Latest / Man in America Podcast / Our Power Grid is DANGEROUSLY Vulnerable… An Attack Could Kill 90% of Americans

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Our Power Grid is DANGEROUSLY Vulnerable… An Attack Could Kill 90% of Americans · Man in America Podcast

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Takeaway, it was dealing with hungry and starving people and taking food away from the the average Joe just for six days and watching, you know, high speed jet pilots and, you know, fighter pilots and, you know, even some of the operations guys just lose, become a pile of pudding in a soup. You know what I mean? They just, they, they lose it when you take their sleep away, you take their food away. So that was one of the big takeaways I had from there. So around that time I decided to pen my own book.
• 0:41
  I am no William Shakespeare. I'd never written a book before. Actually started writing it on notebook paper. That was my first fiction book and it was basically to kind of put my perspectives out there. And, it it basically took it took off out of nowhere.
• 0:54
  I thought I'd sell like 20 copies. And then I went went to Hunt And Camp right after I released it, and I started looking. It was selling, like, a 50 a day, 200 a day. And it made up to, I think, number four in post apocalyptic genres on YouTube. And yeah.
• 1:10
  So that that kinda kicked it off. That was oh, man. I'm getting old. I think it was fifteen years ago. And so I've written five books, since then.
• 1:20
  Three fiction books and my two preparedness manuals, survival theory, probably about a decade ago. I started see, that was probably longer too. It probably about twelve years ago. I started working with clients and helping them build off grid survival retreats. So, you know, my background, I do have a degree in carpentry and cabinetry working in construction.
• 1:38
  And so I really did a lot of study on off grid design and what it takes for a house to function like it did two hundred years ago without electricity and fans blowing heat and cold air around. So I got into survival retreat design and that business grid down consulting grew like like crazy to the point where I can only take a handful of clients at a time. I just I can't work with most of the people that are reaching out to me. So I've worked with over 500 high, you know, pretty high net worth guys around the world overseas. Most of them Kona's here.
• 2:10
  Yeah. I don't know. That's kind of my background. And then as far as organizational experience here, five years ago, I started getting involved in kind of the fight to harden the grid. And the, I've been part of the electromagnetic defense task force, which is a war gaming, operation on the E and P and grid down threats down at LeMay Borgaming Institute, Maxwell Air Force Base.
• 2:31
  So I was part of that, Secure the Grid Coalition. I was a senior fellow on Impact America for, actually, I still am. And then, probably about a year ago here, I was asked to become the deputy director at the US task force on National and Homeland Security, which is a congressional EMP task force that Doctor. Peter Price started, the late Doctor. Peter Price started.
• 2:55
  So anyways, yeah, that's kind of what I've been up to. Sorry to go long winded on you there. But, yeah, it's my background.
• 3:01
  Seth Holehouse: And I've had some folks that have taken thirty minutes to tell me the background. So I think that was a pretty, pretty concise, you know, kind of to bring us up to where we are right now. And so, I remember when when Joe Biden first took office, and I was watching what he's doing with his executive orders. And, you know, one of the executive orders that Trump had put in place was basically banning certain countries from having any access to our grid infrastructure in terms of, you know, like, we're not gonna buy grid, you know, technology from China as an example. And as soon as Biden got in, he undid that.
• 3:35
  And that was a gigantic red flag for me. And so, you know, as someone that's working, you know, on a specific task force to harden our grid and knowing how vulnerable our grid is, where's that battle at right now?
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, that battle is not going, anywhere. I don't want to say that. We're working very hard. So I just two months ago, was in Texas with Senator Bob Hall working on legislation for the Texas grid. I was in Colorado, three months ago or two months ago at the Western Conservative Conference.
• 4:13
  I speak there, met with some some local representatives in Colorado, been speaking with people in Montana. We've got, you know, legislate, we've got stuff in different states that we're working on. Unfortunately at the federal level, for the last twenty years, the organizations that have been trying to push the politicians too hard in the electric grid, the E and P commission and others have been defeated at every turn. Essentially what you have is the electric utility industry is the second largest lobbyist in Washington DC after, pharmaceuticals. So they spend more money in DC than big oil.
• 4:48
  In fact, they spent over a billion dollars, that's with a B, over the last ten years just on lobbying, just in DC. That's not state level. That's just at the federal level. So trying to get trying to get any kind of bills passed to harden the grid has been an extremely uphill fight. We're still fighting.
• 5:08
  We're not gonna give up, but it's it's very difficult because at the end of the day, we have the records of who's getting whose campaigns are being given money. And it's basically just about everybody on both sides of the fence. So, I mean, there's a handful of people that may not take money from the electric utilities, but it's basically everybody. So it's just been, very frustrating. Let's put it that way.
• 5:32
  But we're working our hardest. We've got a lot of great people, at the different organizations. I'm at the, like I said, the the E and P task force. The Secure the Grid Coalition has got a lot of great people that are working hard on this. Unfortunately, there's probably about a dozen organizations, about ten years ago, and we're down to about maybe three because we get no funding.
• 5:50
  We get no outside funding. It's just donation based. And, you know, it's not, this is not the story of David and Goliath. This is the story of like an ant and Goliath. You know what I mean?
• 6:01
  We're just fighting an uphill battle. So, but we're doing the best we can. And, know, we do, we do make progress right now. We're just trying to, educate. That's a big thing is educate people.
