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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Today on the show, survivalism as a financial planning strategy. We talk to the man who literally wrote the book on how to survive the end of the world as we know it. ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Thursday, November 13, 2014.

Today I'm thrilled to bring you an interview with James Wesley Rawls, author of the book, "How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times." We're going to talk about financial planning through a survivalist lens. ♪ I've looked forward to bringing this interview and I was thrilled when I reached out to James Rawls.

I was thrilled that he accepted my invitation. I really have a lot of admiration and respect for him. I've thoroughly enjoyed over the years reading his novels. He's published at least, how many novels has he published? At least four, I think maybe five novels. He's written a couple of books, one of which is literally a textbook entitled, "How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times." Jim Rawls is a master survivalist, I guess.

He's one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever come across within that field of study. He's committed in every way. He is the editor of the most popular survival blog on the internet entitled, survivalblog.com. Today, I bring you an interview with him where we talk about survivalism as a financial planning tactic.

I think you'll find it really, really interesting. This is the type of thing that I love doing on the show. This is the type of conversation, this is what I'm about, is this is the type of conversation that is difficult to find in mainstream personal finance press. Oftentimes, subjects like this, like survivalism, disaster preparedness, things like that, are often, I don't know, just not a lot of people talk about them, not a lot of people bring them up.

But I find in most conversations, you have very careful thinking, rational people that have concerns. So, one of the things, so today, to give you an idea, today I bring you this interview with Jim Rawls. That's going to be the last interview for this week. Tomorrow, I'll be doing Q&A.

So, if you would like me to answer your question on my Friday Q&A show, then call that in. But next week, I'm going to be releasing an interview on Tuesday with Tammy Strobel, who is the founder of, author at Rowdy Kittens, and she is all about minimalism. And so, what can we learn from the survivalist community, which is very much about having the things that you need in physical assets, and then what can we learn from a minimalist, a hardcore minimalist who lives in a tiny house.

And then on Thursday next week, I'm releasing an interview with David Downey, who wrote a book called Radical Immediate Retirement. He goes to a very different perspective. Then the following week, we'll be talking with a couponer. I've got an interview already recorded with a man named Christopher Delaney, who is, he and his two children, he has a wife and two young children.

He and his wife live completely car-free and have in a couple of modern American cities. So, I personally love this variety of topic. I hope that you do as well, and I'm really excited to bring you the interview here with Jim Rawls. He's one of the most knowledgeable people in this area that I know of.

And this is my goal, is to continue to bring you knowledgeable professional experts who really know their craft and also people who are very relatable, who are just pulling out different aspects of finance, so that you can be challenged to know what you believe and why you believe it.

That's my vision for the show. Real quick before I play the interview for you, a quick technical note. If you are on iTunes, some of you know, and I'm going to be saying this for at least a few weeks, if you were previously subscribed to the show on iTunes prior to this last Friday, so prior to November the 9th, excuse me, November the 7th, on November the 7th, I wound up completely destroying and terminating all of my iTunes subscribers because I redirected the feed wrong.

So that affects somewhere between about 1,500 to 1,800 of you by my best guess. So if you were subscribed in an iTunes or an iOS device, anything that uses iTunes, then your feed is now messed up. This also affects many of you who are using other types of feed catchers that use iTunes as their backbone.

I don't know all the names of them, but I've received a few different emails from listeners who've had the problem. I am sincerely sorry that I did that. Obviously, that's not what any podcast host wants to do, is to stop the audience from being able to find their show.

So I'm sincerely sorry that that happened. But if you want to improve it, all you need to do is unsubscribe in the application, whether that's your desktop application or whatever you're using or on a phone, unsubscribe, go and search whatever the store is, the directory that you're using, and resubscribe.

For some of you who have third-party apps where you can put in the RSS feed directly, I have listed that RSS feed on the front page of the website so you can use that, and I apologize. So make sure that you tell your friends, if they like listening, that you'll need to resubscribe.

I didn't go away. I am still here. I am still recording shows. And I'm going to keep on doing it. So I'm sorry for the technical hassle. I appreciate your bearing with me. I just made a mistake and doomed myself, but that's okay. I figure maybe that'll weed out some people who didn't really like the show.

But those of you who like the show, I think you'll find your way back. So I thank you for being here. That's it. Let's get to the interview. So, Jim, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you're making time for me. Thank you for having me on, Joshua.

I've been looking forward to this because I have been wanting to bring somebody from the survival community on the show. And I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough or expert enough to properly represent the survival community. So I figured, well, I'll go find the granddaddy of all survivalists. And I decided that was you and reached out to you, and I was thrilled when you accepted my invitation.

What I'd love to start with is, would you be willing to share a little bit about your personal background as a young man growing up, and how your views and ideas have evolved over time to the point where now you are in many ways a leader of the survivalist community?

Okay. Well, I am a pretty ardent survivalist. I grew up in the bomb shelter era of the 1960s. And I also came from a pioneer family that came out west via covered wagon in the 1850s. And a lot of that mentality really never wore off in my family. We've always been very self-reliant, always been into gardening and cutting firewood and all that sort of thing.

And part of my whole psyche, my whole mindset, came from my grandfather, who always told me, "Set aside at least 10% of everything you earn, and you'll never go to the poorhouse." And my parents grew up in the 1930s, in the Great Depression. So, between my grandparents and my parents, I definitely had an outlook on life that was geared toward family preparedness.

And that's what I've tried to pass along in my blog and in my books, to encourage people to get prepared for regardless of whatever happens, whether good times or bad, a lot of the advice that I give people has meaning. Because even in times of prosperity, things like dollar cost averaging and buying in bulk are just plain common sense.

Even if there is never a disaster, if you're buying rice in 50-pound sacks rather than buying it in 1-pound bags, you're essentially eating cheap. And by buying in bulk, you're saving a tremendous amount of money, and often you're eating more healthy things because you're not buying prepared, packaged foods.

You're buying bulk grains and more nutritious foods or wholesome foods. So, there's multiple advantages. One of the things that I have wanted, and I've read, I think I've read all of the books that you've written. And by the way, thank you for writing Patriots, which I think was the first book that you wrote.

I think that was your first novel. Yes. I wish I'd read it long before I did because when I was a boy growing up, I always loved reading novels, but I couldn't stand how little detail authors would put into their novels. So, when I was actually in eighth grade, I actually wrote an adventure novel for myself, and I put a remarkable amount of detail into it, the type of detail that I wanted to have.

I remember I put four pages on the pickup truck that my hero and his brother drove and described the type of axles and the type of transfer case and the size of the tires and all of these things. And I did about a page and a half on their – I was a ham when I was – I got my ham license when I was – before I was a teenager, I think, and I put a page and a half on their radios in it.

But it was – I finished the book, but it was a total bust, and I never found a single author that appealed to my – that would actually put enough detail in until I read your book Patriots. And I said, "Here's my kind of author." So, thank you. Well, thank you, Joshua.

Yeah, my novels have often been referred to as survival manuals dressed as fiction. I try to squeeze a lot of practical, tactical tips into a adventure storyline. And I kind of have to strike a balance, though. I don't want to drag the story down with too much detail. But people often tell me that they end up reading my books twice, the first time through for fun and the second time through with a notepad and a yellow highlighter in their hand, taking notes.

Right. And I've noticed you've changed over time. I actually prefer the writing style of Patriots, which is far more dense than your most recent. I just finished your newest novel, Liberators. And it's much more – I think Liberators and your newer novels are much more appealing to the mainstream as far as their literary skill.

But I actually prefer the denser, thicker style of Patriots. So, my question is going to be – you've been paying attention to this world for a long time. And one of the things I have often wondered is how do you strike a balance between optimism and pessimism? Because it seems as though one of the consistent themes in reading your blog and consistent themes of when you're in the doomsday space, so to speak, is how do you – are you an optimist?

Are you a pessimist? Do you have any hope for the future being better than the past? How do you handle that personally? Well, ultimately, I'm an optimist for two reasons. One is I'm a Christian and I know where I'm headed after I die. And secondarily, I'm an optimist because I think that there's a lot of hope for America.

Even though we've had some political and economic setbacks, in the long term, I think our constitutional government will be restored. I think our currency will be restored to a sound, precious metals-backed currency. And in the long run, even though there might be a lot of chaos in the interim, I think that our government will be scaled back to the size that our founding fathers intended.

So, in the long run, I'm quite optimistic. In the short run, of course, I'm pessimistic, in part because of the massive debt and deficit that's been built up by our government, the huge amount of monetization of the debt that's going on with quantitative easing, and just general fiscal irresponsibility on the part of our government.

So, even in the absence of natural disasters like solar flares or plagues or pandemics or whatever, I think that within the next decade, we're probably going to see a financial reckoning day that will pretty well destroy the U.S. dollar as a currency unit. And I've encouraged my readers to prepare accordingly.

In the last six years, I've done a lot of financial planning for people, and I've never seen as much fear in my memory as far as just in the end, I guess, fear and concern in the average person about economic, you know, potential economic disaster, as I've seen in the last few years.

How would you, if you were encouraging somebody and trying to help somebody with their financial planning, and they're coming to you and saying, "Jim, you know, I'm really concerned about the short-term potential of the United States," where do you start in applying survivalist concepts to financial planning? Well, I guess the key concept, of course, is what I call a deep larder concept.

