All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a Canadian 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, we're talking about Twitter.
Why Twitter? No, we're not going to talk about Elon Musk buying, maybe not buying, maybe yes buying, but trying to get a lower price for Twitter. We're going to talk about Twitter preparedness and why it is arguably the most valuable tool for you out there. Sit back, grab a beverage, let's get at it.
All right, well, welcome back. Listen, everybody loves Twitter or hates Twitter or thinks it's some control bot-orientated device, artificial intelligence, meant to just spread nuisance, nonsense, and a whole bunch of other new chemical stuff. In other words, most people don't agree on what Twitter is supposed to be, and I would argue after all the interviews we've seen in the last 60 days about Musk and buying it, and all the interviews from the people who work at Twitter, I don't even think they have a clue what Twitter's meant to be. But I think in reality, we can all consider Twitter to be the common square, the city square.
Now, if you remember way back in the 1700s, you know, when you were like 15 years old or something, the 1700s, you didn't really have the printing press working very well, and what you had were center square. You had city center squares where people stood on their soapboxes, literally soapboxes, if you're wondering where that came from. And the whole point was, this is where people came to find out firsthand what was going on in the world. So you would probably hear in your village, or you'd hear from your neighbors, et cetera.
But if you've ever played that game as a kid as to, you know, let's Johnny tell Sally, and we go around a circle, and we spread a secret and see what comes around the other end, a lot of people understand that, you know, you got to hear from the horse's mouth. And when you came around for election times, or when you had a trial, or something going on that mattered in society, everybody would gather in the city center, and they would hear from people. People would assume they would, you know, they would get egged, yelled, whatever. But this is what the city square was.
This is how debates happen between two learned individuals, or unlearned individuals, basically in front of everybody else in the town. Twitter is that for the modern society. It's the place where everybody gets to go and say their piece. Now, civility used to matter in our society, and in a lot of cases, I would argue, it probably doesn't anymore.
Just go on Twitter, and it's not a civil, it's not a quote-unquote safe, I don't know where that ridiculous idea ever was born that there's supposed to be a safe space. But the point being is that Twitter is where everybody goes to yell, and yell at you, and yell about you, and call you all kinds of names. But it's a space where buried in that nose, there's a lot of really great information. So today, we're going to talk about the three big things about Twitter, and then I'm going to give you three quick examples of me fighting with a communist, a public health doctor, and emergency management Twitter.
So here we go. The biggest plus and minus of Twitter is it's the place to your ability to spew. So when you go to Twitter, you can find forums in their spaces if you want to. If you want to create a real echo chamber, go into Twitter's option of spaces.
It's the middle button on the bottom of your smartphone, and it basically takes you to a common space where people are talking about an issue you're talking about. Now, they're generally probably going to be from one side or the other, and therefore, if you're looking for an echo chamber, i.e. a whole bunch of people to confirm your bias and remind you how smart you are, you can go into there. The big thing about Twitter is that you get to choose who you hear from, and you get to mute those you don't.
Now, that creates an echo chamber, right? So if you believe Justin Trudeau's the greatest prime minister in Canada's history, you can find a bunch of people on Twitter who agree with that. You can mute everybody else, and you will remind yourself how smart and intelligent you are. And the same thing if you believe an opposite point of view.
If you believe that Germany should or should not be rearming right now in the face of Russian aggression, you'll find people. The point being is, is that Twitter gives you the ability to listen to everybody. Your choice to listen to everybody, that's completely up to you. If you subscribe to follow all kinds of people from different opinions, then you're going to get that replication of what we used to have in the 15s, 1400s, 1700s of the city square.
We had two, arguably men at the time, yes, on soapboxes, basically with counterpoints yelling at each other, or when you have an election debate, you actually have people who would stump speech, right? And stump speech comes from, they actually used to stand on stumps in the park. But the point being is, is that you have the ability to set Twitter up as a space where you hear all points of view. But the downside of that is, is people on Twitter are not going to be accountable for what they say.
