March 25, 2024 • 45 mins
Description:
In our latest discussion, we recap our failure in navigating a 32-hour power outage with 2 toddlers and our infant twins. Learn from our mistakes as we detail the moments of frustration, humorous incidents, and the insights we gained through such a challenging time. We'll share the list from FEMA on basic guidelines for emergency preparedness and good tips for families to begin getting their homes and children prepared for any emergency.
While researching emergency preparedness tips, it is a slippery slope into full blown prepping and conspiracy theories. Dan lists off the funniest conspiracies that he has come across and gets her blind reaction to whether they have some believability or if it's all nonsense.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to the Finding Time podcast. We are back today with a little bit
of a different recording setup.
Hopefully everything goes smoothly. Or we could have just kept things how they
were because we thought they were going smoothly.
They were, but it was extra work. So I think this is more streamlined. We shall see.
So that's a little behind the curtains peek. Hopefully this doesn't come out
(00:22):
sounding like crap and we won't have to re-record it. We won't re-record it.
We don't have time for that. All right. So what are we talking about today?
We are finding time to prepare for emergencies or finding time to talk about
preparing for emergencies.
That's right. Talking about it and actually preparing for it are two different
(00:45):
animals. One of them is very important and the other one is critical.
So that's fun stuff. This episode was definitely my idea based on our experiences.
I think it was last fall, right? When we had that outage. No, it was in the summer.
Oh, it was in the summer. I remember just being so hot.
(01:05):
Well, that makes sense then. Okay. So do you want me to tell everybody about
it? Yeah. Why don't you give the background?
I don't even remember how this happened, but I know it was almost time for Grayson
to start school because we were trying on new school outfits that we just got
in the mail at like, say, 730 at night.
(01:27):
And all of a sudden it went dark.
That's right. It was after dinner, just right before the bedtime routines.
Okay. And then what happened? It went dark. And of course, we're like, oh, no.
But we had lost power at the house a couple other times.
I mean, I feel like for the most part, it would be like for an hour tops.
(01:48):
Sometimes the neighborhood even gets glitches. But I think that's just normal.
I always hear of everybody losing power every now and then. So we were somewhat prepared.
We have flashlights. The The boys almost like it when it's not going to be for as long as it was.
Yeah, they get a little bit of enjoyment for like an hour or two or so,
(02:09):
and they can play with flashlights and just do some different things.
They don't have to be scared of anything.
But this one lingering into bedtime was not fun whatsoever.
So I remember it happened.
And, you know, thank God we still had cell service and we were able to get the
updates. And I think at that time, the initial ETA to come back on was like
(02:31):
1130, 12 o'clock, right?
Right. So we knew the air conditioner did shut off for a little bit.
We had twins who I'm still breastfeeding at the time.
And we said, okay, I can just breastfeed them.
Otherwise, sometimes I would pump and breastfeed just to have that extra milk for two babies.
There was something else critical. Oh, the boys' sound machines at night.
(02:55):
They need to sleep with these sound machines. machines that's right
they are very routine little boys so
that was kind of a setback but we did
eventually get them to sleep we had
that battery powered one i think so it only has
like a 60 minute runtime but we use that to try to give them some noise and
keep them content i remember staying up and just sitting in the dark i think
(03:20):
i was trying to save my phone a little bit i have like usb nightlight i was
reading a little flipping back and forth checking on my phone for updates.
I think when I came to bed, I saw the first delay to like maybe 5 a.m.
And the one thing I wanted to check because it does scare me a little bit is
that, sorry, neighbors, but I wanted to make sure it was our whole neighborhood,
(03:41):
which as a backstory, we live in a huge neighborhood. There's so many houses.
And so I thought, oh, no, if it's just our house, we have to call separate people
and do who knows what kind of financial charges would happen for us.
But it was the entire neighborhood was just black.
Yes. Yeah, it was everywhere. It was pretty widespread. And I forget how many
(04:03):
people wound up hitting, but it was a pretty big number that were out of power.
So the first setback when I came to bed was delayed by a few hours.
And then I remember waking up during the night and the AC had been running and
we lost most of that comfort, I'll say, by the middle of the night.
So I woke up and it was hot.
The air wasn't on. So I knew the power wasn't back on yet.
(04:26):
I had my phone plugged in just thinking like if the power comes on,
that'll kick on and I'll see the charge.
That didn't happen. I actually don't think I woke up much during the night or
at least didn't wake up to check anything that would have power.
But I wake up just basically on my own at 530 right before the boys wake up, unfortunately.
And Dan usually sleeps in a little bit later. And so when I woke up around 530,
(04:51):
my phone's always charging next to me.
I pull it and I realize, oh, no, it didn't charge.
So I immediately wake up Dan telling him that we still don't have power. Yeah.
So still no power come the morning.
The boys actually slept okay. So no one really had much of an issue overnight.
The biggest obstacle, again, we had less than a year old twins and my pumping
(05:16):
schedule was I wake up at 5.30 and get to pumping.
So that was the first, where am I going to pump?
This is where our big car came in.
That's right. This is where you really gave the kudos to to the big cars.
So we have a Ford Expedition Max and luckily.
It has a full-blown outlet in the back. So you just went out in the car and
(05:38):
plugged in the pump and did that, right?
Right. In the dark, 5.30 a.m., just pumping in our car. But you got to do what
you got to do. So that was the first morning.
And then we wound up going to your grandparents, right? Just saying,
screw this. We're getting out of here and went there for breakfast.
Right. We thought, hey, they would love to have all the little ones over for some pancakes. cakes.
(06:02):
So I'll back up even from there. You and me basically just, I finished pumping
and you had gotten up because obviously you couldn't go back to sleep after
I told you the power was still not working.
So I remember just laying on the couch. Eventually the babies woke up and then
the boys woke up and we were still just laying there in like pitch black,
(06:24):
except for obviously the sun was starting to come through.
That's right. So the sun started coming out. We have no idea what to do that day.
The house is a little uncomfortable at this point. Even though it's morning,
it's a little muggy. Just nothing had been going.
Even if the AC wasn't running, the fan wasn't running, no air was blowing.
It was pretty muggy. Our house is drafty. So we lost a lot of our comfort by
(06:48):
that point. I would say we had food, but we couldn't cook much.
We had very limited options to some extent.
And more so, I think we just didn't feel like dealing with it. So we packed them up.
Went to your grandparents, had some breakfast, hung out for a couple hours,
probably till we just felt like we needed another change of scenery to keep the kids entertained.
And then we went to my parents, right? Right. We went to your parents.
(07:11):
And mind you, this is August.
But of course, like Dan said, it was muggy and raining.
And Dan's parents have a pool. So we normally could have killed even more hours hanging out there.
But with four kids and little resources or planning, it's a very hard to be
in a different environment for, I don't know, at that time, maybe more than
(07:34):
two, three hours, especially with the breastfeeding.
Yes. With just the toddlers, it would have been something different,
but we would just have to kind of entertain them.
And we can also ask them a little bit, even though they were young,
to just kind of bear with us for certain periods.
It's the babies really threw the wrench into that because they needed fresh
milk, warm milk, other things, cribs and noise and just swings to keep them
(08:00):
content, just all sorts of different things.
We couldn't let them get super overheated and we also couldn't strip them down
too much because they were still so small at this point.
They weren't, you know, they couldn't regulate their temperatures all that well either.
So they needed a nice temperature controlled environment.
Right. right, so many of the things that you just take for granted or at least
(08:21):
are able to keep in routine in your own house when all the power is on was just stripped from us.
And long story short, this went this way, not for an hour like we first thought,
not overnight like we first thought, but for 32 hours, everyone in the neighborhood was without power.
Yeah, yeah. We wound up spending a good deal of time with my parents,
(08:43):
but it was hot. But we kind of ran our stay of entertainment there.
They would have let us stay forever.
But the boys, again, just need a change of scenery. We were getting stir crazy.
And I believe at that time, the power was supposed to come back on at 6 p.m.
That was like the last update.
So now we're going on 24 hours without power.
And we're thinking it'll come back on or soon with that. So we had lunch there,
(09:08):
hung out. Then we left for dinner.
And I think your dad even brought us dinner then too, right? Right here, dad.
Thank you to every single one of the family members that entertained us that
day. But yeah, Pappy and Mimi brought dinner that night.
So at least we had some food. It cooled off a little so we could eat out on the deck.
And don't you remember they even took the boys to Urban Air to get them out of the house?
(09:29):
That's right that's right they took the boys to give us
a break and we could just sit down and let the baby sleep so that
was a big help but again we had the best
of hopes that come dinner time or shortly after the power would be back on i
think at that point on the way back we grabbed some ice we put some ice in a
cooler save some of the things we were more concerned about and then eventually
(09:51):
32 hours later whatever time that was late that night the power finally came back on.
Right. So we had to have the whole struggle with bedtime again,
I remember, and just praying that it would be back on when we woke up the next morning.
And it was. Yes. Yeah. And the house was comfortable.
Can I ask you, why did the power even go out in the first place?
(10:13):
We didn't even mention that.
It was just a whole neighborhood of no power. hour it was it
was something weather related but it was like a freak
accident because it wasn't a big storm it was a little rainy
i think it was something that was a freak accident where
a tree caught a transformer but like it was not
a storm that should have caused a major power outage so needless to say yes
(10:35):
we were pretty unprepared we were just making do with what we had in other houses
that were at least under an hour to drive to we were fortunate in that way but
this This was a big eye-opening situation, definitely for me.
I mean, you know, the kids were along for the ride. You were stressed out about
like taking care of them and just all that stuff we had to deal with throughout the day.
