This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How to Prepare for an Emergency with Amy Edelman and Chris Begley, PhD | 442

Starting point is 00:00:01 Hey there, I'm Travis Hoym, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing, and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Check us out and subscribe where. wherever you listen to podcasts. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means to be doing women's work in the world today. And friend, there are an abundant amount of ways we get to do that.

Starting point is 00:01:02 But one way is challenging stereotypes, questioning assumptions, and being true to ourselves. Okay, that was three ways, but again, the list is long. And today we're going to do all three of those things with a topic that may seem strange to do that way. We're talking about having an emergency playbook, being prepared for the just-in-case. Nothing crazy about that, right? It seems practical, important, and likely something women would care about because we know the value of being prepared and protecting the people we love. But somewhere along the way, being prepared for an emergency became associated with being a doomsday prepper. And that comes with some stereotypes and assumptions.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Bunkers, guns and ammo, stockpiles of canned goods, conspiracy theories, and likely a lot of camouflage. And suddenly there's a huge gap between I should probably be prepared for an emergency and I need to be ready for when the feds come for me. Which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it because emergencies aren't ridiculous. They're not even particularly unlikely. Power outages, extreme weather, pandemics, we know things go sidest. ways. And being prepared for that isn't paranoid. It's practical, which is probably why I was disproportionately excited when this topic came our way, because here's something you may not know about me. I'm a bit of a prepper myself. I haven't escalated to a bunker and there is no camouflage in sight, but I do have

Starting point is 00:02:28 freeze-dried food with a 20-year shelf life, water bricks, a solar-powered power station, a hand-crank radio. I mean, I have inventory. Jay thinks I'm nuts, but we'll see who. who's laughing when he needs a life straw and an emergency whistle. But in all seriousness, being prepared builds confidence. Being overprepared or constantly worrying about worst case scenarios builds fear. So where's the line? What do we actually need to know, have, and do so that when something goes sideways, we're ready without having to spend our lives worried about everything? Well, our guest today literally wrote the playbook. Amy Edelman is the author and founder of Indy Reader and Chris Begley

Starting point is 00:03:10 is an archaeologist, professor, wilderness survivor, instructor, National Geographic Explorer, and the author of the next apocalypse. Together, they've written the emergency playbook, a bunker-free guide to disaster preparation, a practical common-sense guide to being ready for the just-in-case

Starting point is 00:03:27 without losing our minds in the process. So Amy and Chris, thank you for being our guests, and I'm going to start by asking what I think is a foundational question. What is being prepared actually mean and how do we know if we're prepared enough or if we've gone off the deep end? I would say at the outset, and I think this is what causes anxiety for a lot of people, is you're never going to be fully prepared for everything.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Even you, Nicole. And I didn't know that fact about you, but I, you know, love that. But you're never going to be fully prepared. It's kind of like a journey. which consists of little steps that you can take every single day. You can fold them into your routine. There's no need to wake up one morning and say, oh my God, I need, you know, long list of things by the end of the week.

Starting point is 00:04:26 It really doesn't work that way. But I think that it really takes the stress, some of the stress away, if it's something that you know you're never going to be prepared enough, but make it part of your routine. Yeah, and the other thing, I think, to that is to imagine the situations that you're actually likely to encounter that aren't zombie apocalypse, that, you know, the power going out for an extended period of time, I mean, which could be a day or be a week, or the water going out. And imagine what you would need in that moment. And that's the kind of thing you can start to get. And, you know, you're also the sorts of things that people have in their houses anyway.

Starting point is 00:05:10 And so what you're doing is really adding to this list of things that are reasonable to have. And at what point is it off the deep end? I don't know. I guess that's how much you enjoy it, how much it increases your confidence and makes you feel good that you're preparing. I would say if, you know, if it's doing that and it's not draining. in your bank account, then keep it up. Yeah. So I like the focus on if it's something you enjoy, if it's building confidence. It's having you lose sleep and live in fear and not be able to function your day-to-day life. That's probably when we've gone off the deep end, I would argue.

