➡ The article discusses potential threats to the United States, including the release of a lethal virus and attacks on the electric grid. It suggests that foreign agents could sabotage the grid from within, or use drones to attack transformers. The article also mentions the possibility of a biological attack using a highly lethal virus. The author believes that such attacks could disable the U.S. military, cause widespread death, and lead to societal collapse.

➡ The speaker, a former intelligence officer, criticizes the U.S. government for not preparing its citizens for potential disasters like pandemics or a collapse of the electric grid. He argues that while other countries like Switzerland and China have robust civil defense programs, the U.S. government is more focused on self-preservation. He also suggests that the government’s lack of action is due to a desire to avoid panic and controversy. The speaker concludes by advocating for term limits to eliminate career politicians who prioritize vote-buying over citizen safety.

➡ The text discusses the importance of the 9th and 10th Amendments and limited government, arguing that many social and economic issues causing division in the U.S. should not involve the federal government. It suggests that if the government followed the Constitution more closely, we could avoid economic disasters and focus on protecting citizens from threats. The text also discusses potential government overreach in crisis situations, with the speaker expressing a willingness to resist any attempts to seize resources from their community. They believe that local law enforcement and National Guard members would likely refuse orders to enforce such actions, prioritizing the safety of their own families.

➡ The speaker suggests that people should prepare for potential crises by educating themselves and acquiring necessary tools, including weapons. They mention that government regulations can be a hindrance to these preparations. They also recommend using resources like the Collapse Survivor app for education and threat warnings. Lastly, they encourage viewers to continue learning and preparing, and to check out Fortitude Ranch for more information.

➡ The text discusses the importance of being prepared for potential crises, such as pandemics or civil unrest. It highlights the need for education and training, and mentions the Collapse Survivor app as a tool for this. The text also discusses the potential for a deadly virus, H5N1, to cause widespread devastation, and the long-lasting effects of such a pandemic. It further explores the potential for civil unrest in the U.S., with a majority of surveyed ‘preppers’ believing that the likelihood of a civil war is increasing. The text ends by discussing the role of wealthy individuals and companies in preparing for such events, and the importance of making survival resources accessible to the middle class.

➡ The text discusses the possibility of a civil war in the United States, triggered by the country’s deep divisions and increasing violence. It mentions scenarios where states or counties might secede, and the role of social media in escalating conflicts. The text also highlights the growing approval of violence against CEOs and the potential for local-level fighting within states. The author suggests that the U.S. is already experiencing a form of civil war, with different regions refusing to obey certain laws, and predicts that this could lead to a more decentralized country.

➡ During political protests, opportunistic criminals often exploit the situation to loot and cause chaos, especially when the police are overwhelmed. Some people in the U.S. have formed groups, known as Marauder groups, to take advantage of such situations. These groups, which have been growing in recent years, are not necessarily well-trained but can still cause significant damage. The discussion also highlights the potential threat from individuals with military training and the importance of being prepared for such scenarios.

➡ The text discusses the possibility of a societal collapse or civil war, triggered by seemingly small, irrational events that can spread rapidly due to social media. It highlights how such a collapse could occur even in developed countries, as seen in the United Kingdom in 2011. The text also emphasizes that predicting the exact trigger event is difficult, but the signs of potential collapse are often visible. It concludes by suggesting that the current economic situation and political violence could potentially lead to such a collapse in the United States.

➡ The text discusses the potential for societal collapse due to various triggers, such as economic downturns or political unrest, and the importance of preparedness for such events. It highlights the role of Fortitude Ranch, a community designed to survive any collapse event, with strategies that remain unchanged regardless of the trigger. The community relies on its members for defense and survival, with everyone contributing to tasks like manning guard posts, gardening, and hunting. The text also addresses concerns about the dynamics within the community, emphasizing that members are carefully selected and expected to cooperate for the group’s survival.

➡ The text discusses a survival community called Fortitude Ranch, which is prepared for potential threats like marauders or government seizures. The community is heavily armed and fortified, making it a hard target for attackers. However, members are more concerned about the government, which can legally seize their supplies. The community operates as a business, with staff in charge and members paying fees, ensuring everyone’s survival through collective effort and shared resources.

➡ The text discusses the potential dangers and survival strategies in a hypothetical societal collapse. It suggests that people may initially flee cities for rural areas, but as resources dwindle, even remote locations may not be safe from desperate groups seeking food and shelter. The text also debates the merits of different survival strategies, such as forming large, well-structured communities versus smaller, more isolated groups. It concludes that in a long-term collapse, no place may be truly safe, and survival may depend on adaptability and resourcefulness.

➡ The speaker discusses the inevitability of a societal collapse due to various threats such as the H5N1 virus, economic recession, political unrest, and potential nuclear warfare. He emphasizes the importance of preparedness and survival communities, criticizing the U.S. government for not having adequate provisions for its citizens. He also mentions the potential for artificial intelligence to be used in creating weapons of mass destruction, and the ongoing geopolitical tensions involving Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and China. The speaker believes that young people should be more involved in prepping as they will have to deal with these threats in the future.

We’re in the age of collapse. The probability is just going through the roof. Our country is very well set for civil war. You’ve got the let’s assassinate CEOs of big firms. Let’s burn down the Tesla factories. There’ll be no food distribution. We’ll have an immediate collapse. Economy’s not functioning. Widespread loss of law and order. Your biggest enemy could be your neighbor. An electric grid is probably the Achilles heel of the United States. The FBI estimates Chinese have safe houses in every state in the U.S. they have at least 1,000 agents over here where they can do sabotage from the inside.

If you take down the electric grid you’ve just disabled, the US Military pandemic is inevitable. We’re going to have them, either from natural mutations or deliberate bio attacks. We now have H5N1 spreading in mammal populations all over the world. What’s the likelihood that that leads to a collapse? It is definitely not low. Our government is not preparing for us. They’re just planning to steal from us if they’re necessary. There’s nothing worse than the US Government when it comes to disgraceful, irresponsible performance and making us not just unprepared for a collapse, but set up to die. World War three is already happening.

This is a house of cars, and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic crash the likes of which we’ve never seen. Hi, folks. Canadian Prepper here today on the channel, it’s an honor to have Dr. Drew Miller, a former USAF colonel with a distinguished military and academic background, including an honor graduate from the USAF Academy and advanced degrees from Harvard University, including a PhD in public policy. He also served in Bosnia and Iraq, and he also has a project called Fortitude Ranch, which is a kind of sort of prepper commune, but it’s unique in a lot of respects.

So I hope to get his take on that today. In a recent model that you. You had a probability of collapse model, I think here that is utilizing simulation apps. The probability of collapse model estimates a 16 to 57% chance of collapse. How was this number calculated? And which trigger events concern you the most at this point in time? Well, first, Nate, thank you for having me on your show. It’s. It’s an honor. Been watching you for years, so it’s fine. Finally fun to finally be on a video with you. And I was an intelligence officer in the military, and so we’re, you know, we’re often trying to estimate what’s the probability we’re going to get into war with country X and for a collapse we do a similar approach.

For this model. It’s, it’s a probability of collapse model. I developed it about a decade ago and presented it to the Military Operations Research Society. Their operations research experts presented it there. And then last year we updated it. And so we got input from 23 intelligence officers, Defense analysts, biologists, scientists, people who are aware of the different, we call them, trigger events, something that could start a collapse. So you know, you need to talk to biologists if you’re worried about an H5N1 pandemic, which I definitely am. And so we put them all in and you, you for some things like asteroid strikes or something like that, we’ve got statistical data.

What’s the probability we’re going to have a super volcano eruption? And as you know, we’ve had, the estimate is five to six collapse events already in the planet’s history where most, I repeat most species were wiped out. And that’s largely asteroid hits and super volcano eruptions. So there you’ve got probability data. So we’ve got an actual number we can use. But for most things like what’s the probability of an H5N1 pandemic? Biologists will tell you it’s inevitable it’s going to happen. When is it going to happen? We don’t know, but they can estimate it. And so what we do is we ask for a range of estimates from all these experts and then we average them together, do some other modifications, but it’s a little bit more complicated.

It’s a two stage process. First of all, the question is what’s the likelihood that this trigger event is going to happen? That we have an H5N1 pandemic. Then the second question is, what’s the likelihood that that leads to a collapse? So for example, you can have an asteroid strike, but it doesn’t lead to a winter event that blocks sunlight and wipes out crops. So just because the trigger event happens doesn’t mean you get too collapsed. So it’s a two stage model, a lot of numbers collected and then put together there’s a range of estimates, I can’t tell you the probability that Chinese agents will use drones and the 1,000 Chinese agents, at least they’ve got in the US and cyber attacks to take down the electric.

What’s the probability of that? We put in a range of estimates and then that’s how we come with models. So that’s why the answer was 16 to 57% annual probability of collapse. It’s highly Uncertain. But the thing is, it is definitely not low. I mean in the low end there’s a 16% chance we’ll have a collapse from one of different. We tracked over 50 trigger events that are in this model. And then it’s, you know, it could be up to 67% is our estimate. So we are going to have collapse. I have a video out called the Age of Collapse where I talk about a lot of these different trigger events and what’s going to happen, but the probability is just going through the roof.

There’s. If I’m droning on, you can stop me. But there’s kind of six things driving this or is all yours. So just don’t be worried about droning on at all. Okay. Well, we see six trends and the number one, and the worst thing is new technologies because it’s nowadays. I mean an individual can modify H5N1. Our government, the US government funded gain of function research had success making avian flu, bird flu, H5N1 transmissible between ferrets, mammals. Not only did our government fund this research, but they didn’t block the publication. The research was published after they were successful on how they did it.

That was about a decade ago. Well, flash forward to today. We now have H5N1 spreading in mammal populations all over the world. Whether or not it was from this research or not, I don’t know. But I can tell you, biologists will tell you either that naturally H5N1 will keep mutating towards human. Human transmissible are more likely. And here I’m quoting the former director of the center for Disease Control and expert. He thinks it’s going to be a deliberate pand or, or Iran does this or some lunatic Unabomber type person who thinks, hey, there’s too many people, we got to save the planet by releasing a virus monkey scenario.

Yeah, they think that’s going to happen. So a pandemic is very high on the list. And then for the US our electric grid is so horribly vulnerable. If you haven’t seen the documentary Grid Down Power up, professional documentary produce, it outlines, you know them, you know the five ways to take down the grid. Well, so does North Korea. North Korea with their tiny little nuclear force, not accurate. Has the ability to take out the US electric grid whenever they want. So there’s just all these ways to happen. So 16, I think it’s probably closer to 57 annual chance.

Yeah, I was going to say they don’t even have to do. They don’t even have to use an EMP they can just take out a few select Transformers. And according to that documentary anyways, you only need to take down a handful of Transformers to actually compromise the entire grid. Interesting that you talk about H51 as being top of mind. One of the videos that I came across in doing some research for this interview was an interview you did with Fox News, I think maybe seven or eight years ago. And this is before the pandemic, obviously. And you were saying in that interview that you thought that a pandemic would be one of the most likely outcomes.