(10:58):
But then afterwards, I just had that lingering kind, I don't know,
failure sensation of just we were not ready for this whatsoever.
I mean, we struggled just to find batteries for flashlights and where the spares
were and all this kind of stuff. It was an absolute disaster.
(11:18):
And 32 hours is a long time to be without power, but it also should have been
much more manageable at the time than it was.
We really did struggle. And I think though most of society struggles now with
no power, because even me, I can't tell you how many times I would flip a light
switch and then it just wouldn't go on.
He started making fun of me because it's just nature that I just flip a light
(11:43):
switch, plug in my phone, even try to use the microwave.
And then it's like, oh, wait, none of this is going to work.
Not a single one. So that was the background for what we wanted to go into today
and where I think we made some changes in our lives just to be better prepared
for situations like that.
(12:03):
So I just said how 32 hours was pretty long, but should have been fairly manageable.
But I did look up some data on how long power outages typically last.
So this is what I found online.
And I forget who it was, but some emergency response organization,
50% of power outages are under 12 hours. And that's what most people experience.
(12:27):
You have a storm or something, and it's a couple of hours, and then it comes
back on usually an hour or two, quite honestly, 35% are one day,
you know, or less 10% are under three days.
And then you have 3% of outages that go to five days and 1% of outages that go over seven days.
But it's easy to kind of go from that short experience to thinking like we need
(12:51):
to be prepared for a couple of days in the event of some kind of issue,
which led me to what causes these issues, what causes outages.
And for the most part, it's almost entirely weather related.
There's other freak accidents, but we are going to go into some some weather
related causes. is what happens when the outages occur and also some good guidelines
(13:13):
and healthy tips to keep your family prepared in an emergency.
The first thing that came up when I was looking for this is actually a pretty
cool map that shows like where outages occur, where the most are reported.
And it's kind of what you'd expect. There's a ton in the Northeast due to winter
weather, nor'easters and things like that.
So most of like Virginia North is on this color-coded map,
(13:36):
like highly red there's a lot of outages there not as
many in the south but then when you get down to the gulf there's a ton because
of the hurricanes in the last couple of years
winter related outages in like houston and louisiana and stuff and that's a
whole nother animal where they're just not prepared for the freezes that have
been occurring and seem to continue to occur you have a little bit in like tornado
(13:57):
tornado alley south central usa where there's a lot of of outages caused by that.
And then California obviously has some sort of in their central part,
mainly due to weather strain, heat issues, grid capacity.
They're kind of a disaster in that sector because they can't keep up with everything.
But it was interesting, the central kind of Western third of the country,
(14:21):
like Montana and Wyoming, South through Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico,
Arizona, that whole section.
I mean, maybe they just don't report it, But that whole thing was completely white.
They just like were not reporting power outages, which I thought was really
fascinating on this map.
So the real question is, OK, our powers out due to a hurricane or a storm or
(14:42):
some other kind of big weather event.
But there is actually something to give you guidelines.
In planning for these weather-related events or just any kind of emergency.
From, do I say it, Dan, F-E-M-A or FEMA?
FEMA. FEMA. So I was wrong on both calls.
(15:04):
He needs to prepare me more for this data he finds. I thought FEMA was a fairly
common acronym or organization.
But you're right. Thank God we've never had to live through a FEMA disaster
so you don't have firsthand experience with them.
I thought you were making fun of me and saying it the way I said it.
I was not. FEMA is how you pronounce it.
Okay. So there actually is some FEMA planning guidelines that you can follow.
(15:29):
And in full disclosure, we still didn't get around to everything,
but Dan has been working towards this.
I think especially just because there's six of us.
Yeah. This was kind of like the starting point for where we are today.
So the guidelines are minimum recommendations from ready.gov,
which is the government recommended preparedness tips is clean water.
(15:53):
You should have a one gallon per person per day for cleaning and drinking.
I wonder how many days then they're saying, maybe at least three.
I think I did see that somewhere. I think they actually recommended like seven
to 10 days because water is something that's pretty readily stored.
Honestly, depending on how you store it, the plastic bottles are sometimes the bigger issue.
(16:15):
And I do think we could stretch that. Now, you want to be drinking water.
We can do maybe without the bathing for a little bit, depending on how clean the babies are.
But that's kind of a that's a really good guideline to set yourself up.
We should say, depending how clean the boys are, because when there's no power,
they're rolling in mud and grass and dirt.
So they're actually the real problem here. Yes, that's true.
(16:39):
So obviously after water, the next one is food. And they recommend a several
day supply of non-perishable items.
So things like canned food, bars, beef jerky, simple grains or pastas.
If you can boil water, peanut butter, I would say icing if you listen to previous
episodes, but things like that.
(16:59):
And just as we are like at least looking at lists for emergencies, we were searching.
I remember when you first started on this, Dan, how really we as a society have
just come away from this because, again, we knew each other since childhood
and both of us immediately remembered your parents' basement.
(17:20):
Like the whole way down the stairs just had a bunch of canned goods,
not even for maybe preparedness, but just that they cycled into the pantry when they emptied out.
Yeah, we just didn't have a huge pantry. We had a basement with like a ledge
kind of going down it and we would stack six, eight, 10 cans high and some,
I don't know, 20 rows of them.
(17:41):
Now that I think about it, like we had tons of canned vegetables, beans, I guess.
I don't even know what they had, just tons of stuff. And then,
and then also we had like, you know, bottles of water juices.
They all kind of fit along this ledge. It was just an extension of the pantry,
but you're right. I mean, that used to be the norm.
My parents are not prepared for emergencies at all. It just kind of was in their head.
(18:04):
And I think an older generation's had to always be prepared for a minimal disaster.
You know, one day, two day, three day, snow storms, whatever.
And so they always had extra stuff. Whereas lately, it seems like everyone's
just used to getting things on a moment's notice.
And that could also be, too, because you could afford to buy a bunch of cans.
(18:24):
And now people are shopping weekly instead of stocking up, maybe necessarily. necessarily?
Maybe, but inflation's hit a lot of things hard. I don't think canned goods
are necessarily high on the list.
I don't think they were 20 cents a can at the time, but I could be wrong. Who knows?
All right. So the next one would be a battery or hand crank emergency radio.
(18:45):
I almost feel like this is outdated, but I guess not because that really would
be the only thing that would work. Your phones wouldn't work once they lose the charge.
Yeah, that's kind of the whole thing is there's still a lot of,
you know, ground-based emergency radio signals that probably need some cobwebs
dusted off of them if an emergency does happen,
but that still is the government protocol by, you know, the NOAA, by FEMA, by everybody.
(19:11):
In an emergency, there's a bunch of dedicated stations. They say,
tune into these and there should be information.
The next one is flashlights and extra batteries.
And I will say, if you have young kids, for some reason, our boys love flashlights.
They play with them at least weekly.
And we have no idea where our flashlights are. We have at least five.
(19:34):
But when this happened or even other circumstances, like if we go on a walk
when it's dark out, They like doing that around the holidays if it's warm.
We cannot find a single flashlight. They just play with them.
And I'm not sure where they're left in the wrong doors that we put them in. That's for sure.
Yeah, they got a little out of hand over the winter. Like you said,
(19:55):
we let them play with them at night or on a walk or something.
Hold it out the cart or the stroller is like headlights.
And it got a little a little hard. I would recommend. I mean,
we got a headlamp when I was going through this. And Grayson loves that.
It does, you know, white light. It is red light. It flashes strobes.
He likes to wear that. And that's pretty fun because he has his hands free.
And then we also got a collapsible one that's like a soft rubber.
(20:17):
So it collapses to the size of maybe like a DVD, even though it's not really a thing anymore.
It's about the size of a DVD, a little bit thicker, but it pops open to,
you know, a pretty big two handed size lantern.
I have a question. Do you know where those are? Because I do not.
I have those locked up in my toolbox.
Those are not out in the general population.
(20:37):
That is so smart. All right. All right. So the next one is a first aid kit,
a whistle to call for help they have, a dust mask,
plastic sheeting, tarps, tents, and duct tape to make a shelter,
moist towelettes, and garbage bags.
And I would say we don't have any of these prepared yet that I just kind of listed off.
(20:59):
No, no, we don't. Those are for real emergencies.
People who dealt with the hurricanes down south or, you know,
again, major flooding disasters.
Disasters this is like loss of life loss of shelter
type situations and if this is
what you have at least you can cover yourself in the
rain you can blow a whistle if you hear emergency trucks coming by but they
(21:21):
can't see you i mean god forbid if you're underwater if you're on the second
floor and your house is flooded or there's a tornado and part of your house
went down that's really what this is for and then you know traveling through
these areas if you need a dust mask or something.
These are real serious type, you know, emergency items.
And then the last three, I feel like you may have just because our tools,
(21:43):
a can opener and a battery charger.
So reading this list, which I never have before, I actually thought we were
more prepared just because of how you've been than we actually are.
We probably aren't even halfway there yet. So here we are doing our podcast for emergencies.
I don't keep you updated on all of these things. We have pretty much everything.
(22:04):
I don't know that we could fully make a shelter, although we do have the equipment.
I did have a whistle in the Amazon cart, actually. So we need to get the whistle.
We have masks. masks and for my birthday
this year what did you get me that i thought was such a nice thoughtful gift
i got you for your birthday was kind
of for the boys so it covered a bunch of ground but
(22:24):
i got a first aid kit yeah i thought that was very thoughtful i'd been going
through a pretty big list of items i wanted to get not all at once but over
time and and you check that one off the list for me and and we did i think get
another you know mobile charger battery pack too so that helps as as well.
