Mike Shelby is a former intelligence analyst who joins us to talk about community networking and preparedness. His company Forward Observer (forwardobserver.com/) publishes reports, builds networks, and offers training.
Check out his book on how to do and Area Study, and hear his thoughts on how to get started where you live.
Mike Shelby is a former intelligence analyst who joins us to talk about community networking and preparedness. His company Forward Observer (forwardobserver.com/) publishes reports, builds networks, and offers training.
Check out his book on how to do and Area Study, and hear his thoughts on how to get started where you live.
We've talked about building community a lot on past episodes of this podcast and a little bit on building intelligence networks. So today we're going to talk to somebody who does both. Welcome back to T-Rex Talk. Today I have a guest named Mike Shelby. Mike has a business called Forward Observer and he's written a book on area studies and is an expert in gathering intelligence, but specifically for the purpose of building community. So, Mike, can you tell us a little bit about what it is that you are trying to accomplish?
Mike:Well, right now, we're going through somewhat of a transition period. I started Ford Observer back in 2016, writing intelligence reports as my full-time job, because people had a lot of questions about what was going on in the world and they were concerned about things that were happening overseas and then here domestically as well, and I just said, look, hey, I'm an intelligence analyst, I know how to write intelligence reports. Let me just take a crack at this. And then, you know, people ended up paying for it. The problem is now, those reports were very good, and we've since grown and in 2020, we exploded and started hiring more folks.
Mike:And the problem is, though, I would write a report and I'd just say there's no solution here. Like I'm not, I'm I'm really good at describing the problem every day, five days a week for years, and we're really haven't been focusing on these any solutions, and so we've just recently, last year, said look, this is it. We're going to focus on solutions as well, and so now we're. We have this. The report's called Early Warning, and we have an early warning network that we're trying to build to focus on those solutions. Here's what you do about all these problems around the world and at home.
Isaac:Yeah, so you've written a book on gathering intelligence essentially, is the early warning network that you're talking about folks who have read your book primarily, or is it people who were already interested in gathering intelligence and making recommendations and doing some of this analysis stuff?
Mike:I think the members of the early warning network most of them have probably read my book or at least flipped through it, and so they're just naturally interested in preparedness. I mean, really we focus on preparedness. You know, there's a couple or a handful of lines of effort and they've really bought into this idea that we're really not preparing for a war with China or an EMP or hyperinflation. We're preparing for the follow-on effects of those things, the effects that hit us out our doorstep or at the end of our driveway, down our road, around our neighborhood, across our community, and those are the actual effects that we need to be preparing for. And it just so happens that we can take these big picture, strategic, catastrophic events like a grid down event, and do an area study and identify how that's going to impact us at the local level. So we're not time.
Mike:We're not really wasting time with the 24 hour news cycle and trying to keep up with uh you know, every, every tiny little uh detail or every YouTube and Twitter freak out about what's going on in the world. We just focus on our own local community. That's where we have influence, that's where we have the power to make things happen and power to improve our lives at the local level, and really that is that's the core message here.
Isaac:Yeah, and one of the things that I think is really helpful there is is kind of that focus where the the current, there's all kinds of different types of infrastructure that have all kinds of different failure modes and they're fragile in different ways and in some ways at the local level, like where I live here in Centerville, tennessee, it kind of doesn't matter what breaks the infrastructure. The end result that we feel is going to be kind of the same, and the good news is that it's fragile enough that we've seen parts of it break several times already, and so we have some experience with what happens when there's no power for over a week. What happens when there's massive flooding Like this is something that we get to practice regularly enough that it isn't too crazy to talk to our neighbors about these basic level of preparedness things. But let's back up just a little bit. When you're talking about your intelligence networks, your early warning networks, what exactly are you preparing people for those follow-on effects that happen locally? But what exactly does that look like?
Isaac:And at some point I want to talk about the conference that we were just at together, because that conference I want to be careful talking about it, because I don't want to sound too critical of the old school, but that conference felt like a mix of old school and new school preparedness folks and highlighted some of the differences. But yeah, what are some of the things that you're wanting people to be ready for? Just hiding in a hole with beans, which which is, you know, a little more of the old school or something a little bit different? That's a community wide.
