On this episode, we are joined again by Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper. Cancel culture, censorship, and accountability are present in the media and it's all controlled by one narrative. How is this happening in the USA? Is critical thinking and free speech at risk?
Nick and Daisy also unpack some of the current events in Canada. This new dystopian direction is alarming. Canada is our neighbor, so it's a good idea to be prepared and pay attention to what's going on.
You can’t prevent a disaster, but you can certainly be prepared for it. Valley Food Storage is offering a special deal for our podcast listeners. Enjoy 15% off your entire order when you use the code PRACTICAL15.
Get the knowledge you need to have to protect yourself from the Cancel Culture. Download our Free Survival Guide Book today, which will show you how to defend your right to speak your mind.
Nick - "Alright. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the Practical Prepper Podcast. My name is Nick and I'll be your host. And today we have a very special guest. She is the founder and publisher of free websites Organic Preppers, The Frugalite, and Preppersdailynews.com. She is the best selling author of 17 books. We have the great and powerful Daisy Loser. Daisy, how are you today?"
Daisy - "I don't know if I'm that great and powerful. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Awesome."
Nick - "We really appreciate you taking the time to do this. And I know you got a lot on your plate, so we thank you."
Daisy - "No problem. I'm happy to help."
Nick - "So let's dive right into it and let's get into a little bit on your background, who you are, how you found prepping, and kind of how you got started."
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Daisy - "Well, really, I got started through abject poverty. When my oldest daughter was about two weeks old, my husband lost his job. Just suddenly totally out of the blue. We thought he was securely employed. We had a good income. I was living in Canada and I didn't have paperwork so that I could get a job. So we were entirely dependent on his income. So he lost his job and it was six weeks before unemployment kicked in, which meant we had to make that last paycheck last for six weeks. And we didn't have very much food. We still had to pay rent and all that kind of stuff. And we basically survived that six weeks on our garden that was just starting to produce a few things and some bagels and peanut butter that I had gotten on sale. I had gotten bagels for a dollar a bag. Remember those days? And maybe ten bags of bagels. And I bought peanut butter. And so we had to kind of ration that out and make it last and accept every dinner invitation from relatives every time they're like, hey, you guys want to come over for dinner? Yes, we do. And I came across this book by Amy Decision called The Taiwan Gazette at a library sale. And it was a dollar. And I was like, I'm getting that book. I know we're broke, but I am getting that book. So I got that book and it kind of changed my life because she has something that she calls the Pantry Principle, which is just a different way of building food storage. It's not prepper oriented at all. It's more about frugality than prepping. So for I would say the first ten years I prepped, maybe the first six years it was really more a frugality issue. And Scarlett O'Hara, God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again. Kind of thing shaking the care in the field.So it was just I wanted to have things on hand just in case. Then I would say about six or seven years later, there was a power outage that had taken out the Eastern seaboard including where we lived in Ontario, which was near Toronto. And I was divorced at this point. And I was living in this very tiny apartment with two little girls, a two year old and a seven year old. And we didn't have power for a week. And it was in the middle of summer, all of our food in the freezer rotted. So that all went to waste. And we were completely unprepared for a power outage. And I thought, okay, I have all of this stuff, but there's got to be a little more to it. And that's when I started delving more into preparedness itself, as opposed to just Galilee and having food and shampoo and things like that on hand."
Nick - "Wow, that is interesting. Because it seems like nowadays it is always born out of like, oh, I'm going to be a prepper, I'm going to be a survivalist. And it's like people think it starts at the extreme. Like, I think the world is going to end and this is what I'm going to do. But it being born out of frugality is very I guess it's a humble beginning to the prepper and survival lifestyle."
Daisy - "Yeah. And that's just been the story of my life. It's all been very humble, very basic origins. Nothing exciting. I've had times when my stockpile saved my bacon, like when I got laid off from work and had to wait six weeks for my unemployment to kick in. And then, of course, it's only a percentage of your income. All the preps that I had put back meant that I didn't have to go to the grocery store the entire time I was on unemployment. Like while I was job hunting, I didn't have to buy anything. I could use that unemployment to pay my utilities and my mortgage and my car payment and just keep afloat. And so really, it is a lifestyle insurance. If you think about it, it's just one of those things. And I'm not talking about prepping for nuclear war or anything like that. I'm talking about preparing for your lifestyle to suddenly change."
Nick - "Right. I feel like it's important that this message gets out to a lot of people other than those who go looking for it, because I feel like it does get the rap of, oh, prepping is bunker with all of this stuff. But really, the people who aren't listening, it'll never happen to me. People like, I'm good at my job, I'm secure. I'm not worried about the power going out. But like you said, you're a living example of it can change on a dime like that. And if you're not ready, extremely, In my opinion."
Daisy - "I don't have any statistics to back this up. Just based on things that I see in my comments section. The number one disaster is a personal financial problem. Now, that might not be losing your job, it could be losing your spouse and his or her source of income. It could be a huge hospital bill that you weren't insured enough to cover, leaving you with a massive debt that you have to now try to dig your way out of. It could be an accident that keeps you from working and also losing your income. There are all sorts of financial it's like a financial minefield right now, all sorts of things that can happen to your money. Obviously, I prep for all sorts of things, but my primary focus is being ready for the economy to make changes and being prepared for that. And then, of course, we've got the supply chain issue, which is affecting everyone and bringing a lot more people into preparedness."
