PLAN FOR CONTINGENCIES: What Our Security Experts Are Predicting

we're just not in the society we used to be in the sense of we don't have the neighbors that we we're friends with we don't have the communities we used to be able to count on so things start to fall apart nobody knows who to count on and things fall very quickly so i think we could be there quickly now i said i think it would take a major catalyst if not i think you're really probably about 18 months before we see major few shortages things like that but like i said i don't know i mean i've i've been wrong in the past but i think you know just based upon the announcement from the world economic forum what they're planning on doing the shortages of food and other things that are disappearing you know right now i can see major food shortages by winter for sure they're telling us what they're going to do nobody's listening if you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future and you'd like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible then you've come to the right place my name is lynette zhang now it's time to go beyond gold and silver [Music] so i'm so happy to have two important returning guests i've got sean and curtis they are extreme experts in security and planning and project management and they've come today to update us so if you haven't seen the first interview with them then click that link below to see the setup because i've been now working with them over the course of i don't know several months and i feel like we've come so far and that this is so important so first of all welcome you guys and could you please explain to people a little bit about what you what you do and then we'll talk about what you've been doing for me so yeah well glad to be back on board and just discussing with you what we're doing and and what we've been doing one of our our main purposes we're contingency planners and project managers for the contingency planning so we do is we help find people look at where they are right now and look at mitigating any sort of circumstance that comes to pass that could interrupt their life and lifestyle and then be able to hopefully maintain that as much as possible in a safe environment so whether it's you know some sort of a natural disaster a man-made disaster or something else we want to make sure you have continuity of operations in both your life continuity of operations in your business so that's our primary focus now both of you are ex-military and then plus curtis you have a lot of experience with building that's what that's what you do so yeah so yeah i did three years in an army and half of that was in iraq the first uh combat tour in iraq operation iraqi freedom uh sean here he's got a lot more military experience than i do uh but since i've been out of the army and before i'd i've been in construction my whole life for the family company and currently here in phoenix i'm the general manager of neoconstruction we're a commercial construction company so it's what i've done my entire life and uh i think that's why we offer such a unique product with five stones is we both have heavy metal we have military experience but also within our military experience and all around that it's it's project management and um yeah yeah so the project management is what makes things happen and gets things done the proper way yep now would you say because this is how i feel about it so correct me if i'm wrong but i think that the organization and the and the uh the experience that you have working under stressful circumstances where you know something bad is happening around you but you're also working on getting into a position to mitigate those problems and and i feel like that's a lot of the value that you've brought to the table with my personal project well i think that's yeah that's spot on with where we're at is what we did is we were in stressful environments sometimes the construction can be pretty stressful trying to get things passed through and push through but at the same time you also have operational construction which i mean my last project with the military was the deputy commander for the border wall so we had the pressure of the white house calling every couple of days asking where the wall was and how many miles we've gotten and so you had continuous pressure of getting things done same time you're trying to you know balance life and then there were times when we're overseas in a combat zone where you know like you said there's things going on around you but you you're basically trying to repair the team and everybody else operationally for the next move to to counter whatever's going on and also to put yourself in a position of strength and that's what we're we're used to dealing with that is when things are falling apart sometimes we can be a little rough around the edges at times um dealing with civilians but we are um we are definitely uh or about getting the job done and getting it done right and and that's really the skill set that we need because whether people realize it or not you know we could be seeing a full-blown revolution in this country and if you're not ready and you're not prepared for that well there's no time than the present to prepare and get into proper position and that kind of takes us to where we're at on my project because everybody knows that it's a mountain project but um it's been phenomenal for me personally just having somebody there that i know that is organizing and keeping things moving properly and um and filling in the holes that i couldn't think about or didn't think about or didn't even know to think about so let's talk about where you are because when we had the interview the first time we hadn't started yet but now we've begun so yeah so what we've we've this majority of our time has been you know since we started has been information gathering i'm trying to figure out you know not only from you but from your teammates from your family members where everything currently was status-wise and so that's a huge part of the the situation is understanding that uh then we went out and we started gathering threats understanding what the threats are i know you know in arizona for per se there's no matter where you live if unless you live in the major city there's a risk of forest fires there's risk of high winds there's snow storms which might surprise people in arizona but you've got you know but mudslides you've got a number of different things that could cause problems for somebody on the safety side then you have your threat of criminal elements you have a threat of um disaster uh from man-made disasters if somebody caused a problem you have governance issues so all those things we look at and analyze um we did multiple trips to your property we've done multiple trips to your your you know your farm here locally we've been made multiple trips to the local community and met with members of the local community and we've been gathering information so that's