Choosing the Right Firearms for Your Preparedness Plan with Joe Dolio of Tactical Wisdom

About This Episode

In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Author and Veteran Joe Dolio. In this eye-opening discussion, Joe shares his unique perspective on the importance of preparedness, the state of society, and the need to safeguard our families in uncertain times. Don’t miss this engaging episode where Joe shares his wealth of knowledge and unique perspective providing valuable insights.

Insights In This Episode

• Joe Dolio emphasizes the importance of having a well-rounded preparedness plan.
• He points out the irony of prioritizing expensive firearms over basic medical supplies.
• He also encourages viewers to critically analyze current events and recognize potential tipping points.
• Joe believes that unsustainable societal shifts may lead to significant consequences.
• Joe Dolio emphasizes the need for a well-stocked first aid kit that aligns with real-life scenarios.
• Our guest encourages individuals to prioritize the safety and well-being of their families above political or ideological conflicts.

About Tactical Business

Tactical Business is the weekly business show for the firearms industry. The podcast features in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs, professionals and technologists who are enabling the next generation of firearms businesses to innovate and grow.

Episode Transcript

Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Show. I’m your host, Virginia Beach based firearms entrepreneur and copywriter Wade Skalsky. Each episode will be exploring what it takes to thrive as a business owner in the firearms industry. We’ll speak with successful firearms industry entrepreneurs about their experiences building their companies, leaders and legislators who are shaping the industry, and tech executives whose innovations will reshape the future of the firearms industry. Let’s get after it. Welcome to the Tactical Business Podcast. My name is Wade Skalsky, your host, and today I’m speaking with Joe Dolio. Joe, how are you doing today? Man?

Joe: I’m doing pretty good. I’m going to apologize in advance. There is a wild cat running around on my desk. Who knows what sort of tomfoolery is going to happen.

Wade: I like it well, I like to say that production errors are a feature, not a bug when I’m interviewing people. So that is all good. Yeah.

Joe: This is the vicious new war cat.

Wade: Oh, nice. What’s the name of the war?

Joe: It comes in a good camouflage pattern.

Wade: Good, good. What’s the name of the war cat?

Joe: Well, its name is Bunny. Okay. Like a rabbit, so.

Wade: Well, the bunny and Monty Python’s Holy Grail is pretty vicious. So I think.

Joe: That’s if you think bunnies are cute, cuddly creatures. Watch the original Watership Down that will scar you about rabbits. You didn’t care.

Wade: About safe spaces back in the day with some of those books, right?

Joe: No, no, not at.

Wade: All, I dig it. Well, I’m actually very excited to talk to you for a couple different reasons. So you’re the author of the Tactical Wisdom series, which actually had a very big impact on me personally. So as what I would consider a normal person, I don’t have a military background. I grew up in North Dakota, did the hunting, do hunting and shooting and all that, but I’m more of a normal person. So you’re and we’ll talk a little bit about the series, but the books had a really big impact on me in a couple different things. So let’s talk about that first. What motivated you to basically write the books, walk me through that process, and then if you can include a little bit of your background and how you got there.

Joe: Sure. I’ll start with the background and we’ll get into how we got there. So I was a US marine, began as a young lad at 17 years old, and the Marine Corps military policeman, so nothing high speed or cool, but I did go a few places and do a few things that exposed me to the way the rest of the world lives, and I realized that we live in the bubble, not the other way around. Right? It’s not a sea of normalcy like we have in America, but the rest of the world lives in what we would call collapsed societies. And having been on both sides of Africa, you see that after serving in the Marine Corps, I did some security work for corporations and people as a bodyguard and did some of that on the private military contracting side, going to a few other colorful places and seeing how the rest of the world lives. And I realized that really, it’s inevitable before Western society as a whole ends up in that kind of an environment. So I kind of went on with life and thought things were going well, and I fell into a really bad spot in my life where I started making mistakes that every man makes. I thought I was in charge and that I was the smart guy, and everyone else around me was wrong, and I could do whatever I wanted with my life and basically destroyed every relationship I had family, business, everything, crashed it all.

Joe: And I went to this Bible study. This shirt I’m wearing right now says every man, a warrior. And I know you’re probably just like me when the wife says, listen, you’re going to go to this group. You’re like, I’m not going to sit around in a room with a bunch of other dudes talking about my problems. Well, I’m going to be honest. I learned that I was not the only person struggling in these same areas. Everyone else was. And I’ll be honest, too, my story ended up strapped to a bed at a VA hospital and they weren’t going to let me go. So the first lesson that I want everyone to know is that, guys, you’re not the only one. Pick up the phone and call someone and they’ll there is someone who is struggling with the same things you are who might be able to help you. So I went to this program and what it is, it’s a program on what areas in which men can improve in their lives biblically, and how it matches to God’s plan for you. And part of it is reading part of the Bible every single day. Well, after I went through it a couple of times, I started leading groups and I got really bored with their directed reading assignments, and I started reading the cool stories that are in the Old Testament.

