MP3 The Special Operations of Preparedness_ Interview with David Jones

David Jones is a retired special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He has had a diverse career in law enforcement and has also written fiction novels. His experiences have shaped his approach to preparedness, emphasizing the need for individuals to be self-reliant and not rely solely on the government. Jones believes that prepping is a practical mindset that involves being prepared for various scenarios, from emergencies to financial collapses. He also discusses his transition from writing law enforcement training materials to fiction, which allows him to explore more nuanced and relatable characters. Many of his characters are based on real people in his life, including himself and his family members. Hey, everyone, it's Kellene, the Preparedness Pro, here with my awesome guest. I'm so excited to have him, David Jones. David, let me tell everybody just a little bit about you because you're pretty awesome. David's a retired special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, otherwise known as OSI, you guys. So during his very, very interesting career, he conducted hundreds of criminal investigations, worked on counterintelligence, anti-terrorism, basically he's a dude's dude, okay? He was also the superintendent of the United States Air Force Special Investigations Academy. He had over eight deployments to the Middle East, serving several years in Europe, and you can see all these aspects of his career influencing his writing. I love his writing. I first fell in love with David, so I'm going to tell you that I fell in love with your writing here, Dave. Loved your series, The Guardians of Brockport, and I want to read other of your series just because I don't really have time for it, I try to stick with preparedness, but because I loved your writing so much, I'm like, I got to read the other stuff that he's written. His retirement, this is one of those guys who doesn't know how to retire, he served as the Wisconsin Chief of Police, and then a University Criminal Justice Program Chair, and he's authored several law enforcement training articles and fiction novels. He stays very busy speaking everything from police response to active shooter situations. He resides in Appleton, Wisconsin. That just sounds pleasant. Is it pleasant? I'm picturing it. Maybe not as pleasant, but it's a nice place to live. Okay, that's good. Yeah, he also continues to serve his community as a volunteer firefighter. Yeah, this guy doesn't know how to stop. Did your wife ever accuse you of that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have plenty of things for me to do around the house, so. Well, one way or another, she'll keep you busy if you're not keeping yourself busy. That's why I write books. If I'm not typing, she's giving me chores, so. Oh, okay. I gotcha. Well, your career has clearly taken you from Air Force Special and Base Investigations to police chief to author. What thread connects these different chapters of your life? I guess service. I grew up in a very patriotic family in Arizona, and my uncles were Vietnam vets. My dad was a little before that, but my older uncle's grandfather was in World War II. So, patriotism was a big part of my upbringing, as was religion, and I wanted to serve. The Gulf War came around in 1991, and I didn't want to miss the only war of my generation, or so I thought. So, I dropped out of college. I was going to college in criminal justice, and I joined the Air Force. And it was a great career. Of course, we had a lot more wars, and I ended up serving as a special agent with the Air Force Bullseye. And for people who don't know what that is, which is most people today, it's like you see the TV show NCIS. There's like five versions of it. We're the Air Force version of NCIS. Oh, NCIS is the one. I don't know how you describe that. Yeah, kind of like the FBI and CIA rolled together for the military. So, if you've seen Jack Reacher, he's the Army version. There wasn't a lot about that OSI. If you remember the $6 million man back in the 70s? Oh, my, yeah. He was an OSI special agent. I see. Okay. We haven't had a whole lot of TV coverage in the last 30 years. Yeah, whereas the FBI is getting it all now. It's like an NCIS. Exactly. So, I retired in 2011, and I married a girl from the area. So, we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. I became a local police officer for a few years. I was a college program chair for criminal justice for a few years. Then I ended up becoming the chief of police for the University of Wisconsin, which is an NCAA Division I university. So, it was a state police agency, but it was different than the city because we had different issues. And, of course, we had the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID and all those issues, which kind of fell into preparedness. And I kind of saw a lot of that before I retired a couple of years ago. You've been retired, but you're crossing your fingers every time you say that because you really don't. Yeah. I'm still a certified Wisconsin police officer. I'm still a detective for the University of Wisconsin, which is a big system. There's 12 universities there. Wow. I'm still a detective. So, they call me back when the presidential candidates come to town. I'll help run the emergency operations center and help some of the planning. It takes some of the stress off the active cops because I can come in as a private chief, private detective. And I used to be an emergency manager as well. I can help the subjoint agencies working together. Does your wife laugh at you every time you use that word, retire? Yeah. Yeah, she does. Yeah. Okay. You've had various roles, especially you have everything from Europe to a university. You've seen both the best and the worst of human nature. How has this shaped your personal approach, like how your family approaches preparedness? I know, one, not all bad guys are truly bad. Not all good guys are truly good. Good people do bad things when they're desperate or they need to feed their children. So, I've seen a lot of that. And I try not to judge anybody under one rule because all of us have the capability to be good or bad. When it comes to preparedness, I know that you can't rely on the government. I've been in the government for 35 years of my life. I'm the one you call if