➡ The text discusses how communities, particularly in less developed nations, are often self-reliant and resourceful in the face of disasters, quickly beginning to rebuild and problem-solve. However, the author expresses concern about how Western societies, like the United States, would respond to a major disaster, as many people live hand-to-mouth and rely heavily on credit and amenities. The author suggests that Western societies are often isolated and lack the community bonds that facilitate quick recovery in other nations. The text ends by emphasizing the importance of knowing and preparing for the needs of one’s community in the event of a disaster.

➡ The text discusses the importance of community and preparation in survival situations. It emphasizes that viewing people as assets rather than liabilities can be beneficial. The text also highlights the importance of having a plan and being prepared for various scenarios, including having necessary medications on hand. It criticizes the “lone wolf” mentality, suggesting that survival is often dependent on community support and cooperation.

➡ The speaker, a seasoned medical professional with experience in crisis zones, designed a low-profile first aid kit that doesn’t draw attention. This is because in dangerous situations, people may target those with valuable supplies, like medical kits. The speaker’s kit is designed to blend in and not look like medical gear, which has proven useful in his work in disaster response and combating human trafficking. The speaker emphasizes that in today’s world, it’s important to be prepared for anything, including being able to treat injuries without drawing unwanted attention.

➡ The text discusses the challenges faced by rescue workers in crisis zones, where they often compete with criminal elements to save vulnerable individuals, particularly children. The author emphasizes the importance of being strategic and not acting impulsively, as the goal is to expose and deter these criminals, not just eliminate one. The text also highlights the rapid growth of human exploitation and organ trafficking, and the role of healthcare professionals in this illicit trade. Lastly, it underscores the need for community cooperation and preparedness to combat these criminal elements, as lone individuals are often unable to protect themselves and their resources.

➡ People can choose to declare refugee status, which gives them access to certain resources but requires them to live in refugee camps and follow strict rules. Some choose not to be refugees, instead banding together as displaced persons and seeking help from non-profit organizations. These displaced persons often face exploitation, which is a growing public health issue. The speaker’s job is to teach healthcare workers how to recognize and combat this exploitation, as they believe the healthcare industry should play a leading role in this fight.

➡ The speaker discusses their experiences with addiction, humanitarian work, and living in Venezuela during a time of political unrest. They highlight the differences in addiction due to the rise of vaping, and the potential problems this could cause. They also share uplifting stories of the generosity of North American countries in humanitarian efforts. Lastly, they recount their time in Venezuela, where they witnessed military coups and social unrest, but also found opportunities to serve and help others.

➡ The speaker discusses the dark side of society, comparing it to a forest fire that needs to burn out. He talks about his motivations to help others as a counterbalance to this darkness. He also shares his reluctance to take on leadership roles, preferring to work on the frontlines. He mentions his deep relationship with God and his family as his driving forces, and how these relationships help him make decisions and keep his cool in dangerous situations.

➡ The text discusses the importance of living with a purpose and contributing to a bigger story, not just focusing on individual gains. It emphasizes the need to balance good and evil in the world, and each person’s role in maintaining this balance. The conversation also touches on the concept of prepping, or preparing for emergencies, and how it should evolve beyond self-centered motivations. Lastly, it encourages people to reassess what truly matters in life, especially in times of excess.

I’ve worked extensively in combating human trafficking combined with my disaster response, where security is a huge issue. If you have something valuable and people are in zombie mode, they will take it from you no matter what. That things have changed. And that’s something that we all need to realize, that rules of war don’t exist anymore. You’ve seen the worst of human nature. How does that human nature manifest when the rule of law dissipates in crisis zones and disasters? These criminals, they’re drawn to that. There’s people that I can exploit, there’s resources I can exploit. And we were in Ukraine.

Our mission was to rescue orphans that were on the front line before the people that were trying to traffic them. Human exploitation, human slavery is the fastest growing criminal trade on the planet right now. They’re not working as lone wolf criminals. They band together, they form groups. How do you combat a gang of criminals? You’re going to need people. Not only are we preparing to survive with resources, we are preparing to combat the criminal element that shows up everywhere. Every disaster, every war, every crisis. They’re like sharks and there’s blood in the water. So if that’s not part of your preps, if that’s not part of your plan, then you’re not ready.

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. So something unexpected happened. We had a guest come and I figured it’d be a run of the mill, gear review style video sharing his expertise about disaster medicine. And it turned out that this guy had a lot of stories to tell. In fact, possibly one of the most extensive resumes that I’ve ever come across when it comes to disaster and emergency preparedness. And for that reason, we decided to have an open ended conversation about all things SHTF with a specific focus on the criminal element that might arise.

So today we’re joined by Aaron Ace. He’s a physician assistant and disaster medicine specialist with over 25 years of frontline experience in emergency rescue, austere medicine. He’s a former firefighter, paramedic and military disaster rescue officer. He’s also led medical teams through some of the world’s toughest crises and war zones and international anti human trafficking missions. With a doctorate in global health and a passion for teaching others, he brings unparalleled real world experience into the conversation. Without further ado, let’s get to it with preppers. We’re prepping for when things go bad, based on what you’ve seen and you can tell us a little bit about yourself, what are some of the biggest misconceptions? Like what’s gonna catch people off guard about a full blown disaster scenario? You know, when you go into a place that’s a total disaster, you have people with all their fancy survival gear and all their training, but if they’ve ever seen that before.

As a person who’s been in a lot of those environments, what do you think is the, I guess the number one shocking thing for most people? You know, this sounds cliche to say this, but it’s mindset. You have people who have looked ahead and planned and prepared and they’ve tried to forecast what’s going to happen and then sort of try and have everything that they need to do that. In the process of doing that, they end up building a mindset of survival. They end up building a mindset of improvisation and figure it out and push through.

And then kind of like your stoic mentality of well, whatever happens, happens. This is how it’s supposed to be. I just need to do the work. And that whether that’s like chicken or the egg, is that first? And that’s why they do that, I’m not sure. But what I do know is when we respond to disasters or when we’re in crisis zones and it could be, I mean, like, you know, Jamaica with the hurricane, where whole communities were just all of a sudden wiped out. It could be Ukraine, where we’ve got the war that’s now going into years and communities are attacked periodically.

But you’ve got lack of resources or you could have just a really bad winter season up here in Canada and you’re not able to get resources into a community. It’s the same in every situation where if they have resources or they don’t, the ones that already have the mentality of I’m going to figure it out somehow they end up finding the resources and they end up surviving. And you have the people that don’t have that mentality. Whether or not they have resources or prepped. For some reason they’re always victims. And for some reason they’re always, they always don’t have enough because they don’t know how to plan, they don’t know how to improvise.

And you know, it’s interesting that you brought up the prepper component of it because it’s not just prepping. Like that is one subset of a population, right? The people that are really into having stuff on the shelves but then you got people that are just naturally safe for a rainy day people. And I gave a webinar, actually, not too long ago, and I was talking about how a lot of us prep and don’t even realize it. Like, do you have a spare tire in your car, or do you have a spare key that you’ve hidden somewhere around your house? Well, that’s prepper mentality.

But is that really prepping? Well, yeah, if your tire’s not flat, if you’re making sure that it’s full, or if you’ve got jumper cables and a little kit in your car just in case you get stuck in the snow somewhere, you’re prepping, you already have that mentality. And, yeah, there’s a lot of people that don’t do that, but the people that do might never consider themselves preppers, but they have that. So I guess I kind of answered my own question. Yeah, the inclination towards self preservation. And those people tend to do well in disasters. They tend to just figure it out.

