All right, welcome to season five of Inside Mike Newhead. 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 a sit-back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, welcome back to Ottawa Studios. Inside Mike Newhead.
Listen, it's been a little bit, life's a little busy. I've got a couple of big deliverables coming up on my business and academic side, so we've taken a bit of a break from producing some episodes here at Inside Mike Newhead. I want to make sure that everyone out there knows that I'm paying attention to the world around us, watching it go pear-shaped and belly up. So today we're going to talk about political turmoil and what does that have to do with preparedness and what you're trying to achieve?
So sit back, grab yourself a beverage, let's get at her. First, of course, I want to say thank you very much for all of your feedback from the last episode about poor old Linguitar's YouTube channel that is back up and running. She was able to go through a fairly elongated YouTube process to get not only her Google Gmail back, but her YouTube channel. And the crux of the issue is that make sure that you're off that tengation.
I hate that. You never wrap yourself around that word. Your two-factor authentication is actually not back to your Google email when it's a Google account because if somebody gets one and they crack it, then when they access your or try to break into your YouTube channel, the link comes back to the very email they've hacked and they go, of course, it's me and click and they're in. And a lot of us use a lot of comps.
So anyhow, it just makes a lot of sense to look at your online ID, never stop paying attention to that, make sure your passwords are all individual. So today, political turmoil, I'm not going to zero in on one specific event. I mean, we see China going upside down, which is really ironic for us here in Canada after we just completed the Public Order Emergency Commission to talk about our government's decision to bring in the Emergencies Act to quell a protest in the capital city of Ottawa where I live. And now the Chinese are having some uproars and the political angst of the Canadian government commenting or not commenting.
The point being is that pretty much wherever you live in the world, the DRC is going, hopefully this piece holds in the DRC and that the African Union can really contribute there and try to put some stabilization. You see Ukraine going into the winter period of warfare. You see the Eastern Europeans are likely going to freeze for most of the winter. Do their government's actions completely.
And then you see the political turmoil in the United States of America with the latest round of elections. So we can go on and on. We can look at any place in the world. You can see it's political turmoil.
So how does that affect your preparedness? Well, first let's ground it in your responsibility, your house, right? You're responsible for you and you're responsible for those people that you've chosen accept responsibility for your family. However, you define that if you're responsible for them.
Like Jordan Peterson says, I'm not necessarily a hundred percent fan of the guy, but I quote a lot of his work and clean up your own house before he started, you know, clean up your room before you start considering or criticizing how other people keep their house. The point being, are you ready for turmoil? And that is an open-ended question. And it generally probably doesn't have a simple yes or no answer, right?
So your responsibility is your house. It's what you are in charge of and it's what you've accepted responsibility for. So what is your plan? You know, what happens if it all goes south, right?
What happens? How does it affect you is the most important way to reflect on a plan for this? How does political turmoil affect your health? How does it?
Well, it's probably, you know, the government going pear shape is probably not going to affect your physical health, right? It may feel a little upset in the stomach, shall we say, with certain politicians as we all are, but the question is, does this actually cause you physical harm? And the answer to that is no unless you're protesting and getting beaten. Your mental health, though, is a big reflection of a lot of times how you care and your empathy and sympathy for the people undergoing strife.
You have to be able to have that kind of empathy and sympathy for people around the world that are going through strife without it actually affecting your own mental health and your ability to get through your day and challenge and do the things in your awesome, incredible life. So you have to pay attention to how that political turmoil locally or internationally, regionally, however, affects your mental health. Another important consideration people don't consider is how does it affect your money? Like seriously, what do you do for a living?
What industry are you involved in? How are the tenants of your financial structure going to be impacted by decisions made in a political turmoil, right? So if you donated to the trucker convoy in Canada, you saw really quickly how political turmoil can dramatically influence your financial assets. If you had your bank frozen, people today that I know that donated today still have limitations on their ability to access and transfer money in the system, you know, eight, nine months after this emergency act was rescinded and the decisions were made.
So there are long-term impacts against people who made what at the time seemed to be a logical, helpful and lawful decision are today still facing impacts on that and their ability to earn money and transfer money around. So you have to assess it. Like if you work in the graphic design industry, how does political turmoil in Brazil that is likely to go pear-shaped? Because it looks like the military may be leaning towards stepping in and canceling Bolsonaro's defeat and Lula's win and setting up a new election or taking power.
We're not sure how that's going to work out Eastern Europe, bad day, US, bad day, Canada, probably even worse with the way our government is going. And I'm talking about some national and national government. So how does your money affect? Because as a preparedness, somebody who's a preparedness individual who's trying to adopt a prepared life, one of your forequadrons of your blanket of preparedness is money and your own independence of your financial status.
