Show Notes: A Non-Apocalyptic Intro to Personal Emergency Preparedness with Jeff Donaldson, PhD | Episode #34

Overview

In this next episode, I was joined by Jeff Donaldson, PhD to kick off a new topic we haven’t discussed on the podcast yet — emergency preparedness. This episode starts with a look at the topic from a micro perspective, personal preparedness, and future episodes will touch on the macro, such as corporate or public-level preparedness and resiliency.

Jeff brings a tremendous amount of experience directly relating to preparedness to the podcast today, from his experience as a military officer in the Canadian Army (28 years!), as the principal researcher at Preparedness Labs Incorporated, and as an Associate Faculty member at Royal Roads University. Plus, he’s earned his MA in Disaster and Emergency Management, along with his doctorate in Public Policy. All that to say, he’s a wealth of knowledge for us on the subject.

He even hosts a highly acclaimed podcast on preparedness (link below) and leads training sessions where he communicates (as he says), “Non-Apocalyptic evidence-based strategies for rational people with dreams.”

Today’s conversation focused on the philosophy of preparedness, the critical role of social capital and how it increases your ability to survive and thrive, personal responsibility, and systematic thinking/planning/considerations for you and I.

— Learn more about Jeff and his projects here —

– Preparedness Labs Inc

– Inside My Canoehead (Podcast)

Highlights from This Episode

Scalability of Preparedness: Preparedness starts at an individual level and can scale to organizational and community levels.
Non-Apocalyptic Approach: Emphasizes rational, evidence-based preparedness over apocalyptic scenarios.
Personal Responsibility: The importance of accepting personal responsibility for one’s outcomes in preparedness.
Special Needs Consideration: Tailoring preparedness plans to account for special needs within a family, such as medical requirements.
Social Capital: Building strong relationships and networks within the community as a key factor in effective preparedness and resilience.
Preparedness as a Lifestyle: Viewing preparedness as an ongoing lifestyle rather than a one-time effort or stockpiling of resources.
Effective Communication: Utilizing marketing strategies to communicate preparedness messages effectively to diverse audiences.
Insurance and Building Codes: The need for policy changes to include disaster risk information in property transactions and promote resilient building practices.
Iterative Process: Preparedness should be revisited regularly, with a commitment of small amounts of time each month to review and update plans.
Role of Financial, Physical, and Mental Health: Emphasizing the importance of financial stability, physical fitness, and mental well-being as foundational elements of preparedness.

Memorable Quotes:

“Preparedness is the blanket of insulation that you wrap your life in so that you can go chase your dreams and rock an incredible life knowing that you’ve taken a few steps to insulate yourself from those shocks that are beyond your control.”
“Preparedness is a lifestyle. It’s not a stockpile. You cannot purchase your way to preparedness.”
“If you don’t take care of yourself, then you’re really not much good to any industry that you work in.”
“Your number one resource you’ll ever have is your neighbor, absolutely without question.”

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Books:
– Using Social Marketing for Public Emergency Preparedness by Professor Nancy Meyer-Emerick
Podcasts:
– Inside My Canoe Head – Jeff’s podcast on preparedness
– Epic Emergency Preparedness in Canada – A podcast for experts and practitioners in the field
People:
– Ryan Holiday – Mentioned in relation to the idea of “The Obstacle Is the Way”
– Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee) – Mentioned for his marketing strategies and the concept of “jab, jab, jab, hook”

Use CONTROL + F to search the transcript below if you want to learn more!

Transcript from this episode

*Note: this transcript was generated using automated software, and may not be a perfect transcription. But I hope you find it useful.

Travis 0:00
Jeff, I've really been looking forward to this conversation all week. I think emergency preparedness might be on a number of people's minds. There's lots of uncertainty in the world, economic, political,

you know, even several wars going on in the world. And really, since probably about January of this year, I'd really started to go, like, personally, just on, like, a deep dive through the topic of personal preparedness, and then preparedness around organizations, and that included, you know, reading books, articles, listening to podcasts, probably some good podcasts, probably ones that you might tell me I should stay away from, because maybe they're a little too I don't know, less researched, maybe a less rational perspective.

And this is emergency preparedness is really a new topic here on the podcast. You're the first specialist in this area that I've talked to, so I think it's going to be really interesting for people to hear your perspective, because we could focus on more of a micro level today, and then I think in some of the future podcasts, the topic can be more and more broad, maybe as it relates to organizations or communities. So Jeff, I really appreciate you sharing your time with me today. Thank you. Oh,

Jeff 1:14
it's an absolute pleasure to be here, Travis, and I think you're absolutely right. Preparedness is scalable. So really, really, it starting at an individual level, discussing about the individual level and the parameters that contain that

is a great place to start, because then you can scale that to organizational level, to multi organizational level, multi location level, and then you can just take it to whatever stage of parameter that you feel is necessary

Travis 1:41
Absolutely, and even just thinking about security practitioners generally, if we're not each individually prepared to take care of ourselves, our family, you know, people that are closest to us, you know, how can we go about giving advice to the largest corporations in the world when it comes to emergency preparedness? So I think it's really something that should be near and dear to the hearts of all security practitioners.

Jeff 2:05
A lot of what we teach in my firm and our products and what we do online is the fact that everything does start with you. And security practitioners themselves have to live a higher degree of stress, anxiety in their lifestyle, they're exposed to uncertain work times, uncertain schedules and things that that disrupt a normal pattern of life, and, and, and so when we get into it later, we start talking about personal preparedness. You know, I'll definitely highlight the idea that, yeah, absolutely, if you don't take care of yourself, then you're really not much good to any industry that you work in, right? Yeah,

Travis 2:45
absolutely. Just, just being able to help our, you know, people in our our personal circles and small groups. And Jeff, I think one good place to start. Could you share a little bit about your about, I guess, first the work that you're doing today, and then what led you in that direction?

Jeff 3:08
Yeah, absolutely. So today, I'm the principal researcher at preparedness labs, Incorporated, which is a Canadian Research and Education firm into the field of preparedness and community resilience. We deal at the individual, the family, the community level and the small organizational level. So you know, businesses, organizations upward of 50 people or so, and we provide education at how to navigate what we refer to as exogenous shock, disruptions that are beyond your control. You did absolutely nothing to start them. You have no influence on how they conduct, how it happens, how it rolls out, but that you have absolute control on how you choose to deal with it and navigate through the situation that you find yourself placed in. And really, it all began to roll the clock back a bit. I retired from the Canadian Army in 2019 and in 2012 I was deployed on an American Camp in camp Phoenix in Kabul, Afghanistan. Thank you to my American host, wonderful place, wonderful people as part of the Canadian contingent. And at that point, you get a certain point in every career, and you realize I've achieved everything that I want to do within my military career. For those of you, if you have listeners who are military, I'm a Mustang, which means I spent time in the ranks before I commissioned to the officer. So that generally means there are some anchors thrown out, and your progression is far slower than the normal officer, course. So I'd really reached the pinnacle of my career. I had done the things that I wanted to do. I was sitting overseas trying to figure out what were the next stages of life, what was I going to transition to? And one of my responsibilities happened to be dealing with humanitarian, international humanitarian agencies that were present in Kabul, working alongside. Side of of NATO, separate from NATO, obviously, but alongside NATO to help improve the then Afghan government's ability to navigate the disaster space. So Afghan, Afghanistan is, is has some significant landslides, and because they literally have no organic capacity to deal with that beyond your neighbors, pulling you out of underneath the rock pile, these organizations were present there and attempting to build this capacity. So I decided it would be a smart deal to switch from one growth industry, which is the military. Just look at the world today, conflict, it's a growth industry, to another growth industry, which was emergency, disaster and emergency management and the grand scheme. And really, I think the switch to the world of preparedness really happened in a number of events following that in the in the second decade of the century, where events continuously happened to the same group of people in the same population, yet they were utterly unprepared for the event. Like, look at Florida. God loved the people in Florida. Wonderful place. Love to go there. Every time a hurricane comes and you watch it on the news, you'd swear hurricane had never hit the state before. Right, right. Like it just, it just seems to be abnormally repetitively chaotic. And you look at that, you say, Okay, there's something amiss here. There's something amiss so ran down the preparedness pathway, and following that, I backed it up with I did my master's degree in disaster and emergency management at Royal Roads, looking at business continuity, which is emergency preparedness for business corporations. And then a couple of years ago, I finished my PhD dissertation on municipal emergency management and how we communicate with the population at large. What do we need to tell them? What does the population need to do, and how do we why are we failing, and I would say, so desperately, in getting the message across to the people. And then, why are people who do receive the message choosing not to adopt the set of behaviors that we believe are appropriate in the time frame. So that kind of series of experiences drove me down the preparedness world. And as had me being on webinars an awesome opportunity today to be a guest on your podcast, to talk about the phenomenon, as I call it, of preparedness, and how really it serves as a stepping stone. As we like to as I like to say preparedness is the blanket of insulation that you wrap your life in so that you can go chase your dreams and rock an incredible life knowing that you've taken a few steps to insulate yourself from those shocks that are beyond your control. So when Mr. Murphy, or the world, whatever you want to call, it comes up and punches you upside the head and a Mike Tyson phrase, right? You actually have a plan for getting punched up side to head. You're not trying to figure out what to do after you got punched up side the head, right? That's the theory behind preparedness. Yeah,

