Several years into the production of The Survival Podcast I began to assemble a group I refer to as the TSPC Expert Council.  These individuals have all demonstrated some key attributes before they were asked to join.

First – They are absolutely experts in their fields and have a track record of providing spot on, actionable and accurate advice.

Second – They are all community members and have all contributed to our community as members before being given a position on the council.

Third – They are all dedicated to helping others achieve individual freedom and liberty in their lives.

To ask a question of one of our council members, just send an email to me at jack at thesurvivalpodcast.com with “TSPC Expert” in the subject line.

In the body of your email first tell me the council member your question is for.  Second ask your question concisely in one to two sentences maximum.  Third provide any and all details after that.  This is the formula to give you the best chance of getting on the air.

I do what I can to get as many of your questions as possible on the air but can’t always get to all of them.  Our council is made of a wide variety of experts in everything from the tactical to the practical and everything in between.

The Members of our Expert Council Include…

 

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Ken D Berry, MD – Health, Nutrition, Medical Issues, Keto/Low Carb –  Ken is a Family Physician, Speaker and Author based in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.

He received a Bachelor of Science degree, with honors, in Animal Biology and Psychology, from Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1996.

He received his MD from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2000.

Ken has been practicing Family Medicine in rural Tennessee for 20 years, having seen more than 25,000 patients in his career thus far. He is board certified in Family Medicine, and has been awarded the degree of Fellow, by the American Academy of Family Physicians.  Ken is the author of LIES MY DOCTOR TOLD ME: Medical Myths That Can Harm Your Health and he has a very successful YouTube Channel and is active and accessible on Facebook

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Shawn Mills – HackMySolar.com

Shawn can answer your questions on off grid living, appropriate technology, and homestead automation design.  His primary expertise is in solar thermal, solar photo-voltaic, and rainwater catchment systems and COST EFFECTIVE implementation of those systems.  Shawn has been an active member in the TSP Community since 2013.

Shawn has worked in and around the power generation industry since 2000 and decided shortly after the Great Recession to build a lifestyle that was more self-sufficient.  He has lived on his off grid homestead with his wife and two children since 2012 utilizing solar pv and rainwater catchment systems he designed and installed himself.

In 2017 Shawn started a consultation company “Hack My Solar” to help others demystify solar and other alternative energy systems and implement them in their own lives.  in 2023 Shawn rebranded to HackmyHomestead.com and expanded consultation to include other Homestead design needs.  His customers have included new construction projects, remote hunting properties, and existing homes and outbuildings with a variety of installation types.  Shawn’s designs are based on customer’s overall goals and a holistic view of energy use AND cost of implementation where sometimes the “appropriate” answer is generator and gasoline rather than newer and more expensive technology.  Check out his website at HackmyHomestead.com

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Patrick Roehrman MTKnives.net – Patrick Roehrman is a knife maker and bladesmith from Missouri, where he and his wife Emily home school their children. He can answer all your questions on knives, edged weapons, tools, and tool sharpening.

After his first child was born Patrick wanted to be able to work from home and be there with his family. even pass his skills on to his children. It took 14 years for his dream to come true. In 2010 he started making knives as a hobby, he soon had enough work to keep him busy but not enough to support his family full-time. Patrick worked as a lineman, always on call, cleaning up every storm. If the lights were out, he was out  too.  With help from Jack Spirko and the TSP community through MTKnives’ stakeholder program, he was able to run his MTKnives business full-time.  All 100 positions sold out in less than 6 minutes.

Next came the knife sharpening video, Beyond Razor Sharp. Patrick knows how to make sharp knives and keep them sharp. He has accomplished some amazing feats such as shaved a balloon with a knife, and splitting a hair three times in the same spot. Patrick loves to share his knowledge and has traveled around the country teaching his skills.

As not all can afford a custom knife, and Patrick’s desire to have a quality knife in the hands of more people, he expanded his business to include some really cool neck knives. They were featured in 2015 in the Blade magazine  Check out his site at MTKnives.Net

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Nicole Sauce – LivingFreeInTennessee.com – Nicole can answer your questions on homesteading entrepreneurship, marketing, web development, and on turning major projects with insurmountable obstacles into achievable goals. Nicole can also take questions on working with (or getting around) public policy makers and local governments, increasing liberty in your life and local community.

