Alright, welcome to season five of Inside My Canoe Head. This is the Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible, awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among a sit-back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. Alright, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside My Canoe Head. Listen, I spent the morning, early part of the morning, perusing across some YouTube channels, and a lot of that Apocatoc is getting a lot thicker.
It's almost like you can cut the air with a knife, what they're trying to portray out there in the world. And I sat back and I thought about, you know, how do we all ride the waves of a chaotic world? How do we do this? Because the nature of why I do this and the nature of this podcast is about learning to just wrap your life in a blanket of preparedness, but you still want to conquer your dreams.
You want to chase and live an awesome, incredible life in an urban, suburban environment. You just would love to do that wrapped in a blanket of preparedness, right? But then you look on YouTube, or you look on your mainstream media sources, and the Apocatoc is through the world. I mean, you know, we're at the edge of global famine.
We're just one trigger away from nuclear exchange. World War III, Germany is collapsing. China is going to take Taiwan and start a massive war. You could, you would not be wrong for thinking that it's time to start digging that concrete bunker in your backyard like we did in the 1960s and 1970s.
So today I thought, you know what, this is a really good time to just sit back and say, how do we do that? Like it's not about, you know, spending $10,000 on something. So how do we navigate this chaotic world? How do you insulate your life from this amazing world?
So we're going to go over a couple of basics related to this channel. Then we're going to talk about a lot of leading thinkers in a couple key areas of finance, attitude, and gaining knowledge. And hopefully you'll know these people. If you don't, you'll reach out and look at some of their stuff.
It's fantastic. So first and foremost with any individual emergency preparedness, this channel is all about that one most important question. Who is responsible for your outcomes? And be serious, it really comes down to it.
We understand the limitations of state capacity, right? We understand that in the emergency management field, both in the educational side and the practitioner professional side and the consultancy side, it's absolutely full of a bunch of incredible people who really honestly down to the core of their soul want to help. But the limitations of the state capacity and what they can actually do is so insurmountably small related to the nature of potential problems that really you as an individual might get lucky that an emergency crew might find you or might land next to you. But the statistical odds of that are pretty darn slim.
So by accepting responsibility for your outcomes, you understand that your ability to navigate a significant disruption and come out the other side smelling like roses is up to you. It is not the state's job to take care of you. So then we talk about animalistic requirements, right? So we understand those to be five simple things, shelter, food, water, health and safety and security.
Now we've gone through those ad nauseam on this podcast. You need a place to get out of the weather. You need to eat. You need to drink potable water.
You need to have first aid skills and some basic things to take care of yourself. You need to have a bit of safety ability, which is situational awareness. You need access to great information. How do you get information on what's going on?
And how do you get information on what the state is intending to do and what they're actually executing so that you can understand all of that going on around you and then you can formulate a reaction plan for yourself and then security because it's infotizently small, statistical outlier, but every once in a while in your life, you're going to have to defend yourself against a physical threat. Now situational awareness and knowing your situation and knowing your surroundings helps you so that you limit that effect. But it gets down to the fact that you as an individual have to know how to fight. And I hope you go through life and never have to experience that.
But if you do, screaming for help or trying to dial a number on a phone is not going to be be the way out. You need to know how to fight. So that's your basic animalistic requirements. Now we set that up.
You might pick your timeline. So on this podcast and a lot of the material that I put out there in cyberspace, we talk about a timeline. So how long do you want to be prepared for? So you look at the chaotic world, you look at your hazard profile where you live, you look at how you live your life.
And I asked a simple question. This started from a question I asked in my master's thesis to employees of businesses. And it was, if I shut off all of your utilities today, where you live, how long could you survive before you have to walk out your front door and ask for help? And then the next question is how long would you like to be able to survive?
Well, first is a no BS situation to look at exactly how you're set up. And the second one is how you would like to. So I mean, you fit all those in. Do you want two weeks of food?
Do you want two months of food? There's a whole debate and I've done whole episodes on each one of these. So you make those decisions, but in a chaotic world, how do you ride the waves of that? Well, there's some great theorists out there.
And I don't want to come across as somebody who just knows everything. But the point is, is that I've read a lot of people. And so when you read a lot of people and you consume a lot of information, say in the personal finance world, you know, I don't have any certifications or education in personal finance and there are some fantastic experts out there on all kinds of platforms to give you advice. But I've read them.