the main part is we're just gathering and evaluating gathering and evaluating and we've made some discussions recommendations because we found things that needed to get done right away with your project but there are other things where we're just trying to gather it all and put it in a report and then put probably help you prioritize what needs to actually get done yeah keep in mind we we have a team of specialists that we work with that we subcontract also for whether it be security specialist communication specialist uh to work with them to to help build this report and they're kind of behind the scenes and then we act as the project managers to put these specialists together they're each individual attributes to to specify exactly what you need for your individual project one of the things that we did very quickly was fire mitigation and it was it was kind of interesting because i didn't really know what to expect you know but you got a great team can you talk more about fire mitigation and how you you know yeah so so the fire mitigation came up as i know definitely um you know some of your family members and yourself were talking about it and here in arizona fire season gets oh i think mid-may or so and it's it gets quick and it's we've already had a number of forest fires here in arizona so we moved quickly and curtis went to um uh the there was actually a fire mitigation expo in prescott and it just so happened to be kind of the right timing was able to go up there and talk to the right contractors the right uh county officials to put together what we needed to do to get it done and get it done quick yeah and the main thing the fire mitigation does is you know you can do you know protect the entire property or you can protect the entire area but one thing the biggest things we look at is structures first where people especially occupied structures where people live and the biggest thing is a lot of people think when they think fire mitigation you think about like when you're clearing up all the brush and stuff on your in your yard or click picking up all your leaves and that's not necessarily the case because in in a forest fire is actually very cleansing and very healthy for the forest and so a lot of times they want the the underbrush the growth that's that's mild to be trimmed down and taken care of and they just want to keep the canopies of the tall trees protected they want if a fire comes through they want to burn out quickly without much fuel but be able to put nutrients back into the soil and also they don't want to touch up too much education then because then you end up with the erosion problems and the wall mud slides and those type of issues that you talked about so well one of the things that you also did is um is connect me with a government program that would actually pay for most of the mitigation or potentially will pay for most of the mitigation so even when you're looking at things that you need to do one of the things i really liked because i wouldn't have even thought about that i mean i would have thought about the fire mitigation that was on my mind but i didn't know that there was a program that would actually government program that would actually subsidize my taking care of my property as far as mitigation was concerned yeah and that that's kind of going along with with proper proper proper project management where you go to the right officials instead of just uh calling a local guy that might be a laborer or someone who you know they can do it on the side you want to do it with the right companies have the right certifications that can get you those things the grants or or the the uh reimbursements or whatever it may be because for uh you know your property a lot of others this is helping the overall community so you have those programs in place where they're eager to assist you in any way they can because it helps the overall community well and that's one of the things we look at not just in the in the fire mitigation but in all aspects because as we talked about um the other day we we're about protecting you know our clients and when we say we're protecting our clients we're going to protect them from the biggest threats and one of the biggest threats a lot of times is if you if you go in there and you're building something that you want to make sure is taking care of your family and protecting them you know there's an area of high winds or ice or heavy snowfall and you and somebody was to build a barn without the proper um structural integrity i mean your risk of dying from marauders moving through the area is probably lower right now than the risk of you know a barn collapsing because of a snowfall or wind issue so when we look at it we look at you know mitigating all the risk uh because there's there is that threat that's of what could come but you know and you need to prepare for it as best we can problems you can never guarantee but you can always um always look at continuing to keep everybody safe in the meantime the the other thing that you um have been helping me with and we're not done with it yet because we're still in the planning stages but as an overall master plan for the community that i'm developing right absolutely so even looking at where we can put water catchment systems to help with well the fire it'll also bring in more animals depending upon how we set those systems up because there's lots of options but i think what's been really helpful for me is really seeing this whole overall plan start to manifest and start to emerge oh well and that's that's one of the biggest things you got to kind of one of the things we always we learned through the military is what's called backwards planning you really have to go look at the end state in mind and until you figure out what the end state is a lot of times you end up you can piecemeal things together but it might not ever look like you wanted to because you never knew what the goal was at the end i mean it's kind of like a lot of what you talked about with with gold silvers what's what's the end state of the dollar well now that you know that now that people can come and plan you know their state planning their you know what they need to pay their taxes on their property tax things like that but until you understand the end state you know when i was um meeting with them and sharing some other people there that's one of the biggest thing to talk about it's like what's your end statement right what's your goal exactly and until you get the goal out then you can't backwards plan and say well in order to get to step you know five i gotta do step four i got step three and step two and stuff you can't start at step one i mean and it's that uh you know if you if i think somebody said if you point a car you know and turn the wheel just a tiny bit it's eventually it'll end up right back in a circle if you leave it at that same degree of change but if you know if you think you're going to change something you have to