Author Interview Joshua Gayou – The Next Generation Show
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The broadcasting network, we have to hit the reset button, create a true culture of preparedness, starting at a very young age and still train all the way up.
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What did it do, everyone? My name is Colin and I am the cohost here at the next generation show. I’m where today I will actually be hosting the show. And this is due to a couple of different reasons. One being that it was one of the resolutions that dad had sent for me at the beginning of the year. If you know what I’m talking about, we did a show. It was either at the end of 2019 or the beginning of this year, a new year show where we basically set goals and resolutions for each other.
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And one of them was that dad was one of the ones that dad set for me was to host a couple of shows. And here I am. So if you want, it was an interesting episode. We kinda talked about like, I don’t know, like the smart goal way of looking at resolutions for each other and how they accomp, how would one another accomplish the goals and whether or not they, you know, were able to be accomplished.
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So if you’re interested in checking out that episode, you can go to prepper, broadcasting.com and you will find it’s like a prepping news page. It’s a lot of good stuff there. And then you scroll down a little bit and you can find our show page as long as well as all the other weekly show hosts and their show page links. So you scroll down, find our show, page, link, and click on it. You can see kind of like what we’re about here, the next generation, and then as well as all of our episodes.
1 (2m 44s):
So few want to check out that episode? You go ahead. Where was I going with that? Oh yeah. And then the second reason I’m on and hosting the show today is because I brought today’s special guests to dad’s attention. So, you know, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m the whole reason this show is here today. That is not at all true because I wouldn’t have even reached out to our special guests. If dad hadn’t advised that I do.
1 (3m 17s):
So at first I didn’t really think much of it, but then I sort of, you know, I, I got to thinking a little bit and I ended up reaching out to our special guests publisher. Yes, he’s an author. And I’m literally just a couple of days later. Here we are. And we’ve been fortunate enough to get him on today. So looking forward to that now dad’s shows are typically formulated a certain way.
1 (3m 47s):
And I know for you regular listeners, this is definitely a little bit of a surprise switch up a little bit, but this show isn’t going to be formulated basically at all. And that stems from a couple different things. One being, I didn’t feel like writing like a story or anything that normally opens up with his announcements and then the story, 15 minute story and how, or at least the prepping, and more importantly, how it relates to the show topic.
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But yeah, I’m just not gonna do it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna switch it up because I kinda like the idea of like a raw organic sort of podcast. So with that being said, I think I still, I still want dad to be able to read his announcements because those do deserve recognition. Our sponsors deserve recognition are, I don’t know, Patriots.
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I know we don’t do Patrion anymore, but our Patriots and listeners all deserve the recognition. So I’m going to, I guess we’ll just, I’ll let it go over to dad and then, Oh, you know what, no, I need to, I need to share my penguin fact of the week. So after this, I’ll let dad take it away with his announcements. And then we can get into a hopefully dive into some good conversation with our guests.
1 (5m 20s):
So today’s grab to go. And fun fact of the week is penguins were once able to fly as a member of the bird kingdom who are, who are unable to fly. Now, penguins I’ve always seemed a little unusual. However, researchers at proceedings of the national Academy of science, of the United States of America, the PNL, the P and S have found that a certain point in their revolutionary journey at penguins could once fly as pain was bodies became more adapted to water.
1 (5m 50s):
Getting off the ground eventually just took too much effort for the birds that were becoming experts, that they were becoming expert swimmers.
2 (5m 58s):
So they effectively traded one prior ability of flight for another more useful one for swimming. And, you know, as we know them today, so that kind of lends itself to survival alone because not a whole lot of things flying around for them to eat up. Right. So, I mean, we’ll go ahead with a couple of quick announcements first off, for those of you listening to the podcast, we, you thank you for that support.
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If you’d like to join us during the live show, be sure to check us out over@prepperbroadcasting.com, go to live chat button, join the live chat plink anyways, and sign in any username you want and you’ll get plugged in. Our guest is in there tonight. So be sure to say hi and welcome. I’m in there with several other like-minded listeners as well. It’s always a good time. So join us for the conversation in the background. Special, thanks to the folks out in Washington, Virginia, as the top listeners in one location this week.
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And this is actually the second week in a row with a stunning 12.8% of listenership, which is pretty impressive. So thanks to you out there in Washington, Virginia, whoever you are in your basement, downloading and listening to every possible episode we’ve ever had. Also thanks to the listeners across, upon and around the world. Pretty much everybody out there for supporting us. And like calling mentioned, if you’d like you can reach out, show your support by joining our private member portal on the PBN site.
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And you get a little bit of added content in that regard and your support allows more freedom and more opportunity for us to do what we do and for you to get more content. So check it out. You can always reach out to me directly on prepper broadcasting.com by going to the next generation show page. And there you’re going to find all my social media links and you can always email me directly for show ideas. If you need links or information, just reach out@prepperdadatmail.com, quick tactical torture.com updates stay tuned for some of the upcoming videos.
2 (8m 4s):
We actually postponed our final edit for the tuck tech kayaks. We were going to do it this weekend, but we decided, yeah, we, again, we postponed it again, but with good reason, because we took them out camping. So we did some kayak, camping to determine feasibility of that. And some of the things we’ll be doing another episode down the road, specifically tailored to that event as one of our dry runs, but the video that’s going up on tactical torture, hopefully we’ll get that edited this week.
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Fingers crossed so postpartum, but it is forthcoming as far as the story today to introduce our guest. When I was trying to explain to Colin briefly last night, the importance of storytelling, I, I couldn’t help, but reflect on the opening scene for the 300, just one of my favorite movies. And I was explaining to Colin how there is one guy and he was just sitting there in front of a fire, telling a story to these other men, the other men, he was trying to, you know, encourage in the face of battle.
2 (9m 13s):
He was trying to rally him up, was trying to rally his own troops and then a movie cuts away and tells the story. And then at the end of the movie, it goes right back to that original storyteller. And you realize that through the course of that story, the person whose or rating was the sole survivor. And if he wasn’t there to tell their story, their ability to have that sort of power and drive in the face of an opponent or, or an enemy that was otherwise seemingly impossible to defeat was able to turn the tide.
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And that idea of storytelling when captured effectively and relay from one generation to the next is something that it helps to preserve. And when it comes to survival and the preparedness preservation is a big part of that, preserving history, preserving, you know, family history, storytelling between generations. I mean, even with, with some of the chaos that we’re seeing all over the country, now we’re seeing monuments dedicated to history that have been destroyed as a result of, you know, political upheaval or, you know, writers or whatever you want to call it.
2 (10m 43s):
The factor means that history in question has been defaced in several ways, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist toppling of statute doesn’t eliminate the history. It doesn’t change that the fact that we are here today allows us to carry on a story. Some of you might be wondering what any of this has to do with prepping well, as preppers, many of us do delve into prepper fiction as a favorite pastime, but even fiction requires a thorough understanding, heavy research and a way with words that you can weave a story without, you know, without any sort of major hiccups it’s actually worth reading and understanding and maybe learning from, and it’s in that story that we find the ability to ask a deeper question of ourselves and of our situations, you know, where are we in this world of chaos and confusion?
