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 are going to talk about personalities kits the various different uses what i put in them and why they exist so sit back grab yourself your favorite beverage and let's get to it and so i often get asked about individual emergency preparedness um why this focus and why not like so the reasons that we as human beings are we within this preparedness movement people listening to this podcast people that are on similar genre journeys why what are the reasons we undertake this effort a lot of people talk about they don't believe in government etc when i look at the bigger picture i kind of roll it up into some of the principles of stoicism we're trying to reduce the influence of external events on our life plan each one of us are on some kind of different journey in life we're all chasing different dreams different achievements some of us are simply trying to make it through to the next day or make it through the end of this one but all of it wraps around your ability to be in control of your life and lessen the impact external people and external events have on you achieving that plan so individual emergency preparedness is exactly that it's all of the thought processes and i'll tell you in this podcast everywhere else that i speak individual emergency preparedness is far more about your mental focus and mental attitude than it will ever be about any physical equipment or any physical steps that you take so when we look at that we have a range of personalities that exist within the preparedness world and i did an episode on this several months ago but i wanted to return to it today because a lot of the names are thrown around you know are you a prepper are you not a prepper etc etc so i've created a spectrum of five personalities that people will generally fall into and it's kind of how i divide this community and then how i assign different levels to them so i'm going to quickly go over them and then maybe if people are interested i'll go into a more in-depth analysis so the first individual on my list is you're blissfully unaware this is the individual who is charging through life with absolutely zero mental consideration for what may happen or what may go wrong individual emergency preparedness is not even a topic this problem this individual probably even realizes exists but they most certainly do not take any precautions to address life's abnormalities they're just piling through life blissfully unaware then we have number two which is i call it your government dependent person this person who has drank the kool-aid and they believe that the government has both the capacity and the responsibility to rescue them in time of disruption so for example if they lose their job for something beyond their control it's the government's job to get put money into their bank if they can't pay the rent it's the government's job to pay it for them if they can't feed themselves it's the government's job to feed themselves and i can go on and on and on we all know these people that they believe that it's the government's responsibility and if we build bigger badder government then everything will be better in our society so they basically just dump off the responsibility it's like risk transfer and insurance but at an exponential level where they just dump the responsibility for their outcomes onto the government and then we come to the target of this podcast which is what i refer to as the prepared individual so this is somebody who wants to carry on and keep their awesome life plan whatever you're chasing whatever you're achieving you want to keep going on you want to rock an awesome life you want to just nail it and have an incredible existence on planet earth while you're here however you do realize that there are a whole bunch of disruptions that could and probably will occur that are outside of your control so you want to take efforts so that you can live that life you look at preparedness as a way of ensuring that you can do the things you want because you've taken the necessary precautions to wrap yourself in a blanket of preparedness you're not a nutcase you're not worried about the end of societal collapse you're just concerned about making sure that this incredible thing called life has as few interruptions as possible so you can rock this world the next one is your prepper and now the difference with a prepper is by my research and i've looked into this extensively and you look at the personality types and what they're trying to achieve a prepper is somebody who honestly believes in expecting a significant disruption and temporary collapse of the normal order of society due to any number of external influences that they believe is likely or imminent they expect it to collapse for a significant period of time but a prepper retains the belief that society will be able to reorientate itself and recover after a significant period of time so these are people that think that the government of society will collapse you will be on your own but that through natural order of things we're going to return to some form of normalcy in a couple of weeks or months down the line so this is the individual who lives in louisiana and expects if another hurricane hits to the experience of katrina will be repeated where there are weeks and weeks where the government is abjectly useless in aiding of the civilians but knowing full well that in the fullness of time society will reorientate itself and bring itself back that's a prepper we go to the extreme the other end which i call a survivalist the survivalist lives life and is all encompassing on the fact that they believe that not only like a prepper there will be a significant disruption causing a collapse in society but the difference with the survivalist is they retain a belief system that society will not recover to its pre-event conditions and that society itself will not grow past what we refer to as local community entities so it'll