The Confessionals - 722: Doomsday Delivered By Drone

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

In episode 722: Doomsday Delivered By Drone, Dr. Drew Miller, a Harvard PhD and retired Air Force Colonel, delivers a chilling warning about the fragile state of society. From collapsing grids to bioengineered pandemics, Dr. Miller paints a grim picture of the threats lurking just beyond the horizon. Drawing on decades of intelligence experience, he explains why lone prepping isn’t enough and unveils Fortitude Ranch—a lifeline for those ready to face the inevitable breakdown of law and order. This episode doesn’t just inform; it confronts the harsh reality of a world on the brink and asks one crucial question: are you prepared to survive?Fortitude Ranch: fortituderanch.comHurricane Helene Relief Efforts List: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/helene-reliefSasquatch and The Missing Man: merkelfilms.comMerkel Media Apparel: merkmerch.comThe Confessionals Members App:Apple Store: https://apple.co/3UxhPrhGoogle Play: https://bit.ly/43mk8kZBecome a member for AD FREE listening and EXTRA shows: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinAFFILIATESGo Silent with SLNT Faraday Bags: https://alnk.to/clXuRY5EMP Shield: empshield.com Coupon Code: "tony" for $50 off every item you purchase!SPONSORSSIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsUNCOMMON GOODS: uncommongoods.com/tonyGHOSTBED: GhostBed.com/tonyCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] to the Newsletter: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-newsletterMAILING ADDRESS:Merkel Media257 N. Calderwood St., #301Alcoa, TN 37701SOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theconfessionals/Discord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelProduced by: @jack_theproducerOUTRO MUSICJoel Thomas - PsyopYouTube | Apple Music | Spotify

Merkel Media This was all circulating around the base That a giant had to kill But no one was supposed to talk about it Each up underneath the door Curl up to grab it And then disappear

When he came over to me Dude he slithered over to me A giant comes out of the cave And they're all frozen And he starts running and firing up this giant With a giant move He's got a spear In one hand

He's running really fast. It spears, Dan, holds them up like this. Somebody else. Shoot them in the face. Shoot them in the face. They basically decapitated. I look over and there are two. Because I know I'm seeing a monster.

Welcome to the show, everybody. Listening to The Confessionals Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Merkel. Thanks for being here. If you've a crazy, wild experience, you want to share with me on the show, go ahead and shoot me an email. My email address is Contact at theconfessionalspodcast.com.

That's contact at the confessionalspodcast.com. or go to the website Theconfessionalspodcast.com, hit the contact section, and you can reach me that way as well. Otherwise for me, just get a hold of me. If you want more shows

on a weekly basis, go ahead and become a member on the website. You'll get access to bonus episodes every week. We got you covered right there at the confessionalspodcast.com. Now, today we have Dr. Drew Miller coming on the show, and he's the person who runs Fortitude Ranch,

which is your everyday man's affordable bugout location. Things could happen where you wish you had community and Fortitude Ranch offers that to the everyday man. What could happen? Well, Dr. Drew Miller comes on today to talk about that. What in the world could lead to us needing to bug out? Systems going down, grid going down to, I don't know, doomsday delivered by drones. Let's get to Dr. Miller right now. All right, today we have Dr. Miller on the show. Doctor, how are you? Pretty good, Tony. Thanks for having me on. Hey, I'm glad you're here. This is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I've been wanting to talk to you for a while.

I think the first time I heard about you was over on Tim Poole's show. I saw you on there, and I was like, this is my kind of guy. I like this guy. So I wanted to bring you on the show, and I'm glad we're finally doing it. To kind of get the groundwork laid out here, if you could give people a background as to who you are and how you kind of got into the whole idea of survival when things go south. And then we'll talk about Fortitude Ranch, which is a big project. working with. Yeah. So I'm the founder of Ford D Ranch where the nation's largest recreational and survival

community and have a place in Tennessee, not too far from you, although we don't give out our locations. But I was an intelligence officer in the Air Force, and I was in during the Cold War, then after the Soviet Union fell. And when the Soviet Union fell, people said, oh, that's it. You know, we've survived. The bad things are over. It's only good days ahead, perpetual peace. And I said, I was in a Celtia. starting to, you're out of your mind. Threats are just getting worse and worse and worse. And, you know, Russia still has their nuclear weapons. We didn't really dodge anything.

And it's getting worse. So the new technology threats are just disaster. So as a prepper for a long time. And like most preppers, most preppers try to do it on your own, which, you know, if it's a minor event, that may be okay. But if there's a bad event, we call it a collapse, meaning the economy's not functioning. And there's widespread loss of law in Northern. order, when that happens, if you're not in a big survival community, a big group that has guards up all the time, lots of guards on duty, 24-7, you won't make it because of the

marauder threat we face. So that's why I've got to 402 Ranch, and we've got to eight locations now growing through franchising, and the world's woken up to prepping. And when I started this a decade ago, people, you know, I go to a good investment conference, I say, hey, I'm a Harvard PhD, retired Air Force Colonel. And I would delay saying the word prepper as long as I could. Because that asinine TV show, Doomsday Preppers, was really popular then. And the first role of prepping is, don't tell anyone you're a prepper.

You don't want your neighbors and bad guys to know, hey, go to Tony's house. He's got a basement full of food and ammo. So you don't tell him your prepper. So no one went on the Doomsday Prepper show. Not normal Preper's on. Only idiot, fun on. Hey, here's my house. Here's my stuff.

Here's my secret story here. show them on TV. So they had idiots on the show, and then people across the U.S. thought, oh, well, Preppers must be idiots because that's what I see on this doomsday Prepper show. But they didn't see real Preppers. They just saw idiots. But I would delay saying Prepper back then, because the second I did, people think, oh, this guy's in a nutcase. It's just the opposite today. And it's not so much because of the COVID-19. It's because of really, you know, Portland and Baltimore in places where people have seen Long Order Break down over just, you know, people protesting something. Law and Order vanishes. They start looting.

And, you know, looting now is just, it's a common occurrence. Flash mobs take place. In California, they look during the day and people don't even bother him almost because the lawyers are afraid to bother them. So people now recognize that prepping is an absolutely smart, must-do thing you're going to survive. And that's only got Fortitude Ranch because, you know, rich people have been prepping all along. You know, like in Soccerberg, Peter Thiel, the rich folks, they've got fantastic survival facilities because they recognize with artificial intelligence, all the technology threats we've got, bioengineering, nanotechnology, developing new means to develop uranium. It's all going to get much, much worse with artificial intelligence. And so the healthy tech people

know about that, and they've developed huge bugout locations. A lot of them are just, leaving the country, Teal's going to New Zealand. And so we wanted to have a place for, you know, middle-class folks to be able to survive and afford it. So we developed Forteat Ranch. We're not a fancy place. If you want fancy, I can tell you where to go. It's survival condo.

