In this FPA Exclusive Podcast, we sat down with author Franklin Horton to discuss his book, The Borrowed World. Take a look and see how it can benefit YOU as a member of the Family Protection Association!
Matthew Ashton:
Thank you so much, everybody, for joining us here today on the Family Protection Association and Survival Life podcast. Today, we’ve got a fantastic guests that we’re really excited about. We’ve got author Franklin Horton with us today. Franklin is an author of multiple survival prepper style books that are fantastic. They can be found on Amazon, and we’ll get a little bit more about how to find them. We’re looking forward to talking with him today. Franklin, it’s wonderful having you on. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Franklin Horton:
Hi. Yeah, I appreciate the invitation. Thanks for having me as a guest.
Matthew Ashton:
No, not a problem. I mean, our CEO, we were talking about who we wanted on the podcast, and Jeremy reached out to me. He goes, “Dude, you got to get this guy.” So I’m like, “Well, if I’m going to talk to him, I better read his book.” So went on Amazon, got it, started reading it. And to be honest, I haven’t binge read a book like that since Harry Potter. It is changed so much. I’m big in the prepper community, that’s what we’re all about here. And to read a book like this was just phenomenal. I stopped watching Netflix, YouTube. When I wake up in the morning, instead of looking at Instagram, I was reading the book to see what was happening. You’ve really crafted some amazing stories.
Franklin Horton:
That’s cool. That’s what I like to hear.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah, it’s it is such a good read, and I recommend it for everybody. So why don’t you tell us a little bit how you got into this, how you got interested in this genre, it’s a very unique genre for people to get into. Were you a writer beforehand? Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah, definitely. You know, I was a person who tried to write early in life. I started writing when I was about 15 years old, and I had written several novels that I never could find a publisher for. And they may have been crappy novels, that may have been my fault. But through the old system, the way it worked was you had to find an agent who believed in you, then that agent had to take you to a publisher, and you had all these hoops to jump through before you could get a book out.
Franklin Horton:
So what changed in the early 2000s was Amazon created the Kindle system, where you could publish a book directly through Amazon, with no middlemen at all. Everything fell on you, though. You had to do your own editing, you had to get your own cover designer, you had to take on the whole business end of getting a book out. So I decided at that point I was going to give it one more shot, and that was it. I was going to try one more book, because I’d invested years in this process and never had anything to show for it. So I wrote a book, the type of book that I really enjoyed reading, because I was reading some of the early post-apocalyptic stuff, and it had always been my favorite going back to Stephen King’s The Stand and some od those cool 70s movies about last man on earth or whatever.
Franklin Horton:
So I wrote what was called at the time post-apocalyptic fiction, but now it’s kind of become prepper fiction. But I wrote my first book, and I threw it out there with no expectation at all. And it just really hit at the right time, and readers seemed to enjoy it. And they’re still enjoying it. I have 18 books, I believe it is, written now. And people are still enjoying that first one. So that’s very encouraging.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah, they’re fantastic. I think what I really appreciated about your book when I first read the first one, I’m getting into the second one now, is the approach you took was not one of a ridiculous premise towards the apocalypse. There’s there’s a lot of like… I mean, when you’re talking, Walking Dead, the ultimate reality of a zombie apocalypse is probably not very scientifically valid. But where you started yours off with a terrorist attack, that really hit me. I’m like, this is legitimate, this could happen. And it was kind of funny when you were talking in the very beginning of that book, that the guy got the idea from a documentary. Because as you talk about that, I’m reading your book and I’m going, I wonder if he’s giving ideas to other people about how this could happen.
Franklin Horton:
If you look it up, that documentary is real. And I watched that documentary on The Learning Channel. And I can’t remember the exact name, but it was simply like, The Crumbling of America. And it was all about infrastructure targets. And as I was watching that documentary, I’m like, I hope no terrorists are sitting here at the end ordering this DVD, because it pointed out all these weaknesses. And I made notes and all those weaknesses, or a lot of them, ended up in that book.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah. And you made a very good point, that that type of a terrorist attack has a much more longterm effect. Yes, 9-11 deaths were terrible, it was a horrible event, but it doesn’t really affect how most of us live our lives, unless you were in New York or you knew somebody who died in the attack.