know where you want to go because if you leave that go the wrong direction over time by the time you get to when you get along you know 10 miles down the road you're you're in the wrong location to begin with and you have to start from scratch yeah that that's a that is a really good point that's why you know here you're right with the wealth preservation and the and the growth piece we always want to know what your goals are and then you can plan it's the right tool for the right job one of the tools that you have uh scheduled and i think we have it scheduled for pretty soon and i think this is like this is quite amazing um to me one of the things is the that you that you have a scheduled to do some training where it's not that i'm only shooting a gun but it's not real bullets right right people are going to be shooting at me too right yeah now this is called simunitions um it's a simulated bullet it's fired out of a real gun it's fired with um no it looks like almost very similar ammunition so it's cartridges it's you have to change magazines it's very realistic but it's a small fire's a small paintball round and that small paintball round um stings quite a bit when you get hit and i mean and it and it gives it leaves a little rapport and a little bit of paintball but the thing is is what we found is you know through combat training and through tactical environment and and both of us been through you know the real real environment of firefights is you really can't understand what it's like to shoot a gun in a combat environment unless somebody's shooting back at you and that's part of the problem with paper training or targets of steel and stuff is this is is human interaction it's kind of like um whether you're doing jiu jitsu or you're doing something else you can do the drills all day but until somebody else is actually countering what you're doing you really don't learn how to operate in that environment and that's one thing we want to do with y'all and so and one of them just be we might you know work on it where we're escorting you we're the bodyguards for you and you're moving but you'll see how as we're pulling you and putting you in a vehicle if as we're extracting you from a position you know when you're being shot at or you know you're having a duck for cover that that helps you understand okay it helps when the stress from something like that actually comes in real life you can mitigate that stress by understanding what it feels like yeah a simulation like that it helps get to his real world as the event as possible so therefore you understand the consequences much better uh rather than just uh being theoretical you've not been in the real situation but you've been as close to as possible without getting serious damage so it does it does kind of flip a switch in your brain to understand the consequences and and how to uh react during those situations yeah i think that's the key is how to react during those situations so this simulation gives you practice right yeah and that's and that's the thing is you want to get that stress level up to where you understand you know how you're going to react to that stress lesson because the biggest well the worst things people can do is they freeze in a situation because they don't feel they know how to react and i remember i was a young lieutenant that was the we're in charge of a platoon and you're responsible for lives of 40 guys and one of the things we were told all the time is like it right or wrong make a decision and make a decision and stick with it and that's you know because sometimes you know even a decision that might be not 100 the best is still you know and when you're executing it it's still better than nothing um i think it was um patton was you know known for you know his his theory that you know there's a a good good plan today is better much better than a perfect plan tomorrow and that's you know where you get things done you know that actually makes so much sense because what i'm finding and we talked about this at our meeting this past weekend is that we know all of these people that know what's going on or appear to know what's going on and yet they're waiting right they're waiting for prices to drop or they're waiting for this or they're waiting for that and and it seems to me that as they're waiting they're choosing they're making the choice to put themselves and their family and their wealth and everything else in jeopardy over some nominal pricing which is in my opinion irrelevant anyway because when you're looking at the difference between your life and your well-being and your standard of living in your family you know what's what's that stupid fiat right yeah and i think i think that's you know one of the big things that happens with a lot of people is like so they get paralyzed they they they have a reason the normalcy bias puts them into a position where like nothing's ever going to happen to me nothing's ever going to happen because it hasn't happened and i think there are you know there's some reasonable expectations of that at the same time when you watch the signs i mean it's like you're getting sicker and sick when you don't go to the doctor eventually you know by the time you figure out what's wrong it might be too late and that's kind of the situation we're in now it's like you just got to decide because not doing anything becomes a decision within itself yeah and that's what we want to help with a lot of people are a lot of talk and no action and they're never going to do anything anyway but then there's also a lot of people who want to do something but they have paralysis by analysis and that's where we want to step in and be able to get them out of that paralysis help with the analysis just like we're trying to reverse engineer the end goal with you so we we can have a plan it's kind of like writer's block you know you want to write you've got the idea but you just got writer's block and then once you start flowing you can start getting it going and you start start going so that's what we want to do with our clients you know the ones who are serious who are not all talk and no action when they get that paralysis by analysis we step in give them a plan give them a a real life vision and a coordinated from a project management standpoint of how it needs to be phased how it needs to be budgeted in the right team members in place to make it happen then you can start making things happen piece by piece kind of how we're going with you you get the most priority things done first and then you've already got things off your checklist now you can move on to the others and it helps get away from that that paralysis that people get stuck in and and one of the things where we're at right now is action um helps you know build the team and as we talked about over this weekend as you know one of the big important things is team building and uh tuckman's stages of uh group forming a group um which you know most project managers know is