Beautiful. It's like being in a five-star hotel. It's just that you're underground in the 9-CBM silo. But it costs $3 million, and most of us can't afford that. So we found it for Ford's Ranch. So, you know, for $5,000, you know, up front your family can join. Then they're just annual dues. And then we're a recreational facility, too.

So, you know, the one near you is surrounded by the Cherokee National Forest. It's a fantastic place to go to hike and vacation, have a good time. So you can stay up the two weeks a year at any 14-inch location. So you can go to Tennessee or Wisconsin, out to Nevada, mountains of Colorado. And vacation, for free. for up to two weeks a year. So that's how we make it affordable for the middle class. That's really cool.

I mean, it's not just a preparer site for the emergency, but you can actually utilize it in the process. So it's not just, in some people's minds, it would be wasted money. It's like, well, what if nothing ever happens and I just throw that money away? But it's something that you can invest in. So it's actually something you're using now.

And also when something bad happens inevitably, it's a place to fall back on. Now, with Fortitude, ranch, you, if I remember correctly, this was a couple of years ago when I first heard you talk about this, if I'm a member, say, to the Tennessee branch and I'm in, I don't know, Pennsylvania and things go south, do I have to get back to Tennessee to get to my branch? So you can vacation any location and you can also survive anyone. Now, your stuff will be stored of what we call your home for. So if you can get to Fort Branch, Tennessee, you definitely want to.

But if you are up in Pennsylvania, you've got to make a decision now. Do I head up to 14-year-inch New York? We don't give exact locations, but I can tell you, Fortis, New York is in the Cadskills. Again, another beautiful location. Or you can say, hey, I'm going to go to 14-inch, West Virginia. And then they've got the member list of how Tony's challenge password there. And then if you answer your password correctly.

Now, let me do that because we don't want to check your idea if it's a pandemic, obviously. We're challenging you from blocks away. outside our defensive walls to make sure, you know, it really is a member. And then when you answer your question correctly, you come into any location to collapse and survive. And that's really, really important. So we've got eight locations now, you know, from Nevada to Maine, Wisconsin down to Texas, all across the U.S. And with franchise, and we're getting a lot more.

That's awesome. Yeah, it makes me feel like you mentioned about TV shows, but there's those TV shows that are kind of like doomsday shows. And you hear, about this. It's a storyline. It's like, we hear about this, this facility out in Colorado. We're making our way there kind of thing. And in reality, I mean, if you're a member at Fortitude Ranch Lake, you kind of have that ability. It's like, okay, where am I at? Where is the closest one? How do I get there? There's lots of proper facilities and have been for a long time. Like, when I was looking at West Virginia was our first, I remember going around and I was talking to realtors looking at land. And I wouldn't say I'm looking for a survival facility.

And you try to keep it confident. Just tell the realtor, I'm looking for a kind of secluded place for us, water on cider right next to it. And describe what I'm looking for it. And I said, oh, you're looking for a pepper facility. And I asked him to say, why would you say that? And the realtor said, because we have members of every three-letter agency in D.C. With survival places out here in West Virginia, it's covered in. Wow.

They're all over the place. Now, most of them are small. It's a little house. And again, I don't want to discourage people from doing any kind of prepping you can. But I will tell you if it's a bad, if the grid goes down, it's down for over here. If it's an EMPA or solar event or a big cyber or physical attack, will take us at least here, probably two or more, to repair the electric grid. And so mariner groups are going to form.

They're going to be big. They'll get more successful and bigger over time. And if you're in a house on your own, even if you got, you know, 20 people, you won't make it. They're going to, you won't be able to hide. No one can hide. I mean, I don't care if you're underground. You got to have an air event. You got to have some solar power. It does something that's going to clue me off that, hey, there's people that have been around here, probably underground, and I'll find you. So you've got to be able to defend yourself on the surface, and you've got, again, a lot of guards operating. I mean, if it's just, let's say you've got

25 people, you know, in your Grant Emma's house out in rural Nebraska, and there's 25 of you, that's hard to keep even two guards on duty all the time. It really takes 50, plus to have guards on duty all the time. Because if you only got two guards on duty at night, that means, you know, Tony, you and I can take out this 25-person group. Because all we do is, you know, we watch, we'll observe, smart marauders are going to from charging, and they're going to spy on you, they're going to observe,

and they'll eventually figure out where every guard you've got is, how many are on duty at what time. So you and I have been watching, we figure out, we're going to do this at 2.30 in the morning. They've got two guards on duty, so we line up our shots. You got your guy going on walkie-talkies. You got your guy? Yep, I do too.

Okay, let's count down. Five, four, three, two, one. We both shoot at the same time, and we're putting good shots. You know, breasted gun, the guards sit and still, you know, the two guards are now dead. The question is, did the people inside here are shots? Because we shot from, you know, maybe 60, 100 yards out. And someone might have heard it. But normally, if you hear a shot, if you hear a noise in the middle of the night,

and you kind of wake up, if you don't hear anything else, else, you immediately just go back to bed. So we'll wait 15 minutes. If no one has gotten up, now you and I go in, and, you know, if the people are lucky, the marauders just steal stuff. If they're unlucky, they go room to room, knifing people, which was actually a scene from the Walking Dead show. I don't know if you watched that series or not.

Yeah. But there was a scene there where, you know, we actually just the good guys broke into a marauder place, and they just went around from room to room knifing people while they were sleeping. So you need a lot of people to make it. You can't do it on your own. That's why you need a survival community. And they did survival communities have been around for decades. The problem is they run on a volunteer basis, the vast majority of them.

And it's just, it's endless arguments. People drop out. They don't pay their dues. And they generally fall apart. And that's why we formed Fortitude Ranch because there's a business and charge. Staff members, most of us are former military like myself. and, you know, we're in charge. You can't get voted off the island, professional management.

Someone's there all the time and peacetime. And then when the shit hits the fan, you know, we're in charge, know what to do. Everything's organized. You know, the scenario you just laid out, it also depends on where you're at in the country as to the culture that's already established there because I can tell you, I've been, I used to live in the Philadelphia area. I moved to East Tennessee about two and a half years ago. And since I've been here, the seeing the difference in cultures is dramatic.