Franklin Horton:
You know, at the time a lot of the post-apocalyptic books that were out were based on EMPs. And the EMP is the sexy disaster. That’s the one people like, because they just get up and suddenly life has changed. But I’ve always been a believer that the slow decline is a much more likely collapse. And what we saw in the Borrowed World, which was my first book, was what they call a collapsing systems failure, which is where one thing mushrooms into many more things and creates this ripple effect throughout the economy and the population. Which is, I know we’re going to get into this later, but that’s a lot of what we’re seeing now, is how one little bump in the road can cause all these cascading ripples that affect other things.
Matthew Ashton:
Absolutely. I mean, that’s definitely a big theme in your book, that’s a theme in what’s going on now in the current world. And I think I really appreciate, like when I read your books, even though like you said, it’s almost 20 years ago now, you hit all the different personalities of people within that book. You have the modern millennials, hikers that are afraid of guns and don’t want to be around people with guns. And we have a lot of that in today’s world, people who can’t stand up for themselves anymore. Versus the main character’s grandpa, who is the bad-ass, who will kill you if you mess with his family.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. You know, what I did was at that time I was living in Southwestern Virginia, which has kind of the Appalachian part of Virginia if you can’t tell by my accent. And I worked in a state mental health agency. So we frequently had to travel to Richmond, Virginia. So a lot of what happens in that book is realistically based on my job at the time. I was making that same trip, 325 miles twice a month to go to Richmond for meetings and conferences and all this stuff. So I based that book on my trip, my coworkers, and my plan to get home if things happened. And coinciding with the time that I was writing that book, I was doing a lot of backpacking. So my idea was, I’d just take my backpack and gear with me. And I would backpack home on the Appalachian trail if things got ugly and I couldn’t drive.
Matthew Ashton:
So that really, that actually got my attention. Because I know about get home bags and stuff, but I’m looking at traveling more and doing some things. And that makes a difference. If you are really far away, a get home back from your work is entirely different from a get home bag when you’re 2-300 miles away from home. And so-
Franklin Horton:
Yeah, exactly. In my day job, which… I write full time right now, but up until December of last year, I had a day job that I went to for years and years and years. And I had a small bag that I took with me every day. And that had the things that I needed to make that 25 mile walk home if it stretched into two days. So it was a very small bag, but because I backpacked a lot, I had a pretty good understanding of how much weight I could take, and the things I needed for a multi day trip. So I wrote that with the backpacking mindset, rather than just a preparedness mindset of what things would you ideally like to have. It was written from the mindset of what things do I realistically know that I can carry for days and days and days.
Matthew Ashton:
Absolutely. And there’s certainly a dichotomy there and spectrum between what your skill levels are, versus what gear you need. I’ve seen a few people talk about this, that the less skill you have, the more gear you need to survive. But to your point, the more gear you have, that’s a lot heavier. It’s going to take longer to get places, you’re going to get tired quicker. So if you can up your skill set, you need less gear and could probably do better in a situation like that.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. And the other balance point there is, how much of your time on your way home do you actually want to spend trying to gather food? So if your primary objective is to nail the trail and do lots of miles, then you want things that either collect food quickly or you want as much as you can gather along the way that doesn’t require a big expenditure of time. Because the idea of hunting along your trip home takes a lot of time that you could be using to reach your family. So that was the consideration in the book, is the guy basically lived off rice, beans, and junk food that he stole out of a vending machine, because he wanted to put lots of miles between him and Richmond, because he was desperately concerned about his family. And that that’s the other huge part of the book is, how his family is getting by without him.
Franklin Horton:
Because in a lot of cases, there is one person in the family who is the prepper, and it’s not always the husband. Sometimes I hear from a lot of wives who are like, how do I get my husband on board with this? So it’s about-
Matthew Ashton:
Let him play with guns.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. It’s a good excuse to accumulate lots of good stuff. But that’s a big part of the book, is the husband in this family took a lot of the preparedness role. So when he was gone, the wife and the kids were having to piece together all the information about how do we run the house with no power, how do we cook with no power? Where are the empty magazines, where the full magazines? How do we get the gun safe? Where’s this, where’s that? So that becomes a big part of the book, too. And that has actually mushroomed into a class that I teach at a lot of prepper events that are local to me, which is how to build kind of an instruction manual for running your own little, running your house in a survival scenario.
