Episode 224: The End Of The World As They Knew It

In this episode we discuss The End Of The World As They Knew It, taking a look at civilizations that collapsed over time and comparing them to our world today.

It's interesting to see how the world ended for those people in the past,  and how does that give us indications of the type of things that we should look out for.

There are a large number of different ways that can cause complete societal disruption. And despite our hubris on the point, we are still susceptible to a large selection of those. Let's take a look at them.

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Transcript

Spice: 0:00

Hello, everybody.

Salty: 0:01

Hello everybody and welcome to the show, the BIG show the most important and critically acclaimed podcast that is recorded in our vehicle and today we are in the Hemi studio. That's right. We are in an eight cylinder, power house studio with all that hemisphere goodness, all 16 spark plugs, sparking away. And welcome to the show. We've got a special episode for you today, especially in the fact that we have no idea where it's gonna go. It's sometimes we just sit around and as old married couples do just talk about whatever

Spice: 0:38

we've been reading and thinking.

Salty: 0:40

And we had will,

Spice: 0:43

I've been reading he's been thinking

Salty: 0:45

she's been reading, which makes you think I'm a huge Dan Carlin fan, if you don't know who he is he does the the best history podcast that has ever been on hardcore history. There's not even it's this is not even up for debate. And he is a he's a talent. He's not a historian, but he's a person who is interested in history. And he is a lot better historian than 95% of the historians, and certainly a lot better at communicating. But anyway, getting back to Dan, the book she's reading is the end is always near. And it's about TEOTWAWKI in its various forms throughout history, and in the world as they do it

Spice: 1:27

relatively frequent and widespread events, as it turns out, because let's face it, most of the major civilizations that have ever existed on this planet, and an even higher proportion of the little ones are gone now. Something happened to them.

Salty: 1:42

I want to I want to clarify what I mean by we don't know where this conversation we really don't we were just talking through some of the stuff that she's learned in the bucket is some of the stuff that we've we've seen elsewhere. And we're talking through other things that we know, and we're trying to, you know, kind of compare that to where we're at. And it's just interesting to see, you know, the where how the world ended for those people in the past? And how does that give us indications of the type of things that we should look out for. So, without further ado,

Spice: 2:16

one of the big takeaways I got from the book is that there are a large number of different ways that can cause complete societal disruption. And despite our hubris on the point, we are still susceptible to a large selection of those, and then

Salty: 2:35

some that are certainly possible for us that would not have applied to them, for example, of

Spice: 2:42

global thermonuclear war. What

Salty: 2:44

exactly global thermonuclear war or something a little less explosive, perhaps, because it was a lot less nuclear blasting, but electromechanical pulses, or natural electronic electronics, disruptions from sun flares and stuff like that. A big solar storm 300 years ago, nobody would care.

Spice: 3:08

They actually had a very big one early in the electronic age. The Carrington event. Yeah, the Carrington event so serious that it fried what telegraph equipment there was, it caused spontaneous transmissions along the wires, it started explosions and fires of telegraph equipment, because the wires picked up so much electrical activity from the magnetic currents that were washing over the planet from the solar storm,

Salty: 3:35

there were places where they knew something was wrong, so they knew to unhook the batteries because the batteries are expensive. And at that time, they were really expensive so that if anything was going wrong, they would unhook the batteries, and they were still able to communicate with each other over the teletype with no batteries attached because the Carrington solar flare was actually powering the system.

Spice: 3:58

The magnetic fields produced are so strong, they were inducing current along the wires enough to send perfectly comprehensible signals.

Salty: 4:06

Yeah, so if you if that sort of thing if she we actually have an article on eBay about it, but you could look it up online in many different places. Fascinating. Fascinating. You have a very, very, very early into the age of men kinds of electrical usage.

