February 13, 2019 • 31 mins
Does art imitate life or life imitate art? James Wesley, Rawles is an American author who writes the survivalist-genre Patriots novel series - set in the near future amidst hyperinflation and a catastrophic global economic collapse. Rawles walks the walk. He lives off the land in a remote location in the Pacific Northwest. For Rawles, it's not just a story. It's our future.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
It wouldn't take too much to take that whole infrastructure down,
with the grids being the lynchpin. All right, all right,
So I don't know how to explain it other than
to explain it. Get an email. Email leads to an
exchange that says, I need you to fly to this airport.
(00:28):
I'm not gonna say the airport because I've been uh
entrusted to not say the airport. Fly to the airport,
Await further instructions. Awaiting further instructions, get a text, get
a rental car, drive out, two hours in the wrong direction,
my fault, drive back, get to another location, get bounced
(00:53):
to a second location, and eventually find myself on a
rural country road, stopping in front of a gate with
no single markers at all. Where am I? I'm at
an undisclosed mountain readoubt for James Wesley Comma rawls. We're
(01:13):
going to the name thing later, head of a survival movement,
what they call the American Readoubt. Former Army intelligence officer
and a guy who's got a predistinct stance. I'm becoming apocalypse,
(01:41):
all right. So usually I can tell you simple things
like where I am, how I got there, can't do
any of that. What I can do is tell you
who I'm with, and who I'm with very specifically, is
a guy named James Wesley Rawls, or as his books
like to call him, James Wesley Comma Rawles. So you
(02:01):
have to pause before the roles. So first of all,
why the comma in the name? Why James Wesley Comma Rawles. Okay,
the comma distinguishes between the given name and the family name. Okay. Well, mostly,
You've got a couple of books on the New York
Times bestseller list, and these would be well the Patriots
novel series, starting with Patriots and then Survivors and Founders
(02:27):
are what are the what are the books about the Patriots?
We're here? The Patriots novel series is a post apocalyptic
novel series set in the near future UH describing a
full scale socio economic collapse and the adventures of a
large number of people all over the country living through
(02:47):
those turbulent years. What I find interesting about this is
that it's a social collapse. It's a socio economic collapse,
Whereas if you had written these books ten or fifteen
years earlier, twenty years earlier, it would have been a
nuclear war, you know, it would be some kind of
kerfuffle with another foreign national. What happens to cause the
real trigger is the U S national debt and the
(03:10):
compounding interest on that debt, and the growing reliance of
the federal government on foreign creditors to keep financing that debt.
Right now, the national debt takes up as much of
the national budget as national defense. Just interest on the
national debt is now nearly as much as the entire
(03:33):
defense budget. I think the chances are that we are
already living in what people in prepper circles referred to
as a slow slide scenario. What we're seeing in our
current economy is a false sense of prosperity that's driven
(03:53):
by debt. The the level of indebtedness public and private
has essentially tripled in the last twenty years. And it's
that it's an injection of basically cheap money or free
money that's perpetuating the stock market. It's it's pushing along
(04:16):
governments at all levels, and it's providing the money for
the welfare state and a lot of other things that
are just chugging along. So the premise of the novel
is that foreign creditors at some point have a Emperor
Song Squirts moment and realize they're never conna be able
(04:38):
to pay this back. So, uh, it causes a collapse
in the US dollar on the for X, it causes
a stock market collapse, and then a full scale route
on the US dollar itself where it basically becomes worthless
over the course of just a few weeks. It becomes
worthless in international perspective and also domestically hyperinflates because of
(05:03):
the international perspective, right, right, Because I've often thought at
times that you know that if if the US, if
we're gonna be run like a mafia crime family at
a certain point, that the U s would say about
all of this debt, you know what, I'm not paying.
But if I get about trying to pay, I'm actually
not paying you, you know. So, as Tony Soprano once famous,
(05:25):
like sad though serious is what happens. If you don't
pay them, you gotta pay, and unfortunately foreign creditors have
to be paid, and if the currency unit itself falls apart,
and then you're in okay. So this is the premise
of the series, but you've gone beyond that, right, I mean,
this is this is a case of you know, walking
(05:45):
it like you talking. That's why we can't tell people
where we are. And I live at a very remote
location in the inland Northwest. I can't say what state
I live in. And uh, we live a very quiet life,
surrounding by national forest and very pretty area. And we're
we homeschool our kids. We live fairly self sufficiently. We
(06:08):
garden for most of our produce. We hunt, we fish,
we raise livestock. It's a fairly self sufficient lifestyle. So
I do kind of walk the walk. Um, So, now,
where did you go to high school? Because I've often
said that people are from where they went to high school.
I went to Livermore High School in Livermore callis count Livermore, California,
(06:31):
which is an Alameda county, right down the road from
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. My dad worked at the lab.
Most of the kids I grew up with worked at
the lab. Their parents worked at the lab. And it
was an interesting place to grow up because we have
the largest number of bomb shelters per capita of any
city in the United States. And all the kids I
(06:52):
grew up with were either the children of people who
designed nuclear weapons, or worked in other programs at Lawrence Labs.
My dad was a nuclear um program manager uh in
be division of the lab. He actually worked with cyclotrons
and linear accelerators and worked in experimental physics. And they
(07:15):
called pure research applied physics at the laboratory means you're
designing nuclear weapons. So, now did this influence your decision
at all to go into the military. My dad had
been an Air Force instructure pilots in T three threes
back in the nineteen fifties, back Korean War vintage. So
I thought, well, uncle in the army intelligence sounded interesting.
