All right, welcome to Inside My Canoe Head, a podcast about individual emergency preparedness, policy related issues, adventure, life, seeking the brilliance of happiness, sit back and enjoy. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside My Canoe Head. This week we're going to talk about a very important issue, of course, the cost of preparedness. Now we're going to measure this cost in a whole bunch of different ways, so sit back, grab a beverage, let's get to it.
So first off, whenever we talk about preparedness on this podcast, I always like to revert right back to our principal message and the most important question in individual emergency preparedness is, who is responsible for your outcomes? And that answer better be you. The government is not coming to help you. Government programs are not designed to save you in significant disruption.
And we here at Inside My Canoe Head firmly believe that individual emergency preparedness is a personal responsibility. And it's actually the number one first thing that we persuade and try to influence people to accept is that you are responsible for your outcomes and therefore it is your job to adopt personal preparedness, not the government's. So with that, we just want to take a couple of seconds here to update you on changes to Inside My Canoe Head in case you haven't checked it out. We have our own website now insidemycanoehead.ca where you will see a place to sign up for our weekly newsletters that are starting to come out regularly every single Thursday, which we'll start this week on this Thursday, which is a couple days from now.
So that will be filled with a whole bunch of individual messages that we're designing. So basically, this is your weekly written mini blog on tips and tricks that are helpful as well. We are over on Instagram and Inside My Canoe Head. We have live Instagram coming up on the 28th of April at 1900.
The reason that date is that's the two-year anniversary of the first episode of Inside My Canoe Head dropping on Apple Podcast. So we also have an ebook that is currently in writing. We're putting together a video course and all of these things will be up on my Buy Me a Coffee website. It's linked on the insidemycanoehead.ca site.
Just explore. See what we've got out there. I've got a fledgling YouTube video set that's going to start improving over the next months. Basically, what we have here at Inside My Canoe Head is a place for individuals to go who are seeking advice on individual emergency preparedness, who don't want to hear chicken little, the sky is falling, the economy is going to collapse.
We're never going to tell you to put two years of food in your basement or any ridiculous crap like that. We're going to tell you reasonable actual things that you can do so you can continue going on and rocking an incredible life while wrapping yourself in a blanket of individual emergency preparedness. So it makes sense when we start off today to think about what is preparedness. Now, there are a series of definitions that are out there in the academic world.
Some of you know that I'm in the very last stages of finishing my PhD on individual emergency preparedness communications. And so when we look at preparedness, we can go super geeky on the academic definitions on the industrial definitions, but it's basically summed up to be your ability to self manage significant disruptions along a phase. So if you think about response phases, light science, all that cool stuff, your response is based upon your level of preparedness. And in this channel, we talk about things taking you along a spectrum from disruptions in normal operations, from just looking at the animalistic requirements of human survival to a complex preparedness program based upon your exposure to life's critical infrastructure supports.
So we do it all in a cover spectrum. But basically, preparedness is just your ability to regulate to manage your way through those life's disruptions, continue to rocking that incredible life. But you've taken a few necessary preparations to have yourself just a little bit more comfort. And a great example is when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, and there were two hour lineups at the grocery store, and everybody was running around like a chicken little with a head caught off.
If you were in the preparedness world like me, you sat back on your living room couch, drinking your coffee, you were not concerned about shortages, you were not concerned about shortfalls. There was never ever going to be anything that you had to rush out and get from the grocery store, because you were afraid that it was going to be gone forever, or it would be many months before it came back. You had a necessary stockpile, shall we say, of things that made your life simple. So you stayed home with your family, you watched it on TV, you digested it, you talked to people, you read things, you came up with a plan, and you were able to self isolate for as long as required to then understand and be ready to reintegrate in whatever society you look like at the time.
That's what preparedness does for you. When we think about the cost of preparedness, we're going to look at actual dollars and cents costs. We're also going to talk a little bit at the end about opportunity costs, which I think personally is very important to consider, and it's also a very dangerous item for some people. So first of all, I've said this all along in this podcast, emergency preparedness is free.
It's free folks. If anybody is a charlatan out there and telling you, here's a laundry list of things you have to buy. Here's the first top 15 things you should be stockpiling up on in your house. That's the type of stuff you need to probably walk away from.
The first thing that you have to understand is you're here, right? You're alive right now. You haven't expired yet. You haven't died of exposure.