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You know, whatever it might be, how did other people survive or hypothetically, how would people survive this month? We’re going to be focusing on solar aspects of solar.
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And we thought one of the best ways to do that would be by kicking it off with an author. Who’s created a complex book series based on a solar EMP and kind of the humanitarian fallout that he imagined on paper and this particular story, captivated Collin’s attention in particular. And I do want to qualify this, especially today’s show by saying upfront that I, the story is actually a series. It’s a four book series, correct? Yes. And the series itself, I haven’t read, but Colin has read the entire thing.
3 (12m 30s):
So in a lot of ways, I want him to enjoy today’s show with our special guest. Our special guest today is Joshua Guy. You, and without further ado, let’s go ahead and bring him on. So Colin, why don’t you go back and make an introduction? We’ll like, that just said without further ado, I’d like to introduce our very special guest and Joshua Guy. You what’s up, man. Hey, thanks for having me on guys. Thanks very much. You know, I, I just realized in the outsiders, Ponyboy opens up a story.
3 (13m 7s):
He starts writing a story in the beginning of the book or in the movie and in the end it’s it goes back to him writing. It’s the exact same thing. But anyway, no, no, I just had to mention that because I just realized it, but to now standing book, that is, I really enjoyed that one. Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, we’ll get into some further questions, but how about you, maybe tell the folks a little bit about yourself, like how, how you found yourself starting out as an author.
3 (13m 44s):
Okay. Well, if it’s all right, I’d like to start that with a story of my own and it’s, it’s, it’s really just the story of you guys reaching out to invite me on here. There’s, there’s a point that I’ll get to, I promise, but I got a email from my publisher that it was just, you know, kind of a one letter says, would you be interested in this? And I read miss of, I think, I think Ryan wrote, it was very kind, very nicely worded.
3 (14m 16s):
And I, I turned down the offer at first. And the reason was because in, in, in the writing, one of the things that was said was we, we think it would be interesting to talk with this person about his career as a prepper. And I thought, well, like I can’t, I’m not really a prepper. And I, I can’t really speak to any authority on that subject. The, there there’s a big difference between preppers and, and a person like me who writes the books that I do.
3 (14m 51s):
And this is that, you know, one group of individuals is actually very good at preparedness and self reliance and, and are very educated self-educated individuals. And then there’s a person like me. Who’s really good at Google. And, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s how you get a book together in today’s age, you know, back in the early days, like when, when Michael Crighton was doing all of his research in libraries, like that was impressive.
3 (15m 23s):
You go to a library, you have to dig out all those books. You have to pour through these, these dust line tombs and get all your facts straight. It’s not even that anymore. You just open up a web browser and say, well, huh, how would I solve this problem? Well, what do I do here? So I didn’t want to present myself as an authority on that subject matter because I didn’t, I didn’t want to come off a fraud. I didn’t, I didn’t want to minimize the kind of interest and dedication.
3 (15m 53s):
It takes for a person who is serious about the lifestyle. You know, I just didn’t want to be a ridiculous, but, but then, you know, I could not stop thinking about that, that invitation mostly because I saw that this was a father and son program, and I respect that quite a bit. I love the, the premise behind all of this. And then as, as you said in your intro, storytelling is a big piece of this and that’s, that’s what I’m in all of this for that’s, that’s what I do.
3 (16m 33s):
I tell stories. I think that there’s a facility for story that allows us to carry knowledge forward from generation to generation. I think it goes deeper than that. I think everything about what makes us, who we are as humans has to do with this practice of storytelling. It’s how we make sense of a nonsensical world. It’s how we explain things to ourselves that we don’t understand starting all the way back from when we were all living in the Bush together.
3 (17m 8s):
And you look at the big, glowing thing in the sky, and you don’t understand what it is. You understand that it brings warmth. You understand that it gives you a light and it’s probably what allows the food to grow beyond that. You don’t know what it is. And so you tell yourself stories to help understand that. And over time, those stories change as is your understanding of the world changes. But the drive to understand, I don’t, I think it’s, it’s perpetuated by that spark to, to explain.
3 (17m 41s):
And that’s really all we’re doing when we’re, when we’re, when we’re, when we’re engaging in this activity, we’re trying to explain, and some of us do it better than others. I, myself am a hack who got lucky, but, and then also you w you asked how I got into this. That’s really, that’s a simple answer. I, I had a story that I was interested in writing. And one day I said, I guess I’ll write a book. So I wrote a book and then, and then there was, there was enough story there that it, that it turned out being multiple books.
3 (18m 18s):
And now today, I’m, I’m like I said, earlier, you guys, before the show started, I’m wrapping up. I think my eighth book right now. That’s awesome. And I got a few more plans
1 (18m 30s):
Just to be clear before we get too much farther, we’re talking about which series the commune series, right? Yeah. So you want to describe that at all? Or? Yeah. I mean, well, unless you want to Josh maybe. Right, right, right, right, right.
3 (18m 46s):
I, you know what I can, I will, I will describe what the series means to me after I hear what it meant to you. How about that? Great answer. Let’s do that. Okay.
1 (19m 2s):
I don’t know, man. I don’t know because I, I, I was referred to this series by my mom because she’s a little bit of a book guru herself. And I remember she had read all the books, then she listened to all of the books. Then she went on Amazon and purchased all the hardbacks just to have them. It was that it was after she had her. Yeah. It was after she had purchased all the books that, and it sort of also how in the same time, all of this stuff started to go down.
1 (19m 40s):
I was like, you know what, maybe, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to sort of, you know, like make reading part of my regular routine because stuff was changing so much at the time. Right. As far as schooling goes. Cause it was, it must’ve been within the first week that I I’d find him. I I’d found myself just looking for things to do because school was either, you know, discontinued or they were in the works of trying to figure out how to bring it back.
1 (20m 13s):
And basically, I, I asked her, I was like, what, what, what should I read? Like, cause I, I, you know, I was interested in reading a book and then she told me that, you know, she went on and on about this, this book series commune. And, but you know, it didn’t take a whole lot because I was pretty much just itching to, to read anything. And then no offense, no.
3 (20m 43s):
Yeah. I mean, you set the bar so high. That’s how we operate and that’s, that’s the only way I’m going to pass the bar anyway, it’s fine.
1 (20m 55s):
So, I mean, I, I ended up reading the book and it must’ve been a couple of weeks later, I had finished the first one and it’s one of those things where, you know, it gets progressively longer each book, but it, it really draws you in. And I guess as a summary to the series, it’s about these group of folk and post-apocalyptic sort of world where they have to overcome marauders and, and all of these other things because of like dad said, there was a solar flare and then it was followed by other things.
