Latest / Man in America Podcast / Is America About to Go Dark?

Transcript

Is America About to Go Dark? · Man in America Podcast

• 0:14
  Speaker 1: Imagine you wake up one morning with the morning sun streaming through the window, and you think, this is kinda strange. I set my alarm clock. I should've been up at 6AM. But you look over, and your alarm clock isn't on, and you realize the power's out. Now there wasn't a big storm last night, but it's not unusual for the power to go out for various reasons, whether it's rolling blackouts or something of the sort.
• 0:35
  So you start your normal process when the power goes out. You make sure that you have the candles. If it stays out towards the evening. You get your generator running. Get the fridge plugged in.
• 0:44
  And by midday, you start seeing notifications popping up on your phone, which is still working at the time. And these notifications are indicating that there is something much larger than a regional blackout that happened, and there's something closer to what would be called a nationwide blackout. And that's concerning to you because you've never experienced that before. You've always just seen the more regional blackouts. But you have no idea what's coming.
• 1:08
  You have no idea what the next week, what the next month, what the next year might look like. But as you start to understand what really happened, that picture starts to form. Now this is a frightening scenario, but it's a scenario that has been recently going viral. There's been an article that was talking about this that was then picked up by other media. And now if you look at the news, you're seeing everywhere that people are talking about this exact topic, saying US power grid at risk of eighteen month blackout.
• 1:40
  What if America went completely dark? Shockingly, vulnerable US power grid could result in eighteen month nationwide blackout, expert warns. US power grid faces blackout warning as one city goes dark over a week. So these are all articles and headlines that were from the past couple of days. Now you have to ask yourself, did something happen?
• 2:00
  What caused this? Why are people suddenly talking about this eighteen month blackout? And we're gonna be getting into all this and more on today's show. So welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse.
• 2:15
  So before we get started, just wanna remind you to make sure you hit the like button, especially the like button. It's a really important one. Hit that like button. I really would appreciate it. Also, make sure you subscribe to the channel, and make sure you share this with a friend if you find it useful.
• 2:29
  And leave a comment, and I'll let you know what I think. I love reading those comments. And also, to remind you that this show is done as both a video format and a podcast format. So if you prefer podcasts, you can find the show on all your favorite podcast apps. And if you prefer video, you find on Rumble, YouTube, etcetera.
• 2:45
  Alright. Let's get into today's show. So as I mentioned, in the past couple of days, I started seeing headlines all over the place about this eighteen month blackout. And I thought, okay. This is quite alarming, and this isn't this is a an area that I've studied extensively looking at grid failure, what happens with a grid failure.
• 3:05
  Is this some sort of report about EMP threats, or what is it? And so I started digging. And so what I'm gonna show you on today's show, what I'm gonna be going over with you is the origin of this this story because it's not something recent. There's an art New York Times article, which I'll show you, but this is actually a much, older topic that has been rehashed, which I think about why is that happening. So we're gonna go over what is what is causing this recent panic of a blackout, but we're also gonna be looking at what actually happens during a potentially one year blackout.
• 3:38
  I'm actually gonna walk you through, you know, in a very rough sense, what one year would look like with a grid failure in America. We're also gonna be looking at the type of grid failure that's discussed in this New York Times article, which is an attack on the grid itself, through more isolated attacks in a series of substations across the nation, which not focusing on an EMP. So I'll be talking about the difference between this type of grid attack versus an EMP, and they're greatly different. So I'll I'll be getting into that. But let me first start with looking at the New York Times article.
• 4:13
  So this is this article right here is what caused this recent freak out, which is not a bad thing for more Americans to be concerned about these things because, hopefully, they take being prepared more serious. So this is the article. It's a very long article. I'm not gonna read the whole thing. I'm just gonna read a few different paragraphs and highlight what it's the point it's making.
• 4:30
  So it says, what if America went completely dark? Says the power grid relies on thousands of aging hand built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years. Now I'm gonna read selectively here, to make sense. And they basically start off describing a situation that happened in 2013 where somebody over in, it was near Coyote Creek.
• 4:57
  I think it out in California. They had shot up an electrical substation. And so, yeah, it was 15 miles southeast of San Jose. Now they'd also cut certain cables, and it was very interesting. So people thought that maybe there were disgruntled workers that had done this.
• 5:14
  They couldn't figure it out. But then as the experts started researching it, the FBI got involved. There's a guy named John Wellinghoff. So he was the the chairman of FERC, which I'll call FERC, right, which is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And he went and investigated it and basically discovered that it was a much more serious thing.
• 5:36
  It was a much more, targeted attack. Right? So he says, well, we think a couple of guys just came in and shot up these transformers. Actually, this is what the FBI had told him. We think it may have been a disgruntled employee, but we don't know.
• 5:49
  They're still investigating. Okay? And so but they discovered that they it was a much more organized attack. Right? So he continues, and he's saying that somebody put together a very carefully planned and very precisely executed attack on the substation.
• 6:03
  We don't know who they are, but they were highly trained. They knew which cables to cut. They knew which part of the transformers to hit, and they knew exactly when the police were coming. They knew exactly when to stop, and they got away completely clean. So they they never actually figured out who did this.
• 6:17
  And this right here is the substation that they had attacked. And so this tied into a report that the gentleman, Wellinghoff, had put together a few months earlier. Right? So his he says here that his mind was on an analysis he'd commissioned just a few months earlier, which identified a potential weak point in our power system, one that looked very much like the crime scene he was now investigating. Electrical engineers had long assumed that the patchwork nature of the grid would protect it from failure.
• 6:45
  Says more than a century ago, industrialists replaced a point to list mode model of supplying power, coal fired plants serving individual factories and neighborhoods, with a highly centralized system of massive generators linked by long distance transmission lines. Customers would now receive electrons rather than coal hoppers in their backyards, a shift that allowed for rapid electric electrification from coast to coast. Again, so this is the substation that was attacked. Now the point here, and and this is again, this is a very long article, is that this power flow analysis that they had conducted. Right?
• 7:23
  So this report that the FERC had conducted, which it modeled the cascading effects of knocking out the most critical substations in each interconnection, ones where multiple high voltage lines came together. He says, we came up with very astounding numbers. If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids so, basically, there's three main grids that supply, the power. Right? So one kind of Texas based is East Coast and West Coast to simplify it.
• 7:49
  And so what he's saying though is if you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you could black out the entire United States. And it says, according to Wellinghoff, which nine substations were taken offline didn't matter as much as long as each one was among the 10 most important in its region. It says, and you could black out all three interconnections individually as well. And he says also saying that, you know, it's really easy to figure out which which parts of the grid are the most vulnerable. He says even a 12 year old with the Internet could do it pretty easily.
• 8:18
  That all you have to do is look up a map of the grid and figure out where most of wires go into substations. That's a critical substation. And now so weeks after the Wellinghoff learned of the analysis that this attack showed him how easy it was to take out these nodes. Says within twenty minutes and enough rifles, a crew could potentially turn off the lights nationwide. So, basically, what he's showing here is that these there are power grid that let's just say you had a coordinated attack, whether it was by an intelligence agency, whether it was by a foreign nation, it doesn't matter.
• 8:57
  But if there was some sort of hostile enemy that wanted to take out the grid across America, then they could have a coordinated series of attacks on these substations. And through attacking these substations, they could actually collapse the grid. Now the real issue here, the big big part of this is that these transformers and the components, when they're damaged, they take a very, very long time to replace. Okay. So let me get into the article.
• 9:26
  Okay. Says it was hard to replace transformers quickly, back then. So now we're talking it's talking about let's see what's the the time frame? That was, you know, longer longer in the past. Okay.
• 9:36
  But, anyway, it's nearly impossible now. Since since 2021, the average wait time for a large power transformer, the fine the kind that you'd find at a major substation capable of hailing tens or hundreds of thousands of volts, has climbed from less than a year to a hundred and twenty eight weeks with some lead times growing as long as five years. Okay. So he says the transformer shortage is bad. This is a guy that was an analyst that was talking about it.
