Every so often, I’ll watch a video that is so egregiously bad, that I absolutely have to do a response to it. Now, this is a hard one for me, because I actually like Andrew Bustamante. He’s been on the channel before. I think in terms of his geopolitical commentary and analysis, it’s par excellence. He certainly has a unique perspective on things, and I would never discourage people from going and supporting him in what he’s trying to do. However, sometimes your heroes let you down, and this happens to be one of those videos.

The video in question is the ultimate CIA survival guide. The top mistakes to avoid. Andrew is a former CIA spy. He’s very open about that. Let’s see what he has to say. You’re right. Most people think about prepping, so they think about sheltering in place. Mistake number one that CIA teaches you is you never shelter in place. Never shelter in place, because when you- Okay, so the first thing that jumped out at me when I was watching this video the first time is, all of these guys, whether they’re from a military background, it could be Special Forces, it could be the CIA, it could be intelligence officers, everybody seems to have this occupational bias, and that colors the advice they give to other people who don’t have the same skill sets as them.

For example, if somebody works in health care, one of their primary fixations is going to be preparing for things like health emergencies, pandemics. If you have a prepper who comes from a military background or police background, chances are they’re preparing for a without rule of law situation. They’re not really too worried about gardening, they’re worried about having enough ammunition to stop a violent threat. Maybe you have somebody who works in Silicon Valley. For them, the primary threat is going to be the disruption that’s caused by artificial intelligence, or maybe you have a climatologist who doesn’t really care about geopolitics and World War Three, their central concern is climate change, and so on and so forth.

You get the picture. So what tends to happen is that they project onto everybody else their own skill sets, their own sets of circumstances, not every scenario is going to be you’re behind enemy lines, you’re a spy, and you need to escape and evade from that situation. So his first point in the first eight seconds, he lost me, because there are plenty of reasons to shelter in place, shelter in place, you force yourself into a position where you’re relying on diminishing resources. You never want to put yourself Okay, so I every second is just bad.

If you shelter in place, he’s saying that you’re forcing yourself into a situation where you’re relying on diminishing resources. What happens when you go out to the countryside, is there just going to be this abundance of resources for you to harvest at will without any resistance whatsoever? I don’t think so. into a position where you’re relying on diminishing resources. You never want to put yourself in a position where the food you eat, the water you drink, the shelter you live in is a diminishing resource, because then there’s a timeline. Okay, so the first thing is it doesn’t have to be a diminishing return.

And even if it is, you can stockpile months worth of food and water more than you would need for most disaster situations. But even if you were worried about diminishing supplies, there are regenerative systems, you can get a solar power system, you can grow a garden, you can have chickens, you can stockpile more ammo than you’re ever going to need in terms of the amount of gunfights you’re actually going to survive. If the situation was so bad, that you ran out of ammunition, and somehow you were still alive, then I’d say you did pretty good.

It can only last for so long. And especially in like an all out disaster, there’s nobody coming to help you. So sheltering in place, the idea of prepping your underground bunker or hardening your house or filling your drawer, your closets full of guns. That is a fundamental error. No, it isn’t. Maybe he just didn’t have a chance to really think through this response. Because one thing about Andrew is he does a lot of interviews. He doesn’t ask for questions in advance. He’s flying by the seat of his pants most of the time.

So respect him for that. But the notion that you’re supposed to be waiting for help, that is antithetical to the ethos of the prepper. That is such that you’re not waiting for the government to come and help you. The ability to prepare for a prolonged period of time doesn’t take nearly as much resources. You get a few bags of rice and beans, you have a moderate amount of ammunition, a self defense implement, a decent amount of water. I mean, you could ride things out for months without having to venture out into a precarious world, where chances are, you’re going to encounter all kinds of threats that you wouldn’t had you just sheltered in place.

Now, a lot of this is dependent on the scenario in question. So there is no one size fits all approach, because there is a variety of different disasters, natural disasters, hurricanes, things of that nature, then yes, you might want to bug out in that situation. But if we’re talking about a larger calamity, where it’s food bar everywhere, then you might as well stay in a place that you know, and that you have a familiarity with so you can defend it, that marketers don’t understand, but true tier one operators do you never let yourself shelter in one place instead.