• 6:14
  And the big thing is as most people just don't understand the threats and they don't understand the risk involved after the fact. And that's that's an uphill battle also trying to get people to understand that.
• 6:25
  Seth Holehouse: Alright, folks. I've got a quick message for you. I have one simple question. If today you could no longer go purchase more food for your family with the food stores that you have in your home, how long would you be able to feed your family? Would it be a week, three weeks, a month, two months, a year?
• 6:45
  This is a really important question folks that we have to be very realistic about because the elites are proactively trying to put us into a state of food crisis and a state of famine. I'm sure you've seen all of the different food processing plants and farms that are blowing up. You've got cattle dying by the tens of thousands. They're proactively trying to collapse our food system because they know if they can control our food, they can control us. And so one of the best ways to be outside of their control is to be able to have our own stores of food and to be able to produce our own food.
• 7:17
  So there's really two things I would recommend. One is having heirloom seeds that you can grow your own food with, making sure that they're non GMO heirloom seeds that that way you can harvest your seeds this year, use them next year. You can use these seeds for generations. Literally, it's how it will work. The other thing though is this high quality storable food.
• 7:37
  This is food that's sitting somewhere, it's hidden in your basement, buried in your backyard, whatever it ever it is. So that way if there is a crisis, if there is an emergency, you might have three months set aside to get through that time period. And so for this, I would highly recommend a company called Heaven's Harvest. This is an amazing Christian owned patriot company, and what they're doing is they're making high quality storable food. Again, lot of the food companies, they say these food buckets, they're all about maximizing calories per dollar.
• 8:07
  They're filling the buckets with a bunch of filler and junk like sweet beverages, etc. But Heaven's Harvest, they focus on very high quality food that will last up to twenty five years on the shelf. They also sell heirloom seeds. You can buy all of your seed, you can buy all of your restorable food. And look folks, personally, I would recommend having at least three months per person in your household, if not six months or even a year.
• 8:32
  Again, depends on your budget, but I'll definitely make sure you have some seeds because that seed those seeds could be worth their weight in gold, if not more in the future. So to go ahead and do this right now, go put up a new tab and go to heavensharvest.com. And if you use the promo code Seth, that's s e t h, promo code Seth, you'll save 15% off of your entire order. So again, folks, the time is running out and you'd rather be three months or one year early than one day late. Again, heavensharvest.com and use promo code Seth to save 15% today.
• 9:08
  Yeah, and that's the thing is I think there's a lot of people that, you know, that there's this the term prepping. It's like, oh, okay, well, I've got, you know, a year worth of food buckets, and I got a shotgun and I've got some, you know, a few life straws and a bug out bag and yet you live in a dense neighborhood, you know, on the outskirts of Chicago, right or, and so, I want to dive into that more than anything. It's just just the mindset. I think that, and I'll go through a caveat out there that I don't think that this is something where everyone should, you know, finish watching a show like this and be so scared that they're like, we're screwed. I can't do anything.
• 9:46
  Like, yes, look, if you have a year's worth of food set aside, you're already way better off than the person that doesn't have any food set aside. So it's good. You know, it's progress. It's baby steps. But I also I think it's important though, just to have a sober conversation about what could go wrong, what that looks like, how vulnerable we are.
• 10:08
  I mean, look, we do we just kind of finished pandemic one point o. They're now talking about pandemic two point o and lockdowns and masks and all this coming back again. They've talked about solar flares disrupting the power grid. They're talking about, you know, Klaus Schwab coming out talking about it. We've got, you know, Putin and Xi Jinping and, you know, China, Russia, Ukraine, and NATO.
• 10:28
  It's like everything, it seems like is reaching this boiling point. And then you've got the whole world burning down. You've got fires everywhere. You've got chemical spills. So I think that right now the conversation about preparedness is is a very important one.
• 10:43
  So I'll just hand it over to you. Where do you think we should start in helping people to just reframe their perspective of risk, vulnerability and preparedness in today's day and age?
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Sure. So this has been a good source of the frustration that I've had on the private side of it, the kind of the preparedness side of it, is because there's so much misinformation on YouTube on not just this topic, but in preparedness in general. So if you're preparing for a if you live in Florida and you're preparing for a hurricane and you put some bottles of water and some freeze dried food down there for a couple days, That's not really preparedness in my opinion. That's just common sense because you live in Hurricane Alley. Right?
• 11:30
  Or Tornado Alley if you're in Kansas or whatever. So it's just gonna take I mean, the government says that it's gonna take them three days to get to you in a normal situation with the rest of the country coming to rally to your age. So that's just common sense. Preparedness circles a lot of times the since the seventies, '1 of the guys I really loved when I first started, his name was Mel Tappan. He was an original kind of preparedness author from the seventies and, you know, made a lot of recommendations.
• 12:00
  I really enjoyed his writings. But the mindset that has been around since y two k and all this is a mindset that something bad is going to happen, you know, another pandemic or this or that, and then the government's going to eventually fix it and we'll get back to normal. So I need to plan for, you know, couple of weeks or a couple of months and, you know, work with my neighbors and and build mutual assurance groups with my my cul de sac in Suburban Suburban Atlanta. You know, these are basically the mindsets that have been in place for fifty years in the preparedness community. And I'm coming along and trying to educate people that if we have a long term grid down event from an EMP or solar flare, we will lose the electric grid and it will be permanent in the sense that our high voltage transformers are are Achilles' heel.
