Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for September 14th through the 20th 2025. Like I say every week it has been very very busy. But thankfully this week, dare I say it, we have a bit of good news. So let's get right to it. Starting off with the global strategic concerns. All in all, around the world it's been fairly dynamic in many different ways. Down in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, the United States has struck another narco vessel. I don't have an exact grid, as with all of these, so we just have to kind of guess where it's at. But the United States continues to strike narco vessels down there. You would think you would think that they would uh be a little bit more careful. We keep dropping hellfires and uh what I also suspect to be small diameter bombs or SCBs, the GBU39s, I believe. And the cartel, the cartel deololis continues to send those boats out. Everyone's talking about how we keep sinking their boats, but uh nobody's really remarked on the fact that we keep dropping hellfires on their boats and they keep sending them out anyway. I don't know, if I was a small boat driver, I might be a little bit more hesitant, but that kind of speaks to the deliberation and the dedication that these cartels have to running uh drugs and people throughout the region. So, moving over to Europe. This is a developing situation as I'm recording this. Uh this morning, there were several cyber attacks that struck multiple airports uh not just in London, but also around Europe. Apparently, it was that the ticketing system uh was cyber attacked, but no real indication on what's going on or what's affected, but a lot of flights have been cancelled and a lot of people stranded because of that. So, we've seen this before in Europe, so it's not entirely surprising, but it's something to be aware of if you're traveling to Europe uh over the next couple of days. And finally, here in the Far East, we have seen an improvement of relations between the United States and China regarding the Tik Tok deal. So, it's a complicated arrangement and conglomerate of ownership, but the United States appear appears to have gotten what they wanted and uh China seems okay with it, I suppose. But either way, this is a a positive movement for tensions in the region to kind of deescalate. That's the way things are for right now, even though the Taiwan issue has kind of not really been addressed and still remains a fairly persistent point of conflict between the East and the West. So, that's it for the rather long-winded uh overview of what's going on this week. Let's move over to strategic movement. Like I said before, the war in the Caribbean Sea continues as before. All of the platforms that were down there a couple of weeks ago are still there. They're just moving around. Uh the F-35s are in Puerto Rico. And there are quite a few MQ9 Reaper drones that have been observed in Puerto Rico as well. So it does indeed look like the United States is settling in for the long haul uh to just keep sinking as many boats as humanly possible coming out of Venezuela. So that's it for strategic movement. Let's move around to the United States and talk about some of the kinetic events that have taken place this week. Here at home in the United States, we have had turmoil that has taken a few different uh tones over the past week or so since the Charlie Kirk assassination. Most of which is centered around a few different ideas. So, first of all, we have a lot of immigration uh stuff getting kicked back up again. So, we've got local opposition to ICE operations in Chicago, which is taking kind of uh national spotlight at the moment, but we also have similar efforts in New York City. So, we've got that pretty solid base of counter ice and pro-rime rhetoric and atmosphere out there in a lot of major cities around the United States. But, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, we can just heap a lot more icing on top of that cake, which has taken the form of uh two things. One, speech related stuff and also violence related stuff. So, the White House has done a very poor job, I'll say this very clearly, the White House has done a very very poor job at separating out these two issues, right? There is a major major major difference between saying mean things about Charlie Kirk and threatening to harm more people. Right? There there's a very clear line there, right? And it turns out that there's nearly complete overlap between those two ideas, right? When it comes to most people talking about the Kirk assassination, many of you have seen that that vin diagram is basically two circles stacked on top of each other. Meaning that the people who say mean things about Charlie Kirk also tend to encourage violence in the same exact social media post. Right? So, the White House has not done a very good job at at talking about that, right? And they're they've set themselves back quite a bit. I think they drag out Pam Bonnie and throw her on the uh media circuit to talk about hate speech, not realizing that this is not really a speech issue at this point, right? This is not about trying to police issues of someone saying mean things about somebody. They can do that all they want, right? That doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. What does matter is interrupting the terrorist attack planning cycle. And that's exactly what the federal government is trying to do. At least it's what it seems like. It's what I hope. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is kind of a common thing these days in all political realms. But all of this comes down to there being a major difference between somebody saying, you know, Charlie Kirk was a bad guy and someone hopping on social media and encouraging their millions of followers to go out and hurt people. And the latter is exactly what is happening. You've got a lot of streamers on Twitch, on kick, and they are uh they're all over these these social media platforms. They're all over these streaming platforms, and they're speaking to young people. They're speaking to people in Discord. They're arranging these groups, right? We know just from the the Kirk assassination itself that the killer was in, you know, a Discord group, right? And a lot of people had knowledge of the attack beforehand. At least that's that's the general insinuation so far based on statements by the FBI. So, all in all, this is not really a speech thing. So for all the libertarians screeching out there, chill out, right? This is not a speech thing. This is in my world now. This is uh this is in the world of counterterrorism, you will find no bigger skeptic of the US government than myself. However, if I hear the words slippery slope one more time, I'm going to become rather annoyed because we are in the trenches now, right? So all in all, positive movement in the right direction, but we also have to keep an eye on a lot of the malign actors that are starting to crop up. We've got Antifa, which is probably getting ready to mobilize if the feds uh actually do make them a terrorist organization. I don't know how they would do that to be honest. They may just flag them as an FTO so that they can cut their funding, but a lot of their funding comes from billionaires in the domestic United States. So, I'm not quite sure how that's going to work out. So, I don't want to commit to any kind of uh assessment on that just just yet. The left was largely neutered by the election. They lost a lot of their steam, but I think they're going to probably get it back if uh organizations like Antifa start becoming a good way to solidify resistance to the Trump regime. Right. I'm not going to say it's 2016 all over again. with regards to the mobilization of the left to, you know, just start their screeching as well. But it may uh it may take some of that historical atmosphere moving forward. But so that's what I'm trying to focus on uh personally moving forward is the immigration angle, the the cartel stuff that's linked into that with organized crime and and more standard uh criminal enterprise kind of stuff, but also the more terrorism angle, the the counterterrorism angle that comes with a lot of these leftist groups becoming more and more emboldened and wellunded and stuff like that. So going to be a busy winter all around, but that's exactly what I'm trying to focus on. And it's not all negative. It's more along the lines of just being aware of what's going on. You don't have to be doom and gloom all the time, right? That's very popular to do these days. But I think that it's very important to slot uh that reaction to Kirk's murder into the appropriate response, right? So yeah, you can mourn and lament uh not just Kirk himself, but also the state of the world and the state of the country, but we've got to get to work and we've got to get serious about our own survival now. If we didn't realize that before, we got to realize it now. and uh especially amongst all of the the normies that are going to come over and start realizing what's happening around them for once in their life. Uh so they are not to be shunned, they are to be helpfully guided, right? We're all about helping each other out and uh better late than never. So more broadly around the country, a lot of the violence and a lot of the kinetic activities that have taken place have largely been centered around the firing slash uh suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, the Jimmy Kimmel show, right? The ratings were already down. ABC was looking for an out and they got it. They're probably going to do the same with the View actually u because I saw that um they were getting some federal pressure from the FCC on that one too, but don't think this is any sort of victory even though there's hundreds of demonstrators out in the street protesting to bring Jimmy Kimmel back, his show was already tanking and they're probably