Travis 8:12
yeah. I really like that philosophy. You talk about a blanket of insulation. I think that's such a great way to put it. And then so Jeff, as we think about emergency preparedness, can you tell me a little bit about just your general philosophy of, you know, how the average person should think about emergency preparedness, or how they should approach it,

Jeff 8:38
absolutely, and there's a couple of stage but the first thing I'm your non apocalyptic, evidence based preparedness guy. Okay, so no, society is not about to collapse. We're not about to have nuclear Armageddon, and we're not going back to the Stone Age.

Travis 8:54
And that's something that really stood out to me when I looked at your website, Jeff, that was one of the first things that popped out the non apocalyptic part, because one of the things that kind of burned this idea of emergency preparedness, in my mind, it was a number of completely irrational podcasts, conversations, articles, like YouTube channels, tons of them, I try to I mean, YouTube's probably even worse than some of the podcasts I'm listening to, but there's one podcast in particular, I think it came out in 2017 and this American journalist was exploring the idea of what a civil war in the United States will look like. This is back in 2017 and listening to the podcast, it was actually very well researched, I mean, not alarmist to the degree that you would expect. But it sounded so realistic, and it was so well researched, I almost couldn't stop thinking about the topic for, like, about the following six months after listening to it. And it's just like you said, it's something that's, you know, very apocalyptic. Um. Yeah, I mean, somewhat evidence based, but there's a lot more stuff. There's a lot more stuff out there that's less researched, not evidence based, completely irrational. So I absolutely do appreciate your perspective on that, and I think that's a fantastic tagline for being non apocalyptic. Yeah,

Jeff 10:18
non apocalyptic for rational people. But, I mean, that's why conspiracy theories are successful, because for them to be successful, like suicidal collapse, you know, the Illuminati, whatever you want to call it, there needs to be a nugget of truth. There needs to be a little bit of something. It's like the funny memes that were all over the internet when the prepper is sitting there with his AR 15 and his bug out bag, and he's sitting on top of a box of vaccines, going, this is not the apocalypse I was promised. You know, everybody has this image of we're going to have a societal breakdown. So I write out front tell people listen, I'm the rational preparedness guy. If you want to insulate your life against things that are beyond your control to facilitate your ability to chase your dreams, which are going to be different than my dreams, which is why I'll never give you a downloadable PDF to checkbox, because that is totally impossible to for your list to look like my list. But if you're really interested in in navigating this chaotic decade and all of the things that continue to cause disruptions in our lives, then preparedness, I would argue, is the frame to use for that. And the first step, and I think it's the most important part, is to accept personal responsibility for your outcomes. And it's, I say, in my books and in my podcast, I say, like, you have to look at that incredible, handsome, beautiful person in the mirror and say, I'm responsible for my outcomes. No one's coming to rescue me. Now that doesn't mean the emergency management folks aren't great, and they're doing a fantastic job. Got all the time in the world for FEMA and what it's trying to accomplish. And it doesn't mean that the community and the people around you are your enemy and you need to be suspicious of them, but what it means is, if you want to adopt a prepared life, then you're going to have to do it. You're going to have to take the steps. And I another one of my taglines is, you know, preparedness is a lifestyle. It's not a stockpile. You cannot purchase your way to preparedness. So I'm also not one standing out there saying, go buy. Here's the list of the top 10 things a prepper needs to buy when they begin. Here's the top five things you need to hoard right now, I don't speak in that language, because, again, I'm a researcher, and what I provide in an educational perspective, is based upon evidence. You know, if you look at the swath of disasters that have happened in North America, especially America, and your databases, trust me, far better than the Canadian one. I'll give you kudos for that. When we look at that, and I look at how many American citizens died of starvation because of a natural disaster, the number pretty closest to zero. So why are we hammering away at people to stockpile food in their basement when nobody has ever died of lack of food. Again, that's the evidence base that I use. What are the things that we know have led to better outcomes? Because we if I look at preparedness from the idea, is the totality of cognitive strategies and physical actions you take so that you have better post event outcomes. I mean, I think that's a rational goal, right? If you're a security officer for a company and you're in charge of the business continuity plan and business restoration plan, your focus is getting the principal functions of your business up and running as fast as you can to limit downtime and lost revenue. Why would your life be any different? Why would your family be any different, right? So I make money on the internet, right? Everything that I do is internet based. Welcome to the 21st century, right? The Internet can't go down like I have to be on the internet if I want to make money so, independent of the grid, independent of the cell network, I have a methodology to restore internet service to my house when it's false, because the internet matters to me, but somebody else, they might actually smile that they get a two day break or a three day break from the internet, right? They're like, this is glorious. I can't This is wonderful, but to me, it's pretty impactful. So this is why, how what you choose to do is going to look it's. Not going to mirror each other. Yeah,

Travis 15:01
that's a very good point, and like you mentioned, just your first point of personal responsibility. I've never been, thankfully, fingers crossed. I've never been in any type of significant natural disaster or anything like that. In my time between California, Nevada, Texas, I was in Austin, Texas when we had the snowpocalypse. I think back in 2021 we got, I don't know, six inches of snow, and the electrical grid went down for most of the state. And even for something as simple as that, I remember, I think it was the city of Austin, they had basically set up these community centers to hand out just like big, big cases of water. Because, of course, the pipes bursted. They had issues at water treatment plants. They basically gave a water boiled notice if you're even able to get water, and that was for something as basic as water. So so many people were lining up to go get water, or, you know, maybe they were contacting their friends or working with their church for a necessity as simple as water. So I think, yeah, just being able to accept personal responsibility for, you know, these very basic elements, you know, the most important thing to stay alive, really, yeah, such a important idea,