And I think that is something that you don’t have to be born with. I think that’s something that you can develop as people gain interest in being prepared and as people gain interest in having what they need in case they don’t have. And I think Covid probably helped a lot of people who had never really considered this as a possibility to all of a sudden not having access to toilet paper as, wow, that’s for real. And this is only for, like, a little pandemic that’s not really affecting my community very much, but yet there’s no toilet paper.

And so it was an eye opener for a lot of people to start thinking about, okay, well, maybe I should have extra canned foods on the shelf. Well, maybe I should have, you know, buy bulk toilet paper and rotate through that instead of having to go every week to the grocery store. Well, our society is such that we only have to think about the next hour, really. I mean, that window is getting shorter and shorter as the supply chain gets more and more sophisticated. So, you know, what you’re talking about is really seeing beyond what’s right in front of you and, you know, thinking about, you know, just cultivating that mindset of, if this happens, then I’ll do this, or just getting into that mode, like you’re saying, because I agree with you that I think a lot of our.

When I find myself in an emergent situation, the mindset that’s been cultivated by about brainstorming and thinking about these different scenarios that might arise, what I would do if, and you’re already kind of got your head on a swivel, you know, even with security, like use the example of, you know, do you have a spare tire? Some people just have a natural security mindset where if I’m leaving, I’m gonna leave a car in the driveway. You know, if I’m going on vacation or, you know, I’m gonna make it look like somebody’s home or, you know, it’s little things like that, that sort of, that sort of mentality will bleed into how you probably respond in these situations.

Yeah, absolutely. And when we’re, you know, a lot of times, unfortunately, disasters affect lower income and low resource populations more. Right. And that’s just a product of mostly government and management of those resources at a much, much higher level than these communities that are having to live without these resources initially. But being able to see that mindset even among people that have very little or even next to nothing, how they can just figure out everything was wiped away. Their house that was actually just sticks with a tarp and a corrugated tin roof was just wiped off the planet didn’t even exist.

And yet somehow they’re still happy. They’re asking for help, but they’re asking for help so that they can rebuild. And that’s a very different mentality than we see especially in these, in our western nations where people, I mean, right now we’re talking about in the U.S. you know, them getting rid of the EBT, SNAP benefits and whatnot. And this mentality of the government owes this to me, the taxpayers of the United States owe this to me rather than, okay, well, I can actually work, I could work 10 to 20 hours a week. So why am I not, why am I relying on that when I should be trying to make my own way? And you don’t see that very often in these communities that we respond to.

You don’t see people just waiting for the welfare handouts. And there are some nations we could talk about that does happen. But on the whole, for the most part, these communities are made up of people that just, they just know how to problem solve and they know how to satisfy their needs. You know, whether it’s the basic maslow needs or whether it’s extended beyond that, they just know how to keep that family unit together and then go find those resources and they start rebuilding almost instantly. I mean, man, we actually responded to Caribbean Island. I won’t say the name of the communist island in the Caribbean that we went to, but was that enough of a.

Yep, you could say it. Keep it we were there just a few days after the hurricane went through and they were already cleaning up. I mean, the east end of the island was decimated. They were already cleaning up the streets, cleaning up debris. Like just a few days, they were still trying to, you know, pick themselves up out of the rubble, and they were already trying to make it look nice again. Right here. We’d be looting and, you know, be cutthroat. Dog eat dog. Probably, yeah. I mean, in some places anyways. We were helping some locals rebuild because the roofs were just taken off of just whole neighborhoods where all the roofs on the houses were just taken away.

And because of the way the government is down there, you have to requisition all building supplies. So we won’t go into the politics of that and getting supplies. They just figured out, okay, how do we nail these tarps to the roof? Well, we’ve got all this debris. They’re not waiting for help to come and say somebody to tell them what to do. Yeah, they’ve got all this debris. And initially the structure was built with nails and wood. And I happened to say to one of the guys that we were working with, I’m like, we’ll just go down to the hardware store and buy new nails and we can have this tarp put up in an hour.

And the guy looked at me, he’s like, what’s a hardware store? Like, you guys don’t have a place where you can go buy building supplies? He said, no, that gets requisitioned from the government. So you can’t buy nails, you can’t buy wood, you can’t buy building supplies. You have to put in a request and then they divvy it out based on what your needs are. He said, we’ll never get nails. And then as he’s pulling nails and straightening them out of the wreckage of his home, he’s like, so we just reuse them. This is the third time I’ve rebuilt this house.

I was like, wow, amazing. It’s incredible because I’m really worried about how our society would respond to a big disaster like you’re talking about. You know, we’ve seen, there’s been a few benign examples, but we’ve never really faced a major national disaster where help wasn’t coming. And we’re not living hand to mouth. Most of us, we have the luxury of having all of these amenities. So we’ve never really had to experience real hardship and do it ourselves. Because if we didn’t do it ourself, we would die, like in A lot of those places. So what is your biggest concern should an event of those proportions happen here? How do you think we would respond if a city was just like a major city was just blacked out for several weeks on end? How do you think we would fare as a nation dealing with those issues? Yeah, that’s an easy answer.

And it’s terribly. And a lot of people will die. We are living hand to mouth, but don’t realize it. We’re living hand to mouth secondhand because a lot of people. So we’ve got our three day supply. A lot of people go to the store like every day in a lot of communities. Skip the dishes. I mean, I don’t know what you guys have there, but as I was saying, that window is getting shorter and shorter. Yeah, don’t even go to the grocery store anymore. But we’re also buying that food on credit. Right. So how many people.

Because that’s, I mean, a lot of places you can’t even use cash anymore. Right. They’ve got the checkout stands that are. Well, this is card only, you know. Or you can wait in that line for cash. I’ll just use the card. Right. So a lot of people get into the trap of using that card and carrying a balance on that credit card. I have a question for you. How many people do you think carry cash nowadays? Oh, yeah, I’d say if we went outside and polled 100 people, we would have maybe single digit percent of people that actually have cash in their wallet.

And I say that because I know myself. I have been caught without cash in my wallet. We had a guy just, I told you, we bought a new house. We’re all excited about it. And so we decided to put in kind of a new driveway. We needed to expand it a little bit. And so we put in a new driveway. And the cement guy was like, all right, well here’s the cost and I’d like it in cash. We don’t even have that here at home. We had no cash at home. And granted we had just moved.

We got to book an appointment with the banker. And so I looked at my wife, I’m like, how are we going to get some cash from this guy? We, we couldn’t even figure out how we were going to do it on that particular day. It was a weekend, could go to bank, you know, and, and we realized. I realized in that moment, man, how far I’ve come from not paying attention in my own already very alert life. Trying to live in such a way that I’m ready For anything. And I was caught without cash. What if the event you just talked about happened right then? Yep.

Nobody’s going to have cash. There’s going to be no way to transact. The only transaction is going to be people stealing stuff. Yep. Well, and there will be a barter system that will show up. But the question for that is when? It might take some time for the barter system to develop. Right. And so everybody says, well, I’m just going to stock alcohol and bullets because that’s going to be my trade. Well, that’s fine. But when there’s still cash around, nobody’s going to want your alcohol and bullets. And for a certain amount of time, there’s going to be plenty of alcohol and it’s going to be freely flowing, and there’s going to be plenty of bullets, and they’re going to be shot at you, probably.

If you’re hoarding stuff, you’re going to go to trade for bullets, and you’re going to get bullets. All right, Exactly. So there’s going to be time where people. Enough people have to die and enough need, enough needs are not met for the barter system to even develop. Do you see that in places that you go when there’s no cash? Like, how does that look like a barter system emerging in communities that are tight. And a lot of these communities that we’ve responded to, they are. They know each other very well, and their families are interrelated. And so you start to see that community coming together to help each other a lot quicker than I think we’ll see in the United States.