bad things happen, whether it's a volunteer fireman or a policeman or a military officer. And we're very willing to do what we can do. And so, if you rely on the government, the government's not always there. The police might be minutes away, but seconds count. You have to be prepared to protect your family, you know, through physical means, through medical means, financial means, from that aspect. And, to me, prepping isn't just about like so many of the preppers or the doomsday preppers you see on TV. It's all about the zombie apocalypse or the worst-case scenario. But, for me, prepping could be having a spare tire or a jack in your car or having an extra $1,000 stuffed away for an emergency, having life insurance or a map in your car. So, prepping is practical to go all the way to the zombie apocalypse. You have to think of it as just kind of a fun fantasy for guys in my generation. Now, I grew up in the 80s watching Red Dawn, so we all have that insurmountable awe that might be out. But, realistically, it could be a COVID situation. It could be a write-up toilet paper for three weeks. It could be a financial collapse. I try to make my prepping for my family realistic. You know, I want to have my 40 acres and live out on the doomsday ramp, but my wife keeps me in reality. We like to have 10-inch breast to liver. So, I mean, we have to have that. Prepping, it's a mindset. It's more about knowledge than stuff, in my opinion. Yeah, it's definitely a lifestyle as opposed to a destination of when that zombie finally knocks on your door, oh, it's time to be prepared. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We subscribe to that over here at Preparedness Pro, too. So, we're on the same page, definitely. A lot of stuff, and I think we're very much in sync the way we think and operate when we're prepared. Oh, well, I'll take that as a compliment because I wouldn't mind being in sync with your mindset at all. So, what inspired you to transition from law enforcement training materials to fiction? Well, I taught at the National Command College, and I taught police executives. And I did a lot of that, and it was nice and fun. But with fiction, you could get to be a little more shades of gray. In law enforcement, it's really black and white. You talk about this policy or this procedure or this law, I respond to it. With my fiction, I can get a lot more nuanced with my characters. I can do backstories for my characters, do feelings, emotions. And it makes the readers more engaged because you understand a cop is not just a cop. I mean, when you become a police officer, people view you as Dave, the cop in that store, or Dave, the cop across the street. I'm still Dave. This is just a job I have. But people paint you with a broad brush via law enforcement, and everything is much more nuanced than that. In writing fiction, I can kind of delve into the nuances. If he kept having bad days, having a marital relationship, if his daughter is sick, then you can think about why he does or doesn't do certain things. So fiction is kind of more fun to write. I try to keep my stories as realistic as possible with real characters and the situations are real. The story is fiction, but I try to make it realistic. That's where my stories are different than like a Jack Reacher where the story, the guy can go beat up 50 guys. My characters are real. They're flawed. They make mistakes. They say stupid things. They make bad decisions sometimes. And it makes it more readable and relatable to people, which I like. Well, you even base your characters on real people in your life. Absolutely. In fact, it's loosely based off myself. I'm not as good looking as the guy in the book. Show that again, Dave. Oh, there it is. That's you 20 years ago, I'm sure. Yeah, more or less. Yeah, so the characters are basically based off my family. Like, Doug is basically Dave. He's a retired OSI special agent. I made him a retired trooper because the trooper sounded more relatable than a chief of police. His wife, Penny, is based off my wife, Patty. She worked in the mental health field, and so she was my dependent wife that followed me around the service, but she's from the area. Now, the daughter, Maddie, is my daughter, Cassie. She's a schoolteacher in the local area. The son-in-law is a firefighter who went to the fire academy with me, so everyone's based off loosely my family. It's a special situation, but it makes it fun to keep, you know, all of my family and friends are in the book. You'll probably be in the next book, too. A lot of my friends are characters in the book. Well, I can't wait to read that one. Son, your son did actually attend fire academy with you, huh? He did, yeah, yeah. He was marrying my daughter, and he's a Filipino-like character in the book. And, of course, it's my way to keep my eyes on my daughter. It's so him and the big guy. So I went to the fire academy at 49 years old, and we both did firemen together. It was fun, which is also why I became the chief of police at a university. My daughter was going to school there. I wanted to keep my eyes on my daughter. So I became the chief of the university police. Now, I noticed in your book, your daughter in the book, she comes to terms with this overprotective dad, and she just rolls with it. Has your daughter learned to do that, too? Yeah, yeah. She's great. Well, I know this daughter. If you read the book, one is a Jessie character. That's kind of like my oldest daughter, and Maddie, the teacher, is my youngest daughter. They're very different characters, very different people, and they look at things differently. But we both have a parental relationship differently. But it's fun to do. But my youngest daughter, yeah, she ended up working at the police station as a student employee doing a parking enforcement. So even though it was really like a sitcom, you know, dad goes to college with you because he's chief of police. A lot of jokes were made, but she's my buddy. We're very tight. Oh, that's awesome. That's really great. And, you know, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that tight family knit. How does that play a role in preparedness? That's everything. Nobody can prepare alone. I mean, even if you're a Rambo, you've got to sleep. You can't protect yourself when you're sleeping. You have to have downtime. And if there's nothing, if I'm trying to protect my