• 12:51
  They weigh 400 tons. We replace about 12 of the 3,000 in this country each year because they last for a very, very long time. And they come from South Korea and Germany. And the lead time currently is twenty four to thirty six months. In the past, it's been like eighteen to twenty four months.
• 13:09
  It's even further out now with raw materials being in short supply. So that's when we send them an order for 12 a year. If they take down our electric grid and we lose all 3,000 of those high voltage transformers, the first transformer is not getting here for two years. And over the course of that year, the congressional E and P commission, nonpartisan E and P commission has warned congress numerous times that we would lose ninety percent of the population the first year. Disease, starvation, societal unrest, your infrastructure completely stops.
• 13:41
  No no canning facilities, farming stops, interstate trucking stops. It's a mass starvation event and it's going it's gonna kill the vast majority of Americans. So even if that transformer does end up showing up two years later, there's nobody around to deliver to the site and hook it up. Right? So that's my point being is mindset, right?
• 14:03
  So people's preparedness mindset in the past has always been short term. And I'm trying to explain to them, if you make plans for the short term and you buy a three month food package from, you know, one of these big companies, which is actually a month worth of calories by the way, but let's say you have three months of food in your basement and you have water and you have supplies and you're talking to your neighbors about this stuff. And then one of these long term events happens, you're they're gonna be eating your food. There's it's not a good plan. So my recommendation for people is you must, if we're talking about a long term event, again, if we're talking about something short term, do it's not that hard.
• 14:44
  Just make basic plans, have some food and some some basic supplies. But if we're talking one of these long term events, the biggest threat to your life is people, is starving and desperate people that look like they just walked off the set of Schindler's List, the hall like the like an encampment. People are gonna be starving to death. We haven't seen that in hundreds of years in the Western world. So a lot of my study has been on areas where that has happened.
• 15:12
  Ukrainian, Holomodore, the the Chinese famine. I I've got dozens and dozens of books here of research. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment. So I put together a report for the military, a white paper on the the effects of starvation and on the psychological and physiological side on troops and on people should they start to starve because that's the thing is everybody makes a plan on normalcy bias. They expect everything to keep happening the same way, people to keep acting and reacting the same way.
• 15:44
  But I'm here to tell you from personal experience, if you, if people start to starve, if they go weak without food, there's no you're not having a rational discussion with somebody that's got a starving kid at home. You're just not. You they're like, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna you know, I've heard I wanna buy a bunch of liquor and and trade it to the drunks for food. It's like like, I I hear some of the most silly things that people online are telling people. So I'm getting long winded again, but my my point being, Seth, is that the most important thing you can do before making any plan of action is to understand the operating environment you're going to be fighting in.
• 16:22
  And and so like any general that goes to to plan a battle, he wants to know the weather. He wants to know how many guys the other side has. He wants to know their resources. He wants to know that there's he wants to know every single thing about that battlefield before he makes the first plan. So for kind of surviving a long term situation, whether it be from a future pandemic that has a forty percent death rate as opposed to a point zero three percent death rate or a long term grid down event.
• 16:51
  Any of these things that are going to completely collapse this country, you need to have a long term plan. And the first thing is understanding human nature and the effects of starvation on the human psyche. And you can look at that through historical means. I wrote a white paper on that and you know, that'll be, you know, we can share that maybe down in the comments or something.
• 17:12
  Seth Holehouse: And so if let's just kind of let's just walk through because this is something that helped me because I, you know, I read your books. I've read the whole, you know, one second after series, which was, you know, really intense. I mean, this is it's, you know, most people like, why are you reading that stuff? Like, it's it's it's kind of dark and scary. Like you know, I want to know what the dragon looks like that might try to come eat my family.
• 17:36
  I want to know what its weaknesses are, I want to know what strength is, I want to know whether it can fly, whether it can blow fire. That way I can just be more prepared for it and also because I can I can recognize that thud that you hear of its wings coming, it's like, oh, I know what it is? And here's how I'm gonna go hide from it. Right? So that's just my perspective.
• 17:54
  I want to look in the dark places because I think it helps me, you know, guiding me within the light places. And so let's just, you know, so I think it's important to explore these topics. So let's just walk through the first thirty days of say, let's just say the first three days of a grid down event, but what could also be the first thirty days of a significant natural disaster, you know, like we've seen some things happen. What if there is a massive storm that wipes out, you know, a large region that's, you know, cut off from help in the ways that we haven't seen before. So, but as I guess as an example, let's just say that a solar flare hits and a good chunk of the country loses the grids down for thirty days.
• 18:40
  Walk us through what happens.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Sure. So just in my perspective, if there's a grid down event for thirty days, it's it's probably going to be permanent. So if the grid does if it's a solar flare and it's a smaller one similar to the Quebec solar flare, and again, we don't know how that would affect us today because that was in 1989 and we didn't have smart grids and all these microchips all throughout our our control systems. But let's say it was a just a regional outage, where the rest of the country, no different than Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, the rest of the country, like always, is gonna rally to your aid. Your job at that point is to have, you know, four or five days worth of food and water on hand until FEMA shows up to to put you on a boat.
• 19:25
  Right? So that's my perspective on short term or regional things. So as far as nationwide events, so let let me let me throw this out there. For a long term grid down event, whether it be from a physical attack, whether it be from solar flare, a cyber attack can take down our national electric grid or an EMP attack. Just so the American people know, there is zero plan of action at the federal government to respond to that.