Mike:I would say the early warning network is unique. What we're trying to do, the number one question I get is Mike, how do I meet like-minded people in my area? I'm trying to link up with people who are politically like me, socially, culturally like me. They're interested in preparedness. I try to talk to my neighbors about this stuff. They think I'm nuts, absolutely insane. And so what we do? A couple of things. Number one is we produce a daily intelligence report.
Mike:So we're looking at risk geopolitical and geostrategic risk, and then also domestic risk what's happening here locally, and the risk is what we prepare for. So when you identify the risk, then we can start looking at how this is going to impact us. So that's number one. Number two we're building a digital community, and this is the part that members like most, and I kind of like, at least, because I'm not on Facebook. I've been very hesitant to do social media stuff. I basically just have to. But what we're trying to do is run a digital community but enable local relationships. And so we're doing that a few ways, including a ham radio, a national ham radio network, and trying to. The internet's eventually going to go down for one reason or another, whether it's a natural disaster or a man-made disaster. We're trying to maintain the flow of information and to push out information via ham radio networks and then, you know, helping people move away from fragile and failing systems. You just said it.
Mike:I live in Central Texas, we deal with this stuff frequently, and so it's those three main lines of effort here that's what's really going to make a difference. So what I'm trying to do is get people active in their communities. I think the general tendency is to focus on DC or focus on what's happening around the world, and we really should be building political, social and economic power at home because, whether it's a worst case scenario or mid case scenario, we are going to be able to use that political, social and economic power to affect the change that we want to see, to keep the bad stuff out and the good stuff in. There is no scenario whether it's Mad Max or some domestic conflict or world war there is no scenario that I can look at and say, gee, I wish I had less political power, I wish I had less social power, I wish I had less social power, I wish I had less economic power locally where I live. So that's really what we're trying to push.
Isaac:There's another aspect, which we talked about the other day, which is kind of business and TRX Arms. Obviously there's all different kinds of businesses people who provide goods, people who provide services but those businesses will have certain assets, and some businesses will have assets that are more useful in emergencies than others. But at T-Rex we are really blessed that we have kind of done two things. Number one we've gotten into manufacturing, and so that means that in economic situations where, I don't know, maybe we're at war with one of our largest trading partners Like that's an awkward situation for a nation to find itself in. Or maybe one of our trading partners is at war with somebody else and trade is no longer something that they're really focused on. Well, being able to make stuff at home is super cool at that point. But then the other thing is we have a warehouse full of stuff, and if you go to the T-Rex website, you'll see that a lot of the stuff that we sell is stuff that would be really handy to have in an emergency, and so hopefully people buy that and they have that at their home. But if they don't, we have shelves of it at T-Rex and that's going to be something that will be helpful for our local community, and so some of this we've done very deliberately and some of this we've looked back at and just said, oh wow, we're actually really well situated for this, that or the other. We're actually really well situated for helping when this scenario happens or when this scenario happens.
Isaac:I talked on the podcast a while back where we were really well situated for a specific minor catastrophe and because we were slow, we didn't get to help very much, and that was kind of convicting me. But it was like, wow, we have a lot of people who are flexible enough that we could give them, you know, just tell them to go down to the square and help evacuate a building. We have a box truck, we have gloves, we have brand new gloves and boxes that we sell. We could have brought all of this stuff equipped.
Isaac:Volunteers had the box truck and I just want to be more focused on that, because we have the resources and we have the connections. We just need to be ready to actually do the work and be thinking through some of that stuff here. So it's on my to-do list to get better at that, and I think that you're really good at thinking through a lot of those things and setting up a lot of those I don't know what the right word is procedures sounds a little bit too formal than some of the stuff that you're trying to do but doing the thinking ahead of time so that when the scenario happens which in this case was a windstorm that damaged a building and inspectors came in and said you can't be here anymore, it's way too dangerous, but you can have two hours to evacuate. We should have been on the ball as opposed to showing up afterwards with sandwiches being like well, you know, we got a whole bunch of real strong guys working at T-Rex and a box truck full of gloves and uh well, we're here for the sandwich part.
Mike:Well, I I tell you I I'm not a preparedness guru. I have way more questions than I have answers, but I am an intelligence guy. I can't identify vulnerability and risk and threats and hazards, and so what I bring to the table is let's look at what the most likely scenarios that we are going to face. Let's identify those first and then find those follow-on effects, find out where actual risk is, and risk is something that happens that we're not prepared for.
