Hoarding in Preparedness

all right welcome back to the studios of inside my canoe head today we are going to talk about hoarding hoarding and preparedness hoarding in life and everything you need to know about it so grab yourself your favorite beverage let's get at it all right welcome back to the start of another wonderful week here at inside my canoe head i'm your host dr d we are going to talk about hoarding why well i tell you if you're watching the news or if you're intentionally avoiding the news and you're watching youtube or you're doing anything online you can't avoid the sense of dread that exists in the world you can't avoid the sense of a coming calamity and this is very profitable in the preparedness space so today we're going to talk about hoarding what it is when it's based on um what it looks like and the challenges that it brings to you in the world of preparedness but first and foremost we are going to start with the most important question in the world of preparedness who is responsible for your outcomes and that answer is you and that means even though we love our friends our traditional first responders in the public sector and those in the emergency management field who will do their best to assist us in times of calamity that their ratio numbers and capability is far less than what the government pretends it to be putting you in a position where you are going to be responsible for your own outcome so if you assume that personal responsibility and accept that you are on the first step to adopting a prepared life thank you very much for everybody and all of your comments that keep coming in especially about the last episode on food that was interesting a lot of great response to that some people thinking i was being a bit over the top about obesity and and food consumption and how to eat the point is that was really simple and i'll revisit it here and then we'll dump and we'll done and on to the next eat real food i don't care what you eat it has one ingredient nature produced it eat it you'll have a great life it's really that simple okay so we're gonna bury that one now we're talking about hoarding so what is hoarding pretty simply it's an act conducted when someone believes that circumstances beyond their control will lead to a shortage of something that they deem essential it's based on the scarcity principle the science of economics and behavioral economics is based upon the principle of scarcity that means there is not enough to go around for everybody if there was you wouldn't have to have governments you wouldn't have an economic system you wouldn't have wages you wouldn't have anything there would just be enough of everything for everybody because we don't have that we organize our system in an economic sense based upon the scarcity principle trying to allocate to the best possible we can a fair and just distribution of the resources that exist what hoarding is based on is the principle of fear and fear is the most powerful of human emotions it's useful to many parties now whether this be charlatans on youtube telling you that the sky is going to fall chicken littles coming that you got to hoard these 10 items before their government bans them uh you know top 10 lists to buy right now before they're no longer on the store shelves they show you pictures of very specific instances that happened during supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and then they say this is your future get out and buy right now that's using fear something coming in the future that you don't understand that places you in a position where you may have a shortage of something you deem essential and therefore you are incentivized through the use of fear to go out and acquire an outsized portion or sizable amount of said item right so fear is really really powerful we saw it a lot uh in the pandemic right so fear is used often by governments uh for good and i know that sounds a little weird but for example when we don't understand something when we don't know what's going on we always go to the most deadly possible outcome so at the first start of the pandemic we didn't know the actual percentage death rate you can call it by many different names but what percentage of the population that got covid19 would die right in the beginning we didn't know we didn't know the virality and the strength and the um transmission of this disease of the virus we didn't know we didn't understand so the fear that was built was based upon the fact that i could get it i don't know if i'm going to die and i don't know if i'm going to spread it to everybody around me so what that did is it's useful in controlling a population it is very useful in sending out very specific messages why fear exists in the population canadians where i'm from we're very compliant population anyhow but that fear induces a much higher percentage of uh compliance within the general population and so that works but where fear breaks down in the human system is until we understand the threat now research has looked at what that point is exactly what it is but it basically in simplistic terms it's when the target can see the roadmap through the problem they're facing so as soon as the population began to understand the virus as soon as the population began to understand that there are very specific targeted demographic groups that are at exceptionally high risk of getting the disease and then of the virus and then becoming significantly ill with it when we understood that and if you were in that group then fear was justified right you were at a really high risk but for the vast majority of the population who was not in that category we started to see a way through this and as soon as we did that we no longer feared getting a virus we no longer feared the effects of the virus on us in our own simple sense right this is not we're not talking globalist or on a population level experiment we're talking to fear induced individually so basically we started to see uh demands for different things to be done openings stopping the shutdowns all that different stuff so but really what happens though is often is agencies