Okay. How do I do a video like this without patronizing my viewers and coming off as being tone deaf to the difficulties that people are going through? Here’s the thing. Hard times are coming and it’s gonna get worse.

The world is in turmoil and it’s not getting any better anytime soon and that’s a reality that we’re all gonna be faced with regardless of our starting point in life.

Now as a person who grew up incredibly poor it is still perhaps inappropriate for me to come on here today and say money doesn’t matter and that’s not what I’m saying okay but I want to have this heart-to-heart pep talk from a person who is forever poor in the sense that as a person who grew up poor in the truest sense of having to steal food in order to survive as much as it was a treacherous experience it was something I would never have any other way.

Now you see all this crap behind me, right? This is one person—could probably survive for the rest of their life.

Okay, more than that—you could feed an army. This is just one aisle in our warehouse.

The stuff is what most Westerners, in particular, look at when they’re thinking about long-term survival. It’s easy for me to say this, and I know people are gonna think, “Oh yeah, well you have all this,” and it’s true, right?

Which is why I’m being sympathetic to the fact that if you’re not in a position where you have the material base covered, that it’s gonna be difficult to relate to this point of view. But just hear me out as a person who’s truly been there.

Which is not to diminish your situation that you’re struggling with right now. I can tell you that the most important thing—and the reason why I call this crap behind me—is because I know at the end of the day, when it all comes down to it, there are five things that are gonna matter more than any of this stuff.

This is gonna sound pedantic, and I’m going to be at risk of using all kinds of truisms in this video. But these are the cornerstones of preparedness.

The first and foremost thing that nobody wants to talk about—that’s your body. If you can’t move at a moment’s notice, you’re gonna die.

The second thing is your intellect, your acumen, your knowledge. You don’t have to have a high IQ—you just have to have the knowledge that you need in order to survive.

Third, and perhaps the most important, especially in an acute crisis, is your ability to manage your parasympathetic nervous system. Your emotions. Your stress control.

At the end of the day, when it comes to surviving long-term off-grid, there’s going to be a series of nodal events that unfold. For the most part, it’s just going to be living day-to-day, tending to the garden, butchering the meat, trying to survive.

But there’s going to be those key points where you’re faced with a stressful life-or-death, fight-or-flight situation. The other thing is community—the most important thing is community.

The more I have this shit, the more shit I accumulate, the more I realize that people are the only thing that matters. That’s the four things.

Now if you’re spiritual, then I guess that’s going to be number five. Never, ever have I met a poor person who had a lot of children.

Never. You might be saying, “Wait a minute, I’m poor and I have a lot of children.” You’re financially poor, but you’re not poor.

No, no—I get emotional when I talk about this because I know people who are just making ends meet, living hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck, struggling. And I see the conditions that their children live in—and I envy that.

For their children. Their children are gonna be tough.

Their children are gonna be hungry for more. The best gift you can give your child is struggle.

I want my kids to struggle. I want them to have it tough.

I want them to have it tough. I want them to have that fire, that hunger inside them, that drives a person day after day, unrelentingly, marching forward, non-stop.

You can’t teach that to a person. You can’t inculcate that into a person after a certain period in their life.

You just can’t. It’s either there, or it isn’t.

When a child is hungry and they can’t have that hunger satiated, it puts something in their brain. Okay? It puts something in them that they carry with them for the rest of their life.

And you can’t buy that. It’s that—that is going to fuel the will to live and the will to endure.

In a grid-down situation, in a social collapse situation—or maybe you just lose your job and you end up on the street—street smarts take hold. Your ability to navigate that kind of environment is so critical.

You look at all the greats in any domain—they all had some kind of trauma. Some deep-seated.

I’m not just talking about, you know, their girlfriend left them or their dad didn’t play with them enough. I’m talking like real trauma.

I don’t wish trauma on people. I’m not romanticizing that.

And in fact, what I’m saying is more of a controlled trauma. I’m thinking that either you have that hunger, you have that spark, you have that fire inside you longing for more—which will carry you through very difficult situations—or you don’t.

Period. Point blank.

There are billionaires in this world who want nothing more, when they’re on their deathbed, than to have had more progeny. You know, if you’re a person who is struggling to make ends meet but you have a large family—that’s wealth.

That really is true wealth. Because think about what a billionaire is trying to do—he’s trying to live, right?

Everything he surrounds himself with—or she—is all for the purpose of getting some dopamine kick and living to tell the tale for just one more day. That’s what it’s all about.

Suffice it to say, I’m pretty sure even those people who, in their final days, claim that they don’t care about people or that that’s not a huge priority for them—I’m pretty sure that when a person is on their deathbed, they’re thinking about these things. Regardless.

And they wish they would have had more. This is where I can, you know, I can understand Elon Musk’s drive to repopulate the planet—because he does get that.

I’ll give him that. He does get that part of all of this—that it’s not about you.

And if you think it’s about you—you’re not gonna survive. If you’re just doing this just for you—you’re not gonna survive.

