All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a today's 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 start of season four of Inside My Canoe Head. Listen, who thought that this little pandemic project started on the 28th of April, 2020, would turn into this booming four-season podcast?
Thank you very much for taking the time to join us here on Inside My Canoe Head. Today, we're going to talk about networks, that group of people who make a huge difference in your life, but we're going to look at them from the perspective of emergency. Emergency preparedness, and how that network is probably your most valuable resource when the shizzy hits the fizzy. So thanks again for taking the time to join us.
I want to start off first by saying this season is going to be all about people. We're going to talk to as many people as we can. We're going to get far more guests on here. We're going to talk about your friends, your networks, all the things that make you tick, instead of just talking about gear and other types of things that are helpful.
As must as that will be, at this point, we need to really take it and zero in what we already have, because any type of podcast now that is calling, or emergency preparedness voice, it's calling for you to go out and buy a whole bunch of crap and everything, misses the fact that we are in a printed money-induced inflation in this country and around the world. We're dealing with an incredible level of food scarcity that is going to hit us in the next 18 months. This is a chaotic world. The 2020s are probably going to be exceptionally disruptive in comparison to the previous decade.
So very, very more importantly, for you to become self-reliant. So we're going to start off with last week's episode. I've got a lot of weird question mark comments on that, and I completely understand. What I didn't tell last week is that, or maybe I did, I don't perfectly recall, is that last week, my entire tribe here inside my canoe head was under a COVID infection.
And that is a pretty wild ride. Now, let me be frank. I have had lots of flus that were worse than this. I've never had a flu like this.
As Matt Gurney said on the line on his weekly dispatch video that, hey, listen, you just woke up and you knew you had something completely different. That this is not like any other flu, not in the sense that it's going to be worse, but it just messes with your sense of smell and your sense of taste. I'm sitting there, racked out, can barely move on the couch, and I'm smelling tobacco smoke. Nobody in my family smokes.
Nobody in my family has smoked for years. And nobody around me in my townhouse development smokes. Yet I'm sitting there, and I'm getting the waft of tobacco smoke, and I don't know why. Or I'm tasting raw metal, but I don't have anything metallic.
I haven't taken any medication, but I have this taste of raw metal in your mouth. It's just crazily weird, this COVID-19. And so that podcast was a little all over the place, and it was a little disjointed, and in some parts it didn't make much sense. So I thought about it for a second and said, hey, listen, maybe I should take this episode down, re-record it or something.
And then I realized, you know what? This is life. It's like what Gary Vee says. You record it, you put it out there, and you move on.
It's a bit all over the map, and that's perfectly fine because that's kind of what life looks like when you're under COVID-19 infection. So we're going to leave that sucker up there. I appreciate your ongoing commentary on it. It's just a life event.
So today we're talking about networks. I have long said on this podcast that the number one thing you can do in individual emergency preparedness, beyond accepting your responsibility for it and coming out and saying, you know, the most important question in individual emergency preparedness is who is responsible for your outcomes, and you accept that responsibility because we know the governments, as much as they will try and are well-intentioned, they're simply not going to come to rescue you. But beyond that, the most important thing that you can actually do, far more important than buying food, water, stockpiling 15 items, all the other junk that you see on YouTube, the most important thing that you can do is meet human beings and build a network. Where I grew up, and I'm sure most of you grew up, I'm 51 years old.
I knew everybody on my street. Everybody on my street knew me. I called Mr. and Mrs.
So-and-so. They knew who I was. And if I messed up as a kid, they were free to call my parents, and my mother was very appreciative that they informed her of my inappropriate behavior, as we say. In emergency situations, everybody could either come out and break up a fight or intervene in something.
We all cared about each other. We were a member of a family as dyslexic and as disjointed as that might have been. We had this sense of community on the street you grew up on. I will argue now that the majority of people listening to this podcast who live in urban and suburban environments probably don't know all their neighbors, probably don't know what they do for a living, probably don't know their hobbies, probably don't know things about them.
Because, number one, it's just not about you meeting the individuals that are immediately around you. It's understanding their networks and how they're connected. So your neighbor may be an electrician, which means, fantastic, you have access to his electrical skills and his tools by befriending him, and he has the same to your set of services. But the fact that you've met him, you now know you have access to an electrician.
So, no, he's not going to come over to your house and he's going to constantly fix things for free. The point being is if you've got a question about electricity, you have somebody who's qualified to answer it and to give you a bit of guidance and pointers. And then when the power goes out because of a significant event and it's down for a couple of days and you're worried about your solar generator, etc., may not be gaining the number of amps that you're looking for, you turn around and you realize you've got a resource next door that can probably help you to ensure your wiring is correct and something along that lines. Now, this is the nature of having human capital.
Now, it's also referred to as social capital. Human capital is referred to in the general social sciences as your education. So whatever education you've gone and done, whatever skill sets you've built over the period of your life, that's your human capital. It's what you have to offer the remainder of the people around you.