Mike:Essentially, or anywhere where a threat or hazard outweighs our preparedness for it, and that's what we've got to point our efforts towards. So I've got a preparedness and survival guy. He's absolutely fantastic and I pepper him with questions. This is a learning process for me for preparedness, but I can look at domestic and global situations right now and just say, as an intelligence analyst hey, this is something we really need to look at.
Isaac:Yeah, and again the follow-on effects are going to be interesting. Like, let's say, this is a super unlikely to ever happen in our lifetime. But let's just say, hypothetically, china decided that they wanted Taiwan to be part of mainland China. You know, just random, weird, totally off-the-wall hypothetical situation. Let's say that that happened. Well, I'm not in Taiwan and I'm not in the US military and I'm actually too old to be drafted anymore, so that wouldn't, the initial invasion wouldn't affect me. But those follow-on effects would come even to little Centerville, tennessee, relatively quickly, the way that things are affected as regards trade and the internet and just all kinds of stuff. So, as an intelligence officer, can you tell me a little bit more about your background, the parts that you can talk about, what made this an interest, a focus and also a skill set?
Mike:Yeah. So first I was a non-commissioned officer. I worked for a living, so I was not an intelligence officer, but I was a sergeant. So I spent three years in Iraq and Afghanistan two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq as a soldier and also as a contractor and I came away with a skill. I was, honestly, I was a listless college student. I really didn't care to sit during lectures and I watched the invasion of Iraq from my fraternity house bedroom and I just said, wow, those are kids going out and doing something real with their lives. I'm learning about fricking, you know whatever biology stuff I don't really care about. So I dropped out of college and enlisted and I came away with actually a lifelong skill. I really didn't know what I was going to do with it. I just said, hey look, this is kind of cool.
Mike:I actually went down to MEPS and the first time I enlisted I was actually permanently disqualified from service because I had a knee surgery. It's kind of a long story, but I appealed. I finally got through and I tried to sign up to be a counterintelligence agent and they're like well, you're going to have to wait two weeks for the next rotation through. I said, well, I'm not going to wait two weeks. What else is there? And so I said, well, what is this all-source intelligence analyst thing? He's like oh yeah, that's like James Bond too, like the counter intel that's like James Bond. And I said, okay, yeah, sure, that sounds cool. I had no idea what it was and it's not anything like James Bond.
Mike:I kind of lucked out because this really is a crucial skill for preparedness being able to sit down and do an area study, to start building intelligence gathering capacity, to make sure that we have the flow of information coming in before and during an emergency so that we can make really good, time-sensitive decisions. And in a worst-case scenario where we have to make better decisions faster than an opponent, there's only one thing in the world that's going to allow you to do that, and that's intelligence. And so, yeah, I have a really big problem. I don't know if it's a chip on my shoulder.
Mike:I got a big problem with the I call it the bug out bag industrial complex, because they say just put 70 pounds of crap in a bug out bag and you've got your fire starter and your, you know whatever, and man, you're going to make it and you know that's sustainment stuff that's going to get us through till tomorrow. But sustainment does not win the war and I want to win the war, so we got to have intelligence.
Isaac:I think that's really key and I think that the other thing is, yeah, I've watched this happen for a little while. I remember our family weren't preppers, we weren't survivalists, but I remember seeing depictions of them in movies like Tremors. And then I remember in the late 90s, as Y2K rolled around, there was a lot more attention and we went to various conferences. We were already kind of weird. We're already homeschooling. We were already, you know, living in a slightly rural area. We were already hanging out with kind of crusty, weird people who are like proto homesteaders I mean not really because we've had homesteaders in this country since you know, centuries, centuries, but sort of the beginning of that. What we now have is a more modern homeschool homesteader movement.
Isaac:And, yeah, it was interesting being at this event that you and I were just at Thank you for inviting me, by the way, because I did really enjoy that. I could see things that reminded me of the old days, the 90s preppers, where it was just have a bunker, fill it with beans, just survive. And then I could see some folks and I could kind of tell, based on the stuff they were carrying around, that their entry level into this world was that off-the-shelf 70-pound pre-built magic bug-out bag that you can buy from you know whatever online retailer. But what was cool to me was a lot of the new folks that were there and a lot of the speakers and a lot of the vendors were this next generation, where they are not survivalists, they are builders and they are fixers. So there were medical people there that had fantastic medical equipment, there were people there with building supplies, there were people there doing food and permaculture stuff, and then you were there doing intelligence stuff, awareness, communication, community building stuff.
