Continuing our focus on solutions, this week we're joined on the podcast by Jack Spirko. His daily podcast focuses on practical, actionable steps each of us can take to "live a better life, if times get tough or even if they don't" — a mission nicely aligned with the one we pursue here at Peak Prosperity.
In this wide-ranging discussion, Jack and Chris discuss the need for spreading awareness of the Three Es, the professional challenges in doing so, and how individuals can go about pursuing both security and prosperity in the face of the likely disruptive changes to come:
We've had these people predicting: This is the Big One! for 25 years. These people are hucksters who just want to make money. "End of America", "The world is going to end!", "In six months the dollar is going to collapse!" — people have been marketed these messages. Here's my concern: it's going to become Chicken Little. And when we really are at a point where you and I are going "Uh, guys…", no one's going to listen.
So as it relates to preparedness: being prepared for the grid to go down for a couple of months — great goal. Wonderful. But I look at preparedness this way: if you and I are in a car together and we're going to drive from Miami, Florida to Portland, Maine, we're going to go to Georgia before we go to Virginia unless we're really dumb people without a map.
So when somebody asks me about preparedness, my first question is: Do you have 30 days worth of food stored up in your home? No? Then stop worrying about the grid going down. Do you have enough money to go 90 days without income and be okay? Not happy, but at least okay at the end of those 90 days? No. Then let’s not worry about total Armageddon yet. Do you have a basic blackout kit, so if your grid goes down for 24 hours you can find your stuff and be comfortable? No? Then your first steps in preparedness should be focused on getting all of these most basic things done.
The way I look at this is: an emergency that affects just you or just you and your immediate family is the most likely emergency you'll experience in your lifetime. You'll probably experience a number of them. If you widen that out to be your neighborhood, it's a little less likely that you, as an individual, will be impacted by it. And as we go to a national level disaster, your odds of having it happen to you on any given individual day – I think in this generation we're going to see it, eventually — but on any given day the risk is relatively low. So we have to take this methodical approach. We prepare first for the disasters that only affect us and our families. Then we prepare at the neighborhood level. Then at the regional level. And by the time you get there, you're so close to being able to at least be somewhat resilient on these wide-scale disasters and so far ahead of where you would be otherwise, that it's doable now. However, if you start out with no preparedness and you start pumping money into solar panels and back-up batteries and stuff to the tune of thousands and thousands of dollars and you can’t handle being laid off for a month, then sooner or later you're going to end up hurt and you're never going to get where you're trying to go. These are the people who get in the car and end up going from Florida to Virginia back to Georgia while trying to get to Maine. Sooner or later, you're going to get lost because clearly you have no map.
This is why for developing preparedness we have to start out with a methodical list. Be prepared to be without services for a day. Now let’s get prepared for a week. Now let’s get prepared for a month. It's actually easy to do it that way. And then you add in a common sense lifestyle. I know you garden and you plant fruit trees and stuff like that — and you talk about a home being a liability to a degree due to taxes etc — but if you take a home with a certain size piece of land and you turn that land into a producer, you create an asset. These are the steps you should take first in your pursuit of preparedness, because most people don’t have the time, the budget or the resources to get prepared for the apocalypse by Wednesday.
And another thing: some people think that if a collapse comes, it will be easier in some ways. I think some people actually have romantic fantasies about collapse — I'll just have my gun and I’ll be able to defend what's mine and no one will be able to take it from me. I won’t worry about paying my debts off because everybody's going to be broke anyways. They can’t repossess my stuff — that's not how collapses work. Look at Argentina. The government gets stronger. The government gets bigger. The Powers That Be want more. And they’ll take it, too. Which is why it's so important to take a phased approach towards developing resilience.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Jack Spirko (81m:34s)
by aaron-hough 