(07:35):
I had interest in foreign language, interest in you know,
foreign affairs, and uh, the intelligence field really gave me
a chance to delve into that. I was involved with
some unclassified country studies. Somebody might deduce from giving your
your initial professional calling that your miss on saying is
(07:57):
informed in a way that it wouldn't be if I
was doing it. Yeah, I think it gave me a
different perspective the country studies I was involved in. One
of the things we're looking at was economic stability. After
doing all those country studies on Eastern Europe and and
and watching you know, hyper inflation with the replacement of
(08:17):
the shekel by the new Israeli shekel, knocking three zeros
off the currency, and having read about the same thing
happening in Greece and uh, later on I saw the
same thing happen in Zimbabwe. Uh. That kind of perspective
made me realize that we're standing on pretty uncertain ground
here in the United States with the level of indebtedness
(08:39):
that we have. It does seem like if Trump's objective
is to reduce the size of the deficit, the tax
the corporate tax cuts, though they might have been live
in business, seems to they're not helping if that's where
they're not happening with the bottom line. And unfortunately, as
you mentioned, a long term obligation and things like social
(09:01):
security and military pensions, federal government pensions, those long term
obligations don't They are not even figured in the twenty
one trillion dollar national debt. If you count them those
long term unfunded obligations into the debt, it's actually more
like a sixty trillion dollar debt, which is three times
the gross national product. So what happened to these other
(09:24):
countries the country's named Zimbabwe, um well in Israel, in
recent Israel, they were able to kind of dig themselves
out of the hole because they had strong economies. In
the case of Zimbabwe, where you had comrade Mugabi who
was and his cronies who were systematically looting the country,
(09:47):
there was no way out. They had to They basically
destroyed the dollar. They went all the way up to
printing one trillion dollar bills and then they completely repudiated
and now they use the South African rand and U
S dollars. Okay, So that's an economic collapse, but that's
not a socio collapse, right right. The logical jump in
a modern technologically connected society is that we have a
(10:12):
society with incredibly long chains of supply, a relatively fragile
power grid infrastructure. We have three grids, the Western grid,
the Eastern grid of the Texas grid, and it wouldn't
take too much to take that whole infrastructure down, with
the grids being the lynch pin. And what I posited
in the novel series was that if you have an
(10:36):
economic collapse and then you have rioting in the big cities,
all those nuclear power plants have to go offline. They
have to scram the piles of those plants and shut
those plants down if they don't have a certain level
of staffing by law, If you don't have people to
handle the equipment, it's not going to happen. You mentioned
(10:58):
three countries to head and collapse, but they didn't have
full scale riots. Why why Why? Here in America, it's
awfully easy to get along with what you've never had.
In a country like Zimbabwe, people were already used to
living at a at an agrarian level. In America, we
are so far removed from our agrarian ancestors, it's not
even funny. In the nineteen thirties when they had the
(11:22):
depression of the nineteen thirties, think the society still held
together because of the families were still living off the land.
They were still actively and engaged in farming, fishing, ranching, mining,
They were they were connected to the land. And today
only one percent of the population is feeding the other
(11:46):
So it wouldn't take very much disruption to basically break
the food chain. And because I'm in an isolated area,
it's so far removed from major metropolitan areas, I think
that the majority of the problems are going to be
in those major your metro areas. Since we're more than
a tank of gas away from the nearest major metro area.
(12:07):
I don't think we're going to see many problems here.
The grid may be down, although thankfully in the Northern
Rockies most of our power is it's hydro electric. In fact,
we actually export power. So did that inform your decision,
did you? Yes? Absolutely, Yeah, the grid is going to
be reconstituted anywhere, it will be in hydro electric areas. First, now,
(12:29):
you've fashioned in a very real way of a lifestyle,
but you also have done something that you know, you've
had children, and these are these are kind of uh,
what do you call free radicals kids? They decide what
they're gonna do, They're gonna you know, at a certain point,
they're free range kids, free range kids. So now have
they have they followed suit? Or are they? Most of
(12:52):
them are prepper oriented and some of them are in
cities or am I right? Yeah? Well one one is
living in a major city in Asia right now. So
that that was a you know, a choice to pursue
an opportunity to be a missionary. So it's there's choices
and trade offs for everyone. I'm pleased to see though
(13:14):
that the majority of My kids have pretty well followed
in my footsteps. They're all very pro gun, very pro preparedness,
and basically pro self sufficiency in terms of the way
they you know, they all have an interest in gardening
and you raising livestock, that sort of thing. How does
(13:35):
how does I mean if you live in the city,
you have an interest, but you can well, you know,
even if you live, even in an apartment, you can
have a window box garden and growth sprouts, and even
so w living in a suburban house on a quarter
acre a lot can have a pretty efficient vegetable garden.
(13:55):
Now these and keep rabbits or chickens are these? Are
these ideas form M in a much more major way
as a result of having been an intelligence officer. Or
are they informed by um religion? Or is it partly religion?
You know, because I you know, I take the Old
(14:16):
Testament pretty seriously, and you know, man's supposed to care
for his own family and provide for his family. But
I think more of it more than my intelligence background.
It goes back to the pioneering side of my family.
We settled in a remote area. It's even so kind
of remote, the Anderson Valley of medicine Mendicino County, California
(14:41):
in the eighteen fifties, and they had a six thousand
acre sheep branch and did just about everything themselves. The
only thing they would buy when they would sell their
wool each year and sell mutton was salt, sugar and tea.
That's the only thing they had to buy. Everything else
they produced for themselves. But they were not similarly informed
(15:04):
by this idea that it was necessary to do this. You, No,
it was just that was just the culture at the time.