And the reason is because in their daily life, they are already living as neighborly as a community. Right. They’re already supporting each other and helping each other because of those needs. But in Western nations, we isolate ourselves. We isolate ourselves in our homes. We isolate ourselves on our phones homes. We isolate ourselves in backyards with big, tall fences. We don’t talk to our neighbors. And when this event happens, or really any kind of breakdown in a region like that, where now you are forced to build that network, you’re having to start from scratch, getting to know somebody who may not be the kind of person that you want in your survival team, in your survival network.

No common values. Yeah. And maybe no skills. Maybe they’re, you know, maybe they don’t have the anything that you need. All they can do is take. Maybe they’ve got health issues, maybe they’ve got disabilities that they might be people we would take care of, but they’re not people that are going to contribute in a survival situation. So knowing that ahead of time would be really helpful. If I know I have neighbors that need certain things, Part of my preps for my neighborhood will be figure out who are the people that I can count on and make friends with them and who are the people that I can’t count on but are going to need to be cared for.

And I’m preparing for them because they will be a drain. And there is no like, well, you just let them die. That might happen, but by just letting them do that one. There’s the humanity aspect, but there’s also the neighborhood cohesion aspect. There’s people that love that person. There’s other neighbors that might have a relationship with that person that maybe I don’t have. And so for me, if I’m going to be a leader in that situation, I have to take that into account. I don’t have a choice. So it’s like that burden is placed on me.

Well, guess what? That is now part of my preps. I need to have a plan for that. And these communities that you’re talking about, these low resource communities and where we generally see these disasters happen more frequently, they’re already doing that because they know so they have already created the relationships that they need. They know what everybody in the village can do, and when something happens, they all just go to work. I think you probably have seen this with American, and I say North American preppers, We have this very individualist mentality where we’re going to, you know, shut ourselves in.

But I think the reality of that, I can just imagine, I’ve never been in the situations that you’ve been, but I can imagine that that facade falls apart pretty quick. And viewing people as assets as opposed to liabilities is kind of a mindset I’m trying to move into. Because, you know, it’s typically portrayed that everybody is an enemy and many are probably enemies. But you know, what does Abe Lincoln say? I always go back to that quote, you kill your enemy by making them your friend. So if you can stockpile things for your potential, would be people who might find their way into your group who originally weren’t part of the plan.

You mitigate one problem. Our job when we do humanitarian operations is to go support the community in rebuilding itself. So we try to not unless we have to be initially, but we try to not insert ourselves in places where we can’t be replaced. Right. We go figure out who’s doing what and then we assist them in doing it better. So if I Go find a local doc. Then I’m going to help him get his practice going again. From a survival standpoint, I mean, this is. It should be common knowledge. But the whole go it alone lone wolf thing, we all know, that’s been debunked plenty.

I always remember one of my favorite books, Louis l’ Amour’s Last of the Breed. You’ve read that, right? Nope. You gotta read it next time we talk. It’s fiction, right? Next. So this is another one of those instructional books. Instructional fiction. And those are. Okay, so next time we talk, you need to have read Last of the Breed because it will blow you away. Away. Okay. It is, in my opinion, it is one of the best works of fiction ever written. But the thing about it is, the protagonist initially starts out going alone, trying to survive.

He’s a pow. He’s an Air Force pilot who’s shot down over Russia. What’s the context? Air Force pilot shot down over Russia. I thought that was his backstory. And he was thrown into an apocalypse. It’s actually not apocalyptic. It’s a chase scenario. So he’s on the run, kind of like. What was that movie, Broken Arrow? Well, he’s on the run from the Russian government, and he ends up going it alone for a while, but then he realizes he’s a survival expert. So he’s also the background. He’s part Native. Native American. So he’s using those genetic and skills learned as a child, and he’s applying them to his military skills in a survival situation.

And he goes to live with a local group of people. And it’s very vivid and explicit in how he actually survives being chased by the government through multiple seasons in Siberia. And it’s very descriptive of trying to survive in those seasons and why he needed that community to be able to survive. Right. And then the end is a man. It is a fantastic cliffhanger. And it’s like, wow, that was totally worth the read. So I highly recommend you read it. Well, there’s a movie called the Way Back, which might be a derivation of that. I’m not sure.

Well, there’s actually been quite a few screenplays written deriving the story from Last of the Breed. But the book, this particular storyline, is in fact, Jack Carr. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jack Carr. He’s a novelist who’s gotten really popular for the terminal list books, which are now it’s a series of movies. He uses that storyline a little bit throughout his books. But what’s cool about it is it Brings it to life. You know, that’s how humans learn. And that’s why, I mean, I guess in a way I would push back a little bit against your opinion on figure in the context of how we learn as humans.

We learn through stories. And those fictional stories actually have a basis in truth. And that truth is that these are common themes and they’re common skills in humanity. And we learn those. And we used to learn those around the fire through stories. We learn them through myth, we learn them through fable. We learn learn them through fiction. And so by having those stories available to us, we can recognize. Oh, okay. That’s a scenario I never thought of. I could apply this in my life to that scenario and maybe that’s how I could problem solve through it.

Well, that is very true. And I would say it’s also, you know, with Hollywood, it’s somewhat problematic sometimes because sometimes what they portray, you know, it really reinforces this idea of the lone wolf. Usually there’s some reconciliation at the end. You know, I’m thinking like I am legend, where this guy’s by himself, but he eventually finds the community at the end. But, you know, throughout that process, this whole prepping culture has been built around me against the world. In fact, they call them LMOs in World War Z. Last man on Earth. Yep. You know, so great book, by the way.

There’s obviously I listened to the audiobook, which was good. The movie kind of sucked, but. Well, it wasn’t the book. It was a movie named World War Z, but it was not the World War Z book. Very trace elements of the original narrative. Well, so going back to what you said initially though, medications, when somebody asked me, what do you think I should stockpile? What do you think I should have for that day? So we already talked about mindset and of course, having the skills to use these things are also important. So gaining those skills. But that should go without saying.

If I have to have stuff, then you know what’s going to kill me fastest? It’s not running out of food. I might survive three weeks without food. It could be running out of water. But. But we live generally in areas where water is procurable, especially with some basic skill you can procure drinking water. I mean, just your toilet. Right. If you’re at home. And there’s also, I mean, it would go back to bug in, bug out. Am I at home? Did my home get destroyed? Am I having to move? Did I build a bug out bag I can’t carry because it’s so heavy and it has everything in it, those kinds of things.

It’s medication. Getting an infection is going to kill me faster than anything, but it’s easily treated. I could get sick or I could get cut and get an infection and get septic and treat that with something I have on the shelf and still be alive or I could be dead in three days. I work in rural emergency medicine, so I work in a community that’s very small, it’s very isolated and it’s mostly geriatric. I’m dealing with sepsis every day. Shift. Yeah, every single shift. And that is not a community that suffered a disaster. That’s today in a community that has.

The railroads are working, the trucks are trucking, the planes are flying. They do have an airport, but I don’t. But the ports are working. Right. So this community is getting their normal things. And yet I’m dealing with sepsis on a daily basis in that ER because people just get sick. So having those medications on your shelf I think should be the first thing to focus on when you’re starting to decide what in the world should I have for that rainy day. Yeah, it’s one of those things that’s just kind of a no brainer. But we take it for granted that we can go and you know, antibiotics have saved so many lives since their invention.

You know, without it, I’m sure hundreds of millions of people would be dead or would have never, you know, so it’s one of the easiest things. It’s also nothing that screams prepper. I mean, maybe we can talk a little bit about the security considerations because the interesting thing that really caught my attention about, and I realize I’m beleaguering the point a little bit when, when I say that this is a very unconventional looking medical kit and I originally thought it was the company who just threw something together and didn’t know what they were doing. And then you come today and you completely changed my perspective on approaching designing a first aid kit.