Jeff 16:30
yeah. And we really, we really look at the second stage. And once you've accepted, if you're not going to accept personal responsibility, and you believe it's the government's role to save you, then, then I wish you the best of luck, but the material that I have is really not going to be all that useful for you. So if you look on to the next stage, and we move past personal responsibility, it's actually understanding for whom you're responsible. So when you think about people would say, Oh, my family. Well, that's fine, but, but welcome to the 21st century, where the Ward Cleaver nuclear family is not the standard, right? So our families are blended. They're multi locational. They could be multi generational. And by the way, as soon as you speak the language of preparedness, a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrow at you, and maybe they're going to come see you when you know when things go down, they're going to turn to the preparedness guy in the family to think about it. So when you think about preparedness, it's not just me, it's whom am I likely going to be responsible for, and what are their special needs? Right? Like I have a family member with a life threatening peanut allergy, right? My emergency food can't be peanut butter, minor consideration, but an EpiPen is good for 15 minutes, and if the medical system is no longer available to access, what did I intend to do after 15 minutes? Right? So the considerations that roll out of defining the family, we argue to people, it's really worth the time and effort to do that and not just dismiss it, that it's all my family. I know them. I'll look at it, and we all have but I hope I don't upset anybody by the name of Karen in the audience. But we all have Karen's right in the family, right? But if they're coming into your house, you need to consider that, right? If you have somebody who has low levels of emotional control and loses their you know what? Every time something goes sideways, you're going to have to be thinking about, how do I manage this? And I don't mean chloroform, but I mean, you know, but, but when you think about who you're responsible for, and if you have a elderly member of the family that may be in a care home down the road. You know, we saw from the pandemic, care homes do not have this preparedness thing worked out, no matter what they tell you. So are you going to cross your fingers and hope that your loved one in the elderly care facility is good to go all on their own? No, I probably think you're going to go get them or go visit them to ensure that they're getting the appropriate treatment. You have to consider that, because when you write that down and you have any reflect upon it, now you realize the preparedness involves more than you, responsibility for more than you, and then it kind of scopes it out for what you're for, what you're likely to be responsible for.

Travis 19:24
Yeah, and you raise a really good point there around special needs, such as medical needs. I was having a conversation with someone, this was at the start of the year, and they were telling me that during covid, I think it was, it might have been insulin or some other similar diabetic medication. Essentially, I think in California, or maybe just particular areas, there was a shortage, and the person I was talking to was literally considering robbing a pharmacy because someone in their family would die if they didn't have this medication, like you. Definitely. Only have to think about some of these more specialized areas, not just Okay, can I? Can I assist with someone with some type of brief hospital care, but if someone has very specialized medical needs where they have to keep a medication refrigerated, or they need some highly specialized care, that's absolutely something that people need to build into their planning

Jeff 20:24
that kind of fuels the as we do in military planning, the idea of the so what? Question, okay, I have a member of my family with a peanut allergy. So what? Well, I've got to consider that in my planning. So what? I've got to have an EpiPen. So what? How many you know, you follow that through. And really it understands that no two preparedness plans that you're creating, and I think that's the a good segue to kind of to frame this discussion is what we need to build, is a preparedness plan that reflects the needs and requirements of your family that's going to look different from everybody else. The steps are going to be the same for everybody involved, but the outcome is going to look different, right? The outcome of what the product that you're going to produce, and remember, I get back to preparedness, is free. I say this all the time. This is a process. It is an it is a dedication, or commitment of time and energy and maybe a bit of research, but it's not a commitment of money. It's not until way later in the process that we might have to consider a monetary acquisition of something right? We're not worried about that. We're worried about adopting the mindset, adopting the attitude, that I need to figure out what the bad day looks like for my family, and then it's going to look differently where you are. So the people in in northern Texas that sucked that, or mid Texas actually, that were affected by that power outage, is because none of the structures there are insulated to build to that standard up here in Canada, like, whatever I've got, I've got really thick walls and really great insulation, because our winners are really freaking cold, right? So we'd be used to that. We'd be better for a longer period of time, but because you shocked the population out of their normal daily operations into something that they utterly had not considered. So when you do a consideration test, it's a good way to describe it is, what is my risk profile for where I've chosen to live? Right? Both of our countries are free and democratic to some reasonable degree. If you don't like Texas, you can move to Louisiana. There's no law preventing you. So you've chosen to live where you do, and by doing so, you've accepted a set of risks that list in the population. Like you're probably not on an earthquake fault. I don't know. I'm just throwing it out there. You might get hit by the remnants of a hurricane. You might not be in Tornado Alley, and you might not be in a flood plain like these are reasonably easy to figure out through public sector agencies as to what risks you're exposed to, what could go wrong. Now the downside of that is, and this is what I caution to people, is everybody wants a flood plan. They want a hurricane plan. They want a tornado plan. They want an earthquake land, and before you know it, you have more plans than you know what to do with. It becomes an onerous task. It becomes a difficult task, and that's the point at which people just avoid they just dismiss it. I'm not doing this. It's too much work. So we lay out a strategy is think of every event that could happen on a spectrum. One end of the spectrum, you have the most likely but the least dangerous event. And on the other end of the spectrum, you're going to have the most dangerous but least likely. And if I set you up thinking about your preparedness plans for either ends of that spectrum, then by just having two you're likely going to be able to navigate whatever happens in the middle. Because remember, I You should not care why your power's out. You care that your power's out right? So again, if you have a tornado power outage plan and an earthquake power outage plan, it gets it can get ridiculous, because adopting a prepared life is allowing to free yourself to do other stuff. Adopting preparedness is not about sitting in your basement six hours a week with a checklist. If that's the outcome, you're doing it wrong. Like that's not the point of preparedness, right? It's so that I can go do the things that I want to do, pursue the dreams, rock the incredible dreams, take risks, which is really cool. I can take extra risks that I would not normally take before, because I have that blanket of preparedness on me. So it's about facilitating, not overcoming with. Have a whole series of plans you could go on time immemorial.

Travis 25:05
Yeah, and I think, I think that relates really closely with the way a lot of security practitioners think today. So example, when we're looking at different threats and vulnerabilities and outcomes and impact, you know, there might be several threats that could all be addressed with the same countermeasure. So if we can prepare for, you know, for a few core scenarios that's really going to cover the vast majority of the different challenges that we might face in some type of preparedness scenario,

Jeff 25:39
yeah, denial of service attack. You don't care who's doing it. It's the same thing, right? When you're looking at a ransomware attempt, when you're looking at a different type, you don't care who planted that certain type of saw. You know coding into your into your systems. You know how to deal with that type of coding, right? There'll be time, fullness of time, to figure out who the MAL intended participants were, but in the interim, right? It's about, how do you lock down? And we, you know, a lot of a lot of people, stop Preparedness at the level of disasters, and there's much, and I have to say for so the industry folks don't hang me out to the yardarms, the good old naval saying, they really fight the phrase natural disasters, because there's no such thing as a natural disaster. Nature does what it does. The fact that it turns into a disaster is because humans have decided to live where they live, and build where they've built. People get bent around the axle on calling it natural disaster. I just throw it out there. I still use the terminology, and I use it simply because the people listening to me understand what I mean. I don't want to waste my time on trying to bring in new nomenclature and a new lexicon of terms, because I feel like it was wrong before. No, if you get it, you get it like, if you security professionals change denial of service to something else. You talk about denial of service, everybody's going to know what, what's going on, what people have attempted to do to your your access points, right? So that's, I have to throw that out there. But when I start talking about preparedness, there's there's something we call the trifecta of preparedness plans. And the first two we talked about, that's your two ends of the spectrum, the trifecta of the preparedness plan. The third one opens the door to thinking that preparedness is not just about natural events. If you get fired tomorrow, that is and you have responsibilities in mortgage and car payments and kids in school, etc, you losing your source of income, whatever reason caused. It is just as impactful to a family as the house burning down. And that wildfire that you evacuated might have missed your house, but what if you burnt down your business? So your security firm is located in a certain building, what is your firm's intent when that building burns down? Now you ask that question, you're probably going to get looked at with three eyes, and nobody knows what you're talking about, but this is how we start the conversations of saying you want to protect your personal interest of an income, because that's pretty important to us, by encouraging your employer to think about strategies that would mitigate their exposure too. So if you're going to take wildfire prevention measures at your house, to move flammable material away from your house and kind of increase the odds of it making it it is in your best interest to make sure that your employer does the same thing so you actually can continue to lead an income. And when we introduce that to people, we just return to remember 2020, March of 2020, great people doing fantastic work for healthy companies were fired. They did nothing wrong, nothing wrong. The company was healthy. Everything was working, circumstances beyond their control. And then so I entitled this. You know, what's your plan when you get fired? And if you don't know the answer to that question, what industry you're going to pivot to, what position you're going to pivot to, turtling on the couch and waiting for it to all go away is probably not a great strategy, though. Many did it through the pandemic, they just sat around and waited for the clouds to clear and then tried to go right back to normal. But those that were exceptionally successful navigating the pandemic, or those who had a strategy. So when you embrace that, you realize, hold on a second. Preparedness is not about 72 hour kits by my door or a jerry can of water or a flashlight. No, this is a lifestyle. Now and then, that's when we start talking to people about, what are all the other things that you do, and how might they be impacted? Yeah,

Travis 30:08
and as you're talking about that, one of the things that comes to mind is also being involved, like having a support network around you, whether that's being involved in community groups or your church or any other organization where people might support each other mutually, where you have an opportunity to help them, and they have an opportunity to help you, and then even help the broader community. Because, you know, I can see a lot of advantages of helping the community broadly after taking care of, you know, your own friends and family first to getting really just keeping the community in order and preventing disorder.