They were worried about the fragility of society like I am,
but the same money, the same self sufficient mindset I
think really pervades every style of my body. But but
I guess I'm wondering, is this driven by you know,
(15:29):
end time signals are less that and more that. Look,
I've actually spent my time analyzing what happens to states
that are failing and that fail, and I'm seeing signs
and i gotta respond to Yes, it's definitely more of
the latter than the former, because I wonder. I mean,
on the one hand, you might say, there I just
did a piece on the nineteen seventy seven blackout in
(15:50):
New York. And the point that I want people to
get to is, you know what happened in July seven?
The whites one out. That's it. Actually people were fairly civil. No, no,
they were civil ninetive the first one. It was sivil.
If they were too there were three. There was one
(16:12):
before seventy seven, and it was one after seventy seven.
Seventy seven was a perfect storm where the Vietnam War
hit ended a few years earlier. Okay, the Vets were
coming back to the city suffering from what we didn't
know was PTS T at the time Nixon resigned a
few years earlier. Ford had just told New York City
to drop dead. I'm not You're gonna bankrupt yourself. Um.
(16:32):
And it was an interest RCE for sil Sky High. Yes,
and so the lights went out. I was watching Boretta
at the time. I remember this, and I kind of
red and whatever. My mom's no, you could come back
in the holes and people went for Over four thousand
people were arrested. Over five of the cops were hurt.
I didn't realize it was that bad. A special uh,
(16:54):
a guy I know who's another intelligence guy, especially for
the guy who then contracts out to like black Water,
and he got called to New Orleans after Katrina, uh,
property protection, and he was like organized gangs. You know,
they show you in the news people stealing pampers. That's
(17:14):
not it. The banks were people came in with fork cliffs. Uh,
those big auto transports of going up to dealerships and
there are guys would we pull up? What are you doing?
The guys pull guns on us. We pull guns on
them and our medals, you know. So it's clear that
the people, I mean, he wasn't gonna say this, and
I'm not gonna say it now, but all they say,
(17:36):
you know, how much money was lost doing the right?
I think a lot of that was people seeing an
opportunity and embracing it. It wouldn't take too much to
cause a total break. And if we get to the
point where the power grids go down and don't come
back up for two months, especially if it happens in
the winter, I'm not sure if they're going to come
back up for years. And that was the basic scenario
(17:57):
for patriots. So now, so you've got a book out,
but then you also in a parallel path that you
start a website. Right, I did a starting the blog
in two thousand five called Survival Blog. It's it's a
very popular blog on family preparedness, and we cover pretty
much every aspect of preparedness, whether it's food storage, communications, equipment,
(18:21):
first aid, water filtration, gardening, livestock, heating your own home
with firewood, all those sort of topics. You know, I
made the break to the hinterry bunnies, but I was
only able to do that because I was self employed,
and unfortunately, most people can't do that. And a lot
of what I'm doing and Survival Blog is coaching people
(18:42):
on how they can survive in the suburbs, and that's
where the majority of my readership still is. A lot
of people want to move to the inland Northwest region
that Merritt there that I refer to as the American readout,
which consists of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the east and
half of Washington and the eastern half of Oregon. That's
(19:04):
the area that I consider the most survivable. Why because
it's all on hydropower and the population density is incredibly light.
Those are the two main factors that and you know,
there's quite a bit of agriculture, farming, ranching, mining. I
think that the chances of that region pulling through are
(19:27):
better than just about anywhere else in the lower forty
eight States. What about the world worldwide? Boy, there, I
think the Pacific island nations would probably have the best
chance to reverting to at least the lightly populated islands
would have the best chance to revert to traditional culture. Yeah,
(19:49):
places like Vandawatu. In places like that, where people are
used to growing ploy, raising pigs, and fishing, they will
still do it, at least the majority of them, or
at least half their cousins do, so their chances of
reverting to that level of technology are fairly high. And
(20:10):
from a multigenerational standpoint, if we had we literally go
into a second dark Age, I think that would actually
be an even safer place than right here. Got degree
in journalism. You're paying attention to reading the newspapers and
processing this. How much? How does class factor into this?
(20:32):
Do you see this being primarily a class struggle? Mainly
class because I don't believe in the whole concept of race.
There's only one race, the human race. Um From a
class standpoint, that there is unfortunately now a dependent class,
and those are people of all different skin tones, who
(20:54):
are dependent on the system, and a lot of known
even have real jobs. That level of dependency is a
huge risk. The majority of it, though, I think is
a distinct difference in the in people's outlook on the world.
People are either directed toward part and home and the
(21:18):
land or their technological or urbanite types who I think
in abstract terms like the funny money that we carry
around in our wallets. And if if you have a
whole group and it's the majority of your population who
(21:39):
lives at that level of abstraction and that little level
of distance away from the land, those are the people
who are the greatest risk. And those are the people
that I have to say, I want to be the
farthest away from I want to be living in the
country with people who live fairly close to the land.
I think those are the people all have the best
(22:00):
chance of pulling through with because they're also producing their producers, right,
they're also self sufficient relatively, yes, and at least if
there if anyone has a chance of reverting to nineteenth
century level technology, it's probably my neighbors. No, this isn't.
I've got a friend who's a Trump, who was a
(22:21):
Trump adherent and he says, you know one thing I
really hate and getting a huge arguments over not politics,
commute lane. So I'm gonna drive into commute lane whatever
I'll pay, and I go, no, no, no, you don't understand.