So obviously security is, you know, something that you’re very mindful of. Tell us a little bit about your approach to these things. Because you’ve been in Ukraine throughout the war. I’m sure you’ve been in many other similar environments. Can we just talk a little bit more about why this gray man approach to things? Yeah, actually it’s a little shocking and it’s because I did not foresee that it would be seen that way. But for you to say, wow, they just kind of threw something together makes me realize a couple of things, but one that I succeeded because that was what I was trying to do.

I wanted to create something so low profile that you would look past it. But two, that I’m not as smart as I think I am because I thought it was revolutionary. And it was revolutionary in the sense that, that it worked. But it was also I thought more people would realize that it was revolutionary. And here’s the thing. So I designed these kits from decades of experience in the field. And one thing I found is if you have something valuable and people are in zombie mode, which is right, they’re lacking something and they’re not thinking now, they will take it from you no matter what.

They will try their hardest to take it from you. So if somebody needs first aid supplies because they’ve got a child at home, that’s sick, guess what, you will be attacked. So if you have a first aid kit, they will be looking at that. If you are out in public in an area that’s about to be attacked by a terrorist, or they’re trying to pick their target and you’ve got something that looks like it’s like a medical supply or something that makes you a valuable person. Person, guess who’s going to be one of the targets. They’re going to make sure you’re included in that blast because you look like you’re valuable, because you look like you might be able to help.

So you’re going to be targeted more so than somebody who just kind of blends in. There’s no humanitarian immunity here. There’s no, oh, that’s a good guy. Let him go. He’s impartial. He’s Red Cross. Yeah, we’ve gone way beyond that. Rules of war don’t exist anymore except for countries that bind themselves to them. And that’s something that we all need to realize, that things have changed. We live in a world that will not abide by rules no matter what the conflict is. We’re watching it right now in Ukraine. So the other thing is my background is in doing not just disaster work, but I work in crisis zones in lots of different settings.

One of them is I’ve worked extensively in combating human trafficking and I’ve worked with organizations where we do, we assist in the undercover investigations of human trafficking and then the rescues of the children that we find during those investigations. As the lead medical officer, my job was to be prepared for anything, was to carry with me on my person all the supplies I would need to take care of a traumatic injury, stab, bullet wound, sick child. To have those things on me, but yet still be able to Pass through security belonging to a criminal and not look like I’m a medic or carrying a bunch of equipment.

If they go through my pockets, are they gonna find a tourniquet? Are they gonna find a nondescript piece of elastic that I could claim as a sex toy or something? You know, something just belongs in that environment. Right. Like that nasal airway that I showed you. Or the chest seal. Right. Remember the chest seal that I showed you that you could put on a sucking chest wound? Right. I got a Mr. Zog’s sex wax, the surf wax sticker, and I put it on my. On my chest seal. And they don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Exactly. I was. Well, no, they’re like, oh, kinky. So I actually had that specifically pulled out of one of my bags when I was trying to get into a location that we were investigating. And the guy pulls it out, and he looks at me, he’s like, how do you use this? And I just gave him a wink and grabbed it and put it back in my bag, which also had some condoms and things just thrown in. There might have been a. To make it look like. Like it belonged. Yeah, I had actually, I had a nasal airway in my kit.

And on the nasal airway was one of those little silicone, a brand new one, mind you. It wasn’t used. Do you know what that is? I mean, I know what it is, but it’s not my style. I’m old school, man. I won’t explain. Stuff is. But, you know, I don’t got time for that. These are paraphernalia that shows up in the environment, and it’s sickening to think about what environment we’re investigating. We’re investigating the sexual abuse of children. Exactly. And all of these things were commonplace. So he’s looking at it going, wow, that’s a new toy I haven’t seen.

What do you use that for? You know, I’m winking to him. And so that’s how I would get my medical supplies past security. I wouldn’t be carrying a backpack of any kind. And if I did have a backpack, it would have, you know, like maybe a. Things that don’t look like medical gear or hidden as medical gear in plain sight. So I’ve done that for 13 years. That combined with my disaster response, where security is a huge issue. And my experience as a firefighter has taught me that I want my gear to disappear. I don’t want people to know what it is.

I don’t care if I need something I’m going to tell them, grab the black bag. This is Jace on it. I don’t need them to go find a first aid kit. Right. If this kit is going to be used by me, I know where it is, I know what’s in it, I know how to grab it and I can explain to somebody how to grab it. So having it labeled medication now that might be different for a mass casualty kit, like, let’s say, which you are going to see. We have some other products coming. We are working on a mass casualty kit right now, which is everything you would need for mass count.

Tourniquets, compression bandages, airways, your gauze. So all of that visibly and nothing else and it’s going to say Jace and mass calm. That’s about it. But it’ll still be in a similar. This really is an SHTF medical kit. Yeah, in the purest form because you’re trying to blend in, presuming that. That that criminal element is going to be looking for anything and everything that has value in that situation. And one of the things will be medicine and not just medical supplies. Yeah. Not just the criminal element, but even your neighbor. Yeah, even you as a person.

You know, you might have your. Your labor attempted to be expropriated by some force. If they know you’re a doctor. If they know you’re. Exactly. And I don’t want people knowing that and that. Have you ever had that situation where somebody’s like, hey, doctor, you come with us? Yeah, actually, one time and no, there was one time we had actually already done the takedown and I was. Everybody knew I was the medical guy. But. So this is a little bit not exactly the situation that you’re referring to. I’ve never been exploited in that way. But one of the criminals was having an issue.

So we were all handcuffed, face down on the ground and just waiting for the process to work itself so that we could go get on our plane and come home. And one of the cops comes over and says, senor, tuer se lo tor near the doctor. Si bancomigo. So he grabbed me by the. Roughly grabbed me by the handcuffs, pulled me up and dragged me into another room. And one of the. One of the criminal. One of the perpetrators that we had been investigating was having an asthma attack. And he’s like, we don’t know what to do.

He was. I mean, he was. And I asked him, I’m like, do you use albuterol? See? So he was having an active asthma attack. Yeah. And actually in this kit, I actually created A spot. This is the trauma. I created a spot where you could slide an EpiPen or an Albuterol inhaler in here if that’s one of your issues. Same with this one. I actually designed this one so that this front panel, you can slide almost anything down there if you need to carry it around extra. So things that I thought about in building these kits that.

That come from all this experience. So he un handcuffed me. I treated the guy’s asthma, and then they took me in another room. And one of the kids that we had been trying to rescue had gotten a cut during the takedown portion, had rubbed up against a nail or something and had this pretty gnarly cut in her arm. And so I bandaged that up and made her feel better. And then he puts me back in handcuffs and drags me back out and puts me back on the floor. And there I waited for the rest of the time until they finished what they were doing.

So, yeah, having the skills puts you sometimes in very unique positions. So in that situation, that was my job. But in a setting where you may not want to, or it might be dangerous to you or your family, keeping those skills, keeping that equipment, keeping those supplies a secret until you’re ready to make them known so that it’s in your, you know, the ball is in your hands, basically. So you get to choose when you make that decision. You get to choose when that information gets out not made for you so that you have control over it.

You feel obligated. But it’s a survival situation, and it’s a moral dilemma. The. Do you let the guy die so you can help other people? Or, you know, that’s a thing right there is that moral obligation, but also the recognition that, like, for example, you know, if I’m sitting across from somebody and we’re negotiating the price on a child, you know, for me to go abuse that child. It would be really easy in some cases because we. We weren’t always working with, like, cartels and, you know, criminal organizations. Sometimes they were just one or two guys.