You haven't died of hunger or thirst in Canada right now, or wherever you may live around the world. This podcast is certain 32 countries. So you haven't expired yet. So you're still here, right?
So something must be going on right. So first and foremost, as I said, emergency preparedness is an attitude and your attitude, your focus, your theoretical lens through which you evaluate life is free of charge. I believe, and I follow a lot of stoic philosophy. It doesn't matter whether you do or not.
However, you look through life, the attitude that you are responsible for your outcomes and the attitude that you are going to take the necessary steps to ensure that is absolutely free. It costs you nothing. And it is the principal, largest, most important thing that you can do. I've said number one, if I was ever to give advice to people about one thing that you could do in individual emergency preparedness beyond having an attitude of self-reliance is very simple.
Go meet your neighbor. It is far better for you to build a social capital network in your community for free and meet and know a whole bunch of people than it will ever be to go buy a hatchet or two weeks food supply or extra water purification tablets. I'm serious because when you build a network of social bonds, it's called social capital in the theoretical sense. That gives you access to that network, the resources within the network, and the connections that people have within the network.
Far more valuable than anything you could have talked about in the basement of your house. So when you think about it, all that is free, meeting your neighbors, meeting people, joining online community groups at Facebook and things along that. That's all free. It doesn't cost you anything but time and it doesn't cost you any money, but it'll do far more for your emergency preparedness than any piece of kit.
Think about for the free side your animalistic requirements. And I say that because I like to refer to humans as an animal in the world, you have five basic requirements. First and foremost is shelter and the gray bearded green beret who has all kinds of websites and social media out there. He says this the best.
You need something to sleep under, something to sleep in, and something to sleep on, remembering that the first layer of shelter is your clothes. So unless you're housing challenged and homeless right now in the country you live, you have a place that will shelter you from the weather. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. I don't honestly care about that.
You have a shelter piece right now. You have sufficient clothing for the environment you're in. It may not be the clothes you want, but it's a clothes that keeps you dry and warm in the weather you're exposed to. You already have food, right?
Let's be frank, you're eating, you're not starving to death. You may be nutritionally challenged, but you're not starving to death. You have food. You have access to water purification through either potable water through your municipality or some other source, because if you look in the mirror, you are currently not suffering likely from cholera dysentery, diarrhea, other waterborne illnesses.
You have reasonable health. Now health is about your choices. It's about becoming physically fit and it's about eating as healthy as you can. Physical fitness costs no money.
You can join all the gyms you want, but being able to do push-ups and planks and go for walks. There's a great individual that I've marked something, and I forget his name and I'll try to put it in the show notes if I remember, that he has a great website on human fitness. He talks about it from the animalistic sense of there are three things that you need to be able to do as a human animal. You need to be able to walk long distances.
You need to be able to periodically sprint short distances. You need to be able to periodically carry heavy items. That's all you have to do to be physically fit in the human sense. There are lots of websites.
For me, I'm slightly overweight and need to work on that and I am. One of the best websites free of charge that I use is called Nerd Fitness. If you ever find a nerd, they're wonderful people. Just go to nerdfitness.com.
They have a beginner bodyweight exercise there. Do that. Follow basic nutritional plans that are available free of charge all over the internet. You've got all the advice you need and it costs you nothing.
You don't need a gym membership, and you don't need to buy expensive food products. The last one is security. Security is not about having a whole bunch of weaponry or a bunch of lock doors. Security is a mindset.
It is a component of two things. One is situational awareness. You just understanding what's going on around you. It's about people that get robbed in a neighborhood at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Unless you're a shift worker, I ask what the heck were you doing there at 3 o'clock in the morning? It's about your situational awareness and your decision making. How do you make decisions? How do you think about your own personal security when you're in situations around the world, traveling at your home, shopping mall, things like that?
Do you have an expensive bag, hang around your neck that everybody can see that they can grab and run with? Or do you just dress like a great person? Wear average clothes, go to average places like blend in the gray man. You're not indistinguishable in any kind from the population around you.
These are security things that will go a long way. Now, if you're concerned about self-defense, there are a whole bunch of free information on the internet that teaches you basic things. For me, I've done my favorite is Taekwondo, but right now I'm working on Krav Maga. And that is Krav Maga is a divided by the Israeli Defense Force.