and agents will double down right so we saw this in the uh pandemic when the messaging from i'm not talking to government messaging i'm talking to government the messaging from some parts of society was well maybe you'll be okay but maybe you'll kill grandma maybe you'll get it and you'll go hurt somebody else so it was a doubling down on the fear realizing that the individuals were no longer in fear of the virus but now we have to keep them in fright and scared and so fear is a very very powerful right uh and i want to codify this before you all get off get on your soapboxes and start sending me messages that i'm anti anti-covid 19 etc i got inoculated i got i got the shots uh the lockdowns worked in certain situations i'm not and i'm just talking about the use and the power of fear so when you're able to induce fear into a population you're able to control the population and the pandemic was a perfect example of that so now transpose that onto what you're seeing on youtube on the preparedness side about the state of the world the coming collapse the coming collapse of the supply chain the coming economic collapse the government collapse uh the hoarding of food um just for one prime example was the u.s government apparently banning the shipment of ammunition outside the country that was apparently a hint that they're about to ban the sale of ammunition so it's a fear inducing move when you induce fear people see scarcity they begin to hoard they see that something out there that they deem essential and for most people it's not going to be the same and they move on so what does this look like in preparedness well the first thing that you often see people hoarding as a result of this uh cataclysmic messaging is food right non-perishable freeze-dried food now i was looking at the price of this last night uh looking at uh and i have a very small stockpile in my in my 90-day stockpile of freeze-dried and that's just the mobility option right because it's easy it's light and it's simple to move but when you look at the cost per calorie which is for most people in this inflation economic induced world cost per calorie uh is very very important uh when you're thinking mobility obviously you're thinking uh ounce or gram per calorie but normally because we shelter our plans are to shelter in place first and foremost we think about dollars per calorie and when you talk about freeze-dried it's really cool and if you have disgusting amounts of money you just go to costco and order a couple of sleds worth it it'll cost you about 15 to 17 grand and you can buy yourself a year's worth of food for you and your family freeze-dried it's good for 30 years you're done right but the vast majority of people listen to this podcast and myself included probably don't have 17 000 sitting in the bank account with nothing to do so a lot of people will look at non-perishable food they will build up a stockpile we talk about it here at inside my new bed and preparedness labs incorporated in our education process that we recommend you keep 14 days now i keep 90 for a whole different set of circumstances that we're going to talk about in an upcoming uh episode but 14 days is the standard that's because uh society's critical infrastructure when it does go down for 92 to 96 percent of the time that critical infrastructure is back up and running within uh 14 days so that's why we say 14 days don't pull it out of the sky it's based on research it's based on statistics that's what we do here at inside my new bed so when you talk about food we're not talking about those who are looking at cyclical annual canning routine so people who can or preserve their own food that they grow or purchase over the winter and through the starving months in the spring they're not hoarding those people are growing towards self-sufficiency it's something completely different hoarding is buying a large volume of something based on the scarcity and fear principle and you are likely not going to consume it right you're likely not going to consume and use that three tons of toilet paper that you bought and that store wouldn't let you return post uh covid initial lockdown so when you think about hoarding we think about food another one that happens a lot is ammunition now this is this is just as important in canada as it is in the united states of america we always think of our american brothers and sisters as the one crazy nuts with the ammunition right thousands and thousands of rounds you see them on youtube i've got 10 000 rounds of 556 is this enough um you know i was an army guy right i went into i went into the fight with 300 rounds that's it yeah i had an echelon system behind me that could replenish me but i only went into the fight with 300 rounds so 10 000 rounds sure but it's based upon scarcity right it's based upon government operations and that the ability of the government to cease purchasing uh by the public of ammunition or what we saw for a short period of time a couple of years ago when the u.s military and u.s government had a massive ammunition order from the manufacturers and basically by the price they're paying they put themselves first and so we saw a shortage for a long period of time and a number of important calibers of ammunition this induced the scarcity principle this induces fear when you see a shortage of nine millimeter ammunition and your preparedness plan is based upon the availability and the application of nine millimeter ammunition you will believe that you are in a position of uh difficulty you are in a position where you need to stock up ammunition right that alone and i've worked in industry and i spent my military current supply chain that is actually used in the supply chain companies will intentionally restrict the availability of their product on the market to induce scarcity so if i want to generate greater sales of nine millimeter i make nine millimeter less available and then i blame the government right so it's the big bad government but in fact it's the ammunition manufacturers who are restricting the distribution now what happens in a lot of these cases is they don't restrict manufacturing