This is just their business. A lot of these places we go work in, it’s just their business. And we might be having this conversation by ourselves where it would be really easy for me to reach across the table and just destroy that person right then and be done. The world is better off without a minute. You gotta be strategic. Yeah. Cause the problem is if I can take the case far enough that he gets arrested, thrown in prison, and maybe killed there, or he gets arrested, thrown in Prison. And you know, it’s all across the news and everybody in the country sees it.

More people go down. Yeah, it’s more of a dissuasion to others, and that’s much more valuable than him just disappearing suddenly. You know, you’ve seen the worst of human nature. So how does that human nature manifest when the rule of law dissipates like that? That element that is out there, that is probably in plain, you know, it’s disguised in plain sight. But these people are among us. We think evil is. We all have our own understandings of it. Usually it’s cut and dry. But you’ve seen this black market, this thing that’s operating in secret, and you probably see these people blend in.

You know, how do you think that’s going to manifest in. I mean, this is a different topic than this, but you know, it’s not. It’s actually a pretty similar topic because in crisis zones and disasters, these criminals that you’re talking about, they, they’re drawn to that. So they actually, they recognize the opportunity because they’re opportunists. So they recognize, okay, there’s people that I can exploit, there’s resources I can exploit. I’ll give you a case in point. When we were in Ukraine, our mission at the behest of the government, this wasn’t us just freelancing, was to rescue orphans that were on the front line, get to them first before the criminal element, the criminal gangs could get them and take them away, take them across the border into Belarus, Romania, wherever they were going.

And there were times where we showed up at the same time and they were working out in the open. Russians weren’t shooting at them, Ukrainians didn’t really know they were, so they weren’t shooting at them. And it was a race against time to get to these orphanages and get the kids first and get them to safety, get them to where the government wanted them, where they could actually watch over them, get them away from these front lines, people who are trying to traffic them, people who are trying to traffic them. I mean, one month into the war, they admitted there were 20,000 children missing.

And that estimate’s gone up. I don’t know what. It’s 10x of children. They just don’t know where they are. So. And that’s in a war zone. It’s exactly the same in disaster zones. They show up, they recognize. And the reason why I mention the exploitation is because that’s the fastest growing criminal trade on the planet right now. So, yes, you have other criminal Trades that are bigger. But human exploitation, human slavery is growing faster than any of them. Because these criminals recognize that human beings can be bought and sold many, many times for lots of things.

Not just for sex but, but also for their labor, for their organs even. There’s statistics that would make your mind spin. I won’t tell them to today. But about organ trafficking, that’s just disgusting. And that involves my industry, that involves the healthcare industry. And it’s one that I get very passionate about. Because if you think about how many health care providers or health care people, administrators, nurses, does it take to successfully transplant an organization organ, it’s the same number of people to successfully transplant a stolen organ as a not stolen organ. And sometimes they’re the same people.

So that’s how many people are involved in the trafficking of a child’s kidney or a man’s liver or an eye. So my colleagues, they’ll go to these disaster zones because it’s so vulnerable. There’s no rule of law, there’s no, you know, shit’s just hitting the fan everywhere. You can just basically kidnap people. Yeah. And that’s why I do get a little bit cynical because that’s the first thing I see when we get there are the exploiters. The criminals are showing up to see what they can take, to see how they can benefit from it. And they’re not working as lone wolf criminals.

They band together, they form groups, they form conglomerates, they form gangs, they form these cartels and they work together. And so if they’re doing that and us law abiding citizens are just doing our best to try and find our way, figure it out. How do you combat a gang of criminals that are trying to exploit you? Especially if you’re trying to lone wolf solo it. That’s impossible. Depending on where you live, that gang is going to take all your stuff. Yeah, I mean that’s just pretty valid choke point or something. Yeah, it’s not gonna happen situation.

It’s not gonna happen. Yeah, that Spartan, I mean how many times did the Spartan standoff at Thermopylae successfully work? Right. Well, we’re still talking about the Spartans, so not very many times in history has anything like that happened. The lone wolf. It’s not a valid scenario because you’re going to need people. If you’ve got a bunch of stuff, you have to secure it or it will get taken. Well, you have to sleep, you have to go to the bathroom, you have to prepare your food, you have to care for your body. Those are all points be Sniped while you’re working, you can be taken out.

Yeah. So if you don’t have a significant group that can manage all of those things in turn, because everybody has to do that, there’s no way to survive that scenario. So not only are we preparing to survive with resources, we are preparing to combat the criminal element that shows up everywhere. Every disaster, every war, every crisis, they show up. They’re like sharks and there’s blood in the water. Right. And we have good data that shows that. So if that’s not part of your preps, if that’s not part of your plan, then you’re not ready. And so these guys that think they’re going to create their homestead and.

And have their. They got their wall, they got their bunker, you better have an army to defend it to. So let’s talk about that a little bit. When you go to these places, is there, you know, are there people who are kind of prepared for these contingencies and they have to flee? Like, what happens to the haves in these situations? That’s where. Yeah, a lot of times they do end up fleeing. That’s why we get the refugee crises that are happening all over the world, and a lot of it happening right now in Africa and from the wars, you know, in Congo and Rwanda, they can’t protect themselves.

No matter what resources they have, they will be taken. The communities don’t even have the time to band together. And so now you get these massive migrations of. Not migrants, refugees. People that truly, really have no place to go because they were just thrown away, were expelled by the criminal element. Exactly. And you’ve got. Well, and go back to Ukraine. We had refugees. Well, we had Ukrainians leaving. The women and the children that weren’t able to fight were allowed to leave at the beginning of the war. And so they would cross over into Poland and other countries, and they had the choice of declaring refugee status or not.

But being a refugee meant they had access to certain resources, but they had to commit to. If they were to receive those resources, they had to commit to live in the refugee camp and only use the government provided resources that were being given to them. If they didn’t accept that contingency, they also had to stay a certain amount of time. If they didn’t accept that contingency, then they could go without being refugees. But then they had to figure out resources on their own. And so then those groups would band together and try to figure out, okay, we’re not going to be refugees because we want to go home.

Sooner than a year. So how about we get together, we try to find these NGOs, these non profit organizations that are helping displaced people. So now they’re not refugees, they’re displaced persons. So let’s try to get resources for our group and try and survive that way. And they do. They actually survive very well. But again, they’re banding together, they’re forming gigantic families and trying to look out for each other. And so when we went to Ukraine, we actually spent some time just doing the rounds and not at the refugee camps. We were going around to find the displaced person camps for everybody who didn’t want to be refugees.

And a lot of people will say, well, why didn’t they want to be refugees? Just accept refugee status and let the government take care of you. Well, it goes back to our initial conversation. These are people who have, for some reason in their genetics, they have that mindset of, I’m a problem solver, I’m going to figure this out and I want freedom, I want to be able to go back to my country. If, if the war is over in six months, I want to go back. Refugees can’t do that. There’s stipulations they might be stuck there.

And it’s true in other countries too. That’s usually the case with refugees is they have to follow a certain set of guidelines and they’re stuck. And refugee camps are terrible. In most cases, they’re terrible, especially when they’re run by the un. So now you’ve got these displaced people by the millions. They’re all over when there’s countries that won’t accept them. Now they’re just displaced people, so they become targets. So now you get these sharks that are kind of following these groups of people around and nipping at their heels trying to figure out, where can I exploit.

And so this goes back to what’s my job, and that’s to teach healthcare workers how to spot, how to recognize exploitation. Because it’s one of the main public health health risks of our day. Because it’s growing so fast and because the value of human labor, human sex and human body parts is becoming so valuable now they are expending resources to be able to work within this industry. And so my job, so I did my doctorate thesis last year on global health and managing emergencies. And my thesis was on the health care responsibility of fighting human trafficking and why our industry, the healthcare industry, needs to take a frontline role, tip of the spear role in fighting it.