looking for a way out. But nonetheless, the same demonstrators that are protesting a Jimmy Kimmel stuff that nobody cares about walk across the street and then protest ICE, right? So, they're the same kind of people, the same demonstrators, same groups, right? And some of them can be pretty kinetic, even though they're a lot of them are mentally ill, such as in Pittsburgh where the FBI field office uh in in Pittsburgh there was attacked by a dude who rammed his vehicle into the front gate or the the entry control point or ECP. No idea what that's about, but generally vehicle ramming attacks tend to be one of two things. A drunk driver or someone who's clinically insane. And it seems to me like it was the latter in this case because authorities stated that he had written uh like with a marker or a paint pen or something all over his vehicle. I tried to find some photos of that to see what he was talking about, but I I couldn't find any photos of what he actually wrote on his vehicle from the from what the feds have said. It doesn't seem like it was very uh clear as to what this dude was all about. But anyway, vehicle ramming attacks always tend to uh pop up when there's some something crazy in the news, right? gets all the the loonies uh riled up and this has definitely been a week for that. So, most of the unrest has of course been centered in Chicago this week uh because the politicians just keep heaping gasoline on that bonfire of counter ice and pro- crime initiative by the local politicians. You've got the mayor, Brandon Johnson, uh, in utter panic mode, trying to do what he can to keep the feds out of his city because he doesn't want to look bad. But because he's not a very smart man, he doesn't seem to realize that the words that he says are going to be recorded and they have meaning. So, when you call law enforcement a sickness that needs to be eradicated, that tends to be what we might u catch a terrorism charge for. So, I don't think the feds are going to go that far. They I mean they could if they wanted, but either way, chances are if you see somebody wearing a mask at one of these protests or one of these like events where you know ICE has to fling somebody across the street, chances are that the person flying through the air is a political candidate uh for some political office in Chicago. So that's mostly what that's about. However, things can get pretty violent pretty quickly. I know everybody's kind of burned out on the whole protester scene. We've seen thousands of people protesting random things that I've causes I've never even heard about over the past few years. I know it's not 2016 anymore. We're all kind of burned out about it, but that still doesn't mean that some pretty serious stuff can't can't happen. So, just something to be aware of. A lot of these groups are trying to become more solidified. It's not like they're formalized groups a lot of times, but you do have this weird conglomerate of politicians running for office trying to throw rocks at ice. people who are paid to be there, people who are there because they're mentally ill, you know, the whole gambit, right? So, it's not like you can put them under one convenient label despite, you know, media sources wanting to do that. But either way, something I'm going to be focusing on over the next few weeks because the White House, and it's not necessarily their fault a lot of times, but the White House has indeed engaged in a lot of activity that is going to be a point of solidification and a point of like unity for these uh for these people who are trying to cause harms. So, it's not the end of the world, but it's something to be aware of because most leftist politicians and leftist voice like politically left voices, even elected officials have urged violence. And you you can't underestimate that, you have to realize that crazy people exist. And though it may be hard for you to imagine that someone would look at a congressman or a congresswoman on social media and say, "I'm going to do exactly what they said." You got to remember people listen to the Kardashians for fashion advice. Okay? So there are enough crazy people out there listening to politicians and listening to big voices and listening to kick streamers. The people most likely to conduct the attack are the people who are also listening to these violent people and doing what they say. Right? So you can't discount that. It's not the end of the world again. But we've got to be aware that the risks are pretty high. And as long as these politicians and these influencers, it it sounds, you know, really bad to say that people listen to influencers, but they do. That's that they they really do. They do on the right, they do on the left. And as long as a lot of big voices are calling for continued violence, then you're going to get continued violence. So, I know a lot of conservative podcasters are now obviously and very quietly increasing their security, which is a good thing. Uh, but it's just something to to be mindful of, right? So, getting down into the regions, let's talk about Washington DC this week. And this is where we get probably the best news we've had all year, which is the changes to the H-1B visa scheme. Yesterday, President Trump signed the gold card uh membership sort of uh subscription package to American citizenship, I suppose. But they also changed how H-1B visas work. And it seems to be a quite a positive change uh for everything from counterterrorism to the safety of Americans on roadways to uh the American job market and economy as well. So, what have they done? Well, the short version is they have made it so that if you want an H-1B visa, you got to pay a $100,000 annual payment to the feds. So, they've slapped a $100,000 fee per H1B visa per year. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what many might describe to be a torpedo to the H-1B visa farming scheme. So, if any company, if any American company wants to have an H-1B visa come over from India, they have to redeem the $100,000 annual payment and they have to keep paying that along with a bunch of other uh stipulations as well. There's a pretty high uh fee just to apply. And then there's the $100,000 fee on top of that. So, it's basically not really removed the H-1B visa at, you know, entirely from, you know, existence, but it has made it very cost prohibitive to engage in as opposed to the few thousand I used to have to pay just in miscellaneous fees. Now, it's 100 grand per person per year. Now, some of you out there may have exceptionally good hearing, and you may be wondering why you don't hear the wailing and nashing of teeth from Silicon Valley, who have basically marketed their entire existence around the H-1B visa farming schemes. In other words, why is big tech not freaking out about this? Well, mostly because uh the pipeline for big tech basically remains the same. So, most of Silicon Valley gets their uh Indians imported into the United States through student visas. So, they bring him over on a student visa and then they can transition into an H-1B visa from there. That's the loophole for this. That's the catch uh to what Trump just signed, at least based on what I can read. So, that's a way that big tech can be okay with this because their farming scheme for foreign workers basically remains unchanged. They can get someone over here on a student visa or an L1 visa and then transition that into an H-1B visa, right? So, the the the farming is still there for big tech. So, don't think Microsoft's going to be emptying out anytime soon. And also, fun fact, this doesn't apply retroactively. So, everybody who's already in the United States with an H-1B visa is going to stay here, right? So, they're not getting booted because of that. So, some good, some bad. I think it's generally good, but it could be better, right? I think a lot more pressure can be applied uh to to get this loophole closed up so that you can't transition one visa to another to to escape the uh the magic uh fee payment here. Another thing which was done separately uh but it was something that was done kind of unilaterally by the state department is that the state department said they're no longer going to be accepting visas for any commercial truck drivers effective immediately. They Marco Rubio announced that I think on Thursday. So again, positive movement, right? I think that was probably done based on the deaths of those people in Florida uh from the Harender Singh uh case. But so again, all in all, positive movement, good stuff. We'll keep moving and keep applying pressure to uh to to help close these loopholes and maybe uh address some of those 55 million visa holders in the United States in due time. Moving over to the Midwestern region, I kind of jumped the gun and talked about Illinois, Chicago already, so I'll kind of skip that. But I wanted to mention something that is rather interesting in the realm of the immigration uh angle, which is Minnesota. So, a couple of days ago, the marriage license for Ilhan Omar was leaked, which confirms that she indeed married her brother so that he could obtain a green card. So, the classic green card marriage, the classic immigration fraud. So, I thought that was kind of interesting. I don't know if there's any traction or movement on trying to police this sort of thing, but I mean, you you can't have a much more smoking gun than this uh when it comes to immigration fraud and committing multiple felonies, right? So, I don't know. Uh it had been suspected for a long time. Uh I don't know if they're going to try to oust a congresswoman from office, especially one that's, you know, kind of got a lot of power these days or not a lot of power, but a lot of is very vocal these days. But I don't know. they went after George Santos. So, but yeah, I did want to mention it just because I don't want it to become memory hold and I thought it was kind of uh