1 (21m 38s):
And what really were really S like grabbed my attention when I was reading, going into and reading the first book was how much it related to the things that we talked about on this show, because it, from everything from like bug out bags, to the difference between diesel and gas, it’s all stuff that we’ve talked about on the show.
1 (22m 11s):
And I just thought it was really interesting how we just happened to have this podcast that we do. And in, in real world, I’m able, I was able to relate to all the stuff that was being talked about when it came to the survivors of this book. And I just, before, you know, I just, I ended up getting so into it that I read the first one, then the second one. And then by the time I was on the fourth one, I didn’t, I barely realized it because I started reading the next one right after I, I finished the previous one.
1 (22m 47s):
So I guess it was more or less, just a strange coincidence that everything in this book that was handed to me, I knew I had some knowledge about, and I w I was just, it was cool. So, yeah,
3 (23m 5s):
That’s, that’s great. I, I got into this whole business through a strange coincidence, so I like how it works out. There’s a cemetery there. Okay. So now, now I’ll speak to that. When I, when I started writing the books, I didn’t, I didn’t really know at the time that prepper fiction was, was the thing that was out there really. I didn’t, I didn’t know. I didn’t realize the, the, I guess the prepper genre, like, like, like what I would consider hard prepper fiction.
3 (23m 39s):
Isn’t, it’s not, it’s not the kind of thing that I read. I read a lot of when, when I’m doing my own personal reading, I read a lot of older stuff. A lot of the, a lot of the stodgier dusty authors, right? The, the old boring crap. And, you know, you know, some, some current Saifai though. I think a lot of it is just not as, as good as I want it to be, not, not compared to a lot of the older stuff, but I, I think I’ve kind of fell into that John, or at least in the first book, especially a little bit in the second one too, I think was B it was because of the story that I wanted to tell.
3 (24m 26s):
And, and, you know, you were discussing the, the logistics of, of surviving in a world where, you know, nothing is mass produced anymore, and nobody’s providing services. You don’t have electricity, running water. A lot of that was kind of a response to other media that I’d seen that, that fell into that category. In my, in my dissatisfaction with that, I, I point to shows such as like the walking dead and anything else that kind of falls into that group.
3 (25m 1s):
Right? It’s like the, the, the, the world is supposed to be over, or people are supposed to be surviving in a fallen society, except all the lights still work, you know, there’s electricity and all that. Yeah. The, you know, you’re, you are, you walk into buildings and if you, if you turn a tap, the water still runs or, or there’s all these things that just paradoxically work or, or there’s scenarios in which things just don’t make sense.
3 (25m 35s):
And I’m going to, I’m going to beat up on the walking dead a little bit here. I didn’t, I didn’t really write my series as a response to that series, but to say that, that it was not influenced by, it would just be silly because it was, I, I kind of looked at that as a model of what things don’t I want to do, because I’m just tired of seeing them everywhere. And it’s, you know, it’s walking dead. Wasn’t the only series that was guilty of perpetrating these things. But it was the one that I had happened to see most recently.
3 (26m 8s):
And so that’s what got my attention, but, you know, you see cars that are still running on gasoline years after everything is falling apart. And, you know, you ask yourself, well, hang on. How, how good is gas? How long will it last? And, you know, it turns out if you don’t treat it, it’s good for, you know, maybe six months then after that, you’re going to start pinging. Oh, okay. That’s interesting. Well, everybody’s got cars still, so that’s fun. And then it, then it kind of progressed beyond that for me, especially, is it, get, it gets later into the series and you start getting these, these despotic warlords that are popping up all over the landscape.
3 (26m 52s):
And again, you, you, you see these guys pop up in, in film after film or book after book and say, it’s always the crazy domineering totalitarian, you know, loves to torture his own people. His is erratic and ridiculous, and you, you see all these people running around and following him. And it just doesn’t seem very likely to me that that’s the case, not without some very specific power structures put in place, which they always miss.
3 (27m 27s):
They, they, they don’t, they, they, they, they, they failed to cover that everybody’s equally dominated in these, in these shows. And it’s like, no, you need an old boys club at the top. You need somebody who wants to perpetuate a status quo for something like that to work. If you’re just evil to everyone, you don’t last long, somebody puts a bullet in your head very quickly because they just didn’t want to deal with you. So there were those things that, that I was interested in covering more realistically, because I wanted to write a story about the process of humanity period.
3 (28m 7s):
And I wanted to deal with that in its rawest form. So that, that kind of led me to the setting that I created in these books. I wanted to deal with people, dealing with other people, with all of the fetters taken off all of the rules of society removed. So, you know, essentially lawlessness or at least unenforced law or tribal law. And, and so that, that kind of led me to this idea that, okay, well, so what I need is I need a world with a hard reset.
3 (28m 45s):
I need all the governments and power structures removed. I need to have the population reduced by a certain amount, because I need things to be spread out a little. And then from that point, it kind of presented the problem will, okay. How would you, how really would you survive in a situation like that? And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want a phone in it. I didn’t want it to just be a story about, Oh, well, they just happened to find food where they needed it, or there was, there was some resource that was required and they just happened to find it in a Starbucks somewhere.
3 (29m 17s):
Yeah. So now I start now I gotta start doing research, you know, and, and, and figuring out, okay, well, how, how really would you, would you deal with this? And a lot of the, the, the points that I touched on in mostly the first book, but then a little bit in the second book as well,
4 (29m 37s):
Was
3 (29m 39s):
It, it, that, that was kind of my process of, of solving that problem and, and also trying to educate the reader as well. Cause I, as writing, I, I tried to take the assumption that, well, people who are coming into reading this book, I’m going to assume they’re, they’re perhaps as ignorant as I was coming into this. So I need to kind of bring people up to speed.
3 (30m 11s):
And I think that’s where those books start to fall into that, that prepper sub genre. Right? Because you see that in, in, I understand now you see that in, in these story types over and over again, it can turn into, you know, problem solution, problem, solution, problem, solution, and then like, that’s the whole story. And if the writer’s not careful, it could just turn into a rundown of here’s the gear and here’s how you use the gear.
3 (30m 43s):
And I didn’t want it to be that I really wanted the, the, the main story that I wanted to explore was really, I wanted two groups of people that neither side were bad guys. Cause like your, your obvious, yeah. Mustache, mustache, twirling, bad guy is boring to me. There’s nothing I’m less interested in than that. I wanted two groups of people that were just people. And I wanted the reader to feel that depending on what, where their point of view, wasn’t the story, whether it was one group of the other group, they could operate under the assumption that they’re this, this is the hero group, you know, and really the problem is that both groups are organized under incompatible principles.
3 (31m 35s):
You have one group who’s decided, okay, well, everything’s falling apart. And they, they take, they take on this prepper mindset where it’s like, okay, we gotta, we gotta hunker down. We have to get sustainable. We have to get crops going on on this piece of land that we’ve plotted out. And we’re going to, we’re going to see what we can do to perpetuate our own survival, realistically, over long period of time, then you have another group that, that never made that leap.
