EverydaySpy Podcast - Maui FIRES & CIA Evac Plans | EverydaySpy Podcast Ep. 6

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Hawaii is experiencing the most lethal wildfires in all American history. The death toll keeps rising as the tragedy grows. In the Southeastern US, it's the middle of Hurricane season. Out West they are seeing record breaking heat waves that are leaving many stranded or dead. In the midst of whatever threat may be pressing on you, Jihi and I wanted to share our insights and training about 'Go Bag' preparation and action. Not just for you, but for your family, pets, and loved ones. Safety has always been a top priority for us – and we know it is for you, too. Find your Spy Superpower: https://everydayspy.com/spyquiz Learn more from Andy: https://everydayspy.com/ Join the SpyTribe: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverydaySpy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverydaySpy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was a fire approaching their house and all they had time to do was grab whatever they could grab, run out the door and either flee down the street or drive down the street. And many of them actually, like you said, they really did end up running into the water, to the beach, into the water for some kind of protection from the heat and the oncoming fire. We've absolutely had situations where we've had to grab our bag and go. Did you know that Sina, our son, is only one foot shorter than you know? One foot shorter than you? Are you serious?

He's how many years? 32 years younger than me. But only one foot shorter. Wow, he used to be a baby. We used to hold him. And like the little in the palms of your hand. Oh my gosh. And our daughter, who just turned sixth,

is completely grown out of all her clothes. Yeah. That I'm not. I've heard her running around the house for the last like four days. like berating me for making her wear little clothes. Really? That's so funny because I swear just a couple weeks ago, I asked her, would you like to buy new clothes?

Because she turned six and she's wearing a size four. And I'm like, oh, babe, you know, we should get you new clothes. She's like, no, I'm fine. And then the last few days, she's been like, mom. Yes. I really need some new clothes. I'm like, okay. Yeah, that's what I get to.

Dad, you make me wear these tiny panties. Dad, these t-shirts aren't big enough. Jeez. What kind of dad are you? just suddenly. I was like, what? Yeah. You weren't this big three days ago.

Yeah. So I'm going to go this weekend and take her on a little shopping trip. It'll be awesome. But it was a reminder that it's about time we go through our go bags again. Yeah. Actually, you know, the batteries have been running out on the flashlights in the house. Yes, and the smoke detector. And the smoke detector.

It's been about a year. Yep. I was agree. So yeah. And you're exactly right. because we have to change. Oh my gosh, could you imagine if we actually had to evacuate for a hurricane?

She would be so angry. And then the only clothes in the go bag for her? We're too small. We're too small. Oh, my gosh. She would light us up. I don't know if you remember when we lived in Thailand,

we had a go bag and you have these great flight suits. They're like giant onesies. And they're yours, but they fit both of us. But they fit both of us. So our go bag always included a flight suit. you know, a flight suit each in one of them because we thought, well, no matter where we go, it's kind of this one size fits all, cover all, like, no matter how fat I get. That was not the intention.

That was not the intention. But secretly, I know that, you know, yeah, no matter what, you know, what's going on, like hot or cold or whatever, the flight suit will protect us. And we've had to use our go bags before because when was the big hurricane? Was it 2015? 16? In Florida? Yeah, we had to evacuate with my grandmother.

Yeah, that was 2017 because it was right after Eli was born. Oh my gosh, she was a newborn. Yeah. So we've absolutely had situations where we've had to grab our bag and go. Yep. That's wild. Okay, so it's a great opportunity then to talk about go bags. Yeah, because especially with, you know, natural disasters right now, like it's, we're in the middle of 13 seasons.

Here in Florida. You know, Hawaii recently had that really terrible fire. You know, I think it's fire season in a number of places. But Hawaii is really also kind of brought the gobacks to mine recently too because the people didn't have any time like any notice, right? People were like literally running away from their homes into the water to flee the fire. You know, so if you're not prepared, you leave with nothing except what's on you. this is really important because this is what happens in modern society, right? We become

dependent on outside institutions to keep us safe. So in Hawaii, they had an alarm system on the island. It was a community called Lahaina. And they had an alarm system that had been built by the municipality that was there to warn everybody of fires because fires are, they're regular there. They're not frequent, but they're a common occurrence. So they had this alarm system, but the alarm system didn't work. Yeah. For some reason, it was down. And then they have a backup system where the state is supposed to send text messages.

But by the time the backup system was triggered, the cellular towers had already been destroyed by the fire. Yeah. So that's exactly what happened. And it ended up being that residents had literally no forewarning. There was a fire approaching their house. Yeah. And all they had time to do was grab whatever they could grab, run out the door and either flee

down the street or drive down the street. Yeah. And many of them actually, like you said, they really did end up running into the water, to the beach, into the water for some kind of protection from the heat and the oncoming fire. Yeah. And I mean, all disasters are different, right? But the thing about the fire is that the wind can make it travel so fast in an unexpected ways. You know, it's like a hurricane where you kind of see it coming three days in advance. You don't know exactly where it's going to land, but you have time to be as safe as you want to be and hunker down or leave, right? But fires are unpredictable, tornadoes, earthquakes. I mean, there are certain disasters that, you know, flash flooding, that they can happen in the blink of an eye

and if you're not prepared to grab something and go, you don't have anything to help you on the other side, right? Because fleeing is one thing. But on the other side, you know, once you're safe, you need something to sustain you as well, right? And one of the things I think that's important to understand is, I mean, there are different types of disasters. Yeah. And some disasters, you do want to have preparation made to hunker down, right? There's some places you're better hunkering down if you have a basement in a tornado. Yeah.

You're better hunkering down if you're, if you have underground lines and you're away from the coastline and during a hurricane. Like you've always got to debate whether the type of natural disaster relevant to you is the type where you need to hunker down or the type where you need to run. I do feel like when it comes to go bags, go bags are relevant and specific to the situation where you have to depart. You have to leave. You should never try to hunker down with only a bag. Right. That's not a good idea. When you hunker down, you kind of build the equipment and build the survivability into your home or into the place where you're hunkering. Right. So when we talk about go bags, it really is to evacuate. For us, we

have never owned a home in Florida where there were underground power lines, where it was resilient against hurricanes. We even built in hurricane proofing technology into our home. But it's still like, it's there to protect the house from being destroyed in a hurricane. It's not there to protect the individuals inside the house. Yeah. During a hurricane. Right. And one of our big issues during the 2017 hurricane was that we had your grandmother and we had a newborn and we knew the power would go out. And we didn't know because that's just, I mean, on a regular storm night, the power would go out. The transformer close to our house kept blowing. And we had no control over that.

