Welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in 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 Ottawa studios of Inside My Canoe Head.
Today, it is my distinct pleasure to put together the 100th episode of this podcast. Now, it's a day after the two-year anniversary of launching this podcast at the very beginning of the pandemic. Yesterday, I did a live on Instagram, supposed to be recording the live. It kind of did, but the audio file, unfortunately, got corrupted as we learned things in life.
Little widgets happen to occur when you want them to, or when you don't. So here we are re-recording it on Friday morning. And basically, today, what I want to do, and I'll be right out front with this, is just a reflection of why Inside My Canoe Head exists, what we hope to achieve here, what is the long-term strategy, and basically why am I taking all this time on the internet? So the history of this channel is pretty simple.
It's like I said, it started in, or this social media brand, started as a podcast in April of 2020, in the midst of the beginnings of the pandemic. We all remember that time frame, very confusing, very challenging, very stressful for a lot of people. We quickly were learning this, it was not gonna be a weekend project all the pandemic, that we were significantly looking at something that had some pretty serious effects in the beginning on a lot of people and a lot of systems. And so why Inside My Canoe Head?
Well, I saw that very early on, it was pretty clear that the world freaking wasn't prepared for a significant disruption. And I mean the world, I mean government systems, institutions, individuals, families, businesses. I could go on almost every sector of our lives, at some point was significantly turned upside down, pear-shaped by the pandemic. And a lot of that could have been addressed in advance by adopting a preparedness lifestyle.
And I'm looking at it wondering why. But you have to remember at the same time, I was about halfway through my PhD at the time, and I'm studying, and I'm just finishing up the final bits of it now, municipal emergency management communications in the preparedness sphere, and what the government is trying to get people to do and how they do those communications, how they're transmitted and how they're received. So I'm studying this in finite detail, the pandemic lands on the world. And so I'm sitting here going, okay, there's a great deal of messaging that needs to get out there to the public, that for some reason is not.
So then before I decided that I'm gonna jump on a white horse and ride it and save the day, let's have a look at what's out there. And it probably hasn't changed much, and it really hasn't actually since 2020. It's a pocket talk, that's all it is. If you go through YouTube and everywhere else, nobody is talking to real people.
And when I mean by real people, I mean regular average everyday salary worker employees who have families, young children, who are just trying to go on with their lives and achieve their dreams and their goals, they don't wanna do anything crazy. They just want to go ahead and achieve whatever it is that they're after. And nobody's talking to them. No one is listening to the government messaging that's coming out.
So you have a group of people who nobody is actually talking to. You have the government who is spewing a whole bunch of stuff out, and none of it is connecting. And so you see this gap. And when you look at what's being produced out there, that a pocket talk falls into like, check and little, we're about to go into World War III.
We are about to have a nuclear exchange. Climate change, if you believe the climate alarmism that's out there, the world is about to be totally engulfed by this massive change in climate. Yeah, climate change is real. Yeah, man has a significant effect on the rate at which climate is changing.
And there are some pretty great things that we as a society can do to lessen those impacts. But if you listen to the people on the climate argument, that's not what they're saying. They're saying you're at the last year. We have one or two more years before it's too late, before we go over the abyss.
There are people talking about telling you to get two years of food in your basement. Not a week, not two weeks, but they're talking two years of food. People are throwing lists. Here are all the laundry lists and downloadable PDFs of all the freaking things that you should buy that somehow magically are gonna make you prepared and are gonna fill your house full of joy and happiness because they exist.
Nobody's talking about planning. Nobody is talking about the process by which you determine what you need to do to meet a preparedness standard. And then what should that prepare in a standard be and who's responsible for creating that preparedness standard for your family? There's no thought process in it.
I can come up with 15 items that I think everybody should do. Create a YouTube video, throw up this great PDF list and think I'm assisting people. In all that you're doing is confusing the masses more because the messages are not only crazily out to lunch but they're contradictory in nature. And basically it's a dog's breakfast of information that's out there.
