Author: cityprepping-author

Outline

1. New Lockdowns & Mask Mandates
2. Firearm Regulations & Restrictions
3. Age of the President
4. Censorship & Cancel Culture
5. Terrorism & Cyberattacks
6. Stimulus & Debt Deferral or Cancellation
7. Criminal Justice Reform

The Biden administration will look very different from the last four years of the Trump administration.  The first few hours and days will see many policies revoked, Executive Orders signed, and bills pushed through Congress.  We don’t entertain a singular, political point of view on this channel.  We try to look at the landscape, determine the most significant threats we face, and inform you how to prepare for them.  This apolitical stance earns me the ire of some and the appreciation of others.  That’s okay because our focus is on prepping, and to do that, we have to know the changes, both good and bad, we collectively face in the future. Every administration brings a wish list with it, but rarely are the Administration and all of Congress held by the same political parties.  This video will look at what the next year and the next four years have in store for America.  From new lockdowns to firearm regulations, increased government spending, criminal justice reform, and more, we will examine how the coming large changes can trickle down and impact your daily life. 1- New Lockdowns & Mask Mandates There have already been announcements that there will be a “ mask challenge “ in the first 100 days of the Biden administration to encourage people to wear their masks and get ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.  While the federal government cannot regulate how the States enforce mask mandates or lockdowns, they can control these with regards to interstate travel.  Any travel between states will require masks, and airports and travel depots could be forced to close in areas of high outbreaks. While lockdowns cannot be mandated by federal law, states will have more generous support for choosing to evoke a lockdown.  Most states provide the governor the power to act in the public’s health and safety during a declared emergency. Many governors will be encouraged to implement lockdowns with the knowledge that the federal government will support their efforts. At the current vaccination rate, it is possible that kids might return to school sometime after summer.  Teachers and school employees will likely need to present vaccination records to return to work.  Federal and state employees, as well, will probably need to present vaccination records before being allowed to return to government jobs or offices.  If the virus is not suitably under control by the summer of 2021, people may need to present vaccination records or a vaccination record card of some sort before being allowed into many public places.  Biden will very likely invoke the Defense Authorization Act and create the avenue for other companies to retool themselves to produce millions and millions of more doses of the vaccines.  The vaccine’s actual effectiveness will begin to be realized, assuming the virus does not mutate, vaccine escape does not occur, and that enough people receive the vaccine.  With more doses and more vaccines administered, the best projections show decreased transmission rates by the late summer of 2021. 2- Firearm Regulations & Restrictions On the JoeBiden.com website, he outlines his position that “gun violence is a public health epidemic.”  With the National Rifle Association filing for bankruptcy and the Congress controlled by Democrats, the first year of a Biden administration may see significant reforms in gun laws.  First may be a repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which Biden lobbied against.  Such a repeal would make manufacturers civilly liable for their products.  Second, may be bans on firearms deemed “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines.  Third, more stringent background checks for new gun purchases will likely be mandated. You may live in a state with strict or lenient gun laws. Still, there is no doubt that a Biden administration will seek to implement policy and legislation that will slow the proliferation of high capacity guns and increase the length of sentences for people who offensively use guns.  These actions at a federal level will impact every state and every level.  You can expect pushback from the 2A crowd as they protest new measures.  Any incident of gun violence, anywhere, for any reason, will be viewed as justification by some leading to stricter measures and a response by others as to why more people should possess legal firearms.  This will be a flashpoint topic in the coming years.  You will see more armed protests and more measures enacted to reduce the number and types of firearms people have available to them.  In anticipation of these stricter measures, expect a surge in gun sales.  If your prepping supplies include any new guns or ammo, you would be wise to get the paperwork in motion on those, but you may find you have missed the boat.  Usually, you can still obtain a personal handgun, hunting rifle, or shotgun, as these are viewed as more personal protection and for hunting. 3- Age of the President No discussion of what to expect in the next four years of a Biden administration would be complete without addressing the President’s age.  Biden turned 78 in November of 2020.  He will be the oldest president ever.  Ronald Reagan was 77 years and 349 days old when he left office.  The average life expectancy of an American male is around 78 3/4 years.  Knowing that the president has the best medical care and staff looking after him, he would be 82 years old when he left office if he only served one term.  If he served two terms, he would be 86 years old when he left office. What does this mean to Americans?  Well, if everything runs smoothly and the economy chugs back stronger, and people feel a greater sense of being united behind their commonalities, it could mean nothing.  If America remains divided, it could mean the political theater from both sides grows even more potent.  If the president dies in office, his successor becomes the Vice President, and many see the current VP as an extremist. We wish that politics weren’t so impactful to our community.  We would rather be preparing for natural disasters than civil unrest or civil war, but we try to stay hard focused for you on today’s real threats.  Those are the real threats of today.  Biden’s advanced age could be a non-issue, or it could throw the country down a wild path of power grabs, posturing, and standoffs. Continue to prepare for the possibility of civil unrest coming to your neck of the woods or your block of the neighborhood.  Take a look at some of the other videos on this channel about surviving martial law or surviving an extended lockdown, and prepare accordingly.  Again, many competent people live lives far beyond the national average.  It isn’t a line in the sand, and people we all know live well into their eighties and nineties full of energy and ideas, but prepare as if that may not be the case here. 4- Censorship & Cancel Culture Censorship and the cancel culture will remain big topics as the lines between free speech and big tech continue to be established and refined.  Conservative social media sites like Parler have been entirely removed from the internet.  It cannot be downloaded and lacks the server space to operate.  It is interesting to note that a hacker legally copied the entire site before it was pulled down, effectively recording all user posts and geo stamps.  Plus, it is being relaunched by a development team out of Russia, so make sure you’re aware of these implications. This isn’t so much of a problem for anyone not posting things that could be interpreted as “bad” or “anti-establishment”; however, it drives the really bad characters underground, and it makes it harder for intelligence agencies to catch the few bad apples that might be out there.  Expect to see several court cases around what constitutes free press and the responsibility of platforms to regulate speech. Expect first amendment rights to rise to prominence in social discourse and court cases.  This may affect many of the platforms you use to communicate with friends and family or to entertain yourself, so make sure you have alternate means.  TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Gab, Instagram, even YouTube will all be scrutinized for either being too aggressive or not aggressive enough in scrubbing their users’ posts. As people turn to other platforms that may spring up, they are also, unknowingly, exposing themselves to systems that may not have the same level of years of hardened security.  Personal information will be a growing commodity amongst hackers over the next several years, as a result.  As you prep yourself and your supplies, take the time to strengthen your online security and make sure you can function without technology.  You may not have those helpful Do-It-Yourself YouTube videos when you need them, and you certainly wouldn’t have them in a grid down situation.  Make sure you are learning what you need to know now.  Make sure you have alternate means of communication with those with whom you want to stay connected.  Make sure you have a plan for when systems go down or are canceled out of existence. Four real threats are coming out of the censorship and cancel culture:  the security of your personal information, the evil actors being driven underground with deepening plots, your potential loss of access to information and people, and your possible loss of access to information. 5- Terrorism & Cyberattacks Terrorism and cyberattacks are likely on a scale we cannot yet fathom.  Domestic terrorism incidents are on the rise, and the nation remains deeply divided.  Political ideologies have spawned zealots across the spectrum.  Though any domestic zealot can take things too far, any acts of violence or intimidation against civilians is considered terrorism.  By that definition, we could be continuing down the current path and see more armed conflicts, more bombings like we have seen in Oklahoma City or Nashville, and more wide-scale civil unrest leading to fires, looting, and vandalism.  That is all just on the domestic side of the equation. From an international standpoint, our intelligence collection assets are weakened when countries are closed off to each other.  State-sponsored terrorism from other countries seeking to strike America when we are already reeling from a grueling 2020 is not unlikely.  The nation’s enemies and enemy regimes will seek to capitalize upon the opportunity they see, especially when any strike within our borders can easily be blamed on one of the domestic factions, which would further divide and fan the flames of internal conflict. Even if all the intelligence agencies charged with thwarting terrorist activities are successful, and we are, thankfully, unharmed and unchallenged, the largest and most extensive cyberattack in history occurred last year.  Systems will need to be rebuilt in many cases, and 100s if not 1000s of company systems were breached.  The full extent of the trove of compromised data is not yet known.  All that data out there, once interpreted, could lead to further hacks and breaches.  Critical infrastructure, typically the last systems to be upgraded or rebuilt, is still vulnerable to larger attacks.  As I have explained in other videos, it only takes a slight push in a few systems to have them spin out of control.   Preppers sometimes too easily dismiss the threat of terrorism because it seems too far away from them, or cyberattacks, because they are just average computer users; however, these attacks can have dramatic effects that ripple out across many systems.  From power outages to system failures to the malicious destruction of systems and ransomware, any single attack can exponentially grow outside its original area of impact and disrupt travel, food supplies, and production, communication, or a host of other systems. Be prepared for disruptions in systems most people rely upon.  Make sure your preps can sustain you through a prolonged period of a grid down situation.  Make sure your systems are protected and redundant.  Download apps like Bridgefy that can work independently of a cellular connection by sending offline messages.  Consider a CB radio and an emergency radio in your supplies.  Make sure you have the means to generate electricity, heat, and light. 6- Stimulus & Debt Deferral or Cancelation There are significant differences between how Democrats and Republicans approach the economy.  As different as they are, however, there are some similarities.  They both have the Fed print more money than we have, which sells off our debt to China, and just prolongs our day of reckoning. We have frequently discussed on other blogs both the weakening of the dollar and the not so rosy outlook for the next few years.  This alone should encourage you to be a prepper. A Biden administration will seek to put stimulus money directly in the hands of tax-paying citizens.  The stimulus checks, by the way, are tied to a person’s 2019 taxes.  If you didn’t file taxes, you probably didn’t get a stimulus check.  This third round of $1400 to $2000 per person checks will be a top priority.  Adding a 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package to an already exponentially growing debt during a time of anemic GDP…well, we don’t think there’s anyone who can’t do the math on that.  It’s not good for the long term economy under the same way the US government has operated since the eighties. If the first checks are any indicator, many will use these checks to survive.  People who don’t need the money right away will either sit on it in their savings accounts or use it to pay off debt.  After the first modest stimulus check, national credit card indebtedness dropped for the first month in years.  Many people have seen this as an opportunity to realign their finances.  As an incentive, they couldn’t go out to restaurants and bars anyway, so they suddenly found more money in their pockets.  Even learning to cook at home has resulted in savings.  Whatever people do with the money, the stimulus checks will serve as a lifeline for many but likely will not stimulate the economy too significantly. Small businesses will continue to fail.  If you can support small businesses, this is the time to do so.  Do what you can to keep the dollars circulating within your community.  This will make the whole economy stronger as a result. Finally, student loan payments and evictions will probably be postponed until the Biden administration feels that the economy is accelerating again.  In an all-out effort to try to get the economy churning again, there could be continued debt deferrals and possibly even some loan forgiveness.  This does put money into working people’s pockets, but it doesn’t translate into a boost in the economy when uncertainties of the future loom. A trade war with China and a global recession have created a shortage of imported raw materials and items.  While trade may increase slightly, particularly with building and construction materials, the economy will move slowly through most of next year.  When it is this strained, any natural disaster can dramatically impact stability.  Perceived threats can spurn massive selloffs and volatile swings.  Prep your finances like you prep your supplies– with cautious attention to detail and with a plan for things to possibly worsen in the future. 7- Criminal Justice & Policing Reform Criminal justice and policing reform is a top priority of the Biden administration.  Kamala Harris’s prior profession was as a prosecutor in the state of California. Expect legislation to be signed that will eliminate the cash bail system.  Expect that first-time and non-violent offenders will be released rather than incarcerated pending their court date.  As we have seen in some states where this policy is already in place, sometimes the first time offender continues their crime binge once released and becomes a repeat offender.  Though there is little mention of police reform on the joebiden.com site, which I will provide a link to the policy page in the comments below, it will assuredly be a topic during the Biden administration.  Law enforcement officers can expect training programs to increase sensitivity, terminations, and suspensions of LEOs who have a prior reputation for heavy-handed tactics and a reduction in funds to purchase military equipment.   Mental health programs will be strengthened in an effort to prevent people who are perceived as unstable from acting upon their impulses and causing harm.  I know from living in a state where many of these measures have already been enacted that some of them work, and some are met with resistance from the local sheriff’s department and citizenry.  Do be prepared for a rise in petty crime and drugs as federal, state, and local agencies try various solutions. Conclusion Just the first few hours and days of a Biden Administration will see many policies revoked, Executive Orders signed, and bills pushed through Congress.  The first few months and years will see the most ambitious plans put forth and debated.  The years following will see dramatic changes in everything from firearm regulations to lockdowns and criminal justice reform.  Add to this the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks and foreign and domestic terrorism, and we may be in store for continued national division.  It is clear that push back, blowback, and conflicts will not be just confined to our country’s or your state’s capitol.  As we saw from 2020, it can spill out onto the streets or suddenly appear in our neighborhoods.  As preppers, we need to continue to prepare for civil unrest.  Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.  Remember that you have to strive to bring the same stability to your outside world as you try to bring to your inside world. As always, please stay safe out there.

