RPF0202-Matt_Bracken

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00:00:30.000 | - On today's show, we bring together three important themes

00:00:35.000 | that will help you to live a better life now,

00:00:37.000 | if everything goes great,

00:00:38.000 | and also to live a better life later,

00:00:40.000 | if times get tough.

00:00:43.000 | And those three themes are these.

00:00:44.000 | Number one, how could you build

00:00:47.000 | a financial independence plan for yourself,

00:00:49.000 | even with few advantages in your background,

00:00:52.000 | through blue water sailing?

00:00:55.000 | Number two, could you build an independent source of income

00:00:58.000 | for yourself through a niche of self-publishing?

00:01:03.000 | And number three, could these plans help you

00:01:06.000 | to live an independent life now,

00:01:08.000 | as well as protect you in case we face,

00:01:13.000 | as a culture and a society,

00:01:15.000 | the so-called end of the world as we know it?

00:01:18.000 | (upbeat music)

00:01:22.000 | (upbeat music)

00:01:25.000 | - Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

00:01:36.000 | My name is Joshua Sheets.

00:01:37.000 | This is episode 202 of the show.

00:01:39.000 | And today I have an interview

00:01:41.000 | with an author named Matthew Bracken,

00:01:45.000 | author of an excellent series,

00:01:47.000 | if you're into political thriller fiction,

00:01:50.000 | author of the "Enemies, Foreign and Domestic" series,

00:01:53.000 | as well as the book "Castigo K."

00:01:55.000 | Gonna talk about building a life of freedom

00:01:58.000 | in a dystopian future.

00:02:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:02:03.000 | I've been a fan of Matthew Bracken's work

00:02:09.000 | for quite a while since I found it accidentally.

00:02:11.000 | A couple of years ago,

00:02:12.000 | you hear a little bit of that story in today's show.

00:02:14.000 | But I really enjoyed his novels.

00:02:16.000 | I enjoy every now and then,

00:02:17.000 | if I'm gonna read a novel,

00:02:18.000 | I enjoy often a political thriller

00:02:21.000 | or some sort of military thriller,

00:02:23.000 | or I have a soft spot for dystopian fiction.

00:02:27.000 | It's kind of an interesting world

00:02:28.000 | because as a financial planner,

00:02:29.000 | you have to dually function

00:02:31.000 | both in a world of optimism

00:02:33.000 | and in a world of pessimism.

00:02:35.000 | And so I find this type of fiction

00:02:37.000 | to be a fun way for me to go back and forth

00:02:39.000 | between optimism and pessimism.

00:02:41.000 | I don't necessarily love those labels of categories.

00:02:45.000 | In my mind, proper approach

00:02:47.000 | is realism, which is to go back and forth

00:02:50.000 | between both of them continually.

00:02:51.000 | Maybe that's a more accurate way to do it.

00:02:54.000 | But with everything in financial planning,

00:02:55.000 | usually we spend all of our time thinking about,

00:02:57.000 | well, here's exactly the perfect future that I want.

00:03:00.000 | But sometimes there are circumstances

00:03:02.000 | that are beyond your control

00:03:04.000 | that make life a little bit tougher.

00:03:06.000 | So it's important, I think,

00:03:07.000 | to think about how do I make sure that my plans work.

00:03:10.000 | Well, I often see financial planning themes,

00:03:13.000 | even in fiction.

00:03:14.000 | And that was the initial genesis of this show

00:03:16.000 | was a financial independence plan

00:03:19.000 | for a male in his early 30s

00:03:22.000 | who came from a laboring job background

00:03:26.000 | who was able to build financial independence

00:03:28.000 | through sailing, through refurbishing a sailboat.

00:03:32.000 | And after finding this first novel

00:03:34.000 | and going to the author's website

00:03:36.000 | and finding out that he had written additional novels,

00:03:38.000 | which I later got and read and recommended,

00:03:41.000 | or I recommend to you.

00:03:42.000 | They're excellent novels

00:03:43.000 | if you're into this genre of fiction.

00:03:46.000 | I wanted to talk to him

00:03:48.000 | and I found an essay that he'd written

00:03:49.000 | called Get Yourself a 30-Footer and Go,

00:03:52.000 | which is about how to build a lifestyle of freedom

00:03:54.000 | for yourself with sailing.

00:03:57.000 | And that's the initial part of this interview,

00:03:58.000 | and it's quite excellent

00:03:59.000 | to talk about some of the practical details.

00:04:02.000 | And to some of you,

00:04:03.000 | this might be an appealing course of action for you

00:04:05.000 | to build and achieve financial independence

00:04:08.000 | in very short order.

00:04:09.000 | We've talked about this a few times on the show,

00:04:11.000 | and I think this show is particularly valuable

00:04:15.000 | because I'm speaking with somebody who's done it.

00:04:17.000 | Matthew Bracken is a former naval officer

00:04:20.000 | or what's the word for a non-officer?

00:04:23.000 | I don't know his rank.

00:04:25.000 | I guess a Navy service person

00:04:27.000 | or whatever the word is, Navy employee.

00:04:29.000 | I don't know.

00:04:30.000 | Sorry, Matt.

00:04:31.000 | I don't know the right name for it.

00:04:33.000 | Also a member of the SEAL teams back in the day,

00:04:36.000 | back when they were UDT and the UDT and SEAL teams.

00:04:39.000 | A lot of experience in different theaters of conflict

00:04:42.000 | in his career.

00:04:43.000 | You can find some information about that on his website.

00:04:45.000 | But since that time,

00:04:46.000 | he took his love of the water and built for himself

00:04:50.000 | his own escape hatch, as he would call it.

00:04:52.000 | He actually built a 48-foot steel sailing boat

00:04:56.000 | to be able to do long-distance ocean cruising

00:05:00.000 | and still owns and sails that boat.

00:05:02.000 | He went on to build a career for himself

00:05:04.000 | writing fiction and self-publishing it,

00:05:08.000 | building and finding his own audience.

00:05:11.000 | As a satisfied reader of his books,

00:05:13.000 | I can affirm and attest to the fun

00:05:16.000 | and the ability of an author to reach their audience.

00:05:20.000 | I've read his four major novels.

00:05:22.000 | If he publishes another one,

00:05:24.000 | I'll buy it immediately and read it.

00:05:26.000 | I think it's an interesting idea

00:05:29.000 | that I wanted to cover here,

00:05:30.000 | but I wanted to cover it with an author

00:05:32.000 | who had actually done it,

00:05:33.000 | how to build an independent livelihood for yourself

00:05:35.000 | through self-publishing.

00:05:37.000 | That's the second part of today's show.

00:05:38.000 | Then in the third and final part,

00:05:41.000 | Bracken's a bit of a pessimist.

00:05:43.000 | He's a pretty hardcore pessimistic guy.

00:05:46.000 | So we talked a little bit about how to protect yourself

00:05:49.000 | from the end of the world as we know it.

00:05:51.000 | Both he and I hope that he's wrong,

00:05:53.000 | but it's a worthy conversation to think about

00:05:55.000 | in case he's not.

00:05:56.000 | So I hope that you enjoy this interview.

00:05:58.000 | I really enjoyed recording it.

00:06:00.000 | I hope that you can learn and benefit.

00:06:02.000 | Think about the themes and the topics

00:06:04.000 | that are presented herein

00:06:05.000 | and consider how they might be applied

00:06:07.000 | to your life in your situation.

00:06:10.000 | So Matt, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

00:06:14.000 | I appreciate your making time to be with me today.

00:06:17.000 | - Good to be here.

00:06:18.000 | Glad to.

00:06:19.000 | - I've been looking forward to having you on the show.

00:06:21.000 | What's interesting is when I made mention

00:06:23.000 | to a couple of listeners of the show

00:06:25.000 | that I was having you on,

00:06:26.000 | I found out that I wasn't the only one

00:06:27.000 | familiar with your work.

00:06:29.000 | I became familiar with your work

00:06:30.000 | through reading your novels.

00:06:32.000 | And I figured out how I did it.

00:06:35.000 | It was back in 2012

00:06:37.000 | when you first put, I think,

00:06:39.000 | Enemies Foreign and Domestic

00:06:40.000 | up on the free list for Amazon.

00:06:44.000 | And at that point in time, I downloaded it.

00:06:46.000 | And I just download free books to my Kindle

00:06:48.000 | from time to time.

00:06:49.000 | Didn't read it for months and months

00:06:50.000 | and then was sitting on an airplane

00:06:51.000 | and I said, "Ah, let's read this one."

00:06:53.000 | I think it's got a picture of an AR-15

00:06:56.000 | or something on the cover.

00:06:57.000 | I said, "Well, let's see what this is about."

00:06:58.000 | So I started reading it.

00:06:59.000 | All of a sudden, I said, "Wait a second.

00:07:01.000 | "This is a great book.

00:07:02.000 | "What does this thing do?"

00:07:03.000 | - And when was it written?

00:07:05.000 | - Exactly.

00:07:06.000 | - When was it written?

00:07:07.000 | Go back, oh, 2003.

00:07:09.000 | Actually, most of it I wrote before 9/11.

00:07:12.000 | - Wow.

00:07:13.000 | - And for people that are familiar with the book,

00:07:15.000 | I had to do kind of a mid-course,

00:07:17.000 | not rewrite, but overwrite

00:07:19.000 | to include 9/11 in it.

00:07:21.000 | And I was very fortunate.

00:07:22.000 | And this is something about self-publishing

00:07:24.000 | and it kind of ties into the whole subject today

00:07:26.000 | about being financially independent

00:07:28.000 | that I'm really keyed in on.

00:07:30.000 | We'll talk about it from the get yourself a 30-footer

00:07:33.000 | and go and other things like that.

00:07:35.000 | But yeah, I was lucky and fortunate

00:07:38.000 | with my timing of self-publishing

00:07:40.000 | and running the whole show.

00:07:42.000 | You need an agent?

00:07:43.000 | Hello?

00:07:44.000 | You need to go to New York?

00:07:45.000 | No, you don't.

00:07:46.000 | You can make, you got Adobe Acrobat,

00:07:48.000 | make a PDF that's print-ready

00:07:49.000 | and print some damn books.

00:07:50.000 | - Right.

00:07:51.000 | - Or put them on e-books.

00:07:52.000 | Anyway, yeah, I wrote most of that before 9/11.

00:07:57.000 | And this is going to why self-publishing,

00:08:00.000 | another advantage people didn't think about.

00:08:02.000 | If I was in the queue at real world,

00:08:05.000 | the real dinosaur New York publishing company,

00:08:08.000 | wow, Matt's got a real contract now.

00:08:10.000 | By the time that, in that length of time

00:08:13.000 | between finishing the manuscript

00:08:15.000 | and it actually hitting the shelves,

00:08:16.000 | I would have had a novel out

00:08:18.000 | that didn't include 9/11

00:08:19.000 | that came out post 9/11.

00:08:21.000 | And you've got an orphan.

00:08:22.000 | It's automatically a dodo bird

00:08:23.000 | 'cause you have no relevance

00:08:25.000 | if you're coming out with a novel

00:08:27.000 | that tests with terrorism.

00:08:28.000 | And it's now that post 9/11

00:08:31.000 | and you didn't include 9/11.

00:08:33.000 | So I could have a turnaround

00:08:35.000 | and just like months before

00:08:36.000 | you're ready to bang out books,

00:08:38.000 | you can include the latest stuff in there.

00:08:40.000 | In "Foreign Enemies and Traitors,"

00:08:43.000 | I was actually writing it

00:08:44.000 | as kind of the Hillary stand-in,

00:08:48.000 | Bill Slick, whatever his,

00:08:52.000 | his wife is going to be the president

00:08:54.000 | when I saw how the convention went,

00:08:56.000 | I was able to do 80% done novels,

00:08:59.000 | change it completely to Jamal Tambour.

