Christian Schauf: Okay, Brock Long, ⁓ you're my guinea pig. First one out of the gate here. Thanks for agreeing to do this with me. ⁓ really looking forward to this discussion. How are you today?
Brock: Doing good, I'm sorry you couldn't find anybody else.
Christian Schauf: No man, you joined the team several months ago here at Uncharted. I'll get into your background. But ⁓ just been really thankful to have you on board. You've you've got way too much information, I think, on natural disasters and how people think about it and the re reactions and what happens to people in these situations. And given given the world we're in, even just this time frame with this Super El Nino. I thought it'd be really interesting to ask you 10 questions around how people should think about this because it like everything in the world, there's so much news coming at you so fast, everybody wonders what it means for them. And so nobody better than you, in my opinion, to ⁓ to ask these questions to. So ⁓ you ready to go? Okay, well, a brief intro for those of you that haven't been following along. ⁓ today's guest is Brock Long. I'm gonna read this because I wrote a really nice introduction, but
Brock: Yeah. Let's do it.
Christian Schauf: You were the former administrator of FEMA and led the nation's response to some of the most devastating disasters in recent history, including major hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural emergencies. And, you know, in my opinion, few people have spent more time thinking about risk, resilience, and how families can prepare for the unexpected. So today I want to talk to you about how to think about that, an ever-changing world, make sure you're safe and your family's safe. Sound good? Anything you want to add? You want to tell a little bit about yourself here? I think
Brock: Yeah. Yes. ⁓ yeah, sure.
Christian Schauf: I think your background's fascinating, man. And some of the stories we for those who don't know, Brock and I kinda tommy boyed through the country for a week, a couple months back, ⁓ meeting with different emergency response groups and you told me some really wild stories of working with President Trump during the first administration, some of the experiences you had, some of the emergencies you had to just jump into and kind of manage. Any fun ones you want to share right now? Just to give people some fun, some fun background.
Brock: Yeah, sure. I'm 26 year veteran chasing disasters. I mean, I'm a very normal guy. I'm not a politician. I'm an emergency manager. care about people and got into this, you know, from a public service standpoint and for whatever reasons, every time I've changed jobs in my career, something catastrophic's happened, Christian. So, you know, I'm trying to scratch my head on that one a little bit and understand it, but no, it's been an amazing career. got into it back in 1999. I grew up in North Carolina. I live here in North Carolina now. Public school educated and just a hard worker and learned to surround myself with many good advisors. You know, and I think that that's really benefited me. But literally my first day on the job, my first job out of college was Georgia Emergency Management Agency. And the first day I literally went to work in the State Operations Center for Hurricane Floyd, which created the largest, the nation's largest evacuation in history from States from Florida to Delaware evacuated for Hurricane Floyd and ultimately it really devastated Eastern North Carolina. I interviewed with FEMA Region 4 on the morning of 9-11. So I was, you know, I was promoted to Hurricane Program Manager at FEMA Region 4 in 2004 in Florida and Alabama. The Gulf Coast got hit with four major hurricanes in six weeks, Charlie, Francis, Ivan, and Gene, and then... The next year Katrina happens and we find out that you're only as good as your weakest link and your last disaster, right? And so Katrina obviously hit and then it was Rita and Ike, I think the same year. And funny enough, Christian, know, Hurricane Wilma in 2005 was the last major land falling hurricane in the country. being category three, four or five storm was the last major land falling hurricane until 2017 when I was Senate confirmed as FEMA administrator. It was voted into office 95 to four by the Senate, which is pretty good track record. I think that's probably the best track record of anybody that's gone through the Trump administration.
Christian Schauf: Ha ha.
Brock: I may be wrong on that, if I was a betting man, would say yes, it's gotta be the four negative votes is pretty good. ⁓ And then I went through 220 declared disasters and wildfires in two years. And some of those were Harvey, Yerma, Maria, California wildfires, disasters you never heard of that hit Tinian and Saipan like ⁓ Hurricane U-2. You got North Korea popping off missiles left and right. And I think a lot of people don't know that when you're at FEMA, you're also head of national continuity programs. So you're in charge of... making sure that the executive branch of government never fails regardless of what you face, whether it's a pandemic, a tornado, or just all-out war. ⁓ you're watching over half the globe too, from Tinnitus, Ipan, all the way to the U.S. Virgin Islands. And this half of the globe is very active, no doubt about it.
Christian Schauf: Is it always active or is it just kind of recent history?
Brock: It's always active. ⁓ you know, you take, if you take, you know, if you take, take a look at my time in office, every three days we had a new event, whether it was a wildfire declared disaster that came across my desk. And I don't think people, you know, the problem with our nation's news media is you only hear about the disasters that don't go very well. ⁓ And I've often said that like, Proper disaster response and preparedness is like a chair with four legs. That seat that you're sitting in, if that's our country, the four legs represent different things. That first leg is a true culture of preparedness within our citizenry that Christian, you and I both believe doesn't exist. I mean, let's face it, we don't have tangible skills. You can graduate Harvard and still not know how to do CPR or invest a dollar in the stock market. And there's a problem there, we gotta come back to that. The second leg is a strong state and local emergency management capability. is the private sector that owns 85 % of what we depend on from power to hospital systems to your communications, you know, everything. And then that fourth leg is FEMA. That's the mechanism that the government has to push down all assets through a governor, ultimately to the local level, to you the citizen going through the disaster. And when all four of those legs are attached in a disaster, then it goes pretty well. When FEMA is the only leg of that chair attached going in, That's when we have the Katrinas and the Marias and Congress wants to reshape and reform FEMA.
Christian Schauf: Wow. Every three days. I don't think people realize that. I mean, I I always say our biggest competitor with Uncharted is apathy. And it's people that haven't been affected that believe then that they won't be. But when you start putting it into those numbers and how frequently things are happening around the globe, it's it's not if, it's when. And that's the thing I always try to preach, but that's a strong data point.
Brock: Well, and I think Christian too, the thing about it, we've got to get people to realize that they are the true first responder in any situation. If I fall over, if we're out and about and I fall over and break my ankle, I'm dependent on the person next to me until the official first responder arrives.
Christian Schauf: Right. Yes.
Brock: or until I can get official first response help or hospital help, whatever I need. And so that's the attitude that we need. We need that old civil defense attitude, take care of your neighbor, back in place, and we gotta get that back.
Christian Schauf: Yep, yep, a hundred percent. That's what I'm doing with my life, so I couldn't ⁓ I couldn't agree more. Well, let's dive in. I feel like you're already hitting some of these questions. So I've got ten questions for you. I think they're valuable ⁓ pieces of information that everybody should understand, and I think you're the guy to answer ⁓ So the first question is what is the biggest misconception Americans have about disaster preparedness?
Brock: that FEMA is gonna make you whole after a disaster. Not the case. The agency was never designed to make anybody whole after you've lost everything through a disaster. And that's the toughest part. While I wish we had the authority and the ability to make people whole, we just can't do it. I think when Jimmy Carter set the agency up back in 1979, it was meant to be a disaster relief agency. How do we provide relief to those who are facing their worst day and time ever? And we've morphed into, I will argue that we have the best emergency management system in the country, regardless of what our nation's news media says. we're gonna offer more services from non-governmental organizations active in disaster all the way to the federal government than any country on the globe. But it's become so complex that it's hard for people to navigate different things. just remember that ⁓ the federal government and FEMA is not designed to fix you after hole. So make sure you're properly insured. Make sure you have tangible skills, those types of things.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, I remember you saying people think of FEMA as 9 1 1 but it's not that at all. It's supposed to help a bit, help where you can, but it's it's not this immediate response to fix your problem, right?
Brock: That's correct. And when FEMA becomes 911, it looks like the response during Hurricane Katrina. When the citizenry was unprepared, uninsured, and state and local governments just did not have the assets in place or the strength in place to manage the disaster on their, you know, to a certain degree. So when the federal government is the one that's come in as 911, ⁓ you know, lower your expectations, America.
Christian Schauf: Right. It's kinda like everything else, right? It's ⁓ underwhelming at best. ⁓ all right. So having seen disasters across the country, what keeps you up at night that people aren't thinking about?
Brock: Long term power outages, ⁓ particularly like right now in North Carolina, man, we're getting ready to go through 10 very hot days, ⁓ close to 100, ⁓ which we get to true four seasons. It's not unrealistic for us to have 100 degree days in North Carolina. But more and more of our power grid is being taxed by everybody plugging in cars and plugging in batteries and everything else in the grid is just not where it needs to be in this nation to handle the demand upon it. when you go across, in my opinion, if you have 10 extreme days of heat, people are running their air conditioning, people are doing more things with the power, and it puts things in peril, right?
Christian Schauf: Yeah. Yeah, and and when was the last time our grid was even like rebuilt or is it just they built it once and we're still using the same thing? Because obviously electricity has become a bigger part of people's lives every day. You know, in here in Utah we talk about data centers and population growth, but it's not like they're putting in new electrical systems to support it. They're just kind of using the same stuff that's been here for decades, right?
Brock: And I think. I mean, obviously the energy companies and energy is a very broad term. We're talking about electric generation. We're talking about fuel. We're talking about solar, wind, hydrology. mean, there's, you know, to me, energy resilience is about balance and having multiple avenues to produce power, you know, from nuclear all the way to solar energy, right? You can't just throw out one and expect the other avenue of energy to take over the demand that's put forward. ⁓ I personally believe we need to get to microgrids. I think One of the biggest vulnerabilities that we have in our country is that our Department of Defense many years ago is completely dependent on private sector energy companies to basically render, you know, provide power. You know, and I think that, you know, military bases need to get back to their own micro capabilities. I think in the future, you know, city county planners, you know, they need to look at what emergency power sources are actually in a community. I mean, look at diesel trains, look at... know, electric hybrid bus engines that could be, you know, how can we use buses to be cooling stations, those types of things. We got to get innovative. I mean, how do we plug in some of these power sources that exist in our community ⁓ for emergency purposes as well? We got to rethink that. But I can tell you that a majority of Americans ⁓ You know, a lot of us are dependent on medications that require refrigeration, right? You know, so what if you go three, four, five days without refrigeration in it because of the energy being off? And I'm just not so sure that people think through a plan or a backup idea to manage that problem before it's too late, the power's already off. Yeah, prolonged energy outages scare me the most. I think, you know, if you have prolonged energy outages, the big cities collapse first and have the largest amount of problems and ⁓ numerous problems. And then it eventually reaches out to the rural areas and those who are isolated that are the ones that are going to be paying the price for prolonged energy outages without a plan.
Christian Schauf: And when talk about microgrids, are you talking like Texas, how they have their own infrastructure? Are you talking about solar on every house or what does that look like?
Brock: I mean, it could start out with how can you improve the energy capability of your home, regardless of what the private companies or, you know, government co-op energy companies provide. I mean, you know, but let's be honest. I mean, not everybody can afford a Tesla battery system or, you know, solar power panels. some cases, you know, aesthetically, we've got a lot of work to do on making things look good. But, yeah, I mean, I have two forms of emergency. generators. I have an electric generator that's solar powered and I have a gas power generator. ⁓ And I learned a lot from that. After Hurricane Helene, we were without power for five days. My solar generator did its job for about a day and a half, kept my refrigerator running. But then we went through five days of overcast post-hurricane weather and it became impossible to charge back. So I ended up using my gas generator. ⁓ And honestly, if... If we get to a point where I run out of fuel for my generators, I've got a gas siphon. I'll just suck it out of my truck or your truck.