• 10:03
  He says, it's like hair on fire biting my nails losing sleep levels of bad. And so what they get into in this article, he goes and he this is just showing you that's what a substation looks like. It actually goes into the process of making these transformers and shows, you know, this is it's a very complex, you know, handmade process. A lot of these transformers literally require, as you see in the picture, like a single person to wire up with copper, wire these transformers that, you know, primarily what they're able to do, the biggest function. As far as I understand, we're not an electrical engineer, but they basically step down the power.
• 10:39
  Right? So if you've got a 100,000 volts coming through, if you plug in a 100,000 volts into your house, something bad would would probably happen. And so they had to have these different components that basically step down that power. So you get delivered a 120 volts or whatever you need for, you know, the device that you're plugging into your wall. This is showing this is a guy in 1942 doing the exact same thing.
• 11:01
  So if we look at this, you can see this technology has not changed very much. This is a guy, again, '42, who's doing almost the identical thing. This is a Westinghouse employee. He's saying that this deploying a technique that hasn't fundamentally changed since 1886. So, basically, here's the key, though, is that these all these different components, and this is what this report is highlighting, is that these different components that make up the grid are they're very fragile from the perspective that you can with a well aimed sniper shot or a couple shots, you can take out these components.
• 11:37
  They're not fragile that they're gonna break if they, if the wind blows too much. Right? But they're relatively easy to destroy if you know what you're doing. And so we've established now that if a series of these components in in multiple substations that are critical substations across the nation, if a series of those were attacked in a coordinated attack, it could literally collapse the entire power grid. And this is what the article was highlighting is that there is this is a huge weakness.
• 12:05
  Now the issue, the real problem is that when if that grid goes down to replace those components, some of these components, the lead time is up to five years. And this is where this gets very concerning because how do they fix that? Right? Because a lot of these things have to be custom built. So it's not like you have, you know, one unit, which is a transformer that you get made, you have a big back stock.
• 12:32
  Most of these substations, you know, they have to have custom made transformers and custom made equipment to match the exact needs of that station. So you can't necessarily have this huge supply of transformers that are just kind of in a backlog sitting there waiting to be used. They have to be built custom, and so this is the state of the electrical grid. Now what he is highlighting and that what this report is saying is if that happened, it could take up to eighteen months for United States to rebuild its grid and get its grid back online. Now that's obviously a very, very long time, and this is highlighting a specific series of coordinated attacks on the electrical grid.
• 13:11
  Now this is very different from an EMP, and I'll talk about an EMP in a little bit a little bit later and get into what a what an EMP would mean and how that's different from this kind of attack. And as bad as this series of attacks could be would be on the electrical grid we're talking about, an EMP would be multitudes worse, and I'll highlight what that means. You're invited to a very important livestream. You know that right now, there's a globally coordinated attack on liberty and privacy to a level that's been never been seen before in humanity. You know that most of the news articles you read are designed to be distractions for the real agenda, the rollout of a social credit system in the West.
• 13:52
  And that's exactly why I've asked Glenn Meter, an online privacy expert, to give you a special online class on Thursday, August 27 at 8PM eastern, where he shows you all the necessary steps to take back your privacy online. It is a lot easier than you think, especially if you know where to start and you've got a privacy expert that's guiding you. Glenn's class is titled exposing a coordinated attack on liberty and privacy. You don't have to be tech savvy to take back your privacy. You don't need any high level technical skills or hacking skills.
• 14:25
  All you need is the ability to use a browser and a desire to protect your freedom. So Glenn is even gonna stay on afterwards to answer your questions live. So if you feel overwhelmed because you think there's no way to protect your online privacy, you need these strategies that Glenn is giving away for free. So it's time to take back your privacy. So to register register for the free webinar visit privacyacademy.com/maninamerica or just click on the link in the show description.
• 14:52
  So this article right here, this was published, I think, just in the past week. Now if you look at the other articles covering it, it seems like this is something that just happened. Right? US power grid at risk of eighteen month blackout, You know, shockingly vulnerable US power grid could result in eighteen month national nationwide blackout, expert warns. So all of the articles and the coverage of this are presenting it as if some expert just came out and issued this really harsh warning saying, hey.
• 15:26
  This is really bad. We're at risk of an eighteen month blackout. But the reality is is that this information was basically spawned all the back in 2013. And so that makes me wonder because you look at New York Times, you look at how the Mockingbird media works, you know that this stuff isn't just random. And so why is it that the New York Times would release this article now?
• 15:50
  Why why now bring this into the forefront? And so I I used to work in the media industry before, and I can tell you that The New York Times plays a very particular role. The New York Times is probably arguably the most influential media in the entire world. And the reason why I say that is not because they have the largest reach necessarily, not because, you know, all the very important people around the world read the New York Times, but The New York Times is what sets the story, and this is the key. And you can see it here.
• 16:21
  All it takes is the New York Times to publish one article that's, you know, talking about some report that was done back in 2013, and all the other major media are now, Mockingbird, repeating that same information, but what they're making it seem like it just happened. And so this is this is why the New York Times is so influential is because it becomes the source for the narrative within the media world. And so you have to ask yourself why now? Why are they now talking about this as if it's something that just happened? We also know that oftentimes there's a predictive programming that happens with a lot of what the they do, where they will tell you or they'll show you what they're going to do.
• 17:06
  It's like Klaus Schwab coming out warning about a massive cyber attack. It's a it's you know, going back to people that have you know, before COVID were hinting at some sort of large scale coronavirus pandemic. So they will oftentimes hint at things before they happen. And if you look at this, it makes me think is and this is why I take it more seriously. Instead of looking at it and saying, okay.
• 17:29
  Well, yeah, this report's over a decade old. We know this stuff. There's you know, this is there's nothing new. I mean, I guess for a lot of people, maybe it's new to them, but there's nothing new from what I've studied here. And I've been studying this for years now, trying to understand the the mechanisms of grid failure, how it affects life, etcetera.
• 17:48
  And so you looking at this, thinking, What is what's with the timing of this? What are they what are they telling us? And I I don't know that. I don't have all the answers. But I think it's it's it's useful for us as an exercise to look at what this would mean.
• 18:03
  And this is it's it's a kind of a painful exercise to ask what would happen if America had a blackout for twelve plus months. It our way of life would change so fundamentally, and I'll walk you through that. Right? So this is also what I wanna go kinda go with you is I'm gonna walk you through, you know, from day one. What what would America look like if you had this type of grid failure?
• 18:29
  What would it look like? Okay. So, you know, the first days would probably be relatively calm. Right? As I mentioned in the intro, a lot of people would just assume the power is coming back on.
• 18:41
  Cell phones would work intermittently. The hospitals would still be running generators. Water would probably still be coming out of most faucets. Police, emergency services would still be operating. So there'd certainly be opportune opportunistic looting, crime, especially in major cities.
• 18:58
  Right? I think that you you would have people within the first day or two that would maybe start, you know, rushing to the grocery store because a lot of people aren't prepared for this. So you would have some, issues like that credit card terminals wouldn't be working, because, obviously, you need power to run those things. You might have some areas where they've got batteries that help with these, these types of issues, and so they can you know, there's still some normal semblance of things. But you're starting to see things that the systems would start breaking.
• 19:22
  Okay? Now I don't think that it would turn into the purge or Mad Max overnight. Most people will be doing what they always do during a blackout. Like, they're checking on their family. They're buying the supplies that they can find.
• 19:35
  They're running generators, and they're waiting for an update. But somewhere as you get to, say, day three or so and and kinda continuing into, you know, day three, four, five, six, seven, the psychology starts changing, especially because people, you know, probably by day or two or three or so, for people that had a way to still charge their cell phones, the cell a lot of cell towers would still be working. So there's a lot of the cell towers and cell infrastructure that have generators. They've got backup battery supplies. So a lot of the cell towers are set up to work for at least, say, eight hours.
