InfluenctheinfluenceEP2.

Brian Baker and Paul LaRose discuss the importance of being prepared for natural disasters, such as tornadoes and wildfires. They emphasize the need for research, planning, and having necessary supplies. They also touch on the inconvenience of identity theft and warn against scams targeting vulnerable individuals, particularly the elderly. They share personal experiences and highlight the importance of staying vigilant and informed. Good evening folks, welcome to Influence the Influence episode 2, this is host Paul LaRose and with me I have Brian Baker, the notorious Brian B. And today we got a few, you know, not really surprises, but you know, a couple of ideas and topics that we want to send you guys away, as well as we got some intelligent discussion going on. We're going to be talking about some real topics that might apply to you, but they definitely do apply to us. So stick around and see what we have in store for you. So Brian, what's on your mind? Well, recently America has been getting hit with a bunch of weather, you know, very windy, stormy, tornadoes, and tornado season is back at it again. Just want to remind everybody to really be safe during tornado season. And as well, you know, you got to have some type of action plan in place and nobody really plans for the things that inconvenience them in life. You know, it could be a second storm or a thunderstorm or, you know, tornado, hurricane, flood, but these things happen yearly and yet everybody always gets surprised and never prepares for them. So I want to bring up that topic today of just things that really inconvenience life. And you know, I've been noticing a lot of things going on with natural disasters. As you said, we, so here in Springfield, we're part of the tornado alley, which puts us at a much higher risk to be hit with a tornado than other places, maybe not in the midwest. And another thing that I noticed was that there were a bunch of wildfires going on out towards the mountain area. Yeah. And Colorado, Arizona area. Yeah. We're, I think we're being put on like a fire alert to some kind of fire warning. Yeah. Yeah. Did you see anything about that? I did. I did see some predictions about a potential of a very big drought, because think about it. All last year, California, they were, they were needing water, Colorado, running out of water, all these places running out of water. And now they're getting hit with torrential downpours, mudslides and snow storms. And the first crisis was, Hey, we thirsty. Second crisis. Hey, now we have too much water. We can't breathe because our land that we spent a million dollars on is getting washed away down the hill from a mudslide because we got too much water now. So my solution possibly is, Hey, what if people just don't fucking live on the side of a mountain when in plan for it, or at the very least have contingency plans in place for this type of weather. And I think the best thing you can really do is just do your research on kind of your area, your geography, your climate, where you live. And since I know that we are at a higher risk for tornadoes, it's important to have a protocol down so that I am able to take steps to protect myself, to protect the ones that I love in the event that a tornado, God forbid, does come and hit us over in Springfield. And all I can really do is advise you people to do the research, know where you live, know what kind of risks you're going to be looking at, and have a plan in place for each event that can come up because it never hurts to be too prepared. Of course, these plans you may never have to enact on, and if that's the case, good. But God forbid, what if something does happen? Yes. First thing first, the easiest way to be prepared for some type of catastrophe is to educate yourself on it. Like, for instance, when you're talking about tornadoes, they usually rate them on a scale, you know, like the F scale, where they can tell if it's an F1, F2, F3. It goes up to what, F7? I think it goes up to F7. But let me take a look real quick, let's see, F scale, and I'll take a look real quick and let you know what the ratings are. Let's see. For everybody's personal safety, all right, on the F scale rating for an F1 tornado, we're looking at about wind gusts of 79 to 117 miles per hour, and that's what Google tells me. But at the same time, it could go a lot faster than that. It can go to F2, which is 118 to 161 miles per hour of wind. And soon after that, you got 162 to 209 miles an hour of wind. At that point, you're already being lifted off of the ground, if you're a full 150-pound adult. At that stance, you should already have things, you know, strut down to the ground, all loose items indoors, or at least underground with you, and, you know, be already in your cell area if you got an F1, F2 in the area. Usually local areas will have, like, a tornado siren to notify everybody, but at the same time, you got to have your own notification system as well, too, like a radio, or at the very least. If you have a smartphone like everybody, it will tell you when there's a warning, or a flash flood warning, or something simple like that, or even APB. But you got to be prepared for these sort of things and have rations, food, water, first aid kits, and at the very least, an extra gas can for a generator if you have your entire house