HS 309 - FBF – “Survivors” with Author and Survivalist James Wesley Rawles

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My pleasure to welcome James Wesley Rawls to the show. He is the author of three books and his latest one is actually a novel entitled A Novel of the Coming Collapse. I think you'll find this interview to be very interesting. Jim, how are you?

Just fine. Thanks for having me on.

My pleasure. Well, tell us about your latest work.

Well, Survivors is a novel set in the near future. It's about a full scale socioeconomic collapse that basically affects the whole world, but actually to the greatest extent right here in the United States.

And is that because we are ahead of the rest of the world in so many ways that a collapse will be much more impactful in a place where people are used to all the conveniences?

We've actually become, we've actually become very soft as a culture and very dependent on our power grid. And as I described in the novel, the power grid, there's actually three of them, is the linchpin of our society. If the grid goes down for more than a week all bets are off.

Yeah, I think people are far too well, I guess I should say they take electricity far too much for granted. I remember my grandmother's house that was built in the 1800s in upstate New York. All the electrical wires are outside of the walls because they were put in after the. And the power grid is vitally important. We would basically be in the Stone Age without it, wouldn't we?

We sure would. And of course, our technological dependence also includes ordering systems for all of our grocery stores. So, you know, they use the Kanban just in Time inventory control system now. So what you see on the grocery shelves is all they have. There's no longer a back room with extra stock. What you see is what you get just in time. Yeah, right. If we have any kind of interruption of just in time deliveries, the grocery stores would be decimated in less than 24 hours.

Yeah, that is really scary. So when you say there are three types of power grids, what do you mean by that?

Well, there's three separate grids. There's an eastern grid, a western grid, and a Texas grid. Just because Texas has to be a little bit different.

They're the state that could secede from the Union in the easiest fashion. I guess too, right?

I guess so with those grids, unfortunately, we've built up this dependence especially for electrically pumped irrigation water. So that in a long term situation, a lot of what we consider productive farmland will revert to desert. Especially in Southern California, like where you are, it will just revert to desert and very quickly people will be reduced to refugee status. In the northern states they'll be freezing to death and they'll be on the road or if they're out of gas on foot heading south. And in the arid Southwest, they'll be on the road heading for areas where they can find water.

Now why would the farmlands be reduced to desert? Because the irrigation depends on the power grid, Is that what you're saying?

Right. Yes. So many farms require electrically pumped irrigation water. There's not many places in the country, aside from a few what they call dry land farming regions where you can grow crops reliably year after year with just rainfall. The number of communities that are served with gravity fed water from end to end are just a handful really. One of the things that I stress with my consulting clients and that I stress in my novels and books is that people need to pick where they live very carefully. They need to find an area, preferably dry land farming region, like the inland Northwest, for example, or an area where they can Buy a piece of land that's on a river or stream or that has gravity fed spring water, that's probably ideal. And of course, I encourage people to move to lightly populated rural areas so that they'd be well removed from any trouble in the big cities because lower population density means fewer problems. There's nothing going to be riots in some little town in Idaho or Wyoming when everything hits the fan. It'll be the big cities where the problems will be.

Yeah, you know, all those things that are we consider to be resources now, which are all those other people and all of the infrastructure they provide, they also utilize all of that. And in a survival scenario that that equation gets completely flipped, doesn't it? Where all of the resources of other people become real liabilities. Yeah, right, right. When you talk about the three different power grids, what would bring them down? Are you talk about solar flares, you're talking about terrorism, nuclear attack, EMP blast? What's the real scare?

All of the above. But even as I showed in my novel, if we have a severe economic collapse with a lot of rioting, we may get into a situation where utility employees are essentially afraid to go to work. They'll be in fear of their lives just being out on the street and they won't want to leave their families at home unguarded. So they may not show up to work. And virtually all the power grid may go down in rapid succession if there aren't the people to run the grid. There's a lot of manpower that's required to keep things humming along. In the western United States, for example, the majority of power comes from coal fired plants in New Mexico and Arizona. And those are mine mouth type plants where there's literally train loads of coal go into these plants. If there's not people to feed the plants, they're going to go down, the grid will go down. And it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort to do what they call a dark restart of the grid. You actually have to start small and build back up to get the grid back online.

What do you mean a dark restart? What does that mean exactly?

Dark restart is where the whole grid goes down. You can't just fire the grid back up instantly. You have to gradually put generating units online. Typically what they would do in the western grid would be they would start with the Bonneville Power Administration with a Grand Coulee Dam, which probably would still be producing no matter what happened, and then use that as a basis to bring all the other plants back up. A lot of these Plants like the coal fired plants require power to start back up, outside power, so they can't start up independently. We built ourselves a house of cards.

In other words, it's like the way you'd have to sort of jump start a car if the battery doesn't work and the alternator doesn't work, you can't start the car anymore because you don't have a crank on the front of it like you did in an old model, Model T days, right? Yeah, right.

