All right. Welcome to Inside My Canoe Head podcast about individual emergency preparedness, policy-related issues, adventure, life, seeking the brilliance of happiness, sit back and enjoy. All right. Welcome back.
We're all here today to talk about that big existential question that we all have. Why are we doing this? Before we get into those details, I just wanted to go over a couple of things that are changing here at Inside My Canoe Head. We got a great new website.
Go over there and see it. It's insidemycanoehead.ca. It has the links to the YouTube to various other things that we're doing. It has a link to buy me a coffee, which soon will be a whole bunch of products there that you can engage into.
And as well, if you follow us on Instagram and Twitter, you've noticed that starting on Monday, preparing us number one came out, and then tip number two, and then tip number three. And today will be tip number five. What we're doing here is we've got about 340 of these tips laid out. And we're going to send them out Monday to Friday with a bit of a recap reel on the weekend to talk about.
And it's basically here is your 30-second engagement for individual emergency preparers every day of your life. If you follow, it shows up. It gives you an idea that makes you go, hmm, it gives you a little second to think. And then maybe after listening or reading this little piece that I put out sometime and there, you'll go, hey, you know what?
This may be something I want to consider. This may be something I want to think about. So it's just a way to easily engage with people without asking them to sit down and say, okay, every day or twice a week, you're going to have to sit down and listen to a 30-40-minute podcast episode. That may not be your thing and you're only periodically engaged with podcasts.
But you're all over Instagram and the 30-second bit every day might be helpful. So we're going to try that out for a little while. But we quite literally have over a year of Monday-to-Friday preparedness tips ready to go. Click on the follow button and see where we can take it.
And I wanted to touch on this topic today because, you know, April 8th is a tough day. And we want to sit back and just take every once in a while, it's important, even on the individual emergency preparedness journey, to just sit back and do a little bit of self-reflection. Like, why are we here? Why are we doing this?
What are our goals? It's kind of like that. You see in the pictures where the gentleman sits down and next to a crackling fire with his pipe and his whiskey, and he starts to contemplate the big massive questions in life. So that's the time right now that I'm going through.
On top of that, my entire family has COVID-19. I do. I'm on day three. It's not a lot of fun folks.
I've said before that I'm vaccinated, whatever. I got it. It's not a lot of fun. So, you know, having sitting up and coughing your gut set and you're saying to yourself like, why are we doing this?
Like, why is this so important? So today we're going to look at why are we doing this? Why are we trying to build a resilient, independent lifestyle through adopting the principles of individual emergency preparedness? So the number one thing that comes to mind is we're really trying to harden our exposure to exogenous shocks.
Now, exogenous shocks are just things that happen that are outside of your control that the event influences your normal daily operations. So you go to the grocery store, half the stuff you want is not there. Various different things occur in life beyond your control and they change how you do. Basically, disruptions, right?
We want disruptions to have less of an effect on the cool, awesome, wonderful things that we want to do in our life and how we want to live our life. Individual emergency preparedness for decades, if not a century has been built around going against disasters, right? We're all about dealing with earthquakes. But in the modern 21st century, we're talking about, you know, cyber disruptions.
We're talking about, you know, workplace disruptions with a very good friend of mine who's an expert epidemiologist. He said, in the end, COVID-19 is largely a workplace change event for a lot of people, not a public health, but it's a workplace change event for those people who retain their position, but had to change how they did it. So we want to really look at, you know, we really want to live this really cool, awesome, incredible life. We want to chase our dreams.
We want to live large. But these exogenous shocks that keep increasing in frequency, increasing in severity, and are affecting our lives and the people that we love around us are having more and more of an impact on our life, and we're becoming less and less comfortable with our ability to manage through those disruptions. So that's the point where we had started adopting a more individual emergency preparedness. And from that perspective, we start looking at, well, like, what can we do, but this has never been, and I'm never been.