It's what the author John Pugsley referred to as the alpha strategy, which you've discussed before in your show. And that is basically to stock up things in depth so that you, A, have a survival stockpile that you can depend upon for your family, food and everything from cleaning supplies to fuel, medical supplies, that sort of thing.

It's a stockpile for you, and it's also inflation insurance, because if you look at the debt and deficit, I think at this point our government's only real escape will be through hyperinflation. And if you can foresee hyperinflation, you know that anything that you have that's invested in dollar-denominated assets is potentially at risk, and an excellent hedge is to invest in tangibles, things like specifically precious metals, common-caliber ammunition, long-term storage, food, and so on.

I think that that is a wise course of action, and if people do recognize the threat of hyperinflation on the horizon, it is the most logical way to proceed for American families. And except for someone who lives in a microscopic apartment, the average American family home has the storage space that's required to stock up with an alpha strategy.

And I think it's a wise course. My emphasis, of course--I'm what they call a guns and groceries survivalist, so my emphasis is on first stocking up on beans, bullets, and mandates, and then after you have a sufficient level of stocking for your family in those areas, then go ahead and invest a bit in precious metals.

And my personal favorite is silver. With silver currently under $16 an ounce, I think it's an absolute bargain. Just don't make the mistake of buying big silver. You don't want to buy 100-ounce Engelhardt bars, or God forbid, the even larger bars that require an assay fee. You want small silver because the small coins are more readily recognizable, and they're in a denomination that's appropriate for barter.

You don't go bartering for things with a 100-ounce bar. It's like a Krugerrand. It's simply too compact a form of wealth for practical barter. Things like silver dimes and silver quarters or silver half dollars, or even something as large as a one-ounce trade dollar like an American Eagle, are more practical for barter because that's the size of currency unit that you need for typical day-to-day transactions.

For a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, a gallon of gasoline, a gallon of kerosene, that's what you really want for barter. I have a question on two different questions on that, and on precious metals in general would be the second question, but the first one is on barter.

I really struggle with that concept because I cannot see any— I can't imagine in the current world that we live in where the average person— you see these videos, and I assume maybe you have, but you watch these videos sometimes that people in the precious metals community produce where they go out and ask the average person on the street, "How much is an ounce of gold worth?

How much is an ounce of silver worth?" It's really hard for me to imagine any kind of scenario in a modern world where people would have any concept of using things like silver coins as barter. Is that actually something that you think is realistic, or is that more of just like, "Well, it's better to have this just in case it does happen"?

Well, I think that at the present time where people are so dollar-oriented, they don't have a really good concept of the inherent value of precious metals. But once the dollar suffers mass inflation or is wiped out, people will very quickly catch on to the real value of precious metals.

And at that point, the key question will not be the exact market value, but rather the trustworthiness of those particular metals. And that's why I like circulated pre-1965 American silver coinage--dimes, quarters, and maybe half dollars-- because those are the most widely recognized in the States, they're going to be the most trusted, and they're the ones that have suffered the least counterfeiting.

The Morgan silver dollars, for example, are very widely being copied and faked by--they're coming out of China right now. But to the best of my knowledge, the Chinese are not faking well-worn silver dimes and quarters. There's just no numismatic value in them, so they don't have any impetus to fake them.

So I think that precious metals will indeed have a role in barter, but it will come fairly late in a disaster situation, because in a very short term, all people are going to be looking for in barter are going to be things like food and common-caliber ammunition. So you should have those stocked up as well, of course.

In fact, stock those first. After a few months, though, or maybe even only a few weeks, price equilibrium will be met very quickly. And even as the U.S. dollar is plummeting, people will recognize the value of a silver dime, a silver quarter, silver half dollar, and be able to recognize that in terms of its equivalence in other barter materials or for an hour or a day of a man's labor.

The beauty of a free market is that prices find equilibrium very quickly. And unless there's artificial constraints on a commodity, the price-finding mechanism of the free market is phenomenal. I really struggle with the idea of precious metals, because I don't have any peg to which I can affix their value.

Let me give you a little bit of background. I'm almost 30 years old. So in my lifetime, there's never been any connection between the U.S. dollar and any kind of external standard, the gold-backed standard that Nixon ended. So there's never any connection. And then I'm past the generations where even my parents or grandparents, you know, my grandparents are dead now.

They're the last ones who probably had any connection to that. I can't see, to me, the idea of having any significant amount of wealth stored in precious metals would cause me to wake up in sweats, because I have no ability to control the value of that. I'd rather get rid of every bit of this metal that is just completely subject to the ups and downs of some kind of external market.

And I'd invest, whether it was something in real estate or something like a business, where I had some amount of cash flow that would give me some ability to say I have a good here, I have a service that I can peg something onto as far as cash flow.

So I have this, the idea of having any substantial sort of wealth in something that I don't control, that just simply sits there and is purely subject to the whims of the market, that would freak me out as an investor. Where am I wrong? What am I missing? Yeah, no, I think you're right in part, because let's face it, a precious metals investment is a non-productive investment.

It's just sitting there. It's not going to create a cash flow for you. And you are correct in that, because the precious metals markets are relatively thin compared to equities, for example. The total value of all of the gold in the world is probably only worth about maybe one-tenth of the value of the S&P.

So it's a thin market, which means the price swings in it can be huge. And it's also a manipulated market, because there's a lot of investors, institutional investors, that are shorting the market at any given time. And when you have a combination of a thin market and heavy manipulation, the price swings can be huge.

But right now, for example, with silver under $16 an ounce, I consider that a pretty strong buy, because I recognize it's a manipulated market. But I look at the fundamental of what happened two days ago, which was the U.S. Mint sold out 2 million ounces of silver, one-ounce American Eagle coins, in two hours.

Immediately after that, the whole annual allotment of silver eagles was sold in less than a day. I had no idea. Wow. Yes, that shows you the real market versus the manipulated paper market for silver. The inherent value of silver is always still there. Now, I am a big believer, again, in common caliber ammunition, storage food, and other things that can be bartered.

I'm also a big believer in productive farmland. And if someone wants to hedge into real estate, I would say, don't be buying suburban apartment blocks. Don't be buying suburban houses right now. Look for productive farmland in what's called a dryland farming region. There, you can grow crops reliably just based on the annual rainfall.

It doesn't require any additional irrigation. That's the place where I would be investing for both survival and for long-term productivity that's fairly drought-resistant. I certainly wouldn't be buying farmland in California right now. They're in the middle of a drought that may go on another five years. Who knows? But if you look at dryland farming regions, like the Moscow, Idaho area, for example, you really can't go wrong.

Because not only is the land itself a good investment, but if times get really bad, you could relocate there and either farm the land yourself or job it out to have someone else tenant farm it for you or contract farm it for you. But you would also -- a lot of these dryland farming regions are in fairly remote areas that are well removed from major population centers.

So it's a win-win. Not only do you have reliable crop production, but you also have an incredibly safe place to be in the event of urban chaos. If there's rioting and looting in the major cities, you're not going to want to be there. I would much rather be living on the outskirts of Moscow, Idaho or Montpelier, Idaho, someplace like that, where there's a very lightly populated farming region, that'll be well insulated from any of that urban chaos.

I assume you probably get this question a lot. But to an average -- so I enjoy reading -- I have enjoyed your novels. And I assume that you've employed some amount of literary license to make them especially entertaining. Yes, I have. For the sake of drama, for example, I show people making some very bad decisions.

And that's partly literary license for the sake of drama, to show the implications of those bad decisions. But go ahead. Right. And I think that's as it should be. It would be pretty boring to watch a movie of a normal person's life. But an author or a creator needs to spice something up.

But where I always struggle with -- even some of the advice that you give when you talk about, well, when this happens, is I can't conceive of how -- I can't conceive of any events that would actually be likely that would lead to the type of mass, region-wide, nation-wide violence, scarcity, shortage, that would affect it on a large scale.

It makes sense to me on a local scale. It makes sense to me even on perhaps a regional scale. But I can't conceive of it on a larger national scale. So -- Well, let me -- Go ahead. Let me illustrate a couple of potential situations that could bring down the national power grids.

And the lack of that grid power could cause massive social upheaval. One would be an X-class solar flare, and that would fry transformers all up and down the systems of all the major power-producing networks. There's actually three American power grids, an Eastern grid, a Western grid, and a Texas grid.

If we had an X-class solar flare, it could take down the power grids for months or even years. And the lack of grid power would be absolutely devastating to our society because we're so dependent on grid power for so many things. Our telecommunications, our computerized reordering systems for inventory control -- we use Kanban just-in-time inventory control -- the routing for major transportation systems like trains and barges, for example, all that could be disrupted.

Not to mention the lack of grid power would cause an absolute public health crisis because grid power is used to provide civic water supplies for 95 percent of American cities. There's very few cities that are on gravity-fed water from end to end. San Francisco is an exception because they have water that comes out of the high Sierras from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and it literally is gravity-fed all the way to the taps in the city of San Francisco, more than 100 miles away.

But that's a rarity. Most cities are dependent upon electric pumps to pump water up to gravity tanks, and then there's water available to the taps. So without grid power, people are going to be without water within 72 hours, and that would cause huge, huge problems. There would be in the Southwest, for example, where there's no other sources of water, you're going to see a huge number of refugees hitting the road almost immediately if they don't have water.

