[Music] We now invite you to enter the portal, the in-house podcast of the portal, a dynamic news social wellness members club based in beautiful Mill Valley, right over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Here at the portal we're dedicated to fostering wellness and connection on all levels from me to we to all across body, mind and spirit. In each episode we'll explore the unique superpowers, insights, passions and purpose that each of our members and friends in our community hold. Shining the light on their particular kind of magic to foster more meaningful connection and collaboration. We hope that enter the portal will serve as your gateway to new ideas, deeper relationships and personal transformation. Hey Sam, good morning. Good morning Tim. Thanks so much for coming in. It's lovely to have you here. Thanks for having me. Yeah we've been talking about having this interview ever since we brainstormed hosting some of the first Doom's Daddy events and we got to have one at our spot Euforbio Garden Zablinus. The very first one. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a really exciting time to see how that went. What the state of things are now and what you want to do with it. And more than anything just really explore this topic of why it's so widely appealing and more important than ever in today's day and age. Absolutely. Yeah. I like to start off with giving everybody a sense of who you are, what your journey has been. You have very storied background a lot of experience across different domains related to this. But tell us about you and just the journey that inspired all of this. Let's see it's been a long journey. So I just kind of transitioned out of a 20 year career of being boots on the ground first responder to humanitarian crisis around the world. Disasters were I had started with the 2004 tsunami when I was a young buck. Went over there as a volunteer for two weeks and that ended up turning into a 20 year career. And so I had worked for a couple different organizations ended up being in Thailand for about a year after that tsunami. And almost immediately started to see where this industry was broken. You kind of from an outsider, you kind of look at the humanitarian sector and the UN and Red Cross. These kind of idols, you know, and like, wow, this, you know, out there doing amazing work. And then you you get in and you realize just how inefficient and broken this lifeline to so many people around the world is. And I worked for a couple different organizations for a couple of years and was constantly just kicking around some ideas around how could what if we had an opportunity completely redo the way this works. So to be honest, I had gotten kind of jaded with the whole humanitarian sector as a whole and I stepped back and then the 2010 Haiti earthquake happened. And I felt really compelled to say, okay, well, if there was ever a time to prove some of these new concepts, this is the time Haiti, it's people don't realize this, but I mean, it was like quarter of a million people lost their lives in moments in a place that is very logistically challenging. You know, it's in highland known as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. And so I said, okay, like before I completely give up on the humanitarian sector overall, let's try some new approaches. Let's go in. Let's see if we can't kind of test some of these ideas. And so that kicked off an eight-year journey with a nonprofit that I still started called Communitarian. Communitarian is a word I made up. It stands for communities united in response relief and renewal. And the important part is the communities, right? So most of this humanitarian work is outsideers coming in doing what it is that they can do. Sometimes it takes them a while to get there. And there's always this unintentional exchange of a beneficiaries, you know, somebody that's receiving the help. There's always this unintentional exchange of their dignity. And you know, people are well-meaning and they're going in. And it's kind of really kicked off this question of like, how do you help somebody without unintentionally, you know, asking for some of their dignity in return? And so a lot of our work was how do we give the communities, the tools, and the resources for them to be a part of their own recovery? And what we found is it just the fastest work, the most dignified, the most culturally appropriate, definitely the most economical, and just really empowering. So we ended up opening what we called resource centers. We opened up one in Haiti. I was there for four years. And then the typhoon and the Philippines. And then the Syrian refugee crisis where we had, you know, tens of thousands of Syrians entering Greece every day. So we opened up a center in Thessaloniki, Greece. And then finally with the earthquake in Nepal, we opened up a resource center there. It was kind of funny one of the, we had opened up this space in this two acre spot in the heart of Port of Prince. And this was back in 2010, right? And somebody came in and said, you know, this is the best maker space we've ever seen. And we're like, what's a maker space? And here we kind of naturally have been doing it. So we opened up these resource centers and filled them full of all these different resources that were shared by the local communities, by the by the UN by, you know, it was a business incubator. We had, I think the first year in Haiti, we had 185 different organizations of some sort use that shared space and resources. And that ended up just having such a larger impact than we had ever expected. And so we kind of really rolled with that. And so my almost my whole career, the last, well gosh, it's been 18 years now has been focused on the power of community when disaster or war when anything starts. That's what I've been focusing on now. The second half of my career, I've got, you know, I had this realization, I have another 20 years of making impact in the world. And it's kind of the next evolution of that. So I'd taken a lot of those ethos of, you know, the power of community after a crisis. And that's what I brought to World Central Kitchen, some sure many people have heard of. I was, I was one of the original employees of World Central Kitchen eight, eight and a half years ago. And we scaled rapidly. We, when I joined, we were about a half million dollar a year, kind of by the humanitarian sector's eyes, we were this cute little feel good nonprofit. And in those first four years, we went from half a million to half a billion and became a well-respected global institution. And there were many things that I can credit to that success. But I think the biggest one was bringing and recognizing that power of local community and putting them at the front center, not as, you know, innocent kind of beneficiary is just sitting there with their hand up, making them active agents in their own recovery. And that absolutely. And so that's something World Central Kitchen are one of our ethos is community is our superpower. So brought a lot of that community perspective and empowerment to World Central Kitchen. And I'm sure many, many of the listeners have heard of it today. I mean, it's a relatively new organization, one of the fastest growing ever. And remind us what the mission of World Central Kitchen was again. We provide meals, food. It's a simple straightforward mission, but we provide dignified meals. My second to last project with them was in Gaza, where right at the start of the war, I'd gone right over there after the October attacks and spent quite a bit of time there. And I think World Central Kitchen is now up to almost half a million meals per day being served throughout one of the most horrific and logistically challenging places in the world. Little bit of what got me here, I realized, you know, World Central Kitchen had really run with those ethos. And then I kind of had this realization, you know, if I got 20 more years of making some sort of impact in the world, what did I want that to be? And that kind of brings us to Doomsdaddy. Amazing. You know, there's a few points I want to dive into that I heard. One is I'm catching this sense that it's about empowering, teaching, elevating people as opposed to going into be a hero or savior. And I wonder if that's something you saw in prior nonprofit impact work was that an impediment traditionally? Was it people projecting what they thought is good for people and trying to come in with maybe ideals like this is the solution in addition to obviously I'm sure there's bureaucratic inefficiency and logistical difficulties to and traditional aid models? You definitely know and had there with a couple of big things. And that was part of community tears goal was to say, Hey, you have an idea. You know, we worked with MIT Harvard, all sorts of different groups and we would host them to help get their projects in Haiti up and going. And I would tell them outright I would go speak of their universities before they dreamed up what the solution is going to be. And they people, get their ideas and then they get very attached to them and then they get on the ground.
