Today we’re talking about 10 unwritten rules of preparedness and survival, if you want to ride out the worst that may come. Let’s get to it. So you think that you’re going to scavenge supplies after SHTF? Even if you are successful, 99% of the time that pretty much means certain death or injury within about 100 days. Now I understand that not everybody can immediately go out and get a homestead. If you guys go back and watch my original videos you’ll realize that my progression into prepping started off as being a more or less urban city slicker who did have experience in the wilderness but I was living out of a bug out bag.

I had a very small condo. Actually I lived in shared accommodation when I started. You’re starting from the perspective of a nomad where you’re only real option if you live in the city and if you have to vacate a city you’re starting from the perspective of somebody who is more or less going to be relying on scavenging supplies from the environment. Whether that means through natural means by hunting, foraging, gathering supplies from nature or going out and trying to loot and scoot. That strategy is going to get you killed. No matter how much training you have tactically you may be one of the best snipers.

You may have been in covert operations. You may be a green beret. Eventually somebody’s going to get the jump on you. From the perspective of somebody who’s just starting out your disposition is going to be nomadic means of self-subsistence. If you look at the evolution of human beings we started off primarily as well tree dwellers at one point but then when we started to emerge from the trees we became nomadic. We followed the food. Civilization was established when we started practicing agriculture. Ultimately your goal in preparedness in your natural trajectory is going to be from a nomad to a horticulturalist.

Scavenging is not a permanent solution. It is a temporary solution and as so long as you are working towards and continuously trying to develop your skills, become more resourceful, become more networked and put yourself in a position where you don’t have to bug out because your bug out location is where you are. That is the ultimate goal of preparedness. As I always say all preppers eventually become farmers. Money won’t save you neither will will power. You know there’s a great quote from the movie Ex Machina the maker of the ai the architect if you will he’s talking to one of his programmers and he says something to the effect of it’s funny you know no matter how rich you get shit still goes wrong.

You can’t insulate yourself from it. I used to think it was death in taxes that you couldn’t avoid but it’s actually death and shit. The reason why I say this quote is that so many people think that you’re going to be able to just buy your way into the lap of luxury post collapse. This rule doesn’t only apply to rich people because you may buy a certain item thinking that that item is going to give you a little bit of an edge and it may but it’s not going to do the work for you.

There is always going to be a necessity for you to get your hands dirty and shtf whether you’re Jeff Bezos or somebody who’s living in the developing world. There’s another quote that is quite befitting here. It is no exaggeration to say that the rich own most of what there is that is not nailed down. The rich rely on the grid the most. A disproportionate amount of their wealth is in some way embedded and can only be acknowledged and recognized if the grid is up. It’s incumbent on you to acknowledge that you stand to lose the most when the shit hits the fan.

It’s a much longer way to fall from the penthouse than it is from the first floor. The people who are living in the basements of the world right now hell shtf they’re going to be able to move up to the first floor but if you’re on the penthouse right now just remember it’s a long way down. Never envy preppers who’ve been doing this much longer than you have. The tendency is to always compare ourselves. We want to keep up with the Joneses. We can’t continue the mentality that got us into these problems in the first place.

You know I’m not going to lie there’s many preppers out there when I look at their properties I’m incredibly envious. If I look at Curtis Stone’s property he’s on top of a mountain it’s just an amazing place it leaves a lot to be desired when you’re on the property where I’m at. Understanding that there’s people who’ve invested their entire lives in this for the last 15 years eat, sleep, drink preparedness. You wouldn’t walk into a kindergarten class and be envious of those who had a university degree. It’s going to take you a while to get there.

So when you see these people that you think are rich just understand they’re probably older than you and if not they’ve just invested a hell of a lot more time. But what’s more important here is what is it that you are envying. The older I get the less I envy people with their stuff and their mansions and their cars. I envy people who have large families who have large networks maybe they are good with their hands and they can build things. For me that’s what I’m envying and that’s what you should be envious of.

Be envious of the person who has a healthy physique. These are the things that are well within the realm of obtainability for anybody. If you’re starting right now you may be at a loss for where to start. Over time you’re going to accumulate all the fear gear. You’re going to get it all. Eventually you’re going to come to realize that the most important things at the end of the day are your social networks, your physical body and above and beyond that how do you manage stress. You can have a three thousand dollar firearm with a ten thousand dollar optic.

If you can’t keep your composure in an adrenaline inducing situation then it’s all for naught. So you should envy that which doesn’t immediately meet the eye. When it comes to trying to forecast bad events completely ignore the status quo. Time and time again they prove their incompetency when it comes to not only being prepared for disaster but just expecting or anticipating outcomes in the first place. Throughout all of history there’s always been a very small minority of people who were warning about impending doom. Now there’s always people warning about impending doom and they say you know a broke clock is right twice a day but if you go back through history there was people who were accurate and they made very accurate predictions of dire outcomes.

