➡ Tom Marazo, a Canadian military veteran, has written a book called “The People’s Emergency Plan 2025”. The book is a guide for civilians to prepare for emergencies, using a process called the operational planning process, which is used by NATO and emergency management organizations. Marazo believes that the public should have access to this information to better protect themselves in times of crisis, as he feels the government may not always be reliable. The book includes exercises to help readers create their own personalized preparedness plans.
➡ The text discusses the importance of being prepared for emergencies and how to plan for them. It suggests assessing your environment and identifying potential threats, then creating a contingency plan with three possible courses of action: staying put, leaving, or waiting to see what happens. The plan should be rated based on its effectiveness, flexibility, and sustainability, and then tested through a “war game” scenario.
➡ The text discusses the importance of having a contingency plan for emergencies. This involves creating a ‘war game’ where one person plays the role of the opposition to challenge the plan. The plan is then transferred to a ‘decision support template’, a summary of the plan with timelines. The text emphasizes the importance of making decisions before an emergency occurs, as fear can impair decision-making. It also highlights the need to consider the extent of violence one is willing to use in self-defense. The text concludes by urging readers to confront difficult possibilities and prepare for them.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of having a contingency plan, especially for those living in forested regions prone to wildfires. It suggests that people should prepare specific equipment for different emergencies, rather than having a general-purpose kit. The text also discusses the idea of organizing equipment based on the type of emergency, such as floods or snowstorms. Lastly, it highlights the need for a process to identify facts, considerations, deductions, and tasks to create an immediate plan for any situation.
➡ The text discusses the importance of personalized planning in emergency situations, emphasizing that one-size-fits-all approaches often fail to address individual needs. It highlights the need for thorough analysis and consideration of specific circumstances, rather than rushing to a solution. The text also points out common mistakes, such as overestimating one’s abilities and not focusing on one problem at a time. It encourages the use of a methodical approach to derive the right plan for each individual, based on their unique needs and circumstances.
➡ The text discusses the importance of preparedness, particularly in the context of potential civil unrest or emergency situations. It emphasizes the need to anticipate potential threats and to plan accordingly, using strategies borrowed from military contexts. The text also highlights the value of community and cooperation, suggesting that forming alliances with neighbors and creating neighborhood watch groups can be beneficial. It suggests that such groups can start small, focusing on shared concerns like property safety, and then expand to address larger threats.
➡ The author emphasizes the importance of being prepared for emergencies and has written a book to guide people through the process. He is also developing a software application to assist with this. The book is not meant to be used only in emergencies, but should be read and understood beforehand. The author’s goal is to help people build confidence and be ready to protect themselves and their families in case of a disaster.
➡ The text discusses the importance of self-reliance and preparedness, suggesting that fear can be a motivator but should not be the driving force. It emphasizes the value of planning and understanding one’s vulnerabilities, rather than relying on consumerism or government aid. The text also highlights the satisfaction and quality of life that can come from independence and self-sufficiency, using the example of a man living off the land. Lastly, it advises those interested in preparedness to start small, identify their most likely threats, and consider what they want from life.
➡ The speaker emphasizes the importance of preparedness for uncertain times, suggesting that people should focus on acquiring practical skills and resources rather than just stockpiling goods. He also encourages forming community groups to share costs and resources, and stresses that preparedness is not just about spending money, but investing time and effort. He acknowledges that not everyone will become a ‘prepper’, but advises those who do to be strategic and thoughtful in their approach.

You want to look at where you live, everything about your surrounding areas and then start considering them under stress. The last place you want to be is in a city, especially during a full on prolonged shtf. I’m taking a process that is meant for war and I’m using it for preparedness. The public doesn’t have the right tools. The government has all the tools, but they weren’t employing them. Ultimately you do have a responsibility to protect yourself up to and even longer than 72 hours. You do not make sound decisions when you’re terrified. It’s important that people understand the extremes they’re willing to go to in a full on shtf.

How far are you willing to go? How violent are you willing to become to protect yourself and your family? If you darken my door unwelcome, uninvited, and my family’s in the house, I’ve already made a very clear decision. You build this plan, you’re building confidence that you are ready to go and you can protect yourself and your family. World War 3 is all already happening. This is a house of cards and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic crash the likes of which we’ve never seen. Do you want the latest emergency alerts? Subscribe to the Prepper News link in the description below.

Hi folks, Canadian Prepper here today on the channel we have Tom Marazo. He’s a Canadian military veteran with 25 years in the Canadian armed forces, retiring as a captain and combat engineer officer. He’s, he holds degrees in engineering, software development and an MBA. He authored the People’s Emergency Plan 2025, a civilian focused emergency planning guide and is active in Veterans for Freedom and Police On Guard for Thee. So I wanted to bring you on today because your book is, you know, a really good entry level, but not just entry level, there’s lots of advanced stuff in here as well.

Oftentimes as preppers we spend 95% of the time preparing for the things that are that only have a 5% likelihood. And so your book really sort of breaks it down and half of the book is exercises. So prepare to work. Right. There’s a lot of appendices there and you guys are going to be filling that out and you know, it’s really going to help you individualize your preparedness plan. So Tom, in your opinion, where I guess we’ll just start out, maybe what motivated you to write this book? Well, a lot of things motivated me obviously more so in the last five years than any other time in my life.

But you know, where I took the information from is in my opinion, information that everybody should have. And so it’s important for people who buy the book or who are interested in it to understand that this entire process, it’s called the operational planning process, I didn’t invent the process, but for the purposes of what’s going on across the world, I put it into a book and I civilianized it for families or for groups or you know, larger groups within a community to take this process and plan for, you know, future emergencies, whether they’re natural disasters, man made or civil unrest, whatever it is within your community that directly affects you.

Now this operational planning process is common across NATO. So if you’re a member of NATO, you follow the operational planning process. Now when I learned this process, I Learned it in 2007 when I was still in the Canadian army and I was going through staff college. So it’s the, it’s basically the Canadian War College in Kingston and it’s a six month long course and there’s a three month residency for the vast majority of the three months. You’re doing simulated planning battles, you’re learning the operational planning process. You know, and on the course that I was on there was about, I’d say about 75 officers.

We had officers from Serbia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech, we had American staff, we had British staff. We also had South Korea, we had a South Korean officer on there. And the reason is, is because if you’re part of NATO and you’re doing combined operations, you want to be planning major military operations from a common denominator, which is the operational planning process. And you know, back in, I think around 2014, I could be wrong on this. The Israelis were target tangling with one of their neighbors. They tried a different process called sod, systemic operational design. It failed miserably.

And they’ve now since then gone back to the operational planning process. Now what’s also interesting is here in Canada, and I would imagine same with FEMA and other emergency management organizations, they also use the operational planning process. Why? Because there’s going to be a point where they have to integrate into the planning process of the Canadian military or the American military or British military. A lot of law enforcement In Canada, the U.S. are also reserve soldiers. And the police forces usually benefit from a reserve soldier, especially an officer getting trained in OPP or operational planning process, because they bring it back to their police departments.

And so this knowledge is right across emergency management organizations in Canada. It’s across the government, it’s across the military and the Coast Guard search and rescue, everybody is using the same process. But here’s the issue. Why didn’t the public have that information? I’ll be honest, I’m a little surprised at this point that another veteran didn’t take this process and put it into a book and give it to the public. But I was really motivated by the last five years and I was also motivated by the fact that if you look at the United States via fema, FEMA has, for one reason or another, catastrophically failed its, its citizens.

I would say, I would almost argue they’ve, they’ve just done deliberate harm and yet the public had no process to follow in order to properly prepare for any type of emergency that, that they met. And in the United States we saw the, the catastrophic consequence of what happened, especially in South Carolina, you see a group of veterans that actually mobilized and activated their communities and went to these emergencies and started making things happen, which is, was the job of fema, but they didn’t do it. So I, I was motivated by the fact that the public didn’t have the, doesn’t have the right tools.

