All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside Mine. Can you head? I am your host, Dr. D.
Today. We are going to talk about stuff, kit, and equipment. So sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage. Let's get at it.
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February 2024 is going down as the most volumous downloads in the four years since this podcast began. This began as a pandemic project in April of 2020 when I realized the entire population of the world was utterly and hopefully unprepared for a systemic, significant disruption that the population simply was not capable of managing through this at an aggregate level, but yet throughout it, there were a number of notable examples where people did exceptionally well in the pandemic and leveraged what was going on in the pandemic to build powerhouse economic activity and powerhouse protected and safe families. So we looked at that. I started this podcast.
Our first month, we had five downloads, four of which were family members. The second month, we had a 26 downloads. I think six or eight of those were family members and I thought that was incredible. My friends, today, we are going to breach near 1000 downloads for the month of February 2024.
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So this week, we are on the eighth week. We're sorry, yeah, the eighth week. I know the seventh week, sorry, I should know this, right? We're on the seventh week of the 10 weeks of practical preparedness.
And this week is all about kit equipment stuff, stockpiles, because so much of what we talk about in preparedness are so much that's in the ether, so much stuff that you are flooded with across the social media mediums is all about kit. There is a distinctive effort to correlate preparedness in physical goods, to make a measure of your preparedness somehow related to the volumes and the type of equipment and stockpiles that you've invested in and decided to place in your basement. We fight that notion here. I use evidence and research to demonstrate that preparedness is a lifestyle, not a stockpile, and not directly correlated in any way, shape or form.
However, we as human beings living in a modern, technologically enabled society, as we do based and supported by the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure, we have stuff, right? The way we've constructed our lives, we require stuff around us, physical goods, to be able to go along with our day, right? I'm talking beyond clothing, I'm talking beyond basic food and the basic things that we need. So if we set the animalistic requirements aside, the basic things we need to survive as an animal in our current modern environment, and we look at stuff, we all have it, right?
And so today's podcast is gonna be all about the interrelation and the number of ideas and concepts about physical goods and how that relates to preparedness. So first of all, let's look at intent. Why does this stuff exist in our house? You look around, there's some studies that have said the average North American household is 300,000 individual items.
By the way that equates to just about the number of skews that are in a modern Walmart. Think about that. The average North American family home has the same number of differentiating individual items as Walmart does on any average given day for sale. It blows us away, but you know who you are.
So the intent is it really comes from four main themes, and we're gonna touch each one of them individually. The first one is the stuff that you have exists for a defined purpose, right? Very specific defined purpose, it's there, it fulfills a role. Then we have the Just In Case.
You have stuff in your house that you just might need on some day, it was acquired for that purpose, and it's there just in case you might need it. We have sentimental value items. We have items that we hold on to because within that item is some type of sentimental connection generally and normally to an experience or a person that is no longer here. And the last one is let's be blunt.
Persuasion by an influencer or an important person and something they said did or showed you that persuaded you, shall we say, to part with your hard earned money and acquire this good. So if we think of it that way, and we think about why that's there, let's talk about timeline. In preparedness we talk about being able to provide your animalistic requirements as part of your shelter in place. And we touched on this earlier this week on our kit and equipment podcast that came out on Monday, we have stuff, we need stuff, let's be frank, right?
We need to eat, we need to be able to provide shelter. We need to be able to provide health, safety and security. And health, safety and security is like, we need a first aid kit, we need a fire extinguisher, we need a lockable house, we need a way to defend ourselves if necessary, et cetera. I mean, these are the basic animalistic requirements.
So where does the timeline come from, right? So we talk about the evidence-based theory of it, but it also comes from the military. And I was a logistician in the army, I was a supply chain manager, so I lived, breathed and was almost near assassinated based upon my ability to deliver DOS. And DOS is an acronym that stands for Days of Supply.
So an army runs on, Napoleon used to famously say it runs on its stomach, right? But in reality, a modern army runs on three combat supplies, which is beans, bullets and gas, right? So you gotta be able to feed the troops, you gotta be able to fuel the vehicles, and you gotta get them bullets to fire, right? And the olden days used to walk and ride a horse, and you used the sword.
