All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a Canadian podcast 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, this week is, today I should say, marks the end of season four of Inside My Canoe Head.
We're wrapping up today talking about crisis information, the importance of it, the sources of it, and what actually you should be looking for. But we just want to say many thanks to all the people who contributed to season four being as successful as it is. A good number of the topics were listeners suggested that we brought out, a couple that I think are still important to resonate and to work on a little bit more. They're going to be coming in season five.
We're going to take a bit of a break, as all of us like to do with summer, unless, of course, the shizzy hits the fizzy. We're going to take a week break, which is huge here at Inside My Canoe Head, because I normally drop two episodes a week. So we're going to have to take about a seven to ten day break, while we all just take a big breather for this beautiful thing called summer. And then we're going to return with season five, that's going to be packed full of a new set of ideas about preparedness, living an adventure life, and getting on with understanding the politics and the global world as we see it.
So thanks again for all those who listened. So today, crisis information, like why is that important? Well, you know, thinking about how to wrap up this season, I had a couple of ideas, but it dawned on me this morning when I opened up my cell phone with my morning coffee as I peruse through all the whining and complaining the world is full of, and there I have my environment, Canada, heat warning, followed by the severe thunderstorm warning for this evening. So when you think about it, there are warnings, but out there, bad things can happen, and when they're weather-related, to some degree, we have a good understanding of them, and we have a good set of advanced warning tools.
So you as a consumer and sitting out here going about your awesome, incredible life, slaying the dragons and chasing your dreams, or just surviving and holding your head above water, depending on what your situation may dictate, the information is out there. So what is available, and basically from a source perspective? So first, there's traditional radio. Traditional radio is by far my favorite.
Here in Canada, and depending on where you live, we have local radio stations that are designated as the local emergency radio station, which means they will get the first feed from the local emergency management folks, whomever they may be, however their job is defined, will go to this radio station, and they will actively take on a responsibility for communicating public awareness messages direct from public officials in times of an emergency. So radio is good. The benefit of the radio is that radio waves do travel a significant distance. They require less tower infrastructure than cell phones do, and therefore, it's not that the towers can't get knocked out.
Look, they're more reliable as a communication platform than, or sorry, as a messaging platform than the cell phones, because radio only messages, it doesn't communicate. Communicate is a human activity that requires two people to exchange information. So you can't exchange information with a radio station active and live, so therefore, they message to you. You have internet news.
Now, I just use internet news because it's a whole program on itself to delve into what source you use. I mean, are you an MSNBC or a Fox listener? Are you a CBC or a Rebel News listener? I mean, we could go down the spectrum of the ideological biases that exist in media today on every spectrum.
It doesn't matter where you fall in the political chart or the ideological spectrum. They're available. Well, then we get into social media, and I did a couple episodes ago, Twitter and preparedness, which was well-received by a lot of people, and the value of Twitter, I mean, you have to fight through the nods and figure out how to use it, but Twitter is an excellent tool for accurate, immediate, up-to-date information, maybe not in your specific local area, but in general knowledge and important events that happen around the world. You then have social capital, which I've told you a hundred times, it's the number one thing in emergency preparedness that you can do that costs zero amount of money and build a community around you, right?
Social capital is the number one tool that you will ever have in response to an emergency. It doesn't matter the shizzy hits, the fizzy, the number of kits and food, et cetera, you have stored in your basement. If you have no social capital, you're not going to last very long. So social capital is essentially your social network of human beings and your ability to communicate with them and discern what's going on in the world, and then even collectively figure out what you're going to do about it.
So those are general sources. Now, the underlying point that I didn't say before that is really the crux of crisis information is who do you trust? Who do you trust to provide you accurate and timely information? Do you believe information that's coming out of a certain source, or do you not trust that information?
That is a huge deal and a huge thing we study in emergency management is that some people assume that because, you know, I have a fancy title, right? I have a fancy title in a town. I'm the emergency manager. This is a community coordinator, whatever, that somehow people will automatically trust me as the number one source.
And that's not true. And that's something that a lot of communities fall victim to that because, you know, people just believe that simply because I own a position or I am, you know, even if I'm a mayor of a town, you know, probably 40% of that town didn't vote for that mayor and they think he's a crook or she's a crook. And therefore, they would obviously lie to you in emergency. So trust is a huge idea.
And it's really important for you right now, if you're not sitting in a crisis situation, is to have that small conversation with yourself about when I'm looking for external information, when I'm looking for accurate, timely, and trusted information on what is going on in the world or in my local, where do I go to get that? That's a journey you need to go down. That's something you have to investigate. You have to consider it.