And here, and I'm kind of, I'm pretty ingrained in the gun culture here. And it is not a secret. A lot of people here invest heavily in suppressed firearms and night vision. So like if you're talking about you have a house and you have 15, 20 people in it and you have two people standing guard, well, the guys outside who have been watching you, they've been watching you with night vision and they got a suppressor. on. So even if you hear the gun go off because it's not completely silent, it's going to sound like somebody dropped a book outside, you know? Yeah. So yeah. The thing I remember is, you know, you may be

in a really nice area. I mean, I'm from Nebraska. It's a pretty nice area I grew up in. But, you know, in Tennessee, I can tell you, a lot of people from Atlanta all over the place, because you cannot survive in a big city or even a big suburb. You cannot survive when the rib goes on. When the electric rig goes on, it's not just you don't have power. You don't have water. No electric grid, no municipal water system. And the estimate from the Congressional Commission that studied the EMP and our fragile electric grid, they concluded that if our grid gets taken down, 90% of Americans will die. And it's not because, you know, there's so many people on defibrillators or anything like that. It's because with the economy not functioning and no municipal water system, you got three days to get safe

water or you're dead. There's no food production or distribution or you die. And then the Marauder groups are going to be probably the biggest threat. I don't care if it's an H5N1 pandemic. Grid goes down, Yellowstone Super Volcano eruption. The thing that will kill most people on a long collapse is other people. It's marauders. And they'll be everywhere. So there's no such thing as it's a nice, safe area because people from big cities will

end up wandering and getting everywhere. So you've got to be able to have, again, we think five to six guards minimum 24-7 is what you need. And that takes a pretty big group to get. keep that kind of guard force going. Yeah. And you were referencing earlier about how the perception of prepping has changed. And that's something that I've seen as well. I've always kind of been a prepper in the sense that like I always wanted to kind of at least have some kind of plan in place. And I never understood why people felt like that that's ridiculous. And I felt like it was just

it was their presumptions as to why you're prepping. So like, yeah, I prep because I don't trust the government. But like also, like, like, I prep because of things like my wife just text me today. Two headlines. One says volcanic activity under Yellowstone seems to be shifting northeast. And the other one says scientists warn of a huge underwater volcano expected to erupt this year. And it's like those kind of things happen. And what are you going to do in the process? Are you going to be able to survive? And especially for those who have kids, what are you going to do with your kids? And what's the up game plan in place for that? So you mentioned about AI. Do you,

you perceive AI playing a role as a threat when it comes to this kind of thing? Absolutely, but there's two kind of threats from AI. First of all, let me talk about the one that most people talk about it and the experts talk about the most. And I think they're not wrong, but they're not talking about the right one. They talk about AGR, artificial general intelligence, meaning, you know, it's not just chat GPT, it's that the AI computers have gotten so smart. They're way beyond us intelligence. They're doing stuff. We have no clue what they're doing. And they talk amongst themselves and link up with robots.

And, you know, it's the Battlestar Galactica and all the movies we've seen. It's the machines become aware. They become wanting to take care of themselves. They realize, boy, these humans are really kind of pretty shitty creatures. We don't really need that. They can run stuff better off. And then they become the threat. That is a threat from AGI in the future.

But that's not the worst day either. There's a completely different threat. And it's a now threat. And that is bad people using AI to develop more effective means to kill people. And that's absolutely going to happen. We have an app called the Collapse Survivor app, and we do a lot of things with it. But the funnest thing we do it, it sits for prepar education and training, and then we put out threat alerts on it as well. But we run simulations on it.

I'm just going to show it to you. We run simulations like there's one right up there. Oh, there is right there. That's the one I'm talking about. We ran a simulation on artificial intelligence being misused to develop new means to enrich uranium the Chinese for nuclear weapons. So we ran a 60-dust simulation on the collapsed survivor app, and it's going to get to the point where, you know, terrorists, you know, a small terrorist group can develop uranium, develop a nuclear weapon. Right now, the technology being used is the same thing we used in the early 1940s. You really believe there's been no advances in material technology or radiological studies to make nuclear weapons easier?

There has been. Laser enrichment is one. And with AI, it's going to be impossible to stop the growth of nuclear weapons and seeing it to the point where terrorist groups can do it. A big company could do it if they want to do. But the worst threat from AI, I think, is bioengineering. Because we've got CRISPR technology, all kinds of ways to develop new means to make. H5N1, which used to be called bird flu. They still call bird flu and avian flu.

Don't do that. It's not bird flu. It's spreading in mammal populations all over the world. A U.S. citizen just died from H5N1, and it's not just from birds. You can catch it from other means. There was a World Health Organization report out last year. Cats in Poland, indoor cats with no contact with the outside dying from H5N1. So this virus is naturally mutating, but worse, you can use CRISPR technology to deliberately

bioengineer manipulate the virus to make it more lethal or more transmissible. And that's going to happen. It's inevitable. We're going to have an each five and one virus. And different forms have different lethalities. But the historic one has had about 60% lethality. COVID-19 was much, much less than 1%. Imagine the double-digit level virus.

Lethality virus spreading. When that happens, no one in the right mind is going to go to work. You don't need the government telling you wearing masks. No one's just going to go to work. If you do and you catch that virus, good chance you're going to be killed or worse. You'll bring it home and infect the rest of your family and kill them as well or them instead. So when that happens, it's going to be an absolute disaster. You can't break down, marauding will break out when you have a choice between,

hey, I can't stay at home anymore because the water system is not working because the municipal water. system's gone down because no one's going in to work it and keep it running, or running out of food, eventually people will start marauding and you're into a collapse. And again, it could last for months. So you have to prepare long term. And that's what 14 ranches about it. We grow food. We have chickens and ranches and gardens and stockpiled seeds. But most importantly, we have a lot of nipples. So it's not that we have tons of staff. There's a few staff members of location. But when you've got 100 people coming out, organized, run effectively with all the equipment and materials you need on site, you can farm and you can ranch. And most importantly,

you can defend it. So you and I and smart people know the importance of weapons. But do you think you're ever going to have a government official saying, hey, Tony, we recommend you stock up with weapons to protect yourself on a clefts. Not even Republicans do that. No. But Democrats, you don't want to ban our ARs. But it's going to be a disaster situation and a collapse. Unless you've got great preparations and a lot of people well organized in a defensible compound where you can ranch and grow food, you're not going to make it.

No, I absolutely agree. And something that I think about a lot. You know, it's honestly a big reason why I moved here because I looked around my surroundings. I was in the Philadelphia area in Philadelphia, the year I left, the year prior had over 550 murders. So it just skyrocketing in crime. I'm like, I don't think I can raise my family around here. If things go south, I thought about it.

I had a half acre of land where I was at. And I was in an older neighborhood. And I was thinking, all right, I can farm this. I can grow things. And I started thinking, I'm a one-man army. I would literally have to stay up all the time to make sure people don't steal my food. And they would. They would steal my food.

And so I started thinking, okay, so I can't. It's not practical to be on my own and defending things, whether it's in this neighborhood or out in the wilderness. And so one of the things that I started looking at was where can I go where this kind of lifestyle is already established in general. And one of the biggest selling points for me was in East Tennessee. It's literally the homesteading capital of the country. Like people homestead here all the time. So it has this mindset of people who want to take care of themselves. They're not asking for things.