and they start looking for that square hole for around peg. And I don't know if there are any real solutions in the humanitarian sector, but people absolutely get very attached to what the preconceived need is going to be and how they're going to address it. And so a lot of what we did with Communitarian was I would encourage that. Get some concepts together. But unless you're designing that, you know, I'm using quotes here, air quotes, unless you're designing that solution with the local community, it's going to have an extremely high fail rate. Wow, that's a really good insight. It reminds me of a basic tenet from permaculture training is, you know, before you go into land with all your ideas, which want to do to it, you know, spend a year on it, listen to it, see what it has to say first before you kind of impose your will on it. I think there's something similar there. And, you know, in the light amount of impact I've done, I remember this notion of serve and support don't save. And it's a very different energy, different mentality. And I kept noticing that those wanting to go into save, it's like that saying the road to hell was paid with good intentions. Exactly. Yeah, great intentions. But a lot of us do with what you want to feel for yourself, not necessarily what's best for those you're working with. And then you have to listen, you know, for that, you have to actively inquire, listen, and involve them in designing what is good for them, just like you said. Which is a prison of the point, you know, I got to work with, sure many of the listeners have heard of chef Jose Andreas. And one of the reasons I joined his team is he was, you know, he has a restaurant empire. He's a very well known chef. Nobody ever told him how humanitarian work should be done. So when I joined up with him, I saw so much potential. You got ethos, you got neuriety, you've got, you know, a following, and you've got this really good looking at, you know, how can we help people with dignity? And so I was like, okay, Jose, let's go. One of his, I call him Jose is what was right. He's got these little like one line or so. He's getting to work with him for those eight years, just taught me a lot. And we see eye to eye with a lot of things. One of them is that the best plan is the plan to adapt. So here, that running, kind of separately from the way the UN governments are on FEMA, Red Cross, everything is they have these very detailed plans. And they're trying to like run in and be like, okay, this situation most closely represents, represents or resembles this thing that we had already thought of ahead of time. And then they're there just, they're not looking at the local resources, right? And planning and adapting around them and adjusting their plan. So with World Central Kitchen, I was like your first boots on the ground in over 70 different disasters in 50 countries. And I would have to show up with kind of this clean slate of like that was a lot of my role was before the, you know, HQ and Washington DC starts making their plan before we start doing anything is to get boots on the ground and see what resources are already there. One of my one of my best examples I was in Ukraine within 24 hours of Russia invading, right? And this was it was my first war zone that I had worked. And okay, how are we going to feed millions of people across Ukraine? I mean, the borders were almost impossible getting in and out of it was an absolute mess. And I come across this group, they actually approached me and they were like, we are an event production community that has a network kind of kind of anarchist kind of like punk, you know, this like, but they were this like pre woven community of like-minded people across all of Ukraine that had never done anything related to humanitarian work, much less, you know, delivering millions of meals in war zone. And they ended up becoming our largest ally over there. They are now responsible. I think it's up to almost 300 million meals that this group has delivered with the sport of World Central Kitchen, but they have, there's all that power of community people, whether it's, you know, a chess club or I've worked with the robotics association of Nepal and all these groups that have, you know, much like you have here with the portal, you guys are a community of some sort. And the power of that community and people that see eye to eye on things once they roll up their sleeves, once they're impacted is just absolute. The biggest resource there is in any crisis I've ever worked in. Amazing. Thank you for naming that. That's very much something we had as our, you know, hypothesis behind the portal is, what if we inverted the model and instead of it being about exclusivity and the owners coming up with a really elite set up programming and headliners, right? That drives coolness or exclusivity. What if we take a page out of burning man where everyone's the programming and most of our programs are member led. So it's more about creating that space. What do you want to create and allowing people to do that giving them the platform? And it sounds like that's what you've done as well. There are minds being given that saying to necessities, the mother of invention. And so it makes sense why you'd actually pop up the equipment of maker spaces because if you go in with that energy of I don't know what's needed here, but let's build the infrastructure that we can create what's needed on site. Then you may have things like 3D printers and CNC wood cutting machines and things that can spin up what's needed in real time on site as you learn, which is different than. All right, we're going to preorder bulk set of these things these sheets this gear. Exactly. Yeah, kids, the humanitarian sector loves its kids, you know, and they're like, OK. A lot of times they don't work so well back to the kind of community as a super power. There is like I said, there's no there's no bigger resource out there. And while I like originally talking with you and about doing the first doom study. We've had a lot of community overlap but looking at what are these communities that. In a large way and that's a threat I was pulling on earlier is like giving these communities permission ahead of time to be active participants when. It hits the fan. I don't know if we can swear on hair. Okay, when shit hits the fan. How I found so much of my career just being giving those communities the first part they need is kind of permission right. I will give you one example at the beginning days of World Central Kitchen. There was a large category five cyclone that hit Mozambique. Very poor coastal area of Mozambique. It was quite bad. I was on the first plane was there directly directly after World Central Kitchen was quite new. A lot of its staff were US based and hadn't traveled in Africa. So they didn't have the yellow fever shop right I had been doing this work. So I had my yellow fever shop. So it turned out I was the only person from World Central Kitchen on the ground for the first two weeks. It took in our current US health care system. It took our international crew two weeks to get their yellow fever shot and get over to Mozambique. Well, the community was already all there. We were already serving 10,000 meals a day just by utilizing and pulling together all of those people within the community who were just waiting to be given an opportunity and given permission to say yes let's go let's do this. So it was kind of one of those funny stories, whereas like proof where the power is in the community. See