• 20:09
  A lot of them are even a couple of days where they're gonna be still be operational. So, you know, a lot of people would still be able to use their cell phone. They'd still be able to get some reports coming through their cell phone. But that would start to stop at around day three, and this is when people would start freaking out is when their cell phone service all of a sudden on day two, their cell phone stops getting service. That's that's concerning.
• 20:36
  The cell phone for a lot of people is where they get their notifications, is how they get their information. So people would be left kinda blind without access to the cell phone or Internet. So but somewhere around that time, right, you know, looking at days, say, three to seven, the psychology really starts to shift here. So grocery stores aren't being restocked. Right?
• 20:58
  So most grocery stores run on that kind of what you refer to as, like, just in time delivery. A grocery store might be carrying, you know, two or three days worth of groceries. That's it. They've got really complex systems for that supply chain where they have you know, if they sell out of something within a couple of days, a new new ones or new product is arriving at at the time they need to refill it. So that's why grocery stores almost always have everything that you're looking for.
• 21:22
  Occasionally, some more obscure thing might be out of stock or whatever, but that's how the grocery store works. But grocery stores wouldn't be restocked. Right? And by this time, refrigerator food is spoiling. So for people that have generators at home, a lot of people being that their generator might just be a little gasoline generator.
• 21:40
  Maybe they've got 30 gallons of gas stored. So maybe they can run a generator for half a day. Or in generators, especially gasoline generators, they eat a lot of gas. So for people, their refrigerated food is spoiling. Right?
• 21:51
  The generators that you had for the grocery stores are done by this point after, you know, three days, three plus days. So whatever food that the grocery store had that was refrigerated, that food is also spoiling. Now it's also gas stations can't pump fuel. They're running dry. So either a, you know, as soon as it hits, everyone floods the gas station.
• 22:11
  The gas station sells out all of its gas. Or that's if the gas has some sort of generator that it can actually pump up the gas from the underground tanks. Like in Florida, there's requirements for gas stations to have generators to to, bring up gasoline, because of their issue with hurricanes and blackouts. But here, we're looking at those that the gas stations can't pump fuel anymore, so they're dry. The ATMs aren't working.
• 22:35
  There's no credit cards. Right? So as I mentioned, the cell towers are going offline because their batteries and generator fuel's running out. Pharmacies are having problems. And then the government tells people this is the key.
• 22:46
  Right? And the government comes in, and when they officially acknowledge what happens, they're gonna tell people that this isn't gonna be fixed tomorrow and maybe not even next week. And that's the moment when this becomes a much more serious issue. Because when people go from thinking, oh, this is just an isolated event, you know, maybe the power's gonna be out for a couple of days. If you live in regions where you have bad winter storms or, say, in Florida, you're used to that.
• 23:13
  You're used to a three, four day blackout. It sucks, but you're used to it. But when you understand that something much larger has happened and that you may be looking at a week, three weeks, a couple of months, the psychology changes significantly. Okay? And so what you're happening now a lot of it also, you're looking at the changes that would happen in society.
• 23:35
  A lot of it happens it will depend on where you live. So where I live, I'm out in the country. You know, I could if I needed to, if I didn't have gasoline, I could ride a bicycle over to our local milk farm and get our milk still. I could go to the local farm market, and we've established our life that way. And so we could still do those things.
• 23:51
  I mean, I'm not relying on the grocery store for my groceries, especially because it's summer now and it's peak harvest. But imagine living in New York City, which I used to live in a high rise in New York City, or if you're in suburbia or, say, live in Chicago or Columbus, Ohio or, Cleveland or Houston. Within a couple of days, those those cities will start to turn into complete chaos. You're gonna have a lot of the criminals, a lot of the the the crime that has been kinda kept under, they're gonna really start coming in full force because you're not gonna have the same police response that you would have when everything is up and running because the police are dealing with other things. They're they're guarding gas stations.
• 24:33
  They're guarding hospitals. They're guarding pharmacies. They're focusing on, you know, keeping things in order. You're gonna have a lot of emergencies coming in. So you have ambulances that are really kind of overtaxed if you have people that are on, you know, some sort of home, you know, kind of power that you need to supply, whether it's their, you know, oxygen or whatever is that they have to be doing.
• 24:51
  You know, people that are on dialysis, they're gonna start, know, being hit. And so you're gonna have a reduction in the police force. And so especially in these these bigger cities, you're gonna have complete chaos. I mentioned earlier, it's not gonna be like the Purge or Mad Max nationwide, but in the bigger cities, that would be, closer to what's actually happening. And so food would disappear incredibly quickly inside of these places.
• 25:14
  Right? So think about how little food is actually sitting inside the average American home compared with how much food a a family needs to consume over a couple of months. Right? Most people I'm sure that you probably aren't most people in this scenario because you watch this show and you're thinking probably similar to the way I do, that you may have a couple months worth of food. You've got some, you know, freeze dried stuff.
• 25:36
  You have some canned things. You have some dried beans. Maybe you've prepared for this, but most American families have not compare have not prepared for this. Especially now that with the inflation, the cost of living so high, a lot of people are just struggling to put groceries, you know, know, on the to put food on the table, let alone buying an extra three, four, five, six months worth of backup food. And so this creates an issue because grocery stores, as I mentioned, they're not warehouses anymore like they used to be.
• 26:04
  So maybe a Costco or something like that, they had they're more of a warehouse model. But grow your average grocery store, they're just the final stop in this enormous just in time distribution system. But once trucking, refrigeration, warehouses, payment systems, fuel distribution, once those things begin breaking down, the fact that America produces huge amounts of food doesn't help the family sitting in an apartment in Philadelphia. So that food exists somewhere, but the system that gets it on their table, that's what's failing. Now by the second and third week, this is when hunger starts becoming a real issue for people who weren't prepared.
• 26:42
  And hunger completely changes the crime equation, and this is an important point. Right? So there's a huge difference between somebody that's opportunistically looting and stealing a television because the police aren't around, and a father breaking into a house because his children haven't eaten in three days. There's a huge difference in that. Right?
• 27:03
  This is what can take someone who is a good neighbor, someone who, has been a pillar of your community. If that person if they run out of food after two weeks and a father has seen his little kids that haven't eaten in three days, that father is gonna have to take some extreme action to try to feed his family. You're getting into this more primal way of living. So you're gonna see the grocery stores, the pharmacies, eventually the warehouses, they're gonna be, like, stripped clean after a couple of weeks, completely stripped clean. So fuel also becomes incredibly valuable.
• 27:38
  Generators become theft targets. So homes that are running generators are just basically advertising that they have gasoline of some sort, probably food and other supplies. And so you're gonna see that that becomes an issue, and this is also to think about. If you're in a large neighborhood, and you're the only house that's running a generator two weeks into one of these events, it's gonna tell all the people around you that you've got power, that you probably have a refrigerator that you're running, that you've got food, and you're gonna have people start targeting those particular homes. You're also gonna have black markets that emerge almost immediately for fuel, medicine, food, batteries, clean water.
• 28:17
  Right? Now as I mentioned before, you know, police, they don't necessarily just disappear, but their job becomes almost impossible. Right? So calls are exploding at the same time that communications, fuel, and staff are deteriorating. That's if these phones are still working, say someone still has access to a landline or something.
• 28:34
  Right? But, also, police, they have families too. The the military, they have families too. And so they have to prioritize what they're gonna do. You're gonna have a lot of people just defecting from the police force, even defecting from the army.
• 28:47
  So three, four weeks of this, if someone's in national guard, they're they're gonna be thinking, gosh. Like, my family's at home. We only had two weeks of food. So they're gonna be they're gonna be abandoning their duties to go home and protect their families. But the ones that are still there, they're guarding hospitals, water facilities, fuel depots, food distribution points, other critical infrastructure.
• 29:08
  So someone breaking into your garage, honestly, the police won't care about that. Right? And so in badly affected cities, entire neighborhoods could effectively find themselves responsible for their own security. Now a key point here is that water itself may actually become more dangerous than hunger. So modern cities simply can't function for long without pressurized water and sewage treatment.