The media the government are not going to tell you when the shit’s going to hit the fan. This is a very important rule of preparedness and if they are telling you that the shit is going to hit the fan usually it means there’s ulterior motives. What they don’t want is to have a panic that they cannot control. Normalcy bias is so hard to overcome because think of the adversity that those people were up against. Take for instance Michael Beery the guy who shorted the housing market back in 2008. Everybody was telling him he was wrong but the data he was the one guy who was actually looking at the data that was telling him otherwise.

The status quo completely oblivious a lot of people got wiped out. Even people who are very skeptical like myself succumb to the social conformist pressure of normalcy bias. If she’s not scared and he’s not scared then I shouldn’t be scared. As a person who looks at the data there’s a lot of things to be concerned about in the modern world. Be aware of the status quo but also be aware of the people who are on the fringes and are rightly skeptical but have their own set of political and religious agendas. Trust your instincts more than the status quo.

Stop being such a Lydite. There’s so many technophobes in the preparedness community that anytime a new technology is introduced there are these traditionalists who romanticize the old ways whether it comes to the one guy who doesn’t want to give up his old buck saw even though silky saws have proven to be like 10 times more superior. People who are so stubborn when it comes to leveraging the tools because everything is technology. Even the Amish use technology. One of the cardinal rules of prepping is not being so fixated on negative news. I realize that information is power and information is a commodity that one should stockpile.

You should seek to constantly be informing yourself about the state of the world so that you can forecast. However some people get into this obsessive doom loop and they need this constant fuel of bad news in order to fuel their preparedness endeavors. Now it is true that old saying that if you scratch a cynic you will find an idealist. So I do believe that at the root of a lot of negativity that is inherent in preppers there is a certain yearning for a better world. But it’s one thing to be aware of all of the risks.

It’s another thing to constantly obsess about it. And I get frustrated with this because often times my daily update videos get way more views than the videos that we’re actually trying to show people how to do stuff. And that’s a sign that there’s a disconnect somewhere. A lot of people are concerned about this stuff. But whatever got us into these manmade crisis that we’re in right now that same lazy mentality is what is going to make people aware of what’s coming but not prepared for it. So for this reason it’s important to not be a pessimist but be a realist.

Never prep out of fear. A lot of people say Nate you’re a fear monger. Fear is a great impetus. It’s a great ignition source to put a fire under your ass to get moving. But prepping is a marathon not a sprint. And what happens with a lot of people is they get overcome by fear. They realize how vulnerable they are. They have this epiphany this aha moment that oh my god you know I’m completely vulnerable to a grid down collapse scenario. And then they just rush out and they start throwing stuff on credit cards and they alter their life within the flick of a switch.

And when nothing happens right away because of course that sort of fear should be reserved for an acute crisis. For imminent danger. You know say you run faster scared. And that is true. But how long can you run faster scared. If fear was my sole motivating factor for leading the life that I’ve chosen to live I would have burned out and become desensitized to the news cycle a long time ago. So I would implore people that having that sense of urgency is good but don’t expect that bad things are going to happen in order to vindicate or validate the life that you’ve chosen.

So if you want to be prepared don’t be scared but beware. Don’t face your preparedness around low probability events. One of the most irritating comments I get on the channel is anytime I’m going to show somebody a new piece of technology you know exactly what they’re going to write. They’re going to push their glasses up they’re going to get right on the computer and they’re going to be like if an EMP happens that’s going to be a completely useless paperweight. Here’s the thing. While that might be true focusing on low probability events only really just makes no sense.

There’s so many people out there who have all of these preparedness things gas masks full on CBRN three thousand dollar hazmat suits and they don’t have a freaking fire extinguisher in their kitchen. In addition to this we also have this thing called confirmation bias. People will obsess about one prospective crisis like a super volcano or world war three or a pandemic or a cyber security incident or a financial crisis and they’ll base their whole persona around that one thing and confirmation bias will take them in the direction of finding more and more information that confirms that fear that irrational fear that that is the most probable disaster of all the possible disasters.

Oftentimes it will stem from your predilections and your education and how you were raised. So let’s say you came from a military family. What you base your preps around is probably going to be something to do with war or World War III.

You may be a person who works in health care, and because of that, for you, pandemic preparedness is top of mind. Now all that said, I think that all of the aforementioned are probably very probable within our lifetime. At some point, we’re going to see a nuclear bomb used somewhere, we’re going to see a massive cyber attack, we’re going to see another pandemic, and we’re going to see an economic collapse.