Matthew Ashton:
That that was a big eye opener for me. When Jim, the character sends his wife a text, and all it says is go to the red book, open it, follow all the instructions. I was like, I need that for my house. Like I realized all the knowledge I have, my wife doesn’t really care, but if you lay out those instructions, people can follow instructions.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. And you know where that came in? That was actually part of my real day job, was I was a facility manager for a lot of different buildings where mental health services were conducted. So I was in charge of construction, and I would get the building built. And then once the building was built to the needs of the program, I would write out the operations manual, which had like, what heat pump filters do you need? What light bulbs do you need? What is your fire alarm procedure? You know, all those little steps. And I started thinking, well, that’d be a great thing to have at home. So that’s what I did, was in that book applied that same idea of having an operations manual to your house.
Matthew Ashton:
I think that’s a genius thing. I think a lot of people don’t have that. And in today’s world, a lot of people don’t know how to do that. They don’t know how to fix something if it breaks, or how to replace things. They rely on repairmen to fix their cars, or a lot of people have yard guys or whatever it needs to be. So that is a huge mindset. That was a game changer for me. I know we teach people to have a family emergency plan, where to meet, how to make sure you have some food and stuff. But you got into such detail with that, and it really hit me that he acted so quickly. And because of that book, his wife was able to get to the store before everybody really understood that it was this big deal. She got all her supplies and cash and everything set up before everybody else had even mobilized, because he had planned that in advance and had that book ready.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah, and it’s been interesting, because recently I’ve heard from people who read those books and said, when this whole COVID thing started happening and the stores started empty and out, reading these books kind of gave me some things to know to look for. I knew to look for warning signs that the stores were emptying. And then I also knew what kind of stuff to buy when I went. So there’s a lot in there that’s applicable to current situations, whether there’s a disaster going on, or whether it’s just in your everyday normal life, like we used to have.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah. That certainly hit me a lot, reading this for the first time, going through COVID, going through the riots and the violence and looting and everything else that’s going on right now. Like when you’re talking about, people are going out and raiding other people for supplies and things like that. And it’s not months and years down the road that this is happening. This is a few days into this trek that they’re trying to make back home, that this stuff’s already happening. I mean, you described that first morning in the gas station when the police had the shootout and everything, I’m like, things can go downhill in a hurry. It’s not years for infrastructure to break down. People can break down very quickly. And we’re seeing that now.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah, and I did a lot of research on that. And of course there’s a lot more information out there about it now, but things turn on a dime. You can be in your car listening to Sirius XM, and thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner that night. And then you can be fighting for your life seconds later. And that’s what happened in that book. And that’s what happens to some people now, who happened to get caught behind protesters or whatever, people were trying to drag them out of the car. And that’s what happened in this book. The guy was… They were thinking about getting on the road, they were thinking about where they were going to get gas. Then the next thing you know, somebody has a tire iron drawn back trying to shatter the window.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah. That, that was definitely eye opening. And the whole thing, how that shootout started with the whole focus on police violence right now. Like you can see how it escalated so quickly from a thrown can to a shotgun, that one pellet accidentally killed somebody, which sets everybody off into this massive gunfight that I’m like, that deescalated so freaking quickly, that it just got out of control. And we’ve seen that. I mean, even here in Salt Lake, it hasn’t been that bad, but there’s certainly been instances that have been pretty bad as far as looting. My friend was in a gas station and a bunch of guys ran in and took a baseball bat to the owner at the front of the thing. And he got out of there quickly, but just out of the blue, like that could get bad really quickly.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. You never know in circumstances like we’re in now, when you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be somewhere where a shooting suddenly turns a small city or a small town into the scene of a riot, and then suddenly you’re caught in the middle of it.