So we had the very young and the very elderly under our care at the time. Yep. In summer. And if the power went out, we were like, that's not a good situation for any of us. So we knew we had to go that year. Yeah. So and then we've had the same thing happen to us overseas too. We've lived in places.

We lived in places that were tsunami warnings. Yeah. Sunami warning places. And a tsunami is not the kind of thing. where you hunker down. Yeah. Right. Even if they're not regular, you know, even if they don't happen every year,

they happen every three or four years. You have to have a plan to evacuate when you're in any kind of zone that threatened tsunami. I lived in Colorado. I lived in California with the military. Those are wildfire areas. Again, wildfires are not something that you hunker down for. You have to evacuate. I love this subject.

I love that you brought this up. Yeah. And, you know, the first time I ever thought about go bags and it ever seemed important to me to have a go-bag was actually when I used to work as a social worker because I used to work with refugees and asylum seekers. And there were so many stories about people who lived in areas where there was unrest. And then the unrest came to their village and they had to run. And they had to run through a forest to some other village, right? I mean, they were in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, oftentimes they, you know, ran, you know, right out of their house, barefoot with just the clothes they

We're wearing no food, no water, you know, and they're trying to survive in a forest with wild animals until they can get to someplace, you know, where it's safe, where they can get to a refugee camp, you know, and then the rest is history after that. But you have to survive the first, you know, you have to survive the fleeing. And I thought, you know, in the United States, we don't think about these things oftentimes because we feel relatively safe. But I thought, you know, the riots that happened in California during the COVID years, people were fleeing. Yeah. Right. And there are oftentimes riots and demonstrations in cities during Black Lives Matter is another period of time where people would flee. And that was the same time as when I developed the mindset of it can, it's, you can never say

it can't happen here. Never. Because anything can happen anywhere. Yeah. A natural disaster or people made disaster, anything. So you should just just be prepared. It doesn't take long to prepare a go bag. And then I met you.

Yeah. And we started talking about all the different things you have to think about when you're making a go bag because it's very individual to the person, to where you're living, to what you're expecting, what could happen in the area that you live in. And I remember when we first met, you had your idea of go bags from your social work days, which I completely understand because that's a scary thought. When you think about, especially the type of people you were helping were people who had self-rescued themselves. out of tragedy in a third world country. Yeah. These are super resilient people. Oh, yeah.

Right? Just incredible to think of the conditions that they were in, whether it was, you know, socially, social oppression or religious persecution or who knows what. But outside of that third world existence, you've got the American existence. So for you, you were coming from Gobags in this third world mindset. Like, oh, my gosh. I just spoke to a woman who was serial raped.

And then she had to escape her tormentors. and she really only escaped with one shoe on. Like, that's terrifying. Yeah. Absolutely terrifying. Not necessarily the kind of thing that the average American household is going to experience.

So I was coming from a military background and a more typical American idea when I had my go bag. So when we first compared notes, we had very different bags. Mine had snacks. We had very, very different bags. But then we met at CIA.

Yeah. And then we ended up getting a proper education in how to prepare go bags. And I think coming out of that, we not only landed on the same page, but we both became much more confident and much more secure in our go bag approach.

First of all, before CIA, I never checked my go bag. I would pack it on like a Saturday. Usually I would pack it in a hurry because I had other stuff I'd prefer to do. And I was like, oh, I'm never going to use this thing anyways. I would just stick a T-shirt in there, stick some socks in there, put a protein bar in there,

Right? Put a flashlight in there. I remember when I took the same go bag from Montana where I was stationed in my last post with the military. I took the same freaking go bag to Virginia when I joined CIA. And then when I actually opened that go bag in Virginia, it was so old that the batteries had crusted. And I was like, I am so glad there is nobody here to see this right now. That's terrible. So I had never even thought to refresh or renew the go-bag. Like we're talking about because of a lie changing growing up, right? Yeah. So even us, as we look right now at changing our own or upgrading our own go-bags for the family,

it's really CIA's training that's making me even consider that. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I feel lucky that we had the CIA training before we had the kids. Because then once we added the kids to the go-bag, you know, when we first married, the go-bags that we had when we were living overseas, you know, we each had. one and then we packed them in ways where, you know, we each could, if we were separated, be on our own with our own bags. But your bag was definitely heavier than mine.

You know, and yours was larger than mine. But then when we had kids and we were like, oh, my gosh, all the kids stuff. And honestly, when we had the baby, I was like praying. I was like, please don't let us ever have to leave the house with all this baby stuff. I remember that. It was so much. So I feel like we should kind of, I feel like. I feel like, ready for a dad joke.

I feel like we should unpack our go bag approach here a little bit because we totally have the opportunity to, right? So the things that immediately jump to my mind about our training, the first one is the 20% rule. Your go bag should not weigh more than 20% of your body weight. Yes. For it to truly be mobile, it should not weigh more than 20% of your body weight. Because you have to carry it.

Who knows how long. Right? Like people think, oh, I'm going to jump on my car and run away. Like, that's not necessarily the case. So you have to carry that bag walking, right? That's what you should expect for, you know, one mile, two miles, three miles. Just have that in your mind, right? So it should also not be a bag that is difficult to carry. Right. Like the shape of the bag matters. Yep. The shape of the bag, two straps because you want to be able to carry it on both shoulders. Ideally, with something that belts across your. hey, your hips as well. Because if you're carrying it for a long period of time, whether it's a long distance or whether you're being relocated. Yeah. Because that's the other thing you have to consider. If this happens in Florida often, you'll relocate yourself to, let's say, like a big football

stadium. And then from the stadium, people will be bust or moved to a different place. So you might be carrying your bag for many, many days, if not weeks. So you want to make sure that you can have a comfortable bag that is strong enough for you to continue carrying it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So the weight, the shape, the size, the two shoulder straps. The other thing that I never realized until the agency taught me this is that you always want to have a pair of spare shoes inside the bag.