it was just me running around with the World Central Kitchen credit card and got full operations up and going because those communities are there. They just need permission. So I kind of what is the kind of pre permission that the portal community can have so that if shit were to ever hit the fans in Marin. And it's just go go gadget portal, you know, relief and that is you know why doomsday was so interesting everyone. But I love the example you because it illustrates that tenant where you really want adoption. You really need co creation, co design, co implementation of any kind of solution, you know in partnership with those you're working with. So again, back to you know serving creating with as opposed to prescriptive or bringing kids or solutions. So here's what I think you need to use that word. I've been using that word for many years and I the pre prescribed right and that's so much of what our government and humanitarian organizations like to do is they like to come in and prescribe things to a community. And as often a prescription they've already written before the disaster even happened. And it doesn't usually work. It's true and it's hard because the more one is recognized as a thought leader or expert. The more one is almost expected to ring those prescriptions and but whether it's in the world of coaching founders or gosh in the world of healing especially. I did this incredible medicine ceremony therefore everybody should do it is such a natural consequence because when you go through personal transformation. Obviously you want to share it with everybody but the danger is one size does not fit all so your mileage may vary. You can't necessarily say the thing that works for me is what everybody should have. Just tracking a court and I think there's a whole other podcast that I could go on for a while because that is definitely I believe that that's from the goodness of people's heart that they found something that works for them and so because it worked for them but that. You know, cross across is that threshold of like no this is the way you can help yourself correct becomes very very damaged that's right in the framing I always tried to take a little bit of humility with and say well this is what work for me you know if it resonates happy to share but again your mileage will vary you know so it's it's kind of like giving bread crumbs and pointers but not like solutions.
It's really timely too because in how we use AI, I think we need to use AI prompts for that too. Treat those AI responses like, "This is what I see and know about, but hey, you need to exercise your own discernment too." Right? So, it's something interesting. The other threat I want to add in here, made for later exploration is how with new technologies like 3D printing AI, the ability to have on the spot in the field resource creation, it sounds like it's going to get more and more advanced. And so that notion of these ever more powerful, almost like maker labs to spin up what is needed on site, feels like it'll get more accelerated and amplified. That's kind of exciting actually. It is. And it's interesting too. It goes back to this age old question of like, "I'm sure you've heard this. What is it?" It's not just the logic is the answer, but wait, what was the question? Right. Right. And so we had the first 3D printing lab in a disaster zone after the Haiti 2010 earthquake. Yeah. And we had all these groups running in being like, "Okay, we've got the technology. Now let's find the problem." Right. And so there's a little, I'll go on a little anecdotal story with that. We set up 3D printing labs in Haiti after the earthquake. Philippines after the typhoon increased with the Syrian refugee crisis and then Nepal after the earthquake there. The best use of 3D printers I've ever seen with all these world experts trying to find the solution to software. We invited, whenever we created our spaces, we would involve all of the community and all of the stakeholders in the actual tangible design. What I realized in Nepal was as we were doing these design workshops, we were doing them in like a hotel conference room, which we had already gotten signed off as being a structurally safe building. And all the participants, you could visibly see, even though they saw the green check in front of the building, you could physically see their cognitive capacity go down once they were inside doing the design sprints. And so here at the same time, because they thought the building might not be safe. It might not be safe. They just went through an earthquake. Right. So you got to look at these other different things. At the same time, the UN came to me and they're like, "Hey Sam, we've shipped in all of our kits and we've got these 20 shipping containers." And so, can you make use of them? And I was like, "Brilliant." Because you don't have to be an engineer at all to see that a shipping container is not going to fall down in an earthquake. So you could teach inside them. We could teach. And so that ended up becoming the center. So I got a piece of property and I had these 20 shipping containers. This comes back to the 3D printing. Yeah. I got these 20 shipping containers and was like, "Okay, what kind of building are we going to design with them?" So we used 3D printing. Wow. 2D printing out the shipping containers and then everybody could submit a design. Because it was like, we had a map to scale of the property. And so, at hundreds of people come and stack them, it's like Legos. Like, what about this? What about that? I invited the disabled people of Nepal Association, the executive director. The guy that's like, represents all the people with disabilities throughout Nepal. And he's blind. And so he was ecstatic that he was able to submit a design using these 3D printed shipping containers. But at the end, he was like, "Sam, I've heard about this 3D printing. I've obviously never seen it. Little wink." Let me ask you a question. When she was done building the center, could you 3D print a map of the entire place so that anybody blind walking in can navigate and know the whole place? I just got goosebumps right now. And I was like, "That is the best use of 3D printing. Somebody that's not in the tech world at all that I've ever heard of." And it's kind of this, it plays on this principle of like just giving the resources to the people and see what they end up doing with it is where the real magic comes with rather than being like, "We're the experts. We know what the technology is supposed to be used for." Right. Once again, co-creation with the folks you're working with. And that's a really good reminder. We often do have a technology, uberales, solutionism, but I think what you're pointing out is even how the technology is used should also keep in mind who we're working with, allow them to be actively involved with the process of how to use it. It might not be traditionally what you thought that technology would use for. Right. Also go to mind or two back to what you said. Use what's there. There's probably so much local traditional indigenous even ancient wisdom and know-how, to leverage the resources already there, whether it's wood or vegetation or whatnot. Again, another permaculture principle, right? No, absolutely. But the biggest resource and the people that know all of those resources and how to use them are the local community. Local community. So that's where like the whole second half of my career, that's the most overlooked resource in any disaster, any war. And unfortunately, there's