Christian Schauf: Yep. Yeah, you're gonna use whatever's around at that point, right? I mean that is I know, yeah, maybe that's the next great product. I like it. I like it. ⁓ all right, next question. If you walked into the average American home today, what would be the first three gaps you'd expect to find that people aren't thinking about when it comes to preparedness?
Brock: You need an unchartered gas siphon, you know. That's it. ⁓ so the, the, the boring one is most households are underinsured if not insured properly at all. you know, and I know insurance is really boring and everybody's going to stop this podcast the minute I reached, you know, talk about that. But, you know, I've never seen anybody starved to death after a disaster. But what I have seen is millions of people uninsured or underinsured. Insurance is not a place to try to save money. Because insurance is the first line of defense and it will fix you first. For example, those who have flood insurance in Harvey, when Harvey hit Texas, the average payout was $120,000. The average payout from FEMA if you were uninsured and lost your home was $4,000 to $6,000, Christian. So insurance plays a major role. Now, The next thing I would say are the basic essentials. I don't think people in most households have the ability to produce clean water or have backup food items once they run out or once water's not popping out of that faucet, or they go under restrictions and different things. I do believe that people should be prepared for not just five days, but as long as they can prepare. You know, for as many days as they can prepare. I do believe in that. ⁓ You know, ⁓ and honestly, a little tip too, you know, everybody knows that like there's this unwritten rule that you shouldn't talk about prepping. Forget that. I think we need to have conversations about prepping. You know, it's not like I'm going to be hiding in my neighborhood as a former FEMA administrator. People are going to be asking, you know, for me, you know, for advice and help and, and food. And sometimes what I've started to do is actually save some of the expired like canned food and different things. That's what I'm going to hand out when people come knock on my door.
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, it's ⁓ a, you know, but you know, I do think we have to have those conversations. The next thing is just know how, just the tangible skills of getting things done. And largely the one thing that they're gonna have that they're gonna wish they had was a communication plan. If we can't talk, if our cell phones don't work, where do we meet? How do we reconnect? ⁓ And the scary thing for me is, you know, I travel across the country like you, Christian. mean, like, you know, I'm traveling all over the place. All I have with me if the earthquake happens in California is the carry on bag of luggage. But I always carry, for example, water filtration capability. If I can get water, that will help me. know, clean water will help me, right? You know, that will extend my time in a faraway place when it hits the fan.
Christian Schauf: Yeah. Yep.
Brock: those types of things and I think through those things. I also kind of map out where the local emergency operations center is and in some of these major cities so that I can generally walk the one if I need to and knock on the door to say, hey, former FEMA administrator here to help. But think communications, think through different scenarios and I think that's it. Lack of insurance.
Christian Schauf: Right. Here to help and do have any water? ⁓ Yeah.
Brock: It's a lack of communication planning with their family, secondary communication and the basic essentials of producing water, clean water and having access to food when it doesn't show up in the grocery stores.
Christian Schauf: Yep. And those aren't wildly expensive things to have a plan around. I mean, those are things that everybody could do tomorrow and improve their situation.
Brock: Right. Right. Yeah. mean, what are the low to no cost, tangible skills that I wish we would put forward in? You know, I dare to say our education system, you know, like our public schools and private schools, but can we not take five minutes of one day a week to go over a tangible skill or to think through a problem? Just five minutes, one day. Every Friday morning at 8 a.m., can we think through five minutes of what we should do if there's an earthquake or, you know, whatever? You know, how do we get those tangible skills back? And I can tell you that other countries are doing that, particularly You know, I think with everything, how active the globe is in Europe, you better believe like, ⁓ you know, European countries and the Chinese, they're teaching their kids tangible skills.
Christian Schauf: Yep. And so if you talk about tangible skills, just name a couple you think would be most important, like that you could teach your kids as an example.
Brock: Well, I mean, let's take a look at what's going on around this country. Why do we allow colleges to accept students into their schools that don't know CPR, first aid, or stop the bleed when we know that mass shootings at schools happen all the time? I'm tired of people thinking that they're not going to be the victim.
Christian Schauf: Mm-hmm. Sure.
Brock: That's where I think we got to change that mindset of you are the true first responder in any situation. you know, obtain the tangible skills. And I don't want to be on my soapbox, but you know, why should schools or why should FEMA start looking at every as a liability rather than part of the solution? And so, you know, we've got change some things like, you know, let's start with CPR, first aid. mean, heck, if you're not going to go take an official class, at least Google it.
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, or excuse me, chat it. Googling it is dying, shows my age. I mean, why do we allow people into workplaces where there's been workplace violence and a history of it without being able to help their neighbor or their coworker if something goes down? That's where we should start.
Christian Schauf: Right. Yep. I I I like what you said about being helpful or being a liability. That's that's really what we're trying to do at Uncharted, is my belief is every time a product leaves our warehouse, we're creating assets, not liabilities, in some capacity, right? At least you have the tools and some instructions in your hand that you can do something. But it's really hard to get people away from their daily lives to take a training And I think you're right. I think the place you could do that is school. I mean, we used to do stop, drop, and roll and all that stuff and h you know, do ⁓ tornado drills where I'm from in Wisconsin. ⁓ why not have a couple classes on the things you just mentioned? To me that would go a long ways.
Brock: But But the beauty of your product, the beauty of your products is they are educational. They, you know, even if you have no knowledge whatsoever, like the 72 pack that I have, I have several, have, you know, one for each one of my boys. I've got a son that goes to college six and a half hours away. At least he's got a 72 hour pack and it's pretty self-explanatory on what he needs, when he needs it. And then like, you know, I find the reason we, got connected if you remember Christian is is the first product I bought was the Zeus battery. Well that Zeus battery empowered me to help my neighbor. The first person I used it on was a close friend of mine whose truck died at a ball game in a parking lot. And it was the first test and he has a big diesel truck. And, ⁓ you know, it wasn't that I got to start off with a small economy size car. It was the biggest truck in the parking lot and it fired right up. And quite frankly, I didn't, I didn't even have time to charge it and it wound up having to use it again with one of my kids, you know? So it was reliable. It was there, but just by having that product or that capability, it enabled me to also be a good neighbor too. So it's one, it's instructive. instructional, but too, it empowered me to be a good neighbor.
Christian Schauf: And it's it's the reason we do that, is because I don't believe people are gonna take time to train, which I wish they would, I really do. But people's lives are busy. If you can give them the instructions in hand that they can actually follow when their adrenaline's spiking, I feel like that's the best solution we can have for a lot of people. ⁓ so yeah, I'm with you there, man. It's just it's about creating heroes and helpers. I say that all the time. But guys like you starting the truck for somebody, now imagine you're in a situation where it's really cold or really hot and you need to get that air conditioning running for grandma or you got little kids that are gonna start freezing. Doesn't sound like that was the situation there, but if you can get an engine running, it changes the game massively.
Brock: And I think too, people don't pay attention to what's being on. mean, we live in fast and food news society. If you can't tweet it and text it in 140 characters, then it's just gonna go right over people's heads or it's gonna be ignored. But we've had many conversations. What does an El Nino year mean? Well, it means get ready for wildfires and big ones. for the next several months and we're already starting to see them pop up and they're be bad out in the Midwest and West. So now that I'm telling you that, have you gone around your house and tried to help, how do I make my house more fire wise? My yard, my landscape and getting rid of dead fuel out of those types of things. You know, so now that you know that El Nino also means this winter we're going to have freak nor'easter snowstorms that start in the Gulf Coast and go all the way through New York, Boston, know, Maine and dump copious amounts of snow. It means we're going to get tornadoes in areas that don't typically get them. Maybe we get less hurricanes, but don't, but like I never care one bit about a hurricane seasonal forecast. You can predict 14 or 35. It only takes one to absolutely rearrange your life or kill your loved ones. And so who cares how many they predict. Hurricanes are going to happen this year at some point, but it only takes one to landfall and ruin a community.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, I think there's two hundred and fifty thousand acres burned already in Utah this year. And that's crazy. Yeah.
Brock: Yeah, four corners there, burning up right now. We're starting to see California's already had a few outside Orange County, inside, outside Orange County area right off the bat. I mean, it's not like these things ⁓ are just happening out of the blue. Be ready for them. And if you've got to leave, if you've got to evacuate, mean, I'm a big believer in bugging in rather than bugging out.
Christian Schauf: I agree. Yes.
Brock: Having the supplies in your house because the chances of you having to bug out are pretty slim in most cases. Most of the emergencies are gonna be where you're in your home. How do you use your home as a safe haven? ⁓ And how do you enhance the capability of your existing home? But if you got a bug out, like wildfires and very quickly again, how do you communicate if your kids are at school and you're at work and you're... another loved one's at home, whatever, and then what do you take with you ⁓ to get out? And so I don't think people think through that, but if it's wildfire season and the warnings are going up for wildfire in your community, you might ought to have some of that stuff prepackaged and loaded up just in case.
Christian Schauf: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think we kinda answered this one, but what's the difference between being prepared and just buying an emergency kit? I'm not trying to shoot uncharted in the foot here, but I think, you know, I I tell people all the time, ⁓ buying our gear is a a piece of the pie. It's a piece of the puzzle. ⁓ I think, you know, we talk about four pillars and that's resources, resourcefulness.
Brock: No.
Christian Schauf: physical and mental fitness and community is how I look at kind of the buckets and maybe I don't know if you have an opinion on that, but I do think that gear is a part of the piece, but how do you think about preparedness? It it's all these things, right? It's knowing your community, it's having a plan, it's all the things you just talked about.
Brock: Well, what gear are you buying, Christian, and from who? Is it any good? Will it work when you need it? That's the first question. So, I've bought plenty of pathetic survival gear in the past.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, yeah.
Brock: And when you start to look at, and I'm not blowing smoke, Christian, I'm a fan, but when you look at the capabilities of the backpack, the fact that I can take a 72-hour backpack and pretty much use it as a flotation device because of how well it is crafted and put together. it's gonna be there when I need it. A lot of people just blindly buy whatever they see coming across, you know, an Amazon commercial or a TV commercial, whatever, and then they realize when they need it, you know, it's not there, the batteries aren't charged or don't hold a charge. mean, who knows, right? Or they make common mistakes. So it's one thing if you just buy supplies. It's another thing if you know how to use it and maintain it. You know, how many people Christian buy a generator and can't get it cranked? It doesn't crank. They don't have the starter fluid around to maybe get it cranked. And then they don't realize that they have to keep using that starter fluid. The carburetor is going to gunk up. How do you clean that? You know, they don't, if you don't test it before it happens, it's not going to be ready for you when you need it.
Christian Schauf: Right. Right.
Brock: And I think it's just not just buying supplies, it's understanding what you're buying, why you're buying it, and how it's going to work and how long it's going to work.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, I I mean two things to that. You said earlier that the goal of insurance is not to buy the cheapest insurance. It's to buy the stuff that's actually going to protect you when you need it. That's one of the biggest hurdles we've faced as a company is competing against what was historically this commodity based market where you had a ninety-nine dollar kit. It's like something you'd buy at a county fair in a tent. You know, it was kind of more like a little kid wants to go play in the woods with it, but it's not gonna make a difference. You wanna buy stuff that's gonna make a difference.
Brock: Right. Yeah.
Christian Schauf: ⁓ two to that what you just said, I've I've been on a lot of podcasts and I've always said the outdoors and camping and hunting and then emergencies and survival, they're like twin brothers. It's just that one you choose to do and one happens to you. And I've always said don't make the Super Bowl the first game you play every year, right? Like get out there, go use the stuff, understand how to do it, understand how to start a fire when it's snowing. I was elk hunting last year, this crazy storm came in and
Brock: Right.