be returned to a tribal style life where you have small community groups operating independent of each other without any overseeing government or provider of services etc so the survivalist sees life returning essentially to the feudal systems of past england without the lords i guess if you can put your mind in to what tribal society used to live like in various parts of the world that's what a survivalist believes will return to and those personalities are important because you need to reflect and it's my system it's not perfect but it's a system that demonstrates where you might sit on the spectrum now i gear this podcast towards the prepared individual the person who wants to keep working and living and being part of an awesome social community within an urban and suburban environment because 80 of us live in cities and it's only going to grow in humanity that's the type of person that this podcast is geared towards what can i do to mitigate the effects of external disruptions to my life that i could charge through the middle of these things you know i had to take a whole bunch of precautions during the coronavirus but i was successful i came out the other end at least successful as i was going in if not more successful i leveraged the opportunities found within significant disruptions of the pandemic because i was prepared and i was able to launch a whole bunch of ideas and do some incredible things during the pandemic while the world was locked down that's a prepared individual that's what i gear this podcast towards so considering that together i think it's important that we take some time to look at kits now i'm going to give this description and this discussion from my perspective and my perspective always is that your home is your castle okay it's where we always want to be but we're not always there so we have to talk about kits and equipment everyday carry and that type of thing because everything that i do in preparedness is about locking down my home this is where we're going to stay this is where my family's going to lock it down where we're going to help our neighbors and build and ensure our community is doing really really well within any type of significant disruption i generally don't need any help from the government i don't expect any help from the government because i've studied actual capacity of state organizations across all levels of government and i understand based upon evidence not belief but evidence that there's nobody there to help me when significant disruptions occur so as a result of that home is my castle and the reason that's important is you're still here right everything you own is in your house that stuff that you think is useful or unuseful or whatever it's all in your house everything you have and everything you need to survive is already in your house i did an episode a couple of weeks ago a couple of days ago on preparedness is cheap it's free it's got some great feedback and people are realizing that you know everything you need to survive is already in your house it's not in cabela's i love cabela's don't get me wrong but everything that you need to be a prepared individual and rock through the next disaster is already sitting in your house right so take a time to have a look around but that's your castle right so everything that i do and we talk about emergency communication plans you know when the shizzy gets the fizzy what's what's everybody how am i going to talk to everybody and i've said this before i don't need to talk to anybody in my family everybody knows the rules the rules is your responsibility because my kids are all in their 20s it's your responsibility to get your butt from wherever it is in the city all the way back to the house because that's where we're going i live in a city of a million people i can't jump in a car or on a bicycle and run around and try to find a family member the odds of that are significantly poor uh and it makes it's illogical and it doesn't make any sense so we're all grown adults we all understand our responsibilities and we all know how to walk so it's our job to get from a to b so back to the castle it's our doctrine so set that aside but i'm not always here so we're going to look through different stages of different kits and situational that may affect you so the first one is what i refer to as regular life edc what's called everyday carry and there's a couple of fantastic youtube channels on individuals who just do edc and they're brilliant because they look at everything but what happens a lot of times is it's very much heavily based in the united states of america and a lot of the u.s of america has things for self-defense that are not legal in the majority of the rest of the developed world so when i look at edc it has nothing to do with offensive or defensive weaponry the most useful weapon that i have is obviously my brain and the decisions that i make with it so i look at edc as dealing with life's hiccups in your own terms and it basically means that you know just life's going to hiccup and it's going to throw you a curveball as you're you know going through life and what things would you like to have on you so for example my edc is a swiss army knife it was a gift from my kids but i'm you know i have leathermans as well multi-tools but i'm an old school swiss army knife with everything from the tweezers to the little scissors to the knife to the pick to the saw to everything under the sun i've done more repairs around my house and places that i've been with a swiss army knife than you can imagine i just i just think it's one of the most fantastic inventions of life i carry a small rechargeable flashlight it's no bigger than a tin bit okay literally no bigger than a tin bit it doesn't have a massive crazy um light on it but if i ever get caught in a part where i'm where it's dark you know i've got a light to just find my way around i mean it's a simple thing it weighs a couple of ounces that's it and the one thing it