The other implications of a grid power collapse have to do with the medical infrastructure. We have a huge number of people in America who are dependent upon medical insulin, who are dependent upon CPAP machines for people with sleep apnea, oxygen concentrators or tanked medical oxygen for people who have COPD or other respiratory problems.

And, of course, there's a huge number of people who are on kidney dialysis as well, and that requires grid power. Most of American hospitals and, so far as I know, nearly all of the kidney dialysis stand-alone centers are dependent on grid power, and they either have no backup generators or only very limited fuel supply for their backup generators.

So we could not just see, you know, rioting and looting in the big cities, but we could see a massive die-off of population. And the scary thing to me, Joshua, is there's so many different things that could bring down the power grids, whether it's a hacker attack, EMP, solar flares, or simply something like a pandemic where public utility employees are afraid to leave their homes so they don't show up to work and the power systems go offline.

It's quite a cascading chain of events. Yeah. And then, so, but then do you, does that, and I haven't studied, I guess, extensive historical context, but then do you assume that automatically leads to widespread violence? Because that's obviously a main feature in your novels, but is there any historical evidence of that?

Well, if you look at what's going on in Liberia right now, even, they have a pandemic going on, and there's so many, so few people who are willing to transport goods or provide services that they're right in the midst of an economic collapse right now, and yet their power is still up.

Well, as up as it usually is. In Africa, the standard is usually power about five days out of every seven. And people are used to sporadic power outages. So when the power's on, they hurry up and do their laundry and, and, you know, pump water and do everything else they do with grid power.

Here in the States, people are incredibly complacent and incredibly dependent on grid power. And if the grid were to go away for any reason, I think their, their, their lives would just crumble. And certainly commerce, as we know it, would come to a screeching halt. Just look at the architecture that we've had for the last 30 years in the United States.

Most retail architecture is all built around these big boxes. There is concrete slab tilt up architecture, which has very few, if any, windows, and the few windows that are there can't be opened. So in the southern half of the United States, you're going to have giant sweat boxes. And in the northern half of the United States, you're going to have giant refrigerators or freezers.

You can't do business in a, in a dark cave. And of course, modern retail is all built around modern restocking systems, inventory control, and point of purchase, credit card transactions. There, you know, it's conceivable that businesses, small businesses, could convert back to a manual cash box type tilt. But most major retailers are just simply going to have to shut their doors.

Or more likely, the doors will be opened for them by crowds of looters. Yeah, it makes sense to me. I live in West Palm Beach, Florida. And it would be, it would be uninhabitable down here with the majority of buildings without air conditioning. And it would just simply, yeah, our entire society and infrastructure is built upon having air conditioning.

If you were, so I can get basically halfway there. Maybe it's my own personal normalcy bias. Maybe it's I don't want to accept it. It's possible. I don't know. Maybe as time goes on, I struggle with this because I think of myself, have you ever read a book called The Rational Optimist by a man named Matt Ridley?

No, I haven't. Okay, so the major premise of the book is that we're living in a time that throughout history is better than any time else throughout history. And that is measured by standard of living, quality of life on just about every metric, whether it's general, you know, the amount of money we have, the accessibility of entertainment, health, exactly.

Yeah, I generally agree with that. We are living in the best of times, but unfortunately, my view of it is what we're doing is breeding a whole generation of people who are incompetent, know nothings with no practical skills. And that if any of that modern infrastructure were taken away, they would be helpless.

Right. And that makes sense to me. So there's this constant, because I come from the traditional financial planning world, there's this need in financial planning to be optimistic. So I consider myself a rational optimistic and an optimist in the long term. However, I have been involved in enough, you know, I'm from Florida, we've been through hurricanes, there are wars all around the world, you watch these things.

And so I think, how can I help my clients prepare for these things? And I think just because in the long term, you know, I expect freedom to grow massively over the long term, I see it happening now, but that doesn't mean that in the short term there's not going to be greater oppression as freedom generally grows with the access to information.

So I struggle with how to integrate these two things together. And I get a lot of questions on the show from young men, young women, people trying to say, how do I plan my finances so that I can be financially independent? And that's a major theme that we talk about on the show here.

And I think that some of the concepts from survivalism have a real benefit. Because, you know, if I had 30 million bucks, and I would imagine, because I know you do some consulting, I would imagine, I can't see why anybody wouldn't want to have a safe place somewhere with a well-stocked bunker with a well-thought-out plan.

That would just seem to me to be, like, why wouldn't you want that? But that's a little more daunting for somebody with middle-class income, middle-class scenario, where there's all these things pulling at the money to say, I can't get to the bunker, so, you know, why even start? If you were giving advice to a young person like me, 30 years old, young family, middle-class lifestyle, would you take it in a staged approach, in a stepped approach?

How would you recommend I think through that to build more resilience into my lifestyle? Well, you definitely want more resilience, and I think a staged or phased approach is ideal. At my website, it's survivalblog.com, if you look in the left-hand bar, I have a link that's marked "Getting Started," and it talks about how people should think through the full implications of societal disruption.

And how they can take steps in an organized manner that won't blow their budget, but that will put them miles ahead of their neighbors. The average American family only has about a three-day supply of food on hand. Simply increasing that to 30 or 60 days is going to vastly increase your chances of survival.

Between that and a water filter, that's the other really key preparation for just about any disaster, because that's kind of the common denominator is disruption of water supplies, even in a flood, because you end up with contaminated water. Those simple steps can put people miles ahead of their neighbors, and even if someone is on a modest budget, even for a retiree or someone who's a college student, those simple things they can do from an actuarial standpoint will greatly increase their chances of survival.

I tend to look at everything from the standpoint of an actuarial accountant, the people who do accounting for life insurance agencies, for example. You look at the most likely threats and the implications of those threats, and then you mitigate them. The total outlay is not all that great. As I mentioned before, there's actually financial advantages to stocking up by buying in bulk, for example.

The cost of living, if someone is self-employed, I highly recommend that they move to a lightly populated retreat region, not just because it's a safe place to be, but because you're going to be living less expensively, the cost of living will be lower, and your quality of life will be higher, because the crime rate will be lower, there'll be less smog, crime, taxes, gun control.

All of that is a lot less likely in those lightly populated regions. So there's multiple advantages. The bottom line for any investor is every dollar that you're not spending unnecessarily represents one more dollar that can be invested productively. And for the survivalist viewpoint on investing, it all meshes pretty neatly.

The only drawbacks to buying in bulk, of course, are spoilage or theft of your supplies. So as long as you have good security, and you're storing everything at a reasonable temperature and in containers that aren't subject to the attacks by vermin, by bugs or mice or rats or whatever, you're sitting pretty.

You're ahead of the game. That's the way I look at it. Now, history may prove me wrong, but if you look at the history of the 20th century, it was a history of larger and larger wars that affected civilian populations to a greater and greater extent with every passing year.

Warfare in the 21st century is going to take place a lot in urban areas, and it's going to directly impact civilian populations. If you look back to the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, wars were practically a spectator sport for most citizens. It was something they read about in the newspapers that took place way out in the middle of nowhere or in some foreign country.

But the wars of the 21st century may be up close and personal for a lot of people, and they're going to take place on urbanized terrain. If you look at the training that's going on with most of the modern militaries right now, they're focusing on urban warfare because they recognize that society has become very urbanized and that the most likely battlefields will be urban areas.

So, to me, the logical escape hatch is to move to a lightly populated region where you're going to be buffered from both the chaos of rioting and looting or the potential impact of out-and-out warfare, whether it's civil war or World War III. On the warfare perspective, one of the things I get really concerned about and why I wish more people were at least moderately prepared for basic emergencies is I get concerned about the expansion of government control, and it seems to me that those who are able to be more self-reliant are more likely to fight for what is morally right than those who are dependent upon a system.

Absolutely, Joshua. I take it a step further and say that it's only those people who are well-prepared and who are not focused on where they're going to get their next meal in the midst of a disaster or martial law or whatever. It's only those people who can step back and look at the big picture and be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.

If all you are focused on is where you're going to find drinking water and how am I going to find the next meal for my children, you can't have your eye on the big picture. You can't be part of the problem. You can't be someone who's helping to organize relief efforts or organize to reinstitute constitutional government.

You just simply won't have the time, the energy, the focus, or the mobility to be involved in those efforts. Your world view is going to be a radius of about 100 feet, the immediate area around your house and providing for your family. It's only the people who are well-stocked and self-sufficient who can really be part of the solution.

Right. I look throughout history and I look at times, whether it's World War II with Nazi Germany or whether it's 1855 or 1860 in the United States of America fighting slavery, and I wonder, would I have had the base and the foundation to work from to fight for what is right or would I have just gone along with the crowd?

And then I look at life today and I wonder, wait a second Joshua, are you fighting for what is right or are you just going along with the crowd? And I find it a searching question because the way that I was taught history growing up, it seems as though I was always taught that that was something else that happened back then.

And yet when I look around today, I mean there's so much evil in the world today that still exists and I just ask myself the question, am I doing what I need to do today to fight that evil and spread what is right and what is good to free people from slavery just to help my neighbor?

But I can only do that from a position of strength. The best way to help the poor is not be one of them first so that you can actually pull them up. Exactly, yes. I concur wholeheartedly. I think that people need to focus on the things that will make them independent.

Whether it being economically independent or food independent in terms of being self-sufficient. I have a big emphasis in my blog on small livestock and large scale gardening for example, which is what we do here at our ranch. That's the sort of thing that will keep people out of the clutches of government and in a position where they can dispense copious Christian charity.