3 (32m 9s):
And they’re, they’re more kind of locusts. They’re just roving across the landscape, living off the bones of, of whatever’s left, whatever they can find. And that, that does, it turns out to be an unsustainable model cause nobody’s producing that crap anymore. And then you, you hit the point where these two groups collide and there to my mind, neither group was really good or bad.
3 (32m 39s):
They just were. And they clash. And, you know, because it’s, it’s a, it’s a fiction series. There’s, there’s gotta be action. There’s gotta be conflict. So it, it can’t go too nicely. But I wanted that process to be something that was, that was more rooted in, in reality, you know, people going to hell on a motorcycle and made out of their best intentions, you know, not, not the guy who, Ooh, they have things that I’m one I’m going to go get them.
3 (33m 20s):
I, you know, I needed to have people that were, that were motivated to perhaps do terrible things or, or, or things that were against their nature, but for, for understandable reason.
1 (33m 34s):
Yeah. And I mean, the realism was definitely something that had me drawn into the book more so, because obviously there’s the stuff that I have already experienced in real world. But you know, like I mentioned, the stuff that we talked about on the podcast, but then there was the stuff beyond that and it made me realize like, Oh, wow, what? That, that does, like, that makes sense that this doesn’t work or that doesn’t work.
1 (34m 6s):
Or they’re not, they’re not just like being handed everything that they need to survive. And, and especially, I like what you said about like the fact that these two groups aren’t bad people, but they are, they have, they have two different ways of looking at how they’re going to proceed and
3 (34m 34s):
Yeah, you definitely start to, and then, then there are, there are bad people inside the group that, that, that can poison the group in and run it a foul
1 (34m 42s):
Surely. Yeah. And you really, I mean, you really start to realize, and you kind of start to think that, you know, like, like you said, those people that poisoned the group, they’re like, okay, well this is a group of bad people. And then you’re like, well, no, these, these people are, aren’t bad people. There, there are individuals who are bad people, but these groups are just trying to get along. And it’s just, it’s not really so much that every man for himself, like you see in a lot of shows and, and other books, and you can tell, I mean, there are definitely bad people out there, but in this series of books, you can, you can tell the difference and, and see that I don’t know, not everyone is out to get other.
1 (35m 38s):
And I mean, yeah, it was definitely something that I started to think about and kind of go back and forth on, and then eventually come to a conclusion on throughout, you know, toward the end of the series. And, you know, you, we started talking about the research and sort of, as we, we dived into the, or dove into the, the depths of, of, of research, you know, I remember in it, must’ve been after the second book and the authors know of the third book you essentially said from the third book to the end of the fourth book was the story that you originally had in mind, but you needed some way for the readers sake to, you know, you needed to provide them like with the background knowledge.
1 (36m 28s):
And that’s sort of what the first two books were. And it was sort of like this exposition for the second two books so that they, they had an idea of where they were presently. And my question to that was what was the process like writing the series? Because I remember in the first book, there were references to the third and fourth book. And, you know, obviously from the second to the first, but also from the second to the third and fourth.
1 (37m 3s):
So was it something that you wrote and then went back and wrote the exposition and the other character building, or was it like a character building experience and you went from start to finish and then went back, you know, is it, was it like a jumping around sort of writing process or, or what did that look like?
3 (37m 27s):
So I have to, I have to go back and remember what I did now, the, the, the, the, the process that I follow for each book that I write changes every time I’m, I’m always, I’m always fiddling with it, tweaking things around experimenting B B, because if I don’t th the, the actual processes of writing becomes boring and quite drear. So I I’m, I’m looking for ways to challenge myself with each book that I do make a little harder or, or, or trickier at least to pull off, because I, I think, I think this happens with a lot of writers.
3 (38m 14s):
You, you could, you can find that that secret sauce or that formula that seems to work, that seems to make the majority of, of your readership happy, but then you just keep doing that over and over again. And, you know, maybe you can do that a certain number of times, but after a while, I think really what you’ll is that you’re just telling the same story over and over again. And I, I can’t do that. It’s, it’s, I, I can’t do the same thing repetitively or, or I get, I get bored and I just don’t stick with it anymore.
3 (38m 52s):
So it’s gotta be something new every time. I, what I can tell you for the commune series was that the, the, the core fundamentals of how I do this that’s, that’s where that was formed commune. The first commune book was the first book I ever wrote. It was, it was the first anything of, of notable length that I sat down, started wrote all the way through and finished. I I’d done like other, excuse me, creative writing projects and stuff before that, but it was always like short form stuff or experimental with really no clue what I was doing or how to finish it.
3 (39m 36s):
When I, when I wrote the commune one, my first book, I was I’m 37, 38 years old. And it was, it was like around that point in my life where I’d figured out how to break down large projects like that and, and, and plan them out and, and execute, you know, you learn how to stick with things. When you get a little time under your belt, you get a little seasoning, right?
3 (40m 8s):
So the first book was really just an experiment to prove to myself that I can finish a book. So the story is very simple. It has a very simple cast of characters. It doesn’t really have any stand out antagonist. It was, it was more just like th the world was the antagonist. And it was just the story of this small group of people, trying to understand how to survive in it.
3 (40m 39s):
And then a part of that landscape were the people that they came across. And, you know, sometimes they, they ran into people that were good people, and sometimes they ran into people that were not so good or, or were a bit unhinged. The, but the, the, the mechanics of writing that book was very simple. I took a group of people and I also, I, you know, I opened up Google maps. All right. And I, I figured out, okay, here’s this person here, that person.
3 (41m 10s):
And I got a sense of what I wanted their backgrounds to be, where they grown up, who they were. So then I put a little button on the map of where they’re at, and then the first part of that story has to be okay, how do they all run into each other? How do they come across each other? And then, you know, what’s the goal, what’s the end point. And it, it turns out to be this, this safe zone, right. In Wyoming, it’s, it’s Kings X, it’s, this, it’s this cabin. That’s gonna solve all our problems once we get there. So this is the thing that we’re going to drive to through the entire story.
3 (41m 42s):
And that was really it. And then, you know, I just kind of like drew a line on the map and figured out, okay, well, this, this is how much distance they could travel in a day. It was very, it was very procedural. Here’s the difference they could realistically travel in a day on foot. Here are the places that they would find along the way. These are the things that they would be interesting in looking for. And I kind of mapped that out. And then I said, okay, so all of this is now is just, you know, like video game speak. This is now just a long drawn out loot quest. The book can’t be that interesting things have to happen so that I’m, I’m taking other people, sticking them into the story.