Christian Schauf: We were waiting for elk and I was like, let's see if we start a fire. I mean it's just a good rep, right? Take what you got, see if you get a fire started because emergencies don't happen when it's seventy two and sunny and you're standing in an aisle at Target buying the cheapest stuff. It happens when your back's against the wall, conditions are horrible, and you've got to make what you have work. And the better the you have, the better gear you have, the better your odds.
Brock: You're right, rarely do disasters happen between the hours of eight and five when we're conveniently at home or whatever. mean, you know, like, or whatever. Now, you know, it's interesting, my wife and I were just in Kansas and there was severe weather moving through last week and tornado watches and warnings going off in the middle of the night. And it was interesting because more people get killed in the middle of the night because they're lethargic. They don't want to get up. They don't want to eat. They turn the, they turn the alert notifications off. and the big tornadoes hit, tornadoes killed more people at night than they do during the day because of that very reason. And it's interesting because we used to have conversations, gosh, this was even 15, 20 years ago, how do you get people's TVs in their houses to flip on and wake them up? know, tornado emergency, know, a warning and then emergency, you know, like how do you do that? But then again, like it would never fly because that's Big Brother and...
Christian Schauf: Hm.
Brock: everything else, but how many times are we gonna see this year bad tornadoes that go through the middle of the night kill more people than they do during the day?
Christian Schauf: Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. So so flipping the script a little bit, people think about this. They've done certain things. What do you see people like what disasters do you see people over-preparing for? And then what disasters do you see people under-preparing for? So you mentioned earlier Power Grid. That seems to be like probably one of the higher priority ones. But are there are there monsters out there that people don't have to worry about? And which ones are they ignoring that they really should worry about?
Brock: So I'm going to take a different spin on that. I don't think people sit down and honestly assess their risk and vulnerabilities based on their geographic location where they live. Let's start with that. You know, where I live in North Carolina is pretty quiet compared to most places, but I have hurricane threats from the East Coast and Gulf Coast. I I also have threats for severe weather, obviously in the foothills and flooding and different things. I'm also very close to the edge of a 50 mile EPZ from a nuclear power plant. You know, so. You know, I don't think people really assess their true vulnerability. If I'm in a big city, holy cow, man, civil disturbances and different things, you know, like if things really start to collapse, how do you get out? You know, it's a
Christian Schauf: Yes.
Brock: And then again, I really wish people could just learn the basic necessities of saving another person's life. That would help, regardless of your risk and vulnerabilities. Because a lot of people, I mean... what you're going to see. think one in four of us, if you look at the statistics I once read, one in four of us is going to have to do CPR in our lifetime. It's either going to be on your kids or your parents, your aging parents. And so, you know, if we know that 25 % of us is going to have to perform that in a day-to-day situation, well, how do we start shaming people into, you don't know CPR? Wow, you can't get a job here. You know, I need people that, you know, you know, how do we do
Christian Schauf: Well I like that.
Brock: that. So it's a different approach. Assess your vulnerabilities, then what supplies, what plans do you need to overcome those and walk through them, test them out. ⁓
Christian Schauf: It's Yeah. One in four of us are gonna need it. It's probably one in two hundred actually have the training, right? I mean that's that's pretty bad. So Brocky there. ⁓ I lost you for a second, Brock. Yeah, I gotcha. Like I said, maiden voyage here. I think this system's designed to kind of sharpen everything up and download as we go, so I I think we're okay, but ⁓ we'll cut the we'll cut that part out. Sorry about that. Yeah. Here's our first test. So back to technology. How do you think technology has made us more resilient and where has it made us more vulnerable?
Brock: That was a power glitch on my end. I got a different approach on where the vulnerabilities are. warfare information. ⁓ China and Russia are wonderful at this. I mean, they're they're really good at manipulating what people read and see. ⁓ I would say declassified reports would tell you that if there is something controversial going on in this country, which is very rarely right, Christian, there's very rarely controversial going on politics or whatever. ⁓ whatever it may be, lawsuit, you know, Supreme Court rulings to rights to movements, whatever it may be.
Christian Schauf: Never. Never happens. Yeah.
Brock: Chinese and the Russian know how to exploit our social media and probably own a third of the conversation. They don't pick a side, they just make sure that we are arguing and hate each other. They'll say, Christian's product at Uncharted is the best, Christian's products at Uncharted are the worst. And then they just start getting us, you know, arguing in between. They have actually been very successful at pulling off protest on a United States American soil, just through kicks and giggles through social media, getting people pissed off.
Christian Schauf: Have you heard about the dead internet theory? Do you know what that means? So we've reached that point now, and that's that over half of the accounts and the comments and everything on the internet are bot generated. So that goes back to what you're saying. If you look at everything happening on the internet and you're like, I wonder who this person is, over half of them are bot farms designed to do exactly that.
Brock: No, no, ⁓ yeah. Yeah, and and I and I see it. I mean, we can have conversations at the dinner table with our family, extended family and friends and you know, whatever else. And and literally, if you look at what just happened, you know, when Russia attacked the Ukraine, I mean, you could see it coming from a mile away. There was a three-part playbook. They they started the misinformation. Why is the West stoking fears of war? There's Nazis over in the Ukraine. We're gonna go liberate the Ukraine. These are just military exercises. Why are you stoking fears of war? Then they start the cyber attacks. They're testing their infrastructure. They're hitting Ukraine's infrastructure. Well, they've done that in the United States pretty, pretty well already. The only thing we haven't done is start trading blows, you know, lava missiles. And so
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, to me, the information age is nobody knows what to believe anymore. Now, ⁓ I will tell you that we saw this activity in hurricane response. We saw we saw them getting involved in arguments of governor so-and-so's doing a great job, Governor So-and-so's doing a terrible job. There's a shelter over here. No, the shelters are open over there. You know, ⁓ we saw cyber attacks a cron critical infrastructure where hurricanes are making landfall. You know, so the information age is we've got to teach. on a regular basis, information warfare, misinformation, you know, that is ⁓ breaking apart, you know, our our ability to love our neighbors. You know, we we we've gotta start teaching businesses and people to recognize what's real and what's not.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, creating community. I mean, that's the only way humans have gotten through anything is working together, whether it was fighting off an invading army or bringing down a woolly mammoth. Nobody does this on their own, right? You need a team, a community around you. And back to your misinformation campaigns, I I do see that and I do think that's a huge threat on our society in general.
Brock: Yep. Yep. And ⁓ misinformation about, you know, look at look at all the stuff around a pandemic. I mean, COVID, you would think people would come together, but man, all we did was mask into a political sign. We or get the shot, don't get the shot. I mean, I'm not sure what we learned other than pandemics are we got a long way to go. You know. ⁓
Christian Schauf: Yeah. Yeah, I I I I thought people would learn from that, but I I I'm fearful for the next one because I think it'll just be a volume two on the same story, unfortunately.
Brock: Yep. At least we seem to be coming around the World Cup together.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, that is true. It's I saw a thing the other day and it was like ⁓ isn't it amazing when you get the governments out of the way how well we all get along? You know, like these people are coming over, they're like, Hey, the US is awesome. I've been to a I went to a Bucky's today, like I had barbecue and ⁓ it was just it was really cool to see that. ⁓ I wish that was amplified.
Brock: Yeah. Well and on that now, Christian, getting the getting the ⁓ the government out of the way. I mean, again, if you look back at who owns the infrastructure that we depend on, like when you flip that switch and the lights come on magically, it's not the government. You know, it's a private sector energy company. I mean, you every time you pick up and use that phone to look at misinformation, you know, who powers that? It's not the government, it's the it's it's the private sector. So what we have to do as a nation Is we have to identify what I call community lifelines. Community lifelines are the things in communities that have to be working, that if they're not working, then people are dying or life routine is disrupted. So what is that? That's your hospital systems, that's your financial systems, that's your power, your bulk water systems, your sewer systems, your ⁓ transportation, ⁓ farm-to-table food, not bottles of water and MREs, but farm-to-table logistics, right?
Christian Schauf: Food.
Brock: And if we know what those things are, then why is the federal government not bending over backwards to protect them regardless of what happens, whether it's a cyber attack, North Korea popping off missiles or tornadoes? And so that's my frustration with the federal government is the private sector who owns 85% of the majority of the capability in this country that you depend on as a citizen should be driving the federal government on where real resilience should be, rather than the government thinking that they understand resilience. And the other the other frustrating piece of where we are as a nation is if the federal government does know all these things can happen, like Russia can shut down the colonial pipeline and fuel can stop flowing from Texas to Virginia, or EMPs can happen or p pandemics can happen, then why are we not educating citizens on how to overcome these things now rather than when they happen?
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, if we know it's gonna happen, then why why aren't we spending time educating people on what the real possibilities are and the things to do? You know. ⁓ but I I believe in bolstering what I call the community lifelines. And that was a doctrine I started at FEMA. And then how do we get like when the power companies want to come trim your trees to reduce wildfire threats, let them do it. Let them do it. ⁓ if they tell you not to ⁓ you know, to conserve energy. Help them out. That's where you get involved as a citizen. That doesn't take any brains. It just takes willpower of saying, you know what, today I'm not going to have every light in the house on and every fan running or whatever. You know. And it does help the infrastructure. And that's where we've got to go. Like it's a partnership. It truly is a partnership between the government and the people.
Christian Schauf: Right. Right. Yep, yeah. That's sage advice for sure. ⁓ if the power in the internet, the cell service disappeared for seven days, what would the average family struggle with first? Or what are the big things that they are maybe not expecting that where their life would dramatically change?
Brock: If the power was off for a week, what say that again now?
Christian Schauf: Yeah, so I'm just I think we've kind of covered this, but ⁓ sticking to my script a little bit, but let's say the power goes out, the internet goes out, communication goes out. What what are the first things that are gonna happen to just the average family that they maybe aren't expecting?
Brock: ⁓ they're gonna be figuring out how to protect the the the food in their refrigerator. then they're gonna quickly shift to, I mean, look at all the people who are like insulin dependent or medication dependent. They're gonna there's gonna be a run on you know, insulin issues and different things, which is you know, if you have a prolonged power outage, you know, down the road, if we ever went, you know, went to war, I mean. Just the lack of access to insulin is gonna kill a lot of people. And you know, and and I I think we take for granted modern medicine and just the access to pharmacies and different things, that's one I would really think through. People are gonna see some really hard times, you know, if they can't get access to ⁓ you know, to To the medicines. The next thing is we live in such a digital world and we're being desensitized to cash money that so much, you know, whether it's cryptocurrencies or digital Venmos or whatever it may be, access to that goes out the window when your batteries die and networks don't work, you know, those types of things. And so just the the ability to get stuff done from a financial standpoint comes to a halt, whether it's a private business or a household. Large cities, I think safety and security really starts to collapse after a week, you know, particularly if there's a heat. I mean if if I'm Russia and China, I'm shutting the heat, I'm shutting your I'm shutting your grids down in big cities during summers or or or or or cold snaps. And ⁓ they know that. They test, you know, they're they're hitting they understand how our community lifelines and infrastructure work better than we do. You know, for example, we do see They realize that our whole entire health and medical system is based on just-in-time insurance reimbursement, right? So if you want to monkey around with that, then start sending cyber attacks on hospital billing and accounting, which is what's been done over the last year. Go look up how many times hospital systems have been hacked. That's why all of us have received letters in the mail about our our information's been stolen. You know, I've gotten three in the last three years, you know.
