Preparing for the Unpreparable

Lance: During the LA fires, I learned something uncomfortable but important. Even thoughtful plans unravel when too many variables collide. Wind, infrastructure, human error. The rules changed mid-sentence. There was nothing cinematic. It was just a shift, and suddenly there was a situation no one could plan for.

Lance: That’s when the real question surfaced: Can we ever truly prepare for a disaster of this scale? And underneath that question is another one: What do you do when the plan stops working, when the systems fail, when help is delayed, when no one is coming? In Tofino on the edge of the Pacific, that question isn’t theoretical, it’s practical. Act one: The rules change mid-sentence. From January 7th to January 31st, 2025, 14 destructive wildfires burned across Los Angeles County.

Lance: 31 people were killed. More than 18,000 structures were destroyed, and the estimated damage is still being calculated, but currently it exceeds $65 billion. Entire neighborhoods in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena were erased. Additional fires burned in other neighborhoods like Griffith Park, Runyon Canyon, and Calabasas.

Lance: The emergency phase lasted 24 days, and the recovery will take years.

Lance: For those of us living here, it began with the wind. The night before, the wind was insane, literally close to 100 miles an hour in some areas, and the air was so dry, our pets were sparking. Trees in our yard were bending in ways that made you rethink your attachment to trees. We all slept very badly. And I gave up at 6:00 in the morning and went to the window, looking west, and the sky was just wrong.

Lance: Not overcast, it was dramatic, a black sky that wasn’t clouds. If you’ve lived through fires before, you know immediately when it’s smoke. It has a smell that registers before your brain catches up. The air quality index was 369. The EPA considers anything above 300 hazardous, the highest category on the scale of what we should technically consider to be breathable air.

Lance: But we’re at 369. That’s not a number that was designed to describe a place where people live. There were no flames near us at the time. We’re in watch and wait mode, safe from the fire, but waiting.

Lance: Power went out about 10 minutes later. We watched as two transformers blew up on our street, and I remember thinking, “That’s gonna take a minute.” It took four days, and that’s when I learned something I genuinely didn’t know. Cell towers lose power when the rest of us do. I had always assumed they had generators.

Lance: Some do. Some have batteries. But fuel runs out and batteries drain, which means the thing you rely on for information degrades exactly when you need it most, and that’s when the crises started stacking. It wasn’t one day. It was compounding. We organized the go bags, stacked pet carriers by the door. We talked to our neighbor about hose positions.

Lance: I could almost hit my neighbor’s whole roof if I lifted the hose to the second floor with a rope. We were definitely problem-solving and planning in real time. My daughter went to stay at her dad’s place in Hollywood because he had power. He lived in a condo surrounded by hardscape, and at that moment, that felt safer than trees and wind.

Lance: Then someone started a fire in Runyon Canyon, and they were told to evacuate immediately. They tried to drive out and hit instant gridlock, not slow traffic, boxed in. They couldn’t even leave the building driveway. People were being told to leave their cars, leave the keys, and evacuate on foot. So they put the car back in the garage, cat carrier and belongings in hand, and she was watching a piece of her childhood go up in flames.

Lance: They ran down the hill to catch the subway at the Hollywood stop. It was free. The conductor told her she would be okay. My husband, Chris, picked them up near our house and brought them home. I cooked dinner that night on the gas stove by lantern light, and my ex-husband spent the night, which even in the best of situations, is something you’d like to avoid at all costs.

Lance: My daughter and I slept in shifts. One of us stayed awake in the driveway listening to NPR in the car because that was the best way to stay informed in real time.

Clip: Listen to this wind. These gusts, nearly 100 miles an hour, and there’s really very little the firefighters can do.

Lance: The feeling shifted from if a fire breaks out near us to when it happens. It felt inevitable and out of control, and we were the lucky ones. When my daughter had to evacuate on foot and I couldn’t get her texts, that was one of the moments I understood how much less control we actually have than we think we do.