Nick - "Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like preparedness financially is something that even a lot of people they aren't ready for. Like they always say the rule of thumb is to have enough money saved for six months bills or something, that if something were to go wrong, you have enough money for that. And I feel like even that basic level of preparedness is something that a lot of people aren't ready for. Well, with inflation and prices going up, like I rent because I travel a lot with prices going up and inflation and things like that, that six months has gone for many people from like $6,000 to $20,000. Yeah. So how many of us have $20,000 that's not invested somewhere that we can't get to? How many people have $20,000 just sitting there waiting to pay your bills? Not a whole lot, no. I say the number is very low. So let's continue down the path of your story and let's get into the bread and butter, the organic prepper. It is a huge resource online for new and seasoned preppers. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and what inspired you to start this website?"
Daisy - "Well, first of all, I never, ever expected it to go the way it has work. Okay, let me go back a little bit. I lost my job again, and this was about a year after I'd had my own personal economic collapse. My father had passed away. I had taken a leave from work. I was behind on all my payments. So my car got repossessed, my home got foreclosed on, and then my children's father passed away. And even though we were divorced, this definitely affected our family because we shared custody and he would watch them when I was working and things like that. So it was a huge hit financially and emotionally. Anyway then, I shortly thereafter got downsized, and I could either cash out my retirement and be unemployed or I could just get fired. Really, there was no option. My job was no longer in existence. And I thought initially, okay, I need to get another job. I worked in the automotive industry. And then I thought, no, you know what? I have this person offering me a side gig online to write for his website. So I'm going to take that and I'm going to find the cheapest house in Ontario to rent that is pet friendly and I'm going to move there. And so Ontario is enormous. It's bigger than Texas and California. It's a huge problem, it's huge. So I found a place 7 hours north of where we lived because we lived in an urban area where of course it's far more expensive. And I found a little cabony kind of place for $600 a month. The catch was it only had wood heat and it was way out in the Boondocks and way up north where it got really cold. It was in the forest. Internet was most of the time we had it, but we would have from time to time week long power outages up there and it's freezing and all sorts of crazy. It was pretty rustic but for the most part we had electricity, we just had to do everything else by hand. So I was like, I am going to start my own business. This is my chance. I have enough money with unemployment and the money that I have put back to get by for a year at this house. And if I can't make it work in a year, then I guess I've got to rejoin the workforce and I really want to be there for my kids because they had just lost their father. My oldest was going away to College and my youngest was still with me. And so we moved to this cabin and I started my website just as like a free blogger, blog Blogger.com. And the person I worked for owned websites. He's like, you have to buy that domain and make yourself a website because you've really got good content. And I was just writing about how it was to be a city person learning to live this rural lifestyle of heating with wood and cooking with wood and things like that. Anyway, so I did and my previous employer helped me set it up. He's my mentor. He's asked me not to mention his name so I can't but yeah, but I talk about him all the time. Anyway, so I started the website and then the first week I had the website up, I happened to write an opinion piece on the Sandy Hook shooting and it was in defense of firearms for self defense. And the media had really contorted the story because the shooter, his mother was a prepper and had guns. And so they made it sound like it was all the fault of these crazy preppers. And so I wrote an opinion piece about that. And somehow I have no idea how this tiny little website that was two weeks old, someone on Yahoo news quoted my article. I mean they were making fun of my article, but they quoted it and put a link in and suddenly I had thousands of visitors. Most of them were telling me I should die but others were like, hey, that's a really good article, and we like your content and these people are jerks. I started off kind of with a big Caboom when that happened, when they made fun of me. So I guess that proves that. Just spell my name right? You know, no publicity. And I was very overwhelmed because of all the hate mail I was getting. I hope you die. I hope your kids die in a school shooting. Things like really mean stuff. And my mentor is like, just stop looking at your comments. I will clear your comments for you. You are not to look at your comments. I just wanted to fold up and quit because I was like, horrible people are so mean. It was bad. And the most overwhelming thing that ever happened was like all of this vitriol. It was crazy. But I hung in there and my friend cleared my comments and I followed his advice. I didn't look at the comments for a month. And anyway, it just grew and grew."
Nick - "Wow, that's very impressive. So when you publish this piece and they link to it at this point, were you just blogging for the sake of blogging, just kind of documenting your experience and like, you weren't even at this point, could you go on the website and enter your email and subscribe to get a sort of feed of what you're posting? Or it was just simply stumbled upon it the most basic free website you could set up."
Daisy - "The only difference is, like, I owned the domain, so it was no longer the free blogger one. It was just like a free theme, free everything, because I think I spent $14 starting my website to register the domain. So, yeah, it was just like the most basic thing in the world. And you look back at some of those articles and are just like, oh, I thought that was a whole article."
Nick - "I'm curious as to what was the follow up piece to the Sandy Hook article. It's a big shoes to fill after that one."
Daisy - "Yeah. Well, actually I did look at the comments once just to collect them and to write about the people who don't want us to have guns and to talk about the kinds of threats that they were making toward me and my daughters and the wishes of death and doom and things like that. So that was my follow up piece. And readers really came out of the woodwork to support the website after that because they're like, that's just not right. I mean, there were some pretty awful comments, and I think that was kind of how the ball really started rolling because people in the preparedness world were like, this nice single mom is just up here living in the woods trying to figure out how to start a fire and not free stuff. And all of these people are attacking her and her children. And so that was what I guess kind of made me a little more real. It was like, oh, it's just a regular person."
