hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so as you can probably guess we've got some pretty big news today um today we are launching our youtube channel so this is something that a lot of people have been asking us to do for a long time um we have had a podcast for quite a few months now and it's been working out quite well but we understand that some people aren't really about the whole podcast format and don't necessarily like um like just listening to someone they're more visual learners so we thought that we would create a youtube channel that helped us host some of our more visual content so today we are launching that youtube channel with this with the topic of workplace safety more specifically how to egress from a building so if you're watching this on youtube you'll be able to see uh this this powerpoint that we created you know we're analysts so of course we had to revert back to a powerpoint for our first video but if you're listening to this to the audio of this on the um on the podcast we'll try to do our best to visualize what's going on on the screen but if you're listening to us on the podcast we highly recommend you go over and check us out on youtube because then you'll be able to sort of understand what we're talking about we wanted to pick a topic you know that's once again a very visual thing that we can't exactly explain in a podcast format so workplace safety why are we talking about workplace safety um well for one this is sort of a topic we've been working around internally for a long time now because it's a topic that is not often talked about right it's very rarely mentioned in the military community it's very rarely mentioned in the prepping community it's really not even mentioned in a sort of taboo a lot of times to talk about within the emergency preparedness community because a lot of times the emergency preparedness community is based off of existing government guidance and as we'll find out that's not necessarily the best thing to resort to in a time of crisis like this so our goal here is to have a data-driven approach um we are going to tackle quite a few uh questions and problems we're not um going to try to theorize whether or not you should evacuate or or how you should handle things in your own uh life mostly because we're not experts right so we're trying to create a process we're trying to examine things from an empirical standpoint and figure out how we can best point out things that you maybe haven't thought about yet basically this whole video is going to be about different considerations that you can go about right so you know as we stated you know this is not going to be a strictly a gearless video we're not going to list out a whole bunch of gear that you are going to need this is more of a considerations type video we will cover gear of course but we're not here to sell a product we don't get endorsed by anybody and for the most part that's going to be on you you're just going to be on you to figure out how to address the problems that we're going to lay out so once again like we said we're not experts not by any means but we do have some common sense right we're not able to perhaps contribute to producing a peer-reviewed scientific journal article on you know emergency escape and and things like that but we are able to use some data right we don't have to be scientists to understand the scientific method and sort of loosely use that as a guide for how to be just be better about preparing for these types of things right so that's really our goal is to not necessarily use you know it would take years to go through a a scientific study of all emergency situations and and then dissect them all and then figure out what's going on with each one of them and then provide recommendations so we're sort of applying both some scientific knowledge and some historical knowledge as well as a lot of common sense and what we think works so that's why we're going to kind of weave back and forth between historical records and what we think so and this is why one of the big things that we've run into is that a lot of research you know hundreds and hundreds of of pages and and hundreds of journal articles have been written about even just minute emergency situations and disasters everything from terrorist attacks to hurricanes have been researched heavily in depth the response has been and the research has been conducted by experts as as it should right the research has been conducted by experts in the field and it's for experts so it's conducted four experts by experts um research has also been conducted by experts to help civilians chances of survival so you've got experts trying to determine what's best for a civilian to figure out uh their way and you know how can the lay person better understand a complex situation some such as some of these emergencies that have come upon us but very very little very little uh research has been conducted by individuals on an individual basis to help their individual chance of survival so that's what we kind of hope to tackle today we're laypersons when it comes to emergency management we do have a little bit of experience you know community emergency response teams cert teams you know so various medical training throughout the you know over the years as well as austere environment medicine so um we're not exactly um strict newbies but we're not experts in any way we cannot give a lot of the advice that has been given by experts on this so we're just going to take you through our thought process and sort of what we do now that of course is going to vary right so we're our goal with this is once again to trigger thoughts and considerations for you so one of the good ways to do this is the good old risk management matrix now i know a lot of you are probably going to be triggered by this graphic as well you should be because it's kind of a thing that gets annoying over time but it's a really good way for examining risk so for those that have not um sort of figured out what this is you can research it on your own time but in short it's a chart that describes the likelihood of an activity on a scale of one to five uh you know from rare to almost certain combined with the consequences or the impact of that thing happening such as once again on a one to five scale such as from insignificant up to catastrophic so let's put this into a format that we can all kind of understand so this was our sort of risk management matrix um this is this one we created just for this video but this is similar to what our daily lives were like uh when we when we lived in the remote coastal pacific northwest area so we we lived there for a few years up in the [Music] washington state area and as you can see a few things were more prevalent than others for instance we can look at landslides for us in our specific area landslides had a medium impact but the likelihood that they would happen was very very high because we were in a remote area so as such the risk for a landslide happening would be high so when we when we understand that um when we put these sort of disaster scenarios and and um and circumstances on a chart like the risk management matrix we realize that things shift around a lot so depending on where you're at things could be a lot different such as when we move to the urban coastal mid-atlantic area so as you can see from the chart all of these things switched around a lot so suddenly landslides became a very low likelihood and also a low impact if they were to happen because we're not in a mountainous area and there's so many roads that it's almost it's extremely unlikely that any uh that our transit would be totally cut off whereas in the pacific northwest landslides could take out the only road going back to our house so um that's sort of what we are are focusing on now as you can see uh in the upper right hand corner of this chart the uh the thing that that we're sort of most concerned about now is uh civil unrest the likelihood that will happen in our specific area is very very high and the impact that it could have is very high so for us civil unrest at this point in time is an extreme risk now that's also uh leads into the point that over time these things change you know risk and the things you need to prepare for changes sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis right so like for instance you know two hours before the minneapolis riots kicked off two hours before those videotapes were released and just using minneapolis as an example the threat of civil unrest was extremely low right but as soon as those videotapes were released and that night fight and that night fell on that same exact day things got really really bad so that goes to show that there's a lot of variables that go into how risk works and once you get kind of an understanding on that once you sort of start thinking in the terms of risk management right it it helps you prepare your response and of course we don't you know that's not to say that you should just memorize the earth's management chart and then just be a a government robot like a lot of us are taught to be when it comes to osha and things like that you know that shouldn't happen as well you should you know think sometimes things aren't going to be on the chart right and sometimes sometimes you need to prepare for things that exactly that don't exactly have a risk they can't you know be be categorized by a number or a color or a chart so that is you know the one caveat to the risk management matrix and so then we come to this um this is of course an image that many people will be familiar with and this is the world trade center uh collapse so we're not going to get into the conspiracy theories or anything like that today we're just talking about the actual result the the actual uh result of the collapse and the reason that we're using the world trade center disaster as a good bench point for a lot of this is number one we have a lot of data we have so much data that it's almost impossible for one person to analyze over a period of time so the world trade center has been heavily studied by literally thousands of people from dozens of agencies and so we have a lot of understanding as to what went down when it comes to the actual impact of the planes the impact of the fires things like that so that's why we're using the world trade center as a good good jumping off point because a lot of the deaths that came from the world trade center by a lot of the reports that came out afterwards were definitely preventable so obviously the people that were living in the direct impact zone of the aircraft that was not a survivable situation but a lot of this a lot of the casualties that occurred we're not entirely sure how many right but we can say that the number of people that could have been saved but weren't is significant so um but you know once again we're not just prevented we're not just talking about you know 911 the absolute worst case scenario a complex multi multi-layered um covert attack on u.s soil that no one was expecting we're also talking about things like the grenfell tower fire of 14 june 2017 in the uk that was a simple a fire residential fire in an apartment building that started when a refrigerator caught fire but that fire spread very very quickly to the rest of the building almost immediately and it resulted in 72 deaths and only 223 people escaping now if you look at the ratio of deaths to escapees that's a very high number of people that died from this tower and the investigation is still ongoing because it turns out that a lot of the cladding on the side of the building played a big impact on it and as you can see here um just a simple peruse of wikipedia can find out that uh a lot of other fires have been started a lot of them resulting in fatalities due to the exact same construction features the exact same uh violent safety violations that occurred in grenfell tower also started fires in other buildings around the world from you know south korea to new jersey the same the same construction technique and the same factors that led to the casualties in the grenfell tower are present around the world so that just goes to show that we're not necessarily planning for a complex multi-layered massive terrorist attack but we're also planning on something that's a little bit more likely even just just the other day one of our writers sent us a message saying hey look my refrigerator caught fire in my house i mean literally you know there was some kind of leak it was just sitting there in the kitchen and i was working at the kitchen table on a report i was writing and i turned around and i smelled something like a you know like like rubber burning it turned around and there's smoke coming out from behind my refrigerator so these things can happen to you every day we don't necessarily are trying to say that 911 is something we should be prepared for every day we're also trying to prevent normal things like building fires so as one might expect this this video is really heavy uh on the fire and that's for a few reasons um we've become i suppose the word is slightly more paranoid after our local riots swept through our area and it's because of fire um so we can defend ourselves against you know armed invaders we can defend ourselves against you know people throwing rocks and bricks and stuff but one of the things that cannot be stopped by us alone is fire right so we're heavily reliant almost totally reliant on the fire department um to help us out with that and we as we saw in our local area and it was widely publicized in not just our area but also in minneapolis where it all started but also in new york atlanta california firefighters being attacked with bricks and molotov cocktails because they were trying to put out fires and the rioters were trying to burn as many things to the ground as possible so for us fire is a huge deal and as a result we learn we learn a lot from firefighters themselves right firefighters are are extremely good sources of information because fires have been going on for quite literally millennia and as such the technologies and firefighting and the especially the personal escape procedures have trained have changed radically so as we see here in this image we have a firefighter that is practicing egressing from a window on an upper story building and that's where we're going to spend the bulk of our time talking about our system for that because one of the things that not a lot of people are talking about we haven't seen anyone talk about this within the sort of um prepping type emergency preparedness community with the exception of one source has mentioned it and we'll talk about that in a second but this is a thing that goes on in every fire department in america and it's firefighter egress systems basically this is a a rather large pouch that they put in the pocket of their turnout coat that basically allows them to within just a few seconds escape a room and rappel down to the ground from a window and it's something that's very interesting to study and worth looking into more so if you want more information about this i highly recommend you look up firefighter egress systems it is a very very fascinating subject to delve into even if you you're not a firefighter it's something that's very interesting to do if especially especially if you work or live in a building that's say two or three stories or even taller than that um which you know we do we live in air and work in buildings which are more than one story so it's something to keep in mind especially for that so so this is essentially what the goal is and this is a photo of a firefighter that's egressing from a structure that's on fire he was unable to egress out of the room any other way and he's forced to use his last resort which is to go out the window and we don't want to see the repeat of you know the very infamous people that have been videotaped and photographed jumping from high-rise buildings because the fire was just too much we don't want that we we want to have at least some last ditch it may not be survivable right as you'll see when we get into this the firefighter escape system and egress package that we've sort of created is not foolproof by any means it is not something that you train on unless you are in a very controlled environment it is a very very much a last-ditch method but it is infinitely better than simply just jumping out the window and hoping for the best so uh one of the big things that we're also thinking about that