My overall outlook on life is from a Christian libertarian standpoint. I'm a libertarian in that I don't believe in interfering in other people's business. But I also have the moral background as a Christian to recognize what is truly right and wrong. I just don't think it's the role of government to try to do anything more than penalize things like rape, theft and arson for example.

That's where I draw the line. I think everything else should be a matter of Christian conscience and I would much rather see people socially shunned rather than have an enormous government bureaucracy and infrastructure that's in effect enslaving us right now. Because in the quest for the war on drugs or the war on terror or whatever, people are sacrificing their individual liberty to a huge extent.

More than most people even recognize. People are still saying, "Oh, it's a free country." Well, is it? I really don't think so. So, as a Christian libertarian, I think it is not at all mutually exclusive with survivalism. It's certainly not mutually exclusive with a preparedness outlook that involves privately owned firearms for example, which I'm a big believer in.

It squares very nicely with the whole concept of reducing the size of government, increasing individual liberty and increasing self-reliance. We've spent the last 60 years in this country essentially creating an enormous welfare class that's incredibly dependent on government. My goal is to see that reversed and to see more individual responsibility, more self-sufficiency and more self-reliance so that people don't even have to think about looking to the government for handouts.

Because in the final analysis, when someone is taking a handout from the government, what they're really doing is they're asking the government to forcibly take money out of my wallet and give it to them. I would much rather look at charity from a Christian standpoint, which is voluntary charity.

And if it weren't for the fact that I'm being taxed about 30% of my income, I think I would be able to tithe much more heavily to my church. I think that our whole society is kind of turned upside down from where it was 100 years ago, where the church and the family were the centerpieces of society, not government.

Right. I agree. I'd like to ask you about financial independence, and I'm curious. Do you mind my asking how old you are? I'm 54 years old, and I'm relatively independent financially. That was going to be my question. If you were cut off, whether through a dramatic external event or whether you just chose to withdraw from the system, has survivalism and personal preparedness led you to a place where you would consider yourself financially independent?

Yes, it has, in part because I was investing in silver when silver was around $5.50 an ounce. So even with the recent drop in silver to the $15 and change range, I still tripled my money. I think that as time goes on and we see silver again reach equilibrium in a real-world valuation, silver is probably going to be somewhere north of $75 an ounce by the time all is said and done, and I'm talking within the next five to ten years.

So my silver investing has certainly paid off. My self-sufficiency projects certainly have paid off. Although I live in an area with very low power rates because I'm in the inland northwest region of the United States where we have very inexpensive hydroelectric power, the photovoltaic power that we produce has paid off fairly well.

Even in relation to the low power utility rates we have locally, we eat very inexpensively because we buy in bulk and because we grow a lot of our own food. We are at the point now where we have three breeding cows at our property, and with the current incredibly high price of both milk and beef, and for that matter butter right now, they're at all-time highs.

So our breeding stock is worth a pretty penny right now, especially people are looking for what are called hand-milked cows rather than typical mega-farm type cows that are used to just being herded in and mechanically milked. The cattle that we raise are used to being handled and in close proximity to people we really develop a bond with our cattle, our dairy cows, so that they're quite suitable to sell into a family that wants to hand-milk a cow.

So I think our breeding stock has certainly paid off well. The other thing that I stocked up on very heavily was firearms and ammunition, and in the last couple of years there were huge shortages of both, and I was able to parlay some of my investments in ammunition, for example, back into cash for other investing, and I made a huge profit.

For example, a friend and I split a purchase of 100,000 rounds of .22 long rifle rimfire ammunition four years ago, and we were buying that ammunition for around two cents a round, and right now .22 rimfire is incredibly hard to find, and it's anywhere from 10 to 15 cents a round.

We'll do the math on that. We're sitting pretty right now. So I think that the survivalist approach to investing is one that has multiple advantages. Not only are you physically insulating yourself and your family from harm, but you also -- the whole survivalist outlook is geared toward practical tangibles, and tangibles have the advantage in that they are not subject to fluctuations in the currency units, and they're also not vulnerable to the whims of government, because you never know when the government is either going to monkey with the value of the currency unit, which it looks like will be happening very soon with mass inflation of the U.S.

dollar, or when our government might try to nationalize IRAs, for example, or 401(k)s and tell everyone, well, it's now going to be under a nationalized system, and we're going to quite benevolently invest your money in the stock market with stocks of our choice, because it's in your best interest.

When you get a government that's big enough to provide everything to everyone, that same government is also big enough to take everything from everyone. I was going to ask you about tangibles and go into more depth on that, but real quick, since you mentioned IRAs, if you were talking -- I concede that it is possible, and because I come from a traditional financial planning background, a primary part of what we do is help people with IRA planning, Roth IRA planning, 401(k)s, et cetera.

And professionally speaking, I'm not sure of any way to be involved in the industry if you didn't have the conviction that that was in the best interest of the people that you're working with. If you came from the perspective that nobody should participate in those tax-advantaged accounts, I think you'd quickly be forced out of the industry with malpractice, because that is a standard part of our profession.

If you were going to try to give any more detailed proof or evidence or substantiate your fear about the government changing the rules, would you be able to substantiate that with other evidence at all? Well, yes. I've had some links in my blog to some planning that's gone on by so-called public interest groups, and a lot of these groups have been in advisory capacity to the Obama administration.

If you look through Survival Blog, we have a search box on the right-hand side. Type in the words "IRA" or "401(k)" with "k" in parentheses and the word "nationalize," and you'll find links to several articles that I've posted that can pretty well substantiate that. There is a significant risk, and there's nothing worse than a cornered politician, in my estimation.

If they get into a real bind, they're going to do what's expedient. If you look back at the nation's last really big financial crisis, what happened? The FDR administration instituted a huge number of new federal bureaucracies. That's where all the alphabet soup agencies, as they call them, were created, with the Works Progress Administration, the National Recovery Act, and the CCCs.

Those were kind of short-lived organizations, but a lot of the alphabet soup agencies are still with us and growing. At that same time period, they also pretty well panicked. There was a lot of bank robbery going on because of the economic disruption, so they instituted the National Firearms Act of 1934, which required a $200 transfer tax for machine guns and sound suppressors for weapons, for example.

That came in under FDR. The other thing that came in under FDR was both a revaluation of the price of gold and a forced turn-in of all bullion gold investments. They were all nationalized by the government. In fact, they nationalized it all at $15 an ounce, and then once they had everyone's gold, they re-pegged the price of gold to $28 an ounce.

That was a neat trick. Again, there's nothing worse than a cornered politician. Never underestimate the ability of politicians to overreact to a situation, and don't get caught at the confluence of a crisis and public policy. Let's face it. It's not the politicians that suffer. It's not the banksters that suffer.

It's your average, everyday, wage-earning American that suffers in these kinds of crises. We're the ones who pay, either in the form of higher taxes or greater regulation, greater control. The real winners are the banking establishment and the politicians. The survivalist outlook on investing that I mentioned previously is the best way to insulate yourself from the vagaries of political change and administration of government via crisis, or government by emergency, as Dr.

Gary North calls it. It's really, man, I tell you, as a young man, it's so tough to weed through this type of analysis because it's so hard for me to gain historical perspective because in my living memory, it's hard to trace major changes in law. I'm just one generation older, but my parents grew up in the Great Depression.

One of the things that I was given just before I went off to college was a US $10 gold piece that our family refused to turn in in the 1934 gold confiscation. It was kind of passed on as a family heirloom. My parents grew up during that time period, and those memories were still fairly fresh to them.

They definitely inculcated me in terms of just how important it is to be able to feed your family, literally. There literally was mass starvation in the United States, most people don't realize, but there were somewhere between 2 million and 10 million deaths in the 1930s that were attributable to the Depression.

People simply were starving to death. That's how hard the times were. A lot of people look back kind of nostalgically on the 1930s, watching TV shows like The Waltons. The Waltons were the survivalists. They were the ones living out in the country and raising pigs and having a big garden and not being dependent on government.

Your average Americans that were in the big cities or the suburbs really suffered in the Great Depression. If someone was out of a job, they were out of luck, and they were either forced into some sort of assistance or had to depend on their country cousins. Joshua, that brings me back to one other very important point, and that is, here we are on the cusp of another possible Depression, and this one I think will be inflationary rather than deflationary triggered when it happens.

But consider this. In the Depression of the 1930s, still fully 30% of the American population was actively engaged in farming, ranching, or fishing. That meant that most people had country cousins that they could depend on for produce and for meat. Well, now we have a situation where literally 99% of the population is being fed by just 1% of the population.

That's how many people are actively involved in farming, ranching, or fishing right now, only 1% of the population. So even if we were to have a Depression that was an exact duplicate of the Depression of the 1930s, I don't think it would be very survivable. We have very long chains of supply, and most people don't have country cousins.

Let's face it. And we also have a society that's much less civil than it was in the 1930s. If you think John Dillinger was bad, just do a repeat of the 1930s now, and I think we would see a crime rate that is absolutely off the scale. And it won't be bank robberies.

It'll be home invasion robberies. Right. And I would say even those of us who do have country cousins--so for example, I have cousins--I live in Florida, but I have cousins in Colorado--excuse me, Wyoming now. They moved to Nebraska, right on the line between Wyoming and Nebraska. But the farming and ranching operation that they have is large-scale corn, some wheat, and a cattle feedlot, and a small sheep feedlot as well.

