All right, welcome to Season 5 of Inside My Canoe Head. This is a Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among us. Sit back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios.
Listen, the world's on fire and it's a bit chaotic. I'm sure you've seen that by now and you probably are just spinning in your head wondering what next could show up on the news. You know, maybe something will emerge from Area 51. Maybe the aliens will finally show up.
You know, at this point, it's hard to understand. But it's also hard to understand whether you and I are actually being told the truth, portions of the truth, spin lines, or something close to that. So today we're going to talk about preparedness and media, and specifically, you know, about what to do and what to do with that nauseating amount of stuff that comes out and where to find the stuff that matters and how to truly navigate the nauseous to find what is really going on around you. Then you can make a decision on what you should do about it.
So I'm not going to spend the day here completely eviscerating all of the current multimedia organizations that are out there, the mainstream media, corporate media, whatever you want to call it. That's too easy to do and it's a waste of your time. Everybody knows they each have their own individual bias. So how do you as a preparedness person find out good information about what's happening in your local community and specifically deep dive into issues that matter to you to help make you an informed individual?
Because one of the key elements of preparedness is having a state of situational awareness. Now, that's not only your immediate surroundings for immediate threats, but that's understanding the situation around you. And this also applies to whatever employment you may have. So, you know, if you're in the construction industry, you're very much concerned about the forecasts that are coming out of the Bank of Canada, the Department of Finance, and various other statistical agencies that don't have any bias, but just statistical analysis states their view on housing starts in the upcoming quarters.
Because if you're looking for how likely it is you're going to remain employed in the construction industry in the coming quarter, coming six months, whatever it may be, that's important information. So it's about knowing where you can go for sources. And I did an earlier episode in the last season about preparedness in Twitter and how Twitter is an exceptionally good source for that rapid, up-to-date, immediate knowledge and information. The problem is on Twitter is there's a bazillion people out there who are liars, right?
So having to figure through the laws and who, number one, has accurate information and who, number one, is usually pretty quick at bringing out that accurate information to all of us on Twitter, you learn who they are in your field and then you follow them. So for me, it's Thomson Reuters. Al Jazeera has a good speed. And then there are a couple of people in the United States that have very good, accurate information and are very quick about it.
But this is the type of thing that we try to find in Twitter and in other online media spaces. And sometimes some people, the information is just as quick on TikTok, as you'll find on Twitter, if you can find the appropriate newsworthy sources on TikTok in between all of the dancing and everything else you can see on TikTok. The idea is, today I want to take a bit of a deep dive into independent media. And I think independent media falls well below people's view sign, or view line, shall we say, or sight line, as to something that's really, really important.
And let me give you an idea. Here in Canada, it's less prevalent where paid for media services. So for example, I subscribe to the line. And the line is a combination of Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson, two journalists in Canada that have brought together, and they're in a couple of years.
I just started subscribing last year. And for $50 a year, I get quality content written without a corporate oversight line to it. So if you go to theline.ca or you go to substack slash the line, you'll find your content there. And it's about a 75 free, 25% hidden.
And I think they're going to move that a little bit more. But there's really top-quality journalism done and top-quality no-poop opinions about what they really think is going on and what it really means. And when it's time to call a politician, you know what? They're free to do it because it's their own business.
So I pay for that. I pay $50 a year for access to quality journalism. I tried resubscribing to McLean's Magazine. I subsequently canceled that again after the second rag showed up at my door.
And I have no idea how to just stop them showing up because it's horrid. I mean, there are a few stories in McLean's Magazine about prominent Canadians doing really cool things around the world. But for the most part, yeah, it's just really bad journalism. But in the United States, for example, I subscribe to Breaking Points.
Now, I pay $100 a year to get access to the unlimited feed. So look it up at the Breaking Points. It's with Sagar and Jetty and Crystal Ball. They wrote a book in 2020, Populism of the Left and Populism of the Right.
They used to be on the TV show, The Hill, and now they started on their own. And they're doing brilliantly, closing in on a million subscribers on YouTube. They have their own written work online. But anyhow, it's exceptionally worth it because I have yet to find two more knowledgeable people on the inner workings of the United States Congress, the inner workings of American politics, and what it really means.
And the two of them, because they're independent journalism, they'll call a spade a spade. Sagar is a Republican. Crystal is a Democrat, which gives you both sides. They both have their own individual podcast, a Republican podcast.
And Crystal and Kyle Kaczynski have a Crystal and Friends. The point here is that they're an exceptional source of what is truly going on. Take out the Fox News, NSNBC, CNN, BS that's out there, and you basically watch it. So if you really want to know what's going on in the United States of America, then you dig into that.
Now, there are two other feeds that I find really, really important in independent media. And one is Glenn Greenwald. And he is a wonderful journalist in the United States of America, well over a million subscribers on Twitter. And he eviscerates politicians on a regular basis.
It's almost comical how accurately he takes apart all of their political spin and calls a spade a spade. And Matt Taibibi is another one who is fantastic at undercutting underneath the carpet and pulling things out that have been swept. So when you start to build a source of independent journalism that is not owed to a corporate master, and they have a great following, you start to see the truth behind the stories. When I mean the truth, I don't mean their truth.