But we have pretty much everything on here.
So if you have this list or at least half of the items like we do,
(22:46):
then you start thinking, what else can you do to prepare for yourself and your
family in the event of emergency?
And the first one is find good sources of preparedness information without overdoing it.
You would more so know things that might be more practical for us in that sense.
I think so. Yeah, we're not overdoing it, I would say, by any stretch of the imagination.
(23:08):
I mean, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but you can really start to
go overboard and try to prepare for every possible disaster.
And it's just a little bit unrealistic unless that's going to be your lifestyle,
at which point it very much becomes a lifestyle.
And then the next one is go through specific scenarios and keep asking,
what do we need to do to be prepared for?
(23:31):
And maybe if you have young kids, what do we do If there's a fire,
what do we do if the power goes out or where do we go?
And this is something that I've been saying I do want to do with the kids,
at least in the event that a fire starts at night or something.
So we do need to work on that one. We do. Yeah.
And that's the easiest way to kind of, you know, take this to the next step.
(23:54):
If you are thinking you want to get more prepared for emergencies or you had
a similar story where, you know, you just had a problem and you weren't ready for it.
And you're kind of going through what we're going through and trying to improve
your emergency preparedness, the easiest thing to do is actually to just start getting organized.
Make a budget. Again, these things cost money.
(24:18):
You have to decide what you want to invest in that you may never,
ever use and how much money do you want to put towards that.
One good guideline I saw was to to think of it as sort of a proportion of your insurance.
It's very much just like a lifeline type insurance.
You don't want to spend $10,000 a year on home insurance premiums or whatever like that.
(24:42):
You have a budget. It fits with the cost of your home and your lifestyle to
ensure your life that way.
So think of it similarly, whether it's, I've seen different things,
50% or sometimes 100 or 200% of what you pay in homeowners insurance, spend that.
If you want to do it over time, take 25%, maybe 50% each year of what you pay
(25:03):
towards towards homeowners insurance and add that to your preparedness budget.
Maybe it needs to be less, maybe more, but start thinking about the things you
want and then ask yourself what situations could we face where we are.
We have snow storms, we have blizzards, we have some heavy weather,
you know, thunderstorms and things like that.
There's got to be some kind of wiring issue because we lose power too easily
(25:24):
around these neighborhoods, I feel like, but we don't have tornadoes,
you know, maybe with one exception, we don't have hurricanes.
So there's different things you need to be prepared for.
If you live on a mountain, you might not have to deal with flooding,
but you might deal with snowstorms. If you live somewhere where it's hot,
you might not have to deal with snow as much.
Although think about what they're going through in Texas now,
(25:46):
that's more infrastructure, but they're not ready for that at all.
So start asking yourself, what situations could I possibly be in with my family?
And then literally take it just
like we We did, okay, in the first couple hours, here's what we'll do.
Hours four through 12, here's how we'll get by 12 through 24.
And just think, how long do you want to go? Is it a day? Is it two days?
(26:07):
Is it three days? And then that builds your budget and your plan.
And then just start acting on it. Make a list and every month or two months
or three months, start stocking up.
Create a little bit of an inventory. If you're getting food,
you know, make sure you're cycling out so things don't go bad.
Canned foods last long, but some ready-made mixes, rice, snacks,
and stuff. you can stock up on. So you always have it.
(26:27):
And then just every two months, three months, you just cycle it out.
So that's a big part of it. What you were just saying about the kids is really
important because there's a lot of good tips where you should practice and educate
them without scaring them and make it fun.
I mean, there's good ideas online of what you can do. One that I really like
was you make a scavenger hunt and you say, okay, if there's an emergency,
if the power goes out, me and mommy are going to do this. We're going to get the babies.
(26:51):
We're all going to go to this room and we're going to ask you to get the flashlight. Can you do that?
And I think that's a real good way to make it fun for the kids and give them
little tasks so they know if something happens, they don't need to be scared.
They just need to chip in and get to work. I love that for them.
Although I would say I don't want to make it too fun because if there was a
real emergency, I'll be like crying and freaking out and they'll be giggling and making a game.
(27:16):
And that might make me even more anxious.
Yeah. So I thought it was a really good idea. Just focus on the task.
Don't make it scary. That's all I think really helpful stuff people can take away from this.
And now let's put some context and interesting stuff to this and talk about
some of the worst disasters that are really happening.
The US. So most of these, there's a lot of large scale blackouts and all sorts
(27:37):
of that stuff, especially out West and the Northwest.
I largely focused on like weather related ones or kind of really disastrous
stuff. I don't even remember this one. It was from 2012.
Maybe it was in Western PA, but 11 States, kind of like West Virginia,
Maryland, PA, Ohio, they lost power for seven to 10 days when a massive Derrick
of storm came through, which is like a huge huge thunderstorm type of formation.
(28:02):
I don't remember that at all, but I'd have to look that one up a little bit
more. But seven to 10 days is terrifying.
That is a very scary amount of time to be without power.
I definitely don't remember that one at all. But the other one in 2012 that
we both remember was Hurricane Sandy.
This was when a massive hurricane hitting 12 12 states, but really hurt New York and New Jersey.
(28:26):
Came through about 8 million lost power, but the damage was billions.
I say I remember this because I went to college about two hours away from where we lived from home.
And it was the beginning of our senior year of college.
And the college simply just flooded. We closed for over 10 days.
(28:47):
So me and my friend drove home. We lived in the same area and both our houses as well had no power.
And so Dan, who went to college six hours away in New Hampshire,
had power, didn't even suffer anything.
I don't think that way. Right. No, I think it was very minimal.
(29:08):
So me and my friend were like, hey, let's just go visit his college for at least,
I think we stayed for about five days because we didn't have school.
We didn't have power anywhere.
So might as well take the road trip and go visit my boyfriend.
Yeah, that was crazy to think about. And again, kind of that childish mindset.
We didn't think of it at the time, but I mean, what a disaster that Hurricane Sandy was.
(29:32):
And we just kind of were like, oh, cool. We were far apart. So we get to actually
spend a week together, which was nice. And yeah, just completely avoided the
real issue, how many people are without power and all that kind of stuff.
The next one, again, in the Northeast, this was pretty large, but not as long lasting.
45 million people were impacted in eight states.
(29:53):
And it was due to just a software bug by First Energy in Ohio.
A tree took down part of their power system. And instead of automatically kind
of rerouting and balancing their power grid, it just blew.
And I think it was 45 million people without power within like eight minutes
of the damage event. It was crazy.
So some of the scarier things that can happen when that came up was the New
(30:17):
York water system failed.
And so kind of had a grid breakdown themselves and it started spewing sewage
into their waterways and they had to close beaches.
I mean, there's massive contamination. In the fallout of the same issue,
Detroit's water treatment system failed as well, and they had a boil advisory for four days.
I mean, probably hundreds of thousands or millions of people who couldn't drink
(30:38):
water safely, couldn't bathe safely.
That stuff is scary. scary. Another one was in 1977, going back a little bit
earlier than the 2000s. It was a storm that caused a blackout in New York City
for 24 hours, but it was largely chaotic.
Both major airports were shut down and 4,000 people had to be evacuated from the subways.
(31:00):
1,000 fires broke out and 1,600 stores were damaged.
Yeah, I think people just had some pent-up issues. I mean, I mean,
it's one thing to be without power for a while.
And I get it. 24 hours is a long time, like we said.
But for that much chaos to break out, I think this is when New York City in
that time was like really crazy.
(31:21):
Drugs were rampant. Crime was rampant. But that is the scary part of what we're
talking about is how easily people can just kind of drift into chaos when they
lose their basic services.
So going back the furthest in 1965, an outage affected 30 million people from
New York, eight other Northeast states, and even part of Canada only for 13 hours.
(31:45):
But there is an incorrect switch that was installed, I think,
actually up in Niagara Falls.
And they went to flip it on and something went wrong and it just shut down power
for, you know, a half a day. But that's a lot of people, especially in 1965.
Brooklyn alone, I think at 800,000 residents without power, there was no train
transportation, no TV, radio.
(32:05):
Again, it's 1965. So that's where all your information is coming from.
They had to assign 10,000 national guardsmen and 5,000 off-duty cops into the
New York boroughs to kind of help keep people safe.
And luckily this one they say was relatively calm, especially compared to the 1977 blackout.
What was funny is coming out of this one, again, in the mid-60s,
(32:29):
there were two main theories that newspapers were publishing and people were
putting out there was it was either a UFO attack that shut down the power or
a communist plot from Russia to take down America.
So tensions were high at that time and people freaked out and luckily the power
came back on and everything was good.
So kind of to close with, while I was obviously looking a lot of this stuff
(32:53):
up and I've taken a lot more steps the last several months to get our house in line,
it is a very slippery slope to keep your home and your family ready for a blizzard
or a storm or a minor outage or a car that hits a pole for a couple of days
to full-blown conspiracy theory.
And I thought it'd be kind of fun because, you know, when you talk emergency
(33:16):
preparedness, a lot of people just call it prepping.
I think there's two differences. Like emergency preparedness is very rational.
Here's what could happen. And I want to be prepared for it.
Usually people using the term prepping are like, you're crazy.
You think the government and society is going to collapse and you have gas masks
and radiation suits in your basement. Right.
And we've noticed just even talking about it, how that line is very fine, right?
(33:42):
To compare the two. And now, especially, I guess, what, with the election year,
it's actually getting even more attention on social media.
So if you're one of those on the fine line of prepping or emergency preparedness,
it's definitely easy to go down that rabbit hole.