does have on it that i got this one for is it has a strobe flashing light and that is my one part of self-defense that i have because if i'm ever faced with somebody in a low light to no light situation that wants to cause me harm putting a strobe a bright strobe light on their face it doesn't defeat the individual but it takes away their visual perception their depth perception and their ability to understand where i'm at and what i'm doing so it's just one of those little confusion things to give me that second to find the hole to run away right remember your number one thing in a fight is to run away jocko will nick will tell you that a hundred times out of a hundred that even if somebody punches him he runs away if somebody pushes him he runs away if somebody blocks him he finds a way to run away when somebody grabs a hold of him they're going to get twisted like a pretzel that's where he changes the conversation but everything up to somebody grabbing onto him even if they hit him he's going to run away because the fall the fall effects of getting into a fight and charges and you hit the individual they drop like a bag of hammers smack their head on the concrete you find yourself with a manslaughter charge and you're looking at four years in prison all because you thought you were a tough guy right dumb ass let's just put it that way so basically i use that flashlight for that and other than that the only other piece of equipment i carry is my phone so my edc kid is literally a swiss army knife and a flashlight and that's it i don't need the precaution of when i leave my house that i am you know just like my mother said when i was a kid i'm dressed for the weather you know i dress for the fact if i have to walk home from wherever i'm going am i wearing the appropriate clothing to do that comfortable wear all that i mean it doesn't have to be crazy i just wear clothes that are appropriate for the environment and i carry those two simple devices and that's the extent of my edc it's it's literally nothing i mean then we talk about the car kit now the car kit exists in my car simply because it's dealing with returning to your home without your car because of a breakdown or a myriad of other things again remember disaster impact reduction i don't care why my car is no longer available to me as a matter of conveyance right it's no longer available and i have to get back home my home is my castle that's where i go my car kit exists to facilitate that distance now i don't leave my car kit in my car unless i'm going to someplace that is beyond a couple hours walk from my house so generally when i'm banging around town doing the stuff no i'm not worried about the car kit uh when i travel like 100 kilometers something like that outside of town i'll throw the car kit in the trunk and it's basically just a bunch of stuff that is what i need i look at animalistic shelter food water it's not complicated i mean if anybody's interested i can do a deep dive into that what's in that bag but it's really simple stuff right it's a blanket to keep me warm uh it's a tarp to to keep me covered from pouring rainstorm it's a couple of snacks and cliff bars and a couple bottles of water it's basically you know i'm gonna have to walk home for say two days right what do i need for two days i don't need to change clothes because i'm wearing appropriate clothing i need 4 000 calories 2 000 calories a day and i need four liters of water and then a blanket to wrap around me the blanket that i use is 100 wool blanket because that sucker can get soaking wet and i'm perfectly fine and if i'm tired i can curl up underneath the big plastic blue walmart tarp that i've got with me and then put wrap myself in the blanket and i'm good to go right it's nothing complicated it really isn't but that's why i have a car kit so in time that i would have to leave my car and abandon it for whatever reason and walk back to my residence i have the absolute minimal basics and listen if that sucker gets stolen it probably will pass me 100 bucks to replace it bag included really it's not a big investment and it's actually not an investment because it's everything i already had in my house i just put it into an old kid's school backpack really it's nothing complicated it's not one of those gucci 511 bags they're really nice don't get me wrong but you don't need that i just use a kid's old you know superman or spider-man backpack and uh most people if they're gonna break into your car and they see a spider-man bag in the back they think they're gonna get a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich and a notebook about art class but not anything decent so maybe it's a good gray man technique but that's my car kit so now we get into a little bit more thought process that it's going to take a little bit more of a thinking plan shall we say vacation so you're on vacation when i call vacation i mean you are staying overnight someplace other than your residence and so i look at breaking vacation into two situational frames one where you're just going to manage with a local authority something like you got sideswiped by a tornado while you were visiting down south and you kind of got on you know what yourself and figure out and you gotta wait in line with a couple hundred other people to rebook your airline ticket to get back home you know what i mean like life's throwing you a discouraging thing so what are you going to have to figure out how you get home so for a regular or normal significant disruption if such a thing exists when i'm on vacation i take mental plans and then i take physical precautions the first mental plan is it's something stoicism teaches as you think through the bad things before the bad things happen so that you've gone through the mental process of how you're going to deal with them. So when I get on a plane and go to Keo Coco Cuba, I have a thought process in my head. What happens if some natural disaster hits Keo Coco? What is my plan?