Lance: There are things you see in movies that aren’t necessarily true. You can’t necessarily drive out of a crowded evacuation zone, and you can’t necessarily reach someone you love when infrastructure is failing. Our faith in the system wasn’t misplaced. It just doesn’t scale. What we were dealing with was something called a compound crisis.

Lance: A compound crisis is when multiple problems hit at the same time, and the really brutal part is that they’re not just adding up, they’re multiplying each other. Each crisis makes the others harder to manage. Think of it like a car breaking down in a rainstorm on the way to a job interview. Any one of these things is annoying.

Lance: All three together, now you’re soaked, stranded, and unemployed. A crisis of this size doesn’t break one thing. It breaks everything, and once everything is breaking at the same time, you’re operating in a different situation. The wind made containment nearly impossible. Water infrastructure failed when it was needed most.

Lance: Communication systems went down. Alerts were late, wrong, or never came. Evacuation routes gridlocked. People were deliberately setting additional fires. Any one of these things is a serious problem. Any two of them is a bad day. All of them at once, feeding each other, that’s something completely different.

Lance: Planning for that level of complexity for every contingency isn’t realistic. So what can you do? I spent a lot of long nights thinking about it. After the fires, I had one question I couldn’t answer myself. Is there ever a way to win something like this or even prepare for it? And the question is, who actually knows what the limits are and who actually knows what to do?

Lance: I wanted to talk to people for whom disaster isn’t a surprise. People who’ve built their lives around the assumption that things go wrong and have thought seriously about what to do about that.

Lance: That brought me to Tofino. Tofino is on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It’s a three-hour drive plus a one-hour ferry ride to downtown Vancouver. One road in, one road out. The next closest landmass to the west is Japan. That’s over four thousand miles of open Pacific with nothing in between. No buffer, no barrier.

Lance: It sits on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a seven-hundred-mile fault where two tectonic plates have been grinding against each other for centuries, locking, building pressure, storing energy. The last time it let go was January 26th, 1700. The coastline dropped. A tsunami formed. We know the exact date not from any written record on this coast, there were none, but because the wave crossed the Pacific and hit Japan that same night.

Lance: Japanese scholars called it an orphan tsunami, a wave with no known parent.

Lance: But people who lived on Vancouver Island for thousands of years knew exactly where it came from. Their spoken tradition had recorded it, passed down through generations. The earth shook, the ocean flooded in, and it happened so fast that people didn’t even have time to wake up and reach their canoes.

Lance: Everything then drifted away, their story says. Everything was lost and gone. That was three hundred twenty-five years ago. The fault is still locked. Scientists put the odds of a magnitude nine point oh or higher in the next fifty years at ten to fifteen percent. When it goes, shaking could last five minutes.

Lance: Waves could reach a hundred feet. There’s more than a forty percent chance of a tsunami hitting in the next fifty years. And wildfire, historically not a primary concern this far into the rainforest, is now on the list too. The climate is shifting. The training is adapting. One road in, one road out. In the off season, Tofino’s permanent population is around 2,500 people, a tight community.

Lance: Everyone knows the risks. Many have trained for them.

Lance: But in summer, the population swells to 16,000 people per day.

Lance: Those 16,000 did not grow up here. They arrived from Vancouver and Seattle and Los Angeles with varying degrees of outdoor experience, physical fitness, appropriate footwear, and the variable that matters most, self-awareness about any of the above. Summer seasoned, many are just really optimistic, and a few are wearing flip-flops at the trailhead of a Class 5 hike, holding coffee and completely unbothered.

Lance: They’ve watched a reel. They’ve read a caption. They feel ready. The governmental emergency support systems, the search and rescue volunteers, the Coast Smart Safety Team, the hotel concierge at the five-star destination, they’ve all spent months planning for earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires. And then June arrives, and they also have to manage 16,000 individual humans who just discovered the Pacific Ocean and have decided to get really close to it every single day.