That doesn't necessarily lend itself to the same type of ongoing--it's not quite as easy to--it's probably better than not having any food, but that's not exactly the type of food that you can eat every single day as perhaps a more integrated farm would have been back in the 1930s.

Right. In the 1930s, a lot of the farming that was going on is what's called truck farming, where just one farm might produce 10 or 12 different crops. Well, right now, modern American agriculture is geared toward a number of things. One is dependence on grid power and electrically pumped irrigation.

Secondarily, it's all geared toward monoculture, which is one crop per farm. And thirdly, it's all very intensively geared toward both pesticides and herbicides. It will not be an easy transition for those farms to revert to 1930s-style farming. There's going to be a steep learning curve, and the productivity is going to drop off tremendously if that kind of transition has to take place.

Right. I have three more quick questions for you. We're right at an hour. Do you have time for three of them, or do I need to pick one of them? No, go ahead. Let's do all three. Okay. So the first one is tangibles, the second is nickels, and then finally I want to come back to the reputation of the survivalist community.

But let's start with tangibles. You mentioned earlier your investments in .22 long rifle ammunition. And so I've looked at this, and I've always thought it would be interesting. And one of the things I'm intrigued with is how you can find these little inefficient markets, whether it's in classic Rolex watches, or you seem to have this just incredibly deep knowledge of all these weird firearm magazines.

You know, there's this type of magazine, these are super valuable, and you get them at three bucks a pop, and then three years later, they're 20 bucks a pop. And so you seem to have this depth of knowledge. And I even look right now, I mean, you look around the firearm marketplace, and it seems to me like you can go pick up, what was it, two years ago, an AR-15 was going to cost you I don't know how many thousands of dollars, and today, I mean, the price has just plummeted.

As have the stripped receivers. Right now you can buy a stripped AR-15 receiver for $49. That's a good investment as far as I'm concerned, because three years ago, you'd be lucky if you could find a stripped receiver for $600. Wow. So how does somebody get, so I've thought, I have a friend who started a, he got his firearms license, and he started kind of a gun shop basically out of his garage as a dealer.

He wound up, it didn't wind up being very profitable for him, but I've thought about this as a way to compound benefits, is that if I were to set up a firearms dealer, get a dealer license and start dealing firearms, well then I can take advantage of having a business that's something that I'm interested in and that I enjoy, and I can compound the benefits of the business tax code with potentially having an investment portfolio that perhaps I could apply a little bit of skill to, and then you always have it under your control.

How does somebody go about getting knowledgeable about that kind of thing, though? Is that even a realistic scenario? Oh, no, it is quite realistic, although I generally recommend that people opt for either firearms accessories or for federally exempt pre-1899 antique firearms, cartridge guns, that don't require a federal firearms license, because I don't like the entanglements of a federal firearms license, and part of it is the BATF can come and inspect your inventory whenever they want.

Accepting a license like that really makes you kind of vulnerable and it raises your profile. So the realist in me tells me that people should either be involved with just firearms accessories or parts or pre-1899 antique firearms that are not even considered firearms under the law, they're considered just antiques.

And even though these guns shoot cartridges rather than they're muzzle-loading, they're still quite effective guns. I wrote a FAQ on that subject, and if you go to the FAQ button at survivalblog.com and then click on the pre-1899 firearms FAQ, that explains it. But generally, I would recommend that if someone wants to start a home-based business, something that's firearms-related might be a good idea, although currently we're in a down cycle, so we're more in the acquisition mode right now because prices are falling.

I like buying into falling markets to buy inventory, and then selling into rising markets. So if someone has a steady income from another job, this would be a good time to start stocking up a home-based, firearms-oriented business. But don't expect really strong sales for the next couple of years.

But the pendulum will swing backwards, and you never know when there'll be a highly publicized event that could cause new legislation, especially at the state and local level. Federally, we seem to be fairly well secure, since we just got a Republican majority in both the Senate and the House.

But I think this would be a good business for people to consider in terms of a knowledge base. Take full advantage of some of the standard references that are out there. Of course, there's a lot on the Internet, like the FAQ I just mentioned that I wrote. But one excellent book is called "Flederman's Guide to Antique Firearms and Their Values." For modern guns, there's a book of standard references called "The Blue Book of Firearms," and it's published annually.

That way, you can buy intelligently, and it'll give you all the details and all the model variations, and what to look for and what to look out for. A lot of it, though, comes with experience. I recommend that people spend a lot of time at gun shows and just spend a lot of time talking with the dealers and picking up knowledge about particular brands of firearms, their collectability, the things to look for in terms of desirable features.

Learn very carefully how to judge the condition of firearms. If you're not carrying around a bore inspection light in your pocket at a gun show, you're a fool. You really need to know how to peer down the bore of a firearm and judge its condition. And just like with any other collectible, condition is everything.

Whether you're talking about antique books or antique guns, it's all about condition. And everybody wants--the be-all and end-all is what they call "mint condition." And you want to try to gradually shift your collection or your inventory toward higher and higher grade and higher condition guns. But the survivalist in me says, "Make sure that all those guns are also practical guns that are in common calibers." So you don't want oddball calibers that will be hard to find in the midst of a societal collapse.

And you don't want to have such obscure or incredibly high-grade engraved or inlaid firearms that-- you know, where you could buy five practical guns in the same caliber that aren't such, you know, incredibly collectible guns. I would rather have five guns that are practical that I could barter rather than one gun that I might spend months or even years finding a buyer for.

So I think your concept there, Joshua, is quite a good one. But people need to take the time to become subject matter experts. And as with any other business, it's your expertise and your ability to interact with customers and wholesalers that will give you the competitive edge to make a business highly profitable.

If you are a know-nothing, you are going to profit nothing. Right. The thing I think is cool about guns, just that-- because I remember years ago when I was much younger, and I was always trained from the perspective that owning precious metals is stupid. And then one day I had a guy that said-- you know, laid out the argument for gold and silver as compared to how much it cost for-- I don't remember any number.

I can't do the numbers off the top of my head. But how much it cost to buy a-- you know, my grandfather in 1940, how much would it have cost him to buy a Colt 1911? And then today in 2014, how much would it cost to buy a Colt 1911 and then to price that in terms of silver?

Versus paper dollars. Right. And it's remarkably consistent. Yes. In fact, there's been several measures like that done. One that's often cited is the price of a fine tailored men's suit. That's been right around one ounce of gold ever since the 1850s. Really? Yeah. You could walk into a men's shop and get a tailored suit of clothes for one $20 gold piece.

Wow. Which is about an ounce of gold. And right now, if you go into a men's shop, it's probably going to cost you about $1,200 for a nice suit. Well, guess what an ounce of gold is? Right. So some things really are timeless. It's not gold that's gone up.

It's dollars that have gone down. And if you look on the Internet, there's a number of web pages that have these really interesting calculators that show the real value of the dollar since 1917, for example, or 1914 with the advent of the personal income tax. It's really remarkable to see the robbery that's gone on in slow motion through gradual inflation in this country.

Most Americans do not realize that they're gradually being robbed year after year of their savings through inflation. And that's one of the huge advantages of precious metals and other tangibles, is that you're sheltering yourself from the ravages of inflation. And right now, those ravages are fairly gradual, but still quite stark in that we've lost 95% of the purchasing power of the dollar since 1914.

But just wait for mass inflation. Then the advantages of tangibles and precious metals will be profound. But I have to point out that the investor in me comes back to that now and says, "Yeah, but if I'd sold the 1911 in 1940 and invested that same amount of money into shares of some excellent companies of America and the world, I could outfit my entire battery of firearms today instead of only replacing the one 1911." It's all relative, and like any other portfolio, it requires balance.

I do not recommend investing entirely in farmland or entirely in precious metals or entirely in firearms or entirely in equities. Balance is where your real protection comes in, because no one can fully predict the future. But by having some significant hedges like tangibles, like precious metals, you're at least buying yourself some fire insurance.

And here I'm talking fire insurance on the dollar itself. Second question on my list is, I can't remember if it was first on your page or whether it was somewhere else referenced, but you have at least in the past been a proponent of purchasing nickels as a guaranteed investment, essentially.

Could you explain the concept behind that, the advantages of it, and also the disadvantages of that strategy? Yes. Well, like precious metals investing, it's a fairly non-productive asset in that you have to have the nickels in your possession, which means you can't be lending them out or investing that money in stocks, for example, to produce dividends.

Or in the case of someone like me who raises livestock, the money I invest in livestock breeds. Right, it multiplies. You have a pile of nickels, it's not breeding, and it's not producing interest, and it's not producing dividends. That's the drawbacks. And also, they're pretty bulky. So there is the risk of theft, although it'd have to be a burglar with a really strong back.

I have $5,000 face value in nickels sitting in boxes right now in a walk-in vault, and it weighs, oh gosh, over 2,000 pounds. Wow. It's a pile that's about three feet high, about a foot deep, and six feet wide. So they're fairly bulky, very heavy. But here's the advantages.

A nickel can still be spent as a nickel. So the downside risk is minimal. The downside risk is essentially the same risk as paper dollars. The upside potential is huge, because right now it's costing the U.S. Mint nine cents to produce each nickel. There's about eight cents' worth of copper and nickel.