And they're not necessarily laced shoes, which is not what I ever thought of, right? Yeah. When you are evacuating and you're actually grabbing your go bag, your go bag sits in your home. Also in your home are shoes with laces. Yeah. So if you're going to evacuate, the first thing you should do is put on shoes with laces. Therefore, you don't need to have shoes with laces in your go bag. Right? You don't put on boots. You don't put on anything heavy.

You don't put on something that's only like you don't put on sandals to evacuate. Oh, yeah, please don't. Put on a pair of lace shoes to evacuate. And then inside your bag, you'll have like a super minimalist thin pair of flip-flops or shower shoes. And that's what they're there for. They're there so that when you evacuate, you have your sturdy shoes. That's what you're wearing. But then anywhere you go, you have this pair of sour sandals, shower sandals or flip flops

or thong sandals that you can actually use in public showers, in emergency showers. If you're outdoors in the running water, like that's what that second pair of shoes is for. Yeah. You're only ever going to use one pair of shoes when you're in an emergency situation. The other pair that's inside your bag is there for all of your hygienic reasons. Yeah. Or, I mean, you might need a backup. Like if you run into the sea and.

your shoes get wet, right? Those can serve as a backup so you're not squishing around and damaging your feet. You have damaging the skin of your feet. You don't want to damage the skin of your feet when you're on the run because that can create other health issues for you and they can get infected and all these other things. Speaking about running into the ocean, that speaks to a different type of bag, right? Because you have to think about where you're living and where you might escape to. So for us, a backpack makes sense. But for somebody, For us, a backpack makes sense because we're going to be fleeing on land. Correct, right.

But if you're in an area where you think water might be more likely than not involved, then a dry bag would be the best kind of go back to you. So if you're going to have to escape by boat, get transported by boat, flee by boat, if you have to walk across water, if there's like a stream in your backyard or if there's a river somewhere near your home, like in that case, you're probably going to want to make sure you're using a dry bag. Or at least have a collapsible dry bag. attached to the outside of your dry bag, of your normal bag,

so that you can put the one inside the other to keep all of your stuff secure. Right. Yeah. So then that takes care of basic footwear. That takes care of the bag itself. One of the things that I think was always really interesting to me was there's an actual strategy for planning what you put inside the bag. So for us, we, you would already mention it, I would always pack my old flight suits. And for anybody who doesn't know what a flight suit is, a flight suit is basically a flight suit is basically a large pair of coveralls that go full length down your arms and full length down your legs. And I didn't realize how awesome flight suits were for a go bag until the agency taught me that a pair of coveralls essentially serves as a protective layer to whatever you're wearing under it

and a pair of clothes on its own and essentially a mobile blanket because you can strap down your arms, strap down your legs. And the weight of a coverall is heavy enough that it keeps you warm in most climates, right? It has to be quite cold before you get really cold in a pair of coveralls or a flight suit. So I packed a flight suit for each of us plus three days, 72 hours worth of clothes, because we also learned there are different types of bags. There's a 24-hour bag, a 72-hour bag, and then a seven-day bag. And of course, bags beyond that. We would always pack a 72-hour bag. Yes. 24-hour bags were not necessarily safe because if it's longer than 24 hours, you start hurting. Yeah. So we would always pack a 72-hour bag. Yeah, I think, you know, in my mind,

a 24-hour bag, you know, you're counting on getting somewhere where you have additional support. Like you know you're evacuating to your mom's house. You know you're evacuating to your in-laws. You know exactly where you're going. Right. You just need 24 hours to get there. Exactly. But the 72-hour bag was, you know, when you have no idea where you're going to end up. And I always wanted to count on not knowing where I was going to end up, especially because oftentimes we lived away from family and friends. So. Yeah, exactly right. And then, so we would pack 72 hours worth of clothes, which is basically three days worth

of clothes, which really is not vacation clothes. Yeah. So it was, it was quite literally three pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, three T-shirts, three shorts or whatever, three long pants. And everything that we packed was appropriate for the environment during the season of the disaster. Right now, we're lucky because we're in Florida. Yeah. And in Florida, all year round, you can basically get away with lightweight t-shirts and lightweight pants,

especially if you're packing a pair of coveralls as a second layer on top of all those things. That's all you all need here, really. But like when you think about a place like Colorado, where there's wildfires in Colorado, or when you think about a place like, you know, Missouri where there's tornadoes and, well, tornado you might want to hunker down. But either way, when you think about different parts of the country, even if you go as far as like North Carolina where there's hurricane season two. Places of four seasons. Right. You've got to think about what is the season that you're going to be using your go bag.

And then you also have to set a reminder on your calendar so that as the seasons change, you revamp your go bag. So every six months, you go from having a go bag that's winter friendly to a go bag that's summer friendly and then back again. Because the last thing you want to do is get stuck with heavy pants when you're surviving in the summer. Or, you know, thin linen pants when you're trying to survive in the winter. So you've always got to be thinking about the types of clothes during the seasons. but you only need to carry the minimum amount of clothes it requires to get through those days because the layers of your clothing are additional clothing in and of themselves.

Right. It's not like, you know, you're not trying to look fashionable. You're actually using the layers of your clothing to keep yourself warm and to keep your clothes clean. Yes. So I think that's the most important concept to have when you're packing, choosing what to pack in your bag, right? is the important concept to keep in mind when you're packing is you want to keep your body with clean clothes on it that will not stay wet, that will keep you warm, right? Because even if it's a hot place, you know, your body temperature changes over the course of

the day. So you want things that, you know, will wick, you know, wick fluid when you're sweating, but then at night keep you warm also, right? Yeah. So some of the materials that we're talking about, we always pack wool, especially for our footwear. We always have wool. I am a big fan of 100% cotton, but cotton is not a wicking material. Right.

Right. Your wicking materials are your synthetic materials. Right. So there's a benefit to having wicking clothes as your base layer. Yes. But then there's benefits to having cotton as your base layers when you're not in a position where you think that you're going to be cold. Right. So if I know I'm going to be cold, I'll put on a wicking layer.