no one seems to be talking about are the covid procedures and mitigations so one of the big trends that's going around in literally every single profession is these coveted barriers so as we see here in this image this is a a gem that has become very famous for setting up individual workstations uh workout stations that have you know they're basically just cubes of pvc tubing with plastic um set up all the way around them and to in order to for people to be able to work out without wearing a mask or something like that now on the face of this this may sound like a you know you can debate whether or not this is a good or bad thing however no one seems to be considering um that this is in fact a um very big fire risk um so let's just take this image here and let's darken it for a second so imagine that you're in a fire and of course the power is going to go out because the fire department the first thing they're going to do is cut power to the building so your lights are going to go out all right so it's going to get darker okay well now let's add in some smoke well you see how hard it is to be able to locate the doors and exits much less having to deal with you know multi-mill plastic that you can and plastic tubing that you can get entangled in so that's a big concern especially considering that our children are now being affected by this so this photo shows a lot of the procedures that classrooms are taking now we could not find an actual photograph of our local elementary school and primary schools which have the actual full cages around the children but we do have this artist's rendition of you know the new procedures for basically doing the same thing with these little cubes and sort of cages put around each child's desk and the child goes inside the plastic barrier and they are able to you know do their schoolwork without a mask on well here's the thing um this this plastic sheeting is not easy to tear through with your bare hands like you need a knife to cut through it especially if you can't get a good purchase on it if you're in duress if you can't see if you're panicking if you're already tired and sleepy you know sleep deprived you're already fatigued from having to run down multiple you know stairwells it's not going to be easy to to to cut through a lot of this stuff and then we also see which this image shows um a lot of the a lot of grocery stores and a lot of workplaces and businesses are now barricading their doors right if you've gone to a grocery store in america or even you know canada or you know with our brothers across the pond um over in the uk or in europe chances are you go into a grocery store they're going to tell you to go in one way and exit one way and in this case in this image of walmart they've actually stacked carts up in front of one of the doors to prevent entry and exit from it you know so that you can only enter one way well what happens if that door becomes suddenly an emergency exit can people run through that barrier of carts no they can't right so you create a bottleneck at the door and that just leads to more fatalities so when we go to our grocery store and we look around and we see that they've you know they've actually moved a lot of the grocery store aisles to um cover up a lot of exits and allow and not allow freedom of movement within the store we think you know how is this not a fire hazard and um it turns out that fire departments agree with us a lot of fire departments well i wouldn't say a lot of fire departments but several fire fire districts and fire commanders around the uh around the us have put out have put out social media posts citing that you have to make sure that you're still abiding by the fire code with all of these coveted procedures so this particular fire department put out a facebook page that said you know that says hey you know shower curtains guess what they're extremely flammable and prone to entrapping people so that's a that's a big concern for us right because this plastic sheeting is everywhere and here's the plastic sheeting that we're talking about a lot of this plastic sheeting is actually made can be bought at lowe's as you can see right here from the screenshot but you can also tell that it's made out of this little material called polyethylene and if we bring up our old magic google machine we can find a lot of different research that finds out that plastic sheeting made from polyethylene will burn big time when it hits by when it's hit by flames so the polyester the polyethylene plastic sheeting that is used in a lot of places is extremely extremely flammable so you've got a lot of times with these covered procedures plastic sheeting it's an entrapment hazard that's also flammable oh and burning plastic also sticks to your skin and you're now creating a an entrapment hazard combined with another fire hazard so that's kind of a big concern for us that we haven't seen anybody talk about within the community so we just wanted to kind of share that and get you thinking about these things because it is a big concern right and another concern that we sort of can't ignore is um conflict right so this is um more addressed to those um workplace concerns and a lot of the things that we're drawing on for this particular bit is the a study that was done by the university of sussex entitled the mass psychology of disasters and emergency evacuations a research report and implications for practice it was written by and compiled by dr john drury and dr chris cocking of once again the department of psychology university of sussex and a lot of the data we recommend you go ahead and download this and read it i think it was written in 2007 so it's not the newest information done on this but it does show and it does bring up a lot of interesting points and one of the interesting points it brings up is how to better communicate with people during a disaster if you're the government agency that's responding to a disaster how to communicate with people in such a way that they'll believe you because as we can see here by this article one of the big concerns on 9 11 this article was written by the way i think two days after 9 11. one of the big concerns were people being extremely angry the survivors of it were being were angry after not immediately after 9 11 because the port authority uh told everyone to go back inside the building because we have to remember what actually happened during 9 11. one you know the world trade center uh when the first tower was hit there were a lot there was a lot of debris falling from that first tower so people were told to stay inside because it was the conventional wisdom was that even for a plain impact on the world trade center it was safer inside the building because people had already been killed that morning from falling debris and big shards of glass and and steel girders that were falling that were the size of vehicles so the port authority and a lot of the fire chiefs and a lot of the authorities that were responding to the initial aircraft impact were telling people to go back inside we have multiple multiple stories i'll just read this one right quick um but he told the observer that as he ran downstairs i heard people being told the building is secure the safest place is inside stay calm and do not leave that's what they were saying they were telling people to go back up to their offices and their desks like the building was not in danger right so that's just one story of many in fact here's another story this is more well known um this is the story of um stanley primeknith which i'm sure butchering that name but um that's how i believe it's pronounced um and we'll just read that one right quick for those listening on the podcast that primeknit had initially evacuated the building after the first plane had hit the north tower but was told to go back inside once he had arrived back at his office on the 81st floor he was on the phone when he noticed the second plane coming right at him he screamed and jumped under his desk as the plane was hitting the building after the impact primenoth found himself alive under his desk with only minor injuries stanley primeknith was a hero that day because he helped a stranger get egress out of the building because after that happened he of course egressed and you can read his story on your own but the point is is that he was he was outside the building he was on the street right he was safe and they told him to go back inside and he made it up 81 floors while there was a major terrorist attack in progress because he didn't know any better right and he was a very very lucky man that day because the plane hit below him and he was able to egress down past it during through the one staircase that had not been completely destroyed so um just little things like this are things that we're trying to to help people to think about so and that sort of leads us to this point of you know thinking do i need to evacuate even though my boss and the police say not to and that's something that you're going to have to evaluate for yourself because as we all know despite what people write in reports and despite what people say on tv and and romanticize things afterwards um we do have to remember that not every employing agency abides by osha right they do not and even osha themselves don't enforce a lot of things that they should um i can remember quite a few i think every single job i've ever had you know outside the military inside the military there's been some kind of osha violation that was a serious safety hazard right and you couldn't report it because if you reported it they'd know it was you and if they knew it was you they'd make your life miserable so um that's something that you're gonna have to kind of figure out how to get around yourself uh we haven't really found a good way to do that we can certainly google ourselves and you know tell you guys to google like how do i confidentially report osha violations and things like that but really i think the the best method is to just be aware and to take measures uh if you're if you're working in a company or in an employing agency and you know that there's no way on earth you're going to be able to egress out of your building if something goes down i mean like for instance you think there's no way you're going to be able to talk your boss into being able to let you evacuate because oh that fire alarm's going off oh it's just a drill you know i can't tell you how many times i've heard that myself so um yeah it's it's a it's a big concern i can't tell you how many times i've had to stay inside a skiff while the building i was in was actually on fire only to have a fire axe come through my skiff door because they were trying to get people out of there and hadn't realized that there were still three of us in the skiff because we were told to stay by the lieutenant commander navy lieutenant commander who had left himself so we realize these situations exist we're not going to ignore them and we're not going to sugarcoat them like a lot of these government reports will do but we do need to say that we don't have a good solution for you we just need you to to think about what you can do and if you're in that situation you're going to have to take a lot more preparations than what we're what we're going to recommend and what we're what we do so that's just something to consider another thing to consider is the longevity of of a disaster as we can see here in this image we have the the world trade center and um just how look how many floors were affected so that on the on the uh wtc2 the south tower the the impacted zone was from the 85th floor down to the 77th floor that's a lot that's a huge distance and likewise on the wtc one uh on the on the north tower it was from the 99th floor down to the 93rd floor so that is a very long distance right even the systems that we have would not have saved us have we been above those above the impact zone but really what we wanted to call your attention to is at the bottom of the screen here um it the wtc 2 collapsed after 56 minutes and wtc one collapsed after 102 minutes so these are not immediate things uh a lot of the a lot of the casualties that um were injuries or the or the survivors or the people that basically were in the towers but made it out in some way um a lot of them were able to make it out because there was plenty of time we're talking at you know we're talking you know almost an hour for the shortest time you know in over an hour and a half for the other tower they had plenty of time to egress and get out of there so we just want to stress that you know what you know the the tower collapsed at minute 102 right so at minute 101 people were still in that tower debating well should i go down you know they're still stuck on like the third or fifth floor you know third or fourth or floor or they're still stuck up god forbid above it you know so up until the minute it collapsed no one thought that those towers would collapse so that's just something to remember as well is that yes you may have time but you don't know how much time you might have and we have this concept of complacency that happens over time for instance you know the longer a disaster goes on without a change in in severity um the more likely people are to become complacent so that that did happen a lot at the world trade center disaster because you know well it's been up in the you know it's been uh half an hour since the plane impacted it and the building's still going strong there's no reason to think it'll fall right that kind of mentality cost a lot of lives that day so that's something to keep in mind as well and you know once again this is kind of a schematic of of what the wtc one the actual visual evidence of fires these are the windows that you could see fire in from the ground and from the air and as you can see this would have been very very very hard to survive had you been working or been located above the impact zone we can theorize about wtc all day long but the fact of the matter is is that even the systems that we have created for ourselves are not foolproof right it would be very very hard to do so and then likewise with wtc2 this one is a little bit different because this one of course it's always debatable but you can see the difference there's much much less fire in wtc2 and there was there was no visible fire on the west face so um that just shows you a a a difference between the two um and basically how even the same disaster can be very very different buildings which are have essentially the identical structure and they were hit with essentially the the the same attack can be very very different uh depending on just a few different factors so um and then moving on to you know this is the uh nist report nist report that was put out there have been hundreds of reports put out about 9 11 but one of the big ones was one of the big takeaways that we got from this report at the time was the milling about right one of the things that hampered evacuation was um as it says here i'll just read it out for the podcast listeners that you know normal response to uncertain but urgent circumstances involving information seeking information exchange and observation basically that boils that uh boiled down that means that people knew something had happened but they didn't know how severe it was and they couldn't see anything right they knew there was a fire they knew that the people in the second tower knew that a plane had hit the first tower because that that was um very obvious from the very start but people in the towers it took them a little bit to find the information about what had exactly happened had a bomb going off as it happened before and they had trained for and things like that and then another concern is here on the slide this is preparatory behaviors gathering materials phone calls making phone calls computer backups and shutdowns things like that basically people tidying up their desk and and closing things down for work just like they're going home for the day and that is a common theme among pretty much every disaster that hits a workplace people people report revert to habit people also don't have the the idea of i need to get out of dodge now and it's difficult to convey a sense of urgency plus we have to remember that uh that you know as it says here on the slide that no first responder interviewed by nist uh thought that the world trade center towers would collapse not a single first responder out of thousands of first responders that