It's all about panicking the public. It's all about stoking fear. The most powerful human emotion and they teach you this in marketing 101. Make people afraid of possible outcomes and then provide them a solution for it.
If you are persuasive enough, then they will simply buy at Nauseum because people are inherently fearful. That's all that's going on right now. It's simply a pocket talk. Somewhere in there are a handful of really incredible emergency managers who are trying to make a difference but they themselves are utterly lost in the middle of this mayhem.
So what is your government doing? At best your government is impotent and dangerous at worst. No one is listening. The government has been issuing some form of the same message of be informed, make a plan, have a kit.
They've been doing that for 20 odd years yet decades of studies have shown that there has been no discernible change in the level of preparedness in the population as a result of decades of messaging. So what the government decides to do is we just need to say it louder. We need to rephrase it. We need to say it more often and in different ways.
People aren't just listening. They've adopted the mentality of blaming the consumer for not listening to the government message. That's why we're in the situation. We're in not that the public is not interested in your message.
They don't find it useful or reliable and they don't find you a trusted source of information. Maybe that's why nobody's paying attention but the government's not issued or interested. But more importantly is the government is messaging the public. They're not communicating with them.
Communication is two ways. It's engaged in a discourse and discussion about how many governments are traveling to a location to talk to the community. What's the community's interest in preparedness? People know what preparedness is.
The community knows what they would like the government to do first in an emergency. What is the most important thing in the community's eyes that the government should do? But community emergency managers are not driving their plan from what the community wants. They're driving it from dogma and research, which then not necessarily meets up with the community needs.
When you do that in the Army parlance, you're picketed in bypass. You're ignored. So it doesn't matter whether you've created the greatest community emergency management plan that's ever been done by some of the most brilliant CEM qualified emergency managers. If your community doesn't find it useful and they don't see themselves in that plan, you failed.
It doesn't matter how many degrees you have. It doesn't matter how many certifications, right? Have you been in this business two decades, right? So do you have one year of experience that's been repeated 20 times or do you have 20 years of experience, right?
So if you're not engaging and communicating and building a trusted relationship with your community, you're just a gas of hot air. And I say that with utmost respect because nobody's listening to you. So here we go again, coming up on preparedness week, the same stock messages with some cute little stuff thrown out by Public Safety Canada hearing and they're gonna pat themselves in the back. They're gonna distribute awards for great programs and they're gonna go off and think they did a great thing.
Nobody is listening to the government right now. And through a lot of the education that I've been doing, gathering the intelligence or gathering the resources, gathering the information that I use to write my dissertation from my PhD. I had to interview dozens of emergency managers and community groups to talk about how that relationship looks like, to talk about how they would like to be engaged by their emergency managers. So when I say this, it's real evidence from municipalities here in the province of Ontario that state the government is impotent and at best they're dangerous.
And the reason they'd be dangerous is they're telling people to do a whole bunch of things but not backing it up with anything useful. So buy yourself a kit. So now people have this strange sense of safety and security based off of the bag of junk that's sitting on their floor, that somehow that's gonna make them more prepared and it sets a dangerous false sense of security in the population. So yeah, government messaging, if it's not right, can be dangerous and actually put citizenry at risk and cause harm.
And right now everybody is diligently working to make sure that that's a success. So looking at the environment like that, I ask myself like, how can I make a difference? I don't profess to be an expert in everything. There are people out there that say they're emergency management or disaster management experts.
Okay, there's no such thing in the world. You become an expert in a very, very specific, tiny niche area. And you do that through basically reading everything anybody has ever written about this very small niche and then examining what the people in that space are executing and doing. And by knowing all of that, you become an expert.
My niche in its very narrow definition is emergency preparedness at the municipal level between the relationship between people and the government and what the government is doing and what the people are doing at the municipal community level. That's my level of expertise. If you ask me about response and recovery, I've got a reasonably well-educated opinion, but I have no means an expert. If you wanna talk about mitigation strategies, building large infrastructure projects to lower disaster risk reduction, I've got some options, I've got some thoughts I could provide.