Christian Schauf: Right, right.
Brock: ⁓ look at what what happens when things like the colonial pipeline gets shut down and magically come back online before gas stations start running out of fuel and food stops showing up at grocery stores. I mean, you know, but but but if the power goes off for a week, it's it's gonna be, you know, how do you maintain your perishable perishable items from food to to to to medicine? And then I think safety and security starts to really unfold and become real difficult in big. Cities. ⁓ I think the rural areas are gonna be okay because people tend to be more resourceful out there. But the medically fragile, medically fragile is ⁓ trying to produce heat and cold and during extreme weather events, like what we're going through in the southeast right now with the heat. It's really hard. Like, you know, Christian, is there a way that we can solve air conditioning when it doesn't work? Is there a way that we can solve heat in a safe manner that doesn't kill people from carbon monoxide in your home? You know, those types of things. I think you really need to be thinking through how you stay warm and how you stay cool. When the power's off, particularly. And this is when it goes off. Is ⁓ you look at Texas and the ERCOT system, it shut off during the ten coldest days, not the ten hottest days. And some people would say that it shut off because everybody decided to go plug in a portable heater all at the same time. You know, and overloaded the system. ⁓ I'm sure there's a more scientific and ⁓ you know, answer, but that's what I heard, you know. ⁓
Christian Schauf: Interesting. Have have you read that book? I think it's One Second After. Is that the name of it? Yep. Everybody should read that book. Because back to your point about insulin and and the domino effect of what happens. It's a fictional book, but basically an EMP hits, power goes out, the main character's daughter has an insulin need. ⁓ he goes through all those things. ⁓ that book really I thought was just incredible and just
Brock: Yeah. Yep, big fan. ⁓
Christian Schauf: having a fictional story kind of guide you through how to think about your own preparedness. I mean I I just go ahead.
Brock: Well, yeah. Yeah, and so much of that book and so much of disaster survival is getting your mind right. So if communication is cut off, failures in communication are the biggest lesson learned in disaster response. If you can't communicate, you can't respond and recover. So in a situation like EMP electromagnetic poles, where you know electromagnetic poles shuts down and fries anything with a computer, anything built after 1975, basically. You know, if it if it shuts down and fries, and and I don't think it'll be as bad as the book dictates, but it could be bad like that in many areas. But like, you know, if you can't communicate and you can't obtain situational awareness. Man, you want to talk about community leaders having to pop up and be in charge and make people, you know, get people's minds right to, you know, their their minds right to survive. That's a big piece of survival in the in that scenario too, is, you know, how do you manage the assets that you have if you don't know how long The situation's gonna last either. You know, so don't go tearing into your disaster supplies. Just, you know, think through, you know, the rationing piece and the proportions and different things, right? And and then that book, too. Everybody thinks they're just gonna go out and hunt. I'd love to see it. You know. I don't think most people could catch a fish out of Lake Hickory over here, you know, but
Christian Schauf: Yeah, absolutely.
Brock: And and everybody's gonna be doing that by the way. You know, so
Christian Schauf: I I You know, I I hunt a lot. I think everybody knows that that knows me. And I was actually talking to Bill Rapier. Bill was a devgrew guy, SEAL Team 6, did some of the biggest missions ever. And he he has this like Minuteman training thing that he does. And I spent a few days with him on his compound learning from him. And I was talking through some of that. And I'm like, I'll be good. I'm gonna I'm gonna be hunting. And he's like, dude, everybody's gonna be hunting. Those the elk will be gone in a month. And
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: It actually made me pause because I hadn't really th my general belief was to your point, most people don't know how to hunt, so I'm gonna be fine. I think I'll be better off than most, having the experience I did, because just picking up a rifle and walking into the woods is not you know, it's not that easy. But if that resource starts getting taxed at a level it never has, he's totally right. It's gonna go away. It's gonna get exponentially harder in no time.
Brock: Songbirds are gonna disappear. I mean, you know, it's ⁓ you know it's interesting, but you know, it's ⁓ the mental aspect of something like that's gonna be one of the hardest things to overcome. People will lose their mind and start taking care of number one. And and a big part of that is is what tangible skills do you I mean here's the question. When you look in the mirror, what do I want you to do? What tangible skills do you bring to the table?
Christian Schauf: Yep, absolutely.
Brock: Hello, hello.
Christian Schauf: Well, so two more questions for you. If someone's listening right now and let's say they had a thousand dollars in one weekend, they're like, Okay, I'm gonna go get prepared. Where would you recommend them spend their time and money first? What would be the first steps? Like, okay, I'm in, I believe you, but I'm on a budget. Where should I start?
Brock: Outside of insurance, okay, putting insurance aside. You know, like again, that prop being properly insured is the first line of defense. ⁓ if I had a thousand bucks, man, I want portable energy. Christian, you know, ⁓ I want I want some type of ⁓ I want the ability to ⁓ produce power, you know, go look at a go leak it go look at a small inverter generator, something that would help me maintain my refrigerator, at least power my refrigerator for a day and a half, you know, or power a fan for a little while. I I wanna I want power for a thousand dollars. You know, that's what I want.
Christian Schauf: So from my from my perspective, I have ⁓ I've got a goal zero, not a huge one, but a good battery pack. I've got a couple of them and I've got solar panels. And then I purposely bought a Ford truck when they started putting the generators and the pickup beds on those things. I don't know if you've seen that. But now I've got a redundancy there, right? If it's stormy, if it's wet. And yeah, I'm with you. And and and I bought a house that had a fireplace and I've got enough wood to last months that I
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: Instead of going to the gym some nights, I chop wood. I did it last night. Filled up a couple loads in the Polaris. To me, that's resiliency, right? You're out in nature, you're having a good time, you're chopping some wood. The fire you're if if the power goes out and it's cold, I I can keep this house warm for months with the wood I have. I've got the generator to keep the food cold, and then I've got the truck as a backup as long as I keep that thing gassed up. And that's something I always tell people is like when things feel dicey, don't let your gas tank get less than half. You just never know.
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: when your credit card's gonna stop working and there's a line of two hundred cars at the gas station, if you got a full tank of gas, that's buying you days, you know, and that's pretty important. So those aren't huge steps, but I'm with you there. I'm with you there.
Brock: Yep. Yeah. And get a gas siphon. Again, man, we need the uncharted gas siphon with my picture on it. Yeah. I'd want portable power. you know ⁓
Christian Schauf: Okay. We're gonna call it the Brock. And it and it it just sucks, right? It just sucks gas. No, that's funny, man. ⁓
Brock: I've got a goal zero two. It does its job. What I like about the electric generator is it's quiet. It doesn't say, hey, look at me, I'm over here like a gas generator does. But I like it because I use it inside my house. ⁓ but the but I do believe that the solar power, the the electric generators, that you know, they've got to get better handling things like a coffee pot. Anything that produces You need a fan or anything that produces heat drains that battery very quickly, which is frustrating. Right. So, you know, on a blue sky day, I would test different things with that generator to really understand how much time you've got. And and I think people forget, you don't have to leave your refrigerator plugged into the solar generator. Just keep it cool. Plug it in every every so often just to keep it cool.
Christian Schauf: Yes.
Brock: You know, yeah. I've got a Demetic as well. I've got a Demetic, a small Demetic cooler. that's a ref has a refrigeration and freezing capability that I can plug into that too. It works pretty well. I can get a day and a half out of that if it was just plugged in continuously. You know. ⁓ but ⁓ yeah, I would try to I would I'd want power. Power crap.
Christian Schauf: Yep. Good answer. Okay. ⁓ I think that's it, man. I appreciate it. ⁓
Brock: No. You said one more. You said there was a last one. What do you want people to do this weekend? Wasn't that wasn't that Ed or something?
Christian Schauf: ⁓ yeah, yeah, that was the other part. I think we kind of answered it, but what's something every family should do this weekend that could improve their resilience? So if they got the thousand dollars, I think go get a generator is probably what you're saying. But on top of that, maybe what are some things that is it putting a plan together for their family? Is it talking to their neighbors? Like what are some things they could do this week to improve their situation?
Brock: Good week. Go meet your neighbor. That's what I was gonna say. Go meet your neighbor. ⁓ if you don't know them, get to know him, try to get to know them. If you do know them, reconnect with them. ⁓ because you may be dependent on them ⁓ in the future, and vice versa. And ⁓ you know, I I think that's important. ⁓ we're gonna need people to gather together to survive some of the worst things that can be thrown at us from a technological standpoint or mother nature standpoint, and It doesn't cost any money to go meet your neighbor.
Christian Schauf: Amen. I believe in that as well. Okay, one last thing here. I'm gonna have you rank five emergency situations from the most scary to the least scary disasters for an American family. Okay. The five are a natural disaster. So that could be hurricane, wildfire, tornado. So natural disaster, a major cyber attack.
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: Economic collapse slash recession, pandemic or civil unrest?
Brock: ⁓ gosh, okay. ⁓ say those again.
Christian Schauf: Cyberattack, natural disaster, economic collapse, pandemic, or civil
Brock: Pandemic, pandemic hands down, we haven't seen the worst. We haven't seen the worst. ⁓ and I don't like where like biological warfare's gone, but pandemic, hands down. ⁓ cyber attack that creates prolonged power outages ⁓ scares me to death too. ⁓ those two that that keeps me up at night. Civil disturbance in mat in in large cities. ⁓ civil disturbances that are prolonged and get out of control that overform that that overwhelm law enforcement. Of the natural disasters, tornado F5 tornadoes are the absolute scariest. There is nowhere to hide. People forget that the Fajita scale, the F scale, That was designed to measure tornadoes was originally des ⁓ developed, if I remember correctly, to measure nuclear bomb blasts. And if you have ever been around an F-5 tornado and seen the aftermath, there is nothing left. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off. I never want to see one of those. And if I do, I hope it's at a distance, a very you know, pretty far distance. ⁓ tornadoes are no joke. No joke.
Christian Schauf: Yes. Yep. Yep. And then where would you put ⁓ so then economic collapse would be last, I guess.
Brock: Yeah. Hmm. I mean, that's right on par with a civil disturbance if it's an economic collapse. I mean, I think Yeah, the civil disturbance, cyber attack, and economic collapse are kind of lateral to me. You know, ⁓ pandemic, those three natural disasters. But what's most frequent, probably the cyber attacks are more frequent than natural disasters with them being second. You know.
Christian Schauf: Or or a cyber attack. It's funny how they all intertwine a little bit, right?
Brock: Natural disaster 20 seconds. So design your plan on frequency, most likely, you know, most frequent to ⁓ highest impact. You know. Yeah, but sit down and think through it. What are your vulnerabilities around you?
Christian Schauf: Yep. Well Brock, that's it, man. That was an hour of great advice. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you being part of the team. ⁓ it's an honor to have you helping us out, trying to make the world a better place. And ⁓ anything anything you want to leave with here? But this was really great, man. I learned a lot too.
Brock: Yeah. Yeah. go USA.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, big I don't know when this will come out, but there's a big USA soccer game Wednesday and Brock ⁓ Brock's a big soccer guy, so ⁓ pretty exciting.
Brock: Yeah. And Hickory FC and Hickory FC Hickory, North Carolina, our football club. ⁓
Christian Schauf: That's your team. You got it, man. Well, thank you for the time, Brock. I super appreciate it. All right. See ya.
Brock: ⁓ Take care. We'll see you. Thank you.