were there none of them thought the towers would collapse so that goes it goes to show you that your disaster might be a new one in the book right our disaster prevention guides and textbooks and all of our doctrine for emergency response whether it be something like the world trade center or something like a terrorist attack guess what all of that doctrine is based off of the last disaster it's based off of sometimes 10 20 30 year old logic and a lot of times that's not good enough in the case of the world trade center it was definitely not good enough um i think that you know this is not to of course this is not to demonize anyone or or or put down anyone who was there i you know we can talk all day long about how how awesome the response was and how you know i think that 9 11 was the most patriotic day that we can remember in u.s history but we do have to recognize that despite the fact that all of the first responders did the best they could and even did better than they should have considered the circumstances we've got to remember that it's not good enough we should always strive to be better and one of the big other takeaways here on the slide is it says in the upper right hand corner there was a quote from one of the survivors of tower 2 and the quote reads i was there during the 1993 bombing i did evacuate with a group of people who had no clue as to where we were going what i learned from that experience was to not trust the port authorities announcements had i not experienced that i might have listened to the port authority announcement and stayed put right so throughout the disaster the port authority was you know putting out announcements that says hey stay here um they they frequently you know i think one of the first ones was for everyone to go to the 60th floor go back up inside the building to the 60th floor where there is a an emergency staging area and you know that that cost a lot of lives that day so one one must remember that yes this research that's done by experts is probably the best research we have because you know research is better than no research at all but you also have to remember that common sense dictates a lot of things and we can't arm share a quarterback the 911 incident but we can say that we can arm share a quarterback our own disasters during the time that they're going on we can certainly say hey they're telling me this i need to do this that's perfectly fine that's what we're encouraging to do but once again it requires a lot of a lot of extra factors that we'll go over in a second so like i said this topic has has not really been touched on by a lot of people i think one of the the the good resources on youtube that's the more famous resource is the urban prepper i'm sure a lot of our uh listeners and and followers and people that are you know sort of in our network are aware of the urban prepper um the urban pepper you know is a guy who lives in pacific northwest um puts out a lot of videos on youtube and is you know an extreme um extremely organized he's well known for one his urban content right his urban you know bug out bags and uh disaster preparedness he's known for his little kids he's got i think he's got a kit for pretty much everything but he's also known for extreme organization so if you want to learn more we highly recommend you checking out the urban prepper by no means not a perfect resource but you know what it's got a lot of good information out there so if you're into that sort of thing that's a good resource to follow up on because we're certainly not experts in the field but you know he's got a lot of good points about things and i don't think any prepper is really an expert in the field i think that we're all doing the best we can because you know prepping and emergency preparedness and just having a generally good situational awareness and and thought process and plan that's not exactly that's not an exact science by any means right um so we're just trying to do the best we can and i think um you know this is one of the very few resources is actually talked about it um but unfortunately when we start going down the prepping road this is where we have to bring up prepping and immediately bash it is that prepping usually has a few stigmas associated with it which we'll talk about in a minute but one of the big things people get hung up on is the gear the gear the gear the gear we've done it ourselves i think i spent probably the better part of my boy scout days amassing a collection of military surplus gear and all kinds of things that are you know cool little gadgets and knives oh my gosh i probably got you know 100 knives and a drawer somewhere in my house but yeah we tend to get hung up on the gear a lot of times and that's not necessarily what we're going for right sure there is an interesting matrix um i couldn't find it for this video but um there is a matrix i think it was sort of talked about first by dave canterbury and the the logic is is that the more knowledge you have the less gear you need with you likewise the less knowledge you have the more gear you need to make up for that lack of knowledge that's why um bushcrafting is such a big hobby amongst people because bushcrafting the idea right is of course you know self-reliance and things like that you know bushcraft type setups and you know you just google the term bushcraft you know camping or bushcraft hiking or just bushcraft in youtube and you'll find a bunch of people you'll know exactly what style it is you know and it's not about um taking you know highly complex gear into the woods it's about doing more with less now likewise consequently we do have to have gear right there's no amount of knowledge that can save you from jumping out of a building there is no amount of knowledge that can protect you from breathing and fire right so we do have to have some gear but we also have to remember that it's not just about the gear and we ourselves have a hard time sometimes uh remembering that because we're definitely um definitely gear heads here we definitely like our gear and like our cool gadgets and you know as soon as our paycheck lands guess what it's probably getting spin on some camping gear or something or a gun part or something but but yeah it's just to remember that we don't want to fall into the trap of building kits right we don't want to fall into the trap of building bags right we want to get into the mindset of knowledge above everything else so that's where we're going to start if you want to start with the whole line system kind of going back to the urban prepper i'm not sure if he's the one who invented it but he definitely talks about a lot of his earlier videos and it's become basically a lot of doctrine nowadays of different lines right you know line one being the things you have the gear and the things you have in your pockets and on your person line two is you know like on your your your play carrier your chest rig or whatnot and line three is like your backpack right and you go on from there but we're going to start here we're going to use that as a rough guide right but we're going to start with line zero and that's the stuff that's inside your head right um and one of the big things if we're if we're going along with you know the fire theme here we're very heavy on fire this uh this particular episode because it's such a big concern for us just knowing where your fire exits are you know how many people just think to yourself right now you work in an office if you work in an office your office is required to have a fire evacuation plan okay well are do you know where that is do you know where that placard is on the wall because it's required to be posted do you have a picture of that evacuation plan on your phone that you can show to a firefighter and tell them hey my co-worker the last time i saw them was here do you have that and if not you probably should take steps to correct that likewise when you stay in a hotel how many of you take a picture of the fire evacuation map when you get into your hotel because a lot of times you know hotels at least in the united states are required to have the evacuation map like on the back of the door or something like that but i've stayed in many many hotels in southeast asia that don't have that at all so that's something to keep in mind as well you know either the placard is gone or it's just a bad hotel and you know trust me these things tend to compound right so if your hotel is not following the code by posting your evacuation plan from your room to the emergency exit chances are they probably skimped on some of the other fire protection methods as well so that is once again something to keep in mind so another thing is know where your first aid slash fire equipment is at we're not talking about strictly fire things nowadays because in a lot of workplaces and a lot of public places a big concern nowadays is active shooting or some kind of altercation or or something involving a gunshot wound so a lot of places a lot of workplaces are implementing these bleeding control kits as we see here in an image um and a lot of people they're new right so everyone you know pretty much everybody can roughly guess where their fire extinguisher is but then do they know where the bleeding control kit is for their workplace something once again to think about another thing to think about is um do i the status and the exact layout of your offices workplaces the place you spend your time that's not your home what is the sprinkler situation is there do you have a sprinkler do you have stand pipes outside that the fire department can hook up to do you have automatic sprinklers do you have no sprinklers at all but you do have reliable alarms something to you know be very considerate of because a lot of this stuff matters and then another thing to be considered about to think about is not necessarily fire but also flooding right so this here is a map of a flood area not a whole lot of people know and you can google this yourself but fema has a flooding map that you can actually type your address in and find your workplace and it will tell you whether or not your workplace is in a flood zone and news flash pretty much every building on earth is in a flood zone the question is what has to flood first so for instance our work center is not so much a huge risk for flooding but um considering it's it's like a hundred feet above sea level i think so basically if our office building gets flooded and in our house is even higher than that so um if our workplace or our or if our house gets flooded um basically the whole east coast is gonna be under water right it's gonna be an apocalyptic scenario right so this is not something you can exactly prepare for however the route that i have to drive from my house to my office is under sea level it is def it definitely goes right through a flood zone and there is no way i can get back to my house from my place of work if there if a flood happens because literally my house sits on uh my little geographic area the the general area which i live in is in a um area it's in a uh on a hill same thing with my office and though basically if there's a flood in my area guess what my office will be an island my house will be an island i can't get to one of the other if there's a flood so that you know that prior knowledge that prior research can save you a lot of time and uh it is something to consider so for instance if if you know if i'm at work can i get a notification that says hey heavy rain is expected within the next few hours and i just research it more and find out oh dear there's a flood warning for you know for a flood watch on until like 9 00 pm tonight guess what i'm going to pull chalks i'm going to leave work and go home early if i can and that will allow me to make sure that i'm at least at my place of place of residence before the flooding starts now if you don't have that flexibility if you have to stay at work basically until your building catches fire and then even then a few minutes afterwards to tidy the place up a bit if you live in and work in that type of environment we've been there with you trust me i i feel for you but you're gonna have to have a lot of you're gonna have to be have the capability of staying at your work or staying nearby the places you can walk to if you can't make it back to your house um and and this kind of you know to ending on the knowledge note we wanted to bring up kind of an interesting facet of of you know practicing with your gear right um it's become sort of white well not so widely known but widely known throughout the the um commercial survival uh industry that um we have the case study here brought up that the you know the famous uh captain sully landing on the hudson you know u.s airways flight 1549 um there were 150 people on board right they were landing in the water so basically that safety brief right that you get when you fly like people who have never flown before had never set foot on an airplane but have seen that in movies they've heard comedians talk about it they've seen it in popular culture like somebody it's so pervasive throughout society and so taken advantage of by comedians in the late 80s early 90s that everybody knows what generally what the safety brief is when you get on an airplane even people have never flown before but despite this there were 150 people on board that air aircraft only 33 of those people managed to take their life vests with them after the plane had come to a stop and they had begun evacuation procedures and of those 33 only four people were wearing their life jacket correctly so despite the fact that they had been lectured on this literally less than half an hour before right because the the incident took took place after takeoff it was immediately after the safety brief and they still failed to do it only four people out of 150 were able to take that knowledge understand it know where the life jacket is and be able to put that into use during an actual no kidding textbook survival scenario right so if you cannot do that if you cannot fall back on your knowledge right because we remember we fall back on the most basic level of knowledge right and for a lot of people grabbing their life jacket when they get off the airplane that's not uh base level base levels just get off the aircraft that's their highest level of training so we have to remember that training training training is the key here you have to remember that even though you know something even though you've read something when a disaster goes down you might not be able to put it into practice so that's sort of um a very very important topic that we cannot emphasize enough but moving on to line one this is the stuff you're wearing and carrying on your person now the first thing we have pop up here is a cobra belt with a cobra riggers belt with a d-ring attachment this is kind of essential right if if you work in a job where you're able to wear a web belt i.e in the military you better do so because this type of thing is pretty much mandatory if you don't have this you're not you're not going to be able to get very far now likewise if you have a job where you can't wear a belt like that you can also get which is what just popped up on the screen here one of these um simple bdu utility belts that cost about five bucks you can get them and they usually come in one size you just cut it to length and it rolls up extremely tightly and you could just put it in your bag and not worry about it and it will work just fine of course it doesn't have the d-ring loop and of course it takes a few uh extra seconds to don vice a belt you're already wearing but it will do in a pinch right so that's something that we're going to be relying on heavily here in a second up next is the pants you're wearing right or the clothes you're wearing so not a whole lot of people are um take advantage of the things they have and as you can see here in this pair of pants i'm sorry for our podcast listeners it's kind of hard to to illustrate but um uh these dotted lines going from the waist belt all the way down to almost the end of the ankle that's how we have rigged up a small short strand of paracord so you can take a paracord and you can loop it around your belt and then feed it down inside your pant leg so that it's almost reaching the floor and you can actually double it up and get upwards of 15 20 25 feet down your pant leg and it's practically unnoticeable for the military guys out there and for some of the civilians who w