Jeff 30:54
Yeah, you hit the nail on on the and for the academic geeks out there, that's the entire theoretical framework that I use for my research is the power of social capital. I'm on the board of directors of the International Social Capital Association, and I lead the Disaster Resilience special interest group within that organization, and we're an eclectic group of researchers and experts and practitioners from around the world that look at the value of human relationships and the power of human relationships. So if you think social capital is the glue and the lubricant that allows society to operate, it is our pro social behavior. So our propensity to make friends, our propensity to be want to be around other people, and our connectedness. Because what social capital allows, it permits the flow of other capital, so it permits the flow of human capital and education. It permits the flow of financial capital and it permits the flow of physical capital. Your I don't if I've never met you, you're not loaning me a grant, right? We don't have a trusted relationship. We don't have a norm of reciprocity. We have nothing between us. And so if I come at you for $1,000 I'm probably politely but I'm pretty sure I know what the response to that question will be. But if we have strong social bonds built in collected organizations like faith groups are a prime example, you build that trusted bond, you build that trusted network and relationships, then I'm going to be able to borrow a grant. If you have it. I'm also going to be able to borrow your lawnmower and your generator. Right some random during a power outage, some random dude shows up at your front door and knocks on the door and asks to borrow your generator, and you've never seen them before, and they claim to live 15 houses down the road. The odds are slim to nil, and slim just left the building that you're going to hand over the generator. But from his perspective, he might be honestly trying to get a generator, but that time in event, in the crisis is not the time to build social capital. So I say to people that the number one resource you'll ever have is your neighbor, absolutely without question. I was on a webinar this morning for the Disaster Recovery Institute, and which is a big business continuity international organization. And we were talking about, you know, well over 80% of earthquake survivors are pulled out of the rubble by locals and neighbors, not by first responders and not by urban search and rescue teams. It is your neighbor who will save you. It is your neighbor who will feed you, water you house, you do first aid on you and will talk to you, right? It's about, you know, there are certain neighborhoods that nobody robs because everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows what's going on, and things that look out of place are out of place, right? There's a there's a pattern of life, as we say in the military, in the neighborhood, and when something's outside the pattern of life, everybody picks up on it, your neighbor is your best resource. And how much money does it cost to make friends with your neighbor? Big fat zero, right? I it's like, and, you know, ask to borrow a cup of sugar, not because you need a cup of sugar, but because you're striking up a conversation and you're building a relationship hot say hi to the people something simple, if you're, if you're a preparedness nerd like me, or you want to start it, just put a sign, you know, print off a piece of paper and saying, I'm having a gathering at my in my garage in front of my house on Sunday. For anybody who's interested, one talks about neighborhood preparedness and how we can help each other out. You'd be surprised the number of people that are thinking exactly how you are and would show up with a brewski in their hand, and before you know it, because when we build this social capital, right, I have access to your resources, but what I also have access to is your network and the resources embedded in your network. So now if you can. Picture all of these connected tiles with all of the lines in between them, you start to build a mesh network of connectedness across your community. That's how you build a self reliant neighborhood. That's how you build a self sufficient group of homes, even if it's only a handful of homes in the street that are interested, right? Right, like, I know, sharing generators. Nobody likes that, but welcome to the inflationary price point of today, right? Six families need one generator in fuel. Nobody, no, everybody doesn't have to go out and buy a generator. And you might say, ah, they won't borrow it. No, no, that's what social capital does. That builds the relationship that allows to say, hey, you know, Tom or Travis, I'm going to be on your front doorstep at nine o'clock in the morning. You've got the generator from nine to 12, right? That's your three hour allocation for that day. Roger that. I'm going to have all the lines run to my my my deep freeze, my refrigerator, my mini fridge with a medication in and I've got all that figured out. It's all ready to go. I show up at nine o'clock, hook you up. I'll be back at 12. I, you know, take it off your system and bring it to the next person, right? So social capital and human relationships are the key to preparedness. Obviously, you're responsible for your family, and I get that. But lone wolfs don't survive pack. Look at, look at a wolf pack. A wolf pack survives the winter. A lone wolf won't,

Travis 36:34
all right, even chimp empire. When I was watching chimp empire, not that long ago, one of the chimps, of course, I can't remember all their names, but one had like a severe arm injury, and in the wild by himself, he's not going to survive, but with his tribe who's taking care of him, who's been looking out for him for the last 1520, years, you know, he is able to survive, and they take care of

Jeff 36:58
at this point, is this whole discussion on preparedness, we spent nothing welcome is it's the reality of preparedness. We've done all of this and increased all of your your thought, your your pro social behavior, your relationships, your network other people who think commonly like you. And you've spent no money. You haven't gone out and bought a thing and and your I would argue, and the evidence tells me that your preparedness level is higher, right? Because if we look at, I'll put my data research nerd hat on here, if we look at post event outcomes, the number one indicator of which community bounces back better is the strength of their social capital. People would think it's money. The first thing everybody would answer is, no, the rich people bounce back better. The rich people can get their way out of it. The answer to that is, no, no, no. Look at the Park on Sunday afternoon. Who's out there for a barbecue? Right? Look at the different cultures that show up for community barbecues on Sundays and Saturdays at the park there. Who will for better? They will far better in a disaster than anybody spending $10,000 on Gucci equipment for their

Travis 38:25
base. Yeah. And as we talk about this, I do love it as a solution, especially since it costs no money. It's just you investing in relationships. And I think another thing I think about too, at least today, in 2024 it's just, I think the bonds between people compared to today versus in the past are not quite what they used to be. There's a there's one famous book they make. A bunch of Political Science students read it. I think it's Bowling Alone, and it was kind of dark, but yeah, it was. It was basically documenting, I think he was using bowling leagues as one analogy, but he was pretty much documenting how community participation and social networks and social relationships weren't quite as tight knit as they are today as they used to be in the past. So I could see that being one challenge for, you know, the average person in the US in 2024 but at the same time, it's a great opportunity. They should know who their neighbor is, regardless of whether they're preparing for the zombie apocalypse or they're organizing a Super Bowl watch party.