00:09:02.000 | And now you can't do that

00:09:04.000 | if you've got a real publishing contract

00:09:06.000 | up in New York City.

00:09:08.000 | You're just stuck writing the Hillary novel

00:09:12.000 | just as Obama's elected.

00:09:14.000 | So I had, was able to late, mid-course correct

00:09:18.000 | and get out something right

00:09:19.000 | as Obama comes in with President Jamal Tambour.

00:09:22.000 | It's just another tip out there folks

00:09:24.000 | for why self-publishing is the way to go

00:09:26.000 | and why you don't need to hook up

00:09:28.000 | with real corporations anymore.

00:09:30.000 | You can do it yourself.

00:09:32.000 | - So I want to talk about self-publishing,

00:09:34.000 | but before we get to that,

00:09:36.000 | because that is on my list of topics,

00:09:39.000 | I want to kick it off with

00:09:40.000 | a little bit of your background,

00:09:43.000 | just as means of introduction.

00:09:45.000 | And how did you wind up

00:09:47.000 | in the world that you are today

00:09:49.000 | writing dystopian fiction?

00:09:51.000 | - I guess I had a really interesting childhood

00:09:55.000 | in terms of the, you know,

00:09:57.000 | doing some sailing before I was even in the Navy.

00:10:00.000 | Then being fortunate enough to be a Navy SEAL

00:10:03.000 | for a couple of years, not career.

00:10:06.000 | I was paying for college, you know,

00:10:08.000 | and it was a deal in those days.

00:10:10.000 | So your Ensign and JG and Lieutenant years

00:10:14.000 | would be basically a payback for your college,

00:10:18.000 | which is all I was, I was never career oriented.

00:10:20.000 | You know, I was, I wanted to go to college,

00:10:23.000 | Navy paid for college.

00:10:25.000 | It didn't look like much fun being a ship driver.

00:10:27.000 | My eyes weren't good enough to fly, you know, fighters.

00:10:30.000 | So I saw the coolest thing around

00:10:31.000 | that looked to me most appealing was SEAL team.

00:10:34.000 | I did that when I was a shooter.

00:10:35.000 | I didn't want to then become a staff officer.

00:10:38.000 | And, you know, all of my other Ensigns

00:10:40.000 | that went out of buds with me

00:10:42.000 | became captains if they stayed in for 20,

00:10:44.000 | because they had really caught the wave

00:10:46.000 | of special operations, you know,

00:10:48.000 | going from the redheaded stepchild

00:10:50.000 | trying to beg for bullets to being like, you know,

00:10:52.000 | the prima donna leader of the show, you know,

00:10:55.000 | a raid on Osama bin Laden.

00:10:56.000 | Who is it? The SEALS!

00:10:58.000 | You know, no matter what it is, who's the, you know,

00:11:00.000 | who saves the mayor of Scalabama?

00:11:02.000 | SEALS!

00:11:04.000 | We used to be called the silent option.

00:11:06.000 | It was, you know, like, we're all like low key,

00:11:08.000 | like don't show our pictures now.

00:11:10.000 | It's like too much, man, too much.

00:11:13.000 | Anyway, yeah, that, that gave me a lot

00:11:15.000 | of good influences for writing novels

00:11:17.000 | about this type of genre and subject.

00:11:19.000 | But more than even being a SEAL for a career,

00:11:21.000 | because I was a SEAL for like the shooter,

00:11:23.000 | the shooter portion when you're a junior officer.

00:11:25.000 | The thing that I wanted to do always

00:11:29.000 | was sail and write novels from the time I was in college.

00:11:32.000 | Before I was in college, one of my,

00:11:34.000 | my oldest sister had a sailboat,

00:11:35.000 | and we sailed around the Caribbean

00:11:37.000 | with her Welsh husband, and I saw the whole world

00:11:39.000 | of people out cruising.

00:11:40.000 | They're not, they're not working for a living,

00:11:42.000 | so to speak, you know what I mean?

00:11:44.000 | They don't punch a clock.

00:11:45.000 | They don't commute.

00:11:46.000 | They're on a, this is in the early 70s,

00:11:48.000 | they're on 50 foot plywood trimarans

00:11:50.000 | with homemade wind generators and, you know,

00:11:53.000 | very inefficient solar panels that were heavy,

00:11:56.000 | but they worked.

00:11:57.000 | You know, the same PV crystals were there,

00:12:00.000 | just not as refined and heavier, but,

00:12:02.000 | and I said, you know, this is a viable alternative.

00:12:05.000 | So you have a house, that's your boat,

00:12:07.000 | it's your transportation, it's slow transportation,

00:12:10.000 | but sometimes that's good.

00:12:12.000 | Gives you time to digest in between, you know,

00:12:14.000 | it's not like you get, take off in a jet, you know,

00:12:16.000 | you're in a fire flight in Baghdad,

00:12:18.000 | and then 10 hours later, you're in San Diego

00:12:20.000 | and your friends are all like, hey, let's go surfing,

00:12:22.000 | and you're like, I'm a little jittery,

00:12:24.000 | I just was in a fire fight 12 hours ago.

00:12:26.000 | A sailboat gives you time to decompress and,

00:12:28.000 | and actualize, you know, and let your,

00:12:31.000 | you know, your mind process everything

00:12:34.000 | from where you've been.

00:12:36.000 | Anyway, I wanted the right novels,

00:12:37.000 | I wanted to sail sailboats, and that's, you know,

00:12:41.000 | I had some good luck along the way

00:12:43.000 | that permitted me to do these things

00:12:45.000 | without getting real personal,

00:12:46.000 | 'cause my wife hates that.

00:12:47.000 | But I started writing my first novels in college,

00:12:52.000 | the only way was through big New York media,

00:12:55.000 | and the closer I got to spending a lot of my life

00:12:58.000 | writing manuscripts, I realized it's a fool's errand,

00:13:01.000 | it's like, you know, being a rube that comes in for the,

00:13:04.000 | you know, pay $100 for the hole-in-one contest.

00:13:08.000 | - Right.

00:13:10.000 | - Yeah, I'll practice a year for that.

00:13:13.000 | - So I've read four of your books,

00:13:17.000 | so I read your "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" trilogy,

00:13:20.000 | and then your "Castigo K" book,

00:13:21.000 | have you published others in addition to those four?

00:13:24.000 | - I'm working on a follow-on, another Dan Kilmer novel,

00:13:29.000 | which is a slightly different dystopia

00:13:33.000 | than "Enemies Foreign and Domestic."

00:13:35.000 | Number one, I wanted to get outside of Continental Lower 48,

00:13:38.000 | every dystopia novel in the world kicking around is like,

00:13:42.000 | you know, I'm in the rubble of Indianapolis

00:13:44.000 | after the zombie apocalypse, I don't care.

00:13:47.000 | I didn't like it when it was good, you know,

00:13:49.000 | I definitely don't want to be there when it's worse.

00:13:52.000 | You know, Baltimore, that's where I'm from, no thanks.

00:13:55.000 | I don't want my heroes in the rubble of Baltimore, okay,

00:13:58.000 | it's just, everybody else can have that.

00:14:01.000 | So I thought this is a way to have a character

00:14:04.000 | that has to be an expat, he has to be,

00:14:07.000 | because his only asset is something,

00:14:09.000 | which is a big sailboat that he kind of inherits,

00:14:11.000 | kind of works for, if he comes back to the United States

00:14:15.000 | with his only asset, banks are gone,

00:14:18.000 | everything that's electronic is gone,

00:14:20.000 | you know, which doesn't leave much,

00:14:22.000 | all of international banking gone,

00:14:24.000 | he comes back to the United States,

00:14:26.000 | he's on a list, the boat will be taken,

00:14:28.000 | so why, he can't go back to the United States,

00:14:30.000 | so everything he does has to be someplace else.

00:14:33.000 | The first novel was set in Miami and Fort Lauderdale,

00:14:36.000 | and that was kind of to give it a grounding

00:14:38.000 | that the initial reader can say,

00:14:40.000 | okay, I know who this guy is, I've been to Miami,

00:14:43.000 | I've went to, you know, these places,

00:14:45.000 | I've been to the Bahamas maybe,

00:14:47.000 | or places like the Bahamas, I can relate to that,

00:14:50.000 | and it's not like grid-down apocalyptic,

00:14:53.000 | it's like, kind of like Southern California today,

00:14:56.000 | you know, like water rationing and electricity rationing,

00:14:59.000 | Civil War ready to break out,

00:15:01.000 | the fuse is right next to the dynamite,

00:15:04.000 | so it's sort of like Baltimore in August this summer,

00:15:07.000 | you know, Cleveland.

00:15:09.000 | But the next novels are further afield.

00:15:13.000 | - So the way that I wanted to reach out to you

00:15:15.000 | on the personal finance basis, though,

00:15:17.000 | was how you began your Enemies, Foreign and Domestic trilogy,

00:15:22.000 | and your main protagonist in the first book

00:15:25.000 | is a young man who goes up and spends a few years

00:15:28.000 | working in the oil fields of Alaska,

00:15:30.000 | I think it was Anwar, if memory is correct,

00:15:32.000 | - I'm like projecting forward stuff,

00:15:34.000 | so in fact, yeah, I didn't have this.

00:15:37.000 | - So, saves his money for a few years,

00:15:39.000 | works like crazy, you know,

00:15:41.000 | lives on the cheap out in the oil fields,

00:15:43.000 | reads for his only source of entertainment,

00:15:46.000 | saves money, and then comes back

00:15:48.000 | and buys a cheap sailboat and is getting ready

00:15:50.000 | to head off down to the Caribbean

00:15:52.000 | and basically be financially independent at an early age.

00:15:54.000 | And then I came back and found out

00:15:56.000 | you had written an entire novel, or excuse me, an essay,

00:15:59.000 | giving that as a financial plan.

00:16:01.000 | So I'm interested, share the genesis of that idea

00:16:05.000 | and is that actually practical

00:16:07.000 | for people to do that in today's world?

00:16:09.000 | - It's totally practical with a few caveats.

00:16:12.000 | Number one, I'm 58, I'm in good shape for my age,

00:16:16.000 | I can still jog around the block and do stuff like that,

00:16:19.000 | and a lot of my peers can't, you know,

00:16:22.000 | and so I'm lucky, I won the DNA lottery in that sense,

00:16:26.000 | and I didn't get blown up in the sandbox

00:16:29.000 | or, you know, 'cause I wasn't there, you know,

00:16:32.000 | so I mean, I was lucky, I've been lucky.

00:16:34.000 | But even at a very young age,

00:16:37.000 | I saw people with my own eyes living on sailboats,

00:16:40.000 | and it seemed like, well, if the reason

00:16:43.000 | that you're tied to one place and you're basically

00:16:45.000 | a slave to banks is because of a mortgage,

00:16:48.000 | and because everybody tells you that a mortgage

00:16:50.000 | makes the best financial sense

00:16:52.000 | because it's the most bang for your buck,

00:16:54.000 | 'cause goodness knows you're in the middle

00:16:56.000 | of the bell-shaped curve with the rest of the,

00:16:58.000 | you know, the rodents running on wheels

00:17:01.000 | to run the whole turbine for the whole shebang,

00:17:04.000 | you know, get on that wheel and run,

00:17:06.000 | 30 years will go, like, quick in your house.

00:17:09.000 | And I said, I don't want that.