Lance: The same people running tsunami drills in April are, by July, taking someone’s boyfriend off a sea stack because he wanted a better photo. That’s Tofino. Existential risk meets peak season. Ancient fault lines meet weekend warriors. And somehow, the people who live here have built a culture that holds all of it, the seismic, the seasonal, the sublime, and the wildly unwise without losing their minds, and I wanted to know how.

Lance: So I headed north. And I need to be perfectly clear here, Tofino is full stop beautiful. I flew in on a Pacific Coastal turboprop. That’s the kind of plane where the cockpit door stays open and you can watch the pilot’s hands on the control from row three. Eighteen seats, no pretense, no bathroom, just you, the engine noise, and a very personal relationship with the fact that you’re in the air.

Lance: And over the coast, the rainforest runs right to the water’s edge and then just stops. Below the wing, dense green, then sand, then islands scattered in the Pacific like punctuation. It was February, unseasonably clear. The sun was low and gold and hitting the water at an angle that made the whole thing look staged.

Lance: I landed into a crisp blue afternoon, slight wind off the ocean, temperature that required a real coat. And within twenty minutes of arriving, I saw the thing that told me I was somewhere special. Surfers wearing wetsuits, carrying their boards and brackets mounted to their bikes, riding directly down to the beach.

Lance: Not to a parking lot, to the water. No cars, no gear bags in a trunk, just a wetsuit, a board, and a bike, and the Pacific thirty feet away, which made everything I was about to hear make a different kind of sense. Over the next several days, I sat down with emergency coordinators, search and rescue volunteers, safety professionals, and hotel staff who manage premium isolation for a living.

Lance: People who think about the gap between what visitors assume and what the environment actually demands. What I kept hearing was a version of the same thing. It wasn’t about gear or checklists. It was about something impossible to pack, the ability to notice when something is off before the situation confirms it, pattern recognition, the small signals that tells you the larger system may not be as solid as it looks.

Lance: That idea is going to follow us all season because it turns out the people who navigate chaos best, whether they’re on a remote and rugged coastline or in the middle of an amped-up crowd, are the ones who learn to read the tells. Natalie Chouinard-Nollet, the program coordinator for Coast Smart Canada, an organization built around one uncomfortable observation, most coastal accidents are entirely preventable, has spent 15 years watching people make that mistake in real time.

Nathalie: You learn just enough to know the things that you know, but then your confidence goes way to the top. But you don’t know the things that you don’t know. And then the more knowledge you get, the less confident you become because you know that there’s a lot of things that you still don’t know and you don’t want to be caught off guard.

Lance: Psychologists call that the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it doesn’t just apply to vacationers. Act three, the illusion of confidence. In 1999, two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, ran a study that confirmed what most of us suspected about that guy at the party who has an opinion about everything.

Lance: The less you know, the more confident you feel. The more you learn, the more your confidence actually drops for a bit. They mapped it out, and the peak, that early spike where partial knowledge feels like expertise, got a nickname, Mount Stupid, which is perfect because you know exactly where it is and you know exactly who lives there.

Lance: The guy who watched one video on YouTube about electrical wiring is now absolutely certain he can rewire his kitchen. He’s not incompetent. He knows something. That’s exactly what makes him dangerous. Alexander Pope wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” and he was describing a cognitive bias 300 years before scientists had a name for it.

Lance: The spike is where people get into trouble, not ignorance, partial knowledge. You read the headline, watched the video, you feel ready, but competence isn’t a feeling. It’s performance under stress, and most of us haven’t stress tested our assumptions.

Nathalie: You can teach people things, but it’s really hard to know that if you teach them just enough, they’ll basically be the worst because they’ll be really confident with the little bit of knowledge that they have, and I feel like that’s when most people get themselves in trouble.

Lance: Tofino makes this visible in a way most places don’t. You can park your car, walk 30 feet, and be standing in genuine backcountry wilderness. The transition is invisible. No gate, no warning light, just a parking lot and then the Pacific.