Spice: 4:22

Widespread telegraph. Yeah. So So if that same event happened right now, we would be stuffed and there would be nothing we can do to stop it. Right. Whereas

Salty: 4:31

if it happened, like say, for example, when the

Spice: 4:34

Romans 200 years before that, yeah, they noticed some really neat Aurora Borealis, and that's about size of it. It would be poor. People might be getting shocks from static electrical shocks from things more often, but that's hardly a life threatening event. So yeah, it's it's a different kind of thing. Also, the pandemic thing, as we talk about this, it's 2020. And we're in the middle of a pandemic, that is Once been very disturbing economically, and not nearly as horrible as such things can be medically,

Salty: 5:08

right now, it's bad. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I've had several personal friends who have died from the thing, having said that, having several personal friends who have died thing isn't like losing half the population to the thing. And that's not an exaggeration, that's happened many times more than half of the population,

Spice: 5:24

there have certainly been lots of civilizations where a pandemic came through and killed 90%. So right. And there is no real reason to believe we could necessarily stop all of those things now. I'm sure given time, medical treatments get better and fatality rates go down and all that, right, but you're not always given time.

Salty: 5:44

And frankly, I have been, I found it eye opening in the fact that what a large percentage of the population in a more deadly pandemic would just die because they refuse to get past their normalcy bias. Yeah, that's just plain and simple. They'd rather die than to put a mask on

Spice: 6:03

informational.

Salty: 6:04

Now I understand this particular pandemic is not as dangerous as you can if you die, it's not the pneumonic play. It's not some of these other it's not the smallpox in its original form. many generations of smallpox survivors in us right now. But it's not a smallpox on a virgin field type dangerous,

Spice: 6:27

we just lost 99 or 100% fatalities in some isolated communities when they got it, right. For the fun,

Salty: 6:32

it's not that dangerous. But if this shows why a lot of people will lie,

Spice: 6:38

how many people would you get infected with something that was a lot more fatal before they actually would start admitting that it was worth paying attention to.

Salty: 6:47

Now I'm gonna I'm gonna puff our chests a little bit here. Because we've said all along, when we since the day we started this project, that our personal belief is the number one threat that we have, and it's not even close in our world is pandemic

Spice: 7:03

know from for, for me, that might be a personal bias kind of thing. Because I'm in the field where I, I teach pathophysiology, I pay a lot of attention to pandemics and Epidemiology and, and things like that. So it might be a case of what you know, is what you know the risks of,

Salty: 7:21

but if you look back through history, that's one of the really, really top ones, okay, at some of the other stuff that you go back through history that they died from, we're probably not going to die from because we're so spread out, for example, a large percentage of the people who belong to a whole subculture of society died when Vesuvius erupted and Pompei wiped him out, it wiped out a whole subculture of that society, because they were all there. They were all there. They were all in that one place. Now, we're not all in that one place. Like for example, if, if a a supervolcano erupts in Yellowstone, for example, yeah, it's gonna play heck for North America. And yes, it will damage the the color ecology of the entire world. But there certainly would not be a tr Waukee globally from Yellowstone going up.

Spice: 8:17

Maybe the food loss of food production might do it. But that would be a couple years down the road.

Salty: 8:22

And we're very resourceful people. Yeah, people are.

Spice: 8:27

That's when people start getting really pinched, they tend to start wars with their neighbors to distract their populace from their internal lows. So that's how we

Salty: 8:35

get rid of a lot of their neighbors. Yeah.

Spice: 8:38

Hey, look at all that other land. We could have to grow stuff on. And that'd be cool. We need it. Yeah. So the risks are still there. For sure. That wall with Mexico? So the question is, how much time and effort do you spend today, investing in preparing for things that are absolutely going to happen to some humans at some time and be very bad for some humans at some time, but have a relatively low probability of happening to you in your lifetime? That's one of the key questions preppers really have to address because you cannot effectively prepare for all of these things and still leave live a decent life. It's questionable. Yeah, I'll say you cannot be prepared for some of these events.

Salty: 9:22

My thesis is this. When I'm doing perhaps, I realized there are some things there's no point in prepping for. There's no point in prepping for an asteroid hitting the earth, because there's nothing that can be done. That can extra can of soup is not going to help if an asteroid that's an Extinction Level Event hits the earth, it's just not. So there's no point in even considering that massive sunflower, that fries the half of the planet that happens to be facing the sun. You're either on it or you're not. And that's you know, there's no point in trying to prep for that.

