Welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside My Canoe Head.
Listen, thanks for all the recent new followers we have in India, in the United Arab Emirates, and a couple of other really cool countries around the world. We are now well into our 30s of the number of nations. For some strange reason, we still have not broken through in the South America. Maybe somebody will just be nice and go change their internet protocol there to say that they're from South America.
So let's get it down. Listen, that's pretty cool, though. I appreciate the ongoing support and all of the information, and accolades, and commentary, and strongly worded suggestions that I get, because I get it all, and I really do enjoy it. So today, listen, I think we need to talk about kits.
And if you've been following me here for some time, you know, I have a very opinionated version, or very clear view on this ridiculous assumption of go bags and everything else out in the world. But since it's out there, you need to address it. You need to have a logical approach to everything you're going to do. So if you're an individual who thinks about kits, who believes that kits are necessary, sit down, grab yourself a beverage, we're going to walk through what we think is the appropriate way to have a look.
But first, let's look at what the world says about kits. So we started off with the 72-hour kit. This was based upon a psychological profiles that was done in the 1950s and 1960s to determine what was the point at which people are willing to take on an activity without reaching the point where they determine it to be necessary, unachievable, insurmountable, and then they walk away and choose avoidance behaviors. And roughly 72 hours were found to be that point.
So 72 hours was created, not because that's what the government will take to get there, you know, what sort of disaster happens. It's simply the maximum amount that we can ask people and be somewhat persuasive for them to adopt. We then see the wonderful Amazon pre-made kits. Like just drop a couple hundred bucks and somebody will send you a package in the mail and have everything in there with all these cool label pouches, good to go, people are making millions.
We have the idea there's one for everyone. I've got a five year old kid at home. They need to have their own bug out bag for their backpack, really. So when they get separated from you, they're going to be able to reach in that bag and utilize everything in there to survive.
It's crazy, but it's out there. We have bug out bags, these really cool ideas that I'm going to grab this and I'm going to run from my perfectly good house or community. And I'm going to run in the woods and somehow start to be an instant bush crafter and I'm going to survive in the woods. Hilarious, if not utterly, absolutely dangerous.
Anybody who's thinking about this, let me be serious. It doesn't work. And then my all to get favorite is the inch bag, the I'm Never Coming Home bag. The one that's created for when the big bad day comes and you are going to be a hermit living off of the land.
And let me tell you exceptionally few people have the skill sets to do that. And a very small percentage of those people will be successful. So if you're not currently planning and living in weeks on end in the bush off of your inch bag, you're setting yourself up for absolute abject failure, which is hilarious, if not sad. Then we have the Fighting Kit.
There are a number of places around the world where people believe that there are going to be mobs and marauders coming around stealing everything. So they've got their assault rifle, their shotgun, their plate carrier and their Fighting Kit ready to go to defend their neighborhood. Somebody's been watching way too many series on Netflix. Let's just put it that way.
And the last most logical thing that's out there is evacuation kits, because there actually is some parts of the country where, or the world, where you do need to have some supplies ready to go at short notice because evacuations are a real probability where you live, but not everybody's in that situation. So with that and understanding, this is the crazy world that's out there, how do you decide what am I supposed to do when it comes to kits? All right, let's be blunt. The most important question you have to ask yourself is, why do I need a kit?
Right? If you need to answer that question. So before you take on any task in life or anything, you need to be asking yourself, why am I doing this? Why am I worried about this?
So the first thing that probably comes up is you live in an area that you face a significant natural hazard that will have you needing to leave your home on short order. So I have friends in southwestern BC that live on the Cascadia fault. They very well way have to leave their house because they are in tsunami zones. I mean, there are real world examples where you do need a kit.
And the situation you're in facing the natural hazard, irrespective of what precautions you take in your home, you may be required to go. That's a real reason to have one. Industrial, do you live in a place where you are next to say a nuclear facility? And beyond your potassium iodide and tablets that you have at home, you might actually have to evacuate the area because of some type of industrial thing that could occur.