Because this is a public health issue, it’s a Global health issue. When people are worried about exploitation or when they’re being actively hunted for exploitation, how can they worry about their general health? But yet they still have health problems. Right. So when they’re even actively being exploited, they still seek health care. They’re still going to ers, even here in Canada and in the United States when they’re being exploited, which our two countries, by the way, are two of the biggest consumers of child sexual exploitation. And I specifically targeted Canadians when I was working down in the Caribbean.

I won’t tell you what island, but the Canadians were the ones that we were pretending to be because they were the ones that were actually actively buying. So in my undercover role, I was trying to be what was down there. Why do you think that is? I mean, now that we’re on the topic, because this is one of the things that I’ve had this running thesis that SHTF here will be worse because people are so kind of mentally up from this system. Why do you think? Is it just because we are in more privileged positions? Yeah, I think that’s, that’s the heart of it.

I think we live in a society that has allowed us to have access, to develop fetishes, to develop needs. And we’ve also lived in so much abundance, we have too much that we have boredom. And so we begin to develop. We also have. We’re the biggest consumer of child sexual abuse material or pornography in general, really. And I think that also allows these things to develop and grow. And people will argue that, you know, well, what’s the problem if you’re using it in the privacy of your own home? But we have pretty good data that shows that the harms of even legal pornography, not even, I mean, discounting the child sexual abuse material, which we know that is abusive, but.

And the use is going up, more and more people are abusing that. And it is a drug. We know it changes the mind the same way drugs do. So, so we’ve got these drivers, and because we have the abundance, we can travel, we can go places where it’s easy to buy and sell what we want. Right. So if I have a fetish for something that’s illegal, I can easily go to the Caribbean or Asia or South America and I can buy it and nobody backs up. It’s incredible that you’re saying that this is getting worse. And I think that’s, that comes as a shocker to a lot of people because we’re supposed to be morally evolving as a species, we’re told.

But, you know, I always go Back to, you know, World War II wasn’t that long ago, you know, I mean, slavery wasn’t that long ago. Like, human beings are fundamentally the same. And now you add this neurotic element of people are all messed up because of, you know, the Internet and dopamine and, you know, fetishizing everything. You add all that together and, I mean, it’s a ticking time bomb should the lights ever go out, you know, you unleash that canned heat onto the world. You know, I usually engage in these conversations hoping that the person would not reinforce my view of the world.

Unfortunately. Yeah, I’m the wrong person. Yeah. But I think it’s important, though, because you have real world experience with this, and you’ve seen it firsthand, and you know that lots of this is a facade. Yeah. You shut the lights off for a few days, and then we become animals again. And you mentioned World War II, and people in general were different back then, and the level of addiction was much different back then. What we have now, the needs that people have are. They’re different and they’re much, much stronger. And. And I think they’re more detrimental to society as a whole.

So things like the pornography, that is an addiction, and that will be a need that people will have to figure out how to fulfill or control. They won’t control it. I don’t have enough faith in humanity that everybody will just suddenly control things that are harmful and suddenly be. You know, a. There’ll be a lot of Jack the Rippers out there. Yeah, there will be. And there will be. There will be fewer people that will be contributing members of society because they’ll. If they’re. If they’re like individualists or if they’re, you know, more like antisocial, then many of them will probably just disappear.

They’ll try and go alone and then die. They’ll realize their needs can’t be met. They won’t be able to make it back. So I think there will be a lot of that, but at the same time, there will be plenty of people that are just hiding and waiting for the moment that they can opportunist. Because they’ll be opportunists. Yeah. And many of them, I think, won’t even realize it. They won’t realize that they have. Have such an uncontrollable urge until they have nothing. I mean, just take. Take the caffeine addiction, for example. What would happen? Guilty as charged.

Yeah. What would happen if there was no more. If you have to live in Colombia to get your coffee because there’s no coffee grown in the United States or Canada. That’s why you stockpile a lot of it. Yeah, but instant coffee, it also goes bad. Yeah, not instant coffee. Oh, that’s true. Well eventually if you had 20 year old instant coffee, I found an MRE in Ukraine from, from World War II and it had some coffee. You tried the coffee, it was awful. Now it could have been awful then. It could have been that that was just what they drank because that’s Ukrainian or Russian coffee.

I don’t even know if they had freeze drying back then. I don’t. Yeah, I don’t think they did, but oh man, it was terrible. But that’s just one example. You know, the coffee, the energy drinks, the nicotine. You know, we talk about cigarettes being like a currency item. Right. Stockpile your cigarettes or your chew or whatever. But now that people are using the vapes and using the different types of nicotine, those addictions are different and so there will people be be people that don’t even know how to use cigarettes. They’re not used accustomed to those people who are already super irritable drug dependent.

A lot of people, I don’t know what is 25, 30%. You take away the addictions, the self medication and it’s a recipe for disaster. What are, you know, let’s maybe try to change the tone a little bit here. My viewers are. No, no strangers to the dark side of things. What is some of the uplifting things that you see in these situations that are surprising to you from communities, perhaps not ones like ours, but ones that, you know, maybe, I guess the thing that best approximates would be a Ukraine situation. Would you say that that’s the best analog for a North American shtf? Or would you say there’s another situation you’ve been in that would look similar if things fell apart? Oh boy.

Yeah. I’m not sure that I even would have an analog because as much as I’ve read and as much as I’ve studied and as much as I’ve tried to like forecast my own idea of what the future is going to be, I’m pretty sure I haven’t even figured out what it’s going to look like, how it’s going to be. Yeah. Because Ukraine is very unique. What’s over there, and they’re very unique, very different from, from United States and Canadians. But what I did see that’s similar and that would be considered more uplifting would be our two countries are two of the most giving countries on the planet.

We are involved in more humanitarian work than any other country. And I can say this from the United States standpoint. We put more money into humanitarian work than anyone else on the planet. And when I show up to disasters, I’m usually there with people from the United States, from humanitarians from the United States, from the uk, From Canada, from other Europeans, European countries. Why? I don’t know. Why am I not. Is it a privilege, though, that we have the luxury of going and doing it? And that’s why we have the luxury. But why would we choose that? Why would we choose to expend our riches? Yeah, well, that’s a good question.

Yeah, I could probably use my own life to answer that question. And there is something about. I’ve always been driven to help and I’ve always had this. There’s something about me won’t let me turn back, turn around, turn away from somebody who’s hurting or suffering. I’ve always thought it was kind of a weakness. It was kind of like that toxic empathy, you know, where I just. I’ll give everything. And from. In fact, my wife kind of jokes about the reason why I can’t ever keep any money is because I’m really good at giving it away. And it’s true, if I have a few dollars in my pocket, I’ll usually end up giving it to somebody before and not just throw it away to somebody panhandling or something, but I’ll usually end up using it, giving it to somebody else.

And I don’t think that’s something I’ve learned. Although when I was 20, I had a decision to make in my life. Was I going to grow up and figure trade? And I was looking at a number of different things. But I had an application to go to commercial diving school at the Puget Sound. And I thought, okay, that’ll be a good job. It’ll make me a lot of money. But something didn’t feel right about it. And I was given an opportunity with my church to go do missionary work, basically to go talk about Jesus for a couple years and serve.

