➡ In a crisis, people often underestimate the threat due to a psychological tendency called normalcy bias, which can lead to panic. The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a useful tool to handle such situations, but many people get stuck at the ‘orient’ stage, failing to make decisions due to anxiety or deference to perceived authority. This can be worsened by the bystander effect, where the more people present, the less likely individuals are to take action. Training and preparedness can help overcome these tendencies, enabling individuals to make decisions and act effectively in emergencies.

➡ The speaker emphasizes the importance of being prepared and making independent decisions in crisis situations. They argue that relying solely on leadership can be risky, as leaders may not always have the best plan. The speaker encourages a mindset of preparedness and autonomy, suggesting that this can make the difference in life or death situations. They also critique societal trends, such as prioritizing cultural issues over competence in roles, and warn against the loss of individual agency in the age of automation.

All right, story time. I recently had an experience that reminded me of how rare the prepper mindset actually is in this world. You know, as preppers, especially with YouTube channels, we get into this echo chamber where we just assume that the average person has common sense when it comes to mitigating emergencies, okay? But you forget that the overwhelming vast majority of people, when it comes to emergencies or disasters, have no autonomy in that situation whatsoever and are always deferring to whoever they perceive to be authority in that situation. So I was recently staying at a hotel.

I’m not going to say where it is or what hotel it is because it’s my little secret, okay? I go there every once in a while to vacate. Now, the hotel itself is. Was never my first choice, I should say. They usually stay at another hotel in this particular spot that I go to, but they messed up our reservations, so we had to stay in this other hotel, which is a tourist haven. It’s a resort, and it’s sought after because of its, you know, guided tours, roadside attractions, and its curriculum. You know, one of those places where you wear a robe and you walk around and there’s things for you to do.

It’s like a cruise ship, but in a hotel form, right? Things that I. I absolutely hate those kind of places. And I’ve intuitively avoided that place for a long time. I walk by it every time I’m at this place, and it’s really well landscaped and, you know, it just exudes that kind of basic normie tourist vibe that I’ve always railed against. As preppers, we’re recalcitrant, we’re obstinate when it comes to authority. We’re very disagreeable when it comes to those things. And in most cases in life, that probably doesn’t serve us too well, except when disaster strikes.

Okay, now, there was a fire drill in the middle of the night. Okay? I’ve never had this happen. I’ve stayed at a lot of hotels, motels, inns, whatever you want to call them. And I’ve never had a fire drill in the middle of the night, especially in a high profile place like this. That was a very big hotel. I mean, this had hundreds of patrons and. And it was fully booked, peak season. Okay, Fire drill in the middle of the night now. Okay, that’s fine. I hear this fire drill in the middle of the night. I wake up and I swear I must have been the first person that acknowledged there was a problem out of these hundreds of people.

And the fire drill was so weird. It Just was a weird. As if the fire drill hadn’t been used in many, many decades. And it wasn’t like what you would expect a fire drill to sound like. And when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you don’t know what a fire drill sounds like, they all have distinct tones, then you’re kind of like, what the hell is going on? It was a ring, but it was. It was weird. It was erratic. Anyways. It wasn’t like, you know, ring, ring, ring, the constant ring. Anyways, so I’m the first person to acknowledge that there’s a problem.

Then about five minutes go by. I presume at that point that, you know, okay, this is probably just either a drill or somebody pulled the alarm. I doubt it would be a drill in the middle of the night at peak season to piss off all the tourists. But I presume that was probably just kids, you know, didn’t smell any fire. Nonetheless, you know, getting the kids up to, you know, start getting them down there. Finally, you know, five minutes into this, the masses emerge and it reaches a critical mass with social referencing in these situations. And I’m a student of social psychology, so I understand all this stuff full well, but it’s good to be reminded of it once in a while.

We all have experiences, look, with the pandemic, you know, wildfires and war preparations over the past five years. We all know generally what the psychology of these situations is going to look like. But there’s only a very, very small amount of people that actually have a preparedness mindset in these situations and are actually doing things of their own volition and not just deferring to someone else for what to do. Now, the problem began when everybody had rushed downstairs and I think it was only myself. And there’s people scattered all throughout the place. There was no muster points.

There was. There was no person in high vis directing people as to where to go, kind of explaining what was happening or at best, the information that they had. At that time, there was no crowd control whatsoever. It wouldn’t have been hard in this particular instance. You got people with babies and kids, but everybody was very compliant for the most part. Would have been easy. Just have one guy in a high vid vest telling people where to go. Now, I’ve done fire drills in institutions before, and I know the drill. You have a muster point. Typically you try to take account for everybody.