So in the previous days, yes, the army marched on the stomach because it was the only commodity that needed to be supplied regularly. They carried all their weapons, they didn't run out of ammunition, and they walked where they went, so they didn't need mobility. So the army has it set up in something called an echelon system, and that simply means that I'll use the Canadian example, a Canadian infantry battalion or a Ford unit carries three days of supply, one on the soldier, one on the company commander, and one on the quartermaster of the role that I filled. Right behind it is you have your brigade sustainment operation, which in Canadian nomenclature is a service battalion.
And the service battalion carried a days of supply on wheels for the entire fighting brigade. So every unit in the brigade, they carried it on a wheels on supply. You go back one level to the division level replenishment area, they carried a number of days of supply in a division stock point, et cetera. And so we would regularly meet and replenish ourselves, right?
So I never carried more than I could carry number one because I was limited in my mobility, but I always carried what I needed and I never carried more than that because that wasn't my mission. My mission was very clearly defined and my kit and equipment that I had allowed me to fulfill the mission. There was regular replenishment, there was inventory management, you know, life O'Lilow, all the different inventory management theories and the schements out there. The intent was I made sure through stock taking and percentage survey of my holdings that I was reasonably confident that I had what I should have.
And when I told people I had it, that I actually would have it, right? So the timeline and days of supply comes from a militaristic background, right? And so we as individuals have a days of supply on hand. I try to not use that a lot when I talk about preparedness because sometimes I do my best to try to separate the militaristic aspect of preparedness because I think it's far too much like that without everybody in camo and minutemen kits and buggo bags and doing patrolling on my property and all this other stuff that you see that I really try to work to separate preparedness from, but it is based on the concept of days of supply, right?
I have so many days of supply because I know there's a replenishment, right? So when you pick your timeline for your personal preparedness plan, we recommend 14 days because 94% of the time or 94.2% of the time, the system, the critical infrastructure system that you and I rely upon to provide the food, finance, water, transportation and distribution system of the goods that we need to survive when it goes down because of a significant disruption, 94% of the time it is back up and running in 14 days, right? 94% of the time it's back up and running in 14 days, AKA, I recommend 14 days, not because it's my opinion. I mean, frankly, who cares what my opinion is and you shouldn't, the evidence tells us that 14 days is when I can replenish from my stock, from society, from my rear echelon, let's call it that, call it the supermarket, right?
I know that if the super, if access to the grocery store is interrupted, I'm confident that 94% of the time within 14 days, I will get access to a grocery store again. So I only need to carry a maximum of 14 days in my household. That's why we recommend it. That's the key to army, days of supply and replenishment echelon system that exists in our society, right?
Because what we would find, and I worked in the grocery store and I did a little bit, not a great deal, but I did a little bit of research into their stock taking, most grocery stores hold about three days of supply for 10% of the population. The way it works is most grocery stores expect people to purchase a large load of groceries about every 10 days. So they expect to see 10% of the population, they hold that they service to show up every day. Now, that's a belled curve, shall we say, the weekends are far busier, but if you average it out, so every week 70% of the supported population will show up to the grocery store to buy and replenish their stockpiles.
They keep three days for 10%. So that 30 is there, right? Now they have a daily replenishment system from their warehouses and inventory. So if you understand that system, you very clearly see why surge and panic buying in the pandemic that occurred, you have 70% of the population is supposed to be there every week, so I carry 30% a day, which means I'm able to manage this weekend surges, et cetera.
But if 80% of the supported population show up over a 24-hour period, that is over double and almost triple the capacity of holdings I have, you stock out a grocery store, right? And the entire replenishment system is built in a very, very well-managed system that doesn't have a surge capacity, it's not designed to have a surge capacity. So when things dramatically run out, the grocery store can't surge shipments of things in because that's extra trucks, that's extra drivers, that's extra material handlers to load the trucks, all those steps aren't available. So this is why you saw the situation you did at points through the pandemic.