Joe: And a lot of guys like, oh, the Bible. It’s a boring old collection of rules. No, man, you get into the Old Testament, there are some stories in there that rival the Lord of the rings, right? There are adventure stories. There’s spies, there’s soldiers, there’s government oppression. Hey, that might be relevant. Read Maccabees. But I started telling the other guys in our weekly meetings about these stories. I was finding. They’re like, I don’t know that that’s in my Bible. I’m like, trust me, bro, it’s there. So what I was finding was these pieces of wisdom from the Bible that applied today, like Nehemiah’s tale of, hey, I was completely surrounded by my enemies. So when me and my boys went anywhere, we wore our armor, we carried our guns and we never had our well guns at the time would have been a bow in an arrow, right? We carried our weapons. We carried our armor. Even if we went to just get water. And I thought, boy, that’s pretty relevant to our life now we’re in a pretty bad environment where you probably should be armed all the time. So I started writing these articles about this and putting them on my own blog, and I called it Tactical Wisdom, where I was pulling old ideas from the Bible to show guys, hey, look, these problems that you all think we’re facing, everyone is faced before, and there was a solution to it.

Joe: And by going back to old school principles, we can do it. And I’ve always been interested in preparedness. So I started tying it to that, saying, you know what, everyone wants to buy the latest gadget or the coolest tent, or the coolest GPS unit, or the best this or the best, that’s not preparedness. That’s just buying stuff. Preparedness is having the skills to use it all. And if we’ve become so reliant on technology like we are as a society, if we become that reliant on technology. For our preparedness. We’re going to be in a really bad spot when things get bad. So I thought, what if I wrote a book where I took these same ideas that I’m finding everywhere else and applied them across preparedness as a whole instead of saying, hey guys, you need the whiz bang 2000 GPS unit that not only will tell you where you’re going and how to get there, but it will make your lunch for you and start a fire. You don’t need all that. What you need is a skills to do it all by yourself without relying on technology, which is the least common denominator. So with that, I wrote the first book. My wife was a big instigator there. She was always telling me, you should write a book. And I think she was being sarcastic mostly, but she really pushed me for it. That’s her cover design, by the way.

Joe: My son did the art, she did the design. And I’ll tell you what, when I first wrote that, I thought if I could get like 20 of my friends to buy it, that’s cool. I can check it off that, hey, I sold a book, but now we’re up over 11,000 copies on that book. And it’s it’s been a solid mainstay. So I just started continuing along thinking, hey, what are some of the things nobody else is talking about in the preparedness space? What are some of the skills that everyone just assumes you have? And that’s where the books have come in. That’s where all the other ones have come in. We now have a total of five main content books and one notebook that goes along with it to help you devise your plan. And I don’t know how many there are in this series, because they just keep coming to me as I finish one. The idea for the next one gets there. And so what that’s done is it’s gotten me involved here, where people now know my name and I’ve gotten the opportunity to speak to people. It lets me do a couple of things. One is reach people about their life not being so bad, and there are people who can help. So that’s been a huge plus. And the other thing this this cat is going to lay here no matter what. Don’t sweat the cat, man.

Wade: It’s good I mean, it it makes it better.

Joe: The other thing is that it’s given me the ability to meet some great and fantastic people and work with them to bring even more people into a preparedness standpoint, and not just preparedness from the world, but preparedness of your soul and your spirit.

Wade: There’s so much to unpack there. So a few things. One is that let’s talk about the book for a second. For me. So obviously I like shooting firearms. I’m into guns, but everyone’s into guns, right? And the thing is that I was always putting off was the medical and the comms parts. And I was like, yeah, I’ve got to tackle the medical side of things. And I got to tackle the comms and all that. But for whatever reason, your book was the first book that I’ve read that really pushed me to start doing that. And so I wanted to thank you for that, because my family’s actually safer because you wrote this book. So that was.

Joe: The intent, right? And what I did was instead of like, when you get some of these books, they’re like, they’re overwhelming. They’re like, I need this and this. Oh my God, that’s so much the baseline training manual was like, listen, man, you can get all that. But this is really what you need. This is the bare minimum. And let’s start there. And communications is one of those areas where that comes out. You talk to a guy who’s a ham guy and he tells you you need a $10,000 radio, a 70 foot antenna, and all this weird gear, and you’re like, man, I can’t afford that. And my homeowner’s association is going to let me throw that antenna up. I just can’t do this. But instead I was like, hey, man, you need a $25 bow for that. Let’s start there. And that’s really the best part about it.

Wade: Yeah, in my mind, when I thought again, I was concerned myself a more normal person in terms of in this field, right, in terms of the preparedness for firearms. Right. And so in my mind, whenever I thought ham radio, I always thought that you would have a desk with this giant radio on it, like huge radio on it, almost like an airplane cockpit in your house, and that you had to take this class for two years to do it. I don’t know why I thought that, but that was just like in my head, so I never even considered it in terms of on the calm side for even one second. And when I started to get into it, I was like, oh my God, this is super accessible. Like, you can get this pretty fast. What you need in terms of for being able to have communications or even just to listen. And again, I think one thing about your books that I really enjoyed is that you do provide a baseline for everything so that it takes away a lot of the overwhelm. So the medical side, the calm side is, look, just this is the baseline. This is what you need to start because it’s a rabbit hole. It’s like you can. But I think people like to go more on the Gucci side of things for the gun side. And they’re like, I’m just gonna keep going. Gucci on the gun and I’m going to get to the medical side later.