interesting that what we knew years ago has proven to be true. So, that's it for the United States. Let's briefly touch on Venezuela this week. I am continuing to work on the IPB or intelligence preparation of the battle space for Venezuela. Yes, I know this is amateur grade stuff, but airfields and military bases are what you got to start with first if you don't have time. And the whole world's been a little bit busy over the past couple of weeks. So, I'm trying to get back into Venezuela, especially considering that now that we have three sunken narco vessels, and I suspect there will be more. My guess is the next thing is probably going to be an F-16 shootown. The the Venezuelan military has mostly slipped into posturing. They know they can't win uh against the US military, and it's not to insult V the Venezuelan military. They literally just can't. There's there's no way they can have any kind of defense against the US military. It's just not it's just a non-starter. Not to say that they can't, you know, put up a good fight in some certain areas and in some situations, but by and large, uh, considering the force that's down there, I mean, you know, they're not going to be able to stop us from whacking narco boats. So, that will probably continue. The cartel deos, which is more heavily involved in the government of Venezuela than one might think. They're basically the way that cartels work in Venezuela is this one cartel is basically implanted at multiple levels of military and political existence. So unlike in say Mexico where there's this like uh passive, you know, everybody's on the take with, you know, the cartels down there and there's multiple cartels kind of fighting for each other, the cartel de la Solles is really the only power in Venezuela and they're more heavily ingrained in Maduro's government. So it's it's not like they're, you know, completely married up with the government, but they're close, right? They're a lot closer than we might think. So that's why this is kind of a big deal because when you're targeting a cartel in Venezuela, you're really targeting in many cases the Venezuelan military. So I would not be surprised if these dudes on these narco boats, which they seem to be targeting with rather large munitions, probably to ensure there are no survivors uh or evidence left. My guess is that they're probably soldiers. Uh but again, that's pure speculation, you know, so there's no way to confirm or deny e either way. But that's kind of how things work in Venezuela. It's a very strange and unique relationship between the government, the military, and the cartels, or really the one main cartel that's down there, which is kind of interesting because then TDA, Trender Aragon, gets thrown into the the mix because that's how the United States is claiming to go after these when really they're not targeting TDA. There's TDA has very little presence in Venezuela now. Although they they might be starting to get more popular uh since the United States has interest in Venezuela, but before anybody knew who TDA was, Maduro had already thrown most of TDA's leadership in prison. So they were kind of on their way out and then uh they found their way into the United States because we had open borders for so many years and then they started committing a lot of crimes and occupying places. Then they became a household name in the United States and cut forward to where the United States is on the brink of war with Venezuela. And we've got a complicated story, don't we? We've got a complicated situation. So, I will have uh more clear products uh on this soon. I just uh right now I'm trying to learn a lot of stuff myself. I'm not a Venezuela expert, but uh thankfully uh Venezuela leaks more information to the internet than War Thunder forums. So, it's not terribly hard to find out where their troops are located and what bases are truly operational versus which ones are just derelictked. So, it just it just takes me a little bit more time to go through it and figure out what's where just in case things start to get a little bit more exciting down there. So, I think that's uh pretty much it for today. I'll roll it up. It's already I've already talked too much today. So, uh let's go ahead and uh finish up with the intercepted ghost net reports. Again, the past couple of weeks, I I I didn't mention it last week, but the past couple of weeks have been absolutely fantastic for the Ghost Net. I've talked to a lot of people. I've got a lot of messages from people who say they've seen, you know, 40 to 70 people uh on the net during the window at any given time. Not that everybody's talking, but they've just seen these call signs come up through like heartbeat messages or something like that. Of course, this is all mostly dependent on solar weather, right? So, if there's a lot of solar weather interference, you're not going to see or talk to as many people as you might otherwise. However, uh I think that the solar weather for the past couple weeks hasn't been super terrible. Uh maybe it's because the sun is starting to set later in the day. I don't know. But either way, it's good stuff. More people are using it. A lot of more different call signs are are popping up and uh I think that a lot of people are getting involved. So, also, as another reminder, there is a VHF option, so it's probably not going to be successful. So don't get your hopes up, but it's there. If all you have is a bow fang, I've got a frequency for you. So download the ghost net plan and you'll see all of the stuff there. There is also a meshtastic node. So for those of you who want to plug that into your fancy RM1 node or any other meshtastic device, you can certainly do so. Line of sight stuff is just not really good to have on a national level simply because the chances of everyone being in line of sight of each other is fairly minimal. Whereas with HF, I can talk to somebody in Canada or down in, you know, Central America fairly easily. But from where I'm at, I can only get a couple of miles with say a Bow Fang radio, right? So unless somebody's a couple of miles, you know, from me, then there's not really a pretty good chance of the line of sight stuff working super well. But guess what? It's there just in case you need it. So that's all I have for today, everyone. Thank you for all of your support. I really do mean it. That's what keeps me going forward and uh continuing this stuff. So, thank you guys all for that and I will see you next time.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for June 21st through the 27th, 2026. Just when we thought the war was over, we get pulled back in, at least to some degree. This is of course no surprise, so let's get right to it. Around the world, it's been a busy week. The main focus this week has been overseas as the earthquakes in Venezuela have caused widespread devastation throughout the most populated cities, including the coastal areas to the north of the capital, as well as the capital itself. Mass casualties have been reported in all of the hardest hit areas and the death toll is expected to be in the thousands. Over in the Middle East, the war has reignited to some degree, though the full-scale targeting campaign has not returned just yet. These targeting efforts have substantially increased the danger to civilian mariners as disputes regarding the administration of the routes has been complicated by the targeting of merchant shipping. Here on the home front, there have been two items of note for this week which I've been tracking. First of all, has been the severe weather and flooding throughout the American South and East. Flooding has continued throughout the hill country of Texas and the following collapse of the weather system has spawned hundreds of storms throughout the eastern half of the country. On average, this is not really out of the ordinary for this time of year, but some areas have been hosted to more severe weather than is normally expected as many storms have swept through the nation. Also in Texas, a different crisis is developing as the spread of new world screwworm has continued to expand significantly. Right now, the total number of cases is still small, a total of 26 confirmed cases so far, but as with all parasites, this can greatly expand without anyone knowing. Considering that the screwworm larva is so small and hard to find on an animal, sometimes this can get out of control really fast, which is why we've gone from one case to 26 in just a couple of weeks. Just south of the border, where much of our beef supply comes from, the USDA has stated that there are over 30,000 confirmed cases in Mexico. This is why things might get a little busy here pretty soon. Concerns are also emerging that highlight some of the more illicit activity that might be going on throughout the region. It's extremely early, so data is limited and this is mostly gut suspicion more than anything else, but it's possible that illicit cattle practices might be contributing to the spread of this disease. For many, many years now, Central American cartels have relied upon diversifying their portfolios by trafficking not just drugs and people, but also beef cattle. Since cartels are not really inclined to follow safe animal handling practices, these cattle tend to be very prone to catching parasites like screwworm. And since they tend to launder cattle through legit businesses for import into the United States, it's impossible to tell if the cheeseburger you're eating came from a wholesome family farm in Oklahoma or a Mexican cartel. This is demonstrated by cases being reported at the same time in different places. The cases in New Mexico popped up at the same time as ground zero in Texas, and these locations are too far away from each other for the fly to have flown that far, which strongly indicates that it's not spreading from the point of detection in Texas, but rather