• 19:50
  There is zero plan of action for the military to respond to that. There is zero plan FEMA's never even done a study on this. Okay? They consider this beyond design basis. Basically, it's an overwhelming problem because in natural disasters, you have the rest of the country routing to the rate.
• 20:08
  If it's something that affects the whole country, nobody's coming to help you. Phones don't work. Gas pumps don't work. A lot of vehicles in the case of an E and P may not function. Everything's kind of that was plugged into the outlets.
• 20:19
  If it's a solar flare is likely fried at that point, computer systems, networks, the Internet. You're looking at losing a large portion of the satellites, low orbit satellites that are that are up in the sky right now. There's so many factors, but nothing bigger nothing bigger than losing the food interstate trucking infrastructure. And I think I went in-depth on it, so I won't go in-depth on it this time. But, essentially, every single thing that if you look around the room you're sitting in right now, every single thing that you own came on a truck at one point in time.
• 20:51
  Every single thing in your kitchen came on a truck. And when those trucks stopped rolling, the factories are unable to to to produce food. There's no electronic signals. The modern food distribution networks is nothing more than trillions of signals flying around the Internet every day. And and, packaging and shipping and distribution centers and everything just arrives right where it's supposed to.
• 21:16
  You stop that machine and the when the grocery stores are out of food in two or three days, they're out of food. So you asked me what is the first thirty days of a long term event look like? So it'd be different if it was a pandemic, it'd be a little bit different if it was this or that, but in the case of an EMP or solar flare, you're losing all aspects of electricity. So I really firmly believe for the first day or two in most areas outside the inner cities, in most areas, people are just gonna be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. You have to realize there's no radio, there's no TV, there's no Internet, there's nobody on the news saying, hey, you know, this is what's happening.
• 21:58
  You know, don't worry about it. We're fixing we're gonna be fixing this. Maybe if you have a you're one of the few people that have a ham radio, you might get some government signals. But for the most part, are just going to be, this is weird, you know, what's going on here? And then by day three or day four, people are really going to start to panic.
• 22:16
  So again, depending on what kind of neighborhood you live in in the city, you're gonna have opportunistic criminals the first night or two stealing TVs, sneakers, regardless of what big city you live in, whether it's Texas or Atlanta or Seattle. Okay? And then by the night of day two, day three, you're gonna see that transitioning to people stealing food because people are gonna really start this is gonna be something completely new for them. Because even when there's disasters, everybody starts getting glued to their phone and their TV and they want updates and reports and, oh, and then, you know, the Red Cross is doing this. Good example of this is look at hurricane Katrina at the Superdome.
• 22:57
  We're talking two days at the Superdome. There were news cameras there. They they were telling the people, hey, that we saw the trucks. They're loading them. They'll be here in twenty four hours.
• 23:07
  And there were still crazy amounts of rapes, murders, violence. So my my point kind of being that has nothing to do with New Orleans. You do that in Beverly Hills, you take people's food away, put them in a desperate situation, they're gonna act no different. It's it's not a matter of socioeconomic situation. It's a matter of humanity and desperation and starvation.
• 23:32
  So the first couple days are going to be kind of low level crime, stealing grocery. So once the grocery stores are cleaned out, they're never there's there's never gonna be a truck to resupply it. And so if you're relying on all the Hollywood movies you've seen on this where there's, you know, military troop carriers that are rolling down the street passing out Emery's, I can I can tell you for a fact that's never going to happen? I have a report on my website that is a report to Congress from the DOD telling them that 99% of the military receives their electric grid from the civilian electric grid. They've warned Congress, if we lose a civilian electric grid within forty eight hours, every military base is out of backup diesel for their generators.
• 24:14
  They have no there's no plan. There's no filing cabinet that the base general can reach over and pull. Well, this is the plan of action for this. Everyone's gonna be winging it. There's no communication networks with the Pentagon.
• 24:25
  It's just so no one's coming to help you. And that's gonna go really badly, really quick. It's gonna fall apart really quick. So when I when I work with my clients, I always tell them, you've got twenty four to forty eight hours to get it out of most cities. If you and so unfortunately, there's a big echo chamber in the preparedness YouTube sphere that is telling people, well, you know, your home is your safe place.
• 24:49
  You've got all your stuff there. That's always been, you know, you know your neighbors, right? And you know, stay stay put for as long as you can have. And they always tell them have a plan B. If it gets too bad, then go to your plan B.
• 25:04
  My stance is is if you wait two weeks till people are actually starving to death and you're watching people kill each other over a can of peaches, and that's the time you want to hit the open road to walk to Uncle Bob's farm, you're probably never gonna make it. So my philosophy is you need to get out early. And even if you, you know, it turns out to be not as big of event and you feel stupid, you go back. I mean, I have people that bugged out during the, the name that shall not be named here a couple of years ago, the event that happened in this country. Right?
• 25:31
  And they, you know, eventually they're like, oh, okay, it didn't turn out that bad and people weren't dying in the streets. They felt kind of stupid and, you know, they they went back home. But, you know, it's, it's better safe than sorry. So my stance is, again, if it's a serious situation like this, you've only got a couple of days to get out the city. So how does it look past that?
• 25:48
  So again, we have to look at history. I do a deep dive. I've got probably 25 pages of historic accounts, and I don't mean like government reports discussing starvation. I mean firsthand accounts from people from these areas that were eight million people died in China, like, anywhere between twenty and forty million people died depending on who, you know, who you believe. And so you gotta look at firsthand accounts.
