Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'm joined here by Clay Martin.
Speaker: Clay is a man who maybe needs no introduction, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
Speaker: He's a special ops veteran who's been in lots of dangerous places, done lots of dangerous things.
Speaker: He's written two books, Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire, about essentially survival and organization under civil unrest conditions in an urban and a rural environment.
Speaker: He's also written Wrath of the Wendigo, which I'd like to talk about.
Speaker: I'll just say my wife bought me Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire, and I went and asked my soft buddies that I have, none of whom are in our circles on Twitter, so it's not like they were buddies of Clay's.
Speaker: And to a man, every one of them was like, oh yeah, Clay's is a real deal.
Speaker: Read that book.
Speaker: So this is a guy who...
Speaker: The only way that I can judge, assess expertise is just to go ask a bunch of people.
Speaker: I don't have any personal expertise, but everybody that I've talked to says Clay is the dude.
Speaker: So welcome to the show, Clay.
Speaker: Well, hey, man.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Glad to be here.
Speaker: And thanks for that introduction, brother.
Speaker: Happy to be here.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I want to jump right into something that you said on Tucker Max's interview.
Speaker: about a Japanese kid who won a competitive shooting competition with, I think you said, three years of airsoft experience and like 30 days of live rounds training.
Speaker: Yeah, it's one of the best, least well-known stories, but to me, biggest story that there is as far as training value from these airsoft guys.
Speaker: He didn't win just a shooting championship.
Speaker: He won what's called Steel Challenge.
Speaker: And Steel Challenge is a national, I mean, it's actually a worldwide event.
Speaker: They hold it every year.
Speaker: It's the same competition.
Speaker: And man, especially it's a fast-paced, quick game.
Speaker: The stages have been the same since like 1976.
Speaker: So everybody knows what they're getting into going into it.
Speaker: And I mean, this dude was a, he was a nobody.
Speaker: I mean, nobody's ever heard of him.
Speaker: He really was just some kid with an airsoft gun that set up some little, you know, bullshit paper plates or whatever in his, you know, his room and practiced it and got the money together, flew over, trained for 30 days and won.
Speaker: Beat Casey Asibio by like a second and a half that year.
Speaker: And I mean, Casey is a, you know, world, he's been a world champion in multiple other disciplines.
Speaker: It's not like all the good guys sat out that year.
Speaker: I mean, he actually, he legitimately won with almost no real gun experience.
Speaker: And what I find so compelling about that is you have said that there are genuine...
Speaker: connections between somebody's skill with that type of shooting and milsim close quarters battle like practice and the real thing.
Speaker: And I'm fascinated by the idea that someone in Japan with the gun control laws and, and, and, you know, the, the sort of law enforcement up your assness that, that is over there was able to become like world-class lethal.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: And the biggest challenge that I see in preparing for like a civil breakdown scenario is you have to get ready before things pop off.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But you cannot be early to the party.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's exactly right.
Speaker: It's like super important that you don't show up early.
Speaker: And so have you thought about ways, do you have ideas for ways that people can prepare that don't put a target on your back in the same way that like airsoft training would?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Well, and actually the airsoft one is crazy.
Speaker: People look at me like I'm nuts when I say that.
Speaker: And a lot of people came back after they read Concrete Jungle where I mentioned it.
Speaker: And they're like, that is preposterous.
Speaker: And people make fun of airsoft guys and milsim guys all the time.
Speaker: Like they're a bunch of fucking nerds that don't know anything.
Speaker: And honestly, for the most part, those dudes are probably more lethal than your guy that has a safe full of guns and goes to the range once a week and blasts some pop cans or some nonsense.
Speaker: They're actually also out there doing like, you know, it's it's nerfed a little bit, but like tactical stuff.
Speaker: I mean, they're running around in the woods.
Speaker: They're actually trying to shoot at each other, all this kind of stuff.
Speaker: So, man, that one is huge.
Speaker: It's actually massive, especially in this day and age, too.
Speaker: It keeps the cost down so much.
Speaker: When I think about how I got good with a pistol, particularly.
Speaker: I had literally like a dump truck load of government ammo that showed up anytime I wanted it.
Speaker: And honestly, the way that I got really good was later in my career because I was on instructor duty and I could just have no responsibility and do whatever I wanted.
Speaker: I would stay after work and shoot for like four hours every day.
Speaker: Free bullets.
Speaker: I mean, why wouldn't you?
Speaker: I actually wore out a Glock.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: I actually wore out a Glock 34.
Speaker: I gave it back to Glock.
Speaker: I was like, I think this one's broken.
Speaker: And they were like,
Speaker: oh my God, like we've never seen one pushed this far.
Speaker: Cause like that, like the, the no-go gauge would almost fall at the end of the barrel is insane.
Speaker: But, uh, you know, barring that, barring and being in one of those unique positions where you have unlimited dollars for this, man, Airsoft is great, dude.
Speaker: You gotta, I mean, it's, it's so cheap and so available and you could do it right there in your, at your house right now.
Speaker: Uh, that's a really, that's one that man is really underappreciated.
Speaker: Then the other stuff, man, for keeping it off your back, it gets a little bit more complex.
Speaker: It depends really on what you're looking to do.
Speaker: If we're talking about food storage, I mean, that's super easy.
Speaker: You just buy some extra and start stashing that stuff away.
Speaker: A lot of the other stuff, a lot of the esoteric stuff, that's where you got to – there's ways to do it.
Speaker: I didn't cover it as much in any of my books.
Speaker: I did cover it a little bit in, I think, Prairie Fire, actually, talking about intelligence networking stuff.
Speaker: That's one that you can practice on your own too.
Speaker: And basically anything that would make you a good salesman will also make you a good intelligence operative.
Speaker: So reading up on some of the better books for salesmanship, and especially the way, you ever been on like a natural salesman in your life, a guy that was just good at it?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That dude will know things about you in a two minute conversation where you didn't feel like you gave up anything that you wouldn't tell your priest in a lot of cases.
Speaker: They just had this natural kind of flowing way of dragging that stuff out and remembering it.
Speaker: And I mean, that's important to you.
Speaker: That's a valuable skill set, too.
Speaker: So honestly, just getting out there and being a little bit social, you know, looking at cars or some other bullshit that you don't really want to do that you're not actually going to buy.
Speaker: That's even a way to pick up on what they're doing, as long as you're smart enough to leave your wallet at home so you don't have to commit to it.
Speaker: You could go into any type of sales pressure place and make something up before you go.
Speaker: Like your name's going to be John Smith now and you have some bullshit email address.
Speaker: That actually gives you practice lying as well, which is an important skill set to have.
Speaker: We're being perfectly honest.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: I was thinking, so one of the projects that we're working on at the group is a scouting program for boys.
Speaker: Oh, cool.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yeah, we're basically looking at the 1911 handbook and being like, all right, clearly we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
Speaker: What went wrong?
Speaker: How do we bring this back and also update it?
Speaker: And one of the things that occurred to me is that you could prepare boys to
Speaker: to like one of the, one of the, one of the, I think directions that Boy Scouts went wrong is it's lots and lots and lots of little merit badges that don't really add up to much.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Um, but if you could, if you could create, um,
Speaker: Like your, your basic scout has to be the, the, uh, he has to be able to sit in the junior slot of the ODA.
Speaker: He has to be able to assist the senior on all of the different things.
Speaker: And then you're, you're like finisher you're the way you finalize is you, is you get the skillset in one lane to become the senior.
Speaker: So you, you go get EMS training or you go get, you know, you, some kind of engineering credential or comms credential.