Starting point is 00:05:51 So, Chris, you alluded to this already. My next question was going to be around what emergencies we should be prepared for. So power outages seems likely. I think there is also a little bit of where you live that may determine that. So I grew up in California. We were a lot more prepared for earthquakes than I am today living in Massachusetts. Now it's more about the extreme weather, snow, things like that. So outside of power outages and knowing what's likely to happen where you live, are there any other emergencies that you find that people don't think about? Well, I think you're exactly right. And to think about where you live and the things that will happen. I'm in Kentucky. Earthquakes aren't something we think about. Where I am in Lexington, you know, wildfires are not really something

Starting point is 00:06:42 we think about, but we do think about tornadoes, even things like hurricanes, which, of course, have effects great distances from the coast sometimes. But there are a few, I think, that we don't sometimes think about. And things like the power outage or the water outages, those would typically be the result of one of these other things anyway. But there are some things that we don't think about or we don't imagine that could really happen. There's probably something we ought to keep in mind or keep thinking about. And the one that comes to mind for me is just with the political situation and sort of civil unrest, you know, things can change. I don't know that they will, but that's the kind of thing that that we really have to make ourselves pay attention to

Starting point is 00:07:32 and to look for the signs that things are changing because we all have a normalcy bias where we tend to think things are going to continue like they've been. And sometimes that's not the case. Yeah, I have grown up. reading a lot of historical novels and history books. And so like World War II, I often think about probably far too often what would happen if there was civil unrest or if we were at war or things like that. So, okay, it's hard to not freak out. Let's be honest. But wherever somebody is at listening, what would you tell them is the best place to start? Like if they've done nothing to prepare up to this point. And Amy, you had said earlier about kind of including it in the day-to-day,

Starting point is 00:08:22 not going and getting a $5,000 budget and buying everything at once. Where would we start? Really, the easiest place to start is to make a plan, and that doesn't cost anything. You know, I'm aware that people are at different places, especially with the cost of things today like skyrocketing. But it doesn't really cost you anything to make a plan. Do you have young kids who might be at school. Do you have an elder parent who you might need to, you know, take care of? Or neighbors, again, who are in need. Make a plan if you have to leave your home, how are you going to get out? Is your car full of gas or fully charged? The roads will probably be clogged the main highway. So have different ways to get to where you're going. Identify where

Starting point is 00:09:14 you're going, do you have a second home? Great. If not, do you have friends who live a couple towns over who you can crash with? These are all things that don't cost anything to do. Also, have an idea of if you own your home. Do you have a copy of the deed in your mortgage papers? If you're leaving your home because there's a wildfire or some kind of natural disaster, it might not be there when you get back. So you're going to have to deal. with insurance companies. And so it's going to make it easier on the other end if you have the papers that you need when the insurance guys come calling.

Starting point is 00:09:55 So those are things that you can do at the start that don't cost really anything to do. But it's about communication. And communicating ahead of time when, you know, you have a cell phone or, you know, you have your family with you. that's what you need to do because after the fact it's going to be difficult. It's going to be way more difficult. Yeah, I've heard that a lot of emergencies, sometimes what will happen is the phones won't work. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:26 And so knowing where to meet people, what to do and having that talk through, like, you know, with our daughter, it's where does she go? Because I don't want her to just hang out at school where everybody's trying to go and pick up their kids. Right. Where does she go? How long does she wait there? does she go next? And like our thing is you go to this place, you wait for a couple hours, we will get to you if it is humanly possible. Right. If not, then you do this next and we will get there. Exactly. And it's empowering. I mean, it's easy. It's easy to freak out when the things