A lot of people approach Twitter with the ideas, you know, if some goofball idiot, whatever you want to call him, comes on Twitter and spews a bunch of junk, I'm going to take it upon myself to tell them how wrong they are. People don't go on Twitter looking to be held accountable. People don't care what you have to say on Twitter. So getting into a Twitter fight, as much fun as that is at times, and I'll explain at the end of this podcast episode about my Twitter fights, you're not going to make somebody accountable.
You're not going to hit a slam dunk, smash of whatever. I mean, if I count the amount of times I was called a little boy, get off daddy's computer and let the adults tell you what to do, and we could go on and on about how many times I've been called a million and one things, or somebody would say, you're an idiot. Is that what you learned at a PhD? What a useful, what a total waste of public money.
The institution should be closed. I mean, you hear everything. So if you're thinking that Twitter is going to be a place for preparedness or any other issue that you want, that you're going to straighten somebody out, you're in the wrong business. That Twitter won't do that for you, and you can't hold people accountable, because they don't give a crap what you have to say.
The other side of it, the second point about Twitter is stress. Now, Twitter, as I said, can be a fabulous place to find information, but it also can get your goat rally up and get you all ready to fight. And if you see somebody going on there spewing that vaccines don't work, and they actually have little microchips in them, you just get so angry. How can somebody be so stupid?
And it very well may be somebody on the other end knowing full well the truth. And they're just typing this out because they know somewhere in the Twitterverse, a bunch of people are going to get riled up, and you've made their day by jumping on there and slamming comments about how stupid they are, you're attaching reports and graphs and figures, facts and things they don't care about, because you think you're trying to help and you're going to solve it. The idea of Twitter is you're going to have to use this thing for what it was designed for, and stop allowing people's comments on Twitter to cause you stress in any way, shape, or form, because that's not their fault. That's your fault for allowing yourself to become bent out of shape and twisted sideways when somebody calls you out or says something derogatory about you.
The world hasn't created a safe space yet, and I'm going to argue, and I'll argue with anybody, that we never should create that space, that people need to learn to live in an environment where other people intentionally and with great effort try to offend them and get them upset and rile them. Welcome to Twitter. I mean, if you can't handle that kind of environment, it's the first app I would suggest. You delete, and it's a place for fights, right?
You'll get, and there's two types of fights on Twitter, and I talk about getting in Twitter fights all the time. My family laughs at me. I'm getting better control of it now, but I used to get into some Twitter fights and get riled up, kind of why this episode is also self-medicine for myself as well. So there's two types of fights on Twitter.
There's a fight of intelligence, and a fight of values, and a fight of opinions and points, and sometimes we get into good ones on there. I've had some pretty good back and forth debates with people about issues on Twitter, some of them lasting several hours, and at the end, a lot of people have said, hey, listen, I appreciate your time. Thanks for spending the time and having a reasonably acceptable discourse with me about it, you know, without calling each other idiots, et cetera. We obviously have different opinions.
We're not going to persuade each other to move our opinions, but we spent a couple hours debating something that's important. You know, I've had those on vaccine mandates, right? Not the vaccine itself, but vaccine mandates. Now, you can imagine how riled up people get and their opinions they have on that, and I've had some debates about people where I believe in the Japanese model, where the government should never have the authority under any public health or any other conditions to mandate something like a vaccine in their people, and mandates through use of coercion, which means if you don't get the jab, for lack of a better term, you face a penalty.
So the Japanese model, their law strictly prohibits the government from having that authority, but what they do is they have a strong cultural sense of responsibility to their fellow citizen and a strong moral compass as to doing what's right for the greater good. So their society operates on the idea that we're in this together. We're culturally as part of a bigger community and family. So the government can never tell you and mandate what you should do.
They give you the best advice possible. They strongly encourage you to, but then they step back and allow you to make an informed decision, and whatever decision you choose, positive or negative, on mandates or vaccine or any other issue, you would never face a penalty for that. There are lots of people who disagree with that opinion, and I've had day-long debates with these people on Twitter, and for the most part, they've largely been productive. They've largely, they've seen my point, I've seen theirs.
We agree to disagree, but we have good debates. That's not the norm on Twitter, okay? That is rare. I'm sorry for all the rest of you, but Twitter is a freaking free-for-all, okay?