Joe: That’s the funniest part to me is you’re like, you talk to these guys, you’re like, okay, so what about your gun? They tell you about their $5,000 rifle they have and I go, what’s in your med kit? Oh, I got a tourniquet and a pressure dressing. Okay. Do you have a splint? No. Well, raise your hand if you’ve ever been in a gunfight. Okay, now raise your hand. If you’ve ever fallen down. Well, you’re more likely to fall down. So having a splint is probably more applicable to your real life than having a tourniquet. You should have both. But if you’re going to say you have a first aid kit, have stuff that you’re probably really going to use, it’s things like that. And that’s where I came from for this whole perspective. It’s like radios guys will spend $5,000 on a rifle, but freak out when I tell them to spend 70 bucks on on the high end bang bang bang bang radio instead of the $20 one. It’s just weird when we put our focus. It is really weird.

Wade: Yeah, absolutely. But once you get it, I think it makes a big. Because guess what everyone’s getting for Christmas this year for like my brother in law to the security guard at my school, I guess everyone’s getting a bafang radio. Everybody. So it’s just because it’s.

Joe: A really cheap. They’re a great thing to hand out.

Wade: So you said something that I thought was really interesting too, is about you’ve been all over and talking about the Bible and I’m a Christian. I’m very pro Bible, obviously, and there’s nothing new under the sun. And I think a lot of people have this idea where they think about, let’s say, the 1940s, for example, where the whole world was going crazy is like, oh, well, we’re so far elevated now. We’re a different type of people. We would no one would ever do that. So we don’t have to worry about those types of things. And actually the last 3 to 5 years have really taught me at least, is that, no, it’s exactly the same as it was in the Bible. People have not changed from the time they were written about in this, in the Bible 2000 years ago, 3000, 4000 years ago till now. And what brought you to your idea that we’re as a country, the Western world is going to start sliding more and more into that. What are you seeing? Why do you think that? I know that you have a pretty aggressive time frame for when that’s going to happen, so walk me through that. Well, I.

Joe: Think that the biggest thing is that in doing research for one of these books, I read the Book of Jeremiah, and when you read Jeremiah, they were doing all kinds of crazy and ridiculous things as a society. And God was like, hey, man, I’m not really down with that. So you should probably stop. And that’s why he sent Jeremiah. Now, Jeremiah was probably due to God invited to parties the least. Oh, here comes Jerry again. He’s going to tell us we got to stop having drag shows. He’s going to tell us. We got to stop reading porn to children. He’s going to tell us we can’t teach these things in school. And I realized, man, where Jeremiah was is where we are today. We’ve got drag queens. We’ve got all these abominations. Everything crazy and ridiculous is okay now. Theft is okay, rioting is okay, all these things are fine. And what ended up happening in that situation? Well, God said, all right, I already promised not to use a flood anymore, but I will use war. And when you look throughout the Old Testament, you’ll see that every time the Society of God collapsed into debauchery and the ridiculousness that goes on, God used war to bring them back to where they needed to be. They were destroyed, led away into captivity, ended up coming back and rebuilding. And I thought, man, is that what we envision or without rule of law, society to be a complete collapse and then a rebuilding? So I started looking at it on a timeline, and I’m going to I’m going to go a little bit overboard here, but I’m going to say it, this drag queen stuff that’s satanic and that’s not even that’s even being nice about it.

Joe: It’s literally going against God. And God’s not going to tolerate that for a long period of time. And there’s a couple of other things in the Bible that point out things like when you allow the unjust to succeed and the just to be persecuted, you’re on the wrong side of history. That’s my paraphrase of the entire Bible. But that’s where we are today. We’re allowing criminals to go free, and we’re punishing people who are trying to protect their families. We are stealing that allegedly Democratic vote and turning it around and installing who we want, not just in America, all over the world, in various countries. The Lula election points that way. And I just thought it’s unsustainable. And one of the things that we talked about, even just this morning on the Council on Future Conflict was the removal of the redemption monument points to something no society in history who remove their monuments and try to alter and erase their history has ever survived. Romans started to do it, were destroyed. It’s just the way that it goes. The Anglo-Saxons went through in and removed all of the old monuments there. They were destroyed. It’s the way that the world works. History is an instruction book. It’s not a well that could never happen to us. Like you said earlier, it certainly can, and it will. So I just thought, hey, how can I look at this and see where we are? And I got involved with a bunch of guys, the Council on Future Conflict that we do every Monday, Wednesday and Friday who are all like minded and all kind of we looked in our crystal balls and we’re all seeing the same thing that the American experiment is pretty much done.

Joe: We’ve removed the actual parts of it that made it great and we’ve turned it into something it’s not. It seems to be a facade now. So when is the most likely time for that all to come to a head? And when you read the headlines, you realize it’s much closer than you think. Most people say, no, that could never happen here. It’ll be a long time from now. That’s normalcy bias. It’s happening in front of you. And we really think first quarter 2025, you will see open violence in America. And that’s at the latest. That’s saying Russia and China don’t make a play. But as we’ve seen, Chinese military age males are being arrested for stoking racial violence in America. As a Chinese man arrested in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he had just painted swastikas all the way up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a synagogue in an attempt to stoke racial tension. That guy is not here by accident. He’s not just running around the country painting swastikas because he thinks it’s cool. He’s doing it to put us at each other’s throats, because China would like to tip us over that edge. I think it’s time that everyone should take the blinders off and start preparing. You don’t need to take a side. You do need to protect your family, though. And I think.