Nick - "So when you moved to this home, you were just documenting your whole learning experience. You had no idea how to do any of it. You're just like, I'm going to go here and I'm going to figure it out."
Daisy - "Well, I really didn't think it would be as hard as it was. I was like, do that. I've had campfires, and I've done this, and I've done that, and I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to get all in, right. I'm kind of a go hard or go home type of person. And I have reinvented our prepping world, my family's prepping world, a lot of times. But this was probably the biggest change I made. It took me almost six weeks to learn how to build a fire in a wood stove that would stay lit. And it was starting to get pretty cold. It was coming up to late September, which, when you're pretty far north, is very cold and just geographically, we lived in the Algonquin Forest, so that's pretty far north. So it's starting to get cold already in September. And I remember sitting there in front of that wood stove for hours, just sobbing because I couldn't get the fire to stay lit. I would be like, okay, this one's going, and then it would die. I finally figured it out, luckily, because it had gotten to the point where it was so cold, we were going to have to just I didn't know what we were going to do because we didn't have anywhere to go. We didn't have any money, really, to speak of to set up a new household somewhere else. I mean, we had to make it work trial by fire. It's like, you moved there literally. Yeah. If I can't figure this out, you got an abandoned ship. You have to physically get to go somewhere warm. It was like abandoned ship or die. He got to 52 up there. That sums up the climate a little bit. Negative 52. Now, it wasn't during this first part when I'm trying to get the fire lit, but I knew that was coming. Although I didn't really expect negative 52. I was like, maybe negative 22. We had a snowstorm that blew a snowdrift against the only door that went all the way up to our roof. And we had to climb out a window and use pots and pans to dig our way to the door because I thought, oh, I'm so smart. I'm just going to put my shovel right here beside the door and dig my way out every morning because it snow basically every night. And yes, then there's the snow drift that goes up to the roof like a 15 foot snowdrift against my door. So we use cooking pots, and we climbed out the window, and I was like, I hate this is an adventure. No, I was like, I hated my cheers are freezing. They could make your life into a movie. I mean, it's. Just think about that. So since this happened, the blog explodes."
Nick - "How did your life change after that where you're like, this is really something that is going to become my career."
Daisy - "Well, okay. At this point, I still wasn't making any money from the website. I just had lots of followers. And I was like, oh, this is fun. I had a full time job at this point with my mentor, who invited me to move to California and paid our expenses to relocate. And he invited me when it was negative 52. And I'm like, Heck, yeah, it's a negative 52 here. I'm going to California really warm and toasty. Right about that. And I asked my daughter and she's like, okay, can we please? She was pretty sick of it, too. Like going out to wait for the school bus. If her hair was still wet, it would freeze to her head. Oh, yeah, it was so cold."
Nick - "Wow."
Daisy - "So anyway, we moved to California and lived there for about five years. And it wasn't until 2014 that my website started making money. And then it made really an amount of money that astonished me. And at that point, I was making more off of my website than I was my job. So I wasn't going to quit my job because I liked that stability of having that paycheck. And my mentor Mercy fired me. He said, no, no, I know you're not going to quit because that's just not you're too loyal to do that. So I'm firing you. Go run your website. And so he fired me in early 2014. No, late 2014, the end of the year. So I was devastated. I was like, but I thought I was doing a good job. And he's like, no, you need to go work on your website. Like, this is a full time job and you're not giving it all of your attention. I'm like it's. Okay. I don't mind getting up early to work on my website because at that point, I got up at four every morning and worked on my website for 3 hours before I worked on his website. So I did all of my work in the wee hours and that way. Okay. If anyone ever wants to start a blog or anything else that they need it to become a habit, do it at 04:00 in the morning. Do it before anything else in your day can get in your way. Because if you say, I'm going to do it after the kids go to bed, you're going to be tired. Gymnastics lessons are going to run late, you're going to go out for pizza afterward or something like that's going to happen and it's going to get in your way. So that's some unsolicited business advice. Do it first time. I like it. As soon as you get up and work for yourself first. Give the best of yourself to your own business."
Nick - "Yeah, that's really great advice. It makes sense."
Daisy - "After you've lived the whole day and you've done all your stuff and you're like, okay, now it's me time. Me time turns into just I'm going to relax a little bit. And then that stuff you should be focusing on, first and foremost out the window. Yeah, it's a lot easier. Exactly. It's the same thing with exercise or diet or anything else that you're really trying to achieve. Put it first and you will succeed at it."
Nick - "That's great advice.There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Free business advice. I know that wasn't really the purpose of this. It just kind of popped out. So the secondary. Well, I won't call it secondary, but the second and third of your websites, how did those kind of come in where you thought, I need to branch out? Was it just like I need to segment my audience? Maybe there's people that care more about this than this. So you create a different website."