Speaker: this is actually going to crack you up do you know why the boy scouts were founded and why that original manual came out the way that it came out tell me that was actually specifically to make a future generation of soldiers uh that was the idea that was the idea as you grow these yeah they were concerned that people already getting too soft urbanization so they founded the scouts the idea that this was kind of a military preparatory course uh to the point that man at least up until like
Speaker: 10 years ago, if you were an Eagle Scout, you got instantly promoted three ranks when you joined the Marine Corps or the Army.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: You already knew all the shit.
Speaker: And it's really fucking crazy, especially if you look at the older manuals.
Speaker: Take one of those, take the patrolling manual from the Boy Scouts and overlay it next to the patrolling manual for, let's say, the Marine Corps 6-5 or the Army's Ranger Handbook.
Speaker: Look at the positions and the way that they walk.
Speaker: It's exactly the same.
Speaker: The only thing that's a little bit different is your duties and responsibilities of like now you create a machine gun instead of, you know, the tent or some bullshit.
Speaker: But yeah, that's what it was built for.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think one of the issues that we've had as we've as we've worked on it is like this question of liability.
Speaker: And I think one of the ways that you can handle that right is you can just.
Speaker: you can just make it a book.
Speaker: Like there's no organization.
Speaker: This is just a book and you and your dad and your friends can go learn some things.
Speaker: No, that's great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And one of the things that I've thought about is like, uh,
Speaker: Basically, same thing with the Airsoft thing.
Speaker: How do you train kids in a way that won't get them in trouble, won't get you in trouble, won't get anybody hurt?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I thought I'd get a little cheeky with it, like pen testing.
Speaker: Like, this is career training.
Speaker: We're going to help you become a penetration tester.
Speaker: So here's how you smash a lock, and here's how you break into a computer.
Speaker: Here's how you social engineer, get somebody's password off of them.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: Dude, it makes total sense.
Speaker: I mean, you know...
Speaker: I had a couple of people actually ask me after I said that stuff too, about the airsoft, like, I'm going to get my kids some, uh, some airsoft guns and, uh, you know, they're going to be toys.
Speaker: I'm like, no, no, no, they're, they're never toys, but you should get them some and, and just have them treat them like their real gun, like their whole life.
Speaker: Uh, but yeah, no, it's a great way.
Speaker: And with your very, very marginal chance of, uh, of injury, you put some safety glasses on and it's basically nothing.
Speaker: Uh, yeah, no, man, that's just all great.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: like you're saying there too, decentralized organization is huge.
Speaker: It's pretty much what all of us have to face down these days.
Speaker: Because, you know, one or two things, like you said, liability,
Speaker: Or Rico statue, if you start trying to grow an organization, that's what they always come after us with.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we've seen this.
Speaker: Like every organization that's popped up that's even a little bit right, it always somehow, some way gets its pee-pee spanked by Rico statue.
Speaker: I mean, just I think today those two, was it Oath Keepers or some bullshit, they got convicted for the January 6th shit.
Speaker: And they got convicted of conspiracy.
Speaker: That w as a big one.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not good.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I think that's just something that we have to we have to accept for for our lot in life now was anything that we're going to do has to be decentralized.
Speaker: And honestly, with the way things are sliding, that's probably better anyway.
Speaker: You know, we think about this, you know, I got buddies that are, you know, dudes that I talk to that are like New York State right now.
Speaker: I can help them digitally, but.
Speaker: when the balloon actually goes up, they might as well not exist.
Speaker: Nothing outside of the five miles around me matters anymore.
Speaker: No human, no nothing.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I guess, you know, one way you can get around that if you're in a, my sort of goal with my, because I've got this group that's spread out all over the country.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: But even now, there's probably three or four clusters where the guys are within 20 minutes of each other.
Speaker: Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: And that's the goal is to get the thing big enough so that the waterline is such that you've got your dozen guys in each city.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And there's no organization.
Speaker: It's just like, I want you to have guys that you like and trust and can count on in your...
Speaker: in your neighborhood, you know, primarily so that you'll have a good homeschool co-op or so that you'll have a good barbecue.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: But also, if you learn some things that'd be valuable in an emergency situation, that's good, too.
Speaker: No, dude, 100% with it.
Speaker: I mean, that's a great way to look at it.
Speaker: And that's one thing that's, I mean, that's probably the hardest step for people to take in the real world is accepting that balkanization thing.
Speaker: And accepting that we need to find our dudes and live close to them.
Speaker: If things do get really bad, you might be living in that dude's woodshed.
Speaker: That's just how this shit works.
Speaker: I mean, it's crazy.
Speaker: People think about this like it's preposterous, but we saw it.
Speaker: And we've seen it in recent memory.
Speaker: I mean, that's basically how Iraq went down.
Speaker: As soon as the central government was destroyed, as soon as it started torturing, killing Shias, and vice versa,
Speaker: And it didn't take very long before they just separated neighborhoods.
Speaker: Lebanon, their civil war was the same thing.
Speaker: All the bullshit in the Balkans, the 90s, it was the same thing.
Speaker: You know, carts going this way and this way, full of everybody's shit.
Speaker: Like, you know, we'll pass each other on the road once and that's it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you think that I wanted to ask you that you mentioned a few times that our situation is probably more like the Balkans than it is like 1861.
Speaker: And I think the nature of technology is such that, that, uh,
Speaker: we're making friends all over the world.
Speaker: And we're also having to like smell the shit of people we hate who live right next door.
Speaker: And we're like, we're, it's like the dream of the internet in the nineties was like, Oh, I'll make friends in Turkmenistan.
Speaker: And then we won't go to war with Turkmenistan and we'll all get along.
Speaker: And it's like, that did happen.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And also we realized how much we freaking hate people in San Francisco.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I'm interested in your take on like, what can we learn from situations like that, like the Balkans, like Iraq, that we could use to strengthen our position and sort of be prepared for that eventuality?
Speaker: Now, this gets into a little bit of a slippery slope as far as trying to predict the future, because obviously nobody knows.
Speaker: I try to read the tea leaves, but I don't really know either.
Speaker: But I think one thing that we can agree on is the Empire is kind of crumbling, and it's not looking very good.
Speaker: And so when I look at the way things are right now, the reason I say that I don't see an 1860 type event, I mean, you have to, when you really look at the roots of 1860, that was, you know, honestly, that was the rich people that lived in the South versus the rich people that lived in the North using the poor people as pawns.
Speaker: It's not like a poor farmer in South Carolina had slaves in 1860.
Speaker: He couldn't afford it.
Speaker: That's just how it was.
Speaker: But they manipulated the state's rights issue and the pride in your region and all this other bullshit and basically got those poor people to go to war for them and die in droves.
Speaker: I just don't see this time something like an equal faction.
Speaker: I mean, we obviously see the lefty, crazy, whatever, communist fucking revolution that has taken over the government part.
Speaker: I just don't see a counterweight that's like an organized...
Speaker: equal-sized thing that will end up fighting it.
Speaker: I just don't see it happening.
Speaker: No, Republicans... I see Republicans as basically the equivalent of Indian agents.
Speaker: Their job is just to keep us...
Speaker: On the reservation.
Speaker: Right, right, right.
Speaker: Sell us as much liquor as possible.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And smallpox blankets and shit.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, dude, I mean, that's a fucking greater now.
Speaker: I mean, I assume it's the Washington Generals too as a political movement.
Speaker: I don't even think they're fucking trying anymore.
Speaker: But that's not really the point.
Speaker: To me, the point is more...
Speaker: No matter what, though, this is already on the glide path to complete fucking chaos.
Speaker: Whether that's just people stop listening and stop obeying the rules, whatever.
Speaker: And I think, honestly, that's more likely anyway than some crazy March on Washington bullshit.
Speaker: I think that's a fucking pipe dream.
Speaker: So that's kind of how I see it.
Speaker: I see things just slowly falling apart.
Speaker: And then you'll have some regional players that are like, okay, fuck it.