And I came down here and literally within, I'd say six months, I had my chickens going. I started raising pigs. And, you know, those are those things that I started implementing on my own. Now you take that, that effort that I did and you multiply it by 100 people all in one centralized location where, you know, there's a fallout happening. Everybody has their job. And speaking on that, what kind of structure is involved with Fortitude Ranch with, so say like an EMP happens. we can kind of go into EMP if we want to as far as defining what that even is. But

the state something like that happens, grid goes down and you have a hundred people that get sent to, that arrive at the Tennessee location. Is there already an established game plan or is the leadership there have like a structure that's going to be like, okay, so we need this, many people doing this and stuff and kind of structure it out as they arrive or how do you think that would work? Yeah. So we have staff in charge operations, manuals, and procedures. So when the collapse starts, you know, I'm not giving away any secrets here. So when your first live at flaps, we tell, we tell our members, you're not going to have any free time. You know, the first several weeks, probably the first month, no free time. You'll be working all the time.

So we are in the forests. So we have to start chopping down trees because we need cleared lines of fire. So we chop down trees, so you can't sneak up on us. We stack the trees into walls. No way has some walls up in feast time. They need you rock walls too. But initially, meanly wood walls going up as we cut down treaties. So we're now behind the wall, defending behind the wall, resting my gun on the top of the wall. And if you come at us, you're out in the open. So it's kind of like World War I trenches. That's saying that idea. And in my PhD dissertation, I should point out, from Harvard on underground nuclear defense shelters and field fortifications for NATO troops. So it's well conventional and nuclear war fighting and how do you

transition back and forth. But statistically, we know from studying, you know, military campaigns and extensive military war gaming and studies, that when you're defending in a prepared position, you have a minimum of a three to one advantage over the attacker. And if it's really well prepared, you know, killboxes, walls, all the cleared lines of fire, you have up to 10 to 1 advantage, meaning that if you're going to take me out, there has to be 3 to 10 of you attacking. And you may win in terms of killing me, but odds are two of you have died or more in the process of killing me. And so that's why the initial work we're doing is cutting down trees, stacking the walls. The other thing we're doing is I'm honest about this. We're breaking the law like,

man, we're doing massive poaching. If it's edible, it's going to be shot. Yeah. So we don't care about hunting permits. We're shooting every living creature we can. And so we cut down the trees stacked and then the walls. I've got all this brunch. What am I doing with Tony? Well, I'm burning it into fires. What the fire is doing? They're drying out my deer meat for deer jerky. So we've got stockpiled food, but in a collapse, it's, but the long-term collapse, it's really all about food and protecting the food. So we're getting more food at that point. So we're hunting. So the point is we're working our asses off. We're gardening, you know, we've got some gardens now. We'll have a lot more. You know, we have chickens now. We'll be

keeping eggs back now to raise more chickens. So it's just a lot of work for the first week. Now, after that first month is over. Now we've got some free time. Our defenses already. The gardens are planted. Everything's in order. You know, probably every deer in your body has been killed already. And so now you have free time. So you can form clubs. You know, history book club or religious group meeting at this time on Sunday we have common areas for people to reserve. So, you know, mental health is an aspect of survival. It's not just food, water, guns, animal, you know, power. You know, mental health matters too. Could you imagine? trying to last a year plus, hiding underground in a shelter, hoping no one ever finds you. Even if you did have a year or stock-tall foot, I mean, it just would be a hellacious, horrible way to live. We're not going to do that. We have DVDs. We have movies.

You know, we have social events. We have clubs that members are formed. We'll have a pretty decent lifestyle. And that's important. You've got to have good mental health. And so we kind of, like to say, we had, you know, good work in this for over a decade. So it's a pretty well-defined business model. Yeah, and it definitely is a well-defined business model.

This concept of the fallout, when I first moved here to Tennessee, I read the book one second after. And it actually takes place, the location takes place right here, North Carolina, East Tennessee. And it really kind of got me thinking about what the psychological aspects of this was, just through the characters of the book. And if I remember correctly, that book was based off a real research. It wasn't just a fantasy book.

This was something that was researched heavy, and then he made it into a fictional book, so it was palatable for people. But it really strikes me through that book, TV shows that the mental health aspect of it could really get to you. And I think that's what they do with astronauts, too. They actually test them on their seclusion before they go into space because you're going to be alone for a long period of time.

So I think that gets overlooked a lot when it comes to survival. You think about the, you know, oh, well, I'm going to be, you know, keeping guard of this and that and, you know, the tough guy, testosterone-driven stuff. But there is a mental health aspect that even the toughest guy is going to have to deal with at times. Hey, guys, this episode is brought to you by Merkmerch.com. Go ahead and get your Merkel Media apparel at Merkmerch.com. We got some new hoodies up there on the store. Go ahead and check it out. Cop years before it's too late.

Also, Merkelfilms.com is where you can get your on-demand streaming of documentaries we've put out, and we have new content from other creators coming to that site very soon. Merklefilms.com. Yeah, you're actually right. You know, there's another movie you recommend you mention the book, the one second after, and it is a realistic book, with one exception, vehicles are not as vulnerable as people think. Most purpose exaggerate the MP threat to vehicles.

Really? Your car is a middle box, and car makers have been aware for decades about the MP threat. So, yeah, some of your chips in an electric car, I'm not going to talk about that. But traditional fuel-injective cars, I dealt with engineers who worked on the NP protection with strategic command or nuclear forces. And they say that the NP threat to cars is pretty grossly exaggerated. Most of those vehicles will not be destroyed. You could be in the wrong place where you're highly exposed to a really high dose.

But for most vehicles, you can survive, and your electronics will work. They found that the only way they could get, they can only way they could zap a vehicle with the MP is that they hooked the cable up to the tailpipe. They said it's just very, very hard to do. So the MP third is absolutely real, but it's the grid that's vulnerable because you've got all these wires. They collect the MP signal, bring it into the transformer and kaboom. Transformer's gone, and the grid's down that's gone for a long time when it happens.

But your car, you know, you don't have wires hanging outside. You got the Ville Shielding. Cars are relatively not. vulnerable to EMP. So, now, the threat is to a large degree exaggerate. It can happen, but it's largely exaggerated. But, you know, you mentioned that book, and then there's movies on the mental health aspect. You remember the movie that's also a book, a book, a book in the movie, The Road? I haven't seen it. Hugo Mortons, and I don't know. I mean, it's very well. It's pretty good about this guy and

his son, and they're trying to survive an apocalypse, and they do flashbacks because he's got a wife. The wife's survived the class. The wife's not with them on the road. And eventually you figure out that the reason the wife's not with him is the wife committed suicide. She couldn't handle it. It was just too much stress. Admirateers. People were being eaten, all kinds of horrible things. And she gave up.