It is. It is. No, there's some legitimate
(34:02):
concerns. There's very serious concerns you need to be ready for.
And then there's also the fun. And what I would say is if you find yourself
looking into this stuff, get a rational friend.
So one of my best friends from college is someone we share funny videos with
a lot and we talk constantly, but he's my sounding board when things seem like
they're getting a little crazy, especially in my feed, the way that it is now.
(34:25):
Sometimes I just have to send him a video and just say, Hey,
I think I'm way too far down the rabbit hole.
This is funny, but this is cuckoo and I need to pull my head back out and just
kind of have a good laugh with him.
So don't fall down the rabbit hole on your own. Have a friend on On the other
end, holding a rope to pull you back up because it almost seems like a lot of
the apps and the algorithms,
(34:46):
just the second you start looking into this stuff, it just throws you all the
way down there to prepare for the worst.
So to make light of some of that, here are some of the what I think are more
like humorous and interesting conspiracy theories that I came across that I
want to get your reaction to because you largely never see this stuff.
So I'll explain it and you give everybody your your instinctual reaction. Are these real?
(35:13):
These are real. These are real. And I won't say popular, but like not uncommon.
So I ignore most of the big ones and ones that I don't think,
you know, the ones that everyone kind of talks about flat earth,
faking the moon landing, the JFK assassination, things that those are conspiracy theories.
That's in the front cover of the textbook of conspiracy theories. theories
(35:34):
some of them have more truth than others but again i
don't think the earth is flat or the moon landing was fake or anything
like that so here's some of the sillier ones that are are
funny the hollow earth theory so that
actually comes from like the book and the movies journey
to center of the earth and i think in godzilla like that lore like it says the
(35:55):
earth is hollow so there's these special caves you can go into and there's a
whole nother earth inside of earth where where Godzilla and King Kong and dinosaurs
and all these monsters exist.
And people think it's real. And there's certain access points throughout the
world. And you can get there.
I think this would be a cool one if you have a lot of time on your hands and
(36:19):
want to find the access points.
That's the whole plot of Journey to the Center of the Earth,
I think, is like it's a partner.
Somebody has found an access point and leaves a book behind for their friend.
And I did ask, I asked Google because I was curious, and this is why my feed is so screwed up.
You know, what about the light? How do you have light in there?
And they have answers for everything.
So don't you worry about it. There's warmth, there's light.
(36:40):
So people think we fake the moon landing, whatever.
That's not that exciting. But I did find out there's a whole set of people who
think the moon isn't real.
They just think it's like a projection or that it's a metal structure that was
put up there either by aliens or maybe the government.
I didn't spend a lot of time on this one. But some people think the moon isn't real.
I think that one's just silly because there's been studies about the moon and
(37:04):
more like scientific information done. So that one's like, yeah.
Listen, when it comes to these theories, science can be faked.
You can't trust everybody. This one's my favorite. I think birds aren't real.
OK. And this one just creeps me out because I don't like birds.
The other day there were like two birds that flew into our garage because we
(37:25):
have like wreaths hanging like the seasonal wreaths. We have them hanging on this bar in the garage.
And there were two birds. They must have been in that wreath.
And then they flew out when me and Theodore were in the garage. And it scared me so bad.
And my grandma, my whole life has refused to go into those bird sanctuaries
(37:46):
or the birds in the zoo that you can go...
Basically caged with them. So this one kind of gets me, but I still think they're real.
I mean, I just think of them as another animal. You know, I thought of the same
thing where like, okay, you think they're fake and they're whatever, government drones.
And it was funny because literally like two months ago, some Department of Defense
(38:09):
put out a patent that they have made a synthetic bird that looks like a pretty
real bird, but it is a spy drone.
So that obviously gets the crazy people all riled up. Like, see,
they could do it. They've been doing it for years.
I came back to the birds were definitely real at one time.
How could this possibly be true?
And what the answer is, I think, in this community is that they had some sort
(38:34):
of mass genocide and killed most of the birds and replaced them with fake birds.
So there you go. They have an answer for everything.
This one was fun. Might go over your head a little bit, but it says,
so the CERN Collider, the Large Hadron run collider was one of the most impressive
engineering feats of human history.
It's this massive, I forget, 14 mile long or some mile long particle collider in Europe.
(38:57):
And they do all sorts of crazy testing there to, I don't know,
understand particle physics and whatever, the fabric of the reality.
In that science, in the math, if you collide particles, the smallest pieces
of existence together, there's some mathematical probability that you might
create tiny little black holes. I think the scientists say it's no big deal.
(39:17):
They're going to do the research, blah, blah, blah. But there's this whole theory
that when they turned it on and started doing these experiments,
a black hole opened up and sucked everything in.
And I don't know. That is why things get a little wonky.
We're living on Earth, but in a black hole and time is some kind of weird.
I didn't really grasp this one fully, but I like the basis of it.
(39:40):
It's very scientific. I like where they're going with this one.
I appreciate where their heads are at.
That's definitely over my head, but I was picturing it the same way.
So basically, they took Earth, sucked it into a black hole, and now we're just
living that way, which I guess wouldn't affect us directly.
Yeah, I don't know what the... I'd love to know what the science really says about that.
I'm pretty sure it's 90% nonsense, but yeah, I'd love to hear what people think about that one.
(40:05):
Unless we keep getting sucked into the black hole, like every couple years,
they think we keep getting sucked in deeper and deeper.
No, that's not how it works. The way that a black hole works is like nothing
gets out, but you've never seen past it.
So if you get into it, you just exist in the black hole.
And I don't know, it would make physics all screwy, but it might.
I've seen people use this to point to things like the Mandela effect where.
(40:28):
You remember one thing from your childhood, but it really was a different name
or your favorite book was a different title, that kind of thing.
So interesting background there.
This one was funny. So you know what cryogenically freezing is?
People want to be cryogenically frozen and basically preserved and hopefully
they could be reanimated and brought back to life.
(40:49):
So allegedly a lot of rich people have
done that throughout history and one of the big names that
allegedly did this was walt disney and walt
disney has a dicey past i'll get
into that because i want to ruin anything or get attacked by disney
people but i think he's got a little bit of a checkered history like he wouldn't
really be a guy people like these days and allegedly he froze himself although
(41:12):
i think the family denied it and the whole theory is that they were tired of
people asking questions and seeing if he was frozen and trying to find out where
his body might be if he was frozen and all that kind of stuff.
So they literally made the movie Frozen and put everything into it to make it
a global sensation so that if you Googled like Walt Disney Frozen.
(41:33):
Disney Frozen, anything like that, all the Google algorithms would immediately
give you the movie and not any information about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen.
This is actually so funny because I don't know anything about Walt Disney's sketchy past,
but you just saying that makes me think, yeah, there's literally nothing you
(41:55):
could search with Disney and
Frozen together that would not give you something related to the movie.
Listen, if you got if you got Disney money, you can pretty much do whatever you want to do.
So if you want to throw the trail off of people searching into where he might
be frozen and protect his body, that is a good way to do it.
Not only because you're spending money to do that, but frozen has made them billions.
(42:15):
It actually made you richer by throwing people off the scent.
So that that is some high level conniving stuff. stuff.
The next one, I don't know if it's
conspiracy theory, but I did think it's always a fun one to think about.
And that's simulation theory, which is basically we just live in a simulation.
This goes back to this guy, Nick Bostrom. I forget if he's a philosopher or physicist.
He's some smart guy out of, I don't know, Cambridge or Oxford,
(42:38):
one of the smartest guys in the world in this field.
And he basically came at it from probability.
We can make such realistic simulation. They're not quite perfect to real life,
but they're getting better and better When you look at modern video games and
computing, they're getting better and better.
So his whole thing is in the next 50 years, it's easy to perceive that we could
have such realistic simulations that then you have to ask, what are the odds
(43:04):
that this is the first time it's been done? And the odds are actually very small.
So he says, if we can make such amazing simulations, the probability is more
likely that we're in a simulation.
That is maybe a more believable one of the ones you've mentioned,
just because they are getting better and better, more realistic,
(43:24):
like even just looking at pictures and like you said, video games from.
Even when we played them in high school or college till now is just mind blowing.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that is my favorite peek behind the curtains.
The Matrix movies are some of my favorite movies.
So that one really resonates with me. Why don't we close on a millennial based
one, which is that Avril Lavigne,
(43:46):
one of those fun emo pop rockers from our childhood teen years,
died in 2003 and her body double has been living in her place ever since.
Why Avril Lavigne though? She was good for a short stint, but not enough to
have a whole conspiracy theory on her.
(44:06):
I honestly, I just, I wish I knew.
It is so funny that that is the real question. Why Avril Lavigne?
Right, I would think Britney Spears or even maybe Ashley Simpson. No, Jessica Simpson.
Or who else am I trying to think of? I don't know. Yes, this one,
it just gets me because it's so specific.
(44:28):
And there's a pretty, you know, big following behind it. So that is a fun one
to dive into for people our age.
So anyways, I love a good conspiracy theory. I thought these were some of the funniest ones.
I think there's some legitimate ones out there. It's always good to be skeptical and, and thoughtful.
But also don't be an idiot and have a friend that can kind of,
you know, bring you back to reality if you need to be brought back to reality.
(44:51):
Or a wife just saying. Yeah, I guess. He thinks I'm easily influenced.
No, you need to be open-minded enough not to say no to everything.
Okay, I get it. But that's it. So hopefully you found some good tips from today.
Look up some great tips for yourself, your family. Think about what emergencies
that you hopefully will never be in but might have to live through.
(45:12):
And then start getting prepared. Start getting ready for any kind of emergency.