Christian Schauf: Okay.
Brock: Doing good, I'm sorry you couldn't find anybody else.
Christian Schauf: No man, you joined the team several months ago here at Uncharted. I'll get into your background. But ⁓ just been really thankful to have you on board. You've you've got way too much information, I think, on natural disasters and how people think about it and the re reactions and what happens to people in these situations. And given given the world we're in, even just this time frame with this Super El Nino. I thought it'd be really interesting to ask you 10 questions around how people should think about this because it like everything in the world, there's so much news coming at you so fast, everybody wonders what it means for them. And so nobody better than you, in my opinion, to ⁓ to ask these questions to. So ⁓ you ready to go? Okay, well, a brief intro for those of you that haven't been following along. ⁓ today's guest is Brock Long. I'm gonna read this because I wrote a really nice introduction, but
Brock: Yeah. Let's do it.
Christian Schauf: You were the former administrator of FEMA and led the nation's response to some of the most devastating disasters in recent history, including major hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural emergencies. And, you know, in my opinion, few people have spent more time thinking about risk, resilience, and how families can prepare for the unexpected. So today I want to talk to you about how to think about that, an ever-changing world, make sure you're safe and your family's safe. Sound good? Anything you want to add? You want to tell a little bit about yourself here? I think
Brock: Yeah. Yes. ⁓ yeah, sure.
Christian Schauf: I think your background's fascinating, man. And some of the stories we for those who don't know, Brock and I kinda tommy boyed through the country for a week, a couple months back, ⁓ meeting with different emergency response groups and you told me some really wild stories of working with President Trump during the first administration, some of the experiences you had, some of the emergencies you had to just jump into and kind of manage. Any fun ones you want to share right now? Just to give people some fun, some fun background.
Brock: Yeah, sure. I'm 26 year veteran chasing disasters. I mean, I'm a very normal guy. I'm not a politician. I'm an emergency manager. care about people and got into this, you know, from a public service standpoint and for whatever reasons, every time I've changed jobs in my career, something catastrophic's happened, Christian. So, you know, I'm trying to scratch my head on that one a little bit and understand it, but no, it's been an amazing career. got into it back in 1999. I grew up in North Carolina. I live here in North Carolina now. Public school educated and just a hard worker and learned to surround myself with many good advisors. You know, and I think that that's really benefited me. But literally my first day on the job, my first job out of college was Georgia Emergency Management Agency. And the first day I literally went to work in the State Operations Center for Hurricane Floyd, which created the largest, the nation's largest evacuation in history from States from Florida to Delaware evacuated for Hurricane Floyd and ultimately it really devastated Eastern North Carolina. I interviewed with FEMA Region 4 on the morning of 9-11. So I was, you know, I was promoted to Hurricane Program Manager at FEMA Region 4 in 2004 in Florida and Alabama. The Gulf Coast got hit with four major hurricanes in six weeks, Charlie, Francis, Ivan, and Gene, and then... The next year Katrina happens and we find out that you're only as good as your weakest link and your last disaster, right? And so Katrina obviously hit and then it was Rita and Ike, I think the same year. And funny enough, Christian, know, Hurricane Wilma in 2005 was the last major land falling hurricane in the country. being category three, four or five storm was the last major land falling hurricane until 2017 when I was Senate confirmed as FEMA administrator. It was voted into office 95 to four by the Senate, which is pretty good track record. I think that's probably the best track record of anybody that's gone through the Trump administration.
Christian Schauf: Ha ha.
Brock: I may be wrong on that, if I was a betting man, would say yes, it's gotta be the four negative votes is pretty good. ⁓ And then I went through 220 declared disasters and wildfires in two years. And some of those were Harvey, Yerma, Maria, California wildfires, disasters you never heard of that hit Tinian and Saipan like ⁓ Hurricane U-2. You got North Korea popping off missiles left and right. And I think a lot of people don't know that when you're at FEMA, you're also head of national continuity programs. So you're in charge of... making sure that the executive branch of government never fails regardless of what you face, whether it's a pandemic, a tornado, or just all-out war. ⁓ you're watching over half the globe too, from Tinnitus, Ipan, all the way to the U.S. Virgin Islands. And this half of the globe is very active, no doubt about it.
Christian Schauf: Is it always active or is it just kind of recent history?
Brock: It's always active. ⁓ you know, you take, if you take, you know, if you take, take a look at my time in office, every three days we had a new event, whether it was a wildfire declared disaster that came across my desk. And I don't think people, you know, the problem with our nation's news media is you only hear about the disasters that don't go very well. ⁓ And I've often said that like, Proper disaster response and preparedness is like a chair with four legs. That seat that you're sitting in, if that's our country, the four legs represent different things. That first leg is a true culture of preparedness within our citizenry that Christian, you and I both believe doesn't exist. I mean, let's face it, we don't have tangible skills. You can graduate Harvard and still not know how to do CPR or invest a dollar in the stock market. And there's a problem there, we gotta come back to that. The second leg is a strong state and local emergency management capability. is the private sector that owns 85 % of what we depend on from power to hospital systems to your communications, you know, everything. And then that fourth leg is FEMA. That's the mechanism that the government has to push down all assets through a governor, ultimately to the local level, to you the citizen going through the disaster. And when all four of those legs are attached in a disaster, then it goes pretty well. When FEMA is the only leg of that chair attached going in, That's when we have the Katrinas and the Marias and Congress wants to reshape and reform FEMA.
Christian Schauf: Wow. Every three days. I don't think people realize that. I mean, I I always say our biggest competitor with Uncharted is apathy. And it's people that haven't been affected that believe then that they won't be. But when you start putting it into those numbers and how frequently things are happening around the globe, it's it's not if, it's when. And that's the thing I always try to preach, but that's a strong data point.
Brock: Well, and I think Christian too, the thing about it, we've got to get people to realize that they are the true first responder in any situation. If I fall over, if we're out and about and I fall over and break my ankle, I'm dependent on the person next to me until the official first responder arrives.
Christian Schauf: Right. Yes.
Brock: or until I can get official first response help or hospital help, whatever I need. And so that's the attitude that we need. We need that old civil defense attitude, take care of your neighbor, back in place, and we gotta get that back.
Christian Schauf: Yep, yep, a hundred percent. That's what I'm doing with my life, so I couldn't ⁓ I couldn't agree more. Well, let's dive in. I feel like you're already hitting some of these questions. So I've got ten questions for you. I think they're valuable ⁓ pieces of information that everybody should understand, and I think you're the guy to answer ⁓ So the first question is what is the biggest misconception Americans have about disaster preparedness?
Brock: that FEMA is gonna make you whole after a disaster. Not the case. The agency was never designed to make anybody whole after you've lost everything through a disaster. And that's the toughest part. While I wish we had the authority and the ability to make people whole, we just can't do it. I think when Jimmy Carter set the agency up back in 1979, it was meant to be a disaster relief agency. How do we provide relief to those who are facing their worst day and time ever? And we've morphed into, I will argue that we have the best emergency management system in the country, regardless of what our nation's news media says. we're gonna offer more services from non-governmental organizations active in disaster all the way to the federal government than any country on the globe. But it's become so complex that it's hard for people to navigate different things. just remember that ⁓ the federal government and FEMA is not designed to fix you after hole. So make sure you're properly insured. Make sure you have tangible skills, those types of things.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, I remember you saying people think of FEMA as 9 1 1 but it's not that at all. It's supposed to help a bit, help where you can, but it's it's not this immediate response to fix your problem, right?
Brock: That's correct. And when FEMA becomes 911, it looks like the response during Hurricane Katrina. When the citizenry was unprepared, uninsured, and state and local governments just did not have the assets in place or the strength in place to manage the disaster on their, you know, to a certain degree. So when the federal government is the one that's come in as 911, ⁓ you know, lower your expectations, America.
Christian Schauf: Right. It's kinda like everything else, right? It's ⁓ underwhelming at best. ⁓ all right. So having seen disasters across the country, what keeps you up at night that people aren't thinking about?
Brock: Long term power outages, ⁓ particularly like right now in North Carolina, man, we're getting ready to go through 10 very hot days, ⁓ close to 100, ⁓ which we get to true four seasons. It's not unrealistic for us to have 100 degree days in North Carolina. But more and more of our power grid is being taxed by everybody plugging in cars and plugging in batteries and everything else in the grid is just not where it needs to be in this nation to handle the demand upon it. when you go across, in my opinion, if you have 10 extreme days of heat, people are running their air conditioning, people are doing more things with the power, and it puts things in peril, right?
Christian Schauf: Yeah. Yeah, and and when was the last time our grid was even like rebuilt or is it just they built it once and we're still using the same thing? Because obviously electricity has become a bigger part of people's lives every day. You know, in here in Utah we talk about data centers and population growth, but it's not like they're putting in new electrical systems to support it. They're just kind of using the same stuff that's been here for decades, right?
Brock: And I think. I mean, obviously the energy companies and energy is a very broad term. We're talking about electric generation. We're talking about fuel. We're talking about solar, wind, hydrology. mean, there's, you know, to me, energy resilience is about balance and having multiple avenues to produce power, you know, from nuclear all the way to solar energy, right? You can't just throw out one and expect the other avenue of energy to take over the demand that's put forward. ⁓ I personally believe we need to get to microgrids. I think One of the biggest vulnerabilities that we have in our country is that our Department of Defense many years ago is completely dependent on private sector energy companies to basically render, you know, provide power. You know, and I think that, you know, military bases need to get back to their own micro capabilities. I think in the future, you know, city county planners, you know, they need to look at what emergency power sources are actually in a community. I mean, look at diesel trains, look at... know, electric hybrid bus engines that could be, you know, how can we use buses to be cooling stations, those types of things. We got to get innovative. I mean, how do we plug in some of these power sources that exist in our community ⁓ for emergency purposes as well? We got to rethink that. But I can tell you that a majority of Americans ⁓ You know, a lot of us are dependent on medications that require refrigeration, right? You know, so what if you go three, four, five days without refrigeration in it because of the energy being off? And I'm just not so sure that people think through a plan or a backup idea to manage that problem before it's too late, the power's already off. Yeah, prolonged energy outages scare me the most. I think, you know, if you have prolonged energy outages, the big cities collapse first and have the largest amount of problems and ⁓ numerous problems. And then it eventually reaches out to the rural areas and those who are isolated that are the ones that are going to be paying the price for prolonged energy outages without a plan.
Christian Schauf: And when talk about microgrids, are you talking like Texas, how they have their own infrastructure? Are you talking about solar on every house or what does that look like?
Brock: I mean, it could start out with how can you improve the energy capability of your home, regardless of what the private companies or, you know, government co-op energy companies provide. I mean, you know, but let's be honest. I mean, not everybody can afford a Tesla battery system or, you know, solar power panels. some cases, you know, aesthetically, we've got a lot of work to do on making things look good. But, yeah, I mean, I have two forms of emergency. generators. I have an electric generator that's solar powered and I have a gas power generator. ⁓ And I learned a lot from that. After Hurricane Helene, we were without power for five days. My solar generator did its job for about a day and a half, kept my refrigerator running. But then we went through five days of overcast post-hurricane weather and it became impossible to charge back. So I ended up using my gas generator. ⁓ And honestly, if... If we get to a point where I run out of fuel for my generators, I've got a gas siphon. I'll just suck it out of my truck or your truck.
Christian Schauf: Yep. Yeah, you're gonna use whatever's around at that point, right? I mean that is I know, yeah, maybe that's the next great product. I like it. I like it. ⁓ all right, next question. If you walked into the average American home today, what would be the first three gaps you'd expect to find that people aren't thinking about when it comes to preparedness?