Isaac:So I am far more fascinated by this idea of we're not. Our goal is not to survive. Our goal is to actually overcome and rebuild and continue to build, and so that is, I think, a neat transition, a necessary transition away from both the kind of more selfish hide in a bunker mentality but also the just have faith in this. You know a three-day assault pack, essentially worth of stuff that you know you bought it as a kit, so you may not even be familiar with what's in there, and I'm very guilty of that myself. There's a number of random kits that I bought and put in the closet. I could actually pull a couple of Condor plate carriers out of the closet that I bought and set up 15 years ago and have not worn more than three times. So yeah, I've done this too.
Mike:It's a very American thing to do. We're just going to buy our way out of a problem and unfortunately, there's some things you can buy your way out of. But what we're going to go through in this country over the next, well, we've been going through it, for sure since 2008, but definitely since 2016,. We've been going through it. I think it's going to get much worse in five or ten years, but ultimately, I want to give my son a better life than I have. Like everyone else, I want to make sure that he inherits a system where he's not trading one tyranny for another.
Mike:And I think there's a sense, unfortunately in the preparedness community, that we just have to hold out long enough and the thing's going to collapse and then we can just rebuild from the ashes. And historically, that doesn't happen. Historically, we're just going to get progressively worse. And there's also a mindset that people say, well, things are going to get worse to a point and and then something's going to snap and then we have a chance to make it better. And let's say that you were living through the Bolshevik Revolution.
Isaac:When was that chance?
Mike:When you're a young man, you're an old, dead man by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. So I think there's a lot of myth busting that needs to happen here, because I don't think that things are in some ways. Things are going to get better, but I have very significant doubts that the thing is just going to collapse and the problem is going to resolve itself and uh, and then we're going to go back to the 1960s somehow.
Isaac:Yeah, I need to. Um, I want to develop this a little bit better. I think that is a really good point, because there are definite times. If you look over a long enough period of history, you can definitely see things like the Roman that was Rome to you know, past all of the fallout, from that to the Renaissance. There's a lot of stuff that happens, and one of the things that I think you can learn from that example is the nations that emerged from the fall of Rome and did well are the ones that had already built their own stuff.
Isaac:It wasn't Rome itself, but it was those towns and those communities from those countries, many of whom had wasn't Rome itself, but it was those towns and those communities from those countries, many of whom had been conquered by Rome, but they actually had all the pillars Pillar is probably the wrong metaphor because not Roman pillars but they already had structure, they already had community, they already had intelligence, they already had some legal structure, they already had some infrastructure. Those were the countries that survived the fall of Rome, not at an ashes level, but at a. We can now do our own thing. We're now out from under the tyranny of Rome, but we already have resources. We already have community. We already have a bunch of different things in place to go out and be our own nation and be our own people, and that's the sort of thing that I believe you really have to be working on for several reasons. But yeah, this wait until there's absolutely nothing left but ashes and then rebuild, like that's no fun. Rebuilding from literally scratch is not the ideal scenario here.
Mike:Yeah, the problem is that I mean that just affects everyone's psychology so deeply, and the big problem that I see is this is not like a five-year process. This is a decadal process, and you talked about the collapse of the Roman Empire and eventually things got better for people. That exists on a timeline of hundreds of years, and so this is something that you and I we may not even see, and so I think the best thing that we can do is is do what we can at the local level to maintain a first world zone in a third world descent, because I look at the future of the United States in 10 to 20 years from now. We're probably looking at, I think we're being gracious. I honestly I think we're probably going to be living in like a South Africa type scenario someplace in America is a Africa type scenario someplace, and America is a big and diverse place, and so there are going to be regions that fare better than others.
Mike:You know, I just I got done reading a book about the Ottoman crisis and it you know basically the. You know the Ottoman Empire collapsed during World War I or, I guess, towards the end of World War I, but it was actually going through a very big crisis period well before that, and there were, in some areas of the Ottoman Empire, even though everything was kind of breaking down and collapsing around them, there were actually some places that experienced a renaissance, and I would like to live in one of those places that experiences a renaissance. So that's why I'm really big on community. I understand you are too, and I think that's probably where why we get along is, because I think we really do understand that the the scenario of what we're, the reality of what we're up against and what we need to do in response, and so the maintaining a first world zone or first world zone conditions during a third world descent is like kind of my big overarching mission.