Again, it's free to research and figure out whether you're in that kind of zone. And the other one that I think is really important to consider is a lot of us live in high density housing. They could be townhouse developments, really crushed in-hosing developments. You could live in a high-rise condo apartment building or something like that.
So basically, you're living with the results of your neighbor's actions. So the idiot two floors above you that didn't turn the bathtub off and went and flooded your entire apartment, causing electrical short out and a little bit of fire in your apartment building, you're living with other people's consequences. So unless you have a single family home that is separated far enough that if the neighbor's house catches on fire, yours won't, you are living with other people's idiocy and accidents that happen. So because of that, you very well may face a threat.
So these are real reasons why a kit makes sense to you. But again, if you go through this process and you can't come up with a logical reason and you do not live in a place where an evacuation threat is real, then I'm not certain you should be building these wonderfully expensive and ridiculous kits with cool labels and putting them by the front door. A lot of times the 72-hour kits are sold and they actually put people in a more dangerous position because people think with these preexisting kits, they're somehow better prepared to deal with and in fact, their reliance on this garbage in a bag that you get offline might actually put them at a higher degree of risk and injury than had they done nothing. So 72-hour kits and preparedness kits, if you don't need one and you're relying simply on a .com sale, might actually put you at a higher risk.
So if you understand, you now, okay, I have a reason for a kit, whatever that is, I get it. You have a reason to need a kit in your home. The next question I ask you is who is you responsible for? Now, if you follow us here at Inside Mike Newhead, we talk about this all the time, that the nuclear word cleaver family is not existing anymore as the majority and I think it's fantastic.
Our definition of family is wonderful, it's inclusive, it's diverse, it can be multi-location, it can be multi-generational, how you define your family matters to you. So if you think you need an evacuation kit or some type of kit to leave your house at short notice, you need to define who you're responsible for because that's gonna help you in the construction process of what you think you need to put in the kit. The next question I'm gonna ask you is where are you going? Now, there's a bit of funny, if you follow some of these nutcases online, they'll talk about the threat of FEMA camps.
You've seen it from the original Red Dawn where the invaders put all the adult males into these camps with wires or you've seen some camps similar to that built in China for their so-called COVID-0 policy. You've seen isolation camps in other countries where people infected with the COVID have been isolated and brought to separate locations. So you've seen that, I don't think FEMA has the time or the effort to build massive camps to force people into, but the point being is, is if you believe you have a need to evacuate your home and you've decided you need a kit and you've defined your family, are you simply gonna leave it up to the government to tell you where to go? Think about that.
You're not gonna do any planning, you've got your kit, you're just gonna sit back and wait for some magical person on the radio with some really cool emergency management title to tell you that you need to go to this place, right? And oh, by the way, guess what? Every freaking person around you is going to that place. So you immediately are going to clog all the major arteries and now you're gonna be sitting in your car for 14 hours straight because you did exactly what the government told you to do.
Now I'm not telling you to ignore the government. I'm telling you that if you believe you need to have an evacuation plan with a kit, you need to have a destination pre-planned. Where are you going to go? Now if you evacuate your home, you need to determine, now this is free of charge.
Don't think that you're gonna be the one who's gonna book a hotel in the next town over. Your fat fingers may not be faster than 10,000 of your neighbors and you probably won't get a hotel within 400 kilometers. So you need to have a pre-pran friends or family, faith or some other community group related destination that you've talked to and have this pre-planned. And once you have that, you need to have multiple routes on how you're going to get there.
For example, I live in Ottawa. I have a pre-planned evacuation destination with a family member outside of Kingston, Ontario. Okay, I'm not gonna tell you the exact location. But I have a whole massive family in there and I have a pre-arranged destination.
I don't need to call in advance. They are perfectly happy for me to show up unannounced with a carload of people and a few personal belongings and I will be perfectly taken care of and I can stay as long as I want. And that's a reciprocal agreement for those people outside, for that other, this family outside of Kingston that they are perfectly free to jump in their car and show up at my front door unannounced and we will absolutely house them. No questions asked.
That's an evacuation plan. Waiting for the government to tell you what road to get on and where you're gonna go. That's a total plan and a recipe for failure, disaster and absolute clogged. If everybody's gonna evacuate down route one, you're not going down route one.