just not people out there building that up ahead of time, leading into Doomsday. That's what I really want this to be is how people to realize themselves as a resource, their community around them as a resource. And a lot of the other ones, yes, there are technologies, there are star links, there are water purifiers, there are all these different things. But the humans themselves as the resource is the number one resource to look at after any crisis. And that must require you to have a different energy when you show up in teaching because it's not just classic teacher or professor or expert has solutions to work with community. Like that, you have to actually listen, have a beginner's mindset, be prepared, encourage, surprise, of wonderizes. It's like being a facilitator, not just a teacher or aid giver. I love Matthew Ochoa is our automotive instructor. We'll get into a bit more of what Doomsday he has, but he's the one that teaches everything around automotive in a crisis. And his saying that just still gives me goosebumps every time he's like, no, we're not teaching them. We are just turning them on to their own ability. And so like so many people have these abilities, but then they haven't given themselves the permission to explore them and use them. And so that's kind of the balance. We try to steer away from this if this do that. Because then you just need to memorize a million point checklist. Right. And so it's developing that critical thinking and helping them realize they've got this. They've got that no no disaster in the matter how much planning you do every single one is a hundred percent unique. They're all sure there are common needs, but the way it impacts and affects and the resources of the local community and the people impacted. There's no amount of prescriptions that you can write to meet those needs perfectly. It sounds like that it's really important to have first principles thinking and some foundational flexible skills that can be applied and mixed in many different ways. Wow. Great. Well, let's talk about Doomsday. First is a very tongue-in-cheek name. Why that name and what is it? I that's a really good question. Look, the current as people think of emergency preparedness, they're for the most part either thinking of kind of your grandmother's red cross group, right? Not saying it's bad. I'm saying everything can be improved on, right? Or that a lot of people automatically think of preference, right? They have this like kind of redneck by machine guns, digging bunkers. And I would say both of those demographics are already being pretty well served with what's out there. And there's a gigantic swath of humans every day, people like us that there isn't anybody serving them. And I've talked to so many people that they know they should be doing something. But currently, if you look at the emergency preparedness, unless you were to go one of that and if you were to go down the red cross route or the the prepper route, people are looking for what's in between and people end up giving up because there's just the whole industry is extremely fragmented, confusing, and full of people just trying to sell you things, right? So there's kind of on the other end of a different spectrum, there's normalcy bias, which we all, you know, a lot of people have or there's fear mongering. And so with both of those spectrums, we're trying to find that giant in between, right? Of it's really everyday people and they're not being served. So Dumas Daddy is meant to be tongue in cheek. And it plays on the kind of doom, but making that like, you know, we're not trying to do any fear mongering. We don't want to be total sarcastic, you know, like funny, either. It's this balance in between that people I've found can really play with it, right? And this is the other really important part is that it should be fun. It should be done in community. And it is a serious topic. But if we take it too seriously, we're not going to have any fun with it. We're way less likely to do anything about it, right? In the daddy aspect, it's fun. It's like a little bit of a dumb energy sort of, I'm going to take this to him's day. So I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to dumb this thing. It's also, it's like, it can, it depends on who the person is, right? Like it is like, yeah, we're going to like conquer this thing together, this horrific event or whatever it may, as it may happen. It's also, there's like dad jokes in there. You know, it's just like, it's fun. That's true. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. The good news was lots of kinds of daddies and daddy energy, too. Exactly. You could define out what is your daddy energy if like a doomsday kind of scenario pops up. And something I, I loved a lot. And why I was so excited about this is I remember we first chatted and I told you, I'm
I'm so interested that I've always been wanting to be more resilient. That was where I used resilient in case of climate disasters, et cetera, et cetera. And you would point it out, well, a lot of things out there like wilderness survival, you're just not going to be rubbing two sticks together. That's just not really applicable. Much more applicable is like, hey, something's hitting right now while alarm's going off, do you have a go-back? Do you know what a go-back is? What's in it? How to use it? It's like these practical urban and suburban resilience abilities. Which has helped us form what it is so very much. Because again, everything that gets taught in our curriculum is learned from 20 years experience of seeing what. And that's what I told you. I think I told you the first time I met you, it was like 20 years being on the front lines of everything. Not once have I seen somebody have to rub two sticks together to identify her, right? But this is where we go. Because like I said, that giant middle of the spectrum isn't being served. So wilderness survival courses are blowing up right now. It's great. If you have one scheduled already, go do it. You're going to learn like some self confidence. You're going to like, if anything, take a wilderness survival course, you might not use any of the skills. You'll probably use that self confidence that you have that once you find yourself in a situation. So that's great. But all the things that we teach are much more realistic. I'll give you one example, every type of disaster causes hell of flat tires. Yep. Right. It's the simplest thing. And people are like, what is being able to change a tire or fix a tire, I have to do with disasters. And it's like, do you know how many times I've had to plug a tire? I mean, even you get a little bit of rain, a little bit of debris washes in the road, you got a flat tire. The other common thing that happens for most every disaster is cell phone communications go out, right? Teslas, they're there, they don't give you 60% of new cars on the market. Don't come with a spare tire. But like Tesla, for example, they'll be like, okay, no problem. We're not going to give you a spare, but we're going to have a free service. You get a flat tire. Just give us a call. We'll come change it for you. Guess what's that going to work, right? Even even in the small disaster and our vehicles for those that have them, really are one of the most valuable tools and assets that you have in a crisis for many people becomes their home. That's going to be great. Just transmitting and temporary housing. Exactly. It's so many things. That's why I haven't seen any other curriculums or any other nonprofits, businesses, whatever