In that case, they have to knock on every room door. And it wasn’t the staff that were doing it, because the staff had no idea what was going on when I realized that nobody had any clue what was going on and everybody was just standing outside awaiting orders. And this was the eerie part, okay? Only myself and one other guy, and if you watch this channel, other guy who was carrying a briefcase. So I presume this guy was like managerial or maybe he was organized crime, I don’t know. But you know, this guy had his head on a swivel, right? We were the only two people in the thick of all this who decided to go and ask the staff what was going on because nobody else.

And it wasn’t like we were clamoring for attention and we were interfering with the protocol that wasn’t happening at all. The staff just simply had absolutely no idea what they were doing in that particular situation. And there was no attempt at crowd control or anything. It was just a total crap show. So you have tourists, many of them, from different places in the world. Most people speak English. It’s not that big a deal that people are coming from out of country per se, but generally speaking, I would say it’s a fairly good cross section. A good sample of the population if you were to do an experiment and the majority of people were just looking for some person in authority to come and direct them.

Well, me and this other guy were like, okay, we’re going to try to figure out what’s going on, right? Because it occurred to me and these are things I’ve known, again, I’ve experienced this before where I’ve been the only one to come kind of stick my neck out and be like, what the hell is really going on? Right? So I finally did that and the staff had no idea what was going on. Finally one firefighter showed up and one rcmp, which is like our federal police service. And they usually work in these places where there’s no local law enforcement and everybody just kind of deferred to that one cop eventually, but.

But there was no, you know, and even the follow up, the next day I went and asked the management, presuming that they were basted with all kinds of, you know, grievances about this particular issue and how poorly it was managed. I shit you not. Not one person out of these hundreds of tourists made it a point to just go and, you know, state their grievance for a couple minutes. And not in a way which was combative or disrespectful. Just saying, look, I’ve done some fire drills before, and I mean, this is a massive liability, you know, that you guys didn’t have any procedure that was Followed whatsoever.

Okay. And again, it’s not about this particular situation. Nobody was hurt, I should add, everybody was fine. But people did have to stand out there for an hour and a half wondering what the F is going on, because nobody wanted to take it upon themselves to try to, you know, figure out any information. And I wasn’t. It wasn’t an emergency that would. If it was an emergency that, you know, somebody was at risk of harm, then I probably would have taken a role and said, this is what’s going on. I would have said, hey, I went and talked to the staff and you know, I would have taken that more directive, active role in things.

But it wasn’t really required at the time. So I went and got the information for myself. But I didn’t situate myself as a leader in that particular instance. But maybe if it was a real emergency, I might have. But of course, it was just a situation where the fire department, because they have a protocol, they have to go and knock on every door and make sure everybody is out of the building anyways. This just reminded me of the importance of autonomy and thinking for yourself and not deferring to authority, guys, because you can extrapolate this to any other disaster.

And we’ve all been through it, you know, with the wildfires, evacuations. We’ve done videos on all these things that we personally have experienced. And the same thing always replays itself. Normalcy bias and the panic spectrum. So what happens, especially in this kind of situation where, you know, you’re going there, it’s like when you’re at your most vulnerable, because this is a place, especially with a touristy hotel, you know, this is a place where you’re pampered people, half the people are walking around in robes, right? And totally vulnerable. This is a place where normalcy bias is going to be higher than ever.

You’re going to constantly minimize any threat in the environment. It’s just a natural tendency. So you’re going to underreact. But those same people always overreact. So there’s a minimizing of the risks and the potential consequences that, that psychology of, of downplaying the threat. And then immediately with people who are not preparedness minded, they go from underreacting, right? To overreacting, to panic. You know, like crazy shit’s happening, we gotta cause a stir. So you don’t want to be on that minimalist, maximalist, normalcy bias panic spectrum. There’s this thing called the OODA loop. Now, I’m not a big fan of these acronyms because I find it can be very confusing, but in this particular instance, it is very useful because.

And it’s very easy to understand what was going on in this particular instance. The reason why more people didn’t not just inquire about what was going on, but follow up with management the next day. And again, nobody else followed up except me. Nobody else criticized how they manage things but me. Which is just weird because this was a. This was a cluster. You know what the OODA loop is, this acronym they use in the military, and it’s observe, orient, decide and act. Seems pretty standard because this is what you do 24 7, right? You observe what’s going on, you orient yourself in relation to said thing, you decide what you’re going to do next and then you act on it.

Well, oftentimes in these situations, people get stuck at orienting and they fail to make a decision because they’re always deferring to some person that they perceive to be an authority. But as indicated, if you extrapolate this to the government, who I assure you is as incompetent as. As these people running the hotel. I mean, I don’t know if it was a skeleton crew that night or what, but they had no sense about them whatsoever. Is that their fault? Is that the fault of management that they weren’t properly trained? Absolutely it was. That’s all this was, was a lack of training.