Brock: You need an unchartered gas siphon, you know. That's it. ⁓ so the, the, the boring one is most households are underinsured if not insured properly at all. you know, and I know insurance is really boring and everybody's going to stop this podcast the minute I reached, you know, talk about that. But, you know, I've never seen anybody starved to death after a disaster. But what I have seen is millions of people uninsured or underinsured. Insurance is not a place to try to save money. Because insurance is the first line of defense and it will fix you first. For example, those who have flood insurance in Harvey, when Harvey hit Texas, the average payout was $120,000. The average payout from FEMA if you were uninsured and lost your home was $4,000 to $6,000, Christian. So insurance plays a major role. Now, The next thing I would say are the basic essentials. I don't think people in most households have the ability to produce clean water or have backup food items once they run out or once water's not popping out of that faucet, or they go under restrictions and different things. I do believe that people should be prepared for not just five days, but as long as they can prepare. You know, for as many days as they can prepare. I do believe in that. ⁓ You know, ⁓ and honestly, a little tip too, you know, everybody knows that like there's this unwritten rule that you shouldn't talk about prepping. Forget that. I think we need to have conversations about prepping. You know, it's not like I'm going to be hiding in my neighborhood as a former FEMA administrator. People are going to be asking, you know, for me, you know, for advice and help and, and food. And sometimes what I've started to do is actually save some of the expired like canned food and different things. That's what I'm going to hand out when people come knock on my door.
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, it's ⁓ a, you know, but you know, I do think we have to have those conversations. The next thing is just know how, just the tangible skills of getting things done. And largely the one thing that they're gonna have that they're gonna wish they had was a communication plan. If we can't talk, if our cell phones don't work, where do we meet? How do we reconnect? ⁓ And the scary thing for me is, you know, I travel across the country like you, Christian. mean, like, you know, I'm traveling all over the place. All I have with me if the earthquake happens in California is the carry on bag of luggage. But I always carry, for example, water filtration capability. If I can get water, that will help me. know, clean water will help me, right? You know, that will extend my time in a faraway place when it hits the fan.
Christian Schauf: Yeah. Yep.
Brock: those types of things and I think through those things. I also kind of map out where the local emergency operations center is and in some of these major cities so that I can generally walk the one if I need to and knock on the door to say, hey, former FEMA administrator here to help. But think communications, think through different scenarios and I think that's it. Lack of insurance.
Christian Schauf: Right. Here to help and do have any water? ⁓ Yeah.
Brock: It's a lack of communication planning with their family, secondary communication and the basic essentials of producing water, clean water and having access to food when it doesn't show up in the grocery stores.
Christian Schauf: Yep. And those aren't wildly expensive things to have a plan around. I mean, those are things that everybody could do tomorrow and improve their situation.
Brock: Right. Right. Yeah. mean, what are the low to no cost, tangible skills that I wish we would put forward in? You know, I dare to say our education system, you know, like our public schools and private schools, but can we not take five minutes of one day a week to go over a tangible skill or to think through a problem? Just five minutes, one day. Every Friday morning at 8 a.m., can we think through five minutes of what we should do if there's an earthquake or, you know, whatever? You know, how do we get those tangible skills back? And I can tell you that other countries are doing that, particularly You know, I think with everything, how active the globe is in Europe, you better believe like, ⁓ you know, European countries and the Chinese, they're teaching their kids tangible skills.
Christian Schauf: Yep. And so if you talk about tangible skills, just name a couple you think would be most important, like that you could teach your kids as an example.
Brock: Well, I mean, let's take a look at what's going on around this country. Why do we allow colleges to accept students into their schools that don't know CPR, first aid, or stop the bleed when we know that mass shootings at schools happen all the time? I'm tired of people thinking that they're not going to be the victim.
Christian Schauf: Mm-hmm. Sure.
Brock: That's where I think we got to change that mindset of you are the true first responder in any situation. you know, obtain the tangible skills. And I don't want to be on my soapbox, but you know, why should schools or why should FEMA start looking at every as a liability rather than part of the solution? And so, you know, we've got change some things like, you know, let's start with CPR, first aid. mean, heck, if you're not going to go take an official class, at least Google it.
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, or excuse me, chat it. Googling it is dying, shows my age. I mean, why do we allow people into workplaces where there's been workplace violence and a history of it without being able to help their neighbor or their coworker if something goes down? That's where we should start.
Christian Schauf: Right. Yep. I I I like what you said about being helpful or being a liability. That's that's really what we're trying to do at Uncharted, is my belief is every time a product leaves our warehouse, we're creating assets, not liabilities, in some capacity, right? At least you have the tools and some instructions in your hand that you can do something. But it's really hard to get people away from their daily lives to take a training And I think you're right. I think the place you could do that is school. I mean, we used to do stop, drop, and roll and all that stuff and h you know, do ⁓ tornado drills where I'm from in Wisconsin. ⁓ why not have a couple classes on the things you just mentioned? To me that would go a long ways.
Brock: But But the beauty of your product, the beauty of your products is they are educational. They, you know, even if you have no knowledge whatsoever, like the 72 pack that I have, I have several, have, you know, one for each one of my boys. I've got a son that goes to college six and a half hours away. At least he's got a 72 hour pack and it's pretty self-explanatory on what he needs, when he needs it. And then like, you know, I find the reason we, got connected if you remember Christian is is the first product I bought was the Zeus battery. Well that Zeus battery empowered me to help my neighbor. The first person I used it on was a close friend of mine whose truck died at a ball game in a parking lot. And it was the first test and he has a big diesel truck. And, ⁓ you know, it wasn't that I got to start off with a small economy size car. It was the biggest truck in the parking lot and it fired right up. And quite frankly, I didn't, I didn't even have time to charge it and it wound up having to use it again with one of my kids, you know? So it was reliable. It was there, but just by having that product or that capability, it enabled me to also be a good neighbor too. So it's one, it's instructive. instructional, but too, it empowered me to be a good neighbor.
Christian Schauf: And it's it's the reason we do that, is because I don't believe people are gonna take time to train, which I wish they would, I really do. But people's lives are busy. If you can give them the instructions in hand that they can actually follow when their adrenaline's spiking, I feel like that's the best solution we can have for a lot of people. ⁓ so yeah, I'm with you there, man. It's just it's about creating heroes and helpers. I say that all the time. But guys like you starting the truck for somebody, now imagine you're in a situation where it's really cold or really hot and you need to get that air conditioning running for grandma or you got little kids that are gonna start freezing. Doesn't sound like that was the situation there, but if you can get an engine running, it changes the game massively.
Brock: And I think too, people don't pay attention to what's being on. mean, we live in fast and food news society. If you can't tweet it and text it in 140 characters, then it's just gonna go right over people's heads or it's gonna be ignored. But we've had many conversations. What does an El Nino year mean? Well, it means get ready for wildfires and big ones. for the next several months and we're already starting to see them pop up and they're be bad out in the Midwest and West. So now that I'm telling you that, have you gone around your house and tried to help, how do I make my house more fire wise? My yard, my landscape and getting rid of dead fuel out of those types of things. You know, so now that you know that El Nino also means this winter we're going to have freak nor'easter snowstorms that start in the Gulf Coast and go all the way through New York, Boston, know, Maine and dump copious amounts of snow. It means we're going to get tornadoes in areas that don't typically get them. Maybe we get less hurricanes, but don't, but like I never care one bit about a hurricane seasonal forecast. You can predict 14 or 35. It only takes one to absolutely rearrange your life or kill your loved ones. And so who cares how many they predict. Hurricanes are going to happen this year at some point, but it only takes one to landfall and ruin a community.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, I think there's two hundred and fifty thousand acres burned already in Utah this year. And that's crazy. Yeah.
Brock: Yeah, four corners there, burning up right now. We're starting to see California's already had a few outside Orange County, inside, outside Orange County area right off the bat. I mean, it's not like these things ⁓ are just happening out of the blue. Be ready for them. And if you've got to leave, if you've got to evacuate, mean, I'm a big believer in bugging in rather than bugging out.
Christian Schauf: I agree. Yes.
Brock: Having the supplies in your house because the chances of you having to bug out are pretty slim in most cases. Most of the emergencies are gonna be where you're in your home. How do you use your home as a safe haven? ⁓ And how do you enhance the capability of your existing home? But if you got a bug out, like wildfires and very quickly again, how do you communicate if your kids are at school and you're at work and you're... another loved one's at home, whatever, and then what do you take with you ⁓ to get out? And so I don't think people think through that, but if it's wildfire season and the warnings are going up for wildfire in your community, you might ought to have some of that stuff prepackaged and loaded up just in case.
Christian Schauf: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think we kinda answered this one, but what's the difference between being prepared and just buying an emergency kit? I'm not trying to shoot uncharted in the foot here, but I think, you know, I I tell people all the time, ⁓ buying our gear is a a piece of the pie. It's a piece of the puzzle. ⁓ I think, you know, we talk about four pillars and that's resources, resourcefulness.
Brock: No.
Christian Schauf: physical and mental fitness and community is how I look at kind of the buckets and maybe I don't know if you have an opinion on that, but I do think that gear is a part of the piece, but how do you think about preparedness? It it's all these things, right? It's knowing your community, it's having a plan, it's all the things you just talked about.
Brock: Well, what gear are you buying, Christian, and from who? Is it any good? Will it work when you need it? That's the first question. So, I've bought plenty of pathetic survival gear in the past.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, yeah.
Brock: And when you start to look at, and I'm not blowing smoke, Christian, I'm a fan, but when you look at the capabilities of the backpack, the fact that I can take a 72-hour backpack and pretty much use it as a flotation device because of how well it is crafted and put together. it's gonna be there when I need it. A lot of people just blindly buy whatever they see coming across, you know, an Amazon commercial or a TV commercial, whatever, and then they realize when they need it, you know, it's not there, the batteries aren't charged or don't hold a charge. mean, who knows, right? Or they make common mistakes. So it's one thing if you just buy supplies. It's another thing if you know how to use it and maintain it. You know, how many people Christian buy a generator and can't get it cranked? It doesn't crank. They don't have the starter fluid around to maybe get it cranked. And then they don't realize that they have to keep using that starter fluid. The carburetor is going to gunk up. How do you clean that? You know, they don't, if you don't test it before it happens, it's not going to be ready for you when you need it.
Christian Schauf: Right. Right.
Brock: And I think it's just not just buying supplies, it's understanding what you're buying, why you're buying it, and how it's going to work and how long it's going to work.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, I I mean two things to that. You said earlier that the goal of insurance is not to buy the cheapest insurance. It's to buy the stuff that's actually going to protect you when you need it. That's one of the biggest hurdles we've faced as a company is competing against what was historically this commodity based market where you had a ninety-nine dollar kit. It's like something you'd buy at a county fair in a tent. You know, it was kind of more like a little kid wants to go play in the woods with it, but it's not gonna make a difference. You wanna buy stuff that's gonna make a difference.
Brock: Right. Yeah.
Christian Schauf: ⁓ two to that what you just said, I've I've been on a lot of podcasts and I've always said the outdoors and camping and hunting and then emergencies and survival, they're like twin brothers. It's just that one you choose to do and one happens to you. And I've always said don't make the Super Bowl the first game you play every year, right? Like get out there, go use the stuff, understand how to do it, understand how to start a fire when it's snowing. I was elk hunting last year, this crazy storm came in and
Brock: Right.