that teach. A whole part of our curriculum is automotive and how to plug a tire. Even if you don't have a spare, how to drive on power lines, how much the majority of people that die in flooding, especially here in California with atmospheric rivers are in their cars. We teach you something out of what is safe, what isn't. That's back again, all to Matthew Achoe. He's just an incredible instructor. There's a lot of simple things. Again, we don't say if this do that, if this do that, we're kind of in his words, turning people onto their own ability to where I think a lot of people are like, oh, I get a flat tire. I just call trip away. And then people end, leave one of our weekends. It's funny. We had the first one at Euphobia Gardens, the very first Doomsday in October. We had two of the participants in separate vehicles leaving. See somebody on the side of the road and stop, which is and help them. They're like, oh, wait, I just learned this thing. We're leaving the event. I'm leaving the event. And so that's another cool part of it is that people really, what we have found with the attendees is people come for their own. They know they should be doing something and they come for their own good. And a huge percentage leave being like, oh, wait, not only can I help myself. I'm not equipped to help other people. You have that. That's the beautiful transformation. That is really, really cool. And so the format is how many days and so right now, I mean, do you know, we can get into this a little bit more at the end, but we're starting out. It's we've got a couple of year plan. I after working at World Central Kitchen, I don't ever want to do things that don't have scalability, right? And everything we did there and everything we do is like, well, what is the need? The need should dictate how big you want to scale something. So right now, I'm seeing the need for this is really, really big. So we want to scale this very large stage one. And the stage one will always stay as a kind of foundation of our work is in person gatherings. So bringing people together, I've done, you know, I'm a trained wildland firefighter and I went and spent a week in a classroom and then went to the hotel at night and back and forth. And just really dry. I've done a lot of these things. They're really just not fun. So that's where stage one is we call camp doomsdaddy. How do you bring this kind of summer camp vibes, community, a little bit of a little sprinkle of, you know, festival or just kind of gathering, something that you might want to go to just to be with your friends. Right. So we did the first one of you for you. The weekend is a jam packed weekend, but fun at the same time. So we do eight hours of emergency medical. We have a great group at a Santa Cruz called Outerlands Medics. These four women that have already naturally started to take, it's called wilderness first aid is a pretty well known curriculum. You know, your boy scout leader had to go through it before they could take you out to the wilderness. Your whitewater after-guide, all of them have to have this wilderness first aid certificate. But what we've started to do is take some of that curriculum and adapt it to more realistic things that you're going to, you know, if you're not out in the woods with a boy scout fruit, but you're caught in a disaster or here's a kind of scary statistic, but also kind of one that brings a little bit of hope because we can do something about it. But it's 70% of traumatic injuries. Their lives can be saved if a bystander has some basic medical training. Wow. The main one that we do is stop the bleed, right? So that's an crazy statistic. And this is a lot of what we teach in just that eight hours in a group. So it's one full day of emergency medical. And then we get into everything about fire. We live here in California. We focus more on fire than earthquake because not only do we have a lot of wildfires here in California, we also have earthquakes, earthquakes cause fires, right? I'm from Oakland. We're expecting when that haverd fault goes anything above a 7.2. The Oakland emergency department is anticipating 800 fires within the first five minutes. There are a total of 400 firefighters in Oakland's fire department, only 200 of them on duty at any single time. Do the math, right? And so we do this whole, it's like a two, two and a half hour long workshop on fire. A lot of people have never, it was a funny thing at the first when I was like, I think one person had ever pulled a pin on a fire extinguisher to put out a fire, had a 50 participants, right? There were like five other people that had pulled a pin on a fire extinguisher in college as a practical joke, right? Wow. Wow. So, yeah, we did this whole workshop. How do we evacuate in wildfires? And I will tell the listeners to that I don't want any of what our participants learn to be confined to that weekend. So you guys live in Marin, right? And FireSafe Council has one of the most amazing like educational platforms. So I advise all the listeners to that are, we, I share with all the participants ahead of time this 11 minute video. It's escaping a wildfire drive downhill. If you just go to YouTube, 11 minutes jammed packed full of life saving information. I've worked a lot of the fires in California. I was in Maui when I was still on fire. I was in paradise when I was still on fire. A large percentage of those people that lost their lives in paradise were because they like instinctively got out of their car, right? And so there's a lot of little tricks around that kind of goes against your instinct, but once you learn it, you're going to have a higher chance of survival. But one of them, yes, like there was gridlock traffic, leaving, leaving paradise. And so your instinct is like without a little bit of education, your instinct is like you get out and run. You know the safest place to be in a wildfire? Your car, right? Well, yeah, exactly. So that's like, there's tons of free resources out there that we also help people kind of navigate, right? There's a back to that, the whole industry being so such a mess. People give up because they're like getting told all these different things and all these different resources. Anyway, two-hour fire workshop also of smoke, you know, how do we evacuate a wildfire, how to put out a wildfire? So we actually have like this big like fire pit as it's like six, seven foot tall flames, that people actually use a fire extinguisher the first time in their life. So that when it comes if they ever in a situation, they're not like, I want them to be like, boom, wait, I've been here before. I've got this. I don't need to read the instructions and figure out what to do. I just grab it and go. Then we do a couple of workshop on communications. There's tons of different options. Another trip, a tip out there for the listeners. There's tons of ham radio and starlink and like all of these sort of things. You can almost guarantee the communications are going to go down with even a small disaster. A lot of our handheld cell phones are now starting to get satellite connectivity. So I'm on T-Mobile. For any of our T-Mobile listeners, it's $10 a month and it connects to starlink. You have to pay for it ahead of time. You can't be like, oh, disaster just happened. Now I'm going to sign up. That's another little tip out there. We go through all of the different options out there and really like, you don't tell people you should do this. It's like, here are the different options. Which one works for you?
