James Wesley Rawles

James Wesley, Rawles is the founder and senior editor of SurvivalBlog.com and the author of "How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It" (2009), a guide a Reuters journalist dubbed "the preppers' Bible." He is not a mining analyst and does not cover mining equities; his relevance to resource investors rests on something broader — a two-decade public argument that physical gold and silver are essential insurance when government-issued (fiat) money loses value. Anyone weighing how much of a portfolio belongs in precious metals will find his reasoning among the clearest in the preparedness world.

A former U.S. Army military intelligence officer (Captain, 1984–1993) and onetime editor at Defense Electronics magazine, Rawles launched SurvivalBlog in 2005 and built it into the flagship publication of the preparedness movement. His novel "Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse" became a New York Times bestseller, peaking at No. 3 in paperback fiction, and his nonfiction guide has been licensed for translation into eleven languages. Eight of his books are in print, spanning fiction ("Founders," "Liberators") and practical guides such as "Tools for Survival" (2014).

His approach is deliberately simple: own tangibles, not paper claims. In "How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It" he advises that once core needs are covered, "anything extra should be invested in silver and gold" — favoring pre-1965 U.S. 90% silver dimes and quarters, known as "junk silver," for small barter and gold coins for storing larger value. He recommends productive farmland and useful tools as core assets and argues that "in the long run, inflation dooms fiat currencies to collapse." He picks no stocks and names no mining companies; the discipline he offers is asset allocation under a severe downside scenario.

Rawles remains active, editing SurvivalBlog daily and appearing on finance programs such as Liberty and Finance, where he has recently discussed a potential U.S. real estate crash and longer-term national decline. He is also the originator of the "American Redoubt" concept, a proposed migration of prepared families to the inland Northwest. For a resource investor, following him is less about trade ideas than about stress-testing a portfolio against the monetary and geopolitical tail risks that drive physical precious-metals demand.