• 29:34
  So water towers and reservoirs, they might buy time. Alright? So, water towers so say you live in a in an area where you have a big water tower, that water tower, you know, through gravity, even without power, will still pressurize your your tap at home for a little while. But when that runs out, you don't have the power to your your town or county, whatever, does not have the power to pump that water back up. Okay?
• 29:57
  Because pumps require electricity, generators require fuel, and treatment plants require chemicals, and sewage lift stations, you know, have to keep running. So once that pressure is lost, contamination can enter in these these damaged water systems. Wastewater can overflow. Toilets stop flushing. Trash collection becomes, you know, a thing of the past.
• 30:21
  Right? And so even the EPA, emergency guidance, specifically, they recognize that extended power outages as a threat are a significant threat to drinking water and wastewater operations. Now imagine several 100,000 people or, say, New York City, millions of people in one city, improvising toilets while the garbage piles up, the sewage systems are failing, people become desperate. They start drinking from streams. They start drinking from puddles.
• 30:51
  They start drinking from wherever they can find water, swimming pools, even questionable wells. Now, unfortunately, a lot of people and this is what you see in if you look at this disaster stricken areas, a lot of people don't understand even the basics of water purification. And, you know, there's especially if you're if you're two days without water. Right? If you are on the verge of dehydration and death with that which happens typically within a couple of days, three, four days, then you might see a puddle on the street in New York City and start drinking out of that puddle.
• 31:24
  That happens all the time. If you look at disaster stricken areas, it's actually it's waterborne illnesses and diseases that end up causing oftentimes the most death. Okay? And so people those say you know, so again, these same areas of water that they're drinking, they're most likely gonna be after some time increasingly contaminated with human waste. So even a local river, again, because what we highlighted is it's not just that the running water stops, it's all the water processing.
• 31:52
  It's all the sewage processing that also stops, which means that as people, you know, continue producing waste, it doesn't just get flushed away and sent to some processing, you know, plant. It gets it ends up in the local water supply, ends up in local lakes, local rivers. Right? So this water will become increasingly contaminated with human waste. So you're gonna have gastrointestinal disease that starts spreading.
• 32:19
  Right? Diarrhea becomes particularly dangerous because someone who's already short of clean water, they now need to replace the water that they're losing. Right? And if you've ever been in a place where you're really sick, you have bad diarrhea, sometimes even the water you drink just comes straight out of you. So you have to drink a lot of water to eventually be able to keep it.
• 32:37
  Now infants, young children, and elderly people, and, you know, those who are sick, they're gonna be especially vulnerable. So in a genuine, say, months long breakdown, bad water and sanitation could ultimately kill far more people than gunfire or, you know, violence or whatever you'd you'd think it would be causing deaths. But then there's the weather. So if this happens in January or say it happens in October, November, the Northeast and the Midwest have a complete different kind of emergency that's on their hands. So say you have a natural gas or an oil furnace, that doesn't mean that you're fine because these modern heating systems still need electricity for blowers, pumps, ignition controls.
• 33:20
  So houses will start freezing. Pipes are gonna be bursting. So people are gonna be moving into whatever buildings still have heat. Others will start improvising with, you know, fireplaces, propane heaters, grills, generators, which create another wave of house fires and carbon monoxide deaths. So if you look back at 2021, the disaster you had there, the, I think it was Yuri, that lasted days, but not months.
• 33:45
  And the state attributed around two hundred and forty six deaths to this winter storm. Now I've heard other numbers that it was closer to six or seven or eight hundred deaths or so. But that was just, you know, a week or so that we saw where there was this freeze, and people were literally freezing to deaths in their home. They were they were on a boiled water warning because the water processing and treatment plants had were off the grid. And so you saw how quickly people this is the you know, kinda fell into complete chaos.
• 34:12
  Now a months long grid failure through a northern winter could be another category entirely. Right? So think about how many people don't have a way to heat their home. If it's you know, if you're in the middle of winter and you're looking at, you know, sub zero temperatures overnight, a lot of people would just end up freezing to death in their homes. It's it's just it's a harsh reality of what happens because, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have the ability to heat their home without electricity.
• 34:42
  Now if you've got a decent fireplace or a, you know, say, a wood stove or something of that sort, and you've got firewood built up, then, okay, you've you've survived one of the biggest threats. That's if you live up north. Right? So I live in Upstate New York, and we run on on heating oil for our home. But we've also got a fireplace, and I've got a lot of firewood.
• 35:02
  And that fireplace, know, will keep our home if I keep it running through the night, it'll keep the home at 60 to 65 or so, even upstairs. But for a lot of people, they don't have that. But then you also have the houses that are freezing. You have pipes bursting. And so there's something else we don't think about is that the building itself starts dying.
• 35:20
  Right? So the the houses, the homes, the apartment buildings that have always protected us and been a safe haven, that building itself becomes uninhabitable because these pipes are bursting inside the walls. The water damage spreads. The fire suppression systems fail. Now when it's frozen, people won't realize that.
• 35:39
  Okay? So maybe store their fireplace. Well, maybe. We'll see. But if you know, a lot of houses, by the time that you have the winter falling out, that house is gonna be an absolute mess.
• 35:49
  It'll be uninhabitable. So, like, a house that loses power in January isn't necessarily just a cold house waiting for electricity to return. Six weeks later, it might have tens of thousands of dollars in plumbing and water damage and no realistic way to repair it. Now if you live in the South, the problem is kinda the opposite, but it's also a really big problem. So imagine Louisiana, Florida, or Houston in July and August without air conditioning, without dehumidification.
• 36:20
  So buildings are gonna become oppressively hot, particularly high rise apartments. So elderly people, you know, young people, the vulnerable, they're gonna start dying from heat. And anywhere there's a plumbing leak, right, or heavy rain or flooding, the buildings can't be properly dried out. And so after, you know, months without climate control, portions of the houses in these hot and humid areas could literally become uninhabitable because they're gonna have so much mold growing. And if you've ever looked into, like, you know, black mold and looked at what mold does to your health, people will think, oh, okay.
• 36:54
  Hey. We live in Florida. We're not gonna freeze to death. And, you know, they deal with the hot air, whatever, but then they don't realize that their attic or some part of their house actually has a massive black mold growth infestation. And after a couple of months, they've now got lung issues.
• 37:08
  They're getting sick because they're dying of mold poisoning. So in the North, you're fighting freezing pipes that have burst. In the South, you're fighting heat, humidity, and mold. So by one month right? This we're we're now just at one month we're looking at here.
• 37:23
  So by one month, I think the distinction between a blackout and a collapse becomes really important. So we're assuming now that large areas still don't have dependable electricity. Millions of Americans, they're not going to work. The schools are closed. There's no businesses.
• 37:37
  Bank there's no banking. Health care is really, really fallen because you're gonna have a huge stress on the health care system. But also the health care, they're relying on their own generators to run the hospitals. Those generators rely on fuel. That fuel dries up.
• 37:52
  So you're longer getting your prescription medicines. So that supply chain is breaking down. A lot of those prescription medicines are coming from overseas. Dialysis pay patients in serious trouble. People relying on insulin, on oxygen, they're in serious trouble.
• 38:06
  Antibiotics and other medical supplies become, like, precious commodities. Nursing homes become extraordinarily difficult to operate. So hospitals would receive priority power and fuel, but even a hospital with electricity doesn't magically manufacture pharmaceuticals, blood products, oxygen, sterile supplies, replacement equipment. So this is where mortality begins climbing for reasons that you wouldn't necessarily be saying, oh, it's because of grid failure. No.
• 38:34
  We're talking about a cascading systems collapse here. So someone's dying because they couldn't get dialysis. Someone, develops an infection from a wound that would have normally been trivial, but most people don't have supply of antibiotics to treat that, so they're gonna die of an infection. A diabetic can't have their insulin. An elderly person dies of dehydration.