But it was interesting how the Fox News host was seemingly being very condescending and kind of snickering and, you know, really making light of what you were saying. And, you know, I’m not sure if you’ve ever revisited that interview since, but, you know, you pretty much hit the nail on the head there. And I don’t think like just the. It’s incredible the shift in attitude towards preparedness since the time you did that interview. Because right now nobody would be laughing at what you’re saying, right? Or at least nobody with brains. That’s before COVID And by the way, you know, for a long time they said, oh, the NIH didn’t give any funding to Wuhan.

That’s not true. We did do gain of function research dollars that the US government gave to the Wuhan Institute before the COVID 19 pandemic. Did it cause it or not? I don’t know. The intelligence community is split on that, as you probably know in the reports. But yeah, pandemic is inevitable. We’re going to have them. Either from natural mut are deliberate bio attacks. I believe, like the former Center CDC director, that the virus is going to be introduced. Because if you want to take out the US from supporting Ukraine, for example, Russia could release an H5N1 virus over here.

Would it spread to Russia? Probably, but very slowly. And before they release the virus, they could develop a vaccine and produce it before they release it. So that’s a big risk. Our electric grid is probably the Achilles heel of the United States. So there’s the FBI estimates. You know, the FBI said there’s a safe. Chinese have safe houses in every state in the US they have at least a thousand agents over here. Some of them are probably already placed have jobs in utility companies where they can do sabotage from the inside. They’ve got agents who can do physical attacks.

You’re probably familiar with the Metcalf substation attack in California years ago, which is professionally done. Anyone who looks at the reports on it Reaches the same conclusion. This is a dress rehearsal. This is a practice attack to shoot up a substation and destroy the transformer. How long does it take? Do you get detected? Professionally done, you know, was it Russian agents? Was it Korean, North Korean, Was it Chinese? We don’t know that. We never, we never caught the people. But China could take out our grid with physical attacks, as you pointed out, not just with a nuclear high altitude EMP detonation.

And then they could also use drones. The drone activity that we’ve seen, that that’s alarmed people over the U.S. yes, there were a lot of false reports and there are people reporting aircraft and normal commercial drones. But the drone activity, the surveillance over Langley Air force base for 17 days was not some commercial guy with the drone. That was an enemy nation state doing surveillance. And then a lot of the activity in northern New Jersey. I mean, the FAA put out a notice saying you can no longer fly drones over electric substations because it looked like they were mapping out, plotting drone routes to take out electric grid stations.

And my belief is that Chinese agents are working in Chinese air taxi drone companies. The Chinese are the leaders in, in drones for taxis. And these are large drones that could release hundreds or more of smaller drones that could spread out, cover, you know, maybe 100 miles or so, land with their small drone with the small physical explosive charge inside. A transformer blows up, takes out that transformer. And it’s worse than that because when that transformer blows up, there’s a good chance it’ll send a jolt of electricity down the power line, might take out another transformer.

That’s why we had this electricity event. That’s your fault up there in Canada. A lightning strike in Canada. This is over a decade ago, Ontario, I believe, you know, and they’re part of our grid. They connected. Lightning strike hit in Ontario and a power jolt came through into the northeast US and it kept spreading and took down a big part of the electric grid in the Northeast U.S. so electric grid is very vulnerable. Why would you want to take down the electric grid if you’re China? Well, if you’re going to invade Taiwan, if you take down the electric grid, you’ve just disabled the US Military.

Yes, naval forces deployed at sea can operate, but there is no separate military electric grid. We use the civilian grid grid. You take down the electric grid. And a congressionally funded study by experts said you take down the US electric grid, anywhere up to 90% of the US population will die. So you can kill off 90% of Americans and you can Absolutely. Immediately disable our conventional military power by taking down this electric grid. And China could do that. We’d not be able to prove it was them if they did the attack with cyber physical agents shooting up transformers and then drone attacks on transformers and then agents and utility companies doing sabotage.

And I think that’s what they’re likely to do. My guess is the Taiwan war, if they get to that. And you know, President Z has made it absolutely clear he wants Taiwan back before he leaves office. And it’s going to be the least surprise war in history. The Chinese have been saying for over 50 years, it’s our civil war, it’s our island, we’re taking it back. So when they do that, if they take out our electric grid, they’ll have no trouble forcing Taiwan to submit, probably without an invasion, U. S won’t be able to oppose it, and we’ll be doing everything can to try to stay alive.

All right, guys, so as some of you know, Canadian prepper is a fully independent channel. We don’t have sponsors, and we’re beholden to nobody. You can help support us by supporting yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com I know that in an emergency, having the right gear can make all the difference. This is why I’ve tested and curated the best preparedness products on the market so that you can be confident and ready for whatever comes your way. Now back to the video. So just to go back to something you said about H5N1, and we’re kind of bouncing in between two different scenarios, but they’re all ultimately interconnected because there’s a biowarfare with H5N1 potentially.

And then there’s the grid down, which could potentially be a multi pronged attack with respect to the H5N1. My only observation to share with that is that, you know, what recently happened in 2020. I think our adversaries seen what happened in the United States versus what happened in China. What happened in China? People locked down, they complied with the government orders, it was immediate, it was swift. Everybody, for at least a few years, you know, perfectly complied with the mandate, whereas in the United States it created all kinds of civil unrest. Now I could only imagine the, the civil divide that exists today being amplified by another biowarfare event.

And it would be incredibly disadvantageous to the open book glass house western democracies in the sense that there’s going to be all kinds of differences of opinion when it comes to who caused it. And, and I mean, you know how the whole thing is going to go. There’s going to be people who don’t want to take the intervention. There’s going to be people who really do, and people who are, you know, aggressively wanting to crack down. And this is something which you’re not going to have that disharmony in other societies where they’re more, you know, uniform, they’re more compliant, authoritarian regimes.

Do you have any thoughts on. On that? And because I think even though it’s one of those things where you don’t want to release a biological agent because ultimately it’s going to affect you also. But maybe, as we’ve seen with the Wuhan flu, it affected the US More than it did China. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I agree with that, nate. And again, COVID 19 was less than 1% lethal. So it’s a good virus to practice with H5N1. If a human gets it, it’s 50 to 60% lethal. There’s different variants, but the one they would release as an agent would be probably 50 to 60% lethal.

And when that happens, it’s game over. No one’s going to go to work. It’s not going to be COVID 19. There’ll be no food distribution. We’ll have an immediate collapse. Economy’s not functioning. Widespread loss of law and order. You’ve got a picture of Ranch, West Virginia up there. But Fortage Ranch, we’re a survival community. We were designed with pandemics in mind. So, for example, we have lots of little buildings. It’s not like we’re all in one shelter underground sharing an air supply, because we’re going to have pandemics and I don’t want to share an air supply.

I don’t care how great you think your filter is. You know, if I was in the same room and I coughed on you, there’s some viruses where they’ve demonstrated that it takes like 5 parts, 5 virus particles is all it takes to infect you. If I sneeze on you, I’m sending hundreds to thousands of virus particles into your face. So we were designed to be spread out for pandemic defense so we’re not all in the same place. And then we’re also spread out because you got to be able to protect yourself on the surface because there will be marauders in an H5N1 pandemic, any disaster, because there’ll be no food distribution.

People are going to start starving immediately. Are start going for food immediately because they’re going to be afraid about starvation. And you got to Be able to protect yourself. That’s why we designed Forte Ranch to do that. We’ve run a lot of scenarios. I mean, you do a lot of great educational videos on your show, but, you know, most people aren’t. Aren’t watching the preparedness videos, aren’t getting ready. That’s why we launched our Collapse Survivor app, because it adverse training. We put videos on there. We’ve got some of your videos on our program. And then we do training simulations where people get put into situations where a pandemic has started.

What do you want to do? You know, you know, the classic almost initial question is, do I want to bug out? Do I stay put if I’m in a city or suburb, or do I leave? You got to make decisions like that, and then you got to deal with as the collapse develops, deal with running out of food, deal with marauder threats, deal with finding waters. All the skills that you train people on. But the vast majority of Americans, and we’re more prepared than most of the rest of the world, they’re just not prepared for. So we’re trying to get people to think about it, to watch programs like yours to get educated.

And the Collapse Survivor app was designed to have something on your phone where you can see videos like the ones that Canadian Prepper puts out and others to get educated. And then we do training simulations as well. And then we do threat alerts, too. So we put out a lot of alerts on how H5N1 is slowly spreading in more and more mammal populations adapting, and it is going to be a human, human contagious virus. And when that comes, my bet is it’ll be the most deadly experience our species have ever had. Biologists estimate that the virus may kill a billion people, but you and I know it’s going to kill more than that if the collapse lasts for over a year.

You know, we all know about the. Not all of us, but preppers like us, we know about the Spanish flu. And it’s. It’s really badly misnamed. First of all, it’s not the Spanish fluid started in the US and Kansas. And secondly, it’s not the 1918 pandemic. It lasted for almost two years. Pandemics aren’t short. They’re going to last for a long time. So you’ve got two years of needing to either use your stockpiled food or fortitude ranch. We grow food and ranch. So you need to be able to prepare, be prepared for a really long time.

When the pandemic hits, if the grid goes down, you’re talking about well over a year. If the US electric grid is destroyed. Well over a year. That’s best case in that scenario too, where there is a high fatality rate here in the COVID During the COVID pandemic, people could still go to the grocery store and confidently know that there’s a very low risk of not only exposure but potentially getting some debilitating illness. In that scenario, where there is, Even if it’s 10% fatality rate, I mean 50 to 60 is kind of, you know, it’s very unlikely, I think that you’re gonna have that sustained transmission.

I mean, it’s possible. But even if it’s a 10% fatality rate, most people aren’t going to want to risk. So even if the supply chain is still somewhat functional, you’re likely not going to want to risk it under those circumstances. Absolutely right. Do you have any thoughts though on. Because I know you’ve, you’ve recently talked a lot about the potential for civil unrest and part of the reason why we connected was to talk about what we’re seeing unfold in the US and for myself personally, I think the only way that the US is defeated is if it defeats itself.

And I think our adversaries realize that. I mean, separated by two oceans. Okay, so what do you do to exacerbate those tensions? While a virus would probably do that or anything that really created more economic uncertainty, all of these things are going to factor in. But how do you think your H5, not your, but the H5N1 scenario would exacerbate these tensions? Because I suspect, I mean, we’re getting to the realm of speculation, I suppose, but I suspect that you’re going to have a big divide in terms of what we’ve seen during COVID but amplified even more.

Yeah, I mean if it’s a really low fatality rate and then people aren’t convinced on it, some people aren’t convinced I need to get vaccinated or get a mask. Then you’d have that divide. But again, if it’s, I agree with you, if it’s even 10%, if it’s any double digit fatality lethality rate, no one’s going to go to work. I mean police, I’m not blaming police, police. If I was a policeman, I would not go to work if there’s a 10% lethal virus because not only I’m risking my life, but I could catch the virus depending on the incubation period, bring it home, kill my family off from them.