If I have any suspicion that I'm not going to be cold, I'll stick to normal cotton. Because even if you sweat and you sweat in a wicking base layer, then it sucks the sweat away, but it also brings all the bacteria from your sweat into the material itself. And that can then work against you. Yeah. Whereas at least if you're wearing cotton, cotton is a looser material. It keeps you cooler in general. So then those are all benefits.

And then the idea is whatever clothes you're wearing, keep them clean. It was always frustrating to me whenever I would watch people in a disaster situation. Yeah. They would not pay attention to what they're wearing when they would be trying to help in the disaster. And they don't realize that if you get your clothes dirty,

then all that dirt, all the mud, all the sweat, all the gunk, all the grease, whatever, that blocks the fibers of the clothing and actually weakens the clothing. So now your clothes will last less time and they'll be less efficient in keeping you cool, keeping you healthy, keeping you hygienic. So you've got multiple pairs of clothes. In a 72-hour bag, you have three days worth of clothes.

It's very easy to set aside one outfit as your work outfit. So then all activity that you do, like to survive or to work on your rescue location or to partner with other people, all your work is done in one outfit. And then you change. and you pretty much always sleep in the same outfit also. That way you're always sleeping in something that's clean and you get the full benefit of the wool, the cotton, the synthetics, whatever it is that you're wearing.

That's really going to be how you sustain yourself for a longer period of time than you might anticipate. Right, because that's the thing that you can't always anticipate what it's going to look like on the other end. So you might end up in a shelter and maybe it's minimal access to a bathroom, minimal access to water. You don't know how clean you're going to be able to keep yourself. And so if you have some of these practices in place, then it helps you sustain for longer.

So what is your strategy? What do you recommend for food and for water? So for water, we usually packed bottles. We usually packed disposable bottle water, and each one of us would carry it in the backpack. I know people who pack bottles with water filters in them. I don't think that's a bad idea either. You have to think about, you know, the key. key is trying to imagine the situation you'll be yourself in as much as possible. So something you

could do to even research is, you know, research disasters that have happened in the area or something similar. Like you can, you know, read about, you know, people. If you're in a hurricane-prone area, you can read about, you know, what was it like for people after Hurricane Katrina? And then from that, think about, okay, these are the things that I'm going to need, right? So, like, you know, you have to, you know, you have to be careful with protein bars because oftentimes they are full of sugar. But, you know, snacks that last a long time because they're going to be in a bag and you need to actually check on your food more often. You know, high protein, things that, you know, will keep you full longer, low sugar. High fiber. High fiber. Yeah. You know, it's

interesting because I remember that you always carried water bottles, but you really only carried water bottles for the first 24 hours. You wanted to have immediate access to water. And then on top of that, we would always carry with some kind of mobile filtering system. A lot of times what I would carry is iodine tablets or iodine drops. That's right. We have iodine tablets. So then the water bottles that we have, a liter or so of water, because water's heavy. Yes. So a bottle of water on each side, that's really just to get you through the first 24 hours. And in a 72 hour. bag, those water bottles that you're drinking become the water bottles that you use to refill your water. But you know that you'll always be able, you'll, you can count on being able to refill

your water in most situations because you'll either have emergency water sources or you'll have public water sources or you'll have water sources in Mother Nature. Now, for sure, if you're in a place like Arizona, you can't count on natural water sources. Right. But in other places, for the most part, you can count on finding water in different locations. But is that water always going to be potable, trustworthy, drinkable? you don't know. That's where the iodine comes in. The filtering system is there to take the junk out.

Yes, filtering systems will tell you that they make your water clean. Yeah. But as soon as you need that filtering system and it breaks, you don't want to deal with Giardia. Right. Yeah. So take the filtering system, but just trust the filtering system to get the junk out so that your water is relatively clear and then use the iodine to actually sanitize it. And drinking iodine water is an acquired taste. It's an I'm glad you never had to do it.

It's absolutely an acquired taste. I learned how to do that in the military during my own sear training. Yeah. But it becomes incredibly valuable because that iodine that's in the water then goes into your system and actually ends up helping you digest all sorts of nasties that you need to digest when you're in any kind of survival or emergency situation. Not to mention the fact that a vial of iodine weighs like three fluid ounces. Right.

Right. Whereas a 500 milliliter bottle of water weighs significantly more. Exactly. So that's the solution for water. I completely agree the solution for food is really to be focused on high fiber, high protein, not necessarily no sugar, but low sugar. Yeah. And you want to stay away from anything that's got a shelf life.

So another thing that's always really good is tinned fish, tinned tuna, tinned sardines, tinned, you know, salmon. As long as you remember the opener. Or they have the peel. If they have the peel. Yeah. Those are the better ones. But now you've got like you've got enough food that you can sustain yourself for as long as you need to sustain yourself.

And I think that's great too because really you're not looking to sustain yourself with the current diet. Correct. That's exactly what I was going to say that you're, you know, you're not going to be eating your three meals a day, you know, with your three balanced meals right with the food pyramid. Like you are just trying to get yourself through. So water is the most important. Correct. You can't survive without water. You can go without food.

And so, you know, having food that sustains you in this emergency situation for 72 hours, you know, that's what you're thinking about. You're not thinking about, what would I like to eat? Or, you know, I have to pack, you know, nine meals. You're not. You're not doing that at all. Yeah, exactly right. And we don't encourage people to think, like, jerky is not a very good thing to take. And dried fruits are not a good thing to take.

Dried fruits are usually dried with a great deal of sugar. And dried meat is usually dried with a great deal of sugar. salt. Yeah. Those two things are going to completely undo the whole reason that you need water. Exactly. Right. So look to grain sources of protein.

Look to those protein bars. Look to nuts. You know, things that have a long shelf life that have not been heavily processed. Yes. Right. That's the key. Okay. So we covered clothes.

We covered water. We covered food. We did not. So I think it's super important to also highlight that, especially depending on where you are, you always want to be aware of the elements. What does Mother Nature have to throw at you? And if you are in a place where it rains, have a raincoat or a collapsible parka or a poncho,

have something. It doesn't even have to take space inside your bag. That's the kind of thing you can wrap up and buckle to the outside of your bag. But if you don't have that, as soon as it rains, you and your entire go bag are destroyed, right? Yeah.