What other routes are you taking? And if that's not available, what's your alternate route? You must always have two routes. Now this is all free.
It's all done by paper maps, which, or your GPS maps on your phone, which is perfectly fine. Even in a power outage and the cell signals down, if you download maps, your GPS signal will work. And if not, get yourself a paper map and a handheld GPS. The point is, is that when you determine that you have a need to go somewhere, it is absolutely your responsibility to predetermine that location and your routes to get there.
And then I'm gonna tell you again, you've got family that you've defined, where the heck are they, how y'all gonna get together in a little bit of communication protocol is good to go. I'll tell you mine. Mine is very simple. In the chaos of something big that's gonna cause a family evacuation.
We have a single protocol in my family. There are no text messages required. There is no phone. You'll know, like, trust me, you'll know when it's time to go.
And when it's time to go, everybody has the personal responsibility in the family to get their butts back to the house. If the house is no longer available, everybody, we have an alternate location to go to after that, where we will meet up and then proceed. The person at the house is responsible for grabbing the evacuation kit and going. The reason I have an evacuation kit is I live in a zone that is subject to an earthquake hazard.
There's a significant fault line. It rarely goes and it rarely goes above a five or a six. But the building code protocols in the province of Ontario, there are no seismic reinforcement in my house. So in a significant seismic event, my house is likely to come down and the neighborhood's full of gas lines.
It's not a place that I want to hang out. Let's just put it that way. So bearing all that in mind, I've defined that for my house, I have a need to leave my home on short order, simply for that one reason. Because of that, I have put together what I believe need is necessary for that potential evacuation.
As a result, whoever is home has the requirement to load that into the vehicle and move and get prepared and then accept people. And if they have to leave the location, then they go to the alternate meetup location to meet everybody else and we move forward. Is it a perfect plan? You know, I've spent 28 years in the army.
I've never met a perfect plan. I don't care what general wrote it. They all have flaws and we're all humans. Nothing is going to be perfect.
So now you've gotten to the important part where you've decided that you need one, you've defined who your family are. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you need to go through the process because they're going to have individual needs. And I'll be a prime example. I've got a child with a peanut allergy.
I gotta remember to make sure that there's an EpiPen in that kit. So if you define that the kit is necessary, you've defined your family and the personal needs, you have a destination, know where you're going. You have a communication plan. Now you've got to determine what you're going to put in your kit.
Now there are three considerations that I wanna talk about. And the first one is going to be animalistic needs. Now you know in the podcast, when I talk about individual emergency preparedness, I always talk about framing everybody's requirements in the animalistic perspective is what I'm trying to say. So the perspective simply means that we are animals in the world, we have some very basic requirements.
Number one is shelter. You're going to have a vehicle and you're going to have appropriate clothes for the weather you're in. That's pretty much all the shelter you need. If your destination is three days away, you're probably picked the wrong destination.
You need one within quick, reasonable days commute with that understanding. You'll probably throw a couple of blankets in the back, but that's it. You don't need to buy anything for shelter. Food, you need food that people like to eat, a couple of bag of chippies.
We're not worried about getting our macro and micro nutrients in an evacuation. It's about putting smiles on people's faces. So if you've got a kid that loves, you know, burnt toast, bang, burnt toast. If you've got a kid that loves Doritos zesti cheese, make sure it's with your sams zesti cheese.
Like seriously, you just need calories. It doesn't matter where it comes from at this point. Water, you're gonna need to drink something. They're probably gonna prefer pop.
That's fine, no worries. Health and safety, a minor first aid kit for booboos. Maybe a trauma kit if you really need one, but seriously, it's just your household first aid kit. Let's not get this overborn.
Security, yeah, make sure you're not doing anything dumb like running around through parts of the countryside that you probably shouldn't be in. But security is mainly that you stay together and that you know where you're going. You have a planned destination. You're on your primary, your alternate route.
That was security plays in the mind. This is not a bang stick toting event where you're gonna be ready to fight off the marauders. If that is, I have no idea where you live. And if you have that threat, you probably shouldn't live there.