3 (42m 19s):
And now we’ve got, we’ve got to collide with them and interact with them and see what happens. Right. So I did, I did that first and re and, and every day writing was really just get me to the next point on the map and describe what happens in the process of getting there. And it was simple every day. I, I, I wasn’t really questioning, what am I saying? What do I need to solve today? What am I going to, what am I going to write? I just don’t get them to the next point in the map. So that was the first pass of that book that I finished.
3 (42m 52s):
It kind of read through it and said, okay, this, this is okay, this is a finished thing. And then I shared it with a few friends, they read it, some of them and said, Oh, this is okay. But then some of them pointed out at a few issues with characterization. And, you know, I said, well, you know, the, the women don’t quite feel like women and all of the men sound the same when they talk. And they all have the same inner monologue. And, you know, there’s, there’s, they were talking about characterization issues, which was stuff that I was so rusty, because I hadn’t really tried to write anything creatively and forever.
3 (43m 28s):
And I’d never written on, was, went back and re read it. Oh yeah, that’s right. This is garbage. So then I went, so then I went and rewrote the whole first book, and, you know, it’s, it’s 2020 now if I went, if I went back and tried to read the first book now, the, in its published form, I’d probably say it was garbage again. No offense. If, if, if you happen to love the thing in the, Oh man, it’s such a great event. Yeah. Okay. Well, I’m, I’m, I’m a different person now from who I was when I wrote it.
3 (44m 1s):
So it’s, it’s hard for me to go back and look at stuff that I’ve, that I’ve already done. So I went back and, and went through a process of adding character, to, to the characters and worked on giving them their own personalities and in differentiating who they were. And it was through that exercise that the entire story kind of unfolded in front of me.
3 (44m 35s):
So up until that point, I just had a single book that go, okay, we get to Wyoming. And then something probably happens after that. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. It’s like another episode later, and I don’t care. And this was really where I learned that I don’t work that way. I can’t work that way. If I’m going to write a story, whether it’s going to be a single book or a series of books, I have to know the ending. I got, I got to know where I got to know where it’s going, because I have that.
3 (45m 5s):
I have to be building toward that intelligently. I need to worry about pacing. I need to make sure that all of the characters that are going to be presented are, are on track to hit that, that final climax toward the end. And I, I must not have the situation in which the reader feels as though I’ve wasted their time. And I think that a big problem with a lot of books is, is that, you know, if you don’t know where you’re going, if you just start to think, but you don’t know where it’s going, the ending may not feel earned.
3 (45m 41s):
It may not feel like it has merit. I know I’ve read plenty of books that felt like that to me. And I don’t, I don’t like wasting people’s time when they feel as though they’ve invested, you know, energy money, hopefully they didn’t, they didn’t get a bootleg, the thing. And that, that was where that whole process emerged, where I understood. Oh, okay. I know what this really needs to be about. I know what the end goal is. And then at that point really organically, I had an entire four book series mapped out just, just in the process of rewriting the first book.
3 (46m 17s):
And then of course my, my process has changed after that. And each book, I know I’m getting better at planning out what the story needs to be.
1 (46m 26s):
So how long did this series take you to write? Do you just like, like with everything
3 (46m 35s):
I had it done probably, well, it, it, it was published over a course of two years, but I probably wrote the whole thing in three. Oh,
1 (46m 47s):
Okay. So about, as long as it took me to read it, not really, I’m a slow reader, but it didn’t take me that long,
3 (46m 55s):
But no, I th I think the first book I wrote in about four months, I think, and the last book, I think took me about six or seven months to write the last books, kind of a fatty it’s a big one.
1 (47m 11s):
So for any other authors that might be listening, I know we’ve had people like Ron foster, other prepper fiction and nonfiction authors on year before what, you kind of talked about, how your characters changed and developed as they were sort of critiqued. But what is one thing you wish you would’ve known before you sort of jumped into this, this writing part of your life?
1 (47m 42s):
Like, I it’s, I know you said it’s not like all you do, but what’s one thing you would have wished you would’ve known, I guess. Cause I mean, surely on the research and detail side of things, it’s, it’s been a learning process, but
3 (48m 0s):
Yeah, I can, I can think of two things right off, I think, well, especially with the, with the first couple of books I wrote, I th I think I would have in, you know, this is really just experience, right. I think this would have been true for any, any story that I decided was going to be like the first thing that I published. And it really just that I, I wish I’d had a bit more polished as a writer. I probably should have. Well, if I had, if I had been planning to do this with any kind of seriousness at all, I probably should have been writing more short stories, leading up to tackling a full novel, because for me, where I’m at now, going back and looking at my earlier work, it is clunky.
3 (48m 46s):
There, there are things I would do differently if, if I had it to go back and do over again. But of course now the books are out and there’s, there’s a lot of people out there who really seem to appreciate them and they don’t belong to me anymore. So, you know, even, even if the, the idea of going in and touching up one of my older stories seemed attractive to me, which it’s really not, I I’m, I’m not allowed to do so because I can’t go stepping on something that people already connected with.
3 (49m 18s):
So that would be one. And then, and then two, I think if I had it to do over again, I would have started with a, with a pen name just D just because as, and you know, I’m not, I’m not hugely known. I do. Okay. I have, you know, my, my nice little following, which, which I prefer, I don’t, I don’t think I’m interested in getting any bigger than I am right now, just because the world out there is a scary place.
3 (49m 52s):
And the internet, especially is it’s a very scary place. And there’s, there’s people out there now today that, that semen power to go after anybody over the slightest perceived insult. And, you know, I think, I think there’s places where, you know, perhaps karma and come up and some warranted, but you know, some of the things that I see happening today, you know, it really looks like a mob out there.
3 (50m 24s):
And I think I would’ve, I would’ve preferred to have my privacy more hidden starting in this game, because when you, when, when you’re writing stories, the way I do, you, you have to put perhaps not your, your self that is ugly, but you have to put ugly things into them. And especially if you’re going to explore the darkness of humanity.
3 (50m 55s):
And I think a lot of people make the mistake of confusing the text on the page with the internal chemistry of, of the writer’s mind. And you see that the two get conflated and, and I, I would prefer as much as possible to keep the things that I write is separated from the person I am just because I don’t, I don’t want the two bleeding into each other. I don’t want knowledge of, of who I am as a human coloring, the interpretation of the work.
3 (51m 30s):
And I don’t want any interpretation of the work, whether it’s accurate or otherwise slipping over into my private life and infecting that. So those would be my two things. If anybody’s out there thinking they’re going to be an author and they, they think they want to hit it big, or perhaps make it big, consider a pseudonym. So can I, you know, cause I want to ask one question where we’re getting onto the top of the hour and this just flown by.
3 (52m 2s):
But one of the things that, that really struck me about this whole thing is that, you know, as an author here, you are writing, what’s essentially a, become a prepper fiction, novel or series, and has been adopted in this community. And yet you wouldn’t necessarily call yourself a prepper. So in doing the writing and doing the research,
2 (52m 34s):
I have you,
3 (52m 37s):
I guess, how do I ask this? It is preparedness or survival is something that you look at differently now that you’ve completed this series and done this research, or is it about the same as before
2 (52m 48s):
Four?