you don't be intimidated by it. Take an option, move forward. How to make a plan. How to like, it's funny, I also share this one story about a pilot that worked with us in Haiti. He had been flying for 20 years, right? Knowing your tail number, your aircraft is like, always there. He was flying in. His engine installed. In that moment, he couldn't remember the tail number of the aircraft he had been flying for 20 years. That's what our brains do. Panic. We go through this whole process of like, it's a very simple emergency plan, but you write it down. Your vision closes right down and your memory goes to shit. It's like, oh wait, I wrote this down. This is what I should do. We walk people through making a pretty basic emergency plan. Everything I said about automotive, so people actually plug the tires, and they're like, oh, what equipment to use out there, down power lines, driving through flood water, jump starting, or car. All these different things. Disasters are really harsh on your vehicle, right? Let's see, what else do we teach? Everything about food and water. You have different options for storing food. It doesn't have to be that intimidating. Water filtration. Let's see. Yeah, I think that's about it. It's a jammed packed weekend. We sprinkle in a little bit of like, woo, there's definitely some little kind of like, grounding practices and, you know, morning yoga and things like that. And I think you mentioned the end, there's kind of a earned celebration, like a little party. Yeah, and a nice feast too. So actually even part of our meals is a sampling of different types of emergency food out there. Right, so like, okay, you've got this option. You can do, you can quickly go to Costco, drop a couple hundred dollars, and have a pantry that's going to be shelf stable for a year, maybe two. Or you can buy this bucket of free-stried food that's going to be good for 20 years, click a couple of buttons, boom, it's there, forget about it. It's up to the person, right? And then the cool part about this is that every single product that we use or recommend, there's a full, the participant's going to full shopping list so that they don't have to try to remember this. We've, I personally have tested every one of the products. It depends on their budget. And I also want to say too that like, you can end up spending a lot of money doing this, but we start with what is the free option you can do right now. So say a go back, people are like, I know, I'm not sure where's a go back. Do I have to go buy this thing off the internet with all this fancy gear and of feral rod to start a fire and all this sort of stuff. And we start with people with like, okay, well, here are all the different things that are in your house already that you own already. And it's just going, putting in a bag, putting it by the front door. Right. Right. Because when you have to, when you get a five minute evacuation warning, you're not going to be like, oh, I think I want to pack this. I think I want to pack that. So a lot of our work is to also not have it be an economic barrier and to not have it be so gear based. That's great. And that goes back to the kit mentality. You know, I'm sure these go bags are selling like crazy, but most people probably don't know what's in it or how to use it. But you know, you check the box, you buy it, but that's different than knowing what's in it and why. That's funny. I had one of the participants be like, yeah, I have a car emergency kit. I needed it. And it was in that like shrink wrapped packaging still. And they didn't have a knife to open it. Oh, right, right, right. Modern convenience. Exactly. I love what you're doing in this. It address something. I actually wanted for myself after, you know, 10 burning mans. I remember thinking, I'm experienced a lot of stuff on the playa. I want to go learn skills. I remember telling Mary and I was like, I wish that was the place to learn resiliency. I'd rather go to burning man if it was more like burning world. And I'm learning workshops and skills each day. And then the party at night is a celebration. So I feel like you've created that. And this is really important right now because as we get more convenience, Tesla's drive you, Instacart delivers everything. You know, it's triple A comes roadside help. The cost to convenience I find is outsourcing or any abilities and know how to a product, a service, a company. And when brids go down, we suddenly find we don't know how to do anything. You do. You just haven't given yourself the permission. And that's what that's what so much it is. And that is it is a, it's an epidemic that we're doing with. People like so many of those skills that are needed are just beneath the surface. Right. And so a lot of what we teach is to like, you just got to scratch a little band and say, Oh, the amazing amount of participants that are like, I had no idea I would be able to like, stop the bleed on another human. That's right. And a tragic accident. Right. And this is why it's so crucial on this time because we're outsourcing our know how and thinking at a faster pace than ever, bigger scale than ever to AI, which is an amazing tool. But if we completely outsource all of it, we're left with no innate capabilities or know how anymore. So I'm really glad you're doing this. It also reminds me of the power of hyper local mutual aid networks, you know, helping each other out, helping ourselves out in times of disaster as opposed to waiting for help from the top, which is never coming. And I remember this one when the fires hit really badly several years ago in Marin, us burning man veterans had all the gear ready. And we already had the male list and WhatsApp groups. And we'd be like, Hey, I got a generator. I got this. I got that. And we just created a list of who needs what we were used to doing that in building up our camps so that that muscle was already there. It's a good, I don't give some advice. Like if you had a choice of going to a wilderness survival course or being an active participant of a burning man builds camp, do the ladder. Yeah, you learn so, so much more realistic, you know, survival stuff. You sure do. I really like that. And, you know, something I'm thinking a lot too is how boy, this is so helpful for our kids as well. So I'm sure it's got a lot of multi generational appeal so that families can be equipped with this. And what a great way to teach kids to be reconnected with their inner skills, but also nature and their physical environments. Absolutely. And there's, there's the skills. There's being turned on to your own abilities. There's some gear in there. There's the network that gets built amongst all, you know, the participants. And the thing that doesn't really get talked about enough as a society, we're constantly like in some sort of anxiety. And we're constantly going around, figuring out ways to address the symptoms of that anxiety rather than just. Getting to the root issue. So one of the real motivations and a lot of the feedback that we've gotten from our participants, is they automatically leave that weekend with a lower daily anxiety of what could happen. That confidence you mentioned, right? Like the wilderness survival course, like, oh, I can figure it out. And we live with so much anxiety and we're constantly like addressing the symptoms, but not the root. Yeah. And again, why this important is, again, resilience of our innate abilities as opposed to further reliance on externalized services or AI or on demand, this or that, right? I think that is the dilemma of modern society. Never has been more convenient on demand than ever, but never at more risk of giving up our own sovereignty, our own abilities are on discernment. Yeah, it's a really important program here. It reminds me of, gosh, it's like a modern day boy scout, girl scouts we need because we've lost that. We've lost it. We've lost, you know, the, what is it? Shop class in high school and all of this sort of stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. And you had asked a bit of unlike so the, the, we're going to keep doing these in-person camps. Great. That's just, it's gold. Like people love it. It builds community. You also mentioned the mutual aid groups. Something that is like really stuck out to me over all the years is there are so many, every community has some sort of mutual aid or local nonprofit that's addressing these issues within their own community. Huge majority of them end up closing after disaster. Right. And so you have all of these needs are suddenly suddenly have all these outside organizations trying to address the needs that these local organizations were addressing. A lot of times those needs get way worse. So in addition to bringing it to communities and individuals, I want to start really bringing it to local mutual aid and nonprofits because that resilience, that disaster resilience of that mutual aid or nonprofit starts with the individuals. The reason most of them close is because their employees were impacted by that disaster. So how do you have a nonprofit or a community initiative if none of the employees are able to go to work? So that's a really exciting next stage that we want to do is start bringing this specifically to those groups so that there. As soon as shit hits the fan, they're not only able to continue meeting the needs they were meeting prior to the disaster, but they're able to scale quickly and start bringing on a lot of the new needs. Wow. Yeah. And that starts with the individual. So I'm excited about this. Like how do we get all the individuals of that group resilient and then make a plan with that group so that they are able to just kick into overdrive whenever happens as opposed to closing for a couple of months. Right. Right. Well, this is really important timing again too, because you know what I've noticed politically and else wise in America climate change is really falling off the radar of things people on talk about. But interest in self resilience climate resilience is through the roof. So effect self interest self empowerment. Maybe that's the route we have to look at more and more. Right. Well, this is fantastic. I have an idea we should definitely do a sampler doom steady workshop here on an evening to get people exposed to it. And even have some frameworks or maybe a couple of you know kind of participatory exercises, but have a great feeder people to want us sign up for the ongoing courses. And you know, I imagine just like Boy Scouts girls, Scouts was the ongoing progression. Absolutely.