It's used around the world. It's a very, very violent, but very, very simple set of techniques that use to get you out of a situation. Krav Maga is all designed about. You're not going to fight in a tournament to win Krav Maga.
It's all about how do I remove the threat from my immediate presence and give myself an escape route? It's there's a lot of great basic Krav Maga lessons that will get you through the majority of situations that are available for free on the internet or YouTube. Udemy has a course. I bought it.
It's $1,399 Canadian, but you can still get everything from the internet, from YouTube. Your basic movements required to remove a threat from you. And as you increase your physical fitness, you'll increase your confidence and your ability to handle yourself. You've done situational awareness and you have strong, sensitive decision making.
And therefore you are less likely to put yourself in a position where some type of form of self-defense. And if you do nothing more than that, you've gone an exceptional level of distance towards individual emergencies, preparedness, self-reliance. And it has cost you absolutely nothing. So if you've got a charlatan out there, it tells you buy this kit, get these items, pack these items in your house, I would run the other way.
Now, the second part of individual emergency preparedness is if you want to take your plan from the animalistic end of the spectrum and more moving it to a complex, more robust, self-reliant system. This takes a more significant investment of time. We have a fantastic plan on previous episodes here on Inside My Canoe Head on a 12-step plan that's based upon 80% of the people that listen to this podcast about 80% of humans that live in developed countries live in urban areas. So you're going to live in an urban or suburban area more than likely.
And because you live that type of environment, your successful operations of society are supported by something called critical infrastructure. And we look at 10 different elements of critical infrastructure and your personal dependency on those elements of critical infrastructure as the foundation and the frame for looking at a more complex in-depth analysis of individual emergency preparedness. And so again, at the beginning of looking at the second complex part of individual emergency preparedness, this is free of charge. It's more of a time investment.
And we're going to talk about a detailed analysis and making a plan for individual emergency preparedness. But yet we have not got to any place where we are asking and instructing or telling you to spend any money on acquiring any goods or services. So you're going to review your dependency on critical infrastructure. You're going to find your shortfalls against those critical infrastructure.
So one may be financial and banking. How dependent are you and your existence on the Canadian or your government's financial sector? What happens if you don't have access to that? And that's how we frame it inside my canoe head.
If you look at the tensed parts of critical infrastructure that the Canadian government sets out, the American government breaks it into 16. Some other government agencies and intergovernmental panels break it in 14 or 15. It doesn't matter what breakdown you lose. You use, sorry, you look at this critical infrastructure piece and you ask yourself, how dependent am I on that for the way that I currently live my life?
So how I currently conduct as we say in military normal operations? How does that? How am I dependent on this critical piece of critical infrastructure? And then you ask yourself the important question, what is my plan when I no longer have access to that piece of critical infrastructure?
So if for whatever reason, and you don't care why at this point, you don't have access to the financial sector, what does your world look like when you don't have access to it? Then you think about what is your plan to deal with that? And every once in a while, when you walk through your plan, the end result of that plan may be that you need to acquire a good or a service and spend a little bit of money to mitigate the effects of losing access to that piece of critical infrastructure, but only spend money only ever commit financial resources to preparedness when you personally as an individual have identified a shortfall against your dependency on a piece of critical infrastructure. I a.k.a.
I have a preparedness timeline, which is the second step of individual emergency preparedness in our 12 step plan is that you're going to determine a timeline you want to be prepared for. On this podcast, I've been open. Mine is now 90 days. I want to be as self-reliant as I possibly can for a period of 90 days.
So I will look at that financial industry, critical infrastructure. And I will ask myself if I don't have access to the financial infrastructure for my 90 day time period, what does that look like for me? The answer for that is I may have to acquire periodic goods and services without accessing the financial industry, which for me meant that I needed a small cash supply on hand in small bills. So I don't have to worry about breaking twenties when nobody has changed at home.
So I might have a couple hundred dollars in tunies to be honest with you, but that's in my head in cost meeting is my own money. I took out of the bank, but that was only decided upon as a result of looking at a dependency on critical infrastructure. So all your purchases must fit an identifiable need that you have found and determined to be real in your circumstances. Now I have a whole bunch of really incredible friends that are in the bushcrafting world and they've got a great gear and I like to bushcraft every once in a while.
