All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts 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.
Listen, the world seems to be a little bit chaotic, shall we say, a little bit messed up. Some would use some other acronyms and some very pointed, often vulgar words to describe this world we're living in. So this week, what we're going to do is talk about the 2020s. And this really started from a great piece from the line, Jen Gerson is one of the two founders of the line and main writers.
And she put out a piece basically saying, enjoy the summer of 2022. It's likely to be the last good one for some time. And when we look around the world in any number of spheres, whether it's economic, political, food, security, inflation, economics, we can go on, it seems to be a chaotic world. So today what we're going to talk about is what I believe to be the reorganization of the 2020s to emerge a new world order.
And no, this is not some theoretical conspiracy theory. Pye from the sky, group of people that are trying to maneuver and control the entire world. This is just a normal psyche that happens every 70 to 80, maybe 90 years in human history. You can go back almost 700 years and look at points that are roughly on average, about 80 years apart.
And you can see where the systems of human existence have gone through a reorg. And ladies and gentlemen, we're reorganizing. So sit back, grab a beverage, let's have a chat. So you're going to ask yourself why this and what has this to do with preparedness.
So preparedness is all about something called situational awareness, right? So situational awareness is basically you understanding the world in which you live and events as they happen around you and how they influence you. No, you and I are not having influence on what's going on on a global scale, but they're becoming knowledgeable and intelligent on what that means and what that is likely to look like. We can then take the precautions that are within our capacity and capability to execute to mitigate the effects, the negative effects and expand on the positive effects of these changes that are coming in the world.
So this is the purpose of today's podcast. We're going to talk about six general areas, governance trade, war, pandemics, government control and cultural frameworks. So let's just, you know, let's get right at it. So what is governance?
So governance is basically the rules and regulations that allow a organization to manage and execute the function. So, you know, every government is gets elected through something called, you know, most places in this world, democracy, right? So you're having election first, pass, post, pro-versional representation, whatever you have and the government gets elected, right? So the government says all these committees, agencies, rules, regulations, laws, it's the framework of systems that allow the government to function and execute their task.
So governance is very, very complicated. And the world has a governance system. And we're at the end of it. We're at the end of the globalization idea.
We're at the end of global one world government idea that Rockefeller really, really promoted AKA, which is why he gave the land to the United Nations in New York and it's at one Rockefeller way. The idea being is for about 80 years now, we've tried this thing called globalism. And now that it's waning and coming to an end and the world is going through reorganization, that framework, a lot of people are holding onto. And in most cases, the countries that hold onto the globalization framework are those who have outsized influence because of it.
So for example, a lot of smaller nations, nations that are heavily dependent on aid and assistance that comes through global organizations like the United Nations, the United Nations World Food Program, OCHA, Disaster Relief, that type of thing. They have an outsized influence on the world because if their vote and the systems that the United Nations didn't exist, some of these smaller countries wouldn't be even a passing thought to the majority of the rest of the world. So a lot of countries have skin in the game to make sure that globalization stays. And it's not.
I've debated this on a previous podcast episode. If you think globalization is sticking around, go listen to that, drop me a line. We can have it abate. I'll bring you on here and we can hash it out.
And globalization really, listen, it was born from the Bretton Woods Conference. It was all about a dichotomous world where you had the Soviet Union and America opposing each other. Every single country of the face of this earth fell in line with one or the other. And the globalization was basically allowing the entire world to expand under the influence of these two countries.
And then it started to fall apart with the Berlin Wall, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know the story. So governance basically, what we're looking at in the 2020s is we're reverting to blocks of like-minded nations. And you see this with the exceptionally fast expansionary protocol of NATO. NATO has been working really, really hard to be an expansionary force in the world.
They've been attempting to grow and influence and surround Russia at the precipitous rate as fast as they could. But without looking like that's actually their intent. You see the rise of a lot of local governance, regional governance organizations like Aizen. It's hard to say, but it's the Asian group of economic coordination for countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam.
You see the same thing in the African Union, the ECOWAS, the Economic Coordination of Western African States. You see it the same thing in the Caribbean, where you have, especially in the field of emergency management, you have the SEDEMA, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency. So what you see happening around the world is under the umbrella of this globalization idea, a lot of these regional powers, regional forces, came together. And that's because they realized that it's exceptionally difficult to get anything done in a globalist agenda when you have 182 voices at the table, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with what your issues are.
So we see an emergence of this. And it's very much linked to our second point of trade. We see blocks of these same geographical nations signing trade agreements, right? So look at NAFTA.