Outline

1. Hoarders & Movers
2. How It Will Play Out
3. Preparing For the Worst

For our entire lives, it has always been assumed that the United States Dollar, the greenback, was so strong it would be the unquestionable reserve currency of the world.  Other countries around the globe transacted in the dollar because it held a position of prominence.  When the economies of other countries stumbled or failed, the US economy kept chugging along.  There is no need to go into a history lesson about leaving the gold standard entirely in 1971.  There is no need to discuss the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates, ordering the printing of more money, and selling debt to foreign countries.  There are other videos I and others have done about this.  Suffice it to say that the added pressure of borrowing and printing more money today and swelling the balance sheets to bail out businesses and citizens compounded by a dramatic decrease in production and a slow recovery time have combined to threaten the greenback’s strength and longevity dramatically.  Add to that what the rest of the world perceives as a coup attempt, and the dollar’s position shrinks a little more each passing day. In this blog, we will examine the aftermath of the dollar, losing its reserve status.  We will explore some of the possibilities leading up to this, the growing elements that bring this closer to reality, but I want to examine the aftermath and how you might protect yourself and prep.  While many experts believe that the dollar will inevitably retain its vaulted status, there are more than a few who are warning that it will not.  We need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.  Even if it doesn’t fully play out, we can better see the effects of an economic collapse, and we will be prepared accordingly. 1- Hoarders & Movers In any currency’s decline, there are two types of people- Hoarders and Movers.  Hoarders are the type who are left holding the bag.  Though that bag may be stuffed with currency as they collect even more cash cheaply on its decline, the money becomes worthless if the bottom ultimately falls out.  Anyone even remotely versed in history and understanding the Weimar Republic will understand this hoarder mentality.  It is exemplified by what turns out to be misplaced confidence in a currency fated to perish.  If you don’t know what I am talking about here, I would invite you to look at some of my other videos on the dollar, hyperinflation, or just google the term “wheelbarrows of money.”  Your hoarders don’t need to be trying to accumulate more money as a currency evaporates in value.  They could just sit on their money.  This has the effect of slowing the flow of money and increases the drag on an economy since economies thrive on transactions.  Either way, the hoarder is typically the person with a bunch of worthless currency. More exciting is the Mover.  This person finds ways to pull their money out of the fiat currency and translate it to other mediums perceived to have more value.  That could be anything really with value, but it has traditionally been gold or long term bonds.  Unlike in prior years, more than one alternative to the dollar exists.  Gold and other precious metals were once the go-to alternatives for investors, and many have gone that route since Goldman Sachs issued their bold warning in July of 2020 that the dollar was in jeopardy of losing its vaulted status.  Gold has always been the alternative because it can be converted back to any country’s currency with just a short lag time.  If the dollar collapses but the British Pound or even the Zambia Kwacha is healthy, an investor could transfer their ounces of gold to that currency in a few days.  In a way, gold is a global currency.  You may have a hard time realizing its full value if you walk into a market to buy groceries with an ounce of gold; however, it is so valued and respected, you could probably find someone willing to pay in the local currency for all your groceries in exchange for that one ounce.  The problem, of course, is that the speed of conversion is slow by today’s standards. The second problem with gold is related to this.  It’s the velocity of money.  A one-hundred-dollar bill, for instance, can change hands from transaction to transaction.  Precious metals, though, are usually housed by a third party and sold or exchanged on another platform.  Transactions seem relatively instantaneous, but they are slow by today’s standards, and the possessor of the precious metal is indebted to both the holder and the transacter of their metals.  If a large sell-off occurs, your transaction could be delayed as larger holders are serviced.  This is true for people trying to convert dollars that are rapidly losing value into gold.  By the way, when people leave the dollar, the cost of gold increases dramatically.  This has been happening steadily for quite some time now.  The government and banks can throttle back or halt transactions if they observe a large scale exodus that could lead to an economic collapse.  They’ve done it before.  So, while both the dollar and gold have some velocity, that velocity can be stopped completely.  Picture it similar to how the stock market will halt trading during periods of large scale sell-off. Even currency to currency exchanges can be suspended or slowed by the enormity of clamoring investors and competing transactions. Since 2009 there has been a new player on the block, though, that functions predominantly outside of many government regulations and prides itself on being outside the slow-moving banks.  The new kid on the blockchain is cryptocurrency.  Governments have been trying to regulate it while not impeding its progress.  Like any disruptive technology, there is an adoption life-cycle that begins with innovators, then early adopters, then early majority, then the late majority.  Cryptocurrency, in my opinion, is somewhere in the early majority phase.  In just the last year, it has been given more validity through extensive platform adoption, allowing everyday citizens to make transactions. Still, it has cost the currency some of its users anonymity in exchange.  Now, though, anyone can purchase vetted cryptocurrency through their PayPal account.  Some pending lawsuits will determine whether cryptocurrency gets inevitably treated as a security or not, like stocks, but this is just part of the regulatory apparatus of governments trying to reign in the rampant growth and adoption of nearly instantaneous transactions conducted anonymously outside of acceptable banking practices.  It ends up not as relevant to us as the fact that it isn’t going to go away, even with a growing regulatory climate. Cryptocurrency plays a critical role in the decline of the dollar because it allows for vast amounts of money to leave the dollar and move to virtual currency that can then be converted into other securities or other currencies.  A departure from the dollar that may have taken days can be completed in just a few hours and at a much larger scale. In June of 2020, the 2,000 cryptocurrencies accounted for 121 billion dollars.  That is a mere 2.4% of all physical fiat money.  Bitcoin alone has grown almost 400% in value since that time, so are we now already at nearly 10% of all physical fiat currency in less than a year?  Add to this that there are thousands of cryptocurrency coins in a market that tops one trillion dollars, and it is clear to see that investors and holders of fiat currency in governments they have shaky confidence or trust in can rapidly move their money out of those fiats exacerbating the fiat currency’s decline in value.  One final cryptocurrency threat to consider is that the currency owners, not any central bank, determine the currency’s course and regulations.  If a cryptocurrency is tied or pegged to the dollar in any way, it would be a challenging but not an impossible task to peg it relatively quickly to any other global currency that most of the cryptocurrency’s holders deemed to be more reliable.  And, just like that, the greenback could be thrown over a cliff. Whether the movers choose bonds, other currencies, gold, or crypto, if they smell blood in the water, they now can move vast amounts of money in very little time outside of the US government’s ability to pump the breaks.  Never before has there been the ability to convert as rapidly in such vast quantities and mostly outside of the government’s ability to control it.  When the low-pressure system is on its way, more rain is in the forecast, the news predicts the storm of the century, and the dams are already brimming with previous rain. Do you stay in your home on the low plains or get to higher ground for a little while? 2- How It Will Play Out To know how it will play out, one only needs to look at how it is currently playing out and extrapolate that out further.  Already Gold went from $1500 to $1900 since the start of the pandemic crisis.  As a measure of all cryptocurrency, Bitcoin moved from eight thousand dollars to just shy of forty-thousand dollars.  The DJIA went from a low of 18,591 to over 31,000. Movers of money, both everyday people with a little extra cash to invest and outright whales,  found solace in securities over merely leaving cash in their bank accounts.  They found comfort in gold and cryptocurrency.  They set the course for abandoning the dollar.  In essence, they tested their escape routes in numbers never seen before.  If these escape routes off the dollar’s ship continue to increase, and if complications like a lasting pandemic and civil unrest continue to drag on the US economy, the dollar could eventually collapse.   Watch for gold and cryptocurrency to rise in price.  Yes, also watch for investors flocking to bonds, but in a collapse, I think this will be less pronounced.  Watch for any country’s central bank to make a large declaration away from the dollar.  Watch for the United State’s credit rating to get slashed again.  Watch for a large scale cryptocurrency rise, which we know is an exodus.  Watch for prices suddenly to jump or a freeze on loans and credit.  Any of these may be an indicator we are on a precipice.  Several of them together indicate we are already over the precipice and in free fall. The dollar is held in massive quantities by central banks worldwide and is used for large transactions, such as oil, grain, manufactured goods, and raw materials.  