infected cattle are probably coming across the border separately and going to many different places. I suspect that the spread of screwworm is far worse than anyone knows right now because all of the efforts within the United States to combat the disease, while certainly the right thing to do, it's going to not be as effective if it's running rampant throughout Mexico. Having a significant percentage of our food supply originating from the third world is not great for food security, but we're here now, and there's not much that can be done from our end other than monitor and isolate and try to get ahead of it. We will certainly keep an eye on it for sure. It's not worth panicking over, but definitely do not sleep on this crisis, either, since this has the potential to severely impact our beef supply later on this year. Moving now to take a look at the situation in Venezuela, it's not good. I have been trying to use a lot of the helicopter and drone footage to geolocate damaged or destroyed buildings, and it's been rather tough because a lot of these cities are just completely destroyed. All of these points that you see on the map are damaged buildings that are hand-picked by me as best I can and assessed to using the standard building damage assessment guidelines created and used by FEMA. Red are buildings which are totally destroyed, orange is heavy damage, yellow is minor damage, and green is mostly untouched. Most of the damage has arisen from the heavily populated areas along Venezuela's northern coast, which has been legendary and infamous for contracting companies using very poor construction materials to help build government housing projects in this region, which surprise, surprise, turn out to not be very stable. The geography of the terrain also adds to the vulnerabilities as mudslides have been a common observance here over the years with many tragedies taking place here due to this soil substrate not being very conducive to building large structures. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people lived here in the Catia La Mar area because it was cheap housing with ocean views close to Caracas. This turned out to not be a super great idea as nearly all of these high-rise apartment buildings have collapsed and killed thousands of people. Speaking of the casualties, as with all natural disasters, the true number is hard to assess right now, especially since most of the response is centered in heavily urbanized areas where the population density is extremely high. Complicating factors also include landslides and terrain deformation from the earthquakes making roads impossible to transit outside the main cities, so a lot of the more remote towns are now cut off from major transit routes. Additionally, several aftershocks have continued throughout the area over the past 24 hours, which has made many of the barely standing buildings even more unstable, so it is very, very likely that many of the structures that still remain will probably collapse over the next few weeks. Since people are still living in many of these halfway destroyed buildings, the chances of more fatalities occurring is extremely high. A lot of people simply have nowhere else to go, so they live in what remains of their house even though it's very much a death trap. Venezuela was uh obviously not in super great shape before the earthquakes, and extreme levels of poverty and improvised housing efforts were common throughout the epicenter region for decades. The recent unsettling within the nation after the leader of their country was arrested by the United States also will be a complicating factor because on the one hand the national government is basically in shambles, but there also would be zero chance that the US would have been allowed in to help victims if Maduro was in power, so maybe that will balance out. I don't really know, but either way US Southcom is moving assets to help coordinate the response in the hardest hit areas. Just as a brief digression for a moment on the damage assessment efforts, there are a lot of people touting the use of AI for stuff like this, and I agree this would be a good tool for the job if it actually worked. But sadly in this case, it's just not good enough and produces so many false positives that it's not helpful. And just to show that, I will load in an AI-driven geospatial product that was compiled for this purpose. This is something that Google and I think Microsoft put together, and we can use this to compare and contrast what the truth really is. And just looking at the comparison between what the AI has given us and what I have assessed myself using helicopter footage of the damage, we can see that the AI is hallucinating pretty hard on some of this. Some of the buildings that are utterly pancaked are only listed as minor damage, and some of the places that are marked as destroyed are still standing. So in this case, it was a good try, it was a really good effort, but the AI models that are being touted and being used and and kind of circulating on social media for this, they're really only as good as the data that's put into it. And in this case, a satellite data with more precision would be needed. Preferably synthetic aperture radar, which would cut right through the clouds and make this a lot easier, but those images are very expensive, and in the case of extremely urbanized terrain, it's debatable as to if it would help anyway. So again, good try, but nothing beats the Mark I human eyeball. And even though the boom in AI has really kind of tried to motivate people to use some of these tools a little bit more more commonly than they've been used in the past, coherent change detection has actually been around for a very long time, and that's not an AI-driven thing. Some of these more AI-driven models are not actually that helpful. I just wanted to put that out there because as I was working on this last night, I saw a lot of people like trying to push a lot of these AI-driven models, and it just turns out, well, they're not that accurate. So I foresee this becoming a problem for the disaster preparedness and disaster response community over the years. So, hopefully things will either get better or we'll learn to not rely on tools that we cannot verify ourselves. So, this little digression shows us an important lesson. Just because we have data displayed in a way that looks cool, it doesn't actually mean that it's accurate or even helpful. So, for the products I'm making, the the few products that I can make, I'm trying to use evidence from the ground to assess the damage. And right now, the biggest intelligence gap, the biggest unknowns are the status of Caracas itself, as well as some of the more remote, but still heavily populated towns throughout the countryside. I have high-resolution imagery of Caracas after the earthquakes hit, but there has been cloud cover over much of the city for a couple of days, which has made it hard to geolocate anything. For me, my plan is to do what I can to get a good picture of the situation on the ground, so that any volunteer groups or agencies can be as prepared as possible if they start heading down there. Even though the sort of governance situation with Venezuela is kind of weird right now, I'm sure that there will be some groups heading down. I'm just not plugged into any of them just yet. But, for anyone who knows anyone heading down there who might benefit from some of my geospatial products, as always, everything I'm building is publicly available in three different ways. You can review my ArcGIS maps online just by tapping the links below, which will open up these maps on your phone's internet browser. And if you need more offline access, I publish these layers as KMZs for use with A-TAC or CalTopo, whichever platform your agency uses. And for the researchers who already use ArcGIS, you can pull my layers into your project if you want, because these are published They're published feature classes on ArcGIS online. For me, this is not just a worthwhile effort due to the mass devastation in the region, but it's also a good way to get those training reps in and get more experience in managing disaster situations, even if we might not be able to go to the physical area. So, definitely going to be keeping an eye on Venezuela over the next few weeks, because this disaster is probably one of the worst that that America has ever experienced. Jumping around the world to the Middle East for this week, the situation has deteriorated as Iranian forces have demonstrated that they control the Strait of Hormuz, and they are willing to enforce their tactical advantage with explosives. Over the past few days, several merchant ships have been hit with various munitions by Iranian forces as these vessels were taking the unauthorized Omani route to the south of the normal traffic separation scheme. When the MOU was signed and the strait was truly opened up to merchant traffic, many ships just went for it, and an administrative and organizational disaster rapidly emerged, and the experiences of every ship is individual and unique. Some ships were given permits and continued transiting just like they have been doing since the ceasefire went into effect. Some ships took any route that they could to get out of the Gulf. Some ships kept their transponders off and tried to sneak out between other ships, and many other vessels have remained at anchor as their owners have deemed the situation still too dangerous for them to make the crossing. Earlier this week, the International Maritime Organization worked with all parties, they even got the Iranians on board to conduct a rescue operation to get many of the stranded vessels and mariners out of the Gulf. However, continuing tradition, this operation was paused almost immediately due to the increase of Iranian and American targeting throughout the region. Turns out the Iranians did not