Nathalie: Some of the patterns that we see the most is this feeling of security that you have from being in a highly controlled environment, and then you come to a place that’s highly dynamic, that’s got lots of hazards that cannot be controlled.

Lance: This isn’t unique to Tofino. It’s an evacuation warning that gets ignored because it’s part of an error-ridden warning system. It’s a fire extinguisher in your kitchen that’s been there for 10 years, and you’ve never checked it once. Systems you stopped thinking about because they always worked, or systems you assumed were working because they were there.

Marcie: I think that because there’s sanctioned trails through these beautiful wild places, people don’t always realize that when you step off the trail, you are in genuine wilderness, and you can get turned around really easily.

Lance: Marcy DeWitt is the president of West Coast Inland Search and Rescue, an all-volunteer organization that has served this community since 1999.

Lance: A trail is infrastructure. It’s not immunity. The presence of order makes us assume stability, but systems stop five steps beyond what you can see. That’s the part people miss. Whatever environment you’re entering, outdoors, urban, crowded, coastal, ask one question before you go further. What happens if this system stops working?

Lance: That single question buys awareness, and awareness buys time. Act four: gear is margin. There’s a saying in more extreme climates, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear. The longer you’re out there, the more it costs you. Gear buys time, and time buys options. But here’s what that saying doesn’t tell you.

Lance: Good gear isn’t about being prepared for everything. It’s about reducing friction for the right things, and the goal isn’t to carry everything. It’s to carry the right things. Natalie said it best.

Marcie: So one of the things that I try to tell people is wherever you go, if you’re going in the backcountry or if you’re packing your backpack or whatever you’re doing, whatever you put in your pack should have more than one use.

Lance: Multi-use over maximalism. It sounds obvious until you’re the person who packed for everything and can barely move. A headlamp is also a hands-free light source, a signal, and a way to read a map at two AM without draining your phone. Duct tape repairs gear, seals wounds, fixes a broken shoe, marks a trail. A hardware store in a two-inch roll.

Lance: And a bandana is a water filter, a sling, a tourniquet, a signal flag. It weighs nothing. In Los Angeles, those ready-made earthquake kits have become almost a talisman. Like, if we all have one sitting in the garage, it’ll keep the earthquake away, and it obviously doesn’t work like that. But here’s what a kit actually does.

Lance: If you build it right, it centers you. It makes you think, even briefly, about what you actually need. And thinking about what you need forces you to think about what could go wrong. That’s not nothing. No one has ever regretted packing a headlamp. They have regretted not packing one. The right gear buys you time.

Lance: It gives you margin, but it’s not a one-stop solution. I sat down with Hillary O’Reilly, the emergency program coordinator for the District of Tofino. She runs the EOC, the Emergency Operations Center, the room where Tofino’s response to any major incident gets coordinated. She is calm in emergencies, not because she doesn’t feel fear, but because she has spent her career thinking about what happens when systems fail.

Hilary: Don’t stop with the checklist, and don’t assume that I can handle anything. I mean, still get the go-bag, but, you know, give yourself grace as that go-bag is gonna look a little bit different for everyone, and, and that’s okay.

Lance: Because margin only takes you so far. A checklist only takes you so far. At some point, the question isn’t what you packed.

Lance: It’s who you are when the plan stops working because the situation has escalated drastically.

Hilary: Preparedness is not a checklist, and we often understandably approach it as one. Like, it is the habits and the routines that we have in our daily lives that really leads to preparedness as a culture. It’s not just a checklist.

Lance: That’s the reframe. The kit matters. The headlamp matters. The go-bag matters, but they’re not the destination. They’re the beginning of a habit, and habits, repeated often enough, become culture. And culture is what holds when everything else stops working. Which raises the question nobody wants to ask out loud, What happens when the culture itself hits its limit?