The dollar becomes stronger when central banks and investors acquire dollars in exchange for other currencies.  As countries face their health crises and slow their production, their transactions outside their country become fewer.  They turn to their own fiat currency.  Their citizens, just like Americans, are looking around for a stable currency if they perceive their currency is weakening.  The difference now, though, is America’s monetary policy hasn’t been that great over the last few decades.  America is engulfed in political strife that has risen to the level of armed citizens attempting to kidnap leaders, riots in the streets, the burning of state buildings, occupations of state and federal buildings, and agitators bent on stopping the processes of government.  You would be naive to think that foreigners who once would invest in the US dollar are inclined to do the same in the current climate, and the strength of the American greenback is built upon those foreigners willing to invest.  So, expect central banks worldwide to seek to move off the dollar and dump their practices of buying up US debt.  When that stops or even slows dramatically, the greenback will be in a death spiral, and the Fed is entirely out of options to stop it, having opened all the valves and used all the tools in its inventory to get to this point.  When interest rates are so low already, where does one go?  We saw a similar death spiral when oil dropped into negative numbers on the world stage. At home, interest rates skyrocket.  When interest rates go up, people can no longer get loans.  It costs more to borrow money.  The economy slows further as a result.  When farmers and producers can no longer sell their product at home or abroad for a reasonable price, they are more inclined to let it go to waste.  Look up what the Milk Strikes of 1933 to get the context of that.  The fact is, though, if farmers cannot profitably harvest their crops, they are more inclined to let it rot and take the insurance and government assurances.  That’s great for them, but it leaves you without milk or food in your market. This final point is inflation.  Many will argue between the exact type of inflation that would occur.  Personally, I don’t think the type matters much because the effect on the consumer is mostly just bad.  Stagflation, walking inflation, core inflation, asset inflation, even deflation on a large scale are all bad for you and me– everyday joes.  As consumers who expect some regulated prices and confidence of distribution, any “flation” is bad.  The most likely occurrence in a spiraling dollar is deflation where an asset bubble falls, as in the housing market of 2008.  Or, it’s hyperinflation, where prices skyrocket more than 50% in one month.  That would be like the price of milk going from 3 dollars a gallon to 4.50 a gallon.  It’s not unimaginable.   These two factors of inflation, however, can spiral around in the same universe.  If the dollar loses all value, there is a world where dairy farmers cannot sell their products, and the price of milk skyrockets.  Then, milk becomes unavailable altogether.  Finally, there’s stagnation where the economy is stagnant, and the prices rise.  Prices are going up despite low demand.  It happened in the 1970s when the United States abandoned the gold standard. Once the dollar’s value was no longer tied to gold, it plummeted. At the same time, the price of gold skyrocketed.  That’s pretty similar to what we would be seeing with the dollar collapsing.  Regardless of the type of “flation” you get, it spells bad for food and staple product prices.  It threatens the easy flow of systems from farm to table.  It’s even worse and drawn out longer when there is large-scale unemployment like we are experiencing today. The fact is that when we lose a system, we have relied upon since birth, we have to struggle to find our footing.  It is incredibly likely that the dollar could lose its vaulted status this year.  If it does, the impact on our markets could be unprecedented.  The strength of the dollar worldwide is tied directly to other countries around the globe willing to use it.  If you have a choice between two or more roads to get to the same destination, but one of those roads that used to be a highway hasn’t been maintained in years, has deep potholes and an occasional washed-out place, and it just rained, which route are you going to want to take?  Which road would an investor take if there are no smoother options?   3- Preparing for the Worst Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.  Here, too, we have to adopt that philosophy.  It is very late in the game for our leaders and politicians to avert the path that the dollar has been on for several years.  We will all suffer to some extent if the dollar free falls.  How much you suffer in that crisis is up to you. If you have money in your bank account that you are just sitting on, you may find yourself in the hoarder category I mentioned earlier.  I am not a financial advisor, so I can only tell you what I and many preppers I know are doing.  You can use this video and this channel as one of the sources you consider to educate yourself on the best path to take with your money.  I have other videos on this channel on how and where to get precious metals.  I have videos on alternatives to the dollar and even cryptocurrencies.  Use those to learn how to insulate yourself.  If you have the money you want for when you finally get to the recovery phase, whatever that looks like, you should have some in cryptocurrency and some in precious metals.  You won’t be able to use an ounce of gold or an Etheruem crypto token to buy a can of beans at the store. However, you may still be able to convert those to any other country’s currency or back into the dollar during the recovering phase and re-establish yourself better than ever. This is assuming you have investable money on hand.  Many Americans don’t.  Many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have enough cash on hand to cover rent, utilities, and food for three to six months.  That is the reality we live in today.  For those people, you will still want to look at those videos in this channel’s archive, as I try to advise the average person learning to prep and the long-time prepper seeking to expand their knowledge.  Whatever money you have on hand, you will want to invest it in durable goods or free yourself from indebtedness if a death spiral of the dollar is on the horizon.  Paying off a car you may find yourself living in will be a better return on investment than hoarding your money in your savings account that pays you barely any interest.  If we ever get to the point where you have a wheelbarrow full of worthless dollars, remember that your loans are not typically scaled.  If you owe 100 thousand on something, the dollars may not be worth the paper they’re printed on, but they will still be capable of paying off that loan statement.  The bank loses out, not you. So, what can you do?  First and foremost is always to have your food and water prepped.  Have an alternative means to collect and purify water if your area’s water system is ever compromised or stops altogether.  Remember that these critical systems require regular maintenance and monitoring.  When people are laid off and that monitoring and maintenance fall off, the systems are more likely to fail catastrophically.  Add to that the regular natural disasters we face every year, and you could see less of a nudge and more of a push towards failure.  Second, understand how to barter and what supplies have more value than others.  When the dollar fails, some items will skyrocket in value and demand.  When the food or fuel lines are long, you may get a whole lot more in trade value with a mason jar full of beans or rice than you will with all the cash you can muster. Next, develop a reusable mentality.  Use strong, durable goods, and figure out how to repurpose items.  Stop throwing things out.  You will have to stretch any item’s use out well beyond its normal life expectancy in a total economic collapse.  Cultivate your talents.  If you find yourself without a job, what other skills can you bring to bear that can get in either money or goods in payment.  Can you sew or fix an engine?  You need to look for opportunities to do those things that will keep resources coming into you.  Learn to hunt, fish, garden, or forage.  If the dollar spirals down to worthlessness, you will still need to bring food to your table.  Just like cooking, these are not prepper skills you can pick up overnight.  If you don’t know how to fish or where the fish are, you will likely not catch anything.  If you don’t know where that wild berry patch is, you may have trouble finding food.   My final tip for you is to begin now to cultivate a sense of community.  Whether that is a network of friends, a mutual assistance group, or getting to know your neighbors on your cul-de-sac, or burying the hatchet with people you may have fallen out with in the past and striving to find common ground.  Your odds of survival increase exponentially when you band together.  Neighbors sharing resources for a potluck can lead to further exchanges and barters that can lead to everyone having what they need to survive a long period of economic decline.  A united cul-de-sac or apartment floor can keep the wolves at bay and provide support for many.  I always have to put the caveat on this one that you should never reveal the extent of your stores and prepping, lest you become the sole provider for everyone.  Use your resources strategically and if you want to give any of them away, make sure you get something in exchange and demand confidentiality. Conclusion  As a prepper, we don’t need a crystal ball or precise forecasting of the future to know what we need to prep for right now.  Will the dollar lose its value this year?  We can’t say with certainty.  It has survived before; but, we can say with confidence that there have never in the past been so many other viable options.  There have never been such rapidly accessible transactions available to people around the world.  Such a perfect storm has never been accompanied by such a long and horrible monetary policy period, a global recession, and an ongoing pandemic.  Will the storm hit us directly, or will we be spared its fury?  Again, we don’t know, but we would be foolish not to prepare when we see such massive storm clouds on the horizon. As always, please stay safe out there.