they continue manufacturing the nine millimeter at the same rate they just warehouse it nine millimeter ammunition doesn't go bad right i mean maybe a century later but it doesn't go bad so i can run regular production levels time over time over time over cycle but only release 72 percent of the stock to distribution causing a scarcity at the end which means i can jack up the price i can then have you buying everything and every new shipment that i release gets bought up almost immediately at higher retail prices and everybody wins both the manufacturer and the distributor and the real tailor except for you john q or jane q public has to buy ammunition under the scarcity fear and at a higher rate so these are things that are done to induce scarcity and fear and ammunition um but people also so why do people want to buy a whole bunch of ammunition well protection fear self-defense fear um people feel like they are maybe likely in the future under threat of armed intervention by some other party and therefore they have to be ready to defend themselves right again i go back to my analogy of if you're one person in a house and you have 10 000 rounds you have a really bad plan right because you're not going to fire that many somebody's going to hit your house in a coordinated effort with eight to 12 individuals you may get four of them but you're done and you might fire off two magazines doing that right the reality of combat the reality of the real world is differently than the youtube assumptions that are made and it's generally not for hunting so i'm a hunter so all of you hunters out there who are great stewards of the environment great stewards of the population and the animal health right at most you're going to take three rounds to take down big game right you might miss once you do a correction on your scope you hit the animal with the first round and you do another round to make sure that it stays down and then it dies a quick safe uh honorable death right full stop you harvest you harvest an elk with three rounds right if you have to harvest if you're even thinking apocalypse and you have to harvest two elk a year to feed your family on top of your other food sources you need six rounds a year to harvest elk so you're not hoarding 10 000 rounds of 338 lapula for your long distance shooting rifle to hunt right because otherwise you're a really bad hunter and you probably shouldn't be out in the bush right literally 100 rounds should last you a lifetime if you're a hunter right other than maybe a little bit of target shooting on the side uh zeroing every year but if you're literally hunting you need 100 rounds maybe 200 for your life that's it so what challenges does this present to you in the preparedness space what challenges does hoarding look on that the first thing is is it uses a fear principle and it induces far too much focus on preparedness i talk about this in a couple of episodes that preparedness is the intent is for you to rock an incredible life the intent is for you to chase your dreams and whatever they may be being an artist a musician a carpenter a plumber what preparedness does is provide a blanket of insulation against exogenous shocks for which you cannot control things as that marcus really us would say are stoically beyond your control and therefore you should not worry you can't worry about things that are beyond your control you just deal with them when they happen the idea of having preparedness it's that buffer it gives you that little bit but when you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about preparedness thinking about your stockpiles thinking about whether you're ready for the next calamity you're too far down the rabbit hole preparedness is something that pops up 30 minutes every month right inside my canoe head and at our online video course that we now have at preparedness labs.ca it's $79 canadian over two hours of videos about how to adopt a prepared life we talk about it in there that once you write your family preparedness plan that's really literally going to take you a couple of hours at most to do time immemorial you're only going back to that plan once a month for 30 minutes that's the extent to which preparedness should occupy your life if you're exceeding that by a great deal then you're in a rabbit hole and you need to extricate yourself from that right you're too far gone you're too far down that rabbit hole and very much in danger of letting preparedness consume your life and you can see other people on youtube they have businesses they're doing all kinds of videos they're talking about all kinds of things i'm sitting here telling you the world is not going to come apart we're in an exceptionally disruptive 2020s and if you understand what ray dalio peter zion and a bunch of other great thinkers talk about this is the disorder right this is the decade where the world is reordering countries everybody's jockeying for position and when we emerge in the 2030s this is what the world will look like for the next 78 years the superpowers the struggles the back and forth that's all we're doing the world's not collapsing the calamity the end times are not coming i haven't seen four horsemen in the sky right it's not going to happen so people are using that fear they're taking the war in middle east the war in ukraine the potential war on taiwan the economic downturn this massive potential housing bubble and they're all bringing it together and trying to present to you a world that's about to come apart at it seems society's going to collapse so hoard hoard everything now buy what you can while the world is still good while nobody's paying attention because when everybody wakes up you're not going to be able to get what your family needs so in other words if you don't hoard you are failing your role as the leader of your family this is why it works this is why people get addicted to this kind of apocatoc this kind of cataclysmic um ending games and then they go down the rabbit hole and they start letting preparedness become a massive massive part of your life the other one is financial is not equal prepared you very very