If everybody does what you do, that commute lane is
just another lane. Right. If we are going to return
(22:42):
to a closer relationship to the land, is clearly in
a nation of three fifty million people that it's getting difficult.
But I know that less than two or three percent
of the population is even going to have an interest
in getting back to the land. How do you know this, Well,
just look at the demographics. The cities are getting bigger.
(23:03):
At the plain states like the Dakotas are actually depopulating,
so it's wyoming. People are still the general trend is
still towards congregating in the big cities. Why because that's
where the money is, and we we have a system
that's dollar driven and that has a level of technological
sophistication that's quite appealing to people because that's that's where
(23:26):
the high paying jobs are, that's where the opportunity for
advancement is, that's where the cultural centers are. And yet
your sons found their spouses not here, but they had
to go to large centers right. Well. Um, in the
case of one of my children, uh yeah, he he
(23:47):
met her at college. But she also happened to come
from a prepper family and she also was homeschooled. Yeah,
so they had a lot in common, so they gravitated together.
Their goal is to in the long run, end out
living as far from the big city as they can.
(24:08):
I don't know that I feel comfortable letting the government
off the hook. I still hold out some hope for
the political process. And it's just difficult, though, in the
century to objectively look at what's going on and say
the chances are better than not that things are going
(24:31):
to get that things are going to improve. I don't
think we're on that side of the equation. What could
or should the average person do who's listening in order
to guarantee their continued safety in the future. There is
no guarantee. But there is an actual aial equation which
(24:52):
is and that is that from an actual aial standpoint,
if I was an insurance actuary, I would say that
if I was writing a policy for socioeconomic collapse, that
policy would be really expensive for people live in the
cities and really inexpensive for people in the low risk groups,
(25:13):
and that would be the people who live out in
the interboonis. So I would recommend that if people have
the opportunity, if they're either at or near retirement age,
or if they're self employed, or if they can develop
a home based business and become self employed, that they
do that and they develop not one, but two or
three revenue streams. So if you're self employed, you would
(25:35):
run two or three different businesses so that you could
pull through all sorts of different economic times, and that
would be your ticket to move to the Mooney's. And
for most people, even those who hold fairly large mortgages,
cashing out of a house in the big city, would
buy a much larger house with a barn, with a
(25:57):
greenhouse on large acreage where they can keep livestock in
the country. But that just doesn't explained that why you
home school to kids. That was more of a philosophical
and religious thing, although just from a purely empirical standpoint,
looking at test scores declining and then having them renorm
the tests multiple times in the case to me that
(26:21):
the public schools are a lost cause and I think
that people, if they're serious about educating their children, should
either educate themselves or they should have them in private schools.
And I think that if people like Donald Trump were serious,
they would have tutition tax credits that would allow people
(26:42):
to take their kids out of public schools put them
in private schools. Private private schools would then flourish, and
eventually you could eliminate the whole public school system. Then
where to poor people get their kids educated well? With
tuition tax credits, they can they can go to private
private schools to that's compelling. It's a compelling vision of
the future. But you know, from the fifties through and
(27:05):
now and so far as I've been paying attention, there's
always been a specific, in particular vision of feature. There's
very much like you as sure. If you go back
to the bomb bomb shelter era of the early sixties,
a lot of those people have the same outlook that
I do. And they had a lot of the same
goals like food storage and self sufficiency and moving to
lightly populated areas those days they were worried about, you know,
(27:28):
being out of fall followed areas that the same kind
of mentality exists and I actually would like nothing better
than to die peacefully in my bed and not having
lived through a socio economic collapse, be able to say
to myself, I lived a good life. I raised my
children where I wanted to on my own terms, live
the lifestyle I wanted. And I'm glad nothing happened. You know,
(27:52):
I'm years old, so so far, so so far, so
so good. And you know, back in the nineteen eighties
I could remember, or even seventies. I can remember late
seventies people were saying no trillion dollar national debt. Remember
there was a you know, if if we reach a
(28:14):
one trillion dollar level of debt indebtedness for the federal government,
our society is going to collapse. Well now we're at
twenty one trillion and counting. Things are hanging in there.
I remember the drill baby drill thing, Sarah and their
concerns about the pipeline oil spills. I mean, well, yeah,
there's every equation is going to have it's detracting factors.
(28:38):
But you know, I'm a big believer in American ingenuity,
and we may be able to power through this. We
may not have a socio economic collapse. But even if
there's only a five percent chance of economic collapse. I
don't want to be the guy who's the third guy
(29:00):
in line. I don't want to be the guy who's
sitting behind all the traffic trying to live the big
cities when everything falls apart. I want to be the
guy who's already living out my my chances are pulling
through when we have gotten much higher. So, uh, do
you convinced you're ready to join the movement? You know?
I'm such an easy mark. I gotta work on it
(29:21):
because I am sorry, but but but not quite yet.
Next week, Next week we have Renee Wu born in Taiwan,
got a pH d in chemistry, worked at a major
high tech corporation doing stuff that it would roast your
brain to to think about. One day, stood up at
(29:44):
work said fuck this, I'm out. Became world champion pole dancer.
I love it. Next up on Ozzy Confidential, Ozzy kind
Fidential is produced by who Else May Eugene S. Robinson,
(30:05):
an executive produced by Robert Coolos, and this episode was
sound designed, edited and mixed by Jamie Cohn and Nick Johnson.
For more Ozzy Confidential, check us out on azzi dot com.
That's o Z y dot com slash Confidential. We published
(30:27):
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you dig what you gotta say good, bad, or ugly,
or maybe we'll get too lazy to do any of that. Thanks,
It wouldn't take too much to take that whole infrastructure down,
with the grids being the lynchpin. All right, all right,
So I don't know how to explain it other than
to explain it. Get an email. Email leads to an
exchange that says, I need you to fly to this airport.