Outline

1. Switching Between Gray Man & Anti-Gray Man
2. Escape After Discovery
3. Engaging the Threat: Agonistic Behavior

We have done blogs in the past on being the Gray Man.  Hiding in plain sight, blending in, and becoming as invisible as possible is one way to survive your environment, but it isn’t always possible.  Sometimes your better option may be to become the Anti-Gray Man.  Your best option may be to stand out from the crowd and project that you are a threat not to be messed with.  If your Gray Man efforts are discovered, and you can’t navigate in secrecy anymore, projecting strength beyond the strength in opposition to you may be your best bet. If you have no weapon, you can look like you do.  If you have no backup, you can give the impression that you do.  In this video, we will examine how to project force, go on the offense when you need to, and deploy the tactics you can deploy when staying hidden is no longer your best option. 1- Switching Between Gray Man & Anti-Gray Man The Gray Man seeks to move unnoticed through their environment.  The Anti-Gray Man has been exposed to at least one or more observers.  They are no longer concealed and may be either pursued or engaged.  Your situational awareness will tip you off, and your instincts are what will keep you alive.  Always, your goal should be to return to Gray Man status, but when that is impossible, you need to display the capability of being a more significant threat to your adversary. Situational awareness will be your indicator as to which status you should be in at any given moment.  In my videos on becoming a Gray Man, I go into great detail about remaining undiscovered and how to recognize when you have been discovered.  Not every observer is a threat, but every unobserved danger will threaten your safety. In every situation, there are threat indicators.  Suppose you can pick up on these indicators. In that case, you can determine whether you need to engage in a fight, exhibit a display of agonistic behavior, which I will address later, or whether you can safely retreat to a gray man status after being initially observed.  Typically, when you are looking around for active observers when you are engaged as a Gray Man, it is not always an enemy.  It may be someone equally trying to remain unseen.  It may be someone who has merely caught your eye.  If you know that it is a person looking for you or pursuing you, you should consider your Gray Man status blown and move on to either the escape or display phases of action.  Your ability to accurately assess the threat is directly tied to your situational awareness and your observational skills.  You need to practice learning to read a room, scan crowds, and assess threats. Assessing the threat and possibly defusing the danger can sometimes be accomplished by merely locking gazes and nodding the head.  This acknowledgment will either be met with a corresponding nod of the head that is typically just a greeting.  A nod in an upward direction is usually an acknowledgment of mutual strength, whereas a nod in a downward direction can be perceived as a submissive posture.  It’s that nuanced.  The non-verbal exchange from a distance is critical to the assessment of the threat. As you are moving through as the Gray Man, you have to continually be assessing individuals that can pull you out of your cloaked status.  Secondarily, how much of a threat is the person.  Are they actively looking for you?  Are they just casually observing you?  Are they just curious about you?  Essentially, you need to know when to pull out of your Gray Man status to avoid prolonged observation or avoid an escalating threat from someone.  At this moment, you need to switch to the Anti-Gray Man. You have a few options at this point.  You can seek to escape or engage in the fight process by threatening and posturing and possibly even physical engagement.  Escaping is always your best option, as I will explain later, but you need to know when full engagement or the threat of full engagement is a better hand to play. 2- Escape After Discovery There are many escape methods after discovery when you know that your discovery is not just casual but intentional and ongoing.  That is to say when you know that the observer is fully aware of you and is intent on confronting you, you are no longer the Gray Man.  At this point, you may immediately choose one of the methods of escape I outline here if that is your most viable option. Diversion Is there a method to create a diversion?  Pulling a fire alarm, which is likely against the law, by the way, starting a small fire, which is for sure against the law, tripping a car alarm or store alarm, or anything that will divert the attention of the crowds, are all methods of diversion.  This helps you isolate the threats against you because as the crowd focus turns to the triggered event, the eyes of your would-be assailants remain fixed on you as you move from the scene.  Be aware that anyone who witnessed you trigger the diversion will also likely be watching you now.  Picture the diversion tactic as the same as hiding in the woods.  If the enemy is approaching, throwing a rock far and away from you triggers a noise that they turn to investigate.  The same is true for an urban environment.  You want to be able to create that noise from as great a distance as possible to make your escape. Obstacles If you are spotted in a crowd, you have the barrier of people between you and your would-be assailant.  That is a natural obstacle.  You can create more obstacles between you and your pursuers and slow their progress.  Is a delivery being made on a dolly?  What would happen if that got knocked over?  Someone carrying an arm full of items?  What would happen if they got knocked over.  This is often shown in the movies when one person is being chased, and they knock carts and file cabinets over behind them to impede their pursuer’s efforts. Call Them Out With your assailant’s eyes fixed on you, call them out to someone who is working in the area: a hostess, a security guard, a worker at a kiosk.  Make sure you make eye contact with your pursuer.  Make sure to give a short description to the person, and end it with a pointed finger right at them.  They will likely look away.  While they are looking away from their being outed, you can make your escape.  Don’t stick around and chat with the person you are talking to.  Say, “I think that person over there in the hat is following me,” for instance.  Say, “That person in the black jacket just stole a lady’s purse.”  End your conversation with the person by saying, “You should probably call the police.”  As they contemplate whether they should, they will also be keeping their eye on the person.  You should move as close to a straight line away from both the observer and your assailant.  This will require your assailant to have to go a long way around or right past your observer.  Your observer will be increasingly more panicked as your assailant approaches.   Direct Confrontation Do you hold the upper hand?  Can you flip the script on your would-be assailant and pursue the pursuer?  If that is your evaluation, you can turn directly toward the person, point at them, and then start making your way directly towards them through the crowd.  Pull people along with you where you can.  They don’t need to follow you, but even turning a stranger’s attention directly on your former pursuer can make it look like you are soliciting aid in the fight you are bringing.  Gently turning someone by the shoulder, pointing at your pursuer, and saying something as silly as, “See that guy with the sunglasses and hoodie?  Is that a monkey he has?”  That will be enough to have the stranger observed.  All the while you are heading to the person, if they don’t flinch or falter in your game of chicken, you will need to plan on bailing left, right, or down into a subway–anywhere that you can find an escape.  If you don’t escape, the confrontation will occur after further escalation once you reach your pursuer.  3- Engaging the Threat: Agonistic Behavior With other avenues no longer viable, your only remaining option at the moment may be engaging with your identified adversary.  Agonistic behavior is any behavior related to fighting, so it covers a wide range of actions.  It covers threats, displays, retreats, placation, and conciliation.  We understand agonistic behavior from our analysis of the animal kingdom.  Every animal fights for territory, resources, or mating rights.  So, too, you may be forced to fight, but fighting is always your last option to be implemented only when other options are no longer viable.  This is because conflict will lead to further exposure at the least and injury or death at the worst.  Though these behaviors reveal themselves throughout an active fight, they are most prevalent preceding the direct conflict.  Fighting and conflict are primal reactions tied to our fight or flight instincts.  Being a Gray Man is meant to keep you out of harm’s way, but if you are discovered, you either have to appear as a formidable threat, escape the area, or simultaneously do a little of both. The adrenaline coursing through your body will help you make, hopefully, the best decision, but I suggest you do both: appear as a larger threat and eye your escape avenues.  I will discuss escape tactics later on, but for now, what you need to know is that physical altercations are relatively rare between humans. However, we see them prominently featured in the media.  Think of any conflict you witnessed after the fact on the news.  The chances are there were hundreds or perhaps thousands of people in the area who may have witnessed it but were not drawn into the melee themselves.  So, out of those many people, only a few were actually within the violent bubble. The Assessment In a typical agonistic behavior scenario, both people involved are assessing the acceptable cost of exposure, injury, or death.  Have you ever seen a movie where the bad guy is pursuing the hero but exposing themselves would mean the police would capture them?  That is the playing out of this risk assessment portion leading up to a potential altercation.  Unless a person is reasonably confident that they can win without injury, or the risk is worth the inevitable reward, they are most inclined to avoid an altercation.  The caveats here are when a person feels their life or the threat of injury is unavoidable, when the person is reacting from their primal mind and lashing out, when a person is no longer rational, or when a person has been trained to bull doggedly and determinedly engage the target.  A person must weigh the risks of the fight.  If the cost is too high, avoidance is favorable. The Display The agonistic ritual’s display phase is where a person would try to project greater strength than their opponent, an unwillingness to be deterred, a possible retaliatory threat, or the appearance of more significant numbers.  These ritualistic displays can be subtle, like not breaking eye contact and staring down your enemy.  They can be implied like reaching your hand inside your jacket and leaving it there, indicating you have a concealed weapon.  They can be aggressive, as in the puffing of the chest with a “Come at me, bro” attitude.  The agonistic ritual display can also be thought-provoking, even looking solidly to the right or left, then back at your pursuer, then back to the same spot, can give the impression that you are not alone.  It would be natural for your pursuer to assess the threat you are alluding to with your long glance.  If you choose this option at the moment, be sure the direction you are looking is not the same as your projected escape route.  The seconds looking away from your actual path that your pursuer spends evaluating the invisible threat will buy you steps along your escape route. Whatever display you make, you should be continually assessing whether becoming the Gray Man again and escaping into the crowd is a viable option.  The second you make that choice, however, you have given up the charade of the display.  Your enemy will know that they hold the upper hand and will re-engage with the pursuit, and will not be swayed by any further subtle displays.  Only an actual force display will force another pause in your enemy.  The display phase is also an assessment phase.  Here you are forecasting your enemy’s willingness to fight.  Many are observing but with orders not to engage or unwilling to engage when it comes down to it because of the more extensive attention they may draw upon themselves.  You need to be making these determinations.  There are just a few outcomes of the display phase.  Either it leads to even more pronounced displays, it leads to an actual engagement, or one or both sides stand down and retreat.  Though you are posturing as if you will bring down the lightning and hammers upon your enemy, you should be simultaneously planning your escape even if you lack the means to do so.   Every engagement throughout history reveals the consequences of wrong assumptions about an enemy’s willingness to engage or an incorrect assessment of an enemy’s strength.  Do not hesitate and evaluate.  Only evaluate while you are engaged in action, and channel stress, anxiety, and adrenaline into focused action on your part.  That is the key to winning the display phase of agonistic behavior. The Fight As we mentioned earlier, you may be forced to fight, but fighting is always your last option to be implemented only when other options are no longer viable.  This is because conflict will lead to further exposure at the least and injury or death at the worst.  Even in the fight itself, choosing between potentially lethal tactics and maiming tactics have to be made.  Causing non-life-threatening injuries to your opponent may result in buying you the critical moments you need to survive and escape.  Engaging in a fight will bring others observing and potentially also engaging against you.  This could be your enemy’s comrades, people trying to break it up, random strangers, or controlling professional forces.  If you are continually assessing your opportunity to escape back to the Gray Man, you may be able to cast your enemy into the chaos and retract yourself from it. If you have exhausted all other options and must engage in a fight, leverage the surprise element with a sudden strike.  Strike with the intent of ending the fight immediately by incapacitating your enemy, and don’t hold back.  In martial arts, they teach you to strike the spot behind your enemy when you throw a punch.  So, too, must you strike with force enough to give your enemy pause.  A first strike is also a form of agonistic display.  It should be of significant strength and shock that it gives your enemy pause about further engagement. Conclusion There are volumes and volumes of materials written on tactics, engagement, developing situational awareness, and threat assessment.  Theoretical works like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Clausewitz’s On War, or Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings are good starting points, but they are theories to be contemplated.  Raise your understanding of these works but make sure to enhance your skills with practical exercises, tactical training, and an understanding of human behavior and tactics.  The topic area is so voluminous that it would be challenging to cover in any single video.  What we have done here is to focus on understanding the moment when you need to switch between the Gray Man and the Anti-Gray Man.  Becoming situationally aware that you are being observed and the observer’s intent determine which side of the Gray Man spectrum you are on, and it should illuminate your next steps.  Returning to Gray Man status is always preferable for your continued safety. Still, if that isn’t possible, you either need to escape, project greater or hidden strengths, or engage in conflict.  Leverage your awareness and your surroundings with any course of action you take. What do you think?  What’s your tactic for knowing when you are being observed?  What’s your best tactic for appearing to have hidden or superior strength?   As always, please stay safe out there.

Outline

1. Develop a Reusable Mentality
2. Have Multiple Revenue Streams
3. Never Credit, Less Cash, Trade
4. Learn to Filter and Purify Water
5. Go Fishing or Hunting
6. Start a Garden and Grow Your Own
7. Preserve and Dehydrate
8. Cook Everything
9. Downsize Your Life
10. Stock Up