Lance: Act five: The ceiling. There is a limit. You can pack the perfect bag, train for the scenario, know the trail, know the terrain, know the exits, and still find yourself in something that exceeds all of it. Tofino knows this better than most places. It sits on a fault that hasn’t moved in three hundred twenty-five years, and the model says when it goes, it will be unlike anything the modern Pacific Northwest has experienced.

Lance: One road out, waves potentially reaching a hundred feet, a population that swells to sixteen thousand on a summer day. The emergency management professionals here, the coordinators, the search and rescue volunteers, the safety teams, they’ve modeled it. They’ve drilled it. They’ve thought about it longer and harder than almost anyone.

Lance: And what the most experienced among them will tell you quietly is this: when the big one comes, the real compound event, the one where everything fails at once, no single preparation will be enough. I met Tim Webb during a West Coast Inland Search and Rescue volunteer training day in Tofino. He’s the former president of the organization and has spent more than 30 years building systems designed to help communities prepare for disaster.

Lance: He has seen the models, run the drills, and spent a long time thinking about what really happens when an emergency hits.

Tim: And you can never be totally prepared for the worst case scenario. Absolutely. And it’s actually quite easy to concoct a worst case scenario. Um, there’s a, there’s a famous saying, I forget who said it, you know, “The best plans don’t survive contact with the enemy.”

Tim: And it basically means when something happens, everything falls apart. You have to be able to, like, be flexible and modify what you’re doing. Uh, you cannot have detailed plans for the worst case because you don’t know exactly what that’s going to be.

Lance: That’s not nihilism. Let me be clear about what this is.

Lance: There’s a concept in Star Trek, yes, we’re quoting Star Trek, called the Kobayashi Maru. It’s a training simulation used at Starfleet Academy, a rescue mission designed to be unwinnable. A ship is stranded in hostile territory. If you go in, you risk your crew. If you don’t, the stranded crew dies. The test isn’t about finding the right answer.

Lance: It’s about how you behave when there isn’t one.

Clip: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.

Lance: How?

Clip: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship. What? I don’t like to lose.

Lance: Captain Kirk famously reprograms the simulation. He refuses to accept the premise.

Lance: He finds a way to win. It’s very American. But in real life, you don’t get to reprogram the subduction zone. You don’t get to reprogram the wind or the arsonist or the empty reservoir or the cell tower that goes down exactly when you need it. The LA fires weren’t one disaster. They were five or six ordinary vulnerabilities: dry brush, access roads, water pressure, communication systems, wind, that arrived simultaneously.

Lance: Each one addressable in isolation. Together, they created something no single preparation could solve. That’s the compound crisis, and you can’t pressure test for it because the combinations are infinite. So what do you do with that? You have to stop preparing for the specific scenario, and you have to start building the person who can adapt to whatever actually arrives.

Lance: That’s the difference between two mindsets. The resistance mindset says, “I will fortify against a threat I’ve identified, fireproof the house, stockpile for seventy-two hours, follow the evacuation map.” The accommodation mindset says, “I will build the flexibility to adapt when my specific preparations fail, multiple exit routes, transferable skills, the ability to make decisions under uncertainty, community networks that don’t depend on cell signals.”

Lance: The question isn’t can you survive the unwinnable scenario? The question is, can you stay adaptive when plan A, B, or C all fail simultaneously? The mental piece is the thing, not the gear, not the checklist, not the evacuation map. The person holding the map. Hilary O’Reilly has spent her career thinking about what happens when systems fail.

Lance: She is, by her own description, calm in emergencies, not because she doesn’t feel fear, but because she has thought carefully about what fear is for.

Hilary: Preparedness is not a checklist. It is the habits and the routines that we have in our daily lives that really leads to preparedness as a culture. It’s not just a checklist.

Hilary: And so that’s a big one for me. And then the other one, and I love the name of the podcast, but the other one is, is just an awareness that a community or a first responding agency can’t assist everyone all at the same time. And so bringing us back to that piece of self-sufficiency, have moments where you know I can take care of myself and my family and my neighbors and, and just that awareness that there’s gonna be sort of peaks and valleys through these experiences of support and assistance and help, and then that help might shift elsewhere and then return.