Speaker: Kansas doesn't pay federal taxes anymore.
Speaker: And then neither do the counties in Missouri that are next to them.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It's just these little regionalized conflicts.
Speaker: I see that as just so much more likely and so much more predictable for where we are right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So like when we – one of the guys that I interviewed was a Green Beret who mentioned –
Speaker: The people who were successful in relative terms, you know, it wasn't great for anybody in the Balkans, but like successful in relative terms in that was people who knew how to get things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And people who knew how to break legs and protect things.
Speaker: That's also important.
Speaker: That's also an important point.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm interested in your take on like, uh, so for, for, for me, I, I'm not going to be a leg breaker, I think in this lifetime.
Speaker: Um, you know, we all grow up dreaming and, and some of us do it and some of us don't.
Speaker: And, um, nor, nor do I think that I'm going to be like a mechanic or a farmer.
Speaker: I've always been kind of a talker and, uh, I I'm interested in, you know, you mentioned in the book that like, you've got your 18 F who's your, your, your, um,
Speaker: intelligence person whose job it is to know people and know what's going on and know things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, and know how to get things and, and, and have relationships.
Speaker: And what would you see as like the, the top, let's say five people to know in my five mile radius to be, uh, to, to be prepared.
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Aside from my ODA, aside from my buddies, my contacts, my informants.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, you talk about useful people.
Speaker: Okay, number one is either a surgeon, a doctor, or a veterinarian.
Speaker: It doesn't matter which one.
Speaker: If you haven't already had that dude.
Speaker: Those...
Speaker: I mean, honestly, in this day and age, I would even say that I believe veterinary school is more difficult than medical school.
Speaker: Like those dudes know their shit.
Speaker: And if I had to have somebody patch me up in a pinch, certainly better him than, you know, my guy that read an EMT book one time.
Speaker: So, you know, that guy, that guy is very important.
Speaker: Secondary.
Speaker: Man, I really lean towards, it's not like a definitive dude, but for me, I know one old cowboy here where I live that knows everybody.
Speaker: He knows everybody, everybody's fucking business, everybody's gossip, and that also undoubtedly means that he can get things.
Speaker: He already kind of is the fixer, and if things got spicy, so that dude exists for you somewhere.
Speaker: I don't know who he is, but he's there.
Speaker: I'm going to have to say third...
Speaker: Man, the local grocer, like if you live in a smaller area especially, that dude is important because not only does he know where stuff comes from and know where shit's, you know, maybe able to get some alternatives.
Speaker: That guy also knows logistics.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: He understands, you know, feeding people and keeping shit straight, keeping things rotated.
Speaker: Man.
Speaker: We've got an agricultural co-op.
Speaker: Oh, nice.
Speaker: They know about feed.
Speaker: They know about hay.
Speaker: They're watching that stuff locally.
Speaker: Those are also guys that I would very much trust to be able to come up with a viable plan when just feed's not coming anymore.
Speaker: Oh, fuck, we're out.
Speaker: How are we going to keep some breeding stock around?
Speaker: What's our rotation schedule going to be?
Speaker: How many things do we need to kill off right now because we can't support, obviously, the shit that we've had in the past?
Speaker: So those dudes are way high on that list, too.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: That's three.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Some kind of leg breaker, be it either the, you know, like the, the, the chief or a deputy or somebody that's fucking tough, or if not him, like the local fucking criminal that is, provided he's not a complete fucking scumbag.
Speaker: But if he is a complete fucking scumbag, somebody familiar with law enforcement on one side or the other.
Speaker: And the flip side of that is if you already know who the kingpin is and shit's looking real squirrely, you might not want to know him just because you're friends.
Speaker: You might want to know him because that's something that needs to get taken care of day one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's a good note.
Speaker: Very interesting.
Speaker: We've been talking a little bit about the elections and January 6th.
Speaker: And in Prairie Fire, you mentioned a really iffy election being one of the circumstances in which things might pop off.
Speaker: And I'm interested to hear, has your perspective changed as a result of 1-6?
Speaker: Did it basically go the way you thought?
Speaker: How has that colored your thinking since?
Speaker: Okay, so it went pretty much exactly the way I thought up until January 6th.
Speaker: you know, when I was writing the book, like, I made that prediction in, like, July, and I can actually remember the moment it happened.
Speaker: I'm pretty confident it was Pelosi came out on TV and was like, we might have to either mail this in or just skip this election, and I was like, like, they hated old orange man so bad.
Speaker: There ain't no fucking way they were skipping an election.
Speaker: That was not going to happen.
Speaker: That was not going to happen.
Speaker: And, like, four seconds after that, I had the epiphany.
Speaker: I'm like, they're stealing this.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: this is happening uh so how they stole it i actually man this is how naive i am i actually predicted just the old you know stuffing the ballots i didn't know about this electronic shit i was yeah fucking shocked on election night when that started happening like whoa doggie uh
Speaker: So they did.
Speaker: I was right.
Speaker: They stole it.
Speaker: But, man, they stole it way bigger than I would have ever imagined, bro.
Speaker: That was, I mean, that was stunning.
Speaker: That was absolutely stunning.
Speaker: So then we were kind of on the glide path.
Speaker: I was like, oh, shit, here it goes.
Speaker: Because the book came out October 31st of that year.
Speaker: So I was like, ooh, here we go.
Speaker: I will say that I was kind of confident going into that, that if an election was sketchy, which it was, and definitely that fucking sketchy,
Speaker: I thought some governor somewhere would be like, nah, dog, not today.
Speaker: And I thought there was a very high likelihood of it starting right then.
Speaker: And obviously I was wrong because all these governors are nutless wonders too.
Speaker: It turns out they're just parts of the machine.
Speaker: So that actually has influenced where I think that we're going now in a big way.
Speaker: Number one, that was really what
Speaker: let me know that like the Republicans are in no way serious.
Speaker: I mean, they are, anybody that's elected now is controlled opposition.
Speaker: You know, maybe you can have some bastions here and there of like maybe Florida, like maybe they're legit, but I doubt it.
Speaker: And it doesn't fucking matter.
Speaker: You could, if you control like five States, like it doesn't matter.
Speaker: But that definitely changed my opinion about the machine anyway.
Speaker: I kind of thought people might wake up more this time too.
Speaker: Obviously, they were going to fucking steal the 22 election.
Speaker: Why wouldn't they?
Speaker: They got away with it the first time.
Speaker: Why would they not do that?
Speaker: And they did.
Speaker: They stole it exactly the same fucking way.
Speaker: All the little fucking vote bullshit.
Speaker: It's the fucking carbon copy.
Speaker: It's the same thing.
Speaker: So that's actually kind of shattered my illusion that the common man would ever wake up.
Speaker: I don't think they will.
Speaker: I think honestly, man, that our countrymen are just too fucking stupid to ever wake up to that fact.
Speaker: Well, there's this huge coordination problem that you have to overcome, which is like the first 10,000 people who...
Speaker: uh, who charge into the breach are going to get their shit wrecked.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, and, you know, nobody wants to be that person.
Speaker: And so it, I, in my opinion, it has to be a situation where the immediate day to day is so unbearable that like, I mean, right now, right now, um,
Speaker: I can move away.
Speaker: My kids don't have to go to their schools and get their fucking nuts cut off.
Speaker: They haven't pushed me into a situation where I...
Speaker: where flipping the table over makes sense for me as an individual.
Speaker: And of course, if we could coordinate everybody and say, all right, today's the day we're all going to do it.
Speaker: Well, then it would be over immediately.
Speaker: But that's a fantasy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, I mean, one of the things that I'm looking to, and I'm interested to hear if you have other things that you look to,
Speaker: like economic political movements that tell you that they're sort of looking out for as, as signposts on where things are headed.