00:17:11.000 | I came up when I was very young with a continuum

00:17:14.000 | that has, like, a supermax underground jail cell

00:17:17.000 | on one end and a sailboat on the other,

00:17:19.000 | and you kind of, like, move to, like, sailboat,

00:17:21.000 | but you're in the marina, but you're ready to go offshore,

00:17:23.000 | you know, and then you got, like, a houseboat,

00:17:25.000 | well, you can move around, but not offshore,

00:17:27.000 | and you slide to the house near the canal

00:17:30.000 | and et cetera, et cetera, and you keep going over.

00:17:33.000 | Most of it is just in townhouses and suburbia

00:17:36.000 | until you're at a supermax.

00:17:37.000 | So I was very wall-phobic for a long time, you know.

00:17:41.000 | Sailboats have walls, obviously, but you live outside,

00:17:45.000 | and you live with the whole horizon,

00:17:47.000 | and the idea of you can now be mobile, right?

00:17:51.000 | It's not like you've got something that you can't take.

00:17:53.000 | You can take it anywhere you want.

00:17:55.000 | It gives you time to process.

00:17:57.000 | It's nice to take going slow to go places.

00:18:00.000 | It's nice if you're physically fit enough, you know.

00:18:03.000 | I mean, it's assuming a lot, but to be able to be free,

00:18:07.000 | you have to not have that mortgage.

00:18:09.000 | You got to cut that mortgage.

00:18:10.000 | Well, you don't want to live in a van down by the river either,

00:18:12.000 | you know.

00:18:13.000 | You don't want to live in a converted suburban

00:18:15.000 | or a school bus in Alaska.

00:18:17.000 | Maybe you do, and I'm not knocking people that do.

00:18:19.000 | I've known people that made cool houses

00:18:21.000 | out of cargo containers, folks, you know,

00:18:24.000 | like split levels on the terrain with patios,

00:18:27.000 | but it's cargo containers delivered on site.

00:18:29.000 | Welding torch, you're good to go.

00:18:31.000 | Plywood, two by four.

00:18:33.000 | It's not rocket science.

00:18:35.000 | But anyway, I like to move around,

00:18:37.000 | so I would choose to have a boat over a container

00:18:40.000 | or a place in the mountains.

00:18:43.000 | You don't have to work if you don't have a mortgage, right?

00:18:47.000 | That $1,000, $2,000, whatever it is, bucks a month,

00:18:51.000 | out of your nut or whatever you call it,

00:18:54.000 | your monthly that you got to make.

00:18:56.000 | Well, what if you don't have that?

00:18:57.000 | So if you have a boat and you own it outright,

00:18:59.000 | you've got your transportation and your habitation

00:19:02.000 | combined in one module.

00:19:04.000 | You're free.

00:19:05.000 | You're off the grid.

00:19:06.000 | You're off the radar.

00:19:09.000 | There are people right now today sailing around Madagascar,

00:19:12.000 | Americans, French, Germans, Dutch.

00:19:14.000 | You know, I've met -- it's just reality.

00:19:19.000 | If anybody interested in this, there's a great --

00:19:21.000 | actually a great website called Cruiser's Forum.

00:19:24.000 | Just go to their -- whatever is revolving around page,

00:19:28.000 | like the threads that are right now being kicked around,

00:19:31.000 | and see the real-world issues of people in the middle of nowhere

00:19:34.000 | dealing with, like, SATCOMs and solar panels and, you know,

00:19:38.000 | should I get a single sideband or should I get a SATCOM phone?

00:19:42.000 | How do you cost that out?

00:19:45.000 | And functionality of those two ways of being in communication

00:19:48.000 | is the middle of everywhere on the planet.

00:19:50.000 | Now, you make your own electricity, of course.

00:19:52.000 | You catch your own water or you have a water maker, reverse osmosis,

00:19:56.000 | you know, or you do other ways or you just carry huge amounts of water.

00:19:59.000 | You're independent.

00:20:01.000 | You're a free person.

00:20:02.000 | And the thing that's cool about it is it's not --

00:20:06.000 | you know, men, work until you're 40 at, you know,

00:20:10.000 | Ace Rocket Law Firm and make a huge amount of money,

00:20:14.000 | and then you can buy a 50-footer and be a king.

00:20:16.000 | It's not like that at all.

00:20:17.000 | You can be 30 and get a 30-footer for $30,000 and go.

00:20:22.000 | Next week.

00:20:23.000 | Right.

00:20:24.000 | You know, next week.

00:20:26.000 | So you built your own boat.

00:20:28.000 | Do you recommend that as a course of action

00:20:30.000 | or do you recommend somebody start with just buying something that someone else has already made?

00:20:35.000 | Unless you come at it as, like, I'm a welder and I just love welding

00:20:39.000 | and I had this dream to weld a boat, I would say no.

00:20:42.000 | There are so many fiberglass boats.

00:20:45.000 | A new fiberglass 35-footer might cost a quarter of a million dollars,

00:20:50.000 | plus or minus 50% from, like, bargain to, you know, from, like, Chevy to BMW.

00:20:57.000 | But they're competing with the last 40 years' worth of fiberglass 35-footers

00:21:02.000 | that are still around unless they got blown up or burned.

00:21:06.000 | And no matter how bad cosmetically they get, you know, 90% of the time they can be brought back to a looking showroom

00:21:12.000 | and they're just, you know, elbow grease, paint, you know, things that you can do with your hands.

00:21:16.000 | No rocket science.

00:21:18.000 | Nothing where you got to come up with a huge amount of money at one time.

00:21:21.000 | So the used boat market is just so reasonable.

00:21:27.000 | You know, when you consider, okay, what's the cheapest house you could get?

00:21:31.000 | Well, a 20-year-old 30-footer, which would be, like, minimal for crossing oceans,

00:21:36.000 | but perfectly doable, depending on the state of its readiness and how new and fancy it is,

00:21:44.000 | it might cost between $20,000 and $60,000.

00:21:48.000 | For $60,000, you could buy a turnkey operation where you could, if you already knew how to sail, right,

00:21:54.000 | if you already were a sailor and you knew what the gear was on the boat, you know,

00:21:58.000 | that you could--when you bought it from afar, like, you're on the West Coast,

00:22:03.000 | you're on a boat in the Carolinas, that you could see what gear is on board that boat.

00:22:07.000 | For $60,000, you could be, like, sailing out of Charleston Harbor in a week,

00:22:10.000 | bound for Bermuda or anywhere on the planet.

00:22:13.000 | And you don't need permission of anybody so far to--you know, we don't need to zarpe out

00:22:18.000 | in a lot of the world, in South America, Central America.

00:22:21.000 | When you leave a port, you got to, like, request permission from the port captain, a zarpe.

00:22:26.000 | It's like this certifies that I've paid all my bills and I'm not, like, absconding on debts.

00:22:32.000 | In America, you don't have to do that. You just leave, okay?

00:22:35.000 | And it's interesting, historically, not much more than 100 years ago, turn of the 19th to 20th century,

00:22:42.000 | there were--and this is--I didn't do the scholarship on this.

00:22:46.000 | I read it on the internet, and I know, you know, what Abraham Lincoln said about the internet.

00:22:51.000 | So, you know--right?

00:22:54.000 | So I mean, don't say Matt Bracken didn't, you know, quote it.

00:22:58.000 | It said that--what I read was that only Turkey and Russia in 1900 required an entrance visa.

00:23:04.000 | Everywhere else in the world, everywhere else but Russia and Turkey, you could just show up and say,

00:23:09.000 | hey, man, I'm an American, you know, I'm not a criminal.

00:23:13.000 | Can I come into your country? You know, maybe I got a passport, maybe I don't.

00:23:17.000 | Whatever they were issuing, then. But you just showed up and said, this is who I am.

00:23:21.000 | And maybe they signed in, like, a hotel. Okay, welcome aboard.

00:23:24.000 | So Russia and Turkey, you know, backward and in their own way, you know, xenophobic.

00:23:29.000 | Only they required an entrance visa. The rest of the world was like, come on in.

00:23:33.000 | We got room. You know, you're not a criminal. You paid your way here.

00:23:37.000 | You got on a boat. That cost money. You got a trunk. Come on in.

00:23:42.000 | Now, most of the world, you've got to get official permission to leave.

00:23:46.000 | That's the state of the loss of freedom today.

00:23:48.000 | But as of 2015, I can get on my sailboat and just go out of the inlet,

00:23:53.000 | and then the whole world is 179 degrees.

00:23:56.000 | You know, and it connects to the whole rest of it.

00:23:58.000 | So if you were giving advice to somebody like me, let's say, so I'm almost 30.

00:24:04.000 | Now, my situation is a little different, that I have a wife and two kids.

00:24:07.000 | Pretend that you were giving two alternate financial plans.

00:24:10.000 | As a novel writer, you think about this stuff a lot.

00:24:12.000 | Pretend, A, on the one hand, I was a young 30-year-old, young man or young woman,

00:24:18.000 | single, and then also as a family.

00:24:20.000 | And I had the dream to go and live this kind of lifestyle.

00:24:23.000 | But I'm from middle-class background, median income earner, working kind of a dead-end job.

00:24:28.000 | What would practically you do if you were going to go back and do it over again?

00:24:33.000 | Well, number one, the first fork in the road is being responsible for other human beings.

00:24:39.000 | And then that goes into a fork in the road of, OK, you got your hot, young, supermodel wife, but no kids.

00:24:46.000 | And then you've got your hot, young, supermodel wife and some kids.

00:24:49.000 | So these are really different situations.

00:24:52.000 | If you're the single guy, then you can live like a cow cut a cooley, living in the boatyard, never shower when it rains.

00:25:04.000 | You live in your hulk of a boat that you bought as a wreck with major fiberglass damage when it sank after a hurricane.

00:25:11.000 | And you live in this thing with a poncho around you, you know what I mean, with a mosquito net over you.

00:25:18.000 | And gradually you put in your own sweat equity and you make this thing a nice new sailboat again.

00:25:23.000 | And that's how you get in it if you're a young guy.

00:25:25.000 | But you can't say to your wife and kids, "Honey, I got this great wreck of a boat and we're going to live like the Swiss family Robinson."

00:25:31.000 | It'll be really hard and embarrassing and humiliating and painful and dirty a lot for the first year or two.

00:25:39.000 | But some people do that.

00:25:40.000 | Now, if the wife says, "I'm down for it," maybe.

00:25:44.000 | But don't put her in that position.

00:25:46.000 | If you've got a wife, you better just be able to pay the coin for a decent sailboat.

00:25:51.000 | Don't say, "Honey, first we're going to learn how to grind fiberglass and what to do to keep it from getting in your skin and not breathing it and stuff."

00:25:59.000 | But as a single guy, your options are much tougher or more rugged because it's completely viable and people do it.

00:26:08.000 | As I speak, people are in boatyards all over the country doing this exact thing where they're buying the semi-wreck because that's the most bang for the buck.

00:26:15.000 | Your sweat equity goes the furthest when you start with a -- because the fiberglass is still fiberglass.

00:26:20.000 | It might be all nasty looking on the outside, but you can bring it back.

00:26:24.000 | That's a big problem with the boatbuilding industry is how do you compete against 40 years of inventory that's just as good as what they made last week.

00:26:33.000 | Who's buying one for a quarter of a million when you can get one for $25,000?

00:26:38.000 | So you're going to pay $50,000 for a 2015 Camaro in nice condition or you can pay a tenth of that for a '71 Camaro in nice condition.

00:26:56.000 | "Gee, that '71 Camaro, I dug it. It was great. There's nothing wrong with it. It runs great. It's perfect. It's been restored."

00:27:04.000 | And it cost a tenth of a new Camaro? Who's going to buy a new Camaro? You'd have to be a fool.

00:27:10.000 | So that's how sailboats are.

00:27:12.000 | So knowing what you actually know, let's stick with just the single-person example.

00:27:15.000 | Would you shoot -- how much money would you shoot to have saved?