family, I'm thinking of my family as a group versus myself. And it kind of goes along with other things you have, like mindset and spirits and ethics and morals. What are you fighting for if not for a family or a group of people you consider as a family? So it's essential. If you read my books, most of it is about Doug's relationship with his daughter on the underside and then his granddaughter. Fatty's pregnant, but one, then she has a child. And Doug talks about his mission in life that he feels is to prepare his granddaughter to leave the country if they get back on their feet. So that's where the change is going to go is he's preparing his granddaughter to be a survivor. You know, and I think that's the best thing that parents can do today. And not to sound all judgy, but with what I see where people can't live without ordering Panda Express, that we've failed at least one generation, if not two, is what I'm seeing. So what are you seeing out there with your vast experience? What can you share with us that people are making mistakes in terms of their personal security? The biggest mistake would be complacency. People are oblivious to this around them. They don't know where they are. They lost their cell phone. They wouldn't have been able to call. Nobody knows phone numbers anymore. It's all stored in that little box. Yet they lost it. They don't know where they are, don't know how to get anywhere. They don't know who to call or what to do. Well, at the university, we had hundreds of cameras. And I'd turn on the camera. We're trying to track down a crime on campus. And I'd see maybe 500 students in a class walking in the hallway. And 99% of them had a cell phone in their face. They're walking. And they lose their cell phone while they walk. One person bends down to try their shoes, and 10 people pile on top of them because they're not walking to where they're going. For example, I taught a lot of women self-defense courses. And a lot of the clubs, the girls would go, and they're oblivious. They'll hang their purse on the back of their chair in the bathroom, go to the dance floor, and someone steals their ID. Or they take drinks from unknown strangers that are already open. So people are oblivious, they're not cautious, and they just don't know their surroundings. If you ask them where the exits in the room they're in, they won't be able to tell you. If you go to a club, there might be three or four at-bar exits. They won't know. Nobody takes the time to facilitate or orient themselves where they're at. They're just oblivious. That's kind of my biggest piece. And yet, I bet when you go into a restaurant, that's one of the first things you notice is where the exits are. Yeah, and so did my daughter and my granddaughter. Because I had a granddaughter, so I have four grandkids. But when my daughters were younger, they'd go into places, and I'd say, okay, where are the exits? And at first, it was just a stupid game. Where could you go? Can you go through the kitchen? Can you go through the square door? What could you do? But now, I mean, that's the point where they'd start pointing out the security cameras in different areas and windows they could go through. It was a fun game played. It's a stupid game, but it's the what-if game. And I did that with police officers and agents brought up in training. I'd say, okay, we're in a car. Just talk to you. Like, okay, we take a round. We take fire from this over here on the east. What do we do? Where can we take cover? What would you say on the radio? What were the directions? What's our address at? What building are we in front of? And so many cops today don't know the law. And somewhere east, it's normal. Now you have to say, okay, I'm westbound. I'm at the 24-meter block of Spencer Avenue. You have to know exactly where you are to get help coming to you. And nobody today really – the younger generation of police officers don't really know the directionals. They're horrible at writing reports. They can't give us the facts because the new generation of – well, not just police, but everybody is trained differently. And when the radios go down in the squad, they update them every six months. And when our squad computers go down, nobody under 30 knows how to be a police officer because they're so ingrained with their computer. Wow. That's a little unsettling. Yeah. I always thought – and this is from – this is television influence, but I always thought that in order to be law enforcement, you had to pass some kind of test of knowing all the streets and knowing all the shortcuts and knowing how to get through this alley if you're following a perp or something of that nature. It used to be. And every jurisdiction is different. Here in New York, I mean, you had your beat, but New York beat is probably several blocks. And I've been at your county sheriff. You might have, you know, 50 miles to cover. So it all depends on the jurisdiction, the agency. But law enforcement overall has dropped significantly in experience. After the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, there was a mass exit of law enforcement with the defund the police movement nationwide. So that's why I retired at 50 from active law enforcement. I would have done another 10, 15 years, but it was such a trial every day, just going and fighting political battles. It was no longer fun. But every cop that was able to has left the force early, and now there's a huge void. They're trying to refund the police after two or three years or realize it was a mistake to defund them in the first place. They're not getting the call. Nobody wants to be a cop anymore. It used to be, for my agency, I had 45 applicants for every one position open. And we used to have, like, kids with master's degrees. It was good. Now I have six. And the average six, they're well-meaning, but they probably wouldn't have been a cop. They wouldn't have made the first cut three, four years ago. So now there's a 10-, 15-year void of experience. You can't replace a 15-year police officer with a rookie cop. There's so much experience you learn in that 15 years. So it's difficult. And now, also, officers aren't being proactive. A few years ago, we'd see three guys stepped out behind a car in the morning. That's probably a clue to doing something shady. We'd do our corrective policing. We'd go and investigate it. But now nobody wants to be