Your social capital is a measure of those bonds that you have. Now, there are three types of social capital. We're going to deal with the first two today. Number one is your bonding social capital.
Those are your really tight ties. We always joke about, you know, who are you going to call at 3 o'clock in the morning when the shizzy ends are fizzy and something really bad happens to you? You've got that list. It's probably pretty short.
You've got some very, very close family members, depending on your cultural background, how you raise that connection with your media family may be strong or weak. But you have a very, very tight, small group of people who you're quite happy to lay out your life's feelings with, and you know you can count on them, and you have access to their resources, right? Now, that's bonding social capital. That's a great idea.
You know all of that. You have resources. It's your best toolkit in emergency management. In life in general, it's your best toolkit, but in emergency management because you have access to all of those people and the resources they may have.
Now, when you think about networks, you realize that those people who are close to you, they're not only connected to you, they're connected to a series of other people in other activities through work or their own social pleasure activities. And so they have a network of people that they're connected to. So if you think about a hub and spoke, you put yourself at the center of a wheel. Each spoke that goes out is a really tight bond.
At the end of that spoke is the other person who you have a tight bond with. That person is also the center of their own wheel. So you start overlaying all of these different wheels of networks, and you start to see the connection that you actually have to a whole series of other human beings through the connections, those immediate social connections. And those people who act as bridges to other networks are called bridging social capital.
So between bonding and bridging social capital, if you were to sit down and take the time and map it out, which is what I do theoretically and on my business side, when I map this out for organizations, you start to see that there is a plethora or a myriad of people with an exceptional set of skill sets and knowledge that you actually have access to that you probably haven't tapped. So when you think about that and you have this network of people, you start to realize the power of the human relationship, far more influential than a stockpile of food or water. And when things go down, if you look at survival groups, and I know this isn't a survival podcast, but I think survival groups are really, really important to look at. They come together.
They share who they are. They share strengths and weaknesses. Leaders will emerge from people who are used to being leaders in tough and chaotic situations. People have certain skill sets.
They start relying on each other. I start taking over responsibility for a certain set of tasks because I have an expertise in that. And the group thrives. If you go back, so pre-industrial revolution, so say 1850 and before, most of human existence on this planet was all about survival.
And humans lived in tribes of about 150 people. It generally didn't get above that because that becomes difficult to self-police and self-regulate. But within the tribe of 150 people, think about those old English villages you see in the movies. You had your blacksmith.
You had your carpenter. You had a whole bunch of different specialties. Now, the carpenter didn't sell anything to anybody, but they traded and bartered skills. So I got all, you know, if I was the carpenter, I traded my chairs and everything else that I would build for other services from other people.
But everybody had their network, so that worked together. So humans are gregarious, right? Now, all you have to do is look at The Alone Show, which is my favorite survival show ever, on the History Channel. And it takes really, really well-trained and experienced survival experts, and it puts them out into the bush with 10 items from a list they get to choose.
And you're there. And, you know, when you give up, you call on the sat phone and say, come get me. And some of them make it 70, 75 days alone in the wilderness. But what takes down every one of them?
Every single one of them, bar a few unfortunate injuries that happen largely from being tired and doing inappropriate things, what brings them down? What brings them down is their mental health, their lack of connection with other humans. They miss their family. They miss their close social bonds.
That bonding social capital is so important for us as humans, it takes down the best survival experts in their environment doing what they are most and best trained to do. That's just a measurement of the power of human networks. So if you think about looking on your street, I live in a townhouse development in Canada's capital city, right? My wife refers to it as Burger Row.
When we go down, every damn house looks exactly the freaking same. And there's hundreds of families on the street. I know about four. So obviously you realize that that's probably an issue if I want to build my relationship.
So we're in the process here of getting to know my neighbors by name, family, their interests, their cultural backgrounds. There's a plethora of culturals and religions on my street, which is fantastic because you get exposure to so much of a rich life for knowing all of these people. You get to know them. You understand.
You wave at them. You smile. You go help them to clear out their driveways and the snow. You do all these different things, and you build a social network.
Now, you're doing this as a good human being, not building a social network as a side thing. But your idea here is you're building those connections. That network is so incredibly important because when the power goes down for a significant period of time and you have a strong relationship, people are going to text each other or they're going to come outside their house on a warm summer day wondering why the power's out. You're going to start chatting up with the neighbors in the street.
These are all relationships that you've built before. When you're on day five of the power outage that is expected to go for another 15 days, for example, you now have a group of people where you can start talking through issues. You start talking through management. Somebody's got a freezer full of $400 worth of beef, but they don't have a generator.
You've got a lithium solar generator that you can loan to them for a couple hours a day to keep them from losing it. Listen, that is fantastic. And, oh, by the way, what you didn't realize is they have an ability in a certain area that is greatly going to help you out. For example, one of them may be a nurse, and then you have medical knowledge that can help you through significant injuries or things that happen that society needs help with.