Effectively, yes.

So you talk about the most important piece of survival equipment someone can buy, Jim. What is that? I kind of have the feeling you're going to say a generator.

Actually, I'd say a water filter. Because if you look at all the disaster situations in the last 10 or 15 years, whether it's Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in the Pacific, you end up in a situation where a day or two into the problem, people have run out of drinking water and they end up getting seriously ill or dying because they are drinking water from open sources that's been fouled. And especially in an urban environment, we live in a first world country where people are used to toilets that flush. They really don't know how to take care of their daily business in a world without flushing toilet. So it's going to be a public health nightmare if the power grid goes down and there's no water magically coming out of the taps or flushing toilets. There'll be a lot. A lot of the open sources for water like creeks, streams and ponds will be fouled by human waste very quickly. So it's essential that every family have a good quality water filter. There's gravity filters available, like the big Berkey filter or the Aquarain filter, or there's also smaller filters that are designed for backpacking, like the Katadyne that have a small pump built in. I'd say that would be the very top of my list. Because without water, you're a refugee in one day, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's such a vitally important commodity, for sure. You also talk, which I find interesting about, about nickels. I mean, what, what's the thing with nickels? So many people would say that's more of an investing. Yeah. Howard Rumpels strategy. Get some, get some silver and you know, a bag of silver coins, just the circulated ones that are really cheap to buy. But what about nickels? Tell me about that.

Well, nickels are kind of a special case. You know, when Howard Ruff was writing back in the 1970s, silver had just come out of circulation now it's virtually gone. You might be occasionally very lucky and find a silver half dollar floating around if you're really lucky. If you go through a bunch of rolls, essentially the silver is all gone. It's all been hoarded away by people who recognize the fact that it's worth 15 or 20 times its face value. In fact, recently it's been worth as much as 30 times its face value. Nickels are a special case, though, because they're still in circulation. The composition has not changed since World War II. So virtually every nickel you come across is going to be 75% copper and 25% nickel. Right now it costs the government about 7 cents to make each nickel because of its base metal value. So what I recommend that people do is every time they go to the bank, ask for $20 worth of nickels in rolls and just start salting them away, they're already worth almost 20% more than their face value. So it's a win win. The other advantage to nickels is if we ever get into mass inflation, the government may issue a new currency and knock a zero off the currency like they've done in many countries. Like when Israel went to the new shekel, for example, or the Italian lira, they dropped as many as three zeros. If they drop a zero off the currency, they'll probably reissue new paper currency, but leave the old coins still circulating because the logistics of issuing, you know, melting down and reissuing new coins would be horrendous. It's not a big deal to change paper currency, but it's a. It's a logistical nightmare to change coinage. So anyone who is holding a large quantity of coinage overnight will have a 10 for 1 gain. If they drop a 0 off the currency, a nickel will suddenly buy a soda pop again or a candy bar again, because if they drop a zero off the currency, gasoline, instead of being $3 a gallon, will be 30 cents a gallon.

You're saying they would keep.

In a hyperinflation environment, they would just rev the currency right, like Zimbabwe did, knocking off a zero. Right?

Yeah. Or in Zimbabwe's case, they got up to the point where they had 100 trillion dollar bills and even those wouldn't buy a cup of coffee.

I have some of those. I have 183. I think I have 180 trillion Zimbabwe dollars now. A listener sent them to me and I thought that was great that he did that listener in Ireland. And, you know, I felt rich until I went on ebay and discovered you could buy all that for about 12 bucks US.

That's only as a collector's eye. Actual buying value before they went out of circulation was next to nothing. Yes, we could, because of the government's just uncontrolled overspending and the fact that they are now monetizing the debt, which is incredibly scary. They're actually buying their own debt every time they have a Treasury auction to make sure that a Treasury auction won't fail. It would be like you or me using our Visa card to pay off our MasterCard. It's just insanity. It would be, I think in the long run, Quantitative easing, which is what they call monetizing now, will be incredibly inflationary. And we may very well see a situation where the government sees fit to knock a zero off the currency. And revaluing a currency actually has a short term economic gain psychologically because everything seems cheaper. And it tends to jump start an economy when suddenly a movie ticket is no longer $8 but 80 cents. People are going to want to go out to the movies even though their wages will have been cut by a factor of 10. Subconsciously they won't recognize that and they'll be spending more. So it's in the government's best interest to revalue a currency and it's in our best interest to hedge against that by stocking up on nickels. Because again, odds are they'll leave those nickels and quarters or whatever circulating at face value. And currently it's nickels that are where you get the best bang for your buck.

Not with pennies though, because I heard it cost like 1.6 cents to make a penny, which is why pennies are ridiculous and they should. You know, it would be a total admission of bad monetary policy if they were to get rid of pennies, but gosh, we should. It's such a joke of a curry.