Daisy - "I mean, I'm just kind of a news junkie. So that's why we created Preppers Daily News. It's just links. It's kind of like Drudge Report for preppers links to article preppers would find interesting. And that is run by me and a lovely woman who is a grandma who is also a news junkie, and she goes on every morning and adds links. So that's how that one started. I don't make money off of that website. It's just there as a service. Like they're prepping articles, news articles, things like that. The third one, the frugalite. I had written a book on frugality called The Ultimate Guide to Frugal Living. And I thought, you know, that is a more gentle introduction to prepping than my prepping website because we do have a little bit of hardcore stuff on there that's scary. And so I thought frugality just kind of naturally leads people down the path. But it doesn't sound as crazy. So I thought, I'm going to start this website as kind of an easy entry. So it's not a prepping website. It's about saving money now and in the future. In a website like that nowadays is beyond important, too, with inflation like we spoke on earlier, just like saving money, thrifting clothes for your children or things like that that most people don't. I don't know if they refuse to do it, but maybe again, they just have that mentality of it's not going to happen to me. So I'm not going to think about it."
Nick - "Right. It's done incredibly well. And I think it's because so many people are having to make these changes, are being forced on them whether they want to do it or not."
Daisy - "Yeah.And then that's a good gateway for them into the organic prepper, where it's the occasional link, cross link. You got to cross build those lists."
Nick - "Absolutely. So over the years, how you've gone from the tundra to bright and sunny California, even over the past few years, from essentially regular living to covid 19. How has your prepping style changed over the years?"
Daisy - "Oh, my gosh. Well, we've made all sorts of changes. I had a little homestead or two different ones in California where we raise livestock and grew food and did stuff like that. When my youngest daughter graduated at 16, she wanted to go to cosmetology school, but she wasn't allowed to till she was 18 in California. So we moved to a different state so that she could go ahead and start because it's kind of silly for her to just sit around and do nothing for two years. So then we lived in suburbia for a while and prepped there. And then after she graduated and got a job and moved out and was out on her own, I lived nomadically for a few years. I sold most of my stuff and put some other stuff in storage near her new home just so it was there if she needed it, like preps and things like that. And I have lived in Greece, Montenegro and Mexico over the past few years, and I've visited quite a few other countries, too. So I just lived out of a in Europe, and then I drove my Jeep to Mexico and live there. What inspired all of the traveling was it just that I'm able to do it and I want to do it, or were you just I have always kind of been like the barefoot hippie type, and it's really not what people expect when they think of preppers. They have a very different viewpoint of us. But before I met my husband and got married, I was just driving around the US and Canada with my dog, checking things out and picking up some waitressing jobs here and there and just making enough money to get by, get to the next town, check things out. Like I was just seeing the world and so I really kind of picked up where I left off. Except in Europe."
Nick - "Yeah. It's kind of like the easy rider lifestyle with Joe just blown in from town to town. That's very cool. That's a cool way to live. So when you go do you prep essentially on the road or that's outside of that lifestyle?"
Daisy - "Sort of. First of all, when you are mobile like that, you really have to lean more on your survival skills than your preparedness skills because, while you can prepare to an extent, there's only so much you can stock up in a place where you're only going to stay for three months. Hence, Survival Skills become indispensable in such scenarios.
Nick - "Right."
Daisy - "Like you're not going to get a year's worth of food in a place like that. So I made careful note of where I could acquire food where I can forage and things like that of water sources and all sorts of other things. I had equipment just like a small Sawyer mini with me. I always kept little packets of dehydrated soup and oatmeal and things like that in my suitcase where you just need boiling water. I had to really change the way I did that. Every time I bought a bottle of water, I brought it home and I just refilled it with tap water and just stashed it under the bed of wherever I was staying. And then before I left, I pitched them out because you can't really haul that in a suitcase on the Airlines. So it really made me a lot more versatile. I can put together a good survival kit really fast from pretty much anywhere when I lived in Mexico.Go ahead."
Nick - "No, it's okay when you're saying you can throw together a survival kit out of pretty much anything. Now, is that what you would consider your bug out bag, or is that in your totally separate?"
Daisy - "Well, I have a bug out bag, of course, but I wrote an article about this. Let's just imagine you are at some kind of touristy location. I did this at the monastery market in downtown Athens. So imagine you noticed that something bad is about to go down, and all you've got with you is just, like your purse with a lighter and a few basic kinds of things. Nothing. No real bug out bag. I timed myself, and in 20 minutes, I put together a very thorough kit where I could have walked to the American Embassy, which is about 3 miles away from the market. I could have walked to the American Embassy, hunkered down in an abandoned building overnight and dealt with rain or whatever just from this flea market. And so a lot of things I bought from a concession stand. I got dried fruit and I got nuts, and I got vodka, which is good for a sanitizer, a fire starter to drink whatever you want to do with it. And I got some water. And I always have, like, a water filter in my purse because they're so tiny now that you can shove one in just about any bag. And so, yeah, I just put that together in about 20 minutes, got as much cash out of the various ATM machines as I could. And that was my test. And it taught me a lot about the kinds of things that you need, what you actually need versus what you think you need when you're building your bug out bag at home. I could buy all of this stuff versus this is what I've been dealt, right?"
Nick - "Exactly."