Catching the virus for me. So police aren’t going to go to work either. So, yeah, Law Order will break down. You’re going to have a collapse in an H5N1 situation. And for civil war, I mean, our country is, as you know, very well divided. And we asked, and recently we did a poll of preppers and we asked, and again, we pulled preppers because preppers watch your shows. They watch for. They’re looking for threats, possibility of a war, a pandemic, all these trigger events. Most Americans and most people just want to think about that staff stuff, but preppers do.

So we pulled them and said, you know, what do you think are likely sources of collapse? And then we. Specifically, because we just did this recently, we asked them a question, and I’ll read it to you. Do you believe that President Trump’s actions and plans to date are increasing or decreasing the likelihood of domestic civil war? 50% said Trump is greatly increasing the likelihood of civil war because our country is. The divisions are getting worse on social and political grounds. Another 20% said he’s slightly increasing the likelihood of civil war. And then 7% responded that he’s not changing the likelihood of his civil war, but a domestic civil war is likely.

So combined, 77% of the preppers we polled, several hundred responded in our poll believe Trump is increasing the likelihood of civil war or that a domestic civil war is likely, likely. So our country is split. You know, we, we dodged a bullet with the election, as you know, because if Trump had lost, I think you could have had a civil war right then and there because they were prepared, you know, not to accept the election results. So we dodged that bullet. But still you have the problem that the country is divided and the divisions are getting worse.

The guy named Ray Dalio, he founded Bridgewater the most, one of the biggest, most successful hedge funds ever. He’s probably one of the smartest persons alive today. Ray Dalio has estimated that the likelihood of a US civil war is greater than 50%. So, you know, he’s not a prepper. It’s not you or me saying, hey, we face a high likelihood of civil war. It’s an expert. But he makes his fortune as a hedge fund manager because he’s predicting future events accurately. I think he’s probably more of a prepper than. Than he lets on, too. Yeah, well, I don’t know if he does.

He probably does. I mean, most preppers, you know, first world prepping, don’t tell him when you’re a prepper, you wouldn’t know if he is but you know, you and I are familiar with the tech executives. You know, Zuckerberg with his huge Hawaii facility, Peter Thiel’s going to New Zealand for his survival place. I mean, there was some data out on that a couple years ago showing how high tech executives are absolutely preparing most of them building their own private, huge bunker complexes. And that’s why we got survival. That’s why we’ve got, you know, Fortitude Ranch. Because we want middle class folks, folks like, you know, you and me with our income level to be able to survive too.

So, you know, we don’t have fancy facilities. They’re, they’re pretty simple. But when you get 100 plus people together at a survival community and you’re sharing the cost, you got a professional staff, someone in uniform like me, most of the military background running it, it can be affordable for middle class folks. And then we’re also recreational facility so our members can vacation at a Fortitude Ranch for up to two weeks a year. So instead of spending, you know, spending $3,000 to rent a cabin in the Colorado Rocky Mountains for your vacation, save that money, stay at Fortitude Ranch, Colorado.

You can stay there for free for a week and then use that money to pay for your Fortitude Ranch membership. That’s kind of our model. There’s, there’s all kinds of potential knock on effects with respect to what might happen in a civil unrest situation. In terms of. So maybe getting more specific with respect to the Trump effect as it pertains to civil unrest, because I think like you said, most people would have thought that we had dodged a bullet. Intentions have somewhat diffused since the election, but on the same token, it almost seems like a. I don’t think it’s intentional necessarily, but there definitely is an overcorrection possibly taking place or that’s what it will be perceived to be in that there’s going to be like an authoritarian backlash if and when the next administration comes in.

Like, it just seems like it’s intensifying each time. So now of course, Elon Musk and Doge and Trump are making these fairly drastic changes, at least with respect to domestic policy. Not so much on the foreign front, but it seems as though this is only going to exacerbate tensions even more. And what do the targeted attacks on Tesla represent in this whole analysis that you have? Like, because, you know, on the one hand these are, you know, just unorganized groups who are doing these things, people keying cars. But, well, they were organized a couple days ago.

I mean they, yeah, I was just gonna, all over the U.S. i was just gonna say there’s, there’s probably an organized component to this. But how does this all factor into your analysis? Because I think this could be a potential investigation inflection point. This, this could be the trigger event of a civil war. It could be the civil war started. So you see the attacks on Tesla and then big protests at his place. But you know, that assassination attempt, the poll data, again, you try to cite data when you can see it. The poll data out on that guy who killed, assassinated, murdered a CEO in New York City.

41% of young American voters, voters. So these are more responsible young folks. 41% said they approve of that. That, that, you know, that’s another indication that, you know, to some degree our country is very well set for civil war. Now, how are they going to play out? I mean, that’s speculation, but that’s why we run these. Sorry, wrong hand. That’s why we run these simulations on collapse. We’ve done two different civil war scenarios. We did them last year. In the first one, Trump lost the election and his supporters wouldn’t accept it and the US Got into civil war.

In the second scenario, Trump, Trump won, but we still got into civil war. It was a very different civil war. And that one. So let me go back to. So if Trump would have lost, I, I’m in Texas, I think Texas would have succeeded. There’s a big Texas movement, a succession movement’s got a lot of support. And if Biden and won, you know, Biden, Harris had won, Trump had won re election, there’s a good chance Texas would say, we’re out of here. They would have succeeded. Well, when Trump won, what happens is California started talking about succession.

They didn’t go forward with it, but what happened is the rural conservative counties in California, largely Northern California, they said, we’re succeeding, we’re breaking up. And that’s what happened in the collapse survivor simulation we ran is rural counties said, screw you, California. Take your gun control laws and shove them into an appropriate place. We’re going to not allow any of your state officials in our counties. We’re not going to follow your laws that we think violate our natural rights protected under the ninth Amendment. And we’re going to form the state of Jefferson. And you know, most of this stuff we don’t make up in the collapse survivor app.

There is a big state of Jefferson succession movement in California. And so that’s one of the ways that a civil war could develop in the U.S. i mean, there’s thousands of ways that could happen. But in this collapse survivors civil war simulation we ran, that’s what happens. California, conservative states, counties started succeeding and then it spread to Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, not Maine, Massachusetts and New York. And you, you see that today we already have another form of civil war going on with Second Amendment sanctuary counties. I don’t know if you’ve done a video on that or not, but if you look up Second Amendment sanctuary counties, and not just counties there, or cities and states in some areas, a lot of government officials, sheriffs, county boards are saying we’re not going to obey state gun control laws because they’re violating, they believe they’re violating the second Amendment to the Constitution, the right to borrow.

They’re already in revolt. So again, to a large degree, you can say the US Is already in civil war. We’ve got counties, states, cities saying we’re not going to obey gun control laws. We have liberal cities saying we’re not going to obey the domestic, the federal government’s immigration laws. That’s going on. That’s open rebellion going on. I’m not going to take off too much on President Trump today saying I may not follow the Constitution where it says I’m limited to terms. A lot of people on the left are saying you’re violating the Constitution because Congress is the one that sets policy and does spending, not the executive.

That’s considered a constitutional violation. Then you’ve got the let’s assassinate CEOs of big firms, let’s burn down the Tesla showrooms and factories. So to some degree, stuff already happening in the United States says that we are in some form of civil war now. Now, I don’t think you’re going to see anything like the first of war. You’re not going to see California, you know, attacking Texas or anything like that. So you’re not going to see states and armies clashing. But you can certainly see a civil war in terms of fighting at a local level within states and groups fighting.

That kind of violence can absolutely occur in the United States. And to some degree it’s starting to happen in the United States. We’ll definitely see some decentralization. And I think maybe that’s a appropriate term for this because of course, things are tightly centralized around the federal government at this point in time. But the United States is a big place. There’s a lot of people, a lot of varied terrain, you know, a lot of, you know, from a military point of view, even like defensible, you know, terrains which would these natural boundaries could ultimately be what shape whatever emerges in that respect.

But, you know, what you’re saying is, is very significant because I even recently heard that the Biden administration and many others from that team were now being denied security briefs. And so, like, you’re having a lot of these drastic changes and a lot of these things. What I fear is that when, that they’re going to do so much to kind of antagonize the other side like this. And, you know, a person might make the argument that it’s justified, maybe say it’s unconstitutional. I’m not going to have that debate. But if you do all this stuff, they need to know that when the other shoe drops or when the other side, you know, takes, when the tables turn, they’re going to do those same tactics again against them.

So you’re going to see like an authoritarian backlash. So even if Trump doesn’t become tyrannical, the next administration will. If, you know, they, they are successful, would be at the Democrats or whoever. But, you know, you made a really interesting point about the normalization of violence against, like, CEOs. And there’s definitely a dehumanization happening, it seems, where I’m not sure if it’s just a confluence of a variety of different cultural factors. You know, I mean, probably a lot of things, video games, social media, just watching guys being blown apart in Ukraine, Russia, war, time and time again, it seems like we’re being dehumanized in a big way.

And that, that could very well manifest as violence that I don’t think a lot of people are obviously in our very whitewashed society, we’re not accustomed to. But I think like you’re saying that that sympathizing with the, the murder of the CEO is indicative that definitely we’ve, we’ve fallen in a lot of ways in terms of our, I don’t know, just our. There was a time when that would have, you know, been reviled as, as just a, an egregious act of violence by everybody. But for, for some reason now it is, you know, it is being.

There’s a lot of discontent and a lot of people are feeling, you know, the pinch of inflation and, you know, it’s manifesting in a way that people don’t really understand what they’re angry about. But a lot of it is to do, I think with just the immiserating circumstances people find themselves in, in nowadays, the dollar is potentially tanking. I don’t know what Trump is doing with the market right now. I mean, he seems to have some strategy in mind. But, you know, a lot of people are in disagreement. So, yeah, this situation could easily work itself out to a fairly nasty, decentralizing collapse of sorts.

Yeah, I agree with all of that. And you know, I think we were discussing before we started taping that the odds of us being able to figure out what is the event that actually triggers a civil war is probably impossible. It could be, it could be an assassination attempt, it could be a wide variety of things. But the country is so divided that it may not take much to spark something that starts in one place and then it spreads. And you see that now in flash mobs. I mean, with social media, all it takes is one thing to go wrong.

Month, you know, political group A attacks political group B. That’s all of our social media retaliation starts. It gets encouraged and enforced by social media, organized by social media, and things take off. And then in the US we saw this in Portland, for example. I mean, the George Floyd and the, you know, the riots that were going on there. You’ve seen it in Baltimore too. Almost anytime in a big US City, if any kind of a political protest starts, bad people not associated with, I’m not blaming the political cause, they’ll jump onto that and they’ll start looting.

You know, they’ll use it because it’s the perfect, it’s the perfect opportunity. And we, we’ve done a lot of, you know, collapse survivor simulations on flash mobs and that. But as you know, anytime you overwhelm the police and if you got a big political protest going on, police are overwhelmed. They’re. They’re caught doing that. Well, the bad guys know, the gang members, the professional criminals know. This is the time for me to break into your house or go into a target and loot so bad people know about it. And you know, in the US we have 1 million known gang members in the United States, which means there’s probably a lot more than that.