• 26:15
  And and you you especially in Ukraine. Selkow Begovic lived through a a modern time where where his city was surrounded during the Serbian conflict and shut off electricity. He was in there for a year without food. Read his books. That and that's that's real recent.
• 26:32
  That's in the nineties. And read his experience that he had with starving and desperate people in a city. Watch how fast it shuts down. So the kind of the point is, is that there's this mentality that we're all gonna hold hands, stand in a circle, sing Kumbaya, and then we're all gonna start working together. And I agree with that sentiment mentality.
• 26:52
  And I I believe if you and your neighbors make a plan of action, you'll do that for the first week or two until people start to really starve. Until your neighbor, you know, is looking at you and you're the only one on the block that hasn't been tightened their belt a couple notches. Right? It's not gonna take long for them to figure out you're the one you're the only one in town not looking gray and gaunt. You're clearly eating.
• 27:12
  You know, we can smell your cook fires out back. Right? You know, and I hear stuff all the time. Oh, you know, grow a secret garden in your backyard and suburbia, put a six foot fence around it. You think your starving neighbors aren't gonna figure out your hoe and potatoes in your backyard for six months?
• 27:27
  I mean, that's just terrible advice. So I'm sorry. I'm going on rabbit trails here, but so I'll step it on a little bit further. So that's the first couple of days. Again, I think mainly confusion.
• 27:40
  So I want to talk about the rural areas because I live in a very rural area. In fact, I've got 12 houses within two square miles. I mean, six of them are farms, right? So I live very, very rurally and I know I grew up on a farm and I and a lot of them garden. They make a small garden to maybe can some tomatoes and grow some beans and to supplement what they buy at the grocery store.
• 28:06
  So again, if you live in the country, this idea that country, you know, Hank Williams junior, country boy can't survive, Kinda, you know, without electricity, not really. Very few of the country people that I know have the life skills to understand how large of a garden they need to grow, have all the plants and all the stuff that all the seed that they need to grow a large garden. They have a functioning root cellar to store stuff in. The big thing is knowing how much food you need to store over the course of a winter. If you're trying to grow your own food for sustenance, most people have no idea how large how huge of a garden you need to grow and have and you make one mistake one year and you're dead.
• 28:48
  Right? So it's it's difficult. So
• 28:53
  Seth Holehouse: Got a quick message for you. So folks, thank goodness inflation is going down. Thank you, Biden. But wait, if inflation is going down, then why are food prices going up, energy prices going up and gas prices going up? Well, because they're lying to us.
• 29:09
  Imagine that. You see right now, the real rate of inflation is closer to 25%, not the 5% the White House wants you to believe. You can see this with your own eyes and your own wallet. What this means is that if you had a hundred thousand dollars in your savings account just one year ago, today, it's only worth about $75,000 in terms of your actual buying power. Your money is losing value by the day.
• 29:36
  If you went back to 1920 and you had a $20 bill or a one ounce gold coin, you could walk into a men's clothing store and buy an entire suit, jacket, shoes, pants, belt, everything. But think about it, what would a $20 bill buy you today? Maybe some socks, but an ounce of gold will still buy you that same suit. And this is why I believe that now more than ever, it's a good time to consider transferring at least a portion of your wealth into physical gold and silver. Real world assets have stood the test of time.
• 30:11
  And for this, I'm confident in recommending Doctor. Kirk Elliott. So Kirk has two PhDs and is an incredible Christian patriot who's dedicated to helping you break free from the trap of inflation. You can buy gold and silver directly even in small amounts or you can transfer your IRA into physical gold and silver with zero taxes or penalties. So Kirk is who I use, he's who my family and my friends use and honestly, he's someone I trust completely.
• 30:36
  And when it comes to your wealth, you need someone that you can trust. So to learn more, open up a new tab right now and go to goldwithseth.com or call (720) 605-3900 to speak to a real person right now. Kirk Elliott's team will answer all of your questions and take care of you every step of the way.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: I I know I sound I'm not the most cheerful Ray of sunshine guy here. Right? I I I get that I'm not, you know, that's kind of my frustrations. There's a lot of people on the Internet that would be like, oh, you know what? Here's a five step plan.
• 31:16
  Here's the top five things. Here's a checklist for you. Just do this and you're gonna be okay. Buy this, you know, device for your house and your car and it'll survive an EMP. Well, don't tell you that it doesn't who cares if the rest of the grid is down?
• 31:34
  Oh, I got a backup generator. Yeah. You probably got, you know, maybe a week's worth of fuel. Okay. Run that backup generator.
• 31:40
  Good. Run that backup generator in Suburban Atlanta and in a perfectly quiet and dark world and figure out how fast you bring people to your doorstep like boss of the flame. Right? There's just there's things that just people haven't thought through and it's a big echo chamber. So get out early.
• 31:56
  But if we're talking long term, within a couple weeks, it's going to fall apart so bad. Again, again, if you read Selkopagovich, I really believe it's going to again, we're talking police go home, firefighters go home, doctors and nurses go home. They only have enough backup diesel typically for most of these places for forty eight hours. Okay? So when that runs out, the, you know, their police radios aren't working.
• 32:21
  There there's gridlock traffic in their city. Even if they could arrest somebody, wouldn't they do drag them by the scruff of the neck all the way back to the jail cell? Are the electric jail cell locks even functioning? Is the judge coming in to even to give them a hearing? Right?