the night was cool for summertime but claude terrell the owner of the world famous restaurant la tour de geant had more pressing matters he and the rest of the restaurant staff as well as their families had just completed their grueling and back-breaking task and not a moment too soon a few weeks later this lavish restaurant would be void of the usual patrons the fine tuxedos and beautiful evening gowns of french high society would give way into an ocean of icy grey uniforms and shiny leatherwoods the occupation had begun so when a few german cargo trucks pulled up outside the restaurant claude was not surprised in fact all was going to plan as a man swaggered up to him claude could tell that he was in charge of this troop one could always detect the sneering aristocratic air of a general's aid waving around a fistful of papers as was stereotypical of the occupiers the man did not hesitate to drop the chilling name of his master herrmann garing gehring had sent this weasel on the express mission to seize their stock of 1867 bordeaux some of the most prized vintages in the world but claude simply shook his head with sadness claiming that those bottles had already been drunk the sniveling little man of course did not believe him but searching the vast wine cellar made it clear all of the rare vintages were long gone not to be outdone and returned empty-handed gehring's aide successfully cleaned out most of the wine from the cellar stealing over 80 000 bottles over the next few weeks and months but that unassuming building on the banks of the river san the restaurant that had served kings and queens for centuries was very good at keeping secrets [Music] as the nazi war machine rolled through paris the spoils of war were a vital part of the wartime economy for the german high command the invasion of france served many strategic and political purposes but also cultural and social purposes as well paris the heart and soul of european culture world renowned for its art and culture was a grand prize for the nazi occupiers as a result paris became a great place for rest and recreation for the occupiers in fact every german soldier was promised a liberty pass to visit paris at least once and immediately after the occupation the streets of paris were filled with the clacking sounds of thousands of jack boots on the cobblestone streets france and especially paris was of course a great military target for germany but a huge motive for the nazification of france was psychological in nature after the occupation all of the clocks in france were set to german time all the road signs were changed to the german language and all traces of france's government were covered with bright red swastikas this psychological warfare was important to the german military for one it increased some morale since most germans had thought that france's punishments and isolationism towards germany after world war 1 was unjust and therefore german soldiers pillaging and plundering paris for spoils of war was not viewed as theft but taking back what was rightfully theirs so there was an element of dehumanization to the occupation as was common throughout germany in the lead-up to the holocaust for the french a traditionally very romantic and passionate culture the black eye of having their nation plundered was a huge hit to their morale of the greatest of these economic and psychological beatings was that of the plundering of french wine france has been the epicenter and world leader in wine production for centuries producing hundreds of millions of bottles even during the war the export of fine french wines was such an important part of german wartime economy that adolf hitler himself commissioned the institution of vine fears or officials that would oversee the export of wine from nazi-controlled french territories this was not only because french wine was so valuable on the export market and therefore could sustain germany's wartime economy a little bit but also because it was a steady supply of alcohol for the german army in addition to being a dagger in the side of france's ego so a triple win for germany over the centuries france's place at the top of the charts for wine production and quality have become heavily ingrained in french culture as it is today but during the war wine became an allegory the nazis taking france's treasured wines was akin to trampling on a nation's soul a patriotic symbol of that nation so it made sense for the nazis to rob france of her precious wines it wasn't only great for german morale but also a slap in the face to the spirit of the french people the french resistance movement during world war ii has become legendary a romanticized tale of the underdog defeating the most technologically advanced army in the world but stepping away from the traditional stories of resistance one little known and often forgotten story lies in the dark corners of a wine cellar wanting to protect some of their nation's most vital resources in industry french vintners quietly created some of the most elaborate resistance networks the world has ever seen all with the goal of ensuring that not a drop of france's finest ever made it into a nazi's glass among the most famous of examples is the story we mentioned in the beginning that of the smuggling operations conducted in secret at the paris restaurant latur darjant recognizing the risk to their vast wine collection when the nazis invaded claude terrell and countless others worked around the clock to construct a false wall in the wine cellar below the restaurant this hidden part of the cellar concealed the most valuable and rare bottles while the rest of the cellar was filled with bottles that were filled with the cheap stuff but they didn't stop there winemakers throughout france created intricate schemes to prevent the theft of their precious wines a favorite tactic was to swap the labels on wine bottles turning a bottom shelf rotgut wine into a rare vintage they would collect dust and cobwebs to cover the new and cheap wine bottles with making them seem old and vintage while concealing the truly rare and valuable wines in secret rooms and complexes the wine making industry was also heavily involved in what we think of as the traditional french resistance with winemakers smuggling people in wine barrels or blowing up trains laden with wine that was to be exported to germany the vast network of wineries in the resistance also meant that intelligence could pass quite literally through the grapevine intelligence operatives quickly learned that most major german offensives were preceded by orders for vast quantities of alcohol in the time-honored tradition of getting troops ready for battle this proved quite useful and intelligence gathered from orders of wine and champagne were passed on to british intelligence in one case french wineries were requested to specifically cork and package the wine to withstand extreme heat which not only confirmed rommel's imminent offensive into north africa but also gave a relatively precise timetable for when the campaign would begin some of the more clever and humorous resistance methods were for winemakers to directly target the gastrointestinal fortitude of the germans by stocking up on au de satine which translates to purgative water or laxatives and over at the bollinger headquarters the staff figured out that their local vine viewer was actually a portly fellow being quite overweight so when he came to visit they offered him a small very thin chair in which to sit that could obviously not take his weight therefore he was forced to stand for his entire visit and rumor has it that he never personally visited the vollinger facilities ever again so even with the most technologically advanced military and with total control over an occupied nation pride and embarrassment were still valuable weapons all of these great stories of resistance and national unity are great and all but we would be quite negligent if we did not point out the dirty laundry of french resistance at the time this will be greatly important in just a moment despite these interesting and motivating stories that tend to over romanticize the situation the french resistance as a whole was actually not that efficient of an organization in fact there wasn't really one single organization at all as one might think a lot of people think that the french resistance was a hierarchical and unified organization with a highly networked infrastructure in the command system this is simply not true the reality of the time was that throughout the war there wasn't really one main coordinated resistance effort but rather pockets of resistance throughout the nation and many of these pockets of resistance hated each other french culture has historically been very interesting not unlike the current issues in the us actually and during the war you have lots of different resistance groups that are composed of people that are just ever so slightly ideologically different from one another so what you get is hundreds of resistance groups that all have their own motivations and most of which don't end up working well with one another let us also not forget that the vast majority of french fighting aged males were not a huge factor for the resistance being interred in german labor camps as soon as germany invaded or otherwise forced to work in some capacity to supply the german war machine in other words there weren't a whole lot of strong young men that had a lot of free time to conduct clandestine operations in nazi occupied france and this was also very much well known by the allied high command upon the creation of the special operations executive or soe when they began supplying and coordinating resistance efforts they found that they did not have as many potential operatives as they first thought and what few resistance groups could form they were highly factionalized also despite what the history channel tells you most historians generally agree that around 2 percent of france's population at the time was actively involved in the resistance that's a pretty small number considering the great national pride that france currently puts on their resistance but once you get down into the weeds of the history and atmospherics of the time this low number of resistance fighters actually kind of makes sense a big factor was that resistance activity was very dangerous and often did not achieve their desired result plus families were often in a state of conflict as when a family member engaged in any actions against the germans that put the entire family and sometimes the whole town at risk this is a problem inherent to guerrilla movements fighting an occupying force the occupier not targeting the gorillas but the civilian population creating resentment between guerrilla fighters and the civilian population a population that they need the support of to have any chance at success so what all of this adds up to is a lot of uncoordinated groups many of which hate each other more than they hate the germans but all being supplied with small arms and explosives air-dropped by the allies conducting insanely risky operations most of the time for very little gain in the end and alienating a good portion of the population who want to avoid reprisals by the germans sounds very different from the romanticized history that we have been led to believe so what can we learn from these stories of resistance during wartime and apply them to our current situation one of the most important takeaways is the concept of the effectiveness of economic warfare napoleon was most certainly correct an army marches on its stomach adapted for today's world this idea becomes a tyrant operates with your money whether it's a few meme bros on reddit costing the untouchables of the world billions of dollars or if it's unsatisfied disney customers creating their own show to prevent cancel culture economic warfare is one of the most valuable tools we have in today's world yes it is true that currency has very little worth because it isn't a finite source and as such powerful people quite literally can print out more money but the metric that currency cannot accurately measure nowadays is value value itself is a currency and it is a hard to quantify one at that that's why wine had a great value during the war economically investing in a currency at the time was not really ideal as by the time france was fully occupied following the german southern expansion into vichy france the concept of money wasn't really a stable market but physical things had value such as wine so by softly sabotaging the wine industry the french people were able to quite significantly affect nazi operations but we must remember that statistic only two percent of french people at the time participated in resistance efforts so we must remember that the french wine industry did not take a scorched earth policy but rather chose to slowly bleed the german empire from within if the french had destroyed all of their wineries that would have caused a severe blow to the french economy which remember the french people were thinking about things after the war even