Starting point is 00:11:00 that we rely on day to day no longer operate. But again, if you've discussed this ahead of time, everybody knows what they're going to do. They're all on the same page. So would you recommend having that plan written out. I think sometimes when things happen, it's a little like, what did we say? What are we doing? Right. Yes, I think it is, it is a good idea to have it written out. And again, I would, you know, I would say paper as opposed to typing it into your phone because, again, if the phone doesn't work, you know, you lose GPS, you lose phone numbers. I mean, how many of us, like, I don't know the phone numbers of my two daughters offhand, you know, my husband, yes, I could get, but the other one's not so much. And they're living in a whole different world. I mean, my kids are in early 30s, late 20s. And so they don't remember a life without a phone. So, you know, to kind of like say, this is what could possibly happen. It sounds crazy. But yes, I would write it on paper. Outside of a plan, which I appreciate you saying,

Starting point is 00:12:10 it costs nothing, which is super helpful. And it triggers communication, which is great in our families. And it does, it's scary to talk about, but it does leave you feeling empowered, not freaked out. So then my next question is, what are the things that every household should have on hand? What are the items that are worth investing in? Well, there's a couple of ways to think about this. Things that you would keep in your house, you know, principally would be the things that would disappear in an emergency, either things.

Starting point is 00:12:40 things to create electricity or things to use instead of the electric things that you use, like flashlight, you know, radio that runs on batteries or one of these hand crank emergency radios. Radios, of course, are going to be one of the main ways you get information in a situation where the, you know, electricity is out or the cell towers have gone down. And, you know, something like telephone numbers, the system doesn't have to go down. You just have to lose your phone or the power to your phone, and then you don't have that. So in your house, you know, I think I would start thinking about all of this. There's something that we invoke sometimes called the rule of threes, which isn't exactly accurate, but it does list the necessities in order of how critical

Starting point is 00:13:33 they are. You can live three minutes without air. You can live three days without water, three weeks without food, et cetera. And none of those numbers are exactly right. But they get you a sense of that. So let's assume that, you know, if you're going to have air, the next thing is extreme weather, which I left out of there, three hours in freezing weather without the right clothing. So I assume in your house you'll have stuff to take care of that, you know, blankets or your coats and all that. Then some water, enough for a few days at least. The old recommendation used to be three days. I think now with some of the more extreme weather events we've seen, people are losing their infrastructure for weeks.

Starting point is 00:14:19 I'm thinking of the floods in North Carolina, for instance. And so the old thinking of, you know, this stuff's going to get resolved quickly may not be the reality that we're living in. So beyond that sort of stuff, one of the things to have really, Ready is a go bag, a bag that has the critical stuff that if you did have to leave, you could grab it. And this isn't just a bag full of camping gear. It should have something, an emergency blanket, a jacket, a jacket, something like that that can help you with cold weather. That's really what you would prepare for. But would have things like hard copies of your important documents that Amy mentioned earlier, birth certificate.

Starting point is 00:15:06 certificates, deeds or titles, insurance papers, things that you might need later if your house is not there or if you're unable to get back to it and you've got to deal with insurance companies or FEMA or the authorities or a bank. And so that would be things. And then, you know, just think what would I need, a flashlight, some extra batteries, a radio with batteries or one of those hand-crank ones is good, some water, some food to sort of get you through the first little bit. You know, you can't carry enough water for much more than about a day, really. But you could have one of those little camping filters. You mentioned a lifestrel that, you know, Nicole, there's, you know,

Starting point is 00:15:51 Sawyer filtered lifestrels. There's a ton of these that you can buy anywhere. And they're relatively cheap, $20 or so. And they'll filter out stuff from pretty much whatever water source you have. have. Now, they won't purify it and get rid of everything, but it will make it drinkable. And, you know, that list of stuff hasn't been very long. That would be a little book bag backpack with an emergency blanket, a jacket, maybe a change of clothes and some extra socks, a little folder with your important papers, a flashlight, maybe a tarp and some rope and a knife, and things that would