They are a joke, but they will be. If they drop a zero off the currency suddenly, they'll have value again. The thing with pennies though is unfortunately, they changed the composition of pennies. They were 99% copper up until 1981, then they switched to a zinc penny, which is just copper flashed. The problem is neither of those coins are magnetic, so you can't sort them magnetically. You have to sort them by weight or by looking at the mint date of every individual coin. So it's very time consuming. The beauty of nickels is they're all going to be 75% copper, 25% nickel up until the time they change the composition of the nickel, which is being planned right Now. So that's why I recommend that people stock up on nickels now before the composition changes and before people have to sort them. And then hopefully when they do change the composition, they'll just make it a stainless steel nickel and then we can sort them magnetically. But I'm not sure if that'll happen.

Very, very interesting thought on the nickels. Never really thought about that before.

Yeah, I have a detailed article about that in my blog. It's Survival Bl. And just in the left hand column, click on the link.

Mark Nichols, survivalblog.com Excellent. In terms of actual barter, I mean, now I suppose we're not talking about nickels anymore. Obviously the precious metals gold bugs always talk about that. But you know, I think something with more utilitarian value, like maybe bullets would be, would be better. Barter, certainly. Food, water, that would be good. But those aren't very portable. They're spoilage problems. Of course you need them for yourself. But maybe as barter, it wouldn't be the ideal thing. What's ideal for barter?

I think 22 long rifle hollow point bullets, complete cartridges are the best barter item to stock up on.

Now why that particular bullet?

Because 22 long rifle is ubiquitous. There's a gazillion rifles and pistols out there that are chambered in.22 long rifle. People will think of it in terms of being able to hunt small game or to slaughter livestock or whatever. So it'll be ideal for barter purposes. Ballistically, the.22 hollow points actually are not that much superior to standard.22, but most people think that the hollow point is better. So subconsciously or consciously, it's a better barter item. The beauty of ammunition for barter is it has a very long shelf life. If you keep it sealed in an ammo can or in a Tupperware container, it'll store for 100 years and still go bang. It's also divisible. You can take a box of 5022 long rifle cartridges and you can have 50 small transactions. You know, you might buy five cans of beans with one box of 22 long rifle ammunition. So ammunition I think is in common. Calibers is just about ideal. In addition to 22 Long Rifle, I would recommend whatever your local police department carries for their pistol. Typically that's.40 Smith & Wesson for a lot of police departments nowadays. Although check with your local department. Stock up on some of that. Even if you don't own a gun chambered in that and then a decent quantity of 9 millimeter 45 automatic.357 Magnum for pistols and then for rifles.223, 7.62 x 39, which is the AK47 cartridge and.308 Winchester. And then for shotguns, pretty much 12 gauge, 2 and 3 quarter inch, various birdshot and buckshot slugs. And if you have a good pile of ammunition built up, you'll be sitting pretty because anything that you've overlooked in your food storage, fuel storage or whatever, you can probably even in the early stages of a societal collapse, still trade ammunition at very advantageous terms for whatever you.

Need. You've really reinforced my thinking. I kind of said it flippantly when I asked you the question, but I have long thought that ammunition is the very best bar because it's highly portable, it's got utility value, and it's very divisible for those exact reasons. And you didn't mention portability, but.

I know you're thinking it is, it was relatively portable. Yeah. Now a lot of other survival consultants talk a lot about silver for barter or even gold coins, but those really won't come into the fore until a few months into a disaster situation. When an economy is starting to reform in the short term, people are going to say, what am I going to do with silver? You can't eat it. But they'll see utility in common caliber.

Ammunition. Speaking of utility, we did an article in one of my newsletters, the Financial Freedom Report, where we're talking about inflation and technology's impact on inflation in terms of the hedonics index and the technology making life seem like there's no inflation. Many times when there really is a lot of inflation underlying the economy on the things you need, the core products of food and energy. And it was entitled eat my iPad. And you know.

And if the power grid goes down, I can't even use my iPad. So that's, you know, very good points there. As far as utility, I've long thought that the gold and silver bugs are. You're right, it's much further into the collapse and many people will have already perished three, four months, six months into it, they will be dead.

Already. Yeah. And in fact, gold really is too compact a form of wealth for.

Barter. Yeah. Not.

Divisible. You know, when an ounce of gold currently is pushing 2,000 bucks an ounce right now. I mean, what are you going to buy with one ounce of gold? I mean an entire farm or somebody's pickup truck. I mean, you're not going to be able to use that for day to day transactions. So for Barter. I would recommend pre1965 silver dimes and quarters make much more.

Sense. See, that's so specific. Again you know, how do you get ahold of those? What's the best way to buy the Pre1965? That's the bag of.