Speaker: I'm looking at energy prices for the Europeans.
Speaker: Like at what point did they actually start not having enough to eat and not being able to stay warm?
Speaker: And what does that do for their feelings about, um,
Speaker: the great replacement about the EU and how unelected those people are and, and all the money that's going to this war.
Speaker: Like, I think, I think once you, once you hit people in like these material factors, that's when the math potentially changes.
Speaker: It does start to matter a hell of a lot more.
Speaker: It really does.
Speaker: And I mean, honestly, look at Brazil too.
Speaker: Like I'm not following Brazil like super closely, but it looks like they're, they're having less of this bullshit than we did.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: They might actually pop off down there, which is pretty crazy.
Speaker: But, dude, I'm 100% with you.
Speaker: That's kind of how I feel about things now.
Speaker: I believe, honestly, that the majority of our countrymen, let's say 70%, 80%, are so blinded by, I can just go to work and watch some fucking sports ball and still get sort of paid, and it's all good, that they would never, ever do anything to change their situation.
Speaker: I mean, dude, you still got people calling for like lock Hillary up like seven years later.
Speaker: Like, come on, man.
Speaker: It's fucking ridiculous.
Speaker: Like it's not, it's not, come on, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm with you, but now you start hurting people's feelings though, with money and gas prices.
Speaker: And I honestly think too, that we're on like an unstoppable glide slope of economic collapse.
Speaker: Like the stuff is, is, is fucked up.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: I'm no economist major either, but when I look at what's happening to gas prices, food prices, the known inflation, stock prices, I'm like, ooh, this is bad.
Speaker: This is real fucking bad.
Speaker: There's almost nothing you can do to turn that around once it gets here.
Speaker: I mean, we printed money to bail ourselves out of 2008.
Speaker: That trick only works once.
Speaker: I don't think we can do it again.
Speaker: So, I mean, I think we're on a glide path here for some real bad stuff.
Speaker: And once people get hungry and cold and, yeah, they start getting a lot more likely to build guillotines, if you will.
Speaker: Yeah, and I basically see my role as helping guys to get prepared in –
Speaker: material economic ways that, that, you know, a more independent way of making a living where you're more in control of how you make your money.
Speaker: You're more in control of your social situation, who your kids are around in ways that like, you know, like we were saying, don't, don't trigger an immune response from the system.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That would, yeah.
Speaker: Nobody wants the immune response right now.
Speaker: That is not, that is not a fun, that's new.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I wanted to get your take on I detected some similarities in terms of your focus in Prairie Fire and Concrete Jungle, your focus on the people skills and the connections and the networking.
Speaker: Because basically, so I picked up Mao Tse Tung's Guerrilla Warfare.
Speaker: And what was fascinating about that is it's like, it's not a long book, it's a thin book, but like, it's like 80% go make friends.
Speaker: And then like 20%, all right, you need this many rifles and this is how your squads are organized.
Speaker: And I wonder if that was, it was just very similar to what you wrote.
Speaker: And I wanted to see if you had like, that was a deliberate connection.
Speaker: Well, fuck yeah, it was.
Speaker: One of the things that used to drive me crazy about the prepper movement, and I'm talking about the old pre-COVID prepper movement, which I was kind of involved with too.
Speaker: I've always been on the fringes of that at the very least.
Speaker: Everybody was like, get some fucking guns and like a bunch of like, no, dude, no, none of that shit matters.
Speaker: It was very deliberate, man.
Speaker: I am a Green Beret.
Speaker: I'm a guerrilla warfare master, whatever.
Speaker: They trained me to do that at like the master's course called the Special Forces Qualification Course, which is heavily influenced by Mao.
Speaker: Basically, the whole course is taken from, you know, communist guerrillas, the successful ones, particularly Mao and then Ho Chi Minh after that and his guys.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, that's a way of thinking.
Speaker: I mean, to the point the course is modeled close enough off that stuff that we call our instructors cadre members.
Speaker: Like, that's their name.
Speaker: That is their title.
Speaker: So yeah, all gorillas in the modern world have been heavily influenced by communist gorillas in Mao.
Speaker: And they do have some very good points, man.
Speaker: They were very successful.
Speaker: And the only way to learn how to counteract that was to learn how to do it.
Speaker: I mean, basically their kung fu is the best at that stage.
Speaker: But yeah, dude, that's it, man.
Speaker: Friends is so much bigger, so much more important than any equipment or any other bullshit.
Speaker: Those human relationships that you can count on.
Speaker: even just knowing somebody personally means that they're more likely to, to help you and see you as an asset and somebody that's not going to, you know, stab them to death in their fucking sleep.
Speaker: So yeah, man, the human connection piece, undoubtedly more important than anything else.
Speaker: Do you think that there are any lessons to be gleaned?
Speaker: I've heard, I've heard different stories from veterans and,
Speaker: About sort of the level of respect that our adversaries in Afghanistan deserve.
Speaker: And I wonder if you have thoughts on like, are there lessons to be learned there?
Speaker: You know, any anything that we could take away from that experience, given that we may face the kind of surveillance and sort of kinetic environment that they were facing.
Speaker: I think I can sum that up.
Speaker: I think I can sum that up in one.
Speaker: They fucking won, didn't they?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They did.
Speaker: And there's the objective was to get rid of the Taliban.
Speaker: The Taliban's control of Afghanistan right now.
Speaker: They fucking won.
Speaker: And that's a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of guys, you know, for my generation, man.
Speaker: And I totally get it.
Speaker: It was not fun to come to that conclusion and face that reality.
Speaker: But that's part of putting on your big girl panties.
Speaker: We face the facts.
Speaker: And the fact is, they fucking won.
Speaker: Same thing with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese.
Speaker: You can look at all the stats, like we kicked the shit out of them in battles, we killed so many more people, and all this other shit.
Speaker: Well, they fucking won.
Speaker: So persistence goes a long ways, it turns out.
Speaker: The ability to take damage goes a long ways.
Speaker: Just being able to outlast your opponent goes a long ways.
Speaker: It's like the Romans getting annihilated at Cuny and then just raising another army.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We'll do this again.
Speaker: We'll do it again Tuesday.
Speaker: So other than that, I mean, and hopefully not absorbing the kinds of losses that we inflicted on the gains because we did.
Speaker: We killed a shit ton of them.
Speaker: I think the biggest thing to look at there is it goes, again, back to the type of conflict that I think is coming.
Speaker: And again, this would be different if like, I don't know, like the fucking red Chinese were landing on California and landing boats like, oh, OK, we know how to deal with that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: For what for what's happening to us and the way I see the empires kind of collapsing and ceasing to exist.
Speaker: I think it's a lot more about avoiding conflict and just being able to survive.
Speaker: Now, you still got to be able to flex enough that the bandits or the local organized crime or the local fucking warlord doesn't want to take all your shit.
Speaker: But if you can avoid getting in a firefight with those guys, that's better.
Speaker: That's much better.
Speaker: And I don't know.
Speaker: We'll see what that plays out to later.
Speaker: But survive is step number one.
Speaker: So it sounds like you're very much anticipating essentially just the escalation of criminality.
Speaker: Yes, man.
Speaker: Even if this were to go to a shooting war, you'll see the escalation of criminality first.
Speaker: And I, like I said, I don't see this being like a blue and gray conflict.
Speaker: So I honestly see even at the later stages of collapse, it'll just be like more organized crime.
Speaker: It'll be like, you know, 30 man squads of criminals instead of three man squads.
Speaker: But it's essentially the same thing.
Speaker: And I mean, that's not unlike, you know, tribal warfare, the planet over.
Speaker: And for all of human history, besides, you know, some organized armies that we grew once in a while, like the Romans or the Greeks, a lot of it could just be comparable to organized crime.