How am I going to get from there back to at least the United States of America where I can drop a credit card, rent a car and drive home? So I think my way through that, I look at the town, I pull out a map, I understand what's there. I understand that I take down the numbers and the telephone and the addresses of the Canadian consulate in the area. Just basic pieces of the pieces of information that I might need to know to help me solve a problem that may not be available to me because the problem has broken communication tools.
So what would I love to know when a bad thing happens? I write that down. The next thing I consider is what physical precautions. Now I put, I take my EDC and I take a few other tools depending on where I'm going.
So I take that survival blanket, which is usually, it's a wool blanket just because they're literally invincible. I take a small tarp and I take some, you know, about two days to three days of emergency food supply. I take a small knife, a multi-tool and a little bit of cordage. So your basic stuff, I take that and I put it in my carry-on like my check luggage.
Obviously you can't carry a knife on. So I literally, my EDC goes into my other luggage and I bring it with me because that's there because I have to walk to the Canadian consulate in the country I'm at, right? So, or I have to walk to a major city from where I might be. What's that distance look like?
How long do I need? What's the weather patterns in the area? So I put that equipment. So it usually takes up, I never allow it to take out more than one fifth of the luggage bag.
If it needs more than one fifth, I need to be thinking about where I'm going and why I'm going there. Or I need to just dial back the apocalyptic thinking in my own head and go back to basics. Animalistic folks. So listen, most of us take a vacation to a warm place.
So I bring a wool blanket, a Walmart tarp, two days worth of food and some water purification tablets and a Nalgene, you know, a lighter, a small knife, and that's it. So basically I can start a campfire if I need to, but I probably won't. I can get out of the rain wherever I am. And then I also, usually the one other thing is I carry a small rolled up backpack.
Now they sell them, they come in like, they look like little, if you remember, they used to be the small backpacks that would wrap up into it. It's like a little bag. It's like the size of a softball. It looks like a wrapped up rain jacket, but it's a very minimalistic, you unravel it and it's a small backpack.
I would use that to throw my stuff in. So that goes into the kit as well. So that's for vacation. The other thing you have to worry about, the second part of vacation is what I refer to as a significant event.
What do I have to, and this is far more a mental game because you can't take significant long-term prepared and stuff on a vacation. Number one, you'll look like a fool. Number two, if you do that, you probably shouldn't be going on vacation. And your number one weapon in that case is going to be your mind.
So your significant event. So for example, I was, if I was in Keokoko, Cuba and the coronavirus broke out again and the countries closed their borders and I might not be able to get back into my home country because the airline stopped flying. If I was in that situation, what is my plan for that? So that's the idea of doing stoic principles, but thinking through planning.
And I talk about this at nauseam on this podcast that you have to think through emergency preparedness far more than you have to purchase for it. So if you think through it and you think about your, I'm on vacation, the airline gets stuck. I'm in a Spanish speaking country. I don't speak Spanish.
That should probably lead you to determine to have some way to translate to Spanish. Some basic instructions written out in Spanish, like where's the toilet? Well, it's really easy to hold up a picture on your phone of a toilet and try to figure out how to say where is the toilet because you may end up somewhere else, right? You know, in French, if you need a hair, if you need a hairbrush or a horse, you may get that wrong.