Not out of the game forever, but all of a sudden everything is wet. Yes. And that can be incredibly damaging, especially if you find yourself in a place where it rains multiple days in a row. Yeah. Do you remember, oh my gosh,

I remember when we were traveling up and down the East Coast and we were in an RV and we ended up in Southern Georgia, or was it South Carolina? It was Southern Georgia, North Florida, in the winter, and it just rained. Oh my gosh, it rained for like eight days straight. Yeah.

And we were not expecting. it. No. We had no idea how any, how the RV would do in the rain. We didn't know anything about anything. And it was like shocking how much it rained. And we had a conversation about like the Native American tribes that used to live there and the original settlers who must have settled there. Like how did they survive in so much rain? Yeah. That's that memory came to mind as we were having this conversation. Yeah. Well, and then on the flip side, you know, this summer, earlier in the summer year in Florida, it was, I mean, there were a few weeks where it just rained and rained and rained and now it's been a few weeks where it has been nothing but humid and sunny

and so same thing you know pack a hat right like the rain pod is really important because you know what is your nemesis yeah right but if it's sunny that can be really damaging to you as well and so you know having some kind of hat that's going to protect you um not just sunscreen like literally a hat that keeps the sun from beating on you if you have to be outside in the elements is really important. That's another reason why having a long sleeve layer, even if you're in a hot place, is really important because you want to keep that sun off of your skin. Yeah. And if you're carrying something fluid like sunscreen, there's no guarantee that that's going to stay. It's got a shelf life. You don't know if it could get lost. Any number of things could go wrong, right? It's going to

be something that makes your skin sticky and tacky and dirty. Yeah, if you can't wash it off. Yeah, you want to avoid anything that you're going to put, any kind of layers you're putting on your skin that are oil-based or grease-based, you want to avoid that in favor of long sleeves. And the reason you're taking a hat isn't because you're afraid of getting wrinkles. Right. It's because a hat doubles as skin protection and eye protection from the sun. So you don't necessarily need to have sunglasses. Maybe you'll have them also if you have sensitive eyes.

But for the most part, the average person can fold up a brimmed hat or even a ball cap. And again, attach it to the outside of the go bag. Doesn't have to take space on the inside. And then you have it available to you if you need it. We always recommend people carry an extra watch. We always recommend people carry extra batteries, AA and AAA batteries, just two or three of each. Because also inside your go bag, you're going to carry some kind,

if you're part of a family, you're going to carry some kind of communication device, like a walkie-talkie. We've always recommended people carry ultra-high frequency, UHF, walkie-talkies in their bag, small ones. They're not that expensive. If you've got four people in your family, every person has a go-bag. We didn't say that. Every person has their own go bag.

Dad does not carry the weight for him and the son. Mom does not carry the weight for herself and the two kids and the dog. Right. Everybody, including your pet, has their own go bag. So when we had our, when our babies were babies, they had their own go bag. Right. It wasn't my bag with their stuff in it. They just had their own little infant go bag.

Not that we expected them to carry it up. Right. It was just, you know, care of minutes were. We would carry it to our bag. So we would always keep them together, but we always knew where to find the babies stuff. Yeah. And we never had to worry about, you know, losing or costing any kind of mess in my bag that came from baby stuff or vice versa. Right.

So all that's super useful. And then the batteries that you're carrying are there to keep your walkie-talkies alive. Again, not for like six weeks. Yeah. It's there so that if something happens in the same. 72 hours, you have a change of batteries, just in case you have a bad battery or anything else, right? And then you always have those also to barter and trade because the other thing that people don't think about is that when you're in any kind of emergency situation, you're going to be with other people.

Right. And you don't want to trade the things that you need. You want to trade the things that are excess. But you also don't want to carry excess on purpose. So what you do is you carry spare and you see how things shape up. carrying three pairs of socks, you may not need three pairs. If you're carrying three pair of wool socks, I mean, honestly, three pairs of wool socks is like nine days worth of clothing. Yeah.

So if you're really in a place where you're only going to be, you know, waiting for four days before pickup or whatever, you're totally within your right to give somebody else that third pair of socks, especially what's going to happen when you come across that poor family with five kids and they didn't have the go bags. They weren't prepared. And one of their kids is really suffering. and you can be like, here's a pair of socks, right? And it's not going to hurt you. It's not reducing your survivability to be generous. If it impacts your survivability, you cannot be generous. Yeah.

That is something else that we were taught. If you are going to pay the penalty of pain and ill and non-survivability by being generous, you can't be generous. Yeah. Like you have to understand that your survivability is of the primary concern. Yeah. How do you feel about weapons? Because weapons is something we get a lot of people who are like,

oh, I got to carry something in my bag to protect myself and protect my family and protect my goods. You know, I am personally not a fan of carrying weapons. But that is because I'm an optimist. I am hopeful that, you know, unlike the Walking Dead, that my enemy will only be the natural disaster and not other humans. So I'm always hopeful that, you know, I'm going to carry the minimum I need to survive the elements and not worry about having to also carry a handgun, which is very heavy, honestly. And that's why I don't recommend handguns for lots of reasons, not in a go bag, right?

But for sure, there's reasons to carry knives. There's reasons to carry multi-tools. I personally prefer a knife over a multi-tool. A knife is lighter weight. Yes. A knife has a very clear multi-use purpose. Yes. Right?

It's sharpened. So you can use it for clothes. You can use it for first aid. You can use it for food. You can use it for self-defense. You can use it for all sorts. You can use it for emergencies. Yeah.

Right? If you ever have to cut somebody out of something. Yeah. It's an important tool. It's a super important tool that you can carry. And you can carry knives across state lines in the United States. You can carry knives across international borders. All you have to do is kind of claim them, right?

And especially if it's a knife of a certain blade length, you've got a lot more flexibility than if you carry a handgun or a baton or a taser or any of those, you know, alternatives that are in the lethal or non-lethal space. They have like one single purpose. Yeah. Like, what are you going to do with a baton besides something? Besides beat somebody. Or a taser besides like it doesn't help you do much.

