What the Super Rich Know, But Ordinary Americans Do Not (Video)

By: The Voice of Reason

In 2015 Bloomberg article titled, “The Rich Are Different; They’re Better Investors,” Noah Smith makes the case that the gap between the super rich and the poor is only going to continue to compound over time, getting worse, not better. As a general rule, Smith says the elite and the well-funded tend to have access to better, but more expensive information, which helps them to earn higher returns. The poor however, are often unable to buy such important data, and therefore can continue to expect lower returns.

When many people think of “prepping,” or “survivalism,” almost immediately images of the “woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, or the religious doomsayer,” come to mind, but have you ever wondered why that is? Could it be that people are “conditioned” over time via the mass media to subconsciously adopt the negative stereotype? For what purpose?

In a recent article in the New Yorker titled, Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich, one very wealthy prepper says that taking precautions is unfairly stigmatized. “They don’t put tinfoil on your head if you’re the President and you go to Camp David,” but they do put tinfoil on your head if you have the means and you take steps to protect your family should a problem occur,” he says. He brings up a valid point, does he not?

As a result of issues on the deterioration of American institutions including the mainstream media and the education system, the skyrocketing national debt, and Obama’s non-stop stoking of racial tensions, Silicon Valley billionaire Steve Huffman says that many of his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire friends believe the risk of large-scale civil unrest is extremely high, and the breakdown of society is imminent. Furthermore, Huffman mentions his concern about one of the same conditions that many global economic experts have discussed, which is the issue of when there is “some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping…”

In an interview not long ago with Bill Holter, one of the world’s leading forensic economists, Holter explained how every society, even American society, is only 72 hours from pure anarchy, because of issues like shipping, or supply lines, etc. Huffman estimates that roughly fifty-plus percent of those same billionaire friends previously mentioned have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad.

What percentage of the super elite do you suppose not only got that wealthy, but have stayed that wealthy, without having access to reliable financial information? Probably not very many, right?

So, if you believe the premise laid out Noah Smith, that the rich and the well-funded tend to have access to better, but more expensive information, then at what point do Americans that are currently riding the wave of “Trumphoria” come back to earth, and realize that the very same danger of economic collapse that existed a year ago under Barack Obama, is every bit as real today as it was then?

Will President Trump be able to slow down the economic tsunami that is headed right for us? Based on much of what we’ve learned during his short time in office, there is every reason to believe that he probably will slow it down a bit, which is all the more reason to prepare while there is time. The sooner every day Americans come to terms with the reality that the far better informed super rich have, the better off they and their families will be.

The following video, and the article afterward both summarize The New Yorker’s Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich, and to help provide some perspective on how much effort the rich are putting into their prepping efforts, I’ve included several additions videos for your enjoyment.

Michael Snyder writes:

Once upon a time, “prepping” was something that was considered to be on “the lunatic fringe” of society. But in 2017, wealthy elitists are actually the most hardcore preppers of all. This is particularly true in places such as Silicon Valley, where a whole host of young tech moguls are putting a tremendous amount of time, effort and money into preparing for apocalyptic scenarios. So while interest in prepping among the general population has fallen extremely low right now, the election of Donald Trump has given liberal wealthy elitists even more urgency to prepare for what they believe is a very uncertain future.

In the January 30th, 2017 edition of the New Yorker, reporter Evan Osnos has done an extraordinary job of profiling these wealthy elitists that are “getting ready for the crackup of civilization”. One of the people that he interviewed was Steve Huffman, the young co-founder and CEO of Reddit…

Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”

According to the article, Huffman estimates that “fifty-plus percent” of his elite friends in Silicon Valley have some form of “apocalypse insurance”. Needless to say, that number would be far higher than for the general population as a whole.

Another tech mogul that was interviewed by Osnos for the story was former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez…

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

As you can see, a lot of these liberal elitists are actually secretly stashing away lots of guns and ammunition.

So don’t believe everything that you read about them being “anti-gun”.

Other big names in Silicon Valley have decided that having a property on the other side of the planet is the best form of “apocalypse insurance”. The following comes from a story about Paypal founder Peter Thiel in the New York Times…

Mr. Thiel’s admiration for New Zealand is longstanding. “Utopia,” he once called it. He has an investment firm in the country that has put millions into local start-ups. He also owns lavish properties there, which his Silicon Valley friends hope to fly to in the event of a worldwide pandemic.