Wade: It’s what’s interesting is you don’t necessarily I think some people may disagree with you that maybe aren’t religious. Right? So like I say, no, I’m not. I’m going to buy into the Bible. I’m not going to buy into that. But what I would say to those people is that, well, you don’t have to just because exactly as that second part of what you said is that is every society that starts to do that with regards to its monuments and starts to wobble off of its axis, just eats itself and it starts. So I lived in California and then we moved in 2019. Right. And since we moved, like we got out of California at just the right time is like at least from an objective observer that’s outside of California. I feel like California is eating itself. Basically, Chicago is eating itself like these places are. The rule of law is starting to be degraded. And when you start to see that in the big cities, it’s only a matter of time before it starts to come to some of the smaller cities. And so you can look at it from a metaphysical perspective, which I do, and I agree with you, is that I think that once a society falls below a certain threshold of people who look to something higher, like something metaphysical, then there’s a problem, right? And also, if you take the metaphysical completely out, just rationally, we’re in the middle of a competency crisis.

Wade: People don’t have any. There’s the cohesion that used to hold the country together is being flung apart. And so from whichever way that you look at it, if you look at it metaphysically or you look at it just rationally, I’m not going to deal with that. I think everyone should use, like you said, take off the blinders and be like, okay, this is going down right now. This is happening. And then the next question is, okay, well, what do you do? Like what does a normal person do? It says, I don’t have anything. If it was me six years ago, I would have been like, I don’t even have a gun. I was in California. I didn’t even I couldn’t even have a gun, basically. I mean, I did, but like, you know what I’m saying? Like, I don’t have anything. Okay, where does that person do?

Joe: Well, here’s the thing is, most people then fall into this false dichotomy of team Red or Team blue. Well, which side do I get on? That’s the wrong thing. The right thing is you are responsible for protecting your family, so you should work on that. All that other stuff is secondary. So what you need to do is develop the skills and abilities and geography, quite frankly, to defend your family and protect your family. Anything beyond that is a plus. But the first thing is ensuring your survival. And if you don’t believe me, to borrow from the metaphysical realm again, Jeremiah 1017 says, gather up your belongings to leave the land. All you who live under siege, that’s God telling you to have a bug out bag and be ready, right? I mean, that’s literally what it says. So if you start there and just say, okay, look, I live in a world that’s volatile. So let me just have for each member of my family, a bag with a little bit of food, a little bit of water, something for shelter and something for first aid. Let’s start there. And once you do that, you’ll be in good shape. I imagine the folks who live in Maui right now would probably thinking, man, if only I had looked at a map before all this happened, or if I had packed a bag before all of this happened.

Joe: I might have been in a much better boat than I ended up in. And that’s where I think everyone should start. That first book, the Baseline Training Manual, literally spells out the stuff to get, and it’s not like most of the other books where I tell you, you got to have the latest and greatest of everything. I’m telling you to get a tarp and a military surplus backpack, start at the bottom, spend the bare minimum of money. But to get you to a position where I could survive, once I can survive, I could start working on other things. And that’s where the other books start to build in on it. And I think you’ll notice, too, a difference in my material, that everyone else’s is most of the people in the prepping space, they’re so focused on firearms. And this fight, I’m the opposite. Well, you’ll see firearms mentioned, but you’ll never see me talk about firearm skill. You’ll see me talk about avoiding conflict more than anything else, because that’s where survival is. The more fights I get into, the less likely I am to win. And if I can just avoid that conflict and have my own gear and be a lot quieter and a lot stealthier, I’m in a better position than a guy who goes from fight to fight.

Wade: You’ll be in a better spot than 99% of the people if you just have a bug out bag, right? You have absolutely a bug up bag in your house. So get home bag in your car and you just have the ability just if something happens. Comms. Right. Like that radio that I was shocked at how that little radio, the distance you can get out of that thing.

Joe: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of them. Well, a couple I’ve got a ton of them. But yeah, this little dude right here, I can hit a repeater 35 miles away, which then extends my radio range another 35 miles the other way. So if you’ve got the right tools and the right things, you can get a lot of range. And on average radio, the radio guys are getting anywhere from 5 to 10 miles with these. Not a bad thing to have at all. No.

Wade: And most people’s kids don’t go to school farther away than 5 to 10 miles. And that’s the thing is, I think what’s so powerful about just doing the basics and again, a lot of people might be rolling their eyes out there and saying, oh yeah, I already know this, I already know this. I’m like, okay, great, if you already know within practice. But there are some of us, like me that don’t know this, this type of stuff. And the leap of safety for your family is incredible that you take just going to the basics. It’s your family is ten times safer just going to that base basic level. And there’s points of diminishing returns for firearms, for example, like how many hours of firearms training do you need to do if you’re going to get incrementally better right over time at some point, but comms and medical food shelves or all that stuff you’re planning in terms of where you’re going to go, your family plan, easy to do ten times safer.

Joe: And listen, guys, if you’re looking for a way to really impress your wife or girlfriend or whatever over Christmas, build her. A get home bag with a radio and give it to her. My wife at the beginning smirked, but now if I take her bag out of her car to restock it, she’s like, where did you put my bag? I need that in the car. And it’s become a thing where she knows that I care enough that I want her to get home. So it really is an important thing and it’s a life changing thing if you start with that one small thing of always having a bag in your car that ensures that you’re able to get home to the rest of your family and they’re able to get home to you, you’re ahead of 85% of the population. And I really think that’s where you can start. We said my book contains literally a checklist on what you need to throw in that bag, and it’s not that much stuff. I think that’s a great starting point.