Silver. Small quantities. Just buy it at your local coin shop. Just go in, ask your local coin dealers, do you have any junk silver on hand? The derisive term that's used by numismatic coin dealers for coins that only have bullion value, where they're so well worn or such common mid date like a 1964 quarter for example, where they have virtually no numismatic value to collectors. They only have their bullion value for their silver. That's the least expensive way to buy silver. It's also the most recognizable way in the United States to have a coin that people will trust when you hand it to them. If you try to barter with a 1 ounce silver medallion like so many private men's put out right now, people might look at that suspect and say well how do I know it's genuine? But if you hand someone a well worn 1964 quarter, it'll be instantly recognizable. People just turn it over, look at the edge, see that there's no copper line on it. And they'll realize that's a silver coin and the chances of it being a fraud are minimal. So they'll take it right at without any question. But anything coming out of a private mint people might look at with great suspicion. That's why I like actual stuff from the US Mint from 1964 and.

Earlier. So what do you think about what the coin dealers will sell you? Silver eagles, the most.

Common. Yeah, the American eagle might have a little more recognizability than anything out of the private mints. But nothing beats actual stuff that was circulating put out by the US Mint before 1965. It's actually hard to fake a well worn coin from that time period. They do it a bit with numismatics, but there's really actually too expensive.

To it wouldn't be worth it. That's the thing with gold. There's a lot more faking in the gold than in the silver world because silver isn't valuable enough to fake where the economy makes it work. Yeah, I want to back up and just ask you another question because there's several more points I want to cover. So just let's look at something really macro here Jim for just a moment. It seems to me and maybe I'm just not old enough. But it seems to me that there was a lot of the survivalist movement was big in the 70s. Howard Ruff being one of the, you know, we mentioned his name before, so I thought I'd bring him up again. One of the big names in that world back then. And then for, for decades he was wrong. I mean, he made all these predictions. People look back on him, thought, oh, the guy was paranoid and out of his mind. And I had him on the show too, and that's why I mentioned him. And now it seems like the survival movement is really gaining steam again. Maybe since the financial collapse, the mortgage meltdown a couple of years ago. Just in terms of the whole survivalist movement, if you will, all these prognosticators in the 70s that were predicting doom and gloom and then we had boom times. Now I think those boom times were built on a house of cards, smoke and mirror. Get off the gold standard, pump the money for a couple of decades. You know, it was fake prosperity. But what is your thought on that sort of macro picture? Like in 10 years is someone going to be listening to this show and saying, listen to these paranoid guys. This never happened. You know, everything's great. I don't think so, but I just thought I'd throw the question out for.

You. On a macro level. The things that I like to look at on a really big picture standpoint are two things. One is derivatives, and the second is debt. It took our nation 180 years to develop its first trillion dollars of debt. It got its second trillion dollars of debt in 10 years and now we have $15 trillion of debt. So we are on a parabolic course at this point. It's virtually unsustainable. And unless cold fusion is patented in the United States tomorrow, I don't think we' to work our way out of it through economic prosperity. We're not going to pay off the debt. So I think it's.

Inevitable. You're talking about not just cold fusion, but any major development like nanotechnology, biotechnology, you know, anything in energy field.

Yes. And if we were the ones that patented it, and if we were lucky enough that it couldn't be copied for 10 or 15 years by foreign competitors, which I don't think is possible these days. But that's the only conceivable way that I can see that we could pay off our national debt. Otherwise we are trapped in a cycle of compounding interest. You don't escape from compounding.

Interest. Right, that's the debt side. What about the derivative side, and I think that's the one very few people are paying attention to, is the derivative.

Side. The whole derivatives concept is fairly complex. And what I think I would prefer people do is read my piece on derivatives. But in essence, a derivative is essentially a bet on the way that a market will move or protection against a move. In a market, it's an insurance contract. And in a perfect world, derivatives are great because there's always a party and a counterparty and one offsets the risk of the other. And at the end of the transaction there's a zero sum gain and everyone is happy. Well, the problem is what happens if you get into an environment with rapidly rising interest rates, for example, or an economic collapse situation where companies are going out of business. In those cases your counter parties can disappear, leaving the other side of the transaction twisting in the breeze. And right now there are hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivative contracts in play. And someday it will probably be a situation a lot like 2008 where we came very close to a derivatives meltdown. We will see a huge meltdown of derivatives and it will topple entire currencies and entire national governments will go under. It could be that.

Bad. And I think that that derivatives complex is something that very few people are talking about. Everybody's talking about the debt problem. I sometimes wonder really, who's in the power position, the lender or the borrower? I think, I think many times the borrower is in the position of strength, but it'll certainly make the lender upset. And that means China and Japan if they don't get repaid or they get repaid into base dollars. But with the derivatives thing, I think maybe a massively oversimplified way to look at it. When we've got derivatives out there that are many times the entire global GDP, and I think the global GDP hovers around 60 trillion.