That's not my area of expertise. You wanna get into emergency preparedness, messaging and communication and requirements at the municipal and individual level? You're in my sandbox. So with being in my sandbox, what do I have to provide to the world?
Well, the idea here at Inside My Canoe Head is, we are providing free information to aid people in the journey along what I see a pathway out of road map to becoming more prepared for life's disruptions. I can't, nor can the people at the other end of this, change anything that's going on in the world out there, right? I can't stop climate change. I can't stop disasters.
But what I can do in my very little world that I exist is I can become more resilient. Now, resilient means I am harder to knock off standard. Now, resilience is a very useful word. It's used all the time in emergency management, disaster management.
The problem is is that the community of practice has yet to find a definition they agree to. So when you look at the natural sciences, resilience has a very, very specific definition. It's basically a body sits at a place of rest. Resilience is a measurement of how much exogenous shock has to be placed on that body to remove it from a position of rest and how quickly it can return to the position of rest.
So basically you're living your awesome frickin' life in urban suburban world and significant disruptions have. The more and more resilient you become, the more and more difficult it is for external things that you don't control to cause you to change your normal operations. Basically disrupt your daily and weekly life plans. That's resilience, right?
It's that measurement. And some people find it easier to look at it at the antonym. Now, the antonym to resilience is vulnerability. So if resilience is a bit too difficult, concept to wrap your head around, think about your vulnerability.
How vulnerable are you to other people's influences? How are other people or external forces able to cause difficulty in your life? Like if you have a job with one line of income and your boss fires you tomorrow, do you have six months of savings and an immediate next job plan to where you go to, right? If you do, you're far more resilient than somebody who has very little savings and hasn't thought through the process of what do I do when I get fired, right?
That person is more vulnerable, you're less vulnerable, switch the antonym around, you're more resilient, they're less resilient. That's where we try to help people along that journey of becoming more and more resilience. Now it's all free, all the information is out there. The platforms that we use here at Inside My Canoe Head are all centered on our website, www.insidemycanoehead.ca is the website there, the link to the podcast, the YouTube channel, the Instagram, to my Buy Me a Coffee for those of you who are looking for the paid promotional side of it.
It's all there on the website and what we do is all the information is free, right? Cause this is a total public service. Yeah, I'm trying to build a social media brand, sure, but the idea is we're providing this service because nobody is helping people, normal people, who want to live an awesome, incredible life. They want to rock a great life, wrapped in a blanket of preparedness for all the things that may or may not go wrong.
So that's what we do here at Inside My Canoe Head and provide the guidance, the 99 episodes that preceded this and the hundreds that will follow this on Instagram, Twitter and Buy Me a Coffee. I put out a daily preparedness tip Monday to Friday. Today I release preparedness tip number 20. I have 342 of them in line.
All this information is free. We're just providing little snippets. In the month of June, we're going to start releasing short reels on Instagram. We're going to launch the TikTok channel.
And so basically this is just more and more ways for people to consume short, little, important, helpful, problem solving pieces of preparedness information. Some people like podcasts like this, they like audio integration. Some people like YouTube, we started the YouTube, we're releasing a series right now on Canoe Preparedness Planning. That's more for you to get a thought process of my background and how I came to preparedness type of thing.
And I love canoe tripping. It's my passion. So that's going to move over to a preparedness genre shortly in a period of time. So depending on how you consume your information, Inside My Canoe Head is going to be there in some form to provide you a daily preparedness tip.
Now, we have a very well-defined 12-step preparedness plan to generate your personal individual emergency preparedness plan for your family. That is free of charge. It's on YouTube and it's on earlier elements of the podcast. We're refining it right now.