(00:28):
I'm not gonna say the airport because I've been uh
entrusted to not say the airport. Fly to the airport,
Await further instructions. Awaiting further instructions, get a text, get
a rental car, drive out, two hours in the wrong direction,
my fault, drive back, get to another location, get bounced
(00:53):
to a second location, and eventually find myself on a
rural country road, stopping in front of a gate with
no single markers at all. Where am I? I'm at
an undisclosed mountain readoubt for James Wesley Comma rawls. We're
(01:13):
going to the name thing later, head of a survival movement,
what they call the American Readoubt. Former Army intelligence officer
and a guy who's got a predistinct stance. I'm becoming apocalypse,
(01:41):
all right. So usually I can tell you simple things
like where I am, how I got there, can't do
any of that. What I can do is tell you
who I'm with, and who I'm with very specifically, is
a guy named James Wesley Rawls, or as his books
like to call him, James Wesley Comma Rawles. So you
(02:01):
have to pause before the roles. So first of all,
why the comma in the name? Why James Wesley Comma Rawles. Okay,
the comma distinguishes between the given name and the family name. Okay. Well, mostly,
You've got a couple of books on the New York
Times bestseller list, and these would be well the Patriots
novel series, starting with Patriots and then Survivors and Founders
(02:27):
are what are the what are the books about the Patriots?
We're here? The Patriots novel series is a post apocalyptic
novel series set in the near future UH describing a
full scale socio economic collapse and the adventures of a
large number of people all over the country living through
(02:47):
those turbulent years. What I find interesting about this is
that it's a social collapse. It's a socio economic collapse,
Whereas if you had written these books ten or fifteen
years earlier, twenty years earlier, it would have been a
nuclear war, you know, it would be some kind of
kerfuffle with another foreign national. What happens to cause the
real trigger is the U S national debt and the
(03:10):
compounding interest on that debt, and the growing reliance of
the federal government on foreign creditors to keep financing that debt.
Right now, the national debt takes up as much of
the national budget as national defense. Just interest on the
national debt is now nearly as much as the entire
(03:33):
defense budget. I think the chances are that we are
already living in what people in prepper circles referred to
as a slow slide scenario. What we're seeing in our
current economy is a false sense of prosperity that's driven
(03:53):
by debt. The the level of indebtedness public and private
has essentially tripled in the last twenty years. And it's
that it's an injection of basically cheap money or free
money that's perpetuating the stock market. It's it's pushing along
(04:16):
governments at all levels, and it's providing the money for
the welfare state and a lot of other things that
are just chugging along. So the premise of the novel
is that foreign creditors at some point have a Emperor
Song Squirts moment and realize they're never conna be able
(04:38):
to pay this back. So, uh, it causes a collapse
in the US dollar on the for X, it causes
a stock market collapse, and then a full scale route
on the US dollar itself where it basically becomes worthless
over the course of just a few weeks. It becomes
worthless in international perspective and also domestically hyperinflates because of
(05:03):
the international perspective, right, right, Because I've often thought at
times that you know that if if the US, if
we're gonna be run like a mafia crime family at
a certain point, that the U s would say about
all of this debt, you know what, I'm not paying.
But if I get about trying to pay, I'm actually
not paying you, you know. So, as Tony Soprano once famous,
(05:25):
like sad though serious is what happens. If you don't
pay them, you gotta pay, and unfortunately foreign creditors have
to be paid, and if the currency unit itself falls apart,
and then you're in okay. So this is the premise
of the series, but you've gone beyond that, right, I mean,
this is this is a case of you know, walking
(05:45):
it like you talking. That's why we can't tell people
where we are. And I live at a very remote
location in the inland Northwest. I can't say what state
I live in. And uh, we live a very quiet life,
surrounding by national forest and very pretty area. And we're
we homeschool our kids. We live fairly self sufficiently. We
(06:08):
garden for most of our produce. We hunt, we fish,
we raise livestock. It's a fairly self sufficient lifestyle. So
I do kind of walk the walk. Um, So, now,
where did you go to high school? Because I've often
said that people are from where they went to high school.
I went to Livermore High School in Livermore callis count Livermore, California,
(06:31):
which is an Alameda county, right down the road from
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. My dad worked at the lab.
Most of the kids I grew up with worked at
the lab. Their parents worked at the lab. And it
was an interesting place to grow up because we have
the largest number of bomb shelters per capita of any
city in the United States. And all the kids I
(06:52):
grew up with were either the children of people who
designed nuclear weapons, or worked in other programs at Lawrence Labs.
My dad was a nuclear um program manager uh in
be division of the lab. He actually worked with cyclotrons
and linear accelerators and worked in experimental physics. And they
(07:15):
called pure research applied physics at the laboratory means you're
designing nuclear weapons. So, now did this influence your decision
at all to go into the military. My dad had
been an Air Force instructure pilots in T three threes
back in the nineteen fifties, back Korean War vintage. So
I thought, well, uncle in the army intelligence sounded interesting.