Wade: This episode is brought to you by TacticalPay.com. Every few years, it seems large banks and national credit card processors suddenly decide that they no longer want to process payments for firearms and firearms related businesses, and so they drop these businesses with almost no notice, freezing tens of thousands of dollars in payments for months on end. If you want to ensure your partner with a payments provider that is dedicated to supporting the firearms industry, or you just want to find out if you could be paying less for your ACH, debit and credit card processing, visit TacticalPay.com. Again, that’s TacticalPay.com. Well. And I think also too is it starts the mindset, because the only advantage that you’re going to have is in the very beginning of seeing before everybody else sees it, of what’s if something’s going down, if you got to get out of town, there’s two situations where it’s just like, everything goes mad Max and everybody knows it’s mad Max. But like your specific little area of the country has something happen. And normalcy bias will keep most people in their homes and keep them where they’re at for whatever period of time that’s going to do. And if you’re like, oh no, we’re getting out of here, right? That could be the difference for your between life and death, for your family. But you won’t do that if you don’t have the proper mindset.

Joe: Well, listen, I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what they ran into in Maui. People waited and waited, and then we’re told they couldn’t go anywhere. And they couldn’t because the fire blocked their way. So I’ve said this from day one, probably one of the first blog posts of mine I put on there. Listen, you can always leave too early. If you leave too early, you just come back. The opposite is not true. If you leave too late, you might never get out. So that’s one of the most important things, is deciding when to actually move and get going. On a related note, yesterday we went up to like a little touristy trap area north of town here and a couple hours to the north. And when we were leaving, I tossed her the spare set of keys to my car and she looked at it and I’m like, listen, do you think it’s a good idea if we’re in a big public place like that? We each have a key to the car just in case we get separated. Whoever gets back to the car first can get there and turn on the radio and get a hold of the other one. And her eyes just lit up. She’s like, you know, I never thought of that. But that’s actually true. Small little things that you don’t think about every day. But if you increase your mindset, you will. And it vastly improves your survivability.

Wade: Well, simple things is just take 10s before you get out of your car. Yeah, just look around. Just like, what do I see? 10s. Okay. 10s before you get back in your car. Right. And I think that mindset starts to raise your brain to, okay, something’s not right. And you can start to trust that gut. Right. But if you’re coming from completely like the world is going into hell in a handbasket and you’re still living in 2015, it’s going to be really hard on those people, I think. And again, I hope nothing happens. Like I have a little bit more of a positive, optimistic view where I think things are going to get bumpy, but I think they’re going to hold now, but I don’t think they’re necessarily going to hold forever. And so that’s why it’s important that I have these skills and my children have these skills, because if it’s not in my lifetime, maybe it’s my kids lifetime or my kids lifetime. And so I have a duty to protect my family generationally as well. And so that’s so either way, you’re covered, right. And so if it happens, you’re ready. If it happens to your great grandkids, they’re ready because of you. And that’s the way that I look at it.

Joe: I’m going to poke you just a little bit here and say that comes from, again, normalcy bias, that you’re dealing with rational actors. That’s the assumption you’re making. If everyone was rational, we would be able to make it through with a couple of bumps. The problem is, is that if you look at the media, they’re playing to the least rational among us. That’s why they shout every day that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, because they want someone to take an irrational action against him, which will cause people on the other side to take irrational action back. And you and I, being rational actors, can’t survive all the irrational actors around us. I say the same thing when people talk to me about war with China. Oh, it’s irrational because we’re China’s biggest trading partner and all this, that and the other thing. Well, one, we’re no longer China’s biggest trading partner. South America is, but two, you’re assuming this from a Western logical thought process. Asians don’t think that way. The saving face of needing to take Taiwan is a big piece of Asian culture, more so than it is for us in our logic. So in other words, to me, doing the illogical thing makes more sense culturally than doing the logical thing and just getting along with everyone else. So we have to play instead of to other logical actors like we want to. We have to play to the least logical among us. And on that note, we just have to be ready for the crazy people to act. I don’t have the confidence that crazy people can save us. One crazy person is all it takes to to end the world. Really. One Kim Jong UN button push and we’re all in a bad spot. I’m not trying to be doom and gloom. I’m just saying we have to have our eyes fully open on some of these things. And I think that’s an important one.

Wade: The one thing I remember from college, basically, is the in political science was the concept of the spiral of violence, right? Where it just where something very small can then be an escalation and then things spiral out of control. And just because things haven’t spiraled out of control since the 1940s or 1950s on a global scale where it’s like millions and millions of people were dying, doesn’t mean that it’s going to stay not spiral out of control. Again, that’s issue number one. And then issue number two is if you look at China, for example, you don’t even have to get into the cultural issues, which I agree with you. The country thinks completely differently than other countries in the world. Right. But you can look at other vectors like they’re they’re, you know, people complain about our national debt. No one ever talks about what China’s national debt is right now in relation to its GDP and who holds it and what’s happening with to their middle class. And so China very easily could be the ones that default and go need a war. And they’re like, we’re we’re going to Taiwan, right. Like. It could be those things as well. And there are so many vectors right now. You look at the just what’s happening right now in the Red sea, where we’re going to have to start sending boats around the Horn of Africa 40% longer to get across there. Like that’s a lot more money. So we have a very fragile world economic system.