Okay, so this is this whole movement is life thing. Not everybody’s tier one operator. In fact, point 0001% of the population are tier one operators, and even them would have to establish some sort of foothold, you can’t just be a nomadic wanderer forever. Again, he’s projecting his own experiences working in covert operations to the average person in a disaster, where they’re going to be far more vulnerable, far more at risk of the myriad threats that exist in the post collapse environment, should they step out their front door with a backpack instead of staying in a place that they know where they can establish a larger supply of resources.

Now, it may come to it that your home gets raided by marauders and thugs. But if that’s the case, what makes you think you’re going to fare any better when you’re outside in the world and you have no defenses, you have no shelter and you have limited supplies. It’s just a stupid idea. Instead, you keep yourself mobile, because on in motion, you carry the resources that you have and you can constantly collect new resources on the way. Right? So consider the difference between having a shelf full of ammunition for your nine millimeter handgun, and then you sit in your house with all of your ammunition, or you move and every time you come across a dead body or a killed cop, you collect their nine millimeter.

Okay, wait a bit. Okay, so here’s your options. All right. You can sit in the comfort of your home, having a shelf full of ammunition. Or you can run around the post apocalyptic wasteland getting shot at hopefully coming across the dead bodies of police officers who I guess just were more unlucky than you’re going to be. And maybe you might get some ammunition. I mean, this is just fantasy land stuff. And I can’t believe that he would actually encourage people to do this. This is just going to add to the problem.

I mean, think about the situation he’s describing here. Think let’s listen to this again. Right. So consider the difference between having a shelf full of ammunition for your nine millimeter handgun. And then you sit in your house with all of your ammunition, or you move and every time you come across a dead body or a killed cop, you collect their nine millimeter ammunition, you move on this is not a video game. What makes you think that the situation is going to be such that there’s going to be a killed cop and that you are going to be one of the lone assholes that somehow survive this all and you’re out acquiring all of their stuff.

Why? Why not just stay in your home, where you have ammunition, instead of putting yourself in this dangerous situation. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. On another mile, you collect more and you collect what you need and you carry what you need. So mobility is huge. I agree that of that whole philosophy of movement is life. You want to be a moving target because as soon as you kind of get too established, you become a target. That said, there’s ways to mitigate those threats. And of course, a lot of this depends on where you’re located in the first place.

If you live out in the country, it’s going to be a lot different than if you live in a high rise building in Manhattan. Obviously, you’re going to have to bug out eventually. So to his credit, if you knew that the world was going to hell, and let’s just say New York was left standing, eventually, you’re going to have to leave that city most likely because indeed, there is a diminishing resource component to that. But even in a high rise building in Manhattan, you can survive for months, you can stock an incredible amount of supplies in a small closet.

But I can also see why this advice doesn’t pertain to the CIA, or doesn’t pertain to special forces, because they’re operating in a broader world where the rule of law is still intact. However, they’re in a certain specific set of circumstances that are dangerous in the moment, and they need to continuously be moving. Bug out disasters are going to come in three flavors. There’s survivability, immediate survivability, then there’s sustainability, and then there’s escape. So when it comes to immediately survivability, you only need to survive 24 hours, right? How would you get from noon today till noon tomorrow? That’s what we call a 24 hour bag.

So a 24 hour bag is small, it’s light, it’s easy, you carry a couple of bottles of water, you carry a little bit of food, you carry a change in footwear, you carry a change in clothes, just in case it’s warmer or cold wherever you’re living. But and this is something that would be perfectly practical and reasonable in certain disaster scenarios. Like if you’re trying to flee a wildfire or a hurricane, usually these are going to be meteorological events that even established preppers might not be able to ride out.

But that’s extremely rare. Just need to survive 24 hours hurricane that sort of thing. Exactly. Okay, well hurricane is going to stay at a hotel. More like a three day bag, but okay, right? You just need 24 hours to get from a safe place here to a safe place somewhere else. 24 hours is easy, right? It’s a backpack, you can move a family of four in a single 24 hour backpack if you wanted to you just get on a plane in Tampa and get off the plane in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and you stay in a hotel safe, bugged out, you’re safe from harm.