Jeff 39:40
You're absolutely right. And, and Dr Putnam's main thesis is that we're switching from a collective society to an individualistic society, right? It's me against the world, not my neighborhood against the world. But one of the, one of the things that could be very, you know, useful for your audience is all those things we. Say about the community, let's transform that to your corporate world. Let's trans that to your corporate community. You're the security professional, and you send out an emergency security notice, and I don't know who you are, this is the first time I heard that you're there, or that you even exist, and you expect me to believe you simply because you have a cool title under your email, like, seriously, that's not the time to be introducing yourself to the corporate world. Everybody should know Travis is the apocalypse guy, or whatever you want to call yourself within the corporation, right? I'm the one that when the bad day comes, I'm going to come to you with instructions. How would you like to receive them? What works best for you? Do you prefer it this way? Do you prefer it that way? What type of language do you like to hear? What would you like me to give you a five step process or the whole background? Right? Understanding your audience, getting to know your audience, it greatly increases the probability that the security message you're going to be sending to the corporate world you serve, the served population, is going to be number one, not deleted, let's be honest, and that people are going to listen to it. I remember when I uploaded a virus to my network and I got this immediate message from somebody saying, walk away from my computer. I deleted it and kept going because I had a task to complete. I didn't know who this person was. Well, I found out later. Trust me, I had a long conversation with the IT folks, but uploading viruses, but if you're going to fill an important role like that, or you want people to help you out when you need advocacy support for your role in the corporation, you do that through building trusted relationships pre event and FEMA calls it blue sky planning. I call it in times of peace and calm, but building those strong relationships across across the corporate world. We myself and another organization, we work with with companies on how to do this, how to operationalize the idea within a corporate environment. So how do I create the conditions to where I get to know the people and figure out who and the really interesting part is you'll often find that the most connected and the most influential person does not have a title. They just have strong pro social orientations and a strong predisposition to being to building relationships, right? They're not the nosy gossipers. That's not what I mean. There are people who happen to know everybody, and everybody knows Bob, and Bob's just a great guy that everybody knows. Well, guess what? When Bob calls for something, he's probably going to get it ahead of you, even if you have the title, because Bob has taken the time and effort to build those social relationships so it facilitates your ability to execute your job at a higher level in times of crisis, when the world's gone pear shaped.

Travis 43:12
Yeah, there's so many interesting ideas there. One I've definitely, absolutely seen the phenomenon you're talking about where, you know, there are just certain people in the organization, maybe it's in office, admin and executive assistant, someone who doesn't even have a security or any type of operations title, yet, they have a perfect understanding of who's supposed to be in the building, who the maintenance staff are, who they could call to solve this problem. They know everyone in the organization and how everything works, and those people are so key, and it's so important to have good relationships with them. And then you also mentioned, too, building relationships before the event takes place. I could think of even things where there's, you know, no significant event, but maybe it's just send it. Maybe it's just the security team sending out a note to the organization for people to, you know, make a small update, or to do some small, simple task. If it's just a completely cold email, you know, there probably goes 40% of the people that received it, it's just going to get deleted. The CTO is just going to delete it immediately because he's too important. And then, you know, you if you're trying to do cold outreach, it's just like if you're in sales, you need to build those relationships ahead of time so that when the event happens, everyone can work together. You're going to be a familiar face. You're not some jerk with the security title telling people what to do. So yeah, I really like the way you put that and the way you frame it, about being all about those relationships. It's

Jeff 44:46
like Gary V, the famous marketer, says, jab, jab, jab, hook. So he provides three offers to somebody before he asks for something. So you know, if you're in the security. A network protection business. Good friend of mine works, has worked 20 years in network protection and, you know, denial of intrusion and a whole bunch of words. I have no idea what it means, but what he does is he helps people at home, so protecting the home network of the employees with all kinds of really free, great high tech advice so they don't have to navigate the NAS and Google faster computer in YouTube and see what pops up. Right? He provides all of that, and then he comes around at the end with the ask, because he's building rapport. He's building value with the people in the organizations. He's helping him out with something that has absolutely nothing to do with the job that he's tasked with, but it's building that social rapport. It's building that connectedness with the individuals. I have another friend who was responsible for preparedness communications in a certain part of Canada, and he went to his boss, and he asked for a $20 a week budget, $1,000 that's not even a rounding error on most you know, account expenses, right? He ran a $20 a week preparedness contest on on the social media. So he created a social media handle for his preparedness part of the organization, and he ran, and he ran a quiz. He put the stuff out, all the jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, all the free stuff all week, and then he put the ask in at the end, and if you answered the question by typing it out, you were entered in a draw for a $20 card. He went to over 3000 followers in a period of a couple of months, out of nowhere, simply because he provided an offer that was of value to the person. Because if I just come on here and say Hi, I'm the preparedness guy, follow me and you'll be great. You don't know who I am. You know nothing about me. I've not built any trust. I've not demonstrated value. And now I'm asking for something, right? So I'm going to give you a whole bunch of things. I'm going to give you a chance to win stuff, just like marketing. 101, like Alex hormocy has in his books about 100 million dollar offer, 100 million dollar leads, right? It's about providing value that's helpful to the person in the end, knowing that your end target is, you know, in the corporate world, I need this person to follow the rules, so my job is easier, and I'm successful in protecting the network or protecting the asset that I'm charged to protect within the company, simply telling people in a quarterly email entitled your quarterly security update from security blah, blah, blah, whatever part of It the CTO blesses this. So you must listen. Type of deal i Whenever I worked in incorporation, I just deleted those. I paid no attention to any of that stuff, right? No, because I get them from everywhere. I'm not I'm too busy. I don't have time for that. You go into a Send. You go into a never read folder, right? I put a filter on you. You're gone. And then when you say something important, where does your email go? It goes into the filter that I set up because you wouldn't stop putting these things out. So it's about understanding your audience, understanding the needs of your audience, understanding what you need them to do, and then think of an innovative and disruptive ways to get that communication across.

Travis 48:42
Yeah, I like the way you put it. I hadn't heard anyone use the Gary Vee analogy, but I think that is a great way of putting it. I think, I think in his book, he calls it like the giving economy, basically, you're giving away, you know, very valuable tangible information that's going to help the people that you're serving. And then, yeah, after providing this and this and this, finally, you know, proposing some type of sales offer. So you've built up good karma by helping people for free all along. And then if they want to take whatever action you're trying to propose, then they have the possibility of doing that. And, you know, it makes me think Jeff, I would assume. What I would assume, the most difficult part about emergency preparedness is convincing people and getting them to prepare for something that may not happen. Maybe there will never be a power outage in Southern Nevada. I know this is like an impossible question to answer. But how do you I don't know, are there any particular approaches that you think are best for influencing people in just being prepared, whether that's on a small level or a larger level?