Look at Aizen. Look at a lot of African block trading groups. We have Southwest, Southeast Asia trading groups. These are all coming out because countries are realizing that in the fall of globalization, these regional trade groups are very important.
So you start to see them taking prominence over things like anybody care about the World Trade Organization. Like the World Trade Organization exists as a way of having a set of rules, normalcy within the world trade systems and how countries will work together in the training environment. And then it was originally set up with an appeals court that allowed countries to force fair trade practices and other things. And the Americans killed that about 20 years ago in Bill Clinton and then George Bush accelerated and Obama just laughed it off.
Americas have blocked or refused to appoint any judges to the panel for appeals. So basically, they killed the appeal court. And because the appeal court can't function, none of the decisions of the World Trade Organization tribunals are effective. Because you'll find me guilty or basically the tribunal will find that I violate international trade law, I'll launch an appeal, everything is set aside pending an appeal.
But because the Americans have killed the appeal court forever and ever, amen, no single jurisdictional decision will ever be finalized by the World Trade Organization. So it's basically nothing but a very big, expensive group of people getting together to talk about the world. So we see that these regional trading blocks are coming down. Now the key to that in the 2020s is that all of these things are required in Navy.
Now, the vast majority of our trade that happens internationally goes by sea. It's just one 20th of the cost of any other type of transportation, especially with these massive container innovations and trans shipments. Now, yeah, we have a lot of disruption in it right now. And that's due to a lot of different things.
And I'm going to talk about a separate supply chain. I've talked about it before in previous episodes. I'm going to have another one coming up next week on the details of that supply chain analysis. But just generally to say that the Bretton Woods conference that set up globalization in the 1940s was about using the US Navy to protect international shipping.
And because the US Navy was the only global Navy to actually survive and stay intact post the Second World War, it provided protection. So piracy was a real thing. Ships were, other nation ships were attacked and taken on a regular basis in the 1920s and 1930s. And so the Navy got that away.
And I mean, this is why China grew. China grew to what it is now because the US Navy ironically protected all of these international shipping routes to allow every single country to trade with every other country without the risk of piracy because you get thumped by the US Navy. So the US Navy is not doing that anymore. They've been crystal clear under President Trump.
And President Biden has been very clear to continue that exact policy that the US Navy's job is not to police the high seas for everybody. The US has 14 trade agreements with 20 countries, five or principal. And within those treaties is the protection of that route by the US Navy. Everybody else is on their own.
You've seen the rise in the early 2020s of Iran, especially states sponsored hijacking and ransom of ships in the Persian Gulf. And you've seen where countries now have to send their own Navy. So the Dutch Navy, the British Navy, if they want their energy ships coming out of the Persian Gulf to be free from harassment, the Dutch have to actually protect their own. They can't count on a global order, AKA the US Navy.
To do it for them. So now you see that because of that loss of that international global supply chain, and it's being reorganized, so it's not a collapse in the global supply chain. And again, I'll get to this in a future episode. It's a reorganization of global supply chains into regional areas.
So basically the production, distribution, consumption, and retrograde of products is going regional, not global. So this is what's happening over the 2020s. And it's going to cause, and you see it now, significant disruptions in the orderly flow of goods. This is because everybody's reorganization of their production.
So for example, the vast majority of electronics and global chip manufacturing has left China. There's very little if any left there. Most of it's gone to Taiwan, but a lot of companies are realizing the largest chip manufacturing plant in the world was recently announced and they've started construction in America. So key critical stuff is reshoring.
It's basically coming back to American companies realized they can't count on countries like China and Taiwan, and South Korea to produce all of their chips because they're in politically or fighting war unstable areas of the world. So that's starting to happen now. There's a great saying called friend shoring. And this means this is the regional idea is that I don't have to bring the manufacturing back into mine.
So I'm a Canadian. So Canada isn't worried about manufacturing everything within Canada. Canada is worried about manufacturing everything within NAFTA, where they have a really strong governance framework to protect access to goods. So for example, something like 90 odd percent of the world's pharmaceuticals are produced in India.
During the beginning parts of the pandemic, India blocked the pharmaceutical export to save their own people. All of a sudden the world was brought to its knees and stockpiles of pharmaceuticals because of a country's position. It was a strong trade relationship with China at the time. So we really didn't have any influence to try to overturn them.
That wouldn't happen within a strong NAFTA framework. And that's the idea of friend shoring and regionalization is that you have very tight groups. So that's happening. So the other part of it is war.
Now, humans have been at war since humans existed and they will always fight. I mean, I wish I lived in a Utopian. I used to say many times during my 28 year military history that I prayed for the day that my job was no longer required, that I could turn in my weapon and turn in my uniform because humans had figured out how to stop fighting. Well, guess what?