you know considered forming storming norming performing and adjoining and the forming part sometimes can be nice and smooth and some more of a lot of uh formalities and people are trying to get to know each other but the most important part in my opinion is the storming part when people start butting heads they start clashing a little bit they start trying to figure out other people's personality and and understanding what people's goals and wants and needs are once you understand that and understand these people aren't threats to you they're part of your team once you get past that part in a low stress environment which is good exactly when that higher stress environment goes then you're in the performing stage of the norming phase and that's much better to do that at that time than it is uh to than to be in a function that's one of the things with military units is the military units that were most um cohesive and work the best at least in the first hundred days of combat or teams that have been formed in advance and gone through multiple stressful environments the other teams where they threw a bunch of guys together and put them in an environment put them overseas together at once always you know did a lot worse at least in the first hundred days because they were trying to go through that storming phase while they did well which means they had to count on each other while they're trying to get to know each other and trying to work through the issues it takes a while for people to settle on their roles know each other's strengths and weaknesses and uh be able to be comfortable with each other yeah it is interesting because exactly what you said yeah we're in the we're in the starving phase and i'm glad that we are because what do you think really the likelihood in your opinion and with your both your backgrounds and experience what do you think the likelihood of us needing all of this experience and the planning in place what do you think the chances are of that if if you had to do it on a scale of one to ten just to make life easier yeah you know i i my problem is i've learned a long time ago i'm bad at predicting otherwise i'd be really good at the reality no i can say i mean i think you know with this transition period and this fourth turning that we're going through right now and the fact that we're in the midst of a fifth generation of warfare and everything else i'd say for sure it's at least 50 50. i mean it could be any any to 50 50 chance that it could go completely bad now are we going to see some bad things absolutely are we going to see like in the sense that i think you know you're going to see massive crime increases you're going to see food shortages you're going to see a major transition period and i think you know it depends on people's level of um tolerance for totalitarianism as far as how far we go yeah but yeah i think you know by the time people start to wake up it's going to get pretty ugly and that stage is going to be ugly and i wouldn't want to be in town for it so i can say that now as far as the level of you know 100 societal breakdown i'm not sure i think like i said it's a 50 50 chance in this transition period but it's going to get ugly between now and then but when i say ugly the problem is is people in america don't understand what what it is even if we transition to become a um honduras belize um or a uh venezuela or taiwan or i mean uh or in taiwan um thailand or one of these countries where you have the haves and the have nots and the middle class is completely gone that's i mean that's that's brutal for most people because they won't be in a position where most of them will end up trying to become a have not have but they're going to advise they have not and they don't know how to live that way yeah it's much of the frog in the boiling water i think so many people are going to realize they're getting cooked and it's just going to be too late for them to get out or prepare and like when you ask that question it's a very hard question to answer because it's almost like well a hundred percent yeah there's going to be a fourth tournament there's going to be some sort of a revolution now this revolution is not going to look like the first revolution right but there's going to be some sort of that and we're probably in the midst of it right now looking back in history 2020 will probably be the real start of that some people might even say 20 or 2008 but really 2020 will be the really start it might go to 2030 who knows of that real revolutionary fourth turning but so in my opinion yeah 100 it's going to happen but what is the scale like shawn saying what's that scale going to be um well i think it is going to come down to a lot more uh have-nots than halves but where's that percentage you know you're going to kind of fall out and be the the new norm and then start all over from there with a whole lot less people with a whole oh that have any kind of ownership or freedom i mean i'll i would like to sit it out and you know be in a position to sit out in a mountain you know resort then i would prefer to sit in a city for sure and i think people need to prepare for that because you know and i mean you might have you know it does it most disasters and most things that happen on a major scale tend to be local and when i'm yeah i see that i mean if you look at any hurricanes if you look at any um even wars wars you know like you look at countries like syria where you know syria has been a war for years and the entire you know entire section of the country had to flee and go to other parts but other parts of the country if you look at videos and stuff people kind of going about their normal day there's some bombings now and then but they're going about their normal day so that's a country that's war torn and yet you still have sections of of it so would pocket you know where we live will be or what pocket anybody else will live will be i don't know and i can't predict that but i can tell you you want to be prepared if you're the one the pockets that goes bad yeah absolutely so so when you're looking at my preparedness and and honestly i started work on this a long time ago okay but what level would you say we're at and how much further do we have to go and and give you know part of the point of this is to give people a little bit of meat that they can take in and execute for themselves well so go into your mantra i think this would be a good way to kind of talk about it because that's that your mantra kind of lets you go so i think when we're talking about food um on the mantra food i think you're very well you know you're probably you know 75 percent of the way there may be something because the thing is you can never plan for exactly what's going to happen it's just all right you know the best estimate so you can never be 100 but i would say you're probably you know on the food side you know particularly when when you get some of this um the hot house is built they're about to start