Isaac:There's an interesting I can't remember now who all was involved in this conversation, but it was a fascinating conversation about Brexit a few years ago and it isn't an exact parallel for what we're talking about, but there was this great hesitation amongst the people having this conversation about Brexit. It was basically yes, we can go do our own thing as the UK, but then we're just a little country, we're not part of this big, gigantic part of the world and in many ways I think Britain has been spoiled because they are a tiny island nation. But when you look at the last couple of hundred years 300 years, 400 years they were the empire that the sun never sat on the empire. They at one point governed or ruled, depending on which word you want to use a quarter of the earth's population, so they have pretty recently been top nation and leaving all of the EU and all of the economic power of all of Europe, for some people felt like so much of a downgrade that it was just really unpleasant to think about and I just think that that clouded a lot of people's thinking.
Isaac:There is no shame in being a really successful, honorable small country and, rather than being dragged down by all of the bureaucracies and things of the EU and having to deal with all of what's going on in Brussels. They could go and forge their own path and do their own thing as an independent nation. But to do that would mean taking this almost sort of demotion, and I think that that was part of the big resistance people. Now there's some people who just have a huge amount of faith and trust in bureaucracy and they didn't want to be disconnected from the EU. But for a lot of people I think they realize like hey, we would be better off on our own, but it would be a demotion on the not necessarily quality of life, but it would be a pretty major demotion in prestige to go from being Britain, the largest empire that the world has seen, and then just the UK off there on the other side of the channel.
Isaac:And I think that Americans need to think through some of these issues as well. Like, are we going to demand that everybody put all their eggs into one giant basket that includes California? Or are people gonna be able to really focus on? Like, hey, I'm gonna build a business right here, I'm going to build relationships with my local politicians and I'm not I'm not ever going to get invited to a Donald Trump inauguration event Cause I, I never, I never did things at this level. Um, that is the sort of thing that I think a lot of us need to be thinking through at this point.
Mike:Yeah, you know, just listening to you, I was kind of processing that as well, and I would probably trade not getting a new iPhone every year for I don't know safe streets, for being able to go into my nearest city and not have to worry about getting mugged or defending myself and then going to prison myself, Cause that's what's happening in big cities today. You know, I'd probably trade granite not having granite countertops, and you know whatever the the McMansion for, for you know, not having to turn on the news and see half the stuff we see on the news every day. So I do think there's a, I do think there's a valid argument there.
Isaac:Yeah, It'll be interesting to see just kind of how things, how things continue continue on, because there there are always opportunities. You mentioned earlier, like the Bolshevik revolution, like um, as corrupt structures were being torn down by the Bolsheviks. Um, I'm not I'm not super familiar with every little bit of of that development process, the way that that movement started and continued, but I actually don't believe that there was a really good window where people could have said, like okay, bolsheviks, you have used terror and murder to get rid of some real, actual corruption in politics. But right at this exact moment is the golden window where we stop you and we go in a good direction. The timing for that is unbelievably perfect and precise and it requires a whole bunch of other stuff to be in place which obviously, in hindsight, we can see was not in place in Russia. But I do think that there's always the opportunity for repentance and reflection and changing direction for people that really do want to do it.
Isaac:And one of the things that I think is really fascinating is in 2020, there were a whole bunch of people who were just coasting and not thinking, who have stopped coasting and started thinking.
Isaac:Now I don't know which way they're going to go. They're either going to say, oh, it's unpleasant to think I want to go back to the previous, you know head in the sand kind of thing and there's a bunch of people who have said, oh, I've decided that I now will not believe anything that anyone ever tells me, ever again, and I'm totally blackpilled, which I think is an equally destructive position to come away with. But I do think that there was a pretty significant change. That happened in 2020, where there's a pretty clear crossroads, and I think the good news is it's not a global crossroads. I think that people have realized that, oh, there's many different ways that communities can take different directions. There's a bunch of different people who are at a crossroads. It isn't all of us waiting to see what Carl Schwab is going to do at the crossroads we all get. We're all at a crossroads as well.
Mike:Yeah, I can only hope you know. One big intelligence gap for me is which way these generation, you know, the Gen Z kids, are going to swing, and you know we've every, every, essentially every generation in this country just about is is more progressive than the last, which does not really bode well considering where we are here in 2024. In another 10 years, the Gen Xers are going to be at the helm of government and making decisions, and that is a very different mindset from the boomer and the silent generations. And so you know, we.