(07:35):
I had interest in foreign language, interest in you know,
foreign affairs, and uh, the intelligence field really gave me
a chance to delve into that. I was involved with
some unclassified country studies. Somebody might deduce from giving your
your initial professional calling that your miss on saying is
(07:57):
informed in a way that it wouldn't be if I
was doing it. Yeah, I think it gave me a
different perspective the country studies I was involved in. One
of the things we're looking at was economic stability. After
doing all those country studies on Eastern Europe and and
and watching you know, hyper inflation with the replacement of
(08:17):
the shekel by the new Israeli shekel, knocking three zeros
off the currency, and having read about the same thing
happening in Greece and uh, later on I saw the
same thing happen in Zimbabwe. Uh. That kind of perspective
made me realize that we're standing on pretty uncertain ground
here in the United States with the level of indebtedness
(08:39):
that we have. It does seem like if Trump's objective
is to reduce the size of the deficit, the tax
the corporate tax cuts, though they might have been live
in business, seems to they're not helping if that's where
they're not happening with the bottom line. And unfortunately, as
you mentioned, a long term obligation and things like social
(09:01):
security and military pensions, federal government pensions, those long term
obligations don't They are not even figured in the twenty
one trillion dollar national debt. If you count them those
long term unfunded obligations into the debt, it's actually more
like a sixty trillion dollar debt, which is three times
the gross national product. So what happened to these other
(09:24):
countries the country's named Zimbabwe, um well in Israel, in
recent Israel, they were able to kind of dig themselves
out of the hole because they had strong economies. In
the case of Zimbabwe, where you had comrade Mugabi who
was and his cronies who were systematically looting the country,
(09:47):
there was no way out. They had to They basically
destroyed the dollar. They went all the way up to
printing one trillion dollar bills and then they completely repudiated
and now they use the South African rand and U
S dollars. Okay, So that's an economic collapse, but that's
not a socio collapse, right right. The logical jump in
a modern technologically connected society is that we have a
(10:12):
society with incredibly long chains of supply, a relatively fragile
power grid infrastructure. We have three grids, the Western grid,
the Eastern grid of the Texas grid, and it wouldn't
take too much to take that whole infrastructure down, with
the grids being the lynch pin. And what I posited
in the novel series was that if you have an
(10:36):
economic collapse and then you have rioting in the big cities,
all those nuclear power plants have to go offline. They
have to scram the piles of those plants and shut
those plants down if they don't have a certain level
of staffing by law, If you don't have people to
handle the equipment, it's not going to happen. You mentioned
(10:58):
three countries to head and collapse, but they didn't have
full scale riots. Why why Why? Here in America, it's
awfully easy to get along with what you've never had.
In a country like Zimbabwe, people were already used to
living at a at an agrarian level. In America, we
are so far removed from our agrarian ancestors, it's not
even funny. In the nineteen thirties when they had the
(11:22):
depression of the nineteen thirties, think the society still held
together because of the families were still living off the land.
They were still actively and engaged in farming, fishing, ranching, mining,
They were they were connected to the land. And today
only one percent of the population is feeding the other
(11:46):
So it wouldn't take very much disruption to basically break
the food chain. And because I'm in an isolated area,
it's so far removed from major metropolitan areas, I think
that the majority of the problems are going to be
in those major your metro areas. Since we're more than
a tank of gas away from the nearest major metro area.
(12:07):
I don't think we're going to see many problems here.
The grid may be down, although thankfully in the Northern
Rockies most of our power is it's hydro electric. In fact,
we actually export power. So did that inform your decision,
did you? Yes? Absolutely, Yeah, the grid is going to
be reconstituted anywhere, it will be in hydro electric areas. First, now,
(12:29):
you've fashioned in a very real way of a lifestyle,
but you also have done something that you know, you've
had children, and these are these are kind of uh,
what do you call free radicals kids? They decide what
they're gonna do, They're gonna you know, at a certain point,
they're free range kids, free range kids. So now have
they have they followed suit? Or are they? Most of
(12:52):
them are prepper oriented and some of them are in
cities or am I right? Yeah? Well one one is
living in a major city in Asia right now. So
that that was a you know, a choice to pursue
an opportunity to be a missionary. So it's there's choices
and trade offs for everyone. I'm pleased to see though
(13:14):
that the majority of My kids have pretty well followed
in my footsteps. They're all very pro gun, very pro preparedness,
and basically pro self sufficiency in terms of the way
they you know, they all have an interest in gardening
and you raising livestock, that sort of thing. How does
(13:35):
how does I mean if you live in the city,
you have an interest, but you can well, you know,
even if you live, even in an apartment, you can
have a window box garden and growth sprouts, and even
so w living in a suburban house on a quarter
acre a lot can have a pretty efficient vegetable garden.
(13:55):
Now these and keep rabbits or chickens are these? Are
these ideas form M in a much more major way
as a result of having been an intelligence officer. Or
are they informed by um religion? Or is it partly religion?
You know, because I you know, I take the Old
(14:16):
Testament pretty seriously, and you know, man's supposed to care
for his own family and provide for his family. But
I think more of it more than my intelligence background.
It goes back to the pioneering side of my family.
We settled in a remote area. It's even so kind
of remote, the Anderson Valley of medicine Mendicino County, California
(14:41):
in the eighteen fifties, and they had a six thousand
acre sheep branch and did just about everything themselves. The
only thing they would buy when they would sell their
wool each year and sell mutton was salt, sugar and tea.
That's the only thing they had to buy. Everything else
they produced for themselves. But they were not similarly informed
(15:04):
by this idea that it was necessary to do this. You, No,
it was just that was just the culture at the time.
They were worried about the fragility of society like I am,
but the same money, the same self sufficient mindset I
think really pervades every style of my body. But but
I guess I'm wondering, is this driven by you know,
(15:29):
end time signals are less that and more that. Look,
I've actually spent my time analyzing what happens to states
that are failing and that fail, and I'm seeing signs
and i gotta respond to Yes, it's definitely more of
the latter than the former, because I wonder. I mean,
on the one hand, you might say, there I just
did a piece on the nineteen seventy seven blackout in
(15:50):
New York. And the point that I want people to
get to is, you know what happened in July seven?