yeah and you get the crops going there and you get your food and stuff like that i'll say you know and in six months you'll be 75 of the way there um for sure you know as long as you can sustain um healthy crops and healthy um animals then i think you that'll that'll be good there um you know water i mean i think you're pretty good you know because you got some natural water sources from the ground and wells and that would be hard uh and shelter-wise yeah shelter-wise we talked about like you know getting some additional um pens some campers some temporary type stuff until you get some more permanent stuff built but those those hopefully number wise it should be at the position where we think you'll be you know sure term yeah 80 there you know because you'll have you know all the shelter you need at least minimal at least minimal shelter you know right some way to stay and be warm and out of the elements and not in my bedroom exactly yeah not everybody living in here you know on the floor in your living room you know right so i think that's that'll be um really big there um at a minimum and then uh security wise i think we've got some work we need to talk about security-wise i mean your your location is is amazing and the sense you know from a security perspective i mean it definitely is you know you know from a from a location perspective i think uh what we need to do is just figure out you know how where the gaps are and talk about that so that one i think you know it it we can talk a little bit offline on that because there's a couple things i don't want to you know go into detail on this but i think your security you're there um partability uh one thing we're actually gonna we're gonna talk about is i i think on you know with a lot of your resources you're very very um close um but i think maybe exploding the resources that you have one of the things we're thinking about we're talking about the other day is medical stuff you have the medical some people with your great medical skills and their skills if they have you know some excess medicine that they have some excess bandages as they have excess things those skills can be very borderable especially i mean when people are out of tylenol or or basic antibiotics or things like that those things will become extremely borderable and so setting up some sort of medical clinic might be you know in the community where you're at might be a good um resource to be able to yeah the vulnerability yeah we have two doctors in our group so you can do that exactly so i mean and we know we're based where you are there's not a lot of really accessible walkable medical um facilities there are none exactly so um so i mean it's in the time of an emergency people can't drive you know right miles a hundred miles to get to a doctor that is a really good point and just sort of as as has an aside um since i've been up there and i had my dogs up there one of my dogs got into a little dog fight where he was wounded and thank god i had just brought up extra antibiotics and i had in there all my gauzes and ointments and and all of that because if i hadn't had that there to work with then either i would have had to have brought him down the hill which he wouldn't have been very happy because he was in pain or i might have lost him i mean i don't know so you know anybody i think that is a really good point for anybody that is getting prepared or especially those that have an ongoing health issue that they have to deal with you know you have to make sure that you have those tools before you need them because i was in the middle of nowhere there was nothing that i really could do for him other than bringing him down the mountain which would have not been great for him and but right now you have that choice to bring him down the mountain exactly in order to fall apart you might not have that choices the medical clinics are overrun and the police are overrun because of because it won't take much i mean people i kind of laughed because they kept talking about the medical um facilities were 80 full because of covid but the problem is they run in the united states because it's a for-profit business they've run icus incentive carriers run at 80 and so when there's a mass casualty event when i say a match guys or the event the definition is i believe um it might i don't care about the federal definition but used to be the definition of six or more casualties mass shootings four exactly yeah the master mass casualty event was like an accident an accident or anything that happens when there's more than six victims of being invented back right away mass casualty well you think about this if you have five mass casualty events in this in one major city over a time hospitals are not only overwhelmed they're breaking and so even you know locally where you are even if you don't have to evacuate the city you have to be prepared for to treat yourself on most as many things as you possibly can keep in mind too like you asked a few minutes ago like where are we at and just the overall like how bad can things get right now on a scale of 1 to 10 saying 10 is absolute warfare we look like a war-torn syria or something like that we're still very low we're two or three on a ten scale of ten because all the institutions are still in place yeah we're losing our freedoms yeah we can see the economic system about the buckle and their defense there aren't they defunding a lot of the police forces i mean crime is definitely on the run exactly and you can start seeing the cracks in the institutions the police forces the the um government the government um uh systems that the in the private uh you know hospitals these things still are still standing you we have our services that were we all take for granted that we all use every day now when those start just completely breaking and going away and it's every man for themselves the institutions have broke down that's when real chaos comes in you go to the grocery store and 80 of the shelves are empty or the grocery sources completely shut down because they got ransacked by marauders that's when this and then there's no police to stop that and then there's no hospital to bring to people who got injured in that riot to go to that's when institutions are are just completely broken and we're we're quite a ways away from that but i mean we're we're heading in that direction at a slow slow boil right yeah i mean like just for example the phoenix police department right now is you know is already a thousand police officers understaffed and and yet there's i think i forgot what percentage of them but large percentages police versus uh on that age to the right about ready to retire aging out and so the next few years they'll probably be retiring um and many of them as soon as they possibly can because of the environment they're working at right now and so and they're not being replaced by people and or they're replacing with people who you know in some cities they talked about like