accused of being a racist or violating someone's rights. And now the officer's going to drive by, and now they get involved unless they're specifically called. So that's why corona's through the roof is because there's no longer corrective policing in America. Because nobody wants to take a chance of getting personally sued or torn apart on TV by the media or labeled a racist or not. But it really affected corrective policing. So how do you think that impacts our own preparedness efforts then? It depends on, I think, the last three years, four years now. People in big cities have learned, you know, in Seattle and Portland, they've learned that the liberal policies in defunding the police didn't work for them. It didn't. The police weren't the problem. We were the systems. So now they're refunding everything. But in that time, people realized that they needed to be. They've learned vast amounts of wisdom. It's never been found. But if you look at even in the liberal areas, gun ownership and gun ownership is up. People that were very anti-gun three or four years ago now realize a benefit tool. A gun is not an evil device. It's an inanimate object. It can be used for good or evil. But now people with access to police are able to protect themselves. So especially among women in the liberal areas, firearms ownership and firearms trading is through the roof increasing. So I think now that they've kind of seen the bad side of that, people are more rewired, more resilient, and learning to be more self-sufficient to protect themselves, especially in the COVID situation. Once COVID closed down all the schools, everybody was homeschooled. A lot of the parents actually saw on the video what the kids were learning, and it wasn't much. And a lot of it was propaganda. So now homeschooling is through the roof. So I think that people are less reliant on the government to take care of them and their families and much more reliant on themselves through the homeschooling issues and taking care of themselves. So I think although it was a bad social experiment, I think a lot of good from the prepping aspect will come of it. But some people are oblivious and will never learn. Some people are preppers and very ingrained. But I think the middle ground is more just self-sufficiency, I think. Well, that would certainly be a refreshing statistic if that was the case. I was going to ask you about that. So we've had this, I call it a benevolent dress rehearsal with COVID because it was an opportunity for people to get a wake-up call. And then we just recently had the two hurricanes in southeastern U.S. What do you think that is the best way to enlighten someone towards a more self-sufficient lifestyle, towards preparedness? I guess experience, shared experiences. People in Florida obviously understand hurricanes. People in California understand riots and earthquakes. But not everyone in the country experiences things. Up here in the Midwest, it's more weather emergencies. There's tornadoes. There's ice storms and snow storms. People in Florida can read about the Midwest. People in California can read about Canada or Europe. But you have to be willing to accept it and learn. Not everyone wants to learn. Most people want to see what Taylor Swift is doing to learn about shared experiences of survival. Then a little bit of Bolivia. People, and I kind of break it down into more urban and rural environments. In the urban environment, people let the government take care of it. They relied on mass transportation, the government, and everything else. Where rural people are more reliant on themselves, more farming. The power goes out, they have a generator, they know what to do. So it's a different standard. If you go back 150 years, this was a great change in the movement in the 1920s, early 1900s. 90% of the people lived in rural and 10% lived in cities. So all the food was grown where 90% of the people were. But then as we became an industrialized country, we have tractors, we have trains to transport the food. We have a highway system after World War II. So now, today, 90% of the people live in urban communities and 10% live in rural where all the food's grown. So people don't live where the food is. So if there's a big war or some sort of thing that takes out an MP or something that takes out the system, nobody lives where the food does. And then 10% of the people live where the food is. We can't pick all the food we need without tractors and fuel and supply and energy and power. So that's where things have been at to change. Yeah, definitely. What do you feel is your key driving factor in terms of scenarios that you believe are realistic that you need to be prepared for? Mine is hyperinflation and the pending war. Most of the writers in my genre do EMP. Everybody does an EMP. Something goes off and all power goes off. That's done to death, and it's not that realistic. The U.S. has three power grids in the East Coast, West Coast, and Texas. It would be challenging to take out all three power grids at the same time. It would be a major issue if they did. Even one of them, we would survive. But to take out all power, and it's still unknown if an EMP would take out all of them. Like in most of the books and movies, nothing works. Cars made after 1985 won't work. We don't really know that that would happen or not. We know certain infrastructures in the Air Force, before I got out, we had hardened 5% of key infrastructures, like Air Force One, and certain fire and water units were hardened from the EMP strike. But realistically, nobody really knows how effective an EMP would be, how close it was in the atmosphere, what it's done. But nobody really knows. We haven't really experienced it since the 1960s. We had solar flares back in the old days that wiped out all the telegraph lines, and we knew that wiped it out in the late 1800s. But really, we were testing our nuclear weapons in the late 50s and early 60s, and that's when transistor radios were new. We did our testing in Yucca Flats, Nevada, and then all of a sudden, the transistor radios in Albuquerque no longer worked. That was the first experience we had with EMPs. Nobody first knew about it. But now we're so much more reliant on technology, and nobody really knows what would happen. So we think it'll wipe out all electronics, but we really don't know for sure. But what I think is more realistic is