Only going to get worse. What the countries are trying to do within these economic systems and the regionalization systems is maintain dominance. And so large players are looking around the world to maintain dominance. Now, what used to be done is through an economic means.
So China had the manufacturing. China had the low cost. They had a huge economic dominance. The Americans the same way.
The European Union have tried it. I mean, they never get along on anything. But the point being is that war is just politics by another means. So first, it's economic dominance.
Then you have a lot of cultural influences, right? You try to bring people within your sphere, your type of governments, your culture, your likes, your dislikes, and you try to bring like-minded people. But in the end, limited combat will happen. And so as Peter Zion put in his most recent book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning and his previous works on disunited nations is that you're looking at a couple of areas of the world who are going to see probably significant shooting conflict throughout the entire 2020s.
And this is just basically to establish the rights to trade routes, authorities, and to try to bring about a new rules-based order since globalization is done. And that is in Eastern Europe, which we're seeing now. You will see it in the South China Sea, and you will see it in Africa. And those three areas of the world are predominantly the areas that are going to see shooting wars pretty much over the entire 2020s.
As country reorganized, for example, China, because of a lot of the trade changes that are happening, is going to be in a position where it is going to want to assert its dominance over Southeast Asia. Basically set the rules for everything that goes on in there and everybody plays by the rules. This is why they're massively building up their military. This is why they're increasing capacity and capability across their economic sea.
And their counterparts in the region are fighting that through their own organization. So that will come to a shooting war. If some type, I have no idea if China invades Taiwan or not. I'm pretty sure they won't.
That's because if the world put the sanctions on China that they put on Ukraine, sorry, put on Russia because of the Ukrainian war, China would cease to exist as a country in probably about four or five months. Because Russia is a net exporter of everything. You can close all their borders and they'll be fine. I mean, economically they'll be hurt, but listen, they can feed their people and they can make everything their people need for a great life.
China can't do any of that on its own. So if you cut off the trade for China, it can't feed its people, it can't provide energy for its people, it can't provide the goods for its people, and the people will rise up and overthrow the Communist Party. And they know that, which is why China has to use muscle to assert when economic dominance isn't working. Other countries are French-wearing and excluding China.
And this is where BRICS is the unknown group. So BRICS is Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. And so this is a new governance, regional, friend organization. It's not regional, actually it's all around the world.
But BRICS is something coming to prominence now in the breakdown of the world. So it is a group of countries that don't normally aren't part of NATO, aren't part of the European Union, and are now putting themselves together to try based upon a combined GDP weight, have some time of large economic governance around the world. So the world is gonna fight, and they're gonna continue to fight, and it's gonna get aggressive, and it's going to be in all of these regional areas, and the shooting wars are gonna carry on throughout the 2020s, because this is what happens. So if you look back every eight years, like I said, through history, you have either one major massive war, or what you have is a series of shooting wars, and the series of shooting wars, or outcomes in a geopolitical sense, are simply to establish the top dog and the world rules order, right?
So when we can't negotiate a friendly agreement, we're gonna fight and figure out who's the top one. So this is what's happening, and we'll continue to happen in the 2020s. What will emerge from the 2020s, is what the global framework is gonna look like for about another 80 years, until we get a time for a change. And it seems incredibly shocking to people right now.
You look at what's going on around the world, and you say, well, this is crazy. I've never seen this before. No, you and I haven't, because we haven't been alive for over 80 years. But this is exactly what humanity's done, at least for the last 500, if not longer years, in Ray Dalio's new bookie outlines all this in how empires rise and fall over the last four or 500 years.
This is not new. It's new to you and I, because we've never seen it. What's going on now is horrible. The war in Ukraine is horrible, but it's absolutely, entirely predictable based upon human history.
It's what our systems do every 80 years. So this will carry on, but what about the pandemic? This thing came out of right field. Sure it did, right?
But there is a really crazy idea that's unpopular and a bit controversial, but I'm gonna bring it up anyhow, because heck, it's a lot of fun. Think about health and the weak, right? As society reorganizes, and as society figures out what the next 70 to 80 years are going to look like, we're going to go through some type of struggle when it comes to the physical health and strength of our own populations. A great analogy is if you look at the relationship between the lion and the antelope in nature.
So basically the lion eats the antelope, and the antelope tries to outrun the lion. Now nature keeps them amazingly through some incredible systems at a balance. There's just enough antelope, and there's just enough lions. So what do they do?
So the lions eat portion of the young for population control. They eat the old, and they eat the sick. So basically what happens is, is the lions feed off the weak portions of the society. So by doing so, the lions keep the antelope heard strong and healthy.