Christian Schauf: We were waiting for elk and I was like, let's see if we start a fire. I mean it's just a good rep, right? Take what you got, see if you get a fire started because emergencies don't happen when it's seventy two and sunny and you're standing in an aisle at Target buying the cheapest stuff. It happens when your back's against the wall, conditions are horrible, and you've got to make what you have work. And the better the you have, the better gear you have, the better your odds.
Brock: You're right, rarely do disasters happen between the hours of eight and five when we're conveniently at home or whatever. mean, you know, like, or whatever. Now, you know, it's interesting, my wife and I were just in Kansas and there was severe weather moving through last week and tornado watches and warnings going off in the middle of the night. And it was interesting because more people get killed in the middle of the night because they're lethargic. They don't want to get up. They don't want to eat. They turn the, they turn the alert notifications off. and the big tornadoes hit, tornadoes killed more people at night than they do during the day because of that very reason. And it's interesting because we used to have conversations, gosh, this was even 15, 20 years ago, how do you get people's TVs in their houses to flip on and wake them up? know, tornado emergency, know, a warning and then emergency, you know, like how do you do that? But then again, like it would never fly because that's Big Brother and...
Christian Schauf: Hm.
Brock: everything else, but how many times are we gonna see this year bad tornadoes that go through the middle of the night kill more people than they do during the day?
Christian Schauf: Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. So so flipping the script a little bit, people think about this. They've done certain things. What do you see people like what disasters do you see people over-preparing for? And then what disasters do you see people under-preparing for? So you mentioned earlier Power Grid. That seems to be like probably one of the higher priority ones. But are there are there monsters out there that people don't have to worry about? And which ones are they ignoring that they really should worry about?
Brock: So I'm going to take a different spin on that. I don't think people sit down and honestly assess their risk and vulnerabilities based on their geographic location where they live. Let's start with that. You know, where I live in North Carolina is pretty quiet compared to most places, but I have hurricane threats from the East Coast and Gulf Coast. I I also have threats for severe weather, obviously in the foothills and flooding and different things. I'm also very close to the edge of a 50 mile EPZ from a nuclear power plant. You know, so. You know, I don't think people really assess their true vulnerability. If I'm in a big city, holy cow, man, civil disturbances and different things, you know, like if things really start to collapse, how do you get out? You know, it's a
Christian Schauf: Yes.
Brock: And then again, I really wish people could just learn the basic necessities of saving another person's life. That would help, regardless of your risk and vulnerabilities. Because a lot of people, I mean... what you're going to see. think one in four of us, if you look at the statistics I once read, one in four of us is going to have to do CPR in our lifetime. It's either going to be on your kids or your parents, your aging parents. And so, you know, if we know that 25 % of us is going to have to perform that in a day-to-day situation, well, how do we start shaming people into, you don't know CPR? Wow, you can't get a job here. You know, I need people that, you know, you know, how do we do
Christian Schauf: Well I like that.
Brock: that. So it's a different approach. Assess your vulnerabilities, then what supplies, what plans do you need to overcome those and walk through them, test them out. ⁓
Christian Schauf: It's Yeah. One in four of us are gonna need it. It's probably one in two hundred actually have the training, right? I mean that's that's pretty bad. So Brocky there. ⁓ I lost you for a second, Brock. Yeah, I gotcha. Like I said, maiden voyage here. I think this system's designed to kind of sharpen everything up and download as we go, so I I think we're okay, but ⁓ we'll cut the we'll cut that part out. Sorry about that. Yeah. Here's our first test. So back to technology. How do you think technology has made us more resilient and where has it made us more vulnerable?
Brock: That was a power glitch on my end. I got a different approach on where the vulnerabilities are. warfare information. ⁓ China and Russia are wonderful at this. I mean, they're they're really good at manipulating what people read and see. ⁓ I would say declassified reports would tell you that if there is something controversial going on in this country, which is very rarely right, Christian, there's very rarely controversial going on politics or whatever. ⁓ whatever it may be, lawsuit, you know, Supreme Court rulings to rights to movements, whatever it may be.
Christian Schauf: Never. Never happens. Yeah.
Brock: Chinese and the Russian know how to exploit our social media and probably own a third of the conversation. They don't pick a side, they just make sure that we are arguing and hate each other. They'll say, Christian's product at Uncharted is the best, Christian's products at Uncharted are the worst. And then they just start getting us, you know, arguing in between. They have actually been very successful at pulling off protest on a United States American soil, just through kicks and giggles through social media, getting people pissed off.
Christian Schauf: Have you heard about the dead internet theory? Do you know what that means? So we've reached that point now, and that's that over half of the accounts and the comments and everything on the internet are bot generated. So that goes back to what you're saying. If you look at everything happening on the internet and you're like, I wonder who this person is, over half of them are bot farms designed to do exactly that.
Brock: No, no, ⁓ yeah. Yeah, and and I and I see it. I mean, we can have conversations at the dinner table with our family, extended family and friends and you know, whatever else. And and literally, if you look at what just happened, you know, when Russia attacked the Ukraine, I mean, you could see it coming from a mile away. There was a three-part playbook. They they started the misinformation. Why is the West stoking fears of war? There's Nazis over in the Ukraine. We're gonna go liberate the Ukraine. These are just military exercises. Why are you stoking fears of war? Then they start the cyber attacks. They're testing their infrastructure. They're hitting Ukraine's infrastructure. Well, they've done that in the United States pretty, pretty well already. The only thing we haven't done is start trading blows, you know, lava missiles. And so
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, to me, the information age is nobody knows what to believe anymore. Now, ⁓ I will tell you that we saw this activity in hurricane response. We saw we saw them getting involved in arguments of governor so-and-so's doing a great job, Governor So-and-so's doing a terrible job. There's a shelter over here. No, the shelters are open over there. You know, ⁓ we saw cyber attacks a cron critical infrastructure where hurricanes are making landfall. You know, so the information age is we've got to teach. on a regular basis, information warfare, misinformation, you know, that is ⁓ breaking apart, you know, our our ability to love our neighbors. You know, we we we've gotta start teaching businesses and people to recognize what's real and what's not.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, creating community. I mean, that's the only way humans have gotten through anything is working together, whether it was fighting off an invading army or bringing down a woolly mammoth. Nobody does this on their own, right? You need a team, a community around you. And back to your misinformation campaigns, I I do see that and I do think that's a huge threat on our society in general.
Brock: Yep. Yep. And ⁓ misinformation about, you know, look at look at all the stuff around a pandemic. I mean, COVID, you would think people would come together, but man, all we did was mask into a political sign. We or get the shot, don't get the shot. I mean, I'm not sure what we learned other than pandemics are we got a long way to go. You know. ⁓
Christian Schauf: Yeah. Yeah, I I I I thought people would learn from that, but I I I'm fearful for the next one because I think it'll just be a volume two on the same story, unfortunately.
Brock: Yep. At least we seem to be coming around the World Cup together.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, that is true. It's I saw a thing the other day and it was like ⁓ isn't it amazing when you get the governments out of the way how well we all get along? You know, like these people are coming over, they're like, Hey, the US is awesome. I've been to a I went to a Bucky's today, like I had barbecue and ⁓ it was just it was really cool to see that. ⁓ I wish that was amplified.
Brock: Yeah. Well and on that now, Christian, getting the getting the ⁓ the government out of the way. I mean, again, if you look back at who owns the infrastructure that we depend on, like when you flip that switch and the lights come on magically, it's not the government. You know, it's a private sector energy company. I mean, you every time you pick up and use that phone to look at misinformation, you know, who powers that? It's not the government, it's the it's it's the private sector. So what we have to do as a nation Is we have to identify what I call community lifelines. Community lifelines are the things in communities that have to be working, that if they're not working, then people are dying or life routine is disrupted. So what is that? That's your hospital systems, that's your financial systems, that's your power, your bulk water systems, your sewer systems, your ⁓ transportation, ⁓ farm-to-table food, not bottles of water and MREs, but farm-to-table logistics, right?
Christian Schauf: Food.
Brock: And if we know what those things are, then why is the federal government not bending over backwards to protect them regardless of what happens, whether it's a cyber attack, North Korea popping off missiles or tornadoes? And so that's my frustration with the federal government is the private sector who owns 85% of the majority of the capability in this country that you depend on as a citizen should be driving the federal government on where real resilience should be, rather than the government thinking that they understand resilience. And the other the other frustrating piece of where we are as a nation is if the federal government does know all these things can happen, like Russia can shut down the colonial pipeline and fuel can stop flowing from Texas to Virginia, or EMPs can happen or p pandemics can happen, then why are we not educating citizens on how to overcome these things now rather than when they happen?
Christian Schauf: Right.
Brock: You know, if we know it's gonna happen, then why why aren't we spending time educating people on what the real possibilities are and the things to do? You know. ⁓ but I I believe in bolstering what I call the community lifelines. And that was a doctrine I started at FEMA. And then how do we get like when the power companies want to come trim your trees to reduce wildfire threats, let them do it. Let them do it. ⁓ if they tell you not to ⁓ you know, to conserve energy. Help them out. That's where you get involved as a citizen. That doesn't take any brains. It just takes willpower of saying, you know what, today I'm not going to have every light in the house on and every fan running or whatever. You know. And it does help the infrastructure. And that's where we've got to go. Like it's a partnership. It truly is a partnership between the government and the people.
Christian Schauf: Right. Right. Yep, yeah. That's sage advice for sure. ⁓ if the power in the internet, the cell service disappeared for seven days, what would the average family struggle with first? Or what are the big things that they are maybe not expecting that where their life would dramatically change?
Brock: If the power was off for a week, what say that again now?
Christian Schauf: Yeah, so I'm just I think we've kind of covered this, but ⁓ sticking to my script a little bit, but let's say the power goes out, the internet goes out, communication goes out. What what are the first things that are gonna happen to just the average family that they maybe aren't expecting?
Brock: ⁓ they're gonna be figuring out how to protect the the the food in their refrigerator. then they're gonna quickly shift to, I mean, look at all the people who are like insulin dependent or medication dependent. They're gonna there's gonna be a run on you know, insulin issues and different things, which is you know, if you have a prolonged power outage, you know, down the road, if we ever went, you know, went to war, I mean. Just the lack of access to insulin is gonna kill a lot of people. And you know, and and I I think we take for granted modern medicine and just the access to pharmacies and different things, that's one I would really think through. People are gonna see some really hard times, you know, if they can't get access to ⁓ you know, to To the medicines. The next thing is we live in such a digital world and we're being desensitized to cash money that so much, you know, whether it's cryptocurrencies or digital Venmos or whatever it may be, access to that goes out the window when your batteries die and networks don't work, you know, those types of things. And so just the the ability to get stuff done from a financial standpoint comes to a halt, whether it's a private business or a household. Large cities, I think safety and security really starts to collapse after a week, you know, particularly if there's a heat. I mean if if I'm Russia and China, I'm shutting the heat, I'm shutting your I'm shutting your grids down in big cities during summers or or or or or cold snaps. And ⁓ they know that. They test, you know, they're they're hitting they understand how our community lifelines and infrastructure work better than we do. You know, for example, we do see They realize that our whole entire health and medical system is based on just-in-time insurance reimbursement, right? So if you want to monkey around with that, then start sending cyber attacks on hospital billing and accounting, which is what's been done over the last year. Go look up how many times hospital systems have been hacked. That's why all of us have received letters in the mail about our our information's been stolen. You know, I've gotten three in the last three years, you know.