Most fights on Twitter is where you get called every name in. You know, for example, if I don't follow some advice from some expert, I'm somehow damning my fellow citizens, and I hate the vulnerable in society if I don't bend over backwards to change my life to try to marginally make their lives better, or whatever it may be. I mean, Twitter is a free-for-all fight. So the majority of fights that happen on Twitter are who can say the worst words, who can report each other first, and who can yell the loudest, and especially when you get people who have that cute little blue checkmark on the side, and a lot of these people have grown huge followings over 10, 15 years on Twitter, and, you know, they'll just go out and they'll spew something that is obviously ridiculous, but they have 150,000 subscribers, 7,000 likes, 289 comments.
You're not getting in the middle of that to change this person, right? And a prime example of it is just go on there and search January 6th on Twitter. Seriously, I don't care where you sit on the American political spectrum or what you believe of the January 6th events. Go look at the exchanges on Twitter about January 6th, and it'll explain to you why that is the majority of arguments and fights that you see on Twitter.
But the point being is it's possible with the right audience if you can find them, and you'll learn really, really quickly whether the people you're having an argument or debate with, depending on their commentary and their points of view and how they organize and present their ideas, whether you're in a Twitter fight for supremacy, a fight to the death, or whether you're in an ideological exchange of ideas, and that will be blissfully apparent to you very quickly. But the last point on Twitter, before I get into my examples of fights, is it is probably the best source of important information. When you're looking for breaking news events, you will figure out very quickly who in the world does have access to that. So I follow probably the number three Thomson Reuters, Al Jazeera, and a couple of sub-stack authors in the U.S.
They are literally the fastest pen to paper when events happen around the world, and they're trusted. I don't follow mainstream media in Canada or the U.S. because they're either just mouthpieces for the current government, whoever it is, or they're argumentatively against the government. So you just take a wave.
I would never, you know, for poop and giggles, if you want to follow national media in your country, go right ahead. But I follow Al Jazeera. I mean, the best stories I find out what's really going on in Canadian politics comes from Al Jazeera, the BBC, DW in Germany, and France 24. They are by far the most accurate and in-depth coverage of Canadian politics.
It comes from foreign journalists. What we have in this country is ridiculously poor. But America suffers from the same thing, and I know there's the same thing. I mean, you watch Sky News Australia, it's like watching Fox in the U.S.
You're not getting accurate assessments as to what's going on. You watch MSNBC, it's the same thing. So in your area of interest, say, let's take preparedness. In preparedness, there are a few hashtags.
One I'll talk about at the end called EMG, hashtag EMG Twitter. It's where emergency management ideological thought is found. Not a bunch of spews from government organizations, but it's where people who work in the emergency management climate addressing type of research theorists, professors, adjuncts. So it's a place where you can go to get with these hashtags that are important.
You can organize and follow the hashtag so it shows up in your feed. You can also go on the top of Twitter and go most recent or the suggested algorithmic answer. And if you go to the most recent and you follow a couple of key individuals and organizations that actually have accurate access to timely information, and they're not buffoons, but they actually tell you what's going on, like Al Jazeera, Thompson Reuters, and a few other, BBC is another one, the BBC World Service, you will get immediate up-to-date information on your Twitter feed faster than any other source you will get out there, right? So that's, and it's also a great source for the main players because when things come out on Twitter, the main players are very, very quickly apt to comment and throw their two cents in.
So it's a great source of immediate information, far better than CNN.com or anything that a journalist would spin, but it comes from that. So Twitter's a great source for that. But just be careful that you're not creating that echo chamber. So for example, if I believe that the world is on the edge of global collapse and I follow a bunch of people that think that, and those hashtags, and then all of a sudden something happens in the world, I'm going to get an inbox full of a bunch of wingnuts telling me to go grab my AK-47 and my bulletproof vest, my go-bag, and head for the mountains because it's about to all come down, when in reality it was a simple event in the Middle East.