The whites one out. That's it. Actually people were fairly civil. No, no,
they were civil ninetive the first one. It was sivil.
If they were too there were three. There was one
(16:12):
before seventy seven, and it was one after seventy seven.
Seventy seven was a perfect storm where the Vietnam War
hit ended a few years earlier. Okay, the Vets were
coming back to the city suffering from what we didn't
know was PTS T at the time Nixon resigned a
few years earlier. Ford had just told New York City
to drop dead. I'm not You're gonna bankrupt yourself. Um.
(16:32):
And it was an interest RCE for sil Sky High. Yes,
and so the lights went out. I was watching Boretta
at the time. I remember this, and I kind of
red and whatever. My mom's no, you could come back
in the holes and people went for Over four thousand
people were arrested. Over five of the cops were hurt.
I didn't realize it was that bad. A special uh,
(16:54):
a guy I know who's another intelligence guy, especially for
the guy who then contracts out to like black Water,
and he got called to New Orleans after Katrina, uh,
property protection, and he was like organized gangs. You know,
they show you in the news people stealing pampers. That's
(17:14):
not it. The banks were people came in with fork cliffs. Uh,
those big auto transports of going up to dealerships and
there are guys would we pull up? What are you doing?
The guys pull guns on us. We pull guns on
them and our medals, you know. So it's clear that
the people, I mean, he wasn't gonna say this, and
I'm not gonna say it now, but all they say,
(17:36):
you know, how much money was lost doing the right?
I think a lot of that was people seeing an
opportunity and embracing it. It wouldn't take too much to
cause a total break. And if we get to the
point where the power grids go down and don't come
back up for two months, especially if it happens in
the winter, I'm not sure if they're going to come
back up for years. And that was the basic scenario
(17:57):
for patriots. So now, so you've got a book out,
but then you also in a parallel path that you
start a website. Right, I did a starting the blog
in two thousand five called Survival Blog. It's it's a
very popular blog on family preparedness, and we cover pretty
much every aspect of preparedness, whether it's food storage, communications, equipment,
(18:21):
first aid, water filtration, gardening, livestock, heating your own home
with firewood, all those sort of topics. You know, I
made the break to the hinterry bunnies, but I was
only able to do that because I was self employed,
and unfortunately, most people can't do that. And a lot
of what I'm doing and Survival Blog is coaching people
(18:42):
on how they can survive in the suburbs, and that's
where the majority of my readership still is. A lot
of people want to move to the inland Northwest region
that Merritt there that I refer to as the American readout,
which consists of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the east and
half of Washington and the eastern half of Oregon. That's
(19:04):
the area that I consider the most survivable. Why because
it's all on hydropower and the population density is incredibly light.
Those are the two main factors that and you know,
there's quite a bit of agriculture, farming, ranching, mining. I
think that the chances of that region pulling through are
(19:27):
better than just about anywhere else in the lower forty
eight States. What about the world worldwide? Boy, there, I
think the Pacific island nations would probably have the best
chance to reverting to at least the lightly populated islands
would have the best chance to revert to traditional culture. Yeah,
(19:49):
places like Vandawatu. In places like that, where people are
used to growing ploy, raising pigs, and fishing, they will
still do it, at least the majority of them, or
at least half their cousins do, so their chances of
reverting to that level of technology are fairly high. And
(20:10):
from a multigenerational standpoint, if we had we literally go
into a second dark Age, I think that would actually
be an even safer place than right here. Got degree
in journalism. You're paying attention to reading the newspapers and
processing this. How much? How does class factor into this?
(20:32):
Do you see this being primarily a class struggle? Mainly
class because I don't believe in the whole concept of race.
There's only one race, the human race. Um From a
class standpoint, that there is unfortunately now a dependent class,
and those are people of all different skin tones, who
(20:54):
are dependent on the system, and a lot of known
even have real jobs. That level of dependency is a
huge risk. The majority of it, though, I think is
a distinct difference in the in people's outlook on the world.
People are either directed toward part and home and the
(21:18):
land or their technological or urbanite types who I think
in abstract terms like the funny money that we carry
around in our wallets. And if if you have a
whole group and it's the majority of your population who
(21:39):
lives at that level of abstraction and that little level
of distance away from the land, those are the people
who are the greatest risk. And those are the people
that I have to say, I want to be the
farthest away from I want to be living in the
country with people who live fairly close to the land.
I think those are the people all have the best
(22:00):
chance of pulling through with because they're also producing their producers, right,
they're also self sufficient relatively, yes, and at least if
there if anyone has a chance of reverting to nineteenth
century level technology, it's probably my neighbors. No, this isn't.
I've got a friend who's a Trump, who was a
(22:21):
Trump adherent and he says, you know one thing I
really hate and getting a huge arguments over not politics,
commute lane. So I'm gonna drive into commute lane whatever
I'll pay, and I go, no, no, no, you don't understand.
If everybody does what you do, that commute lane is
just another lane. Right. If we are going to return
(22:42):
to a closer relationship to the land, is clearly in
a nation of three fifty million people that it's getting difficult.
But I know that less than two or three percent
of the population is even going to have an interest
in getting back to the land. How do you know this, Well,
just look at the demographics. The cities are getting bigger.