different levels and badges you want to pick up. So that could be a way we could support, but I think we should definitely do that last sampler night of this. - I would love that. And I would love the community to start thinking of like, okay, how are we as the portal? Like, you know, we had a couple portal members in the first one. What is a weekend for all portal members? - To where we can be like, yes, we're gonna work on everybody's individual resilience. It's easy to kind of look at. I hear all the hazards of Marin. So this is another part, every participant, starts with we pull multiple reports based on their home address. And so every participant automatically knows, I mean, especially here in California, we get almost everything except for hurricanes. I mean, the atmospheric rivers are getting up close to hurricane, but here in California, we deal with it all. And each address is different and unique. So it kind of starts people's journey with like, well, what is my, am I in a flood plane? Am I in a local fashion zone? Like, what's my earthquake rating? What is my wildfire risk, everything like that. So yeah, I would love to do one with just Marin, or the Marin Bay portal members, right? I'm very happy to do an evening here, a little workshop. I don't want it to be, you know, our drive is to lower this like, overwhelm taking that step and make it, you know, make it lots of little steps. And you know what, if you're here in California, you know, the biggest thing you can do is we're being ready for an earthquake and how simple it is, put shoes under your bed. Oh wow. The majority of injuries after an earthquake are people cutting their feet from things that fall off of shelves or broken glass, or mirrors, broken glass, whatever. So the thing every listener can do right now, is like, oh, you just go, I mean, I live in a little studio, so my front door is four feet from my bed, but for those people that, you know, if you have a larger house and maybe you need to go, you know, earthquake happens when you're laying in bed, maybe you need to run up three flights of stairs or a flight of stairs, it has a bunch of paintings hanging up the stairwell, you know, that could, so that's like one little thing, right? So there's always little things that doesn't need to be like, overwhelming. Yeah. So yeah, I would love to do that here at the portal. I would love to, my deep or ulterior motive is it's such a great gateway, a Trojan horse to getting people more connected and interested in broader topics, whether it's first aid, but even, you know, nature, outdoor environment, eventually, this leads to probably interest in like, oh, I can grow my own food, you know, it's a very natural path towards that. And so that is, so there's, the first ones we're doing are what's called level one, right? So it's a pretty jam-pack weekend of all these like, most realistic things that you're gonna wanna know. But we want, like, it continued for people, and he has about 95% of the participants that said, yes, I will attend a level two, right? And so that's what nobody else is really doing in the industry. Everybody's saying, by this product, do this, and you get so easily overwhelmed, then we're trying to create like, you're gonna take this step, and then this step, and then this step, and the people, if they want, kind of continue their journey, and that does go into, you know, sustaining your own food, growing your own food, or there's other, you know, one of the bigger hazards where meeting as a society is shootings. And so like, I've done like active shooter training and very, very useful. Maybe that's optional for some people, but we wanna kind of create that pathway that people can take without being overwhelmed. - I think it's amazing 'cause the range of things that you can cover within this doomsday type of academy will eventually span everything. And it's a great backdoor into learning things like permaculture. You know, for me, I got interested in nature in permaculture, agrippin cities, and suburbs had no connection with nature, but it was, you know, plant medicine healings, and getting more involved with meditation, and then being more tapped in the collective. And that got me interested to have more relationship with nature in permaculture. - Right, so I think that could be similar here. It was funny. It was just like getting into weightlifting and strength training is what got me into nutrition, and eventually biohacking, which led to the longevity stuff here. So there's all these interesting backdoors into. - It's a great analogy. When I came back from Gaza, I was a rough project, but I had, I weighed 145 pounds. - Well, I had a lot. I weighed less than I did in high school. Not from lack of food, just from it's very high stress environment. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna put on weight. But since I started, you know, trying to go into the gym putting on myself, but then that affected my eating, my sleeping, and so many other things. So I love this analogy of yet getting started and how it can start to impact other things in your life. - Yeah, it's that back to necessity is often the driver. And, you know, often fear at first is the driver. Until you get more resilient, then you become more abundant, and then you wanna learn and expand to all these other areas. - And I think that's what makes us different. I mean, to be honest, a lot of the companies out there that are wanting to sell you stuff are using fear, to sell products. Not what we wanna do at all. That's why almost every one of our curriculum is like, here's the free option that you can do for this product, the Go Bag example, right? Like, sure, we could sell a thousand dollar Go Bag, you know, but we don't wanna start with being, you have to buy this thousand dollar Go Bag. You can start with doing this. - Right. - So we wanna, like I said earlier, it's like, huge spot in between like, normalcy bias and fear mongering. - Yes. - And it's a large space, and that's where we really wanna play. - I love that. I think there's a very natural, almost like hero's journey, energetic arc. You might start with something out of, you know, fear, desperation, scarcity, panic that gets you into it, but as you get more confident grounded, you become more abundant and resource. And at that point, you're able to help others. And it's, you know, kind of flows that way. I mean, that's a lot of people's journey here with even longevity. You're 45, you get that oh shit, meaning with your doctor, where are you here? You better turn things around now. Never been more motivated to not just get in shape, but start to think about longevity, all these other things, right? So I think there is a very interesting parallel to that. - No, like that. - So where do we find you online? How can listeners go? - Instagram, Doomsdaddy, or website, we're new. I