Then you have a three day bag. A three day bag is when you actually expect a disaster to occur and it will take up to 72 hours for you to get to a safe haven. And then you have full on escape. Full on escape means you’re leaving what you’re you’re leaving your property to relocate to another property for an undetermined period of time. Right? So like master massive, massive disasters look like when Katrina came through, people lost everything, they had to evacuate, like they were escaping. And there’s kind of too much.

But yeah, that’s true. However, that’s not much different from a three day scenario. He just said that a hurricane is a three day scenario. Katrina complete disaster. Yes. If the situation is such that you may not be able to return to your home for a long period of time, and on a national level, there’s still rule of law and that this is a regional emergency. You’ll definitely want to bring a reference and identification portfolio. I’m going to post a video of what that is. And some of the things that you might want to consider bringing.

But I think he’s missing here a lot of the obvious scenarios where you could shelter in place. There’s plenty of weather based emergencies, geopolitical emergencies, cyber related power outages, things where you’re not just going to run off into the fray and potentially put yourself and your family members at risk. If you want to do it properly, you also have to have all of your key documentation, passports, birth certificates, you know, all that other stuff. And then we know, as sad as it would be to lose our studio and our house and all of our artwork and all of our children’s memories, we’re gonna lose it.

We can’t fix that. But what we can do is keep the children everybody else alive by relocating the geopolitically, I guess, what is the tipping point that requires you to do to leverage the long term bug out bag? What is it? Is it simply Chinese Chinese economy just took over the US the world power we’re out. I’m not sure what buddy means when he’s asking the question of the Chinese economy taking over the US. That is not like one seminal event that is going to be a protracted situation that likely entails a lot of economic austerity, which is basically just amounting to life’s gonna suck.

But unfortunately, it’s not going to be a Hollywood shoot them up type of cue crisis that everybody wants it to be. Well, power, we’re out. Or is there something along the way that that you’re planning for preparing for? This is the million dollar question, right? And I feel like there’s a lot that we can learn from what the Jews didn’t didn’t do in World War Two. Because too many people were waiting for a tipping point. And what I would say is don’t wait for a tipping point. Set a date on a calendar.

Even better say set three dates on a calendar in early date to check in a mid date where you’re kind of wondering whether or not you should do this and then a final date where you’re like come hell or high water. We’re doing it. Yeah, right. And that’s kind of what we have on our calendar to we are leaving the United States in five to seven years. So he’s talking about strategic relocation, which is what preppers do. So he’s going to strategically relocate to a place that he deems to be safer.

And he’s going to stay there and ride it out. I highly doubt that when shit hit the fan erupts like he imagines it it’s going to, he’s going to leave that place and just wander off into the post collapse ether. So we know that come 2030, we’re leaving, not because we’re waiting for some sort of tipping point, but because between 2030 and 2035, there will be a tipping point. And I would rather observe that tipping point from the stands rather than be on the field. Because then after whatever happens happens and the shakeup happens, then we can decide what we do next.

He’s done videos on his theory of as to what’s going to happen. It’s still a little bit vague. And the timeline is a little sus. But when it comes to a lot of disasters, the whole idea is that you can’t predict when it’s going to happen. It’s not like, okay, we’re going to put it on the calendar. And you know, maybe it’s going to happen on this day. It’s just, okay, so that’s pretty much all he says about prepping. That’s his advice is that you should pretty much always bug out.

Or if you have a crystal ball plan for disaster five, seven, 10 years in advance. The next time I speak with Andrew, I’m going to confront him about this. Because this is potentially very dangerous advice for people to tell them that it’s better to venture out into a potentially dangerous situation than trying to be self sufficient on your own, the notion that you’re waiting for help from the government. That’s something I fundamentally take issue with the whole point of preparedness is to be your own government is to govern your life, self determination.

There’s some fundamental points that we disagree with, I would still say go and subscribe to everyday spy attributes to Monte self titled YouTube channel, lots of great insights. But with respect to this video, I gotta say, I do not agree with the perspective being put forth here. Let me know what you guys think in the comments section below. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe, Canadian preparation. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at Canadian preparedness calm, where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks.

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