hey everyone Chris here with Wasteland by Wednesday I'm out here for a little group exercise today although really I'm just here for the rucking uh right now I'm taking a little coffee break while the youngsters run around in full battle rattle out here uh training themselves to die in the water wars or whatever um with the wildfires that have been tearing up uh Los Angel right now I felt like making a little video to talk about how a similar event uh is originally what got me into prepping for collapse and it wasn't all that long
ago uh this isn't really a prepping related video exactly but I feel like someone out there you know maybe you'll maybe you'll get a little use out of the story uh so I might as well tell it um I've written about it some uh on Reddit and other places but now you can hear it right from me right here um so anyway welcome to the Wasteland my [Music] friends hell of a time to be alive am I right not that anyone asked me but I feel like we are right there at the edge of collapse
not quite at the end of everything yet but uh definitely close enough to the cliff to see what the drop looks like I don't really work anymore not uh not at a normal job not since 2019 I gave that up as the Folly that it always was though it took a personal Awakening to make me see it um my journey into this uh this new life that I'm living came as the result of a phone call from an old friend uh that friend was uh in Australia at the time um having left the US several
years before to find greener pastures um turns out those pastures would end up being red and yellow and orange um yeah the phone call came during the intense wildfires of that time in 2019 December of 2019 exactly um it was Ely a a noisy chaotic call that jolted me out of sleep and plunged me into the Frantic world that my friend was experiencing um the world he was trying to escape um I'll spare you the complete details I'm sure you can imagine and maybe you've seen some of the videos that have been going around uh
from that time but um they were basically driving through those fires um escaping really not driving uh with walls of fire on all side and smoke pouring into the vehicle everybody scared everybody you know out of their minds uh my my friend was trying to tell me uh all of what had happened to him and I I could hear everything but not really make sense of much I couldn't make sense of of really any of it uh lots of screaming and cursing banging and other unidentified noises the car the wind the fire everything um at
one point there was a series of particularly particularly allowed crashes and then the voices screaming became entirely unintelligible uh it sounded frantic it sounded uh horribly violent it sounded final uh and then it was gone dead air The Silence of a final disconnection and I was sure that I had just listened to the last moments of my friend's Life play out in fear and pain as he and his family were engulfed by the fire they were trying to escape I put a little too much wood in there I spent the uh rest of my night
with that thought you know I thought rough enough that I could like feel it scratching at me um but it turns out I was wrong thankfully and gratefully wrong um what had actually happened was simply that the phone had been dropped in the vehicle and of course nobody's going to waste any time trying to pick it back up um pretty much what I listened to was just the death of that device uh but not my friend thankfully not my friend he called me later to tell me the tale of his wild flight through all the
terror and Hellfire that nature mustered up that day um his life was forever changed by it though and mine was as well um along with so many others I couldn't really see the way see the world the way I used to after that uh those hours that I had sat awake thinking uh about people burning to death and a speeding car that kind of changed me a little bit shifted my priorities you could say I guess awaken me as it were awaken me to the threat of what we were really facing and I'd always uh
I'd always been aware of things like climate change uh you know resource scarcity overshoot and all that uh and coming from a military family I was keenly aware of War as well but now I had personally seem seen some some uh some collapse brought into Stark Focus um you know why were those fires so intense how had they even been spawned and when would it happen again like it's happening now in La uh you know what else was out there in the world that I was ignoring what other things had I missed in my distraction
with the Daily Grind of work and bills and credit scores and all that other so busy producing consuming feeding the machine its daily quota for infinite growth I realized I'd somehow lost something else you know and I also realized I had something else in common with my friend uh you know like him I never saw it coming but I saw it then oh yeah I saw I definitely learned a lesson on that fiery night and I I learned that the world wasn't the structured and stabled place that it had once been you know I learned
that we had uh we had destroyed all that uh basically I learned that we had around for so very long and now the time had come for us to find out what the consequences of that would end up being I learned that I had a lot more to learn you know the limits to growth overshoot the planetary boundaries and tipping points and resource scarcity deforestation biodiversity loss and depleted polluted oceans you know all that stuff uh but most importantly uh I had to learn what those things did to our or what those things could do
to our overly complex and interconnected systems and geopolitical tensions um for a while there I was a voracious consumer of data especially in those early days you know I quit my job like I said uh why waste any more time with that right and uh I turned to learning and planning so did my friend and so did many of our other friends uh we all came together in a singular purpose uh something I mentioned in my video on Mutual assistance groups which I'll link at the end of this um you know that purpose was to
find out what was happening and figure out what we were going to do about it uh collapse is what the answer turned out to be what was happening was collapse um of our biosphere and of our civilization uh the two are intertwined you know and as the the uh as the climate destabilizes and the the world's resources grow scarce uh so so too does civilization move ever closer to the brink you know the cliff drop of overshoot and the rapid drop that comes after um many people have already known of the threat from climate change
U but you know few us really took the time to follow that thought to figure out just what kind of response uh Humanity as a whole would have to those pressures you know as as they began to mount what was it going to do to them what was it going to do to us to all of us you know uh and of course logic and reason would Prevail you know that's what it was assumed things would be done problems would be identified and solutions would be found you know no sweat but uh that definitely turned
out to not be the case uh soon after of course the covid-19 pandemic hit and Society found itself turned upside down all of a sudden and all at once those of us who were paying attention had a realization you know we were not going to face crisis with logic or Reason oh no now we would face it with rage we would face it with hate we would face it with division and confusion we would face it with crazy ideas and wild denials we would divide ourselves to the extreme and amplify all the problems beyond what
they needed to be that seems to be the pattern with everything we're doing lately you know and finally we would face it with violence uh that is when I really saw what was coming I I saw the fragility of our civilization of our intricate and interconnected society and its web of interdependencies uh I saw the irrational reactions to even the smallest of stresses and I watched entire lives consume themselves without ever really even being touched by the pandemic uh the politics got them before anything else really could you know I could also see the future
of our struggles with climate change uh a problem much bigger and much more devastating than any plague I could also see that things were accelerating rapidly but uh I saw our future and that future was war you know there simply no other way such a thing's going to go there's no world where some nations would simply bow down to defeat so that other nations could survive hell no um everyone's going to fight to win a spot in the survivors club and uh what Went For The Individual also applies to the national scale you know when
the really hit the fan uh when the world really ran out of what we needed uh we were going to fight over the scraps of what was left that's for damire um and we're getting close to that now you know you can see it if you pay attention uh and that's how my journey and the journey of my friends got started you know to prepare for the changing climate and that inevitability of emerging War um to be ready for the Gathering Gloom that was going to be our future um it's been a few years now
since then uh those of you out there watching who know me or who have read some of my work uh you know you know how far I've come uh not alone of course Nobody Does it alone uh but in concert with my little community of friends you know even my friend from Australia uh you know now we're ready as ready as any can get and now we just wait I don't think we'll be waiting long but but while I wait I try and spread my awareness to others I try to wake them up from the
same dream that I'd been trapped in for more than 40 years of my life try to help them you help you prepare for the consequences of our actions for a post collapsed world on fire for a Wasteland by Wednesday my goal is uh to try to help as many people get ready as I can simple as that you know that's my that's the reason why I wrote my books on the subject why I started my blog and eventually why I made this channel you know I'm just uh I'm just trying to make it through the
fire to the other side and I'm trying to take you with me so I'm glad you're here I'm glad you're watching I hope you stay uh I hope I can I hope I can help us all learn something to help us all survive that's all time is short my friends stay safe stay ready it's a wasteland out there