And so those people, anytime you’ve got any kind of political protest going on, are going to start doing it. And there’s something that’s, that’s gotten worse in the US in recent years. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked about the, the, the Walking Dead TV show. I mean, and for years I had 14 inch members come up and say, drew, you got to watch this Walking Dead show. And I said, no, I’m not going to watch that. I don’t believe in zombies. We got real threats to worry about. Why am I going to watch a zombie show? And then they kept Lobbying me.

So, Drew, it’s not about the zombies. It’s about the Marauders. That show shows your Marauders. And they’re right. It showed you the Marauder threat, but it’s worse. This Nate and I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but we’ve had. Again, we got eight locations. And yes, we got a lot of staff. So we get a lot of reports on the prepping world, but we’ve heard from several reliable reports, people saying that their way to prepare is not to join a survival community, not to watch your videos and get prepared. There’s a lot of Americans who have already formed Marauder groups.

They are already planning now that when the hits the fan. I got bleeped on Fox News for saying hits the fan. I hope. I hope I don’t get bleeped on your show, but when the shit hits the fan, they’re forming a Marauder group. They’ve already got it formed. That is their preparedness plan. Yeah. So a lot of those groups could start taking off the second you get some big political violence goes. It spreads via social media. Some of these Marauder groups may trigger. So in addition to the gang members you’ve got now, Marauder groups that have started forming.

I’m not talking. I’m not saying right wing militia, none of that. That’s. That’s completely different issue. There’s just some people now have kind of formed Marauder groups because people are aware of prepping, they’re aware of collapse threats, they’re aware of the Marauder threat. And, you know, we’d like to think they’re all, you know, watching Canadian Prepper or joining 14th Ranch or getting prepared. Unfortunately, we hear several reliable reports. We’ve run into people who said they’ve got a Marauder group, they formed a Marauder group. That’s their plan from the get go. And that didn’t exist before. I blame the Walking Dead TV show for kind of promoting it.

Not their fault, but I think they triggered. I don’t know if you’ve heard any of that before or not. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if I’d say that the Walking Dead itself caused that, per se. I would say. And I don’t even know how prevalent that is in the preparedness space, but, you know, there’s definitely. Like, you. You made an interesting point about the opportunism during a protest and the limited capabilities of police under those conditions. I can’t remember what the exact statistics are, but there’s like one Cop for every thousand people or something like that.

So I mean, if a city starts getting turned upside down, yeah, you’re going to have a lot of opportunistic people coming out of the woodwork in terms of marauder groups exploiting the situation. I would only be worried about people who like yourself, had like a military background and were really trained in order to, you know, to use their firearm in a tactical way. Those are the people I would be genuinely concerned about. That, you know, the ragtag elements, disorganized, you know, bands of misfits, I would be less concerned about. But you know, if, and I’m not saying that, you know, this is going to be a common practice amongst, you know, military people or ex military people, but I’m saying that they’re the only ones, in my opinion, who, who would be an enduring credible threat, like somebody who was really trained for that purpose, you know, whereas just a bunch of, you know, people who have never had that sort of training, they’re probably going to get taken out when they, you know, there’s that whole defense to offense three to one casualty ratio, like you can only get lucky so many times.

But I, I think that there’s definitely, you know, some people who might overestimate their capabilities in that respect. And you know, fortunately for the people on the other side of that, I don’t think they’re going to be very successful unless they’re, you know, really, they, if they have that training. And I think with video games and media consumption nowadays, we’ve been sort of desensitized to those things. But are people truly prepared for combat? Like combat like that guy? I don’t think so. Like, I think we’re, we’re pretty soft here in, in the West. We’ve been fairly insulated from, you know, the horrors of war and, and engaging it directly like in people like yourself understand firsthand.

And I think that’s allowed us to kind of fantasize about, well, what would we do in this situation. But when it comes down to it, it. I don’t know. I, I’m just, I agree with you that it’s not, you know, and I’ve always used the metaphor of the Walking Dead. It’s not the zombies that, that are the main protagonists. The zombies are kind of like the Golden Horde. It’s really the, your peers that you have to worry about. The people who are on the same kind of technological level as you, those are the ones who are going to pose like the greatest threat.

What do you have any thoughts on that? Or, well, you just remind me. There was an exercise of civil, civil defense kind of training pandemic exercise called Dark Winter. And former U. Georgia senator Sam Nunn played the President in that scenario. And it was, I believe it was smallpox was simulated in this exercise. And again, that’s why we use simulations. It’s the best way to train. You get into it, you can explore stuff. You got to make decisions. You know, it’s make believe, but it, it makes you think about stuff. So anyway, in the simulation at the end of it, they stopped that for a couple days because they realized the pandemic spreading, there’s no food distribution, the grocery stores are looted out, people are going to start starving.

They just call off the exercise. We don’t want to play it anymore. But I think it was realistic. But anyway, Sam Nunn, who was playing the president in that scenario, in the report afterwards, and there was a congressional report filed on this, he said that in a collapse, your biggest enemy is your neighbor, could be your neighbor, which is exactly the point you were making. And you know, back to your point, I agree that, you know, a lot of most people don’t have the training to be a good skills to be a, you know, successful marauder in a collapse situation.

But when a collapse is developing out of political protest, that’s kind of what I was talking about. You know, people think, oh, how we’re never going to get a civil war. It could never happen. And I say, nonsense. It can evolve in irrational means, means, rational ways. That’s how wars start. World War I was assassination of some worthless duke, you know, in Serbia. And it just escalated out of control. So a lot of things could go south for us. But if you’ve got a lot of people who, when there’s political protests, police are overwhelmed, they start breaking into houses to steal and loot, even if they’re not well trained to do, to do so.

They’re not going after a prepper community like Fort Ranch. They’re breaking into some. Someone else is completely unprepared because what the hell’s going on? There’s no collapse. So that could start and then that could spread and it could just get out of control fast. There was an incident, not an incident. There was a bad event in the United Kingdom, and I’m Pretty sure it’s 2011. In 2011, the United Kingdom had this really bizarre thing. Some fighting and attacks on police broke out in London. There was no cause. It wasn’t a, you know, George Floyd event. It just started and there was violence that occurred.

And the next morning that, you know, stopped overnight. And next morning they woke up and said, what the hell? What the hell was that? What caused this? We don’t know. Thank God it’s over. The next night, not only did it start again in London, it spread all over the United Kingdom, all the major cities. This went on for four nights. The United Kingdom had a collapse, and there was no trigger event. It just spread by social media. It went on for four nights, and at the end of the fourth night, they called up all the reserve police and they kept them on duty and they put it down.

They stopped this collapse. Got law and order back. There was formal studies done. I’ve studied them. Those reports. There never was a trigger then identified. But what this is important about, Nate, is that it shows you that a collapse can happen. Law and order can break down for completely irrational means. And there can be no trigger event if a lot of people start breaking the law, start breaking into homes, and they had businessmen killed defending their houses, they had arson attacks on police. All this crap going on in the United Kingdom, a civilized country in 2011 with no trigger event.

So could a civil war in the US develop and lead to violence in a collapse that’s say, hell, yes. There’s thousands of ways it could happen, none of them rational, where people, you know, sit down and plan it or organize it. It just things break down and our society is that way. And when you see, you know, CEOs being assassinated, Tesla dealerships being attacked and arson, you see what we saw in, you know, in. In Portland during the COVID stuff. Protests get worse. I mean, if Trump really does move forward on, hey, I’m going to run for a third term.

I’m going to ignore the constitutional amendment. Yeah, you’re going to see more violent protests and who knows what sparks it? It could be a lot of things, but I think the US to some degree, is starting to see signs of civil war and something. Trigger event, some. Something that could happen that could trigger getting a lot worse is very, very possible, maybe even likely. Now, in our collapse model, that’s 16 to 57%. Civil War was rated low as a collapse event. I think it was like a 2% annual chance. We rated it low because, you know, there’s so many other things that could happen.

H5N1 is the one that worries me the most, or some other bioengineered pandemic, but it very well could be a civil war. You’re not going to be able to estimate it with any statistical basis whatsoever, but you can reasonably see when things are likely to cause a collapse and lead to a disaster. And then you just have to admit that it could be something triggers a collapse. That’s never been on Canadian Prepper and wasn’t even in our model. Something else could do it. Yeah, something entirely asymmetric. There’s a spectrum of civil war, I guess, from civil unrest to like a slow grind deterioration into a authoritarian dystopia to on the other end, a full blown civil war between multiple belligerence.

You know, we could easily see a situation, I think now where the ability of the government to respond and bring control back, where they lose that capability. Because I think people are so accustomed to, well, you know, there might be riots, but eventually it will be brought under control. Right. Eventually it’s going to be contained and it’s going to be relatively. Relatively benign. Even George Floyd, as enduring as it was, you know, ultimately it was contained and it was corralled and it wasn’t able to really take root in any way, which was a threat to the system as a whole.

But we could easily see, or at least I could easily see a situation where as the economic stress on all the, the institutions that keep things centralized start to become more stressed, you could easily have a situation where, you know, things just happen. Like you said, crowd psychology, you know, some mob mania, you know, took root and people started like, I mean, it was still present today in California where you have these mobs of people going and converging on one store and, you know, basically cleaning out the store. Right. You could have a situation like that that just started almost for no reason and just endured, and the police would never be able to fully get a handle on the situation.

Now, it’s interesting that you say trigger event because as we were talking before we started this interview, we were talking about how, you know, we all predict the outcomes. Like during the pandemic, I think I had made a video about how, you know, there’s a pandemic, we’re probably going to see riots, crime is going to go up. But we were never thinking about George Floyd. We never thought that, you know, this would be what caused people to run out and loot and do all this stuff. We always associated pandemic with lawlessness on some level, but there was a trigger event.

So underlying were all of these other tensions. You know, people being cooped up in their homes, people, you know, dealing with financial stress and all this stuff and all that, that manifested at this rage, which was basically unjustly, you know, seen as being the result of this, this incident that happened. So yeah, it’s incredible how like you say, we, we envision these scenarios but we don’t know what that trigger event is going to be. We don’t know, you know, and it always seems like, well that’s the definition of a black swan, right. It’s something that you can’t really expect.

But we all understand what it’s going to entail. We just don’t know what it’s going to be. So I think that’s a very interesting observation. But what I fear is that we could be reaching a point where the resilience and the strength of our system starts to wane so much that something, some trigger event is going to unfold and they’re not going to be able to get a hold of it and things just deteriorate continuously, precipitously to the point of maybe there is secession, maybe there’s you know, a breakup or a Balkanization of the United, I mean, who knows, right? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, well, I agree with you completely.

And the problem is we don’t have a lot of resources. So you look at Katrina for example. When Katrina hit should have been a relatively small scale disaster. We saw it coming. It was a localized area, but Katrina was a disaster for us. Police deserted their report their posts. Widespread looting. There were, I was in the Nebraska Air National Guard. We sent forces down to, to, to that area to help with the Katrina. Most US States sent Guard resources to help them with the recovery operations. Well that was isolated. If political violence starts in the US and spreads, it can be in all 50 states.