No economy in the history of the world has ever sustained a constant rate of growth. Recessions, depressions, and complete economic collapse is inevitable in even the most advanced of societies. Any astute observer can look at the economic signs of high unemployment, low GDP, missed mortgage payments, historic low wages, rising cost of living, and a repressed global economy and see that a deeper recession and possible depression if not inevitable, at least looms like a spectre on the horizon. In this blog, we will look specifically at ten ways you can develop the right mindset and habits to survive another great depression. Survival is ten percent physical and ninety percent mental, so it is important to develop the right mindset today to survive the challenges of tomorrow. If we somehow manage to avoid a massive and prolonged economic downturn, you will end up all the richer by learning these things today because you will spend less and properly use all your resources now. Either way, you end up, hopefully, on top of your situation. 1- Develop a Reusable Mentality If you made spaghetti this month and you threw out that empty glass jar of spaghetti sauce, you have not yet developed the reusable mindset. This is especially important for those who are new to prepping. That jar can be soaked, cleaned, sterilized, and filled with rice and put away. White rice can keep for decades in a sealed jar, and brown rice can last up to a year and a half. You would need three cups of dried rice per day to provide you enough calories to survive, if that was all you ate; and the average spaghetti sauce jar from the store holds about three cups of rice. So, that one jar, with less than one dollar’s worth of rice, could sustain you for a full day and provides an added protection against bugs. It also parses out your larger supply into discernable and potentially tradeable amounts. If it were Pinto beans you’re storing about forty-eight grams of protein. Don’t throw out your jars. While I am not advocating hoarding, you do need to begin thinking about ways to reuse items. Beyond jars, though, to survive a prolonged economic depression, you will need to look at everything you throw out as potentially reusable. Packaging is potential kindling. Food scraps should be composted for the garden. Egg cartons can be used to sprout plants. Old clothes can be mended or used as rags. Wine corks, shopping bags, hangers, rubber bands, and more, all have reusability. Even the cotton balls from over the counter prescription bottles and the bottles themselves can be reused. If it’s something that broke, don’t just throw it out and get a new one. Can it be repurposed? Can it be fixed? Can it be scavenged for useful parts? I’ve watched YouTube videos and scavenged parts out of my broken laptops to sell online. It’s saved me money on buying new PCs. Start to look twice at anything you’re about to throw out and ask yourself, can I repurpose this now or in the future? 2- Have Multiple Revenue Streams Having multiple forms of revenue or goods coming in will help you if one of those streams of revenue or goods dries up. While a second job of only a few hours may not seem like much now, if you lose your primary job, it could be a lifesaver. The same is true for revenue in the form of goods. If you already garden and have too many tomatoes to eat after canning, can you sell them? Can you trade them to someone else for something they have? The slang term for this is to have a “side hustle,” which is something other than your main job that brings in cash or goods. If you can side hustle those tomatoes for someone else’s mending skills to repair some clothes you would have thrown out, you just saved yourself a lot of money, extended the life of your clothes, and made a critical connection in a prolonged economic downturn. Revenue isn’t just about money. It’s any commodity, goods, or services you can bring into your life. Develop multiple revenue streams to make certain that money, goods, or services are still coming to you should your main revenue stream evaporate. 3- Never Credit, Less Cash, Trade When at all possible, never use credit to buy things. Use as little cash as possible by always trying to get a lower price. Sometimes this can mean driving to three different stores to get the best prices on what you need. And, whenever practical, see if there is a trade possible that won’t cost you either cash or credit. To survive, there are things you will need, but the way you obtain them and whether you get them clean or owe someone for them will determine your long term ability to sustain yourself. If you obtain the things you need to survive on credit, how will you get these things when your credit dries up? If a whole nation is suffering an economic depression, at some point, many stores just will stop taking credit of any form. It won’t be worth the risk to them. Dollars may lose value, so relying upon cash transactions isn’t feasible either. Don’t be afraid to ask for a lower price if the supply and demand equation is in your favor or the dollars have more value in the eyes of the seller. Try and stretch out any money you have and focus on necessities. In most transactions, trading what you have for what you need is probably your best option. It instantly reconciles the transaction and gives you what you need right now in exchange. I knew a guy who mowed the neighborhood lawns frequently just to pick up a few extra dollars– what he called fishing money. He also sold catfish for every catfish fry in his town right out of his basement. He traded his service for a little cash which he used to fund his larger and more profitable operation. Like the never credit concept, though, don’t trade what you don’t have for what you need now. Trading tomatoes from your next harvest that might fail will force you into a debt with someone that you will have to renegotiate on their terms. 4- Learn to Filter and Purify Water Municipal water supplies may not be reliable in a prolonged downturn. Collecting rainwater, lake water, stream water, and other water sources can keep you hydrated, but you have to have a plan for filtering, purifying and storing the water. You absolutely cannot live without regular water intake and drinking water. When there is no food, water can at least help to reduce the pangs of hunger for a little while. We have recommended pocket filtration systems in the past, and we still do. Technology advancements have brought these down to under twenty dollars in price, and it is an absolute must have in your prepper supplies. If a natural disaster strikes while the country is in the grips of an economic depression, we guarantee you that critical infrastructures like water and electricity will stay down for a long period of time. Don’t be caught off guard with your water. If you are forced to flee your area, you won’t be able to take that fifty-five gallon drum of water with you, but a mini filter like we recommend weighs two ounces, fits into your pocket, and can filter one thousand eight hundred and eighteen of those fifty five gallon drums. Think like a survivor, and give water its proper place in your prepping supplies. 5- Go Fishing or Hunting Equipment that you don’t know how to use will do you no good when you are trying to use it under the stress of a disaster. This is definitely true for hunting and fishing equipment. I have known great fishermen who made a living off what they caught. I, despite the number of times I have gone fishing, catch very little. There is a lot to learn about both hunting and fishing. Setting lines, tying lines,tying knots, tracking, finding the right spots, and much, much more is out there to know before you can be proficient at these skills. Just finding the right location to engage in the sports can be a challenge. If you have hunting and fishing supplies in your prepping mix, as you should, and you think you will sustain yourself through one or both of those methods, know that you will likely struggle quite a bit if you are not familiar with how and where to use your equipment. Set aside some time to casually fish some weekend. Maybe plan on bagging one extra deer or try turkey or duck hunting. Maybe try your hand at hunting small game and preparing it for your table. Expand your knowledge and bolster your supplies with fresh fish or game. Understand how to process the meat for your table and become less reliant upon a food supply system that can easily falter or suffer from disruptions, especially during an economic depression. 6- Start a Garden and Grow Your Own If you aren’t, at the very least, growing something you can eat and supplement your table with, you are really going to struggle and be dependent upon others in a prolonged depression. I have several other videos on this channel that go into great depth on what you can grow even in an apartment. From sprouts to mushrooms to balcony setups and indoor grow tents, you need to start now to supplement your supplies. Just like hunting and fishing, gardening of any kind requires knowledge and learning through trial and error. Expect that your first couple of batches of sprouts will mold before you figure it out. It’s better to have that happen now than when you are amidst a crisis. Even something as small as an herb garden can provide you micronutrients and vitamins to supplement your other supplies. A cup of mint tea will not provide you much in the way of nutrition, but it will be an incredible psychological boost to you when you are worried about the next dollar or meal. Don’t underestimate the power of growing your own, freeing yourself even a little from tenuous food supply chains, and increasing your self-sufficiency; but you can’t wait for disaster to strike. Start in small ways today. 7- Preserve and Dehydrate Food, being one of the three critical components of survival along with air and water, will become very critical to you to survive a great depression. The last great depression found people in soup lines that stretched several city blocks. In the southern great plains of the United States they actually even pickled tumbleweed as a source of food. Desperate times require that you not waste a single ounce of nutritional food. Learn to use the broccoli stem in your cooking or the carrot tops off those carrots from the farmer’s market or your garden. Cook the pepper leaves along with the peppers in your asian stir fry. Try sunflower leaves or dandelions in your salad. Above all else, though, buy yourself a kitchen countertop food dehydrator and commit to trying to not let anything go to waste for a week or month. If you didn’t get around to eating the whole bag of apples or oranges, those strawberries or raspberries, learn how to dehydrate them and then use them later. Food dehydrators are another one of those items that have dropped significantly in price over the years, and there are a number of plans online for making your own solar food dehydrators. If canning and preserving is too much for you, definitely start on the smaller side with dehydrating foods, but don’t be afraid to try and make your own jam or apple butter. Think like a survivor and start to preserve and dehydrate every ounce of consumable food that enters your home. This will train your brain to start thinking of ways to stretch your food supply. You will look differently at the food you purchase and consume. You will start to become more self-sufficient, and you will begin to start thinking like a person who can survive another great depression. 8- Cook Everything The final point regarding food here is to cook everything. Our diets often consist of eating just small portions of plants that are entirely consumable. I already mentioned the carrot tops and broccoli stock, but there are a lot of parts of the plants we eat we consider scraps. Cilantro and parsley stems, orange and apple peels, cucumber skin and watermelon rinds are all edible. Did you know that the water drained or cooked chickpeas is called aquafaba and can be used as an egg substitute in baking? Cook everything edible you can get your hands on. Forage for herbs and plants on your next hike or outdoor excursion. Bring them home and cook them up. Learn the skills now instead of during a time when you have the added pressure of hungry mouths to feed and an extended period of food insecurity. One final trick for food, when you are eating or preparing your evening meal, add up the total cost of everything you are putting in it and divide that by the number of mouths fed. Come up with a per meal price. Compare that to even one meal out or takeout. You will be shocked at the savings. Many people during this recent pandemic were more than a little shocked at how much they were spending on meals out. Their grocery bills went up but they still had money in their accounts. Eating at home is an amazing savings technique, and it will be the only way to stretch your money in an economic depression. Learn and apply the skills now. 9- Durable Goods Cast iron pans, dutch ovens, fixed blade knives, strong blankets, bolts of denim, canvas, or burlap, sewing kits, leather gloves, work boots, and more are all things you can buy once to last you years. Don’t just buy them to sit on your shelves though, start using them in your daily lives. Use the fixed blade knife in the kitchen and you will suddenly realize that you are also going to need a sharpening stone and knowledge on how to use it. Use that sewing kit to mend some clothes one time, and you may realize you need readers to thread the needle or stronger and a greater assortment of threads. Use the gloves to garden and you may find out there are better, stronger gloves out there that will not fall apart on you. We once used a hickory handled axe we received one father’s day to process some firewood only to have it break on my fourth swipe. It turns out it wasn’t hickory at all or it was bad wood. You don’t really know either how to properly use your durable goods or how durable they really are or what you still may need unless you start using them in your everyday life before a disaster or depression starts. By incorporating these durable goods into your everyday life, you develop a durable mindset that will help you survive long periods of time where simply buying a new product or repairing an old one may no longer be a possibility. 10- Stock Up And, of course, stock up. Recent events have finally awoken many to the need to establish some level of independence from a system that can falter, fail, or possibly even collapse. We simply cannot rely upon the government or the goodwill of our neighbors to bail us out when a crisis from a tornado to a great depression occurs. While I do believe in the good in people, their focus, rightly so, is going to be on themselves and their immediate families; and the government may or may not bail you out or get to you on time. Stock-up on your food, water, ammo, durable goods, and other prepping supplies. Most importantly though, don’t just let these things sit on the shelf. Rotate food supplies. Use and test your tools. Take it to the beach or park with you. Start in small ways to incorporate these things into your everyday life. If an economic depression strikes, it will have less impact on you if you are already living in a self-sufficient manner with less dependency upon the systems collapsing around you. Conclusion Survival is ninety percent mental and ten percent knowledge and skills. You can use this video as a guide for ten tips that will help you develop a survivor’s mentality when facing another great depression. If the United States experiences, instead, a massive period of economic growth and prosperity, you will still benefit by living a more spartan and independent lifestyle. It’s a winning scenario and a survivor’s mindset. As always, please stay safe out there.