• 38:53
  A baby becomes dangerously sick from contaminated water. Someone freezes to death. Someone dies in a house fire started by an improvised heater. Another person is murdered during a robbery over fuel. So these deaths accumulate quietly.
• 39:09
  It's also why, you know, asking how many people would be killed by these attacks, it misses most of the danger. Right? If you're looking at how much people will be killed by murder and theft, etcetera, you're missing most of the danger. Right? Now by two or three months in, starvation becomes a serious possibility if large scale food distribution hasn't been restored.
• 39:30
  Now keep in mind that a lot of what happens in this scenario depends on the state of the government, depends on how quickly they can get certain areas back online. Maybe that, you know, we have international support coming in, we have fuel coming in. They're they're distributing fuels. They're keeping maybe a certain pockets of the nation that are trying to be up and running, but it's doubtful that you're gonna have large scale food distribution. And this is it's just the reality of it.
• 39:55
  Right? So while America has tremendous agricultural capacity, it's not necessarily because the country's run out of food. Right? So we're looking it's not because we don't have any more food growing on the on on the land. It's because that industrial agriculture itself depends on diesel, electricity, refrigeration, fertilizer, processing plants, slaughterhouses, grain elevators, trucking, you know, functioning markets.
• 40:20
  A field full of corn in Iowa doesn't feed a hungry family in New Jersey unless an enormous supply chain of machinery still works between those two places, and you're not gonna have that happening. And so at this point, you'd probably see massive government food and fuel distribution rationing. The military would be involved in logistics. You'd have FEMA involved. You probably had you probably have Walmart set up as, you know, FEMA centers.
• 40:47
  And I I hope you're not going to the FEMA center for a whole lot of other reasons. But what you're also gonna be seeing here is you're gonna see population movement. And this is also gonna create a whole other, you know, level of cascading issues because you're gonna see that people just start leaving places that simply can't sustain them. And so you're gonna have mass human migration across America. So major cities would be especially difficult because millions of people concentrated in places that produced almost none of their own food.
• 41:18
  So you have these people. Some of are gonna, you know, leaving the city and going with relatives. Others are just gonna leave the city and walk to wherever they can end up. Right? You know, if you're living in, let's just say, New York City as an example or Houston, you're not gonna stay in the city for probably more than a couple of days or, you know, a couple of weeks at most because you're gonna see the crime goes through the roof.
• 41:39
  The water is not working in your home anymore because very few people have well access in cities. And if they do, may they may not even have the power to pump that run their well. Food's gonna be running out. Crime is gonna be really increasing. Sickness, the stench, all of it's gonna be increasing.
• 41:53
  So people are gonna start leaving the city. So some people are just gonna just start walking. Now they don't have their cars because their cars run on fuel, so maybe they're gonna be using bicycles to bike somewhere. So but, you know, people are just gonna start leaving these big cities. They're gonna start walking into the more rural areas, which is why, you know, from a preparedness perspective, if you're looking at where your home should be or your home shopping, just think about how close you are to major population densities.
• 42:21
  Just something to consider. Some people are gonna be heading towards the towns that are still somewhat functioning, government shelters. FEMA's gonna have the Walmart set up, and, you know, who knows what else. Maybe the data centers become giant FEMA camps. Who knows?
• 42:36
  But a lot of people just start walking. Right? So that movement itself creates an enormous humanitarian and security problem. Right? And then you also have prisoners.
• 42:46
  Right? So this is something to think about is that what about all the prisons? Because this is an uncomfortable issue. Now I wouldn't just say that the prisons would just empty on you know, by week two and let everyone free. You know, correctional facilities do have generators.
• 43:00
  They've got emergency plans, and governments would most likely put a high priority on maintaining some sense of order there. But these prisons also require a huge amount of outside, infrastructure. Right? They need to get electricity. They need to have water, sewage, food deliveries, medicine, staffing, fuel, functioning electronic security systems.
• 43:21
  So if the surrounding region has has been gen you know, has collapsed for, you know, weeks or a couple of months, maintaining tens of thousands of inmates becomes really, really difficult. Now you might have the authorities that are, you know, consulting prisoners and transferring them to functioning facilities that they have up and running. But in a lot of areas, I would say that a lot of these prisons would, in essence, just open the doors. I mean, that's all they would have the ability to do. If you're a prison guard and you're two weeks into this, you know, you're gonna be going home with your family.
• 43:54
  You're not gonna be staying there. Why would you stay at the prison with all these prisoners when your family is barely getting by at home? And so you're gonna have a lot of prisoners, which also makes you just consider how close you live to a prison because you're gonna have a lot of prisoners that basically just walk out. They're you're gonna have riots. You're gonna have increased escapes.
• 44:15
  And, again, it probably after a couple of weeks of this into into the month one or two, the prisons themselves will probably just shut down. They can't continue to operate. Every time a financial bubble pops, like we'll probably have with AI here coming soon, the same thing happens. The people who built it get out first. And every day, the average Americans are the ones left holding the bag.
• 44:39
  It happened in 2000. It happened in 2008. And the men and women who understood that how the money actually moves, they didn't just survive those years, but they came out ahead. And that's why I really want you to attend this very important event. Mark Wilburn, the president of Neos Capital, is hosting a free live virtual event called the twenty twenty six Freedom Trading Summit.
• 45:03
  So he's gonna walk us all through what's really happening in the market right now and how ordinary average people like you and I can take control of our money instead of handing it over to Wall Street and just hoping for the best. It's completely free. So Thursday, August 27 at 4PM eastern, and there's an encore on Saturday, August 29 at 11AM eastern. So go to mia-neos.com to claim your seat. That's mia-neos.com.
• 45:32
  And that link will be in the description, or you can scan the QR code that you see on the screen right now. Make sure you do this now. Do it quickly because the seats are filling up, and you will not regret it. Again, it's free. So again, go to mia-neos.com or just scan that QR code on your screen right now.
• 45:48
  As we get into six months, this is where America is basically unrecognizable. So crime is not gonna be distributed evenly. Right? So some communities are probably gonna be relatively cohesive. You're gonna have smaller communities, rural communities where churches, farmers, volunteer fire departments, neighbors, local governments could, you know, organize somewhat effective systems for maintaining.
• 46:12
  The smaller the town, the smaller the region, the easier it is gonna be to do that. If you live in, say, a town like where I grew up with maybe a couple thousand people, it's probably gonna be more manageable. But if you live in, say, you know, medium sized town, say your town's got, you know, population of 50,000 or so, that's gonna be a really difficult population to, care for. Right? So, again, you're gonna have some, you know, towns, more rural areas that are gonna be, livable.
• 46:41
  You know, people will kind of build their communities. But other places are gonna be extremely, extremely dangerous. And the dividing line is not just gonna be rural versus urban or rich versus poor. Actually, the richer areas will get hit really hard because all the poor all you know, not all the poor, but, you know, people that are criminals that you know, early on, they're gonna be going and targeting the rich neighborhoods. They're gonna be looting.
• 47:04
  They're gonna be murdering. It's just as part of this process. Okay? So but you so you're gonna have these major disparities by then, you know, six months in. Right?
• 47:14
  You might have one town that has some basic restored electricity, a basic functioning, you know, grocery store, some form of running water, and probably a national guard presence that's helping with distribution. But 50 miles away, you have might have another community that is barely surviving. You you know, surviving off of wood heat, you know, wells with manual pumps, etcetera. Now, you know, I mean, by six months, I'd say most urban neighborhoods will be largely abandoned. You're gonna have, you know, crime groups maybe have taken up, and you're gonna have roaming, you know, groups of crime.
• 47:48
  But most suburban areas, let alone larger cities, will be completely abandoned by six months, you know, aside from, again, like, some very dangerous stuff that's kind of has stayed there. So a lot of homes are gonna be stripped of their useful materials. You know, copper, generators, fuel tanks, vehicles, livestock, store food, these things all have value. So organized criminal groups would be certainly participating in black markets and theft because scarcity creates an extraordinarily profitable market for them. And so, you know, a a couple of chickens or, you know, some some beef that still has survived or some, you know, emergency food, or let alone any kind of weapons, ammunition, these things will become highly, highly valuable.