Starting point is 00:16:28 allow you to, you know, make your life better if you're sort of stuck outside somewhere. And all of that stuff is probably what you, you know, have around the house or a lot of that stuff would be. So those, I would be thinking in that direction. The only thing that you didn't say that I know is in my Go bag, I do have one, are maps. Because as you said before, a lot of times GPS or things like that wouldn't work. Exactly, yeah. Paper maps are, I mean, I have those when I'm out periodically, I'll do archaeological projects here in the states. And, you know, if you're looking for a particular place and you get to an area where there's no cell signal, which is pretty common, and certainly

Starting point is 00:17:17 in Kentucky and Tennessee, and these areas where I often work, you're stuck. I've had to, before drive back to where I had a signal to download the maps so that I could drive back into where I needed to be. And so paper maps are helpful at any point. But certainly if this stuff goes down or you're worried about running out of battery, that's probably the more likely scenario. You're worried about your phone running out of battery and you have to deal with this stuff or you want to save the battery for something more important than, you know, looking at the map. And so you have that option. So that's right, paper maps. Having a teenager who's becoming more independent is both a blessing and a curse.

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Starting point is 00:21:31 If the situation allows it, you should try and stay in your home because for obvious reasons, you know, there's shelter. You have what you need presumably in your home, at least for the moment. But if it is something like a wildfire or a storm that, if you live near the beach, that you know your house is going to flood and you're not going to make it. If you can, then it's better to leave. You have what you need in your home, even if you're not very prepared. And that kind of leads into the next thing, which also doesn't cost any money, which is knowing your community. You know, if you are staying in your home and something happens, you want to be able to rely on your neighbors and have your neighbors be able to rely on you, whether it's for supplies or skills. And this is also something that people these

Starting point is 00:22:31 days aren't very good at. It's socializing with the people who are around them. There's so many things that divide us. You know, it's easy to say, okay, well, they're not on the same side as I am politically. So, you know, I'm not going to be friends with them. But really, when things get tough, the people in your neighborhood, your neighbors, those are going to be the people who you are relying on. That's also something that doesn't cost anything to do. Agreed. And then my next question is around where are we, so we might not be thinking about our community enough. And then there might be some things we're thinking about too much. So my question is, what do you see people buying or doing that they don't really need or are unlikely to need or maybe over emphasizing.

Starting point is 00:23:23 Guns and ammo. That's going to be the big one. It depends on where you are. And, you know, no one is here as naive about, you know, the realities of the world and the way people act. But, I mean, we have plenty of evidence of how people act after these disasters. And it's not, you know, the world of Mad Max or something that you see depicted in these. I mean, Rebecca, sold in its paradise built-in-hell, a book that really details a lot of how people sort of rise to the occasion. Now, how long that lasts, I don't know. But also imagine this. Part of this idea is that I'm going to defend my stash of stuff.

Starting point is 00:24:03 Let's say that I have food here. And for whatever reason, my neighbors don't. You know, am I going to turn them away at gunpoint? No, you know, sorry. That's just not going to happen. even if that makes life a little more difficult for me. And I think most of us are like that. You know, when we think about these, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:25 unprepared hordes that are coming to get your stuff, that's not the way it's going to be. It's going to be somebody and their kid who are desperate. Right. And what are you going to do? You're going to say, well, sorry, I've got this gun. And so that's one thing. I mean, I think that that defensive stuff.

Starting point is 00:24:40 The other thing is just gear in general. When I teach these wilderness survival courses, I'll often have people say, well, you know, I'm not very good at like hiking and camping. You know, and I always tell them, look, hiking is walking. Camping is sleeping. You know, I'm pretty sure you can do those things. And we've made it an industry. I mean, of course, people have things to sell, right? And there are things that make it better.

Starting point is 00:25:05 You know, certainly camping with good equipment is often nicer than camping with no equipment or the wrong equipment. equipment, but it's also not critical. So you already have a lot of the things that you need. Blankets. You know, you have kitchen knives. Those pretty much do whatever a hunting knife will do. And there's, I think that's one thing you can get bogged down in. I don't have the right equipment. Because for the most part, there are many options. I think very well said. I also have a personal belief for, you know, this idea. that any individual or even small group of individuals is going to protect themselves from the government. This mind blasting to me. If the government wants to get you, they're going to get you.