The government has all the tools, but they weren’t employing them. So in my view, it’s not about. My personal philosophy is do not rely, don’t rely on the government. Don’t rely on things. And, and I think you’re probably one of the most predominant experts in that field within this country and amongst your viewers. Don’t rely on, on the system, don’t rely on the government. And ultimately you do have a responsibility to protect yourself up to, and even longer than 72 hours. So why not have the proper tools that’ll give you a fighting chance to do that? And so that’s really the, that’s the, the big long genesis of how this book came into creation.

I view it as a tool that is going to save people’s lives because I don’t think the government is going to be there to, to do their job the way we expect them to. Absolutely they won’t. If you could only see some of the orders that they place from me, it’s like, and how they do it too. How they place the order is the most, you know, unprofess ways that they do it. So what is the, you said that there’s a difference. We often hear all these acronyms like SOD and you know, ooda, Loop and Operational Planning Process.

What was the fundamental difference, if you don’t mind me asking, in the SOD and the Operational Planning process, if you recall SOD was meant to be a faster reaction because if you’re, if you’re doing the operational planning process in a brigade level, because it’s actually meant for about a brigade level engagement, you know, you’re looking at about 5,000 of your own people in a, in your theater of war, but it’s, it’s a little bit slow. Okay. So I remember, you know, doing this process both, you know, I’m not a combat veteran, so I want that to be clear for people that I’m not a combat veteran.

I’m a 25 year veteran. I’ve done everything down to three man reconnaissance patrols. I did that for years, all the way up to being in a brigade staff. And I, I served in Toronto at the div headquarters as the engineer representative in my, my job in a domestic response would have been I was on the commander’s assessment team as the engineer to go forward into, you know, a domestic response and report back the engineer perspective. But all of this stuff, this, the operational planning process, it takes a lot of time to do it. So you’re looking at about a 12 hour cycle.

And remember, in a combat situation, every 12 hours you’re going through an entire new cycle. And so with sod, what was happening is they were trying to shorten the amount of time that they were producing their plants. Now with, with an OODA loop or your, your enemy’s Decision action cycle, you’re trying to actually get inside of your opponent’s decision making cycle and get there ahead of him before he’s had a chance to, to make decisions and give orders down to the field. And I think SOD was an attempt to do that, to try to shorten that amount of time it takes to produce orders and come up with a viable plan.

And unfortunately they couldn’t do it and so they ended up going back to the operational planning process to plan their operations. All right, guys. So as some of you know, Canadian Prepper is a fully independent channel. We don’t have sponsors and we’re beholden to nobod. You can help support us by supporting yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com I know that in an emergency, having the right gear can make all the difference. This is why I’ve tested and curated the best preparedness products on the market so that you can be confident and ready for whatever comes your way. Now back to the video.

Yeah, I mean you make some really good points with, with respect to the, the bureaucratic negligence when it comes to educating the public and I hope everybody at this point, I mean, but I know the majority of people are still asleep at the wheel on this in that they really do think that there is a plan of action for them. And I’m here to tell people that that just doesn’t exist. I mean, if that’s not abundantly clear already, when disaster strikes, that’s when they’re going to typically react and then overreact. As you know, that’s how it goes.

Under reacted or under prepare, then overreact. Right. So that’s why we got to make our own emergency plans. So I’m not sure if you want to, you know, walk through a bit of the process, of the operational planning process, what it is and how we would apply it as preppers. Yeah, I, I think that very simply there are a number of steps that you take, but you have to, you have to tackle a couple of things. First. First and foremost, wherever you live, you have to assess your environment. And we do something called the ipe, Intelligence Preparation of the Environment.

Now that’s what I call it in the book. In a military context, it was called ipb, Operational or Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield or the Battle Space. Yeah, it’s. Since it’s changed names again to ipbe, but for the purposes of this book, I just changed it simply. Intelligence Preparation of the Environment. And what you want to do with that is you want to look at where you live, everything about your surrounding areas, identify them, and then start considering them under stress. How did they behave under stress? For example, in Saskatchewan, how. I think it’s the Saskatchewan river, or let’s say the Niagara River.

If you live in the, in the lower part of the Niagara region in St. Catharines, you know, how does Lake Ontario react under stress? How do the highways. I mean, I live in the gta and I’m just surrounded by the concrete jungle. How do these things operate under stress? Yeah, it doesn’t matter what the emergency is. I don’t care if I’m, you know, I don’t. At this point, I haven’t identified whether I’m, you know, making a plan for a tornado, a snowstorm, a flood. I don’t care. I’m just looking at the intelligence preparation of my environment.

Am I surrounded by forest? Am I surrounded by bodies of water? And once you, you look at that, you want to start to identify something called an nai, a named area of interest. You know, I want to identify a certain intersection. I want to identify a certain bridge. If you live in Niagara, you could live somewhere across. You could be cut off by the Welland Canal. So if you’re in Niagara Falls and you’re trying to travel towards the western side of Niagara, you’ve got the Welland Canal to contend with. Right. So you, you want to look at these named areas of interest and then just kind of monitor those.

Yeah, like imagining, you know, a situation where there’s gridlock and, you know, how would you get out of a situation? Because I think people will always immediately gravitate to what they know. What’s the fastest way to get to such and such during normal times. But that might actually not be the case. And I always, I have this thing where I say, you know, the, the fastest way is the slowest way, and the slowest way is the fastest way when disaster strikes. So that way that you don’t want to take, which is far more circuitous, and you have to, you know, go down a back alley here or something.

Like taking the longest way is probably the way that most people are not going to take because they’re going to all reflexively want to jump on the freeway. Yes, yes, absolutely true. And, and so this kind of gets into my next part, and you kind of alluded it to it earlier. You get to the next piece that’s called a threat matrix, and you want to look at all of the possible. And I list a whole bunch of them, and there could be more. But I list the whole threat matrix in the book and I go through all the different types of scenarios.

You could have an ice storm, a flood, civil unrest, and I broke them down by categories. But you want to assess those for three things. The first two things are pretty important, which is how likely. I think it’s Appendix B. How likely is this to happen? And if so, how dangerous is this to me? So I’ll give you a couple of scenarios. I live in the gta. How likely am I going to experience a volcano? It’s never going to happen. There are no volcanoes where I live. If it happened magically, if it happened, it’d be pretty dangerous.

But in terms of score, it’s pretty low on my list of priorities. Okay, where I live, possibly a snowstorm. How likely is a snowstorm? It’s very likely. But how dangerous is it? To me, it’s not very dangerous because the way we construct our buildings in this particular area. So I look at how likely and how dangerous. But where it really gets prioritized is if it scores high unlikely, and it scores high on dangerous, is there any chance that it could force me from my home within 72 hours if it’s highly likely, highly dangerous and can force me to my home.

That is going to be one of my top priority plans that I want to start to focus on. And then that is where once I go through the threat matrix, I want to identify all the top scoring threats to me. Turns out where I live in Brampton. Oops, I shouldn’t say that, but I live in Brampton. It’s a big city, so you’ll never narrow it down. But home invasion. I live in Saskatoon and people still can’t find me. So I’ve been there, I was there last year, I love it there. And you know, home invasion scored highest on my threat matrix.

What was that? Home invasion. Okay. Home invasion is actually the number one threat to me and my family on the threat matrix. Wow. And so when I’m looking at all of my potential threats to, to me and my family, I’m prioritizing the ones that I need to do an immediate plan for. And so now I understand my environment because I’ve done ipe, I’ve understood my threats. Okay. And now what I’m going to do is start going into my actual planning cycle. This is where I’m going to come up with. I’m going to focus on one threat and I’m going to do something called a con plan, a contingency plan.