I've read them all. And when you read them all, you get a general sense of the idea. You get the general intent of how the world economic system works, how the banking system works and how personal finance systems work. And the point behind getting that education is that you understand.
So today I just want to talk about three people. Dave Ramsey is a great voice in the area. And Dave Ramsey gets down to the brass tacks of him. It's the same as us as you know, except personal responsibility.
Dave Ramsey's big thing is the emergency fund, right? So I talk about emergency fund a bit on my podcast and some of my writings and blogs that are out there that you can find at preparedness labs.ca or I put them up on LinkedIn. Dave Ramsey talks about having a thousand, he begins with $1,000. So basically that theory has always been built around.
Look at every major appliance in your house and what if it failed today? Do you have the cash, not the credit, but the cash to replace it? Look at where your family members live around the world. If there was an immediate crisis and you needed to jump on a plane to get there tomorrow, what does that cost?
And do you have that cash sitting behind? So while his $1,000 is a great starting point, the idea of an emergency fund has always been to be able to pay for what is likely to be your emergency right now without question, execute what you need to do and then reconstitute and rebuild the plant. So $1,000 is great. I live in a townhouse.
My furnace is $6,000 to $8,000 to replace. $1,000 is not going to help me. But my furnace maintenance company offers a plan. So I'll be fine there.
I can pay for it at $200 and some dollars a month for four years and pay off it. So I'm not concerned about that. I've got an emergency fund big enough to cover. The idea being is that your emergency fund is your preparedness secret weapon against financial strikes, right?
So we talk about Tony Robbins and he talks about in Tony Robbins investment books and there's several that go right down into the very nitty gritty details. But I think his best for consumption is called unshakeable. And unshakeable basically says that he talks about the fraud in the investment community that mutual funds or anybody who pretends to be an investor is basically stealing your money. So he's an investment capital place, not wealth management.
And I'll talk about that in a minute. If you're a wealth management person, we'll step that aside. If we're talking about somebody who's attempting to give you guidance on what to invest your money in, they can't beat the stock market average over 20 years. So the end result of Tony Robbins says, use the vehicles that are available.
So here in Canada where I live, we have something called a tax-free savings account. You can put $6,000 a year. So $500 a month, you put it into a tax-free savings account. It's the best vehicle for your retirement.
You max it out, $6,000. You put it in abroad in ETF. So an exchange-traded fund with almost zero management expense ratio, which means you're not paying to do this activity. You're paying an exceptionally low .03 or something ridiculous like that of a percentage to cover the cost of running the fund.
And basically you invest in the stock market and the bond market. And then you go have yourself a great life. Because over the 20, 30, 40 years that this, your TFSA is going to grow and create that retirement fund for you. It's going to crash.
It's going to be bull. It's going to be a bear market. And no, there are four human beings. And Tony Robbins writes this in his book, and he identifies them.
There are four human beings that over a 20-year period have beaten the stock market. And they are fund managers. Each one of them needs a minimum of $100 million in cash to invest in them. And one of them requires over a billion.
So people have, and there's only four of them, and your investment manager is not one of them. So that's Tony Robbins idea. Take a simplistic approach. Take the vehicle, the most appropriate that's allowed by the government in your country.
Because the cheat code with the TFSA in Canada is fantastic because you max it out, right? And so when you retire, it's already taxed money, which means there's no tax and taking it and all the profits, the dividend income, all that stuff comes out when you retire. And so you don't have an income. So according to the government of Canada, you're dirt poor.
So not only do you get guaranteed income supplements and old age security and all these extra benefits, because you're a poor shot in senior, you get the provincial benefits, you get entitlement to all these benefits. Because according to the government, you have no income because that money is already taxed and you're just accessing your resources. There's another great guy, if you're like me, and you started an independent business and you're trying to see what you can do with it, a great book called Company of One by Paul Jarvis. And it's about starting a business and being your own boss, but only keeping that business to the level where you can manage it.
He talks about what you get to that point where you have something called an MVI, a minimum viable income in your business. And so that's what you determine your business needs to return to you to make this entire effort worth. Of course, it's got to cover its costs, but it's cost plus whatever that income you deserve is the minimum to make off of it. And he talks a great story about an accountant that lives in, and this guy lives in Tofino BC, and he loves to surf, right?