replacing people with criminal backgrounds let them be police officers now and so you've got to sit now you have people i didn't hear that yeah they're starting to fill the ranks with with their own uh just it's kind of like the fox running the hen house well just i mean well the example is like i know there's some some inner cities particularly like some of the cities i think in chicago or some others they're large cities and they just they need more and more police officers and they have found that like a lot of young men were in trouble and were arrested and you know got some criminals backgrounds and those that used to be a pretty much disqualification 100 percent there but now they're starting to talk about i don't know if any police forces have specifically done it yet but some of them were talking about know well we'll wave certain criminal activities in order to let people be you know in the police force because they can't fill the ranks at all and same with the military and things like that where they're starting to lower some of the standards yeah the standards are just the same it might not be absolute criminals but the standards have i saw in the short time i was in the military from the time i went in to the time i went out i forgot the exact numbers on the i think was the asvab is the original test you have to take that kind of places you and your military occupation they lowered the score that you needed to qualify for uh by a large amount i don't know the exact numbers but that and that was 15 20 years ago and i can guarantee you it's only been lowered since then so the quality of people that we depend on and trust and the police force in the military are are not the quality people that you would expect to be in there so how quickly do you think it could deteriorate i mean to be honest with you i mean the right catalyst and you could be we could be you know evacuating in a few months i mean or a few weeks i mean i don't know it's that's not ready yet look what that was a minor attack i know i'll probably get a lot of crap for that but imagine if you had 20 coordinated 911 type attacks at the same time this country would lose their mind people would be hysterical yeah i mean like i said you could you could see a situation where you have you know i mean a couple of uh place nuclear strikes or something like that could deteriorate everything rapidly within a matter of because we're just not the society we used to be in the sense of we don't have the neighbors that we were friends with we don't have the communities we used to be able to count on so things start to fall apart nobody knows who to count on and things fall pretty quickly so i think we could be there quickly now i said i think it would take a major catalyst if not i think you're really probably about 18 months before we see major feud shortages things like that but like i said i don't know i mean i've been wrong in the past but i think you know just based upon the announcement from the world economic forum what they're planning on doing and all the the house and the the shortages of food and other things that are disappearing you know right now i could see major food shortages by this you know winter for sure they're telling us what they're going to do nobody's listening you know there's not enough of us listening and it it's really interesting because um i just did a report on the wef which won't go out until next week but uh on the wef there are economists and on specifically on food security they ranked you know the u.s europe and a number of other countries and basically for the u.s it was either

secure or very secure there was no insecurity there which actually makes absolutely zero sense to me because i know people that have to make a choice between putting money in their gas tank or or food on the table and there's a lot of food insecurity in the us maybe not as bad as other countries but um yeah yeah i i think we're and i think we're just gonna continue as inflation continues to increase and then you see the mysterious um unknown um foods processing plants that keep getting burned or destroyed miraculously without anybody investigating i think is a very interesting dynamic as well um so there's a lot of those type things going on but yeah i think we're you know definitely be prepared to barter i i was telling you a story the other day i don't know if you want me to share about you know what happened in pakistan i do and i do want you to share that go ahead and i think don't we have some video or images of that with curtis and i looked in when we're in iraq everybody was wanting to buy the iraqi dinar yes curtis gave me a 250 interestingly enough a 250 dinar note and um can educa maybe you can put it up close to the camera or zoom in so you can see because on this side it's in uh iraqi and on this side it's in english yeah isn't that interesting how the english-speaking world is the great satan that saddam would call it but yet he's got his own money in english yeah i think that's really interesting it was amazing also when we went over the the the stockpiles of billions of u.s dollars he had everywhere i mean he stockpiled billions of dollars basically to his currency was based upon the billions of dollars that he had hidden and the oil so that was his what backed his but yeah well we both bought a bunch of iraqi and are hoping that they was going to come back to at least somewhat where it originally was for years now it's you know now it's great you know decoration that's about it um and then so but that was one of my mistakes but i did find the value of real gold and and silver so um you know particularly so i've got this uh coin here and this is a uh a it's a british sovereign from 1911 and it's actually a pakistani sovereign and a buddy of mine who i was in the military with um uh is a great guy named paul he um he gave me when he found out i was going to pakistan he gave me a couple of those um coins and said hey man if you're in a tight jam you can get over there and and it'll help might be able to help you out and so i had him in my pocket with me and while i was there and um we had what um this is about the same time as daniel pearl had been kidnapped and beheaded that was when i was over there and so i was at the karachi airport and they had attempted kidnapping for me and colonel that were there they tried to take us from the airport um right in the same area of karachi where he was kidnapped um about you know six months after he had been killed and then we had uh and so we're you know dealing with you know a lot of this stuff but i had we were assigned security guards we were also assigned um what they call bat boy and bat boy is a basically a servant um the army used to have them uh basically they help you do your laundry they take care of your food they help take care of all the things that you do as an officer you're busy they're doing whatever you do or as a guest you're directing all these things and so i um i