00:27:19.000 | What I'm trying to get to is an actual practical budget, almost like Brad, the character in your novel, laid out.

00:27:25.000 | In your mind when you were writing his character, how much money did he have? How long had he worked?

00:27:30.000 | And what was his budget in getting started with his cruising?

00:27:33.000 | That's a perfect way to frame it.

00:27:35.000 | Some people do shoestring it where they're going to actually have to do manual labor.

00:27:41.000 | Sometimes they work in the boatyard.

00:27:43.000 | Some of the time during the day they're actually working for the boatyard, scraping barnacles or whatever.

00:27:49.000 | Then in the evenings and weekends they're working on their own boat.

00:27:53.000 | But a person like Brad, he's coming into a project and he's just putting full time into that project.

00:27:58.000 | He's not trying to split between earning money.

00:28:00.000 | He's got it in his pocket.

00:28:03.000 | I would say to put it on the bigger side, which translates to a better chick magnet, because girls don't want to --

00:28:13.000 | there are some, they don't want to crawl into a day sailor where you've got to duck down and go horizontal.

00:28:20.000 | This is the cabin and she's afraid that you're going to jump on her because she's already half laying down just to be in your cabin.

00:28:26.000 | A 40-footer, now it seems like, wow, this guy's got a nice spread.

00:28:30.000 | He's got some coin, this guy.

00:28:33.000 | So Brad's going for a 40-footer.

00:28:35.000 | He could have gone for a 30-footer.

00:28:38.000 | But he had just come back from the Anwar oil field, so he's flush with cash.

00:28:42.000 | He's been saving all of his money.

00:28:44.000 | I would say that if you had a hunt, to put it like just you're going to go right at a project and your goal is to be out sailing,

00:28:52.000 | I would say if Brad wasn't doing all the sweat equity and wasn't willing to put in a few months of like putting in a new engine, for example, a new mast, things like that,

00:29:02.000 | if you wanted more of a turnkey operation out of your $100,000 budget, you could buy a ready-to-go boat easy for $50,000, plus or minus a big percent.

00:29:13.000 | At $50,000, people would be saying, $50,000, I'd buy an 80-footer.

00:29:18.000 | And then there's people saying $50,000 wouldn't buy – so it's just like anything in finances.

00:29:23.000 | When I say $50,000, I'm like it's very elastic.

00:29:26.000 | But if he had come back from the Anwar with $100,000 or if he went to Kabul and he's a contractor and he's making huge coin to risk getting blown up every day of his life –

00:29:36.000 | and I know people like that too.

00:29:37.000 | God bless them.

00:29:38.000 | They're chasing the buck so they can be free.

00:29:42.000 | But if you had $100,000, you'd be on easy street.

00:29:45.000 | You could have a cruising budget for the next three years after you bought your boat that's almost turnkey.

00:29:51.000 | Maybe you're going to do a few upgrades because the boat's been sitting in a marina like most boats for 99 percent of its life.

00:29:58.000 | It never goes out.

00:29:59.000 | It's just sitting in a marina.

00:30:00.000 | So the doctor that owns it finally figures out it's like just a money hole for him.

00:30:05.000 | But the systems are kind of like he doesn't have any secondary electrical generation.

00:30:11.000 | It's not set up for cruising.

00:30:12.000 | So depending on many factors, I would say if you had $100,000, you could buy the boat, completely outfit it, and go for the next three years and never have to work a day in the next three years.

00:30:24.000 | And figuring within the next three years I'm going to encounter some financial opportunity.

00:30:28.000 | It might be running a dive shop in the tropical island somewhere.

00:30:32.000 | You don't know.

00:30:33.000 | It might be Hite Hunter calls you on your satellite text thing.

00:30:37.000 | They've got a little satellite text device called InReach that's made by the same people that do the Iridium sat phones.

00:30:43.000 | Delorme.

00:30:44.000 | Yeah.

00:30:45.000 | It just texts anywhere.

00:30:48.000 | How did they say, "I'm on base camp seven.

00:30:53.000 | We just had an avalanche, and my body is half in the tent."

00:30:56.000 | You know what I mean?

00:30:57.000 | He's got a little thing, and he's just texting right now.

00:31:00.000 | So it's very cool communication-wise. You can be anywhere on the planet, but you can still be in touch in a sense.

00:31:07.000 | And there's many viable – all of this is viable.

00:31:11.000 | But yeah, if somebody had going down this – if somebody had $50,000 cash and no encumbrances, yes, absolutely launch right into this.

00:31:20.000 | So the interesting thing is –

00:31:21.000 | you might spend $30,000, and now you've got to budget your $20,000 to be like upgrades to the boat and some budget to go sailing on.

00:31:29.000 | But I would say $50,000 to $100,000, and you're golden.

00:31:33.000 | One of the things that intrigues me and the reason why I was asking for specific numbers –

00:31:37.000 | so when I was a kid, my dream was to be Tom Clancy when I grew up.

00:31:41.000 | And so probably in some ways similar to you.

00:31:44.000 | I just loved reading fiction, and I thought it would be so fun to sit there with my computer and just sit out by the pool deck

00:31:50.000 | and write awesome novels that people enjoyed reading.

00:31:52.000 | Now, I haven't quite exercised those skills to the point where I've written anything worth reading, but that was my dream.

00:32:01.000 | And one of the things since I became a financial planner that I've often enjoyed looking for is what are the ways to achieve dreams faster

00:32:08.000 | and to not go through the long, circuitous routes that many people take.

00:32:13.000 | And one of the things I like about your character in the novel who's going out and doing manual labor –

00:32:19.000 | and other characters from other novels as well –

00:32:22.000 | is it demonstrates that with a little bit of hard work and a lot of planning,

00:32:27.000 | people can transfer themselves from a fairly normal situation into the kind of situation that many people dream of.

00:32:35.000 | When I've traveled, I've found people all throughout Central and South America who are, like you said, running a dive shop,

00:32:40.000 | and they're living the dream, but they didn't wait until they were 60 to retire with a million dollars in the bank.

00:32:46.000 | They just said, "You know what? I'm going to go work in the oil fields of North Dakota.

00:32:49.000 | The economy's booming up there. I'm going to buy a cheap truck and a cheap pickup truck camper.

00:32:53.000 | I'm going to live cheap up there. Then I'm going to take this, and I'm going to do like you said.

00:32:57.000 | I'm going to buy a sailboat."

00:32:58.000 | And all of a sudden, there they are at 30 or 35 years old, maybe 10 years of work, 15 years of work,

00:33:03.000 | and they've knocked 30 years off the plan that a lot of times the middle manager employee might have.

00:33:09.000 | I was lucky because I was introduced to sailing as a lifestyle by flying down to the Caribbean in the early '70s,

00:33:18.000 | where a sister of mine and her Welsh husband, my brother-in-law, they were living this dream.

00:33:24.000 | They were just on a little 33-foot wooden X racing boat, but I got to see that there were people on homemade 60-foot steel schooners,

00:33:34.000 | ugly as hell, but they were out there, and they made it themselves.

00:33:39.000 | I met somebody in Hawaii on the Big Island. This is a cool story.

00:33:44.000 | I sailed by myself from Panama to the Big Island to Guam, and I'm in the Big Island in this tiny little harbor,

00:33:50.000 | stern tied like a Medmore with the anchor out in front and like a plank or something.

00:33:56.000 | The boat comes in. He ties up near me, and it's Russians. I'm thinking, "This is awesome.

00:34:01.000 | He's finishing a circumnavigation back to the Kamchatka Peninsula side," whatever the archangel or not.

00:34:12.000 | Anyway, the Novosibirsk, whatever, I forget the name of the cities, the far eastern, like San Francisco of Russia, but it's flipped around.

00:34:21.000 | Anyway, he had built this boat out of wreckage in the collapse of the Soviet empire.

00:34:28.000 | Out of salvaged scrap commie crap. It was thrown together. It's functional, ugly works, but overall good enough design that at 100 yards, it looks acceptable.

00:34:43.000 | You can see up close how rough and ready it is, but all of his kids, he's got this beautiful blonde wife.

00:34:49.000 | He's this fantastic Russian guy, and he's got kids that are from 5 to 10 on his boat, like a 40-footer.

00:34:56.000 | He's got at least three kids on board, homeschooling them.

00:34:59.000 | They've learned English and French and German. Not German, but definitely English and French.

00:35:04.000 | His kids, their whole life, have circumnavigated.

00:35:08.000 | He was like, "Yeah, I'm hoping that when I get back," because by the time he gets back, the whole glasnost has come, and now you can just return.

00:35:16.000 | He says, "I'm the first Russian circumnavigator, and I'm hoping to turn it into a book because you've got to have some income."

00:35:25.000 | He wasn't saying it exactly that way, but the kinds of jobs they had done all along the way as translators and unusual situations that they found themselves in, places like Australia, for a year at a time.

00:35:38.000 | They don't have the money to just do a push-on circumnavigation. They have no budget. It's not a fundme.com thing.

00:35:45.000 | There's no website. They're doing it, and they have to stay in places like Australia or Chile or wherever for a year at a time.

00:35:53.000 | Meanwhile, your kids adapted that culture. They're like little sponges.

00:35:57.000 | Yeah, these are my heroes. These are my total heroes, and I challenge anybody at loose ends.

00:36:04.000 | It's just thinking, "Stay here in the sticks or move to the big city. Nobody understands me. I don't have a skill."

00:36:12.000 | Whatever I know about IT, there's an Indian guy that is twice as good for half the money.

00:36:17.000 | I might as well just be brand extinct on my forehead right now.

00:36:21.000 | Get yourself a 30-footer and go. That's why I wrote it.

00:36:25.000 | That provides us with a perfect place to pivot to the topic of publishing.

00:36:30.000 | I'm interested, over the years, and again, feel free to share as much as you feel comfortable or as little as you feel comfortable,

00:36:39.000 | but over the years, have you been able to make some money publishing these novels to actually support yourself to be able to do the type of work that you love without the need for external income?

00:36:49.000 | I can only speak for me. This is just one anecdotal point.

00:36:58.000 | I have four novels out. I wish I had five or six. I'd hope to be like one every other year.

00:37:07.000 | I'm not like a guy that can write 50 novels in 20 years. I just can't do it for many reasons. I can't do it.

00:37:13.000 | I envy people that can slapdash books out that have 29 words in a chapter with complete empty pages in between, and people seem to love them.

00:37:26.000 | My books are fairly dense. I wish I was a more concise writer.

00:37:30.000 | I've got to compliment you. Your book was exactly the kind of book that I enjoy reading as far as detail, rich, dense.

00:37:37.000 | I felt like I got my money's worth. When I finished Enemies, Foreign and Domestic, I happily bought the rest of the trilogy because I knew I would get my money's worth.

00:37:45.000 | There were a lot of books in your genre that really disappointed me over the years.

00:37:49.000 | Exactly. It's just begging. This is how I came into it, in a sense.

00:37:55.000 | In college age, I'm writing thrillers, political, nuclear war kind of stuff, Cold War stuff, and it just wasn't viable.

00:38:07.000 | There's a fellow named Dan Pointer who came into self-publishing sideways as a parachutist.

00:38:16.000 | He has some manuscripts on parachutes with illustrations and so forth.

00:38:21.000 | He goes to publishers and they're like, "How many do you think you're going to sell? Get the hell out of here."

00:38:25.000 | He decided to do it himself because he knew about this thing called non-bookstore book selling,

00:38:31.000 | which is like your pet store has shelves of pet books and your sewing department has a shelf and the music store has shelves of printed books.

00:38:40.000 | He knew that there were a lot of venues he could stick his parachute books right into the hands of parachutists in newsletters and catalogs.