And it was a really hard decision to go, but something felt right. I had this feeling that I’m going to learn something, doing this that is going to change my life. And so I spent a year saving money so that I could. So I could pay for that. And then I did it. I went down to Venezuela and I lived in Venezuela for two years. I lived very poor. There were times where I couldn’t eat because gave my money away. We didn’t have much. My parents would Every once in a while, send care packages down, but those usually showed up with just wrapping paper paper and nothing in the box.

So the way our church does it is I always had a companion. We were assigned together. So I had my wingman, it was usually a Venezuelan. And the two of us would just walk the streets every day looking for opportunities to serve and talk about Jesus. It was cool in a sense that I could focus my life without all the distractions. And this was before cell phones and everything. So it was all the, you know, the 1990 distractions versus the distractions today, which is obviously very different. But yeah, I spent two years just. I was in Caracas.

I was in a little town called Barquisimeto. I spent some time way down in the jungle, but I was always in the barrios. I was always in the really the poor areas. And so I spent every day with like. Like the kind of the lowest. What you consider there, the lowest classes, a lot of them indigenous versus the European, you know, the of European descent. So there’s a lot of. There’s almost like a class system down there a little bit. At least there was then and it’s still kind of the same way now. And, you know, I.

I was there for two coups, two military coups. So. So there was a dog fight between an F16 and a Bronco. The bomber, prop bomber, right over my apartment. And we had debris and bullet holes in our apartment. And the rebel force that was trying to overthrow the government had taken over. This was in what year? In 1992. So I was there from 92 to 92. Before Chavez. Yep. Chavez was actually in prison while I was down there. I had a person that wanted to learn about Christianity that lived right near the prison, which was way up in the mountains.

I mean, this prison was, man, this was like island of Dr. Moreau type place. Like. Yeah, it was. And we had to hike through the jungle to get to this guy’s house. And we had to go right past that prison. And every day we had to go up and knock on the prison door and say, hey, we’re missionaries. We’re talking about Jesus. We’re just going to the community over there. Okay, you guys can go kind of thing. It was. Yeah, it was a little scary, but. And then the second Coup was in 94, just before I left.

So, you know, that was my first time seeing dead bodies in the streets and having, you know, dodge bullets. And I can’t tell you how many times I got tear gassed while I was down there because We, I mean, I was a teenager, so we always ended up in the student demonstrations because we were the same age as all the college students. So any of the towns that I was in, we got tear gas. So I was, in fact, my daily carry. My EDC was my little bag with my Bible and a bottle of vinegar. Because we would pour the vinegar on our ties and that’s how we get out of the vinegar for tear gas.

Yeah, it neutralizes the. Or it’s. Well, we, we felt like it helped. Yeah, they’re. They, they say like, you know, if you look it up now. But they said, well, yeah, it doesn’t really help. It did. I mean, I would like pour it in my eyes and I felt much better and I was able to make a homeless. Yeah, it did something because it was. So anyways, you’re, you’re like, you know, a rare person who. I think it sounds like you because I know you do a lot of other stuff. You do, like you talked about the diving and the rock climbing and some extreme stuff.

So you’re a person who’s naturally drawn towards adrenaline inducing situations. Hopefully there’s enough of those people to counteract the criminal element, but I’m not so sure. But it sounds like there is, there’s more people like yourself out there who obviously do this kind of work, this selfless work, because you don’t have to do this. I mean, you can just sit on a beach and drink margaritas. I would go nuts doing that. Yeah. So there’s something. I would die. You know, there’s something you’re getting. It almost makes me think of the, the Stephen King book, the Stand, you know, where you have.

At the end of the world, you have people bifurcating into good and evil, you know, and you have the people who, for whatever, you know, they’re compelled to help others beyond themselves in a way. And then you have the very selfish people on the other hand, and these two duke it out. And to the victor, you know, goes the spoils. Fortunately, in that movie, good prevailed. But by the sounds of things, you know, we have a. There’s a real dark underbelly to this society. It’s almost like, you know, when you have a forest fire. We suppress forest fires now.

And the problem is, is that mistake, you know, you want that to burn itself out. A lot of these people would get plucked, you know, if we had a justice system that was, you know, more to the point, we’ll say to keep it simply. Unfortunately, a lot of that has been just building and building and then you open the floodgates, and then it’s just total chaos, and it’s a blazing inferno of criminality. Your motivations to get out there and help people are kind of a counterbalance to that darkness that’s out there as well. And I think one of the things that I’m hearing, that’s not only a leadership skill, but it’s something that will pay off for you as a survivor.

If you’re in that mode of helping others, it’s not just completely selfless because you’re making things better. Yeah. I mean, I would say a lot of what I’m doing is subconscious. I’m not often taking that. That like, oh, I need to do this. I need to, you know, I need to get myself ready to go do that. Well, maybe there is a little bit of that, but I’ve always actually been fairly introverted, and I’ve always reluctantly taken on leadership roles. And I mean in the military, to my professional. The detriment of my professional growth. I’ve avoided those leadership roles, even though that’s what you’re supposed to do.

In fact, I was. I’m a major now, and I started as a lieutenant, and I’ve always said I preferred to be a lieutenant. When I made captain, I wanted to stay captain. Why? Because I got to be with the guys. Major is right above captain. Yeah. Goes second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, major, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel. And so I’m about halfway through my career, and I’ve always felt more comfortable with the enlisted guys. I’ve always felt more comfortable on the line. I’ve always felt more comfortable in the field because I. Not because I’ve not wanted the leadership responsibility, but because I felt like I.

I belonged where that frontline work was being done. And so I’ve reluctantly moved up in the ranks because that means you move up to a more managerial type position. My whole life, I’ve always shunned that. I’ve always wanted to work in the trenches. I’ve always wanted to be. Those are the best kind of leaders, right? I would think so. I would hope so. I just. I’m reading Once in a Eagle right now, which is a story about Sam Desmond and his experience in World War I and then in World War II. And it talks about that kind of reluctant leader, the guy who wants to spend his time in the trenches.

And I’m really. Actually, I feel a lot of compassion and a lot of similarity to his experiences. And. I don’t know, I’d like to think that most guys are like that, because there’s also. There’s a lot of guys that seek for those leadership roles, and I’ve never really gotten along with those guys very well. I feel like there’s. It’s a very. Because, you know, there’s kind of like when somebody gains a leadership role, they have that tendency to usurp power and seek more power and want to be more of a leader. We see it in our politicians all the time.

And I would hope that there’s more people like me that would rather reluctantly take on a leadership role and do it as long as we have to. You need to kind of have a little bit of administrative capability, but that shouldn’t be the primary driver, right? Yeah. And I think those are skills that you. You can gain in the process. It’s kind of like, well, I need to learn how to do this, you know, I need to. It’s like, I’m a CQB guy, but I need to learn how to shoot long distance for this one scenario.

But then I’m going back to my cqb, you know, that kind of thing. I mean, it’s a lot like art, you know, you can be an artist who is naturally inspired to make something, or you can be that artist who just does, like, commissioned work and it’s not really art then, you know. So it’s almost like you’re coming in from that true, pure perspective, whereas some people come from it from a more. Well, you know, I just want to get into a position so I can make decisions. What decisions? For whom? Who knows? It doesn’t matter.

As long as I can get into that position, I’ll be content in life. But it sounds like in doing the work you’re doing, you’ve escaped the worst of this society, you know, You’ve escaped the worst of the trappings of easy street and all of the stuff you talk about with the addictions. And, you know, this is kind of your way. This is how you medicate it. The adrenaline, you know, the adrenaline of putting yourself in a situation to try to undo all the shit that’s being created. There’s definitely a level of adrenaline junkie that comes along with this work.