And I think it'll really take a huge burden off of your plate,
especially for me as a father, to know like, okay, the next time around,
I know the game plan. I know what we're going to do.
We'll be like wishing for our power to go out this summer or soon and we'll
see how prepared we really are. Hopefully we won't see.
(45:35):
We'll find out. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Go listen to some Avril.
Welcome back to the Finding Time podcast. We are back today with a little bit
of a different recording setup.
Hopefully everything goes smoothly. Or we could have just kept things how they
were because we thought they were going smoothly.
They were, but it was extra work. So I think this is more streamlined. We shall see.
So that's a little behind the curtains peek. Hopefully this doesn't come out
(00:22):
sounding like crap and we won't have to re-record it. We won't re-record it.
We don't have time for that. All right. So what are we talking about today?
We are finding time to prepare for emergencies or finding time to talk about
preparing for emergencies.
That's right. Talking about it and actually preparing for it are two different
(00:45):
animals. One of them is very important and the other one is critical.
So that's fun stuff. This episode was definitely my idea based on our experiences.
I think it was last fall, right? When we had that outage. No, it was in the summer.
Oh, it was in the summer. I remember just being so hot.
(01:05):
Well, that makes sense then. Okay. So do you want me to tell everybody about
it? Yeah. Why don't you give the background?
I don't even remember how this happened, but I know it was almost time for Grayson
to start school because we were trying on new school outfits that we just got
in the mail at like, say, 730 at night.
(01:27):
And all of a sudden it went dark.
That's right. It was after dinner, just right before the bedtime routines.
Okay. And then what happened? It went dark. And of course, we're like, oh, no.
But we had lost power at the house a couple other times.
I mean, I feel like for the most part, it would be like for an hour tops.
(01:48):
Sometimes the neighborhood even gets glitches. But I think that's just normal.
I always hear of everybody losing power every now and then. So we were somewhat prepared.
We have flashlights. The The boys almost like it when it's not going to be for as long as it was.
Yeah, they get a little bit of enjoyment for like an hour or two or so,
(02:09):
and they can play with flashlights and just do some different things.
They don't have to be scared of anything.
But this one lingering into bedtime was not fun whatsoever.
So I remember it happened.
And, you know, thank God we still had cell service and we were able to get the
updates. And I think at that time, the initial ETA to come back on was like
(02:31):
1130, 12 o'clock, right?
Right. So we knew the air conditioner did shut off for a little bit.
We had twins who I'm still breastfeeding at the time.
And we said, okay, I can just breastfeed them.
Otherwise, sometimes I would pump and breastfeed just to have that extra milk for two babies.
There was something else critical. Oh, the boys' sound machines at night.
(02:55):
They need to sleep with these sound machines. machines that's right
they are very routine little boys so
that was kind of a setback but we did
eventually get them to sleep we had
that battery powered one i think so it only has
like a 60 minute runtime but we use that to try to give them some noise and
keep them content i remember staying up and just sitting in the dark i think
(03:20):
i was trying to save my phone a little bit i have like usb nightlight i was
reading a little flipping back and forth checking on my phone for updates.
I think when I came to bed, I saw the first delay to like maybe 5 a.m.
And the one thing I wanted to check because it does scare me a little bit is
that, sorry, neighbors, but I wanted to make sure it was our whole neighborhood,
(03:41):
which as a backstory, we live in a huge neighborhood. There's so many houses.
And so I thought, oh, no, if it's just our house, we have to call separate people
and do who knows what kind of financial charges would happen for us.
But it was the entire neighborhood was just black.
Yes. Yeah, it was everywhere. It was pretty widespread. And I forget how many
(04:03):
people wound up hitting, but it was a pretty big number that were out of power.
So the first setback when I came to bed was delayed by a few hours.
And then I remember waking up during the night and the AC had been running and
we lost most of that comfort, I'll say, by the middle of the night.
So I woke up and it was hot.
The air wasn't on. So I knew the power wasn't back on yet.
(04:26):
I had my phone plugged in just thinking like if the power comes on,
that'll kick on and I'll see the charge.
That didn't happen. I actually don't think I woke up much during the night or
at least didn't wake up to check anything that would have power.
But I wake up just basically on my own at 530 right before the boys wake up, unfortunately.
And Dan usually sleeps in a little bit later. And so when I woke up around 530,
(04:51):
my phone's always charging next to me.
I pull it and I realize, oh, no, it didn't charge.
So I immediately wake up Dan telling him that we still don't have power. Yeah.
So still no power come the morning.
The boys actually slept okay. So no one really had much of an issue overnight.
The biggest obstacle, again, we had less than a year old twins and my pumping
(05:16):
schedule was I wake up at 5.30 and get to pumping.
So that was the first, where am I going to pump?
This is where our big car came in.
That's right. This is where you really gave the kudos to to the big cars.
So we have a Ford Expedition Max and luckily.
It has a full-blown outlet in the back. So you just went out in the car and
(05:38):
plugged in the pump and did that, right?
Right. In the dark, 5.30 a.m., just pumping in our car. But you got to do what
you got to do. So that was the first morning.
And then we wound up going to your grandparents, right? Just saying,
screw this. We're getting out of here and went there for breakfast.
Right. We thought, hey, they would love to have all the little ones over for some pancakes. cakes.
(06:02):
So I'll back up even from there. You and me basically just, I finished pumping
and you had gotten up because obviously you couldn't go back to sleep after
I told you the power was still not working.
So I remember just laying on the couch. Eventually the babies woke up and then
the boys woke up and we were still just laying there in like pitch black,
(06:24):
except for obviously the sun was starting to come through.
That's right. So the sun started coming out. We have no idea what to do that day.
The house is a little uncomfortable at this point. Even though it's morning,
it's a little muggy. Just nothing had been going.
Even if the AC wasn't running, the fan wasn't running, no air was blowing.
It was pretty muggy. Our house is drafty. So we lost a lot of our comfort by
(06:48):
that point. I would say we had food, but we couldn't cook much.
We had very limited options to some extent.
And more so, I think we just didn't feel like dealing with it. So we packed them up.
Went to your grandparents, had some breakfast, hung out for a couple hours,
probably till we just felt like we needed another change of scenery to keep the kids entertained.
And then we went to my parents, right? Right. We went to your parents.
(07:11):
And mind you, this is August.
But of course, like Dan said, it was muggy and raining.
And Dan's parents have a pool. So we normally could have killed even more hours hanging out there.
But with four kids and little resources or planning, it's a very hard to be
in a different environment for, I don't know, at that time, maybe more than
(07:34):
two, three hours, especially with the breastfeeding.
Yes. With just the toddlers, it would have been something different,
but we would just have to kind of entertain them.
And we can also ask them a little bit, even though they were young,
to just kind of bear with us for certain periods.
It's the babies really threw the wrench into that because they needed fresh
milk, warm milk, other things, cribs and noise and just swings to keep them
(08:00):
content, just all sorts of different things.
We couldn't let them get super overheated and we also couldn't strip them down
too much because they were still so small at this point.
They weren't, you know, they couldn't regulate their temperatures all that well either.
So they needed a nice temperature controlled environment.
Right. right, so many of the things that you just take for granted or at least
(08:21):
are able to keep in routine in your own house when all the power is on was just stripped from us.
And long story short, this went this way, not for an hour like we first thought,
not overnight like we first thought, but for 32 hours, everyone in the neighborhood was without power.
Yeah, yeah. We wound up spending a good deal of time with my parents,
(08:43):
but it was hot. But we kind of ran our stay of entertainment there.
They would have let us stay forever.
But the boys, again, just need a change of scenery. We were getting stir crazy.
And I believe at that time, the power was supposed to come back on at 6 p.m.
That was like the last update.
So now we're going on 24 hours without power.
And we're thinking it'll come back on or soon with that. So we had lunch there,
(09:08):
hung out. Then we left for dinner.
And I think your dad even brought us dinner then too, right? Right here, dad.
Thank you to every single one of the family members that entertained us that
day. But yeah, Pappy and Mimi brought dinner that night.
So at least we had some food. It cooled off a little so we could eat out on the deck.
And don't you remember they even took the boys to Urban Air to get them out of the house?
(09:29):
That's right that's right they took the boys to give us
a break and we could just sit down and let the baby sleep so that
was a big help but again we had the best
of hopes that come dinner time or shortly after the power would be back on i
think at that point on the way back we grabbed some ice we put some ice in a
cooler save some of the things we were more concerned about and then eventually
(09:51):
32 hours later whatever time that was late that night the power finally came back on.
Right. So we had to have the whole struggle with bedtime again,
I remember, and just praying that it would be back on when we woke up the next morning.
And it was. Yes. Yeah. And the house was comfortable.
Can I ask you, why did the power even go out in the first place?
(10:13):
We didn't even mention that.
It was just a whole neighborhood of no power. hour it was it
was something weather related but it was like a freak
accident because it wasn't a big storm it was a little rainy
i think it was something that was a freak accident where
a tree caught a transformer but like it was not
a storm that should have caused a major power outage so needless to say yes
(10:35):
we were pretty unprepared we were just making do with what we had in other houses
that were at least under an hour to drive to we were fortunate in that way but
this This was a big eye-opening situation, definitely for me.
I mean, you know, the kids were along for the ride. You were stressed out about
like taking care of them and just all that stuff we had to deal with throughout the day.
(10:58):
But then afterwards, I just had that lingering kind, I don't know,
failure sensation of just we were not ready for this whatsoever.
I mean, we struggled just to find batteries for flashlights and where the spares
were and all this kind of stuff. It was an absolute disaster.