00:38:48.000 | He wrote the self-publishing manual and he became a guru, not just a bookseller.

00:38:58.000 | So you were saying that he became a guru, is right where you dropped off.

00:39:02.000 | Right. But it became viable. I was never of the mindset, "I bought all of these books on how to get your novel published," the writer's manual things.

00:39:12.000 | I was basically a cult of like, "Write the perfect intro letter to get an agent because you can't even get near mega dinosaur publishing ink without an agent.

00:39:23.000 | It has to be the right agent." So you have to become an expert at this exotic pitch letter that you're going to send.

00:39:33.000 | I was like, "Come on. If I got to go to New York City on my knees, it's like, 'Okay, so the only changes, the ATF are going to be the heroes and the racist right wing militias are going to be the villains.

00:39:44.000 | I can do that. No problem. No problem. Whatever. Please just read my manuscript." I said, "To hell with that."

00:39:52.000 | Somebody more recently told me something that's been such a truism. This should be like a huge marketing.

00:39:58.000 | Marty, anyway, you know what the secret of niche publishing is? Do you know the secret of niche publishing?

00:40:05.000 | I don't know. Find the people that like your stuff.

00:40:07.000 | Let me tell you the secret of niche publishing. They all work!

00:40:11.000 | [Laughter]

00:40:13.000 | You can narrow cast. You can adjust your beam. You don't have to be like a radar spewing it out 360.

00:40:21.000 | You can say, "Where's my audience? My audience is into Corvettes. There's a Corvette club with 100,000 people that are shooting things about Corvettes back and forth to each other.

00:40:32.000 | If your novel has a detective with Corvettes in it, you can make sure that all those people that just dig the hell out of Corvettes has your detective that drives a Corvette.

00:40:42.000 | They're going to know about it. You don't have to just put it in Life magazine and hope that somebody that likes Corvettes and likes detectives happens to stumble on your title.

00:40:50.000 | You can now find your audience. No matter how narrow it is, your product can be more tailored.

00:40:59.000 | The reason I mention this, I said, "Okay, if I was acceptable in New York City, let's say I got the agent and I'm going to pitch them a novel.

00:41:11.000 | It's going to have where the gun people aren't like drunken hillbillies from Deliverance with a whiskey bottle in one hand, shooting a gun, slapping their wife, quoting Bible verses extemporaneously while drinking and shooting, beating their wife.

00:41:30.000 | That's what New York thinks of gunnies. That's what they think of people that have ever known what the Second Amendment's about.

00:41:36.000 | They think that we're out of Deliverance. At best, you're Burt Reynolds. Keep an eye on them. At worst, you're a hillbilly. Squeal like a pig.

00:41:45.000 | I said, "All right, let's turn lemons into lemonade by being a contrarian." This is like lots of finance.

00:41:54.000 | The contrarian strategy is, "Well, what's a novel that absolutely they wouldn't ever get near? Toxic. Toxic.

00:42:03.000 | Isn't there a latent market?" Because when I go shooting, the guy next to me has got $5,000 worth of optics and custom-made, free-floated ...

00:42:14.000 | His upper is a 6.5 Grendel. I'm like, "Wow, man. My Bushmaster is like a Sears Roebuck 22 compared to your AR."

00:42:25.000 | Then he's got more of them, and it's like his hobby. I'm like, "Well, these aren't the drunken hillbillies with a break-open shotgun that they think of in New York City."

00:42:34.000 | In New York, the only guys with guns that are good are liberals, or they're in the FBI and they're liberals, or they work for the CIA, maybe.

00:42:45.000 | Even then, Liam Neeson, he's kind of like a big lefty liberal. He shoots a bunch of guys, but they're always like Serbs or something.

00:42:55.000 | They're a worthy ... Everybody hates kind of boo-hiss, the people he's shooting.

00:43:00.000 | Basically, you've got a big liberal for Hollywood to allow you to shoot guns and express any kind of affection for guns or knowledge of guns or a hobbyism of guns.

00:43:10.000 | You have to be like ... Even Mel Gibson, he's kind of crazy. He's a detective when he was younger.

00:43:16.000 | At least he's a cop, so it's okay. He can wave the gun around, shoot people all over the street because he is a cop.

00:43:22.000 | That meant that they ... But they treat anybody that's a private citizen, they're shaking their hands like Barney Fife, like, "You can't shoot me," as the guy walks up and takes the gun away.

00:43:32.000 | He's like, "These aren't the people I know that are shooters." There's got to be ... I'm watching TV all the time. It's just one insult after another.

00:43:40.000 | It's the same thing, movies. I'm thinking there has to be a huge latent market for people out there that are the guys that are gun enthusiasts that support the Constitution and freedom,

00:43:51.000 | and where they're not the ill idiots and hillbillies, where they're actually the heroes.

00:43:56.000 | That was a consideration of, "Don't just make another detective genre like you're pitching to New York City."

00:44:05.000 | That same publisher has just selected 10 by Robert Ludlum level of ghostwriting, which is all they have today.

00:44:15.000 | There's still Tom Clancy, this and that. He's been ... Wait a minute, didn't he die? It doesn't matter. The name goes on.

00:44:22.000 | Out of the ashes, Johnston. The name goes on. The family says, "We agree not to talk about the fact that he died 10 years ago." Keep sending royalty checks, thank you very much.

00:44:32.000 | Hey, it's a good investment for his family. He created a perpetual annuity for them with his name.

00:44:38.000 | Exactly. No problem. No problem.

00:44:41.000 | So when you started off, you had long wanted to be a writer. Were you writing to scratch your own itch, or were you hoping to actually make some money off of the sale of your books?

00:44:55.000 | Always wanted to make money off the sale of the books. Otherwise, you can't justify to your family, "Well, Matt's eccentric. He plants rare tulips on the roof 10 hours a day."

00:45:07.000 | Because he digs it. He just digs it. He thinks they're the most beautiful ever.

00:45:11.000 | But if it doesn't return any scratch, then eventually they say, "Well, eccentric in a bad way."

00:45:18.000 | So if you're going to be eccentric, be eccentric in a good way. Like build a big sailboat and write novels that people will actually read.

00:45:25.000 | And there's a humiliation phase you go through in your 30s, 40s, and early 50s. But you can get over this humiliation phase where people say, "What's Matt going to be when he grows up?"

00:45:38.000 | And you're like 47 years old or something. So eventually there has to be a return on investment.

00:45:45.000 | But freedom has to come first. I'm very blessed and fortunate the way this thing worked out timing-wise. I finally caught on a wave.

00:45:54.000 | We moved to San Diego. We were in military housing at a time when we thought it was a terrific opportunity to live in officer housing very near SeaWorld and near Pacific Beach.

00:46:05.000 | So we didn't go in the economy and buy a house. Everybody we knew that bought a falling down shack in 2000 in San Diego did a two or three bagger on it. Everybody.

00:46:16.000 | You buy a hot dog stand and paint it and make it a house, you triple your money.

00:46:21.000 | So we didn't. But finally we did arrive at a place where we did catch a little bit of a wave with self-publishing and e-books and all of the rest of it.

00:46:29.000 | But you can make a living at it. It's a golden age of self-publishing. It's so different, but it's different in an old – it's great for everybody except for the publishers in New York.

00:46:41.000 | Sorry, I never liked them anyway. So now the complaint is, "But every kind of drivel and crap is out there and it's so hard to find a good book."

00:46:52.000 | Well, in my world that's called a level playing field. Everybody gets to play.

00:46:57.000 | In The Shining, Jack Nicholson, it turns out he's just writing all work and no play makes Jack an old boy over and over again for hundreds of pages.

00:47:05.000 | His wife thinks he's working on a novel. Well, you could upload that on Kindle and tomorrow people can buy it.

00:47:12.000 | If they think it's interesting, if they click purchase, you could do a blank novel with a period in the middle.

00:47:20.000 | If people click purchase, it's actually kind of like an alternative to a GoFundMe.

00:47:24.000 | You can just write an instant novel.

00:47:26.000 | Then they'll probably say that that's just a cover because you're big at trying to escape the scrutiny of the politically correct commissars, like a bakery or a photography studio or something.

00:47:39.000 | But so far they haven't shut me down. So far I'm like Jeff Bezos' number one fan.

00:47:44.000 | Well, make sure you build things up because things can change.

00:47:48.000 | I'd like to shift and talk about the topic of investing in case of societal change.

00:47:56.000 | So you're a pretty hardcore guy and that comes through a little bit in the interview but even in some of the novels you take some pretty hardcore scenarios.

00:48:06.000 | One of the things I love about novelists is you guys have a tendency to over-research everything to try to make sure that things are accurate.

00:48:18.000 | So in today's world, 2015, looking forward, do you have a personal approach to how you approach investing for your own family's future?

00:48:27.000 | Feel free to be as broad or as narrow with that as you are comfortable.

00:48:33.000 | I think that all – I'm almost starting to consider all of these what I would consider an electronic investment, an electronic instrument.

00:48:45.000 | I think that all of the electronic instruments could go poof in a blink and they'll be about as useless as a confederate bond without the advantage of actually being a beautiful piece of engraving work and calligraphy suitable for mounting on the wall.

00:49:02.000 | You won't even have that. All you're going to have is you'll be able to say down at the soup kitchen, "You wouldn't believe what I had in Black Rock."

00:49:11.000 | What was that? You mean like a black rock? Not exactly. What happened? Well, it all went away.

00:49:18.000 | So I have a – I think it's a huge vote of optimism to have a bunch of your wealth right now in electronic instruments that are as real as our belief that the internet is real.

00:49:33.000 | But just like the internet was a miracle when it came in, it can be a miracle when it goes out.

00:49:38.000 | And the reason I say that is I feel very strongly in many levels that it feels like 1914 and I'm a farmer sitting there in the middle of East Prussia going, "Wow, there sure are a lot of trains going back and forth, a lot of soldiers and cannons moving this way and that."

00:49:56.000 | I mean China building up the islands in the South China Sea and they're just – no, Obama doesn't – Obama is going to either do nothing or he'll do a huge miscalculation that could totally lead to an out-of-the-box genie scenario.

00:50:10.000 | But in any event, no matter what the trigger is, whether the trigger is China, Iran, Russia, just a hack that totally takes out the entire Cisco connectivity of the world, the entire computer network system could just be whoosh.

00:50:27.000 | Because the reason I say that is nobody is really worried that – I mean of course a nuclear holocaust is still a bad thing.

00:50:37.000 | It's not like it became a good thing. But a nuclear holocaust was unlikely because when you fired a missile across the pole, everybody saw where it took off.

00:50:47.000 | And now it's aiming for Chicago? You just blew up Chicago. That base in Russia just blew up Chicago. Well, man, we're pissed at you. We're firing one right back at you.

00:50:55.000 | And mad work against Russians, it has worked against the Chinese. It may or may not work against the Iranians when they nuke up, and they will.

00:51:02.000 | That remains to be seen. But for sure, a way more devastating attack is not to put a nuclear fireball over Washington, DC.

00:51:10.000 | It's to cut off electricity and the computer network to Washington, DC.

00:51:15.000 | You don't have to – you don't need to do anything that fires a missile with a return address, which makes the likelihood of this worst scenario almost a certainty.

00:51:26.000 | If push comes to shove with Iran, with China, with Russia, with any of these guys, if push comes to shove, think about the Sony hack.

00:51:33.000 | That was just over a movie where we pissed off the dwarf over there. So it's kind of like a recon by fire.

00:51:41.000 | We shot a few rounds towards Korea and made them give away their positions.

00:51:45.000 | We tricked them into showing some of the cards they've got for cyber war.

00:51:51.000 | So it's a study point. You could almost consider that an electronic recon by fire. And they fell for it. They fell for it. It's vanity.