Joe: Yeah. And it’s that’s going to get worse. I mentioned that earlier today that you’re about to get a free preview of what war with China would look like, because you’re about to see shortages and price increases due to this longer voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. It’s also the Cape of High prices. So once those ships start going around there, it’s going to get up there. The other thing that I wanted to mention, and I’m going to go all the way back to 911 to do this, but I’m going to start with ten seven. You and I would like everyone in the world to be to be rational actors and not start that spiral of violence. But. Ten seven the attack by Hamas on Israel was a grossly irrational action. They knew that it would generate the response that it did and would only be bad for them. But they did it anyway because it scored them the points they needed with their people. It’s not a rational action, but it’s what they did. So where I’m going with that is we’re a different country than we were. On 911, 2001, the morning of 912, the country came together. People met in churches, people met in public squares, people went to speeches and stood together holding hands over this tragedy that had happened. Do you think that would happen today if we had a 911 level attack in America?

Wade: I don’t. I’d like to think it would. But like I tell my wife all the time in terms of the decisions that we make for our kids, as we don’t live in the same country that we grew up in. And that is a very hard like the schools are different than I went. So I’m an older father. I’m 51, right? And so my kids are five and seven. And so like I have to make decisions based on their school where I’m going to send them to school, what we’re going to do, what everything for them completely different and that they live in a basically in an alien planet compared to what I grew up in when I graduated from high school in 1991. Right. So so no, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s a sure thing. I would like to think that it is. I think pockets of the country would, I think certain.

Joe: I think you’re right. I think that the center and most of the pockets would, but there would be a certain element that would say, well, we deserved this, or well, it was your side that caused this, not my side. And that would put certain elements of our society at risk. And like I said, that puts you and I as logical, rational guys at the whims of the least rational people in the country. And I think that’s where we have to look at things in any sort of preparedness context. Stop looking at it from a logical and rational perspective, and start thinking about what the least rational among us will do. We proved in Moore County, North Carolina, what one irrational person with five rounds of 7.62 by 39 ammo could do, and that was take down the power in a very large geographic area for an extended period of time. Imagine if there was an irrational nation, Iran perhaps, who decided to send 15 guys here to do that in 15 different parts of the country. What I know from my study is that if we had 15 simultaneous blackouts across the country, it would cause a cascading failure that would bring the rest of the country’s power down as well. We had this happen in 2003, if you remember, August of 2003. So if someone did that from an intentional act, I don’t think we would be able to recover from that. And we’re so heavily reliant upon the free flow of electrons that the risk gets greater every single day. We add one more thing to this digital world. It becomes impossible to survive if someone just throws the switch. And that’s the least common denominator I try to work from, is. All it takes is one guy to throw that switch, and we’re all partying like it’s 1885 again, and I don’t know how that’s going to go.

Wade: Everyone likes to start talking about, oh, I is going to be so awesome. And they’re talking about ChatGPT and how everyone’s playing with it, and I think it’s all awesome. But there’s a whole three generations now that can’t even use a map because the AI and Google Maps, for example, you know, the magical phone. No one remembers anyone’s phone number. If your phone went out, like how many people would be in the internet went out, how many people would be able to get Ahold of anybody?

Joe: Absolutely.

Wade: I’ve used a Thomas guide to get around Los Angeles in my life. Right. So that is like the most complicated map ever. I will put myself head to head against, like the highest Delta Force human being for maps because of my autonomous guide skills. Right? Yeah. Uh, I think it’s like grid. Fine. Like you could do that thing, but there’s a whole generation of people that, like, a couple generations of them now that have zero clue how to. They can’t even figure out what direction North is. It’s that bad. Yeah.

Joe: My stepdaughter knows two ways to get everywhere, and they’re all on the highway, which. And that’s because that’s the way that Google sends you. You have to remember to Google is a sales product. Its goal is to drive you past every place where you might spend money, because they make money for that. And when I decide how I’m going somewhere, I look at an actual paper map and make my own route because it’s. Takes you past as much retail and as much other opportunities as it can, but we’ve become so reliant on it, we think that’s the source of truth. Well, this is the fastest way. Well, I can shave 2 or 3 hours off of a long trip by knowing it myself, rather than following what some eye thing does, that it doesn’t create the algorithm for the map to benefit me. It creates it to benefit its masters. Who are the people paying for it? Well, yeah.

Wade: And also. But now the magical box is pretty good for traffic jams, so you have to give me the magic for that. The magical box is good for traffic jams, but if you wanted to go really old school, we could do CB radio like smoking the bandit.

Joe: I know somebody who recommends it all the time and he wears wearing a white shirt right now. So I’m actually a big proponent of CB radio because first of all, physics is a thing. It never stopped working. Despite what people will tell you, there’s almost no one on it now, but what is on it is solid traffic information from truckers. I mean, you’re not wrong there. It’s a good way.

Wade: Well, that’s again, me being older as I grew up and grew up in North Dakota and my dad had a CB radio, he just had one. I just thought it was cool. And so it was one of those things where, and I don’t know if he did it for preparedness or he just thought it was cool, but people don’t even know CB a thing.