They keep it fit, because if you're not fit, if you're not situationally aware, if you're not capable of running at high speeds and very short notice as an antelope, you're become dinner. Now the sad part about the antelope is every antelope will eventually get eaten by the lions and hyenas. They don't bury their dead in ceremonies or whatever. You eventually will become old enough that the young lions and hyenas are able to catch you and you get eaten.
But so the lions keep the antelope's strong fit and a healthy herd. Anything that goes wrong with them gets shaved off. Well, pandemics have come along about every 100 years. If you look through human history, it's a lot more often than that.
It's just now we have a lot more healthy habits of hand washing, and we have some type of medical governance that tries to help us out in ways to do it. But what we've relied upon in this pandemic to try to save our species and to save ourselves is we've looked to government control. We've looked to restrictions. We haven't looked to human health.
So the lions and the antelope, when the antelope's got sick with the pandemic, they got eaten, right? We have a lot of sickness in our society when it comes to unhealthy individuals. And trust me, I'm on my own journey to try to get back to a state of fitness that I used to enjoy when I was a member of the army. I kind of let that go upon retirement for a couple of years and it's now affecting me.
We don't, as a society, champion culturally, health, fitness, and the responsibility to take care of yourself. In other words, we don't say to people, it's your job to be robustly fit and healthy to be able to face whatever may come around, right? So in an idea of preparedness, the number one thing in preparedness is always your health, right? Because if you don't have your health, you have nothing else.
I don't care about your stockpiles of food. They're irrelevant if you're sick every time something happens. But if you keep a robust, massively healthy and fit individual, which can all be done for free, by the way, and that's an upcoming episode, is how to get exceptionally healthy and eat really, really well for dirt cheap and be fit in today's 2020s. That's coming up in an episode, but we don't champion that, right?
So we have a very, compared to human history, we have a pretty sick population as just our standard way of survival. So when a pandemic hits, yeah, it has incredibly outsized effects. And I'll just tell you this one thing, and this is one statistic that doesn't lie in waves one and two of the pandemic in the United States of America, slightly over 80% of the people in ICU were obese. So you can ask yourself, were they in the ICU because of COVID-19?
Or were they in the ICU because they were obese? That is a question that you can go either way on, but if everybody was fit and healthy, they'd be fine because look at the Japanese. And if you don't like that, what I just said, that's great, look at the Japanese. They had an outsized small effect on deaths.
Because what are they? The Japanese are a healthy population. It's cultural. They're fit.
They're healthy. They eat well. They exercise. Obesity is almost not a thing in existence in Japan.
And so what else does their government not have? The government doesn't have the authority to impose mandates. It's against the law for the government to impose mandates, health related and vaccine mandates and restriction and clothing and masks, wearing, et cetera. But the government puts out strong recommendations, backs it up with the best evidence they can.
And culturally, they rely on good judgment of the people and health and fitness of the people. And they've gotten through this pandemic with an exceptionally low death and sickness rate compared to everyone else without government intervention. Because culturally, they had a healthy population. And the last one is kind of a combination of cultural and government control, right?
It's all about right now in our 2020s, we're struggling for what kind of governance we want. This is not a big weather. It's good or bad. But you can see in almost every developed nation in the world, especially in the OECD, during elections, we're becoming fairly polarized.
People are wrapping themselves around this thought of independence versus government support. Is it your responsibility to take care of yourself? Or is it the government's job to feed and house you if you can't figure out how to make enough money to do that? Look at your government wherever you might live in the world and the different rules and how these things are rolling out.
Right now, it's a struggle for countries. And every country is going through it. Our government here in Canada is very much about government control, the nanny state. It's the government's job to help you and save you.
So we're going to impose a whole bunch of rules and benefits that will ensure you'll be OK. Now, a lot of people support that idea. And this is not the day for debating that. We have another strong voices in our population here in Canada that believe that the government is not necessarily a source for good.
But it is a necessary evil to do things that we can't independently do. And our success is not found in strong governments. Our success is found in strong people and independence to chase your dreams. Those are two different government frameworks.
You know, how far do you want your government to have control over your daily life? Some people feel safe and secure when the government can control it and manage it and therefore tell you what's good or bad. You follow the advice, et cetera. Some don't want that.
And one thing I'll use, you know, the COVID-19 work that's going on in Canada right now, our health minister has recently come out and said that they believe they want to redefine in their minds. They want to redefine vaccinated as somebody who has got a shot in the last nine months. So it won't be how many shots do you have. It's did you have a COVID-19 vaccine of some type in the last nine months?