Speaker: I mean, well, there's almost an optimism to that relative to being up against somebody who can see you from orbit and send a little drone to...
Speaker: you know, blow you up before you've heard anything or seen them.
Speaker: Like if I had to face one, you know, I'd rather face the local, you know, psychopath.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, me too.
Speaker: No question.
Speaker: So without getting overly optimistic, that is, that's what I see happening more.
Speaker: If it turns the other way, man, that's a different bag of worms.
Speaker: But
Speaker: I mean, basically, then you're having to switch glide paths completely.
Speaker: You're going to have to say instead, like, I don't know, like five states elect like real governors.
Speaker: And they're like, fuck it.
Speaker: We don't recognize the 2026 election or whatever.
Speaker: And come get us.
Speaker: In which case you have like the classic, you know, blue on gray fight to an extent.
Speaker: I still don't think that goes the way that people think it does.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Obviously not great getting shot at by F-15s and drones and shit like that.
Speaker: But you also can't just carpet bomb Houston.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: You really can't.
Speaker: I mean, you can, but it's not going to help.
Speaker: Are you familiar?
Speaker: Sorry, no, go ahead.
Speaker: Finish your thought.
Speaker: If anything, I see them, the big them, having to adopt kind of an anti-guerrilla strategy for that scenario as well.
Speaker: Not a lot of set piece battles because nobody's kind of dumb enough to face off against our technology.
Speaker: And then that just bleeds us so dry.
Speaker: People ask about which way would the military go.
Speaker: Man, probably like 50-50.
Speaker: We're being honest.
Speaker: It would depend on the specifics of the break.
Speaker: But you could easily see that going 50-50.
Speaker: And then you're right back at square one.
Speaker: We have some drones too.
Speaker: Yeah, no, I've been deep enough with enough of those goobers to know that they're not all on side.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Are you familiar with Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen?
Speaker: No, I'm not.
Speaker: So he's got this theory.
Speaker: This is another book that my wife bought me, and then I went and talked to a bunch of pros, and they were like, yeah, your wife's got great taste.
Speaker: It's a great book.
Speaker: So she just knows, apparently.
Speaker: But basically, his thesis is that the expansion of communications and surveillance technology is making it so that the classic Maoist agrarian insurgency,
Speaker: is a lot harder to prosecute just because it's just harder to hide in the hills than it used to be.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And his thesis is basically that it's going to be the urban littoral, where instead of hiding in isolation, you're going to hide in the noise and the capital of a big city because, like you were saying, they can't carpet bomb Houston.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I wonder, you know, when you wrote Concrete Jungle, you talked about a lot of the problems with like a catastrophic situation
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Breakdown in which case, like you're basically like, if I'm, you know, you tell me if I'm misstating, but, but basically like if it goes bad, then your objective is just to get out of the city.
Speaker: Like you're not gonna.
Speaker: And I, and I wonder if you have thoughts on like, on like kind of an intermediate decline situation where you, it does still make sense to stay and like how you would manage that.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: In fact, it's briefly covered, but it is in there.
Speaker: I did kind of think about that as well.
Speaker: Really, the only way...
Speaker: in my opinion, to stay there, even with advanced criminality, and this will just happen anyway, is again the balkanization by like neighborhoods.
Speaker: Kind of South African broken glass and razor wire.
Speaker: Yes, 100% man.
Speaker: I mean, we've faced kind of like nothing like this, but you can look at inner cities, especially like Harlem or Compton that are controlled by certain gangs in the neighborhoods around that.
Speaker: They already kind of have that.
Speaker: you don't live in the middle of, I forget which gang they are.
Speaker: You don't live in the middle of Compton though and be Crips.
Speaker: You can live in the middle of Compton and be Bloods, can't be Crips.
Speaker: So it's already kind of sorting yourself out.
Speaker: So, I mean, that's not an unfair model for what I would see us turning into if we stayed in the cities.
Speaker: You kind of have to.
Speaker: I mean, you have to have that entire neighborhood on watch and like little kids are playing in the street, but they're also keeping an eye out for not only like,
Speaker: the state, but you know, enemy dudes, cause they know what their fucking cars look like.
Speaker: Uh, and just kind of living in those kind of like fortified little, you know, small block areas for lack of a better word.
Speaker: Uh, it's, it's hard to imagine like pick it up and moving across the city, but if things get bad enough, people will, uh, that's just, that's just how it works.
Speaker: Like they'll, they'll make it happen.
Speaker: Uh, so that's kind of where I would see that going.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, you mentioned that, that basically your orientation toward your survival strategy should model to foreign internal defense.
Speaker: If you think the government's the good guys and unconventional warfare, if you think the government's the bad guys, and can you elaborate on what you meant by that and, and, and how those approaches differ?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: They're actually exactly the same thing in reverse.
Speaker: This is primary mission set for us as Special Forces guys.
Speaker: If our government likes their government, we'll go to a foreign internal defense.
Speaker: And if our government doesn't like their government and likes the rebels, then we'll go do unconventional warfare.
Speaker: So where it gets spicy for Joe Citizen, which we all are now on the street, is...
Speaker: How, okay, I picked my team.
Speaker: And let's say that I'm pro-government this time.
Speaker: Okay, that's a dangerous fucking spot for me to be in.
Speaker: Because the way that I can actually help is all the shit that you see from Homeland Security now.
Speaker: Like, if you see it say something, reporting, all this other bullshit.
Speaker: Well, this is very unfortunate in conflicts like this.
Speaker: But if you get caught ratting, like somebody's going to come over and scoop your fucking eyeballs out with a spoon after they cut your children up with a hatchet.
Speaker: And the same thing is true in reverse.
Speaker: Like if you picked the bad guy team or the rebel team or whatever, all right, and eventually you get caught, well, those things are not off the table for a state actor either if they're pissed enough.
Speaker: So it's just kind of a really shitty situation.
Speaker: The best thing you can do, if at all possible, is remain neutral with your little war band and kind of see what happens.
Speaker: And people look at me like that's a bitch answer, but man, it's the right answer.
Speaker: For the most part, it's not maybe what they're going to make a painting of in 100 years.
Speaker: Fucking that guy stood up like, well, maybe he waited to see who it looked like was going to win.
Speaker: Maybe he just got this one out.
Speaker: But it is the strongest survival strategy, if we're being perfectly honest.
Speaker: Going back to this conflict avoidance thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think, yeah, I honestly, well, maybe this is another direction I can go with you.
Speaker: One of my buddies had me go buy an IFAC.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And something first aid kit.
Speaker: Individual first aid kit.
Speaker: Individual.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: Individual first aid kit to go on a plate carrier.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And I opened that thing up.
Speaker: And it's like, it's just all blood shit.
Speaker: It's just how do I stop blood and how do I plug up holes?
Speaker: And, and, um, uh, like this, this was one of my, like, oh, I'm not a leg breaker moments.
Speaker: I was like, I hate this.
Speaker: I don't ever want to see this shit again.
Speaker: Dude, fucking understandable, man.
Speaker: I fucking get it.
Speaker: I fucking get it.
Speaker: And, you know, is there a way to, like, is there any getting comfortable with that?
Speaker: Like, how do you sort of settle in your mind that you might need to use these things and learn on them?
Speaker: That is a tough one and a very good question, actually.
Speaker: This is honestly the same as what it takes to get comfortable killing other human beings.
Speaker: And this is an important thing for people to ask themselves and to figure out that haven't done it.
Speaker: You know, the first thing is to dispel any notions of like, I don't know, the fucking Rambo fantasy bullshit or on the medical side, the, you know, I'm going to stick a little gauze on and it's going to be fine.
Speaker: The first step is to accept the hard reality that this fucking might be what I got to do.