It’s not one little area. You know, when we, we did a collapse survivor Civil war scenario, I said in one of them as it was running, we had in our thing that political violence got out of hand so bad that the National Guard was called up. That was running in our make believe collapse survivor simulation. In the real world while that exercise was running, this was like March of last year. New York City did call up the National Guard for real to back up because the violence was out of control. They didn’t have enough police to manage their subway.

So we’ve already got, and they’ve done that again in New York City. We’ve already got situations where we have so few police and violence can get so bad crime so out of control in good times that we’ve got to call up the guard. So imagine now a pandemic that’s all over the place, our political violence and fights that are going on all over the US we don’t have the resources to respond to that. And so we wouldn’t be able to. So something could indeed develop into collapse that has a nonsensical, irrational, seemingly small, trivial trigger event.

But if it spreads, and it will spread with social media and the news we’ve got today to go on across the nation. And then if the bad guys, the looters, the gang members, just criminals and bad people are our marauders, start at that point breaking into houses to steal food and resources, the country could have a collapse. And how do you recover from that when it’s nationwide? You can’t just call up the guard or the military and fix that. There’s not enough of them. How long will it last? We have no clue. But if it’s nationwide and the country is divided, is today, it’s unpredictable.

You could have a collapse coming from something that. Again, you and I would never say this is a rational way to get to a disaster, but it does happen. Well, it’s almost like what we’re seeing right now with the economy. You know, the economy was wildly overvalued. I’m not sure if you follow it too much, but, you know, all of the major equities indexes were, you know, record levels of overvaluation. And in that situation, it can kind of continue. You know, it’s like an avalanche, I use that as a metaphor, where you can, can continue to have layers of, layers of snow, you know, and pack on over time.

And all it might take is like the fluttering of a bird’s wings or, you know, a stone that gets dislodged or something like that. Something that you didn’t expect to bring the whole thing down. And of course, tariffs are being what’s being cited as the, the, the culprit in the current financial downturn that we’re seeing, at least in the equities markets. But it could have been anything because the conditions for collapse were already present. It’s just that, you know, it doesn’t take much. It really, like you’re saying it could be nothing, it could just be, you know, a bunch of people decide one day to coalesce around a major store or institution and start rioting for no reason or at least no stated reason.

So, yeah, we’re at a point right now where, you know, I’m definitely seeing, and I’m not sure what you’re seeing on your end. I’m definitely seeing a new appreciation for preparedness. It’s almost become commonplace, particularly in Europe, where now it’s being advised for People to have, you know, 72 hour bags and things of this nature. I mean, you could see that one coming from a mile away. What are your thoughts on the, the changes to the preparedness community that you’ve observed since the pandemic? And what, if anything, have you done differently after seeing, you know, how we as a society responded to, you know, the recent pandemic and all of the events that have unfolded, the war and numerous other incidents that have unfolded, has your strategy for how you’ve laid out these Fortitude Ranch, has it changed at all? Well, Ford Ranch’s strategy hasn’t changed because we were kind of designed with pandemics in mind.

And we really don’t care what the trigger event is, you know, whatever causes it. When Law Order breaks down, you got to collapse. You got marauders out there. Our defense is the same. We chop down trees to clear lines of fire, stack them into walls. All of our members have weapons. We got guard posts. You know, we’re well organized and run, so we defend ourselves. But, you know, we have fields and gardens. We plant. We, we, we do all that. But I want to go back to your, your point about the economy. You’re absolutely right. The stock market bubble is going to burst.

There is likely to be a recession and that could be the trigger. And I mentioned a prepper poll earlier. We did ask them, what do you see as the most likely event that could lead to a collapse? And it was the economy and the problem’s going to be in it, these, these overlap. So let’s say there’s a recession. A lot of people now are unemployed and they’re demanding benefit. And Trump says, we’re trying to cut back our budget deficit. We’re not going to give you huge benefits. And they say, no, I want you to throw money at me because I’m unemployed.

That could be something that combines with the political divisions we’ve got to trigger widespread violence and then things pile on from there and go out of control. There’s just so many ways it could happen. So we’re seeing more and more concern, more people interested in joining Fortune Ranch due to economic, a recession, collapse concerns. But in terms of your answer to your question, has Fortranch changed its methods? Not at all. We’re designed for pretty much any collapse event. We operate the same, it’s all the same process. Get our members in. We use the collapse survivor app to send out alerts.

And if you get the collapse survivor app, you’ll get the Fortitude Ranch alerts, whether you’re A member or not. So when we see H5N1 spreading, we’ll send out an alert. If we see, hey, it looks to us like this political violence is starting to get out of control. Get ready or get to Fortitude Ranch. We think this is it. We think this is going to lead to a collapse. We’ll put out the warnings on that. But once our members come to Fortitude Ranch, you know, we. We start building our defenses up. We get ready. We do, you know, depending on the time of year, we increase our gardening and we prepare for a collapse.

But it almost doesn’t matter what the trigger event is. Our procedures are pretty much the same in a pandemic. Yeah, we got some quarantine things we got to deal with, but by and large, we’re designed for any kind of an eventuality. So, you know, one of my issues with, like, preparedness communities, and I know yours is somewhat more unique than. Than others, is that, you know, you have a bunch of people who don’t really know each other. And I guess the concern for a person like myself is, well, are the doors to me going to be open when I get there, and what is the politics going to be when I get there? Because, you know, and how is this better than me just trying to ride it out with my own family, extended family, friends, and those sorts of things? Like, is there a certain person you’re, like, targeting with respect to this, like, who fits the profile of somebody who’d be an ideal candidate for one of your preparedness communities? Well, more preparedness for the middle class.

So we don’t require. You have a military background or training. Yes, we do tend to have a lot of military members, but it’s more. Because they’re more aware of how things can go to hell. And you can have a collapse, but you need to have a lot of guards on duty 24, 7. So if you’re going to keep six guard posts, man, in the 40s ranch, we’ve got about six guard posts at most of them. That takes a lot of people. You’re already into the calendar. You got to have at least 50 people just to man your guard post.

But again, we’re gardening. You got to take care of chickens and sheep and rabbits and all the other animals. We’re going to do massive hunting. Well, the honest word is poaching. When the. When there’s a collapse starting, we will be shooting every living creature in sight to make in the jerky and to get more food stored. So we need a lot of members and our security Depends on our people. We want a lot of people. And in terms of politics, we don’t expect to have that. The people join Fort Ranch because of the ranch manager. You know, they’re the person in charge.

They’re the ones who know everything. They’re the ones telling you what to do, giving you directions. We have member training. A lot of our members have skills. You know, we have medical clinics. So, you know, we’ve got doctors and nurses on our staff. Not our staff, but in our membership as well. But we need everyone and our mission statement, you know, we will keep our members alive. That’s what we’re all about doing. No one is going to get, you know, forced out. No one’s going to get punished. At Fortitude Ranch if someone becomes a security alert and a problem, we would tell them, hey, stop doing this or we’re going to have to for we’re going to revoke your membership.

You’re going to have to leave. But in a collapse situation, our members will know. We all got to cooperate. We all got to work our ass off. Everyone has to do guard duty, all these tasks, keeping the wood stoves going, all the work to do. We need our members and we need each other. So I think we’ll be a very, very cohesive group. Yeah. So like, how do you ensure that you’re not bringing people into the group who are going to be problematic? Because it almost seemed like this sort of endeavor would benefit from some screening process to somewhat ensure that people weren’t liabilities.

It’s largely self selection bias or normally someone wants to join Fortune Ranch. You know, they thought it over. They don’t want to be a marauder. They do want to be prepared. They’ve looked at us and decided, yeah, this looks like a good fit. So they’ve already done most of the screening for us, but certainly our sales staff and when we do the tour, you’re asking questions of us, we’re asking questions of you and getting to know people. Then we do member training events as well where people can get to know each other, other better. But again, the key thing is that there’s a ranch managers, assistant ranch managers, but we’re in charge.

And again, there’s like a hundred plus members at a 14 ranch location. So, you know, let’s say you and three other guys decide, hey, we want to take this over. You know, there’s no chance for you doing that. You’re going to have to work with the ranch manager. We’re going to know what’s going on. And again we have to stay together to defend against Marauder groups. Our whole goal is to never get in a fight with a Marauder group. We keep our guard post manned. We keep our lines of our cleared lines of fire. We keep our gardens going and the animals all inside and safe.

At night, we’re going to be a very hard target. Marauder groups won’t come after us. But that depends on the fact that when a Marauder observer looks at us during a day, we enforce the rule. In a collapse, you will not be outside without your weapon. So we want the Marauder observers to report back. Holy shit it. They got at least six guard posts. I can see they got defensive walls, cleared, lines of fires. And everyone, every one of those sobs has a weapon all the time. So we want them to see a disciplined group with a lot of people with weapons, defensive walls.

So they’re not going to come after us. What they’re going to do, a Marauder group is going to do is they’re going to go after the soft, easy targets. So we make ourselves the hardest target out there to get after. What our members worry about more, frankly, is our government. And I think you’re aware of this. Executive orders state that a government agency in the US can seize food from you while you’re in Canada. If you’re really in Canada, they can’t do it. But in the US they can do it here, too. They could definitely do it here.

I guarantee that’s what our members are most concerned about is what happens is the army gets sent after us. And I keep telling them, look, I was in the National Guard. Politicians may say, hey, go attack these people and start seizing their food. I think our Guard troops would refuse orders like that. I really do. And the Guard comes from the people from the local area. I don’t think National Guard troops would support that, but it is a fact. I’m not doing a conspiracy theory. Executive orders in the United States and have for decades state that government officials can seize it from the civilians because their goal is continuity of government, keeping themselves alive, themselves in power.

They’re going to take more police protection when you need police the most. They’re going to take more of it to protect the top politicians and elected officials. So that’s the bigger threat we face. Yeah, Marauders are a big threat. Government is the second one that our. That our members worry about. But we’re. We’re the good guys. We’re the team that’s going to, you know, make ourselves be able to deter or defeat a Marauder Attack or a government attack if it comes to that. But I just don’t think National Guard troops are ever going to attack American civilians to steal their supplies.

I hope not. Yeah, I mean, we can definitely have a discourse about the expropriation of stuff and why. I unfortunately think that because people are so conformist and history bears this out that, that they will very likely follow orders so long as there’s enough compartmentalization and the, the momentum is in a certain direction. It’s very unlikely that people are going to resist orders unless there is some leading charismatic figure to say, no, we’re not going to do this because it’s anti constitutional. So I’m not as optimistic in you as you in that respect. But I guess what I would be somewhat concerned about is the.

Any disunity emerging amongst the particular group at Fortitude Ranch as or any prepping community. And this has always been one of my concerns because I’ve lived in and I’ve worked in remote work communities and I can. I know there’s always a certain politic that, that emerges and usually for the most part, things flow harmoniously. But if people feel like they’re being mistreated or they’re favorites being played or somebody is perhaps having too much power or authority over what gets rationed or this and that, you know, I think there’s. And these are obviously secondary things that are, you know, these are only going to become problems after, you know, a major event.