Right. Now, there's always, I am a fan of having weapons that you use for other purposes. Like have a baton in your house? Absolutely. Feel free to have a baton in your house. You want to have a weapon, have a handgun in your kitchen. we had a friend who had handguns in her kitchen. She did.

Have at it, right? Like, whatever it takes to make you feel safe. But when we're talking about go bags, every ounce of weight matters. Yes. Everything in your go bag is should potentially have more than one use. Yeah. So you've got to be thinking that way because you're sticking to the 20% rule first. 20% rule means a 200 pound guy is carrying 20 pounds of stuff.

Yeah. Right. I'm sorry, 40 pounds of stuff. 200 pound guy. is carrying 40 pounds. That's not a lot of stuff. For a 200-pound man to survive for three days, that's not a lot of stuff. Right. So you've always got to be thinking your way through balancing the 20% rule along with what you're wearing or what you're carrying, how where you're going to be, who else you're surviving with, how much you know or don't know about the environment

and the disaster itself. Right. The last thing I think we have to cover is money. What's your stance on money in a go bag? I think you should always keep cash in a go bag, which I'm sure makes people nervous because really you should keep your go bag next to a door. So you can leave quickly with it. You shouldn't create your go bag and then hide it in the bottom of your closet. In the back room. In the back room. So nobody steals the cash you have in there. Like your go bag needs to be in a place where your house catches fire. There's a fire coming. There's a, you know, floodwaters, whatever. You literally open that, you know, your closet door in the front or whatever. You grab the bag, you go.

That's your coat closet. For people up north, there's always a coat closet. Yes, I'm trying to remember what people up north call it the coat closet. Down south, they most always have some kind of mud room or sand room, right? A lot of people that have a garage, do not put your go bag in your garage. Don't put your go bag in the exit to your garage. Put your go bag by your front door because there's no guarantee you're going to escape by car.

Right. Right. So, I mean, even right now in our house, we don't have a closet by the front door. We have a pantry in the kitchen that's closed. to the front. So that's an area that we've considered putting our go bags. But we have these little strange nooks in between our pillars right by our front door. So we actually have multiple bags just hanging on the pillars right by the front door. Yeah, exactly. Easy to take off the hook and get going. So yeah, I think that you should carry a certain amount of cash. I think how much depends

on where you live and how much things cost. You know, overseas we kept, you know, and then... Overseas barely counts. Overseas, $100. Right. In small bills in U.S. currency would cover you for like three or four days. So here we carry $200 in cash. We don't carry any bills large than a $20 bill. Correct. Right?

And that's not just us. We put $200 in your bag, in my bag, and in each of the kids' bags. Yeah. So the reason that's important is because as a family, resource-wise, each person has $200. So if they have to be, if we're separated, which would be terrifying but happens. Yes. If the kids were to be separated, they would have their own currency. Yeah.

But as a family, we now have the combined currency of everybody. Yeah. Right. So together, we have $800 to last three days. Yeah. Now, that doesn't go as far as you might want it to go, but it should be far more than enough combined for the four of us because we're going to be sharing gallons of water. We're going to be sharing, you know, whatever we buy from, from, from, for, for, you know, for, for. from anybody who's providing food or clothing or whatever else.

So you might consume more than our six-year-old consumes, but we get the combined value of everybody's money. But everybody still has to carry their currency in their own bag. So we don't have you carrying everybody's money. And then we're left with no money if we're separated from that. Yeah, I think that's one of the key concepts too, is when you have more than one person, like if you're one person, you're carrying all your own stuff.

But when you have more than one person, everybody has to be independent. Everybody has to carry something so that if people are separated, you can still hold your own and survive. And I understand that there are people out there who teach the idea of like a family bag. And there are people out there. I've even seen people who teach the idea of having a family bag that the dog carries, right? Because the dog can carry more weight on its back.

This is, this goes against everything we were trained. Could it work? Sure. Lots of things could work. Our training taught us that every individual. operator and in a family unit, each family member needs to be seen as an independent operating unit, right, independent operator. Each operator should carry their own resources. Yeah. And then as operators get together, they can combine resources, but you should never count on having group resources for each

individual operator. Right. Because one person might get left behind. I can see it happening. If there was an encroaching or if there was an impending fire, if hurricanes, right, there was an impending hurricane. I would absolutely hurricanes, I would have everybody leave together. But if there was something other than a hurricane, if there was some kind of like wildfire in our neighborhood or whatever else, I can see myself having you guys leave first. As soon as we know it's coming, I could see myself being like, you guys go, right?

You guys get someplace safe, beat the traffic, get there and get settled. And then, you know, I'll take care of the really important things, secure the whatever, make sure the fire safe is in place. Like I'll take the extra two or three hours and either catch up with you at a predetermined combo place or at our final location. You always want the flexibility to decide if you're going to split up and how you're going to reconnect. Not every emergency requires everybody to leave at the same time, but you have to have

individuals with their own resources. Or even if you do leave at the same time, you know, we're a family of four. You know, our daughter trips, I stay behind. Suddenly you guys are a block ahead. Fire comes through the middle and we're separated, right? So, you know, I think when you have little kids from, you know, For example, people are like, oh, my kids are so little. Like, they can have their small backpack, and you could pack their backpack with one

day's worth of stuff, right? And then you carry the extra as the parent. But at least if something happens, like they have 24 hours. Your kid has 24 hours worth of stuff. And then I always have a carabiner. Because at some point, once, you know, the real danger has passed, you're probably going to end up carrying your kid's bag and you can just attach it to the back of yours, right? So just be prepared.

I think same thing with, you know, money. I think for a lot of people having, you know, $200 per family member and cash just sitting in a bag is a lot. That's a lot of money. So I think, you know, you just have to figure out what can you afford, right? It could be $50. It could be $100, right? Just, but have something.

Have some kind of cash because when everything catches fire or, you know, there's, God forbid, like an EMP or there's a bomb. You know, when something horrible happens, you can't count on being able to pull money out of your bank. You can't count on your card being able to work. You can't count on being able to use. Banks being open. Electricity being available. Using Apple pay. Like, it's not going to work probably.