Spice: 10:00

On The Planet

Salty: 10:00

of the planet, so not not really any point. But there's a lot of things where you can prep for not just one problem. But the single prep helps you in 15 or 20 different situations. And those are good things to concentrate on. Because there's always going to be something, there's always going to be a tornado, there's always going to be an earthquake, there's always going to be that freakish ice storm, there's always going to be the electrical grid goes down for three weeks, there's always going to be you know, something is going to happen in your lifetime. There's always going to be war and shortages from a war, there's going to be famine, there's going to be plague in every lifetime. There's something I mean, the Mongols could come Have you heard the Bongo music lately? They may come who ate you? Yeah. The who strongly recommended. Although they're more To be fair, they're being more defensive in

Spice: 10:55

Yeah, I wouldn't mess with them. Their their groove is don't mess with us sons of Ginga.

Salty: 11:02

Yeah, really, actually ours. So anyway, long story short, you know, there's perhaps a good way to look at it as we've driven into an area from no snow into snow covering the ground. Yeah. I didn't know it did that up here. I had no, neither roads are still dry. So anyway, I'm thinking maybe the way to look at it is what can we do that that helps out in all prepping situations that are reasonable to prep for?

Spice: 11:30

Yeah, because some of these are that something which requires, or at least makes these preps helpful is likely to happen in our lifetimes. Any particular one of them is a low probability event. But low probability events sum up in some up in some up and you got enough different opportunities for something to happen. ventually becomes fairly likely that something's going to happen in your future. So that changes the equation as long as you are choosing preps that have a wide utility.

Salty: 12:00

Another thing to consider is, you know, everybody's always watching the news to see what's going to happen next, and see if they can figure out what the next big thing is going to be is going to be economic collapse is going to be you know, just name it. I mean, the thing is, I don't see anybody considering and I think this is a valid consideration, has the event that will topple our society already happened. And we're just living in the death throes of the situation. This is something Dan Carlin brings up in many of his things. And it's an interesting thing to think about, certainly, because

Spice: 12:39

if you were in one of the Roman cities, maybe around 1000, Common Era, during what we call the fall of the Roman Empire, what would you have noticed? If you were somewhere out near the periphery of the Roman Empire when it started contracting, and you're living out there? How much does your life change? Does it look like the fall of the Roman Empire? Or does it just like you're having a string of bad years? Does it look like things are unsettled and may change but you'll probably be able to scrape through for the end of your foreseeable future without dramatic disruption. That is kind of where we're coming from with the has the event already happened? Now,

Salty: 13:23

there was in recent history, I mean, if I were to go back in last 120 years, when I was 100 years, when I say recent history, that's reason, there was one cataclysmic event that has happened, it's probably one that 95% or more of the population wouldn't recognize for what it is. There was a sea change event, there was a millennial event that happened from 1914 to 1980. And that was the First World War. And it I don't think people understand they want to they want to watch the news today to understand what's going on. But I don't think as as a person who's interested in history, and a person who's interested in and what the world's what's going on the world today. I don't think you can actually make any understanding of the news today, without fully understanding the First World War and the peace, quote unquote, peace made right after the First World War, that transitioned the world completely, from an older way to a newer way, and we are still living in the ripples through time of that war. And it's a big deal to

Spice: 14:46

clarify just a little bit. Before the First World War it the dominant story on the scene was a relatively small number of extremely large and powerful colonial empires. monarchies conflicting with each other traditional monarchies in many cases or constitutional monarchies, some internal conflict in them, obviously, but mostly they were playing semi eternal chess games with each other. How many times have the French and the English gone to war here or there over the preceding several 100 years,

Salty: 15:22

right? And you I'd say that the French started that started this change with the French Revolution. Actually, you might say, the strange truly started with the American Revolution, which was, excuse me shortly, followed by the French Revolution, but the turmoil that was causing event to the First World War, not the first world war zone. So what happened during the First World War is important to understand. Because all of the great powers of the world, a United States was not a great power of the world before this was part of the change all of the great

Spice: 15:57

collaborationist, I'm sorry, we were isolationists.

Salty: 16:00

Yeah, all of the great powers of the world bled themselves out, they basically committed mass murder of every one of these great empires, they just cloned

Spice: 16:16

and treasure sells

Salty: 16:17

blood and treasure.