You have to make sure as to the best extent you can that political operations and political decisions are made. For example, in Canada, if you own a firearm store, this is a really bad month for you. Whether you agree with the decision of the Canadian federal government to ban largely all semi-automatic rifles and take away a lot of personal property that was legally owned before, if you make your money in that industry, a political decision has just dramatically impacted your ability to earn a decent living. It's a difficult position to be in because you can't tell the government to stop.
You don't have that level of power, but the government does. The last part is to look at your preparedness to meet critical infrastructure failures. So a lot of times, government decisions, especially dramatic, rapid, non-incremental decisions, happen around critical infrastructure failures. So when you see a significant breakdown of law and order, you saw what happened at the trucker convoy.
We had the emergency's act in Canada implemented. When you see breakdowns in the financial sector, when we start to see a run on banks in certain European countries where it's happened before, you'll see the government come in and put limitations on the amount of money that you're able to access. Irrespective of the amount of money you have in your bank, the amount of money that you're actually able to access on a regular basis can be very immediately curtailed by the government and power against your will. And now you can't access your own money.
So how does that affect your ability to meet? Are you ready for those type of changes? And we've talked in many previous episodes about critical infrastructure, the 10 pillars or 16, depending if you look at the FEMA definition. In the United States of America, how our modern society is structured to where it actually runs incredibly well, very efficient, until these critical infrastructure pillars are affected or removed, especially if the utilities are power or the gas or transportation are taken down.
When the financial point of sales goes down, when electronic banks go down. For example, I do all my banking online, like everybody else does yesterday sitting on watching a hockey game, my app decided to not work. A bit of concern, I'm fine. Obviously a moment to moment access to my bank is not the type of life that I live, but it just reminded me just a little bit in the back of the brain that somebody else through an action totally unconnected to me can have an incredible impact on how I run my life.
And it just paused me for a second. What if this app went away? What if my major bank app went away for a couple of weeks was hacked? Okay, I can get to the teller, right?
How do I pay my bills if I can't get access to my electronic money? How am I going to go back to a paper billing scheme? Like nobody does that anymore. And the second part about all of this is voicing your concern because you are a smart, intelligent, wonderful, incredible individual pursuing an awesome life who has an opinion, who would like to be part of the conversation in political turmoil and be sure the world understands where you see what we should do, how it should proceed and the decisions that you think should be considered to deal with the problem that may be ahead.
So there's a big difference between voicing your concern and getting into a Twitter fight. I love Twitter fights, by the way. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know I have a very loud voice and I'm unapologetically me on Twitter. But the point being is a couple of things you need to consider, number one, evidence.
Facts are not owned. Like there's no such thing as your facts or my facts, your truth or my truth. The fact is something that is what it is. It can be proven to be what it is.
And it's not up for you to determine whether you agree or disagree with it. It's a fact. Now how you interpret that fact, how you want to use that fact in an argument, you're free to do. So evidence is, and this is why I've really enjoyed my career turn to being a researcher because it's not about your opinion.
I really don't care. It's not about something when somebody says based upon my experience, I don't care. What's the evidence? What actually did occur?
What do we know for certain occurred? And then we take the discussion from there. So I am, oh, when you start that in Twitter, in my opinion, it's just a rant. Have yourself a great day.
But if you want to talk about evidence, the following occurred and I know it to be true and here's my evidence to prove that it's true. Bam. Now we have something to debate. What does that mean?
Idea is not defeatable. And I say that because you'll run into a lot of people online and in various different political turmoil who believe that their ideology is correct, right? So you've heard left wing, right wing, far right, far left. I don't know what's worse, Antifa or white supremacy.
The point being here is that somebody who holds a certain ideology is likely not going to be pushed to reconsider by your tweet or your podcast or some voice that you put out there in the ether. So understanding if somebody is coming at a point from an ideological perspective, you're likely not going to defeat them. And this goes back to my favorite university course, Dr. Sharabato at Royal Military College, taught a fourth year psychology course.
It basically, some kind of was how to win an argument. And it basically told you how to defeat somebody in an argument who is ideologically based. So take a religious based argument, right? You're not going to convince somebody that their religious beliefs are incorrect, are untrue and are based on junk.
You can't do that, right? That's very hard to do. But what you're going to be able to do if you're skilled is put a seed of doubt in some part of the argument that they have put forward. So if you consider, you know, a 10 legged animal, a cent, take a centipede, right?
A hundred leg centipede running around. If I can break four legs, the centipede is fine. It has 96 legs, but four aren't working. And that places a seed of doubt.
And that is how you deconstruct an ideology is you deconstruct it piece by piece leg by leg over a period of time. You're not going to win an ideological fight. So I would, I don't even get into an ideological fight. If somebody is a far left socialist or a far right free market liberal, they're just going to be what they be and you're not going to win that fight.