thrown away, which will happen in the event of a severe storm. Do you have any experiences with really bad weather, Paul? So, I did grow up in the 2007 ice storm, and I remember living in a really crappy, poorly insulated, single-story house. It was this ugly orange color, and it was just me and my mom. This was before I got taken away into state's custody, but I'm not going to get into that right now. Yeah. That's why I meant that episode. Yeah, no. My mom's doing alive and well now, and she's cleaned up her life, but anyways, back to the point. She was a single mother trying to raise me, and at the height of the 2007 ice storm, the average temperature was in the negatives, right? The power lines were all frozen over, we did not have electricity, not that we could afford the electricity bill anyways, and then we had the gas oven, which kept our house heated, and it smelled terrible. There was a mouse that climbed in towards the back of the oven, and so every time that she turned this oven on, it had this terrible, baked mouse smell, and it was just, it was rancid. I'm sorry, but I've got to say this. Was that Ratatouille? Ratatouille. Was that Ratatouille dog? He messed up. He did mess up. He fell in, see, this is why you use non-stick pans. Oh, no, he wasn't bad. Continuing off of that topic, we had to do very much the same thing when we moved up here to the Springfield area in 2007 as well, when we got hit with that storm, we only had, we didn't have any universal heat or any heating in our house, we lived on the north side too. What we had was the space heater that we sneakily snuck underneath our fold-out couch mattress thing, and we put it underneath it in order to warm us up, which we know was very dangerous, because there was a risk that it could collapse. It's a fire hazard. It's a fire hazard, but you know what? It kept us warm through that entire winter. We stayed in that bed for a whole week until the temperatures finally dropped down, and we had the oven going at 500 degrees, as high as it could go, really, to continue to try to warm us up. Until the temperatures dropped down? Until the temperatures dropped down. You mean went up? It was pretty cold. Yeah, yeah, you're right. When temperatures went back up, yeah. Sub-zero. It was sub-zero. It was like negative eight, wasn't it, that day? It went down to like negative double digits. Yeah, you get those people from the north, they're like, oh, you're complaining about negative 20? That's nothing. We get negative 80 out here all the time. Fucking Canadians. What are you talking about? Even up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, they'll tell me that cold weather here is nothing. Like, I don't mind the cold, now the heat, I don't like temperatures over here. I can't handle the cold, man. All right. Onto the continuation on the topic of, you know, things get inconvenient in life. Next thing would be, you know, identity theft. That's a real inconvenience to life right there. It has nothing to do with weather, but you know it is something that you have to weather over a long period of time if you do get your identity stolen. Identity theft is a very big issue right now because as technology gets better and AI gets to do almost anything that anybody can think of, you become a lot more vulnerable in your household wares and devices. You know, whether it's a smart watch, people can track you, cell phones, people can track you, people can track your internet data and get inside your storage devices and everything like that. But when it comes to stolen identity, it takes a specific kind of person to want to be somebody else, even if it's for a temporary reason, or at the very least, just to get money off of you. Yeah. Fraud is very real. It is very dangerous, and anyone can fall for it, really. It takes all kinds of different forms, and you're not careful and double-take different messages you're getting either via email, via text, even phone calls. There's a lot of scam callers out there that are posing as sometimes the IRS, and they're saying that you owe the government money, and this may not be the case. They may be someone who's just yanking your chain to make a few bucks off of someone who doesn't know any better. Absolutely. And I've noticed especially elderly folks tend to struggle with that. They tend to fall victim to it, unfortunately. So their entire retirement savings can be lost in an evening just because they answered the wrong phone call, and it's messed up that it happens. But you know, it's something that we've got to deal with in society and remind our loved ones that it's a possibility. And as well, as we get older, you've got to realize that new tricks come out all the time that we could fall victim to as well. Like, you think, oh, no, I'll never be stupid enough to fall for a phishing email, but then guess what? Your boy right here accidentally one day downloaded a printer software so that way he can troubleshoot his printer and then instead got credit card frauded and it took four and a half grand for me because it was a service that you needed to put in the payment method in order to get your printer working. And I was like, huh, this doesn't sound normal. I looked at the link, and then once I finally traced it back, I was like, okay, this is obviously not the right link. HP has their own software and