really like the ships which were acting unilaterally and taking the Omani route instead of getting a permit and taking the Iranian route. And after about a week of this being tolerated and warnings being issued that the strait is closed, the Iranians' patience wore out and they started striking vessels which were doing their own thing on Thursday night. On Friday, yesterday, the United States retaliated by striking essentially an abandoned dock on Siri Island, also called Sirik Island. And even as early as this morning, it looks like another vessel was actually hit in the Strait of Hormuz once again, bringing the total to, I think, three ships hit over the past 24 hours within the strait. So, the escalations are continuing for the time being, but the good news is that this is unlikely to kick-start more serious bombing efforts because the United States has been drawing down resources from the region. This drawdown effort actually started last week, but I wanted to wait for definitive evidence that the US is actually moving resources back to Europe and not just pretending to move resources around. Most of the assets that have been relocated are aircraft as the US Navy still remains on station in the Gulf of Oman, but earlier this week the Air Force moved a bunch of KC-135s back to Al Udeid Airbase, which we can see on the satellite imagery of the base. This is a big indicator that the large-scale shooting is probably over because this base has been a fat juicy target for Iranian missiles and has been hit many times. So, the fact that the US Air Force is moving these airframes back to Al Udeid is a sign that the US does not expect a return to the more widespread targeting, which is good news. Honestly, this is a message that also works both ways. The Iranians clearly see this too and know that the war is pretty much done aside from the occasional strikes against each other's equipment. How this develops from here is going to vary by the day, even by the hour. And the biggest points of debate moving forward will be around the Strait of Hormuz and whether or not an arrangement can be worked out regarding the transit of the strait. But once again, the Strait of Hormuz is only one half of the equation at this point. The other side of the coin is Lebanon. So, aside from the situation in the Persian Gulf, there have also been some developments with the other main conflict of the region, the war in Lebanon. Yesterday, the White House announced the signing of a document between the United States, Israel, and the Lebanese government to establish a security zone in southern Lebanon. Just to cut right to the chase, this document appears to effectively legalize the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and allows the IDF to keep all of the terrain that they have taken so far and even take a new terrain with this amorphous security zone label. Now, if you think this sounds rather surprising and rather unfortunate for the Lebanese, rest assured quite a few Lebanese are also extremely upset about this and mass protests and riots have been ongoing throughout Beirut for the past couple of days. As you are perusing the photos of the signing of this document, the more astute among you might realize that someone is missing from the table, most notably Hezbollah. Yeah, of course Hezbollah did not agree to this. For those who are unaware, unlike in Gaza, the Hezbollah organization is not the actual ruling government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah does effectively control most of the terrain in southern Lebanon. Lebanese politics is always incredibly difficult to describe, but in general, the Lebanese government has always generally at every single step withdrawn to let the IDF invade their country over the past few decades, simply because they're just a small military. They're a small government. Hezbollah doesn't necessarily call all of the shots throughout the entirety of Lebanon. That's That's not true. Hezbollah has certain areas in which they operate and control. They certainly have strongholds, but to say that they control the entire country of Lebanon is is inaccurate. And the Lebanese government is kind of like the third wheel, to be honest, who doesn't get a lot of discussion these days because most people tend to think that Lebanon is simply just a failed state where Hezbollah runs supreme. And that's not true. The Lebanese government actually does wield most of the control in the northern parts of the country, certainly in Beirut. But down in the south, the Lebanese government, the Lebanese army, has mostly withdrawn from a lot of these southern border outposts and checkpoints, simply because they don't want their soldiers getting killed by the IDF, and they know that they're powerless against the Israelis because the Israelis have the American backing, right? So in fact, the signing of this document is the Lebanese government signing along to a deal that they can't enforce on their own. And they're essentially handing over terrain that they don't even control themselves. The people who actually control this terrain, Hezbollah, did not sign on to this deal and have not agreed to stop fighting the Israeli invasion. As a result, this alleged agreement is probably not going to mean much. So Lebanon is still popping off, no matter how much we want to, you know, declare victory and move on. It's still pretty hot. It's still going to be a point of contention. What the Iranians do in response to the signing of this document, how they treat it, and how they sort of feel about the Lebanese government is going to be very interesting to see, but all in all the Middle East is still on fire as always and even though the MOU has been signed, things are not getting back to normal fast enough. This was always on the menu. We have been saying this and expecting this for weeks now. Even during the height of the war, we knew this. But it is helpful to remember that once we transition from crisis to recovery, the process is still going to take a lot of time that the world simply does not have. And honestly, we have not even transitioned into recovery yet. It's still in kind of the amorphous pause between active fighting and recovery. The crisis is still going on and there really hasn't been a super solid solution for it yet. Now granted, this is what this 60-day period of negotiations is for. This is for ironing out the details of a more solid plan, which at the end of that 60 days, then that plan can come into fruition. But for right now, the crisis continues and unless there were 100 ships transiting the strait per day, this the very day that the MOU was signed, we're simply not going to catch up with the demand, so the crisis still continues. Going from 0% of normal traffic to about 10% of normal traffic certainly does not mean that the crisis is over. And since the shooting took place last night on both sides, both the Iranians and the Americans, it's not really clear where we go from here. The MOU is signed and in effect, but things are not returning to normal and only a tiny fraction of normal has been seen so far. And that's where we find ourselves at the end of month four of this conflict, a lukewarm peace with the occasional missile strike, very tepid traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil production remaining stagnant and everybody pretending like the impacts of the war are over. When in reality, we're still more or less in a similar spot as before the MOU was signed. Thankfully, some progress is being made, even though it's slow. But if the Iranians are correct in their assertions, it's unlikely that the global flow of energy will return to the way it was before the war. And now that some limited strikes are taking place once again, it's going to be hard to keep that fraction of global maritime traffic going over the next few weeks. So, wrapping things up today with the Ghost Net reports for this week, I have picked up quite a few transmissions on our little off-grid information exchange system. Lots of people, as usual, transmitting informational reports about their local area, which is fantastic. Summertime is usually the more popular time for radio stuff, and after the past couple of weeks of severe weather around the world, it's good motivation to make sure we are as ready and as prepared as we can be for whatever uncertainties lie ahead, whether it's severe flooding or earthquakes or even ballistic missiles. Maintaining contact with the outside world when an entire region is either devastated or locked down or both is incredibly useful. So, let's get at it and do what we can to have capabilities and options, no matter what happens. So, that's all I have for today. As always, all of my research and geospatial products can be downloaded at the links below. However you wish to visualize the data, there are different options available. Thanks again to all of you on Patreon. I could not do this work without your help, and thanks to all of you for watching. I really do appreciate it. And as always, fight in the shade.

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