I'm never been about selling everything you own and running off into the woods and buying a yurt and starting a garden and getting a solar panel and then just sitting back, living this type of lifestyle, waiting for the world to come to a horrible end. To me, you know, some people, that would be cool, but to me, I've got a lot of really cool things that I want to do in an urban and suburban environment surrounded by a couple of million people. And that's, you know, that's how 80% of us choose to live our lives. So how do we do that?
I mean, let's be honest, it's the old say no one ever says I wish I would have spent more time in the office as they lay on their deathbed. So it's not it can't be about the continued pursuit of higher and higher rank, higher and higher positions of more encompassing authority, bigger, more important signature blocks. I don't know how you qualify success in whatever profession you do, but there's a lot of people who tie that success to the label that's on their office or I did 28 years in the army. I mean, almost everybody that I met in the senior rank levels are always about their defining their success.
If I made it to a certain rank, I am better at what I do than those people who did not. And sure, whatever, you can believe that and you can have yourself a great day, but the sacrifices you have to make to do that are somewhat questionable. But I wrap this all in the two principles of minimalism and simplicity that underscore individual emergency preparedness and how we rock an awesome life. Now, before you run for the exits, this is not about selling things or a hundred thing challenge.
So those of you who have been around this for a long time, understand the hundred thing challenge comes from a guy by the name of David Bruno and he wrote a book called the hundred thing challenge that started my journey into looking at physical items that I owned. And it was his effort was just, could he live with just a hundred personal items in a house around his family, his family would just call him crazy and wasn't participating, but could he just live with a hundred items. So that was his toothbrush, his clothes, you know, whatever activities he did, the stuff that he needed for those activities, his computer, his pens, all the stuff, not the communal stuff, but just him. So it talks about the journey.
It's not about a number. It's always been about a journey of understanding and where my minimalism journey took me to was understanding that what do I want to do in life? Like what activities do I, like what passions do I have other than my work? For example, I love this podcast.
So I invested in a couple of things to make recording this podcast a little easier and a little better quality, right? I don't have 25 different mics and 14 books on how to podcast, right? But I have the few things that facilitate a great podcast that a lot of people are interested in. I love to golf, right?
I really do. I'm not all that good at it, but I do love to golf. So guess what I have? I have a set of golf clubs, a set of golf shoes, and I have a cart, one of those easy carts that you push with, right?
Okay. I have the end result of looking through this lens of minimalism is everything that I have serves a purpose. And you might be asking yourself, what the heck is this got to do with individual emergency preparedness? It's the same when we go through all of the processes in our 12 step program, become prepared and following your preparedness tips.
When you look at everything that you have in your house to facilitate preparedness, it has to have a purpose. It should be there to fill a hole in a plan that you designed. So you want to be able to do X. So to do X, you need one or two pieces of equipment that you don't currently own to be able to facilitate this part of your preparedness plan.
That's your justification for going out and perching it. So now you have the item sitting in your home that facilitates your ability to execute a function that's part of your plan. That's minimalism because you don't have a bleak ton of crap sitting around that you bought offline that some charlatan salesman said, by my 72 hour bag and you'll be good to go, you have everything around you. You've decided it belongs there.
You've decided the quantity that it needs to be in there. And that's all that's there. So that's the principle of minimalism within emergency preparedness is that, yeah, you may have a lot of stuff. You really might have a lot of stuff in the end, but it serves a specific purpose.
Now the principle of simplicity and I use this in my public policy analysis that I do for my research and on the preparedness labs.ca, the business side of what I do for a living. Simplicity is the root of all problems. Every difficulty facing humanity right now actually has a simple problem. And I did an episode on climate change where the solution to climate change is actually quite simple.
Now it doesn't mean it's easy and it doesn't mean it isn't difficult. It has its challenges, but it's quite simple. If you ask anybody with a motive of education, they will be able to explain to you exactly the things that we're doing that are causing the environment problems. So the solution to climate change is not the IPCC at all.
It's not a whole bunch of reports. It's to simply stop doing the things that are causing the damage, right? But nobody said that would be easy. So stop driving internal combustion cars and drive electric vehicles.