Annually. And derivatives are 10 times that at any given.

Time. Yeah, I was going to say like five times or so, but anyway, it's too many to be sure what the number is. Derivatives just really represent fake wealth, right? I mean, that's, I, that's the way I kind of look at it. It's money that's not really there yet. So many parties and counterparties have bet on it being there and it's, it's, it's a smoke and mirrors game. Is that a good way to look at.

That? I think that's a pretty fair assessment. The thing to remember with derivatives is that, but it's all dependent upon a stable Financial milieu. If stability goes out the window, the counterparty risk ratchets up to insane levels. And just to cover derivatives risk can create finance risk, traditional finance risk, because to cover the risk of a derivatives contract that's gone sour, a company will often call in any paper that it has out. So it'll cause a huge margin call, what they call a short squeeze, where anyone holding paper, and a lot of that is people in the futures market, will suddenly see.

All their loans will get called. It's a whole cascade of events. We came very close in 2008 to a global financial meltdown because there started to be margin calls. And the only thing that stopped it was Ben Bernanke creating $15 trillion out of thin air and lending it to European bankers at 0% interest, short term rates. That was the only thing that really stopped it. And that was just a stopgap measure. They were really lucky that they didn't see a full meltdown. I think the next time this happens, and it may very well come out of a crisis over Greece and the euro, there may be no stopping it. And we may see the global credit market completely melt down, which would cause a massive depression and a loss of confidence in several national currencies, including the United States.

Dollar. Any thoughts on when that might.

Happen? You know, oh, maybe next couple of.

Weeks. It seems like it should have happened already, you know, but are we talking one year, five years, Mayan calendar? What are we talking about.

Here? I think sometime in the next two or three years we might very well see a global financial meltdown because.

Again, we have a whole system of currencies in the world that's no longer backed by gold and silver. They're all make believe currencies. They're all basically in a race to the.

Bottom. Yeah, it's all fiat money. And I agree with you on the race to the bottom. But you know what I think becomes important when that happens? I mean, as ugly as it sounds, it's just like the individual with the ammunition and the supplies and so forth. It's, it's the kid with the biggest stick and that's the United States military still. And so what'll happen then is, is the US might start bullying countries around and stealing their resources. I mean, look, that's the history of the world. People look at Napoleon as some sort of great hero. He was a thief with an army. I mean, come on, let's be realistic about.

That. A well trained army. Yeah. In fact, one comparison that I made in my first novel, Patriots, was to Someone who buys a car on credit and who stops paying their car payments. Well, what happens? They send a tow truck and they tow their car away. What happens if you have a kingdom and you stop paying your loans to foreign creditors? Well, they'll come and tow your kingdom away. That's what wars are. It's kingdom.

Towing. But they won't do that in the United States. I mean, they can't tow our kingdom away very easily without a big military. Well, they.

Will. They most likely won't. The problem is, as I pointed out at the beginning of our conversation, we have a house of cards here in the United States where we have so much dependent on our high technology infrastructure that we may actually collapse from.

Within if there's an electrical.

Problem. Right, Electrical grid. Or it could just be something as simple as inflation kicking in where there's a lack of confidence in the United States dollar amongst foreign creditors. And if there's a dollar collapse, then we could see the genuine rate of inflation start to be revealed. And then just like in Zimbabwe, as we mentioned, inflation gets into a cycle where it becomes.

A. It's a.

Spiral. Yes, A self amplifying feedback loop where you can't. Once inflation starts, there's the anticipation of future inflation. So if prices are doubling every two or three days, people will keep driving up prices and they'll buy up all available goods, which will create even more inflation. And you get into a self amplifying loop where Suddenly inflation isn't 20 or 30%, it goes to 100%, then 200%, then 1000%.

Annualized. So do you have an opinion on that real inflation rate? Jim, you said the real.

Inflation. I think our real underlying inflation right now rate right now is probably around.

15%. Yeah. And I think it's a good 9 to 10% for.

Sure. Yeah. If you look at things like food and fuel over the last four years and annualize it, I think it averages out to about 15% a year. It's ironic. You mentioned hedonics earlier. It's ironic that not only does the government apply these arcane hedonic measurements and calculations, but they also with when national governments calculate inflation, they always discount food and fuel. What do people need the most? Food and fuel.

So they're setting aside the most important measure of inflation to essentially cook the.

Books. Yeah, of course they are. And try going to the gas station or buying a bag of groceries and telling the clerk that you want to pay the core rate, not the real price. So it's obviously a game. Hey, you talked about Safest places to live. Did you want to get any more specific on that? You were very well.

Sure. And in fact, well, generally I recommend the western United States versus the east because the east is too heavily populated and I prefer the farming regions of the west that are not dependent upon electrically pumped irrigation water. And that only leaves five or six regions it leaves like the Willamette Valley, the Palouse Hills in Idaho, parts of northwestern Montana, parts of western Wyoming. There's just a few places you.

