All right. Welcome to season five of Inside Mike, a new head. This is a Canadian podcast. It'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 us.
Sit back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. Season five, who would have thought that? Here you are. Thanks for coming back and joining us this week on Inside Mike, a new head.
Listen, it's season five. We have got 115 episodes downrange. We have recently crossed 4,000 downloads in 38 countries. I can't say enough how appreciative I am of all those people who have not only downloaded the episodes, but continue to engage through all of our social media platforms on Twitter, on Instagram.
We're now having fun on TikTok. I've got a YouTube channel, all some version of Inside Mike, a new head. And everybody keeps providing great insight into the world. So what we're trying to do here in season five is bring it to a more holistic view of you as a human being.
I think the first four seasons have talked specifically about a lot of things about individual emergency preparedness, which is great. That's a frame for this podcast. But I think there's a lot of great ideas about how to navigate disruptions in the world, how to best situate yourself. So as the world gives you a left hook or a right cross, you can carry on with an awesome incredible life.
So this season, we're focusing more on real world applications of preparedness. But first and foremost, I wanted to start with reiterating the basic focus and fundamental ethos of what I do. It's about simplification. Now, we live in a world where everything is so incredibly complex, or we're told so that there's so many integrating factors and stakeholder analysis.
I mean, they can go on and on with these buzzwords that you hear. And you'll get a parade of people on news channels to talk about, you know, wow, it is such a difficult problem. We've got experts from around the world. We're going to get eight people on here to get their five minutes of fame.
And we're going to try to solve or address these incredibly complex and difficult problems. But in reality, they're not. They're simply not. I can sit here with you and take apart every significant thing that we're facing as a human species, right down to your choice for breakfast.
And it's actually simple. Simplification is of the process of demystifying the complexity presented by a problem into its constituent parts, and then asking simple questions to solve it. It's how you take what seems like an insurmountable obstacle in front of you and turn it into a simple set of basic questions to answer. And then you're done.
So today on simplification, we want to talk about the basic for it in stoicism. Now, I talk a lot about stoicism on this podcast. I'm a huge fan of Ryan Halliday or holiday, and all of his books and his simple podcast on the daily stoic. I think it's fabulous.
I watch his YouTube channel. I've described everything. I've bought all his books. And it's basically the simplicity of stoicism is the dichotomy of control, which means everything that happens in this world falls into two generic categories, things that you control and things that you cannot.
It's really that simple. There's no requirement to attempt to make it more complex than that. Can you control the situation that you are faced with? The answer is no, then just Amor Fatih is one of the sayings and stoic phrases that's used, and it means you will joyfully accept the fate that is presented to you.
So all of these things that are beyond your control will produce outcomes that are beyond your control. And you will gleefully and joyfully accept them, not because they bring happiness, but because there's nothing you can do to influence or change it. And then there are the other things, the things that are within your control, things you can change, that you have the power to change and that you can make a decision. And stoicism says they fall into one of those two things.
You spend zero time worrying about the outcomes of things for which you cannot control. And Amor Fatih, you just accept whatever is the outcome. It is what it is, because you can't do anything about it. And then you spend all of your time that you wish to spend worrying about the things that are within your control.
So it really is that simple and everything that you face falls into that. Now, why does complexity need to exist? So in our modern society, complexity needs to exist for a couple of hilarious reasons. Number one is governance frameworks.
Imagine if governing people was simple, you wouldn't need several hundred thousand public servants. So governance frameworks are created and expanded on a regular basis to ensure that whatever question is faced needs the input of a myriad of number of individuals, number of studies, massive briefing notes, different levels of committee, coordination and control, a whole bunch of nature influence. In essence, we've taken a lot of simple problems in our society and we've created massive government frameworks, governance frameworks that are there to attempt to solve the problem. So basically, we're conducting activities at a far higher cost than needs to be.
And then you can look at stakeholder engagement, right? So you hear about this a lot when the government's trying to solve issues or trying to address things. They want to have stakeholder engagement. So they hire massive external public relations firms and public firms like Deloitte and KPMG to have massive contracts to deliver reports about things after doing consultation and studying.