So Twitter's great for that. So just remember, you can get access to the world's most accurate and timely information. You just have to figure out for your genre, for your area you're after, who those voices are. But make sure if you do nothing else, that you subscribe to everyone who speaks in the space who is credible.
So for example, I'll go back to the vaccine mandates. There are credible people on both sides of that debate, and there's 6.2 million wingnuts. I can't tell you who they are, but you'll figure out pretty quickly. On the left and the right spectrum, and the one side and the opposite side of whatever issue you're concerned with, there are credible people and you've got to find them.
So let's get to my Twitter fights. And here's a prime example. I'm going to talk about the fight that's crazy. So I got in a fight with a communist.
So we were talking about the absolute need for additional funding in health care. And wherever you live in publicly funded health care exists, except for the United States of America, it seems like it's always underfunded. I mean, you can pull out articles for the last 50 years, and public health care is always underfunded. So you have to ask yourself whether it's underfunded or mismanaged.
So I take the position of, let's first have a deep dive into how we organize, structure, and execute the task of public health care before we start throwing more freaking money at it. So my point was, is that in case you haven't seen inflation, employment crisis, global stresses, taxpayers are broke. Taxpayers don't have any more money. So every time you talk about different levels of government contributing money to solve the problem, it all comes from the same place.
Even corporate tax comes out of the pockets of taxpayers, because that's how a corporation generates revenue. So in the end, it's your and my pocket that has to pay for everything. So every time some Yahoo jumps on Twitter and says, we need to fund health care more, I'm like, what you're saying is you want to reach deeper into my wallet without asking permission to take the money. So fair enough.
I said, how about we go? ahead and look at different ways of organizing health care not a private model but through the public space well this communist jumps in out of right field and i should have known earlier but i spent far too much time in this fight and she i'm assuming it's a she because she had a picture of a woman as her avatar but this is twitter you can be one of 427 different identities and nobody knows if you're a cat or a bot so anyhow she jumps in and says let's tax the rich and so i you know i thought this was in her first couple of statements were actually very well formulated how about taxing the rich and paying their fair share which is a cute little tagline we hear all the time so then i you know responded with statistics and she lives in the same province she was clear that she lived in the same province that i do in ontario and canada so i showed her statistics from ontario and said hey listen um the people that make more than 90 000 a year if you can call that rich but the people who make more than 90 000 a year pay over 95 of the net taxes so if you call somebody like me who makes over 90 000 rich then i already pay 100 of the tax bill every cent barring a few little net contributions that come from people in the 60 to 70k range people above 90k already pay 100 pretty much 100 of the income tax bill in the country so i'm like what you're saying is you want me to pay more like okay and i'm saying you do realize blah blah blah and she started jumping in and saying well it's all about exploitation and then i started to see the communist manifesto come out you know how billionaires and millionaires have exploited people they didn't work hard and i said well why don't you become a millionaire put in the 80 hours a week don't get paid for you know 10 or 11 years you know eat ramen noodles and chase your dream and anyhow the whole thing got dive really quickly into i was a bleep you were a bleep i was 50 plus years old i'm going to die soon hurry up and die boomer uh i'm going to you know she's young she said she was young and beautiful and so she's got her whole life ahead of me so just give me give her my damn money so she can do whatever she wants and it just dove into this tirade and i stuck around far too long for my own senses because i got drawn into how can somebody really i mean if it's a bot it's a bot but how can somebody really dive and believe this crap and i got delved way down into it right so this became a why communist manifestos don't work and then it was just i'm a dumb bleep bleep effing whatever and at some point i just went up to the little three dots there and muted the conversation and walked away so i got into a fight with a communist over whether billionaires and millionaires we should take all their money and pay for health care um so not the smartest day in my life that's for sure but a good debate i got into was with a public health doctor who had 300 000 subscribers they follow me i follow them and their points uh that they were making it was a very short debate because when you have 300 000 followers you can't expect a public health doctor or anybody with 300 000 followers to get into a long detailed debate but i got two or three twitter exchange which is a pretty good for an intelligent debate before you really realize where each other's at you're not going to persuade each other and the point but the point was in this debate was simply about using the data from vaccines and health outcomes for research without the consent of the participants so my point was you can't use my data for the fact that a i'm vaccinated by