• 32:35
  There's just a hundred variables there. Their phones, radios don't work. At some point, justifiably so, they're gonna throw up their hands and be like, I can't do anything. They've got a wife and kids at home. They need to go and protect them.
• 32:47
  Right? So you're gonna lose emergency services right off the bat. It's gonna end up kind of street by street, block by block. It will turn into warlords. There's gonna be no national guard incoming.
• 32:59
  The the police, there's gonna be no law and order. Again, that's something that's never been experienced in this country in two hundred years. So that's the first week or two, right? Things are gonna fall apart really fast. I think 20% of Americans rely on some kind of prescription for live their livelihood.
• 33:16
  You're gonna lose twenty percent of the population right there in a short order. I mean, got diabetics and a lot of other things. Violence. I mean, people, when you take their food away, I mean, at Sudan and some of these African countries and those people, and I'm not saying this cruel, cruelly, but they're kind of used to being angry in their lifetime. Right?
• 33:34
  American people aren't. You make them start to start, you're gonna see extreme levels of violence that Americans don't even believe they're capable of. So it's gonna get real ugly real quick. If you live in a big city, another thing to comprehend is that whether your water and electric requires electricity to function, or I'm sorry, your water and your sewer requires electricity to function. Depending on where you're at, if you're downhill maybe from the septic plant, none of those pumps are going to be working, Everyone's still trying to use the restroom.
• 34:08
  You're looking at raw sewage backing up into your house in a lot of cases and a certain percent of houses. They're not even gonna be inhabitable because you're not gonna be able to stop it because you don't have you don't have the 10 foot key to go out to your your your out to your end of your driveway and shut it off at the road. So you don't have that ability. It's gonna be pumping into your house, methane. You're not gonna be able to live there.
• 34:34
  You're also gonna have a lot of, you know, I I lived near Pittsburgh for a bunch of years in old cities, right? People in the winter getting cold, bringing their charcoal grill inside or using their stove to build a fire and just making stupid choices. No firefighters. There's no water pressure in the, you know, the the fire hydrants, even if there were firefighters. You could lose if it's a windy day.
• 34:57
  I mean, look at what just happened to Maui. I mean, you could lose entire portions of cities, major cities, because there's nothing to stop the the fires from getting out of control. So these types of things will happen. It is going to be far worse than I'm explaining. So again, I'm not trying to be completely dramatic and you know, it is kind of the end of the world, but you know, I'm not trying to say there's no hope.
• 35:22
  And so people look at me and they're like, oh my goodness, how do you, you know, I'm the happiest guy in the world, you know, but that, that comes from my faith in Jesus Christ. Know what I mean? I don't, if I died tomorrow, great. I'm going somewhere better. I don't have to live through the whole thing.
• 35:39
  Right? So, you know, I I guess, like, I don't live in fear. I don't live in worry. I'm not I'm not there yet. You know, you're always kind of getting a little bit further, playing a little bit further.
• 35:52
  And you know, I'm not cashing my kids college fund to do the things that I do. But anyways, I'm sure you have more questions. But at the end of the day, the most important thing, you get nothing else, is you need to educate yourself on historic periods of starvation. Look at firsthand accounts and understand what it's really going to be like. Because if you're listening to a lot of these YouTube clowns that are telling you like, oh, just paint your door and throw some trash in your front yard and nobody will figure out you're living there.
• 36:18
  If you're buying into that stuff, these people have never lived that. They've never done that. It's just, you know, something they saw in The Walking Dead or Hollywood movie and or their brainchild at 2AM in the morning after, you know, a night of pizza. So make sure you understand the threats you're going be facing before you start making plans.
• 36:35
  Seth Holehouse: And if someone came to you, and they said, look, you know, I'm single mom, I live in a townhouse in the outskirts of, you know, a medium sized city. What are I don't have a huge budget. You know, what are a couple, what are some like where should I start because that's actually a lot of you. Yes, you know, a lot of this audience especially the ones that are watching my show. They're already out in the country, they're gardening, they've got chickens, they've got guns, they're in that mindset, but also there's a lot of folks that aren't living like that for various reasons.
• 37:08
  And their solution to preparedness may not, they may not have the option to go find 30 acres, you know, backing up to hunting preserve, right? So if someone comes to you in that situation and says, Okay, you know, what's like the just a few simple things. Where do I start on taking some steps to increase my ability to get through a natural natural or man made disaster?
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So that's a that's actually a very difficult question. And the easy answer that most people would give you is, here's this new PDF I put together, sign up for my email newsletter and you know, everything's gonna be okay. If you have no resources to put into this, and I'm just gonna be blunt, it's gonna be very difficult to survive a long term event. Okay.
• 38:00
  So most people aren't gonna tell you that they're gonna try and give you some gimmicky things to do. But if you have zero money to put into this, gonna be difficult. With that said, for small amounts of money, for the average blue collar worker that, you know, can't afford a $20,000,000 survival retreat somewhere on 3,000 acres to take their extended family to, there are options. They're not great options, but they're good options. They're better options than sitting in town because here's the thing.
• 38:34
  Most people, when this thing happens, they are going to second guess leaving town. They're they're they're gonna remember this conversation you and I are having. They're gonna remember this this this gangly bearded dude that was on your show that was warning them to get out early. And they're gonna sit there and their brain is gonna come up with every reason why they shouldn't leave. Okay?