So I've got a bunch of gear, but I don't have an access part of my emergency preparedness plan for my home because I don't plan on living in the woods as part of my emergency preparedness strategy. I don't have a need or a dependency on a critical infrastructure loss that has led me to understand that to fill a void I need to have an axe. So because there is a relative that I have my axe simply because I like to do bushcraft and build cool shelters in the woods because I think it's a lot of fun, but it has nothing to do with my individual emergency preparedness plan. It's about my fun to do bushcraft.
So you know somebody's telling you to buy all this kit by a 72 hour kit. Well, why? I'll tell you right now every human being as long as you have a home and you're not homeless in a developed or developing country in the world, you will survive 72 hours without wasting your money on a freaking kit that you can buy from the store. Trust me, it's already wrapped around your house.
You already have it. You don't need to buy a 72 hour kit. Go through the time, invest the time in a complex analysis of your individual emergency preparedness in the family, the people for whom you're responsible for, which is a key thing that you do at the beginning of the process, understanding who you're responsible for, who's gonna come knocking on your door looking for help when the shizzy hits the fizzy. So for example, recently I went from 60 days to 90 days.
The world got a little pear shaped on us. So I figured for me, I decided that I wanted to change my preparedness timeline from 60 days to 90 days. And because of that, I then had to look at expanding things. And for the vast majority of what I needed to do, it was the ability to, let's move it on, let's just buy a little bit more of what I had from food, water, that type of thing.
And so fair, not from not a problem. But every once in a while, there was a couple I had to perch, I decided that it would be required for me to purchase a second solar panel for my solar generator, because 90 days potentially could take me into winter low light conditions, I live in a very high latitude, actually the world's most northerly capital. And as a result of that, I don't get a lot of direct sunlight in the winter. So I needed a more robust energy plan, power generation plan for 90 days.
So only only only, and I said this over and over again, only purchase something, only expend your money. When you have personally determined that this is an identifiable need, and there are no other free ways to meet that need, and you need to expand it. So for example, food, and I'll tell you this right now, there's Canadian Prepper is on YouTube, he has 700 subscribers, he's got millions, thousands of videos. But he's got one on there that talk that I really hammer all the time on this podcast, and it talks about 100 days of food for $100.
It's really that cheap to feed yourself. So I don't care about inflation nowadays, you can whine and complain about that all you want. Okay, it doesn't cost any more than $2 a day to feed a human being a robust, healthy diet full of all the macro and micronutrients required for great health at $2 a day. So if you decide that you want to currently expand your food pantry, it does not cost a lot of money.
And not at all, it is almost nominal in the amount of money you will spend to do that. Now, if you like ribeye steaks, we're having a different conversation. But if you're okay getting your protein from a combination of rice and lentil beans, oats and other things like that, then no, it doesn't cost a lot of money at all. So think about that when you're talking about your costs related to doing a more complex individual emergency preparedness, your animalistic costs are free.
You've got that squared away already. When it comes to more complex, you may have some items that are identified that you need to expand a small amount of funds on. Preparedness is generally exceptionally cheap to do for anyone, which I fight with academia all the time and I fight with experts in the field because everybody says, preparedness is a socioeconomic barrier. And my answer to that is no, you're just thinking it wrong.
There are no socioeconomic barriers to being prepared. There are a lot of socioeconomic attitudinal barriers. There are barriers related to mental health, physical health, yes. But when it comes to not having the money to become prepared, that is a bogus piece of junk that you see out there in the preparedness literature, both in academia and in gray literature.
The last thing that I want to talk about today is opportunity cost. There always is an opportunity cost to everything we do. Now, the definition of opportunity cost is essentially everything that you give up to do what you're doing. So every time that I talk about in this podcast about things that you need to do to think about preparedness, I always give you things to do that require time, right?
You have time. So every minute you spend thinking about individual emergency preparedness doing it, either animalistic review or doing a complex review, there's an opportunity cost to that. You could be doing something else. So think about opportunity cost as your next best thing that you could be doing instead of listening to this podcast right now.
So you may be baking bread, driving, doing something while you're listening to me talk away. But if you're just sitting there paying attention to this and listening carefully, there's an opportunity cost you could be somewhere else doing something else, but you've chosen to make the investment. And in emergency preparedness, if you allow becoming a prepper, becoming scared, or becoming too consumed about individual emergency and family preparedness, you can find yourself spending far too much time worried about it concentrating on it, reading about it, looking at it, researching it. And before you know it, there are a lot of other normal, healthy activities that you're no longer doing because you're worried too much about preparedness.