And the first order of the day is going to be protecting the community. And that in itself might be enough social glue flu in order to prevent those, these things I’m talking about from really becoming. One of the reasons why I formed Fortitude Ranch over a decade ago is I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. I knew I had to be in a big group. So I knew they needed a survival community. And then I looked around and there’s been voluntary survival communities for decades. The problem is they don’t last long. They tend to fall apart part because of those disagreements.

I mean, we have two radiation detectors. They’re expensive things. We’ve got two because we believe in, you know, Murphy’s Law, if it didn’t go wrong at will. So we’ve got two. Well, you can imagine the fight that goes on saying should we buy a second one of these? Try to get, you know, a group of 50 to 75 to 100 plus people agree on that, they’ll have a fight over that. Well, we don’t have that. We are not a Volunteer survival community. We are a business. Staff is in charge. We own the property. You remember it’s a country called membership style.

You pay an upfront fee to join and then quarterly dues. It’s our business. We own it, we run it. Our mission is we keep our members alive, we treat them fairly and our survival. I mean, my family is going to Fortitude Ranch. My family’s survival doesn’t just depend on me. It depends on our members. We need 100 plus people. We need the doctors, we need the mechanic if our tractor breaks down. We need all that stuff. But most of all, we need 100 plus armed people because we gotta want, we want Those guard post man 24, seven, six of them.

And then we want to have 100 plus people run into the walls and we see a marauder group, sound the alarm, mount our walls and show them you don’t want to mess with us, you’ll get slaughtered. And so, you know, people are relying on your good faith argument here and, and that you’re you as an individual. I could see as being somebody I would trust personally. But how do they know, you know, these other eight communities who are obviously not necessarily going to be communicating with each other. When I say, I’m saying I’m the ranch manager, for example.

So every place has a ranch manager. Every location has their ranch manager. That’s the person in charge and that’s who our members know. That’s pretty much for a lot of them, that’s the only one they know. Now others come to member training, know some of the other members or they’ll know assistant ranch managers who again tend to be. Most of them are former military folks, but they rely on the staff to give them directions and to keep them alive. But we rely on all of us. We need the manpower. We’re growing food. Yeah, we got stockpiled food.

But you need to be able to grow and ranch for really long term survival. When the grid goes down, it’s at least a year. It may be several years. If it’s a pandemic, it’s going to last for probably over a year. And then how long does it take us to get law and order back? I have no clue. It could be a long time. So we’ve got to do a lot of labor. Yeah, we got tractors, but it’s largely manual labor for our ranching and gardening. We need a lot of people for our long term survival.

Yeah, there’s no doubt that having a community is really the only way that a person is going to ride that out, because you can’t do it alone unless you’re really remote and far removed from all the threats. Even then, if you want a higher standard of living, you’re going to need that specialization that comes from having a. Marauders are going to go everywhere, Nate. If it. If it lasts long term, they’re going to go everywhere. You’re not going to find a place where a marauder group won’t be. I just mean, like, in terms of. Of. Yeah, in terms of, like, the.

The more acute threats. Like, there’s going to be, like, if you’re within, you know, city limits or you’re near a city, you’re not going to be as far up the supply chain. If you’re out in the backwoods, I mean, you’re going to be the last that people mess with. I mean, there’s going to be depending on where you are, of course, but if you’re somebody who lives, you know, like, in the periphery of a city, you’re going to be the. The. The first in the supply chain that the people are going to capitalize on. But I guess, you know, what I’m kind of getting at is, is there some kind of charter or some kind of thing that makes you.

The people can be confident that if they do make this investment in Fortitude Ranch, that they’re actually going to be. That it’s 100% guaranteed that it’s going to be what. What it’s. It proclaims to be when the time comes. Like, what is the guarantee above and beyond the organization’s word? It’s the fact that, as I said, our staff depends on our members for survival. Just like members depend on staff, we all depend on each other. We need all of us. And I have to disagree with you on the city thing. I mean, I think people in cities are going to be fleeing cities as fast as they can from, you know, from the first time it gets bad.

Some people may take them a day or two to realize, yeah, this really is a. As a collapse. But I think everyone’s going to bail out of cities. And for most people who aren’t well prepared, which is unfortunately most, they’re going to head for the hills. That’s the term. Go out into the forest. And they have this stupid notion, oh, I’ll go out and hunt deer and chop down trees and build a home. Yeah, you and tens of millions of other people or hundreds of millions will be out there doing that. And a lot of Americans are going to go into Canada.

Canada thinking that, oh, there’s less population up there. We’ll roam up into Canada. They’re going to go everywhere. If the collapse lasts free, it doesn’t have to last for a year. If a collapse lasts a month. I don’t think you’re going to find any place anywhere in the United States where you won’t find people out looking for food. And the fact that it’s remote makes it more attractive for people who are not prepared and are looking for a place to survive. They’re going to go there because they’re going to see be people all over the place.

And if you’re trying to camp out in, you know, a nice national forest where there’s thousands of other people in your immediate area, you’re going to get killed. So you’re going to have to go to the more remote areas. I mean, Fort Ranch, Nevada is arguably our best spot because it’s. I won’t tell you where it’s exactly, but it’s high mountain desert. So it’s really rough for marauder groups to take out 4 inch Nevada because, you know, we’re an oasis us. We’ve got springs, we’ve got plants and stuff. All around us is desert. That’s a hard place.

But most of our locations don’t have deserts to protect them. They’re in florists and we know darn well there’s going to be marauders out there, people starving to death. Some of them are going to come begging for food. We do that in our collapse survivor app all the time. If you play that, you’re going to have the situation, hey, there’s a starving lady with a kid outside begging for food. Do you want to give me that? And it’s probabilistic, meaning there is no right or wrong answer. And by the random number generator could be that, yeah, she is starving and is legitimate.

It, you know, could be a 40% chance. Nope, she’s part of a marauder group. As soon as you come out, they’re going to shoot you. Or there’s a 20% chance that she is a distraction. She is part of our group. She’s a distraction. They’re coming at you from the other end of your compound now, so you’re going to have to deal with that. But I don’t think there’s any place on the earth you can go or you’re not going to run the marauder. So I have people telling me, oh, I’m going to get on a boat and go out into the ocean.

I wouldn’t do that. You couldn’t pay me to do that. There’s going to be pirates out there doing the same thing and attacking other boats out on the ocean. I don’t think there’s any place you can hide. I do not think you can hide anywhere. I think marauders will end up everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I think eventually there’s going to be desperation everywhere. It’s just a matter of, you know, if you can get off the, the secondary roads into the tertiary and quarternary roads, there’s a less likelihood that people will have the means to even get there in the first place.

And if you do have groups venturing that far out, I would surmise that they would likely not be very sizable. I think a lot of the, the big groups, if there are these marauders speaking totally hypothetically here, they’re going to be going for, you know, the bigger fish. And, you know, somebody who’s has a homestead in the backwoods of nowhere isn’t necessarily going to be the most price catch, at least certainly not in the early phases. So I think there’s like, there’s two strategies here. Like, there was a show that recently came out called Homestead. And you know, in that show it’s right outside of Salt Lake City.

And you know, one of the criticisms that many, much of my audience had against the, the homestead property, which is a fully fledged homestead property, is that it’s so close to the city. And you know, you’re, you’re not gray man. Like, you’re not off the beaten path. You’re not respecting the principles of like, concealment and out of sight, out of mind. But there’s like, with your strategy, I don’t think, even if you were accessible that a lot of people would really mess with you, especially if you had the, a significant amount of manpower and people with military backgrounds who really knew what they’re doing.

So like, there’s kind of two approaches. Like, I think you can be in proximity to danger zones if you have a really good setup and a strong community. I think, in fact, you know, there’s something, there’s an advantage there almost. But if you are a family or an extended family, maybe you have 10 to 20 people in your group, a smaller group, then I think there is advantages in, in maybe venturing a little bit further out. But like you’re saying your place in Nevada there is fairly remote, fairly isolated. Nobody at least, you know, knows where it is as far as, you know.

I mean, I mean, I’m not sure what sort of agreements you have with your members to Ensure that they don’t tell people where it is. Obviously they have a vested interest in not doing so. But yeah, I mean, there’s, I guess there’s different philosophies. So, you know, your strategy of one of, you know, regimentation and structure and a larger community with more people, I think there’s a lot of merit to that and ultimately I think it’s a wise decision. However, I’m still very reluctant myself personally. Maybe that’s because I’m slightly more resourceful than some people to, you know, kind of sign my life to that sort of something that I’m not in control of.

Right. You know, and me as a prepper, I’m very reluctant to, to go into somebody else’s world and, and let them kind of dictate the terms of how things are going to go. And so this is it. This is where, you know, is this making sense? Is this something. No, I agree, I agree with absolutely everything you said, Nate. You know, when I say you can’t hide, I mean in a long term collapse. I agree with you. You know, if you’re in a really remote area and the collapse is over in a couple weeks, yeah, you may never have any marauders out there.

But I think a lot of the collapse threats we face, they’re going to last for a long time time and people will get everywhere and I don’t think you’re going to get a month. I think probably most places in the U.S. maybe not Upper Canada, but most place in the U.S. and southern Canada, there’ll be marauders of groups. I agree with you. Not a huge one in the initial weeks, but eventually they’re going to be there because they’re going to be looking for food and it’s going to be so bad everywhere else. People are going to be trying to get to remote areas.

So I agree with you on that. But you just, I just don’t think you can survive with the small group group even if you’re super duper skilled. Because here’s the deal, let’s say Nate and I, you and I are together and we’re marauders. Two of us, Just two of us. I could take out a family sized group of 25 people because a family sized group of 25 people with fantastic skills, you and I can still take them out. The reason is we’re not going to go blundering in there shooting at this. We’re going to watch them from a distance.

They’re not going to see me observing you or me observing them. So we’re going to eventually figure out they got two guard posts. These are the guard posts. And then so at 3 o’clock in the morning, Nate, you’re over here. You know, whatever your comfortable shooting range is. Distance. I’m over here. We’re on walkie talkies. It’s three in the morning. These are the only two folks up. The other 23 are sleeping and. You ready, Nate? So am I. Okay. Three, two, one. We both shoot at the same time. We’ve just killed the two guards. We’re pretty good shots.

They’re sitting still. You know, we’re arrested, shooting. So we’ve just killed the two guards. Did someone inside hear that shot? Maybe. But the tendency is three in the morning, you hear some noise, you. You wake up, maybe you don’t hear anything else, you go back to sleep. So, Nate, you and I stand still, we stay still. But after 10 minutes, there’s no lights coming on. It looks like no one’s woken up. Now we move in. And if, if they’re lucky, we just steal stuff and leave. If they’re not lucky, lucky we go room to room knifing people.

And by the way, I’ve just. I’ve just done a scene from Walking Dead where they went into a bad guy’s place and they went room to room. The Marauder, they were actually the good guys killing a Marauder group in their place and knifed everyone. But. So, yeah, I was like you. I was a prepper on my own for a long time, but eventually figured out I can’t do it. You know, I don’t have the people. I got to have a lot of guards on duty. I got to have this skills. And then sharing the expense, I mean, dividing it amongst 10 people versus 25 versus 100 plus.