Surfing is his passion. So he has an accounting business that's just big enough. He can manage it, no staff required, right? He could earn three to four to five times the amount of money if he went down to Vancouver and worked in an accounting firm or opened his own accounting firm and hired a bunch of people.
But the guy wants to surf 20 hours a week in Tofino. So he created an accounting firm with a bunch of clients that he takes wonderful care of, and they provide him enough income to pay his life costs and allow him to enjoy 20 hours a week of surfing in Tofino. So Paul Darvish's book is just all about that, how to set up a business, how to make it and grow it just to the point where you're able to manage it. You don't need to hire anybody and you can take care of all of your clients.
Fantastic book. If you follow those three, if you have the emergency fund, you invest enough to take care of your retirement whenever that day comes, and you chase your dreams and you run a business that provides you enough income to do what you want to do. I mean Dave Ramsey, Tony Robbins and Paul Jarvis, they give you great, fantastic information on exactly how to run a financial life that will give you everything you need and you require no other human beings to tell you what to do. And as you know, as Mr.
Wonderful says, a salary is the drug they give you so you can forget about your dreams. Be your own boss. There's nothing in the world better than it. A lot, what most entrepreneurs do is they end up working at Starbys or something like that for a couple of years until they get off the ground.
Go chase your dreams. So when we look at attitude, I'm a big stoic eye. You've heard it a hundred times on this podcast. Talk about Ryan Holiday.
And I've got his book right in front of me here with it. He wrote with Stephen Hasselman, The Daily Stoic. Now he's got podcasts. He's got everything else.
But it's like my daily read. I come down to my desk in the morning. I have my little journal that I jot a few things down about life, the universe and everything. And then I open my daily stoic and I read today's page and it just talks to you a bit about the stoic philosophy of the world.
And I like it because it's not religious doctrine. There's nothing wrong with religion, but this is not religious doctrine. It's about understanding that you're in the dichotomy of control. There are things that you can control and there are things that you can't.
So you spend your entire life worrying and fretting about things that you can control and just are more fotty, which means you accept fate. Everything outside of your control, whatever happens in the war in Ukraine, in Taiwan, in Germany's economy, et cetera, I have no influence over it and I will just joyfully and happily accept whatever happens and there's nothing I can do about it. So it causes me no consternation. It causes me no emotional difficulty because I cannot control it.
Fantastic book. And then you start looking about knowledge. And I'll just give you a couple of quick places that I found exceptional knowledge. Number one, if you're looking for great in-depth investigative journalism, go to Substack.
Now Substack has a lot of writers on it. Now trust me, it's like Twitter. It has a lot of BS. You know what I mean?
So there's great Canadian writers like Paul Wells. Michael Schellenberger is a great, he wrote a book, Apocalypse Never on the Truth About the Climate Crisis. He tried to run for a governor who didn't quite make the cut in California, but he's got great Substack. And these people on Substack, I subscribed to the line with Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney in Canada here.
And so you get great investigative journalism, the kind that we used to count on at mainstream media that largely doesn't exist anymore. So you go to Substack, sometimes just stumble across these guys in Twitter and then you'll find their Substack. It's a detailed investigative journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi in the US.
There's the Breaking Points, which is the podcast and YouTube channel that I follow and pay for, subscribe to in the US to get great stuff. Peter Zion is a geopolitics that I follow and I read all his books. I'm actually getting through his last book now, The End of the World Just the Beginning, The Collapse of Globalism. And so there's some great authors out there who talk about the world in something longer than 30 second snippets.
And the reason I like Peter Zion is not just because he's the only one that says China will collapse by 2030. But everything he says he backs up with the basic evidence in geopolitics. So location, geography, demographics, energy and resources. So if he says China's going to collapse by 2030, he'll show you why the population is going to collapse.
He'll show you why their energy needs are going down. He'll show you why their export resources are problems, et cetera. He'll just not pontificate about the world. He'll give you the evidence.
Fantastic read. And then a couple of theorists I'll end off with. John Rawls wrote the theory of justice. He used to have dinner with Bill Clinton at the White House because of his theory.
The theory of justice, the most famous thing out of the book, and it's a really deep, deep read, is something called the veil of ignorance. And we look at society's different socioeconomic classes that we have now. And the veil of ignorance talks about how would you or any man or any woman design a world to live in when you didn't know beforehand what role you would fulfill. So right now in society, we have in North America, we have people who are poor.