You have to find those sources and you have to, for lack of a better term, test them out. But let's be frank, you know, everybody's going to give you information and somewhere in that noise and cloud and massive amount of information flowing from all sources, somewhere in there is the truth and somewhere in there is a trusted voice that you believe in. And I'll give you an example. Like I'm in my 50s.
So when I was a younger lad in Canada, there were two voices on the news that mattered. So when that voice came to the microphone, you stopped and listened. You paid attention. That was Peter Mansbridge on CBC and Lloyd Robertson on CTV.
These were two stalwarts of the news world. And when they spoke, you listened because they were trusted sources. They had been in your family's living room for 25 years, speaking about world events and important Canadian events. So they were stalwart voices that you understood that if they would make sure that the information they were passing on to you was accurate and was timely, otherwise it wouldn't make it to air.
You trusted the human so that the information coming from them, you would be able to make an active one. So right now, if you ask yourself, I mean, about crisis information, this is belaboring the point a bit here, but this is the critical part of what, where is your trusted source? Who do you turn to? And then what medium are they on?
So I talked about radio and social media and all these different mediums. So where is your trusted source? What medium they are on? And like we do everything in emergency management and preparedness to the extent that it's possible, what is their primary and alternate source of delivery?
So for example, if there is a Twitter feed from Thomson Reuters that you consider to be the number one accurate feed for global information and you follow it on Twitter, what if your cell network goes down? And don't tell me that doesn't happen because us here in Canada, look at BBC, look at even Al Jazeera, it still carries the story of one of our major telecom companies, Rogers, crashing and burning for a day and taking Canada, you know, a good portion of the Canadian population completely offline. And I talked about that in the episode on no internet is, I recorded that actually while I had no internet and it took me a day to publish the episode because, you know, my internet wasn't available, but it's a quick reminder of you just don't assume that you can open that little computer in your hand and that everything's going to work. So if that doesn't work, where's your alternate source?
You always should have an alternate source to get that information or let's call it your second most trustworthy news source. Where are you going to find out? So in the middle of all that, what information are you looking for? Let's be serious.
Let's talk about a pending threat that you're made aware of. What information are you looking for? Well, number one is what is the threat? What is the threat that is facing you in an imminent state of time in a short period of time that is going to influence your ability to conduct normal family or normal business operations at this time?
What is that threat? First of all, you have to, you know, do we have a thunderstorm coming through? That's a big difference from a thunderstorm, right? So again, IDing the threat and identifying the specifics of the threat make a difference.
For example, thunderstorms happen a lot, but 90 kilometer an hour ground winds don't. That will take away your patio furniture and a lot of other things that are sitting outside and make branches smash into your car, which maybe I want to put the car in the garage if you don't have excess junk like I do. It doesn't let me put it there right now. But understanding the threat to the best, most finite detail that you can allows you to then have a picture.
Remember, what you're trying to do when you gather crisis information is you're trying to create this picture in your head. What is driving towards me? What is really coming at me? So if you get, and I just use the weather because it's a great idea.
It happens all the time. So you understand, okay, I have a weather threat. I have a thunderstorm coming. There's a large possibility of severe thunderstorms and maybe hail, maybe 90 kilometer an hour wind gusts and maybe a possible tornado, right?
So then you got to think about probability, right? Because if every time somebody said there was a threat in a severe weather event where I live here in Ottawa, I would never have anything outside of my house and I would never park my car on the street. You know what I mean? Like there's a rational level of concern here that you have to consider.
So you understand the probability, right? Understand the probability is also meaning the timing of it. So right now I'm under a heat warning, right? That's going to go on all day until the thunderstorms come through and clear out the humidity and the heat as natural weather patterns grow.
So natural weather patterns tell me that that thunderstorm is going to happen probably somewhere in the evening and the probability is about 80%, right? I don't have to panic. I don't have to move right now. So understanding the probability of the piece of crisis, that's important as well.
And the outcomes. What are the likely outcomes of that if that was to be true? If what I'm being told as a threat and a probability does come to fruition, what is the likely outcome on me? Forget the whole town.
They'll be fine. I mean, we're talking about individual emergency preparedness here. You and your family, what is the outcome if this event turns out as predicted? You figure that out and then you decide on what it is you want to do about that, how quick that has to be made, and then carry on with normal life, right?