Starting point is 00:25:56 Period. Ended discussion, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, this idea that you can resist sort of military action or something with a bunch of people is a fantasy, of course. And, you know, there are many reasons to resist the government in different occasions. and to protest and complain and fight back in different ways. But really, in thinking of emergency preparation, by and large, that's not what you're going to be doing. I mean, think of the aftermaths of emergencies that you've been in proximity to or actually been in, which are probably going to include tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires. Nobody after those is sitting there thinking, you know, thank goodness I had all this ammo.

Starting point is 00:26:40 You know, that just doesn't factor into surviving or rebuilding from those things. Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned this a couple times and I want to ask, what skills might be more valuable than supplies? Yes, I would say that skills are, you know, pretty much as valuable, can be as valuable as supplies. And I will say, too, the idea of like learning something new these days, you might as well pick something that can be helpful. Like, learn how to garden. I mean, with all of the whole, like, you know, poison lettuce frenzy. We're growing kale in the backyard.

Starting point is 00:27:21 Like, how fun is that? So, or first aid. I just took a first aid class just for the hell of it. I was going to go further until I realized that blood, I can't stand the sight of blood. So I kind of stopped it like CPR. But there are learn how to, I mean, Everybody should know how to change a tire.

Starting point is 00:27:42 You should know how to change the tire. Chris just came to visit a couple of weeks ago driving a Jeep that has 300,000 miles on it, which is like crazy, but he knows how to fix the car. Like, you know how to fix a car. It's fun to learn new things. And if those things can help you now, again,

Starting point is 00:28:05 when things are so expensive, if you can do it yourself, that's great. Or later, and it could possibly save your life, you know, know how to farage, know what's poison, what's not poison. Just learn something new that can potentially help you later on. Even getting in better shape, take an exercise class because if you do have to carry a go bag to someplace safe, you're going to need the energy and the wherewithal to be able to do that. My next question is around something that keeps me up at night, and that's my dog.

Starting point is 00:28:38 So I think we often think about being prepared for ourselves and our human family, but, you know, I don't have a little go bag for my dog. I often wonder, like, what would we do? What should we know about preparing for our pets? We have a dog. Unfortunately, our dog bites. He was a rescue. He's very fear-based. But so we got a muzzle because I said to my husband, and this is just a recent thing, you know, the, the conversation. conversation came up before. If we have to leave the house and go to a shelter or camp outside, we don't want him biting people. But the go bag should have their food, some treats, because it's going to be hard on the dog, just like it's going to be hard on the dog's owner. Poop bags, because again, like everything's going to be crazy, you don't have to worry about stepping in poop. You should have a crate. If you're not, you're not going to be. You should have a crate. If you're

Starting point is 00:29:38 dog is okay with being in a crate, you know, again, a lot depends on the personality of the animal. Yeah, we, we, for instance, have a cat, and so we have a little leash thing, which, you know, we never use. But in this case, you could, we have a crate for it. In our household, too, we have some other animals. We have a rabbit. We have a big turtle that someone gave us 15 years ago. And so some of those are not going. You know, I mean, if we have to go, I don't, you know, there's not always a good solution. We have ducks and chickens. You know, if you're evacuated and you're probably not going to be, if you have livestock, for instance.

Starting point is 00:30:21 And so there might be ways that you want to deal with that. You know, do you let them loose? Do you cut the fence? Do you open the gate? I know that's what people do out west in some of these wildfires because you can't round up all the cattle. You just have to allow them avenues for escape and hope for the best. And so hopefully for pets, somebody can take charge of each one. We all have different physical ability.