3 (52m 52s):
Yeah, I w I would say that my views haven’t really changed. And when I say that I’m not a prepper it’s th that comes with so many caveats, right. It there’s there is being prepared. Right. But then there is preparedness and self-reliance as, or as a lifestyle. Correct. Which is, is not something I engage in. And I mean, there’s, there’s many people who, who make it a, a daily part, maybe not daily, probably maybe a weekly part of they, they, they go away for retreats once a month or so, you know, they, they get in tight with nature, but they’re, there, there are people who they, they do, they, they really make it a life pursuit and they, they train at it.
3 (53m 45s):
You know, they, they train at it just as much as a, you know, a Brazilian black belt, trains, jujitsu rolling on the mat every day. You know, they’re, they’re, they’re always honing those skills. And, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s a little, a level of dedication that, you know, frankly, I just don’t have, you know, I’m a busy guy, I got a lot of stuff going on in my life. And, and for, you know, I enjoy camping. I, you know, I’ve gone camping plenty.
3 (54m 18s):
And my dad is taking me camping. When, when we start a fire though, we just tend to use a lighter, we don’t rub sticks together because then I don’t need to, I can make a friction fire, but it’s, I don’t, I don’t feel the need to practice that skill. Yeah. You know what I’m saying? But then at the same time, if, if you got me into a situation with adverse conditions, well, then I can’t make a friction fire. You know, I need everything to be perfect. Yeah. I need to be, I need the planets to be aligned and all that stuff.
3 (54m 49s):
Yes. I would say that, that I am prepared for most of the, the problems that we are likely to run into in, in this developed world that we live in today, this America, if you took me and dropped me into a real tough country, like a, you know, Venezuela, or, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re things are very unstable and, and there’s, there’s, there’s some actual danger out there.
3 (55m 24s):
I probably fold like a cheap suit, but you know, here, you know, the it’s, it’s like watching how things changed when a COVID-19 really took off. And there were, there were a lot of people that were th you know, there was a lot of panic buying and so forth. And, you know, I, I didn’t feel the need to engage in any of that. Not, not to say that I found myself somehow superior to the people who were there was, there was real fear out there.
3 (55m 56s):
And I think what we were seeing was a lot of people who suddenly understood just how fragile the system we live in is everything we have is based on confidence. Everything from, from start to finish, whether it’s, I’m going to have electricity to electricity tomorrow, water’s going to turn on, I’m going to have the food I need. I’m going to have the medicine I depend on. All of that is confidence.
3 (56m 27s):
The entire economy is confidence based. The strength of our dollar is confidence. The strength of our stock market. It’s all confidence. And, you know, the minute things get unstable and they get rot, confidence starts to crumble. And then we see what happens. Everybody loses their damn mind now, by contrast, there’s, there’s plenty of people that I, that I work with, that, that come from other parts of the world. I had friends from Israel who, you know, grew up in Israel and you talk to them about what’s going on.
3 (57m 2s):
And, and they’re very laid back and looking at it all going on and say, you guys are so crazy. They didn’t understand. They thought they just thought, well, I did, I can’t understand why everybody’s so freaked out. This is so not a big deal, but it’s just, you know, it’s, it’s indicative of a people who lived very comfortably, very confidently. And then they had that warm and fuzzy feeling suddenly snatched away.
2 (57m 31s):
Well, I think the whole thing that, and again, I haven’t read these books, but just in the conversation between you and Colin, it seems very apparent that the human element is the key factor in all of this. That’s not necessarily the survival skills or the gear that you have, or the journey that you take as much as it is the interaction between people. And like you say, when one of those warm and fuzzy start giving you spider, spider tingles on the back of your neck instead, that’s, that’s pretty cool.
2 (58m 4s):
So I’m, now I’m looking forward to reading it. So I appreciate your time. Do you want to try and throw in one or two more questions before we wrap up the show tonight? I’ve got one more that I promised I would ask. And it, this one comes from one of your friends. I mean, not for friends, fans and it’s was having the book take place in Wyoming. Something that was done on purpose as another thing for the characters to overcome. Cause it seems like the cabin owner would have taken that into consideration,
3 (58m 40s):
But, you know, okay. Yeah. Sure. Okay. Well, I don’t know how much time you want to give to this. Cause you said you’re getting to the end here. You guys have me for as long as you want me. I don’t, I don’t mind hanging around, but what, yeah. So what I, what I can say about that was starting out. I wanted a location that was kind of geographic and room geographically remote.
3 (59m 11s):
So that resources would be a little bit harder to get. So there were, there were areas that I was, I was considering for selection based on what I needed to happen in the story. It was less about what would be the perfect place to pick. Right. But I also know that, you know, the survivalist types, they would tend to go to those places that were removed from dense population centers.
3 (59m 44s):
You know, because it’s like you said that it’s, it’s not your gear. It’s not even the boogeyman. That’s scary. It’s, it’s other people that are scary. So we want to kind of get ourselves removed from, you know, humans, humans don’t seem to do too well when you pack them on top of each other. They, I think they start to go crazy. You know, they, they, they need some, some space around them to, to really, I think be their most stable selves. So I was, I was just kind of like, you know, in, in the process of researching, okay, where am I going to do this?
3 (1h 0m 18s):
You know, there were places like Colorado, Montana, Idaho, the, these were all possibilities. And then I think I just, I happen to read somewhere on a forum that there was some, some guy just mentioned in passing like, Oh, you know what, if I, if I was going to have my place where it was going to be my, my hold fast in the mountains or whatever, he said, you know, I, I put it up in the mountains of Wyoming and I didn’t even really, I didn’t really read it well.
3 (1h 0m 53s):
Yeah. I know. I didn’t really read his justification for that. The only thing that really occurred to me when, when I read that was, it was like the same thing that you said, it was like, Jesus, that’s a hard place to survive. You know, if, if you don’t have all of the, all of the, the benefits of modern technology and it’s like, man, that’s, that’s a really hard problem to solve. And that was where my engineer brain started kicking in. And it’s like, okay, that’s a problem solved. How do you solve that problem?
3 (1h 1m 24s):
And that, that seemed like an interesting place to start the story. And it, it fulfilled my criteria of being a remote location, not a high population center, limited resources, so that, so that resource acquisition was, was going to become a driving sort of like a ticking clock. That was definitely a ticking clock in the second bucket was the whole point of the thing was how do we get enough food to make it through the winter when, when everything gets snowed in and it’s all under traversable.
3 (1h 1m 59s):
Right. And so I, I liked the difficulty in, in making that area kind of a viable solution. If I’m trying to survive. I I’m, I’m, I’m probably going somewhere remote in California, you know, a, a population area in California, because you can just grow so much stuff out here. Yeah. Or I’m, I’m, I’m looking for somewhere. That’s a, that’s a little less populated out in the South, you know, like maybe I’m in Kentucky somewhere nice and green and verdant right.