We have the collapse of iraps kind of fun. We do a lot of prep or news on it. We also do, you know, polling and stuff. We asked once, what is the best prepper movie or book or fiction? And the winner was not the road. It was the postman. with Kevin Costner. I think you've seen that.

But that, and that's, that is really one of the best ones, I think. Wow. Yeah, I, I, uh, there's a lot of movies that are along these lines that I, I have to watch and stuff. I hadn't heard of the road. So I'll have to check that out. Um, you mentioned about the grid and, uh, you know, I, I hear about the grid. And people talk about it, you know, in these kind of circles a lot.

Uh, we saw most recent, one of the more recent examples was in, uh, in Texas a few years ago. they had that ice storm and people, you know, everything went down for them. And I didn't know this till recently, but from what I understand, the grid in this country is divided into three regions. And one of those regions is Texas alone. If that's, I might, okay. That's correct. There's the eastern, western and Texan. But, you know, we could talk about the grid, you know, for hours. What I recommend to people, because again, remember, I think I told you earlier, 90% of Americans will die when the grid goes down. A lot of people think, Oh, that's bullshit. He's exaggerating or he made that up. I did not make it up. It was an EMP commission from Congress appointed and funded of experts. But if you really want to understand the threats to the grid, you can do it 15 minutes and enjoy yourself watching. Dennis Quaid's narrated documentary, Grid Downpower. It's a fantastic documentary. Again, grid downpower up. It's won a lot of awards. It tells you everything about not just how the grid is horrible, but how our guys.

government knows about it, has known about it for decades. That 90% figure from that study, that's from 2008. It's an old study, and we knew before them. That's why they commissioned the study. We've known about the vulnerabilities. We don't harden the grid. Why is that? There's two reasons. Number one, the Italian law just don't want to spend money on it, and they make huge donations. They own Congress. And not just Congress. You mentioned Texas has a separate grid. There was a bill in the legislature a year or so ago to have at least a study to look at harming the grid. And the former, the speaker of the Texas legislator, his former chief of staff, is now a utility lobbyist. He got it killed, got the bill killed. And then the second reason

they don't part of it is it is going to cost some money. It's affordable. Compared to saving 90% Americans, it's cheap of spending you'll never do. But still, it's going to take billions of dollars. Your electric rates are going to go up. So the politicians are afraid, if I were under the grids to harm and the electric rates now go up and people are spending $20, $30 more here, someone's going to run against me saying, hey, Tony raise your electric rates because he did pass this bill. Let's get rid of Tony and I'll bring your electric cost out. So they prioritize getting re-elected. Elected officials, I'm talking about the career politicians. You know, the professional ones in Congress who are their year after years spend their entire life in government,

those paint politicians, professional politicians, they don't prioritize protecting us keeping alive. They prioritize getting reelected. So, the utility lobbyists and not losing votes, that's only they consider, not us. But watch the movie grid down power up. It's, you'll explain all the threats to the grid. And it's our Achilles' heel, not just in the United States, but of our military. So there's military bases. I know the one in Tennessee.

McGee, McGee, McGee Tyson, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've been to that base before. Well, that base, I can tell you, like every other base, where does it get its power from the civilian electric grid? If the electric grid goes down, that's it for U.S. conventional military power. Unless you don't naval stuff deployed overseas, you know, it's a small part of our force, you've just disabled the United States. When you take down the electric grid, you also take down our military. Now, I was in strategic air command, and I worked at strategic command and some of my military duty.

We have the strategic military force. Yes, we have pretty reliable power. So we can still operate, but your conventional military forces are gone. I mean, you can't even feed your soldiers. You can't even take care of them. So it's our obvious Achilles-C-Eel. North Korea, with their shitty little nuclear force, is able to destroy the United States anytime they want.

It's a current capability. Do we have an anaer ballistic missile system? Yes. It's not bad that it might get 50% of what North Korea launches. All they need to do is detonate a couple nuclear weapons over the U.S. And it's not like they've got to drop them in East Tennessee or on St. Louis. It's anywhere in the atmosphere high up roughly over the same. in the United States, and that takes down our grid.

So North Korea today, and by the way, North Korea, this is not, I was an intelligence officer with some pretty good clearances, but this is open source. This has been in the newspapers. Russia helped North Korea develop their nuclear weapons. Russia helped North Korea, and they designed them to be optimized for an MP effect. When a nuclear weapon goes off, it has a lot of things. EMP, gamma radiation, thermal radiation. that causes fires, the last wave that comes out.

There's a lot of effects, and depending on how you design the nuclear weapons, you can optimize different effects. Remember the neutron bomb from decades ago? That was to maximize neutron radiation. Well, the North Korean nuclear weapons are designed for maximum EMP generation. They're designed to take down how electric grid, and they can do it. Russia, China, North Korea can take down electric grid with the EMP. China, I think, is also a lot of electric grid.

preparing the capability to take down our grid without using nuclear weapons because it's that vulnerable, not just cyber attack, but agent attacks. We know that China has thousands of agents in the United States. If you watch the grid downpower documentary, they're going to talk about Metcalf. And if you don't know what Metcalf is, it was a substation in California. And I think the year was 2013, but about a decade ago, there was a professional attack made on it. Lots of people were there, came in quickly, shot it up, and then left. And the people came and looked at this and said, this was a professional group that did this. And why?

Why would you tech this substation? The only logical answer is it was a test. We're testing our ability to deploy a special age, small special agent team, shoot up an electric station, take out the big transformers, and then get away without being seen. How long does it take? How hard is it to do? That could have been China, could be in Russia. It could have been around.

We don't really know. But it was a group. I think that you've talked about drone activity in your show recently. I think the best explanation of the drone activity that we've seen, reconnaissance of military bases, but also reconnaissance of electric systems and electric lines and substations. My bet is that is China doing that. And, you know, people have all that nonsense.

First of all, the government is assured me there are no foreign people doing this. and there's no threat. Well, they don't know what it is, so they can't assure us it's not a threat who's doing it. But to me, it's probably Chinese drones flown by a Chinese air taxi drone company. There are 200 companies developing these large drones for air taxi service. Several of them are China. It's not just several are Chinese. The leading companies in the air taxi drone field are Chinese. Some of them are in the United States. So my mind. bet is there are Chinese agents in the U.S. and they're using Chinese air taxi drone companies as a front company.