So, you know, have some kind of cash, even if it's 20 bucks, just to, you know, get you through a moment of a real emergency when you might need to use that cash. So I don't disagree with you completely. I don't disagree with you completely. I'm just thinking about it. It's super important here. It's super important to make sure that people don't think that they can get cheap with the go bag. Like if you want to be cheap with something, be cheap with something else. Yeah.

Right? Like you putting $200 or $100, you feeling the pain of putting as much money as possible not to exceed $200 into your 72-hour go bag is you're not losing the money. Right. It's there. So if some other emergency pops up, if the engine on the car dies or if you need a new tire, like you have the money. It's just in cash in your go bag. So go over there and then take the money out of your go bag and then repopulate it.

Put it on the calendar to repopulate something later on. It's not the same as like, you know, tying your money up somewhere else. Right. But if you need it, holy shit, man. You don't want to grab a three-day bag with 20 bucks in it. Yeah. That is going to go so badly after about 12 hours. Yeah.

And that just. And now all of a sudden it's like, I guess you're still better than with nothing. But I'm just, you know, I'm, I just don't want to give people permission to get cheap with the bag. So that's a fair point. I'm just thinking about my student days when I like didn't have enough money in the bank to pull out like a $5 because they were going to charge me a fee for the ATM. And then all I had was $5. So I couldn't get any money out of the bank. But something that people could do is kind of save money into their go bag, right?

So if you're at a place where pulling out $200 right now and sticking into the go bag, you know, is super painful for you or actually you are unable to do it, then what you could do is just every time you get paid for the next three months or so or however long, right? Put five bucks, put $20. Take that, you know, don't get your Starbucks coffee that day. Stick a $5 bill on your go bag, right? Like just once a week. You could build it up that way, right?

I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm supporting you. I'm just trying to help people out. It's a little bit painful. But the key concept, have some cash in your go back. And I think that covers everything. Really, we've covered food. We've covered cash.

We've covered self-defense. We've covered family planning, individual planning. We've covered clothing. We've covered the bag itself. Right? And I think it's all, and especially with the wildfires happening in Hawaii, like you said. Hurricane season in Florida, like you said. I mean, there's record-breaking heat happening.

Yeah. In record-breaking heat, you know what happens if the freaking, if electricity goes out? Yeah. You got a sked. You got to grab your bag, get in your car, and go somewhere and go somewhere else. Because you don't want to sit around in a heat wave when you don't have any idea when electricity is going to get turned back on. Especially if you're over the age of 60, all folks, if you're over the age of 60, do not mess around with that stuff. Yeah.

Right? You're not weak. It has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with the infrastructure that's there to support you. The infrastructure that's out there, the hospitals, the first aid, the medics, the first responders. like they're there for a certain demographic of people and that demographic basically caps out at like 55. They're there to keep your 25 to 55 year olds alive and healthy barely. Yeah.

Once you're over 60, those EMTs and first responders are not as well equipped to suit your needs. So you've got to keep yourself safe. So I would add one more thing and that is first aid, right? We didn't talk about first aid. So you want to have something in there, a kid or whatever it is for first aid. And then you have to think about your own family's needs.

So if you are taking prescription medications or something like that, you might not necessarily hold them in the go bag. But like for for us, I have all of my list. Yes. I have, I have all of my stuff always in one place. And then I have an empty bag that if I had to run, I would literally shove everything into that bag, zip it up, stuff it in the top of my go bag, and we would go. I see, I remember that. I remember when we were when we were, when we had prescription skin ointments for the kids and we had to use them. So we would just pin a list, like a post-it note to the outside of the bag that had three things that we needed to grab. Yes. So then when you grab the bag, you can't, you see the list right there. You're like,

oh, I got to make sure I grab this. And then one, two, three ointments for the kids right into the bag and you're out the door. Yeah. And those things aren't like spread all over the house. They're always kept in the same place. So it's easy to just, you know, push them in, put them in the bag, go. Great point. Yeah. So I kind of like that we landed on this. go-bag conversation. It was a little bit outside of our normal conversation, but it was still very exciting. It's near and dear to our heart. It's near and dear to our geeky hearts, right? And it's in line with the question that I wanted to bring up today because somebody asked us the question, and I get this question often. I don't know how often anybody gets to talk to you. You're still

kind of a new and special flower that people don't get to talk to. So I'm really curious to hear your answer to this, but the question was, do you ever worry for your family's safety? And I think the implication of the question was, being former CIA and being so public, do you ever worry for your family safety? So the short answer is yes, but I've always worried for the family safety. I think the core of the worry changes over time. But I would say yes. You know, all my old worries are still there about, you know, stranger danger.

And you have anxiety, so you have worry. about worries. About everything, yeah, pretty much. But yeah, being so public for sure is an additional layer because, you know, you just never know when there's going to be somebody out there who misinterprets what you say or who disagree so vehemently and has other issues going on because you can disagree vehemently with somebody and still be civil. But sometimes there are people who have other things going on, that are unaddressed and then they channel that rage towards you. They don't even know you, right?

And you know, you see stuff in the news and that happens and it's really sad. And yeah, definitely I would like to protect my family from that. You know, it's interesting. I like this question because it's helping people kind of understand that we are taking a risk by being public, by talking on podcasts, by interviewing on other podcast channels, by creating a YouTube channel, by creating a business where we share our knowledge, right? Because there's a lot of people out there.

We've seen some crazy people do some crazy things to us, sending emails to our customer service team, calling us, you know, approaching us in public and like directing their anger at us. Somebody accused me of being the reason that we went into Iraq and Afghanistan because of WMD. I was like, I joined CIA in 2007. Yeah.

The whole WMD thing happened in 2002. Yeah. Right? There's no way I can be held accountable for that. But I was the focus of their anger, right? And that happens to us. And I think we are both very sensitive to the fact that we are public and we have made our family public. Right.

Right. We want to share our entire experience in this life as Americans, as service people, as business owners with everybody. We want to be transparent. Right. And some people see that as a reason to target us. So the huge advantage that we have is that it's unlikely anyone out there can target us as effectively as you can counter target. Essentially, you can protect us from the tools that other people use to find us.