And in my con plan, when I’m going through the, the planning stages of this, I’m going to come up with three identifiable courses of action. I call them. It’s a COA course of action. And one is bug out, one is bug in, and one is prepare to leave, but don’t leave yet. Basically monitor. And those are really in, in preparedness. Those are the three major courses of action that you’ve got. Stay, go, or wait and see. Red, green, yellow. Basically. Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much exactly. So now I go through those and I and I have to draw up basically all of the conditions for each one of those courses of action.

Then I’m going to go through and I’m going to do another rating and I have a whole an assessment criteria. You know, will this achieve? My mission is this flexible, is this sustainable? And so I go through and I, and I look at all three coas and then I rate the coas objectively. I create a score. The highest score is the COA that I select. And then I have a backup coa. What’s the second highest? Because that also becomes the contingency plan to my contingency plan. From there I take that plan and now I want to war game it.

And this is where you get to do this with a family member or a friend. And you break up your plan into phases. So if I have to leave, okay, phase one is prepare. Phase two is, you know, the move to your safe location. And then the third phase is your sustainment in that location. So I break that up and I go through step by step. I pick one person in my group to be the bad guy or to be the opposition, to be the devil’s advocate, play the role. They’re. They’re the red roll, you’re the blue, and so you’re, you’re blue team and red team.

And basically you’re saying, okay, in this phase, you know, the prepare, this is what I’m gonna do. And then your red roll player in the war game says, yeah, if you do that, this is how I’m gonna throw a whole bunch of wrenches into your plant. And then I get to counter it. My turn is. It’s turn, counter, counter, turn. So I do my first move, you make your move, and then I come up with a way to counteract that if it happens. So this is how I create my war game. To find out all those nitty gritty details that I wouldn’t normally have gotten on the first go around.

Once I’ve done that, I transfer that information to something called the decision support template. So this is just a one page. It’s a summary of what the plan is with timelines. And it’s really like a. It’s like, you know, a quarterback and talking to the offensive coach. They’ve got the list of plays on a sheet and they know that when they’re in certain areas of the field, they call certain plays certain areas of the field. And so this is all it is. Your decision support template is all of your decisions already made? Yeah. If this event happens now, I want to, I.

I want to be very specific and talk about triggers in decision points, because this is very, very important. A trigger is an event that forces you to choose between multiple decisions. You know, I’m walking down the street and there’s a big car crash. Okay? That’s the event. That’s the trigger. I can either turn around and go home, or I can continue on my way and walk past the accident. It’s an event that caused me to make a decision. And here’s the thing, the very first chapter after the intro is about fear and the impact of fear on the human body and the human brain.

You do not make sound decisions when you’re terrified. And if you, if people don’t believe me, think back to any time they’ve tried to dial 911 in an emergency. And within the first 10 seconds of your, your heart rate going up over 115 to 145, you start to lose fine motor control. After 10 seconds, you’re now starting to have a reduction in your gross motor control. Your speech, auditory exclusion, tunnel vision, vasoconstriction, or, yeah, vasoconstriction. Your body is going through the physiological effects of fear. So how are you going to come up with a plan? The, the truth is, unless you’re a tier one or tier two special operations guy, or a race car driver, a fighter pilot, or an airline pilot, you’re not accustomed to living in that type of a fear environment.

So you don’t make good decisions when you’re panicking. What you do is the purpose of the contingency plan is to look for signals in the environment. Look for triggers in the environment that force you to pull off that contingency plan off of your shelf and say, I’ve got a plan for that event. And so now what I’m doing, instead of being terrified and coming up with a plan, I’m terrified, but I’m activating my plan. A better analogy, best analogy, I can come up with boxers. Mike Tyson didn’t just jump into the ring, never studying his opponent and, you know, said, oh, I’ll figure it out when I’m in the ring.

No, they study their opponent, they watch film, they have a plan, they get into the ring and they fight that plan against the opponent. This is how you have to approach emergencies, and this is how we approach battles. You know, the commander on a battlefield doesn’t go, yeah, Tom, have your guys move up on the right or, you know, pull back on the left. He has a decision support template in his pocket and he’s looking. It’s like, okay, methodical protocol to follow. Because like you’re saying, there’s a limited amount of bandwidth, as I’ve heard it described, mental bandwidth.

And when you’re in a lot of stress, obviously that’s going to narrow a lot. So it’s tunnel vision for a lot of people. And depending on the magnitude of the incident, you know, it can be fairly debilitating for some people. So, like you’re saying, having this. Because oftentimes as preppers, what we do is we buy a bunch of stuff, we throw it in the closet, right? And we never actually envision these scenarios, like the motoric aspect of it all, you know, down to like you’re saying, okay, like in the case of a, a home invasion, you know, they do this, then what do I do? Right, because you don’t want to be deliberating that in the moment because you’re likely going to, I mean you may pull a John Wayne but you know, you want to have a plan of like you’re saying in order to, to free up whatever mental bandwidth you, you’re going to need in that situation to react to the uncertainties.

So. Yeah, yeah. And what you’re saying too, with respect to the, the home invasion example, all of this stuff is amplified by like we often talk about global disasters on the channel. Home invasion is a great example because it’s a problem now and it’s also a problem in a full blown SHTF situation, but on a different scale. So it’s, I like that example because it. Civil unrest, there’s a civil unrest component in there as well and also a kind of, you know, economic, socioeconomic decline, you know, aspect to, to that. So it’s a good scenario to prepare for and I think there’s a lot of, within that specific scenario there’s a lot of things that you can generally apply to other situations as well.

I, I have a chapter in the book, I talk about violence and I talk about morals because in my view it’s important that people understand the extremes they’re willing to go to in a full on SHTF or a prolonged event. You know, they, they talk about nine meals. You know, there’s this sort of idea of nine meals be before the 80 year old next door neighbors kicking in your front door with a shotgun because she’s hu hungry, she missed nine meals, she’s coming for yours. You know, it’s an example. But what I’m trying to get people to understand is you have to make a decision about your own morality.

How far are you willing to go? And that conversation that you need to be open and honest about has to address violence because the greatest moral challenges we’re going to have in an SHTF is going to be about violence. How violent are you willing to become to protect yourself and your family? What are you willing to do? So you have to make decisions prior to them happening. You know, I, I studied Krav Maga for years and you know, I’ve always been, you know, very fascinated with self defense, personal self defense and in other scenarios, women’s self defense.

And what I used to tell my female students, because I used to teach this as well, is that you need to make decisions today. You don’t get to make them when somebody’s putting you into a trunk. Okay. You have to already have been clear and right in your mind about the actions you’re going to take before you take them. Because like you said, you can’t deliberate on the amount of violence you’re going to bring to a very scary situation in the moment. I know for me, I’ve made my own. My own decisions, and I’ve made my own peace with it.

I hope I never have to. But if those particular scenarios were ever to happen, the decision has already been made, and I will live with those consequences afterwards. But if you darken my door unwelcome, uninvited, and my family’s in the house, I’ve already made a very clear decision of what my course of action is going to be against you. I’m not going to deliberate. The decision’s already been made. And so I. I want people to read that chapter because I think it should wake up a sense of, this isn’t. This isn’t a joke, you know, this isn’t fun.

This is nasty business that I might have to be in someday. I hope I don’t. But like you said, you look strategically at the world and you see the trends, you see the changes. You see the. Michael Yawn likes to call it hop. Human osmotic pressure, you know, when he’s talking about different groups migrating to different locations around the world with very different cultural and religious mindsets. So we need to, I don’t want to say harden our hearts and minds and our souls, but we need to confront some really difficult possibilities. Yeah. Right now in Saskatchewan, there’s a major wildfire that is raging out of control.

