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So a little bit of psychology before we jump into this, we all have constraints and what we're willing to do, what we're willing to feel, what we're willing to think about. And what happens when you start talking about something that exceeds those limits is that your brain will flip over and it'll basically , it'll shut down and it's a, it's a protection mechanism. This is, this is deep psychology. It's, it's not something that's easily mitigated and uh, maybe we should talk a little bit about problem solution space too. It just so happens that if a problem has a solution and your constraints preclude you from considering that solution, that problem remains unsolvable to you. I'll give you a very practical example of this. Let's say that that you're overweight, you know, you're overweight, you don't like being overweight. You'd really like to change that. Ok. Great. Well, there's a solution to that problem . It's called intermittent fasting. It's the best way to lose weight. It's the fastest and definitely the lowest amount of suffering. There are reasons for this, which maybe I'll touch on. So, suppose that your constraints are that you're not willing to fast Ok. Well, there goes our solution to the problem but no fear, there are other ways of doing it. It's just 10 times harder and worse, 10 times more suffering. It takes 10 times longer. Well, what, what are those methods? Well, you, you could, uh, you could calorie count, you could be extremely rigid in counting calories and do a caloric reduction over time. Well, how long is that going to take compared to fasting? Well, if you fast you're gonna burn depending on your size, uh, 2000 calories per day and that's about a pound of fat give or take. And so you can lose £1 per day. And, you know, there's, there's decimal point precision here where about 25% of the weight you lose will be muscle and so on. But basically you'll lose about £1 of fat per day that you don't eat. But there's an on ramp because your body stores glycogen sugar in your muscles and in your liver, you're gonna have about one day that you have to go through before you start burning fat to deplete those stores. So, if you wanna lose weight and you're fasting, you've got one day plus one day per pound you want to lose. So, if you wanna lose £10 you got 11 days of fasting. Totally doable. Uh, you could also break that up and do a couple of one day on ramp plus 2 to 3 days of fasting . So it's a little less intense and then you're done no big deal. Right. About 11 days worth of, of, of suffering. And by the way, you'll get used to it because it's constant. So you don't have to keep going through the overhead of adjusting to the process, mentally and physically if you're doing caloric reduction. Well, not only, uh, just how bad is it, not only do you have to, um, contend with the fact that maybe you're doing a 200 calorie per day reduction. So now it takes 10 days to burn 2000 calories. Ok. But it gets worse if you start to starve yourself, your body metab metabolism will actually reduce. And so that 200 calories will actually turn into something less than that effectively. And it's even worse than that because your 200 calorie reduction is probably only getting you into the stockpile that's already in your body. And so now you've taken something that takes 10 days and maybe I'm not exaggerating. Maybe. Now it's gonna take 10 years to lose the same amount of weight. And so that's obviously not tenable. So you have to go way harder than that with the caloric reduction. 200 calories is nothing that's like a handful of cereal or something without any milk or one soda. But if you , if you have to go, uh, much bigger than that, you're gonna start noticing. And now all of a sudden you're like well, instead of a whole plate of food, I get to eat this thimble of, of food. And so it gets a lot harder and no surprise people that do caloric reduction, it's really hard to lose weight and exercise is even worse than that because you just don't burn very many calories even during intense exercise. So, the best way to lose weight with exercise is lifting weights because you get an afterburn effect That's more significant than any other, you know, running cardio. Uh, it's, it's much bigger than, than what you would have with cardio. All right. So what's the point of all this, the point is that the constraints we place on problems matter and when we have constraints, we can easily end up with a much more difficult solution or no solution at all. And that's obviously a problem. So it's very important to train your mind to not, I shouldn't say not, but to soften these barriers that you have these, these constraints you're unwilling to consider. Ok, maybe that should have been a separate video on constraints. So why do I bring this up? Because I'm about to tell you about the grid going down and whenever we get into these topics that just seems so far from your normal life as you, as it's laid out to you and you realize how far it is from your normal life, you shut down, you just say, well, I can't deal with this. You might not even keep listening to it, but even if you listen to it, you in your mind, you're just like, well, what am I gonna do? I'm overwhelmed. Let me tell you something. Being overwhelmed does not jive with being a Christian. Jesus said, he overcame all things while you are overcome by anything. You are not a disciple of Christ. You need to understand that . And I'm not saying this to castigate you. I'm saying this to show you that you have a lack that you need to go to God to fill. And that, that's part of what He offers you. And if you don't have it, you're off base, you're not plugged in the way that you could be. That's what he offers you is peace from that. And many other things he says right in revelation that those who love him, follow him everywhere he goes like a lamb that he will make them overcome too. So that's I guess good news but also bad news because you don't have that. So you need to stop getting overwhelmed by things