We have people at the very low end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And we have people all along that spectrum, all the way up to the top. Access to resources, healthcare and all these other things, police, fire, all that stuff is not equal. We have a very unequal society, right?
John Rawls offers it to you. How would you design society if you did not know which role you filled? And so it's just an idea through the veil of ignorance, how we would look at the world, how we would like to ensure that those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum had access to everything they needed because I might be that person, right? It's just a different way of looking at it.
It's a great theorist, fantastic read and very, very deep read. And the last one is, and I've listened to this guy's material for decades, is Robert Putnam. He's a professor at Dr. Robert Putnam as a professor at Harvard.
And he wrote a book many, many decades ago, and it's just been re-released in 2002, I think. It's called Bowling Alone. And it's the reduction in American social capital. And it's the reduction in the study over time, a longitudinal study of how we are withdrawing to individualism from community structures.
He used to measure the strength of communities. And he studied this for the longest time in detail. And he found out it was really neat that who knew that the key to understanding the strength of social capital, the strength of social cohesion within an American city was the number of choirs. And he did it the detail study.
But his study is about, you know, people used to be a member of a number of community organizations and involved them and participated. And now they don't. And so he just studies that. So the idea behind the world preparedness and chaos and writing the ways of a chaotic world is reading about the world and gathering information and knowledge from where you do to give you a great understanding of why things are occurring.
So Ryan Holiday talks a lot about the dichotomy of control. Like I said, you can't influence what's going on, but it's also very important for you to understand why, you know, what's going on in Ukraine. You know, I've written blogs about, you know, why Putin invaded and why he had to invade now. It's actually quite explainable.
Now, I don't agree with it. Full stop. And I don't agree with war, having been to war. You never agree to war.
But if you look at the history of the Soviet Union translated to the history of Russia, where it sits right now, yeah, Putin had no choice but to invade Ukraine and he had no choice but to invade right now. But to get to that point, you need to do a lot of in-depth reading. And you know, when it comes to finances, finances are really the one and I'll reiterate this before we'll close off for the day is if you are in financial control of your future and your present, if you currently have absolute and unquestionable control over all of your lines of income, be them one or five. I suggest three to five in a family, but it be at one to five lines of income.
If you have control over that, then you have control how you navigate the world. Absolute unquestionable. Nobody can fire you if you're your own boss. If you work for somebody else and they fire you like happen to CTVs anchor Lisa LaFlom, you have a backup plan.
You already know what exactly I'm going to pivot to, what industry I'm going to pivot to. You've researched it. You know how long it's going to take you to pivot. Say it's going to take me three months to do the things I need to do to be up and running in my backup line of business.
So therefore my Dave Ramsey idea emergency fund has to actually extend out to three months. But your emergency fund there mirrors your exact plan, your preparedness plan, your pivot plan, your reaction plan fits with your financial plan. It's all properly funded. So in control, you have the ability to navigate and ride the waves of a chaotic world and take care of those for whom you're responsible and have a great time while you're doing it and thrive and enjoy a world in this suburban and urban environment because you've taken the steps to make it happen.
So hopefully today's a little chat was very much informative for you and maybe made you go home and think about one or two things in life. It's chaotic world out there. If you follow YouTube, if you follow the mainstream media, you think the world's exploding around us and everything's coming apart. So drop over to our website, www.insidemyknewhead.ca or preparednesslabs.ca.
Look at the links, follow us, give us some ideas. What I'm really looking for for the listeners, whether you're on Salt Spring Island, Bowen Island, whether you're in Calgary, Alberta, Ottawa, Ontario or Nairobi, Kenya, Tokyo, Japan or that one of the 38 countries where we're heard in, I'm really looking for ideas. We're trying to figure out where to pivot the podcast to. I've got lots of things I can continue to talk about in the preparedness world and rocking an awesome life, but we're really looking for suggestions.
So feel free to drop me a line on the website, feel free to drop me a line at Jeff at preparednesslabs.ca. Follow me on Instagram or Twitter and send me a DM, whatever it is. Love to. Take care, stay safe and enjoy.
The fall is coming the great weather and sooner or later, you're going to hear the tingles of Christmas. Alright, take care, stay safe.