And it’s a good example of this because oftentimes you’ll talk to these people in communities that live in a forested community, and they have no contingency plan for, you know, I mean, that is the number one threat this day and age, if you live near a forested region, is wildfire. And it’s incredible how few people have made a plan in their heads of, what are you going to take? Where are you going to go to? You know, and especially if all the hotels are booked up along the way, you know, how much gas is in your tank, because these fires, like today, we were seeing gusts of wind up to like 50, 60 kilometers an hour.

And, you know, it was just the smokiest day I think I’ve ever seen. And, you know, we’re in Saskatoon. We’re probably three hours away from this fire. And these things can happen really fast. And, and like you’re saying, a simple, you know, plan like that could potentially make that situation a lot more manageable. Yeah, I, I agree. And I mean simple things. When you’re, again, this is why we do the ipe. We analyze our environment, then we start to look at the course of action. If we realize that, you know what, in a fire scenario we’ve got the means to stay home.

Well, you’re going to go through the process and hopefully make the deductions that one of your tasks in order to mitigate that is to create firebreaks around your house, around your property. Buy the right equipment for firefighting, for protecting yourself against smoke, inhalation masks, respirators. This is, this is where you now, and I’m glad you brought it up because I did want to talk a little about buying equipment. You know, a lot of the, the conversation out there on YouTube is everyday carry bugo bags, get home bags. You know, I think those are valuable and, and I, I would never disparage those because I think they’re needed, I think they’re very, very valuable conversations and knowledge to have.

But they’re general purpose bags. They’re. Whatever happens, I’ve got something to deal with. Everything that’s a, that’s, that’s pretty good under general situations. But what I want to talk about with equipment is in a military context, we don’t take everything we’ve got. We know the mission we’re going on, we know what the objective is. We, we task tailor the equipment we take on the mission. So what I’ve done in the book is once you go through your threat matrix and you’re looking at all of your equipment, so there’s a checklist in there to go through all of the resources, all the tools, all the equipment that you have at your home and identify which type of an emergency that would apply to.

Do I need a rubber dinghy in a, in a snowstorm? No. Do I need a snowblower in a flood? No. So what I’m trying to do is create equipment packages. So I want to, you know, if I’ve got a shed or a storage container or I’ve got something, I want to put my whole flood section together inside a locker or in, in an area. I want all my snowstorm stuff to be together. I think you would like the urban prepper. He’s pretty meticulous like that. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And, and these are, these are important. And you go through do an inventory of what you got and then from there when you realize, okay, this is the first time, the first kick of this cat.

For this plan, I’m missing this, this and this. Now I need to purchase it because it is part of my fire protection plan. Okay, so that’s how you want to do it. Don’t buy everything in the kitchen sink. Buy task specific equipment for the contingency plans that are most likely most dangerous and could force you from your home. And that’s how you build out your equipment pack. So you don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea. Prepare for zombies. And you’re prepared for everything. Well, because things are going to be all over the place, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And in a sense there’s a lot of overlap, which is great. Okay. There’s a lot of the equipment. I don’t care what the scenario. You want a water straw? Yeah, I don’t care what the scenario is. You want a water straw or a water filter, something to carry water. And that does include zombies. So yeah, there are, there is a lot of over overlap in this. But again, when we go back to the fear, if I have to bug out, I want, I, I can’t carry all that stuff in my SUV or in my truck unless I have an awesome rig like you.

But I’m getting rid of it. I’m trading it in for an old shitty diesel. So. Are you? Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll sell it to you if you want. It’s a little, it’s not gray man enough. I bought it when I was young and dumb. So. Yeah, well, I, I think you want to take that stuff that you’ve already got sort of sectioned out and start firing it into your vehicle if you gotta go. Not kind of treating it like you’re going through the aisles at Walmart. You want to just go to, this is my flood section, this is my ice storm section, you know, and start firing stuff in your truck and getting out.

With respect to prevention, because you talked about, you know, home invasion being a scenario in this respect, does your book talk at all about how to, you know, prevent these things from happening in the first place by like minimizing the likelihood that it’s going to happen by shaping the environment in ways that can discourage such an act. Or you know, like with the case of fire, people should have years ago probably cut down those trees that were right next to their house. I see so many people living in the country and, or you know, in a forested region and it’s like you got Forests for hundreds of miles around.

I’m pretty sure clearing out 50ft from your house or whatever, you know, is not going to be a big drain on, you know, your view or anything like that. So I know we talk a lot about home security here. So, you know, is there anything in your plan and you don’t have to get super specific, obviously that, that deals with the preventative component of things. I didn’t specifically, because I, I did think about that, like, do I want to go take the book down that direction? And I did not do it. And I’ll, I’ll tell you specifically why.

What this book is teaching you is a process to derive the tasks that you need to determine to make your situation better. I’ll give you an example. There’s a, there’s a chapter in there where I talk about a hasty plan, okay, where you got kind of caught on your back foot or flat footed and you don’t have a lot of time to do a full on IPE or a big planning process. You literally got caught off guard and you do something called a hasty plan. And at the end of your hasty plan, what you’re doing is you’re looking at the scenario and you’re going to determine six things, but I’ll only talk about the four.

You’re going to look at your scenario and say what’s a fact? I want to start at facts. And in the book I use an in incoming possibility of a flood. And I have a family, young couple, two young kids in an suv. And I give the scenario. And what I’m saying is go through your scenario and determine what are the facts. Just the facts. I have an suv. Okay, then I want you to look at considerations and what are those? Consideration about the facts. What am I considering about this suv? Okay, then I want to look at deductions.

What deductions can I make from those considerations in those facts? And then lastly, based on deductions, it should derive a task. Okay? The idea is once you identify all the facts, considerations, deductions and then tasks, you have a list of tasks, those, that’s your plan. That is your immediate plan right there. And then. So if I’m looking at my environment, I’m looking at my house and I say, look, I want to, I, I need to come up with a, a plan around my house that helps me with deterrence or to make my house look like it’s not a place you want to go to anyway.

It’s not worth the, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze here. So you, you want to go through this process to come up with all of those things, look at the facts, considerations, deductions, tasks, and by doing this you derive that. And the reason I did it this way is, you know, when David Redmond and I started talking about this book, he said, I’m glad you’re doing this because since he became public about his involvement in emergency management Alberta in his military, it’s like, you wouldn’t believe the number of people that asked me to write a plan for them.

He said, now you give them the book, they can write their own plan, which is the whole point. But at the end of the day, if I’m living in a, on the 50th, you know, in a beehive on the 50th floor in downtown Toronto versus somebody who is in a rural area In Ontario with 100 acres, their plans are going to be so drastically different because their considerations are going to be different, their facts are different. So give people the methodology to work through these problems and derive solutions. So this is really why I specifically made the book about the steps and not about the plan.

I’m not giving anybody the plan. I’m giving you the tools to make your own plan based on your needs and what the outcome is that you ultimately want for yourself and, you know, home, home invasion or home defense. Let’s say we were in a full on shtf and in my neighborhood where I’m currently living, I do have property outside of here. The two problems are very, very different. The two solutions are very different. And my biggest problem in a rural environment is getting to an urban environment, is getting to my rural environment and then going from there.

That’s the biggest challenge I have, is getting the hell out of the city. Because in my view the last place you want to be is in a city or a built up environment. Especially during a full on prolonged shtf, you don’t want to be anywhere near the city at all. Yeah, there’s so many variables to calculate when in making videos about these topics. This is something myself and the producer and the other like editors on the channel, this is something we always struggle with, is how do we narrow it down? Because we’re trying to talk about 50 different scenarios.