I mean, this is what's really happening. Now, you can love it. You can hate it. You can argue for it.
You can argue against it. But they present to you what is really going on under the wire. So this is the type of thing that you see coming more and more to the front. Now, Substack Online is where the vast majority of independent media is found.
So if you can go on Substack and you can search for sources, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error. Everybody that I've come across on Substack has both free and paid content. A couple of Canadian prominent journalists are starting to have Substack memberships at different tiers. And some of it is very, very good, and some of it is just as exceptionally bad as the corporate media stuff, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, all these other things, the Sun newspaper networks, etc., that have their own inherent built-in bias.
It just behooves you to go out and look at independent media that exists in your country. Now, I know it exists around the world, and I have a lot of listeners in Europe and some in Africa, and I know it's very important to do the same thing there because government-controlled media through either government-funded bailouts or direct government control, however it may be for state media, you have to very diligently look at what you're being told. So think about this. I mean, if an event happens, you're going to get the event.
It's probably pretty simple to figure out what happened, but where the independent media comes in is why did it happen, right? So, for example, Glenn Greenwald has pulled apart the January 6th Commission for what it is in the United States of America, right? It's a Democratic Congress doing everything they can to prevent Donald Trump from running for re-election. I mean, that's the basic reason why it's there.
Not taken away from any of the dumb, stupid things that people did on that day, and a lot of them are paying for it with criminal offenses, as they should, but when you understand the rationale, and he gets very well into the details of why it is what it is, and if the Republicans are saying already right now that if they win the fall elections and they get control of the House, they're going to launch a comprehensive, detailed investigation into Fauci and Biden's COVID response in an effort to totally embarrass those two people and destroy them public credibility. So that's what these commissions are all about in the U.S., but if you listen to MSNBC or Fox, you wouldn't probably have figured that out. But the point being is that independent journalism is really, really important, and if you have the ability to do it, I would strongly encourage you to fund independent journalism that digs for the truth. I don't want you to tell me whether you like it or not.
I want journalists to go to the old school independent investigative journalism and tell me what happened, right? They can have their thoughts on what they think it means. This is great, but what I really look for is the truth behind the veil, and that's awful hard to find these days. And when we talk preparedness, of course this is huge, because let's just put it this way, if you're somebody sitting on a low-rate mortgage right now and you have to renew in two years and you're not sure whether it's good to live inside the city for societal collapse or you want to live out in the country and you need to start growing some food or just simply that, let's just put it this way, there's a lot of people who bought into the work-from-home, I'm going to be an e-commerce guru, and Shopify is a great company here in Ottawa that went all in on what they thought would be an incredible sustained boom in the e-commerce industry post-pandemic.
A lot of people shopped online, people shopped from home, they're going to do the same thing once the pandemic is over. We're in an endemic now, we can argue that in a different day. But Shopify guessed wrong. They recently laid off 10% of their employees, and a lot of these people are people who really thought they were jumping into that work-from-home, I've got the setup, this is going to be a great work-life balance, I'm so fortunate to do it.
They moved into, because they were working online for the company, they moved to a less costly area of the country, away from other employment opportunities, and now they got the axe on a Zoom call. These are people that probably didn't spend an inherently large amount of time detailing and looking into the likely outcomes of pandemic shopping. So when you look at a series of disasters similar, or disruptions, shall we call them, similar to what has happened, humanity largely does return to exactly its normal. And a dislocation of two years that we've had in the pandemic is not long enough in human experience to change permanent behaviors.
It changes some, but there was no indication that if you look historically and anthropologically, that we would have this permanent change in shopping habits. The evidence wasn't there to support it. People hoped it would, and a lot of companies like Shopify went all in with their benefits, and now some people are sitting in some very precarious and difficult positions. So again, this is where preparedness is very much based on you having a plan for those disruptions that could occur, but it's also about you understanding what's likely to come in your industry, what's likely to influence you.
Like, for example, if you're one of these people that took up a recent Estonian, and the country of Estonia has a fantastic digital nomad visa, probably arguably the best in the world right now for individuals wanting to work abroad as digital nomads. That was really good right up until late February of this year. As soon as the Russians rolled into Ukraine, the threat of rolling into Estonia exists. So right now, as you're sitting in Estonia, should you be on a month-to-month lease, or should you be on a year-to-year lease, locked in legal requirements?
Should you be building a brick-and-mortar business in a place that is likely, potentially, we're not sure, but has a higher degree of probability of threat? These are the type of things that preparedness helps you in understanding where to get that great source of income from independent media, and the situational awareness that it puts forward, right? So if you think about, there's another great show called The Young Turks. Now, don't get me wrong, I love The Young Turks.
They are so incredibly far left, but it is wonderful because they are unapologetically, they're like the Bernie Sanders of independent media, right? If you watch Bernie Sanders' interviews from the 1970s when he was the mayor of a town in his home state, it's the same guy, and he's saying the same things, and he's working for the same things. And The Young Turks are the same way, right? They are absolutely, unquestionably believe in what they're after, and it's great to listen to them.