Mike:Neil Howe is a demographer, he's. He's got a really actually two great books. One was called the fourth turning and then his latest is called the fourth turning, is here and it's basically just a generational cycle theory. It's not just a generational cycle theory book, but one of the things he says is that generations are shaped by how they grow up and what they experienced during their adolescent years and that shapes their adult mindsets, and so I see this thing maybe swinging one of a few ways, but you know, really, ultimately here the biggest risk is that we go through a period of economic turbulence over the next several years or maybe decade, and I think it's just going to get worse from there. You just look at our the debt situation, and then the financial and the monetary situation as well, and I think people are going to be more, more susceptible to authoritarianism and, frankly, I think that's probably where we're headed.
Isaac:Yeah, it'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see because, yeah, there's there's technology stuff that's happening, there's geopolitical stuff that's happening, and then the cultural stuff. I do think that one of the most fascinating things to come out of 2020 was there was an explosion of homeschooling. Now, not everybody that started homeschooling in 2020 kept homeschooling, but another thing that came out of that was a massive level of distrust of the government schools that we didn't really have up until pretty recently. So there is this massive school choice movement that is happening across a bunch of states, mostly conservative states, and I don't know what's going to happen with that. Is that going to be the wedge that pushes people towards more freedom? Or are people going to say we put a band bandaid on it and it's good, let's just keep cruising with the Department of Education Another crossroads.
Mike:Here's where I see that happening. You basically are building a permit not you, but the education system is building a permit underclass. We've got homeschool kids they're in the seventh grade, they operate at a 12th grade level. And then you've got kids in public schools that are at 12th grade level and they operate at a seventh grade level, and so there's going to be a huge divergence over the course of their lifetimes and we are going to have a permanent underclass due to education. And the question is what is the underclass going to demand? I mean, they're demanding a lot of things already and I think that's just another. It's another fault line in our country. Yeah, and I try not to be a doomer yeah.
Mike:But let's be honest, it's really easy to look at these fault lines and say that's not looking good. Add 20 years to that and that's going to be my kids, you know. First line problem.
Isaac:So my solution to this is real simple. The problem is everybody has to. You know, everybody has to do it, otherwise it's less effective. But we need to get back to more of an apprenticeship model and the good news is there are fewer and fewer reasons to go to college, especially if there are homeschoolers out there that are outperforming you academically on tests and things like that. At some point, the universities are so expensive and so driven by DEI policies and so driven by various other policies that trade schools and learning on the job opportunities and various other things are going to be more attractive. And, yes, you will have a pretty significant like you will be starting behind if you start a apprenticeship program at age 19 that starts at like a 12th grade level. But that still is a path. That still is something that is helpful and beneficial. And California raising the minimum wage to 20 bucks an hour means that flipping burgers is no longer a good option.
Isaac:So as states start running out of money and welfare programs start to get mostly transferred toward illegal immigrants, I think that that group of public school kids are going to be looking for options and hopefully we will have built enough businesses and we will have set up enough.
Isaac:I don't know, there's so much that you can learn just on YouTube. I do think that there will be a big chunk of those folks who did not get educated in the public school systems, the government school systems, and they didn't find any of the next path out. They couldn't get a job flipping burgers because only robots can afford to do that now, and they couldn't get into the universities and they could see that nobody enjoys or has any benefits from going to university anyway and they're going to be looking for other stuff and maybe they find an interesting hobby on YouTube like 3D printing, and maybe they find this and maybe they find that and maybe they learn how to learn and they catch up to the homeschoolers. You know late, a few years late, but they actually have some of those opportunities. If we can build those kinds of opportunities for them, my hope is that we will be able to help. We will be able to help a lot of those folks out.
Mike:I think there'll be some exceptions. Naturally, the problem is you can't just be bright anymore. You've got to be bright and have a strong work ethic. And so the kids who are not exceptionally bright but have a strong work ethic, yeah, maybe they'll be able to, you know pick up some skill. Ultimately, I think we're headed towards socialism. I mean, you know, what do you do with these people who can't find a job? What are they?