their own link that you can download in order to get your drivers for your printer. And the main issue was is that this individual that I was talking to over the phone and that as soon as I downloaded the software, I got a call on my phone that knew somehow I downloaded the software. It should have been a clear red sign there. Instead, I was like, okay, this person obviously has some good intentions to help me because, you know, I'm good at heart. I'm an innocent young boy. I'm just trying to get my computer working. Instead, he said, okay, I can help you with this. What you need to do is you need to click this and this and this and open this and zip this file and all this. All right. That'll be $25. Do you have a payment plan? I'm like, what the hell? How does this happen so fast? My dumbass somehow, I didn't, I didn't give him my payment method. His dumbass or smartass, if you want to think of it that way, Manson used the software that was downloaded onto my computer to go into my payment methods that were stored on my computer. I had to delete those real quickly and once I did and took a look at my account, I already got the notification that a big transaction had gone through and luckily I was able to get in online with the fraud department of my bank and get it all stopped and all, you know, satiated before it became a problem. After that, I decided to invest in my own security, especially when it comes to online software usage and everything and as well, put myself through school to learn more about this topic. So that way I can keep my family safe as well in the long run. It's all about, you know, applying yourself in ways that you would never think about from getting your identity stolen from, you know, in your household to protecting your property and so on. All it takes is just that little bit of effort to put in that knowledge to learn what you need to learn in order to take care of yourself in the long run. In the event that you do get your identity stolen, the best thing you can do is contact your bank, have your account temporarily locked, get a new card issued to you and contact the respective authorities if they are, let's just use my example from earlier. If it's someone claiming to be from the IRS but they turn out to be someone who's just scamming you, then you're going to want to contact the IRS and give them a little bit more information about what's going on so they can look into the situation and help other people from falling victim to the same thing. As well, you know, it's always good to have your local Social Security Department in your phone so that way if you ever have any issues with your Social Security number and anybody gaining access to it who shouldn't, you can do the necessary things with that federal department to get things sorted out. Who would have ever guessed that nine numbers could be so important? Yes. Along from the 16, it's on your credit card, you know? I mean... And the three, that's on the back. I mean, the three on the back and the little four for the date, you know what I'm saying? But next topic. So other than the weather and other than, you know, credit card fraud, what's another thing that usually inconvenience you in day-to-day life? Procrastination. I'm going to be honest and just throw that out there. Procrastination is a big issue for me. For me, it's a time management. So me and you, we have the same problem, but opposite spectrums of that same problem. Me, I have too many things to do in a short period of time. You have not that much to do, but you don't know how to do it or you can't muster up the courage or the energy or just the chakra to really do it. It's rather, I struggle to balance recreational time with work time and I need to invest more into work time. So yeah, I do need to brush a little up on my work management, that's for sure. Absolutely. But, you know, I'm a free spirit. I get to be my own boss and I'm pretty excited about kind of the future that my career holds for me. I've made a lot of investment into doing graphic art and even took some of the money back from my college tuition so I could invest that into an iPad and start drawing. Here's my way to defeat procrastination. What I usually do is I think about my life as a whole at first and I'm thinking about how many things I've accomplished up until now. Then I think about how many more things I want to accomplish and then I make a list and then I do step by step, small steps, of course, in order to get to my goal because everybody always is thinking about the goal first. But that's the issue. Don't think about the goal. Think about the steps needed to get to that goal and accomplish your steps one at a time. And slowly over time, you'll see, you'll make it, you'll get there, though. That's all it is. But for me, when it comes to time management, I need to choose what's really important and what's not and just cut out the middleman in the meantime. But other than that, anything else left to say, Paul? I don't think so. I think we did a pretty good job looking at some different topics today and hopefully we're able to give a little perspective to some folks who decided to take the time and listen in. And we appreciate all of your support and we will be back with episode three here soon on NPR NPR with Paul LaRose and Brian Baker. I'm your host, Brian Baker. Thank you.