00:51:59.000 | But imagine what China's got. That was like a few cards from the dwarf of North Korea, maybe.

00:52:04.000 | And another lesson of that is who's really sure it was North Korea?

00:52:08.000 | If any weapon where you're not even sure where it launched from is way more likely to be used, let's say it is – let's say North Korea was actually made a fool of,

00:52:18.000 | and it was really Putin or Iran or somebody in South America that's got a dome on a mountain and he's just Dr. Evil, who the hell knows?

00:52:26.000 | Any weapon where there's no return address is going to be used.

00:52:29.000 | And right now the top target in every country, China, Russia, everywhere, it's our grid, our jugular vein.

00:52:37.000 | Don't worry about tanks in the desert. If that happens, it's ruffling the guys in the tanks, of course.

00:52:42.000 | And don't worry necessarily about the nukes flying over the poles. That might happen later if it becomes a total out-of-control furball.

00:52:51.000 | But definitely worry about attacks against the grid and the Cisco computer network system, the global system.

00:52:57.000 | Everything between our computers runs on Cisco. And that can be attacked on huge levels.

00:53:03.000 | Our Stuxnet virus was so cleverly conceived it got into Iran's secure nuclear engineering systems to cause their centrifuges to wobble.

00:53:12.000 | Well, imagine how much easier it will be to cause generators to wobble that aren't even in protected sites in America.

00:53:20.000 | You know, do things to burn themselves up. And it will be a sustained attack.

00:53:24.000 | It won't be like something launched once. As we try to recover, they'll have plans for knocking our recovery down.

00:53:31.000 | And we'll be doing it to them. So I suppose one of my biggest pieces of advice that lines back up with get yourself a 30-footer and go,

00:53:39.000 | I'd be very leery of living in multi-million human being beehives anymore lately, because the next war is going to shut everybody's power off.

00:53:49.000 | That's going to be target one. Remember, no return address. You hate the guys, you want to cause them ruin, whether you're ISIS or whoever.

00:53:58.000 | You hate them and you want to cause them ruin. You want to cause maximum casualties. You do not need to lob a nuke over a city.

00:54:04.000 | There are many ways to shut off the power and the computers, which are intertwined like the nervous system.

00:54:11.000 | You know, you can't, for example, you just can't say, well, Matt, if they just take out the computer system, well, if then the grid will fail.

00:54:19.000 | I mean, because they're intertwined. You can't have one without the other.

00:54:24.000 | And I'm very concerned that people are very blase about this. I tell people investment. How about a well with a hand pump?

00:54:32.000 | You know, every what is your scenario if your power goes out? Well, a backup water generator will run for a few days to do pump the final pumping stations.

00:54:43.000 | But eventually the system in a week or so, even your city water is gone. So what then?

00:54:51.000 | You know, what are you going to do then? You need water. The rule of four is the air, the water, the food.

00:54:58.000 | Have you seen any because you've been around this world for a while coming from your background in special forces and then writing about it for a long time?

00:55:08.000 | Have you seen people paying more attention? Because so much my challenge that I always face is my lack of experience as measured in years.

00:55:18.000 | And I haven't been paying attention to this world for a very long time. But even in my lifetime, it seems now, at least when I was a financial advisor,

00:55:26.000 | I even relatively normal mainstream people who weren't accustomed to thinking about disaster scenarios were constantly asking about potential disaster scenarios.

00:55:36.000 | And I perceived a change even in the six years I worked as a professional financial advisor. Do you said that happening on society?

00:55:45.000 | That's among people who are even reachable, that are even tuned into a current events, you know, world history understanding level.

00:55:56.000 | But the problem is that everybody today gets to custom customize their own fantasy.

00:56:03.000 | And this is very dangerous on a social level. You don't need to pay news. Financial news.

00:56:09.000 | OK, you know, it's like what news? Well, that could be tornadoes in Oklahoma. Watch that for a minute.

00:56:15.000 | But something it's just dissecting like the bailout for Greece or do you think that one in 100 people outside of your financial circle,

00:56:24.000 | if you walk up to anybody on the street and say, what do you think about the what do you think about the currency collapse in Greece that might be about to happen?

00:56:33.000 | They would sit. Number one, they'd say Greece. Is that still a country or, you know, I don't know.

00:56:40.000 | Where's Greece? So. Among the people that we're even having this conversation with, we almost don't matter.

00:56:48.000 | We're like a clique of rabbis and, you know, on the Titanic.

00:56:53.000 | You know, so we're like in our own compartment where the super geniuses, oh, if the designer had only, you know, I told him two more watertight compartments would have done it.

00:57:02.000 | You know, it doesn't matter. The rabbis go down with the Titanic, even though they, you know, before it even sinks,

00:57:09.000 | they've already got all the problems dissected. And what should it could have? Would it doesn't matter.

00:57:14.000 | We don't matter. Everybody out there is just clicking to Fantasy Island that then they get determined, you know, which fantasy island they're on right now.

00:57:23.000 | So there's absolutely no need to be concerned yourself with impending doom when you're mainlining electronic heroin,

00:57:30.000 | you know, through your virtual reality widescreen TV. That's what I wish people would read.

00:57:35.000 | Alas, Brave New Babylon, my short story. So one of the reasons why I don't have a new novel out, I just kind of switched over.

00:57:41.000 | Novels take so long to write. And what I wanted to say is things like what I saw at the coup and Alas, Brave New Babylon,

00:57:48.000 | because people are so switched into fantasy television that, you know,

00:57:53.000 | it would literally take like an out of control train wreck coming through their house.

00:57:57.000 | You know, Amtrak would have to derail, come through their living room and take out their big screen TV.

00:58:03.000 | Then they'd say, Martha, reality, look, it's in my living room.

00:58:08.000 | But until then, until then, it could be like, well, Operation Jade Helm 2017.

00:58:14.000 | We're now clearing out the West Palm Beach nests of vipers. And people will just be like, oh, gosh, are they still on that?

00:58:21.000 | What's what's happening over on, you know, on American Idol, you know, until the power goes out,

00:58:27.000 | then it's going to be like, wait a minute, where the way I like to think of it, you're in your shower,

00:58:33.000 | completely lathered up, full head of shat, you know, lather, your beard half trimmed or whatever.

00:58:38.000 | And it goes squeak and it's runs. And so what is it?

00:58:41.000 | And you're never going to see another drop of water come out of a pipe for the rest of your life.

00:58:45.000 | You'll be like when you're old age, you'll be like gathered around the campfire.

00:58:49.000 | Grandpa, tell us about when clean, clear, drinkable water just came out of pipes everywhere.

00:58:56.000 | So those types of scenarios make good fodder for novels.

00:59:01.000 | But I would I mean, my guess would be in real life, you wouldn't quite in a novel.

00:59:07.000 | It seems to me like you need it. You need a scenario that's a little bit beyond just just to be fun.

00:59:13.000 | I mean, you don't you don't. And I don't even I don't even have in my novels.

00:59:17.000 | I don't even have like that, because when you watch movies like The Road, right.

00:59:21.000 | Like, you know, what's the point of going past, you know, utter desolation and misery and depression?

00:59:27.000 | You know, I like the semi what I call it is semi dystopian. I like the process.

00:59:32.000 | I like the collapsing empire scenario where the Ronin are looking for new gigs, you know,

00:59:38.000 | and they're they're out trying to stay free.

00:59:41.000 | And but like in the novel I'm writing now, you know, if you have a diesel engine and it hadn't blown itself up,

00:59:49.000 | you know, the belts and hoses are still good. It's still going to run as long as you got diesel.

00:59:53.000 | But what you're not going to have is the satellites and everything in between. You're not going to have GPS.

00:59:58.000 | So it'll be in some ways it's kind of a retro view where, say, the 1930s tramp steamer type of technology still works.

01:00:08.000 | Magnetic compass still shows north sextant. If you know what to do with a sextant and you have a time tick,

01:00:14.000 | you know, would be one of the last things that you would need is a time tick, which you can get on radio.

01:00:18.000 | If some government out there is doing a time tick. But if you don't have a a a anchor to accurate time,

01:00:25.000 | then even longitude, you lose pretty quickly. So then you're back to sailing latitudes.

01:00:31.000 | But I mean, technology will still work during the entropy scenario, but depending on what you've got and how far it is.

01:00:37.000 | Wouldn't you assume, though, that in a difficult situation, for whatever reason, whether a financial crisis or anything,

01:00:45.000 | that there's a period of unrest, there's a period of challenge and then society is quickly reassembled and systems of support are relatively quickly brought back?

01:00:56.000 | I don't assume that at all because I do not assume that at all, because there are a few differences now.

01:01:03.000 | I would I would recommend reading or watching a movie on YouTube called The Last Valley set in the 1600s,

01:01:13.000 | the 30 years war in a little valley in Austria. But watch this movie and now give every make instead of Protestants and Catholics,

01:01:22.000 | make it Muslims versus everybody else. Give everybody AK-47s and ATVs and you can wipe out civilization pretty profoundly.

01:01:31.000 | You know, you can take it down to the roots and burn the roots, depending now.

01:01:35.000 | They Europe came out of that. But a lesson of that era. It also happened a little later in 1640s with Cromwell's invasion of Ireland.

01:01:43.000 | You don't need to set up Auschwitz to like wipe out half or a third of a population.

01:01:48.000 | All you have to do is drive them out of their villages, burn their thatched roofs.

01:01:53.000 | They don't harvest their potatoes. They're like living on the run for a period.

01:01:57.000 | The winter and illness and drink and ditch water does the rest.

01:02:01.000 | You can wipe out a third of a population. That's when everybody lived right where they grew food.

01:02:07.000 | So it'll be worse today because our just in time, perfectly intermeshed world where, you know,

01:02:12.000 | roses are flown in from Colombia on a, you know, giant wide body jet loaded with roses and distributed all around the world.

01:02:21.000 | So we think that like having a fresh rose is like just a average ordinary thing.

01:02:25.000 | It's not. It's we're in the middle of a huge Swiss watch and you can't just yank out a few cogs and say bang on it a few times.

01:02:32.000 | She'll be running again. No, she won't. If the grid goes down for a week,

01:02:37.000 | I'm afraid that our cities are going to absolutely explode and burn one week.

01:02:41.000 | The supermarkets will be looted in three days and then there will be a panic contagion where everybody's main lesson will be.

01:02:48.000 | Don't listen to the people that say don't loot. We're going to set up distribution in a few days.

01:02:54.000 | Those people that stayed home and listen didn't didn't loot.

01:02:57.000 | I got no food because by the time they got the supermarket was a burned out shell.

01:03:01.000 | So everybody will learn from the first city suffering a looting contagion to get there first.

01:03:07.000 | So the food is gone. I don't know if you ever worked on diesel engines,

01:03:10.000 | but there's a there's a situation where you take your high pressure fuel delivery apart,

01:03:16.000 | leading from your high pressure pumps to your injectors.

01:03:20.000 | You take that all apart to fix something or modify something, put a new injector, change oil, whatever.

01:03:27.000 | No matter how much of a hurry you're in, you can't stomp on the accelerator, turn the key and make the thing go.

01:03:32.000 | Everything's got to be put back together very meticulously, piece by piece by piece.

01:03:36.000 | And then you have to purge the air out of the system laboriously, joint by joint by joint, all the way to the injectors.

01:03:42.000 | And then you can start no matter what a hurry you're in, you can't hurry it up.

01:03:46.000 | People zombies are coming. People are aiming guns at you. You can't hurry it up.

01:03:50.000 | If our system, our food delivery system stops, is interrupted for one week.

01:03:55.000 | Our cities absolutely go out of their minds, berserk.