But setting that aside is just to know that the same replenishment system that exists in the army exists to a very similar degree in all of our supply chains and logistics, but in our food system and what we talk about in preparedness and animalistic requirements and figuring your timeline in your family preparedness plan is very much the same activity. You are building your days of supply and your supply chain management and inventory stockpile program for your family, we just refer to it as a timeline. Understanding that grounding, let's look at the four ideas we talked about. So when things exist for a defined purpose, and this is my view of the theory minimalism now, I've talked about a couple of episodes of minimalism in preparedness because I believe in the value of minimalism, but that it's just an idea.
So minimalism comes about number one from a series of great writers. My favorite is Dave Bruno wrote the book called The Hundred Thing Challenge, it's a dozen years old now. And as far before Marie Kondo or Joshua Becker or the minimalist or anything like that, but the idea behind Dave Bruno is he just wanted to do an exercise to see, and if he could live with a hundred items, right? Just him, like the rest of his family wasn't involved.
So he paired his personal items that he used on a day to day basis, and he wanted to see if he could limit that to a hundred or under and then operate that for a period of time. Just to see if lightning, his material load, made a difference, et cetera, right? Great book, go out and read it, 100% recommend. The other part of minimalism that I prescribe to, my version of minimalism, and people love saying that, this is my version of minimalism to me, I define minimalism, et cetera, but to me it exists.
Everything that I own, every physical good that sets in my house that is under my core responsibility, it exists for a purpose, it serves a purpose. Now, the purpose I have may be different from yours. For example, I'm a pretty simple guy, I have very few recreational habits and very few activities, I hunt, I fish, I golf and I backcountry paddle. So I have all of the kit and equipment in good order, quality stuff that allows me to do the things in the leisure activity I do.
I don't have a bunch of kit for leisure activities that I don't do. If I no longer do a project or I no longer do an activity, I dispose of the material associated with that, right? So I have stuff, yeah, absolutely, I don't count myself, I don't have a hundred items, I have far more than that, but everything I possess serves a purpose. In minimalism, there's all kinds of other rules, like the 2020 rule is one of my favorite.
If you can replace the item in 20 minutes for $20, get rid of it and others, there's a bunch of them. What minimalism the benefit of it is, however you decide to ascribe to it is, it provides you mobility, less clutter. But let's be clear, the research, and again, here we come back to the evidence, the evidence shows that people with less physical items are less stress. Now, we're not taking that to the extreme to the homeless or the abject poverty levels, but we're saying that people who declutter their lives, and we talk about decluttering your life in my book, preparedness, simplified book on the beginning, it's available on our website, it's about decluttering your life from a mental health perspective is that your levels of anxiety and stress go down when you have less stuff, right?
Because stuff needs you to clean, organize, move it around, do whatever with it, it's just true. Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, but the data clearly shows that. So that's just minimalism, it's looking around with your stuff related to preparedness, the kit and equipment that you may have right now for preparedness does it serve a purpose. Or does it sit for something that may not happen, otherwise known as the Just in Case crowd.
We call those bug out bags, people create bug out bags for just in case. I advocate for the creation of an evacuation kit for your family. You can call it a bug out bag, but it doesn't look like, I don't advocate for anything that you see on TV, whatever, or on the YouTube, but I talk about the need that you're trifecta of preparedness plans outlines the beginning step in preparedness, right? It is the core basics for planning for preparedness for a family, right?
You have your most likely and your most dangerous, which are either ends of the spectrum of things that could happen to you. The most dangerous being an evacuation, right? So you may have to go on very short order. So there are preparations that you do in blue sky planning and in times of peace and calm.
So that and the highly unlikely, but incredibly disruptive event of an evacuation gets ordered for you and you have to go that you've already figured out that activity to its finite core. And it may require, depending on what you're going to do, to have some stuff set aside ready to go. More than likely though, what I advocate for is an understanding like my evacuation kit is a checklist. I don't have stuff packed pre-packed by the front door.