Not to necessarily throw shade, but even that, you know, somebody there, a supervisor, middle management, should have taken some initiative to put on a high vis vest and direct people as to where to go. Keep them appraised to the situation, you know, do something. Right. But that didn’t happen. So most people are going to freeze after orienting themselves. So they observe what’s going on. Fire drill. Okay, I got myself oriented. I’m now outside. Some people are sitting on the grass right next to the building. That’s not a muster point. A muster point has to be a significant distance away from the building in case there was a real fire, right? So most people will get stuck there.

And a lot of people are thinking what I’m thinking, but they’re just not making the decision. And a lot of this is probably due to anxiety. You know, social anxiety has what, like doubled since the 90s? And just generalized anxiety issues. People are just apprehensive about sticking their necks out, number one, and. Or talking to large groups of people. So most people don’t want to take it upon themselves to do that. Now, oftentimes in these situations, if you have a significant amount of people who are doers and who are taking. Having some agency and not just being mindless automatons.

Oftentimes that will be. What’s the word I’m looking for? It is infectious. And so people will then start, you know, making moves, deciding and acting. But it’s that social referencing thing. They almost need the license to do so. And it’s that herd behavior, conformity. You know, we are conditioned by the education system to, you know, go outside at recess and come back in when the bell rings, stop, go, clock in, clock out. All things that make this highly specialized, technologically sophisticated society work. However, when the shit hits the fan, that’s when it fails us. And there’s a bystander effect, as they call it.

It’s a diffusion of responsibility. So the more people there are, the more you will just defer to somebody else or social reference to figure out what’s going on. Right. So they found in all kinds of studies. And this study has been replicated on numerous occasions in different contexts. The classic example is Kitty Genovese, where in New York City, in a back alley, this lady was murdered and she was being watched by many onlookers and nobody phoned the police. Now, that story is not entirely true. There was some embellishments to kind of fit it into this conceptual paradigm, but nonetheless, the bystander effect has been replicated.

What it is is the more people that are there to witness a disaster happening, the less likely you are to help in that situation. Because you always suspect that somebody else is going to do it, right? You defuse. The responsibility is more diffuse. Whereas if a man is having a heart attack on the street and you’re the only person walking by at that point in time, it’s very likely, very high likelihood that you will help him. The likelihood that you personally will help goes down significantly the more people there are. Right. Because you just assume that somebody else is going to do something about it.

And like most of those people at that hotel, I’m sure everybody assumed that. I’m sure somebody talked to management about how poorly this was managed. But because I’m a student of psychology, I knew that they didn’t. Right. I just knew there’s a good chance that, you know, nobody did, to my surprise. You’re always surprised by these things, even though you understand these principles. So be that outlier. You know, I have this little spectrum here. Not sure if you can see this. It’s a classic meme, okay? So Preppers on the IQ spectrum, the normies are in the middle between 90 to 110 IQ, you can have very smart people who are very conformist.

Now, why is it that throughout the pandemic you had people of a very high iq, high status, people who were very, very well educated and people who weren’t educated at all and were, you know, just on the low end of the IQ spectrum? They both shared in their distrust of various policies that were unfolding at that time. I won’t go into any more detail than that. You know what I’m talking about, right? So you can be a recalcitrant and be on either end of the IQ spectrum. You can be disagreeable when it comes to authority, which, like I say, in most cases probably won’t serve us well in life, except when the shit is hitting the fan.

Then it serves us very well because we’re not just going to be like lemmings and hurt ourselves off the cliff or like sheep and just go to wherever the swarm, the herd is moving. We’re going to be making decisions on our own. And this is life or death. And it’s incredible how mind over material when it comes to preparedness, because the majority of it, when disaster happens, is simply going to be making a decision. Right? And this is why Tom Marrazzo, who’s on the channel recently, we interviewed, wrote a book on the importance of planning, said where most people get stuck, it’s in the decision part.

Okay? If you have training, then the decision part is easy. It’s simply following a protocol. And this is how many people in the military and in law enforcement are able to manage stress. Because it’s basically, if this happens, then do this. You try to minimize the amount of uncertainty and extraneous variables in the equation so that you have a planned response to every possible outcome. Now, you can’t always do that. Therein lies the importance of using discernment and being willing to make a decision in the moment, even if it’s not a popular one at that point in time, which it certainly won’t be when you’re in the fog of shtf, as many people were that night.

I’m sure the majority of people were thinking to themselves, what the hell is going on here? Right? And I’m sure many of them thought to go and approach staff. Now, some people might have reasoned, oh, we don’t want to overwhelm them. They’re probably busy. But this is the thing, you know, I know they weren’t busy. They had no idea what was going on. So again, this wasn’t me. Selfishly, injecting myself into the situation, being disruptive. And there would be a situation where that likely might be the case. If you’re overwhelming a 911 or a 911 emergency center, you know, in a time of crisis, trying to figure out what’s going on, yeah, you’re not really helping the situation out.