01:03:58.000 | Then the diet, everything changes. The economics of food delivery now is in a post looting world where the same 18 wheeler

01:04:07.000 | that could travel unimpeded to your local grocery store last week, it can't anymore.

01:04:11.000 | One driver, no security, no gun, he's driving 60 feet of meat, frozen meat to your store and nobody's guarding him.

01:04:22.000 | Well, a week later, now that's Fort Knox on wheels. Every fuel tanker, everything.

01:04:26.000 | The 18 wheelers run out of fuel in three days. Truck stops, everything.

01:04:31.000 | That's how America moves at the retail level is in 18 wheelers.

01:04:36.000 | Trains have their own situation. But the trucks are looted to the axles in three days.

01:04:43.000 | And it becomes very hard to break this airlock and get the food delivery system restarted into the cities.

01:04:49.000 | Short of a massive level of martial law and jade helm times a billion, I don't think that they have the manpower to do it.

01:04:58.000 | A couple hundred IRA tied down 10,000 Brits in Ireland for a generation.

01:05:06.000 | Cities that are completely out of control are not going to be put back in control by National Guard troops brought in from the suburbs.

01:05:14.000 | Plus the active duty and everything else. Humpty dumpty when it breaks is going to be very hard to fix.

01:05:20.000 | Our cities become ungovernable Mogadishus in a week.

01:05:25.000 | And you remember Mogadishu did at various times have electrical grid running and water plumbing.

01:05:32.000 | And then at times it didn't. It has been broken and rebuilt several times.

01:05:37.000 | But Mogadishu has lessons for all of us. People call Memphis Mogadishu on the Mississippi.

01:05:43.000 | Well, imagine Memphis with no electricity. In a week it's completely out of control and hard to fix.

01:05:49.000 | So coming back from that won't be an easy, pleasant or legal experience.

01:05:56.000 | And it's going to be very likely that if you can come back from that, the level of martial law will be so harsh.

01:06:02.000 | So harsh. It'll be Cambodia level reordering of society of just the only way we can deliver food is some bureaucrat orders everybody in this zip code to get on the buses.

01:06:13.000 | And they resist. Katie, bar the door. But just a normal distribution where trucks are going to reflow the system, the burned out supermarkets,

01:06:24.000 | you know, the looted convenience stores burned out everything in between them. And we're just going to start that up again.

01:06:32.000 | I'm sorry, you can't restart a corpse in a sense. And that's in a sense what you would have after a week with no electricity in a major American city.

01:06:40.000 | I mean, the windows will be broken out of the office buildings. The sewage, just the picture, every high rise, anything over three or four stories,

01:06:48.000 | every high rise takes a lot of pressure to pump water up. And then the sewage has to be taken out.

01:06:55.000 | What we know happens, you know, I'm not inventing this about the future.

01:07:00.000 | I'm witnessing what happens in places like Srebrenica and other places.

01:07:04.000 | What's Srebrenica? I never heard of that.

01:07:06.000 | Bosnia, the city that was the host of the Winter Olympics, like in 1990 or 1988 or something, you know,

01:07:15.000 | Katarina Witt was a hot commie chick that won a gold medal for figure skating.

01:07:20.000 | She's got great YouTube's. Anyway, she was in Srebrenica.

01:07:24.000 | It became then a Holocaust city, you know, of a three way civil war with Srebrenica, kind of as getting artillery from all directions.

01:07:32.000 | Sniper alley, one apartment block, sniping at another apartment block, you know, where you're just living in a high rise becomes a hell hole, in other words.

01:07:40.000 | Got it.

01:07:41.000 | You know, and nowhere that you want to be living.

01:07:43.000 | So what do you do practically to...

01:07:49.000 | So the challenge that I always face, especially it's a real burden as a financial advisor to know how to talk through situations.

01:07:58.000 | And I've learned to be slow in just to be slow in terms of automatically saying, well, this is I know exactly what's going to happen or I know exactly what's not going to happen.

01:08:08.000 | I don't know. History, you start studying enough history and all of a sudden you find that it's probably there are a lot of crazy things that have happened and probably none of it is kind of like what you...

01:08:17.000 | But we have some differences now. You know, we can learn from history.

01:08:21.000 | Right.

01:08:22.000 | There have been many situations. You look at the in New Mexico, the Pueblo dwelling Indians, you know, they just did or Easter Island.

01:08:32.000 | Now, that's one of those like a takes taking a generation or two couple generations timescale.

01:08:37.000 | But big cities can suddenly empty out. Why? What happened? Everything was running there.

01:08:41.000 | And then suddenly there's like a paroxysm of mass violence where all the peasants slaughter all the nobles and then nobody's there in 10 years.

01:08:49.000 | It's like what happened? Boy, something really crazy happened in that city that it suddenly went haywire.

01:08:54.000 | And so when you do financial planning or any kind of risk analysis, you say, all right, what are the downside and upside risks?

01:09:00.000 | And how do you how are we going to how are we going to hedge various things and how are we going to balance various things?

01:09:06.000 | Well, if I'm right about in any war scenario, our grid being a number one target, everybody's going to hit the grid because it's deniable.

01:09:15.000 | China can say, not us. We love you guys. Keep buying our stuff while they're hitting our grid.

01:09:20.000 | But it's going to be filtered to look like it's ISIS, for example, or, you know, anyway.

01:09:27.000 | If I'm right, you don't want to be in a city high rise. All right. Can we start there?

01:09:32.000 | OK, if I'm right, a 30 foot sailboat would be a much nicer place.

01:09:37.000 | That's, you know, a mile from an ocean inlet than, you know, downtown Washington, high rise.

01:09:43.000 | Or downtown New York or downtown anywhere. If I'm right, I hope I'm wrong.

01:09:49.000 | I mean, I hope everybody's laughing at me in 10 years. Matt Bracken, what an idiot.

01:09:53.000 | You know, things are better than ever, ever since they invented unobtainium.

01:09:56.000 | And we all got the fusion DeLorean, you know, and we can, you know, Matt Bracken, boy, what a pessimist he was.

01:10:03.000 | That's I want to be that. I want to be the guy that's like everybody's kicking sand on me at the beach, saying what an idiot he was.

01:10:09.000 | This is what I don't want my kids going through what I see as potentially around the corner.

01:10:14.000 | If we have any kind of a war, our grids are going to be attacked, not with rockets that have a return address, but sneaky through through cyber techniques.

01:10:23.000 | And when that happens, you know, a lot of negative consequences could ensue.

01:10:28.000 | What better time to be out on the sailboat if you're already at a loss for what to do and you don't want to work for, you know, Corporation XYZ and you don't want to work at Walmart as a shelf stocker?

01:10:40.000 | And, you know, you maybe your job got outsourced or whatever your trade is, a dying trade.

01:10:47.000 | If you can work with your hands, I always tell people, young men, number one, never be afraid to work with your hands.

01:10:52.000 | I have in many ways much more respect for blue collar workers and white collar workers having worked with an office environment and construction site environments.

01:11:00.000 | I found that there's much less political duplicity and backstabbing among men that work with their hands.

01:11:06.000 | So it's right there. There's a benefit. And always when I look over a mechanic's shoulder, I'm always saying, huh, makes sense to me.

01:11:13.000 | That ain't rocket science. I could learn that if I wanted to.

01:11:16.000 | Well, you can learn fiberglass repair. You can learn how to put in a 12 volt pump on a boat.

01:11:22.000 | It's not rocket science. You know, guys that are hillbillies do it all the time with hot rods and everything else.

01:11:28.000 | You think they're smarter than you are? Hell no. So, yeah, you can absolutely get a houseboat, a sailboat, a trawler.

01:11:35.000 | It's a viable option. You can still live at the city, work at the firm.

01:11:38.000 | You know, it's just that you have that quirk at the office parties.

01:11:41.000 | Everybody will say, you know, Joshua, do you know Joshua lives on a boat? Really? What kind? Oh, a houseboat.

01:11:47.000 | Yeah, it's right down at the marina. It's down by the micro, the new micro brew, you know, where the sailboats are all anchored.

01:11:53.000 | It's a good place to be, you know, I mean, nobody's saying like he's a prepper.

01:11:57.000 | He's living in a bunker. He moved to Montana with his family, made him live in plywood shacks, you know, with rammed earth walls.

01:12:04.000 | He's a moron. You know, he's crazy. So you can be a total prepper in a sense.

01:12:10.000 | But in my version of prepperdom, I put a much higher premium on mobility.

01:12:15.000 | I don't want to be in a siege situation like a Mount Carmel or a Ruby Ridge.

01:12:20.000 | You know, eventually they got your latitude and longitude and they just start bringing the heavy guns in and they can wait you out.

01:12:25.000 | Whoever they is, right? I mean, just I'd rather be an independent operator who can get out on the ocean and spin the compass around a few times.

01:12:35.000 | I just think that there's value in mobility more than, you know, the digging in somewhere.

01:12:42.000 | It's one of the things that just why I was intrigued and I kind of baited you to go into all that.

01:12:47.000 | Number one, because I think it's important to talk about, but it's stuff that we often don't talk about because it's hard because it requires for you to think about something, requires you to go someplace that you don't usually want to go.

01:12:59.000 | When I think about what happens to my family if I die, for many people that's an unpleasant thought.

01:13:05.000 | But you have to go there and then you go there and you do some planning and you get some life insurance and you drop your will in your estate and you make sure that your family knows what your wishes are.

01:13:15.000 | And then once you've gone there, you can pull back a little bit and just not worry so much about it.

01:13:22.000 | And if it happens, it happens, but you hope it doesn't, at least not in the short term.

01:13:26.000 | But one of the things that I just thought I think was interesting is I look for the solutions to life which can work in many situations and in all situations.

01:13:37.000 | And what's funny about the boating theme of our conversation today, I always loved that scene in, what was the movie, You've Got Mail, where Mr. Fox, the bookstore owner, there's a scene where he's at the dock and there's three boats lined up.

01:13:51.000 | And here are these rich bookstore tycoons and there's the old traditional sailing yacht for the grandfather.

01:13:59.000 | Then there's I think the classic 80s trawler look for the father and then he's got the sleek young super yacht or something like that lined up, Fox 1, Fox 2, Fox 3.

01:14:08.000 | And it's funny because down here on Palm Beach, I haven't noticed a lot of people down here, they've got their escape hatch.

01:14:16.000 | And it's a different looking escape hatch, but they just toss off the bow lines and fire it up and there's some beautiful boats down here and it's an escape hatch.

01:14:25.000 | I've seen guys, I was in the Bahamas last year and I saw people that had some very cool escape pods that were, multi-hulls are definitely, catamarans in particular, above 40 feet.

01:14:38.000 | Catamaran doesn't work so much in smaller sizes, but you talk about a 60-foot deluxe catamaran that somebody spent maybe 2 million on and it's got a satellite dome on the back.

01:14:48.000 | And inside of that dome is a little thing that stays steady no matter what.

01:14:52.000 | The boat's moving around, it's like locked onto its satellite and he's pulling down broadband in the middle of nowhere, no problem.

01:15:00.000 | He's air conditioned, he's connected, he's got a 15-foot rib with its own little crane, it's a rigid inflatable boat with a 50 horsepower console where you sit on a motorcycle seat in the middle, not sitting on the tube in the back like the little boats.

01:15:15.000 | And these are guys that are like, they've made a pile or maybe they're still operating their business from afar, but they're definitely keeping very close to the ocean.

01:15:26.000 | It's considered one of the, a lot of people that are doing this, I think that if you scratch below the surface, it's like, well I thought about Belize but I heard stories about people being like accosted and the policia come in and start demanding tribute, so to speak.