So the point being is, as you think through all the bad things that can happen on a vacation, because your kit is, if you're flying by plane, it's not going to be huge. So it has to be functionable. And most importantly, it has to be durable. The last part that I'll talk about is really important in today's world.
It's evacuation. Now I always break evacuation into two categories, planned and unplanned. And I know it sounds simplistic, but it matters. So let's look at planned evacuation.
You are headed to an alternate location that you have predetermined and you're doing it through your own free will because you've made the cognitive choice and decision based upon the circumstances that you're staying within your residence is no longer a tenable choice for you and those you're responsible for. Now, because you're a planned and prepared individual, you already know what the secondary location is. Mine is a buddy of mine who lives about 230 kilometers away. He knows that in significant issues in the city of Ottawa, if I make the choice to evacuate, he knows I am coming exactly there.
He doesn't even need a phone call. He knows he'll probably have the preparations ready. And even if he doesn't, and I show up on his doorstep with my family and my evacuation kit, we're good to go. And he knows this reciprocal agreement stands.
So a planned evacuation is when you're doing it under your own control because you've made the cognitive choice, not because any external forces are forcing you outside of your house. You think through that. It is a very deliberate action as we call it in the military, which means you will have time to plan. You'll have time to pack and you'll have time to make cognitive intelligent choices as to the things that you wish to bring with you.
That is a planned evacuation of your residence. The secondary and second, more dangerous part of this is the unplanned evacuation from your residence. Now, I really don't care why this is happening. It could be a wildfire.
It could be a tornado. It could be a chemical spill in a nearby industrial complex. It could be any number of external events that are forcing you against your will to leave your home. There are two categories here to consider.
One is you're never coming back. Two is you are going to come back, but it might be a couple of days. And the first one, if you think about why you would leave your home against your will at short notice without ever coming back, it could be a wildfire. You can ask a lot of people in Fort McMurray in 2016.
Nobody thought that their houses were going to burn down, right? Some of them only had, because of a whole bunch of failures of government organizations, some of them only had moments and minutes to leave the house. What's your plan for that? Again, evacuations are a whole another future episode that we're going to get into, but the idea being is there is a potential for everyone for some reason to have an unforeseen event occur that you have to leave and you're never coming back, which means everything in your house is going to be destroyed.
So what do you take with you? You have to consider two things. One, your preparedness things and where you're going to go because you have an alternate location already picked out. You know, it's at the alternate location and you know, from an equipment perspective, what you might want to bring with you.
And a lot of people have that thrown into a duffel bag in their garage. The second part is sentimental items. Now, you know, you can call yourself a minimalist and take pictures of them throw away. Everybody has sentimental items that cannot be replaced.
When you go through the process of thinking through them, there probably are only very small ones that it's literal an impossibility to be replaced. And I've said this on the podcast before. I have three that matter to me. One is my commissioning scroll.
So when I became an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, you get a commissioning scroll signed by the governor general, irrespective of whatever happens to it, it can never be replaced. It's just a matter of fact. If it burns or is destroyed, it's gone forever. The second one is my dad's Bible, right?
It was signed by my great grandmother, giving it to my father in 1955 with best wishes. I can get 101 Bibles in five minutes. I can't get that one back. And the last one is my grandfather's pipe.
He used to smoke a pipe after every meal. I love the smell. It reminds me of him. It's his pipe.
I can get lots of pipes, but I can't get that. And really, I have a few other little things, but they're all in a little box by my desk. So it's grab and go, not a problem. So we have sentimental items that we would take when you're leaving and you are coming back.
So if you have an industrial spill or you have some type of flood or something like that, you're going to come back to your house. Your stuff's got to be there. So you basically get up and go. You've got what's your plan for that?
Well, of course, you've already thought through that. You're going to go to your alternate location. You're going to chill for a little bit and you're going to come back. So those plans really are not that complicated.