Outline

1. Crackdowns & Reactions
2. Disruptions in the Systems
3. What Are the Scenarios?
4. Do You Have Time?

Start with this quote: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Wednesday, January 6th, was a historic day.  It will be forever recognized as a defining moment in American history.  By accident, by a plan, or a little bit of both, there is no denying the evidence of our eyes that the sacred halls of The Capitol were breached.  So what can you expect on the days before, on, and just after Inauguration Day? America is at an inflection point.  The political landscape is violently shifting, and its shift is being violently resisted like we haven’t seen in our recent history.  The parallels between America now and other countries where similar events have gone very badly are apparent.  While some decry a not so well hidden plot to enslave the masses in a new global world order, others are merely concerned that civil unrest may disrupt their way of life.  Were the events of January 6th the first shots fired in a revolution?  Was it the final death rattle of a political, populist movement, or a gasp of the first breath of a new era of governance?  Whichever emerges as the eventual truth, you need to be prepared.  You need to know how the days leading up to Inauguration Day, the day itself, and the days immediately could be violent and dangerous.  You have to plan for the worst but hope for the best.   1- Crackdowns & Reactions Already several right-leaning social media platforms and sites have been forced offline.  Some would argue that is a good thing.  Others would say that it is a violation of 1st Amendment rights.  Many arrests have been made in The Capitol’s occupation, and others have been added to no-fly lists, fired from their places of employment, and targeted.  Politicians have been verbally assaulted in airports and continue to be threatened online.  Terroristic plans involving pipe bombs have been thwarted.  Guns and ammo have been confiscated. In each instance, each side feels that they are acting in the best interest of the country.  In each case, both sides think they hold the moral and just high ground.  The tensions that have built for four years are boiling over.  These crackdowns and arrests will continue until the party in power feels safe.  The reactions will continue through open and sudden flare-ups but will be primarily driven underground.  The violent left will counter violent right in cities far away from Washington D.C., and people claiming the moral and just position will continue to act out individually against anyone they perceive to be a philosophical enemy combatant.  This is, simply, the result of several years of dehumanization of one’s adversaries.  The extreme positions on either side no longer acknowledge the humanity of the opposition.  As with other countries throughout history, that’s a bad spot to be in today.  It does not bode well for America. To keep yourself safe in these troubling times, your best course of action would be not to embroil yourself in the chaotic fires of today.  I know for many that seems to run in the opposite of what they feel.  Many feel this is the do-or-die time where we have to take a stand.  Many think that calls for unity are just to avoid the conflict that must inevitably happen.  If that’s you, you likely aren’t prepping to survive the calamity. You are prepping to hold power in the worst of calamities.  You are less interested in survival and have more bellicose slants.   Instead, tending to your own and making yourself aware of the threats from any side of the loud shouting match are the keys to your survival.  Avoiding both the areas and people involved in the crackdowns and reactions is in your survival best interests.  In the next few days, weeks, even months, law enforcement and federal forces will have a hair-trigger tolerance of large and raucous gatherings.  At the same time, there are people on the extremes of both sides of the shouting match.  So extreme, in fact, that they may feel so desperate as to act in terroristic ways.  We have already witnessed pipe bombs placed in political locations.  On Christmas morning, we witnessed the detonation of an RV in downtown Nashville.  I think it would be unwise to assume that we won’t see more explosive threats in the coming days and weeks.  Whether they materialize or are thwarted will remain to be seen. Still, you should avoid high target areas: federal and state buildings, rallies and large gatherings, media and press buildings, and the main roads in front of and leading to these places. 2- Disruptions in the Systems You can also expect periodic or even catastrophic disruptions to the just-in-time delivery systems we all rely upon for food and services.  When martial law is declared in an area, everything stops.  We all know from last year what a “lockdown” really means.  Now, you have the opportunity and should prepare as if another lockdown is about to occur.  If martial law is declared in your area, if curfews are enacted, if fire and police services are required elsewhere in your community or region, you will suddenly find yourself on your own.  This is where self-reliance as a prepper is so critical.  If the roads are shut down, deliveries to your local grocery store cease to occur.  People cannot get to their jobs, so the means of production also grind to a halt. The Christmas morning Nashville vehicle bomb was believed to be partly to destroy technology infrastructure.  If there are instances of domestic terrorism, critical infrastructures could be destroyed in your area.  The goal of some is to transform the country through the fires of destruction.  Others only intend to sow chaos.  Our nation’s systems are fragile.  When one fails, the effects can ripple out over other systems. Plan appropriately now.  If you have meant to get to the grocery store, gas up your car, or make that purchase of a prepping supply or tool, you are on a short timeline.  Things could fall apart relatively quickly.  We may again see runs on stores and even looting, draining inventories.  You must position your supplies to survive at least 30 days, if not significantly longer. 3- What Are the Scenarios? One of these scenarios will play out.  Trump will resign.  Trump will be impeached sometime after the 19th.  Trump will remain in office and refuse to leave through some combination of the Acts and Executive Orders.  Trump will be forced out of the White House.  Trump will seek refuge somewhere else in the world as Democrats pursue legal actions.  The Vice President will evoke the 25th Amendment.  House and Senate members could be unseated or forced to resign.  State capitol buildings across the country could be occupied.  Hostages could be taken.  Some combination of these scenarios could occur anytime within the next nine days.  Any of these single scenarios could lead to highly charged flare-ups throughout the nation.  I would not have said with confidence last year that any of these things could happen within days, but that’s all changed. Every day that passes, the likelihood of nothing at all occurring is becoming increasingly less likely.  It is not expected that any Inauguration will be held publicly, as in years past.  The optics of crowd size are too prominent these days. No President will want to be publicly Inaugurated when that event has to occur under military guard and in contrast to protests that could also be potential threats.  More than likely, when Biden is inaugurated, it will be a private ceremony of some type.  It will be held in the House or Senate to show national unity, or it will be done in private, but it will likely not be a public event, as in the past.  Much of the coverage of inauguration day may be spent on the whereabouts of Trump instead.  Will he hold a rally in Washington, D.C?  Will he hole-up in Mar-A Lago? Trump may seek to pardon himself for anything that can be perceived as criminal by the left.  If he is later impeached and removed, he will not be able to run for public office again in 2024.  There are rumors that Deutsche Bank will be unloading some of Trump’s loans, and this may reveal aspects of his personal finances that he would rather not be publicly scrutinized.  Trump will likely make a final showing and then move his operations to Mar-A Lago. Any of these scenarios are potential flashpoints for localized or national civil unrest.  Unless your desire is to be drawn into the conflict, your best place, as in any disaster, is bugging-in.  Prepare now to potentially need to shelter in place for an extended period of time if civil unrest flairs up in your area.  Even though this is your best place to be in the coming weeks, you also want to review your bug-out locations and routes.  If you have never before established a survival cache, now may be the time to do so.  Taking that camping trip you’ve been thinking about may be the right choice if removing yourself from an urban hotbed is what you anticipate. 4- Do You Have Time? Whatever you decide is the best course of action for you, the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.  The storm clouds are looming on the horizon.  Your window of opportunity to prepare is rapidly shrinking, and some of the more extensive preps you might have wanted to act upon are likely no longer possible at this late date. Given this remarkably compressed timeline, you need to focus your preps on the immediate and the achievable.  It may seem as though I harp on this repeatedly, at least it does to me, but your food and your water are the essential elements.  Whether that means stocking up on food and bottled water now before runs on stores occur or developing a plan to fill bathtubs and containers with water and eating through your supplies, the nervousness and anticipation people feel now and over the next few days will result in runs-on stores. Inventory your current supplies.  Do you have the minimum you need to get you through the next 30 days?  If you don’t, what can you obtain now to ensure that you can make it at least 30 days?  You have time, but the window of opportunity is closing.  Now would be the time to spring for that case of soup or the less expensive staples you should already have on hand, like rice, beans, and Ramen.  If you are well stocked and prepared, you are better positioned just to replenish some of the items you may be low on right now. Remember, too, that COVID-19 hasn’t gone away, either.  Already, medical facilities are being impacted.  Where I live in Southern California, the local hospital ICU’s are now overcapacity.  You may not be treated for medical emergencies with EMT or health services that may be affected with other injuries for riots or further acts of terrorism.  Avoid activities that could result in personal injury or could lead to extended periods of exposure to COVID-19.  Approach crowded places with caution and take precautionary measures. To survive the widespread civil unrest possible in the coming days, I recommend you prepare to hunker down.  Have a plan to bug-out, even though doing so may force you into the surrounding conflict.  Consider visiting friends and family in safer areas, or a plan just to get away.  If you have to enact that plan, you will be glad to have it in place.  If you haven’t set up a survival cache along the route, you may want to do that now.  If you haven’t been to your bug out location in a while, now may be the time to go there and make sure your supplies there are in order.  If things fall apart while you are there, you will already be in location. Conclusion Our great Union is being tested.  We are genuinely testing in the coming days whether this nation or any nation conceived in Liberty and so dedicated, can long endure.  We do believe we should be actively trying to hold our grand social experiment together, we feel very strongly that your prepping and your and your family’s survival is essential to our country’s survival as well.  We don’t believe that giving in to extremist inclinations at this time will serve anyone’s long term survival well.  As always, please stay safe out there.