I think that's what's been kind of our superpower. So out of curiosity, if you were a crazy and you were trying to find somebody, What would be like two or three things that you would look for right away? I don't want to tell people my secrets. Fair enough. So then not you. What would a average crazy? Because you're a special kind of crazy.

So what would an average crazy look for? So, you know, I think, I think like we've, I've talked about before, you know, the Internet is the biggest security risk because nothing is private, right? If you look long enough and hard enough, you can find out almost anything about a person, especially somebody who starts to become public. But even then, I think there was somebody, I usually do research on people when I'm going to work with them. I'm curious. But it's amazing how much you can find out, you know, you can find out who their spouses, what, you know, what their, not their voter record, but how they are registered to vote.

Usually voter registration records have addresses with them. You know, you can find out history of phone numbers. You can find out family members, right? I mean, that's one of the key things that you do in targeting is not just look at the person, but look at who's around them. All of that's on the Internet. Yeah. The Internet's incredible because it does all that work for you.

It'll tell you the political leanings, the religious beliefs. It'll tell you sometimes the health care history, the phone numbers, the emails, the addresses, the history of addresses, the history of emails. It'll connect you with the phone numbers and addresses of family members. It's really quite insane how much information is out there that can be discovered, not even collected, just discovered if you hit on the right kind of website. Because there's websites out there called people search websites that are backed by things called. data brokers and information brokers. And these are, these are just web crawlers. Yeah. That that are automated to go out there, collect personally identifiable information, PII, collect that about people and then bring them together into a single database. So when people

want to find you, they really can find you. And I think we have always known that that was the reality. If people want to find you, they can. They can. So a couple of the things that we do to protect ourselves. One is we don't live where we are registered to live. Right. The address I usually use for things is actually a forwarding address. Yep, which is completely legal in the United States. So anybody out there who wants to protect their own personal information, you can actually register to live in a forwarding address. Yeah. And then physically live in a completely different address. Doesn't make life a little bit complicated for Amazon or whatever else. Yeah. But it also means that when people find your voter registration and they find your tax history, the address they

find is not yours. Yeah, it's not where you are physically residing. So when Crazy shows up with a bunch of, you know, pickles or eggs, they're throwing it at somebody, like they're throwing it at a door that is a business, exactly, a forwarding address. So that's something that we 100% employ. And then another thing that we employ is a tool called ORA. ORA is a cybersecurity platform. We are clients and we are official sponsors of ORA. So it's really important that we share this transparently. We work with ORA and we support and sponsor ORA. So that's why you see their logo on the screen with us right now. And that's why you'll see a statement in the description below that very clearly states that we are sponsors of ORA. And ORA is a platform that actually erases our public data from the internet. Yeah.

Right. So every data broker and information broker out there has a right by federal law to collect your personal private data. If you can believe that, there's actually an act called the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the FCRA, that makes it legal for corporations to collect your private data. The federal government cannot collect your private data, but they have made it legal for corporations to collect your private data, and then the government can buy your private data from the corporations. Right.

That's all under something called the FCRA. So because that exists, that's why every time you fill out a form online, or sign up for a new app, your data is collected, harvested, and then sold to these people search sites. Yeah. However, it's also legal and enforceable that if you submit a request to have your data removed from their system, they must comply and they must comply in a reasonable period of time. Reasonable period of time is defined as less than 30 days.

So all it takes is for you to submit a request and then a data broker or information broker must delete your data from their records. ORA, the company that we support, has an automated system that actually finds our data for us on these other platforms and then erases that data for us. And it's an automated system. So it goes back and it searches again and again on an automated basis. And every time it finds anything about us, it automatically creates a request from that information service to delete anything about us, which is really impressive when you consider

that there's over 500 data brokers out there, registered, licensed, legal data brokers, over 500 of them. So if you and I were to literally fill out a form for every one of them, it would only be valid for them to erase the data within 30 days of when we sent the form. If their web crawlers go out and crawl our data again

on day 31, it goes right back on their systems. So that's where it's super useful. So yes, we do some tactical things, like register ourselves in different physical addresses. But we also do cyber stuff. And we use a system and we use a platform. ORA is our preferred choice so that you can go in so that ORA does the work for us to erase us from the system. If anybody out there is interested in learning more about ORA or becoming a part of ORA or testing it,

we actually have an agreement with ORA where they get 14 days of a complimentary free trial. All they have to do is sign up at ORA.com forward slash everyday spy. The link for that is actually down in the description, folks. So if anybody wants to give Aura a try, and if you want to go on there and see exactly how simple it is to sign up and erase your own data from those data brokers, just open the description, click on the link below or open a new browser and go toora.com forward slash everyday spy.

You'll get everything you need right there. But between our personal choices and our use of the tool, ORA, that is how we keep ourselves, our data, and our family safe. Yeah, and just like you said, you have to be, it's a constant process and you have to be vigilant. So, you know, a service like ORA, you know, like you said, they are constantly monitoring it. And that's important because for you to take your own time to do that, it would just be so time consuming. So it's nice to have somebody else can provide that service for you. And then you just every once in a while do a check on your own name

and see what's out there. Yeah. And ORA is really convenient. It gives us a dashboard on our cell phone so we can literally look at our digital footprint, along with other things like our credit history, our financial transactions, who's looking us up, where we stand on the dark web. It's a pretty amazing tool, but one of the many things it does that's very cool is help keep us safe by erasing our private data.

Exactly. All right, folks, thanks very much for your time. Hope you enjoyed the conversation. Make sure you take a few seconds to click on the link in the description. Go check out, ORA. Go see if it's a good fit for you and for your family or for yourself as an individual.

And then also make sure that you take the time to visit us at our homepage, Everydayspy.com or take our spy quiz and find out what kind of spy you would be. We really enjoy these conversations with you. I really enjoy these conversations with you. Me too. And we love getting your comments, your feedback, and your questions. So make sure that you leave a question or a comment below for us, whether just to tell us that you love the content or give us an idea

or sign up for Aura and then drop a comment and tell us that you signed up for Aura so that we can celebrate with you. Either way, we're excited to have the next conversation with you and we'll see you soon. Take care.