Again, I'm intelligent software. When you have human intelligence folks, when you have agents overseas, you know, they don't work out of the CIA office in Afghanistan or whatever. They work out of a front company. You have cover for them. So, you know, I pretend I'm a painter or whatever it is. I go to a paint company, but, you know, I work in the office, but I'm doing it. my secret spywork or other stuff there.

So I think that the Chinese have put some of their agents, some of them are probably in utility companies so they can insight sabotage. And I bet a lot of them are also working in Chinese air taxi drone companies. And that's why you've got these large drones, lots of them, doing this mapping and reconnaissance. And it's perfect for them because if they get caught, all they do is they say, well, yeah, we were out there flying over northeast New Jersey. our air taxi route is between New York City and New Jersey.

So we're mapping it out. We're testing our equipment. Why are you doing it at night? Well, it's secret R&D. We don't want our competitors to know, so we do it at night. So it's a perfect cover. And to me, that is the best explanation for the threatening drone activity we've seen in recent years. It's China doing it.

Using general drones probably in a Chinese air taxi drone company. And they're the leading manufacturer drones. I mean, like I've heard that Trump is. planning to outlaw some Chinese drone companies. They're a real threat. I've not seen our government say that, but that is our theory. We put out a preparedness news item on that. That's something we do on the collapse of vibraries.

We'll put out news items for our app. The most important thing does is it gives you threat alert. So back to Fortitude Ranch, when we want to tell our members that, hey, we have a report that H5N1 is mutated again and we now think it's human, human transmissible, you need to immediately cut off all contact with any people and get to your 14 grants location, we put out that thread alert on the collapse survivor app. And you don't have to be a number to buy the app. Anyone can download it.

It's $10 for the whole year. So for less than the cost of, you know, getting a couple cups of coffee at Starbucks, you get an app that gives you preparedness news education, training simulations where you get to test, what am I get to do with X and Y happens? and then you get answers on the app. And then real threat alerts, the same threat alert to we provide

to our full-trent members come on the collapse survivor app. Yeah, I actually have the app myself on my phone, so highly recommend for people to check it out. Now, you mentioned about the air taxi side of things, and to be honest with you,

I saw you mentioned it to me in the email, and I was like, Air Taxi, what's that? And just so people understand. I mean, this is literally like a taxis in the air. Think about the Jetsons type of thing only with drones. And if the leading company is Chinese and there's several of them being Chinese in this country, that does pose a real threat. I mean, with all the drone activity that's been going on in recent months, I'd say, it really kind of, I think, has awoken people to the dangers that drones, that they present

in the sense that, like, you know, I have a drone. I have several drones. I don't have any of the giant ones, but people who have commercial licenses can get these big drones. And from what I understand, it's not that hard to get as far as the larger drones

and getting your pilot's license to be able to get those. And those things, I mean, who's to say those things can't be used as terroristic devices? Oh, they're fantastic weapons of work. So you've got the really, your taxi drone, you know,

you know, bigger than this, not to carry one or two people. Some of them are, you know, a couple more than one person with no pilot, they're autonomous, which is why you've got to do all the detailed mapping. I'm flying exactly where you want to go and land it. So the big ship will take off and, you know, you're not going to attack, that isn't going to dive into a transformer, but the big ship will dispatch the small drums, you know, just a foot in diameter with a little charge. Because at that charge, you know, they're over Langley Air Force,

speaks. Another base I've been to in Virginia, they were mapping that with foreign drones. Well, they didn't say they're foreign. It's unknown drones. I think there were foreign drones. So they're mapping out. So this mothership, if China wants to debate Taiwan and wants to knock the U.S. out, there's a couple things they could do. They could target the electric grid, in which case they dispatch their big drones, the little drones that get sent out, and they just go up, land on top of a transformer with a small charge, kaboom, that's all it takes. transformers gone on, but they can also target our military assets. I mean, a J-30, an F-35 fighter is like $250 million.

So you take your, you know, a couple hundred or a thousand-dollar drone with the chart, fly it into the intake of an F-35 that's on the ramp or in a hangar if they have to close the doors, blow up inside there and, you know, you've used a thousand-dollar drone to take out that $250 million dollar, very expensive fighter. And the plane, because, you know, the air tape, the storage of the engine, the fuel comes in there, if that starts, somehow, you've taken out the hanger, too. So the next world, the next, you know, if we get into war with China, it doesn't start necessarily overseas.

It could start here with Chinese drones from their air taxi front companies, with the benefit of thousands of agents who can run the drones and program them, equip them to do this, also be on the ground to attack electric stations and places like that, they could take out of a lot of our highest, most expensive military assets, and if they take down our electric goods, it's game over. You've not just knocked out the U.S. military, you're going to kill most of the U.S. population. So forget about defending Taiwan. We're trying to just stay alive for the next several years and trying to do whatever they want, which I want or anything else. That's wild. That's wild. The idea of a war being fought here is,

is so far away from our consciousness. It's just something that we have never had to deal with. Obviously, we had 9-11 happen, but the actual, another country attacking us here that's been publicized at least is Pearl Harbor. I mean, like most of us haven't been, weren't alive when that happened. And so it's like, it's a very foreign concept to us, but we better start getting it put into our reality zone because what you're laying out here, I haven't heard a whole lot of people discuss, this idea of the Chinese-owned drone companies like the air taxis and utilizing those already in our country assets to implement a wartime strategy on this country. It's something that I think is very practical and could be done pretty easily. And how long does it take to actually

detect who is in behind these attacks then? Have you ever thought about that? That's the biggest advantage of it. We might never be able to prove it. So we would very likely figure out if they executed a big attack. The drones came from the Chinese drone company. We capture an agent or two in the physical attacks. We will be very confident China did it. So what? You think you're number one you think you'd convince the rest of the world, you know, after what we thought about with Iran, as Iraq has nuclear weapons when they didn't. The Chinese will be denying it. The Russians will be you know, backing them up, you know, our popularity's not that great. We might not convince the world that China did, but more importantly, you know, so what?

Even if we did convince them, what are we going to do now? Oh, we'll launch a nuclear retaliatory strike against China. Well, we'd be justified in doing that, but does that benefit us? Hell no. Because when you launch a nuclear strike on China, they haven't launched any of their nuclear weapons. They're going to be surviving, a lot of them, they'll retaliate. So now we've got nuclear attacks. on the U.S. at a time when our grids down, our militaries not able to operate, that's our major

disaster recovery force, we're now, instead of being, you know, 90% of the population dying, now maybe we're 95% of the population. We gain nothing from doing that. But for China, it's much safer. China deliberately launches an EMP strike like North Korea or Russia to take down our grid. Yeah, they can take down our grid. And we will really tell me to that because you know, it's live. When they're launching on us, we will launch stuff back at them. So China's going to get clobber if they directly attack us with nuclear weapons, and they know that.