Jeff 49:56
And you know it is the I've spent over a decade researching this. One question, how to get people to care? How do we get people to cross that, that barrier, that perceived barrier, and you can, you can look at what I do is, I kind of use Ryan Holiday's obstacle. Is the way idea of what matters to you will be different than what matters to me. So with a certain demographic and again, your messaging is going to have to be demographic specific. You just can't put out one. Part of the problem is you put out one preparedness message to all, all the residents of Texas. It's utterly on a it's so vague that it's it's really not doing anybody any service, right? But if I'm looking at the care home, OCS, however you want to drill down the demographic, the the easiest way through that barrier my experience has taught me is finding out what matters and the fear of losing that it the marketing. The best marketing employee is fear is the most powerful human emotion, right? So you're only successful in marketing and I, and there's a great book to do, to do. I have it here so you can't see it, but it's called, using social marketing for public emergency preparedness, interesting social change for community resilience, and it's by Professor Nancy Meyer Emerick, and basically it talks about that preparedness, communications are a marketing effort. It is no different than I'm a sales job. I don't have a price tag attached to mine, but I do have an activity or a set of behaviors that need to be adopted, right? So I have to be able to solve a problem you have. If you don't have if you don't believe you have a problem. Then, then, then I'm then it's pointless. So I have to make you believe that it's a problem. So you know, what is it that matters to you? Could be children's education. It could be employment, right? Like I said earlier, one of the key ones that I use is your access to a paycheck is fairly important. And if I start the conversation talking about, what does your world look like when I fire you tomorrow and a at will, employment is the basis of America, right? True. So I can fight your boss. Can fire you tomorrow and meet you in the basement of the building, in the front entrance with a banker's box and all your stuff. And I tell you that, and I ask you, what's the plan? I can start the fear response. I can start the idea that, you know, I had never really thought of it that way. I have no idea what I would do, I have, you know, I don't know what is in the States, but 40% of Canadian families are within $400 of bankruptcy at any one given time, right? Everybody is, everybody's freaking close to the line. So if I phrase preparedness, not in getting ready for the disaster, but the disaster itself is one that matters to you as the loss of income. I now can introduce the preparedness idea. I get you to think about personal responsibility. I get you to feel think about attitude. I get you to think about your family. I get to you to think about the risk profile that you're exposed to where you live. And I start that train going, eventually we'll get to, is it 14 days or 21 days is an appropriate timeline to be able to, you know, shelter in place in your home, those discussions are follow on, but to break through the barrier, you have to find out, and it's marketing language, and I unapologetically use it all the time. And in emergency preparedness, and some of the public sector government kind of cringe away from it. I'm like, No, you're selling something. You're selling a preparedness message, right? And look at all the other advertising out there, right? I say to people, if you if you are the Texas Emergency Management Agency, and you're not on Tiktok. I don't know what's wrong with you. Like I don't care whether you like Tiktok. I don't care if you like Elon Musk, even though he loves Texas. But get on X, get your profile on x and put up your social media stuff, right? You need to communicate with the population where they are. Nobody goes to websites anymore, or hardly ever. Um, nope. I don't know about America, but in Canada, next to nobody has a cable subscription anymore. So nobody's watching our equivalent of CBC or NBC or ABC like you get disaster people in front of a news conference. Everybody's watching it on Tiktok live, Instagram Live. They're like, this is where you need to be if you want to connect with a population and sell them preparedness messaging, you have to do it across the medium that they choose to be on. You don't try to pull them over to where you are. You go to where they are. So you bring. Broadcast on Tiktok. You release Tiktok videos, right? We have a there's one. Our fire department does them all the time, right? What? And, you know, gender specific, what? Young boy didn't grow up loving the sound of the fire trucks flying by, right? Well, that never changes. Now that I'm 53 years old, I still think it's really cool. So I love following tiktoks the firetrucks going by, right? But what do they embed it with? They embed it with pictures of what the outcome looks like when you don't have a smoke detector, right? It's a beautiful medium to communicate a visual message. You know, a firefighter standing there holding up going, all you need is to have one of these smoke detectors. And this wouldn't have happened, and this picture, your family would still be here. That's a pretty impactful message, right? And, oh, by the way, if you can't afford it, drop by the fire hall. We have them for free. Bam, right? It's a great message. So, yeah, that's how you do it. You go where they are, and you find out what matters to them, and you'll figure out through marketing where that key door is, what happens now and why preparedness messaging is is so unsuccessful, is it's released on traditional mediums. I don't know what they have in the United States, but we have Preparedness Week or Preparedness Month every night, and it's the same message, have a kit. Be informed. Have a plan. The population summarily ignores it. I got kicked off FEMA training once because I challenged them on their data, and I ran some analytics on their data and came up with a different, different answer, and they blocked me for a little while.

Travis 56:45
But doesn't surprise me, but it's important to challenge ideas. Well,

Jeff 56:52
I if you have a flashlight, you're not a prepared individual. I'm sorry you're missing the point. If you have canned food, you're not a prepared individual. If you've accepted responsibility for your outcome and you're interested in putting a blanket of insulation around your family so that things beyond your control happen. They impact you. They knock you off your normal operations, you get back to it. It's the idea of great communications and adopting repaired life allows you to thrive in chaos, not just survive, right? Everybody survives unless the earthquake crushes you in a building. You're not going to starve to death in downtown Houston, you're not, right? Somebody will give you shelter, somebody will feed you. Let's be serious, right? But what if you lived in a place and ensured that the property you were in was protected against earthquake? What if you had the right seismically built building, and therefore, as buildings come down around you, yours doesn't because you adopted a prepared life. So does that mean you make it more expensive. No, that just means you have to choose a smaller house to get this benefit same amount of money. But preparedness now becomes part of that decision process. You know, I often speak to realtors, like, how many people buy a house? And think about disaster preparedness when you look at it right, yeah, zero, right.

Travis 58:23
And in California, they all, they tell you is, you have this wonderful, $5 million house on a hill in Malibu. You might have to replace it every seven years when there's a disaster. And then, you know, this is the next bedroom,

Jeff 58:41
yep. And there's a fantastic if you want to understand the relationship between housing and disasters, there's a great film called the last house standing. It's available online. I know the producer I've been on, he's got a podcast. I've been on his podcast. He's been on mine talking about how that's one avenue where we can start the discussion about preparedness. Insert it into the realtor. The property acquisition process should include a scheduled disclosure of the disasters in the area, a disclosure of whether this home is in a floodplain, has this home had any disaster related claims, either through insured or uninsured losses that were reimbursed by the state? You know? Making public available information about geospatial mapping, the floodplain, mapping, the wildfire mapping, that type of thing, you know, storm surge mapping things that are available, making it readily available to inform the purchasing decision, the property acquisition decision, which, unless you've got some really cool hobbies I don't know about for you and I that's probably the largest thing we'll. Ever spend money on in our life, right? Yeah, wouldn't we want to know that the bloody thing is in a floodplain? It may not have flooded yet, but according to Noah, it's sitting in a floodplain. Wouldn't that be important information to know if you're a purchaser, wouldn't you not want access to that information when you're making a property, but we don't think like that, right? So I can't tell you to add disaster preparedness to your acquisition process. What I do is I legislation, legislate it through policy into the process. So as part, the realtor is legally required to give you a briefing on disasters in the area you're buying, doesn't you don't even have to think about it, right? Because it's the realtor's responsibility to deliver that to you. What you do with it? Welcome to freedom. You can summarily ignore it, or you can take it into consideration. We've done our due diligence. Hand on heart, we provided you the information. No worries, right? So there are ways to provide this information to people at no cost to them, through normal activities that they already do, right? All that we can ask is we give great information packaged in an interesting way to the target population if they choose to do nothing with it. Again, welcome to Freedom, right? You're free to summarily ignore the government of Texas advice, right? Or, as for those separatists out there the Republic of Texas, right? We have, we have our own offshoots up here as well that are calling for secessionary movements. But you know, the government in the United States of America, through its its cabinet, ministries and departments, will provide information. I don't think it's very good, but it is. It's up to you to decide what you do with it. Maybe getting a piece of preparedness information through the realtor process is the catalyst that flips that binary switch in your head. I don't know.

Travis 1:02:13
Yeah, I think that's a fascinating idea. I mean, especially as I think in Nevada, sure, we have disasters, but really thinking back to when I was living in California, of course, earthquakes are a significant risk, wildfires are a significant risk. Flooding still a risk. Yeah, it just seems like you have a risk everywhere you look in California in terms of housing, and how many of the people buying those homes understand, you know, the historical impact of wildfires in that region, because there's there's parts all over the state that have been impacted by something like that. And you might not necessarily know that when you're shopping in any particular area, you're mostly focused on crime schools. How long it's going to take you to drive to downtown LA or Orange County from San Bernardino? Yeah, you're worried about all of these periphery topics, when really the significant stuff might be kind of floating under most people's radar. I do think that's a really interesting idea of making that part of the standard process so people understand the risk. And I know even in California, there are some insurance agencies that aren't insuring a number of homes because they think the risk of wildfire and some of these other things are too high. So it's, yeah, it's a very interesting situation