In essence, it basically is a way of ensuring self-fulfilling prophecy of I shall exist. And listen, I commented from 28 years in public service. I worked at 11 of those years were in either operational or strategic headquarters in government working with several different government departments. And I know they took a simple question and made it in order to complex involved hundreds of public servants when it really only took two people in a cup of coffee to come to a decision.
However, bureaucracy is a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? So we have these massive bureaucracy and I say it because right now, I live in the province of Ontario and Canada and our healthcare system is coming to near collapse. And it's not just the effect of the pandemic though that's contributing. Healthcare is not complex.
Modern day healthcare is not complex. Now I say that and people will realize it's not, it's not at all. Listen, healthcare has three basic tenets. You have primary care, which is you and your primary care physician keeping you as healthy as possible.
You have public healthcare, which is all about keeping path and degenerate control within society and keeping people safe at work. The next one is acute. That's your hospital. So when there is a requirement for an acute medical intervention into a human's lives, we have something called a hospital to execute that.
That's really healthcare in a nutshell. That's it. Now we can make it as complex as you want or we can make it as simple as you want. It really is not a complex issue.
But if you look at the bureaucracy that backs up modern day healthcare and you look at the administrative and financial tens of thousands of public servants that work in that sector that are absolutely not required whatsoever to execute the function, I mean, this is not different from the episode that we did a couple of seasons ago on climate change. So I basically said, hey, listen, climate change solution is simple. Here are the four things that are here are the four sectors of the economy or society that have the leading contributor CO2 gases to the environment. Here is a simple strategy and plan over the next 10 years to dramatically eliminate reduce if not eliminate those emissions, full stop, done, walk away.
And what do we have right now? The only thing climate change activism has done in this country of Canada where I live is create massive, massive bureaucracy where absolutely nothing has been accomplished. Our emissions as a country have continually gone up and we are nowhere even close to meeting any predictions of emission reductions, let alone net zero 2050. Net zero 2050 in Canada, the whole strategy relies on technologies that are not even invented yet.
Right? But what we have is we have created a massive bureaucracy and academic plethora of human beings who are consuming hundreds of millions of dollars studying something for which they have zero effectiveness, right? They're defeating the whole idea of simplification. So this is what we're trying to talk about from a big picture.
But when we bring that down to you, right, we bring it down to you as a human being individual rocking an incredible life, right? You have to make decisions. If you've never heard of something called the counterfactual. So in research, the counterfactual is what would have happened if a different decision had been making?
So that's creating a counterfactual universe. So basically the hypothetical, right? You come to a decision point in life, do I take another masters or do I take my PhD? I chose to go on to do a PhD and I'm just about finished it.
The counterfactual would have been, hey, if I'd done the masters, I would have completed that in two years and gone on to something even better. I have no idea what would have happened with that counterfactual. I can't assume that I didn't run into problems and you're one and fail out of that masters in a heartbeat. So worrying about what could have been, worrying about what could have been an alternate outcome is called a counterfactual.
And it's not supported by any science. There is no way, shape, or form of attempting to ascertain what would happen. That's completely different from forecasting, because you're talking about something that never happened. And you have no idea what would have happened had you taken that road.
So the point being is you have to make a decision based upon whatever you're facing and simplification tells that we just go forward. So it's the art of taking every struggle you're facing within life and bringing it down to a couple of set of simple questions, answering the questions, making the decisions and carrying forward. And so Jordan Peterson says the same way, if you're a young individual and you have no idea what you want to do with your life, make a decision, choose your first career, not your life's career. And then if you get halfway down that road and decide to stop and do something different, well, you're halfway down a road ahead of where you used to be, because you made a decision.
And that's the idea of simplification. And why we're opening season five with this is because it's going to frame everything. So if you want to solve fitness, right, if you follow me on Instagram and TikTok, you realize I've started a new fitness journey because I'm fat, right? I'm not slightly overweight, I'm not getting up at no, I'm fat, I ate way too many calories and didn't burn them off.
And I added about 50 pounds of extra weight to my frame, then should be there based upon my height and my body size, right? So I've got to get rid of that 50 pounds, it's fat, right? I can come up with a whole bunch of blah, blah, blah, you're just overweight, you're beautiful the way you are. No, I'm fat.