That's what insurance is all about. But if they do it with the drone, physical agent, and also cyber, they probably use cyber as well. And again, China and Russia have been cyber attacks on the grid and other critical with the ship. They've done it. We know they have. They've done it.

And we said, you know, don't do that. you know, don't be bad. They've done it. They got a way. Why do they do it? Why would they do a small level attempt? For the same reason they did the attack on the METCAT power station. You've got a test stuff.

You've got to practice. You've got to assess. Does this work? Were we able to get in? Were we able to shut down this transfer or whatever they're trying to do? So they've developed the capability. And I think in you've seen in recent years, I think what you're seeing is China's added, drone attack capability to go with the thousands of agents that got in the U.S.,

to do that. And one other target I should mention is some people know that a lot of these drone activities were overflying water supplies and reservoirs for, you know, major cities in New York and New Jersey. So it could be they'll use the drones not to carry explosive charges, but to drop into poison. And one other little side note to that, you know, because the people come back and say, well, wait a minute, to poison a water reservoir, you're going to need truckloads of poison. Because you can't just do a little bit. It takes a lot of poison, you know, for that much water. Well, it does with existing poisons, but now I'm back to the real threat we face, which is AI.

AI is going to develop new poisons. It's going to develop new, novel ways to kill people we've never dreamt of before. So, again, the real threat of AI, it's not the bad computers and robots yanging up on us, you know, five years from now. The threat is today. AI being misused by bad people, a unibomber, to develop a new poison, a new means for rich uranium. That was the exercise we did on the collapse survivor. Lots of ways you can use AI to develop new and novel ways to kill people. And we've seen the power of AI years ago to do strange and novel new things.

You remember the Chinese game of Go, this thousand game that's been played for thousands of years. the AI computer years ago played the best go expert, and they were doing some moves in the games that said, what the hell is this? They thought it was in air. They recorded all the computers screwed up. The AI computer screwed up. They made a bad error because they kept doing these really stupid moves.

But it turns out it was just a brilliant new strategy. People in thousands of years had never come up with AI did, and they won. And so that's what AI is. to do. It's going to come up with, you know, oh, you take this chemical and you do this modification, do it, put it in a microwave at this chemical, and voila, you've got something 100 times more powerful than enriched uranium. And voila, you've got a bomb that anyone can make, you know, in your kitchen with a microwave. Nick Bostrom, Professor at Oxford, has been warning people about that. The AI is going to do some really bad things, but he doesn't pay attention to it.

In fact, your testimony, a question, Tony, or observation about how can we've never heard about all this? And the answer is because your government doesn't give a crap about protecting you. They're not doing their jobs. They're doing just the opposite. The biggest barrier to preppy, the biggest problem holding back for example is assing government regulations, federal, state, and local levels. Zoning and circling, oh, Drew, you could only have two buildings under 100-acre property. you can only have two buildings there. You know, and oh, you've got to have this surge protected on it,

and your balusters this, and your stair height that, which double your building costs. And no, you can't, you cannot buy antibiotics. Who do you think you are? You know, stock climbing on an antibiotic. You don't have any right to do that. So there's a bear, and then they just lie to us. So, I mean, a U.S. citizen just died from H5N1,

and what do you hear on the news? The government said, don't worry, it's no threat. It's a low risk. the center for disease control calls H5N1, quote, low risk, unquote. And it's an absolute lie. It is probably the greatest certainly we've ever faced because that virus, thanks to gain of function research, who did that? Our government, our government did gain of function research to take avian flu, a bird flu,

H5N1, and make it mammal to mammal transmissible. They did that about 10 years ago. And it wasn't CRISPR technology. It was an easy technology. Then what did they do? They had their success. They published it in open source literature, how you make H5N1 mammal to mammal transmissible. So look at today, what do we have?

H5N1 in mammal populations, not just dairy cows and humans, lots more all over the world. And it's going to eventually be a human-to-human transmissible, not just mammal to mammal, transmissible virus. It's a flu virus through the nose, through the respiratory system. And when that happens, it's game over. It will be the worst pandemic our species ever experienced. Even if the fatality rate goes from 60% to 10%, no one's going to go to work. Policemen aren't even going to go work. I'm not criticizing the policeman. I'm saying, I'm not going to go out to work. And not just it's a 10% risk that I'll catch the virus, but risk that I'll bring it home to my family and kill them. I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to have contact with other people. You're not going to have law enforcement. No one's going to the grocery store and delivering foods. So the system breaks down. People start starving to death and they'll start marauding. Some of them, a lot of them, will start running it. Our whole society breaks down. That's how you get 90% casualties when you lose the electric grid. when there's any kind of a collapse disaster, law order breaks down, economy doesn't function, marauding breaks out,

it will happen, and you could lose up the 90% of the population depending on how long it lasts at our level of birth. And our government should, for decades, have been warning us about this, warning us about H5N1, warning us about biotechnology,

misuse of AI. They should be honest telling you that H5N1 is going to be a disaster So the former director of the CDC, the Senate for Disease Control, he came out just a few months ago saying H5N1 is going to be a human pandemic and it's going to be horrible. And he said, in my opinion, it will probably be a bioengineered, a deliberate intervention, not the natural mutations. Well, why did he say that? Because he's not under government control. He's the former CDC director.

And the drone threat I just gave me more about, the government has to know about this. There are reports warning about Chinese agents in the electric utilities. Reports out about that. Does our government talk about it? No. What's the drone threat? Well, we don't know what it is, but don't worry about it. It's not foreign.

You don't mean to worry about it. There's no threat to you. We'd have to think, we'd have to think, we don't believe that, you know, Tony doesn't know anything about this thing. But he can assure you, you know, it just doesn't make sense to do that. but that's all we get. So our government is really the biggest threat we have. They're supposed to be the ones protecting us from threats we can't handle on. That's what government is all about.

That's their main job. But they don't do it. No. Their main job is getting themselves to do. You know, there is something that Americans of all sides agree on, that that's term limits. Yes. The polls show overwhelming support for turn limits, but it doesn't pass. It doesn't, you know, they keep, this court keeps throwing it out.