Didn'T mention Utah in there surprisingly.

Well. Unfortunately in Utah it's just too arid. It's always been touch and go in terms of whether they have a good farming year or not. They've become very dependent upon electrically pumped irrigation water. It's one of those areas that will revert to desert. The other problem with Utah, most people think of the LDS Church and its food storage program as a great asset and to some extent it is. The problem with Utah is virtually every Mormon in the country has relatives in Utah. And when everything hits the fan, they're going to want to go move in with their relatives in Utah. So the population, if we have a slow scale collapse something along the order of the Great depression in the 1930s where people can still travel, the population of Utah will probably explode to about 6 million people in the course of two years. So the six month supply of food that the Mormon families have set aside suddenly won't be a six month supply. It will be about a two month supply and then they'll be stuck in a state where if the grid goes down, they're going to be in a desert. So I actually don't like Utah as a retreat.

Location. That's an interesting analysis. Most, that's very counterintuitive. Most people would never analyze it that way. So thank you for that. That's interesting. Let's talk a little bit about self sufficiency. Of course we've been talking about that the whole time. But like, is there a single most important skill or top three.

Skills? Well, I would say.

First aid skills. If you can at least take the Red Cross first aid course and the CPR course would probably be very important. Shooting skills. I've often been quoted as saying that owning a rifle doesn't make you a shooter any more than owning a surfboard makes you a surfer. It really takes a lot of practice to become a safe and competent and confident shooter. Shooting skills are also quite important. And then old fashioned gardening and canning skills I think are very important. I'd say those probably the three top skills That I would recommend that people invest their time in. It takes a long time to learn how to tailor a garden to a particular climate region and get it to the point where you can produce year after year reliably. Reliably in the long term may mean using traditional non hybrid which are also called heirloom or open pollinated seeds. Those seeds don't produce as much as the hybrids. If you can't have reliable crops saving seed from year to year. With hybrids, if you're reduced to the old fashioned seeds, your yield is going to go down per acre. So it's really important that you practice gardening, build up your soil, get your fruit and nut trees planted and established. It takes years for them to start producing. There's a lot of work that goes into gardening and then you have to figure out how you're going to take care of all your extra produce each fall so it'll carry you through the winter. In terms of dehydrating, home canning and so.

Forth. I think what Monsanto has done with seeds should be illegal. That's just wrong the way they've created these hybrid seeds and that's just.

Wrong. Well, especially the genetically modified ones I distrust very.

Deeply. I had a guest that talked about heirloom seeds and he sent me a little sample package of them. How do you know though if you're buying these things that they really are heirloom seeds or.

Not? You really should buy from a reputable.

Vendor.

Right? And there's also an organization called the Seed Savers Exchange. They have a website and it's a wonderful organization. What people do is individual families save seeds from each year's produce that they're sure are non hybrid seeds. They're traditional open pollinated non hybrid seeds. They save those, dry them slightly, put them in packets and then they have an exchange where all you have to do is either agree to send a like quantity of seeds or send someone a self addressed stamped envelope and they will mail you free seeds. It's a wonderful organization. I highly recommend people get involved and it's also the best way to make sure that you have crops that are well suited to your particular climate zone. Because if you buy an off the shelf selection of seeds and you live in a high altitude area or a desert area, you may end up with virtually no production because you don't have plants that are suitable to your.

Climate. In your book Survivors you talk about ham radio and I think that this is the communication is probably one of the most overlooked things by survivalists I think and preparedness people, because they think many times their cell phones will just be the method. And you know, you can't depend on.

That. When the grid goes down, it'll only be the ham operators that have any real idea of what's going.

On. I want to ask you a question about ham. So can I just throw in a question on that and then you can answer them all at once? I think it'll be helpful. To the interview, we did a show with, I think it was the president of the Ham Radio association of America or something like that was on. And he sent me the course to get my ham radio license. And I thought that this was a really good idea to do that because like you say, no grid, no communication. Ham radio is a standalone method of communication where you only need someone at the other end, but no grid is necessary. Very important. You know the thing that bugged me about it though, is if you have a ham radio license, you basically seem to be giving the government an implicit search warrant because they have the right to come in and inspect your equipment at any time. And that just bothers me that they can knock on my door at any time and come into my house and look at my equipment. They might under that guise of doing that. I don't like that it is.

A federal license and there is a inspection thing that goes along with that. Some of my readers of Survival blog are real secret squirrels and their approach is to go ahead and buy a shortwave receiver, go ahead and buy a police scanner and use those regularly, and then buy a ham radio transceiver, an HF band transceiver, but basically test it and then put it on the shelf and never use it because it's illegal to operate without a license in time of disaster. They're planning on operating it without.

A license because who.

Cares?

All the rules are out the.

Window. Yes, and in fact, there's even.