01:15:43.000 | Even though you just were a libertarian and wanted to build your own place in wherever, Costa Wonderful, and you find out that you're just throwing yourself bait into a shark pond where they're saying, come down gringos and bring your money.

01:15:59.000 | And five years later it's like, I'll take it after you build it up.

01:16:02.000 | A sailboat gives you the option to, or not a powerboat, houseboat in the southeast of Florida, perfect.

01:16:08.000 | If your local sheriff doesn't like people living on boats at anchor, in a real world Florida situation, you just say, Fujimo, which is something you jack 'em moving out.

01:16:21.000 | You just take your act on the road, pull up the anchor.

01:16:24.000 | And the cool thing about that kind of thought process, and whether it's a sailboat or whether it's something else, is I think it gives you the opportunity to almost wait out the economy.

01:16:34.000 | If you have the ability to, you've dreamed of around the world sail, and you've bought your boat, and you've equipped it, and you've been working on it.

01:16:42.000 | All of a sudden you recognize that your business is going down.

01:16:46.000 | There's a story I've told on the show several times, but I'll tell it to you just because it's so meaningful to me because I knew the guy.

01:16:52.000 | He was a rich, old construction contractor.

01:16:58.000 | I met him in 2009, 2010, and he said, basically putting the story short, he had been through three recessions, or four recessions.

01:17:08.000 | It wasn't his first recession that he had ever faced.

01:17:10.000 | Most of his workers were contractors.

01:17:12.000 | He terminated all their contracts.

01:17:14.000 | He laid off a bunch of people.

01:17:15.000 | He parked all the trucks, and he bought a boat from some guy that was going out of business.

01:17:19.000 | He was just waiting out the recession going fishing every day.

01:17:22.000 | He bought the deal on his fishing boat, and he was just waiting out the recession.

01:17:25.000 | What I look at with things like what you're saying is assume that we go into another recession.

01:17:31.000 | You wind up in a boring end of the world as we know it type of scenario, which you outlined.

01:17:37.000 | You just go into a period of economic malaise for a few years.

01:17:41.000 | If you've planned, and you go ahead and say, "I'm going to go ahead and make this my time to sail around the world,"

01:17:45.000 | meanwhile you're working on writing your novels, or you're working, in my case, on your podcast,

01:17:49.000 | or you're working on whatever it is that your projects are, and you can do those from the road,

01:17:53.000 | you might be able to live a really great life no matter what happens and come out the other side in a better position.

01:17:59.000 | Yeah. The genesis of the houseboat, everybody knows the genesis of NASCAR, that it came out of the moonshine running hot rods.

01:18:10.000 | The genesis of the houseboat was that during the Great Depression, it was a place that a man could be free and unchaste,

01:18:19.000 | unpursued in that sense, not under any sheriff's jurisdiction.

01:18:25.000 | You could acquire a barge and just put a shack on it, tow it out, throw off the anchor, and say,

01:18:31.000 | "Basically, to hell with all your land rules. I'm just going to sit out here and fish.

01:18:37.000 | I'm going to swim and fish and trade with my neighbors and kind of like be a proto-hippie of the Great Depression era."

01:18:44.000 | And this appealed to so many people, it actually became a subject of a little bit of romanticism,

01:18:50.000 | like the freedom of like, you know, everywhere else you're like a beaten down sharecropper,

01:18:55.000 | oppressed of the earth, and you finally just say, "I'm not playing the land rules.

01:18:59.000 | I know somebody who's got a barge that I can patch up and put a shack on it,

01:19:03.000 | and I'm just not, no real estate deal, no closing cost, no mortgage, no bank, none of that.

01:19:09.000 | Barge, house, go." And that became the houseboat, which is still a very viable option for many more people

01:19:17.000 | than can sail because sailing requires a bit of athleticism, endurance, things like that, balance.

01:19:24.000 | A houseboat, anybody that can roll a wheelchair could have a wheelchair houseboat,

01:19:30.000 | and it could travel from Brownsville, Texas to Long Island Sound to the Great Lakes,

01:19:36.000 | all on protected waterways, but so much of it that you could just disappear into vast wilderness areas,

01:19:43.000 | even in the southeast, and wait it out while whatever things are happening in cities

01:19:48.000 | with soup lines and riots or whatever's happening.

01:19:51.000 | Hopefully none of that happens. When I do the power out scenario, I'm not saying, quote Matt Bracken,

01:19:57.000 | he says the power is going out, I'm saying that's like a boundary on one side,

01:20:01.000 | that's like an equation, and there's a wall on one side, power goes out, and then there's like different axes

01:20:08.000 | that shoot off like freedom versus totalitarianism, and then you can split that left, right, or any way you want to go,

01:20:15.000 | but basically I see at least a slow slide in front of us, I don't see like happy days are here again.

01:20:21.000 | I think that any opportunity to escape the matrix, which is your name, your social security number,

01:20:30.000 | is associated with an email address, bank account numbers, and a house, and Google even came by your house

01:20:37.000 | and took a picture of it in case anybody wants to know what your house looks like,

01:20:41.000 | so you go on whitepages.com and look up your favorite celebrity, and you can like do Google Street View all around,

01:20:47.000 | and then you can bring down Google Earth and look what's in his backyard as of a couple months ago maybe,

01:20:54.000 | but to be mobile means a lot. Now at the top one-tenth of the one percenters, these guys, yeah, they have real estate,

01:21:03.000 | but they got lots of real estate. They also got a mansion in Patagonia with a jet runway, you know what I mean,

01:21:09.000 | and a diesel fuel generator for years, so yeah, the guy might spend a lot of time in Manhattan,

01:21:14.000 | but he's got a plan to get to Patagonia. I'm just saying I can't afford Manhattan or Patagonia,

01:21:21.000 | but I can go both places on a sailboat, or a houseboat would be tough. Patagonia would be tough on a houseboat.

01:21:27.000 | That would be tough.

01:21:29.000 | You'd rig up a sail. Matt, this has been perfect. I've really enjoyed our conversation today.

01:21:34.000 | I want to make sure that people know where to find your novels.

01:21:37.000 | Do you prefer them just go straight to Amazon, or do you send them to your website?

01:21:40.000 | How do you like people to find your novels?

01:21:42.000 | It doesn't matter. Enemies, Foreign and Domestic, Matt Bracken will take you to my website,

01:21:47.000 | which has lots of links. Also, my novels are on Amazon.

01:21:51.000 | My short stuff, if people – look, I love that you'd like the detailed density of my novels,

01:21:58.000 | but a lot of people – I don't care whether it's more spare or lean or rich that way.

01:22:05.000 | Most people can't read a novel that's more than 200 pages. They're just not.

01:22:09.000 | And short stories that I've written that are available in the Bracken Anthology,

01:22:14.000 | I would recommend that as an entree point for people that are not sure if they want to commit to a humongous novel.

01:22:20.000 | And most of those short stories are linked on my website on the links page.

01:22:25.000 | And I would start with things like What I Saw at the Coup, The CW2 Cube,

01:22:31.000 | When the Music Stops, How Our Cities May Explode in Violence, cheerful stuff like that.

01:22:37.000 | I was going to say, you're the life of the party, aren't you?

01:22:40.000 | But also, I have good short stuff, concise stuff like Trapping Feral Pigs and other parables of modern life.

01:22:47.000 | So I have a lot of stuff that's at the entry level for people that just don't want to spend a dime

01:22:55.000 | or download a humongous book because even going back to when I was starting writing EFAD,

01:23:02.000 | I thought if my books – if people consider them prescient, if people say,

01:23:08.000 | "Wow, he wrote that in 2003? I guess I'll listen to him now with what he has to say about 2016."

01:23:16.000 | Because the guys that said in 2003, they said, "Matt Bracken, he's full of it.

01:23:20.000 | What a bunch of hyperbole. ATF doing a scam that would lead to hundreds of people being killed.

01:23:25.000 | They'd never do that." Well, we know that they did.

01:23:29.000 | And we know that the media is happy to cover it up.

01:23:32.000 | So some of the things that I've written about, it gives me a soapbox in a sense.

01:23:38.000 | And what I really want to say, I'll put out in a short form like what I saw at the coup.

01:23:45.000 | And of course I'm always writing as well for the – and the reason I do podcasts and radio, obscure radio broadcasts,

01:23:52.000 | because there's an immediate audience that you're trying to reach, and I hope we both reach with Facebook, etc.

01:23:58.000 | But then there's also all the boys and girls down in the fusion centers.

01:24:02.000 | And I consider these to be kind of like an open letter.

01:24:05.000 | What is the state of right-wing extremist political theory and philosophical thought?

01:24:13.000 | Where are the – Matt Bracken is one of these guys that is on that side, the bitter clinger nation.

01:24:19.000 | They're kind of dangerous.

01:24:21.000 | The Department of Homeland Security said, "Keep an eye on people that really consider the Constitution important.

01:24:26.000 | They're dangerous."

01:24:28.000 | So I consider these podcasts sort of a straight pipeline right to the fusion center.

01:24:32.000 | I like it.

01:24:34.000 | Matt, thanks so much for coming on.

01:24:35.000 | This has been awesome.

01:24:39.000 | Pretty cool to talk to someone who's been there, done that, and built for themselves their own lifestyle of freedom.

01:24:47.000 | I hope you can take some of these ideas and integrate them into your own life.

01:24:52.000 | If you are interested in Matthew's novels, I can't recommend them highly enough.

01:24:56.000 | If you're interested in that kind of thriller type of fiction, that genre type of fiction, his books are very well written.

01:25:02.000 | And I like them a lot more than I like a lot of the – I guess the dystopian genre.

01:25:07.000 | A lot of those plots just to me are pretty far out.

01:25:10.000 | And all of a sudden you wind up with people driving around in tanks and eating each other.

01:25:15.000 | I guess theoretically that's possible.

01:25:17.000 | It's happened before in the history of the world.

01:25:19.000 | But to me it just doesn't seem very likely based upon where we are as a society at this point.

01:25:25.000 | But his thrillers are around a much more practical type of scenario, much more the norm that we face,

01:25:32.000 | what happens in the case of political overreach, massive bureaucracy, power-hungry politicians, kind of interesting.

01:25:40.000 | Much more, in my mind, realistic than what many of the other authors in this genre talk about.

01:25:47.000 | He has three novels in the Enemies, Foreign, and Domestic series.

01:25:49.000 | You can read extensive excerpts from them on his website if you're interested.

01:25:53.000 | The first was Enemies, Foreign, and Domestic.

01:25:55.000 | The second one is Domestic Enemies, the Reconquista.

01:25:58.000 | And then Foreign Enemies and Traitors is the third in the trilogy.

01:26:02.000 | Excellent.

01:26:03.000 | Also his fourth novel is Castigo K, a very different style of novel but also good in its own right.

01:26:08.000 | So check out his novels.

01:26:09.000 | I hope you enjoy that.

01:26:10.000 | He's written on his essay – on his website a number of essays.

01:26:13.000 | The link to Get Yourself a 30-Footer and Go is there.

01:26:16.000 | And then if you're into some of the pretty hardcore survivalist stuff and what happens in societal breakdown and things like that,

01:26:24.000 | he's a very politically incorrect writer.

01:26:28.000 | But you may enjoy reading some of his essays on those subjects as well.

01:26:31.000 | So in the meantime, though, I don't know if I'm inspired to go get a boat.

01:26:36.000 | I don't know.

01:26:37.000 | It might be.

01:26:38.000 | It's not going to be for at least the next couple of years.

01:26:39.000 | But he does build a strong case for it, and I hope that that's been helpful to you.

01:26:44.000 | Thank you all so much for listening to today's show.

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01:27:11.000 | Thank you all so much for listening.

01:27:13.000 | We'll be back with you tomorrow.

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