hyperinflation, and it will cause a collapse of our economic system. That and potentially a war with Europe and China, most likely China. You know, look, what kind of leads to my disaster is we're already hyperinflation, like we kind of are today. We're not quite hyperinflation, but inflation is getting kind of crazy. It's worse than you're telling us it is, of course. Yeah, obviously. But it's a slow cook. It's a slow cook. If it happened all at once, we fought a war for a 3% tax in the revolution. And now look at what we're doing today. Our money's devalued in hyperinflation, and the country's more politically divided than any time probably since the Civil War. Yeah, I agree with you. So in my book, it's hyperinflation affecting all of us. Then we deal with the cyberattack from China, which we're our own worst nightmare. We dedicated our supply chain to Amazon. Most of the rock-and-mortar stores are closed down, and Google ordered it online. Now if our cyberattack cripples us, we can't get things from China. We can't get the fuel. We can't get what we need because everything runs off computers. If computers are corrupted and we can't do it, that's what causes a collapse in my book. And we basically implode on ourselves because of our own over-reliance on technology. So having served in both the Middle East and Europe, you've seen different cultures handle crises. What lessons can you share with us here about community resilience that stood out to you? I guess it comes down to family and shared values. Serving in Afghanistan, there's so many different clans. No matter what, they might all be of the same religion. They might all be Islamic and share the same culture. It all comes down to clans. If your clan is like the other clan, you're all going to fight. You're going to stick together by your family, your tribe, or your clan. So tribalism is a very real thing. When it comes to Europe, I try to do a lesson in tribes in America because we're so spread out. Our families, not like it was 50 years ago. Now my daughter lives in Michigan. My mom lives in Alaska. We're all spread out. So it's less about our tribes, much from small towns, but more about generational. The older generation, like the World War II generation, they grew up as children through the Depression. They view things very differently. In World War II, they had victory gardens. The patriotism was a thing. And everybody banded together in World War II through just the love of their country and patriotism, national anthem. We don't have that today. Nobody really has. Religion is so fractioned. And much fewer people seek a higher power today than they have in any time in our nation. And so our culture has shifted. Our culture is divided, liberal and conservative, but nobody has shared values, or far fewer people have shared values than they did back in the day, which is very concerning. So what do you think? You've alluded to this a little bit. You've read my book and read about the Ten Principles of Preparedness. I've thought about it. Thank you so much. For those of you who don't know, he's referring to the Neanderthals in the kitchen book. So the first principle of preparedness being spiritual as opposed to being keep your mouth shut. How do you think that that really plays into your personal preparedness? Very much so. I think it plays into my being. Do I believe in a higher power? But also it helps me keep faith with my fellow family members than anything else. If you have a faith in a higher power, whatever religion that may be, then there's really no consequences in life. There's no heaven or hell. There's no good or bad. There's no consequences of reincarnation. So why would I choose to be good or ethical or moral? If there's no speed limit, why would I drive 25 miles an hour? If there's no rule of paying taxes, why would I pay taxes? Would I drive 25 miles per hour? I heard that somewhere. The point is if there's no rules or consequences in society, we can't murder someone. We can't do anything else. But in Judeo-Christian values, our whole culture is set up off. They're all set up by that principle. Why would I not cheat on my wife if there's no consequences to it? There's so many open things now. To me, the family unit is the most central core of any community going back for thousands of years. If you don't have faith in a higher power or something that gives you some sort of moral or ethical being, then I just go out there to survival of the fittest. Then I just go take what you have and what they have versus try to make a reasonable survivalist thought. The idea has to do with the ethical or moral decision-making. It changes your whole outlook on everything. Yeah, that decision-making, that has to take place in advance, doesn't it? You can't wait until the crisis is hitting you in the face and then make decisions on how you'll behave. I do a lot of podcasts and talk to a lot of groups. Some of the threat groups are very, very, oh, I have 20 guns, a thousand, a million rounds of ammo, and that's my whole prep. Well, it might be cool in theory if they can fight in the zombie apocalypse, but realistically, a shoot scenario is very rare. If it comes down to it, it's the hardest. It's taking human life. It's a very hard decision. If you're going to shoot your neighbor because they're trying to feed their hungry children, it's even harder to let them. So there's a lot of shades of gray. It's not just the black and white. It's not always hordes of zombies attacking you. It might be your neighbor whose children are starving. Yeah. Hopefully not, maybe, maybe not. The situation is dependent, but you have to understand the situations. It cannot be one. I'd probably sell them my OPSEC if they all know I have food, and they don't. That's an OPSEC issue. Two, I probably hadn't reached out to my neighbors beforehand because hopefully I would have got them on board with prepping ahead of time as well, and they would look out for me as some sort of group. But at the end of the day, if they're going to come and want food for their children, am I going to give them some of my food? Maybe that might be a better solution than shooting, you know, or am I going to leave versus, you know, if I have 20 neighbors that will take over my house, maybe I'll leave. Hopefully I have prep somewhere else at a better stage. But there should be various plans. You don't want