It's not hard. How we get there, we can come up with a whole bunch of public policies and I'm a policy nerd and we can go on and on forever. But for example, taxing the behavior by carbon tax to putting a price on pollution, which is a ridiculous saying, but whatever, you put a carbon tax on a behavior, but you don't prevent the behavior. All you're doing is patting yourself in the back to make it sound like you're doing something to solve the problem.
If you want to solve climate change, you stop doing the things that are causing climate change. Full stop. Next problem. They're all that simple.
Now I have had got into many debates with a lot of independent scholars who talk about the complexity, multiple disciplinary network of stakeholders. And I mean, when you hear phrases like that, you understand their purpose and raise on debt is to build an existence and to build a fight. Imagine if we, most of us that believe in the simplicity movement, got together and solve climate change on the weekend over a case of beer and issued instructions to everybody. Imagine the death of the industry that would happen.
So I'm sorry, but I have a great belief that a good portion of the climate alarmists that are out there are not actually interested in fixing the climate. They're interested in making sure that the industry they're involved in that pays them a great deal of money carries on. It's like the public service, right? Is the public service interested in finding the best possible efficiencies within delivering the services to the citizens?
Or are they, I want the most efficient level of services that I can deliver to the citizens as long as no full-time equivalents are eliminated, right? So you always got to ask that. And I debate this with people all the time who tell me that it's a very childish way to look at a problem and call it simple solutions. And I'm like, no, you're the one who wants a complex environment so you can thrive, bill, get all kinds of speaking gigs, write all kinds of papers and reports and be funded for time immemorial.
I mean, I spent a lot of time in academia and they're creating all kinds of new postgraduate diplomas, masters degrees and everything, all in different elements of climate change. Imagine if we could solve the problem tomorrow and all of that needs to go away because it's not required anymore because we've fixed it. Yeah, they're not interested in fixing it. They're interested in creating a massive industry.
So the solutions are simple to all our problems, but they're not difficult. So let's talk about a couple of things about rocking an awesome independent lifestyle or resilient independent lifestyle. What does that really mean? So we're going to talk about finances, relationships, employment and activities.
Let's get at it. All right. So the first thing is that if you want a very resilient independent lifestyle is you got to get your money in track, right? You got to get your finances with the world on fire, et cetera.
So I'm not a financial advisor. So everything that I tell you here is from personal life experience at age 52, from somebody who has made every possible, ridiculous, dumb financial mistake in history. I've made it. I've done everything wrong.
And so here I am in these lessons learned. Plus I'm the guy who's gone out and read everything. I'm not going to bore you with a list of books that I've read, but seriously, like, okay, this is just my advice to adopting minimalism and simplicity into a couple of key areas of your life that if you do, will go a long way to directly supporting your individual emergency preparedness journey. That's the point.
Number one finances. Let's go save 20% for the last 25. And that's really simple. Like you're here in four quarters.
The first quarter is zero to 20 years. You're just figuring out life 20 to 40 40 to 60. Those are working layers, having a great life, whatever 60 to 80. If you live to the average age, you're not going to work.
So say 20%. It's a real simple thing. Everybody says it. Tony Robbins said the best quote he had individual tell and clarified is like a wealth tax.
You put a wealth tax on yourself. 20% of everything that goes into your bank account goes into an investment for the day when you no longer have anything coming into your bank account. It's that's the simple idea behind it. You pay for everything with a credit card.
Absolutely everything. If they'll take your rent into credit card, you do that. You do one with rewards. The reason you use a credit card is you gain some reward points.
But listen, nobody can, everything that you put on that credit card is covered by all kinds of insurance and it's covered by all kinds of fraud, protection, etc. Your debit card has none of that. So use a credit card, pay it off the end of the month, and then go rock an awesome life. And if you want to invest in the future, but I do listen, you just buy one of those life portfolios.