All of those things are going to be true, but it’s just a matter of time. Is it going to be one year? Is it going to be 10 years or 20 years? You don’t want to base all your preps around pandemic preparedness and then be completely caught off guard with what’s going on in the markets.

Zone preparedness is the best way to play. There’s that old saying, trust but verify. So you could have a standardized set of questions that you ask people who come into your community or seek to transact with you in a grid-down predicament in order to really figure out who they really are.

It’s going to be difficult because you don’t know what people’s background is, and you don’t know what their skill sets are. Oftentimes I see people having these paranoid delusions that everybody’s out to get you, and there is this taboo against helping people within the preparedness community.

It’s important to remember that people are, in fact, assets. There’s a fine line between being too naive and too paranoid. If you’re too paranoid, you run the risk of alienating yourself from everybody, and that’s actually going to lower your survivability and your ability to thrive.

You need the benefits of community. You need specialization that can only come when you have multiple different people with different degrees of specialization and different skill sets. That’s how you build a civilization. When resources become scarce, people are going to have to go into conflict over resources.

People will use deceptive tactics in order to get things from you. There’ll be thievery and conniving and backstabbing. However, at the end of the day, I would still venture to say that 51% of the people that you come across are probably going to have good intentions and are going to be an asset to your group.

So it’s up to you to discern who is who after SHTF. This requires a clear state of mind, one not ridden with negativity and just presuming that everybody is out to get you and that everybody is a detriment because human resources are a thing. People are resources; they are assets.

What are the things that you need most? You need food, you need water, you need security, and you need shelter. 99% of the money that you spend on survival gear should be meeting those base-level needs. A mistake I’ve made throughout my life is spending too much money on micro preparedness.

There’s a good reason to have reliable tools inside your bug-out bag, ones that are built to last. It’s another thing to go overboard and have like a ten, twenty-thousand-dollar bug-out bag. You can if you’ve got the resources, why not? But if you’re a person of modest means, I would say invest more in the macro tools.

You may have a little solar panel in your bug-out bag. The macro version of that is going to be a whole home-based solar system. You can buy a thousand or two-thousand-dollar water filter for your bug-out bag. The tool version of that would be a water well or a rain catchment system.

One of the last things I would recommend is to buy one thing and master it. There’s an old truism, and it goes something like: fear the man with one gun because he knows how to use it. It’s very easy, especially with firearms, to get into this habit of wanting to fill every possible niche.

You need the shotgun, the .22, the portable mini shotgun, the semi-auto shotgun, the lever-action, the bolt-action, and something of every caliber just in case in SHTF you happen to come across a very obscure caliber of bullet. But above all else, master one thing. Find something that works and just stick with it.

You want to have your tools become an extension of your body, and the only way you can do that is if you limit yourself to something that works. There’s also something to consider, and that’s the law of diminishing returns. You can go and buy a knife like this knife right here.

It’s a Benchmade folding knife. This is like 90% as good as a knife is ever going to be. You’re going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get that extra 10%. Is it really worth it is the question. So those are some of the rules for your preparedness tools.

Don’t be a technophobe, but also don’t be one of these gear-obsessed weirdos—let’s just call them gear does. Thou shall not covet thy preps. Don’t get attached to what you have. A friend of mine made a very interesting observation the other day.

He said while the rich are at a disadvantage in that they have a disproportionate amount to lose, they also have another advantage in that if they do get some turnkey off-grid homestead pre-built for them, they’re not attached to it in the same way that somebody who’s built that thing with their bare hands is.

Let’s say a rich guy, after the apocalypse, goes into his turnkey homestead that was pre-built. He has everything pre-made, but he doesn’t know how to use a damn thing. Marauders come. Is that guy going to be beholden to that property? Is he going to have an intimate connection with everything he’s built there and risk dying for that, or is he going to fight another day?

Whereas if you have somebody who built an entire property out with their bare hands for years, that is a part of them. The benefit of that is that they’ve developed this symbiotic relationship with their space. They’re not going to be willing to let that go.

So you have to be willing to let shit go. It’s not the stuff that matters. The stuff is just a means to an end. The end is to have a healthy family, to live long and prosper. That’s what we ultimately want to achieve. So don’t covet thy preps, because your most valuable prepping item is you.

By some philosophical accounts, you, your body, and your mind are all that you truly possess in this world. If you go into this thinking that it’s all about the accumulation of stuff, you’ve missed the point of survivalism entirely. Please stop being annoying; it’s giving us all a bad name.

Try to stay humble with this preparedness game. Understand that you ain’t gonna convince anybody. [tr:trw].

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