Matthew Ashton:
Oh yeah. Of course, you see also the opposite end of that, where people who are prepped and who are ready, dealt with it in a much different fashion. I mean, you had up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, that they basically formed their own militia. And so when people did come to protest, it was a very peaceful protest, because the militia there was armed of the teeth and there was easily like in one picture I counted a hundred guns. And so you knew nothing bad was going to… They kept it very, we’re keeping this in control, this isn’t going to get out of control.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. And that’s exactly what we saw in Virginia. You know, last year when we had our… Well, at the beginning of this year, when we had our second amendment protests, when the governor was trying to crack down and pass all these bills, we had this massive second amendment protest in Richmond, and there was no violence. And people even picked up their own trash when it was done. You would never know that there had been any event there at all.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah. It’s crazy to see how some of that stuff is going on right now and seeing some of the decline. And it’s not even just COVID or the Black Lives Matter. It’s natural disasters. We’ve had a ton of them this year. There’s the Australian bush fires that displaced a lot of people, killed a lot of animals, and that was massive. We’ve had all the storms that hit the south really hard.
Matthew Ashton:
Here in Utah, we had like two weeks after COVID hit and the lockdowns happened, we had an earthquake, which is pretty rare to have. And it was decent enough sized, and some of the buildings got damaged. Our house took a little bit of damage, but it was mostly cosmetic. Like our blinds got decompressed cause of the windows. But it got my attention. It was a 4.7, which most people in California are probably going, ah, that’s nothing. But for here, it got attention. The place where I used to work, my boss actually, we’re good friends still, he sent me a picture. And it shook the building so bad it blasted out an entire glass showcase wall. And so I was like, that’s pretty intense to feel that around here. And so there’s natural disasters that can hit you at any time.
Franklin Horton:
Well, and one of the things that becomes apparent in my books as you go through the different series is that it’s not just about preparing for the apocalypse. Disasters can happen on any scale from large to small, and you’re much more likely to encounter a weather related disaster than the actual zombie apocalypse or whatever. So that’s a big focus of the books as you go through the series and you meet more of the characters, is that people try to be prepared, at least a lot of the people that I built characters out of, for any type of disaster. They try to be prepared just in general, because you don’t know from year to year, day to day, especially in a year like 2020, what the world can throw at us. And even if you were affected on the level of employment, having food that you can fall back on and having supplies that will sustain you over a period of unemployment is a huge benefit of being prepared.
Matthew Ashton:
Extremely so. I mean, I’ve read stories of people, especially here being Utah. The Mormon church does teach a lot of self preparedness and self-reliance, and I’ve read stories of guys who got laid off from work and struggled to find a job for a long time, but they had their year of food storage that the Mormon church teaches you should have. And their family basically lived off that as a means of not having to rely on their budget and the current cash they had until he was able to find another employment in another job. And that’s a big one. When we’re looking at COVID right now, like toilet paper was gone. If you did not have toilet paper stocked up, you were hurting for a while, but there’s other alternatives there. I mean, it’s funny because everybody was like, there’s no toilet paper, there’s no toilet paper I’m going. Yeah. But Home Depot is not sold out of bidets yet. There’s other options there that you just have to kind of be creative and think through.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. And that’s a good example of the ripple effect, the cascading systems failure that we were talking about earlier, because a lot of people didn’t anticipate all the little micro shortages that there would be. [Crosstalk 00:20:57] And anything that comes from China, all the little components that have affected, that you can’t get certain kinds of freezers, or there’s a delay in buying certain kinds of electronics because it’s those component shortages that we don’t always take into account.