I shares as a black rock RBC. Everybody has them. You buy them an investment portfolio. They have like 0.3% MER, which if you're paying anything more than that, it's idiocy because there is not a single, actually, there's five human beings alive today in the world who have beaten the stock market.
Independently each of the last 20 years. There's only five alive and none of them work at your local advisory firm and none of them work at your local bank. Okay. And those people, unless you need about $100 million to get in with them.
So the point being is this. You simply buy, like for example, Black Rock has one that says, you know, retirement such and such a year. So if I retire in 2060, I put my money in there. It automatically throughout the years will rebalance it from high risk to low risk.
As I get closer, it'll have the right mix of dividends. It'll do everything for you. You put everything in one fund. It'll diversify across all the industries for you.
It's literally idiot proof. You can't do better by picking your own stocks. You can't do better by getting a financial manager at the bank to help you. It's impossible.
The math is not on their side. So just be simple, minimalistic, and carry on with your incredible life. Relationships. There was a great award ceremony message from an older individual and it's resonated with me for years.
It is simply means surround yourself by people who eyes light up when you walk into a room. That's it. Fire everybody else. Doesn't matter if they're family members, blood family, if they're relatives, if you're married, it doesn't matter.
If people in your life don't bring joy and happiness to your life, then they must go. Even if they're your sibling and they don't bring you joy, it's time to fire them. Employment. Real simple, folks.
If you're not doing what brings you great joy, then you're wasting time because you can't get any of that back. So when you swing your legs out of bed in the morning, you better be doing something that you absolutely love and you can't wait to get after it. And if that's not true, the best thing that I heard is use the weekend to design the life you want instead of using the weekend to escape the life you have. Pretty profound.
So for activities, it's really simple. I know what I love to do and I don't do things that I don't love to do. It's a waste of my time. So because I love to golf, I have a great set of golf clubs and a cart.
Because I like the backcountry camp, I have all the equipment to facilitate the type of backcountry camping I have. So it's not about from a minimalism perspective of counting. I have too many things or too many closets full of stuff. Look at all this stuff I have.
Yeah, absolutely everything that's in my house for me has a very specific purpose. And you know, all winter long, my golf gear doesn't get used. That doesn't mean I'm going to get rid of it because I know very shortly coming up, I'm going to be playing wack. You know what?
On the golf course. So make sure everything that you have serves a purpose and serves an activity that you love to do. Now, imagine if you had a life where you did what you loved, you're only surrounded by people who bring you joy. Your finances are rock solid and you have a 20% wealth tax that's saving for the future.
And all of the activities you're doing is what you love. Now, if you built that simplistic but also profound and important foundation, now when we're talking about individual emergency preparedness and all of the things and the threats and the hazards you're exposed to. And we get into detailed planning for how we do that. You have a very well rounded foundational base so you understand who you are and how you fit in this world.
For me, it worked. It took a long time. I bounced through a lot of junk, but I ended up with those four things. Finances, relationships, employment and activities, everything else was highly irrelevant and maybe I'll spend some time on it, but highly likely no.
It's like David Kewen said in the book, essentialism. If you ask me to do something and it's not an enthusiastic, absolutely let's do it 90% then the answer to you is going to be no. Even if you're a family member, even if you're a friend, if I'm not a hundred, ninety percent, at least ninety percent committed to doing this and I can't wait to get at it, but I'm not doing it because I don't have the time. So take care of yourself.
Thanks for joining us this week. A little short, but fighting the vid. And so hopefully in my Mondays episode, we will have this solved and be up and running. So take care of yourself and join your great weekend.
Drop over to our website insidemycanoohead.ca. Give me a bit of feedback. I got some links to stuff that we're doing there. It's only getting better from here.
Thanks for your support. Take care. If you got a suggestion for an episode, drop it on the website or send me an email at Jeff at preparednesslab.ca or DM me over on Instagram and inside my canoe head. Take care.
Stay safe and join us for the April 28, 1900 Eastern Time live stream on Instagram. Take care.