• 48:35
  Even gold and silver are you're gonna see a huge kind of use of gold and silver coming into this. The dollar by this point will have been, my guess is, you know, effectively useless. You know, people are know, what good is your dollar? But you will still see people that are trading, precious metals, especially in the regions that are a little more, sustainable, a little more organized, where you you might better go to your local farmer and say, hey. I'll give you, you know, three ounces of silver for, you know, however many pounds of beef.
• 49:05
  Okay? But you would absolutely see, amidst this, you're gonna see a massive increase in murder. Some would be ordinary criminal violence. Right? This is amplified by the absence of policing.
• 49:16
  Some would be robbery. A lot of these robberies would involve would result in death. Because what happens when a family has a week of food left and someone comes to take that food from them? Right? They're not gonna hand it over.
• 49:28
  They're not just gonna say, okay. Yeah. You've got a gun. You're gonna have a firefight. You're gonna have bad things happening.
• 49:35
  So you're gonna have a lot of fighting over resources. You're gonna have a lot of gang activity. You're gonna have people that are, you know, kind of forming gangs. As the criminals go out, they're gonna realize that there's strength in numbers, and so you'll probably have kind of roaming criminal gangs that just exist based upon their ability to just kinda go from city to city, kill people, seize resources, feed their machine, recruit more people. So after six months, you literally could have especially in areas where there's not as much government presence or national guard, etcetera, you could have roaming gangs of of it could be hundreds of thousands of people that are just criminal gangs that are just going from region to region and just kind of raping and pillaging.
• 50:19
  I mean, this is stuff that's happened throughout, you know, all of human history. This is how things how things work. But, you know, violence, I still don't think with the primary killer. I think that the the primary killer in these situations is gonna be dehydration, disease, temperature exposure, malnutrition, and basically the collapse of any medical care. Now by twelve months, if substantial grid restoration wasn't, you know, finally occurring, which you never know.
• 50:48
  And maybe you'd see a lot of nations kinda coming together. You would see that, now, again, this is this is thinking about whether the government would do its best to act in the interest of the people, and that's a big question. You know, whether the government would actually do the right thing. Because so far, we've seen that the government often doesn't do the right thing. And you could also see that the government itself starts to collapse.
• 51:12
  It's very, very likely there could be a coup. This could be you could have a military coup. You could have some strong armed general that sees this as his opportunity to kind of take what he thinks is his. You could have this as an opportunity for political assassinations, and, yeah, I think you very likely are gonna see a lot of turmoil happening in the controlling levels of society. But let's just say that the government is working on grid restoration.
• 51:38
  They're working on bringing things back up. Even with that, even if some regions have, you know, organized food distribution and electricity, America can't just turn the lights back on and go back to normal. Right? There's gonna be massive, massive amounts of damaged housing and infrastructure. Businesses would be gone.
• 51:56
  Families would be relocated. Agricultural production is gonna be completely disrupted. Hospitals and health care systems would be decimated. You know, governments devastated. There'd be a huge population of people dealing with malnutrition, untreated medical problems, trauma, displacement.
• 52:15
  And so I think that the the part that it's easiest to miss when people talk about a one year blackout or an eighteen month blackout is that the danger isn't really spending a year without electricity. It's spending a year with all the things that electricity quietly makes possible. Right? Your freezer going down, refrigerator, you know, all these things, your well pump. These are the things, that are gonna really, really hit a lot of people.
• 52:43
  And so and and the real nightmare of this scenario is that these failures compound. Right? This is a cascading fit, you know, series of failures. So electricity affects fuel. Fuel affects trucking.
• 52:54
  Trucking affects food. Food scarcity affects crime. Electricity affects water. Water affects sanitation. Sanitation affects disease.
• 53:02
  Electricity affects health care. Health care failure makes disease more lethal. Okay. So people or so the police themselves, they need fuel and communications. When policing deteriorates, supply distribution becomes harder, which creates more scarcity, which creates more crime.
• 53:18
  Right? You're happy with their you know, if you do have some sort of food distribution, criminals will be, you know, hijacking trucks of food, etcetera. Right? Which is an unfortunate part of how this would happen. And so that's why the the difference between a, say, three day blackout and a three month blackout, let alone a one year, it's not like it's like, oh, it's not just that, you know, three months is 30 times worse than three days.
• 53:41
  It's infinitely worse. So now I I also I told you that in this, I was also gonna kinda talk about the difference between this type of grid attack and an EMP. And if you're still with me, I thank you for your patience. And I look. My intention with this I look.
• 53:58
  My intention is not to be doom and gloom. My intention is to scare you a little bit. I mean, it's, like, it's it's it's a healthy thing to be scared of realistic threats that could potentially cause great harm to ourselves and our family. It's it's not a bad thing to have a little bit of fear because if you can channel that fear into action, it's a good thing. I think there's a lot of people that they don't even wanna look at this.
• 54:23
  They don't even wanna walk through a scenario of what this what could happen to America. They don't wanna they have, you know, what you call normalcy bias, which is this idea that, well, America's always been healthy, and America's always been America. So that wouldn't happen to America. It's like, well, why? Well, because it's never happened.
• 54:42
  Well, actually, has. It's happened in isolated regions. It's happened to other countries around the world since the beginning of mankind. This has just been part of how things happen. So a lot of people, don't wanna look at this stuff.
• 54:52
  And, this is like, if you've got friends or family that kinda wanna put their head in the sands, this could be a good show to share with them because this information, I think, could be hopefully something that would kinda spur them into action to say, oh, okay. Yeah. This is this is a little more serious than I thought. Okay. Alright.
• 55:10
  But, know, alright, Billy. We're gonna go ahead and get three months of survival food. We're gonna get the backup generator. We're gonna get the the flow jack, you know, hand pump for the well, whatever it is. So, again, my my purpose is not to be doom and gloom and say we're screwed, but it's to highlight a very realistic threat that our nation has, because we hadn't even talked about foreign involvement.
• 55:32
  Because what if the attack on the substations, what if that was part of a larger plan by, say, China to invade America? You could have Chinese and Russian forces that have coordinated the attack on the grid. And then, you know, say six months into this, when America's in a very weakened state, there's a very good chance you're gonna have foreign and hostile nations that are invading America. So you might see that there's a huge mass of Chinese troops on in California and coming up through Mexico and Canada. You know, these could be very realistic scenarios.
• 56:06
  Now, hopefully, the whole world would band together and try to support America, but, you know, America's pissed off a lot of countries. And I think there's a lot of countries that would unfortunately, they'd they'd love to see America fall. Right? Especially the cut Middle Eastern countries, etcetera. Now I told you that I I would touch on the issue of an EMP.
• 56:29
  Now an EMP, which is, electromagnetic pulse, there's a few ways of doing it, but the main way that we'd be vulnerable to an EMP attack is basically, it's a it's a nuclear EMP attack, which is, let's just say that an enemy nation, or even our own our own some corrupt elements within our own government could do this. It's highly possible. That would be that would be it wouldn't be some foreign nation, but actually just foreign actors with their enemy actors within our own with our own country. Let's just say they have a ship a couple ships off the coast, you know, a couple off of the Atlantic, couple off of the Pacific, and these coasts have these, you know, Club K, you know, you know, shipping containers. Shipping containers that basically open up, and they fire missiles out of them.
• 57:12
  Right? So it looks like a shipping container. Maybe it's so easy for China China to have one that's sitting on one of its big, you know, big shipping, barges. So if they detonated a couple of nuclear warheads at a certain, height above America, that's what basically causes an EMP. Because the how that affects look, I'm not a scientist on this.
• 57:34
  But, basically, if they detonate a couple of warheads in strategic locations around America, could be three or four, that could be enough to wipe out the entire power grid. Now when an EMP hits, they will disrupt electronics. Now there's people that think that if an EMP goes off, every single thing with, like, with electronics in is gonna be done. That's not true. It depends on a lot of things.