mean, we've done two events. We've got another event coming up in May, May, 5th and 6th. - Nice. - We want to be doing a bunch more, but we're also kind of, as I was saying, we're staging things out. The first one is to be doing, you know, getting a full calendar of these in-person events. It's, it's gonna be much more ideal to have like a mutual aid group. The kind of pre-woven community fabric bring us into their community, rather than us kind of saying, okay, how many of your community can come to this thing that we've already planned without your involvement, right? Back to the kind of like human-centered design principles. So we want to be doing a bunch more of them. We're gonna be developing an online program because back to like, if there's need, we need to scale to meet that need. Not everybody can, you know, manage to go to an in-person event. So we're gonna start really rocking out the in-person events, developing some online things, and then a store as well. People get completely overwhelmed with the amount of products. - It's like, it's curating. - Like you trusted Marketplace. - It makes sense. - And other resources too. It's like the amount of apps that are out there. So you're probably familiar with WatchDuty. So I'm on their advisory board. John Clark Mills is a friend of mine, but also I believe so heavily in what they're doing. Because in order for people to help themselves and help each other, the number one step is to be informed, right? And that's what WatchDuty does for free. So I'm on their advisory board and it's even part of our curriculum too. And for our listeners that like, if you live in Moran and don't have WatchDuty, I'm sure most of you do, but also get in there and play around with it. I love the only app I know of that once their users to spend as little time on the app as possible, everybody else is trying to keep you on, right? And so there's a lot of tricks in there around my, you can set alarms, right? And so that you're not having to check it obsessively. It's just gonna automatically notify you if there's something in your area, right? Back to that lower anxiety. But a lot of what we're doing is, as WatchDuty, there's a bunch of other examples is helping people find its resource mapping. - Right, right. - And so we're not gonna provide all of these different things, but we're gonna show you the tried and true and take a lot of your analysis paralysis out of it all. - Yep, I love that. Sort of like the, you get it down to the checklists and the cheat sheets and the vetted resources. That's terrific. I do think you should definitely have a badge like program. 'Cause I think people get really into that. - Yeah, absolutely. - So the progression is lovely, right? So I can't wait. I'm definitely gonna be there where we will promote the future ones. The community as well will list all the links you've named in the show notes for this one. We'll create that workshop as a taster for everyone. And I know that we'll have a lot of members that wanna sign up for more of the in-person ones. Hopefully you can host more of these in Malinus and nearby too. - Yeah, I mean, we need to. The Bay Area is definitely a, it's definitely a much higher risk than a lot of other places. Not getting into the fear of ongoing, but what a better, better place to start after 20 years of working abroad on bringing it all right back to my backyard. It's quite important for me, I've had properties and lived in different parts of the US and these days, the discussion is pick your climate poison. Miami is almost untenable because you can't get insurance for hurricane that's summer in a category for I'm just gonna roll through there. If it's in the West Coast, you got earthquakes and fires, it's kinda crazy to think about. - When this is, we're also gonna be like packaging 'cause we are for profit, right? After 20 years of being a non-profit, I want this to be, we have a fiscal sponsor so we can receive tax deductible donations. - Yep. - So we're finding that in between line, we're an LLC and a physically sponsored non-profit. Yeah, some of the amount of tech companies in the Bay who bring in employees from outside, right? So that poor, terrifying employee that might be, you know, coming from someplace with very low hazards, suddenly they're living in the Bay, right? So this is one of the packages we wanna,
working to help with the for-profit side is like how could we be bringing this to corporate events and how that kind of subsidize the more mutual aid groups, right? - Yeah, yeah. - And there's so many directions in go. I can imagine down the road, there'll be demand for consulting for home resiliency and solutions of technology and best practices. - Absolutely. - All sorts of things. Final question, how else can the portal community support you or help you any burning needs pun intended of? - I like that. Sharing the words, we are just about to do our first round of fundraising. Like, I could build this out over time. The time is now, we need to scale quickly, right? And so we're looking at three different ways. Like I said, we have that tax deductible donation rounds. We're looking at loans and then also safe notes. So if this is something that people are passionate about, we're gonna be doing this $600,000 round in the coming weeks. It'll just, now I'm gonna use your pun, just add fuel to the fire. - Yeah, we're doing it here, right? - For sure. - We need to scale this quickly. - Terrific. I know there's a lot of veteran founders, and angel investors in the community. So, - Let's go. - Well, bring awareness to that too. - And they can, they can,
[email protected] or
[email protected], email and Instagram. It's all Doomsdady. - Amazing. - I love it. A lot of great discussion. I'm stoked to join for future events and learn more. - Tim, we're really excited to have you. - Thank you. - It's great to have a feeling that there's a lot of members in the community that also have something to teach everybody else, right? And so we do that with a couple of different things. Every one of our events we've had people be like, what about this? And they kind of bring, you know, back to the resource mapping and gathering, like all of the members end up bringing something to contribute. They're not sitting there as, you know, active beneficiaries or passive beneficiaries. They're active participants. - Very cool. I love that. Well, thank you, Sam. Looking forward to it more. - Tim, thank you. - Thank you for listening to the Enter the Portal Podcast. We hope you found inspiring ideas and insights, as well as potent prompts and pathways to explore. And we're excited for you to visit our physical space soon. For more information on the portal, our community, values and upcoming events, as well as how to apply for membership, please visit www.deportal.house.
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