It was published in 2009, and I guess the reason I hadn’t really been exposed to it is because I’ve been down here.

Neil is/was a writer for Rolling Stone and the New York Times and details his personal journey from a timid, shy, inept, city slicker who laughs at the ‘end of the world’ crowd in 1999 at the turn of the millennium into a full-fledged doom and gloomer, tin foil hat wearing, chicken little and how and why he got that way.

His metamorphosis takes place over a period of nearly 10 years and all the while he is either taking meticulous notes and photos with the intent on writing this book, he has a fantastic memory and is a shutter bug or he recreated everything in excruciating (often very humorous) detail once he had talked his publisher into doing the book.

He learns how to hunt, fish, track, fight, live off the land, urban evasion, stunt driving, etc. etc. etc. He travels to special schools setup to train wilderness nuts and military men and turns his Los Angeles backyard into a training ground for outdoorsmanship- much to the dismay of his girlfriend, and his neighbors I’m sure.

All the while he is working on a “bug out” plan where he just gets “out of dodge” and expatriates to a small Caribbean island called St Kitts or St Kitts and Nevis fame.

Second Passport

Along with an offshore bank account, his pursuit of a second passport seems to be one of the costliest extravagances in his disaster preparedness plans and the one probably furthest out of reach of his average reader. After searching far and wide, including brushes with the Sovereign Society at their annual gathering at an offshore conference in Mexico, he runs into a guy from St Kitts who convinces him that the real estate investment exemption — put in place supposedly to help to support the islands’ displaced sugar cane workers — is the way to go.

This was back during the real estate boom, so apparently pulling a cool 300,000 out of a Los Angeles area home was no big ‘to-do’ to pay for the condo in St Kitts.

Even at that, he’s a year and a half into paying for the real estate and the outrageously expensive legal bill — some 60k plus and he still doesn’t have his passport yet, although with 50 pages left in the book he is told by a swarmy lawyer that makes him very nervous he is being scammed that he has been approved.

Second passports in Uruguay are pretty common as many of the locals here have ancestry somewhere in the EU they can trace back to and many of them carry EU passports from Germany, Italy, and Spain. There is also a lot of interest in second passports for the expats who are here as an Uruguayan passport will let them travel visa free to a number of countries — especially in south america — that would have been previously costly to enter. In addition, there is also the desire to obtain a second passport in order to thumb their nose at the US for good, or just to give them a ‘just in case’ plan if things continue to deteriorate between the US and the rest of the world on the diplomatic front.

A Bug Out Plans and Bug In Plans

Neil’s preparedness makes him classify a ‘bug out’ and a ‘bug in’ plan. First, he wants to be a prepared survivalist in case he is unable to get away to bug out retreat in the Caribbean. In addition, he is worried that a true global catastrophe will take down a small Caribbean island even faster than the US.

His bug out plan involves going to St Kitts with all manner of secondary thoughts put into his head by his wealthy survivalist friends — submarines, gyrocopters, pilot licenses, offroad military grade motorcycles for getting out of the city unscathed. He also decides to (eventually) work within the system and become a member of the civilian disaster preparedness teams and a qualified EMT.

He thinks first of all, it’s good training, and second of all, it will help him have the credentials he needs to get past roadblocks or other official inconveniences should he need to put his bug out plan to work.

Overall, this guy is a great writer. One should read the book for the chapter titles alone which have such intriguing title as “Tips on Death Cult Etiquette”

Just a great read and although he may have colored up some of the stories, a lot of the appeal is in how honest and up front most of this tell-all appears to be.