Just for your listeners that aren't familiar, U.S. nickels ever since the end of World War II have been produced with 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel. All the way up to today's nickels. So because of gradual inflation, all the larger denomination coins have already gone way past--the ones that were produced in silver went way past their base metals value.

The base metal value far exceeded their paper dollar value because of gradual inflation. And that's why they had to do away with silver dimes, quarters, and half dollars in 1964. Because they were starting to be pulled out of circulation by the general public as quickly as they were minted.

Because inflation had destroyed the value of the dollar. So the same thing, same kind of situation now exists with nickels, and to a lesser extent with pennies. But they're even more bulky and even heavier. Right now it costs the government nine cents to produce each nickel. Its base metal value is about eight cents.

Now currently it is illegal to melt down pennies or nickels to recover their base metals because the government hates competition. And they don't want to have one of those emperor's new clothes moments because if they were to legalize that, people would start melting them down and there would be no pennies or nickels left in circulation.

They'd be gone. They don't want an emperor's new clothes moment where people would basically point the light at government and say, "So what does this mean for the real value of our paper dollars? They're worthless." The real value is in those tangible base metal or precious metal coins. So I do recommend buying a small hedge for a typical family that makes say between $30,000 and $80,000 a year.

I would say maybe buy $1,000 worth of nickels as a hedge. Those nickels will never lose their value and there's considerable upside potential if we go into mass inflation. Right. And at some point once they've been driven from circulation, the government will do the same thing they did with the silver coins and that is to legalize their melting for their melt value.

And at that point, they will become a true commodity and just like a $1,000 face value bag of silver, which only weighs 55 pounds, a standard box of nickels, a 100-roll box, which has $200 face value because each roll of nickels is a $2 roll face value, each of those boxes will become a commodity.

And they'll eventually be sold at a multiplier of their face value. Right now, even with a weak commodities market, their melt value is around $0.08 per nickel. I can foresee the time when a nickel will be worth two times, three times, four times its face value and they'll be traded as such as a commodity.

The thing I love about the idea of the nickels and it's one of those things that until you look at it, you think, "Huh." But what I love about it is the way to stack benefits in a transaction like that. And I have not done it because I don't know where I would put a pile of boxes filled with nickels at the moment.

But I might. I'm not sure. I've thought about it. Because when you have a guaranteed floor, you have cash. And let's say that you're always going to keep some amount of cash. So my wife and I always keep currency available. You never know when you need currency and you can get great deals if you can just pull $100 bills out of your pocket and get substantial discounts on items that you're buying or you may need it for various reasons.

So the cool thing about it is it's one of those things where there's a built-in upside and there's limited downside. And the downside that it is, is theoretically, I guess, if you bought $1,000 worth of nickels, A, you have to find a place to put them, which may or may not be feasible depending on your situation.

If I were living in an RV, there's not a chance I would do it. But if you have a secure closet somewhere that you could do it, there's no reason not to. And then the only downside would be, well, I guess I would have to turn that into money, into paper currency.

And you could, I guess, I mean, I've never done the transaction, but I mean, I guess you could walk into a bank or into a few banks and turn it into $100 bills. They'd probably look at you a little weird, but do they do the transaction? All the time.

In fact, there's a lot of people who do what's called coin roll hunting, looking for silver half dollars in circulation. And they go repeatedly to banks and say, I want $100 worth of half dollars. And they take those half dollars home and they search through, looking through them for the silver dollars that were minted between 1965 and 1970 that are 40% silver, the transitional silver half dollars.

Right. But then they regularly go back to the bank and turn them back in. And there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can take it to the bank or there's these machines called Coinstar machines. Normally they charge a fee. That's like, I think they get like a 10% premium for counting your coins and they turn them back into the bank.

But what's not very well known is Coinstar also has an option where they will give you full face value for the coins in the form of an Amazon gift card. So you could use those Amazon gift cards just like cash. Right. Or, you know, to buy what you want, mail order or give them as gifts or trade those cards to someone in lieu of cash.

So that way you're not going to have to pay to turn those nickels back in. So, yes, you're right. The downside risk is absolutely minimal. Right. There's also one other advantage of nickels that I've never seen publicized elsewhere outside of my blog. And that is that in the event that there's a collapse of the U.S.

dollar because of mass inflation, there will be a reversion to silver coinage. But the value of those silver coins will be so high that there'll be some need for smaller change. If a 10 cent pre-1965 silver dime will buy you two or three loaves of bread, how are you going to make change?

Right. And I think that's where nickels might come in, because I think the nickels may become the new pennies or centimes or whatever, where people will ignore the five cent face value of the nickel and they'll just think of its copper and nickel value and say, oh, yeah, well, let's arbitrarily say that 200 of those would equal the value of a silver quarter.

Or 300 of those might represent or 400 of those might represent the silver, the value of a one ounce silver American Eagle round. So I think they may turn out to be quite useful for making change in a barter environment. Yeah, it's possible. I can't imagine it, but I guess it's possible.

Throughout history, I mean, it certainly seems that throughout history there has been the buyer tri-metallic working of money. It's just so hard for me to fathom. Well, as I mentioned earlier, price equilibrium in a free market is met very quickly. And if you look at the history of like Germany immediately after World War Two, their entire economy for about a period of about two or three years was based on the value of cigarettes because the Deutsche Mark was worth nothing.

And the very small amount of foreign currency in circulation made it almost impossible for the average German citizen to obtain. So they very quickly adopted as a purely pragmatic measure using cigarettes as barter currency. And the advantage of cigarettes is you can trade them individually, you can sell them, trade them in a pack, or you can trade them in a carton.

So they were divisible. The only problem was they were perishable. So they weren't an ideal barter currency, but they became a de facto currency from the period from 1945 to about 1948 or even 1949 in Germany. Interesting. I didn't know that. The deterioration would definitely be a problem for a long-term monetary.

You had a heavy smoker in your family. Well, you know what? It'd probably be better than some families that have a heavy spender. Last question I would like to ask you is about the reputation of the, I guess, the survivalist community and the interaction with more mainstream community. I've always been interested.

So I grew up, again, I was a ham radio operator. I was involved with Ares and Races, which are amateur radio emergency response groups when I was a kid. I live in Florida. We have hurricanes. When I was a kid, I started reading SAS survival manuals. I remember when I found, what was his name, Ragnar Benson.

Yeah. I assume that's a pseudonym of some pen name. But he wrote all these books. And as a kid, I just thought, "Ah, how cool is this stuff?" And so for me, it was never a big deal. And I always figured, the ideas from the survivalist community are certainly extremely practical ideas.

I've learned over the last few years, I've interacted with many wealthy people. You always need backup plans. You always need insurance policies. And as a financial planner, all I do, we think about risk and reward, and risk and reward interchange between those things. So I've never talked with somebody who hasn't found the ideas of survivalism practical and interesting, at least if they were moderately just thinking about real risks.

Again, if I had 30 million bucks, I would want to have, as part of that planning, I would want to have a well-stocked ranch in a safe part of the world with a bunker on it. But that's challenging when you're getting started and you're fresh out of college and you have $30,000 of income and you've got to live on.

So you've got to tailor these things. But one of the things I haven't understood, then the other part of my preamble here, is that recently, I don't know what it is, I guess, but maybe it's the concerns since the 2008 economic crisis. But it seems like the ideas of survivalism and prepping and whatnot have become mainstream.

You walk into Barnes & Noble by my house here and there's at least eight magazines sitting there on the magazine rack about bug-out bags and doomsday this and whatnot. But there still seems to be this nervous tension between people. And the first thing you read and you hear is, if you mention survivalism or prepping, is you get this kind of nervous laughter.

"Well, those people are crazy." But, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't understand why that exists. Why is there this tension between the so-called survivalist community and the so-called non-survivalist community? Why is there this kind of nervous tension where everyone feels the need to poo-poo the concepts of survivalism?

Well, I think there's a couple of things going on. One is the mass media has done their best to demonize survivalism. If you look at the depictions of survivalists in popular culture, they're always depicted as people with a screw loose. But why? What's the agenda behind that? Well, that is the other factor.

And that is, I think that there is a deep-seated resentment of anyone who's prepared on the part of anyone who is not prepared, because it makes them feel inadequate, in part. And what's really going on in the back, at the subconscious level, perhaps, or the non-articulated level of the brain, is that people realize that they haven't prepared for their families.

And in the event of a disaster, they don't want to be seen as someone who's not providing for their families. So, as a coping mechanism, instead of getting themselves prepared, which is what they really should do, they instead lash out at those who are prepared. It's almost a form of envy.

Yeah. So, I think that's what's really going on in popular culture. And unfortunately, even the shows that are popularizing survivalism, like the National Geographic Doomsday Prepper show, for example, if you'll notice, the people that volunteer to be profiled on that show tend to come from a pretty unstable school of survivalism, in that they either want to promote a product, or they are some sort of exhibitionist.

I mean, what prepper in his right mind would mention his name and his location if he's well stocked? Yeah. It's the last thing I'd want to do. I mean, obviously, you're putting yourself on some biker gang shopping list for the next depression. So, obviously, the people who have volunteered and put themselves in the limelight do not represent the majority of American preppers.

I think they're picking out publicity hounds, people who are really looking for publicity. And I really have my doubts about their real motivations. So, they're not getting a good cross-section at all. Let me ask you a question about that, because I'm going to disagree with you, but I'm interested in your response.