Joe: I’ll tell you that back in that generation, like my grandparents, we’ll start back with my grandparents. They were preppers. They just didn’t know it. They never called it preparedness, but they lived through the Great Depression and they decided never again. So they always canned food. They always had CB radios from when they first came out, and they always had firearms, and they always had a level of independence that we don’t now, the average city dweller in America is not an independent creature, doesn’t have more than 24 hours with the food in their house. Ask me how I know we don’t have more than 24 hours of food in our house regularly anyway, other than dehydrated survival food, but the food we eat every day, we just go to the store because. Or go to the restaurant because it’s easier. And then our parents, they may have started the survivalist movement, but even that was just the crazies who had all the guns, who buried him in the woods. Everyone else had CB radio, and they still canned their own food, and we lost something in between those generations. Here’s the thing CB radio. I just wish people would pay more attention to it. You don’t need a license. It works farther than even these bafang radios do, and they’re readily available. They’re the most readily available radios in America. You can walk into any truck stop and walk out with the top of the line CB radio for a couple hundred bucks, or a handheld for less than 100, and being in good business.

Wade: And also too, you get access to on the ground Intel because truckers are going to be talking. If everything goes south, they’re going to be talking to each other and be like, what is going on? Right? Because before I forget, I want to show you this because I’m going to show off here. So this is the gnarliest looking carrots you’ve ever seen, right. Wait. And I keep this on my desk because. So these are the grossest carrots ever. They’re like the they’re all they’re small and they’re. This was one of my first seasons when I was got back into growing my own food. I can them and these could be eaten if you absolutely had to. But it always reminds me, and I think this is an important lesson that you’re talking about, is that I couldn’t get to where I am now with my food and my ability to canned stuff. If I wouldn’t have been, like, willing to suck. This is not sexy. You don’t show this to your friends, even though I’m showing it to everyone now in this podcast. Right? But you don’t show this to be like, hey, look, my survival food, right? You don’t do that because it just looks horrible. No one’s gonna eat that. But you have to go through that phase to be able to get good at anything.

Joe: Absolutely. And I’ll tell you what, I grew up in an environment where we had a cabin up north and with a giant garden on it, and we just canned every year as a matter of course. So to me it was natural. But to see people first starting to learn it in the late 2015, 2016 time frame, when folks were really starting to worry, it was weird. And of course the government then labeled it as extremism, of course.

Wade: Well, I remember my grandmother, they would can and everything, and they had a cellar in the farmhouse. Right. So they where they would keep potatoes over the winter and all that. And so if you have that by osmosis, you can actually pick it up pretty quickly. Right. So I keep this on my desk to this jar of gross, disgusting looking alien carrots to remind myself. It’s like, hey, look, you’re gonna always suck something, but you got it in you. We’ve been fooled to think that we don’t have these things inside us, because all of our ancestors, every single person that ever lived, as a result of our lineage, had the courage to survive and had to figure out how to survive. None of them were spoiled like us. Like they all had to figure this out so you can figure it out. Meaning you Joe me way the proverbial you and listen.

Joe: The modern food that you see in the grocery store right now, that’s a new thing. We’ve survived for tens of thousands of years without frozen food and without refrigeration and without canned goods. So while they were canned, just in a different way than what you buy in the grocery store, I guess is what I’m trying to say, and that knowledge is just lost. We can regain it fairly easily, but most people have chosen the path of convenience because it’s just easier. And I could canned my own food, but that’s a lot of work. I’ll just go to the grocery store and get it. Yeah, right up until you can’t anymore. Then what? Well, and.

Wade: The problem too is like, yes, these things are easy to learn, but they’re easy to learn when everything else in your life is easy.

Joe: That’s true. Yeah.

Wade: When things go south, you’re not going to be able to learn this stuff.

Joe: All exactly right. And it’s like the folks who want to be against hunting, but they do buy chicken and cows and they say, well, hunting is inhumane, which is more inhumane taking animals and forcing them to live in a pen only to be killed later or giving the animal a fair chance out in the wild. One is natural, one is not.

Wade: You don’t have to try to convince me I have a freezer with a cow share right there, right of a. Basically I found a cows that are like a 1950s cow. Like I want to get a cow that you would know no difference between this cow and a cow in the 1950s, right? Like how it grazes what they put in it, which is nothing once people start to its rabbit hole. Right. But it’s a good rabbit hole, right? It’s the being prepared. The issues with you’re figuring out how you want to feed your family and feed yourself. It’s like, yeah, it sucks that I can’t just go to the store and just buy whatever I want for my kids. But at the same time, too, it’s like, it sucks going to the store and just buying everything that you want for your kids, you know what I mean? Like, it’s right right now, in my opinion. And I’ll never judge. I’ll never judge anybody else. But I’m just saying, for me personally, it’s like the food thing was a big was very revelatory for me.

Joe: Well, and you know exactly what’s put in that animal and what isn’t, that’s one of my main concerns right now is food security. And what are they doing to some of the mass produced food that everyone is buying? They said, well, we can’t get people to get the vaccine. So what we’ll do is we’ll just put it in the meat. And if you get ethically sourced meat where you know the farmer that he says, hey, this is what I do and what I don’t do, that’s a way better position to be in and I’ll gladly pay more for that. So we found a bunch of people in the Montana area who are doing it that way. And so they’re on the call list, right? I’m going to go to that guy. That’s where I’ll buy a cow from. That’s where I’ll buy a pig from. All my pig products come from my friend Mike, because I’ve seen his pigs from when he raised them to when they slaughtered them. In fact, he wants me to come help him slaughter some tomorrow, I think. But you got to know how the whole food process works and how to do it, because there won’t always be others to do it for you.