before the occupation that's why most wineries decided to band together during the height of the occupation with the goal of conducting more of a soft passive resistance rather than a guns ablazing rebellion blowing up their own refineries and burning their vineyards was not exactly ideal but hiding their good wine and slowing down production would ensure that they had resources equipment and value after the war which by this point was turning in the allies favor with the landings in italy plus they knew that the germans were not playing around and would not hesitate to kill them all if they found out that the wine makers were intentionally sabotaging their products but in a sentiment that is echoed throughout time it is rarely a crime to be bad at your job which is an idea that french winemakers took to heart in modern times it appears that this idea is being carried forward during the coveted crisis last year during the height of this supposed crisis the federal government went into wartime mode forcing companies to produce things like masks sanitation products and ventilators well we also know now that there is a good amount of evidence that the federal government also outright stole medical supplies from private or state-run medical facilities so as to increase their own stockpile realizing that the federal government is probably the least efficient entity on the planet most hospitals entered into a free-for-all mode trying to get as many resources for themselves as they could this was done knowing that the federal government was incapable of adequately meeting needs in a timely manner some states turned to treachery because of this politicians in new york city actively lied about the true number of coveted cases so as to hoard resources and more importantly federal grant money to themselves resources that never got used other places took a more sneaky route providing the federal government with broken ventilators presumably keeping the working ventilators for themselves we know that this occurred because when california tried to cry wolf that their coveted cases were increasing the federal government swooped in and gave them ventilators that they presumably stole from somewhere else ventilators that were allegedly broken so if this is true which we haven't really been able to verify but assuming that it is true that would mean that some hospital or probably lots of hospitals knowingly and willingly gave the federal government defective devices keeping the functional ones for themselves they knew that if the federal government had the ventilators it would be very unlikely that they would actually be able to put them where they were needed in time when it comes to allocating resources in an emergency the government is always a day late and a dollar short or more accurately five days late in a pallet of water short but if hospitals kept the ventilators for themselves they would be able to use them in seconds rather than the days it would take the federal government to send them days that patients don't have some people did this for the money like in new york but in many unnamed hospitals across the country we cannot help but wonder how many hospital administrators intentionally did this so that they would not have the feeling of watching a patient die because they loaded a ventilator onto a truck only for it to sit in a warehouse somewhere we will likely never know how many silent heroes made this tough decision just like during the war in our modern times we also have to worry about factional disputes as we all know by now every day that goes by the powerful people that more or less run the world have spent a lot of time effort and money to keep these factions going against each other they don't really care who's on top as long as everyone is fighting each other instead of them so when it comes to economic sabotage in the modern era we cannot discount this factionalization for many groups in the united states if their adversarial group were to not exist their primary adversary would be the federal government so by having a group that is adversarial this enables the federal regime to not bear the full brunt of a united populace against them which is why governmental agencies are doing everything short of openly encouraging conflict between social groups much like many french resistance groups in 1940 the factionalization in america has reached an almost comical level i mean just look at the republican party there are people in the republican party that are just ever so slightly different from each other in fact these differences are so slight that if you were on the outside looking in you wouldn't think that there are any differences at all but these microscopic differences are such a big deal nowadays with every group that people are willing to kill each other over a difference that is so minute that one would be hard pressed to actually find that difference at all just as with resistance movements in france groups that are fighting each other aren't fighting the occupying force so encouraging at least non-aggression pacts between factions was just as important in 1940 as it is today overall mission success and effectiveness is also a huge factor to consider as just like during the war we in modern times have to be concerned with the effectiveness for much the same reasons this is where the concept of combined operations comes into play during the war french resistance fighters were all about that action at first willingly taking out bridges killing sentries stealing equipment and all the stuff that we see in movies but very soon this became a pipe dream see the germans soon instituted a policy that for every german killed by the resistance they would execute 100 captured french resistance fighters and for every german wounded they would execute 50. of course by the end of the war these executions turned into mass killings of civilians in many cases these extremely high stakes made it very unlikely that even hardened resistance members would do something like blow up a bridge which usually had a century or two at it it simply wasn't worth it for them this was especially unlikely considering that if the resistance were to take out a bridge a single bridge in the middle of nowhere it wouldn't really do much the bridge would be repaired and 100 citizens dead the next morning however if resistance groups could be coordinated to all take out a bridge or railway crossing all at once and immediately before something like the normandy invasion well this would make these efforts worth it so what does that mean for the modern times well this idea certainly takes a less aggressive stance since the us is not being invaded by an outside force but we can adapt to this idea for our modern nation people have noticed that protests don't really work and they usually don't on their own politicians simply don't care what you think it doesn't matter how loud you scream your opinion in the street nobody cares but if you were to combine a protest with a walkout and with a boycott and with a sit-in all on a very important and busy day that could actually make quite a difference in fact a group called the albert einstein institution has developed a master list of 198 non-violent resistance actions that can successfully be used against a tyrannical or dictatorial system their founder dr gene sharp was before his death in 2018 largely considered the father of modern non-violent resistance tactics and as such his organization remains dedicated to this idea but even if we have a list of 198 different tactics and techniques in order for them to be effective they cannot be used in a solitary manner but rather combined together an attitude of non-compliance combined with a boycott combined with the establishment of independent currencies and economies these would not only be vastly effective at giving back people their freedom but also take power away from dictatorial systems and since power is a zero-sum game any power that you create for yourself is taking power away from the untouchables of the world why do you think that the entire concept of self-defense is such a target for these people so going down this list of 198 non-violent actions you will notice that many of these tactics are quite familiar in fact the political left in the united states has been using these tactics against the political right for a long time now even if they themselves don't know it entities like blm and antifa have used many of these tactics like sit-ins and protests in conjunction with more violent means such as harassment property destruction and rioting in order to get their message across but these efforts have been quite ineffective in many areas due to their polarizing alienating and inflammatory rhetoric which is something that we should learn from and that forming a group such as blm or antifa pretty much guarantees that a group will not be around for very long blm is like a firecracker it burns bright for a short time and may break some stuff but after a while it dies out because it ends up alienating everyone who might have been an ally same thing with the bugaloo movement but that movement suffered from other downfalls as well so seeing as our own invasion if you want to call it that isn't a bunch of panzers rolling across the countryside but rather a lot of suits and ties signing a lot of documents we have to realize that resistance to our current tyranny can draw similarities to the resistance movements over time but at the end of the day this fight is our own think about it if the french people who were fighting an outside invading force that was already known for its gruesome brutality and for its mass killing of civilians basically the worst of the worst if the french people were never really able to unite one voice against them until the allied armies had already landed in france just how easy do you think it would be to get people to unite together in the united states right now getting people to form together and not fight each other is 99 of the battle tactical gear and small unit tactics are honestly a small almost afterthought when it comes to the priorities of a strategic campaign yes we absolutely can learn from the french resistance but the lessons we should learn are not necessarily how to live in the woods and blow up trains but rather how to get groups to work together against an oppressive force how to hide and conceal value so as to have an advantageous position when other people expect you to be at a disadvantage how to conduct various trade craft such as building secret facilities from which you can plan operations or hide friends and family in relative safety more than time pencils we need actual pencils more than limpet minds we need hearts and minds this is why we should learn from those french wine makers in 1940 for them outright resistance meant death and the same fate awaits american citizens today if they were to speak out or take action against powerful people though right now we are unlikely to be stood up against a wall for exercising our first amendment a single tweet can not only result in you losing your job but can also result in law enforcement targeting you the mob targeting your home your bank accounts getting shut off and your entire life being sent into a downward spiral and all because of a single tweet for the winemakers getting caught conducting even low-level acts of sabotage meant certain death for american citizens a much more lenient but still horrific fate awaits anyone who gets caught but passive resistance and covert low-level actions were how they fought their war and these sentiments will definitely help us now so even though it might not be as romantic or daring as hiding a bottle of 1867 bordeaux right under herman gehring's nose refusing to support an occupation of our own by not allowing troops to be quartered might just be a step in the right direction to encourage the right kind of behavior and patriotism though it may not be as exhilarating as the maquis hiding out in the french foothills deciding to not pay for propaganda and cancelling your entertainment subscriptions would certainly strike a serious economic blow to tyrannical companies and though it may not be as exciting as smuggling people out of an occupied zone in wine barrels creating your own economic ventures and engaging in a little economic warfare of your own might just make a difference and help us live up to the reputation that the rest of the world has come to know us for we've got a lot of people counting on us to get this right so let's not let them down so that's all we've got for now make sure to stay tuned for our next episode and please make sure to like this video and subscribe to our channel so that you never miss another episode and if you'd like to be more engaged with the s2 underground project please check out our other platforms and if you would like to support us monetarily please consider supporting us on patreon or by checking out our merch store and with that we will see you next time and just like those french men and women in a wine cellar in 1940 fight in the shade [Music] you