Daisy - "And my actual bug out bag is not like a lot of preppers bug out bags. I took a survival course from Selco. I know a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with Selco. He survived the Balkan war and went a year without any food shipments, running water, electricity being sniped at his city, being shelved. He lived through a year of actual hell, and he's a good friend of mine and he writes for our website. But I went to the Balkans and I took an urban survival course for women with him. And one thing we all learned was that we were carrying around a lot of useless stuff. So I pared down enormously after that. I do not carry a stove because I can make a stove fairly easily. People get really fancy with their gear, and a lot of these designs are inherently awful. You're stealthily creeping around, trying to avoid the notice of people, and you're going to unfold this giant stove that you've got and you're going to light a blazing fire and that kind of stuff that you got to lay down on the ground to blow to make the fire go. And it's just not really a real bug out bag. I am a big fan of emergency food like Valley storage food. I'm a big fan of that. However, I don't necessarily think it's ideal bug out bag food, because when you're bugging, your goal is to get from A to B as quickly as possible with as little notice as possible. And so I carry things. And I know this doesn't sound very organic and I'm the organic prepper, but I carry things like peanut."
Nick - "Mmm."
Daisy - "Because they're really the perfect bug out food. You can eat them while you're walking. They've got fat, protein, and carbohydrates, and I mean, they'll really keep you going and you don't have to stop and set up a camp to make them. You also don't want to have all of your stuff strewn all around because if somebody sneaks up on you and you've got to take off, you're going to lose all of that gear that you've got out of your bag. You can stove so easily. Like, if you're in an urban environment, two bricks. I keep a little metal cooking pot in my bag, but two bricks with a fire in between it, and I put my part in that and I can boil some water with very little smoke. Just a tiny little fire is all you need. If you've got a vessel that has a lid, you can also, if you're in a rural environment, you can usually do that. You can usually find a couple of rocks or something that you can elevate your vessel over a fire. So I never carry any kind of stove whatsoever because I don't need to. I can just build a fire and Cook my stuff."
Nick -"That's impressive. But if you can build a fire, you can build a stove like you can almost always find something nonflammable to build yourself a little stove."
Daisy - "It's super easy."
Nick -"Do you have more than one bug out bag? Do you assemble multiple, like one, say one for your home? If you were to have to flee one for the vehicle? Or is it just a one for everything?"
Daisy - "I'm getting it no matter what. I've got one at home that is my primary bag, but I do have a kit in my vehicle that is not exactly a bug out kit. It's more stranded on the side of the road. Kit. My daughter was stuck in that I 95 disaster in Virginia when they had that snow storm a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, 16 hours. And luckily they had some gear with them, and they were in much better shape than a lot of the other folks."
Nick - "Oh, I'm sure."
Daisy - "Right."
Nick - "There's a perfect example, real world example of I mean, some people, they're just like, I don't even have gloves in my car."
Daisy - So immediately when you get out of the car, you're losing heat, your hands are cold. You're already way worse off than many other people snacks for their children or anything like that. I am stunned that nobody passed away because it was ten deg. People didn't have blankets, didn't have food, didn't have water. I know the governor says they were out there handing stuff out. They were not.
Nick - 'I doubt they were not."
Daisy - "Yeah. Nobody officially. And they sat there for 16 hours."
Nick - "Was she prepared for this because of something you gifted her, or you should keep this with you? Or does she do this on her own now? Time to learn about you."
Daisy - "Yes, she does this on her own. And some of the things just happened to be like Christmas presents. They had just gotten that she used for other purposes, like a jar candle that her boyfriend's mother had given her for Christmas was helpful to heat or melt snow or whatever. If they needed to do that, they didn't end up having to do that. But she had the plan and was able to do it. They just layered the clothes they had in their suitcases, and they had coats and gloves and boots and all that kind of stuff. They always have, like a blanket in the car, and they had plenty of food and some water. Not as much as they should have. She has definitely fixed that. And she's like, oh, I really didn't have enough water. And that could have been really bad."
Nick - "Oh, yeah. Was that something in your life that you kind of kids are? Whatever their parents do, they're like, oh, that's not cool. I don't want anything to do with it. Was it something that you were teaching them?"
Daisy - "Like, you need to at least practice this a little bit. She's seen this stuff in action before. You have car trouble and you have to wait for the tow truck, and it takes 2 hours, but it's okay because we have a snack and we have water and we have a blanket and we're going to be just fine. So she's seen it in action. It's just the lifestyle she grew up with."
Nick - "Yeah, that's definitely something that passing it down to your children. It's an amazing it's a gift that they maybe they don't know at the time, but obviously it's a life saving, life changing way of thought that you can have."
Daisy - "Right."
"And her boyfriend is a really great guy. He's very intelligent, but this stuff is completely foreign to him. And what I really respect is that he completely lets her take the lead in situations like this because he knows she knows more about a survival situation than he does because he's an academic. This is not really his wheelhouse and he's happy to help out and do whatever he is asked to do. So it's pretty cool because I feel like we're kind of spreading the word a little bit."
Nick - "Yeah. That's awesome to see somebody be like, look, I'm not going to try and take the wheel and be the tough guy, the man of the situation. I don't know what to do. And without you, I would be in big trouble."
Daisy - "Right. And I have so much respect for that."
Nick - "Yeah. If we kind of shifting in a different direction, it's kind of something that we already talked about. But I was reading one of the articles that I found pretty interesting about the price control and kind of the talks of inflation and how farmers eggs were once $3 a dozen and now they're $5 a dozen. When you're looking ahead for the rest of the year, what else do you foresee that's going to be going up? Do you feel like everything is going to increase and how do you prepare for that style of thing?"