(11:18):
And 32 hours is a long time to be without power, but it also should have been
much more manageable at the time than it was.
We really did struggle. And I think though most of society struggles now with
no power, because even me, I can't tell you how many times I would flip a light
switch and then it just wouldn't go on.
He started making fun of me because it's just nature that I just flip a light
(11:43):
switch, plug in my phone, even try to use the microwave.
And then it's like, oh, wait, none of this is going to work.
Not a single one. So that was the background for what we wanted to go into today
and where I think we made some changes in our lives just to be better prepared
for situations like that.
(12:03):
So I just said how 32 hours was pretty long, but should have been fairly manageable.
But I did look up some data on how long power outages typically last.
So this is what I found online.
And I forget who it was, but some emergency response organization,
50% of power outages are under 12 hours. And that's what most people experience.
(12:27):
You have a storm or something, and it's a couple of hours, and then it comes
back on usually an hour or two, quite honestly, 35% are one day,
you know, or less 10% are under three days.
And then you have 3% of outages that go to five days and 1% of outages that go over seven days.
But it's easy to kind of go from that short experience to thinking like we need
(12:51):
to be prepared for a couple of days in the event of some kind of issue,
which led me to what causes these issues, what causes outages.
And for the most part, it's almost entirely weather related.
There's other freak accidents, but we are going to go into some some weather
related causes. is what happens when the outages occur and also some good guidelines
(13:13):
and healthy tips to keep your family prepared in an emergency.
The first thing that came up when I was looking for this is actually a pretty
cool map that shows like where outages occur, where the most are reported.
And it's kind of what you'd expect. There's a ton in the Northeast due to winter
weather, nor'easters and things like that.
So most of like Virginia North is on this color-coded map,
(13:36):
like highly red there's a lot of outages there not as
many in the south but then when you get down to the gulf there's a ton because
of the hurricanes in the last couple of years
winter related outages in like houston and louisiana and stuff and that's a
whole nother animal where they're just not prepared for the freezes that have
been occurring and seem to continue to occur you have a little bit in like tornado
(13:57):
tornado alley south central usa where there's a lot of of outages caused by that.
And then California obviously has some sort of in their central part,
mainly due to weather strain, heat issues, grid capacity.
They're kind of a disaster in that sector because they can't keep up with everything.
But it was interesting, the central kind of Western third of the country,
(14:21):
like Montana and Wyoming, South through Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico,
Arizona, that whole section.
I mean, maybe they just don't report it, But that whole thing was completely white.
They just like were not reporting power outages, which I thought was really
fascinating on this map.
So the real question is, OK, our powers out due to a hurricane or a storm or
(14:42):
some other kind of big weather event.
But there is actually something to give you guidelines.
In planning for these weather-related events or just any kind of emergency.
From, do I say it, Dan, F-E-M-A or FEMA?
FEMA. FEMA. So I was wrong on both calls.
(15:04):
He needs to prepare me more for this data he finds. I thought FEMA was a fairly
common acronym or organization.
But you're right. Thank God we've never had to live through a FEMA disaster
so you don't have firsthand experience with them.
I thought you were making fun of me and saying it the way I said it.
I was not. FEMA is how you pronounce it.
Okay. So there actually is some FEMA planning guidelines that you can follow.
(15:29):
And in full disclosure, we still didn't get around to everything,
but Dan has been working towards this.
I think especially just because there's six of us.
Yeah. This was kind of like the starting point for where we are today.
So the guidelines are minimum recommendations from ready.gov,
which is the government recommended preparedness tips is clean water.
(15:53):
You should have a one gallon per person per day for cleaning and drinking.
I wonder how many days then they're saying, maybe at least three.
I think I did see that somewhere. I think they actually recommended like seven
to 10 days because water is something that's pretty readily stored.
Honestly, depending on how you store it, the plastic bottles are sometimes the bigger issue.
(16:15):
And I do think we could stretch that. Now, you want to be drinking water.
We can do maybe without the bathing for a little bit, depending on how clean the babies are.
But that's kind of a that's a really good guideline to set yourself up.
We should say, depending how clean the boys are, because when there's no power,
they're rolling in mud and grass and dirt.
So they're actually the real problem here. Yes, that's true.
(16:39):
So obviously after water, the next one is food. And they recommend a several
day supply of non-perishable items.
So things like canned food, bars, beef jerky, simple grains or pastas.
If you can boil water, peanut butter, I would say icing if you listen to previous
episodes, but things like that.
(16:59):
And just as we are like at least looking at lists for emergencies, we were searching.
I remember when you first started on this, Dan, how really we as a society have
just come away from this because, again, we knew each other since childhood
and both of us immediately remembered your parents' basement.
(17:20):
Like the whole way down the stairs just had a bunch of canned goods,
not even for maybe preparedness, but just that they cycled into the pantry when they emptied out.
Yeah, we just didn't have a huge pantry. We had a basement with like a ledge
kind of going down it and we would stack six, eight, 10 cans high and some,
I don't know, 20 rows of them.
(17:41):
Now that I think about it, like we had tons of canned vegetables, beans, I guess.
I don't even know what they had, just tons of stuff. And then,
and then also we had like, you know, bottles of water juices.
They all kind of fit along this ledge. It was just an extension of the pantry,
but you're right. I mean, that used to be the norm.
My parents are not prepared for emergencies at all. It just kind of was in their head.
(18:04):
And I think an older generation's had to always be prepared for a minimal disaster.
You know, one day, two day, three day, snow storms, whatever.
And so they always had extra stuff. Whereas lately, it seems like everyone's
just used to getting things on a moment's notice.
And that could also be, too, because you could afford to buy a bunch of cans.
(18:24):
And now people are shopping weekly instead of stocking up, maybe necessarily. necessarily?
Maybe, but inflation's hit a lot of things hard. I don't think canned goods
are necessarily high on the list.
I don't think they were 20 cents a can at the time, but I could be wrong. Who knows?
All right. So the next one would be a battery or hand crank emergency radio.
(18:45):
I almost feel like this is outdated, but I guess not because that really would
be the only thing that would work. Your phones wouldn't work once they lose the charge.
Yeah, that's kind of the whole thing is there's still a lot of,
you know, ground-based emergency radio signals that probably need some cobwebs
dusted off of them if an emergency does happen,
but that still is the government protocol by, you know, the NOAA, by FEMA, by everybody.
(19:11):
In an emergency, there's a bunch of dedicated stations. They say,
tune into these and there should be information.
The next one is flashlights and extra batteries.
And I will say, if you have young kids, for some reason, our boys love flashlights.
They play with them at least weekly.
And we have no idea where our flashlights are. We have at least five.
(19:34):
But when this happened or even other circumstances, like if we go on a walk
when it's dark out, They like doing that around the holidays if it's warm.
We cannot find a single flashlight. They just play with them.
And I'm not sure where they're left in the wrong doors that we put them in. That's for sure.
Yeah, they got a little out of hand over the winter. Like you said,
(19:55):
we let them play with them at night or on a walk or something.
Hold it out the cart or the stroller is like headlights.
And it got a little a little hard. I would recommend. I mean,
we got a headlamp when I was going through this. And Grayson loves that.
It does, you know, white light. It is red light. It flashes strobes.
He likes to wear that. And that's pretty fun because he has his hands free.
And then we also got a collapsible one that's like a soft rubber.
(20:17):
So it collapses to the size of maybe like a DVD, even though it's not really a thing anymore.
It's about the size of a DVD, a little bit thicker, but it pops open to,
you know, a pretty big two handed size lantern.
I have a question. Do you know where those are? Because I do not.
I have those locked up in my toolbox.
Those are not out in the general population.
(20:37):
That is so smart. All right. All right. So the next one is a first aid kit,
a whistle to call for help they have, a dust mask,
plastic sheeting, tarps, tents, and duct tape to make a shelter,
moist towelettes, and garbage bags.
And I would say we don't have any of these prepared yet that I just kind of listed off.
(20:59):
No, no, we don't. Those are for real emergencies.
People who dealt with the hurricanes down south or, you know,
again, major flooding disasters.
Disasters this is like loss of life loss of shelter
type situations and if this is
what you have at least you can cover yourself in the
rain you can blow a whistle if you hear emergency trucks coming by but they
(21:21):
can't see you i mean god forbid if you're underwater if you're on the second
floor and your house is flooded or there's a tornado and part of your house
went down that's really what this is for and then you know traveling through
these areas if you need a dust mask or something.
These are real serious type, you know, emergency items.
And then the last three, I feel like you may have just because our tools,
(21:43):
a can opener and a battery charger.
So reading this list, which I never have before, I actually thought we were
more prepared just because of how you've been than we actually are.
We probably aren't even halfway there yet. So here we are doing our podcast for emergencies.
I don't keep you updated on all of these things. We have pretty much everything.
(22:04):
I don't know that we could fully make a shelter, although we do have the equipment.
I did have a whistle in the Amazon cart, actually. So we need to get the whistle.
We have masks. masks and for my birthday
this year what did you get me that i thought was such a nice thoughtful gift
i got you for your birthday was kind
of for the boys so it covered a bunch of ground but
(22:24):
i got a first aid kit yeah i thought that was very thoughtful i'd been going
through a pretty big list of items i wanted to get not all at once but over
time and and you check that one off the list for me and and we did i think get
another you know mobile charger battery pack too so that helps as as well.
But we have pretty much everything on here.
So if you have this list or at least half of the items like we do,
(22:46):
then you start thinking, what else can you do to prepare for yourself and your
family in the event of emergency?
And the first one is find good sources of preparedness information without overdoing it.
You would more so know things that might be more practical for us in that sense.