I don't, but what I have is a checklist because what happens in high stress difficult situations is people don't rise to the occasion. People fall to their level of training, right? That's why high end military units, high end police units, high end firefighter units consistently and regularly practice their tactics, techniques and procedures the same way over and over and over again. So that when the high stress day comes and evacuation is ordered, you've practiced the evacuation.
You know what your family's going to do. Everybody understands the role and evacuation and you execute it, right? So my evacuation kit is a checklist. It tells me exactly what to do in order.
It tells me exactly what to grab and where these items are. And it tells me exactly where I'm going, what my exact and specific destination is and the routes to get there, right? So what I do is I take away decision making and times of stress. I don't need to think about what to do.
Next, I need to execute a plan that I have. So that's what I do. I have a plan and I execute it. So examples of non-properately management stuff are profound and they can be impactful.
And one example is a friend of mine who I've been talking to and trying to initiate into the world of preparedness. So I talked about some things that they can consider looking at their animalistic requirements. And so they decided to take on food, right? So they figured they decided their timeline was like five days, right?
So they bought five days worth of food and put it in the basement, right? And so six months later, they're throwing it all out because it had expired, right? They didn't bring in rotation principles with your stuff. So the idea behind having a timeline of preparedness and stuff in your house, I'm on a longer timeline.
I've talked about that before. But if you look at a 14 day timeline, it means you have 14 days of everything that you need. So when I buy something from the grocery store, I put it into the back of the stockpile and I take from the front of the stockpile. You know, you've seen these cans of soup rollers and stuff.
The idea is, is that I put the new stuff at the back and take the old stuff from the front and you rotate, which means my stockpile represents things that I use on a daily basis. So I go in, I grab something and if a stock starts to get low, I look at it for the grocery run and I back it up, right? And then if you do that, you're never gonna run into a situation where what you think you've done is buy a bunch of stuff for preparedness and stockpile. But if you're not using it, unfortunately when a big bad day comes and you might want it, it's gonna be expired, it's going to be poisonous, potentially depending on what the product is, and it's going to be unusable.
So having stuff is one thing, properly managing and rotating the stuff through is important. There's another thing about preparing as you see in the Justin Case world, which are kits, car kits, EDC. Now, I've done a number of YouTube shorts, et cetera, on my EDC. My EDC is two things, right?
I mean, everybody carries a phone, everybody carries a wallet. I don't consider that part of your EDC. Welcome to the modern society. I carry a Swiss Army knife and a small pocket flashlight.
That's it. That's my EDC. You go to EDC channels, you go to people's car kits and you see these molly webbing things on the back of the seats of their car. They've got their truck guns.
They've got, there's a whole bunch of people who have taken having things on hand that I may need just in case to an exponential level. And if it's for a highly improbable event, then you may be pouring a whole bunch of your limited financial resources into something that is likely never to occur, right? Which is why I don't have a massive big evacuation bag with everything ready to go with the water, the food, all that stuff, sitting by the front door of my house, because the probability is so low. I've mitigated that risk by having the list saying, go here, grab this, go there, grab that, right?
Because I do believe that I will have a minimal of five minutes. And within five minutes, and I have tested this as funny as it may seem that I can gather myself. And I was actually on a TV marketplace as a disaster expert on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Where we put a number of families through that, we told them on a moment's notice, you have five minutes to prepare to evacuate your home, go grab all the things you would, and then we assess their performance.
So it's not a bad thing to practice, right? You create that evacuation list and then you see if you can actually correlate it, bring it together and put it in portable containers for a period of that, because I use this stuff regularly, right? I don't have stuff for evacuation. What I use for evacuation is stuff that I use regularly, right?
So it would be ridiculous for me to duplicate it and throw it in a bag at the front door, or to have the stuff that I use regularly in a bag at the front door that I have to rotate through, right? So this is a management of stuff about that preparedness avenue. We also have sentimental goods. This has a relationship to evacuation as well.