gave him him one and um gave my uh guard you know a little silver one and the bad boy i said look just keep an eye out for things if you hear about anything bad or if you're burying anything going on let me know or just make sure nothing happens to me and when i leave i'll be sure to give you the second one of the coins and i didn't tell them where it was or i held it but um i had it you know with me on all times and he uh i mean everything went fine i don't know if that was the kit why but i definitely know it gave him a lot more incentive to make sure i was protected and you know that he kept his ear to the ground if anybody was trying to plot anything against me or do anything else and so unfortunately i mean we had to medevac one of the kernels i was with until we evacuated right away without being able to see him again and give him the second one but i still got that second one on me um to keep you know for just that experience that you know the golden because that gold you know that one gold coin i gave him was because he i was think i was paying him um we were supposed to pay him a dollar a week and i was paying him like you know five dollars a week because just to be nice but i mean even that five hours a week was more than the rest of his family made combined and so that gold coin you know was you know probably you know more than his family made in a year it probably was and and historically you know gold silver diamonds things like that tangibles that actually have wealth can buy you safety and that's been true in the past and i'm pretty sure that'll be true in the future which is one of the reasons why you need all of the gold but now you've been both of you have been in countries where their currencies have gone to zero like hence the iraqi dinar weren't you telling me some experience yeah i went i mean i do i know when we were in some of these countries where it was in central america or other places where you see you know kids they'll just come up with anything they can to sell and i mean you know a loaf of bread or whatever it is and then it's interesting because the currency they didn't want their own currency they wanted us dollars they wanted uh something that was at the time i mean it was so fiat but at the same time us currency had value even though you're in another country and so you could they would they'd much prefer you know one us dollar to a thousand of iraqi or a thousand you know other countries currencies you know so that that that was one of the things we definitely saw as you saw a lot of people in those countries wanted something to value or they've traded you they really love the trade stuff i mean they would they much better to barter like they preferred you to give them a you know pair binoculars or you know i mean a dvd or something than they would you know a a and then they would take their own currency in iraq we would go each week and we would um exchange a 20 american bill for dinar and i don't know how many hundreds or probably millions of dinar we would get but we would get stacks and stacks of that money there and we would uh go into town and we'd eat you know use it to eat use it iraqis were really gonna give haircuts we'd buy things like rugs and we a lot of guys would buy iraqi made suits but with that 20 dollars as we're uh on foot patrol we had to do two six hour foot patrols a day in baghdad in 2003 and 2004 but so while we're in baghdad with that 20 you can live like a king every week yeah well i think maybe we're coming up to that even in this country because that sounds like it's way over there but i think the inflation that we're all experiencing right now makes it very close to home yeah well i mean even yeah i think in right now when you start talking to people i think a lot of people would much they want to get paid right now because i know it you know and you know and it used to be people like oh you get to get around to paying me six months or a year and even contractors they got to get the money now because the value of money is is losing you know its value every week you're so well i'm losing money on projects right now if i have um you know just in the course of starting a large project says a three or four month project um we know we bid that project several months out before and now when the project gets accepted and we start moving on it what we bid three four months ago now we can't do it at the same profit that we we bid and so in the course of that project we're the our profit margins just is getting eaten away uh we we've done large jobs where the price of lumber has almost doubled in the middle of that job so we'll pay for one lumber lumber load at 80 grand and then um you know three weeks later we had to pay for another lumber load and we had to pay 160 grand for the same amount in the course of four weeks wow yeah it's killing us and i'm just one small general contractor and phoenix is loaded with some so everywhere else so everybody's getting hammered by this so what do you think the ramifications of that is going to be i mean how are you going to be how are you going to be bidding these future jobs especially since the powers that be are now admitting that inflation is going to run hot for longer yeah so two things changed is you know for the past um probably since the 90s we've been in what's called a just in time method one construction particularly or even most projects where it's like you just you order stuff and get it there just right before you need to install it and so you don't want to store things and stockpile things and so what we've seen is most of our the construction industry basically most people are doing so taking things they're buying in advance as soon as like they get awarded the contract they buy in as much as the material as possible in advance and pay for it and then the second thing is you're starting to see more and more contingencies written into contracts where it's like okay i'll build this for you for 100 000 but if the price of materials goes up by 10 or more you have to pay the difference and so a lot of people are you know doing that as a contingency so it's changing the way we're doing business just in a minor way but i think it could you know if as as the money supply doesn't keep it out of the demand can't keep up with the the the money especially if they have to do another quantity of easing or something like that then all of a sudden you'll get to a point where what happens is you know then it's just a matter of shortages you know and that's starting to we're starting to see a little that happen as well well this this morning i was in a big meeting for a huge office remodel and uh we are already ordering all the flooring we're ordering all the lighting we're ordering everything right now and we're probably eight to twelve weeks before we even start and i don't even have a contract for building it yet i assume i'm going to get it but just to get ahead of things we're ordering things now because the