and he'll help you with that. There's a process, but you can't get to where he wants you to be if you have constraints because His ways are much different than our ways, much better and you don't expect them. They're outside of what you would normally consider, they're outside of what you would consider to be good if you were doing your own calculations. On that and uh they will absolutely overwhelm you. Every, every story we have in the scriptures are uh sorry is an example. Any interaction with the Lord in the scriptures is an example of just how overwhelming it is for the natural man to interact with God. And so the Gospel gives us a mechanism to contend with that. And it's a process, but it's a process that, that expands your ability to cope and not just to cope but to overcome. That's very important. If you're in a place where the grid coming down, neutralizes, you, neutralizes your progress with God, then that's a problem because the grid is going to come down. Now, I've told you this for years, for years and years. I've, I've talked about this, how many years? I don't know, probably 10. So in 2016, a book came out by Ted Koppel called Lights Out and I'll put a link in the description, you can get a used copy for like $2. Now, this is a super important book and I've spoken about it often. Uh Ted Koppel is not some crazy fringe conspiracy theorist. He's a, he's a retired newscaster from the era where those people garnered trust from the public uh deserved or not. They were trusted people unlike today . But this book is extremely well researched and it's not a hard read. It's not a dense book. Basically, he goes around and talks to all of the, he he has the connections to be able to do this. He interviews very high ranking members of the government and their names are given to investigate what kind of a response the US has in store for a grid down scenario. Now, the cover talks about a cyber attack, that's only one of the several possible sources for this. And the, the book's not explicitly focused on that. So I'm not sure why they included it in the, the subtitle, but it's just on, on grid down scenarios in general. And it lays out some of the ways that could happen. Uh Again, this is not unique research by Ted Koppel. This is a lot of people know about this, but a lot fewer people know about this than should the reason I'm making this video, I saw a headline, I guess Dennis Quaid, the actor is in some documentary about good down and it's coming out soon or something. But I've seen him giving interviews about this, I guess he got interviewed by Tucker Carlson recently. And so it's coming to the forefront of a lot of people's awareness, a lot more people. But it's shocking to see the response from folks because they just immediately dismiss this out of hand precisely because of the psychological triggers that I talked about. OK. So let's go over this. How could this happen? Well, one way it could happen is without any, any involvement from human beings, the sun periodically emits energy blasts and these blasts because of the statistics of, of where the earth is compared to the surface of the sun. You know, it's obviously it's orbiting. And so there's a probabilistic equation and it's rare for one of these blasts to emit from the sun and hit the earth. But they happen all the time, the sun's constantly releasing these blasts and they're of varying energy, but they hit the earth with actual actual, um with some significant regularity, it's just that the energy levels of the blast that hit the earth tend to be low. Why? Because it's patto distributed just like earthquakes are. So what does that mean? Most earthquakes you don't hear about and you wouldn't even feel because there's such low intensity, all the ones you hear about are the really high intensity ones and those are rare. It's just like that. And so now you've got the probability of the solar emission aligning with the earth. So it happens on the right place in the sun where the earth is in the right place in its orbit that it, it hits and then the other probability of it being a significant energy level. And you say, well, ok, so that could happen and, and, and, and some kind of asteroid could hit the earth too, but that's also a rare event. It, it's the same deal. Most are really small and you wouldn't even hear about them because they just burn up. But that's the catastrophic ones that we're worried about. Yes. Ok. But when we talk about catastrophic collisions with asteroids, that's something that's like, oh, people say that was back, you know, millions of years ago that happened once or we have these records of something happening. But it's, it's really hard for us to wrap our heads around just how low of a probability that is. We'll leave that discussion for another day. But the question is, is the sun that sort of rare event? No, it's not. So it's, it's a, you, you can get bogged down in the, in the details of this, but a very significant event uh happened in the 18 hundreds. It was called the Carrington event where solar blast hit the United States, that region specifically this region and it brought down telegraph lines because that was the highest electric technology back then. So, and that's, that's the danger is that the solar flares can interact with the electric systems and it would, it just, it fries, the circuitry is what it does, it overloads it. And so, um the, the what everyone will tell you is that the big problem is, is that today, we obviously have way more electric infrastructure than just telegraph lines. And so phones, electric lines, telecoms. So, so whether it's, it's landline phones or the cell phone system, all the satellites. So your internet, your GPS, it, it gets to be pretty big pretty quickly. Ok. But that's not the only factor, the energy level of the solar event. The other factor is the strength of the earth's magnetic field. And this is something that also varies over time. It's, it's the soul. The sun has cycles, the earth has cycles and the earth is in a state where the the magnetic field is historically