the right side of killing your neighbor who's trying to feed their needs. So it's ethical and moral decision making that. Well, the police officer has more tools. I mean, I have a taser. I have a baton. I have a first-grade. The only thing I have is beanbags for my shotgun. So if I have a horde of neighbors that want to come in, I might hit one of the leg of the beanbag first. There's ways that the escalate situations versus go right to an AK-47 and kill them in the neighborhood like most of the preppers do. All they've prepped is toilet paper and guns. It's a 1% solution to 99% of the problems. Oh, I like how you put that. Yeah, definitely. What if there is no one to shoot? What if everybody else has got the same plan? That means nobody's got food. That's a dumb idea. Just start off with it. But it's a fantasy that most of us grew up in the 80s and 90s watching these movies. You're fighting insurmountable odds. And it's a sexy male fantasy. And it might happen 1% of the time or less than that. But the prepping is so much more. The prepping is, yeah, I have a flat tire. Do I have a jack in the car? Do I have emergency funds? I don't know how to use the jack. Well, nobody does today. You'd be surprised. No, I don't think I would, unfortunately. Yeah. And the university that told me kids with flat tires said, no. I had to make a rule. My officers can no longer change tires. Because I really don't trust you to call a big university. And I declare a thing that we're not AAA. And if my guys are changing, we try to help someone that's not stuck. That's my big thing is community policing. Well, we can't be full-time auto mechanics. Because if I'm doing that, we're not out protecting the community. But so many of the kids today in college have no idea how to change a tire. How many years were you police chief? I went there in 2014 to the beginning of 2022. So it's only gotten worse with the lack of knowledge of people knowing how to change tires. And not only that, but let's be honest. Changing a tire to sign of the road for a cop, that's dangerous. It is. So you don't know what they're there for. You have your back turned. And I get it if you're a small-town cop out in the country. Okay. But, I mean, if you're in a city, you can't turn your back on people. Because you don't know who's good or who's bad. You might have stopped them to help them. But they might be on the side of the road because, you know, they have a dead prostitute in their truck. You don't know what they're there for or who they are. We'll run their plate. But that doesn't always mean they're a good person or a bad person. So now we try to be on the universal police a little bit more educational than hard-handed. I did a dream about the city. It's pretty. The city cops are pretty rough. They have a different jurisdiction. We're state officers. But on campus, most of our clients are always a little younger. So you try to be a little more educational. But we had three homicides when I was chief there. I mean, bad things happen in places unexpected. Wow. Yeah, that wouldn't be expected. So let's switch gears here. One of the things that made the biggest impression on me, it was scolding me, mind you, when I was reading your book, was that I need to do much better in my preparedness for communications when traditional communications are down. Can you share your thoughts on that matter? Communications are vital to everything that you've done. Well, everything in my life, communications have been short. Whether you're in the war, you're in police, communications is always the first thing to go out the window. We have what we call procedures operations. So, like, if you're an EMT working back in St. Louis and you lose connection to the hospital, you don't know what to do. Your doctor is not going to tell you to give X, Y, or Z medications. So we have what's called protocols. So a lot of work there are protocols. So if you lose communication, what would you normally do? And we do that through prepping as well. Okay, fine. How do I know what do I do? If I can't communicate, what do I do? So it's redundancy. And today, communication, we pretty much mean cell phones or computers or texting. And that's going to be the first thing in an emergency that gets jammed up or taken over. So one of the things, we have set protocols. Like, okay, I know that if something bad happens, we're all going to meet back at Uncle Joe's house. Okay, that's our plan. That's our protocol. That's what we do. Or if we're not there, someone's going to leave a note. So Uncle Joe, if we're not there, he's going to leave a note on the back porch under his chair. We all know to meet at Bob's Barn or whatever. So we have set protocols on what you do. Redundancy is a big thing. Like, if you read my books, they have a system of flags. So if you see a flag, it means this or that. It's a different color. Or they have a system of whistle blows. Or different ways to communicate. It could be a pile on a certain rock up on a trail means go left or go right. Redundancy. But it's so hard today because when some of those people lose their cell phones all the time or they get stolen, nobody knows who to call because all the phone numbers, no one remembers phone numbers anymore. Remember when we were kids, you might have 10 or 12 numbers. I still have my resident phone number memorized. Yeah, I still do from when I was 10 too. Today, no one does because the docs change all the time. But, yeah, if you lose your phone, no one knows who to call or what to do. So I always tell everybody, write down phone numbers on a business card and put it in your wallet or your purse. Have it in your car. Have something. If you lose your wallet, it's simple things, but I say take all the stuff out of your wallet or purse and make a photocopy of it. So if you do lose it, you have the credit card numbers and the phone numbers to call, cancel them all. People lose their wallet or purse and kind of just S-O-L because they never thought ahead. They don't know what to do. Well, simple things like that. But communication is key. Big thing is redundancy. One thing I like to do if emails are down, you still have a little bit, is if you have a pen that how bats down, if you have a Gmail, always make like a blank Gmail account for a new group. And so you're not going to send it, but if you were going to write a message, people in the