Mike:going to do. They don't have the work ethic to go out and make something of themselves in not maybe a great career path If we have robots and machines doing a bunch of stuff for us here in the next 5, 10, 20 years. So what do you do with all these kids? What do you do with all the young men who have no life? They look at they're growing up now. They say, oh, my grandparents are retired. They look at the wealthy people and maybe they're poor or maybe they're lower middle class or middle class and they say, oh wow, these previous generations. They had it so great and I have no economic future. I got absolutely zero economic future. What do you do with all these very angry, resentful young men? It just seems to me like there are forces or movements in this country that are going to agitate and point those kids in a direction, and that's another reason why I'm really pessimistic Over the next 20 years in this country it's going to happen.
Isaac:I think it's going to be rough for a lot of people and a lot of places. Do you remember I forget if it was Shackleton one of the polar expeditions? The advertisement that was placed in the paper, looking for volunteers, was just the most miserable, depressing, unlikely to survive, conditions, terrible. And the young men wanted the challenge. Admittedly it was a very different generation, but the people who lined up to volunteer for that very, very likely suicide mission was really interesting. So I wonder if, as things continue to deteriorate, but there are pockets, there are pockets of communities where you can do hard work and you can achieve things and you can accomplish things I wonder if there is going to be a bit of a renaissance among some of these angry young men who say I actually don't want the socialism, I've been playing these video games or I've been watching these movies, or I've been seeing these lectures and I actually would like to drive a tractor and I would actually like to build something.
Isaac:I don't know what the percentages are going to be and I don't know how many, how many folks are going to come out of that, but I was shocked by the number of people who went and watched hundreds of hours of Jordan Peterson talking basically into a security camera in his, in his uh, canadian school room and how many people watched him talk into a webcam and how many people watched him talk on stage. There is a hunger that is there, and again, it's not a massive majority, but it is a really fascinating trend where people, when confronted with a crossroads, sometimes surprise you. So I don't know that I'm super optimistic and there's a lot of places in the country where I am not optimistic really at all but I do think that there will be people, when faced with that crossroads and looking at some of the alternatives, will say, actually I would get a huge amount of fulfillment out of doing harder things as opposed to easier things. But we'll see.
Mike:We will see, you have way more faith in humanity than I do.
Isaac:Well, it's not so much humanity, because as a Christian I believe that humans are desperately, desperately evil and lazy and fallen. But I have a lot of faith in the grace of God and I still think that there's enough momentum in this country. The other thing, speaking historically every time you see a nation or an empire fall, there's a pretty obvious other one waiting in the wings, and I don't actually now maybe that's only hindsight and I don't actually now maybe that's only hindsight, but I don't see another really obvious place waiting in the wings to be just an incredible economic and liberty powerhouse, and so that makes me really curious to see whether or not we're able to recover some stuff here.
Isaac:If there were another new world out there. I would be like, oh yeah, that's obviously where folks are going to go, that's obviously the place where we should probably be looking. But I don't see that now the way that we saw that in the 1600s. I don't see that now the way that a lot of Christian missionaries saw that at the fall of the Roman Empire. They were like it's Northern Europe, the legion couldn't get there, but these are the people that we're going to go and reach. That's the place where we're going to go. So yeah, it's interesting times for sure.
Mike:I think we're at the tail end of a metapolitical shift. There's a really great book called the Sovereign Individual and basically in the first part of that book they explain these 500 years spans in the Western world and this was written back in the 1990s. They're talking about cyber money and they're talking about the future of the nation state. Eventually, the nation state model is not going to exist.
Isaac:The nation state models I mean only around since the 1700s or so, and so yeah, it's extremely young, recent experimental idea which, if you look at it, doesn't seem like so hot.
Mike:Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing Before the nation state people, you and I, this conversation right here. You know people were probably having that conversation about you know about feudalism or you know whatever. And so, just like the age of feudalism is going to disappear, the age of the nation state is going to disappear. And that book the two authors share their idea for what's next. I think those places exist. I think those places exist on earth.
Mike:I'm not quite ready to escape to Mars just yet. I think those places that are probably in Latin America and maybe some places in Europe, I do think they exist and you got to go high tech. That's the only way out of this morass right now is you got to go high tech. We're in this transition from the industrial era to the digital era and we're, you know, the the digital era actually has already started. It started from from in 2020. But my point is, at some point in the digital era, the nation state is going to be like the feudalist system in the industrial area era and at some point, you know, we really have to start thinking about what we can do today to make sure, like what I can do today to make sure that my kids and grandkids are set up for success for the digital era, because that's where all the new money is going to be made, that's where everything's gravitating towards anyway. And so you know, just think about where's the place on earth today?