Why? Why? Because the Supreme Court is appointed by congressmen. They don't want term limits of professional career politicians. They don't want to lose their careers. Their power that they've got. So they make sure you get chief justices who will not allow term limits. So our government has become really the biggest threat we've got is our government. They're not going to protect us. Now, they'll protect themselves. You know, and you're familiar with Mel Weather, I assume, in West Virginia, and there's Reagan Rock. of Sart, Pennsylvania. They've got fantastic survival. I mean, Tony, my best advice you said, if you really want the best survival preparedness, run for Congress, get elected, and they won't just take care of you,

and your family at my expense. That's what I was thinking. And it's even better than that. At the amount of weather, you know what they have. They don't just have, you know, rooms for you and food and dining rooms and, you know, entertainment. Tony, if you get elected, you will have your

little media, they have a media room for you. So you can go to your media room underground and mountain weather and now you can transmit to your to your constituents in Tennessee to assure them that you're still in control and that you should be reelected. So are resources going to that? Do they go into stockparned food like we started to do in the civil defense era against Russia's and we'd have some food that government stockpon's? No, none of that. They take guard themselves, the rest of us can die. That was the title of the whole series, the vice, I guess it's called Vice TV,

but I'll call, well, the rest of us die. There's an episode about Fortitude Ranch, one of the next series of episodes. But the whole point of that show is, government is taking care of themselves, isn't going to do shit to keep its citizens alive. And one last thing on the thing, if you heard of continuity of government?

Yeah, yeah. That's the official government. not just at the federal level, federal, state, local levels. When the shit hits the fan and you and I are trying to get, you know, all the help we can get, you know, police trying to say, hey, there's marauders in every police can you come out. There's going to be less police available because the government institutes continuity of government policies, meaning that instead of just, you know, three state patrol in with the governor, now there's 12. And the city council chair and the mayor, he now gets police. help and assistance, and we're putting police in charge of these critical resources. So when you need police the most in a collapse and marauders around, you're going to have less of them available because, again, the government's priority is keeping itself alive. They don't give a shit about you to him. I'm sorry. I agree. I agree. And that's why it's the idea of it'll be okay. The government has a plan in place. I think we saw four years ago, they don't have a plan in place.

But they want you to believe this. Yeah. Well, I think there's been a lot of people that woke up. I've been on this train for a long time. And I started looking around the room in 2020. I was like, it's getting crowded in here. There's a lot more people in this room now. You know, so like what you were talking about here with, you know, jokingly about running for office, kind of going back to that.

And then kind of taking an action plan here as we wind down. the idea that you presented earlier, which is that if you actually fix the power grade, it's going to cost so much that you lose your job kind of thing. One, term limits would solve that. But also, it sounds like it would take somebody who is very passionate about, let's just say you or somebody. I'm not trying to throw hints at you or anything, but somebody like you that's passionate about these things to have the sole focus.

this is what needs to get done. I'm going to run on it so that when, and I'm going to be honest with people and tell them, this is going to cost us more money, but it will save our lives. That way, when I win, I can just fulfill what I ran on. Do you think that's a possibility?

And on top of that, what do other countries' grids look like? If people talk about fortifying the grid, as somebody who doesn't know much about the stuff, like what does that even look like? Are we talking about putting electricity under the ground or what? Well, first of all, why isn't there a politician, right now? So there are a field.

So I'll name one of them that I happen to know of is Don Bacon. He's a congressman, a Republican in Nebraska. Remember that district in Nebraska, the odd one that, you know, could go independent of the rest of the state. It's like half Democrat. That's his district. And he won a re-election. But he's not a normal congressman. He's not a career politician.

He's a former Air Force colonel, just like me. off at Air Force Base is their strategic command, and he was at that base. So Don Bacon is for harboring the grid, and he's trying to push it, but, you know, he's got to go up against the utility law, this you're going to throw on hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations, and it won't work. You've got to defeat the perverted triangle, as I call it, the career politicians, the government officials, and the lawyers. That's the third group that is in this group that wants more laws, but law.

that make them powerful, not laws that respect our rights to prepare, to use our private property as we need to for survival and our own benefit. And so it's just too much. Our government has to be reformed to really fix this. Term limits is one of many reforms. It's probably the most important one. But without getting me into a lecture on the 9th and 10th Amendments, you know, until they follow the Constitution, we won't get our government bad.

But the 9th Amendment, which guarantees your natural. rights is not enforced, according to Merced. The 10th Amendment, which says the federal government can only do those programs, it's authorized in writing in the Constitution to do, otherwise they're unconstitutional. We can't do that that's not enforced. Hasn't been since 1937 in a Supreme Court case for FBR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the worst American in our history, although in public history text books written by public employees, public school teachers. You know, he's this great hero. Well, what he did is he forced the Supreme Court in the Halvering v. Davis case to declare his unconstitutional programs constitutional and ignore the 10th Amendment, and they did it.

And 99% of Americans don't know about that. That's wild. Well, our Constitution is effectively gone. There are no limits to government. They pass it anyone If they could put up a bill link to, you know, we put up a Tony Merkel celebration center, you know, in Tennessee, and funded with $20 million of federal funds. If your congressman wants, you could do that in Huntsboro. There's no limit to government anymore because our constitution is not enforced by the Supreme Court.

They quit doing it from 1937 only. They just quit enforcing the constitutional limits to government. So the Fortitude Ranch, we have a situation here that we presented during this conversation where, you know, let's just say the grid goes down. There's plenty of situations. Let's say the grid goes down. Because earlier you referenced, I think you said it'd take about two years to get the grid back up. In that, let's just be realistic. In that period of time, grids down, the United States is crippled. Our enemies will definitely take advantage of that. So the idea of rebuilding the grid is now exponential. financially harder because we're now dealing with invading countries. It takes at least a small army to be able to survive in this postmodern world. And so I would say Fortitude Ranch is the everyday man's solution to that. You're not spending $3 million for a bunker. You're paying reasonable fees to be able to have a backup plan in case something happens. So parting here, lay your case for 402 Ranch. And also my last question about 402 Ranch is, I'm assuming this is the case, but are you

guys looking to expand into different areas and stuff and different properties still? Or are you set on the eight locations? Oh, no, we're definitely expanding via franchising. So the last three locations have been open, Tennessee, New York, and Maine, they're all franchise locations. So especially if you have, or no someone who owns an RV park in a remote area. Those are ideal places because you've already made most of the investment you need for a 4-19. You've got to the land, you've got some facilities, bathroom septic systems, RV location, because we have RV memberships as well as, you know, reserving a room.

You can do an RV membership of 14 Ranch. So, yeah, we're definitely expanding. So anyone is interested in, you know, forming a 4thage ranch, just go to our website, Fortridge Ranch. a lot of information on franchising. And, you know, even if we had 100 locations, we wouldn't be sheltering 0.1% of the population. You know, we only get a few hundred per location.

So it would take, you know, millions of locations, not millions, but hundreds of thousands of locations to shelter the population. We're never going to get there. But our goal is hundreds of locations, not just eight. That's awesome. Well, I highly encourage people to check it out. I've been a big fan of 42 Ranch for quite some time.

So I love what you guys are doing there. I'll be talking to Chad more about visiting the Tennessee location. I'd love to check it out. So I appreciate you coming on, Dr. Miller. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. And I hope you don't run for Congress. No, never.

Never. I love it.