And this is, it is one of those genres that has a very, very slippery slope into becoming paranoia, into becoming utterly paranoid about the world around you and bad things that could happen to you and the people you love, and that you're going to spend an exorbitant amount of times researching, looking into everything that you can think of to make sure you're overly prepared against every possible outcome and hazard that may be realized in your life. And before you know it, you're digging a hole in your backyard to put a bunker in and your two years of food supply is on order. That is a huge opportunity cost. So becoming addicted is a real dangerous thing.
So what we try to respond to that here on individual emergency preparedness podcast, like inside my canoe head and others that are out there, is we talk about you need to make a plan, you need to invest a little bit of time, because if you invest time upfront on a plan before you spend a single freaking dollar, then that plan will set you up, you'll have a set of tasks to execute, you can execute them in fairly short order, if necessary, you can buy any item that you need. And then you go on and you live and rock and incredible awesome life. And individual emergency preparedness actually has a really low opportunity cost for you, because you only periodically every once in a while sit down with a cup of coffee, and you think about your preparedness plan. And what happens lately is we've done a couple episodes here on Ukraine, because I had a very, very good friend of mine, an individual who is an absolute incredible human being who is doing humanitarian work in Western Ukraine and asked for some thoughts and advice on helping out.
So we did a bunch of episodes on that. And Putin's war in Ukraine has made a lot of people think about are they ready for significant disruptions like that. When you've already invested in individual emergency preparedness, that opportunity cost of time is actually going to be fairly small, because you're now framing your thoughts in, I have a plan to deal with my loss of critical infrastructure. If war causes the power to go out, or a tornado causes the power to go out, or a winter storm causes the power to go out, the effect on me, the disaster impact is exactly the same.
I don't have power. So your plan is designed to how to mitigate the loss of power, not how to mitigate a tornado, not how to make it a war. Because if you look at the causal influences or the hazards shall we say that could cause you problems, and you just focus on those, you're going to end up with a whole bunch of series of different plans to deal with different hazards. And that's nothing but a recipe for a dog's breakfast of confusion and anger and just consuming so much of your time unnecessarily.
So follow the steps that are available here on Inside My Canoe Head. Remember individual emergency preparedness at its animalistic level is free of church. It is all principally about your attitude and accepting responsibility for your outcomes, becoming a more self-reliant individual, make a detailed plan for the timeline you want to be prepared for, for the people for whom you want to be responsible for, and then if necessary, only as a result of your detailed plan, you may actually have to purchase something. And only then will you be committing funds out of your bank account.
So that's why individual emergency preparedness and preparedness in general is a free attitudinal adjustment far more than it is any type of something that is a socioeconomic barrier, i.e. you are an individual living paycheck to paycheck like the let almost a plurality of Canadian families are $400 away from being broke, right? So those people can adopt individual and family emergency preparedness without costing them any money. And I fight, again, I fight this all the time with the experts who call for massive investments in more government programming blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, that's in that case in a junk waste. All government programming generally does is expand the size and nature of the public service and add to our taxpayer bill. So thank you very much for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head. Please take the time to have a look at my Inside My Canoe Head.ca website, send me an email at jeffattproperinesslabs.ca, hit me up on dm on Instagram.
Join us for our Instagram live is going to be a lot of fun. We've got some great episodes coming up on Everyday Carries, Bags, Kits, and How Those May Become Part of Your Preparedness Plan. We're going to look at cyber and finance defense. How do you formulate a plan against cyber intrusions and the loss of financial, you know, access to the financial system?
And then we're looking at doing a small series on building resilient, independent lifestyle outside of having a couple of cans of food and a bottle of water in your house. How does this lead to building a resilient lifestyle? You know, how do I travel all around the world and do all the incredible things that I want to do but be prepared for if the Shizzy Hits the Fizzy Adam in a foreign country, independent, robust lifestyles. I think that's what we're all looking for in today's modern world.
So thank you very much for joining us today. Give us your thoughts and hopes. If you really like what you hear on this podcast, go to Buy Me a Coffee. Buy, you know, click the button.
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Thank you very much. Take care. Stay safe.