supply chain is so uh stress thin and we're just ordering now because if we wait eight 12 16 weeks to the order we know we're gonna pay more so the client understands that so it's like okay i'm paying you without a contract to to get the stuff now because we know we're not gonna be able to get it when we need to yeah that's actually what happened with me with the hot houses i wasn't actually planning on starting that project until this year 2022 but because of what was happening and i saw the supply chains breaking down i ordered everything last year i paid for everything last year and now they're gonna they fabricated it and they ordered everything at that point uh but now we're finally gonna start actually putting it on site and i'm very grateful that i did all of that because probably because another side effect too is people are getting a lot less for a lot more so they may have a certain spec but that spec's unavailable so now they're forced to choose an alternative spec and pay even more for a less quality spec whether it be a lighting package whether it be flooring whether it be some kind of custom cabinetry whatever whatever it may be you're having to settle for a lot less but you're also paying more for it than what you normally would yeah and that that's just that's hitting everybody in every aspect well i love the term skin inflation because i think you know people think if they don't believe things are going you know getting wrong go to get a box of cereal or get a a bag of you know chips or something like that and see how many yes i mean if you can find an old one in your storage from six months ago look at how many bat open up dump them both in a bowl and see that that same bat size bag has now half as many chips or half as much you know snickers bars are getting smaller but you're paying the same price yeah your toilet paper is so small and stuff so this inflation is the way that the companies aren't raising your prices but they're lowering your quality yeah and they're doing it you know much as everybody's having problem hiring people uh part of that is also the business model because if you can get everything digitized then you don't need the human body there and so you're getting less service even though you're paying the same or you're paying more and i wonder um i wonder how stretched we can be in that arena before things break yeah and that's that's the question that i think that's the billion dollar question there because if somebody can figure out exactly how when it's going to break then they'll be way ahead of the game i mean we know that it's just when's that next straw that's going to break the camel's back because it's like it's continuing to be loaded and loaded and loaded and i think you know whether it's the economy or the the pressures of um you know the cultural pressures going on right now and things like that those things are just continuing to mount and they're not any there's no pressure valve there's no pressure relief valve to let things go so yeah and next year 2023 with the transition of of all of those contracts all those derivative contracts from the one interest rate benchmark to the new one when they ran a small test on it of 80 million and it was a big fat fail you know the time to get prepared the time to get into position is when you have as many options as possible open to you because i think part of what i'm hearing from you so correct me if i'm wrong is that our options are shrinking it's it's not just the value in those packages that are shrinking but it's also the options and then the ability to execute well that's one of the things that you talked about with people that are waiting for the prices to go down to buy a property or to to to buy you know whatever contingency planning they need or anything like that well those options are gonna are gonna shrink i mean whether it's us i mean right now we have capacity to help some people but i mean our capacity shrinks because more and more people are getting to that or it's like you want to buy yourself a ranch or something like that and those with money start when the things start to get the writing gets closer and closer on the wall people are going to start going out and price prices of all the houses in major cities might collapse but the farm country pricing is going to explode because people are just trying to flee and get out of the city so you know as you said there's there's options right now and there's timing because there's a little bit of normalcy bias in everybody's life no matter who you are but if you don't um have prepare to build that community now and build that and and to focus on those options like i said build that that get through that forming stage form your teams get through the soaring to the stage know where people are whether it's because even if you move to a new community and you move and you go to the local restaurant people don't know you i mean they're at that forming stage and they might not be they might be as trusting of you and so until they get to know you you're kind of going through that soaring face but if you're local and you're visiting them every day for the next six months and and year and then all of a sudden something's fall apart they're like okay this is one of our guys and compared to like okay i just bought the house and now things fall apart they're like was this guy on our side or not right and and you know the other thing that i can absolutely attest to because of course with the gold and silver i was working on that a long time before but when 2008 hit you know i knew that that's when the system really died and so i have been working hard and diligent and consistent and i had so much to learn i still do but i mean at that point i knew nothing about gardening farming irrigation you know security i mean i knew nothing but i knew that it had to happen and it had to happen while i still had the opportunity to learn and put it in place and once you know march and april of 2020 hit i was so grateful that i had spent that much time and energy and focus on developing you know even just my gardens out there because i was able to help people and i had no problem giving away toilet paper because i had plenty of it and i don't care if they call me a hoarder i'm not a hoarder my house is deep and tidy but i am hoarding those essential pieces that we need even those chips even though i know that they're like but my grandkids like them and we want to make sure that there is a little bit of comfort yeah you know when you're in a crisis circumstance i don't want anybody that's up there to feel like they're living day-to-day in a crisis circumstance right and like by the way you said back to the options the options are shrinking and then what's what's in that that pool of shrinking options options are less quality and you're paying more for them so it's just kind of like yeah it's a triple when we like like u

2022-06-16 02:35

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