Speaker: And that takes a minute to set in.
Speaker: And once it does, you think about the reasons that you would do that, either the killing or the repairing.
Speaker: For me, that comes to, like, I don't particularly care for medical stuff myself.
Speaker: You know, I'm not great at it, but I do have some training at it.
Speaker: And I've done it on the battlefield and shit before.
Speaker: Really when I got like serious about like my first aid kits to house, it was about my kids.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, well, you know, fucking when I thought COVID was still gonna be like the end of the world or some bullshit.
Speaker: Like if, if there's no doctors, I, my kid falls and fucking stab himself in the chest with some rebar.
Speaker: Uh, am I going to fix that or am I going to let him die?
Speaker: And the answer is I'm going to fix that.
Speaker: So, you know, that's how I like mentally rehearsed.
Speaker: Like, okay, man, I know how to do this shit.
Speaker: This is how you cut off fucking rebar with a hacksaw.
Speaker: This is how you, uh, pull something out.
Speaker: If you have to, if you don't h ave a choice, this is how you crack a rib cage and get in there and see a lot blood vessels and hope for the best.
Speaker: Uh, it's uncomfortable though.
Speaker: And it should be, uh, you know, these are not things that if, unless that's our profession that we normally have to worry about, but that's the thing you do have to worry about them.
Speaker: And, uh, so getting yourself in that headspace of, I'm going to have to fucking do this.
Speaker: So I need to get comfortable with it now.
Speaker: And I just really think about the steps to do it.
Speaker: That, that is actually important.
Speaker: Uh, and the same thing with the, uh, with the killing piece, uh, cause that,
Speaker: even in advanced or maybe especially in an advanced criminology or advanced criminology scenario, it's going to have to happen.
Speaker: And you have to get comfortable with that before you need to do it.
Speaker: Do you think, I wonder if hunting and dressing an animal helps to kind of get the practical material.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I think it's absolutely fantastic.
Speaker: When I think about something like this, like fucking make sure my wife's not in here.
Speaker: My wife doesn't like to touch raw meat.
Speaker: She just doesn't like to.
Speaker: If somebody has to cut up meat, it's going to be meat.
Speaker: She'll cook it and all that shit, but she doesn't like to touch it.
Speaker: That is fucking preposterous for 100 years ago.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: Those women would be like fucking ripping feathers.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: That's not talking shit on her, though.
Speaker: It's talking about how far we've fallen from our natural state.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that those things do help.
Speaker: In fact, as far...
Speaker: If I'm being honest, for men to get comfortable with the idea of both dressing wounds and killing other people, the two probably best things you could do is hunting and some kind of martial art that actually involves fighting, like jujitsu, boxing, kickboxing, and some shit like that.
Speaker: The interpersonal conflict part.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The deliberate infliction of pain.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Even if it's, you know, you're strictly non-lethal and you're doing it to somebody who's maybe your buddy.
Speaker: But that's, I mean, even that just a barrier to strike someone with the intent of ringing their bell real good.
Speaker: That's a lot of people do not have that experience.
Speaker: They do not.
Speaker: They absolutely do not.
Speaker: And especially the, like the kind of softer our world gets.
Speaker: And those are things that you want to know how to do before you need to know how to do them.
Speaker: So, you know, again, it is, it is, I can see it will be very uncomfortable to, to have to learn, especially like later in life, but it's a very important thing to do.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Going back to the subject of children, I, I have this theory that, uh, basically just, just, just having kids, uh, awakens a lot of, a lot of things in you that like you kind of,
Speaker: they sort of complete you.
Speaker: They tie off some loops.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and, and one of the respects in which having kids does that is it, is it forces you to take things seriously that you otherwise wouldn't as a single person.
Speaker: Cause you just, cause your, your, your heart exists outside your chest.
Speaker: If I didn't have kids, I wouldn't even give a shit about the collapse of the Western world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Who fucking cares?
Speaker: Can I still get hookers and coke and some whiskey for the next 20 years?
Speaker: Then fuck it.
Speaker: I don't care.
Speaker: Yeah, you could probably find an island in Indonesia to hide that out and be fine.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Without a problem.
Speaker: It's a lot different when you think about your children and your future.
Speaker: It does.
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: You have to think about something else in you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who are they going to marry?
Speaker: How are they going to, and I mean, so just to not to, not to plug, but like, that's what exit is.
Speaker: Exit is about building infrastructure so that we can have grandchildren.
Speaker: And, um, very, very important.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I, I just, I thought it was really interesting that you mentioned about the, the medical training.
Speaker: I hadn't thought about it that way, but like, absolutely.
Speaker: Like that, that is how I would overcome it is I would go, I need this for my kids.
Speaker: And I would just,
Speaker: gut it out.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And that's, that's, I mean, just be able to visualize that before you need to do it and think about it in those terms will make everything about it a lot more serious.
Speaker: So they make your training for it a lot serious, more serious.
Speaker: And it also kind of, you know, preps your mind to be able to do it should in the God unfortunate instance that you have to.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Even, even fitness.
Speaker: The primary reason that I, that I am trying to stay in shape.
Speaker: I'm 35.
Speaker: Primary reason I'm trying to stay in shape is so that my kids can be strong, but I can still take them out if I have to.
Speaker: Because I think, I think there's this hugely important stage of adolescence where you
Speaker: your dad should still be an authoritative presence in your life.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But you're also going to be inclined to test that dominance hierarchy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think it's really, I've known guys who were like, yeah, I could kick my dad's shit in.
Speaker: And it's not healthy, in my opinion.
Speaker: No, fuck it.
Speaker: That's very unhealthy.
Speaker: See, I'm going to have this problem too because I didn't have kids until I was 36.
Speaker: So, you know, I'm going to be the old dad.
Speaker: It's a harder curve.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a harder curve.
Speaker: So I got to come with it.
Speaker: And I told my wife, if I had girls, I would just already be on steroids, like all of them.
Speaker: Just like, but I have boys, so I only had to, you know, scare them.
Speaker: So that's a little different.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I totally believe in that Mel Gibson trajectory.
Speaker: You know, once you're like 60 some, go ahead, get on the gear.
Speaker: Go ahead and get ripped.
Speaker: Yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He looks great, man.
Speaker: He looks fantastic.
Speaker: Oh, fuck yeah.
Speaker: Well, I wanted to give you a minute to tell us about Wrath of the Wendigo.
Speaker: I haven't ordered it yet.
Speaker: I'm going to order it as soon as we get off the phone.
Speaker: But it sounds like it's covering a lot of the same themes as the stuff that you've written, but it's a fictionalized account.
Speaker: And I wanted to just hear if you've got like a...
Speaker: summary so uh so it was uh super important to switch back to fiction instead of real things had not everybody had not uh because there are definitely things that you cannot write about uh from a serious perspective without getting a talking to but
Speaker: If you live in a fantasy world like Star Wars, like you can write about rebellions and how they might kick off and how they could start and possibly successfully win against the Empire.
Speaker: As I understand it, Wrath of the Wendigo takes place in the Roblox universe.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So in the United Roblox of North Robloxistan, there's some dudes.
Speaker: They're like, you know what?
Speaker: Fuck it.
Speaker: Maybe I just don't want to live under this Roblox regime anymore.
Speaker: And so they carefully craft a plan over a couple of years and recruit some other Minecraft dudes and basically start a low-grade insurgency that shears them off a piece of that republic.
Speaker: And that's how they fight for it and win it and continue to fight against the dark Roblox empire.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As I understand it, it includes some elements of like Norse myth and Amerindian myth.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration there, what you find fascinating about that?
Speaker: Well, that was actually the fucking crazy part about this.
Speaker: A lot of people have asked me, like, was this all marketing hype or did you really have a fucking vision?
Speaker: And the fact is I really did have a vision.