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so one of the questions we get most often around here is from people who are prepared with the basics things like a normal balafang radio and a few other things like a comp plan or something but they're looking to take their communications preparedness to the next level so today we're going to talk about some things that might help with just that so first we have a balfing repeater so if you have a 2.5 millimeter to 3.5 millimeter audio jack cable and a couple of spare bow things laying around you can actually make your own repeater from it um depending on the legality in your area this may be something you might be interested in or not but essentially how it works is how any repeater on earth works which is a radio transmits on a specific frequency is picked up by one radio is transmitted to the other radio via vox which then picks it up and transmits it on a different frequency to another radio somewhere else in the world if you get a couple of these set up and you know and a couple of extended batteries for your baffing or even a wired setup for power and things like that you can set up a pretty significant communications network also this doesn't work just with voice but with aprs as well if you didn't want to use a baofeng radio to dial into the repeater you can also use it with aprs if you're so inclined and to help illustrate the importance of having your own repeater let's take a look at this mock-up of a city here so let's just say for instance that you live right here and let's say that a block or two away is another taller structure such as this one right there where the star is located so if you were to put a repeater at that star location what you could do is take your handheld radio or your directional antenna and point it directly at the repeater and use barely enough power to touch the repeater so that when it is picked up by the repeater and broadcast over a wider distance you're able to get a much wider spread for your information that way all your people out there throughout the city are able to hear the repeater but not hear exactly where you're transmitting from if they're trying to direction find you so that can be very very useful especially if someone comes in and is trying to direction find communications in the area to find out where like ham radio operations are occurring or from where communications are taking place uh this is very beneficial because someone who is going to have an aerial asset in order to help locate a ham radio tower well they're most likely going to find the repeater the repeater is going to be taking the taking the attention away from your actual handset transmission and this is very very useful i can remember personally spending a lot of time uh tracking insurgents in other nations and uh trying to find out exactly where they're coming from only to find out that we've been orbiting a repeater for a while so this is something that is very useful to do if you're trying to remain a little bit more covert also this helps in the world of electronic warfare and jamming so if you've checked out our other content on radio direction finding you'll have a better explanation of how jamming works but suffice it to say the short version is that jamming is not an end-all be-all people tend to think that you flip a switch and everything is jammed all at one time and it can't be unjammed well that's not really true jamming is all reliant on power levels so say you're transmitting at say one watt of power to reach your repeater network and the jammer picks that up and is going to transmit on just enough power to shut you down and overcome your transmission well then if your radio can transmit can be programmed to transmit at a higher level you can boost that up to maybe two watts and of course the cycle continues until either you or the jammer gives up and has no more power left to give right so usually the jammer is going to win in this case but if you're able to stick with the least amount of power required to transmit your message you're going to be more resistant to things like jamming up next are sound powered telephones now we have a specific episode dedicated to talking about sound power and field telephones in their usage in modern war but the short version for for this sort of sort of recap primer on advanced communications is we can jump back and use a century-old technology in a modern world as the united states navy has figured out they have they learned their lesson the hard way with the attack on the uss cole and again uh in 2017 with the uss fitzgerald collision uh they use exactly the power of sound powered telephones uh telephones that rely on nothing but a wire to make that communication uh work so sound power telephones while they are an archaic technology they can most certainly most certainly be used up next our hidden slash improvised antenna and this is something that we've touched on a little bit before but uh i think that this is kind of a unique situation something that the ham radio community is not necessarily equipped to handle at this particular moment so the ham radio community is very very good there's a very small subset of of ham radio operators who are operating in in protected areas or areas like hoas where you're not allowed to have an antenna up in your yard so they create these things called stealth antennas and those are great that's essentially what we're talking about however stealth antennas can also be a huge giveaway to activity based on a relatively new technology new is in the past 20 or so years technology that has made it very very easy to find things like radio antennas and this is the technology this is what we're talking about now i must caveat this and say that once again this is a technology that's very very um highly controlled by the us government um usually it's used used to find things like you know ieds and other troop movements and things like that but we were able to find patents on it as well as a russian company that does the same thing so we figured that we wouldn't get in too much trouble by talking about coherent change detection so coherent change detection is a synthetic aperture radar type system basically it's a very very accurate radar image an image that you can that can be taken that is so accurate that it can detect things like human footprints on dirt or things like wires strung up in the air and the way it works is an aircraft or a platform flies a specific pattern in the sky over a specific area taking a bunch of these synthetic aperture radar images and a couple of weeks later or some time period later sometimes a couple of days sometimes a couple weeks they'll come back and fly the exact same pattern and what they'll do is compare the images and this is where we get things like detecting things like human footprints this is also how we detect things like missile sites being constructed or moved or or hidden areas where we can't see the camouflage but we can see the human footprints leading up to a small little hidden area things like that but it can also be used to detect someone who throws say a ham radio antenna up in a tree during an emergency so that's something to keep in mind as well is that you know you can camouflage your antenna but it's very easy to find if you have the right hardware so improvising antenna from large metal structures would probably be a better idea such as warehouses so a general rule of thumb in the ham radio world is that anything big and metal can be an antenna maybe not a good one but it can work especially if you have a good solid connection method between the antenna material and your radio and also if you have a good antenna tuner so for instance our ham radio our hf radio rigs that we have we could hook these up to the roof of a metal building like a metal roof or something like that and uh it would serve as a pretty good antenna even though it's connected to the ground we could probably use our antenna tuners to get a really good signal out of that or if nothing else a usable signal and there would be absolutely no antenna visible to say a collections method so granted this is kind of pipe dreamy in some areas you're going to have to do a lot of testing and trying out to see what will actually work but this is an option for a lot of people who might not have the capability to string up an antenna in their area or if they're worried about things like you know radar surveillance in their area which is granted you know few and far between but it is there so we wanted to make people aware of it one of the main considerations for doing this though is making sure that one you have permission to do so and that there's no current going through whatever thing you are attaching your radio to as an antenna otherwise you might fry your antenna or something else and there's also the risk of electrocution and other safety issues which are inherent to the hand radio field so if you are going to do something like this make sure that whatever big metal material material you have is you know safe to do so and one of the things when we mention that is people automatically go to railroad tracks now railroad tracks uh even old ones such as this are usually a pretty bad idea and here's why well for one um people think that railroad tracks are just one long you know several thousand mile long depending on the track uh you know several thousand or 100 mile long piece of metal well that's really not the case railroad tracks you know depending on what area they're in and who owns the track they're going to have gaps in them those gaps are to allow the track to expand and contract you know with the heat of the summer and the cold weather in the winter time so that the tracks don't uh buckle and bow and things like that so uh railroad tracks are most certainly not a great idea because they they're really not a long piece of metal you'd have to go and check each specific connection and make sure that it's a good solid non-rusty or corrosive connection between each pieces of track which is going to be hard to do also even if you think that a train track is not being used or is not connected or is old chances are it's probably still going to be hooked up to what's called positive train control meaning that there is electricity flowing through both of those railroad tracks and as we've found out it is kind of a very no-no situation to go near an active railroad line as we found out by the domestic terrorism that we have seen in the pacific northwest when it comes to uh activists trying to either derail trains or cause a positive train control to to error and have an error there so things like that make that sort of a no-no now on the other hand what might be an option is things like bridges so a lot of bridges nowadays are not being used especially things like old defunct railroad bridges where there's no track leading up to the bridge at all and you've got just a big piece of metal there now of course you have to make sure that it's of course not being used and there's no power going through it as well there's no way for you to accidentally put power through a railroad line because that's something you most certainly do not want to do not only because it's dangerous but because it really doesn't work that well like i said railroad tracks are fairly short considering that there's gaps in them and also they're laying on the ground they're connected to the ground so you're not really going to get a good resonance and a good range out of them anyway so stuff like that is is definitely a consideration and then moving forward into a more modern era we have things like laser communications so nasa and other space agencies for a few years now have been working on laser communication systems really ever since the 60s we've been fascinated with putting lasers into space as a communications method and we even for a time period had laser mirror reflectors on the moon so that scientists back on earth could bounce laser signals off and more precisely measure the exact distance between earth and the moon so things like that have been around for a while but lately we are seeing a lot more sort of indie articles come out about how to build laser communication systems and laser communication systems are being able to send a message along a beam of light rather than a radio signal have a very have a lot of potential upsides meaning that you could have purely directional communications communications that can't be intercepted unless you're physically between the two points and even then it's easy to do to determine interceptions so stuff like that would be very cool to develop and we're certainly working on that here at our end it can be done very cheaply it can be done a little bit more expensively but we're definitely looking into things like laser communications and also moving from space age back to some of the oldest forms of communication on earth we have tap code and morse code basically these are the most timeless and simple communications methods that we know of um and for those of you who don't know who the gentleman on the screen is this is admiral jeremiah denton admiral denton was uh he was one of the earliest pows during the vietnam war and his story is very unique in that he was as of of course being tortured daily by the north vietnamese but he was also a essentially a political prisoner since he was such a high-ranking officer but during his interrogations naval intelligence was able to determine that he had some kind of issue with his eyes when he was speaking to the japanese war correspondent who was interviewing him for propaganda purposes they noticed that he was actually blinking something and actually he was blinking out a message so this is exactly what the message was so all the while he was saying that the north vietnamese were treating him nicely and that he was being well cared for he was blinking out for naval intelligence to intercept the word torture and actually his uh award post uh post his release reflected this that he blinked out a distress message in morse code at the television camera and was understood by united states naval intelligence so even though you think that morse code might be a very archaic and ancient way of communicating it is most certainly not out of date and also a more modern version of the morse code is the tap code so for anyone who is in the military and has taken a even the basic siri course they know that the tap code is a simple way of using taps instead of dots and dashes in order to convey a message using a grid as on screen here so memorizing the tap code or having a small little cutout like in your wallet or something that you can you know take a look at every now and then just to refresh yourself stuff like that would be very very handy and learning morse code in tap code is definitely something that if nothing else you know it's a good skill to have and then moving back more into the modern age we have things like software defined radio adsb receivers so for those of you that have been following us for a while you know that we use things like adsb exchange and flight radar 24 in order to track aircraft movements and a few of you have probably noticed by now that at least on flight radar 24 there aren't any military aircraft and that's because flight raider 24 responds to requests from the faa to block or not list certain aircraft so if you're a private citizen and you don't want your information broadcast on the flight radar 24 website you can absolutely tell the faa and the faa will remove you or tell flight radar 24 to remove you from the website you can also skip the faa and just pay flat radar 24 fee and they'll remove your aircraft or at least block it that's why when sometimes you'll see aircraft flying over the area and it will have nothing no data no registration no serial numbers and it will say blocked sometimes adsb exchange another competing website for flight radar 24 so they actually do show military aircraft but not all of them only the ones that are not blocked so that's something to keep in mind as well the good news is is that if you have your own um sdr you can make an adsb receiver in fact this is what ours looks like you can do it with any sdr dongle so for like 25 bucks you can hook it up to your computer run some software on it and and you'll be able to be up and running you can also do what we did which was take a raspberry pi buy a little kit on amazon or some other electronic parts store hook up a power bank to it and now you have a man portable system that works in conjunction with an app to actually display everything in your area and our area is pretty hampered by terrain but we actually get about a hundred miles radius from the uh from this adsb receiver so this is one this is just one of the ones we have we have smaller ones we have larger ones but this is kind of the more man-portable one you'll see a demonstration for on youtube so if you're looking to sort of skip the middle man and not pay flight reader 24 for for a subscription or if your internet might go out in times of need you can actually make your own adsb receiver connect to it with bluetooth on your phone where it's actually wi-fi connect via wi-fi on your phone smartphone and you'll be good to go you'll see all the aircraft in your area keeping with the theme of software-defined radios you can also get what's called a kerberos sdr uh and create basically a passive air search radar which is interesting um if you wanted to get into that now the kerberos sdr itself is kind of expensive at at current market value it's around 300 but all you really need are two sdr dongles and a little bit of electronics experime experience and you'll be able to create this as well and what this looks like is you're able to put these sdrs together with a couple of different antennas and you're able to see aircraft flying in the sky even if they have their transponders turned off depending on the platform you're probably not going to be able to see things like drones uh high-flying you know military drones because they have a lot of stealth characteristics you're most likely not going to be able to pick up any stealth aircraft whatsoever but you're going to be able to pick up things that don't have transponders turned on such as things like air force one in an emergency when they turn their transponder off you'll be able to find them and see them in the sky so that's kind of interesting and very useful especially considering that a lot of agencies are becoming very very aware that these flight tracking websites have a lot more data out there for the average citizen to follow so if you wanted to get into something like this you could build your own radar site and it doesn't emit any signal whatsoever it uses the signals that are already out there in the ionosphere bouncing around in it to see the reflections of aircraft in the sky which is very very interesting so another thing that you could do with an str is intercept weather satellite imagery that's right the weather satellite imagery that you see on the local weather channel is actually freely and publicly available so this is not hacking or doing anything illegal these weather satellites actually broadcast in real time the image of the area in which they're flying over down to earth so if you had the right software set up which is all free by the way and you bought an rtl sdr for say less than 50 bucks or so if you were to buy one of those and set it all up you could at a certain time of day when the satellite's flying overhead it will alert you by the way when the satellite is coming