I found that show on Netflix, and I watched like half an episode, and it just seemed like the people there, either it was the way they were portrayed, or whether it was the way they really were, it's just almost like they're itching for, it's like they have this secret fantasy that they're hoping everything goes wrong.

Yeah. Anyone who's looking forward to that kind of disaster and living at that level, it's really out of touch with reality. Because what we're talking about is reversion to 18th or 19th century living standards. And if you look at the mortality rates of the 18th and the 19th century and the life expectancy of those time periods, and the hardship that people lived, living hand to mouth in those time periods, in the pioneer days, it's really not an admirable lifestyle.

In terms of, you know, it's great for me to have a backup power system and to have storage food and all the self-sufficiency, but when you come right down to it, the sheer drudgery of a world without grid power, the absolute sweat that's going to be expended to live that kind of lifestyle, people have no idea.

Right. I mean, just hauling water by itself, not to mention felling trees by hand without a chainsaw, and then transporting that wood, splitting that wood, stacking that wood, all by hand. Wow. Yeah. My goodness, people have no clue. And if they look with rose-colored glasses on that kind of life and they yearn for it, I really have my doubts about them.

Yeah. And by the way, I agree with you about carrying water. Some years ago, I went to the Philippines and I spent a month there doing some missions work in some various churches there. And we were out in this little place called Balabag, Philippines, and it's the top of a mountain.

No electricity and no running water. Well, running water, the kind you ran to get. And our hosts were carrying water up the mountain, and I went and volunteered to help them where we put the stick on my back and with the five-gallon water containers they had to carry it up from the spring.

It was not a long way. I managed to do it because I'm decently strong. I couldn't do it twice. And I'm looking at these little Filipino guys and they're just trotting up and down, and I just said, "Wow, I could not live this. I would have to undergo some major changes to be able to live this kind of lifestyle." I had a world of respect for them.

But on the topic of the interplay between cultures, when I watch those people, it seems as though it's almost looking for some vindication of, "Yes, I was intelligent." But I feel, as I read a lot of articles, I feel like in many ways the survivalists, people that are involved in the survivalist community, don't really help themselves because they use language that I think is oftentimes derogatory.

And probably the best example that I've observed is the use of the word "sheeple," for example. Or "zombie." I hate that one. It's almost like we're so cool because we're better than everybody else and we're smart enough to see that the world is headed for disaster and everyone else is stupid.

And that's not been my experience with the mainstream population, at least in financial planning, the people that I've worked with, is that most people, I think, do care about planning for the future and they are prudent and they are concerned. And so I wonder if the survivalist community hasn't kind of created this rift both through, in some sense, criticizing the general population, and then number two, with the intense secrecy associated with it.

I mean, there's nothing weird about preparedness. You go to ready.gov and the federal government tells you that you should have a 72-hour kit. And I have friends in emergency management here in West Palm Beach and people in the government are practically begging people to have their hurricane preparedness. But it's almost like this—go ahead.

They say anyone who has a large supply of food or a large supply of ammunition or a large supply of fuel is a potential terrorist. So it's kind of a two-edged sword there. To get back to your previous point, I don't think it's so much the survivalists that are driving away the general population so much as it is the media demonizing the survivalist mindset.

I think that's the bigger culprit. But I think that with survivalism, it should have a lot of appeal to people in the investing community because, let's face it, people who are investment-minded are well-read. They have an eye on the big picture. They're inherently distrustful of government, just like survivalists.

And they also have an international scope of vision. So a lot of high-level investors not only have offshore bank accounts, but they also keep their passports up to date. And a lot of them even have a second passport for another country for that worst-case scenario where they might have to relocate.

So that same inherent mindset exists. That's kind of a common factor between the survivalist community and the high-level investment community. And I think that in the final analysis, we have a lot more in common than we do differences. Right. To me, that's what I see. I don't know. Maybe it's stupid.

I just think there's no reason why the idea of preparedness and planning for your needs is something that should be kind of hush-hush where you don't talk about. And maybe there's a zombie biker gang of people that's going to come to my house. But I can't – I mean, there you get into your novels, and those are well worth reading because it's fun.

But I can't imagine anybody wanting to attack. Those of us who would strongly advocate, I would prefer that every single house on the block had a bunch of guns in it, and I believe that would impact crime rate. Well, who's the most likely person to have a bunch of guns in their house?

People from the survival community. So you could have a force-on-force – I guess that would be the world of your novels, which are very fun to read and think through. But the point I'm trying to make is that when I look at it as a financial planner, you're always looking for what is a good value at a certain time based upon where I am as an individual.

I am not at a place in my financial life where I am going to go out and, again, buy a ranch in Brazil, out in the hinter boonies of Brazil to protect me in case of a US dollar economic collapse. I'm still in a wealth-building phase of my career, and so therefore I'm looking for things that I can do that are practical.

But the idea of having more than two weeks' worth of food, there's no downside to it, and I can leverage – that's why I did a show on the Alpha Strategy. And then as a financial planner, when I have a client sitting here talking about retirement, and I'm looking at a portfolio of equities, and I'm looking at that I have to guarantee a certain level of income off of this portfolio, then it's a lot easier if the client has some resilience in their lifestyle where they could decrease their expenses if they wanted to.

So to me, there's no difference between somebody owning their house and having the goal of having a paid-off house during their retirement years and the idea of them owning their power supply or their water supply or their food supply in some way. And so I want to popularize things because I don't care where the idea and the concept comes from.

If it's applicable and I can pull from it and I can figure out how to apply that within the context of my personal situation, then to me that's a very sound concept, which is what my show is about, is pulling all these concepts from disparate places and applying them in individual lives.

I think that's very wise, Joshua. Before we sign off, I'd like to mention a few resources that people can refer to. I don't want to toot my own horn about survival blogs so much, but I want to mention that there's dozens of blogs like mine on the internet, and most of them have no subscription required.

They're all wide open access. I highly recommend that people take full advantage of those blogs and that they do keyword searches on the topics that are relevant to them and they print out the most important articles in hard copy and start creating binders on different topics, one on ham radio, one on first aid, one on small arms, and one on traditional hand tools, for example.

Start building up a reference library, because knowledge is power, and in the investing world, knowledge is profit. Start building up your reference library. A couple of times in this conversation we've mentioned a book called The Alpha Strategy. It's now out of print. There's an e-book of it available free online, but I would recommend people get a hard copy of it, because it was a best seller back in the 1970s, and there's a huge number of copies that are sitting around in thrift stores.

Because of that, you can find a hardback copy of The Alpha Strategy by John Pugsley for about a buck, or two or three dollars delivered from Amazon.com or eBay. Buy a copy of that book, folks, and it will explain things in terms of tangible investing that he's very lucid in his writing, and the illustrations that he gives are profound.

Just from a practical standpoint, as an investor, people can see the wisdom of having a 2,000-gallon diesel tank in your barnyard. If I can buy diesel when it's $2 a gallon, and then ride out the periods of time where it spikes up to $3.50 a gallon by using it up gradually, and then stock up again the next time there's a plummet in the price, even just seasonal differences in the prices of fuel are a huge advantage, because you're not buying during the peak summer driving season for fuel for your car, for example.

You're going to save a lot of money. So stock up not just on tangibles, and not just on foodstuffs and supplies and ammunition. Stock up on knowledge, folks. And for anyone who's going to be investing in a particular area like firearms or hairspring watches, for example, buy the best references you can find to make yourself a subject matter expert, because that is the key differentiator between you, who will be a savvy investor and a savvy trader, and the GDP, as I call it, the generally dumb public, who basically...

Tim, that's not nice. I know it's not nice, but let's face it. Right, I understand. The bottom line is you either have a knowledgeable investor or you have roadkill. Agreed. Be the savvy investor. Right. And the other thing is get out there in the marketplace. The only way that you're going to be able to barter in the event of a collapse is if you have bartering skills, and those skills only come with time and experience.

So you need to be going to flea markets, and you need to be going to gun shows, and you need to be going to coin shows, and you need to be going to ham radio swap meets. That's where you learn the negotiating skills and the bartering skills that will be crucial to you.

I'm glad you mentioned that. I have a one-year-old son, and I was thinking about that the other day. I'm weak on in-person negotiating. I'm kind of a pushover, and I was thinking about how am I going to—I need to figure out a way to go and get some boots on the ground experience with individuals so I can teach him that.

Your local gun show is one of the best places, because not only do they sell guns there, they also sell a lot of first aid equipment, off-grid power, mobile photovoltaic power systems, ham radio gear. You can find all that sort of thing, and even cameras at gun shows. Right.

That's where you learn the really crucial negotiating skills that will teach you to be a hard bargainer and to have a discerning eye about things. It really is crucial to practice those skills now so that you'll be ready for a post-disaster barter environment where there won't be price tags marked on things and where everything will be negotiable.

If there's one thing that's true about gun shows, it is that at a gun show, everything is negotiable. If you're not using phrases like, "Is that the best you can do? Is that your bottom dollar?" then you're not getting the real market price for things. You're getting the G, pie-in-the-sky price that people want to get for things.

Gain that experience now. I've had several articles in my blog, again, it's survivalblog.com, about bartering skills and negotiation. Take a look through those out of my archives. In Survival Blog, there's over 40,000 archived letters and articles. Please take full advantage of them, folks. It's absolutely free of charge. It's fully searchable by keyword.