So yeah, I, and the idea of public embarrassment, it's a double edged sword. So if you go ahead and publicly embarrass somebody and I ran into this once on Twitter, I was getting into a bit of a debate about, you know, the topic is irrelevant, but I basically using evidence embarrassed the person that I was after or was not after. That's, I felt like I was after them, right? It got into a pretty heated Twitter fight.
I publicly embarrass them because I use facts. I just basically used evidence and they were powerless. They looked ridiculous. They went after me professionally.
They went to my LinkedIn page. They went to my Facebook page. They went everywhere and started boraging everything. And you got to remember, I have a business behind all of this, right?
I have a private corporation, blah, blah, blah. I have a professional side where I present myself as a capable researcher in a certain field. They went after that, right? It took me a lot of time, not a great deal of effort, but a lot of time to bring that back.
And then I realized the double edge of being publicly embarrassing somebody, right? I won the moment. I was right. The person looked ridiculous on Twitter and everybody was part of the conversation could see it.
They got mad and they pouted and they took their bat and ball and they went over and started whacking it around in my house. And it caused a lot of grief and I fixed it. But just be careful when you decide to make somebody look like a buffoon on the internet. They can come back and start causing a lot of Google review damage to you.
And that just takes work to get rid of. You can get rid of all of the damage they do, but it takes a lot of work. So we're going to round this up with wrapping up what we talked about in the beginning, right? Your responsibility is your house.
That's stoic values. That goes back to your stoic virtues and your dichotomy of control, right? Something that happens in the world can be put into two camps, something I can control and something I cannot control. So if it's a political turmoil or something causing me grief and it's something I can control, then I will take the action so that the item no longer causes me grief or is not part of my life.
But if I can't control the actions like the current decisions that my Canadian government is making, the current decisions that Vladimir Putin is making, the current decisions that Zelinsky is making in Ukraine, that Biden is making in the United States of America. And I can go on and on about all of these decisions that politicians have all stripes at all levels of government are making that are causing me angst and getting me riled up. The decision to become riled up is mine. If I decide to become angry and distraught over it, I am the one that is causing myself anger and discomfort, it is nobody's responsibility or fault bought my own, right?
That's the principle of Amar Fatih that they talk about in stoic virtues, except fate. When something is beyond your control, you lovingly and beautifully and willingly accept the world as it is because you can't influence it. The idea is I may disagree with the federal government's decision to ban semi-automatic rifles in Canada, but I can't make him stop. So I'm not going to allow that to cause me grief.
I'm going to say my piece online. I'm going to put my evidence-based facts forward. I'm going to state what I think is an appropriate course of action, and then the world will be what it is, right? My voice in a democracy is my vote.
I cast it at every possible election for every possible position. And I accept that the group that I belong to, the community, let's look at national level. My country as a population agreed to install this government. I disagree with that.
I voted against that. But if I choose to remain in Canada, which I don't have to, I can move anywhere in the world I want to. Well, maybe not North Korea, but you know what I mean. I can move anywhere.
But if I choose to remain in Canada, I have to accept that this is what the country wanted, that this is what the country voted for. And I just have to carry on with my life as best I can. I have my voice. I put it out there.
And then I just sit back and I don't allow the political turmoil to cause me grief. This gets back to the principle that we have in emergency preparedness that we talk about here at Inside My Canoe Head is resilient lives are insulated. They're insulated from impacts from outside actions of other people. So my money, my health, and my preparedness goals that I'm reaching that I'm chasing my 60 to 90 days, whatever it may be, is insulated because of how I choose to construct my preparedness plan for myself and my family.
It's insulated from political turmoil, right? I say my piece, but in reality, nothing the federal government does except for some pretty dramatic changes that it would do to a corporate structure or taxation structure is actually going to affect how I conduct my life, right? My individual, awesome, incredible life that I'm pursuing and the goals that I'm chasing are invariably not up to the government. Like let's be serious.
I mean, unless they make some significant changes, I've created and am continuing to create an insulated life where this largely is not impacted by those type of decisions, right? I created a life where political turmoil has a little effect. And there's a great example I read somewhere and I'll leave you with this thought at the end of the podcast today. And I want to thank you very much for continuing the Listen Inside My Canoe Head and continuing to be patient as I complete this PhD in the last couple of weeks.
And then we get to launch season six starting in January with a new format. We'll get to that as we get closer, but I'll leave you with this thought. Somebody mentioned it to me to just own a laundry mat. Just own a laundry mat.
Everybody in the city needs to wash their clothes. And it doesn't matter what governments in power and it doesn't matter what legislation the government brings in. Everybody needs to wash their clothes. So have competitive prices, working machines, run a laundry mat.
You'll live a great, comfortable life as an independent business owner and at your needs never go away. So if you ever think of going into business, make sure it's a business that is like a laundry mat, a hundred percent insulated from political turmoil. So thank you very much. Take care.
Have yourselves a great day and more coming to come on the coming changes to the podcast and the brand. Take care. Stay safe.