very weak. And so that field serves as a buffer and it mitigates the effect of a solar flare. And so what happens is as the earth's magnetic field weakens the impact of a solar event increases. And so you have the energy that's coming from the sun is one factor and then the mitigating energy of the earth's magnetic field is another. And when the earth's magnetic field is low, you need a less significant solar event, which are more common to create the same level of damage. That's what happens. So, probabilistically, what are we looking at? It depends on who you ask, but it is a at best one in 200 year situation, but it could basically happen any day. So that's fun to worry about. But you say, ok, well, maybe this is a could happen anytime event, but it's one thing, right? And so math aside, statistics aside, if something could happen, I mean, you could drop dead from a heart attack in the next five minutes. You never know. Right. But that's very unlikely to happen. It's very unlikely that you'll see. Well, depending on uh on your recent medical choices, but it's very unlikely you're going to see me dropped dead of a heart attack before I stop recording this video. Because it's just one thing and, you know, all things considered is probably just not very likely to happen and you might go, that's another defense mechanism. Psychologically, we will dismiss something, even though the statistics say it's something that should be thought about. In this case , the, the consequence of this happening is enormous. I'll get to that in a second. And so that is going to multiply by the likelihood to generate the expected cost of this situation. So it's something worth worrying about for sure. E especially because there are actually things you can do to mitigate the cost in your own life. We'll get to that too. But the thing is is that a solar event is not the only source of this. So uh let's talk about why a solar event would cause of significant energy would cause the grid to come down. So if a solar event occurred and the United States was facing the sun when that wave hit the earth and the energy levels were significant enough. What would happen is I I mentioned satellites, I mentioned uh I didn't mention uh smaller electronics, computers, every computer, uh depending on the energy level and where that computer is, all vehicles would be disabled because all modern vehicles have controlling electronics in them. So it won't even start. Uh Even some small engines have electronics in them that would prevent that from happening. But one of the biggest problems is the grid itself. So the electric grid it has, I think three regions in the United States, Texas has its own thing. There's an eastern grid, there's a western grid. There might be one more, but that's the grid in the United States. And the way this works is that it has to keep going in order to keep going. It's not, it's not a situation where you could switch it off and switch it on. It takes an enormous initial input to get the thing running. Now, we've built it up little by little. But if it all came down, you wouldn't just be able to flip it back on. One of the problems with flipping it back on is that if an electromagnetic surge occurred, it's not just that wires would break and fires would start, although that would happen. And as we've seen in the last few summers, there are many places of the United States where trees have been allowed to, to grow where there are power lines and some of these areas have tons of fuel sitting around dry wood that's dead, that's been sitting on the ground and massive forest fires would occur bigger than what we've seen in recent years for sure. But that's, that's not the problem. So you could deploy people to put the wires back on and maybe it takes a little while but it would get back up and running. The problem is the transformers. So the transformers are, you have uh equipment that is on the towers and a lot of those would blow and that would be enough of a, you know, you don't, we don't have millions of these things sitting around those local pieces of equipment that hang on the towers. But that's not even the problem. The problem is the bigger transformers. So even if we could replace all the little ones, the problem with the big ones is they're really old, they're really old and they're very specific, they're not interchangeable pieces and they're absolutely essential. And so if those go up the lead time to replace them is accounted in years , not months, not weeks, not days. And it even gets harder than that. And Koppel goes into this in his book, the facilities that built those no longer exist, the roads that were required to cart these things in because they're huge in some cases don't exist. In some cases, they built special railroads to bring these things in and they don't exist and they haven't existed in a long time. And then you get into where they would be manufactured because the factories that built them don't exist any more, you would have to order them from China and that has some interesting implications. So it's a huge problem and now in the, in the years, it would take to replace these things. There's no power. So now let's get into that. Well, let's hold off on that. Yeah, because that's really gonna discourage you. So, a solar event is not the only thing that could trigger all of this. Those transformers are s are susceptible to other threats and among those threats are cyber attacks and we'll call them in person attacks. So, the cyber attack is an interesting one because you'd think, and that's the whole thing about this story. And this is what's obviously sh was shocking to Ted Koppel. When he wrote the book , you'd think that the government would be concerned about this and doing something about it and instituting measures to mitigate all these risks. Well, they're not at all. There's nothing when you get down to the cyber attack risk. We say, well, we have people for that. Surely we have people for that and we're doing things to try to prevent that their systems. If you have a, a company, you