That's going to come out in an e-book because there are some people who like to consume their content in e-books. So we're writing an e-book right now that's going to come out late in this year. We're putting together a version of Call It a Masterclass on Preparedness, right? A professionally created and exacting specific step-by-step process that you can follow, not the Epocotop crap that you see on YouTube, but an actual useful set of tools for somebody to go along.
And remember, it's all based on the premise that the vast majority of preparedness is free. If somebody's telling you you have to spend a bunch of money to become prepared, then walk away because you don't. In the end, at some point along your preparedness plan journey, you may come across a situation where some item needs to be procured to fill a void that you've identified in your preparedness strategy. Yes, OK, that may occur.
But you'll generate that list for a very, very specific requirement that you determined and not some yahoo on YouTube, giving you a list of 15 things that you have to buy. So those elements are coming out. So by the end of 2022, all of those products will be out there. They'll be either available for you to purchase for the people who are looking for the more specific detail.
All the other stuff will be free on the other side. Basically, the world is laid out for you, and the process is given to you. You're the one who's going to have to make the decision, whether you want to walk the preparedness walk and invest the time it takes. Because it takes a bit of time, and that's the most important resource you have in the world.
You can't get more of it. The reason it takes time is because if you, basic psychology tells us that if you develop a plan by yourself for yourself, then you are far more likely to utilize that plan, rely on that plan, and make that plan successful than if you download a PDF, which is why I don't have one. And I'm not creating one. When I write an e-book, it's going to be the written version of how to create that preparedness plan.
For anybody on YouTube or even the government that says, download this plan, family preparedness plan, just fill in the blocks and sign the bottom, you should be worried. Some people out there, a few people, do have guidelines on how to construct a plan. Again, they're more of checklist, and I'm not a checklist guy. So that will be coming out at the end of the year.
For all of those of you who are interested, I have a corporate business side. It's not related to this podcast, but it's at preparednesslabs.ca, and that's where I provide formal emergency preparedness against staying in my lane, staying in my expertise, preparedness education to businesses. So I'm available to go help businesses and train their employees to be more prepared, and I have a business where I work with municipal governments to help them improve their emergency preparedness communications and to generate that relationship, that communication strategy with the communities they serve so that people see them as a trusted agent and then look to them. You know, when things go wrong, when the shizzi hits and the fizzi, or when disruptions happen, you want to have the community to see the municipality as a trusted agent.
I'm gonna go to their Twitter feed, the emergency management specifically branded Twitter feed to find out what's going on, or I'm gonna go to the place that they want me to be, or they're on the channel that I am, so the emergency management will be on TikTok to talk about the things that are happening. So that's basically the idea behind the business side of it, but I really wanna take the time to thank all of the people who have been on this journey with me at Inside My Canoe Head for two years. This is a passion project. We're gonna be here for planning at least another five years to build this social media brand as best we can to get the preparedness message out there to normal working people, to tell them you don't have to sell everything and move to the year, you don't have to go off grid.
You don't have to have two years of supplies of food in your house to be prepared, but there are some steps that you need to take that are for the vast majority of time absolutely free. The message is coming, we're gonna keep doing it. I wanna thank just none of the number of people out there. You know who you are, you've been subscribers, you've been supporters of me, you've pushed me on, you've told me constructive criticism, you've given me advice, you've agreed to be guests on this podcast, you've agreed to help me out, you've provided advice and I can't say enough that I wanna thank my family and a whole bunch of other people.
I don't wanna name anybody on here because then when you name people you always forget somebody, but you know who you are and you matter and I do deeply appreciate it. So thank you very much. This has been the 100th episode of Inside My Canoe Head. We return with the 101st episode next month in the month of May when we begin another week.
Stick with us at InsideMyCanoeHead.ca, follow us on Twitter and Instagram to get the daily preparedness tips, drop over to buy me a coffee if you wanna thank me and give me a little thumbs up for all of the content. And thank you very much for being part of this incredible journey. Stay safe and have fun.