Starting point is 00:30:48 Some of us can run a marathon and some of us can't and some of us have mobility issues. And some people use a walker or a wheelchair or a cane, sight impaired. all of those realities are going to be different for everybody. And it doesn't somehow mean that you're not able to prepare for this stuff because we all have these limitations. None of us are at the level that somebody else is in terms of their ability to physically deal with all of these things. You also may feel handicapped that, you know, I'm not an athlete. I'm not able to run a marathon or I have to use this walker or, whatever, you know, the particular situation is. But those are just realities that we all face. And it

Starting point is 00:31:34 doesn't somehow mean, well, I can't prepare because I have these limitations, because everyone has them. What's the biggest mistake you see people make in an emergency? Yeah. And I would say it's not having a plan and not having prepared is really going to be the biggest, the biggest issue. And you mentioned earlier about sort of knowledge versus equipment, that's really the first step. You know, the more you can learn, that's always going to be with you. And so if you're able to make something or figure out how to do without it or find an alternative, that's a powerful thing because think about all the situations where you might not be able to get to your house or to your go bag. Even if you are prepared enough to have a version of that in your car, it's still possible that you can't

Starting point is 00:32:27 even get to your car. The knowledge is going to be the thing that you can count on and sort of the things in your purse or the things in your pocket. Okay. What's something you have in your home or in your go bag that might surprise us? Well, I'll start with this, and this grows out of doing trips with students where it would sometimes be pretty physically difficult. We'd have to hike for a day or two. And I would always have some kind of candy or some kind of tree. Or some kind of treat or something that would be a morale razor. You know, it doesn't have a purpose like, you know, a fire starter or water filter. But ultimately, those were things that I used far more than those other things.

Starting point is 00:33:13 You know, I would buy some energy gum at, you know, at the gas station and tell the students, like, look, you can only take one of these every four hours. You know, they really did nothing. But the, but this would make people think, okay, now I'm supercharged. And so you would really see this, the importance of your mindset. And of course, we talk a lot about that in the book. And that might be a surprise to people that the things that will enhance your attitude and help people around you is a part of what I have in mind.

Starting point is 00:33:47 I love that answer. Amy? We have a lot of chocolate and coffee in our zombie closet and in the go bags as well, which again, we've been like stocking. stuff up for like a long time now. And unfortunately, chocolate and coffee prices are going up because of the effect of drought and climate issues in a lot of places. But my husband can't go anywhere without his coffee and I need my chocolate covered caramel. So I, again, love those answers because, and I know you talk about it in the book and I will remind the listener to go get the book. It's

Starting point is 00:34:22 called the Emergency Playbook. It's available on Amazon or wherever you buy books, but let's of course keep our local bookstores in business. But the importance of mindset. And I go back to being prepared builds confidence. I study confidence for a living. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Being prepared builds confidence. And I love that you started by saying and said it a few times through,

Starting point is 00:34:42 there's no way for us to be prepared for everything or to know everything. And so, you know, this focus on skills that go with us wherever we go and mindset and a little bit of chocolate or whatever the treat may be. really, really resonates with me. Thank you both for being here. Again, the book is The Emergency Playbook. I'll also put links, ways to find and follow both Amy and Chris,

Starting point is 00:35:06 and Amy has a subset called Pretty Prepared. We'll put the link to that as well. Thank you both for doing this work and for being here today. Thank you. Well, thank you, Nicole. My pleasure. All right, friend,

Starting point is 00:35:19 there is a difference between preparing because we're afraid and preparing so we don't have to be. We can't predict when things will go sideways, and we certainly can't control everything that happens when they do. But we can have a plan. Buy the lifestrog, pack the go bag, learn the skill, talk to your family, know where the flashlight is before the power goes out. Because we can prepare for what might happen without being afraid of everything that could happen. We don't need to live in fear of the just in case.

Starting point is 00:35:49 We just need to be ready for it. And that is woman's work.

This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How to Prepare for an Emergency with Amy Edelman and Chris Begley, PhD | 442

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