And well, you know, this person has this disposition and this person is completely different. And you know, so how do you, you know, calculate? And making this threat matrix I think is probably one of the only real practical way to go because like you’re saying there’s one size fits all approaches, but they don’t really address people’s specific needs. And then oftentimes you end up having all these, you know, redundancies or aspects of your preparedness plan that are not really necessary, perhaps. So is there any other, like, mistakes? I guess just two questions. One is, how receptive have people been to this book? And the second question is, what are some of the other mistakes you see people making when it, when it comes to their approach to preparedness that you haven’t already discussed? I, I can tell you one big mistake.

It’s kind of a funny story. One, one big mistake I’ve, I’ve seen is enough to pick on the military community. We, we still think we’re all a bunch of young men, okay? And I remember I was in a group and I saw a picture of this guy’s big, giant bugout bag, you know, a 70L ruck sack. And in the group, my, my first comment to him was, do you or your wife have bad knees? And he’s like, yeah, I do, because he was in his 50s. I said, so if I understand correctly, if you go down, you’re going to expect your wife to carry her bag plus yours, or are you stuck there? And so I’m going through the whole thing, fact, consideration, deduction task.

And I looked at it and I said, have you considered a mountain bike with saddlebags? Because you’re going to get a lot further, carry a lot more gear if you’re not on foot, but you’re on some sort of a bike, which you can then attach to your vehicle if your vehicle runs out of gas. So, you know, I, I see this idea that in, in a military term, we call it situating the estimate. Okay? You’re, you’re coming up with a solution before you’ve actually looked at the factors. And in the military, that is a, a big no, no, and you’ll get called out when you’re planning and, and somebody says to you, hey, you’re situating the estimate.

It’s like you’re coming up with a plan and you haven’t actually done the deductions. That is a monumental. No, no. And I do see people do that. They want to go to the finish line and they don’t want to go through the process of, of really analyzing it. And I can tell you a, a good buddy of mine, JTF2, was in Afghanistan and he said, you know, I did the process, I did the planning. It works. You know, he told me they were going to go on a mission, use a certain type of a vehicle, use a certain type of a weapons platform.

They went through the process and they realized the entire vehicle was no good for the environment they were in and nor was that weapon. And they had to go through the process and make the deductions about what is the right weapon. So, so that’s a big thing. I see people situate their estimates, they, they get to the finish line and don’t do the analysis. That’s a big, big mistake in my view. And then I think the second thing they, they don’t do is they don’t focus on one problem at a time. They’re trying to cast the biggest net that they can in hopes that they get everything.

Well, you’re now loaded down with too much stuff, too many considerations and you’re all over the map. And so if you go through this, this deductive reasoning really to derive the right plan for you, you’re much better off. Don’t run to the, don’t, don’t skip to the end. Now I’ve seen you do it. There was a series of videos you put out about seven or eight years ago. You did a full on analysis of I think Ontario, which was where I live and was living at the time. And what I really liked about the video is you were doing deductions, you were looking at the, the facts, the considerations and you were making deductions.

And you know, that’s an important thing because when I get to the deduction, I can derive a task that I need to perform to deal with that specific deduction. So it’s about the analysis, do the analysis, make the deductions, derive tasks. So that’s a big, big mistake I think people make. Yeah. And like you said, the overestimation of our abilities is probably something else too because even myself, you know, I, I, I do a lot of physical stuff. But you know, there was a time when, yeah, I could have, I could think. The other day we shot a video where it was, I was testing out this exoskeleton and yeah, and you know, back in the day I would rock a 70 pound pack like through the west coast trail like it was nothing.

And nowadays, even though I’m still, you know, maybe it’s muscle memory, just not using it enough. But, but yeah, I mean you forget that time takes its toll. So it’s probably good to do a bit of a self assessment in terms of your physical capabilities as well every once in a while. Just like you have to get an eye test every once in a while to keep your license. You should probably do a fitness test. Just so you know where you stand, should you have to carry somebody or what’s a realistic expectation? Because, well, it’s true that you can drop gear.

And, you know, I do believe that I’m not one of these people that thinks while 20 of your body weight, because everybody’s different. You see guys, you know, in the Himalayas who rock, you know, packs that are weight heavier than them, and they’re conditioned to do that. So it’s not really one size fits all. And that’s what I like about this approach. Approach is it’s tailored to the individual. So you’re not just trying to take some, you know, general classification scheme and see where you fit into it. It’s really, you know, focused on your own personalized plan.

And that’s what’s great about the book is that it, it allows you to, you know, put your. Put these thoughts down on paper. And just in doing that itself is a huge step above, because you’re talking about home invasion. Okay. You know, I, as a prepper, I’m prioritizing prevention, but in terms of the actual war gaming, that’s something that I really got to do more of. You know, I’ve thought about it a little bit, but in terms of actually focusing down on the moment by moment as to how that might play out and the various contingency offshoots and triggers, you know, that’s definitely something that is worth its weight in gold.

In one of those situations where I don’t have to make a decision where the decision’s already made, like you said. Yes. And, and that is fundamentally vital, really, if you look at. I’ll use a very terrible example for all the Trekkies out there, you know, you, you’re, you’re out of phasers, you’re out of shields, you’re surrounded by enemy warships, and then all of a sudden, under that condition, you’re supposed to come up with the Picard maneuver, you know, and just save the day and everyone on board. That’s not realistic at all. You always have to pre consider what your opposition is going to do.

Okay, we also, you know, this is what I was talking about. What’s most likely and what is most dangerous. And in a military context, I took that. Remember, I civilianized a process. I’m, I’m taking a process that is meant for war, and I’m using it for preparedness. And the Canadian government in all the provinces and territories do this as well, like emergency management. Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, they all use the same process. They go through the same things. And In a military context, I’m saying, what is the most likely action of the enemy? And of the most likely actions, which ones are most dangerous to me? Well, guess what? That’s my number one contingency plan that I want to prepare for.

That’s how we do it in a combat environment. You can do that if you’re. If your focus. If your belief or your. Your threat matrix identifies that civil unrest is a high probability for me. Now you want to say, okay, civil unrest, it’s highly likely. It’s highly dangerous. Will it force me from my home? Okay, if you, if you have nowhere to go, that changes the entire dynamic. Now I’m hardening where I live. That means I. I don’t subscribe to the lone wolf scenario. I think the lone wolf is a. Is a suicide mission. I think that lone wolves, there’s a reason wolves travel in packs.

It’s because they’re strength in numbers. And if you look at what happened in Sarajevo, the people that survived in Sarajevo basically created packs. Okay. This is the only way, in my view, because if you are going to try and run as a lone wolf, you’re not going to get very far, because at some point you have to sleep. Okay. You have to hunt. You have to do a lot of. You. Can you. It depends on where you go. But I’m, I’m. It’s pretty rare that the lone wolf scenario is a good option. But I would say if I’m in a scenario where it’s SHTF and I have to fortify my position now I’m dragging my neighbors into the fight with me.

I’m building a network around me, and it’s now a neighborhood fight. It’s not just Tom’s house. It’s the neighborhood’s fight. So do you have a strategy for that in the book as well? I actually, there is because it’s a. It’s an awkward conversation, and I’ve always been reluctant about bringing up preparedness to my neighbors for a variety of reasons. Some I do with the stigma, some do with. Can I trust these people? Yeah. So it’s kind of a gamble, but is there, like a. A procedure that you can perhaps have together, you know, if you did not take the proactive steps to build those alliances in advance? Is there any advice on how to quickly kind of muster forces? Yeah, and this is a great question, because when I published the book, we, in this neighborhood, everybody, all around my house actually have cameras.

And there is a chat group. We’re all in a chat group. It started with let’s just keep an eye on each other’s property. And, you know, two months ago, a truck got stolen out of my driveway. And the irony was, the entire neighborhood around my house all had cameras, and they all saw it. But the truck was gone in under two minutes at 4am in the morning. But we were all talking about it. We all had. We all shared video footage of the truck being stolen out of the driveway. But that is where. That’s the gentle introduction.