draft would say, Hey, I'm going to meet XYZ, but you don't send it. Then later, if I'm your buddy, I go in and check the same account, it will be sent by the same as the draft and see what you put. So there's a lot of little ways to script an issue. As long as you have some media connection. But it's not redundancy. You all have a plan. Okay, I'm going to meet my sister. If things go bad, I'm going to meet my sister or my wife or my kid at a certain location at a certain time. Even if a police officer, we have certain codes. If I'm going to arrest a bad guy, he's a big, tough guy. I just get a code to put handcuffs on him. I get a code he's got warrants for arrest. I don't tell him I'm going to arrest him. I might tell my partner. He goes, we'll get tacos after this. And that's our code that I'm going to arrest my partner. Let's be prepared. Or my wife. I've been a cop for 30 years. She might be at a Walmart. I might see a bad guy that I arrested twice before. He wants to fight and he's now off duty with my kids. I tell my wife, hey, let's get tacos tonight. We have a certain code where she knows to either get behind me or to get away from me. If it's a gunfight, I want her to get away from me. Otherwise, I want her to get behind me. We have certain code words that she would know bad things were happening. Because as a cop, you know, not everybody likes you. And a lot of enemies work in the road. And that doesn't stop at 2 o'clock. When you get off duty at your Walmart or Sam's Club with your family. Right. There's consequences of that profession. Absolutely. Yeah. And I teach that under communications, too. Let me ask you, I may look like a buffoon in asking you this, but what do you think about people embracing, like, Morse code or learning shorthand? I think it's a skill, but it's a skill. It's a lost art. Not only you have to do it, but so does the receiver. So if we want to send hundreds of hours to the Morse code, but then you don't know it, I still have to communicate to you. Right. So your plan, learning it, might be a good idea. Yeah. Absolutely. But, like, back in World War II, the ships, they would flash Morse code with lights. Lights travel one way at night. So if, like, your neighbors across the way and you want to get a message to them, you could flash the flashlight to their house. They could respond to you. You know, Morse code's like a whole language. You might have easier codes. Like, you might have 10 or 12 messages like, hey, help, or dinner's ready, or come to my house. If you had 10 or 12 codes and write down dash, dash, dot, dot, it would be easier to learn all of traditional Morse code. That's true. You know, 12 codes to really convey most of the messages you need. That's a good thought. Now, one of the things that I hadn't thought of when I was reading your series was, which, by the way, you guys, this series is wonderful. I get up at 4 a.m., so I'm usually in bed by 7, winding down for the night, reading my scriptures, doing my prayers and everything. But I kept staying up late reading his dang books. I was enthralled. I loved him. I loved what I was learning. I loved the characters, how he read them. I loved the scenarios. I loved having a character that I could believe in, that I could trust in, that he wasn't going to disappoint me. I loved that, too. But one of the things that struck me was how important the communication devices were in a society down scenario, how valuable those were. What can you tell our listeners and our viewers, what can they be doing now to make sure that they don't get caught with so little communication devices? There's no one easy answer because communication frankly sucks. We all rely on cell phone towers. They go down and get overwhelmed. You can't do anything. So there's no great answer. There's radio communication, obviously, and there's different types of it. And I'm not a radio comm expert, but of course the first thing that comes to mind is CD radios. That's pretty good. It's more of a thing in the 70s and 80s. But that has a pretty good range, but it's usually tied to the vehicle, which gives you a greater range. But then you have ham radios, which that's what many type preppers type ham radios, because that's the license you have to get. And they have much greater range, but at different frequencies. And then you have most people have a walkabout or handy talkies to get a Walmart. Those are great, too. But they have a variable to output for power and range. So I might say it has five miles range. In reality, it's probably half a mile. And it depends on a lot of things, like line of sight. Can I see you? If I see you a mile away, I'll try to talk to you. But if there's 5,000 or a mountain between us, it's not going to work. It's more of a line of sight. So don't all say three to five miles. It's realistically under a mile. Then you have, like I know I talked to you before about the Bofang radio. And that's kind of a cheater device. It's still true in some of my characters' books. My characters have ham radios, CD radios, and different aspects, because they have the Bofang is a brand. But it's a Chinese brand. So I ain't endorsing it in Chinese. But it's hard to beat, because it's super cheap. You get it for, like, $20. You can get a pack of, like, 20 of them and give them to your whole family. But the issue is that it's pennished. The benefit of that is it's cheap, but it's scourged a lot, because you can operate it as a ham radio person. It's unlawful to do so. If the FTC is monitoring, you'll get a ticket, because you can't operate a ham radio license on a channel without a ham radio license. But you can buy it and you can listen to it. Like you, I keep mine on the NOAA weather station. I know Lake Michigan, know what the knots are. I hear a lot of stuff. I get a lot of information. I can hear the UPS guys talking to each other. I can hear a lot of different delivery people in the area. So I get information from that. But I can also channel it to my other people, and it's harder to monitor. So if I'm on this radio and the rest of the world in my area has the walkabouts and walkie-talkies, they can't monitor. So it's an object issue, because they can't hear my channels. And if I want to broadcast, I'm lawful to have a ham radio license. I can, and it has a little further output. But if it's a rural emergency situation and the FCC wants to finally give me a ticket, they can, because I'll need help in that case. So a lot of preppers use bow-fang radios. Again, it's not an end-all, be-all. A CDM might have a better output. But the benefit is you can skirt the law legally until you operate on it, and you can connect it to a larger head. It cannot connect to ham radios. So you should really have them all. If you're really dedicated to prepping, you should have no walkabout. You should have a bow-fang type radio, a ham radio license, and a CD. They all do different things. They all communicate differently. So it goes down to what you and I believe in and always having backups to your backups. Redundancy is key. If we talk about the military, two is one and one is none, because that person is always going to fail. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has just been a rich experience. I'd love to get your final thoughts on what do you think, what do you wish that preppers understood today? If you could get one thing into their brain, what would it be? The government is very limited. Our resources are right there. We would like to come help you, but that's not our government's responsibility. We can't help an individual. We can help government groups collectively. I guess the biggest experience would be a Hurricane Katrina when it took out in New Orleans. It was a major, major issue. But people don't realize it affected Mississippians just as much as it did the city of New Orleans. But people in Mississippi were rural people. People in New Orleans were urban people. They relied on the government. The government said leave. They chose not to. The government said, oh, we'll give you busing because most of you relied on mass transportation. They didn't take it. They were upset because the government didn't provide them food and everything else. And afterwards, when 90% of the cops abandoned their jobs to take care of their own families, because that's human nature, nobody was there to help them. But that happened in the rural areas too. But the rural people had a different mindset. They had generators. They had chainsaws. They helped each other sandbag each other's house. They worked as a group together because that was a rural mindset. We're in the urban area. We started killing one another and looting one another and taking away real bad. And it's a very different situation. So I look at the urban versus rural. I wrote a paper for this at the Mad College. But, of course, in today's time, it delved more into racism because people viewed it as a black and white issue. And the culture is, well, it was culture, but it was rural versus urban. Urban people are much more reliant on the government. Now, most of them don't have cars. They rely on mass transportation, trains, that sort of thing. Rural people, they used to go into the power for a little bit. So being more like a rural person, what would you do if the government's not coming? Because they can't. And just down in Hurricane Milton, it took three or four days for anyone to come in with help. And that's one regional where it took the whole country to go help that. If that happened mass in, like, five or six cities at once, there's no resources to fill that, to take care of that. Right. No one's there to help you. But just like the police are coming, you should still have a smoke detector even though there's a fire department. You should still have a medical first aid kit even though there's an ambulance. You should still have maybe a firearm or something to defend your family, even though there's police. The government will come help, hopefully, if they can. But you can't rely on them. They should be your backup, in my mind. Yeah, they should be your backup. That's wonderful. Well, I want people to know how to reach out and get more Dave Jones in their life. So how's the best way for them to find your books and find out more about you? Okay, all my books are on Amazon. That's the best place to buy them. But if you want to learn more about me, my website is davideldonjones.com. D-A-V-I-D-E-L-D-O-N-J-O-N-E-S dot com. There's a little bit about my bio. So my daughter, when I retired, she put together like a video montage of my career, which is kind of fun. And more of my books that are there. But my Guardians of Rockport series is my main series. I also write some homicide books, which they say write what you know. So this is what I've been experiencing in my life. They said women's romance is the best selling genre by far. So I thought maybe I'd knock out one of those. My wife says no, just stick to what you know. I saw Sweet Romance in your Guardians of Rockport, the knowing look between each other. I saw some of that. I'm scared of total failure. I'm trying, I'm trying. And the dog, of course, everything's tied around the dog. And my books are not quite, I wouldn't mark them as Christian books. They're clean. There's no sex or profanity. There's some violence, but I try to keep it. My mom reads them, so I try to keep it in check. But it all comes down to the dog, Baxter. I leave it up to the reader to decide. Is he an intuitive dog? Is he a guardian angel? You don't know. I leave that up to the reader to decide. But he's kind of the common thread. There's always multiple storylines going on, and the dog ties all the storylines together. Yeah, we all want a Baxter in our life. Yeah, we do. We all want one of those. He's going to kill the show. Well, we've got a comment from someone that says, Thank you, Sean. It's very helpful. I'm going to be getting his books. So, LeSean, you're going to love it. We got a whole lot from you today in this 45 minutes, so thank you so very much. Thank you for having me. I'd be happy to come back. Yes, we definitely have more to explore. So thank you so much, Dave, and it's wonderful knowing you. I consider it an honor, and thank you so much for being on the show. Folks, if you haven't liked the Preparedness Pro page yet, make sure that you like that so you stay up to date on interviews such as this. We will be starting this live every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 a.m. Eastern time. We're banking about ten episodes right now that we'll be broadcasting, and then you can count on us being there live every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 a.m. So thank you so much, Dave. I appreciate your time. Thank you. All right. Take care.