[Music] when it comes to the world of satellite communications choosing between the different options out there can be quite confusing even with a seemingly endless amount of product reviews that are paid for by the companies themselves and that's kind of an issue almost all of the product reviews out there on these devices are from the perspective of a couple of different kinds of people such as the hipster backpacker who wouldn't survive a disaster even with the gps communicator or the weekend traveler aka small business owner who does a product review because they are trying to sell the device to you also most actual reviews of satellite communications technology seem to all kind of fall into the same category of going to some remote and scenic location turning the device on sending a message and marveling that it works in other words a lot of people are impressed with the overall technology of satellite communication or even the physical device itself which is perfectly fine satellite communication in the palm of one's hand is very impressive to say the least and all of the satellite communicators currently being sold on the market right now will function they will work depending on what you're trying to do with them but therein lies the problem trying to match a technology to a capability and not the other way around a lot of people purchase these devices and pick a monthly subscription plan with the goal of making it fit into their adventures people buy a gadget and then try to figure out a use for it and even more dangerously some people change their risk management priorities because they think that having a magic sos button in their pocket makes them invincible we think that a better thought process would be to figure out what capabilities you need and then choosing a technology that fulfills this requirement with as little modification to your mission and your risk as possible and these days when everything is more expensive and people are struggling financially we think a different approach is needed especially when it comes to purchasing expensive products such as these so today we're going to cover a few different options for satellite communications from a perspective of our unique needs now let's begin by talking about why we individually or as an organization need satellite communications capabilities as one can probably imagine we are not the typical north face wearing soy latte swigging ultra light eco hippie backpackers when we go out into the wilderness areas where there are no communications we aren't going there to align our chakras or become one with mother earth we have real work to do training setting up observation posts building off-grid shelters cashing supplies all the while writing and creating content for you guys and gals out there and in addition to making sure that things are okay back on the home front where civil unrest has become a part of our daily lives so we need a communications plan that will function all of the time if we cannot get a message back home within a pre-established communications window we don't sit back and say oh well that gives us more time to unplug unwind and enjoy nature nope we stop what we're doing and we work our way down the plan to make these communications happen also all of us tend to travel internationally a decent bit mostly to nations and locations that aren't particularly friendly i personally have used my satellite communicators in conflict zones more times than i have for hiking or backpacking which is something that's not exactly advisable for reasons we'll get into later but the bottom line is that sometimes we are on the grid but the grid itself is not suitable in a lot of countries one cannot simply call 9-1-1 or their version of it and even if a country has a national emergency phone network that actually works you might find that calling the local government authorities to your exact location might not be the best option for survival which leads into something that's important to point out because it will affect every device that we're going to talk about today which is the concept of what constitutes an emergency in ye oldie worldly times back up just a couple of decades ago before satellite communicators were mainstream we had devices like the ultra simple personal locator beacons basically it was just a small device that when you hit the sos button that signal was transmitted to a satellite which beamed it down to a rescue center where the staff then contacted the appropriate agencies of whatever country or location that you are in so one might be able to see the problem with these early devices they are purely binary either you are having a great time and everything is perfect or it's a life or death emergency that will require the military police fire department's coast guard and everyone else to come get you well sometimes we face issues that are not life and death but they could be if left unaided for too long so for us this is a huge criteria being able to send messages requesting help but not necessarily pulling out all the stops and calling in the cavalry and finally the last consideration and one of the major reasons that we tend to use satellite communicators in on-grid locations is privacy all modern smartphones are built from the ground up for very specific purposes the same devices that were created to connect people in ways never done before are now essentially mini surveillance devices in your pocket the primary function of most smartphones has become to spy on you ounce for ounce and gram for gram smartphones are the most sensor dense intelligence collection platforms on or off the earth and this isn't just something to be concerned about when it comes to general privacy either these days merely having a smartphone presents a clear and present danger to the average citizen remember people have been arrested solely because their cell phones pinged them being in the general vicinity of a significant event i don't know about you but i would hate to have been just a dude walking his dog past the us capitol building on january 6th wondering what the hubbub is all about because if i had done that my smartphone would have dutifully reported back my entire existence to national intelligence agencies and i would have been a part of several investigations now it is true that satellite communicators are not secure either national intelligence agencies can break and crack pretty much anything that has a battery however when it comes to tracking satellite communications we're talking an entirely different set of sensors it would take a lot more than your local police department with a stingray device to even know that your satellite communication took place actually we're not aware of any local or state police agency that can actually intercept satellite communications at all only the highest levels of nation-state level intelligence agencies can intercept these communications but even then the crowd of people that can do this stuff within those agencies is very very small think about it this way what would you rather use to communicate with a device that is being used by literally everyone from walmart and google to every single law enforcement agency in the united states to spy on you or a device which is still being used to spy on you but only a couple of national level intelligence agencies possess the means to do so point is the likelihood of incidental and accidental collection in the average american city is much much lower with satellite devices obviously if you don't want to be spied on by the nsa fbi or cia then don't use any device that has a single line of code or takes a battery that's the general rule of thumb that we analysts live by anyway nothing digital is secure not even your alarm clock or electric toothbrush but when it comes to everyday life in a world of mass surveillance i myself feel a lot more comfortable walking around with my satellite communicator out listening for messages from my family and friends while my smartphone lives inside its faraday bag only coming out if i get a message on my satellite communicator that requires better communications so for me personally and for most of our staff here satellite communicators are not just a tool for the backcountry but an everyday tool for reducing digital signatures in urban environments and having a bit more privacy in a mass surveillance state obviously as satellite communication devices become more and more mainstream the levels at which satellite communications are spied on will become more and more localized but for now this seems to be a pretty good option for at least limiting the total number of agencies that can spy on you so for people who have our specific needs which is increasingly including the average person living in the united states there are a few different options for satellite communicators so let's work our way down the list and talk about some of the considerations for each style of device and to begin with we will be getting the elephant in the room out of the way the satellite phone sat phones are the ultimate cream of the crop when it comes to off-grid communications there is currently no technological device that tops the sat phone when it comes to capabilities and here's why sat phones don't just make phone calls nowadays most of them can send text messages send emails and even surf the web albeit using what's basically a dial-up connection and an interface that looks like the very early days of the internet for some people like us this is a necessity sometimes there's nothing that can replace a phone call and if you engage in risky travel plans in nations or locations that aren't super friendly to include the united states a sat phone is going to be a life-saving piece of gear because you can place a phone call to anyone in the world not just an emergency coordination center and one can easily go down the list of scenarios in which this is far preferable to hitting that sos button on a beacon and one of those scenarios is war if you take a look at the terms of service for most satellite communicators on the market you will find that that magic sos button doesn't work if you're in a certain blacklisted country or in a location that the company that you have service through defines as a conflict zone technically the sos button does work and you will be able to use it to talk to whatever emergency recovery center you pay for usually it will be the iercc but in any case you can contact them with the sos button if you are located in say syria or iraq but they are under no contractual obligation to come get you your policy is null and void if you are expecting rescue services in these