3 (1h 2m 34s):
Is somewhere, somewhere. I could just, I can grow stuff all year round Wyoming is just a bastard. So that’s hard. Yeah. So then I, I thought, okay, Wyoming, that’s good. We’ll we’ll how do we make it there? How do we justify this being the place we just figured? Okay, well, this was, there’s a, there’s a primary character in the first book who kind of had his retirement home up there. And that was where he was, that’s where he wanted to end up in life.
3 (1h 3m 6s):
And then when everything goes to hell, well, I guess that’s where I’m going to end up in life. I’m going to make my way up there because this person like this, this person would have been the soul of, of the, the primary group in the story. And he was a prepper. He was the closest thing to a prepper that I had in the book. He wasn’t very good at it. He made a lot of assumptions and oftentimes they turned out to be wrong, but he was the closest thing we had. I couldn’t have anybody in the story that was just, you know, super survival guy.
3 (1h 3m 38s):
That’s no fun. They just know what to do. So I, I wanted it to, I wanted to kind of explore that, like everybody that’s running around right now in modern society, everything falls apart and they suddenly have to survive. Well, nobody knows how to do anything. So, so much of the story had to be people screwing up and getting things wrong. And then, and not screwing up in a way that’s contrived, you’re stupid, but screwing up. And yeah, I would probably make that same mistake myself. And then they got to deal with the repercussions of that.
3 (1h 4m 10s):
One of those screw ups is you probably shouldn’t have bought a cabin in Wyoming. Yeah. Well, our show, the historical arc of our show has been series of failures to overcome and change. So your failures, failures are always best teacher. That’s how you learn. Anything is up. Absolutely.
1 (1h 4m 36s):
Did you have another one? No. I mean, I, I, I, I,
3 (1h 4m 40s):
I think it’s safe to say, okay, well, I wanted to ask one more. Would you have a little bit, I mean, if you don’t mind sticking around for a few more minutes, I kind of want to pick your brain a little bit. It’s fine. Absolutely. So this month we’re talking about solar and we’re going to have some other folks on power from solar is going to be on next week. And hopefully we can get some solar oven stuff and, and just other types of aspects of solar. And one of the reasons why I thought it’d be great if you could come on is because of this, the, the inciting incident, if you will, for the book, which is a solar flare, can you share with us a little bit about why that became a mechanism for your basically what happened and why you chose that?
3 (1h 5m 25s):
Yeah, I, I can, the, the solar flare was kind of a, a secondary choice. What, one of, one of the reasons why was because I wanted to feel I wanted throughout these books to feel as though technology was, I, I mean, like, you know, high technology, the kind of technology that we have today, where it’s like, everything is controlled through internet computers, on innovation and all that. I wanted very much for that to feel attacked and unreliable.
3 (1h 5m 58s):
I wanted to attack our confidence in, in these things that we’ve grown. So used to, depending on, because I really, I think it’s a problem. The, the, how, how dependent we’ve become on the internet. I think the internet, it has evolved humanity to a place that it was not ready to occupy. And I really think that’s, what’s destroying us the most today is, is the, the, the, the natural rhythms that have grown out of the commercialization of this platform where, where inner information is everything it’s, it’s turned, it’s turned individual people into proxies of mindless corporate numbers.
3 (1h 6m 52s):
It’s like the craziest thing I’ve ever seen is we’re, we’re watching people walk around in a programmed state, a conditioned state, and it’s all through these little screens that they’re staring at all day long. And I don’t, I don’t know what the answer is to that outside to say that it’s, we’re, we’re, we’re either going to have to, well, we’re, we’re either going to evolve to a point where, where we know how to deal with it, because I don’t think we’re dealing with it very well right now, or it’s just going to rip us up.
3 (1h 7m 31s):
And, and, you know, there, there will be a, there will be a, a giant reckoning when everything comes to a head, we’ll have a period of decay. And then as, as always happens with humanity, that the, it seems that the single driving force of humanity has always to fight a losing battle against entropy. So at some point a humans will come together again, they’ll start to organize, they’ll build up they’ll repair. And, you know, these are all processes that’ll happen through several generations, you know, Rome fell and then we had something grow up after they replaced it and this, so it goes on and on until we managed to pull our heads out of our rectums.
3 (1h 8m 19s):
But in, in, in my case like solar, so I wanted that technology. I wanted that upfront. You want to feel like, okay, well, I can’t rely on this. I need, I need to rely on something that’s more present, more physical than bits, you know, digits, electronical, ephemera. But I also knew that that by and large, a, a massive event like that probably doesn’t bring society to its knees the way I needed it to, for my book.
3 (1h 9m 2s):
Right. Even something like the Carrington event or a little bit bigger than that, humans are really resilient. And it, it, it takes more than just one thing to knock them into the corner. You know, we’re tough. We really are. So I figured, okay, there, there’s gotta be like a one, two punch to put everybody on his knee. So I figured, okay, well, it’s gonna be this, this, this coronal mass ejection followed by a pandemic. Right. And the idea was that the coronal mass ejection causes the power failure, which causes all these security systems to fail, which, which releases this, this virus that, that somebody somewhere was being very naughty boys.
3 (1h 9m 45s):
And they were, they were engineering in a lab, right. It, and you know, it was funny. Cause at the time I was, I was thinking, you know, is this too much, these, these two disaster events happening, right. And sequence each other, am I asking people to swallow too much of these things are happening right on the heels of each other and then 2020 happened. And I realized that I was probably two restraint, you know, so well, you know, okay.
3 (1h 10m 17s):
You know, you know, what’s fun about 2020 is that later in my career, I’m going to be able to write more things that I would consider farfetched and people will be likely to swallow them. So it, it, it takes the pressure off me as being like a realistic writer. I guess that’s one onus often the way to look at this year, you know, aside from all the other, just, just the horror that’s been going on.
5 (1h 10m 44s):
But that was it. One of the things that
3 (1h 10m 46s):
I think the most interesting to me about the, the writing of these books is how interested people seem to be over my selection of the thing that caused everything to fall apart. Really, you know, they’re Oh man, Oh yeah. If you, Oh, it’s a solar flare. Oh. You know, and they, they, they want to talk about solar flares and they want to talk about novel viruses and all that. It was, you know, I, I, you know, I, I don’t hold a judgment over, over those things that, that connect with the reader.
3 (1h 11m 21s):
Right. It’s like, okay, w w whatever aspects you found in the work that, that really drove your imagination, that’s good. That’s what it’s there for. And I’m happy about that. But then I feel sorry to tell people that, that the solar flare or, or those are just the least interesting things about the story. To me, those were just the trigger events that I needed to produce the conditions that, that were necessary to tell the story that I wanted to tell. And I think, I think that’s evident in the work too. Cause a lot of people like, Oh man, well, you know, I would have appreciated you spending a lot more time discussing the process of society falling.