That’s why I want a survival community. But it has to be organized. It can’t be a voluntary thing. You can’t get 100 people to agree on anything. So it’s got to be the kind of the model that we’ve adopted at forgery. And we’ve been doing it for 10 years now and we think it works. Have we done through a collapse? No. Are we going to do one? Unfortunately, it’s inevitable. We are going to have a collapse. I think there’s a good chance this year if we dodge it this year, a good chance next year. I just don’t see avoiding it.

I mean, you’re not going to stop H5N1 from mutating at this point when it’s already spreading in. So Many mammal populations. You know, one or two mutations. It’s spreading between us not going to. That’s your, that’s your big thing is H5N1. What are some worries me the most? Yeah. And so you know, and I think that that is almost a given at this point. At some, at some point it could even be biowarfare induced. But is there any other scenarios that you’re. That you think are up there on the likelihood list? Oh, yeah. The economic collapse you talked about earlier.

That is what most people rate as the most likely to happen. Is it most likely to lead to a collapse? It’s not likely to lead to collapse. But there’s such a high chance of a recession. And if even at a small chance that it leads to collapse, that could lead to a 5% annual chance of an economic recession leading to collapse. And now you combine that with the political environment we’ve got in the US and the hatred going on, you know, hating mosque hating CEOs of big companies. Could that yield violence that leads to a collapse where police lose control? Absolutely, it very much could.

And then our electric grid. If China’s going to invade Taiwan and we. And by the way, I haven’t released this yet. I’ll say it on your program. I’m about to put on a picture paper. Are recommending the United States abandon its defense guarantees to Taiwan. It’s suicidal and incredibly stupid for us to be doing that. We’re provoking China into either launching a nuclear attack on us or using their agents to take down our electric grid. We’ve got to get out of that because we won’t survive a. A collapse. China can prevail. China will win in a war with us in Taiwan because they’ll use nuclear weapons.

They’ll escalate to nuclear weapons. Weapons. They’re willing to exchange nuclear weapons and lose 10 million, 100 million Chinese. The US president is not. We will back down in a nuclear war over Taiwan. We will lose. And if they take out our electric grid in the process of a nuclear exchange. Again, not my numbers. Up to 90% of Americans will die when our grid goes down. Watch Grid down. Power up that documentary. Don’t take my word for it. They’re citing congressional studies. It’s. It’s over for us. It’s a collapse that, yeah, we’ll survive at Fort Food Ranch.

But when it’s over, what kind of country are we going to have? Not much of one. We’re going to have to rebuild. By the way, that’s about the biggest objection I Get for people forage ranches. You know, if it’s really that bad that I need Fortitude Ranch, maybe I don’t want to survive. And that’s why I think young people should be prepping more than older folks like myself. I mean, you’ve got the most reason to prepare as young people because you’ve got decades of your life ahead of it ahead of you. You need to survive. And you’re going to have to be dealing with this collapse threats forever.

It’s not like we’re going to have a collapse this fall and then it’s ten years of bliss. We’re in the age of collapse. I’ve got a video out called the Age of collapse. These new technologies, artificial intelligence, we haven’t even talked about that yet. But the new ways that allow an individual to develop a weapon of mass destruction, that’s our future. So a Unabomber, you know, Al Qaeda, anyone who wants to is increasingly going to be able to enrich uranium, make a nuclear weapon. We did a scenario like that on the collapse survivor app. Terrorists use AI to develop new means to enrich uranium and they blew up three US downtowns with nuclear weapons.

That’s the future we’ve got. There’s going to be a lot of collapse events and young folks, that’s their future, they’re going to be living with collapse. You know, year after year they’re going to have to deal with some kind of a collapse. Yeah, it’s. What are your thoughts on like the situation Russia and Ukraine and Iran? Like what are the. In your opinion, is this something that you’re concerned about? It sounds like you’re pretty. Not certain certain. But it sounds like you are convinced that H5N1 is the biggest threat. But what about these other theaters of conflict that we’re seeing? Oh yeah, it’s just people ask me what’s the most fun.

I list that again, there’s 50 events we track. Absolutely. I mean, Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons if he keeps losing in that war and escalates to a nuclear war According to U.S. nATO, U.S. and NATO doctrine. If Putin launches a nuclear attack on Poland, for example, which has been helping Ukraine a lot and is a member of NATO. If Russia attacks Poland, according to our doctrine, we will launch a nuclear attack on Russia. And if we do that, Russia is going to launch a nuclear attack on us. And again, two nuclear weapons is all it takes to destroy the US electric grid.

They launch high in our atmosphere. Even North Korea can do it. The electromagnetic pulse will destroy transformers across The US and it will take us at least a year, several to get them back. In the meantime, no food gets produced, nothing gets manufactured. No municipal water systems. If you don’t have electricity, you do not pump water. No municipal water system, no gasoline gets pumped, nothing gets done. Does food get produced? Hell no. Our food production is mechanized. Nice. One last thing that I want to bring up. It’s a related medicine topic. China has been stockpiling grain for years.

They’re getting ready to have a war over Taiwan. They’ve got enough grain stockpiled to feed the Chinese population for up to two years. What is our government in the United States done for us for stockpiled food? Not a goddamn thing. There are no civil defense food stockpiles. We had a little bit built up in the 60s but there weren’t enough have boats to be purchased with it. So our scumbag politicians eliminated the U.S. civil defense food program. It’s gone. We have no stockpiled food. Americans are going to be annihilated in a collapse. We’re going to be dying by the hundreds of millions.

I don’t know if you’ll be much better in Canada, but we ain’t going to make it. China does a better job protecting its citizens than the US does and we’re, we’re in a bad state. I’m, I hate to be too gloom and doom on your program, but you know, we’re in a really bad state and I don’t see how we avoid a collapse. I think you’re in the right place with respect to doom and gloom. So you’re not the first put it that way. Now there’s a lot of us and more and more people are prepping.

But you know, I think it pisses me off is the biggest barrier of prepping. The biggest problem we face is our irresponsible, horrible government. Meanwhile, they are improving. I mean, if you go, if you drive by Mount Weather in Virginia where congress is going, massive construction going on year after year, they’re building and expanding that facility. They’ve got Raven Rock, they’ve got hundreds of facilities for themselves, they improve it. And they aren’t doing a goddamn thing for U. S. Citizens except an executive order that says if we need to, if we run out of food at Raven Rock and Mount Weather and all other FEMA and military facilities, we’re going to come take yours.

Wow. So I’m mad at China, but I’m a lot mad at my government than I am at Putin or China or, you know, almost al Qaeda. Our government in the United States is so horrible, so bad in setting us up for disaster, not doing a damn thing to warn or prepare US citizens. So how does a person like yourself of a high academic pedigree and you know, relatively high military rank, being a former intelligence officer, Harvard, you know, PhD, like what was it that clicked for you, that made you want to go down the path of preparedness? And why do you think others who are of your ilk are not doing the same thing? Well, again, it’s because I was an intelligence officer so I’m aware of the threats.

So when the Soviet Union Union fell, you know, the U.S. president, to score political points, declared a political divin dividend, we unilaterally eliminated all of our battlefield nuclear weapons in the US Military because that scored a lot of votes for President Bush. And they said. And I said, are you out of your mind? The world is not safer just because the Soviet Union is gone. Again, new technologies are making it such that, you know, know I could talk for 30 minutes about nanotechnology. All these new technologies are coming out. AI on top of this. Our future is one of collapse.

And it’s been obvious for decades. Biologists have been testifying before Congress for over a decade saying you are going to have an H5N1 pandemic. You are going to have other pandemics. You’re going to have people using bioengineering to design and manipulate viruses to create pandemics. You need to get ready for it. Has Congress done a damn thing? No. They’ve had congressional testimony saying the US electric grid is a frickin disaster. It’s fragile, it’s easy to destroy. 90% of Americans are going to die. You need to harden the grid. That was over a decade ago, Nate. Over a decade ago.

Has Congress done anything? Not a damn thing. Our government knows this crap is coming. I can quote your testimony in front of Congress on it. And they don’t do a damn thing except to prepare themselves to survive. They don’t do anything for citizens. That’s why I said I mattered our government than I am. Any other threat we face, I matter at the US Government. Yeah. For me that’s an analog of the just in time delivery system of efficiency is that the government operates in a very similar way. Whereas instead of, of putting storage in the back room is because it costs more money.

Instead of having insurance which costs money, they just choose not to. And instead they, you know, they misuse that money and that resources in other ways except when it comes to saving themselves and you cited Raven Rock, there’s a book called Raven Rock how the Elites Plan to Save Themselves or something like that. And by the sounds of things, they’re continuing to build out their own continuity of government plans. Well, not even, not even advising the population that they should get prepared. And that’s the crazy thing. And the reason why they’re not is I presume it’s because they don’t want to create too much controversy and panic surrounding something.

But you would think in the very least they would say you should be getting prepared because we don’t have the capacity to help you. But they’re not even saying that, so they’re horrible. So they’re not like Switzerland. Switzerland has massive programs, shelters, government supported. You know, if you serve in the Swiss military, when you leave, you keep your weapons. They’ve got fantastic civil defense. They can blow up roads and bridges and tunnels coming into Switzerland, Finland, you know, Sweden. Lots of countries do stuff, prepare for themselves. China is stockpiling food for their population. Our government is not preparing for us.

They’re just planning to steal from us if they necessary in case they start running low on food. So I said there’s nothing worse than the US Government when it comes to disgraceful, irresponsible performance and making us not just unprepared for a collapse, but set up to die. Yeah, it’s strange. The rapacious nature of Western government, you know, starkly contrasted against what we all perceive to be the axis of evil, who in the very least, and while there is restrictions on rights and freedoms and things that we can do here that they can’t do there, it really is a situation where you’re on your own here.

And so with that freedom comes the responsibility of knowing that, you know, the government, while they’re, they’re not going to potentially take away your rights and freedoms, although that’s a subject of debate. And I just say idealistically, the government here in the west is going to be more tolerant and allot us more rights and freedoms at the same time. That carries over into a collapse scenario where we’re going to be on our own. Whereas in China, where they have all these strategic stockpiles, they’re planning the big subterranean cities, these, you know, cavernous thousand mile tunnel systems under the earth, you know, they’re prepared to at least keep a certain amount of their population alive.

And I guess that is the benefit of authoritarian regimes. And I always say that, you know, it’s better to be an authoritarian regime in a crisis, in a collapse, but not necessarily when things are good. And so as we’re moving now into to the age of consequences, you know, those societies who are more regimented and who have, you know, more restrictions on freedom of movement and freedom of thought, they’re going to excel in that environment because they can easily control their populations. Whereas here, you know, it’s going to be dog eat dog, every man for himself.