Jeff 1:03:42
that is a very significant problem in areas in the United States right now is, is regions and counties are becoming uninsurable, so companies are either pulling out completely and canceling policies midstream or just not renewing them, or the premiums are so high that a resident can't get fire insurance. So if I can't get fire insurance, and I'm sure the laws, and I know the laws are very similar in the states, if I can't get fire insurance, I can't get a mortgage. That's a requirement of a mortgage. You have to have fire insurance, right? So now I can't get a mortgage for a home in Florida, which means I have to pay cash. What does that do to property values? Right? It torpedoes property values. But what it also do is extends the liability, because your system is the same as ours, who is expected to step in in uninsured losses? Right? The government, the magical money of the government, as I like to call it, come flying in to save the day. Well, we know natural disasters, and I use that name, they'll get mad at me, but we know disasters are commonly about as frequent as normal. We know that the number of deaths to disasters is actually really low and going down in North America, but the value lost is. Growing exponentially, and when it's uninsurable, that puts it on the state of Nevada to have to pay for it. When the state of Nevada goes broke, they have to pass it on to the federal government. And when federal government goes broke, we know exorbitant, untapped federal and state funding does one thing, or spending does one thing, and that drives up inflationary prices, right? So you get into a situation where neighborhoods become uninsurable, and you have a potential situation in the future where the government's going to have to say, I can't insure you either. So now are you going to buy a property in Nevada, outside of Las Vegas, knowing you can't buy insurance for the house, which means you have to pay cash, and you cannot have any insurance from either the government or the private industry. If something happens, are you going to choose to live there? And this is the real no BS problem that's facing a number of areas in the States, because you you have these areas that are and because we don't build back better, right? When a house burns down to a wildfire, what do we build the same damn house, right, back in the same place, same materials, vinyl siding, wood roofs, cool shingles, and all this nice shrubbery and stuff all around the house, right? Exactly why it burned down in the first place? And I, and I say this all the time, and I get in arguments with people. We know how to build fireproof homes, glass, steel and concrete, your home will not burn. Even if you have a wildfire 10 meters or 30 feet away, it won't burn. Yet, we choose to permit people to build homes out of flammable material, and then we have the audacity to get mad and angry when they burn. So it's not like we don't know how to solve this problem. We know exactly how to solve the problem, but is the government in California willing to change the building code to only allow homes to be built out of those three materials, or the exterior of them? I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no, because you don't get reelected.

Travis 1:07:09
No, the government of California has too many problems to even talk about.

Jeff 1:07:14
Oh, we could crack

Travis 1:07:18
that. That's a separate podcast, but Jeff, as you were talking, I was curious, are there any particular emergency preparedness resources, whether it's books, websites, also, you should tell us more about your podcast as well, because you do have one of the most popular emergency preparedness podcasts in Canada.

Jeff 1:07:41
So yeah, I'll do the unapologetic plug first. So my podcast inside my canoe head is Canada's number two podcast on preparedness. I've been at it for years. I've got about 280 episodes out. So we put about two a week. Most of it is me talking about a current subject matter. We periodically have guests, but our model is mostly discussions about topical issues, like, how does prepare? One of my most recent popular one was about politics and preparedness. How to political races and political decisions, your recent change of your Democratic candidate? How does that affect my preparedness? And there's actually some correlations between the two. If you're a practitioner, there's one. There's a podcast called Epic emergency preparedness in Canada. That's the number one podcast. The host is a very good friend of mine. We're canoeing partners that's geared very much towards the experts and practitioners. So if you are work in the business continuity field, or you work in the emergency management field that in corporate America, or in any public government of America, Epic is a great podcast to go to because they talk about life as a practitioner and expert in the field. And going, one of the things that I always say is find out where your local emergency management agency places their information. This, and we call it push and pull communications. So pull communications is that 20% of the population who will go seek information, they'll go looking for preparedness information. So if you're in, I don't know my regions or counties in Nevada, but say whatever the county may be, go to their local site. Go see what they find out when the when the disaster happens. How is your local agency going to talk to you, what radio station are they going to listen to, or are they going to broadcast on what website? Because the internet is could get clogged or go down the cell network, it could clog to go down. But radio is, is a is is, I forget the exact economic term for it, but every. Anybody can listen or nobody listens, and it doesn't crowd the radio airwaves, right? So if your local emergency management is going to talk to you on radio, what station are they are spinning the dial in crisis is not the time to figure this out. Figure out your trusted sources of emergency preparedness information in advance. So when the balloon goes up, when the shizzy hits the fizzy Where are you going to turn to get information? Because one of the things of a preparedness plan is knowing what the government is doing and know what the corporations are doing. So that informs the choices that you are going to make another prime example for preparedness information is if you've got kids in school, especially kids in school busses. What's the school going to do if they're going to pile your children into busses and bomb home on the route? What are you doing driving the other way to go pick them up. Where I live, there's one set of busses for elementary and high school. They run it two different times. So if the state only has the opportunity to evacuate one group of students, which one are they going to evacuate in your family? Who's going to get the kids? And I'm serious like you can't assume when an event occurs that you will have access to cell network to text your spouse to figure this out, right? So what you want to be is a family executing a well rehearsed preparedness plan while everybody else is running around trying to figure out what's going on. You know, when my kids were in school, my wife was going to get them, I wouldn't try. That was her responsibility. We didn't need to talk about it, right? And I knew we were all collapsing back onto the house. So she didn't need to know where I was, or when I was coming home, or whatever I was do, executing my role in getting home. She was collecting the children from wherever they are and bringing them back to the home. Like those plans that are well understood, they cost no money, sitting down with your family and figuring out how you're going to choose to respond to a significant event, right? So if you're and we always know the disasters, they always happen at bad times, right? It never happens on a Sunday morning when everybody's sitting around the breakfast table, right? It happens when the kids are in school, you're at work and your spouse is at work. What does that world look like for you and your family? Walk through it now, where are you going on all the steps that you're going to take? So understanding your sources of information, general information, obviously, I've got a website, preparedness labs.ca.ca, because I wonderful Canadian, we've got free downloads there. And I don't grab your email so I don't know you're there. I'm not trying to grab it for an email list or anything go on there. There's free downloads. Three pager on how to start a family preparedness plan. We've got a journal that's published a couple of times a year with some in depth analysis. There's other for profit stuff there. I'll just set that aside, because that's not what we're trying to do today. But there's free stuff on that website that'll get the discussion started right? It's about sitting down and saying, Hey, maybe, I think in today's world, we as a family need to sit around the kitchen table and just kind of talk about what worries us. You know, what's what's bothering us, what would we like to be able to do better? How would we like to be able to better react? And again, I've got the handout free of charge to start that conversation. It doesn't take money. It's just time and effort to start that plan, to talk to your neighbors about it. And all of a sudden, all of these things are happening, and you haven't spent a penny.

Travis 1:14:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you made great points here. A lot of things around relationship building, community planning, in terms of, you know, the individual scenario, in terms of being able to communicate with your family members during an emergency, yeah, all of these don't necessarily cost any money. It's really just spending a little bit of your mental energy and just working with those around you. I really like those ideas

Jeff 1:14:27
and and the kind of idea there is a comma, maybe you might have to buy something later. And what we phrase it as is, when you're looking through your animal we call them animalistic requirements of food, water, shelter, health, safety and security, right? People forget. We're animals in the environment. Humans aren't on top of the environment. We're part of it, right? So if you look at us from an animalistic perspective and our needs, you want to be able to provide a certain need for your family for a certain period of time that you think is. Appropriate. And in a lot of my podcasts, I go into discussion on how to choose the appropriate timeline based upon your risk analysis, your family, your needs, your risk tolerance, etc. You may realize that I'm lacking the ability to do that. You know, based upon what I have, what I want to be able to do I can't. Now you're in a position where you've got a very defined need that needs to be filled. Now your search may lead to you acquiring and spending a bit of money for a product, but the product is filling a defined need that you found not some guy with a prepper store who's selling you 27 items that are, you know, the top 27 items you should have in your house, right? You live in downtown Reno. How's the AX going to help you? Right? I'll give you ax and Bosa and I'll teach you how to rub sticks together to make a fire. You live in downtown Reno, why? Why you spending a $200 on a premium Swedish ax? Because a YouTuber told you this is what you should supposed to have, right? However, if you live in rural Maine, it's probably a good idea to have a very good quality acts and know how to use it, right? So when you define a gap in your preparedness plan that you can't fill, it will likely, it may likely lead to you having to spend some money and acquire something, but then it's something you've defined, and you know exactly what you want to buy, and you're not suckered into top 10 lists, top five Lists, Top 25 things you should Hoard. I mean, don't get me wrong, those YouTube videos, they're well done. It is a great some of them have brilliant marketing campaigns, but I'm your non apocalyptic evidence based guy for rational people, right? I'm sorry. But for those of you that are hoping the world's going to collapse, I'm I'm sorry, a good old Canadian, I'm going to tell you, I'm sorry it's not going to happen.