So all those sets of decisions are going to be based upon you understanding the threat, the probability, and the outcome, and then place it on your current family circumstances and decide what you're going to do about it, right? But that's an important part of crisis information. It's just not about where am I going to source it. It's about what am I going, you know, how do I process that information?
What are the major things that I have to draw out of it? Because, you know, news people tend to want to extrapolate a whole bunch of things and layer it on a whole bunch of other somewhat useless BS, shall we say. And so therefore, you have to be able to go into that and draw out the key elements of information that you need to understand. And the last part is, what do you intend to do?
And in the Army, we used to call it shoot, move, communicate, right? So a simple thing to do, that's how you survive on the battle space. You shoot, you move, you communicate. Obviously, shoot is executing your plan.
Moving is being alternate and being able to have a secondary source and a secondary option, secondary processes, et cetera. Don't be in the same place twice because then you get shot. And the last part is communicate. It's to make sure that you are in constant ability to draw more information in and to hand information out to people that matter.
So basically, your ability to communicate is based upon your ability to find primary important sources and to draw information from them. But the second part of communicate is your ability to take that information, dissect it, and then transfer it on to the members of your family for whom you are responsible. And in that, give them unnecessary instructions on what is coming next. So do you have a plan?
And a lot of people like to plan a scenario-based planning. It's coming to a larger degree to professional organizations and to the professional side of emergency management. But when we think about individual emergency preparedness, you and your family, you're drawing your crisis information. So do you like the scenario plan?
Well, having a series of plans for every scenario is a detailed way of addressing the issue of emergency planning. But it's also quite cumbersome and quite timely. Now, if you want to put the effort in, go right ahead. I've got lots of episodes in the history of this podcast on how to do scenario planning.
The idea, though, more is, in general, when you follow the processes like we do here on Inside Mike Newhead, a disaster impact reduction. Then your scenarios are based around the loss of critical infrastructure. And we do that simply because disaster risk reduction, which is more of a national and subnational government effort, is far more complex, far more integrated, multiple stakeholders, and it requires massive planning evolutions to execute. So when you're looking at disaster impact reduction, it just means you don't care whether it was a tornado or it was a wildfire that took out the cell phone tower, right?
What you're concerned with is that I no longer have cell phone access. So scenario planning can go that route as well. But the big thing is, like, we talk about it's really important to understand your threat profile for where you live. And when we talk about, and it's part of our upcoming book on Fast and Frugal Method of Preparedness that we'll be publishing at the end of August or the end of September, depending on how life goes, there's a portion in there that we're writing on understanding your threat profile.
So your threat profile is essentially made up of all of the likely events and highly unlikely events that could occur in your area. And the first stage is just understanding the threat for which you've exposed. You've chose to live where you live. Maybe you're forced into it due to socioeconomic conditions, or you're living in a city.
Here you are. This is your home. This is where you and your family reside. Nobody's going to come onto this podcast and tell you you have to move because of emergency management.
There are people that run to the woods and get a different channel, not this place. What we're trying to say is you've chosen to live where you live, or you live where you live, okay? What is the threat profile for your area? Like, by making that choice to live in the apartment in high-density housing in downtown Toronto, here is the threat profile that you are exposed to, because that's different than Etobicoke.
That's different than Mississauga. That's different from somebody living up in the Gray Bruce area. The point is, is that there's a specific threat profile that you're exposed to where you live. And in the book, we talk a bit about how to gather that information.
It's free of charge. It costs you absolutely nothing. It's all open source data. And once you know where to go to gather that information, you can build a really, really important threat profile.
So right off the bat, you understand what you're exposed to, right? It's very, very difficult for you to start emergency planning and start figuring out how to set your family up and yourself and your business up for success when you don't understand the threat that is posed against you. So it's a very important part. And basically, it means the open source data that you go to is the stuff that's available on Canadian Disaster Database on Public Safety Canada.
Most of the municipalities in Canada have an emergency plan posted on their municipal website, which has the threat profile. Unfortunately, our provincial government's emergency management organization is lacking almost completely in that. There's very little information on floodplain analysis, wildfire analysis, and all this other detailed stuff that you would expect. It's unfortunate, but it's the state of emergency management in the province of Ontario.
But you draw this stuff. And wherever you live in the world, there's going to be some iteration of the same level of data available. And it takes a bit of legwork to figure out where it is. Like in the book, we talk about the very specific areas in Canada to go.