locations which kind of makes sense seeing that they are purely a civilian peacetime recovery agency and even then they just contract out the actual rescue to local authorities in your area that's not to say that the iercc specifically will leave you out to dry they will do what they can to help but in these unique non-standard situations there might not be much they can do other than calling the local us embassy and handing things off to them better than nothing but the way things are diplomatically these days good luck but with a sat phone you can actually call a physical person without going through the emergency center and without potentially contracting a several thousand dollar rescue bill when all you needed was a tow truck or directions to the nearest urgent care there are also a lot of situations in which a sat phone is more of a lifesaver than a device with an sos beacon when a person hits that sos button help is not instant it takes several hours or even days away from you depending on where you are but a sat phone could be used to make a quick phone call to an entity that can help you much more quickly for instance let's take the lost hiker scenario if a person is hiking in the back country and gets a bit turned around they can hit that sos button and help will be on the way it will take a while and will probably end up costing a lot of money for the rescue but it will work however if that same person had a sat phone they could call the park ranger office and talk to a ranger in seconds to let them know that they're lost and since all sat phones also give you your gps coordinates you could easily tell the park rangers exactly where you are and they can hop in a truck or a gator and come get you this could be very handy for medical issues if you get bit by a venomous snake for instance you might not have time to wait the several hours it's going to take to come get you if you hit the sos button also what if you are not the one in need of emergency services all of us here have at some point come across a stranded hiker or somebody in need of help at some point or another so it would be great to have a phone that can be used to call for help or a tow truck or even to hand off to a stranded hiker so they can call home and let their friends and family know that they are safe also when it comes to the sos button on your own device some companies are really good about not billing you for a rescue if you hit your button on your device in order to rescue someone else but this is kind of a legal gray area and why i absolutely would hit my sos button to save someone else i might come across i would much rather use a sat phone and spend a couple of bucks on a phone call and avoid that potential issue that is often forgotten about when it comes to wilderness rescue who gets to pay the bill so satellite phones have a lot of benefits and like i mentioned they are arguably the best and most reliable communication device that a person can use to talk to anyone on earth at any instant but there are a lot of cons and the main con for buying a satellite phone is the massive cost sat phones are expensive most sat phones are well over a thousand dollars and that price doesn't include this year's shiny new model no most phones on the market right now are designs that are decades old also most sat phones make old-school nokias look like iphones when it comes to the on-screen options and overall layout of the device so it's pretty depressing to buy a brand new sat phones that cost thousands of dollars only to get a giant brick that looks like they made one design back in the 1980s and just stuck with it and on top of that the monthly fees are excruciatingly expensive as well for instance i personally pay about 60 dollars for my monthly satellite phone plan which includes a us phone number for free which is pretty important and for that price i get about 60 minutes of prepaid talk time that's right 60 minutes for the whole month of course i can go over this limit for a rate of about a dollar 25 a minute but considering that most normal cell phone plans are for unlimited data calls and text messages the off-world option of satellite communication costs a lot more by comparison but also by comparison it is impossible to calculate the real value that a satellite phone can have we know how much it costs we know the exact price of these devices and these plans so we can calculate how much it's going to cost but what's really impossible to know is how much a phone call is worth when you really need to make it such as in an emergency too often we try to equate the price or cost of a technology with its value but based on how many lives have been saved with satellite communications it's not really possible to adequately convey the value of such devices in an emergency they are invaluable or even not really in an emergency situation but in situations where several events occur in which the capability of making a phone call in an off-grid location would be really helpful if you frequently find yourself in situations like this or you place great value on this capability then a sat phone would be a great option for you now up next are the devices at the extreme end of the spectrum the plbs or personal locator beacons these devices are most definitely old school in terms of the more modern options that i will discuss in a moment but old school does not necessarily mean that they do not still have a use personal locator beacons are very simple devices and they have only one job to do these are meant to be thrown into a backpack or vehicle and forgotten only taken out when there is a life or death emergency as a result most of these devices have non-user replaceable lithium batteries which is fine for long-term storage but not so great for constantly testing your device before an outing but these devices do not need a subscription you simply sign up and register your device and that's it no monthly service fee or anything other than the original purchase price which when plbs were popular years ago this was quite preferable to the only other alternative at the time the satellite phone also most plbs don't use the same constellation of satellites that other systems use plbs have their own network of satellites called the kospat sarsat system this was an international collaboration between the united states and russia and a few other nations back in the 1980s with the goal of providing an international search and rescue notification system for all kinds of industries and individuals also most plbs emit a radio homing beacon that can be intercepted by search and rescue aircraft to better direction find you once they get close remember this is older technology and back in the day these satellites and devices didn't have the capability for data so all they did was receive the radio signal from your device triangulated it using other satellites and let the emergency center know that your beacon serial number was activated in this general area since these satellites are government owned and operated the initial rescue efforts are also government controlled an important distinction from other options on the market for instance if you activate a plb within the united states the first agency that would be notified that you need help is the us air force who will then hand off your beacon activation to state governmental rescue agencies or coast guard officials if you are offshore this is a big difference between some of the other options out there that we will discuss next so plbs have their place a device that has a constellation of satellites solely dedicated to search and rescue is pretty handy for redundancy but these days we have other devices that offer different and much more capabilities for around the same price technological improvements and new satellite constellations means that today we have a huge category right in the goldilocks zone between sat phones and plbs satellite communicators these devices fulfill the gap and capabilities between having just a life and death emergency button on a plb and having the high cost of a sat phone and for that reason these devices have exploded in popularity so much so that there are now many different devices in this category when compared to their old school competitors currently there are really only two major companies offering these types of devices garmin and spot which both offer totally different devices an array of devices all of which offer different capabilities so much so that each one of these devices deserves its own video but for now we're sticking with the theme of matching capabilities to a technology so at the bottom end of the satellite communicator range are the one-way only communicators these devices are most closely recognized under the spot brand as the spot company got started with offering these types of devices usually quite small the old school original spot device hasn't really changed that much in terms of functionality over the years which is perfectly fine considering its intended use these devices are meant to be a simple cheap solution to satellite communication in that they don't offer that much they of course have the obligatory sos button which all satellite messengers have these days but also a button that you can press to let people back home know where you're at and that everything is going okay a little check in button the latest generations of spot devices also have a very interesting feature of a help button which spot calls the sov or save our vehicle button think of this as a satellite based roadside service and recovery button if you break down beside the road and you don't have cell reception you can push this button to summon help but instead of going to an emergency center which dispatches rescue personnel this goes to a call center that locates you and calls a tow truck for you of course this requires a small monthly fee of at