Okay, but in this particular instance, this was different. I assure you. It wasn’t just me trying to be disruptive and not being empathetic to what was happening in the moment. I fully took stock of that. In fact, before I made my approach, I made sure that I was not complicating the situation further. I was trying to get more information such that I could potentially, if necessary, relay that information to everybody else who was completely oblivious and complacent about the situation. So situational awareness, not getting stuck in the OODA loop is so critically important. Don’t minimize the threat.

Always approach everything like it is a real threat. And then you’ll never overreact, you’ll never panic. People always say, oh, Nate, you’re a fear monger, and all this. We’re training people so that they don’t panic when the shit hits the fan. That mentality is mitigated by preparedness, by having a plan of action and just being in that mindset and just appreciating how genuinely rare you are as a prepper in this wide world of things. And it’s not that you’re better than somebody else. It’s not that all these people who are more conformists are bad people per se.

Is there going to be some natural selecting going on after shtf? Unfortunately, yes. It just means that for whatever reason, us preppers who are over here and over here, that doesn’t mean there’s not preppers here, but it’s just interesting to note that the world’s most powerful people and those people in backwoods America have that in common, that they distrust authority. You know, isn’t that interesting? It’s just. Just don’t assume that the people who are leading have a plan and don’t assume that their plan is a good one. And I can assure you, having dealt with government and the Canadian military, it’s as good as the people in those positions.

And this is what I think a lot of people fail to understand, is that there’s people who can follow a protocol. Right? But it really does come down to leadership. It really does come down to the guy who’s driving or the girl who’s in the, the, the cockpit at the time. It really does. So you know, you can have all the things in place. You can have the best military in the world. And if it’s not led by a lion, if it’s led by a sheep, then that military is going to falter when it comes to a situation.

And this is just the reality with the situation is you can’t just defer to leadership for the sake of them being leaders alone. You need to scrutinize those people in order to hold them to account and take responsibility. When you think that something is wrong, that’s when you need to act. And this could be in a situation where, unlike this one, maybe it was more emergent. It was more of an acute crisis where it was an active shooter situation. You have to make a decision. You run the way everybody else is running just because they’re running that way.

Maybe that’s the best way to go. Or maybe there’s another alternative that nobody is thinking about at that time. Now, that’s easy to say when we’re in the comfort of our studio right now. People will get overwhelmed and stuck in the OODA loop. But I think that just nurturing this yearning to be more independent in our thinking and preparedness is going to really mean the difference between life or death. Much more so than how much gear and how much stuff you got. Because all of that is going to come down to how you can stay composed in a situation.

And that doesn’t mean you’re not going to be anxious. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to be nervous. That doesn’t mean your heart’s not going to be racing. It just means that you are going to follow this simple model of deciding once you’ve taken stock of the situation. Not getting trapped in that tunnel vision, having a plan of action, okay, and not being afraid to just think independently about the situation. You’re not being a troublemaker just because you’re sticking your neck out wondering, you know, is the situation being managed appropriately? Because it probably isn’t this day and age.

And I actually think that what happened there was more a consequence of where we are collectively as a society. I mean, just in terms of how our governments run. Just the frivolity of it all and the eccentricity of it all in this obsession with things that really don’t matter and the prioritizing of a lot of the cultural stuff, as opposed to getting people who can do the job, right, and prioritizing that. And that’s going to mean all the difference. And this is where, quite frankly, we’re at a loss compared to a lot of these so called authoritative societies in that the people who are in those roles in those societies are there because it’s a meritocracy in many respects.

As much as it’s nepotistic and autocratic. There still is. It’s a meritocracy in the sense that they’re not messing around. Like they don’t hire you just because you have blue hair and you identify as a cat. You know, they, they put people in roles that are the most competent to be in those roles. Regardless of where you emerge from, there might be some sensitivity to, you know, past transgressions and, you know, past injustices and things of that nature. To a point. Right. But not to a point where it’s actually detrimental to those same groups of people.

So these are just things that we have to, we really have to be thinking about because I think that this is actually a societal problem. I hate to say it, but the more I think about what went on that night, I’m not going to get into any details, but it was a consequence of just a general paucity of preparedness, mindset and autonomy that we as individuals have. And in the age of automation, we should not be surprised that more and more people lack autonomy to make those decisions and lack agency. The more agents, AI agents that come online, the less agency people will feel the need to have.

Anyways, guys, I hope I gave you something to think about today. Let me know if you’ve had experiences like this in the comment section. And what you did in that situation. Did your actions differ from others? And were your actions in that situation, were they constructive or were they just additive to the problem? And would you have done things differently? I’m going to read the comments this time because I’m really interested in hearing what people have to say. Thanks for watching. Canadian Prepare.
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