3 (1h 11m 57s):
And it’s like, yeah, I didn’t want to do that because it’s been done so many, so many books have had covered that material. I didn’t want to be there. The place that I wanted to be actually was as, as, as Colin pointed out the start of the third book, that was where I wanted to get going. And I knew I couldn’t even do that because there was going to be this large cast of characters. And if I didn’t spend some time explaining who the hell they were, that nobody was going to care about anything that was going on.
3 (1h 12m 27s):
Yeah. That was books one and two shit. I need a prequel. Excuse my language. Sorry. I don’t know if I can say that on the air. We’ll give you a pass. You get one. Okay, good. No, I get a little loose at the tongue when I started discussing this now. That’s awesome. Well, excellent. I think unless anybody in the chat room has any specific questions they want to ask, you know, I appreciate your time coming on. And if you, if you want to give a shout out to your book series and or website, go ahead and drop it in now.
3 (1h 13m 2s):
And at least that way folks can find you and find your books for purchase or download or whatever. Yeah. I’ll Oh, I’ll go look up my website and then I’ll go put the link in there. I forget. Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m not good at self it’s. It’s about a quarter after and the glasses here are empty, you know, and I think dad, my go ahead and take it away, maybe with his, with his final takeaway as to what we talked about during the show, a lot of good stuff.
3 (1h 13m 38s):
And then as well as kind of how it goes back to that, that the generation of storytelling. Now, do you want to do a project? I was thinking about one in particular. I don’t know if you go ahead. No, you didn’t this week for the parasites prepper project, I thought it would be pertinent to explore solar flare activity. This week’s pint-sized cover project is brought to you by Fower film, solar and shout out to Dean logic on Twitter for exposing me
2 (1h 14m 12s):
To some of these websites. There’s a couple of them that are going to drive into chat. These are actually different websites that monitor space, weather and solar activity. So one of them is the NOAA space weather. And the other one is the NASA mission pages for the SDO, whatever that means space division, probably. And that one has a little bit more of a historical activity of solar flares over the past 10 years.
2 (1h 14m 46s):
There’s some excellent videos and diagrams and resources in those to help people understand what solar flares are and what they do and how they act and how they activate. And, you know, the current level of activity in general, people don’t realize that solar flares happen all the time and their ability to impact the earth is pretty random. And there’s like, obviously if we’re spinning and the sun is spinning and we’re spinning around the sun at the same time, there’s, there’s a solar flare that can get be ejected in any direction and in doing so there’s a significant amount of power that’s released.
2 (1h 15m 30s):
And sometimes when that power is directed toward the earth, it changes all sorts of things. And I think I don’t, don’t quote me on this, but from what little research I’ve done, the Aurora Borealis has actually has something to do with solar flares as a result of the changes in the magnetic field. I don’t know exactly how that works, but the idea in general is to check on some of these websites and do some of your own research, identify some of the recent events and understand how they may or may not impact you.
2 (1h 16m 3s):
Some of the skills that are learned or encouraged through this kind of project is the, are the things like basic research, understanding context of outside forces and the levels of impact, whether their primary, secondary tertiary, or on down the line. If you think about, you know, kind of the butterfly effect, if, if that helps you remember that. And then also that whole idea of preemptive, preemptive, troubleshooting, and critical thought.
2 (1h 16m 34s):
We do hope to keep these coming. And if you’d like to see more and support our work here directly head on over to Amazon and type in my name or Colin’s name or pint and size per project in our book will pop right up. You can click on the link on the show page, if you want download a copy of today. And there’s 28 other projects just like this that you can do with your family for the final takeaway today, I think storytelling is a critical part of human nature. And like we introduced the story or introduced the show today, that idea of a storyteller carries on tradition and the ability for us to question and or relate to the human condition, how people act, how people are supposed to act the forces that act upon us as humans and our research is what backs up truth from fiction or reality from supernatural taking that time to investigate, explore, imagine, or even hypothesize these different situations and scenarios is what makes us better.
2 (1h 17m 40s):
It makes us better preppers. And it allows us to think outside of a vacuum. And it allows us to broaden our perspective and see the parts of the whole mass events, kind of like solar EMPS seem far out. But, you know, even just as recently as June 11th of this year, we had one that was one of the largest since 2017, the president behind the scenes is intensifying EMP protection and potential grid failures as a result of other forms of electromagnetic pulses.
2 (1h 18m 15s):
And that threat while only a fantasy at the moment has a very real potential. So taking the time to explore and preplan for events is what sets us apart as preppers take advantage of the opportunities to delve into fiction while you’re can. And while you’re at it, consider some of the realities that inspired this story in the first place. Preparedness is how we carry on tradition through action and story is how we can carry on the strengths of humanity through example, special, thanks to our guests tonight.
2 (1h 18m 51s):
Joshua Geier thank you for joining us. And I think lastly, in case you missed it, well, actually I’ll give you a chance if you have anything else you want to say before, before we sign off Josh, I just wanted to thank you guys for having me. I had a lot of fun doing this. Anytime you want to get together to shoot the breeze again in the future, you just drop me a line and we’ll get it done. Awesome. Yeah, it’s been, it’s been fun and I do appreciate you taking the, the second.
2 (1h 19m 23s):
How do you say given us a second thought when it comes to coming on the show and just shooting the breeze? It, it does make, I had to give myself the second I had to give myself a second thought. I had to kind of realize what the point of a lot of this is. And, you know, it’s, it’s the, the way that, that we in Ricci enrich each other is through conversation and in discussing things, sharing viewpoints.
2 (1h 19m 55s):
And I’m a very insular person. A lot of times I tend to be introverted and I, I need to do less of that. So thank you for coming out of the woodwork and reminding me of that fact out of the bunker. Well, all right, well, thanks again. And we do appreciate your time. Lastly, in case you missed it on last week’s show, we did a bug out vehicle update on tapping the brakes, where we talked about our recent work involving the bug out vehicle and lessons learned with braking systems. Remember if you list, if you missed out, you can always check out our previous episodes on the show page or on your favorite streaming service while you’re there, be sure to leave us a five star review.
2 (1h 20m 31s):
It does help to boost our presence and allows us to share this message with others. Next week, we are continuing on this theme of solar and we’re going to have special guests on from power film solar. So be sure to join us in chat room for that one. If you’ve got any questions on these rollable solar panels and until then, I think that’s it for today. Everyone. Thanks for joining us on the next generation show. And don’t forget to tune in next time where we explore another aspect of the little things in life that make all the difference in the world.
2 (1h 21m 2s):
This is your cohost, Colin Buford, and your host Ryan Buford, reminding you to stay informed, get involved and be prepared. Have a great night everybody and make it a great week. Let’s do this one. Where’s the other one. We gotta do this. We’ve gotta do it right folks.
2 (1h 21m 24s):