Hilary: And so, um, just that awareness to that to, to be prepared for that part. You know, there’s so much value in training and drilling and practicing these things that it provides almost muscle memory that does certainly help in the moment. And I think it does provide a sense of, of calm in the chaos. I think sometimes what can be misunderstood is that training and practice, it’s not with the intention of removing the emotion.

Hilary: I think it’s really important that we give ourselves grace and recognize that fear and the anxiety that will be there, and that’s normal and that’s okay, and let’s care for each other in those moments. But the training and practice isn’t intended to omit that. So don’t make that your goal. It’s about ensuring that those emotions don’t paralyze you from essential action in the moment.

Lance: That’s the accommodation mindset, not preparing for the earthquake, preparing the person who will face whatever arrives. In your lifetime, you will be a first responder, whether it is a minor fire in your kitchen, a fender bender in your neighborhood, or a disaster of epic proportions. Changing your mindset can change your outcome.

Lance: Tim Webb put it this way.

Tim: You can have plans, you can have options, you can have ideas, you can have different scenarios. What would happen if this happened? Who would do what? And just talking through it, um, can be really powerful because that, that arms you with options, you know, that, that, that may be useful.

Lance: Act six: when it transfers to you. At some point, responsibility transfers, not permanently, not forever, briefly, in the window before help arrives, in the moment before consensus forms, in the space between feeling something is wrong and someone else noticing it, too. That window is yours. There’s a story that I wanna share with you, and I’ve been thinking about this story since before I had a name for this podcast, before I knew exactly what I wanted to say.

Lance: In a lot of ways, it’s why I’m here. Tilly Smith was 10 years old. It was the day after Christmas 2004. She was on the beach in Phuket, Thailand, with her family, her parents, her younger sister. It was the kind of vacation you save for and the kind of beach that looks like a postcard, and then the water started doing something strange.

Lance: It was receding, pulling back from the shore faster than it should, and the surface was bubbling, agitated. Tilly had seen this before, not in person, but in a classroom. Two weeks earlier, her geography teacher had shown her class what a tsunami looks like before it arrives, the warning signs, what the ocean does right before it stops being vacation and starts being something else.

Lance: She told her parents they needed to leave now. Her dad wasn’t sure. The beach looked fine to everyone else. People were walking toward the waterline, curious about the exposed sand, the strange retreat. Her dad hesitated. She pushed. She wasn’t hysterical. She wasn’t wrong. She knew what she knew, and she held onto it even when the adults she trusted most weren’t ready to believe her.

Lance: She pushed again. Her parents listened. Her dad noticed something in her voice. They alerted the hotel staff, and the hotel evacuated the beach. Roughly 100 people walked away from that beach alive. The wave arrived minutes later.

Lance: A ten-year-old girl, two weeks of classroom instruction, one pattern recognition, one refusal to be talked out of what she knew. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Tilly didn’t have special gear. She didn’t have a go bag. She wasn’t from a coastal community with generations of water knowledge. She had a mental model flexible enough to recognize something she’s never seen before in a situation she’d never been in, and she had the nerve to say it out loud multiple times.

Lance: Everyone else on that beach had eyes, but Tilly Smith had framework. That’s the difference between information and preparation, between knowing something and being the kind of person who acts on it when it counts, when no one else is moving, when the adults around you are uncertain, and when the window is open and closing fast.

Lance: The window was hers. She took it.

Lance: Here in Tofino, Tim lives on the edge of a potential catastrophe, a non-zero chance of disaster, and he understands the importance of knowledge and calm.

Tim: I think learning as much about the risks and, uh, and what might happen as possible is key. And so I, so I’m lucky in that because I’ve been studying these things for a long time and because I live where I live, I’ve always stayed very aware of what the different options are and the different scenarios are.