Spice: 16:19

And then they couldn't hold their empire, they

Salty: 16:20

broke themselves,

Spice: 16:22

the parts of their empire that didn't want to be a part of the Empire could then break free afterward. And all the Empires fragmented into a bunch of individual states. And there were all kinds of ideas on who should be in charge of any particular place, and how they should do it.

Salty: 16:38

So here's what that that all gave us. That war gave us the redistribution of the Empires without the power to hold them. In Africa, it gave us the mess we have in the Middle East. And it gave us the divisions random white guy, Europeans, and I'm not being racist. Here, I'm just a white guy, Europeans, drawing lines on a map, regardless of tribal and social previous claims to the area and handing them out to their friends in who helped out during World War One. And this was in an area that all of this that was becoming much more important because of oil. And they gave the these to their friends, because they knew oil was going to be more important. So they could deal and keep the flow of oil as it became a bigger deal in within the Empire. So gotta keep that in mind. That's where the Saudi family came from. That's where the Iraqis came from. That's where the Iranians came from. That's where the Jordanians came from all of these countries were just divided up rather randomly in some cases. And a lot of cases, the British Empire, bless them had all these different people fighting for them. And they promised them the same stuff. Not surprisingly, when the war was over, these guys showed up and say, okay, deliver what we really can't because we have promised the same stuff to three different people

Spice: 18:06

to help them.

Salty: 18:07

Yeah. So I mean, in this set of all these conflicts, right, World War One gave us communism really did it would not have communism would not have happened, had it not been for the destruction, disruption of the First World War,

Spice: 18:21

communism is a major dominating political resume. There have always been pockets of communism, and have been, for the most part, harmless and limited to those who chose to partake in them. And that hasn't, but that's not drama,

Salty: 18:34

The Bolsheviks, with the Bolsheviks Along came a spider. Yeah. And they just happen to be the best at maneuvering into a power vacuum. And that gave us Lenin that gave us Stalin gave us Mao, you know, that gave us

Spice: 18:53

yeah, a whole lot of messes since then.

Salty: 18:56

And communism is so well, at least the way it used to be portrayed is so radically different have a system that cause strife for 100 years, and still causing strife, all based back to this, the death of the Empires. So, anyway, everything that we got going on in the world today, China, World War One, Russia, World War One, Israel, World War One, Jordan, World War One, Egypt, World War One I can keep going on the United States robot one because we were the bankers, the money that the British and the French, and all of the winning allies got to fight the war came from America, which is what made London lose the the title of the financial capital of the world and it became New York because of World War One. We basically became the true 1900s Empire Builder in more ways than one because they bought our stuff with the money we loaned them. We want on both sides of it. Yeah. But Turning Point

Spice: 20:04

didn't leave peace and harmony in its wake. So from a prepping point of view, Yes, you did, watching the news to see what's going on in the Middle East this week is not going to give you a very good sense for what kind of prep you're going to need or where the situation is going to go. These are long games that are playing out. And they're long games that no one political party or politician making decisions is likely to single handedly turn very far. And it's something that people ABS as a group, have done a pretty terrible job of predicting exactly where things were going to go from there. So why keep going with what hasn't worked and keep watching the news to try and figure out how you should prep. Instead, if you go back to core principles, start thinking about what sorts of things you might need and in different circumstances, and focusing on those instead of what looks most pressing today, you're probably going to end up in a better place.

Salty: 21:09

I think one thing to keep in mind on the on the newest thing is just keep in mind that they get paid. The people who do the news get paid to do whatever it takes to induce you to watch. They're not looking out for you.

Spice: 21:21

They're paid by the other option.

Salty: 21:25

That's why you have to look out for you. We have to look out for us, because they're the news people, they don't care.

Spice: 21:34

They're gonna sell you the drama of the day, you're just drama of the day sells well. Absolutely,

Salty: 21:39

you're here's a kook out there and flowerland they don't care and care at all. You got to look after you. And I think the people who survived during the fall of the Roman Empire, were probably the people who were best looking after themselves. You know, I there are very few situations that I can think of where self reliance and the ability to stay internal, in your own little area, your own little group turned out to be a bad thing. Now, I'm sure there are some self reliance in Pompei. You know,

Spice: 22:11

sometimes it doesn't help. But that doesn't make it a bad thing. No, I mean, I can't think of one it's ever been a bad thing and good relations within your local community, which we have much less of now. Because we are reaches so much greater it reduces the focus on local contacts,

Salty: 22:27

right. And then also, frankly, the the news, yeah, they're they made us apart,

Spice: 22:36

dramatic thing that's happening anywhere in the world. And they make their money, they make their money.