I think you. You can’t avoid it, but. So let me ask you a question about that. So shit’s hitting the fan, you know, bullets are flying, you know. What do you do to keep your cool? Well, I. Probably, number one is I keep my. My focus on the why. So I have a family. I have a wife and children that I live for. And everything I’VE ever done. I mean, obviously, after I got married, the birth of my son actually was probably the turning point. When he was laying there not breathing, we had a rough delivery.

I’m getting emotional now. I realized that from that moment I saw his face for the first time, I realized I’m never going to be the same guy again. Like, that’s it. Like, whatever I was doing before, I’m different now. And I don’t know what that’s going to be. But this is me now, because I will do everything, I will expend everything in my life to make sure that this boy grows up and has the opportunity to be better than me. And I’m going to be whatever he needs to be better than me. And I had never felt like that about anything in my life up until that point.

I was 25 when he was born. And, yeah, so I was young, right? And it’s pretty early age to have that kind of epiphany. It was. But it was so. It was like there was no question. It was like, okay, this is it now. Like, there’s this little boy I had. I knew what his name was for years. And I told my wife, our name is. Our son’s name is going to be Bodie. She’s like, what do you mean? We’re not going to wait. We’re going to talk about this. I said, no, I already know what my son’s name is going to be like.

This was when I first got married, so I already had that. Somehow I had that connection to him. But it’s been the same with all my kids. I realized he was just the first one, but it took him being born to make me kind of lose that selfish perspective of this. This is my life. I need to make it something. I need to grow into something. I need to leave my mark. No. My job in this life is to create sons and daughters that will leave their mark if the world forgets about me and what I’m doing.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. They’re the ones that are supposed to have the name. They’re the ones that are supposed to leave the lasting legacy. My job is to just push them to that, because then they will have been better than me. So you control the fear by thinking of something greater than yourself. And I also have a very deep relationship with God, you know, so there’s a lot of prayer that goes into everything that I do. I mean, it’s constant. Like, you know, a lot of people, like, they focus. Their prayers are over the meal, you know, they get up in the morning and they kneel by their bed.

It’s different for me. It’s like a constant day dialogue to some people. It’s probably kind of weird, but I try to make that dialogue kind of always with God, you know, so he’s kind of involved in every decision that I’m making. And, man, I can tell you so many stories of hearing that voice saying, aaron, go do that. And it saved my life, right? And because of that dialogue, I was able to make that instant decision. Not maybe. No, it was, turn left there. Holy crap. I just avoided getting killed, right? Something’s got a book. You got like a book of Eli type mission going on here.

I mean, I’m not religious, but I can kind of relate to you in that it feels sometimes that, you know, when I’m. When I’m functioning with total integrity, that it almost seems like because, you know, we all have moments of weakness. But when I’m being the person I know I should be, it seems like there’s signs. There’s like, I end up moving into the right place that I’m supposed to be in life, you know, that junction, you know, that you finally get to, and you’re like, oh, yeah, so this is why it all kind of worked out in that way.

But I think that’s incredible advice because oftentimes you get advice like, wow, just ground yourself and remember your training, and these are all good things. But the why is so important because I think when it comes down to it, the situations we’re talking about, you’re going to be faced with such horrors that the only way you can really probably get through that is if you. If you have some bigger purpose, some bigger understanding what this is all about that you’re a part of. And it’s not just you as a solitary person doing things for yourself in this life, that it’s about a much bigger story.

And that can be incredibly motivating. I know myself. I look at my homestead sometimes. I think, why am I planting these trees? Like, you know, I’m gonna be fucking 80 by the time these trees are for you. It’s not for me, you know, it’s for the next. Even if it’s not my kids who have that place, I want to build a place if all goes well and the world doesn’t go to shit, I want to build a place that whoever inherits that property will be able to enjoy it and, you know, just have a better. Something better than it is right now, you know, that somebody did the selfless act of doing something that they wouldn’t initially reap the spoils of.

And it’s a hard mindset to get into, especially in prepping, because it is very lone wolf focused. It’s starting to be, like you said, debunked, but it still kind of colors most of the pursuits. Right. The sexy aspect of it is lone wolf. Yeah. It’s John Wick. It’s the lone hero, Rambo. Yeah. You know, there’s this chapel that was built back in the 1700s, and it was built all out of oak. And they realized that all of the rafters. It was a beautiful chapel, and all the rafters were. They had rotted because they were 200 years old.

They had to be replaced, but there was no oak that you could buy to. It was so exorbitant to transport oak from the distance to replace these rafters. And they were trying to figure out this problem, but the church was going to have to be demolished until they realized that the road leading up to the chapel was lined with oak trees that were planted when the church was built. Exactly the number of trees they needed to replace the rafters. I think of that story, in fact, on my lanyard that I wear at work, when I’m in the emergency department or actually whenever I’m in the clinic, I have a little acorn that’s always on it.

And I think about that because that’s how we should be living our lives is not. This is going to be a beautiful chapel. People are going to admire my work because it was. It was a beautiful chapel. But I need to make sure that this stands for generations so that my great, great grandchildren can also be blessed by this. How do I do that? We live in a world that is good, is evil, and there are the extremes. And. Yeah, I’ve seen the extremes and the terrible things that I’ve seen that people have done to children.

They do sometimes keep me up at night, and they’re terrible. But because I have a faith that there’s a opposite, that for everything bad, there has to be a good good. That’s you. Well, I appreciate that, but I believe that it’s going to require a lot more than me because this is bad. But there has to be this. It has to balance. It’s a teeter totter. There has to be that contralateral good. Yeah. Otherwise it doesn’t work. Balance doesn’t work. The universe is out of balance. And I believe that the universe is balanced. So it follows the law of physics that if there is this level of evil in this world, there has to be this level of good.

I just need to find it. I just need to be it or I need to find it or I need to send it, whatever it is, whatever my job is for that moment. I need to be that opposite or I need to help support that opposite. Because this is real and this is there. And most people don’t even know that it’s there. Most people think that, oh, you know, that’s just in the movies. No, it’s not. And it’s worse than anybody can possibly imagine. But this is there too, and these people are there. And I think in that end of the world scenario, I think when the.

The TEOT walkie, when we get to that point, I think they’re both still going to be there. And I don’t think there’s ever going to be until the final say. And this goes back kind of to fate and believe how you want, but when all is said and done, that will be when this is no longer. But until then, we have to deal with this. We have to be that last bastion. We have to be the contralateral good, each one of us, or this will win. This side of the teeter totter will be the heaviest. And that is each one of us has to make that decision every day.

If we don’t, then that side goes down just a little bit more. Man, I want to thank you. I mean, I don’t know where to end a conversation like this, but I mean, I think, you know, you gave us a lot to think about. That is more than we bargained for. Obviously medication is important, but I think you touch on some issues that are not talked about often enough. In prepping, people talk about spirituality, but the way that you articulated it there, I really think it gave something for people like myself who are more agnostic. You gave us something to think about.

Semantics. Those are just labels. Exactly the same thing, I feel with this channel. We’re trying to evolve prepping to something that is where it should be. And, you know, it started off with, like you said, all the sexy, you know, sensational kind of motivations. But, you know, we’re. We’re all kind of. Because we don’t know what it’s going to look like on the other side. I think, you know, you probably do, and I just commend you for trying to be that contralateral force, as you say, in the universe, because we’re gonna need it, man, the way things are going.

So on the bright side, I think the reckoning is going to be good because. Because I think a lot of these problems are caused by maybe excess and maybe if we have a little bit less, we’ll start to. I agree with that. We have to figure out what matters most once again. Anyways, Matt, I look forward to seeing you on other platforms and having these conversations. I could see you and Lex Friedman having a ten hour conversation. Conversation. I’ve always wanted to talk to Lex. We’ll see if we can make it happen for sure. Thanks a lot for coming.

I appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate it. 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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