Tim: So when we get a s- you know, a- an alert here, or maybe there’s a, first thing that happens is there’s an earthquake in Japan or Alaska or Kamchatka, I know a fair amount about what to expect and what that means. Given that event, how long do we have? Do we need to panic? Do we need to rush now? So, you know, often what I tell people for these distant ones is, you know, sit down, make a cup of tea, relax, and, and, and learn as much as you can about what’s happening.

Tim: And then if you need to evacuate, then do it calmly and slowly. People tend to, I don’t really wanna say panic, but you know, something happens and the f- their first thought is, ‘We’ve gotta get out now.’ Um, and that can have, have all sorts of problems. If people jump in their cars and like drive crazy speeds into a safe area, they can cause accidents.

Tim: People can get hurt. People could be killed in a car accident when the risk from a s- you know, a tsunami is basically zero. So learning as much as you can about your exposure, I think, is really good ’cause that helps me to be calm because then I know, um, what can happen and what’s unlikely to happen.

Lance: Marcy DeWitt has spent a decade watching people navigate that window, sometimes well, sometimes not.

Lance: And she has one piece of advice that sounds simple and isn’t.

Marcie: Know before you go, I think is one of the, one of the best slogans that we can put out into the world. In BC, search and rescue is free. We love it when you call early.

Marcie: Daylight is great. The resources for looking for you and rescuing you at night are very different.

Marcie: And no matter what, we’ve got a great team of folks that are there to help you.

Lance: Call earlier than your ego wants to. Daylight matters. Time compounds. Waiting narrows your options. And the window doesn’t stay open. Even before you get the call, there’s a moment that comes first. Natalie calls it the tingly sense.

Lance: I think most of us know exactly what she means.

Marcie: I think if you go outdoors and you do an activity, whatever activity it is, and you start getting the tingly senses of like, hmm, should I even be here? Maybe you should listen to that. Don’t let your peer influence your decision-making just because you don’t want to be the person being like, hey, you know what, guys?

Marcie: I don’t think we should do this right now. Our bodies are pretty amazing in terms of giving us that fight, flight, freeze response. Listen to your guts.

Lance: Leave before consensus. Most incidents have a hinge moment, a hesitation, a data point that simply doesn’t fit, a tingly sense that got talked down by the group or by ego or by the simple human desire not to be the difficult one. Move then, not after validation. That’s what this show is about, not the apocalypse, not the bunker, not the 72-hour kit sitting in your garage next to the holiday decorations slowly expiring.

Lance: This season, we’re gonna cover the full range of what it actually means to be a functional human in a world that doesn’t always behave. From surviving a nightclub disaster to keeping your house from killing you quietly, from what to do when the bear thinks you’re interesting to what to do when the voice on the phone sounds exactly like your mother, from the wildfire decision you make in the driveway to the software update that grounded planes in 17 countries on a Tuesday morning, every episode will circle that same moment, the instant when the situation exceeds the plan, when the map no longer matches the territory, when no one is coming and the next move is yours.

Lance: What we’ve learned in Tofino is that the people who navigate the moment best aren’t the ones with the most gear or the most certainty. They’re the ones who’ve practiced moving when moving is hard, who’ve built the habit of early action, of trusting the tingly sense, of going slow to go fast.

Lance: Preparedness isn’t just a checklist. It’s a culture, and culture is built one small decision at a time. Self-awareness, ask for help, offer what you have, small moves. Those small moves scale.

Tim: And it doesn’t have to be everybody. You just, you just need a few people to catalyze it. Now, maybe that comes back to the volunteer part.

Tim: If you just have a few people that are confident to get out there and do stuff, then other people will do it too.

Lance: No one is coming, which means the next move is yours. Out.

Lance: For resources, links, and everything we talked about today, including Coast Smart Canada, AdventureSmart BC, West Coast Inland Search and Rescue, visit nooneiscomingpodcast.com