There’s that final stage of life, using Erikson’s development model. It’s generativity versus stagnation.

If you don’t become generous and become a beacon of light, and somebody to be emulated within your community—somebody to be somebody else’s something—then what’s the point, right? What’s the point of doing any of this?

To just wall yourself in and live like a recluse? I mean, that’s no way to live life.

You have to be a part of something greater. And so the more stuff I accumulate, the more I really ultimately realize—is that it’s meaningless without people.

It truly is meaningless. And as much as I don’t like people—and they annoy me a lot, okay, I wouldn’t want to be around them 24/7—you still need them.

Not just as a human resource. But I’m a person—so for that reason alone—we need people.

Now what I hope people take away from this video, what I wanted to communicate was—it doesn’t matter if you don’t have money. It matters, but I’m not diminishing that.

I’m not trying to be patronizing or being tone-deaf to whatever you’ve experienced. Because I assure you, I’ve been there.

And obviously everybody is on a different part of the spectrum. But I’ve been pretty damn far down that spectrum—as far as you can be, really, in Western society.

So most of the people who watch this video will be able to relate. Although some of you who might have had your origins in war-torn countries—you’ve had experiences that I could never even relate to.

So the most important thing, above all else, is your personal experiences. What sort of trials and tribulations have you been through in your life?

That’s what’s gonna matter most. That’s what’s going to determine if you’re able to ration this food, if you’re able to manage it without being overrun by an opposing rival community.

If you’re able to maintain the social politics of your community and maintain rule of law and order. If you’re able to control your emotions.

If you’re able to move. Every prepper should want to be in a position in which—if they were to lose everything—they would be alright.

That’s how you know you’re a true survivor and a prepper. If you have everything and you lost it all—this building went up in flames—would I be alright?

If I can confidently say yes, then I’m a prepper. If I can’t, then I got work to do.

If you have something deeply encoded—that is rote and second nature—that is going to be leveraged by your community, that’s going to make you invaluable, no matter if your house burns down or not. If you’re a person who can just maintain their cool under very dire circumstances—that’s going to be valuable.

I used to work in a place, in a mental health setting, and some of the people who could keep their cool the most—were the janitors. You really start to see who the real leaders are.

We’ve created this artifice of strata, this hierarchy in society, where certain people get to the top because they get the best grades in school. And they can climb the social ladder and they can impress a lot of people.

But when it comes down to crunch time—you might be a manager of a company in a world where the lights are still on and the rule of law is still functioning—but then you turn those lights off, and then are you still able to manage those people under those conditions?

Based on what I’ve seen in my 25-year professional career doing various jobs—some of them professional in a clinical setting—what I’ve realized is that never, ever, ever, ever, ever judge a person and their utility on the basis of whether or not they have a degree or something like that. Yes, it’s important—it shows commitment, it shows discipline, it shows drive.

But that doesn’t mean they’re gonna be able to hold it down when the shit hits the fan. So those are the things you have to value in life.

You know how they say the best things in life are free? Well, in prepping, when it boils down to it, it’s also true.

The most valuable things to a prepper are free. They’re what come naturally.

Some of these things you have to hone—like your skill set. You have to learn how to manage stress.

You have to take care of your body—especially in the era of abundant carbohydrates and saturated fats. But anybody can work out.

You don’t need a gym membership to work out. You don’t need tens of thousands of dollars to go.

That’s the real trick, right? “Oh, you gotta go and pay tens of thousands of dollars.”

What is that Good Will Hunting quote? “You spent $10,000 on an education you could have got for $250 in library fees.”

Again, guys—I relate to your struggles. But that’s also an asset.

That’s what you need to understand. I look at my kids sometimes and I’m like—man, I gotta make things a bit more challenging.

Because I’m not getting you guys ready for the rigors of what’s coming. I know it might seem like I’m being disingenuous here—I’m not.

When I see children who are struggling—just on that edge of struggling, where they just have enough but they don’t get what they want—you know what I mean? Where they have a little bit, but they’re still, on some level, not completely satiated—I’m like, man, those kids are gonna be something someday.

Because they’re always gonna have that fire. That hunger.

And that’s a hunger that cannot be put there unless you get it under a certain age. I’m not sure if there’s a psychological term—none that I’ve come across—for this particular phenomenon.

Some might call it the inferiority complex. Which is what drives a lot of great thinkers and inventors.

Contrary to popular belief, the inferiority complex is actually what catapults a lot of people into overcompensating in just insane ways—that allow them to be wildly successful in the real world. All this stuff—it’s great.

Brings you peace of mind and confidence. But it’s only when you get it that you realize those five critical things: spirituality, body, mind, emotions, community.

Five things. All of which are mostly free.

Push yourself beyond yourself. Transform yourself.

Anyways, my friends—take care. Thanks for watching.

Canadian Prepper out.

See more of Canadian Prepper on their Public Channel and the MPN Canadian Prepper channel.