So you were saying that you had, you were driving by Mount Weather and they’re doing upgrades to that. Oh yeah. If you drew, if you drive mountain, Mount Weather, I mean, you can’t go in the facility, it’s well protected. But if you buy that, go by there, you’ll see cranes and all kinds of construction going on. And that’s above ground. Remember, most of Mount Weather is underground. It’s an underground facility. But that’s been going on for years. I don’t give out our precise locations, but you know, Fort Ranch, West Virginia, you know, we’re on the other side of the border, but we have, for example, we have, we have a member of Fortune Ranch, West Virginia who’s worked at Mount Weather.

So he’s been inside there and, you know, doesn’t even live that far away. So we’re well aware of what’s going on there. And they continue to do big preparations for government survival and not a damn thing for US Citizens to survive. It’s just an absolute disgrace. And so as a former former military officer and intelligence officer, is there been like a conflict of interest in you talking about this kind of stuff? Like, has it ever been detrimental for you personally in your own career? Or like, has there ever been any resistance like to, to your Fortitude Ranch? No.

I mean, I was retired military officer, so I wasn’t running Fortunate Ranch while I was, and I was in, I, I was a reserve officer. I was active, then I was guard and then I was reserved. So I wasn’t in a full time position where that could be used against me or anything like that. And you know, we’re not, they occasionally look at us and say, hey, are you, if I was, if I was a militia group or a right wing militia group, yeah, they’d be all over me. But we’re not. We have absolutely nothing to do with politics.

And we are strictly defensive. We defend our property. We don’t, you know, don’t do border patrols or anything like that. If we did something like that, yeah, the government would be all over us, but we’re strictly defensive. So no, they never bothered us. And we still have, you know, the first amendment is still enforced by the Supreme Court. So I still have freedom of speech. But, you know, without getting too technical on you, the Ninth Amendment, which protects our natural rights in the U.S. and the Tenth Amendment, which absolutely limits the federal government to only doing those things specified written out in the Constitution.

Those amendments are both gone. They weren’t repealed. But for all practical purposes, there is no more limit to government in the United States. The Supreme Court has stopped enforcing the 9th and 10th amendments. There’s no limits to what the government can do. And as a result, all the career politicians do is pander for votes by, you know, hey, let me give you money, there’s a pandemic coming. Let me give you $5,000. Let me give you this, let me give you that. Because they’re, they’re more effective buying votes for that than they are, hey, let me stockpile some food for you in case there’s a collapse, or hey, let me raise your electric rates and harden the electric grid.

They won’t vote for that. They should if they’re trying to do the good thing for us and keep us alive, but all they do is buy votes. The most important thing the United States needs is term limits to get rid of career politicians. But there’s other problems, too. Do we’ve got to have a Supreme Court that will enforce the 9th and 10th Amendments and limited government. If we had government limited, we, number one, wouldn’t have this great political divide. I mean, do we fight. Are we dividing the US over foreign policy, our military spending? No, we’re divided over abortion, you know, all kinds of social and economic issues that the federal government has absolutely no business being involved in.

The 10th amendment says they can’t. So the country could be improved by not spending most of the money the federal government spends on is unconstitutional. You don’t have a right under the Constitution to do a health care program. It’s not in the Constitution. So if they followed the budget, followed the Constitution, we wouldn’t have, you know, the economic disaster with debt in a recession that we’re going to have. And then we’d have government that focuses on what they’re supposed to focus on, which is protecting me against threats I can’t handle on my own. That’s what government’s supposed to do.

And our government doesn’t do much of that because they’re too busy buying votes with social and pandering, social programs and pandering. And the 9th and 10th amendments are gone because the Supreme Court doesn’t enforce them. So government can do anything they want to do. And that’s what they’ve been doing. And that’s why we’re set up for a disaster. And most Americans won’t survive a bad collapse. So in terms of government expropriation and excessive rule of law, what have. What is Fortitude Ranch approach to that particular problem? Because, you know, that in my opinion is one of the biggest things I’m worried about is the government overreach in these situations.

Have you thought or war gamed at all with respect to how you’re going to navigate a overreaching bureaucracy when the time comes? Because I think especially as a community, of course you’ll be in the crosshairs. A famous scene from the movie Homestead is when, you know, the, the politician comes knocking and says, hey, you know, you have stuff. And I’ve heard, and by decree of whatever, you know, we get to confiscate this stuff and we need to distribute this to other people. What is your approach to this, given that it’s one of the things that is top of mind for a lot of your, your members we talked about a little bit before.

So for terms of political agendas, 40 Ranch doesn’t have when I’m speaking on my own, but when the government, if government officials do come to try to seize our food, I said earlier, I don’t think that’s likely because they’d have to have the National Guard behind them and even police wouldn’t back that because again, police guard their local people. And that’s by design, mind. We’ve always wanted to have a strong National Guard, not a federal military, to avoid having things like the military being used against citizens. So I think they would refuse orders. But if you’re right and they follow the orders, it’s going to be up to ranch managers, you know, and ranch managers will decide based on our training and what I know about our ranch managers, they would refuse.

I’m pretty sure they would refuse. I would. Because if I give you my food, I’d rather die in a gunfight than die by starvation. I’m not going to surrender myself my food. I would say no, I’d say we’re going to fight for it, you know, refuse to give you food. We’re going to, you know, it’s different and it depends on the situation. So let’s say, hey, we got an army unit here, a guard unit here. They’re fighting marauders, they need food. I would give them food. So it depends on the scenario. But if it’s, hey, you know, we’re running out of Food for our top state leaders in the legislature.

They need more food. I would say, say, well have them go out and start gardening like we do. You know, we’re not going to give away our food. So it’d be up to the ranch manager in this situation. But I would say no. If, if we’re in a bad situation, bad enough that the government officials are low on food and the National Guard is willing to go out and kill and harass civilians to steal their food, then it’s going to be such a bad situation. My bet is we would, the ranch manager would say no, we refuse.

Use will fight. Now we might, we might ask for a vote of our members to see what they want to do in a situation like that. But my bet is there’d be agreement to fight. And I don’t. And if it comes down to that, I don’t think they would attack us now. If they got a tank, yeah, they can, they can break through our walls, but we can go underground too. So you’re vulctually going to have to have people on foot and you, you’d suffer a lot of casualties. The advantage of defending against prepared defenses is at least 3 to 1.

It’s up to a 10 to 1 advantage. We would have that advantage and it’s our terrain and inside the walls you don’t know what we’ve got inside our walls. So we would probably choose to defend. Well, I think you also brought up something interesting about the importance of the locality of it all and knowing people within the community who would potentially be more inclined to resist orders, presuming that those people were taken care of. Because if I’m a guy who’s in with the town sheriff or whatever and you see, you know, your own family starving and there’s this group up on the hill that has all this stuff and all these provisions.

Well, you might know him because you went to high school with him. You know, I mean, in fact, now that I recall this, there was a scene in the movie Civil War. Did you see that one? Now it was such a stupid scenario. California and Texas are allies. We’d be. California might fight Texas. I think they. Yeah, I mean they did. I didn’t watch it. They did that because he didn’t want to be accused of politicizing it. Right. So that’s why Alex Garland made California and Texas Unify in that particular movie to prevent any criticism that he was favoring one side or the other.

But anyways, there was a scene in that movie where it was right near the beginning where a guy is talking about how they had to hang some people because they were stealing stuff, but that they went to high school with that person. So kind of showing the. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily how it’s going to play out. I guess it just means that in desperate times. So. I agree there’s, there’s a lot to what you’re saying in terms of being in with this community, knowing the, the, the people who are local, who are the ones who are likely going to be enforcing this if.

And the. Also the factor of, you know, they have to bring in National Guard, you know, is so that there’s that disconnect there, so they would have less problem enforcing it. I think that’s a very good point. But, yeah, I, I think, you know, I don’t know, when people get desperate, like, I’m a bit more of a pessimist in terms of, you know, what people and the, the depths people will go to. I think generally speaking, if you can take care of those people and if you can make provisions and maybe offer them a better deal even, you know, these are things to think about.

But maybe that’s getting too elaborate in our speculations. I don’t know. Well, one thing about the National Garden Police as well is you’re not going to have many of them. Them, because what’s your priority? It’s, it’s keeping yourself and your family alive. So policemen, a lot of them are going to quit because they’re going to say, hey, law and order is gone. There’s no way in hell I can get it back. And my family is at risk. If I go out and do my patrol in my duty, my family could get attacked by a marauder. So a lot of policemen are going to quit and it’s going to be the same way with the National Guard, law, National Guard or troops.

And say, I joined the National Guard and I was in the National Guard. I joined the National Guard to defend my family from overseas threats. So while deploy, fight overseas to defend my family at home. But my family at home is safe. While in a collapse, my family at home is not safe. So a lot of Guard, National Guard people are going to say, no, I’m not reporting duty. I’m going to stay home to protect my family. And even amongst the federal military, you’ll run into some of that as well. You’ll have a lot of desertions from the federal military.

People say, you know, I realize we really need to keep Langley Air Force Base operating, but, you know, my family could be killed by marauders. I’m out of here. So you’re not going to have, you know, I think the threat of the National Guard and, and police and stuff coming after you to steal your food, I think it’s just there’s so many reasons I see that not happening. I don’t think it’s very likely, but it’s legal. Our government authorized this is it. That’s what bothers me the most. And just, just to reiterate so we’re clear, in Canada we’ll have far less rights than you guys down there.

So it’s not going to be a pretty picture up here. Do you have any other. Before we conclude, just general advice to people who, you know, maybe they, they’re not wanting to become a member of Fortitude Ranch. Is there something you would generally advise for people to be doing at this point in time towards getting more prepared for, for what might be coming? Absolutely. Any preparations you can do are great. Education is great. So the fact that they’re watching your show is a good sign. Keep watching. There’s a lot to learn, as you well know. And you know, get prepared.

The collapse Survivor app will give you a lot of education too and it gives you the threat warnings. You can play simulations to learn more. So it’s education, but it’s also weapons. That’s the other problem with government is, you know, all the gun control stuff. We should be encouraging ars. You know, do you need military capable weapons in a collapse? Hell yes you do. It’s. You got a Marauder group. You know, what am I going to do? You know, I love double barreled shotguns. Well, that’s great. If there’s a Marauder Group of 25 people coming in and I got two shots and I need to reload, that’s not good.

I need clips. I need high capacity magazines. Sorry, not clip clips. Magazines, which I can’t buy legally in the state of Colorado. So you need to get prepared. And the biggest barrier you’re going to have getting prepared is the government and regulators and all the, all this crap they put in your way. Yeah. Okay, well that’s great. And where can people find more information about you@forte.com if you Google us, we’re all over the place. You know, you mentioned Fox. We’ve been on a lot of stuff. Not as popular as Canadian Prepper, but we’re hoping Our, our YouTube channel will eventually come close to you.

While popularity isn’t everything, I’m still learning a lot in this space. Oh yeah, you know people like yourself have a lot to teach people like myself. And I know you do a lot of podcasts on other channels, so I’m sure we’ll see more of you. And yeah, to encourage people if they want to know more, go check out Fortitude Ranch. And thanks for coming out today. I greatly appreciate it. It’d be great to come on again sometime. Absolutely. All right, take care. Thanks. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices.

No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
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