Travis 1:17:16
Yeah, and as I'm hearing you talk, Jeff, really, really, as long as people are thinking through the standard process for doing any type of security risk assessment. You're looking at the assets you're protecting, you're looking at threats, you're looking at vulnerabilities that make them possible. You're looking at gaps in our preparedness. And yeah, really, it's just taking that systematic approach, rather than, you know, being influenced by an infomercial or, you know, a very well put together video on YouTube, or, you know, any type of alarming thing that you might hear in person or online. So it's really just taking a professional approach, just as we would at work, whether it's IT security, physical security, it's taking that exact, that approach and that process to our actual lives.

Jeff 1:18:10
Yeah, absolutely. When you speak to security, I mean, I've noted like your job is not to protect everybody's house, just to make your house look like a hard target in comparison to everybody else.

Travis 1:18:21
That's not wrong.

Jeff 1:18:23
I'm clearing all the shrubs, all the avenue. I'm not hiding in the corner, all of the approaches are lit up like a Christmas tree, and they're all on cameras that don't need the power grid to work right. The guy down the street doesn't look like that. Sorry, bud. But you know, the opportunist is going to move on. And, you know, and then there's all kinds of things to do that. But the idea being is, is it all comes from your life is not incorrect. What you're pursuing and what you're after is awesome, incredible. It's what you want to do if you want to, if your life's goal is to be a barista and be an artist on the side, then I think that's wonderful. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. How do we protect that? How do we insulate that life that you've chosen against exogenous shocks that'll disrupt your normal operations? How can you do that? What matters to the barista who's an artist at night will differ to you as a security professional and me as a part time professor, right? Like those are going to different, but the end result is the same thing. It's a preparedness is not about hunkering in your basement and waiting for the big bad day. It's about facilitating you chasing the dreams you want in today's chaotic economy, in today's chaotic political world, despite what's going on, right? Listen, I've got my popcorn for November 5, right? I've got it scheduled. My wife and I'm at, I'm actually at a disaster conference in the Canadian Rockies. I. Be, and we're all meeting at this really posh bar. It's like $25 cocktails, and we're all bringing the popcorn because, because global impacts as to whatever the outcome of that's going to be, right? And I don't even know who your opponent, the opponents are going to be yet, but we're going to be sitting there watching that ready to go. That decision will influence me as a Canadian. It will impact the industries that I operate in. It'll impact in my economic future, the stock prices, the value like there is a real impact to me as to who wins the US election, not for or against, but whoever is successful, and depending on whether they take the House and the Senate with them, is pretty impactful. That's preparedness. Is about understanding that as well and then deciding, okay, if it goes Avenue A, and I think this is what the likely outcome is. Is there anything I need to consider to be ready for that?

Travis 1:21:04
Right? Yeah, and I think that's a good way of really summarizing it. It's that there's going to be a whole range of factors that are completely out of our control, but we can take a series of very diligent steps based on our geography based on the needs of us, of our loved ones, of our family, to really like you said, to insulate that lifestyle and to give you a buffer from those things that we're just unable to predict, or things that just kind of happen capriciously. So Jeff, before we wrap things up, is there anything else that you wanted to share, or anything that maybe I skipped over?

Jeff 1:21:48
No, I really think if, if somebody listening takes nothing else away, is that you have to understand that it is within your influence to make a difference, and that you can make a difference with your neighbors. You can reduce your anxiety or stress about things that have yet to occur or might occur, because you've taken largely free steps, and to move forward and understand that this is an iterative process. This is not a one and done. You're not going to do this once and figure it. The commitment that I call for in in the book that I wrote is 30 minutes a month. So once a month you'll sit down with your cup of coffee on a Sunday morning. Invest 30 minutes in reviewing your family preparedness plan, has anything changed? Have we added a member? Has somebody's circumstances changed? Has, you know, have I just gone and bought a $600,000 house, whatever? And most of the time, the answer is going to be, No, we're good, right? But in the end, what we started with, I think, is the big point to take away with, and then I'll finish with this, is you're not very good to anybody else unless you take care of yourself. So the first thing that I talk about in our publications is your financial, your mental and your physical health is the first thing you should tackle in preparedness, right? You want to be. And I don't mean David Goggins fit, and I don't mean Dave Ramsey wealthy, right? I mean, take positive control like you are unfit and it's your fault. So now what are you going to do about it? You're broke. It's your fault. So now what are you going to do about it? Your stress to the nines. It's your fault. What are you going to do about it? And then laying out a strategy. It doesn't change overnight. It never does. It takes time and effort, but understanding that when the event happens, being out of shape, stress to the nines and broke is not the time you want to tackle a disaster, right? Like it's you're not very good to your family and the people you love when you're a mess yourself. So it starts with that personal responsibility and beginning the train, and it's a long train, nothing happens overnight, right? But it's accepting that personal responsibility and then starting to make the necessary changes so that when the day happens, you thrive, not

Travis 1:24:18
just survive. Awesome, yeah. And I think those are great points too, thinking just to the most broad aspects of just your emotional, physical, financial health. Those are also huge points too, that, you know, maybe people take for granted in in terms of preparedness, but definitely kind of laying the foundation for everything altogether. Jeff, we talked about so many really important ideas, especially the idea you mentioned, of social capital, of building relationships with your neighbors, with the people in your community, with those that are around you, so that you could support each other mutually in any number of. Completely unpredictable events. And then you gave us some other great ideas, everything from really just the philosophy and the mindset of preparedness and thinking of it as a lifestyle, not necessarily just filling your basement with canned food and water, but so much more than that, and then also just thinking about emergency preparedness in a more structured, systematic way, just as we were, just as we would if we were doing a risk assessment for, you know, a large corporation, it's thinking through the low likelihood, through high impact scenarios, and how you might be able what steps you might be able to take to handle those. And then you also talked about too, which was about influence, which was, you know, thinking about how some of the ideas that we've learned in marketing and psychology, how we could use those ideas to influence people for the better, to take actions proactively to be prepared. So yeah, I think we covered so many really interesting ideas, and I'll definitely be sure to leave links to the resources we mentioned. We mentioned books, podcasts, so leave links to all those resources mentioned. But Jeff, before we go, How can people follow you and get a hold of you.

Jeff 1:26:23
The podcast has got its own website inside my canoehead.ca. The links are all there. It's available on all platforms, whatever you use, Apple, Google, well, not Google anymore, YouTube, Spotify, that's all good to go. And there's a link to send me a message directly right on my website@preparednesslabs.ca I answer every one of those personally. So if you have a thought or idea or you want to challenge something that I said here today, which is what I love to hear and love to get into those discussions, feel free to drop me a line. Excellent.

Travis 1:26:55
Well, this was an awesome conversation, Jeff. I mean, I like to think that I know a little bit about preparedness, but I definitely learned a lot about your philosophy and kind of your really like your system, just like the systematic way that you think about preparedness, in terms of lots of things, being about, thinking about strategy, mindset and a lot of these Other factors that I think might get lost in a lot of other conversations. So I think people will get a ton of great information out of this. And I really appreciate your time, Jeff, thank you.

Jeff 1:27:30
Well, my pleasure. It's a pleasure. Thank

Travis 1:27:32
you. Thanks.

Show Notes: A Non-Apocalyptic Intro to Personal Emergency Preparedness with Jeff Donaldson, PhD | Episode #34

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Show Notes: A Non-Apocalyptic Intro to Personal Emergency Preparedness with Jeff Donaldson, PhD | Episode #34

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