Daisy - "Inflation is going to get worse. It is not going to stop where we are right now, even though they're not counting food and gasoline and inflation numbers. I know in California I don't live there anymore, but my friend just visited from California and she said gas was $6 a gallon there. I know it is. I'm on the East Coast and I was complaining about 325, but prices are going up and up and up. And in an article that I wrote about surviving inflation, so oat milk, I can't do dairy. So I started buying oat milk when I moved back to the US about six months ago and it was $3 a part and then it was $4 a carton and now it's 4.99 a carton. And now I've ordered a bag of £50 of organic oats and I'm going to make my own darn oat milk because I'm paying that much money. And so what we're going to have to do is we're just going to have to shift our perspective. And the first thing that I want to say about that is this is not the end of the world. Everybody is really freaking out about these prices. But we have gone through inflationary periods before, we have gone through economic depression before. It sucks, it's hard, it's unpleasant and uncomfortable and scary. But this is not the first time that society has gone through something like this and you will get through it. So you just have to adjust your mindset to this is how reality is right now. We can rail against people in office and complain about the economic policies that have gotten us here. That is really an impotent way to deal with inflation because we cannot fix this ourselves. So what we have to focus on is our own personal bubble, and we have to focus on what we can do as a family or a community or however you happen to prep. Maybe it's just you living by yourself. You have to focus on what you can personally do to deal with inflation. So the first step I hate to sound like I'm putting you through an AA kind of thing, but the first step is accepting that this is actually happening. And like it or not, this is just how things are. I mean, I don't really like that saying it is what it is, but it's the truth in this situation. There's nothing that we can do to change the overall economy. And that is not to excuse anything that has been done that has caused this, but it's just where we are. So the first thing you want to do is you want to start looking for substitutions. So in my search for affordable oat milk, I'm just using that as my example. I changed brands two or three times, and I try not to be brand specific about anything because you just never know with our supply chain issues if you're going to be able to get that brand right. So forget about your favorite brand of this or that and look for different options. So let's think maybe meat, for example. Let's say some cut that you don't really like is on sale at the grocery store. You can often just ask the Butcher to grind it into, like, hamburger meat or ground pork or ground whatever. And you can use that at a much lower price than what is sitting there. In the case, the butchers will generally cut roast into chops, stew meat steaks at no extra charge. If they do charge where you live, you might want to invest in a meat grinder and some really good knives and just buy those big bulk pieces and cut them up yourself. So that's what I mean about this substitution thing. Fewer options is not a shortage. I'm not saying there won't be a shortage, but it's not a shortage. It's just a different way of looking at things. And I'll just go back and refer to my years of travel. Every place I went, there were different offerings at the store, and I could not be assured of getting the same brand of anything anywhere. I think I've been to nine different countries over the past three years, so that's a lot of adapting. But it really helped me mentally to deal with the situation that we're seeing right now. I go into the store and I don't feel quite the same level of panic that a lot of people are describing when I see the bare shells, because, you know, in Montenegro, they had like three cuts of meat and two kinds of meat, maybe four kinds of meat. I don't know. They didn't have a whole lot. And, you know, you just like, say, okay, I'm getting pork today, and you get whatever the Butcher happens to have out. You choose whatever brand of laundry soap is there. Usually you had an option of two or three brands in most of the places I traveled. So you just choose from what's there, make substitutions and be willing to be flexible. If you are feeling like you are constantly being short changed and oh, my gosh, there's nothing there. That attitude sets you up for like a mindset of scarcity, and that makes you feel like, oh, we're starving to death. And this is terrible. But if you look at it instead as just a chance to practice being more adaptable, then suddenly your mindset is really more of abundance because there is there. It may not be your first choice, but it's there. And you can take that and you can learn new ways to Cook. You can learn new products, you can learn to make stuff yourself. There are all sorts of things. So take this as an opportunity to be more self reliant and more adaptable."
Nick - "Right."
Daisy - "I look at it when you go as a challenge almost when you get there, because like you said, most people would go in if they see the bare shelfs. They have immediate terror coursing down their spine. That all this is it. And they're too plugged into the mainstream news. They kind of frames it in one way and one way only. And that's mostly doom and gloom. But when you go there, you're like, okay, and like the meat thing, I'm guilty of that. I like certain cuts, but just going there and having the Butcher do that or I actually read your article on the inflation this morning before we had this conversation, and I was thinking about even down to the laundry style of, you know, instead of using if you're trying to save money instead of using your washer and dryer for electricity, then you don't have to buy detergent. You can hand wash and hang dry or the curing. That's another one that I know a lot of people are guilty of. Those pots are astronomically expensive. And to go back to the less convenient version, which is just the regular coffee pot that I think people have almost forgotten about now and then you're down to what is it, like $0.08 a cup versus each one of those poses like one dollars, $80."
Nick - "Right. You must get way fancier pods than I do because mine are like .29"
Daisy - "Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are so many ways. And one of the readers commented that on Amazon you can get refillable pods if you really want to use your curing and make one cup at a time, which I kind of like to do because I drink a cup in the morning and a cup in the afternoon. And so I hate to break out the whole coffee pot and filter and all that kind of all that jazz for just a cup. So I have those little refillable things on order now and I can just buy coffee in bulk and pay for cheap coffee instead. And it's like an investment of $10. And then over the course of the year, if you keep track of it, I'm sure many people would be astonished, maybe a little bit sick as to how much money you save by not buying the luxury convenience item versus investing in something."