I've talked about an evacuation is when people understand what to take, I ask the question, what's priceless, right? When people answer everything, obviously, everything around me is priceless. But I'm like, no, seriously, if money wasn't a question, what could you not replace, right? And when it works down to me, there are three things in my house that represent truly priceless items that I can't replace.
One is my Queens Commission signed by the Governor General of Canada, authorizing me to be an officer in the military. That thing burns down, you can't get another one, right? It doesn't matter the circumstances. It's against the law for them to be reissued, okay?
The second one is, I've got a little jar of sentimental stuff that I picked up along the way at every single site that I visited in the wonderful country of Afghanistan. That may be replaceable, but the logistics of that is just far too difficult. And the last one is my father's Bible. My father has long since passed away.
In 1955, my great-grandmother gave him a Bible and wrote an inscription in the front to my father. You can't get that back. I can get all the Bibles in the world. There are billions of them.
I can't get that one. So literally that is it for me. Of all the things in my house, everything else can burn to the ground, and my life will be okay. In fact, let's be serious.
Those three things can burn to the ground, and my life will be okay. I'd just be very upset about it, right? But a lot of the time, our sentimental items that we have in the house, even some preparedness stuff, is limited to our ties and our memories, right? And a lot of it, there's a whole emotional piece here about ties to previous lives, previous events, letting go, the theories of memory.
And I'm not gonna go down the train. I'm not gonna try to give you a cycle of Bible lesson on why you think it's important to hang on to your dead relatives, whatever it is as a memory. Minimalism talks about take a picture of it because the memory is in the picture, the view of the stuff, not the stuff itself. So if you take a picture of grandma's figurine and then you donate or sell grandma's figurine, but you retain the picture in a digital format, you still have the memories associated with the item.
I don't care how you look at it. The point is is that a lot of times, the sentimental item is of no use or value other than the fact that it holds and represents a tie to a previous event occurred in your life. A lot of times people will do this. You'll see families who wanna bring back souvenirs from various trips, right?
So you look around their house and there's a whole bunch of souvenirs related to trips that they've been on. That item holds a memory, it holds no purpose in life, right? It doesn't serve you on a daily or a fairly irregular basis, but it holds a sentimental value tied to a spot. You have to decide whether that's important for you.
I don't know, but it's part of stuff. It's one of the themes of why stuff is around us. And the last one is my favorite, Persuasion influencers. How many of us, and I am guilty of charge, have gone out and purchased something because a really cool YouTuber used it, right?
A YouTuber gets up and says, these are the top 10 backpacking items for 2024. Man, I used to fall for that stuff all the time. I have since totally purged, and I'm continuing to purge my backpacking equipment to get it down to the, just what I need. Now, I buy high quality, very, very expensive kit, but because it lasts me, my rain jacket, a Helly Hanson.
Yeah, other people sell rain jackets, but I've had this thing through some pretty incredible epic events all around North America. It's eight years old and the thing is literally bomb proof. I wouldn't ever venture into the woods without this thing. It's not the lightest, it's not the sexy looking thing, but it is literally a piece of bomb proof gear.
I bought it because an influencer said it was the best one. I mean, come on, we've all done it, right? We see the top 10 lists, and I rant about the top 10 lists all the time. You're new to prepping.
Here's the top 10 things that you need to stockpile on. First, I suggest to batteries, that you get stockpiles of batteries and then you're gonna have to move on to perishable food. I recommend 30 days of parro... You recommend what, based upon what?
What experience have you gone through that has demonstrated or what piece of historical evidence you can point to that has demonstrated that that is what people beginning into preparedness should do, right? My, what we tell you here at Inside Micin' New Head and what's written in my book at preparednesslabs.ca and on my video course at preparednesslabs.ca is very, very simple. It's based upon evidence. We looked at the kit equipment and possessions that were held by survivors of natural and man-made disasters going all the way back to the 1920s in Japan and earthquakes.
