, we have. But how specifically? did that affect? The refineries? I don't know. It's joe biden's fault. I don't know. It's Trump's fault. No, no election for a while. Did they? I don't know.
Spice:They may have they didn't have giant interruptions. But they had interruptions.
Salty:Right? I actually do know they did. Yeah, I looked it up. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, when you get hurricane coming to that shut the thing thing down, and you don't just click a switch and the refinery shuts down. That's not how it works. It takes days to shut these things down and days to start them back up again.
Spice:So there's a dip in supply for a while, which spikes prices. And if you have a lot of illness and absenteeism and your workforce, then maybe a pandemic or something
Salty:I don't know.
Spice:Oh, you mean like there's a whole bunch of cases of Coronavirus in the area where they're doing the refining? Oh, yeah.
Salty:Well has a whole bunch of cases everywhere. So yeah, there is Yeah, there's a lot of people who are sick, a lot of people who are in quarantine, that's just the way it is.
Spice:Texas and Louisiana are being hit hard right now. So workforces down, supply is down, prices are up. And of the political people have done anything of significance that would move the needle one way or another in the past two months. Sometimes that's a factor but not this time. So if you've only got one hammer, every darn thing starts to look like a nail. If the only hammer in your hand is it's got to be the other political parties fault. You're going to take a hammer and start beating on a bolt to try and get it to go in and take a hammer and start beating on a screw to try and get it in or out. Because it's all you got. And it's not gonna work very well.
Salty:And if it's just a matter of what you think and what you believe, you know, I suppose this isn't as big of a deal. But as a prepper. This is nuts and bolts stuff because what you think and what you believe determines the preps you do. The timing of the preps and everything else. For example, right now you can't buy nine millimeter ammunition. You can't buy it. And if someone comes available, I looked at the price of it last night. I think I'm a millionaire. Because I have several boxes of nine millimeter ammunition. I think I'm a millionaire. I really do. A long story short, five news sources. Five, this is what I want people to listen to. I want you to go left wing center left down the middle, right wing wacko, right, five news sources, compare everything and then make your decision. That's what I want you to do. It's what I do. Five, I intentionally. If I need to shortcut it, I'll pick two. Okay, I'll pick center left and center. Right. And interestingly, they virtually never even have the same story as on. Yeah, they'll be talking about completely different things. They just one side, we'll be talking about how this it's just, it's amazing how, and by the center left and center, right. I'm talking about Fox and CNN because they're just very available. You know, you'll look at their front pages and they'll they only have a single single story. That's the same, which that should tell you what you need to know.
Spice:Most of my reading is actually outside the political arenas. But it doesn't matter.
Salty:Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's political, not political. You know,
Spice:it's not in an echo chamber.
Salty:Right even on the like the social stuff like the entertainers, they have just completely different different entertainers. It's amazing. Anyway, long story short, I cannot express enough how dangerous I think it is for people to focus their information gathering on single source or similar source. You know, saying yeah, I read five different like right wing blogs, Riley read five different left wing blogs.
Spice:I listened to both kinds of music Country and Western.
Salty:That's a great line.
Spice:I gotta go.
Salty:Oh, I love that. That's maybe my favorite movie. Because I too hate on Nazis. Anyway, long story short, yeah. If you're a Nazi, please don't listen anymore. My podcasts, please just go away. I'll just make that point. I don't normally talk about politics. But there's a difference between politics and words. I can't speak because we're a G rated podcast.
Spice:I'd personally rather they quit being Nazis and stayed listening to the podcast, but that's me.
Salty:Anyway, pressing right along. Thank you for listening. We appreciate it. And we'll catch you the next time.