An exemption for emergencies written into the FCC.

Regulations. Oh, excellent point. Now tell us about Morse code. You know, you talk about that in your book Survivors and in the HF band. Why is that so.

Important? Well, Morse code can be read through. You can understand Morse code through horrible propagation situations where you just wouldn't be able to make out a human voice. You can literally hear a 2 or 3 watt Morse code transmission from around the world and be able to copy that code and tell what people are saying. A same powered transmitter transmitting human voice because it's using full band, not a sideband, isn't going to carry nearly as far. And it's much harder to Interpret what's being said. So I do recommend using sideband transmission in the HF band so that you can transmit that much farther with very little power. And also you mentioned security earlier with very low probability of intercept by anyone else because there's very few people outside of the ham world that even know Morse.

Code. Well, unfortunately, very few people in the ham world anymore even know it because most of them are getting no code.

License. Right. They dropped the code requirements. So yes, I do think it's important that people go ahead and at least study Morse code and get the equipment and if they feel so inclined to go ahead and get.

Licensed. Yeah, good point. And I like your philosophy, which I've thought of doing myself, of buying the equipment, turning it on and then sticking it on the shelf and not using it until disaster might strike. And then you don't worry about the license or the implicit search warrant, which I don't like like too much either. So any thoughts on retirement or fixed income? And those people that are in that situation, you know, we've got the graying of America. What can they do to adequately.

Prepare? Well, I do think that it's possible to prepare even on a very limited income. And I think that people who are retiring actually are in an admirable situation because that gives them the mobility to move to a lightly populated region. Not only is it less expensive to live out in the boonies, you can get by on 15,000 or $20,000 a year pretty easily out in the boonies. You can't do that in the big city. So that's your ticket to get to the boonies is if you're either self employed or retiring. So I don't look at it as a minus, I look at it as a.

Plus. Yeah, well that's an interesting point because the people that are retired, they have mobility, probably more so than people who need to be somewhere for a job. And mostly that's in an urban area. Which actually brings me to my next question. If you're in an urban environment and most of the population is in some sort of city or at least a suburb, is it possible if you live in a high rise? I mean, a lot of the things you mentioned, gardening, they might be unavailable. What can someone do in an urban area? Obviously being ready for barter ammunition, you can still store food and water. What else should they.

Know? Well, the best thing they can do is be ready to go because I don't think the urban areas are going to be very tenable. I think there will be a lot of People eating each other within a few weeks if the grid goes down. So be ready to go, have a place to go, have it well stocked, be ready to bug out on short notice and recognize the fact that you may only have one trip out of Dodge, you may not have a chance to go back for another load. So it's crucial that you pre position the vast majority of your logistics.

At your intended retreat and that transportation becomes vitally important. If there's an EMP or solar flare type situation. Is your car gonna.

Work? Probably. Your car probably will work. Although I'm a big believer in every family owning at least one older diesel car. My absolute favorite for that would be a pre1987 diesel Mercedes wagon, like a 300D or a 300TD wagon because they're absolutely bomb proof cars, literally EMP proof. They're not vulnerable to EMP at.

All. Well now, and you're saying that because the diesel engine that basically works on pressure versus electricity.

Right? And the only electronic component in the whole car is actually electrical, it's not even electronic. That's the glow plug. Otherwise, on the older diesels that don't have electronic fuel ignition or electronic brakes or any of the other fancy bells and whistles like they have on the new diesels, they could be practically at ground zero of a nuclear blast and EMP will not affect them. Except for the car.

Radio. Well, the question I have for you.

Is the car may continue to work if it's already running, but can you start.

It? Yes, you can. You can start a diesel. As long as you have battery power to fire up the glow plug, you can still start a diesel post emp, no problem.

Whatsoever. Okay. And that battery, and if you're.

Really paranoid, you store a spare ignition glow plug in a metal ammo can and it would take something really, really high field strength of EMP to wipe out a glow plot. Just electrical, not.

Electronic. Yeah, okay, good, good point. And precious metals in the next five years, what do you.

See? I think that depending on what happens with the European financial crisis, we'll probably see gold anywhere between 2,000 and $4,000 an ounce in the next five years. If we have a full scale collapse, there really isn't a dollar value the base on gold or silver because paper currency will essentially be worthless. So what would it be then? A million dollars an ounce? It's in the realm of fanciful conjecture as to what the absolute top would be, but at the very minimum, I think we're going to see $2,000 gold and $50 an ounce, silver in the next.

Year. Yeah, and I would agree that those are realistic. But the question I always ask is, did the gold and silver actually appreciate or did the dollar just lose value? So is that a. Are you simply storing and hedging, in other words? My point there, Jim, is this. And I have an interesting philosophy on the metals that nobody else seems to have is that it's a defensive strategy. It's not offensive. It's a store of wealth. Definitely better than paper dollars for sure. But again, you're not necessarily gaining. When people think they're gaining, they're. They're.