Delve into those archives. There's a real tremendous breadth and depth of knowledge there that will really help you and your families. It's great. I think at one point, it's massive. I always try, when I find a blog I like, I try to read the archives. I think I got through, I think it was like five and a half years, four years of years, something like that.

I said, "All right, there's too much here. I can't read any more of these archives." But I was pretty impressed with my getting through four years worth. Some of the very best things in Survival Blog were from the first year. Right. Because that's where I encapsulated a lot of the key concepts and where I got some of the really good, in-depth articles from my readers that ended up getting posted.

So don't miss that first year of archives from Survival Blog. Absolutely. We've had the blog up since September of 2005. Propitiously, we started publishing Survival Blog one month before Hurricane Katrina. Wow. Wow. I just watched a documentary on that. Wow. That's a long time ago. I didn't realize it was that long ago.

Wow. Interesting. Well, Jim, thank you for coming on. This has been super fun. I just want to thank you personally for at least the novels that you've written. You're at, let's see, there's Patriots, Ex-Liberators. There was also Survivors. Survivors. And then there's the Ex-Patriots, right? Yes. And so I just want to say thank you because I've enjoyed all of them.

And it's nice to read. I know you get a lot of flack for wearing your religion on your sleeve and writing your books in such a way that they are not defiling for a Christian. I know you get a lot of flack for that in the public space, but just from one man to another, I appreciate that.

It's nice to read a fun novel that's a fantasy novel that has a lot of stuff that's written in it without the need of being defiled for dramatic effect. So I know you get a lot of flack for that, and I thank you for doing it. Now, I've got to warn readers, I do depict some pretty violent times, but I'm very careful not to take the Lord's name in vain.

And I'm very careful not to use any obscenity or depict any latent sexual activity like so many novelists for some reason feel they have to do these days. So these are actually novels that you can hand to your teenage children and not feel bad about them reading them. I don't want to do anything as a Christian that people would find offensive.

And a lot of the protagonists in my novels are approaching this near future survival situation from a Christian outlook. And I think that is a valuable outlook to have, because unless you have people who have a respect for the law, when law and order disappear, it's only going to be the God-fearing who will be law-abiding.

And the thing that has struck me about some of those scenarios that you put your protagonists into, things like theft. You always assume, it's generally an assumption that in a time of unrest, the victor takes the spoils and you just simply go with as you can. And your protagonists are very consistent with, it's not the fact that, I remember in Liberators, I can't remember the name of the character, but was leaving the house and knew that they had to abandon and they were careful to leave their rent there.

And it wasn't the fact that the landlord wasn't there, they still left the rent on the table and left. And whether or not the average person gets that or not, I don't think really matters. But to me, I find that thought-provoking as a Christian, because sometimes it's so easy to get caught into what is common and acceptable in the world.

You just don't notice how certain times when you would, you don't notice how in certain situations you just kind of commonly adapt the standard of society instead of your own higher standard. That's the slippery slope. You know, as Christians, we're taught to be in the world but not of the world.

And especially in perilous times, we need to be the role models. We need to be leading out our own Christian witness to the community at large to set a high standard. And that's how morality and law and order will be restored locally, because if we become just another savage, we're going to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Right. Absolutely. Well, Jim, thank you for coming on. I have enjoyed this conversation, and I am sure that the audience has benefited from being challenged and provoked and stimulated with some of your ideas. Keep up the good work, and I thank you for everything that you're doing. Okay, and thank you, Joshua.

I want to thank you for your service to your listenership. You're obviously a very intelligent and articulate individual, and you're coming from the right perspective. And I hope that your listeners appreciate what you're doing with your show, because you're not just saving people's money. In a show like this, you're going to be saving lives.

Thank you so much, and God bless you and your listeners. What a fun interview, huh? I hope that you learned something. I hope that you were challenged and inspired. I want to finish with just a couple of quick thoughts. And as we mentioned there at the end of the interview, I've never understood personally why this – like the word "survivalism" in our culture seems to be this very strange word.

And it seems to evoke all of these emotions that people have. I read financial planning books often and I say, "Well, I'm not talking about survivalism." And I'm like, "But you are talking about survivalism. Why is this such a bad word?" I mean do we not – do you not want to survive and thrive in every way, and do you not want to have the tools and tactics and techniques?

And the best thing that I figured out – and I don't get kind of the sensationalism of some of the things in our culture. But to the best I've been able to figure out, to me I think what – one of the things that happens to people is often they feel threatened.

So if you have – I don't personally share all of Jim's perspectives on the certainty of certain situations happening in the world. I respect him and admire him, and I think that it's certainly a possibility. Anything is possible. None of us have a crystal ball. I don't share his certainty about them though.

However, that doesn't mean that I can't validly learn from him and I can't say how would you actually apply this in my life. I think what happens is a lot of times people are threatened by alternative opinions. So if I'm on the mainstream – if I'm on a news show and I'm talking to you about why you need to invest in stocks, that's a very optimistic perspective because the reason you invest in stocks is because you expect the value of your company and the profits of your company to rise in the future more than the cash that you have right now.

I think to me a lot of it has to do with the conflicts of interest that people have is that you have to propose a certain perspective. What I think is interesting also – I read a lot. I read a lot in the financial planning people. Many people just simply discard the possibility of things happening.

I personally still maintain a perspective of optimism, long-term optimism. What's interesting is that Jim shares that as well. So I think that's really interesting to recognize. But then the key is you have to do planning to be able to get you through because certainly short-term challenges are very possible.

And the way I think about it is a lot of people look to try to make financial assets do things that financial assets simply cannot do. The only point of money or currency or cash or a financial instrument of some sort, the only point and value of it in your life is to buy something that you need and that you want.

And so that may be food for your table. That may be shelter over your head. That may be entertainment with a movie or that may be a trip. That may be a sense of freedom and financial independence. But money is limited in its utility. It's only useful to do certain things.

And oftentimes it is in fact a better strategy to avoid the use of money and go after something directly. And I'll give you an example that I believe is very related but differently. Can you buy happiness? Well, on Tuesday I'm releasing an interview with Tammy Strobel who wrote a book called You Can Buy Happiness and it's cheap.

So can you buy happiness? Well, I think in some ways you can. You can make this point multiple ways. But you can buy happiness in the sense that live a lifestyle that makes you happy. But we would all say it's foolish to say I need to go and spend a bunch of money on a therapist unless you need one.

Maybe you can just do it in advance. Happiness is usually not judged based upon the amount of currency that you have. The emotional needs that people have are sometimes solved with spending money but more often are more efficiently solved by not spending money. And so the key is to recognize the importance of financial planning and financial assets and keep it in its proper place.

There are a lot of human needs that cannot be solved with the expenditure of money. There are a lot of them. So the key is to recognize those things and then to spend the money buying the things that you can buy. And so Jim takes that to one strategy.

Others take it to another strategy. The reason – if you compare today's interview with the interview I'm releasing on Tuesday and read Tammy's book, we didn't talk a lot about the book on the interview which I'll be releasing. But you compare the two, what you'll see is that both of them are buying what they want.

They're buying lifestyle. For Tammy, she seems – she measures her lifestyle and the freedom from the minimalist lifestyle that that gives her. And so she's using her money to buy that sense of freedom. Now, Jim's rebuttal to her would be, "Well, she's entirely dependent on the functioning of modern society," and it's true.

Now, on the flip side, Jim is buying freedom from worry and concern with his approach to finance. And all of us are going to have a different place in this spectrum depending on our situation, the needs of our families, of what we're trying to do. So the key is to be conscious of what you're trying to solve and ask yourself, "Can I solve this with money or can I not solve this with money?" I believe that we can take the strategies from every single walk of life and figure out what is useful to us.

And I hope that that came out in today's interview for you to apply it to your life. You've got to keep these things – I believe you've got to keep the scenarios that you're planning for relevant to your actual life and your actual perspective. Having a life insurance policy is a big deal.

If you look at what is more likely, is it more likely that you might die and you might need to have a life insurance policy? And to care for your family, is it easy just to buy a cheap term life insurance policy or is it easy to do what Jim does and live out in the hinter boonies and have in many ways a self-reliant lifestyle?

Now, the reality is that he can replace the need in many ways. That's why when I did that show on the Alpha Strategy, I think I talked to you about my friend who – that I knew with the father of – I think he and his wife had 12 children.

And he had built a lifestyle for his children and his family that when he died from cancer, I think, in his middle – early, his family was able to continue functioning. That's how I as a prudent person would have planned prior to the invention of life insurance. But it doesn't mean that there are other areas of planning that don't apply.

So I hope that this has been beneficial for you to think through and think through your own personal perspective. Let me know what you thought of today's show. I know that in the modern world, a lot of times people don't give these shows the type of topics. I so appreciate – I mean I was thrilled that Jim accepted the invitation.

I think he did a great job. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you – yeah, I hope you enjoyed it. Give me your feedback on the show. I'd love to hear it. Tomorrow I'll be doing your Q&A. So if you've got questions for me, give them – call them in on the line.

Just go to the website and you'll see the SpeakPipe app. You can do it right from your phone. You can do it right from your computer. That's up to you. If you enjoyed today's show, consider joining the Irregulars. That is the membership program that I've just created, a brand new membership program.

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Thank you all for listening. Have a lovely day. We'll talk with you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice.

Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy. And consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions. Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes.

If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season. Because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

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