• 38:55
  So what I am not advocating for is to try and become the legend of Mick Dodge and run out to your national Forest somewhere and live off the land. You're gonna die just as fast as if you stayed in town, in my opinion, if you do that. A fraction of the people that say they have the life skills to do that actually do, especially through a winter. And even the ones that do, you're not counting on the other 99% of the yahoos that have the same plan as you running around that. They don't have the life skills and you gotta sleep sometime.
• 39:27
  You gotta build a fire to boil water sometime. You you've gotta kill an animal at some point and skin it and drip. At some point someone's going to wander across you or you're in a wander under a tree stand and you're going to get shot for what's in your pack. Okay. So it's just a matter of time.
• 39:41
  It's a ticking time bomb if you try to live off the national forest. So I'm also not saying to just like the movie, The Road and just wander around the open road from from town to town and experience the experience. They make great Hollywood movies, but those people probably wouldn't live a fraction as long as they live if they're wandering around the open world. So I can't afford a survival retreat. I don't want them wander around.
• 40:04
  I don't want to do a national forward. I have five different options. I have five different things that I recommend people do. And I don't want to name them all because it would take me probably ten minutes to flush each one out. So people weren't like, great, you know, but I'll give you one example.
• 40:20
  Okay. Bed and breakfast. There are a lot of bed and breakfasts around this country that are tucked away. They're kind of like your your farmstead bed and breakfast, if you know what I mean. They they, I mean, they bring fresh chicken eggs out from the coop each morning to make you breakfast.
• 40:35
  They're the people that are already gardening that that you try and find some Ben breakfasts, go to their website that are that are off the beaten path that are well outside of a major city, kind of deconstruct where you live. And then over the course of the next year, take a couple weekends there. Yeah, the people. Don't go in there, tell them you're a prepper. Just go in there and just meet them.
• 40:58
  Talk to them, ask them questions. Some of the questions I would ask would, you know, just friendly conversations, tell them about your family and then, oh, you know, do you have any kids? And oh yeah, they've gone to college and they've moved on. Oh yeah, where do they live? Try and figure out how many people might be showing up at this location after the fact, okay?
• 41:16
  So you like, I have a whole bunch of questions that, you know, kind of without getting into, Hey, the end of the world's coming. Do you mind if I show up here? Cause that's not gonna work. Right? So my philosophy is, as you do this for two or three times, you might have to visit five, ten places before you find one that's a good fit.
• 41:37
  Once you find that location, visit it a couple times, not become best buds, but get become really friendly with the owners. Right? The people that run the bed and breakfast. And then take your long term food storage that whatever you have, your Berkey water filters, your extra ammo, your extra guns, take what you can, Get a get us a climate control storage unit, the closest one to their house, put it there. The day after the event, show up there with cash in hand.
• 42:04
  Be like, we were traveling. Hey. We'd like to can we rent a room for the night? I'm sure they're gonna be like, yeah. You know, you can rent a room for you know, things are weird right now.
• 42:12
  There's no electricity, but hey, we our car stopped. Can we can we just rent a room, pay them cash for the night, then pay them a couple nights. Stay there. Maybe on day two or three, be like, I kind of know what's going on. And by the way, I've got, you know, feel the conversation out, talk to them, say, hey, I've got food for you and your wife as well.
• 42:34
  I've got extra seed. I've got guns and ammunition. Do you mind if we stay here and just work together? You know, at that point, you're not a stranger. Right?
• 42:42
  So again, this is a kind of the tip of the iceberg of this particular strategy. Right? Is it a bulletproof plan of action? No, it's not. Is it, you know, uncomfortable?
• 42:53
  Is it weird? Kind of. But I would much rather be living off the beaten path at a place that already has chickens and maybe some goats and a milk cow and right? And they're not visible from the road. I would much rather be there than in my suburban apartment with my, you know, single mother with a child, just praying to God that it's not my door that's gonna get kicked down next.
• 43:17
  Right? Because that's where you will be a couple of weeks into this event. So again, I have five different strategies and that's just kind of the edge of one. So that's in my latest book, Survival Theory Two. If you haven't read Survival Theory One, Two kind of builds on it, right?
• 43:32
  So Survival Theory Two, I mentioned that grid down report that I wrote for the military. Probably the first thirty or 40% of survival theory two is all it's all up here. It's it's explaining to you the physiology and the psychology of humans and historical data. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, I get into Philip Zimbardo, world renowned psychologist, and Milgram study and a bunch of other things. I paint a picture for people.
• 43:55
  Hey, this is this is what the world's gonna look like. Right? And, you know, this isn't some it's a little dark. You know, there's some some pretty tough stories in there that you're gonna muscle through, but it's important for you to understand. And then later on in the book, give those five strategies.
• 44:09
  So to answer your question again, long windedly, I work with super high net worth people, right? I have clients with very big budget. They don't have a budget essentially. We build up whatever their extended family needs, 3,000 acres, 5,000 acres, whatever it takes, right? And they just put this stuff together.
• 44:29
  If you don't have that ability, you have to have a different mindset. You know, do you have an uncle Bob that lives, you know, on a farm somewhere, a third cousin that you haven't seen for four years since your family reunion, but you know, he has a farm somewhere. Why don't you call your mom and dig up that phone number and just reach out like, Hey, you know, it's me, you know, your third cousin, you know, we might be driving through that area here in the next month. We're wanting to just stop sign, say, you know what I mean? Reconnect.