Simply. No, it's not really gain. It's a hedge. It's insurance on the dollar. It's fire sale insurance on the dollar. I like to think of gold as a time machine. It holds your wealth from one side of an economic crisis to the other. At some point they will have a new currency and it'll be convertible. You can take your gold and buy the new currency if and when they have a new one, so that wealth will not be lost. The thing is that a lot of people overemphasize precious metals at the expense of their personal safety and health. You really need to get your beans, bullets and band aids squared away before you even think about buying precious metals. And even then the first precious metals you should buy would probably be pre1965 silver coinage for barter. And then if you're really wealthy, then maybe some gold.

Coins. Yeah, yeah, great point, great point. I think that's a very good view of it. You talked about bug out locations and people living in urban areas and so forth. A moment ago. When someone has a retreat, they need to protect it. Is there a good system for intrusion detection that's inexpensive.

Reliable? Yes. The one that I recommend the most is called a Dakota Alert and that's a radio based infrared intrusion detection system. In the western United States on farms and ranches, they're almost standard equipment as a driveway alarm. If someone walks by or drives by the post where you have a Dakota Alert transmitter, it will trigger and it will send out a radio signal on the MERS band, which is the multiple use radio service band, which is an unlicensed band like cb. And for example, at one at the front of my driveway at the far end of our property, it'll send out this alert and it'll say alert zone one. Alert zone one. And that frequency for the MERS band is very convenient. It's right next to the two meter frequency for two meter Ham radios. It also happens to be right next to the National Weather Service frequency. So with one handheld walkie talkie, I can have 2 meters, I can have the MERS band and I can have the local National Weather Service weather alerts all on one radio. And I can use that radio for push to talk, to coordinate retreat security. It's the perfect system as far as I'm.

Concerned. Well, is this for. I mean, I know you can use it when you're there at the retreat, certainly, but what about when you're away from it? I mean, if this is a bug out retreat and you know, it's really Webcam. Yeah. It's mostly unattended. Right. You're hardly ever.

There. I do recommend, well, first living year round at your retreat if you possibly can. If you can't, then have a trusted family member who's at your family retreat year round. And failing that, you really need to install webcams and you need to hide the vast majority of what you have stored at your retreat. Typically what I recommend is that if people have a basement under a retreat that they do a little creative carpentry and make it look like it's a half basement by building a false wall so they can store all your electronics, all your food storage, all your guns, all your ammo. Everything of value that could be burglarized will be in that hidden room so that a gang of burglars could come into a place, you could even spend a couple of days there and they wouldn't even know that they were sitting right on top of it. And aside from that, I recommend that people also install webcams, multiple webcams, so that they can document if they ever do have their retreat burglarized in normal times. There have been some wonderful success stories of people that have been able to track down. In some cases, it was their own neighbors burglarizing their place and they were caught red.

Handed. Definitely. Well, hey, we've gone longer than we expected. You are a very interesting guest and I got to tell you, I really appreciate your, your very specific knowledge, Jim, and your specific advice on this stuff. You're author of three books, Survivors we talked about. That's a novel. Tell us about the other two real quickly. Give out your website again and any closing thoughts you.

Have. Sure. Patriots was my first novel and it's been quite a good seller. It was called a survival manual, Justice Fiction, and it's still available through Amazon and most of the other sellers. It was actually the prequel to Survivors, although they both are standalone books, they do have a little bit of overlap and they're set in the exact same time period, unlike most sequels. When I wrote Survivors, instead of going out farther into the future, I decided to make it contemporaneous with the storyline of Patriots and just show different geography and people with different sets of personal circumstances than in Patriots. So those are my two novels. And then in addition I have a nonfiction book book that was also a best seller.

It is called how to Survive the End of the World as We Know it, and that's from Penguin Books and it's still available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the other sellers. It's more or less a compendium of some of the things that you'll find in my blog. And my blog again is survivalblog.com it has very deep archives. I recommend that people take the time to go through it.

All. It's all available for any Closing thoughts in terms of what one should do, closing advice, anything I didn't cover. This has been a pretty comprehensive show, so we appreciate.

That. Well, I think I'd like to close with just one thought, and that is I think that survival preparedness begins with prayer. You need to get right with God and pray fervently for God's providence to put you in the right place at the right time with the right people. And from there on, it's all a matter of teamwork. Survival is not just a pile of stuff or even skills, which of course are very important. But a lot of it has to do with who you know, who you team yourself with. So you've got to align yourself with and team with and train and cross train with people that you can, that you know, that you can trust when times are truly.

Bad. Excellent. Very good advice. Well, Jim, thank you so much for joining us today. Excellent show. Lot of stuff discussed and we went much longer. So I appreciate the extra time and our listeners thank.

You. Thank you and God.

Bless.

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