(23:03):
At the plain states like the Dakotas are actually depopulating,
so it's wyoming. People are still the general trend is
still towards congregating in the big cities. Why because that's
where the money is, and we we have a system
that's dollar driven and that has a level of technological
sophistication that's quite appealing to people because that's that's where
(23:26):
the high paying jobs are, that's where the opportunity for
advancement is, that's where the cultural centers are. And yet
your sons found their spouses not here, but they had
to go to large centers right. Well. Um, in the
case of one of my children, uh yeah, he he
(23:47):
met her at college. But she also happened to come
from a prepper family and she also was homeschooled. Yeah,
so they had a lot in common, so they gravitated together.
Their goal is to in the long run, end out
living as far from the big city as they can.
(24:08):
I don't know that I feel comfortable letting the government
off the hook. I still hold out some hope for
the political process. And it's just difficult, though, in the
century to objectively look at what's going on and say
the chances are better than not that things are going
(24:31):
to get that things are going to improve. I don't
think we're on that side of the equation. What could
or should the average person do who's listening in order
to guarantee their continued safety in the future. There is
no guarantee. But there is an actual aial equation which
(24:52):
is and that is that from an actual aial standpoint,
if I was an insurance actuary, I would say that
if I was writing a policy for socioeconomic collapse, that
policy would be really expensive for people live in the
cities and really inexpensive for people in the low risk groups,
(25:13):
and that would be the people who live out in
the interboonis. So I would recommend that if people have
the opportunity, if they're either at or near retirement age,
or if they're self employed, or if they can develop
a home based business and become self employed, that they
do that and they develop not one, but two or
three revenue streams. So if you're self employed, you would
(25:35):
run two or three different businesses so that you could
pull through all sorts of different economic times, and that
would be your ticket to move to the Mooney's. And
for most people, even those who hold fairly large mortgages,
cashing out of a house in the big city, would
buy a much larger house with a barn, with a
(25:57):
greenhouse on large acreage where they can keep livestock in
the country. But that just doesn't explained that why you
home school to kids. That was more of a philosophical
and religious thing, although just from a purely empirical standpoint,
looking at test scores declining and then having them renorm
the tests multiple times in the case to me that
(26:21):
the public schools are a lost cause and I think
that people, if they're serious about educating their children, should
either educate themselves or they should have them in private schools.
And I think that if people like Donald Trump were serious,
they would have tutition tax credits that would allow people
(26:42):
to take their kids out of public schools put them
in private schools. Private private schools would then flourish, and
eventually you could eliminate the whole public school system. Then
where to poor people get their kids educated well? With
tuition tax credits, they can they can go to private
private schools to that's compelling. It's a compelling vision of
the future. But you know, from the fifties through and
(27:05):
now and so far as I've been paying attention, there's
always been a specific, in particular vision of feature. There's
very much like you as sure. If you go back
to the bomb bomb shelter era of the early sixties,
a lot of those people have the same outlook that
I do. And they had a lot of the same
goals like food storage and self sufficiency and moving to
lightly populated areas those days they were worried about, you know,
(27:28):
being out of fall followed areas that the same kind
of mentality exists and I actually would like nothing better
than to die peacefully in my bed and not having
lived through a socio economic collapse, be able to say
to myself, I lived a good life. I raised my
children where I wanted to on my own terms, live
the lifestyle I wanted. And I'm glad nothing happened. You know,
(27:52):
I'm years old, so so far, so so far, so
so good. And you know, back in the nineteen eighties
I could remember, or even seventies. I can remember late
seventies people were saying no trillion dollar national debt. Remember
there was a you know, if if we reach a
(28:14):
one trillion dollar level of debt indebtedness for the federal government,
our society is going to collapse. Well now we're at
twenty one trillion and counting. Things are hanging in there.
I remember the drill baby drill thing, Sarah and their
concerns about the pipeline oil spills. I mean, well, yeah,
there's every equation is going to have it's detracting factors.
(28:38):
But you know, I'm a big believer in American ingenuity,
and we may be able to power through this. We
may not have a socio economic collapse. But even if
there's only a five percent chance of economic collapse. I
don't want to be the guy who's the third guy
(29:00):
in line. I don't want to be the guy who's
sitting behind all the traffic trying to live the big
cities when everything falls apart. I want to be the
guy who's already living out my my chances are pulling
through when we have gotten much higher. So, uh, do
you convinced you're ready to join the movement? You know?
I'm such an easy mark. I gotta work on it
(29:21):
because I am sorry, but but but not quite yet.
Next week, Next week we have Renee Wu born in Taiwan,
got a pH d in chemistry, worked at a major
high tech corporation doing stuff that it would roast your
brain to to think about. One day, stood up at
(29:44):
work said fuck this, I'm out. Became world champion pole dancer.
I love it. Next up on Ozzy Confidential, Ozzy kind
Fidential is produced by who Else May Eugene S. Robinson,
(30:05):
an executive produced by Robert Coolos, and this episode was
sound designed, edited and mixed by Jamie Cohn and Nick Johnson.
For more Ozzy Confidential, check us out on azzi dot com.
That's o Z y dot com slash Confidential. We published
(30:27):
editorial companion articles on azzi and the photos videos for
every single story, so check them out. Go to ozzie
dot com slash Confidential. That's o z y dot com
slash Confidential and you can see behind the siege. You
can learn more about the stories we tell, and even
become an official o c where will be kept uh
(30:49):
in the note on all things Ozzy Infidential. And if
you want to get in touch with us, learn more
or just generally vent hit us up at confidential at
ozzi dot com will send over a T shirt if
you dig what you gotta say good, bad, or ugly,
or maybe we'll get too lazy to do any of that. Thanks,
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