Anyhow, you can see how those networks work. I don't want to belabor the point, but I understand the power of human networks. The idea here is to take a second and to map that network. What does it look like to you?
What does your social network look like, and what type of resources and skill sets do they have? You might have forgotten that so-and-so's best friend is a plumber. You just might have forgotten that or something. If you take the time to write down and identify the people in your networks and the connections that they have that you are aware of, then you can learn a great deal.
The second part of network is what I call network community analysis, and this is where you go out and understand the community groups that are existing in your society and in your area. So you may have a gardening group. You may have a community association. You may have a local sports team that needs fundraising.
You may have a number of these community groups that operate in your area, of which up until now, you were probably blissfully unaware, and there's probably a group that you might be interested in joining, and even if you don't join, it doesn't hurt to just click on their membership and get access to their emails and their weekly newsletters and that type of thing, and you start to gain more and more situational awareness about the community in which you live, and you start to gain greater knowledge about what is going on around you, who the people are around you, and you start to see from that, you start to build this knowledge base. You're connected with some, you're aware of all. Just think of it that way. You're connected with some, and you're aware of all, and you start to build this knowledge and skill set database around you that is exceptionally helpful in an emergency.
So the end purpose of all of this network gathering is, like I said, it's all about having that group of people. It's a service that I offer on my corporate side that we do for municipalities and interested community groups to work to build this network around them and help them understand the world as it exists where they do, and where this is really, really applicable is if you happen to live in a high rise or what we refer to as high density housing. So you live in a very, very compressed urban area where there's a lot of people in a very small period or a very small place. You start to see where it's very difficult.
You live in an apartment building, and there's 150 other apartments. Of course, you're not going to know everybody, but you start to build networks. You start to understand who people are. You see people in their different work uniforms, et cetera.
It's more and more important because you have more of an influence on individuals, and I'll tell you one fine example. There was one individual who was concerned about individual emergency preparedness, didn't quite understand a lot about how to go about doing this, so they simply put up a notice on the bulletin board by the mailboxes in the apartment building and said, hi, I'm so-and-so. So they didn't even identify what apartment they live in. They wanted to keep security.
You know, hi, I'm Sarah, and this pandemic has caused a bit of concern. I'm interested in just being a little bit more prepared for emergencies, people who are interested in that type of thing. I've booked the common room for Friday at 4 o'clock or something like that. Please drop by, and maybe we can learn from each other.
Or they started an online Zoom meeting. Here, click, send me an email at this, you know, anonymous email address, and I'll give you a link to the Zoom meeting, and we can all jump in and talk about it. Or something like that where they started to try to find people who were interested in what they were, but they did so from an OPSEC perspective where they did their best to protect their identity. So that's very helpful in expanding your network and finding like-minded people who think like you and would like to be interested in the things you're interested in.
And, again, it's building another social network. So thank you very much. That's a short little first introductory episode to Season 4 of Inside My Canoe Head. This season, like I said, we're going to get more guests on and less of me yammering and more guests.
I had a bunch of invitations out. Unfortunately, every single one of them came up with an excuse while not to come on. I mean, that happened. So we're going to keep working on some guests.
I've got some people lined up, some great ideas. This season is going to be about giving you the tools because we're getting into more of a disruptive... world so we're going to see more shocks at the grocery store shocks and inflationary prices so how do we continue to navigate this podcast is all about navigating normal life right just be doing it from a perspective of more self-reliance so if you're interested in that go over and visit our new website at inside my canoehead.ca on that website is not only a link to this podcast there's a link to my youtube channel which again i've said a hundred times over if covid haven't hit there's a couple of videos that are coming up and in the making and we here at inside my canoehead had put together a social media engagement strategy that was designed to get more and more pits more and more people interested in individual emergency preparedness through inside my canoehead and we launched it and it's what we call the daily preparedness tip so monday to friday we put out a preparedness tip number whatever and we put it out on twitter buy me a coffee and we put it out on instagram now the idea behind that is it just gives you a daily little 15 second thought provoker about something important in preparedness every saturday a newsletter comes out which you can sign up for on inside my canoehead.ca and it kind of wraps up and talks more in depth about what these weeks of preparedness tips talked about it gives you a leading what we're coming out with the following week at inside my canoehead and where it's going it happened just as covid hit so we got the tips out it was a herculean event to do that uh when your entire uh team your entire tribe is down with uh various stages and various severities of covid 19 but we got that out in the coming weeks that's going to start expanding to daily reels and daily shorts on instagram and youtube um that may be a week or two behind because we're behind a bit schedule because of covid but welcome to the real world so anyhow this is what we're doing here at inside my canoehead it's all free of charge it will always be free of charge the point and the intent is to give back as best we can to help people become more self-reliant in this crazy crazy world so keep reaching out to me at jeff at preparedness labs.ca sign up for the newsletter keep giving your ideas for thought-provoking podcast episodes and thanks again stay safe and take care you