Matthew Ashton:
Very much so. I mean, even something as simple as a bicycle, because all the companies are kind of shut down and not really producing right now. They weren’t really expecting that, well, it’s the summer, nobody has anything to do because nobody has a job. So everybody’s out doing all this stuff. And so Walmarts haven’t had bikes forever because they sold out of them when they normally sell one or two. And you talked about this in your book, that most stores nowadays carry roughly about three days worth of inventory on hand of anything. And they’re heavily reliant on that shipping surplus to keep things going through.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. There’s that just in time inventory situation, we’ve seen the impacts of that now, because one delay in trucking, there are certain things in my local stores that have been in scarce supply ever since this began, and preppers should take notes. This is the things we should be observing. Because before, when I first started writing those books, one of the things I referred back to was Bosnia was one of those modern cities that was reduced to a survival situation in our lifetime. And people looked back on Bosnia and thought, well, what disappeared in Bosnia when they got hit by all this war? And that was one of the references that a lot of survival writers used, was what ran short in Bosnia. But now we’ve got this whole realistic COVID thing happening around us where we can see these shortages. So this is a good time for preppers to take notes and be watching what things disappear, and hopefully tweaking their supplies as things hopefully one day normalize.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah. That’s certainly a really good point. The other thing I know I did is knowing things were out, I looked at what wasn’t and went, okay, can I make food out of that? Can I adapt somehow? There may be canned food that’s out, but for me, actually, a lot of the foods that sold out, my wife has an autoimmune disease. So she couldn’t really eat all the grains, all the boxed foods, all of the pre-prepared stuff because it makes her sick. So it made it kind of an interesting challenge, because the stuff she could eat was the stuff that wasn’t sold out at the time. So it actually kind of, okay, well that’s all sold out, but I don’t need to panic because she can’t have that anyways. So let me refurbish the things that are there, because those are stuff I can use. I can use the fresh vegetables, the fresh meats, things like that, that people weren’t doing.
Matthew Ashton:
I know for myself, the moment COVID came out, I started watching Craigslist and picked up a free freezer that was fully working, and now we’ve got two stand up freezers. And so I’ve got one full of veggies, one full of meat, because that’s mostly what she can eat. And that’s probably two or three months worth of supply.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. We kind of went through the same thing because my wife really can’t eat a lot of foods that have sodium in them. So that eliminates a lot of canned food and frozen foods. So you always have to take those kinds of things into account in your planning.
Matthew Ashton:
Very, very much so. And medications, and like there’s a lot of things that just start making… It makes you think, where’s your weak point? What are you missing? What are you aware of? And your book, despite being fiction, could honestly be a manual for preppers. When I read it, I’m like, he is so on form with every single thing a prepper needs, like this is unbelievable.
Franklin Horton:
You know, there are people out there who I think become preppers from the process of writing their books. But in my own case, I told you I kind of live back in the hills of central Appalachia. This is where my family has lived for awhile. What happened was when people say settled during the colonial days, you had the feisty Scottish people and the feisty Irish people who said, I don’t want to live in a town with a bunch of people. I’m moving to the hills. So they all came out here, and even when I was growing up in the 70s, there were still people around who lived these sustainable lifestyles. And you had farmers who tended to grow almost everything they ate. They had their livestock, they canned, and they only bought those things that they couldn’t produce themselves.
Franklin Horton:
And there was still a lot of that going on. I used to meet these old guys who would eat possums and raccoons and groundhogs and all the food that nobody else wanted. But what happened was there was a period of time in the fifties and sixties, and I guess even up through now for a lot of people, where a rural lifestyle was looked down on as being kind of associated with poverty, associated with the past. And people who even grew up in that didn’t want part of it anymore. So they let a lot of those survival and sustenance skills drop away. And I felt fortunate that I grew up around that and still knew a lot of those people, and knew a lot of those skills.
Franklin Horton:
So when I started writing these books, I thought, this is just a reminder to me, to my friends, to my family, to the people who read my books, that if you have people in your life who know those skills, then you should hang on to them. It’s your duty to learn those things and to pass them on and to preserve them. So while a lot of the characters in my books are preppers, a lot of them are these feisty old mountain people who never got away from living these kind of sustenance lifestyles.
Matthew Ashton:
Very much so. And some of them that you talk about, like some of them are still city people, but they’re feisty enough to make it through. I think Randy was one, that just tough old bird that she’d do what she had to do.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah. And that’s something too, that I think I talk about in that book, and a lot more as the series goes on, is mindset is so much of the battle. It’s not always the skills you have. It’s not always who has the nicest guns, it’s that mindset and that determination and that willingness to go through hard times and to tough it out and to walk out the other end. And she had that, she’s a strong character who was a grandmother, who’s like, I have grandkids to get home to. This is not stopping me.