• 44:59
  Right? So I'm just giving you strategies. So the idea that you have to have a ton of money to build a survival treat, you don't. If you use your brain and use some of these strategies and not just one. So again, that bed and breakfast idea may go flat.
• 45:13
  Your uncle Bob, you know, may turn out to be a psycho or 50 people show up and you guys get looted the first week. Have three or four of these strategies laid out a backup plan, right? A plan B and a plan C. But again, it's a better scenario than staying in town, just watching your kids starve to death, hoping it's not your door that's kicked down next.
• 45:37
  Seth Holehouse: It also seems like one of the most important things and just kind of in conclusion as we're running out of the hour is just recognizing what's happening. Like, because as you mentioned, you know, a lot of people it'll take three, four, or five days before they even can put together what happened. Whereas someone that maybe has read your books or one second after or studied these these different topics. You know, I would think that for me, you know, with my knowledge, if an EMP went off, I would probably know within about a half an hour of testing my phone, testing my car, looking at these different things and say, okay, I've now identified an EMP went off. And here's the here's the course of action.
• 46:18
  And I know that there's so I mean, I've you know you and I could do a twenty hour show together that still just scratches the surface of this this topic because it's just so complex, you you're looking at generators you're looking at, you know, building a rocket stove so people can't see the smoke coming out of your chimney. I mean, there's this there's so many different things to this. So, but I'll pull up your website, one more time for folks. It's just it's griddownconsulting.com. And there's a lot of information on here.
• 46:50
  But what I would recommend, again, is for me, head up to books right there. You're also it's on Amazon or book places. If there's one book that you start with, this is my personal recommendation is just survival theory because that's exactly what it is. You know, they say hope for the best, prepare for the worst. In my opinion, a grid down scenario is one of the worst case scenarios.
• 47:14
  If you're prepared for that, you'll do fine with the hurricane, do fine with the tornado, you'll do fine with the, you know, whatever else comes your way. But that's a great place to start is that book. And so, Jonathan, do you have any kind of closing thoughts as we're rounding things out here?
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, again, I would say this is a heavy topic. This is a dark topic. Don't lose hope. Don't don't give into fear. When this thing happens, have an education in the sense of like, have an understanding of what's happening.
• 47:51
  That way you can make wiser decisions. A lot of times if you make the wrong decision early on, it's, you got to make the right decisions at the beginning of this, right? And then if you do make a decision, stick with it and move forward. If you're a dad with, you know, a wife and young kids or something, be confident. Don't let them see the fear in your eyes.
• 48:10
  You know what I mean? Make a plan or make a decision and move on it. And cause this is going be a scary time for them as well. So again, planning is really important. On the grid side of it, I would just ask everyone to help us out.
• 48:26
  EMPTaskforce.us. That's EMPTaskforce.us. Go there. Offer to volunteer. Write letters to your senators and your congressmen.
• 48:36
  Another place to go is the griddownpowerup.com. Griddownpowerup Com. That's a new documentary, from, David Theiss. It's narrated by Dennis Quaid, and it's a documentary on the EEP threat. So if you have family members or people that aren't really on board that really understand this, I would recommend that it's a one hour documentary.
• 48:58
  It's it's really well done, and that'll explain a lot of these things that we're talking about and what's going on. So griddownpowerup.com, secure the grid coalition, secure the grid dot com, and Michael maybe dot michaelmaybe.com. Secure I think it's secureourgrid.com as well. So these guys, again, none of the the task force, secure the grid, Michaelmaybe, who's kind of our investigative guy that's going after the utilities. None of none of us are funded.
• 49:29
  None I mean, poor Michael's, you know, I think he's done like 4,000 FOIA requests, you know, from the utilities. And he uses his wife's grocery money to do this stuff. So, you know, if you have the chance to donate, donate to our organization or one of these other two organizations, go to Secure the Grid or, I'm sorry, griddownpowerup.com. Watch the documentary. He has a great back end of his website where actually I I think he has, if you do the newsletter thing, I think he has forms and letters that you can just, you know, kind of craft a little bit to yourself and then, sign your name and send it to your congressman and congresswoman.
• 50:06
  So we just need at some point, we need to the congressmen and congresswoman aren't acting because no one's knocking at their door demanding they act on this. I mean, we're talking about the one situation that could kill ninety percent of the American population, and they're not doing anything because nobody even knows it's a problem or a threat. So they can kind of get away with just sitting there and taking the utility monies from their for their campaigns and not do anything. So anyhow, yeah, check out my website, check out those bunch of websites I listed off there. And, you know, Seth, you have the opportunity to put them down below so people can click on them and and help out as much as can join the fight.
• 50:42
  Yeah.
• 50:42
  Seth Holehouse: Well, great. Well, Jonathan, it's good to have you back on again. And I hope this never happens, but I'd rather be one of the few people that knows what's happening and knows what to do. And so just encourage folks, especially your main website, griddownconsulting.com, and that survival theory book will really go a long way in preparation. So thanks again for coming on.
• 51:06
  And I hope to see you again soon in the right light. Hopefully, you know, we're not, you know, kind of heading into something.
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: With the lights on, right?
• 51:14
  Seth Holehouse: Exactly. Yep. So, alright, man. Well, thank you so much. It's great having you on.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Thanks, Seth. You too.