Nicole’s foundation in liberty began when she was three. She stole a chocolate egg from a grocery store. Her mother soon discovered this and made Nicole go back, return the egg, apologize and pay the store owner. Despite this early lesson on personal responsibility, Nicole leaned toward socialism – communism, really, as the best means of organizing society. Then she took her first steps in a public policy issue – mass transit – after realizing that state-run systems are simply unfair. This launched a career working with free-market think tanks around the country bent on developing policy strategy, issue campaigns and putting a face on reform.

She has taught in a public high school, worked as executive coach for Fortune 500 companies and run a nonprofit organization, shaping her perspective on liberty, homesteading entrepreneurship and lifestyle design. Nicole cultivates her interest in learning to do things from absolute scratch – thanks to parents and grandparents who claimed you can learn to do anything you want. Nicole sang in a rock band for fifteen years, has fancy college degrees, and uses her podcast, Living Free in Tennessee, to help spark liberty and self-reliance in those who want to be all they can be.  Check out her website at LivingFreeInTennessee.com

 

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LabCoatsBonesAmy(1)Doctor Bones and Nurse Amy – DoomAndBloom.net – Joe Alton, M.D. is a retired (due to extreme old age) but actively licensed medical doctor and Amy Alton, A.R.N.P. is an advanced registered nurse practitioner and a certified nurse midwife. They’re medical preparedness writers and are here to answer all your medical questions regarding just about anything, from disasters to epidemics to mass casualty incidents. Everything they write about assumes that some disaster has occurred and there are no doctors and no hospitals. Joe and Amy’s mission: To put a medically prepared person in every family.

The Altons are the No.1 Amazon bestselling authors of The Survival Medicine Handbook, NY Times bestselling authors of The Ebola Survival Handbook, designers of an entire line of disaster medical kits, plus a board game SURVIVAL! that was awarded the Teaching Preparedness Resource of the Week by the Prepared Family Blog.

You can find the Altons, as Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy, at their top survival medicine website at www.doomandbloom.net, their YouTube channel at DrBones NurseAmy, Twitter at Preppershow, Facebook at Doom and Bloom, and on their podcast “The Survival Medicine Hour” on blogtalkradio.

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benfalkBen Falk – Whole Systems Design – Ben can answer questions related to permaculture, site planning, energy efficient design and construction, modern homesteading and regenerative design.  He is specifically an expert in cold temperate climates.  Ben developed his landscape architecture studio Whole Systems Design, LLC to apply the productivity of farming and homesteading with the intelligence of ecology to home, school and public spaces.

Life as a designer, builder, ecologist, tree-tender, and backcountry traveler continually informs Ben’s integrative approach to developing landscapes and buildings. His home landscape and the WSD studio site in Vermont’s Mad River Valley align with his larger 175 acre silvopasture farm serve as a proving ground for the regenerative land developments featured in the projects of Whole Systems Design.

Ben has studied architecture and landscape architecture at the graduate level and holds a master’s degree in land-use planning and design. He has conducted about 250 site development consultations across New England and facilitated dozens of courses on permaculture design, property selection, microclimate design, and design for climate change. Ben is the author of the award-winning book the Resilient Farm and Homestead (Chelsea Green, 2013).  For more, see Ben Falk’s recent TEDx talk.

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pugJohn Pugliano – The Wealthsteading Podcast – While I personally manage my own investments, I consider John to be my most trusted financial adviser, period.  He is a true professional, fully switched on and on top of it as a prepper himself that knows your preps are part of your life long financial stability.

John is a long time individual investor and late blooming entrepreneur.  He is the money manager and founder of Investable Wealth LLC.  Investable Wealth LLC. is a hands-on investment advisory firm that specializes in helping clients build wealth with active portfolio management.  Their primary investment philosophy is tactical in nature, taking advantage of current market conditions with trend trading methodologies.

On top of all this, John is an all-around great guy with a cutting view into modern business and economics along with being a licensed HAM Radio Operator.

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geofflawGeoff Lawton – GeoffLawtonOnline.com– Geoff Lawton is “the man” when it comes to permaculture in all climates and indeed all over the world.  I personally consider Geoff to be my greatest mentor in the world of Permaculture and consider him responsible for my full indoctrination into the discipline.