That’s the, hey, we’re in a group. We’re already in a chat group. Maybe we should have a barbecue and maybe talk about, you know, theft in the area and how to do a better job, start small, grow it. I. I hate to use this term because it’s kind of disgusting, but you want to groom your neighbors to a certain point where when it starts to get scary, when you start to see the indicators in the news, in the media, in the environment, that, hey, something big is coming, they’re gonna know it. You’re gonna know it. If they already trust you as a leader and somebody who has a process, chances are you’re probably not gonna have to go knock on the door.

They’re gonna be calling you, saying, hey, what do we do? So I. I spoke about this. I. I was invited to a. A group meeting a week and a half ago in the Niagara region. And one thing I’ve noticed is I, you know, I get invited. I was in Saskatchewan last year. I spoke at an event, did a fundraiser, different activities. And what I’ve noticed is the groups are never bigger than 50, you know, and their focus is something. A big event that has happened to all of our lives in the last five years. But these groups never grow really much beyond 50, 50 members.

I’ve suggested that they start shifting their focus towards something like this right now, and they can have group meetings, do a. Train the trainer, and then come together as a collective group and do bigger planning. But I think it’s worth starting little neighborhood watch groups in your neighborhood to say, hey, we all have skin in the game here, so let’s just do a better job. We don’t have to be besties, but let’s keep an eye on each other’s property, and then from there, you can grow it out. And I think that if you’re demonstrating some leadership ability, they’ll be knocking on your door when it starts to get scary for them.

Because as we know and we’ve seen, we’ve all learned from experience, especially in Canada, Canadians really don’t do anything until they’ve got skin in the game, they’re more than happy to let other people do the fighting for them and then get sued for $290 million. That’s a, that’s a separate issue. Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I remember there used to be a thing called neighborhood watch, and I don’t even know if it’s still a thing anymore or if people’s eyes just sort of glaze over it. But yeah, I mean, it, there used to be a time when it seemed as though people felt a responsibility in that respect.

And I think that is a good icebreaker for people. It’s not taboo to sort of commiserate about the crime in the area and how we can, you know, support one another in that respect. And from that it could be a springboard into that other conversation should something more chaotic arise. So I think that’s a, you know, a good way of approaching it just strictly from a security. You know, I’ll watch your back, you watch mine. Yeah, you get a good sense of your neighbors as well. You know, you, you spend an hour or two, you know, doing a barbecue, you’ll get a good sense of, of what’s important to people.

And I give you a great example. The moment the US President comes up in conversation, you’re going to find out immediately what, what company you’re in. Yeah, you will. And so you’re gonna, you’ll get a true understanding. You don’t have to talk politics, just throw it out there, something divisive and see, see where your neighbors land and write down their address. Or you could have, you could have looked around and seen who had signs in their lawn in the last election. I’m interested in whether or not a lot of those sentiments will endure in a real SHTF or if it’s just a luxury that we’re able to, you know, it is so tribalistic in a superficial sense of politics, you know.

Yes. Whereas I think as a community, your needs and interests would probably override all of that shortly. I agree. You wouldn’t be concerned about, well, is this guy left wing or right wing or. Yeah, you know, I mean, these things would probably have little meaning, you know, in a grid down situation. Have you noticed that’s true. Yeah. Have people been receptive to this? Because this is work. Right. Like this requires people to actually get out a pen and do some thinking. And nowadays, you know, tick tock generation, it’s difficult because unless there’s like illustrations and unless it’s in bite size amounts and it’s a dip in sort of read.

It’s very. And this actually is dip into a certain extent. But have people like, what’s the feedback been on the book? Yeah, well, when you. It’s a great question because in my experience, I’ve written three books now, this is my third book. And what I’ve, I’ve noticed is in exactly that we’re in a TikTok world right now and people don’t like to buy books anymore. And that’s fine with me. This is a workbook. You got to put in the work, you got to put in the time. And my hope is that people will get the book, they’ll photocopy the pages in the back and then they’ll do the work.

That’s what my hope is. The tool is there. You just gotta put in the time, put in the work and feel better about it. And I guess I would say, do you, do you decide to get into the Octagon without actually putting into the work? I hope not. But some, some people out there will and I don’t want them to think, okay, I’ll buy the book, put it on the shelf and in an emergency I’ll crack it open. Yeah. It’s not that kind of book. It’s not that kind of book. You gotta do the homework before the exam.

In the exam is, is the essay or not the shtf, but it’s the event that you’re, you’re planning for. So that is my concern. And so, you know, one of my degrees is in software development and I am actively now building a software application to help guide people through this process. Oh, cool. But the idea is you gotta, it’s a companion book. You should read the book and understand what it is you’re trying to achieve. You know, the, the software platform is just a tool to guide you through the process. Come up with a printed copy of your plan, put it in a binder, stick it up on the shelf, review it every six months to 12 months and make sure it’s still valid.

Okay. And, and that’s the idea. So I am actively building the website for it right now. It’s going to take me some time. It’s not going to be an easy thing for me to do. I do work full time and I write a lot. So, you know, it’ll be, it’ll be months before this tool is out and available to the public. And the other thing is, you know, the people, a lot of people that have looked at the book, they’re excited about it. But so Far I’ve only got 2, 2 ratings on Amazon and luckily one of them is from somebody who read it, who has a lot of experience in emergency management.

So I’m still waiting to, to find out what the feedback is going to be. I only published it on the 7th of May. I put it out to the public. But I’ve been working on this for years, you know, through my career and then doing training sessions with other people and then finally I said okay, let’s, let’s put this into a book and get it into people’s hands. And my goal is to, to, to defeat the SAS Survival handbook as the, the godfather of preparedness books. Not, not technically that, but it, in my view this book is going to save people’s lives.

But this is a just an exceptionally pragmatic approach. And where I think this may actually have its day is probably with like companies even like you know, businesses. Yeah, I mean the value of preparation is just, it’s something that is hard to quantify for people until you’ve perhaps run the, like you’re saying, until you’ve run the exercise and then you realize what your weaknesses were. You don’t understand the value in it. Oftentimes this process. Like you, you mentioned, I’ve got an mba and when I was going through staff college in learning this whole entire process, I remember at the end of it I had a conversation with a Lt.

Colone I knew who also had an MBA, went through, you know, staff college obviously and we had this great conversation because the operational planning process could be used in the business world and you could apply this very process if you wanted. I actually had a chapter, a full on chapter about a business scenario where I outlined this whole situation. I was using the example of a coffee company, a coffee bean company. I took it out because I want to be very specific, focus on this. If there’s an adoption of this book, then I will write the, the, the business emergency plan book as well.

I’ll, I’ll do that. But you know, if I kind of, I view the, the market as a good indicator of whether or not they want something that you’re, you’re giving them. If nobody wants the book, then there’s no sense in building another product somebody doesn’t want. Right. That’s just common sense. But my, my concern about this particular book is that people are going to try to order it when there’s a disaster and by then it’s too late. And the other thing is my goal is to save as many people’s lives as Possible. But if they don’t know that it’s out there, then how do they know that the tool is available to them? And that’s, that’s the harder piece.

Right. I’m a guy who works a job. I, you know, live an army pension in, in my job. And, and I’m happy with that. But I don’t have this crazy marketing budget to spend millions of dollars on SEO to get a, a book out there. Right. So conversations like this are extremely helpful for, for the public to know that there’s a tool that will help them build confidence. And this is a big thing that David always says we have to focus on confidence, not on fear. You build this plan, you’re building confidence that you are ready to go and you don’t have to panic and you can protect yourself and your family.