Christian Schauf: Right, right.
Brock: ⁓ look at what what happens when things like the colonial pipeline gets shut down and magically come back online before gas stations start running out of fuel and food stops showing up at grocery stores. I mean, you know, but but but if the power goes off for a week, it's it's gonna be, you know, how do you maintain your perishable perishable items from food to to to to medicine? And then I think safety and security starts to really unfold and become real difficult in big. Cities. ⁓ I think the rural areas are gonna be okay because people tend to be more resourceful out there. But the medically fragile, medically fragile is ⁓ trying to produce heat and cold and during extreme weather events, like what we're going through in the southeast right now with the heat. It's really hard. Like, you know, Christian, is there a way that we can solve air conditioning when it doesn't work? Is there a way that we can solve heat in a safe manner that doesn't kill people from carbon monoxide in your home? You know, those types of things. I think you really need to be thinking through how you stay warm and how you stay cool. When the power's off, particularly. And this is when it goes off. Is ⁓ you look at Texas and the ERCOT system, it shut off during the ten coldest days, not the ten hottest days. And some people would say that it shut off because everybody decided to go plug in a portable heater all at the same time. You know, and overloaded the system. ⁓ I'm sure there's a more scientific and ⁓ you know, answer, but that's what I heard, you know. ⁓
Christian Schauf: Interesting. Have have you read that book? I think it's One Second After. Is that the name of it? Yep. Everybody should read that book. Because back to your point about insulin and and the domino effect of what happens. It's a fictional book, but basically an EMP hits, power goes out, the main character's daughter has an insulin need. ⁓ he goes through all those things. ⁓ that book really I thought was just incredible and just
Brock: Yeah. Yep, big fan. ⁓
Christian Schauf: having a fictional story kind of guide you through how to think about your own preparedness. I mean I I just go ahead.
Brock: Well, yeah. Yeah, and so much of that book and so much of disaster survival is getting your mind right. So if communication is cut off, failures in communication are the biggest lesson learned in disaster response. If you can't communicate, you can't respond and recover. So in a situation like EMP electromagnetic poles, where you know electromagnetic poles shuts down and fries anything with a computer, anything built after 1975, basically. You know, if it if it shuts down and fries, and and I don't think it'll be as bad as the book dictates, but it could be bad like that in many areas. But like, you know, if you can't communicate and you can't obtain situational awareness. Man, you want to talk about community leaders having to pop up and be in charge and make people, you know, get people's minds right to, you know, their their minds right to survive. That's a big piece of survival in the in that scenario too, is, you know, how do you manage the assets that you have if you don't know how long The situation's gonna last either. You know, so don't go tearing into your disaster supplies. Just, you know, think through, you know, the rationing piece and the proportions and different things, right? And and then that book, too. Everybody thinks they're just gonna go out and hunt. I'd love to see it. You know. I don't think most people could catch a fish out of Lake Hickory over here, you know, but
Christian Schauf: Yeah, absolutely.
Brock: And and everybody's gonna be doing that by the way. You know, so
Christian Schauf: I I You know, I I hunt a lot. I think everybody knows that that knows me. And I was actually talking to Bill Rapier. Bill was a devgrew guy, SEAL Team 6, did some of the biggest missions ever. And he he has this like Minuteman training thing that he does. And I spent a few days with him on his compound learning from him. And I was talking through some of that. And I'm like, I'll be good. I'm gonna I'm gonna be hunting. And he's like, dude, everybody's gonna be hunting. Those the elk will be gone in a month. And
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: It actually made me pause because I hadn't really th my general belief was to your point, most people don't know how to hunt, so I'm gonna be fine. I think I'll be better off than most, having the experience I did, because just picking up a rifle and walking into the woods is not you know, it's not that easy. But if that resource starts getting taxed at a level it never has, he's totally right. It's gonna go away. It's gonna get exponentially harder in no time.
Brock: Songbirds are gonna disappear. I mean, you know, it's ⁓ you know it's interesting, but you know, it's ⁓ the mental aspect of something like that's gonna be one of the hardest things to overcome. People will lose their mind and start taking care of number one. And and a big part of that is is what tangible skills do you I mean here's the question. When you look in the mirror, what do I want you to do? What tangible skills do you bring to the table?
Christian Schauf: Yep, absolutely.
Brock: Hello, hello.
Christian Schauf: Well, so two more questions for you. If someone's listening right now and let's say they had a thousand dollars in one weekend, they're like, Okay, I'm gonna go get prepared. Where would you recommend them spend their time and money first? What would be the first steps? Like, okay, I'm in, I believe you, but I'm on a budget. Where should I start?
Brock: Outside of insurance, okay, putting insurance aside. You know, like again, that prop being properly insured is the first line of defense. ⁓ if I had a thousand bucks, man, I want portable energy. Christian, you know, ⁓ I want I want some type of ⁓ I want the ability to ⁓ produce power, you know, go look at a go leak it go look at a small inverter generator, something that would help me maintain my refrigerator, at least power my refrigerator for a day and a half, you know, or power a fan for a little while. I I wanna I want power for a thousand dollars. You know, that's what I want.
Christian Schauf: So from my from my perspective, I have ⁓ I've got a goal zero, not a huge one, but a good battery pack. I've got a couple of them and I've got solar panels. And then I purposely bought a Ford truck when they started putting the generators and the pickup beds on those things. I don't know if you've seen that. But now I've got a redundancy there, right? If it's stormy, if it's wet. And yeah, I'm with you. And and and I bought a house that had a fireplace and I've got enough wood to last months that I
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: Instead of going to the gym some nights, I chop wood. I did it last night. Filled up a couple loads in the Polaris. To me, that's resiliency, right? You're out in nature, you're having a good time, you're chopping some wood. The fire you're if if the power goes out and it's cold, I I can keep this house warm for months with the wood I have. I've got the generator to keep the food cold, and then I've got the truck as a backup as long as I keep that thing gassed up. And that's something I always tell people is like when things feel dicey, don't let your gas tank get less than half. You just never know.
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: when your credit card's gonna stop working and there's a line of two hundred cars at the gas station, if you got a full tank of gas, that's buying you days, you know, and that's pretty important. So those aren't huge steps, but I'm with you there. I'm with you there.
Brock: Yep. Yeah. And get a gas siphon. Again, man, we need the uncharted gas siphon with my picture on it. Yeah. I'd want portable power. you know ⁓
Christian Schauf: Okay. We're gonna call it the Brock. And it and it it just sucks, right? It just sucks gas. No, that's funny, man. ⁓
Brock: I've got a goal zero two. It does its job. What I like about the electric generator is it's quiet. It doesn't say, hey, look at me, I'm over here like a gas generator does. But I like it because I use it inside my house. ⁓ but the but I do believe that the solar power, the the electric generators, that you know, they've got to get better handling things like a coffee pot. Anything that produces You need a fan or anything that produces heat drains that battery very quickly, which is frustrating. Right. So, you know, on a blue sky day, I would test different things with that generator to really understand how much time you've got. And and I think people forget, you don't have to leave your refrigerator plugged into the solar generator. Just keep it cool. Plug it in every every so often just to keep it cool.
Christian Schauf: Yes.
Brock: You know, yeah. I've got a Demetic as well. I've got a Demetic, a small Demetic cooler. that's a ref has a refrigeration and freezing capability that I can plug into that too. It works pretty well. I can get a day and a half out of that if it was just plugged in continuously. You know. ⁓ but ⁓ yeah, I would try to I would I'd want power. Power crap.
Christian Schauf: Yep. Good answer. Okay. ⁓ I think that's it, man. I appreciate it. ⁓
Brock: No. You said one more. You said there was a last one. What do you want people to do this weekend? Wasn't that wasn't that Ed or something?
Christian Schauf: ⁓ yeah, yeah, that was the other part. I think we kind of answered it, but what's something every family should do this weekend that could improve their resilience? So if they got the thousand dollars, I think go get a generator is probably what you're saying. But on top of that, maybe what are some things that is it putting a plan together for their family? Is it talking to their neighbors? Like what are some things they could do this week to improve their situation?
Brock: Good week. Go meet your neighbor. That's what I was gonna say. Go meet your neighbor. ⁓ if you don't know them, get to know him, try to get to know them. If you do know them, reconnect with them. ⁓ because you may be dependent on them ⁓ in the future, and vice versa. And ⁓ you know, I I think that's important. ⁓ we're gonna need people to gather together to survive some of the worst things that can be thrown at us from a technological standpoint or mother nature standpoint, and It doesn't cost any money to go meet your neighbor.
Christian Schauf: Amen. I believe in that as well. Okay, one last thing here. I'm gonna have you rank five emergency situations from the most scary to the least scary disasters for an American family. Okay. The five are a natural disaster. So that could be hurricane, wildfire, tornado. So natural disaster, a major cyber attack.
Brock: Yeah.
Christian Schauf: Economic collapse slash recession, pandemic or civil unrest?
Brock: ⁓ gosh, okay. ⁓ say those again.
Christian Schauf: Cyberattack, natural disaster, economic collapse, pandemic, or civil
Brock: Pandemic, pandemic hands down, we haven't seen the worst. We haven't seen the worst. ⁓ and I don't like where like biological warfare's gone, but pandemic, hands down. ⁓ cyber attack that creates prolonged power outages ⁓ scares me to death too. ⁓ those two that that keeps me up at night. Civil disturbance in mat in in large cities. ⁓ civil disturbances that are prolonged and get out of control that overform that that overwhelm law enforcement. Of the natural disasters, tornado F5 tornadoes are the absolute scariest. There is nowhere to hide. People forget that the Fajita scale, the F scale, That was designed to measure tornadoes was originally des ⁓ developed, if I remember correctly, to measure nuclear bomb blasts. And if you have ever been around an F-5 tornado and seen the aftermath, there is nothing left. It looks like a nuclear bomb went off. I never want to see one of those. And if I do, I hope it's at a distance, a very you know, pretty far distance. ⁓ tornadoes are no joke. No joke.
Christian Schauf: Yes. Yep. Yep. And then where would you put ⁓ so then economic collapse would be last, I guess.
Brock: Yeah. Hmm. I mean, that's right on par with a civil disturbance if it's an economic collapse. I mean, I think Yeah, the civil disturbance, cyber attack, and economic collapse are kind of lateral to me. You know, ⁓ pandemic, those three natural disasters. But what's most frequent, probably the cyber attacks are more frequent than natural disasters with them being second. You know.
Christian Schauf: Or or a cyber attack. It's funny how they all intertwine a little bit, right?
Brock: Natural disaster 20 seconds. So design your plan on frequency, most likely, you know, most frequent to ⁓ highest impact. You know. Yeah, but sit down and think through it. What are your vulnerabilities around you?
Christian Schauf: Yep. Well Brock, that's it, man. That was an hour of great advice. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you being part of the team. ⁓ it's an honor to have you helping us out, trying to make the world a better place. And ⁓ anything anything you want to leave with here? But this was really great, man. I learned a lot too.
Brock: Yeah. Yeah. go USA.
Christian Schauf: Yeah, big I don't know when this will come out, but there's a big USA soccer game Wednesday and Brock ⁓ Brock's a big soccer guy, so ⁓ pretty exciting.
Brock: Yeah. And Hickory FC and Hickory FC Hickory, North Carolina, our football club. ⁓
Christian Schauf: That's your team. You got it, man. Well, thank you for the time, Brock. I super appreciate it. All right. See ya.
Brock: ⁓ Take care. We'll see you. Thank you.
Christian Schauf: Okay.