little money if none and i have a an episode coming uh sorry a couple of one year ago one 1.5 years ago i'm redoing it in the coming days uh about why preparedness is free i keep coming back to the subject because adopting a prepared life is free being a prepared individual is free getting ready for life's calamities is free it doesn't cost you any money now all the information you need is here at inside my community it's on our social media feeds it's on the 210 plus episodes of this podcast that exist it's all out there right the information you need now if you want a summation sure we have a ebook that costs seven dollars canadian less than five dollars american on amazon the link is at preparedness labs dot ca skip your next latte skip your next dunkin donuts coffee buy yourself a book it's the same thing it talks about how to adopt a prepared life it's very very simple and it's not about um spending money it's not if people are trying to tell you you need to spend money to become prepared like buying supplies buying equipment buying these things um they're wrong they're dead wrong um but people fall down that fall down that and then because governments tell you you need to buy something they create um this financial barrier that in fact is not real right the barrier is created by public policy public policy creates a socio-economic barrier to preparedness people see the call to buy things and they don't have money and then they'll tell you well i can't become prepared because i can't afford to do it right when in fact it's free but it's the very public policy our government puts out that induces people not to become prepared it's kind of a perverse outcome to the public policy and the last thing i'm going to talk about is your mobility in the unlikely event that you have to evacuate and this is based upon uh your threat profile and we talk about that in the book and the course on how to develop and understand your own personal threat profile so what are you exposed to and natural hazards right if you live on a floodplain you can't put five years of supplies in your basement that is dumb they will flood you will lose it all and then you'll try to get an insurance company to cover it all right if you live in the wildland urban interface you've seen the fires that you had in canada and north america this year and in europe and spain and portugal and greece and other places your home can burn down right so unless you've got a fireproof home which we can build them perfectly fireproof um you're putting all of the stock in one place right that becomes very very difficult and as well uh if you have to evacuate and you need to take supplies with you and all of your food supplies your 14 days of food supplies or if you're like me your 30 your 90 days of food supplies uh are all in big heavy canned food how are you going to get that into your vehicle and get out in a short period of time so the summation of this podcast episode is simple hoarding is the result of the application of the use of fear and the scarcity principle by somebody who wishes you to make a financial commitment to do something that's all hoarding is you're doing it because or the people you know are doing it because they believe through whatever information they're gathering that there is an upcoming shortage of an item that they deem to be essential and they don't want to be caught without so just in case they will stockpile 400 double a batteries just in case double a batteries are never made again well the reality of that is slim to nil and slim just left the building so remember that preparedness is there to support you it is there to allow you to rock an incredible life to chase your dreams to go after everything you want preparedness is not something that drags you down consumes your life don't hoard there's no requirement to hoard every single piece of equipment that you have in your house should mirror a requirement for example if you have a bunch of sport equipment but you play those sports awesome if you have a bunch of bushcrafting gear and you actually go out and bushcraft and camp that's awesome if you have a bunch of tools in your garage because you actually use tools to repair stuff in your handy person that's awesome none of that is hoarding that is all useful things that you will use in your normal life hoarding is when you have a bunch of stuff kicking around that you're not actually going to use in your regular life and that you have bought because of fear and then that puts you in a difficult financial position not preparedness it is fear that drives some of our worst purchasing decisions we have out there the scarcity principle used in economics and the principle founding of economics is leveraged across the spectrum to get you to believe that if you don't get it now if you don't buy it now it'll be higher price it's going out of stock it's the last time oh my lord the star is on it at costco it's never coming back you we've all seen it we've all been there so avoid hoarding understand what it is and don't be that preparedness individual that hoards everything under the sun for the just in case for the big bad day when the government collapse the economics comes down the economy's down supply chain ends and we have global war because my friends that's unfortunately for those that want it that's not going to happen the 2020s are going to be disruptive be prepared to navigate numerous exogenous shocks that you won't see coming but that's what you need that's what you can do when you adopt a prepared life so thanks for joining us this week inside my new head i hope you enjoyed this episode drop us a line at jeff at preparedness labs dot ca drop over a comment on our website at preparedness labs dot ca we have everything that we do think there's a free download there for a little primer on how to adopt a prepared life a three-page download is there uh for you free of charge everything we do here at inside my new head is free of charge and always will be and if you're looking to invest a little bit of money in yourself we have options for that too so take care stay safe and we'll see you on Friday