If so, you are considered vaccinated. If you haven't, you are considered unvaccinated. So you could have had three shots of the COVID-19 vaccine, but your third one was more than nine months ago and the government would consider you unvaccinated. That is the idea they're setting the conditions.
So when the fall comes around and the BA, the B5, B5.1 variant that's probably going to cause an upsurgeance in cases in the fall, the government will be able in their mind to reinstate restrictions. Now there's a strong minority, maybe even a plurality of people in Canada who will vehemently oppose that because our third booster rate uptake is well below 50%. In the country. So it's just a struggle, right?
You see a struggle for whether we want to build our governance frameworks on strong government control or whether we want to build a one strong independent control. And this is a cultural thing. Like if I ask you, I'm Canadian, what does it mean to be Canadian? You're going to get a massive series of difference.
So we are in a struggle in all countries for what that looks like. Culturally, in reference to government control and independence, culturally, what do we want our future country to look like? And it's a struggle. I'm not sure whether it'll be a win on one side or a loss on one side, whether it will be the great Canadian compromise here in Canada or something else.
But the point is, is that the 2020s, the culturally and government is going to be a struggle. So right now, this is what I mean. In Canada, we have, like I said, a strong central government who's trying to create a massive, massive government nanny state, right? I think we're going to have a slingshot in the next election where we're going to have the independent folks win a massive majority, strip all of this government control away and we're going to have independence and you're going to have the other side and that some way we probably will settle in Canada here in our 2029 election, will probably settle to something in the middle because traditionally, centrist have won the day in Canada.
I think we're, right now we have a far big government control party in power. The next one is going to be a weak, small government out of your way, live your own life, have all the freedoms you want. And then I think in 2029, when we emerge from the 2020s, we'll be back to centrist. I don't know the rest of the world what it's going to look like, but it's going to be difficult.
So the whole idea today's block house, it's just to talk about the fact that the 2020s forecasting going ahead is going to be an exceptionally difficult set decade, right? We're already a couple of years into it. It's not going to get any calmer. It's actually probably going to get more disruptive.
So what does that mean for you as an individual? What does that mean for you and your family and this idea of preparedness? It is all, as Peter Zion famously says, and it's, you know, most experts in the world will agree, it's geographically focused. If you're sitting here in Canada, you're going to be OK.
You know, you're going to have a lot of fights on Twitter about what the government's doing and our support for international conflicts and who should be fighting and who shouldn't, but really you'll be OK. If you live in Eastern Europe, you've got a big problem in the 2020s coming your way. It's going to look incredibly difficult and challenging. If you live in Germany, I don't know what's going to happen with your energy supplies, with your other food supplies, with your rearming and the massive growth of the military, industrial complex, and the military machine in Germany.
Where does this Russian expansion of the nine gaps to close? Where does that end up? Where does that end in the 2020s? If you're in Africa, the food crisis, the food famine coming, means you're just parts of Africa will literally starve to death in the 2020s because there won't be any food for the UN World Food Program to deliver.
So everything is geographically located. So it behooves you to understand where you live, to understand what is going on in your country's relationship with other countries. How does that governance system influence you and how you choose to operate? What are those likely impacts going to be to your quote unquote normal operations and how your family conducts life?
It's up to you to gather this information because nobody's going to gather it to you on a regional basis, right? You know, I'm about one podcaster. I'm about one voice in the preparedness world. And I very much look to giving people the set of tools that'll help them figure out the answer instead of giving them the answer.
I could come on here and tell you what the forecast for Thailand is going to be. Do a couple of weeks of research and give it to you. But it is inconsequential to me. I've never been to Thailand.
It's on my list, but I've never been to Thailand. I don't live there. So I don't understand the culture no matter what I read. So do that education and figure it out and get some ideas.
And listen, if you got some ideas and feature podcast episodes, drop me a line at Jeff at preparednesslabs.ca. Go over and visit our website at triplew insidemycanoohead.ca and we're across all social media. We're doing a better job. There's a lot of projects on the go, small team here.
So we're juggling a few things. So if there's a bit of a pause in this Instagram tweet feed or something like that, and I keep promising TikTok going to be up and running. And I don't do it. Eventually, I just got to pooper get off the pod as they like to say.
So anyhow, we're getting better. Keep the suggestions coming. I really appreciate your ideas for podcast episodes. Remember, if you want to show idea, I'll put it on.
If you want to be on the show to talk about the idea, we can do that too. So thank you very much for joining us here at Inside My Canoe Head. Have yourself a great day. We've got another wonderful episode coming up on Thursday or Friday.
It's going to be a little bit more fun. Take care, stay safe, and learn skills, my friends.