Like, trust me, I'm a libertarian. I'm not left or right wing. Libertarians don't fall on either side. We go up and down the spectrum from authoritarian to freedom, you know, not left and right.
So as a libertarian, I listen to everybody, right? I listen to The Young Turks, and I listen to the folks over on the other side, right? So it's very important to gather your information from all sides because you understand what the world looks like. And a prime example is a controversial issue in the United States, right?
Roe versus Wade, the striking down of the Roe versus Wade case by the U.S. Supreme Court. You could have seen that coming like a freaking truck. The Republicans have been trying to stack that court and trying to achieve this goal for 40 years, and they have been so blatantly open about it, so blatantly clear that this is exactly what they're doing, and then they did it.
And you see all these people upset and outcry, and I'm like, really? Oh, I'm sure you're upset about it, but you've had 40 years to do exactly what the court told you to do, which was get into Congress and pass a law to protect it. Don't make a Supreme Court decision be your protection, which was weak from the beginning and was always going to get crushed at some time by the Republicans. Pass a law.
So 40 years, you know, mostly Democratic governments, they've had the chance to pass a law, and they never did, which is hilarious watching them scream and yell and pretend to be all upset right now about it when all of these Democratic parties and the government had a chance to fix it. That's just a prime example of if this is the world you live in, if you work in that kind of industry and you see the train coming, don't be surprised when the train hits you, right? And that's just an open and easy example, and there are many other ones out there where you see the world where it's chaotic, and it's not the case out there, right? We see all these chaotic events happening, but when you look through what is going on in humanity and you look at basic structures and basic stuff that doesn't lie, and I'll just end with this little point on statistics and truth.
When you look for statistics, go to sources whose job it is to put it out. For example, Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada issue all the data you need about what is going on in Canada. And I'll give you a prime example. The Consumer Price Index that's released by Statistics Canada gives the basket of goods, and it gives you the rate of inflation, right?
It shows it's going up by so much. But StatsCan also produces something called the Producer Price Index, the PPI, and it shows the price that's rising for the inputs for the producer, right? And you look at those, and then the difference between the PPI Thank you, nobody any questions? I felt good.
and the cpi is how much of the increase in prices businesses are eating and not transferring over to the consumer nobody thinks about that right but the data is out there the data is free for you to see if you want to know why there are shortage of workers in every industry right now some will look and say it's the great resignation people realized in the pandemic that um you know we don't have to work for minimum wages we can do all kinds of other things and that's sure that's good but the reality is if you look at the demographics for canada right if you look at the demographic map of canada between 2015 and 2025 the boomers and the beginning edges of the next generation are retiring they're leaving the workforce so what that means is they're no longer going to do their jobs the problem is is that boomers didn't have enough kids they didn't produce enough offspring so when you look at the number of people in canada who are retiring and then you look at the amount of people behind them in the next five year age gap for men and women it's smaller there's not enough babies so what happened here is and it's going to happen right up until 2025 there's not enough people to take over the job so yeah the great resignation whatever but stats will show you there's not enough people here to fill the opening jobs and there's never going to be unless we massively increase immigration so these jobs are not going to get filled and if you're in the health care industry you're saying you know we don't have enough nurses yeah there's nobody to fill those jobs the younger generation didn't have enough kids either so canada is in a death spiral of demographics we don't have enough human beings to fill the jobs the good part about that is is bicyc economics tells you this should put massive upward pressure on wages now is the time where you should be you know if you want to hire for tim hortons you better be hiring at 21 22 bucks an hour or you're not going to fill all your shifts and it's the same for i mean i've got friends you know my neighbor is in the construction industry and for 30 bucks an hour he can't find a general labor he can't find anybody to work on a job site pulling nails out of boards and carrying crap around for 30 bucks an hour there's nobody like so we are in the demographic shortage but if you studied data you would see that otherwise you're just going oh it's poor government policy etc etc so anyhow we go on and on forever but the point of today was preparedness needs you to know a lot of great information right it's really important to understand the world that's going on around you the other part of it is where do you get that information from and today i just try to point out some some joys and some great people in independent journalism that are trying to tell you the truth of what's going on and the background of why it's happening so i hope today was useful for you continue the great comments coming in uh we look forward to it and in the coming week we are returning back to the normalcy of basic preparedness and survival type stuff so i appreciate you sticking around with us for this uh series we gave it a try uh some liked it some didn't so we'll go back to what everybody likes in the coming week so thanks again uh drop over our website www.insidemycanoohead.ca uh leave us a comment there we have some blogs coming out um if you're interested in more public policy kind of related blogs go over to preparedness labs.ca that's the parent company inside my canoehead that's where we put the more public policy related inside my canoehead.ca has the more individual emergency preparedness related blogs both of those have newsletters sign up for one sign up for both uh it's free it shows up in your inbox once every 10 days or so ideally it's going to get to once a week but life is a little busy right now um so thank you very much for your continued support and if you really like what we do here uh drop over to buy me a coffee slash i am canoehead the link is on the inside my canoehead.ca website and buy me a coffee i'm fueled by wonderful great coffee so thank you very much take your time enjoy life and i'll talk to you next week you