And of course Thiel is far from alone. So many wealthy individuals are buying up property in New Zealand these days that it is actually becoming a significant political issue over there. In fact, it is being reported that foreigners purchased an astounding 3500 square kilometers during the first ten months of 2016…

Statistics showed foreigners had bought over 3500 square kilometers of New Zealand in the first ten months of 2016, which is over four times as much as they did in the same period in 2010.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker that New Zealand had become the hot topic among Silicon Valley leaders lately.

“Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.”

Hoffman estimated that over half of the Silicon Valley insiders were into preparedness – especially since anti-elite sentiment has risen around the globe in recent years. It was intensified by events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, he added.

The article in the New Yorker mentions a man named Larry Hall, who many of the super rich have come to know in recent years. Larry is the C.E.O. of the Survival Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo. The video below includes footage of Hall’s underground paradise.

According to the article in the New Yorker, the original silo of Hall’s complex was built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike. The interior can support a total of seventy-five people. It has enough food and fuel for five years off the grid; by raising tilapia in fish tanks, and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps, with renewable power, it could function indefinitely, Hall said.

In a crisis, his SWAT-team-style trucks (“the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-calibre”) will pick up any owner within four hundred miles. Residents with private planes can land in Salina, about thirty miles away. In his view, the Army Corps did the hardest work by choosing the location. “They looked at height above sea level, the seismology of an area, how close it is to large population centers,” he said.

Take a look at “the Pit-Bull VX”

So are these wealthy elitists ahead of the curve, or are they just being paranoid?

Only time will tell, but they didn’t become exceedingly wealthy in the first place by being stupid.

As I discussed yesterday on The Most Important News, there are certainly reasons to be optimistic now that Donald Trump has become president, but there are also lots of reasons to be prepping harder than ever.

We should be hopeful for the future and working for a better tomorrow, but we also need to understand that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable.

And most of us think that it is just common sense to purchase insurance for our homes, our cars, our health, our lives and so many other things, and yet most of the population is completely unprepared for a major catastrophic event.

It is a good thing to have balance in life. My wife and I are very proud preppers, and there won’t ever be a time when we aren’t prepping.

But we also live our lives without any fear. We know that the world is going to get crazier and crazier, but we do not believe that it is a time to dig a hole and try to hide from the world.

Rather, now is a time to rise up and become the people that we were created to be.

This year my wife and I are going to be taking on some new adventures, and these new adventures are going to give us a bigger voice than ever before.

Someone once told me that life is like a coin. You can spend it any way that you want, but you can only spend it once.

We don’t want to spend our lives paying bills and killing time.

Instead, we want to do all that we can to make a difference and to change the world.

So unlike these wealthy elitists, let us not be in fear of what is coming. There is no other time in history that I would have rather lived than right here and right now, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Finally, since not everyone can afford multi-million dollar bunkers of doom like the super rich can, in the last video, take a look at some much more modestly (but still pricey) bunkers from Atlas Survival Shelters. 

Priced at under $100,000, the shelters are quite luxurious when compared to what life would be like above ground if/when a major crisis hits, but for families that recognize the threats we face are very real, it might be viable option for them… 

THE VOICE OF REASON is the pen name of Michael DePinto, a graduate of Capital University Law School, and an attorney in Florida. Having worked in the World Trade Center, along with other family and friends, Michael was baptized by fire into the world of politics on September 11, 2001. Michael’s political journey began with tuning in religiously to whatever the talking heads on television had to say, then Michael became a “Tea-Bagging” activist as his liberal friends on the Left would say, volunteering within the Jacksonville local Tea Party, and most recently Michael was sworn in as an attorney. Today, Michael is a major contributor to www.BeforeItsNews.com, he owns and operates www.thelastgreatstand.com, where Michael provides what is often very ‘colorful’ political commentary, ripe with sarcasm, no doubt the result of Michael’s frustration as he feels we are witnessing the end of the American Empire. The topics Michael most often weighs in on are: Martial Law, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm, Economic Issues, Government Corruption, and Government Conspiracy.