• 57:55
  If you have electronics that are plugged into the grid, they're gonna be most likely hit even worse. So computers, that kind of stuff that's plugged in will definitely get, you know, hit really hard. A lot of vehicles, especially more modern vehicles, they're you know, the newer the vehicle, the less likely chance it has of of surviving an E and P. Now say you have, like, a '95, you know, Ford Bronco, you know, even though it has some electronics, that might be fine. Right?
• 58:20
  Because, you know, in in you know, the E and P is not gonna be like everything in America that has a little computer chip in or whatever is fried instantly. But still, most of that equipment is gonna be damaged. Now if an EMP hits, this is that is it's multitudes worse than the scenario we talked about with the substation attack. Because if an EMP hits, it means the the vast majorities, majority of vehicles, even government vehicles, you know, ambulances, you know, modern police cars, they stop working. That's one thing.
• 58:50
  Hospital equipment, generators, a lot of these will stop working instantly. So, you know, the hospital that has these big generators right? Like, I've got a whole house generator. It's a Generac. Well, that thing's got a little computer control module in it.
• 59:06
  So my guess is that if an EMP went off, it would stop my generator from working. So and this is just like the the kind of giving a very basic overview. But, you know, if an EMP went off, you would see probably like, okay. If I had to get into estimated deaths and, again, this is a really, really hard thing to kinda determine. But let's just say we had a twelve month blackout, like what I described, you know, the majority of this episode.
• 59:32
  That was, you know, basically attacks on the substations. Not EMP, nothing like that, a twelve month blackout. You know, you could pretty easily see within those twelve months, unfortunately, you could see thirty, sixty, even close to a 100,000,000 Americans dying in that first year. Freezing, malnutrition, starvation, water, you know, waterborne diseases, crime, murder, etcetera. Now in E and P, now there was a commission that report that was put out that they estimated, I think, within twelve months of after a full EMP attack, that they said roughly between seventy five and ninety percent of the population would perish.
• 1:00:10
  And it's not unrealistic if you look at these scenarios of an EMP. A lot of it depends on how the international support would play out. If a lot of the international, you know, countries and allies just left America to be, then those deaths would be much higher. But if if early on we had a lot of support from other nations, maybe it'd be lessened. But, you know, in E and P, I'd say you could safely assume that more than half the country is not gonna make it past that first year.
• 1:00:32
  And it's just the it's just the sober reality of this. Now do I think that these scenarios will happen? I mean, I who am I to say what will or won't happen? You know, our our country has fallen. I think that we're in the days of Noah.
• 1:00:47
  There is there's a lot of good people in this country. There's also a lot of very evil people, and and the systems themselves are very evil and corrupted. And there are very powerful people that want these kinds of things to happen, which makes me think is there a certain timing about this New York Times article that relates to this. And so, you know, I I again, I can't say whether it will happen. I hope that it doesn't, but it's certainly a chance.
• 1:01:12
  Right? I remember I interviewed Michael Yahn, a while ago in talking about, you know, famine and war. And, you know, I said, you know, what's the trigger for these things to happen? And he says, you know, he said, look. You know, everyone gets say, he's he's referring to a forest fire.
• 1:01:24
  Everyone's focusing on what what is the thing that sparks the fire. He goes, but I'm looking at the conditions. He goes, I don't care what single thing causes the forest fire to start. He goes, I'm looking at conditions. I'm looking at dry brush.
• 1:01:36
  I'm looking at, drought conditions. I'm looking at, you know, he's looking at these 10 different variables that all those together means that a single spark anywhere could cause the whole thing to go up. And that's the thing with this is that if you look at the conditions, you you can see that we are ripe for some kind of attack happening like this. It's it's like an enemy nation would have to be studying these things about our country and thinking, okay. How could we effectively use this opportunity to bring down this country?
• 1:02:07
  And so, again, I I hope these things don't happen, but there is a chance they could happen. It's a very plausible, it's a very plausible scenario. There is an an effort of depopulation. It is just the reality of where we are. And America is standing in the way of a lot of the more globalist, you know, new world order, centralized one world government type agendas.
• 1:02:36
  America stands in the way. And if you're trying to bring about that kind of a state, an attack like this on America would make it far easier, to do that. So I just think it's something we should be aware of. And, I'm not trying to, you know, kind of frighten you into, like, kinda that that, you know, you know, fight or flight or freeze. Right?
• 1:02:59
  I'm not trying to push you into, like, that freeze mode or the flight mode where you're just you just wanna ignore all this stuff. I I wanna just, you know, rationally walk through what this looks like because you might say, oh, yeah. That makes sense. I mean, the reason why I live the way that I do, and my wife and I, that we're, you know, we're quite prepared. We have a lot of backup food.
• 1:03:20
  We've done a lot of this kind of, you know, work to prepare for these scenarios. I spent a lot of time analyzing these types of scenarios. It's because I've studied this extensively. I've probably read I've probably read, you know, maybe even over 60 books on grid failure scenarios, what happens, you know, you know, preparedness, stuff like this. Like, I I've I've extensively studied this information, and that's why I'm prepared is because I know the reality of this.
• 1:03:51
  And I know that even if there's a 1% chance of of this happening, that my actions right now, when it hasn't happened yet, could greatly affect the the future of my my life and my children. So there's a lot of us that will pay for insurance on things. You'll get a new a new iPhone, and you'll pay a $100 for AppleCare. Like, well, you know, maybe there's that slim chance something will happen, so I'll pay a $100 to make sure that I get it my new iPhone if it breaks. But people aren't having any kind of preparedness insurance.
• 1:04:20
  And then that's to me, that's one of the most important investments you can make is just to invest the time and the money to get yourself better prepared. And so, you know, there's you know, I'm not gonna get into what to do in this episode. I'll I'll do some other episodes on preparedness in general, cause that's a whole I could spend hours going over that. But, you know, one thing I will say is that this is a lot of what I talked about today is why we're building the ARC community. Right?
• 1:04:47
  And so if you're not familiar with it, so the community, which we're actually, we're now in in beta testing mode, which is a huge, huge, point of progress is that we've got other users that are coming in, and they're testing the site. We're looking for bugs. We're in the final phase of that kind of bug testing and beta testing, which is a major milestone. So it's very close to being released to the public. But the ARC platform is in essence, it's a private social media platform.
• 1:05:10
  It's not just social media platform. It is so much more than that. The whole idea with it is that we wanted to build a platform to enable people to not just learn, because I'll I'll tell what the learning on it, but to meet other people that think like them. Right? So maybe there's someone like me.
• 1:05:28
  Say there's a Seth Holehouse that lives fifteen minutes away that you have no idea that he lives there. And say, you let you think about the world the same way as as this Seth Holehouse guy, and you're worried about this stuff. But in your local friends and family, people think that you're just a a kind of you're obsessed, and you're kind of a whack job, and you're a conspiracy theorist. But what happens when you can find that other person that thinks like you do, let alone finding ten, fifteen, 30 people in your own region that think like this? So this is one of the most important things in terms of survival.
• 1:05:57
  This is what I'll tell you is in terms of preparedness, the most important thing that you can do is to build a community. It is the single most important thing that you can do. No one survives a twelve month blackout in isolation. It's not gonna happen. Right?
• 1:06:13
  A small family, even if they've got a beautiful compound and everything, maybe if if they've got extensive experience, maybe one of them is a doctor and, you know, maybe, but very few people can actually survive in isolation. The key is building a community of people around you that share your values. That's also an important point is that when these situations happen, when the when the society breaks down like this, you're gonna have tribalism. You're gonna have the Muslims that start banding together with the Muslims. You're gonna have the Indian communities banding together with the Indian communities.