In October 1997 Bill Mollison, upon his retirement, asked Geoff to establish and direct a new permaculture research institute on the 147-acre (0.59 km2) Tagari Farm. Lawton developed the site over a period of three years and established The Permaculture Research Institute as a global networking center for permaculture projects. The institute is a non-profit company limited by guarantee. It is currently located at Zaytuna Farm at The Channon in Northern NSW, Australia where Lawton is managing director

At his website Geoff provides opportunities to take his PDC to a limited number of students annually and some of the most incredible free permaculture videos ever produced.

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Comments

Meet the Expert Council — 35 Comments

  1. thanks for all that you do, my family, thanks from the kiwi. all the best and please keep up the good work……….

  2. Does anyone here know what happened to the Americas Voice Now .org site. I can still find there older videos on YouTube, but nothing current. Go Daddy shows that the site name in now available… I really enjoyed his video’s on YouTube, but can’t seem to find them.

    Thanks in advance.

    Dan

  3. This question is for jack spirko. I saw your online fodder video and was wondering if you know of anywhere in Arkansas to buy non gmo barley to use for fodder. Thanks!!

  4. This question is for John pugliano and/or jack. How can I work from home online as a second job and supplement my income well? I am young and in debt and more than anything seek liberty and freedom as Jack has inspired me so well to do, and I would like to start with financial freedom. Whether data entry, add insertion, or survey filler outer (haha) I could not find a credible place to actually make any kind of second income on my own time and at my leisure. Any advice? Where can I go? Thank you.

    • Depends on what your skills are. What kind of value can you bring to people? Do you do graphics design? Are you a good writer? There are hundreds of ways to make money online, or online supplementing type income. My wife and I started a side business selling things on Amazon that is now a full time job for us. You can make a profile on Fiverr.com and do different things for some cash, you can drive for Uber or Amazon instant delivery. Literally the sky is the limit. What do YOU want to do, cause what Jack or I do might not be right for you

  5. I think it’s amazing that almost none of them look the way you imagine they do when you are listening to them on the podcast. The only one who looks like I imagined he would is Paul Wheaten.. Maybe I saw him somewhere and just didn’t remember or what..

  6. I have a question for Brandon Todd of the expert councel.

    What happens with to the long term of bitcoin and people dieing

    details – When people die and bitcoin accounts are saved in their memory, what happens overall to bitcoin with only 23 million total bitcoins. In banks people can get death certificates and wills to extract the money, however is this possible with bitcoin? I guess what i’m trying to say if 23 milion people hold 1 bitcoin each and all of them die, does bit coin die? The USD can produce more currency and fluctuate but can bitcoin do the same?
    Thank you
    Trent

  7. Trent,
    You have been paying attention!! Yes, this is another thing that most certainly will put more deflationary pressure on Bitcoin! There have already been so many stories and cases of people losing their keys and are most likely gone forever. This is a consequence of cryptographically protected stores of value. It is for this reason that sometimes I think that Bitcoin is more real than government issued fiat money. Because how real is something that can be just copied over and over into oblivion?

    Anyway, there still is not many good options to protect against this as far as fail safes like we know of in the traditional financial space, its much like physical cash in this way. The problem usually goes something like this… Bob is really into Bitcoin and Alice his wife, knows far less than he does about it. Bob continues to learn about other cryptocurrencies like NEO, IOTA, Maidsafe, Monero ect ect and diversifies with some held on exchanges and some in paper wallets, with other held in his software wallets on his phone and laptop. Now he has quite a trail of different seeds and keys, some encrypted and password protected all across different devices and key pairs.

    What a mess. Its a good idea to clean up every once in a while and consolidate. I recommend people write down on old fashioned paper and pencil their seeds or private keys along with instructions for their loved ones to be able to access these cryptographic financial instruments. Then I would say find a safe place to put this info where it could be the most safe from theft and fire.

    That last bit is the hard part. I have worked on from time to time trying to take it a few steps further. I thought of an idea where I could take this master file with all of the instructions along with all of the private keys and seeds of which I have typed up on an air-gapped computer(computer that has never seen the internet) which I do have in my basement 😉 and then encrypting this file with standard crypto like pgp. Then taking this encrypted file and encoding into a pic that only my wife would recognize, maybe a pet photo? and then having a “friend” 3 hops away from our friends on Facebook share in on their Facebook account buried inside of all of their other photos. This way a hacker would never put this person connected to us, so even if they found the encrypted file, they would never be able to find the key with my wife. And if they found the key with my wife, they would never find the file buried in 100’s of photos in an account 3 friend circle hops away.