Nick - "Exactly."
Daisy - "Yeah, exactly. So with inflation being one of the things that's really affecting the proper lifestyle and it's kind of brought it to light, what do you feel like are the biggest I use the term cancers in the proper community today that are kind of affecting it in the most negative way."
Nick - "Do you mean like the industry itself or do you mean just the general overall outlook in our country, like the overall outlook of it?"
Daisy - "So since it's been brought to light and it's now more mainstream before, it was kind of in the shadows a little bit for either. Like, these are the people who practice it and they know what this lifestyle is about.Now that it's kind of out in the open, kind of like with the negative comments sections, people get a hold of it that may not really agree with it. So then they kind of twist it and contort it into something that it really isn't."
Nick - "Yes. Well, you're seeing it already a little bit in the mainstream where they accuse people who prep of hoarding and you're in the grocery store shopping for your stockpile. They'll accuse you of being selfish and things like that. So that is definitely that outlook. And the government and the media, the mainstream media are really pushing that narrative that it's selfish to stock up ahead, but there's plenty for everyone and there's nothing to worry about. And all that stuff."
Daisy - "Exactly. I mean, I don't believe a word of it. And I think it's our responsibility to take care of ourselves and our families. If you are waiting for the government to dole things out and ration food to you, you're going to really be living a very different lifestyle than you want to be within a year. I recommend, if you can afford it, buy stuff in bulk right now and put it away properly so that you have food to fall back on. And then as long as you can afford the regular grocery shop, keep those preps put back so that you have them for later. Learn how to work with them because you don't want to waste food. So like wheat berries and things like that, if you've never used them, learn how to work with them. I keep emergency food buckets as well. That way I've got layers of food. I've got my right now food. I've got my within six months food, and I've got stuff that will last a couple of years. And then I've got buckets that are like 1020 years. So if you're just starting out, some things that you can do is just buy double what you would normally buy and start focusing a little bit more on shelf stable options that don't require refrigeration or freezing. So if you're buying canned ravioli by more than you think you'll need by a couple of weeks worth, try to buy a two week supply of food for your family that is completely shelf stable and put that back and forget that you have it. And then just keep adding. Keep getting bigger containers of rice and things like that and store those types of things. Also figure into your calculations the power that you use for cooking these foods. Dried beans are great, but they do take several hours to Cook unless you're using an instant pot. So depending on the cost of electricity, where you are or gas or however you happen to Cook, dried beans may not be as good of a value as you think they are. So if that is your situation, then canned beans might be a better option for you. So you have to take the whole picture into consideration. You also have to think about storage space. I live in a 600 square foot apartment in a city, and I have six months worth of food in my little tiny apartment. I have stuff stashed everywhere, and it doesn't look like a bunker because everything is put away. It's in baskets or under furniture or inside drawers or closets or cabinets. You can really get a lot more in your place than you think you can."
Nick - "What would you say? For somebody who really doesn't know much at all about the lifestyle, where do you draw the line between I bought so much that now maybe I am hoarding a little bit versus, like, smart, effective prepping."
Daisy - "I mean, if your whole house looks like a bunker and you can't walk through it, that's a problem that is not effective. You're not going to be able to find what you have when you need it. So I absolutely don't want to do that. I try to break things down into ingredients for meals, so I have home canned things like homemade chili and things like that. So I've got crackers to go with that. I've got commercially canned vegetables. I can throw together a vegetable soup really easily. I've got various freeze dried ingredients, like ground beef that I could throw into my soup. So think of it in terms of meals, not just getting scuffed. And that's a really good way to make sure that you're balancing your pantry."
Nick - "Yeah, that's good advice, because I feel like I had at one point my parents. This was years ago. I can't even recall the reason for them starting to do this, but they were stocking up on cases of water and like, cans of beans like we talked about. But it was to the point that it was so I guess unguided."
Daisy - "Thats an unstructured that now you're just buying to buy. I don't know if it's for the peace of mind, like, oh, I have this stuff, but really the practicality of it is you're missing it completely. So you're not even going to be able to really utilize that. You just purchased all of this stuff. Yeah, I try to purchase things that I actually eat because I think that's really important because you want to rotate it into your kitchen pantry so that you can use it before it expires. If it's getting close to the expiration date, it really depends on the food. Expiration dates are more Best Buy dates. They're not really expiration dates. So be willing to kind of push that a little bit. And if you feel like you've got far more than you can eat before it spoils, donate it to a food bank so at least somebody can benefit from it instead of throwing it out because there are a lot of people out there struggling."
Nick - "Yeah, that's a very good point. And we might have touched on it already. We might be talking about it currently. But what do you feel like the biggest misstep you can take as a survivalist or a prepper could be, in your opinion, maybe you've done it something that you could only gain from experience that you could maybe share."
Daisy - "Buying expensive equipment. Start out prepping low tech. Don't go buy a generator as your very first prep because your generator only works as long as you have gasoline for it or depending on the type of generator, don't go buy like a $5,000 item and feel like you're prepped. Don't go spend all of your money on guns and ammo and feel like you're prepped. You need a balanced approach and you need to start small and simple. I have a little solar generator now, which doesn't power a ton of stuff, but it meets my needs. In a small apartment, you want to focus on things that you would actually need that fit into your lifestyle that don't cost thousands of dollars. Before I got this little solar generator, I never had anything like that. I had flashlights and candles and oil lamps and that type of prep because that was really much more likely for me to be able to use during a power outage. It was less expensive, and I was still lit up. I can still Cook. I can still do what I needed to do. So think about that. Think about the least expensive way to meet your needs first and the lowest tech way."