Salty: 22:42

That's how they do live.

Spice: 22:44

It's not like they're getting paid to separate us per se. But they're playing to the prejudices of particular subgroups, to gain popularity and following within those particular subgroups. And humans being wired as they are having multiple outlets doing that with different subgroups tends to divide, because you get your echo chamber set up, and you get your people who aren't seeing the same basic story of events that other people are seeing. And they end up being completely baffled as to how anybody could possibly believe differently than they believe. Because look at all this information and evidence that supports their beliefs. Well, the other guys aren't even seeing that they're seeing a completely different point of view. Some of it's just point of view and some of its focus, and some of it's flat out lies, but they're never gonna understand each other. And they are likely to come to conflict, because they don't have a basic common understanding of what's going on to even start with. And that will happen to you if you're not careful to avoid it. Because the commercial interests just happen to have it run that way. And they don't care their commercial interests they're doing what commercial interests do, and their power block interests doing what power block interests do. They're not looking out for the big picture. They're not looking out for you. Even if they're your group. They're not looking out for you. They're looking out for themselves as your darling leaders.

Salty: 24:11

We have travelled to a snowy Wonderland. Yeah. Wow. I mean, there's several inches here. Anyway, just in the amount of time that we were talking and we're just driving north.

Spice: 24:22

We went from three snowflakes to about three inches.

Salty: 24:25

Yeah.

Spice: 24:27

unexpected. Ah. So I'm about done with this podcast.

Salty: 24:35

That's where lots of snow

Spice: 24:37

but I think we actually did come to a point where we did yeah, usually among the wander in that it's difficult to predict what it's going to be, but it's going to be something so you think about what your own needs are likely to be. And try and prevent yourself from being led around by others who really don't have your personal best interest at heart. Even if they are supporting other things that would that you agree with, that doesn't mean they have your long term best interests at heart. So you take care of you and yours, and recognize that other people may have good reasons for not agreeing with you go from there.

Salty: 25:16

And I guess my my other takeaway is when you, when you're when you're external, when you're listening to what other people are saying, watching the news, whatever, I think it's important to realize that not only are is everybody agenda based, because everybody is agenda base, we've all got an agenda, even we have an agenda.

Spice: 25:35

We do things for reasons, everybody,

Salty: 25:37

absolutely. But we at least tell people up front what our agenda is. And if you want to know what that is go on our website, it's all over the website. Remember, that one they have an agenda to they may not know what the heck they're talking about. They're just repeating whatever it is they think you want to hear. And three, they may not have a true understanding of the entire situation, a

Spice: 26:01

natural point of focus is short term.

Salty: 26:03

Exactly.

Spice: 26:04

So they may not even think or think or care about long term things. It's very common, that's part of human nature.

Salty: 26:10

So grain of salt, and concentrate on what matters locally to you circle of influence,

Spice: 26:18

you're going to be living in that local community, when things get rough. And if it's a widespread event, the rest of the world is not going to care and not going to come to help because they'll have their own fish fry.

Salty: 26:28

Yeah. And if you're in a situation where you don't feel comfortable with you know, how it's good things would go down for you in a jet walkie stuff hits the fan type situation. Well, you know, maybe now is the time to start thinking about what you're gonna do about it. Maybe you might not want to wait too long, that sort of thing. Maybe Maybe it's time to make some plans, just saying

Spice: 26:53

some unpredictable point in time it moves from being a theoretical exercise to now's the time,

Salty: 26:59

this world will end. It may be a long time from now. Maybe tomorrow. We don't know, your world will end my world, William. It's just a matter of Do we have to let our world in, in a way that we could have prevented.

Spice: 27:17

Sometimes it has to end us

Salty: 27:19

Yes. Doesn't have to end us something to think about. Okay, we're done with our thing. So, everybody, have a great day. And we'll catch you later. Bye bye.