The second thing is mobility. Understand that Murphy loves to show up when you don't want him to. So if you're driving in a car, make sure that whatever those cute little kits you have is actually mobile. Should that car no longer become available for you?
I know it's just, some people call that weird, intrinsically unnecessary planning. But if I'm driving from Ottawa to Kingston, that's about 180 kilometers or about 110 miles for my American friends. And for some reason, along that route, my car no longer becomes available or serviceable. And I have to hump that.
I don't wanna have 90 pound bug out bags because that's gonna end horribly and ridiculously for me and my family. And the last part is happiness. Like literally, let's be serious. I mean, the kids are gonna want their iPads and it's about you're doing something that is inherently chaotic and inherently stressful.
But in a leadership position, it is your responsibility to maintain calm and chaos. And therefore you must maintain a happy, joyful, external, shall we say persona? And it is just like the old discussion of the duck in the water. From the top of the water, the duck looks like it's happy and calm underneath its little legs are going 100 miles an hour like your brain.
So remember, if the kit is necessary, you've defined your family, you know exactly where you're going. And in the unlikely event that you have to execute this wonderful plan for which you've determined the kit is necessary, you remember that calm and chaos is the most important part of leadership. There's an old saying in the cavalry that simply states, don't run, it stardles the horses. And it's meant to be when you are an officer in the military and the shizzies hit in the fizzy, you do not look panic, you don't run around.
Cause if the troops see the officers coming unhinged, yeah, their confidence level is gonna go down slight a bit. So the point being this is have a kit if you need to have a kit. Make sure the kit fits the very situation that you've defined that is appropriate for where you live, your family, and everything along the lines. Remember, the kit is about the animalistic requirements to get you from your residence to your pre-planned destination.
You don't need to evacuate with three months food supply and enough for fighting platoon, okay? The point here is this is not complex and I'm gonna say it 100 times out of 100, your evacuation kit should cost you nothing. You only need to bring what's in your house. There is absolutely zero requirement for you to acquire anything you don't already own for your kit seriously.
I am tired of this ongoing idea in the preparedness community that preparedness costs money, not bloody, it's free. Do you have a GPS device? Yeah, it's probably your sister's smartphone bud. If you don't have a smartphone, then you are in the small persona in the Western world that does it.
Now, if you're not in the Western world and you live in a rural agrarian society, then your evacuation is gonna look a little different, but you're also gonna have everything you need. Because if you remember from the animalistic perspective, you already live in the environment where you are. You're already able to survive. Right now you have everything you need to survive where you've chosen to live, right?
So to evacuate in the area where you've chosen to live, it doesn't make any sense to say you need something else. You already have everything you need. The idea is just thinking through your basic animalistic requirements, what am I gonna need to get from where I am to where I'm going? And yes, before I go, I know there are people out there screaming, but what about your important documents?
Okay, fair enough. I carry my wallet with me all the time. I'm never away from my important documents. Insurance, all I know is that I've got the seven digit phone number memorized in my insurance agents.
That's all I need. A copy of the policy is irrelevant to me. What am I gonna do? I argue with a multi-billion dollar insurance company that I think interpretation of sub paragraph 122.7 is different than them.
Yeah, good luck with that, bud. Now, I just need the phone number for my insurance company and the insurance company and everybody else is on my phone anyhow. Welcome to the world of the digital age. We're good to go.
So thank you very much for taking the time to join us this week and we talk about kits. I think it's a fun topic. We're gonna have one more episode coming up on Thursday, just a fun little episode. And then after that, inside my canoe head is gonna be offline for about 10 days because I am headed into the back country on an epic, incredible canoe trip.
I can't wait to go. We're gonna have some discussions about it, some films, some YouTube and all that fun stuff. So take care, think about planning for a kid. If you need one, then take the steps that I've mentioned.
Think your way through it. Have your plan, know where you're going. The government will give you advice, but you should already have the whole thing complete. Don't wait for the government.
They're not coming to help you. So take care, stay safe and enjoy this wonderful summer weather.