And it's not just a book for Canadians. It's a book to say, hey, listen, this is what the government does. Your government probably has something reasonably similar codified in a somewhat organizational manner, probably dropped on the Internet and probably somewhere around here, or a couple of quick phone calls to government organizations to find it. So it doesn't cost you any money to understand your threat profile, right?
Once you understand your threat profile, you know what you're against. Now we can talk about planning. But when you talk about crisis information, the key summary to all of this is you need to have a trusted source. You need to figure out who you trust to provide you accurate and timely information in the time of an emergency.
You've got to have that trusted source. And I would recommend that you have two because redundancy is an important part of emergency management, right? So you have two trusted sources that you know you can go to. You have two mediums to find them on because if one medium is not available, you do not want to have blank dead air when it comes to crisis information.
So you have two people or two sources. You have two mediums to find them on. You now understand your threat profile within your area. And then when you get information, when you go out and you find the crisis information and it's coming at you, something's going on, you understand that what you're pulling out of the NOS that is mostly what happens in media.
In that NOS, two important parts of information. What is the actual threat? Pull it out. What is the probability of that threat happening?
And what is the outcome, right? So there's three, not two. So you look for your threat, your probability, and your outcome out of your crisis information from your trusted source. You then sit back and process that.
Now, if you want to take your game to another level and have a set of scenario planning done, your version of shoot, move, communicate for emergency management, you're even farther ahead. But at least with that, you've got your trusted source. You've got your information. Now you put your big thinking brain on and decide what it is you're going to do.
And a lot of this is passing stuff. Like I told you, today we have that basic threat for probably we're going to have a tornado warning, which is not uncommon here. And so what do I do differently? Well, there is a certain level where I decide to take a couple of things in off of the patio and there's a side where I put my car in the garage or there's a decision whether I am, you know, it's a good time to go out grocery shopping.
Basically gives you an idea of what you're going to do. So listen, this is the whole idea of the crisis information. I hope this was valuable to you and I hope this helped you identify what you need to do to get ready for the next crisis because apparently in the 2020s, this is going to be a wild ride. So thank you very much for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head.
Please continue to drop over to my website, www.insidemycanoehead.ca. There's a newsletter, sign up for that. We're a bit sporadic in answering those things. I know we're getting a little bit better.
Drop over to buymeacoffee.com slash I am canoehead. You'll see my preparedness offer for a Zoom call for 75 bucks is there. We put information up there as well. That's where the book sale is going to be in Kobo come August or September when it comes out.
There's also a little buy me a coffee button there. If you like what you hear, drop me a coffee. Gosh, three bucks Canadian. And anyhow, drop me an email at jeffatpreparednesslabs.ca.
It's the same email that the newsletter comes out from. Basically, like any other organization, I'm looking for your feedback. I need to know what I'm doing well, and I need to know what I can improve upon. If there's a subject or an idea you'd love to hear, just send me an email.
Say, hey, listen, dude, how about this? Or how about bring a guest on? Listen, I'm an Ofer. If you're a baseball fan, you know what Ofer 5 is.
I'm an Ofer right now. I've had five invitations out for guests in the last three weeks. Four of them have declined, and one has just utterly ignored me. So that is what it is.
We'll keep trying. Keep stuff coming, and pay attention. I just finished Peter Zion's latest book, or second last book, Disunited Nations, and now I'm starting on The End of the World is Just the Beginning. It is mapping the collapse of globalization.
I love his writing and his maps that are available free of charge on zion.com. They basically show you what's coming at you in the 2020s, and this is about crisis information, right? So make sure you have an accurate picture of what the world is likely to look like throughout the 2020s. It's going to be a wild ride as we go through, I think it's the fifth reorganization of the global order since the 1500s and Exploration Days.
So about every 80 or 90 years, the human race reorganizes the global order. This is what we're doing in the 2020s right now. And people say, oh, we've never seen this stuff before. It's all brand new.
No, it's not brand new. It's the same thing we've done several times before. We just only do it every 80, 90 years, which is why none of us have experienced it before. But what's going on in the 2020s is not different from what happened in the 1930s and 1940s or what happened in the 1770s or the 1870s.
I mean, this is something that we've done regularly. So it's a great book. I'm just mentioning it. His writing is brilliant.
And take the time to enjoy your day and enjoy your summer, right? As Jen Gerson says on the line, this is probably the last good one for some time to come. So take care. Keep on being the incredible person you are.
Enjoy your life. Rock this world. Chase your dreams. And go subscribe to my YouTube channel.
I appreciate it. All right. Take care.