Wade: And also you get. The added benefit is if you know your local farmer, if you’re getting into a situation where it’s like rule of law or whatever, it’s like he’s going to deal with you because he knows you already.

Joe: Exactly right. And I write about this all the time. Have those established relationships, because when things go south, that farmer might not want to take on new customers, but he’ll deal with you because he knows you and he trusts you, and you’re a known quantity. And all these guys who think, well, I’m going to go up north and get into one of these little communities. If they don’t know you, you’re not getting anything in that community. You need to be established up there already, the community where our cabin is, I’ve been going there since I was a child, so I’m a known quantity there. Everyone knows me, knows what I do. But if I had been away from there for 20 years and then everything collapsed and I tried to show up there like, hey, remember me? They’re like, yeah, don’t remember you at all. You have to be known in these circles, in these communities. For example, down in Kentucky, my friend has a property there. He’s also a security contractor. And what he’s already done is he talked with the preparedness minded farmers around him and said, hey, listen, things go in a really bad way. You’re going to need to safely get that food to the market. And in exchange for food, I’ll get you to market safely. You know what? Make those agreements and those plans right now, it’s not a bad thing to do.

Wade: Well, and along those lines, too, is think outside the box and guns, because a lot of people will know how to shoot a gun if something goes south. But not a lot of people know how to do coms and medical. And getting EMT training is really easy to do, inexpensive, and in a long run. So you can be literally life saving for you for your ability to barter those services. And again, people are like, oh, it’s not going to get that bad. Yeah, but it might be good to have EMT training if someone in your family gets hurt, but it.

Joe: Might be that bad for six months and you need to survive that six months. Yeah. So that’s the entire route. I went with my fifth book, the first aid book I went with 1800s and early 1900s level medicine because everyone right now, like I’m reading the National Outdoor Leadership Society, they’re an outdoor leadership school. I’m reading their wilderness medicine book, and every single one of it was packaged the patient for evacuation. Well, what if you and I don’t have that option? What if there’s no ambulance coming? There’s no rescue team to come and take us out of the back woods. I have to have skills not only to set that bone in a splint, but to deal with that broken bone until it heals. And again, people survived millennia with broken bones without modern medicine. So my book takes us back to that level. Hey, this is what they used to do. I’m not saying it’s current medical advice, but I’m saying if you don’t have a modern emergency room nearby, this might be the way to go and it might work. And I think that’s the more knowledge people really need is the old ways of treating injuries.

Wade: Like I said, as I don’t disagree with you at all. And I look at it as like you said with the and this might be a kind of a good way for us to end. And then I want to make sure that people know how to find you is that if you leave too early, you can always come back. If you learn these skills and never have to use them, you can always teach them to your kids or to your neighbor.

Joe: Exactly right. I’ll tell you what first aid skills are the one preparedness skill you could use today. I can’t tell you the number of motor vehicle accidents we’ve come across, my wife and I that I’ve been able to get out and help somebody at just because I know something. And you can too. It’s that simple. We see all these active shooters and people are running down. On there and no one has anything to treat a wound. Learn how to use a first aid kit and carry it. Absolutely.

Wade: And I think that you become calmer as a person and less anxious about the news and what’s happening. The more prepared that you are in all these areas and medical and comms and gun, you know, firearms or whatever. And again, and that’s why I think I can’t recommend your books highly enough for a person who doesn’t come from any background at all, other than hunting and some firearms training. They really did make my family safer. So how do people find you? How do people find your books if people want to contact you, what’s the best place to how to do that? All right.

Joe: So you can find me on Twitter. You find like the biggest dumpster fire. I’m probably at the top of it now on Twitter. I’m @dolioJ and my website is Tactical-wisdom.com. You can find me every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on the Council on Future Conflict on YouTube. It runs from 8 a.m. to about 10 a.m., where we talk about things that are going on in the world. And this year, though, I’m on a big push to change things from study into action, and we’ll be doing training classes all over the place. Nc Scout and I have forged a partnership where we help promote each other’s classes. He’s got a radio class coming up next month down in North Carolina, but beginning in April of this year, I’m going to be teaching each of my books as a class. So there’ll be a Fieldcraft class. There’ll be a scouting and patrolling class. We’re actually going to break up into several other segments and call it something else that I can’t reveal yet, because there’s some business deals we’re working on, but I’ll have a defensive operations class. We’re going to break all of these down into weekend long classes, and we have a new training center in Montana. It will be in the Big Fork, Montana area, and we’re going to have our first classes there in April, and I’m going to be running a Fieldcraft class there as my first one, where you can come learn about how to navigate with a map and compass that we talked about that most people don’t know how to do, or don’t know how to do enough to find out where they are on the planet with just a compass, a map, and a couple of landmarks. So we’re going to teach that kind of stuff, teach you how to build a couple tarp shelters, teach you how to move around in a potentially hostile environment. So it’d be a good time. Watch my website for schedule dates and things like that. And that’s where you can find me.

Wade: Well, Joe, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. I could literally talk to you for another three hours, but I want to be respectful of your time and I would love to have you come on again.

Joe: Absolutely. Anytime. All right.

Wade: Joe, thank you so much. And I’ll make sure that we have all of your contact information in the show notes. Okay.

Joe: Well, man. Thank you.

Wade: You’ve been listening to the Tactical Business Show by TacticalPay.com. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the firearms industry.