And that’s a really, really important thing to have. It’s personal responsibility. You know, we have life insurance, car insurance, we have all these different insurances. This plan is just another layer of insurance. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the years is the people that have the tools have failed to actually do their job. And I want to say one last thing, and I’ve talked to David Redmond about this a couple of times. If you look at what emergency management, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, everybody was supposed to do, every province and territory has an office, a whole team of usually ex military that, and I know this because I actually worked beside the guy in the morning briefs when I was posted to the headquarters in Toronto years ago.

I, I did the morning briefs, you know, for the general, and I sat beside the emergency Management Ontario representative. Okay. He was a retired brigadier, air Force general. Right. We used emo during the GHE 20 summit in 2010. Okay. It’s all the same process. But here’s the thing, and this is what David was saying when he did his interviews. And this is the analogy that I want to make. Every province and territory has one of these organizations. They’re staffed, they’re funded, and they’re trained. And the intent of them is for the premier of the province to activate their emergency management office.

And if you look at society as a wheel in a bunch of spokes, each spoke is banking, education, religion, the economy, police, military, different industries. Those are all spokes. Medical is a spoke. And in the middle of that wheel, the hub, is emergency management. What we saw in the early days of 2020 is they pulled the hub out and they grabbed the medical spoke and they put that in the middle. And we are now living the consequences and we will be, our youth, our young children will be living the consequences of that for years to come.

And that spoke only knew about what that spoke knew and it didn’t understand the effect or the impact on everything else. And what is interesting to me is that every single province and territory did the exact same thing. Even though we had contingency plans across every province and territory for a pandemic or an endemic, and that organization was benched, those con plans were ignored. And what we did is we took the spoke of every province and we said, you’re now in charge of whole of society’s response. That is fundamentally ridiculous. So because of that, this is one of the big motivators why I said, okay, if you’re going to pull crap like that, then I’m going to give the public the ability to become their own hub in their own wheel.

And that’s really why this is important. I’m going to give you the process they were supposed to follow but didn’t. So here you go. I hope you, I hope you take it, I hope you buy the book and go through the plans. When I have the website up, I’ll be happy to, to help answer questions. But again, it’s about enabling and empowering people to do recovery and self rescue. Yeah, I mean that’s a great analogy for what happened and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it explained in that way before. You have to wonder was that group think was that and would those pressures come into play again whatever emergency arises? I mean, next time is it going to be a military dictatorship when World War III breaks out? Or, you know, whatever the disaster is that, you know, branch of society going to be the one that governs the whole process just because everybody is afraid to kind of speak out about it.

Very interesting stuff. I like what you said about confidence and fear and it got me thinking about, you know, when you’re first getting into this, it’s important to be a little bit fearful because if you’re not, you know, if you’re not fearful at all, you’ll just run out into traffic and get smoked by a car. Right. So there has to be a little bit of fear. That’s an impetus to get into prepping at all. It’s just like, you know, I’m worried my house is going to burn down. I probably should go get some fire insurance. It’s only prudent to kind of, to, to be a little bit fearful and not just, you know, think that the universe owes you something.

But what you say about developing confidence because I think if that fear remains throughout the entirety of the process, then you risk that. You know that old saying, haste makes waste and you’re just out there trying to, you know, we, we live in a consumer driven society, so there’s a problem. What can I buy to fix it as opposed to developing the confidence to, to know and maybe the, the, you know, the information as well, the intelligence to be able to say, well, maybe I don’t necessarily need that particular thing. You know, I’m a proponent of good high quality gear, obviously, which is why I have a store.

But I also know that it can kind of get out of hand and people can use it as a crutch. And what you’re saying, I think if people actually were to devise a plan, they would really be able to dial in what they actually needed and they wouldn’t feel the, that fear that motivates them to want to go out and buy stuff. It just wouldn’t be there. You know, I, I guess there’s a fine line between you want there to be because that’s lost on a lot of people nowadays in society. People are not fearful enough, I would say, because unless that’s there, people just don’t want to, you know, take an interest in prepping until it’s too late.

Do you have any thoughts on what makes preppers tick or what makes people like, like, like us? You know, why are we the way we are in your opinion? You know, that is such a, a great question. I, I, I think the common denominator, I would say one of the areas I, I would think is just a, a mistrust of government competence. I, I don’t want to say government, I want to say government competence and you know, a general mistrust that other people are going to take care of us. We are independent people and we believe that we have the, the skills, the know how, the drive and motivation to, to take care of ourselves, to take matters into our own hands and not to be subjugated by some government entity.

We, you know, we are, we are the type of people that would have thrived 150 years. We would have had to, you know, grow our own food, hunt fish, build our own homes. We’re fiercely independent people and what we don’t like is being dependent. You know, that’s just, I think against our nature overall is being reliant on anyone else. I mean you, you’ve, you’ve talked to Shawn James. You know, my self reliance, this is, in my view, he’s living the best life that I could have ever had. If, if. If I had the opportunity like he had right now to live like that, it’d be amazing.

There’s. There’s very little that somebody like Sean James could do right now that would be prepper that he hasn’t already done, you know, but he’s not, he’s not putting himself out there as like this hardcore guy. He’s trying to prep. What he’s doing is. He’s saying, this is the lifestyle that from myself. So I, I kind of look at this in a sense of you. You can live by fear. You can be motivated by fear, or you could be motivated by a quality of life that you want to live knowing that you’re not vulnerable when, you know, everything goes to ashes around you, just about.

You’re still okay because you have the skills to. To do like you’re living this life. My view and the reason I bring up Shawn James is, you know, look at the quality of life he has. You know, he doesn’t have a boss. He’s. He’s providing all of his sustenance. He’s, you know, he’s up at 4:30 in the morning all the time, and he’s, he’s doing stuff around the property. And I think he’s living a much more enlightened, let’s say, satisfying, gratifying life than city slickers or Fortune 500 people. I saw an interview recently. Who’s. Who’s the.

Larry Fink, the. The. The chairman of BlackRock. Right. In the interview, basically said that that guy is the most miserable, angry person that they’ve ever met in their life. Completely unhappy, One of the richest men on the planet. Miserable. Look at a guy like, you know, Sean James seems pretty happy living his best life. So is prepping about worry or is prepping about saying, at the end of the day, I hold myself accountable and I am completely independent and I provide for myself, and I feel good about doing that. And I’ve taken care of all the worry.

You know, it’s. It’s like, do you worry when you’re. You got a giant mortgage, or do you worry less when your mortgage is paid off? Until, of course, the tax bill shows up? That’s a different story. But, you know, always being vulnerable. If. If I lose this, I lose that. This is, this is a philosophy that I think is a better quality of life than, you know, what I’m gonna be. I’m gonna go get a job for 125000 in Toronto. I’m gonna get a condo, I’m gonna get a Tesla, I’m gonna get all this stuff and if I lose that job, I’m screwed.

You know, the classes, classic rich dad, poor dad. So yeah, I, I think that’s, you know, it’s, it’s really about the, the, the, the best life that you want to live and feeling that you’re not trapped in it boxed in any other, anyone else’s corner. Well, there definitely seems like there is, you know, maybe it’s just incidental, but it almost seems like they’re not actively encouraging this sort of thing for, you know, reasons we could probably muse about for hours. I, I don’t think it’s anybody who’s, you know, necessarily being nefarious about it. I just think it’s as a, you know, everybody’s kind of in the same group thinking mode and they want to, you know, just have people be very drone like and able to be controlled.

And so if you, if you can kind of deprive people of that, that yearning to be free, then you can control them a lot more easier. But of course, when disaster strikes, if everybody’s used to being controlled and having no responsibilities, then that burden’s going to fall on the government who will be ill prepared. I mean, I get these phone calls from like government agencies that, and you know, they want to pay for things. The person making the payment wants to get credit card points. And it’s like, don’t you work for the government? Like, shouldn’t there be some sort of like, you know, official process with this sort of thing? But you know, this is, you know, people think that there’s this mysterious underground factory that is churning out, you know, millions of rations and you know, it could be just turned on by the flick of a switch, but you know, such things do not exist.