    The whole purpose of this would be that it would always be accessible, so even if our house burnt to the ground and I was dead and she had to leave the country in short order it could be accessible form any internet connection in the world.

    To make all of this work she would need to know how to use a standard PGP client and an app like http://silenteye.v1kings.io/ (steganography) to get the encrypted file out of the pic of which it would be embedded. Hard feat to do easily. But like I say security and convenience are always at odds in the real world.

    Sorry for the crazy talk here but I like to think outside of the box. I am weird that way, I do it for fun. I think of ways to hide things in plain sight when possible. I think there will be crypto will services coming soon, there is a growing market for such things for sure. There they would most likely employ multi-sig wallets, which is another thing to consider. If you have trusted 3rd parties, you can always create multi-signature keys that will only spend if 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5 parties put their key in.

    • We have had two, both were great but proved to be unreliable at getting responses back in a reasonable amount of time. This was due to their professional commitments. I can generally handle such questions and lean on Tim Glance for assistance given his almost 30 years of military service and rank of Chief Warrant Officer.

    • Trust me it was her decision not mine. She has stopped blogging as well. Making a living as a content creator is wonderful but it is also a lot more difficult and a lot more work than many realize. My gut is she decided it just wasn’t making her happy.

    • Nick has taken a great professional opportunity outside of the Permaculture world. It is a full time job with a shit ton of over time so he stepped away to meet those commitments. He remains a close personal friend and will most likely be at most TSP events, etc.

  8. Have a question for Derek Bonpietro regarding buying a newer high mileage pickup.

    Needing to replace my current pickup, but the cost of used trucks is crazy,  wonding if buying something close to 100k miles is worth the savings.

    Wanting to buy an F-150 4×4 with a 5.0 liter. Currently drive about 8-9 thousand miles per year

  9. We have a few questions on growing greenhouse vegetable in the winter. We built a 10×20 greenhouse with a solid insulated north wall and a west wall that is solid other than a screen door.  The south and east walls are windows, the roof is polycarbonate. We are located in Oklahoma. We do not have a heat source as of now but are researching our options ( if anyone has any opinions).What are the best plants to grow in the winter time in the green house? A couple we would really like to grow are tomatoes and green beans but we have found a lot of conflicting information on how low the temperature can get at night. Also hours of sunlight needed has a lot of different information.Any advice or resources would be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you

    • I sent you more details but he was removed from the EC in Nov of 2019, for making very nasty comments made about the CAC teams.  The doubling down on them.  This coupled with a track record of talking to audience members like they were stupid was the end of the line.  I wish him well, you can follow him on Facebook if you like.

  10. I noticed that Tim Cook the local handyman is missing from the list? I love hearing about Tim’s tool updates as I’m a home project remodeler (electrical/plumbing/drywall/woodworking/etc…) and always looking for good recommendations on new tools. I’ve owned lots of Ryobi/Rigid for hand tools for weekend project use and have been picking up things for finish work like DeWalt router, orbital sander, and the DW735X planer.

  11. I am trying to find the name of the woman who Jack has interviewed in the past about homeschooling; I thought she was on the expert council but I don’t see her here. I tried searching the site but I did not find her name. She homeschooled her kids through high school and talked about how she let them guide their own curriculum choices in high school; she only required math and I think writing and let them design the rest… She had written a book about homeschooling and has a blog, I think. If anyone can tell me her name I’d appreciate it!

    • So Derek recommended a very expensive Honda Generator for a listener. I disagreed in the situation and suggested the guy buy two far less expensive ones, still pocket close to 800 dollars as a reserve and if one broke down it would not matter, because he had TWO generators.

      I told a story about selling computer hardware where I came up against that argument and lost to a lower cost competitor. I said in that instance I lost because my competitor made a case I could not over come with quality.

      For whatever reason this made Derek run away like a kid with his ball from the playground. I still don’t get it, but he is a grown man with his own life to live.

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