• 1:06:47
  You're gonna have different communities banding together, and they're gonna have their own moral framework that they're gonna be doing, and it it's gonna become really much so us versus them. If you look into what one of the major causes of Rome falling was, it was all the different tribalistic communities that formed, especially once the system started breaking down, the welfare system started breaking down. You had these tribes that revert to their tribal behavior to protect their own tribe against the other tribes. And so you'll have that kind of tribalism emerging here. And so the key is that you gotta build your own tribe of people that look at the world the way that you do, that care about these things, that care about faith and virtue and family and tradition.
• 1:07:23
  And so that's why we we're building the ARC is that the ARC becomes a platform for you to meet those people. And also then we're gonna have chapters. And I'm really excited about this. We're gonna have local ARC chapters all over the world. So we're starting off in America at a country level.
• 1:07:39
  But imagine you join, you're like, oh, great. Well, I'm in New York, and, oh, I'm I'm joining the New York chapter. Oh, great. There's a local meetup. And, you know, next month, there's a local meetup, and we're gonna have a big ARC barbecue.
• 1:07:50
  And I gotta go meet people that are also part of the, you know, part of the ARC platform, I gotta build these connections. That's a big part of it. The other thing is education. So on the ARC platform, we've got the ARC Academy, where we're gonna have, we have we've already have maybe 50 or so lessons, but we're building out an entire online academy that is gonna train you. So if you wanna learn about water purification or food storage, food preservation, home security, Say you don't know what kind of gun to buy or how many you need.
• 1:08:21
  We're gonna have training modules and lessons on all of the core topics and even a lot more advanced topics as well. So you're gonna have access to that entire academy on the ARC platform. We're also gonna do expert q and a's. We're gonna do, you know, round you know, roundtables and meetings where we're kinda tuning in. And the idea is this that I I really believe that we're living the days of Noah.
• 1:08:44
  And instead of building a big wooden boat to survive the storm, I think that to me, the ark is the community. Right? And that is the boat that will survive the storm. And so it's also it's a private community. It's members only.
• 1:08:58
  So it's, you know, it's not just something there's gonna a bunch of anonymous accounts that are gonna be arguing and everything like that. So it is gonna be a private community that you have to join. It's it will cost monthly. So there you can either do annual or you can do monthly. So the monthly cost is $17.76, and the annual is $1.76.
• 1:09:19
  And we also have have a founder lifetime option too, which is more limited, which we will have details on the website about that if you're interested in that. But the idea is that we're building so much value into this. And I thought about, okay, should we make it free? We charge a dollar? And I thought about and it's like, no.
• 1:09:34
  It's like, a, I wanna have the funds to keep building it and investing in it. Right? We've we've already spent, you know, the equivalent of 6 figures building this platform. So we wanna be able to kind of really focus and build something absolutely amazing. That's one thing.
• 1:09:48
  But also, I want people that are joining that are serious. I want the ark full of people that are serious about living this lifestyle, getting back to tradition, getting back to living how our grandparents lived, and that they really wanna do it. And if there's someone that says, you know what? That's too expensive, yet they've got their Netflix account, and they've got their Hulu account, and their Disney plus account, and their ESPN, then that's fine. I'm not gonna judge you for that, but it's about priorities.
• 1:10:15
  Now if there are people say you're someone that is just on extreme financial hardship and you're you're you're barely keeping the lights on and, you know, putting food on the table for your kids, we are gonna have a way to have sponsored, accounts and memberships. So if you know, once we launch, we'll have an area where if you are living with if you have that kind of financial hardship, you can apply for a sponsorship. Because I don't want I don't want it to be that it's only people that can afford that $17 a month are able to join. I want it to be that if people really have the heart to, but they genuinely just can't afford it, that we're gonna help them as well. And so, again, we're launching very, very soon.
• 1:10:51
  We've already got 50 over 15,000 people on the wait list to be notified once it's gonna open. So if you want to, add your name to the wait list, it's very simple. You go to this website, which is buildtheaarc.com. So it's Ark, it's a r k. Some people have confused it with a r c, but it's buildtheark like Noah's Ark, buildtheark.com.
• 1:11:13
  All you do is you come on here, you drop in your name and your email, and you join the wait list. And as soon as we launch, we will notify you. Now we're gonna be launching in batches, and so we've got limited spots in each batch. So we've already got our first group is getting in on day one. And so, you know, we're not gonna just let everyone in all at once.
• 1:11:33
  We have to you know, it's it's a new platform, so we have to kind of gradually ease into things. But if you wanna join that wait list to get in, you know, early, you go to buildthearc.com and sign up. And and, again, the arc is I feel like I'm not gonna say it's, like, my life's work, but it feels like it. Right? It feels like everything that I've done so far with, you know, Man in America and my past in the in in the media, etcetera, that, you know, it's leading me to something like this, where I feel like that it's not just about having a podcast and talking about things and having a couple sponsors and everything.
• 1:12:06
  It's about building something. It's about building an arc. And, you know, I've been again, I've studied preparedness for a very, very long time, And I've come to the conclusion through my own process that the most important thing you can do to be prepared is to actually have a community. And so that's what we're doing is we wanted to build a platform that would make it as easy as possible for you to find and build a real community of people. There's even you you can go on you can have privacy if you want there.
• 1:12:34
  You can say, hey. Don't show my location. But because it's members only and it's private and it's in its essence, a lot of people will be more share more open with these things. But you can go on there and you can say, hey. Show me all the people within 50 miles.
• 1:12:45
  Or you can go on there and you can say, hey. I need help with my solar. And so you can see a list of all the people that have solar solar panels or medicine as one of the areas of expertise, and you can then message them directly. We've got encrypted messaging, and you can ask them about, hey, can I send you a question about my solar? There's gonna be groups in there.
• 1:13:03
  So similar to Facebook groups, there's gonna be groups on homeschooling, groups on homesteading, groups on security, groups on faith and religion. We've got a prayer wall. So if you need help, can put your know, post your prayer wall. We've got a town hall, which is where all the common conversations are gonna be happening. So, anyway, all this is gonna be happening on the ARC.
• 1:13:20
  We're gonna it's gonna be a website. We've also gonna have, Android app and, iOS app as well. So we've got beautiful apps that we've developed that go with it. So you can, you know, use your app if you want to. You can go on and just, you know, use the desktop or the website or tablet version.
• 1:13:35
  So we're gonna make it it's gonna be amazing. I'm really excited for it. So again, that's buildthearc.com. And alright. I think that's it.
• 1:13:43
  I I I went a little over an hour longer than I thought I would have gone, but I have a thing where you you put a mic in front of me, and I start talking more than I anticipate. So that's just how it is. Thank you for being here. Thank you for, you know, being alongside me on this journey. I I do have hope for the future.
• 1:14:00
  I'm very optimistic, but that doesn't mean I think that we're we don't have hard times coming. I do think we have very hard times coming, and that's why I'm doing what I can within my control to affect those hard times as much as possible by preparing and building a community. And I hope that you join me in that. Alright. Thank you, and I'll see you next time.
• 1:14:21
  If you could go back in time and buy oil before the world relied on it, would you? Of course you would. Anyone would. So why aren't you buying silver right now? You see, the people who recognized oil early didn't just make money, they got ahead of one of the biggest economic shifts in history.
• 1:14:38
  And today, a similar opportunity is unfolding with silver, because silver is a lot more than just a precious metal. It's a critical resource used in solar panels, electric vehicles, defense systems, AI infrastructure, and even these massive data centers that are powering our digital world and the surveillance grid. So while demand keeps growing, it's actually still affordable enough that the average American can start accumulating it right now. And that's why investors are turning to silver to protect against inflation and own one of the world's most important strategic resources. Don't be the person who looks back in ten years and says, I saw it coming, but I just didn't act.
• 1:15:16
  I'm sorry. So visit goldwithseth.com and learn just how easy it is to own physical silver. Again, that's goldwithseth.com. And here's something a little extra. If you just mention my name when you reach out to Noble Gold, they're gonna send you a one tenth ounce of gold coin just as a thank you when you open a new qualified account.
• 1:15:38
  So again, that's goldwithseth.com.