this moment three dollars but it's an important feature that is absent from spot's competitor garmin another feature that isn't talked about a lot when it comes to spot devices is their concealability spot devices are very small and can quite easily be concealed on one's person no matter what a person is wearing so if you are at the beach or a swimming hole where you're wearing nothing but a swimsuit clothing which is notorious for not being able to conceal or carry really anything at all you can still carry a small satellite communicator like the spot gen 4 and no one will ever notice that you have it and speaking of the spot gen 4 specifically is one of the most waterproof devices there is not water resistant waterproof so i actually take mine in the water with me all the time tucked and tethered away unnoticed in a zippered pocket and considering that with tracking turned on you could literally leave this device on 24 7 tracking your position every hour and just replace the extremely common aaa batteries once every couple months sure this is a very specific use and probably not needed for most people but if you find yourself prioritizing compactness and concealability over two-way communication these types of devices offer some great capabilities however the most common satellite communicators on the market right now offer two-way communication the first devices that did this were made by delorme which was quickly bought out by garmin who took that technology and now puts it in at least half a dozen different devices likewise the other main company that does this is spot again who recently came out with their sort of competitor to the garmin's inreach devices the spot x now inreach and spot devices don't exactly replace plbs the result is the same you can get rescued with both but the chain of events that occurs in the emergency process is very different what is unique is that these styles of devices allow two-way communication which is great because it's vastly cheaper than a smartphone but still has the capability of sending messages that are not of an emergency nature and this is great because it's not just a cost saving thing either in the not so hypothetical scenario of getting stuck in a downtown area because you weren't able to get off work early enough to avoid a riot and the cell phone network is either down or under extreme amounts of surveillance and not an option i personally would feel just fine in most cases with pulling out my satellite messenger and sending off a quick message to the family letting them know what's going on that is an excellent use for these kinds of satellite messengers that is not being talked about at all in the backpacking world because the market for these kinds of satellite messengers is again targeting the group of people that based on their beliefs is actually more likely to start a riot rather than try to save someone from a riot i of course don't intend to paint everyone with broad brush but let's be honest the overwhelming majority of backpacking and outdoor companies are absolutely marketing to people who tend to have a particular political ideology so people everyday citizens that have particular needs can absolutely use these technologies in today's crazy world if you were to tell me that i could purchase a device for a quarter of the cost of a modern smartphone that can't be intercepted or even jammed by my local police department which has no less than three stingray devices permanently being used in my location oh and the monthly plan for such a device is about 15 bucks a month i'd say sign me up immediately now granted one would have to be quite naive to think that the national level spying agencies aren't tracking your every message with one of these devices which leads to our next point of note anonymity it's not possible to register a satellite communicator anonymously actually i take that back technically it is none of the satellite providers that i myself have service with to include sat phone providers asked for any identification when signing up even though they probably were supposed to so in theory you could use a fake name and a burner prepaid visa card to sign up for such services but we would strongly advise against this if you only have one device for life-saving purposes remember the sos function on your beacon is tied to an insurance policy an insurance policy which is sure to be cancelled in the event that you have to use that sos function and the people at the company discover that you used a fake name to sign up and sort of on the lines of anonymity we come to another major consideration or questions that must be asked when it comes to satellite communications is whether or not these devices will even actually be allowed to work in a total or near total societal collapse while pushing past the gaping chasm of unknowns regarding such an event one little tidbit of information is of note in the case of such an event and that is the nature of the first strike attacks and denial of services that will occur should a global war or total societal collapse situation happen remember the us military restricted normal gps receivers abilities to actually have the most accurate positioning data for decades fearing that terrorists or more accurately foreign governments would be able to go to walmart and buy a garment off the shelf and put that gps chip in a missile not bad logic on the surface but considering that russia also built a gps satellite constellation and the fact that this wasn't ever really a genuine threat because anyone who was able to build a gps guided missile certainly had enough outside help to get whatever equipment they needed the pentagon quietly did away with this policy a few years ago but we must never forget the nature of that relationship it is only through the grace of the military-industrial gods in the pentagon that we are allowed to actually even use generic gps satellites in the first place so the logic continues that if one can giveth one can certainly taketh away and considering the dod's recent interest in things like gps spoofing and other space-related weaponry and also considering the current federal governments and pretty much every politician's aspirations of totalitarianism becoming a more real threat to average citizens every day it does stand to reason that one of the more important technologies that is going to get locked down for military or government only usage is satellite communications but that would have to be a truly insane world ending situation because shutting down a satellite constellation has much more consequences than banning an individual from the entire internet or even shutting down an entire website for an entire country not every single person with power in this country and certainly not every single agency within the federal government has a handy encrypted satellite radio in their office a lot of official military and diplomatic communications goes over the iridium network through devices that are registered to seemingly normal everyday citizens so even though the fear of the capability for government agencies to shut down satellite communications is a genuine concern the likelihood that this would happen is also at this point extremely remote too much of the heart and lifeblood of our nation relies on satellite communications from all international shipping and oil production to clandestine military operations the federal government is cripplingly reliant on not just the military side of satellite communications but also the recreational consumer side of things which is something that we mere peasants can take advantage of and that's really what satellite communicators and sat phones can be used for in the context of our modern world yes these devices are intended for a specific set of uses and of course are not as capable as most other communication devices like smartphones however considering the options that are currently out there and considering the comparatively cheap costs of these devices and plans when compared to the capabilities that they provide the field of satellite communications is something that in our opinion is a relatively untapped resource for citizens who are beginning to realize that having their entire lives on a smartphone is perhaps not a great idea i personally use my satellite communication devices every single day for most communications of course i would not expect everyone to rush out and do the exact same thing but i also think that sharing my and our collective experiences when it comes to alternative communications has value and with more and more satellite constellations getting put into orbit the future of satellite communications is much much brighter than it was when the technology was first developed again this of course means that as these things get more popular things like mass surveillance and privacy will become more of a concern with everyday satellite communications but for right now we live in that perfect goldilocks zone in which the devices and technology is reliable enough to fit into one's daily communications needs but also not popular enough to warrant your local health department from using it to spy on you so while we're in this sweet spot for however long it lasts satellite communications are a great way to be more prepared a little more private and have capabilities when others around you do not so if this is something you're interested in stay tuned for our future videos on the subject we will definitely be diving deeper into the world of communications as we move forward and if you haven't already done so check out our previous videos on various communications topics which are arranged nicely in playlists on our youtube channel and thank you again to all of our supporters who make content like this possible until next time fight in the shade [Music] you

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