Nick - "Yeah, I love that. I love the thought behind that because there's people out there that maybe they want to do the whole prefer lifestyle, but they just kind of want the label, maybe. So they figure I'll go out and like a generator. Obviously that term and that piece of technology is so tied to being a prepper, that's like why I need this. And that's honestly the opposite of being prep because you've just taken a ton of money that shouldn't really be that expendable and spent it on this one item, and now you're kind of operating at a deficit."
Daisy - "Almost exactly. That's exactly the case. And you also don't want to end up like you've got to have a place to store your fuel safely if you have a generator. And I'm not just down talking generators, there have been times when it's really nice to have one, but that should not be your starting point. Your starting point should just be some food that you can eat that doesn't require any kind of off grid cooking. That is just really simple. Filling your containers that you have at your house with water. Like if you've got a bunch of Mason jars, they take up exactly as much space full of water as they do empty. So just fill all your containers with water. That's not going to cost you anything. And under your bed, do some things like that. Take note of the things that you use every single day. So like shampoo, body wash, razors, the various foods that your family likes to eat and find a way to supply that for a month without going to the store. That might mean you're buying like dry milk so your kids can still have cereal for breakfast. And it might mean you're filling your linen closet with shampoo and body wash instead of just towels. But there's only so many towels a person needs.Right? I like the idea of also not just going out and getting the generator. Kind of like looking at it almost like you need to know a prerequisite to get that. If you don't know how to start a fire and you haven't earned your stripes of doing all the basic stuff, you should know how to do that first, just in case, in turn, that generator fails you so you have all of that back up again. It's just the general mindset of being prepared for anything. A generator is not ever guaranteed to work. So if you spend all this money on it and it fails you and you have no backup plan, now you're out the money and the resource. Another good piece of advice is to find a supportive community. The comment section on my website, The Organic Prepper, is absolutely filled with people giving their ideas and their support and their help answering questions. Like, I answer some of the questions, but half the time another reader has answered a question very well. By the time I get to it and find yourself a community of people who aren't going to tell you oh, it's too late to even get started. Find people who are going to lift you up, not tear down your efforts."
Nick - "Yeah, that is great advice. The community aspect of it is another thing that people need not forget. It's not just you in this fight against whatever it is that you're prepping for. But I feel like a lot of people see, they think that maybe it's really siloed, like you do this all on your own, but building a network of people that you can rely on and talk to is just as important."
Daisy - "Right."
Nick - "And sometimes somebody else may have an incredibly simple answer to something you've been racking your brain about."
Daisy - "Right. And you may just look at it and say, I can't believe I didn't think of that. There are so many smart people out there. But make sure the community you find is not so extreme that they're not very nice to newcomers. And make sure that double check any advice you find on the Internet, including things you find published on my website and other websites. Nobody's perfect. So don't do anything that could be life threatening, like Canning, without doing it properly, without learning how to do it properly, and checking multiple sources for times and pressures and things like that. Don't say, oh, my grandma never had a pressure canner and she can't meet all the time. Nobody died. Well, that's probably true that nobody in your family died, but is it really worth the risk of botulism a family paralyzed or dead? I don't think it's worth it. Like, I'm going to follow the rules like that. So make sure you're not getting slipshot advice, and make sure you confirm the advice that you get with other places."
Nick -"Yeah, that's fantastic advice. I won't keep you too much longer. I know we've talked well into over an hour here. I can't thank you enough for taking the time and dealing with a little bit of our technical difficulties and just sharing your knowledge more and more with the community. I really appreciate all that you've said here. No problem. It was lots of fun.I enjoyed talking with you. Is there anything else that you would like to bring up that I haven't asked you about, or let everybody know where they can find you?"
Daisy - "You can find me@theorganicprepper.com and the frugalite.com and preppersdailynews.com. Please feel free to join in the comments section. Don't put a lot of personal information in there. We also do have a forum which you can find a button for on the Sidebar. It's not super busy. The comment section is busier. It's almost like a forum because we get so many comments on every article. But jump right in and don't let anybody discourage you."
Nick - "That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm sure there'll be plenty of people just chomping at the bit to get in there and get involved. I also encourage everybody listening to support the fight against censorship I know that the organic pepper was recently defunded. I'm sure we could do an entire episode on cancel culture and the defunding of your website and all of that. So maybe a part two one day?"
Daisy - "Absolutely. Anytime you want. All right. Well thank you so much again, I really appreciate it and you have a great day. All right, you too. Take care."
Nick - "Hope you guys enjoyed the episode lengthy talk there with aduther a lot of great information. I thought I listened to maybe a couple of times really dive into it and get all of what she said. Make sure that you go and subscribe to the organic pepper blog and all the other sites that she's involved in. You get almost daily articles on all kinds of topics so definitely don't miss out on that. Also want to shout out our sponsor Valley food storage again exclusive to the podcast. If you use the code practical PR actical five at checkout you get 15% off your order. Alright guys, thanks so much and we'll catch you next time."