Mike:Yeah, Where's the place on earth today where my kids and grandkids will have the best chance of success at living the life that I had in this country?
Isaac:Yeah, and trying to give them the right skill sets. I kind of wrestle with this, like I'm teaching my kids very new high-tech things. They are flying FPV drone simulators, we are doing 3D modeling stuff together and they are 3D printing their own toys at their uncle's house. I'm trying to give them a window into some of these new technologies so they have an understanding of them, but at the same time I don't want them to have devices or access to the internet that shapes and controls them in ways that I don't want. So there is this very weird threading the needle thing that has to happen when you're trying to do that, when you're trying to prepare your kids for a super high-tech digital world that is coming, without plugging them directly into everything that exists now.
Isaac:The internet was so much safer when we were kids, just dialing up to bulletin board services and reading text files on how to do computer networking and how to figure stuff out. There's a little bit of that spirit that exists, ironically enough, on YouTube, I would say kind of, despite Google's best efforts. But for the most part, the Internet is very much a centralized, top-down control mechanism on all of these big platforms and a data collection method. So, yeah, it's an interesting puzzle to figure out for those of us with kids. It's an interesting puzzle to figure out for those of us with kids.
Mike:Yeah, you know I will tell you, I grew up little L libertarian and you know I really want maximum freedom and I've some in the past just five years or so. I've really started. This is going to sound awful. I've really started to question is maximum freedom actually worth it? Do we actually need maximum freedom? Because that means, yeah, you know, freedom for other people to shape our culture and shape the commons in ways that is really detrimental to everyone.
Isaac:Oh, now we're going to get into a theological conversation which we should probably save for another episode. It gets, that is a fun, but long, deep conversation. But, but long deep conversation. I kind of want to open that can of worms. But, uh, we're already. We're already 47 minutes in. Uh, is there an obvious place that you want to end this conversation? Or is there an obvious thing that we want to say that we're going to talk about next? Uh, in the next episode?
Isaac:Anything that you want to, anything you specifically want to cover that you want people to take away from and do as a result of the ground we've covered.
Mike:Yeah, well, thanks for having me on the podcast. My really closing argument is whether we're talking about a tornado or some big catastrophic long-term environment, everything starts with an area study. You've got to do your area study and I wrote a book on it. It's called the Area Intelligence Handbook and it is available at grayzonestorecom. That's gray, oh you know what. Actually, we'll just, I just, I wrote the book and there's some places you can get it online. How about that?
Isaac:Okay, how about that? I'll put links in the description below because it is a great book, it is really important, and there's a bunch of different ways that you can do your area study. One and there's a bunch of different ways you can do your area study. One way that we did some of them here was join the local fire department and discover some of the stuff through trial and error. Wait for our local electrical substation to be underwater before we figured out where it was, stuff like that.
Isaac:But reading the book and doing it deliberately ahead of time highly, highly recommended. So, uh, I do, I do recommend the book and I would the book and I would love to have you back on the show, mike. And we will do two different things probably on two different shows. One would be I would love to have that theological, philosophical, deep conversation about ideal futures. Not that you're a very smart guy, but I don't think that we're going to solve this on a podcast ourselves. But I would love to have that conversation. And the second one I would love to do a deep dive into the nitty gritty of practical area study stuff and network building, so kind of two speaking of crossroads, kind of two opposite directions that we could go. I would like to record both of those podcasts with you in the future, if you're open to it. I think that that would be two super fun directions that we could go in. We should probably just do both.
Mike:Sure? Well, let me just preface this by saying I'm not a theologian, and you probably do not want me talking about theology, talking about theology. I'm also not a philosopher, but I really like talking about the future and I'm happy to talk about what my perspective is on the future and, I think, where we need to be headed. And then, yeah, intelligence building your intelligence network. After you do your area study, that's like the second big thing you've got to do is start building your local network. So I'm happy to have that conversation for sure.
Isaac:Yeah, I think that would be super fun. So thank you so much, mike, for being on the show. Those of you listening check out some of the different resources, which I will put in the show notes. The reports that you guys are writing are fascinating, and I think that the book is really helpful in letting people start stuff at home, and I think not only is that a great place to start in order to learn stuff, but I think that that is the place where we should be doing our work. Focus on the people that are around you. There are the people that are going to be needing the most help from you and the people who are going to be the most help to you. So start building those relationships, those networks, that community.