overhead you could turn it on and have an auto have an automatic system for downloading the latest weather satellite imagery to your computer all without the internet so that's kind of an interesting usage and a very a very common usage for people who have these sdrs and a little bit of you know technical expertise they can set this up and you can get your weather imagery uh for free from the from the satellites and up next is key wicks so for those of you who have not heard of keyworks before they've been around for a few years now and qx is a program really some software that allows you to download the entire contents of wikipedia to a hard drive and view it in places where there is no internet you can do this with pretty much any wiki wiki voyage wiktionary medical books and things like that on on there project gutenberg is also on there every book that's ever been uploaded to project gutenberg is available things like that basically the sum of human knowledge right so what you could do is using software that's on the keywords website is you could download this and flash it to a sd card then load it into a raspberry pi and once you plug and power up the raspberry pi it then becomes a wi-fi hotspot that you could connect to and view the contents of wikipedia all without using the internet which is pretty cool if you wanted to set up your own little local area network and set up your little hot spot you could put it up somewhere somewhere high where people could get to it and the the latency and with even with many people connected to it's pretty it's pretty quick so even you know something as small as like say a little altoids 10 can hold the entire sum of human knowledge and be broadcasting it to everybody in the vicinity that's going to be pretty cool especially coming up with you know the rampant censorship that's already starting to come down throughout the internet with things like you know amazon's web services and cloudflare and things like that you know that infrastructure is not as exactly as secure as we thought it was going to be especially if they don't like what you say so qx allows you to put knowledge out there and you can use really any uh form of wikipedia and things like that uh so that you're not reliant on a system that might be changed so we're currently using a an image of wikipedia from late uh late last year before all the censorship stuff kicked off and before a lot of wikipedia articles got changed so um at that point in time everything seemed to be like the you know the best uh best image we could find so so that's the one we chose so you could choose any image you want and then flash it to a raspberry pi and then you could be walking around town giving people free wikipedia as you're sitting at the coffee shop or something like that so one thing that we are super stoked about is laura radio or lora radio specifically via an app called meshtastic so a lot of you have heard about us talk about things like gotenna and gotenna is a great tool it's an off-grid mesh communicator that allows you to communicate with somebody else and share a lot of data without an infrastructure being around and basically this you know bringing a smartphone and your device right here you can create your own grid and communicate when there is uh when there's no one else around so that's a really awesome feature we've implemented the gotenna devices into our own emergency plans and we use them pretty much daily for a lot of stuff but there are a few downsides enough downsides that we are starting to move to a system called mesh tastic now we're going to still support goten of course in our emergency communications plan but we figure there's not too many people out there that actually have the gotenna devices for a few different reasons and the main reason is the price these mesh tastic devices specifically the ttgo t beam board can cost anywhere from 25 to 35 dollars the ones we have are 25 bucks and you can get them shipped from china or any retailer such as walmart here in the states for uh pretty cheap so we are using the 915 megahertz versions of the ttgo t-beam board and they were they're working out great and as you can see um these particular versions are 35 bucks a pop but we actually got ours for 25 because we uh soldered on the um the board the led the oled display ourselves so let's talk a little bit more about this mesh tastic thing so goten is like i said are great but gotennas use uh a lot of flashy advertising and stuff to essentially come out and say they're using the mers network so the gotenna devices are essentially a small little repeater network and a little computer built in that transmits your message encrypted by the way across the mers frequencies now this is good and bad good because it's open source and you don't need a license these free these frequencies are free for anyone to use in the united states but that's also bad because they're free for everybody to use in the united states and in our area merge frequencies are heavily used so you might see some interference uh we haven't really had too much of an issue with that um but as far as we can tell but it is a potential right a lot of people possess battlefang radios that can transmit on mers those are the baofeng radios are the de facto you know america the radio of america now and they can transmit homers and a lot of groups are using mers to get around having to buy a license so goten is the same way well the mesh tastic devices are a little different in that these mers frequencies make for not so great of a range it's essentially just vhf radio so in our particular area you know range is subjective right range is going to be different for everybody but we get depending on where we're at one to six miles direct line of sight in our specific area which is you know southeastern united states coastal region more of a woodland type environment so that's something that's not super super great and this has to do with the power that the gotenna can put out the fact that you can't add on an external antenna little things like this add up to to make it basically a fixed system if you buy the gotenna you cannot upgrade it or scale it at all also they're very expensive very very expensive so depending on sales tax in your area you could be paying upwards of a hundred dollars per device to have a gotenna and um you have to buy them in packs of two you can't just say oh well you know you can join our group or you gonna get one you know get another family member on the on the on the system it doesn't work like that you have to buy at least two they don't sell them in packs of one which is kind of a kind of a bummer so you're ended up you're you're ending up spending two hundred dollars and potentially an extra hundred dollars that you don't need depending on how many family members you have and other people in your group so that's kind of a bummer the mesh tastic device is like i said pretty much better in every possible way it's of course encrypted with the same encryption that the gotenna devices use but it's actually got a longer range the it's still line of sight but from what we've been able to tell for whatever reason we've gotten significantly better range and that's because we're putting better antennas on them the antennas on these devices are plug and play you could hook it up to a a 100 foot tall tower or you could hook it up to the little rubber ducky that comes with the board either way you're going to get a better range than from the gotenna because you can mount the antenna somewhere else other than the device you know if you're wanting to run one of these bad boys on your like your plate carrier or something like that you could run the antenna using an antenna relocation kit to somewhere else so just where it's a little bit better to transmit from and because of this alone we think this is really the sole factor is that we're getting 10 plus miles from these devices simply because the antenna is upgradable it's using a little bit less power than the gotenna but it's actually ranges is much uh much more significant and theoretically a lot of people especially in europe where these sort of have a stronger basin here in the states people are regularly getting 30 miles out of these uh these devices so there's that also it's easily scalable just like you can replace the antenna you can replace the battery which is great because one of the things that we personally run into with the gotenna is that the battery runs out after about 24 hours and we have to sit there and charge it via a power bank which is fine for most people but you know a power bank is is something that is going to get a lot of use so power bank for us is is used to charge things like camera batteries you know surveillance equipment mobile phones and things like that i don't need another device that have to charge via usb well the meshtastic device you don't need a usb you can just swap the battery out so it takes a normal 18650 battery which is what a lot of tactical flashlights nowadays take so if if push comes to shove you could take the battery out of your flashlight and swap it over to your communications method that modularity is completely invaluable to us because it's uh it's it's such a scalable and modular system also it uses far less power than the gotenna device the gotenna device we're getting about 24 hours before it's completely dead in the water whereas from the lora device depending on how much we use it we can get from a few days to as much as a week now of course your message latency is going to go up so you're not going to get messages instantly like you would with the gotenna but your device can communicate for several several days as much as a week and like i said you can also solder on additional 18650 batteries in a battery holder and that would work just as fine also the software on board the mesh tastic is open source that is a huge thing for us because we're able to make sure that the community thrives and and grows whereas the gotenna stuff is not really open source it's um it's heavily controlled by the makers of gotenna and there are you know we're dependent on them for software releases whereas the mesh tactic if the main people making the mesh tastic updates and things like that if they go out of business or if they stop making updates the code's out there so somebody else can can take up that torch but really the biggest feature is that it's 35 per unit um or in our case 25 right now they're around 25 dollars but in the the worst case they're 35 so we'll stick with 35. so you can buy really three times as many or four times as many uh device these laura devices as one single gotenna so you can either buy one gotenna well really you can't buy one go tenant like i said they only are sold in packs of two so you're talking about buying potentially eight of these mesh tastic devices or two of the gotenna devices so i think that you know that cost factor alone makes it very uh makes it very appealing also the fact that in the united states the frequency that they use is 915 megahertz 915 megahertz that's very important because most handheld radios cannot transmit on 915 megahertz and this is a very special frequency that's also allocated for uh usage free to the public so you don't need a license to use these not at all as long as you stay on 915 megahertz in the united states in other countries it's different but here we're using 915 and you don't need a license to use it and also most handheld radios most radios in general can't pick it up so that's also very very useful it doesn't it's not going to stop your government surveillance and stuff like that but considering these are using essentially burst communications low power burst communications on a frequency that's not normally monitored that can be a huge boon to security as well one thing to remember though is that the mesh tastic system is more or less in the beta stage you're going to have to have some technical proficiency you're going to have a little bit of experience and you're going to have to put in a decent amount of work whereas the gotenna devices you buy them online you charge them up you connect to the app and you're done well the meshtastic requires a little bit more work than that not much if you can buy these right now i think for ali on aliexpress or alibaba or whatever the website is called you can buy a a ttgo board with the screen already soldered on it with uh the battery connector already on it and it's going to already have the software installed on it so really all you have to do is when you get it screw the antenna on it and put a battery in it and you're done so if you're willing to do that this might be an option for it you don't need to be a sort of you know expert with electronics to be able to to use one of these devices you could if you wanted if you wanted to spend you know a few dollars less per device you could solder the screen on yourself and you could install the software yourself but right now for around 35 bucks you can get the whole kit where all you got to do is pop in a battery and the antenna so that's something that's pretty easy to do and it's something that we are definitely investing in for the future and the reason we're investing in this for the future is that this is no joke a huge deal these devices are definitely going to be around for a long time in fact one company uh created the fossa sat one a mini cubesat that was actually put into orbit around the fall of 2019 fall winter 2019 and it actually was able to while while it was up there uh be able to communicate with substations back on earth for quite a long period of time and it was able to relay messages as well so uh this is something that is definitely developing people are able to do this like they spent the company that did this spent thirty thousand dollars ten thousand dollars on the device and thirty thousand dollar twenty thousand dollars on this seat on board the uh the rocket and they were able to put their satellite into orbit this is amazing and this is all done via crowdfunding so someone who is able to create this infrastructure might be able to create something that's more global one day of course this is really just a sort of early alpha phase of things but it shows that the interest is there and the proof of concept works so we expect to see a lot more of these in the future perhaps to include some more more commercial ventures as well and finally we have to talk about something that's not necessarily communications related but is definitely an advanced topic what we're calling the clueless operator effect now when an emergency happens we have to assume that there will be people out there with radios and other communications methods they might have their own radios and communication stuff or they may have found somebody else's but they may not be an expert they may not have the basic skills right chances are if they have their own radios they probably don't know how to use them as well as say you or i do especially in an emergency when you're going to be stressed and fatigued and you're not going to be able to remember things right due to the fog of war right and chances are they're most likely not going to be able to program their own radios by hand they're probably you might also run into people who have nothing to do with radios they know nothing about radios except for what they see on tv or in video games we're also going to have to assume that there's going to be a lot of people out there that despite purchasing say like a balafang radio on amazon they probably don't have the ability to charge their radio's batteries so they're not going to be able to talk to you for very long chances are and also we have to assume that there might be people out there that don't have the ability to transmit but they can hear blind transmissions right that's why most of our communications plan like our comp plan or com card is really one-way communications we're going to be able to give people information in a very quick and concise manner so that they can hook up with us later right and this requires a very specific set of skills you know communications must be clear and concise this is something that is challenging even in the the ham radio community when it comes to emergency preparedness and stuff we also have to think about the ability to teach a lot of skills very quickly very clearly and over the radio in a short amount of time right so for someone who might not know how to work their radio right we might have to troubleshoot things and ask them questions and try to figure out why their radio isn't necessarily working while we still have the chance to contact them so really a simple industrial grade contingency heavy plan will be very very helpful not just for novices who have like the clueless operators right but for you know experts who might forget things during you know in the fog of war after a disaster where you're going to be you know chances are you're going to be very tired you're going to be stressed you're going to you know be working in a field that's probably not your expertise stuff like that is is uh all reduces capability so a plan ahead of time helps to reduce that impact so something like say our sound powered telephones the sound power telephone is one of the simplest communications uh things on the earth right but even then it still requires just a tiny bit of instruction like this is where you push to talk you push this button for to ring the other telephone and if your phone's not working make sure the wires are connected see that little bit of communication right there if i were to write that down and put that in a little booklet or a little you know laminated index card and zip tie that to the phone that would be very instrumental to somebody who might come across it you know in the night or in the dark in an emergency situation it might be very very helpful especially when when we're talking about things like ham radios which are not easy to understand for those of us who aren't in the comms world right so a lot of us basically we know how to work a walkie-talkie and we don't really know anything about propagation you know tunneling the i you know ionosphere stuff like that that's a hard concept for people to grasp and it's going to be impossible to teach somebody in a stressful environment so yeah hopefully this was all helpful this is just a first episode of many on our advanced communications methods that you can use to increase your capabilities beyond just the basic stuff right i think we're finding out by now with all the mass censorship out there in the world that we're having to create our own infrastructure in a lot of cases and we're having to get smart on topics that previously we've had the luxury of not uh not relying on so right now we're trying to increase capabilities for everyone and bring good information to everybody's communications plan so once again hopefully this was helpful drop us a some comments below if you have anything else to add or if there's any other topic that you'd like us to cover we'll check it out and see what we can do about it and also make sure that odds are that the youtube channel you're watching this on will probably be banned in the future so if you are watching this video watch it also on lbry lbry is our open source peer-to-peer decentralized system that allows us to bring content to anybody that wants it regardless of whether an isp or a server wants us to so make sure to get out there and check that stuff out and we will see you next time but until then always remember to find the shade as to actual out