do things to mitigate the risk of cyber attack. Like if you have something that's absolutely essential, you'll put it on an air gap network, it's not connected to the outside world. So people can't get in and hack it. For example, you say, well, surely the electric grid is nope, no, a couple makes a case that there are entities that already have planted viruses in the, the software that runs the grid. Whether that's, you know, how regional that is, is a different story. But he makes the case that it's already there and it's just sort of waiting for someone to flip the switch. Now, that's apart from a new intervention that could happen at some point in the future. And he makes the, the case that it's very easy for these transformers to be brought down electronically. You basically, you just overload the switching and then the thing burns up and we already heard about how hard it is to replace these things. Well, what about redundancy? So if a solar event happened to take out tons of transformers and obviously be grid down. But if these things were being attacked, how many would have to go down in order for the whole grid to come down something like 10? And I don't remember not any 10, of course, but there are multiple sets of 10 that would do it. And I can't remember how many total there are in the United States, but it's a lot. And so it's a case of a very open target cyber attack is not the only way to bring these down. And this is this is crazy, but it's true. There have been at least two instances where transformers were shot at just by people with rifles and in both cases, it was a precision event and people that would know have said that there was evidence of this being an extremely planned out test run. So So, if you're in the military, you have plans for everything and they've, someone has, has looked into the best way of doing things. You don't want soldiers figuring it out for themselves on anything. If you've been in the military, you know why, uh, you want to hand them something and just say , look, this has been worked out, we're gonna rehearse it. You're, you're just gonna keep doing this till you don't have to think. And you know exactly what to do in every situation. It's not a mystery. There's no hesitation. And so there's evidence that at least twice some entity has deployed a team of something like special forces troops to do this. And so that the, it's knowledge that this can be done. It's common knowledge, you don't even have to dig on the internet and that people have done it in the past. In the one case, they even knew what the reaction time of the local police would be and they were out of there before the cops got there. I mean, in both cases, they got away with it. So, and there may have been more than two that I'm just aware of two. So, um this book was written before, something like 20 million illegal aliens streamed across the border, many of whom are from adversarial countries and our military age. So, what is the probability of the grid coming down? I'm not 100% certain about anything but I am as certain that this is going to happen as I am about anything. This gets the Rob Smith full certainty, stamp of approval, as full as I go. So what will happen if this happens ? Well, nothing I've told you so far is what I think about it except how confident I am that it's going to happen. But that's an opinion shared with very many people. Uh many of whom are well known and, or have tons of responsibility or did not, that that's necessarily an indication that it's right. You could have consensus on something that's totally wrong. Someone in authority can be completely wrong about something. But multiple people including directors of Homeland Security have said, uh multis star generals et cetera have said this is absolutely the greatest threat to the United States and yet you may never have heard of it before. So that's interesting, isn't it? So what's going to happen if this happens? That's also not, it's not needful to speculate the Department of Defense commissioned a report years ago that um that ask this question, what would the survivability of a grid down event be? And there's a timeline, but you could walk through it and imagine it takes about three days for people to understand that the power is not coming back immediately and it takes about three days for the water to run out and the sewage to back up and that's in places where that's uh that's run by local . Oh, what's the word I'm looking for here, municipalities. So, if you're on a well and you don't have power, you don't have water right away. If you're in a city there's gonna be some residual pressure and it's gonna drop off over time. So that's, that's when you fill your bathtub. Um, but the toilets stop flushing the sewage backs up. There's no more water when the water runs out is when people leave their homes. Some people go bananas before that and they'll start looting or rioting faster than three days, but three days is kind of the magic number. What happens after that? Widespread violence happens ? Remember the cars aren't running. So if you've never heard of any of this and your cell phone's not working, your car is not running, your toilet's not flushing and the water is not coming out of the sink. What are you doing? You're freaking out and this is where those who haven't listened are going to start believing just how evil humans are and how much modern prosperity masks. All that. We think that it's morality, it's not morality. It's plenty when you take the plenty away, you see what someone really is and they're evil. Unless they're exceptional people, they're evil and exceptional people are rare by definition. So people start marauding and doing really bad things and like I said, there's gonna be fires and everything in the background and those things will get worse. But you add violence into the situation. Well, if that weren't bad enough, remember all of the sudden there are no prescription drugs. It was, it, was, it, like, 40% of people are on mind altering prescription drugs. And then you've got all