Outline

1. Supply & Equip Yourself
2. Physical Readiness
3. Mental Preparedness
4. Using Your 30-Days

With the events that unfolded in 2020 and the events already taking place at the beginning of 2021, many are beginning to realize the need to prepare themselves should an event occur, forcing them to take care of themselves.  In this video, we’ll lay out the steps you can take over the next 30 days to keep you and your family safe if you had to survive for 30 days on your own.  Most disasters don’t last forever or forever change the way we live, so knowing you can make it for a month after a disaster will be enough to carry you through many of life’s most formidable challenges.   This blog will outline a strategy for you that you can follow for 30 days.  We’re currently developing a complete series of blogs we’ll release soon that will go into much greater detail than what we’ll discuss in this blog.  Still, in light of recent events, we felt it necessary to speed up my timeline in creating this blog.  Most of what we’ll discuss in this video is high-level information to give you a solid starting point.  If you can understand and process what we’re going to teach you, you’ll be in a much better position. 1- Supply & Equip Yourself Having adequate supplies on hand when disaster strikes is critical.  Knowing how to utilize those supplies is essential.  So, as much as you prepare your stores of food, water, tools, and whatever else you feel you need, you also need to equip yourself with the skills and knowledge to appropriately use these things.  Two exercises I want you to start on day one are to start reading labels.  Look at both the nutritional label and the expiration label of the foods you buy.  For instance, did you know that most canned foods will last from 2 to 5 years when stored properly?  There are 1 of 3  types of printed dates on most foods: Best if Used Before, Sell By, and Use By.  Best is used before isn’t about safety.  It’s about the freshness of the food.  Sell by is a manufacturer’s way to tell a retailer to pull the food after that date.  It, too, is not a health and safety date. Use by is the last date that guarantees the best quality of a product.  Nonperishable items like grains and dried and canned goods can still be used well past their label dates.  As a general rule, discard any dented, bulging, or damaged can and approach any long term stored item with caution.   What we want you to start doing, though, is looking at these advisory dates on your food.  Start purchasing foods with longer shelf life and get them in your core prepping supplies.  You may not be able to buy a vacuum-sealed emergency 30 day supply of food in neatly packed mylar containers.  They are expensive, and that’s okay.  In the first 30 days, I want you to focus on the basics.  Buy a case of 24 cans a week of long-lasting foods.  Buy 24 cans of soup, 24 cans of mixed vegetables, 24 cans of tuna or chicken meat.  You will find it is much cheaper to buy in bulk and large quantities, but you can start with just a few extra cans per paycheck.  Shop for what you will eat now, but store away what you will eat later. When it comes to food, add to your list beans, rice, ramen, pasta, salt, sugar, cooking oil, and flour.  Always be picking up at least one of these items extra for your supply.  You will have to reseal most of these items for long term storage to keep out moisture, insects, and rodents, but start building your supplies.  Mason jars, even repurposed jars from other products you buy, are perfect for this purpose.  Next, and here is the real secret, start eating your supplies.  Don’t just put it away for when a disaster strikes.  You need to know how to cook the food, and your body needs to know how to process it.  You may find that you really can’t do beans and rice.  It’s better to know that now than five days into the aftermath of a disaster.  You may find you don’t know how to bake at all.  Now is the time to equip yourself with these skills. Using your food supplies informs your decisions on the other items you need, as well.  You likely won’t be using your powdered milk, canned butter, or hardtack, but you should be trying to utilize the core staples from your supplies.  This gives you a 360-degree view of your readiness.  Do you rely on an electric can opener?  It’s time for a handheld can opener.  Do you lack cooking skills?  Here is your chance to learn.  Do you now realize you need other foods and spices to round out your food stores?  Here is your opportunity to add those things to your shopping list.  Do you now realize your cookware isn’t going to last as long as a cast-iron pan?  Now is your time to get that item you need and learn to cook with it.  You are training your brain through practical application.  To this end, I have one more exercise for you in these first 30 days.  That is visualizing the water you will need to survive. As a general guideline, one person will require 1 gallon per day to cook, drink, and wash.  There are many variations to this, like physical activity level, exposure to the elements, rationing, and fighting off dehydration. Still, for our purposes, the 1 gallon per day is a good starting point.  What you need to do is to be able to visualize that.  Maybe you can’t afford the two stackable Wurx containers or the 10 WaterBricks like I have available at CityPrepping.com.  After all, such solutions are expensive, but you still need to wrap your head around that amount of water and the space it would require.  An emergency water BOB meant for a bathtub, which can be filled in the minutes of or preceding a disaster, will hold roughly 100 gallons.  That could get three persons through the 30 days following a disaster.  That might be part of your solution, but to fully understand the water paradigm, I want you to start buying and stacking in one place, gallon-by-gallon, the 30 gallons per person you need.  One thing to note is that when all in one place, this will weigh almost 250 pounds.  The exercise here is really to wrap your head around and begin tackling the volume of your water needs. While you are at it, and in the interest of equipping yourself, start drinking one gallon of water per day.  That is around 4 liters.  Many people are walking through their daily lives in a constant state of dehydration.  You need to understand what being properly hydrated feels like to understand better when you are not.  Surviving the trauma of dramatically reduced fluid intake begins with recognizing the signs: the foggy thinking, the dryness, the decreasing capabilities of your body’s movements. So, to supply and equip yourself, week-by-week, you can keep track on a printed calendar.  When you add food items to your stores, note it on that day on the calendar.  When you take food items from your stores, note it on the calendar.  When you make your water consumption goal, write H20 on the day, and circle it.  Your goal is to drink a gallon of water on five of the seven days per week.  This will build toward a visual representation of your progress over the 30 days.  That will help you build a solid foundation and inform you how you need to progress after the 30 days.  There are other aspects to “equipping” yourself beyond food and water.  There are the actual equipment and sundries and medicines, and so on that, you will need to start putting in your storage.  For these first 30 days, review some of the other essential prepping supply videos on this channel and others.  Learn what you need beyond food and water, but our goal for these 30 days is to build your food supplies, learn to use your supplies and what you still need, and understand the water paradigm and your place in it.  If you add other items beyond food and water to your inventory like feminine hygiene products, camping products, or medicine, still note it on your calendar. 2- Physical Readiness The majority of people, even well-supplied people, will not survive the first 30 days of a major disaster without significant outside assistance.  Think of it like trying to run a marathon in loafers or heels.  Our shoes are all wrong for the task we are putting them through.  On top of that, though, nobody runs a marathon without preparing for it.  If you’re winded climbing the stairs or the exercise you get is moving from the couch to the mailbox every day, you will have a hard time after a disaster even if you have all of the fanciest and most expensive survival gear and supplies.  Your body just won’t be able to handle it. Before the lockdowns of 2020, many of us may have made new year’s resolutions to get to the gym and commit to fitness.  Many gyms rely upon the income from January and February alone to make it through most of their year.  New memberships soar with people telling themselves, “this is the year.”  Inevitably, the same cycle plays out year after year.  Enthusiasm is met with sore muscles, which lead to skipped days, which lead to feelings of failure, which leads to giving up.  At least 30 out of every 100 gym members are still paying on a gym membership that they haven’t used in over a month.  It’s just a fact. Prepping is also about physically prepping yourself.  It’s hard to do even just a little bit 7 days a week, which is why I suggest you do a little bit 5 days a week.  That could mean going for a jog or popping a workout DVD in your player, but you have to do something.  It could be just walking every day.  It could mean you do it five straight days in a row, or you just can’t one day and need to rest.  My suggestion is to start small but strive for consistency.  You can always build later.  Set yourself a target like 30 pushups and 50 sit-ups per day, then try to hit that target five of the seven days per week.  Set yourself a goal of walking three miles per day, and try to hit that target 5 of the seven days.  Set a plan to do that DVD workout and try to do it for five of the seven days.  Go on a hike on the weekends and get your 30 minutes or more in while invigorating yourself.  If you set several options for yourself, you can put a checkmark on your calendar for meeting your physical fitness goals for five of seven days.  This will give you a visual representation of your progress.  This is so critical to genuinely wrapping your head around your progress.  By the end of the month, you can re-evaluate, either adding in other options or increasing the work’s strenuousness when your body is ready. If you can meet your goal of physical fitness activities five of seven days a week for an entire month, and you commit to drinking the gallon of water per day for a whole month, you may see other problems disappear.  You will likely feel like you have greater mental clarity.  You may feel like you have more energy.  You will be building a foundation you can build upon in the next cycle of 30 days.  You will be increasing your chances of surviving if a disaster strikes on day 31.  We cannot stress this aspect enough, and we will address it in future videos and content this year, but physical readiness is the long game of prepping to survive.  You can’t buy it off the shelf.  You can’t unwrap it the minute you need it.  You need to start small now and stay consistent over a long period of time to be ready when you need to be.   Finally, have both a strategy for eating better by preparing your food and for physical fitness.  If you find yourself in lockdown, you have an opportunity to focus on your nutrition and your cooking of quality foods.  You will save money, as most food is marked up around 300% for restaurants, and you will also be able to understand better what’s fueling your body.  If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry, you know that restaurant food isn’t usually very healthy.  Extra fats, sugars, and salts are how your cravings are triggered.  It’s how they keep you coming back.  That burger, fries, and soda you get once a week may taste good now, but it’s going to take you a long time to burn that out of your system.  Set a goal, as well, to prepare your food, again five of the seven days a week, at least.  Make it a challenge to never throw out a bag of salad greens or fresh produce again.  Prepare yourself in these 30 days for the physical challenge of survival starting on day 31. 3- Mental Preparedness Survival is mental.  It’s having the right knowledge, knowing how to apply it, and having the will and desire to survive.  Your mental preparedness, like your physical preparedness, is something you need to build up over these 30 days to have a chance on day 31.  We view this as equal parts feeding your soul and strengthening your skills.  Like the physical regimen I outline above, you need to focus on accomplishing one of these three things on five of the seven days, and you should try to vary them up to get the full effect.  First, read and research to learn a new skill or better understand a prepping practice.  We try to read at least 30 minutes a day.  Sometimes we can only get a chapter in because of time.  Set a time goal to strive for according to your schedule.  Here you are reading with intent.  Have you always been interested in canning fruit or making jam, but you never did.  Now is the time.  Your goal is to acquire a fundamental understanding of a wide range of practices, even if your understanding is only theoretical. You may not be able to go fishing, but you will still want to know how to tie a Fisherman’s knot.  Once you learn it, you will know it for life, and you will be able to say you know how to tie a bow, an overhand knot, and a Fisherman’s knot.  We used to tell my cub scouts that every knot you learn will be of use to you when you need it most.  You may never need to know a Monkey Fist knot, but when you are in a situation where you need to have one, you will be more likely to survive.  Knots are a quick way to build your skills that can lead to understanding weaving and knitting.  They are easy to learn with just two pieces of rope. Maybe your reading and research is just to brew beer, bake bread, or garden. Perhaps, it’s to learn the ideal growing seasons of certain vegetables and collect heirloom seeds for next season.  Maybe it is to fix your engine or install a light fixture.  By reading and researching with the intent of learning a skill, you are conditioning your mind to become more self-sufficient and more confident.  Now, we say both reading and research because you get the most from reading, but sometimes you get just what you need to know from a good YouTube video.  If you want to learn the basics of brewing, for instance, there are whole channels dedicated to that.  If you want to learn to prep, well, there are many videos right here that will get you on that path, and there are several blogs at CityPrepping.com that carry much of the same information.  Over 30 days, you will start to turn your brain towards self-sufficiency and away from over-dependence on systems and services that will eventually fail you. Second, read to ask the right questions.  We are a big advocate of learning from financial gurus like Kiyosaki, Ramsey, even Orman.  You have to understand every resource, including financial, coming in, and going out.  If you haven’t read them to ask yourself the right questions, you should.  The same is true for philosophy and scripture.  Reading books that help you define your place and positioning in the world, both physically and spiritually, helps you develop your internal resources and ask yourself questions.  Maybe you just want to understand your physical placement in your world.  Read history books about your community.  Pick up a guide on foraging and understand the plants in your environment.  Read and research with the intent of understanding yourself and your world.  I will let you ponder the possibilities and topics involved with that. Third, take time to reflect and ask yourself questions.  Develop a habit of dialoguing with yourself.  Ask yourself where you want to be, how you’re going to get there, and what you can do right now to take a step, even just one step, in that direction.  Maybe you want to journal or list out the pros and cons.  Train your brain to be curious, creative, calculating, and self-reflective. When you read on a topic for improvement of skills, or assist you with self-reflection, write the titles of what you have read on the calendar.  Here, too, it is essential to visualize your progress and keep you consistent throughout.  Thirty days of preparing your mind in this manner may seem like nothing to you.  We are less apt to see the changes in ourselves before others see them in us.  I promise you, though, if you can stick to these mental preparedness practices long enough to make them a bit of a habit, you will find yourself in a position to tackle whatever challenges come your way.  You’ll be agile in a crisis and capable of surviving. 4- Using Your 30-Days We know that’s a tremendous amount to absorb, and it may seem like too much.  It really isn’t.  It is just trying to concentrate on the efforts you may have sporadically tried in the past.  To this end, recording your notes and marking off your calendar will help to keep your efforts focused, concentrated, and progressing.  If you are new to prepping, you can be confident you’re making progress.  If prepping is an old hack to you, you’ll have a means in your hands to reassert the core principles of your prepping.     To use the calendar, just circle the day you are starting your regimen and the day that is 30 days from that starting point.  When you purchase supplies or equipment, document it.  In this way, you will begin to inventory your supplies.  When you store away another gallon of water, document it.  Write out H20 and circle it on the days you consume your gallon of water.   When you complete one of the physical readiness or mental preparedness goals for that day, mark that too on the day you achieved it.  Strive for five of seven days with each of the goals you set.  Remember, you want to start to build healthy habits and a survivor mindset that will later assure you that you have the internal resources to survive. The final thing for the calendar record is to write a few sentences about how you feel right now and what you hope to gain from these 30 days on the back of the page.  Don’t bother looking at it until the end.  At the end of the 30 days, reread it and reflect on whether you think you have made any personal progress.  Are you better prepared?  What do you need to tackle next to best position yourself to survive in the future?   Conclusion We are confident that if you can work on this plan, you will know what you need to work on in phase II of your personal preparedness plan.  We assure you that we will have follow-up videos, and this channel will be an excellent resource for you.  My goal is to lay out an easy-to-follow, step-by-step plan for prepping over this next year.  My goal is to define for you the core of prepping and provide easy instructions for getting your preps in order. As always, please stay safe out there.