the province and then my province and then my health outcomes aggregated without my consent so the province can't be drawing all these results and producing all of these papers on publicly available data on the health of people until you actually ask me to consent for my data to be part of a study it's one of the basic rigors that happens in academic research and they responded by yeah but it's a pandemic so they're going with the data is important and we're going to use it anyhow and we can't differentiate you and my point was absolutely right there's no way to disaggregate that data and dig me out of it my point that i was debating with this uh professor both the professor of public health and a doctor and a phd was that you can't include my data in that without my consent and we agreed to disagree they agreed that i was technically correct when it comes to research uh but in a pandemic this called for extraordinary measures so that was a healthy debate of two people that reasonably agree but had different points of view on an idea we exchanged three or four tweets it went very very well we didn't yell and scream at each other we still follow each other not bad good day lasted 25 minutes and we both carried on the communist fight that was a six-hour ideal of my life i'll never get back and the last part we want to talk about today is twitter and preparedness so if you're looking for a access to the latest information on research etc follow hashtag emg which is capitalized and twitter and what emg twitter does is it gives you access to the professors uh and academics researchers and leading thinkers in the space of preparedness so if you're looking for logical analysis for where preparedness measures where government agencies are headed where researchers looking into and that kind of topical focus then hashtag emg twitter is for you if you're looking for the sky is falling well hashtag prepper hashtag survival are places for you to go so when you search out preparedness i use hashtag preparedness hashtag emergency preparedness uh on instagram but those hashtags are not readily available or even used on twitter so the difference with you may be used to hashtags on tiktok or instagram or something like that but then you're turning around and realizing that oh snap this is not available on twitter and it's a different set of hashtags so you've got to find that out but there is some great information on preparedness out there uh there are some great communities they're doing good work on twitter but the vast majority of community engagement um is just ridiculously low ridiculously low uh so twitter is a great place to find information immediate data it's a great place for preparedness uh to get access to the higher level thinking and ideological orientation or to bring yourself down to your latest survival tips hashtag tips is a great one to follow as well so hopefully today's little conversation about twitter uh put a smile on your face made you laugh a couple of times i'm sure you've gotten into some pretty good twitter fights with people uh i am uh unapologetically me on twitter i have a very specific message here on the podcast very specific message on my other social media feeds but i am an arguably slightly different personality on twitter and that's because it's the nature of the public square it represents it requires a different approach and a different presentation so if you follow me on instagram and then you follow me over on twitter you follow me on the different social media you're going to see a slightly different approach each social media feed requires a different approach for somebody who's putting content and for somebody who consumes you can't bring the same frame and attitude to each one of the social medias because they do it they're fighting for the same space but they're doing it from a different perspective so thank you very much for joining us this week on inside my canoe head drop over to our website www.insidemycanoehead.ca visit our parent company at www.preparednesslabs.ca uh and go over to my buy me a coffee website the link is on my inside my canoe website and the link to my um consultant business there is on the major business is on the business website we'll have a look we're putting more things up as i said um if you follow uh my newsletter and sign up for the newsletter over on inside my canoe head.ca i announced this week that uh publishing has been arranged for the first book um it is going to be something along the lines of fast and frugal it's uh essentially a immediate and a next to no to zero dollar investment guide to preparedness short sweet to the point should be out the end of august be up on kobo and it'll be on my buy me a coffee website so that's coming out soon there will be a video course that goes with it that'll be almost like not an audio book but a visual presentation of everything that you see in the book depending whether you you know like to consume media we have a new preparedness series coming out on our youtube channel is going to start a series this week on no power and we're going to start preparedness no power preparedness no internet preparedness no water preparedness no shelter and start attacking these things in very direct practical ways to do it that cost next to no money or cost money if you're willing to do money so the point being is is we here at inside my canoe head always believe that preparedness is free and it always will be so we're guaranteed to be continuing to give you the tips and tricks that will greatly increase your level of preparedness without having to spend a freaking dime so thank you very much for your time take care of yourself and have yourself an incredible week