Speaker: That part's not bullshit.
Speaker: And that was the way that it came to me was this kind of blending of of of Germanic barbarian, particularly with some North American Indian mythology.
Speaker: And that was kind of like the new religion that these guys awakened as they were breaking away from Robloxistan.
Speaker: It basically reached back into their their primal roots with, you know, and and kind of like reevaluated their spiritual world first.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Is that a topic of interest for you, a topic of study?
Speaker: here's the fun crazy thing before this, it wasn't, uh, I didn't know a lot of these things.
Speaker: It's actually been very weird since the book came out as a, yeah, I got some very smart, like super educated friends and shit.
Speaker: And, uh, so there'll be like elements of the book.
Speaker: I'll call it like, Oh man.
Speaker: Uh, I also enjoy like the, uh, let's say for instance, like the, uh, you know, Siberian shamanistic thing of this and this, and this is what he meant.
Speaker: And I'm like,
Speaker: I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, man.
Speaker: That was just how it came out.
Speaker: They're like, Oh, well that's weird.
Speaker: Cause that's exactly what, you know, whatever is that said, you know, 150 years ago, like, Oh, that actually disturbs me more.
Speaker: It actually disturbs me way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's, that's wild.
Speaker: Well, uh, if, if, uh,
Speaker: If you want something like for the kiddos, I can definitely recommend Dolaire's Norse Gods and Giants.
Speaker: It's this really beautifully illustrated story of all the Norse myths.
Speaker: Say the name of it.
Speaker: D-A-U-L-A-I-R-E-S.
Speaker: Dolaire's Norse Gods and Giants.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That basically, that was in my school library growing up.
Speaker: And I just lit me up as a kid.
Speaker: Okay, righteous.
Speaker: And I think your kids would dig it too, if that's something that's interesting to you now.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: But yeah, well, that's cool, man.
Speaker: Everybody go out and buy Wrath of the Windigo today.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: I want to ask also if there's...
Speaker: What's on your reading list these days?
Speaker: What's been fascinating to you?
Speaker: What would you recommend people check out either in this domain or elsewhere?
Speaker: It's been kind of weird just because...
Speaker: Basically, I've had an awakening, too, that kind of led me to believe at the same time I was writing Wendigo.
Speaker: Man, so much of our history is so much bullshit.
Speaker: It's just made-up fucking nonsense, which is terrifying when you get there.
Speaker: I'm going to definitely recommend Chronicles of Pre-Celtic Europe.
Speaker: That one is fantastic.
Speaker: Whether or not it's true, I don't know, but it's a pretty plausible, pretty good theory and story.
Speaker: That one's great.
Speaker: Somebody said that...
Speaker: Somebody said journalism is the first draft of history.
Speaker: I go, bro, look at these journalists.
Speaker: What does that tell you about history, man?
Speaker: That was exactly right.
Speaker: So you were going to say something else.
Speaker: Other than that, man, honestly, I haven't read a whole bunch.
Speaker: I've just been catching up.
Speaker: I spent the whole summer writing this book, so I've been kind of catching up on my other tasks and stuff.
Speaker: But yeah, that one's great.
Speaker: And other than that, man, spend some time getting ready for the serious boy shit because it's going to get ugly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Ranger Handbook, is that a place to start?
Speaker: Yeah, Ranger Handbook is great, especially if you get the pre-2012 edition.
Speaker: Yeah, basically the older you can get with those, the better off they are.
Speaker: But I think 2012 is when they made the definitive weirdo fucked up changes.
Speaker: What are they doing, like a Girl Scout Ranger handbook?
Speaker: Man, I don't remember what they did, but they took a bunch of shit out and it was not great what they came up with.
Speaker: So yeah, so shit can't any of the newer ones...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Other than that, man, I mean, War of the Flea, some of the classics of, of guerrilla stuff, the squad about the, the IRA.
Speaker: That was fantastic.
Speaker: Is it kind of, kind of, to me, you got to kind of like the flea, like the, like the insect or of the flea.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We were, we were talking off the air a little bit about how the, how the seriousness of the situation has motivated us and has motivated a lot of our friends to,
Speaker: To just clarify like what they're here on earth to do and the tediousness and the soullessness of their day jobs.
Speaker: You know, it's one thing if everything's going to be okay, but if it's really not, then it forces and should force some reflection on what am I actually good for in this world?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: No, dude, 100%.
Speaker: And here's the thing that I think is terrifying.
Speaker: Like, I get it that sometimes we've got to do some bullshit job to make money so we can do the other thing.
Speaker: We've all been there.
Speaker: We've all walked down that road before.
Speaker: It sucks.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: I just feel like, man, we are on the cusp of like the worst economic disaster that anybody can fucking imagine within like six months, if not within like two or three.
Speaker: It's going to be fucking horrible and awful with interest rates and all that other bullshit the way they are.
Speaker: Like loans will be gone.
Speaker: Like the bulkization will mostly be over.
Speaker: unless you have the cash on hand to buy property at the absolute rock bottom, uh, right before hyperinflation takes off and our money's not worth shit.
Speaker: The only problem with waiting that long is you don't have any of the skills that a lot of the dudes that I know that like really got scared about, uh,
Speaker: around the COVID time, they started doing small-scale regenerative farming or raising dairy cows or some bullshit like that two, three years ago.
Speaker: The advantage to that and to getting to your spot as soon as you possibly can is you get to make your mistakes while there's still a chance of recovery.
Speaker: You get to make your mistakes with the cows while they're still a vet.
Speaker: Or you get to make your mistakes with the sheep and they all fucking died because a coyote ate them and you fucked up.
Speaker: When you can still buy a replacement, learning all that shit after the fact, after it's already at like, you know, the, the, the critical threshold, that's a, that's a lot more difficult.
Speaker: So, man, dude, I'm big as much as, as much as you can, are you going to get your spouse on board for this shit to, you know, make your move stat, make it fucking happen real quick.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's definitely a lane in which you can develop capacity that NSA doesn't give a shit.
Speaker: You know, everybody doesn't give a shit.
Speaker: Go grow potatoes.
Speaker: Right, nobody talking to me.
Speaker: And, you know, a lot of guys on Twitter will argue back and forth about like, oh, you know,
Speaker: you're, you're telling guys to like run away into the Hills and when they could be like contesting the real, you know, power structures.
Speaker: And my take on that is if you can't eat, you're not contesting shit.
Speaker: And, and basically it's not about, um, it's not about alternatives.
Speaker: The, the, the analogy that I draw is, is a labor strike.
Speaker: Like, Oh yeah.
Speaker: If, uh, if the factory workers, uh,
Speaker: go on strike and you tell those guys like, Oh, you're just running away from your, from your power structure in the, it's like, no, that's how I develop a power structure is by, is by strategic retreat or tactical retreat.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: And basically, yeah, you shouldn't.
Speaker: If you have the means to make a lot of money and to have a position of power, hang on to it.
Speaker: But also get squared away on this other stuff.
Speaker: Figure out what it takes to buy land, what it takes to grow something.
Speaker: Honestly, for me, the biggest advantage, like I have realized that like,
Speaker: it would have to get real bad for like the best thing for me to do to be, go, go be a farmer.
Speaker: Not because being a farmer is not good, but because I'm, I suck at it.
Speaker: And, and, and basically what I've concluded is like the value of me buying a dairy cow and buying chickens and trying to grow potatoes and strawberries and things is,
Speaker: is that I had to go to the co-op and ask a bunch of questions and people, you know, connect with, connect with the guy who runs the beef auction, connect with the guy who, who knows how to build an apiary or build a chicken tractor.
Speaker: And I mean, those are the guys, my, my insurance policy, in addition to like trying to figure it out myself, I,
Speaker: My insurance policy is kind of that there's a bunch of old farmers around here who know me and know my kids and probably don't want us to starve.