Outline

1. Discuss the Probable
2. Form a Bulk Buying Club
3. Band Together
4. Gift Them Preparedness
5. Networking & Service Projects
6. Practice What You Preach
7. Be the Person Who Says, “I told you so.”

Introduction In a recent poll on the CityPrepping Community tab, we asked how long our subscribers have been prepping.  Two-thirds of the respondents indicated they had been prepping for under a year.  Whether you are new to prepping or you have been doing it since you lived in a commune in the sixties, you have probably received your share of sideways glances and skepticism from both friends and family.  You may have seen some of them with a look of quiet judgment on their faces, as they seemed to be evaluating your sanity.  This past year, however, may have awoken many of your family and friends to prepping.  Others may now realize that having some food and water stored away, understanding the threats we face, having a plan in place when disaster strikes, and increasing your self-sufficiency and independence from a system that is likely to fail is the right path to be on in life.  We want to encourage those folks, and convince the others to join us on our journey to greater self-sufficiency, so we can all reap the benefits.  In this video, We will examine seven ways you can convince your family and friends to, at the very least, get a little prepared along with you.  After all, we are stronger together and weaker alone. 1- Discuss the Probable This last year has given us much to discuss.  There were very few people outside of this channel and some other prepping communities debating a pandemic’s possibilities.  Even then, it was difficult to capture exactly how much of a dramatic impact that was going to have on our global and local cultures and economies.  As you discuss with family and friends your measures to prepare for what you see now or a repeat of what you just lived through, use it as an opportunity to segue into discussions about prepping for natural disasters, civil unrest, or anything that we can’t even imagine that could force us to lockdown at home for a month or more.  Avoid more extensive discussions like nuclear dirty bombs, EMPs, and comets, so you don’t seem too far out there.  If anything can be learned from this last year, it is that we should all be preparing for, at the very least, what we see right in front of our faces. Discuss the most likely disaster in your area.  Keep it local and agree to work together in some way.  Use the news and your area’s history to determine what you should be prepping for and what you would need to feel confident that the impact of whatever disaster occurs will be minimal.  Discuss the probable and work together to build a mutual plan. 2- Form a Bulk Buying Club Subtly building a network and simultaneously stocking up everyone in your network can be achieved through a bulk buying club.  Basically, that’s just a group of people, likely neighbors, family, or nearby friends, that join together to purchase goods in bulk.  The group increases their purchasing power in this way, and they end up paying a lower price on items and having a better inventory of products in their supplies.  The easiest way to get this started is to find a bulk bargain and text a friend.  If you find a deal on toilet paper or fresh eggs or local produce or honey, you probably can’t use that much.  If you text a friend and offer to split the cost and product with them, you will immediately start to build up your informal buying club.  Once your friend realizes the quality, quantity, and savings, you can discuss formalizing a club or adding new members.  Maybe you can start your own local social media group.  There are some severe economic challenges for many right now, and in this coming year, so a bulk buying club is a great way to care for your personal community’s needs, and it allows people to focus their minds on the future when things can be better.  If you have a Sam’s Club card and your friend has a Costco membership, you will never miss a deal buying in bulk.  You can also leverage farmer’s markets and online exchanges and sellers.  Just a little extra time dividing up the product is all it takes.  Usually, the savings is enough to get people on board.  You may have never thought of buying a five-pound bottle of honey before, but I am sure you would rather pay thirteen dollars for that instead of the twenty or more dollars you would pay for the equivalent eighty ounces packaged in twelve-ounce bottles.  Whether it’s beans, butter, alcohol, paper products, diapers, flour, sugar, coffee, or trash bags, buying in bulk can allow you to buy more and at significantly lower prices.  You may someday join together to buy a whole cow and have the freshest, tastiest, and healthiest meats from local ranchers or you may just keep it small.  Through a bulk buying club, you are subtly convincing people to start building up their supplies.  You are convincing people to begin to think about future needs.  You are introducing them to prepping. 3- Band Together Use our physical distancing as an opportunity to reach out and band together.  We are all feeling the fatigue of isolation.  Check-in on your neighbors and friends, and let them reciprocate by checking in on you.  Start a meal swap with your best friend to alleviate the burden of cooking one night a week and share recipes and supplies.  Start a small baking network and feed your friends.  When you give them a loaf of bread or a batch of some cookies, they may just turn around and give you some preserves they made, or fruit from their trees, or a birthday cake.  You never know where even one connection may lead, but these are the opportunities to discuss banding together and tackling the world’s problems together. You know, we don’t think anyone gets to the end of the road and wishes they had spent less time with their friends and families, and we are stronger together.  If you can get even one person on board with you even just a little, the chances are that the person you bring on board knows someone, and that person knows someone, and that person knows someone else.  Before long, you may even be able to build a mutual assistance group.  Get your buddies together for a virtual poker game.  Get your church or scouting group together for a service project.  Join a hobby or mutual interest group online.  Look for ways to band together in new ways.  When we can all safely gather again, you will be able to springboard those connections into a strong network.   4- Gift Them Preparedness An emergency preparedness kit may not be on anyone’s top list of gifts. A basic kit lets people know you are thinking about them through both good times and bad.  Is there a new baby in a family, or did someone become injured recently?  That’s an excellent opportunity to give a decent first aid kit.  Do your grandkids or nieces and nephews live near you?  That’s a great opportunity to buy a set of walkie talkies and have some fun now and a vital means of communication later.  Most boys channel their fear of the world they are growing into by naturally wanting to prep and taking an interest in survival-type things.  That’s an opportunity for adults to buy them little survival tools and multi-tools that they will have on hand should things turn bad.  Did your friend recently purchase a new car?  That’s a great opportunity to give them an emergency road kit.  Do you know someone who occasionally goes hunting, fishing, camping, or on long road trips?  If so, that’s a great opportunity to get them some supplies.  Even the gift of a warm winter coat is an opportunity.  Consider gifting one of the many survival jackets on the market.  A home brewing or cheese-making kit is a fun gift for someone you know, we guarantee you, and someone will benefit from the experience now and possibly in the future. Preparedness gifts aren’t always the funnest or flashiest gifts a person could receive, but they show that you care for a person, and they are gifts that are meant to last in an all too often disposable culture.  Even if you can’t motivate your friends and family to prepare at a level that would make you comfortable, you can be assured they have at least some of the critical things they will need when disaster strikes. 5- Networking & Service Projects Any prepper knows that they may have to go it alone at some point, but every prepper also knows the saying, “Many hands make for light work.”  The fact is that prepping in isolation is hard. Prepping in a community is easy.  You can build a community by prepping through your networks and service projects.  A church group that works to feed the poor, a scouting group that performs a service project, a community group that does any project to foster a better life in their area are all opportunities to share and cultivate a collective desire to prepare for the future. An altruistic volunteer group or community service project is a great way to build a network of like-minded people, but this can also be accomplished through merely joining occupation, trade, or civic groups.  Leverage your area networks to foster a subgroup of like-minded individuals.   If you can direct any of these groups’ work, steer them toward addressing the crisis we currently face.  How can your group begin to tackle the problems of unemployment, hunger, or the digital divide our children face in education?  Can you steer your group to better readiness and make some lifelong friends along the way? 6- Practice What You Preach Practice what you preach.  If you are tired of being locked up, pull out that camping gear and get out to the wilderness.  Many folks who call themselves “preppers” really have little experience with it.  They binge-watch the latest survivor shows and have a host of supplies and tools they have never actually used.  Are you sitting on a twenty-five-pound bag of pinto beans, but you have never even cooked a batch?  Do you have cool camping supplies but haven’t stepped foot in the wilderness, in you can’t remember how long?  Do you have great hiking boots, but you are horribly out of shape?  Have you bought a ton of books, but you still only know how to tie a square knot, can’t cook, never built a fire, never knitted a scarf?  If any of those scenarios sound even slightly familiar, you need to start practicing what you preach.   Others will see your independence and skills.  They will turn to you for advice about getting started on their abilities.  Some will even say, “Well, if he can do it, I can,” and it will be enough to kickstart them down their road.  Don’t just talk about being healthy, self-sufficient, or prepared.  Demonstrate these traits in your daily life.  Talk the talk, but also walk the walk.  Start with yourself and let others notice the change in you. 7- Be the Person Who Says, “I told you so.” While we never advocate for rubbing someone’s mistakes in their face, as they say, we do think it is essential to gently say, “I told you so.”  It is necessary to let people know how much better you are fairing because of your preparedness actions when smaller disasters occur.  Many look back on the challenges they have faced in life, but not all look back at the hard lessons of life.  Talk to anyone who grew up poor, and they can teach you volumes about how to stretch a dollar or a meal.  Talk to someone who was just recently unemployed. It got a little tight and scary, but they got another job, and that person may not tell you what they were enacting in their lives to lessen the impact the next time they are unemployed.  The fact is, it sometimes takes a prolonged period of tragedy or the same tragedies occurring again and again until we finally accept that we need to make a change.  Many people don’t prep because they repeat the most comfortable patterns along systems that continually fail, again and again.  Think of it like that friend who repeatedly dates the wrong type of person.  How many times will they continue to make that mistake?  At some point, you have to take them aside and say both, “Look, I told you” and “Let’s make a plan for you to find someone better.” One of my friends once told me about how his wife had scoffed at his signing up for hotel rewards points.  He also was traveling quite a bit with his job.  In a year, he took her on an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii for a week.  He paid for it all with rewards points.  His wife never scoffed at his rewards programs again, and you know he said, “I told you so,” more than once. Of course, that is a light example, but don’t be afraid to have an open discussion about the tragedies in your own life and how you now have a plan in place for future catastrophes.  Remind a friend that you warned them about this or that and help them build a plan to skirt disaster in the future.  Point to the news and let your friends and family know you saw it coming, which is why you are personally getting prepared.  You don’t have to let people know the quantities and things you have on hand, but you need to get the conversation started to build your prepping community. Conclusion Convincing friends and family to begin prepping always starts with a conversation.  By building your networks and community, you can also forge those relationships to assist you in your own prepping endeavors.  Forming a bulk buying club or a meal swap can be the spark that you need to ignite a larger conversation.  Your friends and family may never fully embrace the prepping lifestyle, but their common sense may motivate them to at least become a little more prepared. How have you gotten your friends and family on board with prepping?  What was your tactic?  What worked best for you?  As always, please stay safe out there.