Matthew Ashton:
No, you’re absolutely right, and you definitely have a point there. I mean, if you’re in a survival situation and it’s you versus somebody else on who’s going to live or die, even if you’ve trained forever… And I think Jim went through this when he killed the first guy, that it’s the first time you’ve ever killed a person. It’s something nobody’s ever really prepared for, no matter what you try to do. Like there’s certain things you just have to do that you don’t think about in survival situations, even down to something as simple as maybe you have to eat bugs for dinner. But it’s something… And you even said, like possums. Most people wouldn’t think to eat that. Or I like watching a lot of Duck Dynasty, and so they always go out squirrel hunting. Well, the idea of eating a squirrel for most people is repulsive, and they’re like, they probably have diseases. But to other people that’s just life. That’s how they eat.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah, my grandfather was one of those, that they baked their squirrels whole, and they took spoons and they cracked the heads open like they were soft boiled eggs and spooned the brains out and ate those. That’s something I never did, and never could bring myself to do, but for people of a certain generation and a certain lifestyle, that was a delicacy.
Matthew Ashton:
That’s what I’ve come to understand watching some of these shows. They’re like, Oh, squirrel brains are great. And I’m like, I can eat the rest of the squirrel, I don’t know that I could go that far.
Franklin Horton:
Yeah, I could never do it. I saw them doing it, I watched them do it, but I never could bring myself.
Matthew Ashton:
Yeah. And there’s certain cool aspects to that. I mean, these books of yours are fantastic. I’ve really appreciated, like I said, I read them faster than I read Harry Potter. Like this is just, I can’t get enough of these books. This is phenomenal.
Franklin Horton:
Well, just to give you an idea of what you’ve got in store for you, there are seven books currently in the Borrowed World series, which is the one you’ve started. I’m working on the eighth book in that series now. I’ve got a couple of other projects out there. One of them, when I first started going to survival shows, after I wrote the Borrowed World, I was going to a lot of prepper events and met some fantastic people. And one of the questions that I got asked a lot was, “Well, this helps me at home, but I need an idea of what to do for my child that’s going away to college, or is living with their military husband in a town that’s far away from us. I need an idea for that.” So the Locker Nine series is a four book series that takes place within the same disaster, but it’s different characters.
Franklin Horton:
And it’s about a dad who prepares for his daughter when she’s going away to college. And people seem to like that series too. So aside from the Borrowed World, that’s probably one of my more popular series. I have another series called the Mad Mick that is post-apocalyptic also. And it’s, I’m working on the fourth book in it now, it should be coming out next month, the fourth book. It is not as much a prepper series as just a post apocalyptic, over the top crazy series that gun lovers and people who like action books tend to enjoy, because it’s really over the top. But I’ve got a lot of books out there for prepper folks. So I really recommend they check them out.
Matthew Ashton:
Oh, I totally do too. Where can they go to find your books, to find you? Where would they go to look to get that?
Franklin Horton:
Okay, if you’re interested in finding out more about my books, more about me, the first place I’d recommend I go is my website, which is franklinhorton.com. It’s got links to the books, it’s got information about me. It’s got a mailing list that you can sign up for to catch my new releases, because I’m releasing about five or six books a year right now. My books are available on Amazon. Most of the time, you’re not going to be able to find them in bookstores. But if you go to Amazon, you can get it for Kindle. You can get the paperback mailed right to you from Amazon. They’re also available on Audible and iTunes. So the audio books are hugely popular. The narrator that I used does a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and he and I have a really good working relationship. A lot of times when I’m writing the books, I hear his voice in my head narrating them. So he lends a lot to the story. So if you’re a person who doesn’t think that you could sit down and read the book, the audio is just over the top. It’s really good.
Matthew Ashton:
Fantastic. Well, it’s been great having you here on our podcast today. We definitely want to encourage everybody to go check out Frank’s books, they’re phenomenal. Again, we really appreciate all of your advice and everything else. Again, go check out franklinhorton.com. Go check him out on Amazon. Thank you everybody for listening to the FPA and Survival Life podcast. We’re very, very grateful to have everybody here who wants to listen, and we will see you all next time.