Speaker: Right, right, right, right.
Speaker: Well, you know, think about this from a co-op perspective too.
Speaker: This is, I live in town, so I've got like a little yard.
Speaker: Well, I've got my brother-in-law lives 10 miles away.
Speaker: I was the land.
Speaker: So I contributed to the chicken feed and the fucking vaccination for the goats.
Speaker: And that's my that's my deal.
Speaker: Like I make more money.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll feed I'll feed cash into this thing.
Speaker: He has more time.
Speaker: He fucking works on that shit.
Speaker: It works out.
Speaker: It's a, it's a benefit to both of us.
Speaker: And, uh, finding those like small scale co-ops like that with somebody that you can trust too, man, that shit has huge value.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, we actually currently, while I'm trying to get my fence figured out, we've got our cattle pastured on somebody else's land.
Speaker: So we pay them to take care of the cows.
Speaker: And, um, yeah, just having these, having these longstanding relationships, uh, is, is, is tremendous.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So yeah, that's, and, and, and the, the regenerative ag thing, I mean, part of the purpose of that is to make it less labor and input intensive.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that it's something that you can conceivably, uh, ramp up to while you're doing other things.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's great.
Speaker: And yeah, we've got 10 acres.
Speaker: It's almost all forest.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: we've looked at from a regenerative ag perspective, we've looked at like thinning out the woods with goats and, and, you know, having kind of the, the tiered, the, the vertical farming and ways to ways to use it more effectively.
Speaker: And, and I'm, I'm, I'm terrible at all of it, but, but it's, but it's, it's actually, it's actually pretty cool to learn.
Speaker: And I also, one of the things that I've noticed with my kids and, and, and,
Speaker: I think a big part of my challenge in my adolescence, and I think a lot of suburban kids can relate to this, is everything my parents asked me to do was basically like make work.
Speaker: It was like it did not like the household would be fine if I did not exist.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: From a material perspective, obviously my parents love me and everything.
Speaker: But like I didn't need to be there for things to work out.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And my boys, they're little, but they go close the chicken coop up and collect the eggs every night.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if it doesn't happen, it's a problem.
Speaker: It's not a big problem, but it's a problem.
Speaker: And if, and if, and if, you know, things were to get really bad and like a substantial portion of our calories were those chickens and the door were left open, that could be extremely bad.
Speaker: And so to give my kids this responsibility, um,
Speaker: while they can still screw it up, you know, without killing everybody.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then, you know, when, when things get hard, they're competent and they get to feel like, you know, I mean something to this family.
Speaker: And, and I just, I think that's one of the things that has created this like shitty teenager archetype is basically the absence of that.
Speaker: See, I had never actually thought about that because I grew up with like, you know, donkeys and horses and shit like that.
Speaker: I'm like a like a little like three acre thing.
Speaker: So it had never occurred to me.
Speaker: To be like a teenager would make work stuff.
Speaker: But it makes a lot of fucking sense now that you say it.
Speaker: And yeah, that makes a lot of fucking sense, man.
Speaker: It really does.
Speaker: I know that just from a homeschool perspective, too, one of the things that we've talked about in our family, though, is we want to get back to that spot where you're at.
Speaker: for those chores and responsibilities that are like real.
Speaker: Cause yeah.
Speaker: I mean, now that I think about it, I've had my kids like, you know, watch the windows, like buy him a toy or some bullshit, but it was made up bullshit.
Speaker: Like it was, you know, yeah, it's a lot different.
Speaker: Cause if it needed to happen, you wouldn't give it to them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It makes a lot of fucking sense, man.
Speaker: There's a, uh, in my church, there was a leader in my church who, who came to visit, um, our, our congregation.
Speaker: And, uh, I don't know if you know, so I'm, I'm a ladder to saints.
Speaker: So we did the two year missionary experience suits and ties and bikes.
Speaker: And I did that in 2006 to 2008.
Speaker: And one of the things that he, and that's basically like our rite of passage.
Speaker: That's, that's boy to man kind of.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Not explicitly, but like girls, you know, at least when I was growing up, girls would be like, I'm expecting to marry a guy who's done that.
Speaker: And if you haven't done that, you're not.
Speaker: He's already done his fucking mission.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're not ready for me.
Speaker: And so it's sort of this acid test of like, how are we doing?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: How are the boys handling this experience?
Speaker: And...
Speaker: It's become really challenging for young boys to make it through that experience.
Speaker: And basically what this leader said was, the only North American kids that are doing okay with this experience are farm kids.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we're running out of farm kids to be honest.
Speaker: And, and I, yeah.
Speaker: And it's, it's so much to do with, uh, being, having a ramp into the adult world versus a cliff.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So dude, totally get it.
Speaker: I think it matters.
Speaker: It's a huge difference.
Speaker: I think too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's, that's incredible though.
Speaker: I hadn't, I hadn't heard that from that perspective and,
Speaker: That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: You know, my kind of equivalency there was at one point, not too distant past, they had to incorporate a class into the special forces course called like how to have a conversation with a human being.
Speaker: Dude, I mean, this is like 2013 or 2014.
Speaker: Well, these fucking kids started showing up, man, that like.
Speaker: couldn't do it like like they'd grown up with so much like technology in their hands and this bullshit that like they really didn't navy seals yeah well they had no idea how to how to work how to like talk to a person it was crazy but yeah dude it makes sense that's wild man and it's wild and and what are the what are the ramifications for readiness like how could you possibly know
Speaker: How could you possibly know what those kids are going to do?
Speaker: You know, it's, it's maybe they surprise you, but you know, who knows?
Speaker: It's exactly, exactly.
Speaker: Man, that's crazy.
Speaker: Um, so what are you, so you're, you're, you're basically, um, subsidizing some, some kind of farm activity.
Speaker: One of the things that my, um,
Speaker: my other green beret, uh, uh, buddy mentioned when we talked about this was, yeah, guys who have the connection between urban, like manufactured goods and distribution and money and all that.
Speaker: And then like, you know, the stuff that actually comes out of the ground and, and stuff that you need to eat, um, and timber and things.
Speaker: The people that are that have a foot in both worlds do a lot better.
Speaker: And it is an advantage in some ways.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think so.
Speaker: I think that's smart.
Speaker: But like in terms of your personal, you know, you're are you doing like backyard farming?
Speaker: Are you raising rabbits or something?
Speaker: Or what's what's that look like for you?
Speaker: No, part of the reason that I moved here where I'm living at right now is my family's been here since the land rush.
Speaker: I've got like thousands of cousins with real farms and ranches and shit like that.
Speaker: So I live in town just because that was where I fell and it's what I could buy at the time.
Speaker: But I'm not worried about that part because I've got a big circle around me that has that bit covered.
Speaker: Yeah, it's rolling deep.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's basically a unique situation, you know, for me, but
Speaker: Yeah, I've got some night vision goggles, so I'll make sure the cows stay safe.
Speaker: They grew the cows.
Speaker: We call it fair.
Speaker: Excellent, man.
Speaker: Hey, I really appreciate you taking this time.
Speaker: This was awesome.
Speaker: Incredible info for the guys.
Speaker: Oh, dude, thanks for having me on.
Speaker: No, I enjoyed the hell out of it, man.
Speaker: This was great.
Speaker: So yeah, again, if you want to support Clay and learn some good things, check out Concrete Jungle, Prairie Fire, Wrath of the Wendigo.
Speaker: Those are all available on Amazon.
Speaker: If you want to learn more about what we're doing, check us out at exitgroup.us or follow us on Twitter, exit underscore org.
Speaker: Hey, Clay, thanks for being here.
Speaker: Hey, thanks, brother.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