the people who are on life saving prescription drugs. So the life saving people die. So anyone that requires insulin, for example, they're gonna die as soon as their insulin runs out, the refrigerators aren't working by the way. So even if you have a stockpile, you're dead. Um People who aren't mobile, if, if you're in a situation where you can't put on a backpack and start walking, you're not gonna live very long because a lot of the population, something like 90% live in places where you cannot stay. If this happens, why can't you stay? There's no water and that'll kill you within three days. There's no food and depending on how overweight you are. I I already talked about that. You get one day per pound of body fat, excess body fat that you're carrying. That's if there's plenty of water because it's a very water intensive process to burn that fat. Um So then you get diseases that start happening very soon. Things that we don't worry about because we have climate control, automated sanitation, flushing toilets. We've got clean water when you don't have clean water, which by the way, there's basically no natural source of water in the United states anymore. That doesn't have giardia in it. So, unless you have the right kind of water filter and a normal water filter won't be sufficient. Normal water filters are just sediment filters. But if you can't filter out giardia, you're gonna get diarrhea and you're gonna die. So this starts stacking up quite quickly. And the dod said that within a year, 90% of the population in the United States would be dead if the power goes out. So remember how I said the generators would take years to replace, under peaceful circumstances, under under complete command and control like we have now and the ability to build roads and whatever else. Well, guess what happens in a grid down, it doesn't come back and within a year, 90% of the people will be dead. So of all the things that you could think about as far as future scenarios go, this one's pretty important and this is one of many reasons that I have said again and again and again, you need to live in a rural area, not suburbs, not, hey, I, I have a larger yard than most people. You need to live in a rural area. A place with very low population per square mile. This is, this is one of the main reasons why. So as you think about the future, again, the psychological tendency is just to say, look, if it's over a threshold, I just can't even think about that. You have to integrate the future into the present and choose based on what's likely to happen in the future. We live in a world now . We didn't even talk about E MP S. So an E MP is a weapon that blasts out an electromagnetic pulse. That's what the acronym is. And it, it, it does the same thing as a solar event. It's usually more localized. But you think that this is some outlandish thing that, for example, when I said this years ago, people said, yeah, but what nation would launch an E MP on us because it has to come on an intercontinental ballistic missile. It's basically, it's a high altitude nuclear explosion. There are other methods of generating them nowadays though. But let's say that it's a traditional way and let's say , but we'd see that coming. We have alert systems and no country would do that because we counterattacked before it landed. Do you remember that balloon situation? Do you realize that there could have been an E MP on that balloon or any of those balloons? And did you see what the nation did as a response ? Nothing. They let the thing float right over the United States. And if it had, it had an E MP, it would have triggered everything I'm talking about. So don't think that this is some outlandish thing that would take all these very rare low probability events to occur or that we'd have some way of stopping it if someone really wanted to do it. And it's not just China that has the capability. And I mentioned there are E MP devices that don't require ICBM S or balloons. Even there are ways of doing this that would have zero detection until after it happened. If there were a country that wanted to invade the United States or just take out the United States, they would absolutely do this, they would absolutely do this. Why would you attack with the military without softening up the target when, you know, 90% of the people would die in a year if you wanted the land, this is what you would do or if you just wanted to get rid of an adversary and there are people around the world who have both of those motives. So as you think of life, whatever you have planned in the future, it probably dwarfs in comparison to, to having a plan for this. And at a minimum, that plan should be. I have a backpack and a nice water filter and a winter sleeping bag. That's kind of a rare thing. It's a weird thing to have, but that's what you need for. Very cold. If you're in the winter in most of the United States, you need a winter sleeping bag and I know where I would go and maybe you have maps to get there, like military grade maps. You can order them from the US GS, you probably have none of those things. And cost wise, you say, well, money's tight. How could I afford that? That's not a lot of money. Just orient your, your, your holiday gifts to that, your birthday and Christmas gifts for the next two years and you'll have it. There are ways of doing this that aren't excessive, or you say, like, hey, hiking boots would be good to have and wouldn't it be great if we just spent more time hiking around as a family? Like that's a low cost thing to do. Even if nothing happens, it's good to be in shape and spend time out outside as a family. Right. Obviously, moving to a rural area is a very expensive thing and it keeps getting more expensive, but the benefits of it also keep increasing, the biggest benefit is the longer you wait, the more expensive it will be and the, the reasons to do it will keep stacking up. So these are things to think about. And if you're living in a place where you wouldn't wanna be, if this happened, you should think about living in a different place.