I think so. Yeah, we're not overdoing it, I would say, by any stretch of the imagination.
(23:08):
I mean, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but you can really start to
go overboard and try to prepare for every possible disaster.
And it's just a little bit unrealistic unless that's going to be your lifestyle,
at which point it very much becomes a lifestyle.
And then the next one is go through specific scenarios and keep asking,
what do we need to do to be prepared for?
(23:31):
And maybe if you have young kids, what do we do If there's a fire,
what do we do if the power goes out or where do we go?
And this is something that I've been saying I do want to do with the kids,
at least in the event that a fire starts at night or something.
So we do need to work on that one. We do. Yeah.
And that's the easiest way to kind of, you know, take this to the next step.
(23:54):
If you are thinking you want to get more prepared for emergencies or you had
a similar story where, you know, you just had a problem and you weren't ready for it.
And you're kind of going through what we're going through and trying to improve
your emergency preparedness, the easiest thing to do is actually to just start getting organized.
Make a budget. Again, these things cost money.
(24:18):
You have to decide what you want to invest in that you may never,
ever use and how much money do you want to put towards that.
One good guideline I saw was to to think of it as sort of a proportion of your insurance.
It's very much just like a lifeline type insurance.
You don't want to spend $10,000 a year on home insurance premiums or whatever like that.
(24:42):
You have a budget. It fits with the cost of your home and your lifestyle to
ensure your life that way.
So think of it similarly, whether it's, I've seen different things,
50% or sometimes 100 or 200% of what you pay in homeowners insurance, spend that.
If you want to do it over time, take 25%, maybe 50% each year of what you pay
(25:03):
towards towards homeowners insurance and add that to your preparedness budget.
Maybe it needs to be less, maybe more, but start thinking about the things you
want and then ask yourself what situations could we face where we are.
We have snow storms, we have blizzards, we have some heavy weather,
you know, thunderstorms and things like that.
There's got to be some kind of wiring issue because we lose power too easily
(25:24):
around these neighborhoods, I feel like, but we don't have tornadoes,
you know, maybe with one exception, we don't have hurricanes.
So there's different things you need to be prepared for.
If you live on a mountain, you might not have to deal with flooding,
but you might deal with snowstorms. If you live somewhere where it's hot,
you might not have to deal with snow as much.
Although think about what they're going through in Texas now,
(25:46):
that's more infrastructure, but they're not ready for that at all.
So start asking yourself, what situations could I possibly be in with my family?
And then literally take it just
like we We did, okay, in the first couple hours, here's what we'll do.
Hours four through 12, here's how we'll get by 12 through 24.
And just think, how long do you want to go? Is it a day? Is it two days?
(26:07):
Is it three days? And then that builds your budget and your plan.
And then just start acting on it. Make a list and every month or two months
or three months, start stocking up.
Create a little bit of an inventory. If you're getting food,
you know, make sure you're cycling out so things don't go bad.
Canned foods last long, but some ready-made mixes, rice, snacks,
and stuff. you can stock up on. So you always have it.
(26:27):
And then just every two months, three months, you just cycle it out.
So that's a big part of it. What you were just saying about the kids is really
important because there's a lot of good tips where you should practice and educate
them without scaring them and make it fun.
I mean, there's good ideas online of what you can do. One that I really like
was you make a scavenger hunt and you say, okay, if there's an emergency,
if the power goes out, me and mommy are going to do this. We're going to get the babies.
(26:51):
We're all going to go to this room and we're going to ask you to get the flashlight. Can you do that?
And I think that's a real good way to make it fun for the kids and give them
little tasks so they know if something happens, they don't need to be scared.
They just need to chip in and get to work. I love that for them.
Although I would say I don't want to make it too fun because if there was a
real emergency, I'll be like crying and freaking out and they'll be giggling and making a game.
(27:16):
And that might make me even more anxious.
Yeah. So I thought it was a really good idea. Just focus on the task.
Don't make it scary. That's all I think really helpful stuff people can take away from this.
And now let's put some context and interesting stuff to this and talk about
some of the worst disasters that are really happening.
The US. So most of these, there's a lot of large scale blackouts and all sorts
(27:37):
of that stuff, especially out West and the Northwest.
I largely focused on like weather related ones or kind of really disastrous
stuff. I don't even remember this one. It was from 2012.
Maybe it was in Western PA, but 11 States, kind of like West Virginia,
Maryland, PA, Ohio, they lost power for seven to 10 days when a massive Derrick
of storm came through, which is like a huge huge thunderstorm type of formation.
(28:02):
I don't remember that at all, but I'd have to look that one up a little bit
more. But seven to 10 days is terrifying.
That is a very scary amount of time to be without power.
I definitely don't remember that one at all. But the other one in 2012 that
we both remember was Hurricane Sandy.
This was when a massive hurricane hitting 12 12 states, but really hurt New York and New Jersey.
(28:26):
Came through about 8 million lost power, but the damage was billions.
I say I remember this because I went to college about two hours away from where we lived from home.
And it was the beginning of our senior year of college.
And the college simply just flooded. We closed for over 10 days.
(28:47):
So me and my friend drove home. We lived in the same area and both our houses as well had no power.
And so Dan, who went to college six hours away in New Hampshire,
had power, didn't even suffer anything.
I don't think that way. Right. No, I think it was very minimal.
(29:08):
So me and my friend were like, hey, let's just go visit his college for at least,
I think we stayed for about five days because we didn't have school.
We didn't have power anywhere.
So might as well take the road trip and go visit my boyfriend.
Yeah, that was crazy to think about. And again, kind of that childish mindset.
We didn't think of it at the time, but I mean, what a disaster that Hurricane Sandy was.
(29:32):
And we just kind of were like, oh, cool. We were far apart. So we get to actually
spend a week together, which was nice. And yeah, just completely avoided the
real issue, how many people are without power and all that kind of stuff.
The next one, again, in the Northeast, this was pretty large, but not as long lasting.
45 million people were impacted in eight states.
(29:53):
And it was due to just a software bug by First Energy in Ohio.
A tree took down part of their power system. And instead of automatically kind
of rerouting and balancing their power grid, it just blew.
And I think it was 45 million people without power within like eight minutes
of the damage event. It was crazy.
So some of the scarier things that can happen when that came up was the New
(30:17):
York water system failed.
And so kind of had a grid breakdown themselves and it started spewing sewage
into their waterways and they had to close beaches.
I mean, there's massive contamination. In the fallout of the same issue,
Detroit's water treatment system failed as well, and they had a boil advisory for four days.
I mean, probably hundreds of thousands or millions of people who couldn't drink
(30:38):
water safely, couldn't bathe safely.
That stuff is scary. scary. Another one was in 1977, going back a little bit
earlier than the 2000s. It was a storm that caused a blackout in New York City
for 24 hours, but it was largely chaotic.
Both major airports were shut down and 4,000 people had to be evacuated from the subways.
(31:00):
1,000 fires broke out and 1,600 stores were damaged.
Yeah, I think people just had some pent-up issues. I mean, I mean,
it's one thing to be without power for a while.
And I get it. 24 hours is a long time, like we said.
But for that much chaos to break out, I think this is when New York City in
that time was like really crazy.
(31:21):
Drugs were rampant. Crime was rampant. But that is the scary part of what we're
talking about is how easily people can just kind of drift into chaos when they
lose their basic services.
So going back the furthest in 1965, an outage affected 30 million people from
New York, eight other Northeast states, and even part of Canada only for 13 hours.
(31:45):
But there is an incorrect switch that was installed, I think,
actually up in Niagara Falls.
And they went to flip it on and something went wrong and it just shut down power
for, you know, a half a day. But that's a lot of people, especially in 1965.
Brooklyn alone, I think at 800,000 residents without power, there was no train
transportation, no TV, radio.
(32:05):
Again, it's 1965. So that's where all your information is coming from.
They had to assign 10,000 national guardsmen and 5,000 off-duty cops into the
New York boroughs to kind of help keep people safe.
And luckily this one they say was relatively calm, especially compared to the 1977 blackout.
What was funny is coming out of this one, again, in the mid-60s,
(32:29):
there were two main theories that newspapers were publishing and people were
putting out there was it was either a UFO attack that shut down the power or
a communist plot from Russia to take down America.
So tensions were high at that time and people freaked out and luckily the power
came back on and everything was good.
So kind of to close with, while I was obviously looking a lot of this stuff
(32:53):
up and I've taken a lot more steps the last several months to get our house in line,
it is a very slippery slope to keep your home and your family ready for a blizzard
or a storm or a minor outage or a car that hits a pole for a couple of days
to full-blown conspiracy theory.
And I thought it'd be kind of fun because, you know, when you talk emergency
(33:16):
preparedness, a lot of people just call it prepping.
I think there's two differences. Like emergency preparedness is very rational.
Here's what could happen. And I want to be prepared for it.
Usually people using the term prepping are like, you're crazy.
You think the government and society is going to collapse and you have gas masks
and radiation suits in your basement. Right.
And we've noticed just even talking about it, how that line is very fine, right?
(33:42):
To compare the two. And now, especially, I guess, what, with the election year,
it's actually getting even more attention on social media.
So if you're one of those on the fine line of prepping or emergency preparedness,
it's definitely easy to go down that rabbit hole.
It is. It is. No, there's some legitimate
(34:02):
concerns. There's very serious concerns you need to be ready for.
And then there's also the fun. And what I would say is if you find yourself
looking into this stuff, get a rational friend.
So one of my best friends from college is someone we share funny videos with
a lot and we talk constantly, but he's my sounding board when things seem like
they're getting a little crazy, especially in my feed, the way that it is now.