Okay, so I need to get rid of this. So how do I do that? It's really, really simple, right? So I have a simple plan, follow me on Instagram, social media to deal with that.
But I realize that it's not a complex issue. Weight loss is not a complex integrated multi-stakeholder, multi-faceted, myriad of plethora of input kind of thing of bureaucracy. It's not, you have to expand more calories than you take in full stop. When your body starts burning and burning those extra calories, each pound of fat is 3,500 calories.
Bam, multiply that 50, that's the calorie differential I have to have over time to get rid of it done full stop. It's not hard, how you do it many different ways, but the answer is simple. So as we go forward for the rest of the season, we're going to be dealing with a lot of really cool issues related to life, rocking an incredible life, chasing adventure, a bunch of individual emergency preparedness stuff and scenario type planning. But what we're going to base it upon is the fact that your needs are very, very simple.
So we've talked about it before on the podcast about your animalistic needs, your shelter, your food, your water, your health, safety and security. We talked about your social capital and your relationship building, the need for you to have a good group of people you trust and hang out with and talk through. It's great for your physical and mental health. And then you need to contribute to society and that can be through some type of employment, through some type of volunteering.
Most people do it through an employment. You know, I do something for a living that makes society a better place. I earn enough money to pay for my basic requirement and needs. And through all of that, and that's your, that helps you develop as a human being.
I mean, it's really not complex. When we think about it, you could share a bachelor apartment with three other people. You could eat beans and rice and a little bit of sauce to spice. You could live in used clothing that you buy at the used clothing store and you could work 20 hours a week minimum wage and lead an incredible, awesome, wonderful life, be in a wonderful human being and pursue all your passions and dreams.
Or you could be totally stretched out in a single family home. And 8.1% inflation is not, is not allowing you to meet your bills. You are struggling and you are incredibly stressed, right? These are the times that we're in right now, which makes it so much more important for us to address a whole bunch of really cool upcoming topics.
But just remember, life is simple, right? We have basic, simple needs. It's not complex. When we face with decisions to solve problems, they're actually really simple questions to answer.
They may be difficult to implement. Please don't misunderstand me. When I say to solve transition, when you want to solve the emissions problem in the transportation sector, it's to transition to electric vehicles. That's a simple done, let's walk away.
Now, first you have to build the grid, then you have to build the infrastructure, then you have to build the supporting technology, then you have to make sure little kids in Africa aren't digging out the minerals, rare earth minerals with their bare hands. There's a whole bunch of things that you have to do, but the decision is very simple. We take it, we accept it, we move on. Done.
Next question. Life is not more difficult than that. And we're going to use that frame to tackle everything about your life and individual emergency preparedness. So we appreciate your time in this short episode this week.
Drop over and visit us at www.insidemyknewhead.ca. We're going to have a couple of blogs coming out as we bring in season five, we're adding a few things to the mix. We're starting to kick the box kicking off. We're going to do some more YouTube videos.
We're starting a dual blog thought process. So addressing the bigger problems in life, we're going to come out in a couple of blogs. One is going to come out off of our parent company, Preparedness Labs Incorporated, and the other one's going to come off inside MyKnewhead.ca. So sign up for the newsletter on InsideMyKnewhead.ca.
The blogs get posted on my LinkedIn profile and on those two websites. So come back and visit us regularly. If you're on the newsletter, we summarize that every Saturday with a list of things that are coming, things that have happened, big thinkers, and where we're going this week on InsideMyKnewhead. It's a great journey.
Follow us along. We're having a great deal of fun. Drop over to the BuyMeAcoffee website. There's a bunch of new products coming.
That's where you're going to find our book release that we're proud is should come out at the end of August. It may be the end of September, but basically we're going to have a Fast and Frugal book there that's going to be available for purchase on BuyMeAcoffee or on your Kobo Reader. So thanks again. Drop me a line if you need any support, any help.
We're here to put episodes together that make you smile. I want you to download this podcast, hit play, and be laughing, smiling, or on the opposite, I want you to be freaking angry at me because I fired you up and challenged your position on something. And we're going to do both this season. So yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun.
Very much looking forward to it. You folks rock. Thanks for the couple of years of support. We only got a wonderful future together.
Take care. Have fun.