…TRADE DISPUTES CONTINUE IN NORTH AMERICA. COUNTER-ICE PROTESTS BECOME MORE COMMON THROUGHOUT THE USA.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- North America: Over the weekend, the two-front trade dispute between the United States, Canada, and Mexico…

…https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/john-rudat-germany-stabbing-dresden-b2813871.html Eureka courthouse fire: https://krcrtv.com/north-coast-news/eureka-local-news/man-sets-car-ablaze-on-humboldt-county-courthouse…

…that it's really it's going to be really hard to maintain consistent contact between say North America and Europe any time of day for the qrp operator if you've got 100 watts to…

…TRADE WAR IN NORTH AMERICA PAUSED AS NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Sweden: This morning a shooting was reported at an educational facility in Örebro. Approximately 10x fatalities were reported, with many others wounded in…

…noticed and that can be applied as more of a blanket statement for the United States and North America at large I guess the first thing that many of you have noticed that myself included over…

…First of all, in North America, the trade disputes have continued between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, largely without very much notice. There have been some developments over the past week or so, just tit…

…is the liquor shortage in vermont north carolina and ohio so for those of you that don't know all three of these states i believe i know north carolina and ohio are i don't…

…model 100s so like i said before these are some of the most commonly used handcuffs in north america by everyone from criminals to your local police department as it stands these are also some of…

…it is unlikely that North Korea will change their fate on a whim much less on an event taking place halfway around the world North Korean officials likely seek to divide America's attention along with…

…satellite and is for uh supposedly to provide consumer grade internet access for the Americas so for North America and South America uh and it we're looking at potentially it being a total loss because…

…So, like for the United States to Europe or for Europe to Australia or so on and so forth, right? Thursday nights are generally for more America, North America, Canada kind of news sort of thing…

…The cable in question is part of the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System, a large network of cables connecting many Southeast Asian countries (including China herself) with North America.

…the United States of America and really nothing happened because of that they cleaned up the debris and everyone went about their day like it never happened right here in North Carolina the power goes out…

…Around the world, the summertime kinetic activity appears to be in full swing this week with many conflrations arising and a few going away over the past few days in Mexico and really throughout North America…

…https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/north-america-braces-new-trump-tariffs-saturday-deadline-nears-2025-01-31/ Congo Ebola Concerns: https://www.barrons.com/news/lab-holding-ebola-in-drc-s-goma-at-risk-amid…

…https://www.cbsnews.com/news/louisiana-shreveport-mass-shooting-children-dead/ North Carolina 1: https://x.com/SBI1937/status/2046257663416099004 Epsom 1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/17/police-say-no-evidence-of…