(34:25):
Sometimes I just have to send him a video and just say, Hey,
I think I'm way too far down the rabbit hole.
This is funny, but this is cuckoo and I need to pull my head back out and just
kind of have a good laugh with him.
So don't fall down the rabbit hole on your own. Have a friend on On the other
end, holding a rope to pull you back up because it almost seems like a lot of
the apps and the algorithms,
(34:46):
just the second you start looking into this stuff, it just throws you all the
way down there to prepare for the worst.
So to make light of some of that, here are some of the what I think are more
like humorous and interesting conspiracy theories that I came across that I
want to get your reaction to because you largely never see this stuff.
So I'll explain it and you give everybody your your instinctual reaction. Are these real?
(35:13):
These are real. These are real. And I won't say popular, but like not uncommon.
So I ignore most of the big ones and ones that I don't think,
you know, the ones that everyone kind of talks about flat earth,
faking the moon landing, the JFK assassination, things that those are conspiracy theories.
That's in the front cover of the textbook of conspiracy theories. theories
(35:34):
some of them have more truth than others but again i
don't think the earth is flat or the moon landing was fake or anything
like that so here's some of the sillier ones that are are
funny the hollow earth theory so that
actually comes from like the book and the movies journey
to center of the earth and i think in godzilla like that lore like it says the
(35:55):
earth is hollow so there's these special caves you can go into and there's a
whole nother earth inside of earth where where Godzilla and King Kong and dinosaurs
and all these monsters exist.
And people think it's real. And there's certain access points throughout the
world. And you can get there.
I think this would be a cool one if you have a lot of time on your hands and
(36:19):
want to find the access points.
That's the whole plot of Journey to the Center of the Earth,
I think, is like it's a partner.
Somebody has found an access point and leaves a book behind for their friend.
And I did ask, I asked Google because I was curious, and this is why my feed is so screwed up.
You know, what about the light? How do you have light in there?
And they have answers for everything.
So don't you worry about it. There's warmth, there's light.
(36:40):
So people think we fake the moon landing, whatever.
That's not that exciting. But I did find out there's a whole set of people who
think the moon isn't real.
They just think it's like a projection or that it's a metal structure that was
put up there either by aliens or maybe the government.
I didn't spend a lot of time on this one. But some people think the moon isn't real.
I think that one's just silly because there's been studies about the moon and
(37:04):
more like scientific information done. So that one's like, yeah.
Listen, when it comes to these theories, science can be faked.
You can't trust everybody. This one's my favorite. I think birds aren't real.
OK. And this one just creeps me out because I don't like birds.
The other day there were like two birds that flew into our garage because we
(37:25):
have like wreaths hanging like the seasonal wreaths. We have them hanging on this bar in the garage.
And there were two birds. They must have been in that wreath.
And then they flew out when me and Theodore were in the garage. And it scared me so bad.
And my grandma, my whole life has refused to go into those bird sanctuaries
(37:46):
or the birds in the zoo that you can go...
Basically caged with them. So this one kind of gets me, but I still think they're real.
I mean, I just think of them as another animal. You know, I thought of the same
thing where like, okay, you think they're fake and they're whatever, government drones.
And it was funny because literally like two months ago, some Department of Defense
(38:09):
put out a patent that they have made a synthetic bird that looks like a pretty
real bird, but it is a spy drone.
So that obviously gets the crazy people all riled up. Like, see,
they could do it. They've been doing it for years.
I came back to the birds were definitely real at one time.
How could this possibly be true?
And what the answer is, I think, in this community is that they had some sort
(38:34):
of mass genocide and killed most of the birds and replaced them with fake birds.
So there you go. They have an answer for everything.
This one was fun. Might go over your head a little bit, but it says,
so the CERN Collider, the Large Hadron run collider was one of the most impressive
engineering feats of human history.
It's this massive, I forget, 14 mile long or some mile long particle collider in Europe.
(38:57):
And they do all sorts of crazy testing there to, I don't know,
understand particle physics and whatever, the fabric of the reality.
In that science, in the math, if you collide particles, the smallest pieces
of existence together, there's some mathematical probability that you might
create tiny little black holes. I think the scientists say it's no big deal.
(39:17):
They're going to do the research, blah, blah, blah. But there's this whole theory
that when they turned it on and started doing these experiments,
a black hole opened up and sucked everything in.
And I don't know. That is why things get a little wonky.
We're living on Earth, but in a black hole and time is some kind of weird.
I didn't really grasp this one fully, but I like the basis of it.
(39:40):
It's very scientific. I like where they're going with this one.
I appreciate where their heads are at.
That's definitely over my head, but I was picturing it the same way.
So basically, they took Earth, sucked it into a black hole, and now we're just
living that way, which I guess wouldn't affect us directly.
Yeah, I don't know what the... I'd love to know what the science really says about that.
I'm pretty sure it's 90% nonsense, but yeah, I'd love to hear what people think about that one.
(40:05):
Unless we keep getting sucked into the black hole, like every couple years,
they think we keep getting sucked in deeper and deeper.
No, that's not how it works. The way that a black hole works is like nothing
gets out, but you've never seen past it.
So if you get into it, you just exist in the black hole.
And I don't know, it would make physics all screwy, but it might.
I've seen people use this to point to things like the Mandela effect where.
(40:28):
You remember one thing from your childhood, but it really was a different name
or your favorite book was a different title, that kind of thing.
So interesting background there.
This one was funny. So you know what cryogenically freezing is?
People want to be cryogenically frozen and basically preserved and hopefully
they could be reanimated and brought back to life.
(40:49):
So allegedly a lot of rich people have
done that throughout history and one of the big names that
allegedly did this was walt disney and walt
disney has a dicey past i'll get
into that because i want to ruin anything or get attacked by disney
people but i think he's got a little bit of a checkered history like he wouldn't
really be a guy people like these days and allegedly he froze himself although
(41:12):
i think the family denied it and the whole theory is that they were tired of
people asking questions and seeing if he was frozen and trying to find out where
his body might be if he was frozen and all that kind of stuff.
So they literally made the movie Frozen and put everything into it to make it
a global sensation so that if you Googled like Walt Disney Frozen.
(41:33):
Disney Frozen, anything like that, all the Google algorithms would immediately
give you the movie and not any information about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen.
This is actually so funny because I don't know anything about Walt Disney's sketchy past,
but you just saying that makes me think, yeah, there's literally nothing you
(41:55):
could search with Disney and
Frozen together that would not give you something related to the movie.
Listen, if you got if you got Disney money, you can pretty much do whatever you want to do.
So if you want to throw the trail off of people searching into where he might
be frozen and protect his body, that is a good way to do it.
Not only because you're spending money to do that, but frozen has made them billions.
(42:15):
It actually made you richer by throwing people off the scent.
So that that is some high level conniving stuff. stuff.
The next one, I don't know if it's
conspiracy theory, but I did think it's always a fun one to think about.
And that's simulation theory, which is basically we just live in a simulation.
This goes back to this guy, Nick Bostrom. I forget if he's a philosopher or physicist.
He's some smart guy out of, I don't know, Cambridge or Oxford,
(42:38):
one of the smartest guys in the world in this field.
And he basically came at it from probability.
We can make such realistic simulation. They're not quite perfect to real life,
but they're getting better and better When you look at modern video games and
computing, they're getting better and better.
So his whole thing is in the next 50 years, it's easy to perceive that we could
have such realistic simulations that then you have to ask, what are the odds
(43:04):
that this is the first time it's been done? And the odds are actually very small.
So he says, if we can make such amazing simulations, the probability is more
likely that we're in a simulation.
That is maybe a more believable one of the ones you've mentioned,
just because they are getting better and better, more realistic,
(43:24):
like even just looking at pictures and like you said, video games from.
Even when we played them in high school or college till now is just mind blowing.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that is my favorite peek behind the curtains.
The Matrix movies are some of my favorite movies.
So that one really resonates with me. Why don't we close on a millennial based
one, which is that Avril Lavigne,
(43:46):
one of those fun emo pop rockers from our childhood teen years,
died in 2003 and her body double has been living in her place ever since.
Why Avril Lavigne though? She was good for a short stint, but not enough to
have a whole conspiracy theory on her.
(44:06):
I honestly, I just, I wish I knew.
It is so funny that that is the real question. Why Avril Lavigne?
Right, I would think Britney Spears or even maybe Ashley Simpson. No, Jessica Simpson.
Or who else am I trying to think of? I don't know. Yes, this one,
it just gets me because it's so specific.
(44:28):
And there's a pretty, you know, big following behind it. So that is a fun one
to dive into for people our age.
So anyways, I love a good conspiracy theory. I thought these were some of the funniest ones.
I think there's some legitimate ones out there. It's always good to be skeptical and, and thoughtful.
But also don't be an idiot and have a friend that can kind of,
you know, bring you back to reality if you need to be brought back to reality.
(44:51):
Or a wife just saying. Yeah, I guess. He thinks I'm easily influenced.
No, you need to be open-minded enough not to say no to everything.
Okay, I get it. But that's it. So hopefully you found some good tips from today.
Look up some great tips for yourself, your family. Think about what emergencies
that you hopefully will never be in but might have to live through.
(45:12):
And then start getting prepared. Start getting ready for any kind of emergency.
And I think it'll really take a huge burden off of your plate,
especially for me as a father, to know like, okay, the next time around,
I know the game plan. I know what we're going to do.
We'll be like wishing for our power to go out this summer or soon and we'll
see how prepared we really are. Hopefully we won't see.
(45:35):
We'll find out. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Go listen to some Avril.
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