So it gets into this idea of people having a go bag. So I've always railed against go bags and bug out bags for one very particular reason is because far too often in the preparedness world, they are brought forward and are used as a crutch. You don't need to think, you don't need to train, you don't need to be educated. You just get a whole bunch of crap.
You put it in a bag by your door, you get one for each member of your family. And now for some magical reason, you're now prepared and ready to deal with life's disruptions. And there couldn't be anything farther from the truth. If I put my nerd hat on, I'll tell you right now, there is zero evidence anywhere in academia or in the professional sense that a single human being's outcome has been improved post-event, post-disaster from having a 72-hour kit.
There is zero evidence that a single human being's outcome has been improved because of that kit. Actual evidence, not what you think would happen, not that you think they're good ideas, not that you believe that they're good ideas and obviously logically they're going to help somebody, but I'm looking at actual evidence that we can point to to say the Jones's family made it because of their EDC or their lives were that much better because of their EDC. No, there's no evidence to that. That's why I rail against them all the time because they're used as so much of a crutch.
That's why when I talk about individual emergency preparedness, I talk about a plan. Now, if you want to put together an evacuation bag for stuff that you need to grab and go in a really quick hurry in case you have an unplanned evacuation from your house, now you have a plan. You don't build the bag until you have a plan of where you're going to go because what you know is on the other end of the spectrum, the other end at the destination, you know what you're taking in your car kit that you've already made up because in case you have to walk home, now you have a plan that will gear you towards what you think you need to have in that bag. Obviously, in unplanned evacuations, you're not going to grab your 90 days of food and water from the basement.
This is not a disaster proper show from History Channel or whatever channel that was on. This is an actual what do you need in an evacuation kit. But basically, let's be, for example, if I had to go to the alternate location, it's 230 kilometers away. My evacuation kit that's in my house is if I get 30 kilometers out and the car breaks down and I have to walk, that's all it is.
It's the basic animalistic supports for myself, my family members to walk that 200 kilometers to the location. The average human is going to be able to walk under mental motivation probably 30 to 40 kilometers a day. So I'm looking at, I prep for about five days on the road. So five days at animalistic requirements and we're at the other end.
It's not challenging. I can do a big breakdown of anybody. Throw me a commentary if you'd like to hear that. But really, that's about it.
Again, I got, you know, I get a lot of, I wouldn't call it hate mail. People say, you never talk about specifics. You never give us buy A, B, and C. I didn't want an episode on that just because I was getting railed on it.
But it's because I look at individual emergency preparedness very, very much as a planning exercise far more than a physical goods exercise. So I hope we're a little conversation today about the different personalities that are involved in individual emergency preparedness and then how I break down the thought process for EDC, car kits, vacation ideas, that type of thing. The idea is to stimulate your thought process, to get the synapse firing, your dendrons and your axons firing and getting everything in your brain working so that you're planning and thinking through, I'm going to go on a vacation. What are the things that could go wrong?
And what is my plan for when they do go wrong? Then you get to go have an awesome, incredible, wonderful kick butt vacation with you and the people you love because you've taken the steps to think and prepare through it. So thank you very much for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head. Go over and check out our website at insidemycanoehead.ca.
I'm on Instagram at insidemycanoehead. There are links on the webpage to my corporate side, to my buy me a coffee site. If you like what you hear, buy me a coffee. Otherwise, just keep the great comments coming.
I appreciate it. If you sign up for the new letter at insidemycanoehead.ca as well, that's coming out this week. And then on top of that, if you have some detailed commentary, drop me a line at jeffatpreparednesslabs.ca and we do episodes on demand. We've had a couple of people send in some very specific requests.
I've done some research, put it together and put it out for you. So thank you very much for joining us. Take the time to think through emergency preparedness. You're a heck of a lot smarter than you probably give yourself credit for and you probably have 97% of the kit that you need to be a prepared individual already in your home.
So take care, stay safe.