And we brought that forward. We studied the populations that did better. We studied the groups of populations that bounced back faster and we looked at the activities they did, the friendships and connections they had and the kit and equipment they had. We take all of that well over 100 years of evidence and we design an animalistic system to support you.
It's based on evidence. It's not my opinion, right? Who cares what anybody's opinion is? Frankly, I couldn't give two hoots.
You tell me this is what I should do, I'm gonna ask you and I'm gonna go down a road here that not a lot of you are gonna agree upon. I spent 28 years in the Army. I did supply chain management, but I ran around and did a whole bunch of cool stuff, right? Just because I was in the Army doesn't make me good at anything.
I probably can shoot better than most people because I've shot hundreds of thousands of rounds. If I did CQB training, I'm probably better at that. I ran supply chains across permissive and non-permissive and semi-permissive environments, right? So I can set up distribution nodes better than the average person.
But because I was in the Army doesn't make me better at preparedness. It doesn't, okay? Because I was a police officer for it. So if somebody was a police officer, it doesn't make them better in security, right?
Everybody has an opinion. You remember, you ever hear that phrase that I have 20 years of experience and it can be expressed as, I have one year of experience repeated 20 times or I have built a cumulative 20 years of experience. You're staring at two different people there. So understand the source of the information that you begin with and understand that what we tell you here is based upon research and evidence, right?
When I say 94% of the sectors of critical infrastructure are restored in 14 days and that's why I recommend 14 days, I've done the evidence study. I've looked at the data from across dozens of jurisdictions in North America and looked at the failure rate and the revival rate of these different sectors of critical infrastructure put together a mathematical statistical formula came up with 94% and I have the evidence to back up what I said. If somebody comes on a prepping channel or a YouTube channel and tells you you need 30 days of this, what's their evidence other than their opinion? And if it's their opinion, then the smart individual discounts that on the spot.
Full stop. And I do that and I people get better at a shape when I say that. Don't listen to me because it's my opinion. Listen to me because I have the evidence to back up what I tell you.
That's what's grounded in our book, prepared to simplify book one, the beginning, $7 ebook. It's available on COBO and Amazon. So as I like to say, $7 Canadian and a lot less American. What's in that book is evidence based.
If you go to our website at preparedness labs.ca, there's a free download. You don't even need to leave your email. I don't even know you were there but there's a free download on starting to build a family preparedness plan, right? Free of charge.
I don't know you be there. You don't have to subscribe to my email list. It's right there. You can if you want to, but it's a free everything on that sheet.
Those three pages, PDF document that's there is based upon evidence. I've built this education system and I've built the recommendations based upon my over a decade of experience in researching. I've researched this subject of individual household and community preparedness and resilience for over a decade, this and this alone. Nothing else.
This is what I research. This is what I've written literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of published material on and it's all evidence based, not opinions. So enough of the rant off the soapbox. Hopefully today's episode talking about the different themes and why kit equipment comes in.
Why kit is important? We've said it in the previous episode that the number one thing to remember is that every physical good that's entered your life needs to serve a purpose. If it does for you, you require no justification for anybody else. We recommend that you decide on your preparedness kit through the definition and construction of a personal preparedness plan.
When you build your personal preparedness plan, as you go through it, you will check boxes. I can do this. I can do that. Oh, I want to be able to do this activity.
I'm lacking. I can't do that activity. And here's the piece of kit that'll help me. That's the exercise that should identify pieces of kit equipment that you will acquire to support your preparedness initiatives.
Not a top 10 list. Not what somebody threw in a buggo bag or not when you can buy a commercial off the self-survival kit off of Amazon, all right? You can do that if you have the money, but if you want something designed for you to support you and your family and the incredible people and individuals they are, that's the strategy. So thanks again for joining us this weekend inside MyCanoo Head.
And a final shout out again, this has been the greatest month that we've ever done in downloads here at Inside MyCanoo Head. I put my hand on my heart and thank everyone. Drop over to our website, www.insidemycanoohead.ca. A bunch of good, cool stuff is there.
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And then we get to start season 10. Take care and stay safe.