And the supply chain is really in the hands of those same people who are scrambling to, you know, order masks from China when the hit the fan there in 2020 and then decided that they knew everything about everything. And you know, so, ah, I, I sort of went on a little bit of a rant there. Sorry about that. That’s okay. I do it all the time. I thought it was a daily update. So do you have any, you know, just, I, I guess final advice for, for people who are trying to get into this stuff. Yeah.

Start small and pick, pick the. Like I said, go to your threat matrix. What is the most likely and what is the most dangerous? And of those two things, if they’re really high, can this force me out of my home. Start there, start small, and don’t look at it like I need to throw money at the problem. If, if you want to do a, if you want to learn about bugout bags, I mean, you could do a Google search or a YouTube search and you probably get a thousand videos on bugout bags and everyday carry. You can get all the tactical stuff that, that is out there if you want, but figure it out, what is the purpose of this plan? What am I most, most vulnerable to? And then start there.

I think that’s it. And, and also, you know, what is it that you want from your life? I, you know, this is a thing that I, because I, I mean, you know, I’m on Twitter and some other social media and stuff, and I, I see over the last five years, especially since my time in Ottawa, there’s, There’s groups that are addicted to the fight, and I don’t think they know what they’re fighting for anymore. And every once in a while, I throw it on social media, remind them, like, like, what are you doing this for? Who are you doing this for? I think that a lot of groups out there have great intentions, but they’re addicted to the fight and they’ve lost sight of what the fight actually is.

And I, I would say with people, shift focus right now, focus on one little thing, but also start to figure out what, what’s the kind of life that you want to have? That’s, that’s kind of the process I’m, I’m doing again then, is I’m looking at my life and saying, what is the kind of life that I actually want to have and how can I prepare? And does preparedness tie into that? Because, you know, I like what you’re doing with the greenhouse. You know, I, Another thing, this is what I wanted to say earlier. It’s kind of a funny story, and I think it was on your channel years ago.

I, There was some discussion about gold and metals and stuff. It may not have been your channel. And my comment in, in, in the, the video was, you know, have. Instead of buying metals, have you considered buying seeds? And the response from one of the other people in the comments was, yeah, the gold is to buy the seeds, dummy. They actually called me dummy. Right. And my response back was, you could show up, yeah, you could show up with a donkey cart full of gold to buy my seeds. And I’m not giving you my seeds because I can’t eat the gold, but I can feed my family with these seeds.

I’m not giving up the things that are going to keep me alive. You know, metals are important. I get that. But, you know, it’s. It’s just a. It’s a. It’s a funny thing that we’re all going through. I think there’s a lot of fight in people. There’s a lot of worry, there’s a lot of concern. And I think ultimately just be very specific about what is most likely what’s most dangerous. Can it force you off your land? Start there. And remember, you can’t just throw money at this problem. You got to do the work, you got to invest the time in this.

And, you know, it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to terms with that quite frankly, the majority of people are just never going to get to that point. The majority of people are never going to become preppers. And then of those preppers, and call me cynical, the majority are just going to be, you know, kind of Walmart preppers, where they’re just stockpiling. And the people who are actually going to go to this extent to make a plan of action. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the. If there’s a sea change in how the public views preparedness, which will largely be, you know, dictated by the CBC and ctv.

Like if CBC came out to out tomorrow and said everybody needs to get their, you know, people’s emergency plan, then, you know, you’ll be seeing people trip over each other to make their plans. Right. Like the, the stores will be cleared out because so many people are still only receptive to that wavelength of things. But yeah, when they do that, I say when prepping becomes popular, it’s probably close to too late. Yeah. And you know, another thing is, you know, I said earlier, don’t throw money at the problem. One of the things that kind of goes overlooked, I think, is a lot of.

A lot of people want to go and buy the gear. And I’ve said to people a lot of time, go buy the skills. Go invest in the skills. You know, in the last five years, I’ve done timber framing. I got certified as an aquaponics system designer. I’ve learned about microgreens. I’m learning about skills. And I’m. I’m actually, my network is people that have skills over. And I’m not talking about somebody who teaches, you know, gender studies at a university. I’m talking about, you know, doctors, dentists, nurse, electricians, Internet network people. People have skills. A way to prepare is, in my view, one of the best ways is to develop your skills, get More skills.

It doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to go down to some blackwater range in the US and get all your trigger time skills. That’s not what I’m talking about. Skills that are going to help you thrive in, in an shtf. I mean if you can cut down a tree and you know, convert that tree into shelter, that is going to sustain you for years. That, that’s a skill worth having as opposed to just throwing money at all this gear that I might not even need. Right. I think invest in skills and, and that’s what I’ve been personally doing.

In terms of gear though, the, the things I do do sometimes I’ll go to like Home Depot for one thing and I’ll see a sale on little things like nails, screws and I stockpile those things because if I do have to go to my land and build, you know, some big thing, I gotta have a way to fasten it. And, and so it’s those little tiny things I used to upgrade my, or increase my, my, my grocery shopping by 10%. Every time I went I buy an extra 10% for storage. It’s stuff like that. You, you’ve got the freeze dryer.

You know, I think that’s probably an exceptionally wise thing to purchase. But for people that don’t have a lot of money, I would say form your neighborhood group and go in on all the cost and then do that together. If you want to start small, have the barbecue, say hey everybody, I want to buy this, you know, multi thousand dollar freeze dryer. Who wants to pitch in and we can all, you know, do big parties where we’re freeze drying that skills, it’s skills and equipment. Yeah, yeah, no it’s, it’s great advice and it’s one of those things where for myself personally the channel has actually been somewhat of a hindrance in that respect.

Were it not for a lot of the experts that I’ve brought on where I’ve been able to get that first hand training, you know, it’s, it’s something which is time consuming and people view it that way and. But once you kind of, you know, grasp something or get a handle or something to sink your teeth into with any domain of study, oftentimes it can be pretty self guiding and motivating. So. And there’s all kinds of tools online now for people to do this kind of stuff. So people can get the book on Amazon. Yes. Yeah. And I know people have a heartache with Amazon.

Some people have told me. But honestly I, I Don’t carry the inventory. And it’s, it’s the cheapest possible way to get it into the hands of people and the fastest. And I think a lot of those people probably secretly shop on there anyways. I mean, I have a store and I shop on Amazon. Not because I necessarily like it, it’s just. It is what it is, right? You can’t fight the future. There’s people who are on horseback, you know, shaking their fists at trains and cars for. For many decades. It’s just, it’s the way the world is going, unfortunately.

Well, I want to thank you for coming out today and that was great. And you know, we may have to bring you back on and do a bit of a deeper dive into various scenarios of, you know, a global scope and maybe we’ll do that on the other channel. Yeah, sure, I’d love to come back. That’s a bit of a no holds barred channel over there that we’re starting with the Prepper News, so. But thanks a lot for coming out and Definitely. Guys, go and pick up a copy of this book and don’t just put it on the shelf, actually thumb through it and just, you know, just put it aside and do a page every now and again and run some drills, run some exercises and maybe we’ll use it as the basis of doing a few training videos on the channel.

I think that would be a good idea. Yeah, I, I’d love to come back and participate in any training you want to do for people on the channel. Awesome. Awesome. Good stuff, man. Well, you take care out there in Ontario. I hope you got your bugout plan ready to go because you never go. All right, take it easy. Thanks. Don’t forget, daily updates are waiting on the Prepper News channel link below. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best price. Raises no junk and no gimmicks.

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